The Theatre of Civilized Excess: New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy. (Costerus New Series)

The Theatre of Civilized Excess New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy

COSTERUS NEW SERIES 169 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper

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The Theatre of Civilized Excess New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy

Anja Müller-Wood

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2007

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2190-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction

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1 Relocating the Stage: Reflections on Early Modern Theatre Culture

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2 “All the Ill Man Can Invent”: John Webster and His Duchess

59

3 Look Who’s Talking (Plainly): Dangerous Eloquence in The Atheist’s Tragedy

90

4 Memory, Mimesis and the Material: Chapman’s Scene of Writing (The Law)

124

5 Theatrical Excess, Critical Practice: Women Beware Women and the Shaping of a Bourgeois Aesthetic 159 Bibliography

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book was a long time in the making. Beginning as a postdoctoral dissertation, for which I was granted the venia legendi in English Literature by the University of Trier in 2002, it subsequently underwent a protracted metamorphosis which has resulted in the present volume. Naturally, during this process I have become indebted to many people too numerous to mention by name. My gratitude goes to all those who, over the past several years, have helped shape my thoughts by actively engaging with them, whether in written or spoken form. I owe special thanks, however, to those individuals whose generous encouragement has been a sustained (and sustaining) source of inspiration and confidence. I am particularly grateful to Professor Horst Breuer at the University of Trier, my postdoctoral advisor, whose unwavering support has made so many things possible for me. I also thank my other colleagues at Trier. Professor Stanca ScholzCionca in particular provided kind and thoughtful intellectual and personal advice. For their friendship and intellectual input over many years, I am grateful to Dr Nele Abels and Dr Wanda Klee, Dr Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier, Dr Andrea Gerbig and Dr Ulrike Tancke. My editors at Rodopi, Marieke Schilling and Dr C.C. Barfoot, have been extremely helpful in guiding me through the process of preparing the manuscript for publication, thereby considerably improving the original text. Needless to say, whatever mistakes remain are my own responsibility. I also would like to thank my former research assistant at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Pia Schmidt, who helped prepare the initial proposal submitted to Rodopi. Finally, separate thanks are due to my husband, Dr J. Carter Wood, who was instrumental in my completing this book. That this book was also instrumental in bringing us together makes its publication all the more significant to me. For this – and so many other reasons – it is dedicated to him. Bingen, November 2006

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INTRODUCTION Strictly, Elizabethan drama is experimental, expansive, sometimes ingenious, in fairly close touch with medieval tradition but energetic with Renaissance forces .... Jacobean drama is thought of as critical, sombre, disillusioned.1

Few canons in the Anglophone literatures are quite as notorious as that of Jacobean tragedy. With its bloody bombast, hyperactive emotionality and graphic violence, the tragic drama written and performed during the reign of King James I has become coterminous with the ruthless violation of the accepted rules of good taste, moral decency and aesthetic order. These are plays in which characters are mutilated and tortured with apparent gusto, in which intricate assassinations are planned and mercilessly executed (sometimes on stage) and in which protagonists, in fits of madness, dash out their own brains – or those of others. The decadent delight of such scenarios of excess has been read as a sign not only of the moral shortcomings of the playwrights who imagined them but also as an indicator of the overall chaos and confusion into which a whole society had been plunged with the death of Queen Elizabeth and the succession of the first Stuart king.2 My epigraph is illustrative of such a reading of Jacobean tragedy, which continues to loom large in early modern studies. According to this view, the nature of Jacobean theatre is intrinsically linked to the mentality of Jacobean England as a whole, a world apart from life during the reign of the last Tudor Queen. Used derogatorily, the term 1 “Jacobean”, in Bloomsbury Guide to the Renaissance, ed. Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 172. 2 See in particular F. P. Wilson, Elizabethan and Jacobean (1945; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). For a good survey of recent historical reassessments of James I, see Pauline Croft, “The Reign of James VI and I: The Birth of Britain”, History Compass, I/1 (2003).

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“Jacobean” serves to distinguish not only the Tudor and Stuart monarchies but also Shakespeare and his work from the majority of other early modern writers and dramatists. As a result of this anachronism (which squarely ignores the fact that a large part of Shakespeare’s oeuvre was written and performed during the reign of James I), Jacobean drama, and Jacobean tragedy in particular, has become a no-go area in academic study: the works of John Marston and Thomas Middleton, George Chapman and John Webster, Cyril Tourneur and John Fletcher rarely feature on the reading lists of English literature graduates. If they are lucky, they may encounter these authors in the work of later aficionados (my own initial encounter with seventeenth-century drama, for instance, came in the course of reading T. S. Eliot’s poetry). The absence of Jacobean dramatists in course curricula is symptomatic of the reductive image of early modernity taught students of English literature today, whose understanding of “the Renaissance”, even after long years of study, rarely extends beyond a half-hearted knowledge of a few select comedies and tragedies by a “Bard” forever associated with the Virgin Queen. This blind spot initially triggered my interest in Jacobean tragedy, which I began to explore with the conviction that there must be more to this maligned canon than the moral depravity for which critics had vilified it. What I encountered during my research was indeed a drama of excess – a surfeit of blood, skulls and swordfights, mixed with a not inconsiderable amount of psychological terror. However, it was a drama of excess that appeared nonchalant if not strangely selfconfident about its own extremes. Rather than expressing the playwrights’ world-weariness and despair, the excess of Jacobean tragedy struck me as an obvious (and self-confident) aesthetic posture, which for precisely that reason deserved serious critical investigation. Moreover, I found that these plays contain plenty of those experimental, expansive and ingenious moments listed in the Bloomsbury Guide as characteristic elements of the Elizabethan style. Unsettlingly self-referential, many Jacobean tragedies surpass the experimentalism associated with Elizabethan drama to the extent that they anticipate much later aesthetic developments: as criticism has pointed out, it seems a small step from Marston to Brecht, from The Revenger’s Tragedy to Reservoir Dogs.

Introduction

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Yet although one of the interests of this book is to illuminate transhistorical connections between past and present, my aim is emphatically not to view the early modern theatre as a prophetic mirror image of ourselves, contemporary malaises or our endeavours to remedy them. The past must be known by what differentiates it from the present; it must be acknowledged to be foreign and investigated as such. The specific otherness that I am concerned with in this book is the stage’s changing economic and social character. The opening of the first permanent London theatre in 1576 marked the beginning of a steady professionalization of theatre culture. This professionalization not only embedded the stages increasingly firmly in their cultural context, it also entailed new concerns and interests for theatre practitioners – concerns and interests which both enriched and complicated their tasks. The professionalization of the theatres led to their increasing independence from the usual source of financial support (aristocratic patrons) and traditional cultural and thematic contexts for their work (that is, civic and religious festivities). However, both the resulting concern with profit and the creative expansion with which it was intrinsically entwined had negative implications for theatre practitioners. Play texts are indicative of dramatists’ awareness of their complex situation, revealing the aesthetic, pecuniary and social concerns directly related to the specific condition of the early modern theatres. These concerns also shape the questions guiding my analyses. Might the trademark excess of Jacobean drama not point us towards an understanding of the early modern theatre’s position in society as well as its view of art and aesthetic pleasure at this particularly sensitive time of professional development? How do the characteristic extremes of these plays correspond to the theatres’ condition; more specifically, how do they reflect and relate to the uncertainties and anxieties which accompanied this process? The hypothesis that early modern theatre practitioners saw their situation with a sense of anxiety and uncertainty also led me to stray from the historicist path on which I had initially set out in my research. In particular, I came to question the assumption that early modern drama, and Jacobean tragedy in particular, was political and socio-critical in outlook. According to this view – pervasive in criticism – playwrights consciously responded to the decadence of those in power, thus paving the way for the political upheaval that climaxed in the execution of Charles I in 1649. Although such ideas

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had in the past been put forward to revalue this vilified canon of dramatic texts, their privileging of context over text and emphasis on subversion paradoxically also meant limiting the theatres’ cultural scope. To argue that Jacobean tragedies reflect specific political concerns, while apparently giving these plays social relevance, reduces them to mere critical vehicles of other, “more important” issues. Rather than taking Jacobean tragedies as mirrors of political realities, I will read them as astute gauges of the theatres’ changing institutional status, whose self-referential pointers to the dramatic situation allow us to draw inferences about theatre practitioners’ selfperception and understanding of their work. Indicating the selfconfidence intrinsic to their newly professional status, they also reflect a concurrent sense of uncertainty, which leads us to ask fundamental questions about the socio-economic condition of the stage, the selfimage of its practitioners and the role of the audience in the production of dramatic meaning, pleasure and value. This is not to say, however, that there is a one-to-one relationship between the anxieties of the early modern stage and its dramatic excesses. As I will argue throughout this book, rather than indicating defeatism, the excess that characterizes Jacobean tragedy points to theatre practitioners’ confident belief that by putting these excesses centre stage they can be mastered and transcended. Far from limitless and gratuitous, the excesses of Jacobean tragedy are contained and strategic, testifying to theatre practitioners’ aim (and ability) to tame that which they considered extreme, in compliance with nascent civilizing trends in society at large. And hence the portrait I will draw of Jacobean tragedy inevitably differs from the image typically propagated by criticism. Far more rooted in and less subversive of its culture than has tended to be acknowledged, the early modern stage was a moral institution at the heart of its culture. Although this picture may frustrate the desideratum of subversion that continues to dominate early modern scholarship, it may provide a significant extension of our understanding of Jacobean tragedy, its professional context and aesthetic strategies – involving us, the academic readers of this drama, in ways we have not hitherto considered.

Introduction

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Critical perspectives Critical attempts to defend Jacobean tragedy can be roughly divided into two groups: first, those scholars writing in the mid 1960s who set out to explain the excesses of Jacobean drama as an expression of deeply-felt morality on the part of the playwrights: in other words, as pointers not so much to their own decadence but rather to the decadent powers that be. Harking back to the medieval dramatic tradition, which explored excess and depravity with the aim of affirming aesthetic and moral norms, these plays were, in the words of a critic of the day, “quests for moral order”3 in a world given over to excess, media through which playwrights sought “for intrinsic value in experience”.4 The second group of critics, who could broadly be labelled historicists, reacted to this moralizing stance by foregrounding the political quality of the plays’ excesses. This latter trend announced itself at around the same time when, in a number of seminal lectures later collated under the programmatic title The Tragedy of State, J. W. Lever denounced the depolitization of Jacobean tragedy by the moralist school of critics while at the same time countering this critical trend with readings that teased out the political dimensions of these plays. Accordingly, for Lever, Jacobean tragedy is “a product of the intellectual ferment and spiritual upheaval which preceded the first great European revolution”.5 It anticipates, indeed it helps to instigate, the civil war and the subsequent republican interlude under Oliver Cromwell. It is this position that has had the most enduring impact upon Renaissance scholarship, especially on British cultural materialists, even when they do not explicitly treat the Jacobean stage. For instance, in his influential Radical Tragedy (1984), Jonathan Dollimore reads early modern revenge tragedies as staging the last resort of alienated individuals creating destructive sub-cultures

3

Irving Ribner, Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order (London: Methuen, 1962). In a similar vein, see Arthur C. Kirsch, Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1972). 4 Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 6. 5 J. W. Lever, The Tragedy of State: A Study of Jacobean Drama (1971; London and New York: Methuen, 1987), vii.

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“dedicated to revenge”.6 Similarly, Francis Barker links the excesses of early modern drama with the violence of early modern culture, suggesting that the violence of these plays reflected the violence of the Elizabethan and Jacobean crown who, “in defence of property and the established social order ... killed huge numbers of the people in England”.7 While echoing Lever’s influential association of drama and politics, Barker’s statement also testifies to a decline in interest in the distinction between Elizabethan and Jacobean, Shakespeare and “his contemporaries”, suggesting the revaluation of the label “subversive”, which had previously served to defend some dramatists against the charge of decadence. Whether used in a broad or a specific sense, such theses are based on a radical view of theatre along the lines formulated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “every new civilization as such (however held back, attacked and fettered in every possible way) has always expressed itself in literary form before expressing itself in the legislature of the state.”8 From this perspective, the early modern stage is nothing less than a testing ground for the revolution of 1642 and an imaginative laboratory for the killing of a king. The cultural materialist Franco Moretti has applied this Gramscian view to early modern drama in general, arguing that “Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy was in fact one of the decisive influences in the creation of a ‘public’ that for the first time in history assumed the right to bring a king to justice”.9 Echoes of Gramsci can also be detected in Dollimore’s suggestion that in the early seventeenth century there existed “a connection ... between the undermining of these institutions and a theatre in which they and their ideological legitimation were subjected to sceptical, interrogative and subversive representations”.10 6

Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 29. 7 Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 190. 8 Quoted in Margot Heinemann, “Political Drama”, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, eds A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 162. 9 Franco Moretti, “The Great Eclipse”, in Signs Taken For Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Form (London: Verso, 1983), 42. 10 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 4.

Introduction

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If such notions, however strong their influence upon the critical imagination in recent years, seem curiously insufficient, this may have to do with the fact that they are over simplistic, all critical ingenuity notwithstanding, in particular with regard to their underlying understanding of power. Their teleological focus on the civil war entails a one-way concept of power. However, as theorists of power since Foucault have been pointing out, power does not emanate from a single source from where it trickles down on those “below”, but is the result of reciprocal exchanges and interactions.11 What is more, the political interpretation devalues the social significance of drama and the theatrical institution, diverting attention from the stage and towards the seemingly more relevant outside sources of power and influence. From this perspective, drama can at best be reactive, responding to outside stimuli, rather than a cultural medium with intrinsic interests and concerns translated into aesthetic form. By extension, theatre practitioners are little more than helpless underlings driven to reject the dominant powers, rather than responsible and selfinterested agents within a highly complex context of dependencies and interests, which may itself have provided a stimulus for their dramatic products. The complexity of this situation is thrown into relief when we think of the early modern theatres as commercial institutions in transition, emerging from a system of aristocratic patronage to enter a more open arena of economic exchange and competition. In this professional context the aims of the early modern theatres were as multiple and diverse as their social ties – a situation which inevitably sheds a very different light on the plays investigated in this study and requires us to reformulate the questions we ask of them: what was the cultural location of the early modern theatres? Who were early modern playwrights writing for? How did concerns about the audience shape their self-perception and dramatic products? As I have indicated earlier, the entry of theatre practitioners onto the early modern cultural market need not have made their lives any easier or more independent. The shift from patronage to the market (in itself never absolute) may merely have diversified the demands made on the theatres and its practitioners, resulting in increased pressure rather than liberation.

11

See, for instance, Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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The commercial nature of the early modern stages, with all its complex implications, is increasingly taken into consideration by critics. Studies such as Douglas Bruster’s Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (1992) or Paul Yachnin’s Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (1997) see the early modern stages as commercial enterprises whose interest in economic success was intertwined with anxieties about the social relevance and legitimacy of their dramatic products. Bruster’s emphasis on the concern of early modern theatres with cultural participation is significantly extended by Yachnin, who goes so far as to argue that because of this concern the early modern theatre was “powerless”. “Precisely because drama was perceived to be separate from real life and because play was perceived to be separate from power”,12 Yachnin suggests, it could deal with topical issues in a particularly frank and critical manner. If this commercial take on the early modern stage remains a minority view in the critical debate, this might have to do with the fact that it demystifies our image of that theatre. Above all, it challenges the attractive and influential idea that the early modern theatres were placed on the margins of early modern English society. This notion was advanced by Steven Mullaney’s seminal study The Place of the Stage (1988),13 in which he argued that the early modern theatres of London, on account of their geographic location near the city’s prisons, asylums and bear baiting arenas, occupied a marginalized cultural location, and one which they willingly embraced and exploited to subversive ends. For Mullaney and other critics writing in this vein, the location of the stage affirms its role as a cultural counterforce, a critical player within a decadent context.14

12

Paul Yachnin, Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 3. 13 Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). 14 See especially Louis Montrose, for whom the stage was the place where cultural or religious practices abandoned in the wake of the Reformation could be enacted: the theatre provided “a substitute for the metaphysical aid of the medieval church in a welter of occult practices” (The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 31).

Introduction

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This popular conceptualization is challenged by critics who emphasize that the theatres, not least because audiences themselves consisted of diverse and conflicting strata, were a force field of multiple influences and intentions. In Anthony Dawson’s and Paul Yachnin’s recent The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England (2001) the early modern stage is depicted, much less monolithically than previously, as “a kind of way-station, a place where different cultural avenues cross”.15 Rather than occupying just one social and cultural space, the early modern theatre fulfilled a variety of expectations of its highly diverse and demanding audience. While Dawson and Yachnin do not completely disavow the theatre’s role as a political counterforce, they nevertheless see this as only one of many possible functions of this complex institution. The fact that the early modern theatres possessed both “flexibility and adaptiveness”16 suggests that criticism may have to abandon its adamant insistence on the subversive nature of the stage. In Jean Howard’s words, the early modern stage was “neither essentially subversive nor recuperative”, but “could and did serve a variety of competing class and gender interests”.17 To extend this view, one might suggest that theatre practitioners could have been informed by a deeply conservative and self-interested drive towards becoming part of their social context – in short, to fit in. That interest may not only run counter to any subversive intention, it also may have lead theatre practitioners to deliberately exploit the didactic potential of their medium. As I will argue, the display of excess in Jacobean tragedy occupies a central position in this conservative project, because it enables the simultaneous exploration and exorcism of what this drama sets out to contain. Staging extreme deeds and emotions, performing the transgression of that which is considered socially acceptable, dramatists provided opportunities for moral judgement while at the same time making good use of their audiences’ desire for spectacle. The performance of excess was a profitably duplicitous strategy, satisfying both the commercial interests of theatre practitioners and the moral aspirations of the culture they served. 15

Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 12 (emphasis in the original).

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Method Methodologically, I will draw on two theoretical approaches to support my readings of the plays I have chosen for investigation: on the one hand, historical discourse analysis in the tradition of Michel Foucault; on the other, Lacanian psychoanalysis, in particular its notion of fantasy. Usually these theories are seen as incompatible: while Foucault is concerned with the emergence of social attitudes and mentalities at specific historical moments, Lacan endorses a transhistorical, one might say universal, perspective upon the subject in her or his world. Foucault uses the term discourse to describe the way meanings are shaped and disseminated in cultures, as well as the issues of control and power inscribed in these processes of meaning production and distribution. By making discourse of something – above all, of something that terrifies us – we contain it. As Foucault demonstrates with regard to our understanding of sexuality, discourse allows us to “come to terms” with that which we fear in both the literal and the metaphorical sense (although it is important to remember that in Foucault’s conceptualization discourse is not only verbal). In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault criticizes the “repressive hypothesis” that has long dominated the perception of sexuality in the West. Against this hypothesis, according to which sexuality has been subject to a continuous process of silencing and repression since the seventeenth century, he holds that “discourses concerned with sex” have in fact proliferated after that historical watershed, suggesting a very different development. What Foucault observes is “the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail”.18 In the case of sexuality, those who speak about it assert their authority over this existential but mystifying aspect of human life by turning it into a field of scientific enquiry and scholarly debate. Foucault’s argument regarding the discursive containment of sexuality provides a critical grid that can be superimposed on 18

18.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1978; New York: Vintage, 1990), I,

Introduction

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Jacobean tragedy and its notorious excesses. From a Foucauldian perspective, these excesses can be read as a discourse geared at containment: by putting violence, bloodshed and terror on the stage, early modern playwrights demonstrated their ability to rein them in. This argument may seem to bring me close to the moralists’ school of criticism mentioned earlier, for whom Jacobean drama was moral tout court. Nevertheless, there is a subtle difference between this view and my own position. As I will suggest throughout this book, Jacobean tragedy is less a mirror of fixed moral positions than a stage for the evolution of these positions; rather than teaching a specific morality, it illustrates how morality is achieved through the strategic representation of its immoral other. The problematic implication of this dialectic is obvious: discursively taming excess, these plays reveal that the moral messages they propose rely upon an unsettling underside. This point brings me to two further, not entirely dissimilar critical voices that have shaped my argument in more or less obvious ways. The first is Norbert Elias, whose concept of the “civilizing process” serves as a recurring critical reference point in this study. Elias argues that over the centuries and under the influence of groundbreaking changes in the political and economic sphere (the development of nation states, the state-monopoly on violence, the division of labour and rationalization of production), human behaviour has become increasingly self-controlled and refined, both on an individual and a collective level.19 Critics of Elias’ influential theory have focused on its teleological and progressive trajectory, which a close look at human behaviour and interaction in the late twentieth-century seems to defy.20 Furthermore, as Foucault’s work has shown persuasively, social transformations do not happen naturally and out of the blue, but are largely results of power struggles whose directions and effects deserve to be traced in detail, rather than simply assumed as givens. However, since both Elias and Foucault are concerned with the development of attitudes and mentalities, their theories are synergetic – with the one illuminating the scope and limits of the other. The deep-seated similarities that allow for such synergetic interactions 19

Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation, 2 vols (17th edn; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). 20 See, for example, Hans Peter Duerr’s three-volume study, Der Mythos des Zivilisationsprozesses (1993; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995).

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explain the recent renaissance of Elias’ theory in social and historical studies. More directly relevant to my argument is Walter Benjamin’s study of German Baroque drama, The Origin of German Tragic Drama,21 not least because this drama was deemed equally notorious in its time. The excesses of Baroque German tragic drama – representations of violence paired with a penchant for rhetorical exuberance – are less tokens of decadence and despair than attempts at epistemological mastery during a period when meaning itself had become a bone of contention. Complex, at times cryptic, Benjamin’s book is uncannily ahead of its time, anticipating the linguistic scepticism of poststructuralism, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, which forms the second methodological pillar of this study. As Lacan emphasizes, human beings are supremely capable of imagining excess: witness our violent dreams and fantasies. However, Lacan does not read the excessive fantasies produced by our imagination as evidence of perversion or violent intentions, but as responses to the condition of a self which for Lacan is fundamentally unstable and volatile. Like Lacan, Benjamin is aware of this instability, to which the Baroque dramatists responded with the representation of excess. To clarify this proposition, I need to turn to the triad of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic whose complex interaction, according to Lacan, structures the psyche. The first of these terms, the Real, is not to be confounded with reality (in the sense of “everyday life”): instead, the term denotes existence at its barest, that which lies before and outside of what Lacan calls the Symbolic – the order of language and the law of the father. “Inveterately intersubjective and social”,22 the Symbolic provides the self with an identity, the principles of social interaction and a means of communication and representation. At the same time, the separation between Real and the Symbolic is never absolute: the Real, although it can never be experienced directly, makes itself known in everyday reality. Fantasy, which belongs to the domain of the Imaginary, for Lacan has a functional role in this unsettling interplay of the Real and the Symbolic: its task is to sustain the Symbolic order in the face of the disturbing force of the Real. 21

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London and New York: Verso, 1998). 22 Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991), 93.

Introduction

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Lacan’s understanding of fantasy has various implications relevant to this study. As his theory asserts, we fantasize not in order to escape reality but rather to imagine scenarios that allow us to overcome existential fears. Therefore, even when our imagination seems to be most excessive we still act well within the limits of the Symbolic law. Dreaming, we order our universe, even if in the process we challenge the limitations the Symbolic law imposes upon us. But secondly, fantasy thereby testifies to the self’s unstable psychic condition; it is evidence of the fact that something substantial is amiss in our lives (although we will never find out what this something is),23 while appearing to provide a remedy for this lack. Furthermore, and this is of particular significance for the argument of this study, the ambiguous and constitutive nature of fantasy urges us to revalue the relationship between fantasy and desire. Fantasy is not, as we like to think, the reflection of some secret desire: it creates the parameters within which we can explore our desire24 – without ever knowing its true object. The material-historical dimension of the presumably universalist psychoanalytical point of view has in recent years been explored by the work of the Slovene theorist Slavoj Žižek. Žižek’s astute analyses, often of popular culture, reveal the discursive networks in which we exist not only to be a reaction to concrete historical issues and concerns, but as expressions of an enduring human psychological structure.25 For Žižek, what determines the human condition throughout the ages is the understanding that we are not masters/mistresses over ourselves or our worlds, but fundamentally traumatized, “hysterical” subjects continuously fighting the lack that 23

See Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality”, in Formations of Fantasy, eds Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 5-34. 24 Fantasy “constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates; that is, it literally ‘teaches us how to desire’”, Slavoj Žižek writes in The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 7. 25 See Thomas Betteridge, Shakespearean Fantasy and Politics (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005). Betteridge praises Žižek’s work as a timely alternative to (new) historicist readings because it attempts “to restore truth as a category to critical thought” (20) – although that truth does not tend to be comforting or pleasant. Betteridge’s study, which was published when I was in the final stages of the present book, affirms my own reading of Jacobean tragedies as fantasmic structures placed against an undefinable trauma which is related but cannot be reduced to concrete developments taking place outside the stage.

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emerges with our subjectivity. An unsettling “remainder” testifying to this foundational hysteria threatens all forms of containment. By implication, there is no subversion of the containing structures by which the subject is shaped, because that which seems to subvert their hierarchical power is in fact intrinsic to them. Bringing this theory to Foucault’s concept of discourse throws into relief the fact that for Foucault, too, the possibility of subverting power is always inescapably limited. For, as Foucault himself points out repeatedly throughout his work, our acts of subversion fail to unsettle the hierarchical structures against which they are directed because they ultimately serve the maintenance of these structures. Žižek’s materialist appropriation of Lacanian psychoanalysis can shape our understanding of the Jacobean stage and its particular excesses in an innovative way. A cultural institution in the making, the stage was determined by economic considerations and an indebtedness to the audience’s pleasure. The theatrical discourse of excess fulfilled the double function of exploring the dramatic value of excess and establishing a moral response to it. From a Foucauldian point of view, we can read these plays as means of modulating audience responses discursively, not least by exposing them to excesses they were expected to reject. The Lacanian perspective as formulated by Žižek reminds us that, although the staging of excesses ultimately served the self-assertion of early modern theatre practitioners, this strategy promises to affirm that which it seeks to contain. Although many plays of the period achieve closure, often abruptly, by resolving their confusion, these closures tend not to be satisfying. To the contrary, the surprising reversals that characterize Jacobean tragedy, although they serve to resolve the hopeless plot entanglements, are haunted by the anxieties against which they are placed, shattered by the very fears that they are meant to ward off. If these considerations help us to rethink our understanding of the early modern stage, they also allow us to reformulate the issue of gender, which is a crucial facet of the theatrical discourse of excess. In Jacobean tragedy, it is women (or womanly men) who typically feature as an excessive force to be reckoned with. On one level, we might read the dangerous wilfulness of dramatic women in terms of a general misogyny present in early modern society at large. Alternatively, we might argue that these women are powerful or

Introduction

23

heroic figures. The discursive method I have been outlining on the previous pages allows us to see a further, hitherto unexplored dimension of these striking figures, which might be contextualized as fantasmic responses to institutional uncertainties. Projecting these onto horrifying female characters, playwrights were able to simultaneously exploit the theatrical power of these figures and to exorcise their threat – however strongly this threat continues to overshadow the plays in whose context it is unleashed. Structure The structure of this book is five essays which all circle around the question of the early modern theatre’s particular institutional situation. The order is thematic rather than chronological, emphasizing that the different issues I have chosen to address occupied the minds of theatre practitioners simultaneously. I have selected my corpus of texts not because these plays allow me to delineate a developmental trajectory, from the more to the less excessive or vice versa. However, the book is nevertheless structured by a distinct spatial movement: from the issues closest to the hearts of theatre practitioners to questions related to their relationship with their environment – from the inside to the outside, as it were. In the first chapter, “Relocating the Stage: Reflections on Early Modern Theatre Culture”, I will map the institutional landscape of the early modern stage and the function and significance of excess in this context. What I will also delineate in more detail is the notion of the early modern stage as a place of split personality, whose multiple allegiances are reflected in its seemingly contradictory aesthetic strategies. Drawing on a selection of dramatic and non-dramatic sources, I will illustrate how theatre practitioners were clearly aware of this duplicity and developed strategies to deal with it – bringing the stage close to other, more overtly didactic institutions at the time. Following this broad overview I will, through four case studies, illuminate the individual areas of excess, anxiety and compromise addressed by the plays under consideration. Chapter 2, “‘All the Ill Man Can Invent’: John Webster and His Duchess”, is a revaluation of The Duchess of Malfi in view of the tragedy’s engagement with its own imaginative resources. In Webster’s tragedy, fantasy is pervasive and used by all characters as a means to come to terms with the world. The strategically deployed fantasies enable the containment of far graver fears, more specifically, the fears that meaning is no longer

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fixed and finite. As such, the play reflects upon the stage’s own foundational reliance on the imagination as a means to negotiate its uncertainties while also illustrating the inevitable failure of this strategy. Chapter 3, “Look Who’s Talking (Plainly): Dangerous Eloquence in The Atheist’s Tragedy”, reads Cyril Tourneur’s play as a dramatization of the representational crisis of the early modern period, especially as it impacted on the early modern discipline of rhetoric. Just as the eponymous Atheist turns against himself at the end of the play (literally knocking his brains out with the axe he wields against another), so theatrical representations potentially turn against themselves, uprooting comforting truths and meanings. In the end, The Atheist’s Tragedy emerges as a play of unsettling reversals, which shatter its apparently conservative structure. In Chapter 4, “Memory, Mimesis and the Material: George Chapman’s Scene of Writing (the Law)”, I investigate the dramatic modes and perspectives of George Chapman’s Tragedy of Bussy D’Ambois – its diegetic and mimetic features – as means of closure and authorial dominance. Withholding or exploring excess, Chapman attempts to modulate the audience’s responses to his play. His authorial interference, however, only draws attention to his anxiety about the powers of performance, thus affirming its disconcerting hold over his work. The final chapter discusses Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women as a reflection upon the pitfalls and excesses of an emergent market capitalism. Middleton’s women, often celebrated as unusually strong female characters in early modern drama, embody his lucid understanding of the self-destructive nature of the market economy on which he so perilously depended. The utilitarian aesthetic developed in the play, based on the ideal of thrift, ultimately does insufficient justice to a play which itself participates in the formulation of this aesthetic ideal. Neither simply moralistic nor ultimately therapeutic, the excesses of Jacobean drama point to a complex position in between which implicates us, its spectators and interpreters, in a potentially unsettling way. The psychoanalytical perspective that forms the basis of my own critical endeavour complicates not least any easy and rigid distinction between dramatic past and critical present (the excessive “then” and the civilized “now”), suggesting instead a diachronic trajectory that highlights the endurance of at least some aspects of human existence. Of course, Jacobean drama is the result of historically specific

Introduction

25

experiences. Yet even as such it inevitably is part of a longer historical development to which we, too, belong. This is not the same as saying that Jacobean tragedy reveals the essential similarity of past and present, nor, more tritely, that it testifies to the enduring presence of evil in human experience. To the contrary, what this drama uncovers is the historicity of our own attitudes and concerns and the often disconcerting differential logic that sustains them. In other words, it not only suggests that the aesthetic and moral parameters brought to these plays are rooted in the past, but that they were shaped and formed by a strategic deployment of that which culture earmarks as dangerous, extreme and uncivilized. It is, finally, the formative connection between Jacobean tragedy and our aesthetic and moral expectations today that might explain the reputation of this dramatic canon. The present study seeks to take Jacobean drama and its criticism as representative expressions of two related stages in a long discourse of civilization in which to understand excess means to contain it, where the knowledge of excess is the power over it (however incomplete). What the plays I will be exploring in the following ask us to do is to accept irrational excess into the circle of the rational, however much our own moral discourses may be in denial of their extreme and excessive basis. Inevitably, then, my study illuminates a small facet of a pertinent evolutionary story. But while this story has tended to locate the great paradigm shift into civilized sensibility in the eighteenth-century, a matrix against which Jacobean tragedy has been viewed as blunt and barbarous, I believe that we ought to redraw the boundaries of this chronology. Far from being an aesthetic or moral aberration, as it is habitually seen, Jacobean tragedy participated in the creation of a new discourse of order, containment and reason – a discourse that continues to shape our take on the world to this day, however much reality may undermine it. If this is the truth of Jacobean tragedy, however, it is also its tragedy. While this dramatic canon may represent, in eyes of some of its readers at least, a low point in our comforting story of the civilization process, it already allows a first glimpse of the rational sensibility that would eventually come to dismiss it.

CHAPTER 1

RELOCATING THE STAGE: REFLECTIONS ON EARLY MODERN THEATRE CULTURE I must keep my wits and pay close attention to them: if I start them crying, I will laugh as I take their money, but if they laugh, I shall cry at having lost money.1

What was the function of early modern theatre in its social context? Where was it positioned with regard to the ideals and norms of its day? Did it comply with the parameters of its social and political order or provide a subversive challenge to the hegemonic powers of state and church? Or might it have been located somewhere in between these extremes of compliance and subversion, requiring its practitioners to develop more complex strategies in response to their specific situation? Asking these questions means reopening an area of enquiry which seemed to have been sealed: pointing to the location of the London theatres in the vicinity of Bedlam, Bridewell prison and the bear-baiting arenas, critics have confidently declared that “the place of the stage”2 lay outside and beyond the respectable, on the margins of early modern London society. Because of their specific geography, the theatres constituted a disruptive agent in a consummately hierarchical world: a position of subversion consciously (and critically) exploited by their practitioners. Despite the obvious attraction of this influential argument, I will, in the following chapter, sketch a somewhat different scenario, because I believe the thesis of the marginal role of the early modern stage falls short of the true complexity of what was by that time already a highly professionalized (and commercial) cultural institution. This new status not only offered theatre practitioners hitherto unknown economic and aesthetic options, it also confronted them with new obligations and 1

Plato, “Ion”, in Two Comic Dialogues: Ion and Hippias Major, trans. Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 27. 2 Mullaney, Place of the Stage (see n.13 in the Introduction).

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responsibilities, among which pleasing their notoriously heterogeneous audiences was central. In view of such institutional concerns, it is only realistic to suggest that those working in and for the stages might not have been satisfied with the role of a marginalized force pursuing subversive intents. Instead, it might be argued that the early modern theatres’ new state of relative permanence also led their practitioners to seek cultural and social legitimation.3 One way of achieving this aim may have been to assert the moral probity of the theatre and its products. If the stages thereby furthered the rise of a new, rational aesthetic which paved the way for the “civilized imagination”4 that would come into its own only in the eighteenth century, they also contributed to what might be called, in the words of Norbert Elias, a more general “civilizing process”.5 Working with an eye both to commercial success and social integration, the theatres engaged in the exploration and containment of social disruptions and emotional extremes: “Places of business … [the theatres] regularized and normalized carnival.”6 Rather than a place of subversion, therefore, the early modern stage was a laboratory for civilized behaviour, a place where excess was explored in order to be tamed. To describe the early modern stages as civilizing institutions does not mean to say that they and their products were inherently moralistic, as one school of criticism maintained in the 1960s and 70s,7 holding up their relentless dramatic mirrors to a world they perceived as hopelessly decadent and debauched. Instead, the stage’s civilizing attitude must be seen in the light of its complicated position between the world of business and the world of art – its split personality, as it were. Intrinsically connected to its commercial concerns, and hence shaped by audience expectations, the moral

3

See Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3 and Yachnin, Stage-Wrights. 4 Timothy Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 196. See also Daniel Cottom, The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 5 Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (see n.19 in the Introduction). 6 Bruster, Drama and the Market, 10. 7 See my Introduction, n.3.

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lessons of the stage’s products are calculating and strategic and, for precisely that reason, ought to be taken with a pinch of salt. Furthermore, the Jacobean dramatic morality entails the threatening possibility that that which is evoked in order to be contained may unsettle the ideals that its controlled display was intended to serve. The following chapter (along with my subsequent analyses of selected plays) will show how the civilizing project of the early modern stage – although contained by an overt moral message – always threatened to founder on the profitable deployment of dangerous excesses. Money and meaning on the early modern stage Early modern drama is itself an invaluable source of information about the condition of the professional stages, its meta-dramatic references indicating theatre practitioners’ astute understanding of their own status, the economic framework of their art as well as the anxieties concurrent to this division between the aesthetic and the commercial. Dramatic prologues and epilogues in particular, although often ironic and tongue-in-cheek, are helpful indicators of overall mentalities, concerns and anxieties. These anxieties are not only specific, related to a particular play or its playwright, but indicate fundamental uncertainties, shared by the stage and the market, regarding meaning, identity and accountability.8 More, the metadramatic pointers to the theatre’s fraught situation also provide strategies for “managing” these uncertainties,9 affirming theatre practitioners’ increasing self-confidence and professional pride. References to the economic nature of the early modern stage are, for instance, omnipresent in the work of Ben Jonson, testifying to the playwright’s contradictory take on his profession.10 Even the famous comic overture to his city comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614), in which a clerk reads out the terms of engagement between playwright and spectators, is undercut by an undertone of anxiety and an astute (if pained) awareness of his dependence upon the audience. Already the 8

Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), x. 9 Dawson and Yachnin, Culture of Playgoing, 43. 10 Don E. Wayne, “Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: An Alternative View”, Renaissance Drama, XIII (1982), 103-19.

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need to contract with the spectators suggests that Jonson does not expect them to behave according to his expectations. However, Jonson was by no means the only dramatist deliberately drawing attention to the nature of his labour. At around roughly the same time, John Fletcher expressed his grasp of his own economic situation in the epilogue to his The Tragedy of Valentinian (c. 1610-14). Here, too, the playwright illustrates his sensitivity regarding his institutional context when he has an actor remind the audience of the economic nature of their relationship with those on stage: We would fain please ye, and as fain be pleased; ’Tis but a little liking, both are eased; We have your money and you have your ware, And to our understanding, good and fair. For your own wisdoms’ sake be not so mad To acknowledge ye have bought things dear and bad; Let not a brack i’th’stuff, or here and there The fading gloss, a general loss appear. We know ye take up worse commodities And dearer pay, ye think you bargains wise; We know in meat and wine ye fling away More time and wealth, which is but dearer pay, And with the reckoning all the pleasure lost. We bid ye not unto repenting cost: The price is easy, and so light the play That ye may new-digest it every day. Then, noble friends, as ye would choose a miss, Only to please the eye awhile and kiss Till a good wife be got, so let this play Hold ye awhile until a better may.11

No less blunt (and humorous) than Jonson, Fletcher cannily assesses the nature of his work and the relationship between stage and auditorium, while presenting himself as a merchant of superior wares. What is implied in this assertion, however, is that the audience is essentially a mob of bargain-hunting philistines, potentially blind to the artistic value of his products. At the same time as self-confidently affirming the early modern theatre’s commercial concerns, Fletcher also acknowledges the attendant pitfalls: the aesthetic and the 11

In Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies, ed. Martin Wiggins (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 328. All references for quotations from this edition will be included in the text.

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economic may be incompatible, a dilemma exacerbated by the untrustworthiness of the unsophisticated audience. Fletcher’s Epilogue gives the lie to the popular critical notion that the relationship between stage and auditorium was a harmonious “give-and-take”,12 or “joint venture of limited liability”13 between equal partners. For Robert Weimann, one of the exponents of this notion, the egalitarian stage-auditorium relationship becomes particularly apparent in liminal dramatic moments of epilogues and prologues, where, as he suggests, the play is “handed over” to the audience, who then negotiates the play’s “post-scriptural future”.14 Granted, Weimann acknowledges the ambiguous power of the audience by associating the spectators with a “supreme court of appeal”, a critical body evaluating the plays performed before it; nevertheless, he ultimately values the spectators’ role positively, viewing their active participation in the dramatic process as a sign of the subversive “circulation of authority” of the Shakespearean cultural experience.15 However, the fact that Weimann bases his argument exclusively on Shakespeare, more specifically on a rather narrow sample of Shakespearean plays, indicates the limits of his view – which become even more apparent when tested against other contemporary dramatic sources.16 The Epilogue to Fletcher’s Valentinian, for instance, depicts a somewhat more complex situation by introducing a crucial aspect of the theatrical experience which Weimann leaves unexplored: the issue 12 Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 19. 13 Agnew, Worlds Apart, 111. 14 Robert Weimann, “Performing at the Frontiers of Representation: Epilogue and Post-scriptural Future in Shakespeare’s Plays”, in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama: Essays for G. K. Hunter, eds Murray Biggs et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 96-112. 15 Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1. On “circulation”, see also Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 16 Weimann typically refers to As You Like It and The Tempest. In Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2003), Douglas Bruster questions such limited source material, which is typical of New Historicist “thick” descriptions, favouring instead broad – and thus “thinner” – analyses of early modern culture (xv).

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of competition, which is invoked when the playwright, in the final line of the epilogue, imagines a competitor already waiting in the wings with a “better play”.17 Of course, in acknowledging this other, Fletcher expresses a not inconsiderable self-confidence: the better play to relegate him to second place may never materialize. More, given the quality of his product, which can be digested again and again, a replacement may not even be needed. And yet, his self-assurance resounds with a sense of tension. For who determines what makes a better play? And is the audience as Fletcher imagines it – always out for the best deal – really capable of making the kind of aesthetic judgement that would do justice to his work? Both boastful and uncertain, simultaneously intimidated by and flattering an audience identified as an element of uncertainty in the dramatic process, Fletcher’s Epilogue speaks of the playwright’s anxiety about his role as a purveyor of dramatic wares. Fletcher’s sceptical view of his clientele suggests his awareness of their role in the construction of the play’s meaning. This function is also acknowledged by Weimann, for whom dramatic epilogues authorize the audience “to recollect, discuss, and reappropriate the performed play after its theatrical transaction is over” – in other words, to establish the play’s meaning on their own terms. This interpretive power, however, requires a radically new way of understanding the production of meaning in general. The early modern period is indeed associated with such a “revolution in worldpicturing”:18 the birth of a concept of representation which, according to Michel Foucault, disrupted the stable system of analogies which had hitherto characterized the human view of the world. Words and things, for instance, up to that point existing in a fixed and immutable relationship, “no longer resemble one another”;19 instead, the depictions of reality reveal their status as representations and become deceptive and untrustworthy. This development may have rendered drama more complex and, ultimately, more interesting, enabling the creation of ambiguity, irony and tension, and hence of “experiential 17

Or a parody, as in the case of Chapman’s, Jonson’s and Marston’s Eastward Hoe (1605). See Heather Anne Hirschfeld, “‘Work Upon That Now’: The Production of Parody on the English Renaissance Stage”, Genre, XXXII/3 (1999), 175-200. 18 Weimann, Authority and Representation, 1. 19 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 48.

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emotions”20 in the audience. In the wake of the representational revolution, plays not only became more marketable because aesthetically more complex: their increasing complexity also fostered an emerging concept of the “bibliographic ego”21 – creative individuals defining themselves by their art. In tandem, the economic nature of the stage and the representational transformation taking place in early modern culture interacted with the increasing liberation of playwrights from the aristocratic patrons that had hitherto supported their work and the religious and civic contexts in which dramatic performances had traditionally taken place. While, as a result, playwrights were able to make use of their art in innovative ways, the aesthetic potential also furthered new pressures. The newly commercial context would not only have supported aesthetic change, it in fact necessitated it, driving playwrights to develop aesthetic strategies that would allow them to address as many segments of their market as possible.22 Whether or not playwrights also found these profitable strategies aesthetically rewarding, however, is another question. After all, playwrights may have seen the loss of reliable, stable meanings that allowed them to develop aesthetically in more negative terms. If representation diversified their work, this diversity came at the price of destabilizing “given, unitary locations of authority”,23 not 20 The same experiential emotions that are the goal of the “illusionist” theatre which would eventually come to replace the early modern stage. See Hans-Jürgen Diller, “Cruel Words and Cruel Deeds: Towards a Notation for the Relationship Between Speech and Action”, in Chapters from the History of Stage Cruelty, eds Günter Ahrends and Hans-Jürgen Diller (Tübingen: Narr, 1994), 29. 21 Joseph Loewenstein, “The Script in the Marketplace”, in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 265. 22 This aesthetic complexity and contradictoriness may also have made drama “politically” elusive. See Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Janet Clare, “Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) and Michael McKeon, “Politics of Discourses and the Rise of the Aesthetic in Seventeenth-Century England”, in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, eds Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3551. A different view is put forward by Howard, Stage and Social Struggle. 23 Weimann, Authority and Representation, 8.

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only of the audience, as critics have pointed out,24 but also on the part of the dramatist. The early modern stage may have provided a place where “new signifying practices that rewrite the discursive rules of relationships between authority and representation, subject and power, body and ideological positionality”25 could be explored. However, precisely because such statements so obviously reflect contemporary critical views, they ought to be applied to past contexts with caution. Would early modern theatre practitioners have eagerly deconstructed the authority they were only beginning to shape? This question becomes all the more pertinent if the audience is taken into account. The spectators were not only far from static factors in the theatrical experience, but also, along with the plays, increasingly sophisticated,26 critical and active in the evaluation of theatrical meaning. Finally, these were paying audiences, who expected to get their money’s worth when they came to the theatre (and who, if dissatisfied, might withdraw both their spiritual and financial support). Throughout Valentinian, Fletcher acknowledges and addresses this fraught situation through meta-dramatic gestures. Consider the play’s noble soldier Maximus, whose own fate sets off that of the eponymous character, the tyrannical emperor of Rome. Once an honourable citizen, Maximus is transformed in the course of the play – and in the pursuit of his moral agenda to rid the city of Valentinian – into a vengeful, egocentric and ambitious despot. Various distinctly early modern anxieties meet in this character: as the tyrant’s alter ego he highlights the other’s aberrant power and serves Fletcher in expressing the fear that legitimate power may become unlawful,27 while at the same time embodying an ambitious individualism run riot. Significantly, the speech in which Maximus admits to his bloody deeds foregrounds feelings of isolation: “Is there another friend, another wife, / Or any third holds half their worthiness / To linger here alive for?” (V.iii.9-11). Abandoning the communal concerns that had 24

Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 26. 25 Atilla Kiss, The Semiotics of Revenge: Subjectivity and Abjection in English Renaissance Tragedy (Szeged: Jószef Attila University, 1995), 11. 26 See Andrew Gurr, “The General and the Caviar: Learned Audiences in the Early Theatre”, Studies in the Literary Imagination, XXVI/1 (1993), 7-20. 27 See Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 166.

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initially motivated his actions, he increasingly isolates himself. Having rid Rome of the tyrant, he desires to become emperor himself: “Stay, I am foolish, / Somewhat too sudden to mine own destruction. / This great end of my vengeance may grow greater / Why may I not be Caesar?” (V.iii.23-26). Apart from identifying general cultural anxieties, such passages also entail very specific references to the theatrical context. Maximus’ lengthy contemplation on the trail of violence he has left behind opens with the telling exclamation: “Gods, what a sluice of blood have I let open” (V.iii.1). Hovering somewhere between fearful awe and ecstatic triumph, Maximus’ words only draw attention to the bloodbath set off by his deeds – a strikingly candid and self-accusing way of taking responsibility for one’s actions. However, the issue of responsibility raised in this instance lends the scene another dimension by introducing a further agent. Maximus’ conspicuous use of the term “author” to describe himself points beyond the limits of the stage and towards the playwright: “The empire’s all afire, / And desolation every where inhabits; / And shall I live, that am the author of it?” (V.iii.3-5). With this invocation of his own creative authority Maximus also points beyond the limits of the stage, to the dramatist responsible for the excesses “authored” by his character in the first place. As a consequence, we may read this meta-dramatic reference in two, mutually influential ways. Maximus’ words could be seen as an act of scapegoating: the character implicitly puts the blame on the dramatist so as to sanction his actions. More positively, however, Maximus’ words are also a self-confident gesture of aesthetic authority on the part of Fletcher. The words put in his character’s mouth are his signature, triumphantly signalling to the audience: “see what I can do!” The audience, too, is drawn into the process of authorial legitimization. Despite the cultural difference established by its exotic Roman setting, the play reaches out to the auditorium by repeatedly reminding the spectators of their presence in the theatre and their involvement in the events on stage. For instance, Maximus conjures up an imaginary audience of witnesses or jurors to legitimize his actions by addressing his dead friends: “My dear friends, pardon me, / I am not fit to die yet if not Caesar” (V.iii.30-31). This “post-mortem

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discourse”28 aims at legitimization for his deeds in the here and now from “beyond the grave”. However, in the case of Maximus the call for his friends’ understanding and absolution is subverted by the distinctly narcissistic intent of his words. His concern with their opinion hardly veils the fact that this is an attempt on his part to impose his view of the situation, suggesting that he would like to see his actions, however unlawful, affirmed. By replicating the factual (theatrical) context in which he makes this address, Fletcher turns the threatening spectators into willing accomplices whose presence in the theatre justifies the excesses taking place on stage. Like Maximus’ “dear friends” they are asked to pardon the hero turned villain – and with him the playwright. That early modern spectators would have willingly provided such a pardon is suggested by the negative views of the consuming public ventilated in both dramatic and non-dramatic sources of the time. In the moody Preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton remarks on “the kind of policy in these days, to prefix a phantastical title to a book which is to be sold” to entice readers,29 suggesting that audience tastes were superficial and extreme. Printed versions of plays often foregrounded the extreme emotional reactions on the part of the audience to entice potential buyers.30 That playwrights were in fact catering to audience demands with the advertisements of their plays is suggested ironically by William Shakespeare in the artisans-scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,31 which comically voices the playwright’s awareness of his audience’s thirst for scandal and spectacle. Such evidence suggests that playwrights, like the common players who performed their work (a professional distinction that was far from

28

Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 5. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. and introd. Holbrook Jackson (1932; New York: Vintage-Random House, 1977), 20. 30 Cf. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 115-16. 31 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1979). Brooks takes the artisans’ “most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe” (I.ii.11-12) as a parody of plays such as “Thomas Preston’s Cambyses (published c. 1570): ‘A lamentable tragedy full of pleasant mirth’” (20). 29

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rigid anyway), were “servant[s] of the people”32 who relied on strategies of seduction and flattery to entice as many of their masters and mistresses as possible. Seen against this background, Maximus’ involvement of his spectators in his deeds may be seen less as an expression of his power over them than as a gesture of propitiation. Here, Fletcher seems to be close to the anti-theatricalists of his day, more specifically to their suspicion about the audience’s evaluative and interpretive involvement in the events on stage. Reiterating views popular since Plato,33 early modern anti-theatricalists question recent depictions of the early modern stage as a contractual endeavour between (presumably) equal partners. The work of early modern antitheatricalists indicates the anxieties that accompanied the structural developments and changes thus idealized34 in a manner that suggests not least its particular sensitivity to the emotive and psychological quality of the stage.35 For instance, in Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), the renegade theatre practitioner Stephen Gosson describes the theatres as “the very markets of bawdry, where choice w[i]thout shame hath been as free as it is for your money in the Royal Exchang[e]”.36 With Douglas Bruster we could read Gosson’s statement as a sign of the former playwright’s anxiety about his involvement in the emerging market economy and “the commodity function of the Renaissance theater, a place where money can buy the fantasy of one’s choosing”.37 Indeed, this interpretation is supported by statements made by other contemporary dramatists about the interpretive multiplicity by which they were faced. In the Prologue to their city comedy The Roaring Girl Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton suggest that 32

John Cocke quoted in Heinemann, “Political Drama”, 166. See the epigraph to this chapter. Plato’s Ion represents an audience-directed dramatic theory that relies on and exploits the dependence on the audience for commercial reasons. For a commentary on this dialogue, see Oliver Gerland, “Socrates’ Muse and the Audience’s Desire”, Text and Performance Quarterly, XII/4 (1992), 293-304. 34 See especially Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 35 G. K. Hunter, “Rhetoric and Renaissance Drama”, in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 115. 36 Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions, ed. Arthur Freeman (1582; New York: Garland, 1972), G 4 v. 37 Bruster, Drama and the Market, 6. 33

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members of the audience make the meaning of the play according to their individual interests: “Each one comes / And brings a play in’s head with him; Up he sums / What he would of a roaring girl have writ, / If that he finds not there, he mews at it.”38 Infinitely diverse, the audience brings myriad expectations to a play, all of which ought to be satisfied. However, Gosson’s fear of uninhibited choice may also be seen in another, more negative, sense. What seems to be just as problematic for Gosson as the proliferation of fantasies in a theatre on the market is their inherent insubstantiality, which makes misinterpretation possible in the first place. At the end of the Epistle to the Reader in Plays Confuted, Gosson explicitly associates stage and market when he likens the player to the wavering, volatile merchant: “for a Player is like to a Marechants finger, that standes sometime for a thousande, sometime for a cypher, and a Player must stand as his parte fals, sometime for a Prince sometime for a peasant.” What is troublesome for Gosson in this instance is not so much the commercialism of acts of exchange on the emergent market, but the way these acts of exchange are in fact forms of “acting”, representations of reality and selves devoid of essential meaning. More terrifying than the limitlessness of choice is the possibility that underneath this theatrical spectacle there may be nothing. Whatever role a player personifies, it is a theatrical chimera of the sort Gosson had already critiqued in The Schoole of Abuse (1579), where he had blamed the players for “profer[ing] Skirmishe” only to reveal underneath “a shadow, or conquere a Paper monster”.39 The economic dimension of Gosson’s anti-theatrical text lends his concerns yet another meaning, usually ignored by critics. His fear that texts which no longer possess an inherent meaning can be interpreted in ways that run counter to the playwright’s intention is revealed in his repeated expressions of anxiety about the reception of his work. It is also suggested by the argumentative rigidity that distinguishes the later Plays Confuted in Five Actes from the more open and ambiguous Schoole:40 it seems that over time Gosson became more and more 38

Quoted in Plays on Women, eds Kathleen E. McLuskie and David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 156. 39 Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, ed. Arthur Freeman (1579; New York: Garland, 1973), A 3 v. 40 Cf. Arthur F. Kinney, “Stephen Gosson”, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, 172 (Detroit: Gale, 1996), 100.

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concerned with maintaining a hold over his writing. His awareness of the audience’s misinterpretations comes to the fore in the dedication of Plays Confuted, addressing the gentlemen and students of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the Inns of Court. Distrustful of the audience, he dismisses the concept of the “gentle reader”: “When Gentlemen reade with a minde to barke, their throtes are so narrow that nothing will downe: whatsoever we speake is too rounde or too flatte, too blunte or too sharpe, too square or too crooked, one waye or other it standes awry.”41 Gosson here seems painfully aware that his intention may be warped by the consumers of his work.42 His negative view of his audience might explain why, after his own first dramatic experiments, Gosson turned his back on the theatre, only to become one of its harshest critics. But to put the blame on the audience alone means to skirt the social and epistemological changes that made these interpretations possible in the first place. What Gosson’s anxiety reveals is the fact that his words, whatever they are, “stand awry”: are crooked by definition. Words, like commodities on the market, receive their value – their meaning – in exchange. Far from being merely an economic issue, the fear of being rejected by the audience has an epistemological dimension, casting a shadow of doubt over the textual basis of Gosson’s authorization. The problem identified by Gosson is representation itself.43 In the catch-22 situation described by anti-theatrical texts and plays alike, where the very means of authorial self-assertion are associated with the playwrights’ vulnerability, where audiences both create and threaten the meaning of a text and where their benevolence and pleasure may make or break the success of a play, dramatists had two options: turning away from writing for the stage (Gosson’s answer), or developing ways of coming to terms with, if not profiting from, this situation. This brings us back to Fletcher’s tragedy, whose selfreferential pointers to the theatrical situation – which may strike us as prophetically modern or postmodern – are more than mere playful 41

Gosson, Playes Confuted, A 4 v. Cf. Cartelli, Economy, 14. 43 Michael O’Connell sees the issue of representation as being at the centre of early modern iconoclasm in The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8-9. 42

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experiments with dramatic form. I suggest that we read them as intentional strategies deployed to resolve the problems confronting dramatists in the wake of the groundbreaking changes outlined above: the increasing commercialization of the stage and the discovery of representation. Maximus’ tragic recognition of his guilt is the verbal overture to his descent into self-destruction: “For though my justice were as white as truth, / My way was crooked to it: that condemns me” (V.iii.15-16). But apart from a moment of tragic anagnorisis, Maximus’ words also constitute a meta-dramatic commentary – at once self-confident and self-conscious – of a stage practitioner on his own emotive and excessive resources. The stage relies on the “illegitimate” excessive displays (“sluices of blood”) for which Maximus takes responsibility, even if the messages it wishes to put across are ultimately moral. Fletcher’s play thereby confirms Stephen Orgel’s observation that early modern playwrights “seem to share, and even to make dramatic capital out of, the prejudicial assumptions of their most hostile critics” so as to “disarm and expell” them.44 Arguing that early modern drama has a confessional structure, which deliberately exposes the sources of its shame, Orgel echoes Michel Foucault, who describes the confession as a discursive ritual in which the speaker asserts his own position in a social context not only by being “the subject of the statement”, but precisely by acknowledging the power of others. The confession is a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it

44

Stephen Orgel, “The Play of Conscience”, in Performativity and Performance, eds Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 148-49.

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The Theatre of Civilized Excess exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.45

Because acts of discursive containment in the Foucauldian sense are determined by the belief that to speak one’s fears means to keep them (and their sources) in check, they inevitably possess a curious aura of self-confidence. And although the discursive containment of emotion and excess is informed by a sense of phobia, the act of putting this phobia into words inevitably contains a certain level of euphoria.46 The confession is a talking cure that is as seductive as it is salutary, providing a framework within which extreme emotions can be explored, exploited and thereby legitimized. Within the context of the professional early modern stages it would have been an attractive and highly marketable dramatic strategy whose duplicity allowed playwrights to cater to the audiences’ excessive urges while at the same time warding them off. In the case of Fletcher’s Valentinian, this confessional structure has wide-ranging effects on the way we view the play as a whole, notably its underlying misogynist antithesis. As critics have noted, the tragedy plays off “traditional manly, military values” associated with characters like Maximus and his friends and the “effeminate sensuality of the Emperor’s court”.47 Although at first sight this contrast between masculinity and femininity might seem to be the play’s dominant structural feature, a closer investigation of the manly values allegedly championed by the playwright unsettles this distinction. Maximus (who increasingly resembles the tyrant he sets out to combat) is not the only character undergoing a dangerous transformation in the course of the play. His loyal friend Aëtius, a veteran general, similarly epitomizes virtuous constancy even in the face of death: Why do ye weep? Am I so wretched to deserve men’s pities? Go, give your tears to those that lose their worths: 45

Foucault, History of Sexuality, I, 61-62. Matthias Luserke, Die Bändigung der wilden Seele. Literatur und Leidenschaft in der Aufklärung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 38. 47 Rowland Wymer, Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986), 136. 46

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Bewail their miseries; for me wear garlands, Drink wine, and much. Sing paeans to my praise: I am to triumph, friends, and more than Caesar, For Caesar fears to die; I love to die. (IV.iv.18-24)

Echoing a classical pretext – the death of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue Phaedo48 – Fletcher here buys into the longstanding misogynist myth of the valiant soldier.49 As such, his play also expresses anxieties regarding masculinity present in early modern culture,50 especially the association of femininity with cowardliness and emotionality. However, the amorous metaphoric and distinctly erotic structure through which Aëtius’ virtuous fortitudo is expressed immediately undermines it: “I love to die”, Aëtius says with determination in the passage quoted above, thereby establishing an erotic promise that is titillatingly suspended for another 240 lines, until he finally announces his suicide by twice apostrophizing and kissing, like a lover, his sword. The scene which, on the level of content, celebrates masculine containment and virtue is excessive on the level of structure and language. The same character who rejects emotions on principle serves Fletcher to invoke those emotions in the audience. The effect is disastrous: just as words which no longer mean one thing threaten to disperse into a surplus of meaning, so a death that has lost its heroic significance becomes overkill when it is thrown on stage, where it is circulated as on a market. The sense of surplus death becomes distinct in the play after the peripeteic suicide of Pontius, the assassin hired to kill Aëtius in Act IV. After a lengthy exchange between the two men, in which they assert each other’s valour verbally, Pontius makes a 48

In the relevant passage Socrates, stoically resigned to his fate, admonishes his mourning friends Apollodorus, Crito and Plato: “Really, my friends, what a way to behave! Why, that was my main reason for sending away the women, to prevent this sort of discordant behaviour; because I am told that one should make one’s end in a reverent silence. Calm yourself and be brave” (Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant, rev. edn [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993], 184). 49 On the motif of soldierly death throughout the centuries, see Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig, Ästhetik des Todes (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1995). 50 Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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final gesture of manliness by stabbing himself with the command: “Die as I do” (IV.iv.176). Rather than circumventing the murder he had been hired to commit, this deed acts as a trigger for a whole avalanche of further deaths: seeing his self-slain, would-be killer, Aëtius follows his example and turns the sword against himself. In the rapid succession of short scenes that follows the assassin’s death, his murderous stipulation has a deadly domino effect, with corpse being heaped upon corpse – including those of Maximus and Valentinian. Were it not for the sudden interception of the voice of reason, embodied by Valentinian’s widow Eudoxa, the play would continue in this destructive vein. Her calm admonition that “Wise men would know the reason first” in response to the far from rational battle-cry of the blood-thirsty Roman soldiers who demand to have her “cut ... in thousand pieces” (V.viii.65-66) puts a stop to the bloodbath set off by her deceased husband. This unsuspected twist in the play’s overtly misogynist perspective provides the paradoxical finale to its perversions of soldierliness. More reasonable than the great soldiers of this tragedy, the play’s “bloody woman” (V.viii.39) disproves such prejudices and instead affirms that it is men who are excessive in Fletcher’s play. Rather than denying traditional masculine values, the tragedy uncovers their fundamentally excessive basis, ironically revising the myth of masculinity on which it draws. Nevertheless, to contend that the play thereby radically revises contemporary gender stereotypes would be simplify its more complex point of view. The feminine order of reason is introduced too late in the tragedy to have an effect on the action proper. Although Eudoxa is not exactly excluded from the plot, her appearance at the end of the play affirms her factual marginality. She does not so much install order as confirm the confessional frame of containment within which the characters have self-confidently drawn attention to the overkill in which they participate. I have already discussed the implications of Maximus’ confession; in a very similar way, Phidias comments upon Aëtius’ suicide by ritualistically invoking the loss and absence that is the result of this death: “O, a loss of losses. / Our lives, and ruins of our families, / The utter being nothing of our names / Were nothing near it” (IV.iv.321-24). Yet although Phidias appears to represent a different perspective, the nothingness he imagines is no less excessive than the bloody surplus evoked in Maximus’ “sluices of blood” speech

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in the subsequent act. Whether as absence or as surplus, excess is contained by such gestures of discursive acknowledgement, which at the same time allow it to be explored at leisure. This strategy, however, is as risky as it is profitable. The constant evocation of that which the speaker fears, even in the name of containment, is a process both typical and destructive of the dramatic genre which tends to be seen as particularly teleological and closed: tragedy. In enacting dramatically what the play otherwise rejects, Fletcher’s Valentinian also revalues traditional notions of the tragic. Tragedy and excess Tragedy has been the object of a protracted critical debate over the centuries. Yet although the different approaches seem to agree on certain unifying features (a noble but flawed hero, whose metaphorical blindness transforms into painful insight as a result of disastrous events), the variegated theory of tragedy reveals the genre’s function as a screen for the projection of changing critical mentalities, which are less illuminating about the dramatic form itself than about those who investigate it.51 As an exhaustive and differentiated treatment of the critical canon on tragedy would exceed the scope of this study,52 I will focus on those theories that see the genre less as a static and “profoundly teleological form whose full meaning will be uncovered in the revelation of its end”53 than as a fluid discourse in the Foucauldian sense, which illuminates the process of making meaning instead of putting forward particular, clearly demarcated meaningful insights. However provocative such a dialectical reading of tragedy may seem, it is suggested already in older disquisitions on the genre. For instance, in George Puttenham’s genealogy of the dramatic genres in the Arte of English Poesie (1589), tragedy continues the didactic and disciplining work begun by satire and comedy in the earlier stages of the evolution of the dramatic arts. For Puttenham, tragedy is therefore the adequate form to respond to and resolve the tensions resulting 51

The idea of critical self-fashioning is put forward in Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 52 See, for that purpose, Richard H. Palmer, Tragedy and Tragic Theory: An Analytical Guide (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1992). 53 Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 45.

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from an increasingly changeable world.54 Entailed in this project of resolution is the unsettling possibility that the containing aims of tragedy may fall victim to “the evils that it seeks to overcome”.55 Aware of the “sweet violence” (Terry Eagleton) that is one of the genre’s salient features, Puttenham understands that the pedagogic intent of tragedy may be undermined by the representational problem that shapes it.56 Therefore Puttenham’s view of tragedy has affinities with that of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose theory of tragedy emphasizes the constructive interaction of its apparently contradictory structural elements of order and excess, the Apollonian and Dionysiac. In Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy), Nietzsche describes the duplicitous engagement of Apollonian and Dionysiac elements in tragedy.57 In this interaction, the Dionysiac is an orgiastic, erotic force upon which the Apollonian imposes its will to order. The Apollonian order relies on its orgiastic counterpart; the birth of tragedy “in the cult of Dionysus” ultimately confirms its pagan other. In tragedy, order and excess are inseparably intertwined, making it, in Camille Paglia’s polemical formulation, “an irony of literary history”.58 For Timothy Reiss, this inextricable interaction, which testifies to the deficiency of all discourse, encapsulates the “tragedy” of tragedy. Drawing on Foucault, Reiss takes tragedy as an “analytico-referential discourse” which “creates order” and, subsequently, “makes it possible to ascribe meaning to that order”.59 Because of that, the genre does not reveal a particular truth or “supposed knowledge”,60 but contributes to the shaping of new culturally and socially significant 54 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 30-31. 55 Jonathan Crewe, “The Hegemonic Theater of George Puttenham”, English Literary Renaissance, XVI/1 (1986), 77-78. 56 Ibid., 81. 57 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie (aus dem Geiste der Musik), in Kritische Studienausgabe, eds Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV, 1967), I, 25. 58 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990; New York: Vintage, 1991), 6. 59 Timothy Reiss, Tragedy and Truth: Studies in the Development of a Renaissance and Neoclassical Discourse (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 2 and 17. 60 Ibid., 9.

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meanings, defining in each individual instance anew what is tragic. More, the conclusions at which tragedy arrives are never finite. The discourse of tragedy can do no more than establish “a kind of balance of ambiguities through their immobilization, their sealing in an ordering discourse”.61 It is “open, unresolved, and has no possible resolution …. At best, grasped in an ordering discourse, it tends to destroy that discourse from within.”62 Significantly, Reiss takes the discourse of tragedy as a response to moments of change and crisis, such as in fifth-century Greece and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. With this emphasis on crisis, Reiss’ approach resembles that of Walter Benjamin in his discussion of German Baroque drama, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), although Reiss himself does not make that connection. Benjamin’s study is a particularly apt text for the analysis of Jacobean tragedy, not least because the Baroque canon with which Benjamin is concerned, like Jacobean drama, is famed for its violent excesses and extremes. The point of departure for Benjamin’s enquiry is the pervasive epistemological uncertainty that accompanies the Baroque emergence of individual intentionality and the resulting loss of “original experience”.63 The Baroque is characterized by the realization that once meaningful signs have lost their inherent significance: This knowledge, the triumph of subjectivity and the onset of an arbitrary rule over things, is the origin of all allegorical contemplation. In the very fall of man the unity of guilt and signifying emerges as an abstraction. The allegory has its existence in abstractions; as an abstraction, as a faculty of the spirit of language itself, it is at home in the Fall. For good and evil are unnameable, they are nameless entities, outside the language of names, in which man, in paradise, named things, and which he forsakes in the abyss of that problem.64

61

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. 63 See Burkhardt Lindner, “‘Natur-Geschichte’: Geschichtsphilosophie und Welterfahrung in Benjamins Schriften”, Text und Kritik, XXXI-XXXII (1971), 45. 64 Benjamin, Origin, 233-34. 62

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The nascent subject leaves her or his mark on the world by naming things, only to realize that these names fail to describe the world. In Terry Eagleton’s words, for Benjamin the Trauerspiel reveals the awareness that what has opened up is a “gulf between materiality and meaning”.65 In German Baroque drama, this representational abyss is mediated (although not resolved) through the traditional device of the allegory. Yet while seventeenth-century allegory employs the medieval convention, it no longer encapsulates the fixed and firm meanings of this model. In a world where signification is subject to individual language use, even allegories can no longer express conclusive meanings. Instead, Baroque allegories are no more than an “other-discourse”, which, instead of expressing an inherent hidden meaning, always points to ever-different possibilities of signification.66 In a manner that seems to anticipate the contemporary deconstructionist privileging of writing over speech, as well as its concomitant notion of the “supplement”,67 Benjamin draws the analogy between allegory and writing to illuminate the scepticism of the form. If allegories are forms of writing, as Benjamin suggests,68 then they similarly engage in the creation of an endless string of signifiers, forever deferring meaning. These very similar approaches to tragedy have significant implications for my interpretations of Jacobean contributions to the genre, since they illuminate and challenge issues frequently raised with regard to this theatrical canon: its aesthetic hybridity and its outspoken misogyny. To view tragedy as a discourse means to complicate any easy generic definition, such as that between tragedy and melodrama. As Terry Eagleton says, there is no pure tragedy: “‘normative’ or ‘moral’ tragedy often betrays a certain sensationalist subtext or exoticism, of sweetly heightened sensations and covert erotic pleasures, which links it reluctantly to its melodramatic 65

Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), 3. 66 Cf. Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory”, New German Critique, XXII (1981), 112. 67 In “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, Derrida describes this term as endless deferral of meaning in the play of signification (see his Writing and Difference [1978; London: Routledge, 1997], 278-93). 68 “Allegory ... is not a playful illustrative technique, but a form of expression, just as speech is expression, and, indeed, just as writing is” (Benjamin, Origin, 162).

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sibling.”69 Furthermore, as Peter Brooks has argued, melodrama too may be seen as a problem-solving form: a genre whose sensual and sensationalist elements allow an emerging rational individualism “to face the abyss even if its content may be nothingness, and to assume the burden of consciousness that results from this confrontation”.70 Whether we devalue tragedy by revealing its similarities to melodrama, or revalue melodrama by emphasizing its tragic dimension: in accepting the intrinsic hybridity of either genre, we make easy value judgements based on their distinction impossible. We also complicate the distinction usually made between tragedy and revenge tragedy. If tragedy in general is an ordering genre, concerned not only thematically with the law but representing a vestige of legal ratiocination and discourse,71 then revenge tragedy merely takes this ordering intention to a further level. Fundamentally action-directed, revenge guarantees a high level of bloody spectacle and emotional excitement. Particularly apt to explore and contain excessive emotional energies, revenge tragedies promise both dramatic excitement and moral rewards and as such represent the most profitable genre for a deeply profit-minded institution. However, if tragedy, like melodrama, seeks to construct a world rather than transmit universal meanings, then the argument for the inherent superiority of the genre (as well as the litany about its decline72) falls flat. These considerations also ask us to rethink the function of femininity in tragedy, which is typically understood as the unsettling other within a masculine order. Reinterpreting the Nietzschean categories from a gender perspective, Camille Paglia has described the genre as the victory of male (Appolonian) will over the Dionysiac, the “chthonic” principle, associated with feminine “procreative nature”.73 In drama, this triumph is mediated, for instance, through the violation of female (or effeminate) characters. Critics of early modern drama have frequently, and from various perspectives, sought to 69

Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 9. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 206. 71 John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), especially Chapter 1. 72 George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (1961; London: Faber and Faber, 1995). 73 Paglia, Sexual Personae, 12. 70

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contextualize this phenomenon – which Paglia phrases in explicitly unhistorical terms – as responses to political, religious or scientific changes.74 The women violated on the early modern stage function as screens on which to project general but very real anxieties. However, if we take tragedy as a discourse that seeks to construct stable meanings, then we should also be wary of taking its representations of women as one-to-one mirror images of the lives of real women. Rather than references to real women, female characters in Jacobean tragedy (whether depicted as victims or as a threat) represent an operative principle in the discourse we call tragic. Philippa Berry has recently argued as much with regard to Shakespeare’s tragedies which, she notes, are unsettled by their “feminine endings”. This term is adopted from poetics, where it serves to describe the “metrical supplements to an iambic pentameter in the form of an eleventh syllable, usually unstressed”.75 While feminine endings enable the enjambement of individual lines and thereby contribute to the rhythmic flow of the poem, they also undermine the poem’s semantic structure. In a similar way, feminine figures in Shakespearean tragedy fulfil a simultaneously constructive and threatening function. The feminine endings of Shakespearean tragedy unsettle not only the teleological nature of the genre but the cultural ideals that inform it. Their end marks openness rather than closure, excess not limitation.76 Berry’s analysis of Shakespearean drama provides a helpful grid for the discussion of Jacobean tragedy, whose treatment of women has often been explained as an expression of a general misogyny. Rather than taking these figures as realistic representations of early modern women, I suggest that we see them as fantasmic constructs invoked to 74

Cf. Leonard Tennenhouse, “Violence done to Women on the Renaissance Stage”, in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, eds Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 79; Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 180, and Celia R. Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6. 75 Philippa Berry, Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 4. 76 Ibid., 8-9.

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achieve their own containment (and to affirm the theatre’s disciplinary power). It is therefore appropriate to label these figures femmes fatales: the embodiment of social crisis77 and “boundary confusion”78 and yet expressive of an “irresistible charm”,79 the femme fatale is a figure of great complexity. As such, she provides the perfect medium for the early modern theatre’s aesthetic and moral double allegiance and split personality. Seductive and enticing, she enables highly entertaining acts of self-asserting mastery. Early modern femmes fatales can thus be seen as strategic invocations of an excessive force that in turn serve to captivate the audience’s emotions. Incarnations of the genre’s inherent contradictions, they enable rewarding strategies that allow their strategic exploitation, scapegoating and exclusion. Although they are invoked in the name of containment, these dramatic femmes fatales embody a dangerously excessive force at the heart of tragedy, which – while enabling the ordering intentions of this dramatic form – inevitably haunts it. Civilizing excess In view of tragedy’s didactic quality, we might come to a somewhat different understanding of the cultural location of early modern theatres and the function of their dramatic products than the one outlined above. For Steven Mullaney, the early modern theatre was a stimulus and channel for emotions, however without pedagogic ends: “unlike the pulpit ... [it] was an affective rather than a didactic forum.” This rigid distinction between the emotional and the educational, between stage and pulpit, relies on the critic’s reductive view of the constructive uses of affect in both church and theatre. The early modern pulpit and stage resembled each other in the way they exploited the emotional potential of their audience, to ends that were usually far from excessive or subversive. Radically severing affect and pedagogy, Mullaney contradicts his own view of the theatre as a didactic institution, which he voices in the same essay:

77 78 79

Dominique Maingueneau, Féminin Fatal (Paris: Descartes, 1999), 12. Daileader, Eroticism, 11. Žižek, Plague, 51.

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The Theatre of Civilized Excess The shift away from the morality tradition and its abstract personification of states-of-being and toward the particular, discursive, and theatrical embodiment of affective characters demanded and produced new powers of identification, of dramatic representation but also of self-representation, not only of the fictional construction of character but also of the social construction of the self. As a forum for the representation, solicitation, shaping, and enacting of affect in various forms, for both the reflection and, I would argue, the reformation of emotions and their economies, the popular stage of early modern England was a unique contemporaneous force.80

Mullaney takes affect as a discursive construct and thereby concurs with the recent tendency in anthropology, psychology and sociology to see emotions as an operative principle in and an index of social discourse.81 At the same time, emotions are for him a pre-existing and finite force in the cultural context, which theatre can only reflect upon, release or shape – a passive matrix either subject to or subversive of culture. While Mullaney suggests that the stage’s emotional potential had civilizing properties (“reflection”; “reformation”), participating in the redefinition of society and subjectivity at large, he nevertheless places it on the margin of this process of reformation, leaving unexplored the crucial role of affect in the self-definition of this cultural institution in-the-making. This facet of theatrical experience, which Mullaney seems wary of thinking through to the end, provides the cue for my own analyses. I suggest that theatre is a didactic forum precisely because it is an affective one. Again, this argument can be explained by emphasizing the stage’s location at the heart rather than on the margins of its culture. On a first level (acknowledged also by Mullaney), the values expressed in individual representations of emotion reveal the stage’s didactic scope in a way that allows us to trace the historically specific parameters of affect. Theatre enabled the evaluation of affect and the 80 Stephen Mullaney, “Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-1607”, Shakespeare Quarterly, XLV (1994), 144. 81 See Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, “Introduction: Emotion, Discourse, and the Politics of Everyday Life”, in Language and the Politics of Emotion, eds Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1-23.

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negotiation of emotional norms in a manner that held a mirror up to the culture of which it was part: a culture that was increasingly determined by ideals of rationality, sobriety and self-discipline. Therefore the theatre was didactic not only when it illustrated correct behaviour, since even the violent extremes of Jacobean drama ultimately serve an ideal of “prudent mediocritie”.82 As Gail Kern Paster observes, actors on the early modern stage illustrated an “emergent ideology of bodily refinement and exquisite self-mastery”83 and affirmed the disciplinary quality of their professional mimesis by literally “going over the limit”: “The actor is in or out of a humor not of his own making but well within his affective command.”84 Given the permeable boundary between the professions of actor and playwright in the early modern period, these observations are equally valid for the dramatists of the time, whose role was changing in tune with the changing nature of the stage. If, as I have suggested earlier, the early modern period marked the emergence of the authorial self newly aware of the aesthetic significance of his work and intent on guaranteeing its proper reception, would it be too far fetched to argue that the acting out of excess found its necessary equivalent in the writing of excess? And could it not be that playwrights might have driven their medium to its imaginative limit so as to enable authorizing gestures of selfdiscipline? In other words, did early modern playwrights go “over the top” to mark not only their creative expertise but also their power over the play, and those who watched it, by dramatically testifying to their ability to contain that excess? This image of the stage informs the opinion of early modern defenders of the stage, who countered the anti-theatricalists’ critique of the theatre’s use of a meaningless speech by emphatically declaring its didactic function. The notion that the stage is conducive to cathartic

82

Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in General, quoted in Anthony Dawson, “Performance and Participation: Desdemona, Foucault, and the Actor’s Body”, in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 34. 83 Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 14. 84 Ibid., 20.

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insight85 pervades Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, from Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetrie (1595) to Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (published 1612), from Thomas Nashe’s tonguein-cheek defence of theatre in Pierce Penniless, where plays are described as “sour pills of reprehension, wrapped up in sweet words”,86 to Hamlet’s moralistic “mousetrap” in Shakespeare’s tragedy. George Puttenham, too, defended the stage as a conservative medium, where the failure of the hegemonic status quo was depicted in order to reinstate it all the more powerfully, in The Arte of English Poesie. But this process, where the audience was asked “not merely to acknowledge but imaginatively to embody the law of which it is the ultimate subject”,87 represents an inherent threat to the conservative aims thereby pursued. For example, the confident belief that excess could be used to didactic ends is mirrored by the renaissance of the highly affective Ciceronian rhetoric in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,88 especially as it found expression in the vogue for verse satire in the 1590s (whose subsequent prohibition in 1599 indicates that the genre’s didactic exploration of excess might not have pleased everybody89). Less acerbic defenders of affect than the Elizabethan satirists found more constructive uses for the emotions. John Reynolds, for example (invoking stage and pulpit alike) in his Oxford lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1572-73) writes that “the passions must be excited, not for the harm they do but for the good, not so they twist the straight but so that they straighten the crooked; so that they ward off vice, iniquity and disgrace; so that they defend virtue, justice

85

I am using the term “catharsis” deliberately and against the critical notion that, unlike in continental Europe, its role in early modern English theatrical contexts is contested (see Orgel, “Play of Conscience”, 143). 86 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane (1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 14. 87 Crewe, “Hegemonic Theatre”, 84. 88 See Heinrich F. Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte: Englische Wirkungsästhetik im Zeitalter der Renaissance (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975), 29 and Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 270. 89 Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 138.

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and probity”.90 Distinctions were made, usually along gender lines, between good and bad emotions, between sinful and righteous anger,91 and while affect was not exactly celebrated, there was increasing space for the exploration of the human affective potential in the name of rhetorical persuasion. Aside from the theatre, it was the church that provided a public context where emotional excess was used to highly didactic ends, as the example of Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich, illuminates. Famous for his unrelenting moral probity, Hall is repeatedly associated with classical Stoicism. But Hall differs from his Greek and Roman forebears not least in his attitude to affect. Unlike them, Hall did not seek to purge himself of the passions, but aimed at a more constructive relationship with his God-given affective potential: “I will not be a Stoic, to have no passions; for that were to overthrow this inward government God hath erected in me; but a Christian, to order those I have.”92 His 1625 sermon “The Defeat of Cruelty” exemplifies the passionate pedagogy of his earlier The Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608),93 throwing into relief its effectiveness as well as dangers. Essentially a jingoistic morale-booster against the Spanish enemy, the sermon allows the outspoken anti-Catholic Hall to ostracize the arch-enemy by invoking various stages of Christian and Protestant purges and prosecutions in graphic detail: Who can express the savage cruelty of the enemies of the gospel? Look into the ancient story of the infancy of Christianity, ye shall see how men set their wits on the rack to devise torments. To show 90 Quoted in Lawrence D. Green, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Renaissance Views of the Emotions”, in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 13. 91 Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). 92 Quoted in Audrey Chew, “Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism”, PMLA, LXV/6 (1950), 1137. 93 In The Characters, Hall announces: “I have showed you many fair virtues .... They shall please yet better after you have troubled your eyes a little with the view of deformities; and by how much more they please, so much more odious and like themselves shall these deformities appear. This light contraries give to each other in the midst of their enmity, that one makes the other seem more good or ill” (The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall, ed. Philip Wynter [1863; New York: AMS Press, 1969], VI, 106).

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The Theatre of Civilized Excess you that in a painted table which poor Christians felt would be a spectacle of too much horror. What should I lay before you their gibbets, wheels, stakes, caldrons, furnaces, and all their fearful pomps of death? what should I tell you of men dressed every way that meats were for the palate? Here was flaying, frying, boiling, broiling, roasting, baking, hashing, and all possible kinds of hideous forms of murder. To forget all old immanities [= monstrous cruelties], what should I show you the flames of our late Marian times? What should I bring you into the holy inquisition, and show you there all the bloody engines of torture, an hell upon earth? What should I present you with the whips, halters, and knives of eightyeight? Or raise up your hair with the report of those Spanish cruelties which were exercised upon our men in the Indies during the late war. Death was but a sport in respect of the torments in dying.94

Echoing Protestant orators from Erasmus to Luther and Melanchthon,95 Hall’s sermon illustrates a constructive use of excess, here illustrated by his reliance on the rhetorical principle of amplificatio – the deployment of images and tropes to render his language more vivid and persuasive. Above all, Hall’s sermon recalls the most prominent Protestant martyrology, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563). The anti-Catholic tract that prefaces the Actes, “The Persecutors of God’s Truth, Commonly Called Papists”, contains a section that strikingly resembles the passage from Hall’s sermon quoted above: See, I say, and behold, here present before your eyes, the heaps of slain bodies, of so many men and women, both old, young, children, infants, new born, married, unmarried, wives, widows, maids, blind men, lame men, whole men; of all sorts, of all ages, of all degrees; … whose wounds, yet bleeding before the face of God, cry vengeance! …. See, therefore, I say – read, and behold your acts and facts; and when you have seen, then judge what you have deserved.96

94

Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall, V, 262-63. Cf. Vickers, Defence, 291. On Martin Luther as a “choreographer of thought”, see Peter Matheson, The Rhetoric of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 20. 96 Quoted in Diehl, Staging Reform, 186. 95

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Both examples evince a striking theatricality. Hall and Foxe emphasize the processes of showing and looking (or, in the case of Hall, the process of not looking), thereby literally drawing their audiences’ attention towards the terrible spectacle they depict. The aim of this spectacular strategy, however, is not merely to raise the congregation’s violent emotions but also to confirm their function as witnesses of the sufferance of the righteous and, by extension, their role as judges of their tormentors. What legitimizes their exposure to such gory displays is the implied presence of the divine spectator in whose name this spectacle is invoked.97 Hall’s sermon adds a twist to these operations. He cunningly transforms the rhetorical principle of amplification from a mere accumulation of violent images into a titillating play of invocation and abnegation. Hall’s apparent rejection of spectacular cruelty, which he subsequently describes in great detail, only makes these images more effective. While Hall here reveals his awareness of the emotional potential in the congregation/audience, who can be excited to moral ends, his gesture of self-abnegation reveals the transformation of divine judgement into an individual conscience able to contain the images (and their attendant emotions) thereby invoked. The ideology of the passage works on two levels: apart from enacting the power of English morality to contain the fearsome ghosts it could conjure up, it also illustrates the power of rhetoric to incite and to bridle the passions. By implication, Hall here presents himself both as a good Englishman and an excellent didactic orator. Taking violence as the mark of cultural difference, his sermon similarly seeks to illuminate British superiority by exposing the cruel aberrations of the Spanish inquisition.98 But if his optimistic “othering” of violence99 reveals the seductiveness of political propaganda, it also points to the weaknesses of a dichotomous logic that relies upon precisely this other to make sense at all. Dismissing the violence of others as gratuitous, Hall simultaneously makes it meaningful by exploiting it in the name of his own patriotic agenda. Even in the light of the 97

Ibid., 186 and 193. In a very similar manner the Jacobean judiciary insisted that England, in contrast to the Catholic continental powers, was a torture-free zone. See John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 22. 99 Barker, Culture, 148. 98

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overarching political context of his sermon, the potentially exciting impact of this catalogue of atrocities cannot be ignored. Yet although the passage in question disputes the critical notion that Hall appropriated a plain, terse Senecan style in accordance with his alleged Puritan leanings,100 it by no means suggests that he was subscribing to the rhetorical duplicity on which his didacticism relies. The audience Hall was imagining was a faithful one, whose emotional potential could safely be exploited to a higher moral end. Hall’s sermon vividly refutes critical attempts to separate affect and pedagogy, to distinguish between emotional and didactic media, and thereby puts in perspective the distinction between stage and pulpit made by critics like Mullaney. In being extremely affective, Hall is also highly didactic. In turn, this conjunction may be brought to our understanding of the stage, whose excessive displays were not staged to incite excessive pleasure but to rein it in. Such observations may buttress the notion that the theatre engaged in a post-Reformation iconoclasm that characterized early modern culture at large. For Huston Diehl, the violent misogyny of early modern drama is a mirror image of the ambiguous attitude of Protestant culture towards beauty and decorum, a potentially self-destructive gesture made by playwrights against the inherent idolatry of their work. Playwrights disciplined the aesthetic and emotional scope of the dramatic medium precisely by exploring the beautiful and then responding to it with an “iconoclastic violence”101 that suggests the prevalence of a “Protestant aesthetic” in the early modern theatre. The professional context that I have outlined in this chapter again complicates such closed interpretations of the early modern theatre’s excesses. As I have shown in my reading of Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Valentinian, this play, far from condemning excess, revalues it as a quintessential dramatic force. The play’s final iconoclastic gesture, when the Empress Eudoxa literally installs a regime of reason, is ultimately insignificant for the overall dramatic economy – reason here is a feeble force only half-heartedly introduced after the main action has taken its bloody toll. Since reason is not conducive to 100

Hall, who had no explicit Puritan affiliations, was associated with Puritanism because of his “moderate asceticism of his notions of personal conduct” (Chew, “Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism”, 1133). 101 Diehl, Staging Reform, 163.

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theatrical pleasure, it is pushed to the margins of the play, where it establishes the limit of excess that affirms other strategies of containment. The fact that it is embodied by a woman undermines its relevance even further, reducing reason to a screen behind which the playwright can exploit the masculine excesses on which he relies. Thus although Valentinian illustrates the complex dialectic that connects the exploration of the dramatic means available to the playwright and a self-imposed censorship, the tragedy defies the idea that such acts of “self-consumption”102 were intentional or truly selfdestructive (let alone that they paved the way for the closing of the theatres in 1642).103 Such arguments, in associating theatrical fantasies with enchantment and beauty, enthralment and splendour as well as titillating danger, position them in opposition to the self-chastising, self-denying discourses of a dreary Protestantism and identify them as subversive relics of pre-Reformation rituals set up against the dominant religious spirit.104 In endorsing the popular image of the early modern stage as a place of subversion, foreshadowing revolution and regicide, critics also play into the hands of the iconoclasts by confirming their anti-theatrical belief in the powers of the imagination.105 Whatever critical intention such arguments may serve, they ultimately seem to disapprove of the theatre culture they thereby seek to defend. A central problem, I believe, is the concept of fantasy that necessarily underpins the emphasis on the early modern theatre’s self102

Jonathan Crewe, “The Theatre of the Idols: Marlowe, Rankins, and Theatrical Images”, Theatre Journal, XXXVI (1984), 321-33. 103 Diehl, Staging Reform, 173. 104 Montrose describes the early modern theatre as “an alternative” to the symbolic forms of the medieval church lost after the Reformation (The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996], 31). At the same time he distances himself emphatically from criticism that establishes a more direct link between theatre and Catholicism, such as Michael O’Connell’s article “The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater”, English Literary History, LII (1985), 279-310. In his more recent monograph with the same title (The Idolatrous Eye, 2002, see n. 43 above) O’Connell addresses what he sees as Montrose’s misinterpretation of his position and clarifies his view. 105 Karin S. Coddon, “The Duchess of Malfi: Tyranny and Spectacle in Jacobean Drama”, in Madness in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3.

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destruction. This hypothesis relies on a concept of fantasy as an escape route from reality, a way of obfuscating the horrors of life. The subversive nature of the stage endorsed by such theses becomes doubtful, however, as soon as we modify the concept of fantasy on which they are based and shift our concern to the forms, structures and function of fantasies in the creation of meaning and order – in other words, when we acknowledge fantasy to be a fundamentally constructive phenomenon, a buttress of reality. From this perspective, we need to review our understanding not only of individual plays, but also of the general function of early modern theatre within its cultural context. Meddling with the extreme and excessive, the early modern stage affirmed its role as a cultural institution where these extremes and excesses could simultaneously be explored, commercially exploited and didactically tamed. By acknowledging the complex nature and intentions of the early modern stages we open up innovative critical avenues for long-overdue reinterpretations of their products.

CHAPTER 2

“ALL THE ILL MAN CAN INVENT”: JOHN WEBSTER AND HIS DUCHESS Poor foolish boy, why vainly grasp at the fleeting image that eludes you? The thing you are seeking does not exist: only turn aside and you will lose what you love. What you see is but the shadow cast by your reflection; in itself it is nothing. It comes with you, and lasts while you are there; it will go when you go, if go you can.1

John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1613) occupies a special position in the Jacobean tragic canon. Unlike most of the all but forgotten plays of the period, this tragedy of a virtuous young widow pursued and finally killed by her brothers because of her love for a socially inferior man, has maintained a perennial fascination. For feminist and traditionalist critics alike, who admire the title character as a figure of unassailable integrity and admirable constancy in the face of patriarchy’s irrational madness, the play has served as a powerful catalyst of their critical self-perception and moral integrity. As a consequence, The Duchess of Malfi has typically been read dualistically, as a dialogue between different moral and representative registers making thinly veiled political references to early modern England. While the Duchess and her husband Antonio represent sanity, containment and emotionality, her brothers embody madness, excess and political scheming. Critics emphasizing the contrastive structure of the play tend to see the titular heroine as the triumphant embodiment of moral superiority and heroic individualism: she is a

1

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (1955; Harmondsworth: Penguin 1971), 85.

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strong woman steadfastly resisting the negative powers that dominate the world of Malfi by clinging to her ingrained sensuality and desire.2 However, such readings ignore the ostentatiously imagined and overtly foregrounded nature of the tragic excesses of Webster’s play3 – its concern with the imagination, or fantasy. On that level, it may be taken as Webster’s self-conscious exploration of the imaginative sources of his own tragedy and of all dramatic art. In the play, fantasy is not only pervasive, it continually cuts across lines of class, gender and morality. It is intimately and constructively connected with the individual psyche, whatever exorbitant, excessive or violent form it may take. That the imagination is the linchpin of psychic as well as aesthetic authority is indicated not least by the tragedy’s classical reference point, the myth of Narcissus, according to which the self is constituted as well as haunted by its fantasies. For this reason, fantasies do not provide an escape route from reality. In analogy to his eponymous character, the playwright is “plagu’d”4 by an art that is as inevitable as it is seductive. Webster not only knew that he was doomed to dream: as a professional playwright dependent on the benevolence of his spectators, he also knew that he was doomed to exploit this dream-potential to commercial ends. The pervasiveness of fantasy in Webster’s play also questions any attempt to locate the Duchess outside of its fantasy economy as a feminist icon or martyr. Huston Diehl has read the Duchess’ subjection to the psychological terror undertaken at the behest of her twin brother, and her ultimate destruction in Act IV, as a self2

See, for instance, Theodora A. Jankowski, “Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi”, Studies in Philology, LXXXVII/2 (1999), 221-45 and Linda Woodbridge, “Queen of Apricots: The Duchess of Malfi, Hero of Desire”, in The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Naomi Conn Liebler (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 161-84. For a persuasive critique of the “strong woman” argument in interpretations of Webster’s play, see Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), especially 68-102. 3 Leslie Duer, “The Landscape of Imagination in The Duchess of Malfi“, Modern Language Studies, X/1 (1979), 8. 4 The full quote runs: “Excellent: as I would wish; she’s plagu’d in art” (IV.i.111). John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974). All references for quotations from this edition will be included in the text.

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mutilating gesture by the playwright against the forbidden fantasies of theatre: as a sign of his Protestant suspicion of the Catholic imagination of the Petrarchan tradition,5 which manifested itself in a destructive iconoclasm. Protestant art (embodied by the Duchess) is “godly and potentially redemptive”, inducing “self-examination” and “an anxiety about art and theater” in the audience by making “the act of viewing representational art visible”. By contrast, a Catholic aesthetic (represented by her brother Ferdinand) is “demonic and dangerous” and “collapses the distinction between sign and thing signified, deceiving and confusing the spectator”.6 However, the Duchess’ early death could equally be seen as an important trigger for the perpetuation of theatrical fantasies and spectacular imaginations, suggesting the playwright’s deliberate exploration of the dramatic situation and therefore his astute understanding of the power and function of the imagination in formatting the psyche. If Webster’s play is iconoclastic at all, this iconoclasm is not only tentative, apologetic and self-conscious: its effect is productive, triggering off the very fantasy machinery the play allegedly defies. This argument gives the character of the Duchess a meta-theatrical role so far left unexplored in readings of the play. I will show that Webster’s Duchess not only fantasizes actively, but that her fantasies may be taken as a crucial early modern representational strategy of containing excess by staging it.7 For the playwright, she is an ambiguous figure who allows him to exploit and simultaneously to transcend the extreme potential of the early modern stage. Webster’s nightmare and nemesis, as well as his mirror image and alter ego, she alone provides an instrument of his absolution.

5

Diehl, Staging Reform, 164. Ibid., 185, 183, 197 and 208. 7 Regarding the use of such strategies in prose and poetry respectively, see Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Renaissance Fantasies: The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction (Kent, OH and London: Kent State University Press, 1999) and Dorothy Stephens, The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6

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Subject to fantasy George Bernard Shaw’s view of Webster as “the Tussaud laureate”8 is illustrative of the critical attitude vis-à-vis the playwright and of what Shaw (along with other critics) considered a notorious play. The Duchess of Malfi represents an immense night9 and “nightmare world”,10 consisting of a disturbing “catalogue of the appalling”.11 Yet far from simply immoral, the play’s index of terror confirms something more constructive: it indicates that the playwright has understood the tools of his trade. Aware that fantasy is his business, Webster explores “all the ill man can invent” (I.i.275) with selfconfident flamboyance and determination. In so doing, he consciously closes ranks with the many fantasizing creatures of his play, revaluing the imagination in the process. Indeed, at first sight, fantasy in The Duchess of Malfi seems to be associated mainly with Ferdinand and the Cardinal, the Duchess’ scheming brothers. In this context it earmarks a destructive madness, as Ferdinand himself suggests when he begs his brother to dispel his thoughts of their sister, lest “my imagination will carry me / To see her, in the shameful act of sin” (II.v.40-41). Since by this time the audience has already sampled his violent imagination – for example when he fantasizes about his sister’s “bleeding heart”, of which he wants to “make a sponge” (II.v.15), or when he imagines himself hewing her “into pieces” (II.v.31) – Ferdinand’s belated plea to put an end to his fantasies signals at best a false penitence. His omnipresent fantasies are evidence of the terrible scope of his hyper-creative mind. Yet Ferdinand is not the only character fantasizing about the Duchess. His violent fantasies have their positive counterpart in the reverential description made by her loyal steward Antonio at the

8

G. B. Shaw, quoted in Christopher Ricks, “The Tragedies of Webster, Tourneur and Middleton“, in Sphere History of Literature in the English Language, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Sphere, 1971), III, 306-307. 9 Rupert Brooke, John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1916), 158. 10 Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Circle, Sword and the Futile Quest: The Nightmare World of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi”, Cahiers Élizabéthains, XXI (1985), 53-66. 11 Sharon Kaehele Shaw, “Medea on Pegasus: Some Speculations on the Parallel Rise of Women and Melodrama on the Renaissance Stage”, Ball State University Forum, XIV/4 (1973), 18.

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beginning of the play, which introduces the adored woman in absentia: But for their sister, the right noble duchess – You never fix’d your eye on three fair medals, Cast in one figure, of so different temper: For her discourse, it is so full of rapture You only will begin then to be sorry When she doth end her speech; and wish, in wonder, She held it less vain-glory to talk much, Than you penance to hear her: whilst she speaks, She throws upon a man so sweet a look, That it were able raise one to a galliard That lay in a dead palsy, and to dote On that sweet countenance: but in that look, There speaketh so divine a continence As cuts off all lascivious, and vain hope. Her days are practis’d in such noble virtue That sure her nights – nay more, her very sleeps – Are more in heaven than other ladies’ shrifts. Let all sweet ladies break their flatt’ring glasses, And dress themselves in her. (I.i.187-204)

To highlight the scope of corruption and depravity in Malfi, Antonio depicts the Duchess, along the lines of early modern clichés about women, as the embodiment of perfection – “chaste, silent and obedient”12 – so much so that she may serve as a mirror image for other women. In a world of appearances (note the mention of “vainglory” in l. 7), she sends signals of supreme reliability: her look “speaketh so divine a continence / As cuts off all lascivious, and vain hope” (ll. 13-14). She thereby also affirms Antonio’s earlier praise of France and her “judicious king”, who culls his court of dangerous and destructive elements such as “flatt’ring sycophants” and “dissolute / And infamous persons” (I.i.8-9) for the benefit of his country. Antonio’s idealized image of the Duchess of Malfi two hundred lines later connects her with his idealized vision of France, suggesting that 12

Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women 14751640 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982).

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she is not only the embodiment of female perfection, but also represents an exemplary individual worthy of inhabiting, if not leading such a model state. Antonio’s praise, however, is immediately put in perspective by his confidant Delio, who chides his friend for the long-windedness of his encomium: “Fie Antonio, / You play the wire-drawer [= go to great lengths] with [The Duchess’] commendations” (I.i.205-6). Delio’s sober reminder strikes in two directions: it not only takes the Duchess down a peg or two, questioning her physical beauty as well as the moral integrity it suggests, but also exposes the inappropriately idolatrous nature of Antonio’s words. In the course of the play, the excessive nature of Antonio’s positive fantasies is echoed (as well as subverted), by the violent fantasies of his negative opposite, the Duchess’ brother Ferdinand. For although the two characters’ fantasies of the Duchess might differ in content, diction and tone, they are similar in force and perspective. Whether idealized by Antonio or vilified by her brother, the Duchess is the passive target of the male imagination. As such, however, she is given a particular function in the self-representation of either man, illuminating, respectively, Antonio’s tolerance and mildness and Ferdinand’s conservative patriarchal morality.13 In both cases, the Duchess provides a feminine otherness against which her brothers and her husband can fashion themselves. She is “the differential product of her relation to the putatively masculine background against which ‘she’ is defined”,14 rather than a self existing by herself. Confirming masculine identity, that differential logic deprives the Duchess of the very capacity in which male power is grounded: the ability to imagine. By extension, it denies her the unalienable interior space where these images are produced.15 The conjunction of imagination and power complicates the analysis of Webster’s Duchess. For to argue that she is excluded from the imaginative machinery that fantasizes her as an other deprives her of 13

See Jardine, Daughters, 70. Lynn Enterline, “‘Hairy on the Inside’: The Duchess of Malfi and the Body of Lycanthropy”, The Yale Journal of Criticism, VII/2 (1994), 88. 15 On the contested issue of interiority in the early modern period, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). 14

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what the play identifies as a source of authority and power. Critics who idealize the Duchess pursue a similar aim as her brothers and their henchman Bosola16 – as well as her husband Antonio: they seek to find in her a fundamental truth. However, in so doing they deny the daunting implications these fantasies have for the men who engage in them. As the mirror of male ideals, the Duchess is far from a mere passive surface; even as the “femininity effect” of a male “specular economy”,17 trapped in the field of another’s gaze, she literally embodies the lack that triggers her male counterparts’ fantasies in the first place, mirroring back to them their own estrangement. The Duchess not only challenges the gender difference she aids to establish and maintain,18 but also – given her own dependence on Antonio’s and Ferdinand’s fantasies – loses the status of absolute authenticity suggested by the play and its critics alike. The recognition of the dialectics fusing the Duchess with her male others warns us against taking the self-assertive statements associated with her throughout the play at face value. For example, her famous statement immediately prior to her death, “I am Duchess of Malfi still” (IV.ii.142), is regularly cited to illustrate the notion of completeness and authenticity. This statement appears to hark back at other moments of physical agency and authenticity in the play, especially her proposal to her enamoured steward Antonio in Act I. Initially accepting the obligation of the powerful woman to “woo, because none dare woo us” (I.i.440-41), the Duchess subsequently draws attention to the fact that she is a woman first rather than a political function, by highlighting her physical presence: “This is flesh and blood, sir; / ’Tis not the figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my husband’s tomb” (I.i.453-55). This physical presence is only underlined by the fact that it results in a marriage across social strata, with the Duchess “marrying down”19 to escape the confines of her social position. Nevertheless, to describe this scene as a “charming idyll”,20 providing a “fleeting spell of blissful intimacy and carefree 16

Enterline, “‘Hairy on the Inside’”, 88. Ibid., 87. Enterline derives this term from Peter Stallybrass. 18 Ibid., 91. 19 Marliss C. Desens, “Marrying Down: Negotiating a More Equal Marriage on the English Renaissance Stage”, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, XIV (2001), 240. 20 Ribner, Jacobean Tragedy, 116. 17

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happiness”21 in the otherwise bleak world of Malfi, seems inappropriate. First, we should be wary of over interpreting such moments of assertive authenticity for historical reasons. When seen in context, the Duchess’ attempt to “evade patriarchal surveillance”22 by claiming a space of privacy is an act of political kamikaze: a rejection of the power given her by virtue of her social position.23 Furthermore, the Duchess herself sees this moment in a far from unambiguous way, as her expression of uncertainty immediately prior to it suggests. Asking her waiting woman Cariola to “wish me good speed / For I am going into a wilderness, / Where I shall find nor path, nor friendly clew / To be my guide” (I.i.358-60), the Duchess invokes political chaos. She thereby provides a contrastive counterpoint to the political ideal depicted by Antonio at the beginning of the play, suggesting that this world is a utopian dream. Nevertheless, it remains uncertain what the wilderness the Duchess conjures up at this point actually refers to. Does she anticipate her brothers’ reactions to her own actions, or is she maybe referring to the steps she is about to take? Is it a sign of her brothers’ brutality or of her own? Whatever may be the case, she fantasizes. Her fantasy image certainly is at odds with the intimate encounter it heralds. Although the Duchess depicts herself as the target of the masculine imagination, trapped in a world where nothing is real – a “tedious theatre,” as she puts it, where she is forced to “play a part ... ‘gainst my will” (IV.i.84-85) – the Duchess engages in the same acts of the imagination she identifies at the trademark of others. To argue, as critics have done, that she thereby “assumes her own place within the context of his spectacle without any pretensions to visual mastery”,24 ignores such instances of participation. Furthermore,

21

Jean-Pierre Maquerlot, “Time and Tragic Mode in The Duchess of Malfi”, in French Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: “What Would France With Us?”, eds Jean-Marie Maguin and Michèle Willems (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1995), 44. 22 Daileader, Eroticism, 7. 23 Lisa Jardine sees the Duchess as a “travesty” of womanhood, a “caricature” of feminine subjectivity, who is subsequently exorcized: “Headstrong, emancipated female lover … chastened into figurative resignation” (Daughters, 92). 24 Enterline, “‘Hairy on the Inside’”, 96.

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contrary to critical intention, it also deprives her of a cognitive capacity the play identifies as human. The pervasiveness of fantasy in Webster’s play connects characters across the boundaries of sex and social position, suggesting that the playwright appreciated its crucial function in the human psyche and inviting a Lacanian interpretation. This apparently anachronistic link between The Duchess of Malfi and twentieth-century post-Freudian psychoanalysis is further supported by the play’s use of the myth of Narcissus, which has particular meaning in this theoretical context, especially in its notion that the creation of the self relies on acts of fantasy. In the tripartite Lacanian model of the psyche, fantasy is associated with the Imaginary, the order of narcissistic reflections and identifications. However, Lacan also takes fantasy to be of functional importance to what he calls the Symbolic: the order of language, the Law of the Father and of gendered and linguistic subjectivity – in short, reality. In the Lacanian model, this Symbolic reality is the diametrical opposite of the Real: human existence prior to any form of symbolization, that which is unrepresentable. As an expression of the Imaginary, fantasy supports the Symbolic in its project of warding off the dangers of the pre-symbolic Real. In the words of the Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek, on whose work I draw in my analysis of Webster’s play, fantasy is a “primordial form of narrative” set up to explain and resolve “some original deadlock”25 – a foundational moment of irresolution. Two related aspects of the Lacanian notion of fantasy are significant to my reading of Webster’s play: first, Lacan’s argument that fantasy, even in its most violent and absurd formations, is part of our rational existence and symbolic reality. The strategic deployment of fantasy is an ontologically necessary “passage through madness”26 that enables our perception of normalcy. Second, his emphasis on the failure of fantasy. Lacan rejects the view that human beings fantasize simply because they gain “a particular satisfaction deriving from the integration of an original organic disarray”.27 Although our functional 25

Žižek, Plague, 10. Cf. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London and New York: Verso, 2000), especially 34-41. 27 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (1977; London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 21. 26

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fantasies may ultimately be driven by such a “transcendental”28 desire to organize chaos and disorder, they are already strategic. For that reason, the production of fantasies is endless. Our imagination, unable to resolve the terrible deadlock to which it responds, constantly creates new horrors.29 Each (apparent) fantasmic resolution of a problem gives rise to new fantasies, since each remedial fantasy recreates the traumatic kernel (or, in Žižek’s formulation, an “indivisible remainder”) that had triggered it in the first place, and hence each fantasy requires further fantasmic resolution. Rather than testifying to the subject’s creative mastery of her or his existence, this chain of fantasies marks the subject’s constitutive lack and hysteria (what Žižek calls its integral “ticklishness”) and undermines the ideal of subjective projection on which the notion of fantasy as escape is based. Fantasy, then, is not the raw material of another world into which we can seek refuge from a dreary reality, it is the imaginary groundwork of the very reality in which we live. Nevertheless, while fantasy illustrates the self’s mastery over the world, it also reminds the subject, insidiously, how uncertain and tainted this mastery is. In Webster’s play, too, fantasy both maintains and marks the limits of the symbolic order and as such represents that on which his characters rely to make sense of life and which they wish to escape. This is not only equally true of Antonio’s positive and Ferdinand’s negative fantasies of the Duchess. The Duchess’ vision of a wilderness shortly before asking Antonio to marry her also testifies to her inherent ability to fantasize. In the play it remains unclear whether this fantasy refers to her presumptuous proposal or the disastrous political consequences of her actions. Whatever her focus, the powerful determination of the words preceding her confrontation with the terrible unknown suggests that she anticipates a radically new experience:

28

Cf. Žižek, Subject, 32. “The relationship between fantasy and the horror of the Real it conceals is much more ambiguous that it may seem: fantasy conceals this horror, yet at the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its ‘repressed’ point of reference” (Žižek, Plague, 7). 29

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If all my royal kindred Lay in my way unto this marriage, I’d make them my low footsteps: and even now, Even in this hate, as men in some great battles, By apprehending danger, have achiev’d Almost impossible actions – I have heard soldiers say so – So I, through frights, and threat’nings, will assay This dangerous venture: let old wives report I wink’d and chose a husband. (I.i.341-49)

At first glance, and taken out of their context, these words may indeed nourish a feminist interpretation: the Duchess defies the limitations of class and gender imposed upon her and radically claims the right to shape her own existence. Nevertheless, her prophetically determined words are interwoven with significant contradictions. Blasphemously recalling Psalm 110, “Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstole”, the Duchess’ “footstep” may for instance have reminded audiences of Christopher Marlowe’s immensely popular Tamburlaine I,30 where Marlowe’s megalomaniac overreacher takes the Biblical image at its most literal and uses the former emperor Bajazeth as the “footstool” to his throne.31 A similar use of the image can be found in the anonymous pamphlet “Jane Anger Her Protection for Women” (1589), which places it in the feminist context of the querelle des femmes, the public controversy around the virtues and vices of women which began in the Middle Ages and was revived with a vengeance in the early modern period. Anger exposes the foolishness of the Assyrian king Ninus, who was cuckolded by the Babylonian Queen Serinamis, by stating that “His foot-stool match he made his head, and therefore was a beast”.32 To paraphrase “Anger’s” somewhat contorted syntax and clarify her irony: Ninus stooped too low to conquer, becoming an animal in the process. Although it cannot be determined with absolute certainty whether “Jane Anger” 30

On the popularity of Tamburlaine in early modern drama, see R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37-39. 31 Tamburlaine, IV.ii.1, in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, eds David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 45. 32 Quoted in The Women’s Sharp Revenge: Five Women's Pamphlets from the Renaissance, ed. Simon Shepherd (London: Fourth Estate, 1985), 34.

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was a pro- or anti-feminist text, the pamphlet provides a potentially negative backdrop to the play’s concern with “the paradox of female rule”.33 But even if we disregard the potential negative connotations of the Duchess for early modern audiences, the allegedly transgressive nature of her words is also undercut in another sense, to which Lacanian psychoanalysis points us: they too are fantasmic strategies similar to those of her male counterparts, indicative of an unnameable intrinsic terror and unable to contain that force. Like her male counterparts, the Duchess makes sense of a deadlock by imagining terror. More, just as Antonio and Ferdinand mirror one another in the structure and function of their fantasies of the Duchess, so the Duchess has a fantasizing alter ego. In dreaming up a wilderness of the unknown to disguise the abyss that haunts the self – including her self – the Duchess recalls her second brother, the Cardinal. After the Duchess’ death, which he had helped to bring about, the Cardinal sees a vision of “a thing, arm’d with a rake / That seems to strike at me” (V.v.1-6) in a fishpond in his garden. Like the Duchess, the Cardinal is “seeing things”, and terrible ones to boot. His hell echoes her wilderness and confirms the strategic function of fantasy as a means of rationalizing one’s own, no less terrible acts. The “thing, arm’d with a rake”, while expressing the Cardinal’s guilt, distracts from his own involvement in the death and destruction of his sister; in fact, it serves to let him off the hook. That the Cardinal’s strategy must fail is suggested by the very specific literary reference established with the image of “the thing”. It is one of the many references in the play to the myth of Narcissus, on which Webster draws to illuminate the tension-filled relationship between subjectivity and fantasy. In Ovid’s version of the story of the beautiful young man enamoured to his own reflection, Narcissus dies from unrequited self-love and is “worn and wasted away with love, and slowly consumed by its hidden fire”34 because he is unable to grasp that what he sees in the pond is his own image. Rather than a 33 See Christy Desmet, “‘Neither Maid, Widow, nor Wife’: Rhetoric of the Woman Controversy in Measure for Measure and The Duchess of Malfi”, in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, eds Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1991), 85. 34 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 87.

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departure from this pattern of failed identification, the Cardinal’s interpretation of the image in the well clearly recalls Narcissus’ inability to understand that the one he sees in the water is himself. Just as Narcissus invents an other to love, so the Cardinal fantasizes an other whom he makes accountable for his own deeds. In both cases this strategy is unsuccessful: Narcissus fails to see that he has fallen in love with himself and dies pining for an imaginary other, while the Cardinal is murdered after he has taken his own terrible image to be another person. In so doing, he confirms the proleptic comment made earlier in the play by his ruthless stooge Bosola, who suggests preposterously that “[the Cardinal] were able to possess the greatest devil, and make him worse” (I.i.46-47). This statement captures the very complexity of the Cardinal’s relationship to his imaginary other as well as himself. The term “possession” indicates active ownership as well as passively being possessed: the Cardinal is both the Devil’s lackey and his competitor; “the thing” in the pond might be the other and himself. The Cardinal’s “confession” in fact relegates responsibility, confirming the cynical comment made earlier by Bosola that imagined terror can disguise factual acts of violence and guilt – that “the devil / Candies all sins over” (I.i.275-76). Contrary to critical opinion which explains such instances as tokens of the play’s sublime obscurity,35 I wish to emphasize the strategic nature of the Cardinal’s speech, which is not so much a reflection of as indeed an active and creative response to a collapse of meaning. Rather than expressing uncertainty and confusion, it reveals a rational attempt to resolve a much more fundamental uncertainty. As such, however, it reveals that the sublime is not irrational. Already part of the rational order of things, it is a creative strategy which is already on the side of reason, “conceal[ing]” and “‘gentrif[ying]’”36 the abyss of the Real that it appears to represent. In the play, the rational ideal is embodied by the resolutely reasonable Delio, who is juxtaposed with his highly superstitious friend Antonio, upon whose apprehension that “Somewhat looks like danger” (II.ii.73) he comments: “How superstitiously we mind our evils! / The throwing down salt, or crossing of a hare, / Bleeding at nose, the stumbling of a horse, / Or singing of a cricket, are of pow’r / 35 36

Cf. Brown’s Introduction to The Duchess of Malfi, xlix. Žižek, Subject, 40.

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To daunt whole man in us” (II.ii.75-79). Antonio’s decision soon after these lines, to have a birth chart made for his newborn son (II.ii.8586), ironically affirms his rational friend’s admonishments. However, Webster’s notion of fantasy concurs with the psychoanalytical perspective on fantasy I have outlined, which suggests that the “mad” withdrawal from reality can mediate productively between the Real and the Symbolic (and hence that reason and madness cannot be fully separated). In a very similar vein, Webster repeatedly identifies the absence of meaning as the trigger of irrational fantasies. For instance, Antonio’s vision of “a saucy, and ambitious devil” (I.i.411) dancing in the empty centre of the Duchess’ ring is underlined by Delio’s observation that silence is conducive to superstition: “In such a deformed silence, witches whisper / Their charms” (III.iii.58-59). But while the play thereby seems to voice the anxieties of an emerging rationalism, recalling other instances when superstition collides with the play’s strained semblance of sanity, they also indicate that the human mind is able to fill the void with remedial fantasies.37 The irrational and rational are not contrastive elements, but accomplices in the creation of reason. The Duchess, too, makes this point when the madmen hired by Bosola perform their St Vitus’ dance in front of her to drive her crazy. Her comment that “nothing but noise and folly / Can keep me in my right wits, whereas reason / And silence make me stark mad” (IV.ii.5-7) could be seen to illustrate a “process of critical distancing” by the Duchess, pointing to her “lasting victory of reason over madness, of self-denial over desires” and providing her “with an unalterable identity”.38 At the same time, however, the statement emphatically confirms the functional relatedness of reason and fantasy. As even the Duchess is forced to realize, the world must be filled with noise so as to overpower the daunting void of silence – even if it is the noise of madness. In suggesting that absolute silence is not only impossible but also undesirable, however, the Duchess voices an important insight: there 37

In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998; London and New York: Random House-Vintage, 1999), E. O. Wilson points out that “without the stimulus and guidance of emotion, rational thought slows and disintegrates. The rational mind does not float above the irrational; it cannot free itself to engage in pure reason” (123). See also Ronald De Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1987). 38 Maquerlot, “Time and Tragic Mode”, 45-46.

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is no place outside the imagination. To endow the Duchess with an “unalterable identity” outside the machinations of her world would mean to deprive her of that property. Men and women are alike in their proclivity to dream.39 A fantasizing subject (and subject to fantasy), the Duchess is as threatening as any other character in the play. Her maid Cariola’s critical commentary on the Duchess’ wooing of Antonio may therefore be taken as a hint at the inescapability of her fantasmic capacities: “Whether the spirit of greatness or of woman / Reign most in her, I know not, but it shows / A fearful madness; I owe her much of pity” (I.i.504-6). We might be tempted to conclude from this commentary that the Duchess is a subversive force, whose madness is “the medium of disordered, potentially transgressive subjectivity”40 rather than the result of her exposure to her brothers’ destructive powers. Such views, in reiterating the ontological dualism between madness and reason, defy the paradigm of subversion to which they aspire, ultimately confirming the norm rather than doing justice to the evident complexity of this character. Moreover, since the Duchess’ opening address to Cariola might itself indicate a fantasy world rather than a factual state, the servant’s association of her mistress with “a fearful madness” may be one-sided. If, as such, it is illustrative of the way fantasy works against the terrors of the inconceivable, it also reminds us that this terror is embodied, not least, by the Duchess herself. Tales of love and cruelty The focus on fantasy in The Duchess of Malfi also allows us to review the play from a structural perspective. As critics have argued, Webster’s tragedy is maintained by a series of constitutive contrasts: good and bad, the domestic and the political/public, the “coherent subjectivity” and “sanity”41 of the Duchess and Antonio versus the “brutal theatricality”42 and “tyrannical misogyny”43 of her brothers’ Machiavellian world. When seen from the angle of fantasy, however, the apparently dichotomous architecture of The Duchess of Malfi 39 40 41 42 43

See Žižek, Subject, 68-69. Coddon, “Tyranny and Spectacle”, 2. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 14. Daileader, Eroticism, 84.

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gives way to a much more complex blueprint based on similarity and reflection. This complexity undercuts the play’s surface dualism on the level of class and gender, which seems to extend into the relationships depicted in it: a premature ideal of companionate marriage and partnership, as represented by Antonio and the Duchess, played off against the politic scheming of her brothers. In Susan Wells’ more abstract formulation, in the play a “dominant” and an “indeterminate” register interact in a powerful dialectical tension. For Wells, The Duchess of Malfi “is marked by the uneasy dominance of its typical register”, which is represented by the world of the Duchess, the ideal of “domestic intersubjectivity” it seems to endorse and the “commonality” that apparently emerges in the interaction between the titular character and Antonio. These ideals are challenged by the influence of the indeterminate register, represented by the calculating cruelty of the Cardinal and Ferdinand. Their indeterminate counter-discourse has a double effect, not only highlighting the positive aspects of the Duchess’ world, but also pointing to its problems and flaws. For Wells, the interaction of these registers makes the play’s idealized domesticity more balanced and realistic, without unhinging it completely. This interpretation of The Duchess of Malfi, appears comforting and complete, despite the notion of indeterminacy raised by the critic’s emphasis on the play’s dual nature. Its evasively circular logic, acknowledging a limited interdependence and maintaining an apparent interpretive openness, nevertheless anticipates her reassuring conclusion that the play finally asserts “the relevance of the Duchess’s vision and the dominance of the play’s typical register”.44 According to Wells, it is the Duchess who finally gets the upper hand, triumphantly asserting, even in death, the moral and epistemological virtue with which she is initially associated.45 44

All quotes from Susan Wells, The Dialectics of Representation (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 62, 67, 68 and 80. 45 For Wells, these conflicting registers correspond to different concepts of representation and, implicitly, of communication. While the dominant register establishes the “referential power” (19) of a text and supports the meaning-making process, the “indeterminate” register gives a text “a quality of contingency” (44) and disrupts significance. While the world of the Duchess seeks to communicate meaning and connect with the outside, that of her brothers disrupts meaning and hampers communication. On the issue of failed communication in Webster’s play, see also G.

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Wells’ view of the play is shaped by a Habermasian concept of intersubjectivity, taking it to mean a dialogic relationship of equal partners.46 Outside their inescapable interaction – in which they clash and influence each other – (good) self and (evil) other are for Wells monadic, pre-extant entities. Instead of taking the Duchess’ world and that of her others as mutually constituting elements, Wells describes an intertwined dualism of ultimately separate entities. This allows her to skirt the possibility that these entities might co-exist in a potentially much more fraught interdependence. By contrast, my discussion of fantasy in the previous subchapter has begun to illuminate a somewhat more complex situation. As I have pointed out, on the level of the imagination the characters in Webster’s play only differ by degrees. All characters fantasize, none of them occupies a safe point outside the imagination and there is no hiding place from its often terrible and ultimately insufficient operations. By extension, any straightforward demarcation among characters and the worlds they represent is bound to fail. At least as far as their fantasies are concerned, Antonio resembles Ferdinand, just as the Duchess resembles the Cardinal, and each of them dreams to ward off their own inherent trauma. The point is therefore not to see the Duchess as more real than the other characters but to accept her as equally flawed (and even threatening). The fact that Webster’s heroine is eliminated long before the end of the play suggests not only that the playwright himself might have perceived the Duchess in this way; in fact, her absence in the last part of the play fulfils Bosola’s destructive plot – his desire to lead her “by degrees” to “mortification” (IV.ii.177) – on the level of dramatic structure. In so doing, the play provides a very differentiated meditation on the concept of otherness and difference on which it appears to draw. “The other” here is far from the incarnation of mere difference that imposes itself as an aberration from the outside; rather, since Webster locates a sense of otherness in each of his characters, he invites a psychoanalytical interpretation of his play. According to the tripartite Lacanian model of the psyche, “the other” has three different dimensions. First, it is the imaginary other, or “my fellow human K. Hunter in “English Folly and Italian Vice: John Webster”, in John Webster, eds G. K. and S. K. Hunter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 256-63. 46 Wells, Dialectics, 5.

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beings with whom I am engaged in the mirror-like relationships of competition, mutual recognition, and so on”. Second, it is the “big Other”, as whom we depict the rules that shape our existence: the other as authority. The third other is located in the Real. As such, it is “the impossible Thing, the ‘inhuman partner’ with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the symbolic Order, is possible”.47 The three levels of otherness are inevitably interlinked: no axis between the two terms can subsist without the third one. If the functioning of the big Other is suspended, the friendly neighbor coincides with the monstrous Thing .... if there is no neighbor to whom I can relate as a human partner, the symbolic Order itself turns into the monstrous Thing that is directly parasitical upon me .... If there is no Thing to underpin our everyday symbolically regulated exchange with others, we find ourselves in a Habermasian, flat, aseptic universe in which subjects are deprived of their hubris of excessive passion, reduced to life-less pawns in the regulated game of communication.48

A play of reflections, resemblances and mirrorings, The Duchess of Malfi is suggestive of Webster’s complex understanding of otherness.49 From this perspective, however, we need to revise the idea that the Duchess, of all characters in the play, can escape her own otherness. She too represents a dangerously unsettling force. This change in perspective also entails that we take much more seriously the fantasies of the character so clearly tied to her: her brother Ferdinand. The nature of Ferdinand’s violent fantasies (especially – but by no means exclusively – those directed at his twin sister50), 47

Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 163. 48 Ibid., 165. 49 A similar point is made, in passing, by Maurizio Calbi in his Approximate Bodies: Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 3. 50 Thinking of his sister, Ferdinand imagines himself as a tempest, “toss[ing] her palace ‘bout her ears”, “root[ing] up her goodly forests” and lay her general territory as waste” (II.v.17-21). In a similar way, he threatens to destroy the doctor come to cure him: “I will stamp him into a cullis, flay off his skin, to cover one of the anatomies this rogue hath set i’th cold yonder, in Barber-Chirugeons’ Hall” (V.ii.7782).

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suggests a potential interpretive direction which is significant to both our understanding of this character and the structure of the play. Ferdinand’s fantasies bear a striking similarity to the “images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body”51 – the corps morcelés – that Jacques Lacan observes in the dreams and fantasies of his analysands. He relates these to the psychic condition of the self, more precisely to its fundamental incompleteness. As noted before, for Lacan the self is marked by an integral “lack” incurred with the entry into the Symbolic, during what he calls “the mirror stage”.52 For Lacan, this lack is not a pathological state, but the inevitable condition of subjectivity, which makes all forms of human expression, constructive as well as destructive, possible in the first place.53 Both in its structure and its effect, this Lacanian concept resembles the myth that sustains Webster’s play. Like Narcissus, the self during the mirror stage defines itself through its relationship to a mirrorimage; like the mythical figure, the subject has to learn that this image is insufficient and abandon it. Psychoanalytic theory challenges the notion that the subject, once it has realized that the other is insufficient, can exist by itself. Instead, what the subject is forced to realize during the mirror stage is that neither he or she nor the other possesses a substantial subjective identity: “I am nothing of what happens to me. You are nothing of value.”54 For that reason, the mirror stage marks the beginning of the economy of desire that will from now on inspire the subject, while also mediating between subject and world. These considerations also help us to rethink the role of Ferdinand as the Duchess’ irrational antagonist. Criticism has been puzzling over his concession, towards the end of the play, that “She and I were twins: / And should I die this instant, I had liv’d / Her time to a minute” (IV.ii.267-69). From a Lacanian perspective, this statement encapsulates the reflective notion of subjectivity which not only forms the basis of all human endeavours, but which also provides the source of all trauma. This dependence explains Ferdinand’s consummately 51 52 53 54

Lacan, Écrits, 11. Ibid., 46-78. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 20.

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ambiguous attitude towards his sister. At first ordering her slow destruction at the hands of Bosola and then desperately craving to “see her face again” (IV ii 272), he reveals the contradictions that mark the relationship of self and other, its simultaneous interplay of reliance and rejection. From this perspective, Ferdinand’s brutal fantasies do not point to the anger of the fully-fledged self regressing into madness55 but express his foundational dependence on a dangerous other who challenges the ideal of self-contained subjectivity. Therefore, contextual readings that interpret Ferdinand’s behaviour as the expression of social crisis and change shy away from the implications of his madness beyond the play’s historical context. For example, Frank Whigham’s argument that Ferdinand ironically embodies an “entropic apotheosis of the superb Renaissance hero”,56 is undermined not least by the essentialist notion of desire and intersubjectivity on which it is predicated. To argue that his “infringing attitude looks like a desire but functions as a hostile withdrawal inward”,57 fails to describe the very complexity of the desire that characterizes the bond between Ferdinand and his sister. Desire here is a conscious gesture towards an other, made by a full and fully aware self. By contrast, a Lacanian perspective describes desire as an expression not of a concrete need or a subjectively determined longing but of the lack defining the condition of the self. Against this background, the withdrawal from the other is not a sign of madness, but a gesture of sanity. What unites aristocrat and bourgeois, men and women and, for that matter, dramatic past and critical present, is a psychic structure based on a necessary, strategic rejection of the other imagined as an ideal. This rejection alone paves the way for the creation of a sense of self. Narcissus dies because he fails to withdraw from the imaginary other, yet this is a productive death. As Julia Kristeva has pointed out, this failure has provided Western thought with the model on which to ground its ideal of subjectivity. Rephrased and revalued as a necessary, constitutive self-love, the destructive love of the other aids 55

See Kennedy, Just Anger (see Chapter 1, n.91). Frank Whigham, “Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi”, PMLA, C/2 (1985), 270. 57 Ibid., 268. 56

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the creation of the psychic interiority we take for granted.58 Accordingly, Narcissus’ flaw and the reason for his self-destruction is not the fascination with his own reflection, but the fact that he takes his mirror image for real. This flaw, however, is not merely a cognitive one. Recognizing the mirror image for what it is – a reflection, not an other – the self creates the necessary distance and difference to the outside world. Narcissus fails to make the turn from outward to inward speculation: privileging the imaginary other over the imagining self, he allows the latter to be engulfed by the former. Thus rationalized, the myth of Narcissus reveals – and legitimizes – another fact: the fundamentally object-less and egocentric nature of a demystified and sanitized love. In exchange for this “blessed loving madness”,59 in which self and other merge, we receive the gift of dreams: “The object of Narcissus is psychic space; it is representation itself, fantasy.”60 Those who are sane must be narcissistic; to know ourselves we must love, above all, our selves. These psychoanalytical reflections on the myth of Narcissus make a point which is important for a reinterpretation of the character of Ferdinand as well as of what criticism has described as his “problem” or aberration. It is not Ferdinand’s withdrawal from the world that marks his madness, but his failure to accomplish the foundational act of withdrawal into himself on which the psyche is grounded. Instead of achieving self-reflective autonomy, he succumbs to the power of the other. Overwhelmed by his melancholia, he even attacks and attempts to “throttle” his own shadow, causing the courtier Malateste to admonish him: “O, my lord: you are angry with nothing” (V.v.38). Ferdinand is “ill” because he fails to take his own shadow for what it is. Like Narcissus he is paranoid and self-destructive, “guilty of not knowing himself: he who loves a reflection without knowing that it is his own does not, in fact, know who he is”.61 By extension, in this instance he rejects the privilege of the imaginative interiority

58

Narcissus’ speculative monologue “leads the ideal inside a Self that, only thus, in the concatenation of reflections, establishes itself as internality” (Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love [New York: Columbia University Press, 1987], 109). 59 Ibid., 8. 60 Ibid., 116 (emphasis in the original). 61 Ibid., 107.

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promised by Narcissus’ fate and explored and deployed by the playwright. Ruinous signification The Duchess of Malfi defeats the hope of its characters (and, implicitly, its critics), to ever exit the circle of fantasmic representations. The infinity of the fantasy machinery is rendered in Webster’s play by the recurring motif of travel, which is exemplified not least by the wilderness the Duchess evokes prior to her proposal to Antonio. Granted, although frightening, her imaginary wasteland represents a utopian refuge from the claustrophobia of Malfi. But whether literally or metaphorically, escapism invites contradictory responses in the play. The Duchess links travel with madness when, in a speech addressed to her brother Ferdinand, she voices her concern about his mental health: “You are very cold. / I fear you are not well after your travel” (IV.i.51-52). Ferdinand, this is the suggestion, has been away in more than the geographic sense; the absence here described is emotional and psychological. Such statements are in stark contrast to the more positive notion of travel introduced to the play by Antonio’s visit to France prior to the beginning of the plot, which establishes the backdrop of a political ideal of justice and honesty against which the true terror of Malfi unfolds. Such positive associations with travel as insightful and educational are undermined for example when Ferdinand uses the term “voyage” to remind his sister of the terrible implications of her remarriage: Think’t the best voyage That e’er you made; like the irregular crab, Which though’t goes backward, thinks that it goes right, Because it goes its own way: but observe, Such weddings may more properly be said To be executed, than celebrated. (I.i.318-23)

Ferdinand’s admonitions underwrite the claustrophobic nature of Malfi, where the Duchess’ desire to escape into domestic bliss is depicted as irregular – a perversion. Nevertheless, his warning contains more than a grain of truth, reminding his sister that from a

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political point of view her marriage to a man beneath her is an act that is as excessive as it is naive, literally demanding ritual exorcism in the name of order. The most poignant comment on travel in this context is Bosola’s cynical reply to the idealizing depiction of French politics which Antonio sets against the corruption of Malfi by associating it with the virtuous Duchess: “I have known many travel far for it, and yet return as arrant knaves as they went forth, because they carried themselves always along with them” (I.i.42-44). Bosola here dismisses the desire for escape (and, by implication, the escapism of fantasy) not only as cowardice: what the traveller seeks to flee is endemic to the human condition; escape is therefore futile. Informed by the neo-Stoic belief that the individual has to endure both interior and exterior terrors,62 this scepticism regarding real travel has a metaphorical significance; it anticipates the Duchess’ own ambiguous fantasy of escape and emphasizes her own entrapment in the machinations of the imagination. More, Bosola’s words recall the word of warning directed at Narcissus, enamoured to his own reflection, by the narrator of the Metamorphoses: “What you see is but the shadow cast by your reflection; in itself it is nothing. It comes with you, and lasts while you are there; it will go when you go, if go you can.”63 The play and the dramatic context similarly emphasize that escape is futile; like his characters, Webster acknowledges fantasy as a significant albeit potentially dangerous dramatic resource. In a final confrontation with fantasy towards the end of the play, Webster affirms the omnipresence of fantasy and develops from there his professional compromise with his own fantasy potential. In the graveyard of an abandoned, dilapidated abbey, Antonio and his friend Delio are exposed to the imagination in both visual and aural form. Fantasy works first in the form of Antonio’s vision of “a face folded in sorrow” (V.iii.45), then as an echo that repeats his words and, in the act of repetition, distorts them. As if to comply with the rational ideals introduced throughout the play, notably by his reasonable friend Delio, Antonio adamantly refutes the echo so as to assert his own rational status: “Echo, I will not talk with thee, / For thou art a dead 62

Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, Written in Latine by Iustus Lipsius, trans. John Stradling (London, 1595), 5. 63 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 85.

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thing” (V.iii.38-39). His response seems to illustrate a dawning of rationality that would appear to suggest that he has finally heeded Delio’s rational reminder, earlier in the play, that superstition threatens to “daunt whole man in us” (II.ii.75-79). He continues: Come; I’ll be out of this ague; For to live thus is not indeed to live: It is a mockery, and abuse of life I will not henceforth save myself by halves; Lose all, or nothing. (V.iii.47-51)

Antonio here endorses a reassuring ideal of self-contained subjectivity, underpinning it with a rigid all-or-nothing attitude that seems to distinguish him from Ferdinand, who takes his own shadow for a physical other. Realizing that he cannot escape the apparently omnipresent figments of the imagination, Antonio at least claims that he does not fall for them: feeling that he is sufficient to himself and able to assess the world rationally, he does away with the dangerous and inexplicable by calling it unreal and insignificant. Rather than Narcissus, Antonio resembles another emblematic mythical figure: Ulysses, whose rejection of the sirens’ song in the name of an ideal of rational scepticism enables his journey towards a self that has freed himself from the need to dream.64 But just as the search of the mythical hero is haunted by the ghosts it seeks to escape,65 so the fate of Webster’s Antonio questions this gesture of rejection. In light of the significance fantasy is given in the play, Antonio’s defiance is not so much a token of his superior sanity as the overture to death. His belief that he can do away with the other is as naive a perspective as is Ferdinand’s throttling of his shadow. Both men clearly fail to acknowledge that they themselves create what they fear and are doomed to be haunted by it. The graveyard scene reveals a contrasting take on the self’s ability to free itself from its ghosts. Exemplifying the fascination of a

64

Cf. Kristeva, Tales, 109-10. Žižek emphasizes the masochistic and ultimately excessive jouissance entailed in Ulysses’ heroic rejection of the sirens (Subject, 290).

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budding experimental science with the phenomenon of the echo66 it could, on a very superficial level, be read as a token of an indefatigable confidence in the rational capacities of man. At the same time, however, the scene is unquestionably coloured by the less optimistic implications of the literary-mythical source on which the playwright draws. As we have seen, the myth of Narcissus addresses the self’s inherent anxieties and fears, endorsing a survival strategy of rejection in response to the subject’s dependence on the other. Webster’s echo scene introduces yet another character from the myth to the play: the Echo that marks the beginning of Narcissus’ tragedy. Echo is the garrulous nymph punished by the goddess Juno to nearspeechlessness; all she is able to do is repeat the words of those who speak before her, manipulating them slightly. She falls helplessly in love with the beautiful Narcissus, but is harshly rejected by him for her truncated repetitions of his words. In literary criticism, the figure of Echo has been taken as a symbol of the relationship between subject and language, reader and text. According to this critical perspective, Echo’s perversions of Narcissus’ words represent a threat to the subject of the utterance and the meaning of her or his words.67 The early modern fascination with the echo and its cultural and literary transformation of the myth therefore may be seen to entail sceptical insights into the nature of language that foreshadow twentieth-century theorizing about the failure of signification. For Walter Benjamin, echo games in Baroque drama captured the crisis of signification that in his view characterizes the period as a whole and the genre of the German Trauerspiel in particular.68 In Terry Eagleton’s assessment of Benjamin’s study, the echo represents an unsettling “free play of sound”; a “self-delighting, purely sensuous residue” of language which the order of signification seeks to subdue, but “with which all written language is inexorably contaminated”.69 The staged encounter with the echo illustrates an attempt to subdue this force, while pointing to the inevitable limits of 66

Cf. John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 1-5. 67 Caren Greenberg, “Reading Reading: Echo’s Abduction of Language’, in Women and Language in Literature and Society, eds Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker and Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), 300-309. 68 Benjamin, Origin, 210. 69 Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, 5.

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this strategy of containment. Dangerously material, the echo resembles what Julia Kristeva, with reference to Plato’s Timaeus, has called the chora:70 a pre-linguistic, fluid and formless rhythmical mode of communication prior to the Symbolic order, which questions the self’s ability to know her or his world and to symbolize that knowledge. The chora haunts ordinary (and ordered) speech as material sound: “In this unsettling or reordering of linguistic meanings through sound ... there is a return of the hidden materiality of language which exists as a musical tonality before it becomes meaningful utterance.”71 In a dramatic context, such concepts gain further complexity. Just as, in literature, the echo hints at the material reality of writing and reading, invoking the presence of the reader, theatrical echo scenes may dauntingly serve to imitate the presence of the spectators in the auditorium. Webster’s echo is a reflection upon the way sound threatens speech, challenging attendant notions of subjective authority. The echo in the graveyard not only repeats Antonio’s words, it also perverts them in subtle but significant ways and calls into question the agency Antonio claims to possess.72 It may also be taken as a pointer to the disconcerting and potentially overwhelming “noise pollution”73 emitted by the audience in the theatre, their whispered comments and conversations, whether they indicate inattentiveness or critical interest. These scenes may, therefore, also be seen as meta-dramatic statements about the commercialization and professionalization of the early modern theatre and its increasing reliance on paying audiences. Again, however, the mythical source adds a particular twist to this dependence. Antonio’s words recall Narcissus’ cruel rejection of Echo: “‘Away with these embraces! I would die before I would have you touch me!’” In Ovid’s version, Echo subsequently retires to the woods, where she wastes and withers away “till finally her voice alone remained”. Equally, in this account, the rejection and death of Echo 70

Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), especially 25-28. 71 Berry, Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings, 45. 72 See Enterline, “‘Hairy on the Inside’”, 115-21. 73 Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 131.

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contributes to the lamentations of all those disappointed lovers of Narcissus who curse him: “May he himself fall in love with another, as we have done with him! May he too be unable to gain his loved one!”74 Before falling for the figments of the imagination, Narcissus is already guilty of a self-punishing hubris: a belief, namely, that he can do without the other. While the myth of Narcissus resolves the anxieties relating to the self by idealizing the space of self-sufficient interiority, it also reminds the self of its continuing and unconditional obligation to the other. A “narrative about responsibility”, illustrating “the duty of responding to the call of the other”, it also embodies “an incalculable risk and an unpredictable chance”75 in the interaction between text, reader and author. Narcissus’ death is not only caused by his inability to recognize the image in the well as his own reflection, it is in fact ultimately triggered by his rejection of Echo. By analogy, this situation of dependence also applies to the position of the playwright. Like the mythical character, theatre practitioners such as Webster were dependent on the echoing other in the auditorium. While this other may challenge authorial intentions with his or her interpretations, it also was a paying other on whom the financial success of the play relied: no financial or spiritual reward without the risk of interpretation. In this commercial context the other raises not only ethical issues but also questions of creative ownership and financial gain. These considerations also allow us to rethink Antonio’s sudden and unexplained vision, in the graveyard, of a “face folded in sorrow” (V.iii.44). This event, too, has been interpreted as a transcendent vision of the Duchess, heralding the non-spectacular, Protestant theatre that forces the audience and Antonio “to look beyond the material stage”.76 Certainly, the variety of positive associations traditionally evoked by the term “face” would seem to confirm such views. Representing an other – a friend, partner, lover – the face bids, if not love and friendship, then at least respect. It is irreducible, encapsulating the ideal of a unified meaning untainted by the flaws 74

All quotes from Ovid, Metamorphoses, 84. Claire Nouvet, “An Impossible Response: The Disaster of Narcissus”, Yale Studies in French Literature, LXXIX (1991), 104. 76 See Diehl, Staging Reform, 209. 75

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that mark “normal”, post-symbolic signification. The face, in the words of its most prominent analyst, Emmanuel Levinas, is “absolute authenticity”.77 From a sceptical post-structuralist perspective such views would be seen as fetishistic. Slavoj Žižek takes the face as an object that serves as a stand-in for the foundational abyss at the centre of the self and therfore at best a reminder of our existential lack.78 In this sense, the face is a transcendental signifier like the phallus, filling a fundamental absence of meaning with a presumably meaningful presence.79 For Julia Kristeva, the face is the prime fantasy that responds to the narcissistic wound the child incurs following its separation from the mother: the “capital vision” that follows a capital loss.80 By analogy, the critical association of Antonio’s vision with the figure of the Duchess may be seen as a very similar kind of hallucination, the projection of a comforting ideal in response to a fundamental absence of significance: the term “vision” is an elegiac euphemism for the skull beneath her skin. It is informed by a critical ideal of transcendence that ultimately serves not only to deny the violent fact that the Duchess is dead, but also the omnipresence of death, which tarnishes every sign with the mark of transience. Even without resorting to theory, Webster’s play itself presents evidence against the notion that Antonio’s “face folded in sorrow” is in fact a transcendental vision of his dead wife. Such an argument is based on an implicit link between the vision of the face, the echo and the dead Duchess, which is in fact made nowhere in the play.81 In insisting on this link and taking it to point to the Duchess’ function as a token of a better, restrained imagination, criticism itself perverts

77

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity quoted in Žižek, Totalitarianism?, 187. In Derrida’s words: “The face is given simultaneously as expression and as speech. Not only as glance, but as the orginal unity of glance and speech, eyes and mouth, that speaks, but also pronounces its hunger …. This unity of the face precedes, in its signification, the dispersion of senses and organs of sensibility. Its signification is therefore irreducible” (in Writing and Difference, 101). 78 Žižek, Totalitarianism?, 187. 79 Lacan, Écrits, 281-91. 80 Julia Kristeva, Visions Capitales (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1998), 14. 81 See Diehl, Staging Reform, 210.

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what is there in the play: it creates a “fantasy echo”82 of the tragedy and its eponymous figure which evades their complexities and contradictions. By filling Antonio’s vision with inherent meaning and positive significance, criticism replicates the character’s self-delusion that he can escape his fantasies and enter a more reliable world. Whether as enamoured troubadour (idealizing the Duchess in a verbose eulogy), or as born-again iconoclast (rejecting the vision her absence calls forth in him), Antonio remains tied to the fantasies that establish his own psychic space. By radically denying his own fantasy-potential he merely responds excessively to excess, emphasizing his similarity to rather than difference from Ferdinand – a similarity which is ultimately and terribly confirmed by the fact that both characters finally perish. A more constructive perspective seems to be provided by Delio, Antonio’s consummately rational friend, who reacts to the corrupting sounds of the echo with an apparently healthy pragmatism. Reminding Antonio that it is ultimately he who creates the echo, Delio invests what his friend sees as a traumatic situation with a creative undertone, thereby giving it a positive twist: “you may make [the echo] / A huntsman, or a falconer, a musician, / Or a thing of sorrow” (V.iii.2123). Delio’s sceptical compromise with fantasy by way of acknowledging the individual aesthetic authority it denotes, foregrounds the inherent problems of Antonio’s search for autonomy outside of the influence of the imagination. More, Delio here illuminates the implications of Antonio’s self-destructive rejection of the face also on a meta-dramatic level. After all, from the perspective of the playwright, this rejection exemplifies the rejection of a dramatic resource. Lest he wants to commit professional suicide, Webster needs to develop strategies to deplete the forces of his imagination while still exploiting their capacity to enthral and excite the audience. Whatever acts of iconoclasm we may detect in the play, they are circumscribed by these interests and concerns. That such compromises come at a price is insinuated by the context in which the scene in question takes place. In the graveyard, the fact of death is the one certainty on which all characters can rely, as Antonio’s verbal memento mori – “all things have their end” (V.iii.17) 82

Joan W. Scott, “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity”, Critical Inquiry, XXVII (2001), 284-304.

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– reminds us. Significantly, however, this graveyard is explicitly marked as a ruinous place by Delio: “I do love these ancient ruins: / We never tread upon them but we set / Our foot upon some reverend history” (V.iii.9-11). Reverberating with the scholar’s curiosity, these words again underline Delio’s rationality: as an object of inquiry, the graveyard and its ruins are no longer mysterious but something that can be analysed and historicized. Critical interpretations are informed by a comparable pragmatism when they describe the graveyard as the “eternal landscape of romance”83 or as a direct historical reference to the dissolution of the monasteries under the Tudors.84 What these interpretations tend to ignore is that such projections are only possible because ruins, like those in Webster’s graveyard, have already been emptied of all inherent meaning. Emptied of significance, they nevertheless become a repository of our interpretations. It is for precisely this reason that Walter Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, associates the ruin with the dialectical mode of expression that characterizes the Trauerspiel: the allegory. Both, allegories and ruins are signifiers, individual linguistic units which, taken together, create meaningful text: “allegories are, in the realm of words, what ruins are in the realms of things.”85 In this function, neither allegories nor ruins possess inherent meaning or symbolic weight. They are mere set pieces in a larger context of meaning-production. As such, ruins encapsulate the historical condition of the Trauerspiel, its disillusioning awareness of transience, not so much because they allude to a concrete historical situation, but because their own use illustrates the transience of history: “When, as is the case of the Trauerspiel, history becomes part of the setting, it does so as script. The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience.”86 Endowed with a deceptive fixity, the ruin illuminates the fragmentary nature of all signification. Hence the ruin is emblematic for a signification of the supplement, furthering the metonymic displacement of meaning in the endless play 83 Richard Hillman, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 27. 84 See Diehl, Staging Reform, 212. 85 Benjamin, Origin, 178. 86 Ibid., 177.

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of signifiers.87 Just as signs in the ruinous background of the graveyard proliferate without ever remaining fixed to a meaning, so other presumably significant signs of Webster’s play are shown to be empty and hollow. The surplus of theatrical images in The Duchess of Malfi88 – what could be called the play’s “histrionic overkill”89 – confirms that these images have also lost their moral potential. Webster’s play, then, confronts us with the abyssal abilities of the human imagination. It also suggests that the endless proliferation of fantasies is all there can be in a world where meaning can no longer by relied upon. Against this background, the critical depiction of the Duchess as the supreme emblem for an untainted, transcendental meaning emerges as yet another strategic fantasy to paper over the factual uncertainty she embodies. In so doing, criticism itself enacts what the Duchess’ enemies do to her: turning her into a lobotomized corpse,90 prevented from living – and dreaming.

87

Cf. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, 20. Cf. Rupert Brooke’s observation that The Duchess of Malfi is characterized by a “heaping-up of images and phrases” (Brooke, John Webster, 156). 89 Thomas Sorge, “Baroque Theatricality and Anxiety in the Drama of John Ford”, in Jacobean Drama as Social Criticism, ed. James Hogg (Lewiston, NY and Salzburg: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 127. 90 Cynthia Sugars, “Sylvia Plath as Fantasy Space or: The Return of the Living Dead”, Literature and Psychoanalysis, XLV/3 (1999), 23. 88

CHAPTER 3

LOOK WHO’S TALKING (PLAINLY): DANGEROUS ELOQUENCE IN THE ATHEIST’S TRAGEDY Language re-presents what vision presents, and yet this repetition produces something different from that which it repeats, for the truth of language is that, compared to vision, 1 it is false.

Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (published 1611) is another tragedy where language, in Michel Foucault’s astute formulation, has broken off “its old kinship with things”2 and opened up the ambiguous space of representation into which both its characters and the playwright are drawn. The full title of the play, The Atheist’s Tragedy or: The Honest Man’s Revenge, appears to contrast the lustful ambition of the malicious protagonist D’Amville and the contemplative, selfless spiritualism of the knightly hero Charlemont. Yet this “manichean” polarity3 is put in perspective by the conjunction “or” that links its two components. Who is the tragic hero in this play: the atheist or the honest man? On the grammatical hinge that seems to differentiate the two characters, the apparent antagonists twist and turn to the rhythm of a capricious language. The volatile relationship between hero and villain positions Tourneur’s play within the same moment of epistemic crisis to which, according to Walter Benjamin, the genre of the Trauerspiel responds. The gap between world and words that marks this crisis comes to the fore precisely in the characteristic stylistic device of this dramatic genre, the allegory. Unlike the allegory of old, however, which brings 1 Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 16. 2 Foucault, Order of Things, 49. 3 Cf. Danièle Berton, “Du Jeu de l’ego à l’alter ego ou de l’histoire d’une métamorphose en compagnie de Cyril Tourneur”, in L’Altérité dans la Littérature et la Culture du Monde Anglophone (Le Mans: Université de Maine, 1991), 19.

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forth intuitive insights, the Baroque allegory fails to provide ultimate and reliable meanings. To the contrary, it results in a chain-reaction of signification that can only be halted with those desperate deus ex machina solutions that are characteristic of this genre.4 Because the allegory, rather than a mere “playful illustrative technique”,5 is a complex, dialectical mode of expression in its own right, it resembles writing; as script, it draws attention to its meaning-producing processes and exposes their failure.6 As a Trauerspiel, The Atheist’s Tragedy engages with the production and failure of meaning. The play traces the vendetta of its sceptical anti-hero D’Amville against his brother’s family, notably his virtuous nephew Charlemont. D’Amville’s increasingly selfsubverting ploys finally collapse at a climactic but absurd moment of self-destruction. As D’Amville is about to execute his nephew with an axe, the instrument he raises against the other turns against him and, in the laconic words of one of the characters on stage, “knocks out his brains” (V.ii.240-41).7 Farcically implausible, this happy ending defies its own triumph. While suggesting an attempt on the part of the playwright to set right the things that had got out of hand, D’Amville’s bizarre and “oddly unsatisfactory”8 end reveals the extent to which The Atheist’s Tragedy has been taken over by the crisis with which it struggles.9 To merely argue that The Atheist’s Tragedy illustrates the wilful misinterpretation of language by representatives of evil,10 is 4

Cowan, “Theory of Allegory”, 118. Benjamin, Origin, 162. 6 Ibid., 175. Benjamin’s conception of allegory anticipates the principles of Derridean deconstruction, especially its critique of the privileging of the spoken over the written word as the source of untainted, reliable meaning, as discussed for instance in Derrida’s “Writing and Difference” (See Chapter 1, n.67). 7 The Atheist’s Tragedy in Four Revenge Tragedies, ed. Katherine Eisaman Maus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). All references for quotations from this edition will be included in the text. 8 William E. Gruber, “Building a Scene: The Text and its Representation in The Atheist’s Tragedy”, Comparative Drama, IXX/3 (1985), 208. 9 See R. J. Kaufmann, “Theodicy, Tragedy, and the Psalmist: Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy”, in Elizabethan Drama: Comparative and Critical Essays, eds Clifford Davidson, C. J. Giankaris and John H. Stroupe (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 197. 10 As suggested by Irving Ribner, Introduction, in The Atheist’s Tragedy, ed. Irving Ribner (London: Methuen, 1964), xix-lxvi; Rosalie Osmond, Mutual Accusation: 5

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insufficient, however. What is striking about Tourneur’s play is that in it language is not only depicted as fundamentally malleable, but that it continues to function even under altered epistemic parameters. The play thereby exemplifies “the antinomies of allegory” which, according to Benjamin capture the pessimistic morality of the Baroque Trauerspiel: “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance.”11 The inherent reversibility of the Trauerspiel undermines even the end of Tourneur’s play. Rather than durable stability, the play’s conclusion represents only a momentary halt in an infinite interchange of images, suggesting nothing else than that the final closure will itself be subject to continuous deferral. By implication, this linguistic condition also questions the playwright’s apparent reference to earlier homiletic and hortatory literary and dramatic traditions. The outward conservatism of Tourneur’s play is, as I will show in this chapter, undercut by the sceptical perspective on language which the play articulates in tune with more widespread contemporary debates on the uses and dangers of language. Rhetoric in crisis The linguistic scepticism The Atheist’s Tragedy is introduced in an emblematic passage towards the beginning of the play, which appears to illustrate an unwavering confidence in the ability of human beings to use language constructively. Charlemont, the tragedy’s knightly hero, defends his “affection to the war” – his ambition to become a soldier – against his father Montferrers, who would prefer his only son to prove the family’s honour at home rather than on a foreign battlefield: “Shall I serve / For nothing but a vain parenthesis / I’th’honour’d story of your family?” (I.ii.18-20). Seventeenth-Century Body and Soul Dialogues in Their Literary and Theological Context (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Katherine Eisaman Maus, Introduction, in Four Jacobean Revenge Tragedies, ed. Katherine Eisaman Maus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), xxviii, and Huston Diehl, “‘Reduce thy Understanding to Thy Eye’: Seeing and Interpreting in The Atheist’s Tragedy”, Studies in Philology, LXXVIII (1981), 47-60. 11 Benjamin, Origin, 175.

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The archetypal exchange between father and son within which this question arises, with its echoes of the biblical story of the prodigal son, establishes a crucial dramatic tension between action and inertia, life and death. In this conflict Charlemont seems to assert the superiority of the young and canny, apparently corroborating the critical view that he is “the most definitely soldierly of all Elizabethan heroes”.12 Depicting soldierliness in strikingly linguistic terms, through an analogy between action and speech, Charlemont evokes one of the play’s sustaining conceits: to act unheroically means to create a flawed narrative, a story with pauses, gaps – parentheses. When seen outside of the dramatic context in which they are uttered, Charlemont’s words suggest his unflagging self-confidence in his ability to speak the man that he is.13 The story he has to tell will be whole, unbroken and exemplify his noble character. This argument is underpinned mimetically: Charlemont’s language use demonstrates the heroic skills to which he lays claim, his words encapsulating the rhetorical aptitude that the conduct literature of the time associated with the image of the good courtier. Complying with the humanist parameters of courtliness as outlined, for instance, in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, Charlemont uses both words and swords in an elegant and effective manner, gracefully and, above all, without apparent affectation. Wrapping the argument against his father in a trope that befits the play’s general concern with language, the metaphoric parenthesis invoked to illustrate the determination with which he is willing to defend the honour of the family, Charlemont makes a convincing gesture of what Castiglione calls sprezzatura: courtly nonchalance.14 While the fact that Charlemont phrases his self-confidence as a question may suggest that he acknowledges, with a certain humility, that heroic stories might fail, it also indicates his belief that the “vain parenthesis” is as yet merely a threat that the right actions and/or words can keep at bay. 12 M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (1935; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 183. 13 As Ben Jonson puts it: “Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee” (in Timber, or Discoveries, in Works, eds C. H. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson [1947; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970], I, 625). 14 Castiglione’s neologism describes the “uncontrived and effortless” deployment of artful linguistic strategies (Cf. Baldessare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. G. Bull, rev. edn [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988], 67).

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But does this make Charlemont a soldier par excellence? If we consider the passage in question in its dramatic context, Charlemont’s belief that language exhibits the speaker’s inner worth appears less as a signal of his soldierliness than the target of the playwright’s irony. Tourneur embeds Charlemont’s self-confident linguistic gestures within the same sceptical perspective on language represented in the play by his uncle D’Amville, who abuses words to bend the world to his will. The passage in question follows an illuminating exchange between D’Amville and his servant Borachio, in which the former more or less openly voices his evil intents: his plan to destroy his brother’s side of the family in order to defend his own social position and material wealth into posterity. Charlemont’s absence is functional in this project: once his nephew is eliminated, D’Amville would be free to kill the ageing Montferrers and marry off Charlemont’s betrothed Castabella to his own sickly son Rousard. The play’s revealing overture allows Tourneur not only to disclose D’Amville’s intentions, but also to illuminate that it is language that enables D’Amville to veil his destructiveness. Initially, his abuse of language lies in his extreme vagueness. Only his instrument Borachio, himself as cunning and malicious as his master, can “understand the mark whereat you [D’Amville] aim” (I.i.59) – that is, get the gist of D’Amville’s allusions. The audience might at this point still be in the dark regarding D’Amville’s ploys, potentially failing to recognize D’Amville’s “mark” when it walks on stage in the form of Charlemont. With Charlemont around, D’Amville’s allusiveness is suddenly replaced by a bluntly positive imagery expressing ideals of kinship, family honour and parental responsibility. Only after Charlemont has left the stage, D’Amville discloses his real aims in an unusually plain-spoken statement ad spectatores: “Let all men lose, so I increase my gain: / I have no feeling of another’s pain” (I.i.123-29). The vicious finality of the blunt couplet seems to confirm the satanic nature of this figure, which already his suggestive name indicates: D’Amville is a damned soul (French “âme”). But Tourneur questions the parameters that shape such simple views by unsettling the distinction between good and bad on which they rely. D’Amville’s ploys are made possible precisely because they comply with his nephew’s noble ideals. Apostrophizing war at the beginning of his address to Charlemont, D’Amville beckons to the young man’s heroic

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intentions (I.i.67-68). The remaining speech, in which he reminds him of his social status and nobility and the need to defend and exhibit these characteristics in battle, is equally coloured by irony. Idealizing a world of stable social hierarchies, a golden age where true heroes would not be hindered by ambitious upstarts, D’Amville addresses the conservative class-consciousness of his aristocratic nephew. Describing him as “the honour of our blood” (I.i.76), sadly scorned by an inferior “troop of gentry” (77) who ridicule his “backwardness” (80) while garnering social prestige in battle, he presents his nephew as the victim of a disrupted social order. Coming from a character who has abandoned the belief in the intrinsic meaning of words, such statements are highly dubious. For the parenthesis which is, for Charlemont, merely a state of emergency following his improper actions, is for D’Amville not only the inevitable status quo of language, but also the paradoxical basis of his power. As he exclaims triumphantly after Charlemont has left for the battle: “Well! Charlemont is gone. And here thou seest, / His absence the foundation of my plot” (I.iii.210-11). D’Amville’s euphoric deployment of paradox sends a signal to all those who would naively trust his words – the simple-minded Charlemont, for instance. To call Charlemont naive means to take him as the guileless victim of his uncle’s deeds. However, the relationship between the hero and his antagonist is much more complex because both are depicted as distinctly linguistic creatures. Despite the allegorical nature indicated by his name, D’Amville is no satanic figure. At best, he is a stock stage Machiavel whose major flaw lies in his superior comprehension and grasp of the complexity of human communication. He does not so much maliciously pervert language to achieve his goals as make use of its inherent ambiguity. This linguistic sagacity may not absolve this character, nevertheless, it draws attention to the play’s participation in a general early modern scepticism about language’s ability to signify, to which the playwright could only react in a complex and potentially contradictory manner. The closeness of Charlemont and D’Amville is not only revealed by the fact that the former’s interests in honour and fame actually support the latter’s project. More, a closer look at the linguistic basis of Charlemont’s soldierly identity suggests that he is not only the victim of his uncle’s ploys, but his alter ego, even his shadow. The

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rhetorical skills that are the hallmark of the good soldier are themselves based on a deliberate and strategic exploitation of the duplicitous nature of language. Charlemont’s courtly sprezzatura is an intrinsically ambiguous mode. The ideal of transparent speech and communicable meaning he invokes to illustrate his soldierliness is inherently entwined with the dissimulation and deceit that form the basis of his self-image, potentially undermining the ideals of communication and reliable identity that shape the way he presents himself.15 What is more, from this perspective Charlemont’s naivety might itself be considered a strategic disguise of his own rhetorical cunning. In questioning the linguistic basis of Charlemont’s soldierly ideal, Tourneur evokes the early seventeenth-century crisis of rhetoric,16 when rhetoric became a target of criticism not only for its strategic exploitation of the inherent duplicity of language, but also for the personal ambitions and interests that it served. Given the number of rhetorical treatises, tracts and commentaries published in the three centuries after the rediscovery of key texts of classical rhetoric such as Cicero’s Epistolae ad familiares or Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria,17 and the overall positive perspective on rhetoric they represent,18 it may seem inappropriate to speak of a crisis of rhetoric. Rhetoric, in the words of Wayne Rebhorn, was a “growth industry” in the early

15

Arthur F. Kinney, Continental Humanist Poetics: Studies in Erasmus, Castiglione, Marguerite De Navarre and Cervantes (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989) notes that sprezzatura “eliminates the basis for knowing anything or anyone. It allows one man to play many parts, as we all must do in our daily existences. But it also may rob us of any singular identity that is our own” (104). See also Harry Berger Jr., The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a more positive view of sprezzatura, see Jennifer Richards, “Assumed Simplicity and the Critique of Nobility: Or, How Castiglione Read Cicero”, Renaissance Quarterly, LIV/2 (2001), 460-86. 16 Rhodes, Power of Eloquence, 58-63. 17 For the influence of classical sources on continental humanism, see Kinney, Humanist Poetics, especially 3-45. 18 Brian Vickers, “‘The Power of Persuasion’: Images of the Orator: Elyot to Shakespeare”, in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: California University Press, 1983), 411-35.

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modern period.19 Brian Vickers estimates that about two thousand rhetoric manuals were published in Europe between 1400 and 1700, providing “several million Europeans” – from the aristocracy to lay and religious academics and including the emerging professional classes as well as women – “with a working knowledge”20 of the field. There were multiple reasons for the enthusiasm with which classical rhetoric was revived: rhetoric provided a means not only for aesthetic experiment and exploration, thus appealing to emerging artistic professions like that of dramatist, but also for self-advancement and self-definition in an increasingly individualistic world. Rhetoric, therefore, was an important tool for anybody scrambling for social advancement. However, in the three hundred years marked out by Vickers attitudes to rhetoric changed significantly, and while the above estimates may give us a sense of the social function of rhetoric in early modern culture, they also explain its eventual rejection. The duplicity of language is only one explanation for this criticism. In the early modern rhetorical revival the linguistic and social dovetail and mutually determine each other: rhetoric is not merely the art of decorum and ornament, but of influence and power; hence it always entailed a potential for social advancement and change. Early modern artes rhetoricae were no mere style-guides (nor, incidentally, are their modern equivalents on the shelves of our bookstores today): they were teach-yourself manuals that served the various aspirations and intentions – personal, political, social – of their readers and authors alike. What some saw as a welcome means for self-advancement, others took as a provocation and threat. Tourneur’s role in this social discourse, however, was inevitably ambiguous. However sceptical his perspective on the uses and intentions of rhetoric in this play may seem, his criticism is inflected by the fact that his own work and

19

Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 7. 20 Vickers, Defence, 256. James Murphy speaks of “a thousand neglected authors” of rhetoric manuals that would deserve scholarly attention (“One Thousand Neglected Authors”, in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy [Berkeley: California University Press, 1983], 20-36).

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success relied on the same rhetorical strategies identified as dangerous. Early modern defenders of rhetoric presented it as the embodiment of ideals of individualism, self-improvement and power, emphasizing its constructive, communicative nature.21 For George Puttenham, the author of the influential Elizabethan The Arte of English Poesie (1589), language was the medium of the political being, rhetorical eloquence a civilizing skill, the orator and poet a “culture-hero”,22 whose task is to teach and delight. Both in its content and form, the Arte exemplifies the early modern confidence that rhetoric is a handmaiden of logic and prudence,23 its exceptional concision underpinning the author’s belief that poets were capable of putting language to civilizing uses.24 Rhetoric, then, was typically seen as a highly effective means to regularize human interaction without resorting to violence.25 If such views illustrate a new acknowledgement of human emotions and psychology26 and endorse an emerging notion of individualism, they also affirm a belief in the constructive and 21

Cf. Rhodes, Power of Eloquence, 41. Vickers, Defence, 272. See also Puttenham, Arte: “Poesie was th’originall cause and occasion of their first assemblies, when before the people remained in the woods and mountains, vagarant and dispersed like the wild beasts, lawlesse and naked, or verie ill/clad [sic] …. Whereupon it is fayned that Amphion and Orpheus, two Poets of the first ages, one of them, to wit Amphion, builded up cities, and reared walles with the stones that came in heapes to the sound of his harpe, figuring thereby the mollifying of hard and stonie hearts by his sweete and eloquent perswasion” (6). All references for quotations from this edition will be included in the text. 23 On the connection between logic and rhetoric, see W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (1956; New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), 4, and on prudence Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985). 24 Cf. Willcock’s and Walker’s Introduction to Puttenham’s Arte, lxii. 25 As Henry Peacham writes in The Garden of Eloquence (1577): “what the sword may do in war, this vertue may performe in peace, yet with great difference, for that with violence, this with perswasion, that with shedding of blood, this with pearcing the affections, that with desire of death, this with special regard of life” (quoted in Heinrich F. Plett, “Theatrum Rhetoricum: Schauspiel – Dichtung – Politik”, in Renaissance-Rhetorik. Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Heinrich F. Plett [Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1993], 86). 26 On the psychological dimensions of rhetoric, see Grant Boswell, “The Disfunction of Rhetoric: Invention, Imaginative Excess, and the Origin of the Modes of Discourse”, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, XVIII/3-4 (1988), 231-50. 22

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communicative nature of rhetoric that remains attractive to this day. A rhetorical device that also appears to exemplify modern liberal ideas of “agreement”27 is the argument in utramque partem. This argumentative device demands that the orator depicts both sides of an argument in order to highlight one (that is, the more positive) of the two positions. Since the negative other is not silenced or denied but, on the contrary, explicitly articulated, the argument of utramque partem has been seen as indicative of proto-democratic sentiments.28 However, Tourneur’s play defies the optimism that informs such views. In The Atheist’s Tragedy the argument in utramque partem is seen as potentially self-undermining: to give space and voice to an other might thwart the good intentions behind this strategy, privileging not the benevolent orator but the malignant other. All positive implications aside, utramque partem also points to the same linguistic relativism of which early modern critics of rhetoric were only too aware. It, too, contains the potential of a dangerous reversibility29: the good may fail, the bad be victorious, and ultimately the two are deeply dependent upon one another. But there is another aspect that questions the optimism with which rhetorical strategies like the argument in utramque partem are invested: the driving interest for the rhetorician was (and continues to be) to influence and persuade.30 Rhetoric aims at leading an audience not only into particular beliefs but also to “real action in the world”.31 The eloquent man was “the emperor of men’s minds”, the relationship between orator and audience one “between ruler and subject”.32 While rhetoric may make human communication less overtly brutal, it cannot make the actual violence of the power structures in which it is 27 For H.-G. Gadamer, “true rhetoric cannot be separated from what [Plato] calls dialectic – in the original sense, which can be understood as the art of leading a conversation. This art is really the art of agreement” (“The Expressive Power of Language”, PMLA, CVII/2 [1992], 348). On the communicative means of rhetorical persuasion, see also Kahn, Prudence, 19; Matheson, Rhetoric of the Reformation and Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 28 Cf. Rebhorn, Emperor, 14 and Kahn, Prudence, 20. 29 Cf. Kahn, Prudence, 22. 30 Rebhorn, Emperor, 3. 31 Cf. Quentin Skinner, “Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence”, Essays in Criticism, XLIV/4 (1994), 271 and Vickers, Defence, 314. 32 Rebhorn, Emperor, 9.

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deployed vanish. George Puttenham, for instance, dispels any liberal optimism with regard to rhetoric when he bluntly maintains in the Arte that “none other can so well beate into the ignorant head, as the well spoken and eloquent man” (140-41). Furthermore, and this is exactly the point at stake in The Atheist’s Tragedy, rhetoric may help to disguise the power structures it mediates, including their underlying violence. The fact that in the play rhetorical devices are used in a personal context should not distract us from the traditional function of rhetoric as a public art, deployed in the relations between the courtier and his aristocratic patron. Rhetorical treatises were not only about language, they were conduct books for young noblemen trying to make it in the early modern social hierarchy. Dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, Puttenham’s Arte, too, is an outspoken bid for patronage.33 Rhetoric not only aided the “impure motives”34 of courtly poetry, providing aspiring courtiers with the necessary linguistic know-how, it also adopted the impure cunning characteristic of courtly behaviour in general: strategic dissembling and disguise. Throughout the Arte, Puttenham emphasizes that language, because it is “artificiall and made by man” (5), can be used to persuade others and postulates that strategic dissembling through language is the prime skill of the good courtier, who may thereby “winne his purposes and good advantages” (299-300). The third book of the Arte, “On Ornament”, is an inventory of the persuasive rhetorical tropes or “figures” to which up-and-coming courtiers could have recourse. Interestingly, his list establishes an analogy between language and the tactical cunning practised at court.35 Figures are therefore not only “instruments of ornament”, but also “abuses or … trespasses in speech”, which draw language “from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certaine doublenesse, whereby our talke is the more guilefull & abusing, for what els is your Metaphor but an inversion of sence by transport” (154). Significantly, a central figure in Puttenham’s list is allegory, which he associates with linguistic

33

Ibid., 7. David Javitch, “The Impure Motives of Elizabethan Poetry”, in The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 225-38. 35 Cf. Ibid., 227. 34

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dissembling, “the Courtly figure”.36 Puttenham’s surprising trust in the just deployment of rhetoric illustrates the Elizabethan self-confidence in the power of human beings to use rhetoric appropriately and with the best intentions in mind. Although he acknowledges that language is potentially “vitious” (156), he is convinced that persuasive strategies can further “the bewtie and good grace of utterance” (155-56). Seventeenth-century critics of rhetoric were less optimistic: emphasizing the potential abuses of eloquence, they recalled doubts latent already in the work of earlier humanist rhetoricians. De Copia (1512), the influential textbook written for the humanist academy of St Paul’s in London by the Dutch humanist Erasmus, provides a noteworthy companion piece to Puttenham’s text. De Copia, too, is a list of rhetorical devices aimed at sharpening pupils’ skills in exploiting linguistic abundance; rather than serving ambitious cunning, however, this linguistic abundance is here harnessed to the humanist ideals of mediation and reconciliation.37 However, while the various rhetorical strategies subsumed under the label copia might have helped modify educational standards, they also entailed risks.38 Above all, in appropriating rhetorical copia to his educational project, Erasmus was confronted with the dilemma of verbal excess faced by any rhetorician: “how to expand a discourse … but also how to control that expansion, to keep dilation out of bounds.”39 All scepticism aside, Erasmus was nevertheless certain of the positive implications of rhetoric, as long as language was used “correctly” and subject matter (res) dominated words (verba).40 Whatever risk remained had to do with the users of the “godlike power of speech”. Especially “persons of no real education or 36 Allegory “is when we speake one thing and thinke another, and that our wordes and our meanings meete not” (Puttenham, Arte, 186). 37 Matheson, Rhetoric of the Reformation, 217 and Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991): “The humanist text served as an orthopedic model rather than a threatening force. It offered an articulate receptacle for the subject’s desires, instead of merely imposing restrictions on them” (33). 38 One of these risks being the replacement of physical violence by more insidious forms of coercion. Cf. Halpern, Poetics, 20-60 and Vickers, Defence, 258. 39 Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 13. 40 Rhodes, Power of Eloquence, 48 and Matheson, Rhetoric of the Reformation, 21819.

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understanding” would potentially “pile up a meaningless heap of words and expressions without any discrimination, and thus obscure the subject they are talking about, as well as belabouring the ears of their unfortunate audience”.41 Illustrating Erasmus’ conservative social vision,42 his assessment affirms the social dimension of rhetoric and recalls the role accorded to language in the Reformation, during which emphasis was placed on the vernacular.43 Yet the prefatory material to De Copia also voices explicitly economic concerns. In his dedicatory address to Colet, Erasmus is emphatic about his friend’s selfless generosity and lack of calculation in his pedagogic endeavour.44 In the same place Erasmus apologizes emphatically for the publication of his text in an unfinished and unrevised version, defending it as an attempt to pre-empt cannibalistic bootlegging “as the lesser evil of the two”. This suggests that he, too, was subject to forces beyond his humanist morality.45 The mass of rhetorical publications in the centuries to follow, indicating that rhetoric would indeed become a lucrative and highly competitive market, confirms the anxieties that are noticeable in Erasmus’ text. His fear that rhetoric could be used as a weapon against the existing social order was not entirely unwarranted and anticipated, almost prophetically, some of the excesses users of rhetoric would eventually go to. Taken together, the epistemological and social aspects of the spread of rhetoric illuminate and explain why, by the mid-seventeenth century, the awareness “that speech could be put to evil ends”46 was firmly in place. Francis Bacon and others increasingly saw language as “irrational and magical”47 and rhetoric as potentially “threatening, aberrant, resistant to the author’s intention to persuade to right 41

Desiderius Erasmus, De Copia, in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), XXIV, 295. 42 Matheson, Rhetoric of the Reformation, 218-19. 43 For Matheson, Reformation polemic “was the weapon of the under-dog, of those who were hurting and those who were thinking .... It is a liberating tool; it topples the false consciousness of oppressor and oppressed; it empowers the marginalized; it lays bare the power-broking behind religious rationalisations” (ibid., 244-45). 44 Erasmus, De Copia, 285. 45 Ibid., 288. 46 Vickers, Defence, 285. 47 Rhodes, Power of Eloquence, 7.

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action”.48 Bacon, who had still associated Orpheus with philosophy in The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609), linked rhetoric with the theatre and its idols in the Novum Organum (1620), emphasizing that underneath all its didactic intentions rhetoric is a consummately performative and theatrical mode. An emerging “modern” ideology of lucidity and transparency,49 voiced above all by representatives of the emerging empirical sciences,50 dominates the discourse of rhetoric in the later seventeenth century, when the model of Ciceronian eloquence was replaced by the more rigid styles of Seneca and Tacitus.51 In a well-known passage from The Advancement of Learning, Bacon utters his dissatisfaction with the way “choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures” seemed to have substituted “weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement”.52 Later in the century Thomas Hobbes would take the eloquent abuse of language as characteristic of the violent state of nature he imagines in Leviathan.53 From the vantage point of today, the seventeenth-century critique of “inkhorn terms” – of excessive jargon – may confirm our scepticism regarding language. Accordingly, our ancestors faced a world of transformation and fluidity similar to ours (and which therefore only present-day critical and methodological considerations 48

Kahn, Prudence, 22. On plain speech as a perennial attempt at streamlining language according to particular moral and political goals, see Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), especially 63-77. 50 The early modern “empiricism” was still clearly embedded in the older scientific thought against which it defined itself. For extensive treatments of the development of empirical science, see Richard Nate, Wissenschaft und Literatur im England der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 2001); Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) and Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 16261660 (London: Duckworth, 1975). 51 Rhodes, Power of Eloquence, 60-61. 52 In Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, eds James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath (London, 1869; Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1962), III, 283. 53 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 157. 49

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can truly fathom).54 Yet such arguments fail to see the enduring relevance of rhetoric in many areas of early modern experience, including drama. The early modern crisis of rhetoric did not express a sudden and unexpected paradigm shift with regard to language, it was the inevitable result of the same rhetorical tradition from which and within which it emerged.55 It is this indebtedness that marks the integral limits of plain speech ideals, whether in the seventeenth century or today. Neither Bacon nor Hobbes could escape the excesses of language, which they reinscribed in their attempts to map out the parameters of a superior knowledge mediated through plain speech.56 Finally, what must not be forgotten in discussing these conflicting debates around the nature of language and the abuses of rhetoric is their social dimension, of which both Puttenham and Erasmus seemed in their different ways aware. As Deborah Cameron has pointed out, any linguistic ideal of transparency and plain style is informed by clear historical and political interests.57 In the case of the early modern context, one of the issues is the social change that accompanied the rhetorical revival. Modern rhetoricians were often “men on the make … from the lower classes” and threatened the hierarchical structures in which they were operating. What raises its ugly head beneath the fantasy of a rhetorically established imperial power is a fantasy of social mobility “in which the baseborn rise up and even come to dominate those above them in the social hierarchy as well as those 54

Maurice Hunt, “Elizabethan ‘Modernism,’ Jacobean ‘Postmodernism’: Schematizing Stir in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries”, Papers in Language and Literature, XXXI/2 (1995), 115-44. Hunt maintains “that the concepts and terminology of modernism and postmodernism form metaphors especially effective for grasping Elizabethan and Jacobean writers’ struggle to arrest and contain flux in paradigms true to shifting perceptions of the world” (115). Jonathan Dollimore makes a similar point in “Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection”, Renaissance Drama, XVII (1986), when he suggests that “Postructuralism is helping us to see again what the Renaissance already knew” (55). 55 Cf. Skinner, “Moral Ambiguity”, 269. 56 See Lisa Jardine on Bacon in Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) and, on Hobbes, Kahn, Prudence, and Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For more recent examples, see Cameron, Verbal Hygiene, for instance her discussion of George Orwell’s self-undermining ideal of linguistic transparency in his influential essay “Politics and the English Language” (69-70). 57 Cameron, Verbal Hygiene, 64.

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below”.58 The master of language becomes a social liability, language in the mouth of the skilled orator a dangerous threat to the order it once served. This threat is illustrated not least by the common association, in the early modern period, between rhetoric and treason.59 The early modern debate around rhetoric provides the conflicted background against which to view Tourneur’s representation of Charlemont and D’Amville. Moral antagonists at first sight, they quickly emerge as mirror images when investigated from the point of view of their language use. At the same time as affirming, through these characters, the social relevance of rhetoric, Tourneur’s play also testifies to the rhetorical nature of early modern drama in general.60 In fact, with the increasing dominance of silent reading, as rhetoric was less and less exercised in “powerful speaking” and more and more in “fine writing”,61 the early modern theatre might have been the last bulwark for the exploration of the persuasive powers of oratory.62 Paradoxically, then, the art of eloquence was upheld by the same men who in the eyes of Erasmus threatened it: social upstarts like Tourneur himself. His keen, even disillusioned engagement with rhetoric in The Atheist’s Tragedy suggests the complexity of his response to the linguistic nature of his art. Both empowering and destructive, language provides the uncertain basis of Tourneur’s play, a foundation which is precarious even when it seems at its most stable. Unsettling reversals The linguistic scepticism of The Atheist’s Tragedy inevitably inflects the play’s allegorical and emblematic register. However, although the 58

Rebhorn, Emperor, 16. Cf. Mullaney, Place of the Stage, 116-34. 60 Plett, “Theatrum Rhetoricum”, 338. 61 Rhodes, Power of Eloquence, 45. This point is also made by Gadamer, “The Expressive Power”, 349 and Plett, “Theatrum Rhetoricum”, 346. 62 The theatre’s indebtedness to rhetoric qualifies Vickers’ view that Shakespeare, unlike the rhetoricians of his time, exposed the propensity of language to plunge people into chaos. While a critique of language is present in both Shakespeare and Tourneur, a close investigation of their work suggests how complex that criticism is. If Tourneur, like Shakespeare, “knew more about the power of persuasion than did its theorists” (“The Power of Persuasion”, 435), then one of his insights was that he too relied on the powers of persuasion. 59

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play, like so many other examples of early modern art, exemplifies the continuing significance of medieval thought in the early modern period, it is reductive to see Tourneur’s “allegorical method” as a sign that the playwright is “dealing in absolutes”, presenting a moral stance “in the clearest and least ambiguous terms, with a kind of exaggeration common to moral exempla”.63 If Tourneur repeatedly invokes stock allegorical images and characters, he does so ironically, aware that they no longer have an immediate impact and power. His irony diminishes even the most compelling token of medieval allegory, the skull, to insignificance. As “the accepted symbol of Death personified”,64 the skull is the most cogent memento mori in the Western tradition: a humbling reminder of human mortality. Tourneur is entirely in keeping with this traditional context when he has Charlemont, whose initial selfconfidence has by that time been replaced by melancholy, take refuge in a graveyard to meditate upon his father’s death. Even the attempt by the hired assassin Borachio to kill him there does not curb Charlemont’s trust in the continuing significance of the old points of reference: just as the graveyard is for him still a site of solitary contemplation, so the skull continues to be its prime emblem. Realizing that his life may be at risk, Charlemont seeks “more assurance” (IV.iii.77) in a vault. It is only there, in this “convocationhouse of dead men’s skulls” (75-76), that the certainty Charlemont seeks is rebuked. A skull he picks up develops a disconcerting liveliness in his hands; his confused question “Death’s head, deceiv’st my hold?” (78) suggests that “the skull slips and staggers him”, as the stage direction puts it. The slipping skull undermines the certainty Charlemont hopes to find in his melancholy retreat65, proleptically disavowing his statement, later in the same scene, that skulls “are the pillows whereon men sleep best” (204). The bizarre vividness of the skull in this instance links Tourneur’s play with examples of the macabre art of death, such as the fifteenth63

Ribner, Atheist’s Tragedy, xxxvii. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 309. 65 Andrew Sofer comments upon the scene in question that, by apparently taking on a life of its own, the “disagreeable prop here literally refuse[s] to prop up a character”, thereby defying Charlemont’s righteousness and literally reducing him to a mere prop himself (“The Skull on the Renaissance Stage: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Props”, English Literary Renaissance, XXVIII [1998], 47-74). 64

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century Baseler Totentanz (Basle Dance of Death): a panoramic allegory illustrating death’s terribly indiscriminate impact on all strata of society. The painting shows a cross-section of urban life, identifiable by the accoutrements of their classes and professions, as they are led off by frightfully lively skeletons clothed in windingsheets. The grisly sensationalism of the Dance of Death can be explained as a reaction to the plague epidemics of the early modern period; more specifically, it can be seen as a discursive strategy on the part of artists to tackle the “undifferentiating blankness”66 of death. The pervasive, if not obsessive, early modern engagement with death is a discourse in the sense put forward by Foucault, whereby death was simultaneously contained and “invented”,67 delimited and voiced. This discursive containment can be seen as a response and solution to the outrage of death, its omnipresence in the early modern experience notwithstanding. The nature of this outrage was social as much as physical; the processes of decay, putrefaction and vermiculation lead to the violation not only of individual but, more frighteningly, of communal boundaries. The work of death destroys the physical body as much as the symbolic body of the state, blurring not least the rigid class distinctions of early modern society. In John Donne’s words, the absolute levelling out of social difference during the process of decay “is the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and peremptory nullification of man that we can consider”.68 Against this discursive background, Tourneur’s use of the skull may be interpreted differently. Charlemont’s reflections at the beginning of the scene upon the lives of those buried in the graveyard do not so much refute as confirm, indeed celebrate the undifferentiation established by death: This grave – perhaps th’inhabitant Was in his lifetime the possessor of His own desires. Yet in the midst of all His greatness and his wealth, he was less rich And less contented than in this poor piece Of earth, lower and lesser than a cottage, 66 67 68

Neill, Issues of Death, 14. Ibid., especially 1-3. “Death’s Duel”, quoted in Neill, Issues of Death, 12.

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The Theatre of Civilized Excess For here he neither wants nor cares. Now that His body savours of corruption, He enjoys a sweeter rest than e’er he did Amongst the sweetest pleasures of this life, For here there’s nothing troubles him. And there, In that grave lies another. He, perhaps, Was in his life as full of misery As this of happiness; and here’s an end Of both. Now both their states are equal. (IV.iii.5-19)

Here, death is indeed the great leveller, but is positively connoted as harbinger of peace, putting an end to want and ambition – in short, to the kind of desires Charlemont had expressed at the beginning of the play. D’Amville’s commentary, when he discovers Charlemont and his beloved Castabella asleep in the vault amidst skulls and bones, seems to confirm a spiritual transformation towards humility: “Sure there is some other / Happiness within the freedom of the / Conscience than my knowledge e’er attained to” (IV.iii.284-86). Superficially, Tourneur’s play seems to fulfil this desire. But we should not overlook the fact that Charlemont imposes spiritual meaning upon the various memento mori he discovers in the graveyard. His graveyard speech is essentially a set of projections informed by the notion that death is a moment of respite from all earthly misery and toil. The fact that Charlemont modifies his associations twice with the word “perhaps” draws attention to the fact that these are indeed fantasies, whatever comfort he may derive from them: the meaningful skulls may after all be nothing but dead matter. Tourneur’s play here echoes other play in which skulls are identified as mere bone: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the Danish Prince’s projections on the skull of Yorick, once the King’s jester, are reduced to absurdity by the gravediggers’ dialogue.69

69 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (1982; London and New York: Routledge, 1995), V.i.178 ff. An intriguing materialist reading of the scene is provided by Richard Halpern, “An Impure History of Ghosts: Derrida, Marx, Shakespeare”, in Marxist Shakespeares, eds Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 31-52.

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Whether such instances turn Tourneur’s dramatic world into a “universe denuded of spiritual significance”70 is a question that needs to be investigated further. As I have pointed out before, what is remarkable about Tourneur’s view of language is not that he postulates the end of meaning, but that in his play language continues to be meaningful even under altered conditions. Meaning in it is uncertain, not absent. Signs may lack spiritual significance, yet they nevertheless continue to communicate. Charlemont’s skull, too, is not devoid of meaning; in fact it seems to possess an intrinsic disconcerting doubleness, sliding from weighty significance to the ridiculous as it slips out of Charlemont’s hand. For Walter Benjamin, precisely this doubleness testifies to the crisis of signification that marks the genre of the Trauerspiel.71 The skull is the metonymic reduction of what is, according to Benjamin, “the pre-eminent emblematic property”72: the corpse. Only violent death can create the level of transcendent abstraction which enables the making of meaning, only as a deadly allegory the human body can signify.73 However, as Benjamin also points out, there is a price to be paid for this allegorical abstraction, as it turns once meaningful signs into empty hieroglyphs. Thus functionalized, the skull is a mere “sarcophagus of image, constructed from base matter, emblematic and scripted, with a surplus of signification”.74 Rather than exuding symbolic significance, the skull can stand for any other sign, always pointing past the reality it seeks to denote. Not only meaningless, it is above all matter, materiality: the skull embodies “the solidity of a real which maddeningly persists beyond our attempts to think away its contradictions”.75 70 Una Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation (1936; London: Methuen, 1965), 155. 71 Benjamin describes this doubleness in another context as “total expressionlessness – the black of the eye-sockets – coupled to the most unbridled expression – the grinning rows of teeth” (in One-Way Street and Other Writings, quoted in Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, 20). 72 Benjamin, Origin, 218. 73 “The allegorization of the physis can only be carried through in all its vigour in respect of the corpse. And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter into the homeland of allegory” (Benjamin, Origin, 217-18). 74 Blau, Audience, 336 (emphasis in the original). 75 Halpern, “Impure History”, 49.

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No longer the comforting allegory of old, Tourneur’s skull is in fact connected to another of the play’s motifs associated with the early modern critique of rhetoric. Informed by the courtly ideal of dissimulation, the operations of rhetoric were also conceptualized through an imagery adopted from fashion. These motifs also infiltrate the solitary refuge of the graveyard. For example, the superstitious Puritan priest Langebeau Snuffe, who serves to introduce a brief moment of comic relief into the graveyard scene, hides a sheet, wig and beard among the graves, to don them as a protective disguise against the ghost of Montferrers whom he believes to haunt the graveyard. But the graveyard where disguises are hidden is itself perceived as a disguise. For Borachio it is “the fittest place for death” (IV.ii.15), not only for those who are already buried there, but also for Charlemont, whom he is meant to assassinate. D’Amville explains further that the darkness and solitude of the graveyard provide the perfect cover for the murder of Charlemont, whose death, once discovered, would be “imputed to th’attempt of thieves” (IV.ii.26). The once meaningful place of rest is thereby not only abused by the lawless, it becomes itself the disguise under whose cover lawless deeds can be performed. Tourneur takes the association between disguise and verbal dissimulation even more literally in his play when he uses a fashion prop, a scarf allegedly worn by Charlemont, as an instrument in D’Amville’s strategy against his brother’s family. The scarf is produced by Borachio as evidence for Charlemont’s death in battle, as a “sad remembrance of [Charlemont’s] life” (II.i.104) which he vows to wear to his own end in the presence of Montferrers and Castabella. The scene provides an instance of dramatic irony that might have reminded the audience of the prophetic encounter between Charlemont and his uncle in act one, when the young man mistakes his uncle’s intentions. While Montferrers and Castabella take Borachio’s report at face value, the audience knows about the fictitiousness of his story. Montferrers’s comment on his son’s alleged death – “Torment me not with witnesses of that / Which I desire not to believe, yet must” (II.i.106-7) – is funny rather than terrifying because there is no need to believe Borachio’s account. The fact that Montsurry falls for it not only emphasizes his naivety, it also confirms D’Amville’s self-confident statement, a little later: “So. The

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foundation’s laid. Now by degrees, / The work will rise and soon be perfected” (II.i.118-19). Since the audience has been let in on the situation, Montferrers’s assertion that “My turn will be next. I feel / My self not well” (II.i.126-27), becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although a tangible object, “Charlemont’s” scarf is also an abstract floating signifier that can be misapplied. The presumably reliable piece of evidence of Charlemont’s death is nothing but an indicator of the catachrestic nature of language. Erasmus had defined catachresis in negative terms as abusio, or misapplication, and distinguishes it from metaphor.76 Yet, as Tourneur’s play demonstrates, linguistic misapplication need not prevent communication. This disturbing insight allows us to specify the linguistic anxieties entailed in the early modern discourse of rhetoric in which Tourneur’s play participates. Quentin Skinner focuses the early modern anxieties regarding the catachrestic nature of language on such rhetorical figures of redescription such as the paradiastole – “the misnomer” – which serve to enhance the orator’s persuasiveness: “The orator’s aim in this case is taken to be that of redescribing a given action or situation in such a way as to augment or extenuate its moral significance, thereby hoping to alter the attitude of the audience and enlist them in his cause.”77 The Renaissance rhetorician Henry Peacham aptly called paradiastole “an instrument of excuse”.78 George Puttenham explains that we are dealing with paradiastole “when we make the best of a bad thing, or turne a signification to the more plausible sense: as, to call an unthrift, a liberall Gentleman: the foolish-hardy, valiant or couragious: the niggard, thriftie: a great riot, or outrage, an youthfull pranke” (185). For Puttenham, redescription is simply another legitimate rhetorical device, whose further implications he does not address. Words can only be exchanged against one another when they no longer possess an intrinsic meaning. While most early modern rhetoricians knew that the ambiguity of language was a source of empowerment, repeatedly voicing the belief that orators would use this potential to honourable ends, the advocates of plain speech saw in figures of rhetorical redescription “the equivocal relationship between

76 77 78

Erasmus, De Copia, 337. Skinner, “Moral Ambiguity”, 273. Ibid., 281.

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eloquence and truth”.79 For example, in Leviathan Thomas Hobbes indicts “the art of words, by which some men can represent to others, that which is good, in the likeness of evil; and evil, in the likeness of good; and augment, or diminish the apparent greatness of good and evil; discontenting men, and troubling their peace at their pleasure”.80 Like other examples from the early modern dramatic canon81 The Atheist’s Tragedy reflects upon the potentially disastrous effects of rhetorical redescription by associating the play’s negative characters with this device. D’Amville triumphantly celebrates paradiastole when he states that “fair accompliments make foul / Deeds gracious” (III.i.49-50). D’Amville is safe in the knowledge that he can challenge traditional hierarchies and order even while working from within “established social and religious forms”.82 One of the fair accompliments which D’Amville uses to make his foul deeds acceptable is the motif of “the house”, both in its literal and metonymic form. Even D’Amville’s introductory speech is suffused with legitimizing ideas of succession, of family continuity and of property: Yet even in that sufficiency of state A man has every reason to provide and add. For what is he hath such a present eye And so prepared a strength, that can foresee And fortify his substance and himself Against those accidents, the least whereof May rob him of an age’s husbandry. (I.i.46-52)

Echoing Montferrers’ attempts to dissuade his son from entering military service, D’Amville’s words point to the legitimacy of his ideal of self-preservation. However, as Tourneur’s play makes plain, good intentions can have truly terrible implications. Borachio expresses this awareness quite bluntly when he picks up the stone with 79

Ibid., 281. Hobbes, Leviathan, 157. 81 Skinner quotes the casket scene in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as an example for “a mediation on the figure of paradiastole” (“Moral Ambiguity”, 280). 82 P. B. Murray, A Study of Cyril Tourneur (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 68. 80

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which he plans to kill Montferrers and comments: “Such stones men use to raise a house upon; / But with these stones I go to ruin one” (II.iv.71-72). The duplicity of signs allows D’Amville to appear to act well within other peoples’ interests when actually violating them. Although presumably catering to Charlemont’s military endeavours, he prepares his nephew’s elimination to undermine his brother’s intention. Picking up the stone with which his brother was killed, D’Amville meditates cynically: “Upon this ground I’ll build my manor house / And this shall be the chiefest corner stone” (II.iv.11819). There are further amoral abuses of the motif of the house in the play. D’Amville invokes this trope to seduce Castabella, by this time married to his son and therefore his daughter-in-law, making himself guilty of incest in its early modern definition: “Would it / Not grieve thee, that a stranger to thy blood / Should lay the first foundation of this house / Upon the ruins of thy family?” (IV.iii.106-109). D’Amville’s words indicate the absolute perversion of a theme which, in other contexts, possesses comforting and positive meanings. The absence of a genuine foundation to his demands creates the selfdestructive paradox that leads to the collapse of the narrative on which his power is built. The perversions of language that are the basis of his power begin to turn against D’Amville; the ghastly absences that had helped him create his story now haunt him as emblems of his guilty conscience. This reversal is of course captured most strikingly in the scene in Act V where Tourneur has the axe which D’Amville raises against his nephew turn against himself. This final about-turn, however, had already been anticipated earlier, by D’Amville’s comments upon the death of his son Rousard: His gasping sighs are like the falling noise Of some great building when the groundwork breaks. On these two pillars stood the stately frame, And architecture of my lofty house. An earthquake shakes ‘em. The foundation shrinks. Dear nature! In whose honour I have rais’d A work of glory to posterity; O bury not the pride of that great action, Under the fall and ruin of it self. (V.i.76-84)

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Built on the ambiguities of language, D’Amville’s imaginary building collapses. Here, the house figures in yet another way, namely as a metaphoric expression of the conflict between body and soul, the material and the spiritual, reiterated again and again in the literature of the time. Rousard’s once “proud” body – this being one of D’Amville’s projections belied by fact – is now a mere “fading mansion”,83 the vain, transitory and ultimately sinful container of a poor, tormented soul. The shift in Tourneur’s treatment of the motif of the house, from a token of D’Amville’s worldly ambition to a more traditional emblematic representation of the conflict between body and soul, would yet again seem to confirm the play’s traditional imagery and conservative stance. Encased in a corrupt and corrupting body, the soul can at least hope to achieve transcendence and peace in death. But despite this consolatory tone, we should be wary of suspecting a cathartic conclusion. Charlemont’s almost smug comment on his uncle’s violent death resounds with the same reversibility that had characterized the play up to this point: “Thus by the work of Heav’n, the men that thought / To follow our dead bodies without tears / Are dead themselves, and now we follow theirs” (V.ii.297-99). If death indeed promises the end of destructive human ambition, as Charlemont had suggested only a few acts previously, then the fact that he is still alive points to the deferral of this release. More, Charlemont’s description of the climactic reversal of fortune marked by D’Amville’s death suggests that he will continue to be haunted by the evil other that enables his positive self-image. However reassuring the play’s concluding tableau of a funeral procession where the good follow the bad may seem, it maintains the structure of mutual dependence and referentiality which had made D’Amville’s linguistic ploys possible in the first place. The good and the bad, the dead and the living remain intertwined to the last, both in an epistemological and moral sense. In echoing the many other reversals and redescriptions taking place in the play, this final passage in fact anticipates a renewed reversal and so on, ad infinitum. The symbiotic relationship between formerly essential categories suggested at the end of Tourneur’s play is characteristic of the 83

See Shakespeare’s sonnet 146, “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth”.

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Trauerspiel and its allegorical devices. For Walter Benjamin, the fact that Baroque allegories no longer possess an inherent significance results not only in an avalanche of images, as “the allegorical intention fall[s] from emblem to emblem down into the dizziness of its bottomless depths”. That surplus of images, however, Benjamin argues, is finally put to a stop by language’s catachrestic potential, whereby even a negative allegorical intention finally develops a positive meaning.84 Here, too, Tourneur’s play exemplifies the differential nature of the Baroque allegory: good and bad are inherently dependent on each other; devoid of an inherent meaning, they receive their significance only by their difference. In a gesture that anticipates the linguistic scepticism of twentieth-century critical theory, Benjamin emphasizes the inherent meaninglessness of allegory in the Trauerspiel: Evil as such, which it cherished as enduring profundity, exists only in allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means something different from what it is. It means precisely the non-existence of what it presents. The absolute vices, as exemplified by tyrants and intriguers, are allegories. They are not real, and that which they represent, they possess only in the subjective view of melancholy; they are this view, which is destroyed by its own offspring because they only signify its blindness. They also point to the absolutely subjective pensiveness, to which alone they owe their existence. By its allegorical form evil as such reveals itself to be a subjective phenomenon.85

If the allegorical representation of moral categories emphasizes their constructedness, it also points to the fact that, as essences, they do not exist. Evil and good are subjective projections, not intrinsic moral categories. In Tourneur’s play D’Amville’s apparent satanic terror is as hollow and empty as the tale on which he builds his power. Even more dauntingly, however, this hollowness also applies to his presumably good alter ego. Relying on the negative other to make sense at all, “good” is not only essentially insignificant, it also always runs the risk of becoming like its disavowed significant other. 84 85

Benjamin, Origin, 232. Ibid., 233.

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Containing linguistic excess Unruliness, then, is the linguistic condition of Tourneur’s play until the very end: an unruliness which not only allows language to be used with evil intents, but which also undermines the speech of the apparently innocent. This uncontainable linguistic dimension forms the play’s volatile ground structure, pointing to a fundamental excessiveness of language. The foundational dichotomy embodied by Charlemont and D’Amville can be seen as a strategy against this perversion of language, although the contrast, as we have seen, merely serves to veil the unsettling fact that the two characters are strikingly similar, not least in a linguistic sense. Tourneur, in tune with the opinion of his day, attempts to contain the threat of rhetoric by gendering it. Fear of rhetorical copia was regularly projected onto female characters embodying linguistic excess, such as the biblical Rahab, Venus or Circe.86 In Tourneur’s play, Levidulcia, Castabella’s bawdy surrogate-mother and apparently the chaste woman’s antagonist, is a character in this tradition. While the younger of the two is characterized by quiet containment, Levidulcia is excessive, which also reveals itself in the language she uses. Whereas the chaste Castabella uses language “honestly”, Levidulcia, as her name suggests, makes “light” of it, perverting signification. Castabella’s virtue is captured in her assertion: “I speak’t as ‘tis now in fashion, in earnest” (I.iii.45). Levidulcia’s linguistic corruption, by contrast, is clearly associated with her physical wantonness, revealed in her memorable exclamation: “I could clasp with any man” (II.iii.63). This excessiveness has a distinct theatrical potential, allowing for moments of dramatic irony and humour. Consider the scene in Act II, when Levidulcia invites her servant Fresco into her room: “Th’art welcome into my chamber, Fresco. Prithee shut the door” (II.v.1). The irony of the passage depends on the ambiguity of her speech act. The sentence “prithee shut the door” remains unclear regarding Fresco’s position. While for Levidulcia there is one particular meaning to the situation, this is apparently not obvious to Fresco. Her response – “Nay, thou mistakest me. Come in and shut it” (II.v.2; emphasis mine) 86

Cf. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 8-10, on Rahab and Rebhorn, Emperor, 137, on Circe and Venus.

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– suggests that Fresco has misunderstood her, closing the door while being still outside of her room. Although on one level this communicative fiasco is a rather blunt joke, it echoes other, more fatal misunderstandings taking place in this play, such as those between D’Amville and his nephew, potentially undercutting the scene’s comic tone. More, its irony is also complicated by the fact that Levidulcia, in this instance, is associated with the riddle and the power it establishes.87 Levidulcia’s ambiguous orders indicate her dangerousness. Whether or not she exploits the riddle consciously is a question to which I shall return presently. Certainly, the playwright seems to view death as one means to put an end to her riddling ambiguity. Having demanded “in excess” – more than one man as well as her own pleasure – she is caught red-handed during a tête-a-tête with D’Amville’s younger son, Sebastian. When he and her husband are fatally wounded in the skirmish that follows, Levidulcia realizes her loss. The lengthy speech that follows the violent end to Levidulcia’s amorous excesses shows a reformed woman, capable all of a sudden of moral conscience. O God! my husband! my Sebastian! husband! Neither can speak; yet both report my shame. …. Dear husband! let Not thy departed spirit be displeas’d, If with adult’rate lips I kiss thy cheek. Here I behold the hatefulness of lust, Which brings me kneeling to embrace him dead, Whose body living I did loathe to touch. (IV.v.57-67)

Levidulcia’s repentance here takes an appropriately linguistic form. In a surprising volte face the former riddler calls upon the unequivocal meaning of signs when she describes the silent bodies of the two dead 87

As Mieke Bal writes: “The subject who proposes the riddle knows the answer, while the addressee does not. Moreover, there is power in the initiative itself. It presupposes the right to be listened to, the obligation on the part of the addressee to invest the effort to find the answer” (“The Rape of Narrative and the Narrative of Rape: Speech Acts and Body Language in Judges”, in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry [Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988], 5).

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men as “report[ing] [her] shame”. Death brings with it an end of ambiguity that marks the beginning of virtue. Levidulcia’s speech seems to confirm that language is the medium of unambiguous, and hence moral, meaning. But although Levidulcia’s death would support conservative interpretations of the play and foreshadows the other rightful death taking place in it, that of D’Amville, a number of uncertainties in this passage put in perspective Levidulcia’s sudden lapse into morality and meaning. Levidulcia does not make a moral decision between men; in the face of death she still fluctuates between her husband and her lover, maintaining her erotic appetite to the end. This is illustrated not least by the highly rhetoricized nature of her speech, which is laden with images and devices, indicating a continuing rhetorical excess although on the level of content Levidulcia pretends to have been chastened. This speech might have enabled a highly stylized performance by the boy actor representing Levidulcia. Granted, he might have given this figure genuine tragic force,88 whilst transgressing the limits of gender in the process.89 More likely, however, seems to be the possibility that in this instance the boy actor might have driven his expertise to the limit so as to make the audience laugh. Levidulcia’s end, then, might have provided a welcome comic relief in view of a dangerous virago. Nevertheless, Levidulcia’s death encapsulates the dangers of rhetoric and a rhetorical theatre. By staging her deeds and her death, the playwright was running a similar risk as the orator using the argument in utramque partem. Depending on the way the role of Levidulcia was performed, the Schadenfreude potentially evoked by her elaborate swan song could have caused the audience’s empathy, unsettling whatever straightforward moral interpretation the playwright might have sought to achieve in the first place. A truly sophisticated strategy of silencing would establish a more solid extinction of the excesses with which Levidulcia is associated. In Tourneur’s play, Levidulcia’s dangerous linguistic power is most effectively contained when it is simply disavowed. Levidulcia’s failed seduction of Fresco detaches her from the linguistic ambiguity 88

Cf. Lorraine Helms, “‘The High Roman Fashion’: Sacrifice, Suicide, and the Shakespearean Stage”, PMLA, CVII/3 (1992), 554-65. 89 Gruber, “Building a Scene”, 198.

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with which it is associated. We must remember that the moment of linguistic corruption here is accidental (after all, Levidulcia wants Fresco to come to her) and rests on his misinterpretation. Therefore, while Levidulcia may resemble D’Amville, she never uses or abuses language in quite as calculating a way as he does. On the contrary, instead of an intentional and malicious misapplication of language, the scene testifies to Levidulcia’s linguistic as well as sexual disempowerment: she can communicate neither through language nor with her body. A very similar strategy of disavowal can be detected in George Puttenham’s anecdotal account of a riddle told by his nurse in The Arte of English Poesie: I haue a thing and rough it is And in the midst a hole Iwis: There came a yong man with his ginne, And he put it a handfull in. (188)

For Puttenham the riddle belongs to the “sensable figures altering and affecting the mynde by alteration of sence or intendements in whole clauses or speaches” (186); like the other rhetorical devices he lists, it is ultimately duplicitous, a form of dissembling. Puttenham’s riddling nurse seems to signal her empowerment: she knows more than those who listen to her riddle; like a courtier, she exploits the duplicity of language. But Puttenham defuses the nurse’s power by exposing her own misinterpretation of the riddle. His reassuring assertion that her answer to the riddle in question was “a furd glove”, and concluding remark that “some other naughtie body would peradventure have construed it not halfe so mannerly” (188), emphasizes its bawdy duplicity, which Puttenham shows to be unavailable to the woman. He thereby counters the nurse’s linguistic imposture by turning her ambiguity into helpless naivety. The woman-riddler is a cue for the rhetorician’s irony – the joke in the end is all his. Puttenham’s use of paradiastole can be connected to the explicitly malicious uses to which D’Amville puts rhetorical re-description. Nice speech may veil nasty intents, even if the speaker is not aware of it; rhetoric not only substitutes for violence, it also disguises the fact that “words do address bodies directly; they do tell a story of sex and

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violence”.90 In the early modern period, the most striking version of this veiling violence of rhetoric is the poetic convention of the blazon: “a richly ornate and mannered evocation of idealized female beauty rendered into its constituent parts.”91 Early modern literature and poetry abounds with blazons, whether serious – as in the Petrarchan sonnet – or ironic – for instance in Olivia’s checklist of feminine beauty in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, his Sonnet 130 or John Donne’s seventh elegy, “The Comparison”. The inherent violence of such verbal anatomies is obvious; their favourite object was “not only ... any indiscriminate body, but … a specifically female corpse”.92 The Renaissance blazon, in ever new contexts and examples, created “die schöne Leiche” avant la lettre. As such, the blazon was the poetic equivalent to other anatomizations pursued by the early modern “culture of dissection” (Jonathan Sawday). The risks entailed in this strategy have been indicated above with regard to Levidulcia: if putting a dangerous woman on stage may be an ambiguous endeavour because this gives her room to speak, then killing such a female character may create unwanted audience admiration or empathy. A more subtle way of confronting the threat of a rhetorically skilled woman is illustrated by Tourneur’s “hero” Charlemont. His parting words to Castabella are an extended metaphor in which the usual blazon-repertoire of bodily parts is translated into rhetorical terminology (recalling, of course, 90 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 241. See also Robert M. Cover, “Violence and the Word”, The Yale Law Journal, XCV/1595 (1986), 1601-29; Teresa de Lauretis, “The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender”, in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, eds Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 239-58; Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century”, in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 16-39, and Catherine Mac Kinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 91 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 191. 92 Ibid., 191. In Tourneur’s play, anatomy is associated with D’Amville, who believes that to anatomize Charlemont would allow him to understand the nature of happiness and contentment: “I would find out by his anatomy, / What thing there is in Nature more exact, / Than in the constitution of my self” (V.ii.141-43). The metaphor of anatomization evokes a metaphysical curiosity of a world at odds with itself, whose search for hidden truths under layers of flesh is bound to fail.

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Charlemont’s own depiction of his knightly acts as proper speech). Castabella’s entry as the last of friends and family to bid the hero farewell is his cue for a sustained poetic conceit that likens the beloved to speech: My noble mistress! this accompliment Is like an elegant and moving speech, Compos’d of many sweet persuasive points, Which second one another, with a fluent Increase, and confirmation of their force, Reserving still the best until the last, To crown the strong impulsion of the rest With a full conquest of the hearer’s sense: Because th’impression of the last we speak Doth always longest and most constantly Possess the entertainment and remembrance. So all that now salute my taking leave Have added numerously to the love, Wherewith I did receive their courtesy. But you (dear mistress) being the last and best That speaks my farewell, like th’imperious close Of a most sweet oration, wholly have Possess’d my liking, and shall ever live Within the soul of my true memory. (I.ii.68-85)

The passage works in an intricate and complex way not because Charlemont, this “passionate and unthinking, even anti-intellectual young man”,93 has a penchant for complicated conceits, but because his speech entails a promise he has no interest in keeping. The simile on which the speech rests, the analogy between woman and rhetorical performance, may appear as an unusually benevolent, if not radical, statement at a time when a “good” woman was above all a silent woman. Alongside Charlemont’s double apostrophe of Castabella, which complies with the blazon convention, it even suggests a reversal of the traditional hierarchy, establishing Castabella as the subject that acts in speaking: her arrival (“this accompliment”) is associated with a speech both “elegant” and “moving”. Moreover, as 93

Murray, Study, 100.

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the embodiment of “correct” speech, following the appropriate rhetorical gradatio (“increase”), the woman-speech conquers “the hearer’s sense”. This notion is further emphasized by Charlemont’s concession that Castabella has “possess’d” his “liking”. Castabella is depicted as actively embodying Charlemont’s own rhetorical ideals. Captivating and persuasive, her behaviour exemplifies courtly eloquence and actions, confirming the words of the Elizabethan rhetorician Thomas Wilson that “the gesture of man, is the speache of his bodie”.94 Significantly, however, Castabella remains utterly silent in this instance, challenging the image of eloquent activity Charlemont paints in his speech. Instead, it becomes obvious that his address is not really about the woman he loves: significantly, he uses the pronoun “you” only twice, while “my” and “I” (read: Charlemont) feature half a dozen times. The actions and attributes that seem to mark Castabella’s virtue persistently point back to the (male) speaker. Rather than expressing unconditional praise, Charlemont’s speech resembles the mock encomium: a parodic version of the poetry of praise whose ultimate intention is different to the speech act it superficially performs. In the words of Joel Fineman, the mock-encomium is a medium of the poet’s self-fashioning: “an objective showing that is essentially subjective showing off.”95 Just as his praise of Castabella provides Charlemont with an opportunity to present himself as a skilled orator, so the love of which he speaks is less directed at her than at himself (“the love, / Wherewith I did receive their courtesy”). Charlemont’s desire is not based on his attraction to Castabella;96 in fact it is actually disconnected from the object to which it allegedly refers. In silencing Castabella, paradoxically by imagining her as speech, Charlemont creates a foundational myth of self based on the cancellation of the other. Rhetorically, this scene is an example of pragmatography, the description of an absent event or object. In this instance, however, the pragmatographic situation is particularly ironic because the person described is in fact present on stage. However, while Castabella’s wordless presence heightens the silencing effect of Charlemont’s 94 95 96

The Arte of Rhetorique quoted in Plett, “Theatrum Rhetoricum”, 333. Fineman, Perjured Eye, 5-6. Ibid., 18.

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speech, it also points to the insufficiency of this dramatic device.97 Since words can never capture the absent object, the pragmatographic situation is always a form of dissembling. Like Puttenham’s nurse, Castabella is prevented from becoming an abusive user of language – paradoxically precisely by being imagined as language. Once again, Charlemont’s resemblance to D’Amville becomes apparent. Like his uncle, he requires an absence as the foundation of his self-image and power. As solipsistic as himself is his language, a poetry that does not only praise itself but also the very language that is its basis. As Castabella disappears within Charlemont’s flattering words, she exposes the “languageness”98 of poetic language, its idiosyncrasy as well as its inherent excess. Although Charlemont’s encomium to Castabella may be seen as a poetic confession drawing attention to the rhetorical dimension of his own words, it is confident and shamefaced at the same time. Affirming the character’s closeness to his evil other, it also draws attention to the playwright, who exploited the language whose pitfalls he saw in as cunning a way as his characters.

97 98

Cf. Plett, “Theatrum Rhetoricum”, 351. Fineman, Perjured Eye, 32.

CHAPTER 4

MEMORY, MIMESIS AND THE MATERIAL: CHAPMAN’S SCENE OF WRITING (THE LAW) Describe narrative as pretended history, a point of view with some claim to privilege that permits at least the illusion of control; then drama sets up the mirror image, that all is freedom and play.1

George Chapman’s adaptation of French history for his Tragedy of Bussy D’Ambois (c. 1604), singles out two historical events: a famous duel fought in 1578, which did not involve the real D’Ambois on whom the play is based, and his adulterous affair, which led to his death in an ambush prepared by the vengeful husband of his mistress. Conjoining ideals of masculine fortitudo and sexual prowess, the selected incidents project the image of a chivalric hero par excellence – which is supported by, and in turn helps to maintain, the aesthetic and moral dualism that appears to structure the play. Two contrasting representations of violence illustrate this underlying dualism. The first scene of violence is the report of a sword fight between the titular hero Bussy and his followers and the jealous courtier Barrisor and his entourage. The second, the torture of Bussy’s lover Tamyra at the hands of her raging husband Montsurry, is represented in a proto-realistic scene of full frontal violence exceptional for the drama of the time: the woman is dragged onto the stage by her hair, repeatedly stabbed and finally put to the rack by her husband. These scenes affirm the rigid, apparently unambiguous and finally manipulative moral structure of the play and thereby support the familiar critical tale of the playwright as a didactic dramatist and poet, elitist and politically conservative if not nostalgic. By inversion,

1

Robert S. Knapp, Shakespeare: The Theater and the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 39.

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the argument has allowed critics to recruit Chapman into the army of Jacobean social critics.2 Whatever their politics, these contrastive arguments are defensive apologias of a play hard done to by criticism,3 not least because of its outrageous torture scene. Considered an aesthetic and moral embarrassment, the scene has been interpreted as indicative of the playwright’s misogyny,4 his “lack of taste”5 and failure of his aesthetics.6 Other critics have been more benevolent about the play’s contradictions, taking them as its particular hallmark and evidence of the playwright’s dialectical stance.7 Such arguments, while informed by an earnest wish to defend an underdog dramatist, ultimately participate in what has been called the critical “mystification” of George Chapman. This mystification aims at resolving the contradictions that characterize the playwright and his play by identifying underneath the outward ambiguity of Chapman’s work the comfortingly closed presence of a “philosophic, central self”.8 My aim in this chapter is to attend to both of these apparently antithetical aspects of Chapman’s play by exploring their constructive 2

See Lever, Tragedy of State; Kathleen McLuskie, “Politics and Dramatic Form in Early Modern Tragedy”, in Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts, eds J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 217-36, and John Huntington, “Chapman’s Social Strategy”, Criticism, XXXIX/2 (1997), 161-84. 3 John Dryden famously wanted to burn the play “annually to the memory of Johnson” (quoted in Gerald Snare, The Mystification of George Chapman [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989)], 8). 4 Cf. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, eds Edmund Gosse and James Wise (1925; New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), XII, 192-93. 5 Levin L. Schücking, Shakespeare und der Tragödienstil seiner Zeit (Bern: Francke, 1947), 25. 6 Ornstein, Moral Vision, 54 (see n.4 in the Introduction). 7 See The Tragedy of Bussy D’Ambois, ed. Nicholas Brooke (London: Methuen, 1964), xxviii-xxix, and McLuskie, “Politics and Dramatic Form”, 219. Foremost among these dialectical defences is Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Similarly, R. B. Waddington reads the play in question in terms of concordia dicors in The Mind’s Empire: Myth and Form in George Chapman’s Narrative Poems (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), especially 19-44. 8 Snare, Mystification, 170.

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interaction. A. R. Braunmuller’s notion that Bussy D’Ambois illustrates Chapman’s hermeneutic quest to find “certainties within mutability”,9 positioning a conservative ideal of stability against a world of clashing social and political codes,10 is germane to such an approach because it emphasizes the strategic nature of Chapman’s moral stance. However, although I too interpret the play’s structure as an ideology of order set up against a world in flux, I do not wish to reduce the playwright to a chagrined but passive observer of these transformations. If Chapman’s absolutism is marked by fundamental contradictions, this has to do with his own entanglement in a world in flux. Chapman’s life-long determination to succeed in court circles, usually seen as evidence of his elitist tendencies, is a notorious biographical fact.11 But although the aspirations were repeatedly frustrated, they ultimately relied on the precise social changes that apparently caused the playwright such unease. Whether he liked it or not, Chapman was a child of his time, driven and haunted by the transformations in which grudgingly participated.12 Like all differential arguments that aim at making their point by drawing on that which they wish to critique, the dramatic logic of Chapman’s play cannot escape its ultimately excessive basis. The tragedy’s unyielding structural contrast between good and bad is inevitably subverted by the mutually constitutive relationship between them. The narrative ideal of order and containment stipulated by the first scene of violence is threatened by the dramatic pull of the torture scene. In addition, we may take the torture of Tamyra not merely as a threat to the narrative containment idealized at the beginning of the play, but also as its conceptual basis: the act of violence logically 9 A. R. Braunmuller, Natural Fictions: George Chapman’s Major Tragedies (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), 26. 10 See Richard S. Ide, Possessed with Greatness: The Heroic Tragedies of Chapman and Shakespeare (London: Scolar Press, 1980) and Leonard Goldstein, George Chapman: Aspects of Decadence in Early Seventeenth Century Drama, I (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1975), for variations of this critical perspective. 11 As M. C. Bradbrook writes in George Chapman (Harlow: Longman, 1977): “Never was anyone more unfortunate than Chapman in the choice of his patrons” (233). 12 See P. K. Ayers, “Staging Modernity: Chapman, Jonson, and the Decline of the Golden Age”, Cahiers Elisabéthains, XLVII (1995), 9-27.

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precedes its retelling. The outrageous brutality of the torture scene demands to be resolved with the aid of precisely the reporting strategies proposed at an earlier point in the play by the messenger’s account of Bussy’s fight. The following reading of Chapman’s tragedy seeks to uncover the constitutive dependence of these apparently contrastive scenes. What appears as a rigid juxtaposition of rhetorical order and theatrical free play, aimed at idealizing the former, is in effect a dramatic slide towards the performative point of origin and indeed the traumatic nucleus of Chapman’s heroic historical narrative. If this slide affects the way we view the play and its playwright, its distinct meta-critical significance transcends the limits of the dramatic genre. Bussy D’Ambois urges us to investigate “the point of stories”,13 critical, literary and dramatic, their structures and strategies, but also the unresolved blind spots that inevitably tarnish the tale they tell. Veiling / revealing violence To determine these blind spots in Chapman’s play we must begin by mapping its sustaining dualism and its implications. The dichotomy that underpins Chapman’s play can be described as one between diegesis and mimesis, between “telling” and “showing”. Rather than representing the violent skirmish between Bussy and his antagonist Barrisor directly, Chapman uses the device of the messenger, adopted from Senecan tragedy, to illustrate the heroic qualities of his protagonist: But D’Ambois’ sword (that lightened as it flew) Shot like a pointed Comet at the face Of manly Barrisor; and there it stuck: Thrice pluck’d he at it, and thrice drew on thrusts From him, that of himself was free as fire; Who thrust still as he pluck’d, yet (past belief!) He with his subtle eye, hand, body, scap’d; At last the deadly-bitten point tugg’d off, On fell his yet undaunted foe so fiercely, That (only made more horrid with his wound) Great D’Ambois shrunk, and gave a little ground; 13

Ann Rigney, “The Point of Stories: On Narrative Communication and Its Cognitive Functions”, Poetics Today, XIII/2 (1992), 263-83.

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Here, the reporting mode of the passage distracts from the brutality of the incident. In contrast to the retrospective validation and legitimization of Bussy’s battle, the violation of Tamyra at the hands of her husband takes place in the absolute, mimetic present; enacted though as yet not judged and justified, it is an experiment in process about whose meaning and value the text as such yields no clue. All we are provided with is the hysterical verbiage of the torturer run riot, which provides the acoustic backdrop to his victim’s cries of suffering: Who shall remove the mountain from my heart, Ope the seven time-heat furnace of my thoughts, And set fit outcries for a soul in hell? O now it nothing fits my cares to speak, But thunder, or to take into my throat The trump of Heaven; with whose determinate blasts The winds shall burst, and the enraged seas Be drunk up in his sounds; that my hot woes (Vented enough) I might convert to vapour, Ascending from my infamy unseen; (V.i.38-47)

14

The Tragedy of Bussy D’Ambois, ed. Maurice Evans (London: Benn, 1965). All references for quotations from this edition will be included in the text.

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Compared to the messenger’s report, Montsurry’s tirade suggests that he is emotionally inundated. His outburst is hysterical rather than disciplined, brutal rather than civilized. More, despite this verbal effusion Montsurry is no reporting witness who helps the audience to come to terms with the scene of torture. On the contrary, his frenzied verbiage emphasizes the uncommented nature of this event, in which the spectators are at once witnesses to a violent crime and voyeurs guilty of prying upon this act of domestic violence. The first scene, by contrast, recalling the Platonic dismissal of mimesis,15 illuminates the didactic intentions pursued by the author, whose rendering of the historical material is coloured by his moral perspective and nostalgic craving for a better past.16 Echoing other allusions to the myth of the golden age in the play,17 the narrative frame turns Bussy’s violent act into an “epic narratio”18 of chivalric heroism. The messenger’s report echoes, on a small scale, the historical tragedy’s transformation of experience into a coherent, chronological narrative. Placed at this early point in the play, the messenger’s narrative could therefore be said to stipulate what I call a memory imperative – a call to remember – against which the rest of the play is tested. The fact that in Bussy D’Ambois memory is not only stipulated but also prevented or withheld indicates its function as a medium of authorial assertion. Chapman’s moralistic strategy is aptly captured by the distinction made by Robert Knapp in the Epigraph to this chapter, between an “illusion of control” of narrative and the impression of “freedom and play” of dramatic representation – a juxtaposition that demonstrates the playwright’s command of his material. If seen as an example for the rhetorical strategy discussed in the previous chapter, the argument in utramque partem, Chapman’s argumentative structure may be interpreted positively: as a “liberal enquiry” of differing narrative

15 See Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 89-102. 16 On Chapman’s strategy to “lift event into example” in his The Tragedy of Byron, see Braunmuller, Natural Fictions, 23. 17 This myth is invoked for the first time in Act I, when Bussy is introduced as an exile from a corrupt court, living in a “green retreat” (I.i.45). On Chapman’s use of the myth, see Waddington, Mind’s Empire, 15 and Goldstein, George Chapman, 174. 18 Altman, Tudor Play of Mind, 308 (emphasis in the original).

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positions,19 which interact in a quasi-democratic polyphony. Yet the critical transformation of a notoriously elitist playwright into a tolerant, if not experimental author somewhat glibly brushes over the play’s underlying structural contrast. By pitting a ritualized, choreographed form of violence against an act of blunt, erratic and apparently gratuitous brutality, Chapman constructs certain representations of violence as other, as well as something done by and for others. The good and bad types of violence thus defined relate to elite and popular forms of dramatic representation and, implicitly, point to the consumers of these forms of representation. While the first appears to address an educated audience (in the true sense of the term: listeners wont to hear poetry spoken rather than watch actions performed), well versed in the modes of Senecan high rhetoric, the second seems to pander to a more brutal, spectatorial contingent in the theatre.20 Chapman here contrasts listening with seeing, a refined appreciation of poetry with the blunt voyeuristic desire for spectacle, with the obvious intention to idealize the former. Like many other plays of the period, Bussy D’Ambois suggests that the playwright was sensitive to the groundbreaking transformations confronting theatre practitioners at the time. The increasing involvement of the audience in the meaning and success of plays was commented upon at length by early modern theatre professionals,21 often in ways that suggested their anxiety in the face of these changes. Similarly, Chapman’s manipulative22 contrast of forms of dramatic representation hints at his distrust of the audience. And yet, the ostentatious morality and narrative containment of the reported sword fight titillates their gory tastes. The Nuntius’ Senecan passion barely masks the graphic description of Barrisor’s violent death; its evocative iconography of bloodbath and agony invites the spectators to continue fantasizing the scene in bloody detail, while at the same time sustaining their comforting belief that in so doing they contribute to the writing of an heroic myth. 19

Ibid., 319. On the development from audiences to spectators, see Gurr, Playgoing, 86-98. 21 See Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590-1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), although he does not count Chapman among the professional playwrights of the time. 22 Cf. Ide, Possessed With Greatness, 16. 20

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In light of this performative impulse, the second scene of violence does not so much contradict as complement the first. The messenger’s ornate rhetoric, while serving to veil the violence of Bussy’s fight, is not only excessive in its own right: the rhetorical floodgates on which Chapman’s morality is based could burst open with the force of that which they wish to contain.23 It also creates a desire for the performance of violence, which is finally fulfilled in the second scene. This performative pull disturbs the safe moral terrain apparently staked out by the two scenes. Instead of establishing a clear-cut contrast between unconnected events, they describe a dramatic trajectory leading from the messenger’s narrative transformation of Bussy’s fight to the representation of violence, from memory to mimesis, which inevitably threatens the play’s contrastive morality. This drift towards performance is also suggested by the same ideal of martial violence which the playwright invokes in the first scene of violence: the duel. Although Bussy’s three-a-side sword fight is strictly speaking not a duel, its choreographed and highly formalized nature in the reporter’s narrative (as well as its corresponding function in the dramatic and moral economy of the play) suggests that this is indeed the practice to which Chapman refers. This reference allows us to historicize this particular scene as well as the play as a whole in the context of contemporary debates around the practice of the duel; it also helps us to illuminate its relentless slide towards the performance of violence it eschews initially. Violently theatrical as well as secretive, the duel inevitably ran counter to the professed rationality of the emerging nation state under the leadership of an absolute monarch and its monopoly on violence; it was publicly debated throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and serious official attempts to abolish the practice were made by James I in 1613 and 1614. Thought to have been written in 1604, Chapman’s play is positioned at a moment when opinion with regard to this issue was highly unstable, a time when duelling, a topic still open to discussion, could be publicly defended.

23

Bussy D’Ambois resembles that earlier play of outrageous gendered violence, Titus Andronicus, in so far as that here, too, “the rhetoric of violence points outward to theatrical spectacle, pressing language into enactment” (Helms, “‘High Roman Fashion’”, 558).

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Like other plays of the period,24 Bussy D’Ambois seems to take a stand in favour of duelling as a modality of a golden age of chivalric virtues.25 Against the rhetorical transformation of manslaughter into a heroic narrative by Chapman’s Senecan messenger we may place Francis Bacon’s Charge Touching Duels of 1614 as a retrospective commentary by a representative of the “rationalism of the Jacobean establishment”.26 Bacon accuses the defenders of the duel of hiding the destructiveness and violence of the practice behind a rhetorical screen of formal correctness.27 What they thereby obscure are the pernicious implications of duelling, here phrased in tellingly economic terms: duels represent an unnecessary excess and expenditure; they are “follies” that cause the spilling “of so much noble and gentle blood”,28 draining the body politic of its human resources and literally hollowing out the state from within. Bacon’s pragmatic perspective may seem to skirt the issue by criticizing not duels, but their effect on the nation’s economy; nevertheless, his view can be applied to the messenger’s report in Chapman’s play, informed as it is by the idealization of formal order which, according to Bacon, veils the factual brutality of the event it depicts.

24 Such as Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and a number of pre-1615 plays from the Beaumont and Fletcher canon. See G. R. Waggoner, “Timon of Athens and the Jacobean Duel”, Shakespeare Quarterly, XIV (1965), 302-11. 25 Bussy D’Ambois has been read in the light of the Jacobean chivalric revival associated with Henry, Prince of Wales, James I’s eldest son and one of Chapman’s patrons until his sudden death in 1612. See Richard Badenhausen, “Disarming the Infant Warrior: Prince Henry, King James, and the Chivalric Revival”, Papers in Language and Literature, XXXI/1 (1995), 20-37. For more general accounts on the chivalric revival, see Arthur B. Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition of Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1989); Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996) and Roy Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (1986; London: Pimlico, 2000). Recent revisions of this notion can be found in Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). 26 Halpern, Poetics, 227. 27 Bacon, Works, XI, 402. 28 Ibid., 400.

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In pointing out the conflicting positions in the debate around the duel, it should not be overlooked that Bacon’s worldview and the practice he attacks are inseparable components of the same historical moment. Bacon represents the rational faction of a world in change, of which the duel is itself a marker. After all, the practice of duelling evolved in the early modern period from medieval forms of legal and ludic combat as the particular property of an aristocracy that saw itself threatened both by an increasingly centralized, absolutist power above and by terrifying upwardly mobile ranks of society below. For the waning aristocracy the duel was a codified means of self-definition, a test (albeit potentially fatal) of their aristocratic autonomy and token of their self-discipline, privilege and, above all, honour. Nevertheless, the duel was a contradictory gesture of self-assertion. At the same time as serving as a bulwark of aristocratic values, offering a sense of individual as well as collective identity in the face of growing social uniformity, the duel testified to the crisis haunting the aristocratic class: not only a response to the aristocracy’s uncertain position at a time of changing social hierarchies, the practice was in itself duplicitous. The duel enables the public recognition of aristocratic honour by making it manifest in ritualized role-play. Honour, however, relies on a hierarchical distinction between truth and spectacle, essence and appearance, and is inevitably threatened by the duel’s theatricality. How can the duel, which is all theatrical pose, represent honour without compromising it? And how can one distinguish with certainty between real and imitated honour, if the only way to reveal it is in performance? The appropriation of this spectacle of aristocratic privilege by the aspiring bourgeoisie, who would adopt (and safeguard) the practice in the nineteenth century,29 seems to confirm such concerns, illustrating the fluidity of class29 On the transformation of the duel from an aristocratic to a bourgeois practice throughout the centuries, see Ute Frevert, Ehrenmänner: Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Munich: Beck, 1991); V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Dietrich Schwanitz, “Das Duell als Drama: zur Codierung der Ehre zwischen literarischer Verklärung der Noblesse und sozialer Selbststilisierung der Stände”, in Ehre: Archaische Momente in der Moderne, eds Ludgera Vogt and Arnold Zingerle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 27090.

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distinctions and the unreliability of the rituals on which these distinctions are based. It is precisely this fluidity that characterizes Chapman’s play, which is set at the moment when honour was no longer the absolute property of one class, but the attribute of the naturally virtuous – “man in his native noblesse” (III.ii.91), as the King puts it with regard to Bussy – regardless of social context. The messenger’s diegetic disguise of the violence of Bussy’s fight illustrates the duel’s “morality of hiding”30 at which also Bacon had directed his criticism. Duels not only took place in secret places – the champ clos – out of public view. The formalities of the fight, too, served to hide the duellist behind and within them. The messenger’s account in Bussy D’Ambois only supports this double secrecy. Instead of a one-to-one representation of experience, it serves to idealize his protagonist and his deed, veiling what really had happened. This verbal veiling is mirrored on another level, by the hero’s notoriously bombastic and opaque language. Criticism has explained Chapman’s obscurantism in the play in question and in other instances from his work as the strategy of a confirmed allegorist to voice a secret knowledge and absolute truth without compromising it. Echoing the messenger’s pathos, Bussy’s style serves as a screen to conceal his deeds.31 The resulting dilemma of how to reveal this truth to the select few while keeping it out of sight of the unworthy may help to explain the enigmatic quality of this tragedy.32 Jonathan Goldberg has illuminated the political level of the linguistic obscurity of Bussy, persuasively arguing that it illustrates the playwright’s deliberate appropriation of King James’s royal language and, implicitly, his position of absolute 30 See Achatz von Müller, “Schauspiele der Gewalt: Vom Zweikampf zum Duell”, in Das Duell: Der tödliche Kampf um die Ehre, ed. Uwe Schultz (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 1996), 20. 31 Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries (1983; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 158. In the “Free and Offenceles Justification” of his poem Andromeda Liberata, Chapman writes: “As Learning hath delighted from her Cradle, to hide her selfe from the base and prophane Vulgare, her ancient Enemy; under divers vailes of Hieroglyphickes, Fables and the like; So hath she pleased here selfe with no diguise more; then in misteries and allegoricall fictions of Poesie” (The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett [1941; New York: Russell and Russell, 1962], 327. All references for quotations from this edition will be included in the text.). 32 See Waddington, Mind’s Empire, 4.

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authority. The impenetrable and secret language of Bussy D’Ambois not merely confirms Chapman’s role as an elitist allegorist, but provides a reflection upon the complex and fantasmic nature of absolute power – what Christopher Pye has called the “regal phantasm”33 – and the “symbolic rituals”34 that maintain it: theatrical court performances like the masque, royal pageants and processions as well as spectacles of punishment. In this “theatre of conscience”,35 the absolute monarch is the privileged actor, the vanishing point of sight and power, the embodiment of a gaze which must not be returned lest this (re)turn would uncover the material origin of his authority: his mortal body and private self.36 His exposure to the gaze of the public results in his evasion of this gaze: at his most visible the king is also truly invisible. The paradoxical nature of absolute authority may help to illuminate the play’s ambivalent stance regarding the duel. As we have seen, the duel was a complex ritual of honour that invited conflicted responses. While his own class expected the monarch, the greatest aristocrat of all, to take a stand in the name of duelling, raison d’état demanded that he condemn it. The absolute monarch had to simultaneously confirm and dismiss the practice and his involvement therein. But this contradictory double strategy also maps the way in which absolute power typically asserted itself. The King legitimizes Bussy’s duel implicitly by ordering its retelling by the messenger (“Relate at large what thou has seen and heard” [II.i.34]) before he legitimizes it explicitly by pardoning Bussy against all common sense. In the same instance, however, the King distances himself with a striking gesture of self-cancellation: “Enjoy what thou entreat’st, we give but ours” (II.i.205). Immediately dissociating himself from the royal gift of pardon by demanding to leave it unrequited, the King makes a gesture of self-abrogation that allows him to vanish within the rules conceived 33

Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 34 Slavoj Žižek, “The Object as a Limit of Discourse: Approaches to the Lacanian Real”, Prose Studies, XI/3 (1988), 99. 35 Cf. Goldberg, James I, especially 147-63. 36 The distinction between the material self of the monarch and his political persona, the king’s division into “two bodies”, is described at length by Ernst H. Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

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by himself even as he enacts them; he is, in this instance, both infinitely powerful and ultimately un-responsible. His clemency towards Bussy diminishes his pardon as well as his accountability for it. The outraged response of the Duke of Guise, one of Bussy’s antagonists, to this pardon is similarly evasive and indirect: “Mort Dieu, who would have pardon’d such a murder?” (II.i.207). Even criticism of the King comes by way of an inversion: phrased as a question, it affirms the secretive royal power instead of challenging it. At various points of the play, then, monarchical authority is not so much represented as obscurely suggested, thereby maintaining the secrecy that betokens its power. Bussy has a crucial function in the obscure revelation of this powerful secrecy, enabling the King to assert his authority unspokenly, as it were, or rather, through a performance that is itself never shown. Chapman’s play here illustrates how absolute power escapes dangerous exposure to the prying eyes of the public. Its hero provides the King with a “founding myth for the imperium”37 that immediately eclipses him: a narcissistic mirror image which reveals the King only as a reflection, leaving his material self untouched. Bussy’s final self-image echoes this untouchability: “Here like a Roman statue will I stand / Till death hath made me marble” (V.iii.144-45). His imaginative transformation into a statue turns the mortal protagonist into an immortal Herculean hero,38 omnipotent, larger than life and as such incorruptible by spectatorial perversion. Two implications need to be emphasized here to fully understand the complexity of Chapman’s perspective. The first is that a political power based on theatricality, however absolute, is also integrally vulnerable, or “queasy”.39 Monarchical power reveals itself through fantasy scenarios that rely on a mysterious agreement between King and subject, which is confirmed, again and again, by the unquestioning reiteration of the symbolic forms that sustain it. This blind spot at the centre of monarchical authority makes it volatile.40 37

Goldberg, James I, 160. Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962). 39 Goldberg, James I, 152. 40 This potential seems to be confirmed in the sequel to Bussy D’Ambois, where Chapman depicts the King, who in the first play still epitomizes virtue and constancy, as “sensual, vacillating, treacherous and bloody” (M. Th. Parrott quoted in The

38

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However, the fantasmic nature of monarchical power also emphasizes its reliance on the subject’s participation in this power. Royal power is not merely imposed by the monarch, it requires a subject to be exposed to it by reflection. This symbiotic relationship suggests another implication of the spectacular strategies of absolute power: if absolute power is dependent on the subject, then the subject may in turn appropriate the strategies of absolute power. The absolute monarch, with his claim for an inaccessible, secretive interior, provides the model for an individual, sovereign subjectivity for which Chapman’s Bussy is the prime example.41 In echoing the King, Bussy appropriates for himself an ideal of self-contained interiority significant not only for the playwright in question as well as his contemporaries,42 but of continuing relevance to this day. The concept of honour introduced to the play with the theme of the duel provides the link between the role of the absolute monarch and the private interiority of the absolute subject. Like monarchical authority, honour is revealed indirectly, through spectacle: it must not be represented. That honour cannot be proven empirically explains why Francis Bacon associated it with superstition in his disquisition on duelling. Honour, Bacon argues, is dangerous because it is all in the mind. Therefore duels, which serve the assertion of honour, are “a sorcery that enchanteth the spirits of young men … with a false shew, species falsa; and a kind of satanical illusion and apparition of honour; against religion, against law, against moral virtue, and against the precedents and examples of the best times and valiantest nations ….”43 The play suggests that Chapman anticipated such rational arguments against the ideals he endorsed. Almost by way of rebutting Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, ed. Robert J. Lordi [Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1964], 11). 41 For a critique of Goldberg’s Foucauldian reading of Chapman’s play, see Scott Wilson, Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 148. 42 For Huntington, Chapman’s obscurity is only superficially “self-defeating and illogical”, but evidence of his “rhetorical-educational mission” to address the “‘vulgar’ issue of the injustice of wealth and power in a predominately aristocratic culture” (“Chapman’s Social Strategy”, 161 and 162). In “The Theatre of the Idols”, Jonathan Crewe identifies the ideal of interiority is a particular property of the Jacobean drama, posited against what he calls “the theatre of monstrous idols” – the empty spectacle of the theatre of the time and explains why Jacobean drama is “violently self-divided” if not “self-consuming” (333). See also Chapter 2, n.15. 43 Bacon, Works, XI, 401.

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the charge of superstition, Bussy D’Ambois explicitly exposes the terrors entailed in the rational attitude. Monsieur, for instance, Bussy’s erstwhile patron and later adversary, attempts to seduce Tamyra by arguing that honour is a mere figment of the imagination: “Honour, what’s that? Your second maidenhead: / And what is that? A word: the word is gone, / The thing remains” (II.ii.60-62). While Monsieur represents the perversely reductive view of a world where old ideals have been lost, where dishonourable men lead women to surrender their honour rather than setting out to defend it, Bussy never denies the existence of an essential truth. For him it is the invisibility of honour that validates it: in a world of appearances honour indicates an inwardness beyond the grasp of empiricism, a privacy tarnished only by the attempts to expose it, a truth more substantial and intimate than facts.44 Today’s view of honour is shaped by the rational perspective of the likes of Francis Bacon. Our rejection of honour is celebrated as a victory over the impulsive and irrational, investigative truth over blind faith, rational sobriety over superstition. But in all this confidence we tend to forget that honour, however much we would like to relegate it to a different time and culture, is a highly adaptable concept and resistant to structural social changes. The concept of honour survives not only in the “archaic-Mediterranean”45 pockets of our avowedly multicultural societies, but is present, much more prominently, in the very ideal of a private self to which we all lay claim. In precisely this individualized form the question of honour becomes the moral and dramatic linchpin of Chapman’s play, which is located at that historical moment when honour derived from virtuous acts increasingly came to replace honour possessed by lineage.46 From 44

Chapman alludes to the “firm truth” of the Homeric hero in the epistle dedicatory to his translation of the Iliad: “Yet still your Homer lasting, living, raigning, / And proves how firme Truth builds in Poet’s faining” (George Chapman, Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad, ed. Allardyce Nicoll [1956; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998], 4). 45 Ludgera Vogt and Arnold Zingerle, “Einleitung: Zur Aktualität des Themas Ehre und zu seinem Stellenwert in der Theorie”, in Ehre: Archaische Momente in der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 9. 46 On the role of honour in early modern society, see C. L. Barber, The Idea of Honour in the English Drama, 1591-1700 (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 1957) and Mervyn James, “English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485-1642”, in Society, Politics, and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge:

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this shift, which establishes a dramatic inevitability to prove the invisible, entirely abstract attribute Bussy claims to possess, the play receives its particular dramatic momentum. By manipulating his historical data, making Bussy destitute (“poor”, as the stage direction in Act I, scene i, tells us) and desirous of social advancement, Chapman places him in a social limbo that requires the enactment of his hero’s natural, but as yet unacknowledged (“neglected” [I.i.47]), honour. Although the theme of honour is invoked by the tragedy’s hero in the name of an absolute and unequivocal truth, it in fact confirms the performative quality of Chapman’s play and urges us to rethink its dramatic structure. Although the play can indeed be seen in terms of a neoclassical (and conservative) trajectory from prostasis via epistasis to catastrophe,47 this chronology might equally be thought of in the reverse, with the narrative depiction of Bussy’s duel as a response to a prior act of violence rather than a prologue and overture to what is to follow. The dramatic trajectory from memory to performance draws the audience to the point where the violence successfully contained at the beginning of the play is subsequently enacted for the first time. Speaking / writing the law The inherently performative quality of the duel and the narrative ordering of this brutal act of ritualized fighting open up another contextual perspective from which the play can be seen: the law and contemporary early modern debates around it. The King’s pardon legitimizes Bussy’s fight and evokes strong responses amongst his opponents at court. But the critical interceptions on the part of Bussy’s adversaries fail to diminish the effectiveness of the messenger’s report, which mimetically underwrites the King’s pardon by affirming the lawfulness of the fight. Its lawfulness is expressed directly when, in the triumphant couplet that concludes his report, the messenger associates Bussy’s private skirmish with the medieval predecessor of the duel, the trial by Cambridge University Press, 1986), 308-415; on honour and masculinity, see Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999), 35 and Low, Manhood and the Duel, 3. 47 Peter Ure, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: Critical Essays by Peter Ure, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1974), 184.

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combat: “(of all the six) sole D’Ambois stood / Untouch’d, save only with the others’ blood” (II.i.131-32). The miraculous outcome of the event, a gesture of divine judgement, justifies the fight and the fatalities incurred. The fact that the messenger narrates – remembers – what others consider a violent skirmish makes the event ethically valuable as well as lawful,48 by literally making the bodies of the combatants “walk upon a particular path”:49 I saw fierce D’Ambois, and his two brave friends Enter the field, and at their heels their foes; Which were the famous soldiers, Barrisor, L’Anou, and Pyrhot, great in deeds of Arms: All which arriv’d at the evenest piece of earth The field afforded; the three challengers Turn’d head, drew all their rapiers, and stood rank’d: When face to face the three defendants met them, Alike prepar’d, and resolute alike, Like bonfires of contributory wood: Every man’s look shew’d, fed with either’s spirit, As one had been a mirror to another, Like forms of life and death; each took from other; And so were life and death mix’d at their heights, That you could see no fear of death, for life; Nor love of life, for death: but in their brows Pyrrho’s Opinion in great letters shone, That life and death in all respects are one. (II.i.35-52)

In the messenger’s speech, the violent event is introduced to “a specific, centrally regulated jurisdiction, a specific domain of discourse subject to rules of both lexical and semantic scope”.50 Diction and imagery of the passage establish an impression of choreographed harmony; depicting the violent struggle as “strangely

48

See Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1990), 29 and 36. 49 Ibid., 42. 50 Ibid., 152.

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formalized”, “architectonic”, even ballet-like,51 the messenger’s report defuses its violence by aestheticizing it; the narrative enclosure where ritual and order reign supreme imitating in its form the champs clos where the illicit practice of the duel was performed secretly. The passage constitutes an implicit defence of the act by illustrating the duel’s rule of satisfaction: the even ground on which the combat is fought and the concomitant equality in rank of the combatants justifies the duel as an act of mutual acknowledgement of status – “to the point of confusion”.52 Even life and death are in the scene so close as to become indistinguishable, the scene’s harmonious quality justifying even the fatal outcome. Against this feat of containment, Montsurry’s unspeakably brutal treatment of his wife is accompanied by the unordered and excessive words with which he asks her to identify “the most inscrutable Pandar / That ever lapp’d up an adulterous vomit” (V.i.69-70): That I may hang him, and then cut him down, Then cut him up, and with my soul’s beams search The cranks and caverns of his brain, and study The errant wilderness of a woman’s face, Where men cannot get out, for all the Comets That have been lighted at it. (V.i.68-70; 73-78)

In stark contrast to the overt harmony of Bussy’s duel, here, all is pose, mockery. Montsurry recalls Bussy’s dismissive depiction in Act I, of the “poor Statuaries” – bad actors – whose attempts at embodying a virtuous hero merely create a “hollow colossus” who can only “straddle”, “strut” and “look big and gape” (I.i.9) without expressing the rightful anger of the virtuous. Montsurry acts this part too ostentatiously, his hysterical frenzy punctuated by the violation of his wife. His mock-heroism highlights the aesthetic superiority of the representation of Bussy’s duel, thereby channelling audience reactions into an appropriately critical rather than sympathetic position. This hollow man is hardly awe-inspiring. 51

Cf. Gunilla Florby, The Painful Passage to Virtue: A Study of George Chapman’s The Tragedy of Bussy D’Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (Lund: Gleerup, 1982), 132, 131 and 135. 52 Ibid., 132.

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The vacuity of Montsurry’s actions may also bee seen in legal terms. Montsurry does not unveil divine judgement in honourable combat but by evidence – an evidence established by fallible mortals, brutally, if needs be. In stabbing and torturing his wife, Montsurry anticipates the cowardly ambush he prepares for the play’s hero: both go against the ideals of the rule-bound battle for honour and brand the likes of Montsurry as morally corrupt. The theme of anatomy evident in the hysterical speech above associates Montsurry with the forensic curiosity of the post-Copernican world and its desire to make visible the unseen. Montsurry represents the anatomical paradigm that characterized the early modern “culture of dissection” (Jonathan Sawday)53 whose general rationality, as represented for instance by Bacon’s dismissal of duels as “fantasticall”, also contains a violent dimension, which is famously exemplified by Bacon’s demand “to examine nature herself and the arts upon interrogatories”.54 Montsurry and the world for which he stands are dismissed by Chapman as blunt, brutal and – this is a crucial aspect of Chapman’s critique of the law – ultimately fallible. After all, the violation of Tamyra does not contribute to Montsurry’s fact-finding mission and hence calls into question the import of his violent empiricism. In the passage above, Montsurry mimics both the messenger’s and Bussy’s high rhetoric: his speech lacks credibility not because it fails to establish a sense of rhetorical bombast, but because he has been shown all along to merely imitate this rhetoric. The torture of Tamyra is the climax of Montsurry’s transformation from credulous cuckold to (pseudo) tragic hero, the excessive finale of a theatrical rather than heroic self-fashioning.55 Furthermore, Montsurry’s ferocious investigation is unnecessary, as he already knows the outcome of his inquisition, having been mocked by the Guise in the previous act: “Go home, my lord, and force your wife to write / Such loving stuff to D’Ambois as she used / When she desired his presence” (IV.ii.100-102). Tamyra’s body of evidence will

53

See Chapter 3, n.91. Quoted in Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 26. 55 Hence I disagree with Florby’s depiction of Montsurry as a “tragic hero vibrating in formal dramatic lament” (Painful Passage, 135). 54

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only ever mean as much as Montsurry knew beforehand; it does not yield any new information or significant truth. Montsurry’s brutal and ultimately ineffective investigation asks us to consider the contextual significance of Chapman’s legal allusions. It would appear that with his play he was reflecting upon, if not contributing to, a long-standing legal debate amongst English lawyers, in which two positions can roughly be determined. First, there were the defenders of the English legal tradition, characterized by a jurisdiction based on precedent and equity, second, there were those endorsing a legal system based on the continental Roman model.56 A representative of the latter faction, Francis Bacon captures the two sides in this debate when he juxtaposes a customary “law of reputation” and a positive “gown-law”.57 The latter term expresses a law that relies on positive rules and statutes to streamline human interaction in a society – Bacon’s own position. The former term invokes the common law, whose emphasis on personal concepts of honour and virtue is potentially at odds with an overarching positive order. This individualistic aspect explains also why honour is invoked by defenders of the duel to justify this antisocial practice. In Bussy D’Ambois Chapman seems to beckon towards the law of reputation with his hero’s sententious line: “Who to himself is law, no law doth need, / Offends no king, and is a king indeed” (II.i.203-204). Bussy here calls for a non-legalistic space where the virtuous would act properly without being restrained by official rules. The negative example of Montsurry allows Chapman to make his point even more strongly, illustrating the violent perversions of Roman law at the hand of the inept representatives of a new world order.58 Bussy’s haughty rejection of the legal profession seems to corroborate such an understanding of the play: Show me a lawyer that turns sacred law – 56 See Gerald Hammond, “‘A Jest’s Prosperity’: The Idea of Contract in Sixteenthand Early Seventeenth-Century Literature”, Tamkang Review, XXVI/1-2 (1995), 117, and Shael Herman, “Quot Judices Tot Sententia: A Study of the English Reaction to Continental Interpretive Techniques”, Legal Studies, I (1981), 165-89. 57 Bacon, Works, XI, 400. 58 Goldstein interprets Montsurry as a medium for Chapman’s criticism of the emerging middle class and the contradictions of bourgeois marriage, especially its propertarian basis (George Chapman, 159).

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In his speech, Bussy seems to voice his allegiance to an older, a “sacred law”, associated with fairness, arcane knowledge and virtue and representing a defence against corruption. The lawyer imagined by Bussy perverts such noble ideals, turning the law into a selfdestructive demon in the process. His profane law fosters wilful misinterpretations and redescriptions, turning what had in the past been good, bad and vice versa. As defenders of the common law have pointed out with reference to the literalism of the English tradition, the possibility of misinterpretation is indeed a particular danger of statute law.59 Such aberrations also justify the aggression with which Bussy argues against the legal profession: the perversions of what once was sacred simply deserve no better. In a manner that is typical for Chapman’s philosophy, the playwright and poet takes a brutally didactic stand. Nevertheless, Bussy’s apparently unequivocal statement regarding the law is called into question by his association with secrecy and silence that seems to link him with political absolutism. This association would contradict his connection with the common law, which criticism has tended to idealize as a “barrier against absolutism”.60 Rather than clarifying the position of the contradictory eponymous hero, the legal context of Bussy D’Ambois not only confirms his conflicted and contradictory position, but also complicates any critical attempt to determine Chapman’s legal partisanship. Instead, we are well-advised in our reading of the play to 59

See Herman, “Quot Judices”, 176-80. C. H. McIlwain, “The English Common Law, Barrier against Absolutism”, American Historical Review, XLIX (1943), 23-31. 60

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heed Richard Helgerson’s reminder that the contrast between English common law and the Roman and continental legal forms it seems to reject can be overstated. As Helgerson points out, Roman and continental law were of conceptual significance in the mind-set of English common lawyers.61 Although the distinction between continental and English common law may be in tune with the contrastive structure of Bussy D’Ambois, Chapman never denies that there is a need for a formal legal order. Although his hero claims that he is “a law unto himself”, he is, for instance, defined and defended by the rule-bound discourse of the messenger’s speech. These contradictions necessitate a more differentiated contextualization of Chapman’s seemingly topical legal references. Rather than presenting sides in the legal debates of his time, these references have a more general and abstract dimension. We may, for instance, see them in light of Walter Benjamin’s strategic distinction between a law-making (“rechtssetzende”) and a law-preserving (“rechtserhaltende”) force.62 While the former serves to describe the mythical moment when the law is instituted, the latter depicts the force by which this initial installation is upheld. In view of Benjamin’s distinction we might interpret the torture of Tamyra as the initial imposition of the law upon the body of a perpetrator; as such, it is almost mythical in its immediacy and yet calls for the remembrance of this event. The rhetorical transformation of Bussy’s duel, by contrast, represents the act of “cognitive reintegration”63 of a similarly mythical event. The chronology of the two scenes thus runs counter to the play’s structure as I have outlined it above. While their interaction recalls the dramatic shift towards performance that seems to characterize the play, the act of performance here has a different 61

Cf. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 71. 62 These are the terms used in the English translation of Benjamin’s book (quoted in Žižek, Totalitarianism?, 33). Crucial to Benjamin’s argument is the duplicity of the term in German. See Jacques Derrida, Gesetzeskraft: Der “mystische” Grund der Autorität (1990; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991) and Anselm Haverkamp, “Ein abwerfbarer Schatten: Gewalt und Trauer in Benjamins Kritik der Gewalt”, in Gewalt und Gerechtigkeit: Derrida – Benjamin, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 162-68. 63 Bettine Menke, “Benjamin vor dem Gesetz: Die Kritik der Gewalt in der Lektüre Derridas”, in Gewalt und Gerechtigkeit, 221.

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function. Rather than fulfilling the memory imperative voiced by the narration of the duel, the violation of Tamyra marks a beginning and demands to be remembered. Taking Benjamin’s differentiation as our point of departure, we might conclude that Chapman’s play exposes the violence at the heart of the law, the brutality of the judiciary, however benevolent and just its aims. From this perspective, the playwright would become a prophet of recent critical legal theory, which has increasingly concerned itself with the unsettling depths beneath the alleged objectivity of legal discourse and actions. It may, for example, be taken as evidence for Robert M. Cover’s statement that “legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death”, resulting in “the imposition of violence upon others”.64 However, to claim Chapman along these lines as a prophetic liberal whose depiction of Montsurry’s violence illuminates the bloody roots of the law, would mean to ignore Chapman’s own compliance, in the play in question, with the dramatic demand to perform violence. The realistic staging of Tamyra’s violation reveals that the playwright was by no means squeamish about exploiting violence dramatically. Strategically pitting Montsurry’s theatricality against the ideal of aristocratic secrecy and self-reflectivity as embodied by Bussy, Chapman succumbs to theatrical “tactics of exposure”65 that ultimately rebound back on himself. His on-stage anatomy of Montsurry’s anatomical desire has rightly been described as “hideously violent”.66 Rather than an act of official justice, it in fact recalls far from refined public shaming rituals such as charivari, the communal scolding of a cuckolded husband and/or his faithless wife. Like Shakespeare’s Othello, Chapman’s play seems to be “organized around the abjection and violent punishment of its central figures”,67 implicating the spectators and their violent desire for ritualized, collective brutality. The presumed sympathy with Tamyra may be obliterated by the spectators’ craving for her violation. Indicating the 64

Cover, “Violence and the Word”, 1601. Maus, Inwardness, 44. She uses the term in connection with Protestant polemics. 66 McLuskie, “Politics and Dramatic Form”, 220. 67 Michael D. Bristol, “Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in Othello”, in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 142. 65

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playwright’s dependence on and willingness to go along with the demands of performance and exploit the spectacular, the play’s dramatic violence also challenges our desire to exculpate the playwright. Chapman’s ostensibly moral lesson relies on the violent excess which it critiques. Finally, to take Montsurry’s ire at face value and to grant him the power he claims to have over his wife is to give the character much more credit than Chapman himself is willing to attribute to him. The playwright’s ironic perspective debunks Montsurry’s legal operations much more effectively than any liberal litany about the brutality of the law could. Enacting the dramatic mechanism of torture, Montsurry not only constructs himself: by exposing the representational economy of institutionalized cruelty – in Elaine Scarry’s words, the “conversion of real pain into the fiction of power”68 in torture – he immediately deconstructs his own fiction of authority. Chapman’s emphasis on the performative nature of Montsurry’s search for truth suggests that this is less an act of discovery and (re)cognition and more of interpretation and construction. “Till thou writ’st, / I’ll write in wounds, my wrong’s fit characters, / Thy right of sufferance” (V.i.124-26), Montsurry announces ominously, literally “carving” Tamyra “as an emblem of adultery”,69 in scarlet letters. Conflating two conceptual steps with regard to the law – first, the law’s discovery of injustice (“my wrong’s fit characters”), second, its punitive quality (“Thy right of sufferance”) – the words Montsurry directs at his wife seem to illustrate his absolute power. But although Montsurry imitates the absolutist selfauthorization of both Bussy and the King, his performance is merely a “fantasy of epistemic mastery”,70 which cannot express an objective truth or deeper knowledge. It is significant that Montsurry’s law-making act is in the play depicted so emphatically as an act of writing, which calls into question his self-appointed role as lawgiver. Rather than the truth of the law, the scene illuminates its solipsistic nature, its inevitable eliding of the originary moment of the law’s first installation (what Slavoj Žižek

68

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 27. 69 Brooke, Bussy D’Ambois, xlviii. 70 Hanson, Discovering the Subject, 26.

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calls “the self-referential abyss that is the law”71). Like all texts, the story of the law is caught up in its own textuality.72 Montsurry’s justification of his brutality as inherently lawful is flawed in so far as it, too, merely executes justice without installing it. Since his authority is never more than the displaced authority of other agents (such as Monsieur or the Guise), he is merely a stand-in for some other source of power (and a weak one to boot). Unlike Bussy, however, Montsurry does not possess the hero’s substantial core and secret truth, thereby making himself the target of both Chapman’s dismay and ridicule. The similarities between the two scenes and the stages of the law which they might be said to represent refer us back to Walter Benjamin’s distinctions between the law-making and law-preserving forces. At closer inspection, this distinction is revealed as a strategy: it is an imagined difference that allows Benjamin to illuminate the similarity between the two phases. What connects the law-making and law-preserving violence is their being similarly involved in the process of narration. Legal power is always already remembered, repeated, quoted. We are unable to mark the law’s point of origin, let alone its meaning. While the differentiation between these types of law may provide a momentary conceptual aid, it is unable to describe the mystical violence that represents the foundational act of the law (and hence, of legal authority).73 Similarly, Chapman’s apparent distinction between different stages of the law emphasizes their relatedness rather than difference, indicating the inaccessible, secretive kernel of the law and reminding us that the birth of the law cannot be determined or described.

71

Žižek, Plague, 223. Any attempt to identify the origin of the law is haunted by that supplementarity which, according to Jacques Derrida, characterizes all writing: “Everything begins with reproduction. Always already: repositories of a meaning which was never present, whose signified presence is always reconstituted by deferral, nachträglich, belatedly, supplementarily: for the nachträglich also means supplementary. The call of the supplement is primary, here, and it hollows out that which will be reconstituted by deferral as the present. The supplement, which seems to be added as a plenitude to a plenitude, is equally that which compensates for a lack (qui supplée)” (see his Writing and Difference, 221). 73 See Menke, “Benjamin vor dem Gesetz”, 219. The messianic dimension of Benjamin’s notion of divine – pure – violence is the subject of Derrida’s critique in Gesetzeskraft, 67-68. 72

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The truth of performance Chapman’s treatment of the law dovetails with the play’s pervasive concern with secrecy and individual identity. Significantly, however, the secrecy idealistically incarnated by Bussy is embodied contrastively by a further character in the play: Tamyra, Montsurry’s wife and the protagonist’s lover. The secret nature of their affair is suggested by the discretion with which it is depicted. Never shown, merely hinted at by Tamyra’s allusion to the “close embraces” (III.i.2) she had exchanged with the hero, it belongs to the space of privacy which the playwright is unwilling to expose to the audience’s prying eyes. Nevertheless, I will conclude this chapter by arguing that the secrecy Tamyra shares with the hero poses a particular problem for the playwright. We have already seen that within Chapman’s critique of one strand of the law, Tamyra serves to expose Montsurry’s investigation as a sham. But Montsurry is not the only victim of Tamyra’s unreadability, which is so adamantly illuminated by the playwright; her effect on the play’s eponymous hero is even more fatal. For Tamyra, the letter she writes Bussy under duress in her own blood is an unmistakable sign of the fact of her torture: “I’ll write, but in my blood, that he may see / These lines come from my wounds, and not from me” (V.i.168-69). Her lover, however, interprets them differently: as a token of her unfaltering passion – “a sacred witness of her love” (V.ii.90) – rather than a word of warning, Bussy duly walks into the trap devised by Montsurry. Ultimately, then, he stumbles – and falls – over the play’s ambiguous female body. Far from being evidence of a heroic “independence of divine warning”,74 as one critic has seen Bussy’s act of misinterpretation, it destroys his credo of being a law unto himself, ultimately illuminating his human, all too human frailty. Tamyra, then, encapsulates a deathly bodily duplicity. While her note to Bussy invests the numerous secret letters handed around in the play with a brutal materiality, it simultaneously fails to divulge a correct meaning, thus confirming Chapman’s belief in the autonomous self’s secret core. This material secrecy figures also on another level of the play, where it has meta-dramatic implications. In performance, the figure of Tamyra surpasses the inaccessibility of Chapman’s hero, 74

Altmann, Tudor Play of Mind, 315.

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drawing attention to the fact that a body on stage is never truthful. Performance criticism has pointed out that “in the theatre, the truthful body always lies”,75 as the actor must deny his own feelings so as to appear emotionally authentic on stage.76 Similarly, the performance of Tamyra’s body illuminates “the partial and biased nature of meaning on the stage”.77 The final paradox posed by Tamyra is that she opens up a space of interiority far more secret than that of Bussy, the King or indeed their author: an inwardness expressed by the inconceivable and unreliable truth of performance. Seen from this perspective, Tamyra challenges not only the power of the men in the play, but also the notion of the supremacy of the play’s text in the making of dramatic meaning, thereby putting in perspective the authority of the playwright. Rather than “a cipher, a sign of subjection”,78 passively exposed to Montsurry’s mad rampage, Tamyra torpedoes not so much the intentions of her husband – which, as we have seen above, are in fact ultimately self-undermining – but above all the monopoly on aristocratic secrecy claimed by both Bussy and his author. If we believe recent criticism, then early modern playwrights sought to exploit the subversive possibilities of performance directly and deliberately. The cognitive and communicative nature of the early modern stage made it a particularly apt medium for such exploitations, since it was as yet not an illusionistic theatre where stage and auditorium are separated by an imaginary “fourth wall”.79 Instead, stage performance, by deliberately drawing attention to itself, broke theatrical illusion. The place for such acts of disillusionment was the front of the stage, the platea, where direct addresses to the audience and comments upon the events taking place centre stage could be made. The commentaries on the platea illuminate the theatricality of the play. In this process, they do even more, illuminating not only the “production of ideologies”80 but also the generation of authority. Whatever notions of authority are put forward on stage, they may be 75

Dawson, “Performance and Participation”, 36. See Knapp, Shakespeare, 38. 77 Ibid., 26. 78 Dawson, “Performance and Participation”, 30. 79 See Bertolt Brecht, Der Messingkauf, in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), XVI, 803. 80 Umberto Eco quoted in Sorge, “Baroque Theatricality”, 126. 76

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challenged by the “process of authorization” performed on the platea. For Robert Weimann, therefore, authority on the early modern stage is “bifold”.81 In her critical annotation of Weimann’s argument Lorraine Helms attempts to transcend its ultimately hegemonic and strikingly “ungendered” privileging of the popular tradition as represented by the events on the platea by proposing the existence of a tragic platea characterized by the dying and suffering woman acted by a boy or young man. Suffering cannot be prescribed by explicit or implicit stage directions; its representation is contingent, dependent on the given situation and different in each individual performance of a play. Complementing, in performance, the gaps of a play text generally unexplained by stage directions with his own interpretation of his role, the boy actor embodied a source of particular ambiguity even on a classical stage intent on preventing subversive interceptions. The boy actor’s performance might have allowed him to propose a very personal interpretation of the scene, one which might counteract the playwright’s intentions, enabling a local agency which would disrupt the closed discourse established by the play’s text.82 The torture scene in Bussy D’Ambois provides an excellent dramatic laboratory for the actor’s exploration of his histrionic techniques. Here the woman/boy actor bound to the rack drifts from comprehensible pleading and arguing into random screams and shrieks: “Oh, who is turned into my Lord and husband? / Husband? My lord? None but my lord and husband. / Heaven, I ask thee remission of my sins, / Not of my pains; husband, O help me, husband!” (V.i.142-46). Relying on the actor’s individual interpretation and representation of the words (or, indeed, the silences) of the play text, such an act of violence might constitute the prime site for actorial self-speaking. Representing a blatant, “uninterpreted presence”83 in the play, Tamyra’s suffering represents a moment of particular dramatic uncertainty. She disrupts the moral dichotomy established by Chapman’s juxtaposition of forms of dramatic representation and the epistemological closure thereby postulated. For 81

Robert Weimann, “Bifold Authority in Shakespeare’s Theatre”, Shakespeare Quarterly, XXXIX (1988), 402. 82 Cf. Helms, “‘High Roman Fashion”, 559. 83 Knapp, Shakespeare, 34.

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instance, the boy actor could have interpreted his role in favour of the character and her lover. By summoning his performative and elocutionary skills, he might also have represented Tamyra as truly dignified in her pain and inciting the audience’s “passionate participation”84 in her suffering. Such a revaluation would of course contradict the way Chapman himself seems to have envisaged the character. Tamyra’s speeches make it apparent that she is no martyr, all spirit and no body,85 desexualized and desireless like her male counterpart Bussy. To the contrary, the playwright has Tamyra herself draw attention to her body even in the moment her suffering, in a vocabulary that recalls the imaginary excesses of the novella literature of the time:86 Sweet lord, enjoin my sin Some other penance than what makes it worse: Hide in some gloomy dungeon my loathed face, And let condemned murtherers let me down, Stopping their noses, my abhorred food. Hang me in chains, and let me ear these arms That have offended: bind me face to face To some dead woman, taken from the cart Of execution, till death and time In grains of dust dissolve me. (V.i.102-11)

My interest here is less with the erotic frisson potentially established by these words, whose innuendo is strengthened by the 84

Dawson, “Performance and Participation”, 42. Frances E. Dolan writes that representation of women’s executions “scrupulously downplayed the female body in order to highlight the divine comedy of the soul’s release”. See her “‘Gentlemen, I have one thing more to say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563-1680”, Modern Philology, XCII/2 (1992), 166. By contrast, Chapman does not turn Tamyra into a disembodied martyr when he gives her room to speak, but insist on her seductiveness to the end. 86 Notably the most successful novella collection of the time, William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (published 1566-67). A striking example for the feminine exploration of the genre’s pornographic potential is Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621), discussed in Helen Hackett, “The Torture of Limena: Sex and Violence in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania”, in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, eds Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), 93-110. 85

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fact that they were spoken by a boy actor, than with the way Chapman has Tamyra draw attention to her body, marking her as materiality. But this emphasis on the physical throws into relief the question whether the secret embodied by Tamyra can ever be known. Maintaining her volatility against the memory imperative established at the beginning of the play, she falls out of the grid of legitimation and containment posited by Chapman. While the messenger in the first scene functions as a witness whose testimony legitimizes Bussy’s heroic deed and so guarantees its survival, Tamyra’s suffering remains without this containment and narrative validation. To argue, as Elisabeth Hanson has done, that Tamyra “is not herself a repository of secrets so much as the vehicle through which otherwise unrepresentable matters of state can be brought to light”,87 points to one significant function of this character; however, it ignores that Tamyra’s inalienable secrecy also constitutes a threat. In her bodily duplicity – both providing the material basis of legal knowledge and defying it – Tamyra illuminates the contradictory views of torture coexisting at the time when Chapman wrote his play. According to Hanson, “in the discursive economy of English torture the body functioned amphibiously, giving truth a basis in material reality that made it susceptible to discovery, while, in the intense subjectivity of its pain, making truth inaccessible to all but the sufferer”.88 While the body was seen as a source of truth, the space for a public, accessible and readable evidence, it was also considered as a site of individual conscience out of legal bounds. Lawyers such as Francis Bacon acknowledged as much when they claimed that torture should only be used to provide evidence within the legal process, not to expose the conscience of the tortured.89 While at first sight indicating an incipient humanitarian attitude, this gesture ultimately served to legitimize torture by expulsing it from the legal process and making it a task of the executive. At the same time, the argumentative division between forms of torture illuminated the limitations of the law, which is unable to get to know the real secrets of the body of the 87 Hanson, Discovering the Subject, 55. She takes Chapman’s tragedy as one in a number of plays from the period where “the vexed relation between the subject and the early modern state” (56) is articulated in domestic terms. 88 Ibid., 27. 89 Ibid., 40

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tortured. The tortured body figured as a “site of resistance”90 in the fact-finding process, pointing to the limits of legal knowledge and the power of the law over the self. Rather than being the vehicle of Chapman’s humanist critique against domestic violence, Tamyra’s torture contributes to the playwright’s nostalgic lament for a golden age. In contrast to the new world represented by the likes of Monsieur and Montsurry, this golden age could at least hope to find metaphysical insights, if not truth itself, even if the price to be paid was violence. Ultimately unsuccessful, the torture of Tamyra is at odds with the idealized truth finding depicted by Chapman in other examples from his work. For Chapman, knowledge could only be achieved violently and torturously; a point of view that inscribes the playwright in a philosophical tradition beginning in classical antiquity according to which the body of the tortured contained a metaphysical truth. Informed by such notions, the Athenian legal system used torture to wrest this truth from the body of the slave.91 Other examples from Chapman’s work place the playwright in this philosophical tradition. For instance, in his obscure poem The Shadow of Night (1594), a fundamentally melancholy stance92 is interwoven with images of beating, hammering and torturing to illustrate the conjunction of violence and knowledge. The epistle dedicatory to Matthew Roydon juxtaposes, in a similar manner, the extremes of true knowledge and the half-hearted discovery of merely superficial information: It is an exceeding rapture of delight in the deepe search of knowledge ... that maketh men manfully indure th’extremes incident to that Herculean labour: from flints must the Gorgonean fount be smitten. Men must be shod by Mercurie, girt with Saturnes Adamantine sword, take the shield from Pallas, the helme from Pluto, and have the eyes of Graea (as Hesiodus armes Perseus against Medusa) before they can cut off the viperous head of

90

Ibid., 41. See Page Dubois, Torture and Truth (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 137. 92 On Chapman and melancholia, see Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 1979), especially Chapter 13. 91

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benumming ignorance, or subdue their monstrous affections to most beautifull judgement. (19)

Knowledge – “beautifull judgement” – here contrasted with benumbing ignorance, is achieved through a protracted and painful process in which the body must endure physical extremes. The process of understanding is a form of torture. In the poem proper Chapman illuminates this point: the speaker not only sees himself “in torture” (l. 17) in the face of “the shipwracke of the world” (l. 10), but also adopts a particularly brutal position regarding others: Then like fierce bolts, well rammed with heate & cold In Joves Artillerie; my words unfold, To breake the labyrinth of everie eare, And make ech frighted soule come forth and heare, Let them breake harts, as well as yeelding ayre, That all mens bosoms (pierst with no affaires, But gaine of riches) may be lanced wide, And with the threates of vertue terrified. (ll. 21-28)

The poet’s violent words associate virtue with acts of brutality: ramming, breaking and lancing the bodies of those who would not listen, teaching them a moral and spiritual lesson. The virtuous poet affirms his virtue by way of the violation of the body – his own and that of others. It is obvious, then, why Tamyra should present a problem for Chapman. Marking the limit of knowledge for the hero and his adversaries by confronting them with the material reality she embodies, Tamyra defies the playwright’s ideal of virtuous truth. Instead of bringing about knowledge, she might at best incite interpretation – which is not only doomed to failure, but which also presents a dangerous possibility in a theatre that was increasingly becoming aware of the spectators’ interpretive powers. As I have described in this chapter, this danger is only heightened by the play’s performative structure. Bussy D’Ambois literally veers towards a moment of performance where the dramatic promise made by the narrative transformation of violence in the messenger’s speech at the beginning of the play is finally satisfied. This slide from a diegetic to a

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mimetic stance not only draws the play towards a point of chaos and excess, it in fact reverses its dramatic chronology and logic: responding to and fulfilling the stipulation made by this first scene of narrated violence, the torture of Tamyra can also be seen as motivating it. Rather than the fulfilment of the violence imagined by the messenger’s report, it is the violent source of his narrative. But to reverse the play’s chronology also means rethinking the function of the audience in this scene of violence. In this situation, the spectators have a much more active and responsible role with regard to the play: made witnesses to this act of brutality, they are impelled by the messenger’s narrative to remember. Tamyra’s torture imposes a moral and epistemological responsibility on the audience, asking them to validate her suffering by remembering it93 – just as the messenger had remembered Bussy’s fight. After all, the fact that Tamyra’s ordeal takes place in the unremembered present makes a crucial, and to our eyes probably cruel, statement: her as yet unremembered suffering has no legal significance. Whether or not Chapman wants the audience to remember, however, remains doubtful. Why would the playwright hand over his play to a public he despised, as his contemptuous comments throughout his work suggest?94 The memory imperative stipulated by the messenger at the beginning of the play, as indeed by the historical nature of the tragedy as a whole, might in this case have been far from desirable for the playwright. In fact, Chapman’s anxiety about the character of Tamyra is suggested by his more general concern with establishing distance between auditorium and stage so as to prevent involvement or 93

Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London and New York: Routledge, 1992): “To testify is thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative, to others: to take responsibility – in speech – for history or for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the personal, in having general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences” (204). 94 Chapman is most explicit about the role and significance of the audience in his poetic justification of his commendatory poem Andromeda Liberata, where he attacks the “savage multitude” for viciously misreading this poem. Written for the scandalous marriage between Frances Howard and the Earl of Somerset (1613), Chapman’s poem rendered the cause celèbre even more scandalous by defending Howard and Somerset, accused of the murder of Howard’s first husband. For a detailed account, see David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

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sympathy with her suffering. The audience’s voyeuristic position is hinted at in the scene that precedes Tamyra’s torture; a much criticized instance95 where different spirits of the underworld conjure up a vision of Monsieur and his conspirators, allowing Bussy, Tamyra and the Friar to spy on them. Chapman’s meta-dramatic gesture of replicating on stage the immediate conditions of the theatre emphasizes the unbridgeable distance between spectators and spectacle; it beckons as well as restrains them. When Bussy, forced to watch Montsurry stab Tamyra’s servant Pero, tries to interfere, he is held back by the Friar in a manner that seems to signal to the audience: “Look, don’t touch”: “Do not stir; / There’s too much distance and too many locks / ’Twixt you and them, how near so’er they seem, / For any man to interrupt their secrets” (IV.ii.80-83). The effect of such framing operations is of course didactic.96 Cautioning Bussy, the Friar also calls for the spectators’ restraint, literally placing an invisible fourth wall between them and the stage. With his meta-dramatic gesture, the playwright reiterates his contempt for the audience, whose judgements he does not trust. If such gestures suggest that Chapman did not want Tamyra to be remembered, he explicitly takes her out of the reach of anybody’s testimony with her final words. Proclaiming: “Sweet lord, forgive me, and I will be gone” (V.iii.237), Tamyra accepts the banishment by her husband. Promising never to “grieve you with my sight” (V.iii.238), she leaves the stage for her death in isolation. The spirit of her words is one of no reconciliation: her wounds shall never close except by her death; the appropriate punishment is an exile that completely dehumanizes her, confirming that she is not worthy of being remembered. Taken out of the reach of the audience’s memory, she literally (and actively) becomes an outcast with no hope for memory. In this sense, Chapman’s refusal to let the character die on stage is an act of a quasi95

Millar MacLure, for instance, dismisses the spirits of the underworld as mere “grotesqueries” (George Chapman: A Critical Study [1966; University of Toronto Press, 1968], 21), while for Robert Ornstein they are part of the play’s “hackneyed devices” (Moral Vision, 54). 96 As in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the doubling frame in Chapman’s play “structures the audience’s perspective; it guarantees that the most bizarre twists and turns of court intrigue are governed by a higher power” (Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], 20).

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divine authority, a denial to pin down Tamyra’s “meaning” and treatment.97 In having her body, Tamyra is out of legal bounds – free, but also free to be forgotten. Sent off stage, Tamyra retires into the space of privacy and vanishes as a public person.98 Wrapped in an arras, Tamyra leaves in shame, remaining the dark secret of Chapman’s first Bussy-play until revived in his sequel, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois.

97 Chapman here seems to address and anticipate a shift in meaning of habeas corpus, which entailed a re-accentuation in the relationship between subject and king, a “decline of pardon” which guarantees the continuing availability of the subject within the legal process. See Anselm Haverkamp and Cornelia Vismann, “Habeas Corpus: The Law’s Desire to Have the Body”, in Violence, Identity, and SelfDetermination, eds Hent De Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 234. 98 Cf. Goldberg, James I, 152.

CHAPTER 5

THEATRICAL EXCESS, CRITICAL PRACTICE: WOMEN BEWARE WOMEN AND THE SHAPING OF A BOURGEOIS AESTHETIC A certain evolution of wealth, whose symptoms indicate sickness and exhaustion, leads to shame in oneself accompanied by petty hypocrisy …. The representatives of the bourgeoisie have adopted an effaced manner; wealth is now displayed behind closed doors, in accordance with depressing and boring conventions. In addition, people in the middle class – employees and small shopkeepers – having attained mediocre or minute fortunes, have managed to debase and subdivide ostentatious expenditure, of which nothing remains but vain efforts tied to tiresome rancor.1

With this last chapter we finally reach outward, into the larger socioeconomic context in which early modern drama was written, performed and received. While I have so far largely focused on the epistemological dimension of the professionalization of the early modern stage, the following discussion of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (c. 1625) will deal with the material aspects of this development. The son of a wealthy London stonemason, Middleton was arguably the most sympathetic chronicler of the joys and woes of the city’s emerging middle class from which he hailed. While Middleton’s social allegiances become apparent in his plays’ settings and themes, their self-critical meta-dramatic references reveal the playwright’s awareness that, also as a writer for the stage, he participated in (and profited from) the emerging market.

1

Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure”, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 117.

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Middleton’s critical self-referentiality appears to anticipate the reappraisal of traditional notions of economics undertaken recently by the “new economic criticism”,2 amongst whose conceptual influences are the challenges to bourgeois ideals of utility and thrift made by Georges Bataille (see the Epigraph). Bataille’s critical strategy is to unveil the hidden excesses of these ideals: their inherent catastrophic, disastrous and ultimately orgiastic, “principle of loss”.3 In so doing, his criticism also draws attention to the rhetorical strategies applied to deny these complexities: the “forms of ideological obscurantism”,4 which frequently have a literary dimension, that mark the discourse on economics. Both critical economists and literary scholars writing through the lens of economics have participated in the “unveil[ing] of the discipline’s buried metaphors and fictions”5 and the exposure of the abysses of the economic reality it describes.6 If economic models fail to contain what they fear, so do the models of language and aesthetics based on their framework.7 This perspective, anachronistic though it may seem at first sight, provides the point of departure for my reading of Women Beware Women. If we take Middleton’s concern with the economy in this play to both point to an outside reality and to itself, the theatrical context and its relationship with this outside reality, we need to extend our understanding of the play’s pecuniary metaphoric and its historical specificity.8 What also needs to be investigated are the parameters of our analysis. Consequently, I will read Women Beware Women not as a play about money and the market but as a vehicle for the playwright’s self-reflective engagement with his own economic reality and the narratives (and their failure) by which it was surrounded. Like Bataille, Middleton depletes certain middle-class ideals by identifying 2

A representative example of this criticism is The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, eds Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 3 Bataille, “Expenditure”, 117. 4 Cedric Watts, Literature and Money: Financial Myth and Literary Truth (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 5. 5 Woodmansee and Osteen, Introduction, in New Economic Criticism, 3. 6 Ibid., 14. 7 Scott Cutler Shershow, “Of Sinking: Marxism and the ‘General’ Economy”, Critical Inquiry, XXVII (2001), 468-92. 8 See, for example, Christopher Ricks, “Word-Play in Women Beware Women”, Renaissance and English Studies, XII/47 (1961), 238-50.

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their strategic rhetorical dimension and the conceptual abysses they seek to veil. This critical dimension allows us to review a play which has been targeted for its stylistic hybridity: its intermingling of constraint and excess, which is illuminated not least by the play’s disastrous finale, a brutal wedding masque at odds with the play’s overall aesthetics. I suggest that this hostility may be taken as the product of the same ideals and norms the play itself helps to shape. In accusing the playwright of failing to produce a homogeneous work of art, critics demonstrate the success of the ideology mapped by his play. To contextualize Middleton’s Women Beware Women, then, does not merely mean to trace a particular historical attitude to money represented by it, but also to explain the utilitarian parameters of the “bourgeois perception”9 informing modern criticism, whose very emergence is illuminated by Middleton’s play. To this end, a reading of it must be meta-dramatic and meta-critical at the same time, revealing the historical, constructed nature of critical positions as well as their inevitable involvement in what they challenge. Utility and its discontents Women Beware Women ends with a bang, not a whimper: with a wedding masque stage managed by Livia, the play’s flamboyant procuress and schemer, who uses this spectacular aristocratic display to settle accounts with her enemies: first, by making them act in the masque and then killing them in the process. In a drama which superficially plays off the opposing factions in a world of changing social hierarchies – an emerging middle class of new money and power and an aristocracy of old property and authority – the masque appears as an authoritarian attempt on the part of a member of the aristocracy to assert its power.10 Unfortunately for Livia and her victims, this gesture of containment is subsequently crossed from various directions, as almost everybody else in this play-within-the-play has their own axe to grind and appropriates the marital ritual in order to seek personal 9

Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982). 10 See Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (1975; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), especially 37-58.

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revenge. The spectacle of aristocratic authority and order is perverted by the conflicting individual interests it serves. Livia’s carefully devised script of death soon “swerves a little from the argument” (V.ii.123),11 as one of the confused spectators on stage puts it, turning, apparently on its own account, into an absurdly democratic dance of death12 that leads all the actors involved to their final demise. Unsurprisingly, criticism has not been exactly benevolent about this bloody finale. The scene in question has been seen to attest to the playwright’s attempt to “wrestl[e] ... with closure”13 and resolve an emotional confusion of petty conflicts and personal lusts by “creating a superficial impression of tragic doom”.14 A “dramatic fiasco”,15 hijacking an otherwise strikingly realistic drama, the masque has puzzled critics, who have taken it as evidence of the author’s despicable regress to a “naive sensationalism”16 that caters to the irrational cravings of an audience starved over four long acts of the thrills of bloodbath and gore The play’s closing apocalypse defies aesthetic ideals of unity. Livia’s masque is as the climactic stylistic flaw of this monstrous Jacobean “mongrel”,17 rendered even more ambiguous by the dangerous fascination the scene potentially harbours for the audience. After all, in juggling contrasting modes and styles, Women Beware Women describes a dangerous emotive and affective trajectory of suspense: having initially evinced a precocious naturalism that would seem to match Middleton’s middle-class allegiances,18 the play 11

Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, ed. J. R. Mulryne (1975; Manchester University Press, 1986). All references for quotations from this edition will be included in the text. 12 Ornstein, Moral Vision, 191. 13 Anthony Dawson, “Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape”, Studies in English Literature, XXVII (1987), 318. 14 Ornstein, Moral Vision, 191. 15 Dawson, “Women Beware Women”, 318. 16 Cf. Ornstein, Moral Vision, 191. 17 G. R. Hibbard, “The Tragedies of Thomas Middleton and the Decadence of the Drama”, Renaissance and Medieval Studies, I (1957), 54. 18 Zara Bruzzi and A. A. Bromham describe his style as “spare” in “‘The soil alters; Y’are in another country’: Multiple Perspectives and Political Resonances in Middleton’s Women Beware Women”, in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, eds Michele Marrapodi and A. J. Hoenselaars (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 258. The view of

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ultimately rebukes such directives and drifts towards stylization and artifice. No contextual explanation19 can reconcile critics primed by an aesthetics that relies on the subdued realism of “the natural attitude”20 to the exuberant artifice, excess and ostentation on which the play climaxes. What barges violently into Middleton’s plot with the masque in Act V is style in all its deviant duplicity and superfluity,21 undermining the expectations we make of the play and its author Although such views ostensibly express aesthetic concerns, they are in the final analysis shaped by economic ideals. The violent apocalypse that disrupts the otherwise homogeneous dramatic vision of Middleton’s play represents an excess and surplus that flamboyantly fails to comply not only with an idealized notion of art, but also of economic reason. This rationale is exemplified for instance by the circular-flow model of classical economic theory, which depicts economic relations as a closed, perfectly balanced circuit, projecting the image of “a world at rest, at equilibrium, at peace with itself”.22 Yet at the same time as occluding real contradictions and uncertainties, such fantasies allow us to discover where such acts of Middleton as naturalist avant la lettre goes back to Hibbard, who famously called him a “seventeenth-century Ibsen” (“Tragedies of Thomas Middleton”, 54), although he conceded that the playwright was as yet unable to transcend the limits imposed by the dramatic tradition within which he worked. For a useful overview of the conflicting “versions of Middleton” provided by his various interpreters, see Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), especially 1-16. 19 For contrasting contextualizations, see Chakravorty, Society and Politics and Yachnin, Stage-Wrights. While Chakravorty sees the generic and dramatic discontinuities of Middleton’s work as signs of the dramatist’s “disturbing insights into the structures of social and political authority” (14), Yachnin suggests that the hybridity of Middleton’s play is predominantly “parodic” (126). By contrast, I argue that Middleton’s stylistic hybridity must be seen as an entirely more serious and selfreferential moment of self-definition in the context of a theatrical culture in crisis. 20 Edmund Husserl’s term is appropriated by Norman Bryson in his Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (London: Macmillan, 1983), 4-5. 21 On the duplicitous violence of style, see Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 37-41. In a similar vein, Bryson defines style as “an inert and functionless deposit encrusting the apparatus of communication” (Vision and Painting, 7). 22 Susan F. Feiner, “A Portrait of Homo Economicus as a Young Man”, in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, eds Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 198.

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closure fail, where the smooth running of the economic machine is disrupted by the noisy materiality of human labour, the restless uncertainty of human emotions and desires, by the sacrifices and excesses that both unsettle and enable economic exchange.23 Interpretations of Middleton’s play suggest how strongly literary criticism correlates with the ideals underpinning concepts like the circular-flow model. However, the play also allows us to return to the point of emergence of both the critical and the economic ideologies. Illustrating a nascent ideology of order and containment, the play also exposes the abysses of bourgeois rationality and reason which this ideology serves to veil. The fact that Middleton sets his play in Florence is probably more than a token reference to the early modern fascination with Italy and Florence’s most famous son, Niccolò Machiavelli. As the cradle of capitalism and its concurrent ideologies, the Italian city state provided the inhabitants of early modern England with a referential frame within which to reflect upon themselves. Florence, as Stephanie Jed notes, was not only a vibrant early modern commercial centre, but also the place where forms of “chaste thinking” evolved as a means to provide these commercial activities with a veneer of respectability. Strategies of self-chastisement connected two ostensibly separate strata of sixteenth-century Florentine society, the humanists and merchant-oligarchs. In the case of the Florentine humanists, “chaste thinking” served to disavow the violence contained in the founding myth of Florence and “prologue to republican freedom”:24 the story of the rape of Lucretia and her subsequent virtuous suicide. The merchant oligarchs deployed similar arguments with similar self-chastising aims. Nowhere else was their success in denying the material truth of their money-making better documented than in the bookkeeping that charted their profits and

23

Feiner establishes an analogy between “the vicissitudes of markets” and “the vicissitudes of our mothers”: “Insofar as markets vacillate between generosity, availability, and affirmation on the one hand, and withholding, scarcity, and punishment on the other, who among us is not at some deep level reminded of our profound dependency upon forces we cannot control? The prospect that markets may fail us tends to awaken our earliest horrors and fears of total abandonment” (“Portrait”, 195). 24 Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 13.

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losses, while at the same time endorsing the principles of order and secrecy.25 These principles are reflected by the particular form of reasoning or ragione that informs the operations of double-entry bookkeeping.26 First documented in 1494 by the Franciscan Luca Pacioli, double entry bookkeeping reflects changing socio-economic structures and indicates the ideals and ideologies summoned in response to this change (and, hence, whatever anxieties required such strategies). In the words of James Aho, double entry bookkeeping served above all the rhetorical purpose “to justify an activity about which there existed in medieval Christian Europe a considerable suspicion: namely, commerce itself”.27 This justification was provided by the formulaic, even ritualistic format of the merchant’s ledger, which created the illusion of a closed economic circuit without gaps and excesses, intimating of course the fantasy of closure of such economic idealisations as the circular-flow model. While concealing on the one hand the merchant’s factual interest in the increase of wealth, double entry bookkeeping legitimizes his profitable endeavours by making them moral, reflected by the “fundamentally equitable and balanced transaction”28 from which it arises. The well-balanced account of the Renaissance merchant, in testifying to his civilized self-containment, validates his “dirty” work. Women Beware Women explores the possibility that the selfchastising rhetoric of Florentine humanists and merchants may be haunted by its foundational excesses, even violence.29 The play illustrates how rhetorical strategies of concealment work and how they fail. In fact, the play can be seen as a dramatic allegory upon 25 Ibid., 92. According to Jed, Florentine merchants tried to keep their ledgers closed from prying eyes, notably those of women, who were seen as “potential divulgers of the family secrets” (ibid., 81). 26 Ibid., 99. 27 James A. Aho, “Rhetoric and the Invention of Double Entry Bookkeeping”, Rhetorica, III/1 (1985), 22. See also Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002), 23-43. 28 Ibid., 33. 29 See also Stephanie Jed’s “The Scene of Tyranny: Violence and the Humanistic Tradition”, in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, eds Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 29-44.

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misguided attempts at balancing the books, with Livia’s masque the most spectacular example of how the floodgates of rhetorical and logical calculation are threatened by the excess and surplus they seek to hide. At first sight a futile gesture by a representative of a class on the way out, the masque also expresses a bourgeois attempt, on the basis of a rational economic calculus, to break even. At the same time as exposing the excesses of a decadent aristocracy, the play’s disastrous finale also implicates its bourgeois hero Leantio, whose own principles it uncovers as excessive. A clerk employed by a rich Florentine merchant, Leantio incarnates homo economicus and his ideals of conservation and diligence. And yet, from the very beginning of the play, literally upon Leantio’s return from Venice with his new wife, the wealthy Venetian heiress Bianca, Middleton complicates the homogeneous self-image of this character. The tension established by this unlikely couple is captured by the warning words spoken by Leantio’s mother: Such a creature, To draw her from her fortune – which no doubt, At the full time, might have proved rich and noble – You know not what you have done. .... What ableness have you to do her right then In maintenance fitting her birth and virtues? (I.i.58-66)

Livia’s proleptic statement realistically assesses her daughter-inlaw’s emotional make-up and astutely adumbrates the basic principles of the characters’ economic condition. Highlighting the feeling of loss that inevitably accompanies Bianca’s removal from her habitual context of luxury and wealth,30 Leantio’s mother also points to the psychological dimension of his economic system: a system based on the principle of exchange. At the heart of this system lies desire, stimulated by scarcity or lack. In turn, this desire causes human beings to exchange goods and money, a process which both connects and 30

Leantio’s mother seems much more perceptive than her son, when she ascribes to Bianca the ambition to transcend the “birth and virtues” which are the property of women who do not want to be “confined / By their conditions, virtues, bloods, or births, / But flowing to affections, wills, and humours” (I.i.68-70).

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separates them and which both satisfies and furthers desire. Embodying the fundamental principles of the market, Bianca also incarnates the force that represents an integral challenge to this economic structure. Leantio counters his mother’s warnings by adamantly professing his ability to contain the danger she prophesies. Strategically, he depicts his relationship with his wife from the very beginning in economic rather than emotional terms: for him, Bianca’s value lies in the fact that she keeps him from temptation, as he admits in his memorably smug declaration that, married to her, he would “find no wish in me bent sinfully / To this man’s sister, or that man’s wife” (I.i.28-29). Imagining Bianca predominantly as a means to an end – namely, a peaceful life – and using her as a panacea against all wishes and desires at odds with middle-class ideals of rational containment, Leantio underestimates merely the force not merely of Bianca’s ambitions, but also that of his own profit-driven logic. His superficially moralistic stance indicates how the principle of utility serves to screen a far from utilitarian reality of ambition, profit and excess that will ultimately be his undoing. Through the personal conflict between mother and son, Middleton stages a clash between two economic principles: one of use value and one of exchange value. Reminding her son of the complexity of human emotions and desires, Leantio’s mother views human beings, in an almost modern way, as economic agents in a world that relies on their desire to have more. By contrast, Leantio’s strategic recourse to use value to contain the danger embodied by Bianca reveals a distinctly pre-economic and far from profitable way of thinking. Given his own social position and professional role, Leantio’s invocation of use value is a deliberate utilitarian strategy characteristic of an emerging economic order that knows that it is anything but contained and chaste. Already at this early stage, the play foregrounds the uncertainty of Leantio’s craving for security; this is further underlined whenever Middleton highlights the inner ambiguity and conflicts of his token bourgeois. Leantio defends himself successfully against the private desires that almost make him abandon his ordinary work routine with breezy gestures of diligence. He puts a stop to his momentary wish to “let the goods at quay / Look to themselves” (I.iii.17-18) with the

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abrupt reminder that “’Tis time of day / For us to be more wise, ’tis early with us; / And if they lose the morning of their affairs / They commonly lose the best part of the day” (I.iii.28-30). Nevertheless, Leantio’s moments of pragmatic self-assertion are intertwined with a constant nagging undertone of dissatisfaction and envy, for instance when he refers dismissively to his “rich master” (I.ii.151), simply inverts hierarchies by making himself the yardstick against which to compare rich gallants (I.iii.1-4) and depicts himself as the epitome of hard-working virtue in an otherwise idle world (I.iii. 31-35). Signs of dissatisfaction, recalling his mother’s words of warning regarding Bianca’s potential frustration with a marriage to a man below her, they illuminate Leantio’s ambition and desire. As Middleton’s play, in such instances, uncovers the inherent ambiguities of the ideal embodied by Leantio, it also reminds critics dismissing it on the grounds of its excess of the secrets our own disciplined rationality might be harbouring. As Leantio’s invocation of utility31 with regard to Bianca suggests, his ragione is based on an exclusionary dichotomy between the useful and the useless, which is highlighted in the play by the apparently dichotomous juxtaposition with the flamboyant excess of a hedonistic aristocracy. Leantio’s antagonist the Duke of Florence, who eventually becomes Bianca’s lover, is introduced by means of a spectacle of excess, a pageant which is only one of the many theatrical non-profit displays counterpointing notions of productive exchange in the tragedy (their culmination being of course the climactic violent masque at the end of the play). Similarly, the lavish decorations in Livia’s house (some of which – the “naked pictures” [II.ii.401] which the Duke’s collaborator 31

Although the term “utility” was the brainchild of a later historical age, Middleton’s emphasis on purposive action nevertheless invokes the concept. On the connection between purposiveness and industrialisation, see E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”, in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1991), 401. Leantio’s utilitarianism is undermined by his resemblance with the Duke, who describes Bianca as being “of purpose sent into the world to show / Perfection in one woman” (III.ii.2324). Both men see her in terms of use value and meaning and in both cases the mantra-like use of the term “purpose” serves to legitimize patterns of behaviour by investing them with intentionality. The fact that the contemptible sycophant Guardiano, too, appropriates the term when announcing Isabella’s arrival with the words “Take you especial note of such a gentlewoman, / She’s here on purpose” (III.iii.2), seriously undercuts these legitimizing strategies.

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Guardiano shows Bianca to get her in the mood for his contractor’s advances – are actually never shown, thereby heightening the erotic tension they promise) are representative of the excess of art also intimated in various instances when characters imagine themselves as artists and stage managers, representing and displaying other human beings. While acting as a self-referential pointer to the theatrical context in which these displays take place, the motif also introduces a distinct erotic substratum to the plot. This is furthermore explored in the quasi-incestuous relationship between Hippolito, Livia’s brother, and his niece Isabella, whose utility-defying challenge to rewarding reproduction we may call, with Claude Lévi-Strauss, destructively endogamous.32 Repeatedly challenging the confrontation between the productive and unproductive, the useful and the gratuitous, Women Beware Women foreshadows twentieth-century attempts to unhinge such dualisms by revealing how an economic logic of utility and constraint is haunted by what it seeks to deny, inevitably tipping over into unreason and madness.33 While a concern with the “economics of the irrational”34 became an important critical trend in the 1990s, the seminal critique of capitalism was already made early in the twentieth century by Georges Bataille,35 who illuminated the inevitable

32

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969), 42-51. 33 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (1991; Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1994), 34-70. 34 Part III of Woodmansee and Osteen’s anthology The New Economic Criticism, for example, is dedicated to “the economics of the irrational.” 35 The intersubjective, sacrificial and ultimately desirous aspects of economic exchange were emphasized already at the turn of the nineteenth century by the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who pointed out the unaccountable areas of radical relativity and undecidability within economic rationale in his Philosophie des Geldes (4th edn; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). Similarly, for Pierre Klossowski, neither the useful nor the useless have an essential identity, the useful is always useless, driven to expenditure, just as the useless has a clear utilitarian, intentional quality. In a manner that resembles Bataille’s argument, Klossowski suggests that Sadeian perversions and industrial production are structurally related (Die lebende Münze [Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 1998]). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explore the traces of madness explicitly produced by capitalism in AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1971; London: The Athlone Press, 1984): “… capitalism, through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic

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submission of “the productive” to the “unproductive expenditures” it stigmatises as its others. His list of examples for such unproductive activities – “luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected from genital finality)”36 – resembles the tokens of excess of Middleton’s play summarized above. These unproductive expenditures have an epistemological dimension: they defy the imposition of meaning and are egocentric and bounded off, resisting commerce, communication, production and reproduction. Bataille’s challenge to this dichotomy sets out from the conceptual flaw entailed in and derived from the principle of utility itself. Utility founders on the most fundamental level because it has no inherent significance, because “there is nothing that permits one to define what is useful to man”.37 Instead, the meaning of utility always lies outside of itself, in the productive ends it serves. More, as Bataille points out, the very notion of productivity can only be imagined against the background of the negative, unproductive other which alone, as the differential factor in discourse, allows the production of meaning. Because it does not possess an inherent significance, utility requires the representation through an excessive negative, which is in turn embedded in the ideal. To transfer this interaction to the social concerns of the play in question: the bourgeois world needs the aristocracy as an excessive other to conceptualize its own economic and moral ideals. In Women Beware Women, the issue of love exemplifies the workings and the failure of this ideology. In the play the unproductive is synonymous with the dangerous experience of unconditional, unremitting and meaningless love, whether erotic or parental. Describing his mother as a “poor affectionate soul”, whose love for him, her “knavish” child (I.i.8 and 10), transcends any moral and economic logic, Leantio intimates the rational, utilitarian ideal which informs his own view of love and his relationship with Bianca: “love that is respective for increase / Is like a good king, that keeps all in peace” (I.iii.47-48), Leantio states smugly, thereby affirming his accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit” (34). 36 Bataille, “Expenditure”, 118. 37 Ibid., 116.

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utilitarian of his wife. Nevertheless, a tone of uncertainty is noticeable already here, as Leantio’s words juggle profit (“increase”) and stability (“peace”) without resolving their differential interplay, anticipating other moments in the play when such safe differentiations are challenged. For instance, Leantio’s lengthy eulogy on “honest wedlock”, spoken on his return to Florence after his first separation from Bianca, concludes on a triumphantly lustful note: “after a five days’ fast / [Bianca will] be so greedy now, and cling about me, / I take care how I shall be rid of her” (III.ii.25-27). Indicative of an excessive lust that contradicts his bourgeois ideal of diligence, Leantio’s words also provide an opportunity for audience Schadenfreude. Witnesses to the fateful tryst between Bianca and the Duke during Leantio’s absence, they already know that these hopes will be frustrated. The dramatic irony in this instance only highlights the contradictions that haunt Middleton’s dramatic bourgeois: in the instance that he acknowledges his inherent lustfulness, he finds that his desires will remain unrequited; this introduces an undertone of barrenness into Leantio’s economic logic. The perennial patriarchal association of femininity and useless excess, whereby Leantio tries to defuse both his relationship with his wife and his mother by impregnating them with economic value, provides his already contradictory self-identity with an equally uncertain safety valve. His view of his mother reveals both his anxiety of this lack and his strategies against it: Now this is scurvy And spake as if a women lacked her teeth. These old folks talk of nothing but defects, Because they grow so full of ’em themselves. (I.i.121-24)

Leantio’s resolution marks the economic logic he represents: he diverts the terrors that haunt his own ethos of profit by displacing them onto the female other. Leantio’s metaphorical disarming of his mother’s mouth (which invites association with other parts of her body) illustrates the gendering of his economic paranoia as well as the strategy he summons against it: a remedial rhetorical displacement of his lack of his into the female other that leaves the parameters of his economic logic intact.

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That this strategy may fail is suggested by the contradictoriness of Leantio’s words. In the last line of the above passage, defect turns into plenitude, suggesting that, paradoxically, one can be full of lack. But the shift from absence to presence, even surplus, in this line also suggests something else. While the gaping maternal mouth at first sight seems to threaten Leantio’s self-confidence, this abyss is also what ultimately leads him to imagine ways to escape and transcend it. Lack becomes the trigger of productivity and thrift, and it is functionalized38 in a way that anticipates later conceptualizations.39 The inescapable interdependence of the useful and the useless, without which the former would not be meaningful, also explains why Leantio’s attempt to subsume the code of expenditure under the code of profit, to render profitable what is by nature unproductive, is destined to fail. Without lack, no desire; without desire, no profitable exchange. The play here seems to anticipate the much more recent insight that economic value is established through sacrificial exchanges.40 Leantio’s awareness of the sacrificial aspect of value is maybe nowhere revealed more clearly than in his elopement with Bianca from her home in Venice. The triumphant words with which he comments on this act reveal that to him she possesses this sacrificial value: “Now say, if’t be not the best piece of theft / That ever was committed” (I.i.43-44). Here, Bianca’s value is measured by the loss felt by her family. Leantio’s triumph is a gauge of their grief, but also of their envy: it brings him, the middle-class upstart, in competition with his superiors. This instance of levelling out social distinctions will eventually be mirrored by the “economic” relations with the Duke into which Leantio enters once Bianca abandons him in favour of the Duke. But there is a further dimension to his words, which seems to corroborate a point increasingly made in economic theory, namely that a market economy not only cannot escape “the impulse to sacrifice 38 See Niklas Luhmann, “Knappheit, Geld und die bürgerliche Gesellschaft”, Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft, XXIII (1972), 186-210 and Georg Simmel, “Das Geld in der modernen Kultur”, in Schriften zur Soziologie, eds Heinz-Jürgen Dahme and Otthein Rammstedt (5th edn; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 91. 39 See Carolin Gerschlager, Konturen der Entgrenzung: Die Ökonomie des Neuen im Denken von Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon und Joseph Alois Schumpeter (Marburg: Metropolis, 1996), 26. 40 Simmel, Die Philosophie des Geldes, 56.

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and squander”, but that it may in fact deliberately choose to do so, revaluing this impulse to positive ends.41 For Leantio, his theft is a form of subversion from which he derives an indubitable pleasure, despite the fact that the act already anticipates its containment. But if Leantio’s crime is a token of his economic self-confidence, it also looms over the relationship like the dangerous ambiguities of the merchant’s ledger, which Leantio, faithful to the rhetorical rules of early modern double entry bookkeeping, tries to keep impeccable. At the end, he too will have to acknowledge the extent of his participation in the processes of exchange when Bianca decides to leave him for the Duke. His epiphany, captured in his monotonous lament “Oh hast thou left me then, Bianca, utterly” (III.iii.241), illuminates the melancholy response to his own economic condition. Torn, twisted and haunted by that which does not comply with the order he avowedly represents, the bourgeois role-model reveals the characteristics of “homo economicus as a young man”, whom Susan Feiner portrays as “intensely romantic” but also surprisingly infantile. His economic ideals and ideologies express a nostalgic42 craving for the pre-genital, polymorphous symbiosis between mother and child, “in which choices were very limited and autonomy was totally contingent”.43 Feiner’s reading puts the psychic processes I have discussed in various contexts throughout this book in economic terms. The operations described in the above passage roughly correspond to the stages of the Imaginary and the Symbolic in the Lacanian framework outlined in previous chapters. The loss of homo economicus’ former sense of unity is the inevitable precondition of individual subjectivity and ambition; although traumatic, it provides the basis of the necessary competitiveness. But as the imaginary notion of the economy is itself a fantasy, it fails to still the desire of homo economicus to return to this prior state. Faced with the demands and 41

Shershow, “Of Sinking”, 469 and 471. Although the term “nostalgia” was coined in the second half of the seventeenth century “to denote a form of melancholia induced by prolonged absence from one’s home or locale, i.e. homesickness, the longing for a familiar space”, it only came to express “the longing for a former, more familiar time” at a later stage in history (Lowe, Bourgeois Perception, 40). As with the term “utility” (see n.31), Middleton’s play seems to describe a bourgeois concept avant la lettre. 43 Feiner, “Portrait”, 206-207. 42

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frustrations of an economic order based on competition and sacrifice, he idealizes an unachievable state of unity and plenitude which, like all forms of escapism, inevitably confirms the rational order it presumably contradicts. To yearn, from the position of restless ambition, for a mythical prior state of unity means to create a nostalgic escape route that leaves present contradictions unchallenged. The dream of unity is a confirmation of the status quo: a world, namely, where meaning and value are established in exchange. A further example for such utopian dreams of wholeness is provided in the play by the contemptible relationship between Isabella and her uncle Hippolito. In reproaching her brother Hippolito for the relationship, Livia even provides the audience with moral arguments for their response: must thy eye Dwell evilly on the fairness of thy kindred, and seek not where it should? is it confin’d Now in a narrower prison than was made for’t: .... So he heaven’s bounty seems to scorn and mock, That spares free means, and spends of his own stock. (II.i.8-16)

However moral her intention, Livia describes the liaison through the utilitarian lens of Leantio’s mercantile ethos. Her arguments are consummately materialist: for her, a good marriage is a profitable one. Therefore, at the same time as aping Leantio’s principles, Livia exposes them as hypocritical. More, she violates the principle of utility herself when she panders Isabella to Hippolito – not, however, without having validated the powerful attraction between uncle and niece by being economical with the truth. Moreover, while Livia may serve to invite our moral dismay, the incestuous relationship she fosters may be seen far more leniently by the audience. This possibility is supported not least by the fact that this is the only marriage of true minds in the play, the only relationship that would satisfy developing bourgeois values and ideals of companionate marriage and the nuclear family. The positive nature of this relationship is only highlighted by the fact that it is endangered by the disastrous albeit legitimate alliance between Isabella and the

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foolish Ward to whom she is pledged. Having him treat Isabella literally like a horse on the market (note his demand to “see what teeth she [Isabella] has” [III.iv.82]), Middleton emphasizes the almost Edenic quality of her relationship with her uncle. Even though this liaison is never a real alternative to the economic reality it defies, it nevertheless illuminates the desire to imagine a reality outside of this logic of production and profit. Changing and exchanging worlds A close look at the economic processes at stake in Middleton’s play reveals that the social transformations it stages are far more complex than criticism has tended to acknowledge. Typically, Women Beware Women is read in terms of class-conflict: between good citizen and bad courtier, between middle-class common sense and aristocratic excess, between a new society of urban merchants and old-world feudalism. According to this dualistic structure, the male antagonists of the main plot, Leantio and the Duke, represent two entirely distinct economic discourses. Thrifty and business-minded, the former embodies mercantile ideals of conservation and production; vain, superficial and excessive, the latter flaunts his wealth in exorbitant self-indulgent displays. Such readings are informed by critical notions that take the early modern period as a time of transition, “radical reorganization”44 or “crisis”,45 during which the feudal order gave way to an emerging middle class characterized by an entirely new economic and moral perspective. The question as to how exactly this transition took place and in what ways it affected the old and the new systems, however, continues to be a bone of contention amongst historians. While the transition from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism once tended to be seen in simple and straightforward terms, the historical debate today 44

L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), 267. 45 On crisis in early modern Europe, see E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century”, in Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660: Essays from “Past and Present”, ed. Trevor Aston (London: Routledge, 1965), 5-58; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) and H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century”, in Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660: Essays from “Past and Present”, ed. Trevor Aston (London: Routledge, 1965), 59-95.

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emphasizes the murkiness of this shift, foregrounding continuity rather than radical change and tracing the indebtedness of bourgeoisie to the old order46 as well as the appropriation of newly emerging social discourses by the aristocracy. Critical commonplaces about change and transformation are as inadequate in describing the historical context in which Middleton’s play ought to be placed as they are in providing a satisfactory account of the play’s intrinsic operations. The class interactions taking place in Women Beware Women are far too complex to be captured by a dualistic structure that takes both the aristocracy and the middle class for granted, typically in order to privilege the latter.47 This rigid grid may be unsettled by a different concept of transformation: “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production”48 which Karl Marx called “primitive accumulation” and which paves the way for the full-blown alienation that characterizes mature capitalist modes of production. As Richard Halpern points out, this genealogical substratum of the linear and progressive Marxist historical narrative may do more than revalue the significance of Marxist historiography. By capturing, in this hybrid historical moment, a glimpse of the processes of an incipient capitalism, primitive accumulation provides a useful concept to illustrate the conflicting energies, discourses and sign systems of Renaissance culture. Seen semiotically, the violent de-coding of the feudal order, for example through the dissolution of monasteries, the economic enclosure of agricultural land and the rise of a 46

Colin Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution, and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France and Germany (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 15. 47 See Bruzzi and Bromham, “‘Soil’”, 256. In a similar vein, Laura Severt King sees the play in terms of two sharply delineated worlds divided by violence: “… Middleton stresses the danger of aristocratic depravity to the rest of society. Images of disease and contagion reinforce the point that the corruption of society’s elite endangers everyone” (“Violence and the Masque: A Ritual Sabotaged in Middleton’s Women Beware Women”, Pacific Coast Philology, XXI/1-2 [1986], 44). Dawson, while emphasizing the clash between the Duke and Leantio, eventually points out that “Middleton seems intent on showing how similar theses two characters really are” (“Women Beware Women”, 309). On the whole, criticism has evinced an astounding leniency with regard to Leantio, persistently ignoring not only the contradictions of his ethos, but also its inherent violence. 48 Karl Marx, Capital (1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), I, 875.

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geographically mobile labour force, was followed by a re-coding of the fragmented feudal world that established “various preconditions for capitalist production – the spread of markets, the development of merchant’s capital, the creation of a dispossessed class”.49 This process of semiotic change, however, was far from straightforward; the slow dismantling of one social code coincided and interacted with a newly emerging code, which had yet to achieve its full power. Halpern’s theatrical example for this tension within the social semiotic is King Lear, which, he argues, dramatizes the conflict between the “order-word” (mot d’ordre) and the “consumption sign”. The former term, borrowed by Halpern from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,50 indicates total power: the mot d’ordre entails a significant content and meaning and hence points to the authority of those who deploy such order words. The latter, by contrast, describes the destructive aristocratic dépense which, in the feudal world at least, underpins the authority of the order-word though spectacular acts of excess. In King Lear the link between order-word and consumption sign is severed, the sign of excess is reduced to a mere husk of meaning. This situation is marked by Lear’s solemn announcement at the very beginning of the play: “Know that we have divided in three our kingdom.”51 For although this speech act marks the king’s absolute authority (in contrast to the sham filial flatteries of Goneril and Regan, who represent the emergent new order), it is immediately put in perspective by the division of his land it denotes. Shakespeare’s tragedy here depicts “the difference between absolutism’s strength as a sign system and its weakness in real economic and political power”.52 Invoked anachronistically, the older sign system almost begs for its deconstructive re-coding. Like King Lear, Middleton’s play depicts an aristocracy in crisis, whose loss of authority is paralleled by newly developing bourgeois 49

Halpern, Poetics, 69. Halpern comments: “For Deleuze and Guattari, the term mot d’ordre suggests ‘order’ both as ‘command’ and as ‘arrangement’ or ‘ordering’ …. The mot d’ordre … reveals that the most ‘neutral’ linguistic conception of language as a signifying system entails certain operations of power. Even in its blandest designative or signifying functions, language acts as a command” (Poetics, 308). 51 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare, (Walton-on-Thames: Arnold, 1997), I.i.36. 52 Halpern, Poetics, 231. 50

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codes of power. It is one of the prophetic ironies of the play that the contractual state that will mark the end of the Duke is anticipated at an early point in the play by a spectacle of excess, the pageant which attests to the Duke’s aristocratic authority by introducing the notion of his superior invisible visibility, his every act and gesture representing a gift which must under no circumstance be returned lest it reveal the material source from which it stems.53 The operations of aristocratic excess are voiced by Leantio’s mother, who, in response to Bianca’s claim to have been seen by the Duke during the pageant, admonishes her: That’s ev’ry one’s conceit that sees a duke: If he looks steadfastly, he looks straight at them, When he perhaps, good careful gentleman, Never minds any; but the look he casts Is at his own intentions, and his object Only the public good. (I.iii.106-11)

True though this observation may be in theory, it is in fact a flagrant misinterpretation of the actual situation. The Duke has of course seen Bianca. He and his observant subject have engaged in an exchange of glances that marks the beginning of a fateful chain-reaction of desire and will eventually lead him to compete with her husband. In the very moment when ducal authority seems to have reached its apex, his looks are no longer “at his own intention” and immune to the public’s spectral responses, but locked in an exchange with another individual. The untouchable body of authority reduced to the bodily materiality of an ordinary mortal, as desire enters the relationship. Similarly, the pageant is no longer determined by aristocratic notions of charity and public duty, as Leantio’s mother believes. After all, her own words reduce the aristocrat to a mere “good careful gentleman”, superimposing bourgeois notions of foresight and responsibility onto ultimately excessive aristocratic ideals of statecraft and public welfare. But Leantio’s mother here misinterprets not only the workings of aristocratic authority but also those of the Florentine 53

For a similar depiction of the assertion of aristocratic authority in Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, see the previous chapter.

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society at large: there is no longer a homogeneous public good towards which the Duke could direct his attention, only a disseminated multitude of plural interests and opinions. The Duke’s recognition of Bianca in the crowd illustrates not only the “disruption of [his] spectatorial gaze”,54 but also the fracturing of the community into its many individual constituents – a significant aspect of this play to which I shall return. The scene in question suggests that the changing power structures which underlie the play’s dramatic and thematic dynamic are related to new economic conditions. The fatal exchange of gazes with Bianca, the wife, anticipate the Duke’s economic exchanges with Leantio, the husband, which materialize when, with a gesture of casual grandeur, he gives Leantio the captainship of the fort at Rouans in “payment” for Bianca: “Take it, the place is yours then, and as faithfulness / And desert grows, our favour shall grow with’t” (III.iii.41-42). In a feudal society this act of aristocratic largess would indeed have represented a gesture of absolute authority. But in the new economic context represented by Leantio, this gesture is inevitably self-undermining, the gift (its name, Rouans, resounding with notions of ruin) no longer a signal of authority through expenditure but of a mere mean profiteering. Trying to render meaningful what by definition escapes such utilitarian categories, the Duke recalls Leantio’s assessment of meaningless, valueless love as profitable (note that he uses the verb “to grow” twice). Like Lear, the Duke misjudges the role of the gift as a signal of aristocratic power. He evaluates a gift that finally is empowering only because it offends the very principle of value, because it literally demands to be forgotten. The gift, as Jacques Derrida writes, “is excessive in advance, a priori exaggerated”55 – it is, to a certain extent, mad and can therefore not be subjected to rational accounting.56 Inserting the gift in a context of exchange, putting it on the market, as it were, the Duke subjects the symbol of power to a new system of signification. Here, the old tokens of his authority have not 54 Philip Armstrong, “Watching Hamlet Watching: Lacan, Shakespeare and the Mirror/Stage”, in Alternative Shakespeares II, ed. Terry Hawkes (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 227. 55 Derrida, Given Time, 38 (emphasis in the original). 56 Ibid., 35.

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only ceased to function, they have in fact become ridiculous.57 Embracing the principles of a new market economy and undermining the feudal discourse upon which his authority rests, the Duke commits a semiotic-symbolic suicide. The fate of the born-again bourgeois is finally sealed when, feeling himself at the height of his authority, he seals a contract which is flawed from the outset: the peace treaty between Bianca and the Cardinal. His triumphant comment upon establishing consent amongst the two antagonists, “I have all indeed now” (V.ii.16, emphasis mine), turns out to be the overture to his end. The contract marks his final subjugation to the moral and economic calculus that renders the absolute authority in which he naively continues to believe insignificant, making him answerable to an ethos of exchange in which he is no more able to enforce the promise of a contract than any other citizen.58 Having inserted himself into a system in which the foundations of his power have become meaningless, the Duke can no longer hope to get “all”. His frustrated “I have lost myself in this quite” (V.ii.138), spoken during Livia’s increasingly chaotic masque, is a striking reversal of his former self-confidence and marks his moral and political decline. To call the Duke’s behaviour naive would be to belittle the actual implications of his words and acts. Similarly, the charge of corruption levelled against the Duke by criticism is equally simplistic. In fact the Duke is not so much the “source and victim of dangerous corruption”,59 as accountable for a blindness that illuminates the failure of his political (rather than moral) vision.60 Unaware of the transformations of the world around him, the Duke clings to an 57

On the collapse of the Hegelian concept of “lordship” into comedy, see Derrida, Writing and Difference, 256. 58 This anticipates the Hobbesian notion of a contractual authority, ultimately captured in the image of the Leviathan. See also Hobbes’ De Cive, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), where Hobbes speaks of the need to establish a “power which can compell both parties [in a contract]” (56). 59 King, “Violence and the Masque”, 47. 60 On the play’s blindness-and-insight theme as a token of moral depravity, see Edward Engelberg, “Tragic Blindness in The Changeling and Women Beware Women”, Modern Language Quarterly, XXIII (1962), 20-28 and John Potter, “‘In Time of Sports’: Masques and Masking in Middleton’s Women Beware Women”, Papers in Language and Literature, XVIII/4 (1982), 368-83.

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aristocratic vocabulary that no longer signifies, not least because he himself has surrendered it to rules that defy his own authority. But it would be too simple to conclude from this complete abandonment of aristocratic power that Middleton presents the middle class as superior. To the contrary, at the same time as illustrating how the appropriation of new, bourgeois codes leads to the decline of the feudal order, the playwright reflects upon the implications of weakening aristocratic codes for those who adopt them in the process: the rising middle class. These implications are discussed in a crucial meeting between Bianca and Leantio following his sudden promotion to captain of the fort at Rouans. Bianca’s comment on Leantio’s newly acquired attire suggests that, for her, his is a case of “mutton dressed as lamb”: LEANTIO: Y’are richly placed. Methinks y’are wondrous brave, sir. BIANCA: LEANTIO: A sumptuous lodging. Y’have an excellent suit there. BIANCA: LEANTIO: A chair of velvet. Is your cloak lined through, sir? BIANCA: LEANTIO: Y’are very stately here. Faith something proud, sir. BIANCA: (IV.i.51-54)

However, far from being merely a “sordid slanging-match”,61 a petty domestic conflict, the scene attests to the wholesale abandonment of political power in Middleton’s Florence. Bianca’s attack strikes in opposite directions at the same time. In mocking Leantio for his exaggerated apparel, Bianca ridicules the imitative appropriation of aristocratic signs by the bourgeoisie, thereby exposing Leantio’s hypocritical breaking with his own economic and moral ideals. Cynically, she defuses his criticism of her possessions – her sumptuous accommodation and furnishings – that are of the same kind as his elaborate attire. But as her criticism uncovers the hollowness of the same objects that betoken the Duke’s power, it also challenges the

61

Kenneth Muir, “The Role of Livia in Women Beware Women”, in Poetry and Drama 1570-1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks, eds Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), 86.

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man who acts as her protector.62 Implicating both men and the worlds they stand for in her sarcastic dismissal of their signs of authority, Bianca’s catty comments regarding her husband testify to the general power vacuum – on both an aesthetic and a political level – at the centre of this world in transition.63 It is the former, formal aspect of this scene I want to address before I turn to the political implications of Middleton’s play. For Bianca’s criticism of her husband could also be taken as a statement about the condition of the early modern stage, where actors, like Leantio, wore clothes that did not match their social status. Despite the strict sumptuary rules of the time,64 the early modern theatres used clothes handed down to the players by their noble sponsors and patrons as stage costumes. Leantio’s attire, although its actual provenance remains unidentified in the play, inevitably links him to the Duke, to whom he also owes his new position. Yet although his “excellent suit” may be interpreted as a livery of sorts, confirming the continuing power of the Duke over Leantio, its ambiguity nevertheless underlines 62 Hence Verna Ann Foster’s psychologizing defence that Bianca, on account of the age difference between the two male characters, “quite simply ... learns to regard [the Duke] as a father figure who will love, provide for, protect, and make a pet of her, and her love for him springs from and is fed by her need for him”, misses the point (“The Deed’s Creature: The Tragedy of Bianca in Women Beware Women”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXXVIII/78 [1997], 510). 63 Critics are divided on the question of whether Middleton’s later work and this play in particular deal with the issue of power. Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), in line with her argument that the once outspoken parliamentary Puritan Middleton turned away from political issues after 1615, contends that Women Beware Women “is not about power in the widest sense” but a story “stripped down to its human and social essentials” (Puritanism, 80). For a critique of Heinemann’s thesis, see N. W. Bawcutt, “Was Thomas Middleton a Puritan Dramatist?”, Modern Language Review, XLIX/4 (1999), 925-38. For interpretations that regard Middleton as a more outspoken “analyst of power”, see Nadia Rigaud, “Middleton Analyste du Pouvoir”, in La Violence dans la Littérature et la Pensée Anglaises, eds Nadia Rigaud and Paul Denisot (Aix en Provence: Université de Provence, 1989), 41-56 and Bruzzi and Bromham, “‘Soil’”, 252. In contrast to these discussions, which depict power in exclusively judicial and political terms, my reading draws attention to the transformation of monarchical and state power into far more “fugitive” or “latent” forms (Halpern, Poetics, 4). 64 See Jardine, Daughters, 141-68 and Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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the already ongoing process through which sumptuary symbols of power were being decoded.65 The scene in question illuminates this ambiguity also stylistically: for the exchange between Bianca and Leantio, Middleton appropriates the classical rhetorical mode of stichomythia, a verbal duel in which opposing opinions are played off against each other. If Leantio’s aristocratic attire marks his professional achievement, then Middleton’s rhetorical mask of stichomythia may similarly be seen as a token of prestige. His educated allusion to classical oratory allowed him to disguise his middle-class allegiances as well as his involvement in the newly evolving commercial and aesthetic discourse.66 Nevertheless, as in the case of Leantio, this is an ill-fitting suit, far too excessive and flamboyant for the body of the player made to wear it. The domestic exchange between husband and wife, therefore, highlights the absence of power that is the condition of Middleton’s world. As such, this scene is helpfully illuminated by Paul Yachnin’s challenge to the familiar critical notion of the subversiveness of the early modern stage. For Yachnin, the early modern theatre was “powerless”, which is also why playwrights were able to explore politically sensitive themes unheeded. Furthermore, the relative political insignificance of the stage and its practitioners mirrored the factual powerlessness of the aristocracy who provided the costumes used in the production of plays. If the stage, by underlining “in a dazzlingly clear form the structural transformation of the aristocracy from a politico-military ruling class to a consuming one”,67 asserted its own role in that process, it also acknowledged and embraced the political paralysis accompanying this social change. The scene in question suggests Middleton’s awareness of the fallibility of bourgeois strategies of appropriating the aristocracy’s 65

As Peter Stallybrass points out, the term “livery” is contradictory, being associated at the same time with servitude and freedom. See his “Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage”, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, eds Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 289. 66 A similar observation is made with regard to the allusions to classical Greek and Roman literature in Ben Jonson’s work by Scott Cutler Shershow, “Idols of the Marketplace: Rethinking the Economic Determination of Renaissance Drama”, Renaissance Drama, XXVI (1995), 1-27. 67 Halpern, Poetics, 239.

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power by imitating its formal attributes. Doubling the dramatic situation, Bianca’s challenge to her husband’s performance ridicules not only a dying class and those who continue to apply its dead semiotic system, but, quite concretely, the actor on stage, who deploys these signs for commercial reasons. Pouring scorn on her husband, Bianca is also calling the stage’s bluff, exposing its imitative strategies – as well as their failure. New order The need to adapt and change is expressed most urgently by Livia’s disastrous masque. On the free stage of exchange, open to everyone who wishes to rewrite the social text, Livia’s authoritarian gesture marks the end of aristocratic assertions of power through wasting and squandering, foregrounding the catastrophic implications of such gestures of excess. Her revenge is power hoist with its own petard, scheming destroyed by scheming – a total destruction which is not so much a case of divine justice as a man-made spiral of devastation, triggered off when an old authority is put “on the market” and subjected to new forces of exchange. In this sense, the masque fails to be a cult as Bataille defines it: “a bloody wasting of men ... in sacrifice.”68 If the masque represents excess, it already functions according to the principles of economic production and could provide the various critics of capitalism, from Marx and Engels to Deleuze and Guattari,69 with a striking example for their argument that capitalist production is fundamentally self-destructive.70 Livia’s masque illuminates the extremes of an economy that is inherently cannibalistic.71 As it concludes the play’s descent into chaos, the 68

Bataille, “Expenditure”, 119 (emphasis in the original). See n.35. 70 In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (New York: International Publishers, 1983), Marx and Engels write: “Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells .... The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself” (22-23). 71 See Klossowski, Münze, 42 and Crystal Bartolovich, “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism”, in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, eds Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 204-37. 69

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masque seems to present “the final stage of a radical strategy of suspension and deconstruction of the tragic genre and of its moral and providential paradigms”.72 While such an interpretation confers transgressive qualities on Middleton’s play, we should nevertheless be wary of overemphasizing the masque’s role as an aberration and instead view it as a deliberately deployed argumentative strategy, which has a precedent, for instance, in Leantio’s constructive use of the principle of scarcity illustrated in the previous subchapter. Hippolito’s moralizing commentary upon the total destruction of the masque responds to thematic and metaphoric concerns voiced throughout the play: “Lust and forgetfulness has been amongst us / And we are brought to nothing” (V.ii.144-45). If his emphasis on “nothing” reiterates the motif of lack introduced at other points in the play, it also points to an influential political tract written some thirty years later. The political, moral and indeed aesthetic wasteland depicted in Middleton’s play invites the association with the violent state of nature described by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan.73 Middleton’s immoral Florence resembles Hobbes’ disrupted “multitude” who, divided in judgement and opinion, not only are each others’ enemies, but “reduce their strength by mutuall opposition to nothing”.74 Hobbes responded with a distinctly theatrical phantasm of authority to this experience of nothingness: by imagining a political representative upon whom the multitude agrees by covenant. Authored by the community, this actor or “artificial person” establishes a particularly strong and enduring bond between subjects and state.75 Nevertheless, however “total”76 a representative this 72

Renato Rizzoli, Representation and Ideology in Jacobean Drama: The Politics of the Coup De Théâtre (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 153. 73 C. B. Macpherson notes that the Hobbesian state of nature is not so much outside civilization as deprived of an effective form of political authority: “Hobbes’s state of nature ... is the hypothetical condition in which men as they now are, with natures formed by living in civilized society, would necessarily find themselves if there were no common power able to overawe them all” (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke [1962; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 1819. 74 Hobbes, Leviathan, 224-25 (emphasis mine). 75 See Pye, Regal Phantasm: “The virtue of conceiving a theory of political representation in terms of theatrical representation is that it allows Hobbes to transfer agency: while in so far as he is a representation of himself, the author merely owns his

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artificial person may be, he is not a tyrant, since his actions always take place in the name of those he represents and to whom he is obliged.77 Hobbes developed this image of effective power in juxtaposition to the terrifying state of nature. In “this time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man”, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture on the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.78

Although this and similar passages in Hobbes’ text have fostered the critical commonplace that Leviathan endorses a pessimistic view of human nature, they also affirm the strategic function of the state of nature, which Hobbes invokes to argue for an ideal, peaceable civil society under the aegis of a strong sovereign.79 In line with the commercial concerns of a nascent market economy, this better world imagined by Hobbes is also clearly a productive one. The image of the ideal community entailed in Hobbes’ chaotic state of nature is informed by economic ideals: the state where everyone is everybody else’s enemy is, above all, economically stagnant. Middleton’s play, in raising very similar issues, also comes to similar conclusions. The catastrophic masque stage-managed by Livia words, because he is an actor, the representative can be seen to have been guaranteed the right to act. In this sense, by making himself the author of the representative’s words and actions, the contracting individual also makes himself subject to the actor’s words and actions” (51). On the durability of the Leviathan, see Horst Bredekamp, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes”, Critical Inquiry, XXV/2 (1998), 258. 76 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1972), 20. 77 Ibid., 33. 78 Hobbes, Leviathan, 186. 79 Macpherson’s Introduction to his edition of Leviathan is appropriately called “Hobbes, Analyst of Power and Peace” (see also Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 22).

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with the intention to settle accounts with her enemies not only speaks of her failure to install order, it also intimates a more effective political modus vivendi. Livia’s authority is an archaic attempt at establishing an absolute authority, turning a blind eye to the paradigms of contractual consensus and productive exchange already operative in Florence. Therefore, although Livia is bent on maintaining order, her revenge is unlike Hobbes’ anticipatory, almost utopian concern with the future good.80 In a world which would require a Hobbesian notion of political representation, an “artificial person” to bring about order, Livia claims a decidedly and destructively natural form of authority.81 Believing that she is both author and actor in her violent design, Livia resembles the Vice in medieval morality plays. Echoing this evil “deceiver and master of diguise”,82 who is presumptuous and anachronistic at the same time, Livia can do nothing but fail. There are further instances in Women Beware Women that anticipate the dilemma at the centre of Hobbes’ theory of the state: how to reconcile the more negative implications of human passions and possessive individualism with the desire for peace and “commodious living” that leads human beings to establish communities without bringing the whole productive flow of social energies to a halt.83 Like Hobbes, Middleton rejects stasis. Consider the paralysing, even suicidal drift towards standstill of Bianca’s dangerous fluidity as illustrated in Act IV, scene i, a curious dramatic set piece that allegorizes the play’s central concerns. The three characters on stage, Bianca and two Florentine Ladies, all set their watches by different church clocks. The metaphor of time is of course a variation on the play’s theme of the relativity of meaning and morality, expressing the demand for a greater formal regulation of life 80 As defined by Hobbes in De Cive as “that which is done out of necessity, out of endeavour for peace, for the preservation of our selves, is done with Right, otherwise every damage done to a man would be a breach of the natural Law, and an injury against God” (73). 81 Here I beg to differ with Lisa Hopkins’ depiction of Livia as a medium of Middleton’s Puritan criticism of “the performative nature nature of the theatrical self” in her “Beguiling the Master of the Mystery: Form and Power in The Changeling”, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, IX (1997), 159. 82 Agnew, Worlds Apart, 114. 83 Macpherson, Introduction, 11.

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on the basis of a synchronized time.84 The inhabitants of Florence appear not be cut out for such a world, a harmonious form of community is impossible. Strife rules because people go by “opinion” (IV.i.4) rather than by reason; not because time, as in Shakespeare’s Elsinore, is “out of joint”, but because there is no single common time. The confusion enacted in Middleton’s dramatic allegory with regard to time recalls the linguistic chaos of Babel: the dissemination of time hampers human communication. “Faith, my desire and hers [Bianca’s] will nev’r be sisters” (IV.i.23), is the aside of one of the Ladies prior to her exit, whose concern with human relations clearly transcends the superficial erotic innuendo of her words. The Lady’s commentary indeed points to a pessimistic conjunction of desire and death not exceptional in early modern culture:85 her words are an ominous anticipation of the lethal chaos that soon is to follow. More optimistically, the passage may be seen to invoke an almost Hobbesian state of contradiction and non-communication with the strategic aim to overcome it. Like Hobbes, Middleton insinuates the solution of this state of disorder in this scene, precisely by illustrating how it should not be done. Significantly, the Lady’s aside is preceded and followed by repeated gestures of absolutist isolationism on the side of Bianca. Setting her watch by the sun (i.e. the Duke) and hence overriding any other time zone, demanding to be left alone and refusing to take seriously her upstart husband, she fails to act according to the new order that has begun to announce itself. In so doing, Bianca ultimately negates her own economic function within the framework of the play. In the course of the journey that takes her from her “father’s window” (III.iii.258) to the Duke’s palace, Bianca shifts from a quasi-economic state to the economic field proper, exposing the inherent flaws of either context in the process. Existing at the intersection of the social codes represented by Leantio and the Duke, she is the traumatic principle that threatens a politico-economic order in transition from within. A free-floating signifier in the field of meaning, she interacts with the world in an 84 In fact, the play here seems to express a desire for the “new Puritan discipline and bourgeois exactitude” that would mark the economic conditions and relations of a fully industrialised society (see Thompson, “Time”, 353). 85 Jonathan Dollimore, “Desire is Death”, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, 369-86.

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inevitably paradoxical way; divisive and communicative at the same time, she enables the economic relations between Leantio and the Duke while threatening their power. Bianca incarnates the negative momentum on whose driving force the market relies, but which those involved in the market seek to deny. Whereas Leantio’s mother holds up to her son the mirror of lack at the heart of his economic rationale, Bianca attests to the point at the other end of the spectrum: she represents the surplus that is the explicit desire of commercial capitalism, its violent ultima ratio and therefore its greatest taboo. Leantio’s strategic treatment of his wife suggests that he is fully aware of her potential without admitting it. Initially imagined by him as his “masterpiece” (I.i.41), Bianca exists, as the object invested with the creative labour of homo faber, at the beginning of the play in absolute dependence upon Leantio and hence in an apparently economically “primitive” (read, “unproductive”) condition. This is illustrated also by the fact that he depicts her as a “jewel” he believes to have “cased up from all men’s eyes” (I.i.170). But this image, as well as the label of “masterpiece” which he bestows upon his wife, should alert us to the self-contradictions upon which this strategic designation already founders at this early stage. Emphasizing Leantio’s conscious turning away from his actual economic condition, the term idealizes his relationship with his wife by investing it with the positive gratuity which distinguishes the artefact from the tool. The term revalues Bianca as well as her master, who thereby elevates himself from the role of artisan (a maker of tools) to that of artist. However, in calling Bianca his “masterpiece”, Leantio expresses his narcissistic view of this commodity;86 in fact, he thereby anticipates such tokens of excess as the erotic decorations of Livia’s house, which will provide the backdrop to his wife’s seduction. This economic idiom is accompanied by self-reflexive dramatic gestures that point to the market-like quality of the stage, illustrating the playwright’s awareness of his own role in the economic world. In a manner that complies with his merchant identity, Leantio shows Bianca forth – first in Act I, scene i, “View but her face, you may see all her dowry” (I.i.54), later when he reflects upon his wife standing at 86

Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market”, in This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985): “man endows the commodities he produces with a narcissism that blurs the seriousness of utility, of use” (177).

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the window: “See, and she be not got on purpose now / Into the window to look after me” (I.iii.13-14). The term masterpiece, with all its connotations of gratuity and excess, propels Leantio’s utilitarian ideals into the field of exchange, where they will inevitably be atomized. Depicting Bianca as his artefact, Leantio confirms the precarious condition of homo faber; his pull onto the market, illustrated in the play when Bianca abandons her self-styled “creator”, moves into the field of exchange87 and literally enacts the foundational moment of alienation that is the separation of producer and product. While Bianca seems to get a better deal than Isabella, who is subjected to a treatment more appropriate to a cattle market, the principle in effect remains the same: Bianca is the object for all, on and off stage, to gaze at. As such, however, she is far from passive. Cunning, eternally evasive, Bianca intimates the famous “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”88 which Marx would attribute to the commodity. And it is this awareness of being a commodity, invested with a certain amount of economic power, that allows Bianca eventually to respond to the Duke’s advances, put herself on the market and demand a better price for herself. Admittedly, as a gesture of individual liberation, her act of selling herself is dubious, not least as it will inevitably lead to her being transformed back into somebody else’s property. And yet, a relatively dispassionate perspective would illuminate facets of this character overlooked by all too empathetic readings. The typical view of criticism has been to victimize Bianca as yet another “woman on the market”,89 a helpless foreign ingenue driven from peaceful monogamous heterosexuality into the seductive splendour of court life by masculine sexual prowess,90 a “fearful”91 “hostage of sexualized politics”92 who finally dies a solitary death in a hostile environment. My reading of the play has shown that this view cannot be sustained. Far from being passively moulded by the two men who 87 Hannah Arendt emphasizes that homo faber, on entering the market, immediately becomes subject to the same principle of exchange that he seems to defy (see her Vita Activa oder vom tätigen Leben, 9th edn [Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1997], 191-200). 88 Marx, Capital, I, 163. 89 Irigaray, “Women”, 177-91. 90 See Martin White, Middleton and Tourneur (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 118. 91 Dawson, “Women Beware Women”, 308. 92 Chakravorty, Society and Politics, 163.

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possess her, Bianca symbolizes the energy which is both disruptive and constitutive of the authority of each man. She is the restless basis of a new socio-economic order that will not be taken account of, “a determining, enabling but oppressive, and alien ‘condition’ over which the subject has no control”.93 Bianca is not merely a tangible object, she possesses the intangible objectivity of economic value, drawing everything around her into a vortex of exchange where notions of essential identity, autonomy and authority are rendered meaningless. In that narrow interstice she occupies between her states as reified property Bianca is elevated to a state where she embodies the essence of exchange, the raw market force – desire itself as opposed to an object of male desire, frozen as is its symbolic manifestation, money.94 Embodying both the communicative function of money as “the foundation of calculability in social relations”95 and the inherent limitlessness and disembodiment towards which it points, Bianca is equally duplicitous, objectifying as well as irrational. Her frightening mobility anticipates the overkill of the masque and cannot be reconciled with the defensive arguments that mark traditional readings of the figure. Maybe Muir was closer to the truth than more benevolent readers when he called Bianca a “ruthless killer”.96 Any answers provided by the play to the problem of excess embodied by Bianca are given on the aesthetic level only. With Women Beware Women Middleton seems to confirm the budding bourgeois concern with reasonableness and compromise anticipated

93 Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 41. 94 On the equation of money and desire, see James Buchan, Frozen Desire: An Enquiry into the Meaning of Money (London: Picador, 1997) and Simmel, “Das Geld in der modernen Kultur”, 89. 95 Max Weber quoted in Harvie Ferguson, The Science of Pleasure: Cosmos and Psyche in the Bourgeois World View (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 249. Simmel writes: “Since it is essential to transform money into definitive, concrete values, it establishes a consummately strong link between the members of the same economic context; precisely because it cannot be used, it points to the other individuals who can provide what one wishes to use” (“Das Geld in der modernen Kultur”, 81, my translation). 96 Muir, “Role of Livia”, 86.

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already in his earlier work.97 This shift is fulfilled in Bianca’s death and expressed in her final words: “What make I here? These are all strangers to me” (V.ii.206). But although Bianca’s central position at the end of the play may invite the spectators’ empathy,98 her words prior to her death make as “sloppy” and “sentimental” a swan song as that of Moll Yellowhammer in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.99 Furthermore, the scene espouses a bourgeois notion of nostalgia, ambiguously undercut by the exoticism that is nostalgia’s underside. This exoticism is represented in the play by Venice, Bianca’s home, which early modern England saw as a dangerous but also unattainable other.100 When followed through to the end, however, Bianca’s words make yet another point. Her sentimental lines are actually directed at the Duke or, in other words, at the representative of an aristocratic ideal whose process of dissolution the play had illuminated: “These are all strangers to me, / Not known but by their malice, now th’art gone” (V.ii.206-207).101 While expressing her aristocratic leanings, Bianca’s final statement confirms yet again the hopeless entanglement of the play’s two semiotic systems. Bianca’s nostalgic invocation of the aristocratic world are lined with an emotionality inflected by bourgeois values. Criticism of the play has duly adopted such emotional statements without acknowledging their inherent contradictoriness, in turn failing to see its own contradictoriness and excessive core. 97

Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The Middle of Middleton”, in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama, eds Murray Biggs et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 161. 98 Yachnin, Stage-Wrights, 125. 99 Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton (1968; London and New York: Methuen, 1980), 127. 100 On the myth of Venice, see David P. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990). Indeed, her appearance on the balcony looking down at the pageant in Act II may have invited more negative associations with the city, recalling Venice’s famous courtesans who, according to Vecellio, “come to the windows, frequenting even more the doorways and the street, to draw into the net the suckers that pass by” (quoted in McPherson, ibid., 44). The exchange of gazes in that scene in Middleton’s play suggests that the Duke is precisely such a poor “sucker”. 101 On the reflection of this myth of the Renaissance as a pre-capitalist haven in Modernist literature – and the collapse of this idealization – see Sharon Stockton, “Virginia Woolf and The Renaissance: The Promise of Capital and the Violence of Materialism”, Clio, XXIV/3 (1995), 231-50.

Theatrical Excess, Critical Practice

193

By emphasizing Bianca’s weakness and victim status, critics of the play have been complicitous with Leantio and the Duke in stifling her dynamic. They thereby have reiterated their chaste thinking, while ignoring the fact that the theatre, that powerful symbol of the market, already engages in and possibly legitimizes the exchanges symbolized so powerfully by this dangerous female figure. Women Beware Women enables us to revisit the site where our critical practice was born out of an emerging ideal of pragmatics and thrift. Middleton’s play, like probably none other of the time, reminds critics of the roots of their assumptions and asks them to question their parameters and aims. Implicitly, it thereby cautions its audiences and readers that, just as absolute chastity – whether economic or aesthetic – does not exist, any critical attempt to balance this dramatic book is doomed to fail.

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INDEX abusio, 111 actors (players), 51, 141, 182-84; boy actors, 118, 151 affect (emotion), 17, 27, 32, 35, 40, 41, 47, 49-56, 59, 80, 98, 129, 150, 162, 164, 167 Aho, James, 165 allegory (and see Benjamin, Walter), 45, 88, 90-92, 95, 100, 101n, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 115, 165, 188 amplificatio, 54, 55 anagnorisis, 39 anger, 53, 41, 78 anti-theatricalism, 36 argument in utramque partem, 99, 118, 129 aristocracy, 78, 97, 133, 161, 166, 168, 170, 176-77, 180 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 53 audience, 17, 22, 24, 27-29, 40, 41, 49, 52, 55-56, 61, 62, 69-70, 84, 85, 87, 94, 99, 102, 110-11, 118, 120, 129-30, 139, 149-50, 162, 171, 174, 193; influence on the meaning of plays, 12, 15, 30-38, 156-57 authority, 18, 33, 39, 121, 161, 162, 177-82, 184-85, 187, 191; absolute, 134-47, 179; creative, 34, 35, 60, 65, 76, 84, 87, 147, 148, 150-51; “circulation of”, 30 Bacon, Francis, 104, 133, 138,

143, 153; Works: The Advancement of Learning, 103; Charge Touching Duels, 132, 134, 137, 142; Novum Organum, 103; The Wisdom of the Ancients, 103 Bal, Mieke, 117n Barker, Francis, 14 Basle Dance of Death (Baseler Totentanz), 107 Bataille, Georges, 159-60, 169-70, 184 Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels), 20, 45-46, 83, 88, 90, 92, 109, 115, 145-46, 148 Berry, Philippa, 48-49 “bibliographic ego”, 32 blazon, 120-21 Braunmuller, A. R., 14, 126, 129n Brecht, Bertolt, 10, 150n Bruster, Douglas, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, 16, 32 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 35 Cameron, Deborah, 103n, 104 capitalism, 164, 169-70, 175-77, 184, 189 Castiglione, Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier, 93 catachresis, 111

Index catharsis, 52, 57n Chapman, George, 10; Works: Andromeda Liberata, 134n, 156n; The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, 136n; The Shadow of Night, 154; The Tragedy of Bussy D'Ambois, 24, 124-58 Charles I, 11 “chaste thinking”, 164, 193 chora, 84 Cicero (Ciceronian), 52, 96, 103 Civil War, 13, 15 civilizing process (and see Elias, Norbert), 25, 27 confession, 39-40, 42, 71, 123 containment, 18-19, 22, 23, 25, 27, 40-43, 49, 57, 59, 84, 107, 116, 126, 130, 141, 153, 161, 164, 165, 167, 173 copia, 101, 116 Cover, Robert M., 120n, 146 Cromwell, Oliver, 13 Dawson, Anthony (with Paul Yachnin), The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England, 17 deconstruction, 46, 91n Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl, 37 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 169n, 177, 184 Derrida, Jacques, 35n, 86n, 179, 180n; supplement, 46, 147n; Works: Gesetzeskraft, 145n, 148n; Given Time, 169n; Politics of Friendship, 35n; Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, 163n; Writing and Difference, 46n, 91n Diehl, Huston, 56, 60-61, 92n discourse (discursive) (and see

219 Foucault, Michel), 18-25, 33, 35, 39, 40, 43-48, 50, 57, 74, 97, 103, 107, 111, 140, 145, 146, 151, 160, 170, 175, 176, 180, 183 Dollimore, Jonathan, 104n; Radical Tragedy, 14 Donne, John, 107, 120 double entry bookkeeping, 165, 173 drama, early modern, 10, 11, 14, 24, 25, 28, 51, 56, 104, 105, 124, 159; epilogues and prologues in, 28-31; metadramatic references (selfreflectivity), 28, 33, 34, 39, 84, 87, 149, 157, 159, 161, 189; morality of, 13, 19, 22, 27-28 duelling, 131-37 Eagleton, Terry, Sweet Violence, 44, 47; Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, 46, 109n Elias, Norbert (and see civilizing process), 19, 20, 27 Eliot, T. S., 10 Elizabeth I, 9, 101, 102 Erasmus, Desiderius, 54; De Copia, 101-102, 104, 105, 111 excess (excessive), 9-14, 17, 1925, 27-28, 34, 35, 39-45, 47-49, 51-54, 56-58, 59-60, 61, 64, 72n, 76, 81, 82n, 87, 101-104, 116-18, 123, 126, 131-32, 141, 142, 147, 152, 156, 160-61, 163-71, 175, 177, 178, 179, 183, 184, 189, 190, 191, 192 fantasy (imagination) (and see Lacan, Jacques and Žižek, Slavoj), 18, 20, 21, 24, 37, 6073, 75, 77-89, 136, 138, 147,

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165, 173; as a rational strategy, 58, 67-68, 70 Feiner, Susan, 164n, 173 “feminine endings”, 48 femme fatale, 49 feudalism, 175, 176-77, 179-80, 181, 184n Fineman, Joel, 90, 122, 123 Fletcher, John, 10; The Tragedy of Valentinian, 29-31, 33-35, 37, 40-43, 56 Florence, 164, 168, 171, 181, 185, 187, 188 Foucault, Michel (and see discourse and representation), 15, 18, 19, 22, 31, 39, 44, 90, 107; The History of Sexuality I, 21; power, 15, 18, 19, 22 “fourth wall”, 150 Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments, 54-55 gender, 17, 22, 43, 48, 53, 60, 65, 67, 69, 74, 116, 118, 131n, 151, 171 gift, 135, 178, 179 Goldberg, Jonathan, James I and the Politics of Literature, 13435, 136, 141 golden age, 95, 129, 132, 154 Gosson, Stephen, Plays Confuted in Five Actions, 36-38; The Schoole of Abuse, 37-39 Gramsci, Antonio, 14 Habermas, Jürgen, 75, 76 Hall, Joseph, The Characters of Virtues and Vices, 53; “The Defeat of Cruelty”, 53-56 Halpern, Richard, 176-77, 182n Helgerson, Richard, 144 Henry, Prince of Wales, 132n Heywood, Thomas, An Apology

for Actors, 42 Hobbes, Thomas, 104; De Cive, 186n; Leviathan, 103, 112 homo economicus, 166, 173, 18587 honour, 92-95, 133-35, 137-39, 142-43 Howard, Jean, 17 Humanism (humanist), 93, 101102, 164-65 iconoclasm (iconoclastic), 56, 61, 87 Inns of Court, 38 interiority (inwardness), 64, 79, 85, 137-38, 150 intersubjectivity, 45, 74, 75, 78, 169n Jacobean tragedy, 9-14, 19, 25, 45, 48, 49, 59; criticism of, 13-14, 17; women in, 22, 48-49 James I, 9, 10, 131, 132n “Jane Anger Her Protection for Women”, 69-70 Jed, Stephanie, 164, 165n Jonson, Ben, 93n, 183n; Bartholomew Fair, 28-29 Kristeva, Julia, 78, 84, 86 Lacan, Jacques (and see Žižek, Slavoj), 18, 20, 70, 77, 78; Lacanian model of the psyche (Imaginary, Real, Symbolic), 20-21, 67, 75, 173; “mirror stage”, 77 lack, 21, 22, 65, 68, 77, 78, 86, 148n, 166, 171-72, 185, 189 language, 22, 46, 83-84, 98, 102; ambiguity of, 90, 91, 92, 9497, 100-101, 109, 111, 113-16, 123, 160, 177n; scepticism

Index about, 92, 102-104, 105 law, 24, 47, 52, 57, 137, 139-40, 142, 148, 149, 153; English and Roman, 143-45; torture, 55n, 124-26, 129, 142, 145-46, 149, 151, 153-55, 156-57; trial by combat, 139; violence of, 142, 146-48 Lever, J. W., The Tragedy of State, 13-14 Levinas, Emmanuel, 86 Lévi-Strauss, Claude (endogamy), 169 London, 11, 16, 24, 101 Luther, Martin, 54 madness, 9, 59, 62, 67, 72-73, 7880 market, 24, 28, 32, 36-38, 41, 102, 159, 160, 164n, 167, 172, 177, 179, 180, 184, 186, 189, 190, 191, 193 Marlowe, Christopher, Tamburlaine I, 69 Marston, John, 10 Marx, Karl, Capital, 176, 184, 190; (with Friedrich Engels), The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 184n masculinity, 40-42 masque, 135, 161-63, 166, 180, 184-86, 191 melancholia, 79, 115, 154n, 173n melodrama, 46-47 memento mori, 87, 106, 108 memory, 24, 129, 131, 139, 145, 153, 156, 157 middle class (bourgeoisie), 78, 143n, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171, 172, 17374, 175-77, 178, 180, 181, 183, 184n, 188n, 191, 192 Middleton, Thomas, 10; Works: A

221 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 192; Women Beware Women, 24, 159-93; (with Thomas Dekker), The Roaring Girl, 37, 184n mimesis, 24, 51, 127, 129, 131 misogyny, 22, 47, 49, 56, 73, 125 Moretti, Franco, 14 Mullaney, Steven, 49-51, 56; The Place of the Stage, 16, 26n Narcissus, myth of, 60, 67, 70-71, 77-80, 81, 82, 83-85 Nashe, Thomas, Pierce Penniless, 52 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 44, 47 nostalgia, 173n, 192 Orgel, Stephen, 39 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 70 Pacioli, Luca, 165 Paglia, Camille, 44, 48 paradiastole, 111-12, 119 Paster, Gail Kern, 51 patronage, 15, 32, 100, 182 Peacham, Henry, 98n, 111 performance, 118, 131, 133, 136, 139, 145, 146, 147, 148-51, 155 peripeteia (peripeteic), 42 plain speech, 103n, 104, 111 platea, 150-51 Plato, Ion, 26, 36; Phaedo, 41; The Republic, 129n; Timaeus, 84 pleasure, 11-12, 22, 38, 47, 56, 57, 117, 173 poetry, courtly, 100, 120, 122-23 pragmatography, 122-23 primitive accumulation, 176 Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, 43-44, 54, 98-

222

The Theatre of Civilized Excess

101, 104, 111, 119, 123 Pye, Christopher, The Regal Phantasm, 134-35, 185n querelle des femmes, 69 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 96 reason (rationality), 25, 27, 42, 47, 51, 57, 67, 70, 71-73, 79, 81, 82, 83, 87-88, 131-32, 137-38, 142, 164, 168, 169, 188, 191 Reiss, Timothy, Tragedy and Truth, 44-45 representation (representational), 24, 31-33, 37, 38, 44-46, 50, 61, 79, 80, 90; political, 185n, 187 “repressive, hypothesis”, 18 rhetoric, 24, 52-53, 55, 119-23, 127, 130-32, 142, 145; crisis of, 93-105, 110, 111-12, 116, 118, 160, 161, 165-66, 171, 173, 183 riddle, 117, 119 Roydon, Matthew, 154 ruins, 88 satire, 44, 52 Sawday, Jonathan, The Culture of Dissection, 120 science, 83, 103 secrecy (secret), 131, 134, 136, 138, 141, 144, 146, 158-50, 153, 157-58, 165 Seneca (Senecan), 56, 103 Shakespeare, William, 10, 14, 30, 48, 49, 105n; Works: Hamlet, 52, 108, 188; King Lear, 177; The Merchant of Venice, 112n; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 35; Othello, 146; Sonnets, 114n, 120; Timon of Athens, 131n; Twelfth Night, 120 Shaw, George Bernard, 62

Sidney, Sir Philip, An Apologie for Poetrie, 52 Skinner, Quentin, 111 spectacle, 17, 36, 37, 47, 55, 67, 130, 131n, 133, 135, 137 sprezzatura (and see Castiglione, Baldassare), 93, 96 stichomythia, 183 Stoicism, 53 style, superfluity of, 163 subjectivity (subject), 18, 21, 22, 33, 39, 45-46, 50, 52, 62, 67, 68, 70, 73, 76-78, 82-84, 13637, 153, 158n, 173, 185, 191 sublimity (sublime), 71 suicide, 41-42, 164, 180 superstition, 72, 82, 137-38 Tacitus, 103 theatres, early modern (stages), 9, 26-29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 4851, 53, 56-58, 105, 150-51, 182-84, 193; as civilizing instruments, 27, 51-58; powerlessness of, 14, 16; professionalization of (commercialization), 11, 12, 14-17, 23, 27-30, 32, 39, 40, 58, 84, 159 Tourneur, Cyril, 10; The Atheist's Tragedy, 24, 90-123 tragedy, 59, 127; as discourse, 4049 Trauerspiel, 45-46, 83, 88, 90-92, 109, 114 Venice, 166, 172, 192 Vickers, Brian, 97, 105n violence (violent), 9, 14, 19, 20, 34, 44, 51, 55, 56, 60, 62, 64, 67, 71, 76, 86, 98, 99, 100, 101n, 119-20, 124, 126, 127, 129-32, 139-43, 146-48, 151,

Index

223

154-56, 163, 164, 165, 168, 176n, 185, 186, 187, 189

(and see Dawson, Anthony), 163, 183

Webster, John, 10; The Duchess of Malfi, 24, 59-89 Weimann, Robert, 30-31, 151 Wells, Susan, 74-75 Whigham, Frank, 78 Wilson, Thomas, 122

Žižek, Slavoj, 21-22, 67, 86, 147; the other, 75-76; Works: Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, 76, 86n, 145n; “The Object as a Limit of Discourse”, 135n; The Plague of Fantasies, 21n, 67-69; The Ticklish Subject, 67-68, 82n

Yachnin, Paul, Stage-Wrights, 6