Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England 075460425X, 9780754604259

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Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modern period. Ashgate’s new series of interdisciplinary and comparative studies, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, takes up this challenge, reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Submissions of single-author studies and edited collections will be considered. Titles in the series include: The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre Barbara Stephenson Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World Edited by Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe Edited by Helen Hills Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe Edited by Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam Staging Slander and Gender in Early Modern England Ina Habermann ‘Shall She Famish Then?’ Female Food Refusal in Early Modern England Nancy A. Gutierrez The Medici Women Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence Natalie R. Tomas

Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England Edited by DOUGLAS A. BROOKS Texas A&M University, USA

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Douglas A. Brooks 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Douglas A. Brooks has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Printing and parenting in early modern England. – (Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism 2. Printing – England – History – 16th century 3. Books – England – History – 16th century 4. Printing – England – History – 17th century 5. Books – England – History – 17th century 6. Metaphor in literature 7. Parenthood in literature 8. England – Intellectual life – 16th century 9. England – Intellectual life – 17th century I. Brooks, Douglas A. 820.9´003 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Printing and parenting in early modern England / edited by Douglas A. Brooks p. cm—(Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Women and literature—England—History—16th century. 3. Women and literature—England—History—17th century. 4. Parenting—England—History—16th century. 5. Parenting—England—History—17th century. 6. Printing—England—History—16th century. 7. Printing—England—History—17th century. 8. Parent and child in literature. I. Brooks, Douglas A. II. Series. PR424.P75 2003 820.9´352042—dc21 200305601 iSBN 9780754604259 (hbk)

For Victoria

A bone, a pebble, a ramskin; chip them, chap them, cut them up allways; leave them to terracook in the muttheringpot; and Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in print. Till ye finally (Though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

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Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Douglas A. Brooks

ix xiii xvii 1

Part I

Reproductive Rhetorics

1

Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes Margreta de Grazia

29

2

Meaning, ‘Seeing’, Printing Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson

59

Part II Ink and Kin 3

4

5

A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body Katharine Eisaman Maus Ben Jonson’s Branded Thumb and the Imprint of Textual Paternity Lynne Dickson Bruckner

89

109

All Father: Ben Jonson and the Psychodynamics of Authorship 131 David Lee Miller

Part III Issues of the Book Trade 6

7

The Bastard Art: Woodcut Illustration in Sixteenth-Century England James A. Knapp

151

Promiscuous Textualities: The Nashe-Harvey Controversy and the Unnatural Productions of Print Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast

173

viii

CONTENTS

8

The Birth of Advertising Michael Baird Saenger

9

Printing Bastards: Monstrous Birth Broadsides in Early Modern England Aaron W. Kitch

10

‘Red Incke’: Reading the Bleeding on the Early Modern Page Bianca F.C. Calabresi

197

221 237

Part IV Parental Authorities 11

12

13

Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s A Mirror for Magistrates Stephen Orgel

267

Checking the Father: Anxious Paternity and Jacobean Press Censorship Cyndia Susan Clegg

291

Pater patriae: James I and the Imprint of Prerogative Howard Marchitello

303

Part V Textual Legacies 14

How Many Children Had Alice Walker? Laurie E. Maguire

15

Mothers and Authors: Johnson v. Calvert and the New Children of Our Imagination Mark Rose

16

327

351

In Locus Parentis Judith Roof

371

Afterword Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth

395

Bibliography Index

403 429

List of Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 6.1 6.2 6.3

7.1 7.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1

Female figure 1; C. Estienne, La Disséction des parties du corps humain (1546), by permission of The British Library Female figure 2; C. Estienne, La Disséction des parties du corps humain (1546), by permission of The British Library Organs of generation; A. Vesalius, Vivae imagines partium corporis humani (1566), copyright British Museum Gutenberg with punch; A. Thevet, Vies et portraits des hommes illustres (1587), by permission of The British Library Diagram of type; L.A. Legros and J.C. Grant, Typographical Typing Surfaces (1916) Lettered man; G . Tory, Champ Fleury (1529), by permission of The British Library Printing-house; J. van der Straet, Nova reperta (1600), copyright British Museum Birthing-place; L. Dolce, Transformationi d’Ovido (1555), by permission of The British Library Early Caxton woodcut; Vincent de Beauvais, The Myrrour of the World (1481), by permission of The Morgan Library Engraving from Orlando Furioso; J. Harington, Orlando Furioso in English heroical verse (1591), by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library Woodcut of Brute’s accidental killing of his father; R. Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), from the Special Collections Department, University of Pittsburgh Library System Woodcut of Thomas Nashe; G. Harvey, The Trimming of Thomas Nashe (1597), by permission of The British Library The Picture of Gabriel Harvey; T. Nashe, Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596), by permission of The British Library The true description of two monsterous children (c. 1560) The true reporte of the forme and shape of a monstrous childe (c. 1560) The forme and shape of a monstrous childe borne (c. 1560) Woodcut of an annual guide to the body; T. Buckminster, A Newe Almanacke and Prognostication for the yere of Lorde God M.D. LXXI …. (1571), by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

40 41 45 46 48 49 50 51 153 156

167 176 186 222 223 224

241

x 10.2

10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 11.9 11.10 11.11 11.12 11.13 11.14 11.15 11.16 11.17 11.18

LIST OF FIGURES

Title page; Thomas Brewer, The Bloudy Mother or the most inhumane murthers, committed by Iane Hattersley, vpon diuers infants …. (1610), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University Title Page; T. Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (1607), by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library Title Page; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

249 252 268 269 270 270 271 271 272 272 273 273 274 276 276 277 277 278 278 280

LIST OF FIGURES

11.19 11.20 11.21 11.22 11.23 11.24 11.25 11.26 11.27 11.28 11.29 11.30 11.31 11.32

Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

xi 280 281 281 281 282 282 283 283 283 285 285 286 286 287

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Notes on Contributors Douglas A. Brooks is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and the General Editor of Shakespeare Yearbook. He is the author of From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He is completing a book entitled ‘In Such a Questionable Shape’: The Imprint of Paternity in Early Modern England. Lynne Dickson Bruckner is Associate Professor of English at Chatham College in Pittsburgh, PA. She has published essays on Chaucer, Sidney, and other topics. Bianca F.C. Calabresi is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. Her essay is part of a forthcoming book entitled Shakespeare by Accident: The Unseemly Typographies of Early Modern Drama. Cyndia Susan Clegg is Distinguished Professor of English in the Humanities Division at Pepperdine University. She has written a number of books including Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Margreta de Grazia is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Clarendon Press, 1991), and co-editor (with Stanley Wells) of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2002). She is currently writing a book on Hamlet and the periodization of the early modern. Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth is Assistant Professor of English at Allegheny College. She has published essays on female textual and medical communities and is the author of The Reproductive Unconscious in Medieval and Early Modern England (Routledge, 2003). Aaron W. Kitch is Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College. He has published essays on renaissance drama and is completing a book that traces the mutual influence of printing and drama as cultural institutions in early modern England.

xiv

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

James A. Knapp is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books (Ashgate, 2003). Laurie E. Maguire is Tutorial Fellow of English at Magdalen College, Oxford and a Lecturer in English at Oxford University. Her books include Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Textual Formations and Reformations (University of Delaware Press, 1999), and Studying Shakespeare: A Guide to the Plays (Blackwell, 2003). Howard Marchitello is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England: Browne’s Skull and Other Histories (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and the editor of What Happens to History (Routledge, 2001). Katharine Eisaman Maus is Professor of English at University of Virginia. Her books include Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton University Press, 1984) and Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1995). She is an editor of the Norton Shakespeare and the Norton English Renaissance Drama. David Lee Miller is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. His books include The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1988) and Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father’s Witness (Cornell University Press, 2003). Stephen Orgel is Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities at Stanford University and the General Editor of the Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture Series at Cambridge University Press. His many books include The Illusion of Power (University of California Press, 1975), Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Imagining Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Wooster. She is the author of Renaissance Fantasies: The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction (Kent State University Press, 2001) and is currently at work on a new book entitled Gossip, Violence, and the Politics of Print: Early Modern Abuse Pamphlets.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xv

Judith Roof is Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her books include Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change (Routledge, 1996); Come As You Are: Narrative and Sexuality (Columbia University Press, 1996), and A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (Columbia University Press, 1991). . Mark Rose is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Shakespearean Design (Harvard University Press, 1972), Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Harvard University Press, 1981), and Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 1993). Michael Baird Saenger is Assistant Professor of English at Southwestern University. He has published articles in various journals, including Studies in Philology and James Joyce Quarterly. Saenger is completing a book entitled The Form of the Frame: Textual Engagements and the Genres of Liminality in the English Renaissance. Ann Thompson is Professor of English at King’s College London, and has published extensively on Shakespeare. She has edited The Taming of the Shrew (Cambridge University Press, 1984) and is currently co-editing Hamlet with Neil Taylor for the Arden Shakespeare (third series) of which she is also a General Editor. She is General Editor of the Routledge Feminist Readings of Shakespeare series. John O. Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Thames Valley University. In addition to co-authored work with Ann Thompson, he has edited Monty Python: Complete and Utter Theory of the Grotesque (British Film Institute, 1974) and co-edited (with Manuel Alvarado and Antony Easthope respectively), The Media Reader (Indiana University Press, 1990) and Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory (University of Toronto Press, 1991).

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Acknowledgements Like nearly all human births before the advent of cloning technologies, this book had two parents, Erika Gaffney at Ashgate Publishing, and myself. As is often the case in these ‘matters’, I, the putative father, actually had something very different in mind prior to conception: a proposed special session for the 1999 Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association in Chicago. Erika saw a call-for-papers I had circulated via the [email protected] website and emailed me to suggest that the session topic, ‘Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England,’ might make for an interesting essay collection. Thus, this book, which examines some of the cultural and historical intersections between textual and sexual reproduction, was – appropriately enough in the digital age – conceived on-line. During the volume’s rather protracted three-year gestation period, Erika remained a loyal and steadfast partner. When she went on maternity leave (prospective readers be warned!) during the final stages of the book’s editing and production, she passed this little creation of ours onto Ann Donahue. Ann has proven to be a very capable and caring surrogate mother. As is generally true with essay collections, a DNA test of this one would reveal a rich and varied ancestry, and I am most grateful to all of the scholars who patiently nurtured their contributions through two lengthy periods of intense pre-natal revision. Margreta de Grazia’s brilliant work on printing and parenting initially put me in the mood, if you will, and she has been an enthusiastic supporter of this project from the beginning. Margreta, Cyndia Susan Clegg, David Lee Miller, and Stephen Orgel presented superb papers at that Chicago MLA session three years ago and so were present at the originary scene of the paternal crime. I am grateful for their continued presence. Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth graciously agreed on very short notice to write the afterword. I also want to thank Flora Alice Rose – and her author(s), Gayle DeLong and Jonathan Rose – for letting me use her publication announcement. Anonymous readers made many helpful suggestions. Susanna Finnell and Anne Lake Prescott have been great believers in this project. Two undergraduate research assistants provided invaluable assistance at crucial points in this project. Erin Fleming helped me compile the bibliography, and Kathryn Krol helped me put the final manuscript into proper digital shape for publication. Funding for their work was generously provided by the Texas A&M University Research Opportunity Program, the Texas A&M Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activities, and The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. Versions of the following essays appeared in print previously: Mark Rose, ‘Mothers and Authors: Johnson v. Calvert and the New Children of Our

xviii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Imaginations’, in Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 613–33; David Lee Miller, ‘All Father: Ben Jonson and the Psychodynamics of Authorship’, in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, eds Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 233–60; Margreta de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Terence Hawkes (New York: Routledge, 1996), 63–94; Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson, ‘Meaning, ‘Seeing,’ and Printing’, in Shakespeare, Meaning & Metaphor (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 163–206; Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘A Womb of his Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 266–88. I am grateful for permission to reprint that material here. Fate determined that my parents would only have thirteen years to revise and correct their text after publication. Fortunately, during the past thirteen years Victoria Rosner has done a great deal to make me more legible and readerfriendly. Accordingly, this book is dedicated to her.

Introduction Douglas A. Brooks In the beginning, God created the alphabet! Only then were heaven and earth created. Sefer Yetsira The slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier changes the whole course of history by modifying the moorings that anchor his being. Jacques Lacan, ‘Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’ The generation machine is still sweet between my thighs, but for a long time I haven’t felt the sweetness of a letter between my eyes. Yehuda Amichai, ‘To Speak About Changes Was to Speak Love’ Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he made Hamlet say: ‘My tablets! quick, my tablets! ‘Tis meet that I put it down, ‘etc’.’ Bram Stoker, Dracula

An electronic mail message posted recently to the listserve for SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) under the subject heading, ‘Second Edition’, contained the following announcement: NEW PUBLICATION AUTHOR(S): Gayle DeLong, with minor editorial assistance from Jonathan Rose TITLE: Flora Alice Rose PUBLISHER: Morristown Memorial Hospital DATE: January 14, 2000, 4:03 p.m. DIMENSIONS: 6 pounds, 9 ounces PRICE: Priceless

Sent by the father/editorial assistant of the daughter/book, the announcement spawned a number of responses written by delighted well-wishers from among the more than 1,000 booksellers, librarians, and historians of the material book who comprise SHARP’s membership. No concern whatsoever was voiced over the decision to employ a conceit in which childbirth and the publishing industry were seamlessly conflated. Indeed, several respondents gleefully pushed the conceit nearly to the point of catachrestic collapse. In one message, for example, posted under the subject heading, ‘Second Edition: Lack of ISBN’, the writer observed: ‘Typical! Another small press issuing a new publication without an ISBN. That’s “International Standard Baby Number”, of course’. Certainly

2

PRINTING AND PARENTING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

the announcement, and the many responses it generated, is wholly appropriate for a readership deeply interested in the material production, circulation, and use of books, and perhaps explains why not one respondent questioned or commented on the equation of a new-born baby with a newly published book. And yet the conceptual, rhetorical, and metaphorical links between procreation and authorship, between reproduction and publication, have a long history; in fact, those links may well be the very foundation of history itself. The essays collected in this volume bring into focus a remarkably important and complex phase of this long history. They persuasively demonstrate that during the early modern period the awkward, incomplete transition from manuscript to print brought on by the invention of the printing press temporarily exposed and disturbed the epistemic foundations of English culture. As a result of this cultural upheaval, the discursive field of parenting was profoundly transformed so that many important conceptual systems relating to gender, sexuality, human reproduction, legitimacy, maternity, kinship, paternity, dynasty, inheritance, and patriarchal authority came to be grounded in a range of anxieties and concerns directly linked to an emergent publishing industry and book trade. In other words, neither Shakespeare nor his contemporaries would have found anything at all odd about the birth announcement quoted at the outset, except of course the infant/book’s date of birth/publication. Rather, for more than two centuries after Johann Gutenberg first joined the technology of movable type to that of the wine-press, issues related to human reproduction, parentage, and child-bearing were often articulated in the language of the book trade. Nor, for that matter, was it easy to think or talk about authorship, printing, or publication in the same period without recourse to the language of parenting. Referring to the emergence of the early modern author function, Robert Weiman observes ‘[t]he ties between product and producer had by this stage become so close and personal that the process of appropriation was often sanctioned by metaphors of procreation … the political economy of the product (the text in the marketplace, the book as a unit of exchange-value) could be almost obliterated in the biological metaphor of procreation, which suggested the process of “bringing forth one’s own”’.1 The essays in this collection not only explore why procreative metaphors were so spectacularly suitable for articulating a range of emergent relations within a book trade radically transformed by the invention of movable type, but also make it clear that these patterns of expression have cultural and historical significance that goes well beyond the strategic deployment of a set of metaphors by a few savvy publishers and booksellers. In her essay, Katharine Eisaman Maus usefully characterizes such patterns as ‘largely subphilosophical, suggesting habits of mind rather than carefully articulated systems of thought’. As a whole, then, this collection is deeply committed to sorting out what such mental habits can tell us about the culture in which they were formed.

INTRODUCTION

3

One thing seems certain: after 1450, when as Lucien Febvre puts it, ‘some rather unusual “manuscripts” made their appearance in the northern regions of Western Europe’,2 two very distinct discourses – of kin and ink, of prince and prints, of parenting and printing – began to merge. There were precedents for this merger, many of which Margreta de Grazia examines closely in her essay; nevertheless, the invention of printing abruptly revived, energized, and transformed whatever prior links between writing technologies and human reproduction had appeared during comparable earlier periods of cultural upheaval. Sons who did not resemble their fathers became ‘badly printed’; books that were ineptly printed or published without authorial consent became ‘bastards’; conception, understood principally as the act of imprinting a moist female womb, came to be suspiciously similar to the printing house process by which a dampened sheet of paper received letters from inked type. De Grazia usefully characterizes this sudden confluence of printing and parenting, noting: In the English Renaissance, comparisons of mechanical and sexual reproduction, imprints and children seem to multiply, as if the new technology of the printing press revitalized the ancient trope. A cluster of infantilizing tropes anticipates the nineteenth-century term for early printed books, incunabula (from cunabula, cradle). The textual imprint as child recurs in preliminaries to early modern books, putting into play the semantics shared by biological and textual reproduction: of issue, generation, copying, duplication, multiplying, engraving and gravidity; of textual and sexual inscriptions that survive the grave through enduring ideas and successive children; of two types of lines, scripted and genealogical which promise to extend the parent/author beyond death.

It is tempting, no doubt, to dismiss the sudden proliferation of such comparisons as an early modern semantic trend of sorts, but in fact many of the essays gathered here convincingly argue that much more was involved than merely a kind of metaphorical cross-pollination between two different species of discourse. In her essay, Cyndia Susan Clegg succinctly points to some of the larger issues that may have been at stake in the coupling of textual and sexual reproduction in the period: From time out of mind, the inevitable consequence of the anxiety unruly women provoke in men has been female oppression. Male anxiety about the legitimacy of children grounds virtually all the legal, social, and cultural controls patriarchy has imposed on female sexuality … . In England in the latter half of the sixteenth century, printing joined with a wide array of cultural and political events to strain traditional patriarchy’s seams – not the least of which included the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of English nationalism under a female monarch. And while western patriarchy possessed 6000 years of experience in trying to control unruly women, English cultural institutions – themselves in some turmoil by 1600 – proved incapable of imposing any coherent restraints on the troubled and troubling entities that were challenging its patriarchal structures.

4

PRINTING AND PARENTING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

What Clegg’s remarks suggest is that the cultural, ideological, legal, and political impacts of printing and parenting’s merger were enormous; the repercussions (as essays in this volume by Mark Rose and Judith Roof make clear) can still be felt even now as we are undergoing a new – though uncannily familiar – set of transformations ushered in by the advent of digital technology. The essays in this collection examine in great detail a wide spectrum of literary, historical, and cultural artifacts produced during the convergence of human and mechanical reproduction, of parenting and printing, in early modern England. In doing so, they necessarily bring together two of the most vital critical paradigms available to scholars in the humanities today: gender studies and history of the book. Not only does this uncommon bit of interdisciplinarity generate fresh and exciting insights into the literary and cultural production of the early modern period, it also greatly enriches the two critical paradigms themselves. Moreover, it may well be the case that this collection has something very important to say about what ought to concern us in our own episteme during this very new – yet alltoo-precedented – phase of technological transition. ••• In his elegant eulogy for reading in the age of electronic media, Sven Birkerts worries that ‘[t]he stable hierarchies of the printed page … are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly minted circuits’.3 Similarly, media critic Neil Postman warns that our incautious embrace of computer technology will alter the metaphors we live by and disturb the epistemic foundations of culture.4 Alarmist reactions to new forms of writing technology are, of course, not new; they have been voiced with considerable frequency since the mythical Egyptian King Thamus admonished Theuth (the storied inventor of writing) that hieroglyphics would make men forgetful.5 Yet, the anxieties contemporary societies are experiencing as they grope their way through the initial decades of the digital era were most clearly articulated and amply documented during the first two centuries of print in Europe. Indeed, one finds in a wide range of texts published during this period expressions of concern not unlike those of Birkerts, Postman, and other contemporary digital doomsayers. Where Birkerts, for example, frets about the threat ‘the rush of impulses’ generated by computers poses to print’s ‘stable hierarchies’, Filippo di Strata concisely expresses a comparable concern when he asserts ‘Est Virgo Hec Penna: Meretrix Est Stampificata’ (The Pen is a virgin, the printing press a whore).6 In her essay, Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast sheds some light on this infamous assertion: Indeed one reason that print is so closely associated with prostitution (male or female) is that, like prostitution, it depends on a large volume of anonymous clients and on the potential for financial reward; certainly the sheer volume of texts produced by printing presses smacks of promiscuity.

INTRODUCTION

5

This is why the pamphleteers move so easily from accusations of prostitution to accusations of overwhelming booksellers with printed sheets. Both activities, for one thing, threaten the intellectual community by trivializing it.

Like ‘proper’ women in a patriarchal society, the pen was essentially housebound; the press, on the other hand, appeared in public much too often for those who may have felt threatened by its increasingly frequent broadcasts. Gordon Williams notes, ‘print demystified, weakening élite privilege of access and therefore the élite themselves, particularly as it encouraged translation. It was a bawd presiding over the rape of knowledge, a disrupter of stable cultural assumptions’.7 Similarly, Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol observe that print ‘democratically opened up texts to potentially broad and heterogeneous readerships … knowledge was liberated from the control of a social (and academic) literate elite for an increasingly literate general populace whose access to texts entailed politically charged rights of interpretation and use’.8 Prior to the emergence of these new readerships, Wendy Wall finds much evidence of what she terms a ‘prevalent sexualized textual transaction’ in which ‘the writer is always already masculinized, the pen symbolically the phallus, and the page a virgin female’.9 If, as Wall’s remarks suggest, the pen and the page constituted an idealized scene of sexual/textual intercourse, the printing press conjured images of an unruly reproductivity. ‘The body of the book,’ Jan-Dirk Müller asserts, ‘was in the manuscript culture a guarantor of the longevity of the word and of the presence of author and meaning.’10 According to the logic of its own peculiar resurrection narrative, the dead flesh of the book’s parchment body enabled the written word to live on, in the words of Jean Gerson (a fourteenth century chancellor of the Sorbonne), ‘for 10, 100, or 1,000 years, and this not only by itself [in se] but also by the multiplication of the exemplars [per multiplicationem exemplariorum] that are copied from the original’.11 Capable of outliving the humans who made and used them, manuscripts also multiplied, thanks to an all-too-familiar mating ritual involving the scribe, his pen, and his parchment. This reproductive aspect of the scribal publication had previously received careful consideration from Richard de Bury (1285–1345) when he wrote in Philobiblon (1345): For as the bodies of books [librorum corpora] … undergo a continual dissolution of their structure … a remedy should be found, by means of which the sacred book paying the debt of nature may obtain a natural heir and may raise up like seed to its dead brother, and thus may be verified that saying of Ecclesiasticus: His father is dead, and he is as if he were not dead; for he hath left one behind him that is like himself.12

Nearly fourteen centuries after a father-and-son story about word and flesh was first told, another one would be offered for the body of the book that had

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kept the earlier story alive. As with the Cadmus myth and Plato’s account of Theuth’s invention, both of these stories were curiously silent on the subject of mothers. But a maternal element of sorts would make an appearance soon – and when it did, the embodiment of writing and the writing body would be forever transformed. It was the parchment codex’s physical capacity to endure rather than to multiply that initially got extolled after the invention of the printing press because, of course, no scribe could possibly compete with a printer in terms of reproductivity. And so for the first time perhaps since Theuth argued with King Thamus on behalf of hieroglyphics, advocates of scribal publication went on the defensive. Nearly half a century after Gutenberg began to produce copies of the Bible that still bear his name, Abbott Johannes Trithemius observed in his Praise of the Scribe (De laude scriptorum, 1494), ‘Who is ignorant of the differences between writing [scriptura] and printing [impressura]? A manuscript, written on parchment, can last a thousand years. How long will print, this thing of paper [res papirea] last?’13 Indeed, Trithemius is so concerned about the printed page’s vulnerability, he proceeds to make a rather remarkable appeal to members of the scribal trade: ‘The devout scribe should never lessen his zeal. He should copy the unstable prints and thereby give them longevity, since otherwise they would not last long’.14 Then, suddenly realizing the enormity of the task he has set before the scribes of the world, he offers them something of a pep talk: ‘[The scribe] is not restrained by external circumstances like the printer. He is free and rejoices in his freely performed task. He is in no way inferior to the printer, and his zeal must not weaken because the other prints’.15 Conspicuous in its absence from this laudatory tract on scribal publication, however, is any mention of the per multiplicationem exemplariorum that so captured the imagination of Gerson 100 years earlier. Nevertheless, as Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson make clear in their essay here, before long the reproductive body, which had always haunted the writing body, would return with a vengeance. While many more examples of statements concerning anxieties attendant on technological change (both past and present) could be cited here, my principal goal in briefly raising the issue of possible thematic, conceptual, and emotional links between the first age of print and the digital age is merely to suggest that from our current position near the end of the epoch of the printed book, we are afforded a unique opportunity to peer into that epoch’s beginnings in the early modern period. From this privileged vantage-point, one of the allegedly ‘stable hierarchies’ of the printed page that has become visible and, thus, conspicuously unstable, is paternity. Specifically, it seems that clear during the past two decades of cyber-culture’s incunabula phase early modern notions of paternity – and, by extension, those patriarchal formulations and practices that sustained and were sustained by these notions – have come under intensive scrutiny.

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In a 1987 study, Marjorie Garber observes that, ‘the undecidability of paternity, articulated again and again in the plays by putative fathers like Lear, Leontes, Leonato, and Prospero, is analogous to, and evocative of, the undecidability of authorship’.16 A subsequent study by Alison Findlay, which examines the preponderance of bastards portrayed on the early modern English stage, lists more than 70 plays – out of approximately 450 extant plays from the period – featuring bastard characters.17 For Findlay, early modern representations of bastards are extremely significant because English society, she claims, was ‘organized round paternal authority … [t]he kingdom was ruled by a series of father figures and analogies between family and state drew attention to the interrelationship of domestic and national politics’.18 As such, ‘the bastard,’ Findlay asserts, ‘with no father, represented something ‘other’, something outside this divinely ordered pattern. Born of a female sexuality unsanctioned by patriarchal authority, its birth created an extraneous social unit – a family which was not one since it had no paternal governor to nourish and educate the child according to social norms’.19 Over 10 per cent (eight plays) of the 72 plays Findlay examines were written by Shakespeare, more than by any other playwright who wrote for the London playhouses. It is tempting, in this light, to posit a link between Shakespeare’s singular status in the West and the singularity of his interest in bastardy during a period when, as I am suggesting, the advent of print undermined the existing paternal foundations of patriarchal culture. In an important sense, the early modern stage often rehearsed the links between paternity and print before its audiences, for if dramatists were obsessed with bastardy, they were also quite taken with writing technologies of all varieties. ‘Renaissance plays,’ Stephen Orgel observes, ‘seem compulsively to turn to scenes of writing, to letters, intercepted epistles and forged documents.’20 Recent studies by Frederic Kiefer21 and Eve Rachele Sanders22 amply document the extent of this compulsion. Moreover, much writing in the period, as Douglas Bruster notes, ‘tended to collapse the traditional distance between bodies and texts’, leading to the emergence of a developing genre Bruster labels ‘embodied writing’.23 Such writing, he adds, ‘often described the body in detail, through graphic treatment of physical appearance and body parts’.24 In a recent study of printed Renaissance anatomy books, Andrea Carlino asserts that ‘[t]wo features recur in all examined representations of the anatomical lesson: the open cadaver and a textual authority (a book or a figure reading)’.25 The consistent presence of the latter feature in such lessons not only conjoins the body and the book, but also suggests a conjunction between the book and paternity touched on by Jonathan Sawday in the context of Renaissance anatomy books. Noting how advances in ‘knowledge of the human body’ in the period are often presented in a schema that ‘is patrilineal’, Sawday contends that ‘[t]his patrilineal diagram of understanding, with medical knowledge passed

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from father to son in a line of descent, was roughly the diagram with which sixteenth century commentators and investigators worked’.26 A comparably patrilineal diagram, many of the following essays suggest, determined how wide ranges of early modern discourses were understood. No doubt, what Sawday calls the ‘anatomical Renaissance’,27 and its reliance on increased access to publication and the growth of literacy, brought printed books and bodies into close proximity with one another.28 With regard to English literary production, however, it was the genre of romance that often shouldered the burden of the period’s cultural effort to sort out the future of fatherhood after the invention of moveable type. This generic predilection makes a kind of sense when we contrast romance with epic. While the latter tends to be structured by geographical movement, the former generally focuses on dynastic movement. Indeed, this distinction can be seen to play itself out, for example, in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, where the shift from the one genre to the other between Books I and IV is conditioned partly by a shift in the poem’s treatment of the links between parenting and printing.29 In the specific context of the English stage, dramas indebted to the romance tradition were especially preoccupied with the relation between paternity and print. Referring to Shakespeare’s later plays, Richard Wilson observes that ‘the romance, by disclaiming actuality, recounts what the history obscures: patriarchy’s inability to impose mastery on the female body’.30 The seeds of this genre’s concern with patriarchal anxiety are already planted in comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream where, for instance, Theseus informs Hermia her father was a god, ‘To whom you are but as a form in wax / By him imprinted’ (1.1.49–50). Furthermore, as Thompson and Thompson observe in their essay, The similarity between sexual and literary rights of reproduction is made explicit in The Taming of the Shrew when Biondello uses the language of copyright in urging Lucentio to elope with Bianca: ‘Take you assurance of her, cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum’ (4.4.92–3). The Latin phrase, meaning ‘with exclusive rights to print’, was a standard one in the book trade and implies that by marrying Bianca Lucentio will establish his copyright in her body, gaining the sole right to print – copies of himself presumably. Bianca’s subsidiary role in the business is emphasized ten lines later when Biondello refers to her as ‘your appendix’.

For Wilson, it is while writing his later romances like The Winter’s Tale, in which ‘Leontes assures Florizel that ‘Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince, / For she did print your royal father off / Conceiving you’ (5.1.124– 6)’, that Shakespeare finally turns to ‘the proprietorial rights and productive relations of his own industry’ for the language of parenting.31 The sonic resemblance here between ‘print’ and ‘prince’ succinctly represents a larger cultural relationship that gets explored more fully in Cymbeline. In that play,

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(one that tells the story of a king’s lost sons – a story explicitly indebted to the conventions of romance), Posthumous is orphaned at birth, adopted by the king, and wakes up, upon having a book placed on his chest by a ghost, to report: ‘Sleep, thou hast been a grandsire, and begot / A father to me’ (5.4.123– 4). In Hamlet, the visitation of the father’s ghost prompts the prince to exclaim, ‘My Tables, My tables – meet it is I set it down’ (1.5.107–8). In Cymbeline, conversely, a ghostly book prompts the visitation of the father. Taken together, the two plays suggest a powerful link in the early modern cultural imagination – a ‘habit of mind’, to recall Maus’s useful phrase – between unstable father figures and writing technologies. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other passages from texts written in the period that could be cited here – a number of which are examined in the essays to follow. Nevertheless, I think the few provided so far begin to suggest that once the medieval romance’s preoccupation with lineage and dynastic continuity gets passed on to early modern writers, they often express that genre’s peculiar concerns in the early modern language of printing and the London book trade. Partly this is the case because the medieval book had itself been the subject of considerable genealogical anxiety. In Philobiblion, De Bury refers to the need ‘to replace the volumes that are worn out with age by fresh successors, that the perpetuity … may be secured to the species’, then lets books themselves voice their own concerns about the degenerative results of scribal transmission: ‘Ah! how often ye pretend that we who are ancient are but lately born, and try to pass us off as sons who are really fathers’.32 Here kin and ink are bound tightly together between the covers of a manuscript codex devoted to paternal uneasiness and the love of books. In light of such pre-Gutenberg examples, the intersection of parenting and printing in the early modern period might be seen as (to borrow from the lexicon of the current technological episteme) merely an upgrade of a paternal operating system running more or less smoothly behind the screen of patriarchal culture for at least a century. And yet, two questions persist: Why paternity? And why did the metaphorical onus of conceptualizing the mystery of procreation – especially the anxious contribution of the father to the process – not get transferred onto the back of some other invention or discovery in the period? Some tentative responses: first, it is certainly true, as Naomi J. Miller observes, that ‘[d]uring the early modern period, maternity was constantly evaluated, conceptualized and redefined, from a range of social and artistic perspectives, even as maternal practices shaped standards of care’.33 Accordingly, some of the essays here not only examine the impact of print on notions of maternity as well as paternity, but also suggest some of the difficulties in discussing how the latter was transformed without considering the implications for the former. In Thompson and Thompson’s essay, they assert that once the printed

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page appeared ‘the method of its production, the actual process of copying or printing’ was appropriated for the ‘patriarchal aspect of the metaphorical field’ of early modern parenting. Furthermore, this patriarchal appropriation also seems to have entailed the disembodiment of maternity. ‘Women,’ Thompson and Thompson observe, become ‘merely devices by which men make copies of themselves … their role should be as neutral as possible; the important thing is to produce a child which is an exact copy of the father.’ The primacy of the mother’s bodily neutrality, we shall see shortly, is actually encoded in the lexical/semantic field of the term ‘mother’ itself. Nor, for that matter, was the paternal desire for exact replication (a desire we finally seem to be on the verge of fulfilling courtesy of recent advances in reproductive science) peculiar to the early modern literary imagination.34 Examining the meaning of marriage in Ancient Greek myth and culture, Nancy Jay writes: The social and religious continuity of the patrilineal family gives males an attenuated form of immortality in the institutionalized succession of fathers and sons. The beasts, recognizing no fathers, have no continuity at all to mitigate individual mortality. On the other hand, if children only resembled their fathers perfectly they would be identical younger versions, cloning younger exact duplicates in their turn, and the Golden Age of male immortality would have returned. It is only mothers, bearing mortal children, who dim this glorious vision of eternal and perfect patriliny. Remember Pandora: because of a woman, men are mortal.35

What does seem new and significant about Shakespeare and his contemporaries, however, is that they rely chiefly on the lexicon of the printing press and the early modern book trade to express these widespread and long-standing preoccupations. As to the question of why print – as opposed to some other technology – was so appealing as a source for the early modern discourse of parenting, de Grazia exposes some of the pre-print technological advances enabling the printing press to be marshaled to the task of representing the largely invisible workings of reproduction. Indeed, it is difficult to read de Grazia’s essay without being persuaded that the early modern patriarchal recourse to a metaphorics of print for articulating the roles of mother and father in human reproduction was the inevitable next phase of a remarkably long and fairly consistent relationship between writing technology and paternity.36 There are a number of significant conceptual parallels between early modern reliance on print and earlier rhetorics of fatherhood that could be mentioned here. At this point, though, I want to focus briefly on the question of why pre-biological notions of paternity were particularly vulnerable to changes brought on by the invention of new writing technologies. To rework the title of Michel Foucault’s influential essay about an epistemically related act of creation, it seems worth asking, ‘What is a Father?’

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Noting the frequency with which Shakespeare frets over ‘the physical link between a particular man and child’ and fantasizes about ‘male parthenogenesis’, Louis Montrose reminds us ‘the “facts of life” have been established as facts relatively recently in human history with the development of microbiology that began in the late seventeenth century’.37 Absent the kind of DNA evidence currently enabling even an unwise father to know his own child, knowledge of biological paternity once amounted to little more than a set of cultural notions and concomitant metaphors Shakespeare and his contemporaries were forced to live by – notions and metaphors which, as Postman might warn, had already been altered by the advent of mechanical reproduction. But perhaps Montrose is too eager for us to have had the facts, because if we are searching for the historical moment in which the secrets of reproduction – especially that consistently troublesome issue of paternity – were revealed, then the late seventeenth century may be somewhat premature. William Harvey, the proto-microbiologist who discovered the circulation of the blood, is also credited with contributing to the then nascent field of reproductive science. The importance of those contributions, however, has been considerably diminished by Thomas Laqueur. Referring to Harvey’s lengthy study of human procreation, Disputations, Laqueur observes: ‘The book corrects a few relatively minor errors in previous accounts of the embryology of the chick, makes a strong but inconclusive case for epigenesis, suggests experimentally but does not prove the important point that fertilization is not the merging of a mass of semen with a mass of menstrual blood, and fails after desperate efforts to understand the mystery of generation’.38 As to the larger historical significance of Harvey’s work, Laqueur is even more skeptical, concluding: ‘Harvey’s new epistemology and substantive discoveries led right back to new versions of old stories. Generation, the bodies most social function, remained beyond the reach of a nonexistent neutral language of organs and functions. Desperate to understand how it all worked, Harvey spun story after poignant story about sexual difference, always pretending that it was Nature herself who spoke’.39 Subsequent scholarship in the field, Laqueur’s research makes clear, did not improve much in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the specific case (a word I use here for its legal resonances) of paternity, the facts did not finally begin to come in until 1900 with the discovery by Karl Landsteiner of human blood groups. Then, suddenly, the law and the law of the father were publicly compelled to share the same courtroom, though privately the one had never really been apart from the other. As ‘[a] tool for the identification of criminals and fathers’, according to Judith Roof, ‘blood groups enabled the elimination rather than positive identification of suspects. The first paternity tests based on red-cell blood types “excluded only 15 to 19 per cent of alleged fathers”’.40 Though not terribly accurate or reliable, such tests presented fathers with the first biological evidence in human history that

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they had contributed to the procreation of a particular child – in short, that a particular child was really theirs. In the past 20 years, a period coinciding with the introduction of personal computers, new paternity tests based on Human Leukocyte Antigens have proven to be 99 per cent accurate, and DNA testing offers, in Roof’s words, ‘the hope of positive identification of individuals rather than the elimination of suspects’.41 Similarly, Carol Mossman asserts that ‘[w]ithin the last dozen years or so, forensic science has made a breakthrough which may have far-reaching implications. For the first time in the history of human reproduction, it is possible to locate and “prove” biological fatherhood: that is, to situate, with certainty, the biological father within his body’.42 In the essay she contributes to this collection, Roof examines the implications of some of these developments, especially the recent practice by biotechnology corporations of copyrighting genes. Working backward from the twentieth century’s ‘breakthrough’ requires us to ask what the lack of such evidence implies about the difference between paternity and maternity, and why the former might be more vulnerable to the introduction of new technologies such as printing. It is perhaps one of history’s more devastating ironies that at precisely the moment paternity began to gain a biological foothold, anthropology (and, concurrently, psychoanalysis) began to undermine it. In his 1927 book The Father in Primitive Psychology,43 Bronislaw Malinowski reports a rather startling discovery he made during a four-year expedition (1914–18) to the Trobriand Islands in New Guinea: the Trobrianders do not associate intercourse with paternity. In fact, ‘between the father and the children,’ he observes, ‘there is no union whatsoever’.44 Although it is unlikely anyone at the time drew a connection between Landsteiner’s discovery and Malinowski’s, it is difficult now to look back at this moment in the early decades of the twentieth century without seeing its importance for the history of the father. There, Janus-like, this figure simultaneously faced his anthropological past and his biological future. The latter promised a heretofore unavailable certitude about his contribution to the destiny of his species; the former served as a nagging reminder of a troubling memory that had long haunted him in the form of a question succinctly asked and answered by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson in a recent book about fatherhood: ‘How can a man be certain that a child is his? The mother knows: The child comes out of her. The man can only presume’.45 The oppositional structure of man/mother employed by Masson here neatly captures the essence of a difference between parents which, as he observes, often conditions how fathers are treated in reproductive circumstances: According to many biologists, it is the doubt of paternity that explains the common behavior of people at a birth who remark on the resemblance of the baby to the father: ‘He looks just like you’ is said far more often to a father than to a mother. People will even bring photos of the father (less

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often the mother) when he was young to match them with the baby. They are attempting to convince the father that the newborn child is his, that he need have no doubts, that he should care for ‘his’ biological offspring.46

While paternity tests, increasingly promoted on daytime television talk shows over the past decade (the same period in which the spectacular debut of the dot com age has also dazzled us) may soon render these behaviors and practices obsolete, the prior significance of such father-centered rituals inadvertently makes a profoundly important point: until the biologism of the twentieth century ruptured the epistemic foundations of fatherhood in the West, the opposition of maternity and paternity lined up rather exactly with the key anthropological opposition of nature and culture. Or, as Yvonne Knibiehler concisely puts it, ‘paternity is not a fact of nature but a human invention. Maternity has always been evident due to the fact of pregnancy and childbirth. But not paternity’.47 Mossman refines Knibiehler’s distinction somewhat, noting ‘cultural partitions ally paternity with the mind, as distinguished from maternity itself defined in terms of materiality’.48 Similarly, John W. Miller observes: In that a child grows in the body of its mother, mothering is a biologically determined experience to a far greater extent than is fathering. By contrast, fathering is a predominantly cultural acquisition. Its prerequisites are the discovery of the male role in reproduction, the cultural appropriation of that discovery, the formation of exclusive enduring sexual bonds between a specific male and female, and their mutual willingness to share in the ownership and care of the children born to them. Seen in this light the historical emergence of the father-involved family may be characterized as a truly revolutionary event (emphasis added).49

It is worth noting that two of the ‘prerequisites’ Miller mentions – the ones I have emphasized typographically in the passage quoted above (discovering the father’s role in reproduction and culturally appropriating that discovery) – are precisely the ones missing from the family structure of the Melanesian Trobrianders Malinowski described in 1927. The disparity in parental status noted in all of these accounts also appears to operate at the lexical/semantic level. According to Philippe Bolusset, ‘[a] comparison of the word paternité (‘paternity’/‘fatherhood’) with the word maternité (‘maternity’/‘motherhood’) reveals that these two terms, both nominalized predicates, do not refer to exactly the same concept. Not that they should of course, but they should at least refer to symmetrical notions. On the contrary, however, the contexts in which they may occur vary considerably’.50 Though all of the contexts Bolusset examines mirror the nature/culture divide that concerns us here, a few are particularly striking. ‘There are,’ Bolusset writes, ‘many examples of the figurative use of the lexical item père in association with an animate subject, where the term acquires the meaning of creator, inventor or instigator … whereas examples with the figurative use of the word mère seem

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far less common and in any case acquire a totally different meaning value.’51 Noting that ‘the word mère is inherently devoid of a genitive property and intentionality, having thus a purely instrumental property’, Bolusset concludes that it is worth asking whether ‘these properties derive from deep-rooted sociocultural preconceptions which define the role of fathers as truly creative while the mother’s role is perceived as merely reproductive or instrumental. After all, the word “matter” in Greek comes directly from the word “mother”’.52 In short, ‘What is a Father?’ and ‘What is an Author?’ seem to be the same question. Given my previous intimations of links between the first age of moveable type and the digital age, it seems noteworthy that all of the scholarship on paternity and maternity referenced above (and there is much more) has been published in the past decade of tremendous technological change.53 Indeed, it is tempting to argue here that the remarkable proliferation of such scholarly studies since the mass-market introduction of the personal computer and the meteoric ascendancy of the internet closely parallels the proliferation of literary treatments of paternity and bastardy after the invention of the printing press. And yet, as is often the case with such arguments about the cultural unconscious, Freud tends to complicate things. The thinker who bequeathed to us the Oedipus complex and the myth of a patricidal primal scene/family meal, who late in life decided that a children’s toy for practicing penmanship afforded him the best analogy for how the unconscious works, was no stranger to the advent of new writing technologies. The years he spent in medical school (1873–81)54 overlap with the massmarket introduction of the typewriter.55 Furthermore, the year Freud finished his education and embarked on a medical career was also a rather important one for typists. As Friedrich A. Kittler notes, ‘it is clear that the statistical explosion [in typewriter use] begins in 1881, with the record sales of the Remington II’.56 Psychoanalysis and typing share an anniversary of sorts. We can never know for certain, of course, to what extent this new invention made an impression on the father of psychoanalysis; but it is certainly curious that, as Alan Bass observes, ‘from the beginning to the end of his career, Freud refined his conception of psychic content and structure according to metaphors of traces and machines. These metaphors finally fell into place, with the two combined, in the “Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad”’.57 Or, in Kittler’s concise depiction, ‘psychoanalysis discovered during its clean-up operation that in dreams, “pencils, penholders, … and other instruments are undoubted male sexual symbols”. It only retrieved a deeply embedded metaphysics of handwriting’.58 It should come as no surprise, then, that from this ‘metaphysics of handwriting’ Freud gleaned an uncannily familiar realization about the difference between paternity and maternity. In Moses and Monotheism (1934), a book he began to work on after Malinowski inadvertently revealed the originary scandal of

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patriarchy’s paternal legacy, Freud weighed in on the topic. His contribution, if not a direct response to the earlier book, nevertheless seems aimed at imposing something like damage control. Still committed to Totem and Taboo’s bizarre tale of the father’s physical dismemberment and subsequent abstract rememberment, Freud offers a new version of this progression in Moses and Monotheism – divided this time not diachronically between a physical past and an abstract future, but rather synchronically between mother and father. Noting that maternity is observable and thus verifiable, he then reminds us that ‘[p]aternity, on the other hand, will always be an uncertainty, a fiction, a speculation and “thus” represents the “victory of intellectuality over sensuality” – that is, an advance in civilization’.59 In other words, mother becomes the dismembered body, father the re-membered abstraction. Clearly, Freud was either not aware of or chose to ignore recent advances in the analysis of human blood groups and red-cell blood types, for the ‘victory’ he celebrates was already well on its way to becoming a hollow one. Writing since DNA testing leveled the playing field for maternity and paternity, and emboldened, conceivably, by the faint sounds of the printed book’s death rattle, recent scholarly accounts of parenting seem to expand upon an insight Freud had more than half a century ago during the advent of the typewriter age, albeit stripped of its Victorian and sexist ‘thus’. And although only David Lee Miller’s essay here deals explicitly with Freud, the majority of the other essays in this collection are directly or indirectly motivated by the same cultural concerns about the historical/conceptual status of maternity and paternity as scholars in other fields who are working in the current era of transition from the age of print to the digital age. Moreover, the preoccupation in many of the essays here with what has come to be known as ‘the history of the book’ can also be traced to our transitional era. Indeed, a number of arguments about the relation between the current interest in early modern printing and contemporary cultural/technological change have been made in the work of many scholars who promote the critical significance of examining the material book. In an important essay intended as a kind of manifesto for such criticism, David Scott Kastan observes: In no small part because the emergent electronic technology now threatens the hegemony of the printed book (though not, as some have claimed, its actual existence, for the advantages of the codex form become increasingly obvious as the electronic alternative presents itself), the achievements of print culture have become objects of intense interest in their own right. It shouldn’t, of course, have required the electronic revolution to focus our attention on the medium of print, but the processes of textual production are newly visible and urgent. The materializations of the text are no longer inevitable or transparent, and scholars are no longer indifferent to the historical formations of the literary works they study.60

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What Kastan’s remarks make quite clear is that the current surge of historical interest in early modern printing is as deeply rooted in anxieties about technological change as recent scholarship on parenting, though, of course, the latter discourse can also be traced more directly to transformations in biotechnology facilitated by advances in computing. In this context, Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England as a whole is doubly exotropic in its critical vision inasmuch as the essays that follow consider early modern thinking about print as well as contemporary concerns about digital culture; and they treat early modern notions of human reproduction as well as contemporary concerns about developments in the area of reproductive technologies. If, as I am suggesting, a significant amount of recent scholarship on both biological and mechanical reproduction should be viewed in part as a response to the present transition from one dominant form of media technology to another, then in much the same way that early modern poets/playwrights responded to a parallel transition recent science fiction writers/filmmakers have shown a comparable level of interest in the impact of technological change on human procreation. A movie entitled The Matrix (1999) intimates that the human imagination continues to be quite preoccupied with the cultural links between reproduction and technology some 400 years after Shakespeare and his contemporaries articulated those links. In the film, written and produced since the internet came into its own, an artificial intelligence software program has taken over the world, displaced human reproduction, and enslaved all but a tenacious group of rebels who huddle near the earth’s core for heat and continue to reproduce sexually. The earth is no longer habitable – its atmosphere destroyed in the final great battle between humans and software – and now human babies are cultivated in fields of artificial wombs maintained by giant software machines. Nourished intravenously with the liquefied, black ink-like remains of the dead and forcefed virtual reality into their brain stems to make them docile, these cultivated humans remain enwombed from ‘birth’ to death – their only function to serve as human batteries, power sources for generating the energy the omnipresent, omnipotent software program needs to run. The film, it seems to me, brilliantly and vividly makes two important but rather disturbing arguments: first, now that the biological foundations of paternity have been scientifically established, paternity’s prior status as a shape-shifting cultural construct built of concepts borrowed from a succession of writing technologies can be excavated and exposed; and second, if we do not rid ourselves of these vestigial constructs now that they are no longer needed, then a nightmarish world of technology run amok awaits us.61 And yet, the film remains profoundly indebted to a cultural past, its title gesturing (perhaps unwittingly) at a convergence of reproduction and technology quite available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Moveable

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type for the printing press was produced, according to Philip Gaskell, by the following method: The type-caster put the two halves of the mold together complete with the first matrix, and held them thus in his left hand, while with his right he lifted a ladle-full of molten type-metal. He then dropped the metal suddenly into the mouth of the mold, and at the same instant gave it a jerk or toss to force the metal into the recesses of the matrix.62

If, as some of the essays in this collection argue, the invention of printing transformed how we thought about human reproduction in the early modern period, then the moveable type that fueled the transformation emerged from a device, the name of which Christine V. McDonald succinctly historicizes: The word matrix in English like matrice in French comes from the Latin Matrix meaning womb. In both languages it has taken on, among others, the following two meanings: 1. a situation or surrounding substance within which something originates, develops, or is contained; 2. in printing it means a metal plate used for casting typefaces.63

Like wombs, early modern printers’ matrices were frequently made from a reddish material (copper),64 and they produced little bodies. As de Grazia observes, ‘typefounders and printers have always regarded the single moveable type character as a human being standing erect, each type having a body, a face, beard, neck, shoulder, back, belly, and feet’. The fact these erect beings have beards suggests that typefounders’ wombs only carried sons to term. Though quite brilliant and shocking, I would argue the Matrix is also merely a recent version of a story told many times and in many ways during periods of technological/reproductive crisis. One such version, generated by the invention of printing, is Rabelais’ first published work65 – especially, the letter Gargantua writes to his son Pantagruel. In this uncharacteristically serious episode, a father writes his ‘Most dear son’ that of all God’s embellishments of ‘human nature’, the greatest is ‘the one by which we can, in this mortal state, acquire a kind of immortality and, in the course of this transitory life, perpetuate our name and seed: which we do by lineage sprung from us in lawful marriage’.66 Then, a paragraph after confiding ‘I might seem to have desired nothing but to leave you, after my death, as a mirror representing the person of me your father’, Gargantua makes a seemingly unrelated assertion: ‘The elegant and accurate art of printing, which is now in use, was invented in my time, by divine inspiration’.67 Two different methods of God-given reproduction (human and mechanical) are linked by a father, a son, and a mirror. And as the reference to a mirror implies, the desired outcome of both reproductive activities is the same: the production of identical copies. Conspicuously absent from Gargantua’s missive, which follows a chapter devoted to cataloguing ‘the fine Books in the Library of Saint Victor’s’,68 is any mention of Pantagruel’s mother. Her absence

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may explain why, as Carla Freccero notes with reference to the letter, ‘No overt rivalry occurs in this father-son relationship’.69 Subsequently, a number of English poets, playwrights, pamphlet writers, and printers/publishers would find conceptual intersections between printing and parenting increasingly integral to their efforts to explore and characterize a range of issues related to paternity, legitimacy, authorship, and publication. While the majority of the essays here examine in great detail several such efforts at exploration and characterization, others show how the convergence of printing and parenting in early modern England continues to underwrite certain discourses in the present. Taken as a whole, then, I would contend that the essays in this collection make the following interrelated claims: 1. Until biological evidence of the paternal contribution to reproduction was discovered in the twentieth century, paternity existed only as a succession of cultural constructs. 2. Such constructs were derived chiefly from the semantic field of a given culture’s dominant writing technology. 3. The introduction and subsequent integration of a new writing technology therefore disturbed existing constructs of paternity as well as those discourses and institutions grounded in paternal authority. 4. Such periods of technological transition were experienced as crises until existing constructs of paternity could be revised to accommodate the new technology. 5. Revising existing constructs of paternity to accommodate new technologies necessitated the production of mythic/religious/literary/scholarly narratives to account for and document these periods of transition and crisis. Because I am eager to let the collection speak in the varied tongues of its contributors, I will not take time here to substantiate any of these claims. Indeed, I think the essays themselves do so. Rather, I will conclude by offering a brief overview of the essays to follow. ••• The collection begins with two essays considering the extent to which Gutenberg’s invention fostered the metaphorical and rhetorical convergence of printing and parenting. In ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes’, Margreta de Grazia accounts for the proliferation of metaphorical/rhetorical links between mechanical and sexual reproduction, imprints and children. Arguing that print revitalized ancient technological/reproductive tropes, she examines how imprinting metaphors surface repeatedly around issues of virginity and chastity, rape and adultery, bastardy and paternity. In ‘Meaning,

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“Seeing”, and Printing’, Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson also document the metaphorical/rhetorical intersection of printing and parenting in the early modern period, contending it was generated by patriarchal anxiety over the father’s role in human reproduction. Accordingly, visual likeness constitutes the privileged point of connection between the two forms of reproduction: only when a son is as similar to his father as one copy of a printed book is to another can the child be deemed legitimate with any certainty. Consequently, Thompson and Thompson argue, printing and pressing metaphors carry a strong phallocentric bias. Given the conceptual merger of printing and parenting depicted by de Grazia and Thompson and Thompson, it follows that more figurative acts of creation were also affected. Accordingly, the three essays in Part II focus attention on the increasingly entangled alliances between paternity/maternity and authorship in the period. Noting how early modern English writers closely associate the creative imagination with the pregnant female body, Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘A Womb of his Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body’, argues that the male appropriation of the womb as a figure for the imagination is motivated by the appeal of the woman’s body as a closed, interior, and protected space. Based on her analysis of several works in which male writers rely on analogies between mental creativity and bodily fecundity, Maus concludes that the female body provides a risky but compelling model for the structure of male poetic subjectivity in the English Renaissance. In the poem ‘On My First Son’, Jonson seems to seek a kind of eternal and inviolable paternity, memorializing the seven-year-old Benjamin as ‘his best piece of poetry’. The phrase powerfully equates child and text. Lynne Dickson Bruckner, ‘Ben Jonson’s Branded Thumb and the Print of Textual Paternity’, contends such an equation enables Jonson to locate a reproductive power evading both the dangerous female body and the vagaries of death. Jonson’s paternal mark is to be sought in authorial inscription, particularly through control over print, and Bruckner examines the ways in which page and flesh frequently become interchangeable surfaces for the Jonsonian imprint. In ‘All Father: Ben Jonson and the Psychodynamics of Authorship’, David Lee Miller treats issues of authority and paternity in the context of Jonson’s struggles with fatherhood, patronage, and authorship. For Miller, these struggles circle around the peculiar anguish of an insistent dream, the dream of a culture founded by Abraham and refounded by Jesus on the sacrifice of the son’s body to the Father’s word. The chief significance of this dream is the power of the feelings it arouses, and Miller contends such feelings make possible the cultural/textual transference of masculinity. If the invention of moveable type compelled the discourse of parenting to undergo a significant lexical/semantic upgrade, then the early modern London book trade was something like the primal scene of that transformation. As such,

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the five essays in Part III treat a range of issues pertaining to textual and sexual reproduction. In ‘The Bastard Art: Woodcut Illustration in Sixteenth-Century England’, James Knapp argues that like the many bastards portrayed on the English stage, ‘ill-formed’ figures cut in wood marked the textual worlds they inhabited with an often dangerous excess – opening them up to multiple and sometimes contradictory readings (and viewings). Knapp offers a reevaluation of the role of woodcut illustrations in early modern English printed books by tracing their long-standing subordination to the desire for an authoritative parentage for subsequent artistic forms. Interested in other forms of excess, Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, ‘Promiscuous Textualities: The NasheHarvey Controversy and the Unnatural Productions of Print’, focuses on the proliferation of abuse pamphlets in the period. For Prendergast, who considers how abuse pamphlets rely on the very language of sexuality and scatology that most other ‘legitimate’ writings suppress, such pamphlets lay open the contradictory and problematic constructions of birth upon which the culture of the London book trade was built. Prendergast contends that promiscuous publication points to larger cultural concerns that illegitimate offspring threaten stable, conventional notions of paternity and patriarchal authority. In ‘The Birth of Advertising’, Michael Baird Saenger suggests that the deployment of procreative metaphors in the paratexts of early modern books can usefully be viewed as a highly developed system of advertising, indeed as the first such system in the modern world. He shows how publishers habitually structure their presentation of books in order to present and entangle the reader in a set of metaphoric relations. Such relations frequently compel the reader to enter into a physical engagement of love, protection, or parenting towards a text which can be anthropomorphized as a woman, a man, a defenseless victim, or a child. Dedicated chiefly to depicting the birth of monsters to mortal women, monstrous birth broadside ballads feature many of the cultural, theological, and political strategies of constructing meaning available to early modern subjects. Aaron W. Kitch, ‘Printing Bastards: Monstrous Birth Broadsides in Early Modern England’, argues, in part, that this new media invokes the topos of monstrous births in order to foster relationships between print-producers within the Stationers’ Company and ballad buyers with whom the broadside ballad eventually became identified. Unlike books sold at established bookshops and stationery stalls, broadsides were more often sold by criers who hawked them on the street. In the final essay of this section, ‘“Red Incke”: Reading the Bleeding on the Early Modern Page’, Bianca F.C. Calabresi takes the topic to the microlevel, charting how ink was used on the pages of early modern books to give the impression of a bodily interior through the simulation of blood or bleeding. Focusing on discourses of phlebotomy, unnatural maternity, and the red title pages of The Bloudy Mother and Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon, Calabresi explores the use of sanguineous technologies in early modern printed texts to

INTRODUCTION

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reveal and order the inner workings and offspring of seemingly inscrutable characters – particularly women – marked as sexually compromised, criminal, or dangerous. The essays in Part IV shift the focus from the discursive convergence of printing and parenting to the impact such a convergence may have had on forms of authority. The first of these three essays takes up the authority of a female reader. In ‘Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s copy of The Mirror for Magistrates’, Stephen Orgel examines the traces of a female book lover’s interactions with this most patriarchal of texts and argues Clifford was able to appropriate the book to her life by filling its margins with a compendious diary of her reading. Moreover, Orgel finds in her challenges to various patriarchal conventions evidence that raises questions about the underlying theoretical premises of this collection. Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘Checking the Father: Jacobean Censorship and Anxious Paternity’, examines the workings of patriarchal absolutism by focusing on the censorship of a Jacobean marriage manual. Although no coherent motive for censoring the text was provided, Clegg shows how the manual is rather unconventional in its representation of patriarchal family relations, and she argues that the material fact of its censorship underscores the censors’ anxiety about both print and paternity. Clegg’s analysis uncovers the extent to which seventeenth-century concerns about the proliferation of print were linked to anxiety about royal authority as a pattern of patriarchy. In ‘Pater patriae: James I and the Imprint of Prerogative’, Howard Marchitello contends that James’s concern with the apparent writing-ruling dialectic (i.e., his ability as a producer of texts to offer compelling justifications for his kingship and the idea of monarchy itself) not only manifests an understanding of textuality but also articulates a certain theory of the limits of textuality. For Marchitello, James’s own theory of divine right inhabits and destabilizes the space between these two models of textuality and power. Seeking to ground royal authority in printed texts, James is also compelled to resist what Marchitello terms ‘the sovereignty of textuality’. It has long been common to analogize books and humans – both can be said to have parents, become orphans, and need guardians. The essays in Part V move forward to the present in order to explore how this analogical tradition – greatly energized by the convergence of printing and parenting in the early modern period – continues to resonate. Concerned with transmission, genealogy, legitimacy, authorship, and many other issues pertaining to the establishment of an authoritative text, New Bibliographers searched for the hidden parental origins of a given text. In ‘How Many Children had Alice Walker?’, Laurie E. Maguire argues that although Alice Walker was an important practitioner of the New Bibliography, the patriarchal foundations of textual scholarship edited her out of a critical history that traces its lineage

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from W.W. Greg to Fredson Bowers, to Thomas Tanselle. Maguire looks closely at Walker’s body of work in order to restore her to the twentieth century’s bibliographic genealogy. Faced with conflicting biological claims in the 1993 surrogate mother case of Johnson v. Calvert, the California Supreme Court shifted its inquiry from the physical to the mental realm: ‘Who was the “originator of the concept” of the child?’ the court asked, invoking the paradigm of intellectual property law. In ‘Mothers and Authors: Johnson v. Calvert and the New Children of Our Imaginations’, Mark Rose examines the important precedents for the court’s invocation. Aware of the long history of reciprocity between ideas of biological and intellectual generation, Rose argues that Johnson v. Calvert represents a significant new phase in the historical trajectory linking literary production and biological reproduction. In much the same way printing gave rise to the anxious need to assert ownership and fix responsibility (hence copyright), the emergence of digital technologies has spurred anxieties about the loss of the original and stimulated compensatory strategies for reestablishing something like a father in the site of ownership. And while the biological father’s link to a child can for the first time in history be drawn with certainty, the evasive transnational corporation has become one version of a new paternal metaphor. Judith Roof, ‘In Locus Parentis’, argues that quite literal proof of this shift in the character of the symbolic father has begun to appear in the recent practice of copyrighting genes. Roof looks closely at this recent development in the relation between ownership, code, and the idea of a parent, focusing on how biotechnology corporations have turned parentage to their profit. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 180. Trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1976), p. 9. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), p. 3. See Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vantage Books, 1993). Socrates is the source of this anecdote in Plato’s Phaedrus: Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 520. Quoted in Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 169. Shakespeare, Sex and the Print Revolution (London: The Athlone Press Ltd, 1996), p. 46. Ed. Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2000), p. 5.

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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‘Reading for the Blot: Textual Desire in Early Modern English Literature’, in Reading and Writing in Shakespeare, ed. David M. Bergeron (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 131–59; p. 132. ‘The Body of the Book: The Media Transition from Manuscript to Print’ in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 32–44; p. 44. Jean Gerson, ‘De laude scriptorum’, quoted in Müller, ‘Body’, p. 37. Quoted in Müller, ‘Body’, p. 39. Quoted in Müller, ‘Body’, p. 36. Quoted in Müller, ‘Body’, p. 36. Quoted in Müller, ‘Body’, p. 36. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 26. Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 253–8. Findlay, Illegitimate, p. 1. Findlay, Illegitimate, p. 3. ‘Knowing the Character’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 40 (1992): 124–9; 24. Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996). Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). ‘The Structural Transformation of Print in Late Elizabethan England’, in Marotti and Bristol, Print, Manuscript, Performance, pp. 49–89; p. 50. Bruster, ‘Structural’, p. 50. Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 187. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 39–40. Sawday, Body Emblazoned, p. 41. This closeness has been echoed in a number of critical studies written in the first decades of the digital age. See, for example, William W.E. Slights, ‘Bodies of Text and Textualized Bodies in Sejanus and Coriolanus’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991): 181–93; or Jeffrey Masten, Textual intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See my essay, ‘“Made all of Rusty Yron, Ranckling Sore”: The Imprint of Paternity in The Faerie Queene’, forthcoming in Renaissance Conversations: Literature, Politics, and History in Dialogue, eds Zachary Lesser and Benedict Robinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), p. 171. Wilson, Will Power, p. 165. Trans. E.C. Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). Quoted in Müller, pp. 39–40. ‘Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modern Period’, in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, eds Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 1.

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34 The recent Kubrick/Spielberg film A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) is the latest artistic effort to represent the fantasy of paternal self-replication. In the film’s Frankensteinian plot, a scientist whose son died while still a young boy creates a line of robot boys for childless parents. The primary innovation of this new line of lifelike robotic children is they can be ‘imprinted’ – the term employed several times in the film – with a range of human emotions. 35 Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 31. 36 See also my essay, ‘Bodies that Mattered: Technology, Embodiment, and Secretarial Mediation’, Invisible Hands: Secretarial Mediation, 1500–1900, eds Leah Price and Pam Thurschwell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 37 ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form’, in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 40–43 (original italics). 38 Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 143. 39 Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 148. 40 Reproductions of Reproductions: Imaging Symbolic Change (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 7. 41 Roof, Reproductions, p. 7. 42 ‘DNA and the Stakes in Embodying Paternity’, in Paternity and Fatherhood: Myths and Realities, eds Lieve Spaas and Trista Selous (London: Palgrave, 1998), pp. 40–61; p. 40. 43 (W.W. Norton and Co., 1927). 44 Malinowski, Father, p. 12. 45 The Emperor’s Embrace: Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood (New York: Pocket Books, 1999), p. 152. 46 Masson, Emperor’s Embrace, p. 155. 47 ‘Fathers, Patriarchy, Paternity’, in Changing Fatherhood: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, eds Mirjam C.P. van Dongen, et al. (Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers, 1995), pp. 201–14; p. 201. 48 Mossman, ‘DNA and the Stakes’, p. 41. 49 Calling God ‘Father’: Essays on the Bible, Fatherhood and Culture (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1999), p. 14. 50 ‘Pere and Mere: Unequals in Language’, in Spaas and Selous, pp. 74–84; p. 75. 51 Bolusset, ‘Pere and Mere’, p. 76. 52 Bolusset, ‘Pere and Mere’, pp. 79, 81. 53 The majority of the sociological, historical, and anthropological studies on which much of the recent work relies were published in the early years of the computer revolution. See for example, David Bakan, And They Took Themselves Wives: The Emergence of Patriarchy in Western Civilization (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979); Peter Wilson, Man the Promising Primate: The Conditions of Human Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 54 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988), pp. 26–8. 55 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael White (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 183–5.

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56 Kittler, Gramophone, p. 183. 57 ‘The Double Game: An Introduction’, in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, eds Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 66–85; p. 77. 58 Kittler, Gramophone, p. 186 (italics in original). 59 Quoted in Mossman, ‘DNA and the Stakes’, p. 42. 60 ‘The Mechanics of Culture: Editing Shakespeare Today’, Shakespeare Studies XXIV (1997): 23–30; 23–4. 61 Other recent films such as The Road to Perdition (2002) and Minority Report (2002) suggest Hollywood continues to find the complexities of fatherhood to be a bankable commodity in this era of technological transition. However, the movies most preoccupied with the links between technology and paternity (albeit comically) are the three Austin Powers films. While the first two films treat a range of reproductive and paternal issues including legitimacy and cloning, the most recent installment – suggestively titled Goldmember and advertised with the slogan, ‘Bad to the Clone’ – centers on the return of Austin’s father as well as Dr. Evil’s troubled relationship with his clone, Mini Me, and his biological son. Mike Myers, the writer and star of all three films, recently indicated in interviews that the idea for the Austin Powers character came to him shortly after his father’s death. 62 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 10. 63 ‘Choreographies: An Interview between Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald’, Diacritics 12 (1982), p. 67. 64 Henry-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 216. 65 Marshall McLuhan, who also sees Rabelais’ tale as rooted in technological change, observes: ‘Anybody who looks at the Gutenberg question at all, runs very soon into Gargantua’s Letter to Pantagruel. Rabelais, long before Cervantes, produced an authentic myth or prefiguration of the whole complex of print technology … pantagruelion [is] the symbol and image of printing from moveable type’. The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), pp. 179–80. 66 Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J.M. Cohen (New York: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 193. 67 Rabelais, Gargantua, p. 194. 68 Rabelais, Gargantua, p. 186. 69 Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 21.

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PART I REPRODUCTIVE RHETORICS

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CHAPTER 1

Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes Margreta de Grazia I

Metaphysics

Why Wax? In the Meditations, Descartes alone in his study, sitting by the fire, wrapped in his cloak, resolves to make a clean sweep of all his old opinions – among them, the opinion that external objects are more real than consciousness itself. In order to examine this opinion, he needs a representative thing or body. He chooses wax.1 ‘Let us consider … one particular body. Let us take, for example, this piece of wax.’2 My question is, with a world of objects to choose from, why wax? It is generally assumed that he chooses the object most noted for mutability.3 Wax waxes. As he notes, it has already undergone two transformations – from flower to honeycomb – before reaching him. And when put before the fire, it suffers a whole gamut of additional changes, one for each of the senses: shape, but also colour, flavour, smell, feel, even sound (when he raps it). That he still, despite these permutations, knows the object to be wax, demonstrates that, contrary to his old opinion, perception of the wax does not depend on the wax itself but on ‘the intellect alone’.4 It is not just wax in the abstract that Descartes contemplates, but a particular piece of wax: ‘this piece of wax’ [my italics]. He not only observes this piece of wax: he handles, whiffs, licks, knocks it. It is at hand; why at hand? Because it is on the top of the desk where he is writing.5 Until replaced by selfadhering and gummed envelopes (before envelopes even), return addresses, individuating signatures and a national postal service, wax belonged on every well-equipped desk, as indispensable as paper, pen, and ink. As the editors of his eight volumes of letters point out, Descartes – in self-imposed exile for most of his life – was a prolific letter writer.6 Every letter he sent, he must have sealed. (If we had receipts for purchase of wax, we could approximate the number of letters he wrote and sent.7) What must be noted, however, is that Descartes makes no mention of the instrument that was used to make the imprint on wax: the signet. Indeed, he seems to be teasing us with its absence. Warming the wax by the fire was part of the sealing routine: the wax was

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melted and then imprinted. But Descartes softens the wax not so that it will receive the signet’s defining form but so that it will go formless. Descartes had good reason to dismantle this little piece of standard desktop equipment. It was the traditional metaphor for how knowledge is acquired and retained. A common household item, the signet/wax apparatus symbolized the mystery of how the outside world entered the mind and stayed there. As the mirror received reflections, so the wax received impressions. Unlike reflections, however, impressions remained – as memory or fantasy. To repeat, then, my opening question: why wax? Why did Descartes choose wax as the representative object? It was not, after all, the only mutable object at hand: he might have reached for a sheet of paper from his desk, for example, and crumpled, ripped, stained, burned it to ashes; he might have taken frost from the window pane. I would like to suggest that his choice of wax was a choice of wax-without-signet. To feature wax alone was to dismantle the apparatus which, as we shall, see, was key to those old opinions he determined to clear from his mind. It was critical, for example, to Plato’s epistemology and Aristotle’s metaphysics, as well as to Descartes’s own earlier philosophy. The model of the signet and wax figures centrally in the Platonic dialogue generally considered to have defined epistemology as a separate science from ontology, knowing as a separate domain from being. In the Thaetetus, Socrates asks Theaetetus to ‘imagine that our minds contain a wax block’,8 the scriptive surface used in classical times before papyrus; vellumand paper.9 It is on this wax block that impressions were made of perceptions and of ideas ‘as if we were making marks with signet-rings’, says Socrates.10 Knowledge and memory depend upon these imprints: ‘We remember and know anything imprinted, as long as the impression remains in the block; but we forget and do not know anything which is erased or cannot be imprinted.’ The quality of a man’s intelligence depends on the state and upkeep of his mental wax block. Those whose wax block is ‘deep, plentiful, smooth and worked to the right consistency … are called clever’; while those in whom it is ‘dirty, with impurities in the wax … or too moist or too hard … are said to be in error about things and to be ignorant’.11 The same graphic device returns in Aristotle’s De anima, again in relation to cognition, with emphasis on a new detail: ‘as the wax takes the sign from the ring without the iron and gold – it takes that is, the gold or bronze sign, but not as gold or bronze’, so too sense receives the forms of the objects it perceives but not their matter.12 In both processes, efficient and material causes remain distinct. These figural imprints constitute sense impressions which register in the mind as memory, ‘just as when men seal with signet rings’;13 both remembering and thinking draw on these images. Their durability depends on the quality of the surface: a diseased or aged memory, for example, retains no more imprint than if a ‘seal were impressed on flowing water’. The metaphor of

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imprint on wax continues well into the middle ages and beyond, in discussions of mnemonic devices which derive the metaphor from the anonymous Ad Herennium, as well as from Quintilian and Cicero.14 In his earlier Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628), Descartes called upon the same device to describe perception: ‘sense-perception occurs in the same way in which wax takes on an impression from a seal’.15 Descartes insists that this statement is to be taken literally: ‘It should not be thought that I have a mere analogy in mind here’ [my italics]; and he proceeds to explain how the surface of our sentient bodies is literally changed by the perception of an object, ‘in exactly the same way as the shape of the surface of the wax is altered by the seal’. It is not just touch that depends on impressions made on skin, but the other senses as well, for each is wrapped in thin, skin-like membranes which are malleable but not permeable: ‘in the ears, nose and the tongue, the first membrane which is pervious to the passage of the object thus takes on a new shape from the sound, the smell and the flavour respectively’. Even vision depends on physical impressions, for an ‘opaque membrane receives the shape impressed upon it by multi-coloured light’. To illustrate how colour impresses the eye, Descartes reproduces three imprints representing white, blue, and red. The figures illustrate the abstract form in which extended things, res extensae, like colour, might enter the brain as thought, res cogitans. The imprint made by the object on the eye is in turn imprinted on the internal surface of the brain.16 There is no perception that could not be reduced to a similar imprint: ‘The same can be said about everything perceivable by the senses, since it is certain that the infinite multiplicity of figures is sufficient for the expression of all the differences in perceptible things’.17 The senses relay such imprints first to the common sensibility (the internal sense, which receives and coordinates impressions delivered by the external senses) and then to the imagination (or memory). At each stage, the transmission takes place ‘in exactly the same way as the shape of the surface of the wax is altered by the seal’.18 The triple relay of imprints finishes in the brain of ‘cognitive power’. Unlike the passive senses, common sensibility, and imagination, the brain functions like both parts of the instrument: now passive, now active: ‘sometimes resembling the seal, sometimes the wax’. But now we are in the realm of mere analogy: ‘But this should be understood merely as an analogy, for nothing quite like this power is to be found in corporeal things’.19 What was literally true in relation to the senses is in relation to the mind no more than a figure of speech. Ten years later, when Descartes writes the Meditations, the apparatus is not even useful as analogy. The device has been disassembled: wax stands alone. Signet and wax had represented the process by which objects in the world became objects of knowledge; wax by itself, however, suggests an autonomous consciousness, dependent on its own innate ideational resources. The absence

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of the signet is conspicuous too in a letter Descartes wrote on 2 May 1644 in which wax returns as an analogue for the brain, not because it receives imprints, but because it assumes different shapes.20 Paired with the signet, wax worked as something of an epistemic talisman, guaranteeing a correspondence between inner and outer, mind and bodies. Apart from it, mind is thrown back on its own devices – its innate ideas – the most salient of which is the idea of God itself, ‘as it were, the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work’.21 II

Genetics

The signet/wax apparatus presided over another area of classical enquiry besides epistemology. It was repeatedly evoked to illustrate a similarly mysterious phenomenon: not only how world entered mind to produce thought, but also how man penetrated woman to produce children. The gendering of the two parts of the apparatus was predictable: the form-giving seal was male and the form-receiving wax female. The male bearing down on the female left a foetal imprint (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The analogy supported the theory that the foetus was from the moment of conception complete, its parts and organs fully formed and therefore undergoing no development, only enlargement.22 Early modern engravings suggest how easily this theory lends itself to the wax/ signet analogy. In Figure 1.1, for example, the womb of the woman before impregnation is represented as a blank armorial seal awaiting the imprint that is blazoned on the pregnant womb of Figure 1.2, a flat surface imprinted with a completely formed child. The signet and wax apparatus, then, served to illustrate both processes of conception: the having of thoughts and the having of children. The double designation appears as ancient as the technique itself, existing in both Greek and Latin, activated in several of Plato’s dialogues.23 In the same dialogue that features the wax block, Socrates discusses learning in terms of giving birth, brainchildren as children of loins, using the language of fertility, barrenness, gestation, labour, delivery, and childbirth to describe the arduous and protracted process by which ideas are generated in the mind.24 In addition to introducing these obstetrical terms, Socrates assigns himself the role of midwife: ‘my midwifery has all the standard features, excepts that I practise it on men instead of women, and supervise the labour of their minds, not their bodies’.25 Socrates’s identification of himself with midwife seems calculated to replace (and neutralize) his identification in Symposium with lover or eros.26 In ancient Athens, relationships between older men and younger boys were conventionally erotic and instructive, pederastic and pedagogic;27 bodies as well as minds were deduced and established by the priestess Diotima in Symposium. In her

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famous disquisition, she explains how ‘the ladder of love’ begins with love of a beautiful boy and extends by gradations to love of wisdom. By casting himself as midwife rather than lover, Socrates moves learning from the realm of volatile desire so empowering to the teacher. There is a special urgency to this refiguring of the teacher’s role, for the dialogue ends with Socrates departing to face charges of having corrupted the youth of Athens. The claim to midwifery seems calculated to disarm his accusers: an obstetrician, an innocent bystander (obstare), has no power to corrupt, unlike the seductive and inseminating teacher. In Aristotle’s De genaratione, the seal/wax mechanics proves as apt in describing generation as it had perception, both types of conception depending of form giving imprint to matter. The homologous relation between the male and female reproductive organs could itself be imaged as the relation between the depressed image on the signet and the raised image on the wax, the female genitalia an inversion of the male.28 The apparatus was also useful in representing generation itself: the foetus is formed when male seed imparts form to female seed, when male generative principle (the efficient cause) imposes perfection upon female matter (the material cause): ‘The female always provides the material, the male that which fashions it, for this is the power we say they each possess, and this is what it is for them to be male and female’.29 In his much less respected theories of generation, as in his epistemology, Descartes dispenses with the signet-wax mechanics. Foetus and mind stand alone and autonomous, like the wax. In Meditations, he makes the seemingly offhand remark that his parents had a negligible part in creating what he identifies as himself: ‘insofar as I am a thinking thing, [my parents] did not even make me; they merely placed certain dispositions in the matter which I have always regarded as containing me, or rather my mind, for that is all I now take myself to be’.30 He has no more connection to his progenitors than his ideas do to the objective world. In his later physiological work, Description of the Human Body (1647/8), Descartes includes a section describing the formation of the foetus or, as he terms it, ‘the seminal material’.31 Here, too, as innate ideas are independent of the external world, so the foetus bears no imprint of world or parent. Indeed, for him, there is no moment of inception in which matter receives definitive form but rather a protracted process in which parts and organs gradually come into being.32 Nor are two distinct sexes involved, active fashioning passive; instead two not very different fluids commingle initially to produce not a foetus but ‘a disorganized mixture of two fluids’,33 an impossibility for Aristotle since the mixture of male and female semen would confuse efficient and material causes. These fluids interact upon one another to generate a mutual heat which in turn sets off a process of fermentation, ‘as a kind of yeast’:

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We may observe how old dough makes new dough swell, or how the scum formed on beer is able to serve as yeast for another brew; and in the same way it is easy enough to accept that the seminal material of each sex functions as a yeast to that of the other, when the two [male and female] fluids are mixed together.34

The Cartesian foetus is thus produced by a self-activating internal process (like Cartesian innate ideas) rather than by stimuli from the outside (like pre-Cartesian ideas).35 As this brief account has indicated, the signet/wax apparatus has been of tremendous importance to theories of both knowledge and generation, illustrating the critical interactions that were otherwise imperceptible between world and thought and between father and child. If there were no conformity between world and thought, there would be no truth (only error, fantasy and madness), no basis in the world for thought. If there were no conformity between parent and child, there would be no bloodlines, no basis in biology for social organization. The mechanics of the signet/wax apparatus demonstrated what could not be seen at the site either of cognition (in mentis) or of impregnation (in utero). In order to clear the mind of all its old opinions (about epistemology, about physiology), Descartes does away with that little apparatus, pulling it apart in the Meditations, omitting it altogether in Description of the Body. His solipsistic ideas and spontaneous births, requiring no contact with the outside, rendered the apparatus obsolete as a metaphoric and mechanical guarantee of both metaphysical thought and physical birth. Though not quite altogether: having taken it apart at the beginning of the Second Meditation, Descartes puts it back together in the concluding line. He repairs it in order to describe imprints that come, not from outside but from inside, not from world but from mind: ‘I should like to stop here and meditate for some time on this new knowledge I have gained, so as to fix [imprime] it more deeply in my memory’.36 Here the mind itself has assumed the function of the imprint-making signet, impressing its own mnemonic wax with knowledge. In this concluding sentence, the titular act of meditation is represented as a kind of psychic self-imprinting. Meditation involves a selfreflexive impressing, another fantasy of pure autonomy – like original thought and autogenetic birth. III Metaphorics In the English Renaissance, comparisons of mechanical and sexual reproduction, imprints and children, seem to multiply, as if the new technology of the printing press revitalized the ancient trope.37 A cluster of infantilizing tropes anticipates the nineteenth-century term for early printed books, incunabula (from

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cunabula, cradle). The textual imprint as child recurs in preliminaries to early modern books, putting into play the semantics shared by biological and textual reproduction: of issue, generation, copying, duplication, multiplying, engraving and gravidity; of textual and sexual inscriptions that survive the grave through enduring ideas and successive children; of two types of lines, scripted and genealogical which promise to extend the parent/author beyond death. Dedication pages abound in which imprinted children complain of having been disowned, orphaned, discredited and abused, often as spurious or illegitimate. Without parental protection of any kind, they seek patronage, a patron or foster father who would adopt and support. The preliminaries to the 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays attempt to procure surrogate guardians or fathers (in the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery) for the ‘orphanes’ or playtexts gathered by the volume.38 A patron was to protect the textual dependent from various misfortunes, plagiarism among them. It is thought that the poet Martial coined the term – plagiarus, literally a kidnapper – to protest against another poet’s having claimed Martial’s verses as his own.39 The trope in reverse is also pervasive: the child as imprint as well as the imprint as child, the imprint of the father, as Aristotle would lead us to expect. Thus Hermia is ‘but as a form in wax, / [by her father] imprinted’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.50), and Aaron’s son is his ‘stamp’ and ‘seal’, his ‘seal … stamped in his face’ (Titus Andronicus, 4.2.69, 127). With all stamping techniques – whether of wax, coins, or paper – there is always the possibility of forgery. Posthumus, convinced of the infidelity of all women, concludes that his father’s whereabouts were unknown ‘When [he] was stamped. Some coiner with his tools/Made me a counterfeit’ (Cymbeline, 2.5.5). The changeling child might be substituted for the legitimate child as easily as the counterfeit coin for the true, or – as in the case of Hamlet – the forged letter for the authentic. Hamlet succeeds in substituting his own forgery for his uncle’s commission because he has his father’s authorizing signet. ‘How was it seal’d?’ (5.2.47), asks Horatio. Once Hamlet gave it ‘the’ impression’ (line 52) of his father’s signet, ‘The changeling [was] never known’ (line 53).40 Shakespeare’s Sonnets use the trope in both directions. The children the poet enjoins the fair youth to beget would be his imprints: ‘[Nature] carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die’.41 And the poetic imprints the poet produces would be surrogate children. Early on in the collection, the scheme for dynastically reproducing the youth yields to the project of poetically reproducing him, inked verse lines substituting for generational loins or lineage, preserving the young man’s image for posterity, obliterating thereby Time’s disfiguring engravings, the ‘lines and wrinkles’ of old age.42 In these instances, the connections between offspring and imprints are metaphorical: the book without a patron is like an orphan; the legitimate child

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is like the father’s seal. But the same semantic overlappings acquire a more material dimension in practices such as pedagogy and obstetrics, learning and engendering, the reproduction of knowledge and the reproduction of children. Boys are capable of learning for the same reason that women are capable of engendering: because they are impressionable, like wax. That the analogy was more than mere metaphor is demonstrated by the importance of temperature control to both processes. Because a cold pupil could be intractable, schoolmasters are advised to save the most arduous writing exercises until one o’clock in the afternoon.43 Midwifery manuals maintain that a matrix needs to be kept warm in order to avoid barrenness, just as wax needs warming before receiving an impression.44 Of boys, it is said that teaching them before the age of seven is futile because ‘that which printed is therein / It holds as sure as water graved with pin’.45 But once the surface is firm enough, the imprinting process can begin: through mimetic or copying practices, from letters to exempla to precepts, so that the child himself will be able to reproduce like a ‘mint of phrases’ (Love’s Labour Lost, 1.1.165).46 Up to the late Middle Ages, these lessons were routinely impressed on wooden tablets covered with wax;47 but they could also be inscribed on paper with pen. A material inscription would ideally register in the mind as well as the writing surface, seeping through the surface via the writing hand or the reading eye into memory itself, from a graphic to a psychic register.48 Receptive to pedagogic and stylistic imprints, boys often serve as pages, taking in their master’s lessons, like Shakespeare’s generic pupil William Page.49 In all these instances, the line between education and seduction tends to blur, just as it does in Plato’s Theaetetus and Symposium, so that pedagogy slips into pederasty. Falstaff, like Socrates, is alleged to be a great corrupter of youth as well as a philanderer. His great weight makes him a natural maker of imprints; he is called a ‘bed presser’ (1 Henry IV, 1.4.242), the bed of the printing press being the surface on which the forme is laid. It is suggested that he will imprint anything that takes an impression – with the possible exception of Mistress Quickly, who like an otter, is neither fish nor flesh, a man knows not where to have her – whether it be his own boy page in 2 Henry IV, given to him by Hal who might himself have similarly served him,50 or Mistress Page and Mrs. Ford. To the last two, Falstaff sends duplicate love letters to each wife, second editions, each wife assumes, a good 1,000 having already been printed. Textually and sexually indiscriminate, he ‘cares not what he puts in press’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.1.78).51 In addition to boys and women, Falstaff also impresses men. In 2 Henry IV, we observe him impressing men into the King’s service, drafting or conscripting them, by writing their names on his list (enlisting them), what he calls ‘pricking’ them. Men in the military are much more susceptible to marital pricking – to

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the peppering of gun shot and knife points – but also to sexual pricking: ‘I have misus’d the king’s press damnably’ (1 Henry IV, 4.2.12; my italics), admits Falstaff, suggesting sexual coercion as well as monetary extortion. This is the basis of Falstaff’s joke at the expense of Feeble, the woman’s tailor. Shallow asks ‘Shall I prick him?’ (3.2.142), doubting whether the tailor used to making holes in women’s petticoats will be any good at making holes in the enemy’s coats, and Falstaff quips ‘If he had been a man’s tailor he would have pricked you’ (3.2.153), though both Feeble’s and Shallow’s names suggest limitations in that area. In this context, it is hard not to see the thigh wound Falstaff obscenely gives the dead Hotspur as another instance of his indiscriminate bent for pricking and impressing bodies, male and female, young and adult, dead and alive. Martial pricking or scoring has venerable precedents among the Ancients – both the Greek Patroclus and Achilles and the Roman Coriolanus and Aufidius. Coriolanus, for example, bears a sword that makes men with ‘death’s stamp’ (Coriolanus, 2.2.107). Embarrassed by his own scars, he prefers to publicize wounds he has given his enemies, particularly the stripes he has ‘impressed’ (5.6.107) upon Aufidius in the ‘encounters’ (4.5.123) that are the subject of the latter’s fantasies. Aufidius admits as much at a telling moment: while embracing Coriolanus as passionately as he did his virginal bride. The impress of the law makes itself felt in time of peace as well as war, through penal rather than military inscriptions, the lashes, wounds, and scars of corporeal punishment. These disciplinary markings are not altogether unpedagogical. Law impresses itself on the body that will not take in its lessons in any other form. Branding letters on the flesh – the S for Sedition, for example – is intended as a warning to the public, to be sure, but also as a final lesson to the criminal, as if to imprint on the body the instructive cipher resisted by the mind. Caliban is whipped (receives what Shakespeare elsewhere calls ‘the impression of keen whips’ Measure for Measure, 2.4.101), according to Prospero, because resistant to more literate forms of instruction, ‘which any print of goodness will not take’ (The Tempest, 1.2.352). So too boys in Tudor schoolrooms were subjected to the schoolmaster’s rod. In fact, Erasmus notes that in many cases ‘the school is, in effect, a torture chamber’.52 The lettered, however, are spared the law’s most extreme imposition. The death sentence could be avoided by demonstrating literacy with the reading of the ‘neck clause’. It was not until the very end of the seventeenth century that women gained the full benefit of clergy, but before this they could plead for a benefit of another kind: pregnancy instead of literacy.53 The same logic seems to underlie these two special dispensations, as if both inseminated women and male seminarians were spared because of their reproductive or generational capacity for children and letters respectively. Impregnation, as our attention to Aristotle would lead us to expect, is also described as an imprinting technique, as when in The Taming of the Shrew

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Lucentio is told to take the woman he intends to marry, ‘Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum’ – an inscription appearing on title pages signifying that the printer had the sole right to print (4.4.93). In other words, Lucentio should impress Bianca with his insemination imprint before she loses to another man’s mark the whiteness or virginity proclaimed by her immaculate page-like name. Beatrice’s fantasy takes a similar form when she imagines herself and Benedict between folded sheets, bed sheets and folio sheets, with Benedict, one assumes, on top, imprinting her with his issue. Submission is not always voluntary, as in the case of Lucrece; indeed, she bases her self-defence on women’s constitutional inability to resist male disfiguration: ‘Women [have] waxen minds’ that take on ‘th’impression of strange kinds’ (line 1242), with no more culpability ‘than wax … Wherein is stamp’d the semblance of a devil’ (lines 1245–6). In coining, the impression is made on molten metal, like wax and paper a surface capable of receiving graphic and sexual imprints. The unstruck metal was called a blank, like the unmarked page Blanches and Biancas are named after in honour of their virginity (or, ironically, their promiscuity). Ophelia’s lap as well as Gertrude’s is made of this metal, and Hamlet finds the maid’s more magnetic than the matron’s: ‘here’s metal more attractive’ (3.2.108). His next question pushes the word further: ‘Lady, shall I lie in your lap? … I mean, my head upon your lap’ (lines 110–11, 114). Despite Hamlet’s disclaimer, the request to lie head in/on lap does mean ‘country matters’ (my italics) – the kind of copulative lying that would transform blank metal to a medal or medallion stamped with the head of the father. Isabella’s complaint in Measure for Measure that women ‘are credulous to false-prints’ (2.4.130) refers specifically to the seducing imprint threatened by the man who bears the name of a coin, Angel, whose ‘metal/mettle’ had the great figure of the Duke ‘stamp’d upon it’ (1.1.49–50) before it was tested. The stamp Juliet receives is also precipitous, for Claudio impregnates or imprints her with ‘too gross’ charactering before their union has been fully legitimized (1.2.154). Counterfeit coining, like usury, is frequently associated with sodomitic sex.54 Imprints can be made on both sides of the body, verso as well as recto, just as they can on both sides of page or a coin. Jove lavishly drops his seminal coins on the right or front side of Danae but on the inverse or backside of Ganymede, another page. Ganymede, in Henry Peacham’s emblem book (1612), is emblematized as both sodomite and counterfeiter, guilty, says the gloss, of the ‘crime of false coin’, a sexual and economic violation.55 It is he himself who is the counterfeit coin, an example of base metal stamped with the image of the Olympian king, circulating among numismatic nobles, sovereigns, crowns, and royals. But he is base metal too because pressed on the backside or bottom, struck from behind.56 Social and anatomical inversions both run counter to nature and are therefore unproductive of either progeny

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or profit. The association between sodomy and counterfeiting unfolds in the surprising etymology of the term ‘queer’ used from the seventeenth century as a cant term for counterfeit money (‘queer money’), before centuries later it was applied to aberrant sex.57 The sexual and mechanical interconnections so prevalent in the period’s semantics can also be traced in its graphic representations. In Figures 1.1 and 1.2 for example, the womb is represented before and after conception: first as tabula rasa and then as emblazoned seal. The woodcut of the woman is a reworking of a reclining Venus, with an important modification: a rectangle around the abdominal wall has been left open, to be filled in with a woodblock of the gynecological section. This factotem was a labour-saving device, enabling the printer to use the same model in illustrating different views of the womb. But it was a device, too, that in the printer’s hand graphically enacted the generational trope of male imprinting female. Two independent woodblocks have been impressed on the womb of the female models: of a blank heraldic crest on Figure 1.1 and of a monogramatic foetus on Figure 1.2. The foetus looks like an insignia, incised on the flat abdominal wall, not unlike the letters cut into the stone plinth beneath the woman’s crotch. The figural foetus has been imprinted by the male into the material body of the female, whose womb here serves to showcase the little pictograph. Inception is clearly the formative moment rather than gestation. The foetus from the start is full formed and independent of the womb which provides it only with temporary lodging, like the loggia enclosing the spectacled male in the upper left corner. In generation as well as in education, the two types of conceptual powers (mental and corporeal) could become confused. As the pupil’s body could be impressed as well as his mind, so too the woman’s mind could be impressed as well as her body; and simultaneously, though not necessarily by the same male. In a mid-seventeenth century collection of questions and answers attributed to Aristotle, the question arises: Wherefore doth the imagination of the mother, which imagineth of an Ethiopian or Blackmore, cause the mother to bring for a black child, as Alberus Magnus reporteth of a Queen, who in the act of carnal copulation imagined of a Blackmore which was painted before her, and so brought forth a Moor?58

And the philosopher responds that in this instance ‘the childe born followeth her imagination, and not his power of forming and shaping’. The picture of the Moor pre-empts the imprint of the father, the ocular impression subverts the venereal. The reverse happens in Titus Andronicus: white overshadows black – not in Aaron’s child who bears his father’s black stamp, but in his kinsman Mulietus’s child who is fair enough to pass for the Emperor’s heir. Imprinting metaphors surface repeatedly around issues of virginity and chastity, rape and adultery. Editors explain in glossing Malvolio’s exclamation

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1.1

Female figure 1; C. Estienne, La Disséction des parties du corps humain (1546), by permission of The British Library

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1.2

Female figure 2; C. Estienne, La Disséction des parties du corps humain (1546), by permission of The British Library

41

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upon breaking the seal of the letter he believes from Olivia – ‘By your leave wax. Soft! And the Impressure, her Lucrece with which she uses to seal’ (Twelfth Night, 2.4.93) – that Lucrece must have been engraved on Olivia’s seal. To stop there is to miss the ugly joke. Women are sealed in two states: virginity and chastity. The hymenal seal is broken in marriage; the marital seal is broken by either rape or adultery. Lucrece’s very name connects her to this sealing process, for it suggests two types of creases. There are epistolary creases like those made by Lucrece herself in the letter she sends her husband, folded (line 1311) and sealed (line 1331).59 And there are labial creases, like those of Lucrece’s ‘sweet lips fold’ and those of their vaginal counterparts; the one seals with kisses, the other by sexual consummation, both ideally conjugal. The raped Lucrece is like a letter whose seal has been tampered with – and she imagines that one violated seal will be as detectable as the other. The two seals also overlap in King Lear: Edgar’s bold ripping of Goneril’s epistolary seal – ‘Leave, gentle wax’ (4.4.256) – is warranted by its contents: proof of her adulterous breaking of the sacramental seal. One broken seal deserves another. The reverse happens in The Winter’s Tale. Leontes receives a letter from Delphos, has his messengers swear they ‘have not dared to break the holy seal’ (3.2.128), and after breaking it himself reads that his wife’s seal (that is, his seal on her) was also never violated, ‘Hermione is chaste’ (line 131). Violated chastity and adulterous fornication lead to questions of bastardy and paternity, and once again to imprinting devices. Leontes strains to see himself in his son Mamillius just as he begins to doubt his paternity. He looks at him for a miniature portrait of himself, the only possible confirmation besides women’s suspect words. He refuses to see such signs in the daughter he has convinced himself he did not sire, though Paulina insists she is ‘Copy of the father’ – her features, like so many incisions and recesses in an incised surface, duplicating her father’s: ‘The trick of’s frown; his forehead; nay, the valley, / The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles’ (The Winter’s Tale, 2.3.100–103; my italics). What Leontes doubts in his own children, he recognizes immediately in Polixenes’s son: ‘Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince, / For she did print your royal father off, / Conceiving you’ (5.1.123–5). The trope is from both coining and printing, for a royal is both a coin and a size of printing paper (as well as the books made from it: royal octavo, royal quarto, etc.). The prince is like both a numismatic and bibliographic print of his royal father. IV Mechanics As the examples from Shakespeare have demonstrated, the mechanics of the imprint – of seal, stamp, coin, or woodblock – worked itself into the semantics of the period, wending its way through discourses beyond the

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literary, into pedagogy, anatomy, law, and finance. But it was not simply that these reproductive machines generated reproductive metaphors. Reproductive metaphors structured reproductive machines, at least one machine: that huge, epochal, imprinting machine – the printing press. The press is after all a machine which, like the seal, makes impressions. Or rather it is an aggregate of seals or signets: so many typebodies to be set and locked into a chase and pressed mechanically to produce an imprint, on absorbent paper instead of malleable wax.60 The astonishing thing about this machine was the degree to which it materialized or mechanized the metaphorics of the signet and wax. It was made and made to function as a generational or reproductive system: made up of sexualized parts, it performed virtual copulative acts. It is not just that textual reproduction shared with sexual reproduction a vocabulary of generating issue, propagating copy, like begetting like. It materialized and mechanized that vocabulary. Both the text and diagrams of the earliest full description that we have of the construction and workings of the printing press, Joseph Moxon’s The Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683–84), suggest the extent to which the printing press was constructed as a sexually gendered generational apparatus. The various pieces of equipment – the chase, the mold, the dressing block, the ribs of the press itself – were held together by gendered pieces: ‘Male-Duftails are fitted into Female-Duftails’;61 ‘The Female Block is such another Block as the Male Block, only, instead of a Tongue running through he length of it, a Groove is made to receive the Tongue of the Male-Block’;62 ‘The Office of the Male-Gage is to fit into, and slides along the Female-Gage’;63 ‘Male-screw is fitted into a square Nut with a Female-screw in it’.64 These mechanical pairs – the male and female duftails, blocks, gages, and screws – are the mechanical counterparts to Galen’s sexual organs. According to his model, there was basically one sex: the female reproductive system was simply an inverted, interior, and inferior version of the male, as numerous anatomical drawings attest (Figure 1.3).65 That the one-sex model should have endured so long, from the fourth century BC to the Enlightenment, and despite mounting empirical refutations, is hard to explain.66 But surely its holding power had something to do with its power to hold: the best way of holding objects and bodies together – of joining wood and coupling bodies – is the mechanics (and erotics) of the plug and the hole.67 Put together with copulating parts, the press operated when the force of the press and the press-man bore down on the forme (smeared with viscous oilbased ink) to imprint the absorbent and retentive page. Called a ‘horse’ and later a ‘bear’, the press-man must have been Falstaffian in his corpulence, and so he appears in a late sixteenth-century engraving of the printing-house (see Figure 1.7). Of course, all presses – wine presses, olive presses, paper presses – might be said to suggest the same sexual act of ‘bearing down’. The press

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of the printing press was unique, however, in that it applied not just pressure but a figure of some kind: an imprint. So too did all reproductive apparatuses, from the signet on wax, to the stamp on coin, to the woodblock on paper and textiles. All these techniques involved, like the act of copulation itself, inverse commensurate parts, either in relief or intaglio, raised or sunken, the reproduced image an inside-out version of the reproduced original: ‘what is inside women, likewise sticks out in males’.68 The feature that distinguished the printing press from all other modes of reproduction – movable type – was made by a process that also required gendered conjoining. The process began with a punch or patrix – a sleek tapered metal shank (of about 1 3/4 inches) with letters or ciphers on its tip. The patrix or punch was ‘sunk into’ a soft piece of wood called a matrix. (A question arises, ‘viz. How deep the Punches [or patrices] are to be Sunk into the Matrices?’ The answer is ‘a thick space deep, though deeper to an n would be yet better’.69) It was this process that most closely resembled the imprinting of signet and wax, as the earliest French handbook (1567) on print specified: ‘la matrice … n’est autre chose que l’imprésion du charactère frappé, non plus ne moins que quand on margue un cachet dedans la cire’.70 Molten metal was then poured into and impacted against the matrix in order that a sharply defined letter would be produced. In a 1587 engraving based on an earlier painting, Gutenberg is depicted holding the patrix or punch for the letter A in his right hand that has been struck into the matrix or mould he holds in his left (Figure 1.4). From this coupling of imprinting patrix and imprinted matrix letters were formed. They were removed from the mould and ‘dressed’ with great care, even tenderness: the type dresser goes as near the Light as he can with the Letters … and examins what Letters Come not well either in the Face or shanck .… Then with the Balls of the fingers of both his Hands, he Patts gently upon the Feet of the Letter, to press all their Faces down upon the Tongue; which having done, he takes the Mallet in his right-Hand, and with it knocks gently …. Then with a small piece of Buff or some other soft Leather, he rubs a little upon the Feet of the Letter to smooth them.71

The letters were treated like newborns. And indeed they do look astonishingly humanoid, with human anatomies: a body (stem of metal) standing on ‘feet’ with ‘shoulders’ supporting a face whose physiognomy is literally its character, a legible face (Figure 1.5). The anthropomorphic quality of typebodies has not gone unremarked: For purposes of nomenclature typefounders and printers have always regarded the single movable type character as a human being standing erect, each type having a body, a face, beard, neck, shoulder, back, belly, and feet. These parts fall into three divisions: the shank, the shoulder, and the face; the shoulder and shank together comprising the body.72

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1.3

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Organs of generation; A. Vesalius, Vivae imagines partium corporis humani (1566), copyright British Museum

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1.4

Gutenberg with punch; A. Thevet, Vies et portraits des hommes illustres (1587), by permission of The British Library

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As the mechanical letter has face and body, so too the anatomical man has letters: in Geofrey Tory’s anatomy, ‘L’homme letré’ (Figure 1.6 is ‘insinuées et intimées’73) with the 23 letters of the Attic (Roman) alphabet, programmed for virtuous words and deeds. Issuing from copulative mechanical exercise, letters could themselves be quite sexy, as they are in sixteenth-century embodied alphabets in which the body of the letter is represented by lusty human bodies in seductive poses and erotic positions, intended to inspire a love of letters.74 And their inseminating power was suggested by the name of the receptacle in which they were held when not in use, (upper and lower) cases75 (Figure 1.7 left), the same name given the seed-carrying scrotum and uterus, which also possessed upper and lower cases.76 It is because the letters have such anthropomorphic traits and drives that the Star Chamber orders that offending presses and letters be ‘defaced’, ‘battered’, and ‘broken’.77 (Greg, 1930, pp. 161, 240, 243). Once dismembered, its broken parts are returned, like the scattered bones of a saint. A male saint, it must be emphasized, for the imprinting type-bodies, true to Aristotle, were decidedly male, each one possessing that determining marker of masculinity – a beard.78 Like the letter, the printing-house was gendered male.79 The printers’ guild, the Brothers of the Stationers’ Company, was unusual in excluding female apprentices.80 This cannot have been because of the physical and messy nature of printers’ work, for female apprentices were routinely admitted in the early modern centuries to such ‘unfeminine’ crafts as wheel-wrighting, masonry, and blacksmithing.81 It was not until 1666, however, that the first girl was indentured to the Stationers’ guild.82 It is true that printers’ widows not uncommonly became members of the Company in the sixteenth century. However, that remarriage outside the Company entailed the forfeiture of membership83 suggests that it was conferred upon them not in their own right but as surrogates for their deceased husbands. Even as late as the nineteenth century, with the large influx of women into the printing industry, they were mainly barred from print-making machine and type and assigned to the manufacturing and stitching of print-taking pages.84 Nor was this assignment any more than their original exclusion dictated by biological difference, for, if anything, women’s smaller hands were better suited for the nimble work required by type-setting. A curious female counterpart to the masculinist printing-house can be found in the birthing-place (Figure 1.8). Until midwives’ hands were replaced by man-midwives’ forceps, the delivery of children was an exclusively female occupation.85 As recent studies have shown, women in seventeenth-century London received their training as midwives through an apprenticeship system made up only of women; so too, the licences and testimonials required for practising were obtained through a female network.86 The mutual exclusivity

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1.5

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Diagram of type; L.A. Legros and J.C. Grant, Typographical Typing Surfaces (1916)

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1.6

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Lettered man; G . Tory, Champ Fleury (1529), by permission of The British Library

1.7

Printing-house; J. van der Straet, Nova reperta (1600), copyright British Museum

1.8

Birthing-place; L. Dolce, Transformationi d’Ovido (1555), by permission of The British Library

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of the two sites upheld the gendered binaries of signet and wax: the printinghouse doing the printing of the notional figural signet, the birthing-lace doing the receiving of the corporeal material wax. The belief that the two reproductive processes were incompatible also kept the realms discrete. There is evidence in French printing shops of fear lest menstruating women ruin metal machinery, ‘rust iron and brass, dull cutting instruments, jeopardize already hazardous process of casting, and the like’.87 In England generally, midwives called on the assistance of male surgeons only if the foetus or mother or both had died.88 In this deeply entrenched division of labour, the gendered binaries of the signet and wax still prevail, directing not only ideas and metaphors but machines, customs and institutions. This essay has discussed how imprinting devices – seal, stamp, coin, and woodblock – have been used to represent the workings of the mind and body. From ancient times, reproductive mechanisms, particularly the signet and wax, have provided a model for reproductive bodies and minds – for the conception and generation of ideas and children. In the early modern period, these connections were elaborated and extended through a complex semantic circuitry, traceable in Shakespeare’s language as well as in several contemporary discursive sites and practices. Yet the transposition between the mechanical and human worked in more than one direction: not only from machine to man to mechanized man, but also from man to machine to humanized machine – as the example of the printing press suggests. With its anthropomorphic reproductive parts and processes, the copying machine was a kind of copulating body. A copulating body with a difference, that is, and not just in size or capacity. The difference pertained to the imprint-making mechanism itself: uniform in all other imprinting apparatuses, it was multiform in the press. A signet or stamp could produce only one insignia; the forme of the press, however, made up of variable and movable letters, could produce a virtually infinite number of impressions. Even in the course of a single working day, the forme was assembled and disassembled, often repeatedly. On a bad day, letters might even spill out onto the floor (and the compositor would be fined for each one dropped). It may be quite misleading, then, to assume that fixity was the printing press’s great effect on Western culture. The innovation was, after all, movable type. While perhaps more fixed than cursive script, it was certainly less stable than stamp, block, or signet. The movable imprint of the press made for a more efficient and flexible reproductive technology, to be sure. But what happened to the epistemic and genetic theories that once conformed with the fixed imprint of the signet? Were knowledge and generation imagined differently? Was the new mechanics of the press attended by transformations in how thought and sex were construed? It is fair to raise such huge questions at the end of this study only because it may well be that recent Shakespeare studies have been in the process of

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anticipating answers. Textual scholars are no longer tyrannized by the Fixity of Print, the assumption that typography worked to standardize, regularize, and stabilize texts. It is generally recognized now that malleability and provisionality characterize the Shakespearean text to such a degree that it is not clear whether certain texts should be regarded as single or multiple.89 As our sense of what kind of textual imprints the early modern press produced has changed, so may have our assumptions about knowledge and sexuality. We are skeptical of claims like Hamlet’s that plays constitute ‘the very form and pressure’ of the age (3.2.24). The discursive complexes in which the plays are enmeshed are mimetic of no prior and independent reality, historical or empirical. Nor is the binary model of imprinting male and imprinted female any longer adequate for plays that are now seen to stage a range of polymorphous fits and mis-fits. In approaching body, mind, and text, Shakespeare studies appear to be dispensing with the binaries once mechanized by the signet and wax. It may be that the combinatorial possibilities of movable type on page are more in line with our present expectations, as we ourselves move from one form of reproductive technology to another. Notes 1

I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Neil Hertz’s consideration of the practical, conceptual and mystical importance of wax. ‘Dr. Johnson’s Forgetfulness, Descartes’ Piece of Wax’, Eighteenth Century Life 16.3 (1992): 167–81. I must also thank Peter Stallybrass for showing me Hertz’s essay as well as for his encouragement from start to finish. 2 Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols, eds J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), v2. p. 20. 3 On Descartes’ wax and the topos of mutability, see J. Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Patterns in Poetic Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 217–19. 4 Descartes, Philosophical, p. 20. 5 Hertz, ‘Dr. Johnson’s Forgetfulness’, p. 175. 6 Descartes, Philosophical, p. viii. 7 For a demonstration of how poundage of wax correlates with volume of letters, see the conclusions drawn from the documented increase in the use of wax (from 3.63 pounds to 31.9 pounds) in Chancery over a 50 year stretch in Henry III’s reign, in M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), pp. 45–6. 8 Plato, Theaetetus, trans. R. Waterfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 99. 9 R.H. Rouse and M.A. Rouse, ‘The Vocabulary of Wax Tablets’, Harvard Library Bulletin 1 (1990): 1–13. 10 Plato, Theaetetus, p. 100. 11 Plato, Theaetetus, pp. 104–5. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates draws on the same image of the imprint to describe knowledge as recollection. Here, however, the

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17 18 19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28

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imprints come not from the outside through time, but reside inwardly from birth – imprints of ‘absolutes’ like equality, beauty, goodness, and justice. See Plato’s Phaedrus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1953), 7SD. Aristotle, De anima, trans. H. Lawson-Trancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 187. Aristotle, ‘On Memory and Recollection’, in On the Soul, Parva naturalia, On Breath, trans. W.S. Hert (London: Heinemann, 1935), p. 287. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1994), pp. 49–50. Descartes, Philosophical, p. 40. For a physiological description of this phenomenon, see the description and diagram of how impressions on the eye refigure themselves on the brain, in his The World and Treatise on Man (1629–33) (Descartes, Philosophical, p. 105). See also his description of the eye of a dead ox, ‘Optics’, in Discourse and Essays (c. 1630) (Descartes, Philosophical, p. 167). Descartes, Philosophical, p. 41. Descartes, Philosophical, p. 40. Descartes, Philosophical, p. 42. Descartes, Philosophical, p. 232. In the same letter, Descartes compares the brain to paper as well as wax; and as wax is without signet, so paper is without pen. Folds in the paper take the place of any stamp or script (p. 233). He draws the same analogy in his letter of 29 January 1640: ‘As for the impressions preserved in the memory, I imagine they are not unlike the folds which remain in this paper after it has once been folded; and so I think they are received for the most part in the whole substance of the brain’ (p. 143). On Descartes’s punning on his own name, ‘the Greek word for paper’, see J. Nancy, ‘Dum Scribo’, Oxford Literary Review 3 (1978): 6–20. Descartes, Philosophical, p. 35. On the theory that the foetus at fertilization was complete in miniature (preformation) and on the countervailing theory that the parts and organs developed sequentially (epigenesis), see P. Bowler, ‘Preformation and Pre-existence in the Seventeenth Century: A Brief Analysis’, Journal of the History of Biology 4 (1971), pp. 221–44. The signet/wax apparatus makes a comeback in this century, however, both in Freud’s identification of the psyche with the modern day wax tablet – the mystic pad – and with Derrida’s critique of that identification, in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ in Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) pp. 196–231. Both writers are fully aware of the tradition behind their discussions, Freud announcing ‘a return to the ancient method of writing upon tablets of clay or wax’ (quoted by Derrida, p. 223) and Derrida noting, ‘From Plato and Aristotle scriptural images have regularly been used to illustrate the relationship between reason and experience, perception and memory’ (p. 199). Plato, Theaetetus, pp. 25–9. Plato, Theaetetus, p. 27. Plato, Symposium, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989), p xxiii, 177D. Plato, Symposium, pp. xiv–xv. On the Galenic one-sex model (in which female sexual parts were construed as the interiorized inversion of male), see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 32–5.

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29 30 31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49

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Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 30. Descartes, Philosophical, p. 35. Descartes, Philosophical, p. 321. For a discussion of Descartes’s theories of generation in the context of seventeenthcentury theories of preformation and epigenesis, see D. Fouke, ‘Mechanical and Organical Models in Seventeenth-Century Explanations of Biological Reproduction’, Science in Context 3:2 (1975): 366–88. I wish to thank Karen Newman for showing me before publication her invaluable genealogy of generation, ‘Fetal Positions: An Essay on Individualism’, Science and Visuality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Descartes, Philosophical, p. 322. Descartes, Philosophical, p. 322. In Book II of Paradise Lost, Milton solves the doctrinal crux of how original sin entered the world by drawing on both forms of Cartesian conception: innate ideas and epigenetic birth. Sin emerges not from any outside stimulus, neither Creation or Creator, but automatically – from Satan’s own brain, its conception of sin simultaneously a sinful thought and a child named Sin (lines 747–61). Descartes, Philosophical, p. 23. I have benefited in this section from Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson’s discussion of Shakespeare’s use of printing, stamping and coining metaphors in relation to issues of gender difference, generation, and legitimacy in this volume See my Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). H.O. White, Plagiarism and Imitation During the English Renaissance. A Study of Critical Distinctions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 16. On the monarch’s use of the signet, Privy Seal, land Great Seal, and their eventual preemption by the monarch’s signature or ‘sign manual’, see Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 260–63. Shakespeare, The Sonnets and a Lover’s Complaint, ed. J. Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 11. See my ‘The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994), pp. 35–49; p. 46. J. Brinsley, Ludus literarius: or, the Grammar Schoole (1612), facs. rpt (Menston: Scholar Press, 1964), p. 32. See D. Everden, ‘Mothers and Midwives in Seventeenth-Century London’, in The Art of Midwifery ed. Hilary Marland (London: Routledge, 1993). T. Whythorne, The Autobiography, ed. J. Osborne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 7. On the various forms of copying prescribed by humanist pedagogy, see Jonathan Goldberg’s chapter ‘Copies’ in Writing Matter, pp. 111–69; for a discussion of the importance of various mimetic practices in Tudor education, see Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 19–60. Rouse and Rouse, ‘Vocabulary’. Goldberg, Writing Matter, pp. 159–60; ‘Hamlet’s Hand’, Shakespeare Quarterly 39:3 (1988): 307–27; 316. On the circulation of folio and boy pages, especially among pederastically inclined pedants and pedagogues, see E. Pittinger, ‘Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42, pp. 389–409. On Nashe’s

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52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

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punning use of page in The Unfortunate Traveller, see J.V. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 69–73. On the male author’s identifications with the pages of his publications, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 1–2. ‘Hal’s Desire, Shakespeare’s Idaho’, in Henry IV Part One and Two, ed. Nigel Wood (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), pp. 56–7. There is some suggestion that the blubbery Falstaff – called ‘tallow’ (1 Henry IV, 2.4.111), ‘greasy tallow-catch’ (line 228) and likened to ‘a candle, the better part burnt out,’ ‘a wassail candle … all tallow’ (2 Henry IV, 3.3.79–80, 84) might be considered in this context. For a discussion of Falstaff’s effeminacy, see Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 50–70, p. 155, n. 19. Halpern, Poetics, p. 26. I wish to thank Albert Braunmuller for pointing out to me that women did not receive benefit of clergy until the end of the century. The connection between sodomy and counterfeiting is the subject of William Fisher’s essay, ‘Queer Money’, and I wish to thank him for sharing it before publication. H. Peacham, Minerva Britanna, or a Garden of Historical Devices, London (1612). I am grateful to William Fisher for this reference. S.K. Fischer, Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 95. Fisher, ‘Queer Money’, ELH 66 (1999): 1–23; Aristotle, The Problems of Aristotle, with Other Philosophers, and Physicians: Wherein are Contained Divers Questions with their Answers, Touching the Estate of Mans Bodie. On the poem’s ‘postal circuit’, see, Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 195–200; on Lucrece and the humanist project of textual purification, see Stephen Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); and on her relation to the ‘stigma of print’, see Wall, Imprint of Gender, pp. 214–20. For the similarity between the two technologies, see M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), p. 160. It should be noted, however, that the letters of the press are in relief whereas the figure of the signet is recessed. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683–84), ed. Herbert David and Harry Carter (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 43. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, p. 181. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, p. 140. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, p. 72. Laqueur, Making Sex, pp. 32–5, Figures 20–37. Laqueur, Making Sex, pp. 150–54. This is, quite literally, the rude mechanics of Shakespeare’s ‘rude mechanics’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That it applies to both artisanal and sexual activity is apparent in the very names of the artisans, all of them alluding to the fitting together of inverse parts, sexual and artisanal. Snug the Joiner or Carpenter snugly joins pieces of wood together, like male-duftails and female-duftails. Snout the Tinkerer knows, like all tinkerers, how to stop up holes, his outstanding nose or snout giving

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68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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him a natural advantage; Starveling the Tailor needles his way, thin starveling that he is, into women’s garments. ‘Peter’ Quince finds his way into women’s corners or quoins, the metal or wooden shanks used to full up gaps. And Francis the Bellows Mender, liberally (licentiously) stops the holes in womb-like bellies or bellows. What all these names suggest is the basic phallocentricity of both making things with cloth, metal and wood and making children with bodies: different hardware, but the same mechanical principle of joining and fitting together inverse parts. The only exception is Bottom the Weaver: though his name suggests the right phallic shape of the spool around which the yarn is wound, it is, as his name also suggests, in the wrong erotic position: on the bottom, encircled rather than inserting, as Bottom is when Titania mounts him in the stretch of the play demonstrating topsy-turvy consequences of female domination. On the names and trades of these artisans as well as their erotic counterparts, see Patricia Parker, ‘Rude Mechanicals’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, eds Margreta de Grazia, Peter Stallybrass, and Margaret Quilligan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 54–5. Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 133. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, p. 154. Christophile Plantin, La Premiére, et La Second partie des dialogues francois pour les jennes enfans, anvers, 1567, p. 236. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, pp. 184, 187. D. Thomas, Type for Print (London: Joseph Whitaker and Sons, 1936), p. 17. Geofrey Tory, Champ Fleury (Paris, 1529), p. XXIIIV. Goldberg, Writing Matter, pp. 226–8. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, pp. 27–32. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 27–31. W.W. Greg and Eric Boswell, Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1576–1602 (London: The Bibliographic Society, 1930), pp. 161, 240, 243. I wish to thank Ian Gadd for first telling me about bearded typefaces. Moxon discusses the cutting of beards in Mechanick Exercises, pp. 24–5, 188. According to C. Cockburn, printing in England has a long history of excluding women from the setting type (Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change [London: Pluto Press, 1991], esp. p. 154). For similar conclusions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, with attention to how definitions of masculinity were repeatedly unsettled by changes in type-setting technologies, see A. Baron, ‘Questions of Gender, Deskilling, and Demasculation in the U.S. Printing Industry, 1830–1915’, Gender and History 1:2 (1989): 178–99. For a full account of women’s involvement in printing in the eighteenth century, despite these customary restrictions, see C.J. Mitchell, ‘Women in the Eighteenth-Century Book Trades’ in Writers, Books, and Trade, ed. O.M. Brack, Jr (New York: AMS Press, 1991), pp. 25–75. (My thanks to Simon Stern for showing me this essay.) Although his interest is women’s apprenticeship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, K.D.M. Snell endorses studies establishing that ‘the apprenticeship of girls was an accepted fact’ in the earlier centuries (Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], pp. 272–6). Snell, Annals, pp. 274–5. Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403–1959 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), p. 162. Blagden, Stationers’ Company, pp. 95, 162.

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84 Cockburn, Brothers, pp. 23–6. 85 On the invention of the forceps, the replacement of the traditional midwife with men-midwives and the sudden increase in male attendance at childbirth in the eighteenth century, see Hilary Marland, ed., The Art of Midwifery (London: Routledge, 1993). 86 Everden, ‘Mothers and Midwives’, pp. 9–26. 87 On the incompatibility of menstrual and technical processes in sixteenth-century France, see Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women in the Arts Mécaniques’, Lyon et l’Europe, hommes et sociétés: Mélanges d’histiore offerts à Richard Gascon vol. 1 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1980), p. 146. 88 Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 109–18. 89 See my essay, ‘The Question of the One and the Many’, Shakespeare Quarterly 46:2 (1995): 1–7.

CHAPTER 2

Meaning, ‘Seeing’, Printing Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson I

The Trouble with Imagery

In this essay we consider metaphors drawn from the field of books and printing. They will be explored for their own sake, but also used as a body of examples against which to test the arguments put forward by the philosopher Donald Davidson against there being any such thing as metaphorical meaning.1 But before assembling some printing metaphors or expounding Davidson, we want to begin by making a few critical points about the notion of ‘imagery’ still widely used in discussing the figurative in literature. Perhaps our reservations are based on an over-literal view of what speaking of imagery and images implies. But we need to lay out our broad objections at this point, since later we will be asking whether Davidson runs the risk of echoing at a more sophisticated level the mistake we believe to be involved in any treatment of metaphor as imagery. What is supposed to be going on in a piece of language that is ‘rich in imagery’? On the face of it, such language must prompt mental images in profusion. The reader is provided with a number of stimuli for the visual imagination. To speak of metaphor as a species of imagery is to claim that it is primarily concerned with the evocation of mental pictures. The best metaphors become those which make one ‘see’ something, ‘picture’ something. Similarly, the best vehicles, or the best donor semantic fields,2 become those which lend themselves to visualization, and the best readers are those who discover or are taught how to maximize this inner-eye effect in responding to metaphor. We are not making a very original point when we reply to these assumptions that such an account turns one of the things that can happen as the result of encountering a metaphor into metaphor’s defining characteristic. An account of mental picture-making as part of the literary reading process would be a very interesting study in its own right. What makes it difficult is the wellknown difference between visualizers and non-visualizers: some people report a vastly fuller inner-eye ‘accompaniment’ to the reading process than others do. It is not at all clear that non-visualizers are greatly disadvantaged when the text before them is a metaphorical one. On the other hand, it is necessary to visualize when reading descriptive prose, such as the leisurely scene setting paragraphs in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, if one is to enter into the experience of reading which makes the most of the text’s power. What seems perverse

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about ‘imagery’ as a term is that it is applied to metaphors and withheld from Scott. Of course, defenders of the term sometimes use it in an expanded sense whereby it is no longer confined to the visual. When luckless students are invited to count the ‘images’ in a poem, they are sometimes asked to classify them according to the sensory modality in question, so we hear of ‘auditory images’, ‘tactile images’, and the like. To some ears (including ours) phrases such as ‘tactile image’ sound ill-formed: an image is something visual. But we would admit that, working back from ‘imagination’ (which clearly is not restricted to the visual: there is no problem about imagining a thunderclap or imagining the feel of polished wood), one might want to use ‘image’ in a specialized way so as to cover inner-ear, inner-taste, inner-smell, and innertouch phenomena as well. (There does seem to be a lexical gap here since ‘imagined sense datum’ is so cumbersome.) However, the same argument still applies against equating an all-senses notion of imagery with the figurative: the appreciation of Robert Burns’s ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ simile no more depends on the reader’s ability to summon up an imagined rose before his or her inner nose than upon the ability of the inner eye to picture woman plus rose, woman as rose (how?), or whatever a visual account of the figure as ‘imagery’ implies. Once a necessary relationship between figure and visual or sensory image is denied, the way is open to investigate particular relationships that may pertain. What do we in fact ‘see’ in grasping the point of a particular metaphor? A plausible answer might be: just what fleeting and diagrammatic (and perhaps internally inconsistent) visualization is helpful to that end. A reader attempting to understand one of the more complex time metaphors in Troilus and Cressida3 may very well need to spatialize time in some inner-visual way, but to speak of an image forming as a result of that process seems overly reifying, as if some Dali-esque illustrated version of the text were the text’s raison d’être. But the denial of the primacy of such ‘images’ does not require us to deny that spatialization and indeed picturing (e.g., at 3.3.145–50, who is Time? where is his wallet? where is Oblivion?) can contribute to our grasping the semantic or conceptual analogy the reader or hearer is presented with. II

People are Books

Our first group of printing-based metaphors will bring out how a donor field, which is intrinsically eminently visual, can nevertheless be used in a way which discourages detailed visualization. The Elizabethans, like ourselves, were fond of using a PEOPLE ARE BOOKS everyday structural metaphor.4 What do books as a donor field allow us to

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appreciate about people? Books are readable; by passing the eye over their print we receive messages, ideally truths. They have covers, and are kept closed when not in use. Although a whole book is a lengthy and often complex message, its general character and particular contents are revealed synecdochally by special parts, namely the title page and the index. Similarly, people can be ‘read’: their appearance and their behaviour are semiotic. This process can require – for those who are not already ‘open books’ – some opening or revealing process (compare the fairly recent idiom ‘He finally opened up to me’). Equally, parts of a person’s appearance or behaviour can be indicative of the whole of his or her character. A quick run-through of some Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean examples reveals some of the possibilities for using PEOPLE ARE BOOKS either straightforwardly or with some elaboration.5 In Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Cariola denies betraying her mistress and declares ‘when / That you have cleft my heart, you shall read there / Mine innocence’ (3.2.114–16): ‘heart’ is synecdochic for the whole person, and can be broken, but here the breaking would also amount to the opening of the book wherein Cariola’s truth will be found written. In Marston’s The Insatiate Countess, the Countess herself asks ‘Is not the face the index of the mind?’ (Act 2, p. 30, l.24): face is to mind as index is to the whole book.6 In Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, the wronged husband Frankford represents their children to his wife Anne as ‘these young harmless souls, / On whose white brows thy shame is character’d’ (sc. 13.2.120–21). This evokes the less happy side of the open book analogy: looking at the children, innocent though they be, the community will be able to ‘read’ Anne’s infidelity (shades of The Scarlet Letter!). Earlier in the same play, Wendoll, Frankford’s friend and Anne’s lover, has claimed that all of her reproaches are ‘recorded / Within the red-leav’d table of my heart’ (sc. 6.2.126–7); perhaps here the insistence on the colour of the ‘table’ (= writing tablet) is a trifle unfortunate. Closely related, however, is Hamlet’s promise to preserve the Ghost’s ‘commandment … / Within the book and volume of my brain’ (Hamlet, 1.5.102-3). In these latter two examples the permanence of the printed or written, as opposed to the transitory nature of spoken language, is relevant and the ‘coveredness’ of heart and brain, like the ‘coveredness’ of books, is seen as helpful. If you think of covers as most exciting when opened, however, consider Orsino telling Cesario-Viola ‘I have unclasp’d / To thee the book even of my secret soul’ (Twelfth Night, 1.4.13–14). Book covers with clasps represent the ultimate form of external protection for the message. On the ‘open book’ side, a more complicated Shakespearean example occurs in King John when John asks the French king, ‘If that the Dauphin there, thy princely son, / Can in this book of beauty read, “I love”’ (2.1.484–5). The book of beauty is John’s niece Blanch. What seems odd here is that the text which the Dauphin is to read

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in Blanch is not her declaration of love to him but his to her – a reversal not inappropriate to the cynical calculations of state upon which the whole idea of the match depends. Thus the face, the heart, and the brain can all be ‘seen as’ (thought of as) books or parts of books. But what does it mean to ‘see’ a person ‘as’ a book? How far is the metaphor visual and how far is it purely conceptual? Consider Northumberland in the opening of 2 Henry IV predicting (accurately, as it turns out) that Morton is bringing bad news: ‘Yea, this man’s brow, like to a title-leaf, / Foretells the nature of a tragic volume’ (1.1.60–61). Here the point of resemblance is spelt out; the man’s brow is not like a title-leaf because it literally looks like one but because it has a similar capacity to ‘foretell’ a story. There is also an underlying synecdoche here: the brow is the ‘front’ of the person as the title-leaf is the ‘front’ of the book. But the potential for strictly visual similarity between the brow of a person and the title-leaf of a book is not developed. The resemblance depends primarily on the conceptual point that the expression of the brow or face is like writing in so far as both are signsystems which can be ‘read’ by those possessing the necessary skill. The semiotics of facial expression involves the sense of vision, obviously, just as writing does, but the conceptual likenesses between writing and facial expression seem much more interesting and intricate than the visual one. Information, in both cases, is acquired by the ‘reader’, but only if he or she possesses the code or language in which the information is couched. The link between vision and understanding can be broken in two ways: the face can be seen but not understood (lack of code), or understanding may derive not from the face at all but from previous knowledge projected onto the face by the viewer (surplus of message). Morton’s brow functions as an effective sign because those who see it can associate its configuration with bad news. Similarly, in A Woman Killed with Kindness when the guilty heroine asks, ‘Can you not read my fault writ in my cheek?’ (sc. 17.l.56), we assume she is alluding to a visual signifier – a blush – that bears a determinate signified in the context. By contrast, in Chapman’s Byron’s Conspiracy, Savoy, referring to the inscrutability of the banished La Fin, speaks of ‘those strange characters writ on his face / Which at first sight were hard for me to read’ (1.1.170–71): only with practice can Savoy pick up La Fin’s facial code, though the face itself does not become more visible. And we have already quoted an example of the other disruption of the vision-understanding link from A Woman Killed with Kindness: the ‘white brows’ of the children are only ‘character’d’ with their mother’s shame for those who already know her guilt, rather in the same way that the faces of contemporary celebrities come to signify the known facts about them. How the PEOPLE ARE BOOKS metaphor can be elaborated in ways which demonstrate both kinds of vision-understanding disruption is well illustrated

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by two passages from Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece. After the rape, Lucrece’s fear is that she is all too easily readable. She implores Night to linger: Make me not object to the tell-tale Day: The light will show, character’d in my brow, The story of sweet chastity’s decay, The impious breach of holy wedlock vow; Yea, the illiterate that knows not how To cipher what is writ in learned books, Will quote my loathsome trespass in my looks.

(lines 806–12)

Yet, ironically, her own vulnerability was earlier seen to be due to her inability to read or decipher the lust in Tarquin’s eyes: But she that never cop’d with stranger eyes, Could pick no meaning from their parling looks, Nor read the subtle shining secrecies Writ in the glassy margins of such books.

(lines 99–102)

She could not ‘read’ Tarquin, for all his visibility. Now to be visible for her is to be read as ravished, where it is clearly the fact of the rape once known that will lend meaning to her looks. (In her distraught rhetoric there is a sense of some more direct, natural-sign communicability of her plight, so that it could be ‘read’ as directly as a blush can be ‘read’, but what sort of brow-configuration could, on its own, say ‘rape’ is hard to guess.) It is certainly possible, and arguably desirable, to form a mental image of Tarquin on the basis of 2.99–102, with some help from cultural stereotypes of ‘lustful looks’. But is this directly facilitated by the figuration, or is it independently achieved once the point of the metaphors has been grasped? If the latter, we would be dealing with an ‘image’ that is closer to that evoked by a novelistic descriptive paragraph than to ‘imagery’ as usually understood. And this seems to be the case; or at least the visualization (or spatialization) involved in working out the metaphor is of a quite different sort from that which produces a reasonable Tarquin-picture. This is shown especially in the development of the metaphor in one detail: if faces are books, eyes are margins. Visually and spatially, the likeness between eyes and margins is downright negative, eyes being in the middle of the face (presumably if we looked for the most visually marginal part of Tarquin’s face we would choose his ears). But of course the resemblance is a conceptual one, based on the notion that what eyes and margins have in common is a capacity to carry commentary (or perhaps to provide emphasis, as with the little hands pointing to ‘notable sentences’ in Elizabethan books). Shakespeare liked the EYES ARE MARGINS metaphor well enough to use it again in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet. We shall be returning

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to the former passage, in the course of which Boyet describes the effect on King Ferdinand of seeing the Princess: ‘His face’s own margin did quote such amazes / That all eyes saw his eyes enchanted with gazes’ (2.1.246–7). The word ‘quote’ reappears; in the passage from Lucrece (l.812), the Riverside editor glosses it as meaning ‘notice, observe’, while here the gloss is ‘indicate’. The verb seems to oscillate between referring to the reader’s interpretative action and referring to the giving-off of information on which that action is based. Boyet describes a man whose eyes not only function (see) but reveal (signify): he is seen by all to be seeing in a particular way. So two different registers of the visible are in play – yet the metaphor animating them does not itself depend on, or even allow, visualization. As for the Romeo and Juliet margin, it is evoked in the course of Lady Capulet’s encouraging Juliet to take interest in Paris: Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face, And find delight writ there with beauty’s pen; Examine every married lineament, And see how one another lends content: And what obscur’d in this fair volume lies Find written in the margin of his eyes, This precious book of love, this unbound lover, To beautify him, only lacks a cover. The fish lives in the sea, and ‘tis much pride For fair without the fair within to hide. That book in many’s eyes doth share the glory, That in gold clasps locks in the golden story; So shall you share all that he doth possess, By having him, making yourself no less.

(1.3.81–94)

Here the donor field of the book is fully explored for what likeness it can provide for Paris’s merits – so fully, in fact, as to constitute a ‘high’ complement to the humour of the Nurse’s ‘low’ approach to the question of marriage. Paris is to be ‘read as’ delightful, with his eyes (reciprocally?) providing a commentary which Juliet will find easier to read. At this point, however, the ‘cover’ aspect of books is taken in an unusual direction: Paris’s lack of a wife leaves him incomplete; in this donor field the figure for the incomplete is the book without a cover. Another field is evoked briefly to lend elucidation: the sea surrounds the fish as necessarily as a book’s cover binds its pages (or – with the container-contained relationship moved further away from the concrete towards the abstract – as a book encloses its contents). Juliet is to be Paris’s completing environment, and as a beautiful object herself is ‘golden’ enough for the purpose.7 Any attempt to describe the ‘image’ or picture of Paris-as-book evoked by this passage seems bound to result in disaster. Not only are there the difficulties

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involved in visualizing eyes as margins or faces as written-on which have already been considered. The picture is even more radically incoherent because of the shift from Juliet-as-reader to Juliet-as-cover. Add to this the sudden undeveloped appearance of the fish in its sea, and the speech seems to be revealed as a grotesque mess. Abandon the picturing strategy, however, and the speech, while still a little strained conceptually, is so well within the limits of its context: Lady Capulet can be recognized as speaking floridly without seeming to be uttering nonsense. III Davidson’s Argument In ‘What Metaphors Mean’, Donald Davidson argues elegantly and subtly for the thesis that ‘metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation mean, and nothing more’.8 His paper might appear on a careless reading to be a radical attack on all interpretation of metaphor – an attack which literary scholars would feel obliged to resist. But the profession can relax: while ‘a metaphor doesn’t say anything beyond its literal meaning’, nevertheless ‘this is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words’.9 Davidson’s account of how metaphor works depends on drawing a clear line between meaning and use. A standard example of the meaning-use divergence is the use of a declarative statement to achieve the same effect as a command or request. ‘It’s getting very chilly’, uttered by A in a context in which B is in a good position to close the window, will probably have the same effect on B as ‘Will you close the window, please?’ But, in Davidson’s view, it cannot be said to mean ‘Will you close the window, please?’ It has literal truth conditions, so that it is true if and only if it is indeed getting very chilly. It could be truthfully uttered in all sorts of circumstances in which closing the window is not an option or not desired. Furthermore, grasping what it means as a statement is a precondition for B’s acting on it as if requested: we can imagine B working it through: ‘What is A saying? What does he want me to do about it?’ The second step can only proceed if the first step has been successfully taken. For Davidson, a metaphorical statement means something false or tautologous, but is used to direct attention towards similarities or differences. Max Black, responding to Davidson, accuses him of holding a ‘comparison’ view of metaphor,10 though this is not in our view the damning objection that Black takes it to be. But if someone brought to Davidson an insight or thought they had had as a result of a metaphor which did not lend itself to being characterized as comparison-based, he would not be particularly surprised: we do not confine ourselves to comparison when we are trying to work out why a literally peculiar thing has been said.

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Theories of metaphor which speak of special metaphorical meanings, according to Davidson, mistake their goal. Where they think they provide a method for deciphering an encoded content, they actually tell us (or try to tell us) something about the effects metaphors have on us. The common error is to fasten on the contents of the thoughts a metaphor provokes and to read these contents into the metaphor itself. No doubt metaphors often make us notice aspects of things we did not notice before; no doubt similarities to our attention; they do provide a kind of lens or lattice, as Black says,11 through which we view the relevant phenomena. The issue does not lie here but in the question of how the metaphor is related to what it makes us see.12

This relationship is not, Davidson insists, that of the communication of a finite cognitive content (and hence a finitely paraphraseable content): [T]o suppose [a metaphor] can be effective only by conveying a coded message is like thinking a joke or a dream makes some statement which a clever interpreter can restate in plain prose. Joke or dream or metaphor can, like a picture or a bump on the head, make us appreciate some fact – but not by standing for, or expressing, that fact.13

To use a ‘twice-true’ metaphorical example from Ted Cohen14 to which Davidson himself alludes: there is a great difference between how the (tautological) proposition ‘No man is an island’ corresponds to the single fact that no man is an island, and how using ‘No man is an island’ can cause the reader or hearer to reflect generally on human interconnectedness. ‘If this is right,’ says Davidson, ‘what we attempt in ‘paraphrasing’ a metaphor cannot be to give its meaning, for that lies on the surface; rather we attempt to evoke what the metaphor brings to our attention’.15 Davidson’s key evidence for this difference between meaning and evocation is the difficulty of satisfactory paraphrase; his concluding remarks on this are worth giving at length: [W]e imagine there is a content to be captured when all the while we are in fact focusing on what the metaphor makes us notice. If what the metaphor makes us notice were finite in scope and propositional in nature, this would not in itself make trouble; we would simply project the content the metaphor brought to mind onto the metaphor. But in fact there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, and much of what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character. When we try to say what a metaphor ‘means’, we soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention. If someone draws his finger along a coastline on a map, or mentions the beauty and deftness of a line in a Picasso etching, how many things are drawn to your attention? You might list a great many, but you could not finish since the idea of finishing would have no clear application. How many facts or propositions are conveyed by a photograph? None, an infinity, or one great unstatable fact? Bad question. A picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture.

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It’s not only that we can’t provide an exhaustive catalogue of what has been attended to when we are led to see something in a new light; the difficulty is more fundamental. What we notice or see is not, in general, propositional in character. Of course it may be, and when it is, it usually may be stated in fairly plain words. But if I show you Wittgenstein’s duckrabbit, and I say, ‘It’s a duck’, then with luck you see it as a duck; if I say, ‘It’s a rabbit’, you see it as a rabbit. But no proposition expresses what I have led you to see. Perhaps you have come to realize that the drawing can be seen as a duck or as a rabbit. But one could come to know this without ever seeing the drawing as a duck or as a rabbit. Seeing as is not seeing that. Metaphor makes us see one thing as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight. Since in most cases what the metaphor prompts or inspires is not entirely, or even at all, recognition of some truth or fact, the attempt to give literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply misguided.16

It seems to us significant that while Davidson’s strategy is to make it seem generally unmysterious that metaphors should not have special metaphorical meanings through his instancing of a variety of other phenomena which are equally non-propositional in character – jokes, dreams, pictures, bumps on the head17 – he concludes his argument with a strong concentration on visual examples (maps, Picasso etchings, photographs, the Wittgenstein duck-rabbit drawing), and that this tendency to think of metaphor in primarily visual terms is also present in his approval of Black’s representation of it as ‘a kind of lens or lattice’. What is special about metaphorical evocation? How is it that the poet can calculate these effects? (Calculation of effects is consistently assumed by Davidson; the ‘unlimitedness’ of evocation is not to be confused with randomness.) Confusion is easy here because the notion of similarity is basic both to how literal meaning works and to what metaphorical evocation does, but it is put into play differently in the two cases. ‘Ordinary similarity’, which ‘depends on groupings established by the ordinary meanings of words’,18 is what instances of the same class of objects or actions bear to one another: all the entities that can be literally and truthfully characterized as books are similar (in ‘sharing the property of bookhood’). Now say we want to encourage Juliet to notice ways in which Paris is attractive, and a Paris-Juliet match desirable. Lady Capulet’s strategy is to present Paris as something else that is attractive – as it happens, a book. To say ‘Paris is a book’ is literally false, because the Paris-book similarity is non-ordinary: it would be a mistake to look for some super-class of objects including both real books and Paris and say that 1) ‘book’ has changed its meaning: it is for the nonce the signifier for a wider class, amongst which Paris is to be found; and 2) since ‘book’ now means this wider class, the statement is true. Beyond ‘ordinary similarity’ is what we might call ‘trivial similarity’. Simply to transform ‘Paris is a book’ into ‘Paris is like a book’ achieves a

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change in literal truth-value but does not make the statement more (or less) usable. What renders the similarity expressed by literal ‘like’ trivial is the point frequently made by philosophers that ‘everything is like everything, and in endless ways’.19 So while saying ‘Paris is a book’ is literally false, by virtue of the facts of ordinary similarity, saying ‘Paris is like a book’ is literally trivial, by virtue of the limitless nature of trivial similarity. Metaphorical evocation, triggered by our failure to find any reason for the literal utterance of a falsity or a tautology, involves a search for novel similarity. (Though Davidson scrupulously points out that ‘what we call the element of novelty or surprise in a metaphor is a built-in aesthetic feature we can experience again and again, like the surprise in Haydn’s Symphony no. 94, or a familiar deceptive cadence’.20) We know that, once we have classified an expression as figurative, the main maxim governing its use is that we are to search for ‘unexpected or subtle parallels and analogies’21 on the basis of that expression. And, as Simon Blackburn puts it in an account strongly influenced by Davidson: The metaphor is in effect an invitation to explore comparisons. But it is not associated with any belief or intention, let alone any set of rules, determining when the exploration is finished.22

There are rules determining whether something is or is not a book – rules depending on, but at the same time sustaining, ‘ordinary similarity’ in what may be a circular, foundationless way. But there are no rules limiting the aspects of the world that our attention might be drawn to by being asked to search for surprising ways in which Paris and a book are analogous. This kind of novel similarity is distinguished from trivial similarity in so far as our thoughts are not random but are determined by the situation in which the analogy is used and the further verbal context in which it is embedded. How would visual similarity operate across these categories? Where ordinary similarity is in question, this would depend on the nature of the class involved. There are surprisingly few objects which we group together purely because of how they look, though some degree of looking-alike often follows from or goes hand-in-hand with other similarities. On the other hand, it is very easy to think of classes which are based on wholly non-visual criteria (e.g., carcinogens, democracies, metaphors), or cases where a visually-based classification turns out to involve error (e.g., whales classified as fish). Trivial similarity is too broad to be visual; to determine that something is like something else visually is to narrow the field of pertinent comparison sharply. Hence visual similarity is available as a point which novel similarity can make one notice. But nothing suggests that it is necessarily the point. Nothing, that is, except for the confusion brought into the field by one further application of the protean notion of similarity, and one fact about

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human thought. 1) The final (after ordinary, trivial, and novel) and often crucial relationship involving similarity is iconic similarity – what a picture (or map or diagram) shares with what it is a picture of. This particular relationship between a representation and what it represents determines many of the everyday uses we make of the word ‘like’. 2) In thinking about something, we often can, and sometimes need to, form a mental picture or diagram of it. This image resembles its object, or a prototypical example of the class being thought of, iconically. The general importance of mental imagery in remembering and problem-solving, plus the ubiquity of pictorial representation in our culture, are probably sufficient together to account for the odd pull towards thinking of visual similarity as necessarily central to the comparisons metaphor invites us to explore. This pull can be felt at work in Davidson’s remarks on the difference between living and dead metaphor. Compare his remarks on the mouths of bottles – when ‘mouth’ applied only metaphorically to bottles, the application made the hearer notice a likeness between animal and bottle openings. (Consider Homer’s reference to wounds as mouths.) Once one has the present use of the word, with literal application to bottles, there is nothing left to notice. There is no similarity to seek because it consists simply in being referred to by the same word.23 –

with those on the idiom – now, he believes, dead as a metaphor – ‘He was burned up’: ‘He was burned up’ is genuinely ambiguous (since it may be true in one sense and false in another), but although the slangish idiom is no doubt the corpse of a metaphor, ‘He was burned up’ now suggests no more than that he was very angry. When the metaphor was active, we would have pictured fire in the eyes or smoke coming out of the ears.24

There is no suggestion that the bottle-mouth likeness, when alive, was primarily or exclusively visual. But ‘burned up’ is assumed to have once evoked a fairly specific picture. Too specific, we may feel; the everyday metaphor whereby ANGER IS HOT can remain alive without our having to picture a person on fire. Consider the moment when Shakespeare’s King John says to the King of France, France, I am burn’d up with inflaming wrath, A rage whose heat hath this condition, That nothing can allay, nothing but blood

(3.1.340–2)

John does not intend his hearers to picture him on fire but King Philip perversely does this and proceeds to bring out the implications of the image in an adversarial way: ‘Thy rage shall burn thee up, and thou shalt turn / To ashes, ere our blood shall quench that fire’ (3.1.344–5). King Philip here is not a better reader of the initial metaphor than King John, simply a hostile one.

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In fact, it would be possible to follow both King John’s threat and King Philip’s retort on a purely conceptual level. It is what we know about fire, not what we visually remember of it, that is necessary if the lines are to be effectively usable. King John relies on two basic items of knowledge about fire: that it is dangerous and that pouring liquid over it can extinguish it. King Philip retorts on the basis of a third item of knowledge: that fire destroys its fuel, transforming it into ashes. These are not difficult facts to ‘image’, by producing mental pictures of prototype fires, prototype liquids thrown over them, and prototype heaps of ashes. But the longer one lingers over the images, the less productive the picturing exercise seems. Do we want to ‘see’ buckets of French blood thrown over King John, or his barely recognizable charred corpse? Did anyone indeed ever ‘see’ Davidson’s angry man as the victim of combustion? IV What Likeness Guarantees: Printing and Legitimacy We have looked at some metaphors in which print or writing is used to evoke how visual signs in a person’s face indicate or seem to indicate a more general condition (Morton is the bearer of bad news, Lucrece has been raped). Here are three comparable examples: in Much Ado About Nothing, Leonato misreads Hero’s appearance (presumably her blushes) as evidence of her sexual guilt: ‘Could she here deny / The story that is printed in her blood?’ (4.1.121–2). Othello looks for similarly readable signs in Desdemona: ‘Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, / Made to write ‘whore’ upon?’ (Othello, 4.2.71–2). Here the face is not specified and Desdemona as a whole seems to be paper or book. Another instance where the body as a whole is readable occurs in Measure for Measure when Claudio acknowledges that Juliet is visibly pregnant by remarking, ‘The stealth of our most mutual entertainment / With character too gross is writ on Juliet’ (1.2.154–5). It is striking how regularly when a woman’s face or person is in question, it is her sexual guilt or innocence that is to be read from it. The general tendency is for women to be seen as the books or papers which are to be read by men – having been written or printed upon by other men. (This notion of women, especially young girls and virgins, as ‘blank pages’ waiting to be inscribed by the male pen/penis is by no means exclusive to Shakespeare or to the Renaissance period, as Susan Gubar has demonstrated.25) When we move from the book as an end product to the method of its production, the actual process of copying or printing, the patriarchal aspect of the metaphorical field becomes even more marked: women are merely devices by which men make copies of themselves. Ideally, it is implied, their role should be as neutral as possible; the important thing is to produce a child

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which is an exact copy of the father. In The Winter’s Tale, Paulina claims that Hermione has fulfilled this requirement in giving birth to Perdita: Behold, my lords, Although the print be little, the whole matter And copy of the fathereye, nose, lip, The trick of’s frown, the forehead, nay, the valley, The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles, The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger.

(2.3.98–103)

She exaggerates somewhat in her insistence (can one really see a likeness in fingernails?) and it is curious how the gender of the possessive pronouns (‘The pretty dimples of his chin’) is dominated by the male father rather than the female child. Later in the same play Leontes intends a compliment to Florizel’s mother (missing, presumed dead, like most mothers in Shakespeare) when he speaks in similar terms to him: Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince, For she did print your royal father off, Conceiving you.

(5.1.124–6)

In these passages visual likeness is presented as vital: the child should be as like the father as one copy of a printed book is like another. Such resemblances can occur in real life, and it is not surprising that essential disanalogies between copy-likeness and kinship-likeness should be suppressed by the metaphor (little books do not ‘grow up’ and become big books!). But an important gap between visual resemblance and legitimacy has already been opened up in The Winter’s Tale by the time Paulina tries to use the resemblance argument. Visual resemblance is not, after all, a necessary and sufficient condition for legitimacy, which is a matter rather of fact, as determined by kinship and/or property relations: might not an illegitimate or unauthorized copy of a book be physically very like an authorized one (even before photocopying technology)? The human analogy here would be illegitimacy when it is the responsibility of the father: nothing guarantees that legitimate Edgar looks more like Gloucester than illegitimate Edmund. The crucial question, ‘Is this an authorized copy?’ in such cases is not addressed by the criterion of physical resemblance. On the other hand, it is common knowledge that legitimate offspring need not resemble the father, nor indeed either parent. This leaves only the case where the mother’s fidelity is in question and a father-child resemblance does exist as one in which the latter fact is pertinent. This is of course the burden of Paulina’s speech (although it later transpires at 5.1.225–8 that Perdita actually looks like Hermione).26 Leontes himself has raised questions about people’s assertion of parent-child resemblance earlier in conversation with his young son Mamillius:

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What? hast smutch’d thy nose? They say it is a copy out of mine … … they say we are Almost as like as eggs; women say so – That will say anything … … Mine honest friend, Will you take eggs for money?

(1.2. 121–2, 129–31, 160–61)

In his jealousy, Leontes first acknowledges that the resemblance is generally recognized, then dismisses it as a trivial resemblance: egg-to-egg resemblance sounds like a strong claim, but it is only women who are making it – and anyway, are eggs true coin? (The associative process is of course set up as peculiar: ‘He something seems unsettled,’ as Hermione says.) The similarity between sexual and literary rights of reproduction is made explicit in The Taming of the Shrew when Biondello uses the language of copyright in urging Lucentio to elope with Bianca: ‘Take you assurance of her, cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum’ (4.4. 92–3). The Latin phrase, meaning ‘with exclusive rights to print’, was a standard one in the book trade and implies that by marrying Bianca Lucentio will establish his copyright in her body, gaining the sole right to print – copies of himself presumably. Bianca’s subsidiary role in the business is emphasized ten lines later when Biondello refers to her as ‘your appendix’. How genuinely open-ended is the metaphorical evocation process in cases such as those we have just cited? A difficulty that Davidson shares with Kittay and Lehrer27 is that his description of what happens in metaphorical use can seem to overstate the cognitive riches that a particular metaphor ought to provide. Leontes tells Florizel that his mother has printed his father off in the first two-and-a-half lines of a fifty-five line conversation in which printing is not alluded to again. Restoring it to its immediate context, we can see how ‘print’ operates as part of a series of devices for embodying and varying the idea of doubling: Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince, For she did print your royal father off, Conceiving you. Were I but twenty-one, Your father’ image is so hit in you (His very air) that I should call you brother, As I did him, and speak of something wildly By us perform’d before. Most dearly welcome! And your fair princessgoddess! O! alas, I lost a couple, that ‘twixt heaven and earth Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as You, gracious couple, do; and then I lost (All mine own folly) the society, Amity too, of your brave father, whom

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(Though bearing misery) I desire my life Once more to look on him.

(5.1.124–38)

Florizel doubles Polixenes as print, as image; he and Perdita double Leontes’ lost children (who ‘might thus have stood’); Polixenes and Leontes were doubles (‘brother’, with reference back, for the audience, to the conversation idealizing this youthful friendship in 1.1); the present seems to double the past (‘something … By us perform’d before’). The net result of all these likenesses is no doubt evocative in an open-ended way, but for this to occur the local ‘print’ metaphor needs to be touched quickly and then dropped – so quickly in fact that to give a literal paraphrase of it does not seem impossible or inappropriate. Doesn’t Leontes simply mean ‘You are just like your father’? Davidson would correctly reply that, while this may be what Leontes uses the words to mean, it is not what the words mean. The case is one to which Davidson’s careful qualification applies: ‘Of course, [what we notice or see] may be [propositional in form], and when it is, it usually may be stated in fairly plain words’.28 Actually, Davidson’s account is sufficiently nuanced to allow both for this sort of strictly limited evocation, whereby the literally false statement is understood as saying something which can easily be paraphrased, and for evocation as an open-ended invitation. When the reader, perhaps more readily than the hearer, pauses over a metaphor such as the one Leontes uses, relates it to other moments in this text and other texts, examines its ideological implications, and so forth, he or she makes a different use of the words from that which works best when hearing the whole speech in its immediate context. It is a helpful feature of Davidson’s account that, since the products of the wider and narrower evocative processes are not meanings, we do not need to argue over whether the wider results are ‘really’ what Leontes means, or ‘go beyond’ what Leontes means, or whether the narrower result represents some impoverishment of meaning. V

How Likeness is Achieved: The Press

While the conceptual question of legitimacy constitutes a major element in the SEX IS PRINTING metaphor, there is also a more physical link between the two activities. This centres on the word ‘press’ itself: in J.F. Ross’s terminology,29 ‘press’ differentiates from one context to another, taking on a printing sense, a sexual-activity sense, or one of many other senses. Take for example Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor speaking scathingly of Falstaff’s love-letters to herself and to Mistress Ford:

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warrant he hath a thousand of these letters, writ with blank spaces for different names (sure, more!); and these are of the second edition. He will print them, out of doubt; for he cares not what he puts into the press, when he would put us two. I had rather be a giantess, and lie under Mount Pelion. (2.1.74–80)

‘Press’ here is dominated first by ‘print’. Falstaff has violated one of the conditions that is supposed to separate the hand-written from the printed: his love-letters are form-letters. ‘He will …’ signals a hyperbole expressed via the future tense, a not uncommon way of varying simile. (Compare ‘It is as if he had …’.) What the use of the future tense adds to the simile is a suggestion that this would be a logical extension of or next step in his folly. But then the real next steps contemplated by Falstaff are affairs with, if possible, both of the Merry Wives. That this is similarly foolish (‘careless’?) can be nicely captured by allowing ‘press’ to differentiate retrospectively, under the dominance of ‘us two’, so as to take on a sexual sense. Then the idea of being pressed upon physically by the full weight of Falstaff gets taken up in a further hyperbole as Mistress Page uses another simile variant (‘I had rather be’ for ‘It would be like’), a Falstaff-as-mountain metaphor, an allusion to the proverbial piling of Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa as a metaphor for excess, and a hard-to-characterize associative move whereby, since according to the logic of the figure she is identified with Mount Ossa, Mistress Page would need, in order to sustain the likeness, to be a giantess. At this point, the printing sense of ‘the press’ has yielded to a more general sense (application of force) into which the context infuses both a sexual meaning and a reminder of Falstaff’s bulk. Is this a fully-fledged example of a SEX IS PRINTING metaphor? The passage is certainly a fine instance of the apparently effortless, witty co-ordination of a number of distinguishable figures and verbal operations. One of these is, it would appear, a pun on ‘press’. Davidson is keen to distinguish pun from metaphor, since in a pun it does seem reasonable to hold that two separate meanings of a word are involved. He uses Shakespeare to exemplify this: When Shakespeare’s Cressida is welcomed bawdily into the Grecian camp, Nestor says, ‘Our general doth salute you with a kiss.’ Here we are to take ‘general’ in two ways: once as applying to Agamemnon, who is the general; and once, since she is kissing everyone, as applying to no one in particular, but everyone in general. We really have a conjunction of two sentences: our general, Agamemnon, salutes you with a kiss; and everyone in general is saluting you with a kiss. This is a legitimate device, a pun, but it is not the same device as metaphor. For in metaphor there is no essential need of reiteration; whatever meanings we assign the words, they keep through every correct reading of the passage.30

How does ‘press’ differ from ‘general’? Ross would describe the ‘general’

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pun as involving merely equivocal senses of the word.31 The ‘press’ pun, however, both depends upon and reawakens the analogy between the senses of ‘press’ being played on. Shakespeare uses ‘press’ elsewhere in unambiguously sexual contexts, as when in Venus and Adonis he describes Venus (apparently Falstaffian in size in this poem, if in no other respect) overwhelming Adonis with her embrace: ‘He with her plenty press’d, she faint with dearth, / Their lips together glued, fall to the earth’ (lines 545–6). Here ‘press’d’ is literal, and has nothing to do with printing. And when Pandarus invites Troilus and Cressida to ‘press … to death’ the bed of their ‘pretty encounters’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.208–9) he similarly uses a verb which conveys just what will literally be done to the bed (leaving aside the personification-plus-hyperbole of ‘to death’).32 Now, if Shakespeare had written ‘for he cares not what he puts into the press, when he would press us two’, the passage would have simply punned on the ‘press’ of printing (a noun) and the ‘press’ involved in intercourse (a verb). But as it stands, the latter clause is grammatically elliptical for ‘when he would put us two into the press’. ‘Press’ in its second occurrence in the spelt-out version remains a noun, and ‘into the press’ as a whole phrase must be understood metaphorically. No doubt what is immediately evoked could be ‘stated in fairly plain words’ (in this case adding a euphemistic motive for the word-play) but keeping ‘in the press’ as a metaphor for sex does allow for further evocative reflections.33 Given our earlier discussion of legitimacy questions, incidentally, it is interesting to look at the sentence preceding the passage we have been commenting on. Mistress Page produces for Mistress Ford ‘the twin-brother of thy letter; but let thine inherit first, for I protest mine never shall’ (2.1.72–4). That which makes the letters like printed material, their over-similarity, also makes them like over-similar children whose rights of inheritance are thereby confused. VI Coins and Wax Coins, like books, are produced through the transfer by pressure of a pattern onto material previously blank. Another activity which could be similarly characterized is one common in Elizabethan times but almost lost in our own: the authentication of a document by attaching to it a piece of wax onto which some design, the property of the issuer, has been pressed. ‘Seal’ differentiates, in appropriate contexts, to mean both the design and the wax bearing the design. Also given that the wax could serve the further function of securing the document against unauthorized examination, ‘seal’ comes to mean a method of keeping things closed, or the activity of securing them, as when we seal letters, or rooms.

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In this section, we lay out some examples of coining and sealing metaphors as print-like; the purpose of the exercise is to show how coining and sealing are also operative within what we have so far characterized as the SEX IS PRINTING metaphor, so that we see how Shakespeare exploits what all four activities have in common for figurative purposes. Whereas the notion of the illegitimate printed book must have been of direct interest to a comparatively narrow group of Elizabethans concerned with publishing, the notion of the counterfeit coin would have been more generally accessible. So Angelo can make use of an UNLAWFUL SEX IS UNLAWFUL COINING metaphor when he rejects Isabella’s plea for mercy for her brother who has made the unmarried Juliet pregnant: It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stol’n A man already made, as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image In stamps that are forbid. ‘Tis all as easy Falsely to take a way a life true made As to put metal in restrained means To make a false one. (Measure for Measure, 2.3.42–9)

Illegitimate children are still essentially seen as ‘stolne and surreptitious copies’,34 but now as forged coins rather than as pirated texts. Moreover, the infringement of copyright is seen in this context as not just a crime against an individual (as in the case of an unauthorized copy of a book) or against the state (as in the case of a forged coin) but against ‘heaven’ in so far as human beings are supposed to be made in the image of God. The word ‘metal’ is of interest here. Angelo has previously tried to refuse his appointment as the Duke’s deputy, saying: Let there be some more test made of my mettle Before so noble and so great a figure Be stamp’d upon it.

(1.1.48–50)

In the First Folio, the spelling is ‘mettle’ in both cases; indeed the OED begins its entry under ‘mettle’ by saying that it is ‘originally the same word as metal of which mettle was a variant spelling, used indiscriminately in all senses.’ The attempt to differentiate between concrete and non-concrete senses, using the spelling ‘metal’ for the former and ‘mettle’ for the latter, did not begin until the eighteenth century. So one’s mettle, one’s ‘ardent or spirited temperament’ (OED) can also be an impression-taking surface, a substance that a figure can be stamped upon. Coins are made of metal because metal, once cool again after the minting process, is durable enough to hold a shape.35

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Later in her dialogue with Angelo in 2.4, Isabella surprisingly (and dangerously) agrees with him that women too are ‘frail’ in the sense of being vulnerable to sexual temptation: Ay, as the glasses where they view themselves, Which are as easy broke as they make forms. Women? Help heaven! men their creation mar By profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times frail, For we are soft as our complexions are, And credulous to false prints.

(2.4.125–30)

The passage demonstrates how, if one wants to make a point about women’s weakness, the print metaphor offers only too rich resources. Women are reflecting surfaces, breakable surfaces, soft surfaces. Metonymy – women are associated with mirrors because they use them frequently – and synecdoche – the complexion can stand in for the whole woman – slide into metaphor. The two metaphors are inconsistent at surface level (complexions neither reflect nor break), but can be felt to be coherent at a deeper level because both are grounded on women’s capacity to produce copies, to ‘make forms’, or be printed upon as a result of the masculine ‘stamp’. Clear as the general idea is, ‘credulous’ is odd. To be soft is to be too easily printed upon (or ‘impressed’?) and that is like being too ready to believe something or someone (presumably, in this context, men’s promises or men themselves). But this line of thought seems to make the ‘print’ the external stamp which causes the woman to be printed (i.e., the false man) rather than the result of the printing, the false (illegitimate) child, as the parallel with ‘make forms’ would suggest. To say women are as soft as their complexions is actually not the best basis for sexist printing metaphors, since it is facial mobility rather than skin texture that sustains FACES ARE BOOKS metaphors, and no printing process uses for material on which to print any substance as soft as living skin.36 This is where wax has the advantage, as an impression-taking substance which has all the softness, malleability, inconstancy, and so forth of patriarchy’s Eternal Feminine. A good example of a straightforward simile along these lines can be found in Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy when Levidulcia, encouraging Fresco to be bold in his love-making, assures him Ladies are as courteous as yeoman’s wives, and methinks they should be more gentle. Hot diet and soft ease makes ’em, like wax always kept warm, more easy to take impression. (2.5.20–23)

A different patriarchal point is made by Theseus at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he tells Hermia that she is bound to obey her father:

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To you your father should be as a god; One that compos’d your beauties; yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power, To leave the figure, or disfigure it.

(1.1.47–51)

Hermia’s status as female and as child gives her in law a duty to be malleable to the right men (her father, the man her father has chosen for her). However, her nature as female and as child makes her as susceptible (‘credulous’?) to the wrong men as Levidulcia’s ladies. This is Egeus’ complaint: Lysander has stol’n the impression of her fantasy With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits, Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats, messengers Of strong prevailment in unhardened youth. With cunning has thou filch’d my daughter’s heart, Turn’d her obedience (which is due to me) To stubborn harshness.

(1.1.32–8)

At this point in our argument we should be sensitized to the implications of ‘impression’; Hermia is presented as soft in the wrong way (‘unhardened’) in respect of Lysander’s unauthorized courtship, and correspondingly hard in the wrong way (‘harsh’) towards her father. In this framework, women’s weakness is both desired (in so far as it achieves their subordination) and feared (in so far as it makes them unreliable as property: cf. Egeus’ ‘last word’ on the subject, ‘And she is mine, and all my right of her / I do estate unto Demetrius’ (1.1.97–8)).37 A more cheerful use of the WOMEN ARE WAX metaphor occurs in Venus and Adonis when Venus exclaims after being kissed by Adonis: Pure lips, sweet seals in my soft lips imprinted, What bargains may I make, still to be sealing? To sell myself I can be well contented, So thou wilt buy, and pay, and use good dealing, Which purchase if thou make, for fear of slips, Set thy seal manual on my wax-red lips.

(lines 511–16)

Kisses are frequently seen as the ‘seals’ of the ‘bargain’ of love in Shakespeare (see The Taming of the Shrew, 3.2.123; The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.2.7; and Measure for Measure, 4.1.5–6) and ‘slips’ could mean ‘counterfeit money’ (see Romeo and Juliet, 2.4.45–8). Without lingering over all the sell-seal wordplay here, we should point out the surprisingly asymmetrical view of kissing that is implied. How can Adonis’ lips be the seals while Venus’ lips are the receiving wax? Of course, lips are here meant euphemistically for other parts of the body. All these printing, pressing, and stamping metaphors potentially rely on our grasping that what is really ‘behind it all’ is the male penis as what

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(im)presses and the female vagina as what receives the impression. Decorum no doubt blocks this from being directly evoked in many cases, but not here. (Nevertheless, the patriarchal assumptions that structure most of our examples may turn out to depend ultimately on a view of activity-passivity which cannot otherwise be ‘grounded’.38) The WOMEN ARE WAX metaphor, like the others in this group, can serve to excuse women, though in a patronizing way: it is striking however how narratively irrelevant these excuses tend to be in Shakespeare. Possibly this is less true of Viola’s reflection in Twelfth Night on how easily, disguised as a male, she has unintentionally won Olivia’s heart: How easy is it for the proper-false In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms! Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we, For such as we are made of, such we be.

(2.2.29–32)

But even here it is hard to feel that Viola herself is at all soft and passive like wax; much less so are Hermia or Venus – or Isabella, as Angelo immediately discovers when he proposes in the wake of her ‘credulous to false prints’ speech that she should ‘Be that you are’ (Measure for Measure, 2.4.124), i.e., frail, only to be rejected forcefully. Probably the most inexplicable occurrence of the motif is in The Rape of Lucrece, where the narrator takes it upon himself to excuse Lucrece: For men have marble, women waxen minds, And therefore are they form’d as marble will; The weak oppress’d, th’ impression of strange kinds Is form’d in them by force, by fraud, or skill. Then call them not the authors of their ill, No more than wax shall be accounted evil, Wherein is stamp’d the semblance of a devil.

(lines 1240–46)

The phrase ‘by force’ here is more to the point than the wax metaphor: the obvious reason why Lucrece cannot be called ‘the author of [her own] ill’ is that she has been forcibly raped, not because women are too weak to be held responsible for anything at all!39 The next stanza, incidentally, concludes with a FACES ARE BOOKS remark which asserts that the softness of women’s faces makes them more readable: Though men can cover crimes with bold stern looks, Poor women’s faces are their own faults’ books.

(lines 1252–3)

On one occasion, however, Shakespeare presents a character who moves from using the metaphorical field we have been discussing in the usual misogynistic way to a novel and repentant development of it. In Cymbeline, Posthumus, like

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other Shakespearean heroes, angrily damns all women because he thinks he has reason to suspect the fidelity of one: Is there no way for men to be, but women Must be half-workers? We are all bastards, And that most venerable man which I Did call my father, was I know not where When I was stamp’d. Some coiner with his tools Made me a counterfeit.

(2.5.1–6)

But later in the play, repenting of his order to Pisanio to kill Imogen on the strength of his suspicions, he offers the gods his own life by way of compensation for the murder: take No stricter render of me than my all. I know you are more clement than vile men, Who of their broken debtors take a third, A sixth, a tenth, letting them thrive again On their abatement. That’s not my desire. For Imogen’s dear life take mine, and though ‘Tis not so dear, yet ‘tis a life; you coin’d it. ‘Tween man and man they weigh not every stamp; Though light, take pieces for the figure’s sake; You rather, mine being yours; and so, great pow’rs, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds.

(5.4.16–28)

Like Angelo, Posthumus develops the coining metaphor in terms of men being made in the image of God (or, in this ostensibly pre-Christian setting, the gods): ‘take pieces for the figure’s sake; You rather, mine being yours.’ The gods themselves are the only authorized coiners in this context. Whereas the phallic action of ‘stamping’ was central to his earlier speech, the financial side of coins comes to the fore in the later one. (Indeed, the whole play has a strongly mercantile strain, perhaps because of the influence of one of its sources Frederyke of Jennen, which tells the wager story from a decidedly commercial viewpoint.) But when he describes the ‘pieces’ or coins of his own life as ‘light’ he is no longer devaluing himself on account of his rhetorically supposed bastardy but merely asserting that Imogen’s life is more valuable (‘dear’ in both senses) than his own. This assertion is in fact remarkable both in its wider implications (Posthumus still believes Imogen to be guilty) and in the way it is expressed. The word ‘light’ was frequently used at this time to mean ‘wanton’ or ‘promiscuous’, but almost always with reference to women, as when Lucio in Measure for Measure comments cynically that ‘women are light at midnight’ (5.1.279–80), or when

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Portia in The Merchant of Venice more playfully says, ‘Let me give light, but let me not be light, / For a light wife doth make a heavy husband’ (5.1.129– 30). Whores were proverbially said to be ‘light’ and were also frequently seen as counterfeit coins, as in the trial scene in Webster’s The White Devil when Monticelso ends his ‘character of a whore’ with What’s a whore? She’s’ like the guilty counterfeited coin Which whosoe’er first stamps it brings in trouble All that receive it.

(3.2.98–101)

Given this background, Posthumus’ image of himself as a light coin is very unusual; it reminds us that he is asking to be punished for having acted on the assumption of Imogens’ ‘lightness’. Once the donor field of coinage is thought of not in terms of how coins are produced but of how they are exchanged, the motif of a male-female asymmetry gives way to one of reciprocity, or at least of inequality being a question of personal character rather than gender. But overall we must see the printing metaphors as carrying a strong phallocentric bias. The only exception to the pattern whereby men do the printing or stamping and women are the paper or wax is to be found in the romantic convention whereby it can be claimed that a woman’s image is imprinted on a man’s heart. This is actually rare in Shakespeare and even when it does occur is expressed ambiguously, as when Boyet in Love’s Labour’s Lost tells the Princess of France how he knows that the King of Navarre is in love with her: Why, all his behaviors did make their retire To the court of his eye, peeping thorough desire: His heart like an agate with your print impressed, Proud with his form, in his eye pride expressed.

(2.1.234–7)

Although the man’s heart has received the woman’s print it seems significant that it is not seen as something soft and malleable like wax, but as something hard, a precious stone (an agate) which has been carved – and which could in fact be used to make an impression on wax! VII Sexism in Metaphor, Sexism in the Text To find questions of gender, sexuality, reproduction, and property so centrally raised by Shakespeare’s printing metaphors may be unexpected but is certainly topical, given the recent explosion of work on gender-discriminatory ideologies. Readers will have gathered that we are not ourselves very enthusiastic about the women-as-wax-or-paper ‘picture’; it seems to us to conceal important aspects of women’s activity, both as sexual partners and as mothers, in a way which

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leaves the ownership of both women and children ‘naturally’ in the hands of men. If we think for a moment about biological facts, it seems to say the least curious to embrace a set of metaphors which imply that men, not women, are the ones who do the real ‘shaping’ in the process of birth.40 However, the degree of sexism of the Shakespearean text clearly cannot be directly read off from micro-level analysis of these metaphors. The intrinsic bias of a metaphor may be overridden if it is placed in the mouth of a character to whom things are going to happen and who will be broadly evaluated by the audience on that basis. For Isabella to speak of women’s frailty in the particular context of trying to get a pardon for her brother, or for Viola to speak in the same vein in a context in which the difficulties she faces make it understandable that she should temporarily feel a little frail herself – these are different things from having an authorial voice stating as a general principle, ‘Women are frail’. A debate about the overall degree of phallocentrism of Measure for Measure would have to take into account larger issues, such as the final assessment to be made of the play’s central but ambiguous male character, the Duke. Shakespeare cannot be expected to have stood somehow outside the broad belief systems of his time. Amongst these were patriarchal assumptions – not of course quite the same patriarchal assumptions as those which sustain sexism today. In general, there is a strong tendency in the plays for belief-systems to be challenged, suspended or ironized in the course of the action (rather more than at the conclusion of the action). This reflects 1) the intrinsic instability or internal stresses which all ideologies exhibit; 2) a positive Renaissance willingness to accept that exploring or playing with these difficulties is a positive or educative activity;41 and 3) a temperamental affinity for this sort of operation as a part of playwriting on the part of Shakespeare himself. It is not then contradictory to hold that patriarchal assumptions can be both challenged within the plays at the macro-level and found broadly to structure them (or, if you prefer, vice versa). Similarly, at the micro-level, patriarchal assumptions structure many of the metaphors which Shakespeare has as it were to hand, ready to be worked up for specific purposes. So, in the course of elaborating and ‘decorating’ Angelo’s argument about the equivalence of murder and illegitimate begetting, the SEX IS COINING metaphor, with its active male/passive female assumption, gets taken up and explored. If it would be wrong to say that the assumption is thereby endorsed (since in the dramatic context the argument may turn out to be as unreliable as its proponent), it would be equally wrong to see the assumption as necessarily challenged. Isabella and the audience are busy enough trying to work out what if anything is wrong with Angelo’s argument as a whole without challenging the patriarchal assumptions built into the metaphor through which the argument is unfolded. (For that matter, Isabella and most of any given audience probably share those assumptions. This is the problem!) But sometimes a micro-level problematizing

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of assumptions is achieved which is equivalent to, and generally linked to, the macro-level questioning occasioned by characters and events. This is what we see happening with Posthumus. One coin metaphor seems to be challenged by a very different one which, in shifting from the production of coins to their exchange, ‘finds’ equality. More usually, however, it is the self-limiting or self-problematizing nature of an analogy which plays at the micro-level the assumption-challenging role. Our ultimate reservation about Davidson – or, more exactly, about how his arguments might be incautiously paraphrased or extended – centres on how ‘getting the point’ or ‘seeing the vision’ evoked by a metaphor can come to sound like a unitary and unchallengeable experience. Once you have seen women as wax, that would seem to be that, if what has happened is fundamentally non-propositional. How could such a ‘vision’ be denied, if nothing is being asserted? An account of metaphor which, on the other hand, gives full weight to the propositional content of what a metaphor evokes will be better able to describe how the evoked propositions may in turn be in tension with one another, may indeed upon examination self-destruct, as examined ideology tends to do. It will also be able to allow for the possibility of criticism from an external position, the reaction to l.1240 of The Rape of Lucrece (‘For men have marble, women waxen minds’) which is simply to say, ‘No’. Notes 1 2

3 4

Donald Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, Critical Inquiry 5 (1978), pp. 31–47. ‘Vehicle’ is from the terminological dyad ‘tenor/vehicle’ introduced into the study of metaphor by I.A. Richards in the 1920s. Chapter Two of SMM, ‘Animal Metaphors in King Lear’, explores the more recent application of roughly the same distinction in an essay by Eva Kittay and Adrienne Lehrer, ‘Semantic Fields and the Structure of Metaphor’, Studies in Language 5 (1981), pp. 31–63. Kittay and Lehrer replace ‘vehicle/tenor’ by speaking of a donor (semantic) field and a recipient field. So, if PEOPLE ARE BOOKS (see note 6 below for this notation), the recipient field (tenor) is people and the donor field (vehicle) is books. Just after SMM went to press, Eva Kittay’s major book on metaphor, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) appeared; but the Kittay and Lehrer article remains an excellent brief exposition of this analytical approach. We address these in Chapter One of SMM, ‘Time Metaphors in Troilus and Cressida’. In modern usage, consider ‘You can read him like a book’, ‘I never got beyond page two with her’, ‘He’s an open book’, ‘You can’t tell a book by its cover’. Life itself can also be seen as a book, as in ‘That chapter of my life is now closed’. The notational device of characterizing metaphor families as X IS/ARE Y, in small capital letters, was invented by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson for their seminal Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); see SMM, Chapter One.

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In finding non-Shakespearean examples, we have made use of Louis Charles Stagg, Index to the Figurative Language of the Tragedies of Shakespeare’s Chief Seventeenth-Century Contemporaries (Memphis: Memphis University Press, 1977; reprinted by Garland, New York and London, 1984). References are to the following editions: The Plays of George Chapman, ed. T.M. Parrott (London: George Routledge, 1910); Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. R.W. Van Fossen (London: Methuen, 1961); The Plays of John Marson, ed. J. Harvey Wood (Edinburgh: Oliver Boyd, 1938); Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedy, ed. Irving Ribner (London: Methuen, 1964); John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1964 and 1960). In this period, the index would generally be placed at the front of the book rather than at the back. Some editors add the ‘cover’ here may imply a pun on the legal expression femme couvert, meaning married woman. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 32. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 32. Max Black, ‘How Metaphors Work: A Reply to Donald Davidson’, in Sheldon Sacks, ed., On Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 181–92. Davidson is here referring to Max Black’s earlier essay, ‘Metaphor’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, N.S. 55 (1954–55): 273–94. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 45. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 46. Ted Cohen, ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’, Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 669–84. Cohen, ‘Figurative Speech’, pp. 669–84. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, pp. 46–7. Davidson has a footnote to this passage making it clear that he views ‘any use of language’ (our italics) as similarly opening up processes of noticing to which ‘there is no clear end’. So all of language-in-use floats semi-free from the propositional meanings it nonetheless depends on. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, pp. 33–4. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 39. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 38. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 40. Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 174. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 37. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 38. Susan Gubar, ‘‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity’, Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 243–63. Paulina in fact goes on to pray that the baby has not also inherited her father’s jealousy ‘lest she suspect, as he does, / Her children not her husband’s!’ (2.3.107–8). The absurdity of this underlines the asymmetry of the sexes in this respect: women are usually in a much better position than men to know the provenance of their children. Cf. n. 3 above. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 47. J.F. Ross, Portraying Analogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). We discuss Ross’s contribution to the study of metaphor in Chapter Four of SMM, ‘Making Sense in “Sonnet 63”’: ‘Differentiation is Ross’s term for [the] process [whereby] the word ‘drop’, for example, means something rather different, but not

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33

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totally different, according to whether what is being dropped is a brick, a stitch, a friend, or a hint; Ross would say that ‘‘drop’ differentiates accordingly’ (p. 133). Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, p. 35. ‘Mere equivocation covers words which are identical in spelling and sound but which are completely unrelated in meaning. [An] example [is] … “bank” which can … mean “verge of a river” or “depository for valuables”’ (SMM, p. 137). Actually, two senses of ‘press’ are being punned on here. The personified bed, who can be pressed to death, is presumably, as editors point out, seen as being like an accused person who remains silent in court (refuses to plead) and is sentenced to the particular death which consists of ‘pressing to death with weights’ (Riverside). The evocation opened up by the metaphorical half of the pun is truly open-ended, because it is not at all clear just what propositions one is to entertain on the basis of the similitude ‘A bed on which a couple is making love is like someone dying of peine fort et dur’. Once one goes beyond Pandarus’s own ground for the comparison, silence – and going beyond is invited by the gathering darkness of the play – the evocative field of the metaphor is powerful but indeterminate. ‘Press’ as a verb, needless to say, used to be literally what was involved in the printing process. With today’s photographic methods of printing, this is no longer the case; compare ‘to dial’ as now used of push-button telephones. One aspect of the sex-printing likeness thus begins to fail for us. This phrase comes of course from Heminge and Condell’s prefatory address ‘To the great Variety of Readers’ in the First Folio. It seems appropriate that, when Shakespeare’s plays were eventually published in this volume, his colleagues and editors reversed the PEOPLE ARE BOOKS metaphor by seeing the plays as ‘Orphanes’ and themselves as ‘Guardians’ (in the ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’) and by going on to describe previous unauthorized editions as ‘diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostes, that exposd them’. They promised that ‘those, are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes.’ A related metaphor that Shakespeare frequently uses could be expressed as THE MIND IS A MINT (or FORGE); consider the King’s description of Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost as one ‘That hath a mint of phrases in his brain’ (1.1.165) or Nestor’s view of Thersites in Troilus and Cressida as ‘A slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint’ (1.3.193). Similarly, Imogen in Cymbeline has ‘a mother hourly coining plots’ (2.1.59) and the chorus in Henry V refers to ‘the quick forge and workinghouse of thought’ (5, prologue 23). When we were writing SMM, the great cultural shift in the West towards tattooing was just beginning. The tattoo is not to our knowledge a Shakespearean theme, though of course it was to be of the greatest importance to Shakespeare’s admirer Herman Melville. A bald assertion of parental power is of course conventional at the beginning of a comedy. Equally conventional is the overthrow of such power, though it is significant that a woman’s freedom in this respect is limited to replacing a father with a husband. Lakoff and Johnson (see note 3 above) speak of the ‘grounding’ of everyday metaphors in bodily experience common to all human beings, so that, for instance, MORE IS UP and BETTER IS UP are grounded in the human body’s uprightness in motion and non-uprightness in sleep, illness, or death. Oddly, in Twelfth Night, it seems that Olivia’s personal seal depicts the figure of Lucrece: Malvolio, opening the love-letter forged by Maria, comments ‘By your

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leave, wax. Soft! And the impressure her Lucrece with which she uses to seal’. Inside, he finds a further reference to the story: ‘I may command where I adore, / But silence, like a Lucrece knife,/ With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore; / M.O.A.I. doth sway my life’ (2.5.91–3, 104–7). Just before remarking upon the design of the seal, Malvolio has identified his lady’s ‘hand’ (handwriting) by the shape of certain letters, the choice of which is clearly (but puzzlingly) sexual: ‘These be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, and thus she makes she her great P’s’ (2.5.86–8). Letters, ‘impressure’, sex, and the Lucrece motif are clustered together in a comic context here, several years after the composition of the tragic poem. 40 It could well be argued that the CREATION IS BIRTH/IDEAS ARE BABIES group of metaphors helps to strengthen men’s claim to be the ‘real’ creators, since most of those doing the conceptualizing tend to be male. 41 Such a willingness is posited and explored by Joel B. Altman in The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

PART II INK AND KIN

C\ Taylor & Francis ~

Taylor & Francis Group

http://taylora ndfra n ci s.com

CHAPTER 3

A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body Katharine Eisaman Maus Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar begin their groundbreaking book on the Victorian novel, The Madwoman in the Attic, by remarking that literary creativity is often construed as a masculine attribute. The poet’s pen is in some sense (even more than figuratively) a penis … the patriarchal notion that the writer ‘fathers’ his text just as God fathered the world is and has been pervasive in Western literary civilization.1

Writing from a different theoretical standpoint, such French feminists as Luce Irigaray, Hèlëne Cixous, and Catherine Clèment have emphasized a Lacanian connection between linguistic representation and the phallus.2 For feminist critics, then, problems of authorship become acute when the writer is female. ‘If the pen is a metaphorical penis,’ Gilbert and Gubar inquire, ‘with what organ can females generate texts?’3 Irigaray, Cixous and Clèment, Margaret Homans, Susan Gubar, and others have tried to chart the literary development of a ‘woman’s language’ that eschews or subverts ‘male’ phallic forms of representation.4 While disputing a phallocratic connection between virility and good writing, these critics share the important assumption that writers naturally imagine their creativity in terms of their own bodies, their own genders. The analogies are essentially celebratory, or at least positive ones. Men think of their literary creativity as a form of sexual potency because they value both attributes, even though a Lacanian distinction between penis and phallus may complicate the relationship between bodies and processes of signification. Women, heroically asserting the importance of culturally undervalued female experiences, must redeem both their bodies and their creative energies for themselves, if they are not to succumb to neurosis or bad faith. In this essay I examine a different metaphoric connection, one that challenges some of the assumptions underlying this important account of creativity. In the English Renaissance, the creative imagination is commonly associated with the female body. In the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, Philip Sidney describes himself as ‘great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes’. Ben Jonson, often described as the most aggressively ‘masculine’ of English Renaissance writers, nonetheless frequently depicts his own creativity as maternal.

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In Poetaster’s ‘apologetical dialogue’, for instance, he represents his ‘longwatched labours’ as ‘Things, that were born, when none but the still night, / And his dumb candle saw his pinching throes’. In the Cary-Morison ode, the turn of the infant of Saguntum, ‘half got out’ but already retreating back into a womb that will become its tomb, rehearses the ‘turns’ and ‘counterturns’, the strophes and antistrophes, of a poem generated to commemorate the dead. Shakespeare burlesques the figure in Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which the would-be poet Holofernes boasts that his effusions ‘are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion’ (4.2.68–70).5 Milton, phallic poet extraordinaire in Gilbert and Gubar’s account, makes anti-censorship arguments in Areopagitica that rely upon analogies between ‘the issue of the brain’ and ‘the issue of the womb’. For the English Renaissance writers who employ this analogy, it hardly follows that women make better artists than men. The relative scarcity of women writers in the English Renaissance contrasts vividly with the unprecedented literary activity of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English men, with the emergence of important women writers on the continent, and with the explosion of important female talent into the English literary marketplace in the Restoration and eighteenth century. Nor would this scarcity have seemed surprising to many Renaissance intellectuals. Sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury medical authorities explain women’s unfitness for serious intellectual pursuits on physiological grounds. Citing Galen, they claim that a woman’s body in general and her womb in particular is cold and moist: Were it not so, it would fall out impossible, that her monthly course should flow, or she have milke to preserve the child nine moneths in her bellie, and two years after it is borne; but that same would soone wast and consume.6

By contrast, bodily heat and dryness are qualities associated with, indeed constitutive of, maleness. They are also, not coincidentally, the qualities associated with intellectual exertion generally, and imaginative creativity in particular: To think that a woman can be hot and drie, or endowed with wit and abilitie conformable to these two qualities, is a very great errour; because if the seed of which she was formed, had been hot and drie in their domination, she should have been borne a man, and not a woman …. She was by God created cold and moist, which temperature, is necessarie to make a woman fruitfull and apt for childbirth, but an enemy to knowledge.7

What makes women fertile – what makes them women – also makes them stupid. Why should men imagine their poetic and intellectual endeavors in terms of a sex to whom those endeavors were proscribed – in terms, moreover, of the very organ that is supposed literally to chill and dampen the female intellect? The apparent anomaly sharpens rather than diminishes when we recall how

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exclusively female was the experience of giving birth in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when midwives and female ‘gossips’ rather than male physicians attended women in travail, and husbands were excluded from the birthing chamber.8 The easiest explanation is that men envy women’s ability to give birth; but if this is true, it merely raises further questions. For ‘womb envy’, whatever it is, is surely no more a fact of nature than ‘penis envy’. Rather, it is a cultural construct, and the cultural mechanisms involved are what should really interest us. Moreover, what these poets manifest is not ‘envy’, understood as a consciousness of lack and a search for substitutes. In Freud’s account, the woman who suffers from ‘penis envy’ eventually resolves her complex by making her child stand proxy for the missing penis. But Sidney, Jonson, and Milton do not indicate any sense of inadequacy. Their bland appropriation of what does not seem ‘appropriate’ is not a search for a substitute, but a claim that they already possess the real thing. In this essay I shall argue that the female body provides a risky but compelling model for the structure of male poetic subjectivity in the English Renaissance. I

Pregnant Wits

Analogies between mental creativity and bodily fecundity are not new to the English Renaissance, nor do they require the exaltation of a female function. In the Theaetetus, for instance, Socrates informs his interlocutor that his mother was a midwife and that he has inherited her gift. He does not have ideas himself, but his interrogative technique helps others bring forth theirs: So great, then, is the importance of midwives, but their function is less important than mine … mine differs from theirs in being practiced upon men, not women, and in tending their soul in labour, not their bodies …. Now I have said all this to you at such length, my dear boy, because I suspect that you, as you yourself believe, are in pain because you are pregnant with something within you …. Remembering that I am the son of a midwife and have myself a midwife’s gifts, do your best to answer the questions I ask as I ask them. And if, when I have examined any of the things you say, it should prove that I think it is a mere image and not real, and therefore quietly take it from you and throw it away, do not be angry as women are when they are deprived of their first offspring.9

Even while deriving his talents from his mother-midwife, Socrates discards her specific skills and attributes. He not only differentiates male from female and mind from body in a familiar hierarchical arrangement, but also aligns both pairs of terms, so that the superiority of the male over the female is equivalent to the superiority of mind over body. The male must possess in the mind some creative gift analogous but superior to the fruitfulness of the female body: Socrates flatteringly contrasts the young man’s sensible readiness to relinquish

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unsatisfactory ideas with a woman’s irrational attachment to her doomed infant. The very similarity between thinking and childbirth clarifies their differences, excluding women from philosophy by a principle that seems as natural as the principle which precludes men from giving birth. English Renaissance versions of the topos, however, complicate such neat distinctions. In the prefatory letter to his sister in The Arcadia, Sidney alters the Socratic paradigm even while invoking it: For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child which I am loath to father. But you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment. Now it is done only for you, only to you; if you keep it to yourself, or to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill, I hope, for the father’s sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities …. In sum, a young head not so well stayed as I would it were … having many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster, and more sorry might I be that they came in than that they got out. But his chief safety shall be the not walking abroad; and his chief protection bearing the livery of your name.10

Pregnant with his fancies, Sidney produces an issue which, like Theaetetus’ inadequate ideas, would, in the Greek scheme of things, deserve a quick death. The birthing is, however, therapeutic, apparently both for parent and for child. The word ‘grown’ in the phrase ‘would have grown a monster’ could mean ‘become’ – in which case Sidney’s head is threatened with monstrosity – or ‘generated’, in which case the work is itself deformed: a monster if it were not delivered, and monstrous even now that it is. Fortunately, the fate of the child-work depends here not upon the authority of the ‘cruel’ father-writer but of the compassionate female reader; more changes between Socrates and Sidney than intuitions about the morality of infanticide. In Sidney’s witty reformulation, the childbirth metaphor makes the genders cross. The man submits to the woman’s will (‘your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment’), and she in turn provides the child with shelter and a name. This blurring and interchange of gender-roles seems an appropriate prelude to a romance in which a prince assumes a transvestite disguise in order to pursue a heterosexual agenda, thoroughly disrupting the familial and erotic loyalties of the two women and one man who fall in love with him. The tone of the prologue is playful; Sidney seems unconcerned about the authorial masculinity that his deliberate scrambling of maternal and paternal attributes might seem to compromise. To other writers, such reversals can seem more immediately threatening. Milton’s description of the birth of Truth in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce suggests uneasiness:

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Though this ill hap wait upon her nativity, that shee never comes into the world, but like a Bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth: till Time the Midwife rather than the mother of Truth, have washt and salted the infant, declar’d her legitimate, and Churcht the father of his young Minerva,from the needlesse causes of his purgation.11

Truth comes forth from her originator as if from a mother, but, like Sidney, the author swiftly regains a specifically male identity: it is as Truth’s father that he must, scandalously, be ‘churcht’. Milton represents this obligation as preposterous not only because left-wing Protestants considered the ceremonial purification of new mothers a Popish superstition,12 but because his topsyturvy version of the ritual outrageously subjects the male writer to the female authority of Time, and moreover identifies the male intellect with an unclean childbearing body. The incoherence of Milton’s trope originates in an ambivalent wish to conflate intellectual originality with childbearing, while simultaneously implying that to identify the two processes is to confuse carnal and spiritual in a typically Catholic error. But Socrates’ clear separation of male and female, mind and body, seems impossible. So when English Renaissance poets imagine themselves inhabiting women’s bodies – as possessors of wombs, or as undergoing intellectual childbirth – two different but related questions arise. The first is: given the vigor with which the masculine prerogative was asserted in the early modern period, why are these writers attracted to such analogies at all? The second is: if they employ these terms, why not use them with the confidence of Socrates in the Theaetetus, to reinforce rather than to confuse the demarcations between male intellect and female carnality? Contemporary evidence suggests that connections between the womb and the Imagination, and between completed works, speeches, or actions and babies, were not merely poetic topoi in early modern England. After the failure of the Earl of Essex’s coup in 1601, for instance, many of his friends faced trial for high treason. Henry Neville protested in court that he had not taken part in Essex’s insurrection itself, but merely participated in a conference planning the rebellion: this, he maintained, ‘was no more Treason than the childe in the mothers bellie is a childe’.13 Neville’s defense is curious: he claims that the child in the mother’s belly is not a child, but he calls it a child nonetheless. Neville only makes sense if he is saying that before a certain point, ‘treason’ is not public, therefore not prosecutable by the courts. In this respect Neville’s analogy is extremely suggestive. He stresses less the womb’s fecundity than its hiddenness, or rather a fecundity dependent upon hiddenness. The womb becomes the private space of thoughts yet unuttered, actions yet unexecuted. It is a container, itself concealed deep within the body, with something further hidden within it: an enclosed, invisible organ, working by means unseeable by, and uncontrolled from, the outside. Sixteenth-century

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anatomists go into great detail upon the stratified membranes that constitute the womb, ‘tunicles’ and ‘panicles’ layered one inside another like a set of Chinese boxes; some insist, moreover, that the womb is additionally divided into two, five, or seven cells like a honeycomb or labyrinth. Galen had insisted that women’s reproductive organs are exactly parallel to men’s, but inside-out, or rather, outside-in: All the parts, then, that men have, women have too, the difference between them lying in only one thing … namely, that in women the parts are within the body, whereas in men they are outside …. Consider first whichever ones you please, turn outward the woman’s, turn inward … and fold double the man’s, and you will find them the same in both in every respect.14

Or, as the sixteenth-century French physician Ambroise Parè echoes him, ‘that which man hath apparent without, that women have hid within’.15 The anatomical reticence of the female body can be a source of embarrassment for Renaissance obstetrical writers, whose writing and diagrams indecorously display what seems to demand concealment. Thus Jacques Guillemeau’s English translator assures his readers that ‘I have endeavoured to be as private and retired, in expressing all the passages in this kind as possible I could’.16 Both men and women have ‘secret parts’, but women’s are genuine secrets. The female body imagined in these terms modifies rather than departs from a familiar misogynist topos. Antifeminist texts from classical satire to film noir complain that the woman’s visible body, a fascinating surface further elaborated by cosmetic enhancements, has nothing to do with the essence concealed within – if, indeed, there is anything inside at all. In The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women Joseph Swetnam rehearses this topos: [Women] are also compared unto a painted shippe, which seemeth fair out wardly, and yet nothing but ballace within her; or as the Idolls in Spaine, which are bravely gilt outwardly, and yet nothing but lead within them.17

The anonymous author of A Discourse of the Married and Single Life similarly explains: Sometimes at marriages Walnuts are scattered up and downe; which sheweth, that a woman is like unto a Walnut, that hath a great shell, but a little kernel; faire without, but rotten within.18

The outside is no clue to the inside. A notion of women as deceptive or hollow surfaces produces paranoid complaints about female hypocrisy and vacuity. At the same time, differences between inside and outside can be exhilarating under different circumstances. Anticipating an invasion by the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth I rouses the courage of her troops at Tilbury by telling them that she has ‘the body of a weak and feeble woman, but … the heart and

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stomach of a king, and a king of England too’.19 Elizabeth’s claim apparently reverses the metaphors I have been considering here, since it involves a woman appropriating male bodily parts, but it relies upon an identical intuition: it is never obvious what a woman has inside her. The possibility of such a hidden space appeals to those who want to shield some aspect of themselves from public scrutiny or control. Renaissance advice literature for aspiring humanists and courtiers, full of exhortations to concealment of one’s true motives, fosters precisely this kind of self-protective impulse. Bacon is repeating an old Renaissance saw when he tells his readers in Of Simulation and Dissimulation that ‘The discovery of a man’s self by the tracts of his countenance is a great weakness and betraying’, or praises the inhabitants of Bensalem for seeking to be ‘hidden and unseen to others, and yet to have others open and as in a light to them’. Jonson likewise does not pretend to originality when he writes in Discoveries: It was excellently said of that Philosopher … that the rashnesse of talking should not only bee retarded by the guard, and watch of our heart; but be fenced in, and defended by certaine strengths, placed in the mouth it selfe, and within the lips.

The ability to exploit the difference between invisible private thoughts and visible public actions is one of the important Renaissance meanings of the word ‘Politic’. Even Martin Cognet’s Politique Discourses Upon Trueth and Lying, which makes the lie the basis of all sin, concedes that ‘if a man woulde … discover to everie man the secrete of his minde, he shoulde be counted but a dlzard’.20 The woman’s body, then, incarnates some of the particular privileges and paradoxes of Renaissance subjectivity. On the one hand, she is constituted as something preeminently seen; the paradigmatic focus, as numerous feminist writers have pointed out, of the male gaze. At the same time her interior ‘difference’, her lack of visibility, can become a topos of a resistance to scrutiny, of an inner truth not susceptible to discovery or manipulation from the outside. In Astrophil and Stella (1580), Sidney gets over his labor pains when he eschews external aids and begins to trust his depths: ‘Look in thy heart and write’ (1.14). Jonson often associates his claims to a womb with quasi-Stoic assertions of independence: he gives birth to his work in proud solitude, his labors unattended. In The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois (1613), Chapman’s Stoic hero Clermont suggests the advantages and disadvantages of a subjectivity formed upon this model: The garment or the cover of the mind The human soul is; of the soul, the spirit The proper robe is; of the spirit, the blood; And of the blood, the body is the shroud.

(5.5.170–73)

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The mind is elaborately insulated by layers of increasingly material substance – soul, spirit, blood, body – which provides necessary shelter for the true, vulnerable center of human identity, even while precluding any direct communion between the interior subject and exterior objects. Perhaps, then, the womb is another of those small enclosed spaces in which so many seventeenthcentury poets discover their poetic identity and freedom; like Donne’s little room, Carew’s hidden garden, Lovelace’s prison cell. The clearly bounded and delimited body is the space of freedom. While it might seem that the calculated cultivation of a hidden space within would be incompatible with misogynist paranoia, the reverse is in fact the case. The unreadability that seems so attractive in oneself seems sinister in others; one man’s privacy is another woman’s unreliability. The female interior encloses experiences unappropriable by an observer: adultery, orgasm, and so forth are both unseeable and possible. This dilemma, essentially a version of the ‘problem of other minds’, produces the paradoxes or oxymorons of antifeminist rhetoric: women’s silence conceals their true thoughts, women talk too much; women are inscrutable, women disclose everything. Hamlet boasts to his mother that he has ‘that within which passes show’, but her own unforthcomingness drives him, literally, nearly crazy. In books III and IV of The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s exaltation of Britomart, the armed figure of chastity, militantly closed to penetration, coexists with much more disturbing portraits of female figures who exploit their inscrutability, like Helinore or the false Florimell. The Renaissance male appropriation of the womb as a figure for the imagination is perfectly consistent with an ideology that prescribes the strict supervision of female sexual behavior, and the exclusion of actual women from literary endeavors. Thus, as we have already seen, in Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton’s daring mixture of metaphors relies upon an ultimately conservative notion of woman’s subjection to man’s authority. For men, the womb can become a figure for a kind of freedom, however limited; but the very hiddenness of that freedom can preclude allowing it to the actual possessors of those wombs, whose bodies, unreadable from the male point of view, suggest a kind of anarchy. This way of thinking about women’s bodies, however, is extremely tendentious. The appeal of the woman’s body, for a man who wants a subjective refuge, is the way it is closed in upon itself, the way her interiority is protected by opaque bodily perimeters. But as an emblem of a ‘closed’ subjectivity, the female body is defective insofar as it is penetrable, insofar as it is, in fact, a sort of paradigm of penetrability.21 Moreover, the birth process, both in reality and as a metaphor for rhetorical production, involves the permeability of boundaries in the other direction, the sensational transfer from inside to outside through an orifice that ordinarily, in Jonson’s phrase, ought to be ‘fenced in, and defended by certaine strengths’. That favorite King James Bible word ‘knowledge’ has both a carnal and spiritual significance; men ‘know’ their wives, but the

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expression is not reciprocal. When Donne in Holy Sonnets 14 asks to be raped by God, he takes on a position that seems ‘feminine’ or passive. The point is that his position is already feminine, insofar as God is always already inside. But if the mechanics of impregnation are repudiated, then some of the chief attractions of the female body as a metaphor for poetic creativity – its receptivity and fruitfulness – seem endangered too. Sidney and Jonson both identify themselves with a pregnant female body, struggling to ‘deliver’, to ‘express’, an interior fullness. The act of poetic creation seems to require a reference to an inside even as that inside is being externalized, as the difference between inside and outside is transgressed or annihilated. But this is pregnancy without impregnation. At the end of the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, Astrophil’s pregnancy is revealed to be essentially self-generated: something comes out, but nothing came in. He becomes able to give birth when he recognizes his own self-sufficiency, stops relying upon externals, and looks within his own heart. The Muse gives him advice, but she does not give him the poem: she is a midwife, not an origin or even a co-begetter. Likewise, Jonson manages simultaneously to employ and disavow the childbirth metaphor in Timber, or Discoveries (1640) when he writes that language ‘springs out of the most retired, and inmost parts of us, and is the Image of the Parent of it, the Mind’ (lines 2032–3). He wants to emphasize an interior space in which the creative imagination works, without stipulating how language got in there in the first place. So the mind, although it functions like a mother, becomes merely a ‘parent’, divested of its gendered specificity. It would seem that Renaissance poets could avoid these awkwardnesses by imagining themselves in terms of the female body, but at the same time making clear – as Socrates had – that the figure was an analogy, that processes of mind and body cannot be confused or conflated. Instead such metaphors become, for English Renaissance writers, the sites of gender disorientation rather than of clarification. In vernacular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century speech and writing, the whole interior of the body – heart, liver, womb, bowels, kidneys, gall, blood, lymph – quite often involves itself in the production of the mental interior, of the individual’s private experience. Humors psychology is perhaps the most systematic working-out of this premise, but often it is invoked more casually. ‘When I am dead and opened,’ Mary Tudor puns to her counselors, ‘you shall find Calais [callous] lying in my heart.’22 Edward Coke, presiding at the trial of the Gunpowder conspirators, describes to the prisoners the rationale behind the punishment that awaits them: the traitor’s ‘bowels and inlay’d parts [are] taken out and burnt, who inwardly had conceived and harboured in his heart such horrible treason’.23 The traitor comes to the scaffold quite literally to spill his guts, to have the heart plucked out of his mystery. None of this ought to suggest anything like consistent materialism on the part of early modern Europeans. There is considerable philosophical dispute

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in the Renaissance among neo-Stoics, neo-Platonists, Galenists, Paracelsans, Aristotelians, and others about the relation of bodily and mental phenomena; theologically, philosophically, psychologically, and medically oriented discourse compete, coexist, and sometimes blend in surprising ways. But the patterns of speech I am discussing here are largely subphilosophical, suggesting habits of mind rather than carefully articulated systems of thought. Except in the case of philosophers like Descartes, few attempt to sort out the implications of their own linguistic practices, which bring the carnal and the spiritual into frequent but unstable intimacy. Consequently, when a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century man lays claim to a womb, the precise character of his assertion is sometimes difficult to assess. Renaissance speech habits can make it difficult to know when we are dealing with a bodily metaphor and when with a bare statement of fact – and whether, many times, this kind of distinction is even germane. Moreover, even given a general lack of clear distinctions between bodily and mental processes, the womb seems a particularly indefinite organ. Although early sixteenth-century anatomists had disproved Aristotle’s claim that the uterus wandered about the body, and discredited Galen’s notion that it constituted a separate animal, notions of its errancy and autonomy persisted in the popular imagination and undoubtedly suggested comparisons with the idiosyncratic itineraries of fantasy. Rhetorical treatises elaborate the similarities. Thomas Wright claims that hasty and imprudent speakers ‘commonly are with childe with their owne conceits, and either they must bee delivered of them, or they must die in childbed’.24 Words such as ‘conception’, ‘issue’, and ‘delivery’ imply affinities between childbirth and thinking or speaking. Patricia Parker has discussed many of these punning affinities between the pregnant woman and the text of corpus – for instance the pun on mater, matter, mother, the connection between the copious, amplified text and the enlarged, fertile female body, the traditional association of women with a loquacity that lacks any ‘point’ – while Lisa Jardine has described the implications of the common Renaissance association between sexual promiscuity and female speech.25 These half-analogical, half-literal relationships could only have been reinforced by intimate, casual connections between the brain, in which Galen had located mental functioning, and the womb. Huarte Navarro writes: ‘the member which most partaketh the alterations of the bellie, all Phlisitians say, is the braine, though they have not set downe the reason whereon they ground this correspondence’.26 Gynecological writers, following Aristotle and Galen, invariably warn that a pregnant woman’s mental state affects the physical and psychological disposition of the fetus, that the developing child is likely to be imprinted by the images that come before the mother’s eyes or are entertained in her imagination. Conversely, disorders that originate in the womb – hysteria, greensickness – produced, and were diagnosable by, primarily mental symptoms.

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These medical beliefs complicate the neat contrasts Socrates makes in the Theaetetus. The most significant difference between the midwife and the philosopher, in Socrates’ account, is the ability of the latter to tell true from false, a talent irrelevant to the delivery of babies: ‘for women do not, like my patients, bring forth at one time real children and at another mere images which it is difficult to distinguish from the real’ (150B). In Renaissance obstetrics however, the close links between mind and body made malformed children as likely as malformed ideas; in fact, the former were a consequence of the latter. ‘Monstrous creatures of sundry forms are also generated in the wombs of women,’ writes Paré, ‘somewiles alone, otherwiles with a mola, and sometimes with a child naturally and well made, as frogs, toads, serpents, lizzards’.27 The monstrous birth, transgressing categories, becomes not merely a tragic instance of deformity, but an intriguing intellectual puzzle. The fascination with misleading evidence evinced in these treatises seems part of the same pattern: the instructions on how to tell a tumor from a fetus, a genuine conception from a psychosomatic pregnancy, a male from a female child before delivery. The Renaissance midwife needs to be able to tell true from false, monster from human, mola from embryo, in a way Socrates had reserved for the philosopher. II

Body and Mind in Milton’s Comus

All of these complexities surrounding the difference between male and female, mind and body, converge upon the poetry of the young Milton, for whom both oppositions are crucially important. The association of intellectual creativity with the fecund female body is extremely attractive to him, as we have already seen. But it is also more problematic than it is for Sidney and Jonson, since at this point in his life his poetic gift, he insists, is predicated upon sexual renunciation. Milton devises a solution which preserves many of the advantages of the trope of the poet-in-childbirth while adapting it to the decorum of his particular situation. As many critics have noted, the author of Comus, whose sexual fastidiousness had earlier earned him the nickname ‘Lady’ from his contemporaries at Cambridge, invests himself in the character of the Lady, speaking from the place of the virgin. In a university rhetorical exercise, written six years before Comus, Milton suggests how he may have imagined this investment: Have I by killing a snake suffered the fate of Tiresias, Has some Thessalian witch smeared me with magic ointment? … From some I have lately heard the epithet, ‘Lady’ [Domina]. But why do I seem to those fellows insufficiently masculine? … Doubtless it was because I was never able to

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gulp down huge bumpers in pancratic fashion; or because my hand has not become calloused by holding the plow-handle; or because I never lay down on my back under the sun at mid-day, like a seven-year ox-driver; perhaps, in fine, because I never proved myself a man in the same manner as those gluttons [Ganeones]. But would that they could as easily lay aside their asshood as I whatever belongs to womanhood.28

Here, as in Comus, Milton imagines an individual threatened by a metamorphic power, but here the metamorphosis is false – both because, of course, he is not actually the victim of a Thessallan witch, and more importantly because he embraces rather than denies the ascription of effeminacy. The Lady, here as in Comus, advertises his/her rejection of indiscriminate sensuality and withdrawal from coarsely physical toll and pleasure. For his adversaries, Milton uses the word Ganeones – a word that means not only ‘gluttons’ but ‘perverts’ – turning the homosexual implications of his nickname back upon his hypermasculine opponents and conflating, just as he will in Comus, sexual profligacy with dietary intemperance. But Milton also imagines that his own occupation of a feminine position is a matter of choice; that he is free to lay aside whatever belongs to womanhood as one cannot lay aside an immutable characteristic like stupidity. His imaginative identification with the Lady in Comus might be seen as the same kind of gesture, an attempt to assume a role that, while deeply self-expressive, can nonetheless be discarded when it becomes inconvenient. Milton’s identification with a virginal character allows him to enjoy the advantages of the secure interior space associated with the female body without suggesting, even by the studious omissions of Sidney and Jonson, that the interior need be compromised in order to obtain, a rich classical and Christian tradition of thinking about the virgin female body in terms of what Theresa Krier has recently called, in Spenser’s case, a fascination with ‘warmly eloquent surface and protected interior’. But as Krier points out, Spenser’s ‘creative impulse … is to honor the otherness of feminine bodily life’.29 He maintains a certain distance between his virgin characters and the experience of the male author or reader, who occupies the place of a spectator. Milton, by contrast, follows Sidney and Jonson in identifying himself with the woman. He thinks of his poetic vocation in terms of inhabiting the Lady’s physical position. Comus explores the implications of that identification with unprecedented boldness and rigor. Versions of the Lady’s body, a perfectly enclosed, strictly delimited interior space, pervade the masque. The Attendant Spirit tells us that the gods live ‘insphered / In regions mild of calm and serene air’ (lines 3–4); Echo, in the Lady’s song, is ‘unseen / Within thy airy shell’ (lines 230–31); the lost brothers are imagined as hidden in a ‘flowry cave’ (line 239); the sheep are ‘folded flocks pen’d in their watled cotes’ (line 344); the Attendant Spirit refers to ‘the litter of close-curtained sleep’ (line 554). These lovely, reassuring

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images have their nightmare counterpart in terrifying visions of involuntary confinement: mortals are, the Attendant Spirit announces, ‘confin’d and pestered in this pinfold here’ (line 7); the night is a ‘Dragon woom of Stygian darknes’ (line 131–2); the woods a ‘close dungeon of innumerous bowes’ (line 349); Comus and his followers, ‘within the navel of this hideous wood’, perform ‘abhorred rites to Hecate / In their obscured haunts of inmost bowres’ (lines 520, 535–6).30 For Comus, invisible space is the place of transgression; if, as he says, ‘Tis only daylight that makes Sin’ (line 126), then he can do anything he likes as long as no one sees him. His unspeakable concealed enormities recall the gynephobic anxieties of misogynist writers such as Joseph Swetnam; his male power (the power to rape) is magically dependent upon evil women – his mother Circe and the witch-goddess Hecate. The virtuous Lady, by contrast, thinks of herself as always fully displayed before an omniscient divine eye, a spectator that both keeps her safe and evaluates her, that by observing her provides her with her own capacity of observation. ‘Eye me blessed providence’, she prays (line 329), asking both to be watched and to be given eyes, granted vision. Similarly the Elder Brother contrasts the transparent interiority of the virtuous with the opacity of the bad: He that has light within his own cleer breast May sit I’ th’ center, and enjoy bright day, But he that holds a dark soul, and foul thoughts, Himself is his own dungeon.

(lines 380–84)

Complicating this distinction is the fact that the virtuous individual maintains a well-lit interior only by strictly policing its boundaries, whereas Comus, who exploits the sinful potential of the hidden refuge, does so by insisting upon the necessity of penetrating, violating that space. Thus not only is the enclosed female body simultaneously fortress and trap, but how one experiences the space inside depends upon one’s moral perspective. The virtuous person’s freedom exactly resembles the vicious person’s confinement, and vice versa. The issues become especially vivid when Comus attempts to intimidate the Lady: COMUS: Nay Lady sit; if I but wave this wand, Your nervs are all chain’d up in alablaster, And you a statue; or as Daphne was Root-bound, that fled Apollo. LADY: Fool do not boast, Thou canst not touch the freedom of my minde With all thy charms, although this corporal rinde Thou hast immanacl’d, while Heav’n sees good. (lines 659–65)

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This recalls the Ovidian text: Hanc quoquc Phoebus amat positaeque in stipite dextra sentit adhuc trepiclare novo sub cortice pectus conplexusque suis ramos ut membra lacertis Oscula dat ligno; refugit tamen oscula lignurn. (Phoebus loved her even now, and his right hand, placed upon the trunk, felt the heart still trembling under the new bark. Embracing the branches as if they were human limbs, he bestowed kisses upon the wood; but the wood shrank from his kisses.) (Metamorphoses 1, 553–6; my translation)

Forced to endure Apollo’s unwanted caresses, Daphne is nonetheless protected from rape. The moment contains both threat and promise, paralysis and liberation. Comus’ attempt at intimidation can become the very material of the Lady’s defiance. When the Lady asserts that Comus’ power over the ‘corporal rind’ cannot extend to ‘the freedom of her mind’, she insists that what is inside her is of a radically different kind than what is on the surface. Ovid’s text is pointedly ambiguous on this issue. On the one hand, the heart still beats under the bark, and the wood shrinks from Apollo like flesh beneath a garment. On the other hand, the wood he kisses (lingo) is the same wood that shrinks (lignum); so by the end of the passage, as the metamorphosis completes itself, the difference between surface and depth seems meaningless. The exchange between Comus and the Lady thus puts tremendous pressure on the ambiguities in Renaissance analogies between body and soul. If the universe of Comus is dualist, then the Lady’s intuition of the safety of her mind within her body, her ‘corporal rind’, is correct. If it is not, she is not. The rest of the masque gives us little help in deciding the issue. On the one hand, Comus can imagine the Lady residing within her body as a person within a house: Sure somthing holy lodges in that breast, And with these raptures moves the vocal air To testifie his hidd’n residence.

(lines 246–8)

But the emblematic function of the Lady’s virginity depends upon assuming that the body and the mind are of the same substance, or at least that the body is in some intelligible relation to the mind. Moreover, moral issues are persistently figured in corporal terms: When lust By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk, But most by lend and lavish act of sin, Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion.

(lines 463–6)

What is the difference here between carnal impurity and mental sin? Another way of putting this is that Comus combines an Ovidian discourse with

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Augustinian and Stoic ones that are at odds with it. In Ovid, especially as he was interpreted in the Renaissance, physical transformations represent psychological ones. When Comus’ victims drink his potion their human count’nance, Th’express resemblance of the gods, is chang’d Into some brutish form.

(lines 68–70)

The pun on ‘express’ – external, exact – suggests that the body’s form reproduces the form of the soul, a point the Attendant Spirit makes later in the masque when he describes Comus, potion as ‘unmoulding reason’s mintage / Character’d in the face’ (lines 5, 29–30). The power of this identification of body and soul is intensified in the traditionally allegorical masque form in which Milton is working, in which the whole point of the genre is to personify abstractions and make them visible, devising ways to present what Jonson had called ‘more removed mysteries’ to the eyes of the spectators. Contradicting this kind of figurative procedure is the Augustinian claim that the condition of the body is irrelevant to moral worth – a claim made most vigorously, not coincidentally, in a discussion of rape victims in The City of God I.XVI–XIX. Women who suffer rape, Augustine insists, are in no sense defiled, because they do not consent to the action. Even if in the course of the act their bodies have, against their will, helplessly experienced sexual pleasure, their souls – the only things that finally matter – remain pure. Likewise the ‘budge doctors of the Stoic fur’ (line 707), derided by Comus and quoted approvingly by the Elder Brother, strive to separate moral worth from bodily accidents. In the way A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle represents the body as both separable and inseparable from the soul, dispensable and indispensable for the practice of virtue, it resembles much of Milton’s early work; in the divorce tracts, for instance, James Turner describes him ‘torn between materialist monism and hierarchic dualism’.31 In this particular instance, however, the specter of rape exacerbates difficulties produced by the relationship between the tenor and the vehicle of the metaphor mind = female body. By equating, even symbolically, the free mind with the impenetrable body, Milton makes rape a highly problematic issue. The Elder Brother, describing the unassailability of ‘true virgins’, manages to reassure his younger brother by insisting that his sister possesses a ‘hidden strength’ that controls the fate of the body: ’Tis chastity, my brother, chastity: She that has that, is clad in complete steel. …………………………………………… No goblin, or swart faery of the mine, Hath hurtful power o’er true virginity.

(lines 420–21, 436–7)

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Our problem in assessing the Elder Brother’s claims is that it is unclear whether or not they are meant to be evaluated apart from their generic context. In the magical world of romance, in which aggressors quail from ‘sacred vehemence’ (line 795) and river goddesses hurry to the rescue, the Lady has nothing to worry about. But in real-world Renaissance Britain, a woman’s moral worth was inevitably involved with the fate of her vulnerable body, and the Elder Brother is close to suggesting that since ‘true virgins’ are unassailable, rape victims are responsible for their own fate: they must have asked for it. This would hardly have been an academic issue for the Earl of Bridgewater’s family. Their notorious relative, the Earl of Castlehaven, had recently been executed for various sexual crimes, one of which involved encouraging his servant and homosexual lover, Skipwith, to rape his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, Elizabeth Audley, while he watched. Elizabeth – first cousin and agemate of Alice Egerton, who played the Lady in Comus – had been married the year before the rape to Castlehaven’s seventeen-year-old son, but the marriage had evidently not been consummated; although the Earl provided Skipwith with ‘oil to open her body’, he was at first unable to penetrate her. After Skipwith confessed, Elizabeth was convicted of adultery, fornication, and incontinency. Her grandmother, who took in the rest of the Castlehaven children in this time of crisis, refused to provide refuge for Elizabeth: ‘some sparkes of my grandchilde Audlies misbehaviour remaining … might give ill example to the young ones which are with me’.32 Clearly this child, whom modern sensibilities would see as a victim of outrageous abuse, was held responsible both by legal authorities and by her own family for the sexual assault committed upon her. And Milton keeps the pressure on by emphasizing the corporeality of the Lady, by making it difficult to idealize her virginal body too completely. One such moment occurs when, surprisingly, she responds to Comus’ seductive language with the phrase, ‘I had not thought to have unlockt my lips’ (line 756). But what seems like capitulation turns out to be resistance: the Lady unlocks her lips in order to refute Comus’ argument, not to drink his potion or allow him any other kind of access. Another moment has provoked more critical discomfiture; after the brothers enter, the Lady proves to be stuck to her chair by ‘gumms of glutenous heat’ (line 917). Phrases like these force attention upon the Lady’s body as a body, not as an emblem for something else, highlighting the ambiguous metaphoricity of Renaissance mind-body relationships. If the body is expressive of the soul, then line 917 suggests that the Lady is saying no while meaning yes. Hugh Richmond writes that ‘the Lady’s … body acknowledges [Comus’] authority’; John Carey that there are … elements in the masque which suggest some spiritual deficiency [on the Lady’s part]. She does, after all, get glued to Comus, chair, and the chair ‘smeared with glutinous heats’ brings to mind the sexual heat for which Comus’ enchantments are allegories.33

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If the body is distinct from the Soul, on the other hand, then it is necessary to insist with Augustine that involuntary physical responses, even sexual ones, are morally inconsequential. Problems like ‘the vulnerability of the body’ or ‘the problem of the existence of other minds’ or ‘the relation between mind and body’ might seem, in other words, to contain no explicit reference to gender, but their solutions are likely to seem different when the minds and bodies are male, rather than when the minds and bodies are female. By explicitly gendering such questions in the confrontation of Comus and the Lady, Milton renders them acute and troubling, especially given the fact that Milton is imagining himself as inhabiting the Lady’s body, whatever that may come to mean in a work that calls into question the difference between mind and body. For if mind and body are inseparable, then it is a sheer impossibility for a male poet imaginatively to occupy a position physically designated as female, even while retaining the intellectual qualities associated with masculinity. The fantasy Milton elaborates in Prolusion 6 of occupying a feminine position temporarily, like an article of clothing, seems in this light to involve a confusion about, or denial of, that inseparability. But if, on the other hand, mind and body are entirely discrete categories, then it is unclear why one kind of body should seem an especially appropriate structural model for creative subjectivity – that is, why Renaissance poets should want to imagine themselves as women at all. At the crucial moment, Milton uses masque conventions to obscure the issue further. The Lady insists that she has the power to bring Comus’ castle down around his ears, and he – while granting that fact – moves forward to ‘force’ her nonetheless. What is about to happen? Will the Lady’s virginity, as a figure of the free mind, prove a source of magical power, or at least something unassailable from the outside? Will Comus turn out to be able to rape her after all, and if so, would he be committing merely an insignificant assault upon the body, the ‘corporal rind’, or would he be more seriously compromising a virginity that has been represented throughout the masque as a moral virtue? Although the Lady is saved at the last moment, Milton does not depict the Lady as rescuing herself from rape, nor does he show the brothers as able to solve her problem. He wants to preserve virginity – the unpenetrated body – as the emblem of incorruptible poetic creativity and the wellspring of moral virtue, but he is, realistically, aware that actual bodies are indeed penetrable, suffering not only rape, but disease, death, and decay. In Lycidas, written four years later, Milton is obsessed with a somewhat similar problem: the swollen, rotten bodies of the Anglican communicants, forsaken by their pastors, have an unfortunate affinity with the presumably swollen, rotten body of the drowned Edward King, with whom the corrupt church members are supposed to be contrasted. In the elegy the solution is to deny the relevance of the material, accidental world to spiritual and moral truths: the material King may be sunk

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low, but the ‘real’ King is mounted high. In Comus the same option is available to Milton, but he does not quite take it. Perhaps the allegorical form of the masque forbids him to take it. Or perhaps, as in the passage cited earlier from Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton wants to insist both upon the proximity and the distance between mind and body. At any rate, the resolution of the Lady’s dilemma represents a deflection in emphasis, a shifting of the terms in which it has been constructed. At the end of her ordeal, still fastened to Comus’ chair, the Lady requires the supernatural salvific agency of the nymph Sabrina. As the Attendant Spirit informs us, Sabrina was herself an innocent victim of intolerable persecution who was rescued by sympathetic powers, the water nymphs and their father Nereus, at the crisis of her fortunes. Sabrina’s story, and her intervention in the Lady’s case, addresses less the poem’s tense mind-body problematic than what might seem its isolating consequences. The Lady’s steely continence, and her insistence upon mental freedom in the face of physical peril, has seemed as much Stoic as Christian. In order to assimilate the virtue into a Christian framework, Milton must emphasize its ultimate dependence upon a charitable external power, a saving grace that simultaneously allows the Lady’s reincorporation into both her family and her social context. I have a few concluding observations. In the case of Comus, the ambiguously metaphorical female body becomes a site of anxiety about symbolization, about the status of emblem – obviously an important issue in a masque, especially a masque written by an iconoclast. In the case of the more general issues, I would suggest that the equivocal and anxious cross-gender identification implied by these metaphors might provoke a rethinking of the ways we discuss literary creativity in a patriarchal society. In the cases I have been examining, the use of bodily metaphors suggests no ‘natural’ or ‘healthy’ tie to one’s own physical structure, and the analogies are extremely intricate and shifty (women are closed; women are permeable; women are full of interesting things; women are hollow inside; men are boring inside; men have real inner lives which women either do not have or have only in grotesque ways). I wonder too if the problems of ambiguous figuration that I have been discussing with respect to Renaissance poets also haunt us today? Notes 1

The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 4. As Gilbert and Gubar indicate, Harold Bloom’s powerful oedipal account of poetic influence and originality in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) is premised upon this ‘more than figurative’ analogy. See also Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 184–99.

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2 3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

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Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Cixous and Clèment, The Newly Born Woman (1975), trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Madwoman, p. 7. See above, and Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Susan Gubar, ‘“The Blank Page” and Issues of Female Creativity’, in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1985), pp. 292–313. Elizabeth Sacks enumerates Shakespeare’s use of similar metaphors in Shakespeare’s Images of Pregnancy (New York: Macmillan, 1980), and gives further examples from Nashe, Harvey, Whetstone, Skoleker, Dekker, Lyly, and Daniel. Juan de Dios Huarte Navarro, Examen de Ingenios. The Examination of Mens Wits, trans. R. C[arew] (London, 1604), p. 270. Huarte Navarro, Examination, p. 274. See Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynecology in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), and Adrian Wilson, ‘The Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation’, in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 68–107. Plato, Theaetetus 15CB–15IC, trans. Harold North Fowler (London, 1977). The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 3. The prefatory letter is published in the first printed edition of the work (The New Arcadia) in 1590, and in subsequent editions as well. Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), vol. II, p. 225. For Puritan hostility toward ‘churching’, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 59–61, and Wilson, ‘Ceremony of Childbirth’, pp. 78–82. In An Apology for Smectymnuus (1642), Milton comments sarcastically upon ‘errors, tautologies, impertinences’ in the ritual’ (Complete Prose Works, vol. II, p. 939). Francis Bacon, A Declaration of the Practices and Treasons Attempted and Committed by Robert late Earle of Essex and his Complices (London, 1601), K2r. For some implications of this conception of treason, see my ‘Proof and Consequences: Inwardness and its Exposure in the English Renaissance’, Representations 34 (1991), pp. 26–49. On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. and ed. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 628. For a full account of these theories, see Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). ‘The Anatomy of Mans Body’, in The Workes of that famous chirurgeon Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas Johnson (London, 1649), p. 128. Child-birth, or, the Happie Deliverie of Women (London, 1612), p. 3. (London, 1616), p. 3. (London, 1621), p. 96. George P. Rice, ed., The Public Speaking of Queen Elizabeth: Selections from the Official Addresses (New York: AMS Press, 1951), p. 96. Trans. Sir Edward Hoby (London, 1586), p. 13. Gail Kern Paster and Peter Stallybrass remark that women often feature in Renaissance texts as ‘leaky vessels’ requiring girdling or enclosure (Paster, ‘Leaky

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Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy’, Renaissance Drama 18 [1987], pp. 43–65; Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’, in Rewriting the Renaissance, eds Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986], pp. 123–42). John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. George Townsend (London, 1839), vol. viii, p. 625. State Trials 2.184. The rationale, like the punishment, is traditional; see John Bellamy, The Law of Treason: England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 39, 47, 52. The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), p. 110. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Routledge, 1987), pp. 17–35; Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983), pp. 103–40. Huarte Navarro, Examination, p. 273. Works, p. 763. This passage comes from a treatise on smallpox, measles, and worms; Parè’s fascination with anomaly is more fully displayed in On Monsters and Prodigies, later in the same collection. Prolusion 6, trans. Bromley Smith, in The Works of John Milton, vol. xii (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), pp. 240–41. Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 129, 139. All quotations from Comus are from Helen Darbishire, ed., The Poetical Works of John Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). James Granthan Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 200. Cited from Barbara Breasted, ‘Comus and the Castlehaven Scandal’, Milton Studies 3 (1971), pp. 201–24. Leah Marcus, in ‘The Milieu of Milton’s Comus: Judicial Reform at Ludlow and the Problem of Sexual Assault’, Criticism 25 (1983): 293– 328, draws attention to a rape case that the cart of Bridgewater was investigating in his judicial capacity as Lord President of Wales, in the months before Comus was performed; in this case, the initial response of the authorities was to imprison the raped woman. Hugh Richmond, The Christian Revolutionary: John Milton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 72; John Carey, Milton (New York: Arco, 1970), p. 46. Critical debate on the gums is summed up in Edward Le Comte, Milton and Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 1–4.

CHAPTER 4

Ben Jonson’s Branded Thumb and the Imprint of Textual Paternity Lynne Dickson Bruckner In early modern England, the family was viewed as a microcosm of the kingdom and a metaphor for the nation; as such, clear lines of patrilineal descent were constructed as fundamental to cultural continuity.1 Not surprisingly, early modern culture strained to repress the degree to which such lines were also tenuous. While the legal status of women in marriage, inheritance practices, and penalties imposed on the parents of children born out of wedlock all worked to minimize the inevitable vagaries in patrilineal ordering, the perceived threats to secure hereditary lines were almost overwhelming.2 Foremost is the unavoidable fact that reproducing the father relied directly on the female body – the designated weak link in the chain of patrilineal continuity. Moreover, even if they did not see the female body as excessively open, early modern fathers could no more guarantee that their wives would produce ‘men-children only’ than they could see to it that their sons would escape the high rates of infant morality or death in childhood. As evidenced in the boyhood deaths of Shakespeare’s Hamnet and Jonson’s Benjamin, these anxieties were not merely constructs; forty per cent of early modern families did not have sons to carry on the paternal name.3 David Cressy has recently confirmed that early modern fathers generally preferred sons over daughters, a preference closely related to issues of lineage. While birth and birthing remained in the feminine domain during the period, aristocratic and gentrified fathers played an active role in determining the social significance of that birth. Diaries show that early modern fathers were directly involved in two practices closely tied to the continuity of lineage: selecting an appropriate wet-nurse, and arranging for the infant’s baptism. Breast milk, believed by many to be converted menstrual blood, had implications in terms of hereditary traits; thus, the appropriate selection of a wet nurse was crucial.4 Godparentage was equally important in that it could establish or affirm the ties of kinship. The early modern father’s investment in patrilineal descent does not, however, negate the possibility that he cared deeply for his children.5 While Lawrence Stone is famous for describing the period’s ‘coldblooded attitude’ towards children, recent scholarship has argued against this formulation. Stone, in suggesting that children were almost universally viewed as ‘smelly and unformed little animals lacking the capacity to reason’, or mere

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‘playthings, toys to divert the mind’, oversimplifies the emotional contours of the early modern period.6 Regarding Marvell’s letter to Sir John Trott on the death of Trott’s son, for example, Steven Zwicker and Derek Hirst locate ‘a plangent tone … unique among the Marvell texts. The grief of the father and the extinction of patrilineal descent occasioned a powerful turbulence’.7 Marianne Novy has amended Stone’s assertion that most people in sixteenthand early seventeenth-century England ‘found it very difficult to establish close emotional ties to any other person’.8 Novy finds that while Stone may have ‘identified a cultural ideal of Elizabethan society’ (a sort of emotional distancing), this ideal exists in tension with the ‘warm, affectionate families’ in many of Shakespeare’s plays.9 While Novy’s particular focus is on the romance plays, the death of Cordelia, the slaying of Macduff’s children, and the loss of Mamillius all suggest a culture that included parents who valued and loved children. In short, ties between early modern parents and children, and particularly between fathers and sons, were closely related to the cultural value placed on patrilineal descent, yet affection and the desire for a secure hereditary line should not be considered mutually exclusive categories.10 As discussed above, due to both the construction of the female body and the biological realities of early modern life, there was no guarantee for paternal continuity; and the sense of loss associated with disruption of the parental line was immense. Perhaps such experiences of loss explain the frequency with which the period locates alternative modes for reproducing the self – one of the most significant of which is the birth/text metaphor. Appropriating the trope of feminine birthing, Sidney, ‘great with child to speak’, labors to bring forth the opening sonnet in Astrophil and Stella. The preface to the Arcadia similarly calls the text ‘this child which I am loth to father’ – a statement that hints at Sidney’s anxiety about the cornucopian excess of this prose romance. Nashe, in his Lenten Stuff, refers to The Isle of Dogs as ‘the infortunate imperfit Embrion of my idle hours’.11 In the Sonnets, Shakespeare urges the young man to procreate, noting that nature ‘carved’ him ‘for her seal, and meant thereby / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die’. And later, in The Winter’s Tale, Leontes questions the legitimacy of his son, studying his face while stating, ‘they say it is a copy out of mine’. Somewhat differently, and with what is perhaps a striking sense of the danger and insufficiency of the child/text metaphor, Spenser’s Error is consumed by the ‘deformed monsters, fowle, and blacke as inke’ (emphasis mine) that she bore and ‘nurst’. Offering an equally intriguing formulation, Jonson, in the letter to Volpone, refutes his critics’ charge that ‘not my youngest infant but hath come into the world with all his teeth’. Such textual moments display how readily biological reproduction found its ideal metaphor in the language of textual reproduction. And while not universally, they also hint at the insufficiency of this analogy – the inability of print (given its own vagaries) to alleviate the uncertainties of biological reproduction.

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In recent decades, scholars have made much of Ben Jonson’s quest for lasting poetic recognition – a quest he sought to fulfill through the creation of a stable body of printed works. This essay extends this scholarly conversation, reading Jonson’s desire for an authoritative poetic legacy in relation to the loss of his first son – a loss that seems to have occasioned both grief and rage.12 Read in this context, the almost obsessive print text of Sejanus and the branding metaphors in and around Volpone become suggestive of a Jonsonian desire to establish a firmer, less agonizing reproductive line through the vehicle of print.13 The brand was a potent metaphor for Jonson, who – after pleading benefit of clergy – was branded with the Tyburn ‘T’ on his thumb. Reflecting perhaps daily on the permanence of this brand, this indelible mark on the body, Jonson may very well have wished that his legacy was this deeply etched, and if not through genetics then through print.14 Suffering from the loss of at least two children (and his first son in particular), Jonson focused particularly on the printed text. In many ways, Jonson’s print texts from this era serve as his claim to clear literary paternity – a sort of paternity that skirts the twin threats of biology and mortality. And yet, as these plays also register, Jonson recognizes that the literary text is perhaps no more stable and resilient than is the human body – so easily marked, so easily lost, so easily met with destruction. I

A Moveable Type of Fatherhood

In 1619 Jonson recalled a dream he had just prior to his first son’s death: at that tyme the Pest was in London … he saw in a vision his eldest son (then a child and at London) appear unto him with the Mark of a bloodie crosse on his forehead as if it had been cutted with a sword, at which amazed he prayed unto God, and in the morning he came to Mr. Cambdens chamber to tell him, who persuaded him it was but an appreehension of his fantasie at which he should not be disjected. In the mean tyme comes there letters from his wife of the death of the Boy in the plague. He appeared to him he said of a Manlie shape and of the Growth that he thinks he shall be at the resurrection.15

Although Jonson had been separated from his family for some time prior to Benjamin’s passing, the boy clearly held a significant place in his father’s psyche.16 Benjamin’s appearance in a ‘manly shape’ assures Jonson that his son has found a place in God’s redemptive universe, yet this comforting image necessarily elicits conflicting emotions in the father. While the vision of his son resurrected would have been soothing to this Christian poet, it would also minimize the importance of biological father.17 Imbricating solace and parental displacement, the dream firmly marks Benjamin as God’s child. The bloody cross on his forehead, etched ‘as if it had been cutted with a sword’, supplants

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the mark of the biological father, imprinting Benjamin as God’s property. As it both evokes the institutionalized mark of quarantine drawn on the doors of plague-ridden houses, and aligns the child with Christ, the cross is suggestive of how institutional, spiritual, and emotional imperatives coalesce and compete when the father is cut off from his son. This dream provides a tempting interpretive framework for Jonson’s wellknown elegy on his son. While critics have argued that the poem, with its concluding vow never to ‘like to much’ that which the writer loves, achieves only a cynical resolution, I am inclined to agree with David Kay who finds that the poem ‘betray[s] a tenderness with which [Jonson] is rarely credited’.18 Skeptics may argue that Jonson’s use of convention and a source poem (drawn from Martial) diminishes the probability that the elegy is expressive of felt emotion. Jonson, however, was known to express some of his most personal sentiments through the mouthpiece of classical phrases and quotes.19 And it is equally useful to recall that in the early modern period convention was far from antithetical to sincerity.20 Indeed, regarding Jonson’s poems on Benjamin and Mary’s early deaths, Sara J. van den Berg finds that ‘nowhere are style and poetic convention put to the service of deep feeling more than in Jonson’s epitaphs for his children’.21 For the purposes of this argument, it is the death of the son that most concerns us:22 Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sinne was too much hope of thee, loved boy, Seven years tho’wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I loose all father, now. For why Will man lament the state he should envie, To have so soone scap’d worlds and fleshes rage, And, if no other miserie, yet age? Rest in soft peace, and ask’d, say, here doth lye Ben Jonson his best piece of poetrie. For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such, As what he loves may never like too much.23

The poem both asserts God’s primary ontological claim to the boy – noting that he was only ‘lent’ to the poet – and seeks to establish a kind of eternal paternity, memorializing the seven-year old Benjamin as Jonson’s ‘best piece of poetry’. Evoking the bitter sting of his loss, Jonson deploys the language of economics; the boy is ‘lent’, and the poet must ‘pay’ what has been ‘exacted’ from him.24 The persona (which in this case I think we can readily call Jonson) nonetheless struggles to quell his bitterness, as he seeks to place the body’s death in the context of his faith.25 And yet, as the famous ‘O, could I loose all father, now’ makes clear, Jonson’s sense of loss is so immense it can barely be contained in the lines of the poem; the shift in voice in the closing couplet, moreover, ‘communicates the difficulty with which [Jonson] conforms his will to God’s,

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and the lines suggest that his faith is barely able to hold his grief in check’.26 Kay concludes that the poem achieves a ‘settled resolution’, as Jonson accepts the Christian wisdom that ‘man’s true blessedness transcends the limits of merely human relationships, however deep those relationships may be’.27 While convinced that Jonson is indeed seeking to find resolution in such Christian wisdom, I would argue that the poem is perhaps strongest in its refusal to resolve the conflict the poet feels between his sense of loss, and his recognition that his emotions are in tension with his faith. From the Hebrew, Benjamin translates as ‘the child of my right hand’. The phrase evokes the image of Christ at God’s right side (that which Jonson should have seen through his love for the boy), and simultaneously serves as Jonson’s particular claim to his son. This claim is evident in the pun on the right/write hand, a pun that insists that Jonson as poet made this boy.28 Certainly, when Jonson again summons the trope of poet as maker in line ten, he destabilizes the Christian acceptance the final couplet attempts to convey. Benjamin’s resonant ventriloquism of his father’s desires, naming himself as ‘Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry’, echoes well beyond the restraint of the closing couplet. Finally then, On My First Son recognizes and works to assimilate God’s prior claim to the boy, yet also maintains (as the title reflects) that Benjamin was written into existence (and will, via the poem, be written into eternity) by the pen of the father. The elision of poem and child was not infrequent in Jonson’s work, nor in the period more generally. This poem, however, provides the most explicit notion of fathering the text, and reminds us that the print/parent metaphor encompasses not only those institutionalized, yet very real concerns about legitimacy and lineage, but also the uncontainable agony of losing a child to death. Fusing notions of semen and ink, child and poem, paternity and print, the plays that Jonson writes and publishes after his son’s death attempt to locate a site in which the uncontrollable vagaries of biological experience could be more firmly etched, more securely imprinted, and so most eternally owned by the father. II

Jonson, Paternity, and the Print Text of Sejanus

In recent decades, scholars have underscored the degree to which Jonson, perhaps more than any other writer of his era, sought to produce a lasting, classically resonant body of work.29 While the unprecedented publication of his Workes in 1616 is the poet’s boldest statement in these terms, Jonson critics have found that the years around the production of Sejanus and Volpone mark the moment in which Jonson begins publicly – if somewhat ambivalently – to stake his claim to poetic authority. Such studies have compellingly argued that Jonson’s fervor for the stable text was directly related to his tri-fold desire to

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outlast his era, to overcome a fickle and sometimes under-educated audience, and to avoid additional charges of sedition from the court censor.30 While critics are right to note that these concerns drive Jonson’s writerly agenda, they have yet to link the poet’s nearly obsessive drive to ensure the lasting stability of his body of works to the loss of his son in 1603. In an astute discussion of Jonson’s struggle for authority in the early years of the seventeenth century, Richard Dutton has argued persuasively that the ‘precise formulation of the Epistle [to Volpone] owes a good deal to what were in fact intensely traumatic experiences in those years’.31 Nowhere, however, does Dutton list the death of Jonson’s first son among these traumas.32 It is immensely suggestive that Sejanus – the quarto of which is startling in its attention to they layout of the printed page – is the first work Jonson publishes after his son’s death.33 It is equally interesting that when performed in 1603 the play was nothing less than an unmitigated disaster; the revised print copy of Sejanus hints at a Jonsonian desire to rework and reinvent the past through the construction of a lasting and unblemished literary legacy.34 Written in 1603 and printed in 1605, Sejanus provides one of the most striking examples of the Jonsonian desire to fix the printed page. Jonson was a frequent visitor to the print shop and may have supervised the printing of this play. Prefaced by a bulky prefatory apparatus (which includes no fewer than eight poems praising the play in addition to a lengthy letter ‘To the Readers’) and studded with marginal citations, the text has been noted for its careful attention to its Latin sources.35 From ‘Actvs Primvs’, the play is laden with Roman attributes – attributes which Jonson – drawing a firm line between his own work and that of his classical predecessors – mobilized to cultivate his laureate identity.36 In the opening letter ‘To the Readers’, moreover, Jonson tells us that he has excised those sections ‘wherein a second pen [probably Chapman’s] had good share’; he thus claims sole authorship to (read paternity of) the play. Yet, if we consider carefully the frenzy of citations bordering the pages of Sejanus, multiple concerns seem to be at stake. In addition to avoiding charges of censorship, the marginalia works to delimit the reader’s interpretive scope, for the citations also occupy the traditional place of the reader’s gloss. Conveniently, the marginalia works to place Jonson in a clearly etched line of literary descent, yet one senses that Jonson both admired and resented his literary forefathers. Potentially, the very debt Jonson feels toward his sources puts him in an antagonistic relationship to them. The move to contain them in the margins of the play suggests not only a desire to give his sources a place, but also to miniaturize them in relation to his text. In short, the layout of Sejanus visually suggests that the text has digested and expanded on that which preceded it. And yet, the sources at times threaten to strangle the playwright’s text, as if he writes from a literary paternity that – not unlike Error’s spawn – is

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as likely to consume as it is to authorize his poetic stability. Jonson sought, but was not naïve about the difficulty of forging a lasting poetic heritage. Given that Jonson’s sons were to be literary rather than biological, one wonders whether he anticipated that he would not have a son to carry on the paternal name. In Sejanus, lineage and the inherited power that it implies are subject to manipulation and multiple ruptures. In his plot to become next in the emperoreal line, Sejanus arranges Drusus’ (Tiberius’ son) death and seeks to marry his widow, Livia. Tiberius, working through Macro, foils Sejanus’ attempts at usurpation; fitly, the minion is punished by his own death as well as those of his children – which is to say the obliteration of his hereditary line. Nonetheless, the educated in Jonson’s audience would have known that while Tiberius’ named his grandson, Tiberius Gemellus, and his grandnephew, Caligula, as joint heirs to the throne, Caligula gained sole possession of Roman power, and subsequently had his cousin murdered. The play underscores a fact that recent English history had made abundantly clear: even those at the top of the power structure cannot dictate and ensure secure lines of patrilineal descent. In a thoroughly Jonsonian move, the dramatist contends with his own sadness and frustration about the vulnerability of sons by foisting his agitation onto his audience. Simultaneously, the nearly obsessive attention to detail in the printed text of Sejanus speaks to the Jonsonian desire to have a fixed world, a world in which the mark of the textual father is as clearly and eternally etched as God’s cross on Benjamin’s forehead. III Volpone’s Brand of Fatherhood Volpone, despite its claim to comic form, shares much with its tragic predecessor. As Ann Barton writes, ‘Volpone was generated by Sejanus. Both plays concern the relationship between master and parasite; both concern the failures of institutional justice; and both lack strong, good characters … who can amend … human viciousness and crime’.37 I would extend Barton’s observations to note that both dramas tremble with issues of lineage and paternity. Etched with cruelty and an ending that, as Jonson himself notes, violates the comic form, Volpone largely seems aimed at dismantling cultural confidence in patrilineal descent. The play reduplicates such anxiety through locating a brutal, yet insufficient, alternative to such shaky paternity – recurrent images of brands and burns, imprints that elude erasure and defy displacement. Volpone is explicitly concerned with descent, inheritance, sexuality, and legality. With a plot premised on the Magnifico’s fabrication that he is near death and so in search of an heir, the play immediately raises issues of lineage. The legacy hunters who daily attend Volpone’s bed function to disclose the rude materialism that undergirds culturally idealized notion of lineage. Furthermore,

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Mosca plays upon (and so fractures) the notion that merit has a bearing on whom will be named next in Volpone’s line. Speaking to Voltore, Mosca avers that Volpone would ‘be bless’d / To have his heir of such a suffering spirit, / So wise, so grave, of so perplexed a tongue’ (1.3.62). While this ‘praise’ embeds a pointed jibe at lawyers and their manipulative speeches, Voltore still hears it as statement of his worthiness. In the cultural game of inheritance, merit and justice are held up as guiding principals, but Volpone more than suggests that greed and base desires underwrite the early modern investment in descent and lineage. From his opening speech, Volpone crows that he values gold above human connection; it is the ‘best of things; and far transcending / All style of joy in children, parents friends’ (1.1.16–17). Applying the very language of fathers and sons to gold, Volpone hails the commodity as the ‘sun of Sol / But brighter than thy father’ (1.1.10–11). Moreover, in a stunning reversal of the cultural value placed on paternity and lineage, Volpone substitutes gold for human connection. The ‘childless’ Volpone boasts that he has ‘no wife, no parent, child, allie, / To give my substance to’ (1.1.73–4). Lawrence Danson asks, ‘What kind of life, what kind of self, is that? From one point of view it is a fantasy of ultimate freedom, existence with no strings attached. From another, it is an ontological horror, to be “a kind of nothing, titleless …”’ (Coriolanus, 5.1.13).38 The ‘ontological horror’ which Danson describes is one in which Jonson may well have been immersed as he composed this play. The play raises this ontological fear in multiple and incessant ways. Relentlessly complicating notions of family and fatherhood, Volpone shows how one can never rest secure in notions of lineage. Studded with references to adultery, bastard children, (dis)inheritances, and legal manipulations, Volpone both mocks the ideals under girding a patriarchal social order and eats away at any secure notions its audience may have about patrilineal ordering. While the play opens by designating Volpone as ‘childless’, he may or may not have fathered various offspring. In response to Corvino’s ‘Has he children?’, Mosca blithely states: … Bastards, Some dozen, or more, that he begot on beggars, Gipsies, And Jews and black-moors, when he was drunk. Knew you not that, sir? ’Tis the common fable, The Dwarf, the Fool, the Eunuch are all his; He’s the true father of his family, In all, save me: but he has given’ em nothing.

(1.4.43–9)

While Sweeney argues that this moment constitutes a joke at Volpone’s expense – one in which Mosca slanders the Magnifico who cannot (as he feigns deathly illness) reply – it also functions as a parody of pro-creation.39 Volpone is either

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the biological or surrogate father to the sensual misfits who occupy his house, though his mode of parenting is hardly one to be emulated. To Volpone’s delight, Mosca sings that fools are ‘the great man’s dearling, / and your ladies sport, and pleasure’ (1.2. 71–2), and as Mario DiGangi has noted Volpone’s sensuality is located as patently other. Volpone sensualizes and dominates the figures in his household, fostering an eroticized play land in which his appetites are the primary concern. The Magnifico’s very treatment of the fortune hunters is phrased in highly erotic terms. He seems to take a particularly pleasure in the fact that ‘Women, and men, of every sex and age’ (emphasis mine) come to his house daily in hopes of getting his inheritance, and his voluptuous pleasure is more than evident in his description of arousing their hopes by ‘Letting the cherry knock against their lips, / And draw it, by their mouths, and back again’ (1.1.89–90). The father himself, Jonson implies, can be the weak coupler in a social continuum, and this anxiety is certainly not remedied by the play’s other father, Corbaccio. Repeatedly, the play exposes the soft foundation of fatherhood and lineage, the very blocks upon which early modern constructions of identity and nationhood rested. Note how lineage is parodied in the seemingly playful entertainment regarding the transmigration of Pythagoras’ soul.40 Early in the play, Nano tells the story of how Pythagoras’ ‘fast and loose’ soul moved through various philosophers after which, ‘kings, knights, and beggars, knaves, lords and fools gat it, / Besides, ox, and an ass, camel, mule, goat and brocke’ (1.2.29–30). Undermining the weight given to biological notions of human descent, the soul flits from one body to another. Furthermore, the soul’s journey has temporarily halted in Androgyno, a figure whose hermaphroditic possibilities are both erotically charged and at odds with tidy notions of reproduction. The paternal line is not neat and easily maintained; rather, it is liable to unaccountable gaps and slips, a point ironically poised against the Pythagorean belief that the world could be fully known through numerical relationships. The difficulty of maintaining a secure paternal line is further exposed through the roaming eroticism that characterizes Volpone’s house. The intricate plot through which Volpone attempts to bed Celia serves to show how readily the legitimate heterosexual unions upon which patriarchy is predicated can be corrupted. In the case of Celia, her husband’s jealousy is matched only by his desire for wealth; thus, despite his fear of being cuckolded, Corvino volunteers his wife to be the young woman, ‘lusty and full of juice’ (2.6.35), to lie beside Volpone. Corvino’s prior attempts at circumscribing Celia’s body, moreover, are a source of ridicule in the play – and so suggest that no amount of spousal vigilance can circumscribe the female body. After he catches his wife throwing down a handkerchief to Volpone (as the Magnifico plays Scoto of Mantua), Corvino establishes the following rules:

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And thy restraint, before, was liberty To what I now decree; and therefore, mark me. First I will have this bawdy light dammed up; I’ll chalk a line; o’er which if thou but chance To set thy desp’rate foot; more hell, more horror, More wild, remorseless rage shall seize on thee ............................................................. Then, here’s a lock, which I will hang upon thee; And, now I think on it, I will keep thee backwards; Thy lodging shall be backwards; thy walks backwards Thy prospect – all be backwards; and no pleasure That thou shalt know, but backwards … … know it is your own Being too open, makes me use you thus.

(2.6.48–61)

While on the one hand Corvino’s response is absurd, with his threatened ‘chalked line’, his insistence that she is ‘too open’ speaks directly to those worries rumbling at the core of patriarchy. The play repeatedly evinces images of the open and unreliable female body; from Lady Would-Be’s ‘eternal tongue’ (3.4.85), to Mosca’s anxiety producing description of courtesans as ‘so subtle, full of art … [one] may cheat us all’ (2.6.52–4), to Corvino’s insistence that ‘if women have a will, / They’ll do ’gainst all the watches o’ the world (2.8.8–9), the text cultivates masculine anxiety about the feminine. Here, Corvino’s plan to hang a lock upon Celia readily speaks to a desire to delimit the female body, rewriting it as closed and inaccessible. Ironically, in his rage, Corvino appears to expose his own erotic preferences, for now that Celia has transgressed, he insists that she will only know ‘pleasure … backwards’ – a preference that would hardly seem to lead to the efficient conception of heirs. In Volpone, erotics – which seem to be both mutable and ubiquitous – are always in opposition to legitimate reproduction, and a secure lineage. A play that mentions Aretine’s pornographic poems and prints no less than three times, Volpone vibrates with a sort of rampant sexuality, and the sexual possibilities it presents include the bestial (in its Ovidian images), the exotic, the hermaphroditic, the adulterous, and the homoerotic. Consider Lady Would-Be’s insistence (brought about by Mosca’s conniving) that Peregrine is a cunning courtesan disguised as a boy. In a fit of jealous rage, Lady Would-Be describes Sir Politic as ‘your light land-siren, here, / You Sporus, your hermaphrodite … a lewd harlot, a base fricatrice, / A female devil, in a male outside’ (4.2.46– 7, 55–6). While the scene evokes laughter at Lady Would-Be’s expense, her accusations simultaneously raise tantalizing images of sexual acts between Sir Pol and a whore, and/or between Sir Pol and Peregrine (or both). As a whole, the scene reminds everyone in the audience of the erotics of the Jacobean stage. The audience has, after all, recently witnessed Volpone’s loveliest female character (Celia) being played by the loveliest boy in the acting company.

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In this earlier seduction scene, the play calls explicit attention to multiple sexual possibilities. Indeed, as Volpone tells Celia: Why art thou mazed, to see me thus revived? Rather applaud thy beauty’s miracle; ’Tis thy great work: that hath, not now alone, But in sundry times, raised me, in several shapes, And, but this morning, like a mountebank, To see thee at thy window. Ay, before I would have left my practic, for thy love, In varying figures, I would have contended With the blue Proteus, or the horned flood.

(3.7.145–53)

Volpone stresses that Celia has ‘raised [him], in several shapes’ – and surely the pun is deliberate. Moreover, the image of Volpone contending with Proteus readily summons not only the multiple shapes to which the Greek sea god was prone, but also assigns Volpone the role of Ganymede.41 Making explicit this image, Volpone recollects himself in the role of Antinous: … Nay, fly me not. Nor, let thy false imagination That I was bedrid, make thee think I am so: Thou shalt not find it. I am, now, as fresh, As hot, as high, and in as jovial plight, As when, in that so celebrated scene, ................................................ I acted young Antinous; and attracted The eyes, and ears of all the ladies present, T’admire each graceful gesture, note, and footing.

(3.7.154–64)

Here, Volpone’s sexual energy is tied to the vision of himself as Antinous, a beautiful youth, and the minion of the Emperor Hadrian. As Richmond Barbour has noted, ‘If Volpone is potentially a rapist like Jove, he is also, like Jove’s cupbearer, Ganymede, ambiguously available’.42 In addition to summoning this image of himself, Volpone explicitly calls up Ovidean erotics, proposing that if Celia gives in to him, they will ‘in changed shapes, act Ovid’s Tales, / Thou, like Europa now, and I like Jove, / Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine’ (3.7.222-3). Volpone even imagines that he will exhaust these possibilities and will have Celia in ‘more modern forms’. She will be: Attired like some sprightly dame of France, Brave Tuscan lady, or proud Spanish beauty; … and, for change, To one of our most artful courtesans, Or some quick Negro, or cold Russian; And I will meet thee, in as many shapes.

(3.7.225–33)

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As emblematized in Androgyno, Volpone underscores how sexuality continually takes multiple shapes and finds multiple objects. Conceivably, such erotic descriptions would have evinced considerable pleasure in the audience, and so, in very material terms, Jonson may have acted on his audience the very likelihood of sexual roaming. Such sexual slippage is further registered in the multiple liquids, oils, ointments, and elixirs that range throughout the middle of the play.43 The oil Volpone hawks in his performance as the Mountebank would seem to be the Viagra of early modern Venice: Would you be ever fair? And young? Stout of teeth? And strong of tongue? ………… … …………………… Moist of hand? And light of foot? Or, I will come nearer to it, Would you life free from all diseases? Do the act, your mistress pleases?

(2.2.195–202)

The ‘strong tongue’, ‘moist hand’, ‘light foot’ to which this jingle appeals are all clear sexual codes that become explicit in doing the ‘act’ one’s ‘mistress pleases’. This moment evokes yet another reproductive anxiety, impotence. From Volpone’s angry, ‘Think me cold, / Frozen and impotent, and so report me?’ (3.8.250–51), to Corbaccio’s desperate desire to be thought a ‘lusty man’ (1.4.112), the play witnesses masculine fears about aging and the inability to procreate. Such anxiety is only layered onto the worries about cuckoldry expressed through Corvino’s character. Given the anxieties the play generates about both male and female bodies, it is not surprising that gold becomes for many of its characters the most secure repository not only of affection, but also of sensuality. Echoing and distorting the familial relations Volpone displaces onto gold, Mosca describes this metal in highly sensual, liquid terms. As he states to Volpone, ‘When you do come to swim, in golden lard, / Up to the arms, in honey, that your chin / Is born up stiff, with fatness of the flood, / Think on your vassal’ (1.3.70–73). Mosca even assigns to gold regenerative powers, charging a plate recently presented to Volpone to ‘Stand there, and multiply’ (1.4.2). Seductive and voluptuous, gold participates in the erotics that appear everywhere in this play, functioning both to displace culturally sanctioned reproduction, and to remind the audience how cupidity threatens inheritances of multiple sorts. Jonson’s agenda seems to be to unsettle his audience; Volpone refuses to offer alternatives to the sensuality and greed that directly threaten patrilineal descent. Celia and Bonnario have been described as ‘insipid as they are innocent’, and Corbaccio and Bonnario certainly do nothing to restore confidence in the bonds between fathers and sons.44 Corbaccio, the work’s sole image of the father other

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than Volpone, only increases agitation about descent. In his desire to acquire excessive wealth (for which he uses the interests of his son as an excuse), Corbaccio’s greedy legacy hunting results in the foolhardy decision of naming Volpone as his heir. In disowning his son, the antiquated miser (who refuses to come to terms with his own approaching mortality) ruptures his own lineage. Not only is Corbaccio persuaded to disown his son with relative ease, but also, during the trial, he assists in framing Bonnario and Celia in order to protect himself. In this scene, Corbaccio describes Bonnario as ‘The mere portent of nature, / he is an utter stranger, to my loins’ (4.5.108–9). Charging that his son’s life was brought about by some freakish unnatural birth, Corbaccio goes on to label him as ‘Monster of men, swine, goat, wolf, parracide’ (4.5.111). Bonnario, of course, is too simplistically good to refute his father’s charges, and Corbaccio’s charge against his son is not challenged by anyone else as it rests firmly on the culturally familiar anxiety about bastard and/or unnatural children. The ready slips and fraudulent possibilities inherent in naming an heir are reiterated when Volpone generates his plot to further taunt the legacy hunters. Despite having triumphed in the initial trial scene, Volpone urges Mosca to play the lucky recipient of his fortune. While the Magnifico invents this plot to vex Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, it ultimately serves as his undoing, for Mosca refuses to admit either that the Magnifico is alive or that the will is a fraud. Throughout the play, wills appear as incredibly pliable documents; Mosca continually (and falsely) tells each of the legacy hunters that he has been written into Volpone’s will. The very documentation that is intended to ensure clear lineage and inheritance is, rather like the female body, constructed as open to gaps and slippages that can lead to the miswriting of the rightful heir. Rendered uncertain by roaming erotics, and made dangerous both by desirous heirs and cruel or misguided fathers, patrilineal descent is a social arrangement which according to this play is more likely to erupt in mistakes and misappropriations than it is to lend stability to patriarchy. The play nowhere needs to state that this social arrangement often faltered because for Ben Jonson and so many early modern families there was no son to carry on the family name. IV Forging the Father If the printed page marks out desire for textual eternity in Sejanus, Volpone is scored by frequent references to branding. While the printed text of the latter is less remarkable than the Sejanus quarto, the play’s use of the image of the brand eating into human flesh fully speaks to Jonson’s desire for eternal textual paternity. These brutal images are essential to Jonson, for as Volpone makes clear, he is a poet who recognizes the vulnerability not only of paternity,

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but of the printed text as well. Mere ink on paper – as the shifting wills in the text underscore – is always liable to change and misapprehension. The play underscores the permeability of the text with the inaccurate, forged, and misapplied legal documents that occupy its second half. Pen and ink, print and paper are far from invulnerable to the vicissitudes of early modern culture. Jonson, moreover, is acutely aware of multiple forces that threaten the text; one of his primary worries is the mob of misreaders to whom the printed text immediately becomes open and accessible. Volpone provides an unforgettable image of one such mobbish reader in the figure of Lady Would-Be. Voracious, Lady Would-Be has consumed writers from Plato to Aretine; in response to Volpone’s pointed remark that the poet ‘says that your highest female grace is silence’, Sir Pol’s wife excitedly responds, ‘Which o’ your poets? Petrarch? Or Tasso? Or Dante? / Guarini? Aristo? Aretine? / Ceico di Hadria? I have read them all’ (3.4.79–80). Given her assessment and misapprehension of what she has read, Lady Would-Be clearly represents the reader that Jonson both disdains and fears. In addition to the readers who parrot what they have read with little or no understanding, those readers he describes as ‘invading interpreters’ particularly piqued Jonson. As he writes in the Epistle, ‘Application is now grown a trade with many; and there are, that profess to have a key for the deciphering of everything’. Jonson caricatures such overly subtle readers in the figure of Sir Politic who believes that sedition and spies are everywhere.45 Consider his comments about Stone the fool, who Sir Pol refers to as ‘one of the most dangerous heads / Living within the state’ (2.1.64–6). Pol insists that ciphers and secrets are to be found in every corner: I have observed him, at your public ordinary, Take his advertisement, from a traveller (A concealed statesman) in a trencher of meat; And instantly, before the meal was done, Convey an answer in a toothpick.

In response to Peregrine’s disbelief at this remark, Pol asserts, ‘Why, the meat was cut so like his character, and so laid, as he / Must easily read the cipher’ (1.2.72–83). Jonson’s pointed jibe at overly subtle interpretation registers his further concerns about capricious readers and textual misapprehension. Given the vagaries of print and the habits of early modern readers, it is no surprise that Jonson seeks to establish his text as a fixed document that resists readerly appropriation. Jonson’s claim to his play is fully evident in the Prologue. Addressing the charge that he writes slowly, Jonson presents: This his creature, Which was, two months since, no feature, And, though he dares give them five lives to mend it, Tis know, five weeks fully penned it;

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From his own hand, without a coadjutor, Novice, journeyman, or tutor.

(lines 13–18)

Tellingly, Jonson describes the play as his ‘creature’; the passage avers, moreover, that the father of this work is vigorous, having developed its features in less than two months. Jonson further notes that his ‘own hand’ penned this work, claiming sole paternity to the text (and, intentionally or not, obliquely referencing his poem on Benjamin). Differentiating himself from other poets, Jonson describes his comedy as a ‘refined’ work the aim of which is to ‘mix profit with … pleasure’. The pleasurable response he hopes his play will elicit arrives in the Prologue’s closing lines: All gall, and copperas, from his ink, he draineth, Only, a little salt remaineth Wherewith he’ll rub your cheeks, till, red with laughter, They shall look fresh, a week after.

(lines 32–6)

The conceit Jonson deploys in this passage relies on the ingredients of ink. Here he claims to have removed all corrosive agents from his writing, so that his audience will only be made merry by the ‘salt’ that remains. This good-natured image, however, takes on additional valences if we consider how Jonson had previously used this conceit. Indeed, the Epistle to Volpone resurrects a precise and violent image from the poet’s previously unpublished Apologetic Dialogue. Reframing the dialogue in the Epistle to Volpone, Jonson reveals a far more acerbic stance toward his audience. Addressing those who refuse to recognize the beauty of true poetry’s moral agenda, he writes: As for the vile, and slothful who … are so inward with their own vicious natures, as they worthily fear her [poetry] ,… she shall out of just rage incite her servants (who are genus irritabile) to spout ink in their faces, that shall eat, farther than their marrow, into their fames; and not Cinnemus the barber, with his art, shall be able to take out the brands, but they shall live, and be read, till the wretches die, as things worst deserving of themselves in chief, and then of all mankind. (lines 137–42)

Here Jonson imagines a less-than-pleasing fate for those who fail to appreciate his art. Rather than faces cheerfully rubbed red with salt, his detractors are to have ink burn permanent brands into their faces. These marks, moreover, will burn ‘farther than their marrow, into their fames’, and so will result in branding for them a legacy of contempt and scorn. The image of the brand, of course, would have been particularly resonant for Jonson. In 1597 after pleading benefit of clergy to escape hanging for Gabriel

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Spencer’s death, the poet was branded on the thumb with the Tyburn ‘T’. Jonson must have seen and noted the mark frequently; it is hardly surprising then that he chooses the brand as a metaphor for textual permanence.46 Jonson raises and puns on his brand in the Epistle to Volpone, writing that poetry is ‘so divine a skill (which indeed should not be attempted with unclean hands)’ – a remark many in his circle surely noted with humor. And the image of punishment by branding appears later in the play; hearing the Saffi at his door, Volpone imagines: ‘I do feel the brand / Hissing already, at my forehead’ (3.8.17–18). Tellingly, while Jonson’s use of the branding metaphor invariably preserves the notion of burning or eating into the skin, it is most often ink (or the nitric acid used in etchings) that is the burning agent. While black gall ink in the period was known to stain hands very badly, when mixed properly it would not have burned into the flesh. Such burning seems to be Jonson’s invention – an expansion of the metaphor to make more explicit the connection between branding and printing. Jonson may have drawn this image from the medieval codices that he almost assuredly handled; in many of these early texts, the ink had burned into the page such that the letters – like paper cut outs – fell from the page, and Jonson may have adapted this image to his own uses.47 Certainly the analogy between page and flesh would suit the poet’s agenda. Significantly, the violence inherent in this corrosive metaphor finds its most horrifying articulation when applied to the female body. In two explicit instances, Corvino threatens to dissect or anatomize Celia, exposing her to eternal shame: Nay, stay, hear this; let me not prosper, whore But I will make thee an anatomy, Dissect thee mine own self, and read a lecture Upon thee, to the city and in public. Away!

(2.6.68–73)

Terrified that his wife would indeed be open to other men, Corvino’s recourse is to imagine imprinting his narrative (his absent son?) on her flesh. Given his assumptions about the exterior deceptiveness and openness of the female body, Corvino must anatomize (and so stabilize) Celia. Only when dissected, and perhaps not even then, can she become the stable page upon which he can inscribe his lecture. A scapegoat for the inherent weaknesses in a patriarchal social order, the female body is twice presented as a slate that must to be marked to its interior. After Celia resists going to bed with Volpone, Corvino threatens: Heart, I will drag thee hence, home, by the hair; Cry thee a strumpet, though the streets; rip up Thy mouth, unto thine ears; and slit thy nose, Like a raw rotchet – Do not tempt me, come.

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Yield, I am loath – Death, I will buy some slave, Whom I will kill, and bind thee to him, alive; And at my window, hang you forth: devising Some monstrous crime, which I, in capital letters, Will eat into thy flesh, with aqua fortis, And burning corosives, on this stubborn breast.

(3.7.84–93)

Here, aqua fortis (nitric acid) is substituted for ink. Corvino’s text – that Celia is a whore – will be writ in capital letters and publicly proclaimed as the truth. The image speaks volumes about the masculine desire to dictate and have dominion over the text at the core of the female body – even if (or perhaps because) the name it must bear is whore. Yet, if the truth of the feminine is its inherent whorishness, there is little chance of patriarchy reproducing itself in a line of descent that resists corruption. Of course, Corvino is not representative of the play’s values; rather, under the veil of comedy, his character raises the deepest anxieties of patriarchy: there is no such thing as a clear line of patrilineal descent; there is never the promise of a legitimate son.48 As the horrific rage directed at Celia’s body suggests – the mark of the father, even when it finds its way to the inmost page of the womb, is never fully visible, never fully secure. Early modern England relied on patrilineal ordering. In response to the many threats to such ordering, writers including Ben Jonson displaced their desire for lineage on to print, forging an alternative legacy through textual production. Yet, the vagaries of print culture only reduplicated the problem of generating a fixed heritage. At best, print provided an unpredictable vehicle for self-reproduction. Nonetheless, the brand provided a powerful image for the desired textual stability. It is an image that Jonson appropriated and played upon in all of its complex registers. Notably, near the end of his life, Jonson pens a scathing epigram to his long time competitor, Inigo Jones. The poem relies on both the image of the brand and the corrosive power of ink that Jonson, roughly 25 years earlier, had deployed in Volpone: Sr Inigo doth fear it as I heare (And labours to seem worthy of that fear) That I should wryte upon him some sharp verse, Able to eat into his bones & pierce The Marrow! Wretch, I quitt thee of thy paine Thou’rt too ambitious: and dost fear in vaine! ........................................................ Thy forehead is too narrow for my Brand.49

Severely failing in health and struggling on the margins of the Stuart court, Jonson resurrects the very tropes he had used in another time of loss to represent his violent desire for textual permanence.50 Their use in this late poem is well

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worth noting, for Jonson – while making it abundantly clear that he still could summon the language to eat into his rival’s marrow – refuses to brand Inigo Jones. Jonson, in inscribing neither the corrosive stigma of the brand nor its enduring imprint on his now ascendant competitor, reserves for himself the particular mark imprinted on his thumb and bodied forth in his texts. Notes This essay could not have come into being with out the kindness and kind insights of Douglas A. Brooks, Ann Baynes Coiro, William E. Lenz, and Marianne Novy. 1 2

3

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5 6 7

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David Cressy describes the kingdom as ‘the family writ large’ in Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 27. As Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford note, ‘A wife had few legal rights over her body in relation to her husband. He had the legal power to administer what was termed “lawful and reasonable” correction …. Any inheritances of personal property she was due were her husband’s, unless some specific protection had been made’ in Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 37–8. Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker note that as many as ‘40 per cent of families never had sons to survive to maturity through whom they might imagine the permanence and perpetuity’ of partrilineal and national descent in ‘Andrew Marvell and the Toils of Patriarchy: Fatherhood, Longing, and the Body Politic’, ELH 66 (1999): 629–54; 650. Cressy notes those who argued against wet-nursing did so on the basis that it threatened the continuity of lineage and inheritance. He further finds that decisions regarding godparentage were often made on the basis of secular and consanguineous concerns rather than spiritual ones, writing ‘godparentage formed part of matrix of kinship and clientage’ in Birth, Marriage & Death, pp. 89, 103, 156. In his discussion of Isaac Archer’s journal Cressy notes the ‘husband’s gendered preference for a son’, p. 34. Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England: 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row 1977), pp. 106, 116, 113. Marvell, who remained single throughout his life, can respond in acutely emotional terms to another man’s loss of a son. Even if such emotion was occasioned in part by ruptures in the narrative of national descent, the poet’s recognition of the ‘sorrows of fatherhood’ seem to be extended well beyond a mere construct, and seemed to be shared by many. Arguing for the connection between patriarchal concerns and fatherhood, Zwicker and Hirst write, ‘The recognition that fatherhood, in the most domestic and sheltering senses of that word, undergirds all the structures of patriarchy exacts from Marvell this cry of anguish’ – regarding A Poem upon the Death of O.C., p. 644. Stone, Family, Sex, p. 99. Marianne Novy finds such families particularly evident in the romances. ‘Shakespeare and Emotional Distance in the Elizabethan Family’, in Shakespeare and Gender: A History, eds Deborah E. Barker and Ivo Kamps (New York: Verso, 1995), p. 63.

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10 Cressy writes, ‘Far from there being a paucity of emotional warmth in these families, I find their emotional lives to have been complex and intense, especially affected by grieving and loving’ in Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 10. In his earlier work, Keith Wrightson also notes that parents ‘made a considerable emotional investment’ in their children. English Society: 1580–1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), p. 109. 11 In Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson 11 vols, eds C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vol. 1, p. 15. 12 Jonson’s sensitivity to the ties between fathers and son has been well established by critics. Yet critics almost summarily neglect the degree to which such expressions relate to the poet’s lived experience as a father. As Anne Barton writes regarding Volpone, ‘Jonson’s usual sensitivity to the father/son relationship renders Bonnario’s predicament especially emotional’. Volpone, or the Fox: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), p. 98. 13 Jonson’s daughter, Mary, died in infancy in roughly 1601. His first son, Benjamin, died at the age of seven in 1603. Given this essay’s focus on the patriarchal anxiety about descent, it is Jonson’s response to his first son Benjamin’s death that most concerns me. His second son, Joseph, was born in 1599, and there is little reason to believe he survived the plague that ended his brother’s life. Here, I rely on David Riggs’ excellent biography: Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 14 My review of concordances to the poems of Jonson and Sidney, and the poems and plays of Shakespeare, suggests that while the brand was a salient metaphor in the period – particularly in regard to Cupid’s brand – Jonson seems particularly drawn to it at this point in his career. The brand would have appealed to Jonson as it carried the double meaning of stigma and, more positively, ownership. While the OED indicates that the use of ‘brand’ as a trademark does not emerge until the early nineteenth century, Jonson would surely have liked this usage as well – signaling an exclusive product by Jonson. Of course, Shakespeare’s most familiar use of the brand is Edmund’s ‘Why brand they us with base? With baseness?’ (Lear, 1.2.9). 15 Conversations with Jonson in Herford and Simpson, vol. 1, pp. 139–40. W. Speed Hill reminds us to be wary when it comes to accepting Drummond’s records of Jonson’s remarks at face value. Nonetheless, Hill, like most Jonson critics, accepts ‘the honesty of Drummond’s attempt to be precise’. ‘Biography, Autobiography, and Volpone’, SEL 12 (1972): 309–28; 312. 16 As Herford and Simpson observe, ‘From his home he remained absent for five years’, vol. 1, p. 31. The time frame for these absences seems to be between February of 1602 and 7 February 1607 ‘when he dated his dedication to Volpone “from my house in the Blackfriars”’ p. 31, note 1. Jonson’s persistent absence may have been related to the loss of his son in 1603. 17 David Lee Miller outlines how the period’s adulation of simulations of manhood ‘organizes the circulation of masculine self-love, forever pursuing its own image through a minuet of substitutions’ adds another layer to this image. Benjamin’s ‘Manly image’ may serve simultaneously to confirm and displace the biological father. ‘The Father’s Witness: Patriarchal Images of Boys’, Representations 70 (2000): 115–41; 119. 18 W. David Kay, ‘The Christian Wisdom of Ben Jonson’s On My First Son’, SEL 11 (1971): 125–36. 19 In the prefatory letter to Sejanus, for example, Jonson only admits his desire for praise via a Latin tag drawn from Persius: Neque enim mihi cornea fibra est.

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G.G. Ramsay’s translation, quoted in Ayers, is ‘My heart [literally, fibra = entrails] is not made of horn’. Sejanus: His Fall, ed. Philip Ayers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). Relying on Derek Attridge’s discussion of Puttenham, Mary Thomas Crane argues that, ‘authentic discourse depends not on inspiration, imagination, or creative imitation, but on the ability to recognize fragmentary traces of a shared cultural code’. Here, I extend this formulation to suggest that emotional utterances also depend upon artifice to be recognized as authentic. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 38. The Action of Ben Jonson’s Poetry (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), p. 101. Van den Berg also notes that the poems enact ‘the drama of grief and hardwon restraint’, insightfully reminding us that ‘because the epigrams of praise and blame address and judge life, they highlight those moments when the poet mourns a life that might have been’. She concludes, ‘The poet can commemorate; he cannot revive the dead. The fact of death, at once certain and unknowable, cannot be compassed in epigram’ (pp. 102, 99). In the instance of Jonson, the overlay of paternity and print is far more apparent when it comes to the death of his son. While emotionally charged, the epitaph on Mary (who died in infancy) does not elide poem and child – a logical outcome of the cultural value placed on patrilineal descent. Jonson was to lose all three of his sons before his own death. Two died in childhood; his third son, Ben, ‘died two years before his father in 1635’. That Jonson again named a son Benjamin indicates his investment in patrilineal ordering. Herford and Simpson, vol. 8, p. 9. Herford and Simpson, vol. 8, p. 41. While I disagree with his assessment of the emotional intensity of the poem, Howard Marchitello provides an interesting reading of the economic metaphor here. ‘Desire and Domination in Volpone’, SEL 3 (1991): 287–308; 292. In a compelling discussion of the Christian ethos that Jonson maps onto his source poem, Kay argues for the ‘greater emotional depth’ of Jonson’s version (‘Christian Wisdom’, p. 133). Kay, ‘Christian Wisdom’, p. 31. Kay, ‘Christian Wisdom’, pp. 136, 135. Marchitello similarly notes this pun (‘Desire’, p. 292). Richard Newton, in his astute essay, ‘Jonson and the (Re-)Invention of the Book’, convincingly shows that the poet ‘labors throughout his writing to appropriate to himself the epithet “classical”’. In Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, eds Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), pp. 31–55; p. 39. For the argument that in order to avoid charges that his play was topical Jonson carefully cites classical sources, see Annabel Patterson, ‘Reading Sejanus: Ciphers and Forbidden Books’ in Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Regarding Jonson and audience, John Sweeney has written that the poet’s ‘experience in the playhouse had revealed the audience to be an intractable, unregenerate mass, entirely unconcerned with his program for profit and pleasure’. ‘Volpone and the Theater of Self-Interest’, ELR 12 (1982): 220–41; 222. ‘The Lone Wolf: Jonson’s Epistle to Volpone’ in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics, and the Jonsonian Canon, eds Julie Sanders, Kate Chedgzoy, and Susan Wiseman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 115.

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32 Dutton reads the Epistle to Volpone amidst ‘a whole sequence of traumas and confrontations with authority, dating back to the Isle of Dogs affair, including conviction and branding for killing Gabriel Spencer, conversion to Roman Catholicism, problems over the ending of Every Many Out of His Humour (where Jonson originally brought on stage a boy actor impersonating Queen Elizabeth), examination over Poetaster and the staying by authority of its “Apologetical Dialogue”, examination by the Privy Council over Sejanus, imprisonment and threat of mutilation over Eastward Ho, implication in possible government manipulation of the Gunpowder Plot, and prosecution for recusancy in the aftermath of the Plot itself’. Ibid. p. 121. 33 Eastward Ho!, for which Jonson went to prison in 1604, was also printed in 1605. Given, however, that this play is co-authored by Jonson, Marston, and Chapman, it seems less expressive of Jonson’s particular response to his son’s death. Nonetheless, the play, with its faulty and favorable son-in-laws, and its prodigal son motif, does relate to Jonson’s investment in the connections between fathers and sons. His masque, Hymenai, preformed in January of 1606 also occupies this time frame. 34 It is likely that he revised Sejanus while imprisoned for charges of Anti-Scottish sentiments in Eastward Ho! 35 In his introduction to the Revel’s Sejanus, Philip Ayres carefully notes the play’s copious margin notes and many Roman attributes: ‘If the greater than normal demands this text makes on a printer by virtue of its scholarly apparatus made Jonson’s presence at the shop advisable, his desire that the play in its printed form body forth the Roman-ness it achieves in language, imagery, and moral atmosphere made it essential’. Evelyn Tribble has also written on the play’s extensive marginalia, commenting that ‘The publication of the quarto is one attempt to circumscribe such irresponsible interpretation; in this case, the circumscription occurs on the level of a page hemmed in by marginal notes which continually draw attention to the historical and classical, rather than topical, nature of the subject matter’. Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 147. 36 The reduction of marginalia in the 1616 Sejanus as well as the similar trimming in the Masques hints that Jonson – who had accumulated considerable authority by that time – no longer felt the need to buttress his text with a protective shell. 37 Barton, Volpone, or the Fox, p. 98. 38 ‘Jonsonian Comedy and the Discovery of the Social Self,’ PMLA (1984): 179–93; 187. 39 Sweeney finds the scene a joke at Volpone’s expense in ‘Volpone and the Theatre’, p. 37. Mario DiGangi suggestively observes: ‘Whether Volpone is actually childless or the “true father” of his servants, he rejects the dominant heterosexual order, and homoerotically indulging a meanly born servant, outgoes the most beastly of foreigners: “The Turke is not more sensuall, in his pleasures, / Then will Volpone”’ ‘Asses and Wits: The Homoerotics of Mastery in Satiric Comedy’, ELR 25:2 (1995): 179–208; 189. 40 In his discussion of how Volpone generates anxiety about household and reproductive stability, DiGangi also notes that ‘Reproduction is parodied in Nano’s story of the degenerate transmigration of Pythagoras’ soul from Apollo, into (among other beasts) an ass and finally into Androgyno,’ ‘Asses and Wits’, p. 188. 41 It seems very likely that Jonson had the erotics of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in mind as he wrote this section of the play. The poem was published in 1598, and

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Jonson’s frequent coadjutor, Chapman, had completed the poem for publication. Initially mistaking Leander for Ganymede, Neptune watches the boy’s ‘arms, and as they opened wide, / At every stroke betwixt them he would slide / And steal a kiss” (667–70). Hero and Leander in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edn, vol. 1 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993), p. 752. ‘Boy Actors and the Erotics of Jonsonian Theater’, PMLA (1995): 1006–22; 1009. See 3.4.80, 3.4.96, and 3.7.60. Herford and Simpson, vol. 2, p. 64. Sejanus raises similar concerns about misguided or overly suspicious readers. Such ‘in’ jokes are far from unusual in Jonson’s work; as the opening letter to Sejanus shows, he is particularly prone to puns on his monstrous body and enormous appetite. There he puns on his tendency to eat to excess, writing ‘Quem palma negata macrum, donata reducit opimum’, or, as note 44 indicates, ‘denial of the palm sends home lean, its bestowal plump’ in Ayres, p. 52. I am indebted to Jack C. Thompson for providing me with extensive information on early modern inks. As Miller notes, the father ‘cannot see his fatherhood’ in the mother (‘The Father’s Witness’, p. 120). This epigram is included in Herford and Simpson under ‘Ungathered Verse’, vol. 8, p. 408. By 1631 Inigo Jones had achieved the sort of centrality to Charles’ court that Jonson had enjoyed ten years earlier under James. While the aging poet more than implies that he could pen criticism that would ‘eat into his [Inigo’s] bones and pierce / the Marrow’, Jonson proclaims, ‘Thy forehead is too narrow for my Brand’. The line, of course, reads two ways: either Inigo’s forehead is too puny a target to merit Jonson’s vitriol, or Inigo has incited so much rage in Jonson that the poet’s fierce brand will never fit on his rival’s forehead. Either way, in refusing to condemn his rival, Jonson makes his full condemnation readily apparent.

CHAPTER 5

All Father: Ben Jonson and the Psychodynamics of Authorship1 David Lee Miller In the quarter century since Michel Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ and Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ were first translated into English, the concept has been ‘interrogated’ often. Rumors of its death proved exaggerated, however, for it still serves many of the purposes Barthes and Foucault identified. In literary study the single-author monograph may be increasingly rare, but the author’s name is nevertheless a charm to conjure well-tilled fields of inquiry out of the textual wilderness. It remains the most important way texts are gathered into chronologies or stitched into social, technological and other histories. But increasingly, and in spite of excellent work on the literary history of authorship, we find the concept examined most seriously in works of cultural history and critical bibliography, where it designates broad forms of symbolic capital as well as immediate forms of textual control for which interested powers and parties compete – in theater history, for example, or in accounts of court culture, intellectual property, censorship, patronage, literary coteries, manuscript circulation, print, publishing, and the book trade. Since the career of ‘self-creating’ Ben Jonson (as Thomas Dekker called him) has been an important site for Foucauldian excavations, it should be an excellent place to reconsider their effects on the once-familiar figure who has been parceled into so many functions and discourses.2 Presumably it is not enough simply to pick the author up and set him down in these new surroundings, dusted off but otherwise not much altered. How can we read the effects of social and historical dynamics back into the writing subject? Not, I suggest, by rehabilitating the author as a distressed unity. Rather we need to follow the tangled workings of his struggle to generate, out of the dispersed and conflicting grounds of his social existence, imaginary effects of integrity and authority.3 The authorial-self Ben Jonson created is conspicuously virtuous, ‘centered’, and masculine. The ostentatiously masculine features of his poems – his love of words like straight, stand, and upright, his rhetoric of disavowal and stubborn independence – can still tempt critics to describe his best verse with phrases like ‘manly simplicity’ and ‘achieved being’.4 But increasingly criticism has also been describing early modern England as a crisis point in the history of masculine selfhood.5 In this account, masculinity as a social role and a cultural artifact lacked precisely the qualities of stability, security, and autonomy that

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Jonson claims for his authorial persona. Rather than enumerate the emphatic attributes that mark his self-presentation, then, I will seek to understand the imaginary defenses and compensations that complicate Jonson’s acts of poetic making. To do so I will draw on the psychoanalytic notion of the trauma, an imaginary ‘event’ that turns the act of writing (I will argue) into a compensatory assertion of creative mastery.6 ••• In the spring of 1603, Queen Elizabeth died and James VI of Scotland traveled south to London to be crowned. He arrived in May along with the bubonic plague. Ben Jonson, meanwhile, had left the city, ostensibly because of the king’s progress rather than that of the pestilence. He was visiting the country estate of Sir Robert Cotton, at Conington in Huntingdonshire – an excellent place to be during the planning stages of the Jacobean succession. Cotton, knighted by James on 11 May, played a central role in the cultural vanguard of the new regime, so if Jonson wanted to seize opportunity by the forelock there was no better way to position himself for royal patronage than by joining William Camden and others in Cotton’s library at Conington. But Huntingdonshire was also a very good place to find oneself in a time of plague, when the mortality rate in neighborhoods like St Giles, Cripplegate (where Jonson’s wife and children remained) could easily exceed 50 per cent.7 Leaving London to avoid the plague was a matter of social privilege: ‘Members of the lower classes,’ writes David Riggs, ‘were forbidden to leave the city; they had no choice but to remain and die’.8 Joshua Scodel quotes ‘the official prayer for plague in 1603’ as prescribing fatherly care: ‘the chief remedy to be expected from man is that everyone would be a magistrate to himself and his whole family’.9 This was a double-edged prescription, for as Riggs observes, Any city dweller who had access to a country house could be virtually certain of escaping the disease by vacating the town. The mortality bills for the great epidemic of 1665, to cite an extreme case, list over 100,000 Londoners but do not include a single magistrate, courtier, or wealthy merchant.10

In this sense, Jonson was rather too much a magistrate to his family. It may be unfair for modern readers to sit in judgment, removed as we conveniently are from the horror of bubonic plague on the one hand, and on the other from the combined pressures of ambition and low status in a literary system propped up by patronage. The more intriguing question about Jonson’s motives is how he understood them, for he faced an impossible choice. Monarchs are crowned once in a lifetime. Royal patronage in the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign had been scarce; the doors that opened in 1603 might

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close quickly and stay shut for decades. What would it accomplish to stay in London? A man might share his family’s fate, but there was no way he could shape it except by leaving. And yet, to leave a child in danger betrays the father’s role as protector. In the same year, Jonson’s friend John Florio published a translation of Montaigne that laid out yet another logic implicit in such a choice: There are few men given unto Poesie, that would not esteeme it for a greater honour, to be the fathers of Virgils AEnidos, than the godliest boy in Rome, and that would not rather endure the losse of the one than the perishing of the other. For, according to Aristotle, Of all workemen, the Poet is principally the most amorous of his productions and conceited of his Labours …. Nay, I make a great question, whether Phidias or any other excellent Statuary, would as highly esteeme, and dearely love the preservation, and successfull continuance of his naturall children, as he would an exquisite and match-lesse-wrought Image, that with long study, and diligent care he had perfected according unto art.11

Jonson had confronted this ‘great question’ less explicitly the year before in the ‘Apologetical Dialogue’ added to Poetaster, where he depicted himself spending ‘halfe my nights, and all my dayes, / Here in a cell, to get a darke, pale face, / To come forth worth the ivy, or the bayes’ (lines 234–5).12 Since this was about the time that he separated from his wife, it is hard not to suspect, with Riggs, that ‘compulsive work habits’ alienated Jonson from his family.13 Florio’s Montaigne offered both justification and consolation for such distress: ‘what we engender by the minde … are brought forth by a far more noble part, than the corporall, and are more our owne. We are both father and mother together in this generation’.14 In these terms, Jonson would have been sacrificing domestic fatherhood for a metaphysical paternity in which he and his writings, like God, comprised a nuclear family in one person. The rhetoric of patriarchy offered a number of mutually reinforcing ways for Jonson to refigure his domestic loss. It was a mark of social status (the father as magistrate); it was a choice of spirit over flesh, art over nature, craftsmanship over passion, and godlike self-sufficiency over dependency and loss of control. Florio’s language glances, too, at the ever-present fear of cuckoldry when it praises intellectual offspring as ‘more our owne’; the desire to be ‘father and mother together in this generation’ may illuminate the panic with which Shakespeare’s King Leontes will separate Queen Hermione from their son in The Winter’s Tale, proclaiming that she has ‘too much blood in him’ (2.1.58). Florio’s Montaigne is uncomfortably close to this irrational conviction that all fleshly generation is adulterous when weighed against the uncontaminated purity of male parthenogenesis. The journey to Conington, however, brought Montaigne’s ‘great question’ home in a new way. Sometime after arriving, Jonson had a vision. Sixteen years later he described it to William Drummond of Hawthornden:

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When the king came in England, at that tyme the Pest was in London, he being in the Coûntry at Sr Robert Cottons hoûse with old Cambden, he saw in a vision his eldest sone (yn a child and at London) appear unto him wt ye Marke of a bloodie crosse on his forehead as if it had been cutted wt a sûord, at which amazed he prayed ûnto God, and in ye morning he came to Mr. Cambdens chamber to tell him, who persuaded him it was but ane appreehension of his fantasie at which he should not be disjected·. Ò in ye mean tyme comes yr letters from his wife of ye death of yt Boy in ye plague. he appeared to him he said of a Manlie shape & of yt Grouth that he thinks he shall be at the resurrection.15

Drummond’s account suggests that the ‘vision’ may have been a dream; biographer David Riggs, identifying the ‘bloody cross’ on the boy’s forehead with the red cross nailed on doors in plague time to mark houses under quarantine, calls it the ‘“day residue” of a Freudian dream analysis’.16 But whether dream or hallucination, the apparition must have struck Jonson as a harrowing accusation.17 In a powerful and lucid condensation of images, the sign of the plague has been identified with the crucifix. It has also been identified with the signum Dei, the mark of God’s servants in Revelations: ‘Then I saw another angel ascend from the rising of the sun, with the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm earth and sea, saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God upon their foreheads”’ (7:2–3).18 If the apparition was in one sense an accusation, in another it expresses a potent counter-thought, for ‘the hundred and forty-four thousand sealed’ (7:4) – which include ‘twelve thousand out of the tribe of Benjamin’ (7:8) – will be protected from the plagues and other judgments to follow. This comfort, however, remains very much within a sacrificial logic, for God’s servants are saved by the blood of the lamb. Drummond’s phrasing recalls the opening description of the Redcrosse Knight in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: ‘But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore, / The deare remembrance of his dying Lord’ (1.1.2.1–2). Even if the allusion to Spenser was as fortuitous then as it seems inescapable now, the imaginary sword that cuts a cross into the boy’s forehead still marks him as clearly for sacrifice as for salvation. If you want to be a divine maker, the vision seems to say, here is what it will cost you. This is what it takes to be God. And worse: this is what you have done. For it is Jonson himself, in this fantasy, who has marked the boy. The vision does quite not say so, but its implication is clear: as Benjamin is the child of his father’s right hand, his death is the ghastly work of his father’s writing hand. In the irrational but imposing logic of this dreamwork, the father’s literary vocation has caused his son’s death. Benjamin was, in his father’s words, ‘exacted’ by fate on the very day he became a boy for his culture: his seventh birthday. ‘In early modern England,’ Scodel reminds us, ‘seven was considered the crucial age of transition, the

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usual age that children became subject to gender-specific behavior and boys left the feminine, nurturing world of their mothers, nurses, and school dames in order to enter the masculine, disciplined world of fathers and schoolmasters’.19 He adds that ‘Jonson himself entered Westminster School and discovered his spiritual father, Camden, sometime after he turned seven’. It was at Westminster too that Jonson first met Robert Cotton. In its detail, then, as well as its larger significance, the trip to Conington would have evoked for Jonson that momentous day when the masculine world of learning and social advancement first opened to him. In Cotton’s library he was returning to the scene of his nativity in manhood and letters – a threshold he was still trying to cross, in pursuit of a status his ‘corporall’ begetting had not conferred. But he was resuming the passage to manhood on his son’s seventh birthday. Meanwhile the younger Ben Jonson stayed behind, on the day he should have left it, in a venue that was lower-class, feminine, infantilizing, and deadly. And there he died. In the vision he appears ‘of a Manlie shape’. This comes as a comforting thought, balancing the somber news of death with a subdued glance at the Resurrection. It gains poignancy from the unstated counter-thought that this ‘Grouth that he thinks he shall be at the resurrection’ is also the growth he should have attained in life – if only his father had been less amorous of his productions and conceited of his labors. In this way the boy’s visionary manhood brings consolation, loss, and accusation together in a single form. In that specter the father would have found himself reflected with unsparing precision: the unforgivable transgression of usurping his son’s passage to adult manhood; the guilty fear that this wish might be (as in the event it was) too literally, too completely granted; even a guilty anxiety lest the son should return, magnified and vengeful, for a ghostly squaring of accounts. For the boy’s ‘Manlie shape’ is not only the growth he would have attained but the menacing form in which he does rise from the grave, and the charge it brings is one the father must face at the end of time – for the thought of Resurrection brings with it that of the Judgment Day. For Jonson the logic of this symbolism, inherent in the long-term mythic structures of Western patriarchy, resonated in minutely personal ways. His own father had died a month before he was born; these two events, his own birth and his father’s death, are strikingly condensed in his description of himself as ‘Posthumous born’.20 This unhappy conjunction of paternity with mortality comes back to haunt him now as though his son’s death were the price of his own survival, just as his father’s death had been the price of his birth – and as Christ’s death is the price of his salvation. The bleeding incision on his son’s forehead condenses these associations at once with the signum Dei and with the sign of the plague. It also evokes the ideas of writing and swordplay. In 1598, as he lay under sentence of death for killing Gabriel Spencer – with a

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rapier – Jonson had converted to Catholicism, renegotiating his relationship with the heavenly Father. He got off by pleading ‘benefit of clergy’, but his thumb was branded with the letter ‘T’, ‘for Tyburn, where he would have been hanged’.21 Are the rapier and the T-shaped brand not recollected in the thought of a cross ‘cutted with a sword’ into a grown boy’s forehead? Jonson’s vision gains density and resonance from the range of personal and cultural materials it distills with such economy. Its pathos and arresting force, however, are retroactive effects of the little boy’s death. As a premonition, the vision gives the eerie feeling of an effect that precedes its cause. It can do so, of course, only if the event it heralds has already in some sense taken place. There is evidence that, for Jonson in 1603, this was true. In the first place, the ‘event’ his premonition signifies is not the mere fact of his son’s death but his own responsibility for it. The death itself, that random, intransigent piece of reality, has not only been foreseen by the father’s anxiety – a reasonable and even inevitable fear, under the circumstances – it has also been transformed by a distinctive fusion of imaginary and symbolic elements. For it is not literally true that Jonson’s vocation caused his son’s death. Among the symbolic elements that figure in this transformation is the literary topos of the puer senex, or aged boy. As a variation on this topos, Benjamin’s premature manhood in the vision suggests that the proper sequence of things has been violated. The year before, Jonson had used this same motif to commemorate Salomon Pavy, attributing the boy’s untimely death to his skill at playing old men. In the poem Sal projects an illusion stronger than fate, but far from enabling a triumph over death his artistic coup only hastens it. Riggs describes the bitter reality Jonson so euphemistically laments: Like many of the Chapel Children, Salomon Pavy had been kidnapped by Nathaniel Giles, the Queen’s choirmaster, who forcibly abducted him into the company at the age of ten. The children and their parents had no legal redress – the boys were impressed on the authority of the Queen …. Sall was old before his time; his life was a performance wherein he was doomed to play a part devised by cynical adults.22

In Jonson’s poem, death completes and, as it were, perfects the premature adulthood forced on children abducted for royal art. The Fates simply reenact the choirmaster’s abduction in the name of a higher authority, and ‘Heaven’, like the queen, ‘vowes to keepe him’.23 The prematurely aged boy is a figure for this pattern of anticipation. Virtually a second-order symbol for the conundrums of symbolism, he embodies the proleptic repetition of an ‘event’ that always precedes itself. For Jonson this event took the form of an antecedent fantasy that drew him repeatedly toward the imaginary figure of the dead child. ‘All his life,’ writes Ann Barton, ‘Jonson responded with what for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was abnormal intensity to the deaths of children, those of other people as well as his own’.24

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Riggs compares him to Dickens: Jonson ‘could identify with lost children because he too had known misfortune at an early age’.25 A very early age, if he was ‘Posthumous born’. Riggs and Barton speculate that Jonson had a hand in revising The Spanish Tragedy.26 The evidence for this guess remains doubtful, but it’s not hard to see why the critics are tempted, given Jonson’s notable preoccupation. Whoever wrote the additions imagined a resonant question for Hieronimo: ‘What is there yet in a son / To make a father dote, rave or run mad?’27 I take the prescience of this question seriously, and would like to suggest an answer. A son is a symbolic mirror; in him a father sees reflected the trauma of masculine identity. ‘Trauma’ is a psychoanalytic term whose meaning changes over the course of Freud’s work (and again in Jacques Lacan’s appropriation of Freud), but two elements are crucial to my use of it here.28 First, the trauma is an ‘event’ defined not by its objective features but by its effects on the human subject; and second, these effects are determined retroactively. Any childhood experience of helplessness or isolation that brings home the fact of dependency, any seemingly random injury that registers as punitive, any blow of circumstance that delivers the existential shock of vulnerability may produce traumatic effects. So may a seemingly trivial incident that acquires a painful significance only much later. What matters is that it shatters the subject’s sense of self, and that this experience – precisely because it was unmasterable – remains with the subject, who keeps trying illogically to go back and master it in retrospect. In Lacan, the trauma is associated with ‘the real’ as that which resists symbolization. It does so, I think, not because it is tied to some inexpressible mystery at the heart of reality but because its decisive character as a subjective event is precisely that it was overwhelming, that it could not be assimilated.29 Whatever it was, the trauma caught us off guard. Our efforts to master it in retrospect are interminable because ‘it’ consisted in a loss of mastery that destroyed the illusion of security on which our selfpossession normally depends. The effort to symbolize this moment for ourselves – by assigning it a cause or reason, for example – is a way of assimilating it. What caused the event objectively matters less than the fact that we experience it, initially, as uncaused – it seems to come from nowhere. In the essentially subjective character of the traumatic event, then, the search for a cause is secondary. We find a place in the scheme of things for what has happened, and in the process we reassert our own place in the scheme of things as well, resettling ourselves in relation to a knowable reality. In the abstract there may be no reason this process should be gender-specific. But most human societies make gender a fundamental coordinate of that relation to reality, one of the elementary ways we project ourselves into the world. I assume, too, that our patterns of response to traumatic experience are central to the processes of ego formation. So the

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shattering experience remains with us, a perpetual stimulus to rebuild the imaginary self-possession of which it deprived us, and our efforts to do so are gender-specific. Masculinity as a way of being in the world is also a way of being in relation to the trauma. Why does a father see this in his son? Perhaps because a son implicitly calls on him to be that masterful and deific figure no person can truly embody. In a patrilineal patriarchy authorized by a paternal deity, the son both makes him a father and shows him that he can never be the father. In the Iliad, Priam looks down helplessly from the walls of Troy to lament his own destruction in the fate of Hector; Jove looks down weeping on the fate of Sarpedon but does not dare to intervene. In the Hebrew Scriptures Abraham can be Isaac’s father, and a father to many nations, only because he is willing to sacrifice Isaac without question. The Aeneid is filled with sons who die ante ora parentum, before their fathers’ eyes.30 Christianity avoids this scene: Jesus asks why God has forsaken him, but neither the Gospels nor the iconographic tradition show the Father looking down to behold his son’s suffering; that is the role of the Virgin Mother in pietàs. The exception is a limited and specifically Calvinist tradition in the sixteenth century, as narratives of the Passion begin to describe a vengefully sadistic God presiding over the crucifixion.31 In general, though, to be a father in this essentially sacrificial tradition is to bear witness to the destruction of the son, and to see in his death at once the essence and the destruction of fatherhood itself. From this perspective Jonson’s failure appears twofold. There is first the father’s archetypal inability to prevent his son’s death. Since the father also personifies necessity or the law, this failure often appears reversed as his demand for the son’s death – as in the legendary severity of the Roman Consul Lucius Junus Brutus, the myth of the crucifixion, or the guilty subtext of Jonson’s own vision.32 This reversal plays out the sacrificial paradox that identifies the essence of fatherhood with the son’s destruction. Jonson’s absence from London, however, adds a second layer of failure, for unlike the gods and patriarchs of Calvinist and classical myth, he has not witnessed his son’s death. This is an essential role – even the medieval Christian tradition honors and preserves it in the figure of Mary – because only the gaze of the proper witness can guarantee the dignity, pathos, and significance of the filial sacrifice. Jonson’s vision at once points to this failure and corrects it, bringing the dead son before the father’s gaze as a grievous and arresting portent. The subsequent narrating of this vision – to Camden, to Drummond, by Drummond – repeats both the accusation and the compensatory motive, at once summoning and trying to ward off the specter of the dead boy each time the story is retold. (If the narration is not subsequent but originary – if the apparition is neither dream nor vision, but a ghost story – then the motives of guilt and compensation stand out, if anything, even more starkly.33)

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This same contradictory play of motives extends into Jonson’s authorship of Epigram 45, On my First Sonne. The opening lines of the poem are an impossible speech act addressed to the dead boy: Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy, Seven yeeres tho’wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I loose all father, now. For why Will man lament the state he should envie? To have so soone scap’d worlds, and fleshes rage, And, if no other miserie, yet age? Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lye BEN JONSON his best piece of poetrie. For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes bee such, As what he loves may never like too much.34

The poet’s speech is marked by a yearning resistance to the mortal paradoxes of patriarchal fatherhood: when he writes ‘O, could I loose all father, now,’ the conditional verb betrays his longing to give up paternity even as it acknowledges, tacitly, his inability to do so. Scodel describes the poem as compensatory in a number of ways. It provides the burial monument and ritual which the child, as a plague victim, probably did not receive. It makes Jonson imaginatively present at the scene from which he was absent – so present, in fact, that he completely excludes the mother who was there. It also makes him the agent of an action (‘I thee pay’) rather than the passive victim of an event he learns about only belatedly.35 But what is more, the poem makes Jonson the author of Benjamin’s death, and thus, reflexively, of his own. ‘Farewell’ is the first (not last) word of a poem in which Jonson proceeds to compose himself in the form of Benjamin’s absence. Lauinger’s comment on the epitaph for Mary applies to this one as well: ‘To submit fully to the will of heaven and to resign his local fatherhood in favor of the divine paternity must have seemed to Jonson like embracing his own extinction’.36 In On My First Sonne he not only embraces his own extinction, he seeks to author it: he replaces the lost boy, who will no longer bear his name, with language so powerful it has forced the loss itself to carry his name past death to future generations. The poem presents Benjamin’s death as his father’s, not his own. It punishes the father’s sin; it deprives him of the secular immortality conferred by the son as bearer of the paternal name; its meaning is the conditional rather than absolute status of human fatherhood.37 It also turns the father back into a son as he stands humbled before the absolute master, reminded of the death-wound he was posthumous-born with. The poem addresses its salutation to the boy, but the father’s apostrophe to his son is quickly subsumed by his stance toward God. ‘I thee pay,’ he writes – not I pay to you (as your due) the fatherly care

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you lacked, but I pay you, like money or a gift, to the eternal paradigm of fatherhood in recognition of His absolute claim to the title ‘Father’. Cast in the second person, this sentence is as rigorous as fate: an implacable reminder that Benjamin is not a boy, but a dead boy, the child not of Jonson’s marriage but of his right hand. At the same time, by invoking fate it softens the accusation implicit in the vision, for if the boy’s death was sealed from the beginning then in a sense it was not altogether his father’s doing.38 The closing lines of the poem bring its transaction from heaven down to earth as the son mediates between the father and a hypothetical asker, but the child is still caught up in an exchange between others. The concluding message is addressed from the author to himself, ‘For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such, / As what he loves may never like too much’. The fictional epitaph, meanwhile, is voiced only by the father who tells a dead child what to say on that inconceivable occasion when it will speak.39 The formulaic tag of monumental inscription, ‘Here doth lye’, reminds us with laconic force that death, writing, and the author-father have all in their ways preempted this phantom voice. Scodel observes that Jonson’s use of the ‘ask’d, say’ formula echoes Spenser’s envoi to The Shepheardes Calender, and therefore ‘emphasizes that his seeming address to his son is really a figure for his confrontation with his own written words’.40 In this confrontation, the commonplace ‘here doth lye’ is wrested, by the audacious substitution of poem for child, from the unerected headstone we imagine to the literal space of the page before us. As Milton in Lycidas will turn aside from the lost body of Edward King to contemplate the power of his own consolatory vision, Jonson here abandons the lost body of the dead boy to commemorate his own poem.41 This is the other meaning of ‘his best piece of poetrie’. The poem’s rhetorical coup is to convince us (as it no doubt convinced Jonson) that what we hear in this language is a chastened father’s diffidence toward art, not the gratified mastery of a Virgil or a Phidias admiring his own handiwork. And yet On My First Sonne is Ben Jonson’s best piece of poetry. He knew this, and says so in spite of himself, with stunning candor. We know it too, even as we read the boast.42 In this sense the lost boy really is buried in, and by, his father’s language. Perhaps it would be more exacting to say that his loss is buried there, repudiated by the very self-effacing strategy that lets the poem’s language seem to be about the child and not itself. For it is only the gesture of apostrophe, with its paper-thin fiction of a dead boy who will speak, that enables this language to conceal the counter-poem hidden all over its surface – the counter-poem whose burden we find in Montaigne. In that poem, the ‘sin’ to which Jonson confesses is not that his son pleased him too much, but one much harder to acknowledge: that he took too much pleasure in his other creations. The all-too-conventional (and convertible) analogy between books and children sustains this unacknowledged confession of artistic pride through to the poem’s final line.43

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It would be hard to imagine a more tangled play of motives. Tilt the page slightly and the pious fiction about a humbled author-father and his ‘loved boy’ turns into the guilty confession of a stricken author-father whose first love was his work. Stare at the page long enough and this guilty confession turns into the astonishing fait accompli of a ‘self-creating’ poet who was always his own first son.44 Epigram 45 performs the impossible act of inscription by which Jonson means to take possession of his own dispossession by death. He would name two sons ‘Benjamin’, but only the children of his right hand would survive. His consolation would be that of Montaigne’s exclusive maker: his name lived on through the ‘Sons of Ben’ – heirs of the letter, begotten through the textual inversions that enabled Ben Jonson, ‘Posthumous born’, to become the retroactive author of his own death.45 When he came back to the signum Dei in that context, his allusion to it would be deliberate, unambiguous, and controlled: First, give me faith, who know My selfe a little. I will take you so, As you have writ your selfe. Now stand, and then, Sir, you are Sealed of the Tribe of Ben46

••• Ben Jonson’s literary career embodies a powerful ideology of authorship. At the heart of this ideology lurks the impulse to master fate. Governed by that motive, the act of writing becomes an effort to untie the temporal knot of the trauma by restaging its inversion of cause and effect. The author goes back, confronting again the blow for which he had been so unprepared. But now he takes possession of it by projecting himself as author into the empty space of the absent cause. He wants to be taken as one who knows and has written himself. Needless to say, the unique and unrepeatable events of 1603 do not make up a general paradigm of authorship. In seeking to generalize about them we confront a milder version of the dilemma created by the traumatic ‘event’, for as we gather specific incidents into broader patterns, they turn out (insofar as they fit the patterns) already to have happened. My argument cannot escape this quandary, but it does not need to: the quandary is the point. Jonson’s creation of himself as an exemplary author is distinctive because he so powerfully fuses its private and idiosyncratic form (masculine identity-formation as retroactive resistance to a traumatic experience) with its broader form as an ever-present dimension of writing (reference is retroactively constitutive).47 For Jonson, then, the passage to manhood and the creation of a public authorial self are the same struggle. The form this struggle takes is writing as symbolic fatherhood. The literary and cultural traditions of early modern Europe are so thoroughly patriarchal that such a development seems, in retrospect, to have been inevitable. The dominant

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conceptions of authorship and literary creation could only be masculine and procreative.48 Decades of feminist scholarship have demonstrated the barriers these conditions presented to women who wrote, but they were no unmixed blessing for men.49 Lacan calls this force of tradition the symbolic; in Epigram 45 Jonson calls it ‘fate’. He says this fate was Benjamin’s, but it is his own. Death is arbitrary – Benjamin Jonson did not have to die, he just did. What was not arbitrary but socially, culturally, and historically bound is his father’s response. The world of early modern England demanded that a male author recast the choices and circumstances of his personal life, and even construct his sense of selfhood, in the terms its culture offered. His task was to achieve the inevitable – whatever it cost. Notes 1

2

3

4

This essay is excerpted (with extensive revisions) from David Lee Miller, ‘Writing the Specular Son’. The argument of that essay links Jonson’s vision of his dead son, as reported by William Drummond, with the ‘dream of the burning child’ as reported by Freud, and then with a dream of his own that Jacques Lacan reports in discussing Freud’s text. Both this essay and the earlier version belong to a work recently published as Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father’s Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). Thomas Dekker, Satiromastix, or the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet, in The Dramatic Works (1.377), refers to Jonson as ‘that selfe-creating Horace’ (5.2.138); Richard Helgerson adapts the phrase in the title of his chapter on Jonson in SelfCrowned Laureates. Richmond Barbour, in ‘Jonson and the Motives of Print’ (Criticism 40 [1988], pp. 499– 528), argues that ‘across a wide range of theatrical and literary venues, Jonson’s achievement documents dialectical struggle between social subjection and personal agency’ (p. 499). Other important studies of authorship and literary production that center on Jonson’s career include Stephen Orgel’s The Illusion of Power, Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates, Stanley Fish’s ‘Author-Readers’, Richard C. Newton’s ‘Jonson and the (Re-)Invention of the Book’, Joseph Loewenstein’s ‘The Script in the Marketplace’, Sara van den Berg’s ‘Ben Jonson and the Ideology of Authorship’, and Douglas Brooks’s ‘“If He Be at His Book, Disturb Him Not”: The Two Jonson Folios of 1616’. Loewenstein’s recent book, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) the argument about ‘the bibliographical ego’ broached in his 1985 essay). Following a long tradition of critical diction, Helgerson says of the panegyrical epigrams, ‘Their manly simplicity, their air of achieved being, bespeaks the goodness of both the poet and his subjects’ (Self-Crowned Laureates, p. 169). He comments on Jonson’s affinity for the language of uprightness on p. 170 (with a nod to Thomas Greene, ‘Ben Jonson and the Centered Self’). Fish’s essay touches on many of the themes I invoke here, including the self-begetting strategies that pervade the rhetoric of Jonson’s verse, the notion of writing as a figurative genealogy, and the implicit masculinity of the writing self. For example: ‘generation in the world of Jonson’s poetry occurs not by sex, but by reading, by the reading of like by like,

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and it is essentially a male phenomenon in which the organ of begetting is the eye’ (p. 245). My emphasis falls on differences internal to what Fish names ‘Jonson’s Community of the Same’. 5 See, for example, Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible; Stephen Orgel, Impersonations; Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity; and David Lee Miller, ‘The Father’s Witness’. 6 My approach in this essay is broadly compatible with that of van den Berg in ‘Ben Jonson and the Ideology of Authorship’ (Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, eds Jennifer Brady and W.H. Herendeen [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991], pp. 111– 37, although I do not draw on Winnicott and hence do not specify the origin of the trauma in separation from the mother. This is not the place to debate psychoanalytic theory, but I would argue that since pre-oedipal infants do not distinguish between mother, father, and self, it is anachronistic to speak of the body from which they ‘separate’ as specifically maternal. In my perspective this anachronism appears as an instance of the retroactive causality that characterizes the temporal structure of the trauma. 7 David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life, pp. 94–5. My argument in this essay is significantly indebted to Riggs’s account. 8 Riggs, Ben Jonson, p. 95. 9 Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph, p. 92. ‘By contemporary standards’, writes Scodel, Jonson ‘had neglected his patriarchal obligations’. Jennifer Brady notes in ‘Jonson’s Elegies of the Plague Years’ that the poet enjoyed a class status that he had no power to extend to his family, adding that ‘the court injunction of 29 May 1603 ordered all gentlemen to leave the city’ (p. 215). Jonson left in late March. 10 Riggs, Ben Jonson, pp. 93–5. 11 Montaigne 2:88 (the italics are Florio’s, or the printer’s). Critics and biographers regularly note that Jonson presented Florio with an inscribed copy of Volpone that addresses him as ‘Loving Father, & worthy Freind [sic]’ (reproduced in Herford and Simpson, eds, Ben Jonson, 1.56–7). In ‘BEN IONSON his best piece of poetrie’, Wesley Trimpi suggests the relevance of the essay ‘Of the Affection of Fathers to their Children’ to a discussion of Jonson’s On My First Sonne, noting that Jonson, ‘as if directly contradicting Plato’s preference for children of the mind … firmly asserts that this child of the body is his “best” piece of poetry – that is, the best thing he has made’ (p. 150). Jack D. Winner, in ‘The Public and Private Dimensions of Jonson’s Epigraphs’ (in Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, eds Claude J. Summer and Ted-Larry Pebworth [Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1982], pp. 107–19), also cites this essay but suggests that Jonson ‘collapses Montaigne’s distinction’. I am indebted to Winner’s suggestive discussion of the pun on ‘poesis’ as ‘a complex response to “fathering”’, and to his perception that the poem’s ‘impulses do not entirely coalesce …. Instead of holding conflicting views in suspension, [the wordplay] underscores their incompatibility’ (pp. 116–17). Scodel follows Winner in arguing that ‘Jonson rejects Montaigne’s crucial distinction and categories … by making the identity of his child-poem dependent on himself alone’; he sees Jonson as resisting separation from the dead child. I argue that Montaigne’s distinctions do inform the poem, which both enacts and rejects the Platonic preference, because I see the idealizing union of poet-father and son-poem as haunted by the specter of filial sacrifice. 12 Quoted from Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 4.324. Citations of Jonson’s works throughout are to this edition, identified by volume and page; i/j, u/v, and f/s are normalized throughout. The ‘apologeticall Dialogue’, appended to Jonson’s play

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Poetaster but suppressed after a single performance, was not restored until the folio printing in 1616, where it appears under the heading ‘To the Reader’ (1.317). Riggs, Ben Jonson, p. 93. G.W. Pigman, III, in Grief and the Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), concludes that ‘not enough evidence exists to say whether or not he was estranged from his wife at the time,’ i.e., in 1603 (p. 88). Montaigne, 2:85. Herford and Simpson, 1.139–40. Riggs, Ben Jonson, p. 95. Jennifer Brady, ‘Jonson’s Elegies of the Plague Years’ (Dalhousie Review 65 [1985], pp. 208–30), notes that ‘the extensive mention of the impact of Benjamin Jonson’s death on his father in contemporary memoirs of the poet suggests just how far he was from being able to absolve himself of responsibility’ (p. 215). On the relation of this signum Dei to the semiotics of the stigmata, see Lowell Gallagher, ‘The Place of the Stigmata in Christological Poetics’, in Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger, eds, Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 93–115. Scodel, English Poetic Epitaph, p. 97. Riggs, Ben Jonson, p. 9. Riggs, Ben Jonson, p. 53. Riggs, Ben Jonson, pp. 91–2. Herford and Simpson, 8.77. Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 19. W. David Kay also remarks that Jonson’s epigrams on the deaths of children ‘betray a tenderness with which he is rarely credited. No other English poet in the period opened himself so fully in his verse to the grief and sorrow which his children’s deaths may have caused him’. ‘The Christian Wisdom of Ben Jonson’s On My First Sonne’, SEL 11 (1971): 125–36; 136. H.W. Matalene, ‘Patriarchal Fatherhood in Ben Jonson’s Epigram 45’ (in Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990], pp. 102–12), qualifies this emphasis by stressing ‘the premodern, patriarchal nature of Jonson’s father-feeling’ (p. 107). Riggs, Ben Jonson, p. 88. But see D.H. Craig (‘Authorial Styles and the Frequencies of Very Common Words: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Additions to The Spanish Tragedy’, Style 26 [1992], pp. 199–220), who offers stylometric grounds for doubting Jonson’s authorship of the additions. The Spanish Tragedy, ‘Third Addition’, lines 9–10 (in Edwards, ed., p. 125), emphasis added. For an accurate synopsis of the term’s provenance and development in Freud’s writings, see J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, s.v. ‘Trauma’ (New York: Karnac Books, 1996). For Lacan’s appropriation of the term, see ‘Tuché and Automaton’, in Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), pp. 53–64. For Lacan, the trauma is distinguished as a moment in which the subject encounters the fact of its own split existence. The encounter is therefore an essentially ‘missed encounter’ with the real of the unconscious. M. Owen Lee, Fathers and Sons in Virgil’s Aeneid (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979), comments on the use of this phrase as a ‘leitmotif’ in

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the poem. He sees the death of Pallas in Book 10 as exemplary: ‘we have in the death of Pallas a summary [of] and comment on the Aeneid itself, which is the story of a hero who went to fulfill his destined role in history with his father on his shoulders and his son at his side, and whose eventual success, never reached in the compass of the poem, is dependent on the sacrificial deaths of many surrogate sons’ (pp. 6–7). See Shuger, ‘The Death of Christ’, in The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 89–127. Brutus executed his own sons for plotting the return to Rome of the banished Tarquin kings; cf. Aeneidos 6.817–23. In ‘Jonson’s Elegies of the Plague Years’, Brady writes suggestively about Jonson’s motives in confiding such personal episodes to Drummond (pp. 208–13). The essay also offers perceptive observations on the links between On My First Sonne and other poems in Epigrammes. Herford and Simpson, 8.41. Scodel, English Poetic Epitaph, pp. 94–7. Ann Lauinger, ‘“It makes the father, less, to rue”: Resistance to Consolation in Jonson’s “On my first Daughter”’ Studies in Philology 86 (1989): 219–34; 226. Francis Fike remarks in ‘Ben Jonson’s “On My First Sonne”’ (The Gordon Review 11 [1969], pp. 205–20) that ‘in giving his first-born son his own name, Jonson seems to have indicated his hope for a temporal immortality through his son’ (p. 208). Cf. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy: ‘Jonson’s attachment is fiercely possessive: the child is his creation. The entire poem is centered on Jonson; the son has no existence independent of his father’ (p. 88). Peter Sacks in The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spencer to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) finely observes that the first couplet’s ‘identically delayed cesurae … give the last foot in each line (“and joy”, “loved boy”) a fragile and tragic detachability’ that presents the boy as ‘a vulnerably exposed and indeed severed extension of Jonson’s “line”’ (p. 120). In ‘Public and Private Dimensions’, Winner notes the way that ‘the sense of right as “conforming with justice” echoes ironically in the phrase “the just day”, as the idea of the “right” nudges that of the “just”. In the same vein, the note of submission in “I thee pay” is checked by the force of “exacted”, which loses its theological connotations by virtue of its subject – the impersonal “thy fate”’ (p. 113). The loss of theological implication, as the poet attributes his child’s death not directly to God’s will but to the more abstract, classical notion of fate, subtly reinforces the submission of ‘I thee pay’ by discreetly veiling God’s fiercer aspect. The ancient prophets could be less decorous: cf. Ezekiel 20:25–6, ‘I defiled them through their very gifts in making them offer by fire all their firstborn, that I might horrify them; I did it that they might know that I am Yahweh’ (translation given by Alberto R.W. Green in The Role of Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East [Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975], p. 175). Ilona Bell (‘The Most Retired and Inmost Parts of Jonson’s “On My First Sonne”’ CLA Journal 29 [1984], pp. 171–84), compares these lines to Hamlet’s repeated plea to the ghost of his father, ‘Speak to me’ (p. 179). Scodel, English Poetic Epitaph, p. 105. Here, as often, Sacks in The English Elegy describes the poem much as I do, but with consistent and, finally, one-sided emphasis on its consolatory power for the grieving father. His account of the poem concludes on a note from which I recoil: ‘And what finer destiny for the child of his right hand than to be assimilated to that

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voice and mask which the poet has in turn bequeathed to him – to become, after all, an eternally speaking “piece of poetry”?’ (pp. 124–6). To such aesthetic piety, which seems to endorse and so to repeat the poet’s retroactive effort to choose loss, one can only reply that living long enough to grow up, or even to grow old, might have been a finer destiny. Stephen Booth dissents from this view in his aptly titled book, Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson’s Epitaphs on His Children, and Twelfth Night (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Booth, who plays the grumpy outsider with obvious relish, argues for the superiority of On my First Daughter. Scodel links Jonson’s ‘evident pride in the poem-child as the product of his hand, and his alone’ to the ‘later proud declaration that Volpone came “from his owne hand”’ (English Poetic Epitaph, p. 99). Many commentators note that in echoing the etymology of the name ‘Benjamin’, Jonson speaks not of ‘the’ but of ‘my right hand’ (emphasis added). It was also in 1603 that Jonson dropped the ‘h’ from his patronym, self-consciously adopting an idiosyncratic spelling. Riggs links this innovation with the motive of self-creation in the epitaph for Benjamin: ‘the new spelling proclaimed his uniqueness …. In a narrower sense, the change of name set him apart from his real father and his three children, all of whom had been Johnsons. The aggrieved parent who wrote On My First Son had wished to “loose all father, now”; the altered spelling, which appears in the first occurrence of his name after the death of his sons, reaffirmed that intention. “Johnson” was an inherited name (“son of John”) that connoted filial and paternal attachment; “Jonson” was an invented name that implied autonomy’ (pp. 114–15). Douglas A. Brooks, ‘“If He Be At his Book”: The Two Jonson Folios of 1616’ (Ben Jonson Journal 4 [1997], pp. 81–101), notes that the new spelling appears in print for the first time on ‘the [1604] title page of Jonson’s contribution to James’s procession into London [STC 14756]’ (p. 88), a detail that ties the change decisively to the conjunction of circumstances surrounding the trip to Conington. In ‘Progenitors and Other Sons in Ben Jonson’s Discoveries’ (in James Hirsh, ed., New Perspectives on Ben Jonson [Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997], pp. 16–34), Jennifer Brady reads Discoveries as evidence of ‘the period, late in life, when Jonson considered his status as a progenitor of poets – not only the Tribe of Ben, but generations yet unborn’ (p. 16). ‘An Epistle Answering to One That Asked to be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben’, lines 75–8. In The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) Marshall Grossman offers a magisterial account of the literary history to which this brief analysis belongs. Moving from Augustine to Milton, Grossman analyzes the narrative and rhetorical strategies that generate successive historical versions of a ‘canonical’ and implicitly masculine literary selfhood. I am particularly indebted to his definition of a ‘literary-historical event’ (pp. 16–18, 47). This does not mean they were simply, unequivocally, or uniformly so. For an interesting discussion of male authors’ figurative appropriation of female procreativity, see Katharine Eisamann Maus’s essay in this volume, ‘A Womb of His Own’. In ‘Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson: Patronage, Authority, and Gender’ (Ben Jonson Journal 1 [1994], pp. 15–30), Susanne Woods develops ‘a few preliminary comparisons and contrasts between Lanyer’s and Jonson’s approach to the authority

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derivable from the Jacobean patronage system’, noting the gender-advantage Jonson enjoys in a hierachical system in which ‘all authority derived from the idea of the father’ (pp. 15, 19)

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PART III ISSUES OF THE BOOK TRADE

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CHAPTER 6

The Bastard Art: Woodcut Illustration in Sixteenth-Century England James A. Knapp All the products of ideological creation – works of art, scientific works, religious symbols and rites, etc. – are material things, part of the practical reality that surrounds man. M.M. Bakhtin Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

King Lear, 1.2.22

Six years after setting up the first printing press in England, William Caxton produced England’s first printed illustrated book. A translation from a popular French medieval encyclopedia, Caxton’s Mirrour of the World (1481) closely follows the appearance of the Burgundian manuscript that served as the copy text.1 At first glance, the most noticeable difference between the scribal manuscript and Caxton’s printed text obtains in the use of woodcut illustrations to emulate the manuscript illuminations. Though the use of woodcuts was standard for fifteenth-century book illustration on the continent, where images had been printed from blocks as early as the late fourteenth century, Caxton’s illustrations represent some of the earliest woodcuts printed in England (Figure 6.1). But rather than bringing England’s printed images in line with the continental standard, according to most critics, Caxton’s role in the development of the illustrated book was to leave England’s printers a legacy of incompetence and conservatism that would take two centuries to overcome. Most early English book illustration has been described as hackwork, produced in an artisanal backwater. And rather than progress in the sixteenth century, examples of English illustration from the age of Elizabeth I have often bolstered accounts of early modern England’s impoverished visual culture, stifled by reformation iconoclasm.2 Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, ‘rudely stamped’, woodcuts from the pages of an enormous variety of English books have been viewed by early modern contemporaries and modern critics alike as ill-formed, the work of anonymous laborers rather than artists. Though not the primary medium of representation in most of the books printed in the period, like the many bastards to mar the English stage, ‘ill-formed’ figures cut in wood marked the textual worlds they inhabited with an often dangerous visual excess. Rather than secure a particular meaning latent in the text, these images opened the text to multiple

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and sometimes contradictory readings (and viewings). In what follows, I argue for a re-evaluation of the role of woodcut illustrations in early modern English printed books by tracing the principle reasons for dismissing their importance to the desire – both then and now – for an authoritative parentage for the art. I

‘Why Bastard? Wherefore Base?’: Continental Book Illustration and the Artistic Print

A glance at the surprisingly slim scholarship on early English woodcut illustration reveals a preoccupation with the lack of native-born artisans. The ‘father’ of English woodcut style is agreed by most to be a German, Hans Holbein, the younger, and the next greatest influence is Dutch (largely through the work of Marcus Gheeraerts, the elder). In the midst of the desire to identify the designers of the best anonymous woodcut illustrations, such critical endeavors fail to account for the presence of an overwhelmingly large amount of visual material to be found on the pages of early modern English books. For despite the apparent lack of skilled artists and craftsmen, English printers illustrated a significant portion of their output; Ruth Samson Luborsky and Elizabeth Morely Ingram recently catalogued more than 5,000 woodcuts and engravings that were printed in English books between 1536 and 1603 alone.3 Yet the perception that England’s early illustrations are of little arthistorical significance has discouraged scholars from attending to the role that such a large quantity of illustrated books had in defining the character of English representation in the sixteenth century.4 Longstanding assumptions underlying the historical study of illustration have inhibited the examination of early English woodcut illustration. With a few exceptions, the woodcut illustrations one finds on the pages of sixteenth-century English books offer little substance for traditional histories of illustration. An array of factors contributes to the conclusion that England’s early woodcuts add little to the overall story: the anonymity of the artisans who produced the illustrations, the collaborative nature of their manufacture, the often apparent lack of origin in the texts they illustrate (evidenced by the repetition of cuts and the appearance of anachronistic or inaccurate images), and the lack of artistry in comparison to illustrations produced on the continent. As a result, attempts to explain this poor state have dominated the history of the early English book, leaving the role played by the visual component of these ‘crude’ objects in the production of meaning largely unexamined. By ignoring the ways in which these images complicate the production of meaning, we deny a significant feature of early modern print culture its role in shaping both early modern English attitudes towards the visual and our own understanding of the early modern.

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Early Caxton woodcut; Vincent de Beauvais, The Myrrour of the World (1481), by permission of The Morgan Library

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The roots of the debased reputation of woodcut illustration run deep, as support for the pejorative assessment has been generated both by critical historians and from contemporary accounts. The leading historians of Renaissance printmaking, David Landau and Peter Parshall, point out that ‘[t]hroughout the annals of early printmaking, woodcuts have tended to be accorded second-class status’.5 Responding to what they perceive as an unjust judgment of history, Landau and Parshall have taken pains to rescue the woodcut from art-historical obscurity. However, rather than question the basis of the art-historical method that has contributed to the debasement of the woodcut, Landau and Parshall have endeavored to demonstrate that ‘a percentage of the woodcuts made in Europe were fashioned with excruciating care and were almost certainly intended for a discriminating clientele’.6 This move, though a welcome gesture for that percentage of woodcuts newly granted aesthetic status, does little to improve the critical awareness of woodcut illustrations in England, few of which would meet the criteria sketched out by Landau and Parshall. More generally, this art-historical approach reveals the limitations of cultural history’s current attitude towards the aesthetic component of cultural artifacts, in which the aesthetic is either retained as a monolithic category or rejected as an ideological projection. From an examination of early modern English illustrated books and the things people wrote about them, neither position is particularly satisfactory. In ‘An Advertisement to the Reader’ introducing his Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591), Sir John Harington offers one of the rare accounts of English book illustration to appear in the sixteenth century: As for the pictures [illustrating the present volume], they are all cut in brasse and most of them by the best workmen in that kinde that have bene in this land this manie yeares … I may truly say, that (for mine own part) I have not seene anie made in England better nor (in deede) anie of this kinde in any booke, except it were in a treatise set foorth by that profound man, maister Broughton, the last yeare, upon the Revelation, in which there are some three or four pretie figures (in Octavo) cut in Brasse verie workemanly. As for other books that I have seene in this realme, either in Latin or English, with picturs, as Livy, Gesner, Alciats emblemes, a booke de Spectra in Latin, and (in our tong) the Chronicles, the booke of Martyrs, the book of hauking and hunting and M. Whitneys excellent Emblems, yet all their figures are cut in wood and none in metall, and in that respect inferior to these, at least (by the old proverbe) the more cost, the more worship.7

Harington concludes by asserting that the quality of the images is confirmed by their use of perspective, ‘[f]or the personages of men, the shapes of horses, and such like, are made large at the bottome and lesser upward, as if you were to behold all the same in a plaine, that which nearest seemes greatest and the fardest shewes smallest, which is the chiefe art in picture’.8 These comments

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appear consonant with modern attitudes concerning what constitutes aesthetic quality in printed illustrations. Especially reassuring are Harington’s attitude towards the artist’s skill with perspective and the delicacy of metal engraving compared to woodcut. Yet his comments deserve a closer look, for Harington’s seemingly modern aesthetic sense dissolves when one examines the illustrations to which he refers. Even a cursory examination of the Orlando Furioso illustrations reveals the extent to which they deviate from ideal notions of illustration and aesthetic printmaking. Especially striking are the use of perspective and the relation of the images to the medium of metal engraving. Rather than capturing the natural relation of objects in a single visual field – a use of single point perspective often taken as symptomatic of the birth of the subject in early modern culture – perspective is employed in the engravings to differentiate between temporally distinct episodes in Ariosto’s cantos by placing them in relation to one another spatially (Figure. 6.2).9 In other words, the pictures present the course of an entire canto ‘in one plane’, a method of visualization that has met with disdain from modern critics of illustration.10 Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that the illustrations (probably engraved by Thomas Cockson and others under Harington’s close supervision) can be traced to images originally designed for the medium of woodcut (included in the 1556 Valgrisi edition of Orlando Furioso).11 Finally, despite the promotion of his own volume as worthy of ‘the more worship’ as a result of the added cost, Harington admits a good deal of familiarity with the ‘inferior’ canon of sixteenth-century English illustrated books. Not only can he identify an impressive list of books illustrated with woodcut images, he seems confident in his knowledge that, by 1591, very few English books had been produced with metal engravings. While Harington is happy enough to draw on the lack of English books with metal engravings as a way of distinguishing his own volume as a deluxe edition, his elevation of engraving hardly leads to a strong condemnation of books with woodcut images. Indeed it is difficult to find the modern bias against woodcut illustrations in such accommodating observations as these. Even if one turns to John Evelyn’s seventeenth-century work on engraving, no such hierarchy can be found; in fact Evelyn points out that woodcut is more difficult to execute than metal engraving as the artist is required to work in negative when producing a relief cut whereas the positive image of engraving and etching is produced in a process resembling drawing.12 The privileged status of engraving and etching owes more to the fact that important artists moved from woodcut to the intaglio processes at the end of the fifteenth century than to the nature of the images themselves. The emergent distinction between ‘artistic’ printmaking – usually associated with the single-sheet print – and book illustration sheds light on the denigration of the woodcut, as known artists moved on to the new media while book illustration continued to rely on

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Engraving from Orlando Furioso; J. Harington, Orlando Furioso in English heroical verse (1591), by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

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woodcut, the process more easily accommodated to printing from moveable type. Though the techniques for printing images predate the introduction of moveable type in Europe by several centuries, the development of graphically reproduced images accelerated rapidly in the fifteenth century due to the demand for technical solutions to reduce the labor intensive work of book illustration. Pointing to the estimation that ‘fully one-third of all books printed before 1500’ contained illustrations, Landau and Parshall claim that ‘the maturation of the woodcut was a direct consequence of printed book illustration’. They go on to emphasize the importance of the interrelations between book production and the ‘artistic print’ in the Renaissance: ‘the book industry has rarely been acknowledged as the dominant and moving factor in the emergence of the print as an independent art form of aesthetic stature and commercial success. Yet the fact is that those areas in which important schools of relief printmaking arose are also closely tied to the book industry’.13 The relationship of artistic printmaking to the book industry is complicated by the legacy left to printing by the manuscript trade. Just as techniques and methods developed in the context of a manuscript culture shaped the appearance of early printed books, so the prevailing patterns in illumination and painting affected the development of the graphic arts for printing pictures. While the early printers sought to reproduce the word in typefaces that simulated the appearance of existing scripts, early illustrators worked to move the illuminator’s task into the print shop. From the outset, then, the most significant aspect of the new technologies for the reproduction of images was that graphic reproduction was considered primarily a derivative form. Present before the introduction of the letter-press primarily in textile printing, woodcut was a method that aimed to produce what Walter Benjamin later called ‘the work of art designed for reproducibility’.14 As a time and labor saving technology, printing from woodblocks allowed textile printers, and later on others such as the producers of playing cards, the luxury of crafting one design that could be sold as many objects. In Richard Godfrey’s words, ‘[t]he essence of prints is in their multiplicity’.15 Nevertheless, historians and critics of prints and illustration remain preoccupied with unique examples, individual stylists, and (ironically) the identification of pecularities in specific states associated with individual prints. Placed atop the aesthetic hierarchy are so-called ‘artistic’ prints. Though some book illustrations – mostly from the fifteenth century – are granted this status, most artistic prints are associated with known artists of stature from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This period, encompassing the work of artists like Albrecht Dürer, Hans Burgkmair, and Marcantonio Raimondi, ended with the development of methods for the systematic reproduction of images produced in other media (mostly paint). The rise of the ‘reproductive print’ marks for most print historians the end of significant art in graphic media until the midseventeenth-century experiments of Rembrandt.

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Landau and Parshall document two stages in the development of what are now called ‘reproductive prints’, copies in graphic media of images not designed specifically for reproduction (an etched copy of a painting, for example). First, the involvement of well-known painters and sculptors in the production of prints waned with the emergence of what William Ivins describes as ‘a sort of rudimentary grammatical or syntactical system’, which developed into a ‘very full fledged linear syntax’.16 This development allowed, first, for painters to enhance their reputations through the sale of reproductive prints of their painted works (rather than produce works for a specific graphic medium), and second, for a complete division between the work of the reproductive printmaker and that of the visual artist. The reproductive printmaker was sectioned off from the original artist as a worker rather than a creator. As soon as the syntactical systems had been perfected, such workers were no longer involved in the development of the art; they simply repeated the techniques perfected by the masters. The division erected between the reproductive printmaker and the visual artist has been confirmed by evidence that print publishers rather than artists often held the rights to the plates and determined the choice of designs in response to market concerns. This final division of labor effectively ended the kind of collaboration that had fostered the development of the early print as art: ‘the moment for the ascendancy of the publisher, another level of commercial organization … brought with it a loss of concern about the integrity of the images and a predicable disposition to print plates until they were exhausted’.17 For Landau and Parshall, Michelangelo’s lack of interest in printmaking testifies to the dominance of the ‘reproductive print’ by the middle of the sixteenth century in Europe; lack of interest from the artist hailed by Vasari as the quintessential Renaissance subject is enough to declare the end of the artistic print until the mid seventeenth century. The entire initial phase in the development of printmaking – marking the progression from artistic discovery to systematic reproduction – began around the same time that Gutenberg printed his Bible in the 1450s and had run its course by the middle of the sixteenth century, just as the first English artists were beginning to experiment with etching and engraving. Absent from the aesthetic scene at the moment when graphic art was first considered art, English illustration has consequently been relegated to the status of derivative and instrumental representation, essentially unimportant in the larger story to be told of the development of graphic art. Harington’s comments suggest several important questions about both the perception of illustration in the period and the assumptions critics have made about the state of the art. Specifically, while later critics have understood the historical progression from woodcut to engraving to etching and ultimately lithography as one driven by the development of style and the desire to find a graphic medium better suited to refinements in the visual arts, Harington’s

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comments reveal a desire to mark a certain class of books as the domain of an elite audience. As the quality of the designs is apparently less important for Harington than the cost of the materials and the fashionable reference to perspective, modern critical assessments of his book’s aesthetic quality seem inadequate to the task of accounting for its location in the representational economy of the late sixteenth century as Harington understood it. The example points up the difficulty of assessing the aesthetic component of cultural products of pre- and early-modern societies. Because the present understanding of aesthetic production is indebted to developments in the modern era, it is difficult to imagine a time when modern notions of the aesthetic did not obtain. And while it might seem unnecessary to repeat such a commonplace of post-structuralist historicism, it is to aesthetic judgments that woodcut illustrations owe their debased position in accounts of early modern English cultural history. The history of the aesthetic as a category belies the political and economic interests that have traditionally accrued to the category in the name of disinterestedness. As Terry Eagleton has argued from a Marxist perspective: during the ‘moment of modernity … Art [was] … autonomous of the cognitive, ethical, and political; but the way it came to be so is paradoxical. It became autonomous of them, curiously enough, by being integrated into the capitalist mode of production. When art becomes a commodity, it is released from its traditional social functions within church, court and state into the anonymous freedom of the market place…. It is “independent” because it has been swallowed up by commodity production’.18 The history of bookillustration, like that of the aesthetic, is a history that reveals a longstanding class-bound desire to reserve a space in the increasingly instrumental social realm for the non-functional, for an excess that was in early modern discourse termed superfluity. As Eagleton makes clear, however, the effort to valorize superfluity has the result in a capitalist economy of commodification. In Harington’s account of the value of engraving over woodcut, one can glimpse the gestation of just such a commodification of the artwork, even if the cultural transition required to disentangle the aesthetic from the cognitive, ethical, and political realms was at an early stage. By his own admission his (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) decision to ‘worship’ the metal engravings comes from their expense as much as their formal beauty. His taste for engraving cannot be linked to a refined preference for images designed in the more fashionable medium, as the images on which his engravings are based were designed initially for woodcut. That Harington’s interestedness is made available to us so readily is evidence that the appropriation of the aesthetic by market forces had only begun. And thus to jettison the category of the aesthetic in favor of a politicized account of cultural production would be as inadequate to the task of accounting for the early modern illustrated book as is modern aesthetics. Harington’s catalogue of English illustrated books positions

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his deluxe edition as one among many ‘books with pictures’ that occupied early modern experience, figuring what might be called aesthetic experience. Though it is often assumed that aristocratic readers looked down their noses at inferior English books, favoring the higher quality of continental imports, Harington’s familiarity with the products of the English presses suggests a more complicated story. This more complex narrative is one that is marked by the traces of an early modern aesthetic sensibility, which is not easily linked to either a class bound notion of functionlessness or specific economic, political, and social interests. II

The History of Illustration and Its Discontents

Many critics searching the past for the artistic print, like those looking for the aesthetically pleasing illustrated book among examples from the sixteenth century, cease their investigation when they determine that an instrumental function has overtaken the aesthetic status of the work of art (at which point it is no longer a work of art, but a simple object). Something like Kant’s ‘purposeful purposelessness’ still stands at the center of such categorical distinctions.19 The problem of distinguishing between ‘reproductive’ and ‘artistic’ printmaking is that graphic art in general blurs the line between aesthetic and commercial production. For at the same time that artists like Dürer were experimenting with the limits of various graphic media, the location of this development – in the context of mercantile exchange – forced the new art form to respond to market forces that were often at odds with the aesthetic interests of the artists and craftsmen involved. The craftsmen who remained in the trade after it was abandoned by those intent on producing original artworks should not be ignored. For the images they produced played an important role in defining their culture’s taste for visual representation. An unfortunate consequence of the disciplinary location of most studies of book illustration in art history, together with the tendency of literary discussions to ignore illustration, has been that critics consistently overlook the importance of this particular facet of the English Renaissance. For while these books provide important insight into the cultural development of the age, it is certainly true that they add little to the larger story of artistic printmaking. The need to attend to the larger story still energizes E.H. Gombrich’s general claim about the basis of art historical enquiry, written more than 30 years ago: ‘Without the idea of One Art progressing though the centuries there would be no history of art’.20 And though it is difficult to argue with such a pragmatic claim, it is also misleading to follow the distinction between artistic and instrumental illustration formulated with the luxury of hindsight and without much attention to the character of an age in which these forms mingled so productively. As

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is evident in Harington’s comments, those reading illustrated books in early modern England did not eschew English books for those produced by the great continental artist-printers.21 And it seems equally clear that the illustrations they saw related to the words in a way that drew on prevailing cultural tastes while simultaneously capitalizing on the power of images to convey a variety of messages. Some of the most successful printing decisions regarding illustration are difficult to accommodate within traditional discussions of printing as art, despite the fact that they led to a kind of book around which influential reading communities formed. It is important to consider the fact that ‘aesthetically impoverished’ books served as the basis of literate culture in England just before, and largely during, its Golden Age of letters. To argue that cultural production is best viewed as enabled by all of the complex social, economic, political, and religious conditions that constitute any human activity, and without attempting to abstract a notion of the ideal art object from such material conditions, is not to declare the end of the aesthetic as a useful category for critical analysis. This is not an argument against evaluative statements; it is, however, a reminder that value, especially aesthetic value, does not operate outside of history. The process of discrediting, in Raymond Williams’ description ‘almost all of the advantages of this theory’ – the notion of ‘One Art’, of the Aesthetic – has led, regrettably, to the equally unworkable position that nothing about cultural production ought properly to be called aesthetic.22 I urge a balance between the aesthetic and the material that is truly responsive to Janet Wolff’s caveat for a sociology of art, that ‘aesthetics cannot be unaffected by sociology – nor sociology dismissive of the aesthetic’.23 Rather than attempt to rescue England’s first graphic artists from the charge of incompetence, I would like to redefine the notion of the aesthetic to accommodate an intangible quality of the books of the period. With this move comes the sacrifice of art in its most comforting formulation – as the domain of universal humanity – but in its place one might find out more about the role of both aesthetic production and aesthetic response in the process of cultural change. Both the enduring hold great art has had on successive cultures and the ephemeral quality of popular movements can reveal something about the human need for aesthetic material, not in one form but in a constant state of change. Shakespeare’s longevity – to take an obvious example – has been made possible by the lack of a consistent aesthetic idea for which his works might stand as representative. As Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass suggest, ‘the solitary genius immanent in the text and removed from the means of mechanical and theatrical production … is, after all, an impoverished, ghostly thing compared to the complex social practices that shaped, and still shape, the absorbent surface of the Shakespearean text. Perhaps it is these practices that should be the objects not only of our labors but also of our desires’.24 The reproduction of the conditions of human existence in art has long been

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considered a properly complex object of intellectual specialization; separating the means by which human cultures have reproduced this reproduction from the realm of creative activity has removed a fascinating feature of the aesthetic process from the discussion. Historically, the study of illustrated books has been an exercise in separating the aesthetic edition from the object of everyday use, but often in the case of early printed illustrated books the instrumental object is merged with the imaginative art object, rendering such distinctions questionable. When commentators attend to the fit between the visual page and the represented text, similarly questionable distinctions come into play. On the one hand, the accuracy of the edition is tested against what is known to be the text – the organization of the symbols on the page must be recognizable, in that they must effectively refer one to the proper verbal sequence of words that can be identified with the particularity of the linguistic text in question. Adrian Johns takes care to stress the distinction between books and texts: ‘a text is the content of any written or printed work, considered apart from its particular material manifestation’.25 And, on the other hand, a judgment is made as to the quality of the edition’s design, based on its ability to provide an aesthetic experience – one that is explicitly visual and tactile – simultaneous to the experience with the text. Early modern illustrations are peculiarly divided between these two functions, due to their dual nature as both clarification and embellishment, though in the modern illustrated book the two categories have become fairly well differentiated. Today, technical or instrumental illustration generally refers to the kind of illustrations found in a textbook, such as a picture of the Georges Pompidou Center accompanying the textual description of the building’s contribution to art history; a second category, imaginative illustration, has been reserved for illustrations that embody the interpretation of the literary text by a creative artist/illustrator. In the case of instrumental illustration, the picture of the building must be recognizable as that specific building to serve its purpose, though it need not be a photographic work of art. In contrast, an imaginative illustration may not be clearly recognizable at all as long as it can be identified as a product of the artist’s imaginative experience with the text.26 Distinguishing between these two forms of illustration has provided work for a good number of scholars interested in defining a specific kind of illustration as art. The difficulties they have encountered testify to the instability of the distinction that results from both changing criteria used in making aesthetic judgments and the changing nature of illustration itself. Nowhere is the distinction less clear than in the sixteenth century, at the exact moment when graphic reproduction began to endow the visual image with the power to convey information efficiently, making accuracy a viable concern in visual reporting and suggesting a difference between such reporting and art.

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Common distinctions between ‘ornamental’, ‘general’, and ‘direct’ (or ‘true’) illustrations were generated by the critical study of book illustration that emerged in the context of nineteenth-century antiquarian book collecting – a practice primarily concerned with the book as an aesthetic object, an artifact more valuable for its condition and appearance than its ability to relate information about the social functioning of the culture in which it was produced.27 Such common practices as the bleaching and cropping of pages intended to purge copies of contemporary marginalia, often resulting in the loss of printed marginalia and text, confirm this point. The critical vocabulary developed in this context reflects the emphasis on the book as a selfcontained art object/artifact. The most important and enduring product of this development for the study of book illustration involves the idea of illustration itself – the notion that ‘direct” illustrations (images which depict ‘a particular textual reference, whether by visual translation or by commentary’) – can be distinguished from illustrations that are ornamental, but tonally appropriate, or general, but thematically appropriate.28 This idea ultimately enabled the study of illustration to become separate from the study of illustrated books. In such distinctions, the linguistic text is always primary, as in Joachim Moller’s description, ‘[l]iterature has been seen as content conveyed in written form and illustration its servant’.29 Common distinctions between types of illustration generally follow from judgments as to how obedient the servant had been, or in more nuanced accounts, the degree to which practical matters blocked the most effective use of illustration. III Revisiting the Unpresentable: Toward a Historicized Aesthetics The questions left open by those most engaged with the critical study of illustrated books point to the difficulty of making sense of sixteenth-century illustrations. One example from a well-known illustrated book can serve to suggest a new direction for the critical reception of illustration in the period. The first edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles includes woodcut images that have been counted among the finest in the period – in traditional aesthetic terms – while their role as illustrations has been taken as typical of the crude quality of English illustration. Hodnett’s account is typical: ‘the main Holinshed illustrations seem … the finest specifically designed for an English book before 1600 and among the most successful in an English book of any period’, but ‘[t]he wholesale repetition spoils the effect of the book as a whole, of course’.30 Hodnett’s ahistorical account highlights the advantages as well as the limitations of traditional aesthetic inquiry. His even-handed acceptance of the quality of the designs, though admirable, reflects the desire to remove the illustrations from their origins in the early English book. One would hope to

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avoid the temptation of applying later conceptions of illustration to the edition and focus instead on the way the illustrations work in the context of Holinshed’s history. Such an analysis would give equal attention to both text and image, to account for the entire page before either reading the text intact or attending to an illustration. But this analytical method is ideal, as Stephen Behrendt’s description of the act of reading an illustrated book implies: ‘When we read an illustrated text we do not in fact perceive and internalize word and picture simultaneously …. In reality the verbal and visual texts displace one another, albeit generally very rapidly, within our consciousness’.31 While it would be unproductive to contest that readerly attention shifts from text to image with the apprehension of an illustrated book, the alternate moments of concentration on the verbal or visual elements may be less important than the way these two different experiences with representation affect one’s sense of the book’s message, and the ways in which they shape reading practices more generally. Just as the modern reader of early English books must work to remember that black letter type was easier for the average English Renaissance reader to decipher than roman or italic type, it is important to remember that illustrations also occupied a different place in sixteenth-century books than is familiar today. In the intervening centuries, the status and function of illustration has changed dramatically – as has the relative cultural value of visual and verbal representation – and any assessment that does not take account of such change will produce an unnecessarily distorted view. During the sixteenth century throughout Europe the same artists used the same technologies of graphic reproduction to produce illustrations for anatomies and emblem books, botanical guides, and romances. The separation of a purely aesthetic form of illustration from other more instrumental modes does not occur during the period in question. What we might call the aesthetic appreciation of Thomas Geminus’s engraved illustrations to the English edition of Vesalius’s De Fabrica (Basil, 1543; English edition 1545) would not have moved the images out of the practical realm of natural science or practiced anatomy. But despite widespread acknowledgment that the aesthetic only emerged as a distinct category in England with the Earl of Shaftesbury in the early eighteenth century, accounts of English illustration have been dominated by modern aestheticism. Eschewing illustrations that seem primarily concerned with meaning or those which appear in tension with the received textual message, the history of illustration has traditionally foregrounded the aesthetic component of printed pictures to the detriment of a critical understanding of the book as a composite and complex object. In contrast, I have been suggesting a form of critical self-reflection that would admit the usefulness of the aesthetic in discussions of early- and even pre-modern cultural artifacts while at the same time acknowledging the absence of a disengaged aesthetic response – or even the ideal of aesthetic disinterestedness. Such a position ought to reveal the

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inadequacy of critical assessments of the so-called ‘book arts’ prefigured in the ethos of nineteenth-century aestheticism and bibliophilia. Here it is useful to consider Edward Said’s notion of a ‘contrapuntal analysis’ of historical texts, a kind of analysis that would honor a text’s necessary relation, sometimes discordant, to messages that result from both the history leading up to the moment of production and the history brought to the text by the reader in the process of interpretation. Out of respect for the now commonplace poststructuralist refrain that ‘[t]here is no such thing as a direct experience, or reflection, of the world in the language of the text’, Said argues that critical attention must be redirected to the variety of historical developments which enable texts to be read differently over time.32 Yet, rather than locking the past away and allowing only for the analysis of the self-contained world of ‘textuality’, the lack of direct reflection opens the text to a wide range of influences: ‘In reading a text, one must open it out both to what went into it and to what its author excluded. Each cultural work is a vision of a moment, and we must juxtapose that vision with the various revisions it later provoked …’.33 Though Said’s interest is primarily with post-coloniality, and the problems of sympathetically reading texts produced in the context of western imperialism, his ‘contrapuntal analysis’ is suggestive for the reassessment of illustrated books produced before the age of artistic illustration in England. By examining early English books with the awareness that our own habits of reading create expectations for the illustrations that could not possibly be met, it is possible to imagine other image-text relationships and other ways of attending to the visual page. Rather than seeing the words and illustrations as contradictory, one form displacing the other (violently), one can imagine how the movement back and forth – between text and image – might serve to merge the effects of a book’s verbal and visual information to produce a tonally complex and hybrid object. With this in mind, consider the first illustration of Holinshed’s volume (Figure 6.3). Illustrating the story of Brute’s accidental killing of his father, the accident that led to his eventual (mythical) founding of Britain, the image does not depict an ancient scene. Despite the appropriateness of its content to events in the narrative – a hunting accident – and the likelihood that it was designed for this purpose, the image strikes a discordant note to the modern observer. Other illustrations in the volume depicting roman dress belie the easy explanation that the Elizabethans were too culturally primitive to understand the anachronism of the dress depicted in the scene. Alternatively, the quality of the illustration throws doubt on the explanation that the potential readership was easily drawn in by any visual approximation of the text, thus prompting printers to illustrate their books carelessly in the hopes of better sales. What if, on the other hand, readers of this book liked images of this kind, in this context? What if precisely the aspects of this illustration that complicate its

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accommodation into the language of criticism were the aspects that enlivened the experience with illustrated books for sixteenth-century readers? In studying a period marked by a simultaneous emphasis on the importance of history and the impossibility of its accurate representation, why are we so quick to reject the alternative meta-representational mode that the Holinshed illustrations suggest? When we try to read sixteenth-century illustrations through the categories forged in the context of modernity, when a disconnected liberatory aesthetic made sense as a form of resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the enlightenment, we obscure the pre-history of the modern era that continues to inform our present understanding of imaginative representation. Even the progressive cultural theory that strives to ‘bring the high low and the low high’, offers a skewed lens through which we might view illustrations that appear naïve to the modern eye. The naïve was not the popular, just as the popular was not the purview of a new laboring class. These social and cultural transformations had not yet solidified in sixteenth-century England. The pejorative assessments of sixteenth-century English woodcut illustrations cannot be overturned in the manner that Landau and Parshall suggest for the ‘artistic’ printmakers of the continent. Nor would it be desirable to do so if it were possible. At the same time, however, to relegate the images that complicate the visual space of the early modern English page to the status of ‘popular’ representation would also be to deny the alterity of early modern illustrative practice by appropriating it for a current critical agenda. As Tessa Watt has cautioned, the sixteenth-century advent of ‘cheap print’ ought not be seen to represent a widening of the representational gap between mass consumers and elite producers.34 In a period when ephemeral print was as likely to find its way into the hands of the gentry as those of the growing merchant class, the influence of decisions concerning the visual appearance of books should not be underestimated. To dismiss the presence of ‘crude’ images in the material books on which our knowledge of Renaissance texts is based is to remove the texts even more completely from the living world in which they originally generated meaning. The Elizabethan valorization of legitimacy arguably turns on the simultaneous obsession with cuckoldry, with the fear of illegitimacy, of the bastard. When the bastard became the subject of art, this did not mean that the concept was emptied of its moral and economic implications. Quite to the contrary. As so much of the New Historicist and Cultural Materialist criticism has demonstrated, the presence of such loaded figures as the unruly woman or the iniquitous bastard only serves to demonstrate how thoroughly saturated the imaginative realm is with political, ethical, and social interests. It seems untenable, then, to continue purging early modern texts of their embarrassingly naïve pictorial representations in the hopes of defending a coherent vision of a golden age of letters.

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Woodcut of Brute’s accidental killing of his father; R. Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), from the Special Collections Department, University of Pittsburgh Library System

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Notes 1 2

3 4

For an account of this book, see my ‘Translating for Print: Continuity and Change in Caxton’s Mirrour of the World’, Disputatio 3 (1998), pp. 64–90. Historians of illustration have maintained a striking consensus over the poor quality of early English books. David Bland begins the English section of his major study, A History of Book Illustration: The Illuminated Manuscript and the Printed Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), with the statement that ‘[i]t must be admitted without qualification that England’s early contribution to the history of the illustrated book was negligible’ (p. 137). A.M. Hind’s assessment in An Introduction to a History of Woodcut, 2 vols (1935; reprint, New York: Dover, 1963), is also typical: ‘English woodcut illustration in the xv century lags far behind contemporary work on the continent of Europe both in extent and quality, and its interest is for the most part literary and antiquarian rather than artistic’ (vol. 2, p. 707). Even the champion of English printmaking, Richard T. Godfrey, begins his study, Printmaking in Britain: A General History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day (Oxford: Phaidon, 1978), with the lament that ‘[n]othing is less becoming to the history of British printmaking than its belated and uncouth beginnings’ (p. 13). In A History of Printing in Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), Colin Clair quotes T.C. Hansard’s description of the first English books as ‘very rude and barbarous’ (p. 18). And in English Woodcuts, 1480–1535, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), Edward Hodnett’s summary of Caxton’s illustrated books captures the disappointment of the historian looking for artistry in England’s incunables: ‘The width and acuteness of his literary tastes evidently did not extend to artistic matters …. The first native hand made the cuts for the Myrrour of the worlde and no more – let us hope because Caxton was disgusted by such hacking. The second hand was no tremendous improvement …. England stumbles on to the book-illustration stage with some of the poorest cuts ever inserted between covers’ (p. 1). According to Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books, rev. edn (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1965), ‘English sixteenth-century printing was lamentably bad in comparison with the products of the presses of Aldus Manutius at Venice, Johann Froben at Basel, the Estiennes in Paris, or Christopher Plantin at Antwerp’ (p. 29). Finally, in The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St Martins Press, 1988), Patrick Collinson observes that while ‘mid-sixteenth-century English Bibles were copiously illustrated’, as Elizabeth’s reign wore on, ‘Protestants began to direct the eye, that potentially idolatrous eye, inward, rejecting realistic religious pictures as unreservedly as bible plays and godly ballads. Bibles for the most part ceased to be illustrated …. Book illustration in England seems to regress, just when we might expect it to advance’ (p. 117). Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), has revised Collinson’s thesis that England moved from iconoclasm to ‘iconophobia’, but her evidence for a vibrant visual culture is based on single-sheet prints (mostly ballads and broadsides) rather than illustrated books. Ruth Samson Luborsky and Elizabeth Morley Ingram, A Guide to English Illustrated Books, 1536–1603 (Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), p. vii. Important exceptions include: Luborsky, ‘Connections and Disconnections between Images and Texts: The Case of Secular Tudor Book Illustration’, Word & Image

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3:1 (1987): 74–83; Luborsky, ‘The Illustrations: Their Pattern and Plan’, in John Foxe: An Historical Perspective, ed. D.M. Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 67–84; and Watt, Cheap Print. Seth Lerer, ‘The Wiles of a Woodcut: Wynkyn de Worde and the Early Tudor Reader’, Huntington Library Quarterly 59:4 (1998): 381–403, addresses the use of a single illustration in several books printed in the first decades of the century. Luborsky’s earlier article is the most significant attempt to account for later sixteenth-century woodcut illustration, and though it is very helpful, it is admittedly quite preliminary. Watt does address the cultural influence of woodcut images in the course of her discussion of ephemeral print in the period indicated in her title, but illustrated books are not the focus of her study. Others to consider sixteenth-century English printed images include Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram, ‘The Iconography of the Acts and Monuments’, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. D.M. Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 66–142; Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); John N. King in both English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). But unlike Lerer, Watt, and Luborsky, these important studies focus on the iconography and sources of the printed image in England, rather than examining the specific relation of image to text in illustrated books. David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 169. Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, p. 169. Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, translated into English Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington (1591), ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 17. The text by Broughton, to which Harington refers is A Consent of Scripture (1588; STC 3850); for a discussion of the engraved plates included at the end of Broughton’s text see Luborsky and Ingram, A Guide, p. 258; and Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Part I, The Tudor Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 162–3. Harington, Orlando, p. 17. On perspective as a form that figures a space for the modern subject see Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 377–447, and Christopher Braider, Refiguring the Real (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). James Elkins’ The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) argues for a less monolithic notion of perspective that better accommodates practices like that described by Harington. See Bland, A History, p. 140. The illustrations to the English edition are direct copies of engravings by Porro for the 1584 Italian edition, which were in turn copied from the woodcuts in Vagrisi’s edition. See Hind, Engraving in England, I.240 and Bland, A History, pp. 140–43. John Evelyn, Evelyn’s Sculptura, with the unpublished second part, ed. C.F. Bell (1662, 1755; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), p. 56. Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, p. 33. They are referring to calculations in S.H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 158. The term ‘artistic print’ is generally used to distinguish between prints designed and executed by the same artist (and intended as works of art in their own right) and those prints that are ‘reproductive’ copies made from original artworks designed and executed in another medium (such as painting).

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14 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 224. Benjamin is specifically referring to film, which he saw as emancipatory for its resistance to the ‘aura’ of traditional art. In Benjamin’s view, the resistance was a result of the lack of an original – any showing of the film equaled its reality as art. It was thus an art form that would finally offer itself to the people apart from the materiality to which the value of traditional art had always been bound. The print was an early form of this development for Benjamin, though the ability to confer value on the individual impression made it less conducive to the kind of emancipation he had in mind. He was unable to foresee the development in modern collecting which would put a price on the ‘original’ prints of early films, returning them to the market economy and its injustices in a manner he hoped they would bring to an end. For the present discussion it is still worth drawing attention to the distinction between ‘individual’ works of art and those ‘designed for reproducibility’. 15 Godfrey, Printmaking, p. 9. 16 William M. Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (1953; reprint Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1969), p. 66. 17 Landau and Parshall, Renaissance Print, p. 361. 18 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 368. 19 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (1952; reprint Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 48–50, offers the following definition of aesthetic response: ‘the judgement of taste is simply contemplative, i.e., it is a judgement which is indifferent as to the existence of an object, and only decides how its character stands with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure …. Taste is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful’. Kant would probably consider the kind of instrumental function that I am identifying with some illustrated books to be ‘good’, with the reservation that it is simply ‘mediately good, i.e., the useful, which pleases as a means to some pleasure’ (p. 48). Though Kant’s aesthetic theory has borne the brunt of the more severe attacks on the notion of the Aesthetic, his ideas still resonate throughout discussions of aesthetic production and response. 20 Ernst Gombrich, Norm & Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), p. 10. 21 A note on importation is required here. Those who purchased imported continental books were the same readers who had driven the market for manuscript books; they were well educated, and they came almost exclusively from the universities, the church, the nobility, and the court. Their taste was for Italian and French books of ‘high’ quality, primarily in Latin, though sometimes in French or Italian. Early printers like Caxton did not try to compete with the imports. Instead, and often relying on patronage to ensure the financial security of a volume, they produced books in English for which a known market existed and no continental printer yet specialized, mostly popular books of private devotion and romances. Lotte Hellinga has described the importance of England’s changing social landscape in creating the demand for English books around the turn of the sixteenth century: ‘After the scholars, including the lay scholars, as well as the clergy and the religious houses, English professional men were the greatest purchasers of books. They were the lawyers and doctors, dons and schoolmasters educated at university. Together with the merchant classes they represented at that time in England the layer of society that was rising on the social scale more than any other. The professionals,

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and also the merchant class, were more affected by the advent of printing than any other sector of society. Until that time there is, in England at least, not much sign that they were book owners on any large scale, but from that point on books became part of their daily life, and they began to count books among their usual possessions’, [‘Importation of Books Printed on the Continent into England and Scotland before c.1520’, in Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books, circa 1450–1520, ed. Sandra Hindman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 205–24; pp. 219–20]. As Bland points out, these classes furnished a demand for a different kind of book from that desired by the court, church, and university scholars, that is, from those classes usually responsible for maintaining aesthetic taste. Yet, the preferences of the newest readers were not simply vulgar, and Plant reminds the modern interpreter that ‘[i]t is easy to exaggerate the poor taste of the reading public’ (A History, p. 49). Finally, as the present discussion is intended to demonstrate, there is significant evidence that even the purchasers of imports did not exclude the products of domestic presses from their libraries, a fact that casts further doubt on the notion that the English book trade was secondary to that of the continent at least in terms of its cultural influence. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 153–4. Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 2nd edn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 115. Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly 44:3 (Fall 1993): 255–84; 283. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. xxi. Many illustrations in the second category, of course, also lead to a form of symbolic recognition that is often associated with aesthetic response. This will be an important point for my argument, as I aim to show the problems with making a distinction between the two forms of illustration. The categories ‘ornamental’, ‘general’, and ‘direct’ are commonly used in discussions of illustration. Ornamental illustrations include those non-verbal aspects of the printed matter that have no ostensible connection to the text; general illustrations are appropriate to the content, but not clearly derived from the specific text illustrated; and direct (or ‘true’) illustrations include details necessarily derived directly from the text (see Luborsky, ‘Connections and Disconnections’, p. 74). One goal of the following discussion is to point to the shortcomings of these categories for historical criticism. Luborsky, ‘Connections and Disconnections’, p. 74. Luborsky is providing a qualified version of this commonly accepted definition of ‘true’ illustration. Moller, ‘Preface,’ in Imagination on a Long Rein: English Literature Illustrated, ed. Moller (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1988), p. 8. This is even true in cases where the image has ostensibly overtaken the text in popularity, for example when illustrations have been removed from books to be displayed or re-sold. In most critical accounts, the texts on which such illustrations were based are still identified as the source of the influence or appeal. See Meyer Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), pp. 9–16. Hodnett, Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, of Bruges, London, and Antwerp (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker and Gumbert, 1971), p. 50. Bland refers to another old technique as a problem in his description of a seventeenth-century illustrated edition of

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Paradise Lost: ‘There is nothing else in it [the edition] quite so impressive as the illustration to Book I …. But the other plates are all somewhat spoiled by the intrusion of that archaic habit of showing successive actions in one picture’ (A History, p. 191). Behrendt, ‘The Functions of Illustration – Intentional and Unintentional’, in Moller, Imagination, p. 30. Susanne Langer takes the notion of displacement a step further, by associating it with violence: ‘there are no happy marriages in art – only successful rape’ (quoted in Behrendt, Imagination, p. 40). Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 67. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 67. As Watt points out, ‘if the culmination of this process was the creation of a separated body of “chap” literature for an identifiably “plebeian” audience, this did not occur within the period [1550–1640] … and possibly not until the eighteenth century. Before 1640, it is likely that a large proportion of the buyers were drawn from the middling ranks of yeomen, husbandmen, and tradespeople, and that even gentry readers were not uncommon. If publishers did increasingly “target” humbler readers, this should not necessarily be seen as a divisive phenomenon. Cheap print in this period was just as likely to be an instrument of social cohesion, as more people were brought into the reading public, and as stories, images, and values permeated the multiple tiers of English society’, p. 5.

CHAPTER 7

Promiscuous Textualities: The Nashe-Harvey Controversy and the Unnatural Productions of Print Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast It is not, I think, coincidental that the popularity of abuse pamphlets should have grown with the rise of print culture.1 Witty and vituperative phrases like ‘There is a Doctor and his Fart that have kept a foule stinking stirre in Paules Churchyard’, attracted a large audience of readers eager to feed on the genre’s rhetorically elegant and quite vulgar epithets.2 The target of this particular abuse is the scholar and pamphleteer Gabriel Harvey; his farts are the pamphlets that he sells at the bookselling center of London – St Paul’s. The author of this abuse is Thomas Nashe, whose vivid, vulgar language appears to have attracted a large readership of mixed backgrounds and education. This power of attraction illuminates the symbiotically parasitical relationship between print and abuse pamphlets. Pamphleteers depended on the medium of print to disseminate their writings quickly and profitably; printers, in turn, found that ‘pamphlets are an ideal speculative venture, for they require little investment and might become valuable …, especially given their potential to … broaden the market for printed texts’.3 As such, this vituperative genre is symptomatic of early modern print culture’s ability to disseminate novelties and notoriety; abuse pamphleteers do so by proliferating harsh and censorious statements against, for instance, the Catholic church (‘that scarlet Whore’) or against women, about whom Joseph Swetnam claims that ‘betwixt their breasts is the vale of destruction: and in their beds there is hell, sorrow, and repentance’.4 My particular interest in the metaphorics of abuse inheres in the way that abuse pamphleteers – whether they abuse Catholics, women, or poets – return repeatedly to the base, promiscuous, and vulgar parthenogenesis of printed texts. Thomas Nashe, for instance, contends that rival pamphleteers are ‘every quarter bigge wyth one Pamphlet or other’ while Constantia Munda claims that print has become ‘the nursery and hospital of every spurious and penurious brat which proceeds from base, phrenetical brain-sick babblers’.5 Given that pamphleteers like Nashe and Munda are themselves employing the medium of print to disseminate their abuses, their representation of pamphleteering as an indiscriminate production of bastardized texts reflects and refracts

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deep anxieties associated with producing texts for a medium that has, as yet, no authorized literary conventions or social status. Indeed, because abuse pamphlets are constructed on the very language of sexuality and scatology that most other ‘legitimate’ writings suppress, they lay open the contradictory and problematic constructions of birth upon which early modern print culture is built. It is perhaps worth pausing here to define more clearly what, exactly, abuse pamphlets are. They are a particular articulation of a long-standing tradition of exchanging insults, a tradition that has appeared in most oral and written cultures. In particular, early modern form has three major conventions: first, abuse pamphlets are an extreme form of the genre of polemical debate with which all university students were thoroughly familiar (most abuse pamphleteers appear to have been university-trained); hence the often elaborate rhetorical constructions of these pamphlets. Second, abuse pamphlets add to this tradition of polemics a highly scatological and sexualized rhetoric, one often aimed at a particular person (or group of persons). For example, one of the infamous Martin Marprelate pamphlets discloses abuses in the Anglican Church by focusing on the corrupt practices of John Bridges, Dean of Sarum. Third, this form of abuse seems particularly dependent on the rise of the printing press. As Alexandra Halasz has noted, the establishment of the Stationer’s Company in 1557 gave this company a monopoly status over most registered works, but it is not until 1580 that the Crown appointed a regulatory commission to ensure that printers were not illegally printing registered works. As a result, printers found themselves eager to create new, unregistered works, and so many of them commissioned writers to create hastily composed pamphlets that had not yet been entered in the Stationer’s Register, pamphlets whose lively contents would immediately attract readers.6 Indeed, this date marks a clear increase in the production of abuse pamphlets – with the appearance of the highly popular Martin Marprelate against the Anglican hierarchy. This fertile period of production lasted until well into the 1620s, with pamphlets attacking Joseph Swetnam’s Arraingnment of Lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women. As these examples suggest, the apparent best sellers among this genre were pamphlets against Anglicans or Calvinists, pamphlets against women or men, and pamphlets against poetry or against poet-haters. Harvey and Nashe, as we will see, enthusiastically absorb rhetoric from all of the above as they tirelessly accuse each other of being immoral, effeminate, and hackneyed writers. Whether pamphleteers are attacking women, Calvinists, or poets, most share the opinion that print is an impersonal mechanical force, one that instills an obsessive desire in writers to produce superficial texts indefatigably.7 Pamphleteers, as a result, produce (according to Harvey) ‘a Storehouse of bald and baggage stuffe, unwoorth the aunswering, or reading’.8 Harvey’s rhetoric here differs significantly from the metaphors of birth employed by

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most manuscript writers. Manuscript writers more often employ such birth metaphors to signal a crisis of transition from conceptualization to written expression. Philip Sidney, for example, tells his sister that his Arcadia, ‘having many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster’.9 For writers in print, this crisis of articulation is further complicated by issues of excessive production – hence the symbology of frequent and multiple births associated with the mechanics of print.10 William Webbe speaks to this notion when he begins his Discourse of English Poetry with a diatribe against the ‘innumerable sortes of Englyshe Bookes, and infinite fardles of printed pamphlets, wherewith thys Countrey is pestered, all shoppes stuffed, and every study furnished’.11 Webbe’s comment speaks to two anxieties associated with the culture of print – its threat to traditional gender and class hierarchies, and its purported promotion of a rapacious desire for money.12 But such anxieties about gender, class, and money are repeatedly displaced onto metaphorics of monstrous and bastard births. Indeed for most authors of the period, the result of this unstoppable production machine is a series of unnatural textual births without clear maternal or paternal origins, and without a healthy period of gestation. Just as problematic for these writers is the notion that printed texts question the traditional (though itself often uncertain) association between masculinity and writing. The association had, of course, been supported by punning associations between words and swords, pens and penises. But the printing press contained no such physical associations with masculine appendages. If anything, the opposite was the case. One popular form of print type, for example, was a ‘minion’ – a pun that pamphleteers (as we will see) used frequently and enthusiastically to represent their rivals in print as sexually dominated by other women or men. The term ‘pressing’ itself, as Wendy Wall has noted, contained much the same connotations, as it was a popular euphemism for taking the subordinated (hence feminine or effeminate) position in a sexual act.13 The implication is that print effeminizes male writers by subordinating them to the demands of printers and readers. As such, puns associated with the printing press support a popular notion that printed works are being produced by effeminate writers, particularly as effeminacy, during the early modern period, was associated with an excessive desire for women and with weak sperm. This is certainly what Gabriel Harvey suggests when he writes to Thomas Nashe that ‘the true answere is, thou seekest too many wayes to cast out thine excrementes, thou are too effeminate, and so becomst like a woman, without a beard’14 (Figure 7.1). For Harvey, as for other writers of the period, the base and arid couplings of effeminate writers with the printing press can yield no fertile progeny; its only production is excrement. Effeminacy, then, is associated with a certain kind of writing for print – weak, superficial, and hastily written. Effeminacy also implies that writers for print,

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Woodcut of Thomas Nashe; G. Harvey, The Trimming of Thomas Nashe

(1597), by permission of The British Library

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like the medium of print itself, are novel, unnatural creatures – neither quite masculine nor feminine. Hence Harvey characterizes Nashe as a ‘Termagant; that fighteth not with simple words, but with dubble swordes’, while Jane Anger cavils against the anonymous author of Boke his Surfeyt in Love by claiming about writers like him that ‘Wealth makes them lavish, wit knavish, beauty effeminate’.15 As such, the metaphorics of effeminacy is closely related to the symbology of unnatural and bastard births associated with the medium of print. What print, then, adds to traditional associations of problematic writing with bastard births is the notion of impossible or unnatural births – such as births from sodomitical couplings. The impersonal and often anonymous productions of the press become associated, as well, with births out of nothing – with no apparent parentage outside of the mechanics of the press. Whether it be births outside of marriage, births from unnatural sexual practices, or mysterious mechanical births, the promiscuous and notorious productions of print figure forth cultural concerns about the inability to control and predict the illegitimate offspring of effeminate desire, productions that threaten stable, conventional notions of paternity. To indulge in print, pamphleteers seem to suggest, is to disturb the very structures of heredity and legitimacy upon which authoritative and patriarchal English culture depends. By implication, the loss of such structures threatens English culture with chaos and insignificance. Small wonder that the scene of print during the sixteenth century was associated as much with horror as with wonder. I

The Nashe-Harvey Conflict

Perhaps the most infamous example of such anxieties of parthenogenesis is the Nashe-Harvey controversy, a controversy that seems to have captured the attention of much of the English readership from 1590–99 – when the Archbishop of Canterbury finally brought this series of lively personal insults to a close by ordering the confiscation of Nashe’s and Harvey’s pamphlets. It would seem that, for the Archbishop at least, these pamphlets threatened the authoritative structure of the English church, if not of English patriarchal culture as a whole. The quarrel, indeed, originated in aspersions about birth, legitimacy, and class; and, as we will see, it seems to have epitomized the kind of excremental ‘nothings’ so often associated by Nashe and Harvey with print culture. What started the quarrel was a pamphlet by Richard Harvey (Gabriel Harvey’s brother), published in 1590.16 In his The Lamb of God, Harvey accuses Nashe of ‘peremptorily censuring his betters at pleasure’; Harvey then pretends to confuse Nashe with ‘our Butler of Pembroke Hall’.17 Two

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years later Robert Greene, a close associate of Nashe’s, responded by attacking Richard Harvey personally, along with Harvey’s father, and his two brothers – John, and the eminent Cambridge scholar Gabriel. Greene essentially characterized the Harveys as a family of common ne’er-do-wells.18 Greene’s comments, in turn, inspired Nashe to weigh in on this controversy. In Pierce Pennilesse, Nashe commented that Richard Harvey was but the son of a ropemaker.19 This negatively worded characterization led Gabriel Harvey to write extensively, in his Foure Letters, about the poverty and low character of Nashe. From this point on the controversy turned into a series of escalating vituperative exchanges between Nashe and Harvey that returned repeatedly to the same subjects – the representation of the rival’s Other (Nashe or Harvey) as unsuited for the university, as pandering to print culture, and as a promiscuous, effeminate producer of nothings. The highly scandalous, politically threatening, and quite popular character of this controversy makes it an ideal focusing point for issues of gender and procreation associated with the emergence of print culture – particularly as they reflect on notions of traditional authority. For what Harvey and Nashe constantly return to is the concept that the university is an idyllic site of male homosocial exchanges mediated by the alma mater of Cambridge and legitimated by the blood-line of male classical authors. In contrast, these pamphleteers represent print culture as a rapacious scene of rivalry between effeminate men whose base alliance with promiscuous muses yields a series of bastard texts. Yet despite a strong sense that print represents a fall from an edenic university community, the scene of print remains a place of fascination and desire for these male writers, arguably because of its transgressive and illegitimate constructions. For Nashe in particular, the very negative traits associated with print culture enable him to present himself as self-created from the ‘nothingness’ of print, hence freed of the often oppressive strictures associated with patriarchal convention and authority. Nashe’s texts, like Harvey’s, at once despise and toy with the image of the author as a nonce creature who produces unauthorized texts out of an unnatural desire for the promiscuous and anonymous pressings of print.20 Looking first at the legitimizing genealogy of the world of the university, I will then look at Harvey’s and Nashe’s attempts to transfer this scene of legitimacy onto print culture, even as these pamphleteers associate their printed work with illegitimacy, promiscuity, and effeminacy. Inherent in this turn towards illegitimacy, I argue, is a submerged desire on the part of the pamphleteers to represent themselves as new, significant voices in the literary scene. At the same time, this representation allows Nashe and Harvey to mask what may be the ultimate scene of pleasure afforded by print – the homoerotic frissons associated with its strong rivalrous relationships. Ultimately, I suggest, print is a mediating force that enables Harvey and Nashe to pit their authorial

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identities against each other maliciously and pleasurably, thus (consciously or not) representing print culture as the effect of aggressive sodomitical acts between male authors that yields the troubling yet pleasurable flourishes of print. It is, I would suggest, the very act of Nashe’s and Harvey’s abasements into print that made this controversy so popular to its heterogeneous readership. Certainly the popularity of these vituperative exchanges is strongly associated with the pleasures of witnessing a noted and respected University Praelector in Rhetoric like Harvey indulge in what was considered one of the basest forms of expression in print – abuse pamphleteering.21 Harvey himself is quite aware that he has debased himself; in fact he writes that his pamphlet has fallen from being ‘a mighty peece of worke’ to becoming a pamphlet which ‘they [booksellers] muste needs in all haste … to sett to sale in Bartholomewe and Stirbridge fayer, with what lacke ye Gentlemen? I pray you will you see any freshe newe bookes? Looke, I beseeche you, for your loove and buie for your moonye …. I wisse he is an University man that made it, and yea highlye commended unto me for a greate scholler’.22 Harvey touches on most of the sensitive issues associated with publication – its associations with anonymous proliferations of paper, with the selling of the author’s identity, and with the text’s consumption by base readers. The implication is that Harvey has debased himself by moving from the private coterie world of the university to the public world of print, where booksellers turn Harvey’s professorial status into a kind of feverishly produced commodity fetish that reproduces and sells the reputation of Harvey in the popular marketplace. The more that the press produces versions of Harvey’s texts, the more that the significance of Harvey’s name, it seems, is debased. Just as problematic, of course, to Harvey’s reputation is the quite nasty and vituperative language that he, like Nashe, employs in his pamphlets. Harvey, for example, represents Nashe as ‘the lewd scribler, the offal of corruptest mouthes, the draff of filthiest pennes, the bag-pudding of fooles, & the very pudding-pittes of the wise of the honest’.23 These scatological and sexual (‘lewd’) terms become associated with the controversy’s agile manipulation of traditional notions of masculine identity and procreations, notions which seem to have been of universal concern for early modern writers and readers, given the frequency of their appearance in print. For Harvey, in particular, the promiscuous, bastard nature of print culture threatens the pastoral, homosocial community of Cambridge University (attended by both Nashe and Harvey), replacing it with an aggressive and self-destructive scene of competition that destroys tradition, learning, and authority.24 Harvey, here, seems to be responding to Stephen Gosson’s comment that a responsible writer needs ‘To shew the abuses of these unthrifty scholers, that despise the good rules of their ancient masters, and run to the shop of

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their owne devises, defacing olde stampes, forging newe printes, and coining strange precepts’.25 To participate in the genre of abuse – its associations with novelty and the culture of print, is not only to problematize one’s association with the traditional culture of scholars but de facto to destroy, or, at least, ‘deface’ it.26 Such destructiveness can only be solved, Harvey claims, if ‘God, or good Order, circumcise the Tongues, and Pennes, that slaunder without cause, and raile without effect, even in the superlative degree of raving’.27 The terms ‘circumcise’ and ‘circumcision’ in the Tudor and Jacobean period had three major connotations – to abridge, cut, or to purify.28 Harvey implies here, then, that patriarchal tradition can only reassert its authority and morality if it censors the rhetorically excessive and overly aggressive pens wielded by abuse pamphleteers. If we follow the common associations of the pen with the phallus (associations emphasized by the term ‘circumcise’), then Harvey comes quite close to suggesting that ‘God or good Order’ should castrate these unruly writers. II

The University and the Press

The problem, then, faced by university-trained pamphleteers, is how to create a space of legitimacy within the scene of print – how, in other words, to separate their elite writings from those produced by hack pamphleteers. Elite writers do so by attempting to project their homosocial university coterie onto the world of print; hence they characteristically affirm a readership of ‘gentlemen’.29 Stephen Gosson, for instance, introduces his School of Abuse by writing to ‘Gentlemen and others’, while Harvey writes for a readership of ‘honest gentlemen’.30 In this way university-trained writers attempt to establish a homosocial community of cultured authors and readers, mediated by the medium of print. Harvey maintains the concept of such a community throughout his pamphlets by referring tirelessly to the friends who have encouraged him to write or by claiming that he writes his pamphlets to provide ‘some little contentation of friendes’.31 An even more crucial strategy for establishing his authority as a coterie writer is Harvey’s insistent representation of his scholarly career as the product of a legitimate and authorized genealogy. Hence Harvey represents Cambridge as an idealized Lévi-Straussian scene of mediation, where peaceful exchanges between men are mediated by a silent woman, in this case ‘that flourishing Universitie, my deere Mother’.32 The alma mater is represented as fertile, nurturing, and, above all, supportive of homosocial bonds. In much the same way (though with a touch of irony), Nashe represents ‘Saint Iohns in Cambridge … as a pittying Mother’ who ‘sent from her fruitefull wombe sufficient Schollers, … which extraordinarie conception, uno partu

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in rempublicam prodiere the Exchequer of eloquence Sir Iohn Cheke, a man of men, supernaturall traded in al tongues, Sir John Mason, Doctor Watson, Redman, Aschame, Grindall, Lever Pilkington’.33 Cambridge is represented as the cornucopian and generous mother that gives birth to the most notable scholars of the time. If Cambridge is the legitimate and legitimizing mother of university scholars, these scholars establish their paternal legitimacy via a kind of aristocratic bloodline of male authors. Harvey, for instance, contrasts Nashe’s novelties with the stately writing of ancient authors like Cicero, Isocrates, Plutarch, and Xenophon.34 Nashe employs a similar trope to distinguish his Anatomie of Absurditie from other abuse pamphlets of the period, by commenting that ‘men hast unto novelties, and runne to see new things, so that whatsoever is not usuall, of the multitude is admired, yet must Students wisely prefer renowned antiquitie before newe found toyes, one line of Alexanders Maister, before the large invective Scolia of the Parisian Kings Professor’.35 By invoking this paternal genealogy, Nashe distinguishes his writings from the ‘novelties’ that characterize most pamphlets in print – writings that are too new to claim any blood lineage. For all their purported differences, then, Nashe and Harvey share a vision of the university as an idealized world of scholars born out of a legitimate and authoritative union between an ancient literary lineage and the alma mater. It would seem, in fact, that Nashe and Harvey insist on this idealized lineage in order to associate themselves with a kind of rarified genealogy that their actual background lacked – hence, perhaps, their extreme sensitivity to being accused of abasing themselves by printing their works. Such accusations of abasement are so common as to form a kind of infrastructure to these pamphlets, but just as strongly associated with these accusations is a marked interest in representing one’s rival as a base interloper in the rarified world of the university. In a quite early example of the longstanding rivalry between Cambridge and Oxford, Nashe claims that Harvey, despite his status as a lecturer at Cambridge, has very little claim to this academic status. Nashe notes that Harvey received his doctorate at Oxford, which, according to Nashe, grants degrees to scholars too intellectually feeble to receive them from Cambridge.36 Harvey is, by extension, not a genuine member of the Cambridge university coterie, but rather of what Nashe terms, the ‘fraternitie of fooles’.37 On his side, Harvey claims that Nashe ‘from the swathing bandes of his infancie in Print, was suckled of the sweetest nurses, lulled of the deerest groomes, cockerel of the finest minions, cowled of the daintiest paramours, hugged of the enticingest darlinges, and more then tenderly tendered of the most delitious Muses, the most-amiable Graces, and the most-powerfull Venuses of the said unmachable great’.38 Harvey effaces Nashe’s association with Cambridge (which Nashe attended for three years) by associating Nashe with print from his ‘infancie’. In the process, Harvey associates Nashe’s

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writings with all the aspects of pamphleteering that gave writers for print a bad name – above all seduction and lasciviousness. Whether he associates the fall into print with Nashe or with himself, it is clear that for Harvey the movement from manuscript to print is a kind of fall from a homosocial utopia. Harvey represents this fall as a ‘Farewell [to] my deere moothers, sometime floorishing Universities: some that have long continued your sonnes in Nature; your apprentices in Arte, your servauntes in Exercise; your lovers in affection; and your vassalles in duety: must either take their leaves of their sweetest freendes; or become the slaves of that dominering eloquence, that knoweth no Art but the cutting Arte; nor acknowledgeth any schoole, but the Curtisan schoole’.39 This is one reason that Harvey plays up his reluctance to print his pamphlets. As he puts it, ‘it was the sinister hap of these infortunate Letters, to fall into the left handes of malicious enemies, … Who adventured to imprint in earnest, that was scribled in iest … ’.40 Whether or not we take seriously Harvey’s claim that he only printed his pamphlets reluctantly, Harvey discloses here his quite consistent view of print culture as, above all, rapacious. In stark contrast to the private, supportive world of male bonding in which Havey can ‘make no different between my deerest frendes, and my selfe’,41 men, in the public culture of print, are predators who steal precious words from each other.42 Given that Harvey is participating in the same genre in which Nashe is writing, his insistence on the exceptional purity of his own project implies the opposite – that Harvey is projecting onto Nashe his own anxieties that he has compromised his prestigious position as a manly and virtuous Cambridge scholar. Like Nashe, Harvey has sullied himself with the medium of print. By extension, he may be producing the same kind of bastard, illegitimate texts that threaten his authoritative and legitimate status within the community of Cambridge. What Harvey and Nashe share, then, is a triangulated vision of university culture in which university students create homosocial bonds with their peers via the mediations of the alma mater. Against this Lévi-Straussian ideal, they represent the world of print as a kind of nasty Girardian triangle, in which male writers compete bitterly over their common object of desire – in this case the mechanical fecundities of the printing press.43 The press is, in fact, much like René Girard’s classic female object of desire – gendered feminine, passive, silent, and, finally, less important to the two claimants than their bitter rivalry against each other. The mediating female figure shifts from the nurturing maternal landscape of Cambridge University to the promiscuous and rapacious press – a kind of mechanical Duessa. Yet, Girard-like, this competition over control of the press masks a desire to emulate, even become, one’s male Other. Certainly Nashe’s eagerness to slander Harvey bespeaks a desire to conquer and take the place of this father figure whom, it appears, he unconsciously wishes to become. Interestingly,

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Harvey seems himself to have recognized this oedipal urge and encouraged Nashe to take the classic place of the castrated son, as he claims that Nashe ought to have to ‘put out his owne eyes, and so eclipst himself of the sight of the world’; then he tells Nashe to ‘keep thou thy self still in prison … that so thou more cleerely seeing thine owne deformed nature, mightst labour to reforme it’.44 If we follow the Freudian implications of the oedipal allusion, then Harvey is once more suggesting that Nashe castrate himself in order to separate himself from the promiscuous productions of print; then he will be accepted by the patriarchal circle of the university.45 And, of course, Harvey’s oedipal reference suggests that he and Nashe are claiming the same female object of desire – in this case the printing press. But just as problematic as the generational conflict between Nashe and Harvey is their sibling relationship: both pamphleteers are from upwardly mobile backgrounds; both are part of the Cambridge coterie; both are trying their fortunes in the medium of print. Like Girard’s classic pattern of rivalry in which opposing male rivals turn out to be quite similar to each other, Harvey and Nashe cast the other as a writer who has betrayed the fine traditions of university writing and culture by engaging in print, while remaining blind to their own participation in this betrayal.46 This nasty construction of his Other, of course, licenses Harvey to abuse Nashe enthusiastically, deliciously, and maliciously; above all it seems to have inspired Harvey to dissociate Nashe’s writings from a legitimate university coterie and associate them, instead, with the promiscuous pressings of print. Referring to Nashe’s preface to Greene’s Menaphon, Harvey refers to Nashe’s ‘keping of the foresaid Balls sister, a sorry ragged queane, of whome hee had his base sonne, Infortunatus Greene, his forsaking of his owne wife, too honest for such a husband’.47 While, as usual with Harvey, some of the references here are obscure, Harvey clearly represents Nashe as forsaking his legitimate family circle in order to seduce base women and produce bastard children – among them his pamphlet in defense of Greene.48 When Harvey is not accusing Nashe of fathering bastard texts, he represents Nashe as betraying the homosocial bondings that define Cambridge University by indulging in homoerotic seductions of his readers, patrons, or friends. Harvey tirelessly refers to Nashe as a ‘dainty minion’,49 as the ‘Minion of the Muses’,50 or as a member of the ‘minion profession’51 who prostitutes himself with ‘minion Rhetorique’,52 to ‘the riotous humour’ of his male audiences’ ‘licentious vanity’.53 Harvey follows up on this insult by claiming that Nashe writes to show affection for his ‘Paramour’, Robert Greene.54 Nashe, by implication, is a kind of catamite, whose homoerotic scribblings yield a series of meaningless texts. Harvey supports his representation of Nashe as a kind of male (and hence infertile) prostitute by associating Nashe, as well, with a variety of negative

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feminine traits. Nashe is termed variously ‘the Pandars Stew’, a ‘Termagant’, and a practicer of ‘curtisan Philosophy’, who is beholden to his ‘brothell Muse’.55 He goes on to imply that Nashe has bastardized the English language by basely sexualizing it. Nashe’s ‘frisking penne,’ according to Harvey, ‘began to playe the Sprite of the buttry, and to teache his mother tongue such lusty gambolds as may make the gallantest French, Italian, or Spanish Galgiards to blushe for extreame shame of their ideot simplicitie’.56 Rather than allowing himself to be nurtured by his chaste alma mater, Harvey claims that Nashe does the opposite – he seduces a related maternal figure, ‘the mother tongue’, turning her into an incestuous and shameless slut. Perhaps Harvey’s most virtuosic moment of insult is his rich and varied association of Nashe’s output with every possible kind of unnatural sexuality, as he associates Nashe with ‘impure Ganimeds, Hermaphrodits, Neronists, Messalinists, Dodecomechanists, Capricians, Inventors of newe, or revivers of old leacheries, and the whole brood of venerous Libertines, that know no reason, but appetite, no Lawe but Luste, no humanitie, but villanye, noe divinity but Atheisme’.57 Nashe appears here not just as a catamite, but also as a multi-gendered being, an incestuous male, and a promiscuous woman, all of whom, according to Harvey, are associated with the unnatural, mechanical, and mass production of texts with no authority, tradition, or meaning, except that of their promiscuous proliferations. Nashe, not surprisingly, uses the same repartee against Harvey; but where Harvey accuses Nashe of bastardizing the English language by turning to base and slangy rhetoric, Nashe accuses Harvey of coupling with the printing press in order to produce an unnatural amalgam of university and popular rhetoric. Hence Nashe terms Harvey an ‘arrant butter whore, … cotqueane & scrattop of scoldes’,58 whose writings are based on ‘termagant inkhorne tearmes’.59 At other times Harvey is a ‘Curtezan that can deny no man’.60 Harvey is, in other words, at once a female laborer and prostitute, a male housewife, and a hermaphroditic scold. Symptomatic of Harvey’s feminized and hermaphroditized personality, is, according to Nashe, his coterie of authors: ‘Barnabe [Barnes] and Anthony [Munday] … his minions and sweet-harts’.61 The homosocial world of Cambridge, from the perspective of Nashe’s pen, has become associated with base, perverted acts of writing. III The Nothingness of Print As the passages above suggest, there are some notable differences between Nashe’s and Harvey’s diatribes. Harvey tends to represent Nashe as an immoral youth who imprudently wastes his intellectual talents by associating himself with the promiscuities of the press. Nashe is more likely to represent Harvey as

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an effeminate old scold who is unable to adapt his effete language to the supple medium of print; hence Nashe refers to Harvey’s characteristic amalgam of academic and pamphleteering rhetoric as ‘Hermaphroditic phrases’,62 and even includes an illustration of the effeminate Harvey as an obsequious minion of the court (Figure 7.2). What both sets of insults share, however, is a tendency to represent the male Other as producing at once infertile texts from homosexual liaisons and bastard texts from promiscuous women. The point is, of course, that both are closely associated – that printed works are the product of dubious births, whether from a sodomitical, hence infertile, ‘thinge of nothing’ or from promiscuous productions with no legitimate lineage.63 This is why, I think, print so often becomes associated with terms of generation and procreation; not only do these terms refer to print’s dizzying ability to generate new texts, but also to its own mysterious establishment out of nothing.64 This latter reaction reminds us of the utter strangeness and novelty of print as an unnatural and monstrous (hermaphroditic) birthing machine that appears to produce endless texts from nothing. Harvey, at least, seems to be describing the medium of print in this way by referring to Nashe’s conceits as ‘a certaine pregnant, and lively thing without name, but a queint mistery of mounting conceit, … that … will bunge Demosthenes owne mouth with new-fangled figures of the right stampe’.65 Nashe’s rhetoric suggests a sort of pregnant female (‘queint’) figure with no lineage but with an untiring sexual appetite that, linked intimately with the printing press, yields lascivious novelties with no significance.66 Essentially, then, figurations of prostitution and sodomy yield the same association – texts with no significance that are born out of a heated and undirected desire to disseminate texts promiscuously. Indeed one reason that print is so closely associated with prostitution (male or female) is that, like prostitution, it depends on a large volume of anonymous clients and on the potential for financial reward; certainly the sheer volume of texts produced by printing presses smacks of promiscuity. This is why the pamphleteers move so easily from accusations of prostitution to accusations of overwhelming booksellers with printed sheets. Both activities, for one thing, threaten the intellectual community by trivializing it. Hence Harvey accuses Nashe of counterfeiting ‘an hundred dogged Fables, Libles, Calumnies, Slaunders, Lies for the whetstone’.67 Nashe responds by claiming that Harvey is ‘a conspiratour and practiser to make Printers rich, by making thy selfe … a manifest briber of Booksellers and Stationers’.68 Nashe, characteristically, implies that Harvey is such a mediocre writer that he cannot even get the customers by which to prostitute himself in print: he has to pay for the printing itself.

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The Picture of Gabriel Harvey; T. Nashe, Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596), by permission of The British Library

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IV The Illegitimate Pleasures of Print The fact that Harvey and Nashe continued to publish their pamphlets implies that they may have had good reasons – beyond defending their good names – for participating in this unnatural medium. In fact, it seems that each time one participant attempted (at least purportedly) to end the conflict, the other rekindled it. Harvey, for example, appears to have heard that Nashe was planning to apologize to Harvey in the preface to his Christ’s Tears; before the work appeared in print Harvey attacked Nashe in his New Letter of Notable Contents which casts Nashe, among other things, as a hypocrite.69 At the same time, Harvey constantly refers to pamphleteering as ‘that study, that mispendeth pretious Time, and consumeth it self, in needlesse, and bootlesse quarrels … & what so abhominable, as forged & suborned calumnies?’70 Nashe provides one possible answer to this question, as he defends himself against Harvey’s accusation that he is a professional hack: ‘and for deriving my maintenaunce from the Printing-house, so doo both Universities, and whosoever they be that come up by Learning, out of Printed Bookes gathering all they have; and wold not have furre to put in their gownes, if it, or writing, were not’.71 Nashe makes clear the ways in which university culture – which Harvey tries so desperately to distinguish from print culture – was in fact becoming increasingly dependent upon the medium of print as a means to enhance one’s reputation, get access to scholarly books, and make money. Such audacious statements suggest that Nashe is less threatened than is Harvey by notions of sexual perversity and gender deviancy associated with print culture. Indeed Nashe openly confesses that ‘twise or thrice in a month, when … the bottom of my purse is turnd downeward, & my conduit of incke will no longer flowe … I am faine to … follow some of these new-fangled Galiardos and Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous Villanellas … I prostitute my pen in hope of gaine’.72 Not surprisingly, Nashe is also quite willing to admit his fascination with the genre of abuse and the medium of print which enables its production and dissemination. Nashe’s apparent ease with the culture of print led Ronald McKerrow to suggest that Nashe entered into the quarrel not so much to defend his good name but rather ‘to bring the writer and his wit into notice’.73 One reason is that Nashe seems to like the idea of creating himself ex nihilo. In fact, he essentially proclaims himself as a writer of no genealogy when he claims, in Strange News that, ‘This I will proudly boast … that the vaine which I have (be it a medium vaine, or a madde vaine) is of my owne begetting, and cals no man father in England but my selfe, neyther Eupheus, nor Tarlton, nor Greene.’74 The bracing combination of the idea of self-creation, along with the excitement of matching pens with his rivals, is what inspires Nashe to end his Strange News by appending a poem about his quarrels with Harvey:

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Were there no warres, poore men should have no peace; Uncessant warres with waspes and droanes I crie: Hee that begins, oft knows not how to cease, They have begun, Ile follow till I die. Ile hear no truce, wrong gets no grave in mee, Abuse pell mell encounter with abuse: Write hee againe, Ile write eternally. Who feedes revenge hath found an endlesse Muse. If death ere made his blacke dart of a pen My pen his speciall Baily shall becum.

For Nashe, here, participation in the medium of print leads not to the effeminization of the pamphleteer but rather to his hyper-masculinity, as Nashe structures his poem around words like ‘warres’, ‘waspes’, ‘abuse’, ‘revenge’, and ‘dart’. Of course, the very overdetermined nature of this metaphorics may gesture to the opposite – to a strong defense against the notion that pamphleteers are effeminate minions. Certainly the fact that Nashe affirms his tireless antagonism against Harvey in a dizaine – a ten line poem associated with the sonnet (the classic form of love poetry) – suggests that an erotic, if not necessarily minion-like, desire for the male Other is what generates this series of abuse pamphlets. By casting his hatred of Harvey in a dizaine, Nashe implies that the pamphlet wars are, finally, a series of intimate, obsessive, and passionate scenes between men, made possible by the mediations of print. Even as Harvey, and at times Nashe, claim that print culture erodes traditional constructions of masculinity, Nashe suggests that print’s ‘new’ masculinity, based on attempts by rivals to castrate each other in print, is a far more exciting and interesting, if riskier, proposition. Even Harvey appears to gain some pleasure as well as, perhaps, profit from printing his pamphlets, despite his constant protests to the contrary; otherwise, why would he continually punish himself and risk his reputation by indulging in pamphleteering?75 I would suggest that for Harvey, as for Nashe, abuse pamphlets offer a quite liberating and bracing form of self-expression – an alternative to the often dry and logical academic writing of the period. And if Harvey’s reputation achieved a somewhat unmasculine cast as a result of his engagement in print, this problematic reputation may have been counterbalanced by the erotic excitement underlying this genre. Certainly, if we follow Eve Sedgwick’s commentary on the Girardian triangle – the notion that strong rivalries between men mask a homoerotic attraction between them – then one might see in Harvey’s vituperations (as in Nashe’s) a strong fascination for, even obsession with, each other. Harvey’s discursive statements, of course, do not admit to such a fascination; yet one remark does gesture to this interpretation. In the Trimming of Thomas Nashe, Harvey says to Nashe: ‘Thus I speak not to wage discord against thee, but rather to make an end of all iarres, that as wife & husband will brawle and

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be at mortall fewde al the day long, but when boord or bed time come they are friendes againe and lovingly kisse one another: so though hetherto we have disagreed and beene at oddes, yet this one coate shall containe us both, which thou shalt weare as the cognisaunce of my singuler love towards thee’.76 While ironized, the statement does seem to describe the intimate relationship between Nashe and Harvey – at once opposites and the same, joined intimately by their common background at Cambridge University and their common participation in this controversy. The historical consensus has been that, whatever financial benefits Harvey might have hoped to accrue from printing his pamphlets, he should, nonetheless, have stayed away from print.77 Harvey’s reputation (in part because his rhetoric was judged as less figurative and supple than Nashe’s) suffered badly in comparison and helped establish Nashe’s reputation as a lively and interesting writer.78 From this perspective, one can read the Nashe-Harvey controversy as a tragi-comic morality tale, in which the old scholar, Harvey, is swept away by the ‘new man’, Nashe, who understands and manipulates the promiscuous metaphorics of print. Part of Nashe’s success, then, can be attributed to his willingness to wallow in print’s promiscuous and sodomitical pleasures, even as he claims to abhor participating in print culture. For Nashe, these pleasures may not lead to classic texts, but they do gesture to a notion with which he is entranced – the creation of a nonce self out of the apparent nothingness of print. Yet if we compare the politics of these two writers, the situation becomes more complex. Harvey, in fact, was the more radical of the two writers – strongly supporting the leftist Calvinist agenda, while Nashe enthusiastically spoke for the established church. And, for all his celebrations of self-creation, Nashe is just as strongly attached as is Harvey to the notion of the nurturing maternal university and the paternal genealogy of classical texts. Like Harvey, Nashe represents the shift from the university to print culture as a fall from a pre-sexual, nurturing world protected by the chaste mother, to the world of sexual rapaciousness governed by the sluttish printing press. And, like Harvey, Nashe concomitantly represents this shift as a move from supportive homosocial relationships to aggressive sodomitical couplings, which give birth to excremental texts. Nashe also seems to share with Harvey a kind of horror of and fascination with the mechanical proliferations of texts out of, apparently, nothing. The main differences, then, between Nashe and Harvey, inhere not so much in political perspective or in the construction of print culture, as in the writers’ ultimate placement of the self in relationship to the printing press. Despite the temptation of advancing and proliferating his name in print, Harvey finally drew back from a commodified market that, for him, was inescapably associated with prostituting his good name. Apparently unwilling to advance his career further via pamphleteering and unable to secure a permanent position at Cambridge (perhaps because of his problematic reputation as a pamphleteer),

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Harvey retired to Saffron-Walden. After the Nashe-Harvey controversy came to a close, in fact, Harvey published no more works. The younger Nashe, in contrast, chose to exploit the notoriety of the NasheHarvey conflict by employing it as a midwife for his creation of a constantly shifting and always rhetorically lively persona that made his works so popular in the marketplace of print. From this perspective Nashe seems to have won the oedipal contest with Harvey. Although he never carved out a comfortable and profitable career as a professional writer (no one of his era really did), Nashe’s projected image of his pamphleteering Self is almost indelibly associated with nascent, popular print culture – the sexy and transgressive commodifications of the word that yield nonce texts out of the unnatural couplings of author with printing press. By, finally, identifying his name with the most popular genres associated with print (pamphlets and novellas), Nashe risks his name in the marketplace, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether his intimacies with the printing press have yielded a vital or excremental corpus. This risk may, in some ways, have been the death of him. Nashe published two more pieces, Nashe’s Lenten Stuff and Summer’s Last Will, then his writings were censored by the order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Within two years, at the age of 34, Nashe was dead. Yet this risking of his persona in the marketplace of print nonetheless seems to have paid off; not only is Nashe far more famous than Gabriel Harvey, but many critics would say, that Nashe achieved a rare success in writing and publishing by turning lewd, scatological vituperations into artistic pieces, most of which, pace the Archbishop of Canterbury, have remained, for four centuries, in print. Notes 1

2

3

As Linda Woodbridge and Alexandra Halasz have noted, the term ‘pamphlet’ is unstable: people who considered pamphlets to be serious works called them ‘treatises’ while those who considered them to be more popular or frivolous called them ‘pamphlets’. In the abuse tradition, however, writers of the period commonly used the term ‘pamphlet’, so I will use that term consistently to describe these works. See Linda Woodbridge, Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540– 1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 7; and Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1–4. Thomas Nashe, Strange Newes, of the Intercepting Certaine Letters, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 1: p. 256. All further references to Strange News are by page number to this edition of the text. Halasz, Marketplace, p. 26. On the expenses associated with printing books, see especially Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, ed. Geoffrey NowellSmith and David Wooton (London: NLB, 1976), pp. 109–27. For an overview

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of the economic conditions of the period that made writers dependent on their printers, see Edwin Haviland Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 132–42; and Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, ed. Rev. J.W. Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), pp. 3–7, and ff. James Hart, The Arraignment of Urines (London, 1623); Joseph Swetnam, The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women, in Half Humankind: The Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640, ed. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 201. Thomas Nashe, The Anatomie of Absurditie (London, 1589), p. 9; all further references to The Anatomie are by page number to this edition of the text. Constantia Munda, The Worming of a Mad Dogge, in Half Humankind, p. 130. See Halasz, Marketplace, pp. 20–26. For details on the mechanical processes of print, which made printshops look ‘more like modern workshops than the monastic workrooms of the Middle Ages’, see Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book, pp. 128–42. Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters, in Gabriel Harvey: Foure Letters and Certeine Sonnets, ed. G.B. Harrison (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), p. 40. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 3. On traditional metaphors of birth associated with male writers, see the essay by Katharine Eisaman Maus in this volume. William Webbe, ‘Discourse of English Poetry’, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1904), 1, p. 226. Issues of class and finances associated with early modern print culture have been charted by a number of critics. On these issues, as they become associated with the Nashe-Harvey controversy in particular, see Kenneth Friedenreich, ‘Nashe’s Strange Newes and the Case for Professional Writers’, Studies in Philology 71 (1974); Halasz, Marketplace, pp. 82–114; and Lorna Huston, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 15–37 and ff. See Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 1–7 and ff. Gabriel Harvey, The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, in The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, in The Huth Library (London: 1884), 1, p. 39. All further references to The Trimming of Thomas Nashe are by page number to this edition of the text. Harvey, Pierces Supperrogation Or a New Prayse of the Old Asse (London, 1593), p. 12. All further quotations from Pierces Supperrogation are by page number to this edition of the text. Jane Anger, Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women, in The Women’s Sharp Revenge: Five Women’s Pamphlets from the Renaissance, ed. Simon Shepherd (New York: St Martins Press, 1985), p. 32. Richard Harvey, The Lamb of God, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p. 76. Harvey’s reasons for attacking Nashe are complex, but are above all a visceral reaction to Nashe’s rather smug selfpresentation as a mature writer in his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon. For more details on the history of the quarrel, see especially McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5, pp. 65–109. See also Travis Summergill, ‘The Influence of the Marprelate Controversy on Thomas Nashe’, Studies in Philology 48 (1951): 145–60.

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17 We do not, in fact, know much about Nashe’s background, except for the fact that his father was a minister. For what information we do have on Nashe’s background see especially McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, pp. 2–8. 18 We do not have the actual words of this accusation, since it was deleted from Greene’s Quip for an Upstart Courtier soon after its publication. 19 Harvey’s father was in fact a rope-maker, and also a prominent citizen of SaffronWalden. He was prosperous enough to send all three sons to Cambridge. For further information on Harvey’s background, see Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Works of Gabriel Harvey, The Huth Library (London: Hazell, Watson, and Viney, 1884), pp. x–xii. 20 My interest in the way that print authors conceptualize themselves via a metaphorics of gender and procreation is particularly indebted to recent work by Wall and Halasz – both of whom focus their studies on the ways that gender is a site onto which writers can displace anxieties about the heterogeneous class structure of print and the emergence of proto-capitalism, whereas I focus more on the metaphorical genealogies of print. For a study of economics and nascent capitalism as an influence on Nashe’s writings in particular, see Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context. 21 On Harvey’s intellectual status and influence, see also Grossart, ed., The Works of Gabriel Harvey, introduction; and Halasz, Marketplace, pp. 89–90. 22 Gabriel Harvey, Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, in The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 1, p. 113. All further quotations from Letter-Book are by page number to this edition of the text. On this passage, see also J.W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism 1 (1951), pp. 139–64; p. 155. 23 Harvey, Pierces Superrogation, p. 12. 24 Of course, the university was not quite as halcyon a place as Nashe and Harvey claimed. On the notion that writers saw print culture as threatening to the coterie world of scholarship, see especially the classic article by J.W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print’ (Essays in Criticism 1 [1951], pp. 139–64). Saunders, however, also notes, that this sense of stigma was not universal; among professional writers, the stance of ‘coyness was largely assumed and superficial’ (p. 120). On this sense of stigma, see also Halasz, Marketplace, pp. 21, 164–5; and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 175. Most contemporary critics agree that there was some sort of stigma associated with printing one’s texts, but that writers also exaggerated this stigma by their constant and conventional recourse to the modesty topos. For a cogent overview of this stance, see Wall, Imprint, pp. 10–17. For an opposing perspective on the notion of the stigma of print, see Steven May, ‘Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical “Stigma of Print”’, Renaissance Papers (1980): 11–18. 25 Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse, Containing a Pleasant Invective Against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, & c. (London, 1841). 26 Gosson’s comment suggests, as well, how printed books are like counterfeit coins – constantly sought after and proliferated, but with no actual value. 27 Harvey, Foure Letters, p. 53. 28 The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘circumcise’ and ‘circumcision’. 29 See Johns, Nature, pp. 36–40, for a discussion of early modern attempts to create a ‘gentleman’s’ press.

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30 Harvey, Foure Letters, p. 71. 31 Harvey, Foure Letters, p. 71. Although the modesty topos was very much the convention of the period, Harvey does insist on it indefatigably, unlike, for instance, Nashe, who more casually employs the topos, with phrases which mention that he is ‘playing the dolt in Print’ (Thomas Nashe, Pierce Pennilesse, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald McKerrow, p. 154). 32 Harvey, Foure Letters, p. 31. 33 Thomas Nashe, ‘A Preface to Menaphon’, in McKerrow, ed., 1. p. 313. All further references to this work are by page number to this edition of the text. 34 Harvey, Foure Letters, p. 41. 35 Nashe, Anatomie, p. 43. The ‘Parisian Kings’ probably refers to one of Ramus’s works. On this reference, see F.P. Wilson’s ‘A Supplement to McKerrow’s Edition of Nashe’ in McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5, pp. 6–7, n. 43. A similar instinct leads Nashe to refer to Erasmus as ‘that aged Father’ (‘A Preface to Menaphon’, p. 312). 36 Nashe, Strange News, p. 271. 37 Nashe, Strange News, p. 279. 38 Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 67. 39 Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 17. 40 Harvey, Foure Letters, p. 31. 41 Harvey, Foure Letters, p. 7. 42 Unlike Nashe, who, like most of his contemporaries, casually employs the modesty topos (by, for instance, condemning himself ‘for … playing the dolt in Print’), Harvey insists constantly on this topos, as he tirelessly affirms that he has been drawn most reluctantly into print. See Thomas Nashe, Pierce Pennilesse his Supplication to the Devil, in Pierce Pennilesse his Supplication … and Selected Writings, ed. Stanley Wells, in The Stratford-upon-Avon Library (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), 1, p. 154. 43 Harvey places Nashe more firmly in this triangle and outside of the homosocial idyll of Cambridge by asserting, in The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, that Nashe has no friends (pp. 45–6). On this rapacious triangle, see René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 44 Harvey, Trimming, p. 47. 45 This type of generational conflict, certainly, is what McKerrow considers to be central to their problematic relationship. As he puts it, ‘above and before all, there was, I think, that ancient opposition between the old and the new, between servility and independence, between prejudice and the right of a man to that consideration which his abilities and achievements deserved’. Although, according to McKerrow, it was the Harveys who stood for the future and Nashe for the past (McKerrow, The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5, p. 67). 46 On this controversy as a quarrel between two somewhat similar men, see also Halasz, Marketplace, p. 87, and McKerrow, ed. The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5. Sheavyn notes how such rivalry was induced by an environment in which many writers were vying for few possibilities of publication and patronage; see The Literary Profession, pp. 8–38 and 127–47. 47 Harvey, Trimming, p. 20. 48 See also Pierces Supererogation, where Harvey refers to Nashe as a product of ‘thy mother’s gutter & thy father’s kennel’ (p. 30), and, later refers to ‘howe the poore fellowe his father hath put him to his foisting, and scribling shiftes; his onely gloria

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patri, when all is done. Rule thy desperate infamous penne; & bee the sonne of a mule, or the printers Gentleman, or what thou wilt for me’ (p. 43). Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 12. Harvey, Foure Letters, p. 47. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 225. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 22. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 12. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 33. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, pp. 1, 12, 23, 45. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 248. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 45. Nashe, Strange News, p. 299. Nashe, Pierce Pennilesse, p. 42. Nashe, Have with You to Saffron-Walden, in McKerrow, ed., 3: p. 27. All further references to Have with You are by page number to this edition of the text. Nashe, Have with You, p. 108. Nashe, Strange News, p. 265. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p.253. On inconsistencies in the gendering of print culture, see also Wall, Imprint, pp. 1–2, and 220–21. Of all the pamphlets, Pierce Pennilesse brought Nashe the most success, going into five editions in its first five years of publication. On the publication history of this pamphlet, see G.R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 59. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 16. Not surprisingly, Nashe envisions Harvey’s audience as debased as well. In Have with you Saffron-Walden, Nashe also describes a typical reader of Harvey as a ‘Pandar’ who enjoys discussing prostitutes (p. 42). Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, p. 16. Nashe, Strange News, p. 261. On this moment, see especially McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5, pp. 102–4. Nashe, on his side, seems to have rejected an early offer of parley on Harvey’s part in order to escalate the controversy. McKerrow discusses this response in The Works, 5: p. 88. Harvey, Foure Letters, p. 42. Nashe, Have with You, pp. 127–8. Nashe, Have with You, p. 31. Nashe, Strange News, p. 243; Ronald McKerrow, The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5, p. 88. Scholarly consensus, in fact, is that Nashe’s great subject is ‘nothing’. C.S. Lewis says that ‘if asked what Nashe “says”, we should have to reply, Nothing’. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 416. Alternatively, Hibbard states that this appearance of having no subject comes from the fact that ‘The way he says a thing counts for more with him than the thing said’. Thomas Nashe, p. 64. Yet … As Febvre and Huston note, the printing press did not necessarily support originality and novelties; in fact it often did the opposite. But it is clear that Nashe, at least, is attempting to forge a strong connection between novelty and print (Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book, p. 278; Huston, Thomas Nashe, pp. 72–3). For an interesting discussion of the way that the ‘nothingness’ of Nashe’s works is associated with Nashe’s attempt to shape a definition of poetical discourse untrammeled by Puritan strictures of morality, see Huston, Thomas Nashe, especially pp. 25–8.

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75 On Harvey’s interest in using print to establish himself as a public figure, see also Halasz, Marketplace, pp. 90–4. 76 Harvey, Trimming, p. 66. 77 On the sense that Harvey lost out in this battle of wits, see especially, Grosart, ed., The Works of Gabriel Harvey, 1, pp. ii–ix; and McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5, pp. 65–8. 78 On contemporary responses to Harvey’s and Nashe’s reputation, see also Halasz, Marketplace, p. 86; James Nielson, ‘Reading Between the Lines: Manuscript Personality and Gabriel Harvey’s Drafts’, Studies in English Literature 33 (1993), pp. 3–44; and Sheavyn, The Literary Profession, pp. 133–5.

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CHAPTER 8

The Birth of Advertising Michael Baird Saenger Critics such as Wendy Wall, Margreta de Grazia, and Jeffrey Masten have been drawing increasing attention to the value of looking at the margins of Renaissance books, and in the process they have questioned how those margins define books and authors, and more self-consciously, how we tend to define those margins.1 Additionally, scholars in a number of areas have been energetically redefining the status of traditional objects of study by literary critics, questioning assumptions about the profession of writing, the nature of publishing, and the historical development of authorship;2 they have pointed out how texts which lie both inside and outside the traditionally demarcated ‘authorial text’ have much to say about reading, writing, and printing in the Renaissance.3 My goal in this essay is to point to the most basic fact of front matter, that it promotes the purchase of books, and to revisit the implications of this often under-remarked, yet fundamental element of book publication. For all the success that recent criticism has had in unpacking these pages on psychological, sexual, and political levels, we have often denuded front matter of this quite obvious function. Perhaps in part because of the fact that we never encounter early modern books as an ordinary commodity that we might buy, we do not tend to see them as purchasable objects. In the brief survey that follows, I wish to suggest that one of the most valuable ways to understand front matter in the early modern period is to recognize that these pages constituted an early, coherent, and very versatile system of advertising – perhaps even that these pages constitute something like the birth of modern advertising – and simultaneously, the transformation of the boundaries of, and hence the idea of, literature. As such, they employed techniques of irony, personification, humour, and readerly involvement geared around a very specific and rather crucial act of reader-response: the purchase. These techniques are easily overlooked if we view early modern books solely as witnesses to shifts in authority and social politics. Print, as Kevin Pask has suggested, was the ‘first mass produced commodity’.4 Nothing but such a mass-produced commodity could have generated the birth of modern advertising, a birth that has been marked since its inception not only by wide appeals to a large (though rarely undifferentiated) audience but also by attempts to make inert and virtually identical commodities seem somehow alive and personally connected to the purchaser. Only when mass production begins does its capitalistic palliative,

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the personalized commodity, become necessary: the printed book had to protest that it was not precisely the thing it was. It is within this context that I wish to place the nexus of parenting and printing discourses. I suggest that the reliance on parenting metaphors in the front matter of printed books constitutes an important idiom for textual mediation in the Renaissance, one to which I assign the term ‘paratextual induction’. I have chosen the word ‘induction’ in order to suggest that front matter leads the reader into the text, but more specifically that front matter seduces and transforms the reader into a new role, one which is especially suited to buying and engaging with the particular text that follows. After all, books of language acquisition, heraldry and high culture generally served as devices of class mobility, capable of delivering cultural capital to a broader audience than ever before.5 Books were literally transformative, but they were also literarily transformative, presenting the act of reading in their paratexts almost as a rite of initiation, figured in intriguing rhetorics. This system is nothing like the modern advertising of books, but it may appear more familiar if it is compared to the way in which Don Quixote relates to the books that he reads; early modern front matter presents, as it were, the terms by which the reader can become a part of the book. Advertising became particularly prominent in the later sixteenth century as printing became more efficient and patronage more scarce.6 If publishers were entirely artless then it might be justified to treat paratexts as essentially different from literature, but publishers are far from artless. At a minimum, the publisher frames and advertises the internal text, but as I shall explore, prefatory writers, including the publisher and translator, often have a profound impact on the way a text is read.7 One example from the Italian Renaissance may be taken to show how powerful the art of the publisher can be. Andrea Alciati is usually given credit for ‘inventing’ the emblem in his Emblemata (1531), but in fact, as Rosalie Colie astutely notes, Alciati ‘began simply by combining two short forms, adage with epigram: it was his publisher [Heinrich Steyner] who conceived the idea of adding figures, or woodcut pictures’ in order to make the text more accessible, and thus more marketable.8 After Alciati, the figures became perceived as a sine qua non of the form of an emblem. Here, as is usually the case, the publisher is primarily concerned with marketability, but this example suggests that the publisher is not merely a middleman or a retailer of art; he is at least a spin doctor and at most an inseparable collaborator.9 The idea of an artless publisher may be as much of a myth as the idea of a non-commercial artist; indeed these two myths may well go hand in hand, together constituting a mutually dependent bipolarity that allows modern readers to idealize creative genius and scorn the mercantile realities of art.10 Recently, front matter and marginalia have been getting a great deal of attention in the work of New Historicists. The most recurrent theme in these studies has

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been the debate over when and how to locate the emergence of the modern notion of the author. Following the lead of Margreta de Grazia, critics have sought to periodize bibliographic authority, examining works such as Jonson’s Folio, Thynne’s edition of Chaucer, and Ponsonby’s Sidney, and constructing a prehistory of the authoritative/authorial presence in books.11 But the practice of genealogy has inevitably led to the characterization of whatever preceded the emergence of something (the novel, tragedy, authorship) as inchoate and primitive in comparison to the thing for whose origin the genealogist is searching. Within this research, then, we have failed to ask an important question: if bibliographic authenticity came about at a certain time, what fundamentally different system preceded it? I would suggest that even in the small sample of texts examined in this essay, we can glimpse a thriving system of bibliographic presentation that preceded and to a large extent continued to coincide with the emergence of modern bibliographic authenticity: this alternate system involves a heterogenous system of apparatuses that authors and publishers employ in order to engage readers with books. I

Foreign Texts Who Walk and Talk

Perhaps the best place to begin a study of paratextual induction is in prefatory material to translations, a class of books which was very important and also very likely to receive metaphoric presentation. Translations of everything from Homer to Spanish romances to the sermons of Calvin were hot items in St. Paul’s churchyard. Modern translations tend to present translation as a relatively invisible or transparent art that is better the less it is noticed,12 but Renaissance presentation consistently emphasizes the virtues, mechanics, problems, and inadequacies of translation.13 One early modern translator writes: [c]omparatiuely the author is the light, and the translator is as it were an other candlesticke, to translate the light into, and that for those which thorough ignorance of the tongue could not attaine to the light when it shone out of the authors owne lampe.14

The metaphor of a fire combines the notion of illumination (and implicitly ‘enlightenment’) with the transferability of a translated text; a transferred fire is just as bright as the original. Or almost as bright: there is a subtle distinction between the ‘candlesticke’ of the translated text and the full ‘lampe’ of the original. Elsewhere, Holland states that both the original and the translation are ‘but candlestickes, for the light is Gods’ (¶3r). In general, translators tended to downgrade the quality of their translation with respect to the great original from which they were working. The humility topos is as old as rhetoric, but here that

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rhetorical trope is being deployed as an advertising technique. By deflating the tangible and purchasable text, this author is paradoxically promoting the experience of reading, which transcends the physical limitation of the book. Richard Linche, in the feigned awkwardness characteristic of the epistle to the reader, deliberately makes us aware of the inevitable faultiness of the translation he offers: Such as it is therefore, either culpable in words too much affected, or in disproportion being not methodically composed, or in shallownesse in the not proper vnderstanding of the first authors meaning, it must now passe, as for me it is too late to recall it ….15

There are no metaphors in this passage, and yet behind the veneer of awkwardness Linche is carefully involving the reader by asking her to see beyond the faults of his text, in a search for the greater original. Linche makes us aware of his own fallibility and his own temporality (‘too late to recall it’) in order to make us alert to the transcendent original that we must yearn to see behind his translation. Masten notes an example where this deprecation of the translation takes the form of a misogynistic metaphor;16 when dedicating his translation of Montaigne, Florio refers to it as ‘this defective edition (since all translations are reputed females), delivered at second hand …’.17 The ur-text is (or was) a virginal female body. As with many of his fellow translators, Florio apparently announces the difficulty or even impossibility of his own task even as he makes us yearn for the true Platonic original text that he can only attempt to represent. The metaphors used to frame early modern translations have received some attention recently. In one of a very few careful studies of the discourse surrounding translation in the Renaissance, Theo Hermans has codified many of the metaphors that circulated in translators’ prefatory material and traced some larger trends.18 He notes that in the earlier Renaissance most translators used metaphor and allegory to express their own derivative and servile relation to the inventio and the far greater beauty of their originals. However, a shift occurred roughly in the middle of the seventeenth century when translators begin to present themselves in a kind of mystical relationship with the original author. Indeed, whereas earlier translators tended to allegorize the original text, later translators tended to claim a metempsychic union with the dead author, so that the text the translator presented could be seen as a perfect expression of what the author would have written if he were a living Englishman. Some critics see this shift as an evolutionary progression from vagueminded metaphoric thinking to a modern posture of scrupulous translation. Hermans, on the other hand, is one of the few critics to observe the subtle mechanics of the earlier metaphoric mode of presenting translations without a tone of condescension. Nevertheless, the only answer that Hermans presents

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for the question of why earlier translators favoured metaphor and a posture of subservience vis-à-vis their originals is that they were still influenced by the medieval allegorical tradition, and that they sincerely believed translation to be a humble craft. But as Hermans shows, translators were often very creative in their construction of self-effacing metaphors. One translator writes ‘I do not affect to follow my author so close as to tread upon his heels’.19 Another tells us that he chooses to be a humble translator because he is afraid that if he tries to match the beauty of his originals he will suffer the fate of the hubristic figures Phaeton, Lucifer, and Pan, thus implicitly figuring the original author as the Helios, God, and Apollo, respectively.20 Florio refers to his version of Montaigne as beneath the original text itself just as ‘artes nature is short of natures art, a picture of a body, a shadow of a substance’.21 Does all this creativity merely express humility? I would suggest that, although the pretence is certainly humility, the very profusion of metaphors suggests a different goal: to entice the reader into imagining a true original, one that cannot be printed on the page. Indeed, I suspect that the typical Renaissance translator is demanding of his reader something like an Iserian response, to fill in the gaps of the translated text and search for a glorious absent ur-text. In so doing, the reader becomes engaged more profoundly with the book, and that goal is consonant with the overriding purpose of front matter – to advertise.22 In Thomas Hoby’s dedicatory letter to his translation of The Courtyer, Hoby puns on the title, referring to the book itself as a young and charming Italian courtier who is already well known in his home country, France, and Spain, but one who needs the favour of Lord Hastings in order to make a good name for himself in England: ‘hee is beecome an Englishman’.23 Hoby is able thus to mediate between two entirely different meanings of ‘The courtyer’: the Platonic ideal of sprezzatura to which the meaning of the text aspires, and the book itself, in international publication, a book which is presented as a cosmopolitan courtier.24 Likewise, Barnabe Riche introduces his translation of Herodotus thus: Right Courteous Gentlemen, we haue brought out of Greece into England two of the Muses, Clio and Euterpe, as desirous to see the lande as to learne the language; whome I trust you wil vse well because they be women, and you cannot abuse them because you be Gentlemen.25

Riche, like Hoby, personifies the text, but Riche gives the general reader (and not the patron) the responsibility of being the tour guide for these foreign visitors.26 The readers play a role in the metaphorical situation; they are encouraged to read a foreign text as ‘Gentlemen’ would entertain foreign women, both feeling and suppressing sexual desire.

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Metaphors of Inaccuracy By my soule ye prynters make such englyshe So yll spelled, so yll poynted, and so peuyshe That scantly one cane rede ….27

In this section I want to address a second characteristic of books that is frequently metaphorized: the idea of textual inaccuracy. The notion of studying the treatment of error would at first seem more suprising than the previous one, of translation. In modern books, textual error is never metaphorized, and even the practice of printing a list of errata has gone out of fashion; in the modern book, the publisher does everything possible to erase all traces of error. But this was not true in the Renaissance, when error was frequently both admitted and dealt with in creative ways. In order to explain this phenomenon, we may begin with Arthur Marotti’s recent observations on the nature of an early modern printed text: Print cultivated the notion of an ‘authorized’ text – with or without the cooperation of authors. Both publishers and authors began to express concern for the correctness of the texts being printed – a contrast to the more casual attitude toward texts in the manuscript system.28

The concern for accuracy was found not only in humanist publications but also in such ordinary literature as printed sermons, which were often presented as precise transcriptions of the orally delivered sermons.29 This concern is often expressed metaphorically. I shall begin with a remarkable example: Abraham Fraunce prefaces one of his books with a dedicatory epistle, explaining that he was forced to publish the work himself because it had been so terribly distorted by manuscript circulation. It was ‘so pitifully disfigured by the boistrous handling of vnskilfull pen men’ that the hero, Amyntas, ‘was like to haue come abroad so vnlike himselfe, as that his own Philis would neuer haue taken him for Amintas’.30 The accusation of a distorting agent elsewhere is often used as a negative contrast against the good text that the reader has in hand. But what is most remarkable about Fraunce’s scheme is that the heroine of his story is figured as a reader of the book, who would prefer an accurate text of her lover. Fraunce thus adroitly mixes real presence with textuality, and he does this so deftly that we might not even notice consciously that this is more than a witticism. Just as Hoby asks Hastings to greet a physical courtier, Fraunce asks us to imagine a heroine who is able to step outside the text and look in. Both Hoby and Fraunce deliberately confuse the barrier between the text and the reader, and in both cases that confusion makes the text seem social and interactive, rather than an inert object. The practice of calling attention to textual errors was so common for printers that it could be used to humorous effect. In Robert Copland’s Seuen Sorrowes

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that women haue when theyr husbandes be deade, from which the epigraph to this section comes, the reader is carefully positioned to view the text ironically, especially in a paratextual dialogue that Copland presents between a character bearing his own name and ‘Quidam’.31 As early as the 1560s (STC 5734), Copland adopts this form for the ‘Prologue’ before one of his pamphlets, which serves a function similar to the epistle to the reader: Copland Why should I muse muche tryfles for to wryte Or wanton toyes, but for the appetyte Of wandryng braynes, that seke for thynges new And do not reche if they be fals or trew. Quidam With what newes or here ye any tidinges Of the pope, of the Emperour, or of kynges Of martyn Luther, or of the great Turke Of this and that, and how the world doth worke. Copland So that the tongue must euer wagge & clatter And waste their wyndes, to medle of eche matter Thus ben we prynters called on so fast That maruayle it is, how that our wittes can last.32

The speakers decide that the most marketable text would be a satirical pamphlet entitled ‘the seuen sorowes that these women haue / whan that their husbandes been brought to graue’.33 This is, of course, the title of the satirical pamphlet for which the dialogue is a ‘Prologue’. Copland’s playful attribution of the text to ‘Quidam’ is an example of how often authorship is deflected or cloaked in prefatory materials. A brief inspection of Copland’s other entries in the STC betrays the fact that he was hardly as coy as he appears to be in printing such pamphlets. This ironic positioning of the text and the reader continues when Quidam brings up the issue of bad printers. Quidam tells Copland his idea for a text that will sell well. Copland asks him if he has a manuscript, and Quidam responds: I haue no boke, but yet I can you shewe The matter by herte, and that by wordes sewe Take your penne, and wryte as I do say But yet of one thyng, hertely I you praye Amende the englysh somwhat if ye can. And spel it true, for I shall tel the man By my soule ye prynters make such englyshe So yll spelled, so yll poynted, and so peuyshe That scantly one cane rede ….34

Copland objects to this accusation; printers do honest work, and Copland would never insult them in such a way. But of course, he might print such comments if

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someone (in Latin, quidam) else were to say them. Clearly, Copland is staging a routine that is rather like that of the modern-day ventriloquist, making Quidam insult other printers and then pretending to be shocked. But this joke helps to advance the overall purpose of the dialogue: to make sure that the reader knows that the main text of this satirical pamphlet is to be read ironically. A.W. Pollard was not the first to moralize textual mistakes.35 When early modern publishers acknowledge the idea of error (as opposed to specific errors in the text), they often do so with overtones of sin and fallibility. In their prefatory letter to Shakespeare’s First Folio, for example, Heminge and Condell go out of their way to stigmatize earlier quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays, thus valorizing the Folio edition that they introduce: ‘(before) you were abus’d with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors, that expos’d them’.36 The aspersion they cast on all previous texts of Shakespeare’s plays has had an enduring effect on modern criticism; indeed it has taken some time for bibliographers to reject the dichotomy, which Heminge and Condell self-servingly present, of good and bad publishers. What is not sufficiently recognized is how common, and how malleable, the notion of moralized printing is. Particularly in the front matter to religious texts, errata are often both real and thematized. The front matter to Nashe’s most religious text, Christs Teares over Ierusalem, contains an ordinary notice of specific errata. But a few pages earlier, amidst the humility of the epistle dedicatory, we also find the following comment: ‘Wit hath his dregs as wel as wine, Diuinitie his drosse. Expect some Tares in this Treatise of Teares’. Nashe’s humility is linked with religious observance: elsewhere he calls the epistle itself a ‘prayer’.37 The phonic similarity of ‘Tares’ and ‘Teares’ implicitly connects Nashe’s fallible text with human fallibility, and by extension original sin. Only Jesus can redeem the ‘Tares’ (of the text and of fallen man) by shedding His ‘Teares’ on the cross, and that is the point of the book. Among the several epistles prefacing his Resolves. Divine, Morall, Politicall, Owen Feltham includes deferential letters to patrons, but he adopts a ministerial voice in his letter ‘TO THE PERVSER’. In this letter he begins as a humble author asking for a reader who will inform him of errors in the text: ‘Et lectorem, et Correctorem liberum volui …. The noblest friend, is an honest boldnes in the notifying of errors’.38 So far this is a fairly ordinary admission of the fallibility of the printing process, but, as the letter goes on, Feltham’s point gradually becomes clear: ‘no Christian [is] so much his minds master, as to keepe precisely all his resolutions …. Hee is not a good man that liues perfect; but hee that liues as well as hee can, and as humane fraileties will let him’.39 Feltham casts his book as moral philosophy, essays that tell the reader how to behave in a moral manner in countless real-life situations. The reader can find errors in the text, but the clear implication is that Feltham’s

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basic purpose is to write a text that will find errors in its readers, and help to correct them through moral philosophy. Just as Feltham cannot perfectly enact his Resolves, so ‘no Christian’ can perfectly enact his ‘resolutions’, and this human weakness is why Resolves is necessary. Errata are implicitly equated with ‘humane fraileties’ and used both as a mirror for the reader and as a metaphor for man’s fallen state and his need for spiritual correction. The text says to its readers ‘Find faults in me and fix them, and meanwhile I will be finding and fixing faults in you’.40 In Surprised by Sin, Stanley Fish argues that Milton entraps the reader into an examination of her own sinful state.41 For example, when Satan speaks, the reader sympathizes with him, and then afterward recoils from her own sympathy when she realizes the context of Satan’s rhetoric. Fish’s argument would be strongly buttressed by making a reference to Feltham’s framing gesture. Feltham clearly does precisely what Fish suggests Milton does; both Feltham and Milton invite the reader into one position and then entrap her into another position where she herself, in a fallen state, is the real subject of the work. When the idea of error is not moralized, it is usually used as a means of asking the reader to see beyond the printed page, and to search for the original that the page strives to represent. The idea of error comes up again in the front matter to Resolves; the last page of front matter (sig. A4v), contains a list of errata. This is a real list, but underneath it we find a message, presumably from the publisher: The Authors absence ha’s made faults multiply; and if you mend not these, you iniure him: for, they are such as marre the sense, and doe even quite drowne the Conceit.

The nine lines of errors (and the generally high quality of the internal printed text) that the publisher presents hardly justify this claim. Clearly, the publisher is exaggerating the presence of error in order to engage the reader in a different way than Feltham’s epistle does; the publisher is asking the reader to be charitable and to see the conceit behind the text, and he is using errata as an excuse to invite the reader to engage deeply with the book. In this case, textual inaccuracy serves nearly the same function as the presentation to a translated text. By declaring the present text’s attempt and failure to capture a Platonic ideal conceit, the publisher is able to lure the reader into seeing the current text as a kind of smudged lens through which she must strain to see the purer thought which lies behind it. Before going on to the next paradigm of prefatory rhetorics, I want to examine one more case where error is exaggerated in order to make the reader search for the original true text behind the flawed page. Most recusant controversial literature was printed on the Continent, and these books were usually littered

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with errors because the printers very often did not speak English. But this very problem could be thematized in prefatory matter. One recusant author publishing in Louvain (or Leuven) prints what appears to be an exaggerated simulation of error at the very end of a book defending the Catholic faith: Excuse, guid reider, the erreurs committit in ye prenting. Considder the difficultie to prent our langage in a stra[n]ge countrey. God Keip zovv.42

At first, this looks like a ribbing of Flemish printers.43 In fact it has a more serious effect: it wins sympathy for the author’s message, which lies behind a flawed exterior. And it is hardly an accident that the most distorted phrase here is clearly meant to be read as a distortion of ‘God keep you’. In a secret Catholic text, those words have more than jocular meaning to those who might read the book. Ostensibly the target of this textual joke is Flemish printers, but in fact it gestures to the stifling effect of English censorship of Catholic texts, a regime that forces recusant discourse into second-rate media of communication. The examples of thematized error I have considered here run the gamut from prose romance to recusant literature, and this range suggests that error could be used for many different purposes depending on the nature of the text that was being framed. But in all these examples we can begin to see how early modern printers and authors, quite unlike their modern counterparts, used the idea of error in order to lure readers into complex engagements with books. III Lewd Textual Relationships In this section I intend to look at prefatory metaphors from another angle so as to isolate two specific kinds of metaphors that can be used to deal with a wide range of qualities any book may possess. I shall begin with the rhetoric of sexual intercourse, a set of metaphors that appears frequently in relation to printing.44 It is easy to see how a text could be figured as a private virginal manuscript awaiting circulation through print. ‘Pressing’, itself, could function in a bawdy sense, but the metaphorical link between printing and copulation goes beyond a bawdy joke, since both activities can connote reproduction, enfranchisement, and the transformation of a private thing into commodification and public circulation,45 as is exemplified in Mistress Page’s often quoted satirical vision of Falstaff’s print-shop in The Merry Wives of Windsor.46 In the front matter that frames George Pettie’s collection of novellas, A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, the act of publishing is presented not just as surreptitious, but as the kind of betrayal one might find inside a novella.47 R.B. presents himself as the publisher of Pettie’s text, declaring in a letter ‘To the gentle Gentlewomen Readers’ that he has broken the trust of his friend Pettie in order to please women. He defends himself thus: ‘I care not to displease twentie

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men, to please one woman’ (A2r).48 After this letter, we find out more about this betrayal as we encounter ‘The Letter of G.P. to R.B’. This is supposedly the letter that Pettie sent to R.B. along with the manuscript novellas, and it clearly instructs R.B. to ‘vse them to your owne priuate pleasure, and not to impart them to other … (A3r). Next we find a letter from the printer saying that he had qualms about printing a book under these circumstances, but decided to edit the work slightly and go ahead with printing. The reader is led into a position of voyeurism through these epistles, peeking in at what was ‘intended’ to be a private discourse; the very act of buying and reading the book makes us complicit in this betrayal.49 This sort of voyeurism is strikingly akin to incidents inside the novellas, such as the episode where Pasiphae shows the love-letter from Verecundus to King Minos, and thus to the entire court.50 The revelation of private letters is thus an appropriate bridge to Pettie’s collection of love-novellas. Indeed, the male reader is an interloper throughout the text: at first R. B. publishes the text to ‘please one woman’ and then throughout the interior text the readership is familiarly addressed as ‘gentlewomen’.51 The notion that this prefatory narrative is more literary than true is supported by Pettie’s preface to the subsequent The Civile Conversation; there he refers to the publication of A Petite Pallace without any indignation, and even at one point implies that it was an authorized publication after all. In that preface, Pettie refers to criticism he has received for publishing A Petite Pallace. The only reference to the ‘surreptitious’ nature of its publication is a weak gesture: Hauing (gentle Readers) by reason of a trifling worke of mine (which, by reason of the lightnesse of it, or at least of the keeper of it, flewe abroade before I knewe of it) already wonne such fame …, I thought it stood mee vppon, to purchase to my selfe some better fame by some better woorke, and to counteruayle my former Vanitie, with some formall grauitie.52

Pettie addresses critics who ‘tenderyng, as it were, my credit, thynke it conuenient that such as I am (whose profession should chiefely be armes) should eyther spende the tyme in wryting of Bookes, or publyshe them beyng written’ (1r, underline added). But he does not actually deny the charge; he goes on vigorously to defend the act of publishing A Petite Pallace, never once accusing his supposedly treacherous friend of doing the publishing. In short, if the letters before A Petite Pallace are not an authorial or collaborative frame, they are certainly not much of a betrayal. R.B. eroticizes the text and implicates the reader in a manner that is strikingly similar to the way in which Riche offers up his presentation of Herodotus. Perhaps this is no coincidence; one editor of Pettie has suggested that ‘R.B. … are possibly the reversed initials of Barnabe Riche’.53 Wall eloquently explains the dynamics of this kind of textual frame:

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The most common means for the writer or printer to ease the text into the public eye was for him to suggest that publication did not have full authorial consent. This strategy of dissociating text and author created a skewed vision of printed texts; they seemed to be private words snatched away from their producers and offered for sale to the public. Discourse was written as private and secretive matter unveiled in a moment of transgression. Reading became figured as an act of trespass.54

In John Day’s much-discussed epistle to his edition of The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex (or Gorboduc),55 he contrasts the present book with an earlier ‘bad’ edition (Q1) by setting forth an elaborate scenario whereby the earlier publishers kidnapped and raped the manuscript, which he heroically restores to respectability.56 We feel a certain amount of indignation at the textual rapist who wronged the virginal play, a man who, like Judas, ‘lacked a little money’.57 But this very location of money, dishonesty and commerce somewhere else helps to encase Day’s text in an ethos of pure and honest noncommerce where the victimized text can be comforted. Interestingly, a recent editor notes that despite ‘Day’s hyperbolical address, Q1 was not so corrupt that, if corrected, it could not be used for the copy-text for Q2’.58 In this case, as in that of Pettie’s supposedly unauthorized publication, a glance outside the text in question reveals what we may already suspect: the ‘facts’ of publishing are often subordinate to the need to melodramatize the act of publication. At the opening of the main text of a book on moral philosophy, Owen Feltham begins with a sexual metaphor: IDLE Bookes are nothing else, but corrupted tales in Inke and Paper: or indeed, Vice send abroad with a Licence: which makes him that reades them, conscious of a double iniurie: they being in effect, like that sinne of brutish Adulterie. For if one reades, two are catched ….59

Feltham likens the relationship between the writer and the reader of more salacious books to adultery wherein the two people are made guilty by one act. Implicitly, his own work is the opposite, legitimate textual intercourse within the virtuous state of matrimony. Like all authors (and human beings) Feltham is sinful, but his text constitutes an effort to repent and to reform others, whereas some bad authors produce texts in order to advertise and propagate their sins. In various ways, then, prefatory metaphors of sexuality tempt the reader into a closer engagement with the text, whether we are helping to comfort a sexually assaulted text, scorning other more immoral books, or even scorning the present text in a search for the original female virginal ur-text which preceded it.60 Furthermore, we have seen that the reader is not always invited to be so scorning of desire; Riche invites us to socialize with Clio and Euterpe, and, by his very caution that we do so like ‘Gentlemen’, he arouses our desire for these Greek muses. And perhaps Hastings is meant to be tempted when Hoby presents to him a young, cosmopolitan Italian courtier.

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IV Textual Births By far the most common kind of metaphor in front matter relates writing and publishing to labour and childbirth. One common conceit of prefatory epistles presents the main text as a baby in need of assistance, sometimes taking advantage of the parallelism of working to print a text and labouring to give birth. As de Grazia observes, The textual imprint as child recurs in preliminaries to early modern books …. Dedication pages abound in which imprinted children complain of having been disowned, orphaned, discredited and abused, often as spurious or illegitimate. Without parental protection of any kind, they seek patronage, a patron or foster father who would adopt and support.61

The image of a baby is a classic topos for inspiring caritas. This metaphor for textual production is obvious, and easily adaptable to the nature of the text and the prefatory writer. For example, one editor figures himself as the midwife, not the mother of the text. But he asks the reader to ‘help to support me poore Midwife, whose daring aduenture hath deliuered from Obliuions wombe, this ever-to-be-admired wits miracle’.62 This is a particularly interesting case because it shows one way in which the reader can be asked to become a part of the metaphor that frames the text, as an active participant; we are encouraged to help the midwife in her physical labour. It is also interesting that Oblivion is imagined as the mother. Allegorical personifications are common in frontispieces (Oblivio appears in the frontispiece of Raleigh’s History of the World),63 and this example demonstrates how one genre of front matter can borrow from another. In his prefatory epistle to Greene’s Menaphon, Nashe takes advantage of the opportunity to advertise his own previous book, the Anatomie of Absurditie.64 At one point Nashe tells the reader, ‘If you chance to meete it [Anatomie] in [St] Paules, shaped in a new suite of similitudes as if … it were propped at seven years’ end in double apparel, think his master hath fulfilled covenants, and onely cancelled the indentures of dutie’.65 Nashe’s allegory is a new twist on the book-as-child motif; here the text is an apprentice that has completed his indenture, rather than a child emerging from the womb. But what is most telling about this example is that Nashe imagines the reader meeting, not seeing, the book. This notion of a physical encounter between the reader and the personified text is reflective of the fundamental nature of anthropomorphization in book advertising. Some births are legitimate, and others are not; one can easily see how this fact can be linked to the production of books. In a dedicatory epistle that appears in his Academy of Love (1641), John Jonson says to his patron, ‘your good liking will protect me from all Momists and Zoylans; and in so doing, I shall not feare that any one wil say this my off-spring is illegitimate’.66 The dedicatee

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is presented as a guarantor of legitimacy, against the topoi of personified ill will, Momus and Zoilus. Johnson then refers to his text as a pitiful baby who ‘here lies mute, wrapped up in the purity of white sheets’ (A3v); the pun on bed sheets and sheets of paper mixes humour and caritas delicately. The text = child link is obvious, and for this very reason it is often slightly ridiculous. In the dedicatory epistle to Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, W[alter] B[urre], the publisher, figures the play as an infant in want of care.67 The conceit itself is humorous, and the first detail we learn is that the baby was ‘begot and born’ in eight days. In other words, the conceit itself is barely born before it is exposed for being an awkward comparison, an eightday pregnancy. The conceit is unpacked and yet continues awkwardly, not unlike the play which it introduces. Known facts about the play are elegantly dovetailed to the conceit; it was ‘utterly rejected’ (i.e., the performance did not go well) because it was ‘unlike its brethren’.68 It was on the brink of utter death when its patron, Master Robert Keysar, dramatically rescued it. Coming to the printer ‘ragged’, it was restored and was ‘desirous to try his fortune in the world’.69 After a short pregnancy, the baby reached adolescence almost as quickly. The conceit of the abandoned child elicits both sympathy and ironic humour. Before a play that parodies stage romance, we have a colourful letter that can be read as a parody of the text = baby metaphor; if it is ill-received, the author writes, the father will breed more brothers (plays?) to seek revenge. The reader is encouraged to feel pity, but failing that, fear will do. In a similar vein, Drayton worries in his epistle ‘To the Reader of the Barons Warres’ that he may be ridiculed for writing and publishing poetry. Drayton borrows a rejoinder from ‘that Spartan Prince, who being found by certaine Ambassadors playing among his Children, requested them to forbeare to censure, till also they had some of their owne’.70 But this common metaphor could also serve more serious purposes. In his prefatory letter dedicating the Arcadia to his sister, Sidney writes: For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my hearte, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulnes this child, which I am loth to father.71

Both versions of Sidney’s Arcadia, like most romances, hinge on the dislocation and reparation of familial bonds. By imaging himself standing over his text like a potentially murderous father, Sidney makes his work into a character: a baby who might have been abandoned if not for the patronage of his sister. The text itself, qua infant, is located in a dynamic familial drama. Sidney here adapts a prefatory trope to suit the genre of the main text, just as he prefaces his vigorous defence and praise of poetry with an anecdote of Pugliano, a comically overzealous praiser of horses. Moreover, he implicates himself in

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his text by presenting the act of scribal publication as the sort of melodramatic act that might take place in a romance. In reality, of course, publication in either the scribal or print medium was not nearly so dramatic. But Sidney elegantly implicates himself in the world of romance, and he subtly emphasizes this parallel between the paratextual narrative of publication and the internal diegesis of the romance by likening himself to Greek fathers: Arcadia is in Greece. This example might seem to undermine my essay, since Sidney is clearly not a commercial publisher; the Arcadia was initially conceived of as an intimate non-commercial textual exchange, and only after Sidney’s death was this letter used as a printed paratext. But, in fact, this example calls into question the dividing wall we almost inevitably place between an auteur like Sidney and a workman like Ponsonby, the text’s publisher. Both participated in an economy of textual transmission that had its particular dynamics, genres, and roles. Sidney had read his share of printed books, and his manuscript dedication was inevitably inflected by the ambient culture of textual advertisement. The private letter functions well as a public advertisement, and so Ponsonby printed it as a private text for the general reader to look in on, before buying and reading a text that contains more than its share of people who spy on private scenes. Once it left Sidney’s hands, even the very fact that this letter was originally a private, non-commercial manuscript could be used to market the printed version of the Arcadia. Paratexts stand at the margins and invite the reader in. To a virtually endless extent, a text can be re-encircled and marketed to a new audience each time it is transferred from stage to page, from French to English, or from manuscript to print. Prologues to plays, when printed, function as prefatory verse epistles to the reader; Sidney’s letter could well have been initially intended to be read not only by his sister but also, voyeuristically, by their coterie. Paratexts are always open to receive new contexts, new ironies, and new meanings. There have been several studies of the demise of Elizabethan liminal genres during the Enlightenment,72 and critics like Wolfgang Iser have pointed out how important readerly involvement is to the emerging genre of the novel. I would like to conclude by suggesting that as Renaissance liminality faded from fashion, it found a new incarnation in the novel. Iser has suggested that novels often construct an ‘implied reader’ who must perform certain roles while reading, and this is an excellent way of describing how Renaissance publishers coaxed the reader to adopt a particular role or roles best suited to engagement with each text. Iser’s concept of the ‘implied reader’ is a role that the text leaves open for, and indeed subtly encourages, the reader to occupy. For example, the reader in Pilgrim’s Progress is encouraged to join Christian in seeking clues for her own salvation, whereas the reader in Joseph Andrews is led into a position of constructing, in her own imagination, a combination of worldliness and

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virtue that is pointedly absent in the text itself.73 Iser’s paradigms of reading aptly describe how the reader interacts with these texts, but his insights could be traced backward in English books. Indeed, I suspect that a writer like Bunyan is drawing from a long tradition of paratextual induction in English front matter; Bunyan’s prefatory apology punningly figures reading as both a labour and a journey: ‘This Book will make a Travailer of thee’.74 In the early modern period, a wide range of books, even ‘non-literary’ ones such as Resolves, were framed with tropes of readerly involvement. Before too long, Enlightenment rationality began to frown upon what were seen as Renaissance eccentricities, considering such gestures to be quaint and unscientific, as de Grazia has demonstrated in Malone’s use of ‘authenticity’ to present Shakespeare in 1790;75 over the course of the eighteenth century, Shakespeare became a classic and translations became transparent. But the same century saw the invention of a genre that was specifically based on subjectivity, parallax, oblique reading and imaginative readerly engagement. I would suggest that Elizabethan genres of paratextual induction did not survive in those books the Enlightenment sought to characterize as objective, but that these techniques found a new life in the developing genre of the novel. In other words, the paratext of Sidney’s Arcadia may well be more of a proto-novel than Sidney’s romance itself. In time, the extra-diegetic frame of the (nonexistent) found or translated text would become characteristic of the Gothic novel, and within a century and a half letters like the ones which frame A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure would overtake the entire text of the epistolary novel. Just as they were being banished from the paratext, the genres of early modern advertising found new life by colonizing prose fiction and helping to transform it into the novel. As the example of the emblem attests, publishers did not only present literature; from the inception of print, they also helped to change its course. Notes 1

2

Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) and ‘Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 767–85; Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997); de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes’, in this volume. Especially influential on these issues have been Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in Early English Drama, eds John. C. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422, and Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

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Following the work of Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), critics have applied the term ‘paratext’ to anything in a book that lies outside of the main text. Genette intended the term ‘peritext’ to serve for this meaning, but his related term ‘paratext’ is the one that has caught on in subsequent criticism. Genette coins the term ‘peritext’ to refer to whatever frames the text in the original printed book, and breaks this field down into numerous grounds, such as authorial/non-authorial, truth/fiction, and so on. He uses the term ‘epitext’ to refer to anything related to the text which occurs outside of the book (such as contemporary gossip about the book); together, ‘peritext’ and ‘epitext’ constitute the ‘paratext’ (pp. 4–5). He goes on to suggest that the ‘paratext’ is a threshold, or – a word Borges used apropos of a preface – a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back. It is an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text), an edge, or, as Philippe Lejeune put it, ‘a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text’. (p. 2)

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The paratext is, in other words, a pivotal context for the work. The problem with applying Genette’s taxonomy to Renaissance front matter is that Genette’s terms are designed to cope with texts of the French nineteenth century. For Genette, the paratextual realm is a space where various figures, especially the main author, can fix or unfix the meaning of the central text. In Renaissance front matter, fixing meaning is subordinate to advertising the text; the purpose and the genres of front matter are entirely different in the Renaissance from those in the post-Enlightenment period, as de Grazia has shown (Shakespeare Verbatim, pp. 2, 49–93). Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 4. Pask is clearly not interested in previous mass-produced commodities, such as bricks, because they were not themselves discursive. Bricks were certainly marketed, but they were not advertised in the modern sense, because modern advertising thrives on the complex discursive and psychological relationships – often imagined as mutual – which exist between the product and the buyer. On these issues, the second volume of H.S. Bennett’s trilogy, English Books and Readers, 1558–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) is still unsurpassed. As Wall suggests, ‘it was only in the latter half of the sixteenth century that print became popular and affordable enough to come into real conflict with the still burgeoning manuscript culture’ (The Imprint of Gender, p. ix). See also Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1558–1603, pp. 269–321. Paul Voss argues that this development was spurred on in the latter years of the sixteenth century by a decline in the aristocratic patronage of printed books. Such a decline is easy to explain by pointing to the increasing output of printing: the number of potential patrons stayed the same while the number of books increased dramatically; patrons could not keep up. As Voss suggests, ‘Elizabethan printers, publishers and authors developed the advertising arts to help offset the decline in literary patronage’. See Voss, ‘Books for Sale: Advertising and Patronage in Late Elizabethan England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 733–57; 734.

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Even in basic decisions such as the size and format of a text the publisher shapes how literature is perceived. As one critic writes, ‘Whatever the author’s intentions about his book may be, it is the publisher who decides the guise, or disguise, under which the book enters the public domain. The publisher decides what the book is presented as’. T.A. Birrell, ‘The Influence of Seventeenth-Century Publishers on the Presentation of English Literature’, in Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English, eds Mary Jo Arn, et al. (Groningen: WoltersNoordhoft, 1985), p. 163. What is at stake in the title itself is best reflected in Birrell’s observation: ‘When a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century publisher wanted a translation of Ovid’s Amores to sound respectable, he called it Ovid’s Love Elegies and when he wanted to present it as something overtly sensational, he called it Ovid’s Amores’ (p. 169). That comment raises an important issue of this chapter: that publishers cannily negotiated the borderline between respectability and advertisement, knowing that legitimacy itself is as marketable as sex. Many medieval readers were not unduly tempted, because Ovid’s erotica were often presented in manuscript form without a title (see ‘Accessus ad Auctores: TwelfthCentury Introductions to Ovid’, trans. Alison G. Elliott, Allegorica 5 (1906), pp. 6–48), but print culture was never so bashful. 8 Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 36. See also Charles Hope and Elizabeth McGrath, ‘Artists and Humanists’, in Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 183–5. The most detailed treatment of the development of the idea of figures in Alciati’s emblem book can be found in Hessel Miedema, ‘The Term Emblema in Alciati’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968): 234–50. 9 Jesse Lander embraces this approach in his analysis of the evolving paratexts of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. As Lander observes, ‘If one starts from the assumption that the book is created collectively by a plurality of intentions, then all the elements that make up the book deserve consideration’. See Lander, ‘“Foxe’s” Book of Martyrs: Printing and Popularizing the Acts and Monuments’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, eds Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 69–92; p. 74. 10 As Masten points out, modern scholars are so heavily (and often unconsciously) biased toward the singular-author model that we tend to disdain collaborations or attempt to disentangle them by identifying an author and an interloper. Masten notes how textual intermediaries, such as Florio in his presentation of Montaigne, far from effacing themselves, in fact go to great lengths to entangle themselves in the ideas and mechanics of the books which they translate and present (Masten, Textual Intercourse, pp. 32–3). Alternatively, as Masten notes, many modern editors – tellingly – refer to collaboration as a ‘contagion’ (p. 17). 11 Some modes, such as lyric and drama, were gradually presented with more of the trappings of cultural legitimacy (the two books that are most often pointed to as markers of this increasing respectability are Tottel’s Miscellany [1557] and Ben Jonson’s Workes [1616]). Other subjects, such as medicine, went in the other direction, beginning as highly respectable Latin books and gradually acquiring populistic bastard children in the book culture; see Bennet, English Books and Readers. 12 In recent years, translation theory has burgeoned as a field of scholarly study, nurtured by university departments of comparative literature. But despite this expansion of translation theory, most ordinary modern translations from Plato to

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the Bible to Rousseau are still presented as if they were transparent presentations of the ideas which the author intended to express. In his study of English translation theory in the late Renaissance, T.R. Steiner states that ‘[i]n the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, there was no theory of translation, literary or any other kind’. English Translation Theory: 1650–1800 (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1975), p. 7. In Steiner’s analysis, Chapman’s prefaces to Homer are a key moment of theory-building, but Dryden is the first developer of a really coherent theory of translation. This is true if we understand ‘theory’ to refer to a systematic set of standards and guidelines, but what preceded ‘translation theory’ is worthy of more study. It is certainly unfair for Steiner to say that ‘Chapman virtually ended English insouciance regarding [translation] theory’ (p. 8). The sort of theory that can be found in front matter to translations before the evolving neoClassicism of Chapman and Dryden is indeed a different idiom, but it is not so much insouciant as allegorical and metaphoric. More recently, Micheline White has suggested that female translators had a much more important and interesting role in the book trade, and in religious controversy, than has been previously assumed. ‘Renaissance Englishwomen and Religious Translations: The Case of Anne Lock’s Of the Markes of the Children of God (1590)’, English Literary Renaissance 29 (Autumn 1999): 375–400. Along similar lines, Ana Kothe suggests that female translators like Isabella Whitney carve out an active role not merely for themselves, but for readers as well; the preface is the site for complicated maneuvering between the reader, the translator and the original text, as well as a contested site between gender roles. ‘Modest Incursions: The Production of Writers and Their Readers in the Early Modern Prefaces of Isabella Whitney and Margaret Tyler’, English Language Notes 37 (September 1999): 15–38. Holland, Henry, trans., A Treatise of Gods Effectual Calling, by Robert Rollock (1603, STC 21286), p. ¶3r. Linche, The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction (1599, STC 4691), p. [A4]v. Masten, Textual Intercourse, p. 60. John Florio, trans., The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses, by Michel de Montaigne (1603, STC 18041), p. A2r. Hermans, ‘Images of Translation: Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation’, in The Manipulation of Literature, ed. Theo Hermans (London: Croom Helm, 1985). Hermans, ‘Images of Translation’, p. 108. Hermans, ‘Images of Translation’, p. 114. Hermans, ‘Images of Translation’,p. 115. See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Iser’s understanding of the psychological responses of the reader hinges on role-playing, and thus is particularly suited to an understanding of the identification patterns that readers adopt when encountering paratexts, since paratexts explicitly demand an action from the reader, i.e., purchasing the book. Jauss’s typology of ‘Interaction patterns of identification with the Hero’ (set forth on p. 159, and explained pp. 152–88) is grounded on Northrop Frye’s typology of the hero, and shares with Frye a tendency to essentialize literature and set aside its material context. Hoby, Thomas, trans., The Book of The Courtier From the Italian of Count Baldassare Castiglione: Done Into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, facs. ed. with an

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Introduction by Walter Raleigh (1561, facs., New York: AMS Press, 1967), p. 5. This topos of the foreign text as a tourist may be consciously or unconsciously related to the fact that in English the word ‘translate’ still contained, in addition to the modern meaning, the sense of change of physical location, e.g., to translate a bishop. For an insightful treatment of the conjunction of these two meanings of ‘translation’ in the Renaissance, see Karlheinz Stierle, ‘Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation’, in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, eds Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 55–67. 24 Ana Kothe has recently argued that Isabella Whitney outlines a similarly active role for the reader in her preface to A Sweet Nosgay, Or Pleasant Posye: contayning a hundred and ten Phylosophicall Flowers. Kothe suggests that Whitney has described and inscribed herself within an economy of readers that includes the anonymous reader of the printed artefact going up for sale. This economy does not describe the reader as a passive recipient of the writer’s action: Whitney’s reader – male, female, common, or otherwise – is expected to participate in gathering his or her own collection of ‘flowers’, just as she did. (‘Modest Incursions’, p. 25) 25 Riche, Barnabe, trans., The Famous Hystory of Herodotus. Deuised into Nine Bookes (1584, STC 13224), p. A3v. 26 The internal text is divided into the Clio book (beginning at folio 1r) and the Euterpe book (beginning at folio 69v). 27 Robert Copland, The seuen sorowes that women haue when theyr husbandes be deade ([1568?], STC 5734), p. [A3]r. 28 Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell, 1995), p. 230. 29 Bennett, English Books and Readers, p. 153. 30 Abraham Fraunce, trans., The Lamentations of Amyntas for the Death of Phillis, by Torquato Tasso (1587, STC 23692), p. ¶2r. 31 The dialogue form was common in pamphlet literature; see Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets 1580–1640 (Rutherford: Associated University Press, 1983), p. 257. 32 Copland, Seven Sorows, p. A1v. 33 Copland, Seven Sorows, p. A2r. 34 Copland, Seven Sorows, pp. [A2]v–[A3]r. 35 Pollard has been blamed for creating the categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos with respect to Shakespeare’s plays. But as Paul Werstine notes, Pollard himself shows a more subtle sense of what those terms mean than critics who adopted his binary opposition. ‘Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: “Foul Papers” and “Bad” Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65–86. 36 The First Folio of Shakespeare: 1623. facs. ed. Doug Moston (New York: Applause, 1995), p. A3r. 37 The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, (1904–1910, reprinted Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), p. 2:[9]. 38 Feltham, Resolves, p. [A4]r. 39 Feltham, Resolves, p. [A4v]. 40 Though cleverly deployed, Feltham’s basic configuration is quite old. Geoffrey Galt Harpham has noted a similar use of the ‘imperfect text’ topos in hagiography. Roger Pooley summarizes Harpham’s argument thus: ‘Harpham notes that Athanasius

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knows that an account and a lived life [of Saint Anthony] cannot be the same, in a parallel to the way that his readers’ imitation of Anthony’s life cannot attain to his perfection, but that “virtue resides in the effort”’. The role of the preface in pointing out the imperfections of what follows thus parallels writerly and readerly attempts at representation. Pooley, ‘I confesse it to be a mere toy’: How to Read the Preliminary Matter to Renaissance Fiction’, in Critical Approaches to English Prose Fiction 1520–1640, ed. Donald Beecher (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1998), p. 112. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Toronto: Macmillan, 1967). John Hamilton, A Facile Traictise (Lovan [Louvain]: 1600, STC 12730), p. [x6]v. This book is filled with printing errors, so it is difficult to say with certainty that the passage quoted contains simulated errors and not real ones. Nevertheless, on the same page, we find a sentence which is printed more accurately: ‘God forbid (sayes S. Paul) that I glore in ony thing, bot in the croce of our Iord Iesus Christ’. Louvain was historically split between French and Flemish speaking communities; these errors seem more like mock-Flemish than mock-French. In ‘Imprints’, de Grazia provides an incisive study of the semantic and epistemic implications of the metaphors that circulate around the textual creation of books and the sexual creation of babies, as well as other scenarios, such as imprinting wax and sodomitic pressing. Gordon Williams also touches on the ‘book-woman equation’ and its various lewd metaphors, often involving opening the pages/labia of the book/woman to read/penetrate it/her. Williams, Shakespeare, Sex and the Print Revolution (London: Athlone, 1996), pp. 48–50. Sexual metaphors for writing were commonplace. The ideas of inscribing a blank (virginal) feminine page with a phallic pen, or pressing it with masculine type, occur often in poetic treatments of writing; see, for example, Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1998), pp. 148–53. In The Norton Shakespeare, eds Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), this passage appears as 2.1.65–9. George Pettie, A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure ([1576], STC 19819). Juliet Fleming, in ‘The Ladies’ Man and the Age of Elizabeth’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 158–81, explores the paratext of this book in its relation to the gender anxiety of male writers under the reign of a queen. Fleming productively reads the complicated framework which activates a Freudian ‘dirty joke’ situation of homosocial bonding, and simultaneously ruptures that bond with the treacherous act of publication. Fleming defines the ‘ladies’ text’ as an oddly ambivalent performative masculinity where the book is ostensibly presented to a female audience, and she shows how this trope circulates between male authors such as Riche and Lyly, a circulation which in itself hints at the homosocial nature of this apparent service to women. Gordon Williams discusses the concept of ‘Reader-Spectator as Voyeur’ (Shakespeare, Sex, p. 46). He adopts a stance similar to mine, analyzing the paratextual presentation of a voyeuristic text to a tempted reader, and also noting how Sidney treats the reader similarly inside the New Arcadia (pp. 46–8). I. Gollancz, ed., A petite Pallace of Pettie his pleasure (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908) 2, p. 100. In her reading of this text, Wall agrees that the publisher figures the reader as a voyeur, but she does not address the connection of this position with the genre of

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the main text (Imprint, pp. 174–5). She writes, ‘Prefaces that construct and display a sphere coded as private cast the reader into the role of voyeur, one who partakes of forbidden discourse and is complicitous in stealing a glance at clandestine words’ (Imprint, p. 176). George Pettie, trans., The Ciuile Conuersation, by Stefano Guazzo (1581, STC 12422), p. 1r. Gollancz, ed., A petite Pallace, p. 1:xxv. Wall, Imprint, p. 173. Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc [1570]: The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, facs. (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1968). Wall provides an analysis of this epistle, in which she reads it more psychologically than I do. She suggests, ‘Although the printing of the authorized text supposedly erases its wayward and lewd history, the publisher’s lengthy analogy indelibly inscribes the text as a promiscuous and immoral object’ (Imprint, p. 184). Douglas A. Brooks takes a more pragmatic stance, arguing that Day’s penury encouraged him to construct an ‘elaborate and masterful sales pitch’, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 44. Dekker echoes this metaphor, applying it not to the abuse of one text but to the abuse of the very idea of textual knowledge itself. In the midst of railing against unscrupulous pamphlet-writers, he exclaims, ‘O sacred Learning! why doost thou suffer thy seauen leaued tree, to be plucked by barbarous and most vnhallowed handes? Why is thy beatifull Maiden-body, polluted like a strumpets and prostituted to beastly and slauish Ignorance?’ The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Alexander Grosart (London: Hazell, Watson and Viney, 1884–86), 3:246. In early modern typography, ‘Ignorance’ is capitalized because it is an important noun, but there is an ambiguity here because ‘Ignorance’ could also be a personified abstraction, to be imagined as a ‘beastly and slauish’ customer at a brothel. Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc: or Ferrex and Porrex, ed. Irby B. Cauthen, Jr (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. xxix. Owen Feltham, Resolves. Divine, Morall, Politicall [first century] ([1623?], STC 10755), p. B[1]r. Wall points to one prefatory writer, Anthony Scoloker, who satirizes others: He [i.e., the affected kind of prefatory writer, whom Scoloker scorns] is A man in Print, and tis enough he hath under-gone a Pressing (yet not like a Ladie) though for your sakes and for Ladyes, protesting for this poore Infant of his Brayne, as it was the price of his Virginitie borne into the world in teares.

Part of Scoloker’s mockery hinges on his ridicule of the other author’s gender confusion; Scoloker is ridiculing the ostentatious and contradictory prefatory metaphors, where an author presents himself as a shy virgin, and also ‘A man in Print’. He implies that, by using conflicting metaphors to humble themselves to please the audience, other authors have entirely lost all integrity and even all identity. Scoloker mocks what Wall terms ‘the perplexing mix of gendered roles evoked by the rhetoric of publication’ (Imprint, p. 2). 61 de Grazia, ‘Imprints’. 62 Henry Olney, An Apologie for Poetrie, by Philip Sidney, (1595, facs., New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), p. [A4]r. 63 Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (1614, STC 20637).

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64 Thomas Nashe, preface, Menaphon: Camilla’s Alarm to slumbering Euphues in his melancholy cell at Silexedra, by Robert Greene, ed. Brenda Cantar (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1996). 65 Menaphon, p. 94. 66 John Johnson, The Academy of Love: describing ye folly of younge men, & ye fallacy of women (1641, STC J782), p. A3r–v. 67 Francis Beaumont, Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Michael Hattaway (London: Ernest Benn, 1969). 68 Zachary Lesser has recently suggested that this reference to the theatrical failure of the play, though it may well be true, serves to complement Burre’s presentation of the quarto as a rarefied text for people who felt themselves to be on the upper end of the playbook market. See his essay, ‘Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, English Literary Renaissance 29 (Winter 1999): 22–43; 24–5. 69 Beaumont, Knight, p. 3. 70 The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1931–41), p. 2:5. 71 Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 57. 72 For example, Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim and Steiner, English Translation Theory. 73 Iser, The Implied Reader, pp. 1–56. 74 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N.H. Keeble (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 6. 75 This is the central argument of Shakespeare Verbatim.

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CHAPTER 9

Printing Bastards: Monstrous Birth Broadsides in Early Modern England Aaron W. Kitch From their inception in England around 1500, printed broadside ballads addressed a wide range of subjects in the service of diverse functions. For a penny, customers could purchase a religious primer, an account of the King of Scotland’s murder, a prayer for Queen Elizabeth, a description of a townleveling fire, an epitaph of a London alderman, the complaint of a sinner, the ‘fantasies of a troubled man’s head’, or a political ‘flyting’ of a disgraced courtier – all inscribed in ballad verse and printed on a single sheet of paper.1 The broadside format demanded brevity, but it also gave printers and engravers the chance to experiment with new layouts and decorative designs – and to explore new markets for cheap print commodities. Appropriating the traditional oral ballad, the printed ballad appealed to literate and illiterate readers and listeners alike; its pictures might appeal to any tavern-goer from where it hung on the wall, just as its recitation by a traveling chapman could entice anyone within hearing. Though most of sixteenth-century broadsides focus on London events and topics – raging against ostentatious dress, the greed, of merchants, or the godlessness of courtiers – some also express nostalgia for ‘neighborly love’ and the ‘true dealing’ associated with a disappearing rural England.2 A series of broadside ballads about monstrous births appeared in England during the 1560s and quickly achieved popularity, based on the number of copies that survive relative to other types of ballad from the same period. These ballads, and others like them, denote a new focus of printed ballads after 1550 on sensational events in England, though their fascination with monstrosity also aligns them with what Jean Céard calls ‘l’age d’or des prodiges’ (the golden age of prodigies) – when authors from Pierre Boaistau to Rabelais and Francis Bacon distinguished between natural and unnatural signs to test the limits of established systems of thought.3 Monstrous birth broadsides combine for the first time among the extant ballads woodblock illustrations, ballad verses, and a journalistic prose section (Figures 9.1–9.3). Their self-described function was, as one ballad puts it, ‘to move us wretched sinners to amendment of our wicked lives, by this lamentable Spectacle for all men & women to behold’.4 Following Céard’s arguments about early modern European prodigies, modern critics like Lorraine Daston, Katharine Park,

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The true description of two monsterous children (c. 1560)

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The true reporte of the forme and shape of a monstrous childe (c. 1560)

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The forme and shape of a monstrous childe borne (c. 1560)

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and Dudley Wilson include monstrous birth broadsides when discussing the epistemic shift from pre-Baconian interpretations of prodigies as theological signs or ‘portents’ to quasi-scientific analyses of supernatural phenomena as facts or ‘evidence’.5 According to this historical narrative, prodigies are for the early modern period a litmus test for established systems of thought – a way of moving beyond both classical accounts by Aristotle, Cicero, and Pliny and Christian interpretations by Augustine and Aquinas – and an impetus for the creation of new disciplines of fact-based inquiry into the natural world. As compelling as this narrative is within the histories of science and natural philosophy, it operates necessarily at the expense of the formal specificity that frames its evidence, tending to collapse broadsides, medical discourse, the recorded testimonies at trials, and sonnets into homologous forms of ‘data’ that provide equal access to the collective epistemology of an age. But English monstrous birth ballads achieve their cultural meaning and historical importance as a result, in part, of their formal attributes. Indeed, they reveal much about sixteenth-century print practices as reflections on their conditions of production within a Tudor print industry that was undergoing consolidation and increased regulation. I will argue that the monstrous birth broadsides employ biological disfiguration as a way of navigating a series of connected anxieties surrounding social and textual reproduction, in the process of advancing the cause of print as a proper medium for divine revelation. Residues of anxiety remain in the production of these ballads – including their association with excessive and unregulated production, diminished cultural authority, and the disenfranchisement of rural husbandmen and yeomen farmers from new socioeconomic structures. According to surviving records, the printing of monstrous birth broadsides peaked at a time of intense print regulation, one that included the 1538 royal proclamation that no book in English was to be printed without prior authorization by an appointed representative of the crown, the formal charter of the Stationers’ Company in 1557, the Company’s renewed ordinances of 1562 that cemented its hierarchical structure, and the six-part decree by the Star Chamber in 1566 reinforcing the Stationers’ power to search and seize illegal printed matter from any warehouse, printing shop, bookseller’s stall, or port in the realm.6 An early catalyst for print regulation in England was the Lutheran reform movement and its perceived threat to Henry VIII, who took measures to prevent European propaganda from reaching English soil. In 1524, the Bishop of London was privately urging booksellers to reject Protestant books and treatises printed across the Channel. By 1530, a formal proclamation took aim at the potential blasphemy of imported pamphlets and chapbooks. A 1538 edict forbade any book from printing in England until it had been approved by a royal licenser.7 The 1557 Charter of the Stationers’ Company, which established the sole right of the 97 freemen of the Stationers’ Company to print books

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in England, extended the authority of search and seizure of illegal, seditious, heretical, or illegally produced printed materials. As a formal agreement, it helped to define the political and social status of print as an industry by legislating legitimate and illegitimate content. It also established the Company as a force of mediation between a government anxious to regulate the content of printed matter and a group of printers eager to protect their commercial interests by securing monopolies and patent rights from the crown on entire classes of books and other printed matter.8 Though one extant monstrous birth broadside was printed in 1552 by John Day,9 most of the extant copies on the subject of monstrous births were printed between 1562 and 1568. Day’s broadside was itself printed shortly after King Edward instituted reforms in press licensing that required the pre-print licensing of all works by the King or one of his deputies – a proclamation that, as Cyndia Susan Clegg suggests, was ‘far more intrusive than any Henry had instituted’.10 Queen Elizabeth’s 1559 Injunctions to the Company laid the foundation for Episcopal licensing of the press, ordering that ‘no manner of person shall print any manner of book or paper, of what sort, nature, or in what language soever it be, except the same be first licensed by her majesty by express words in writing’. Elizabeth singles out ‘pamphlets, plays, and ballads’ as especially ‘unseemly for Christian ears’ and orders a specific group of royal commissioners to oversee their licensing and production.11 These injunctions and provisions for regulation would have made printers aware of the political ramifications of what they printed, especially in relation to the specific forms of print they produced. The 1560s witnessed a new series of regulations, including the 1566 Star Chamber proclamation reinforcing the authority of any two members of the Company to search for illicit materials in any port or workhouse or shop in the country, extending to them the power ‘to open and view all packs’ with impunity.12 Though official censorship of printed matter was neither consistent nor uniformly logical, the political stakes of print, including the specific form of print in question, were extremely marked in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. The scholarship on Elizabeth’s censorship practices has produced important but conflicting accounts of her efforts to restrict print production,13 but it should not be forgotten that she also intervened in specific cases to oversee that certain kinds of print were produced in certain situations, such as in producing a series of Irish broadsides printed in Gaelic to promote Protestantism in 1571, for which a typeface was invented that became known as ‘Queen Elizabeth’s types’.14 I would suggest that the monstrous birth broadsides as a print-oriented genre should be understood in relation to these and other efforts by the crown and the Stationers’ Company to regulate and oversee the printing trade. The ballads’ repeated obsession with aberrations of natural form represented by the figure of the monstrous child – the potentially endless deviations from the norm that

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the human body can take – occurs at the same time that the broadside format itself becomes targeted within the Stationers’ company as a troubling form of print. Ballads were especially hard to regulate due to their small size and ease of dissemination. The Stationers’ Company punished the few transgressors they could find, marking printers in the official Registry. But since the singlesided broadside could be produced by printers and disseminated by itinerant chapmen (thus circumventing the booksellers), it was an easy commodity to print illegally. Approximately 2,000 ballads were recorded in the Stationers’ Register from 1557 to 1600, but conservative estimates of the number actually produced during that period start at twice that number.15 The more the print industry was regulated by a formally codified set of rules that were overseen by a hierarchy of members of the Company that extended from the lowest apprentice to the governing Warden, the more the ballad became tainted as a dangerous form of print. Because of their small size, popularity, and ease of dissemination, ballads were increasingly seen as invitations to print piracy.16 Broadsides were relatively easy to produce and could be disseminated by itinerant salesmen and women, bypassing the bookstall or shop as a conventional site of sale. As a form, the broadside thus gave rise to a number of anxieties among print producers.17 The broadside ballad’s eventual association with (and degradation as) popular culture – part of what Peter Burke calls the ‘withdrawal’ of the upper classes from shared popular culture around the turn of the sixteenth century – only extended these anxieties.18 These attributes of the broadside are important for understanding the monstrous birth broadsides as a class-inflected product and help to account for why many parents of deformed children in the broadsides are described as yeoman farmers or tradesmen. As the ballad’s cultural capital decreased, print producers used the topos of the monstrous birth as a way to displace anxieties about natural and unnatural forms of print production onto the processes of biological reproduction among a certain class. The anonymous author of the Parnassus plays gives us a representative picture of the lowly status of ballads, especially in relation to sexual reproduction, when a character in Return From Parnassus proclaims: ‘[One] who blurs fair paper with foul bastard rimes, / Shall live full many an age in latter times’, mocking the balladeer who seeks fame through his or her rhymes: ‘Who makes a ballad for an ale-house door, / Shall live in future times for ever more’.19 Thomas Nashe similarly loathes the ubiquitous ‘babbling Ballads … which every red-nose Fiddler hath at his fingers end’.20 The public threat of ‘filthy ballads’ was in their capacity for exciting lust and ‘excess’, as William Prynne suggested – moral consequences that were connected, it would seem, to the ballads’ own material excesses as a product of the printing press.21 A 1562 monstrous birth broadside associates the deformed infant precisely in these terms, a deformity ‘caused of want or to[o] much store / Of matter’.22

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Though representations of monsters have been popular at least since classical Greece, they accumulated several specific political associations in the sixteenth century. Aristotle took a broad view of monstrosity as a category of deviation from the norm and understood monstrous births to be caused by a degenerative mixture of seminal fluid.23 Pliny and Cicero followed with accounts of the monstrous in relation to divine providence that were Christianized by Augustine and his accounts of the monstrous in relation to the all-encompassing natural canvas of God’s creation.24 But the meaning of monsters took a more material turn in Renaissance Europe, initially in the Italy of the guerre horrende and then as part of continental Reformation propaganda. Ottavia Niccoli speculates that popular prophetic treatises such as Giuliano Dati’s Del diluvio di Roma of 1495 established a genre of vernacular print designed for a popular audience.25 Dati’s verse prognostications took the monster as a symbol fit for global interpretation, but it was Martin Luther who articulated a specific religious and political purpose for monsters when he included two woodcuts depicting a ‘monk-calf’ and a ‘pope-ass’ in a 1523 pamphlet whose features were meant to suggest, by analogy, the monstrosity of the papacy. Luther’s populist pamphlets were translated into French, Dutch, and English as part of a strategic appeal to popular rather than clerical culture in advancing the cause of church reform.26 His use of the printed broadside in this way helped to define the print medium for the first time as a mode of international vernacular communication. German and French precursors of the English printed broadsides in the sixteenth century emphasized the pictorial aspect, sometimes printing illustrations alone (without any text) and likely inspiring English printers to experiment with the form themselves.27 The prose passages that almost always accompanied the English broadsides produced compelling arguments for the truth and legitimacy of the events described and suggested that the ballads were reaching a more literate audience, since these passages were probably not sung aloud to an audience by the peddler. The emphasis on factual detail, detached mode of narration, and objective language of description in these prose sections anticipates the ‘objective’ style of news reporting that started in earnest in the 1620s. Such prosaic narration can be found in the monstrous birth broadsides, as in the following description: Margaret Mere, Daughter to Richard Mere of the said Towne of Maidstone … was delivered of the same childe the 23rd day of October last past, in the year of our Lord, 1568, at 7 of the clock in the afternoon…having as it were stumps on the hands, the left leg growing upward toward the head, and the right leg bending toward the left leg, the foot thereof growing into the buttock of the said left leg.28

Large woodcut illustrations brought prominently to the foreground gave monstrous birth broadsides increased representational power of expression,

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but again the practice of early modern woodblock illustration was tainted, as James A. Knapp argues in this volume, as a bastardized form of artisan labor. English broadsides later in the sixteenth century resemble the earlier prognostications of Dati, which take a more universal approach in interpretation and prefer to spread blame around more generally. But, as we will see, this universalism actually conceals a specific class bias. Luther’s notion of analogizing the body of the monster piece by piece does, however, seem to influence a 1568 monstrous birth broadside that interprets the gaping mouth of the child as the poisonous speech of the English, the child’s fingerless hands an index of English indolence. The repeated imperative in the ballad to repent for one’s sins and to ‘mend the monstrous life… / Lest endless death’ result, would have been familiar to original listeners given the propensity for Christian writers in the sixteenth century to interpret all portents, including natural disasters and astrological signs, in providential terms.29 English monstrous birth ballads use the monster as an object of instruction to the population at large, reading deformed births within a providential framework as one of many portents announcing God’s omnipotence and his ultimate judgment. While eschewing the customary anti-papist rhetoric common to other broadsides of the time,30 they nonetheless display a normative Protestantism appropriate to the Elizabethan Settlement era. As such, they can be loosely included among the series of providence tales tradition revealing God’s presence on earth in unexplained phenomena in the service of Protestant doctrine.31 This Protestant hermeneutic more fundamentally allows the ballads to justify their own representation of highly sensational and potentially degrading content by re-inscribing such transgression within a larger providential order. What seems like an enormous breach in nature is actually the result of God’s will; the pain and suffering of the innocent child forms a necessary prelude to the reader’s deliverance from sin: ‘Wherein the goodness great of God / we way and set so light / by such examples calling us, / from sin both day and night’.32 This didacticism aligns the monstrous birth broadsides with traditional models of early modern writing as moral edification, even while its material embodiment is the result of technological innovation. The printers and authors use, in other words, more conventional modes of interpretation within the forward-looking medium of the broadside. Such a move renders them as what Wendy Wall (after Oswald Spengler) calls a ‘pseudomorph’, a printed work that resembles manuscripts in order to disguise its innovation and buttress its authority.33 Broadside ballads look backwards and forwards simultaneously in their appropriation of older forms of discourse (the traditional oral ballad) and in using modern print technology for social and political ends. The broadsides employ perhaps a more traditional hermeneutic to conceal or legitimate their own innovative and potentially disruptive form.

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The ballads recuperate the supposed transgression of deformity as a way to legitimate their own authority as printed matter. Their rhetoric is steeped in the Book of Revelation. A 1562 ballad reminds the reader that ‘The scripture sayeth, before the end / Of all things shall appear, / God will wondrous strange things send, / as some is [sic] seen this year’.34 Indeed, the act of printing the broadsides, which audiences might construe as the commercial exploitation of suffering on the part of printers and balladeers, becomes an act justified and even demanded by God. The craft of printing can thus perform God’s work: No carver can, nor painter may, The same so ugly make, As doeth itself show at this day, A sight to make the[e] quake! But here thou haste, by printing arte, A sign thereof to se; Let each man say within his heart, – It preacheth now to me.35

The broadside confirms its own power to represent through its particular printed format what painting and sculpture cannot. At the same time, this particular ballad affiliates itself with the oral culture of the clergy, since it ‘preacheth’ to each reader, providing immediate access to his or her conscience. The ballads also emphasize a process of self-education that stresses the warm humanity of Christ’s redemption over the impersonal and externalized Law of Moses. The ballads remind the listener: ‘For if we printed in our breast, / these signs and tokens strange: / [They] Would make us from our sins to shirk / our lives anew to change’.36 The ballads align the theological problem of excessive sin that must materialize in some form in order to be recognized (i.e., by sinners who can then repent) with the broadside medium itself. The ballads emphasize how tragic deformation of nature by God’s will actually serves a greater moral good, just as the potentially untrustworthy broadside format itself may seem like an aberration, but it is really a form of didactic entertainment that can contribute to the general welfare of the English nation. A ballad describing a monstrous child born at Chichester reminds the reader that ‘Before the earth was overflow[ing] / With waters huge throughout / He sent them Noah, that holy one / Who daily went about to warn people’.37 The 40 day flood, a global catastrophe, signifies the enormous surplus of sin that it simultaneously obliterates and symbolically cleanses. A monstrous birth ballad of the same year reads likewise: ‘So grossest faults brast [i.e., burst] out in body’s form, / And [a] monster caused of want or too much store / Of matter, shows the sea of sin, whose storm / Overflows and ’whelms virtue’s barren shore’. Here surplus sin caused by the people must find suitable form, must not escape ‘the shameful mark / Of bastard son in bastard shape descried’.38

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Because of the marking of the printed ballad itself as a bastardized and always potentially illicit form of print, this ‘shameful mark’ becomes the broadside’s own as well as that of the deformed infant. The subtext of the ‘unnatural shapes and forms, / thus brought forth in our days’ is thus the broadside itself as an ‘unnatural shape’ that uses the topic of monstrous birth to explore its own condition. The broadside that chastises its readers by suggesting that ‘Where we do run at random wide, / our selves flattering still: / And blazing others’ faults and crimes, / yet we ourselves most ill’ perhaps protests too much.39 No textual artifact had been so efficient or thorough in ‘blazing others faults’ as the monstrous birth broadsides. This kind of self-consciousness of the broadside’s own form is heightened in the monstrous birth broadsides when compared to extant ballads from the same period.40 The monstrous birth ballads were highly self-conscious about their own formal properties in relation to other ballads. Even more overtly political broadsides, like the staged debates between Thomas Camel and Thomas Churchyard in 1552 that was implicitly about the social function of broadside ballads, fail to make direct allusions to their own formal and material properties. Given their popularity, it is not surprising that some of the monstrous birth broadsides found their way into the drama of the period. Shakespeare includes references to monstrous birth broadsides in The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, for example. Mark Thornton Burnett has uncovered some of the connections between The Tempest and contemporary wonder books, including possible allusions to monstrous birth broadsides in Stephano and Trinculo’s comments about Caliban in Act 2.41 The figure of the conny-catching balladeer Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale memorably situates broadside commerce in the countryside. One of the broadsides mentioned by Autolycus in 4.4.260 actually alludes to the monstrous birth broadside genre itself (‘how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden’). Shakespeare’s satirical portrait of Mopsa and Dorcas suggests that a more cultured and urban audience should distance itself from such behavior, but the scene is interesting as a representation of urban fantasy about rural culture in the early seventeenth century, if not as sociological evidence of patterns of rural literacy and print consumption.42 The authors and printers who created the first monstrous birth broadsides in England were not yet the struggling printers onto whom the ballad trade would be foisted later in the century. They were major figures in the Stationers’ company – men like John Alde, William Griffith, and John Day who were original signers of the Company charter in 1557 and each of whom printed at least one monstrous birth broadside in his career. These were men centrally involved in a fledgling print industry whose sustenance was their highest priority. Their choice of subject matter, as of format and style, was dictated as often as possible by the tastes of their consumers, most of whom were probably in London.

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But even though the monstrous birth broadsides were all produced by professional printers in the urban setting of London, they share in common their references to the English countryside. A reader or listener who had contact with all of the extant monstrous birth broadsides might well conclude that these kind of deformities happened exclusively in places like Maidstone, Colchester, Buckinghamshire, or the town of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. The class status of the parents is also remarkably consistent: the broadsides normally name the parents in the prose section, where the father is often listed as a husbandman or a tradesman.43 As in The Winter’s Tale, one subtext of the monstrous birth broadsides in depicting aberrant offspring is the rural laboring class whose connection with deformity reveals a specific set of class dynamics. Monstrous birth broadsides transfer anxieties of deformed biological reproduction onto a rural peasant class as a way of understanding their own print status, a process that responds in part to the historical transition from feudal to capitalist society in England. The yeoman farmer who is most often named as father in the ballads plays a key role in Karl Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation, the process by which a surplus labor force originally emerges from the dissolution of feudalism and which provides the critical mass for development of capitalist social organization. In Marx’s account, these agricultural laborers, uprooted by enclosure and consolidation of farming practices, find themselves forced to sell their own labor power to others. This break with feudal social organization is experienced as a disruption in their relation to the distribution of labor and the control of means of production.44 Marx defines primitive accumulation in volume 1 of Das Capital as ‘nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’.45 The disenfranchised yeomanry formed with others in sixteenthcentury England a labor pool that provided the raw labor power to jump start capitalist business structures. By portraying the rural laboring class as it experienced the transition from feudal to capitalist modes of production, the monstrous birth ballads engaged in making collective history. They attributed the monstrosity of the aberrant births to the yeomanry as a class rather than to the individual behavior of parental figures. Collective sins of the English nation, rather than specific sins of individual parents, are held responsible for these crimes of nature, which afflict the rural farmer with disproportionate frequency. The individual fault of the birth, in the biological sense, is rewritten (implicitly) as the product of a certain social class at a time when that class was undergoing dramatic change and restructuring in the wake of enclosure and new capitalist economic structures. The providential reading of the scene of monstrous birth thus naturalizes the changes in modes of production brought about by primitive accumulation as an act of God.

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The problem of excess matter which is at the heart of the broadside ballad is also the means by which mechanical and biological reproduction are grafted onto each other – using the topos of sexual reproduction as a way to navigate the status of print production. As an institution, the Stationers’ Company itself was invested in two overlapping modes of production – the medieval guild corporation as a system of regulation and its capitalist-oriented print product. Marx outlines how the guild structure historically ‘hindered the transformation of the single master into a capitalist’ by resisting the encroachment of merchant capital and regulating the dissemination of trade knowledge through the apprenticeship system.46 The guild’s regulatory function restricted the flow of free labor that primitive accumulation made possible. Within the ballad trade itself this kind of tension is especially apparent, since the ballad’s format encouraged unprecedented avenues of selling and trade. In this sense, the monstrous birth broadsides reflect this structural division within the Company itself about its role in relation to commercial trade in printed goods and the larger social transitions within guild structures in England at the time. By repeatedly depicting rural victims, the broadsides displace collective anxieties about print onto a rural underclass whose monstrous progeny suggests its inability to reproduce in socially productive ways. The providential interpretation of the broadsides – that England as a whole should regard these rural monstrous births as a God’s indictment of their sinfulness – also reinforces the class identity of the fathers and mothers of the children. The fault of the deformity lies not with the individual sins of the parents, even in the case where the birth is out of wedlock, but show rather how the rural peasant farmer with a deformed baby was a victim of forces beyond his immediate control. God’s wrath is one name for these forces. Enclosure is another. The disenfranchised rural peasant farmer rendered unproductive by the use of land as a source of wealth rather than a means of subsistence, or the small-time tradesman put out of work by the far-reaching Elizabethan trade monopolies, found himself displaced by new processes of social production. But print as a capitalist enterprise employs a mode of textual production made possible by these changes, by the accumulation of primary capital that disrupts the lives of some of the very tenant farmers depicted in the monstrous birth broadsides. These printers transfer anxieties about the printed broadside – its illegitimacy, excessive materiality, and potential for transgression – onto the disenfranchised class and then peddle the broadsides to urban and rural consumers alike, reinforcing the peasant farmer’s status as a victim. The broadsides recast the historical series of political actions by individual actors that gave rise to the long process of primitive accumulation in England as a supernatural force that transcends individual agency and results, via the faceless march of historical inevitability, in the unnatural reproductive deformations of a certain class of laborers recently marginalized by changing agricultural and trade economies.

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Notes I would like to thank David Bevington, Douglas A. Brooks, and Cyndia Susan Clegg for their helpful comments on this essay. Early modern spelling has been modernized throughout. 1

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7 8

See Thomas Knell, An ABC to the Christian Congregation or a Path way to the Heavenly Habitation (London: Nicholas Hill, 1550; STC 15029); A Doleful Ditty, or Sorrowful Sonnet of the Lord Darly, Sometime King of Scots (London: Thomas Gosson, n.d.; STC 4270.5); John Awdley, A Godly Ditty or Prayer to be Sung Unto God for the Preservation of his Church (London: John Awdley, 1569; STC 9950); D. Sterrie, A Brief Sonnet Declaring the Lamentation of Beccles (London: Robert Robinson, 1586; STC 23259); John Phillips, An Epitaph, or a Lamentable Discourse (London: Richard Johns, 1571; STC 19869); William Birch, The Complaint of a Sinner, Vexed with Paine (London: Alexander Lacy, 1563; STC 3080); J[ohn] C[anand], The Fantasies of a Troubled Man’s Head (London: Alexander Lacy, 1566; STC 4555); and Thomas Smith, A Treatise Declaring the Despite of a Secret Seditions Person (London: John Redman, 1540; STC 22880.6), respectively. For a comprehensive catalog of extant broadside ballads, see Carole Rose Livingston, British Broadside Ballads of the Sixteenth Century: A Catalogue of the Extant Sheets and an Essay (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991). These quotes come from John Barker, A Ballad Declaring how Neighbored Love, and True Dealing is Gone (London: Richard Lant, 1561; STC 1419). For other examples of ballads engaged in London-oriented social critique, see Thomas Brice, Against Filthy Writing and Such Like Delighting (London: John Alde, 1562; STC 3725), and The Manner of the World Now a Days (London: s.n., 1562; STC 17255). David Cressy notes how broadsides participate in a nostalgia for a more charitable England that was believed to have existed in the pre-Reformation past. See Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 43. Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges: L’insolite auXVIe siècle, en France (Genevea: Librarie Droz S.A., 1977), pp. 161–225. The Right Strange and Wonderful Example of the Handy Work of a Mighty God (London: Richard Jones, 1583; STC 20127). See Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, ‘Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England’, Past and Present 92 (1981): 20–54; Lorraine Daston, ‘Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe’, Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 93–124; and Dudley Wilson, Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 1993). See Cyprian Bladgen, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403–1959 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), pp. 38–44, for an overview of these regulations. The full texts of the 1557 charter and the 1566 Star Chamber Ordinances, as well as an excerpt of the 1559 Injunctions, appear in A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, ed. Edward Arber, 2 vols (London, privately printed, 1875), 1, pp. xxvii–xxxii, 322, and xxxviii respectively. Blagden, Stationers’ Company, pp. 28–31. See Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 11–25.

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9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18

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His name is associated with the broadside, but the Protestant Day may actually have been imprisoned under Mary until 1557. See E. Gordon Duff, A Century of the English Book Trade (London: Blades, East and Blades, 1905), p. 38. Clegg, Press Censorship, p. 27. Elizabeth I, Injunctions given by her Majesty (1559). Quoted in Arber, ed., 1: xxxviii. Elizabeth I, Injunctions, 1:322. The two poles are represented most usefully by Annabel Patterson in Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) who argues for a heavy role in censorship, and Richard Dutton, who emphasizes the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Elizabethan censorship system (Mastering the Revels [Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1991]). Clegg gives an overview of the debate in Press Censorship, pp. 3–6. See Bruce Dickens, ‘The Irish Broadside of 1571 and Queen Elizabeth’s Types’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1949–53, eds Bruce Dickens and A.L. Mumby, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), pp. 48–60. See Livingston, British Broadside Ballads, p. 32. See, e.g., Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602 to 1640, ed. William A. Jackson (London: Bibliographical Society, 1957), p. xvi. See, for example, Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 2, 16, 206–7, 234–6. See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1994); and Sharon Achinstein, ‘Audiences and Authors: Ballads and the Making of English Renaissance Literary Culture’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992): 314–16. Quoted in Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 262. Quoted in Würzbach, English Street Ballad, p. 258. See William Prynne, Histromastrix: The Players Scourge (London: Michael Sparke, 1633), p. 267. The True Report of the Form and Shape of a Monstrous Child, Born at Much Horksley (London: Thomas Marsh, 1562; STC 12207). The monster is a necessary accident of nature in De generatione animalium, analagous to the production of female babies that are supposedly less perfect. See The Works of Aristotle, ed. and trans. W.D. Ross, vol. 5, ed. E.S. Forster (Oxford, 1927), IV.3.767b–768a. See Céard, pp. 3–30; Dudley, pp. 16–28; Daston, ‘Marvelous Facts’, pp. 95–100. See Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 4–16, 30–60. See Daston and Park, ‘Unnatural Conceptions’, pp. 25–8. See Daston, ‘Marvellous Facts’, p. 104. Daston, ‘Marvellous Facts’, p. 104 The Form and Shape of a Monstrous Child Born at Maidstone in Kent (London: John Awdeley, 1568; STC 17194). See, e.g., Luke Shepherd, Antipus (London: J[ohn] Day, 1548; STC 683), in which biblical events become the exact opposite of the way they are told in the bible when they become the property of Catholics. And see Jörg Schan, The Well-Spoken

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43

44

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Nobody (London: S. M., 1550; STC 18599), that celebrates the appearance of the vernacular bible. Popular examples of these providence tales that come after the monstrous birth broadsides include Arthur Munday’s A View of Sundry Examples (1580) and Phillip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses (1583), as well as parts of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563). For an historical account, see James D. Hartman, Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 1–3, 18–25, 39–63. John Mellys Nor, The True Description of Two Monstrous Children (London: William Lewes, 1566; STC 17803). See Wall, Imprint, pp. 231–2. John D[ay], A Description of a Monstrous Child, Born at Chichester in Sussex (London: Leonard Askell, 1562; STC 6177). D[ay], A Description. Mellys Nor, True Description. D[ay], Description of a Monstrous Child. True Report (n. 22 above). Mellys Nor, True Description. See, e.g., the nationalistic popular broadsides like Song between the Queen’s Majesty and England that staged the courtship between the queen (Bessy) and a personified England in which the latter earns the queen’s love after apologizing for her imprisonment and ill treatment under Mary. William Birch, A Song Between the Queen’s Majesty and England (London: William Pickeringe, 1564; STC 3079). Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘“Strange and Woonderfull Syghts”: The Tempest and the Discourses of Monstrosity’, Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997): 195. See Achinstein, ‘Audiences and Authors’, for an account of this scene as a depiction of ballad culture. For more on the relation between The Winter’s Tale and the monstrous birth broadside, see my ‘Bastards and Broadsides in The Winter’s Tale’, Renaissance Drama 30 (2001): 43–71. Dudley Wilson explains this peculiar homogeneity by arguing that upper class families would have concealed their own monstrous progeny in some way, but such a claim assumes that the broadsides refer to actual monstrous births (other factors notwithstanding, at least two of the broadsides depict the birth of male-female pairs of Siamese twins, a biological impossibility). See Wilson (n. 5 above), p. 51. For an influential and extensive account of the relation between primitive accumulation and early modern literature in England, see Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Karl Marx, Das Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Pelican, 1976), p. 875. Marx, Das Capital, p. 479.

CHAPTER 10

ʻRed Inckeʼ: Reading the Bleeding on the Early Modern Page Bianca F.C. Calabresi Red is the chief Colour that is used with Black in Book-Printing: of Reds there are two sorts in general use, viz. Vermillion and Red-Lead; Vermillion is the deepest and purest Red, and always used to Books of Price. Red-Lead is much more faint and foul, and though more used than Vermillion, yet used only to Books of Vulgar Sale and Low price, as Almanacks, &c. Joseph Moxon, Mechanical Exercises 24.21.17 (1678)

I ‘For want of inke, receive this bloody writ’, Bel-Imperia writes in her letter urging Hieronimo to the vengeful conclusion of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.1 Kyd’s heroine uses blood as ink: to her audience, her ‘bloody writ’ is an indication both of her commitment to revenge and of her brother’s Draconian textual surveillance. For the early performers of Kyd’s play, conversely, ink served as blood. A marginal notation reproduced in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century quartos of the play calls for ‘Red Inke’ to represent the sanguineous handwriting of Bel-Imperia’s epistle on stage. The interchange of the two fluids suggests that analysts of early English print culture should reconsider the uses of rubrication – that is the use of red ink in texts – in this period. Scholars interested in the material practices of reading need to ask, on the one hand, how red ink generates meaning as blood on the early modern page as well as on the stage and, on the other, whether the staging of writing in blood can itself be a kind of rubrication – a directed reading – for the spectators. II In their groundbreaking article ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass call attention to what can be gained by considering the matter from which the early modern play-text is produced. ‘We need … to rethink Shakespeare in relation to our new knowledge of collaborative writing, collaborative printing, and the historical contingencies

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of textual production’, they convincingly maintain. In a final section entitled ‘Paper’, they warn, however, that If there is any single obstacle between us and such a project, it is the sense that the value of Shakespeare lies elsewhere, in the inner regions of the text rather than in the practices recorded on its surfaces …. And this indeed is the hermeneutic that the standard modern edition encourages, its legibility producing the illusion that Shakespeare can be seen through the text …. The clean and familiar textual surface allows reading to proceed unencumbered past matter and into the heart of the matter – into Shakespeare’s ‘meaning’.2

In this essay, I examine the role of that hermeneutic in the early modern production of books – both the simulation of matter on the surfaces of texts and its connection to ‘the heart of the matter’ – the ‘essential’ meaning of the text which such an illusion claims to elicit and present for the reader. In so doing I wish to question and complicate notions of how early modern readers viewed the materiality and contingency of texts – their ‘provisional state in the circulation of matter’3 – in contrast to our own impoverished expectation of a ‘transparent and purely intellectual’ relationship of reader to book.4 By focusing on the early modern simulation of body fluid on the page, I hope to address directly what de Grazia and Stallybrass term the ‘crucial quality of paper – its absorbency’ which they introduce as an object of study that allows a way out of the metaphysics of surface/depth, ‘outer/inner, form/content, appearance/reality’.5 While a closer look at the fluid and paper manipulated by early modern textual producers may liberate the post-modern reader from such binaries however, for the early modern reader the interaction of fluid and paper was an initial source of such a textual metaphysics. In presenting red ink as blood, the early modern text sought in its own way to create the impression of depth upon the surface of the text, to generate the imagined insides of subjects through the marking of their somatic boundaries, albeit through visual strategies that later simulations of interiority would reject as crude and overly material. As Joseph Moxon’s classifications cited above demonstrate, rubricated texts possessed a wide range of value in the early modern marketplace, from the most literally canonical – Bibles and Books of Common Prayer – to the most ephemeral and underrated – pamphlets and almanacs. Part of my examination focuses on the status valences of texts printed with red ink in order to suggest how the rare early modern rubricated play-text was situated and understood in this hierarchy. Notoriously, Sir Thomas Bodley, first librarian at Oxford, associated almanacs and plays as both unfit for his new collection. Most examples of those genres were insufficiently ‘singular’, he wrote to his assistant in January of 1612: ‘Happely some plaies may be worthy the keeping: but hardly one in fortie’.6 While almanacs were among the most

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widely reproduced and commercially successful textual commodities, plays were among the least frequently published books in the late sixteenth- and early-seventeenth centuries. Thus, although Bodley anxiously lists almanacs and plays alongside ‘an infinit number’ of books ‘that are daily printed of very vnworthy maters & handling …’, his use of ‘singular’, like the early modern associations of ‘common’, reflects something other than dismay at the sheer quantity of such texts.7 Their lack of exclusivity and specificity, not to mention propriety, makes them unsuitable for acquisition in his eyes. In this essay, I look closely at how red ink creates meaning simultaneously as blood and as a rubric – ‘a written Order’, in one seventeenth-century definition.8 When the blood on the page is gendered as female, the body from which it is imagined as emerging is correspondingly read according to certain social regulations. That rubricated female corpus turns out to be viewed much as the early play text was viewed by Bodley – as insufficiently ‘singular’, as dangerously in circulation, as a social object that resists categorization or methods of ordering. In fact, the early modern links between human and textual bodies that I discuss in this essay go beyond the metaphorical. Both bodies contain ‘vnworthy maters’ of a sort. Accordingly, both are marked by rubricated rules that, in their evocation of blood through red ink, seem to promise to their readers the somatic containment of unruly subjects. The association of text and body can thus perhaps further our understanding of how, in the context of a specific set of historical conditions, ‘acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body’; in this case by connecting the surface of the body with the surface of the page.9 III In the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, as in earlier periods, red ink was used in texts to differentiate information and to emphasize that which was important.10 In almanacs, specifically, red ink announced feast (or ‘red letter’) days, commemorated the anniversary of the monarch’s birth or accession to the throne, noted the shift from first quarter to full moon, marked the start of the four legal terms and ‘dogdayes ende’, as well as highlighted particular and significant events in the brief chronological histories of the British world included in many texts (the invention of printing, for example). Not content merely to inform their readers, almanacs also instructed them in temporal calculation, offering schemes for ‘Howe to know certainly the begynnynges and endynges of the Termes’, how to calculate the Dominical letter for several years, and ‘A short and true note to knowe the openyng of the Exchecquer’, which rendered the reader more independent in his/her use of printed

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calendars.11 These recipes for calculating beginnings were often themselves rubricated, an appropriate continuation of medieval conventions of marking the start or internal beginnings of texts with red. In short, almanacs organized time and made it visible and, moreover, legible. Red ink formed an important component of that endeavor, a visual aid reminding the reader of his or her participation in ritual observations of time passing. Red ink contributed, in particular, to the corporeal regulation of the almanacs’ readers within time. One of the almanac’s more significant functions was as an annual guide to the body and its humors (Figure 10.1); specifically as an aid to the control of body fluids through bleeding, purging, baths, and other remedies often home administered or self imposed.12 In these sections of almanacs, red ink is again used for emphasis and differentiation, this time to point the reader to helpful places in the calendar that would allow his self-regulation of ‘laudable’ and plethoric body fluid.13 T. Hill’s A new almanac of 1572 marks the times ‘for purging with Potions and Pylles’ with one sign in red ink, the times ‘to purge with electuaries’ with another, the ‘tymes for bloude letting’ with a third. Gray’s 1591 almanac lists under the rubricated ‘Physicke Notes’ that it is ‘Good to Vomite in Aries, Taurus, Sagittarius, or Capricone’, ‘Good to take Glysters in Aries, Libra, or Scorpio’, and ‘Good to retryane fluxes or Rewmes in Taurus, Virgo, or Capricorne’. Red marginalia emphasize especially that it is frequently ‘good to let blood’: ‘the Sanguine in Pisces/the Chollericke in Cancer or Pisces/the Melancholicke in Libra, Acquarius or Pisces/the Phlegmaticke in Sagittarius or Aries’.14 Other texts distinguish ‘Fit times for Blood-letting’ and ‘Dangerous times for Bloodletting’ under rubricated titles or construct tables for ‘taking of Physicke and letting of blood, depending vpon the place of the Moone’ and the somatic state or need.15 In keeping with their ostensible aim to increase the reader’s powers of selfgovernment, almanacs adopt an avuncular tone and simple mnemonic rhymes to communicate necessary information. Atop its calendar for January, an almanac of 1616 advises ‘if your bodies in health will keepe, / warme meates for it is very meete: Flye Phisicke, sloath, and venerie,/avoide all Baths most carefully’. Come April, when ‘stormie showers doth make the earth yeild pleasant flowers’, one should accordingly and homologously begin to spew forth: ‘Purge well therefore, for it is good, / to help thy body and cleanse thy blood’. However, at times the text adopts a sterner voice. In February, the almanac cautions ‘Bleede not, nor Bath, be rulde by me, / except vpon necessitie’.16 The text enjoins ‘be rulde by me’: in turn, if obedient, the reader will acquire good health and ‘laudable’ fluid. Contributing to the assertion of this somatic rule is an engraved replica of a man with arms and legs outspread, naked and often opened at the torso to show a rough outline of internal organs. Around this schematic form, the names of

‘RED INCKE’: READING THE BLEEDING ON THE EARLY MODERN PAGE

10.1 Woodcut of an annual guide to the body; T. Buckminster, A Newe Almanacke and Prognostication for the yere of Lorde God M.D. LXXI …. (1571), by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

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the various body parts and their allied constellations and planets appear in black or red ink. Typically, Osborne’s 1622 almanac presents this figure with a simple rubricated explanation: ‘the Anatomie of Mans body, as the parts therof are gouerned by the 12 Signes of the Zodiack’ (A2v). Buckminster’s almanac of 1571 elaborates more fully, suggesting the image’s visual utility for its reader: ‘In beholdyng this figure Anotomicall, you may easyly see and consider howe the xij. celestial signes and, also the vij. planettes do raigne and rule in the partes of mans body, aswel by the determination of rules phisicall, as astronomicall’ (A4r). Thomas Laqueur correctly reads the ‘set of correspondences’ displayed in these images as bringing ‘the cosmos into the body’, reflecting the physical links between universe and individual by the rubrication of parts and planets.17 Within the context of the text’s various instructions on evacuation, however, such correspondences also work to construct a reader in potential conflict with that cosmos – a reader who thus needs the text as guide, authority, and mediator. Where the reader seeks to rule his own body in sympathy with the heavens, the text seeks to rule the reader, using a red ‘Rubricke’ – that is, ‘An order or rule written’ (Cockeram K1r) – as a fittingly emphatic and visually compelling means by which to emphasize its commands.18 If the reader wishes to work harmoniously with those celestial bodies that govern his own, the text implies, he must follow its red rule. If he should be willing to do so, the text offers him a fantasy of somatic control through a series of sanguinary procedures appropriately marked by red ink. Central as epitome and in actual layout, the anatomical image confirms Renaissance notions that the male body serves as the locus of medical knowledge. Despite a medieval manuscript tradition that at times included a female version alongside the male, printed almanacs contain only a masculine zodiacal figure. Equally telling, given the homologies and differences seen between the plethoric bodies of men and women, the specific bleeding requirements and dangers for the humorous female body with its colder, thicker blood are elided. By contrast, herbals which claim a female audience, like Gervase Markham’s The English Hus-wife, Contayning, The inward and owtward vertues which ought to be in a compleat woman (1615), include remedies for conditions explicitly suffered by women as well as men.19 This erasure of the feminine body has important implications given that the zodiacal figure situates the reader not only at the head of the book on the one hand, and the center of the universe at the other, but places him amongst a number of social systems and cycles which like the human body are regulated in time and by rubrication.20 The association of somatic and social control grew increasingly strong in the early modern period, in part through new canons of propriety examined in the work of Norbert Elias and exemplified in the market for conduct guides and

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courtesy manuals. As Gale Paster articulates in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England, despite the inherent likeness perceived between male and female bodies in the Renaissance, the capacity for bodily containment and hence social authority was unequally attributed to men and women. Writes Paster, in a system where ‘habits of thought and discourse do not distinguish between the ethical and physical domains … the hierarchy of physiological values in the blood can be appropriated for the canons of bodily propriety, so that bleeding is construed as an issue of bodily voluntarity and self-control’.21 Women’s bodies, identified as profoundly or excessively ‘leaky vessels’, thus come to represent and to reconfirm perceived female threats both to ‘the acquisitive goals of the family and its maintenance of status and power’ and ‘to historically emergent demands of bodily self-rule’ which linked somatic with social economies.22 As Valerie Traub, Jonathan Sawday, and Thomas Laqueur, among others, have explored, the gendering of anatomical prints powerfully affected imaginings of the interiors of bodies in the sixteenth century, opening the feminized cadaver to the gaze and probings of anatomist and commercial consumer alike, mediating through the female body the vulnerability inherent in the violation of boundaries by the anatomist’s art. The ‘figures anotomical’ or ‘zodiacal men’ of printed almanacs can be seen as participating in and differentiating themselves from the market for these images newly in circulation in important ways. On the one hand, like the elaborately engraved bodies that stand or lie in textual anatomy theaters, they provide a visual focus for the information dispersed throughout the calendar, advertising ‘the conviction that the opened body was the font and touchstone of anatomical knowledge’ (Laqueur 70). On the other, they maintain in circulation medieval representations of the body whose powerful and continued effects have been underestimated by critics impressed by the new visual realism offered by Vesalian illustration.23 Sawday, for example, reads medieval images of the humoral body as, in some sense, the antitheses of early modern anatomies based on their handling of the dichotomies of exterior and interior: more recognizably ‘human’ than … the Vesalian … [t]he body has a face, hair, and schematic two-dimensional representations of the limbs. At the same time, the body is oddly rendered transparent – we are able to see both the exterior and the interior at the same time. It is as though the artist is allowing us to peer Through the body’s surface, rather than into its structures. In other words, the body resists any easy incursion into its interior, by retaining the signs of a surface barrier.24

Even more starkly, in Traub’s view, ‘pre-Vesalian anatomical illustrations, diagrammatic and schematic, depended so heavily on external paradigms to depict the body’s interior that the very concept of interiority is belied’ in such texts.25 Yet, in their terminology, the almanac’s creators clearly attempt to

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associate their figure with this burgeoning anatomical tradition, entitling their images ‘Anatomies’ or ‘dissections’ despite their significant differences in form and production.26 In their elaborate schemes for arranging somatic information, both genres share the desire to submit the body to written and visual order: ‘By Artificial Figures representing the members, and fit termes expressing the same’ in the words of William Jaggard, printer of Eumatographia Anthropine or A Description of the Body of Man, the first affordable vernacular anatomy book. Certainly the producers of almanacs could or would not avail themselves of the three-dimensional perspective system of the Vesalian model which made it ultimately so successful and immediately so desirable. Nonetheless, in their own way, their images call upon what Laqueur terms ‘the authority of seeing’ – those ‘various stratagems for creating the “reality effect”’ that ‘make pictures stand in for bodies themselves’27 – albeit in a radically different mode.28 Like many of those cited above, John Securis’s 1614 almanac uses red ink in the production of the text to contribute to this illusionistic effect. In Securis’s, as often in almanacs ranging from the early-sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth century, the black-ink anatomical image, particularly its open torso and its loose rendering of internal organs, is overprinted by fine red lines that form the appearance of a Galenic network. Because red ink is used for image and instructions, the rubricated page directs the reader both to and into his body, linking that interior explicitly with the expulsionary lessons of the text and calling attention to its need for release. The anatomical figure is still part of the text’s schematic tables then – a diagram like the other charts in the text for understanding when and why to manage the production of humors – but it also creates a rough simulation of the fluid-filled interior of a body via the careful imposition of ink as blood. The illustrations of academic anatomies transform the low status of their dissected cadavers – the corpses of executed criminals – by posing them in imitation of High Renaissance art and displaying them in expensive folio editions. In contrast, the almanacs’ power as commodities was recognized to lie precisely in their cheap production and fluid mobility. Humphrey Baker suggests in the introduction to his translation of Oronce Finé’s The Rules and righte ample Documentes, touchinge the vse and practise of the common Almanackes which are named Ephemerides (1558) that almanacs thrive in the more open markets of print culture, ‘seynge that the people at thys present are daylye more intentiue, and enclined also to reade and to haue vnderstandynge in artes and sciences’ (A3v). At tuppence (a third the price of a play-quarto), and as one of the few textual commodities that could be assured of requiring a second printing (so much so that almanacs were the only books allowed two days pressing), they had a circulation and an audience far more diverse than most books in the period.29 Almanacs cost far less, for instance, than

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either anatomy texts or demonstrations: as a result, their diagram of the body permitted many more readers of all status levels the impression of a glimpse into their own physical interior than the Latin folio editions in which most Vesalian images appeared.30 Like its more discussed Vesalian fellows, the almanac’s somatic image results from sixteenth-century developments in print culture – the emergent technology of dual-color printing. As Joseph Moxon’s instructions for printing a rubricated text suggests, including an additional color was a time-consuming process, and more importantly, increased the chances of fouled sheets and therefore of wasted materials.31 Printing in red called for a number of additional or atypical activities which would add to the complexity of production and cost of the text: cutting a new Frisket, adding overlays, mixing a properly loose ink that would not dry too quickly on the form, pulling the press unusually lightly, not to mention adding an extra print run. Peter Blayney rightly points out that once a sheet was to be printed in red, the addition of other words or images would cause little inconvenience in setting up or printing. The selective overprinting of part of a woodblock in red, however, as the rubrication of the ‘anotomical man’ necessitated, would be more difficult given the impossibility of removing or raising part of the image.32 The rubricated anatomical image of the almanac thus depends on a laborious and precise system that allows the red ink to be printed more or less exactly within the lines of the first run. Recent work on anatomies has ascribed a ‘“technologizing” of the interior’ and a gradual perception of the body as mechanical to the ‘anonymous, normative models of the insides’ provided by new Vesalian images.33 In its relative accuracy, the mechanics on which the rubrication of almanacs rely may also contribute to the illusion of precision in the control of the body. The reader’s own potential control and release of body fluid is analogous to the ability to contain and release fluid on the page demonstrated by the text. In addition to providing a glimpse into the reader’s own body, then, the anatomical image joins older and newer technologies which offer parallel models of containment and control – textual and somatic – connecting earlier images and medical practices with newer mechanical means. Whereas Vesalian anatomies strenuously work to separate the image from exposition in order to further its illusionistic effects, the continued presence of the rubricated text surrounding the overprinted body prevents the viewer from seeing the ink simply as blood, however. Simultaneously representing a directed reading, red ink calls attention to the relation of an imagined somatic interior to a structure of knowledge outlined on the surface of the page.34 As body fluid, red ink presupposes a physical interior; as rubrication, it returns the reader to ways of ordering bodies – like texts – through writing.

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IV In his essay ‘Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject’, Louis Montrose describes the ‘dedication page [as] a liminal discursive space, one that (in Robert Weimann’s phrase) lies between the text in the world and the world in the text: [T]he initial pages of a book are the threshold to the fiction’, he elaborates.35 While Montaigne claimed impatience with those elements of a texts he deemed irrelevant to its ‘matter’ – the superand subscriptions of letters, the title- and dedicatory-pages of works – more conventionally the early modern period shared Montrose’s sense that one could judge the contents of a book by its cover.36 The idea that the front of a book could indicate its interior worked figuratively, as well. In 2 Henry IV, for example, Northumberland exclaims on seeing Morton, ‘this man’s brow, like to a Title-leafe, / Fore-tels the Nature of a Tragicke Volume’.37 When the subject at hand, then, was particularly inscrutable, a title page might seem to offer a purchase on its ‘real’ nature, the title page might serve as a ‘face’ in which the true motive or guilt of the subject might appear. The rules of evidence in English courts did not begin to be codified until the mid-seventeenth century, according to Katharine Eisaman Maus; however an interest in ‘the orderly gathering of evidence and its presentation in court’ was growing in the sixteenth century.38 Blood linking individuals to the scene of the crime was, then as now, a powerful indicator of guilt. Maus cites Justice Warburton’s reply to Sir Walter Raleigh on the nature of proof and circumstance: ‘If one should rush into the king’s privy chamber, whilst he is alone, and kill the king … and this man be met coming with his sword drawn all bloody: shall he not be condemned to death?’39 Blood’s individual make-up as well as its surface-presence was seen as having the potential to reveal hidden criminal behavior.40 The antiGalenist George Thompson wrote of the fluid that ‘so great a power hath this liquid red matter to alter our conditions … that according as it is constituted … our morality may be good or bad’.41 Equally, a bloody act could produce a bloody interior. The anonymous Bloody downfall of Adultery, Murder, and Ambition warns of the permanent damning mark that results from ‘Bloodshed and Murder, in which whosoeuer dippeth but the tippe of his finger, giues to his soule a scarlet staine, which never can bee cleared vntill the dissolution of the Body …’ (B4r). Nonetheless, in so far as that stain remained inside the body, it could be difficult to identify the occurrence and the human agent of murder. ‘But men can but see as men’, laments Thomas Brewer in The Bloudy Mother or the most inhumane murthers, committed by Iane Hattersley, vpon diuers infants …: ‘the eye of man cannot peirce or prye into the thoughts and intent of man; neither can it giue the hart intelligence, but from outward behauoiur and working: And therefore right easily may the iudgements of men be deceived’.42 The occasion

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of infanticide, in particular – the ‘bloody and heauie subiect’ of Brewer’s text – while generally based on the irrefutable presence of a dead newborn, was difficult to distinguish from stillbirth, especially, as Frances Dolan points out ‘if [the body] had no marks of violence upon it’.43 Brewer’s text stresses both the necessity of visual proof for his argument and its strange elusiveness in the crime’s account. In the first of the murders ascribed to the servant girl, Jane Hattersley, her mistress, Goodwife King, finds Hattersley’s neonate in the house ‘by his mother breathlesse, with the mouth of it all soyld with fome, that rose by her violent wringing’ (B1v). Yet when she returns with a crowd to ‘see that eye-wounding spectacle’, she finds none of the former evidence. The mother ‘had so wrought upon the child, to clense and trim it, that there was no signe of such a hand as is minister to a hell-hardened hart, to be found uppon it’ (B1v). Brewer assumes a direct correspondence between inner morality – ‘a hell-hardened hart’ – and outward action – the hand as minister. Nonetheless, Jane Hattersley’s behavior consistently thwarts the narrator’s attempts to manifest her guilt visually. According to Brewer, the difficulty of producing verifiable proof in this case lies not only in the cleverness of the accused, who ‘cunningly blinded the eyes of people, in the time that her sinne must needs appear’ (A4v), but in the very effects of witnessing this egregious crime, the results of which struck Goodwife King, for example, ‘with such a strange and inexcogitable amazement, that she could not perfectly tell, whether she saw that she saw or no’ (B1v).44 In the face of the repeatedly equivocal nature of sight, the very lack of visible signs becomes a proof of guilt: Hattersley had ‘many great bellies … but the unhappie loads of them could neuer be seene: by which we may iustily thinke, and perfectly: in reason, knowe, that there were many more murders, then are in these leaves laid open’ (B3r–v) writes Brewer. While not abandoning entirely the search for a credible eye-witness, Brewer’s text turns to an alternate source of legitimation, ‘the eyes of [the reader’s] understanding’ with which he claims that, by the narrative’s close, the reader will have ‘seene the most iust and deserued end of Hattersley and her lover’ (B4v). Turning in its own way to the reader’s vision, the text’s title page seeks to provide the proof which fails to appear in the pamphlet’s written account of the murder and disposal of the infants. Divided into three equal sections, the cover presents a number of different visual demonstrations of the participants’ guilt. The left panel reconstructs the moment of the second infant’s burial where ‘this unfortunate fruite of lust’, murdered ‘by the hand of the bloody mother, and by the cunning of the cruell father’, is ‘most secretly buried in a graue … in his orchard’ (B2r). In the foreground a tiny skull and leg bones of the first child lie strewn, while behind its mother holds the body of the second infant and its father wields a shovel. The exhumed skeletal parts simultaneously locate the other missing babies of Brewer’s text and anticipate the disinterment of

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the second infant’s body which leads to the parents’ arrest. By its synchronic structure, the image simplifies and condenses the scientific process narrated by the text in which the recovered ‘bones … before Justices and men of account, were prooud … by the skill of a cunning and very expert Anothomist, to be the bones of a child’ (B3v). This brief mention of the anatomist’s testimony both hints at and elides a standard of visual accuracy which the text aspires to and repeatedly cannot attain and which the title page then attempts to supplement (Figure 10.2). It also transfers the responsibility of providing criminal proof from the female community of mistresses and neighbors to male professionals.45 According to Brewer’s account, due to this scientific intervention both Hattersley and Adamson were arraigned: the latter was freed on bail because of his higher status; the former remained in jail but ‘wanted nothing’ thanks to her lover. Brewer sees this as Adamson’s strategy to secure Hattersley’s silence: she went to the scaffold refusing to testify against him and he was acquitted. But Brewer appends Adamson’s fate as a coda to his text, advising the reader ‘If we look well into this lamentable end of his, we shall finde a lesson worth the looking into …’ (C1v). The title page as well elaborates his punishment: opposite what would become the juridical evidence against the murderous mother, a bedroom scene depicts ‘the most loathsome and lamentable end of … [Hattersley’s] master, the vnlawfull begetter of those vnfortunate Babes being eaten and consumed aliue with Wormes and Lice’. While Hattersley’s punishment is essentially public, Adamson’s is doubly interior – a reinscription of the scene of divine retribution, in which we are shown the surviving parent made ‘by the iust iudgement of God (which God make us all haue an eye to) a prey to these despicable and deuouring creatures’ (B4v). Linking these two tableaux with the uppermost section, in which the title The Bloudy Mother is printed in large letters, is a trail of red ink. Over the bodies of Hattersley and the baby, on the head and hands of Adamson, incongruously tracing the outlines of the tiny skeleton at front, red overprinting argues for the ‘bloody’ nature of the crime and connects the accused with their victims. By printing the title ‘The Bloudy Mother’ itself with red ink and then singling out certain other words in red as well, Brewer’s text compensates for the lack of definitive visual evidence by making the reader into an eye-witness, luridly providing the link between ‘Jane Hattersley’, ‘Infants’, ‘burying’, ‘Adam Adamson’, and ‘Babes’ which the text failed to do. There is no evidence within the text that Hattersley’s infants were found with blood on their bodies: in general, according to Dolan, most infanticides were suffocations.46 By bloodying itself, however, the title page eliminates the ambiguities between stillbirths and infant murders which create juridical complications for convictions. Moreover, the use of red ink to stand for blood less marks the crime as literally bloody than suggests the bloody nature of the criminals – ‘those Cruell, bloudy,

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10.2 Title page; Thomas Brewer, The Bloudy Mother or the most inhumane murthers, committed by Iane Hattersley, vpon diuers infants …. (1610), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University

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and libidinous bad liuers …’ (C3r) – thus fulfilling the text’s purpose to ‘shew (with terror) the bloody and most dangerous events of lust, and such libidinous liuing’ (A2r). Revealing the accused in the act of concealment and showing them subject to the watchful eye of God, the title page makes manifest the events hidden from the community, visually generating proof both of a guilty body and a guilty soul.47 In so far as ‘mother’ is a term for uterus in this period, the title ‘The Bloudy Mother’ also suggests a glimpse into the interior of the mysterious criminal female body. According to Galenic theory, all wombs were naturally bloody. In his A Briefe Discovrse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), Edward Jorden describes blood as ‘that humor wherwith we are nourished: without which the infant in the mothers wombe could neither grow & increase in bignesse, nor yet liue’.48 Yet the inherently corrupt blood of the uterus was thought not only to cause diseases in children but according to some sixteenth-century authorities to prove fatal to men during sexual intercourse.49 The title’s rubricated conflation of Hattersley and her womb allows the visual materialization of Hattersley’s murderous ‘unnatural’ maternity, the signs of which Brewer, paradoxically, can again find only in the lack of visible evidence: Mothers haue hearts of wax that melt and consume in the heate of sorrow that comes by the wrong of their children: and eyes (that like full fountaines) in aboundance of tears, shew the greefe and anguish they suffer for the least wrong their children suffer. But this wretch had a hart of steele, and eies of marble, so indurate, that no motion of heauen or sparke of humaine pitty, could be seene or perceiued in them. (B1r–v)

Paster’s analysis of gendered bleeding emphasizes the anxieties surrounding the supposed inabilities of women to adhere to early modern patriarchal canons of bodily behavior and discusses as well the literary representations of a few exemplary women who master ‘masculine’ self-induced phlebotomy. The discourses that structure texts where female blood is simulated as emerging on the page suggest, however, that the involuntarily bleeding female body offers a legibility preferable to its early modern readers than its alternative, the body which refuses to be read on its surface. Rather than fear the leaky female body here, Brewer celebrates it as a consequence of proper maternal feeling. What he finds appalling are the indications of a Bakhtinian classical body in Hattersley – ‘a hart of steele, and eies of marble, so indurate’ – which prevent its incorporation in his visual system of proof. In contrast to these demonstrations of containment, he is at pains to establish her somatic circulation, labeling her ‘this strumpet’ (A4r), Adamson’s ‘harlot’ (B1v), and reading her rapid return to health after the supposed birth of her child as proof of base status and sexual activity: ‘But common it is that such common peices, can beare it [childbirth] but better then

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true and lawfull bearers of children can’ (B2r). Menstruation, as a material sign of ‘other varieties of female incontinence’, including sexual incontinence (Paster 83), thus links and renders visible libidinous and bloody crimes that in themselves shed no blood. According to F. Lenton (1631) ‘A Prostitute or Common Whore … is both menstruous and mercenary: Lust and Murther are her professions and she cares not who knowes it’.50 On viewing this ‘menstruous’ criminal, Brewer’s proper reader, ‘seeing the foule ends of folly, and ungratious actions a farr off’, himself guards against a figurative penetration and monstrous pregnancy: ‘least the temptation and thought, which was the Embryon of that euill, insinuate, and creepe into his heart …’ (A3r). Thus, in Brewer’s text, the threat of a morbid womb can be found within either men or women, an ‘eye-wounding’ that is the product not so much of wickedness but of insufficiently judicious vision. Right readers, however, will respond appropriately: ‘mothers with wet eyes, and Fathers with grieu’d hearts …’ (A2r). Brewer’s proper audience reinstantiates the emotional gender difference whose lack has frustrated Brewer’s narrative revelations – reasserting the controlled somatic interior as the province of men and visible bodily fluid as the mark of women. The Bloudy Mother brings matter (and the nature of ‘mater’) to the surface, when it cannot be located inside. Like more conventional rubrication in print it orders and emphasizes, but unlike them it does not distinguish; in fact it seeks to link and associate deeds and agents through the repetitive use of color. In a related textual strategy, The Whore of Babylon concentrates red ink in the oversized title ‘Whore of’ where the conjunction of word and color can evoke for the reader a number of Protestant truisms about the Empress of Babylon (Figure 10.3). Rubrication on Dekker’s title page reminds the reader of the Whore of Babylon’s ‘real’ nature, immediately setting off the subject from a number of female figures with whom she runs the risk of being confused within the text. While narrowing the reading of its antagonist, however, rubrication complicates the cultural status of the play as a text. The reader may recognize the Empress marked in red as common but may also categorize the play as such. V Summarizing his intentions for the reader, Thomas Dekker writes in his preface to the 1607 printed edition of The Whore of Babylon that The Generall scope of this Drammaticall Poem, is to set forth: (in Tropicall and shadowed collours) the Greatness, Magnanimity, Constancy, Clemency, and the other incomparable Heroical vertues of our late Queene. And (on the contrary part) the inveterate malice, Treasons, Machinations,

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10.3 Title Page; T. Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (1607), by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

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Vnderminings, & continual blody strategems of that Purple whore of Roome, to the taking away of our Princes liues, and utter exterpation of their Kingdomes.51

To make the absolute contrast between the figures of Elizabeth I as Titania and Rome as the Empress clear to whatsoever level of audience, Dekker relies heavily on the powers of sight – ‘the Optick sense’ as he calls it – to ground the dichotomy: ‘wee present / Matter aboue the vulgar Argument: / Yet drawne so liuely, that the weakest eye, / (Through those thin vailes we hang betweene your sight, / And this our piece) may reach the mistery’ (A3r). Nonetheless, critics have found a disturbing level of ambiguity concerning the nature of resemblances within the play itself.52 From the start, the visual certainties advertised in the prefatory materials are complicated. ‘The superstitious Harlot: “purple whore: / The whore that rides on the rose-coloured beast: when so accused counters that a false Truth herself, ‘that strumpet, that inchantresse’,… has stolne faire Truths attire …”.’ To the suggestion that her face is marked with ‘letters misticall’, which identify her as ‘Babylon … The Citie of Confusion’, the Empress challenges ‘Point out these markes: which of you all can lay / A finger on that Moale that markes our face?’ (H4r), anticipating Plaindealing’s own demurral to Truth when the latter makes the same accusation.53 Whereas the descriptions of Truth as ‘not painted’ and ‘not gorgious in attire, / But simple, plaine and homely’ might set her apart from the ‘scarlet veiles, and mantles’ of the Empress, they introduce a potential concordance between the constructed magnificence of the two female rulers which can only prove more troubling. Indeed, Titania’s advisors’ vituperations against ‘that mannish woman’ and ‘that lustfull bloudie Queene’ suggest the narrow difference between Elizabeth’s successful political manipulation of androgyny and the monstrosity of other examples of female rule. The homophonic ‘Queen’ and ‘queane’ (subject of Cockeram’s punning entry ‘Women Queenes and queanes’ in The English Dictionary of 1623) are never far enough apart for comfort’s sake within this text. Clare McEachern has written of sixteenth-century Protestantism that ‘resemblance is the enabling medium of English religious identity, as well as its undoing’.54 In particular she discusses the similarities between a series of images of Elizabeth I and the Whore of Babylon produced in London in the 1580s and 90s which suggest that ‘far from defining itself in opposition to Roman rule, the Tudor state sought to appropriate its powers’.55 As she notes, whether representations of Elizabeth I were modeled on existing images of the Whore of Babylon or vice versa is less significant than the discursive effect of the opportunity for confusion, the ultimate instability at the heart of representations of female rule and virtue. Exegetical texts on the Whore of Babylon in Revelations show a repeated need to interpret and explain the imagery surrounding the scarlet woman for

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their readers as if to ensure its clarity. To John’s statement ‘I sawe a woman sit vpon a scarlet coloured beast’, the Geneva bible provides this commentary: ‘The beast signifieth the ancient Rome: the woman that sitteth thereon the newe Rome, which is ye Papistrie, whose crueltie and bloodshedding is declared by scarlet’.56 ‘Revelations’ red’ could vary in hue from Sir Edwin Sandy’s ‘rosecoloured harlot with whom the kings of the earth haue committed fornication’ to the ‘purple and scarlet colour’ of her robes in the 1579 Bishop’s Bible.57 The associations remained the same however: sanguine redness is a shared feature of whoredom and Rome. In Duessa’s initial appearance in The Faerie Queene, her ‘scarlot red’ clothing and its typographic conflation with ‘harlot’ signals her affiliation with the Whore of Babylon for the reader as much as does the Persian-like ‘mitre on her hed’.58 In sum, the Whore of Babylon ‘is red with blood, and sheddeth it most licentiously, and therefore is coloured with the blood of the Saints’.59 Dekker’s text similarly connects redness, licentiousness, murder, and blood: ‘their Kings are slaues to sate your lust, and … their bloud / … serues as a floud, / For you to drinke or swimme in … / the robes of purple that you wear … are not giuen you / As types of honour and regality / But dyed so deepe with bloud … that … y’are with red murder gilt’ (H3v). The makers of the title page use a more direct means than Dekker’s ‘tropicall and shadowed’ colors to convey this sanguineous nature, however. By printing ‘Whore of’ in red, the title page seems to simplify the difficulties of vision produced in Dekker’s drama. The rubricated title establishes distinctions between female subject-positions that proved impossible to maintain on stage by embodying visually the most salient characteristics of its main antagonist within the name that most clearly reveals her underlying identity, encapsulating ‘scarlet’ within ‘harlot’ much as does Spenser’s typographic play on words. Yet while it seems to imprint the Empress’s bloody character, the matter of The Whore of Babylon’s title page in fact complicates the desire to identify and locate certain forms of individual agency and culpability through the mechanism of print. The victory of Titania’s forces over the supporters of the Whore of Bablyon is depicted within the play as the purgation of the humorous and infected social body, a phlebotomy reluctantly yet dutifully administered by the ruler who acknowledges that for ‘our peoples … good, / We must the Surgeon play, and let out blood’. If the red ink is read as blood, the bleeding of the body politic then issues forth on the title page, evoking Dekker’s other printed narratives of social phlebotomy which appropriate and subvert the authority of the anatomist in order to empower the newly emergent position of author. The move by which the queen effects such a healthful bleeding is in fact a form of writing. Titania calls attention to the connection, exclaiming as she signs the death warrant, ‘Witnesse: so little we in blood delight, / That doing this worke, we wishe we could not write’ (G4r). As a rubric, the title page continues the association

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of writing and bleeding. The appearance of red ink on the surface of the text marks the return of social order as a function of textual as well as somatic recomposition – producing a legible text that reflects a legible social body.60 Despite Dekker’s self-construction of the author as the rubricator and rectifier of social ills, Moxon’s instructions suggest that this organization of the title page remained one of the printing house’s important duties through the late seventeenth century: ‘Nor does a Compositor the least shew his skill in the well ordering and humouring of a Title Page’.61 Moxon describes in detail the choices available to the Compositor in ‘electing a Body’ in which to ‘Set the precedent Matter’, emphasizing that he should choose that design ‘which best pleases his fancy or is in present mode’. In its initial function, certainly in the early modern period when books were sold unbound, the title page served as advertising. Indeed, posted not only on bookstalls but around the city, title pages could be completely separated from their contents, directing their viewers to the bookseller from whom they could obtain the further reading matter they desired.62 As Moxon’s citation opening this paper indicated, the red-inked work could belong in one of several categories of textual commodities, whose range of value was most starkly represented by the two forms which contained rubricated calendars – the Bible and the almanac. But which genre does this frontispiece then advertise and does it accord with the construction of the authorial persona via ‘his own’ construction of the text? On the one hand, the printed The Whore of Babylon seems to claim in its ‘Depthes & Heightnings’ the elevated status of a literary work: it begins with a list of ‘Drammatis personae’ and an address to ‘Lectori’ which emphasizes its marred production by public performance and contrasts the renewed aspirations of its writer as ‘Poet’ (A2r–v). On the other, in its speeches by Plaindealing and Titania that enumerate civic and national ills, it resembles the ‘cultural bloodletting’ of those social satires in which Dekker intentionally imitates demotic cultural forms like almanacs and hornbooks, parodying but also replicating their form in typefaces, rubrication, and, in The Raven’s Almanac, in ‘the body of a man drawne … like a theefe beg’d for an Anatomie in Surgeons Hall’63 (B1r). Lastly, its overtly Protestant ideology would seem to ally it to the numerous successful devotional texts popularizing religious practice that sought to establish their credentials by emulating the rubricated frontispieces of sixteenth-century Books of Common Prayer. While this potential confusion of status might well prove lucrative by increasing sales, it undermines the play’s ostensible claims to literary authority, casting it as the unruly, much handled object which arbiters of canonicity like Bodley shunned. The problems of reading the proper place of the rubricated body thus extend from the narrative to the text itself. In the early modern period, vermillion’s ability to mark the cultural status of the bodies that bore it served other capacities than as a source of red ink

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for ‘Books of Price’. As red crystalline mercuric sulphide, it was also a major component in rouge or face-paint.64 Because, unlike The Bloody Mother, the title page of The Whore of Babylon does not display an actual body marked as bloody, it thus leaves open the question of whether the reader is seeing the signs of a internally sanguineous nature or yet another artificially appealing front. As Plaindealing’s initial ignorance of the Empresse’s artificial beauty demonstrates, feigned blushes can be difficult to perceive. ‘Play. “She was then in mine eye, The goodliest woman that euer wore fore part of Sattin: … now shee is more vgly then a bawd.”’ / ‘Truth. “Shee look’d so then; fairnes it selfe doth cloth her / In mens eyes, till they see me, and then they loath her”’ (G3v). Both bloodshed and its cosmetic simulation on the face function as indications of female lust and criminality in this play. More troubling for this narrative and its title page is Plaindealing’s suggestion that painted and unpainted women may be equally suspect: ‘P[l]ay. “But how shall I know, thou art the right truth?”’ / ‘Truth. ‘Because I am not painted.”’/ ‘Play. “Nay if thou hast no better coulour then that, ther’s no trueth in thee, for Im’e sure your fairest wenches are free of the painters”’ (G2r). Rejecting the ambiguous signification of the blush as manifestation of shame as well as chastity, Truth asserts ‘on my modest cheekes, / No witching smiles doe dwell’ (G2r). In religious discussions, Truth often is given a distinct hue of her own: When John Jewel speaks of the ‘show and color of truth’ he means black and white, as Truth’s costume for the initial dumb show of The Whore of Babylon and Una’s clothing in The Faerie Queene reflect. In 1607, such coloration was already linked to the seeming authority of writing: the proof of an attempt on Titania’s life, her advisor Fideli argues, lies ‘Here … in blacke and white’ (H1v). The redness of the Whore on Dekker’s title page thus seems intended to create meaning not merely in and of itself but against a background of black ink and white paper that connotes unpainted/uncolored simplicity such as Truth unsuccessfully claims for herself.65 Like ‘to paint’, the verb ‘to color’ had its own associations with deception. Before his fall, Bussy d’Ambois exclaims confidently to the Friar, as he plans his seduction of Tamyra, ‘Give me the colour, my most honour’d Father, / And trust my cunning then to lay it on’ (2.2.150–51). Likewise, George Gifford uses the word ‘color’ to mean ‘theatrical performance’ when he writes of devils in his 1587 Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts: ‘whensoeuer they appeare in a visible forme, it is no more but an apparition and counterfeit shewe of a bodie, … and when they make one body to beare the likeness of another, it is but a colour’ (E1r). Here color embodies specifically the staging of matter – ‘the counterfeit shewe of a bodie’ – in visible form. Even without the suspicion that coloration is inherently corrupting, the capacity of print to manifest reliably legible bodies has been called into question by the narrative. The ‘Empress’ after all is the mistress of self-reproduction on

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both stage and page, embodying the early modern associations of publication and play-acting with prostitution: ‘Our royall signet, / With which, we, … / Haue sign’d so many pardons, is now counterfeit: / … our Babylonian Sinagogues. Are counted Stewes, where Fornications / And all vncleannesse Sodomiticall, … are now acted: / Our Image, which (like Romane Casars) stamp’d / In gold, through the whole earth did currant passe; / Is now blanch’d copper, or but guilded brasse’ (A4v). The failed attempt to distinguish between print and performance resurfaces in the juxtaposition of the title page advertisement of the play, ‘As it was acted by the Princes Seruants’, with Dekker’s prefatory address which Bodley-like champions the printed version of the play over its earlier ‘bad handling’ by the ‘Players’ (A2v). Unlike the title page of The Bloudy Mother, which seeks to fulfill the desires of the narrator to bring matters to a head, the frontispiece of The Whore of Babylon replicates the failure of reading, if not bleeding, within the play’s narrative. Rather than order and distinguish categories with red ink, it ultimately suggests the ambiguity both of extravasated blood, which cannot be traced to its bodily source and of the blush, which signifies both modesty and its obverse – shame – in early modern culture. Promising to contain Imperial Catholicism within a single rubric, it falls prey to the multifarious signification of color, suggesting that within the ideology of printed truth any rubrication must be read as a masking of the page. But more significantly for an understanding of drama’s existence in print, the title page and the narrative together fail to sustain the generic distinctions which Dekker’s front ‘matter’ enacts – the distinction, indeed, between stage and page. Revealing the creators, the subjects, and the functions of drama as anything but singular, The Whore of Babylon threatens to make common – to ‘empresse’ – the play: it reveals but fails to contain its ‘vnworthy maters’ on its surface for readers to see and handle anew. Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J.R. Mulryne (London: New Mermaids, 1989), 3.2.26. In an expanded version of this paper, I discuss in greater detail the significance of Bel-Imperia’s letter and the textual products of several other women who write in blood on stage as well as the use of other body fluids as writing materials. Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 255–84; 279–80. De Grazia and Stallybrass, ‘Materiality’, p. 279 Roger Chartier, ‘Meaningful Forms’, Liber 1 (1989): 8–9, esp. 8. De Grazia and Stallybrass, ‘Materiality’, p. 280. Letters 220 and 221, January 1612 in The Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, ed. G.W. Wheeler (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), pp. 219–21. Bodley, Letters, p. 221.

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Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie 1623 (Menston, England: The Scholar Press, 1968), E1r. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 136 (original emphasis). Red ink arose as part of a tradition of directed reading in the early Middle Ages. According to Mary Carruthers, ‘the visual presentation of a text was considered … to be a part of its meaning … necessary to its proper reading, its ability to be significant and memorable’ (Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1990, p. 224). Chaucer in the House of Fame imagines the voices of human beings rising from earth clothed red or black as if written. John Lydgate in the fifteenth century has a vision of his poem The Fifteen Joys and Sorrows of Mary before writing it: ‘sett out in picture with Rubrisshes departyd black and Reed / Of ech chaptitle a paraf in the heed’. From its earliest inception, rubrication was associated particularly with the beginnings of texts; the incipit or indication of a new topic was often written in red. Dante describes the book of his memory as rubricated with the words Incipit vita nova. The fourth-century Augusteaus manuscript of Virgil is the earliest surviving example of colored initials – at the beginning of the first line on each page. Rubrication then becomes a convention for marking the beginning of each major division of a text. Rubrication thus told readers when to start and, if Carruthers is correct, what to remember from a text. Red ink was also used in tituli – part of the rubrication of a written text – a marginal summary of chapters or a quotation of the first few words in a textual division which later develop into the convention of titles (Carruthers, pp. 241, 244). Thomas Buckminster A Newe Almanacke and Prognostication for the yere of Lorde God M.D. LXXI … (London, 1571), A6r. Bernard Capp, in his survey of English Almanacs 1500–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), regards these instructions as used primarily by professionals. In setting out these rules, almanacs were supplying a large number of provincial and amateur physicians with the rudiments of astrological medicine (p. 205). He cites Gabriel Frende’s edition which addresses the inexperienced surgeon directly, stating of its adapted guide to bloodletting this figure is prefixed, thy hand to guide. At the same time, Capp includes a physician’s complaint that suggests that many lay people continued to follow the almanac’s advice on physic through the end of the seventeenth century (albeit with deadly results). While occasionally almanacs will include a direct address to a physician or surgeon (see for example a note in Gray’s almanac of 1591 ‘all these [times] are not onely very perilous to fall sicke in, but also dangerous to use any extreame remedie to the Patient, as Purge, Uomite, Phlebotomize, and Cautrize …’. A3r), more often they speak directly to laymen, at the same time suggesting that they consult physicians for advice (in turn often the authors of those same almanacs). See Gail Kern Paster’s discussion of such categories in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Discipline of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) especially her introduction, ‘Civilizing the Humoral Body’, and second chapter, ‘Laudable Blood: Bleeding, Difference, and Humoral Embarrassment’. Thomas Hill, A New Almanac STC 459 (London, 1572); Walter Gray, An Almanacke and Prognostication made for the yeere of our Lorde God 1591 …, STC 451(London, 1591), A2v.

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15 Iohn White, A new Almanacke and Prognostication for the yeere of of [!] our Lord God 1628 …, STC527 (London, 1628); George Osborne, A new Almanacke and Prognostication for the yeare of our Lord God 1622 …. STC 493.8 (London, 1622), B3v–4r. 16 Iefferie Neue, A new Almanacke and Prognostication, with the forraigne Computation, seruing for the yeare of our Lord and Sauior Iesus Christ 1616 …, STC 489 (London, 1616). 17 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 117. 18 Note that the rule or lines which bordered and divided medieval manuscripts and some early modern printed texts were drawn in red, hence the generalization of the term in later periods. See Christopher de Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 20–23. Printed books continued to observe the convention, although no longer necessary for the production of a straight text. De Hamel notes that ‘of medieval books Unruled manuscripts … are the cheap ugly home-made transcripts’ (p. 21); such associations may have conditioned the desire of readers and producers for ruled printed texts into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 19 Specific treatments for women included an inhalant for the mother [uterus] or specifically for the passion of the mother; oil of nutmegs for comforting the stomach and inward parts, and assuaging the pain of the mother and sciatica; dry powder made from a female mole for the falling evil if it be a man, and from a male mole for a woman with the same illness; receipts for the stopping of the womb and for the green sickness; to increase a woman’s milk; to dry up milk; poultices for sore breasts; drinks for ease in child bearing; and a section entitled, ‘ADDITIONS to women’s infirmities including prescriptions to cease a women’s flowers, for the superfluities of the matrix and pain in the matrix’. Gervase Markham, The English Housewife, ed. Michael R. Best (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 1.177–83. Nonetheless, Markham’s text expresses reluctance to entrust extensive medical knowledge to his female reader: ‘Indeed we must confess that the depth and secrets of this most excellent art of physic is far beyond the capacity of the most skilful woman, as lodging only in the breast of the learned professors; yet that our housewife may from them receive some ordinary rules and medicines which may avail for the benefit of her family, is … no derogation at all to that worthy art. Neither do I intend here to load her mind with all the symptoms, accidents, and effects which go before or after every sickness, as though I would have her assume the name of a practitioner, but only relate unto her some approved medicines, and old doctrines which have been gathered together by two excellent and famous physicians … for the curing of those ordinary sickenesses which daily do perturb the health of men and women’. 20 Buckminster’s almanac, like many others, includes ‘Notes for conuenient tymes to Sowe, Set, Plant, and Graffe’ which lists when to cut wood for timber, when to move or remove trees, and when to cut vines, according to the same signs used to cultivate the individual body. Almanacs situate their readers geographically as well by targeting particular regions of residency, Dorchester or Hereford for example, while maintaining they serve generally for all Englande or even this whole Britaine Monarchy: [Gray 1591; Gervale Dauncy, Dauncy 1614. His President for the Starres, or the Almanacke of Prognostications, for this Yeere of our Redemption. 1614 (London, 1614)]. Buckminster’s ‘The principall Fayres of Englande and Wales, orderly set foorth, with the moneth, day, and place, where they be kept’

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(E3r) speaks to the reader as commercial being, and by the start of the seventeenthcentury almanacs were often made to appeal specifically to various professions: sailors, weavers, brewers, constables, and farriers (Capp 33). Almanacs aimed at women, however, only began to be printed in the 1640s and to flourish by 1700, according to Capp. Paster, Body Embarrassed, p. 78. Paster, Body Embarrassed, p. 25. For an excellent survey of the medieval iconography of the zodiacal body, see Harry Bober, ‘The Zodiacal Miniature of the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry – Its Sources and Meaning’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948): 1–34. Valerie Traub, ‘Gendering Mortality in Early Modern Anatomies in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture’, eds Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 44–5; Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 1. See also Michael Neil, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 102. Sawday, Body Emblazoned, p. 102. Similarly, according to Laqueur, envisioning bodily interiors was not possible in some significant way before the new, extravagantly public theatrical dissection and its visual representations: ‘What had been hidden before … was now made available for general consumption. Late twentieth-century readers need to guard against using Vesalian-influenced conceptions of what our bodies look like inside in imagining earlier responses to medical images’. As Sawday cautions, in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, a ‘science’ of the body had not yet emerged. Instead, what was to become science – a seemingly discrete way of ordering the observation of the natural world – was, at this stage, no more than one method amongst many by which human knowledge was organized. See for example, John Securis, A New Almanacke and Prognostication, for the yeare of our Lord God MDLXXI STC 511a (London: Thomas Marshe, 1571). Laqueur, Making Sex, pp. 77–8. According to J.B. de C.M. Saunders and Charles D. O’Malley, anatomical plates of the Vesalian kind appeared before his Tabula Sex and Fabrica: in 1518, the Spiegel der Artzny circulated at the same time a crude and fanciful diagram of the skeleton, typically medieval and a series of views of the brain and the tongue on a second plate that without doubt were drawn from the actual dissection. The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (New York: Dover Press, 1973), p. 23. Like Vesalius’ earliest works, they are regarded as ‘fugitive sheets’ for the use of students of anatomy – to present popular information or to provide a ready reference for the student or relatively unlettered barber-surgeon (p. 25). Large, printed on one side, and often in the vernacular, the illustrations were frequently crude and anatomically inexact. Vesalius addressed his Tabulae Sex to students and physicians exclusively and they are recognized as representing his most up-to-date research with an accuracy hitherto unseen. Nonetheless Saunders and O’Malley point out numerous physiological phenomena which suggest the use of animal cadavers as prototypes for the illustrations (for instance the plate of Arteria Magna which shows the shape of the heart, the position of the kidneys and the branches of the aorta … based largely on forms other than man, possibly a monkey and the inclusion of a small figure with the organs of generation that shows the implantation of the vessels carrying down the semen that seems based on the

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modified anatomy of a dog). In the Fabrica, as well, illustrations seem based on dissections performed on non-human cadavers; the engraving of the hyoid bone, according to the authors, despite the comparison in the accompanying text with that of a dog (p. 62) and Vesalius’ own critique of Galen’s descriptions which he revealed were themselves based on quadruped anatomy (pp. 64–6). According to O’Malley and Saunders, it was not only reliance upon the anatomy of the domestic animals, and especially that of the ape, but a persistent Galenic influence which led Vesalius to adjust the size and position of various significant veins (the jugular and renal veins in particular) and to neglect the arterial system which played a minor role in phlebotomical medicine (p. 134). (See also their commentary on his complete delineation of the entire great artery [aorta] freed from all parts (p. 136)). That is to say that the verisimilitude which we see in Vesalian illustration has to do with other factors as well as its accuracy in representing the internal features of our bodies. For the approximate price of a play text see Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’ in A New History of Early English Drama, eds John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422. On almanacs and their retail cost from the 1550s to 1650s, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 262–3. Watt uses almanacs to gauge the price of the least expensive books available in this period – termed three halfpenny or twopenny books. Although she has found records of some octavo penny pamphlets, the ‘two poor pence, or three pence at the most asked for almanacs seems to represent by and large the bottom of the multiple-sheet text market’. The information on almanac printing comes from a conversation with Blayney. In 1616, when the first small-sized vernacular anatomy appeared, its author justified its publication on utilitarian as well as pedagogical grounds: ‘in the aforesaid Authors, the descriptions of the parts being interposed betweene the Figures, distract the minde, and defraud the storehouse of memory; besides this the volumes are not portable: Whereas by the contrarie, this small volume presenting all the partes of the body of man by continuation to the eie, impresseth the Figures firmely in the mind, and being portable may be carried without trouble, to the places appointed for dissection: where the collation of the Figures, with the Descriptions, cannot but affoord great contentment of the minde. The Printer therefore of the former great volume, hath published this small Manuell, hoping it will prooue profitable and delightfull to such as are not able to buy or haue no time to peruse the other …’. Alexander Read, Eumatographia anthropine or a description of the body of man (London: W. Jaggard, 1616) 8o, A3r–v. Mechanical Exercises, 2.24.16. The difficulty of fairly inking and smoothly printing types so treated cannot be overrated. Notes p. 428, Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises: A literal reprint in two volumes with preface and notes, Theo. L. De Vinne (New York: The Typothetae of the City of New York, 1896). David Hillman, ‘Visceral Knowledge’ in The Body in Parts, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 84; Sawday, Body Emblazoned, p. 28. In their conflicting illustrative capacities, the zodiacal bodies epitomize the tension between residual and emergent medical systems at this moment, a tension which results not only from competing knowledge in scientific communities but from the status affiliation of that information and its adherents. As debates on methods of

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bleeding arose from the comparison of earlier Arabic versions with new translations of Galenic texts, the almanac was a source for the most conservative of phlebotomic theories. Nonetheless, according to Capp, throughout the seventeenth century, almanacs ensured that knowledge of astrological medicine was more widely accessible than ever before, ironically at a time when it was already declining in respectability at the higher levels of the profession (p. 206). While Capp sees the information contained within almanacs as a ‘sustained attack … on the secrecy and exclusiveness of the medical profession’, a number of prominent practitioners, including Richard Foster, president of the Royal College of Physicians in the early seventeenth century, produced almanacs, seemingly recognizing the potential selfpromotion that the name-recognition of almanacs’ title pages offered them and the profession (Capp, p. 205). Louis Montrose, ‘Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modern Subject’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, eds Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996), p. 91. Dekker’s Raven’s Almanacke plays on this assumption, masking corrective parody in the coloration of the authentic article. The red title, ‘The … Almanacke … That shall happen this present yeare … With certanie [!] remedies, rules, and receipts, … LONDON establishes the generic context for the work, while the black-inked text provides the details Foretelling of a Plague/Famine. and/Ciuill Warre. In place of the specific location for which the almanack is designed and particularly suited appears an unusual geographic range of application: not only within this Kingdome of great Brittaine, but also in France, Germany, Spayne, & / other parts of Christendome. Black ink subverts the guides to bleeding and sweating, the advice on husbandry, by offering directions how to preuent or at least abate not personal illness or failed crops but the edge of these / uniuersall Calamities’. The title page to The Ravens Almanacke uses red to emphasize the conventional features of an almanac, leaving the black lettering to form the commentary and prognostication which belies the initial impression. Cited in Frederick Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), p. 37. See also Tamburlaine ‘by the characters graven on [his] brow is seen to deserv[e] to have the leading of a host’ (1586). Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 104–7. Maus, Inwardness, p. 104. In Body Embarrassed, Paster argues that blood’s power to blazon guilt – even more than the psychological enormity of the guilt itself – lies behind Macbeth’s fear that ‘all great Neptune’s ocean’ will not ‘wash this blood / Clean from my hand’ (2.2.57.58) Paster, Body Embarrassed, p. 64. George Thomson Aimatiasis, or the Sure Way of Preserving the Bloud (London, 1670), p. 2, in Paster, Body Embarrassed, p. 73. Thomas Brewer, The Bloudy Mother or The most inhumane nurthers, committed by Iane Hattersley, vpon diuers Infants, the issue of her owne bodie: & the private burying of them in an Orchard with her Araignment and execution …. (London, 1609) A3v. Dolan notes that statutes defined neonatal infanticide as a crime of concealment and charts the development of the infanticide statute of 1624, which attempted to remove concealment as either a motive for infanticide or a barrier to prosecution

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by demanding that women produce at least one witness to testify that the infant had been born dead. Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 129, 160. The difficulty of trusting one’s own eyes continued to hamper Hattersley’s prosecution. At the time of birth of Hattersley’s supposed second baby, ‘a neighbor, goodwife Ford, upon hearing the weake shrike of a newborne infant, took advantage of a key hole to catch sight of a bole-dish, in which was the after birth of a child, and other perspicuous and evident tokens of a childe borne at that instant. Yet when she came back upstairs her eye and eare … busie to find that she sawe through the key hole; … she could neither see what she had seene, nor heard what she had heard: for all was most cunningly cleard’. This re-emphasis of gender divisions appears both in the work’s title and title page illustrations. The title perpetuates the Aristotelian distinction between parental roles in generation – male contributing form, female matter: the infants are the issue of [Hattersley’s] body while Adamson is both grammatically and physically the active agent as their ‘vnlawfullbegetter’ (the slip in spacing implies his full biological responsibility). See Brewer, B2v–3r, This child, as by manifest and probable circumstances ‘appeard at her triall, Adamson (after they had by most vile and inhuman violence, taken the breath from it, that but then it had received) in the dead of night … buried it an unknown graue as the former. And Dolan Those women who did commit infanticide were so reluctant to use force that suffocation and exposure were the most popular methods of killing infants and small children’ (p.124). The title page shows us two elements of the creation of the Foucauldian criminal subject by the old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood as they are translated from performance to text. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 16. See also Chapter Two, ‘The spectacle of the scaffold’, especially pp. 47, 55. Although he suggests the potentially differing effects of the two genres, Foucault’s brief discussion at the end of this chapter of the relation of criminal text to execution fails to discuss the transformation of the inscription of the crime by torture on the criminal body into the constitution of that body and crime through other systems of writing. For the effect of a soul through punishment of the body, see Discipline and Punish, p. 29: ‘This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. It should be noted that Brewer’s account again points out the limitations as well as the force of Foucault’s argument: the extensive role of various social and professional groups other than the monarch in the production of this power/ knowledge nexus’. Edward Jorden, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother facsimile reprint in Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case ed. Michael MacDonald (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991), F2v. Patricia Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present 91 (May 1981): 47–73; 61. F.L., Characterism or Lenton’s Leasures Expressed in Essayes and Characters (London, 1631), E6v.

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51 Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (London, 1607), A2r. 52 See in particular Jean Howard’s discussion of anti-theatricality in this text in The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994). I am indebted to her analysis of the breakdown of dichotomies of theatricality and plainness at work within the play. 53 See Howard, Stage, pp. 55–6. 54 Clare McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 52. 55 McEachern, Poetics, p. 58. 56 The Geneva Bible: The Annotated New Testament 1602 edition, ed. Gerald T. Sheppard (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1989), 119r. 57 In Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 33. Bishop’s Bible, p. 124. 58 Significantly, those without access to the text’s visual allusion have more difficulty in forming that identification: ‘If an allegory of Duessa as the scarlet whore of Revelation has more than made her associations clear to the reader, only the revelation of Duressa’s body … clearly demonstrates to Redcrosse the difference between a good woman and a false church’ (McEachern, Poetics, p. 44). 59 The Book of Common Prayer, with the Psalter or Psalmes of Dauid (London, 1607), 133r. 60 In the extended version of this essay, I discuss the associations of Empress with early-modern terms for printing or empressing that suggest further connotations of somatic and textual propriety created in the play-text. 61 XXII.xv.5. The printer for The Whore of Babylon is unidentified: other rubricated title pages for Dekker’s work appear in texts printed by Edward Alde and produced for and published by Nicolas Butter. Butter, in particular, can be linked both to frequent dual-color printing and to demotic works with which such visual phenomena were associated. 62 In a recent essay, Josep Besa discusses the complicated relationship a title can bear to the narrative it introduces: its function as entrance point shifts as the reader encounters what the book contains, losing or gaining authority or utility. Besa’s description of this process oddly recapitulates the tropes of the early modern rubricated text. ‘At the outset, as the title is a clue to interpretation, it restricts the reader’s initiative and activity; in this function, it approximates its medieval predecessors, the tituli, that regulate a reader’s response to the text. Later on, as the reader enters the text, the title appears as a fluid and porous body: the title is impregnated with what we subsequently read …. In Gogol’s Dead Souls, for example, The words become impregnated with a totally different and incomparably richer meaning, … as a sponge absorbs sea water ….’ ‘Title, text, meaning’, Textual Practice 11 (1997): 323–30. 63 If, as I’ve suggested above, the formation of the title page lay with the work’s printer, its publisher Nicholas Butter issued a number of rubricated down-market works, including Dekker’s pseudo-apocalyptic rubricated Seven Deadly Sins. 64 See Annette Drew-Bear Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage: The Moral Significance of Face-Painting Conventions (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1994), p. 22. Drew-Bear cites Nashe’s description of the face of Pride in Pierce Penilesse as covered with vermillion and white (p. 17). 65 John Jewel, An Apology for the Church of England (London, 1563), ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville, VA, 1963), p. 12.

PART IV PARENTAL AUTHORITIES

C\ Taylor & Francis ~

Taylor & Francis Group

http://taylora ndfra n ci s.com

CHAPTER 11

Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Cliffordʼs A Mirror for Magistrates Stephen Orgel Lady Anne Clifford was an articulate and powerful figure who gives the lie to a whole complex of modern assumptions about what was possible for women in seventeenth-century English society. She was also a voracious reader and bibliophile. Barbara Lewalski, in the course of a seminal study of Clifford, which focuses in part on the importance of books to her life, observes that Clifford never commented on her reading.1 It is true that neither her diary nor the large amount of correspondence that survives includes any mention of literature – readings from the scriptures are meticulously noted, but the books she kept beside her for information and recreation go unrecorded. In one case, however, she left a detailed record of her reading, and that is the subject of this essay. Its larger subject, however, is to challenge a pair of assumptions prevalent in current bibliographical theory: first, that the history of the book is the history of print technology; second, that printing was developed as an arm of patriarchy, and that it was essentially a way for men to replicate themselves and to deny any agency to women. I shall return to these issues in my conclusion. I am here examining a very late edition of A Mirror for Magistrates (Figure 11.1), published in 1609–10, a version of the famous work much enlarged and reorganized, not always very sensibly, to fill in gaps, and to bring it up to date by covering Elizabethan history – it concludes with Heywood’s long poem England’s Eliza. The copy I am considering has copious marginal annotations in pen and ink, in at least three different hands, including a reading diary recording the dates and locations where the readings occurred, for the most part aloud, to a listener addressed as ‘your ladyship’ (Figure 11.2). The readings began on 21 March 1670 – the volume was already 60 years old – and continued through 20 May at Brough and Pendragon castles in Westmoreland. During this three-month period, with the exception of a two-week hiatus at the beginning of April, the readings took place pretty much daily, though they were neither comprehensive – not all stories were read – nor consecutive. The next year in April 1671, at Brougham Castle, the book was taken up again and the final section, England’s Eliza, was read aloud; and a second reading of England’s Eliza took place in Appleby Castle in September 1673.

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11.1 Title Page; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

These castles are all properties of Lady Anne Clifford. By 1670 this formidable matriarch had for 20 years been definitively confirmed in her possession of her ancestral estates in Westmoreland: she had succeeded in breaking her father’s will; all her father’s male heirs contesting her claims had died, and she had successfully pursued complex and extended litigation against both her family and her tenants. She had triumphed, had left London and the court world of her youth, and now lived permanently in the county of which she was the principal landowner. She was, through her two marriages, the dowager Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery; in her own right she was the Baroness Clifford, Westmoreland, and Vecsey, and was, in addition, hereditary Sheriff of Westmoreland. Like a true Renaissance prince, she moved continually from one property to another – her four principal

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11.2 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

residences were the castles just mentioned, and there were a variety of other lordships and manors that she also owned and visited. She traveled in a horsedrawn litter over the mountainous roads and stayed for a few months at a time at each of the castles. She was over 80 in 1670; she was born in 1590, and died in 1676. She identifies herself quite definitively near the end of England’s Eliza, noting next to a passage about ‘That famous horse-man, launce-fam’d Clifford hight, / The great Heroë noble Cumberland’ (Figure 11.3) that ‘this was my ffather George erle of Cumberland’ (p. 848); twenty-two pages later she has the same note beside ‘Renowned Clifford on the fruitfull deepe / Like Joveborne Perseus’ (Figure 11.4) (p. 870). Obviously she liked the poem because it included so much of her own family history. But she also makes an interesting family error in the process of appropriating the work when at one point her heroic father is referred to simply as ‘Cumberland’, rather than ‘Clifford’, and she marginally identifies him as her grandfather, the second Earl (‘that Cumberland was my grandfather’) (Figure 11.5), and then subsequently corrects the word to ‘father’ (p. 790) – she is reading, or rereading, carefully enough to catch the mistake. There are a number of other quite personal moments throughout the book: she finds a Clifford ancestor in the tragedy of Edward II, and notes ‘which Lord Clifford died the 1st yeare of K: Edw: 3: Raigne without Legitimate Children As he was never married’ (p. 716); she marginally identifies ‘Russell that martiall Knight’ as (Figure 11.6) ‘Sr Wm Russell he that was my Mothers younger Brother’ (p. 805); she observes of ‘noble Bingham, that illustrate Knight’ (Figure 11.7) that ‘this Sr Richard Bingham had a neece that served mee a good while as my chief gentlewoman / Bingham a Dorsettshire man’ (p. 803); and she notes at the beginning of the tragedy of

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11.3 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.4 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

Humphrey Plantagenet (Figure 11.8) that it was read to her in Brough Castle by William Watkinson (p. 327), who was for many years Clifford’s secretary. The marginal commentary opens, however, with a particularly interesting family error. At the very beginning of the book, beside the title The Authors Induction, she writes this: ‘I am of that opinion that this is the same that is called mr Sackvills induction Immediatly after I heard it Read over to me the 21: day of march in 1670’ (Figure 11.9) (A8v). It is, in fact, not Sackville’s Induction but John Higgins’ induction to the book as a whole – Sackville’s famous Induction to his tragedy of the Duke of Buckingham appears much further on. Three days later she marginally corrects herself (Figure 11.10): ‘but

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11.5 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.6 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

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11.7 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.8 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

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11.9 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.10 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

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afterwards I perceived that that his Induction begins att the 255: page’ – page 255 is, indeed, headed, in very large type, ‘Mr. Sackville’s Induction’ (Figure 11.11), and around it she duly notes, with perhaps more show of deliberation than is warranted, ‘I thinke this is the right Induction that was written in the beginning of Queene Elizabeth’s time by mr Thomas Sackvill that [was] afterwarde Lord high Treasurer of England & Earle of Dorset. which was read over to mee the 24: of March in Brough Castle 1669:1670 / And the other induction be but Counterfeat to this’ (p. 255).

11.11 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

This is notable, and even surprising, for several reasons. First, though she has never read Sackville’s Induction, she knows about it, and knows that it is what she wants to hear – it is, in this book, the real thing: ‘the other induction’ is not merely the wrong one, but a ‘Counterfeat’. For this particular reader, however, Sackville’s poem was not merely famous; it was in a real sense a family heirloom: the Thomas Sackville who was afterwards Lord Treasurer and Earl of Dorset was her grandfather-in-law, her first husband’s grandfather. It was he, indeed, who had first proposed the marriage of his grandson Richard Sackville with Lady Anne. He died in 1608, less than a year before their marriage, when she was 19. Even if she never met him – which seems very unlikely – he was a person of considerable importance in her life; so her detachment in referring to him only as a literary and public figure is remarkable: compare it with the

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marginalia about ‘Sr Wm Russell he that was my Mothers younger Brother’ and Sir Richard Bingham’s niece ‘that served mee a good while as my chief gentlewoman.’ Not only does she not appropriate Sackville, both patriarchy and her first marriage are being suppressed here. It is probably to the point, therefore, that having read Sackville’s Induction she did not go on to read the rest of Sackville’s contribution to the Mirror, the Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham – in the 1609 edition this does not immediately follow, but the Induction is clearly an induction to that particular tragedy: it concludes, ‘Then first came Henry Duke of Buckingham … / On cruel Fortune weeping thus he plaind’ (p. 271). A really interested reader would surely then proceed to the plaint. Apparently the Induction was all the Sackville she wanted – though she wanted a good deal else from the book as a whole. Most striking, perhaps, is the fact that she has never read the book before. Though she collected books throughout her life, including such English literary classics as Arcadia, the works of Chaucer, Spenser, and of her tutor Samuel Daniel and Florio’s Montaigne, this classic apparently first came into her possession when she was 80 years old. If her husband owned a copy of his grandfather’s masterpiece, she did not keep it; if there was a copy on the shelves at Knole, her home for 20 years and the Sackvilles’ ancestral seat, she did not read it. But for three months in 1670, and twice thereafter, she read the book eagerly and appreciatively, frequently noting in the margins ‘a good verse’, or ‘marke this’. This brings me to some paleographical issues. I have said that there are at least three hands discernible in the marginalia. The principal one is the one in Figure 11.12, which we might call the narrative hand, the one that conveys most of the information about what was read when and where. It is a very clear scribal hand, that of Clifford’s secretary William Watkinson, whom she refers to as her ‘chief writer’ during the last years of her life – this is the same hand in which her diary for the 1660s and 1670s is written. She dictated the diary to him, as she dictated most of these marginalia. And like a true Renaissance secretary, Watkinson wrote in whatever persona was required. For some narratives, the heading he provides takes the form ‘This was read to your ladyship on such a date at such a place’; some are headed, ‘This your ladyship read over yourself on such a date’; but in some, Watkinson disappears, and the heading reads ‘This I read myself on such a date’, (Figure 11.13) and even ‘This was read over to me on such a date’ (Figure 11.14) – Watkinson’s mistress at these moments speaks through him, just as she does when he writes her correspondence in the first person. But there is a second hand which also writes ‘This I read on such a date’ (Figure 11.15), a rather shaky italic hand. This hand also makes more personal comments, noting particular passages for emphasis or praise: ‘A good vearse’ (Figure 11.16); ‘Marke this’. This is Clifford’s own hand; she was taught the italic that ladies used, and in her youth it was a careful, very controlled hand.

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11.12 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.13 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

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11.14 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.15 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

In her maturity her surviving correspondence shows it as a swift and forceful hand, significantly less elegant. By the age of 80 she had less control over it, and in a few places seems to require help in completing her marginalia, as in Figure 11.17 (p. 211), which she gets not from Watkinson, but from someone with a less professional scribal hand. The personae throughout the book shade into each other as Clifford’s sense of herself incorporates her servants, and as they ventriloquize her voice. The marginalia are informed, as her diary is, with a passion for meticulous and often repetitious detail, and with no evident principle of subordination. Here is a passage from the diary for 1668 about the visit of one of her former lady’s maids, which gives a good sense of her style:

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11.16 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.17 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection The 11th day of May in this year did my old servant Mrs Elizabeth Gillmore, whose first husband was mr John Turner, come from her son-inlaw Mr Killaways at Wirk in Wiltshire to an inn at Reading in Berkshire, and from thence next day to London, where she stayed till the 5th day of the month following, in which time her second husband Mr John Gillmore with their maid and a man called John Walker and one Thomas Kingston came up thither with her. And from thence the same 5th day of June they came down together in a hired coach towards York, whither they got well the 9th day; and there my servants George Goodgion and John Hall by my appointment met them with some of my horses to bring them from thence hither to Brougham Castle. And accordingly they set forth from York the 11th day, and came that night to Greta Bridge, and the next day over Stainmore and by Brough Castle into my Castle of Appleby, where they lay all night, Mrs Gillmore and her husband lying in the Baron’s

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chamber there; and from thence the 13th of this June they came by Julian Bower (where they alighted to see all the rooms and places about it), and so through Whinfield Park hither into this Brougham Castle to me, where I kissed Mrs Gillmore, I having not seen her since the 11th of August 1663, when she had been for a while at Skipton Castle with me, till now this 13th of June. (Diaries, 189)

The crazily compulsive detail of this is entirely consistent with her way of reading her copy of A Mirror for Magistrates. For example, on 19 May 1670 Thomas Blennerhasset’s tragedy How Uter Pendragon was inamoured on the wife of Gorolus Duke of Cornwall was read to her, and at the end she had Watkinson write, ‘these Blenner Hassetts are the Antients[t] Gentlemen in Cumberlande’ (Figure 11.18) (p. 218). They then proceeded to the next tragedy, Blennerhasset’s How Cadwallader the Last King of the Britaines was expelled, at the end of which – six pages later, say 12 minutes of reading time – Watkinson duly noted that ‘these Blenner Hassetts, are Antient Gentlemen in Cumberland’ (p. 224). The next day they read Blennerhasset’s How Sigebert for his Wicked Life was thrust from his throne and miserablie slaine, and when they concluded Watkinson wrote ‘this Blener Hasset has writ severall of the bookes before who come of a Good Kindred in Cumberland’ (p. 234). They then read Blennerhasset’s How Ladie Ebbe did Flea her nose and upper lippe away, to save her virginitie – four pages, less than ten minutes long – and at the end Watkinson noted ‘this is the same Blener Hassets that writ divers of these before’ (p. 238). They went on to the four pages of How King Egelred for his wickednesse was diversly distressed by the Danes, and Watkinson observed ‘this is that blener Hasset that has writ Divers of this before’ (p. 242). And finally, still on 20 May, a few minutes later, they read How Edricus Earle of Mercia, Destroyed the Valiant King Edmund Ironside, of which Watkinson noted that ‘this Thomas Blener: Hasset was a Cumberland Gentleman who made many of these Poems’ (p. 244). This is an entirely characteristic progression, with the tales meticulously prepared for the possibility that she may someday reread them out of sequence. So far we have looked at some ways in which Clifford appropriated and controlled the book. But she also enjoyed it, and the marginalia in her own hand gloss salient points – in the tragedy of Leir and Cordila, Queen Cordila, she marginally notes, ‘was taken prisoner’ (Figure 11.19) (p. 64); through the efforts of the Empress Helena ‘Brittons all turned Christians’ (Figure 11.20) (p. 196); Edward II ‘was putt to Dethe withe tormentt in Barkley castell’ (Figure 11.21) (p. 733), and she several times notes beside that particular story that she has heard it often (Figure 11.22). Her hand also expresses frequent admiration and approval. From the very beginning of the book she likes its philosophy and epigrammatic morality. John Higgins’ prefatory citation of Plotinus’s dictum that ‘The property of Temperance is to covet nothing which may be repented’

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11.18 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.19 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

earns a marginal ‘excelent good’ (Figure 11.23) (A2r), and his observation that Cyrus and Hannibal would never have come to tragic ends ‘but for want of temperance’ is marginally declared ‘true’ (Figure 11.24) (A3r). Her taste in verse is conservative, but she has an ear for dignified and powerful prosody: Sith that the wrath of gods hath yeelded me, And eke my brother, captives to your hands, I am content to do as pleaseth thee, You have my realme, my life, my goods and lands, I must be needs content as Fortune stands.

This, from John Higgins’ tragedy of Albanact is declared ‘A good Verse’ (Figure 11.25) (p. 5), and Higgins’ fourteeners sending Brute off to found Britain,

READING LADY ANNE CLIFFORD’S A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES

11.20 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.21 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.22 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

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11.23 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.24 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection An Iland in the Ocean is, where Giants erst did dwell: But now a desert place that’s fit, will serve thy people well

is ‘A remarkable prophesie in verse concerning the building of another Troy of great Britane’ (p. 7). Here are a few more examples from among a great many, to give a sense of her taste. Beside Higgins’ invocation of the ‘world divided from the world’ topos – An Ile said I? nay nam’d the world throughout Another world, sith sea doth it divide From all, that wants not all the world beside

- she writes ‘Marke this’ (p. 11). In Robert Duke of Normandy, ‘Nine times the pale-fac’d Queene of peacefull night’ – or perhaps the whole stanza – is declared ‘A good verse’ (Figure 11.26) (p. 643). As for Sackville’s Induction, it includes, for her, ‘A good discription of the house of Sorrow’ (p. 261); and this bit from John Higgins’ tale of Fulgentius is ‘An Excellent Good Vearse’ (Figure 11.27):

READING LADY ANNE CLIFFORD’S A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES

11.25 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.26 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.27 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

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You noble men, yee see what trust there is In Fortunes gifts, how mischiefe makes the marts, And how our hoped haps in warres do misse, When backe the brave and blinded Ladie starts. High reaching heads swim oft in seas of smarts.

(p. 170)

She especially commends ‘Three good verses’ (Figure 11.28) at the opening of the tragedy How King Kimarus was devoured by wilde beasts: No place commends the man unworthie praise. No Kingly state doth stay up vices fall: No wicked wight to woe can make delaies

(p. 103)

The next line, however, strikes a modern ear as even better: No loftie lookes preserve the proud at all.

Is there any significance to the fact that only three good verses are cited here, not four? Did the fourth perhaps strike too close to home? Throughout the book, whole pages are commended with the curious expression ‘A good side of a Leffe’ (Figure 11.29) – leffe is an old form of leaf, as in a leaf of paper (when Watkinson writes the phrase (Figure 11.30) he spells the word ‘leafe’), and this is apparently a way of being precise: ‘a good page’ could refer to the whole double-sided leaf, but she wants it clear which side she means. Our reaction to this will probably be to wonder what the point of the precision is: for whose benefit are these marginalia are written other than herself? But the book is a testimony to how public and communal a matter the reading of literature still was in the seventeenth century. Aside from England’s Eliza, a clear favorite that she reads over twice, the tales she singles out for praise are The Life and Death of Robert Surnamed Curthose, Duke of Normandy, noting that ‘though this bee a very sadd one yett it is the best in all this Booke’ (Figure 11.31) (p. 632), and the story of How Queene Helena of Britaine Married Constantius the Emperour and much advanced the Christian faith, of which she says ‘this is one of the Excellent’s treatice in all the Booke’ (Figure 11.32) (p. 195). We need not pause much over her attraction to the British heroine under whose wise guidance, as she marginally notes in her own hand, ‘Brittons all turned Christians’ (p. 196). The combination of female authority and the triumph of faith was certainly sufficient guarantee of excellence. Robert Duke of Normandy is another matter. The story is, as she notes, very sad. It concerns the brother of William Rufus, who spent his life fighting attempts to dislodge him from his rightful place. All his successes – and there were many – proved ultimately delusive, and he ended his days in misery. If Anne Clifford, at the age of 80, saw this

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11.28 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.29 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

as a cautionary tale about her own life, let us hope that she viewed it as an alternative model, the fate she had escaped. This book is not simply a printed text – very few books are, and no book’s history concludes with its publication. As soon as a book has a reader it has been changed, and it is a rare book from this period that does not bear the imprint of ownership. To begin with, books were sold unbound, and the purchaser decided on the binding; and this was only the first of many proprietary decisions. This particular reader went to considerable effort to make A Mirror for Magistrates her own, to reinvent it as a part of her life. It did not merely entertain her and her household on spring evenings for a year or two: under her hand it celebrated her heroic ancestry, chronicled her days, and served as the receptacle of her memory. So I now turn to the question of who this person was whom we know as Lady Anne Clifford. She was indeed Lady Anne Clifford until the age of 19: that was her courtesy title as the daughter of a peer. When she married Richard Sackville she became

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11.30 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.31 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

11.32 Marginal note; A Mirour for Magistrates; W. Baldwin et al. (1609–10), private collection

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first Lady Anne Sackville and Lady Buckhurst, and two days later, upon the sudden death of her father-in-law, she was Anne Countess of Dorset. After Sackville’s death in 1624 she was the Dowager Countess of Dorset, and when in 1630 she remarried Philip Herbert, she became in addition Countess of Pembroke and Montgomery. Upon his death in 1649 she was, by virtue of her marriages, the Dowager Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery. And having established herself through long and complex litigation as her father’s sole heir, she was in her own right the Baroness Clifford, Westmoreland, and Vecsey – she had successfully refuted the claim that women could not succeed to baronies. After 1630, and for the rest of her life, she always signed herself in her personal correspondence Anne Pembroke. Who, then, is Lady Anne Clifford? And in whose interest is it to refer to her as a permanent 19 year-old virgin? Who is disembodying maternity here? It is easy to dismiss her remarkable success as an exception that proves the universal rule of patriarchy; but I do not think she is an exception. On the contrary, she is the rule. Her power and authority depended on her status as her father’s sole heir, but it also depended even more on her success in breaking her father’s will: so much for patriarchy and paternity. Not even the king and the attorney general could persuade her to assign her property to her husband; her consent was necessary, and there was no power in the realm that could force it from her. She knew it, and they knew it. So much for absolute monarchy and the subordination of wives. She also succeeded in disinheriting her father’s male heirs in favor of her elder daughter and son-in-law: so much for primogeniture and masculine succession. But it is also a mistake to represent these simply as acts of hers – acts of subversion or defiance or self-determination. All involved extended legal processes in which she was consistently supported by the courts. Her defiance was fully vindicated, and she worked entirely within the system. She was not a revolutionary. This is what I mean by saying she is not the exception, she is the rule, and she understood that she was. She is no more an exception than her Mirror for Magistrates is an exception. It is, on the contrary, an especially clear example of the Renaissance attitude toward the relation of books to readers. I return finally to the question of printed books as devices by which men could make exact copies of themselves without the agency of women. The outrageous, wonderful Nicholas Barker once asserted that every copy of a manuscript was identical to every other copy, but every copy of a printed book was unique. I take this Wildean epigram to embody a truth: we assume that variability is a part of manuscript culture, but print culture is now regularly claimed to aspire to the invariable – books were replications, men making exact copies of themselves. I submit that this is false: not only was the Renaissance book never concerned with replication, but the culture as a whole had no interest in books as exact copies. The technology of printing could easily have produced a uniform product, but the printers’ mode

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of operation practically guaranteed that it would not do so. All this is perfectly well known, but postmodern theory seems incapable of taking it into account: proofreading in Renaissance printing shops was done while the printing was in progress, and both corrected and uncorrected sheets were used indiscriminately in the final makeup of the book. To produce a set of exact replicas of a text, all that would have been necessary was to stop the press for the ten minutes it took to correct the proof sheets, but the Renaissance printer did not do this. This is not to say that Renaissance printers had no notion of a final correct copy: they included errata pages in their books. But the final, correct, uniform text was not what the book was conceived to embody – it was left to the reader to produce the correct text, by referring to the errata. What the Renaissance wanted from books was not exact replication, it was dissemination, the ability to produce 500 or 1000 copies of a book, rather than five or ten or fifty. The fact that there were variations in those copies merely shows how much less of a change print culture represented from manuscript culture than we want it to represent. Finally, women were not at all excluded as producers from this system, any more than they were excluded as readers. If Clifford’s library included a copy of Milton’s 1645 Poems, it was available to her through the agency of a printer named Ruth Raworth. Ruth Raworth was an active and well-regarded printer from the 1630s to the 1660s. She had married into a family of printers – her father-in-law, Robert Raworth, was the piratical printer of the 1602 edition of Venus and Adonis, and was constantly in trouble with the law, but his son John was a well respected master printer who did a good deal of work for Parliament, and his wife was a full partner in the business. Modern mythology declares that women were excluded from participation in the guilds, but this is not the case; the presence of women in the English crafts guilds throughout the Early Modern period is well documented.2 The usual way of disposing of the problem of Early Modern Ruth Raworths is to declare them unexceptional: they need not be taken into account since they are merely serving as surrogates for men. Ruth Raworth, however, is not a surrogate for her husband. During his lifetime they were business partners, and after his death in 1645 she continued the business – the very fact that his presence was unnecessary for the business to continue makes the point. But in a sense, to deal with her by calling her a surrogate gives the show away: if a woman can be a surrogate for a man, what constitutes a man? Notes 1 2

Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 140. See K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 270ff. The pioneering work in the field is Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1919).

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CHAPTER 12

Checking the Father: Anxious Paternity and Jacobean Press Censorship Cyndia Susan Clegg The wives speciall duty may fitly be referred to two heads: first she must acknowledge her inferioritie: secondly she must carry her self as an inferior … let her set downe this conclusion within her soule: Mine husband is my superiour, my better: he hath authoritie and rule over me, nature hath given it him, having framed our bodies to tendernesse, mens to more hardnesse …. His will I see to be made by God the tie and tedder, not mine actions alone but of my desires and wishes also. I will not strive against God and nature. William Whately, A bride-bush (1617, 1619, 1623)

The premise that the emergence of print culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries disturbed the epistemic foundations of patriarchal culture rests upon the idea that the printing press’s issue – prolific, profligate, and remote from the author’s pen – stirred anxieties about the issue of the pen’s phallic twin. This premise is indebted, in part, to the recurrent rhetorical strategy employed in early modern England of gendering written texts as feminine. According to Wendy Wall, the new literary marketplace inspired writers and publishers to define reading, writing, and publishing by generating various representations of women. Feminine texts offered the ‘unauthorized ground on which authorship could be established’.1 While Wall’s paradigm genders the act of writing as male, it makes no distinction between scribal or printed texts.2 Both are equally fetishized within this system’s economy; the female text, the object of male power, represents a commodity to be trafficked among readers. Thus feminized, the book became an appropriate object of male desire.3 Implicit in Wall’s argument is that the book, printed or scribal, is a common whore, simultaneously the creature and the nemesis of patriarchal authority over the feminine body. The problem printing posed to patriarchy, however, really has little to do with prostitution. (Men, after all, have long been simultaneously fascinated with virgins and whores.) Nor is it entirely a matter of male authority over feminine texts. Printing intruded upon the folie aux deux between author and text that existed in manuscript culture, where a man’s pen wrote or failed to write, and when it wrote, the text bore the inscription of his authority and

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control. My favorite evidence of the degree to which early modern England absorbed this trope appears in a conversation about male impotence that took place in the course of the 1613 Essex divorce proceedings.4 Although those who opposed the nullity maintained that ‘the Earl in open estimation was to be thought an able man and that his father was not thought in that land insufficient’, one opponent of the divorce suggested that ‘perhaps his fathers sin was punished upon the Son and that it were truth the Earl had no Ink in his pen’.5 Perhaps the most compelling dimension of this conversation is its unabashed certainty of patriarchal lineage; a man can know what his pen has written. He cannot, however, know for sure what the printing press will print. The problem here is not any feminine text but the unruly one – the one whose assignations with rival authors, printers, even censors, peopled the world with an inundation of textual Calibans. In a patriarchal society such proliferation of potentially illegitimate issue threatened the author, and by extension, male authority. This is the source of anxiety. From time out of mind, the inevitable consequence of the anxiety unruly women provoke in men has been female oppression. Male anxiety about the legitimacy of children grounds virtually all the legal, social, and cultural controls patriarchy has imposed on female sexuality. By the sixteenth century, when Judeo-Christian culture effectively had enjoyed nearly six centuries of devising means to assure that a wise son could know his father, the emergence of printing made controlling one’s literary issue somewhat more problematic. As one might expect, anxiety about textual legitimacy prompted efforts to impose controls on printing. From the earliest years of printing, Stationers in London passed regulations to protect publishers’ interests in their texts. By the early seventeenth century authors participated in proofreading printed versions of their writings to check their legitimacy. Other kinds of textual profligacy called for control as well. The emergence of censorship within virtual historical seconds of print technology’s birth was an inevitable consequence of anxieties about printing, and probably too about parenting. In England in the latter half of the sixteenth century, printing joined with a wide array of cultural and political events to strain traditional patriarchy’s seams – not the least of which included the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of English nationalism under a female monarch. And while western patriarchy possessed 6,000 years of experience in trying to control unruly women, English cultural institutions – themselves in some turmoil by 1600 – proved incapable of imposing any coherent restraints on the troubled and troubling entities that were challenging its patriarchal structures. So if printing unsettled patriarchy, the practice of censorship was equally unsettled – and unsettling. One particular instance of censorship in the early seventeenth century testifies to the degree to which anxious efforts to control both literary and natural paternity so destabilized a text that it confounded the authority that sought its control.

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In 1621 the Court of High Commission called upon a Calvinist minister, William Whately, to correct the text of a popular marriage manual, A bridebush, for allowing divorce. This looks like an anxious effort by patriarchal church authorities to control a printed text that loosened the bond matrimony imposed on female sexuality. If, as the text suggests, both a man and a woman might remarry if a spouse either committed adultery or refused the other partner his or her ‘due benevolence’ to the marriage bed, how certain might a second husband be that a child was his own? Furthermore, how efficacious would marriage itself be in imposing restraints upon unruly women – or men? Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, had expressed such anxiety in 1613 when King James called upon him to support the Essex divorce. To his own mind, approval of the case would mean that ‘any man who is discontented with his wife and every women discontented with her husband … will repair to me for like nullities. If I yield unto them, here will be strange violation of marriages’.6 Since Abbot headed the 1621 High Commission that censored Whately’s book, it is tempting to conclude that this act of censorship simply reflected patriarchal anxiety. The book’s publishing history and text, however, confound this. Whately’s book first appeared in 1617, having received the ecclesiastical imprimatur of Gervase Nidd, D.D., fellow of Trinity, and rector of Southchurch, Essex, 1611–15, and Sundridge, Kent, 1615, 1629, both benefices within Archbishop George Abbot’s immediate control. Since Nidd was Abbot’s appointee, Nidd almost certainly shared Abbot’s theological views. Nidd served as an ecclesiastical licenser between 1611 and 1616, during which time he authorized 143 books for the press, including poetry by Richard Brathwaite, George Wither, and John Drayton. Of the 62 religious works he approved, many were by Puritan divines and a few were by non-conformists like John Dod, Robert Cleaver, and John Sprint. His sympathies here parallel Abbot’s. Kenneth Fincham has observed that privately Abbot ‘saw any challenge from Puritan nonconformity as of negligible significance’.7 It is unlikely, then, that in approving Whately’s book in 1616, Nidd was performing a particularly radical act. Whately’s views were consistent with those of Continental reformers, who, for the most part, regarded marriage as a human institution subject to civil authority rather than a sacramental one.8 A bride-bush’s 1617 edition experienced an untroubled birth – no fanfare or furor here. In an environment of anxious parenting such a birth would appear rather remarkable, except that the book goes a long way to quell patriarchal fears about unruly women by containing an inoculation against the freedom its view of divorce implies. Although the book opens by allowing marriage’s dissolution when its companionate state dissolves, it closes with the mantra of female subjectivity that opened this paper.

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The wives speciall duty may fitly be referred to two heads: first she must acknowledge her inferioritie: secondly she must carry her self as an inferior … let her set downe this conclusion within her soule: Mine husband is my superiour, my better: he hath authoritie and rule over me, nature hath given it him, having framed our bodies to tendernesse, mens to more hardnesse …. His will I see to be made by God the tie and tedder, not mine actions alone but of my desires and wishes also. I will not strive against God and nature.

What has a man to fear if his will is ‘the tie and tedder’ of a woman’s actions, desires, and wishes? The publication of the 1617 edition, however, failed to address its author’s paternal anxieties. According to A bride-bush’s second edition, the first had been a profligate one. In the 1619 dedication to his father in law, George Hunt (the son of a Marian martyr), Whately maintains that he gave a friend a copy of the sermon, delivered 11 years before, which formed the basis for A bridebush, and found it ‘last yeere published without my privity’. This prompted Whately to ‘peruse certaine larger notes’, and ‘custome [now] hath brought this inkie and paperie thankfulnesse into practise’.9 The 1619 text clearly drew upon the ‘larger notes’; its length nearly doubled that of the earlier book. Its revisions point to the considerable anxiety the first illegitimate text produced. Throughout the revision, Whately exerts his authorial control on his subject by imposing schematic analyses and expanding the precise terms of his argument through extensive illustration and analogy. So anxious has this author become about his own literary issue that he intensifies his argument for patriarchal authority by introducing the trope of marriage as a ‘little kingdom’: Now a family must be governed as well as maintained …. The man must be taken for Gods immediate officer in the house, and as it were the King in the family; the woman must account herselfe his deputy, an officer substituted to him, not as equall, but as subordinate; and in this order they must governe ….10

Employing the common hierarchy God, king, man, wife – hardly surprising in itself – becomes a curious thing in Whately’s hands. Influenced as he is by Protestant views of companionate marriage, his argument strains under the imposed hierarchy. Whately counsels reciprocal love in the couples; just, wise, and gentle authority in the husband; and submission and obedience in the wife. The prescription, however, becomes problematic on three counts: in its parallels between the husband’s rule and the king’s; in its arguments against absolutism; and in its allegation that contractual bonds might be dissolved. When Whately counsels justice, wisdom, and gentleness to the husband, he introduces examples where a king must be just, wise, and gentle, and in doing so, develops a model of monarchy that implicitly criticized the state. The ideal marriage and the ideal state exist for the benefit of the wife/subject, and

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the respective ruler of each will succeed by pleasing the wife/subject. When the husband/king fails to understand this, tyranny reigns. To emphasize how necessary it is for a husband to please his wife, Whately adds, ‘for it was a King that had that advice from the wise old men, and they were subjects …. If thou please them, they will serve’.11 When he argues the benefit a wife derives from her husband’s rule, Whately seems to imply that subjects should derive similar benefits from their king: So all governours have their power from God, rather for the benefit of them whom they governe, than for their owne ease, pleasure, profit, or for the fulfilling of their owne desires …. The King ruleth, that the people may enjoy more happiness by his scepter, than they could without it ….12

When he counsels wisdom and mildness in a ruler, he implicitly condemns abusive government: Wisdom is the eye of government …. Mildness is the health and good constitution of government, without which it is like a big body, full of diseases; unjust government is tyranny, unwise government is folly, unmild government is cruelty; but just, wise and mild government is government indeed.13

As problematic as this model of ideal government is that emerges in A bridebush’s second edition, the limits that the text places on authority – limits that come remarkably close to contemporary resistance theory – appear even more provocative. Whately’s entire argument depends upon the absolute authority of God and the precedence that authority takes in any model of government. Arguing from this premise, Whately imposes an absolute limit on what any governor might command: ‘Justice … must looke, first, that no unlawfull thing be commanded’. Moreover, ‘What God commandeth’, a governor may not forbid, and ‘what God forbiddeth, he must not command’.14 This has remarkable implications for a religio-political state like England when illustrated, as Whately does, with examples of religious practice: It is tyranny and usurpation for any governour to be ignorant of, or to transgresse the limits or bonds of his own place: for a man to command his wife to lye to his advantage, to breake the Sabbath for his gain, to participate in his fraud, or the like: nothing is more abhorrent for equitie. Where Princes have commanded their subjects to worship images or commit other iniquities, they have brought upon themselves the odious name of tyrants; and the not yeelding to ther sinfull commandments, hath been a high praise unto their subjects.15

Whately here appears to have in mind Protestant resistance to Marian efforts to restore Rome’s yoke, and King James would probably have agreed with the idea that forcing subjects to participate in what was clearly an image of ‘Popish’ worship constituted tyranny. The idea that subjects be praised for not yielding, however, directly contradicts the King’s view of government. James

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explicitly stated in The Trew Law of Free Monarchy that children never have the right to resist bad parents, nor subjects bad kings. God visits people with tyrannical princes to punish and correct them: the duetie, and alleageance of the people to their lawfull king, their obedience, I say, ought to be to him, as to Gods Lieutenant in earth, obeying his commands in all things, except directly against God, as the commands of Gods Minister, acknowledging him a Iudge set by GOD ouer them, hauing power to iudge them, but to be iudged onely by GOD, whom to onely hee must giue count of his iudgement; fearing him as their Iudge, louing him as their father; praying for him as their protectour; for his continuance, if he be good; for his amendement, if he be wicked; following and obeying his lawfull commands, eschewing and flying his fury in his vnlawfull, without resistance, but by sobbes and teares to God, according to that sentence vsed in the primitiue Church in the time of the persecution.16

To condone not only passive resistance but also outright disobedience, as Whately does when he says that to disobey a tyrant is ‘the best obedience’,17 openly challenges prevailing notions of patriarchal authority. In 1622, John Knight would be in serious trouble for preaching a sermon at Oxford based on the doctrine of the Protestant theologian, David Pareus, who maintained that subordinate magistrates could rise up against their prince if he interfered with religion. A commission of 12 bishops condemned Pareus’s book as dangerous and seditious, and it was burned publicly in London, Oxford, and Cambridge. Whately’s view of conscience is potentially even more disturbing than his definition of resistance as ‘the best obedience’. According to Whately, a Christian’s conscience is sovereign; it is ‘Gods immediate officer, and … must yet bee obeyed, and over-weigh the authoritie of all other commanders …’.18 In a marriage, even when a wife’s conscience errs, the husband must ‘forbeare the urging of his authoritie’: ‘What she upon some reason (to her thinking, though not indeed as truth) grounded upon the Word of God, doth account a sin, that the husband ought not to force her unto’.19 Although Whately does not go so far as to carry this to a fully developed analogy with civil government, he leaves little to the magistrate where religious scruples are concerned: ‘conscience is the supreamist commander of man next under God, and hath the highest and most soveraigne authoritie over mens actions’.20 Given the trope of patriarchal monarchy, little is required of the reader to see this as an assault on the King’s authority over the individual subject in matters of religion. Whately’s advice to the husband is not the text’s only source of subversive arguments against absolute patriarchal/monarchical authority. Even where his text is most anxious about the threat unruly wives pose to patriarchal order – in its counsel of obedience and submission to wives – the absolute authority of that order is compromised. In advising wives to endure the limits of their

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husbands’ authority, even to the point of submitting to physical abuse, Whately qualifies his argument with a strange contradiction: You will say (perhaps), that then a wives case is most miserable: I answer, that so it is indeed: but yet no more miserable than of a godly child, being under the roofe of a tyrannical and sicken father … and of Christian subjects being under the yoke of an unchristian and persecuting tyrant, which yet must none of them save themselves by rebellion, nor some of them by flight. It is yielded, that a woman herein … may crave the aide of the Magistrate.21

The suffering wife may neither rebel nor flee but, strangely, may find recourse in law. By implication, tyrannical husbands (and kings) must subordinate their authority to law. In Jacobean England, this position resembles the arguments current over royal prerogative and the common law: Whatley’s view corresponds to that of Edward Coke and the common law lawyers that statutory law, and hence Parliament, constituted the highest law in the land. The little kingdom Whately describes in the second edition of A bride-bush is by Jacobean standards a curious one indeed. Although the subject (wife) must submit obediently to the ruler’s (husband’s) authority, that authority is qualified. It should not be tyrannical. It is subject not only to both God’s word and civil law, but to the scruples of Christian conscience. And while Whately never explicitly allows rebellion, by placing his counsels for a good kingdom of marriage within an argument that allows divorce, he implies that, like the bond between husband and wife, the bond between subject and king may be dissolved by bad faith. Whately’s entire argument is framed by his contention that chastity and ‘due benevolence’ constitute the principal duties of marriage, which, when unfulfilled, dissolve the bond itself. Paradoxically, the two societal constraints that marriage imposes on female sexuality which represent absolute male domination of the female subject – the inhibition of her sexuality outside marriage and the requisite control of it within – in the hands of Whately become an assault on the patriarchal authority marriage itself constitutes. In his discussion of the primary marriage duties, Whately refers to husband and wife as ‘yoke-fellows’, and when either one of these yoke fellows breaks the marriage bond – either by sexual infidelity or by ‘desertion’ of the other partner’s sexual due – the bond is immediately dissolved and divorce thus becomes acceptable. The wronged party, subject or ruler, may obtain a divorce. The truly radical element of Whately’s argument is that it threatens patriarchal authority at precisely the same instant that it seeks to shore up marriage – the characteristic institution by which patriarchy literally controls the female body – and monarchy figuratively controls the obedient subject! Despite the radical tenor of Whatley’s text, it circulated for nearly four years, two before Whately was called before the High Commission and another two before a ‘corrected’ version replaced the one in circulation. We know about

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the book’s censorship from the correction that was appended to the 1623 text. Dated 4 September 1623, Whately writes that he was ‘forced to acknowledge’ his opinions on divorce to be false and therefore ordered them be omitted from the 1623 reprinting of the text, but the printer apparently lost the paper ‘wherein they were corrected’. The 1623 edition is exactly the same as the 1619 except that it appends the correction that identifies and locates the erroneous passages. Whately tells his reader in the addendum that he ‘was willing to give thee this advertisement, which may serve better to keepe thee from mistaking with me, then if the former points had beene onely left out, or altered’. As printed, then, the entire 1623 text both contains and repudiates the doctrine of divorce, leaving the reader free to weigh the evidence and judge the argument on its own merits. The advertisement to the reader, laying blame as it does on the printer for yet another unruly text, again registers anxiety about the product of the printing press. At several levels, then, the 1623 edition embodies the unsuccessful efforts of anxious patriarchal entities – the High Commission, the author, the husband – to control unruly texts, unruly wives, and unruly subjects. The 1623 text with its retraction raises another issue altogether. Why was a book that had appeared in 1617 and in 1619 suddenly censorable in 1621? Both earlier editions shared the view that infidelity and desertion dissolved the marriage bond, and neither had been censored. The answer, I believe, rests in the change in the political environment in England, where royal authority itself became anxious about the subjects’ relationship to their king. In 1618 war broke out in the Rhenish Palatinate, which was governed by Frederick and Elizabeth, James I’s son-in-law and daughter. Loyal English Protestants, including Archbishop Abbot, appealed to the King to go to war against Spain in support of Frederick and Elizabeth. Instead, in what Peter Lake describes as a ‘failure of royal policy’, James preferred to negotiate an end to the disturbances through seeking a marriage alliance with Spain. English Protestants viewed the refusal to enter the war as England’s failure to ‘align itself on the side of the godly in the international struggle with Antichrist and Spain’.22 James’s policy provoked the antipathy and censure of the English people. Girolamo Lando, the Venetian ambassador to England, describes the conditions that developed: In this generation his people have been smitten to the heart about their religion, being troubled without in every quarter by the peril of the nation and the grave situation of the king’s daughter, while they saw him joined to the Spaniards in hateful negotiations, even suspecting a change in religion …. The preachers daily exhort the people to obedience, although recently some have expressed seditious and most dangerous opinions, offering the strongest opposition to the Spanish marriage, both privately and publicly, with supplication, advice and prediction.23

Amidst this climate of criticism, James enacted his most deliberate and sustained censorship campaign, directed not only at the press but also at

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Parliament and the pulpit. In December 1620 and in July 1621 the King issued proclamations against ‘the excesse of lavish and licentious speech of matters of state’ that cautioned his subjects ‘to take heede, how they intermeddle by Penne, or Speech, with causes of state, and secrets of Empire, either at home or abroad’.24 In December 1620 the King ordered the bishop of London to summon the clergie ‘to charge them from the King not to meddle in their sermons with the Spanish match nor any other matter of State’.25 And while Kenneth Fincham and Lake have concluded that these efforts had little effect,26 several preachers were arrested. James’s government’s enactment of repressive measures in response to unruly discourse is the classic response of an anxious patriarchy. What remains in the matter of Whately’s A bride-bush is why the censorship extended only to the section on divorce and not to the entire text, so much of which directly challenges patriarchal authority. The answer lies in the divided religious and political alliances that existed in 1621. As Fincham points out, Archbishop Abbot, who headed the High Commission and was zealous in using the Commission to discipline scandalous clergy,27 was himself strongly aligned with the zealous English Protestants who advocated going to war over the Palatinate. In spring of 1621 Abbot was implicated in both the remonstrance the Palatinate ambassador issued to James protesting his inaction and an effort to press for a French rather than a Spanish marriage. Abbot criticized James’s foreign policy at precisely the moment that James was attempting to stifle public criticism; for this, he was confined to Lambeth Palace, and ultimately lost his influence at Court.28 This is when Whately’s book came before the High Commission. It is important to remember that the High Commission was a court that followed set procedures. In a matter like this, charges would have been preferred to the Commission, and probably not been part of the Commission’s own agenda, especially given Abbot’s own political views and the fact that Nidd had authorized the first edition. Given the anxious political climate of 1621, the threat Whately’s book posed to patriarchal authority and control could easily have been misread as ‘dangerous and seditious’, which, by the way, was the character of writing the High Commission’s charter called upon it to control. That the High Commission did not suppress the book outright reflects the degree to which its head, Abbot, shared Whately’s criticisms of abusive patriarchal authority and subscribed to the precedence of religious conscience. For the High Commission to require of Whately only his submission – that he was convinced by the ‘reasons alleged in the High Commission’ that his view that adultery or desertion dissolved the matrimonial bond was false – constituted a remarkably lenient sanction in a climate charged with anxious patriarchy.29 By requiring Whately to recant his view of divorce, the High Commission’s action rallied around patriarchal authority to sufficiently affirm that the bond by which the patriarchy could assure control over unruly female bodies would

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be upheld. Other views dear to Calvinists on conscience and God’s absolute sovereignty were allowed to remain. Paradoxically, the third edition of A bride-bush with its appended recantation is not any better ruled by authority than the first had been. This time, the printer, having lost the papers expressing the author’s intention to have offending passages castrated, failed to enact the mutilation Whately had obediently ordered of his own text. A bride-bush was spared being – in the words of a later Calvinist victim of Laudian censorship -‘gelt exceedingly’ and ‘purged’ of ‘all the smart and masculine passages’.30 Instead, Whately’s epilogue offered the kind of lip service to authority that he had counseled to the wife. Right after A bride-bush told her to ‘set downe this conclusion within her soule’ and gave her the mantra ‘Mine husband is my superiour’ to repeat to herself, it proceeds: Wherefore O thou wife, let thy best understanding be to understand (that, that makes for they peace), that thine husband is by God made they governour and ruler ….31

Patriarchal authority here depends upon the wife’s understanding for its construction; indeed it depends upon her understanding – upon her conceiving it in her ‘best understanding’ for her own good (‘that, that makes for they peace’) – for its existence. Submission to authority thus derives not from authority’s inherent power but from the power and wishes – from the best understanding – of the subject. It is but to maintain the peace that a woman must accept her husband’s authority, that an author must defer to the High Commission, and that an Archbishop of Canterbury must agree to surrender his role in confessional politics, as Abbot did when James took offense at his activities on behalf of Frederick and Elizabeth in the Palatinate. The 1623 edition of A bride-bush registers at every level patriarchy’s anxious desire – and concurrent failure – to exercise authentic authority over unruly texts, unruly wives, and unruly subjects. Notes 1 2

3 4

Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 7. Margareta de Grazia’s use of a sexual trope for printing is more effective in restricting it to mechanical reproduction when she observes, ‘It is not just that textual reproduction shared with sexual reproduction a vocabulary of generating issue, propagating copy, like begetting like. It materialized and mechanized that vocabulary’. See ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes’ in this volume. Wall, Imprint of Gender, p. 69. In 1613 James pressed for the divorce of Frances Howard from Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, so that Lady Essex would be free to marry the King’s favorite, Robert Carr.

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British Library, Sloane MS 3828, fol. 6v. British Library, Sloane MS 3828, fol. 10v. Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 226. John Witte, Jr. ‘The Transformation of Marriage Law in the Lutheran Reformation’, in The Weightier Matters of the Law; Essays on Law and Religion, ed. J. Witte, Jr and F. Alexander (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988), pp. 71–2. William Whately, A bride-bush, 1619, A1. Whately, 1619, p. 89. Whately, 1619, p. 60. Whately, 1619, p. 109. Whately, 1619, p. 113. Whately, 1619, pp. 113–14. Whately, 1619, p. 115. Johan P. Sommerville, ed., The Political Works of James VI and James I, 1993, p. 72. I am indebted to Professor Sommerville for providing me with a copy of this in computer searchable disc format. Whately, 1619, p. 116. Whately, 1619, p. 117. Whately, 1619, p. 117. Whately, 1619, pp. 116–17. Whately, 1619, pp. 213–14. P.G. Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and the Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, The Historical Journal 25 (1982): 805–25; 813. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts relating to English Afffairs, existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, 1619–1621, vol. XVI, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London, 1910), no. 603. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, eds, Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 497, 520. Norman Egbert McClure, ed., The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia: The Philosophical Society, 1939), II, p. 330. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, Journal of British Studies 24 (1985), p. 199. Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 50–51. Kenneth Fincham, ‘Prelacy and Politics: Archbishop Abbot’s Defence of Protestant Orthodoxy’, Historical Research 61 (1988): 36–57; 52. Domestic State Papers, 14/121/7. London Public Record Office. William Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 1656, p. 254. Whately, 1619, p. 189.

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CHAPTER 13

Pater patriae: James I and the Imprint of Prerogative Howard Marchitello Near the end of December 1621 as King James was considering the possible marriage of his son Charles to the Spanish princess, Maria, the House of Commons grew increasingly concerned over the prospect of such a union with Catholic Spain and inaugurated a debate in Parliament on the issue of the marriage. James, jealous to safeguard what he understood to be his hereditary rights – both paternal and political – to decide on his son’s marriage prospects, quite understandably objected: in bringing such a discussion to the floor, he claimed, Parliament had grossly violated the King’s royal prerogative, under which normally fell such issues as foreign policy and marriage negotiations. Unmoved by James’s objections and, moreover, further troubled by what was perceived by many to be James’s general softness on Spanish aggression – he seemed resolutely disinclined to intervene against the Spanish attack on the Palatinate (whose prince was the Elector Frederick V, the husband of James’s own daughter Elizabeth and hence his son-in-law) – the Commons not only debated the proposed marriage, but approved and entered into the Commons’ Journal a Protestation outlining their concerns and objections to it.1 In retaliation James took three further measures: first, he instantly dissolved Parliament; then, he took the dramatic step of literally tearing the Protestation out of the Common’s Journal; and lastly, he wrote and published a text, His Maiesties Declaration, Touching his Proceedings in the Late Assemblie and Conuention of Parliament.2 This sequence of events, I suggest, epitomizes precisely James’s relation to royal power on the one hand, and to print on the other: royal power (by James’s definition, at least) naturally resists not only attempts to limit it, but even discussions of its nature; print, for its part, provides the King with a ready and easy way to offer his own theoretical and philosophical explanations and justifications of kingship and monarchy. Furthermore, it is critically important that these issues should coincide, as they do in this instance, over the figure of James’s son. It is in the person of Charles – and the fate imagined for him by the King – that James enacts the role of both pater and pater patriae. The events sketched above open, indeed, onto a more particular inquiry into the exact nature of the relation – simultaneously collaborative and contested – of royal power and royal print: if royalty impresses upon print an elevated or exalted status, how does print impact royalty? Or, how can we describe the ideology

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in play that prompts James to tear pages from the Common’s Journal and seek, in effect, to replace them with his own ‘authorized’ version – especially when that version is simultaneously understood to be a text, the Declaration, and a child, his son Charles who (on the model of a biological copy) will succeed him as king?3 Long before the Declaration in his first published political book Basilicon Doron (1598), written for and dedicated to ‘HENRY MY DEAREST / SONNE, AND NATVRAL / SUCCESSOVR’, James demonstrates that he understands very well that he stands as author of political tract and of Henry, and as father to both.4 When we look not only to his theoretical texts on kingship and monarchy, but also to his speeches in parliament, his declarations and proclamations, as well as other political texts, James’s objective as royal author is to offer – in textual form – explanations and discussions of royal power and royal prerogative. As these texts demonstrate, James clearly believed that his own position depended at least in part upon his ability as a writer, as a producer of texts, to offer compelling justifications not only for his own position as king (he repeatedly invokes a double genealogical claim to the throne of England), but for the existence of monarchy in the first place and the nature (divine) and the extent (limitless) of its power.5 In response to these demands James wrote frequently and extensively. I will argue in this essay that James’s political texts are essentially characterized by a certain patriarchal understanding of textuality, on the one hand, and a certain theory of the limits of textuality on the other. Even as he sought to ground his own specific (and generic) political authority in texts of his own patriarchal authorship, James found it necessary to resist what I will call the sovereignty of textuality, a phrase meant to capture the drive toward the very legibility – the rendering explicit and concrete – of royal authority that James simultaneously sought vigorously to suppress. Throughout James’s reign and his career as an author (the two become indistinguishable), the sovereign desire for textual production (which is frequently a matter of textual reproduction, as will be discussed below) is engaged and countered by the equally strong desire to resist the sovereignty of textuality. But, as I hope to demonstrate in this discussion, this struggle over textuality does not occur in a purely textual realm (though this will certainly be one of its most important registers). Rather, James writes and responds to a complex array of political pressures and protests. In part, then, this discussion seeks to locate James’s struggle with textuality within a particular set of historical and material circumstances. Among these conditions is the realization – represented across a wide range of texts whether literary, philosophical, or political in character – that the articulation of power is anything but an easy or unproblematical task. As an example, we can look to what is perhaps the most philosophical of John Donne’s theological works, the Essays in Divinity. In this text, which is an extended meditation (at least partially exegetical in nature) on

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the opening lines of the first two books of the Bible, Donne stumbles upon a paradox: God’s power, though everywhere manifest, is nevertheless resolutely inscrutable – both philosophically or theologically, and linguistically: Of all the wayes in which God hath expressed himselfe towards us, we have made no word which doth lesse signifie what we mean, then Power; for Power, which is but an ability to do, ever relates to some future thing: and God is ever a present, simple, and pure Act.6

After examining and finally rejecting those terms and concepts most typically (if casually) invoked in definitions of God’s power – omnipotence, omnipotent, all-sufficient, all-efficient, all-conficient, and all-perficient – Donne rather desperately turns to the presumably less obscure world of politics for assistance: Nature is the Common law by which God governs us, and Miracle is his Prerogative. For Miracles are but so many Non-obstantes upon Nature. And Miracle is not like prerogative in any thing more then in this, that no body can tell what it is.7

As this passage itself makes manifest, however, the political world is by no means any less obscure; indeed, what assistance it offers (as a metaphoric register) serves only to obscure even further the definition of power – divine, certainly, but temporal as well. Moreover, this passage stands as one important instance in Donne’s writing in which the theological and the political become indistinguishable. Or, the theological and the political become mutually destabilizing. As a good reader of God’s two ‘books’ – the created world and the Bible – Donne may well expect to find the true nature of God’s power textually, and therefore legibly, inscribed. And yet, Donne’s observations and interpretations of God’s texts in search of God’s power not only yield the admission that ‘no body can tell what it is’, but open on to an unanticipated aporia: the very act of such inquiry itself serves merely to remove the desired object of knowledge entirely from our view: ‘And after that is out of necessity established, that Miracle is against the whole Order of Nature, I see not how there is left in God a power of Miracles’.8 While the analysis of God’s power easily falls under the declared rubric ‘essayes in divinity’, Donne’s ruminations, as I have suggested, are at the same time deeply engaged in the world of contemporary politics, with special concern over the nature and status of royal authority and prerogative.9 By the time Donne wrote his Essays in Divinity (between, perhaps, 1610 and 1615) a serious debate over the nature of political power had already begun to command serious consideration and comment.10 For a great many parliament men and like-minded jurists (Sir Edward Coke among them), the central question to be decided had specifically to do with the proper definition of royal power (particularly its limitation to and under the law), while for James

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the entire issue was fundamentally a matter of the very definability of royal power. In the parliamentary debates of 1610, to take one important example, when Parliament considered (and eventually refused) the Great Contract, an inquiry into the status of James’s actual and theoretical power held a place of central importance.11 Arguing against James’s assumed right of imposition – the levying of extra-parliamentary taxes on certain imports and exports as a legitimate and essentially unrestricted source of royal revenue – Heneage Finch, Member of the House of Commons, joined the debate over the extent of royal prerogative on the side of more strict limitations by pointing to the very characteristic that Donne identifies in his Essays – the indeterminacy of royal power. In his speech to the Commons on 2 July 1610, Finch’s aim is precise: ‘I will not deny the distinction of the two powers in the king, a limited and an absolute … but what that absolute power is, is all the question’.12 While Finch takes careful note of the ambiguity and obscurity that tend to obtain in discussions of the king’s power, he nevertheless does not shrink from offering his own rather confident anatomy of both royal prerogative and its strict relation to reason and law: I say ‘tis an absolute power not of will but of reason, not assumed but allowed, not above the law but by the law …. And therefore though I agree that as the law allows many prerogatives to the king bounded and limited by certain rules of law, so in many cases of a temporary nature which by the wisdom of the common law could not be reduced to a fixed and certain rule, the law doth yield absolute power to the king as in war and peace, coins and the like, yet none of them are so absolute but they are objects of our reason, not mysteries of faith ….13

Finch is responding here to three particularly important arguments that James had consistently offered as part and parcel of his political theory of monarchy: the primacy (and historical priority) of the king over the laws, the fact that common law had never been submitted to codification (which Finch calls ‘a fixed and certain rule’), and that the essential nature of royal power in fact was a great deal like a mystery of faith. First, James was emphatic in his assumption that royal power – especially as figured in his prerogative – was a feature of monarchy that existed both before and above the law. Some dozen years earlier, for example, in his The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1597), James had written that kings enjoyed a literal primacy over parliaments since kings were the source of – and therefore consequently above – laws: The kings in Scotland were before any estates or rankes of men within the same, before any Parliaments were holden, or lawes made: and by them was the land distributed (which at first was whole theirs) states erected and decerned, and formes of gouernment deuised and establised: And so it followes of necessitie, that the kings were the authors and makers of the Lawes, and not the Lawes of the kings.14

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Although there will be moments when James will seem to equivocate on this passage and others like it, such equivocation concerns only the fact that when he wrote these lines he was writing as king of Scotland – and not England – and do not at all change or modify his greater assertion about the absolute primacy of the king.15 Characteristically, then, James is quite consistent in this assertion (a claim that will also later serve James in his theoretical arguments concerning the ‘rights’ of Parliament).16 There are instances from his writings both before and after his accession to the throne of England when James offers an even further (and more aggressive) formulation: that the king is himself Lex loquens, a speaking law. From Trew Law: For although a iust Prince will not take the life of any of his subiects without a cleare law; yet the same lawes whereby he taketh them, are made by himself, or his predecessours; and so the powre flowes alwaies from his selfe …. Not that I deny the old definition of a King, and of a law; which makes the king to bee a speaking law, and the Law a dumbe king: for certainely a king that gouerns not by his lawe, can neither be countable to God for his administration, nor haue a happy and established raigne ….17

And from a speech to Parliament, 31 March 1607: But here I pray you now mistake mee not at the first, when as I seeme to finde fault with your delayes and curiositie, as if I would haue you to resolue in an houres time, that which will take a moneths aduisement: for you all know, that Rex est lex loquens, And you haue oft heard mee say, That the Kings will and intention being the speaking Law, ought to bee Luce clarius ….18

Finch’s second protestation concerns the state and nature of common law and the fact that it had never been submitted to codification. While Finch certainly saw this as common law’s great virtue (indeed, he calls this its ‘wisdom’), James spoke frequently of his desire to see common law submitted to codification in the form of writing/printing and in English. ‘I could wish that [common law] were written in our vulgar Language’, James declares, ‘for now it is in an old, mixt, and corrupt Langage, onely vnderstood by Lawyers’. For his part, James would have common law textualized: Our Common Law hath not a setled Text in all Cases, being chiefly grounded either vpon old Customes, or else vpon the Reports and Cases of Iudges, which ye call Responsa Prudentum …. And therore would I wish both those Statutes and Reports, aswell in the Parliament as Common Law, to be once maturely reuiewed, and reconciled ….19

Finch’s third complaint is that James acted as king with the assumption that his subjects should accept a vastly expanded royal prerogative simply as a ‘myster[y] of faith’. While I will return to this issue below, it is important to note here that Finch’s comment was an especially apt one, since James was given to

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characterizations of royal prerogative that were systematically dedicated to a general mystification. The opening paragraph of James’s Declaration of 1622, in which James seeks to justify his recent dissolution of Parliament, offers a powerful example of James’s tendency to shroud power and prerogative in profound and imponderable mystery: albeit hauing so many yeeres swayed the swords and scepters of three renowned kingdomes, Wee cannot but discerne (as much as any Prince liuing) what apperteineth to the height of a powerfull Monarch: yet, that all men might discerne, that Wee, like Gods true Viceregent, delight not so much in the greatnesse of Our place, as in the goodnesse & benignitie of our gouernment, We were content in that one Act to decend many degrees beneath Our Selfe: First, by communicating to all Our people the reasons of a resolution of State, which Princes vse to reserue, inter arcana Imperij, to themselues and their Priuie Councell: Secondly, by mollifying and mixing the peremptorie and binding qualitie of a Proclamation, with the indulgence of a milde and fatherly instruction: And lastly, leading them, and opening to them that forbidden Arke of Our absolute and indisputable Prerogatiue, concerning the calling, continuing, and dissoluing of Parliaments ….20

A further and centrally important royal and authorial claim to which James was devotedly attached, as suggested by the reference to his ‘milde and fatherly instruction’, was his assertion of his role as Pater patriae, a role by no means original to James, and indeed well-entrenched by the moment of his accession to the English throne. In Ben Jonson’s first poem to James, A Panegyre: On the Happy Entrance of James, Our Sovereign, to His First High Session of Parliament in This Kingdom, the 19 of March 1603 – a poem that concludes with a Latin tag from Florus, ‘Solus Rex, et Poeta non quotannis nascitur’ – the poet describes James’s inaugural progress toward Parliament, during which Themis (identified in the poem as the mother of Justice, Order, and Peace) offers the new King a moralizing lesson on history and ethics intended to prompt him to a righteous reign. Themis then addresses the people: She told them what a fate Was gently fallen from heaven upon this state; How dear a father they did now enjoy That came to save, what discord would destroy ….21

While Jonson is certainly a complicated figure to invoke here (in another text that is perhaps contemporary with A Panegyre, Sejanus, he offers a thoroughly ambivalent depiction of absolute royal power), Jonson’s description in the poem of James as a father to the nation is characteristically astute. In his tract The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, James had already demonstrated what he took to be the king’s patriarchal relationship to both his subjects and to his own political authority, and his later political theory would continue to assert his role as pater patriae. Though a common theme across the range of James’s

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texts and examples abound, the following passage from Trew Law is especially apt: By the Law of Nature the King becomes a naturall Father to all his Lieges at his Coronation: And as the Father of his fatherly duty is bound to care for the nourishing, education, and vertuous gouernment of his children; euen so is the king bound to care for all his subjects …. And shortly, as the Fathers chiefe ioy ought to be in procuring his childrens welfare, reioycing at their weale, sorrowing and pitying at the euill, to hazard for their safetie, trauell for their rest, wake for their sleepe; and in a word, to thinke that his earthly felicitie and life standeth and liueth more in them, mor in himselfe; so ought a good Prince thinke of his people.22

If we read James on the nature of his kingship and its relationship to patriarchalism we see that these were, in fact, the very terms in which he sought to establish his political authority, at least on a theoretical level. James’s incarnation as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland marked a complex series of transitions in early modern English social, cultural, and political life, including the emergence of a coherent articulation of royal absolutism in contemporary legal and political theory. This emergent doctrine of absolutism – in which royal prerogative, it was argued, was the law of the land that was itself not bound by any law or legal code – was in sharp contrast to the predominately constitutionalist disposition of legal and political theory characteristic of and produced under the Tudor monarchs. Sir Thomas Smith, for example, writing in 1565, argued that ‘the most high and absolute power of the realm of England consisteth in the Parliament’, and his views (characteristic of Tudor constitutionalists more generally) were echoed by other writers seeking to define the nature of the monarchy in England – particularly in light of England’s separation from the Catholic (and absolutist) monarchy of the papacy, and the ensuing ProtestantCatholic tensions, both internal and international.23 Political and legal writers, practitioners and theorists such as Richard Hooker (in his monumental study Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity), or William Camden (Discourse Concerning the Prerogative of the Crown), while committed to monarchy as the best form of government ordained and determined by God’s example, were nevertheless strong advocates of the constitutionalist belief in the limited nature of royal authority and power, whether the terms of that limitation were predicated upon a theory of rule by consent, or on the more general notion of a contractual relationship between the monarch and his or her individual subjects.24 While a number of compelling explanations of this gradual (though by no means universal or uncontested) change in legal and political theory have been offered – including the increasing importance of civil (as opposed to common) law in England, the pervasive influence of continental legal and political theory, and the effects of both Catholic and Calvinist theories of absolutism that had long been so influential on the Continent – I argue that

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under James I, the relation between patriarchal theory and print played an integral part in this move toward royal absolutism. Patriarchalism articulates the doctrine of masculine domestic and political authority in the form of a narrative guaranteed by natural reason and natural law: God’s masculine authority as supreme Father is naturally communicated to the king; the king in turn communicates it to his loyal children/subjects. In his political texts, James submits this theory to the practices of print. James both posits and exploits this mutually sustaining relation between parenting (domestic, social, and political – he declares himself ‘Parens patriae’) and printing when characterizing his intent in writing Basilicon Doron for his son.25 In fact, in the dedicatory letter to Prince Henry (which appears before the letter to the reader), James asks, ‘Whom-to can so rightly appertaine this Booke of instructions to a Prince in all the points of his calling, aswell generall, as a Christian towards God; as particular, as a King towards his people?’ He continues: Whom-to, I say, can it so iustly appertaine, as vnto you my dearest Sonne? Since I the authour therof, as your naturall Father, must be carefull for your godly and vertuous education, as my eldest Sonne, and the first fruits of Gods blessing towards mee in my posteritie ….26

James then claims to ‘ordaine’ his book ‘to bee a resident faithfull admonisher’ of Henry, especially since James believes that he will not always be present to offer guidance: And because the houre of death is vncertain to mee, as vnto all flesh, I leaue it as my Testament and latter will unto you. Chargeing you in the presence of GOD, and by fatherly authoritie I haue ouer you, that yee keepe it euer with you, as carefully, as Alexander did the Iliads of Homer.27

Henry, though, is not the only ‘son’ of the King referenced in the front matter to Basilicon Doron; James offers, near the end of his address to his readers, the hope for the happy reception of his other child, the book itself: And thus hauing resolued all the doubts, so farre as I can imagine, may be moued against this Treatise; it onely rests to pray thee (charitable Reader) to interprete fauourably this birth of mine, accourding to the integritie of the author, and not looking for perfection in the worke it selfe.28

And then, lastly, to conclude the equation offered between Henry and the King’s book written for him as two royal ‘births’, James concludes: and specially that since it was first written in secret, and is now published, not of ambition, but of a kinde of necessitie; it must be taken of all men, for the trew image of my very minde, and forme of the rule, which I haue preseribed to my selfe and mine ….29

As these lines suggest, James clearly conceived of print as a mechanism capable of presenting the true image of the king and his honorable intentions.

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On the one hand, this suggests a perhaps naive but certainly idealistic understanding of the immediacy of the printed word, as if the printed word were always and unproblematically clear and invulnerable to misconstruction. On the other hand, however, there are many significant instances in his works in which James seems quite clearly to recognize the exact opposite, that the printed word is indeed most vulnerable to a range of misunderstandings, confusions, abuses, and (worse still) misinterpretations.30 What remains to be considered is the degree to which James’s faith in and fears of the printed word derive from print itself. What was James’s relation to print? Does print as the vehicle for royal self-authorization (as opposed, for example, to the royal progress) structure or determine James’s relation to or understanding of authority? In order to begin to offer responses to these questions, I would like to turn to a telling moment in one of the most important – and controversial – of James’s political works: As I haue already said, Kings Actions (euen in the secretest places) are as the actions of those that are set vpon the Stages, or on the tops of houses: and I hope neuer to speake that in priuate, which I shall not auow in publique, and Print it if need be (as I said in my BASILICON DORON).

These lines were delivered by James I in a now-famous speech to Parliament on 21 March 1610 (a speech to which Heneage Finch was in part replying in his remarks in the House of Commons) and were subsequently preserved in printed form in three editions in 1610 and then again in James’s 1616 Workes, published in 1616.31 While the immediate context of the speech was James’s attempt to mollify Parliament’s growing anxiety over what was perceived (at least by some) as his absolutist inclinations, his alleged preference for Civil Law over Common Law, and the ease with which he seemed willing to redefine the nature and status of Parliament, this passage illustrates not only James’s relation to his parliament or his preferred form of government, but perhaps more importantly James’s understanding of his relation to print and to texts. To begin, James marks his iteration of the resolutely public nature of kingship as in fact a re-iteration: ‘As I haue already said’. This reference to an already-spoken assertion concerning the nature of his office, however, refers not intratextually to an earlier moment in the speech of 21 March 1610, but rather (as the final phrase notes) intertextually to James’s Basilicon Doron, first published in 1598.32 On the one hand, James attempts here to substantiate an explicit claim to constancy: not only does he vow in 1610 to remain true to a proper understanding of the nature of kingship, but he has remained constant even to this vow, pointing back, as this passage does, some twelve years to both the earlier text and James’s status as James VI of Scotland before his assumption of the English crown in 1603. On the other hand, however, the passage to which James refers in the 1610 speech is in fact neither his own, nor

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is it present in his Basilicon Doron. When we turn to that text, we find that the passage James cites in 1610 as his own is in fact his (deliberate) paraphrase of Luke 12: 2-3, and does not appear within the text of Basilicon Doron proper, but rather in the King’s epistle ‘To the Reader’ – a portion of the text that was itself not present in any of the earliest editions of Basilicon Doron and does not, in fact, make its first appearance in the multiple editions of 1603: Charitable Reader, it is one of the golden Sentences, which Christ our Sauiour vttered to his Apostles, that there is nothing so couered, that shal not be reuealed, neither hidde, that shall not be knowen; and whatsoeuer they haue spoken in darkenesse, should be heard in the light: and that which they had spoken in the eare in secret place, should be publikely preached on the tops of the houses …. 33

By virtue of its status as a marked paraphrase of the gospel’s quotation of Christ’s warning to his disciples about the ‘leaven of the Pharasees, which is hypocrisy’ – it is, strictly speaking, neither original nor originally James’s.34 Moreover, to this ‘original’ iteration (in ‘non-original’ editions of Basilicon Doron – that is, beginning only with the 1603 editions) of the public and open nature of kingship, in the text of the 1610 speech James significantly adds another dimension – one that will be of particular importance in this discussion: the promise of a print(ed) iteration: ‘I hope neuer to speake that in priuate, which I shall not auow in publique, and Print it if need be’ (emphasis added). This would seem to suggest that James clearly understands print to be an intensifier of publicness: not only is James ever constant (so much so that his thoughts in private or in secret correspond to his words in public), but, as a further sign of his constancy, he is willing to enact what the logic of his assertion suggests is the most public and hence most true and constant of all utterances: the printed page. But this is a step, he intimates, that he would be willing to take if it should prove necessary; the turn to print would function, then, as a reactive response – in the model of certain punitive measures – offered only in response to serious provocation: ‘and in Print if need be’ (emphasis added). Within this logic print constitutes that medium that best meets the demands of kingly openness, constancy, and godliness in part because print becomes permanent.35 This indicates, I suggest, that for James there are two related benefits to be reaped from print – which are, at the same time, the two related demands that James places on print as it works toward the production of objects of knowledge: first, it enables the formulation (and subsequent dissemination) of objects for judgment; and secondly, it enables the formulation of objects of judgment. The former of these are important because via print they become definitive, while the latter, to the contrary, are important for James precisely because they resist becoming definitional. We saw a version of this in James’s desire to see England submit its laws to codification in and through print. In Triplici Nodo, as suggested above, James wants very seriously to avoid

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confusions and misinformation concerning the controversy surrounding the Oath of Allegiance. He needs to be certain that his subjects – those who could and would read his text, at any rate – would know exactly the arguments offered and countered. To this end, James literally reproduces within his text the relevant documents – an instance of the king’s faith in textual sovereignty since the text performs the truth-value of its argument by manifesting evidential text. A text such as Triplici Nodo, then, meets the first demand of print: it provides evidence, in the form of text, that is then submitted to a readership as definitive and, in a word, absolute. At the same time, James’s political texts are required (by both James and by his political theory) to meet the second demand of print: that it performs something of a resistance to becoming definitional. These texts are required to reify certain forms of mystification – particularly regarding the nature of prerogative. What is especially striking in this is that James requires that each text meet simultaneously both of these demands of print.36 In other words, such a text – even as it is offered as an object for judgment – steadfastly refuses to submit itself (or some portion of itself) to judgment; it resists the move toward what can be called full disclosure. Or, to re-phrase: James submits his authorship to judgment, but not his authority. If, then, James’s readers are, in a sense, licensed to judge his texts – as ‘objects of’ – then James is determined to help fashion his own ideal readers – whether they are his subjects or his son. Among the many virtuous actions to which James seeks to prompt Henry in Basilicon Doron, a particularly significant one – for Henry’s proper education, to be sure, but also for the integrity of James’s political theory – is proper reading.37 James advises Henry ‘preasse [strive] to bee a good textuarie’ and this is advice (or, perhaps, a command) that he extends to all readers of his texts, which are written for and addressed to ‘me deare countrymen, and charitable readers’.38 The activity James describes – indeed, that he prescribes – is a certain procedure of reading, of acting as a ‘good textuarie’. To the considerable extent that Basilicon Doron is a conduct manual intended to offer both theoretical and practical guidance for Prince Henry, the forms of conduct James most consistently strives to produce, regulate and control are the related practices of reading and ruling. Indeed, for James these two practices are virtually indistinguishable: one rules in accord with what one reads. For James, this is particularly the case for kings: Remember then, that this glistering wordly glorie of Kings, is given them by God, to teach them to preasse so to glister and shine before their peope, in all workes of sanctification and righteousnesse, that their persons as bright lampes of godlinesse are vertue, may, going in and out before their people, give light to all their steps. Remember also, that by the right knowledge, and feare of God (which is the beginning of Wisdome, as Salomon saith), ye shall know all the things necessarie for the discharge of your duetie, both as a Christian, and as a King; seeing in him, as in a

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mirrour, the course of all earthly things, whereof hee is the spring and onely moover. Search the Scriptures, sayth Christ, for they beare testimonie of me: and, the whole Scripture, saith Paul, is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable to teach, to convince, to correct, and to instruct in righteousnesse; that the man of God may be absolute, being mafe perfite unto all good workes. And most properly of any other, belongeth the reading thereof unto Kings, since in that part of Scripture, where the godly Kings are first made mention of, that were ordained to rule over the people of God.39

If a king’s proper activity is proper reading, as James suggest, a king’s proper action lies in judgment. In Basilicon Doron, James argues that the most part of a Kings office, standeth in deciding that question of Meum and Tuum, among his subjects; so remember when ye sit in judgement, that the Throne ye sit on is Gods, as Moyses saith, and sway neither to the right hand nor to the left; either louing the rich, or pittying the poore.40

The question of the relation of the king to (civil) instruments of judgment was a principal point of contention in the reign of James, particularly in his much-celebrated struggle with Sir Edward Coke over the status of the king as a judge. Coke argued vigorously that the king could not in fact act as a judge, while James understood the act of judging to be fundamental to the role of monarch. This was, of course, a battle that Coke was destined to lose, but the war, it could be said, was ultimately won by those who argued for a more strict division of the political powers of the monarch into the more fully autonomous institutions of a separate and dedicated judiciary. In his speech before the Star Chamber (20 June 1616), James makes clear his understanding of his ‘divine’ right to both judgment, and to appoint deputies (judges) for its equitable execution: Kings are properly Judges, and Judgement properly belongs to them from GOD: for Kings sit in the throne of GOD, and thence all Judgement is derived. In all well setled Monarchies, where Law is established formerly and orderly, there Judgement is deferred from the King to his subordinate Magistrates; not that the King takes it from himselfe, but gives it unto them ….41

With this, James establishes the authority of his magistrates to act as judges – an authority that dervies from James’s own personal right to judgment, which is itself wholly and exclusively derived from God’s similar authority. But of course, the magistrate’s authority and power to judge are strictly limited. In his discussion of these limitations, James has recourse to the same principal of the distinction between admissible and inadmissible curiosity we saw him deploy in his discussion of the nature of reading. He warns his judges, ‘Incroach not upon the Prerogative of the Crowne’:

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If there fall out a question that concerns my Prerogative or mystery of State, deale not with it, till you consult with the King or his Councell, or both: for they are transcendent matters, and must not be sliberely [lightly] caried with an over-rash wilfulnesse; for so may you wound the King through the sides of a private person: and then I commend unto your speciall care, as some of you of late have done very well, to blunt the sharpe edge and vaine popular humour of some Lawyers at the Barre, that thinke they are not eloquent and bold spirited enough, except they meddle with the Kings Prerogative: But doe not you suffer this; for certainely if this liberty be suffered, the Kings Prerogative, the Crowne, and I, shall bee as much wounded by their pleading, as if you resolved what they disputed: That which concernes the mysterie of the Kings power, is not lawfull to be disputed; for that is to wade into the weaknesse of Princes, and to take away the mystical reverance, that belongs unto them that sit in the Throne of God …. It is Atheisme and blasphemie to dispute what God can doe; good Christians content themselves with his will reveled in his word. So, it is presumption and high contempt in a Subject, to dispute what a King can doe, or say that a King cannot doe this, or that; but rest in that which is the Kings reveled will in his Law.42

It had long been in the interest of monarchs to keep ‘prerogative’ an ambiguous and indeterminate term and concept, thus allowing them something of a (relatively) free hand in its exercise; once subjected to attempts at legislation – as we see in the reign of Charles I – ‘prerogative’ immediately loses the power afforded it precisely by virtue of its indeterminacy. And once pressed, absolutists will seek to define ‘prerogative’ as the very mark of the king’s true (that is, absolute) sovereignty. In one especially important and notorious episode, John Cowell, Vice-Chancellor and Regius Professor of Civil Law, Cambridge, sought to define the authority of the king as absolute when, in his 1607 law dictionary, The Interpreter, he defined ‘prerogative of the king’ as that especiall power, preeminence, or priviledge that the King hath in any kinde, over and above the ordinarie course of the common lawe, in the right of his crowne.43

Cowell’s belief that the king – without the consent or participation of Parliament – could make laws caused great consternation in Parliament, which demanded that Cowell be punished. In response, Cecil announced that James would intervene, and would himself write a proclamation condemning Cowell’s book. The resulting royal proclamation of 25 March 1610 makes clear that James’s objection to Cowell is not that he is absolutist in principle (so was James, and on that score at least Cowell’s book would likely not have been objectionable), but rather that Cowell is intrusive in his interests, and that, moreover, these interests constitute a violation of ‘the deepest mysteries of Monarchie and politique government’. In an age ‘so much given to verball profession, aswell of Religion, as of all commendable Morall vertues’, the proclamation declares, when inquisitive men ‘not being contented with the knowledge of so much

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of the Will of God, as it hath pleased him to reveale; but they will needs sit with him in his most privie Closet, and become privie of his most inscrutable Councels … it is no wonder that men in these our dayes doe not spare to wade in all the deepest mysteries that belong to the persons or State of Kings or Princes, that are gods upon Earth; since we see … that they spare not God himselfe’.44 Attempts to define ‘prerogative’ – while perhaps absolutist in nature, such as Cowell’s – are understood necessarily as dangerous and counterproductive; royal prerogative is, then, best left as an implied characteristic of monarchy rather than as one of its identifiable and measurable quantities. Cecil, in his address to the House of Commons committee appointed to investigate Cowell’s book, asserted that the ‘Prerogative of Princes is a thinge which will admitt no disputacion’, a sentiment that James sought to emphasize when he reminded the Commons that ‘It was dangerous to submit the power of a kinge to definition’.45 This prohibition on attempting to define prerogative, it should by now be clear, applies equally to James as to any of his subjects, whether supporter or dissenter; the most James could offer by authoring his texts was his repeated assertions of the inviolable mystery that serves to exalt and to shroud (and therein to protect) the true nature of royal power and prerogative. I would like to close, however, with a final consideration of a passage from the letter ‘To the Reader’ that prefaces (later editions) of Basilicon Doron, a passage in which James re-negotiates the idea of ‘testament’. In this letter, and in part as a way of explaining why he has turned to print, James has recourse to the story of a surreptitious (and unauthorized) publication of some portions of Basilicon Doron: So as it was neither fit for him [Henry], nor possible for me, to haue made this Treatise any more ample then it is. Indeed I am litle beholden to the curiositie of some, who thinking it too large alreadie (as appears) for lacke of leisure to copy it, drew some notes out of it, for speeds sake; putting in the one halfe of the purpose, and leauing out the other: not vnlike the man that alledged that part of the Psalme, non est Deus, but left out the præceeding words, Dixit insipiens in corde suo. And of these notes, making a little pamphlet (lacking both my methode and halfe of my matter) entituled it, forsooth, the Kings Testament, as if I had eiked a third Testament of my owne to the two that are in the holy Scriptures.46

While James’s humility will not allow his writings to stand in such relation to God’s old and new testaments as the ‘editors’ of the Kings Testament hopefully anticipated, James is rather all the more willing to let stand the comparison between Basilicon Doron and the Psalms implied in this passage: James’s unsolicited editors are likened to the vulgar reader of the Psalms in that as corruptors of texts they are all of them fools. But in order for James’s hapless editors to be like David’s hopeless reader, James’s work must stand in some

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ennobling proximity to David’s Psalms. In addition to having been authorized by kings, what serves to distinguish Basilicon Doron and the Psalms, then, from their impoverished mis-readings is (James suggests) their completeness, their fullness; and, conversely, what distinguishes a ‘bad’ copy is nothing so much as its incompleteness – ‘putting in the one halfe of the purpose, and leauing out the other’. According to the logic of James’s conceit here – and this is true of Basilicon Doron as a conduct manual for the future monarch more generally – James becomes identified with fullness and completeness, in that it is his wisdom (like Solomon’s in Proverbs) that allows him to assume the role of royal tutor for the Prince. But at the same time, this logic serves to identify the Prince as characterized by his incompleteness, which first James and then his book will work to fill and complete. In other words, if James emerges from this passage as the self-present original, then Prince Henry is revealed to be the incomplete and perhaps fragmentary and partial copy. Or, rather, the process of copying (Henry into another James) is not yet complete and requires further acts of inscription and imprinting. The force of James’s testament – in his dedication to Prince Henry he will call Basilicon Doron the ‘faithfull admonisher’ of the Prince in the King’s eventual absence – falls upon its capacity to emend the corrupted copy of itself; the King will fashion his son/copy in his own likeness. Within this system, David is an important figure, not merely because he was the author of the Psalms, or because he was the great king of the Israelites, but since he was both at the same time. And moreover, David was succeeded by his son, Solomon – also a king and an author. Solomon follows David; Proverbs follows Psalms and was itself followed by Ecclesiastes, followed by the Song of Solomon. The passage from father to son, from king to king, is also the passage from text to text.47 This dynamic of succession describes James’s renegotiated notion of the king’s testament – and the Kings Testament: It is trew that in a place thereof, for affirmation of the purpose I am speaking of to my Sonne, I bring my selfe in there, as speaking vpon my Testament: for in that sense, euery record in write of a mans opinion in any thing (in respect that papers out-liue their authours) is as it were a Testament of that mans will in that case: and in that sense it is, that in that place I call this Treatise a Testament.48

But in order to work properly, testament – like texts, as James conceives of them – can only ever truly speak in the absence of the speaker; James suggests this in the dedication of Basilicon Doron to Henry: Receiue and welcome this Booke then, as a faithful Præceptour and counsellour vnto you: which, because my affaires will not permit mee euer to bee present with you, I ordaine to bee a resident faithfull admonisher of you: And because the houre of death is vncertaine to mee, as vnto all flesh, I leaue it as my Testament and latter will unto you.49

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The burden of the book-as-testament’s success falls squarely on the shoulders of the son. James will have done his part: he has written and dedicated the text that will not only survive him but will continue to write the son-text, transforming Henry into a completed copy of James’s original. But even as testament holds out this promise of success, it marks the danger of failure. Indeed, since the son has already been identified as a corrupt copy of the king himself, the prognosis is doubtful. While the might of King David comes to yield to the wisdom of Solomon, the wisdom of Solomon, in the fullness of time, in turn yields to a form of despotism, whereby the reign of Solomon will eventually lead to the rebellion of Jeroboam. So long as testament requires the loss of the father-original and the inheritance of the son-copy, it bears the double mark of the means to success and the imprint of failure. The only possible escape from this falling-off through posterity resides in the figure of the fatherson, the king-prince, the David-Solomon. Such anxiety can only be ended once James is both father and son, king and subject, David and Solomon. As it comes to pass, the son named in Basilicon Doron does not inherit the testament prepared for him by his author/father/king. But in the face of this unexpected loss of the son, James effectively re-dedicates the book when Basilicon Doron ceases to be an individual text by virtue of its inclusion in the 1616 folio – a book explicitly dedicated to Charles but constructed as a monument to James – and becomes instead a feature of James’s self-reflexive Workes. When it becomes, in other words, part of the original. Notes 1

2 3 4

A version of this episode is discussed briefly in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. xxvii–xxviii. Sommerville quotes a portion of the Protestation (reprinted from Historical Collections, ed. John Rushworth, 7 vols, 1959–1701, I: 53): ‘the Liberties, Franshises, Priuiledges, and Iurisdictions of Parliament, are the antient and undoubted Birth-right and Inheritance of the Subjects of England; And … the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the King, State, and Defence of the Ream, and of the Church of England, and the maintenance and making of Laws, and redress of mischiefs and griuances which daily happen within this Realm, are proper subjects and matter of Counsel and Debate in Parliament’ (p. 303, n. 1079). The Declaration is printed in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 250–67. All citations to James’s writings refer to this text. For an important discussion of the relation between textual and sexual production and reproduction in the early modern period, see Margreta de Grazia, ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenburg, and Descartes’, in this volume. For a discussion of the nature and status of authorship in the period – and in terms of King James, in particular – see Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge

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6

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University Press, 1997), esp. Introduction and pp. 63–73. See also, more recently, Douglas Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. chs 3 and 4. For a more general discussion of England’s ‘mediated response’ to King James in the first decade of his reign, see Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). In a speech in the Star Chamber, 20 June 1616, for example, James reminds his auditors (and readers) on his double descent from Henry VII ‘from whom, as diuers wayes before, I am lineally descended, and that doubly to the Crowne; and as I am neerest descended of him, so doe I desire to follow him in his best actions’ (p. 206). John Donne, Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 79. Subsequent references to this work are to this edition. This passage occurs in Book Two of Essays in Divinity, which is devoted to an extended meditation – at least partially exegetical in nature – on the opening line of the book of Exodus (‘Now these are the Names of the Children of Israel which came into Egypt, & etc’.). While the first part of Book Two addresses the matter of names (in sub-sections entitled ‘Diversity in Names’, ‘Of Number’, and ‘Variety of Number’), the second part addresses something that Donne claims is ‘destin’d for a second Part, because it is radically and contractedly in that first verse, but diffused and expansively through the whole book: The Mercy, Power, Justice, and Judgement of God’. Donne then adds laconically, ‘of which, if nothing can be said new, nothing can be said too often’ (pp. 61–2). Donne makes relatively short work of the consideration of God’s mercy (figured as a safe harbor); but, as suggested above, the case is much altered when he turns his attention to the altogether more formidable question of God’s power. In fact, when preparing to embark upon this discussion, Donne declares, ‘It is not his least mercy, that we have been thus long possessed with the meditation [of God’s mercy]: for thus long we have been in the Harbour, but we launch into a main and unknown Sea, when we come to consider his Power’ (p. 79). Donne, Essays, p. 81. Donne again laments, ‘So that, as yet our understanding hath found no word, which is well proportioned to that which we mean by power of God; much less of that refined and subtil part thereof, which we chiefly consider in this place, which is the absolute and transcendent power of Miracles, with which this History [Exodus] abounds’ (p. 81). Donne’s difficulties multiply rapidly. Since, for Donne, God is not equivalent or reducible to Nature (which God created), we now have two forms or expressions of power that equally resist definition: ‘power of God’ – which we witness in the natural world and in history – and ‘power of Miracle’ – which initially seems characterized by eruptions of the incommensurate (the unnatural, let us say, and the un-historical) into the fabric of the natural and the historical. Donne, Essays, p. 81. Donne continues: For, the Miracles which are produced to day were determined and inserted into the body of the whole History of Nature (though they seem to us to be but interlineary and Marginall) at the beginning, and are as infallible and certain, as the most Ordinary and customary things …. So that truly nothing can be done against the Order of Nature. For, Saint Augustine says truly, That is Naturall to each thing, which God doth, from whom

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proceeds all Fashion, Number and Order of Nature; for that God, whose Decree is the Nature of every thing, should do against his own Decree, if he should do against Nature. As therefore if we understood all created Nature, nothing would be Mirum to us; so if we knew Gods purpose, nothing would be Miraculum (pp. 81–2).

9

There are a number of interesting and important observations to be made about this passage – not the least of which is the way in which it displays (or performs) Donne’s textual understanding of such issues as history, nature, and power: to the sufficiently informed eye, miracles appear not as aberrations or violations of nature – not, that is, as ‘interlineary and Marginall’ features of God’s texts (as Donne had only just suggested in the self-same paragraph), but instead as fully-integrated texts. In other words, what appears as God’s ‘power of miracles’ is merely a function of human ignorance, our failed knowledge, which is failed precisely because it is insufficiently historical: ‘so if we knew Gods purpose, nothing would be Miraculum’. To phrase this within a more politically-inflected language, which is equally (as I have suggested) the register in which it exists, Donne is able to cross this aporia only by virtue of two radical acts: the first is to deny God the attribute of the miraculous, and the second is to revise his own fore-going notion of miracleprerogative into a label that identifies an empty set, as merely the ephemeral and transient effect of finite human knowledge. To locate this never-fully acknowledged ‘resolution’ within the explicitly political register of Donne’s historical context, Donne evacuates royal prerogative of its substance and its meaning. One result that would follow from this – if, that is, Donne were himself to follow these implications of his own meditations – would be the flattening-out of James’s royal power. To return to the nature-Common law and miracle-prerogative metaphor, royal power can only consist of the sum total of Common law and its consequences. A most infelicitous conclusion for a political thinker such as James. But, this remains the path not traveled, as Donne simply allows this aporia to reside at the center of his text, without the benefit – interlinear or marginal – of any further meditation on his part. In ‘John Donne, Kingsman?’ in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 251–72, an important article that seeks to re-think ‘the question of Donne’s politics’ and which to that end considers (among other texts) Donne’s Essays, Annabel Patterson argues against the traditional view of Donne and his essentially absolutist sensibilities – particularly in relation to King James: from the records that Donne left us to consider … it is impossible to produce a single-minded person, let alone a coherent pattern of behaviours. The story of Donne in the reign of James is a story of self-division and self-contradiction; and we will learn more about Jacobean intellection and introspection by noticing the contradictions than by trying to smooth them away.

10 For a discussion of the date for Donne’s Essays, see Simpson (n. 6, above), pp. ix–x and xviii. 11 For discussions of the historical and political context of these debates see Johann P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London: Longman, 1986), esp. chs 3–5; Johann P. Sommerville, ‘James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics and Continental Theory’, in Peck (n. 9, above), pp. 55–70;

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Paul Christianson, ‘Royal and Parliamentary Voices on the Ancient Constitution, c. 1604–1621’, in Peck (n. 9, above), pp. 71–95; Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). A useful collection of important writings on questions of divine right, absolutism, and Parliament are assembled in Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England, ed. David Wootton (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Proceedings in Parliamentary 1610, 2 vols, ed. Elizabeth Read Foster (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), vol. 2, p. 234. Proceedings in Parliamentary 1610, vol. 2, p. 235. James, King James VI, p. 73. One important example occurs in James’s letter ‘To the Reader’ in Basilicon Doron: And as for the other point, that by some parts in this booke, it should appeare, that I doe nourish in my minde, a vindictive resolution against England, or some principals there; it is surely more then wonderfull vnto me, vpon what grounds they can haue gathered such conclusions. For as vpon the one part, I neither by name nor description poynt out England in that part of my discourse … [and] care not what any traitour or treasonallower doe thinke of it. And English-men could not therby be meant, since they could be no traitours, where they ought no allegeance (James, King James VI, p. 8).

16 See, for example, James’s Declaration (n. 2, above), esp. James, King James VI, pp. 262–3. 17 James, King James VI, p. 75. But, by way of anticipating potential unease at this notion of the king as Lex loquens and therefore above the law (an unease that was manifest within the House of Commons throughout James’s reign), James attempts to indicate in this same passage – and many more besides – that the good king will always rule by (his) law: For albeit it be trew that I haue at length prooued, that the King is aboue the law, as both the author and giuer of strength thereto; yet a good king will not onely delight to rule his subiects by the lawe, but euen will conforme himselfe in his owne actions thervnto, alwaies keeping that ground, that the health of the common-wealth be his chiefe lawe …. (James, King James VI, p. 75) 18 James, King James VI, pp. 160–61. In a later formulation of this same idea, we can see James once again attempting to assuage parliamentary anxiety, this time couched within the double context of James’s historical account of the evolution of monarchy, on the one hand, and, on the other, James’s efforts to come to some satisfactory terms with the idea of a contractual relation between monarch and his or her subjects: Yet how soone Kingdomes began to be setled in ciuility and policie, then did Kings set downe their minds by Lawes, which are properly made by the King onely; but at the rogation of the people, the Kings grant being obteined tereunto. And so the King became to be Lex loquens, after a sort, binding himselfe by a double oath to the obseruation of the fundamentall Lawes of the kingdome: Tacitly, as by being a King, and so bound to

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protect aswell the people, as the Lawes of his Kingdome; and Expresly, by his oath at his Coronation …. (James, King James VI, p. 183) 19 James, King James VI, pp. 186–7. 20 James, King James VI, p. 250. 21 Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 335–40. 22 James, King James VI, pp. 65–6. 23 Sir Thomas Smith, The Common-wealth of England, quoted in Sommerville, Politics and Ideology (n. 11, above), p. 88. 24 See Sommerville, Politics and Ideology (n. 11, above), esp. ch. 2, ‘Government by Consent’, pp. 57–85. 25 James, King James VI, p. 195. 26 James, King James VI, p. 2. 27 James, King James VI, pp. 2–3. 28 James, King James VI, p. 11. 29 James, King James VI, p. 11. 30 In this regard, James in fact shares a certain anxiety with one of his rivals: Pope Paul V, who, in his written denunciations of the Oath of Allegiance – and to which James not only responded in Triplici Nodo, but which James reproduced in that text (along with the Oath itself) – embedded warnings against misinterpretation within his texts in the form of repeated (and defensive) insistence upon prescribing the one and only meaning to be derived from texts. From the First Breve: ‘We command you that ye doe exactly obserue the words of those letters, and that ye take and vnderstand them simply as they sound, and as they lie; all power to interpret them otherwise, being taken away’ (James, King James VI, p. 90). And again (from the Second Breve): ‘After long and weightie deliberations vsed concerning all those things which are contained in them [described in previous Apostolic letters] and that for that cause ye are bound fully to observe them, reiecting all interpretation perswading to the contrary’ (James, King James VI, p. 97). 31 For an important discussion of the dating of James’s Workes, see Brooks (n. 4, above). 32 For a discussion of the dates for Basilicon Doron see Sommerville, King James (n. 2, above), Introduction and pp. 268–9, n. 1. 33 James, King James VI, p. 3. 34 In the King James version, the passage from Luke reads thus: In the mean time, when there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore, whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in the closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops. (Luke 12:1–3) Interestingly for our consideration of James’s political use of these lines, the context within the gospel for this passage is the moment when Christ first confounds not only the Pharisees, but also the scribes and the lawyers: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them

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…. And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them …. Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered. (Luke 11:44, 46–7, 52) And, lastly, the response of those Pharisees, scribes, and lawyers so condemned is recorded as well: And as he said these things unto them, the scribes and the Pharisees began to urge him vehemently, and to provoke him to speak of many things: Laying wait for him, and seeking to catch something out of his mouth, that they might accuse him. (Luke 11:53–4) I think it fairly easy to imagine (and reasonable to do so) that James, contemplating his always rather tense and frequently contentious relation to Parliament, could come to see its members as too insistent in their inquiries and too invested in ‘seeking to catch something out of his mouth’, and therein construe them as altogether too like the Pharisees, scribes, and lawyers repudiated in these passages by no less an author and authority than Christ. 35 James frequently invoked the figure of his transparent heart, which could hide nothing from his subjects but rather served to represent his honesty and constancy. James in fact conjures this image at the opening of his 21 March 1610 speech to Parliament: As ye made mee a faire Present indeed in presenting your thankes and louing dueties vnto mee: So haue I now called you here, to recompence you againe with a great and a rare Present, which is a faire and a Christall Mirror; Not such a Mirror wherein you may see your owne faces, or shadowes; but such a Mirror, or Christall, as through the transparantnesse thereof, you may see the heart of your King. (James, King James VI, p. 179) See also, for another example, James’s Declaration (p. 251). Though in these instances James understands the ‘Christall Mirror’ as a benevolent present to his subjects, he is also interested that they should understand the potential for harm that attends their stewardship of it; near the end of the same speech (21 March 1610), James returns to the image: Thus haue I now performed my promise, in presenting vnto you the Christall of your Kings heart. Yee knoe that principally by three wayes yee may wrong a Mirrour. First, I pray you, looke not vpon my Mirrour with a false light: which yee doe, it ye mistake, or mis-vnderstand my Speach, and so alter the sence thereof. But secondly, I pray you beware to soile it with a foule breath, and vncleane hands: I meane, that yee peruert not my words by any corrupt affections, turning them to an ill meaning, like one, who when hee heares the tolling of a Bell, fancies to himselfe, that it speakes those words which are most in his minde. And lastly, (which is worst of all) beware to let it fall or breake; (for glasse is brittle) which ye doe, if ye lightly esteeme it, and by contemning it, conforme not your selues to my perswasions. (James, King James VI, p. 203)

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36 In From Playhouse to Printing House (n. 4, above) Brooks identifies a similar splitting in another landmark folio of 1616: Ben Jonson’s Works, a splitting that results in what Brooks compellingly calls ‘the two Jonson folios of 1616’ – or, the ‘book’s two bodies’ (p. 113). 37 James is especially concerned with the practice of reading Scripture: when ye reade the Scripture, reade it with a sanctified and chaste heart: admire reverently such obscure places as ye understand not, blaming onely your owne capacitie: read with delight the plaine places, and studie carefully to undersand those that are difficile: preasse to bee a good textuarie; for the Scripture is ever the best interpreter of it selfe; but preasse not curiously to seeke out farther then is contained therein; for that were over unmannerly a presumption, to strive to bee further upon Gods secrets, then he hath will ye be; for what hee thought needfull for us to know, that hath he revealed there: And delyte most in reading such parts of the Scripture, as may best serve for your instruction in your calling; rejecting foolish curiosities upon genealogies and contentions, which are but vaine, and profite not, as Paul saith. (James, King James VI, p. 15) 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

James, King James VI, p. 84. James, King James VI, p. 13. James, King James VI, p. 24. James, King James VI, p. 205. James, King James VI, pp. 212–14. John Cowell, The Interpreter (Cambridge, 1607), pp. Ddd3–Ddd3v. For a discussion of the Cowell episode, see Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, ch. 4. Stuart Royal Proclamations: Volume One: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625, eds James F. Larken and Paul L. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 243. Quoted in Sommerville, Politics and Ideology (n. 11, above), p. 125. James, King James VI, p. 10. James’s new notion of testament leads back ultimately to that greatest of fatherson relations: God and Christ. James begins his speech in the Star Chamber (20 June 1616) with a passage from the Psalms: ‘GIVE THY IVDGEMENTS TO THE KING, O GOD, AND THY RIGHTEOUSNESS TO THE KINGS SONNE’, then continues: These be the first words of one of the Psalmes of the Kingly Prophet David, whereof the literall sense runnes vpon him, and his sonne Salomon, and the mystical sense vpon GOD and CHRIST his eternal Sonne: but they are both so wouen together, as some parts are, and can onely bee properly applied vnto GOD and CHRIST, and other parts vnto David and Salomon …. But both senses, aswell literall as mysticall, serue to Kings for imitation, and especially Christian Kings: for Kings sit in the Throne of GOD, and they themselues are called Gods. And therefore all good Kings in their gouernment, must imitate GOD and his Christ, in being just and righteous; David and Salomon, in being godly and wise …. (James, King James VI, p. 204)

48 James, King James VI, p. 104. 49 James, King James VI, pp. 2–3.

PART V TEXTUAL LEGACIES

C\ Taylor & Francis ~

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http://taylora ndfra n ci s.com

CHAPTER 14

How Many Children Had Alice Walker? Laurie E. Maguire In the book of Numbers it is writ When the man dies, let the inheritance Descend unto the daughter

(Henry 5 1.2.98–100)

Sometime between the early modern and the Romantic periods the meaning of the adjective ‘original’ changed. From denoting the derivative (something which had an origin) it came to mean the opposite: something without origin, something that was itself an original. The New Bibliographical project of analytical bibliography, textual criticism, and editing that began in the early 1900s and dominated most of the twentieth century was characterized by a dedication to the original, in the early modern sense. Concerned with textual transmission, genealogy, stemmas, reprints, legitimacy, with distinguishing the substantive from the accidental, compositor A from B (or C or D or E), the compositor from the author, the author from the Other (book-keeper, actor), the New Bibliographers aimed to find (conceptually if not physically) the ‘true original copies’ of the early modern printed text.1 This original, textual drive has a long metaphoric history. The New Bibliographers’ Darwinian drive simply appropriated the early modern tropical predilection for anthropomorphizing texts, a habit familiar to us from the numerous prefatory epistles that present texts as abused (orphaned, abandoned, mistreated) or nurtured (adopted, bandaged, patronized). Texts, like human beings, have parents, become orphans, seek guardians. If texts have parents, literary and historical movements have founding fathers. Chaucer is the ‘father of English poetry’; the Cavalier poets are the ‘sons of Ben’; Sir Walter Scott, planning an edition of the Works of Dryden, wrote ‘I will not castrate John Dryden. I would as soon castrate my own father’, although he later conceded ‘it will be indispensable to circumcise him a little’.2 The New Bibliography had not one founding father but three: a textual trinity of W.W. Greg, R.B. McKerrow, and A.W. Pollard. Pollard turned to Shakespeare later in life, his primary interest being rare books, and it is in his influence on Greg and McKerrow that his contribution lies. The real pioneers were Greg and McKerrow, and, if posterity equates New Bibliography with the former, it is because McKerrow was less published, less long-lived (he died

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prematurely in 1940; Greg, three years his junior, outlived him by 19 years), and less forceful as a personality (his shy and modest nature is mentioned by many).3 Thus twentieth-century bibliography traces its lineage from Greg, passing to Fredson Bowers, to Thomas Tanselle.4 This agnatic textual descent probably accounts for the terminology used by critics until the last decade or so, in which editing is figured as masculine. But, as in Henry 5, an alternative genealogy exists; one that comes from McKerrow and that involves the female line. Alice Walker was a colleague and correspondent of McKerrow, with whom she has much in common. Despite an early edition of Q1 Merry Wives (1910), Greg was never a Shakespeare editor; both McKerrow and Walker spent decades editing Shakespeare’s plays. When McKerrow died in 1940, the Oxford Old Spelling Shakespeare project, of which he was editor, was far from complete, and Walker was appointed as his successor (the project was still unfinished when she died in 1982).5 Both McKerrow and Walker published their views on Old Spelling Shakespeare, McKerrow in a book, Prolegomena to the Oxford Shakespeare (1939), Walker in diverse articles. Walker later assisted John Dover Wilson in editing Othello for the New Cambridge Shakespeare, edited Troilus and Cressida in her own right and, in a review by Peter Alexander, received unqualified praise for her editorial work: from the 1930s she had acquired a matchless reputation at the OUP for textual accuracy.6 Masculine tropes of editing curiously edit Alice Walker out of twentieth-century textual history. Is this editorial Salic law – ‘to wit, no female / Should be inheritrix in [textual] land’? Walker’s professional life was centred on origins. She devoted herself to ascertaining the origins of Elizabethan drama in social/cultural, biographical, bibliographical and editorial contexts. Her first article, published in 1932, was an extraordinary inquiry into Thomas Lodge’s reading: what he read, how he read it, how he wrote (or rather, compiled); in short, how Lodge used his reading.7 The bipartite title, ‘The Reading of an Elizabethan: Some Sources of the Prose Pamphlets of Thomas Lodge’, sends the wrong signals to a reader 70 years later. Although the second half of the title sounds predictable and prosaic (think: Geoffrey Bullough), the first half more accurately characterizes the whole article, for it denotes a topic and an approach that we associate today with the work of cultural and historicist critics like Lisa Jardine, Steven Zwicker, Kevin Sharpe, and William H. Sherman. In recovering Lodge’s habits of thought and writing, Walker shows herself to be an astute investigator of literary origins and appropriation. The following year she published a book on a different aspect of origins: a biography of Lodge. Published by the London firm Sidgwick and Jackson (of which McKerrow was a director), this study was supplemented in the same year by two articles on ‘The Life of Thomas Lodge’ in Review of English

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Studies.8 But it was her inquiries into the bibliographical origins of the plays in the First Folio of Shakespeare that were to earn Walker her reputation as a textual scholar, and over the next three decades she published 17 articles on Shakespearean textual problems, two single-play editions of Shakespeare, an edition of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (co-edited with Gladys Willcock) and one book on the First Folio, as well as 37 book reviews (she was a regular reviewer for RES).9 In 1960, the year in which she took up an appointment as Reader in Bibliography and Textual Criticism at Oxford University, a position she held until her retirement in 1968, she delivered the British Academy Shakespeare lecture. Her subject was Edward Capell and the origins of ‘scientific criticism of the text’, and the lecture was an attempt to ‘pay tribute to a neglected Shakespearian’.10 Alice Walker is not a neglected Shakespearian, but her critical career merits more attention than it has received. Shakespeare’s Earl of Canterbury urges the King, ‘Look back into your mighty ancestors’ (1.2.102); I propose to follow his advice. Unlike Canterbury, however, I do not have a manipulative agenda. Rather, through an analysis of Walker’s textual inheritance and textual legacies, I want simply to consider the enatic descent of textual studies. Alice Walker was born in 1900; I am writing this essay in 2000. Millennial moments aside, this seems a good time to assess her achievements in, and contributions to, the first century of New Bibliography. I

Alice among the Compositors

Removing the veil of print, identifying the accretions of the printing house so that we can see through them to the author at work, was the focal point of all New Bibliographical inquiry. Printing represented ‘a stage in transmission about which we know very little and ought to know more’, wrote Walker;11 ‘as one of the main tasks of an editor today is that of separating the grain from the chaff in three centuries of critical opinion, it is important to have some systematic means of winnowing’.12 Walker’s means of winnowing was compositor identification. Compositor identification is now a staple of all bibliographical and editorial work, but in the 1940s it was in its early days. Walker was one of the first to employ it, and she ranks alongside Charlton Hinman who thanks Walker in the acknowledgments to The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio13 for encouraging his work. Walker is so immersed in the printing-house that she talks about compositors as personalities rather than alphabetical letters. Of Compositor A’s methodical habits she writes, ‘He could normally maintain a system and I have no doubt that if A had decided to turn every tenth “e” he could have held his head to the business’.14 She knows B’s characteristics when he’s in a hurry and when

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he’s at leisure, and therefore allows herself to infer the latter behaviour from the former: ‘With time for reflection, B would have supplied the apostrophe wanted in the first word and would probably have substituted “blush’d” and “chaf’d.”15 When B changes his spelling preference for ‘prethee’ to ‘prithee’ between setting the Folio Comedies and the Histories, Walker observes his transitional orthographic vacillation in a romantic metaphor: ‘B’s struggles to be off with the old love are interesting’.16 Compositor identification is inevitably rooted in the personal – the identification of personal spelling characteristics; Walker talks not just about personal habits but about personality. Like Hinman’s, many of Walker’s conclusions about compositors have since been refined. What has not been questioned, however, is the value of compositor identification, and on this subject Walker was repeatedly and eloquently astute.17 She sees the long-term benefits of compositor identification and proselytises accordingly. Identifying compositors helps one to identify printers (‘where other means fail’); it helps one to ‘date (at any rate approximately) undated books and cancels’;18 it enables one to dispose of the ‘now common fallacy of supposing that misreading is the commonest type of printing house error’.19 Compositor study also alerts one to the likelihood of lost printed texts, since mixed spelling by a compositor indicates a printed predecessor.20 (Compositors tend to follow the spelling of a printed copy-text relatively faithfully since the printed text conveniently fits the measure of the page but the spelling of the printed source competes with the compositor’s own instinctive spelling habits surface; the result is a mixture of orthographic forms.) Walker therefore encourages us to investigate those plays for which the first printed edition postdates the first performance or Stationers’ Register entry by a long way, or which advertise their text as revised or corrected: Love’s Labour’s Lost (Q 1598; ‘Newly corrected and augmented’), The Spanish Tragedy (Q 1615; Henslowe’s Diary 23 February 1591/2), Edward 2 (Q 1594; SR entry 6 July 1593), David and Bethsabe (Q 1599; composition c. 1581–94). Compositor identification also helps the editor select and reject emendations. ‘Chapels’, an error for ‘chapless’ in Q2 Romeo and Juliet, looks like a simple case of transposition. Not so, Walker points out: ‘The termination “–lesse” is invariably used throughout this text. What the error signifies, therefore, is that the compositor never intended to set up “chaplesse” but misinterpreted as “chapels” a spelling of his copy which must have had the short spelling “chapless”’.21 Furthermore, compositor study enables one to determine what is Shakespearean and what is not. Is the light punctuation in Merchant of Venice and Q2 Hamlet ‘typical of Roberts’s printing-house? Did Simmes normally pepper his texts with the heavy, metrical pointing exemplified in the verse of 2 Henry IV and Much Ado? Did Jaggard’s compositors A and B usually elide hypermetrical vowels according to the dictates of their own ear or were they guided by their copy?’22 Note the range that answering such questions requires:

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it is not one compositor but the entire printing house, not one Shakespeare text but everything printed by the printer that are important. Walker did not undertake these studies (or if she did, she did not publish them), but she saw their significance and hence paved the way for the work of D.F. McKenzie, Peter W.M. Blayney, and Mark Bland.23 II

Alice among the Editors

If Compositor B wrestled with two forms of spelling ‘prithee’, Alice Walker wrestled with two ways of editing Shakespeare: old spelling versus modern spelling. Given that she later became the editor of the Oxford University Press Old Spelling Shakespeare, the resolution of her personal struggle in favour of modernized editions is surprising. In fact, her devotion to modernized spelling (‘an Old Spelling edition … is an expensive pastime’24) is a direct result of her work on compositor determination, and the logic of her conclusion is inescapable: old spelling editions do not give us the author’s old spelling (this, she points out, was why the Old Cambridge editors rejected the idea of an old-spelling Shakespeare25). ‘When Muir … in the New Arden Lear followed the Folio’s ‘murther’, what was he reproducing – the compositor’s spelling or a scribal alteration of the Q1 spelling on the authority of the prompt-book? If it was the prompt-book spelling, was it Shakespeare’s?’26 If old spelling told us something about pronunciation, that would be a different matter, but for Elizabethan phonology we are twice referred to the quirky ‘unsophisticated spelling of … John of Bordeaux’ rather than the ‘conventional spelling of printed books’.27 I attribute Walker’s failure to complete the Oxford Shakespeare to a loss of belief in what she was doing. This, presumably, was why she left instructions for her papers to be destroyed after her death (her last will was made on 5 October 1982, nine days before she died). The concept behind the Oxford Shakespeare was finished; destruction of documents ensured the edition was too. Although old spelling editions serve a purpose (see below), they have no place in the commercial market.28 Editors need old-spelling editions; readers do not. Walker’s understanding of what old spelling represents, or does not represent, makes her unhappy about the preservation of old spelling in modernized editions such as the first volumes of the New Arden series. Since words like ‘murther’ or ‘vild’ are simply variant spellings, to preserve them means that New Arden texts ‘are neither old, nor modern but an arbitrary mixture’.29 She criticizes T.S. Dorsch’s Julius Caesar for ‘mongrel spelling’ and bemoans the ‘preservation of archaisms’ in Peter Ure’s Richard II.30 J.C. Maxwell’s edition of Titus Andronicus prompts the observation: ‘The purpose of a modernized edition is to modernize and not to select for preservation such oddities as strike an editor’s fancy’.31

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The New Arden practice receives extended examination even when Walker is not writing official reviews of individual volumes. In ‘Compositor Determination’, Walker cites Kenneth Muir’s King Lear as an example of why a ‘systematic study of printing-house spelling is plainly wanted: … to act as a curb on this kind of folly’ (i.e., mixed spelling), and she ponders the inconsistencies of Arden’s mixed editorial policy: ‘if Muir preserved “murther” and “vild”, why not the vowel variants in “show” and “shew”, ‘blood’ and “bloud”? Why not the commoner “alablaster” or “abhominable”?’32 Walker points out that editors’ misunderstanding of spelling also taints their decisions about pointing. M.R. Ridley felt that altering punctuation was like altering a reading, i.e., it constituted emendation. Walker exposed his analogy as false. ‘An editor is as free to modernize punctuation as he is to modernize spelling …. He only emends when his alteration is a substantive change, affecting the sense’.33 Thus, Walker’s views on spelling, punctuation, and emendation in editions of Shakespeare were determined by her familiarity with the printing house. This familiarity also enabled her to make useful suggestions to Una EllisFermor about the format of New Arden Shakespeares. The very full collation notes in Richard David’s Love’s Labour’s Lost are often redundant: ‘where the readings of derivative texts later than the First Folio are plainly compositors’ errors no useful purpose is served by citing them’.34 This might seem obvious to us today but in 1952, when David’s Love’s Labour’s Lost was but the second in the New Arden series – a series which was breaking new ground in putting New Bibliographical theory and discovery into sustained editorial practice – such thoughtful criticism was invaluable. Although an advocate of modern spelling editions of Shakespeare, Alice Walker saw the need for an old spelling edition. An old spelling edition provides ‘the spelling in which emendations must be made’.35 In other words, editors must edit in modern spelling but think in old spelling; an old spelling edition is necessary as a prelude to one in modern spelling. Walker’s continuation, from 1940, of McKerrow’s work on the Oxford Old Spelling Shakespeare represents only one half of her editorial vision. When, under new editors, OUP finally brought out its Complete Works of Shakespeare in 1986, it did so in two volumes: old spelling and modern spelling. What seemed like a volte face in editorial policy36 was actually a realization of Walker’s dual desiderata. III

Alice among the Students and the Annotators

While she devoted her textual energies to the mechanics that underpin editing (textual transmission, compositor determination, the selection of copy text), Walker’s opinions on the merits of old and modern spelling editions, and on

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how to modernize in the latter, indicate an interest in the entire process of editing from point of manufacture (Elizabethan author) to point of consumption (twentieth-century reader). Walker is particularly interested in the twentiethcentury student reader. (Like her near contemporaries Dover Wilson and Peter Alexander, but unlike the first generation New Bibliographers Greg, McKerrow, and Pollard, Walker was a university teacher: she taught at London University from 1928–31 and at Oxford from 1960–68.37) Her articles and reviews are peppered with insights about what is useful in the seminar room/ lecture room/student study (and about what is not). The original Arden Antony and Cleopatra is a ‘splendid period-piece of editing …. But who would choose to use a period-piece in the lecture room? It merely puts an untold number of people to the trouble an editor might have spared them’.38 Her review of the New Arden Love’s Labour’s Lost contains no fewer than four references to the ‘needs of students and teachers’. David’s introduction is not ‘a serviceable introduction for students’; she complains about an off-puttingly long note (‘some seven inches of it’); in notes to editions students need ‘less illustration and more explanation’. Walker’s views on annotation are most fully expressed in her article on ‘Principles of Annotation: Some Suggestions for Editors’ – the first and only attempt in the twentieth century to theorize annotation.39 Walker’s concern, as ever, stems from her interest in origins, in this case, lexical origins. Despite bibliographical advances, ‘there will always be a residuum of compositors’ errors which can only be detected by literary means’.40 It is important therefore to determine ‘how far Shakespeare’s language was the current coin of his day and how far it was his own minting’. The OED had been completed in 1928 and ‘ought to have revolutionised the annotation of Shakespeare’. Instead, editors continue to justify words by parallels, a habit that antedates the OED; parallels tell us ‘what the word means’ but not ‘whether there was anything unusual in the use of it’.41 Walker proposes to sweep parallel passages out of notes ‘and to have a gentleman’s agreement between editor and reader that, when a word is merely glossed without further comment, it can be assumed that the word was in ordinary use in Shakespeare’s time in the sense given’.42 Her model is collation notes: ‘we have now cleared collation notes of much useless matter …. Explanatory notes should, in fact, show the same kind of discrimination as collation notes’.43 The rest of the article offers analyses of Elizabethan usage, interesting insights into the way poetic language works, and the differences between the editor’s task in explaining figurative language and the lexicographer’s in defining meaning. Walker finds Schmidt’s Lexicon has ‘a readier grasp of poetic devices’ than the OED for ‘poetry must break loose; semantics must pin down’.44 In two important footnotes (notes 6 and 11) Walker re-introduces her favourite subject, compositors, taking us further into compositorial noetics.

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She is suspicious of assumptions that, when an editor is faced with variant readings, the ‘rarer word will be Shakespeare’s, since, so the argument runs, no scribe or compositor would have introduced it’; she wants an estimate of ‘the range of vocabulary’ a King’s Men’s scribe might have acquired, and of the difference in vocabulary between Jaggard’s compositors and Roberts’,45 and, in a bold surmise, she writes: ‘The risk in Folio texts is, indeed, that Jaggard’s compositors might have developed a bias against the modesty of nature towards the recondite in vocabulary’.46 These are provocative points and, combined with the examples and theories of annotation in the body of the text, make this one of Walker’s most interesting and important articles. IV

Alice and the Anxiety of Influence

Any twentieth-century textual scholar has to deal with the influence of W.W. Greg, the ‘prime mover’, the ‘Atlas’ of modern bibliography but for whose leadership ‘we might be back in the jungle’.47 Given the force of Greg’s personality, the strength of his opinions, and the magisterial appearance of his major writings, it is all too easy to be overawed by this textual Titan. Alice Walker was one of his few contemporary critics – not wantonly captious but, like McKerrow (who shared some of her reservations about Greg’s work) instinctively interrogative. In ‘The Rationale of Copy-text’48 Greg offered one of his most influential arguments: that an author’s second thoughts must supersede his first. This argument became textual orthodoxy, but, as Walker observed unhappily, this ‘orthodoxy involved some conflict of will with reason. What an editor had to accept as, theoretically, the more authoritative reading was not invariably the one that his judgement approved’.49 Of course, the scientific ambitions of the New Bibliography necessitated the reduction of any editorial trait that smacked of subjectivity. Throughout her career, Walker acknowledged (in an unrepentantly anti-New Bibliographical view) that textual studies were personal: ‘My conclusions represent, of course, rationalizations of my own objections to readings such as “vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts”. An editor can, I think only trust to his judgement’. The role of compositor study is to make that judgement informed rather than whimsical.50 No New Bibliographer would, in practice, disagree with Walker’s statement, but Walker is emboldened to put her views in print, strenuously resisting Greg’s tyranny of copy-text. One of the most tenacious of New Bibliographical theories is that derived from Maunde Thompson’s study of spelling in Hand D of Sir Thomas More in which he tells us that Shakespeare (Hand D) used idiosyncratic spellings like ‘a leauen’ and ‘scilens’.51 This opinion has become a truth universally acknowledged – but never by Alice Walker. She writes, ‘The evidence of

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spellings such as “a leauen” is valueless; most of the spellings which have been thought to be Shakespearian are far too common in manuscripts of the period to have any significance’.52 This brisk dismissal, in which Walker wears her manuscript learning lightly, is paralleled by equally brisk introductions. Walker assumes that readers’ textual knowledge is as easily accessible as her own, and that they can orient themselves in the dramatic situation and its textual problems without the need for antecedent explanation. Thus, a note on a line in Merry Wives of Windsor (3.3.176) begins, ‘Though editors have generally preserved this Folio reading, it gives only a loose sort of sense and is, I believe, an error for “untapis”, meaning to come out of cover or hiding’.53 She does not give the reader the sentence, nor explain the background to the dialogue and situation in which it occurs.54 The only instance in which she does so is in an article published in Shakespeare Quarterly in the year of her death (‘Six Notes on All’s Well that Ends Well’). Here she takes time to situate the reader in the six dramatic moments whose cruces she discusses. In this scene-setting, I suspect the influence of Shakespeare Quarterly’s editor rather than an authorial change of lifetime habit, for the following year’s posthumous publication, ‘The Text of Measure for Measure’ (which might equally have been titled ‘Twenty-three Notes on Measure for Measure’) offers far less by way of dramatic explanation than does the note on All’s Well. Walker could offer narrative to the less technical audience when occasion demanded – her British Academy lecture is a good performance piece, as are the two articles that originated in public lectures (‘Principles of Annotation’, ‘Compositor Determination’) – but that bibliography is her instinctive critical move is seen in the way in which she turns critical books, such as K.M. Lea’s Italian Popular Comedy, into personal textual challenges. In a seven-page review of Lea, in which Walker emerges as an animated theatre critic and a good Italianist, she metamorphoses before our eyes into a bibliographer, performing the extraordinary feat of collating Lea’s book with itself. This is not just a typical review-paragraph pointing out errors but a three-page collation list, neatly subdivided and classified, with four sections tabulating variants and omissions.55 The same instinct surfaces in her review of the New Arden Titus Andronicus where she analyses a typesetting error and assigns it to its origin as if she were dealing with an Elizabethan quarto.56 Most reviewers note errors in the books they are reviewing; Walker analyses them. The tone is not one of captious persnicketiness but of a textual instinct and love of printed books, page by page, word by word, error by error. Walker’s bibliographical expertise occasionally spills over into a magisterial rhetoric that reminds one of Greg in its empiricism but actually has more in common with A.E. Housman in its hyperbole. ‘Anyone acquainted with the spelling of Simmes’s, Creede’s, and Eld’s compositors’, writes Walker, ‘could

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determine, almost at a glance, to which of the three No. 242 (The Fair Maid of the Exchange) should be assigned and similarly whether No. 278 (Mustapha, 1609) was Windet’s or not’.57 In the same article she reveals that ‘Fredson Bowers’ account of the Hamlet Q2 running-title evidence, for instance, at once revealed to me which variants in spellings were important and which were of no account’.58 (Cf. Housman on discovering a misprint in a poem by Walter de la Mare: ‘I knew in a moment that Mr de la Mare had not written rustling, and in another moment I had found the true word’.59) Walker’s rhetoric in the first quotation is disingenuous, as the reference to compositors is irrelevant. What she is talking about is instant recognition of type, which requires familiarity with the stock in the printing house, not with its compositors. But for Walker the printing house equals the compositor(s). For the experienced bibliographer, instant recognition of type is certainly possible and so, despite the introductory red-herring, the statement is valid. But Walker’s second claim, instant discrimination in spelling variants, is left as a rhetorical gesture rather than bibliographical fact because, like Housman, Walker advertises her ability by failing to share its textual results with us: she does not tell us ‘which spellings were important and which were of no account’. Textual tease à la Housman or earnest bibliographical challenge? Walker had much in common with her New Bibliographical avatars. With Greg she shared an impatience with bibliographers and textual critics who did not know what they were doing;60 like Greg she had bibliographical patience, stamina, and dedication.61 With McKerrow she shared common sense and caution in the face of Greg’s more dominant theories. But she was also autarchically independent of both men. She pioneered compositor analysis; she acknowledged the subjectivity of textual studies; she made pedagogy and editing bedfellows; and she theorized annotation. These differences from her predecessors are not insignificant, but they seem minor in comparison to the aspects to which I now turn: her personal style of writing, her literary criticism, and her performance criticism. V

Alice, our Contemporary

There is much to praise in the New Bibliographical writings of Greg and McKerrow but no one could accuse either scholar of providing entertaining reading. Textual writing was not revolutionized until the 1980s (that decade of revolution in textual thinking) with the prose of Gary Taylor. What is significant about Taylor’s writing is not its wit, or iconoclasm, or originality – although it has these qualities a-plenty – but its use of metaphor. Metaphor shows a mind at play (‘play’, of course, became respectable in the post-structuralist world of Jacques Derrida). Greg might be an acerbically

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witty book-reviewer when he has a target to shoot down, but he never permits himself to play. In his textual research there is negligible use of metaphor (the text of Orlando Furioso is a ‘strange abortion’, for example) and it jars, not because it sounds strange coming from the pen of Greg (although it does), but because it doesn’t serve any purpose; it is a cliché.62 Taylor, on the other hand, develops his metaphors. The introduction to the Textual Companion is full of anthropomorphizations that continue the trope of Heminge and Condell’s prefatory epistle: plays are siblings, collected works are family reunions, editors are the pimps of discourse.63 For Taylor, metaphor was just the beginning of making textual research readable: see his ‘Farrago’ and ‘c:\wp\file.txt 05:41 10–07–98’ to discover how far we have come. Other factors have contributed to the new readability of textual criticism. Textual criticism is no longer the property of textual critics, its terminology only accessible to bibliographical epopts. Critical miscegenation has imbued textual criticism with new critical practices, new vocabularies, and prose styles that descend from different traditions. The stream-of-consciousness writing of Derrida and Barthes is a world removed from the heavy guiding hand of Greg’s mathematical prose. We now write about texts, as we read them, ‘without the father’s signature’. As the tying, defining hand of the father-as-author has been removed, so has the tying, defining hand of-the-father-as-textual critic. Greg would not recognize the style in which much textual criticism is written today. Alice Walker would. She is a highly metaphoric, witty, and playful writer. ‘The red corpuscles of revenge tragedy’ petered out in ‘the anaemic strain of Philaster, The Maid’s Tragedy and Unnatural Combat’;64 the Elizabethans had a ‘gold rush for vocabulary’;65 in describing strands of revision (‘later reference’) in Puttenham, she tell us that ‘islands of later reference … group themselves into an archipelago stretching over the end of Book 2 and the whole of Book 3’.66 Sometimes her lively style comes from using Shakespeare’s lines in another context. Thus, the alleged reporter of Q1 King Lear suffered from the ‘disease of not listening, the malady of not marking’;67 a negative character analysis of Troilus concludes: ‘Hector lost his life and Troilus his horse – and the latter, like Ajax’s horse, may have been the more capable creature’.68 She finds J.C. Maxwell’s comparison between Titus Andronicus and Othello ‘much like Fluellen’s comparison between Macedon and Monmouth’.69 Sometimes controlled understatement adds flavour: the editorial hand she detects at work in the dialogue of 2 Henry IV has overhauled Shakespeare’s colloquial idiom ‘with the result that the language of Falstaff and his associates has a gentility that far surpasses anything Prince Henry might have envisaged in their reform’.70 Elsewhere her writing has an aphoristic sound-bite quality. Of Troilus and Cressida: ‘what fired Shakespeare’s imagination was Troy, not Troilus’; ‘Troilus’s associations were with comedy, but Troy’s with tragedy’.71

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Of sixteenth-century language: ‘English syllables had been drilled to march; they could now be trained to dance’; ‘language rose like a tide on all sides until the ghost of John Cheke relinquished its Canute-like efforts’.72 In Textual Problems of the First Folio, Walker wrote that the transcript of Macbeth had ‘style and personality’.73 The description is no less applicable to her own writing. Greg revealed his personality in book reviews, partly because recurrence of editorial sloth and carelessness prompted unrestrained rhetorical ire. Walker shares Greg’s impatience with low academic standards and intellectual cecity but it manifests itself not in vituperation so much as headmistressly reprimands. Deborah Jones’s essay on Lodowick Bryskett offers an ‘ill-advised and immaturely written comparison of Lycidas and Bryskett’s pastorals’.74 K.M. Lea’s book suffers from ‘too many omissions, bad grammatical errors and syntactical flaws … and a disregard of the distinction between commas and conjunctions makes the work in places seem slapdash. With care, the style could easily have achieved distinction’.75 (Is this a book review, one wonders, or an end-of-term report?) R.C. Cawley’s The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama is not a book but ‘a write-up of a card-index’.76 Frances Yates’ ‘sentence building is frequently naive and poor’; her use of colloquialisms ‘exemplify an insensitiveness to verbal decorum which constantly jars’; the style is ‘pedestrian’.77 The prose of Fredson Bowers is ‘muffled’, as is that of John Munro.78 The same critical tone is applied to Elizabethans who disappoint. Compositor B suffers continually. The conclusion to Textual Problems of the First Folio reserves its final sentence for one last dig at Compositor B’s ‘extraordinarily careless and high-handed ways’.79 Nor is her beloved Puttenham exempt from disapproval. Puttenham could have treated versification seriously if he had wanted but, we are told sorrowfully, ‘he has not made the effort’.80 (Poor Puttenham: must try harder; could do better.) Though Walker’s provocative style was not much to the taste of Philip Brockbank,81 it is, I maintain, her style that makes her so readable today. VI

Alice-Speak

One distinctive aspect of Walker’s prose style is her unusually idiomatic prose. Her favourite idiom is ‘yark’ in the phrase ‘yarked up’. Sometimes she calls attention to the phrase with inverted commas, as if acknowledging that it is not standard English; at other times the phrase is incorporated in the fabric of the sentence without any special notice, but at all times the sense of this idiomatic verb is clear. Thus: ‘I do not suggest that the manuscript from which the Quarto [of Othello] was printed was “yarked up” by actors’;82 ‘vulgarism … found

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in many bad quartos yarked up by actors’;83 ‘The Arte was not “yarkt up” in haste’;84 several of Lodge’s pamphlets ‘were clearly “yarkt up” in response to no other impulse than the necessity of producing an adequate number of pages for a Quarto volume’.85 The OED defines yark as ‘To “get up” or compose rapidly or hastily, to “dash off”’ (OED yark 4c), and notes that it is obsolete (the last citation is 1621). Walker knew of the verb’s obsolescence; when it appears in F Othello, 1.2.4–5 (‘Nine, or ten times / I had thought t’haue yerk’d [Q ierked] him here vnder the Ribbes’; TLN 207–8) she glosses it as follows (my italics):86 The now obsolete ‘yerk’ appeared first as a term in shoemaking (= to twitch stitches tightly) and was used, like the surviving variant ‘jerk’, for any quick movement – here, almost certainly, for a sword thrust; cf. LLL 4.2.132, ‘the jerks of invention’ (Q. ‘ierkes’) and HV, 4.7.79, where F ‘yerke’ (a spelling of compositor B) is used for a horse’s kick (note to 1.2.5, pp. 146–7).

It is hard to imagine the phrase escaping today’s copy-editors. Does Walker know ‘yarked’ from English dialect (she lived in Lancashire, Devon, and Cornwall)? Or has her mind been steeped in Elizabethan language for so long that the obsolete is, to her, current? Given the delight with which she pounces on the idiomatic in Elizabethan texts,87 the answer is almost certainly the latter. A number of eyecatching phrases are concentrated in Textual Problems (emphasis added): [Richard] foozles Anne’s return in the verbal game. For a compositor to have spent time in consulting another text only to embrangle his own was, in fact, to waste time. There is nothing to suggest that he [the collator] scamped his task.88

For the delightful ‘foozle’, the OED (citing the Bavarian dialect verb fuseln = work hurriedly and badly) gives ‘To do clumsily, “make a mess of”; to bungle’ (2 trans); all its entries are from nineteenth-century slang. The OED’s first entry for ‘embrangle’ is from 1664: ‘to entangle, confuse, perplex’. For ‘scamp’ we find ‘to do (work, a task, etc. negligently or hurriedly … cf. skimp)’; again the verb’s use is purely dialectal. Elsewhere Walker twice criticizes authors for ‘muffled’ writing.89 This figurative use of the verb is first recorded in 1599 in Cynthia’s Revels; the OED has no twentieth-century citations. Thus, of the five examples of Walker’s idioms, three are early modern in origin, two are colloquial or regional. Another phrase – equally unusual but again equally clear – is not glossed by the OED. In the conclusion to Textual Problems Walker warns that ‘we shall have some very curious texts … if … the errors of compositors … are represented as the milk of the word’.90 Presumably the milk of the word is the centre, the essence, as in the milk of human kindness. Such language creates a strong personal

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flavour, an idiolect; and épatisme is not a characteristic associated with textual criticism in the decades in which Walker was writing. This personal flavour is not solely due to idiomatic vocabulary. Walker’s literary opinions are always prominent in her textual criticism. In this conjunction, Walker allies herself with Housman and against Vinton Dearing whose Manual of Textual Analysis (1959) she reviewed: I am not, I admit, sympathetic towards the divorce of Thought from Textual Criticism …. What [the beginner] needs to know is how the preliminary business of collation contributes to the solution of more complicated problems which cannot be solved by mechanical means and, as the textual critic has to think in the end, why should he not give thought to the matter from the beginning?91

But her alliance of literary criticism and textual criticism is also partly due to the fact that Walker is, quite simply, an excellent literary critic. VII Alice as Literary Critic Although it was published in 1957, Walker’s introduction to Troilus and Cressida has stood the test of time. The play’s military characters ‘are not part of the oldfashioned chronicle play symbolism, in which a crooked figure might attest a million, but individuals madly intent on personal ends’.92 These ‘personal ends’ mean that even Hector is culpable: his honour is ‘personal indulgence, like Achilles’ pride, in a society in which individualism is a menace’.93 Thus, the Trojans ‘wear the motley with better grace but they are as much the victim of ruling passion as the Greeks’.94 Walker is less sympathetic to Cressida than I am inclined to be; but she is, at least, not sentimental about Troilus either, as she spells out Shakespeare’s satiric, low-mimetic intent. Troilus’s ‘affected and strained calculation … sterilizes the love story by substituting artifice for ardour’.95 (Contrast Kenneth Muir who as late as 1982 was pro-Troilus and anti-Cressida.96) Vibrant sections on genre (‘to see Troilus as a tragic figure is to ignore the many precautions Shakespeare took to preclude a sentimental interest in the love story’97), on Troilus, Troy, the play’s satire and the play’s integrity, as well as the expected sections on text, date and sources, make this a highly readable and durable vade mecum in which the editor’s engagement with her literary material is everywhere apparent. This symbiosis of literary criticism and textual criticism is apparent in all Walker’s textual writings. Keats objected to the banality of Rowe’s emendation of Troilus’ image in 1.1.39 (‘as when the sun doth light a scorne’ Q; a-scorne F; a storm Rowe). Walker counters Keats through literary criticism: ‘The triteness of the emendation … is, in fact, a recommendation. The simplicity of the two other similes in this speech precludes the idea that any subtlety was

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intended’.98 At Troilus and Cressida 3.3.137, Q reads ‘while pride is fasting in his wantonness’; F has ‘while pride is feasting in his wantonness’. Walker explains, ‘Q has the right antithesis between Ajax’ willingness to seize an opportunity and Achilles’ willful neglect of his fame’.99 In Love’s Labour’s Lost, she supports Richard David’s restoration of the Q reading at 5.2.661, ‘The party is gone’, explaining that ‘gone’ means both ‘dead’ and ‘gone with child’. This is important, she argues, because ‘the pageant of the Worthies, very appropriately, is brought to a riotous end by an equivocation’.100 In Othello 3.3.158 (F: ‘What doest thou mean?’ Q: ‘Zouns’) she explains: ‘The F reading is dramatically right. Restraint is the dominant trait in Othello’s character. Had it not been, the play would not have been a tragedy’.101 It is not Walker’s competence as a literary critic to which I wish to draw attention (although the competence is certainly there. Contrast poor Greg’s unhappy literary sense.102). Rather, it is the fact that her explanations contain almost as much literary as textual criticism. The two are healthily intertwined.103 VIII Alice as Theatre Critic Walker’s literary sense is linked to her dramatic sense. Her edition of Troilus and Cressida contains an unprecedented footnote reference to stage history. The Cambridge editions had always devoted space to stage history, but it was corralled into a special section in the introduction, independent of the text; furthermore it was written by someone other than the editor, initially Harold Child and then C.B. Young. We had to wait for the revised New Mermaids series of the 1990s before production history was referred to prominently in footnotes, and, in an innovative Cambridge series of the late 1990s, Shakespeare in Production, the annotation is devoted exclusively to staging. Alice Walker anticipates this practice by forty years. Emending the Q/F SD ‘Exit’ to ‘Exeunt’ at Troilus and Cressida I. 2.296, Walker comments: Cressida’s attendant appears to have been a mute onlooker for the latter part of the scene and editors perforce supply ‘Exeunt’ here. His presence is last acknowledged in Cressida’s offhand ‘So he says here’ in l.53. Mr George Rylands tells me that, in Marlowe Society productions, Pandarus waves Alexander off at this point.104

The New Bibliographers generally had a poor sense of theatre, partly because they were often anti-theatrical.105 Thus, in his British Academy lecture, M.R. Ridley argued that readers of Shakespeare have advantages over viewers: they don’t have to keep up with the spoken word, and they don’t suffer ‘the imaginative loss inevitable through the mediation of the actor’.106 Reviewing

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Ridley’s lecture, Walker diplomatically observes, ‘This is a defensible point of view, provided it is remembered that the plays were never intended for scrutiny in the study’.107 In all her writings she is attentive to stage movement. The gloss she provides at Othello 2.1.218 (‘Lay thy finger thus’) notes ‘A French critic … suggests that Iago here seizes Roderigo’s finger and shuts his mouth with it (the mouth gaping with astonishment)’.108 In 1957 (aged 57) she reveals that she has never seen Measure for Measure acted.109 I do not know if this omission had been remedied by 1982 when she envisaged the stage picture in Measure for Measure 4.5: ‘What did the Duke thank him [Varrius] for? It was probably because he showed the proper respect due to the Duke on his return by kneeling and “Come, we will walk” was the signal for him to rise and accompany the Duke “off”’.110 Neither Greg nor McKerrow would have written such a note; although both attended the theatre, neither felt compelled to incorporate the theatrical in their work. Walker shows a good awareness of practical theatre from the point of view of scriptwriter as well as audience member/director. A review of Greg’s Malone Society Reprint of A Looking Glass for London and England turns into a fascinating mini-article on speech headings: The confusion in Sc. III can, I think, be cleared up by assuming that there were only three speaking parts in this scene: the Smith’s man (described as Smith) and two associates, the first (Ruffian) peaceful and pro-Smith, the second (Clowne) quarrelsome and anti-Smith. Then in Sc. VII when these same three characters reappear the master of the Smith of Sc. III appears as Smith and a revision of the names of the three characters of the earlier scene became necessary; the Smith’s man, before described as Smith, is now described as Clowne, and the Ruffian and Clowne of Sc. III appear as Ruffian 1 and Ruffian 2.111

This combination of bibliographical logic and sensitivity to theatrical composition results in exactly the argument that David Bradley used to such brilliant effect in 1992 when he explained problems in The Battle of Alcazar.112 Walker writes here as a bibliographer but thinks as a theatre practitioner. Similarly, her linear diagram of the character entrances and plot structure of the commedia, The Ship – a diagram whose content she summarizes as a ‘tidily plaited braid with a fringe at the end’113 is but one degree removed from a full-blown cast analysis of the kind used by theatre historians such as Scott McMillin. IX

Alice’s Children

Alice Walker received a major textual inheritance and left significant textual legacies. She inherited from McKerrow the most tangible expression of the

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New Bibliography – OUP’s ‘new “textual” Shakespeare’.114 Although she was more than capable of seeing McKerrow’s two volumes through the press,115 and of editing the remaining volumes on her own, she asked the press to form an editorial advisory board to which she could turn for counsel. (Kenneth Sisam to W.W. Greg: ‘She assures me she would not be a nuisance, and would not expect advisors to work hard, but rather to give her the benefit of their experience and judgment …. I really think Miss Walker means what she says’.116) The board was composed of W.W. Greg, E.K. Chambers, and David Nichol Smith. In accordance with McKerrow’s views, Walker requested that Peter Alexander not be included: ‘she said he [McKerrow] distrusted him on the bibliographical side, i.e., didn’t think he gave enough weight to clear bibliographical evidence’. She made an additional request of her own: the exclusion of John Dover Wilson.117 Walker was later to edit with, and for, Dover Wilson in the 1950s, and although Wilson praises her in the highest terms in his preface to Othello (which functions, unusually, as advance advertising for Walker’s Troilus and Cressida) the section in his autobiography on editing calls attention to Walker by omission. He lists the three editors who assisted him in the New Cambridge series: G.I. Duthie, J.C. Maxwell, and Alice Walker. He pays tribute to the first two, complimenting them on their achievements, after which the chapter ends, having conspicuously failed to satisfy the narrative expectation that would give Walker a line or more to herself.118 In a personal memo recording the conversation he had with Walker about continuing the Oxford Shakespeare after McKerrow’s death, Kenneth Sisam does not record Walker’s reason(s) for excluding Dover Wilson, if indeed she offered any. But her textual differences with Wilson can be glimpsed in her earlier correspondence with McKerrow. In the late 1930s Walker developed the habit of marking up each of McKerrow’s introductions, texts, collation notes, and annotation, and of providing a detailed summary of her marginal responses in lengthy typescript. Her response to McKerrow’s editing of The Taming of the Shrew comments on his collation notes for the concluding exeunt. She has been ‘a bit bothered’ by Dover Wilson’s stage directions (such as ‘they go’ instead of ‘Exeunt’): There is a lot to be said for ignoring this kind of eccentricity. Perhaps you could make a general statement somewhere that as the reader can safely assume that all S.D.s will be worded by D.W more suo you haven’t noted them. You could quote as an example his final exeunt in this play ‘they all go off to bed’! I am afraid these S.D.s for the nursery infuriate me!

Here we see Walker self-consciously altering the direction of twentieth-century Shakespeare editing in a move which resists Wilson’s influence and anticipates her subsequent request to Sisam. If Walker’s double stance against Wilson counts as her first major stance on the Oxford Shakespeare, at the start of her work on the project, her next major

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gesture comes at the end, when, Prospero-like, she destroys her books. She leaves to Gladys Orchard all her chattels plus £2,000 ‘on condition that she undertakes to my Trustees that she will destroy all my notes manuscripts and notebooks’.119 This condition dramatically put paid to a project whose origins go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and ranks as one of Walker’s clearest textual statements. Walker died in 1982; so, in a sense, did the New Bibliography. Despite the destruction of the McKerrow-Walker Shakespeare, Walker’s story continues with textual survival. At Oxford in the 1960s Walker supervised seven graduate students. Four of the names are prominent in Renaissance scholarship, and two of the names stand out: for 30 years, Trevor HowardHill and MacDonald P. Jackson have been major textual critics.120 However, as section VI above, on Walker’s style, makes clear, Walker’s most obvious textual successor is someone she never taught. Gary Taylor took the prose of textual studies in a direction first taken by Walker, his immediate predecessor as Oxford editor. It may seem odd to give Walker’s style equal weight with textual substance as a legacy; but it is, I believe, the change in textual rhetoric since the 1980s that accounts for the widespread interest in textual studies today. Taylor is the direct descendent of Walker’s rhetorical play, and, through him, all students who cut their textual teeth in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus, any textual critic under the age of 45 owes more to Alice Walker than s/he realises, for the language in which we write is marked with her signature. Walker retired to Cornwall and died in hospital in Devon. She never married; her will names no surviving family. Her executors are lawyers and the witnesses to her final will hospital staff; in this will Walker’s personal prose style is obviously subservient to testamentary phrasing. Despite the thanatoptic context, a distinctive Walker personality and rich sense of personal life emerges. She leaves modest sums to friends in Cornwall and Devon and to the Vicar and Churchwardens of St Olaf’s Church in Bude; she leaves her royalties to Cambridge University Press; to Gladys Orchard she leaves all her goods (excluding the fish in her garden ponds) plus £2,000 on the condition noted above; her estate goes to the National Trust for the upkeep of its gardens in memory of her parents and of Miss Janet Ruth Bacon. (Bacon, former principal of Royal Holloway College, was the friend with whom Walker shared houses in Devon, Cornwall, and Oxford from 1944–65.)121 The goldfish are provided for specially: ‘I desire that the said Trust [the National Trust] shall transfer to one of its properties (preferably Cotehele or Lanhdrock) all the fish from my garden ponds as speedily as possible’. As for Walker’s own remains, she has no preference for cremation over burial but cooperatively offers instructions for both alternatives: ‘If my mortal remains are cremated then my Trustees shall arrange for my ashes to be scattered without ceremony upon the sea at Bude. And if my mortal remains shall be buried then I desire that the burial shall take place in the churchyard of St Olaf’s Church Poughill aforesaid’.

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The will shows a precise but flexible personality; someone with a love of gardens and country houses; someone generous to friends living and dead; someone who cares less about the disposal of her own remains than she does about those of the Oxford Shakespeare. Although there are no living relatives, the will is populous with community: neighbours, the local vicar and churchwardens, her publisher, friends (and fish). The same variety populates her textual criticism and it is this that distinguishes her from her bibliographical forebears. Walker’s hallmark is textual heterogeneity – compositor study, stage history, literary criticism, humour, verve, and idiom. One hopes that her textual line will stretch out to doomsday. Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6

Paul Werstine notes this in ‘Narratives about Printed Shakespeare Texts: “Foul Papers” and “Bad” Quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 65–86. Joseph Loewenstein’s etiological study locates the origins of the New Bibliographers’ concern with origins in the work of Sidney Lee. ‘Authentic Reproductions: The Material Origins of the New Bibliography’, Textual Formations and Reformations, eds Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), pp. 23–44. Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (Boston: Godine, 1992), pp. 56, 58–9. G.B. Harrison, ‘Ronald Brunlees McKerrow’, Review of English Studies 16 (1940): 257–61; 261; W.W. Greg, ‘Ronald Brunlees McKerrow, 1872–1940’, Proceedings of the British Academy 26 (1940): 489–515; and Harold Jenkins (personal communication). Greg seems to have designated Bowers as his successor: in two manuscript letters in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, he recommends this young American as a promising scholar. On Tanselle’s inheritance of the mantle, see W. Speed Hill, ‘The Ironies of Paternity: The Life and Works of Fredson Bowers by G. Thomas Tanselle’, Documentary Editing 16 (June 1994): 29–33. The OUP archives contain several volumes of Walker’s notes on McKerrow’s work, from the 1930s and early 1940s, but nothing for the later period of Walker’s editorship. That the material no longer exists is clear from Walker’s will which instructs one of her legatees to ‘destroy all my notes manuscripts and notebooks’. The reason for this dramatic request will become apparent in section II of my essay. For his review see Peter Alexander ‘Review of Alice Walker, Textual Problems’, and of Walker and John Dover Wilson, eds, Othello’, Review of English Studies n.s. 9 (1958): 189–93. For OUP opinions see OUP archives CP/ED/000018 in which the correspondence prior to Walker’s appointment is littered with comments such as the following: ‘He [McKerrow] told us a considerable time back … that she was accurate beyond his own standards’ (Kenneth Sisam to W.W. Greg 22 February 1940); ‘Miss Walker is the most (did he say, the only?) accurate woman McKerrow has encountered’ (R.W. Chapman to Kenneth Sisam 28 March 1939);

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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‘she … can prepare copy to something near perfection’, a ‘formidably exact lady’ (R.W. Chapman to ‘BP’, 28 March 1939). McKerrow comments on Walker’s habit of pointing out his own inconsistencies: ‘very irritating but entirely salutary’ (McKerrow to Sisam, 2 May 1936). This article originates in Walker’s Ph.D. thesis at London University, Studies in the Work of Thomas Lodge, submitted in 1926. I presume that it was McKerrow who encouraged Walker to review regularly for RES (of which he was editor), and to publish her first book with Sidgwick and Jackson. McKerrow was known for giving ‘preference to the work of the young and the unknown scholar’ (Harrison, [1940], p. 260); at the same period he facilitated Harold Jenkins’s Henry Chettle (1934), which looked set to founder until McKerrow came up with a financial subsidy. By 1936 Walker was assisting McKerrow with the Oxford Old Spelling Shakespeare. On 2 May 1936 McKerrow wrote to Kenneth Sisam, ‘I seem to have found the ideal person to help me with the job, namely Miss Alice Walker … she has an eagle eye for every kind of inconsistency and sloppiness’ (OUP archives CP/ED/000018). I am grateful to Trevor Howard-Hill for sending me his DLB entry for Alice Walker and for corresponding with me about his material. Walker, (1960a), pp. 144, 131. Walker, (1955a), p. 5. Walker, (1956), p. 99. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Walker, (1955a), p. 15, n. 8. Walker, (1953a), p. 88. Walker, (1955a), p. 6. E.g., Walker, (1953a, 1955a, 1956). Walker, (1955a), p. 6. Walker, (1955c), p. 309. Walker, (1955a), p. 6. Walker, (1955a), pp. 10–11. Walker, (1953a), p. 163. Donald F. McKenzie, ‘Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practice’, Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969), pp. 1–75; Peter W.M. Blayney, The Texts of ‘King Lear’ and their Origins, Vol 1: Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Mark Bland, ‘William Stansby and the Production of The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, 1615–1616’, The Library 20 (1998): 1–34. Walker, (1955a), p. 10. Walker, (1955a), p. 4. Walker, (1955a), pp. 4–5, n. 2. Walker, (1956), p. 110; (1955a), p. 4. In these, and other, articles Walker is insistently polemical on the difference between orthography and orthoepy. What is extraordinary about the recent – 1990s – old spelling Penguin series of Renaissance dramatists is not its demise but the fact that it was ever contemplated. Walker, (1955b), p. 81. Walker, (1958a), p. 71 and (1958b), p. 194. Walker, (1955b), pp. 81–2. Walker, (1955a), p. 4, n. 2. This crusade against miscible orthography was not confined to Arden editions. Walker also chastized Oxford lexicographers for their

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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51

52 53 54

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inconsistent policy in the OED. OED remarks that the spelling ‘blue’ was ‘hardly known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the normal spelling was “blew”’. But under ‘blue-bottle’ the OED gives a modernized Q spelling from 2 Henry IV (1955a, pp. 3–4). Walker, (1955d), p. 416. Walker, (1952c), p. 384. Walker, (1955a), p. 13. Stanley Wells’s Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling was a pointed counter to McKerrow’s Prolegomena. On these appointments, and the period in-between, see Trevor Howard-Hill, ‘Alice Walker’, DLB entry. Walker, (1955d), p. 415. Although editing has been much theorized of late, there has been very little attempt to theorize annotation. A.C. Hamilton (1975) provides the first essay, in relation to Spenser, in an argument about language (which has much in common with Walker’s views). See A.C. Hamilton, ‘On Annotating Spenser’s Faerie Queene: A New Approach to the Poem’, Contemporary Thought on Edmund Spenser, eds Richard C. Frushell and Bernard J. Vondesmith (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), pp. 41–60. I deal with annotation’s promulgation of misogynist ideology in Maguire and Thomas L. Berger, Textual, pp. 67–91. Walker, (1957a), pp. 95–6. Walker, (1957a), p. 97. Furthermore, editors ‘often introduce fresh difficulties for the uninstructed – old spelling and unfamiliar words which require at times more explanation than the text itself’ (p. 98). Walker, (1957a), p. 98. Walker, (1957a), pp. 104–5. Walker, (1957a), p. 101. Walker, (1957a), p. 100, n. 6. Walker, (1957a), p. 102, n. 11. Walker, (1958c), p. 84 and (1964), p. 355. Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950–51): 19–36. Walker, (1951), p. 334. F. W. Bateson seconds Walker’s objection in his essay, ‘The Application of Thought to an Eighteenth-Century Text: The School for Scandal’, Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 321–35. Walker, (1953a), pp. 162, 89, 162. Sir Edmund Maunde Thompson, ‘The Handwriting of the Three Pages Attributed to Shakespeare Compared with his Signatures’, Shakespeare’s Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, ed. A.W. Pollard and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), pp. 57–112. Walker, (1953a), p. 76. Walker, (1958a), p. 173. See Walker, (1953a), pp. 41 and 159 for but two of countless examples. Walker’s notes to McKerrow on his introductions for the Oxford Shakespeare express exasperation when he indulges in narrative. For example, on McKerrow’s introduction to The Comedy of Errors she writes the marginal note, ‘Can this be shortened? I find plot summaries tedious’ (OUP archives, Comedy of Errors file). Kenneth Sisam referred to her ‘acrid reviews’ and R.W. Chapman thought of her as the ‘formidably exact lady who fell foul of poor K. M. Lea’ (OUP archives CP/ ED/000018, KS to EKC 7 February 1940 and RWC/BP, n.d.).

348 56 57 58 59

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63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

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Walker, (1955b), p. 81. Walker, (1955a), p. 7. Walker, (1955a), p. 14, n. 8. Emphasis added. While acknowledging that some emendations can be made effortlessly and automatically, such as the correction of misprints in our daily paper, Tom Davis reacts with textual humility (or scepticism?) to Housman’s boast of instant recognition of error and simultaneous emendation in his essay, ‘The Monsters and the Textual Critics’, Textual Formation, pp. 95–111; pp. 104–5. Both N. Burton Paradise and Frances Yates are rebuked for ‘bibliographically useless’ information; see Walker (1933b), p. 97 and (1935b), p. 350. Even Greg does not escape: he has recorded as errors ‘legitimate linguistic forms in their day’ (Walker [1934b], p. 225). In Walker’s lengthy career as a reviewer only C.J. Sisson (Walker [1937]), D.L. Patrick (Walker [1938]), and D.J. McGinn (Walker [1939a]) receive lavish praise, and Harold Jenkins alone is singled out for scrupulous accuracy and interpretive brilliance (Walker [1953b] and [1957b]), p. 64. On Walker’s abilities, see Alexander, who in his ‘Review of Alice Walker’ praises her ‘patience’, ‘stamina’, and ‘determination’ (p. 188). Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar and Orlando Furioso (Malone Society, Oxford: Frederick Hall, 1923), p. 357. Walker, coincidentally, uses Greg’s ‘abortion’ image, but by extending the image and annexing it to a quotation, she turns cliché into metaphoric purpose: of Troilus and Cressida she writes: ‘critics have found the play less a birth of Shakespeare’s invention than an abortion’ (Shakespeare, Troilus [1957], p. x.). Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 7, 69. Walker, (1939a), p. 352. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie, eds Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. xlvii. Puttenham, Art, p. xlvii. Walker, (1953a), p. 48. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). Walker, (1955b) p. 80. Walker, (1953a), p. 99. Shakespeare, Troilus (1957), p. xxiii. Puttenham, Art, pp. lxxii and xciii. Walker, (1953a), p. 128. Walker, (1933c), p. 473. Walker, (1935a), p. 83. Walker, (1939b), p. 476. Walker, (1935b), pp. 350, 351. Walker, (1958d) p. 318 and (1960b) p. 79. Walker, (1953a), p. 163. Puttenham, Art, p. lxx. Howard-Hill, DLB entry, typescript p. 19. Walker, (1952b), p. 24. Walker, (1953a), p. xl. Puttenham, Art, p. l. Walker, (1932), p. 265.

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86 Walker edited Othello with John Dover Wilson; she provided the text and annotation, leaving Wilson responsible for the introduction. (See the Prefatory note in Shakespeare, Othello, eds Alice Walker and John Dover Wilson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957], p. vii.) 87 See, for example, Walker, (1933d), pp. 472, 473. 88 Walker, (1953a), pp. 26, 3–4, 85, my italics. 89 Walker, (1958d), p. 318 and (1960b), p. 79. 90 Walker, (1953a), p. 162. 91 Walker, (1962), p. 99. Cf. Taylor, ‘The Rhetoric of Textual Criticism’, TEXT 4 (1988), pp. 39–56; pp. 47–8. 92 Shakespeare, Troilus, pp. xvi–xvii. 93 Shakespeare, Troilus, p. xxvii. 94 Shakespeare, Troilus, p. xv. 95 Shakespeare, Troilus, p. xvi. 96 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Muir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 97 Shakespeare, Troilus, pp. x–xi. 98 Shakespeare, Troilus, p. 142. 99 Shakespeare, Troilus, p. 190, note to 3.3.137. 100 Walker, (1952c), p. 382. 101 Walker, (1953a), p. 139. 102 See Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 48–50. 103 For the most recent demonstration of the inter-relatedness of the two, see Thomas L. Berger, ‘The (Play)Text’s the Thing: Teaching the Blinding of Gloucester in King Lear’, Teaching Shakespeare through Performance, ed. Milla Cozart Riggio (New York: MLA, 1999), pp. 196–219. 104 Shakespeare, Troilus, p. 149. 105 Walker is never anti-theatrical although she sometimes shows a misunderstanding of practical theatre. In ‘Miscellaneous Notes on King Lear’, she writes, ‘If this is a “report”, it is very odd that Cornwall and Edmund should have their parts so “pat” in this insignificant scene and that the actors in the opening scene should have been so imperfect in their lines’ (Walker [1952a], p. 376). However, to actors no scene is ‘insignificant’. The same thinking colours her comment in a parenthesis in Textual Problems: ‘Edmund had a better grip on his part in 3.5 (an unimportant scene with Cornwall) than in his reply to Edgar’ (Walker [1953a], p. 46). 106 Quoted from Walker, (1941), p. 250. 107 Walker, (1941), p. 250. 108 Shakespeare, Othello, p. 168. 109 Walker, (1957b), p. 64. 110 Walker, (1983), p. 9. 111 Walker, (1934b), p. 224. 112 From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 113 Walker, (1935a), p. 85. 114 Kenneth Sisam to E.K. Chambers, 21 March 1935 (OUP archives CP/ ED/000018). 115 Using her correspondence with McKerrow from the 1930s, Walker was responsible for revising McKerrow’s introductions and texts.

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116 22 February 1940 (OUP archives CP/ED/000018). 117 Kenneth Sisam, undated memo to self, presumably 7 February 1940, the day Walker visited him to discuss the items his memo records (OUP archives CP/ ED/000018). 118 John Dover Wilson, Milestones on the Dover Road (London: Faber, 1969), p. 187. 119 Walker, (1982b), clause 5. 120 The students and their thesis titles are as follows: Trevor Howard-Hill, ‘Ralph Crane and Five Shakespearian First Folio Comedies’; MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Material for an Edition of Arden of Faversham’; J.G. Saunders, ‘Hamlet: A Survey of its Textual History and of Present-Day Problems, Illustrated Mainly from Act I’; H.E. Speck, The Life and Works of Thomas Milles’; Alistair Tilson, ‘The Text of Bacon’s Essays’; Juliet Udezue, ‘An Edition of The Phyale Lachrymarum of William Lathum (1634)’; G.J.B. Watson, ‘A Critical Edition of Thomas Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One’. 121 Howard-Hill, DLB entry.

CHAPTER 15

Mothers and Authors: Johnson v. Calvert and the New Children of Our Imagination Mark Rose What is a mother? Who is the mother of a child when one woman provides the ovum for fertilization and another carries the baby to term? This was the issue before the California Supreme Court in 1993 in the surrogate mother case of Johnson v. Calvert.1 Faced with these conflicting biological claims, the court shifted its enquiry from the physical to the mental realm. Who had first intended to bring the child into the world? Who was the ‘originator of the concept’ of the child? But in formulating the issue in this manner, the court was, as one justice pointed out, implicitly invoking the paradigm of intellectual property law – the owner of a creative work is the originator or author of it – and this amounted, the dissenting justice argued, to the treatment of a child as property. Johnson v. Calvert is an extraordinarily resonant case. It echoes King Solomon’s famous judgment when confronted with two women who each claimed to be the mother of a child, and it also echoes Athena’s judgment in The Eumenides when she rules that Orestes is not related to his mother Clytemnestra. It raises questions about our understanding of the relationship between nature and technology, and it challenges conventional assumptions about gender and reproduction – how exactly is a woman’s role in reproduction different from a man’s? – and about the nature of kinship. Moreover, like the famous Baby M case in New Jersey a few years earlier,2 it raises questions about whether recent developments in reproductive technology are leading to a new form of the commodification of human beings. As one jurist remarked, the case interrogates ‘our collective understanding of what it means to be human’.3 What principally interests me in this essay, however, is the significance of the court’s resort to the model of intellectual property law to resolve the conflicting claims and the implicit equation of mothers and authors. As I have discussed elsewhere, the modern representation of the author as the originator and proprietor of a special commodity, the work, was formed in England in the course of the eighteenth century in part through the blending of a Lockean discourse of property with the eighteenth-century discourse of original genius.4 What emerged by the early nineteenth century was the figure of the romantic author, the notion of the author as a creative man who by

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virtue of imposing the imprint of his unique personality on his original works makes them his own. This notion provides the paradigm and reference point for intellectual property law. Historically, copyright has been an expansive, imperial doctrine, forever conquering new territory in the name of the author. Very early in its history protection was extended from printed texts to engravings and to printed music. In the nineteenth century, in a decisive moment, protection was extended to photography. By today, the flag of authorship has been raised over pictorial and graphic works of most kinds, including architectural plans and buildings, commercial advertisements, labels, and fabric designs; over sculptural works, including dolls, toys and jewelry; and over all sorts of dramatic works, including pantomimes and choreographed dances. Sound recordings are protected, as are musical works; game and contest rules are copyrightable; and so are computer programs, which have been called ‘silicon epics’ and which are regarded by the law as no less works of authorship than poems or novels. Characters such as Superman or Donald Duck are protected, too, even apart from the contexts in which they appear; and in some jurisdictions the public image or persona of an individual such as Groucho Marx or Vanna White is also a property that is protectable and that can be willed to one’s heirs.5 Likewise, under patent law it is possible to establish property rights in biological materials such as cell lines – in a famous recent case the Regents of the University of California established ownership in a cell line derived from a medical patient’s spleen without his consent6 – or even in genetically engineered plants and animals such as Du Pont’s transgenic OncoMouse, a laboratory mouse designed to develop cancer.7 There are, then, precedents for the extension of intellectual property rights to aspects of personhood and even to living materials; nonetheless, the California court’s extension of the intellectual property paradigm to the determination of motherhood in Johnson v. Calvert represents a remarkable moment in the history of authorship. The facts in the case were as follows. Mark and Crispina Calvert – a white man and a Filipina woman – were a married couple who wanted to have a baby. Although Crispina had had a hysterectomy, nevertheless, her ovaries remained capable of producing eggs, and the couple was considering employing a surrogate when they were approached by Anna Johnson, an African-American woman, who offered to bear their child. The Calverts and Johnson signed a standardized surrogacy contract which provided that a zygote created from Mark’s sperm and Crispina’s egg would be implanted in Anna who would bear the baby to term for the Calverts. In return the Calverts would provide Anna with a life insurance policy and with $10,000 for her services, the final portion of the fee to be paid after the birth. The contract was signed on 15 January 1990, and the next day Crispina’s eggs were surgically removed and combined with Mark’s sperm in a petri dish. Three days later the implantation in Anna’s womb took place. Unfortunately, in the course of the pregnancy relations between

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Mark and Crispina and Anna deteriorated. The Calverts learned that Anna had had a history of stillbirths and miscarriages, and Anna, for her part, felt that the Calverts were not emotionally supportive of her and had not fully complied with the contract on the matter of the life insurance policy. In the seventh month, finding herself in financial difficulties, Anna sent the Calverts a letter demanding immediate payment of the $5,000 due her after the birth; otherwise, she threatened, she would not give up the baby. The Calverts responded with a lawsuit seeking a declaration that they were the legal parents of the unborn child; Anna countered with her own suit asking that she be declared the child’s mother. The child, a baby boy, was born on 19 September 1990, and shortly thereafter the case came to trial in Orange County Superior Court. The facts in Johnson v. Calvert were thus significantly different from those in the Baby M case decided by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1988. In that case, too, there was a contract between a childless couple, William and Elizabeth Stern, and a surrogate, Mary Beth Whitehead, in which a $10,000 payment was provided for the surrogate to carry a baby to term and deliver it to the couple. In the Baby M case, however, Mary Beth Whitehead was both the child’s genetic and gestational mother, and therefore the New Jersey court was not faced with a decision about which woman was the ‘natural’ mother. Rather, at the heart of the Baby M case was the question of the enforceability of the contract. The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that, because money was involved, the contract amounted to child selling and was illegal. The status of the contract figured in Johnson v. Calvert as well, but the principal issue in this case was framed as the question of gestation versus genetics. Johnson’s lawyers argued the uniqueness of childbearing and the fact that from time immemorial the woman who bears a child has been regarded as the mother of that child. The Calverts’ lawyers argued that genetics should determine the issue. For Judge Richard N. Parslow, Jr, the trial judge, the claims of genetics greatly outweighed those of gestation: Who we are and what we are and identity problems particularly with young children and teenagers are extremely important. We know that there is a combination of genetic factors. We know more and more about traits now, how you walk, talk and everything else, all sorts of things that develop out of your genes, how long you’re going to live, all things being equal, when your immune system is going to break down, what diseases you may be susceptible to. They have upped the intelligence ratio of genetics to 70 per cent now.8

Judge Parslow called Anna Johnson a ‘genetic hereditary stranger’ to the child, saying that her relationship to the boy, if indeed she had any, was analogous to that of a foster parent.9 The appeals court took a slightly different tack – to reach its decision it invoked a complex reading of the California Uniform Parentage Act of 1975, a statute designed to end the distinction between

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legitimate and illegitimate children – but finally it affirmed the trial court’s decision and reinforced its emphasis on genetics: As evidence at trial showed, the whole process of human development is ‘set in motion by the genes’. There is not a single organic system of the human body not influenced by an individual’s underlying genetic makeup. Genes determine the way physiological components of the human body, such as the heart, liver, or blood vessels operate. Also, according to the expert testimony received at trial, it is now thought that genes influence tastes, preferences, personality styles, manners of speech and mannerisms.10

The California Supreme Court, however, read the Parentage Act differently, concluding that the Act equally supported the biological claims of both the genetic and gestational mothers. Under these circumstances, the court ruled, motherhood was ultimately a matter of intention. Even though Crispina Calvert had not borne the child, nevertheless, as the surrogacy contract demonstrated, it was Crispina who had ‘intended to bring about the birth of a child that she intended to raise as her own’11 and therefore she was the natural mother. The court thus affirmed the previous rulings in favor of the Calverts. The supreme court’s decision was not unanimous. Justice Armand Arabian concurred in the majority’s finding that Crispina Calvert was the natural mother, but he disapproved of the majority’s taking a position on the issue of the surrogacy contract. As a matter of law, he suggested, it was unnecessary for the court to express any opinion about the contract; and, as a matter of policy, it was unwise to venture without legislative guidance into so ‘vast and profound’ an issue.12 The objections of Justice Joyce Kennard, the only woman on the court at the time, went further. In a long and closely reasoned dissent, Justice Kennard noted that the ‘originators of the concept’ rationale on which the majority relied was derived from intellectual property law and that the majority opinion was thus based on an analogy between childbearing and authorship. ‘Just as a song or invention is protected as the property of the “originator of the concept”, so too a child should be regarded as belonging to the originator of the concept of the child.’ This was, in effect, the argument that the majority had made. But the analogy was inappropriate, Kennard argued, because children are not property: ‘Unlike songs or inventions, rights in children cannot be sold for consideration, or made freely available to the general public. Our most fundamental notions of personhood tell us it is inappropriate to treat children as property’. Therefore, Kennard said, the notion that the principles of contract law might be applied to determine the life of a child was inappropriate: ‘Just as children are not the intellectual property of their parents, neither are they the personal property of anyone, and their delivery cannot be ordered as a contract remedy on the same terms that a court would, for example, order a breaching party to deliver a truckload of nuts and bolts’. Furthermore, she charged the

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majority with failing to appreciate the dignity of childbearing: ‘A pregnant woman intending to bring a child into the world is more than a mere container or breeding animal; she is a conscious agent of creation no less than the genetic mother, and her humanity is implicated on a deep level. Her role should not be devalued’.13 Instead of relying on principles derived from intellectual property and contract law, she argued, the court should have looked to family law and grounded its decision on the principle of the best interests of the child. She would have remanded the present case to the trial court for a determination of parentage on that basis. But in general, Kennard said, a gestational surrogacy arrangement should only be permitted under the supervision of the courts. In this way, there would be assurances that no party was being exploited, that the surrogacy arrangement was a matter of medical necessity, and that all the parties met standards of fitness. In developing intentionality as the test for motherhood, the majority opinion, written by Justice Edward Panelli, cited for support a series of three recent commentaries dealing with the determination of parentage in the context of surrogacy arrangements. The earliest, and in some ways the most interesting, was a 1986 note, ‘Redefining Mother: A Legal Matrix for New Reproductive Technologies’, in which Andrea E. Stumpf, then a law student, first made the argument for regarding ‘mental concept’ as the crucial issue.14 ‘Prior to physical conception of a child’, Stumpf wrote, the beginnings of a normal parent-child relationship can come from mental conception, the desire to create a child. When the child’s existence begins in the minds of the desiring parents, biological conception of the child declines in importance relative to psychological conception with respect to the full life of the child. The mental concept of the child is a controlling factor of its creation, and the originators of that concept merit full credit as conceivers.15

Stumpf explicitly invoked the intellectual property paradigm in a note in which she remarked that the ‘thoughts of initiating parents which become embodied in the creation of a child parallel the mental element at the root of intellectual property protection’. And she went on to cite in support of the analogy between bodily and mental creation the old fable, sometimes considered a precedent for copyright, of the sixth century Irish King Diarmud who supposedly settled a controversy over whether the owner of a manuscript had the right to control its transcription by remarking, ‘To every cow her calf’. ‘It is ironic’, Stumpf noted, ‘that the notion of literary property should have been birthed by a notion of motherhood as construed by biology’.16 The pun on ‘birthed’ that Stumpf allows herself reinforces the point that she is making, as does the pun on ‘matrix’ in her title. A few years after Stumpf’s piece, Marjorie Maguire Shultz, writing in the wake of the Baby M decision, proposed intentionality as the appropriate

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basis for making decisions about legal parenthood in the context of advanced reproductive technology. She pointed out that one of the advantages of adopting the criterion of intention would be its gender neutrality, remarking that such a regime would encourage male nurturing of children no less than female.17 Likewise, John Lawrence Hill argued for intentionality rather than biology as the essential element in parenthood, giving the position an Aristotelian color by speaking of the intending parents as the ‘first cause’ or ‘prime movers’ of the procreative relationship.18 Neither Shultz nor Hill explicitly invoked intellectual property law, but Hill observed that in the context of considerations of sperm and ova as objects of property, the analogy of copyright might be employed. The publisher of copyrighted material may sell the right to use the material but the right to duplicate or alter it is not included. Analogously, the source of genetic material might be understood to retain an interest in preventing certain uses, for example, to develop an interspecies hybrid. But this copyright-like interest would not, Hill argued, necessarily give the genetic donor the right to be considered a parent, ‘just as a publisher has no right to reclaim a book purchased for a legitimate purpose by another’.19 The line of thought that the majority employed had thus been developing for some years in the law journals in response to the dispersal of biological roles that results from advances in reproductive technology and the consequent abstraction of the notion of biological conception. In what sense can one speak of a baby being ‘conceived’ in the sterile, technological environment of a petri dish? There is an understandable tendency in these circumstance to relocate begetting from the physical specificity of an individual female body to the freefloating and, as Shultz in particular emphasizes, potentially genderless sphere of intellectual conception. Furthermore, the widely disseminated popular discourse of molecular genetics, the notion of DNA as a ‘master molecule’ that incorporates the secrets of identity, likewise involves a process of abstraction in which the physical specificity of the organism is effaced. In this discourse the genome is first essentialized as equivalent to life itself and then metaphorized as a ‘code’. The process by which the code becomes flesh is treated as a form of ‘translation’ in which the DNA produces the ‘words’ of RNA and finally ‘expresses’ itself in a protein.20 Thus the discourse of genetics specifically invokes the metaphor of textuality – as many have noted, this discourse is the latest version of the ancient trope of the ‘book of nature’ – and consequently, too, it generates issues of intellectual property. Can a human genetic sequence be copyrighted? Can an artificially created gene be patented? These are the kinds of legal questions that the reconceptualization of life as ‘information’ involves. Let us note, too, that there is a long history of reciprocity between ideas of biological and ideas of intellectual generation, a history that is implicit even in the way the term ‘conception’ moves readily between physical and

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mental referents. Aristotle, whose ‘form and matter’ theory of generation was dominant for some 2,000 years, employed the analogy of the human arts in order to explain procreation. The male, he suggested, is like a carpenter whose intellect shapes the matter according to his idea of what it should be; the female merely provides the physical substance. No material part of the carpenter enters his work. Likewise, no material part of the male is incorporated in the embryo; nevertheless, the male provides the active principle that forms the child in the father’s image.21 The analogy between intellectual and physical generation implicit in Aristotle’s theory was elaborated in medieval and early modern thought in the theory that mental activity takes place not within the tissues of the brain – tissue of any kind was regarded as too material to be the site of mentation – but within the ventricles or cavities.22 In this way the brain was understood to be a kind of womb of thought, as it is, for instance, in the pedant Holofernes’ representation in Love’s Labor’s Lost when he brags about his fertile invention, explaining that his wonderful ideas ‘are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourish’d in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion’.23 This was certainly how the seventeenth-century experimentalist William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, understood the matter. From his dissections of female deer prepared for coition Harvey concluded that the uterus and the brain were indeed alike and that this was the secret of generation: conception in the womb occurred in a manner similar to conception in the brain.24 Harvey’s understanding of procreation was perhaps influenced by the common metaphor of a book as a child, a trope that, as Ernst Curtius reports, goes back to Plato.25 In the Symposium, Diotima explains that what men desire is immortality. Some seek to immortalize themselves by begetting children, others by begetting intellectual works. ‘Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than any ordinary human ones?’ Diotima asks. ‘Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory?’26 A number of Latin writers followed Plato in referring to writings as children, and there are scattered examples of the trope in the middle ages as well; nonetheless, it was not until the early modern period when the systematic individuation of authorship encouraged the notion that a book might incorporate a writer’s self that the trope became ubiquitous. Sir Philip Sidney, for example, opens his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella by representing himself as ‘great with child to speake’, in this manner playing with the incongruity of a male pregnancy.27 Likewise, in the preface to Don Quixote Cervantes explains that although his book is not ‘the handsomest, the liveliest, and the wisest’ child that might be, nevertheless as an author he ‘could not violate Nature’s ordinance whereby like engenders like’. Thus, he continues, ‘what could my sterile and uncouth genius beget but the tale of a

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dry, shriveled, whimsical offspring, full of odd fancies such as never entered another’s brain’.28 And the notion of authorship as a form of procreation continues to be invoked to the present day both in general discourse – though no longer, I suppose, with the sense that a mental conception might literally be analogous to an embryo in the womb – and in the context of discussions of intellectual property. James Joyce, for example, in a letter of 21 August 1912 to his wife Nora speaks of the still-unpublished Dubliners as this ‘child which I have carried for years and years in the womb of the imagination as you carried in your womb the children you love’.29 Similarly, Nathaniel Shaler, like many other apologists for intellectual property rights, defends copyright by employing the trope of procreation: ‘The man who brings out of the nothingness some child of his thought has rights therein which cannot belong to any other sort of property’.30 As even a cursory invocation of the representation of authorship as analogous to procreation suggests, authorship is a gendered category.31 Indeed, even today the principle that an author has a right to have his name attached to a work he has created is known as the ‘right of paternity’.32 Moreover, as a category, authorship incorporates not only the mind-body dichotomy characteristic of the Western cultural tradition but also the gendering of the mind-body opposition. Matter – the term is related to both mater and matrix – is female; intellect is male. And both the dichotomy and the hierarchical arrangement of the terms of the dichotomy, the inferiority of body to mind in the mainstream of Western thought, reflect the patriarchal structures that have been characteristic of Western societies since the classical period. Enlightened as we might suppose ourselves to be in these last years of the twentieth century, these associations and meanings still play through our language and thought. Thus even today there is, I believe, a slight sense of disjunction, a hint of the oxymoronic, about the yoking of ‘mothers and authors’ in a single phrase. In her dissent, Justice Kennard vigorously protests the majority’s devaluation of the physical contribution that the woman who bears a child to term makes to the process of reproduction. ‘The majority’s approach entirely devalues the substantial claims of motherhood by a gestational mother such as Anna’, she writes, using a phrase in which ‘substantial’ can perhaps be read in several senses at once. She goes on to note that in a previous decision the California Supreme Court acknowledged that ‘a pregnant woman and her unborn child comprise a “unique physical unit” and that the welfare of each is “intertwined and inseparable”. Indeed, a fetus would never develop into a living child absent its nurturing by the pregnant woman’.33 It seems to me that Justice Kennard can be understood to be protesting against the long history of abstraction in the contemplation of reproduction, one that reemerges in her colleagues’ ‘originator of the concept’ rationale. To be pregnant is not simply to have an idea. Authorship may be represented as a form of childbearing but childbearing

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is not equivalent to authorship. Perhaps, too, her reassertion of the ‘substantial claims’ of the physical and the organic – and what I take to be her distaste for the ‘gender neutral’ principles proposed by Shultz – can be understood as an objection to the masculine appropriation of child bearing implicit in making intellectual conception the essential act in procreation. To refuse to acknowledge that the woman who gives birth to a child is related to the child is to repudiate the testimony of the eyes and the materiality of the body. It is, in effect, to repudiate nature – as Aeschylus’s Athena can be understood to repudiate nature, and her own female gender to boot, when she accepts Apollo’s argument that Clytemnestra was not Orestes’ kin. The woman, Apollo says, merely nurses the man’s seed, preserving it as a ‘stranger’ – had Apollo testified in Johnson v. Calvert he surely would have said ‘genetic hereditary stranger’ – in her womb.34 This notion of procreation as essentially parthenogenic is of course nothing more than the orthodox doctrine of a patrilineal society; nonetheless, baldly stated as in Apollo’s argument, the position is scandalous. This point is comically made in the episode in Tristram Shandy in which the pedantic Doctor Kysarcius, like Apollo, undertakes to prove that Mrs. Shandy is no relation to her son. Kysarcius cites ‘The Duke of Suffolk’s Case’, a ruling in which, as Kysarcius puts it, ‘not only the temporal lawyers – but the church-lawyers – the juris-consulti – the juris-prudentes – the civilians – the advocates – the commissaries – the judges of the consistory and prerogative courts of Canterbury and York, with the master of the faculties, were all unanimously of opinion, That the mother was not of kin to her child’. To which Uncle Toby, implicitly citing another authority, responds, ‘And what said the duchess of Suffolk to it?’ Thus Sterne mocks the pedantry that would deny a patent fact of nature.35 Justice Kennard’s protest against the majority’s devaluation of the gestational mother’s contribution suggests her discomfort with this kind of repudiation of nature. It also may seem to align her with those feminists who, made uneasy by the abstractions of post-modern theory, call for the retrieval of the physical specificity of the female body.36 Let us note that Johnson’s lawyers made a similar claim for the woman’s distinctive bodily contribution to procreation. In their brief to the appeals court they argued that Judge Parslow had erred in comparing Johnson to a foster parent: Both men and women must contribute genetic material to create a child, but it is only the women who use their entire bodies to gestate and give birth to children …. It was Appellant who gave birth to Baby Boy Johnson and it was Appellant’s physical human relationship with the child that caused the child’s existence to come into being. While millions of human sperms and eggs can join together, human nature requires a human woman to gestate the child into its very existence and natural human reproduction proceeds only on the basis that a woman will give birth to a child …. The court fundamentally erred in its logic by comparing Appellant’s legal

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relationship to the child as one of a ‘foster parent’ or a ‘wet nurse’, as both analogies presuppose a child in existence. Nor can it be logically concluded that Appellant is merely a ‘carrier’ of a child, as Appellant initially is inseminated with human reproductive cells and then Appellant procreates the child into its very existence.37

This argument attempts to retrieve a sense of the natural by representing Johnson as a mother not essentially different from any other. But the rhetoric collapses under the weight of the facts. As the Calverts’ lawyers pointed out in response, Anna Johnson was never ‘inseminated’, rather, a zygote was implanted. Nor could she be said to have ‘procreated’ the child, for the zygote was formed in a petri dish.38 Indeed, the conspicuous awkwardness of Johnson’s lawyers’ phrasing – ‘and then Appellant procreates the child into its very existence’ – is an index of their attempt to naturalize a procreative process that was never in fact an instance of ‘natural human reproduction’. The Calverts’ alternative insistence on genetics, ratified by both the trial and the appeals courts, was also an attempt to naturalize the birth, in this case by appealing to the principle of biological continuity and the maxim that like engenders like. ‘As evidence at trial showed’, the appeals court remarked, ‘the whole process of human development is “set in motion by the genes”’.39 Interestingly, this popular discourse of genetics, the representation of the genes as the active force in procreation, can be understood as a successor to the ancient representation of procreation. According to Aristotle, the active but immaterial male principle was received and nurtured by the female who supplied the matter and brought the resulting child into the world. According to the current popular representation of procreation, the active principle is DNA, the bearer of the genetic ‘code’ and the master molecule that represents the ultimate ‘secret of life’. Figured as a code, DNA is a kind of text. But figured as an active force, DNA becomes a kind of author.40 Johnson’ lawyers rejected this kind of genetic essentialism. ‘There is a misconception that a baby is made from DNA’, they said, citing the words of an expert who testified at the trial. Perhaps a genetic relationship might be regarded as equivalent to parenthood in an ordinary birth, but the genetic argument failed to take into account the unusual circumstances of the present case. In the case of a ‘non genetic pregnancy it can no longer be said that the genetic link is so unique or weighty as in a traditional pregnancy’. Whether or not she is genetically related to the child, the birth mother ‘has a profound influence on the genes and every aspect of creation’. As a particular example, they cited testimony to the effect that ‘the size and shape of the human brain is predominantly determined by the gestational mother, more so than a genetic contributor’. The gestational mother had been represented as merely the passive carrier of a baby that was not hers, but this was not the case: ‘Baby Boy Johnson is not the same baby that would have emerged from any other birth mother’s womb’.41

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Justice Kennard also implicitly rejected genetic essentialism, but neither would she have awarded the baby to Johnson on the basis of gestation. Her preferred resolution involved no dubious naturalizations but instead was concrete and pragmatic. The majority responded that she was confusing custody with parentage: The dissent would decide parentage based on the best interests of the child. Such an approach raises the repugnant specter of governmental interference in matters implicating our most fundamental notions of privacy, and confuses concepts of parentage and custody. Logically the determination of parentage must precede, and should not be dictated by, eventual custody decisions.42

Under the ‘best interests’ standard, parentage would be determined by the courts; under the ‘originators of the concept’ standard, the private arrangements made by the contracting parents would prevail. But this, as Justice Kennard pointed out, was to treat a child as property. Another possible resolution had been proposed, one that also avoided both essentialism and abstraction. The ACLU had submitted an amicus curiae brief arguing that the court should find that the child had two mothers, a gestational mother and a genetic mother. But the court rejected this proposal. It acknowledged that advances in reproductive technology had made more than two parents biologically possible, and it further acknowledged that as a result of rising divorce rates multiple parent arrangements had become common. Nevertheless, the court dismissed the ACLU proposal more or less out of hand, saying ‘we see no compelling reason to recognize such a situation here’. The Calverts are the genetic and intending parents of their son and have provided him, by all accounts, with a stable, intact, and nurturing home. To recognize parental rights in a third party with whom the Calvert family has had little contact since shortly after the child’s birth would diminish Crispina’s role as mother.43

Let us note that in this statement the argument from genetics returns: the opinion reminds us that the Calverts are both the intending and the genetic parents. What the court is attempting to do is to preserve, as nearly as possible, the traditional nuclear family. It, too, in its own way, is seeking to naturalize the birth.44 As a number of commentators have observed, race was an unspoken but significant element in the case from the beginning.45 That Johnson was black and the baby was not perhaps added urgency to the genetic claims and the principle of like engenders like. Indeed, after the trial, Richard C. Gilbert, one of Johnson’s lawyers, remarked bitterly that Judge Parslow had ‘wanted to give the white couple the white baby’.46 Of course, Crispina Calvert, a Filipina, was not exactly white, but in the binary mode of American racial discourse she became white; and so did the child, though journalistic reports might note, implicitly making an argument for the Calverts, that the baby ‘has

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his genetic mother’s dark shiny hair and wide eyes’.47 Nor was Anna Johnson, who claimed American Indian descent, simply black. But the prospect of a finding that would allow a ‘black’ woman to be declared the natural mother of a ‘white’ baby was clearly unsettling. And yet, what aspect of this case was not unsettling? Sterne’s Uncle Toby might mock the pedantic doctor’s claim that Mrs Shandy was not kin to her son Tristram, but what would he say about a child born from a zygote created in vitro and then implanted in a surrogate? The various attempts to naturalize this birth collapse under their own weight because the facts themselves repudiate any simple or received idea of ‘nature’. Valerie Hartouni has recently observed that the challenge to the courts in Johnson v. Calvert ‘was to restabilize conventional understandings of motherhood and family and thereby to recontain the proliferation of meanings, identities, and relationships generated by the panoply of new reproductive practices and, in particular, by the practice of gestational surrogacy’.48 Who is related to whom and how in a world where a child may have more than two biological parents – or, for that matter, in the world of the near future in which artificially produced embryos may be gestated in artificial wombs? But the proliferation of meanings, identities, and relationships generated by new reproductive technologies represents only one of the many unsettling social changes that have occurred in the United States in recent years. The majority opinion in Johnson v. Calvert noted the proliferation of multiple parent arrangements attendant on the increasing divorce rate. One might point as well to changing medical and legal attitudes toward homosexuality – a significant number of states now allow same sex partners to adopt each other’s children – and, of course, to changes in the roles of women and ethnic and racial minorities in American society. As Thomas Laqueur has suggested, perhaps the great public interest that cases such as Baby M and Johnson v. Calvert have evoked, an interest quite incommensurate with the number of people who might be affected by the decisions, may be related to the way these cases function as ‘representative anecdotes’ that serve to focus broad social anxieties.49 Furthermore, let us note that the proliferation of social meanings merges with, and in some respects is indistinguishable from, the proliferation of cultural meanings that can be invoked by such coded terms as ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘deconstruction’, and that is evident in, among other phenomena, the many challenges to the received canons of art, music, literature, and history; the challenges to aestheticism and the notion that cultural productions are disinterested practices that are separable from political, ideological, and economic concerns; and the challenges to the romantic conception of the author as the unitary, creative source of meaning. As Michel Foucault points out in ‘What is an Author?’, the familiar representation of the author as a genial creative force, the source of proliferating

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meanings, disguises the fact that in practice the figure of the author has often functioned to limit and restrict meaning. We deny, for example, that such and such an author could have intended such and such a meaning, and therefore we rule that meaning out. ‘The author’, as Foucault puts it with characteristic drama, ‘allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning’.50 But if authorship has become a subject rather than an assumption of inquiry in academic circles, the author has remained the paradigmatic figure of intellectual property law. Thus, for example, the US Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed the principle of ‘originality’ as the ‘sine qua non of copyright’,51 and in a recent book Paul Goldstein, one of the leading contemporary scholars of copyright, remarks that ‘Copyright is, after all, about authorship, about sustaining the conditions for creativity that enable an artist to create out of thin air and intense, devouring labor an Appalachian Spring, a Sun Also Rises, a Citizen Kane’.52 Given the long history of exchange between ideas of physical and ideas of intellectual generation, and given the continuing vitality of the figure of the author in legal discourse, it does not seem arbitrary that the California Supreme Court should have employed the authorship paradigm in its attempt to reconstruct the image of the nuclear family from an unsettling proliferation of significations. ••• Does Johnson v. Calvert represent a lasting advance of the banner of authorship or is the California Supreme Court’s decision merely an aberrant ruling that will eventually find its way into the cabinet of legal curiosities? The US Supreme Court declined to review the case. In New York State, however, a somewhat similar matter of disputed motherhood came before a court of appeals the year after Johnson v. Calvert was decided in California. The New York case, McDonald v. McDonald,53 involved a divorce action in which a husband argued for custody of twin girls on the grounds that his wife was not their natural mother and that he was the only natural parent available. In this case the husband’s sperm had been mixed with the eggs of an anonymous female donor and the resulting zygotes implanted in the wife’s uterus and carried to term. To support his argument that his wife was not related to the children, the husband relied on Judge Parslow’s decision in the trial court phase of Johnson v. Calvert and his finding that genetics were more important than gestation in the formation of a child. The New York court observed, however, that Judge Parslow’s reasoning was not accepted by the state supreme court, which had found that either the genetic or the gestational mother could arguably be considered the child’s natural mother. The New York court further noted that

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the California Supreme Court had anticipated precisely the circumstances involved in McDonald v. McDonald when it hypothesized a true ‘egg donation’ situation – one in which a woman gestates a donated egg with the intent to raise the child as her own – and said that in such a case the birth mother would, as the woman whose intentions had brought the child into being, be the natural mother. The court took account of Justice Kennard’s dissent, but said that it found the majority’s reasoning to be persuasive and therefore held that Mrs. McDonald was the natural mother of the children. But, in a second case subsequent to Johnson v. Calvert, an Ohio court rejected the California court’s reasoning. In Belsito v. Clark54 the issue was technical not adversarial. The case arose because according to Ohio law the gestational mother, who in this case was the genetic mother’s sister, would be listed on the baby’s birth certificate as the mother and the child would be treated as illegitimate. The genetic parents went to law seeking a judgment that they and not the gestational mother were the child’s natural and legal parents. The Ohio court took note of both Johnson v. Calvert and McDonald v. McDonald but found fault with the intentionality test on a number of grounds including the fact that, in the Ohio court’s opinion, such a test might bring about unacceptable results. For example, the court hypothesized, what if two women decide to procreate and raise a child together with one providing the egg and the other gestating the embryo? Under the Johnson test both would be declared natural mothers. Thus meanings and relationships would continue to proliferate. The proper test for parenthood, the court said, should be genetic. Citing Blackstone, case law, and Black’s Law Dictionary, the Ohio court observed that kindred was a matter of ‘blood relations’ and that this in modern terminology meant ‘shared DNA or genetics’.55 When gestational surrogacy techniques are employed in the procreation of a child, the court said, ‘the natural parents of the child shall be identified by a determination as to which individuals have provided the genetic imprint for that child’.56 Thus the court ruled that the baby was legitimate. On the basis of these two subsequent cases it is impossible to predict how the law will develop, but it appears likely that if the Johnson test is not followed the courts will resort to genetics in gestational surrogacy cases. Genetics conveys both a reassuring aura of scientific certainty and a sense of continuity with traditional discourses of ‘blood’. Even in Johnson v. Calvert, after all, both the trial court and the appeals court based their rulings on genetics, and the Supreme Court, while adopting a different reasoning, nonetheless awarded the child to the genetic parents.57 But let us pay attention for a moment to the phrase ‘genetic imprint’ which the Ohio court repeatedly uses in its ruling. On the one hand, the phrase perhaps evokes fingerprinting, also a technique for establishing identity in legal context; on the other, it incorporates a printing metaphor. A child bears its parents’ genes as a book bears the imprint of its source. This may be understood as the publisher who stamps the title page

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with his mark, or alternatively as the figure who authorizes the publisher, the writer, who also stamps the title page with his mark and who possesses, as I mentioned earlier, a legal ‘right of paternity’. In any case, the imprint is the sign of identity, of personality, and therefore of possession. The phrase ‘genetic imprint’ returns us to the analogy between babies and books, parents and authors. Indeed, as we have already seen, the discourse of genetics incorporates the language of textuality and something like the idea of authorship. Perhaps in some ways, then, the genetic test can be understood as not altogether different from the intentionality test with its underlying paradigm of authorship. The point of commonality is the distinctly modern notion of the unique, autonomous individual. Though we may speak casually of ‘the human genome’, we are equally fond of asserting that each of us has ‘a unique genetic makeup’. Moreover, though we know that human procreation is never in fact reproduction, we nevertheless imagine that each of us has a ‘natural desire’ to pass on his genes to the next generation, a natural desire to achieve a kind of genetic immortality. I use the masculine ‘his’ advisedly here, for it is apparent that this pattern of thought, inflected as it might be by modern ideas of individuality and autonomy, nonetheless descends from ancient notions about the desire for immortality such as those expressed by Plato in the Symposium. And it is apparent, too, how difficult it is to extract ourselves from the gendered structure of the thought patterns we have inherited, the association of the active principle of creativity with the mind and the male, and the association of the passive principle of nurturing with the body and the female. What is striking to me is the poverty of our paradigms for explaining ourselves to ourselves. Authorship is one such paradigm. The notion of authorship is implicit in the way we explain a vast range of generative activities from the way game shows are created to the way babies are made. Perhaps this is to be expected. As Carol Delaney has shown, the way in which a culture thinks about procreation intersects with the way it imagines divine creation, and both are related to forms of social organization.58 The romantic notion of authorship – the idea that an author creates something, as Paul Goldstein puts it, ‘out of thin air’ – is of course a transformation of religious doctrine. And the notion that what the author creates is at once an expression of his unique personality, a kind of brain child, and an object of property is commensurate with the social ideology of democratic individualism and free market capitalism. The intensity of Justice Kennard’s uneasiness with anything that might smack of baby selling is related, I suspect, to the thinness of the partitions that separate children from property in our society, as of course in many others as well. When is an infant sold and when is it adopted? In principle baby selling is illegal. Nonetheless, in practice there is a thriving American market in babies for adoption, as Elisabeth M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, among others, point out in the famous and scandalous essay in which they propose to

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legalize baby selling in order to alleviate the shortage of ‘first quality’ children available for adoption. ‘The antipathy to an explicit market in babies’, Landes and Posner write, ‘may be part of a broader wish to disguise facts that might be acutely uncomfortable if widely known. Were baby prices quoted as the prices of soybean futures are quoted, a racial ranking of these prices would be evident, with white baby prices higher than nonwhite baby prices’.59 Like the Baby M case, then, Johnson v. Calvert points to the fragility of our belief that we do not treat people as commodities. But at the same time it points to the vigor of the authorship paradigm. Romantic notions of authorship do not really fit our best understandings of how cultural production works. Even copyright lawyers realize perfectly well that texts are not created out of thin air and that most cultural productions are in one sense or another collaborative. But although we may speak vaguely – and often more with wishful thinking than with real conviction – about the death of the author, we do not yet have a really compelling alternative model to propose. And now the invention of new reproductive technologies has destabilized our understanding of human procreation as well, opening up such unnatural prospects as that of a child with multiple mothers. Do we really wish to re-naturalize these unnatural births by imposing on them a fetishizing discourse of genetic essentialism? Isn’t the purpose of these technologies precisely to free people from the limitations of their merely natural capacities? What implications do fetishized essentialisms have for other reproductive issues such as abortion? The author paradigm at least recommends itself in this way, that it empowers the individual to negotiate his or her wishes with maximum personal freedom in relation to the state. But, on the other hand, do we really wish to endorse the production of children by free contract? What implications would this practice have for our sense of personhood and human dignity? Perhaps the best we can do is, as Justice Kennard suggests, to insist upon the supervision of the courts at every step in the process of a surrogacy arrangement. But can the courts really function well as the final authority in such matters? Moreover, doesn’t such a prospect indeed raise, as the majority in Johnson v. Calvert put it, a repugnant specter of governmental interference? Doesn’t it in effect constitute the courts as licensers and censors in relation to our most intimate expressions of ourselves? At the conclusion of ‘What is an Author?’ the only alternative to authorship that Foucault can muster is the vision of proliferating discourses developing in ‘the anonymity of a murmur’.60 But what is this utopia, really, beyond the negation of romantic authorship? Likewise, here too in the contemplation of these new children of our imaginations what is apparent is the difficulty that we have in thinking our way toward models that are adequate to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

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Notes 1

2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

19 Cal. Rptr. 2d 494 (Cal. 1993), cert. denied, 114 S. Ct 206 (1993); hereafter abbreviated Johnson. For generous assistance of various kinds while writing this essay, I am grateful to many friends and colleagues including Ann Bermingham, Robert Burt, Rowland Davis, Sarah Fenstermaker, Patricia Fumerton, Donna Haraway, Valerie Hartouni, Thomas Laqueur, Corynne McSherry, Robert Rotstein, Patricia Shepard, and Everett Zimmerman. In Re Baby M, 109 N.J. 396 (N.J. 1988), 537 A.2d 1227. Johnson, 506. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). See also Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). On the extension of copyright see Peter Jaszi, ‘Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of “Authorship”’, Duke Law Journal 1991 (1991): 455–502. Section 102 of the US Copyright Act of 1976 lists the current subject matter of copyright in general. See the discussion in Paul Goldstein, Copyright: Principles, Law and Practice, 3 vols (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1989), 1:57–226. Public images are protected under the right of publicity doctrine; see Goldstein, Copyright, 2:601–7. The term ‘silicon epics’ comes from Anthony L. Clapes, Patrick Lynch, and Mark R. Steinberg, ‘Silicon Epics and Binary Bards: Determining the Proper Scope of Copyright Protection for Computer Programs’, UCLA Law Review 34 (1987): 1493–594. Moore v. Regents of the Univ. of Cal., 793 P.2d 479 (Cal. 1990), cert. denied, 111 S. Ct. 1388 (1991). For OncoMouse see Donna J. Haraway, ‘Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture: It’s All in the Family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-century United States’, in Uncommon Ground, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), pp. 321–66. Quoted by Janet L. Dolgin, ‘Just a Gene: Judicial Assumptions About Parenthood’, UCLA Law Review 40 (1993): 685. Quoted by Dolgin, 684. Anna J. v. Marc C. et al., 286 Cal. Rptr. 369 (Cal. App. 4 Dist. 1991), 380; hereafter Anna J. Johnson, 500. Ibid., 506. Ibid., 514–16. Andrea E. Stumpf, ‘Redefining Mother: A Legal Matrix for New Reproductive Technologies’, The Yale Law Journal 96 (1986): 187–208. Ibid., 195–6. Ibid., 195 n. 33. Marjorie Maguire Shultz, ‘Reproductive Technology and Intent-based Parenthood: An Opportunity for Gender Neutrality’, Wisconsin Law Review 1990 (1990): 297– 398. John Lawrence Hill, ‘“What Does It Mean to Be a “Parent?” The Claims of Biology as the Basis for Parental Rights’, New York University Law Review 66 (1991): 353–420. Ibid., 393. See Richard Doyle, ‘Vital Language’, in Are Genes Us?, ed. Carl F. Cranor (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 52–68; Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Master

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23

24

25

26 27 28 29

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Molecules’, in Are Genes Us?, pp. 89–98; and Keller’s, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). ‘De Generatione Animalium’, trans. Arthur Platt, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 678. See Walter Pagel, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Contributions to Knowledge of the Brain and Its Functions’, in The Brain and Its Functions (Springfield, Il: Charles C. Thomas, 1958), pp. 95–114. The Latin term venter may refer either to the belly or the womb. ‘Venter’ is still current in legal usage to designate a maternal parent. 4.2.68–70; The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.B. Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1974), 193. In Peri Bathous Alexander Pope represents poetry as either ‘a natural or morbid secretion from the Brain’, adding: ‘Therefore is the Desire of Writing properly term’d Puritus, the “Titilation of the Generative Faculty of the Brain”, and the Person is said to conceive; now such as conceive must bring forth. I have known a man thoughtful, melancholy and raving for divers days, who forthwith grew wonderfully easy, lightsome and cheerful, upon a discharge of the peccant humour, in exceeding purulent Metre’; The Prose Works of Alexander Pope: The Major Works, 1725–1744, ed. Rosemary Cowler (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986), p. 189. In a female deer prepared for coition, Harvey noted, the outer surface of the uterus ‘appears thicker and more fleshly’ than at other times, while the inner surface ‘becomes more tender and corresponds in smoothness and softness to the inner parts of the ventricles of the brain’. He continued: ‘seeing that the substance of the uterus that has been made ready for the conception is so very like the constitution of the brain, why may we not justly surmise that the function of each of them is also alike, and that what imagination and appetitive are to the brain, that same thing, or at least something analogous to it, is awakened in the uterus by coitus and from this proceeds the generation or procreation of the egg?’ William Harvey, ‘Of Conception’, trans. Gweneth Witteridge, in Disputations Touching the Generation of Animals (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1981), p. 445. Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), pp. 132–4. On the trope of the book as a child, see also Terry J. Castle, ‘Lab’Ring Bards: Birth Topoi and English Poetics 1660–1820’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 78 (1979): 193–208; Elizabeth Sacks, Shakespeare’s Images of Pregnancy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980); Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse’, in Speaking of Gender, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 73–100; and my ‘From Paternity to Property: The Remetaphorization of Writing’, in Cultural Agency/Cultural Authority, eds Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Barbara Stafford has much interesting material in her chapter entitled ‘Conceiving’, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 211–79. ‘Symposium’, trans. B. Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, 2 vols (New York: Random House, 1937), I, p. 33. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 165. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Walter Starkie (New York: Signet, 1964), p. 41. Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, 3 vols (New York: Viking, 1957–1966), II, p. 308.

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30 Quoted by David Ladd, ‘The Harm of the Concept of Harm in Copyright’, Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. 30 (1983): 426. 31 For a well-known treatment of authorship as a gendered category see Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press, 1989). 32 The ‘right of paternity’ is one of the crucial elements of the doctrine of the author’s ‘moral right’ as ratified by the Berne Convention. 33 Johnson, 515. 34 ‘The mother is no parent of that which is called / her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed / that grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger she / preserves a stranger’s seed, if no god interfere’. The Eumenides, 2. 658–61, trans. Richmond Lattimore, The Complete Greek Tragedies, eds David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), I, p. 158. Apollo clinches his argument by pointing to the presiding judge herself, Athena, who sprung directly from her father Zeus’s head. 35 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. J.A. Work (Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press, 1940), pp. 328–30. 36 For an analysis of this position see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), esp. pp. 27–55. 37 ‘Opening Brief for Appellant’, 34–5, Anna J., on file at Los Angeles County Law Library. 38 ‘Respondents’ Brief’, 22, Anna J., on file at Los Angeles County Law Library. 39 Anna J., 380. 40 Evelyn Fox Keller suggests that at least until World War II nucleus and cytoplasm were tropes for male and female in biological discourse, and she relates this gendering of cell components to the representation of the nucleus (DNA) as active and the cytoplasm as passive. See Refiguring Life, esp. pp. 38–40 . 41 ‘Appellant’s Reply’, 2–4, Johnson, on file at Los Angeles County Law Library. 42 Johnson, 500 n. 10. 43 Ibid., 499 n. 8. 44 Randy Francis Kandel, ‘Which Came First: the Mother or the Egg? A Kinship Solution to Gestational Surrogacy’, Rutgers Law Review 47 (1994): 165–239, challenges the California Supreme Courts’ insistence that a child can only have one mother. Kandel points out that ‘when it used the metaphor of naturalness, the court was also culturally constructing the nuclear family as a natural family form’ (p. 187); instead of searching for a rule to find the most ‘natural’ mother, the court should have adopted a broader view which acknowledged the possibility of other forms of kinship relations. 45 See esp. Valerie Hartouni, ‘Breached Birth: Reflections on Race, Gender, and Reproductive Discourse in the 1980s’, Configurations 1 (1994): 73–88. 46 Quoted by Dolgin, p. 687, n. 212. 47 Catherine Gewertz, ‘Parents of Child Born to Surrogate Face Final Challenge’, Los Angeles Times, 17 April 1992, A29. 48 Hartouni, ‘Breached Birth’ p. 76. 49 Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘“From Generation to Generation’: Imagining Connectedness in the Age of Reproductive Technologies’, forthcoming. 50 ‘What is an Author?’, trans. J.V. Harari, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 101–20. 51 Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, 111 Sup. Ct. 1282 (1991).

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52 Paul Goldstein, Copyright’s Highway: The Law and Lore of Copyright from Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), p. 76. 53 608 N.Y.S.2d 477 (New York 1994), 196 A.D. 2d 7. 54 67 Ohio Misc. 2d 54 (Ohio 1994). 55 Ibid., 59. 56 Ibid., 66. 57 Jeffrey M. Place, ‘Gestational Surrogacy and the Meaning of “Mother”’, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 17 (1994): 907–17, argues that the California Supreme Court reached the right conclusion for the wrong reasons; it should have decided the case on the basis of genetics. 58 Carol Delaney, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 59 Elisabeth M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, ‘The Economics of the Baby Shortage’, Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1978): 344. 60 Foucault, ‘What’, p. 119.

CHAPTER 16

In Locus Parentis Judith Roof Genes are just chunks of software that can run on any system: they use the same code and do the same jobs. Even after 530 million years of separation, our computer can recognize a fly’s software and vice versa. Indeed the computer analogy is quite a good one. Matt Ridley, Genome

Genes spark a profusion of metaphors; the computer analogy above is quite a good one. As a substance whose operations are the highly complex subject of a specialist’s vocabulary, DNA is regularly costumed in metaphor for its public appearances. But instead of portraying genes in terms consonant with the elaborate metonymies of organic chemistry, cultural discussions of genetics deploy metaphors from various processes of signification, which transform an all-too-literal mechanism into a mysterious leap from a DNA signifier to the bodily signified. The gene (and/or DNA) has been rendered variously as a code, a blueprint, a book, a map, an alphabet, a digital language, a recipe, instructions, an autobiography, and a Chicago gangster.1 As what we now perceive to be the final, most minute site of life’s operations (all sciences end with strings these days), DNA is the animating, originary Word that is to be made flesh. These mostly representational analogies may not seem odd because they already constitute the filters through which the larger culture understands what genes are and how they operate. Through their linguistic analogy, DNA’s textual metaphors offer the illusion of an explanation of how genes work; if genes are like texts, DNA functions like language, its ability to convey ‘meaning’ working much like grammar and syntax.2 The textual metaphors also enable illusions of both genetic literacy and propriety, providing models for ideas of authorship and ownership that have attached to DNA and genes since the 1980s. If DNA is a complex text to be deciphered, science becomes art, scientists become paleographers and critics, and the workings of vital chemistry can be authored, copied, rewritten, and copyrighted by anyone who can wield the ‘language’. It does not make any difference that DNA chemistry really can be reworked, though, in ways that barely resemble literary criticism or textual analysis.3 Rather than providing a key to chemical methodologies, textual metaphors support the right to decipher, decode, rewrite, own, and profit from life’s ‘textual’ key. DNA’s textual analogy also implies such other genres as history and such activities as transcription, translation, and reproduction, which also become

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part of what we envision as genetic function and process. If genes are a text, the text is as much history as recipe; and the evolution of humanity can be ‘read’ in its figurative etymologies, archaic vocabularies, and ‘verbal’ excess.4 DNA’s extensive ‘book’ contains the vocabularies of both earlier forms of humanity and genes that appear in other species. Like any text, genes can represent a range of meanings without being alienated or diverted from their human narrative. For example, humans share 98 per cent of their genes with chimpanzees. But if genes’ archival remains and textual wanderings are not themselves accounted for (as in the Human Genome Project), the sense of a unified set of specifically human genes may never be established. Since the human genotype is mostly not unique to humanity, humans deploy other modes of appropriation such as naming genes, listing and mapping them, and ultimately producing and patenting them. This is less a Frankensteinian over-reaching than it is ultimately a flustered attempt to mark the code, which extends beyond both species and era, with the ineffably human. The extent to which textual metaphors have shaped the directions genetic research has taken is a question for a different analysis. Evelyn Fox Keller’s insightful Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology amply illustrates how agenic metaphors – ‘the discourse of gene action’ – enabled (or forced) a shift from studies of the larger organism to a focus on genes as the primary cause and locus of biological knowledge.5 DNA watchdog Richard Lewontin suggests that the characterizations of gene discourse produce a misperception that DNA is an active causal agent, when it might just as easily be perceived as a passive template or information resource. For both Keller and Lewontin, discourse about genes has swayed the directions of scientific research and distributions of resources.6 This essay will analyze the motivations for and the larger cultural effects of the promulgation of specifically textual metaphors applied to genes and DNA. Textual metaphors include analogies that use any form of conventional inscription (including codes, maps, and computer software) where the inscription operates as a signifier for something somewhere else, where the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary, and where the metaphor (whether linguistic or informational) masks the metonymical process by which DNA gets from nucleotide string to protein and body parts. The prominence of textual metaphors in gene discourse accounts in part for how it might be that genes can be patented, but such metaphors also represent a complex cultural response to the emergence of the very different governing logic represented by DNA, a logic which transects such symbolic social structures as parentage and individuality.

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The Codex Sapiens

Matt Ridley’s Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999) is an example of the extent to which textual metaphors define popular notions of DNA’s operations. A ‘lucid and exhilarating romp through our 23 chromosomes’ (as James Watson comments), Genome depends entirely on understanding genes (and DNA) as a kind of script or codex which contains both the instructions for human beings and a transcript of the past, and works like software. Focused on the genome, or the entire list of base nucleotide pairs from all 23 human chromo-somes, Ridley’s sampling of meaningful sites on each information-packed strand transforms human genes into an index of individual traits (‘Intelligence’, ‘Instinct’, ‘Self-interest’), social concerns (‘Politics’, Eugenics’, Environment’), and life themes (‘Life’, ‘Fate’, ‘Death’) that constitute both the physics and metaphysics of twentieth-century western humanity. The genome is a book, Ridley explains, with ‘twenty-three chapters, called chromosomes’, where each chromosome contains ‘several thousand stories, called genes’, where ‘each story is made up of paragraphs, called Exons, which are interrupted by advertisements called Introns’, and every paragraph ‘is made up of words, called codons’, and ‘each word is written in letters called Bases’.7 This elaborate textual analogy is not something Ridley has manufactured on his own; his book is an imaginative extension of the vocabulary already employed by researchers and commentators. Ridley’s metaphors, like those of predecessor gene sage Richard Dawkins, acknowledge the shift from material book to electronically-generated text; both see DNA as literally digital, its pairs constituting a binary code through their serial arrangement and binary attractions. DNA metaphors keep up with the times; in offering a different model of textuality the software analogy adjusts the textual metaphor to the increasingly metonymical logic of contemporary textual production, while still resisting the abandonment of the textual metaphor as the primary figuration of genes and DNA.8 Ridley’s jaunt through the genetic alphabet is only the most recent (and most elaborate) example of the linguistic and textual metaphors applied to the operation of DNA and genes. Ridley’s book follows such books as Walter Bodmer and Robin McKie’s The Book of Man (1994), Steve Jones’s The Language of the Genes (1993), and Jeremy Campbell’s Grammatical Man (1983), and anticipates the torrent of appeals to the alphabet and book precipitated by the announcement of the genome’s completion in June, 2000. From the nineteenth-century August Weissman’s analogy between ‘primary constituents’ (genes) and an English telegram to Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 analogy of the ‘code-script’ to Watson and Crick’s notion of ‘genetical information’, both DNA and genes have been interpreted and advertised as a biological entity that conveys a message, their affinities to languages, texts,

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and cybernetic modes of information organization inflecting a particularly communicative model of biological operation.9 Richard Dawkins, who has authored genes’ most inventive metaphors (such as the ‘Chicago gangster’), brings the book metaphor into question. ‘The metaphor of the page for the gene,’ he says, ‘starts to break down here. In a loose-leaf binder a whole page may be inserted, removed or exchanged, but not a fraction of a page. But the gene complex is just a long string of nucleotide letters, not divided into discrete pages in an obvious way at all’.10 He replaces the notebook metaphor with a slightly different model of the text – the scroll form seen by Peter Stallybrass as alternating with the book as a material mode of reading practice.11 The point is not, however, that we have somehow returned to the scroll, but that textuality’s mode of representation has some bearing on our imagined notions of genetic function and all forms of textuality are approximations that in some way import metaphor as a way to explain DNA’s very mechanical process. Apart from the practice of representing nucleotides by the initial letters of their chemical names (as occurs in much chemical notation), DNA’s imagined textuality was there from the start, reflected in the very choice of the word ‘gene’, whose etymology connotes analogies of generation, combination, and reproduction that typify language and textuality. Competing etymologies are offered for the word ‘gene’; their variations demonstrate the range of expectations that predefined it. German scientist W. Johannsen is credited with first employing the term ‘gene’ in 1909. In the American Naturalist in 1911, he notes that he ‘proposed the terms “gene” and “genotype” … to be used in the science of genetics. The “gene” is nothing but a very applicable little word, easily combined with others, and hence it may be useful as an expression for the “unit-factors”, “elements”, or “allelomorphs” in the gametes, demonstrated by modern Mendelian researches’ (OED Online). Johannsen’s lexical pragmatism curiously reiterates the gene’s own mechanisms as both gene and its signifier function as little units that combine with others to enable the expression of something. Some dictionaries (such as Merriam Webster) credit Johannsen’s logism as deriving from the German word Pangen, a noun referring to the particles formerly believed to have been contributed to the reproductive cells by various parts of the body in a process called ‘pangenesis’.12 In this context the term ‘gene’ became a corrective for pangenesis’ mistaken hypothesis, standing alone in place of the ‘pan’ and the ‘sis’, as the key originary element, but carrying with it a history of theories about it (something the chromosomes will also be credited with). Other dictionaries avoid the German detour through pangenesis altogether, simply linking the word ‘gene’ to variants of the Greek Genos meaning race or offspring. This etymology privileges the generative nature of genes, linking them to the traditional Greek locus of the origins of western culture.13 In keeping with their etymology, genes seem to fulfill the promise of the long-sought single mechanism which would provide life’s key since, like life,

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genes can instill order and reproduce themselves. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, order and reproducibility are also traits we associate with language. Textuality and life would seem to have some common ground, the latter easily translated into the former. But genes go one step further than texts, which is what makes genes alive: DNA is credited with being able to reproduce both life and itself. The gene – the generative element – is the quintessential node of reproduction; it is reproduction doubled. The ‘secret’ of life not only accounts for the reproduction of order (that complex systems are deployed in a working arrangement) and the orderly reproduction of individuals within a species, but its own reproduction of the chemistry by which it reproduces itself. Although we are much more familiar with genetic activity through such failures of order as mutations and disease, and even though DNA is employed most of the time to produce and maintain very complex systems, the attractiveness of the gene seems to consist primarily in its role as a purveyor of heritability.14 Discussions of genes emphasize reproduction as a way of bringing forward something that is the same but different from the past as opposed to production, on the one hand, which, like a factory, comprehends only the making of something different, or replication, on the other hand, which comprehends only the production of the self-same. Since DNA is mostly operative in production and replication, our fixation on genes’ contribution to reproduction points to our preoccupation with our own individual origins. Only through the parental combinations of human reproduction do genes seem to manifest themselves in us and enable us to position ourselves as both manifestations of the past and something to be made manifest in the future. We might claim that this subtle bias toward the reproductive occurs because of the nature of the gene or the state of evolving scientific knowledge (heredity and the effects of mutations were the first evidence of genetic function), but it might also be because figures of reproduction intrinsic to notions of textuality are particularly attractive and necessary to our cultural acceptance of the the idea of the gene. Not only does reproduction center the human in the genetic process (as opposed to centering the gene whose interests, as Dawkins suggests, are sometimes different from our own), but also both textuality and reproduction are figurations of metaphor as a logic of meaning production. Let us assume that Sigmund Freud and Roman Jakobsen were right when they each proposed that only two basic logics (or ‘poles’ to quote Jakobsen) order language and representation.15 On the one hand, condensation or metaphor enacts a logic of substitution and combination that typifies the operation of language itself as it replaces things, actions, or ideas with words and their combinations. Metaphor represents an interplay of similarity and difference when a different signifier with some similarities to the original stands in for the referent. Metaphor produces a pyramidal effect on a vertical scale (to speak metaphorically). On the other hand, representation can also be seen as a

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process of displacement or metonymy as language relates to its referents only by displacing them. Metonymy works through contiguity – by being next to or associated physically to the referent. Metonymy produces a string or chain effect on a horizontal scale (again to speak metaphorically). These logics of representation, while initially elicited to explain dream logic and the workings of language, also define the difference between the magical or symbolic (including representation itself as a mode of conjuring that which is not present) and the physical mechanical world which operates quite literally through the meshed contiguity of parts. In this context, the difference between metaphor and metonymy as organizing logics is represented in the traditional differences between father and mother (as well as other such binaries as soul and matter). Before DNA technologies, a father’s relation to his child was always metaphorical; the patronym cemented a relation that could never be entirely certain.16 The mother’s relation to the child was metonymical; she was its mother by virtue of the physical contiguities of birth. The politics of sexual difference that haunt the parental scenario also define the relative value of metaphorical and metonymical logics. The symbolic and magical is generally valued more than the mechanical and the literal; the incarnate is worth more than the material and embodied. When the mechanical is valued (as it often is), it is metaphorized; hence the speeding train becomes a symbol of human progress or the computer becomes a ‘brain’. In other words, metonymy, though its logic rules technology and even the workings of biology, will only slowly come to dominate representational logic and symbolic systems and only if it is consistently veiled in metaphor. The logic of substitution (symbolization, paternity, soul, magic) eclipses the contiguity that underwrites it, even – or especially – in relation to DNA, whose operation is purely metonymical. In this sense DNA, genes, and metonymy are a figurative mother whose regime is thwarted and constantly reshaped by the representational machinations of an increasingly obsolete paternal law. The discovery of DNA, in fact, throws a glitch into the Law of the Father that operates through – and is the quintessential example of – metaphor. In the realm of human reproduction and social systems, the law of the Father operates when the ‘something’ of the father’s name comes to stand in for and seal the erstwhile unprovable relation between father and child.17 Until DNA testing made the determination of paternity possible, the identity of a child’s father could only ever be circumstantial. The Law-of-the-Name-of-the-Father, like any law, produces a physical and a social relation by means of language.18 Most law is an operative metaphor that works like the patronym. Property law, for example, creates a relation between land and an individual by means of a text (a deed). Social limits are set by just saying the word (traffic signals, national boundaries, licenses). The fact of paternity is not important; rather, the means by which it is established and sustained – metaphor, law – are. In

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undermining the necessity for the paternal metaphor by proving the connection between father and child, DNA also threatens the collapse of the symbolic order that depends on the function of metaphor as the bridge between matter and culture. To avoid this collapse, DNA is rewrapped in metaphor – and not just any metaphor, but the analogy of the WORD, the code, the same figure applied to originary paternity and law (which, at least biblically, came together). DNA and genes are also steeped in images of reproduction that imply that genetic behavior is simply human reproductive behavior in miniature and that human reproduction is something like textuality, producing a relation by means of the metaphorical superimposition of the text on the body.19 Reproduction, which can refer to everything from breeding and the productions of fecund conjunctions to making replicas, operates as we imagine metaphor operates. Two somewhat dissimilar entities – say, body and text – come together and produce through their combination a new meaning – child, property – which elaborates and might even substitute for one or both of the original entities, is similar to them, but continues as itself. Reproduction is the literalized, material figuration (if any such oxymoron is possible) of metaphor, epitomizing its processes of substitution, condensation, and signification. Reproduction is a productive process envisioned as occurring on a vertical plane; human reproduction is represented on the branches of a family tree. The verticality and the layered substitutions of metaphor produce history, tradition, narrative, and order in the guise of the law which functions, like the gene, to impose order on an otherwise chaotic body politic. Both deploying metaphors of textuality and emphasizing the genes’ role in reproduction turns the genes’ process of replication (the production of exact copies) into the more picturesque vicissitudes of reproduction. Replication is metonymic and automatonic in the sense that it occurs automatically and autonomically based only on the nucleotides present. Glossing this process with visions of sugarplum chromosomes dancing together to mingle their codes coats genetic mechanisms with the combinatory romance of metaphor. While certainly during conception chromosomes do meet and match up their genes much like the card game ‘War’, and that matching affects the operation of specific nucelotides present, the chromosomes continue to replicate rather than reproduce – they only copy what they have rather than making any further new meaning (until they age or are smited with toxic substances when their new meaning is often cancer). Textuality translates the prosaically mechanical into the symbolic magic that inserts a leap between signifier and signified. As metaphors on behalf of metaphor, textuality and reproduction evoke combinatory processes in the face of the very different kind of logic at work in genetic chemistry. We know genes are involved in reproduction, but their mode of replicating is in fact different from the conjunctive bliss we normally associate with the egg-and-sperm saga

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(whose ‘courtship’ behaviors are often romanticized in the hackneyed epic of the stalwart chevalier and the reluctant bride).20 DNA is a substance composed of two pairs of binary chemicals or ‘bases’ – Adenine (A) and Thymine (T), and Cytosine (C) and Guanine (G). These bases are arranged in pairs in a chain bound together with sugars to produce DNA’s famous double helix structure. Reproducing either side of the chain will result in the same series of bases because of the complementary habit of the pairs. If, for example, a chain consists on one side of A, C, G, T, the other side will consist of T, G, C, A. When the base pairs ‘unzip’ and replicate, two identical strands of the series are produced. In vitro DNA replicates itself with the help of another nucleic acid, RNA, which forms a ‘negative’ impression of the base pairs by matching the bases with their complementary opposites (except for Thymine which is replaced on RNA with another base, Uracil). DNA replication, then, though it recalls romantic myths through its literal attraction of opposites, works through mechanical contiguity. It is metonymical instead of metaphorical in its logic, like a photographic negative. Its series of base pairs, when replicated by RNA, produce the amino acids that constitute living flesh, again, like a photographic negative. Individual genes, which might be composed of thousands of base pairs, not only contain amino acid templates but DNA that also initiates or closes down certain processes as well as DNA that provides a protective margin of extra base pairs. DNA and genes in concert with enzymes produce only nucleic acids, amino acids, and the initiation or termination of replication through a thoroughly metonymical process (which is not, in fact, even quite digital, in that it has two binaries instead of only one) without a hint of symbolic significations. Even its ability to produce amino acids is metonymical, coming from the order of its chained base pairs. DNA works entirely mechanically, without ‘meaning’ or intent; it requires no symbolic leap of significatory magic, no metaphor to link signifier and signified, since its signifier/signified relation is direct and physical. DNA is not a code; it does not stand for anything other than itself. The order of its elements, when replicated, produces a sequence of amino acids and proteins which in turn constitute tissue and comprise metabolic processes. DNA has none of the arbitrariness or indeterminacy of the text; there is no metaphorical gap to be filled between base and base like there is between signifier and signified. DNA’s metonymical logic represents a very different symbolic system than that which has reigned in western culture at least since Newton. Like quantum physics, string theory, and even digital machines, DNA chemistry works through a complex series of mechanical relations where the link between one element and another is binary, automatic, and devoid of those substitutive leaps that characterize both metaphor and magic. If metonymy were to be signified metonymically, its signifier would be the body it produced. To symbolize genes in any other way, one must use some form of metaphor, even if that consists

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only in the synecdoche of the base pairs’ initials (from their metaphoricallyapplied names). To some degree, then, because we communicate via language, DNA must be represented metaphorically. But necessity is not the father of convention. In so far as genes can prove the relation between father and child where before the name would do, now the figure of the name (the text) configures the relation between the gene and the body by masking the intricate sets of metonymical relations by which the body derives from the genes. It is a way to perpetuate the rule of metaphor even as it gives way to the more fragmented networked logic of metonymy (which only looks fragmented from the vantage of metaphor). Textuality also paves the way for anthropomorphism where genes are endowed with will, desire, motivation, and personality. Keller critiques the centrality of agenic metaphors in gene discourse, citing early Mendelians such as R.A. Brink’s genetic imperialism: ‘the Mendelian theory postulates discrete, self-perpetuating, stable bodies – the genes – resident in the chromosomes, as the hereditary materials. This means, of course, that the genes are the primary internal agents controlling development’.21 Genes become actors, little ‘stable’ players who strut, bargain, battle, and dominate. They sometimes become ‘selfish’ genes, as Richard Dawkins has observed, or combatants in a gender battle where x-chromosome genes select against certain desirable male characteristics.22 Part of this anthropomorphism is linguistic convenience where the effects of complex processes of evolutionary mechanisms such as survival of the fittest are displaced into the genes as a way to enable a shorthand discussion of the mechanism. This is the case with Richard Dawkins’ ‘selfish gene’ which ‘hitches a ride in the survival machines created by other DNA’,23 or the ‘Chicago gangster’ analogy which Dawkins uses to account for the kinds of traits we expect from entities that have survived tough turf wars. ‘Like successful Chicago gangsters,’ he observes, ‘our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world’.24 It is extremely tempting to envision genes as little motivated directors, as vicious, cigarchomping Capone figures with ruthless desires to eliminate the competition. This humanization aligns us with our genes; what is good for the genes is good for us. But it also enables an empowered displacement from the utter helplessness the human might experience in the face of its inexorable genetic determination and its automatic and inhuman process of replication.25 Rendering DNA as an ur-text with reproductive proclivities or displacing human motives into a tiny genetic theatre is more than merely a linguistic necessity. While on the one hand, as Keller points out, ‘metaphors of information and instruction … provide powerful rationales and incentives for mobilizing resources, for identifying particular research agendas, for focusing our scientific energies and attention in particular directions’,26 the textual (which comprises both information and instruction in their various metaphorical

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incarnations) is also defensive and compensatory in relation to the metonymy of DNA operation. Metaphors of signification employed to describe DNA reinscribe metonymy as metaphor, replication as reproduction and the inhuman as human, making the rule of metaphor the operational truth of life. Even if DNA works metonymically, we can try to believe that its mechanics are really like a book or little people. They therefore also still belong to the order of law, whereas metonymies never need law. While the father needed the name (and other laws) to signify his paternity before DNA, traditionally there were never laws certifying maternity (with the exception of some cultures who carried the mother’s name forward as well).27 If DNA is a text that we can read, and if it is something we can transcribe, then it is also something we can copy, selectively manufacture, alter. Instead of being its subject, DNA becomes ours; humanity stays unique, and the higher powers of mystery and magic still reign. II

Homo Ludens

From Seymour Benzer and the drosophilists to more contemporary genetic researchers, it has become clear that genes may govern more than physiology.28 Determining to some degree some kinds of behaviors (actually an everincreasing list), knowledge of genetic influence increasingly shifts responsibility for such behaviors as anger, hyperactivity, drug addiction, intelligence, sloth, and thrill-seeking from the individual to the genotype. If our genes comprise a governing life text then the role of individual choice seems to diminish. If, as Ridley points out, genetic predispositions may influence behaviors from 40–60 per cent of the time, then that influence offers 40–60 per cent to which our own responsibility for behaviors is diminished. At its most extreme, this genetic causality becomes a determinant beyond the control of the individual, shifting notions of culpability and responsibility and suggesting such possibilities as the ‘my-genes-made-me-do-it’ defense to criminal behavior. It has become a commonplace to attribute behavioral disorders (‘lying, stealing, bullying, fighting, cruelty to animals and people, property destruction, and truancy’) to genetic causes.29 The fact that these are now called ‘behavioral disorders’ and not character flaws indicates the extent to which individual responsibility and control have given way to ideas of social and environmental causality. If the individual is in the grip of forces beyond its control, then genes, the environment, abuse, and society constitute a range of mitigating factors which both explain and potentially exculpate transgressive behaviors. While it may be that this extended chain of causality plays out and makes visible an underlying metonymy (where metonymy consists of chained causality and responsibility is a vestige of metaphor), it also represents the kind of fragmented, and disunified collage that bespeaks postmodernity in the

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face of responsibility’s unified and organized modernity. It is also possible that our increased knowledge of what genes might effect, while scientifically demonstrable, is part of a larger cultural trend that has already shifted causality and responsibility away from the individual to other social, environmental, and now genetic catalysts. It seems only logical that genes might account for impulses explained by social disadvantage, trauma, and mental illness. This is not to criticize the validity of these as causes. Rather, it is to point out how the notions of individual power, responsibility, and the subject itself have changed – perhaps a welcome change given the hidden class and gender biases inherent to the Cartesian western subject. The post-DNA subject has become a composite of outside forces, a pastiche of virulent fragments, including its genetic legacy. The individual is envisioned as justifiably having less self-control and ability to exercise choice – and hence bear responsibility. At the same time, selfhelp therapies and fitness regimes have become more prevalent, offering a defense of self-control and will to the eroding individual. The subject, who in a Cartesian system knew itself, now is the subject of information beyond itself. It is the effect of information instead of information’s controller, transected by messages flowing in all directions, responding equally to genetic and media stimuli. This shift in the concept of the individual does correlate with another aspect of genetic discovery: thinking about genes as a repository of human history – as being both the inscription of human evolution and the all-important survival of species information. This, too, subordinates the individual to larger patterns. If the individual is only a single droplet in a genetic pool, then the individual becomes merely a vector or the survival and passage of genetic information. As Dawkins characterizes it: Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes [yet another code-text]. The genes are not destroyed by crossing over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.30

In this sense genes are the reason for human existence. But even this vector function is not very individualized. Since genes are by their nature not very individual, the same genes or combinations exist and have existed in large numbers of people and species through history. While people have their own particular genetic combinations, the genes themselves and their variations exist throughout the biosphere. This means not only that one’s own genotype is not really very unique, neither is one’s genetic legacy. If this is the case, parenting becomes less the transmission of a unique line and more a contribution to the

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larger gene pool. We may get our genes from our parents, but our inheritance is neither distinctive (except in the case of extreme mutations which usually are not good anyway) nor existent only within our own family line. Parental narcissisim is merely a carrot inciting vectors to proliferate other genetic vectors. The family is an illusion of an organized and specific genetic line (which is constantly infiltrated with alien genes). What does it mean, after all, that one may have inherited recessive blue eyes from two grandparents, especially when such traits are not necessarily linked to any others (such as personality or stature), nor are they really very unique. Phenotypical inheritance provides the illusion of legacy, continuity, and belonging. By the same token, all individuals don’t need to reproduce to have their genes passed on; they pass through others – and some genes perhaps should not be proliferated at all. The careful tracking of cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs carriers by the Committee for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Disease has almost eliminated these genetic illnesses in the Jewish population in the United States (Ridley 191). While critics see this as a dangerous eugenics, it could also be understood as a refusal on the part of vectors to proliferate damaging DNA. In the context of humans as gene carriers, we might even view the refusal of some individuals to reproduce – especially if they suspect they carry defective genes – as a heroic stand against the perpetuation of certain undesirable and certainly selfish genes (even though, as stated earlier, such genes are hardly individual). It is still part of a cultural bias toward reproduction that we regard attempts to limit the passage of bad genes as over-reaching eugenics (who is to say what a bad gene is after all?), and applaud and support the untrammelled passing of genes. We might understand our unquestioned enthusiasm for reproduction not so much as an instinct for enriching the gene pool but as simply doing what is ultimately better for the genes. Separating genes from bodies in this context is conceptually difficult precisely because we see chromosomal matching and reproduction as the same process. Genetic variety is like a dating service with unlimited choices; it is a resource wherein Nature (or God) knows best. In other contexts, as discussed below, separating genes from bodies is a desirable – even necessary – gesture that requires that we untangle the actions of genes from the insistent scene of reproduction. But we still look to genes as markers of identity expressed in the physical traits we share with other members of our immediate family despite the fact that genetic research widens its view of the biosphere. We cling to the imagined unique combinations of our own DNA as a way to underwrite our singular and meaningful existence. Both the Human Genome Project and DNA fingerprinting become ways we can specify the humanity and individuality of our genes in the face of discoveries that DNA is neither too species specific nor very individually distinctive. When the subject becomes an effect, it is comforting to know that we still have our own distinguishing fingerprints

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and genotypes. Hence, the insistence on identity through DNA typing which continually reaffirms the uniqueness of our genetic combinations and ourselves in a universe that increasingly undercuts difference in favor of variety. And the urgent need to identify, name, and patent genes themselves. Jus tertii. There seem, thus, to be two major, related defensive or compensatory motives for employing textual metaphors in relations to genes: 1. to mask an anxiety about a transition in the dominant logic of signification from metaphor and the law of the father’s name to metonymy and the mechanics of digitality; and 2. to assuage an anxiety about individuality. Patenting genes and DNA is another compensatory activity enabled conceptually by genes’ textual gloss and further motivated by the promise of excessive profit (another way of compensating the individual). Turning DNA technologies into property represents a complex renegotiation of notions of nature and technology, and the extension of concepts of commodity and property. In 1992 a group of researchers from Wales and MIT filed a patent that claimed a property right in, among other things, 1. A nucleotide sequence selected from the group consisting of: a) isolated DNA obtained from human chromosome 19, wherein said DNA consists of the myotonic dystrophy gene including a variable number of repeats of the three-base unit CTG or the substantially complementary strand of said DNA, wherein the number of repeats is greater than about 50 in individuals affected by myotonic dystrophy, b) isolated RNA transcribed from the DNA of a); and c) a fragment of the nucleotide sequences of a) or b) which comprises a region of DNA containing the CTG variable repeat region of the myotonic dystrophy gene, wherein said fragment specifically hybridizes to the CTG variable repeat region of the nucleotide sequences of a) or b).31

On the surface it would seem that this group of researchers is claiming a right in a portion of human chromosome 19, specifically a portion where mistaken transcriptions have led to the pathological proliferation of the threebase unit CTG (Cytosine, Thymine, Guanine) resulting in a condition called myotonic dystrophy (DM) in which a person’s muscles atrophy to the point of complete disability. Indeed claim number 10 on the same patent reiterates this claim, staking out ‘An isolated human DNA sequence obtained from human chromosome 19, wherein said DNA consists of the myotonic dystrophy gene comprising the CTG triplet repeat region of the myotonic dystrophy gene, or the substantially complementary strand of said DNA, wherein the CTG triplet is repeated about 50 times or more’. How can researchers patent a portion of DNA that occurs naturally? Isn’t such a claim analogous to astronomers patenting stars they discover, or botanists patenting plants they find in the Amazon basin? As William Haseltine, the President of Human Genome Science, suggests, ‘Trying to patent a human

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gene is like trying to patent a tree. You can patent a table that you build from a tree, but you cannot patent the tree itself’ (DNAPatent.com). US Patent law provides the following: ‘Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title’ (35 USC 101).32 This provides patent holders with ‘the right to prevent others from making, using, selling, or importing a given invention’. In the context of biotechnology, patentable inventions belong generally to the category of utility patents or plant patents. Utility patents apply to new processes, machines, modes of manufacture, or matter composition or useful improvements to any of these. To be patentable, utility patents must be non-obvious, new, and useful. In other words the invention cannot already exist, should be new to the experience of the average person, and must be useful. One cannot patent a theory or an idea. So how is it that the above researchers could patent a sequence from a gene and why would they want to? Does this mean that if I had DM I would have to pay them for the use of my nucleotide sequence? What it means is that if I wanted to find a cure for DM I would have to pay everyone who owned a patent on some applicable bit of knowledge for the use of the knowledge and processes they discovered. How can this be if this nucleotide sequence is not new – is the tree instead of the table? Ostensibly gene patents apply mostly to genetic tinkering – to processes by which genes can be located, altered, made to work in a different organism, or used in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals or other therapies.33 But sometimes, as in the example above, patents seem to apply to pre-existing nucleotide sequences.34 On the one hand, gene sequences, unless they are contrived by biotechnologists, are not new and therefore should not be subject to patent. But the isolation and transcription of genes seems to be an ‘original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium’. What is new, then, about gene sequences are their transcription, the discovery and inscription of the ‘text’ which is regarded as having been authored by the scientists who discerned its order. These generally come in the form of cDNAs (the prefex ‘c’ reminiscent of the copyright symbol) or DNA marker sequences. cDNAs are condensed versions of genes, or ‘complementary DNAs’ that have been derived by trapping messenger RNA active in cells, exposing such RNA to reverse transcriptase (enzymes that chemically return RNA to the DNA form from which it must have come, i.e., if the RNA reads CGUA, the DNA source would have read GCAT). Since RNA exists in nature, what is patented is the DNA work product that resulted from the reversing process. It has been transcribed. Though such DNA sequences may warrant a utility patent, both the processes and the actual genes themselves can be conceived as patentable because genes are seen as texts and texts are the subject of another slightly different form of property right: copyright. Copyright law reads: ‘Copyright protection

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subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device’ (17 U.S.C. 102). Patents for gene sequences seem to exist somewhere between patent and copyright. The metaphorically textual gene invites the concept of copyright, while the literally chemical nature of genetic material transposes copyright into patent. Without the textual analogy, however, patenting any portion of naturally-occurring DNA or its functions would be like patenting black holes and the calculations by which their presence was discovered. Patenting genes has not occurred without some soul-searching. Who owns genes and other pieces of DNA?’ asks the Human Genome Project Website in its section devoted to Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues (ELSI).35 That we can even ask a question like this demonstrates not only a shift in our understandings of the body, but also in the ways we conceive of property and the possibilities of ownership. If the body is an expression of a genetic text, and if reading and interpreting that text are the rightful property of the scientists who accomplish such reading, then it would seem to follow that these author/scientists would have a property right (a patent) in anything their discovered genes expressed. This is certainly the case for plant patents, cell lines (such as HeLa cells), and certainly specially-bred laboratory animals.36 In humans, however, there is a fine division between the code and the body. The code can be broken up and parsed out to its many readers (the many different biotech companies and governmental agencies engaged in the Human Genome Project [HGP], for example). The code takes on an existence of its own, detached from the tissue to which it is linked and conveniently so. If the genetic code is a text that can be parsed and distributed among many reader/authors, then its various parts and the methods by which they are read can become the intellectual property of whoever discerns them without having to address the stickier issues of the code’s expression in human beings. In fact, the genome being deciphered by the HGP is already a theoretical text that represents no individual genome (since there is not a single human genome). It is instead very much like the imagined ur- or source text deduced from the study of multiple versions of the same story. While the Human Genome Project and research into gene therapies raise ethical questions about how genetic information is to be used and who has access to such information, the curious notion of patenting any kind of genetic information is also motivated in some part by the profit pressures of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. With therapies as potentially profit gold mines, biotech companies, the government, scientists, and even potential patients see the private sector as the best way to shepherd life-saving methods into practice. And the only way to stimulate such development, at least in a capitalist way of thinking, is to permit private corporations and

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individuals to make money from an exclusive right in a method, a technique, or information derived from scientific research often funded by public monies. The philanthropic virtues of venture capital were aided historically by a shift in the relation between public funding and business interests. The availability of property rights in the fruits of scientific discovery emerged as the result of an unrelated zeal in reducing government debt. In 1985, the GrammRudman-Hollings deficit reduction act reduced funding to the NIH and other federally-supported research institutions. To cover their shortfall and keep their labs running, it was suggested that researchers avail themselves of the Technology Transfer Act of 1986 which encouraged government scientists ‘to collaborate with private industry to speed publicly funded research to the public’.37 Arrangements with businesses were known as ‘cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs)’ and provided royalties of up to $100,000 per year to contributing scientists. Ostensibly the act was designed to encourage government scientists to make their discoveries available in a more timely manner, but business interests in exclusivity would work against the free circulation of knowledge. Clearly, then, CRADAs were designed to enable corporate profit at public expense. As Jeff Lyon and Peter Gorner comment, ‘government scientists were not only allowed to work out commercial patent rights and exclusive licensing rights to the commercialization of discoveries that the public had paid for; they were supposed to do it’.38 If DNA literalizes the father, then patenting DNA technologies reestablishes a metaphorical paternity in the guise of governmental, university, or corporate ownership of the exclusive right to plunder snippets of DNA information and technologies. While this is done in the name of corporate motivation, few, if any, question the basic applicability of patents to genes and/or information about them. As E. Richard Gold comments, ‘our patent system was designed to promote research through the granting of property rights (to prevent a tragedy of the commons in which no one would invest in research without having private property rights) …’. What worries commentators is not the basic problem of how a code shared by everyone can become the property right of only a few, but whether or not the policy of granting patents will ultimately have a deleterious effect on scientific research. As Gold further observes: ‘Imagine now that different people have the exclusive right to use a particular series of these codes (such as the series that defines a gene). This means that researchers wanting to use, copy, or study (at least in a commercial context) these series of codes can only do so after gaining (usually for a fee) approval from the rights holder. Anyone wishing to study the genetic basis for digesting sugar will thus have to buy rights from a very large number of people – so large a number, in fact, that he or she will simply give up and study something else’.39 DNA patents, which, thus, seem to be only a temporary spur toward the accumulation of information, illustrate the stubborn resilience of paternalistic

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fantasies in which anxieties about a failure of control or connection are allayed by nominalistic spraying – by appending a name by law as a means of signaling dominion. If DNA were to operate freely and without the delusion of proprietary oversight (which, in fact, it does), then what does that do to any human conception of mastery, self-determination, or mystical relation to a deity or superior will? Patents, then, are both potentially lucrative franchises and a way of maintaining an illusion of human centrality and authority (and quite specifically, the superiority of capitalist organizations). While creating a property relation by appending a text is a very traditional way to produce a property right, the notion of what can be property has shifted in relation to genetic discoveries and the contemporaneous scramble to copyright information systems. What this extension of the concept of property represents is simultaneously a shift in the conception of what is ownable and shift in the understandings of what might constitute nature. While specific bits of ‘nature’ have always been ownable (i.e., land, ferae naturae, trees), natural systems such as species, weather, the cosmos, and physical laws that demonstrate uncontrollable vicissitudes or scale have not been. When, however, biological processes are traced to the level of the micro where there are, for all intents and purposes, orderly and manipulable bits rather than mysterious manifestations of whimsical power, nature becomes technology and micro-biology becomes a matter of text and transcription. Like texts and information systems, microbits become ownable, shifting the notion of property from an exclusively macro- to a macro- and micro-terrain that extends the concept of the tangible from land and gross objects to information and chemicals whose ‘bit’ nature has metaphorically solidified and objectified them. It is difficult to discern whether digitality or genetics or both have pushed the intangible and micro into the realm of the tangible and perceivable; both have arisen simultaneously. However, the digital provides the model of the ownable informational bit which, when transposed onto the textual metaphors of genetics, transforms genes into ownable bits. Of course, this extension of the ideas about what is ownable is also motivated by profit, but by itself profit does not shift very conservative conceptual systems such as property.40 If the paternal reasserts itself compensatorily by owning DNA, paternity as textual propriety is just as metaphorical as ever (or more so). At the same time, representations of literal paternity increasingly try to occupy metonymical maternal sites (everything from Kramer v. Kramer to Mr. Mom, Mrs. Doubtfire, Big Momma, and Junior).41 It is as if father is trying to hedge his bets by occupying both the symbolic logics of metaphor and metonymy. The Tiresian shift of the paternal into maternal, while responding to larger symbolic changes, also tries to compensate for recent acknowledgments that gender might not be binary. In other words, when the stable poles of gender seem to blur, the idea of the father stabilizes that blurring by moving with it so that

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instead of having blurred and non-binary gender, the binary categories simply expand. The move of the father to include the site of the mother accompanies the reification of conventional gender dualities on the level of genetic activity. In the face of the increasing genetic recognition of the non-binary nature of gender itself (humanity contains multiple genders rather than merely two), certain traditional gender traits are being ratified as genetic in origin (females are genetically nurturing, males genetically aggressive).42 Despite or because of the binary (or double binary) nature of DNA and the binariness of digital codes, gender becomes less binary and more varietal, but also less an effect of culture and nurture and more an effect of genes. While the definition of genetic qualities through recourse to traditional notions of gender partly combats gender blurring, the very terms of the genetic gender discussion represent the sneaky reintroduction of gender stereotypes as the very basis for establishing genetic gender categories and traits in the first place. In other words, scientists look for and interpret correlations between behavior and genes based on behaviors already traditionally associated with certain genders in patriarchal cultures. With the potential loss of binary gender, traditional notions of gender and patriarchy reenter as the conceptual foundation for the kinds of questions posed about gender and genetics, protected by the gloss of the genes themselves as incorruptibly objective sources of gender truth. Both property and gender seem to reiterate, then, some compensatory extension of metaphor, playing the conventional against systems of variety and dynamism that no longer fit. This does not mean, however, that this metaphorical imperative will prevail forever. Already it is undercut by the very systems – information, chaos, string theory – over which it might try to establish conceptual hegemony. Keller, for example, points to the way the metaphor of information has enticed genetic research away from the simple cause/effect structures that dominated scientific epistemologies (pp. 79–118). Because information ultimately escapes the textual, it may represent a metaphor that veers away from the metaphorical logic and proprietary possibilities offered by textual metaphors. But it does this at the same time that notions of property are extended to include information itself. The shift of logics is very slow. It may also be the case the genes are the vector by which the transformation from the realm of metaphor into the realm of metonymy is accomplished while keeping in place redefined but still operative notions of paternity and law. Whereas previously in patriarchal culture children were their father’s text in the sense that they were socially identified by means of his name, with DNA and genes both parents become texts and texts parents. The social functions fulfilled by familial alliances are being supplanted by a sense of the truer script offered by DNA. While ‘blood’ has traditionally been a motivation for alliance, DNA both underwrites and exceeds those alliances in so far as DNA information becomes the site of truth about both individuals and their parentage.

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This may partly account for the unravelling of the necessary fictions around adoption. The emotional and social ties developed through nurture compete against the ‘fact’ offered by DNA, both in terms of identity and in explanations of behavior. Studies of separated identical twins, for example, have shown that despite environment, twins will act in uncannily similar ways. What prevails is the text – which supplants the parent in favor of truth on the one hand and property on the other. If the text outweighs the parent in symbolic value, how long will the notion of parent last? When do father and mother become a conglomeration of corporate entities with interests in the myriad strands of our genes? At what point will the forms of organization and responsibility whose ideal still governs western culture be replaced by either the more cooperative and free-flowing dynamic represented by our understandings of information or the repressive competitiveness of the Chicago gangster corporate oligarchy? Postscript: Big Time Real Estate As I finish this essay, the following news item appears: Race to Announce Draft of Genome Map Nears Finish … Regardless of which group [public or private] wins, the achievement will be a scientific milestone akin to the discovery of the smallpox vaccine and penicillin or the unraveling of the structure of DNA. It will change society, revolutionize medicine and alter the ways diseases are detected and treated. ‘It’s like putting a man on the moon for biologists,’ Dr Steve Russell, of the department of genetics at Cambridge University, told Reuters. The achievement is so astounding, said Dr Peter Little, of Imperial College in London, that 10 years ago scientists didn’t dream it was possible. He compared it to Christopher Columbus arriving in America. ‘It was an exciting moment but actually the world didn’t change. But now when you look at who is living and working in America you realize the importance of what had been discovered,’ he said. Discovering Another New World Now that scientists have mapped most of the new world of human genes, the next step is to figure out what the three billion letters that make up DNA mean. ‘If we can understand it, which is very difficult to do, inside that DNA sequence is the parts list for the human being. It’s all of the proteins that make us,’ said Little. Although the list is immensely important the real biological challenge is understanding how all the bits go together to make a human being. ‘Just because you have the parts doesn’t mean you know how to make a car,’ said Little. (Reuters, June 24, 2000)

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And on 26 June, the following: ‘We have discovered the human alphabet – what we now have to do is put the letters in the right order and make a sentence. Only when all that is done shall we have the book of life to read,’ said Dr John Toy, the Medical Director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in Britain.43 Letters, alphabets, sentences, parts lists, cars, the book of life, the new world, the moon: textuality meets property in a most overt form. I rest my case.

Notes 1

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Such metaphors are fairly pervasive. Stephen Dawkins is responsible for the Chicago Gangster in The Selfish Gene and Matt Ridley for the analogy of the autobiography in Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. The Web page titled ‘Gene Map 99’ heads its discussion of genetic mapping with the title ‘The Book of Life’ (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genemap99/). At the celebratory interviews following gene map completion, James Watson comments, ‘The human genome is our genetic instructions and it’s as if we have a series of books that provide instructions for human life’ (‘“Book of Life” Release Party’, CBS News Online, 27 June 2000). The Human Genome has become somewhat synonymous for DNA (and vice versa) in mass media, even though most important work on DNA has been done on other species and even though the human genome has very few ‘genes’ that are exclusively human. Because DNA and genes use the same metaphors, I will use the terms more or less interchangeably even though they are not quite the same thing. DNA refers to the nucleic acid structure of which genes are comprised, but not all DNA is a gene. This distinction between DNA and genes does become important when considering the problems of patents. Evelyn Fox Keller credits Erwin Schrödinger with having used the first informational metaphor for DNA in 1944. This was before Watson and Crick had discerned DNA’s structure, but not before scientists had imagined the functioning of a replicator. See Schrödinger, What Is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 21 and Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 19. DNA can be enzymatically cut and spliced to rearrange its elements, add viral markers or exogamous elements. The process is more analogous to film editing than writing, but even film is not a very accurate analogy. The human genome contains many genes (approximately 97 per cent) that do not express, but which do occur in other species. Refiguring Life, p. 11. Lewontin notes that ‘DNA is a dead molecule, among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the world …. [It] has no power to reproduce itself …. While it is often said that DNA produces proteins, in fact proteins (enzymes) produce DNA. The newly manufactured DNA is certainly a copy of the old, … but we do not describe the Eastman Kodak factory as a place of self-reproduction [of photographs]. Not only is DNA incapable of making copies of itself, … but it is incapable of “making” anything else either’ (cited in Keller, p. 23). See also Richard Lewontin’s critique of genetic research in Biology As Ideology (New York: Harper, 1991). Ridley, Genome, p. 6.

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Keller observes a shift from agenic metaphors that characterized earlier DNAinfluenced genetic studies and more recent information/cybernetic metaphors that shift again how scientists regard the relation between gene and organism. For the purposes of this essay, however, both the agenic metaphors (treated below) and the informational ones are different versions of similar textual metaphors that still understand DNA as a signifier. I group these together not to occlude the inflections these metaphors bring to the development of thinking about DNA, but to show how on a deeper level, they are all a similar response to the same anxiety. The shift from language to information roughly replays the differences between modernism and postmodernism. Keller, Refiguring Life, p. 94. The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 28. Conference paper given by Peter Stallybrass in 1999 at Indiana. Pangenesis was one theory for how it was that parental gametes carried the genetic material for the whole body. The idea was that before reproduction, little particles from each kind of cell traveled to the reproductive cells and lodged there to be present at the making of the new being. The terms ‘genealogy’ and ‘genetic’ long pre-existed the term ‘gene’, genealogy emerging in the fourteenth century referring to a family line and genetics appearing in the nineteenth century as an adjective referring to origin, or, as Charles Darwin employed it, meaning to have a common origin. ‘Gene’ simply becomes the basic lexical unit underwriting notions of heredity that had long existed. Schrödinger couches his entire discussion of genes in terms of heredity in What Is Life? In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud discerned condensation and displacement as the two logics through which dreams were organized. In his readings of Freud, Jacques Lacan adopted Roman Jakobson’s understandings of metaphor and metonymy to gloss Freud’s insight in linguistic terms. Jakobson saw metaphor and metonymy as two ‘poles’ of organization that were inter-related. The introduction of blood typing in 1900 began the process of identifying the father scientifically, though blood types only narrow the field slightly and worked more often to show who could not be the father rather than who was. Until DNA testing made the determination of paternity possible, the identity of a child’s father could only ever be circumstantial. The Law-of-the-Name-ofthe-Father, like any law, produces a physical relation by means of the word. In like manner, property law, for example, creates a relation between land and an individual where there is otherwise no necessary connection by means of a text. This is a gloss of Lacan’s idea of the Law-of-the-Name-of-the Father which pervades his work. See more specifically, Lacan’s ‘Les formations de l’inconscient’. In the context of her discussion of the information metaphor in gene discourse, Evelyn Fox Keller also arrives at the potency of metaphor as a persuasive figuration. She says, ‘Still, even while researchers in molecular biology and cyberscience displayed little interest in each other’s epistemological program, information – either as metaphor or as material (or technological) inscription – could not be contained. In the real world, there was no stopping the circulation of meaning, no cutting of what Lacan calls the circuit of language. In the 1960s, metaphor, not material exchange, provided the primary vehicle for this circulation. In other words, it was the metaphorical use of information – as it criss-crossed among these two sets of disciplines, their practitioners, and among their subjects – that provided the principal vector for the dissemination of meaning’ (Refiguring Life,

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pp. 103–4). This paper elaborates the ways that metaphor itself compensates even (or especially) in the realm of information science as a way to mask the chained and seemingly disorganized circulation of information, circulation itself being one of the prime metaphors. This is the case in many television documentaries about reproduction where gametes are endowed with intent and instinct (the little homunculus lives!). And the egg is a bumbling dominatrix who plays far too hard to get. Quoted in Fox Keller, Refiguring Life, p. 7 (her emphasis). See Ridley’s chapter on the x and y chromosomes entitled ‘Conflict’, Genome, pp. 107-21. The Selfish Gene, p. 45. The Selfish Gene, p. 2. Eugenics is another way humans attempt to control genetic action. We fear certain kinds of control, such as eugenics, while we favor other more illusory kinds, such as gene naming. The difference between trying to control which genes are retained and expressed and simply naming those that exist seems to embody the difference between hubris and good science. But eugenics and cloning at the level of our current knowledge consist in operating metonymical systems. These systems seem lawless and capable of doing great damage and are therefore subject to strict legal and ethical (metaphorical) supervisions, especially where humans are concerned. Most of us are not nearly so worried about the effects of corporate gene-splicing in our food crops such as practiced by Monsanto and others, though some are concerned about loosing non-natural genes (such as resistance to Roundup) into the environment. The potential for genetic control presented by the completion of the Human Genome Map raises fears about insurance companies practicing eugenics. Corporate stewardship of pieces of the genetic code combined with the general lack of knowledge, poor insurance regulation, and the pathetic state of health insurance in the United States does not present a very hopeful scenario for the future of medicine. While the impetus of HGP announcements about the map’s completion is the promise of a revolution in health care, the genetic conditions these future cures might alleviate may already be excepted from insurance coverage by carriers who have scrutinized their insureds’ genomes. If this is the case, the profit motive for the development of cures for congenital genetic disorders is undermined from the start. Only diseases that occur as a result of some genetic change (such as cancer) or that may be cured by the intervention of gene therapies would be profitable. This would push increasingly towards prenatal genetic screening and the practice of the kind of eugenics critics already fear. Fox Keller, Refiguring Life, p. 21. More recently some states have added maternity statutes parallel to paternity statutes, partly in response to a literal reading of the ERA, partly in response to changing familial systems. Seymour Benzer determined that fruit flies’ temporal rhythms, memories, intelligence, and romantic preferences are at least in part defined by genes. See Jonathan Weiner’s account in Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (New York: Knopf, 1999). ‘Antisocial Behavior, Executive Function Deficits May Be Linked’, Crime Times 6:2 (2000), p. 5, Crime Times, http://www.crimetimes.org/97c/w97cp5.htm. The Selfish Gene, p. 35. ‘Sequence Encoding the Myotonic Dystrophy Gene and Uses Thereof’, Patent Number 5955265, 21 September 1999. Inventor(s): Brook; J. David, West

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Bridgford GBX, Housman; David E., Newton, MA, Shaw; Duncan J., Banchory GBX, Harley; Helen G., Rhiwbina GBX, Johnson; Keith J., Glasgow GBX. For the full patent see ‘The DNA Patent Database’. 32 United States Patent Law was amended in 1999 to include specifically biotechnological products and to redefine what novelty might mean in a biotechnological context. The section on patentability now reads: ‘Section 103. Conditions for Patentability; non-obvious subject matter (a) A patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title [35 USC § 102], if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made. (b)(1) Notwithstanding subsection (a), and upon timely election by the applicant for patent to proceed under this subsection, a biotechnological process using or resulting in a composition of matter that is novel under section 102 [35 USC § 102 ] and nonobvious under subsection (a) of this section shall be considered nonobvious if – (A) claims to the process and the composition of matter are contained in either the same application for patent or in separate applications having the same effective filing date; and (B) the composition of matter, and the process at the time it was invented, were owned by the same person or subject to an obligation of assignment to the same person’ (emphasis added). 35 USC §103. 33 Dorothy Wertz defines what is in fact patented in ‘Gene Letter: Patenting DNA – A Primer’. Over 5,000 applications have been filed for United States patents on fragments of human DNA. So far, the Patent Office has granted over 1,500 patents. How is it possible to patent something that only God or nature can make? The answer is that it is not. Nothing can be patented in its natural state, including DNA in a human body. What is being patented is the process of discovering and isolating in the laboratory certain strings of DNA that were not obvious before. Only the DNA that exists in the laboratory can be patented, not the DNA in humans or animals. The patent covers only the process, not the in situ raw material. Someone else could still ‘discover’ this DNA using another method not covered by the patent, as long as they used their own database. (If they used the patent holder’s database, their ‘new’ method would fall under the original patent. Few researchers want to create a new database.) US law allows the patenting of whatever is discovered through a new method, along with the patenting of the method itself. (Not all countries permit this.) Hence the seeming paradox of patenting human DNA. 34 And hence HUGO’s concern over the proliferation of what are, practically speaking, gene patents. In ‘Life in Genetics – What’s Happening’, Dorothy Werth reports that ‘HUGO is asking the PTO to reject the estimated 20,000 patent applications currently pending that do not meet criteria for utility. They are also requesting the PTO rescind any non-qualifying patents already approved – including those based on computer predictions of utility. HUGO recently announced its opposition to the patenting of genetic discoveries with as yet unproven utility’. 35 ‘Human Genome Project Information’ website. The same site also makes available the following statement on the patenting of DNA sequences: ‘HUGO (The Human

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Genome Organisation) is worried that the patenting of partial and uncharacterized cDNA sequences will reward those who make routine discoveries but penalize those who determine biological function or application. Such an outcome would impede the development of diagnostics and therapeutics, which is clearly not in the public interest. HUGO is also dedicated to the early release of genome information, thus accelerating widespread investigation of functional aspects of genes. This statement explains our concerns’. HeLa cells were cultured from cells taken in 1951 from a cervical malignancy in a patient named Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African-American woman living in Baltimore. Unlike regular cells, cancer cells seem to be able to divide endlessly. HeLa cells are so prolific and aggressive that not only are they still reproducing, they often take over other cell cultures. Taking and culturing such cells without the patient’s knowledge or permission has spurred ethical discussions of such practices. The answer in the Lacks’ case has been to declare the cells independent single-celled organisms. See ‘The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks’ website. In the 1980 case, Diamond, Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks v. Chakrabarty 447 U.S. 303; 100 S. Ct. 2204, the Supreme Court determined that a live, humanmade micro-organism is patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101, giving wide scope to the term ‘composition of matter’ in the Patent statutes. Jeff Lyon and Peter Gorner, Altered Fates: Gene Therapy and the Retooling of Human Life (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 125. Altered Fates, p. 125. The public/corporate merger seems to have worked for the HGP which completed its ‘book of life’ in record time. However, future generations will quite literally pay the price for our having sold our genetic legacy to private interests. Property seems to require analogy in general as a way of extending the notion of land owned in fee simple to other kinds of ownership. I develop this argument at length in Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change (New York: Routledge, 1995). In addition to variations of the XX or XY karyotypes associated with the ‘normal’ development of anatomical gender difference, there are also a number of embryological and developmental processes that can alter either of these genotypes in their phenotypical expression. Thus, there may be a range of genders along and male/intersex/female continuum. See for example, Anne Fausto-Sterling, ‘The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough’, The Sciences March/April (1993): 20–24. Patricia Reaney, ‘Rough Draft of Human Genetic Code Completed’, .

Afterword Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth In a response to the unauthorized publication in 1650 of her work The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, Anne Bradstreet wrote The Author to Her Book.1 In this poem Bradstreet addresses her work, her poetry, as her child. She writes: Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth didst by my side remain, Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad, exposed to public view

(lines 1–4)

Bradstreet’s meditation on her work as ‘offspring’ and her mind as a kind of womb is by now to us a familiar trope. The apprehension she expresses about her ‘ill-formed’ offspring’s ‘exposure’ to the general public reflects the culture of production, writing, and reproduction. While her use of the birth metaphor marks her as a ‘descendent’ of various male authors such as Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, it is in some way also essentially different. This difference stems from the fact that Bradstreet was a woman, and one living a very different kind of life in America than either her male or female Puritan counterparts in England. Unlike the above male authors, with whose work she was most likely familiar, Bradstreet’s use of the birth metaphor might seem initially to us more apt or ‘natural’; the childbirth ritual was by and large the sole domain of women well into the seventeenth century, and Bradstreet was herself a mother of eight, so in some sense the metaphor can be read literally as well as symbolically. Further, her subject position as a Puritan woman, wife, mother, and author highlights for us the multiple narratives of selfhood no doubt running through early modern culture. However, her tactical use of the birth metaphor is an example of what Judith Rose refers to as a ‘re-appropriation’ of female procreative ability.2 In re-appropriating the childbirth trope, Bradstreet reveals certain reactionary reproductive interests. In this light, the poem is more than an affected apology or extended metaphor in which the author describes her at times ambivalent, diffident, but finally affectionate relationship to her own work as that between a mother and child. Rather, understanding the historical context of the textual birth paradigm in ‘The Author to Her Book’ gives us an opportunity to recognize the culture’s intricate relationship to reproduction in general, and to female creation in specific. This collection of essays, in drawing together gender studies and the history of the book, variously turns our attention to related disciplines and paradigms

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that broaden our understanding of the cultural production of texts as marketable ‘bodies’ as well as agents of social inscription and change in the late Middle Ages and early modern periods. As the essays in this collection also suggest, the links between procreation and authorship and printing have historically been expressed and formulated by men in response to a fear about and desire for women’s procreative potential and practice. We have seen these desires and apprehensions revealed in striking ways through a number of different cultural discourses where the production of early modern texts served as a substitute for the procreative act – from the language used to describe mechanical modes of production to dramatic form and poetical works. The implications of epistemic change springing from the advent of the printing press have been articulated generally throughout this volume, and we have seen the impact of reproductive desire and language on the portrayal and conception of mechanized book production. But just as the cultural notions of reproduction informed the language of literary and book production, so too the advent of the printing press had an impact on reproductive practice, not so much in terms of the medical philosophy, but rather in the ways in which male midwives and male physicians began to infiltrate a previously female ritual.3 While we have access to a number of sustained medical theories on reproduction from philosophers such as Aristotle and Galen, the rituals and practices of medieval and early modern childbirth are difficult to track due to the lack of traditional documentary evidence. In part because of this lack, childbirth and reproduction, even though interrelated to gender and sexuality, have been traditionally subsumed under these topics, or even ignored altogether. Drawing together social and medical history and literacy and literary studies to examine social practices and metaphorical representations of childbirth allows us to press harder and from a different vantage point on the practice of literary production as birth, the link between paternity and authorship, and the close cultural relationship between creation, procreation, and book production.4 Akin to Douglas Brooks’ idea of the ‘cultural unconscious’ in his Introduction, I would like to propose that many of the issues raised in this volume can be read under the rubric of a ‘reproductive unconscious’. The exploration of the reproductive unconscious begins with the central premise that medieval and early modern men and women had to negotiate a conflict between the ideological and material need of the culture for them to procreate, and the ideological injunction that they remain virginal and nonprocreative. This conflict was negotiated on a social level through instructional manuals, midwives, and gossips; obstetrical and gynecological manuals in particular directly addressed reproductive practices. However, in literary representations, parturition was repressed or distorted. Medieval and early modern men’s and women’s experiences and apprehensions of childbirth, and their difficulty expressing the experience, were in part a result of the conflicting

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discourses of virginity and procreation and the inherent physical dangers of childbirth. In formulating this, I have drawn upon Frederic Jameson’s notion of the ‘political unconscious’.5 In his chapter ‘On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act’, Jameson argues that texts mirror diachronic social struggles, particularly struggles between classes. The culture then ‘resolves’ these conflicts through literary discourses. I argue for the existence of a reproductive unconscious in the culture that is certainly not limited to, but emerges in particularly arresting ways in, medieval devotional texts that sought to teach virginity and prescribe enclosure. These texts mirror and seek to ‘resolve’ conflicts around the work of the potentially procreative body. The conflict and anxiety about reproduction and virginity, women’s sexual promiscuity, inheritance and paternity, and men’s general ongoing exclusion from the birth ‘plot’, extends into the era of the printing press. Here a chaste woman may be reproductive in the confines of early modern married chastity, but she is also expected to be ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’ in the creative sense. One of the areas where creative and procreative anxiety gets explicitly articulated is through the construction, distribution, and consumption of medical reproductive philosophy, particularly obstetrical and gynecological and midwifery manuals. Early modern obstetrical, gynecological, and midwifery manuals are one hinge by which the relationship between literary production and reproduction converge; they are a particularly fruitful location of inquiry because of their content – medical philosophy and practical advice for pregnant women and their midwives – and their marketing – they are at once touted as a comforting aid to women and as a revelatory doctrine of ‘women’s secrets’.6 The texts are designed both to supply knowledge to those women within the childbirth chamber, and to penetrate the chamber of women. Such is the case with the language and ideology surrounding the printing press. Thus, for a man to be both creative and procreative requires the reassertion of the reproductive power through literary and social expression, either through ersatz reproductive practices, or through medical philosophy that seeks to reveal, appropriate, and infiltrate female reproductive knowledge. We can think of men’s appropriation of childbirth and conception in literary texts and for literary production as another means of infiltrating female procreative power. Humoral theory in general delineated women’s temperaments as incompatible with intellectual productivity; they were too cold and moist (as opposed to the more perfect hot and dry man) to be creative. This, of course, is in the face of women’s obvious procreativity – her pregnant, fecund body that was the chosen metaphor for many a man’s creative process from the ancients and into the late seventeenth century. We have seen this more specifically in the medical philosophies of reproduction, particularly in the various conception theories in which women were said to provide the ‘matter’ and men the ‘form’.7 Galen

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illustrates clearly the understanding of the role of the female in procreation and creation as equally impotent when he writes of the role of women’s semen in conception: ‘the female semen is exceedingly weak and unable to advance to that state of motion in which it could impress an artistic form upon the fetus’.8 Medical and biological ‘observations’ and findings on reproduction upheld and legitimated the patriarchal social order, and biological observations were in turn explained through a patriarchal sociopolitical paradigm – they were mutually informed constructs.9 These theories in which we see gender in its social and historical contexts cannot finally address the experience or practice of the body in any real way. And it is in those moments of practice, simultaneously alluded to and elided, that we see the image of the female reproductive body in childbirth practice in resistance to male production. If we turn back for a moment to Bradstreet’s The Author to Her Book, we can see how her poem is more than a reaction and response to her self as female author: If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none; And for thy mother, she alas is poor, Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

(lines 22–4)

Historically speaking, the ‘ill-formed’ qualities of the offspring as seen in line 1 were generally seen as a result of the mother’s natural imperfections. But in the last few lines we see Bradstreet create a kind of autonomy for herself in which she provides both the form and the matter. The book/child, instead of having no mother, has no father. While the lack of a father here would seem to result in the equally adulterated form of a ‘bastard’, it also flips the paradigm of textual birth to the woman and evokes the idea of a virgin birth. This reappropriation allows Bradstreet to claim her position within a market economy – she transcends the cultural limitations of biological production through the means of literary reproduction. Traditionally we have seen the medieval and early modern understanding of reproductive biology as nascent and distant from our own. We also see our understanding of biological reproduction as essentially disengaged from textual production and as having advanced from anxieties and desires around the female procreative body. Yet the past continues to be mirrored in our own present. As in the past, our culture’s conception of the reproductive process is rooted in the metaphors used to describe that process. The needs that produce the language used to describe reproduction have remained relatively constant, even into the twenty-first century. In her 1997 essay ‘The Egg and the Sperm’, Emily Martin examines the ways scientific and popular accounts of fertilization rely upon and are embedded within ‘stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female’.10

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These consist of various cultural stereotypes of men’s relationships to women, including metaphors of war to describe the sperm’s ‘journey’ to the egg, and describing the egg in terms of its cunning ability to ensnare the sperm. In the course of supplying numerous examples of misogynistic metaphors used in biology textbooks, Martin reveals the inherent dangers formed by this same language and imagery. The danger that Martin sees in using stereotypical gendered imagery is that it might foster the idea that the process of fertilization ‘is a result of deliberate “human” action at the cellular level’, an idea which would have a profound impact on cultural behaviors related to infertility, abortion, surrogacy, and cloning, as well as other technological areas related to reproduction.11 It seems, too, that our own reproductive unconscious can be seen in numerous locations in our everyday culture, in biology textbooks, in copyright law, in BBC productions such as ‘The Secret of Sex’, in national debates over stem cell research, and in discourses of fertility treatment and genetic engineering. The reproductive unconscious is most transparent in film and fiction. The recent George Lucas film, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, provides a telling example of the continued struggle of the culture to ‘resolve’ its fears and desires about the female reproductive body. This episode has parallel storylines, one in which motherhood is vexed, and one in which it is elided. One story involves Anakin Skywalker’s search and rescue of his mother, Shmi. This narrative resonates with the medieval and early modern desire for women to be simultaneously chaste and fruitful. As a kind of post-modern Virgin Mary, Shmi represents the impossible fulfillment of this desire in her seemingly ‘virgin’ birth of Anakin.12 The other storyline has Obi-Wan Kenobi in search of the individual who has masterminded and bankrolled the developing clone army on the planet Kamino. This clone army is created from a single male individual, Jango Fett. While the mass production of clones includes alteration of their genetic code to make them more obedient and submissive, Jango Fett has his own unaltered clone, his ‘son’, Boba Fett. The notion of a clone army formed from the genes of one man, thereby eliding the need for a mother, evokes the idea of the male appropriation of the birth metaphor. It is also analogous to the printing process. The Star Wars saga reaffirms that while it appears our conscious understanding and representation of reproduction has become more complicated, in certain respects our unconscious – and the fears and desires that shape it – has not. Wherever possible, we must continue to interrogate our reproductive history and the continuing construction of our reproductive selves. Collections such as this one give us such opportunities. The authors in this book have used multidisciplinary means to think about textual history and production, and the reproductive metaphors with which they are so closely aligned, to help us understand the recesses of the past and also the present.

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7

8 9

The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America was published in London in 1650 by Stephen Bowtell at the behest of Bradstreet’s brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge. He apparently brought Bradstreet’s manuscript to England from America, and without her consent. ‘The Author to Her Book’ was published posthumously in 1678 in Several Poems Compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight. Boston: John Foster, 1678. See Judith Rose, ‘“The First Fruits of a Woman’s Writ”: Re-appropriation of the Metaphor of Conception by Early Modern Women’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1998). For further discussion of this phenomenon see ‘“I wyl wright of women prevy sekenes”: Female Textual and Birth Communities and the History of Women’s Medical Texts’ in my book The Reproductive Unconscious in Medieval and Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2002). While I do not make an explicit connection to the impact of the printing press on reproductive practice, I discuss the ways in which the printed text became a means to infiltrate female textual and birth communities. See for example Margaret Ferguson’s Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern France and England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See also Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, eds Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 75, 95. Also see in particular pp. 81–3. I also take this term ‘reproductive unconscious’ from Patricia Yaeger’s essay ‘The Poetics of Birth’, Discourses of Sexuality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 262–96. In this essay, Yaeger is interested in the problem of ‘renarrating birth’ as a ‘central preoccupation of Anglo-American literature’; her interest in the reproductive unconscious is more purely Marxist, and concerned, of course, with the nineteenth century production value of labor in childbirth, and the divisions of productive and reproductive labor (p. 287). See for example Eucharius Rösslin, Der schwanngeren Frawen und Hebammen Rosegarten (1526), or Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives. Translated by Wendy Arons as When Midwifery Became the Male Physician’s Province: The Sixteenth Century Handbook: Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1994), and Thomas Bentley, The Monument of Matrones (London, 1582). Aristotle and Galen differed on the way a woman contributed matter. While Galen argued that the female produced semen, Aristotle argued that the female produced no semen at all. Rather, her material contribution was in the form of impure menstrual blood. See, Aristotle, De generatione animalium: On the Generation of Animals, with an English translation by A.L. Peck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), I, pp. 725a11–728b22. Cladius Galen, Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, translated from the Greek with an Introduction and Commentary by Margaret Tallmade May, 2 vols (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 633. For a discussion of the epistemological and political construction and interpretation of sex, see Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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10 Emily Martin, ‘The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles’, Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life, eds Louise Lamphere, Helena Ragone, Patricia Zarella (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 85. See also Bonnie Spanier’s book Im/partial Science: Gender Ideology in Molecular Biology for a scientific and feminist analysis of how the culture’s beliefs about class, race, and gender shape scientific discourse. 11 Martin, ‘Egg’, pp. 94–5. 12 Shmi explains in Episode I that she became pregnant mysteriously, and that Anakin has no biological father. In Star Wars Episode II, Anakin is plagued by nightmares about his mother, whom he has not seen in a decade. He senses she is in terrible pain, and this leads him back to his home planet of Tatooine where he finds her held captive by Tusken Raiders – stealthy, fully cloaked, Sand People. Anakin fails to rescue her alive – she dies within moments of his reaching her. We see here played out the narrative of the Virgin Mary, the desire for a special, almost Oedipal, kinship with the mother, and the fear of the reproductive female body that is outcast and punished.

C\ Taylor & Francis ~

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http://taylora ndfra n ci s.com

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Walker, Alice (1951), ‘The Textual Problem of Hamlet: A Reconsideration’, Review of English Studies 2: 328–38. Walker, Alice (1952), ‘Miscellaneous Notes on King Lear – the 1608 Quarto’, MLR 47: 376–8. Walker, Alice (1952), Review of Richard David (ed.), Love’s Labour’s Lost, Review of English Studies 3: 380–86. Walker, Alice (1953), Review of Harold Jenkins, ‘The Tragedy of Hoffman’, Review of English Studies 4: 168–9. Walker, Alice (1953), Textual Problems of the First Folio, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Walker, Alice (1955), ‘Compositor Determination and Other Problems in Shakespearian Texts’, Studies in Bibliography 7: 3–15. Walker, Alice (1955), Review of J C. Maxwell (ed.), Titus Andronicus, Review of English Studies 6: 80–2. Walker, Alice (1955) Review of J.H. Walter (ed.), Henry 5, Review of English Studies 6: 308–10. Walker, Alice (1955), Review of M.R. Ridley (ed.), Antony and Cleopatra, Review of English Studies 6: 415–17. Walker, Alice (1956), ‘Some Editorial Principles (with Special Reference to Henry V)’, Studies in Bibliography 8: 95–111. Walker, Alice (1957), ‘Principles of Annotation: Some Suggestions for Editors of Shakespeare’, Studies in Bibliography 9: 95–105. Walker, Alice (1958), ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’, Review of English Studies 9: 173. Walker, Alice (1958), Review of Allardyce Nicoll (ed.), Shakespeare Survey 8, Review of English Studies 8: 63–4. Walker, Alice (1958), ‘Review of Allardyce Nicoll’, Shakespeare Survey 9, Review of English Studies 9: 318–19. Walker, Alice (1958), Review of Peter Ure (ed.), Richard III, Review of English Studies 9: 193–5. Walker, Alice (1958), Review of T.S. Dorsch (ed.), Julius Caesar, Review of English Studies 9: 71–2. Walker, Alice (1959), Review of W.W. Greg (ed.), Society Collections, Review of English Studies 10: 83–4. Walker, Alice (1960), ‘Edward Capell and his Edition of Shakespeare’, Proceedings of the British Academy 44: 131–45. Walker, Alice (1960), Review of John Munro, The London Shakespeare, Review of English Studies 11: 78–80. Walker, Alice (1962), Review of Vinton Dearing, Manual of Textual Analysis, Review of English Studies 13: 99. Walker, Alice (1964), ‘The Shifting Text’, Times Literary Supplement 23: 355.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations; ns indicates chapter notes; passim refers to numerous scattered mentions within page range. Abbott, George 293, 298, 299, 300 absolutism 309–10 abuse pamphlets 173–4 see also pamphlets/pamphleteers advertising see front matter almanacs/calendars 238–42, 243–5 red ink 239–40, 244, 255 anatomical prints 7–8, 240–42 Buckminster’s almanac 241 Estienne 40, 41 monstrous births 222–4, 228–9 Tory 49 Vesalius 45, 164, 243–5 anger is hot metaphor 69–70 annotation/annotators 332–4 anthropology and biological paternity 12, 13 anthropomorphism genetic metaphors 379 letters/typebodies 44, 47, 48, 49 Aristotle 30–31, 33, 35, 39, 54ns, 98, 228, 357 authorship female 395, 398 intellectual property 351–2, 363 Jonson and the psychodynamics of 131–42, 142–7ns notions of 357–9, 362–3, 365, 366 Baby M case (Sterns v. Whitehead) 353, 355–6, 362, 366 Bacon, Francis 95 Baker, Humphrey 244 Barbour, Richmond 119 Barthes, Roland 131 Barton, Ann 115, 137 Bass, Alan 14 bastard art see woodcuts bastard texts 209–10 pamphlets as 173–4, 177, 178, 183, 185 printed broadsides as 230, 231 bastardy/illegitimacy 7, 42, 116 and counterfeiting 35, 76, 80–81

Behrendt, Stephen 164 Belsito v. Clark 364 biological and intellectual conception 355, 356–8 biological paternity 11–13 Birkerts, Sven 4 birth see childbirth birthing-place Dolce 51 and printing-house 47–52 Blennerhasset, Thomas 279 blood ink metaphor 237, 238, 239, 244 and murder 246–50 blood-letting 240, 241 ‘cultural bloodletting’ 255 bodily and mental interior 97 Bodley, Sir Thomas 238–9 body cultural status of 255–6 male and female 242–3 see also female body; mind, and body body fluids 240, 241 and paper 238, 245 body parts 240–42 Bolusset, Philippe 13–14 book illustration see woodcuts book metaphors 60–65, 67–8, 77, 79, 83n, 357–8 Bradstreet, Anne 395, 398 branding with ink 123–4, 125–6 Brewer, Thomas: The Bloudy Mother (Brewer) 246–50, 251 title page 249 broadside ballads 221–33, 234–6ns Bruster, Douglas 7 bubonic plague 132, 134 Buckminster’s almanac 241, 242 calendars see almanacs/calendars California Uniform Parentage Act (1975) 353–4

430

PRINTING AND PARENTING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Carey, John 104 Carlino, Andrea 7 Catholicism and Protestantism 309–10 causality and genes 380–81 Caxton, William 151, 153 censorship 226, 292–3, 297–9 Chapman: Byron’s Conspiracy 62 childbirth metaphor 91–3, 97, 98–9, 174–5, 395 monstrous birth broadsides 221–5, 226–33 ‘reproductive unconscious’ 396–9 textual 209–12, 218–19ns unnatural 177 child(ren) of Alice Walker 342–5 book metaphor 357–8 infanticide 246–50 Jonson: death of son 111–13, 127–8ns, 132–42, 142–7ns textual imprints as 34–6, 209–10 Christianity 138, 253–4 licensing of printed materials 225–6 monstrous births 228, 229, 230 see also Protestantism class and bubonic plague 132 and monstrous birth broadsides 227, 232, 233 Clifford, Lady Anne A Mirror for Magistrates margin notes 267–89, 269–74, 276–8, 280–83, 285–7 title page 268 biographical details 268–9, 285–8 Clifford, Lord George 268, 269 codex sapiens (genetics/DNA) 373–80, 390–92ns Cognet, Martin 95 coins/coining 38–9, 42 counterfeit 35, 76, 80–81 metaphor 80, 82–3 and wax 75–81, 84–5ns Coke, Sir Edward 314 Colie, Rosalie 198 compositors, identification of 329–31, 332, 333–4, 335–6 computer/digital technology 4, 15–16 Comus (Milton) 99–106, 108ns

conception 33–4, 39, 40, 41 biological and intellectual 355, 356–8 and signet/wax apparatus 32, 33, 35, 36 Copland, Robert 202–4 copyright 356, 358, 363, 384–5 counterfeiting and illegitimacy 35, 76, 80–81 and sodomitic sex 38–9 Cowell, John 315–16 Cressy, David 109 cultural status of body 255–6 Danson, Lawrence 116 Davidson, Donald 59, 65–70, 72, 73, 74, 83 Dawkins, Richard 373, 374, 379, 381 Day, John 208, 226 de Beauvais, V. 153 de Bury, Richard 5, 9 de Grazia, Margreta 3, 10, 17, 209, 212 and Stallybrass, P. 161, 237–8 death of son 318 Jonson 111–13, 127–8ns, 132–42, 142–7ns Dekker, Thomas: The Whore of Babylon 251–3, 254–5, 256–7 title page 252 Descartes, René 29–30, 31–2, 33–4, 53ns, 54ns, 55ns digital/computer technology 4, 15–16 disparity in parental status 13–14 divorce 293, 297, 298, 299–300 DNA see genetics/DNA Dolce, L. 51 Donne, John 97, 304–5, 306, 319–20ns Dutton, Richard 114 Eagleton, Terry 159 editors 331–2, 333, 334, 335 effeminacy 175–7, 178, 184–5, 188 Elizabeth I 94–5, 132, 226, 253 engravings 152, 154–7, 159–60 errors 202–6, 216–17ns, 289, 335 Estienne, C. 40, 41 eyes are margins metaphor 63–5 faces are books metaphor 77, 79 see also people are books metaphor

INDEX

431

fatherhood/paternity biological 11–13 DNA 376–7, 386–8 moveable type of 111–13, 127–8ns Sejanus (Jonson) 111, 113–15, 121, 128–9ns Volpone (Jonson) 110, 111, 115–25, 129–30ns writing as symbolic 141–2 Febvre, Lucien 3 Feltham, Owen 204–5, 208 female body bleeding/leaking 242, 243, 250–51 imprinting metaphors 37–8, 39–42 male Renaissance poets and 89–106, 106–8ns Volpone (Jonson) 117–20, 124–5 see also womb; women Finch, Heneage 306, 307–8, 311 Findlay, Alison 7 Fish, Stanley 205 Florio, John see Montaigne, Michel (John Florio) foetus see conception; womb foreign texts, translations of 199–201, 214–16ns Foucault, Michel 131, 362–3, 366 Fraunce, Abraham 202 Freud, Sigmund 14–15, 137 front matter 197–9, 212–14ns foreign texts 199–201, 214–16ns lewd textual relationships 206–8, 217–18ns metaphors of inaccuracy 202–6, 216–17ns red ink 254–5, 256, 257 textual births 209–12, 218–19ns

Harington, Sir John 154–5, 156, 158–60 Hartouni, Valerie 362 Harvey, Gabriel 174, 175, 176, 177, 181–5, 186, 187–90 Harvey, Richard 174–5 Harvey, William 11 Henry, Prince (son of James I) 310, 313, 316, 317–18 Henry VIII 225 Heywood, Thomas: A Woman Killed with Kindness 61, 62 hidden space, female body 95–6, 101 Higgins, John 279–84 High Commission (1621) 293, 297–8, 299 Hill, John Lawrence 356 Hill’s almanac 240 Hoby, Thomas 201, 202 Hodnett, Edward 163 Holinshed, R. 163–4, 165–6, 167 Holland, Henry 199 homo ludens (genetics/DNA) 380–89, 392–4ns homoeroticism/sodomy 38–9, 183–4, 185, 188

Galen 90, 94, 98, 397–8 Garber, Marjorie 7 Gaskell, Philip 16–17 gender authorship and motherhood 358–9 and genetics 387–8 nature of printing-house 47–52 genetics/DNA 371–2, 390ns big time real estate 389–90, 394n codex sapiens 373–80, 390–92ns homo ludens 380–89, 392–4ns of imprints 32–4, 54–5ns

identity and genes 382–3 male 93, 137–8 illegitimacy see bastardy/illegitimacy imagery 59–60, 63, 83ns impregnation 37–8 impress of law 37 imprints genetics/DNA of 32–4, 54–5ns mechanics of 42–53, 56–8ns metaphorics of 34–42, 55–6ns metaphysics of 29–32, 53–4ns

metaphor of textuality 356, 371–2, 373–5, 376–80, 383, 388–9 vs. gestation 353–4, 359–62, 363–5 Gerson, Jean 5 Gifford, George 256 Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S. 89, 90 Gold, E. Richard 386 Goldstein, Paul 363, 365 Greg, W.W. 327–8, 334, 336–7, 338, 342, 343 Guillemeau, Jacques 94 Gutenberg, Johann 44, 46

432

PRINTING AND PARENTING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

inaccuracy see errors infanticide 246–50 ink branding with 123–4, 125–6 see also red ink inside and outside, female body 94–5 intellectual and biological conception 355, 356–8 intellectual property 351–2, 354–5 copyright 356, 358, 363, 384–5 DNA patents 383–7 intentionality, as test for parenthood 355–6, 364 Iser, Wolfgang 211–12

law, impress of 37 learning and conception 36 Legros, L.A. and Grant, J.C. 48 letters/typebodies 44, 47, 48, 49 licensing of printed materials 225–6 likeness and printing 70–75, 84–5ns lineage 7–8, 109–10, 116, 120–21, 125, 139 literary critics/criticism 340–41 literary origins 328–9 Lodge, Thomas 328–9 Luther, Martin 228, 229 Lynch, Richard 200 Lyon, J. and Gorner, P. 386

James (VI of Scotland, I of England) marriage to Spanish princess 298–9, 303 relationship with subjects 295–6, 298–9 royal power 303–4, 305–18 succession 132 Jay, Nancy 10 Johannsen, W. 374 Johnson v. Calvert 352–5, 358–62, 366 Jonson, Ben 89–90, 95, 97, 131–2 death of son 111–13, 127–8ns, 132–42, 142–7ns patriarchal power of Kings 308 Sejanus 111, 113–15, 121, 128–9ns Volpone 110, 111, 115–25, 129–30ns Jorden, Edward 250

McDonald, Christine V. 17 McDonald v. McDonald 363–4 McEachern, Clare 253 McKerron, R.B. 327–8, 332, 336, 342–3 male(s) body and female body 242–3 identity 93, 137–8 Renaissance poets and female body 89–106, 106–8ns Malinowski, Bronislaw 12 margin notes see Clifford, Lady Anne margins eyes are margins metaphor 63–5 paratexts 211 Marotti, Arthur 202 and Bristol, M.D. 5 marriage 291, 294–5, 296–7 Ancient Greece 10 and divorce 293, 297, 298, 299–300 James (VI of Scotland, I of England) 298–9, 303 Marston, John: The Insatiate Countess 61 Martin, Emily 398–9 Marx, Karl 232, 233 Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff 12–13 matrix 17 and patrix 44, 46 The Matrix (film) 16–17 Maus, Katharine Eisaman 246 mechanics of imprints 42–53, 56–8ns metaphors blood and ink 237, 238, 239, 244 book 60–65, 67–8, 77, 79, 83n, 357–8 childbirth 91–3, 97, 98–9, 174–5, 395

Kastan, David Scott 15–16 Kay, David 112–13 Keller, Evelyn Fox 379–80, 388 Kennard, Joyce 354–5, 358, 359, 361, 364, 365, 366 King–subjects relationship 294–6, 298–9 Kittler, Friedrich A. 14 Knibiehler, Yvonne 13 Krier, Theresa 100 Kyd, Thomas 237 Lacan, Jaques 1, 137, 142 Landau, D. and Parshall, P. 154, 157, 158, 166 Landes, E.M. and Posner, R.A. 365–6 Lando, Girolamo 298 Laqueur, Thomas 11, 242, 243, 244, 362

INDEX

coins/coining 80, 82–3 eyes are margins 63–5 genetics/DNA 356, 371–2, 373–5, 376–80, 383, 388–9 and imagery 59–60, 63, 83ns of imprints 34–42, 55–6ns of inaccuracy 202–6, 216–17ns and likeness 70–75, 84–5ns meaning of 65–70 New Bibliographical writings 336–7 prostitution 4–5 and representation 375–6 reproductive 43–4, 56–7ns, 70–73, 89ns, 288–9 sexist 81–3, 86ns sexual 37–8, 73–5, 76, 206–8, 217–18ns translations 199–201 wax 30–32, 34, 38, 39–40, 78–9, 83 metaphysics of imprints 29–32, 53–4ns metonymy 375–6, 377, 378, 380–81, 387, 388 midwifery 32–3, 47–52, 91, 99, 190, 209 Miller, John W. 13 Miller, N.J. 9 Milton, John 91, 92–3, 96, 99–106, 108ns, 205 mind and body gendering of opposition 358 Milton’s Comus 99–106, 108ns wax metaphor 30–32, 34, 38 and womb 93–4, 357 monstrous birth broadside ballads 221–5, 226–33 Montaigne, Michel (John Florio) 133, 140, 141, 200, 201, 246 Montrose, Louis 11, 246 Mossman, Carol 12, 13 motherhood and authorship 358–9 surrogate (Johnson v. Calvert) 352–5, 358–62, 366 moveable type 16–17, 44, 52, 157 of fatherhood 111–13, 127–8ns Moxon, Joseph 43, 44, 237, 238, 245, 255 Müller, Jan-Dirk 5 Munda, Constantia 173 mutability of wax 29

433

Nashe, Thomas 173, 176, 177, 180–85, 186, 187–90, 204, 209, 227 Nashe–Harvey controversy 177–90, 191–5ns Navarro, Huarte 98 Neville, Henry 93 New Bibliography/Bibliographers 327–8, 329, 334, 336–7, 341, 342–3, 344 New Historicists 198–9 Nidd, Gervase 293, 299 nothingness of print, Nashe-Harvey controversy 184–5, 194ns Novy, Marianne 110 oedipal allusion, Nashe-Harvey controversy 182–3 Orgel, Stephen 7 Ovid 102–3 pamphlets/pamphleteers 4–5, 173–5, 190–91ns Nashe-Harvey controversy 177–90, 191–5ns satirical 203 paper and body fluids 238, 245 paratexts 211 ‘paratextual induction’ 198, 199, 211–12 Paré, Ambroise 94, 99 Parker, Patricia 98 Parnassus plays 227 Parslow, Judge Richard N. 353, 359–60, 363 Paster, Gale 243, 250 patents, DNA 383–7 paternity see fatherhood/paternity patriarchy 77–8, 81–2 and Jacobean press censorship 292–3, 297–9 penis pen as 89 ‘penis envy’ 91 people are books metaphor 60–65, 67–8, 83n see also faces are books metaphor Pettie, George 206–7, 212 plagiarism 35 Plato 30, 32–3, 36, 53–4ns, 357, 365

434

PRINTING AND PARENTING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

plays and almanacs 238–9 Parnassus 227 see also Shakespeare, William poets, male, and female body 89–106, 106–8ns Pollard, A.W. 204, 327 Postman, Neil 4, 11 power, royal 303–4, 305–18 prefatory texts see front matter pregnant wits, male Renaissance poets 91–9, 107–8ns press metaphor 43–4, 73–5 and university, Nashe-Harvey controversy 180–84, 193–4ns ‘pricking’ 36–7 primitive accumulation 232, 233 print regulations 225–7, 234–5ns printing-houses compositor identification 329–31, 332, 335–6 gendered nature of 47–52 van der Straet 50 property rights see intellectual property prostitution pamphleteers 4–5, 183–4, 185 The Whore of Babylon (Dekker) 251–3, 254–5, 256–7 Protestantism 226, 253, 255, 295–6 and Catholicism 309–10 Prynne, William 227 psychoanalytical perspective 14–15, 137–8 punctuation, alteration vs emendation 332 puns 97, 98, 113, 124, 175, 201, 355 vs metaphor 74–5 Rabelais, François 17–18 rape 39–42, 79, 103–4, 208 The Rape of Lucrece (Shakespeare) 42, 62–3, 64, 79 Raworth family of printers 289 red ink almanacs/calendars 239–40, 244, 255 as blood 237, 238, 239, 244 The Bloudy Mother (Brewer) 246–50, 251

front matter 254–5, 256, 257 The Whore of Babylon (Dekker) 251–3, 254–5, 256–7 ‘red letter’ days 239 representation and metaphor 375–6 reproductive metaphors 43–4, 56–7ns, 70–73, 89ns, 288–9 see also sexual metaphors reproductive organs 43, 45, 47 ‘reproductive prints’ 157–8 reproductive technology 355–6 ‘reproductive unconscious’ 396–9 Riche, Barnaby 201, 207, 208 Ridley, Matt 371, 373, 380, 382 Riggs, David 132, 136–7 Roof, Judith 11, 12 Ross, J.F. 73, 74–5, 84–5n rubrication see red ink Sackville, Richard 274, 285–8 Sackville, Thomas 270, 274–5 Said, Edward 165 Sawday, Jonathan 7–8, 243 Scodel, Joshua 132, 134–5, 140 Scott, Sir Walter 59–60, 327 Sejanus (Jonson) 111, 113–15, 121, 128–9ns sexist metaphors 81–3, 86ns sexual metaphors 37–8, 73–5, 76, 206–8, 217–18ns see also reproductive metaphors Shakespeare, William 52–3, 204, 237–8, 329 All’s Well that Ends Well 335 Antony and Cleopatra 333 bastardy 7, 42, 76, 80–81 Coriolanus 37 Cymbeline 8–9, 35, 79–80 Hamlet 9, 38, 53, 61, 330, 336 Henry IV 36–7, 62, 327, 330 King John 61–2, 69–70 King Lear 42, 331, 332 Love’s Labours Lost 36, 63–4, 81, 90, 330, 332, 333, 357 Measure for Measure 37, 38, 70, 76, 77, 79, 80–81, 335 The Merchant of Venice 80–81, 330 The Merry Wives of Windsor 36, 73–4, 335

INDEX

metaphors 11, 61–5, 67–83 passim A Midsummer Night’s Dream 8, 35, 77–8 Much Ado About Nothing 70, 330 Othello 70 punctuation, alteration vs emendation 332 The Rape of Lucrece 42, 62–3, 64, 79 Romeo and Juliet 63–5, 67–8, 330 Sonnets 35, 110 spelling 330, 331, 332, 333, 334–5, 336 The Taming of the Shrew 8, 37–8, 72 The Tempest 37, 231 Titus Andronicus 35, 39, 331, 335 Troilus and Cressida 74–5 Twelfth Night 39–42, 61, 79 Venus and Adonis 75, 78 The Winter’s Tale 8, 42, 71–3, 110, 231, 232 Shultz, Marjorie Maguire 355–6, 359 Sidney, Philip 92, 95, 97, 110, 175, 210–11, 212 signet/wax apparatus and conception 32, 33, 35, 36 printing-house and birthing-place 47–52 see also wax sin, monstrous births as embodiment of 230, 232, 233 social class see class Socrates 30, 32–3, 91–2, 93 sodomy/homoeroticism 38–9, 183–4, 185, 188 souls, transmigration of 117 sovereignty of textuality 304, 313 spelling, Shakespeare texts 330, 331, 332, 333, 334–5, 336 Spenser, Edmund 96, 100, 110, 134, 140 Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (film) 399 Stationers’ Company 225–7, 231, 233 Stone, Lawrence 109–10 students 332–4 Stumpf, Andrea E. 355 surrogacy contract status 353, 354–5 surrogate motherhood (Johnson v. Calvert) 352–5, 358–62, 366 Swetnam, Joseph 94, 101, 173, 174

435

Technology Transfer Act (1986) 386 textual analysis see Walker, Alice theatre critics/criticism 341–2 Thompson, A. and Thompson, J.O. 8, 9–10 title pages 249, 252, 268 see also front matter Tory, C. 49 translations of foreign texts 199–201, 214–16ns transmigration of souls 117 ‘trauma’ of masculine identity 137–8 Trithemius, Johannes 6 Turner, James 103 Tyburn ‘T’ brand 111, 123–4, 136 type anthropomorphism 44, 47, 48, 49 ‘Queen Elizabeth’s types’ 226 see also moveable type typewriters, invention of 14, 15 university, Nashe-Harvey controversy 178, 179, 180–84, 193–4ns van den Berg, Sara 112 van der Straet, J. 50 Vesalius, A. 45, 164, 243–5 virginity 38, 39–42, 70, 100, 101–6 and procreation 396–7 Volpone (Jonson) 110, 111, 115–25, 129–30ns Walker, Alice 327–45, 345–50ns Wall, Wendy 5, 207–8, 291 Watkinson, William 275, 279 wax 29–32, 53ns and coins 75–81, 84–5ns and women 38, 39–40, 78–9, 83 see also signet/wax apparatus wealth and lineage 116, 120–21 Webbe, William 175 Webster: The Duchess of Malfi 61 Weiman, Robert 2 Whateley, William: A bride-bush 291, 293–5, 296–8, 299–300 Williams, Gordon 5 Wilson, Richard 8 womb 17, 39, 40, 41, 93–4, 95–6, 98, 357 ‘womb envy’ 91

436

PRINTING AND PARENTING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

women authors 395, 398 complexions 77 exclusion from print-houses 47 and patriarchy 77–8, 81–2 wax metaphor 38, 39–40, 78–9, 83 see also female body woodcuts 151–66, 168–72ns de Beauvais 153

Harington 154–5, 156, 158–60 Harvey: Thomas Nashe 176 Holinshed 163–4, 165–6, 167 Nashe: Gabriel Harvey 186 see also anatomical prints Wright, Thomas 98 writing as symbolic fatherhood 141–2 Zwicker, S. and Hirst, D. 110