Go Figure: Energies, Forms, and Institutions in the Early Modern World 9780823291694

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GO FIGURE

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GO FIGURE Energies, Forms, and Institutions in the Early Modern World

 Edited by Judith H. Anderson and Joan Pong Linton

Fordham University Press New York 2011

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Copyright 䉷 2011 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Go figure : energies, forms, and institutions in the early modern world / edited by Judith H. Anderson and Joan Pong Linton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-3349-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-3351-9 (ebook) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. English language—Early modern, 1500–1700—Semantics. 3. Symbolism in literature. 4. Semiotics in literature. I. Anderson, Judith H. II. Linton, Joan Pong. PR421.G6 2011 820.9⬘34—dc22 2010039556 Printed in the United States of America 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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Contents

Introduction Judith H. Anderson and Joan Pong Linton

1

Spenser’s Giant and the New Science Mary Thomas Crane

19

The Sacramental Neuter and the Missing Body in Robert Southwell’s Poetics Lowell Gallagher

38

Reconfiguring Figuring: John Donne as Narrative Poet Heather Dubrow

58

The Narrative Turn against Metaphor: Metonymy, Identification, and Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa Amelia Zurcher

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Caterpillage: Death and Truthiness in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting Harry Berger, Jr.

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Figuring Belief: George Herbert’s Devotional Creatures David Glimp

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Entertaining Friends: Falstaff ’s Parasitology Donald Hedrick

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Skin Merchants: Jack Cade’s Futures and the Figural Politics of Henry VI, Part II Julian Yates

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Notes

171

List of Contributors

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Index

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Introduction judith h. anderson and joan pong linton

In Go Figure, our focus on figuration joins a semiotic emphasis to a sociopolitical one and seeks to achieve, if only cumulatively, a kind of wholeness. Our collection is at once formal and historical, semiotic and cultural, aesthetic and material. We engage the dominant emphases of recent decades, especially material history, embracing religion, politics, science, and class, and we also engage emphases that have recently emerged on the critical landscape, such as the so-called ‘‘new aestheticism’’ or ‘‘new formalism’’ and the even more recently minted ‘‘historical formalism.’’ Pigeon-holing -isms (especially premature ones) are undesirable in our view, but they already exist and bear witness to the recurrence, renewal, and revision of an interest in form. Our volume variously combines this interest with the materialism that has dominated criticism since the 1990s. Essaying ‘‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,’’ Paul Ricoeur emphasizes the substantiality, indeed the quasibody, of language. He instances the substantiality of figures of speech and refers approvingly to Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of ‘‘figure’’ as ‘‘the visibility of language.’’1 Ricoeur aims at the iconic aspect of metaphor, the archtrope—what we popularly term an image. Jean-Luc Nancy has more recently conceived the verbal image, or figure, as having a ground comparable to that of a painting, a ground that is not only visual, but ‘‘also musical, poetic, even tactile, olfactory or gustatory, kinesthetic,’’ and more.2 The human imagination is traditionally the image-making power, and, in Nancy’s words, ‘‘not the faculty of representing something in its absence’’ but ‘‘the force that draws the form of presence out of absence,’’ which is to say, ‘‘the force of ‘self-presenting’ ’’ (22). The figure is irreducibly substantive, material—itself a body or meaningfully comparable to a body. In one or more bodily senses, it is forcefully there. Like the traditional use of the human body to figure the body politic, such as the kingdom, republic, or 1

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state, or to figure a legal entity, or corporation (from the Latin corpus, ‘‘body’’), the figure’s embodiment extends from rhetoric to social and cultural institutions and from forms like these to the energies that shape, disrupt, and underlie them.

Roots of the Word-Concept Figure Erich Auerbach’s classic essay ‘‘Figura’’ shows how a word, ‘‘on the basis of its semantic development . . . may grow into a historical situation and give rise to structures that will be effective for many centuries.’’3 Auerbach traces the developing senses of figura, or ‘‘figure,’’ from its etymological roots through its various historical uses in Latin. Originally, he explains, ‘‘figura meant ‘plastic form,’ ’’ and it shared its stem with fingere, ‘‘to form or fashion by art,’’ figulus, ‘‘potter, seal maker,’’ fictor, ‘‘image-maker, creator,’’ and effigies, ‘‘likeness, image, effigy’’ (11). The first major development in usage occurred when figura was employed to signify ‘‘grammatical, inflected, or derived form,’’ an abstracted use that Auerbach associates with the Hellenization of Roman education and the consequent translation of many Greek terms into Latin ones (14). Generally, Latin figura replaces Greek sche¯ma, ‘‘perceptual shape,’’ but for Auerbach the force of figura is ‘‘broader, sometimes more plastic, in any case more dynamic and radiant than [that of] sche¯ma’’ (15–16). The dynamism and radiance of such figuration bears emphasis, suggesting, on the one hand, forcefulness, action, energy, and on the other, extension, overflowing brilliance, surplus meaning. En route to a second major development in usage by Quintilian, Auerbach’s interest rises with Lucretius’s deployment of ‘‘the general concept of ‘figure’ . . . in every possible shading from the plastic figure shaped by man . . . to the purely geometric outline’’ (16). Lucretius, Auerbach tells us, even describes ‘‘the figura verborum (‘the [auditory] figure of words’),’’ a figure which, as will be evident later in our introduction, anticipates more modern developments. Translated, Lucretius explains that when . . . we press out these voices from the inmost parts of our body, and send them forth straight through the mouth, the quickly-moving tongue, cunning fashioner of words [verborum daedala], joints and moulds [articulat . . . figurat] the sounds, and the shaping of the lips does its part in giving them form [formaturaque labrorum pro parte figurat]. When there is no long race for each of those utterances to run from start to finish [i.e., not much distance to travel from our mouths], the words themselves also must necessarily be

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Introduction 3 plainly heard and distinguished in all their joints and moulding; for the sound keeps its shaping [figuram] and keeps its form.4

Auerbach pauses again over usage by the Roman architect Vitruvius, for whom figura is form or, more precisely, ‘‘the reproduction [Nachbildung] of such form, the architect’s plan [Grundriss]. . . . Often figura means ‘ground plan,’ ’’ and Auerbach adds that this meaning, ‘‘slightly tinted’’ for his own larger purpose of characterizing biblical figurae, suggests ‘‘a plan of the future work’’ (23/22). In a Renaissance connection with the Vitruvian ‘‘ground plan,’’ Philip Sidney’s figural conception of a ‘‘ground-plot’’ in his Apology for Poetry comes to mind. Geoffrey Shepherd, Sidney’s editor, glosses groundplot as ‘‘the ‘seat of argument’ (Quintilian, Institutes, V.x.1), where material is hidden and whence it is sought in the process of ‘invention’ ’’; and Forrest G. Robinson explains Sidney’s ‘‘ground-plot’’ as a metaphor with architectural, literary, pictorial (‘‘ground’’), mathematical, scientific, rhetorical, and logical connections.5 As Auerbach explains from the perspective of his larger purpose of tracing the development of biblical typology, the most important event in the first century c.e. was the refinement by Quintilian of the concept of the rhetorical figure, introduced as a technical term in rhetoric by Cicero and the author of Ad Herennium. Early in Book IX of The Institutio Oratoria (which, glancing at our title, we might translate as ‘‘The Institution of Oratory’’), Quintilian attempts to distinguish tropes from figures: ‘‘the name of trope is applied to the transference of expressions [sermo . . . translatus] from their natural and principal signification to another, with a view to the embellishment of style or, as the majority of grammarians define it, the transference of words and phrases [dictio . . . translata] from the place which is strictly theirs to another to which they do not properly belong. A figure, on the other hand, as is clear from the name itself, is the term employed when we give our language a conformation [conformatio] other than the obvious and ordinary.’’6 Ever judicious, Quintilian frames his distinction with examples of disagreement about it among grammarians and actual examples of figures and tropes that he himself has difficulty classifying exclusively as the one or the other. He then acknowledges the unimportance of naming (i.e., distinguishing) either of them as long as its rhetorical value is evident, and he notes that both might occur in the same thought, since figures employ both metaphorical and (lexically) normative words (IX.i.6–9). Throughout ‘‘Figura,’’ Auerbach is invested in a distinction between figures and tropes in a way that Quintilian simply is not. Auerbach wants

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to keep tropology and specifically allegory—continued metaphor—as far as possible from what he calls konkret Innergeschichtlichen, ‘‘concrete inner history,’’ a profoundly significant but nonetheless materially real history revealing more than places and dates (42/37). But this is again to glance forward to Auerbach’s larger purpose, without having yet finished with Quintilian, who returns a second time to defining figure, this time alone rather than in distinction from trope. Now figure is found by Quintilian to have two senses: ‘‘In the first it is applied to any form in which thought is expressed, just as it is to bodies which, whatever their composition, must have some shape. In the second and special sense, in which it is [also] called a schema, it means a rational change in meaning or language from the ordinary and simple form, that is to say, a change analogous to that involved by sitting, lying down on something or looking back.’’7 He gives as an example, a student who harps on the same cases, tenses, rhythms, or even metrical feet and must therefore be instructed to vary his ‘‘figures [figuras].’’ In the first sense, then, ‘‘everything is expressed by figures.’’ In the second, the name applies to ‘‘certain attitudes, or . . . gestures of language [habitus quidam et quasi gestus],’’ and we take figura, or ‘‘schema in the sense of that which is poetically or rhetorically altered from the simple and obvious method of expression [quod sit a simplici atque in promptu posito dicendi modo poetice vel oratorie mutatum]’’ (IX.i.12–13). He concludes that figura indicates ‘‘a form of expression to which a new aspect is given by art [arte aliqua novata forma dicendi]’’ (IX.i.14). He next explains that there are two classes of figures, namely figures of thought and figures of speech—respectively, of mind, feeling, or conception and of words, delivery, style, and like forms of expression (IX.i.17). Once again, Quintilian’s distinction between figures of speech and tropes thins out, an observation that the extension of the term figure normatively to tropes such as metaphor and allegory enforces historically. Quintilian, while interested in categorizing tropes and figures for instructional purposes, is not invested in keeping them apart to the extent Auerbach is. Quintilian is not struggling to define figura as simultaneously and integrally both material history and its significance. When Auerbach turns to the ‘‘strangely new meaning of figura in the Christian world,’’ his destination from the outset, he describes this as a ‘‘creative, formative principle, change amid the enduring essence, the shades of meaning [das Spiel: ‘‘play’’] between copy and archetype [zwischen Abbild und Urbild: ‘‘likeness and original’’]’’ (28/27, 49/42). The first Christian reader of biblical history he treats is Tertullian, for whom ‘‘the naming of

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Joshua-Jesus is a phenomenal prophecy or prefiguration of the future Saviour. Such a figura is something real and historical which announces [or signifies] something else that is also real and historical’’ (29). At the same time, figuration infuses history with meaning and purpose. Predictably, Augustine is the true exemplar of Auerbach’s figural readings. In Augustine, Auerbach finds the word figura expressing ‘‘the general notion of form in all its traditional variants, static and dynamic, outline and body’’; basically, it expresses ‘‘outward appearance’’ or ‘‘variable aspect over against [gegenu¨ber: ‘‘opposed to, in the face of, in relation to’’] the imperishable essence.’’ This same word also appears as ‘‘idol, as dream figure or vision, as mathematical form’’—indeed, we would add, as divine ground-plot (37–38). In the Patristic writers, ‘‘the idea of the sche¯ma as molded by preChristian poetry and oratory—the rhetorical image or circumlocution that conceals, transforms, and even deceives—[also] enters in’’ (45). Herein lies the implication of ‘‘deeper meaning’’ (45–46). Figura is the ‘‘literal [historical] meaning or event in reference to the fulfillment cloaked in it’’ (47). ‘‘Thus history, with all its concrete force [sinnlichen Kraft], remains forever a figure, cloaked and needful of interpretation’’ (58). Although insisting that allegory and figuration, tropes and figures, are not the same, Auerbach also admits that they share some ground: ‘‘figural interpretation is ‘allegorical’ in the widest sense’’ because in it ‘‘one thing represents and signifies the other’’ (54); moreover, ‘‘sometimes to be sure, . . . common allegory was also termed figura’’ in the Middle Ages (34). Equally revealing are some of the words and phrases Auerbach employs to characterize figura: in figural readings, historical things and persons become ‘‘vehicles [Tra¨ger: ‘‘carriers,’’ fig. ‘‘vehicles’’] of meaning’’ (34/31), phrasing that for us evokes I. A. Richards’s familiar image of metaphor as a simultaneous combination of tenor and vehicle.8 At one point, Auerbach even describes Augustine’s figural method as a metaphorical transfer from time to eternity: ‘‘Even though Augustine rejects abstract allegorical spiritualism, . . . he nevertheless has an idealism [Idealita¨t] which removes the concrete event [das konkrete Ereignis], completely preserved as it is, from time and transposes [versetzt] it into a perspective of eternity’’ (42/37, emphasis added). Auerbach’s transposition resonates with the Latin term for that archtrope metaphor, translatio, or in verbal form, transferre, ‘‘to carry across, to transfer,’’ or indeed, ‘‘to transpose,’’ versetzen. As often as Auerbach openly or implicitly acknowledges that figura is allegorical, hence tropic, he tries to push allegory away: opposed to figura, it is ‘‘mere allegory,’’ or else it is, without his using the term, allegoresis, that is,

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merely moral or ethical, as in Origen, and not really historical in its ‘‘abstract . . . spiritualism’’ (30, 36, 42). Momentarily he seems to forget that the common definition of allegory from classical to Renaissance times is simply ‘‘continued metaphor’’; or as Cicero’s Crassus explains in De Oratore, allegory is an extension of metaphor: whereas metaphor is typically based in a single word, allegory occurs in ‘‘a chain of words linked together’’ (ex pluribus [verbis] continuatis connectitur) and thus, in modern terms, in the contiguous relationship that characterizes narrative.9 Instead, Auerbach urges that a ‘‘figural or typological or phenomenal structure’’ must be ‘‘sharply distinguished from other, allegorical or symbolical, forms’’ (60). Much of the problem, of course, lies in the impoverished definition of allegory Auerbach assumes, but this is a different story from the history of the word-concept figure/figura that bears directly on our volume.10

Theorizing Figuration into the Present Like Auerbach’s historicized figura, the literary conception of figure and figuration both in the Renaissance and in relevant poststructural theory has ancient roots, variously concealed and conspicuous, in concepts of form, image, dynamism, and radiance. The classical analogy between poetry and painting is a commonplace version of these that is famously captured in Horace’s ‘‘ut pictura poesis.’’11 This Horatian analogy points to something visualizable in poetry even as it suggests the possibility of rendering poetic principles into painterly practice. While Renaissance poetics treasures Horace’s dictum as one touchstone for its theory, it also inherits from classical tradition, especially from the actio or the performative aspects of rhetorical delivery, a tendency to analogize discourse to the human figure, to the sinews, joints, skin, build, and shape of the body. Both the Horatian dictum and the rhetorical tradition converge in the ideas of enargia (Greek arges, ‘‘bright’’; Latin evidentia, inlustratio, repraesentatio), or vividness and distinctness in description (the practices of ekphrasis, effictio, and the like), and energia (Greek ergon, ‘‘work’’; Latin, actio), or the liveliness and ‘‘point’’ of style in appealing to the senses, moving the emotions, and effecting turns of thought. As stylistic qualities, enargia and energia are often closely related in theory and in practice. Aristotle’s Rhetoric specifies vividness [enargia] as a means of achieving ‘‘impressiveness of style,’’ and relates liveliness to ‘‘putting things directly before the eyes of the audience,’’ by which he means ‘‘using expressions that show things in a state of activity [energia].’’12 What

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these concepts/qualities have in common are their appeal to the senses, especially the visual sense, and their purpose of moving the audience through the use of rhetorical figures. Thus Aristotle counsels the use of ‘‘metaphors and epithets for vividness,’’ and he also praises Homer as one who ‘‘constantly uses the device of metaphor to make lifeless things alive, and in every case gains his admirable effect by representing them as active.’’13 While etymologically distinct in Greek, the concepts enargia and energia are conflated in Roman reinterpretations, understandably perhaps. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, vividness (Latin vividus) means ‘‘living, animated, lively’’; the adjective vivid, said of ‘‘persons (or animals),’’ means ‘‘full of life; vigorous, active, or energetic on this account; lively or brisk,’’ and of ‘‘actions or operations,’’ means ‘‘proceeding, or taking place, with great vigour or activity’’ (1a, 2a). In the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian characterizes enargia as something that ‘‘forces itself on the reader’s notice.’’ Writing from the context of forensic rhetoric, he further clarifies that ‘‘our language is not sufficiently effective, and has not that absolute power which it ought to have, if it impresses only the ears, and if the judge feels that the particulars, on which he has to give a decision, are merely stated to him, and not described graphically, or displayed to the eyes of his mind’’ (VIII.iii.62). Quintilian’s formulation thus merges visual impressiveness, the aim of enargia, with the effect of liveliness or energia, the setting of events before the mind’s eyes. Such conflation reflects oratory’s motive of affecting listeners by stirring powerful emotions in them. Along with ethos and logos, Aristotle includes pathos among the three ‘‘artistic proofs [means of persuasion] that may be furnished by the method of Rhetoric through our own efforts.’’14 Following Aristotle, Cicero in De Oratore stresses the need for orators to feel the emotions they wish to incite in their audience. The effects of enargia and energia are implicitly aligned with the praise of passion in courtroom performance, for example, the lawyer’s pleading with ‘‘such mental vigor, such energy, such passion’’ showing from his eyes, face, and gestures and ‘‘so overwhelming in the flow of . . . impressive words’’ as, himself set ‘‘ablaze,’’ likewise to ‘‘set . . . the jurors on fire’’ (emphasis added).15 This emphasis on the emotions extends to the literary theory of the figure, as seen in Longinus’s later definition of the poetic imagination as that which ‘‘in your enthusiasm and strong feeling you seem to see . . . when you speak of [it] and put it before the eyes of your audience.’’ Longinus goes on to say that ‘‘well timed and vigorous emotion and noble excellence of style’’ can ‘‘by the vigor of their current . . . naturally sweep along and push forward the rest, or rather they demand highly figurative language as a

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necessity and do not allow the hearer to object to their number, because he is fired with the enthusiasm of the speaker.’’16 The dynamic interplay of emotion between poet/performer and audience is already implicit in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as ‘‘mimesis of an action . . . in language embellished by distinct forms . . . employing the mode of enactment . . .; through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions.’’17 The concepts of enargia and energia find new developments in Renaissance rhetorical and literary theories of figuration. In An Apology for Poetry, a text notably representative of Renaissance ideas on poetry, Sidney defines poetry as a ‘‘speaking picture,’’ the figuring forth of an idea or foreconceit, both to teach and to delight the audience. In its pedagogical aim, poetry shares with philosophy and history the same objective: ‘‘the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of welldoing and not of well-knowing only’’ (101, 104). For Sidney, however, the poet’s speaking picture surpasses the philosopher’s ‘‘wordish description’’ in its power to ‘‘strike, pierce, [and] . . . possess the sight of the soul.’’ Through such impressive force, the poet’s speaking picture goes beyond the exquisite description of particulars to ‘‘satisfy [the hearer’s] . . . inward conceit with being witness to itself of a true lively knowledge’’ (107). We may detect here a conflation of energia with enargia as earlier noted in Quintilian. While Quintilian subsumes energia in enargia, Sidney can be said to do the reverse when he faults love poets for not feeling the passions they imitate, ‘‘which easily (as I think) may be betrayed by that same forcibleness, or energia (as the Greeks call it) of the writer’’ (138). Again, the speaking picture surpasses written history in going beyond what happened to attend to what ought to happen: ‘‘as in History looking for truth, they go away full fraught with falsehood, so in Poesy looking but for fiction, they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention’’ (124). Sidney’s ground-plot, functioning as Quintilian’s ‘‘seat of argument,’’18 underscores the visualized conceptual process that expresses the persuasive force of poetic figuration. As the energized—and energizing—rendering of an idea, his speaking picture charts a course from the poet’s conception to the audience’s reception that eventuates not just in gnosis, or well knowing, but also in praxis, or virtuous action in the world. While Sidney’s speaking picture exemplifies the normative view in Renaissance poetics, George Puttenham offers a somewhat different approach, one notable for its emphasis on the aural in the treatment of enargia and energia in figures. Puttenham deals with visual figures as well, but his attention to the aural ones remains his distinctive contribution to the history of

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the figure. In Book III of The Arte of English Poesie (1589), he discusses aural figures as qualities of rhetorical ornamentation: ‘‘one to satisfie & delight th’eare onely by a goodly outward shew set vpon the matter with wordes, and speeches smoothly and tunably running: another by certaine intendments or sence of such wordes & speeches inwardly working a stirre to the mynde: that first qualitie the Greeks called Enargeia, and of this word argos, because it geueth a glorious luster and light. This latter they called Energeia or ergon, because it wrought with a strong and virtuous operation, and figure breedeth them both.’’ These qualities in turn provide the basis for identifying three types of figures: auricular figures (such as the aposiopesis, prolepsis, hysteron proteron, epitheton, and the like), which, having only enargia, ‘‘serue the’eare only’’; sensible figures (such as metaphora, metonymia, allegoria, ironia, and the like), which, having only energia, ‘‘serue the conceit onely, and not the’eare’’; and sententious or rhetorical figures (such as anaphora, antistrophe, climax, parison, apostrophe, prosopopoeia, and the like), which, having both enargia and energia, ‘‘serue both turnes as common seruitours appointed for th’one and th’other purpose.’’19 As Linda Galyon has shown, in attending to the ‘‘affective power of sound in language,’’ Puttenham reflects the habits of what was still a largely oral society.20 Sidney certainly shares a sensibility attuned to sound, as seen in his discussion of quantitative and qualitative verse, in which ideas of enargia and energia are implicit: ‘‘The ancient [quantitative system of prosody] (no doubt) more fit for music, both words and time observing quantity, and more fit lively to express divers passions by the low or lofty sound of the well-weighed syllable. The latter [the modern accentual system] likewise with his rhyme striketh a certain music to the ear; and, in fine, since it doth delight, though by another way, it obtaineth the same purpose’’ (140; emphasis added). The difference is Sidney’s insistence on the priority of the foreconceit, the ‘‘poetic sinew,’’ informing the aural effects of verse: noting how few verses he has seen ‘‘that have poetical sinews in them,’’ he invites their translation to prose to assess their meaning, which, he avers, will reveal ‘‘a confused mass of words, with a tingling sound of rhyme, barely accompanied with reason’’ (133). In treating the aural effects of language, both Sidney and Puttenham speak to contemporary literary practice and distantly recall the connection of figuration with sound and rhythm by Lucretius and Quintilian. They also anticipate recent figural theories that attend to what is not or cannot be visualized in figuration. Such inquiry finds its most sustained and fullest development in the writings of Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard. In Discours, figure,21 Lyotard theorizes the

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figure by bringing its operations into relation with ‘‘the condition of discourse.’’22 Being heterogeneous to discourse, figure is inarticulate; it operates as ‘‘that which, in representation, makes us aware that there is something which cannot be represented,’’ namely, ‘‘an other to representation.’’23 It is sensed, rather, as a force that transgresses the operations of discourse to shape a text from within, producing such textual effects as images, tropes, rhythms, and narrative forms that readers can sense as affect and movement. Beginning with phenomenology, Lyotard ultimately develops this formulation by analogy to Freud’s theory of the dream-work and the unconscious, building in particular on Freud’s claim that ‘‘the dream-work ‘does not think, calculate or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.’ ’’24 Even as Freud borrows freely from poetic concepts in theorizing the dream-work, its non-discursive workings provide a basis for Lyotard to theorize the figure. In the process, Lyotard elaborates three aspects of the all-encompassing entirety of the figure: as image, as form, and as matrix. Of the three aspects, only the image, or figure as image, can in some way be visualized in the written text. As such, the figure-image may range from the text itself as an image to what Geoffrey Bennington describes as ‘‘an image possibly in the sense of a figurative or representational picture, potentially introducing something of the order of a perception of depth into what is described as the ‘flat’ surface of discourse.’’25 Again, by analogy, Lyotard aligns the figure as matrix with unconscious desire and its libidinal energies, both ‘‘figural’’ and ‘‘figurative, [that] constitute the matrix of the primal phantasm’’ (26/246). Although inaccessible, this figure as matrix, arising from one’s experience, is both forceful and individuated. While desire has a ‘‘mobile element’’ that ‘‘sends the ‘faculties’ using articulated language into a spin,’’ it can also be ‘‘the fixative [la rigidite´: ‘‘stiffness,’’ perhaps ‘‘persistence’’] which keeps certain parts of [the dream text] readable.’’ This stiffening, persistent element Lyotard relates to the shaping force of the figure as form, which operates both as a ‘‘rhythmic schema’’ at the sentence level, and ‘‘to support and control the articulation of the large units of the narrative’’ at the stylistic level and so on.26 Lyotard’s theorization of the discursive and figural dimensions in language helps to clarify and reconcile disparate rhetorical theories. It is possible to say, for example, that the quality of enargia pertains to the representational function of discourse, and energia, to the energetics of the figure. The different theoretical emphases on the visual and the aural we have seen in the poetics of Sidney and Puttenham, as well as in the ancient roots of figuration, also find their place in Lyotard’s theory of the figure. Specifically, the

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figure as image approximates Sidney’s notion of poetry as figuring forth a speaking picture, that is, an image produced in and through words that express an idea (foreconceit), even as this idea and the words that articulate it are in the process enlivened by the figural force of the image. At the same time, the figure as form relates to Puttenham’s rhetorical figures, in which the patterning of sound is integral to the sense of the delivery. Longinus, too, captures this energia of the figure-form when he compares the affective power of verbal harmony to that of flute music which, by ‘‘caus[ing] certain emotions’’ in listeners, can ‘‘inspire them with a sort of corybantic frenzy.’’27 With respect to current theory, Lyotard’s attention to the figure grounds a critique of the applications of categories from structural linguistics to the unconscious and to figurative language, as seen in the oft-quoted Lacanian dictum ‘‘the unconscious is structured like a language’’ or in Jakobson’s situating of metaphor and metonym in the paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions of language. Both formulations rationalize and thereby reduce linguistic expression to articulated discourse, failing to account for the energetics of desire that figure both the dream text and poetic uses of language, and indeed of artistic signs more generally. At the same time, as the title Discours, figure indicates, the figural presence in the written text is not the only focus of inquiry in Lyotard’s volume. He also examines the presence of discourse in painting, and, as Mary Lydon observes, his examination leads, among other things, to the ‘‘deconstruction of representation,’’ of the internalized discursive rules of Renaissance perspective that inform pictorial representation.28 As scholars of Renaissance painting have similarly concluded, perspective vision is a construct to which the Renaissance eye must first be acculturated. Here Lyotard is interested in what to the trained, acculturated eye is no longer visible, the resources of the unrepresentable matrix that, in Lydon’s words, ‘‘underlies and energizes’’ the art of the graphic or painted figure.29 Indeed, poststructuralist theory has shown how the figure haunts diverse kinds of texts, finding applications beyond the fields of art, poetry, and music. In his analysis of historical narrative, for example, Hayden White points to the ‘‘tropics of discourse,’’ or the projective agency of certain tropes in constituting the field of historical discourse, predisposing the emplotment of historical narratives in the modes of romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire.30 To an extent, White’s project resembles Auerbach’s situating figuration in history. Even in scientific epistemology, as Thomas Kuhn has theorized, shifts occur and are subsequently stabilized through the figurative thinking of the paradigm—the ground-plot of the paradigm, we might add

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with another glance back to Sidney.31 More broadly, Michel Foucault likewise argues that different ages shape and are shaped by their own epistemes, or epistemological paradigms, which posit the conditions of possibility for the production of knowledge, or what is recognized as truth in the human sciences.32 The political effect of Foucault’s postulate is to implicate knowledge-making in structures of power as individuals participate in normative discourses and practices within institutions, although Foucault ultimately argues that ‘‘power is everywhere,’’ that ‘‘it comes from below,’’ not just from above.33 Here the energetics of the figure resides as well, as a force that both establishes and destabilizes. Giorgio Agamben’s study of political theory traces the logic of sovereign power to its conceptual grounding in Aristotle’s definition of potentiality (dynamis) in relation to actuality (energia): ‘‘A thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing im-potential (that is, there will be nothing able not to be).’’34 For Agamben, ‘‘potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it (superiorem non recognoscens).’’35 Being simply is and is absolutely: in this formulation, potentiality (dynamis) becomes indistinguishable from actuality (energia), a striking difference from Auerbach’s biblical dynamism. Agamben finds a similar logic of doubleness in the operation of sovereign power, especially with respect to Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as ‘‘the one who decides the exception’’ or the state of emergency in which the suspension of human rights remains within juridical sanction (as in the creation of concentration camps).36 By the same token, the potentiality to and not to defines the ‘‘contingent’’ as the ‘‘domain of human freedom’’ in its refusal of necessity, or the imposition of sovereign power.37 Without exhausting the possibilities, we will mention as a last, related example of a figure of ethical resistance, the neuter (or neutral), around which has gathered a rich nexus of theoretical opinion.38 This figure plays on its root meaning (Latin ne-uter, ‘‘neither this, nor that’’), and operates as tropic oscillations that shape texts from within, in ways that baffle the rules of (discursive and institutional) language games—games that have real, formative consequences.

 The essays that follow in this volume afford diverse conceptions of figuration and address a broad array of verbal and visual texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, extending into the eighteenth. Situating theory

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in history, they focus on science, sacramental poetics, romance and lyric narrative, and the natural world, in still lifes, prayer, parasites, and politics. The artists they treat include poets, painters, storytellers, and playwrights. These essays show how figural energies and forms shape both texts and the practices that produce them—how in fundamental ways figures are in play in the making of human subjects, societies, traditions, and institutions. The first essay, ‘‘Spenser’s Giant and the New Science,’’ by Mary Thomas Crane, proposes that the egalitarian Giant’s weighing scale, or balance, in the fifth book of The Faerie Queene actually figures a scientific instrument and measures Spenser’s epistemological doubts about the stability and intelligibility of his universe. In Crane’s words, it ‘‘represents the appeal and dangers of a new experimentalism and a newly analogical approach to scientific truth.’’ This experimentalism is essentially metaphorical rather than representative of ‘‘a literal causal connection between appearance and reality,’’ as implied by the scientific analogies of Aristotle. In Aristotle’s natural philosophy and its Ptolemaic elaboration, which were still dominant in the sixteenth century, change is a function of essence and its telos, or ‘‘purposeful end.’’ Increasingly, Aristotle’s view was being undermined by perceived phenomena, such as the physics of projectiles, chemical transmutations, and irregularities in the heavens, that demonstrably and extensively engaged Spenser’s interest. Crane locates the figure of Artegall in an anxious but exciting post-Aristotelian world in which appearance has separated from ideology. Unlike contemporary English mathematicians, whom Spenser evidently read, the poet lacks the Giant’s confidence that the new approaches to nature would restore its rationality. Crane concludes with a challenge to Foucault, arguing that instead of a shift from an episteme of resemblance to one of difference, the early modern period witnessed movement ‘‘from an epistemology of essentialism or identity, to one of analogy.’’ In ‘‘The Sacramental Neuter and the Missing Body in Robert Southwell’s Poetics,’’ the second essay, Lowell Gallagher examines the relation among the speaking ‘‘I,’’ community, historical situation, and figures of divine agency in the sacramental poetics of Robert Southwell. With subtle complexity, he suggests the intimacy of Southwell’s figural poetics both with early modern expressions of the neuter (or neutral) and late modern theorizing of it by Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes. In grisaille, ‘‘gray monochrome,’’ for Barthes the ‘‘color of the colorless,’’ Gallagher finds the painterly color of the neuter, and in the enthymeme, or rhetorical syllogism, he sees ‘‘the grisaille-effect.’’ He associates this effect at once with the indifference of Ignatian meditation and with the withholding by the enthymeme

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of one of its terms, which is neither here nor there and therefore neuter (neuter). Both Ignatian indifference and the enthymeme capitalize, as Gallagher puts it, ‘‘on the instrumental force of the unsaid in dialogue,’’ and Southwell’s poetics does so as well. Like the neuter (or neutral), this poetic does not register or respond to skeptical impartiality so much as it does to the not-known, the non-non-A. In Gallagher’s view, Southwell’s ‘‘enthymemic fluency . . . gives traction to the eventfulness—the kairotic [temporally critical, messianic] restlessness—of the poems’’ with respect to received forms of rhetorical argument, bonds of social life, and theopolitical thought. The kairotic insights of Agamben and Auerbach, radically similar and radically different as they are, both come to mind here. Southwell’s poetic responds to the urgent Reformation question ‘‘ ‘Who owns Christ’s Body?’ by keeping it open’’ and reentering ‘‘the peculiar compact of salvific and critical force’’ in St. Paul’s messianic Epistles. The neuter cast of Southwell’s figural poems lies in their kairotic sense of the triforme Corpus Christi— the threefold body of Christ (historical, sacramental, ecclesiastical)—and this sense puts them in a neuter relation to time and history. The next essay, ‘‘Reconfiguring Figuring: John Donne as Narrative Poet,’’ by Heather Dubrow, treats narrative form as a figure and thus observes the figuring of form itself. Storytelling, conceived as metanarrative in her account, is agency—power as assertion and control of oneself and others—but it is also the recognition of the limits of power and the agency often identified with it, whether by competing stories, by iterability, by song, or otherwise. Dubrow remarks the high incidence of narrative as conquest, judgment, and journey in Donne’s Songs and Sonets and notes that as a student of law, Donne knew the use of narratio in legal argument, that as a preacher, he recognized the effectiveness of exempla in the ars praecandi, and that as a theologian he likely saw the relevance to soteriology of narrative engagement with closure and anticlosure. She explains how Donne’s poems use narration ‘‘to control the demons’’ on their edges, ‘‘especially death and betrayal.’’ If Donne is the poet of lyric narrativity, however, ‘‘he is also the poet of the disnarrated,’’ of ‘‘events that do not take place,’’ as Gerald Prince defines this term and, as Dubrow aligns the term with Donne, ‘‘of verges and edges, of what might or might not happen.’’ Song and prosody are two areas that Dubrow opens for further exploration of Donne’s narratorial techniques. At first glance these might seem odd cousins of his edgy conversational voice, yet both are figurally present as form within it.

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Whereas in the first three chapters, Mary Crane analyzes a shift within science from literal correspondence to metaphorical analogy, Lowell Gallagher discovers in messianic time/history an escape from the Hegelian metaphorics of supersession, and Heather Dubrow treats metanarrative form within lyric, Amelia Zurcher engages seventeenth-century prose romance in her essay addressing ‘‘The Narrative Turn against Metaphor: Metonymy, Identification, and Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa.’’ In Boyle’s romance Zurcher discovers a curiously modern model for prose narrative structure, one that suggests the narrative strategies of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Whereas most British romances of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods have a penchant for allegory, Zurcher argues that Parthenissa blocks it. This refusal of metaphor both invites metaphorical interpretation and gestures toward the antiinterpretive poetics of the eighteenth century. Zurcher focuses on an extended, foundational moment in Parthenissa when the fictively embellished historical character Artabanes suddenly becomes Spartacus, not through metaphorical or analogical correspondence but through the utter collapse of his character and narrative into those of another. For Zurcher, Parthenissa is antifigural in another way as well, since it blocks the Scaligerian, Auerbachian, and Galenic inclination to understand a character’s disposition as the figure that plot fulfills through action. While recognizing problems with Roman Jakobson’s totalizing opposition of metaphor to metonymy, of resemblance to contiguity, Zurcher uses this distinction skillfully to focus ‘‘attention on the seams between elements or topics in prose narrative’’ that encourage us ‘‘to see the narrative as a complex system of episodic units in a variety of relations to one another.’’ For a suggestive instant, we might recall the analogical relations conceived by Tudor mathematicians and wonder whether they, like the narrative structure Zurcher describes, could be considered metonymic rather than metaphorical. Although Zurcher recognizes the possibility of irony in Boyle’s juxtaposition of fiction and history, she reads it instead either ‘‘as a sort of psychologization of metonymic structure’’ or as the thematized ground for formal abstraction into metonymy. In either reading, Zurcher observes, metonymy corresponds (metaphorically, of course) to revisionist histories of the Civil War that reject a causality produced by stringing events along a timeline rather than viewing them largely as accumulations of happenstance. Once again the figure and here specifically the archtrope metaphor emerge as a critical node of interpretation, history, and productive controversy.

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16 Judith H. Anderson and Joan Pong Linton

In Harry Berger, Jr.’s ‘‘Caterpillage: Death and Truthiness in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting,’’ the shaping force of the figure is visibly at play as well, this time within the pictorial medium, and Berger’s attention to the ‘‘dynamic visual force’’ of images reveals something ‘‘lively’’ about a genre as conventionally still—arrested, motionless—as the still life. Berger examines paintings that have long been identified with the tradition of vanitas to show how they escape the discursive ‘‘capture’’ of iconography, in this case the ‘‘truthiness’’ of vanitas as both ‘‘futility and conceit,’’ the latter in its moral sense. As the title’s neologism ‘‘caterpillage’’ suggests, Berger focuses on the presence of insects (especially at the caterpillar stage) and snails in these paintings, creatures whose voracious appetites are seen in the signs of destruction they leave behind on their host plants, turning the still life of ‘‘nature morte,’’ or nature dead, to the dynamism of ‘‘nature mourant,’’ or nature dying. In engaging with numerous vanitas readings of these paintings, Berger argues that ‘‘iconography makes trifles of terrors when it dissociates what snails and caterpillars stand for from what they do.’’ The result is to subject the visual force of realistic images to a reductive kind of allegoresis. While scholars have more recently seen in some still-life paintings transgressions of the vanitas trope that speak to the cultural context—to ‘‘the bad faith of tulipmania’’ (Anne Goldgar), or ‘‘the bad faith of the Dutch colonial trading empire’’ (Julie Berger Hochstrasser), for example—Berger detects even in these insightful readings a displaced attention from the painters’ interest in the relentless caterpillage. By contrast, he asks readers to see in the still life of vanitas scenes of ‘‘small-scale violence’’ that embody not the moral truthiness of natural decay but the forces of nature’s rapacity. If nature is red in tooth and claw in the paintings Berger studies, it takes on a benign aspect in the Christian tradition of devotion. As David Glimp points out, from medieval times on Christian tradition appealed to nature as the object of meditation on the power of God as Creator, and to creatures in nature as themselves agents of devotion. His chapter, ‘‘Figuring Belief: George Herbert’s Devotional Creatures,’’ discovers in the poems of Herbert’s Temple a devotional poetics that engages the creature in both these senses. Thus in ‘‘Affliction,’’ an ‘‘arboreal wish’’ enables the speaker to refigure belief in response to affliction through the example of trees as a ‘‘figure of renunciation.’’ More affirmatively, the appeal to the creature provides a means to ‘‘(re)describe collective existence,’’ and the ‘‘polyfunctionality of God’s creation’’ serves ‘‘to redress the instabilities of human thought and action.’’ What emerges is ‘‘a theological regime of accumulation of praise,’’

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a figural poetics that, responsive to the period’s developing finance capital, brings a ‘‘quantitative focus to devotional obligation’’ even as it attends to the affective dimension of praise. Glimp’s approach reorients critical attention from Herbert’s concern with selfhood as the ‘‘exclusive or ultimate horizon’’ in the poems by locating the self in an expansive community of human and nonhuman agents, in what may be called a devotional version of actor-network theory and an updating of the traditional book of nature. This affirmative view of the devotional creature counters the abject status of the creature in political theology, subjected to an earthly sovereign—with contemporary relevance to charges of Stuart absolutism—whose power to suspend law reduces the human creature to ‘‘bare life,’’ shorn of basic rights. While institutional and economic forces are implicit in Herbert’s devotional poetics, they are overt and integral to Elizabethan theatrical practices in Donald Hedrick’s ‘‘Entertaining Friends: Falstaff ’s Parasitology.’’ This essay takes a materialist approach to early modern theater as entertainment, focusing on the character Falstaff as embodiment and ‘‘metafigure’’ for the theater, especially in his relationship to Prince Hal, which opposes the two as both friends and rivals in their shifting positions as entertainer and entertained. This ‘‘competitive/collaborative’’ model of friendship, dyadic rather than binary, plays out in a series of individual and institutional relationships between author and actors, between rival actors, and between rival audiences who collectively and preinterpretively produce the theater experience. Hedrick coins the term ‘‘entertainment unconscious’’ for the fluid and volatile energies driving these relationships. Within this context, what he finds striking about Falstaff as friend is his associations with nature, especially animal nature. These speak to his ‘‘fail[ure] to be a figure of capitalist accumulation.’’ Especially in his ‘‘persistent action of staging non-action,’’ Falstaff ’s parasitology incarnates in the figural politics of theater a radical potential for refusal—as in Agamben’s sense of the ‘‘potentiality to notbe’’—of the market forces that would, and often do, shape theatrical productions as entertainments. Like the preceding three essays, by Berger, Glimp, and Hedrick, the last essay in this volume, Julian Yates’s ‘‘Skin Merchants: Jack Cade’s Futures and the Figural Politics of Henry VI, Part II,’’ focally engages the world of nonhuman creatures. It also serves to gather up many earlier thematic threads—sacred, scientific, economic, political, semiotic, and above all figurative in Lyotard’s tripartite sense of this fertile concept as matrix, form, and image. Specifically like Hedrick, Yates locates the politics of the figure

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in Shakespearean theater. He reads the Cade sequence as performing a momentary awareness of the power of the figure in the skin of the ‘‘innocent lamb’’ turned parchment for a legal document. In attending to the figure, Yates draws on Lyotard’s image of the figure as a ‘‘crumpled form’’ (of words on a wind-rippled banner) folding in energies hidden from the surface and operating tropically to ‘‘sutur[e] . . . matter and semiosis.’’ He further draws on Donna Haraway’s extension of this sense of the figure (in her redescription of the trope of metaplasm) to ‘‘a network or assemblage of differently animated actors (human, animal, plant, and mineral) who exchange properties (biological, semiotic, and figurative) as they collectively constitute the world.’’ Within this finely tuned theoretical context, Yates suggests an analysis that unfolds a ‘‘crumpled figure into its topology’’ and reveals the links and actors comprising the network. In the Cade sequence, Jack ‘‘recovers’’ in the figure of the lamb’s skin the ‘‘missing actor of an institutionally sanctioned mode of writing.’’ This recovery ‘‘marks the first step in a renegotiating of contracts (sacral, pastoral, legal, economic) that bind the commons to their king.’’ The sequence thus stages an ‘‘anti-writing utopia,’’ a violent ‘‘leveling of representational mechanisms’’ that in part effects social change, but that, even in directing its violence against sanctioned modes of writing, is itself a form of writing, an attempt at ‘‘reaching inside’’ the writing machine to ‘‘tinker with’’ its ‘‘routine mechanisms’’ and ‘‘refold ‘things’ differently.’’ For Yates, such a utopian sense of the refigurative potential of writing does not pertain merely to rebellion: instead, it implicates all interpretive acts, including ours as critics.

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Spenser’s Giant and the New Science mary thomas crane

Artegall’s debate with the egalitarian Giant in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene has long been recognized by readers as raising, more explicitly than elsewhere in the poem, issues about language and representation that are fundamental to it. In his eagerness to argue down the Giant, Artegall ends up contradicting the Proem to Book V (on the existence of change in the world), the description of his own upbringing in canto i (where he is able at least figuratively to weigh right and wrong in a balance), and, ironically for a fictional character in an allegorical poem, denigrating the power of language and figuration to provide access to truth. Annabel Patterson has argued that the episode highlights the difference between allegorical icon and complex metaphor such that ‘‘allegory itself comes under interrogation’’ as inadequate to express the realities of the ‘‘concrete instance.’’1 Judith Anderson has shown how Artegall’s extreme idealism involves a mistrust of language itself (in its material and figurative dimensions) that becomes increasingly pronounced in the rest of the poem.2 In general, readings of this episode relate its self-contradictions and its doubts about the ability of language to represent truth to the increasing pessimism of the later books of the poem. That pessimism is, in turn, usually related to Spenser’s experiences in Ireland, the economic and political crises in Europe to which Book V alludes, and his failure to gain support from the English court.3 I would like to propose taking the Giant’s balance historically as a scientific instrument, and taking the scientific revolution as a relevant context for Spenser’s epistemological uncertainties in this episode. Doing so reveals how the astronomical issues raised in the Proem are inextricably related to the imbalance of elements that the Giant seeks to redress with his scales. It also provides evidence that the Giant’s weighing project, although still politically dangerous, is not as fanciful as Artegall (and some critics) have thought. New questions about the stability and intelligibility of the universe 19

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raised in the last quarter of the sixteenth century help us understand the particular form of the Giant’s project and Artegall’s resistance to it. Along with new ideas about the structure of the universe and behavior of matter came altered assumptions about the relationship between the appearance of the world and the causes of natural phenomena, and about how human beings can gain access to knowledge about causal reality. When the Giant and Artegall argue about whether the elements are disordered, whether unsubstantial things can be weighed, and whether unlike things can be compared, they reference specific debates ongoing among mathematicians and natural philosophers in the period. John Dee’s ‘‘Mathematicall Praeface’’ to Billingsley’s translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometrie (1570) and Thomas Digges’s addendum to his father’s Prognostication Everlasting (1576) provide a context for the Giant’s debate with Artegall. Spenser may well have had Dee’s preface in mind when writing this episode. Artegall’s self-contradictions echo epistemological ruptures and inconsistencies that were common as early modern thinkers struggled to understand a universe that no longer revealed its truths on the surface. As far as I know, no one has made a sustained argument that the scientific revolution provided a significant context for Spenser’s poem. Given Spenser’s determinedly retrograde poetics—his use of allegory, archaic language, and the frameworks of Neoplatonic and Christian belief—such an argument might seem bizarrely wrong-headed. Judith Anderson has, however, suggested that contemporary developments in astronomy provide a context for the Proem to Book V.4 I want to develop this suggestion to show that the late sixteenth-century breakdown of the Aristotelian scientific synthesis seriously threatened belief in the stability and intelligibility of the natural world, that Spenser was aware of these developments and affected by the resulting epistemological crisis, and that the Proem to Book V and episode of the Giant are crucially shaped by a welter of new ideas about the nature of the material world.

The End of the Aristotelian Universe and What It Meant Literary scholars have tended to see the end of the Aristotelian worldview through a humanist lens, emphasizing that it was prompted by a rejection of excessive reliance on scholastic authority in favor of a return to careful reading of non-Aristotelian texts from the ancient world.5 According to this account, humanism contributed to the scientific revolution in two ways: by rediscovering ancient texts (for example, those by proponents of atomism)

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that challenged Aristotle and also, ultimately, by paving the way for empirical science to substitute experiment for reliance on authority.6 According to this view, the Aristotelian theories of the natural world were obviously incorrect but were maintained out of reverence for authority and quickly rejected once scientists began to apply the empirical method to nature. Seen in this light, the scientific revolution had little direct impact on literature in England until the seventeenth century. However, since the influential work of Thomas Kuhn, historians of science have complicated this view and have emphasized the long period preceding the discoveries of the seventeenth century in which the Aristotelian account of the natural world began to seem increasingly inadequate to explain certain aspects of it, especially the physics of projectiles, the perceived irregularities in the orbits of the planets, and the mechanics of chemical transmutation.7 These historians also emphasize the reasons for the lasting appeal of this system in spite of its shortcomings and therefore highlight the disorienting nature of its loss. Kuhn attributes the long dominance of the Aristotelian system to the fact that it ‘‘was far nearer to many primitive conceptions of the world than its ancient competitors, and it corresponded more closely with the evidence of unaided sense perception.’’8 Steven Shapin describes how the introduction of atomic theories of matter worked ‘‘like the Copernican view of the world’’ to drive ‘‘a wedge between the domain of philosophical legitimacy and that of common sense’’ such that ‘‘our actual sensory experience . . . offered no reliable guide to how the world really was.’’9 Thus, there was a significant gap between widespread knowledge that the Aristotelian system was failing and the establishment of a clear and convincing substitute for it. Although mathematicians and natural philosophers in late sixteenth-century England such as Thomas Hariot, John Dee, Thomas Digges, and Robert Recorde found speculations about the Copernican universe or an atomic theory of matter to be exciting, less scientifically adept thinkers who became aware of these ideas found them unsettling, as established beliefs about the stability and intelligibility of the universe were questioned.10 John Donne, of course, famously alludes to this breakdown in ‘‘The First Anniversary,’’ where he laments the fact that the ‘‘new Philosophy calls all in doubt,’’ destroying the existing model of the universe and elements and their stability or ‘‘cohaerance.’’11 Although Spenser is not as willing as Donne to address these issues explicitly, he is equally aware of and disturbed by them.12

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22 Mary Thomas Crane

It is important to note that the Aristotelian theories of matter, motion, and cosmology were inextricably interconnected. Thus, the astronomical issues raised in the Proem to Spenser’s Book V are not separable from the Giant’s subsequent discussion of weight and balance and the epistemological issues it raises. Aristotelian physics is crucially based on what Margaret Osler has called an ‘‘essentialist’’ view of things in the world, assuming that ‘‘our observations in some manner reveal the inner nature of objects to us.’’13 We have not, I believe, adequately registered the implications of the breakdown of this essentialist epistemology. For Aristotle, the observable qualities of the natural world revealed their constitutive elements, and therefore their essential nature. Only ordinary experience of nature yielded truth about its causes; experimentation could not do so because it created artificial and unnatural conditions that might alter the course of nature, but could reveal nothing ‘‘essential’’ about the phenomena in question.14 Aristotle recognized that some things in nature had hidden causes but that these could not be discovered by artificial means. Aristotelian essentialism also maintained that number (the discrete units of counting) and magnitude (the continuous units of size: length, area, weight, etc.) were fundamentally different in kind, and that different kinds of magnitude (distance, time, force) were incommensurate and could not be compared in the same expression.15 These beliefs prevented progress in fields like the physics of motion, since entities like distance, force, and time could not appear in the same equation. Instead, motion was explicable only through knowledge of the essential qualities of matter. Aristotle thus considered all change to be a function of the essential nature of things in the world, because all things changed to move toward their appropriate end or telos: seeds grow into plants, grape juice changes into wine, because these are their destined ends.16 Everything in the sublunary world was composed of four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—and these elements were relatively heavy or light because it is the essential nature of an element to seek its proper place in the universe. Earth, as the heaviest element, seeks the center, so heavy objects fall to earth because they are composed largely of earth and therefore seek the center of the universe; flames rise because fire seeks the heavens.17 In the Aristotelian system (and its Ptolemaic elaboration), the structure of the cosmos is based on these essential and observable properties of the elements. The earth must be stationary and must be located at the center of the universe because it is the nature of heavy earth to seek the center, and of matter to remain motionless unless disturbed. As the English mathematician

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Thomas Digges summarizes the Aristotelian position in 1576 (in order to argue against it), ‘‘the most effectual reasons they produce to proove the Earthes stabilitie in the middle or lowest part of the worlde, is that of Gravitie and Levitie. For of all other the Element of the earth (say they) is most heavie, and all ponderous thinges are caryed unto it, stryvinge (as it were) to sway even downe to the inmost part thereof.’’18 As Kuhn notes, ‘‘in the absence of external pushes derived ultimately from the heavens, each of the terrestrial elements would remain at rest in that part of the terrestrial region natural to it.’’19 Thus Artegall echoes orthodox Aristotelian theory when he tells the Giant: The earth was in the middle centre pight, In which it doth immoveable abide, Hemd in with waters like a wall in sight; And they with aire, that not a drop can slide: Al which the heavens containe, and in their courses guide.20

Of course, in practice the elements on earth are not arranged in this orderly fashion. According to Aristotle, they are disturbed by the motions of the heavenly spheres and by the influence of the sun and planets. Ultimately, though, the quantity of each element is fixed, and their movement stabilized—‘‘contained’’—by their teleology and by the orderliness of the heavenly spheres and the presence of the highest sphere of fixed stars, which was composed of an eternal fifth element and not subject to change.21 The study of weight (and balances), however, provided an exception in antiquity to the Aristotelian dogma that deemed artificial experimentation to be untrustworthy and unable to penetrate to the hidden causes of things. It also provided a way for unlike things (such as distance and weight) to be compared, and for qualitative phenomena to be quantified, at least in a rudimentary way.22 The science of weight brought to bear the idealizing world of mathematics on the material world of weight and balance. The pseudo-Aristotelian ‘‘Mechanics’’ begins by acknowledging that ‘‘Remarkable things occur in accordance with nature, the cause of which is unknown, and others occur contrary to nature, which are produced by skill for the benefit of mankind.’’23 According to Jurgen Renn and his colleagues, the balance was, from its invention ‘‘in the first half of the 3rd millennium b.c.’’ the first artificial instrument invented for the purpose of measurement (in a period when other forms of measurement were based on ‘‘natural units’’ such as body parts).24 The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise bases many of its insights on observation of balances and levers, both of which, it acknowledges, are artificial constructions that alter the course of nature.25 It also uses

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geometry to understand the principles behind the operation of the balance, and in so doing violates an Aristotelian bias against mixing the pure realm of mathematics and the study of material phenomena.26 Archimedes (to whom the Giant alludes when he boasts that ‘‘all the world he would weigh equallie,/If ought he had the same to counterpoys’’) was thus able to build on this approach to achieve a complex theorization of weight and balance that was not limited by Aristotle’s theory of the elements. The science of weight continued to be elaborated through the medieval period, culminating in a treatise by Nicholas of Cusa, Idiota de staticis experimentis, which advocates using a balance to determine the proportion of elements in various substances and ultimately to weigh immaterial things like musical notes, friendship, and animosity.27 John Dee refers to ‘‘Statike,’’ or the science of weight, in his preface to Euclid, summarizing sections from the pseudoAristotelian treatise, Archimedes, and Nicholas of Cusa in passages that provide a striking analogue to Spenser’s Giant.28 Aristotle’s essentialist system offers a natural world that is stable—its perceivable change is controlled by a belief in teleology, and by the fixity of the highest heavenly sphere. It is also intelligible, since the visible and sensible qualities of matter were thought to give reliable access to the truth about its essential nature and to causal explanations of its behavior. On the other hand, there were phenomena that it could not explain very well, and by the end of the sixteenth century the Aristotelian system was beginning to fray around the edges. The Aristotelian theory of motion (that things remain at rest unless moved, and that heavy objects seek the center) could not explain the movement of projectiles, and Galileo and others developed theories of motion that abstracted it from the essential nature of matter and saw it, instead, as a temporary and relative state.29 Galileo and others (including Thomas Hariot in England) also began to be attracted by atomic theories of matter, which seemed better able to explain transmutation phenomena and better able to be reconciled with mathematics. The movements of the stars and planets did not, in fact, correspond to the perfectly circular spheres that Aristotle posited, and an increasingly complex system grew up to explain them, until Copernicus did so by arguing that the earth rotated on its axis and revolved around the sun. More accurate observations of the heavens led to the discovery of a new star in 1572, and proof that comets were located above the moon in the realm of the fixed stars, thus introducing change into the realm that stabilized the rest of the universe with its fixity. The universe became simultaneously less stable and less intelligible as the data of common sense and daily experience were questioned on all sides.

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In the seventeenth century, proponents of the new science found strategies to restore a measure of stability and intelligibility to the world. As Keith Hutchinson has argued, the Scientific Revolution redefined the concept of intelligibility when scientists like Boyle and Descartes moved away from the earlier idea that what was insensible was unintelligible, to a belief that sensible qualities were not indicative of the nature of matter and that, instead, only the insensible substrate of atoms was ‘‘intelligible.’’30 Such scientists became able to see the special conditions of experiment as offering an analogy for—and therefore significant truth about—the ordinary workings of nature. As Peter Dear notes, seventeenth-century experimentalists were able to believe that experiments yielded significant information about nature only by assuming that ‘‘what happens in such a situation [an experiment]’’ is a ‘‘metaphorical identification’’ with ‘‘what happens in nature.’’31 Seventeenth-century scientists stabilized the world by imagining that it was based on invisible mechanisms that ran like clockwork.32 But in the last thirty years of the sixteenth century, these solutions to epistemological rupture were not yet in effect. An educated non-scientist like Spenser could employ tools inherited from the past to patch together the cosmos: Neoplatonism could restore order and fixity; Christianity could restore teleology; allegory could forcibly render the surface of the world intelligible. The patchwork nature of the repairs, however, remains visible on the surface of the poem in its doublings and contradictions.

How Much Did Spenser Know? Edmund Spenser was in a position to know quite a bit about the discoveries and speculations that were disturbing the Aristotelian cosmos in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Because of his familiarity with issues related to calendrical reform, he would have known about the irregularities in planetary and stellar motion (to which he alludes in the Proem to Book V and again in the Mutabilitie Cantos) that caused some to question the Ptolemaic system. Frances Yates has argued that Spenser was acquainted with John Dee, who was involved with calendrical reform and whose student, Thomas Digges, was the first person to explain the Copernican system in print in English and also published an account of Tycho Brahe’s observation of a new star, confirming its location above the moon in the realm of the fixed stars.33 Dee owned several copies of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise on mechanics, and also the treatise by Nicholas of Cusa, Idiota de staticis experimentis, which describes a series of experiments to be performed with a

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balance or ‘‘weight scales’’ designed to investigate the nature of the four elements, and he alludes to both works in his preface to Euclid, which Spenser seems to have read. As Alison Chapman has argued, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender acknowledges and is shaped by contemporary controversy over calendar reform.34 Precession of the equinoxes, the movement of the celestial poles in a twenty-six-thousand-year cycle, meant that the position of the celestial equator, and thus the equinoxes, changed over time. This movement led to a discrepancy between the sidereal year (as determined by the movement of the sun in relation to the stars) and the tropical year, determined by the equinoxes. By the 1570s the Julian calendar was off by about ten days, and the Pope instituted reforms to fix the discrepancy. According to Kuhn, Copernicus’s ‘‘concern with the calendar therefore led him to a serious study of precession, and thus to an intimate knowledge of that aspect of astronomy about which Ptolemaic astronomers were in the greatest disagreement.’’35 In 1582, Dee was asked by Elizabeth’s privy council to come up with a plan for an English calendar, so that England would not have to adopt the Catholic Gregorian calendar.36 As Chapman notes, four English bishops, including Bishop Young, by whom Spenser was employed in the late 1570s, were asked to consider the issue of calendrical reform. Spenser would thus have been exposed to these issues in multiple ways. A vernacular astronomical treatise called the Prognostication Everlasting, originally published by Leonard Digges in 1556 and then revised and augmented by his son Thomas (Dee’s student) in 1576, provides a striking example of the changing attitude toward Aristotelian and Ptolemaic theory in late sixteenth-century England and the epistemological implications of this change. The full title of the treatise describes its subject matter: ‘‘containing . . . rules to judge the weather by the Sunne, Moone, Starres, Cometes, Rainebow, Thunder, Cloudes, with other extraordinary tokens.’’ Leonard’s treatise is firmly based on Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy, since it proceeds from the assumption that the disturbance of the elements on earth (and therefore the weather) is caused by the movement of the heavenly spheres. He assumes, also, a universe that provides readable ‘‘tokens’’ of natural causes on its surface, and Spenser will use a cognate of the word, betoken, in the Giant episode. The final section of the book provides various tables for determining things like the phases of the moon, culminating in a perpetual calendar. Leonard’s treatise assumes a stable universe, bounded by the unchanging heavenly spheres and intelligible through ‘‘tokens’’ visible to all observers.

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Thomas Digges, however, in 1576 added an appendix that sought to correct his father’s outmoded view of the universe. Digges significantly views the Copernican system as more stable, because it resolves the complex irregularities in the Ptolemaic system, including precession, but as less immediately intelligible, because it violates the evidence of the senses. He points out that his father’s ‘‘Modill’’ of the universe, based on the Ptolemaic system, had recently been replaced by a ‘‘new Theorick or Modil’’ in which the sun, not the earth, was located at the center of the cosmos. Thomas notes that the Ptolemaic system had become unstable, as it had ‘‘more and more’’ been discovered to contain ‘‘continuall errors’’ and ‘‘infinite absurdities’’ (Mr). Digges, grounded in Dee’s Neoplatonism, embraces a sun-centered universe as more stable than its Ptolemaic alternative: ‘‘the whole Globe of mortalitie is caryed yearely round about the Sunne, which like a king in the middest of all raygneth and giveth lawes of motion to the rest’’ (Mr). As a result, although ‘‘the Sunne and great Globe of fixed starres seeme to sway about and turne, albeit indeede they remayne fixed’’ (Mr). For Digges, the Copernican argument that the earth moves explains away the troubling evidence (of precession) that the sphere of fixed stars actually moved: ‘‘For albeit sundry Astrologians finding alterations in the declination and longitude of Starres, have thought that the same also should have his motion peculiar: yet Copernicus by the motions of the earth salveth al’’ (Nr). The fact that the universe doesn’t appear to work this way doesn’t bother Digges, and he first simply remarks that ‘‘so many wayes is the sense of mortall men abused’’ (Mr) by the appearance of the world. He then sounds a Baconian note when he asks ‘‘why shall we so much dote in the appearaunce of our sences, which many wayes may bee abused’’ (Mv). Digges, however, substitutes for sense data ‘‘the Rule of Reason, which the great God hath given us as a lamp’’ (Mv). For Digges, as the sun stabilizes and fixes the cosmos, so God-given reason provides intelligibility when the senses fail. English mathematicians were at the forefront of Europe in the acceptance of new ideas, and there were other mathematicians in late sixteenth-century England who were able to share Digges’s excitement about them. Thomas Hariot, for instance, speculated that matter was based not on the elements but on tiny atomic particles, which he attempted to correlate with geometric points.37 At least some of these thinkers shared with John Dee a version of mathematical Platonism that rendered these new ideas less threatening. In his preface to Euclid (1570), Dee describes mathematics as uniquely able to mediate between the idealized world of Platonic forms and the material

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world. He divides all things into ‘‘Supernaturall’’ (‘‘immateriall, simple, indivisible, incorruptible, and unchangeable’’), ‘‘Naturall’’ (‘‘materiall, compounded, divisible, corruptible, and chaungeable’’) and ‘‘of a third being’’ (‘‘Thynges Mathematicall’’).38 Things mathematical are a third being because ‘‘beyng (in a maner) middle, betwene thinges supernaturall and naturall,’’ they ‘‘are not so absolute and excellent, as thinges supernatural: Nor yet so base and grosse, as things naturall.’’ Things mathematical ‘‘are thinges immateriall: and neverthelesse, by materiall things hable somewhat to be signified’’ (iv). Dee argues that mathematical ‘‘Formes’’ ‘‘are constant, unchaungeable, untransformable, and incorruptible. Neither of the sense, can they, at any tyme, be perceived or judged.’’ However, we do have access to ‘‘images’’ of these forms which are ‘‘aggregable and divisible.’’ Both number and magnitude in their pure forms partake of the ideal, but in their represented forms participate in the material world. For Dee and Digges, Platonism provides a way to interpret the Copernican universe as stable—because it seemed more in tune with the mathematical framing of the universe and because the sun represented a suitable center for a Neoplatonic universe. Neoplatonism also solves the problem of intelligibility, because the deceptiveness of appearances was to be expected when the material world only dimly reflects the perfect mathematical forms that lie behind it. Things mathematical, however, offer the possibility of ‘‘somewhat’’ signifying the ideal through the material. Both Patterson and Anderson have seen Artegall’s debate with the Giant as, in part, a conflict between Platonic idealism and the realities of the material world, suggesting that the victory of idealism seems forced and that its inadequacies in accounting for the complexities of the material world are made clear. Spenser’s treatment of precession and the nature of matter in Book V shows that he was torn between rival views of the world, and that he was unable fully to embrace the grounds for optimism that were shared by Digges and Dee. While the Giant accepts a disordered material universe at face value and believes that an artificial instrument can reveal truth and restore order, Artegall insists that the disordered appearance of the world does not, in fact, give access to truth about it. What Leonard Digges saw as reliable ‘‘tokens’’ are, for Artegall, unreliable if they don’t support his preexisting assumptions about the order and stability of the cosmos. The Giant’s balance represents the appeal and dangers of a new experimentalism and a newly analogical approach to scientific truth.

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Book V and the New Astronomy Spenser’s Proem to Book V offers a pessimistic account of the decline of the world, calling on accounts of the successive ‘‘ages’’ of the world, from an initial golden age to a current degenerate ‘‘stonie one,’’ found in various classical sources. However, Spenser introduces a new twist when he links the conventional Ovidian account of social decline to disorder in the heavens, taking four stanzas to describe the precession of the equinoxes: For who so list into the heavens looke, And search the courses of the rowling spheares, Shall find that from the point, where they first tooke Their setting forth, in these few thousand yeares They all are wandered much. (V.Pro.5)

Spenser goes on to refer to the obliquity of the ecliptic in some detail: the sun ‘‘is miscaried with the other Spheres./For since the terme of fourteene hundred yeres,/That learned Ptolomae his hight did take,/He is declined from that marke of theirs,/Nigh thirtie minutes to the Southerne lake.’’39 Spenser also refers to the irregularity of planetary orbits, noting that ‘‘most is Mars amisse of all the rest, /And next to him old Saturne, that was wont be best’’ (V.Pro.8). Astronomical observers had been aware of precession and the irregularity of planetary orbits since antiquity. However, these phenomena had been ‘‘explained’’ through elaborations of Aristotle’s original cosmology: eighth and ninth celestial spheres were added to the system to account for the motion of the fixed stars, and a complex system of epicycles added to account for the irregular motion of the planets. According to orthodox Aristotelian/ Ptolemaic theory, there would be no reason to associate precession with ‘‘wandering,’’ or decline. However, the pressing issue of calendar reform in the sixteenth century led Copernicus, among others, to reconsider the phenomenon of precession and to offer an alternate explanation for it. Spenser, in this passage, shows off a technical knowledge of precession probably gained through his involvement in the debate about reforming the calendar. In this context, precession becomes a sign of the beginning of the end of the Aristotelian universe, and therefore of its stability and intelligibility. When Spenser has Mutabilitie refer to irregular planetary orbits and precession, she notes that ‘‘these Star-gazers’’ are ‘‘stonisht’’ and ‘‘damne their

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lying bookes’’—the accounts by Aristotle and his commentators that are called into question by the irregularity of the heavens (VII.vii.52). Mutabilitie argues that precession, the fact that ‘‘the Starres and Signes therein still move’’ (VII.vii.55), suggests that the supposedly unchanging realm of fixed stars was, in fact, subject to alteration and therefore to decay. Historically, precession had not been taken as a sign of alteration in that realm, since it was attributed to the motion of crystalline spheres. Tycho Brahe’s observations of the supernova in 1572, however, demonstrated that this new star was located above the moon and therefore proved that change did occur in the area of the heavens that was formerly believed to be unchanging. Thomas Digges replicated Brahe’s observations in his Alae seu Scalae of 1573, confirming the location of the new star among the fixed stars, and Dee did the same in an unpublished manuscript, ‘‘De stella admiranda.’’40 Spenser was probably moved to take a more pessimistic view of the phenomenon of precession as a sign of instability, unintelligibility, and decline, by his knowledge of observations made ‘‘of late’’ that proved the realm of fixed stars was subject to change.

The Science of Weight The Giant’s attempt to use a balance to restore the proportion of elements in the world is directly related, in several ways, to the developments in science to which the Proem alludes. We should recall that the position of the earth at the center of the Ptolemaic universe is a function of its weight: according to Aristotle, the earth must be at the center because the heavy element of earth naturally seeks the center. Under ideal circumstances, the four elements would arrange themselves as Artegall describes, in concentric spheres of earth, water, air, and fire. However, according to Aristotle, weather on earth, caused by the influence of the sun and planetary spheres, disturbs this ideal arrangement to create the conditions that we experience: wind and water disturb and redistribute earth. Ultimately, these disturbances are kept under control by the influence of the fixed stars, and by the teleology of the elements themselves. If, however, the structure of the universe is questioned, the stability of the elements might also be open to question. If earth doesn’t naturally seek the center, what is to keep it from flying off into the heavens? If the fixed stars are not fixed, what lends stability to the system? The Giant’s belief that the balance of elements on earth has become disturbed would be a plausible corollary of the astronomical disturbances described in the Proem. The

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Giant’s use of a balance to attempt to restore the order of the elements on earth might seem like a similarly plausible use of a scientific instrument to understand and master the material world. In his preface to Euclid, Dee includes an account of ‘‘Statike,’’ ‘‘an Arte Mathematicall, which demonstrateth the causes of heavynes, and lightnes of all thynges: and of motions and properties, to heavynes and lightnes, belonging’’ (b4r). Dee lists ‘‘Statike’’ among branches of mathematics that are derived ‘‘from the puritie, absolutnes, and Immaterialitie of Principall Geometrie’’ and applied to measurement of material things (a3v). Dee is concerned to relate most human endeavors to mathematics, and the description of the science of weight is preceded by a claim (based on passages from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics) that justice is dependent on arithmetic: ‘‘Nor (Justice in infinite Cases) without due proportion, (narrowly considered,) is hable to be executed,’’ especially by someone who must ‘‘decide with aequitie, the infinite varietie of Cases’’ (air–v). Dee also provides a history of practical geometry, arguing that it arose in antiquity to remeasure boundaries ‘‘when Boundes and meres of land and ground were lost’’ whenever some force ‘‘did wrongfully limite, measure, encroach, or challenge (by pretence of just content, and measure) those landes and groundes’’ (a2r–v). Spenser’s Giant similarly seeks to redress elements that have ‘‘encroched uppon others share’’ (V.ii.32).41 Dee presents ‘‘Statike’’ as an experiment-based science: ‘‘by the Bilanx, or Balance (as the chief sensible instrument,) Experience of these demonstrations may be had: we call this Art, Statike: that is, the Experimentes of the Balance.’’ (b4r–v). Dee provides a summary of some of Archimedes’ findings about buoyancy and then (most probably) alludes to experiments proposed by Nicholas of Cusa to determine the proportions of the elements: ‘‘Moreover, by the foresaid propositions (wisely used.) The Ayre, the water, the Earth, the Fire, may be nerely, knowen, how light or heavy they are (Naturally) in their assigned partes: or in the whole. And then, to thinges Elementall, turning your practise: you may deale for the proportion of the Elementes, in the thinges Compounded’’ (cir). The Giant’s project of determining the original proportions of the elements does not seem fanciful in light of this claim. Dee seems to equate the mental ‘‘weighing’’ of evidence in the mind with the experimental truth provided by the balance: ‘‘Frende, I pray you, way these thinges, with the just Balance of Reason. And you will finde Mervailes, upon Mervailes: and esteme one Drop of Truth (yea in Naturall Philosophie) more worth, then whole

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Libraries of Opinions, undemonstrated: or not aunswering to Natures Law, and your experience’’ (cir). Dee then provides directions for using the balance to solve otherwise difficult or impossible geometric problems involving the comparative volumes of solids, by filling them with water and comparing the weights of the amount of water that would fill each one. Here again, Dee sees the balance as a means of revealing truth ‘‘which, long hath bene wished for’’ by bridging the ideal world of mathematics with the material world of matter and mass: ‘‘And though it be Naturally done and Mechanically: yet hath it a good Demonstration Mathematicall’’ (c3r). Despite these optimistic claims about the access to hidden truth provided by the balance, Dee is moved to interrupt his optimistic account of experimental science with a religious interjection that sounds like Artegall, and echoes some of the Bible verses to which he refers. Dee himself apologizes for this digression, which he calls a ‘‘pang’’: ‘‘Mervaile nothing at this pang (godly frend, you Gentle and zelous Student.) An other day, perchaunce, you will perceive, what occasion moved me’’ (b4v). After urging readers to be aware of ‘‘what proffit, (all maner of wayes) by this Arte might grow,’’ Dee addresses God: ‘‘Thou onely, knowest all thinges precisely (O God) who hast made weight and Balance, thy Judgement: who hast created all thinges in Number, Waight, and Measure: and hast wayed the mountaines and hils in a Balance: who hast peysed in thy hand, both Heaven and earth’’ (b4v). ‘‘Peised’’ (weighed) is another word that appears in Spenser’s account of the Giant, and nowhere else in his poem. For Dee, the balance provides a way to gain access to aspects of nature that are hidden from view and to quantify complex phenomena. Without explicitly doubting the Aristotelian system, he nevertheless looks forward to modern experimental science by suggesting that the ordinary evidence of the senses needs to be supplemented with data provided by a scientific instrument if the ‘‘hidden’’ truths of nature are to be discerned.42 The balance also provides a means of comparing very different kinds of things to each other, potentially in violation of Aristotelian essentialism. The need to discern these hidden causes becomes even more pressing after Aristotle’s essentialist worldview begins to be questioned. If the observed nature of things doesn’t reveal their essence, how do you connect appearance with reality? One way to make this connection, as we have seen, is through experiment and analogy. If the causes and real nature of things are no longer what they seem, you must learn to understand them by analogy with what you can

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see; the mechanistic universe of the seventeenth century is this kind of analogy.43 We can’t see the underlying structure of atoms, but we can understand how they work by analogy with clockwork mechanisms. In the early modern period, a corollary of the general abstraction from essential qualities was an expansion of what was considered to be commensurable: things are no longer identical to themselves, but they can be understood by comparison with very different things.44 Whether or not Spenser knew Dee’s preface, the Giant’s use of balances to redistribute the elements offers enough technical detail about the process to make us view it in relation to the science of weight. Thus, although the biblical analogues that Spenser brings to bear call the Giant’s enterprise into question, its scientific provenance suggests that it could be imagined as an appropriate response to a disordered universe. If scientific speculation has rendered the universe unstable and unintelligible, one possible way to restore intelligibility and stability would be through scientific experiment. Spenser is both attracted to this possibility and terrified by it.

Allegory and Experiment Throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser presents us with a world—both landscape and characters—which, he repeatedly tells us, ought to be intelligible, but which rarely is. He sometimes uses naı¨ve allegory as a way of rendering the surface of his imagined world intelligible by fiat: a character is named Una and represents the singleness of truth.45 However, as most readers have noticed, the intelligible surface of Spenserian allegory refuses to stay that way: Una is doubled by a false spirit-Una and then again by Duessa. The Redcrosse Knight cannot tell the real Una from her constructed double, and virtually no one can tell the true Florimell from the false one. The poem repeatedly tells its characters (and readers) that they should be able to ‘‘read aright,’’ but Spenserian allegory repeatedly complicates itself to render the relationship between signifier and signified multiple and slippery. As Patterson has noted, the balance is introduced first as a simple, stable, and ‘‘highly abstract’’ icon of justice but becomes more complex when, in the hands of the giant, it becomes an instrument of more material, and less exact, comparison.46 The Giant-scientist looks forward to a newly focused use of analogy in an attempt to capture a stable truth about the material world. Historians of science have argued that early modern experimentalists such as Galileo and

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Boyle began to employ analogy in highly specialized ways to articulate theories about causal phenomena in nature when sensory data failed to provide direct access to causes rendered invisible by the end of the Aristotelian system. Lorraine Daston notes Galileo’s reluctant use of analogy (drawn from the pseudo-Aristotelian De mechanica) to convey ‘‘a subsensory explanation for manifest effects’’ of a continuum composed of separate atoms.47 Dedre Gentner and Michael Jeziorsky argue that Robert Boyle, like Galileo, uses a similarly specialized form of analogy to convey the insensible actions of atomic particles. For Gentner and Jeziorsky, Boyle’s focused analogies ‘‘are not concerned with whether corresponding components shared surface qualities’’ but rather work to establish ‘‘a common systematic relational structure.’’48 Like Galileo and Boyle, Spenser’s Giant uses his scales to compare things that are very different with respect to their apparent qualities (truth and falsehood) but which share a common relational structure with respect to weight. The episode as a whole, however, suggests that the Giant’s focused analogy is as inadequate to a full understanding of reality as is naı¨ve allegory. Spenser introduces the balance in Book V in its familiar form as an abstract symbol of justice: Artegall, the knight of Justice, is taught by Astraea ‘‘to weigh both right and wrong/In equall balance with due recompence/ And equitie’’ (V.i.7). Scales or balances were a common icon for justice from antiquity and as such provide Spenser with a stable referent for his allegory.49 The analogy between weighing in a balance and dispensing justice seems clear and unambiguous. However, in this image, as in the traditional image of the scales of justice, what is being weighed is not clear. Spenser says ‘‘to weigh both right and wrong in equall balance,’’ and so it is not clear whether ‘‘right’’ is in one pan of the balance and ‘‘wrong’’ in the other, or whether ‘‘both right and wrong’’ are weighed separately: two rival ‘‘rights’’ against each other, or two rival ‘‘wrongs.’’ In general, what is salient in the image of the balance is not what is being compared but the fairness of the mechanism as an instrument of comparison.50 In traditional iconography, the scales of justice are often depicted as empty: they offer the potential to compare two things, but what they compare is not important. A related tradition depicts the weighing of souls at the last judgment, where a soul is weighed against collected sins, good deeds, or the gospel—again, what is compared is of less importance than the act of unbiased comparison.51 As a static allegorical icon of justice, the balance in Book V, canto i, represents the act of comparison as unproblematic.

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When the image of the balance returns later in canto ii, Spenser shifts our attention to what is being weighed and calls attention to the problematic nature of comparison. This image functions less as an allegorical emblem and more as a complex metaphorical representation of the use of an artificial instrument to determine truths about the natural world, and of the use of scientific analogy itself to compare unlike things to each other. In canto ii, Artegall encounters a Giant who is ‘‘holding forth on hie/An huge great paire of ballance in his hand,/With which he boasted in his surquedrie,/ That all the world he would weigh equallie’’ (V.ii.30). Like Dee’s investigator of ‘‘Statike,’’ the giant will use his balances to compare the proportions of the elements, variously offering to weigh sea against earth, fire against air, heaven against hell and thereby repair the damage that had ensued over the years as each ‘‘had encroched uppon others share’’ and made their proportions unequal. Like Dee as well, the Giant believes that weighing can give insight into human behavior (‘‘so were realmes and nations run awry’’) and potentially rectify it. Artegall echoes Dee’s brief religious ‘‘pang’’ when he strenuously objects to this project, arguing that the Giant’s attempt to ‘‘weigh the world anew/ and all things to an equall to restore’’ is ‘‘great wrong’’ (V.ii.36). Artegall argues that the elements have been so bounded by God that ‘‘mongst them al no change hath yet beene found,’’ directly contradicting the Proem’s claim that the universe has altered and declined. Like Dee, Artegall points out that the elements were all created ‘‘in goodly measure, by their Makers might, /And weighed out in ballaunces so nere, / That not a dram was missing of their right’’ (V.ii.35). As Anderson notes, the Giant counters with an appeal to the evidence of the senses: like an orthodox Aristotelian he directs Artegall to ‘‘plainely see’’ how the sea does ‘‘encroach’’ upon the earth.52 The Giant accepts the Aristotelian faith in appearances, but they lead him (like Copernicus) to question the stability of the universe. Like Thomas Digges and Dee, the Giant believes that scientific discovery can create an alternative and more compelling order in the universe; unlike Digges, he does not believe that the senses are deceptive, arguing, instead, like Dee, that an instrument like the balance can reveal hidden truth and restore order. Artegall, on the other hand, is like Thomas Digges in preferring stability to intelligibility. He contradicts the evidence of the senses to insist on an idealized version of order. Anderson rightly argues that Artegall’s preference for mind over matter is Neoplatonic, and it resembles a passage in Dee’s preface where he compares astronomy and music as ‘‘sister’’ arts of the eye and ear respectively, but as arts in which the evidence of the senses must be

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perfected by the mind: ‘‘as Astronomie hath a more divine Contemplation, and commodity, then mortall eye can perceive: So, is Musike to be considered, that the Minde may be preferred, before the eare’’ (b2v). But Artegall also insists on an orthodox Aristotelian essentialism: it is impossible, he argues, to compare unlike things like truth and falsehood or right and wrong. Artegall also refuses to accept that an artificial instrument can provide access to truth about the material world. The balance cannot actually weigh right and wrong; it is just a symbolic representation of an act of judgment that must be carried out in the human mind. The balances ‘‘doe nought but right or wrong betoken.’’ Unlike Leonard Digges, Artegall inhabits a post-Aristotelian world in which the ‘‘tokens’’ presented by the face of nature cannot provide reassurance of its stability and intelligibility. He finds himself in the worst of all possible epistemological worlds. Although, like Dee and Thomas Digges, he uses Neoplatonic idealism to counter his anxiety about the complex unreadability of nature, he isn’t able to share their optimism that new mathematically informed approaches to nature can—as the Giant argues—restore its stability. The violent destruction of the Giant (whose own weight and the laws of force and momentum cause his downfall) provides the only possible outlet for Artegall’s epistemological impasse. The Giant’s balance is thus a scientific instrument, but it is also a figure for a new kind of analogy that needed to develop as the universe no longer yielded up its truths directly. In this sense, Foucault was wrong to argue that this period saw a movement from an episteme of resemblance to one of difference: in fact, there was a change from an epistemology of essentialism or identity, to one of analogy.53 Cognitive linguists have argued that human beings can conceive of immaterial and abstract concepts only by analogy with concrete spatial experience.54 Aristotelian science took these analogies as representing a literal causal connection between appearance and reality. The gap opened up by the end of the Aristotelian era was precisely a gap between the immaterial and invisible causes of things and their material manifestations; between a theory of nature and the piecemeal material manifestations of it yielded up by experiment. This was a gap that could be bridged only by analogy, and, as Daston and Gentner and Jeziorsky have shown, thinkers as different as Galileo and Boyle used analogy in careful and targeted ways to link theory with practice.55 What was lost—a sense of being in direct contact with the truth about a stable natural world—was compensated for by an expansion in what could be productively connected by analogy or comparison.

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Poetry, of course, has always had license to compare unlike things. In The Faerie Queene, however, Spenser seems to feel compelled to submit poetry to a more rigorous standard of truth. His Artegallian desire to use language to show that ‘‘truth is one, and right is ever one’’ (V.ii.48) comes up against his need to acknowledge the complexities of the material world. The episode of the Giant reveals that Spenser understood some of the epistemological implications that accompanied the beginnings of the new science, that he was attracted by the possibility that experiment could offer stable access to truth, but that ultimately he could not substitute scientific analogy for the openness of poetic figuration, choosing instead both conspicuously and dubiously to eliminate the gigantic spokesman for science. The beginning of Book V, along with the Mutabilitie Cantos, reveals the extent to which Spenser’s sense of truth was informed, and conflicted, by the most recent scientific advances of the time.

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The Sacramental Neuter and the Missing Body in Robert Southwell’s Poetics lowell gallagher

By a simplification that is clearly abusive, one can recognize in the entire history of philosophy an effort either to acclimatize or to domesticate the neuter by substituting for it the law of the impersonal and the reign of the universal, or an effort to challenge it by affirming the ethical primacy of the Self-Subject, the mystical aspiration to a singular Unique. The neuter is thus constantly expelled from our languages and our truths. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation1

Mindful of the hazard of abusive simplification, this essay ventures an excavation of the recalcitrant terrain opened up by Maurice Blanchot’s 1963 essay on the ‘‘thought of the neuter’’ from which the epigraph to this essay is taken. I want to hollow out a space in the archive of critical discourse on the neuter—from the Latin ne-uter, neither this nor that—in order to indicate how the enterprise of thinking the neuter, by which I mean treating the neuter as both object and tool of inquiry, offers a compelling opportunity, redeemed from the exile Blanchot describes, to rethink the nature and contours of the relation between represented self (the speaking ‘‘I’’), predicated community, historical occasion, and conjectured figures of divine agency in the sacramental poetics of Robert Southwell. Let me stipulate that the phrase ‘‘sacramental poetics’’ refers not only to early modern devotional writing on the mysteries and articles of faith shared and disputed by rival (Romanist and reformed) confessional identities. It also refers to the implied object of post-Enlightenment philosophical and theological inquiries into the question of how and where the trace of the sacred or sacramental may be said to appear—how it figures itself, becomes available to perception or 38

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thought even as it maintains its difference and distinction from what perception and thought can hold.2 To narrow the point, I want to suggest some ways in which an abiding trait of Robert Southwell’s poetics—the impulse to negotiate and even to absolve received distinctions between sacramental event, symbolic language, and exigent historical circumstance—harbors a profound intimacy not only with early modern expressions of the neuter, to which I’ll turn in a moment, but also with the phosphorescence of late modern critical reflection on the neuter—its flaring up, unruly and unaccommodating to axiomatic proposition, notably in the work of Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes. To bring such names, drawn from the turbulent stream of Francophone postwar philosophizing on literary space and ethics, under the canopy of a proposed intimacy with an Elizabethan poet—moreover, a poet still generally considered a ‘‘minor’’ figure in the literary canon3 —may well appear to raise more methodological questions than are worth the detour. What kind of intimacy could obtain between Southwell and Blanchot? The intimacy described in these pages has no obvious historical warranty—none, at least, that standard historiographic practice would recognize, relying as it does on a reflectionist model of textual production, the nuclear compact of text, author, and local milieu. That compact, however, typically begs the question of its represented historicity by occluding exemptions to the allegation of anachronism. As its widespread appeal in early modern scholarship suggests, the cultural materialist paradigm has proven an adroit corrective, teasing out signs of intimacy between historically disparate environments by proposing a dialectical relation among residual, dominant, and emergent formations over the longue dure´e. This is not to say that the corrective paradigm vitiates the question of anachronism. Rather, in its most critical formulations it interrogates the ideological purchase of anachronism. In common usage the term anachronism shores up the received sense of history as an unfolding continuum indebted to an organic model of development and implicitly mortgaged to narratives of cultural tradition and norms of literacy that are humanist and sociological in orientation. This is precisely the sense of history that the neuter interrupts and refigures. I began by indicating that my approach is a kind of excavation. To indicate more precisely how the interruptive dimension of the neuter contributes to the sense of intimacy I have in mind, I want to isolate one part of the archaeological metaphor—the ‘‘tool’’ part—and apply it here. There are obvious differences between the archaeologist’s and the literary critic’s tools, not least concerning the nature of the retrieved object and the received

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sense of the act of retrieval. The object is always physical for the former and only occasionally so for the latter, just as the sense of retrieval is necessarily literal for the archeologist whereas for the literary critic it is primarily metaphorical—an established part of the rhetoric of illumination applied to a mental construct. But the similarities are telling, in so far as these bear directly on the force of the neuter that I want to explore. In both situations the tool becomes part of the contextual surround of the object or construct, because it is responsible for making the object visible and enabling it to circulate in an interpretive community and to migrate across differently articulated interpretive communities. In both situations, the tool participates in the locality of the object without belonging to that locality in the organic or genetic sense of belonging (the sense on which demarcations of historical period and historicity typically rely). Put somewhat differently, the tool produces an intimate relation with its object that arises both from the tool’s figurative or prosthetic proximity to the object and its temporal and cultural distance from it. Intimacy of this kind is neither wholly proximate nor wholly distant, neither partisan nor impartial in an absolute sense. The intimacy born of the tool is, quite literally, neuter: ne-uter, neither this nor that.

 The encyclopedic instrumentality of the neuter is impressively conveyed in lectures given by Roland Barthes on the topic at the Colle`ge de France in 1977–78, which were published in 2002, though it must be said that the lectures also constitute an embarrassment of riches—playful testimony, as it were, to the neuter’s extravagant history. For my toolkit I select only those intuitions, starting with fragments from Barthes’ opus and moving into the sixteenth-century archive, that will help me track the passage of the neuter in two of Southwell’s overtly sacramental poems, ‘‘Of the Blessed sacrament of the Aulter’’ and ‘‘The Nativity of Christ.’’ This particular compact of figures for tracing the neuter isolates an important part of Southwell’s aspirations as a poet with both mystical and militant yearnings, even as the ensemble also indicates the unsettled merger of those yearnings and the challenge of translating them into social reality. I begin with Barthes’ inaugurating gesture: ‘‘I call Neutral everything that baffles [de´joue] the paradigm.’’4 And further: the ‘‘desire for Neutral’’ is desire for ‘‘suspension [e´poche´] of orders, laws, summons, arrogances, terrorisms, puttings on notice, the will-to-possess . . . suspension of narcissism: no longer to be afraid of images . . . to dissolve one’s own image (a wish that borders on the negative mystical discourse, or Zen or Tao).’’5 Though

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Barthes’ range of reference is encyclopedic, the lectures recurrently turn for inspiration to the seminal work of Maurice Blanchot on the neuter, particularly the two essays on the topic in The Infinite Conversation, the 1969 volume composed of texts written in the fifties and sixties. From these essays the following remarks point up the elective affinity between Blanchot’s and Barthes’ intuitions of the neuter’s roving provocation. First, the citation of a question taken from the Provenc¸al poet Rene´ Char: ‘‘How can we live without the unknown before us?’’6 The response: ‘‘The unknown is always thought in the neuter,’’ and so too, ‘‘the unknown is neutral, a neuter.’’ ‘‘Research—poetry, thought—relates to the unknown as unknown. This relation discloses the unknown, but by an uncovering that leaves it under cover,’’ and this is so because the ‘‘unknown as neutral supposes a relation that is foreign to every exigency of identity, of unity, even of presence.’’ Indeed, ‘‘every encounter—where the Other suddenly looms up and obliges thought to leave itself, just as it obliges the Self to come up against the lapse that constitutes it and from which it protects itself—is already marked, already fringed by the neutral.’’ ‘‘Let us then also say’’ that ‘‘God, whether he is or he is not . . . [is] the sovereignty of the neutral, in relation to Being always in excess, empty of meaning, and through this emptiness absolutely separate from all meaning and non-meaning.’’ If the shared idiolect of Barthes and Blanchot were a physical body, its pulse would be found at the suburbs of theology and the pulse would be measured as an oscillation, veering into coincidence, between the mundane and the sublime.7 The particular hybridity of Southwell’s training, as Jesuit missionary and as poet, identifies two overlapping early modern resources in which the encounter—and intimacy—between mundane and sublime orders of experience is also cultivated and, indeed, constituted as a formative element of a discipline: Ignatian meditative technique and the humanist curriculum in rhetorical technique.

 The prestige of the Ignatian method in English poetic tradition has generally been attributed to the method’s program for drawing the exercitant into the prospect of devotional intimacy with the theological drama of salvation through a supple and seemingly exhaustive art of mental imaging. For Barthes, in the 1971 essay on Loyola, the Ignatian imaginary generates an obsessional ‘‘culture of fantasy.’’8 For my purposes, the more consequential affinity between the Spiritual Exercises and Southwell’s poetic experimentalism turns not on the method’s recipe for imagistic fecundity but, instead, on

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the ‘‘principle and foundation’’ of the method, the cultivation of a rigorous posture of ‘‘indifference.’’9 If Ignatian indifference provides fallow ground for Barthes’ ‘‘radical imperialism of the image,’’ it is no less true that it also consumes what it promotes, by treating each conjured image as a functional element in a devotional grammar and syntax, a ‘‘virtuality of possibles,’’ in which the ever-absenting trace of a divine communication, the missed rendezvous, may be discerned and continually sought after:10 ‘‘Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by means of doing this to save their souls. . . . To attain this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things, in regard to everything which is left to our free will and is not forbidden.’’11 What I want to retain from the manual’s prescription is the amphibious character it ascribes to the ‘‘indifferent’’ Ignatian subject. An instructive gauge appears in one of the key stages in the meditative protocol: the mental ‘‘composition’’ of place. ‘‘Composicio´n’’ refers not only to the pictorial architecture of the meditated scene but just as importantly to the exercitant’s practice of putting herself or himself into the ‘‘right disposition’’ for meditation.12 In other words, the Ignatian method promotes an ongoing transitivity between aesthetic, devotional, and ethical modes of attention.13 This feature indicates how the method’s ascetic character is animated not by a refusal of the secular but rather by a cultivated interest in the indeterminate region (inter-esse) where all things may be seen to differ from themselves as well as from each other and thus find themselves implicated in a network of responsiveness to and responsibility for what is other, whether near or far. This perspective imposes qualifications to Barthes’ provocative statement that the ‘‘Ignatian I . . . has no value in existence’’ apart from its status as a ‘‘psychological vacuum, whose pure locutory existence ensures a kind of errancy through indefinite persons.’’14 Barthes’ ascription of ‘‘no value,’’ vacancy, and errancy to the Ignatian subject is preemptively marked by a Saussurean linguistic scheme and its cult of the arbitrary. Tellingly, Barthes nowhere spells out the kinship between Ignatian indifference and the thought of the neuter, yet it is precisely the neuter aspect of Ignatian indifference that distinguishes the latter from the inert substantiality and sovereign impartiality otherwise commonly attributed to the nest of synonyms Barthes invokes in place of the neuter. I can indicate more precisely what I mean by turning to the Ignatian sensibility that meanders incognito through Barthes’ lectures on the neuter, for example, in the section on color. Contemplating Hieronymus Bosch’s

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Garden of Earthly Delights, Barthes’ gaze is struck by the mute eloquence of the grisaille (gray monochrome) used on the reverse of the triptych to establish the panoramic landscape of the third day of Creation, ‘‘time of the first rain, first trees and bushes.’’15 This time is none other than ‘‘Neutral: time of the not yet, moment when within the original nondifferentiation something begins to be sketched, tone on tone, the first differences.’’16 Barthes’ encyclopedic taste leads him at this juncture to a phrase from Lao-tzu, but that is no reason to ignore the Pauline undertow that Bosch (and Barthes, too, one suspects) would have taken for granted. The neutral time of the not yet plays on the ambiguity of Pauline eschatology, which belongs to neither chronological nor cyclical time but to kairos, the saturated time of opportunity, where the not yet urgently arrives. It is precisely this sense of the neuter that colors, one might say, Ignatian indifference. Crucially, for Barthes—and, I would argue, for Ignatian pictorialism as well—the question of color, which entails interest in discerning the neutral ground of coloration (grisaille, the ‘‘color of the colorless’’), bears on time no less than space: ‘‘Now, the monochrome (the Neutral) substitutes for the idea of opposition that of the slight difference, of the onset, of the effort toward difference, in other words, of nuance: nuance becomes a principle of allover organization . . . that in a way skips the paradigm: this integrally and almost exhaustively nuanced space is the shimmer . . . : the Neutral is the shimmer: that whose aspect, perhaps whose meaning, is subtly modified according to the angle of the subject’s gaze.’’17 Barthes’ phenomenology of the monochrome achieves intimacy with the ethos of the Ignatian method by insinuating an inherent complicity between aesthetic discernment and ethical vigilance. The stakes of the adventure are high, and for the same reason in each case, because the adventure turns not on the subject’s capacity for mastery but instead on its sustained exposure to the onset of a ‘‘slight’’ yet categorical difference from monochromicity, an unfurling of nuance in which the subject is implicated.

 Grisaille aptly names the color of the neuter in pictorial terms. In sixteenthcentury humanist rhetorical cultures, ‘‘color’’ was also one of the received generic expressions, together with ‘‘ornament,’’ ‘‘flower,’’ and ‘‘figure,’’ for the verbal locutions through which the orator or poet produced memorable effects and persuasive arguments.18 In the rhetorical arts, the verbal color of the neutral would most likely register as a discreet process rather than a discrete entity: a cumulative effect diffused over the spectrum of figures deployed in any speech act that observed (or, better, silently enlarged) the code

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of decorum. Arguably, Castiglione’s praise of courtly sprezzatura aspires to such diffusion, to the degree that the protocol for the courtier’s advancement includes acquisition of a supple mimeticism of skills and artless performance under the canopy of the social distinction it erects.19 One figure of speech, however, enters the orbit of the grisaille-effect: the enthymeme, also known as the rhetorical syllogism. Though capable of considerable formal flexibility, by the late sixteenth century the enthymeme was commonly thought to be a truncated syllogism. Memorably, the Ramist philosopher Roland MacIlmaine calls the enthymeme a ‘‘mutilet Sillogisme’’—mutilated because it leaves out one of the terms leading to the conclusion.20 The term may be withheld for any number of reasons: ‘‘haste or speed,’’ according to a contemporary manual; or because the premise is doubtful or unspeakable and thus left unsaid for strategic reasons; or because it is so commonplace that it may be taken for granted.21 The range of motives, together with the possibility of their overlap in practice, indicates the volatile face of the ‘‘neuter’’ conjured by the enthymeme. We should note here that the withheld term is quite literally neuter: neither here nor there, yet functionally present through its absence.

 Ignatian indifference and enthymemic reasoning do not have identical stakes in the neuter; as noted, the former is mobilized by the prospect of a salutary interface of aesthetic and ethical concerns, and the latter by the ‘‘shimmer’’ of nuances informing the pragmatics of communication. But they overlap in one regard. Each capitalizes on the instrumental force of the unsaid in dialogue. The Ignatian subject’s powers of discernment are trained, as Barthes suggests, to ‘‘the reverential acceptance of God’s silence, the assent given not to the sign, but to the sign’s delay.’’22 So, too, the credibility of the enthymeme depends on the user’s artful leverage of discernment and discretion, a secularized asceticism. Less is more. Southwell’s investment in the neuter encompasses both these repertoires. For example, whether Ignatian compositional technique may be said to contribute a source or a congenial analogue for Southwell’s pictorial nuance, it is the Ignatian drive toward indifference that prompts Southwell’s brand of negative capability, the ‘‘sweet repose’’ that gives ‘‘breathinge flighte’’ (‘‘To the Reader,’’ ll. 11, 4) to the emotive range and detail found in the penetrating profiles of saintly but wounded and humiliated figures like Joseph and Peter (‘‘Josephes Amazement,’’ ‘‘St Peters Complaynt’’).23

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This feature has limited critical force, however, to the degree that its selfconsuming or subtractive character accommodates a formalist view of Southwell’s poetics, one predisposed, that is, to treat the poems as artifacts, finished objects, rather than events. Southwell’s enthymemic fluency, however, gives traction to the eventfulness—the kairotic restlessness—of the poems and to their corresponding critical force. Consider, for example, the enthymemic resources irrigating the opening stanzas of ‘‘The Nativity of Christ’’: Behould the father is his daughters sonne The bird that built the nest, is hatchd therein The old of yeres an hower hath not outrunne Eternall life to live doth nowe begin The worde is dumm the mirth of heaven doth weepe Mighte feeble is and force doth faintly creepe O dyinge soules behould your living springe O dazeled eyes behould your sunne of grace Dulle eares attend what word this word doth bringe Up heavy hartes with joye your joy embrace From death from darke from deaphnesse from despayres This life this light this word this joy repaires

The paradoxes in the first stanza are congruent with the title because of the unsaid theme uniting the ensemble: the arrival of the ‘‘sunne of grace,’’ which radically altered, and alters, the experience of time. This unsaid harbors a commonplace in Christian devotional culture, the Pauline sense of the messianic event as the onset of a redemptive time, sub gratia, between Christ’s resurrection and its parousia, its fulfillment or summation. While celebratory, the commonplace is not banal, however. As we shall see, crucial nuances to Paul’s temporal scheme mark the neuter’s passage through Southwell’s poetics. For help in laying out the nuances, I turn to Giorgio Agamben’s commentary on Romans. In The Time That Remains, Agamben emphasizes the peculiar ‘‘uni-dual structure of the messianic event,’’ which is ‘‘comprised of two heterogeneous times, one kairos and the other chronos, one an operational time and the other a represented time, which are coextensive but cannot be added together.’’24 On this account, ‘‘kairos is nothing more than seized chronos.’’25 This is not simply subjective time but rather time put at the subject’s disposal. As Agamben puts it, paraphrasing Paul, it is ‘‘the time

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that is left us.’’26 Hence the Pauline implication that ‘‘the messianic world is not another world, but the secular world itself, with a slight adjustment, a meager difference. But this ever so slight difference, which results from my having grasped my disjointedness with respect to chronological time, is, in every way, a decisive one.’’27 The implications of this intuition are indeed decisive. The meager difference introduces a radical principle of non-coincidence into all culturally and socially reified demarcations of identity, such that all persons and groups, under the aegis of the messianic event, come to recognize themselves, and others, through the logic of a ‘‘double negation’’: neither A nor non-A but non-non-A.28 Neuter. The decisiveness of the Pauline messianic is offset by the sheer difficulty of sustaining, much less fulfilling, its insight against the world-constituting grids it parasitizes (part/all, either/or, before/after, and so forth).29 Broadly speaking, it is always possible for the double negation (non-non-A) and its kairotic ethos of dispossession to be domesticated, subsumed under prevailing orthodoxies, or treated as innocuous. As I have been suggesting, the neighboring domain of the enthymemic neuter presents an instructive counterweight, if only because it enables interrogation of the undeclared intimacy in speech acts between innocuous or ordinary assumptions (cultural doxa) and the ‘‘shimmer’’ (the onset or insinuation) of the scandalous, the unprecedented, or the unthinkable. In a word, enthymemic reasoning remembers the literal sense of parousia (presence) as the capture of the very disjointedness of the ‘‘now.’’ Because it recognizes the integrally asymptotic character of the ‘‘presence’’ of the present (through which all communication occurs), the enthymeme’s unsaid member is able to mobilize something, a remnant, of Paul’s sense of messianic kairos. In this regard, it provides a tactical resource for tracking the conveyed intuition that the impossible happens. As noted above, the enthymemic subtext to the opening stanza in ‘‘The Nativity of Christ’’ indicates the onset of messianic kairos as one of the ‘‘impossible’’ events assembled under the theological mystery of the Incarnation—impossible but also largely normalized as an article of Christian faith, at least since the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century. The ambiguous ‘‘now’’ in the line that rounds off the opening sequence of paradoxes (‘‘Eternall life to live doth nowe begin’’) thus unremarkably merges the historical present (the speaker’s imaginative grasp of the chronologically remote event of the Nativity) with a quasi-liturgical voicing of the kairotic present (the subject’s grace-filled experience of the time that remains, interrupting chronological demarcations). The paradox that closes the stanza,

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however, introduces an enthymemic edginess to the voiced ‘‘now.’’ On the one hand, ‘‘Mighte feeble is and force doth faintly creepe’’ reminds readers of one of Paul’s famous aphorisms for the transvaluation of social reality brought about by the messianic event: ‘‘whenever I am weak, then I am strong’’ (2 Cor. 12:11). On the other hand, the line issues tacit recognition that in the ‘‘now’’ inhabited by the poet and his (mostly English Catholic) readership, disputed ownership of the trans-valued attributes, might and feebleness, precisely characterized the rift between reformed and Romanist claims to apostolic fidelity. In other words, the line places two discordant subtexts in glancing proximity to the Pauline paradox: the militant expectation, familiar enough in Counter-Reformation cultures, that the current ascendancy (‘‘Mighte’’) of the reformed churches will be dismantled; and the sobering recognition that the ‘‘force’’ of the Catholic church, undisputed in pre-Reformation England, has been significantly enfeebled. This is not to say the partisan accent vitiates access to the kairotic intuition embedded in the Pauline paraphrase—access, that is, to the domain of non-non-A. The route reopens with the arrival of the verb ‘‘creep.’’ The verb insinuates a disjointed appreciation of the consequences of the messianic event for recognized ‘‘force.’’ By the end of the 1580s the word ‘‘creep’’ enjoyed a secure place in the controversialist lexicon of English reformers, designating the insidious encroachment of the Jesuit mission in England.30 Sir Walter Mildmay’s speech delivered at the opening of Parliament in 1581, months after the arrival of the mission, helped set the standard in its account of the latest instance of papist fraud: ‘‘You see how lately [the Pope] hath sent hither a sort of hypocrites, naming themselves Jesuits . . . whose principal errand is, by creeping into the houses and familiarities of men of behaviour and reputation, not only to corrupt the realm with false doctrine, but also, under that pretence, to stir sedition.’’31 Southwell’s incorporation of the language used to discredit and endanger the society to which he belonged is not unusual. The humanist curriculum followed during his preparatory years at Douay and at the Roman College provided a rich fund of disputational methods, including the tactic of parroting the opponent’s words in order to challenge their authoritative pretension. Further, his association with controversialist theology and his exposure to Cardinal William Allen’s strenuous ‘‘anti-Protestant programme’’ during his tenure as prefect of studies at the English College in Rome would have sharpened his sense of the proselytizing purpose of such mental exercise.32 Anne Sweeney suggests that he perhaps absorbed the ‘‘English College habit’’ of taking ‘‘the Protestant side for argument’s sake in order to be strong in refutation’’ a

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habit she finds echoed ‘‘in the debate in his ‘Poema de Assumptione B.V.M.’ ’’33 The conjecture is plausible. Tellingly, though, the poem Sweeney advances as evidence deploys a conspicuously narrative and propositional structure. Not so the first stanzas of ‘‘The Nativity of Christ,’’ whose gnomic character frustrates translation into disambiguated paraphrase. Within the narrow compass of ‘‘force doth faintly creepe,’’ the poem projects the anticipated humiliation of the reformed churches as well as the current straits of the dispersed English Catholic enclaves; it parodies reformists’ suspicions of the mission’s craft in stirring sedition by secret byways; and it also reflects the obverse view, hinting at the ways in which known tools of the mission—pastoral discernment and oratorical charisma—may ‘‘repaire’’ intimacy with the Christic ‘‘word,’’ and do so ‘‘faintly,’’ beyond the sense afforded by confessional antagonism. The latter prospect (the embedded intuition of the non-non-A) is inarguably faint, but it accords with the ruminative and speculative tenor of Southwell’s poetry.34 The speculative nuance of the Nativity poem gains point in the second stanza’s mode of address. The repeated second-person plural possessive adjectives (‘‘your’’) invoke a general community of readers unriven by confessional distinctions, and the benign character of the poem’s announced theme, the Nativity, tends toward such a view (something that cannot be said so easily about the more tendentious Marian poems). It is perhaps no accident that the call to the plural ‘‘your’’ occurs no fewer than three times, as if the poet has been seized by an eschatological vision of the communion of saints in harmony with the divine perichoresis of the Trinitarian mystery, the ‘‘sacred dance-play’’ through which Father, Son, and Spirit transcendently enact a ‘‘gesture of reciprocal dispossession . . . at once belonging and distance.’’35 Yet here it also pays to observe Sweeney’s account of Southwell’s studious attention to pronominal detail: his ‘‘punctilious distinctions’’ in this matter ‘‘demonstrate an acute sensitivity to language communities, Southwell adapting to the varied interests and lexis of his wider readership.’’36 Given the perturbation generated by the introduction of the verb ‘‘creep’’ in the first stanza, there is reason to wonder who, indeed, is being addressed in this poem. Southwell’s placement of the possessive adjectives is suggestive. They are attached, without exception, to the cascade of periphrastic invocations of Christ’s name. Cumulatively, they enhance the poem’s kairotic charge by advancing a deceptively facile question: Who owns Christ’s body?

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Recent scholarship in early modern church history has amply shown how the binary logic of early modern ecclesial antagonism (and Whiggish historiography) tends to favor reductively oppositional views of confessional identity (Reformation vs. Counter-Reformation). While reflective of powerful cultural dispositions and demonstrable traumas, such views are also myopic, to the degree that they abbreviate the cultural impact of manifold negotiations on both sides of the confessional divide. Sweeney captures the essence of the Romanist challenge: ‘‘When is a Catholic not a Catholic? Even the contemporary terminology was unable to contain the variety, range, and depth of shades of religious conformity or otherwise in late Elizabethan England, and Southwell’s life was entirely bound up in that deadly tangle.’’37 The terminology included recusants, church papists, schismatics, and multiple apostates, but the vexing question of conformity was also provoked by tensions between different clerical groups (e.g., territorial skirmishes between English seminary priests and Jesuits). Further, despite the centralizing innovations and the globalizing ambition of Tridentine church administration, the heterogeneous condition of the social body of English Catholics—diasporic communities on the Continent, underground or scattered communities on English soil, some well-organized, others conspicuously less so—challenged received understanding of catholicity, outside the abstracted language of dogmatic theology.38 A related problem surfaced with the scandalous publicity of Southwell’s treason trial in 1595, which advertised Southwell’s reliance on the species of equivocation known as mental reservation. A distant cousin of the enthymeme, mental reservation entails the production of a truncated verbal statement, with the missing elements held in reserve mentally. Both practices could be called linguistic inversions of the part/all relation, in the sense that the suppressed element transforms the apparent ‘‘all’’ (the visible or articulated element) into a ‘‘part’’ of an unseen or undeclared whole. The sustained attacks on the practice of mental reservation during the trial, together with the jurors’ verdict of treason, confirmed widespread suspicion that Catholic equivocation, emblem of a perverse catholicity, amounted to a Trojan horse in the Protestant church-state, by effectively decoupling the linguistic, social, and juridical mechanisms through which national consensus might be reached and enforced on matters crucial to the survival of the church/state body.39 This overview summarizes the official reformist answer to the question Who owns Christ’s body? and it represents the answer that was clearly on

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Southwell’s mind in his prose writings and missionary career. It also haunts Southwell’s poetic enterprise, insofar as many of his poems adopt a consolatory rhetoric aimed at an English Catholic readership, or perform a quasiliturgical function for a community with infrequent access to the sacraments, or mount a polemical stance for the benefit of a mixed readership. I am arguing, however, that Southwell’s sacramental poetics also responds to the question Who owns Christ’s body? by keeping it open, reentering the peculiar compact of salvific and critical force found in Pauline messianism. Found, that is, in the inflection of the non-non-A, which escapes and surpasses categorical mechanisms for encoding the real.

 Aristotle enshrined the primacy of the enthymeme in the discipline of rhetoric by calling it ‘‘the body of persuasion’’ (Rhetoric 1.1 [1354a]).40 The Ramist rehabilitation of Aristotle’s argument in the sixteenth century placed new, and to some minds limiting, focus on one aspect of the term’s mechanism: the mutilating function.41 Aristotle’s sense of the holistic character of the enthymeme’s place in the ‘‘body’’ of rhetoric can be surmised from the root of the word: thymos, heart. In ancient Greek rhetorical and literary cultures the word referred not only to ‘‘the seat of the emotions and desires, or of motive, of the sometimes uncontrollable forces of desire and wish that drive human intentionality’’ but also to ‘‘the production and the reception of passional thought and eloquent, persuasive discourse.’’42 The Ramist perspective, widely disseminated by the late sixteenth century, effectively refashioned the ‘‘body of persuasion’’—the body that, for Aristotle, signified the culturally integrative power of enthymemic communication—as essentially wounded and broken (though not necessarily defective). In the scholarly history of rhetoric, this development typically serves to indicate one of the far-reaching consequences of Peter Ramus’s innovations, the wholesale decoupling of rhetoric and logic and the consequent marginalization of rhetoric as a supplementary discipline, a repository of discursive cosmetics. For the literary and cultural critic, however, a slightly different picture emerges, one in which the Ramist innovation coincides uncannily with the high tide of the Devotio moderna, with its unprecedented interest in the salvific benefit of focused attention to the mutilated body of Christ. Through a Foucauldian lens, the account of the coincidence would read like this. Ramism is already modern, exhaustively articulating the taxonomy of identity and difference through which modernity’s disciplinary boundaries are achieved (logic/rhetoric; mind/body; public/private, and so forth).

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The Devotio moderna is a proleptic seizure of an alien host, an attempt to suture the developing rift between the premodern sense of being at home in a world of cosmological correspondences driven by a generalized participatory ethos, and the dawning modern appreciation of the ramifying logic of severance and reified distinction. The account just given may be no more than Foucauldian caricature, and it certainly needs qualification.43 But for my purposes it provides a helpful metanarrative against which to gauge the critical quotient of Southwell’s sacramental poetics. One thread of the story is missing, however. It follows tectonic shifts in the theological doctrine of the threefold body of Christ (triforme Corpus Christi), the historical body, the sacramental body, and the Church body.44 Henri de Lubac’s thesis, set forth in Corpus Mysticum and Exe´ge`se Medievale and further developed by Michel de Certeau in The Mystic Fable, demonstrates the subtle but decisive change that had begun by the thirteenth century in the understanding of the threefold body of Christ. The originary scheme, implicit in Ephesians and the Gospel of John and articulated in patristic and early medieval theology, emphasized the mutual intimacy of the three bodies. In de Certeau’s words, the sacrament and the Church ‘‘were joined (the term ‘communio’ was, moreover, common to both) as the contemporary performance of a distinct, unique ‘event,’ the kairos, designated by the ‘historical body’ (Jesus).’’45 Crucially, the sacramental body (the Eucharist) was understood to be a ‘‘unique and everywhere instituting operation (the ‘mystery’), linking the kairos to its progressive manifestation.’’46 The received name for the kairotic instrumentality of the sacramental body was Corpus mysticum, with the ‘‘mystic’’ element understood not as a discrete entity but as a discreet mediating operation. As de Certeau puts it, ‘‘ ‘Mystic’ is the absent third term that joins two disconnected terms.’’47 In the late medieval and early modern eras, the ternary scheme was refigured as a binary, predicated on the ‘‘positivity of an apostolic authority (the historical body) and that of a sacramental authority (the Eucharistic body),’’ which were ‘‘linked to one another and split off from the Church,’’ which henceforth served as ‘‘their hidden extension.’’48 Tellingly, by the early modern era the phrase Corpus mysticum commonly referred not to the Eucharist but to the Church, while the hiddenness designated by the adjective ‘‘mysticus’’ was increasingly associated with ‘‘a new inner ‘mystical’ experience’’ separated from the nexus of liturgical, sacramental, and communal actions and situated instead as the object of

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ecclesial surveillance.49 As de Certeau’s explication brilliantly demonstrates, by the middle of the seventeenth century the object of surveillance had migrated into the institution of medicine and the vocabulary of pathology. In a word, the career of the adjective mysticus—the atrophy of the word’s signifying compass and sclerotization of its mediating function— became symptomatic of modernity’s characteristic repartitioning of disciplinary regimes and jurisdictions. The story told by de Lubac and de Certeau helps explain why so many of the arguments in the Reformation era over the nature of Christ’s body seem to speak at cross-purposes. There is little doubt that the animus fueling confessional controversies over the meaning of the ‘‘real presence’’ of Christ in the Eucharist reflects mutual consternation at the ideological as well as ecclesiological crises provoked by the irreconcilable senses and locations of the word ‘‘real’’ that were brought to bear on the topic. The blind spot in the controversies, and the site of the truly insoluble problem, was the unthinkable prospect of a profound intimacy between reformist and Romanist dispensations. Both were at home in the new binary distribution of the triforme Corpus Christi. For both, in different ways, the ternary scheme had become unintelligible (as had the operative range of the terrain formerly shared by the words ‘‘mystical’’ and ‘‘real’’).50 Both were already on the threshold of the modern, in the sense that the Foucauldian narrative describes. The sacramental sense I attribute to Southwell’s poetics, and specifically its neuter cast, resides in the poems’ fugitive access to the no longer thinkable, and extensively kairotic, sense of the triforme Corpus Christi. This does not mean, however, that the sacramental intuition I have been describing represents a nostalgic element in Southwell’s poetry. Nor does it issue a polemical defense of a lost value into contemporary confessional debates over the nature of the mystical Corpus. The plural ‘‘you’’ conjured in ‘‘The Nativity of Christ,’’ for example, does not anticipate a readerly ‘‘us’’ to be identified with a historically determinate collectivity. The calls to the plural ‘‘you’’ address an audience that is neither particularized nor generalized but is instead figured as a body whose identity (and participatory role in the Corpus mysticum) is at stake precisely in the undecided relation between particular and general. In other words, the kairotic impulse to the dynamic of call and response both assumes the narrowing semantic field of the mystical (in both Tridentine and reformist cultures) and at the same time seizes a remnant of the earlier manifestation of the mystical that ‘‘beckoned toward

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the purpose of a productivity, or the direction of a journey to be undertaken ‘beyond’ all present points of reference.’’51 So, too, the kairotic ethos housed in Southwell’s language gives witness to the strange intimacy, the relation of belonging and distance, between the eschatological urgency of Pauline kairos and the critical provocation found in its twentieth-century heir: the reclaimed kairos that informs Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on the ‘‘historic index’’ of images.52 For Benjamin, it is their historical index that gives images their dialectical, and implicitly kairotic, charge, in a manner that escapes the supercessionist ethos of historical development to which the Hegelian notion of dialectical progression lends itself. Every present is determined by those images that are synchronic with it: every Now is the Now of a specific recognizability. In it, truth is loaded to the bursting point with time. . . . It is not that the past casts its light on the present or that the present casts it light on the past; rather, an image is that in which the Then [das Gewesene] and the Now [das Jetzt] come together into a constellation like a flash of lightning. In other words, an image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but imagistic. . . . The image that is read— which is to say, the image in the Now of its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.53

To be sure, Benjamin’s sense of what is at stake in the kairotic urgency, the ‘‘perilous critical moment,’’ informing dialectical images bears no more than passing resemblance to the kairotic intentions found in either Paul’s or Southwell’s writings. This is so not simply because of Benjamin’s historical and cultural distance from his antecedents but, more interestingly, because of the rift Benjamin detects between the apparent transmissibility of authorial intention and the dislocating seizure of the Then/Now constellation. While the latter event may mark the foundation of ‘‘all reading,’’ as Benjamin avers, it does not identify reading as a hermeneutic apparatus for gauging meanings derived or propagated from images and thence subsumed under the mantle of a particular cultural habitus—the stuff of tradition. Rather, the process just described is arrested and for a time, the time of the Then/Now, it is inverted: chronos is subsumed under kairos. Where, then, may we detect intimacy between Southwell’s sacramental poetics and Benjamin’s dialectical image? It resides in Southwell’s access to

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the neuter, and the neuter plays its hand in the poems’ registration of the lack of coincidence between the present and the Now and between the past and the Then. The scene of the discrepancy, I’ve been suggesting, occurs in the poems’ manner of siting the mystical triforme Corpus Christi. ‘‘Of the Blessed sacrament of the Aulter’’ is the proof-text for my claim. The poem clearly demonstrates Southwell’s allegiance to salient elements of CounterReformation sacramental theology and devotional practice, notably in the stanzas invoking the mystery of the transubstantiated bread (‘‘whole in every crumme,’’ l. 68) and the sensory regimen borrowed from the Spiritual Exercises (ll. 31–36). This axis is indisputable and symptomatic of the historical conditions of its production. But it is not exhaustive. Consider, for example, the conspicuous absence of the two key words—real and presence—that exemplified the ascendancy of the binary scheme (visible/invisible) and the divided confessional locations of the exemplarily visible (sacrament/scriptural corpus).54 In their place the poem introduces an array of words and figures that reactivate the earlier, mediating, sense of the ‘‘mystical’’ function of the Eucharist, its performance of an ‘‘action of divine self-giving inseparable from the bringing about and consolidating of the body of the faithful.’’55 The two separate topoi in the poem—the scene of ‘‘Christes Final meale’’ (l. 5) and the adoration of the ‘‘Blessed sacrament’’—are linked at several turns by the linguistic shifter ‘‘here’’ (ll. 19, 22, 25, 29, 31, 37, 40). The spatio-temporal deixis of ‘‘here’’ is simultaneously local and indeterminate: it escapes the reifying taxonomy of the binary scheme. Under the deictic canopy, the seeming referential mission of the poem (declaration of the transubstantiation thesis) takes on the ‘‘shimmer’’ of something resistant to propositional language. The ‘‘more’’ in the lines ‘‘Men must with sound and silent faith receive/More then they can by sence or reason lerne’’ (ll. 51–52), for example, slips outside of referentiality altogether; it figures the absent body of Pauline kairos. Even the line that inaugurates the poem’s more explicit rehearsal of the transubstantiation thesis—‘‘The god of hoastes in slender hoste doth dwell’’ (l. 61)—follows the deictic curvature. The verb ‘‘dwell’’ ably summarizes the localized spectacle of the visible/invisible dyad in the transubstantiated species, but it also stands as a memory place of the Pauline sense of the influx of Christic charisma, the gift of grace, and the corresponding interdependence of the different aspects of the body of Christ. Thus Paul’s prayer that ‘‘Christ may dwell by faith [habitare Christum per fidem] in your hearts . . .

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being rooted and founded in charity’’ (Eph. 3:17). What I want to emphasize, however, is the chiastic form of the line. A prominent rhetorical device in both Hebraic and Hellenic textuality, the figure of chiasmus orchestrates personal, social, and political concerns around an absent center (AB:B⬘A⬘). The recursive cast of the figure serves as a locus of exposure to a latent nonpresence, an elsewhere, through which the evolving fund of a given culture’s ontotheological, exegetical, and ethical principles articulates itself, without securing, for all that, the equipoise of a closed identity.56 Translated into Paul’s idiom, chiastic figuration grasps kairos. Translated into Benjamin’s, it grasps the disorienting immediacy of the dialectical image, which is conveyed by the interruptive force of its historical index. This force, in Eduardo Cadava’s words, ‘‘always claims the image for another time—for another historical moment (itself plural, and composed of several other moments) and for something other than linear, chronometric time.’’57 In Southwell’s line, the chiasmus isolates the intimacy of two near-homonyms (‘‘hoastes’’ and ‘‘hoste’’), a relation figured not by a declarative verb (the verb comes later) but by the ambiguous word ‘‘in.’’ Because of the poetic inversion in the line, the precise grammatical function of the word appears, briefly, untethered. Is the word solely part of a prepositional phrase, anchored to ‘‘hoste,’’ or is it also the detached particle from a phrasal verb? By the end of the line, it is clear that ‘‘in’’ is a preposition and not part of a phrasal verb (the kind of locution that the verb indwell suggests). But at the moment of its articulation, the word’s relation to ‘‘dwell’’—to the sacramental suggestiveness of the named action—is unsecured. At the heart of the chiasm, then, ‘‘in’’ is undecided, resonant with the spatio-temporal indeterminacy of prepositional deixis. The implication: the heart of the chiasm, its thymos, interrogates, not declares, the nature and scope of the relation between communal body (‘‘hoastes’’) and sacramental body (‘‘hoste’’). The interrogative arc further carries semantic echoes of the Latin cognate hospes: stranger, the guest–host relation, hospitality. In a word, Southwell’s line entertains a fugitive hospitality toward the missing body of Christ: the vanishing sense of the triforme Corpus Christi. The hospitality entertained here is not exactly redemptive, however, at least not in a normative Christological sense. This is so because the kairotic charge of Southwell’s poetics, and the kind of dwelling it conjures (for thought, or feeling, or exposure to a transcendent elsewhere) places the poems in a neuter relation to time and history. In other words, the poems’ imagined dwelling is neither the scene of their material origin (the sixteenth-century present) nor the scene of their theological gestation (the apostolic past). Rather, they dwell in the discontinuity between those scenes,

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in the sudden and unforeseen constellation of the Then in the Now, with the Now rigorously understood, as Benjamin would have it and as Southwell’s poems glancingly intuit, as ‘‘the Now of a specific recognizability.’’58 For Southwell, the intuition carries what must be called, I think, an untimely Benjaminian accent. One of Benjamin’s explanatory notes on the peculiar exigency of dialectical images makes it clear that the ‘‘historic index’’ of images ‘‘doesn’t simply say that they belong to a specific time; it says above all that they only enter into legibility at a specific time.’’59 The critical force, and perhaps also the poignancy, of the sacramental neuter in Southwell’s poetry turns on the specific character of the image it conjures for recognition. What appears is not the articulated triforme Corpus Christi as such but, instead, its passage into illegibility.60 Daringly, Southwell’s poetic experimentalism makes it possible to wonder whether and how the image of the triforme corpus may constitute a redemptive event precisely through the specific condition of its legibility: its withdrawal. Benjamin may have provided one of the tools for grasping the speculative scene just described, but Benjamin’s own highly idiosyncratic grasp of the messianic and critical referents of redemption neither can nor should be equated with the redemptive prospect schematized in Southwell’s parsing of the vanishing triforme corpus. Southwell is on his own here. Southwell’s Benjaminian accent, I would argue, resides in the poems’ indication, via the neuter, that the ‘‘truth of time’’ may be intimately bound to ‘‘an objective structure of meaning, an event of meaning’’ rather than to the intended and archived contents of meaning.61 Admittedly, the claim I am making here begs the question in positing how such a gesture could be received by a religious community as the ‘‘truth of time.’’ That question-begging, however, is already in the poems: it belongs to the historical index of the sacramental neuter. In a recent essay, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton frame a thesis that helps me describe both the particular call to which Southwell’s speculative gestures respond and the missed rendezvous between those gestures and the traits, drawn from the life and the writings, that have shored up Southwell’s reputation in literary tradition as a cherished, if minor, religious poet. Religion is not fully reducible to culture. . . . [It] is a reservoir of foundational stories, tropes, and exegetical habits that structure and give shape to political institutions and literary forms in ways that occur in culture—in specific spatio-temporal moments—while also manifesting a shaping power not

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fully reflective of the historical settings in which they are exercised. . . . Unlike forms of national belonging, the singular traits of ascription and prescription around which religious communities form are conceived as coming from outside the groups that adhere to them—in the form of a sublime gift, book, or law that pierces human temporality and sociality without being fully defined by them. . . . Religions survive when they manage to install elements of thought that stand out from the very rituals and practices designed to transmit but also to neutralize them. This is not to say that religion does not participate in culture, but rather that what distinguishes religion from culture is its absurd insistence and persistence beyond the local habitations of custom and habit, practice and power.62

In my view, one of the ‘‘singular traits’’ of Southwell’s sacramental poetics, its particular way of remembering the ‘‘double origin’’ of the word religion (legere, to read, to assemble; and ligare, to bind or link), is intimately caught up with the restless provocation of the neuter.63 Passing through Pauline and Benjaminian byways, Southwell’s poetics of the neuter marks out a sacramental space that differs not only from forms of national belonging but from dominant forms of religious belonging as well. The resulting prospect makes it possible to wonder whether the received religious character of Southwell’s poems has helped occlude an important distinction between the sacramental and religious reservoirs irrigating them, with a corresponding loss of attention to their speculative range. The fugitive character of the markings, however, also reminds us that Southwell’s poetic experimentalism, its way of thinking the neuter, is situated asymmetrically between two absent bodies in its own time: the vanishing triforme Corpus Christi and a corporate body of attuned readers that, well before the end of Southwell’s career, had gone missing.

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Reconfiguring Figuring John Donne as Narrative Poet heather dubrow

Turning to Narrative and Form An essay on narrativity invites assays at narrative; an article on form invites the dovetailing of memoir with more traditional scholarly prose. Some years ago a distinguished colleague kindly agreed to read two chapters of the book I was writing. About the first chapter he made a number of acute and generally though not invariably appreciative comments. About the other he offered only one sentence: ‘‘This chapter is formalist.’’ Clearly pejorative, not merely descriptive, this act of predication implied that no further analysis need or should be wasted on the errant pages in question. This story anticipates my subject here from a number of perspectives. Most obviously, my essay explores the attraction to narrative in Donne’s Songs and Sonets and in so doing encompasses questions about the relationship between narrative and form. Moreover, the reader of my chapter in effect attempted to silence the voices of established practitioners of formalism through an implicit story of his own about putative progress in the field, while Donne’s lyrics often subdue one tale via another; and my varied motives in opening on this incident (substituting my story for those implied in the colleague’s critique, redefining a threatening situation, synecdochically highlighting larger issues) mime motives impelling Donne and many other tellers of tales, possibly even some of the less savory and more self-serving impulses.1 Above all, my colleague’s dismissive comment tacitly adduced form as a figure for a nexus of professional practices and attitudes, and my essay is also about the figuring of form, and in particular about narrative form itself as a figure. Another narrative of my own, a much grimmer one, provides different but compatible perspectives on the connections between narrative and other forms, figuration, and Donne’s own attachment to storytelling. As I 58

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was beginning to rework a draft of this essay, I had a lengthy phone call with an old friend because his wife, an equally close friend, had just died unexpectedly in her early sixties. He rehearsed the events terminating in that event at some length and in considerable detail. One obvious but important reason mourners often tell such stories is that they are attempting to assert control over the events by ordering them, in the several senses of that verb. Similarly, of course, I am exercising a form of control over my own grief by deploying the telephone conversation in an intellectual project, this essay (though this, like other contemporary discussions of power, should be nuanced by emphasizing how varied the practices encompassed within that concept are and how often they interact with other drives, in this instance a memorialization of my friend Linda). In any event, the opportunity for control is rooted in the association of narrative with teleological certainty; though problematical in the ways I will shortly adumbrate, that linkage is in practice substantiated by many stories; stories about a death have the potential to substitute for those tingling what-ifs that death often provokes (‘‘What if we had caught it earlier?’’ ‘‘What if I had visited her before she died?’’ and so on) certainties about what happened and why. According to this model, narrative figures in the sense of providing a reliable and unimpeachable representation; that is, for figuration in the senses of adornment or potential distortion, it trades figuration in the sense of mimesis on the verge of identity. Or, to put it another way, it exchanges for an anamorphic image a trustworthy mirror.2 Moreover, such tales can reinforce that substitution through a model of performance that arguably works better for storytelling than for the genderings with which it is more commonly associated: these conversations were no doubt among many in which my grieving friend retold the events, making them firmer each time. In other instances, however, narratives about death attempt to assert control by establishing certitude not about the events but rather about interpretations and responses to them. Thus, for example, mourners sometimes interpellate their audience as a listener expected to perform certain ritualized roles and deliver certain scripted sentiments (‘‘well, he had a good life,’’ ‘‘he wouldn’t have wanted to live any longer himself,’’ ‘‘there is nothing anyone could do,’’ and so on). But this too is of course only a partial truth. If one might say that many structuralist models of narrative imply certainty, some structuralists and many poststructuralists have established storytelling as the realm that delights in rather than banishes the alternative versions, the what-ifs. Surely my friend’s story, like many told under such circumstances, was an attempt to

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order the event and its sorrow that at best only partly vested agency and control in himself. Such retellings can, for example, demonstrate limitations on the agency of the teller in that the listener’s expected responses are governed less by how this particular storyteller recounts this particular event than by social codes and conventions about how one offers comfort to the bereaved. Deaths, like the tales they invite, are of course various, and I’ll suggest significant differences between stories that draw attention to their own fictionality and ones that firmly insist on historical accuracy. Nonetheless, the two intersecting patterns crystallized by my phone call with my friend— trying to establish agency and power in the face of the pride and power of an antagonistic force, whether or not it be death, and acknowledging the limits in that attempt—recur in Donne’s Songs and Sonets. In so doing these lyrics also call into play, and into interplay, two poles of storytelling. At the risk of painting with a broad brush, I could classify them as structuralist and poststructuralist: respectively, on the one hand a when in the sense of a specific time at which a specific event occurs and a then in the sense of its consequences, and on the other hand a noisy market of competing possibilities. Through that interaction—and the interaction between narrative in particular, form in general, and figuration—Donne’s lyrics explicate the central question of this essay: how and why the forms of narrative attract a poet whose reservations and even resistance to so many types of structure, from metrical pattern to political authority, has been extensively documented.

The Turn: Narrative and Power The stories critics tell about Donne too often neglect the stories Donne tells. A model, even an icon, of lyric poetry, that ‘‘great frequenter’’ of plays is regularly associated as well with the dramatic. Yet the Songs and Sonets, the texts on which this essay focuses, also incorporate many narratives and do so in ways that make us think further about the lyric and narrative modes, about song, and about the effects of the material conditions of dissemination on their author. That incorporation of narrative, I’ll demonstrate, is impelled both by the familiar but potent links between storytelling and agency or control toward which I gestured above and by the less predictable ways storytelling in many forms actually threatens the power of the teller. Master and slave of so many political, spiritual, and emotional threats, Donne attempts to counter this one in numerous ways, but especially by subjecting

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the narratives of other storytellers to the perils he fears overshadow his own tales. In so doing, however, he also demonstrates how limited an analysis of tales that focused only on agency and power would be. If we search for the components often assigned to narrativity—the representation of a series of events, causality, change, the solution of a problem, and so on—the Songs and Sonets repeatedly testify to Donne’s interest in narrative in these several senses, an interest more evident in his work than in that of many other lyric poets. ‘‘The Dreame’’ tells not one but a couple of stories, notably about the events caused by the lover’s awakening the speaker; the first stanza of ‘‘Confined Love’’ is an etiological story about revenge; the poem entitled ‘‘Song’’ that begins ‘‘Goe, and catche a falling starre’’ tells a tale about a chain of happenings culminating in change: the addressee will go on a journey, report his findings, and discover that they have been undercut by the inconstancy of women.3 (As I will suggest below, however, this speaker wears his rueful narrative with a difference.) The twinning of ‘‘The Relique’’ and ‘‘The Funerall’’ is intriguing modally as well as in so many other ways: the descriptions, speculations, and instructions of ‘‘The Funerall’’ turn into a narrative, emphasizing causality, in ‘‘The Relique.’’ The moment of finding ‘‘That subtle wreath of haire’’ (l. 3) and the gloss on it to which ‘‘The Funerall’’ is devoted are thus transformed: When my grave is broke up againe Some second ghest to entertaine, . . . . . . . . . . . Then, he that digges us up, will bring Us, to the Bishop, and the King, . . . . . . . . . . . All women shall adore us, and some men. (ll. 1–2, 14–15, 19)

To be sure, the story I have excerpted is encased in forms of conditionality, such as ‘‘If this fall in a time, or land’’ (l. 12), and to that too I will return. But the point remains that the praxis of this lyric is narrative in one of the paradigmatic incarnations identified above: the when of a particularized moment succeeded by a then involving both a later moment temporally and a consequence causally. Arguably the most intriguing instance of modal interplay in the Songs and Sonets, ‘‘The Indifferent’’ opens on two stanzas devoted to a libertine celebration of inconstancy, thus apparently providing textbook instances of both dramatic and lyric modalities rather than narrativity: ‘‘I can love both

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faire and browne . . . I can love any, so she be not true’’ (ll. 1, 9).4 Indeed, the poem demonstrates how often Donne and his contemporaries write poems that can readily be classified as dramatic monologues despite recurrent attempts to claim that form for proto-modernism and the Victorian period. In the third stanza, however, the text turns to storytelling in virtually every sense of that term: Venus heard me sigh this song, And by Loves sweetest Part, Variety, she swore, She heard not this till now; and’t should be so no more. She went, examin’d, and return’d ere long, And said, alas, Some two or three Poore Heretiques in love there bee, Which thinke to stablish dangerous constancie. But I have told them, since you will be true, You shall be true to them, who’are false to you. (ll. 19–27)

Thus this lyric encourages us to substitute for the widespread assumption that lyric and narrative normatively impede each other, the recognition that instead one often impels the other.5 More to my purposes here, the apparent lyric meditation in the first two stanzas is as it were put in quotation marks: it is reframed, reformatted, to become an event—a performance in more senses than one and tellingly a performance of a song in particular—within a narrative about Venus. Yet that generalization too calls for qualification. We cannot, for example, rule out the possibility that the third stanza represents not a move to another discursive realm, a shift from performance to straightforward narrative reportage, but rather another stanza in a song. Why, then, is storytelling so common in the Songs and Sonets? My principal answers will both assert and challenge its transhistorical and transcultural potentiality to assert the agency of the storyteller, but other, cognate explanations rooted in biographical and cultural particularities aptly introduce that assertion. If, as many narratologists assert, the end of lyric in several senses of ‘‘end’’ involves conquering the woman’s body, that is an end obviously of interest to the author of the Songs and Sonets. If narrative involves judgments, as some other narratologists have claimed, Donne does not suffer fools gladly. If narrative figures a journey, another common theory, it is striking how often literal journeys occur in his love poetry. Indeed, Donne may be in more ways than one among the most traveled of all poets of his era. Moreover, Donne the law student knew about the importance of narratio in legal arguments; Donne the preacher recognized the significance of

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exemplarity in the ars praecandi; and Donne the theologian speculated about eschatology, arguably an analogue to the emphasis on closure and anticlosure in narrative. But the overarching reason for the narrativity of the Songs and Sonets— the reason this paper both proposes and subsequently challenges—is that the act of telling stories both generates and figures one of Donne’s central preoccupations, power, and more specifically the agency manifest in controlling both events and listeners. Stanley Fish announces, ‘‘Whatever else Donne’s poems are, they are predominantly occasions on which this power [of words] can be exercised; they report on its exercise and stage it again in the reporting, and when one asks about a moment in the poetry, ‘Why is it thus?’ the answer will always be ‘in order further to secure the control and domination the poet and his surrogates continually seek.’ ’’6 To be sure, the masculine persuasive force of critical pronouncements like this (‘‘predominantly,’’ ‘‘always’’) suggests that Fish remakes his Donne, like his Milton, in his own image, and later in this essay I will call into question other assumptions of Fish as well. But his emphasis on Donne’s preoccupation with power is indisputable, and the implications for Donne’s storyteller are manifold. Most obviously and predictably, telling a story oneself asserts the types of control that Fish and many readers posit as the central agenda of Donne’s poems. When, for example, Donne crafts a narrative about what will happen after his death, which is the plot of so many of these lyrics, or for that matter what will happen after that little death, a departure, he is approaching the event over which typically one loses control through a type of discursive control. The reader is aware not only of the apparently reliable mirror to which I referred above but also of the agent positioning it, determining what we see. A leading theorist of narrative, James Phelan, distinguishes it from other modes by characterizing it in terms of someone telling someone else something for a purpose, thus emphasizing its fundamental rhetoricity;7 the narratives in the love lyrics of that rhetorician Donne typically have many purposes centering on the assertion of the role of alpha male. If, for example, ‘‘The Flea’’ is a classic example of the immediacy of a dramatically rendered present, it concludes in the confidently established future of ‘‘when thou yeeld’st to mee’’ (l. 26); ‘‘A Valediction: of the Booke’’ plays the uncertainties of future fidelity against the certainty that the book in question will be read in the satisfying and self-serving ways the speaker describes.

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So commonplace that it is often assumed, the immediacy of Donne’s poems, their rootedness in the here and now, is apparent. Less apparent and arguably no less revealing is an issue introduced by the examples I just cited from ‘‘The Flea’’ and ‘‘A Valediction: of the Booke’’: the role of futurity not only in the theological contexts where one would expect it but also in the love lyrics.8 In particular, often the stories Donne tells concern the future. To be sure, in his writings as well as those of other poets, the future tense works in ways as various and volatile as conditionality. For example, in a characteristically acute reading, Helen Vendler has shown that in Herbert’s ‘‘Love (III)’’ one of Love’s assertions about the future should be read not as prophecy but as ordination. Both acts involve power, but power of very different types: ‘‘Love answers not with ‘You are he,’ but rather with the ordaining words ‘You shall be he.’ Love’s ‘shall be’ (not, significantly, the ‘will be’ of futurity) represents the salvific will of God and its efficacious means, the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit.’’9 In Donne’s own canon, too, futurity assumes enough forms to resist a single overarching thesis. The future is variously represented as linked to, indeed coexisting or merging with the present (‘‘The Baite’’) and as a sharply distinguished alternative to the present (‘‘Farewell to Love’’); as a world of fantasy fulfilled (‘‘The Relique’’) and as nightmare (‘‘A Feaver’’). Despite these complications, in general Donne’s texts turn to the future in an attempt to tell stories about a type of certainty and resolution that is apparently not as accessible in the present. In addition to ‘‘The Flea,’’ witness ‘‘The Apparition,’’ which exemplifies the roles of the speech act of threatening in stories about the future. Here the implicit threat that the lady will literalize Petrarchan conventions by actually killing him and the accusation of her threatened and threatening infidelity are conquered by inserting a threat of what might happen into a story about what is apparently happening. In this text the stories on which this future is based are the stuff of wishfulfillment: the future here is a world where some threats are blocked and counter-threats are apparently successfully effected, a world where the desired, fantasized revenge may be largely if not entirely realized. Thus the poem itself tropes the future action it describes: the story it tells is itself meant to haunt and unsettle the lady in the here and now. And thus too the cooption of narrative in the interests of power plays is successfully effected, or, as we will see, at least effected with partial success. Similarly, ‘‘The Curse’’ asserts the power of language by turning what might happen subsequently into something that is apparently happening in the present, in part through the use of enallage, the varied verb tenses that in this, like many

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instances in Donne’s poetry, give the illusion that what might occur in the future is in fact present in more senses than one. In short, the link between telling a story and acquiring power is evident structurally and thematically throughout the Songs and Sonets. That connection is forged even more firmly lexically, inasmuch as to tell was frequently used for counting wealth.10 In ‘‘Loves Alchymie,’’ Donne himself encourages us to relate telling to such acquisitiveness when he enumerates that unholy trinity, ‘‘I have lov’d, and got, and told’’ (l. 3) and associates it imagistically with other versions of what banks today term wealth management. Sexual ‘‘getting’’ is linked with the acquisition of other booty; counting or telling one’s wealth is connected to lockerroom boasting, thus suggesting a connection between sexual pleasure and the afterplay of boasting about it in a homosocial environment like the bathhouse in which Lincoln Center’s 2008 production of Cymbeline so aptly set the initial encounter between Iachimo and Posthumus. As that scene, the eponymous merchant’s opening remarks in The Jew of Malta, and the convergence of meanings in the word tell all suggest, the power that variously derives from counting material wealth and from activating the potential wealth of a story are social acts whose efficacy often depends on an attentive audience. Although the role of storytelling in the Songs and Sonets has frequently been overlooked, my assertion that the monarch of narrative uses it to attempt to establish an absolutist power will probably not surprise any readers. More surprising and no less significant are the ways that relationship is forged in circumstances where the speaker does not himself tell a story, thus inviting us to look from new perspectives at the connections between narrative and power. Donne’s speaker often asserts his agency, and limits that of others, by assigning a story to someone else. As I have already suggested, ‘‘A Valediction: of the Booke’’ commands future lovers to write ‘‘Annals’’ (l. 12) of his love based on that originary, archival text, the letters of the lovers. (These poems may recall the many lyrics in which Donne forbids speech, as he famously does in ‘‘The Canonization,’’ though these interdictions do not necessarily prohibit narratives as opposed to other types of speech.) Another sense in which the assertions of agency via storytelling are interactive and social is that the plot of many of Donne’s lyrics—plot in several senses of that term—involves substituting his story for an alternative one someone else might proffer. This essay has already gestured toward telling instances of that pattern. In ‘‘The Relique’’ the story of the lovers in the final stanza is implicitly substituted for—and in more than one way supplements—the contending story that they are relics. ‘‘The Dampe’’ plays threats about what

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could happen in the future with an alternative story about what will happen if she yields to him. Another poem to which I referred earlier, ‘‘Song’’ (‘‘Goe, and catche a falling starre’’), repeatedly informs the addressee of what he will in turn say to that very speaker. In other words, the power plays connected with storytelling often involve regulating not one’s own tales but those intoned by others. This panopticon surveys narrative movements as well as physical ones. In short, by telling stories about what has happened, by regulating the stories others tell, by substituting rival stories for ones an antagonist proffers, and by turning stories about what may not happen into stories about what will happen, Donne uses narration to control the demons on the edges of his singularly edgy poems, especially death and betrayal. From a different perspective, narrative form variously figures and fights threats like those. But mimetically I too want to substitute some other stories: different ways of interpreting Donne’s attraction to narrativity, different approaches to its edges. The Jonsonian ode to which my subheads refer, ‘‘To the Immortall Memorie, and Friendship of that Noble Paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison,’’ incorporates prosodic, thematic, and even obstetrical turnings; so too must an ode to Donne’s achievements as a teller of tales.

The Counterturn: Narrative and Power? Narrativity can signal and establish the speaker’s power—and narrativity can also unsettle that power and the agency so closely associated with it. In many of Donne’s stories, his potency as author and that of the diegetic storyteller within the poem are undermined, and the workings of narrative are hence redefined to include peril as well as promise. This process of delimiting the potency of the speaker’s storytelling typically involves either or both of two templates. First, sometimes one storyteller battles another to grab the microphone and tell her own and very different story, creating a struggle in which the principal speaker of the poem does not emerge as a clear victor; or, similarly, sometimes someone appropriates that speaker’s story and uses it for very different ends. The newborn story either retreats to the womb, like its counterpart in Jonson, or is adopted by another parent. Pivoting on Donne’s characteristic preoccupation with rivalry, such instances reverse the praxis of poems in which he successfully appropriates or assigns tales himself. Second, his lyrics often remind us how hypothetical and hence volatile and even fragile their own stories are, recalling too that story often alludes to one

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possible interpretation among many. In particular, lyrics that trade in futures risk losing their investments. First, then, the power of rival stories. Donne is all too aware that the obverse of an audience that obediently repeats a story is, as it were, the empire that strikes back with its own version, thus turning the substitution of one story for another into a continuing struggle rather than a closural victory. In ‘‘The Flea,’’ a particularly cogent example of the dialogism that Ilona Bell attributes to Donne and many other poets, in killing that pest the lady also kills one story and substitutes another, defining the flea, and probably the attempt at seduction it represents, as a pest to be killed.11 (Characteristically, though, her lover quickly recuperates that alternative tale for his own ends: ‘‘Just so much honor, when thou yeeld’st to mee,/Will wast, as this flea’s death tooke life from thee’’ [ll. 26–27]). Alternative stories are, however, only one of several limitations on the agency of the original storyteller. The darling and demon of poststructuralism, iterability, is potentially one sign of that agency. But it may instead or in addition reflect the limited impact of the story. As Prospero’s compulsive storytelling reminds us, one repeats what one fears has not been heard fully or correctly the first time, or what one cannot stop oneself from repeating, or cannot be sure others will repeat. Images replicated in a series of mirrors are likely to seem less, not more, reliable, as the work of many contemporary sculptors, such as Dan Graham, Anish Kapoor, and Josiah McElheny, reminds us. Iterability also opens the door to revision and appropriation by a rival author. Donne’s ‘‘Triple Foole’’ laments the loss of power over one’s verse and over the emotions it ‘‘fetters’’ (l. 11) when someone takes it over: ‘‘Some man, his art and voice to show,/Doth set and sing my paine’’ (ll. 13–14). Behind that consciousness surely lie the material conditions of scribal transmission so cogently demonstrated by Arthur F. Marotti and his heirs and assigns. Donne, like its other authors, was aware of how readily a text could be changed in the course of copying and circulation, though I have argued elsewhere that glosses on this process by Marotti and others need to be modified by recognizing the types of authorial agency that scribal culture permitted and even encouraged.12 In other words, the poems internalize and fictionalize their own conditions of production and dissemination. If the future of Donne’s material texts is indeterminate and unstable, so too are the future events within them. Whereas their author often refers to the future to assert knowledge of the unknowable, control over the uncontrollable, his poems also demonstrate the paradoxes and problems in those

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endeavors. Literary stories about the future, like the quotidian reportage of death to which the opening of this essay alludes, attempt to substitute the thens and therefores often associated with narrative for what if, and I have cited several examples where that craft is largely successful. But elsewhere it fails. Traced by Thomas Hester, who demonstrates that the word ‘‘if ’’ is used in no fewer than forty-three of his fifty-seven lyrics, weighing in at an extraordinary ninety appearances, Donne’s predilection for that term signals and in some instances directly creates the instability of predictions about the future.13 In a poem to which I referred earlier, ‘‘Goe, and catche a falling starre,’’ the insistently closural firmness of the conclusion, ‘‘Yet shee/Will bee/False, ere I come, to two, or three’’ (ll. 25–27) is implicitly unsettled by the heterometrical rhyme and complicated by all the preceding conditionality (‘‘If thou beest borne’’ [l. 10], ‘‘If thou findst one’’ [l. 19]). Moreover, as I noted earlier, many of Donne’s stories about the future draw attention to the fact that they are representations in senses that compromise their reliability, thus reinforcing the fictiveness inherent in concepts of poesy. Stories demarcated as artistic differ from stories like my friend’s narrative about his wife’s death inasmuch as the first often foregrounds its self-conscious fictionality while the second typically insists on its historical accuracy. Admittedly, these distinctions, compromised by poststructuralist principles about the unreliability of all narrations, can be further undermined by the specificities of a given situation, such as a story recounted by that uncle infamous in the family for his penchant for exaggeration and selfaggrandizement. But the point remains that the generic norms and instrumental aims of avowedly literary representations and their everyday analogues typically influence their creation and reception enough to mark the dangers in the common supersession of the category of literary by broader generalizations about discourse. In any event, as these examples suggest, the instability of stories about futurity is but one instance of another way narrative is variously blocked and compromised in some of Donne’s lyrics. I have focused thus far on how his poems sometimes translate futurity into certainty, and that is the prevalent pattern, but in other instances they draw attention to stories that may not come to pass. The narratologist Gerald Prince has developed the category of the disnarrated, that is, events that do not take place.14 If Donne is the poet of narrativity to an extent we have not acknowledged, he is also the poet of the disnarrated: of verges and edges, of what might or might not happen. So many of his lyrics are uneasily located on the brink between the

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anticipation of a story and its realization. And if Donne is the poet of journeys, he is also the poet who dwells in waiting rooms (should he encounter Elizabeth Bishop there, they would find they have a lot in common). To be sure, some of the poems examined above usefully trouble Prince’s category by showing how, especially through enallage, what has not taken place can be represented as what has or what definitely will happen. ‘‘The Apparition,’’ for example, technically fits the category of the disnarrated but in so doing shows the risks involved in using that term to encompass both it and, say, ‘‘A Feaver,’’ a poem about a death that is feared but not realized: the senses and extent to which what they concern does not take place are profoundly different, as are the rhetorical and psychological consequences. In an analysis that could help us to gloss those distinctions in Donne’s poetry, another narratologist, Uri Margolin, cogently demonstrates the necessity of distinguishing a range of expressions: what might happen, the hope it will happen, the assurance that it will.15 These distinctions usefully prevent us from exaggerating the frequency or force of those verges between narration and its absence in Donne—more often in his work the disnarrated assumes the mantle of narration—but the fact remains that certain poems deny their speaker the agency involved in telling the story he wants to tell. But at once the most significant and most neglected source of the instability of the power storytelling can bestow is its connection to song. Returning to ‘‘The Triple Foole,’’ we find that that poem expresses deep anxiety about a text being turned into a song despite the wishes of its author. And if we look back at the opening of the third stanza in ‘‘The Indifferent,’’ the word ‘‘song’’ (l. 19) complicates my earlier analyses. Not only does it link an apparently Ovidian poem to other traditions, as many scholars have already observed; it also suggests that the first two stanzas, which seem paradigmatic of Donne’s dramatic voice, can also in some sense be labeled song, thus among other things invoking the way performance unsettles apparent authenticity. The word ‘‘song’’ troubles categorization in another sense, adumbrated above; at first glance we may think that ‘‘this song’’ (l. 19) refers only to the first two stanzas, which are now being contrasted to the story about Venus—but what if ‘‘this song’’ alludes to the whole poem, including the very line that contains it? A limited connection between Donne and song has of course long been acknowledged, with, for example, Edward Doughtie suggesting that it may have influenced his stanza forms and Paul Gaston commenting on the seventeenth-century settings of some half a dozen of his poems as well as their subsequent role in Britten’s work.16 But most studies of lyric in general

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and Donne in particular have been at pain to dismiss or at least downplay such connections, whether by challenging the linkage of lyric and song or by emphasizing the conventional contrast between the edginess of Donne’s conversational voice and the mellifluousness of song.17 In evaluating his relationship to that medium, however, we need to consider not only whether his poems can readily be set to music but also how song as a discursive category both influences and buttresses his conceptions of lyric, especially in this instance as it relates to narrative. The evidence that Donne, like many members of his culture, recognized significant connections between song and lyric is substantial—ranging from his use in the Songs and Sonets and elsewhere of the terms song and hymn even for lyrics that probably were not sung, to how he celebrates the Sidneyan psalms to his apparent interest in Ronsard, whose sixteenth-century editions included musical settings.18 On the one hand, then, connecting lyric to the affective potentialities of song intensifies the power of the storyteller. But on the other hand, linking lyric and song, even simply as analogous discursive registers, intensifies and extends those doubts about the storyteller’s power to which I referred in two overlapping ways: first, others may appropriate the song, and second, it may include multiple voices. To begin with, songs are especially amenable to iterability, as ‘‘The Triple Foole’’ emphasizes. Even more to my purposes here, the very concept of song in this period introduced the possibility of multiple and often competing voices. The popularity of madrigals in the period, as well as the widely circulated polyphonic settings of love poems by Ronsard and others, emphasized potentialities for several voices. Participant and celebrant in Reformed services, Donne was certainly aware of how congregational singing of psalms, an innovation of the Reformation, involved many participants, an analogue to the idea, emphasized in Donne’s poem on the Sidneys, that these poems were themselves composed by both God and David. Persuasive and original, Sarah Iovan’s studies of vocal performance have established that often the instrument was not merely a repetition or intensification of the vocal part but rather a different and divergent voice. In other words, her argument demonstrates that accompaniment by, say, a lute could enact instrumentally, as it were, the challenges to the originary author that Donne traces in ‘‘The Triple Fool’’ and that students of scribal culture have traced in his milieu.19 Although this essay focuses largely on the Songs and Sonets, their ambivalences about song can best be glossed by the curious passage in the tribute to the Sidneys’ psalms, which first casts a heavy stone, the indubitably

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charged word ‘‘cloven,’’ onto the surface of Donne’s praise and then attempts with only partial success to delimit its ripples: That, as thy blessed Spirit fell upon These Psalmes first Author in a cloven tongue; (For ’twas a double power by which he sung The highest mater in the noblest forme;) So thou hast cleft that spirit, to performe That worke againe, and shed it, here, upon Two, by their bloods, and by thy Spirit one. (ll. 8–14)20

The Stand I have first argued that storytelling attracted Donne because of its potentialities for authorial agency, then subsequently shown how the storyteller’s control can be fragile and volatile. My own argument may appear to be cloven, with the two voices of my story, or perhaps my two rival stories, contradicting each other or, more charitably, figuring the interplay of rival stories and the conflict between closural and anticlosural narrativity that the essay has explored. But this paradox may be explained if not totally resolved. First, Donne, a master of the preemptive strike, often counters the threats to his storytelling and to storytelling in general by deflecting and redirecting them: he attributes to rival storytellers precisely the obstacles that he fears confront his own sallies into narrative. The anxiety that his stories, like the material manuscripts of his poems, may be appropriated by others is rechanneled by appropriating and changing other storytellers’ texts, whether that be achieved through ironizing Marlowe’s version of pastoral in ‘‘The Baite’’ or redefining the story about infidelity that the eponymous jet ring would otherwise tell into a narrative of his own ability to protect the ring himself and his own emotions. The fear that his own stories cannot be told, remaining trapped on the verge between the narrated and the disnarrated, is controlled by writing about the silencing of others, a plot we have repeatedly encountered. In these senses as well, then, narrative form figures its enemies and rivals. Moreover, pace Fish, Donne has enough control over his language and the drives it expresses to be able to use it not only to assert power but also to acknowledge and study what complicates or destabilizes such assertions. Or, to make the same point modally, that tension between storytelling as a

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source of and threat to authorial power attracts Donne the lyric poet because stories can inspire lyric meditations on their potentialities and limitations. And the tension between storytelling as a successful assertion of authorial control and as a threat to that control challenges Donne the dramatist because it lends itself to the sort of dramatic interplay between stories and their tellers that we encounter throughout the Songs and Sonets. In short, he is attracted to narrativity precisely because it figures and explores conflicting models of power and hence is attractive to the poet who speaks and thinks a syntax of disjunctive conjunctions like or: he delights in telling stories and telling stories about doing so, or failing to do so, because those operations play out the tension between agency and its discontents that interests him in so many other ways. His concern is not merely to assert but also to explore and evaluate poetic, masculine, and masculinist agency. Recognizing that Donne’s interest in stories sometimes is independent of or even in tension with their efficacy as a conduit of power thus also invites future work on the aesthetic motivations behind his interest in narrative. In pursuing that question one need not assume that his delight in aesthetic effects is totally disinterested, but neither should one reduce the motivations behind them only to the search for power. Nor, of course, in exploring the aesthetic drives behind Donne’s narratives should we presuppose that the man who coined the phrase ‘‘well-wrought urn’’ is interested only in the type of unity that phrase implies. Indeed, arguably the heterometrical couplets to which I referred above model the effects his narratives often attempt to produce through devices besides prosody. These stories create abrupt disjunctures like the one I identified in the switch of modes in ‘‘The Indifferent’’; and in poems like ‘‘The Blossome,’’ where the impact of meter is intensified by anticlosural enjambment, they unsettle the suasive and closural power plays of the couplet form. But further exploration of these issues necessarily demands a new story, though one whose relationship to this article would be more compatible than the fraught interaction between stories told by Donne and his rival storytellers.

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The Narrative Turn against Metaphor Metonymy, Identification, and Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa amelia zurcher

Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa, published serially throughout the 1650s, is one of a group of mid seventeenth-century British prose romances that share a penchant for political allegory. In keeping with generic predecessors such as Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Wroth’s Urania, and especially John Barclay’s Argenis, these long and narratively complex romances use their fictions of aristocratic lovers and soldiers to debate contemporary problems in ethics and political theory and to represent national and international political events. Most mid-century romance became obscure within a few years of the Restoration, but Parthenissa was read well into the eighteenth century, when by conventional literary history its outmoded genre would seem to have been replaced by the more sophisticated and entertaining form of the novel. Its extended popularity was probably due in part to the notoriety of its author: Roger Boyle, brother of the now more famous Robert and a moderate Royalist, was expected to go into exile after the execution of Charles I, but instead defected suddenly to Oliver Cromwell’s employ in 1650 and became a member of Richard Cromwell’s inner circle, only to convince Charles II at the Restoration that he had been a loyal servant of the crown all along. Doubtless part of the attraction of Parthenissa’s generically typical roman a` clef form was the access it seemed to promise to the inside story of Boyle’s political career.1 But Parthenissa is also intensely selfconscious about literary form and interpretation, and at several moments it begins to construct a model for prose narrative structure that in retrospect turns out to have been oddly modern. Against type, as it were, in these moments Boyle blocks allegorical reading, substituting metonymic contiguity for metaphoric correspondence as the paradigm both for his own narrative structure and for the kind of interpretation it requires. In this essay I will read Parthenissa’s pronounced rejection of metaphor as itself a metaphor, 73

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speculating on its function for Boyle as historical fantasy and critique. At the same time, though, I will also approach Parthenissa’s turn away from conventional figural representation on its own terms, as a gesture toward a kind of anti-interpretive poetics that has more in common, perhaps, with the narrative forms that followed it than with those of its own genre.

 Romance in England after Sidney and Spenser was already established as a genre both allegorical and highly self-reflective, but Barclay’s phenomenally popular 1621 Argenis (published in Paris in Latin, but written after Barclay had spent a decade in James I’s court) lays out its allegorical mission with a clarity no imitator could miss. In these troubled political times, declares the court poet who is Barclay’s fictional counterpart, he will embark on a ‘‘new kind of writing’’ and produce a ‘‘Fable like a Historie,’’ in which readers both famous and ordinary will see themselves ‘‘as in a Looking-glasse,’’ come to new understanding of the events of their time, and be moved to confirm or reform their behavior accordingly.2 Like its exact contemporary Urania, by Mary Wroth, Argenis offers not only one-to-one representations of its handful of prominent readers but a collection of variously signifying episodes for its lay audience, which is supposed to realize Barclay’s didactic aims by tracing both the internal correspondences of one episode to another and also their varied external correspondences to the world outside the narrative. In the 1640s and ’50s romances such as Percy Herbert’s The Princess Cloria and the anonymous Theophania followed this model closely, offering a variety of lightly fictionalized stories of erotic and military allegiance among their aristocratic protagonists in an effort to represent and thus rationalize the chaos of contemporary political events. Parthenissa adds another layer to the pattern, resorting to a collage of episodes and figures from ancient history as the starting point for its narrative. Embroidering liberally on information in Livy, Tacitus, Polybius, and Plutarch, Boyle takes as his ostensible subject the early life of the Parthian King Artabanes (historically, probably Artabanes II, whose reign is sketched only rudimentarily in Tacitus and Plutarch) and his friends and rivals in the Parthian court. Most of the romance’s first and second books Artabanes narrates in retrospect to a hermit on a deserted island, while he is still a young man with few political responsibilities and is lingering in despair over the apparent loss of his beloved Parthenissa to a rival. Over the course of this set of his adventures, Artabanes tells the hermit, he has encountered Hannibal, Pompey, Marcus Crassus, and a whole host of lesser figures from ancient history, whose stories Boyle

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weaves together by supplementing them with erotic rivalries and military exploits, all without regard to discrepancies in historical time.3 Boyle’s historical method makes it difficult to read Parthenissa as straight political roman a` clef in the style of Argenis and The Princess Cloria. Indeed, in the dedication of the first book to Lady Northumberland, via a conventional disclaimer about his inability to represent her true glories, Boyle disavows any allegorical referentiality for his characters and hints that readers should approach them instead as companions.4 But Boyle’s most extraordinary and sustained demonstration of his anti–roman a` clef method comes shortly afterward in Book 1, during Artabanes’s account of his life to the hermit. About sixty pages into his story, Artabanes and his servant, sharing narrative duties, begin reciting, in the first person, Plutarch’s account of Spartacus, from his Life of Marcus Crassus, and suddenly the reader, along with the shocked and thrilled hermit, is brought up short by the realization that Artabanes and Spartacus are the same man. ‘‘O gods,’’ cries the hermit, ‘‘is it then Artabanes . . . who so fill’d the world with his generous Actions, that not to have heard of him is as great wonder as any he perform’d?’’ ‘‘This,’’ replies Artabanes’s servant, with a gesture toward his master that functions doubly within Boyle’s narrative frame and his own embedded one, ‘‘is that same Spartacus’’ (89). Fleeing Parthia because of Parthenissa’s apparent infidelity, Artabanes had been captured at sea by Pompey and sold to the Roman who trained Spartacus and other prisoners of war as gladiators, and from there he was launched on the brief career that to the hermit is already legendary. At the hermit’s urging Artabanes and his servant continue the story, taking a detour into the history of the Second Punic War to bring Spartacus into contact with Hannibal and one of his Capuan opponents, a young man named Perolla mentioned only briefly in Livy for his political opposition to his own father.5 Artabanes embeds within his narrative the very long story of Perolla’s star-crossed love affair, recounted at one remove in the first person by Perolla’s lover and eventually adjudicated by Spartacus himself, and then he resorts again to Plutarch to narrate his own (that is, Spartacus’s) last campaign against Marcus Crassus. At the point of Spartacus’s ostensible death, obscure in the classical sources, Boyle has him resume the name of Artabanes and set sail for Parthia to rejoin his previous narrative trajectory. One of the few historical surveys of seventeenth-century literature to take any account of Parthenissa, obedient to the allegorical hermeneutic norms that govern most seventeenth-century romance, concludes that Artabanes is a ‘‘Spartacus-figure’’ (and both characters, as rebels against established authority, probably also figures for Cromwell).6 A figure for

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Spartacus, however, is exactly what Artabanes is not. On the contrary, in this scene Boyle brings together two characters from distinct and non-intersecting historical narratives and then, against all convention, asks the reader to understand them not as parallel but as identical. It is almost as if Boyle sets out to make entirely literal the representational project Barclay provides for modern romance: as story-teller, Artabanes peers into the ‘‘Lookingglasse’’ of Plutarch’s account and finds not an alternative version of his story but his very own self. Argenis and its generic heirs offer their audience a mimesis, a re-presentation; Parthenissa offers, in contrast, a model of absolute identification—identification, that is, not as the mostly metaphoric process we often mean by the word, according to which a reader or character feels such affinity with another’s position that she sees the world as if through the other’s eyes, but rather a complete collapse of one character and his narrative into the identity and the narrative of another. And the identification occurs between characters who seem to share almost nothing. Not only is there no indication, before his capture by Pompey, that Artabanes has any militaristic ambitions or Spartacan canniness, but after his stint as Spartacus he reverts entirely to his identity as despairing lover, as if his own legendary feats had nothing to do with him. Within a genre that so frequently, carefully, and explicitly exploits the techniques of roman a` clef, it is difficult to read this model of identification as anything but a deliberate departure, Boyle’s notification that he means to block the kind of analogical correspondence romance has taught us to expect. If the peculiar manner in which Boyle incorporates Spartacus into Artabanes’s narrative will not allow us to read one character as metaphor for the other, Parthenissa’s Spartacus story is also antifigural in another sense. In his careful revision of Aristotle’s relation between plot and character, Julius Caesar Scaliger argues in his own 1561 Poetics that while the good poet cannot be said to teach ‘‘character’’ per se, since in a typical plot ‘‘many things are done contrary to character,’’ the poet does nonetheless teach ‘‘disposition,’’ as nothing can be done in a plot unless a character is disposed to do it. ‘‘Action, therefore,’’ Scaliger concludes, ‘‘is a mode of teaching,’’ and disposition, that which within the plot spurs a character to action, is ‘‘that which [readers] are taught.’’7 While it would be going too far to claim that Scaliger reverses Aristotle’s primacy of plot over character, it is clear that disposition for Scaliger—a kind of fore-conceit for action, what he also calls, quasi-Platonically, a ‘‘form’’ or conception—is the object the poet means to convey (7.1.3), and that this fore-conceit is lodged as firmly in the poet’s literary characters as it is in his or her mind. Erich Auerbach’s well-known

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summation of Christian figurative practice defines the work of the figure as the establishment of a temporal relation between one event or person and a second, the goal of which is to encompass or fulfill the first, in both a spiritual and a concrete, even ‘‘carnal’’ sense.8 And Galenic humoral theory, a dominant model for understanding human behavior in the early modern period, held that people were disposed by their constitutions toward certain actions.9 If we combine these theories, all part of the bedrock of early modern conceptions both of poetics and of psychology, it becomes possible to understand a character’s disposition as itself a figure, an outline that a wellconstructed plot then fulfills through its action. Effective narrative needs to surprise its audience through anagnorisis, but it also needs to confirm the audience’s expectation, in effect convincing the audience to be surprised at what, in some sense, it has known all along. In the Aristotelian-Scaligerian tradition inherited by early modern romance, character as figure is one of the essential tools in this task, a device by which poets may adumbrate and thereby justify their design. Early modern English narratives play self-consciously and frequently with this idea. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, for instance, is the playwright’s exuberant retort to Scaligerian poetics, the warrior who outrageously defies any disposition that could possibly inhere in his shepherd-identity as he improvises himself into being, right in front of the play’s audience. Boyle challenges convention via a different path, by introducing into his narrative a character who brings with him a long tradition of being dispositionless. Eventually western culture will adopt Spartacus as a historical figure—in retrospect he becomes an anticipatory paradigm for eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European movements against African slavery and imperialist domination, and even later (via Stanley Kubrick’s film) for the cause of gay liberation in the United States10 —but in the early modern period he is still a cipher. In Plutarch and Appian, the fullest classical sources, his story appears riddled with gaps and inconsistencies. He is a Thracian, known to the Romans and their sympathetic historians as mercenaries and cowards, and the success of his escape from the sure death of the gladiators’ pit and then of his threeyear campaign against some of the best generals Rome has to offer is seemingly without precedent, not only for a Thracian slave but for anyone. (As Boyle comments in his preface to the second part of Parthenissa, ‘‘Past ages cannot Parralell ’’ him, ‘‘neither doe I beleive the Future will.’’11) In most classical accounts his motivations remain shadowy—perhaps he meant to challenge the Romans, but perhaps instead he was simply trying, Odysseuslike, to usher himself and his fellow-slaves back home. Appian asserts that

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after his final defeat by Marcus Crassus his body was never found, one last mystery in his mysterious life.12 By sidestepping the ancient prejudice against Thracians and offering a substitute for the frustratingly shadowy account of Spartacus’s death in the classical sources, Boyle’s revision does ostensibly answer some of the problems in the historical record. It seems unlikely, however, that Boyle expected his audience to understand these changes as making any claim to facticity or adding much ballast to the conventional story. On the contrary, Parthenissa frustrates closure by emphasizing Spartacus’s lack of disposition. Mid-century romance, as I have argued elsewhere, tends to translate characterological disposition into self-interest, understood in early modern thought as the impulse toward those actions that it is most fundamentally in a creature’s nature to perform.13 Parthenissa is less prepared than any other romance of the period to offer an ethical justification for self-interest and more concerned to disengage from the necessity felt to inhere in interest: where Cloria or George MacKenzie’s Aretina condones self-interest as a transparently rational political motive, Parthenissa repudiates it as inimical to true friendship. In this light Boyle’s story of Spartacus might be read as Parthenissa’s epitome. Spartacus becomes a rebel by accident, because he is at the wrong place at the wrong time in his melancholy wandering. He has no intention of challenging the Roman empire, and indeed, near the close of his campaign he chooses not to advance on the city of Rome because he does not wish to ‘‘insult’’ his enemy. Apparently without ambition or any kind of desire that could establish a trajectory for him, in Boyle’s account he fails even to effect the suicide he has planned, via hand-to-hand combat, because the opponent he has lighted on turns out to be an old friend from Parthia who refuses to fight him. It is Spartacus’s nature in Parthenissa, even more than in the classical sources, to be inadequate to his own extravagant story; that he is so exactly adequate to Artabanes is Boyle’s Marlovian joke at the expense of conventional figural narrative.

 Jacques Amyot, in the preface to his French edition of Plutarch’s Lives, which Thomas North included when he translated Amyot’s edition into English in 1579, asserts that the distinguishing feature of ‘‘lives,’’ as opposed to histories, is that they represent not men’s ‘‘doings and adventures’’ but their ‘‘consultacions,’’ ‘‘the things that proceede from within’’ and lead them to do what they do.14 ‘‘Lives,’’ for Amyot, are about Scaligerian disposition at least as much as Aristotelian action. If it is fair to assume that Plutarch’s Lives was understood in the early modern period as a sustained

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examination of disposition, then even in its relation to its source, Parthenissa’s first book seems to work aggressively against type. Not only does Boyle ostentatiously signal, by Spartacus’s relation to Artabanes, that we are not to read the heroes as conventional allegorical figures for one another, but he also resorts to a veritable catalogue of dispositions from which to borrow his dispositionless character. In one of the anti-romances following on Charles Sorel’s parodic The Extravagant Shepherd (1627–28; translated into English 1654) such ironic emphasis might be its own end, but Parthenissa is too welldisposed toward romance, and too interested in its hermeneutics, for the reader to stop there. If Boyle’s characters are not allegorical representations of one another, and the narrative of one is not constructed as a reflection of that of the other, how might Parthenissa work instead? Or, to put the question another way, what alternative hermeneutic does the romance make visible? For modern readers, one obvious starting point is the antithesis between metaphor and metonymy that Roman Jakobson famously posits as the structural foundation of virtually all semiotic systems. Extending figural analysis from words and tropes to the far broader category of topic, which in practice comes to include even character, Jakobson argues that every topic in a given discourse is in figural relation to another, and that all figural relations can be reduced to two primary kinds—metaphor, which relates topics by similarity, and metonymy, which relates them by contiguity. Adapting Saussure’s system of axes, Jakobson plots metaphor on the vertical, synchronic axis of ‘‘selection’’ and metonymy on the horizontal, syntactic, diachronic axis of ‘‘combination.’’ Metaphor, for Jakobson, is a signifying practice essentially independent of time (polysemy is a state, not an event), while the process of metonymy cannot unfold except through time, as one topic follows or precedes another.15 Following Saussure, Jakobson holds that selection connects terms ‘‘in absentia,’’ terms ‘‘conjoined in the code [i.e., Saussure’s langue] but not necessarily in the message [parole],’’ while metonymic combination conjoins terms ‘‘in the actual message’’ (119). Even Jakobson cannot quite sustain this absolute distinction between metaphor and metonymy—as he concedes elsewhere, ‘‘any metonymy is slightly metaphoric and any metaphor has a metonymic tint’’16 —but he does claim that one or the other tends to predominate in a given literary form. In general he associates poetry with synchronic, selective metaphor, and prose (by which he seems to mean mainly narrative) with diachronic, syntactic metonymy. Jakobson insists on the figural nature of both metaphor and metonymy, but there are moments in his work that provoke the sense metonymy might

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be somewhat less figural than metaphor. Although he argues that both metaphor and metonymy can ‘‘revitalize’’ conventional perception or conception, which is part of what he believes art means to do, nevertheless in line with many theorists after him (and with the American New Critics’ preference for poetry over prose) he finds metaphor to be more revitalizing, because ‘‘selection’’ seems to him more agential or creative than combination.17 As a result, he says, narrative featuring a high degree of contiguous relation can give the impression that it is operating on autopilot, independent of a shaping consciousness—one result of which, as he notes in a fascinating essay on Pasternak, is that active, agential voice and even agential character often seem to drop out of highly metonymic narrative.18 Jakobson wants to retain the complex syntactical possibilities of metonymic combination, and he tries to avoid reducing contiguity to simple parataxis. At the same time, though, the relation described by metonymy at Jakobson’s pole, purified of selection (a limit case, as he concedes, not achievable in practice), seems to consist of little more than nearness, so that tautologically, contiguity at this extreme signifies little beyond itself. Unlike metaphor, at its limit metonymy seems virtually nonfigural, right at the boundary where words stop being in relation. Jakobson’s theory has been criticized for its reductive generality, which leads him into oversimplifications and inconsistencies particularly on the subject of metaphor. But his use of figuration as itself a metaphor, if rarely precise in a theoretical context, is often usefully suggestive, and for my purposes here his broad dichotomy between metaphor and metonymy offers a provocative characterization of a central antithesis in early modern narrative. If we apply Jakobson’s logic to narrative structure in a broad sense, we might call narrative metaphoric insofar as its characters and episodes refer to stories and ideas outside the narrative proper (such as roman a` clef or parable) or function internally as versions of one another (as in Shakespearean drama, which famously addresses one question in several different contexts). Or, we might call narrative metaphoric to the extent that its action or resolution can be seen to ‘‘fulfill’’ the shape it outlines at the outset through devices such as characterological disposition, in the model I traced earlier that emphasizes disposition. Separately or together, these three options probably characterize the large majority of literary narratives. By contrast, we can call metonymic the narrative that foregrounds local, immediately contiguous relation and generates its form through the continuous unfolding of events. Narrative is metonymic insofar as its elements are linked by ‘‘and then,’’ Jakobson’s quintessential paratactic tool.

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In general, what I am calling metaphoric narrative tends to produce a pronounced readerly impression of agency. In any metaphorical structure, the vehicle delivers us to the tenor, but the process also works the other way, the fact of the tenor bringing the vehicle more closely into focus as such, and for this reason metaphoric narrative shows a significant degree of self-reflection, a quality often realized or emphasized through a strong narratorial presence. (The many definitions of literary language as intrinsically self-reflective—Jakobson himself makes this point—privilege metaphor over metonymy.19) Correspondingly, and perhaps too because selection can be understood as more agential and creative than combination, as I suggested earlier, there is a stronger readerly presumption of design behind metaphoric narrative, whether authorial or divine. Insofar as arrival at the tenor ‘‘answers’’ or fulfills the vehicle, or action fulfills character, metaphoric narrative gives the impression of being (or asking to be made by the reader) a closed, coherent system, one that has been ‘‘thought’’ in advance. All these traits contribute to the sense that metaphoric narrative represents or inhabits a realm governed by aesthetic necessity (thematic or, more prestigiously, formal), rather than by contingency—witnessed, for instance, in Angus Fletcher’s description of allegorical figures as agentive ‘‘daemons’’ bent on realizing their signifying destiny, or Paul de Man’s association of metaphor and analogy with necessity in contrast to contiguity’s openness to chance.20 In literary history, metonymic narrative is most often metaphoric narrative’s poor relation. Its plot appears to have been put in motion by accident, rather than by destiny or the interests and designs of a narrator, and it proceeds as if independent of a narrator’s guiding hand, sometimes seemingly even without any narrative voice. Like Spartacus’s story in Parthenissa, which does not answer or reflect anything in Artabanes’s before it, the elements in metonymic narrative seem connected only arbitrarily, as if they happened to fall along the same line by pure chance. At its most extreme such narrative appears simply to describe the world as it presents itself randomly through time, in an endless paratactic sentence that is as far as can be from Aristotelian plot. This antithesis in narrative structure is paralleled by the early modern generic antithesis between epic and romance. Epic will not map exactly onto metaphoric narrative as I have been describing it, but there are several similarities: most significantly, epic’s emphasis on destiny and teleology; the allegorical relations it establishes among its own narrative, those of its predecessors, and history; and its tendency to rationalize its represented world into a coherent system of analogies (the paradigm for which, by

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David Quint’s powerful analysis, is the Aeneid’s elaborate analogic structure).21 At the other end of the dichotomy, many of the faults for which prose romance is often blamed, from the seventeenth century onward—its linking of one episode to the next by little more than parataxis, its attraction to contingency and avoidance of closure, its lack of literary self-consciousness—belong to metonymic structure. Broadly speaking, it seems fair to say that if all prose narrative is to some extent metonymic, as Jakobson hypothesizes, then early modern prose romance (and much medieval romance before it) is especially so. Those early modern romances that aspired to cultural prestige within a narrative culture that intensely privileged typology and allegory over other forms of representation—Sidney’s epic revisioning of the genre, for instance, or Mary Wroth’s canny adaptation of episodic structure for allegorical purposes—had to work hard to position themselves well away from the metonymic end of the continuum. If my application of Jakobson’s bipolar figural scheme to early modern narrative structure were simply another way to name the familiar antithesis between epic and romance, it would not be of much use. Its value inheres, instead, in the model it offers for reading early modern prose, especially romance. Interpretive criticism, as Jakobson notes, is itself a metaphoric discourse, a ‘‘meta-language’’ with the aim of inscribing another version of its object, and insofar as it mirrors poetry’s own metaphoric operation it constructs a ‘‘homogenous’’ system that answers the critical drive for coherence and closure. Jakobson calls for something ‘‘comparable to the rich literature on metaphor’’ for metonymy, but as he implicitly concedes, metonymy does not call for interpretation as such—indeed, an interpreted metonym has become a metaphor.22 As a result, attempts to read early modern prose figurally tend to privilege metaphoric structures over metonymic, even when they strive to construe figuration as something more than local ornamentation. So, for instance, in Brian Vickers’s sophisticated reading of figuration in Francis Bacon’s prose, the local metaphors that stud the prose serve as analogies for and thus keys to the argumentative structure as a whole.23 Locating figuration at the level of narrative structure itself, by contrast, focuses our attention on the seams between elements or topics in prose narrative, encouraging us to see the narrative as a complex system of episodic units in a variety of relations to one another. Parthenissa, by this model, is the sum of a vast number of narrative units, through which Boyle makes a path by linking and differentiating them in a variety of ways. And Jakobson’s bipolar model reminds us that analogy is not the only criterion according to

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which relationship can be constructed: contiguity itself may be an ideological or aesthetic choice on the part of the narrator, with the potential both to signify meaning and to structure readers’ apprehension of the text.

 In blocking the metaphorical correspondence that his fellow romance-writers usually cultivate, then, Boyle positions Parthenissa at what we might describe as the far metonymic end of Jakobson’s continuum. By its nature Parthenissa’s unusually metonymic structure offers little by way of internal explanation for itself, but even in the absence of self-reflexivity such a structure begins to make a demand on meaning. One of the central issues in recent scholarship on early modern prose narrative has been the relation between fiction and history, a relation that in early modern thought seems only sometimes to have to do with their relative faithfulness to fact. According to Michael McKeon’s now all but canonical account, a large share of fiction’s energy in seventeenth-century England is devoted to the ‘‘categorial instability’’ between itself and history—an uncertainty about the essential distinction between them—that is not successfully resolved until the novel emerges around 1720 to define history as factual in contradistinction to the novel itself.24 Extending McKeon’s logic, we might read Parthenissa’s juxtaposition of Spartacus’s ostensibly historical narrative with Artabanes’s fictional one, a juxtaposition too dramatic to be merely naı¨ve, as instead ironic, a recognition that fiction and history can no longer be metaphorically assimilated into one another. Itself a metaphor, that is, Boyle’s metonymic link between Spartacus and Artabanes would signify a more general tension in seventeenth-century narrative between factual history and imaginative fiction, and an effort to open that tension to scrutiny. From the retrospective point of view of the novel such an interpretation seems sensible, but I am doubtful that facticity was really at issue for Boyle. In his preface to The Princess Cloria, Percy Herbert argues that romance is the only genre in which it is possible to express such historical events as those of the 1640s and ’50s that defy belief, and by this dictum Parthenissa’s incorporation of Spartacus’s unprecedented and unaccountably successful rebellion looks not anomalous or random but entirely appropriate.25 For Herbert it is not romance’s fictitiousness that separates it from other kinds of narrative but its departure from probability, a quality that history predicated on facticity sometimes shares, as Boyle may mean to point out in borrowing Spartacus for romance. As I have suggested, Boyle and Herbert were

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both working in the quasi-Aristotelian tradition of Scaliger, whose influential Poetics classifies all discourse as philosophical, rhetorical, or pleasing, and puts fiction and history together in the last category as dual examples of narratio, by its very nature delightful. For Scaliger fiction is distinct from history as much because it is instructive as because it lacks basis in fact—an idea that Philip Sidney, of course, would later develop at length.26 And Scaliger comes close to arguing that the object of fiction’s mimesis is itself imaginary, that the ‘‘forms’’ the poet imitates are found chiefly not in nature but in other texts.27 My point is not that early modern thought lacked any distinction between history and fiction on the grounds of facticity, but rather that there is generic and hermeneutic context for Boyle that makes facticity only one criterion by which the two genres might be differentiated from or likened to one another. Indeed, in the preface to the second part of Parthenissa Boyle concedes that he violates historical veracity by putting Hannibal in the same time frame with Spartacus, but also counters that the lessons usually offered by the stories of these two men are in no way vitiated by his own narrative play.28 Fiction in Parthenissa may not be an allegorical figure for history, but neither does it get in history’s way, because history for Boyle is a series of episodes that retain their nature and value in a variety of settings. If the point of Boyle’s metonymic structure, then, is not to draw special attention to any distinction between fiction and history, what else might it signify? Besides its episodic and open-ended nature Parthenissa manifests several of the other characteristics Jakobson associates with metonymic narrative, especially its disinclination to represent narratorial agency. One of the striking formal features of mid seventeenth-century romances such as Cloria, Eliana, and Aretina, in comparison with their predecessors by Ariosto, Spenser, and Sidney, is that they rarely foreground their authorial narrators, but Parthenissa takes this to an extreme, recounting almost all of its plot via first-person reminiscence by its characters and sometimes embedding its stories three frames deep. Boyle’s romance also echoes at the level of theme the metonymic association with ‘‘free’’ plots rather than those that present themselves as governed by necessity or fate. One of the central arguments of Parthenissa’s male lovers, for instance, is that male friendship is ethically superior to heterosexual erotic love, on the (Montaignean) grounds that it proceeds from ‘‘inclination,’’ by which Boyle means something close to reasoned choice, as opposed to the seeming fatedness of erotic love (e.g. 566, 573).29

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As we might expect of someone enslaved, Boyle’s Spartacus himself asserts the value of freedom, but in oddly narrative terms. Contemplating a march on Rome, he tells his company that its real advantage would lie not in victory but in its indication to the Romans that the rebels act according to ‘‘our election, not our necessity’’ (242), that they transcend the narrative ambit usually prescribed for slaves. Shortly thereafter Spartacus decides against the march, because if he won he would insult the Romans and because, as his servant concludes, he is suffused by a deep ‘‘Melancholy’’ (244). Spartacus’s repeated disinclination or inability to act, which is echoed by several of Boyle’s other heroes, might seem at odds with his valorization of freedom, but it may well have been more conventional in the early modern period, nervous as it was about the ethics of a self-interest independent of providence or community, to associate agency with necessity than with choice. We might think, for instance, of the stoic embrace of necessity as the only basis for virtuous, disinterested agency. Throughout Parthenissa its heroes express the wish to free themselves from necessity and fate, but like Boyle-as-narrator, hiding in the wings, they are reluctant to claim their own interest and the corresponding power of design. Perhaps, with Jakobson, we can read this reluctance as a sort of psychologization of metonymic structure, or, vice versa, as the thematic ground for the formal abstraction into metonymy. Ironically, the correspondence of the two provides evidence of an urge toward metaphoric coherence that may be inescapable in narrative. There are also several possible analogues available outside the text for Parthenissa’s metonymic structure. One is what we know of Boyle’s biography: as I noted earlier, he took the Royalist side until 1650, when, probably en route to France, he was arrested and ‘‘persuaded’’ by Cromwell to switch allegiance, and then at the Restoration he somehow managed to restore himself to royal favor and became a servant of the crown in Dublin. Throughout Boyle’s political career his opponents derided what they took to be his expedience. Though it is possible only to speculate, a person with his history might well have seen a reason to obscure or disavow his own agency and self-interest, or (more charitably) have felt a sense of his failure to effect his own narrative design in any theater but the most local. Another, more textual analogue for the romance’s metonymy is suggested by the work of revisionist historians of the mid-seventeenth century, who in the 1980s and ’90s criticized both Whig and Marxist accounts of the period for being totalizing and deterministic.30 In the revisionist view the conflict of mid-century was produced not by an ineluctable shift in the zeitgeist toward parliamentary democracy or against social oppression, but by myriad local

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tensions and events, working sometimes in harmony and sometimes in opposition. As in Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, reclaimed for its sense of the power of historical contingency, in revisionist history the execution of Charles I was almost accidental, the result of immediate constraints on and decisions by a small group of people who did not intend to kill the king almost until they did so. Part of the critique of conventional history revisionists meant to make is that conventional historical narrative produces the effect of causality simply by stringing events along a timeline, which draws attention to their similarities and differences and in turn makes later events seem responses to earlier ones. One complicating factor is that not only characters in history and fiction but people in the world act as if they were in metaphorical narratives, organizing events according to the principle of causality in order to decide what to do next. To resist this tendency, revisionist historiography recalled us to metonymic narrative as I have been describing it, narrative that demands attention to the absence of anything but contiguity between or among its elements and denies the existence of coherent, systemic agency. A fully metonymic historical narrative, as revisionists well knew, would approach a contradiction in terms, if history’s task is concerned with causality, and post-revisionist historians have recuperated long-term causality and insisted on the analogies, for instance, between social and political thought and between the ideologies of political elites and the middling sort.31 But perhaps Boyle, like Clarendon after him, found at least some precedent in the events of his own lifetime for a view of history as random and contingent, and perhaps, too, the attraction of that precedent registers not just a biographical but a more general cultural wish to escape historical agency or responsibility.

 As I have been emphasizing, these ideological motives for Parthenissa’s structure are only speculative, merely hypotheses about what Boyle’s metonymy might signify as itself a figure. One of the questions Parthenissa challenges us to ask, by so blatantly blocking metaphorical correspondence, is whether it is inevitable that metonymy register as a metaphor, and here once again Boyle’s treatment of the Spartacus story is illuminating. If Parthenissa’s Spartacus does not call for figural interpretation, what does Boyle ask of his audience instead? In this case, as I suggested earlier, the answer seems to be identification. When Artabanes first acknowledges that he is Spartacus, Boyle has him pause in his account for a full page while the hermit models for the reader his wonder at encountering this historical legend in the very

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flesh. What is strange about the reader’s relation to Spartacus at this extended moment is that, with the hermit’s, it feels unmediated by the apparatuses of narrative. In effect Spartacus steps out of his historical frame into Boyle’s fiction, suddenly materializing in the narrative present without any set-up or context. And in the state of surprise Boyle has fostered by withholding narrative preparation, we as readers are momentarily precluded from summoning up our own series of frames (Plutarch, ancient Roman history, tales of rebellion, etc.) with which to locate Spartacus and instead seem to join him there, as if we were suddenly inside the familiar story ourselves. Just as Artabanes identifies himself absolutely with Spartacus, so our world seems to become conflated for an instant with the narrative we are reading, Barclay’s mirror dropping away. This uncanny sense dissipates quickly, but Boyle reminds us of its presence several times in the romance, at various moments when our attention is brought to the process of reading or listening. One of the oddest is a brief episode recounted to Spartacus by Izadora, the fictional lover Boyle devises for Perolla. Izadora is in the middle of telling Spartacus her own complicated history when she pauses to discuss the remarkable Amazora, an inhabitant of a city Hannibal besieged on his way to Rome. During the siege Amazora recognized that the city’s women were consuming the limited supply of food without doing anything to resist Hannibal, and true to her name she decided to rally all the women of the city ‘‘to whom Glory was more pleasing than Life’’ and lead a nocturnal escape over the city walls. Unfortunately Hannibal’s army ‘‘cruelly murther’d’’ the entire party (111). When Perolla arrived after the fact and heard the story (before he met Izadora), he killed fifteen hundred Lybians in retaliation and then fell in love with the dead woman. Amazora’s ‘‘Fire was of so peculiar a quality,’’ recounts Izadora, ‘‘that when it had reduc’d her to ashes, those very Reliques retained heat enough to inflame him, and perhaps there has been seldom heard of a Love so strange in the Birth, in the Life, and in Death. For it was created by an object that was dead, the Effect remained when the Cause was taken away, and having no material sustenance to preserve it selfe alive’’ (111). In fact, Izadora generously concludes, of Perolla’s heart she herself has now ‘‘onely the reversion’’ (111)—a word that when used with the definite article in this period often means a leftover, as from a meal (OED II 4.a). Izadora does not make any of the rationalizations about dead lovers usually summoned when new ones have already taken their places: Amazora did not lay the ground in Perolla for a better or even an equivalent love, nor did Perolla turn her memory into a Neoplatonic stimulus toward virtue. On

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the contrary, though she was present to Perolla only through a story, she was nevertheless so real to him that she all-but-literally consumed a part of him, her ‘‘Effect’’ as material as the original ‘‘Cause.’’ As at the moment of Spartacus’s recognition, Boyle in the Amazora story seems to be trying to conjure an apprehension of literary or narrative character not as signifier or vehicle but as the almost-material real. Amazora will never join Perolla within his own temporal frame, but she acts on him as if she had, arousing all the responses that might be produced by a woman in the flesh. Boyle may find a precedent in Mary Wroth’s 1621 romance Urania, especially in the extraordinary moment when the Wroth-figure Pamphilia enters an elaborately allegorical palace and literally ‘‘metamorphoses’’ the allegorical figure of Constancy and the conceptual virtue she represents into her own breast, reversing the trajectory of much allegorical interpretation and hinting that character, rather than concept, must be the reader’s interpretive endpoint.32 But Boyle goes even further than Wroth, in that whereas Wroth sustains the sense of literary character as a mediator between conceptual idea and the real, extrafictional person in the world with the reader, Boyle reaches to put the reader on virtually the same plane with the literary/historical character. If metaphorical characters perform presence, reminding us of their distinction from the referent even as they assert their similarity, characters in Boyle’s metonymic narrative simply assert it, as if to trick us momentarily into forgetting the artificiality of historical narrative, or of history itself. Parthenissa’s suggestion that reader and character might inhabit the same narrative frame, however briefly, is on the surface an odd mechanism toward identification. Usually readerly identification is associated with realistic characters, characters who through richness of descriptive and narrative detail resemble ‘‘virtual persons’’ and thereby seduce readers into believing temporarily that they have entered another world.33 And realist characters, by most accounts, are metaphorical rather than metonymic. In Georg Luka´cs’s prescription for historical realism, to cite one well-known example, character must be ‘‘typical,’’ by which he means not ‘‘commonplace’’ but ‘‘possessing capacities and propensities which when intensified illuminate the complex dialectic of the major contradictions, motive forces and tendencies of an era.’’34 Realistic character, for Luka´cs, is a sort of microcosm, reproducing in little within itself the enormous burden of history. Tzvetan Todorov too defines realistic character as metaphorical, arguing that the imputation of ‘‘psychology’’ that turns character from a mere narrative agent to a person is a metaphorical recapitulation of the narrative action. Whereas

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in ‘‘a-psychological’’ (pre- or non-novelistic) narrative a state or quality of character is merely a precipitating condition, with no existence independent of the action it provokes (something very close to what Scaliger means by disposition), in psychological narrative such as the novel the causal relation between psychological state and act is so ‘‘diffuse’’ that the psychological in effect detaches itself from the action, which was in fact causally self-contained already, and shows itself to be a mirror, a ‘‘duplication,’’ of the relations among the various actions in the narrative.35 Parthenissa, by contrast, is entirely lacking in the kind of historical and psychological detail cited by Luka´cs and Todorov; not only is its character nonrepresentational, but there is no content, in the realist sense, for it to represent. But even so, Parthenissa suggests, the reader can be persuaded to believe for a moment that she inhabits the fictional frame; against our retrospective, novelistic expectation, metonymic narrative does have the power to enlist the reader in identification. Identification is a complex process, enacted in many different ways, and at first glance Boyle’s version might seem like a footnote to literary history, only one strange facet of a narrative unusual even among its historically obscure contemporaries. But Parthenissa’s mode of enlisting readers, and indeed its metonymic strategies more generally, are probably not as singular as they appear. In concluding I want to glance at their similarity to the narrative strategies of an early novel with profound and as yet not fully understood debts to seventeenth-century romance, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Richardson, as is well known, happened upon the project of Pamela in the process of producing a conduct book, and in the novel he goes to great lengths to insist that he is only the editor, not the author, of Pamela’s history. But Pamela is not a mimetically realist character, and in fact Richardson encourages readerly identification with her by means of a mechanism quite similar to Boyle’s. Like Spartacus’s successful rebellion, Pamela’s marriage to Mr. B is a social outrage, a narrative marvel that cannot be anticipated by such tools as characterly disposition. Pamela, following in the steps of all real romances, protests that it and its heroine are innocent of design: the novel has no authorial narrator, and Richardson’s brilliant technique of having Pamela write ‘‘to the moment,’’ in a mode that parallels the sexual and social passivity forced upon her, means that Pamela cannot be said to know the narrative’s ends or retrospectively shape its form any more than Richardson can. To the extent that readers suspend disbelief in reading the novel, they acquiesce not to Pamela’s reality per se, as a person in the extrafictional

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world, but to the narrative process by which the novel purports to be happening, its unfolding as if in the same ‘‘real time’’ in which its audience encounters it. Certainly the contemporary readers who made Pamela’s character such a publishing phenomenon identified with her, when they did, in part as a form of social wish-fulfillment, and also probably because of her vulnerability. But readers also identify with Pamela because Richardson compromises our ability to see her as a type, a figure either for her audience or for the action in her own narrative. It is not accidental, in this context, that the strategy of the novel’s skeptical debunkers from Fielding forward has been to read her metaphorically. It becomes impossible to put ourselves in Pamela’s shoes, Fielding’s Shamela insists, when we invoke the misogynist stereotype that Pamela must have been from the beginning—the scheming, self-interested woman who buys her way with her sexuality—and when we recognize her as a type we see that her disposition has cast the novel’s end as inevitable from its very beginning. In a recent symposium on the problem of early modern dramatic character, Jonathan Crewe observed that the popular (and to some extent even scholarly) sense of Shakespeare’s characters as ‘‘virtual persons’’ seems to resist all attempts at theory. Although we know at some level that his characters are literary and theatrical effects, in most cultural forums we continue to treat them as if they were people in the world with us. This resistance, Crewe concludes, has proved so persistent that perhaps it is time to move from dismissing it as naı¨ve to engaging its history.36 Parthenissa, I have been arguing, offers one episode in that history, a demonstration that ‘‘virtual persons’’ can be produced not just by drama and realist fiction but by kinds of narrative in which we have not expected them to appear. It reminds us too that identification is not just a default effect, the result of uneducated reading practices; on the contrary, in Boyle’s romance it is backed by its own technology, a complex set of metonymic practices that may have more to do with the relation of romance to novel than we have yet understood.

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Caterpillage Death and Truthiness in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting harry berger, jr.

The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at. T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ Description of the world differs from the world. . . . The gap between the animation and durability of the description, and the ephemerality of the object in real life—that is, the knowledge that the actual model for the painting has long since disintegrated—is the emblem of mortality. . . . Descriptive painting did not emerge to fulfill the requirements of the vanitas topos. . . . Rather, the topos followed from the technique. Christopher Wood 1

Ever since its emergence at the turn of the seventeenth century, the aesthetic body of Dutch still life painting has been hamstrung by iconography. Viewed through the magnific lens of Britannica Online, iconography is ‘‘the science of identification, description, classification, and interpretation of symbols, themes, and subject matter in the visual arts. The term can also refer to the artist’s use of this imagery in a particular work.’’2 The Wikipedian etymology gets us closer to the problem: ‘‘The word iconography literally means ‘image writing’, and comes from the Greek eikon (image) and graphein (to write).’’3 Iconography, then, is the practice of ‘‘writing’’ on images and reading them as texts. 91

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In iconographical discourse, the text most frequently inscribed in or on still life painting is said to be the vanitas. ‘‘A vanitas painting contains collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures; it exhorts the viewer to consider mortality and to repent.’’4 This definition may be shopworn but it’s accurate as far as it goes. Vanitas embraces both senses of the term ‘‘vainness’’: futility and conceit. It is the vanity of being mortal, the vanity of failing to be art, the stupid hope that art can conquer death. But the vanitas is not only a theme. It’s a figure or trope: the translation of the theme into a recurrent pattern that governs both the choice of objects and the syntax and rhetoric of their visual relations. The vanitas as trope is invested with the moral energy of a cultural attitude. The idea of the vanitas as cultural attitude or structure of thought lurks in the titular pun of Simon Schama’s impressive if problematic study: The Embarrassment of Riches.5 Schama takes issue with the thesis articulated by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that the Protestant ethic gave aid and comfort to capitalism by presenting the pursuit of wealth as a godly duty, a calling, rather than as a sin or frailty.6 Schama objects that the abundance of wealth with which the Dutch were blessed was also a moral burden.7 He documents the various strategies they used to equilibrate one embarrassment over against the other so that they could, with clearer conscience, go on making and having enough to be embarrassed about.8 The Embarrassment of Riches as a whole is an extended meditation on the pervasiveness of the vanitas in Dutch culture. In Schama’s terms, the business of much still life is to register the pressure of embarrassment and the claim of morality, and then to move on. Yet as he shows in a later essay on the genre, vanitas as an ambience retains predicant force.9 Its moral patina oxidizes still life so that the debt owed by sinfully successful burghers to their culture may be acknowledged and rubbed off. Its tarnish coats a genre that too readily betrays the happy predicament of a Golden Age: ‘‘the embarrassment of riches.’’ But since still life luxuriates in its vexing profusion, the vanitas symbolism may be forced to present itself as a target of parody. My argument in this study is that if it is strategically useful for iconography to seem more important than it actually is, it may be because the vanitas it privileges is actually less important than it seems. It diverts attention from other figures, other forces. To put it in terms borrowed from a sister medium, vanitas iconography is the McGuffin of still life:

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Caterpillage: Dutch Still Life Painting 93 McGuffin. In a film (now also in a novel or other form of narrative fiction): a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops. Oxford English Dictionary In effect, the function of a MacGuffin [in a Hitchcock film] is like the ‘‘meaning’’ of a poem—which T. S. Eliot compared to the bone thrown by a burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind while the poem goes about its own, deeper business.10

According to Eliot, ‘‘The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem . . . may be . . . to keep [the reader’s] mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him; much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog. This is a normal situation,’’ Eliot adds, ‘‘of which I approve.’’11 But even in the face of parody, the watchdog of the mind is never fully distracted. The persistence of recognizable vanitas symbols keeps it snarling on its chain. Recent interpreters of still life have conferred new depth on the vanitas, partially extricating it from the commonplace sense featured in the Britannica definition cited above. They concede that its ‘‘chief use’’ may be to divert the watchdog by throwing it a moral bone while the painting ‘‘goes about its own . . . business.’’ But they also show that there is much to be diverted from. In their critiques of the culture that produced still life they uncover darker enactments of vanitas, episodes of bad faith unfolding at both the local and the international levels. The present study is deeply indebted to the work of Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Anne Goldgar, and Richard Leppert.12

Vanitas: The McGuffin of Still Life Still life is notable for its devotion to the special quality of moral evasiveness Stephen Colbert calls ‘‘truthiness’’: ‘‘Truthiness is what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.’’13 Truthiness: the spirit of iconography; the objective of the vanitas. Colbert’s critique of evasiveness reminds me of a similar critique voiced by Shakespeare’s Lafew in All’s Well that Ends Well: ‘‘They make trifles of terrors, ensconcing themselves in seeming knowledge when they should submit themselves to an unknown fear’’ (II.iii.3–6).14

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We can see a good example of it in a plate from Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (Figure 1), a collection of engravings Hoefnagel’s son made after his father’s drawings and published in 1592.15 The central figure in the upper half of the plate is a single rose thrusting up from the ground. The rose opens ecstatically to embrace the source of its life, the sunlight of the Erasmian adage lettered just above it, Aeternum florida virtus (‘‘Youth flowers eternally’’). This flourish doesn’t go unchallenged. At the bottom of the page is another inscription, Mirabar, celerem fugitiva aetate rapinam et dum nascuntur, consenuisse Rosas, which the editor of the volume translates as: ‘‘I wondered at the speed of decay in this fleeting life, and that while roses are blooming they are also fading.’’ This is the standard elegiac message which the plate as a whole delivers. But however ‘‘wise’’ this timeworn elegiac motto may be, it has little to do with what goes on at the center of the illustration. The rose’s wide-open petals are beginning to droop, and with good reason: a snail stretching fantastically out of its shell is coiled tightly around the stem of the rose. The rose’s eagerness to soak up the sun is matched by the snail’s eagerness to

Figure 1. Joris Hoefnagel, Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii, 1600, Part II, plate 2. Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, inv. no. 94209d.

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strangle the rose. The original inscription registers this more accurately than the translation does: the translator muffles the force of the original by using ‘‘decay’’ to English the word rapinam, which means plunder or pillage (as in caterpillage). What actually goes on in the image reduces the inscription to a McGuffin, a ‘‘bone thrown . . . to distract the watchdog of the mind.’’ Hoefnagel’s Archetypa seems to have interested several early seventeenthcentury Dutch still life painters, who included caterpillars, snails, and wellchomped leaves in their imaginary bouquets. These critters are sometimes depicted realistically. More often, they are toylike or jewel-like, as exquisite as the exotic-looking shells and enameled porcelain ware with which they so frequently share the picture space. Iconographers tend to downplay the terrors, diminish the impact, of these lovely agents of decay by reading them not only as in malo reminders of mortality in the vanitas tradition but also as in bono figures of religious allegory—insect metamorphosis either as resurrection or as symbolic of the perpetuity of the natural cycle. For example, Sam Segal subjugates realism to allegoresis when he argues that ‘‘in the first half of the seventeenth century the Dutch flower still-life is almost always read as a vanitas.’’ Segal’s emphasis is elegiac rather than moral or religious: ‘‘Flowers bloom for only a short time, so their beauty is of brief duration. So it is with the life of man, which like a flower is bound by time. The damaged rose petals strengthen the idea. The snail means that time appears to proceed slowly but irrevocably creeps forward. The snail is bound by the earth, i.e., the material realm. This pertains also to the caterpillar.’’16 This is surely a possible way to interpret the presence of snails and caterpillars. But it isn’t the only way. Shortness of life is one thing. Damage is another. Segal’s vanitization of the caterpillar as representing the tooth of time comes down to this: the caterpillar is—and was then represented as—the feeding stage of the butterfly. Seventeenth century gardeners and painters may not have had access to the truths of modern caterpillar science, among them the fact that during its two-or-three-week tenure on earth, the constantly chomping caterpillar can grow several hundred times its original size.17 But they had eyes to see with. And they had ideas that transformed the caterpillar into a redeemable monster: its metamorphosis into a moth or butterfly still gets interpreted as a symbol of resurrection.18 By reading such images as symbols, iconography captures their details and transforms them into textual denotations. The presence of objects like a skull, a time piece, or a burning fuse has a contagious effect. All the items

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in their neighborhood contract the vanitas and become symptoms of supposedly preexisting bodies of belief. It would be misleading to overstate the prevalence of this malady. A brief review will show that in recent decades scholars have given the vanitas new depth and richness. Their attitudes range from careful specificity to mild skepticism. The most energetic contemporary apologist for iconographic truthiness has been Eddy de Jongh, but his defense is measured and exploratory rather than dogmatic. His strategy consists in confessing that lack of real evidence forces the latter-day scholar to compensate in two ways. First, he imagines what a seventeenth-century iconological treatise would say if only it had been written, and second, he deduces from this erudite fantasy what meanings seventeenth-century painters would have found in the treatise and thought obligatory to convey.19 De Jongh cautiously rejects the idea that ‘‘all still-lifes of the period were overburdened with references’’: some artists may have ‘‘preferred to arouse only vague associations in their public,’’ while ‘‘in certain works there is precious little or no deeper content at all.’’20 He insists that ‘‘iconology cannot be practiced without a certain element of speculation.’’21 And he is careful to sort out different levels of symbolic potentiality. On the one hand, the ‘‘unambiguous’’ vanitas still life contains a skull. ‘‘Dishes and items of food,’’ on the other hand, ‘‘just do not have it in them to make as strong a semantic impact as skulls.’’22 This is part of de Jongh’s commendable polemic against excessive iconography. He is intent on protecting the practice from symbol-hunters whose enthusiasm would give his art a bad name. He goes on to concede that in the absence of any early treatise, ‘‘we have to resort to a method of interpretation that can produce nothing more substantial than twentiethcentury reconstructions of possible seventeenth-century answers.’’ The phrase, ‘‘nothing more substantial’’ is disarmingly modest. But the author immediately raises the bar: ‘‘these reconstructions,’’ he sternly adds, ‘‘do not necessarily have to be devoid of good sense.’’23 The topic is more systematically explored in Paul Taylor’s illuminating study of floral symbolism.24 During his extended account of the symbolic valencies of twelve flowers and three insects, Taylor is careful to emphasize the diversity and flexibility of response (or non-response) in ‘‘a society where symbolism could be attached to or withdrawn from virtually anything at will.’’25 Like de Jongh, he generally accepts and works with the conventional range of meanings ascribed to the vanitas. In one comment, however, he briefly anticipates the more complicated sense of the vanitas

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that Anne Goldgar will develop: ‘‘Dutch people in the Golden Age were perfectly able to pay enormous sums for a flower, use it as an emblem of the vanity of earthly riches, and see no discrepancy at all between their actions.’’26 The most ironic manifestation of the vanitas occurs at the botanicohistorical level. It concerns the true cause of the apparently spontaneous generation of the brilliant ‘‘flames’’ or ‘‘breaks’’ that made tulips so valuable: ‘‘What the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip, a fact that . . . doomed the beauty it made possible. . . . For several hundred years tulips were selected for a trait that would sicken and eventually kill them. . . . The more beautiful the breaks produced by the infection, the greater the number of infected plants in Dutch gardens and the more total virus in circulation.’’27 The vanitas receives new depth and meaning in Goldgar’s Tulipmania. She argues that although its customary deployment preceded the tulip crash of 1636, it takes on more intense significance when the crash is coupled with the plague in 1636–37.28 The theme of her powerful chapter entitled ‘‘Bad Faith’’ is that the titular phrase picks out the vanitas by which behavior in the tulip trade was stigmatized. ‘‘Bad Faith,’’ which centers almost obsessively on issues of trust and distrust, shows how the tulip becomes the figural displacement as well as the material cause of sharp practices among dealers: ‘‘Tulips were perhaps particularly susceptible to problems over trust. The nature of the flower made this so. There were perhaps two weeks in the year in which the flower’s blossom . . . was actually visible to buyers. For the rest of the year, buyers had to take the promises of the sellers on trust.’’29 But the promises were unreliable and ‘‘the tulip crash proved a tremendous shock to notions of trust.’’ For the most part ‘‘the damage was . . . not financial. It was the confusion of values, the breakdown of honor, and the destruction of trust bound up in the events of the 1630s that caused this damage to Dutch society.’’30 In Goldgar’s vision, vanitas becomes a force that transgresses its conventional iconographic operations. It takes on the specific qualities of the bad faith of tulipmania: In the pamphlets and tulip songs, the unreliability of the flower was partly intended to be a contrast with the reliability of God. . . . The tulip, like Flora, is in some ways a metaphor here for its own sellers; to rely on them was also to build on sand. . . . When the tulip trade crashed, some authors suspected that it was not through any economic mechanisms that they in any

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98 Harry Berger, Jr. case would have been ill equipped to explain. It was rather the fault of certain deceitful practices carried out by a cabal of essentially criminal florists. . . . It was this social anxiety . . . that was most frightening for contemporaries. It was crucial to this society, a society anxious for order, to know just who was who.31

If Goldgar focuses on the vanitas of bad faith within the local Dutch tulip trade, Julie Berger Hochstrasser expands the scope of inquiry to the bad faith of the Dutch colonial trading empire. The thesis of her remarkable Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age, published in the same year as Goldgar’s Tulipmania, is that ‘‘trade’’ is a euphemistic way to describe the violent and piratical pursuit of the commodities depicted in still life pictures. Yet even when still life is depicted under the sign of vanitas, the ‘‘visual language of the commodity’’ affirms and exalts the power of the merchants whose spoils the artist imitates: their aspirations bleed into his. This language betrays ‘‘what now reads as a political agenda of legitimation, even entirely apart from any calculated strategies on the part of the artist.’’32 In other words, Still Life and Trade explores the truthiness of still life in political and ideological terms. The brutality documented by Hochstrasser, and the intense if low-key voracity that drives the double-dealing of Goldgar’s merchants, throw a shadow over the more benign characterization of Dutch culture formulated by Simon Schama. The shadow of vanitas that falls across the embarrassment of riches in the time of tulipmania has the form of an enormous incessantly munching caterpillar. And within this comic figure, this visible worm, there lurks another.

The Sick Rose O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.33

At first glance, Blake’s ‘‘Rose’’ connotes whatever is natural, beautiful, fragile, innocent, and open or vulnerable to the world, while the worm brings evil, corruption, disease, mortality, and worldly experience. But at

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second glance, this changes by the time the elevated ‘‘thou art’’ gives way to the colloquial and sharply terminated sibilance of ‘‘sick.’’34 The apostrophe uttered by the voice of Experience marks a performative act of mystification. It represents a speaking to, and a gazing at, something that seems simultaneously to be definite and familiar to the speaker but indefinite and unfamiliar to us readers. ‘‘Rose’’ appears as a proper noun, and the possibility that it names a woman flickers into thought for a brief moment because ‘‘O Rose’’ is a vocative. Blake’s poem descends into a field of deepening blue that blackens its last two lines. From this benighted ground a thorny, leafy rose plant shoots up, arches around the inscribed verses, and is dragged earthward by its heavy fallen blossom. Three women are depicted in various postures of despair, all dressed in the rose’s hues. The first emerges from the blossom and the other two are above it. The second is a bud-like form ‘‘huddled [on a shoot] as if weeping’’ and the third, higher up, has ‘‘her head buried in her arms, her left leg pulled up but dangling, her long scroll-skirt tangled almost wormlike down the main stem.’’35 In addition there are at least two visible worms, a voracious caterpillar at top left working on a leaf and a banded caterpillar or earthworm attacking the fallen rose. I say ‘‘at least two’’ not only because some versions show a worm-like swelling between the two leaves at the upper right but also because of the highest woman’s ‘‘worm-like’’ skirt. It curls down like a long caterpillar. Its tail is wrapped tightly about the main stem in a strangle-hold that seems partly responsible for the sickness of the rose. The utterance that descends into a darkening field is at once sympathetic and sardonic. It projects the surprised and pained observation of a lamenting child. It projects the grim retributive disgust of the punishing Judge. Yet the voice that reverberates through the rhetorical storm makes the Rose not only the victim but also the accomplice of the worm. It registers both the helplessness of a futile warning and the bitterness of the cynic’s fulfilled prophecy. Its bite penetrates most sharply in the phrase ‘‘has found out’’: has discovered and exposed what you tried to conceal, ‘‘thy bed/Of crimson joy.’’ Blake conjures up a haunting lamia-like presence whose ability to destroy its destroyer lurks in the instability, the reversibility, of the poetic inversion, ‘‘his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy.’’ Thy life destroys his dark secret love. Thus innocence is fulfilled in being violated by experience, and unknowingly desires ‘‘her’’ own destruction. It’s with ‘‘her’’ permission that the violator finds its home, finds its bed, finds its pleasure, in the Rose.

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By the end of the poem, the women no less than the worms infect the image like allegorical swellings. Scholars have applied the standard iconographic compresses to them—vanitas and resurrection—along with particular allusions in the domain of intra-Blakean iconography.36 But the two stanzas inscribed in the picture’s central depths project a speaking voice that turns the banality of such iconographic trifles into the terrors of erotic and sado-masochistic complicity. From this Blakean standpoint, the moral McGuffins of the vanitas exemplify the evasive action censured by Shakespeare’s Lafew, again: ‘‘They make trifles of terrors, ensconcing themselves in seeming knowledge when they should submit themselves to an unknown fear.’’ Objectively, the vanitas motif represents the threat of disorder. Reflexively, it represents the fear of that threat. Blake caricatures the ‘‘rational’’ desire to repress or neutralize that fear in the figure of Urizen, whose motto is ‘‘One command, one joy, one desire,/One curse, one weight, one measure,/One King, one God, one Law.’’37 Urizen is the spirit of truthiness, the drive to capture the world for iconography. It’s as if to forecast and mock the emergence of modern iconography that Blake feints toward the vanitas motif in ‘‘The Sick Rose.’’38 His tiny nightmare gives substance to the genre name that the French seem to have bestowed on still life in the year before his birth.

Nature Morte According to Charles Sterling, the Dutch term still-leven appeared in ‘‘the jargon of the studios’’ in the 1650s, when ‘‘leven (life or nature) simply meant ‘model’ or ‘living model’; still, of course, meant ‘motionless’. Stillleven, then, in contradistinction to the painting of figures or animals, was the painting of things incapable of moving.’’39 In other words, the objects of still life were described as things incapable of making the kind of trouble sitters in group portraits make for their painters and each other. Sterling adds that in eighteenth-century Paris, under Dutch influence, ‘‘still lifes were designated . . . as nature repose´e, i.e. things at rest,’’ and that nature morte, which was first used in 1756 and finally prevailed in France, ‘‘undoubtedly connotes a shade of contempt. It came into use when the idea of motionlessness was extended to include everything that is inanimate or dead.’’ But ‘‘there are few Frenchmen today for whom the term nature morte evokes the opposite of life.’’40 Yet this evocation lurks in the wings when Sterling enumerates the motifs to be found in vanitas pictures: ‘‘We . . . find symbols of the destruction of life and matter (shabby books,

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wilted flowers, blighted fruit, stale bread, worm-eaten cheese, severed ropes), and symbols of the inexorable flight of time (hourglasses, timepieces, guttering candles). Still other symbols remind us of the precariousness of man’s life, by likening it to a soap bubble, or of the brief duration allotted to earthly things, by likening them to a flitting butterfly, a flower, a cloud of smoke. . . .’’41 Sterling locates a rationale for this list in Paul Claudel’s account of de´sagre´gation: ‘‘common to the majority of seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes is a compositional device’’ that ‘‘consists in suggesting a latent movement which, we are made to feel, is already going on under our very eyes. ‘The Dutch still life,’ wrote Paul Claudel, ‘is an arrangement in process of disintegration, it is something that has fallen prey to duration.’ In the Vanitas, which is entirely devoted to the idea of transitoriness, this Baroque dynamic was perhaps pursued with greater lucidity than in any other type of picture.’’42 Claudel’s is an interesting move because it shifts the terminological weight from a metaphoric or hyperbolic sense of ‘‘dead’’ to a literal sense of ‘‘dying’’: from nature ‘‘morte’’ to nature ‘‘mourant.’’ Sterling’s deployment of Claudel is equally interesting because it identifies mourant with de´sagre´gant, and both with a ‘‘compositional device’’ common to most still lifes. Nature mourant is a more accurate descriptor than nature morte. Flowers have been severed from their life source. They have, in a word, been cut. They may have a short afterlife once they’ve lost their roots, but they’re technically dead. All they can do is wilt—more or less slowly, depending on conditions. In that respect, floral still life is a genre devoted to moribund organisms, a genre literally devoted to nature mourant.

Nature Mourant: Bosschaert’s Leaves, Merian’s Caterpillars ‘‘Nature in the Raw Is Seldom Mild.’’ So argued the American Tobacco Company in the 1930s on behalf of such refinements of Culture as Lucky Strike Cigarettes (‘‘raw tobaccos have no place in cigarettes’’). It may be counterintuitive to direct this wise saying toward the representations of nature in still life. They seem on the surface to be paragons of mildness. As Roland Barthes famously put it, still life’s ‘‘universe of fabrication . . . excludes terror, as it excludes style.’’ It delivers only a ‘‘sheen,’’ an ‘‘assemblage’’ of ‘‘easy surfaces’’ that ‘‘lubricate man’s gaze’’ and ‘‘facilitate his daily business among objects whose riddle is dissolved.’’43 Simon Schama objects to this dismissive happy talk on the grounds indicated by the titular theme of The Embarrassment of Riches: ‘‘so far from Barthes’s ‘universe of fabrication’ displaying ‘an absence of terror,’ this

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particular commercial culture seems almost excessively anxious about both the propriety and durability of wealth. Death’s-heads appear . . . with extraordinary frequency.’’44 A skull is a predictable signifier of anxiety, but it isn’t the only one. Depictions of nature in the raw abound in still life. They tend to be less sensational and more mischievous than death’s-heads, and they take different forms. For example, since some flowers were no less costly than works of art, they were treated as such in paintings. ‘‘The flower was presented as if it were a museum exhibit, an exquisite silver goblet or gold chased figure.’’45 This may have been particularly true for tulips—‘‘each petal of a tulip might be worth over 50 guilders’’—but Taylor is discussing flowers in general. He dryly suggests that the ‘‘hyper-realism’’ characterizing flower pieces by Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573 –1621) probably reflected ‘‘an attempt to give the viewers their money’s worth.’’46 All the more telling, then, that in five paintings of bouquets majestically posed before aerial views (one on a ledge, four framed in stone window niches), Bosschaert inflicts caterpillage on rose leaves.47 Three of these works include likely suspects: a fat caterpillar on the ledge (London), a snail on the ledge (Amsterdam), two small caterpillars foraging in the foliage (The Hague). In four of the five, the windows open up on landscapes. The London version, which shows only cloudy skies, is compositionally the most dynamic. Horizontally, the niche is centered, but its symmetricality is challenged by the dramatic alteration of light and shade. With the light falling from the left, the left side of the niche interior collapses into a flat band of black while the right side, mottled by flower shadows, opens up and arcs forward. The effect of projection is intensified by the deep thin shadow of the right casement cutting into the wall and driving it back. This pattern exerts its torque on the arrangement of roses. Although the central vertical bisects the vase—which is actually a roemer48 —the bouquet sits closer to the left arch than to the right, where it’s subject to competing pressures. On the one hand, the three upright stalks all bend toward the left as if seeking the shade. On the other hand, a diagonal vector curves up toward the right from the fallen daffodil through the damaged leaf toward the topmost leaves at upper right. The sum of these pressures discloses itself in a kind of helical force that slowly pushes the bouquet toward the left. The drama continues on the ledge: the shoots of the daffodil flail as the corpulent caterpillar marches menacingly toward it. Given the preciosity of Bosschaert’s flowers, there is something perverse about his insistence on depicting damaged leaves. The message it flags conflicts with the sense conveyed by hyperrealist artifice. Although the bouquet

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he invented clearly could never preexist his painting of it, Bosschaert presents his imaginary flowers as assailable creatures exposed to the perils of the soil. Leaf-holes are picturesque: they let the sky show through. They are realistic: they dramatize the still life painter’s unwillingness to idealize. But they also extend the reach of the vanitas. The co-presence of damaged leaves and curious critters elicits the standard response, illustrated in this comment on Bosschaert’s 1614 ‘‘Flowers in a Glass Vase’’: ‘‘Bosschaert wants us to know that the earthly loveliness of the flowers is transient. A sense of passing beauty and decay are conveyed by the fly in the foreground, and by the caterpillar, which marches up the stalk of the red and yellow tulip, ready to devour it.’’49 ‘‘Bosschaert wants us to know’’: the rhetoric of intentionality guarantees the truth of the statement by transferring iconographic agency from commentator to artist. I have no quarrel with this move. ‘‘Bosschaert wants us to know’’ anything we say Bosschaert wants us to know. What bothers me is the asserted content of what he wants us to know. ‘‘The earthly loveliness of the flowers is transient.’’ This is so true. It speaks to our mortality. I’m just not sure it’s the message conveyed by the image of the caterpillar marching ‘‘up the stalk of the . . . tulip, ready to devour it.’’50 The collocation of the chewed leaf and militant caterpillar doesn’t attest merely to ‘‘Goldengrove unleaving’’ or to ‘‘the blight man was born for.’’ It attests to the rapacity of nature green in tooth and claw. ‘‘The rapacity of nature’’: a heavy phrase to load onto Bosschaert’s pintsized predators. Observers tend to find them ‘‘cute’’ rather than crapulent. Yet for anyone who takes the vanitas seriously, it would be foolish to overlook their figural force. They represent the pillagers of plant life, and their prowess has been most energetically paraded in the work of the great Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1718).51 In almost every plate of her caterpillar book Merian illustrates insect metamorphosis from egg to caterpillar to pupa to butterfly.52 With few exceptions, the different phases are depicted in the setting of a plant or flower, and the scenes are frequently cluttered with creepers and crawlers around and above and under and on the poor plant. Of the 154 plates in Erucarum Ortus, 74 depict plants with holes in the leaves or with parts of leaves bitten off. In one plate (26), only the midribs, veins, and outlines of the leaves are left. In several plates the butterfly wing patterns have circles that resemble leaf-holes.53 And in several plates the butterflies—which Merian depicts as

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fat caterpillars with wings—hizz down like angry dive bombers aiming at hapless plants.54 Merian designed three title-page garlands for the original volumes collected in Erucarum Ortus. In all three, the author’s mischievous and curious spirit is displaced to the assortment of insects that explore the garlands (10 in the first, 16 in the second, 11 in the third). The first garland is the strangest of the three. It consists of two branches bent to form the standard oval shape of garlands and wreaths. But the branches are roughly cut, knobby, and studded with galls. Rather than bearing blossoms, like all Merian’s other wreaths, they’re festooned with a scatter of fourteen ragged leaves, six of them seriously damaged, two bearing large deposits of butterfly eggs with emergent larvae. At play in the field of the ragged wreath are a housefly (or bee), a beetle, two moths, and six segmented caterpillars—eight really, since the moths are only winged caterpillars. In Erucarum Ortus, Merian unapologetically promotes the priorities expressed in her title: of caterpillars, their metamorphosis, and their plant food (see Figure 2). This is a book about caterpillars, not about flowers. But insect predation is not ignored in the exquisite images of Merian’s New Book of Flowers.55 Although only two caterpillars appear in the thirty-six plates, the flowers in eight of them suffer leaf damage. The damage is all the more noticeable because the individual flower portraits are so stylized, so simply and gracefully choreographed. Even in Merian’s paradise of flowers, the worm turns. One of the great observers, collectors, and artists of her time, Merian has been enlisted in the ranks of vanitas producers: ‘‘she kept her subjects alive and painted them at each stage of their development. She often pictured them feeding, the decayed or partly eaten foliage perhaps acting as a reference to the ‘vanity’ theme in Dutch art, by which viewers were reminded of the impermanence of the material world.’’56 But for viewers who didn’t and don’t and won’t need this reminder, the ‘‘reference’’ may work the other way round: not from feeding to impermanence but from the ‘‘partly eaten’’ (the impermanent) to the eater. When I observe Merian’s caterpillars at work or at play or in repose, I don’t think of the vanitas. I’m struck chiefly by their insistent and threatening animal presence—by their otherness. Hairy, banded, and bristly, huge in comparison to the eggs from which they would have recently emerged, stretched taut to reach a leaf, curling around foliage that barely sustains their weight, studiously attentive to the next bite, they are the monsters of the manor.

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Figure 2. Maria Sibylla Merian, Flowers, Butterflies and Insects: All 154 Engravings from ‘‘Erucarum Ortus’’ (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1991), plate 21.

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I don’t blame these reflections on Merian. Her books make three things clear: that she was primarily interested in studying and demonstrating how insects live and eat and change; that she loved her work—the work of collecting, raising, observing, and depicting insects; and that she treated the techne¯ of depiction itself as a magical form of metamorphosis from life to art. Nevertheless, just as her caterpillars cast shadows on the page, her attentiveness to the small signs of damage darken her vision. There, death has taken over. But her depiction of it, like the dans macabre, is lively.

‘‘Small-Scale Violence’’ Iconography makes trifles of terrors when it dissociates what snails and caterpillars stand for from what they do: ‘‘The snail means that time appears to proceed slowly but irrevocably creeps forward. The snail is bound by the earth, i.e., the material realm. This pertains also to the caterpillar.’’57 But the English language annexes a long tradition that shows respect for the caterpillar’s natural agency by building into its name a reminder of the damage it does with its powerful jaws. The OED cites several early instances (from 1475 to 1631) in which the term signifies ‘‘a rapacious person; an extortioner; one who preys upon society.’’58 The active and exploratory postures of still life’s critters prompt the viewer to imagine them not just standing for ideas but crawling, creeping, flying about, getting into small places, probing the darkness behind and within things, having their will of their world, some of them quietly at work damaging flowers. Paul Taylor describes these predatory episodes as acts of ‘‘small-scale violence.’’59 But Alan Chong argues that painted insects should be dissociated from their predatory referents: although bugs were treated as vanitas symbols because they were ‘‘destructive creatures that consume flowers and fruit,’’ their painted equivalents were admired as ‘‘perfection in miniature’’ and studied ‘‘as marvels of nature.’’ He goes on to suggest that they ‘‘seem to act as observers and onlookers. In environments usually devoid of human participants, they are surrogates for viewers, exploring the interstices of bouquets, feeling the surfaces of various materials, and examining objects from different viewpoints.’’60 This is an interesting and suggestive if bizarre line of interpretation (critters as connoisseurs), but it doesn’t support the idea that these insects are marvels of nature. Chong’s emphasis is actually on marvels of illustration and visual art. Also, the surrogate-observer thesis fails to account for the

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many images in which snails and caterpillars don’t simply look on and observe but munch and nibble. Yet there is an important insight in Chong’s proposal. Depicting bugs in microscopic detail momentarily diverts the eye from their hosts. Occasionally the extravagant colors of shells and butterflies vie with those of the blossoms. Perhaps bugs threaten flowers less as predators than as performers competing for attention with their floral superiors. And maybe predation is just a hyperbolic or catachrestic way to represent this competition. Small-scale violence nevertheless happens. It irrupts, for example, at the fauna-littered base of a 1624 Flower Piece by Roelant Saverij (1576–1639). Here, a cockatoo studiously dismembers a frog while a second frog looks on. In another Saverij still life, a rose petal and ladybug occupy the center of a table, while two large crickets converge from left and right. The posture of the cricket on the left suggests that it stalks the ladybug, which prudently heads toward the viewer. The other more upright cricket hides behind or peers over the fallen petal as if preparing to pounce. If there’s a suggestion of conflict or drama in this scene, it surely doesn’t accord with our entomological knowledge. Saverij’s crickets are decorative and harmless—unless, of course, they are grasshoppers, which are akin to locusts and have less benign connotations.61 But even if they are merely crickets, they visually suggest other sources of aggression. The painting mischievously makes them appear to be up to mischief, while the sense of drama hinted at in this tiny but amplified arena is sharpened by the presence of what seems to be an interested observer, the bee looking down at the action from its perch on the rose. In Balthasar van der Ast’s Still Life with Fruits and Flowers (1620/21), a Wanli vase is posed near the front edge of the table like a captain or ensign in a civic guard banquet piece. To the left of the vase a Wanli dish filled with fruit sits respectfully further back on the table. Although the dish with its fruit leaves and branches sprawling lengthwise takes up three-quarters of the table, it nevertheless remains subordinate to the vase. On the extreme right a cascade of tiny ants upends the table surface so that its steeper backdrop threatens to destabilize the vase and flowers. The oversized broken flame tulip reaches up as if grasping for air. But its warm tones project toward the observer and make the bouquet lean more precariously forward.62 Van der Ast (1593/94–1657) produced coherently integrated and thematically organized still life groups.63 Group order is nevertheless challenged from another source. Dispersed along the length of the panel and the front

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edge of the table is an array—less a parade than a straggle—of colorful objects (caterpillar, lemon, three shells, butterfly, bee, tulip, carnation, two grasshoppers), some heading one way, some another. The butterfly sits triumphant on its tulip, the caterpillar curls like a lemon peel over the table edge. A spider, its filament barely visible, appears to be descending from a rose leaf in the vase, and the column of ants to its right pulls the viewer in for a closer look. These miniatures activate the observer shuttle.64 They tempt the eye to abandon the distance point most congenial for a viewing of the image as a whole. Drops of condensation on the grapes, blemishes on the apple, and small insects on the fruits and flowers separately clamor for attention. To the left of the Wanli vase, two ants probe a dead fly. A second spider lurks like a ghost in the shadows behind the fringe of grape leaves and the blemished apple. The representation of the monstrous mouths and tongues of butterflies is oddly detailed. Finally, desaturated autumnal hues touch the grape leaves with imminent decay.65 Saverij, van der Ast, Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606–1683/84), and Abraham Mignon (1640–1679) are among the painters who play up the acts and agency of natural mischief. De Heem, who was Van der Ast’s student, fills his marvelous 1660 Flowers in a Vase (in Innsbruck) with several aggressive critters. Some lurk suspiciously in the neighborhood of a branch full of seriously chomped leaves. Against a dark background, caterpillars glitter, snails gleam, and flowers glow. But the most stunning touch is what might be called the Dylan effect: the bouquet is blowing in the wind. Caught as if in a draft swirling down from above—a dynamic visual force intensified by the reflection on the vase—the stalks sway and bend and droop, the moths hang on for dear life, and a wasp between the tulips barely weathers the squall. One of the two top tulips arcs toward the right with cupped petals blown upward while the disarranged petals of the other tulip flutter haplessly in the downdraft. The representational temper of de Heem’s student, Mignon, has been well characterized by Kim Todd: ‘‘For him insects had a darker spirit. He portrayed them as emblems of death and decay. In his later paintings, they emerged from overripe fruit: larvae feasting on plum flesh, ants toiling on the skin of a peach, a beetle lingering near a hole-ridden cherry.’’66 These are emblems not merely of decay but of rapacity. And they are not emblems merely; they are representations. Frequently, however, the objects Mignon depicts—oysters, flowers, leaves—are not under attack. They’re just going bad by themselves; only

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time and rot assault them. Flagging the vanitas is always a possible motive. But another is equally possible, if less probable: representing what has happened to the object since the leisurely painter, whose brush moves like a snail, began to copy it.67 In Mignon’s forest scenes, denizens of the ‘‘sous-bois’’ setting are depicted as if under water, not merely under woods. At the center of one such scene a mother finch feeds a nestful of fledgings while the father guards from above.68 And well he might. All around this sylvan household are the spoils of hunting and the menace of contending serpents. Living creatures eye dead ones and their gaze is returned. One dead fish gawks intently at a squirrel, another at a frog. Sous-bois in Mignon’s world, the marks of human intervention are predatory. But their strange convergences pick out a new and bizarre version of a familiar genre: the wilderness as Wunderkammer. Dead rabbits (or squirrels) and fish, looming spiders, capsized lizards, and inquisitive ornamental snails (but no caterpillars) are all on display as woodland collectibles. Mignon’s darkness can be mischievous. He explores what happens to baskets or heaps of fruits and flowers when, like Little Red Riding Hood, they get lost or left in the woods. His bloemstilleven adventures are experiments with quirky indoor action narratives. Caterpillars give way to cats that excitedly overturn vases of flowers. The cat figure repeated in two paintings (in Amsterdam and Lyon) looks positively feral. An intruder from the wilder world of Mignon’s woodland scenes, it frightens the flower, upsetting not only the vases but also the viewer’s expectations. Todd writes that Mignon worked in a tradition in which plants and animals were used ‘‘to represent elements of Christianity and morality.’’69 Yet her descriptive flair reverses the iconographic skew. ‘‘Elements of Christianity’’ may be the message that first greets observers in a culture attuned to vanitas displays. But these elements provide a framework that excuses and enables the portrayal of the ‘‘darker spirit.’’ It isn’t necessarily the case that voracity gets sanitized and vanitized. It may be that, in a kind of reverse iconography, the appeal to vanitas opens the door to the darker pleasures of portraying rapacitas. In other words, vanitas is the McGuffin of still life, even as the figural force of pillagers tropes vanitas into rapacitas. Seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting vibrates with a discernible if understated force of aggressive predation that is, at least to me, more uncanny and strange than you find in the consolations of iconography. As I’ve been suggesting, I think it’s possible for still life to be vanitized without being sanitized. When I look at its minute mischief-makers, I’m reminded of the fairy tale world, where wooden soldiers, nutcrackers, and

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other small inanimate objects come alive after dark, take over the premises, and sometimes behave appallingly while their young owners—their weak masters—sleep. In pop culture, which makes terrors of trifles, this has coarsened into such phenomena as the Chucky nightmare. But before Chucky took it over the top, fantasies of things that go bump in the night were always recognizable diminutions and displacements of more troubling terrors: fear of mortality, of vulnerability and powerlessness; fear of the breakdown of order, the loss of control, the transgression of boundaries, the inversion of hierarchy; fear of the desire for what is forbidden; fear of the desire for release from the vanitas into the terror of the real. These overlapping fears fuzzily converge in the traditional vanitas reading. But their resonance is damped down. All the flowers of the spring Meet to perfume our burying; These have but their growing prime, And man does flourish but his time: Survey our progress from our birth— We are set, we grow, we turn to earth. Courts adieu, and all delights, All bewitching appetites! Sweetest breath and clearest eye Like perfumes go out and die; And consequently this is done As shadows wait upon the sun.70

As a practice that claims to reproduce the express symbolic intentions of a past era, iconography sometimes fails to illuminate the darker corners of still life. The corners are already dimly aglow with the radiance of tiny terrorists who call attention to themselves as predatory performers. They compete with ‘‘all the flowers of the spring’’ by slowly chewing them to bits. ‘‘And consequently,’’ as they silently chomp away under iconography’s discursive cover, they throw large shadows against the wall of sleep. ‘‘All the flowers of the spring/Meet to perfume our burying.’’ A predictable dash of truthiness. The beautiful changes into the stink of death—into a congregation of moribund flowers whose captive fragrance withers into grief. But with the repetition of ‘‘perfumes’’ in line 10, flowers and fragrance put up resistance. They briefly revive as similes attendant on ‘‘sweetest breath and clearest eye,’’ and here it isn’t shortness of life they celebrate

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but its precious sweetness and beauty. The similes resist the assault of iconography and fight to get free. ‘‘And consequently’’ they ‘‘go out and die.’’ Their sweetness vanishes into the gloom cast by the apocalyptic play on ‘‘shadows’’ that ‘‘wait upon the sun.’’ The shadows serve the sun. They dutifully attend its rising. They patiently wait for it, and for its galaxy, and for all moribund galaxies, to wilt and die. Flowers and shadows together figure the forces of nature mourant as the dynamic that drives what the editors of this volume call ‘‘the energetics of desire.’’ This essay has been about such moments of sweetness and assault and resistance and surrender; and about such moments of terror.

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Figuring Belief George Herbert’s Devotional Creatures david glimp

O that I were an Orange-tree, That busy plant! Then should I ever laden be, And never want Some fruit for him that dressed me. George Herbert, ‘‘Employment (2)’’1

In the early modern English devotional lexicon, the creature signified the vast array of beings and things created by God. ‘‘Meditation on the creature,’’ a form of contemplative practice developed within medieval theology, encouraged the devout to survey the immense complexity and glory of God’s handiwork as a way of intensifying their faith. By reflecting upon the multiplicity of God’s creative accomplishments believers were to be able to achieve a more profound awareness of the sublime magnitude of his power.2 Recent scholarship has shown us how this theological understanding of creatureliness within modernity—which clearly embeds accounts of sovereign authority, creaturely subordination, and obligation of the created toward the creator—informs the political theology of sovereign power. Specifically, creatureliness serves as a privileged trope for characterizing life subject to sovereign rule, to the rule of a contemporary sovereign power that evacuates political life by privileging the preservation of life over all other functions of government.3 Elevating security to the dominant—if not sole—justification for rule in the name of protecting subjects during a time of emergency, the exercise of sovereign will to suspend laws effectively reduces people to the level of what Agamben calls ‘‘bare life.’’ In Julia Reinhard Lupton’s account, ‘‘the creature represents the flip side of the political 112

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theology of absolute sovereignty developed in the latter sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In [Carl] Schmitt’s analysis the king is like God in the creative-destructive potential of his decisive word, his juris-diction. By extension, his subjects are his creatures, the objects of his continual sovereign activity, a power that comes to the forefront during states of emergency, when the normal functioning of positive law is lifted in favor of the sovereign’s executive decisions.’’4 Within the extreme circumstances of the sovereign’s emergency exercise of power over life and death, creaturely life constitutes an abject state of being, a reduced or impoverished form of life stripped of all dimensions of political autonomy. ‘‘Creatureliness’’ defines a minimal existence divested of those aspects of personhood associated with models of citizenship or social life more generally within contemporary liberal polities. This essay seeks to describe the creaturely dimensions of Herbert’s poetics, and the above genealogy and critique of political sovereignty illuminates key aspects of how Herbert draws on and works with the theological concept of the creature. Specifically, I argue that the juxtaposition of the account of sovereignty detailed via the critique of political theology and a theological understanding of God’s sovereignty helps locate an important motive for Herbert’s poetry. In our present moment, the sovereign suspension of law that would reduce subjects to the level of creaturely being takes as its authorizing objective the provision of the security necessary for the operation of a neoliberal regime of capital accumulation.5 By comparison, motivating Herbert’s poetry is an intensely felt obligation to what we might call a theological regime of accumulation of praise. But in order better to understand how Herbert seeks to fulfill this obligation and the role creatureliness plays in this effort, it will be necessary to note limits to the critique of political theology’s understanding of creatureliness. For perhaps obvious reasons, the account of creaturely life associated with the critique of sovereignty tends to view creatureliness as predominantly a state of complete abjection. However justifiable such an emphasis may be in the current political context, this approach tends to displace or downplay a more affirmative understanding of creatureliness that will turn out to be of considerable relevance for Herbert’s poetics.6 More than a collection of objects upon which one might meditate, the creature was also understood to possess a devotional agency all its own. Such is the implication of the hymn included in the Book of Common Prayer as an option for morning services, the Benedicite Omnia Opera Domini, and of many passages throughout the Bible.7 To take a prominent example, Psalm 148 directs a series of imperatives to ‘‘Praise the Lord’’ to a whole host of human and nonhuman creatures:

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114 David Glimp Fire, and hail; snow, and vapor; stormy wind fulfilling his word: Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars: Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl: Kings of the earth, and all people; princes, and all judges of the earth: Both young men, and maidens; old men, and children . . .

Here, as elsewhere, the psalmist addresses the creature as sharing in both the capacity for thanking God and the obligation to undertake such celebration; as the Geneva Bible’s compositors assert, in reference to Psalm 150, ‘‘all of the order of nature is bound to this duty . . . never to cease to praise him.’’8 Psalm 148’s injunctions constitute praise as an inclusive devotional project encompassing the entire creature, from angels and saints to people, animals, trees, geological formations and meteorological phenomena. So doing, it defines creation as a vast network of human and nonhuman agents and establishes a way of apprehending the world as a collective in ways that, as I shall elaborate, cut against the grain of humanist or legal accounts of community and political obligation. As I hope to show, George Herbert’s poetry engages both senses of the creature noted thus far—as object of meditation and as agent of praise. These alternatives in turn bear upon this volume’s central organizing concern to the extent that in Herbert’s poetry these two ways of apprehending how humans relate to the rest of creation entail two alternative modes of figuration. On the one hand, the creature serves as a means of figuring the depth of the poet’s crisis of belief; creatures offer a kind of privileged thematic content for representing states of extreme despair or, conversely, preferred or desirable modes of existence. Figuration in this sense may be aligned with the dominant critical approach to Herbert’s poetry, which I should like to characterize as ‘‘ethical.’’ Drawing on Foucault’s understanding of this term, I mean that most readers of The Temple understand Herbert’s poems to depict crises of faith and to respond to those crises by intensifying relations to the self, by defining forms of personhood that strive to overcome or modify the speaker’s relationship to himself on the way to a rejuvenated, humbled, or otherwise clarified faith.9 From this perspective, the creature provides Herbert with a set of representational resources for specifying figuratively how humans should understand themselves in relation to God and God’s sovereign power. On the other hand, Herbert’s engagement with the creature also encompasses a dramatically different, impersonal account of belief and poetic efficacy, an account that elaborates upon the liturgical and biblical precedents

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by characterizing nonhuman creatures as embodying a mode of belief not routed through consciousness. The possibility of a mode of belief distinct from our traditional understanding of the phenomenon as a cognitive state challenges traditional humanist assumptions about moral agency and obligation.10 Richard Hooker may here be taken as representative in the way he grounds moral and political obligation on a distinction between ‘‘voluntary agents’’ characterized by their status as ‘‘intellectual creatures’’ and ‘‘naturall agent[s],’’ creatures that ‘‘can do no otherwise then they doe.’’11 However, the idea that creatures ‘‘do[ing] no otherwise then they doe’’ constitutes a form of praise offers not only a counter-example for ethical self-clarification, a source of representational content capable of figuring desirable forms of existence, but also a precedent for an understanding of noncontingent praise that sponsors a second figurative dynamic. In this latter sense, figuration constitutes a form of nonsubjective agency, a mode of action not troubled by the vicissitudes of human belief or cognition more generally. Herbert draws on this understanding of the creature to augment his own efforts at praising God—of contributing to the theological regime of accumulation of praise posited above—and aligns the collection of words he places on the page with the devotional abilities of the creature, its capacity for autonomous and persistent praise. Although this aspect of his poetics is most visible in ‘‘The Altar,’’ one of his best known ‘‘figure’’ poems, to borrow George Puttenham’s nomenclature, Herbert extends to his entire corpus of poetry this account of figuration as enabling ceaseless devotional activity.12 Such an insight allows us to augment the ethical approach to Herbert with an understanding of his poems as creatures, created artifacts capable of a durable belief that persists in the face of the limits on human devotional capacity.

 An immediate point of contact between the contemporary account of sovereign power and Herbert’s poetry—one genealogical link among many that connects early modern theology to political theology—is the experience of ‘‘affliction,’’ one of the central preoccupations of The Temple. Grasped phenomenologically, affliction can be characterized as the traumatic experience of an opaque, non-rationalizable divine will. The state of creaturely being under conditions of the emergency exercise of sovereign authority corresponds to the extreme suffering—one aspect of Luther’s concept of anfechtung—prompted by the inscrutable, sovereign will of God as manifest in the awful things that happen to even the most ardent believers and the deep uncertainty about the status of one’s soul in the afterlife.13 For

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example, the first nine stanzas of Herbert’s ‘‘Affliction (1)’’ describe a series of disappointments in the narrator’s life, a wild oscillation between, on the one hand, the speaker’s assumption that his commitment to God will yield ‘‘joys’’ (l. 3), ‘‘delights’’ (l. 5), and ‘‘mirth’’ (l. 12), and, on the other hand, the grim reality of ‘‘woe’’ (l. 24), ‘‘pain’’ (l. 25), and ‘‘sorrow’’ (l. 29) deriving from sickness, the death of friends (l. 32) and the ‘‘entangle[ments]’’ of employment in the world (l. 41). In response to the radical disruption of Herbert’s optimistic life narrative, the poem’s speaker effectively throws up his hands in stanza 10, exasperated by the survey of a life disrupted: Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me None of my books will show: I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree; For sure then I should grow To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust Her household to me, and I should be just. (ll. 55–60)

The speaker’s arboreal wish represents a corollary to the extreme despair that accompanies his sense of loss of control over his life, his inability to achieve a recognizable or socially sanctioned career trajectory or life narrative. As in this essay’s epigraph from ‘‘Employment (2),’’ where Herbert voices a similar desire, life as a tree represents a minimal version of existence, one stripped of aspiration to any kind of autonomy, distinction, or capacity for purposive self-fashioning. To want to be a tree, to ‘‘grow/To fruit or shade,’’ is a way of giving up and letting go, an ascetic renunciation of one’s will in the face of a radical incapacity either to discern God’s plan or autonomously to assemble a viable life. The creature as a figure of renunciation, the vehicle for an ascetic tenor, also enables Herbert to conceptualize the experience of affliction as a benefit received from God, as a functional aspect of what comes to be perceived as God’s quasi-agricultural care for his creatures. The perspectival shift—in which the speaker comes to embrace creatureliness and the sovereign power ultimately responsible for affliction—is registered with considerable tact in ‘‘Employment (2),’’ in which the speaker wishes that he could provide ‘‘some fruit for him that dressed me’’ (l. 25). ‘‘Dressing’’ is a euphemism for the violence of affliction, as is evident in ‘‘Paradise,’’ a poem in which Herbert situates himself within God’s orchard in order to secure his protection. Thinking of himself as a plant provides a way of voicing a desire for assurance so that the uncertainty and harm of this world, the affliction the believer faces, can be understood to be aspects of Christ’s agricultural care (see Figure 1).

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Figuring Belief: Herbert’s Devotional Creatures 117 I bless thee, Lord, because I GROW Among thy trees, which in a ROW To thee both fruit and order OW. What open force, or hidden CHARM Can blast my fruit, or bring me HARM, While the inclosure is thine ARM? (ll. 1–6)

Figure 1. George Herbert, ‘‘Paradise.’’

The poem graphically seeks to understand affliction as part of a divine plan; just as the gradual truncation of words yields a significant design, so the ‘‘cuttings’’ (l. 14) of worldly suffering are understood as arboreal care. Figuring himself as a tree enables the speaker to constitute the harmful vicissitudes of human existence into a kind of divine ‘‘art’’ (l. 9) and allows him to conceptualize suffering as a kind of protection, indeed, as a way of making Herbert even ‘‘more fruitful’’ (l. 12). Though the genealogy here proposed is largely suggestive, it will perhaps be no great stretch to see clear lines of continuity between creaturely modes of being in Herbert—in which the creature figures forms of life that welcome abasement in return for the safety provided by the sovereign—and the contemporary biopolitics of sovereign power.14 That said, it will be important to acknowledge an aspect of ‘‘Paradise’’—and the theological discourse of the creature more generally—that complicates the picture somewhat. Even as it depicts a perfectly complacent and static collective of believers, the figure of orderly rows of trees Herbert uses to represent this collective also suggests a radical equivalence among the faithful. The striking image of a collective with no hierarchical distinction between humans hints at a certain radical potential inherent in the discourse of the creature. Consistent with Lupton’s claim that creatureliness can serve as a point of departure for considering forms of communal life outside the ambit of the damaged and damaging modes of belonging that characterize contemporary liberal democracies, some religious radicals in the decades following the publication of Herbert’s poetry seized upon the creature as a means for reimagining collectivity.15 Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena catalogues with alarm the idea held by some that upon Christ’s return and triumph all men will be

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able to enjoy ‘‘all lawfull pleasures which all the creatures then redeemed from their ancient slavery can afford’’; alternatively, and perhaps even more extreme than the vision of a future leveled human community, is the idea ‘‘that we should think of our selves no better then was meet, for God loves the creatures that creep upon the ground as well as the best Saints; and there is no distance between the flesh of a Man, and the flesh of a Toad.’’16 In a manner similar to the voices Edwards records, Gerrard Winstanley subtly draws upon the fact of humans’ status as creatures to critique the modes of violence that go into maintaining the institution of private property; speaking to the ‘‘Lords of Manors,’’ Winstanley argues that ‘‘you and your Ancestors got your Propriety by murther and theft, and you keep it by the same power from us, that have an equal right to the Land with you, by the righteous Law of Creation.’’17 The Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel in her prophetic utterances embraces the diminutive and more or less pejoratively gendered use of the term creature to identify with all of creation. Reworking the practice of meditating on the creature noted at this essay’s outset, Trapnel somewhat gnomically exclaims: ‘‘Oh, But who is he or she that admires the Lord Jesus through all, in all, and above all; He is all in nothing-Creatures, the Creature is nothing, but thou hast said, thou dost great things through nothing.’’18 As in the title of the work that records this utterance— The Cry of a Stone—Trapnel simultaneously embraces her lowly status as creature and uses that creaturely status to legitimize her speech. Certainly there are clear differences between each of these scattered instances, distinct emphases and objectives that inform the appeal to the discourse of the creature. However, taken together, Winstanley, Trapnel, and the anonymous sectaries catalogued by Edwards illustrate how acknowledging the status of all things as created by God could underwrite radical challenges to existing hierarchies of power and privilege by enabling alternative visions of collective being.19 Although the concept of creatureliness can sponsor disruptive utopian imaginings, it must be noted that Herbert’s engagement with creatureliness does not proceed in this way or develop these radical potentials. Even so, Herbert does appeal to the creature as a way to (re)describe collective existence. To grasp the communal possibilities Herbert emphasizes will necessitate understanding the creature in somewhat different terms from those emphasized thus far. As suggested at the outset, the creature functions not only as a sign of abjection—an especially powerful means of figuring (in one

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sense of that term) the phenomenon and phenomenology of affliction as well as some kind of ideal accommodation to God’s sovereign power over life and death—but also in a more affirmative register, instantiating modes of devotion superior to human faith. The better to understand not only what is enviable about creaturely being but also how and why Herbert will seek to enlist creaturely forms of praise in his devotional project it will be useful to say more about Herbert’s sense of human devotional incapacity, at once an aspect and a mechanism of affliction that takes the form of a profound personal instability. In Herbert’s poetry people seem to be unable to control themselves in any sustained way and thus frequently appear to be always capable—if not on the verge—of doing truly horrible things, a situation deriving from something akin to an early modern version of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. We can assemble a kind of phenomenological inventory from Herbert’s poetry to demonstrate his sense of the extreme instability of cognition: he describes thoughts as variously ‘‘a case of knives’’ and rebels (‘‘Affliction (4)’’), ‘‘busy flame’’ and Basilisks (‘‘Sins Round’’), ‘‘balls of wild-fire’’ (‘‘Evensong (1)’’), ‘‘tempests’’ (‘‘Perirrhanterium,’’ stanza 19), or a ‘‘whirlwind’’ (‘‘Giddiness’’). Indeed, the last poem offers a picture of a person lacking capacities for regulating his thoughts and in turn for governing his life such that it is difficult even to speak of a single person across time: ‘‘He is some twenty sev’ral men at least/Each sev’ral hour’’ (ll. 3–4). Because of the extremely disorganized nature of human understanding in Herbert’s work, the ability to undertake sustained projects, to organize one’s life around a single set of principles or beliefs or goals, runs aground on the vagaries of the mind.20 To pick up on the resonances in ‘‘Giddiness’’ of a comparison of thoughts to a ‘‘whirlwind,’’ man is a kind of walking disaster, unable to focus his thoughts on a single project, thus unable to guarantee that he won’t at some subsequent moment alter radically the principles organizing his life, won’t do something in the future that he currently finds unthinkable. To recall Hooker’s terms invoked at this essay’s outset, in light of the kind of cognitive instability Herbert describes, it will be evident that at least in some ways creatures’ inability to ‘‘do no otherwise than they doe’’ represents an advantage over humans in the realm of devotion. This is a point articulated by a number of authors, and developed most explicitly by Godfrey Goodman (eventual Bishop of Gloucester) in a pamphlet entitled The Creatures Praysing God: or The Religion of Dumbe Creatures (1622). Though

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the author primarily emphasizes the religious life of humans—the purpose of the tract is to shame humans into more earnest efforts to live their faith—he nevertheless acknowledges the advantages creatures have over people: they may be ‘‘dumbe,’’ but creatures are persistent. Goodman observes that where mankind utilizes ‘‘decent and comely ceremonies, which serue to stirre vp our dulnesse, and to set forth Gods magnificence, and therefore are most commendable in vs, yet they [‘‘dumbe creatures’’] haue none; for they want none: in stead of them, they haue a truth and syncerity in their seruice, without hypocrisie or dissimulation: they are not troubled or disquieted in their owne thoughts (as we are) that they should be admonished by outward ceremonies: but they are like the Angels in heauen, wholly intent to their seruice. I would I could say as much for our selues.’’21 Human privilege notwithstanding, the very aspect that elevates humans above all other mundane beings—their capacity for thought—comes to be understood as a disadvantage with respect to the rest of the creaturely world. As we’ve seen in Herbert’s poetry, subjectivity turns out to be a detriment, a point of vulnerability that potentially thwarts efforts to praise God. Where elsewhere Goodman insists upon the more sophisticated quality of human belief, in practical terms the ceremonies that characterize human worship turn out to be a sign of incapacity vis-a`-vis the remainder of creation. Goodman’s critique, that human faith and worship are vulnerable to distraction or (even worse) ‘‘hypocrisie,’’ recalls efforts to defend and to justify the Book of Common Prayer and the Church of England’s public devotional practice more generally. Ramie Targoff has shown the extent to which anxiety about ‘‘the danger’’ of the worshipper’s unstable thought process underwrote defenses of public prayer: ‘‘formalized language becomes . . . a crucial safeguard against the natural weaknesses of human devotion.’’22 As Goodman develops the argument, ceremony exists as a necessary prop, a disciplinary tool required to help humans achieve the kind of unperturbed and uninterrupted worship creatures and angels alike undertake. Humans require mechanisms to secure them against the autonomy of their minds; like angels, ‘‘wholly intent to their seruice,’’ the vast array of things that make up God’s creation are at no risk of becoming distracted, indeed do not need to be ‘‘stirred up’’ at all in order to worship God properly. Their praise in many ways thus far surpasses that of humans in intensity, sincerity, and constancy. John Milton acknowledges an interesting version of this logic in Paradise Lost, one that will help bring Herbert’s approach to figuring creatures into clearer relief. Specifically I’m thinking of Milton’s depiction of Adam and

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Eve’s first effort to reconcile with God after the Fall. When the first couple’s inarticulate ‘‘sigh’’ (XI.5) and sorrow-filled prayers reach heaven, Christ brings them before God ‘‘clad/With incense’’ (XI.17–18). The phrase echoes Milton’s earlier account of the morning prayers that open Book IX, specifically the depiction there of ‘‘the humid Flow’rs, that breath’d/Thir morning incense, when all things that breathe,/From th’ Earth’s great Altar send up silent praise/To the Creator, and his Nostrils fill/With grateful Smell’’ (IX.193–97). In his intercessory colloquy with God, Christ elaborates the connection between floral worship and Adam and Eve’s prayers. See Father, what first fruits on Earth are sprung From thy implanted Grace in Man, these Sighs And Prayers, which in this Golden Censer, mixt With Incense, I thy Priest before thee bring, Fruits of more pleasing savor from thy seed Sown with contrition in his heart, than those Which his own hand manuring all the Trees Of Paradise could have produc’t, ere fall’n From innocence. (XI.22–30)

Prior to the Fall, Milton insists upon a clear hierarchy of human and nonhuman forms of worship, a hierarchy organized around vocal capacity; in the prelapsarian matin of Book IX referenced immediately above Adam and Eve join ‘‘thir vocal Worship to the Choir / Of Creatures wanting voice’’ (IX.198–99). Christ’s account of Adam and Eve’s prayers maintains a sense of hierarchy on earth, but it is a radically reconfigured hierarchy, and the distinction between vocal and nonvocal praise (closely related to Raphael’s monist account of the distinction between rational and nonrational forms of being [V.479–87]) in the postlapsarian context gets reworked as a distinction between contingent and noncontingent faith.23 Though plants ‘‘want’’ the benefits of subjectivity, such as the capacity to speak or sing, the ability to understand or imagine, they also possess a devotional life free of the instability and uncertainty that characterize creatures much higher up the great chain of being. In Christ’s presentation to God, rather than a substance extremely advanced beyond the vegetable world in their capacity for thought and speech, the first couple appears as simply the best plants in Eden, whose prayers are better than the best fruit Earth could have produced had they not disobeyed God’s dietary prohibition. In order to incite God’s mercy, Christ labors to convince God of the sincerity of Adam and Eve’s contrition

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and their worthiness for forgiveness by presenting their actions in terms of the devotional agency of plants, a forensic strategy directed toward what Christ assumes to be a kind of olfactory bias on God’s behalf. That is, Christ’s speech assumes that floral prayer represents the purest form of devotion and therefore represents the most appropriate form for human petition after the Fall. To make his strongest case for Eve and Adam, Christ translates their prayers into the olfactory idiom of flowers, which is to say he puts the prayers and petitions of fallible humans in the language of a creature whose faith is unwavering and whose devotion is perfectly sincere.24 Herbert is certainly concerned with the sincerity of human devotional utterance, as are Milton and Goodman. However, The Temple also advances what we might understand as a quantitative focus to devotional obligation, a focus faintly registered by Milton in Christ’s favorable comparison of the first couple’s prayers to the ‘‘pleasing savor’’ of the fruit that ‘‘all the Trees/ Of Paradise could have produc’t’’ prior to the Fall, and rendered more explicitly legible in Herbert’s preoccupation with being able to produce as much praise as possible, a felt sense of needing to augment the amount of devotion God will receive by praising all the time. In ‘‘Praise (2),’’ the speaker commits himself to treating every day like Sunday, promising that ‘‘Sev’n whole days, not one in seven,/I will praise thee’’ (ll. 17–18). ‘‘Love Unknown’’ culminates with the voice of a ‘‘friend’’ enjoining the poem’s speaker to ‘‘praise [God] to the full/Each day, each hour, each moment of the week’’ (ll. 68–69). Similarly, in ‘‘Gratefulness’’ the poet asks for ‘‘such a heart, whose pulse may be/Thy praise’’ (ll. 31–32). That Herbert enjoins God to provide him with a heart capable of uninterrupted devotion shows the ardor motivating his faith, his sincere wish to be able to live up to the profound responsibility to offer adequate devotion; that he has to ask for assistance displays an awareness of the fragility of his faith, his own susceptibility to the vagaries of human inclination that renders him prone to celebrating God ‘‘when it pleaseth me;/As if thy blessings had spare days’’ (ll. 29–30). This is the central ‘‘problem of praise’’ in The Temple, the double bind encompassed by the imperative to celebrate God in the face of human incapacity to do so adequately, an incapacity exacerbated not only by limits to human endurance (Herbert would have to sleep sometime) but also by the inescapable volatility of human cognition detailed above.25 Herbert’s desire to pray all the time, to provide God as much praise as possible, represents an effort to accommodate himself to what at this essay’s outset I designated a theological regime of accumulation of praise, which in fact Herbert conceptualizes as a dynamic of accumulating wealth. Consider

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‘‘Praise (3),’’ which explicitly addresses the speaker’s sense of compromised devotional capacity and consequently posits conversion as a mechanism of augmenting praise. In response to the acknowledgement that his ‘‘heart,/ Though pressed, runs thin’’ (ll. 37–38), the poet exclaims: O that I might some other hearts convert, And so take up at use good store: That to thy chests there might be coming in Both all my praise, and more! (ll. 39–42)

The metaphor that governs these lines comprehends praise as a kind of finance capital, a fungible good that enables a collectivizing response to human inadequacy. Proselytic activity makes it possible to augment the tribute of praise God receives even though the figurative revenue stream from the poet fluctuates unpredictably.26 Conversion offers a means of decreasing the impact of Herbert’s own devotional shortcomings by drawing on the resources of others, in a way spreading out the effects of inconstancy or human inadequacy across a larger group of believers so that the net effect is an increased flow of devotion to God. Herbert’s ability to praise may vary, but the expanded community of praise would assure that God gets more praise than Herbert himself could offer on his own. Though ‘‘Praise (3)’’ imagines a collective response to the vagaries of individual worship, its vision is in the optative mode. Like the request in ‘‘Gratefulness’’ for ‘‘such a heart, whose pulse may be/Thy praise,’’ the poem is a petition rather than an accurate description of a current state of affairs. When we turn to another poem concerned with proselytizing, namely ‘‘The Church Militant’’ with its sweeping historical survey of the spread of Christianity across the planet, the tenuousness of the vision of ‘‘Praise (3)’’ comes into stark relief. ‘‘The Church Militant’’ understands the center of Christian piety as poised to move to the New World in the wake of the colonial enterprises there (‘‘Religion stands on tip-toe in our land,/ Ready to pass to the American strand’’ [ll. 235–36]), though the future Herbert imagines for religion in America turns out not to be one of glorious and triumphant expansion, but one of ongoing struggle. The back and forth of momentary victory answered by decay and failure is perfectly captured by the syntactical ambiguity of Herbert’s claim: ‘‘The Church shall come, and Sin the Church shall smother’’ (l. 266).27 Like Giovanni Arrighi’s account of the cycles of economic expansion and contraction that characterize

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the movement of the center of finance capitalism from Genoa to Amsterdam to London and so forth, Herbert reads church history as periodic episodes of intensified and enlarged devotion followed by an inevitable collapse into iniquity, spurring further westward movement.28 Consequently, if ‘‘The Church Militant’’ may be understood as taking the proselytizing vision of ‘‘Praise (3)’’ to the furthest limit possible—imagining devotion spreading across the globe—the resulting conversion does not augment praise, at least not in the long run, but rather simply spreads the dialectic of human aspiration and failure, enlarges not devotion but ‘‘giddiness.’’ Simply adding more people to the church does not guarantee greater praise, since those added would presumably all be susceptible to the compromised cognitive abilities and disorganized agency Herbert understands to characterize everyone. The ‘‘governmental pessimism’’ of The Temple, its general sense that people lack the basic tools for regulating their thoughts and actions or determining the consequences of what they do, dictates that the task for Herbert becomes one of locating an alternative population with the devotional resources capable of making up for human frailty.29 Confronting human ‘‘giddiness,’’ Herbert seeks to enlist the devotional efficacy of nonhuman creatures. We can begin to see how Herbert employs this strategy in the poem in The Temple most explicitly and elaborately occupied with the creature, ‘‘Providence,’’ an extended survey of nature’s symmetries and perfections, which in turn demonstrate God’s providential designs. Near the poem’s opening, Herbert characterizes himself as the ‘‘Secretary’’ (l. 8) recording God’s praise, an office that at least at the outset situates him in a position superior to the rest of a creation incapacitated by its lack of language. Addressing God, Herbert asserts that Beasts fain would sing; birds ditty to their notes; Trees would be tuning on their native lute To thy renown: but all their hands and throats Are brought to Man, while they are lame and mute. Man is the world’s high Priest: he doth present The sacrifice for all; while they below Unto the service mutter an assent, Such as springs use that fall, and winds that blow. (ll. 9–16)

In the assumption that ‘‘Man is the world’s high Priest’’ these lines may be compared to Milton’s characterization of Christ as priestly intermediary for

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Adam and Eve, though of course there are limits to the analogy. Critics have tended to seize on this opening contrast between rational and articulate poet and the devotionally incapacitated creature as summing up the poem’s ontology;30 but what many scholars overlook is the hortatory nature of these lines.31 Herbert’s blustery and super-hierarchical ontology underpins and advances an extremely rigorous and exacting deontology, a heightened sense of obligation that implicitly acknowledges the possibility that mankind might ‘‘refrain’’ from celebrating God: He that to praise and laud thee doth refrain, Doth not refrain unto himself alone, But robs a thousand who would praise thee fain, And doth commit a world of sin in one. (ll. 17–20)

The idea that mankind might refrain from praise confronts the fragility of human belief Herbert elsewhere foregrounds, and the urgency with which he seeks to remind humans of their devotional obligations—by figuring it as a crime against the rest of creation, and a form of action with hyperbolically multiplied negative effects—faintly yet perceptibly acknowledges the possibility that humans lack the cognitive and personal equipment to fulfill their pious responsibilities. This sense of obligation toward the creature, and the demand associated with the hint of anxiety about the consequences of not following through on that obligation, approaches a kind of radically open relation to the creature Walter Benjamin admired in Kafka, an ‘‘attentiveness’’ that ‘‘included all living creatures, as saints include them in their prayers.’’32 For Herbert, the extreme attentiveness to the creature leads to a quasi-sublime rapture before the creature. Contemplating God’s vast and intricate creation with awe, Herbert exclaims: ‘‘If we would hear/Thy skill and art, what music would it be!’’ (ll. 39–40). What humanity might hear as ‘‘muttering’’ is really divine music being played in an idiom and on instruments mankind cannot immediately comprehend and that do not necessarily require mankind’s mediation to count as praise.33 The remainder of this longish poem is spent somewhat randomly cataloguing God’s creation, that is, in a way striving precisely to cultivate a deep attentiveness to the music of God’s ‘‘skill and art,’’ for example, in the weather, the sea, the geographical distribution of food, the medicinal virtues of herbs, or the odd minutiae of creation’s design—the parental behavior of pigeons, the structure of crocodilian mouths, and so forth.

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Although his meditation on the creature approaches the kind of Levinasian stance Beatrice Hanssen locates in Benjamin’s writings, Herbert ultimately does not ‘‘fundamentally and resolutely [resist] incorporating the other.’’34 Instead, at least in the aspect of Herbert’s poetics with which I am here concerned, his designs on the creature are at the end of the day instrumental. Herbert seeks to draw on the creature to enhance his own devotional performance, to constitute creation’s nonhumans as a resource for augmenting or at least stabilizing his capacity to contribute to a theological regime of accumulation of praise. Consider the poem’s final two stanzas: All things that are, though they have sev’ral ways, Yet in their being join in one advice To honour thee: and so I give thee praise In all my other hymns, but in this twice. Each thing that is, although in use and name It go for one, hath many ways in store To honour thee; and so each hymn thy fame Extolleth many ways, yet this one more. (ll. 145–52)

Where earlier in the poem, plants, animals, and all created things ‘‘assent[ed]’’ to human ministrations, in the penultimate stanza all creatures take on a conciliar function, and guide the poet’s own writing. Devotion originates not with mankind, but with the advice of the created world. The claim that ‘‘Providence’’ praises ‘‘twice’’ suggests that Herbert not only follows the counsel of nonhuman creation, but also uses other creatures to augment his poem’s devotional work. In his Life and Doctrine of Ovr Saviour (1656), Henry More would enjoin his reader to build a ‘‘Tabernacle’’ to God in his or her ‘‘memorie’’ to acknowledge the ‘‘incomparable benefit of [God’s] presence with vs and thanking him infinitely for it, calling all creatures to assist [him], for all is too too little.’’35 Similarly, surveying the wonders of creation allows Herbert effectively to enlist the assistance of the creature, to utilize the honor the creature offers God to double his own praise. The second stanza above moves from emphasizing how the created world advises his poetry to underscoring how his poetry is like the created world in the multiplicity of praise it offers. As in the previous stanza, Herbert redefines the relationship between human and nonhuman worship in order to improve his own devotional performance; by imitating the polyfunctionality of God’s creation, the many ways each thing can honor God, Herbert provides more praise, quantitatively

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increases and intensifies the praise this poem offers. Rather than mankind’s ‘‘dumbe’’ and thereby incapacitated parishioners, the creature serves Herbert as a kind of devotional prosthetic, allowing him to magnify his own worship and celebration of God.36 Though the case I’ve been making has focused on a poem not generally understood to be one of Herbert’s finest or all that central to his oeuvre, the dynamic I’ve located in ‘‘Providence’’ possesses a more general relevance for Herbert’s work as a whole and prepares us to consider how Herbert’s figural poetics both draws on and seeks to add to the creature as a way to redress the instabilities of human thought and action. ‘‘The Altar,’’ perhaps Herbert’s most famous poem, recapitulates the account of creaturely agency advanced in ‘‘Providence’’ and draws attention to this devotional agency in its material shape (see Figure 2). While the poem certainly involves the first dynamic of figuration detailed above—the appeal to creatures as privileged thematic content through which Herbert seeks to comprehend affliction— ‘‘The Altar’’ also instantiates a second understanding of figuration as a kind of nonsubjective action. Critics have long acknowledged that ‘‘The Altar’’ is actually composed of two altars—the altar made out of the speaker’s heart and the altar of the poem itself. In the context of the present argument, we may observe that the two altars embody two distinct modes of belief and devotional agency. One is subjective and personal, and consistent with Herbert’s concerns about human cognition, changeable—the first person singular appears in this poem only at line 13 as subject to ‘‘chance,’’ open to whatever forces would cause the speaker to ‘‘hold [his] peace.’’ The other altar, by contrast, is nonsubjective and impersonal, and thereby not vulnerable to the vicissitudes of personhood. Of the two altars, the former has held the greatest interest for scholars. Few have been as adamant as Stanley Fish in dismissing the possibility of impersonal agency in the poem, though even among those who recognize the claims for autonomous devotion ‘‘The Altar’’ advances tend to dismiss such possibilities as inadequate modes of praise, or downplay them as secondary to the putatively more important activity of human worship.37 But even if critics differ sharply about whether or not the poem succeeds or fails in its rendering of selfhood, their efforts are organized around a hermeneutics of the self—including those who see the poem as seeking to efface or undermine the self or who dismiss the poem for failing to achieve a coherent vision of selfhood.38 This is not to deny that the poem addresses concerns of selfhood—it most certainly does this—but to draw attention to how defining personhood as the exclusive or ultimate horizon within which the poem operates

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128 David Glimp A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears, Made of a heart, and cemented with tears: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workman’s tool hath touched the same. A HEART alone Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy pow’r doth cut. Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy name: That if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine, And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.

Figure 2. George Herbert, ‘‘The Altar.’’

effectively elides the impersonal aspects of the poem and thus misses important dimensions of what it is that Herbert would have the poem do. Taking an ‘‘object lesson’’ from Julian Yates’s discussion of early modern culture more generally, the point is not to adjudicate between the claims of the subject and the object—or, in the slightly different nomenclature of the present argument, between the claims of human and nonhuman creatures— but to try to understand their networked and mutually enabling articulation.39 In the present case, rather than force a choice between the two altars, I propose that we understand the relations between the two altars as governed by the practical problem I’ve been tracing. Herbert seeks to invest ‘‘The Altar’’ with a capacity for noncontingent praise that makes up for the compromised agency of the poet, the acknowledged inconstancy of his faith and devotion to God. The poem does so, moreover, not necessarily because it disciplines the subjectivity of the poet or reader, but because of its creaturely ability to praise without human mediation.40 Should the unthinkable but inevitable loss of focus happen, Herbert’s poem provides a kind of minimal assurance that God receives praise. Herbert’s allusion to Luke 19:39– 40—in which Christ answers the Pharisees who bid him to ‘‘rebuke his

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disciples’’ that ‘‘if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out’’—links the poem’s nonsubjective, impersonal belief to the dynamic noted in ‘‘Providence’’ by invoking an extreme instance of the devotional capacity of the created world. As a version of the speaking stones from the gospel of Luke, ‘‘The Altar’’ seeks to operationalize the devotional agency attached to the creature. With the penultimate couplet—‘‘if I chance to hold my peace,/These stones to praise thee may not cease’’—the poem establishes a distributed agential network of creatures, sutures human and nonhuman capacities for praise to form a creaturely artifact able to achieve the uninterrupted worship the poet cannot accomplish on his own. Who, then, is the audience for this poem? On the one hand, to the extent that ‘‘The Altar’’ participates in the kinds of ethical projects scholars have understood Herbert’s work to pursue, the answer would be human creatures. From this perspective, the poem seeks to transform or move readers to live more perfect versions of their faith, even as it acknowledges the fragility of human devotion. On the other hand, to the extent that the poem functions in the way that I have just described—as a creaturely artifact that serves to augment praise—its audience would be God, the subject and beneficiary of the ceaseless praise ‘‘The Altar’’ strives to guarantee. Though, as noted at the outset, Herbert scholars have almost exclusively read the poem and indeed all of the poet’s work in terms of the former dynamic, I’ve emphasized the latter dynamic in ‘‘The Altar’’ because it instantiates an understanding of poetic action Herbert would extend to all the poems in The Temple. In ‘‘The Dedication,’’ Herbert writes: Lord, my first fruits present themselves to thee; Yet not mine neither: for from thee they came, And must return. Accept of them and me, And make us strive, who shall sing best thy name. Turn their eyes hither, who shall make a gain: Theirs, who shall hurt themselves or me, refrain.

In one sense, the poem appeals to the account of creatureliness discussed at this essay’s outset. By characterizing himself as a priest delivering his ‘‘first fruits’’ to God—alluding to the requirement that a new priest pay his first year’s income to the monarch—Herbert invokes the hierarchical vision noted at the outset of ‘‘Providence,’’ in which the speaker casts himself as God’s ‘‘Secretary . . . of praise.’’ Engaging the arboreal thematic noted in ‘‘Affliction (1),’’ ‘‘Employment (2),’’ and ‘‘Paradise,’’ ‘‘The Dedication’’

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constitutes the poems of The Temple as a realization of the longing to be fruitful for God. And as a fruit-bearing creature, Herbert strives to contribute to the theological regime of accumulation of praise in ways that recall both the optimism of ‘‘Praise (3)’’ and the pessimism of ‘‘The Church Militant.’’ As I’ve argued, taken together these two poems both voice a desire for converting more people to the project of praise (‘‘That to thy chests there might be coming in/Both all my praise, and more!’’) and advance a grim awareness of the tenuousness of this proselytic vision, a deep pessimism about expanding the ranks of the faithful to include all humans on the planet. The final couplet of ‘‘The Dedication’’ holds on to the hope of ‘‘Praise (3),’’ and treats the poems as capable of increasing God’s ‘‘gain,’’ even as it acknowledges a certain recalcitrance among the potential converted as well as a sense that the poems may produce unanticipated or undesirable effects in readers. Herbert charges God with the task of sorting out these two populations—those who profitably can be enlisted into the ranks of the faithful, and those who might harm Herbert.41 The ethical efficacy of his poems, their capacity through their representational content to ‘‘convert . . . hearts,’’ is simply out of Herbert’s hands, beyond his control. At the same time, ‘‘The Dedication’’ also engages the understanding of nonsubjective poetic action informing ‘‘The Altar’’ and generalizes that impersonal figurative dynamic to all his poems. The poem’s first four lines attribute agency to the poems themselves in a way consistent with the devotional autonomy of the creature. With differing emphases, Ramie Targoff and Achsah Guibbory have impressed upon us the importance of community to Herbert’s poetry, the extent to which his poetry both addresses a community of worshipers and draws on the devotional conventions through which such a community was continually called into being and regulated.42 Herbert’s ‘‘Dedication’’ posits and situates the poet among a considerably more expansive sense of community, a community implicitly including the vast collective of human and nonhuman creatures and explicitly including the artificial creatures—the written figures made up of ink distributed across paper—that are his poems. The competition Herbert requests God to sponsor—‘‘Accept of them and me,/And make us strive, who shall best sing thy name’’—certainly will energize the poet, but it will do so even as it energizes the poems themselves, understood to be a collection of creaturely artifacts disarticulated from their human source, capable of competing on an equal footing, as it were, with Herbert. Moreover, here the priestly analogy breaks down, since the delivery of ‘‘first fruits’’ was a onetime payment to the queen or king. Consistent with the sense that as creaturely artifacts like ‘‘The Altar’’ all the poems are capable of persistent praise,

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this poem framing The Temple provides an alternative way of achieving the vision of ‘‘Praise (3),’’ the longing to be able to provide God with ‘‘all my praise, and more!’’ As a collective of devotional creatures, The Temple offers Herbert’s Lord an augmented revenue stream of praise, human giddiness notwithstanding.

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Entertaining Friends Falstaff ’s Parasitology donald hedrick

Shakespeare’s frequent friendship pairings can congeal for us in a single figure in the imagination, one that is dyadic rather than binary. I refer particularly to those pairs in an ‘‘entertainer/entertained’’ relation, of the sort familiar in the modern entertainment industry, particularly in comedy teams continuing the tradition of nineteenth-century minstrel ‘‘interlocutors’’ (the bantering partners often consisting of a comic naı¨f and a straight man). Thus we recall Burns and Allen or even today, Penn and the semi-mute Teller. Among prominent Shakespearean pairs of this nature we immediately think of the Fool and Lear, Puck and Oberon, Enobarbus and Antony, Parolles and Bertram, among others. Beyond such examples are other, similar friendships especially salient and problematic for present purposes, namely, dyadic figures that test the paradigm by inviting the question, which is the entertainer here? Such, for instance, are Kate and Petruchio, or Benedick and Beatrice. Other complicating examples, such as Hamlet—the comic ‘‘entertainer’’ of ideas, together with Horatio, the friend entertained—upend the class and political relations we normally expect, where the entertainer is typically a social subordinate, in yet another of that play’s prolific mysteries. Hamlet’s uncharacteristic representation is highlighted even more when the clown prince is bested in wit, as Hamlet himself concedes, by the gravedigger Clown. Friendship’s political implications for the early modern period have been admirably studied by Laurie Shannon in an important examination of ‘‘sovereign amity.’’1 The complications raised by representations of entertainer/ entertained friendships, however, may invite further consideration of Shannon’s argument that Renaissance friendship entails utopian ideals for the polity from its expectation of equality between friends. That is, in some 132

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entertainer/entertained dyads we encounter representations of rivalry and competition, considered here for the way in which these ideas may establish a certain complexity, perhaps not in opposition to an ideal of friendship but rather constitutive of it. Accordingly, I want to propose two alternative figures of friendship of this complicated sort that carry rivalry with them, intertwining friendship with what might ordinarily be its binary opposite into one knot, not for Derridean reasons but for historical and pragmatic ones. I identify the first, more historically novel of these two figures in the theater’s new material relations, whereby both heightened cooperation and heightened competition are inextricably and explicitly linked as one, a combination sometimes even thematized or narrativized in plays. The second figure for further exploration here is a more residual and traditional one for such friendships, namely, the figure of the companion from the world of animal nature. This double figuration, so to speak, maximizes a theatrical energy that both shapes and is shaped by cultural forces. Weaving these figures together—the emergent with the residual, the economic and institutional with the animal—Shakespeare composes a rich, even revolutionary pattern or metafigure called Falstaff. Falstaff has been subjected to myriad interpretations. From traditional Lord of Misrule and Vice figure to alternative father and to the pleasure principle,2 Falstaff ’s multiplying identities in criticism can be taken collectively as evidence that either Shakespeare anticipated the poststructuralist position on identity and subjectivity as multiple, or else wished to create a spectacular or limiting version of such multiplicity in a notorious and unique instance, more multiple than the rest of us. Without plucking out the heart of Falstaff ’s mystery or addressing that question directly, we might consider that a fitting approach to this phenomenon is to attempt to think of Falstaff doubly rather than singly—despite his protestation ‘‘I am not a double man’’ (1 Henry IV, V.iv.138)—not for his size or his duplicity but as an embodiment of friendship.3 Indeed, a recent survey of the earliest receptions of Shakespeare’s character in the audience’s memory and mimicry demonstrates that the fat knight was primarily associated from the start with ideas of friendship.4

Theater Friends The immanent figure for the entertainer/entertained friendship pairing is the theater itself, in whose practice we see the plays’ fictional entertainer/ entertained dyads writ large. The character relation is, therefore, a figure

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within the larger, institutional figure. To understand fully the effect of this larger pairing would require a thorough historical account of the market side of the theater, a scholarly project as yet in progress by theater historians and others examining the ‘‘business of playing’’ from theater economics to audience reception.5 I can therefore only briefly explain its implications for the present analysis, conceding from the start that my own analysis may depend on speculation about how the institution as a whole is to be understood—how to consider the theater’s own figure, as it were, since the act of figuration, insofar as it involves ideation, would seem to require a form of totalization and seeing as a whole. My own assumptions from a more limited perspective, while not refuting the considerable scholarship they rely upon, nevertheless vary from current positions, two prominent examples of which I note here. The first is that of the theater historian Roslyn Knutson, whose important scholarship has been directed at rejecting one view of the theater as ruthlessly competitive by providing evidence of the continuation of guild company spirit and practices intended to promote cooperation.6 The second is the work of Andrew Gurr, who does indeed locate evidence for ruthlessness but argues its containment within Philip Henslowe’s rival theatrical company, and even particularizes it in the entrepreneur himself as exemplifying the ruthless capitalist by contrast to Shakespeare’s more democratic yet higher-browed company.7 Such a take on Henslowe’s entrepreneurship certainly has some purchase, when we observe, for instance, Henslowe’s own actors in 1616 entering a virulently-worded lawsuit of ‘‘Articles of Oppression’’ against him. As a corollary to this argument, Shakespeare’s company stands for Gurr as an almost utopian counterpart, not anti-commercial but in some way transcending or distancing itself from the commercial, and from the merely popular appeal to audiences, by aiming for the higher values that literary tradition has identified (or back-projected) in his works.8 My ‘‘entertainment’’ focus, derived more from the broad sweep of economic history, is located somewhere between these arguments (or to the side of them both), holding that competition, even ruthless competition, is bound up with noncompetitive cooperation, particularly as the market as a whole develops in a capitalist direction from merchant capital toward massive profits (since the economic mode of the theater as a joint-stock company would not have been fully capitalist at the time). The complex picture I propose, informing the entertainment relationship studied here, would equally explain the residual force of the economic ideology of the guild system as well as the introduction of practices and expectations, certainly such

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as those of Henslowe, that for the sake of profit and profitability would undermine and challenge cooperation—just as the economy overall would become capable of doing. One part of this argument has been proposed in a study of the collaborative playwrighting of The Two Noble Kinsmen, where I conclude that the play thematizes its own circumstances of joint authorship in the way it represents its protagonists as both friends and rivals. This ‘‘competitive/collaborative’’ matrix suggests a materialist order applicable, therefore, to institutional as well as to individual practices, one where the possibility of rivalry, even destructive rivalry, may be present in potentia, as is evident in Shakespeare’s figures of friendship.9 Given this understanding of the commercial theater as a whole, the case of Falstaff provides an exemplary instance of a social relationship in friendship that is rather easily identified as both collaborative and competitive, for which the insult-swapping, or ‘‘flyting,’’ may be seen as exemplary. He is, moreover, the Prince’s consummate and constant entertainer, and agglutinative of more friendships as well, from the companions within the play space to his fans in the audience space. This collaborative/competitive model may very well have, at least at times, operated within the theater in individual affective practices. In the theoretically vexed relationship of text to performance, a rivalry of values would always be present potentially, as the actor’s stage labor would in effect add something like surplus value to the value of the writing, through the ‘‘entertainment value’’ of bodily action, gesture, and voice.10 This productive differential may especially have applied, as we might expect, to the ‘‘extra bits’’ and improvisations of comic actors. Their space within the popular tradition of theater, as Robert Weimann has instructed us, would have been the liminal one at the edge of the stage, between the represented characters and the audience, accounting for their ability directly to address the audience.11 While we need not take Hamlet’s instructions to the actors, with his admonition to the clowns not to improvise beyond the text for laughs, as Shakespeare’s own, we can certainly infer from them a potential, at least, for competitive friction and upstaging. Not surprisingly, the banishment of Falstaff has been linked to Shakespeare’s company’s move away from the physical clowning of Will Kemp, its move to the Globe, and the growth of a more elite theatrical culture.12 Falstaff has accordingly been understood as a ‘‘figure of the theater of the 1580’s,’’ which Shakespeare is himself ‘‘banishing’’ along with the character. In describing him this way, Richard Helgerson aptly identifies a competitive/collaborative context for the shift: ‘‘If Kemp and the players’ theater he represented were rivals of

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Shakespeare and the emerging actors’ theater, they were rivals in a shared transformation of the popular and the commercial.’’13 One phenomenon of the early modern theater far less well attended in scholarship, however, has been the place of the rivalry of actors, in which we can see the outlines of the competitive/cooperative model proposed here. A crucial factor for this would, of course, have been the emergent star and celebrity system, with its inevitable tendencies for resentment and envy. For a performance to work at all, of course, a degree of cooperation would need to be in place. Yet even that cooperation may not have been as singlemindedly directed toward a given end as in modern performance and directorial practice, not only because of far fewer rehearsals than modern rehearsal practice allows,14 but also because of actors shaping those ends individually, if not competitively. For the latter phenomenon, we know, for instance, of literal competition among actors from comments describing performances at which there was betting upon competing actors.15 How bets were placed or adjudicated in such rivalry is as far as I can tell unknown, but to acknowledge the practice at all is to transform our overall sense of early modern theatrical performance and its reception. Such betting took place, moreover, in the context of a theater already associated with the more extreme risks of gambling, insofar as we hear of young nobles losing their shirts by associating with actors. Showing both gambling’s prevalence outside the theaters and its function as rival entertainment, Thomas Nashe in Pierce Pennilesse paints a picture of bored young gallants idly deciding which of London’s rival entertainments to choose for the afternoon: theater, dicing, or the brothels.16 For perhaps the most revealing picture of actor ‘‘wagers’’ we have the metatheatricality of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, in which a grocer and his wife attend a play within the play and continually bet on actors and plot, hoping for the acting victory of their young apprentice Rafe. In thrusting him onstage to perform with professionals, the couple unintentionally also puts the genre of romance into absurd competition with the city comedy the actors perform.17 The competition of actors, not merely for casting but also on the stage itself, additionally charges the Falstaff/Hal relationship. Here one risks italicizing the obvious about their friendship. While the important debates will continue about the meaning and significance of the rejection of Falstaff— characterologically, politically, and culturally—Shakespeare’s dramatic structure alone would suggest that, for a betting audience, the immediate value of the end of the play would be to see which character ultimately

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prevails, who comes out on top. Henry, in short, is declared winner. The characteristic ‘‘sportification’’ of drama, to use Theordor Adorno’s term for the logic of entertainment, ends the first round of the contest of Henry IV— Part I—with the defeat of Hotspur, while the round two of Part 2 ends with the defeat of the popular favorite. That there would have to be multiple and competing audience allegiances would project the competitive force of the play into the parallel arena of the spectators. Once again, the earliest response history of the play is revealing in having been bifurcated along precisely these lines, divided between ‘‘admiration and denunciation’’ of Falstaff.18 The implicit competition or rivalry here, therefore, is not of actor versus author, but of actors’ rivalries translated into audience ones, whereby the audience in effect wagers on one protagonist over the another. At such a point the audience is neither unified nor ‘‘monolithic’’ in its response, as often assumed in critical readings, nor individualized, but rather divided against itself, each side championing one of the characters. The arena for audience members themselves is thus also a competitive/collaborative one. Distinct here either from a ‘‘unified’’ view of audiences or else from one assuming individual ‘‘responses,’’ a third position involves the production of champions or fans of characters who oppose one another. For this third ‘‘entertainment value’’ understanding, the audience’s pledge of allegiance is to the choice of rivals, so that to choose an entertainer is isomorphic with the choice of entertainments in the first place. The function of the ‘‘text’’ is to provide the arena for the sportification of playgoing, not to direct audience allegiance, but to create the potential for victory of one over another. While it may be accurate in a limited sense to describe this situation as one in which the text does not ‘‘constrain’’ interpretation, it is quite different from one in which the interpretation is wholly free, indeterminate, or disseminated, or one in which the ideal audience is neutrally above, merely appreciating the fray. Yet it might be argued that the situation is more ‘‘preinterpretive’’ and figural than interpretive and that the audience is to be described less as an ‘‘interpretive community’’ and more as a group of teams. The Henriad thus returns us to our initial question about entertainer/ entertained dyads, namely, which is the entertainer, which the entertained? While Falstaff at first seems the obvious candidate for entertainer, the situation may be more complex than that. The Prince’s hidden plan to shine forth as the underdog, for instance, gives us a prediction that his status as

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more tedious straight man to Falstaff in the comedy team anticipates a reversal. His plan is to transform into an entertainment figure, translating Falstaff ’s ‘‘fun’’ as tiresome and even more tedious than work, and thereby defeating a rival entertainer. Such one-upping will be repeated in market strategies from Shakespeare’s time to the present. The Prince’s aesthetic role is to rescue ‘‘sport’’ from the realm of what has succumbed to boredom (‘‘as tedious as to work’’—1 Henry IV, I.ii.182–83). This new ‘‘entertainment,’’ redesigned for public consumption (meaning that the rejection must be performed publicly) constitutes the Prince’s trumping of Falstaff ’s entertainment. In the economic sphere analogous to this theatrical practice, a capitaldriven strategy is really more anticompetitive than competitive, or rather constitutes an extreme competition whose intent is to destroy the competition. By adopting the position of the competitive entrepreneur, however, the prince positions himself for the final scene that replaces a private holiday with a civic one. At the same time he returns ‘‘entertainment’’ to its earlier linguistic figuration as reception for an important person rather than ‘‘mere’’ popular amusement outside civic structures. I term the economic subtext here an ‘‘entertainment unconscious,’’19 evident even in the linguistic transformation of the term entertainment, which had previously also meant ‘‘to hire’’ or ‘‘to employ.’’ The question of who the entertainer is here, in the sense of who can hire and fire or who pays, once again narratively registers the logic of entertainment value as the relation between the one who pays and the one who is paid. Hal maximizes his returns royally, winning the next play of the Henriad all for himself, with Falstaff relegated to a memory onstage and off. The anomaly of The Merry Wives of Windsor, however, attempts a reconciliation and perhaps a significant idealization of the entertainer/entertained asymmetry, by having Master Page invite the humiliated Falstaff to dinner, ‘‘where I will desire thee to laugh at my wife that now laughs at thee’’ (V.v.158–59). Entertainer and entertained in this feast swap roles and reciprocate, as will some couples engaged in ‘‘merry wars,’’ such as Benedick and Beatrice.

Companion Species Within the context of the competitive practices that materialize theater as a cultural figure and institution of friendship, what is striking about Falstaff as an embodiment of the friend is his association with nature and with various animals. These naturalizing associations, we shall see, draw attention to Falstaff ’s staged body and ultimately to the friend as parasite both in the term’s

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traditional human sense and in its emerging biological sense. Along with the forms of otherness earlier noted that have been ascribed to the character, Falstaff ’s natural body has been described in terms of infantile narcissism, the repressed maternal body, and sodomitical desire.20 Falstaff enjoys a particular association in the plays, however, with the nonhuman, with animals. Bruce Boehrer, in his important study of animals in Shakespeare, nevertheless takes very little account of Falstaff, except to note the instance of his wearing the buck’s horns as Herne the Hunter in Merry Wives.21 While Boehrer does note the coupling of animals and humans in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare identifies this urban feeder as an animal himself, as a kind of comical oasis of nature within an urban setting. In Merry Wives we hear Mistress Ford as she anticipates the comic plotting against him, saying, ‘‘What tempest, I trow, threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor? . . . I think the best way were to entertain him with hope’’—Falstaff ’s role is reversed, as the entertained rather than the entertainer (II.i.55–58). A ‘‘vile worm’’ (V.v.80) to one of the children disguised as fairies to torment him, but her ‘‘deer’’ to Mistress Quickly out to gull him (V.v.114), Falstaff is quick to embrace self-denigration in order reduce himself comically to animal nature: ‘‘I am here a Windsor stag, and the fattest, I think, i’ th’ forest’’ (V.v.10–12). Falstaff ’s animal references multiply. He is a ‘‘fox’’ to be unkenneled (Merry Wives, III.i.137). As an ‘‘old boar’’ to the Prince (2 Henry IV, II.ii.124), he is perhaps even more prophetically likened to the bulls who became notorious as entertainment in their baiting, when Quickly and Tearsheet are described as his kinswomen: ‘‘Even such kin as the parish heifers are to the town bull’’ (2 Henry IV, II.ii.135–36). Falstaff is an animal with the capacity for realizing the animal potential in others, as the Prince complains: ‘‘And the boy that I gave Falstaff. ’A had him from me Christian, and look if the fat villain have not transformed him ape’’ (2 Henry IV, II.ii.56–58). Eater of food, he is also what is eaten, both to others—Doll Tearsheet delightfully multiplies her terms of endearment, calling him ‘‘thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig’’ (2 Henry IV, II.iv.205)—and to himself, whom he calls ‘‘more than half stewed in grease like a Dutch dish’’ (Merry Wives, III.v.102), or even more degradedly, a ‘‘mountain of mummy’’ or flesh on a carcass (III.v.15). A good deal of the comedy in watching Falstaff is to see him immobilized in his animal nature, whether falling asleep while hiding out from the sheriff, playing dead on the battlefield of Shrewsbury (‘‘death hath not struck so fat a deer today’’), or carried off in a laundry basket. Moreover, Falstaff ’s

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images and metaphors run the spectrum of the biological and even evolutionary, sometimes described almost as pure matter, at other times as matter given life, then as life organized toward survival, as he declares the prime directive of evolutionary survival over the dead body of the honorable Sir Walter Blunt: ‘‘Give me life’’ (1 Henry IV, V.iii.58). He even mockingly interprets himself as a symbol of life: ‘‘But to counterfeit dying when a man thereby liveth is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed’’ (V.iv.115–17). To the extent that his behavior on the field becomes an animal one of assuming protective camouflage, the old thematic question of his ‘‘cowardice’’ becomes even more of a moot point. Cowardice is not only his nature, it is, he claims, nature’s ‘‘perfect image.’’ His reasoning amuses partly because it is obvious logic-chopping, but also because it reproduces animal reasoning itself: as Montaigne writes in his fascinating exploration of animal behavior: ‘‘Animals employ the same method and the same reasoning as ourselves when we do anything’’ (italics added).22 As a figure of the natural, Falstaff might also be argued to occupy another sort of liminal space aside from his theatrical liminality between the audience and the players or playwrights. That is, he occupies the space between the animal and the human, throwing off what Giorgio Agamben argues in The Open is the hegemony of the ‘‘western anthropological machine’’ that defines the one in distinction to the other.23 As animal, he also occupies the space between two pastoral traditions, the laborless one, derived from Virgil’s idylls, and the labored one, derived from the same author’s Georgics. Or rather, he inhabits the laboring world only to disavow its labor and be fed for free, personifying what Marx calls ‘‘minus-labor.’’24 In terms of current politics of the environment, he stands not for an environmental philosophy based on asceticism and scarcity, but rather for one outlined by Andrew Ross in The Gangster Theory of Life. This is a political imaginary of a world in which ‘‘public goods are no longer considered to be in short supply or in lavish excess,’’ but where ‘‘individual gratification is intensified and not determined by concerns for common environmental well being,’’ and ‘‘where hedonism has replaced asceticism as the dominant mode of green conduct.’’25 A crucial factor makes it less surprising and counterintuitive to consider Falstaff as a figure consistent with environmentalism rather than, as we might first expect, a figure merely of excess, waste, and overconsumption. After all, Shakespeare has Falstaff turn a complaint about his ‘‘waste’’ by the Lord Chief Justice (‘‘Your means are very slender, and your waste is great,’’) into a jest about his size: ‘‘I would it were otherwise; I would my means were greater and my waist slenderer’’ (2 Henry IV, I.ii.128–31).

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What prevents Falstaff from symbolizing all that is offensive to today’s environmentalism, however, is that he fails to be a figure of capitalist accumulation, which is founded on limitless rather than limited expansion. That is, as a body, of course, Falstaff may be a figure representing individual overconsumption, but as a body, he is simultaneously a figure of the limits of consumption. We can understand this more fully from the cultural philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who addresses the question of what is ‘‘natural’’ about capitalist accumulation. He concludes that the natural does indeed provide a tendency, but that its limits are specifically those also provided by nature, in contrast with capital: ‘‘We may suppose that, biologically and physiologically, life contains a tendency towards being accumulative which is immediately slowed and inhibited by opposing factors, such as saturations or obstacles. The growth of animal life is a prime example of this. Every species would flourish indefinitely if this expansion did not contain its own limits (its negation) within itself. In point of fact, every species is prey to other species. What is more, as it grows, every species modifies its own environment and destroys the species it in turn preys upon.’’26 Here, therefore, the competitive side of the figure of the friend works actually to limit rather than to expand capital, as we might expect from Falstaff ’s own tendency to maximize non-labor and leisure. In his comic immobility he embodies a further check on the overconsumption he may seem to represent, certainly countering the proverbial hyperactivity of labor that was seen to embody the new era of mercantile venture and to become more and more productive. Nor does he, in his sloth and indifference, seem a likely candidate for the appeals of emergent consumerism to product status or to cultural class. We know the biological companion that feeds off another as the parasite, but it is necessary here to trouble our immediate sense of the term. To point out this association with Falstaff ’s character is hardly novel, for it returns us to the question of friendship on stage: the parasite was, of course, a character type—the flatterer and dependent one of classical drama, well known in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, whose ‘‘traces’’ have long been noted in the character of Falstaff.27 Jonson develops the type even more explicitly in his comedies, in his parasite servant to Volpone, Mosca or the ‘‘fly,’’ who generalizes the corrupt realm of self-interest as a world inhabited only by parasites and ‘‘subparasites,’’ a world of interlocking reciprocal dyads. The ‘‘subparasite’’ figure warrants further exploration of its own, however, for its complication of the entertainer/entertained relation. What happens to how we theorize the parasite, in other words, when the parasite acquires its own parasite?

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Just as the entire narrative structure of the two parts of Henry IV turns on the question of who is taking advantage of whom, the logic of the parasite itself involves such a question. Shakespeare’s own sense of Falstaff ’s friendship would actually have been closer to this thematization than our current sense of parasitism, since the zoological and biological senses of the term parasite did not come into force until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to that, the term was more closely linked to its original Greek sense of a person allowed to sit at the dining table of an official at the official’s expense. By 1539 (according to the OED), we see an extension of the medieval sense of the parasite as a table companion for a rich person, into the more general early modern sense of one living at the expense of another or of society, and from that onward to its strongly pejorative modern sense. But the nonpejorative meaning of parasite, perhaps residual, seems structurally built into the dramatic representation of Falstaff, in Merry Wives especially, when, exposed and defeated in his comic comeuppance, Falstaff is nevertheless invited at the play’s conclusion to dinner by Master Page: ‘‘Yet be cheerful, knight. Thou shalt eat a posset tonight at my house’’ (V.v.158– 59). The ending serves as a feel-good corrective to the parallel moment in Part II, when Justice Shallow’s invitation to the defeated fat knight to dinner at his house is immediately followed by Falstaff ’s arrest along with the inviter. Nevertheless, Shakespeare uncannily invokes an emergent sense of parasite, what would become the more complicated, less stigmatized scientific view, a current taxonomy that explicitly addresses the question of advantage. Curiously, this less pejorative sense replicates an original sense of the term, the unpaying guest at the table who ‘‘pays’’ by entertaining the host. The scientific figures of symbiosis and the relation of guest and host species thus accidentally parallel what we think of Hal and Falstaff and the possibilities raised by the play: there is true parasitism, in which harm is done to the host; commensalism (in which the host is unaffected); and mutualism (in which the host benefits). Shakespeare’s own use of the term reflects an emergent, proto-scientific flexibility or neutrality in regarding the parasite. Of the four times he uses it, three are clearly stigmatized: Richard II’s queen calls hope a parasite in flattering her (II.ii.70); Coriolanus also uses the term synonymously with flattery (‘‘when steel grows/Soft as the parasite’s silk’’ [I.x.44–45]); and Timon, as he presents his own table guests with the mock banquet of stones and water, lashes out at them with insults that include ‘‘most smiling, smooth, detested parasites’’ (III.vii.86). The exception to stigmatized use is Polixenes’ praise of his son—‘‘my parasite, my soldier,

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statesman, all’’ (The Winter’s Tale, I.ii.169)—where Shakespeare either returns to the less stigmatized reading or, in the radical flexibility of his metaphoric practice, uncannily anticipates the more neutral and even positive scientific term. What is imagined in the usage appears to be the commonplace of children entertaining adults, since the same passage describes how entertaining they are to old people. Usually fed for free, children are, therefore, ideal figures of both entertainer and parasite. Traditional philosophical ideas of friendship had often idealized the relationship by emphasizing, as Laurie Shannon has surveyed, the requisite equality of the soul mate. Montaigne, a locus classicus of this idealized view, personalizes the idealization with a friendship following the topos of two in one, a relation transcending death, even producing a ‘‘passionating,’’ lyrical excursus on an actual friend. At one point he nevertheless notes that he would not want the same kind of companion for his table that he would want for his bed, drawing on the traditional and even positive sense of the society of the banquet ‘‘parasite’’ without, however, requiring a contrasting notion of the nonfleshly, platonic union of souls. Renaissance plant lore furnishes more salient material for Falstaff ’s figuration through its intersection of the scientific or natural with the social. Geffrey Whitney, in his emblem book, portrays, and even idealizes, the unequal but reciprocal parasitism of an interlinking tree and vine as the visual figure of friendship. The relation observed in the simultaneously cooperative and competitive figure of theatrical friendship is easy enough to identify in the natural sphere in the early modern context. Whitney’s very idealization of friendship creates a relationship of dependence, for the image is not one of sameness but of difference, a young vine propping up an elderly tree. A ‘‘fruitful vine’’ spreads itself about the ‘‘withered elme,’’ ‘‘rotten, drie, and dead, his branches still.’’ Glancing at this difference, the poem assures the reader that this is to the tree’s advantage, the moral being that ‘‘wee shoulde be linck’de with such a friende,’/That might revive, and helpe when wee bee oulde/ . . . to helpe for to uphoulde.’’28 Yet the very explanation of the young vine holding up the dead tree creates an image of parasitism known well before the later scientific eras, as we can see from the real discussions of botany in Gerard’s 1597 Herball, with its comparison of the different sorts of vines. Gerard distinguishes wild from cultivated vines, such as the Spanish ‘‘manured Vine’’ that produces Falstaff ’s own sack.29 As a more wild parasite himself, Falstaff ’s praise of sack in Part II of Henry IV must strike a knowledgeable gardener as ironic, as he praises his companion

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prince for having acquired the wildness that produces his valor by cultivating a taste for sack, unlike his humorless brother John, ascribing Hal’s valiant behavior to his having taken the ‘‘cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father’’ and transformed it: ‘‘he hath, like lean, sterile, and bare land, manured, husbanded, and tilled [it], with excellent endeavour of drinking good, and good store of fertile sherry, that he is become very hot and valiant’’ (IV.ii.105–8).30 In the vine’s reciprocal or dependency relation, Gerard prescribes a gardening that contrasts the vine with its soil: ‘‘A wise husbandman will commit to a fat and fruitfull soile a leane Vine, and of his owne nature not too fruitfull: to a leane grounde a fruitfull vine.’’31 Unlike Whitney, with his idealization of vine–tree friendship, Gerard is clearly aware of the parasitical nature of some species, particularly varieties of the bindweed he notes as especially English: the blue bindweed, for instance, ‘‘climeth upon things that stand neere unto it, and it foldeth it selfe about them with many turnings and windings, wrapping it selfe against the sunne contrarie to al other things whatsoever.’’ Other varieties of bindweed are even more parasitical: ‘‘the rest of the Bindweedes are not fit for medicine, but unprofitable weedes and hurtfull unto eche thing that groweth next to them.’’32 Shakespeare’s vine imagery is generally positive, even lyrically romantic (‘‘the fruitful vines,’’ ‘‘the vines of France and milk of Burgundy,’’ ‘‘and like a vine grow to him,’’ ‘‘her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart’’ . . .), but he once notes dependency that reverses the typical logic of parasitism, such that the tree endangers the healthy vine, when Arviragus in Cymbeline wants to separate out the grief and patience ‘‘rooted’’ together in the alternating smiles and sighs of their young charge (Imogen): ‘‘Grow patience,/And let the stinking elder, grief, untwine/His perishing [i.e., destructive] root with the increasing vine’’ (IV.ii.60–62). Perhaps implying the typical botanical reciprocity of vine and tree, with the young supporting the old, Shakespeare has Poins call Falstaff a ‘‘dead elm’’ (2 Henry IV, II.iv.301). As parasite, Falstaff also seems to embody one of the chief features that Agamben describes as belonging to the animal, that they are ‘‘open’’ to particular stimuli from their environment. This feature was the focus of one of the earliest proponents of ecological biology, the German zoologist Jakob von Uexku¨ll, who studied the tick. Although ticks live by sucking blood, a tick separates out only the temperature of blood from perceptions of its world; it is ‘‘open’’ and attracted only to that. Shakespeare makes only one reference to ticks, for derogatory purposes, in Troilus and Cressida, when Thersites claims he would ‘‘rather be a tick in a sheep’’ than possess the sort of

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valiant ignorance he attributes to Achilles (III.iii.298–99). But a closer parallel can be drawn to Falstaff ’s comic, and comparatively natural, parasitism, which is perhaps also his downfall, in his characteristic ‘‘openness,’’ however narrowly focused, to sack (and attraction only to sack without lime) as the object of his addiction. Falstaff experiences sack exactly as, according to Uexku¨ll, an animal relates to the world through its carriers of significance, or Bedeutungstra¨ger,33 the marks that are the only interest of the animal. Falstaff, as a figure of the parasite at the table, is remarkable, moreover, for the number of times that, against the very idea of theater, he is portrayed comically as fixed or immobile: his initial sleeping, his falling asleep when the sheriff arrives, his playing dead on the battlefield. Thus the maximum return of laughter can be achieved from a minimum investment in stage business.

Entertainment Value and Non-Work Immobility itself becomes an image for something far greater than the fat knight’s merry drunkenness. When Falstaff is immobile the body itself represents to the audience the greatest refusal—the refusal even to act, calling up a potential refusal even to do what his ‘‘friends’’ in the audience have paid for him to do. This anti-employment image rejects both servantship and the wage-labor that would replace it as if they were, anticipating Marx’s view, comparable forms of slavery or exploitation. While the Prince from the beginning of Part 1 reveals that he is a figure of potentiality, looking toward ‘‘redeeming time’’ and his reputation, it is Falstaff who clearly represents what Agamben, citing Aristotle, refers to as the complement of ‘‘the potentiality to be,’’ namely, the Bartlebyesque ‘‘potentiality to not-be.’’34 Despite his portrayed riot, or rather because it must be portrayed, the Prince is never potentially not a prince or king; he is capable of dissimulating by being unkingly, but is not capable of merely simulating kingship. Falstaff ’s relation to simulation is different. Falstaff is the character Shakespeare exploits for comic purposes as the figure who does not move, who freezes at the end of the two plays, playing dead and silent on the battlefield in one, and painfully silent during the king’s rejection speech in the other. Shakespeare will even comically replay such stage non-business in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Falstaff in order to escape the wrath of the jealous husband whose wife he covets, will hide, immobilized, in a side-chamber and in a laundry basket. His last comic escape escalates further into a figure of immobility within mobility: he is able to exit on his own, but in the socially immobilizing costume of a woman.

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It is this persistent action of staging non-action, whether deliberate or forced upon Falstaff, that confers on him the image of the parasite as great refuser, enacting a ‘‘potentiality to not-be.’’ Prior to the rejection scene, Falstaff at the end of Henry IV, Part II is wholly unusual in his activity, in haste to see Hal at the coronation. Something is, of course, wrong with this picture from the start. This uncharacteristic speed in riding to London occurs only when he is imagining a positive potential, the potential to ‘‘be somebody’’ as opposed to his not-somebody of the fat knight, never seeking any further titles, unless in obvious jest. The final scene is an ‘‘entertainment’’ in the properly Elizabethan sense of the term, a welcoming procession in which Falstaff and Henry finally alter roles: the host becomes the entertainer, the former entertainer becomes the abject outcast. The scene enacts a linguistic violence, in which the older, royal sense of entertainment defeats, seemingly for good, the newer sense of ‘‘amusement’’ and thereby signals the loss of a theater friend. Its residual sense is its authoritarian one. Whether Falstaff feeds off the Prince or the Prince feeds off Falstaff—a question we are invited throughout the Henry plays to contemplate— parasitism is a deeply embedded figure of friendship and a determinant of the narrative treatment of Falstaff. Aside from this narrative, however, the parasite, according to the philosopher Michel Serres’ extended meditation on the topic, must eventually be cast out, even though parasitism is, he asserts, ‘‘the oldest profession.’’ While Falstaff mockingly argues that theft is all right if it is one’s vocation, since it ‘‘is no sin to labor in one’s vocation,’’ what seems radical about the parasite is that its model of friendship idealizes at the same time a freedom from labor at all. This friendship, like Falstaff ’s companionship, embodies the most subversive relation of all; in exchange for the entertainment of his stories and his mirth, he interrupts our logic: ‘‘The parasite invents something new. Since he does not eat like everyone else, he builds a new logic. . . . People laugh, the parasite is expelled, he is made fun of, he is beaten, he cheats us; but he invents anew. This novelty must be analyzed.’’35 Even more subversively, in his immobility, Falstaff the parasite comically tweaks or assaults the very friendship he has with the audience, who have paid to see action, not immobility and sleep. His commercial antithesis becomes the bawdy jig often ending performances at theaters—especially ironic if audiences arriving at the end got to see the dance for free. If the Epilogue-actor’s announcement of his dancing refers to a jig, the dance would contrast with Falstaff ’s non-comic immobilization by the king and would convey some of the aura of an ironic dance of death.36

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The image of immobility comes to life, as it were, in Henry V, in Mistress Quickly’s remembrance of Falstaff dying, finally immobilized on his deathbed. As she describes moving her hands up his still body to find everything ‘‘as cold as any stone,’’ the comedy of her speech—if it is comedy— approaches a sublime juxtaposition with tragedy.37 Ultimately, for Shakespeare, Falstaff is not the figure of a friendship ‘‘ideal,’’ but neither is he altogether a counterfigure or negative exemplar, as might be expected from his evident distance from the Renaissance idealizing discourses of friendship that Laurie Shannon understandably privileges.38 Once we stray or swerve from those idealizing discourses, however, and detour through the other worlds of the institutional and the natural, we arrive at a fattened hodgepodge, a miscellany of subjectivities, but not just any miscellany and not limited to the human. The original social and biological meanings are inextricably conjoined in Falstaff ’s dual figure of theater and nature. Yet the hodgepodge of Falstaff is a tactical one resisting customary visual and rhetorical figuration, serving not so much as a figural resolution but rather more like a figural question—contingent and conditional and even transformable—for whatever we choose to name ‘‘friendship,’’ even with a rogue. Nobody’s perfect. We may never quite identify the speech act for declaring friendship, the ‘‘I-hereby-befriend-you,’’ comparable to the conventional declaration of love; we are left only with ritual or semi-ritual gestures for the ambiguity of performing friendship, whose theatrical representatives are subjected to the logic of entertainment value. For this reason Shakespeare earlier assigns a prominent representative of the theatrical imaginary, namely Puck, to conclude A Midsummer Night’s Dream (if you can call it a conclusion) with the line ‘‘Give me your hands, if we be friends’’ (Epi.15, italics added). Puck thus speaks as another dual figure, one out of the natural fairy world (of early modern British folklore) and a ‘‘friend’’ working for the Lord Chamberlain’s men. Puck’s conditional unconditionality anticipates a friendship in potentia, or even what for Shakespeare may have been an inconclusive, emergent friendship ideal whereby our initial paradigmatic question, which is the entertainer, which the entertained? has been magically transformed into the question, which is the entertainer, which the friend? My own analysis, emphasizing the parallel rivalries within the institutional and the natural figures of friendship for Shakespeare, also emphasizes an undermining of labor itself. The modern examples of this implicit critique are marginal indeed: one can locate them, for example, in Paul Lafargue’s 1880 expansion of Jeffersonian rights in his treatise The Right to Be

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Lazy, in effect a parasite’s manifesto. There he speculates that if the oppressed classes were to rise up in their strength, ‘‘not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the rights of capitalist exploitation, not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her.’’39 We might note for presentist purposes that Soviet communism condemned and punished ‘‘parasitism,’’ thus joining hands with late Western capitalism in its similar ideological stance against the ‘‘free lunch’’ and tendency to resist even the U.S. Constitution’s dedication to the ‘‘general welfare.’’ To bring Falstaff ’s parasitological entertainment revolution thus into the present historical moment, where it might serve as a cultural alert or corrective along the lines of Andrew Ross’s hedonistic environmentalism, we might in conclusion produce for reflection the Manifesto against Labour composed by the German radical anti-Marxist or post-Marxist group known as Krisis. This more or less eco-anarchical political organization argues, much as Lafargue did as a contemporary of Marx, that classical Marxism itself fundamentally supports another form of oppression and alienation by virtue of its having been founded, hopelessly and dogmatically, upon labor. Perhaps along with echoes of the Shakespearean entertainer/entertained figure we can recognize the voice of a friend of yours in the stirring conclusion to their political manifesto against labor: ‘‘Workers of all countries, call it a day.’’40

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Skin Merchants Jack Cade’s Futures and the Figural Politics of Henry VI, Part II julian yates

In Act IV, scene ii of Henry VI, Part II (1590/91), Dick the Butcher speaks the line that will be remembered: ‘‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’’ (IV.ii.71).1 Rebel leader Jack Cade agrees, ‘‘Nay, that I mean to do,’’ but pauses, adding the more open-ended, ‘‘Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment; that parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings, but I say, ’tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since’’ (IV.ii.72–76). It is not clear what happens on stage at this moment. Does Jack hold the ‘‘this’’ to which he refers aloft, calling all eyes to a parchment, as he discerns the constellation of animal, vegetable, and mineral matter that funds the legal forms of writing of Renaissance England? What exactly does Jack see, touch, or feel as he holds the skin of a lamb in his hands and the script thereon ‘‘stings’’ him? Whatever stage business unfolds, Jack’s question invites an audience to consider the efficacy of writing as a legal technology in the period, as a coding of matter that bites some and funds others. In the break-neck violence that follows, the figure of this ‘‘innocent lamb’’ seems all but forgotten. Jack’s open-ended question about parchment, which seems to want to slow things down, as he and his fellows inquire into their situation, becomes irrelevant. Enter the unhappy crux of just how we should understand Shakespeare’s attitudes toward Cade, the rebellion, the ‘‘populace,’’ or the ‘‘fishy’’ bottom-dwelling ‘‘groundlings,’’ as Hamlet names them.2 What does the refolding of archival traces—the splicing together of phrases from John Ball, Jack Straw, and Wat Tyler’s uprising of 1381; Cade’s Kentish Uprising of 1450; the 1517 uprising by xenophobic apprentices; the Hackett rebellion in July 1591; the felt-makers revolt of June 1592—or, to refold Roger Chartier’s phrase, ‘‘Shakespeare[’s] 149

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mobiliz[ation] of different languages (legal, millenarian, carnivalesque, folkloric, etc.)’’ in Henry VI, Part II have to tell us?3 Does the play stage a murderous anti-writing oral utopia, as Chartier (among others) thinks? Does it magnify or contain the horror of the episode? With whom or what does the play finally side?4 One response, such as that Paola Pugliatti entertains in what remains the most comprehensive study of the play’s use of source materials, is that all our answers to these questions will be ideological. ‘‘We tend to use the episode,’’ she writes, ‘‘in order to support some kind of preconceived picture rather than to interpret it,’’5 that is, to serve as guarantor or referent for some supposed outside to discourse, most usually the political or epistemological function of the stage in Renaissance England and by extension the political (or not) opinions of whoever ‘‘Shakespeare’’ may have been. What’s laid bare then by such a crux are all the elisions forced upon us as we approach the text in order for our own model of the ‘‘past’’ to cohere. What do we fold over or leave out this time in order for our reading of the play to convince? Technically, writers, editors, critics, butchers (such as Dick), the stage actor (who fills Dick out), and you or I, are all skin merchants. And butchery, as John Michael Archer tells us, is the governing metaphor of the play.6 My aim in this essay is to offer a topological reading of the Jack Cade sequence, treating the episode as a bewitched spot in the archive, the site of an antagonism or flux, a two-way mirror that even as it ostensibly stages a ‘‘past’’ asks its audience to interrogate their own modes of historical figuration—all the ways we have of animating the textual remains of the dead to produce an effect of the ‘‘past’’ in the ‘‘present.’’7 I am interested in the way the Cade sequence might be said to thematize a politics of the figure, an understanding of historical process that regards interventions in the writing machine or the figural life of ‘‘things’’ as the most potentially important or durable mode of political action. In using the phrase ‘‘writing machine’’ I seek to remind readers that language is perhaps the first technology, which both in spoken and written forms serves as a tool for rhetorical persuasion and as an external device for installing memories in individuals and collectives.8 When Jack looks into the surface of a parchment and registers the animal presence and feels the sting of the parchment’s claim upon him, the strangeness of writing as a medium that codifies social relations becomes a felt and knowable phenomenon. Fallen among goats, not sheep, as one inventive etymology for ‘‘tragedy’’ as ‘‘goatish song’’ has it,9 Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Cleopatra will register Jack’s insight in melancholic mode, reading their own deaths as a

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change of state, a translation from ‘‘life’’ to ‘‘liveliness’’ in discourse—a restive silence or elision in Hamlet’s case; a problem of fidelity in letters sent home to Venice for Othello; the threat of public spectacle for a caged Macbeth; ‘‘boyed forth’’ on stage for Cleopatra. I argue that a similar awareness of the power of the figure as a formalizing ‘‘event,’’ productive and dangerous, a suturing of matter and semiosis, occurs in Act IV of Henry VI, Part II and that this awareness is keyed to the possibilities on offer from the ‘‘liveliness’’ or appearance of life created by the writing ‘‘event’’ of the 1590s—the success of history plays in the wake of the Armada of 1588. In what follows, I ask first who or what exactly is ‘‘Jack Cade?’’ When is he? Where is he? What counts as a ‘‘text’’ for the topological mode of reading I sketch in this essay? I then read Act IV of Henry VI, Part II in detail and consider its exemplarity in the terms offered by Thomas Nashe’s defense of chronicle plays in Pierce Penniless (1592). I end with the return of Jack Cade’s ovine query of parchment circa 1600, refolded this time by Hamlet in conversation, as usual, with Horatio.

Unfolding Jack Some way into ‘‘The Dream-Work Does Not Think,’’ Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard pauses to discuss the poster for Frederic Rossif ’s film Revolution d’Octobre. In Lyotard’s hands, the poster becomes mobile. As he turns it, Lyotard restores movement to the figure, and unfolds its crumpled form. ‘‘The letters of the title,’’ he observes, ‘‘are deformed in such a way as to give the impression that a wind is blowing the flat surface on which they are written. This is enough to make this plane movable, to turn it into a piece of cloth, the cloth of a flag carried by someone who is walking fast towards the left (which, as well as being politically symbolic, also carries a plastic value: the eye moves from the left when reading; hence the letters move ahead of the glance, complementing its movement). But this is only the beginning’’ he adds; were ‘‘the wind to blow harder, if the horse of the standard-bearer were to gallop, if one were able to ‘freeze’ the inscription, certain letters would disappear altogether into the folds and others would undergo radical changes. . . . Re´volution d’Octobre might read Re´von d’Ore and be heard as Reˆvons d’Or (let’s dream of gold).’’10 In Lyotard’s performance of the figural possibilities of Rossif ’s poster, we come face to face with his sense of the ‘‘figure’’ as a field of affective intensity, which alludes to a radical exteriority to discourse, accessed in the brute moment of an encounter. In Lyotard’s hands, we come to see how Rossif ’s

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poster interrupts itself, constitutes itself and the historical referent it names as a singularizing ‘‘event.’’ The rippling surface of the poster suggests the presence of some other ‘‘thing,’’ force, or order of meaning entirely. Some ‘‘thing’’ present only as a wavy line bulging through the surface of the image. As the anthropologist of visual culture Christopher Pinney remarks, the hyped-up temporality or immediacy, the ‘‘this-ness’’ or ‘‘now-ness’’ of Lyotard’s encounter with the poster, its ‘‘materiality,’’ ‘‘might be defined as that figural excess or supplementarity, which can never be encompassed by linguistic-philosophical closure.’’11 The figure resists reading, demarcating a zone of excess, and indicating a field of potentiality. It is this sense of the figure that I deploy in my reading of Jack’s ‘‘innocent lamb,’’ finding in Jack’s open-ended question a mode of thought and a perception allied to Lyotard’s sensitivity to the figure. In advocating a topological approach to the Jack Cade sequence or interlude, then, I aim to move critical discussion away from the representational life of the play toward the lexical and semiotic registers in which it trades, toward what we might call the surface or ‘‘skin’’ of the play-text. Crucial to my thinking here has been the work of the anthropologist and science studies scholar Donna Haraway and specifically her interest in the tropic dimensions of language, in the way figures of speech make certain configurations of signs and matter thinkable and others not. One of the characteristics of Haraway’s work has been the adoption of successive tropes, each allied to ways of thinking, ways of configuring the world. In The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003), for example, Haraway’s favorite trope for what she names dog tales is metaplasm. ‘‘Metaplasm,’’ she writes, ‘‘means a change in a word, for example adding, omitting, inverting, or transposing its letters, syllables, or sounds. The term is from the Greek metaplasmos, meaning remodeling or remolding. Metaplasm is a generic term for almost any kind of alteration of a word, intentional or unintentional. I use metaplasm to mean the remodeling of dog and human flesh, remolding the codes of life, in the history of companion species relating. . . . Woof.’’12 What Haraway likes about metaplasm is the ‘‘biological taste’’ of the word. ‘‘Compare and contrast ‘protoplasm,’ ‘cryptoplasm,’ ‘neoplasm,’ ‘germplasm’ ’’ she suggests, and you’ll come to appreciate the crosscutting or splicing together of ‘‘flesh and signifier, bodies and words, stories and worlds’’ in what we have been used to calling societies and she calls ‘‘nature-cultures.’’ She finds this trope useful in capturing the various senses of her project, which is to demonstrate how

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the ‘‘remodeling of dog and human flesh, remolding the codes of life,’’ produces what she terms ‘‘companion-species relating.’’ For Haraway metaplasm names the key technique by which a biological as well as semiotic archive is successively performed to create all manner of differently animated beings and worlds. In effect, Haraway extends Lyotard’s conception of the figure into the world of biology, expanding our sense of the figure as a tropic operator whose job it is to splice together words and things, signs and matter, in order to constitute worlds and maintain them. Crucially, ‘‘metaplasm can signify a mistake, a stumbling, a troping that makes a fleshly difference.’’13 Her redefinition of the trope provides no shelter from the fact that the world is populated by inhuman and frequently indifferent agencies not our own. Indeed, the choice of metaplasm as a privileged trope marks a step for Haraway toward an order of description in which it no longer makes sense to speak of an individual species so much as of a ‘‘companion-species’’ or ‘‘multi-species crowd’’—a network or assemblage of differently animated actors (human, animal, plant, and mineral) who exchange properties (biological, semiotic, and figurative) as they collectively constitute the world.14 For Haraway, the ‘‘remodeling and remoulding’’ of human and dog yields a positive model of ‘‘companionspecies relating,’’ whereas the articulation of, say, sheep as ‘‘stock’’ offers a model, still a ‘‘companion-species,’’ rooted in domination.15 The trade-off between sheep and shepherd is not one of mutually enhanced expertise, as in the case of the canine/human ‘‘companion species,’’ but instead one of wool in return for a limited exposure to predators. There are good and bad ‘‘companion species,’’ then, good and bad ‘‘multi-species.’’ While Haraway’s interests and vocabulary may seem light years away from Henry VI, Part II, her model of the ‘‘companion’’ or ‘‘multi-species’’ echoes the language of popular protest, of commons, commonwealth, subsistence, and utopia, we find in the play. What manifests in the play as a hallucinatory stay of proceedings, holding back only for a moment Dick the Butcher’s ‘‘Let’s kill all the lawyers,’’ represents, in Haraway’s terms, a dawning awareness of the material-semiotic work performed by all the plants and animals whose manufactured remains constituted the writing machine of Tudor England. Jack sees some of the network of human and non-human actors that constitute a parchment that ‘‘stings’’ (sheep and wax) and this knowledge provides him with a weapon against his betters. The disorienting dose of reference, the palpable thisness, provided by animal skin has a leveling effect that detaches him from a world produced by parchments. He hopes that his insight, his synesthesic registering of how parchment can

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‘‘sting,’’ might make a ‘‘fleshly difference.’’ Likewise, Haraway’s redefinition of metaplasm represents one such attempt to engineer a figural ‘‘event’’ in our archive that she hopes will change the routines we have for constituting ‘‘persons’’ and ‘‘collectives.’’ By asking us to apprehend our relations with animal and plant others via the rubric of the companion- or multispecies she hopes to constitute a difference in our ways of building collectives and so of making a home out of the world. Jack Cade’s ovine summoning as he discovers the figure of an ‘‘innocent lamb’’ in the surface of a parchment or piece of vellum is an allied gesture, a momentary leveling of codes that might make something ‘‘different’’ thinkable, possible, knowable. Both try to tinker with the routine mechanisms of their respective writing machines, reaching inside to refold ‘‘things’’ differently. Beyond this broad thematic continuity between Haraway’s own political commitments and the languages of popular protest we find in the play, metaplasm itself marks the play-text of Henry VI, Part II in two distinct ways. As Russ Macdonald tells us, during the Renaissance metaplasm was a crucial tool for maintaining metrical regularity while incorporating allusions to or quotations from other texts.16 Metaplasm and its allied tropes cause the surface of the text to ripple but not to tear, registering the presence of other texts or designating a zone of absorptive poetic play. Metaplasm also happens to be the governing trope of the Jack Cade sequence or interlude via the play’s folding and refolding of differently timed phrases, words, events, and codes. Jack Cade’s lines are knit together out of the rallying calls of successive English rebellions from 1381 onward, a polychronic folding together of differently timed quotations held together as a constellation of rebel utterances. In Act IV, scene ii Jack is also himself the butt of an extended study in metaplasmic verbal play, as his fellow rebels refold his name in parody. Unfolding ‘‘Jack,’’ in the senses offered above, has several consequences for how I model what counts as the ‘‘text’’ of Henry VI, Part II and how I understand the kinds of work performed by editors, literary critics, historians, and audiences. For if, in accounting for the passage of time, you opt for a process philosophy, as does Haraway, then quite quickly you find yourself unfolding a complicated form or crumpled figure into its topology, tracing the differently timed links that make up the network to which you have just added yourself.17 Time effects exist—but they are usually a question of frequency, routines, or traffic, the number of times a figure is performed the same way—processes that in another language we have been accustomed to calling ideology.18

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‘‘Time does not count,’’ writes the sociologist Bruno Latour, ‘‘time is what is counted. It is not an explanatory variable; it is a dependent variable that needs to be explained. It doesn’t offer a framework for explanation, since it is an effect that has to be accounted for among many other, more interesting ones. Grab calendar time and you’ll find yourself empty-handed. Grab the actors, and you’ll get periodization and temporality as a bonus. Here is sociology’s sole advantage over history.’’19 ‘‘Grabbing the actors’’ means, as a first step, inventorying all of the differently timed ‘‘actors’’ or ‘‘actants’’ (persons, animals, plants, ideas, tropes, machines, techniques) who may be said to participate in a process (text, play, performance) and following them wherever and whenever they go. It is possible always, using this type of model, to say with some precision when and where you are. In the course of writing this essay, I have spent a good deal of time sitting in a library, inhabiting Act IV of Henry VI, Part II, reading editions that prefer F1 (1623) to Q1 (1594) and its reprints, Q2 (1600) and Q3 (1619). I have been following a series of tense discussions in Roger Warren’s 2002 Oxford edition as to how and why this or that editor did or did not mark the derogatory commentary Dick the Butcher and his comrades deliver while Jack Cade speaks in Act IV, scene ii as ‘‘asides.’’ The issue for Warren is one of prescription. Mark them as asides and you reduce the potential for reading the Cade sequence as disruptive or even self-ironizing carnival, and so sponsor a negative appraisal of the rebels. Asides seem an unnecessary editorial intrusion, thinks Warren, citing a performance of the play in 2001 in which ‘‘the comments were overt, mocking statements, relished [and heard] by all’’ (52). Given my interests, I am inclined to read these highly politicized editorial and performance choices as one more episode of metaplasmic folding and unfolding of letters, words, and lines that constitutes the textus (style but also flesh or skin) of a play that has something to do with the flesh and skin of the human actants, Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare at least, who had a hand in writing it. This process began with the writing of the play itself, with the additions and deletions to the historical archive that ‘‘Shakespeare’’ made. Following Latour, then, I could represent the moment of my reading in this essay as a string of dates—1590–91/1594/1623/2010—as long as you understand that time index as a work in progress, in need of constant monitoring and recalibration as the contexture that is Henry VI, Part II proliferates and my essay acquires more actants: F1, Q1, Q2, Q3, Nashe, Shakespeare, his editors, quotations from the rebellions of 1381, 1450, 1517, 1591, 1592, a reader, perhaps, a critic, and so on.20 This mode of dating records Henry

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VI, Part II as an ongoing assemblage of times and places, as an extended text. In this light, Roger Warren’s decision to cancel one tradition of editorial folding and provide a ‘‘flat’’ text for Act IV, scene ii counts as an ‘‘event’’ in the life of the play. It is a self-conscious act of writing that aims to constitute the Jack Cade sequence in a manner that does not already presume a reading—that renders the question of ‘‘grotesquerie’’ or ‘‘carnival’’ as a challenge to directors, audiences, and readers. His choice is ‘‘material’’ in the sense that it processes the script as a mode of poesis or making, a ‘‘wordthing,’’ Lyotard might say, that designates a zone of ‘‘affective intensity’’ whose ‘‘performance’’ will constitute an audience, a company, a ‘‘play,’’ and so a world. ‘‘Enter Jack Cade, Dick the Butcher, Smith the Weaver, a sawyer, and a drummer with infinite numbers,’’ off to kill some lawyers or really anyone who can write and read.

Speaking of Sheep Here is Warren’s rendering of the key passages in Act IV, scene ii that frame Jack’s first appearance on stage, delivered as a ‘‘flat’’ text with no indication as to what Cade can and cannot hear: cade butcher cade butcher cade butcher cade butcher cade butcher weaver cade butcher cade weaver

We, John Cade, so termed of our supposed father— Or rather of stealing a cade of herrings. For our enemies shall fall before us, inspired with the spirit of putting down kings and princes—command silence. Silence. My father was a Mortimer— He was an honest man and a good bricklayer. My mother was a Plantagenet— I knew her well, she was a midwife. My wife descended from the Lacys— She was indeed a pedlar’s daughter and sold many laces. But now of late, not able to travel with her furred pack, she washes bucks here at home. Therefore am I of an honourable house. Ay, by my faith, the field is honourable, and there was he born, under a hedge; for his father had never a house but the cage. Valiant I am— A needs must, for beggary is valiant.

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Skin Merchants: The Figural Politics of Henry VI, Part II 157 cade butcher

I am able to endure much— No question of that, for I have seen him whipped three market days together. (IV.ii.31–54)

As Jack embarks on his own ‘‘becoming Mortimer,’’ deploying a royal ‘‘we’’ to absorb the commons, Dick carves him up. Sloughing off his patronym, Cade, in order to announce his ‘‘true’’ genealogy, Jack demands silence, which Dick enforces. Thus begins a double oration: (1) Cade’s predatory mimesis of Mortimer, just as York had said was the plan in Act III, scene i; and (2) his comrades’ metaplasmic refolding of him, punning here on the alternative sense of cade as ‘‘barrel’’; on the ‘‘mortar’’ in Mortimer, deriving Cade as bricklayer; on ‘‘jennet’’ in Plantagenet to find his mother a midwife; restringing Lacys as ‘‘laces’’; transposing a g into a d to put his father in ‘‘the cage.’’ Dick the Butcher and John the Weaver’s fractal refolding of Cade produces another ‘‘we,’’ as the tradesmen-become-rebels that Cade seeks to absorb make his skin ripple or bubble, emitting a multiplicity of voices and words that are parenthetically (and so insistently) more ‘‘present.’’ Cade entered the play in Act III, scene i as ‘‘John Cade of Ashford,’’ York’s ‘‘substitute’’ or deputy, seduced into a performance of the now defunct John Mortimer, whose ‘‘face,’’ ‘‘gait,’’ and ‘‘speech’’ he ‘‘resemble[s]’’ (III.i.371–73). York recalls the ‘‘headstrong Kentishman’s’’ performance in Ireland, where outnumbered by a ‘‘troop of kerns,’’ ‘‘thighs peppered with darts,’’ he turned ‘‘sharp-quilled porcupine’’ (III.i.363) and then, when rescued, ‘‘caper[ed] upright like a wild Morisco,/Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells’’ (III.i.364–65). Jack’s skin stretching performance (he’s a porcupine-become-hybrid-Moorish/Morris-dancer, depending on which sense of Morisco you hear) turns heads—York’s among them—and so he turns intelligencer, betraying first kerns, and now, hopes York, the commons.21 The play begins then in this scene by voiding the historical Cade, whoever he may have been, in favor of a spectacular series of surfaces or ‘‘Cade effects’’ that York appears to manipulate. Indeed, in York’s speech, Cade is recognized and valued as an unruly mimetic agent that parasitically eats its host, obliterating all sense of the original. What happens to Cade, assures York, matters not at all—if he’s ‘‘racked and tortured’’ (III.i.376), subjected to juridical refolding, there’s no ‘‘pain’’ that can induce him to implicate his master. And if he ‘‘thrives,’’ York will come to ‘‘harvest’’—deploying a devastating change of seasonal metaphors that will cut down Cade the ‘‘coistrel’’ while ‘‘reap[ing]’’ (III.i.381) what he has sown. ‘‘Commotion’’

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Cade creates aplenty in Act IV, scene ii. But, what order of sense York will be able to make of the ‘‘commons’ mind’’ (III.i.374) thereby seems doubtful: they appear distracted. Just like the play’s critics, then, York’s surety, his ability to make ‘‘sense’’ of all this ‘‘commotion,’’ rests on his coming last, his parasitic ‘‘the next [always] for me’’ (III.i.383). Act IV, scene ii began with First and Second Rebel (in most editions still the probable actors ‘‘Bevis’’ and ‘‘Holland’’ whom, maybe, ‘‘Shakespeare,’’ or someone, folded into the play-text by mistake), trying to catch up to the action. Things have advanced and the two are a bit behind—having only recently and rather hastily acquired weapons—a ‘‘sword, though made of a lath’’ (IV.ii.1), a strip of wood traditionally wielded by Vice characters in morality plays. First and Second Rebel are up on the news—‘‘Jack Cade the clothier means to dress the Commonwealth, and turn it, and set a new nap upon it’’ (IV.ii.4–5)—invert it, that is, and put a new wooly skin on it (bah).22 Second Rebel’s also getting the lingo down pat. ‘‘So he had need, for ’tis threadbare’’ is his winking comeback. The two of them see Jack, Dick, and John entering—‘‘I see them, I see them!’’ (IV.ii.21)—and ‘‘things’’ quite literally speed up, quickly assuming a break-neck pace. Jack announces the new terms of the Commonwealth: ‘‘seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny,’’ ‘‘the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops,’’ drinking ‘‘small beer’’ will become a ‘‘felony,’’ ‘‘all the realm shall be in common.’’ Jack draws all to him and pronounces himself their ‘‘King’’ (IV.ii.60–65). Continuing to direct proceedings, Dick calls all to action, and proposes to kill the lawyers. And so they will—eliminating all they meet who can write or whose timing is poor: Emmanuel, the clerk of Chatham, who has a book with ‘‘red letters in’t’’ (IV.ii.84); both Stafford brothers (IV.iii); the soldier who runs in shouting ‘‘Jack Cade, Jack Cade, Jack Cade’’ (IV.vi.6) just as Cade declares it ‘‘treason’’ to ‘‘call [him] other than Lord Mortimer’’; Lord Saye, who learns the perils of quoting Latin (IV.vii.52). Before they embark on their killing spree, however, Jack pauses. ‘‘Kill all the lawyers?’’ ‘‘Nay, that I mean to do,’’ he replies, but adds the more open-ended ‘‘Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment; that parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings, but I say, ’tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since’’ (IV.ii.72–76).23 There’s a momentary stay of the action, and Jack sees or hallucinates something—the skin of a proverbially coded ‘‘innocent lamb,’’ held dead/alive as that parchment. It’s not clear if there’s a parchment or a piece of vellum on stage—but for a moment, Jack sees a sheep in that surface—touches it maybe, feels the

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metaphorical sting that makes parchment the true source of pain. The arrival of the clerk from Chatham—‘‘How now? Who’s there?’’ (IV.ii.77)— interrupts this momentary stay, converting this discovery of the prior acts of writing or metaplasmic refolding of animal skin that give a bee-sting to wax into an immediate attack on whichever human relays in the writing machine (clerks, lawyers, etc.) find themselves caught up in the action. Things quite literally speed up and the ‘‘lamb’’ is forgotten or, rather, transposed into other registers: as Archer notes in his study of the play’s ‘‘civil butchery,’’ Gloucester is described as a ‘‘lamb,’’ and Suffolk a ‘‘butcher.’’24 What Jack recovers, momentarily, in the figure of the skin of a biblically charged ‘‘innocent lamb’’ and realizes in his zoographic animation of wax that stings, is the elided term or missing actor of an institutionally sanctioned mode of writing. Recovering the occluded ovine actor and feeling the sting in wax enables Jack to unfold the chain of metonymies that builds his world, slowing the efficacy of parchment and wax down to the point that all the actors or actants who make up the world may be discerned. This discovery, this hiatus effect, marks the first step in a renegotiating of contracts (sacral, pastoral, legal, economic) that bind the commons to their king. If not for the interruption, and Smith the weaver’s immediate reduction of the clerk from Chatham to his ability to ‘‘write and read and cast account’’ (IV.ii.79), then who knows where Jack might have led us? In the event, the deck is stacked—most obviously, as Chartier demonstrates, by the backwards causation evident in the naming of said clerk from Chatham: ‘‘Emmanuel,’’ ‘‘which,’’ Chartier tells us, means ‘‘ ‘God be with us,’ a formula frequently used as a heading for legal documents.’’25 Just as Jack discerns the material-semiotic relays that make his world and begins to tinker with the figure, in walks the walking, breathing personification of institutional writing. ‘‘Let’s kill all the lawyers,’’ says Dick, ‘‘Look—here comes one now.’’ And so they do. A minimal utopian particle adheres to Jack’s lamb—held there by the dose of reference or thisness delivered in the recovery of the brute materiality, the strangeness that is a parchment. Whatever happens next, Jack’s figure conserves, in small, the utopian impulse, what Louis Marin might name the momentary suspension of ‘‘historical time [during which] institutions and the Law itself in its totality [were] challenged in and by speech, [and] communication circuits [were] reopened between those who near or far were drawn within it.’’26 As in the famous moment in More’s Utopia (1516) when Raphael Hythlodaeus shuts up the obnoxious English lawyer by summoning a flock of homicidal sheep to Cardinal Morton’s table to speak the truth

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about enclosure—‘‘Your sheep,’’ says Raphael, ‘‘which are usually so tame and so cheaply fed, begin now, according to report, to be so greedy and wild that they devour human beings themselves and devastate and depopulate fields, houses, and towns’’27—so, Jack Cade’s ‘‘innocent lamb’’ makes the language of pastoral and pastoral care intrude into the manufactured remains of animal skin (parchment) that constitute the writing machine of his present. Each grasps the figural lamb in a different way. Raphael animates the sheep of England in order to discern the sinister enclosing ‘‘companion species’’ (dog, sheep, landowner) of his day. Jack sees a dead lamb in a parchment whose efficacy he disintegrates into an inventorying of its parts. Both trade on the leveling effect their animal-summoning produces. But as Raphael tells More, utopia takes time. More asks Raphael ‘‘to give a full description of the island. Do not be brief.’’28 Raphael obliges, saying that ‘‘there is nothing [he] shall be more pleased to do,’’ but he adds that ‘‘sed res otium poscit.’’ ‘‘This thing will take some time or leisure,’’ freedom from everyday tasks, that is, from eating, sleeping, talking to servants and familiars. Just as Utopia pauses, suspends everyday routines, asserting that the utopian conversation may unfold only when bellies are full, Henry VI, Part II speeds up. Enter the clerk. Exit the lamb. Dick and company are hungry. They quite literally want their dinner.29 Having no access to the material and symbolic reserves allied to otium, the privileged condition necessary for utopian thinking, if Jack and his friends ‘‘idle,’’ they will die. Emmanuel ends up with ‘‘his pen and inkhorn about his neck’’ (IV.ii.100–101). And in the wake of the violence unleashed against writing, Cade grants Dick’s ‘‘suit’’ that ‘‘only the laws of England may come out of your mouth’’ (IV.vii.5). It’s the rival parliament of the mouth, Jack’s ‘‘It shall be so. Away, burn all the records of the realm. My mouth shall be the Parliament of England’’ (IV.vii.12–14) and ‘‘henceforward all things shall be in common’’ (IV.vii.16) that causes critics to quail before the sequence. Phyllis Rackin recognizes that ‘‘the collection and systematizing of legal records supplied a crucial instrument for the Tudor effort to construct an absolutist state’’ (we might lower the ante a little here and refer merely to the Privy Council’s desire for a centralizing authority), and she takes pains not to reduce the danger posed by the sequence, but she regards the literal violence epitomized in Jack’s proclamation as ‘‘preposterous’’: ‘‘he proposes a revolution so radical and so ludicrous that it discredits the just grievances it addresses.’’30 Warren draws comparisons to the Nazis, Pol Pot, and Kosovo.31 In similar vein, Chartier reads the play as a misplaced, murderous attack on writing waged

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in the service of a fictionalized, historically impossible orality. He finds in Jack’s ‘‘innocent lamb’’ the trace of a mid-thirteenth century image introduced by Sinibaldo dei Fieschi, Pope Innocent IV to be: ‘‘Contra jus gentium fuit inventum a jure civili, ut credatur pelli animali mortui,’’ which he translates as ‘‘against the ‘jus gentium’ the civil law has decided that we must believe in the skin of a dead animal.’’32 For Chartier, this image stands surety for the primacy of ‘‘viva vox’’ in evidentiary economies and legal systems and so figures a fundamental distrust of writing. Against what he reads as the play’s overly binary modeling of an all-out war between orality and literacy, Chartier wishes historians and critics to recognize the ‘‘equivalence between orality, the image, and the written word’’ as complementary and coextensive modes of communication, all of which would be deployed by the variously competent members of ‘‘an entire society, from court to country, by the learned and the illiterate, the rulers and the ruled.’’33 These are strong objections. And yet it is hard for me to know quite why we should be disappointed. Where’s the scandal exactly? Why should we expect the play to deliver a ‘‘positive’’ representation when the archive Nashe and Shakespeare refolded evinces only passing sympathy for ‘‘sheep’’ who turn ‘‘wolfish.’’ It’s hard to imagine the play doing much more than it does: translating the various traces of popular protest its authors find in the archive to produce an exemplum of sorts, a figure, necessarily distorted, necessarily partial, of how rebellion ‘‘feels.’’ That said, what Jack’s anti-writing utopia figures is the profound leveling of representational mechanisms that accompanies and may effect social change. This leveling is violent. It is frightening. But it is important to recognize that violence directed against the writing machine, violence directed at discourse, is and was writing. When Emmanuel walks on stage in Act IV, scene ii he personifies the actual objects of violence in earlier revolts: the technical relays of writing itself. As Steven Justice has demonstrated, while sixteenth-century chroniclers represented ‘‘the insurgent animus directed at the archive’’ by the sheep– turned-wolves of the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381 as the ‘‘revenge of a residually oral culture against the appurtenances of a literacy that was threatening because alien and mysterious,’’ they were fantasizing a world that they might have wished to have existed.34 What the chronicles represent as sheer violence was instead a carefully orchestrated use of violence against specific forms of writing found to be particularly oppressive. If only the peasants had been truly illiterate sheep. If only they were truly rendered hysterical when confronted by the state’s acts of writing—then there would have been no rebellion. Instead, as Justice discovers, the peasants’ discriminating attacks

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on certain kinds of legal documents, archives, and books were, in fact, a precisely engineered series of interventions in the writing machine that aimed to address questions of subsistence and redress a perceived failure of the system.35 In other words, in the chronicling of the Peasant’s Revolt, we watch one particular, parasitic social group attempt to slough off their intimate involvement with and responsibility toward another differently literate social grouping.36 Hence the insurgent writing practices of Wat Tyler, John Ball, Jack Straw, and their fellows were retrospectively demonized as nonsensical, irrational doings by illiterate subhuman ‘‘peasants.’’ The violence we witness on the stage of Henry VI, Part II, which turns off so many critics, is the figural encryption of actual writing practices, the scandal, if you like, of writing acts generated from below, directed toward those who fantasized writing as their monopoly. The archive that Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare refold in their rendering of English history ripples, then, with the partial remains of successive acts of antagonistic writing, remnants of attempts to communicate ‘‘negative feedback’’ on the part of the human ‘‘sheep’’ and fantasies of animalistic fear of writing on the part of their sometimes predatory ‘‘shepherds.’’ While there may be no ‘‘positive’’ representation of insurgent writing in the play, it remains unclear whether such a representation could be intuited as such. Instead, these occluded acts of authorless writing are transposed into the figural lamb Jack finds in the parchment, the metaplasmic verbal play of Act IV, scene ii, and the ongoing mimesis of an authority that proceeds by an impossible self-predication: ‘‘Away, burn all the records of the realm. My mouth shall be the Parliament of England’’ (IV.vii.12–14), proclaims Jack. Even as he does so, Jack is subject to further refolding such as he receives from John, who chimes in with ‘‘Then we are like to have biting statutes unless his teeth are pulled out’’ (IV.vii.15–16). This kind of heteroglossic verbal play and the instability it causes resists the reduction of an irrecoverable historical Cade and the whole interlude to Yorkist taxidermy. Jack makes this claim himself directly, pitting his agency against York’s. Countering Stafford’s brother’s ‘‘Jack Cade, the Duke of York hath taught you this,’’ he declares, ‘‘He lies, for I invented it myself ’’ (IV.ii.141–45)—but in doing so he introduces into the verbal texture of the play the name that will undo him: ‘‘Go to, Sirrah, tell the King from me that for his father’s sake, Henry the Fifth, in whose time boys went to spancounter for French crowns, I am content he shall reign, but I’ll be Protector over him’’ (IV.ii.146–49). So, with London at their feet, its laws rewritten

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by their present practices, Cade’s mouth the Parliament, Dick given a monopoly on selling meat during a doubled Lent (IV.iii.1–5), there comes a Clifford to ruin them. ‘‘Is Cade the son of Henry the Fifth?’’ (IV.viii.34), he asks. Later, Cade remarks, ‘‘The name of Henry the Fifth hales them . . . and makes them leave me desolate’’ (IV.viii.56–57). Faced with an uprising? Merely mention the name Henry the Fifth, the play seems to say, and all your troubles will pass. In Act IV, scene x, we meet an uncertainly bovine or ovine Jack Cade, abandoned, on the run, and ‘‘ready to famish,’’ who has climbed ‘‘o’er a brick wall . . . into this garden to see if [he] can eat grass or pick a sallet’’ (IV.x.1–10), where he is dispatched by the otium-seeking Alexander Iden, who just happens to be out for a quiet walk. Iden prides himself on his selfimposed rustication from the ‘‘turmoils’’ of court to ‘‘this small inheritance’’ his father has left him. ‘‘I seek not to wax great by others’ waning,’’ he remarks, or to ‘‘gather wealth.’’ ‘‘Sufficeth,’’ he adds, that ‘‘that I have maintains my state, / And sends the poor well pleased from my gate’’ (IV.x.16–22). Speaking from the same script of Platonic withdrawal that we find articulated by Raphael in Book I of Utopia, Iden enters with a full tummy, perfectly at ease with his self-regulating body and the well maintained boundaries of his estate.37 Like some overly mimetic reader of the Utopia, Iden registers as a recreational humanist, as he who regulates his body and his estate so perfectly as to achieve a state of equilibrium in his exchanges with the world: input equals output.38 He needs nothing. He produces no surplus. ‘‘Eden’’ in Holinshed, who has become ‘‘Iden’’ (or self-same) in the play, comes upon Jack, who snarls at him wolfishly. They draw and Iden kills him. Jack dies with famine on his lips—‘‘O I am slain! Famine and no other hath slain me’’ (IV.x.59); ‘‘I, that never feared any, am vanquished by famine’’ (IV.x.74). As Rackin tells us, these references to famine are not found in the historical record.39 Jack’s exit, after he has been dispatched by a recreating Iden, represents an uncertain signal. In what remains still, perhaps, the most influential reading of the scene, Stephen Greenblatt discerns the naturalization of private property rights as the marker of collective belonging subtly folded into what will retrospectively be recorded as defense of the realm from a ‘‘monstrous traitor.’’ ‘‘Symbolic estate gives way to real estate’’ is how he puts it.40 Greenblatt is aware of the reference to ‘‘court’’ and ‘‘country,’’ but rules it part of the scenery and not otherwise operative. But there’s more to it than that. Before he kills him, Iden subjects Jack to a negative blazon, at every

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point magnifying their difference, the difference, that is, between the leisured and well-fed and the poor and hungry, between a recreating gentleman and a famished Cade on his way to becoming ‘‘cattel’’—to use the period’s word for the range of herbivores that live in herds. ‘‘Oppose thy steadfast gazing eyes to mine,’’ demands Iden, ‘‘See if thou canst outface me with thy looks./Set limb to limb, and thou art far the lesser:/Thy hand is but a finger to my fist./Thy leg a stick compared with this truncheon’’ (IV.x.44–48). The confrontation between a well-fed and well-read country gentleman and a famished illiterate or differently literate stands as a stark reminder of the causes of popular protest in the period even as it may ostensibly stage the victory of private property as such. As Archer notes, it’s Cade who speaks the language of butchery in this scene, asking his sword to cut Iden’s ‘‘chines of beef ’’ (IV.x.56), but the specter of cannibalism he raises seems inclined to magnify the words we hear most often: ‘‘Famine and no other hath slain me!’’ (IV.x.59); or Cade’s last words, ‘‘For I, that never feared any, am vanquished by famine’’ (IV.x.74). The Cade sequence ends, then, as uprisings tended to, with the ‘‘populace’’ becoming once again the figural ‘‘sheep’’ of historical record, that is, by returning to the matter of subsistence that animated their demands in the first place: food. In Act IV, scene x, in effect, we will have been watching the retraining of Jack’s mouth: no longer the self-predicating Parliament of the land, the mouth of this wolfish sheep is denied flesh as he is forced to eat grass. Jack’s final skin-turning performance, his becoming ‘‘cattel,’’ registers the efficacy of those institutionally sanctioned relays in the writing machine that are proof against his and his fellows’ acts of writing. Only in such ‘‘things’’ as ‘‘Henry the Fifth’’ is there true power. Still, it is the power of the stage as a sometimes rival mechanism to body forth such historical persons as Jack, who here narrates the process of passing into the historical record, figured as a becoming ‘‘cattel.’’ Allied to his performance is the crumpled figure, Lyotard might say, of an ‘‘innocent lamb,’’ which serves as antagonistic record or archival trace of rebel writing practices and not simply rebel violence. This phrase endures, a latent, figural possibility, waiting to be unfolded by other audiences or readers, who might make of it the kind of ‘‘fleshly difference’’ the historical Jack and his fellows attempted, and that Haraway seeks to engineer today. What did the ‘‘sheep’’ in Shakespeare’s audience think of the play? What, in other words, was the play’s function as chronicle-play in the London of the 1590s? According to Nashe, at least, the sheepy audience tended to find the play distracting.

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Remake/Remodel In Pierce Pennilesse (1592), Thomas Nashe makes the not terribly original argument for ‘‘the pollicie of Playes’’ as ‘‘very necessary’’ ‘‘light toyes’’ that will ‘‘busie [the] heads’’ of those people who find themselves with too little to do when a ‘‘State or Kingdome that is in league with all the world . . . hath no forraine sword to vexe it.’’41 There’s just nothing quite like ‘‘feare of invasion’’ ‘‘every houre,’’ he observes, to keep people on their toes—to enervate and so animate the multitude and ensure that the state is ‘‘confirmed to endure.’’ War, or better yet, ‘‘feare of war’’ keeps people busy. Peace renders them idle, immobile, relaxed—and restless. No otium here, thank you. Only the threat of idleness, of undirected leisure, and the possibility that the likes of a Jack or a Dick might perceive an ‘‘innocent lamb.’’ ‘‘Three cheers’’ then for plays, players, and their companies. Boo, hiss to the shortsighted ‘‘shallow-brained censurers,’’ the city fathers and all such antitheatricals who are, after all, ‘‘not the deepest searchers into the secrets of government.’’ They just don’t get it. Plays are not the cause of civil disorder. They do not ‘‘corrupt the youth of the Cittie’’ (214). Instead, they have a ‘‘necessary’’ function—to provide one of the four-fold pleasures that ‘‘men that are their owne masters . . . bestow themselves’’ to during ‘‘the after-noone,’’ which is ‘‘the idlest time of the day’’: ‘‘game playing, following harlots, drinking or seeing a Playe’’ (212). Isn’t it better that those hungry dogs not called to heel by a ‘‘Henry the Fifth,’’ an Armada, or the threat of an Armada, have a couple of play-‘‘bones’’ ‘‘cast before them . . . to gnaw on’’ so that they don’t look around for something or someone else to chew? Tracing this suspended zoographic, I might say that Nashe’s throwing of play-‘‘bones’’ to under-employed dogs rewrites them as sheep, not wolves. Trading on a series of possible futures—some good (people so busy they’re sheep), some bad (people so idle they’re wolves)—Nashe offers plays as an improving state of distraction for those persons he names ‘‘corrupt excrements’’ that ‘‘affayres of the State’’ ‘‘cannot exhale’’ (212). Enjoying himself immensely, the virtuoso Nashe further takes on the counterfactual burden to ‘‘prove Playes to be no extreame; but a rare exercise of vertue.’’ Follow his argument and playgoing becomes the privileged writing machine not merely of the state but of the commonwealth. It serves as a conduit for the ‘‘past’’ and a caution to the ‘‘future.’’ ‘‘First, for the subject of them [plays],’’ he writes, ‘‘it is borrowed out of our English Chronicles,’’ resuscitating the ‘‘acts’’ of our ‘‘valiant forefathers’’ ‘‘that have line long buried in rustie brasse and worme-eaten bookes’’ (212). Reclaiming the acts of the dead from the ‘‘Grave of Oblivion,’’ as Archer notes,

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Nashe proclaims plays (histories at least) ‘‘reliquaries of aristocratic honor.’’42 ‘‘How would it have joyed the brave Talbot (the terror of the French),’’ continues Nashe, ‘‘to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding’’ (212). If Nashe is referring to the play Philip Henslowe named ‘‘harey the 6’’ in his diary, the play that will become what we now call Henry VI, Part I, then apparently, as so many commentators have noted, it must have gone very, very well. Indeed, the ‘‘tragedian,’’ frequently read as a reference to the ‘‘Ned Alleyn’’ Nashe says he’ll commemorate if one day he writes anything in Latin (215), must have been especially convincing. And therein lies the power of plays that Nashe offers as their defense. Against their detractors, ‘‘any Collian, or clubfisted Usurer,’’ Nashe proclaims that ‘‘there is no immortalitie can be given a man on earth like unto Playes’’ (212). Allying himself with the dead, and their descendants, Nashe judges the detractors of plays and playgoing envious killjoys who dislike ‘‘any man that is not sprung up by base Brokerie like themselves’’ and unable to discern what’s in it for them to have Henry V on stage reliving past glories in France. ‘‘They know when they are dead,’’ he accuses, ‘‘they shall not be brought upon the Stage for any goodness, but in merriment’’ (213). Archer sees ‘‘a movement analogous to the dynamic present in Henry VI, Part I: even as citizens and other urban inhabitants are enlisted in the charismatic recreation of a glorious national past, the financial and political leaders of the city . . . are stigmatized as greedy cowards.’’43 What tends to go unnoticed in Nashe’s repositioning of plays and playgoing as a kind of virtuous or moral calisthenics, perhaps because it appears so cliche´d—of a piece with the cult of memorialization in the period—is the emphasis on the manner in which plays transport their audience. Nashe freezes the performance of the tragedian (who momentarily inhabits the skin of the now defunct Talbot) and the reaction of the spectators as something Talbot does not see but would have ‘‘joyed’’ to think on. The reanimating power of Nashe’s katabasis stands surety for the stage as a machine for producing various kinds of ‘‘pasts’’ in the ‘‘present,’’ rendered less as a spectacle than as an impossible thought or feeling imagined in the bones of a dead man, ‘‘newe embalmed with the teares’’ of the audience. Andrew Gurr has written persuasively of this passage as the ‘‘first description of mass emotion other than laughter in any London playhouse,’’ citing Nashe in particular as a key source for understanding the shift in stage practice during the Armada

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years.44 Nashe’s logic seems more complicated, however. For if plays are reliquaries, forms that somehow distil or preserve past virtue, enabling it to be re-actualized in as many ‘‘presents’’ as there are metonymic shows or showings (at ‘‘several times’’ in this case), then plays and playgoing become the privileged means by which to provide the successive doses of reference once provided by the actual threat of Armada, Nashe’s ‘‘forraine sword,’’ or, in Henry VI, Part II, by ‘‘Henry the Fifth.’’ For Nashe, then, public theater becomes a device by whose contiguity with the dead, whom it dusts off, and causes to walk again, the state is able to access the referential powers of violent acts of marking or history-making. Such resuscitations, he contends, will tend to distract, to keep their audience quiet. Admittedly, Nashe’s defense is high on a discourse of anticipation, written from within the tomb, from the position afforded by the bones of the dead that the multitude might else be gnawing on in the form of Talbot’s living descendants. Like Jack Cade or any other figure from the chronicles, Talbot is summoned then as a kind of exotic derivative from times past—a repeatable future that the plays access in order to make sure that nothing can finally happen. To borrow a phrase or two from Richard Doyle’s reading of the rhetoric of contemporary cryonic technologies and the complex financial arrangements they require in order to maintain the undead, we could say that the contract Nashe proposes here between the state and its players offers up theater as an ‘‘engine of anticipation’’—an anticipation here felt by the dead Talbot, kept freshly dead by the production of affect in the theater of Nashe’s ‘‘today.’’ Time appears here as a reversible and contingent effect of a particular technology, making Nashe, ‘‘Shakespeare,’’ and theater more intensely ‘‘present’’ here, today in a debate about its future.45 If today, the rhetoric of cryonics, whose feasibility remains undecided, has no choice but to ‘‘exchange an economy of reference for an engine of anticipation,’’ Nashe has it much easier. As self-appointed rhetorician of a viable technology, already pulling in bodies left, right, and center, such that the city fathers are protesting at the traffic generated by just two operating theaters in the early 1590s, Nashe subtly offers up public theater as an agent of distraction, an enervating recipe or confection that will provide the commonwealth with the doses of reference it needs to ensure that metaphorical ‘‘sheep’’ remain ‘‘sheep.’’ Of course it is all very improving. Virtuous action will be worthy of replication and re-embalming, producing fake (i.e., animal) blood and real (i.e., human) tears. In addition, spectators (city fathers included) will be chastened in the present by the negative examples as well as the virtuous.

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But, don’t get distracted. What you have really been seeing on stage will have been Nashe, ‘‘Shakespeare,’’ and the whole company engaged in a project that they hope will, and which did, exchange an ‘‘engine of anticipation’’ for a valid economy of reference, the many public theaters in London and plays entered at the Stationer’s Register. These are the ‘‘products’’ or ‘‘harvest’’ of the Jack Cade sequence of which York dreams—not a utopian renegotiation of social contracts. By that same token, however, the translation of now defunct human skins from parchment to stage, reanimated by the shadows of the company, quite by accident, generates a host of figural possibilities, such as Jack’s ‘‘innocent lamb.’’ A politics of the figure, such as I have embarked on in this essay, looks always to the future, even as it discerns latent possibilities in the past. For at different historical moments, by virtue of a change in state or the addition of a new actor (human and not), contracts deemed closed—Jack’s fleeting insight into the efficacy of writing as a political weapon—may be reopened. The utopian impulse in Henry VI, Part II exists then, encrypted in the figure of an ‘‘innocent lamb,’’ still waiting to be unfolded.

‘‘Who or What’s There?’’ hamlet horatio hamlet

Is not parchment made of sheepskins? Ay, my lord, and of calves’ skins too. They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in that. I will speak to this fellow. Who’s grave’s this, sirrah? (V.i.96–99)46

You dare not, as Hamlet tells Horatio, lay your trust in the writing machine. There’s no trust or assurance to be found there. Its relays animate the dead. But the machine lies. It betrays your trust, rerouting your desires. ‘‘Henry the Fifth.’’ There’s no stock, no security, to be found in parchment. Trust to voice. Talk to someone: ‘‘Who’s grave’s this, sirrah?’’ Inhabiting the grave-world of the likes of Talbot, Hamlet has thrown up a skull he will later claim to recognize. But first he fantasizes it to belong to one of Dick’s lawyers—‘‘Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?’’— whom he delivers as an ubi sunt to the texts or formal properties of legal writing: ‘‘Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?’’ (V.i.83–85). He then summons Jack’s killer, ‘‘a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries’’ (V.i.87–89)—all of which turn to ‘‘dirt.’’ Hamlet’s own

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writing games do not always go exactly according to plan, even when they ostensibly prove effective: the forensic monitoring of audience reaction; the textual murder of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; both have led him here, to this grave. Hamlet poses Jack’s question—or, rather, he answers it: the real sheep and cattle are those who trust in parchment, who trust in the efficacy of dead animal skin. Don’t be one of those. Luckily there’s a passing clown whose job it is to tend these graves and to verify who’s in them. It may of course be a misattribution, but Hamlet seems to have read his Nashe, says he knew this Yorick, and so invests here in this skull, in this grave, deploying a passionate archaeology that levels social rank and privilege: Yorick and Alexander, here, on this stage. Doing his best to take on the perspective of the dead, to enter the grave itself as corpse, becoming, by turns, Jack Cade, a sheep, a cow, a lawyer, both Yorick and Alexander, Hamlet luxuriates in the ecstasy of his imminent upload, the translation to a death that will only render him more lively than ever. But be careful he seems to say. For by the upload or translation, you are being rewritten, again, and forever. You might, like Jack and Hamlet be allowed to narrate your translation into ‘‘cattel’’ or into corpse, but that’s as much as there is to hope for. There’s nothing human in the archive. The skin, however, is real. Go figure.

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Notes

Introduction judith h. anderson and joan pong linton 1. Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,’’ in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 141–57:142. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 4. 3. Erich Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, (New York: Meridian, 1959 [1944]), 11–76:76. For Auerbach’s original German text, see Neue Dantestudien, Instanbuler Schriften, 5 (Istanbul: Robert Anhegger, Walter Ruben, Andreas Tietze, 1944), 11–71. When we cite both languages, we shall give the English page number first and the German second. 4. Lucretius De rerum natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 318–21 (IV.549–56): ‘‘Hasce igitur voces cum corpore nostro exprimimus rectoque foras emittimus ore, mobilis articulat verborum daedala lingua formaturaque labrorum pro parte figurat. Hoc ubi non longum spatiumst unde illa profecta perveniat vox quaeque, necessest verba quoque ipsa plane exaudiri discernique articulatim; servat enim formaturam servatque figuram’’ (our emphasis and capitalization of ‘‘Hoc’’ at the beginning of the second sentence). Auerbach does not look at this passage in the detail that we do. 5. Forrest G. Robinson, The Shape of Things Known: Sidney’s Apology in Its Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972), 122–28. Reference to An Apology for Poetry; or, The Defense of Poesy is here to the edition of Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1965), 124 (‘‘ground-plot’’) and 201n25f. 6. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1980 [1920]), Bk. IX.i.4–5: ‘‘Est igitur tropos sermo a naturali et principali significatione translatus ad aliam ornandae orationis gratia, vel, ut plerique grammatici finiunt, dictio ab eo loco, in quo propria est, translata in eum, in quo propria non est, sicut nomine ipso patet, conformatio quaedam orationis remota a communi et primum se offerente ratione.’’ For discussion of Quintillian’s tropology,

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172 Notes to pages 3–9 see Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 138–49. 7. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, IX.i.10–11: ‘‘Nam duobus modis dicitur: uno qualiscunque forma setentiae, sicut in corporibus, quibus, quoquo modo sunt composita, utique habitus est aliquis; altero, quo proprie schema dicitur in sensu vel sermone aliqua a vulgari et simplici specie cum ratione mutatio, sicut nos sedemus, incumbimus, respicimus.’’ 8. Richards’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, in which he explains the idea of metaphorical tenors and vehicles, was published in 1936 (New York: Oxford University Press); see chap. 5, esp. 96–98. Accounts of the development of the theory of metaphor in the twentieth century often refer to Richards’s terminology. Our phrasing (‘‘for us’’) is meant to avoid the claim that Auerbach, publishing in Istanbul in 1944, was somehow indebted to Richards’s idea. Figurative vehicles are not unique to Richards. Intertextuality is also at work. 9. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore, ed. G. P. Goold, trans. E. W. Sutton, completed H. Rackham, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1976–78 [1942–49]), II (Bk. III.xli.166). We have used this text for the Latin throughout; in the following section, ‘‘Theorizing Figuration into the Present,’’ a different English translation will obtain: see n. 15 below. 10. For discussion, of Auerbach’s view of allegory, see Judith H. Anderson, Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5–15. 11. Ars Poetica, l. 361, in Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961). 12. The Rhetoric of Aristotle: An Expanded Translation with Supplementary Examples for Students of Composition and Public Speaking, trans. Lane Cooper (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960 [1932]), III.iii.6, 407b, III.xi, 411b. 13. Ibid., III.vi, 1407b, III.xi, 1411b. 14. Ibid., I.ii, 1356a. 15. Cicero, On the Ideal Orator (De Oratore), trans. James M. May and Jakob Wisse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), II.188. 16. Longinus, ‘‘On Literary Excellence,’’ in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilbert (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999 [1940]), 165, 183. 17. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell, in Aristotle, ‘‘Poetics’’; Longinus, ‘‘On the Sublime’’; Demetrius, ‘‘On Style’’ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), VI, 1450a47–49. 18. See n. 5 above, particularly Shepherd’s note 25f, in which he identifies the ground-plot with the seat of argument; cf. also the discussion by Robinson specified in n. 5. 19. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), facsimile reproduction (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1988 [1970]), 155, 171. Puttenham goes on to treat individual figures under the three headings. A listing of figures also appears in ‘‘The Table’’ at the end of the book (318–20).

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Notes to pages 9–12 173 20. Linda Galyon, ‘‘Puttenham’s Enargeia and Energeia: New Twists for Old Terms,’’ Philological Quarterly 60 (1981): 29–40:34. 21. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksick, 1974 [1971]). Quotations from Lyotard are from ‘‘The Dream-Work Does Not Think’’ (taken from Discours, figure), trans. Mary Lydon, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 19–55; where we give dual page numbers, the English appears first, followed by the French. 22. The phrase ‘‘condition of discourse’’ is taken from Bill Readings’s Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991). As Readings explains, ‘‘the condition of discourse apprehends things solely in terms of the representability by or within its system, as meanings or significations that discourse may speak’’ (xxxi). 23. Ibid., 22. 24. Lyotard, ‘‘The Dream-Work Does Not Think,’’ 20, quoting Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 5:507. 25. Geoffrey Bennington, ‘‘The Same, Even, Itself . . . ,’’ Parallax 6.4 (2000), 88–98. 26. Lyotard, 25, 28/245, 248; 29/249. 27. Longinus, ‘‘On Literary Excellence,’’ 191. 28. Mary Lydon, ‘‘Veduta on Discours, figure,’’ Yale French Studies 99 (2001): 10–26:21–22. 29. Ibid., 22. 30. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 31. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 32. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973 [1971]), and Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge; and, The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 33. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 95–96. 34. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1047a, 24–26, quoted by Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 45. Not surprisingly, Agamben’s idea too touches Auerbach’s discussion of biblical dynamism, although Agamben does not engage with Auerbach here. In The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Daley (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), Agamben does engage Auerbach and arguably attempts to contain his work on figura, in both senses of the verb contain (76–77). 35. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 46. 36. Agamben goes on to say that, in its oscillating doubleness, sovereign power operates as a complex figure or topos comparable to a Moebius strip or Leyden jar (ibid., 37); such a figure exists only virtually because ‘‘it is impossible to diagram

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174 Notes to pages 12–21 every step of its topological transformation’’ (Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation [Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2002], 134). 37. Giorgio Agamben, ‘‘Bartleby; or, On Contingency,’’ in Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243–71:261. 38. See, for example, Maurice Blanchot, ‘‘Rene´ Char and the Thought of the Neuter,’’ in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Colle`ge de France (1977–1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); and Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (New York: Humanity Books, 1984).

Spenser’s Giant and the New Science mary thomas crane 1. Annabel Patterson, ‘‘The Egalitarian Giant,’’ in Reading Between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 89–90. 2. Judith H. Anderson, ‘‘Weighing Words with Spenser’s Giant,’’ in Soundings of Things Done: Essays in Honor of S. K. Heninger, Jr., ed. Peter Medine and Joseph Wittreich (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997), 70–92. 3. Ibid., 74; for a summary of readings of the problematic nature of justice in Book V, see Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005), 116–21; and Andrew J. Majeske, Equity in English Renaissance Literature: Thomas More and Edmund Spenser (New York: Routedge, 2006), 93–114. Patterson and others have emphasized the Irish context for the pessimism of Book V; see especially Andrew Hadfield, ‘‘The ‘Sacred Hunger of Ambitious Minds’: Spenser’s Savage Religion,’’ in Edmund Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield (London: Longman, 1996), 177–95. See also Stephen Greenblatt, ‘‘Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,’’ in Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1–29. Greenblatt links Spenser’s pessimism in part to ‘‘his nagging sense of social marginality’’ (21). 4. Anderson, ‘‘Weighing Words,’’ 74, 86n12. 5. By ‘‘Aristotelian,’’ I mean the corpus of Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian writings inherited from antiquity as well as the medieval elaborations of that corpus and the ancient scientific writings (especially the Ptolemaic and Galenic works) that were generally received as compatible with the Aristotelian worldview. 6. See Ann Blair and Anthony Grafton, ‘‘Reassessing Humanism and Science,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (Oct.–Dec. 1992): 535–40. Recently, some scholars have emphasized the links between humanist practice and the development of scientific knowledge by artisans and practitioners who were not limited by Aristotelian theories of nature. I’m emphasizing a quite different historical trajectory, but it seems likely that both were happening simultaneously. The scientific revolution was complex, multi-faceted, and involved multiple and contradictory processes. See especially Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the

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Notes to pages 21–23 175 Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 7. On problems with the motion of projectiles, see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution 2nd ed. (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985 [1957]), 119. 8. Ibid., 99. 9. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 53; see also Christoph Meinel, ‘‘Early Seventeenth-Century Atomism: Theory, Epistemology, and the Insufficiency of Experiment,’’ Isis 79 (1988): 68. 10. Francis Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937), discusses the role of Dee, Recorde, and Digges as advocates of Copernicanism. 11. John Donne, ‘‘The First Anniversary,’’ lines 205 and 213, in Donne’s Poetical Works, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 1:237–38. 12. Of course, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the ‘‘New Science’’ upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), discusses the loss of certainty and order that accompanied the end of the Aristotelian worldview; however, she assumes that it was still dominant through the end of the sixteenth century. 13. Margaret J. Osler, ‘‘Galileo, Motion, and Essences,’’ in The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe: Readings from ‘‘Isis,’’ ed. Peter Dear (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 107. 14. See Peter Dear, ‘‘Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature,’’ Isis 81 (1990): 663–83. Dear argues that experiments were akin to miracles, since both were at odds with the ordinary course of nature. 15. Richard W. Hadden, On the Shoulders of Merchants: Exchange and the Mathematical Conception of Nature in Early Modern Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 63–82. Hadden argues that early modern scientists like Galileo were able to make progress in the physics of motion because they began to relate number and magnitude and learned to include different entities in the same equation. 16. Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Architecture of Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 [1962]), 86. 17. Richard S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 19. 18. Leonard Digges and Thomas Digges, A Prognostication Everlasting (London, 1576), N2r–v. 19. Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 84. 20. All passages from the poem have been taken from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), here V.ii.35. 21. Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 84–85.

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176 Notes to pages 23–25 22. Hadden argues that neither Aristotle nor Archimedes uses measurements and that Aristotle always relates ‘‘force to force, distance to distance or time to time in two examples of motion,’’ thus preserving essentialism (Hadden, On the Shoulders of Merchants, 63). 23. Aristotle, Minor Works, trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 331. 24. Jurgen Renn, Simone Reger, Paul Weinig, and Peter Damerow, ‘‘Mechanical Knowledge and Pompeian Balances,’’ Preprint 145 (Max-Planck-Institut Fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2000), 2. 25. Renn et al. argue that Aristotle was the author of the treatise (ibid.). See Thomas N. Winter, ‘‘The Mechanical Problems in the Corpus of Aristotle,’’ Faculty Publications, Classics and Religious Studies Departments, University of Nebraska at Lincoln (2007), http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/classicsfacpub/68/, for the argument that the work was written by Archytas of Tarentum. 26. Paul Lawrence Rose and Stillman Drake, ‘‘The Pseudo-Aristotelian Questions of Mechanics in Renaissance Culture,’’ Studies in the Renaissance 18 (1971): 65–104. Rose and Drake note that in this treatise ‘‘mathematics and physics met in the ‘mixed science’ of mechanics, where the problems were physical but the methods of demonstration were mechanical’’ (89). They trace readership of this treatise during the Renaissance in order to shed light on the question of whether the scientific revolution was inspired mostly by a Neoplatonic mathematical approach or by experimental materialism. They see this work as combining both. Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), similarly notes that the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise ‘‘oversteps’’ boundaries between the mathematical and physical (163). 27. A translation of Idiota de staticis experimentis by Jasper Hopkins is available online at http://cla.umn.edu/sites/jhopkins/DeStaticis2-2000.pdf. In the relevant passage, Nicholas advocates using a balance to investigate musical harmony and even ‘‘the friendships and the animosities of animals (and of men),’’ although he doesn’t explain how this would be done (623). 28. John Dee, Mathematicall Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (London, 1570), b4r–c3r. 29. See Osler, ‘‘Galileo, Motion, and Essences,’’107 and Westfall, Construction of Modern Science, 19. 30. Keith Hutchinson, ‘‘What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?’’ in The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe: Readings from ‘‘Isis,’’ ed. Peter Dear (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 86–106. 31. Dear, Discipline and Experience, 158. 32. For an extensive account of this mechanical worldview, see E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, Pythagoras to Newton, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986 [1961]). Dear, Discipline and Experience, notes that ‘‘the full integration of artificial experience into natural philosophy in the seventeenth century therefore involved a reconfiguration of the relationship between art and nature, one represented by the new metaphor of the world as a machine’’ (153).

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Notes to pages 25–33 177 33. Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (New York: Routledge, 1979), 111–27, argues that Dee’s Neoplatonism influenced Spenser. She ties Spenser to Dee through Sidney and Dyer but is interested in Dee as a purveyor of esoteric occult philosophy and not in relation to scientific and mathematical knowledge. 34. Alison A. Chapman, ‘‘The Politics of Time in Edmund Spenser’s English Calendar,’’ SEL 42 (2002): 1–24. 35. Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 271. 36. Yates comments that Spenser was writing The Shepheardes Calender at the same time that ‘‘John Dee was exercising his mathematical, astronomical, and astrological knowledge on the project of the reform of the calendar’’ (123). 37. See Jess Edwards, ‘‘Points Mean Prizes: How Early Modern Mathematics Hedged Its Bets between Idealism and the World,’’ in The Arts of SeventeenthCentury Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture, ed. Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002), 43–57. 38. Dee, Mathematicall Praeface. 39. V.Pro.7. The Variorum Spenser cites G. S. Hilliard as pointing out that ‘‘ ‘thirtie’ is incorrect, but may be a misprint for ‘thirteen,’ which would be nearly correct’’; The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966 [1936]), 5:158. 40. Johnson, Astronomical Thought, 155–57. 41. ‘‘Encroach’’ does not appear previously in The Faerie Queene and, apart from this episode, appears only once more, in Book VI. 42. Dee does disagree with Aristotle at one point, when he corrects ‘‘great Errors’’ in his theory of natural motion, refuting the idea that ‘‘Of any two bodyes, the heavyer, to move downward faster then the lighter’’ (c1r). Dee was ahead of his time in recognizing what Galileo would later make more widely known. 43. See Mary Thomas Crane, ‘‘Analogy, Metaphor, and the New Science: Cognitive Science and Early Modern Epistemology,’’ in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 103–114, where I argue that Donne’s ‘‘metaphysical images’’ resemble a new style of scientific analogy, and that (pace Foucault) analogy became more important in the seventeenth century as a direct connection between appearance and causal reality was severed. 44. Interestingly, Aristotle brings up the issue of commensurability in the Nicomachean Ethics, the work from which Spenser (at least nominally) takes the list of virtues around which his poem is organized. Discussing justice and equity, Aristotle notes that while money makes it possible to compare the worth of very different kinds of goods in commercial exchanges (and therefore to determine equitable exchange values), this kind of commensurability does not extend to mathematics more generally: ‘‘in truth it is impossible that things differing so much should become commensurate.’’ (Hadden, On the Shoulders of Merchants, 79). Hadden argues that advances in early modern bookkeeping led to an abstraction of value and enabled thinkers like Galileo to begin including very different phenomena (distance and force)

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178 Notes to pages 33–39 within the same equation. When Artegall questions the commensurability of right and wrong, he is maintaining an orthodox Aristotelian position. 45. ‘‘Naı¨ve allegory’’ in the sense used by Northrop Frye, as ‘‘a disguised form of discursive writing’’ that ‘‘has its center of gravity in the pictorial arts.’’ See Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971 [1957]), 90–91. 46. Patterson, ‘‘The Egalitarian Giant,’’ 90–91. 47. Lorraine Daston, ‘‘Galilean Analogies: Imagination at the Bounds of Sense,’’ Isis 75 (1984): 307. Daston argues that this use of analogy is grounded in the relationship between pure mathematics and applied physics. 48. Dedre Gentner and Michael Jeziorsky, ‘‘The Shift from Metaphor to Analogy in Western Science,’’ in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 456. 49. Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 158–59, traces the history of scales as ‘‘as symbol of equity.’’ 50. Bruno Kisch, Scales and Weights, An Historical Outline (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1956), notes that although single-arm balances were common in antiquity, justice is always symbolized by ‘‘a balance with two pans and an equalarm beam’’ because ‘‘the equal arms of the balance represent more clearly the idea of equal treatment’’ (76–77). 51. See Mary Phillips Berry, ‘‘On the Psychostasis in Christian Art,’’ The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 22.118 (Jan. 1913): 208–14. 52. Anderson, ‘‘Weighing Words,’’ 74. 53. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), esp. chaps. 2 and 3. 54. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 55. Daston, ‘‘Galilean Analogies,’’ 302–10; Gentner and Jeziorsky, ‘‘Shift from Metaphor to Analogy,’’ 447–80.

The Sacramental Neuter and the Missing Body in Robert Southwell’s Poetics lowell gallagher 1. Blanchot, ‘‘Rene´ Char and the Thought of the Neuter,’’ in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 298–306:299. 2. The diverging stakes are perhaps best indicated by the etymological kinship between the words ‘‘sacred’’ and ‘‘secret’’ (sacrum, secretum). As Jean Borella points out, both are related to secernere, to separate or set aside. See Borella, The Secret of the Christian Way, trans. and ed. G. John Champoux (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 169–71. 3. See, for example, the apt characterization of Southwell’s ‘‘established reputation as a minor Elizabethan poet’’ in Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007), 22.

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Notes to pages 40–44 179 4. Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Colle`ge de France (1977– 1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 6. 5. Ibid., 12–13. 6. Blanchot, ‘‘Rene´ Char,’’ 298. Subsequent citations in this paragraph, in sequence, are from pages 299, 300, 306, and 303–4. 7. For an illuminating account of the theological vectors informing Blanchot’s writings, see Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 8. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1976), 69. The classic account of the place of Ignatian meditative technique in English poetic tradition is Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962). A useful summary and critique of the reception of Martz’s thesis may be found in F. W. Brownlow, Robert Southwell (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 125–34. For an important recent reevaluation of Martz’s assessment of Southwell’s poetry, see Anne Sweeney, Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia; Redrawing the English Lyric Landscape (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2006). 9. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, trans. and ed. George E. Ganss, S.J. (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1992), 32. 10. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 66, 73. 11. Spiritual Exercises, 32. 12. Ibid., 155n34. 13. Sweeney’s characterization of the method is apposite: ‘‘Ignatius did not invent strong response; he created a lay methodology, and a new emotional language capable of transference across boundaries—again: ‘muliplex est modus tradendi exercitia’ ’’ (Sweeney, Robert Southwell, 78). 14. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 51. 15. Barthes, The Neutral, 50. 16. Ibid., 50. 17. Ibid., 51. 18. See Elizabeth D. Harvey, ‘‘Flesh Colors and Shakespeare’s Sonnets,’’ in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael C. Schoenfeldt (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 314–28. 19. For a discussion of the social distinction at stake in the cult of sprezzatura, see Harry Berger, Jr., The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 9–10. 20. The Logike of the Most Excellent Philosopher P. Ramus Martyr, trans. Roland MacIlmaine, ed. Catherine M. Dunn, Renaissance Editions, No. 3 (Northridge, Calif.: San Fernando Valley State College, 1969), 46. 21. Thomas Blundeville’s Art of Logike (1599) describes the enthymeme as the ‘‘unperfect Sillogisme, made for haste or speed.’’ Roland Barthes’ survey of the enthymeme remains an instructive commentary; see ‘‘The Old Rhetoric: An Aideme´moire,’’ in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 57–87.

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180 Notes to pages 44–48 22. Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 75. 23. All citations of Southwell’s poems are from Robert Southwell, S.J., Collected Poems, ed. Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney (Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet Press, 2007). 24. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 70. 25. Ibid., 69. 26. ‘‘Messianic time is the time that we have, par excellence (‘Therefore, whilst we have time [ho¯s kairon echomen] let us work good’; Gal. 6:10),’’ ibid., 68. 27. Agamben, 69. This ‘‘slight difference’’ alters, among other things, the essentially chronological sense of parousia favored in Christian tradition—i.e., the equation of parousia and eschaton, or apocalyptic End-Time. Paul’s use of parousia (‘‘presence’’) exploits the literal sense of the Greek morphemes (‘‘to be next to’’) in order to mark the innovative coupling of kairos and chronos that constitutes the messianic event. The temporal coordinates of Pauline messianism also inform patristic and medieval views of biblical and literary typology, a feature memorably described in Erich Auerbach’s classic essay ‘‘Figura,’’ though Auerbach’s emphasis on the hermeneutic fecundity of the derived allegorical method deemphasizes the critical implications of Paul’s paradigm, as Agamben suggests. See Agamben, Time That Remains, 74 and 138–45, and Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York: Meridian, 1959 [1944]), 11–76. 28. Agamben, Time That Remains, 51. 29. Church history, seen from the perspective of the recurrent and occasionally violent remapping of the border dividing orthodoxy from heresy, may be said to misrecognize rather than sustain the radicalism of Paul’s access to the neuter. It is perhaps no coincidence that the general appeal of the Spiritual Exercises in the century following its publication depended on the sheltering impression that the manual’s prerequisite ‘‘indifference’’ cultivated a benign asceticism, with its innovative meditative protocol reproduced in variously altered formats that generally held it at a tolerable distance from the front lines of controversy over soteriological doctrine and dogma in Romanist and reformed churches. 30. The word’s semantic palimpsest includes the ‘‘shimmer’’ of a medieval devotional resonance: the memory of penitential creeping to the cross. Thus Langland in Piers Plowman: ‘‘And crepeth to the cros on knees, and kisseth it for a juwel!’’ (B text, xviii.431). See the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/LanPier.html, accessed October 28, 2008. I thank Judith Anderson for the observation. 31. Quoted in J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 2 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953–57), 1:383–84. A good discussion of the context may be found in Thomas J. McCoog, ‘‘Sparrows on the Roof,’’ in Spirit, Style, Story: Essays Honoring J. W. Padberg, ed. Thomas Lucas (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2002), 338–39. 32. Sweeney, Robert Southwell, 5. 33. Ibid., 56.

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Notes to pages 48–51 181 34. It also respects the affinity between Southwell’s poetics and the core ethos of The Spiritual Exercises. To recall Barthes’ aphorism: ‘‘The Exercises is the book of the question, not of the answer’’ (Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 74). As Sweeney argues in a different context, ‘‘Southwell’s poetry was intended not simply to proselytize on doctrinal subjects but to bring fire to the heart of the reader, in the hope of raising his or her spiritual sensibilities’’ (Sweeney, Robert Southwell, 12). 35. Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 109. 36. Southwell, Collected Poems, 122–23. 37. Sweeney, Robert Southwell, 23. 38. In effect, by the turn of the century the word diaspora could have been substituted for catholic in more than one aspect. Hosting diverse experiences of exile (meditative exercise, the experience of political exigency) together with the rhizomic habit of missionary culture, diasporal catholicism was also invested, for ‘‘young aristocrats’’ of Southwell’s generation, with ‘‘an aura of romantic adventure’’ (Brownlow, Robert Southwell, 3). 39. A nuanced assessment of this problem, in the context of Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, may be found in Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 265–332. 40. See Jeffrey Walker, ‘‘The Body of Persuasion: A Theory of the Enthymeme,’’ College English 56 (January 1994): 46–65. 41. See, for example, James P. Zappen, ‘‘Aristotelian and Ramist Rhetoric in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: Pathos versus Ethos and Logos,’’ Rhetorica 1 (Spring 1983): 65–91. 42. Walker, 48–49. Interestingly, Walker defines the ‘‘strategic intentionality’’ associated with enthymemic discourse as ‘‘kairotic inventiveness,’’ by which he means ‘‘inventiveness to what ancient rhetoricians called kairos, ‘the opportune’ at any given moment in a particular rhetorical situation’’ (49). For an expansive treatment of the topic of the heart, see Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 43. I allude to the argument presented in Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). For a provocative account of the decisive role of monotheism in the kind of metanarrative Foucault proposes, see Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 44. See Jean Borella, The Sense of the Supernatural, trans. G. John Champoux (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), 70 –77. 45. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 83. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid.

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182 Notes to pages 52–57 49. John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 123. 50. As Milbank, following de Certeau, points out: ‘‘the crucial shift was certainly not the Reformation: rather Protestantism and Tridentine Catholicism represented two alternative versions of ‘reformation’ which should be defined as the switch from the triadic to the dyadic account of the relation of the various bodies of Christ’’ (ibid., 124). 51. De Certeau, Mystical Fable, 84. 52. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 462. 53. Ibid., 462–63. For an account of Benjamin’s debt to Pauline kairos and messianism on this score, see Agamben, Time That Remains, 138–45. 54. The word ‘‘present’’ does appear, once, but in a diplomatic translation of the transubstantiation argument built into the notion of ‘‘real presence’’: ‘‘God present is at once in everye place’’ (l. 79). The point was a common one in Romanist defenses of the ‘‘real presence,’’ but its syllogistic force is muted in the figurative and imagistic surround of Southwell’s poem. 55. Milbank, Being Reconciled, 124. 56. Further discussion of the implications of chiasmic figuration for reformist culture may be found in Lowell Gallagher, ‘‘Merleau-Ponty’s Chiasm and the Ethical Call of Situated Criticism,’’ in What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, ed. Howard Marchitello (New York: Routledge, 2001): 95–122. 57. Eduardo Cadava, ‘‘Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins,’’ October 96 (Spring 2001): 39. ‘‘Just as his ‘Then’ cannot be reduced to the past,’’ Cadava points out, ‘‘Benjamin’s ‘Now’ does not name a present,’’ and since the present ‘‘is constituted in relation to all the images that ‘Now’ give it its signature—that come to it from elsewhere but also from other historic moments—it, too, can never be present’’ (39) in a simple or unitary sense. In other words, because of the absent center that gives it its body or form, chiastic figuration captures the kairotic force of the dialectical image. 58. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462. 59. Benjamin, Konvolut N 3.1, in Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project), cited in Christopher Fynsk, ‘‘The Claim of History,’’ Diacritics (Fall–Winter 1992): 122–23; Fynsk’s translation differs from the published translation in Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462. 60. Put another way, the particular historicity of the image of the triforme corpus captured by Southwell resides in the ‘‘Now’’ that becomes legible in the temporal matrix of the poems and also shears off at contact with received cultural schemas for understanding what is present in history. 61. Fynsk, ‘‘Claim of History,’’ 117. 62. Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘‘Sovereigns, Citizens, and Saints: Political Theology and Renaissance Literature,’’ special issue of Religion and Literature 38.3 (2006): 1–2.

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Notes to pages 57–64 183 63. The senses of the neuter at issue in these pages, of course, work against the grain of the neutralizing effects Hammill and Lupton detect in the rituals and practices of institutionalized religion.

Reconfiguring Figuring: John Donne as Narrative Poet heather dubrow One section of this essay was presented in earlier form at the John Donne Society in February 2007. I thank that audience for trenchant comments and Ilona Bell for painstaking and perceptive readings of successive versions. I am also grateful to Judith Anderson for acute suggestions about the manuscript of this essay itself and to James Phelan for valuable comments about my work on narrativity on several occasions. 1. A number of recent collections and essays have examined the status of form and formalism in the profession. See esp. Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), which is an expanded version of Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000), and Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 2. Compare the discussion of such modes of representation in Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007). 3. Throughout this essay I cite John Donne, The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 4. For a different but not incompatible reading of this widely neglected poem, see Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 63–65. 5. On the modes supporting rather than battling each other, compare my study, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), esp. 200–7. 6. Stanley Fish, ‘‘Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power,’’ in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 223. 7. Phelan develops these distinctions among genres and modes in several essays. It is, for example, explored throughout ‘‘Rhetorical Ethics and Lyric Narrative: Robert Frost’s ‘Home Burial,’ ’’ Poetics Today 25 (2004): 627–51. 8. Although the significance of futurity in Donne’s spiritual writing has hardly been neglected, its role in the secular poems on which my essay focuses has seldom been discussed. In one of the few exceptions, Achsah Guibbory focuses on how writing about the future involves addressing audiences more public than the current one; see Guibbory, ‘‘A Sense of the Future: Projected Audiences of Donne and Jonson,’’ John Donne Journal 2 (1983): 11–21. 9. Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 25.

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184 Notes to pages 65–73 10. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘‘tell.’’ 11. Ilona Bell develops her concept of dialogic love poetry throughout Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); on Donne, see esp. 16. 12. Dubrow, Challenges of Orpheus, 165–88. 13. These and related statistics appear in M. Thomas Hester, ‘‘ ‘Let me love’: Reading the Sacred ‘Currant’ of Donne’s Profane Lyrics,’’ in Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature, ed. Helen Wilcox, Richard Todd, Alasdair Macdonald (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996), 130. 14. Gerald Prince, ‘‘The Disnarrated,’’ Style 22 (1988): 1–8. 15. Uri Margolin, ‘‘Of What Is Past, Is Passing, or to Come: Temporality, Aspectuality, Modality, and the Nature of Literary Narrative,’’ in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 142–66. 16. Edward Doughtie, Lyrics from English Airs (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 29; Paul L. Gaston, ‘‘Britten’s Donne and the Promise of Twentieth-Century Settings,’’ in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, ed. Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, Essays in Seventeenth-Century Literature 1 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 202–6. 17. See, e.g., John T. Shawcross. Intentionality and the New Traditionalism: Some Liminal Means to Literary Revisionism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 79–80, on differences between lyric and song. 18. On Donne’s engagement with Ronsard, see Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 115–16. 19. See Sarah Iovan’s as yet unpublished dissertation, ‘‘Radical Presentations: Performance in Early Modern English Lyric’’ (University of Wisconsin–Madison), esp. chap. 2. For different but compatible interpretations of multiple voices specifically in the type of lyric known as an ‘‘air,’’ see Daniel Fischlin, In Small Proportion: A Poetics of the English Ayre 1596–1622 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), esp. 27, 269–70. 20. I cite The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912).

The Narrative Turn against Metaphor: Metonymy, Identification, and Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa amelia zurcher 1. For Boyle’s biography, see Kathleen M. Lynch, Roger Boyle, First Earl of Orrery (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1965); Eustace Budgell, Memoirs of the Lives and Characters of the Illustrious Family of the Boyles (Dublin, 1754); and A Collection of the State Letters of the Right Honourable Robert Boyle, . . . together with some other Letters, and Pieces of a different kind, Particularly the Life of the Earl of Orrery, by the Reverend Mr. Thomas Morrice, his Lordship’s Chaplain (Dublin, 1743). For Parthenissa’s

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Notes to pages 73–78 185 popularity, see Francis Kirkman, ‘‘To the Reader,’’ in The Honour of Chivalry: or, the Famous and Delectable History of Don Bellianis of Greece (an older romance with a new continuation by Kirkman) (London, 1671); and Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1930 [1785]), xi, 71–80. 2. John Barclay, John Barclay his Argenis, trans. Robert Le Grys (London, 1628), 131–32. 3. In the preface to the second part of Parthenissa, published with the first part, both for the first time, in 1651, Boyle notes that his sources for the Second Punic War are especially Polybius and Walter Ralegh’s summary History of the World (Boyle, Parthenissa [London, 1651], A2r [this preface begins after p. 412; immediately after the preface, pagination of the second part begins again at 1]). He does not mention his sources for other figures and events, but his account of Spartacus’s life, as I will suggest, closely follows Plutarch, though he almost certainly also knew Appian’s story in The Civil Wars (a Latin translation was published in Basel in 1554, and an English translation, by W.B., in 1578). For Livy he may have relied mainly on Ralegh. Probably the most accessible source for the Parthians, from whose history he takes little but proper names, was Tacitus’s Annals. 4. Roger Boyle, Parthenissa, That most Fam’d Romance, The Six Volumes Compleat (London, 1676), A2v. All further references to Parthenissa will be to this edition unless otherwise noted. 5. Livy, Ab urbe condita, Books 23 –25, ed. Frank Gardner Moore (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), 23.8–9. The name Perolla is a variant reading of ‘‘perlici ad’’ in 23.8 that is reproduced in early modern Latin and English editions of Livy (see Moore’s note 4 at 23.8). Ralegh alludes only in a couple of sentences to Livy’s story of a son whose political opposition to Hannibal challenges his father’s loyalties (Walter Ralegh, The Historie of the World in Five Bookes [London, 1652], 392). 6. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 245. 7. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics, trans. Frederick Morgan Padelford, Yale Studies in English 26 (New York: Henry Holt, 1905), 83 (7.1.3, ‘‘Whether the Poet Teaches Character or Action’’). 8. Erich Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York: Meridian Books, 1959 [1944]), 11–76:33–34, 53. 9. Douglas Trevor’s recent discussion of early modern humoral theory makes the link to characterological disposition, and also traces opposing theories of person and character; see Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 10–15, 26–30. 10. On the Spartacus story from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, see Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 37–43. 11. Boyle, preface to the second part, Parthenissa (London, 1651), A2v. 12. Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Thomas North, 6 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1967 [1579]), 4:53–59; Appian, The Civil Wars, trans. John

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186 Notes to pages 78–84 Carter (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 65–67 (1.116–20). Plutarch’s and Appian’s sources probably include Sallust’s Historiae; of Livy’s account, only the Epitome survives. For discussion of the surviving classical material on Spartacus, see Thomas Grunewald, Bandits in the Roman Empire, trans. John Drinkwater (New York: Routledge, 2004 [1999]) and Barry Baldwin, ‘‘Two Aspects of the Spartacus Slave Revolt,’’ The Classical Journal 62.7 (April 1967): 289–94. 13. Amelia Zurcher, Seventeenth-Century English Romance: Allegory, Ethics, and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 111–23. 14. Plutarch, Lives, 1:20. 15. Roman Jakobson, ‘‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,’’ in On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique MonvilleBurston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 115–33, esp. 129–30. 16. Jakobson, ‘‘Linguistics and Poetics,’’ in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 62–94:85. 17. Jakobson, ‘‘On Realism in Art,’’ in Language in Literature, 19–27:21–22. 18. Jakobson, ‘‘Marginal Notes on the Prose of the Poet Pasternak,’’ in Language in Literature, 301–317:313. 19. Jakobson, ‘‘What is Literature?’’ in Language in Literature, 368–78:378. 20. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964), 25–69; Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 14. 21. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 21–49. 22. Jakobson, ‘‘Two Aspects of Language,’’ 132. 23. Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 154–73. 24. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 20. 25. Percy Herbert, ‘‘To the Reader,’’ The Princess Cloria, or The Royal Romance (London, 1661), A1v. 26. Scaliger, Select Translations, 2–3. 27. David Marsh, ‘‘Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetics,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 65.4 (2004): 667–76:672; Marijke Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999). 28. Boyle, preface to the second part, Parthenissa (London, 1651), B1r–B2r. 29. Boyle follows French romance, which was probably his model, in privileging inclination over other motives for love, but he redefines the terms: French romance prefers l’amour d’inclination (love based on passionate affinity) to l’amour d’e´lection (love based on reasoned choice) on the basis that love that is subject to choice cannot truly be sincere. Boyle did not find his precedent in English usage; in England, too, ‘‘inclination’’ usually connotes passion, although the value assigned to it there is negative rather than positive (see, e.g., Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 21). For

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Notes to pages 84–92 187 the French usage see Mark Bannister, Privileged Mortals: The French Heroic Novel, 1630–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), esp. 72–73. 30. For now-classic statements of the revisionist argument, see Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), and Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (New York: New York University Press, 1981). 31. For a useful summary of revisionist and post-revisionist ideas, see Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1998), esp. 3–9. 32. Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, N.Y.: Renaissance English Text Society, 1995), 169. For a discussion of this moment, see Zurcher, Seventeenth-Century English Romance, 42–43. 33. The quotation is from Jonathan Crewe, in a recent symposium on literary character that I will discuss briefly below: ‘‘Reclaiming Character?’’ in the forum ‘‘Is There Character after Theory?’’ Shakespeare Studies 34 (2006): 35–40:35. 34. Georg Luka´cs, ‘‘The Intellectual Physiognomy in Characterization,’’ in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 149–88:158. 35. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘‘Narrative-Men,’’ in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977 [1971]), 66–79. 36. Crewe, ‘‘Reclaiming Character?’’ 35, 39.

Caterpillage: Death and Truthiness in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting harry berger, jr. An expanded version of this chapter, Caterpillage: Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. 1. Christopher Wood, ‘‘ ‘Curious Pictures’ and the Art of Description,’’ Word & Image 11.4 (October–December 1995): 350–51. Ernst Gombrich expressed a similar insight: ‘‘Every painted still life has the vanitas motif ‘built in’ as it were, for those who want to look for it. The pleasures it stimulates are not real, they are mere illusion. Try and grasp the luscious fruit or the tempting beaker and you will hit against a hard cold panel’’ (‘‘Tradition and Expression in Western Still-Life,’’ Burlington Magazine 103 [1961]: 180). 2. Britannica Online, s.v. ‘‘iconography,’’ http://www.britannica.com/eb/ article-9041997/iconography. 3. Wikipedia, s.v. ‘‘iconography,’’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconography. 4. Britannica Online, s.v. ‘‘vanitas,’’ http://www.britannica.com/eb/article9074816/vanitas. 5. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). 6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958). For a concise but more detailed profile of the Weber thesis, see Roger Tawney’s introduction, ibid., 2–3.

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188 Notes to pages 92–96 7. French, l’embarras de richesse or l’embarras de choix, having more wealth or choices than you know what to do with. Embarrasser is literally ‘‘to bar, to put up a barrier,’’ to block or impede. The predicament of riches is having too much and feeling bad or guilty about it. And in the Netherlands Schama writes about, the sense of the predicament is exacerbated by the constant warnings of the church predikants. 8. See especially pp. 334–38, 343, and 370–71 of The Embarrassment of Riches. Schama’s thesis and book have been sharply criticized by Jonathan Israel in ‘‘Driven to Greatness,’’ Times Literary Supplement, November 5, 1999, 3–4, and by J. L. Price in ‘‘The Dangers of Unscientific History: Schama and the Dutch SeventeenthCentury,’’ Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 104 (1989): 39–42. See also the objections raised in David Freedberg’s less savage review: ‘‘The Bosom of History,’’ in The New Republic, December 6, 1999, 44–46, 48–51. 9. Simon Schama, ‘‘Perishable Commodities: Dutch Still-Life Painting and the ‘Empire of Things,’ ’’ in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 478–88. 10. Ken Mogg, ‘‘Frequently Asked Questions on Hitchcock,’’ http://www .labyrinth.net.au/⬃muffin/faqs_c.html. 11. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1948 [1933]), 151. 12. Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996). 13. Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, October 17, 2005. 14. On this general theme, see my Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, intro. Peter Erickson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 11, 126, 288–90. 15. Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592): Natur, Dichtung und Wissenschaft in der Kunst um 1600 (Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 1994). Part II, plate 2, p.127. 16. Sam Segal, A Selection of Dutch and Flemish Seventeenth-Century Paintings (New York: Hoogsteder-Naumann, 1983), 91. For a set of more cautious and strategically concessive iconographic readings, see the essays prefixed to the catalogue Still-Life in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Eddy de Jongh et al. (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1982). 17. See ‘‘Caterpillar Anatomy,’’ http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/ butterfly/anatomy/Caterpillar.shtml. 18. See ‘‘The Parable of the Caterpillar,’’ http://www.caterpillar.org.uk. 19. Eddy de Jongh, ‘‘The Interpretation of Still-Life Paintings: Possibilities and Limits,’’ in Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting, trans. Michael Hoyle (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 1995), 143 and 130–48 passim.

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Notes to pages 96–100 189 20. Ibid., 132–34. The question raised by the translated term ‘‘deeper’’ in this context is whether the statement is to be taken as descriptive or as evaluative. By ‘‘deeper,’’ does the author simply mean ‘‘hidden beneath the surface’’ or does he mean ‘‘better, more profound’’? 21. Ibid., 19. 22. Ibid., 132, 137. 23. Ibid., 143. 24. Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600–1720 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 43–76. 25. Ibid., 52. The flowers are rose, lily, tulip, sunflower, violet, peony, corn, passionflower, carnation, columbine, poppy, and crown imperial. The insects are flies, butterflies, and ants. 26. Ibid., 27. 27. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 89–90. 28. Goldgar, Tulipmania, 92–93, 254–56, 260. Goldgar’s inquiry focuses on Amsterdam, Enkhuizen, and Haarlem. 29. Ibid., 286. 30. Ibid., 293, 304. 31. Goldgar, Tulipmania, 266–67. 32. Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 262. 33. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, 1789–1794, introduction and commentary by Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Orion Press, 1967), n.p., plate 39. 34. Compare ‘‘thou art ill,’’ ‘‘you are ill,’’ ‘‘you are sick,’’ and the contemporary idiom, ‘‘you’re sick.’’ 35. David V. Erdman, ed., The Illuminated Blake (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1974), 81. 36. See, for example, Erdman, ibid., and Keynes’s comment on plate 39 in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Resurrection is traditionally figured by the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly. Blake’s three female figures represent the stages of metamorphosis in descending order: the caterpillar at top, the cocoon on the middle branch, the butterfly emerging from the fallen rose. But of course this sequence is easy to read in reverse, since the butterfly figure is dominated or blocked by the worm, and the compositional vectors drive the eye up the stalk and around to the caterpillar/woman. For seventeenth-century studies of the metamorphosis of caterpillars and other insects, see Maria Sibylla Merian, Flowers, Butterflies and Insects: All 154 Engravings from ‘‘Erucarum Ortus’’ (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1991), discussed below, and Johannes Goedaert, Metamorphosis et historia naturalis insectorum (Middleburg, 1662?). For more on Merian, see pages 103–6 and note 53 below. See also Sam Segal, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries, trans. Ruth Koenig (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1990), 33 and 23–40 passim.

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190 Notes to pages 100–4 37. William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, II.8, in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1948), 222. 38. In my view, Urizen is not only Blake’s version of Milton’s God, but also Milton’s. See ‘‘Paradise Lost Evolving, Books I–VI: Toward a New View of the Poem as the Speaker’s Experience,’’ in Harry Berger, Jr., Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. John P. Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 [1967]), 324–69. 39. Charles Sterling, Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, trans. James Emmons, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 63. 40. Ibid., 63–64. 41. Ibid., 64. 42. Ibid., 72. The clause, ‘‘it is something that has fallen prey to duration,’’ must have been added for emphasis. It is not in Claudel’s text. 43. Roland Barthes, ‘‘The World as Object,’’ in Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, ed. Norman Bryson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 106–15:107–8. 44. Schama, ‘‘Perishable Commodities,’’ 482. 45. Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 16. 46. Ibid. ‘‘Hyper-realism’’ (ibid., 137) was first applied to Bosschaert by Laurens J. Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty, trans. A. M. Bruin-Cousins (Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis, 1960), 20. Although Umberto Eco’s use of the term is motivated by an entirely different set of concerns and objects, his sense of the term would accommodate Bol’s and Taylor’s deployment of it. See Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1986). 47. The paintings are in London, Amsterdam, The Hague, and Cologne. 48. The term roemer has often been translated as ‘‘rummer,’’ but that is misleading. The Dutch word is built on roem, glory or renown or celebrity. A roemer is a glass for toasting or boasting (roemer also means ‘‘a boaster’’). 49. ‘‘Painting Flowers,’’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/paintingflowers/ paintings/flowers_glass_bosschaert.shtml. 50. Ibid. 51. On Merian, see the excellent recent study by Kim Todd, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2007). For a stimulating appreciation of Merian and her importance, see David Freedberg, ‘‘Science, Commerce, and Art: Neglected Topics at the Junction of History and Art History,’’ Art in History/History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, ed. David Freedberg and Jan de Vries (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991), 377–427, esp. 377–87. 52. Merian, Flowers, Butterflies and Insects. 53. See Ibid., plates 9, 10, 35, 66, 67, 147, and 149. 54. See Ibid., plates 77, 96, 121, 122, 128, 132, 134, 138, and 139. 55. Maria Sibylla Merian, New Book of Flowers, introduction by Melanie Klier (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2003). 56. Encarta, s.v. ‘‘Merian Maria Sibylla,’’ http://au.encarta.msn.com/ encyclopedia_781540862/Merian_Maria_Sibylla.html.

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Notes to pages 106–12 191 57. Segal, Selection of Dutch and Flemish Seventeenth-Century Paintings, 91. 58. See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘‘caterpillar,’’ sense 2. 59. Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 146. 60. Alan Chong, ‘‘Contained under the Name of Still Life,’’ Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands, 1550–1720, ed. Alan Chong and Wouter Kloek (Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Publishers, 1999), 26–28. 61. Segal notes that cricket and grasshopper were often confused and warns that although the latter is also associated with the voracious locust, it isn’t always interpreted ‘‘in malo’’; Sam Segal, A Prosperous Past: The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands, 1600–1700, ed. William B. Jordan (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1988), 101. 62. The authors of the entry in the excellent volume Still Lifes: Techniques and Style, ed. Arie Wallert (Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Publishers, 1999), attribute the flatness to mistakes in painting combined with effects of aging, but their concern with ‘‘convincing spatial illusion’’ isn’t tempered by attention to the organizing schema (54–55). 63. For a thorough analysis and description of van der Ast’s compositions, see Sam Segal’s commentary in Masters of Middleburg: Exhibition in the Honour of Laurens J. Bol (Amsterdam: Kunsthandel K. & V. Waterman, 1984), 48–60. See also Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 146–49. 64. On the observer shuttle, see Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 51, 57. 65. In van der Ast’s Flowers and Shells, plate 23 in Chong and Kloek, eds., StillLife Paintings from the Netherlands, a spider crawls along the edge of the table toward a dead bee, and a caterpillar with its hairs standing on end cranes up toward the flowers in the horn-shaped shell. See also the aggressive posture of the butterfly attacking a cut rose in the same painter’s Fruit in a Basket with Two Wanli Dishes, plate 35 in Segal’s Flowers and Nature (pp. 87 and 190–91). A similar spider in the foreground of van der Ast’s 1623 flower piece in the Ashmolean is described by Taylor as ‘‘rather macabre’’ (Dutch Flower Painting, 148). 66. Todd, Chrysalis, 35. 67. This effect resembles the one produced by Rembrandt when he makes his sitters look like they have been holding the pose for a long period of time. 68. In the Louvre, this is descriptively entitled: Le nid de pinsons, poissons, reptiles et ecureuil mort au milieu de plantes et d’arbres. 69. Todd, Chrysalis, 35. 70. John Webster (The Devil’s Law Case, V.iv.128–43); anthologized in The Oxford Book of English Verse under the title ‘‘Vanitas Vanitatum.’’

Figuring Belief: George Herbert’s Devotional Creatures david glimp In addition to this volume’s editors, I would like to thank Katherine Eggert, Pamela Hammons, Jeffrey Shoulson, John Vincent, and Julian Yates for their valuable help with this essay.

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192 Notes to pages 112–14 1. All quotations of Herbert’s poetry are from George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991). 2. For discussions of the practice of meditating on the creature, see Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962). Umberto Eco (Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986], 17–19) discusses the widespread acknowledgement in the writings of medieval theologians of the ‘‘polyphony of the universe’’ and the ‘‘cry of joy’’ that accompanied the contemplation of God’s creation (18). 3. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Pres, 1998), Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Agamben, ‘‘Security and Terror,’’ Theory and Event 5.4 (2002): http://muse .jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.4agamben.html (accessed February 1, 2005); Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘‘Creature Caliban,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 51.1 (Spring 2001): 1–23, and Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), which incorporates the Shakespeare Quarterly essay; and Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 4. Lupton, Citizen-Saints, 164. The passage as it appears in Lupton, ‘‘Creature Caliban,’’ is quoted in Santner, On Creaturely Life, 29. 5. The ‘‘war on terror’’ has unfolded as an effort to establish American-style democracy in the Middle East, an effort that carries with it the assumption that political liberalization will support economic liberalization, opening up opportunities for expanded trade and expanded accumulation of wealth. For a recent version of this position directed toward a popular audience, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). The notion of a ‘‘regime of accumulation’’ develops from the kind of research agenda outlined by the various contributors to David M. Kotz et al., eds., Social Structures of Accumulation: The Political Economy of Growth and Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6. Though Santner, for example, notes an alternative tradition of creatureliness aligned in his work with the poetry of Rilke, this latter account of creaturely being as a radically ‘‘open’’ form of life is bracketed and subordinated by way of a Heideggerean privilege of humans as inhabiting ‘‘world-forming’’ modes of being, as opposed to animals who are merely ‘‘absorbed’’ in their ‘‘environment’’ and other objects that cannot be said to inhabit a world at all. Santner, On Creaturely Life, 8. 7. Book of Common Prayer (Cambridge, 1630), B2r. (STC 16380.3) 8. The Bible and Holy Scriptures conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament (Geneva, 1561), annotation to Psalm 150. 9. For example, critics have argued that Herbert responds to the instability of being by advancing an ethos of renunciation or self-abnegation (Helen White, The Metaphysical Poets: A Study in Religious Experience [New York: Macmillan, 1936]; Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature

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Notes to pages 114–18 193 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972]; Barbara Harman, Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert’s Poetry [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982]); by characterizing affect or desire for salvation as the sufficient conditions for salvation (Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983]; Deborah Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990]); by employing the strategies refined in monarchical or noble service to enable an active negotiation with God (Michael Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991]); or by channeling subjectivity into appropriate devotional forms (Martz, Poetry of Meditation; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979]; Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001]). ˇ izˇek’s effort to understand ideology as 10. An exception here would be Slavoj Z belief materialized in the ‘‘extimate’’ realm of the ‘‘effective functioning of the social field,’’ rather than in the ‘‘intimate’’ domain of peoples’ consciousness. See ˇ izˇek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 36, and especially Z account of ideology as functioning like a Tibetan prayer wheel. Also relevant is ˇ izˇek’s On Belief, (London: Routledge, 2001). Z 11. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie: Eight Bookes (London, 1604), 52. (STC 13713) 12. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1988; facsimile reprint of Edward Arber’s 1906 edition), 104–14. The perspective advanced here intersects with Judith Anderson’s study Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996); though the ontology projected by the discourse of the creature cannot be subsumed completely into an understanding of ‘‘magic,’’ this study’s fifth chapter, ‘‘Magic and Metaphor: Tree Rings in the Renaissance Arboretum,’’ 137–65, is especially resonant. For her comments on Herbert’s ‘‘Easter Wings’’ and on Puttenham, see 17–18. 13. See Strier, Love Known, 107–8, on anfechtung. 14. Santner fascinatingly shows how a certain tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German Jewish thought, deriving from and developing a version of the theological discourse of the creature, ‘‘rehearsed the psychic—or better, creaturely—complexities of life abandoned to the validity or force of law’’ (On Creaturely Life, 41). The discussion of Herbert in the present essay advances a similar suggestion with respect to the early modern theology of the creature. 15. Lupton, Citizen-Saints, see for example, 178–80, as well as chapter 7 on Milton’s Samson Agonistes, 183–203. 16. Thomas Edwards, The First and Second Part of Gangraena (London, 1646), 19, 17. (Wing E227) 17. Gerrard Winstanley, A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England ([London], 1649). Available at http://www.bilderberg.org/land/poor.htm (accessed June 23, 2008).

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194 Notes to pages 118–23 18. Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone: or a Relation of Something spoken in Whitehall (London, 1654), F3v. For a discussion of Trapnel’s efforts to establish her authority in relation to established conventions of public speech and literary form, see Pamela S. Hammons, Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002), 55–99. Margery Kempe and her scribe (writing sometime around the late 1430s) similarly appealed to both the universalizing and restrictively gendered aspects of the term creature. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996). The usage appears at the work’s outset and runs throughout and has effects comparable to those Trapnel seeks to produce. 19. For a more recent example of the radical potentials inhering in the discourse of the creature, consider the ‘‘creation care’’ movement, a surprising alliance of evangelical Christians and environmental activists who seek to derive an ethos of responsible environmental stewardship from a strict reading of the Bible. For a programmatic statement of the Creation Care movement’s organizing principles, see ‘‘On the Care of Creation: An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation,’’ http://www.creationcare.org/resources/declaration.php (accessed November 13, 2006). 20. Strier is especially lucid on this point in ‘‘The Attack on Reason,’’ chapter 2 of Love Known, 29–60. 21. Godfrey Goodman, The Creatures Praysing God: or The Religion of Dumbe Creatures (London, 1622), D4r. 22. Targoff, Common Prayer, 5. 23. Such a claim resonates with Stanley Fish’s attention to the ‘‘risks’’ of faith the poem confronts. See especially ‘‘On Other Surety None,’’ chapter 15 of How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 511–59. Though Fish acknowledges that the creation praises all the time (2), belief for him is a cognitive stance and his concern is to distinguish the formation of right and wrong convictions; consequently, Fish doesn’t consider how contingent human faith relates to these creaturely modes of belief. For an impressive account of the objective dimensions of poetic subjectivity in Milton’s Lycidas, see Lauren Shohet, ‘‘Subjects and Objects in Lycidas,’’ Texas Studies in Language and Literature 47 (2005): 101–19. 24. Godfrey Goodman speaks of flowers and other ‘‘odoriferous’’ creatures in a comparable way: ‘‘what are these indeed but nature’s sacrifices?’’ Goodman, Creatures Praysing God, E2r. 25. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 302–3. 26. On this poem’s understanding of conversion as a mode of augmenting praise, see Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1981), 106. For a recent account of The Temple as organized around conversion, see Margaret J. Oakes, ‘‘ ‘To be thy praise,/And be my salvation’: The Double Function of Praise in The Temple,’’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47 (2005): 120–38. 27. See Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 43.

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Notes to pages 124–27 195 28. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994). 29. The phrase ‘‘governmental pessimism’’ adapts the notion of governmental optimism drawn from the work of Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, for example their essay ‘‘Governing Economic Life,’’ Economy and Society 19 (1990): 1–31. 30. Erica Fudge, in Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) specifically addresses ‘‘Providence’’ as offering among the most transparent statements of the rigidly hierarchical anthropomorphism she locates in early modern England (3–4). For an important overview of early modern accounts of man’s primacy over creation, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Thomas is of course attuned to dissenting voices, and discusses throughout the book writers who challenged or qualified ‘‘human ascendancy.’’ Thomas briefly mentions the account of creation with which this essay is concerned (137). 31. Michael McCanles has suggested—in an oft-quoted phrase—that ‘‘ ‘Providence’ is . . . the kind of poem the persona of The Temple aspired to write all the time, a poem in which God and self are serenely at one in a total vision reflecting the interpenetration of God’s will and man’s’’; McCanles, Dialectical Criticism and Renaissance Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 93. Michael Schoenfeldt picks up on the overwhelming demands implicit in these lines in Prayer and Power, 87. 32. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,’’ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 134. I am indebted to Beatrice Hanssen’s discussion of Benjamin’s creaturely ethics, especially in ‘‘The Response to the Kreatur,’’ chapter 10 of her book Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 150–62. 33. Compare Thomas Traherne’s more optimistic take in The Second Century, where he urges his reader ‘‘By an act of the Understanding . . . [to] be present now with all the Creatures among which you live: and hear them in their Beings and Operations Praising god in an Heavenly Maner. Som of them Vocaly, others in their Ministery, all of them Naturaly and Continualy’’ (Thomas Traherne, Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings, ed. Anne Ridler [London: Oxford University Press, 1966]), 248. 34. Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History, 162. 35. Henry More, The Life and Doctrine of Ovr Savior Iesvs Christ (Gant [Ghent], 1656), G1r. (Wing 1018:01) 36. I agree with Margaret Oakes’s assertion regarding these lines that ‘‘Herbert . . . incorporates natural phenomena to create fitting praise,’’ though I am concerned to show how this incorporation proceeds less out of a sense of human superiority to creatures and more from a sense of devotional insecurity; see Oakes, ‘‘ ‘To be thy Praise,’ ’’ 134. 37. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, 209n23; see also Strier, Love Known, 193.

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196 Notes to pages 127–32 38. For a prominent instance of the former approach, see Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, 156–233; for an instance of the latter, see Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 61–63. 39. Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). The argument I’m advancing about ‘‘The Altar’’ also intersects with Juliet Fleming’s attention to a variety of kinds of early modern writing—on walls, posy rings, dishes and drinking pots, and the like—that ‘‘require . . . no subjective position of enunciation,’’ that are ‘‘predicated on the assumption that words are matter imbued with intelligence.’’ Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 41, 142. This account of forms of ‘‘monumental writing’’ is anticipated in Anderson, Words That Matter, for example in the discussion of sententiae, 33–42. The argument I’ve advanced in this essay might be contrasted with that offered by Jonathan Gil Harris in chapter 1 of Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 32–65. This important study came to my attention after this essay was in press. Briefly, where Harris reads Herbert’s work in general, and ‘‘The Altar’’ in particular, as failing to transcend matter understood as abject substance, I’ve attempted to offer a view of The Temple as an ontologically crowded space, traversed by multiple accounts of the nature of reality and of the relation between the human and nonhuman worlds, not all of which understand nonhuman domains in such abject terms. 40. Ramie Targoff insightfully writes about this poem that ‘‘just as Hooker recommends replacing the weak and unreliable utterances of the individual with the sturdy texts of the Prayer Book, the poet compensates for the weakness of his heart by subordinating himself to the poem that he has constructed.’’ Targoff, Common Prayer, 101. See also Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 50. 41. This point resonates with Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘‘Submission and Assertion: The ‘Double Motion’ of Herbert’s ‘Dedication,’ ’’ John Donne Journal 2.2 (1983): 39–49. 42. Targoff, Common Prayer, Guibbory, Ceremony and Community.

Entertaining Friends: Falstaff ’s Parasitology donald hedrick I acknowledge the helpful responses to this essay and its earlier versions by the present skillful editors, as well as by Jeff Masten and Lars Engle, who responded at an MLA Shakespeare Division Session where part of the current essay was presented. I wish also to thank the Folger Shakespeare Library for granting me the fellowship that enabled this research, together with the fellows and reading group members who graciously and productively received my earlier stumblings toward the ‘‘entertainment theory’’ informing this essay. I include especially Georgianna Ziegler, Nora

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Notes to pages 132–36 197 Johnson, Adam Smythe, Lorna Hutson, Patricia Parker, Linda Levy Peck, Emma Smith, Tiffany Stern, Leeds Barroll, Heather James, Kent Cartwright, and Diana Solomon. 1. Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 2. Ibid.,167–68. 3. All citations are from The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2008). 4. Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 90. 5. From the title of William Ingram’s important study of the origins of London’s theater business, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). But Ingram’s work limits analysis by warning of a dangerous temptation to ‘‘postulate parallels with our own age’’ (15), whereas I find some parallels productive to consider. 6. Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 7. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 8. Gurr describes Shakespeare’s company in 1603 as ‘‘the most uniquely democratic and co-operative organization in the whole of England’’ (ibid., 88). 9. Donald K. Hedrick, ‘‘ ‘Be Rough With Me’: The Collaborative Arenas of The Two Noble Kinsmen,’’ in Shakespeare, Fletcher, and ‘‘The Two Noble Kinsmen,’’ ed. Charles H. Frey (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 45–77. 10. Donald Hedrick, ‘‘Male Surplus Value,’’ Renaissance Drama, n.s., 31 (2002): 85–124. 11. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 12. See Colin McCabe, ‘‘Abusing Self and Others: Puritan Accounts of the Shakespearean Stage,’’ Critical Quarterly 30 (1988): 3–17, and David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 43. 13. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 227, 230. 14. Tiffany Stern believes that there might have been only one general rehearsal for plays at public theaters. See her Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 76. 15. See B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 93–94, and Donald Hedrick, ‘‘Real Entertainment: Sportification, Coercion, and Carceral Theater,’’ in Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage, ed. Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susequehanna University Press/Associated University Press, 2010), 50–66.

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198 Notes to pages 136–45 16. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Pennilesse, in Selected Writings, ed. Stanley Wells (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), 64. 17. Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, in English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington et al. (New York: Norton, 2002). 18. Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, 71. 19. The concept is modeled after Fredric Jameson’s seminal The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), and proposes that ‘‘entertainment value,’’ construed more technically than it is usually, is especially a product or byproduct of the new purpose-built theaters and entertainment industry of Shakespeare’s time, attaching itself to the new modes of capitalist maximizations of profit, scale, and profitability. To unpack the mechanisms of this value, I argue, is to answer Walter Benjamin’s question about where capital is hiding; see Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 172. 20. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 167–68. 21. Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 56–57, 82–83. 22. Michel de Montaigne, ‘‘An Apology for Raymond Seybond,’’ in The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1987), 514. 23. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). 24. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1977), 401, 405. 25. Andrew Ross, The Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1994), 272. 26. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans John Moore, 3 vols. (London: Verso, 1991–2005), 2:331. 27. Robert Withington, ‘‘ ‘Vice’ and ‘Parasite’: A Note on the Evolution of the Elizabethan Villain,’’ PMLA 49 (1934): 743–51. 28. Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Aldershot, U.K.: Scolar Press, 1989 [1586]), 62. The intriguing nature of the metaphor of gender relations here, that the vine cleaves to ‘‘her’’ body, invites further exploration in gendered and queer terms of the entertainer and parasite figures. I am grateful to Jeff Masten for this suggestion. 29. John Gerard, The herball or Generall historie of plantes (London, 1597), 724. 30. I do not argue here for some direct influence of the culture or agriculture of botanical writing on Shakespeare or on Falstaff, but suggest that the complexity of such a figure as Falstaff can be readily generated by attendance to the natural world alone, even before cultural and institutional configurations, and that Shakespeare must have been aware of this sort of complexity in itself. 31. Gerard, Herball, 727. 32. Ibid., 714 33. Agamben, The Open, 41. Agamben’s use of the term open derives from his readings of Heidegger and Rilke (49–62).

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Notes to pages 145–50 199 34. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 34. 35. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 35. 36. I am indebted to Joan Pong Linton for this insight and connection. 37. See William Empson on this crucial scene for the friendship theme and for Shakespeare’s daring use of bawdy comedy while actors and even audience may be weeping: Essays on Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 52. For a reading of the scene in historiographic terms, see Donald Hedrick, ‘‘Advantage, Affect, History, Henry V,’’ PMLA 118 (2003): 475–77. 38. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 158. 39. Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy and Other Studies (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2002), 56. 40. Gruppe Krisis, Manifesto against Labour http://members.blackbox.net/oebgdk /krisis_manifest-englisch.html, 28.

Skin Merchants: Jack Cade’s Futures and the Figural Politics of Henry VI, Part II julian yates This essay began as a paper written for a seminar entitled ‘‘Shakespeare and the Question of Time,’’ directed by Lowell Gallagher at the Shakespeare Association of America Meeting in Dallas in 2007. I am especially grateful for comments from Judith Anderson, Joan Linton, and David Glimp. Parts of the essay were presented at George Washington University and the University of California, Los Angeles, and I am grateful to the audiences at both these Universities and especially for the responses of Rob Watson, Debora Shuger, and A. R. Braunmuller. 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 2. On Hamlet’s use of ‘‘groundlings’’ and the fishy zoographic see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 21–22. 3. Roger Chartier, ‘‘Jack Cade, the Skin of a Dead Lamb, and the Hatred for Writing,’’ Shakespeare Studies 34 (2006), 77–89: 84. The list of possible source rebellions derives from Annabel Patterson’s Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), chap. 2. 4. Space does not permit a full accounting of all the significant readings of the Cade sequence, but key readings would include Richard Wilson’s sense of Shakespeare’s ‘‘scorn for popular culture’’ in Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (New York: Harvest Wheatsheaf, 1993), 29; Michael Hattaway’s sense that the Cade rebellion serves as a cautionary tale on the evils that factionalism can produce, in his introduction to The Second Part of Henry VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20; Phyllis Rackin’s contention that Jack and his fellows are not allowed to ‘‘transcend the conventions of comic representation . . . mark[ing] their separation from the serious historical world of their betters’’ and that the play finally

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200 Notes to pages 150–53 sides with the ‘‘aristocratic bias of [its] sources,’’ in Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 75, 201–47; and Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘‘Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,’’ Representations 1 (1983): 1–29. 5. Paola Pugliatti, ‘‘ ‘More than History Can Pattern’: The Jack Cade Rebellion in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, 2,’’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992), 451–78: 453. 6. John Michael Archer’s analysis of the ‘‘civil butchery’’ of the first tetralogy eschews what he names the ‘‘despotism of mimesis over drama’’ in favor of ‘‘lexis’’ or ‘‘verbal traces.’’ Following in the wake of allied studies by Patricia Parker, he focuses on the language of the plays to recover a telling similarity between the arguments the plays make and those used to defend theater in antitheatrical debates. See John Michael Archer, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 19–20. My debts to Archer should be obvious throughout this essay. 7. On the humanities as a tool of reference management, see Tom Cohen, Ideology and Inscription: Cultural Studies after Benjamin, de Man and Bakhtin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–27 especially. 8. My use of ‘‘writing machine’’ is intended to capture the inhuman technicity of ‘‘writing’’ and also to mark the influence of Jonathan Goldberg’s attempt to redirect historical scholarship of the Renaissance toward a Derridean ‘‘poetics of the literal.’’ See Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. 15–28. On the cultural graphology, see also Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). For a study that ranges beyond the early modern period, see Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds., Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (New York: Routledge, 1997). 9. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), VIII.vi.5. Quoted in Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 203. 10. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, ‘‘The Dream-Work Does Not Think,’’ trans. Mary Lydon, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 19–55: 27. 11. Christopher Pinney, ‘‘Things Happen; or, From Which Moment Does That Object Come?’’ in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 266. 12. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 20–21. 13. Ibid., 22. 14. On ‘‘multi-species’’ see Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 165. ‘‘Irony’’ was the privileged trope of Haraway’s hugely influential ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The

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Notes to pages 153–58 201 Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–89. Metaplasm is a selfconsciously neutral alternative. On the ‘‘non-’’ or ‘‘a-modern’’ as a refusal of the purification of entities into human and not, see Bruno Latour, The Parliament of Things, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 15. On domestication and the processing of sheep as ‘‘stock’’ see Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 54–57. On the negative impact of anti-ovine prejudices in understanding sheep behavior see primatologist-turned-sheep-farmer Thelma Rowell, ‘‘A Few Peculiar Primates,’’ in Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society, ed., Shirley C. Strum and Linda M. Fedigan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 57–70, and Vinciane Despret, ‘‘Sheep Do Have Opinions,’’ in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 360–68. 16. Russ Macdonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 81. While Renaissance writers typically reserved their praise for ornamental figures and wrote little on the subject of elision, Macdonald cites George Gascoigne and George Puttenham as having ears particularly attuned to the poetic possibilities offered by metaplasm and its allied tropes. 17. Other possible models of process might include the ‘‘rhizomatics’’ of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); the ‘‘contexture of prehensions’’ or networks of Alfred North Whitehead Process and Reality (1928), the topological structuralism of Michel Serres. Of Serres’s many works the most frequently cited is Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 18. Louis Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86. 19. Bruno Latour, Aramis; or, The Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 88–89. 20. For Latour’s system of dating see Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). I take Louis Althusser’s styling of ‘‘ideology’’ as a series of temporal gags in his ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’’ to raise all the relevant questions from within a reading of Marx. 21. Porcupines were understood to discharge their spines when hunted. As Edward Topsell describes, ‘‘when they are hunted the beast stretcheth his skin and casteth [quills] off, one or two at a time.’’ Such porcupines that might have been seen (barring hedgehogs) were ‘‘brought up and downe’’ from Africa to ‘‘Europe to be seene for mony.’’ Edward Topsell, The History of Foure-footed Beasts (London, 1607), 588. 22. ‘‘Nap’’ derives from the language of sheep-shearing; see OED. 23. As Chartier reminds readers, in Q1 (1594) the lines appear differently: ‘‘Why ist not a miserable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should parchment be

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202 Notes to pages 158–63 made, & then with a litle blotting ouer with inke, a man should vndo himselfe’’; William Shakespeare, Henry The Sixth, Part Two (Quarto 1, 1594), ed. Michael Best, Internet Shakespeare Editions, University of Victoria, 2005, http:// internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Annex/Texts/2H6/Q1/scene/4.7, also quoted in Chartier, ‘‘Jack Cade,’’ 78. 24. Archer, Citizen Shakespeare, 80–81. 25. Chartier, ‘‘Jack Cade,’’ 81. 26. Louis Marin, Utopics or the Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1984), 3. My reading of this moment in Marin is indebted to Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’’ Diacritics 7.2 (Summer 1977): 4. ‘‘Naturalization’’ in Jameson’s subtitle is a misprint for ‘‘Neutralization.’’ 27. The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed., Edward Surtz S.J. and J. H. Hexter, 15 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), 4:65–67. 28. Ibid., 4:108–9. 29. For a reading of the place of food in the Utopian contract, see Julian Yates, ‘‘Humanist Habitats; or, ‘Eating Well’ with Thomas More’s Utopia,’’ in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2007), 187–209. 30. Rackin, Stages of History, 209, 219. 31. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, 52–53. 32. Chartier, ‘‘Jack Cade,’’ 78–79. Chartier’s reading is a brilliant performance but it remains unclear how Shakespeare might have come to know of Sinibaldo dei Fieschi’s figure of dead animal skin—hence, perhaps, the editorial silence on the matter. 33. Ibid., 87, and 85–87 generally. 34. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 41, and on ‘‘insurgent literacy’’ more generally, 13–60. 35. Ibid., 48. 36. I mean ‘‘parasitic’’ here in the nonpejorative sense developed by Michel Serres in The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). The literal meaning of parasite, Serres observes, is ‘‘to eat next to’’ (7). Para designates a vector. Sitos is the food. Hence, to be ‘‘parasitic’’ is to come after or to live on or within the relation to others (sheep, persons, etc). 37. On Book I as staging a debate between Platonic withdrawal from public service and Ciceronian engagement, see Quentin Skinner, ‘‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the language of Renaissance Humanism,’’ in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 123–58. This essay is revised and reprinted as ‘‘Thomas More’s Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility,’’ in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2:213–44.

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Notes to pages 163–68 203 38. Richard Halpern reads this quest for equilibrium as a naturalizing of ‘‘bourgeois consumption’’ in More’s text. See Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 136–75. 39. Rackin, Stages of History, 209. 40. Greenblatt, ‘‘Mudering Peasants,’’ 23–24. 41. All references will be to The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, vol. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). Nashe’s argument seems to transfer St. Augustine’s reformulation of prostitution as sex-or desire-work in De ordine II.iv to public theater. Understandably, Nashe’s defense has received much critical attention. For reasons of space it is not possible to provide a list of all the relevant critical commentaries here. Especially notable however, in my view, are William N. West’s discussion of Nashe’s faith in humanist conceptions of theater as providing exempla, in Theaters and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 117–19, and Paul Yachnin’s pointed reading of Nashe contra Philip Stubbes so as to expose their shared sense of the power of theater to affect its audience. Yachnin will of course argue that this efficacy was judged to have been misplaced in the 1590s and beyond, hence his modeling of the later theater as ‘‘powerless’’ in Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 1–2. 42. Archer, Citizen Shakespeare, 84. 43. Ibid., 84. 44. Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 165. 45. Richard Doyle, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 86–87. 46. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed., Philip Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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Contributors

Judith H. Anderson is Chancellor’s Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her most recent books include Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (2008), winner of the MacCaffrey Award of the International Spenser Society; Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (2005); and Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (1996). Harry Berger, Jr., is Professor Emeritus in Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author, most recently, of Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt’s ‘‘Night Watch’’ and other Dutch Group Portraits (2007), Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (2005), and Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (2000). Among his forthcoming books is A Fury in the Words: Love and Death in Shakespeare’s Venice. Mary Thomas Crane is Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English at Boston College. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (2001) and Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in SixteenthCentury England (1993). She is co-editor, with Henry Turner, of the Ashgate book series ‘‘Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity.’’ Heather Dubrow, who is the Reverend John D. Boyd, S.J., Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham University, has most recently authored The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (2008), Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (1999), and Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (1995). She is also the author of Forms and Hollows (2011), a poetry collection. 205

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206 Contributors

Lowell Gallagher is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (1991) and co-editor, with Frederick S. Roden and Patricia J. Smith, of Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives (2006) and, with Shankar Raman, of Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment, and Cognition (2010). David Glimp, Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is the author of Increase and Multiply: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England (2003) and co-editor of Arts of Calculation: Quantifying Thought in Early Modern Europe (2004). Donald Hedrick, Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at Kansas State University, has published widely on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, film, and cultural theory and is co-editor, with Bryan Reynolds, of Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000). He has held a Fulbright at Charles University in Prague and visiting professorships at Colgate and Cornell Universities, Amherst College, and the University of California at Irvine. Joan Pong Linton is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the author of The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (1998, 2007). Her current book project deals with the poetics and politics of the trickster in early modern England. Julian Yates, Associate Professor of English and Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware, is the author of Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2003), which was a finalist for the MLA First Book Prize. His current work focuses on the agency of plants and animals in the making of historical events and human dramas. Amelia Zurcher is the author of Seventeenth-Century English Romance: Allegory, Ethics, and Politics (2007) and the editor of Judith Man’s Epitome of the Historie of Polyarchus and Argenis (2003). She is Associate Professor of English and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Marquette University.

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Index

abjection, Herbert and, 119 accumulation: of capital, 113, 141; of praise, Herbert and, 113, 122–23; regime of, 192n5 action, Scaliger on, 76 Adorno, Theodor, 137 ‘‘Affliction (1)’’ (Herbert), 116–17 ‘‘Affliction (4)’’ (Herbert), 119 Agamben, Giorgio, 12, 45–46, 112, 140, 145, 173n36 agency: Donne and, 65; Herbert and, 127–28; narrative and, Donne and, 66–71; in still life paintings, 108 allegoresis, 5–6, 95 allegory: Auerbach on, 4–6; Cicero on, 6; naı¨ve, 33–34, 178n45; refusal of, Boyle and, 73, 75; Spenser and, 19, 33–37 Allen, William, 47 All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare), 93 ‘‘The Altar’’ (Herbert), 115, 127, 128f, 129 America, religion in, Herbert on, 123 Amyot, Jacques, 78–79 anachronism, term, 39 analogy: epic and, 81–82; Herbert and, 129–31; Spenser and, 33–34, 36 Anderson, Judith H., 1–18, 193n12; on Spenser, 19–20, 28 animals, in Shakespeare: as model of friendship, 133, 138–45; Yates on, 149–69 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 150–51

‘‘The Apparition’’ (Donne), 64, 69 Appian, 77–78, 186n12 Arcadia (Sidney), 73 Archer, John Michael, 150, 165, 200n6 Archimedes, 24 Aretina (MacKenzie), 78 Argenis (Barclay), 73–74 Aristotle: and commmensurability, 177n44; and enthymeme, 50; and essentialism, 22, 24, 36; and figuration, 6–7, 12; worldview of, end of, 20–25 Arrighi, Giovanni, 123–24 Artabanes, Boyle on, 74–78 Artegall, in Faerie Queene, 19–37 asides, and Cade character, 155–56 astronomy: shift in views on, 22; Spenser and, 20, 29–30 audience: and Henry VI, Part 2, 164; Herbert and, 129; Nashe on, 166–67; theatrical, and competition, 136–37 Auerbach, Erich, 2–6, 76–77 Augustine, 5, 203n41 aural figures, 2, 4, 8–9, 11; Dubrow on, 60, 69, 72 Bacon, Francis, 82 ‘‘The Baite’’ (Donne), 64 balance, Spenser on, 19–37 Barclay, John, 73–74 bare life, Agamben on, 112 Barthes, Roland, 40–42, 101, 181n34 Beaumont, Francis, 136 bee, Shakespeare on, 149, 158 belief: Herbert and, 112–31; humanism and, 115

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208 Index Bell, Ilona, 67 Benjamin, Walter, 53–54, 56, 125 Bennington, Geoffrey, 10 Berger, Harry, Jr., 91–111 Blake, William, 98–100 Blanchot, Maurice, 38, 41 ‘‘The Blossome’’ (Donne), 72 Blundeville, Thomas, 179n21 body of Christ: ownership of, Southwell on, 48–50; threefold, Southwell and, 51–56 Boehrer, Bruce, 139 Borella, Jean, 178n2 Bosch, Hieronymus, 42–43 Bosschart, Ambrosius, 102–3 Boyle, Robert, 34, 73 Boyle, Roger, 73–90 Brahe, Tycho, 25, 30 Britten, Benjamin, 69 butchery, Henry VI and, 150, 159, 164 butterflies, 95, 103–4 Cadava, Eduardo, 182n57 Cade, Jack, 149–69; character of, 151–56; scene with, 156–64; scholarship on, 199n4 calendrical reform, Spenser and, 25 ‘‘The Canonization’’ (Donne), 65 capitalism: accumulation and, 113, 141; Arrighi on, 123–24; Winstanley on, 118 Castiglione, Baldassare, 44 caterpillage, 91–111 caterpillar, term, 106 Catholic identity, issues in, 49 causality, principle of, 86 change: Aristotle and, 22; Spenser and, 19–20 Chapman, Alison, 26 Char, Rene´, 41 character: Luka´cs on, 88; Scaliger on, 76; Shakespeare and, 90, 151–56; Wroth and, 88 Charles II, king of Great Britain, 73

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Chartier, Roger, 150, 159–61 chiasmus, 55 Chong, Alan, 106–7 ‘‘Christes Final meale’’ (Southwell), 54 Christianity, and concept of figure, 4–5 Christ’s body: ownership of, Southwell on, 48–50; threefold, Southwell and, 51–56 Church, as body of Christ, 51–52 ‘‘The Church Militant,’’ 123 Cicero, 3, 6–7 Civil War (English), 85–86 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, earl of, 86 Claudel, Paul, 101 Colbert, Stephen, 93 collectivity, creature and, Herbert on, 117–19 color: grisaille, 43–44; Ignatian method and, 42–43 commensalism, 142 commercial aspect of theater, Hedrick on, 132–48 commmensurability, 177n44 companion species: as friendship model, 133, 138–45; relating, 152–53 competition, friendship and, 133–38 condition of discourse, 10, 173n22 ‘‘Confined Love’’ (Donne), 61 conformity, Southwell and, 49 contiguity, 82–83, 86 control: Herbert on, 116; narrative and, Donne and, 60–71; storytelling and, 59, 63 conversion, Herbert on, 123 cooperation, friendship and, 133–38 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 24, 26, 29 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 142 Counter-Reformation, Southwell and, 38–57 Crane, Mary Thomas, 19–37 creation care movement, 194n19 creature (term), 112, 118 creatureliness: Herbert and, 112–31; Milton on, 120–22

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Index 209 creep (term), 47–48 Crewe, Jonathan, 90 crickets, 107, 191n61 Cromwell, Richard, 73, 85 The Cry of a Stone (Trapnel), 118 cryonics, rhetoric of, 167 ‘‘The Curse’’ (Donne), 64–65 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 65 ‘‘The Dampe’’ (Donne), 65–66 Daston, Lorraine, 34, 178n47 Dear, Peter, 25, 176n32 death(s): Donne on, 63; Shakespeare on, 150–51; still life painting and, 91– 111; storytelling and, 59–60 de Certeau, Michel, 51–52 ‘‘The Dedication’’ (Herbert), 129–30 Dee, John, 20–21, 24–28, 31–33 de Heem, Jan Davidsz, 108 de Jongh, Eddy, 96 de Lubac, Henri, 51 de Man, Paul, 81 devotion: Herbert and, 112–31; Southwell and, 38–57 Digges, Leonard, 20, 26 Digges, Thomas, 20–21, 23, 25–26, 30 disnarrated, Donne and, 68–69 disposition: Amyot on, 78–79; Richardson and, 89; Scaliger on, 76–77 dogs, Haraway on, 152–53 Donne, John, 58–72; on instability, 21, 68 Doughtie, Edward, 69 Doyle, Richard, 167 Drake, Stillman, 176n26 ‘‘The Dreame’’ (Donne), 61 Dubrow, Heather, 58–72 Dutch still life painting, 91–111 dwell (term), 54–55 economics, of theater, Hedrick on, 132–48 Edwards, Thomas, 118 Eliot, T. S., 91, 93

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embarassment of riches, 92, 101–2; term, 188n7 emotions, figuration and, 7–8 ‘‘Employment (2)’’ (Herbert), 112, 116 enallage, Donne and, 64–65, 69 enargia, 6–9 energia, 6–9 entertainment: Hedrick on, 132–48; Nashe on, 165–68; term, 138 entertainment unconscious, term, 138, 198n19 enthymeme: Aristotle and, 50; Blundeville on, 179n21; Gallagher on, 44; and neuter, 44–50 environmentalism: Falstaff and, 140–41; Krisis and, 148; religion and, 194n19 epic, and romance, 81–82 episteme, 12, 36, 50–51 equality, and friendship, 143 equivocation, 49 eschatology: Donne and, 63; Paul and, 43 essentialist epistemology, 22, 24, 36 ethical approach, to Herbert, 114, 130 Euclid, Dee and, 27–28 ‘‘Evensong (1)’’ (Herbert), 119 experimentalists, 25, 31; Spenser and, 33–37 The Extravagant Shepherd (Sorel), 79 Faerie Queene (Spenser), 19–37 Falstaff: death of, 147; Hedrick on, 132–48 famine, Cade on, 163–64 ‘‘Farewell to Love’’ (Donne), 64 ‘‘A Feaver’’ (Donne), 64, 69 Fielding, Henry, 90 figuration, 1–18; Boyle and, 73–90; chiastic, 55; Donne and, 58–72; Herbert and, 112–31; Jakobson on, 79–80; Shakespeare and, 132–69; Southwell and, 38–57; Spenser and, 19–37; still life painting and, 91–111; theorizing, 6–12

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210 Index figure: Lyotard on, 151–52; word-concept, 1–6; work of, Auerbach on, 77 ‘‘The First Anniversary’’ (Donne), 21 Fish, Stanley, 63, 127, 194n23 ‘‘The Flea’’ (Donne), 63, 67 Fleming, Juliet, 196n39 Fletcher, Angus, 81 floral symbolism: Blake and, 98–100; Milton and, 122; Taylor on, 96–97 folding approach, 150–51; and Cade, 151–56 form: Lyotard on, 10–11; narrative and, Donne and, 58–60 formalism, 1, 58 Foucault, Michel, 12, 36, 50–51 Freud, Sigmund, 10 friendship, in Shakespeare, 132–48; animal companion model of, 133, 138–45; competition-cooperation model of, 133–38 ‘‘The Funerall’’ (Donne), 61 futurity, Donne and, 64–65, 67–68 Galen, 77 Galileo, 24, 34 Gallagher, Lowell, 38–57 Galyon, Linda, 9 gambling, and Shakespearean theater, 136 Gaston, Paul, 69 Gentner, Dedre, 34 Gerard, John, 143–44 Giant, Spenser on, 19–37 ‘‘Giddiness’’ (Herbert), 119 Glimp, David, 112–31 Goldgar, Anne, 93, 97–98 Gombrich, Ernst, 187n1 Goodman, Dogrey, 119–20 Graham, Don, 67 grasshoppers, 107, 191n61 ‘‘Gratefulness’’ (Herbert), 122–23 gravity, science of, 23–24, 30–33 Greenblatt, Stephen, 163 grisaille, 43–44

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ground-plot, 3, 8, 11 Guibbory, Achsah, 130, 183n8 Gurr, Andrew, 134, 166 Hadden, Richard W., 175n15, 176n22, 177n44 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 132, 149–51 Hammill, Graham, 56–57 Hanssen, Beatrice, 126 Haraway, Donna, 152–53 Hariot, Thomas, 21, 24, 27 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 196n39 Hedrick, Donald, 132–48 Hegel, G. W. F., 53 Helgerson, Richard, 135–36 Henry IV, Part 1 (Shakespeare), 133, 138, 140, 145 Henry IV, Part 2 (Shakespeare), 139–40, 143–44, 146 Henry V (Shakespeare), 147 Henry VI, Part II (Shakespeare), 149–69 Henslowe, Philip, 134, 166 Herbert, George, 112–31 Herbert, Percy, 74, 78, 83 Hester, Thomas, 68 historic index, of images, Benjamin on, 53 history: Boyle on, 74–78; fiction and, 83; Herbert and, 124; neuter and, 39; revisionist, 85–86 Hochstrasser, Julie Berger, 93, 98 Hoefnagel, Joris, 94–95, 94f Hooker, Richard, 115 Horace, 6 humanism: and belief, 115; and scientific revolution, 20–21; Southwell and, 41, 47 Hutchinson, Keith, 25 hypocrisy, Herbert and, 120 iconography: Berger on, 91–111; de Jongh on, 96; term, 91 identification: Boyle and, 73–90; issues with, 86–90

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Index 211 if (term), Donne and, 68 Ignatian method, 41–43, 179n13; Barthes on, 41–42, 181n34; and neuter, 44–50 image(s), 1; historic index of, Benjamin on, 53; Lyotard on, 10–11 imagination, 1 immobility, Falstaff and, 145–48 Incarnation, 46–47 inclination: Boyle and, 186n29; Montaigne on, 84 ‘‘The Indifferent’’ (Donne), 61–62, 69, 72 Innocent IV, pope, 161 insects, in still life paintings, 91–111 instability: Cade and, 162; Donne and, 21, 68; fiction and, 83; Herbert and, 119. See also stability Iovan, Sarah, 70 Jakobson, Roman, 11, 79–80 Jameson, Fredric, 198n19 The Jew of Malta (Marlowe), 65 Jeziorsky, Michael, 34 ‘‘Josephes Amazement’’ (Southwell), 44 Justice, Steven, 161 Kafka, Franz, 125 kairos: Agamben on, 45–46; and body of Christ, 51; Southwell and, 45–47, 52–53 Kapoor, Anish, 67 Kemp, Will, 135 Kentish Uprising, 149–50 Kisch, Bruno, 178n50 The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont), 136 Knutson, Roslyn, 134 Kubrick, Stanley, 77 Kuhn, Thomas, 11, 21, 23, 26 labor, Falstaff and, 138, 140, 145–48 Lacan, Jacques, 11 Lafargue, Paul, 147–48

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lamb, Shakespeare on, 149, 152, 158, 160 Latour, Bruno, 155 laziness: Falstaff and, 145–48; Lafargue on, 147–48 Lefebvre, Henri, 141 legal system, Donne and, 62 Leppert, Richard, 93 Linton, Joan Pong, 1–18 lives, Amyot on, 78–79 Longinus, 7–8, 11 ‘‘Love (III)’’ (Donne), 64 ‘‘Love Unknown’’ (Herbert), 122 ‘‘Loves Alchymie’’ (Donne), 65 Lucretius, 2–3 Luka´cs, Georg, 88 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 56–57, 112–13 Luther, Martin, 115 Lydon, Mary, 11 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 9–11, 151 lyric, Donne and, 60, 62, 69–70, 72 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 150–51 Macdonald, Russ, 154 MacIlmaine, Roland, 44 MacKenzie, George, 78 Manifesto against Labour (Krisis), 148 Margolin, Uri, 69 Marin, Louis, 159 market forces, Hedrick on, 132–48 Marlowe, Christopher, 65, 77 Marotti, Arthur F., 67 mathematics, Spenser and, 21, 25–28 matrix, Lyotard on, 10–11 McCanles, Michael, 195n31 McElheny, Josiah, 67 McGuffin: term, 92–93; vanitas as, 92–98 McKeon, Michael, 83 meaning, Eliot on, 93 meditation: on the creature, 112, 126; Ignatian method, 41–50, 173n13, 181n34 Merian, Maria Sybylla, 103–6, 105f

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212 Index The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare), 138–39, 142, 145 metaphor: Aristotle on, 7; Auerbach and, 5–6; Cicero on, 6; Jakobson on, 79–80; Quintilian and, 4; refusal of, Boyle and, 73–90; Ricoeur on, 1 metaphoric narrative, 80–81 metaplasm, 152–54; term, 152 metonymic narrative, 80–81, 86 metonymy: Boyle and, 73–90; Jakobson on, 79–80; Shakespeare and, 159 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 147 Mignon, Abraham, 108–9 Milbank, John, 182n50 Mildmay, Walter, 47 Milton, John, 120–22 Montaigne, Michel de, 84, 140, 143 morality: balance and, 34; Schama on, 92 More, Henry, 126 More, Thomas, 159–60 mourning, storytelling and, 59 mutilating function, of enthymeme, 50 mutualism, 142 mystic (term), 51–52 naı¨ve allegory, 33–34, 178n45 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1 narratio, Donne and, 62 narrative: Boyle and, 73–90; Donne and, 58–72; metaphoric, 80–81 narrativity, elements of, 61 Nashe, Thomas, 136, 151, 165–68, 203n41 ‘‘The Nativity of Christ’’ (Southwell), 40, 45, 48, 52 nature, Falstaff and, 133, 138–45 nature morte, 100–1 nature mourant, 101–6; term, 101 neuter, 12; Barthes on, 40–41; Blanchot on, 38, 41; Southwell on, 38–57; term, 38, 40

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Nicholas of Cusa, 24–26, 31 North, Thomas, 78 Oakes, Margaret, 195n36 ‘‘Of the Blessed sacrament of the Aulter’’ (Southwell), 40 ontology, Herbert and, 125 Osler, Margaret, 22 Othello (Shakespeare), 150–51 painting, Berger on, 91–111 Pamela (Richardson), 89–90 paradigm, 11–12 ‘‘Paradise’’ (Herbert), 116, 117f Paradise Lost (Milton), 120–22 parasite (term), 141–42, 202n36 parasitology, Falstaff and, 132–48 Parker, Patricia, 200n6 Parthenissa (Boyle), 73–90 pathos, Aristotle on, 7 Patterson, Annabel, 19, 28 Paul, saint: on body of Christ, 54–55; on reversals, 47; on time, 43, 45 Peasant’s Revolt, 161–62 ‘‘Perirrhanterium’’ (Herbert), 119 Phelan, James, 63 Pinney, Christopher, 152 planets, orbits of, irregularities in, 21, 24 plot: Boyle and, 84; Donne and, 65; Scaliger on, 76 Plutarch, 75, 77–79, 186n12 ‘‘Poema de Assumptione B. V. M.’’ (Southwell), 48 poetry: Crane on, 37; Herbert and, 112–31; Sidney on, 8–9, 11; Southwell and, 38–57; Spenser and, 19–37 politics: Herbert and, 112–13, 115–31; Shakespeare and, 149–69; theory on, 12 porcupines, 157, 201n21 poststructuralism: on figuration, 11–12; Shakespeare and, 133; and storytelling, 59–60 potentiality, 12, 145–46, 152

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Index 213 Richard II (Shakespeare), 142 Richards, I. A., 5 Richardson, Samuel, 89–90 Ricoeur, Paul, 1 The Right to Be Lazy (Lafargue), 147–48 Robinson, Forrest G., 3 roemer vase, 102; term, 190n48 romance: Boyle and, 73–90; and epic, 81–82; and history, 83 Rose, Paul Lawrence, 176n26 Ross, Andrew, 140, 148 Rossif, Frederic, 151

power: narrative and, Donne and, 60–71; storytelling and, 63. See also sovereign power ‘‘Praise (2)’’ (Herbert), 122 ‘‘Praise (3)’’ (Herbert), 123 presence, Southwell and, 46, 54 priest, analogy of, Herbert and, 129–31 Prince, Gerald, 68 The Princess Cloria (Herbert), 74, 78, 83 projectiles, physics of, 21, 24 property rights: Greenblatt on, 163; Winstanley on, 118 ‘‘Providence’’ (Herbert), 124–27, 129– 30, 195n31 psalms: 148, 113–14; congregational singing of, 70; Sidney translation of, 70–71 Ptolemy, 22, 29 Puck, 147 Pugliatti, Paola, 150 Puttenham, George, 8–9, 11, 115 Quint, David, 82 Quintilian, 2–4, 7–9 Rackin, Phyllis, 160, 163 Ramus, Peter, 50–51 Readings, Bill, 173n22 rebellions: Shakespeare on, 149–69; targets of, 161–62 Recorde, Robert, 21 Reformation, Southwell and, 38–57 rehearsals, in Shakespearean theater, 136, 197n14 religion: Dee and, 32; Donne and, 63; and environmentalism, 194n19; Herbert and, 112–31; Southwell and, 38–57; Spenser and, 35; term, 57 ‘‘The Relique’’ (Donne), 61, 64–65 Renn, Jurgen, 23 renunciation, Herbert on, 116 reversion (term), 87 rhetorical figure, 3 rhetorical syllogism. See enthymeme

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sack, Falstaff on, 143–45 sacramental poetics: Southwell and, 38–57; term, 38 Santner, Eric L., 193n14 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 79 Saverij, Roelant, 107 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 76, 84 Schama, Simon, 92, 101–2 sche¯ma, 2, 4–5 Schmitt, Carl, 12, 113 science: Haraway on, 153; Shakespeare and, 142–43; Spenser on, 19–37 Scientific Revolution: and intelligibility, 25; Spenser and, 19–37 sculpture, Dubrow on, 67 Segal, Sam, 95 self, Herbert and, 127–28 self-interest, 78 Serres, Michel, 146, 201n17, 202n36 Shakespeare, William: All’s Well that Ends Well, 93; characters of, as virtual persons, 90; Cymbeline, 65; Hedrick on, 132–48; The Tempest, 67; Yates on, 149–69 Shamela (Fielding), 90 Shannon, Laurie, 132, 143, 147 Shapin, Steven, 21 Shepheardes Calender (Spenser), 26 Shepherd, Geoffrey, 3 ‘‘The Sick Rose’’ (Blake), 98–100

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214 Index Sidney, Phillip: Arcadia, 73; on fiction, 84; on ground-plot, 3, 11–12; on poetry, 8–9, 11; psalms of, 70–71 simulation, Falstaff and, 145 Sinibaldo dei Fieschi, 161 ‘‘Sins Round’’ (Herbert), 119 skin, Yates on, 149–69 snails, in still life paintings, 94–95, 94f song (term), Donne and, 69 ‘‘Song’’ (Donne), 61, 66, 68 Songs and Sonets (Donne), 58–72 Sorel, Charles, 79 sovereign power: Agamben on, 173n36; Herbert and, 112–13, 115–31; Schmitt on, 12 Spartacus, Boyle on, 75–78, 85–87 speech, Donne and, 65 Spenser, Edmund, 19–37; scientific knowledge of, 25–28 sportification (term), 137 stability: Copernicus and, 26–27; and elements, 30–31; Spenser and, 19– 20. See also instability Sterling, Charles, 100 Stern, Tiffany, 197n14 still life painting, 91–111; term, 100 story (term), 66–67 storytelling: Donne and, 58–72; and power, 63 ‘‘St Peters Complaynt’’ (Southwell), 44 structuralism, and storytelling, 59–60 subjectivity, Herbert and, 120 subparasite figure, 141 Sweeney, Anne, 47–49, 179n13 Tamburlaine (Marlowe), 77 Targoff, Ramie, 120, 130, 196n40 Taylor, Paul, 96–97, 106 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 67 The Temple (Herbert), 112–31 Tertullian, 4–5 theater: Hedrick on, 132–48; Nashe on, 165–68 theology, Herbert and, 112–31

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Theophania (anonymous), 74 Thomas, Keith, 195n30 tick, as parasite, 144–45 time: Latour on, 155; Paul on, 43; Southwell and, 45–47, 56; utopia and, 160; Yates on, 154 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 142 Todd, Kim, 108–9 Todorov, Tzvetan, 1, 88 tool metaphor, 39–40 ‘‘To the Reader’’ (Southwell), 44 trade, Dutch and, Hochstrasser on, 98 tragedy (term), 150 Traherne, Thomas, 195n33 transmutation, chemical, 21, 24 transubstantiation, 54 Trapnel, Anna, 118 ‘‘Triple Foole’’ (Donne), 67, 69–70 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 144–45 tropes, versus figures, 3, 5 tulipmania, 97–98 Tyler, Wat, 149 ‘‘Upon the Translation of the Psalms . . .’’ (Donne), 70–71 Urania (Wroth), 73–74, 88 Urizen, Blake on, 100, 190n38 Utopia (More), 159–60 ‘‘A Valediction: of the Booke’’ (Donne), 63, 65 van der Ast, Balthasar, 107–8 vanitas paintings: Berger on, 91–111; Goldgar on, 97–98; Hochstrasser on, 98; Merian and, 104; term, 92 Vanitas Vanitatum (Webster), 110 Vendler, Helen, 64 Vickers, Brian, 82 vine image, Falstaff on, 143–44 violence: in Henry IV, Part 2, 146; in Henry VI, Part 2, 150, 159–62, 164; in still life paintings, 106–11; Winstanley on, 118

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Index 215 Virgil, 82, 140 Vitruvius, 3 von Uexku¨ll, Jakob, 144 Warren, Roger, 155–56, 160 Weber, Max, 92 Webster, John, 110 weight, science of, 23–24, 30–33 Weimann, Robert, 135 White, Hayden, 11 Whitney, Geffrey, 143 Winstanley, Gerrard, 118 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 142–43 Wood, Christopher, 91

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worms, Blake and, 98–100 writing, Cade and, 150, 158–61 writing machine: Cade and, 159, 161; More and, 160; term, 150, 200n8 Wroth, Mary, 73–74, 88 Yachnin, Paul, 203n41 Yates, Frances, 25, 177n33 Yates, Julian, 128, 149–69 Young, bishop, 26 ˇ izˇek, Slavoj, 193n10 Z Zurcher, Amelia, 73–90

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