Shakespeare, Othello and Domestic Tragedy 9781472555465, 9781441194701, 9781472508874

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To my parents, Darwin and Carole

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank those who read and responded to portions of the manuscript: my University of Dubuque colleagues Jonathan Barz, Nathan Faries, Jessica Schreyer, and the anonymous outside reviewers. I also received important philosophic pointers from Shawn Floyd. I am grateful to David Avital, the senior commissioning editor at Continuum who guided the manuscript expeditiously to publication. I also would not have been able to complete the research for this book without the assistance of various librarians: Mary Anne Knefel and her staff at the Charles C. Myers Library, particularly Jaimie Shaffer, Meris Muminovic, and Sue Reiter. I appreciate the professionalism with which they accommodated my many requests. Bob Klein and Heidi Petit of the Karl G. Schroeder Special Collections Room at Loras College allowed me generous access to their editions of Holinshed’s Chronicles and other early books in their splendid collection. John Rush and his staff at Emmaus Bible College graciously assisted me with their library’s repository of early biblical and theological manuscripts. I would be remiss, too, if I did not acknowledge the support of Mark Ward, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College at The University of Dubuque. By the time the book is published, portions of chapters one and five will have appeared as “Miraculous murders: Othello and domestic tragedy” in the 2011 volume of Allegorica. I am grateful to David Murphy and Sara van den Berg, co-editors of this issue of the journal, for permission to use a revised version of the essay in the book. Although the book is almost unrecognizable from the dissertation I wrote over a decade ago, its inception lies in those pages, and I wish to thank the members of the committee who oversaw it: Donald

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Stump; Clarence Miller; and the late Thomas Moisan, who served, capably as ever, as dissertation director. Finally, none of my writing gets done without the love and support of my wife, Jennifer, and our two children, Derek and Gabi.

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Introduction: Shakespeare and the Domestic Tragedies

Around 1580, a distinct group of plays—domestic tragedies as they came to be known—began to appear in the new professional playhouses of London. The notoriety of these plays stemmed in no small measure from their depiction of “interracial marriage, lunacy, satanic possession, uxoricide, infanticide, and suicide” (Orlin 2002: 245). Most prominent of all is their staging of spousal murders based on actual cases from Faversham, Plymouth, Edmonton, and other provincial locales. Just how sensational and graphic they were can be seen in a play published some two years before the first performance of Othello. On 23 August 1594, Thomas Merry, a Puritan tavern keeper who lived in a self-professed “meane and discontented state”, killed Master Thomas Beech, a wealthy chandler, for his money (1601: sig. A3v). In order to conceal his crime, Merry also killed Beech’s servant, Thomas Winchester, who knew of his master’s whereabouts at the time of his murder. The graphic nature of the murders made the story ripe material for a domestic tragedy, and seven years later Robert Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies was published. Merry took the unsuspecting Beech into his home—a key site in domestic tragedy—and, with a hammer, mauled him. The stage direction is explicit: “Then being in the upper Roome Merry strickes him in the head fifteene times” (B4, italics in original). One can imagine the length of time such a spectacle would take, and yet it constitutes only a prelude to his decision to dismember the body so that he can dispose of it piece by piece: “Merry begins to cut the body, and bindes the armes behinde his backe with Beeches gartere, leaves out the body, covers the head and legs againe” (E2). The Senecan butchery, what Merry himself calls his “spectacle of inhumanitie” (D2v), continues when he moves on to the servant boy, Winchester. Again the stage direction is

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gruesomely quantified: “When the boy goeth into the shoppe Merrie striketh six blowes on his head & with the seaventh leaves the hammer sticking in his head . . .” (C4). The hammer is left in Winchester’s head for a good while longer as it becomes a piece of early modern forensic evidence for the coroner. One of the objectives of this book is to connect Two Lamentable Tragedies and other domestic tragedies to Othello, a play that features the equally graphic smothering of Desdemona by her husband in what is in effect their nuptial bed. In Thomas Rymer’s infamous yet perceptive early critique, he thought the murder “can produce nothing but horror and aversion, and what is odious and grievous to an Audience” (1692: 150). Retold in ballads, broadsides, cheap pamphlets, and even chronicles, the murderous stories—the pulp fiction of the day—spread to London where their theatrical representation (appealing as it no doubt was) was most unusual in terms of tragic decorum. As Peter Lake observes, By laying claim to the status of tragedy for these bitter, bloody and salacious stories, authors were attributing significant moral weight and seriousness to their theatrical presentations of commonplace, local, largely plebeian narratives taken from the bottom end of the cheap-print market. (2002: 26) Domestic tragedies do not concern themselves with kings or even with great political figures such as Coriolanus, Titus, Tamburlaine, and their like. These spousal murders were not the work of a Clytemnestra killing Agamemnon, but of yeomen and their housewives; the provincial landed gentry; merchants; taverners such as Merry; and others with little or no claim to social, and thereby tragic, standing. The names Alice Arden, Ulalia Page, John Frankford, and Frank Thorney are scarcely recognized today, nor would they have registered among their contemporaries had it not been for the egregiousness of the murders and the proliferation of accounts of the crimes, beginning with word-of-mouth and culminating ultimately in tragic representation. Catherine Richardson suggests that Arden of Faversham, the first extant domestic tragedy, represents “the epitome of the process by which the death of a householder in a provincial town

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impertinently enters the national consciousness—a movement from household out to community” (2007: 126). The same audiences who saw The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark or Richard III one day could have seen Two Lamentable Tragedies or The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham the next. Explaining Merry’s and Arden’s presence on the stage alongside their more illustrious tragic counterparts is part of the task of this book. The explanation lies in the increased social mobility of the sixteenth century that first permits and later drives the tragic representation of these nonaristocrats. As men such as Arden rose in social status, they in turn gained tragic standing. In addition to this historical contingency, we will need to revisit genre theory to understand the generic possibilities that opened the way to the staging of domestic tragedy on the early modern stage. Despite some opposition to genre study that persists in literary studies, genre, and in particular the genre of Othello, matters. On the surface, identifying Othello as a domestic tragedy may seem to be a rather modest assertion, but it has far-reaching implications: it bears on our understanding of the play and what Shakespeare was up to when he wrote it. While Othello is a tragedy in broad terms, it fits more accurately within the specialized subgenre of domestic tragedy, and this has yet to be fully acknowledged—more often, in fact, the association is explicitly denied. Shakespeare’s wonderfully adaptive use of various generic forms in Othello—Petrarchan conventions, comedy, allegory, and travel narrative, among others—is well known, yet there has been a reluctance to include domestic tragedy within the generic mix. The standard view is that Othello is “the nearest approach which Shakespeare made to a domestic tragedy”(Ridley 1958: xlv), yet that very nearness implies that the play never quite fits within the genre. Othello, according to this argument, may gesture in the direction of the domestic tragedies, yet it does so without actually belonging to or fully participating in the genre. However tantalizingly close the connection may at times appear, the consensus position firmly denies Othello a place among the domestic tragedies. To be sure, Shakespeare often invokes a genre for a moment and assimilates the form into the generic amalgam of the play he is writing. Othello’s description of his travels is an example, for instance, of how travel narrative informs the play, yet Shakespeare employs it in a

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relatively limited way; one cannot accurately describe the play as a travel narrative. I am not, however, suggesting a similar, relatively minor or tangential, connection between Othello and domestic tragedy. In my view, we have not merely some superficial trace of the subgenre in Othello; domestic tragedy is, rather, deep within the generic DNA of the play. This may seem to be a large claim, but in the course of writing this book I have become increasingly convinced of its accuracy, indeed of its inescapability in light of Shakespeare’s repeated use of almost all of the conventions that typify the genre. It is true that he alters and expands these conventions: in the end he becomes less interested in the tragic representation of the lesser gentry than he is in the very ontology of the tragic hero. What does it mean to have tragic standing in the early modern period? Domestic tragedy raises this larger question, and this seems to have caught Shakespeare’s attention and to have engaged his interest throughout the writing of Othello. Shakespeare also gives sustained attention to the brutal spousal murders at the heart of the domestic tragedies, exploring the psychological pain and even religious depths of marital infidelity and betrayal. The play simply could not have been written in anything like its present form without the domestic tragedies. Othello is, to state my case openly, a domestic tragedy. Critics have resisted the association of Othello with domestic tragedy for several reasons. First, because Othello pushes the conventions of domestic tragedy to their limits—Shakespeare adds race, gender, and religious affiliation to the subgenre’s focus on what we now call social class—we have not recognized the play for what it is. Othello appears different in kind whereas it is really only different from other domestic tragedies in degree. Some early twentieth-century critics dismissed the idea of Othello as a domestic tragedy, considering the form as something of a historical curiosity, an extension of the outmoded morality plays. Others dismissed the form as being beneath Shakespeare’s artistic notice, unworthy of his greatness. Domestic tragedy was “the poor relation”, as Paula McQuade puts it, “of serious—that is, political—tragedy” (2003: 415). In addition, there has been a modern tendency to view domestic tragedy as misogynistic in its alleged degradation of women and celebration of violence against them. This has had the unfortunate effect of

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leading some scholars to dismiss the subgenre out of hand. Despite such demurrers and even animadversions against the genre, Othello is not only a domestic tragedy, but the pre-eminent example of the form, pushing it to limits his predecessors never had, and anticipating a democratization in the representation of tragic subjects that came to fruition only in the twentieth century. At the same time, however, feminist scholars have contributed greatly to our understanding of the subgenre by drawing attention to its depiction of domestic abuse as well as to issues of domesticity in general. The subgenre’s geographic domesticity—its Englishness—has led to a further reluctance to include Othello among the domestic tragedies. Several critics, as we will see in Chapter 3, insist that Othello cannot be a domestic tragedy because its Mediterranean mise-en-scène is far removed from the provincial local settings of Faversham, Plymouth, Collumpton, and Edmonton. The Englishness of domestic tragedies must be conceded—it is a regular feature of the genre—but, like any other generic trait, it alone cannot determine a play’s inclusion or exclusion from the subgenre. Even conceding the point, one has to do so with careful attention to Othello. If not a native, Othello is certainly an insider in Venice, unlike Shylock who finds himself the alien other in the same city: The play will end, like Titus and Lust’s Dominion, with the Moor’s alienation. But the tragedy begins with the assumption that Othello is a “most worthy”, “noble” (1.2.91–92), and “valiant” general (1.3.48), who has “done the state some service” and whose tragic self-destruction will be a tragedy for the state.(Bartels 2008: 162) Maurice Charney underscores the point: “Othello is a Venetian subject within Venice, and this endows the play with a feeling of domestic tragedy” (2009: 21). If one were to argue that Englishness is the sine qua non of the genre, this would be, as we will see in Chapter 1, a misunderstanding of the nature and function of genre. The sine qua non of genre simply does not exist: a lone criterion cannot exclude Othello from inclusion within the subgenre when so many of the play’s other features match so well the traits one finds repeatedly in domestic tragedy. Shakespeare had to have recognized that the other

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domestic tragedies were set in England, yet he Englishes Othello in ways that render it virtually indistinguishable from them. Othello is domestic in another, more primary, sense of the word: its concerns are not with great affairs of state, but with the private, domestic affairs of the home. Othello would like to fight the Turks—the decorum of tragedy or history might well demand a battle—but the Turks founder at sea before he gets the chance to engage them, while the real turmoil lies within his mind and within his marriage. Othello turns inward, as do all the domestic tragedies, and slays his wife, displacing his martial impulses onto his wife’s allegedly infidel body. In having Othello slay Desdemona within their domestic walls, in their bed, Shakespeare demonstrates his unmistakable familiarity with the subgenre of domestic tragedy.

I As is true of most genres, no universally accepted canon of the subgenre exists, although Andrew Clark has shown that seven extant plays enjoy wide acceptance as domestic tragedies: Arden of Faversham (1592), A Warning for Fair Women (before 1599), Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601), A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603), A Yorkshire Tragedy (1605), The Witch of Edmonton (1621), and, quite late, William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker(1636)(Clark 1975, p. 417; Orlin 1994, p. 246). In addition, with the use of Henslowe’s Diary, the Stationers’ Register, and other theatrical records, Clark compiled a list of 26 additional, lost plays, for a total of 33(1975: 417). Domestic tragedy may have been anomalous in terms of tragic decorum, but its plays were not few, and of those plays whose authorship we know with near certainty, they offer a veritable pantheon of English dramatists: Middleton, Chettle, Dekker (twice), Drayton, Fletcher, Ford, Heywood, Jonson, Massinger, Rowley, Webster, and Shakespeare if one includes Othello, as I intend to. Several playwrights such as Jonson may have only attempted to write a domestic tragedy once, but the fact that they did so suggests it was prominent enough as a form to capture their imagination with its possibilities. The heyday of domestic tragedy coincided with Shakespeare’s career. It would have been virtually impossible, given what we know of

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him and of his voracious literary appetite, for him to have been unfamiliar with the twenty-five or so domestic tragedies that were performed between 1580 and 1604, the accepted date for the composition of Othello. He would have had to throw an uncharacteristic blind eye to what was going on around him on the stage, both to the use of nonaristocratic characters as protagonists in these tragedies and to the spousal murders in them, the latter of which had been sensationalized in the early modern equivalents of today’s tabloid press. Naseeb Shaheen demonstrated Shakespeare’s repeated use of material from A Warning for Fair Women—this is hardly surprising since it was one of a number of plays, including Middleton’s1 A Yorkshire Tragedy and possibly Arden of Faversham as well, that belonged to the Chamberlain’s Men-King’s Men (Collington 2000: 191; Shaheen 1983: 521–25; Knutson 1991: 45, 60, 107). Intertextual and other ties suffuse the genre: Leonore Lieblien has shown, for instance, the “quite explicit” links between A Woman Killed with Kindness and A Warning (1983: 190), and this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are good reasons that these plays constitute their own subgenre. Attempts have also been made to tie Shakespeare to specific domestic tragedies. Both A Yorkshire Tragedy and A Warning belonged for a long time to the Shakespeare apocrypha (Berek 2008: 179, 186n1), and Shakespeare’s authorship of Arden of Faversham has also been argued since the seventeenth century but never proven (Lockwood 2007: xxix–xxx; Kinney 2009: 82). MacDonald Jackson (2006) has made a sustained and compelling case that Shakespeare almost certainly wrote some scenes of the play, an argument Arthur Kinney and Hugh Craig independently corroborate by means of their application of “computational stylistics” to Arden. They conclude, “we can be confident in our conclusions: Arden of Faversham is a collaboration; Shakespeare was one of the authors; and his part is concentrated in the middle of the play” (Kinney 99).2 As one example of Shakespeare’s authorship of the middle of the play, Jackson focuses on a moment from the play’s third scene where Black Will resolves to kill Arden: I tell thee, Greene, the forlorn traveller Whose lips are glued with summer’s parching heat

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Ne’er longed so much to see a running brook As I to finish Arden’s tragedy. (iii.100–103) Jackson comments: The phrase “summer’s parching heat” is found in 2 Henry VI, which has “In winter’s cold and summer’s parching heat” (1.1.78). It appears in no other play of 1576–1642, and the whole of LION [“Literature Online” electronic database] English drama contains only one eighteenth- and one nineteenth-century echo of the phrase. In the very next line “a running brook” is shared with The Taming of the Shrew (Ind.2.49) and with no other play of 1576– 1642. Indeed, the phrase appears in only one other LION work—whether poetry, drama, or prose—before the nineteenth century, and that is John Studley’s translation of Seneca’s Medea, a closet drama of 1566. Thirdly, “Whose lips are glued” has its counterpart in “That glues my lips” in 3 Henry VI (5.2.38). This image of glued lips constitutes a third Shakespearean link that is unique in early modern drama. And the three links—within two consecutive lines—are to three of Shakespeare’s first four plays, according to the Oxford Textual Companion, which dates them 1590–91. Moreover, the Arden lines have close parallels in Venus and Adonis. . . . (2010: 28) Although I am persuaded by this evidence, my argument itself is not contingent upon Shakespeare’s coauthorship of the play, even though, if true, it would strengthen the case I am making for his awareness of the subgenre and its conventions. As a sharing partner of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare could easily have known Arden from having seen it in performance or even from having acted in it. But even if none of these conditions were met, it is still easy to show that Shakespeare knew the conventions from numerous other domestic tragedies. The connections between Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and Othello are so extensive, for instance, as to be undeniable (Rudnytsky 1983: 123–24). As we will see in Chapter 5, Shakespeare also clearly draws upon A Warning for Fair Women in his depiction of Roderigo’s and Desdemona’s respective deaths and

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momentary revivals. Collectively it is beyond doubt that Shakespeare knew—read, saw, collaborated on (in Arden), or performed in—a substantial number of the domestic tragedies. As this book will make amply evident, Shakespeare’s use in Othello of domestic tragedy’s conventions attests to his thoroughgoing knowledge of the subgenre.3 Although the bulk of this book will deal with Othello in relation to the extant domestic tragedies, it can be instructive here to consider Othello in light of what we know of Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker’s lost play, The Lamentable Tragedy of Page of Plymouth (1599).4 Shakespeare, who was acquainted with both men, knew Jonson particularly well as both friend and professional rival. Shakespeare was listed in Jonson’s own First Folio as one of the “principal players” in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s production of Every Man Out of His Humor (1599) and of Sejanus (1603). The Second Folio further identifies him as having performed in the 1598 production of Every Man in his Humor (Jonson 1640: B2; McDonald 1988: 4). Given that he was acting in these plays around the time of the writing of Page of Plymouth, Shakespeare would in all likelihood have been aware of the play even if he did not see or act in it, both of which are distinct possibilities. The actual murder was committed in 1591, and the story circulated widely; had Shakespeare not known of it, he would have been like an American unaware of the O. J. Simpson spousal murder trial of several years ago. It is not necessary, however, to prove Shakespeare’s direct knowledge of Page of Plymouth; again, there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare knew the subgenre of domestic genre quite well and responded to it in his own writing. Yet it is worth our time to examine Page and see what light it sheds on Othello.

II Even without an extant copy of the play, we know a great deal about the story, and we almost certainly have some of the same source material from which Jonson and Dekker constructed their play. “Ulalia Glanfield, the fair daughter of a Tavistock tradesman, was wooed by an eager and stalwart youth [also of Tavistock], George Strandwidge” or Stranwich (Whitfeld 1900: 66). She is said to have returned Stranwich’s love and from all accounts the two intended to be married.

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First, however, Stranwich left for London to learn his prospective father-in-law’s trade, but in a patriotic impulse Stranwich soon left on an expedition for Spain as a “lieutenant of a man-of-war”, as Anna Bray has it in her nineteenth-century history of Devonshire (1879: 145). In her fiancé’s absence, Ulalia’s father, “disapproving of the attachment”, sought a more financially rewarding match (145). John Chanter then picks up the story: An old miser, of Plymouth, named [John] Page, availed himself of this apparent neglect of the young soldier, and on settling a good jointure, obtained her father’s good graces and her hand. She took with her a maid servant from Tavistock, but the husband was so penurious, and compelled his wife and her maid to do all the work themselves. (1866: 11) Page, who sounds like the miser figure from Roman comedy, anticipates a character such as Morose from Jonson’s later Epicoene (1609– 1610): he “wish[ed] to have an heir to disappoint his relations, who perhaps were too confident in calculating upon sharing his wealth . . .” (Bray: 145). Ulalia soon experienced remorse for having married Page: She was evidently not the type of girl who would have submitted, even under compulsion, to wed a tottering widower for the mere sake of his money, and the return of her lover from the expedition, and his passionate importunities, distracted her with the consciousness that she had been persuaded to take an irreparable step. (Whitfeld 1900: 67) Printed within months of the murder, Anthony Munday’s “Sundry Strange and Inhumane Murders”, informs us that “the Devil so wrought in the hearts” of Ulalia and Stranwich that they “practiced day and night how to bring her husband to his end” (1591: 60), much as Othello and Iago debate the means of Desdemona’s death. And just as Alice Arden tried to do to her husband, Mistress Page “did within the space of one year and less, attempt sundry times to poison her husband” (60), all to no avail. Her maid then

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advised them to get rid of the old gentleman, and Stanwich at length, with great reluctance, consented to their putting an end to him. Page lived in what was afterwards the Mayoralty House (at Plymouth), and a woman who lived opposite hearing at night some sand thrown against a window, thinking it was her own, arose, and looking out, saw a young gentleman near Page’s window, and heard him say, “For God’s sake stay your hand!” A female replied, “’Tis too late; the deed is done” . On the following morning it was given out that Page had died suddenly in the night, and as soon as possible he was buried. On the testimony, however, of his neighbour, the body was taken up again; and it appearing that he had been strangled, his wife, Stanwich, and the maid, were tried and executed. (Bray 146) The details of the actual killing soon came out. Mistress Page contracted a murder-for-hire with one of her servants, Robert Priddis (Prideaux); Stranwich himself “hired one Tom Stone to be an actor in this tragical action” (Munday 60). Conspirators in place, the murder took place Wednesday, February 11th, 1591: About ten of the clock at night, M. Page being in his bed slumbering, could not happen upon a sound sleep, and lying musing to himself, Tom Stone came softly and knocked at the door, whereupon Priddis, his companion, did let him in, who was made privy to this deed; and by reason that Mistress Page gave them straight charge to dispatch it that night, whatsoever came of it, they drew toward the bed, intending immediately to go about it, M. Page, being not asleep, as is aforesaid, asked who came in, whereat Priddis leapt upon his master being in his bed, who roused himself and got upon his feet, and had been hard enough for his man, but that Stone flew upon him being naked, and suddenly tripped him, so that he fell to the ground: whereupon both of them fell upon him, and took the kercher from his head, and knitting the same about his neck they immediately stifled him. And as it appeareth even in the anguish of death, the said M. Page greatly labored to pull the kercher from about his neck, by reason of the marks and scratches which he had made with his nails upon his throat, but

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there he could not prevail, for they would not let slip their hold until he was full dead. This done, they laid him overthwart the bed, and against the bedside broke his neck, and when they saw he was surely dead, they stretched him and laid him on his bed again, spreading the clothes in ordinary sort, as though no such act had been attempted, but that he had died on God’s hand. (61–62) In domestic tragedy, murder-will-out: examining her dead brother’s body, Page’s sister, mistress Harris, “spied blood about his bosom” (62), and the ensuing investigation soon led to the indictments of all the conspirators: Thus did the Lord unfold this wretched deed, whereby immediately the said Mistress Page was attached upon the murther and examined before Sir Francis Drake, Knight, with the mayor and other magistrates of Plymouth, who denied not the same, but said she had rather die with Strangwidge than to live with Page . . . . and at the assizes [at Barnstaple] holden this last Lent, the said George Strangwidge, Mistress Page, Priddis, and Tom Stone, were condemned and adjudged to die for the said fact, and were all executed accordingly upon Saturday being the twentieth day of February last, 1591. (84–85) The men were hanged, but Ulalia Page was presumably burned alive for being found guilty of petty treason, the statutory punishment enacted in 1352 for a mariticide(Chanter 97).5 As with all of the other domestic tragedies, the story was egregious enough that it quickly made its way into tracts, as we have seen, and a number of contemporaneous ballads. One of them, written by the balladist Thomas Deloney and printed in London in 1591 by Thomas Scarlet,6 relates the “Lamentation of Master Page’s wife”, from which I quote two stanzas: You Devonshire dames, and courteous Cornwall knights, That here are come to visit woeful wights,

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Regard my griefe, and marke my woeful end, And to your children be a better friend. ................................ And Plimouth proude, I bid thee now farewell. Take heede, you wives, let not your hands rebel; And farewell, life, wherein such sorrow shows, And welcome, death, that doth my corps inclose. (Deloney 1967, pp. 484–85) Not to be outdone, Stranwich also has an eponymous lament attributed to him: The deed late done in heart I doe lament, But that I lov’d I cannot yet repent; Thy seemly sight was ever sweet to me, Would God my death would thy excuse me. ................................ Wretch that I am that I consent did give, Had I denied Ulalia still should live; Blind fancy said her suite do not deny, Live thou in blisse or else in sorrow die. (Whitfeld 76) Capitalizing on the relative recency of the murder as well its notoriety, which had spread to London, Jonson and Dekker collaborated and by 10 August 1599 “had finished part of a domestic tragedy called Page of Plymouth and received an advance of forty shillings” (Riggs 1989: 55). The prolific Dekker apparently had no qualms about collaborating on a later domestic tragedy, The Witch of Edmonton (1621). For his part, Jonson apparently considered Page a bit of hackwork written because he was in financial straits. The play is lost, as W. David Kay suggests, probably “because he left unpublished his collaborative works and those he did not consider worthy to be included in his canon” (1995: 21, 29); for one or both reasons Page of Plymouth is absent from the collected works of the First Folio. Given Jonson’s classical bent and aversion to generic innovation and experimentation, for which he famously chastised Shakespeare, it is no surprise

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that Page may have been purposefully suppressed. Jonson was not, as we will see, the only playwright who was uneasy about the tragic representation of provincials such as John Page. In any event Philip Henslowe, the Elizabethan theatrical entrepreneur and impresario for the Admiral’s Men, recorded in his famous account book three weeks later on 2 September his giving Jonson and Dekker another 45 shillings as “fulle payment for A Boocke called the lamentable tragedie of page of plemoth . . .” (1961: 123). Henslowe paid them, in toto, 11 (Anon. 1845: 80). It is not difficult to establish Page of Plymouth’s early and frequent association with other domestic tragedies. A Shakespeare enthusiast writing under the pseudonym Dramaticus wrote of Page in 1845, “It was founded upon an event of comparatively recent occurrence, and, in this respect, it resembled The Yorkshire Tragedy . . .” (79). Indeed it does, as is evident from an earlier account in which John Taylor uses Page’s story as an exemplum. Taylor, the Thames waterman who styled himself the “water poet”, tells of a fishmonger, John Rowse, who took a mistress, then separated from his wife, and finally debauched himself and spent all his money as a “prodigall Father” . Upon returning home, he could not bear the impoverishment he knew his daughters, ages five and four, would face: “his two Children were like to bee left to goe from doore to doore for their living” (1630: Mm 5). Similar to the filicide in A Yorkshire Tragedy, Rowse drowns his children in quick succession. “By this mans fall”, Taylor moralizes, “wee may see an example of Gods Justice against Drunkennes, Whoredome, and Murder; the Divell being the first Author: who fil’d Cain with Envy, that hee murdered his brother Able: who tempted David first to Adultery, and afterwards to Murther . . .” (Mm). After the litany of ancient biblical transgressors, Taylor focuses not on the uxoricide Rowse but on two contemporary mariticides: “Arden of Feversham, and Page of Plimmouth, both their Murders are fresh in memory, and the fearfull ends of their Wives and their Ayders in those bloudy actions will never be forgotten” (Mm). Although Taylor does not say so, it stands to reason that performances of Arden of Faversham and Page of Plymouth played a substantial role in popularizing these cases, rendering them “fresh” to him even though they took

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place over 75 years earlier. Reflecting back from the mid-nineteenth century, Chanter notes, “The event was one which made a great sensation at the time, and gave rise to a drama, and likewise to a great number of broadsides and ballads, published in all parts of the kingdom, ‘The lamentable tragedy of Page, of Plymouth’” (11). As we will see in the ensuing chapters, there are a number of traits common to domestic tragedies that distinguish the subgenre from its more traditional form. Even without the story, The Lamentable Tragedy of Page of Plymouth belongs by its very title with the other domestic tragedies, most of whose titles proclaim their protagonist’s provincial location: Faversham, Yorkshire, Edmonton, and Plymouth. Even more striking than the locative title is the fact that these protagonists are not even of gentle birth, much less that of Hamlet, “Prince of Denmark” . That the locative is also used in the title Page of Plymouth underscores the very anomaly that is domestic tragedy. A play titled The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice is closer generically to Page of Plymouth than it is to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

III Othello bears a number of striking similarities to the other domestic tragedies, as we will see, but for now let us restrict our focus to those distinctive features it shares with Jonson and Dekker’s play. Neither Page nor Othello has much if any claim to royal status, much less to a princedom as his domain. Their liminal (social) status for tragic representation is what sets the protagonists of domestic tragedy apart from traditional tragedy. Although Othello is a general and claims royal birth, Shakespeare renders his claim to tragic standing even more tenuous, more open to challenge, than that of Page. Othello is about as noble as Iago is “honest”, the respective epithets attached to their names. Both plays depict intrafamilial—here, as usual, spousal—murders, another signature feature of the subgenre, serving perhaps as its raison d’être on the English stage. The murders each take place on the marital bed, the quintessential mark of domesticity, and each is followed by the quick solving of the crime: murder will out. Both stories emerge from “low” literature—the broadside and the novella, respectively—not the histories that usually serve for tragic

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representation. In Page as in the other domestic tragedies there is the adulterous lover complicit in the murder; Othello gestures unmistakably in that direction with the character of Roderigo, a figure nowhere in Shakespeare’s source but ubiquitous in domestic tragedy. Roderigo has an unusual role, though, for an adulterer in domestic tragedy: a man who welcomes an affair but is never granted one. Othello complicates the love triangle by presenting two would-be adulterers: far from displaying motiveless malignity towards his general, Iago expresses his own carnal desires for Desdemona as well, thus making him a rival to Othello. George Stranwich serves as a lieutenant in a man-of-war. In Cinthio’s source tale, the Cassio figure is a lowly corporal, but Shakespeare elevates Cassio to a lieutenancy. The fact that they are both lieutenants is almost certainly a mere coincidence, but there are a number of uncanny correspondences between the two plays. Later, the man to whom Othello declares, “Now art thou mine lieutenant” is the man who, like Stranwich with Page, both cuckolds Othello and destroys him in the process. Othello, too, a man in whom the heats and passions of youth are now “defunct”, bears a likeness to the senex figure of Page of Plymouth who is to be replaced by the younger, more desirous, and thus more suitable suitor. And there is the rather unsettling resonance of the handkerchief in both plays. Thomas Rymer warned that all good housewives should look to their linens lest they suffer as Desdemona did for neglecting to manage such household trifles. Rymer thought the play was founded upon a trifle, and indeed to some extent it is, but a handkerchief is also the murder weapon in Arden of Faversham and in Page of Plymouth as well: Stone and Priddis “fell upon him, and took the kercher from his head, and knitting the same about his neck they immediately stifled him. . .” (Munday 61). And just as Othello did with Desdemona (5.1.83–95), “they would not let slip their hold until he was full dead” (61). Finally, as we will see in Chapter 5, the unmistakable presence of the uncanny was said to attend these murders, and their inclusion in the plays is a distinctive feature of the subgenre. In Page, three “strange things” were seen on the nights immediately after the murder: “an ugly thing formed like a bear, whose eyes were as it had been fire, bearing about him a linen cloth”; a raven that hanged itself from the

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mainmast of a sunken ship; and this “ship was all this while aground, lying with her stern to the shore, and suddenly the said ship turned herself round and brought her stem where erst her stern did like which did alight upon the head of a ship’s mast, sunk at the end of the town . . . ” (64). In equally bizarre incidents, both Roderigo and Desdemona seem to come back from the dead to identify (and in Desdemona’s case to exculpate) their respective murderers. Such momentary revivals are, as we shall see, quite in keeping with similar manifestations of the uncanny in domestic tragedy. Although we cannot be certain how well Shakespeare knew Page of Plymouth, there are enough tantalizing similarities to suggest that the correspondences are more than merely accidental. Shakespeare knows the form of domestic tragedy and takes pains to invoke and even to exploit its full potential in Othello. He never does so again, but after Othello there is scarcely a need to: in one fell swoop Shakespeare adopts the form and pushes it to its very limits, putting to the test, as we will see, one of the most rudimentary divisions between the rank of characters who populate comedy and tragedy. If tragedy represents those of aristocratic rank and above, what are we to make of Page, a wealthy merchant from Plymouth? His plight as a husband cuckolded at the hands of his amorous younger wife is stock material for comedy. The same can be said for Othello, but with a vengeance: not only is he older and poorer than the “wealthy curled darlings” of Venice, but as a black mercenary general with an exotic, checkered past, his social position is even more tenuous. By all appearances, Othello ought to be a comic buffoon or senex far removed from the tragic stage. Even he envisions his own comic cuckolding—“Now [Cassio] denies it faintly, and laughs it out” (4.1.115)—before he gives the story its final deadly and tragic turn.

IV Let me give a brief outline of the chapters to follow. Since the consensus view on Othello denies close ties between Shakespeare’s play and the domestic tragedies, Chapter 1 examines how domestic tragedy is routinely defined too narrowly and, even worse, as a static form. I revisit genre theory to demonstrate the dynamic fluidity of generic

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forms, especially in the case of an artist as creative as Shakespeare. As Lawrence Danson remarks, “Shakespeare’s plays are so many explorations and experiments in the endlessly revisionary process of genreformation” (2000: 7). One of the mistakes that those who deny Othello’s association with the domestic tragedies is to assume that the subgenre has some essential—sine qua non—feature that Othello lacks. But genres simply do not work this way, and Chapter 1 examines both what genres are and what they do. This may seem rudimentary, but it is necessary to counter some of the prevailing views on why Othello is not a domestic tragedy. Still, for specialists or those otherwise well-versed in contemporary genre theory, they may wish to skip these few initial sections of the chapter. I make an effort in this first chapter to disabuse us of the popular notion that genre is merely a classification system—as is the case, for instance, in plant biology. Conceiving of literary genres in the same way renders them far too static and overlooks the essence of generic evolution. Genres have much less to do with classification than they do with communication: what does the choice of a particular genre convey in terms of expectations and meaning; what does it foreclose? As I argue, Shakespeare’s decision to write a domestic tragedy signals his own interest in and break from the traditional social stature necessary for tragic standing: he takes it to the nth degree by rendering Othello’s social standing suspect in so many ways. What was Shakespeare doing when he chose Othello as his protagonist and, contrary to his source tale, rendered him the presumed social and cultural inferior of his white wife, the daughter of a Venetian senator? Critics are still divided over whether Othello is the “noble Moor” (a phrase Shakespeare uses nine times in the play) of A. C. Bradley and other idealist critics or whether, as is the fashion these days, he is unworthy of his wife and place. His tenuous social and tragic position is the direct result of Shakespeare’s engagement with domestic tragedy. Chapter 1 also briefly rehearses the historic proscription against the use of nonaristocratic characters in tragic roles. What makes domestic tragedy so innovative is its downward modification of this dictum to include new men such as Thomas Arden, arrivistes whose liminal status in society made their tragic representation possible and

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problematic at the same time. I examine the two standard accounts of the rise of domestic tragedy (those of Henry Adams and Lena Orlin), both of which tend toward a priori, theoretical argument, neither of which pays adequate attention in my view to the subgenre’s use of protagonists of middling social status. While it might be useful at times to look at a Renaissance commentator’s theoretical argument about the possibility of using nonaristocratic protagonists in tragic drama, it is more instructive to examine the actual workings of the domestic tragedies in their existential context if one wants to offer a persuasive account of their rise. What I have attempted to do, then, is not to make the plays fit an abstract theory, but to make sure that my explanation conforms to the actual workings of the plays and can thus adequately account for their anomalous appearance on the early modern stage. Drawing upon the contextualizing work of Frank Whigham as well as historians of the early modern era, I argue that social mobility—the unprecedented movement into and out of the gentry—blurred the traditional distinction between the aristocracy and those without degree or title. In addition, the rise of the professional playhouses, driven by profit as they were, allowed and encouraged the representation of people previously ignored by tragedy. And the fact that these plays almost always depicted, as in Othello, egregious spousal murders rendered them powerfully appealing to audiences—in a word, marketable. Chapter 2 is devoted to a discussion of Arden of Faversham, in part because of its seminal influence on the development of the genre, in part because of the convincing evidence that Shakespeare wrote the middle sections of the play. My intention is to demonstrate how Arden comes into being as a play that represents not the highborn but an arriviste figure. In order to do so, I take a close look at the historical Thomas Arden and his reputation among scholars as the wealthiest inhabitant of Faversham, a claim that does not stand up under scrutiny. His beginnings were quite humble, his rise not as meteoric as we once thought. Arden’s social standing, which is directly related to his viability for tragic representation, is the crucial issue. The chapter examines quite closely John Stow’s and Raphael Holinshed’s historiographic accounts of Arden as well as the playwrights’—it was unquestionably a collaboration—use of Holinshed’s Chronicles in their

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depiction of Arden. What no one seems to have noticed before is that Holinshed suppresses or otherwise omits some of the same material that Stow used in his own account of Arden, and these omissions have the effect of gentrifying Arden, rendering him a suitable subject for the tragic stage—but just barely. Arden’s tragic stature is tenuous, and Stow, Holinshed, and the playwright give us a portrait of a man who (like Othello) is both worthy and unworthy of tragic representation. Chapter 3 examines the critical reception of Othello from Thomas Rymer’s attack against it in 1692 to contemporary animadversions against the form and Othello’s possible connection to it. Again, the standard view is that Othello comes close to the form of domestic tragedy without ever actually participating in it. It is striking how critics routinely feel compelled to mention Othello in the same breath as domestic tragedy—Shakespeare’s “nearest approach” to the genre—only then to deny any real connection. I trace the history of this critical consensus and discuss what I believe are its shortcomings. It is a challenge to argue any longstanding consensus, but important to do so when a genre such as domestic tragedy is generally misunderstood and, as a result, we have a skewed perception of its ties to Othello. I analyze both the older view of the subgenre as an aesthetically inferior form as well as more recent claims of misogyny that influential scholars have put forth. There have, however, been two articles intimating a positive connection between Shakespeare’s play and the form—Paula McQuade’s being the most recent (2003)—but no sustained argument has been offered until now. In the concluding sections of the book, I establish Othello’s multifarious ties to the other domestic tragedies, including his repeated borrowing from them. Chapter 4 begins the case for Othello as a domestic tragedy, focusing on the play’s adherence to the subgenre’s conventions as well as Shakespeare’s innovative variations on them. As variations, Shakespeare’s adaptations nonetheless keep returning us to the dominant form, which is always at play in the complex variations that he gives us. Domestic tragedy is not merely one of a number of minor, competing genres Shakespeare draws upon in writing the play; it is the central one around which the others revolve. Chapter 5 explores three conventional phenomena—the miraculous,

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monstrous, and especially the uncanny—that typically attend the murder-will-out topos of the subgenre. The use in particular of the uncanny in Othello solidifies its place among the domestic tragedies. As with many of the plays, murder-will-out in Othello does not appear to be the result of divine intervention as that phenomenon might be depicted in liturgical drama or miracle plays. Instead, something less sectarian, more mysterious and weird—the uncanny—is present in Desdemona’s deathbed speech identifying her killer. I will pay attention to the presence of the uncanny in several of the domestic tragedies, and then conclude with a discussion of A Fair Warning for Women (c. 1595) in relation to Othello. Both Roderigo’s lingering in life to identify Iago as his murderer—an incident often overlooked—and Desdemona’s uncanny speaking from beyond the grave have their antecedents in the earlier domestic tragedy that Shakespeare knew so well. In response to Emilia’s request to know who has harmed her, Desdemona tells her, “Nobody; I myself; Farewell” (5.127–28). Her response touches on, even as it inverts, the murder-will-out convention of the subgenre. Moreover, she speaks the line when she is presumably dead—Othello takes great pains to make sure that he has smothered her long enough to ensure her death. As odd as Desdemona’s resuscitation or momentary resurrection from the dead is, it is consistent with other uncanny events that characterize the subgenre. The conclusion, taking from Chapter 1 the insight that genre communicates meaning to the reader, asks what sort of meaning we can infer from Shakespeare’s decision to write Othello as a domestic tragedy. First, his depiction of Othello indicates that Shakespeare was investigating the traditional decorum associated with the tragic protagonist; that is, he took his cue from the domestic tragedies’ use of non-noble protagonists and complicated Othello’s tragic standing in ways that press well beyond social status. In a way that recalls Aristotle, Shakespeare interrogates the time-honored connection between tragic suffering and the aristocratic and mythic figures who populate tragedy. I suggest that Othello subtly anticipates the democratization in tragic representation that typifies modern drama. Shakespeare had raised questions of tragic subjectivity before, most pointedly in Hamlet, and he intensifies that inquiry here by examining the ontology

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of the tragic hero: what sort of person, in the end, is an appropriate subject for tragic representation? The answer he offers, with remarkable precocity, is almost anyone. Second, Shakespeare underscores the spousal murder, the signature event in domestic tragedies, by presenting us with not one but two of them in Othello. Shakespeare’s doing so is typical of his method of complicating received forms and genres. His doubling of the spousal murder is just one more way he takes the conventions of domestic tragedy to the nth degree. Shakespeare’s attention to spousal murder further reminds us of the domesticity of these plays and allows us, especially in the case of Othello and Desdemona, to better understand how infidelity, real or perceived, can destroy marriage and those who stake their happiness on it. Milton’s eminently rhetorical question in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, “What thing more instituted to the solace and delight of man than marriage?”, underscores just how transgressive spousal murder is (1643: 103). In the end, I intend to substantiate my claim that Shakespeare repeatedly engages the conventions of domestic tragedy in Othello. That he deepens those conventions and thus offers his own unique variation on the form becomes increasingly evident. Yet despite Shakespeare’s enriching of the genre, pushing it beyond what were for him staid limits, the roots of domestic tragedy are pervasive in Othello, beginning with the Moor’s gruesome spousal murder. And just as Hamlet cannot be fully understood without the generic context of revenge tragedies such as Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy or Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, so too one needs to see Othello, the Moor of Venice in situ alongside Page of Plymouth, Arden of Faversham, Cox of Collumpton, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and the other domestic tragedies. Othello is a domestic tragedy and, moreover, the quintessential example of the form.

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Chapter 1

Genre Theory and the Rise of Domestic Tragedy

For some time now genre study and its alleged classification schemes have been déclassé in literary circles. Tzvetan Todorov noted the problem as early as the 1970s: “To persist in discussing genres today might seem like an idle if not obviously anachronistic pastime. Everyone knows that they existed in the good old days of the classics—ballads, odes, sonnets, tragedies—but today?” (1976: 159). The problem for genre theorists was exacerbated in the next decade by three influential critics. Fredric Jameson, who saw a capitalist transformation from the “older generic categories” to “the subliterary genres of mass culture”, declared genre criticism to be “thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice . . .” (1981: 105). Adopting a pragmatic approach, Foucault thought genre study unworkable because of the elusiveness of stable categories as well as the inability of critics to agree on what the terms even mean (1972: 22). Derrida, too, noted how the very notion of genre tends to circumscribe rather than open discussion: “As soon as the word ‘genre’ is sounded . . . a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: ‘Do,’ ‘Do not’ says . . . the law of genre” (1980: 56). As with other critics, Derrida tends to view genre as a rigid classificatory system (61); if it were, genre study would be unwieldy, even a hindrance to literary study.1 The very word “genre” bothers Derrida, perhaps understandably so because, although he never discusses its etymology, its origins lie in the Greek eidos, the same word Plato used for his theory of forms, those archetypal, immutable entities that are, in his view, preeminent objects of thought. To think of literary genres as similarly fixed is,

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however, to misunderstand them. Derrida, however, will not be caught in such a mistake. His typical ambivalence surfaces when he suggests that individual works in relation to a genre have “a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set” (59). Genre, as Derrida recognized, is unavoidable: “a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text . . .” (65). Why is this? Alastair Fowler explains: The processes of generic recognition are in fact fundamental to the reading process. Often we may not be aware of this. But whenever we approach a work of an unfamiliar genre—new or old—our difficulties return us to fundamentals. No work, however avant-garde, is intelligible without some context of familiar types. (1982: 259)2 E. D. Hirsch, Jr. makes the point more broadly: “All understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound” (1967: 76). A text is thus inescapably in the world of genre but not of it: individuation is always at work, aligning a work with others in a genre, even as the work in question may differ from the others in unique ways. Texts resist the closure that rigid generic identification would give them; they are what Richard Strier (1997) calls “resistant structures” or, more accurately in this case, resilient structures. If a genre does not merely, or even primarily, classify something as being either within its limits or beyond its pale, then what, if anything, does invoking genre do for us? The question is rudimentary but crucial if we are to understand Othello’s association or lack thereof with domestic tragedy. If one has an obsolescent understanding of genre as a rigid classificatory system, then it usually follows that a discussion of Othello’s genre is viewed as being unworthy of significant interest, with “tragedy” or any other generic designation serving as a useless placeholder. The problem is even more acute: not only do some critics apply a rather rigid litmus test to determine whether Othello can be classified as a domestic tragedy, they also misunderstand the nature of domestic tragedy, what it is and what it does. For

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this reason I will have to leave the discussion of domestic tragedy and of Othello for later. First things first, and genre theory, since critics must rely on it when discussing Othello’s possible inclusion as a domestic tragedy, is first.

I As Fowler remarks, those opposed to genre study occasionally make use of straw man arguments: “Some think that genre theory is irrelevant, in that it fails to correspond to actual literary works. This opinion rests often on a misapprehension about genres. It assumes that they exist simply and immutably, that they are permanently established once and for all . . .” (24). Rosalie Colie noted, too, that “a rigid system of genres—which, really, never existed in practice and barely even in theory—by which each subject defined separately commands its and only its assigned form”, is merely a convenient fiction (1974: 114–15). The paradox is this: if there is an unchanging reality about genres, it is that they are constantly in flux: metastizing, fading, subverting, evolving, and so on (Guillén 1971, p. 121). Generic categories are thus subject to continual updating and revision. The question is not whether genres change; it is, rather, how and why they change. “The concept of genre”, as Claudio Guillén observes, “looks forward and backward at the same time. Backward, toward the literary works that already exist”, forward to those that will come into being through this creative tension (109–110). Genreless texts do not exist because genres provide the preexisting forms with or against which an author works (111). Genres serve as models, rough hewn as they must necessarily be, and thus imitation—the shaping of their ends— is and always has been part of the creative process. The immemorial imitation of earlier forms enjoyed a special ascendancy in the Renaissance; it was the era’s tutelary spirit. Mimesis can of course hinder originality; innovation is necessary so as to differentiate the new from the old (Colie 8). Genre theorists rightly speak of genre formation as an open “process”, not as a series of fixed forms: “Genre, then, is a system in which each new member changes the system: a form always in the process of reforming itself” (Danson 5).3

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Literary experimentation reshapes forms—adding to, subtracting from, contradicting, and innovating among works that share the same generic features (Cohen 204). Viewed in a pejorative light, this can represent a negative, angst-laden struggle, as in Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, yet the creative writing process is really an invitation to experimentation, which begins not ex nihilo, but with genres. “The relationship between the individual text and the series of texts formative of a genre presents itself”, as Hans Jauss describes it, “as a process of the continual founding and altering of horizons” (1982: 88). The invitation begins with sameness, but ends, if the artist is creative, with difference, a stretching or playing against or even subverting of the genre. This continual revision of genres is inescapable; we see its manifestations everywhere: Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey are merely two fine examples from the romance novel. Critics who exclude Othello from the domestic tragedies at times perceive genres as mere classification systems. But genres are not static forms, and my aim is a more properly inclusive and expansive understanding of genre in relation to Shakespeare’s play. The aim, I hasten to add, is not to define domestic tragedy loosely enough so as to permit Othello to come within its penumbra; it is, rather, to understand Shakespeare’s play’s unmistakable participation in the genre, even as he modifies and expands the subgenre as he engages it.

II If we can now dispense with this notion of generic fixity, we need to address a second misunderstanding of the purpose and function of genre. Simply put, genre is really about communication and interpretation, not classification (Lewalski 1986: 2). Genre functions as a “pre-text” to direct a reader’s reading, to make it intelligible: “There is a communication between the author and the reader, saying that the reader is to recognize the genre and raising the questions Why is the poem put into this form? What does this form add to the communication within its content?” (Shawcross 1991: 197, 13–14). Shawcross is of course recovering authorial presence as an important part of literary communication: the author’s choice of genre creates

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“meaning expectations” that may be confirmed, modified, or subverted, but they are inescapable as initial and often ongoing means of communication between writer and reader (Hirsch 72). By conveying meaning in and through form, genre thus helps one to interpret literary works. Let’s take one famous example of this phenomenon: “Hamlet’s revenge is enmeshed in scruples exceptional in the genre [of revenge tragedy] and amounting to a comment on it. Without knowledge of revenge tragedy, then, Hamlet would be incomprehensible: no valid construction would be possible” (Fowler 262)— or at least ignorance of revenge tragedy would result in a reading of Hamlet that is less rich than it would be in light of the play’s generic significations. Genres are intimately connected to the act of interpretation. If one interprets Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, for instance, as a serious revision of Virgil’s Aeneid, complete with tragic gravitas, it means something quite different than if we see it as a mock-heroic parody of Virgil’s work, which is an equally plausible reading of the play. Differences in interpretation are often disagreements about genre. As I will argue, reading Othello as a standard tragedy—a perfectly legitimate way in which to interpret the play—conveys a meaning that is significantly different from reading the play as a domestic tragedy. A further function of genre is to give order and structure to new works: the conventions of a genre permeate and subtly organize most of the other constitutive elements of a work (Fowler 259). Implicitly or explicitly, genre functions as a template ordering the work and giving it meaning in and through its genre. We know, too, that Renaissance authors took genre very seriously, that generic classification for Shakespeare and his contemporaries reflected “deep habits of mind” (Lewalski 1986: 1; Danson 145). Such, again, is the nature of mimesis and the classical models that figured so prominently in the period, even when an author such as Shakespeare assimilates multiple genres into a complex whole. One can go beyond simple generic correspondence, but the correspondence is still there: “Significant pieces of literature are worth much more than their kind, but they are what they are in part by their inevitable kind-ness” (Colie 128). Othello’s possible status as a domestic tragedy matters because genre determines in part both the shape and the meaning of a work; indeed,

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the two are inseparable. We will not understand as fully as we ought to the implications—the meaning—of Othello if Shakespeare designed and shaped it as a domestic tragedy: if “generic indicators are commonly missed”, as Fowler remarks, “the kind as a whole must be misunderstood” (59).4 One of the primary objectives of this book is to help us recognize the generic indicators of domestic tragedy that suffuse Othello, and our understanding of the play should change in response to this recognition. From at least the time of Thomas Rymer we have in part misread Othello because we have not seen it for what it is generically. Domestic tragedy may be a minor, even inferior, subgenre and misogynistic to boot (I will consider take up claims later), but these are no reasons to deny its affinities with Othello, even if Shakespeare’s play pushes well beyond what the form had already done.

III How does one decide whether a new work belongs to a particular genre? If one were to take the view that genre is simply a classification system, then one could simply match up the criteria associated with a given genre and see whether a work fits within it. The first problem with this, as we have already seen, is that it assumes a static norm to which the new work must be compared; it defines genre narrowly and prescriptively. In the hands of second- or third-rate authors, genre often does become mere formula, a recipe that can be followed to the letter—serial fiction such as The Hardy Boys or the Nancy Drew books work this way, as does much popular romance fiction. Yet a great work such as Northanger Abbey pushes well beyond the received conventions of the romance novel, often invoking only to play against and ultimately to transcend them. In actual practice, the question of generic identification and affiliation requires, as Robert Elliot remarks, careful judgment: How does then one know whether x (which perhaps seems a borderline caste) is a satire or not? Following Wittgenstein, one looks at a number of satires about which there is not question—which

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are at the center of the concept, so to speak—and then decides whether work x has resemblances enough to the undoubted example of the type to be included in it. The point is: this is not a factual question to be settled by examining the work for the necessary and sufficient properties which would automatically entitle it to the name satire; it is a decision question: are the resemblances of this work to various kinds of satire sufficient so that we are warranted in including it in the category—or in extending the category to take it in? (1962: 23) Classification systems use abstract logic whereas genres are empirically based and change over time; classification systems employ rules whereas genres use conventions that are themselves metastable (Colie: 30). “A theatrical genre”, as Lucy Munro notes, “is best understood as a set of conventions that were used by dramatists and playing companies and recognized . . . by audiences” (2005: 189). Although conventions are not radically open—“convention” by definition depends on general consent or accepted practice (OED)—they are subject to continual modification and adaptation. The notion of a work having indispensable properties falsifies the receptivity to change that is inherent in genre: When we assign a work to a generic type, we do not suppose that all its characteristic traits need be shared by every other embodiment of the type. . . . We can specify features that are often present and felt to be characteristic, but not features that are always present. (Fowler 40) Fowler famously used the metaphor of “family resemblances” to describe the relation between individual works that belong to a given genre: they belong to the same family, but individual members can and do display an array of differences (38). One can use other metaphors— the various shades of a particular color, for instance—but the idea is the same: difference in similarity. As Samuel Johnson observed long ago There is therefore scarcely any species of writing, of which we can tell what is its essence, and what are its constituents; every

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new genius produces some innovation, which, when invented and approved, subverts the rules which the practice of foregoing authors had established. (1751: 300) This innovation and consequent subversion is precisely what the writing of new works does. Even when an author abandons all the conventions of a genre, if the job is well done the author does it almost always in conscious, deliberate awareness of the conventions being transgressed. Consider, for instance, Miguel de Unamuno’s novel Mist (Niebla). Victor Goti, a character as well as the novel’s prologist, declares his own radical plans for a book: It is not going to be a novel, but . . . a nivola! For then none will have the right to say that I am annulling the laws of their genre (and to make up a genre is only [to] give it a new name), and I am giving to it the laws that please me. (1914: 165–66) Victor is quite right that he has the freedom to compose as he pleases and that his doing so will change the genre of the novel. So as to avoid “annulling the laws” of the novel, which is part of generic transformation, he invents the nivola for himself, but his practice is the inevitable one of an author working with and reshaping the conventions of a genre.5 Given this understanding of genre, it is time to turn to the genre of domestic tragedy, or subgenre, rather, since it is a particular and unique subset of the genre of tragedy. Othello is an innovative reworking of the genre, as we will see, but first it is important to understand the particular historical situation that gives rise to domestic tragedy.

IV John Payne Collier coined the term “domestic tragedy” in 1831—ex post facto, to be sure—calling it “a species of dramatic representation . . . which may be said to form a class of itself” (49). His judgment has stood the test of time. A number of studies were devoted to the genre in

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the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, out of which Henry Hitch Adams’s English Domestic, or Homiletic Tragedy 1575–1642 (1943) emerged as and remains the authoritative critical work. Martin Wine borrows Adams’s titular framework for a working definition of the genre: Plays within this classification deal with protagonists “below the ranks of nobility” (domestic),6 inculcate “lessons of morality and religious faith in the citizens who [come] to the theatres by offering them examples drawn from the lives and customs of their own kind of people” (homiletic), and end “in death for the protagonist” (tragedy). (1973: lvii–lviii) Although the Renaissance is rich in uncanonical and mixed kinds (Fowler 181; Colie 10–28), there was one rudimentary distinction between comedy and tragedy that was almost universally observed: “In a Tragedy”, as Thomas Blount’s notes in Glossographia, “the greatest parts of the actors are Kings and Noble persons; In a Com[e]dy, private persons of meaner state and condition” (1656: 2R4v). What makes domestic tragedy distinctive is its representation of nonaristocratic characters as tragic protagonists: the murders are committed by and against members of the lesser gentry and their spouses. Although this is certainly in keeping with how genres actually evolve, it is worth exploring further the appearance of this innovation on the English stage. The notion that the lead characters of a tragedy should be of high rank is ultimately of Aristotelian origin, and was propagated by Horace and countless others as well. Aristotle observed that the tragedies he knew dealt with “those in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity”, yet he notes this characteristic was not originally observed: “Though the poets began by accepting any tragic story that came to hand, in these days the finest tragedies are always on the story of some few houses, on that of Alcmeon, Oedipus, Orestes . . . or any others that may have been involved, as either agents or sufferers, in some deed of horror” (1995: 1450b1).7 Aristotle leaves the door open, presumably, for any “agents or sufferers in some deed of horror”; if so, then Arden of Faversham is as tragically viable as Aeschylus’s Oresteia: Alice Arden is every bit as gruesome a murderess as Clytemnestra—more so because of her story’s historicity.

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Aristotle’s observation was later restricted to mythological figures and the nobilitas major. In this century alone, beginning with A. C. Bradley, much idealist criticism restricted Aristotle’s universals—by which he merely meant a character who represents what “such a kind of man will probably or necessarily say or do” (1451b1)—to the elite, to what a king or aristocrat might say or do. The idea is that we learn more from the fall of the illustrious (De Casibus Virorum Illustrium) than from that of their social inferiors. For Robert Metcalf Smith, writing in Types of Domestic Tragedy, to look at mere commoners—this is how he and Adams perceived Arden and the other subjects of domestic tragedy— “whose problems are of special rather than universal interest” is “often a merely distressing and pitiful experience” (1928: 6). Smith represents a longstanding tradition of tragic decorum. The fourth-century grammarian Diomedes, for instance, stipulated in his Ars Grammatica the appropriate rank of characters: “The distinctions between comedy and tragedy are these: the characters of tragedy are semi-divine, leaders of the state, kings; those of comedy are unimportant and private persons” (in Orlin 1994: 75). Such a distinction was well known in the Renaissance, enough so that it became the “operative notion” of the two genres (Herrick 1962: 2).8 In England the division is prominent in the writings of the influential drama critics George Puttenham and Stephen Gosson (Kinney 1974: iii). Puttenham remarks that comedy is “never medling with any Princes matters nor such high personages, but commonly of marchants, souldiers”; tragedy is limited to “lofty” characters such as Princes (1589: 32–35). For his part, the antitheatricalist Gosson does not initially abolish all drama since “Some plays still deal with Aeneas and Turnus . . . and where they demand that men portray men illustrating right modes of behavior they constitute fruitful and even necessary lessons” (Kinney 1974: 55). The literary case for the hierarchy is made by English authors as well. Chaucer picks up the refrain in the prologue to The Monk’s Tale: Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie, As olde bookes maken us memorie, Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee,

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And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly. (1390: ll. 1973–77) Consider, too, Hieronimo’s discourse on comedy in The Spanish Tragedy: A comedy? Fie, comedies are fit for common wits: But to present a kingly troop withal, Give me a stately-written tragedy, Tragedia cothurnata,9 fitting kings, Containing matter, and not common things. (4.1.156–61) Yet as we have seen, for every generic rule there are exceptions and occasionally even striking transformations. In his Apology for Poetry, Philip Sidney would seem to follow the course of Gosson and Puttenham when he objects that contemporary plays (his beloved Gorboduc excepted) “be neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns . . .” (1580: 116). Elsewhere, however, Sidney approves of exceptions: “some poesies have coupled together two or three kinds, as tragical and comical”, and, as a writer who works with genre, Sidney finds nothing wrong with doing so, “for, if severed they be good, the conjunction cannot be hurtful” (86).10 Marlowe’s plays constitute another instructive exception since their appearance is contemporaneous with the development of domestic tragedy. What is one to make of Tamburlaine, a peasant with “shepherd’s weeds” who rises to lay claim to vast territories? The Jew of Malta’s Barabas takes center stage and suffers persecution at the hands of his Christian tormentors; his presence as a tragic protagonist flouts both convention and prejudice. Perhaps most striking of all is Edward II, a history play preeminently concerned with status, particularly that of Gaveston. What shocks the royal peers is that “That villain Gaveston is made an earl” (1.2.11): YOUNGER MORTIMER: Thou, villain! Wherefore talk’st of a king, That hardly art a gentleman by birth?

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KING EDWARD: Were he a peasant, being my minion, I’ll make the proudest of you stoop to him. (1.4.28–31) Marlowe’s protagonists simply attain greater heights than do those of the domestic tragedians: Tamburlaine outsizes Thomas Arden, John Page, and Frank Thorney. Tamburlaine is a suitable tragic subject because of his meteoric rise, “Threatening the world with high astounding terms, / And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword” (Prol. 5–6). Marlowe’s plays belong, as Peter Berek remarks, to a group of tragedies “printed in the early 1590s” that are “about heroic social mobility” (2008: 171). In plays of heroic social mobility, calling attention to the distinction between high and low on the tragic stage opens new directions possible for tragic representation. One could argue that the domestic tragedians’ break with the high/low distinction is in some ways more radical, even if they disclaim any intent to alter the convention. That these plays are now known as a distinctive subgenre is evidence that they did innovate in their use of nonaristocrats as tragic protagonists. In all these plays, the impulse is to represent those of nongentle birth; together, they offer the tantalizing possibility that social mobility can establish one’s place among the great. Thus, around 1580 a current of tragedy emerges in which the protagonist’s conventional social standing comes into question, and from which two streams branch off. Plays of heroic social mobility represent one vein, the tributary of domestic tragedy another.

V In discussing George Lillo’s revival of domestic tragedy in The London Merchant (1731), Cohen asks The question for the genre critic is why and how such a subgenre is initiated. The most obvious explanation is ideological: the plot of a known popular form becomes the subject of a traditionally elite one. The intermingling of the two suggests an elevation of the merchant’s role that is one of the tragedy’s themes. It also indicates a reshifting of the hierarchy of generic kinds. (215)

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As we saw with the life and murder of John Page of Plymouth, there is movement from known, popular—traditionally sub-literary—forms such as cheaply printed narrative pamphlets and ballads to the more elite form of the tragic stage. We will see this again in Chapter 2 as we trace the phenomenon in Arden of Faversham, moving from the cheap and ephemeral pamphlet to the chronicle and eventually to the stage. For now, however, we need to examine what Cohen calls a “reshifting of the hierarchy of kinds”, in particular the use of lower status characters, the traditional subjects of comedy, in tragedy. What accounts, again, for the appearance of domestic tragedy? An initial answer lies in the economics of the nascent early modern theater. Twenty-five of the thirty-three domestic tragedies were written between 1578 (Cruelty of a Stepmother) and 1608 (A Yorkshire Tragedy), at a time when the English professional theater was in its formative stages. Threat of closures from both plague and protests brought by civic and religious authorities, as well as the stiff competition from bear-baiting and other entertainments, meant that the professional theaters had to adapt to survive. The theoretical dictum of tragic protagonists coming from the highest social ranks appears to have given way, in domestic tragedy, to the practice of capitalizing on notorious spousal murders that had scandalized the country. A slight modification of tragic decorum in favor of situating the threshold for tragic representation a bit lower on the social scale hints, smartly, at economic and stage populism. The egregiousness of spousal murder makes for good drama, then and now. Theater had to be responsive to its audience whose members we know represented both the high and low and every gradation in between. The production of domestic tragedy at this moment in history seems to reflect and exacerbate a deeper struggle in English culture over rank and hierarchy. Social fluidity becomes stage fluidity; the stage, as Hamlet notes, is “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.524). Remarkably, the socioeconomic shifts of the late sixteenth century have not been examined for their influence on this alteration in tragic decorum on the early modern stage, yet in my view these changes in the social structure of English life more than adequately account for the emergence of domestic tragedy. Before I make this case, however, it is

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important to examine the prevailing accounts for the appearance of nonaristocratic protagonists in domestic tragedy. In the more recent account, Lena Orlin argues powerfully that domestic tragedy emerges as a dramaturgical experiment rooted in changing conceptions of the family. Although Orlin acknowledges the centrality of noble or royal characters in tragic theory, she finds a precedent for deviation from the norm: “While sixteenth-century England received no classical warrant for a ‘domestic’ tragedy, it perhaps imported contemporary theoretical precedent with [Cinthio] . . .” (1994: 76). Her “perhaps” derives from a letter, dating from 1543, in which Cinthio declares that Aristotle “does not at all forbid us to depart somewhat [from tragic conventions]—when so required by the place or the time or the quality of the things that are being handled . . .” (75). It is quite correct that Aristotle merely described the form of tragedy, yet those descriptions, especially the rank of tragic and comic subjects, became prescribed conventions. Rather than concede the point, Orlin uses it to argue that the early modern period established for the first time the worthiness of any person for tragic representation: This is my closing acknowledgment of the power of the Arden story and a first tribute to the achievement of the Arden play. Arden of Feversham proceeded from the early modern principles that, Diomedes to the contrary, there was no unimportant household and that, by virtue of analogy, Alice Arden’s crime . . . established the precedent that found private matters fit for dramatic representation. . . . (76) Unfortunately, the assertion that there was no unimportant household cannot withstand the weight of historical evidence.11 Even if one were to concede the point that such radically egalitarian principles were taking shape in the early modern era, the statement scarcely applies (as Orlin herself demonstrates) to the household of Thomas Arden or to any of those represented in domestic tragedy. Arden, like John Page, was hardly an everyman. On this point, Orlin follows Adams, who originated the “humble station of the hero” as the distinguishing characteristic of the genre

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(1943: viii). The tragic protagonists are all, in this view, well below the ranks of the gentry—households that had previously been considered unworthy of tragic representation. Adams’s assertion has regrettably solidified into the consensus view. Although it is true that domestic tragedies lower the social bar for tragic representation, they lower it to a medial position: these nonaristocrats are from the lesser or near-gentry, the nobilitas minor as opposed to the nobilitas major. The characters in these plays may be nonaristocratic, but they do have some claim or realizable aspiration to inclusion among the yeomanry or lesser gentry. Consider the male leads in the extant domestic tragedies: Thomas Arden, a substantial landowner and gentleman; George Sanders (A Warning for Fair Women), a London businessman who does well enough at the Exchange for him to acquire gentle status; John Frankford (A Woman Killed with Kindness), a gentleman “possessed of many fair revenues”; Thomas Merry (Two Lamentable Tragedies), a social-climbing tavern keeper who aspires, if unsuccessfully, to gentle status; Walter Calverley (A Yorkshire Tragedy), a gentleman descended from a notable Yorkshire family who squanders his wealth and, presumably, his social standing; Frank Thorney (The Witch of Edmonton), a gentleman’s son who marries the daughter of a rich yeoman to secure his father’s land and status; and Young Bateman (The Vow Breaker), a mere soldier left in the lurch by his fiancée, who, precisely because Bateman is unable to acquire gentle status, marries a wealthy German. Page of Plymouth, too, as we saw in the introduction, is quite wealthy, but a member of the merchant class, fit subjects, as in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, of comic fare. Without exception, the protagonists of domestic tragedy are all either established gentlemen or arrivistes. To say, then, that there is “no unimportant household” in domestic tragedy is to situate the genre closer than is warranted to Arthur Miller’s elevation of the common man in Death of a Salesman (1949). That the lesser gentry, the nobilitas minor, had not previously been considered worthy of tragic representation is certainly true. But the issue is not what allowed commoners to acquire tragic standing—they had none in the early modern period. The question is what allowed or even encouraged the choice of the lesser gentry as tragic protagonists. Adams proposed what remains the largely unchallenged view that domestic tragedies

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arise from the ashes of the morality play: “Had it not been for the moralities, domestic tragedies could not have come into being, for the early homiletic drama accustomed audiences to dramatic traditions necessary for domestic tragedy ” (1943, p. 73). As in Orlin’s updating of his theory, Adams suggested that Everyman—type for any man—was a prototype for the representation of nonaristocratic characters in domestic tragedy. Yet Adams himself recognized a generic problem facing his theory: “The early moral dramatists had no appreciation of the difference between tragedy and comedy . . .” (54). He was quite correct: the generic distinctions so prominent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have been blurred, ignored, or even unknown to the authors of morality plays. Thus, to suggest, as Adams does, that the use of a commoner as the protagonist in a morality play (where generic boundaries may well have been invisible, and, therefore, permeable) anticipates the use of a commoner in early modern tragedy (where such distinctions were understood and routinely maintained) is to insist on similarity where fundamental incommensurability obtains. Adams emphasizes literary continuity from one period to the next at the expense of other explanations, particularly those rooted outside mere literary influence. This does not mean that medieval drama played no role in the development of domestic tragedy. Just as there are Senecan influences on the domestic tragedies, one can see vestiges of the moralities on domestic tragedy, especially in a play such as Two Lamentable Tragedies. Not only do the allegorical figures of Homicide, Avarice, Covetousness and Truth continually comment on the tragedy unfolding before them, but Truth also ends the play with a direct address to the audience in much the same way many of its medieval predecessors did: See here the end of lucre and desire Of riches, gotten by unlawfull meanes, What monstrous evils this hath brought to passe, Your scarce drie eyes give testimoniall. . . . (1601: K2v) Yet even Two Lamentable Tragedies with its heavy didacticism, moves from abstract platitudes to the localized, historical account of Thomas

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Merry’s gruesome double murder. Robert Weimann suggests that this difference between the universal and general impulses of medieval theater and the “concrete experience” of the early modern stage underscores a dramatic shift toward “a new sense of the interdependence of character and society” (1978: 238). When one looks at the other domestic tragedies, their departure from the morality plays becomes even more abrupt. Domestic tragedies often lack overt moralizing, and in the case of a complex work such as A Woman Killed with Kindness, moral assessments are occluded at best (Lake 2002: 379; Wine lx–lxi; Ure 1974). Othello, too, scarcely fits within the framework of domestic tragedy if the genre is simply the outgrowth of the morality play: Othello wants to see some outward sign of devilish hooves in the fiendish Iago (5.2.294–95), but neither the beast fable nor the morality play nor the Vice figure can accommodate his wish for an easy explanation of human evil.12 A second problem with Adams’s view is that what one sees in domestic tragedies is not a connection to the moralities; instead, one sees a self-conscious awareness of these plays’ status as tragedies. In the epilogue to Arden of Faversham, Franklin apologetically calls the play a “naked tragedy”; in A Warning for Fair Women, the induction presents a debate between the allegorical figures of Tragedy, Comedy, and History all vying for center stage, with Tragedy eventually forcing her contenders off stage by “whip[ping] them” (Induction 71 s.d.). She must, nonetheless, apologize in the epilogue for her usurpation: “Beare with this true and home-borne Tragedie, / Yeelding so slender argument and scope, / To build a matter of importance on . . .” (2729–31). Part of her apology is mere convention, but her invocation of tragic conventions and of the play’s deviation from them, is telling. This is tragedy with a difference: a “home-borne” one with “slender” subject matter, hardly the tragic decorum befitting kings. In the prologue to A Woman Killed with Kindness, Heywood, too, signals the unconventionality of his play, as he echoes and subverts Christopher Marlowe’s memorable “high astounding terms” from the prologue of 1 Tamburlaine : I come but like a harbinger, being sent To tell you what these preparations mean:

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Look for no glorious state, our Muse is bent Upon a barren subject, a bare scene. We could afford this twig a timber-tree, ...................................... Our coarse fare, banquets; our thin water, wine; ...................................... Our ravens, doves; our crow’s black feathers, white. . . . (ll. 1–5, 9, 12) Martin Wine summarizes domestic tragedy’s difference from the moralities and from conventional tragedies: Although morality plays had established the tradition of presenting sin and violence allegorically in relation to a “realistic social background” and history plays currently were establishing “a most intimate connection between the events on the stage and the audience” by dealing with known personages against a national background, no one really disagrees that Arden [as the first extant domestic tragedy] brings something new to the English stage in its serious treatment of the affairs and passions of ordinary and near-contemporary Englishmen. (lviii) A third divide between the morality plays and domestic tragedies exists in the material conditions of the theater. Beginning around 1580, London had no fewer than six playhouses in operation six days a week (Gurr 2009: 18), partly in response to a rapid growth and concentration of population in the city. Andrew Gurr further suggests that by 1583 “the transitional didacticism of the ‘morality’ plays was also going fast. Playgoers, now paying directly for their entertainment, were motivated exclusively by the pleasure they expected for their pennies” (2004: 145–46). The commercial impulses of the established playhouses—the need to attract playgoers who wanted to be entertained—are well known. Individual theaters had to compete not only against other playhouses but against a variety of popular entertainments. If poetry both teaches and delights, as Sidney contended, delight in earlier English drama must be justified by instruction, the latter of which is especially paramount in the moralities (Lamb 1994: 499– 519). Domestic tragedies, along with much of early modern theater,

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bring delight prominently back into the equation: the spectacle of spousal murder, for instance, frequently subordinates instruction to the margins of the play, often to the title page or to the scaffold speeches that are a distinctive feature of the subgenre (Gurr 2004: 139). Audiences were probably much more intrigued by the representation of Thomas Arden’s bodily imprint lingering on the ground two years after his death than they were with any overt moralizing the play offers. As with several other forms, the morality play exercises an influence on domestic tragedy, but we would do well not to exaggerate the connection to what are dissimilar generic forms and impulses: the gap between A Woman Killed with Kindness and Everyman is a chasm suggestive more of discontinuity than similarity. Despite the many differences between moralities and domestic tragedies, Adams’s account still holds critical sway. Often, critics amend some fine point in his framework, such as Stephen Trainor’s insistence that the homiletic strain in domestic tragedy owes its origin to Anglican impulses (1983: 40–46), or, in A. C. Cawley’s view, to a Catholic ethos (1989: 155–68). Viviana Comensoli’s recent account likewise corroborates Adams’s position, only adding cyclical drama to the list of medieval influences on domestic tragedy (1999: 16, 27).13 One must, however, look elsewhere for an accounting of the genre’s provenance.

VI Orlin envisions a radically democratizing influence on the stage. John Frankford, Frank Thorney, John Page, and Thomas and Alice Arden are not peers of the realm, to be sure, but neither are they mere commoners. Adams in turn believed he had found a precedent in the moralities for nonaristocratic protagonists. Domestic tragedy emerges from neither of these hypotheses, although Orlin’s account is closer to the reality: domestic tragedy involves a modest but significant downward modification of tragic representation, one that is quite consistent with what we have seen concerning the workings and evolution of genres: a genre such as tragedy can seem fixed or even timeless, but . . . [g]enres do not, however, stand still . . . each new comedy

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or tragedy is a negotiation between an inherited form and current ideas and fashions. . . . For instance, in the 1590s companies began to perform tragedies about middle-class citizens, rather than kings or nobles. (Munro 191) Lucy Munro refers of course to domestic tragedies, which represent members of the “middle class” or, to be more historically accurate, to the lesser gentry whose cases of spousal murder attracted widespread notoriety and made Arden, Page, Thorney, and other quasiaristocrats suitable subjects for tragic representation. Their middling social status and the egregiousness of the murders combined to the horror and titillation of paying audiences. The authors of these plays knew that Arden and the other protagonists were unconventional choices for tragic representation, but only a bit of social fudging, plus a good measure of historiographic precedent in Thomas Arden’s case (see Chapter 2), transforms them into tragic figures. As Catherine Richardson remarks of these protagonists, “Men in small communities may be unimportant nationally, but they were significant locally” (84–85). Indeed, these men were unimportant nationally because they were nonaristocrats, but significant locally, even before the murders. The murders simply brought their stories to the attention of the nation. If tragedy began to elevate the lesser gentry to tragic representation in the 1580s, we would be wise to remind ourselves of the now well-documented social instability and mobility of the period.14 Of particular relevance to domestic tragedy, as social historians and cultural anthropologists have shown, is the movement into and out of the gentry at rates unprecedented and unrivalled again until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This shifting social structure and the natural evolution of dramatic practice converged to create, or allow for, domestic tragedy. It has been a commonplace since the publication of Greenblatt’s Renaissance SelfFashioning (1980) to look at the mutual interdependence of theater and society, and domestic tragedy is a perfect example of the phenomenon. For contemporary social theorists such as William Harrison and William Camden, “as the universe was ordered in a great chain of

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being, so society was composed of various estates of men all settled and contented in their degree” (Stone 1967: 21). Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman insists that gentility depends not on “vulgar opinion” but is “essential and absolute”, “inherent and Naturall” (1622: B4). The increasing social mobility of the period belies this essentialist conception of social status. Traditionally of course the ownership of land for three generations was crucial to one’s claim to gentility (Kelley 1990: 167). The numerous indicators of gentle status—land, conspicuous consumption, diet, clothing, servants, expensive sporting pursuits—were not absolutes but contingencies within a changing world (Wrightson 2003: 25; Whigham 1984). When the social world experienced the tumult it did in the sixteenth century, the absolute, essentialist status of the gentry came into question. Only a small portion of this story needs rehearsing if we are to understand domestic tragedy. As the population grew and agricultural prices rose in the sixteenth century, yeomen and other entrepreneurs, lawyers and financiers among them, capitalized and laid claim to gentle status, despite the fact that “the most fundamental dichotomy in society was between the gentleman and non-gentleman” (Stone 1966: 17)—a divide that, in theory at least, was impassable. Yet “in contemporary estimation yeomen were often ranked next to the gentlemen and considered to be pressing on their position” (Cressy 1976: 39); Hamlet notices the jostling for status even as it reaches the court: “By the Lord, Horatio, this three years I have took note of it: the age is grown so pick’d that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe” (5.1.138–41). This jockeying for position among the gentry and near-gentry manifested itself most conspicuously in the intense preoccupation with land, as its acquisition alone could elevate a yeoman’s children into the gentry. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and the consequent relaxation of legal restrictions hindering the alienation of Church property aided and abetted the land grab (Orlin 1994: 17). Throw into this mix Henry’s decision to sell Crown lands, and it is no surprise that 25–30 percent of the total landed area of the country became available for sale (Stone 1966: 42–43). The sale of these lands was a way for those with money, new or old, to acquire or solidify a claim to gentle status (Whigham 1996: 10), a

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point underscored by Wrightson’s conclusion to his examination of Yorkshire in the period 1558–1642: Finally, 210 families were able to achieve recognition of gentle status for the first time over the period, while a further seventynine probably did so. Of these rising families some were wealthy townsmen establishing themselves on estates, but the majority were prosperous yeomen who crossed the indefinable but crucial threshold of recognition as gentlemen. Such independent evidence confirms that, as contemporaries were aware, social mobility was a constant phenomenon in English society. (2003: 27) Harrison records this change in the conception of gentle status. He initially insisted on traditional lineal descent, declaring that the gentleman “is defined to descend of three descents [generations] of nobleness, that is to say, of name and of arms both by father and mother” (1577: 110). Yet he also recognized that extra-lineal criteria—a university education, for instance—could confer gentle status. Even more surprising, Harrison acknowledged that something as ephemeral as appearance played a role: “[one who] can live without manual labor, and thereto is able and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman, he shall for money have a coat and arms bestowed on him by heralds . . .” (114). He could have been describing Shakespeare, as could Peacham, who inveighs much more strongly against the self-made man: “Neither must we Honor or esteeme those ennobled, or made Gentle in blood, who by Mechanicke and base meanes, have raked up a masse of wealth, or . . . weare the Cloath of a Noble Personage, or have purchased an ill Coat at a good rate; no more than a Player upon a stage . . .” (B4). However frowned upon this self-fashioning was in certain quarters, the importance of keeping up with the Joneses, or of rising to their level, was not lost on contemporaries (Vaughan 1600: S5; Stone 1967: 65–69). It is important to remember, too, that social movement was not unidirectional. In seventeenth-century Yorkshire alone, “as many as one third to a half of the families claiming gentility changed” (Wrightson 26). Of movement downwards on the social scale, “history, however,

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rarely records, and even more rarely pays attention to, such tragedies” (Stone 1966: 35). Histories may not, but plays such as A Yorkshire Tragedy certainly do. Douglass Bruster has emphasized the early modern stage as a center of commerce where profit requires the playwrights to be responsive to their play-going public (2005: 2–10). Part of that responsiveness in the 1590s entailed “tap[ping] that reservoir of curiosity about the real lives of living people which is now the refreshment in newspapers”; given this interest, Arden of Faversham represents “one writer’s sense of what his market would bear” (Gurr 2004: 170, 172). Domestic tragedy taps perfectly into this market through the use of local nonaristrocratic figures made famous through murderous scandal. What made Thomas Arden and George Sanders so appealing to paying audiences may have been their social equality with, or resemblance to, those in the audience. In good materialist fashion, the early modern stage was sensitive to the way in which economics informs social status, especially among the newly rich or “privileged playgoers”, as Ann Jennalie Cook (1981) dubs them, who liked to advertise their status at performances(Gurr 2009: 50; Butler 1987: 293–98). Such concern with status may have suggested intriguing possibilities both dramaturgically and financially to playwrights eager to attract audiences along the socioeconomic ladder. The existence of thirty-three domestic tragedies is evidence of their appeal, durability, and putative acceptance as tragedies. Whigham summarizes the circulation of social energy between stage and society: The ideological struggle over models of social rank in early modern England is now a familiar matter. The land dispersion attendant upon the dissolution of the monasteries, interacting with a variety of other factors, generated an increasingly disturbing sense that status previously constructed as absolute and God-given could in fact be acquired by various kinds of human effort. (1996: 10) He has analyzed the frequency in early modern drama of characters who either establish or solidify their tenuous claims to status by seizing others’ land, property, women, and so on. They do so to have

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their identities acknowledged, which is precisely what happened in the broader culture off stage. Domestic tragedy is acutely responsive to this social mobility, capitalizing on these egregious spousal murders among the lesser gentry. There were spousal murders among commoners, but those cases do not merit historical notice, much less tragic representation. Far from attempting a radical break with received tragic conventions, domestic tragedies take pains not to flout tragic decorum; instead, they suggest that nonaristocrats such as Thomas Arden and George Sanders have risen far enough socioeconomically to pass tragic muster. Although domestic tragedies share “a number of overlapping characteristics and impulses” (Comensoli 1999: 13), central to almost all of them is the vulnerable social standing of their subjects. As members of the lesser gentry, these men and women become acceptable subjects for tragic representation, especially since the egregious spousal murders they represent drew crowds and encouraged dramatic imitators. Arden may have been a provincial with no gentle pedigree, but he acquired powerful friends at court and the wealth that went with it; he even served a term as Faversham’s mayor (Hyde 1996: 68–73).The view that the “domestic” in domestic tragedy refers to men of “humble station” has become a critical commonplace. With the use of social history in the analysis of the plays, critics have begun to correct Adams on this one point, but most often the corrections are made in passing, or in notes (Holbrook 1994: 87n7), or go too far in suggesting that these protagonists can be anyone “of less than royal birth” (Henderson 1998: 173). Orlin has recently modified her earlier position, noting in regard to the subgenre’s tragic protagonists, “stature was variable within certain non-aristocratic, above-the-poverty-line parameters” (2002: 371). This is quite correct, even if it has done little yet to change our broader understanding of domestic tragedy in relation to Othello. Failure to understand the implications of representing the lesser gentry has obscured Shakespeare’s penetrating exploration of the tenuous social standing of his Moor of Venice. The nonaristocrats of all these plays had some claim to status as gentlemen and were ideal subjects with which to explore the interaction between social mobility

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and tragic theory. Domestic tragedy is not an experiment that defies normative expectations in tragic theory; instead, it is an experiment rooted in—indeed, justified by—the shifting material conditions and status of early modern persons. The sensational spousal murders represented in domestic tragedies lent, to be sure, an economic attractiveness to the staging of these plays, but the deeper issues they explore—Othello relentlessly so—are the social standing of their protagonists and the horror of domestic violence, which gives them a poignancy that reaches back to classical drama. We should also recall that Collier’s coining of the term in 1831 was applied ex post facto— 250 years later, in fact. Domestic tragedies referred to themselves quite self-consciously on their title pages and elsewhere simply as “tragedies” . Even in the few references domestic tragedies make to their innovations in subject matter, they never once consider themselves to be outside the realm of tragedy. Thomas Rymer, as we shall see, might not accept the decorum of a Thomas Arden as tragic protagonist, but his presence on stage, along with that of his fellow protagonists, suggests that the early modern stage was amenable, for a time at least,15 to the tragic representation of nonaristocrats, persons who, like Othello, had by traditional standards little claim to social and stage worthiness. In the end, the unprecedented social mobility of sixteenth-century England and the economic incentive to stage spousal murder plays explain the tragic representation of commoners such as Thomas Arden. The economic incentive was probably a necessary but not sufficient condition for the staging of Arden: necessary because the spousal murder brought in paying audiences to see the spectacle, but not sufficient in and of itself to overcome the impasse of tragic decorum. Surely there were other commoners who had been murdered or suffered other calamities whose stories could have been represented on stage, but were not. What is it about Arden of Faversham that allowed it to become the first tragedy of a commoner? I would suggest that the answer lies in Arden’s social mobility, which the Arden playwrights used as both a necessary and, more importantly, sufficient condition for his tragic representation. It was the egregious mariticide, coupled with Arden’s rise into the gentry in provincial Faversham, that made

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the conditions ripe for his representation on the early modern stage. As we will see in the next chapter, in order to compensate for their protagonist’s nonaristocratic status, the Arden playwrights gentrify Arden while simultaneously allowing for and alluding to his liminal status. Just how tenuous Thomas Arden’s status was can be seen in John Stow’s narrative account of Arden’s common origins, an account redacted in Raphael Holinshed’s later chronicle of the murder. The Arden playwrights took their story largely from Holinshed, but traces of Arden’s lowly past remain in the play. The effect is to make Arden, like Othello and all of the protagonists of domestic tragedy who follow him, seem at once worthy and unworthy of tragic representation.

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Chapter 2

A Local Habitation Lends a Name: Thomas Arden’s Tragic Stature

On Sunday, 15 February 1551, about seven o’clock in the evening, 43-year-old Thomas Arden, a man “of tall and comely personage”, sat down to play a game of backgammon in his home and was murdered by a conspiracy of ten people including his wife, Alice, and her lover, Thomas Mosby (Holinshed 1587: 1062; Orlin 1994: 15; Hyde 18). The Wardmote Book of Faversham for 1551 recounts the events, as the conspirators, led by the allegorically named “Blackwyll”, surprise Arden: the foresaid Blackwyll whome [Alice] and her compleces had bestowed prvely before / and came wt a napkyn in his hand / and sodeynly came behinde the said Arderns back threwe the said napkyn our hes hedd & face and strangled him / and forthwt / the said Morsbye stept to him / and strake him wt a taylors great pressing Iron uppon the hedd to the Brayne. . . . (in Wine 161) According to the antiquarian John Stow, Black Will then gave Arden a “great gash” that “kyllyd him”; for good measure his wife “with a knyfe gave hir husbond 7 or 8 pricks in the brest becawse she would make him sure”. Apparently, Arden was “so evell belovyd” in Faversham that Alice was able to convince her co-conspirators that they could kill him with impunity (Hyde 121, 120).1 Yet two of his benefactors were members of the Privy Council, which investigated the murder and acted with dispatch. Within a month Alice and a female maidservant, Elizabeth Stafford, were burned at the stake in Canterbury for petty treason, while Michael Saunderson, a manservant

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likewise adjudged guilty of petty treason for betraying his master, was “hanged; cut down while still alive; stripped naked; his genitals cut off and stuck in his mouth; his entrails pulled out and burned; his body cut into quarters and parboiled with his head and then dispersed” (94). The story itself became widely and enduringly dispersed. In A Defense of the Judgment of the Reformed Churches, John Rainolds, one of the translators of the King James Bible, had not forgotten the gruesome murder. Arguing for a husband’s right to divorce his wife in a case of adultery, Rainolds warned that cuckoldry might be the least of the man’s worries: And how can he choose but live still in fear & anguish of mind, lest she add drunkenness to thirst, & murder to adultery: I mean lest she serve him as Clytemnestra did Agamemnon, as Livia did Drusus, as Mistress Arden did her husband? (1609: N1)2 From her story’s small beginning in Faversham of Kent, Alice had become, in just over a half century, the “English Clytemnestra”, a feat of no small significance (Wine lxxii). Her metastasis from domestic housewife to near-mythic killer, and her husband’s from lowly clerk to victimized gentleman, testifies to the mythopoetic capacities of historiography.3 What gave the story its real staying power, however, was its translation to the English stage in Arden of Faversham (1592). Arden is the first extant domestic tragedy to cast a nonaristocratic character as tragic protagonist—with understandably mixed results. Stephen Orgel has observed that calling Arden of Faversham a domestic tragedy is “a backhanded compliment since tragedy really ought not to be domestic” (1979: 111). Arden offers “high conventions fitted to pedestrian folk” (Holbrook 98), and this juxtaposition tends to make the play uneven, careening towards comedy at times. We should expect this, given that nonaristocratic characters usually inhabit the world of comedy. Yet the play self-consciously situates itself within a tragic mode, calling attention at least four times to “Arden’s tragedy” (iii.103, 165; iv.80; viii.30).4 Martin Wine summarizes Arden’s uniqueness: “no one really disagrees that Arden brings something new to the English stage in its serious treatment of the affairs and passions of ordinary and

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near-contemporary Englishmen” (lviii). The question is why? What allowed or encouraged the playwrights of Arden to think that these characters, and particularly Thomas Arden, could occupy the same tragic space as a Hamlet or Lear? The literary representation of men such as Thomas Arden is not wholly without precedent. Adams recognized an impulse in the popular literature of the day toward the representation of nonaristocrats: “The nondramatic literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contains many tales similar to those dramatized in domestic tragedy. These stories helped to establish the customary attitudes of the people toward the events and deeds which provided dramatists with plots for tragedies of domestic incident” (viii, 26). Consider, for instance, The Life and Death of Jack Straw, the pedestrian story of a mere tiler who refuses to pay his taxes to the king’s collector (Anon 1594: A3); or The Mirror for Magistrates, where one finds embedded between stories of kings and peers of the realm three tales of lesser figures: those of Jack Cade, Jane Shore (Edward IV’s mistress), and of a rebellion by “the viler part” in “The Blacksmith” (1559: 414). Democratizing impulses are clearly at work in the early modern era and thus it is perhaps logical to deduce that domestic tragedies might attempt to incorporate nonaristocratic characters into tragic drama. Yet domestic tragedies hardly emerge from these nondramatic sources: the requirements of tragic decorum still constitute a generic impasse. As I argued at the end of the preceding chapter, the economic incentive for staging the horrific spousal murder was not in and of itself enough to warrant the tragic representation of commoners. The playwrights still need to justify generically the economic incentive for staging the play; they cannot simply lower the bar and suggest that a nonaristocrat such as Thomas Arden can suddenly become a tragic protagonist. Any number of commoners experienced tragic loss, and the representation of their stories could also have been brought to the stage, but were not. What allowed Thomas Arden’s tragedy to be staged, what set it apart?5 The answer has been overlooked because it constitutes a paradox: Arden is at once a commoner and a gentleman. Since tragic decorum militated against the depiction of commoners as tragic protagonists, Arden should not be a tragic protagonist; since he can also lay claim to having risen into the

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gentry, he becomes an acceptable (if tenuous) subject for tragic representation. As both commoner and gentleman, Arden enjoys an ambivalent and unusual status that permits his representation, even as the very act of casting him as tragic protagonist necessarily modifies tragic decorum downwards. Thomas Arden is a member of the lesser gentry whose social difference from a Hamlet or a Lear is a difference in degree, not in kind: he is a member of the nobilitas minor rather than the nobilitas major. When he died that fateful night in 1551, he could lay claim to having acquired gentle status in the course of his lifetime. That status was accepted by early commentators on the murder, including John Stow and, especially, Raphael Holinshed. By 1609, as we saw, Arden is no less an established victim of mariticide than Agamemnon, which places him in high—mythic—company. But when Arden was killed 15 February 1551, those in Faversham also knew that he was an arriviste figure, an opportunistic, selfmade—even greedy—man who made the right connections to acquire land, real property, a gentle wife, and the de facto bearing of a gentleman. His contemporaries in 1551 did not know the mythic Arden of 1609; they knew him as a man who had been able to elevate himself from what he had been, a commoner. John Stow’s unpublished account of Arden’s humble origins gives us the clearest account of this, but it survives, in redacted form, in Holinshed’s telling of the tale, and also in the play itself, which takes Holinshed’s account as its primary source. What happened in Arden’s life is that he acquired the social stature of a gentleman and thereby acquired the suitability for tragic representation, even if he is of a lower social standing than the traditional protagonists of tragic decorum. In becoming the first English commoner who occupied center stage in a tragic drama, Thomas Arden established the precedent for the representation of the arriviste figures who populate domestic tragedy. In my view, Arden represents a modest but telling downward modification of tragic decorum. How did the playwrights go about this modification, as they had to recognize even more acutely then than we do today the difference between Thomas Arden of Faversham and King Gorbudoc or Hamlet or any other tragic protagonist they could have known in 1592? The solution was handed to them by Holinshed and other commentators on the story, who elevate—gentrify—Arden,

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suggesting that he had attained a social standing worthy of historical notice. At the same time, and with brilliant ambivalence, the playwrights make us aware of Arden’s lowly past as well as his shrewd financial sense. In part the playwrights merely reflect the historical Thomas Arden’s upward social mobility and his claim to gentility, even as they undercut this claim by showing how his avarice and opportunism establish his unmistakably crass origins. Thus, in what follows I will demonstrate both Arden’s lowly origins, mentions of which suffuse the play, as well as his claim to a social stature in 1551 (and thereafter) that warrants his tragic representation. Arden of Faversham becomes, in effect, the first tragedy of a commoner who is simultaneously an established gentleman.

I The main source for Arden of Faversham is Holinshed’s account in his posthumous 1587 (second) edition of the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Lockwood 2007: xxvii). After a paragraph on the death of the earl of Southampton and some charitable works by Sir Andrew Jude, mayor of London, Holinshed interrupts the narrative to insert Arden’s story. Numerous critics have noted his squeamishness about including a “private matter” in his history of the great: About this time there was at Faversham in Kent a gentleman named Arden most cruelly murdered and slain by the procurement of his own wife. The which murder, for the horribleness thereof, although otherwise it may seem to be but a private matter, and therefore, as it were, impertinent to this history, I have thought good to set it forth somewhat at large, having the instructions delivered to me by them that used some diligence to gather the true understanding of the circumstances. (1062) At the end of the account, which takes up four folio pages, he nonchalantly reverts to his account of the great:, “And thus far touching this horrible and heinous murder of master Arden. To return then where we left. About this time the king’s majesty calling his high court of parliament . . .” (1066). Yet as Holinshed well knew, historiography

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traditionally concerned itself exclusively with aristocrats (Helgerson 2000: 18–22). The vast majority of English people “stood in the background”, as Keith Wrightson remarks, “in the penumbra of historical consciousness” (11)—a phenomenon that, as Erich Auerbach showed to such sterling effect, also permeates western literary history (2003: 2). Renaissance historiographers often derided chroniclers for their inclusion of stories of middle- and lower-status persons. Annabel Patterson has argued that Holinshed and his fellow chroniclers were “inarguably middle-class, and writing primarily for a middle class audience” (1994: 188–89); in Edmund Bolton’s less neutral appraisal, the chroniclers themselves were “of the Dregs of the common People”(ca. 1618: 96). Indeed, detractors of chronicles inveighed against them as being “full of confusion and commixture of unworthy relations” (Heylyn 1621: C1)—“triviall houshold trash”, in John Donne’s satiric dismissal (1597: 17). The chroniclers’ democratizing impulse eventually, as we know, became acceptable practice for historians and other writers, but in the mid-sixteenth century it was an innovation in historiography, one that established a precedent for the Arden playwrights and their successors in the subgenre. In the induction to A Warning for Fair Women, Tragedy herself asks that we “Beare with this true and homeborne Tragedie, / Yeelding so slender argument and scope, / To build a matter of importance on . . .” (Cannon 1975: 2729–31). Domestic tragedies are self-consciously aware of their generic “impertinence”, yet they press ahead despite these apologies and apparent violations of tragic decorum. They do so because they feel justified in modestly lowering the threshold of the social status requisite for tragic representation. The lesser gentry become acceptable subjects, and Holinshed, among others, represents Arden as a gentleman, someone whose fall is worthy of historical and, by extension, dramatic notice. As men such as Thomas Arden acquired land and status, they also acquired the potential for tragic representation. Land tenure and social status are intimately linked in the minds of early modern commentators; the possibility of introducing an arriviste in the role of tragic lead was not lost on the authors of Arden of Faversham. As the play opens, Franklin tries to cheer Arden, who is worried about his

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wife’s affair with Mosby, with the news that Lord Somerset (Edward Seymour) has given him a grant of the lands surrounding the Abbey of Faversham: Arden, cheer up thy spirits and droop no more. My gracious Lord the Duke of Somerset Hath freely given to thee and to thy heirs, By letters patents [sic] from his majesty, All the lands of the Abbey of Faversham. Here are the deeds, [He hands over the papers.] Sealed and subscribed with his name and the king’s. Read them, and leave this melancholy mood. (i.1–8) Arden’s wealth and stage identity are conferred in the same instant: a local habitation indeed lends a name. As Michael Neill remarks, land in the early modern era has a “paradoxical role as both an index of rank and a fungible commodity”: The commodification of land made it a key mechanism by which mere pelf could be transformed into social prestige, conferring an aura of legitimacy upon upward social mobility. For it was still the ownership of landed estates that served, better than anything else, to mark the most important of all divisions in early modern society: that between the nobility and gentry on the one hand and the commonality on the other. . . . (2000: 51–52, italics Neill’s) From Arden on down, all of the characters realize that to acquire land is to acquire social stature. In the subplot, Arden’s servant Michael wants to marry Mosby’s sister, Susan; to do so he also is willing, like Shakespeare’s Edmund, to kill for land: whether I live or die I’ll make her more worth than twenty painters can; For I will rid mine elder brother away, And then the farm of Bolton is mine own. Who would not venture upon house and land When he may have it for a right-down blow? (i.170–75)

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A similar economic calculus is applied by Greene, who would “rather die than lose my land” (i.518), and by Black Will, who tells Greene, “Give my fellow George Shakebag and me twenty angels; and, if thou’lt have thy own father slain that thou may’st inherit his land, we’ll kill him” (ii.85–87). Land is the prime commodity from beginning to end, with Arden dying—fittingly perhaps—on the land he wrested from Read and his wife. In life, land conferred gentility; on stage, tragic stature.

II Arden is a new man as the play opens, but his social standing is at issue throughout the play. To get a sense of the historical basis for this, it is worth revisiting Lena Orlin’s and Patricia Hyde’s independent reconstructions of his life. Contrary to eighteenth-century marginalia that cite Wye in Kent as Arden’s birthplace, he seems to have been born in Norwich, outside Kent (Orlin 1994: 21). When he later appears in Faversham, in Kent, he can lay no claim to having established his claim to gentility through his forebears’ landed presence in the area. Although not of gentle birth, Arden was “probably a member of a family that was part of the merchant elite of Norwich” (Hyde 26). The next public records we have of Arden show him, in 1537, in the service of Sir Edward North (Lord Clifford in the play), for whom Arden served as a mere clerk, not a promising start for tragic representation. (Can one imagine Hamlet similarly clerking?) North himself was a new man in Tudor society, a lawyer who was the recipient of Cromwell’s patronage, sat on the Privy Council, and was eventually made Baron North of Kirtling (Helgerson 2000: 152). His titles included the chancellorship of the Court of Augmentations in 1544, established by Henry VIII for dispersing church property after the dissolution of the monasteries. Arden strengthened his hand by marrying Alice Brigandine, who just happened to be North’s stepdaughter (Hyde 22, 32; Wine xxxvi). Arden had one other influential Westminster connection in Sir Thomas Cheney (Lord Cheine in Arden). Cheney too was a member of the Privy Council and—more important for Arden—the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, which included Faversham. Cheney helped

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arrange Arden’s appointment as the king’s collector of customs in Faversham as well as the comptroller of Sandwich, both lucrative positions (Orlin 1994: 27; Hyde 43). In 1544, Cheney received a license to alienate a Benedictine abbey in Faversham, and granted a portion of the lands to Arden on 24 March 1545. The abbey’s holdings were vast—300 houses in toto (Hyde 16)—and for £117 Arden acquired a small but significant portion of the alienated buildings: “twenty-five messuages, two corner tenements, two shops, a cottage, a storehouse, seven gardens, lands including the abbey site and another one-halfacre parcel” (Orlin 1994: 29; Swaine 1970: 11). We need to be careful about the extent of Arden’s rise, however: he made out well, but he did not acquire all of the abbey’s holdings. Nonetheless, his social rise is accomplished the moment the play opens, and it is precisely this ascendancy that is crucial to his viability as a tragic protagonist. Raymond Chapman, the first critic to focus on social status in the play, noted its uniqueness as a tragedy dealing with peasants and yeoman (1956: 15–17). But what is one to make of Arden himself—does he have the social stature necessary for tragic standing? Given the play’s existence, the answer would seem to be tautological, but we ought not to substitute an ex post facto judgment for what at the time was almost certainly an experiment in tragic decorum. The play itself is strikingly ambivalent in its representation of Arden, but let us begin with its representation of Arden as a gentleman. The title page, typically elaborate for its day, had a separate literary life of its own in St. Paul’s churchyard, the popular site of the book trade, where it was used as an advertising handbill (Wine xix). It begins with the usual indictments: THE / LAMENTA- / BLE AND TRVE TRA- / GEDIE OF M. AR- / DEN OF FEVERSHAM / IN KENT. / Who was most wickedlye murdered, by / the meanes of his disloyall and wanton / wyfe, who for the loue she bare to one / Mosbie . . . . (2) The “M.” of the title page is of course an abbreviation for “master”, which can refer to one who directs or controls a household or who owns land. Originally it was a term of respect dating from 1340 and

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“used only in speaking of or to a man either of high social rank or of learning, but gradually extended in application”.6 Its use here indicates Arden is a person of rank; as an advertisement for a tragedy, which requires a certain social standing, the handbill makes no mention of Arden as a new man. Likewise, Arden is frequently referred to in the play as a “gentleman”, a term equally in flux in the period but whose use nonetheless indicated one’s having arrived: “To Arden and his contemporaries, however, the right to call yourself a ‘gentleman’ was a matter of solid social significance . . .” (Neill 2000: 56). Both “master” and “gentleman” register social gradations within Arden, just as they do thirty years later in The Witch of Edmonton, a late domestic tragedy (1621). As Old Thorney and Old Carter negotiate the wedding of their son and daughter, respectively, Carter—a newly wealthy yeoman—has no pretentions about his social origins: Old Thorney. You offer, Master Carter, like a gentleman; I cannot find fault with it, ’tis so fair. Old Carter. No gentleman I, Master Thorney; spare the Mastership, call me by my name, John Carter. Master is a title my father, nor his before him, were acquainted with. Honest Hertfordshire yeomen, such an one am I. (1.2.1–6) The Arden of his eponymous play has no such qualms, even though he is, again, not of gentle birth and began his ascent clerking for North. In the play Arden is quick to insist upon his gentility and to distinguish himself from Mosby, even though Mosby also worked for North and rose by the same business acumen to become his steward. No doubt because Arden did in fact rise further than Mosby, who was also—villainously—fully complicit in the murder, the historical record drew clear social distinctions between the two men. The earliest official account of the events surrounding Arden’s death, the Wardmote Book of Faversham, identifies him in its shorthand script as the “foresaid gent”, and Mosby only as “one Thomas Morsby a tayllor of london” (in Wine 160). The Breviat Chronicle for

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1551 also describes the murder of “one Arden a gentilman” (xxxvii). Eighty years later, Arden’s status is similarly secure in the 1633 ballad, “The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden”, which suggests in its workaday iambic pentameter that Alice was married “Unto a Gentleman of wealth and fame” (164). The balladists produced their work quickly for mass audiences and, as a result, they tended to offer sensational and simplistic storylines: good versus evil; the genteel Arden versus the upstart Mosby (Dolan 1994: 48; Stone 1967: 387). Arden was wealthy, to be sure, but we must be careful not to overstate his wealth or importance in the town.7 His is not de casibus tragedy. Having said this, it is also clear that the gentlemanly Arden of the sources is largely reproduced in the play—even exaggerated at times, as Keith Sturgess notes (1969: 22–23). Not only is he identified by his enemies (his wife, unfortunately, among them) as a gentleman (i.203), he also acts with noblesse oblige: magnanimous to his servants (iii.176) and faithful to his wife (x.29–31), attributes, according to Henry Peacham, of the gentry(C1v, C3v).8 Arden’s servant Michael even suggests that Arden is a gentle “lamb”: Michael. Thus feeds the lamb securely on the down Whilst through the thicket of an arbour brake The hunger-bitten wolf o’erpries his haunt And takes advantage to eat him up. Ah, harmless Arden, how, how hast thou misdone That thus thy gentle life is levelled at? (iii.191–96) The last line of Michael’s speech conflates Arden’s alleged lamb-like gentleness with his social status. The parable includes a reference to the levelers who would destroy enclosures and the social distinctions men such as Arden worked so diligently to maintain. Arden even asserts, just as Othello will his royalty (1.2.22), his genteel status: “I am by birth a gentleman of blood” (i.36). This claim, like Othello’s, cannot be verified: both men share an itinerant status but claim an aristocratic past that is tied to other places. Arden does not want others to view him as a new man, but the playwrights, who knew their sources well, keep revisiting the issue of Arden’s social and tragic stature.

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III Between the original records of the murder and the later, entrenched representations of Alice as the English Clytemnestra and Arden as abused gentleman, stand those of the antiquarians Raphael Holinshed and John Stow. Holinshed’s account derives from Stow’s, which though never published in his lifetime is preserved among his papers in the British Library (Harley MS 542). Both Stow and Holinshed accept Arden’s having acquired genteel status some time before his death in 1551. Stow informs us that Mosby was initially unwilling to kill Arden, or even to pick a fight with him, “for he sayd he could not fynd in his harte to kyll a gentleman” (Hyde120)—Holinshed copies the line verbatim (1587: 1064). Yet Stow’s account varies from Holinshed’s in a few material respects that bear on the question of Arden’s status. Stow merely tells us that Arden “married a well favoryd yonge gentlewoman” (Hyde 117); Holinshed adds a detail that hints at their social commensurability: Arden was “matched in marriage with a gentle-woman” (1062). Holinshed in fact subtly begins to gentrify Arden. The playwrights adopt Holinshed’s locution in Alice’s description of herself as “Being descended of a noble house, / And matched already with a gentleman . . .” (i.202–03). Stow provides suggestive evidence of Arden’s humble origins: “This Ardene had a mother dwellynge in Norwiche who went a beggynge, but he assayed all meanes possible to kepe hir from it, which wowld not be . . .” (Hyde 117). Arden had acquired enough wealth by this time to provide her with a stipend, but to no avail; he seems to have been able to stop her begging only by force: “Than she was restreyned from hir beggynge, and willed to chuse who shuld with hir porcion kepe hir durynge hir lyfe . . . notwithstandynge she nevar injoyed after she was restreyned from hir beggynge” (117). The recidivist beggar of Stow’s account, with which he opens his narrative, is nowhere to be found in Holinshed’s version. Stow moreover describes Mosby as “a taylor by his occupation, a blacke swartman, who in procese of tyme was made one of the chefeste gentlemen about the Lord Northe” (117). Holinshed copies Stow’s description of Mosby’s occupation and complexion, but then refers to him as a mere “servant to the Lord North”. With the omission of Mosby’s social climbing as well

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as Arden’s lowly past, Holinshed distinguishes between the two men and in the process renders Arden, and Arden alone, worthy of tragic representation. Two further discrepancies between Holinshed and Stow bear on the play. Stow notes that Mosby “had piked a qwarell with hym rydynge to or from London and callynge hym knave, vyllane and cokoolde, but Arden would not fight” (120). Holinshed obliquely refers to “some quarrel”, but omits (or suppresses) the remarks about Arden’s being called a knave or villain (1064). Arden refused to fight, and may have done so because a gentleman is under no obligation to fight with a social inferior (Barber 1985: 34). According to Stow, however, Arden abstained because he hoped to gain by his wife’s adultery: Perceyvynge ryght well theyr mutuall familiaritie to be muche greatar then theyr honestie, was yet so greatly gyven to seke his advauntage, and caryd so lytle how he came by it that in hope of atteynynge some benefite of the Lord Northe by meanes of this Mosby who could do muche with hym, he winked at that shamefull dysorder and bothe parmyttyd and also invited hym very often to be in his howse. (Hyde 117) To be sure, Holinshed disapproves of Arden’s actions, but he also downplays the rapacious wittol of Stow’s account, merely reporting that Arden did not want to “lose the benefit which he hoped to gain at some of her friends hands in bearing with her lewdness . . .” (1062). Holinshed’s account is more indirect, even tactful, the effect of which is to mitigate Arden’s moral culpability for and complicity in his wife’s adultery. Holinshed suggests that the “horribleness of the murder” leads him to include Arden’s “private matter” in his chronicle. Another motive is equally plausible: Holinshed views or wants to view Arden as a gentleman, someone worthy of inclusion in his chronicle because of his social prominence. Holinshed gentrifies Arden by omitting most of Stow’s material that indicates Arden’s self-fashioning as well as his humble birth. One could argue that Holinshed’s squeamishness over reporting the “private matter” refers to Arden’s status as a provincial of whom the history chronicle should take no notice. Yet Holinshed expresses no

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concern with Arden’s tenuous social status, only with the privacy of a domestic spousal murder. The Chronicles solidify Arden’s suitability for the history chronicle and, by extension, the tragic stage. Holinshed in effect acts as Thomas Arden’s theatrical agent.

IV The playwrights look to Holinshed’s version of the Ardens’ “private matter” with a keen and probing eye. Historically, Arden found his wife’s adultery financially useful; dramatically, the playwrights transform Arden’s toleration of the adultery even further than Holinshed does. First, they completely suppress the fact that Arden acted as a wittol, virtually prostituting his wife to Mosby in the hopes of material benefit from Lord North. Both Stow and Holinshed are clear on this point; Holinshed merely downplays it. In the play, Arden gives no indication of hoping to profit from his acquiescence to Alice’s adultery—probably in part because the North family wanted to dissociate themselves from the events of a generation past, including the unseemly business of Lord North’s being part of the Privy Council when it decided that Alice, his stepdaughter, should be burned at the stake for her role in the murder (Helgerson 2000: 25; Whigham 1996: 73). The effect of the suppression is to depict Arden here as an abused husband and injured gentleman, although Arden is also manifestly guilty of self-delusion; his uxoriousness prevents him from acknowledging what Franklin tells Alice in his presence: “Why Mosby taunts your husband with the horn” (xiii.138; Lake 108–110). Second, the playwrights transform Arden’s pandering to Mosby’s sexual desires into class antagonism (Comensoli 1999: 85). Notice this early exchange on the subject of his wife’s adultery: Franklin. Comfort thyself, sweet friend; it is not strange That women will be false and wavering. Arden. Ay, but to dote on such a one as he Is monstrous, Franklin, and intolerable. Franklin. Why, what is he? Arden. A botcher, and no better at the first,

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Who, by base brokage getting some small stock, Crept into service of a nobleman, And by his servile flattery and fawning Is now become the steward of his house, And bravely jets it in his silken gown. (i.20–30) In other words (and with offhand misogyny), a woman’s adultery may be expected, but for her to cross class lines in doing so is simply intolerable. He sounds like Chaucer’s “lusty bacheler” who complains that his prospective bride is not only old and ugly but, worse, “comen of so lough a kynde” (1101). Apparently, class will tell. The playwrights’ emphasis on class is in fact central to the work, as Michael Billington remarks in his review of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1970 production of Arden. Billington found this particular performance wanting because what it seems to overlook is the play’s incessant harping on class distinctions. The cuckold despises Mosbie because he is an artificer and a “good man botcher”, his mistress even flings his lowly origins in his face and one is made to feel that his crime is not merely that he’s a murderous adulterer but that he’s base-born with it. (1970: 13) Arden seems to reinforce his own status, and his sense of injury to it, by continually denigrating Mosby: “injurious ribald” (“a menial or dependent of low birth”9) (i.37); “villain” (304); “base” (311); “groom” (305); “peasant” (323); “sirrah” (310); “goodman” (“prefixed, usually with satirical intention, to the names of persons under the rank of gentleman”10) (315); “drudge” (322); and, here, “botcher”—“a mender of old clothes”, as Johnson’s dictionary has it, “the same to a tailor as a cobbler to a shoemaker” (in McAdam & Milne 1963: 104). The social and professional divide separating tailors from botchers is clear. The OED cites Richard Baxter’s The divine life (1664): “A sorry Taylor may make a botcher”, and further defines the latter as “One who does a thing bunglingly . . . an unskillful workman, a bungler”. Tailors belonged to a guild and had some pretensions, part of which no doubt entailed distancing themselves from botchers. Arden insists on Mosby’s former status as a botcher, a vocation Mosby later acknowledges (i.320–21).

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Arden never passes up the opportunity to make what Whigham calls “sneering allusions” to Mosby’s status. When Mosby pulls out his sword to defend himself, Arden resorts to statutory law which, as clerk to his father-in-law North, he learned well: Then ARDEN draws forth Mosby’s sword. Arden. So, sirrah, you may not wear a sword. The statute makes against artificers. I warrant that I do. Now use your bodkin, Your Spanish needle, and your pressing iron, For this shall go with me. (i.310–14) The sumptuary law, enacted by Edward III, stipulated that anyone under the rank of a gentleman could not wear a sword. Arden deprecatingly advises Mosby to use his tailor’s bodkin and other tools of the trade—Spanish needle and pressing iron. The irony of course is that the real Mosby used an iron to kill him. Mosby is as quick to defend his social aspirations as Franklin and Arden are to dash them. In response to Franklin’s question, “Why, canst thou deny thou wert a botcher once?”, Mosby defies him: “Measure me what I am, not what I was” (i.320–21). “Measure me” is still part of a tailor’s vocabulary, but he has attempted to fashion a whole new identity for himself. Holinshed and Stow’s ambivalent treatment of Arden is captured in the play, where he is both gentleman and villain. As such, he resembles his nemesis, Mosby, and the collapse of distinctions separating them mirrors the effacement of status boundaries within the play. Arden scorns Mosby’s “base brokage” (i.26), yet Arden brokered numerous land deals in the Court of Augmentations for himself and for others. Arden fashions himself as a gentleman with no resemblance to the likes of Mosby, but when he angrily denies Mosby’s claims to social parity, one can hardly avoid the impression that Arden doth protest too much. The adulterous Alice and even Clarke, the painter, both refer to Mosby as “Master Mosby” (i.259, 291), a recognition that he too is a new man. Arden’s acute sensitivity to the nuances of title is similarly evident in its depiction of Dick Greene. Identified in the dramatis personae simply as “a tenant”, Greene informs Alice that Arden’s letters patent for

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the Abbey lands clears his title “so that all former grants / Are cut off, whereof I myself had one” (i.461–62). He notes that he is a gentleman who must now beg; Alice soon relays his plight to Mosby: This morning, Master Greene—Dick Greene, I mean, From whom my husband had the Abbey land— Came hither, railing, for to know the truth Whether my husband had the lands by grant. (i.554–57) The abrupt change from “Master Greene” to “Dick Greene” registers his falling status: he is no longer a master, unlike Arden, the man who, according to Stow, “had got extorciously a piece of ground from him on the backside of the abbey” (Hyde 118; Neill 2000: 57).11 Greene’s impoverished status costs him, in the compact space of one line, his status among the gentry.

V The world of Arden is, in the end, one of social volatility. That volatility is also felt in the generic impulses at work in the play. The playwrights could easily have suggested, with Whigham, that this is a history play (1996: 63) or—with murderous bunglers such as Black Will and Shakebag who fail on six occasions to kill Arden—a comedy, so much so that we begin to root for the conspirators to get on with it (Dolan 77; Bradbrook 1960: 41). Mythic elements, too, collide with prosaic reality in a comic mode: the ferryman of scene 11 recalls Charon, but in this case he is unable to make his way because of the dense fog. Yet nowhere does that volatility register so well as in the complex, layered representation of Thomas Arden. If the play emphasizes his social prominence as a gentleman, it simultaneously depicts Arden’s liminal, arriviste status. With a play so finely attuned to the class implications of language, social slurs directed against Arden are worth noticing: Alice, Greene, and Mosby repeatedly refer to Arden as a churl (i.488, 509, 513, 520, 567, 574), a term that typically refers to one’s low—nonaristocratic— social status (Richardson 113; Neill 2000: 83). Read refers to him as a low-class “carl”, Greene as a “villain” (iii.81), and even Black Will calls him a “peasant” at one point (ii.102). Greene subtly contrasts Arden’s

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transplanted status with Alice’s standing as part of the old Kentish landed aristocracy: “Respects he not your birth . . .? Why all Kent knows your parentage and what you are” (i.489, 491). Given the playwrights’ reliance on Holinshed, who at times shares Stow’s unwillingness to whitewash Arden’s past or unendearing qualities, we should not be surprised by this fuller picture of the real Arden. But that thick description of Arden and his life brings into question his standing as a tragic protagonist. Both Stow and Holinshed, for instance, record Arden’s taking of a field from the widow of a man named Cooke; she then married Richard Read. In Stow’s account, “This filde he had taken by extortion from Cooks widow, then Reads wife and given them nothing for it, for the whiche the sayd Reads wife dyd not only shed many a teare, but also cursyd the same Arden to his face continually . . .” (Hyde 124). The play dramatizes this, assigning the speech to Read himself: Reede. Pardon me, Mistress Arden; I must speak, For I am touched. Your husband doth me wrong To wring me from the little land I have. My living is my life; only that Restesth remainder of my portion. Desire of wealth is endless in his mind, And he is greedy-gaping still for gain; Nor cares he though young gentlemen do beg, So he may scrape and hoard up in his pouch. (i.469–77) Arden claims his social status is secure, but the playwrights keep adverting to moments of “base brokage” on his part, effectively eliding the distinction Arden would like to maintain between Mosby and himself. Mosby even tells Arden that the abbey grounds were offered to him before Arden secured them, and seems to express an interest in buying some of them from him (i.293–97). Arden seems to have been an upstart crow in Faversham and, as a result, to have alienated people (Read, Greene) along with the abbey grounds. His lone friend in the play is Franklin, a character nowhere in the sources but whose very name suggests a nonaristocratic landowner on equal social footing with Arden: prosperous

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but hardly of the old landed aristocracy (Neill 2000, p. 58). Arden’s isolation in the play is borne out historically: in 1547, he became a jurat [alderman]; in 1548, the mayor of Faversham. Only two years later, in 1550, the year before his murder, the Faversham Wardmote Book records that Arden was disenfranchised by his fellow jurats, apparently for not paying a “cess” or assessment on his land (Orlin 1994: 41; Wine xxxvi). According to Orlin, Arden’s failure to pay was his way of protesting the town’s “nonpayment of his ground rent” when holding the Valentine’s Day fair on his land. In the view of his fellow townsmen, the abbey grounds had been the traditional site for the fair, and rents and profits from it belonged to the town (1994: 41). Arden apparently kept the profits for himself because at this section in the margin of the Chronicles, Holinshed notes, “Arden a covetous man and a preferer of his private profit before common gain” (1065). The play makes no mention of the Valentine’s Day business, but it does suggest that Arden is not the kind of idealized, beneficent landlord upon whom the needy could depend. As Garrett Sullivan, Jr. observes, landowners had duties toward those on their land; personal contacts were a way of cementing these interdependent relationships. Arden in the play is an absent landlord, spending much of his time in London, neglecting his home and land (1994: 234, 245; Dolan 74). Arden certainly casts off the mantle of protective landlord: Reede. Master Arden, I am now bound to the sea. My coming to you was about the plot of ground Which wrongfully you detain from me. Although the rent of it be very small, Yet will it help my wife and children, Which here I leave in Faversham, God knows, Needy and bare. For Christ’s sake, let them have it. Arden. Franklin, hearest thou this fellow speak? That which he craves I dearly bought of him Although the rent of it was ever mine.— Sirrah, you that ask these questions, If with thy clamorous tongue Thou rail on me, as I have heard thou dost,

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Arden’s use of “thou” and “sirrah” registers Read’s status as a needy dependent, yet he himself comes across as a pretentious and unmerciful upstart. The playwrights’ ambivalence in Arden’s representation may owe itself to differing views as to the justice of his slaying, both their own views or those of their sources. The Faversham Wardmote Book and The Breviat Chronicle, along with ballads and later accounts such as Rainolds’s, are clear that this was a cruel murder, with justice duly meted out to its perpetrators. While neither Stow nor Holinshed condones his murder—Holinshed’s vocative gloss, “O Importunate & bloody minded strumpet” (1064), makes clear his regard for Alice—they nonetheless consider Arden’s death a divine punishment for his dealings with Read and others. After informing us that Read’s wife “cursed him most bitterly even to his face, wishing many a vengeance to light upon him”, Holinshed adds another, competing gloss in the margin: “God heareth the tears of the oppressed and taketh vengeance: note an example in Arden” (1066). In his narrative, Stow offers an Old Testament allusion omitted by Holinshed. Having killed Arden, the conspirators took his body “and layde the cowrce along in the filde (whiche filede he in his lyfe tyme had got by like title as Ahab got Naboths vineyard for he had taken it from one Reade and his wife by violence . . .” (Hyde 121). He refers to the Samarian king Ahab’s killing of Naboth to take land that had been in his family for generations, as had Read’s. The prophet Elijah delivered the message that Ahab would die for the act and dogs would lick up his blood (1 Kings 21). Stow’s choice of analogy is revealing: the king opposes a simple Jezreelite and has, like Arden, the means to extort the land from his powerless neighbor. The playwrights are likewise of two minds: Arden’s murder is an egregious act, staged right before our eyes, but his covetousness and ill-treatment of others offer extenuating (but by no means exonerating) circumstances. With such nuanced views of Arden, but the play gives us—minus the material excised for political reasons—the man in full.

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VI Finally, let us return to Holinshed’s misgivings about including Arden’s story in the Chronicles. In part, as I noted, those misgivings are historically well founded. But the public/private binary that Holinshed wanted to impose on his own material is falsified in the act of publishing it: the play, too, as Kinney observes, “enacts a private history that Holinshed thought had wide public resonance” (2009: 79). Holinshed, in other words, relied on the public resonance of the Ardens’ private history when he included it in the Chronicles. In the play, too, private and public collapse become almost indistinguishable (Schutzman 1996: 294–96; Sullivan 243). As Helgerson argues, the murderers of Arden “performed a series of acts no less deliberate and no less political than many an act of state . . .” (1997: 158). Mosby deliberately and symbolically usurps the role of paterfamilias during the murder scene when he sits on a chair while Arden sits on a stool (Lake 105), a point nicely illustrated in the frontispiece to the 1633 edition of the play. As they kill him, Arden’s social rise is brought to our attention one last time, though here Black Will ironically literalizes it: ARDEN Mosby! Michael! Alice! What will you do? BLACK WILL Nothing but take you up, sir, nothing else. MOSBY There’s for the pressing iron you told me of. [He hits him with the iron] SHAKEBAG And there’s for the ten pound in my sleeve. [Stabs him] ALICE What, groans thou? Nay then, give me the weapon. Take this for hind’ring Mosby’s love and mine. [Stabs him] (xiv. 230–35) They raise him up only to take him down, as all the conspirators have something to gain from Arden’s demise.

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To be sure, Holinshed’s “private matter” also had very public—state—ramifications, despite Alice’s assuring Mosby that “there was not any that would care for his death: nor make any great enquiry for them that should dispatch him” (1064). Arden was well connected at court, and the Privy Council dispensed harsh penalties to the eight captured conspirators. But as Helgerson observes, even though it undercuts his own argument about the prominence of the play’s politics, Stow and Holinshed obscure Arden’s Westminster connections and rise (1997: 52–54). Stow hints at his humble origins, but both he and (especially) Holinshed depict Arden as an established if avaricious gentleman. The playwrights give us an equally full portrait of Arden as a new man, showing that newness at the very outset of the play in the awarding of the abbey lands. And it is Arden’s rise into the ranks of the lesser gentry and subsequent murder that qualify him for tragic representation, just as they had made him an appropriate subject for Stow and Holinshed. Nonetheless, playwrights and chroniclers alike were aware of their subject’s tenuous social position: Stow’s account was never published in full, though he did publish in his Annals of England (1592, 1631) a highly truncated version of events. Unlike his own foul papers, and unlike Holinshed’s four folio pages, Stow’s Annals affords Arden one lone paragraph: On Saint Valentines day, at Feversham in Kent, one Arden a Gentleman was murthered by procurement of his owne wife, for the which fact, shee was the fourteenth of March burnt at Canterburie: Michael Master Ardens man was hanged in chaines at Feversham, and a Mayden [Elizabeth Stafford] burnt: Mosbie and his sister were hanged in Smithfield at London: Greene which had fled, came againe certain yeeres after, and was hanged in chaines in the highway against Feversham, and Blacke Will the Ruffian that was hired to doe that act, after the first escape, was apprehended, and burnt on a scaffold at Flushing in Zeland. (1631: Eee2) Stow restricts his attention here to the penal phase of Arden’s tragedy, though it is clear from the brevity of his account that he believes he is writing for an audience that knows the story well as a piece of English history during the reign of Edward VI, and can presumably

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flesh out the reference to Blacke Will the Ruffian. Holinshed redacted Stow’s fuller, unabridged account to offer his own gentrified version of Arden’s life. By continually reminding us how Arden’s socially liminal position translates uneasily to the tragic stage—we are never far from comedy and the pedestrian in Arden—the playwrights foreground just how atypical this tragedy is. Yet Arden’s story was well known and could be expected to draw theater audiences equally eager and horrified to view its spectacular spousal murder, and tragedy was the only viable generic mode. It is not that the employment of Thomas Arden as a tragic protagonist suddenly democratized the theater; rather, Arden’s story was made to fit tragic conventions, even if the fit is at times awkward. For his own part, Holinshed demarcates the private from the public and justifies the former through its use as a moral exemplum. The playwrights have their own concerns—generic ones—about Arden’s suitability for tragic representation: “But for a dramatist, wanting to give tragic stature to a common and domestic murder, some connection, however remote, to the crown was needed—and was supplied” (Helgerson 1997: 155). As arresting as this assertion is, it seems to me to be crucially mistaken. Helgerson suggests that the domesticity of the tragedy can only be justified by subsuming it under the label of the political. To be sure, connections to Westminster would matter if they were stressed, especially if one were to attempt to justify the play on generic grounds as state tragedy, but the playwrights, again, deliberately deflect attention away from Arden’s ties to the Privy Council. Arden’s murder is treated as a local, provincial matter handled by the mayor of Faversham, who tells us, in a rather oblique reference to the official inquest that was authorized in London, “I have the Council’s warrant to apprehend [Black Will]” (xiv.364). And in the play it is the mayor who conducts the investigation into Arden’s murder, and even seems to pronounce his own legal judgments upon the murderers: And listen to the sentence I shall give: Bear Mosby and his sister to London straight, Where they in Smithfield must be executed; Bear Mistress Arden unto Canterbury,

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Where her sentence is she must be burnt; Michael and Bradshaw in Faversham must suffer death. (xviii. 27–32) The mayor has no authority to act as judge, much less to order executions at the various sites he mentions, but, technically speaking, he only gives “sentence” that Mosby and his sister should go to London where they will be executed (after the Privy Council’s formal inquest and their subsequent trial), and Alice to Canterbury where she will be burnt. Technically, he does not—and historically he did not—act as their judge, but the language is ambiguous enough to suggest that this is really a local matter being determined by the citizenry of Faversham. It is the mayor and the watch, after all, who make the discovery of Arden’s body and of the criminal conspiracy against his life. Helgerson insists that there be a connection to the state in order for the playwrights to justify the play as a tragedy; the state is present and alluded to, but it is always in the background. With surprising relentlessness the playwrights bring the focus to the local, provincial authorities as the actors in the play.12 We have to pay more attention to the dynamics of the play and less to the historical record of the Privy Council’s role in Arden’s murder, which Helgerson and others have so meticulously been able to reconstruct. Sir Thomas Cheney plays a very minor role in the play—he appears only once in a chance roadway encounter with Arden in the Isle of Sheppey (ix.96–100)—as does Sir Edward North, who has no presence in the play and is referred to under a pseudonym in order, presumably, to protect his family. Arden’s close ties to these men, as well as his rise through the Edwardian state bureaucracy, are virtually nonexistent. The state does appear briefly at the very outset of the play where Franklin, as we have seen, informs Arden that he has acquired from the Lord Protector some abbey properties. Even here, however, the playwrights suggest that the acquisition may be less a reflection of Arden’s shrewd political dealings than a simple recognition of his social stature: “My gracious Lord the Duke of Somerset / Hath freely given to thee and to thy heirs . . .” (i.2–3, italics mine). The language is ambiguous: “freely” may refer to the nature of the land grant, apparently a freehold or an estate in fee simple, which in law conveys a right of title to the grantee and to his heirs. But it is possible that the

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adverb may also or instead refer to the manner of giving; that is, as an act that the “gracious” Duke freely bestows on Arden as an already established gentleman in no need of a state connection to justify his tragic representation. Given Helgerson’s own acute interest in the political, it is no surprise that he styles Arden’s murder “no less political than many an act of state” (1997: 158). This is true, but only in a narrow sense—Arden’s murder is a collective act and does alter the polis, at least in tiny Faversham. But his murder is most definitely not an act of state, and has precisely the marks of a “private matter” that distinguish it from more public or broadly political affairs. It is, in the end, a spousal murder involving a private couple and those (such as servants) who are closely connected to them. Arden’s murder had political ramifications to a limited extent in his life, but the play, again, repeatedly downplays the public in favor of the private. Helgerson attempts to explain Arden as a state play and thus justify it as tragedy, but the playwrights focus on its private, domestic nature. If anything, the play subsumes the political within the private. Holinshed, too, is uneasy about including Arden’s story for precisely the reason that it is, as he says, a “private matter”, but he nonetheless includes the murder, as he says, “for the horribleness thereof”. All murders are putatively horrible; what makes Arden’s particularly so is his status as a private citizen rather than a public figure, a simple husband murdered by his wife in their home. Its domesticity, I would argue, is what gives his murder its pungency. And the representation of a private matter is what matters in the play, since it is primarily based on Holinshed’s account and not on the reconstruction by literary critics and other scholars of the historical Arden and his ties to the state. Holinshed’s representation of Arden as a gentleman arriviste is what counts and what paved the generic path to the writing of the first extant domestic tragedy—and for others to follow. Likewise, Arden did not follow established tragic conventions, but instead created a precedent for the tragic representation of private matters and of the lesser gentry such as John Page and John Cox of Collumpton. Arden’s influence was immediately and sensationally palpable: domestic tragedies continued to be written, and with growing confidence in their stage viability. That confidence continued for some forty years,

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yet reached its apex, its most thorough and brilliant exploration, in 1603/04 with Shakespeare’s Othello. What remains at issue in domestic tragedy in general, and in Othello with a particular vengeance, are private, not state, matters. And part of that emphasis on the private is the representation not of royalty, but of protagonists such as Arden, such as Othello, with tenuous political and thereby tragic standing. Let me conclude this chapter by way of a coda on the critical reception history of domestic tragedy. As I have noted, previous theories concerning the subgenre’s origins are rooted in intertextual—new critical—explanations or in theoretical perspectives. What Arden reveals, by way of contrast with these largely a priori accounts, is its rootedness in the changing social demographics of early modern England. As society changed, so did its modes and conventions of representation. The Ardens’ story emerged from word-of-mouth, official inquest, narrative pamphlets, ballads, chronicle history and, finally, from the tragedy that bears their name. Theories not rooted in this historicity, both of the culture as well as the play, are in my view implausible and have occluded from view the most immediate and best context in which to understand Othello.

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Chapter 3

Othello and Domestic Tragedy: The Critical Reception

One of the curious features about Othello criticism is that even those scholars who find no connection between Shakespeare’s play and the domestic tragedies nonetheless feel compelled to deny the association. No one feels similarly compelled to declare that Hamlet is not a comedy, or that Timon of Athens is not a romance, yet the nagging suspicion of a generic tie persists in regard to Othello and domestic tragedy. References to the domestic tragedies in fact keep popping up in discussions of Othello, only to be put down as the cockney does the eels going into her pastry pie: “She knapped ’em o’th’ coxcombs with a stick and cried, ‘Down, wantons, down!’” (Lear 2.4.121–23). Before, then, I make in the next chapter a positive case for Othello as a domestic tragedy, it is important to acknowledge and examine the longstanding and continuing case against it. I will focus on the critical reception of Othello from Thomas Rymer’s infamous attack in 1692 to contemporary animadversions against the form and Othello’s possible ties to it. In effect, I will trace the history of this critical consensus and discuss what I believe are the misunderstandings of this position. Most of what has been written about Othello in relation to domestic tragedy is predicated on Henry Hitch Adams’s view of the subgenre as an inferior form emerging, as we saw in Chapter 1, from the moralities. Once we see that Adams’s position is no longer tenable, then the affinities between Shakespeare’s play and the subgenre will come sharply into focus. But first we need to see the history of that critical reception.

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I Most critics who have given any thought to the issue have explicitly or implicitly rejected a generic association between Othello and domestic tragedy. For Robert Metcalf Smith, to look at commoners—this is how he regarded the protagonists of these plays—“whose problems are of special rather than universal interest” offers “a merely distressing and pitiful experience” rather than the catharsis offered when the tragic subjects are kings and nobles (6). By restricting Aristotle’s “universals” to the elite, as we saw in Chapter 1, Bradley and his epigones represent a time-honored tradition in support of the “great man” of tragic decorum. Smith argued that Othello was not a domestic tragedy because its hero is an “idealized personage”, the play itself of such “colossal magnitude” as to possess “universality”—a quality that, according to Smith, can never emerge from the provincial focus of the domestic tragedies (1).For his part, Adams regarded A Woman Killed with Kindness as an outstanding domestic tragedy (143), yet despite its close intertextual ties to Othello, he dismissed any connection between the two plays, believing the genre was aesthetically inferior, well beneath the “mature Shakespeare” (187). It would be interesting to know what he might think of the attribution of the middle scenes in Arden to Shakespeare: is Arden an example of early, immature Shakespeare? As I alluded to in the introduction, Othello and A Woman Killed with Kindness resemble each other in enough ways to suggest that one of the playwrights was clearly and deeply indebted to the other’s drama. No one knows with certainty which play antedates the other, but Peter Rudnytsky presents a compelling argument, using Henslowe’s Diary, to suggest that A Woman Killed with Kindness was first performed in the winter of 1602–03, and Othello on 1 November 1604. The eighteenmonth separation is some evidence that A Woman Killed with Kindness is a “probable source and analogue” for Othello (1983: 123–24). No one questions A Woman’s inclusion in the genre of domestic tragedy; Othello, for all its affinities with Heywood’s play, has until now fared differently in critical reception. Even if Rudnytsky’s educated guess is incorrect and Othello in fact precedes A Woman Killed, then Heywood’s play is indebted in countless ways to Shakespeare’s. The precise

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chronology is, for my purposes, immaterial: either way, the plays are intimately connected by their alleged adulteries, by the killing of their wives in their respective marital beds, and by other ways as well, as we will see in Chapters 4 and 5. In Adams’s view, the relatively low artistic merit of a domestic tragedy such as Two Lamentable Tragedies would somehow have precluded Shakespeare from having had any part in the genre, as if he worked only in some higher aesthetic sphere. Even without the attribution of Shakespeare’s collaboration on Arden, one has only to compare his Rumpelstiltskin-like spinning of Arthur Brooke’s strawy Romeus and Juliet (1562) into gold to dispel Adams’s notion. Adams avoids including Othello also because it bears little resemblance to the moralities, which would contradict his argument concerning the genre’s provenance. The play’s lone gesture toward the moralities is one of dissociation – Othello glances incredulously at Iago’s potentially cloven feet: “I look toward his feet, but that’s a fable” (5.2.285). Othello simply outsizes the morality play; an attempt to contain domestic tragedies within the framework of the moralities will of necessity exclude Othello. If, however, one of the representative features of domestic tragedy lies in the representation of arrivistes, those who did not have the social pedigree to establish their suitability for tragic representation, then Othello is in play. More recent critics also take a dim view of the genre, considering the domestic tragedies to be “minor works” (Bach 2007: 107) despite the fact that Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness, both highly regarded, enjoy almost universal acceptance as domestic tragedies. Certain feminist scholars have taken exception to the genre because of its frequent representation of female infidelity and its supposed reinforcement of gender hierarchies. Yet as Lake has argued, we ought to be careful about ascriptions of generic misogyny (54–58). To be sure, the plays do depict mariticides and, to an extent, consequent threats to patriarchal order. Yet the numerous uxoricides— in A Yorkshire Tragedy, A Woman Killed with Kindness, The Witch of Edmonton, and Othello, to name a few—suggest not a genre exploring uniquely male anxieties so much as the unisex problem of men and women in the most intimate of human relationships killing one another. The murder of a spouse, not the murder of a male spouse, is at issue. Critics

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have too often taken at face value Heywood’s title, A Woman Killed with Kindness, as if the play asks us to approve the permissibility of killing an adulterous spouse. Such readings are difficult to maintain in light of the considerable sympathy generated for Anne Frankford in the play’s final scene. Moreover, Frank Thorney’s murder of his unwanted wife in The Witch of Edmonton and Othello’s of his innocent bride are every bit as egregious as Alice Arden’s murder of her husband. As numerous critics have noted, while Arden represents Alice’s mariticide as heinous, the representation of her character is balanced and shows the complexity of her situation: Arden was an absent, penny-pinching husband, merciless landlord, and a man who, according to Holinshed and Stow, prostituted his wife to Mosby in order to curry favor with Lord North. This is hardly a flattering portrait of Arden. As in A Woman Killed with Kindness, the adulteresses of these plays are often represented as women who deserve our sympathy as much as our scorn, while the men are neither hapless victims nor, if they survive, willing to forgive and reconcile with their wives. John Frankford is a perfect case in point: his estrangement of his wife from her home and children may be legal, but the moral justifiability of his doing so is dubious, especially since he only forgives her when she is dying as a result of the separation. In an influential essay, Karen Newman dismissed both the genre as well as Othello’s possible ties to it: “Instead of relegating Othello to the critical category of domestic tragedy, always implicitly or explicitly pejorative because of its focus on women, jealousy, and a triangle, we can reread Othello from another perspective . . .” (1991: 92). Newman’s comments deserve close attention. First, why should we read it from another perspective? Dolan notes that Iago “deploys the fiction of the traitorous wife” that one finds repeatedly in domestic tragedy (114), so effectively, in fact, that Iago almost seems to have attended a performance of Arden of Faversham or A Woman Killed with Kindness. When Arden, for instance, suspects Mosby of committing adultery with Alice, she chastises him Nay, hadst thou loved me as thou dost pretend, Thou would have marked the speeches of thy friend,

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Who going wounded from the place, he said His skin was pierced only through my device. And if sad sorrow taint thee for this fault Thou wouldst have followed him and seen him dressed, And cried him mercy whom thou hast misdone; Ne’er shall my heart be eased till this be done. ARDEN Content thee, sweet Alice, thou shalt have thy will, Whate’er it be. (xiii.122–31) Desdemona similarly importunes Othello on Cassio’s behalf I prithee, call him back. ................... I prithee, name the time, but let it not Exceed three days. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tell me, Othello. I wonder in my soul What you would ask me that I should deny, Or stand so mamm’ring on. What? Michael Cassio, That came a-wooing with you, and so many a time, When I have spoke of you dispraisingly, Hath ta’en your part—to have so much to do To bring him in! By’r Lady, I could do much— OTHELLO Prithee, no more. Let him come when he will; I will deny thee nothing. (3.3.53, 68–69, 74–82) Iago smartly employs the fiction of the traitorous wife to convince Othello “That she repeals [Cassio] for her body’s lust; / And by how much she strives to do him good, / She shall undo her credit with the Moor” (2.3.351–53). Shakespeare adopts the convention of the adulterous wife who is convicted—not by a court but by her husband who usurps the roles of judge and executioner. Newman also describes domestic tragedy as a fixed form, “always implicitly or explicitly pejorative because of its focus on women, jealousy, and a triangle” (92, italics mine). Since most of the plays do deal with spousal murders as a result of adultery, both jealousy and a love

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triangle are indeed traits of the subgenre. As for its pejorative nature, some of the plays may show signs of misogyny, or at least are open to such interpretation. Yet one simply cannot, as we saw in Chapter 1, make blanket categorizations of generic categories: genres are continually in flux, subject to continual innovation. Even if one were to accept Newman’s characterization of domestic tragedy as irredeemably marked by misogyny, its ties to Othello would nonetheless remain undisturbed: Iago’s comments about women in general and Othello’s belief in Desdemona’s specific infidelity map perfectly onto the monolithic framework Newman wants to confer upon domestic tragedy. Newman’s comment suggests something uniformly sinister in these plays’ representation of women. There are of course innumerable instances of misogyny in the literature of the period—The Taming of the Shrew is merely one of the better known examples. Domestic tragedy is neither uniquely nor, more importantly, always already misogynistic. At moments, misogyny surfaces or is latent in these plays, but a carte blanche judgment about the subgenre seems misplaced. Is Arden of Faversham pejorative in its focus on women? Is A Woman Killed with Kindness? One can offer such interpretations, but the question is open rather than foreclosed by the genre, and this is a fortiori the case in Othello. What is striking is how strongly Newman demurs to Othello’s possible association with domestic tragedy—and her reaction is hardly unique. In most cases, however, possible ties between domestic tragedy and Othello are denied in passing—“[Shakespeare] does not seem to have turned his hand to the domestic tragedy . . . in the limited sense of the murder play . . .” (Sturgess 13)—or simply not even mentioned in article- or book-length treatments of the subgenre (Lieblein 1983; Comensoli 1999; Lake). Nonetheless, the subgenre’s multifarious representations of the domestic have attracted critical attention. G. Wilson Knight declared, “Othello is eminently a domestic tragedy”, but he meant the comment in terms of its private, familial emphasis, not its generic affiliation (1957: 108). More recently, attention has focused on the material domesticity of the plays: Catherine Richardson argues that Shakespeare did not write a domestic tragedy because Othello is not domestic enough. In her view, tragedies like Othello “tend to focus on one very intense interior scene—the bedchamber in Othello, the closet in

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Hamlet, for instance”, whereas “it is not only the prominence and frequency of their use which marks domestic tragedies out. Other plays’ interest is in the domestic as a concept, rather than a location. It is intended to be recognizable to the audience in its level of particularity in a way that is simply not the case in, for instance, the plays of Shakespeare” (199–200, “italics hers”). According to this definition, the number of domestic locations must reach a certain critical mass for the play to be considered a domestic tragedy. But this is to define domesticity in only one direction and to insist on it as the sine qua non of the subgenre. It is unlikely that any playwrights would have similarly delimited the term; if so, they give no indication of it. Domesticity surely means more than the frequency with which interior, domestic spaces are used in a play. Having said this, Richardson’s discussion of the genre’s use of interior spaces and of the material items of the home is a valuable contribution to the literature on domestic tragedy. As we will see, these characteristic traits are also very much part of the furniture, literal and figurative, in Othello.

II As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, mention of Othello keeps surfacing in discussions of domestic tragedy. In his Arden 2 Othello, M. R. Ridley declared Othello “the nearest approach which Shakespeare made to a ‘domestic tragedy’” (xlv). His view is now almost a consensus omnium, restated with only slight variations: “It is a widely held view that Othello, the Moor of Venice is the play in which Shakespeare comes closest to writing a purely domestic tragedy” (Jensen 1996: 155; Orlin 2002: 371; Korda 2002: 111). Critics commonly refer to Othello’s proximity to the subgenre, yet they go no further, and the implication is that, in the end, Othello is not really a domestic tragedy (Vitkus 1997: 159; Danson 116–27; Rees 1990: 185). Orlin usefully notes that “both those writing on [domestic tragedy] and those specializing in Shakespeare display a lingering discomfort with the categorization” of Othello as a domestic tragedy; “Two obvious causes for uneasiness about calling Othello a domestic tragedy are its nonEnglish setting and the superstructure of matters of public concern which Shakespeare imposes on this story of domestic murder” (1994: 247–48).

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The prima facie objections Orlin raises deserve scrutiny. First, she interprets “domestic” to mean “set in England”, which is likewise the lone criterion used to define the subgenre in a recent history of English literature (Carter & McRae 2001: 110). “Domestic” is a loaded term, of course, as it can just as easily refer to the intrafamilial, private matter of the household. If one applies this second denotation, Othello fits perfectly within the subgenre. To take Orlin’s more limited point, however, Othello is not domestic in the narrow sense of being set in England, and this does distinguish it from every other known domestic tragedy. An English setting must nonetheless remain, in terms of genre theory that we saw in Chapter 1, only a characteristic trait of the subgenre. No spousal murder, another characteristic feature, occurs in Two Lamentable Tragedies, yet it enjoys wide acceptance as a domestic tragedy. Othello’s own lack of an English setting is more complicated than simple geography. Shakespeare was bound to set his play in the Mediterranean if he was to remain faithful to his source tale from Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (The Hundred Tales, 1566); to set it in Everley, Wiltshire, for instance, would have required more than mere geographic change: the entire plot would have had to alter radically, perhaps beyond recognition. We also ought to be wary of simply dismissing the Italian setting as strictly foreign and thus in opposition to a domestic mise-en-scène. The “myth of Venice”, as David McPherson argues, conferred upon Venice a curiously ambivalent status in England. Venice becomes, at once, the repository of civilized Christendom against the Turks and the site of sophistic Catholic corruption (1990: 16–42). The Turks posed a mutual threat to Italian and English Christians, and the play is located somewhere between the poles of domesticity and foreignness. Venice has even closer ties to England than one might initially think. As Andrew Hadfield remarks of the setting in Othello, “Venice demands to be read as England” (2003: 92), a tendency that Marjorie Garber, in a discussion of Twelfth Night, sees more broadly: “I am presuming here that Illyria  England, following the custom of other Shakespearean plays” (2005: 529). Part of this had to do with the sophistication of early modern audiences: “They knew that plays about ‘Venice’ or ‘Rome’ were also—largely?—about London” (Skura

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2008: 308). As Northrop Frye observed, Shakespeare develops “a technique of what might be called spatial anachronism, in which Mediterranean and Atlantic settings seem to be superposed on top of each other [. . .]” (1965: 65). Indeed, stereotypical Italian vices—“In Venice they do let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands” (3.3.216–17)—had already come home to the English stage in the adulterous domestic tragedies set in Faversham, Edmonton, and Chevy Chase. The principle at work is one of theatrical vicariousness: the cathartic fear that what happens to characters on stage could happen to those in the audience. In a remarkable moment of candor and empathy, Patricia Hyde observes of Alice Arden, Poor Alice, not, I think, a cold, calculating woman, but a passionate woman driven to desperation. Thousands and thousands of women today feel exactly the same about their husbands as Alice did about hers. Stow tells us that “she was so inflamyd with the love of Mosby that she lothyd hir husband” . Have we not heard that somewhere before? We women should weep for her, not try to whitewash her . . . . today in that situation there is ultimately divorce. For her there was no way out. (101) Would a woman (or man) viewing Othello distance herself from its spousal problems because of its Italian setting? In my view, Venice and Cyprus are stand-ins for a world from which an English audience could not comfortably distance itself, one which they would recognize, as in any domestic tragedy, as all too familiar. In other words, the settings of Venice and Cyprus make little real difference in the deeper dynamics of spousal betrayal and murder in domestic tragedy. Even if they did, the play is still domestic on its own geographic terms: “Othello is a Venetian subject within Venice, and this endows the play with a feeling of domestic tragedy” (Charney 21). As for her second claim, Orlin concedes that Othello is “not a conventional tragedy, either” (1994: 248), but she believes that the “superstructure of matters of public concern” is impertinent to domestic tragedy. Orgel observed that their impertinence is one

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reason these plays are grouped together, “since tragedy really ought not to be domestic” (1979: 111). Yet Othello evinces, just as Arden had, a complex interaction between private and public: the “private and domestic quarrel” (2.3.209) initiated by Roderigo ripples outward in ever-widening circles until several characters are dead and the fall of Cyprus, without Othello to defend her, seems imminent. Likewise, the senate’s public deliberations are interrupted by the private matter of Brabantio’s outrage over Desdemona’s elopement. Later, when Othello begins to mistreat Desdemona, Emilia implores, “Pray heaven it be / State matters, as you think, and no conception / Nor no jealous toy concerning you” (3.4.156–58). Iago, too, disingenuously urges Desdemona, “I pray you be content . . . The business of the state does him offense” (4.2.172–73). State concerns open and close the play, but the Turks founder at sea and the play turns inward, beginning with Desdemona—“a moth of peace” (1.3.259)—following her husband to a war that never materializes. As we saw in Chapter 2, the public/private binary that Holinshed wanted to impose on the Arden story collapsed, just as it does in Othello. What is remarkable about Shakespeare’s play, however, is its ability to continually remind us of the public/private binary, even as it renders the distinction virtually null. Othello assures the Doge that private concerns will not “taint” his “business” . In his formula, housewives are welcome to cook with his helmet if he can be domesticated: No, when light-winged toys Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness My speculative and officed instruments, That my disports corrupt and taint my business, Let huswives make a skillet of my helm. . . . (1.3.271–72) Such incongruous, and brilliant, mixing of private and public spheres almost certainly reflects Shakespeare’s awareness of how we traditionally associate tragedy with majesty and public affairs of state: as Milton says in “Il Penseroso”, “Gorgeous Tragedy” “[i]n Scepter’d Pall come[s] sweeping by” (ll. 97–98). Shakespeare’s impertinent mixing reflects his awareness of the public/private dichotomy so typical of a

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play like Arden, which, again, he likely co-authored. After airing his allegations of Othello’s use of witchcraft against his daughter, Brabantio concedes defeat before the Doge: “I humbly beseech you, proceed to th’affairs of state” (1.3.223). It is one of the supreme ironies of the play that the affairs of state keep being relegated to the background by more pressing private matters, which in the fullness of time imperil the body politic. Dolan neatly summarizes the incongruity of the plot: “Othello is the story of a hero who went into a house” (134). Othello associates himself with outdoor, public action; his movement from the “big wars” (3.3.365) to a trifling handkerchief is, indeed, striking (Nuttall 2001: 135–36). Shakespeare suggests that Othello never is able to reconcile “the flinty and steel couch of war”, his “thrice-driven bed of down” (1.3.233–34), with the nuptial bed he must now occupy in his private capacity as husband. Instead of imposing a superstructure of public matters on private ones, Shakespeare takes pains to strip away public matters until all we have is the domesticity of the bed upon which Othello murders his wife, the iconic centrality of which is brought home in Act Four of Verdi’s Otello with the marital bed at center stage. Such emphasis on the intimate, private matters of the home is a feature of comedies and, of course, of the domestic tragedies as well. In the end, Othello’s own private and domestic quarrel causes far more damage to Venetian order than any prospect of Ottoman invasion: he displaces violence against the Turks onto Desdemona’s body, mistaking her for the infidel.

III Given the play’s uxoricide and domesticity, critics have inevitably had to come to terms with its possible affinity with the domestic tragedies. Bradley’s use of the rhetorical litotes is revealing in its guarded admission of the play’s domesticity: “Othello is less unlike a story of private life than any other of the great tragedies” (1904: 22). The play also has that contemporaneous feel to it that was typical of the domestic tragedies: the Turkish attack on Cyprus was only thirty years in the past, and would have been well known to early audiences of the play. Othello’s proximity to the domestic tragedies has been mentioned

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enough to become a buzzword among scholars (Danson 116). The prolific Harold Bloom calls the play, without elaboration, “a domestic tragedy of blood” (2005: 224); Patricia Parker describes Othello as being “more bourgeois than Hamlet, Shakespeare’s one truly domestic tragedy . . .” (1992: 207). Her emphasis lies on the domesticity of the play rather than on the genre per se; she is not, in other words, making an argument about Othello’s genre. Brian Shaffer has written the only article entirely devoted to the question. As in Parker’s approach, Shaffer defines domestic tragedy as “bourgeois marriage tragedy” and suggests that the genre explores the demise of the nuclear family as a result of the sin of adultery (1988: 445). Shaffer is correct in identifying adultery and the demise of the nuclear family as important traits of the genre, and he further notes the “development of one or more love triangles” (443), which is of course central to the adulterous emplotment that is typical of most domestic tragedies. In the end, Shaffer draws upon Adams’s homiletic formulation of the genre: “marriage . . . temptation . . . sin . . . discovery, repentance” (445), and then suggests that Othello borrows from and alters this emplotment (444). Although Othello does significantly alter the genre, Shaffer does not quite go far enough to suggest how Othello innovates with the form. More recently, Paula McQuade remarks, “Most early modern English domestic tragedies exploit popular misogyny by emphasizing the mendacity of the adulteress” (416). Othello instead deviates from this convention and focuses instead on Desdemona’s truth-telling, an inversion that still situates the play, as McQuade notes, firmly within the genre (415–16). The late Anthony Nuttall offered a similar endorsement in one of his typically arresting observations:

It may be that Othello can provide us with a clue to the labyrinth of the comedies. Othello itself is written against, rather than with, the grain of genre. Even more than Romeo and Juliet, it is Shakespeare’s domestic tragedy, where “domestic” is not merely a difference added to the genus “tragedy” but is rather a mark of paradox. (252–53)

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Nuttall made his nuanced comment in passing; he never quite fleshed out his meaning. What he opens for us, however, is a discussion of Shakespeare’s use of genre and in particular his use of comic conventions in a tragedy. In Nuttall’s view, Othello is not merely a different kind of tragedy, but a paradox at the heart of tragedy. To get at Nuttall’s meaning, let us take a brief excursus into Shakespeare’s understanding and use of genre. In the preface to his 1765 edition of the plays, Samuel Johnson observed that Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination. . . .(66) Bloom turns this into near-bardolatry: “Shakespeare . . . writ no genre”; “mature Shakespeare almost always is beyond genre” (1999: 639, 616). The kernel of truth here is that Shakespeare overcomes the ordinary limiting features that come with the choice of a genre, the selection of which channels a play into a particular direction and can isolate it from other genres (Booth 2004: 233; Danson 7). But if genres are as we know by their nature constantly in flux, Shakespeare takes this capacity to its limits with his endless creativity, always testing his works against the arbitrary limits that ready-made formulae might seek to impose upon them. In Othello, Shakespeare makes overtures to multiple forms: Petrarchan conventions; revenge tragedy; Jobian discourse (4.2.49– 66); commedia dell’arte; comedy (Neely 1994: 70–71; Ogude 1997: 163); charivari (Bristol 1996: 180–87); romance and romantic comedy (Snyder 1979: 70–74); moralities; the homiletic tradition (Mallette 2003: 383); travel narrative (Newman 83–84); and to others as well. As Howard Felperin remarks, Shakespearean tragedies have a “radically ambivalent status as structures which can never quite reunite with their own dramatic models nor leave those models definitively behind (1977: 87, italics his). His description reminds us again of how genre formation works, especially in the mind of an artist who forges new

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material out of old, invigorating and reshaping it as he works. He appears to have “thought of genres not as sets of rules but as sets of expectations and possibilities” (Orgel 1979: 122). If this is true, then he would have seen Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, Page of Plymouth, and the other domestic tragedies not as static pieces but as dynamic forms opening veins that he could mine further. But in engaging the form, would he have given us merely, say, another Arden? The answer, as Stephen Booth observes, is no: “Shakespeare appears to have been fascinated by audiences’ generically or locally derived expectations and assumptions and by the theatrical energy to be had from playing his play off against the one the audience manufactures and tries to see . . .” (in Rosenbaum 2006: 474–75). If thirty domestic tragedies are any indication, audiences had come to expect from them an adulterous liaison, a spousal murder, provincial characters from outside the tragic norm, and a murder-will-out resolution, among other things. Othello without question brings those expectations and assumptions to the table, only to play off against them, to innovate with the form. Dolan remarks that Othello “does not fit neatly” among the domestic tragedies (111); Orlin likewise concedes that Othello is “not a conventional tragedy, either” (248). This persistent suspicion of an association attests not to the play’s disjunction from the genre but to Shakespeare’s reshaping of domestic tragedy from within. Calling Othello Shakespeare’s “nearest approach” to domestic tragedy likewise acknowledges his use of the conventions of domestic tragedy, even if it does not quite recognize the freshness of Shakespeare’s take on the form. His “intent” in Othello “is clearly to establish the tragic. The difficulty with Othello is its genre” (Shawcross 44). The play fits, but with a difference, one that has been felt since its first printings: Confusion over its genre began in Shakespeare’s own time—the quarto title pages called it a history, the author of the 1609 preface praised it as a comedy, the First Folio editors apparently planned to place it among the tragedies—and continues in our own. (Snyder 89)

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Part of this, no doubt, is the flux within and overlap of generic categories, but the larger issue is Shakespeare’s deployment of multiple forms and conventions within a tragic frame. Let us take one of those forms, that of comedy, because of its putative separation from tragedy as well as its affinity with domestic tragedy, whose characters are drawn from its ranks.

IV Domestic tragedies emerge, as we have seen, from the “low” literature of broadside ballads, pamphlet narratives, and the like. Susan Snyder notes the lowliness of Cinthio’s source tale: “Once again a novella source, with its love motive and deception plot, seems to have prompted the dramatist to shape his material in ways that would remind his audience of comic conventions” (70). Indeed, Othello employs stock comic elements: “A jealous husband, a chaste wife, an irascible father, a clever malicious servant, a gullible friend, a bawdy witty maid . . .” (Orgel 1979: 122). Othello arises in the midst of the domestic tragedies whose ties to comedy are strong, self-consciously so in their use of lower status protagonists and the adulterous love plots they employ. Although comedy is never far removed from Shakespeare’s tragedies, Othello is different in degree: it ought by rights to be a comedy. No one made the point more forcefully than Thomas Rymer, the historiographer royal better known for his literary criticism attacking Shakespeare for not following classical literary decorum. Rymer’s views of women and blacks are outrageous, but his work remains important because it is the earliest criticism we have of Othello. What is most remarkable is his view of Othello as a failed tragedy—as, in fact, a comedy (Orgel 2003: 110). In A Short View of Tragedy, Rymer notes the high regard in which Othello was held by his contemporaries: “From all the Tragedies acted on our English Stage, Othello is said to bear the Bell away” (1692: 138). Not one to join the madding crowd, Rymer will have none of it:

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There is in this Play, some burlesque, some humor, and ramble of Comical Wit, some show, and some Mimicry to divert the spectators: but the tragical part is, plainly none other, than a Bloody Farce, without salt or savor. . . . when some senseless trifling tale, as that of Othello . . . impiously assumes the sacred name of Tragedy, it is no wonder if the Theatre grow corrupt and scandalous, and Poetry from its Ancient Reputation and Dignity, is sunk to the utmost Contempt and Derision. (164 and 173) For all his faults, Rymer is a fairly astute critic: he recognizes (even as he deplores) the generic mixing at work in the play, as well as the prominence of comedy—farce even—in the frame. Contrast this with Bradley’s view of the lack of humor in the play: After the conflict has begun, there is very little relief by way of the ridiculous. Henceforward at any rate Iago’s humour never raises a smile. The clown is a poor one; we hardly attend to him and quickly forget him; I believe most readers of Shakespeare, if asked whether there is a clown in Othello, would answer “No.” (53) Yet in Oliver Parker’s filmic version, Kenneth Branagh’s Iago is a clown, equal parts fun and ruthlessness. His hypocritical sententiousness—“How poor are they that have not patience!” (2.3.364); “This is the fruits of whoring” (5.1.118)—testifies to his moxie and perfect comic timing. By the classical standards to which Rymer is such an unerring guide, the mixing of just two genres, the comedic and tragic, contravene the most rudimentary rules of decorum: “Jealousy and cuckoldry, after all, like the misalliance of age and youth, were themes proper to comedy; and the triviality of the handkerchief plot epitomized for Rymer the generic disproportion that must result from transposing them into a tragic design” (Neill 1994: 201–02). For Rymer, Othello is as inappropriate generically as Polonius’s absurd conflation of “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral” genres (Ham. 2.2.398–99). Rymer also thought that the use of domestic trifles in a tragic frame a gross impropriety: “the Handkerchief is so remote a trifle, no Booby, on this side Mauritania, cou’d make any consequence from it” (160). Emilia herself notes the triviality of the device: her

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husband sought the handkerchief with more “earnestness” than she thought “belong’d to such a trifle” (5.2.234–35). Rymer himself could only draw the most banal of morals from such a prop: “Secondly, This may be a warning to all good Wives, that they look well to their Linen” (132). Yet his very fixation on the handkerchief helps us to recall the prominence of such pedestrian, household goods in domestic tragedy. And the handkerchief hardly seems a coincidence: John Page of Plymouth was strangled with his own handkerchief; Arden was pulled down and strangled from behind with a napkin—a small towel or handkerchief (OED). Desdemona is also smothered with her own bed linens, a point Rymer seems to have overlooked in his anger: “So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief! Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief?” (160). In some ways anticipating Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916), a modern domestic tragedy, Shakespeare’s choice of a handkerchief and bed linens appears innocuous enough until one considers that linens serve as the murder weapon elsewhere in the genre and further serve to emphasize the plays’ domesticity. Rymer is not—I say this with some trepidation—a bad critic; he is simply ignorant of domestic tragedy: “Understanding can occur only if the interpreter proceeds under the same system of expectations [as the author]” (Hirsch 80–81). It is clear that Rymer has no conception of the possibility of using lower status characters and household stuffs—the material of comedy—in a tragic form.1 Shakespeare’s reliance on comedic conventions in a tragedy would have signaled to early audiences accustomed to domestic tragedies that they were in familiar generic territory. Not understanding this and applying his own classical notions of decorum, Rymer considers the play a generic monstrosity. As Fowler remarks, there is “a tendency to see merely faults of composition, where in actuality writers are exploiting an assumed familiarity with forgotten genres” (259). Shakespeare can assume such familiarity in 1603, the heyday of domestic tragedy, but it was lost by 1692. Rymer’s only knowledge (if we can call it that) of domestic tragedy is of Othello, and without the situational context of the other domestic tragedies, the play appears monstrous to him in its mixture of comedy and tragedy.

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V I would like to conclude this chapter by taking one other point of contention Rymer had with Othello; namely, its title. Titles are often the only explicit indication we have of genre (Fowler 92), and thus we need to take seriously the title Shakespeare chose for his play. The genre is not in question in King Lear or Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, but what are we to make of Othello, the Moor of Venice? In choosing this title, Shakespeare takes liberty with his source in a way that maddened Rymer: Shakespear alters it from the Original in several particulars, but always, unfortunately, for the worse. He bestows a name on his Moor; and styles him the Moor of Venice: a Note of pre-eminence, which neither History nor Heraldry can allow him. Cinthio, who knew him best, and whose creature he was, calls him simply a Moor. We say the Piper of Strasburgh; the Jew of Florence; And, if you please, the Pindar of Wakefield: all upon Record, and memorable in their Places. But we see no such Cause for the Moor’s preferment to that dignity. And it is an affront to all Chroniclers, and Antiquaries, to top upon ’um a Moor, with that mark of renown, who yet had never faln within the Sphere of their Cognisance. (131–32, italics his) He could not be more correct: why confer upon Othello the locative “of Venice” as if it is a formal title? The alteration from Cinthio has no point, is really inexplicable if one does not understand the elevation of status as a typical feature in domestic tragedy where a character’s claims to aristocratic and thereby tragic stature are otherwise tenuous. To recall Chapter 2, Holinshed gentrifies Arden, rendering him worthy of tragic representation, even as we also see the liminal position he occupies in Faversham. Othello, the Moor of Venice does not quite fit with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, but it certainly resonates with Arden of Faversham, Page of Plymouth, The Witch of Edmonton,and the lost Cox of Collumpton (1599). These locative titles do not indicate royal status, but they do serve a purpose. If one did not know who Thomas Arden was—murdered

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in 1551, forty years before his story was staged—they knew at least where he was from. If the name did not register in and of itself, adding the place to it may have added recognition, as these murders were known for their gruesomeness as well as the provincial locales in which they were committed. The local settings of these murders brought familiarity to audiences, perhaps too much so: Arden, unlike Hamlet or Prometheus, was simply from another county, a day’s travel or so. He could, in other words, be just like those watching him, and audience members in turn could suffer the same fate Arden did if they were to prove equally unfortunate in their choice of spouse. Shakespeare’s title renders Othello less provincial and more foreign and exotic, as if his is indeed a royal title. The use of a locative can serve as a mock indicator of title, which is how Rymer regards Othello’s origins. But Shakespeare’s use of the locative here seems to indicate, as in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, royal status—until one considers that “Moor” is an indicator of ethnicity rather than of aristocracy. What so bothers Rymer is that Othello, the Moor of Venice is too close to a royal title, which he wants to reserve for those with pedigrees that can be verified in the heraldic records. What he does not see is that the use of the locative title is a way to elevate Othello’s status, even as doing so brings it into question, and probably deliberately so. Rymer’s concern, as old-fashioned as it seems, reveals that the apparent oddity of Shakespeare’s giving a locative title to Othello is consistent with the practice in other domestic tragedies. As we are about to see, Shakespeare continually registers his familiarity with the conventions of domestic tragedy. If we consider the genre in light of his dramatic thinking, Shakespeare would have seen what the domestic tragedies were doing—their modus operandi—and would have recognized the need to give us something new, not another Page or Arden but rather some phoenix rising from the ashes of a popular form that had already been in existence for approximately twenty years when he turned his attention to it in Othello.

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Chapter 4

Othello as Domestic Tragedy: The Case for Inclusion

Now that we have seen the reception history of Othello in connection with the domestic tragedies, it is time to demonstrate the many conventions of the genre that Shakespeare employs in his play. As I will argue in the next two chapters, domestic tragedy is not merely one more form assimilated into the complex configuration of the play, but the dominant one upon which Shakespeare relies. That leaves us with the question of why: why would he invoke the form and to what end? Kenneth Burke usefully reminds us that “imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers” (1957: 3, italics his). Othello is a stylized response to the questions posed by the domestic tragedies, one that uses the typical traits of the genre and adapts them at times to dazzling effect. As the first to dismiss any connection between Othello and domestic tragedy, Adams assumed that if Shakespeare were to write a domestic tragedy, he would stay neatly within the conventions of the form as he—Adams— identified them: sin-adultery-murder-repentance (187). As we saw in Chapter 3, Shakespeare was a writer who worked in familiar genres, but was never merely conventional. Yet even if we adhere to Adams’s homiletic framework, Othello fits. Schematically, the general formula is as follows: A is married to B, usually some time before the play opens; A, who is either the husband or (more typically) the wife, commits adultery with C. In one variation (Arden, for instance) A and C then conspire, with or without the help of others, to murder B, and do so. A and C are caught, they confess and repent of their crime, and are punished with a sentence

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of death. In another variation (A Woman Killed, for example), B, the injured spouse, becomes aware of spouse A’s adultery with C and takes appropriate legal (perhaps even extra-judicial) action against A and possibly C as well. A and C admit their guilt, repent, and receive their punishment. Othello represents a variation along these lines, as B becomes aware, or thinks he becomes aware, of A’s adultery with C (Cassio) and attempts to kill both A and C in retribution. Othello falsely assumes Cassio has confessed (5.2.72) and asks Desdemona to repent (ll. 28–30). She refuses, he kills her as punishment for her alleged adultery, and then he is the one who repents when he learns of the falsity of his allegation against A and C. Othello is a variation, to be sure, but one whose permutations are recognizable within the characteristic limits and possibilities of the genre. Take, for instance, Shakespeare’s addition of a fourth character, D, to the mix: Roderigo is the real would-be adulterer who is shunted aside by Iago, who in turn also desires Desdemona. Should we designate Iago with an E, since he too would like to take his own place in the expanding A-B-C triad? As we will shortly see, love triangles are part of the genre’s conventions, and Shakespeare writes with an eye to the possibilities of geometric progression. The critical inability to recognize it for what it is reflects in part the originality of Shakespeare’s variation on the form. The play, as we will see, repeatedly engages the conventions of the domestic tragedies in both implicit and explicit ways. Domestic tragedy resists precise definition because it, like all genres and subgenres, is constantly in flux. There is no universal, normative Domestic Tragedy. Yet to make a critical judgment about whether a work is a domestic tragedy is not all that difficult—no one seriously disputes the inclusion of Arden, A Yorkshire Tragedy, A Woman Killed, Two Lamentable Tragedies, The Witch of Edmonton, and others as well. There is no one singular or necessary trait that would automatically qualify a work as a domestic tragedy, but there are enough resemblances between the plays collectively, as well as enough differences between them and other tragedies, to warrant their grouping as a distinct subgenre. The question of including another work, as we saw from Robert Elliot, requires a careful weighing of the traits of the work in relation to the constitutive features of the genre (23). Moreover, according to Hirsch, “The best way to define a genre—if one

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decides that he wants to—is to describe the common elements in a narrow group of texts which have direct historical relationships” (110). Othello, as we have seen, has precisely such connections. The issue is whether Othello shares enough features with the other domestic tragedies to justify its inclusion in the group. In my view, the case for this, which I intend to make in these final two chapters, is a very strong one. Othello not only extends the category, as great works do with the genres they employ, but it does so firmly and repeatedly within the conventions that typify the domestic tragedies.

I To begin, probably the most consistent plot feature these plays share is their representation of spousal murder: their uxoricides and mariticides1 render these plays at once domestic and tragic. Numerous critics have commented on the genre’s attempts to capitalize on the sensational stories of spousal murders, just as Arden, A Warning, Page of Plymouth, and A Woman Killed had done before Othello, and as A Yorkshire Tragedy2 and The Witch of Edmonton, among others, would do after it. The intrafamilial—domestic—violence in not exclusive to the subgenre (Marston’s plays are a case in point), but domestic tragedy locates the violence in the relationship between a husband and wife with unmistakable piquancy. The murders are almost always in response to a spouse’s adultery—either alleged, as in A Yorkshire Tragedy, or real, as in Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, or Page. Indeed, marital infidelity is so characteristic that A Woman Killed, even though it, like Othello, is not based on any historical spousal murder, routinely finds itself classified as a domestic tragedy because of Anne Frankford’s adultery and subsequent starvation that leads to her death. Yet she would not have employed such draconian penance had her husband not disowned and estranged her from their home and children. If this is not murder by indirect means, what is it?3 The title itself implicates her husband and suggests that Anne’s death is not a simple suicide. Contemporaneous with Heywood’s play, Othello shows clear signs of familiarity with it and with the convention of spousal murder in

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domestic tragedy. Othello’s uxoricide is unique to Shakespeare’s corpus, yet routine in domestic tragedy. To be sure, there are echoes of a potential spousal murder in Goneril’s encouragement to Edmund, “Ere long you are like to hear,/If you dare venture in your own behalf,/A mistress’s command” (Lear 4.2.19–21), yet this is never realized. What is typical of Shakespeare’s murderous couples such as the Macbeths as well as Claudius and Gertrude is close connubial connection. Claudius does kill Gertrude when she drinks the poisonous cup prepared for Hamlet, but Claudius does as much as he can, without betraying his plot of course, to prevent her fatal drink (5.2.293–95). Desdemona is likewise conjunctive to Othello’s soul, but he willingly intends to and then murders her in gruesome fashion. Beginning around 1580, spousal murder was on the “horizon of expectations” for audiences that saw domestic tragedy (Jauss 13). No one familiar with the theatrical scene in 1604 could see Shakespeare’s play and fail to connect this detail to the spousal murders that characterize the subgenre. Since its uxoricide is a prima facie connection to the domestic tragedies, the burden for excluding Othello from the genre ought to fall on those who would do so. Perhaps this is why some critics feel the need, as we saw in Chapter 3, to mention domestic tragedy in relation to Othello even as they deny the association. Spousal murder is not a universal feature of the domestic tragedies, yet its prominence is clearly one of the features that distinguish the subgenre as such. If plot is the crucial element of tragedy, as Aristotle believed (1450b1), Othello fits the mold perfectly, as it concerns from beginning to end the unfolding of its murderous action. As I remarked in the introduction, Othello would like to fight the Turks, but they keep foundering at sea before he gets the chance to engage them, while the real turmoil is within his marriage and, ultimately, in his outraged sense of being cuckolded. Othello turns inward and slays his wife, displacing his martial impulses onto his wife’s allegedly infidel body in a way that shows unmistakable familiarity with the subgenre of domestic tragedy. Thus, the spousal murder at the center of Othello draws upon the uxoricides and mariticides that are such a prominent feature of the subgenre. Although Shakespeare had dealt with intrafamilial violence in his Senecan Titus Andronicus, the

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uxoricide in Othello seems to be a radical departure until one considers the milieu of domestic tragedy. We also saw in Chapter 3 that domestic items—pressing iron, handkerchief, bed linens—frequently serve as murder weapons in the genre, and we ought to note the use of poison as a further domestic weapon. Historically, men kill women with violence; women use subterfuge. The reason is not difficult to understand: less physically powerful than men, women resort to other means, often a domestic weapon at hand, and poison is as stealthy a means as any to kill someone. Occasionally it happens the other way around, as when Gertrude herself takes the poisoned chalice and all Claudius can say without revealing his plot is a simple, “Gertrude, do not drink” (5.2.290). Poison is part of the domestic landscape of spousal suicides, too, as in Romeo and Juliet. As with Romeo’s apothecary, Alice Arden “was acqwayntyd with a certayne payntor dwellynge in towne of Faversham, who had skyll of poysens, which she demaundyd, and he denyed not” (Hyde 117). Ineptly mixing the poison in his morning milk, she gave it to Arden, who noticed both its discoloration and foul taste: “Mystris Ales, what mylke have yow given me here?” Later, “as he rode to Cantorbery, he fell in a great vomittynge and a laske [diarrhea], and so porgyd upwards and downewards that he was preservyd for that tyme” (117–18). In Page of Plymouth, likewise, Mistress Page “did within the space of one year and less, attempt sundry times to poison her husband” (Munday 60)—similarly to no avail. It may of course only be a coincidence that when he begins to contemplate the murder of his own wife, Othello first considers dismembering her—“I will chop her into messes” (4.1.202)—and then lights upon what he decides is a better option: “Get me some poison, Iago, this night” (l. 206). He would have made the attempt, too, had Iago not dissuaded him: “Do it not with poison. Strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated” (ll. 209–10). The handkerchief, bed linens, and poison are subtle reminders of the subgenre, perhaps inconsequential if considered individually; together they point towards the modus operandi of domestic tragedy. Othello’s reference to poison resonates with attempted spousal poisonings in the subgenre, and even suggests a certain emasculation in him: he later resigns himself to the fact that “every puny whipster gets my sword” (5.2.253).

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II Equally characteristic as the spousal murders in domestic tragedy is the use of nonaristocratic characters in a tragic mode. If the protagonist’s tenuous, liminal social standing is a typical feature of the genre, then we would expect Othello’s worthiness for tragic representation to be an important issue in the play—and it is. Moreover, as in Arden and later domestic tragedies, questions of social status are ubiquitous: the periphery of Shakespeare’s play is rife with instances of characters rising and falling in status. Consider, for instance, the numerous ways in which characters change places with one another. One of Shakespeare’s alterations of Cinthio’s source tale was his decision to elevate Cassio from a lowly corporal to a lieutenant. Shakespeare further ennobles him as a Florentine gentleman who displays what Peter Stallybrass calls “patrician courtesy” (1979: 270). Cassio repeatedly points out his social superiority to Iago: “Let it not gall your patience, good Iago,/That I extend my manners; ’tis my breeding/That gives me this bold show of courtesy” (2.1.99–101). He has precisely the kind of refinement Othello also lacks; the discrepancy is what allows Iago to make Othello think that Desdemona might leave him for such a gentleman. That Cassio, however, may also be more of an upstart than an established gentleman is evident in the clown’s mocking echo of his pretentious language: If the gentlewoman that attends the General’s wife be stirring, tell her there’s one Cassio entreats her a little favor of speech. Wilt thou do this? CLOWN She is stirring, sir. If she will stir hither, I shall seem to notify unto her. (3.1.25–30) Cassio is a new man, his ascendancy, like that of Arden, demonstrated at the outset of the play by the conferral of his lieutenancy. Iago strips him of his title for a time, but his reinstatement and promotion in the end—“Cassio rules in Cyprus” (5.2.342)—makes his ascent quite impressive.

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Iago is himself a study in social mobility. His “motiveless malignity”, as Coleridge termed it (388), is anything but motiveless. He has multiple reasons for his duplicity, one of which is class envy: “class as motivation is the principle of Othello. In the relations between military rank and social class lie the causes of the tragedy” (R. Berry 1998: 112). In Cinthio’s tale, the corporal never replaces the ensign; Othello, however, eventually rewards Iago with his hoped-for lieutenancy, a status he claims in perpetuity: “I am your own forever” (3.3.495). Iago makes relatively easy work of his acquisition, but in contemporary practice it was quite difficult for one from his nonaristocratic status to ascend the military hierarchy. Iago’s failure to win the lieutenancy at the outset of the play is primarily a social, not military, shortcoming on his part: “Preferment goes by letter and affection,/And not by old gradation . . .” (1.1.37–38). His downward mobility is the opposite of Cassio’s rise: when the latter replaces Othello as commander of Cyprus, Iago is a mere “slave” who awaits torture. Class antagonism also permeates matters of faith (Hunt 1996: 346–47): CASSIO Well, God’s above all; and there be souls must be saved, and there be souls must not be saved. IAGO It’s true, good Lieutenant. CASSIO For mine own part—no offense to the General, nor any man of quality—I hope to be saved. IAGO And so do I too, Lieutenant. CASSIO Ay, but, by your leave, not before me; the lieutenant is to be saved before the ancient. (2.3.97–105) Cassio conflates social with theological status as he wishes “no offense” to “any man of quality”—Iago clearly excepted. Iago repeatedly calls Cassio a “knave” behind his back (e.g. 2.1.240), just as Greene, Read, and Alice had done to Arden. Cassio in turn belittles Roderigo during their brawl: “A knave teach me my duty? I’ll beat the knave into a twiggen bottle” (2.3.141–42). Even in their apparently innocuous

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dialogue as they prepare for the night watch, they employ competing tropes to describe Desdemona: IAGO He hath not yet made wanton the night with her, and she is sport for Jove. CASSIO She’s a most exquisite lady. IAGO And, I’ll warrant her, full of game. CASSIO Indeed she’s a most fresh and delicate creature. IAGO What an eye she has! Methinks it sounds a parley to provocation. CASSIO An inviting eye, and yet methinks right modest. (2.3.15–23) Cassio resists Iago’s coarse insinuations (Howard-Hill 1996: 180), yet his misplaced condescension eventually places Cassio in trouble because he, too, like everyone else in the play, thinks Iago is “honest”, a word that was applied, as Empson argued, to “low class, and stupid, but good natured people” (1951: 224). When Iago tells him, “I think you think I love you” (2.3.311), Cassio cannot even conceive of one from Iago’s social sphere as having the sophistication to practice any sort of linguistic subterfuge. As part of their attention to the socially precarious positions of their characters, domestic tragedies trace the impoverishment of spendthrifts such as Walter Calverley in A Yorkshire Tragedy. Roderigo offers another example of the phenomenon. “I’ll sell all my land”, he declares (1.3.383), only to later lament, as Calverley and Mountford had in A Woman Killed, “I have wasted myself out of my means” (4.2.193–94). Just as Mother Sawyer will do later in The Witch of Edmonton,Iago acts as pander to a would-be adulterer, though unlike his counterparts in the genre his help is both specious and vicious. In spite of his failure to win Desdemona, Roderigo makes the usual “scaffold speech” one finds in domestic tragedies, as he “repents” his “unlawful solicitation” even though it never reached fruition (4.2.206– 07). No Roderigo character appears in Cinthio’s tale, and he is not necessary to the plot. Shakespeare only needs him if he wants to follow the convention of the would-be adulterer in domestic tragedy: Thomas Mosby (Arden), George Browne (A Warning for Fair Women),

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Wendoll (A Woman Killed), Stranwich (Page of Plymouth), the wealthy German (The Vow Breaker), and so on. Adams identified the “love triangle” as one of the distinctive features of domestic tragedy: husband, wife, and adulterous suitor. Roderigo differs from his counterparts in other plays in one singular way: he is completely unsuccessful (Shaffer 451). One of the contrivances of the domestic tragedies is the quick and inevitable submission of the wife to the importunate suitor. Desdemona, by way of contrasting variation, is virtuous. It is Roderigo (along with Wendoll and other suitors in the genre) who cannot control his concupiscence: “I confess it is my shame”, he tells Iago, “to be so fond, but it is not in my virtue to amend it” (1.3.320–21). As part of his Calverleylike descent into destruction, he confesses himself willing to sell all his land in order to win Desdemona (1.3.383). To Iago, he is a “snipe” who never, so far as we can tell, even has an audience with Desdemona and dies a “murd’rous slave!”, a mere “villain”, as Iago calls him as he stabs him to death (5.1.63). Domestic tragedies consistently employ the figure of the adulterous suitor, which Roderigo certainly is, even if his importunities come, along with his purse and life, to nothing. Roderigo’s failure to fill his role signals one of the ways Shakespeare adapts the conventions of domestic tragedy. Just as he had doubled the Plautine twins in A Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare here gives us a second, equally fictitious, love triangle, with Cassio as alleged suitor. Neither of these potential adulterous liaisons materializes anywhere outside Othello’s fevered imagination. Othello never even envisions Roderigo as a potential home-wrecker, instead substituting Cassio as such. Yet Roderigo is such a comically inept suitor that even before the play opens Brabantio has already summarily dismissed him: “I have charged thee not to haunt about my doors./In honest plainness thou hast heard me say/My daughter is not for thee . . .” (1.1.99–101). Even cuckoldry becomes a form of social mobility in Othello. Emilia notes the prospect: “But for all the world! Uds pity, who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch? I should venture Purgatory for’t” (4.3.77–80). This is social mobility at extreme cost, and Desdemona can hardly imagine it: “Dost thou in conscience think—tell me, Emilia—/That there be women do abuse their

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husbands/In such gross kind?” (ll. 63–65). Despite Emilia’s affirmation, Desdemona remains steadfastly incredulous: “I do not think there is any such woman” (l. 86). Her naïveté deepens in light of the domestic tragedies’ staging of Alice Arden, Anne Frankford, Ulalia Page, and others as well—and these were not simply fictitious cases of adulterous wives. Emilia herself protests that she “should venture purgatory” for such promotion, yet she is the instrument of her husband’s downfall. Despite the wife typically being the adulterous spouse in domestic tragedy,4 Emilia argues for mitigating circumstances, ending her cautionary tale, “Then let [husbands] use us well; else let them know,/The ills we do, their ills instruct us so” (ll. 105– 06). This is the message we see in Arden, and thus the alleged misogyny of the genre is in need of reconsideration. The masculine fear of cuckoldry runs deep: “I do suspect the lusty Moor”, says Iago, “Hath leaped into my seat” (2.1.297–98). Desdemona, too, reminds Othello What? Michael Cassio, That came a-wooing with you, and so many a time, When I have spoke of you dispraisingly, Hath ta’en your part. . . . (3.3.76–79). Othello admits that Cassio has been his stand-in—“[he] went between us very oft” (3.3.109)—and Iago uses this innocuous detail to ensnare him. In a play about lieutenancy—literally place-holding—about stand-ins or would-be stand-ins, the stability of one’s place is continually questioned. As Dolan notes, Othello loses social status when he considers himself a cuckold (111). His incredulity—“Cuckold me?” (4.1.202)—leads to humiliation and loss of an identity that was intimately tied to his wife, a bond stronger arguably than that between any other Shakespearean couple. Othello can hardly speak of what he thinks has been done to him: “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul./ Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!/It is the cause” (5.2.1–3). Just as social mobility is a recurrent trait in domestic tragedy, it is as well in Othello, yet we would be wise not to think of Othello as merely another play about the lesser gentry jostling with one another for social status. Hugh Grady’s analysis is worth noting:

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the class theme seems to me to remain largely latent and undeveloped. . . . In the end, no individual or class interest of any kind is well served by Iago’s plotting. The results achieved . . . finally destroy Iago himself; they cannot be reduced to some rational calculus of self-interest but contain some larger, self-destructive irrationality at work. (1996: 99) Iago gains the lieutenancy, but it is not really what he is after. Social status was enough for Arden, Sanders, and Calverley; Iago goes through the same motions only to discard the goal in the end. It is as if Shakespeare touches on the conventions of domestic tragedy not so much to displace them as to push beyond them. Nowhere is this more evident than in his treatment of the character with the most tenuous social status of all—Othello himself.

III Just as Hamlet becomes a revenge tragedy that pushes the form to its limits, so too Othello takes the exploration of social mobility in the domestic tragedies to another level, especially in its depiction of the Moor. On first glance, Othello seems readily distinguishable from his alleged dramatic predecessors, provincial parvenus such as Thomas Arden and George Sanders. As commander of the Venetian armed forces, Othello seems to outsize the domestic tragedies’ use of nonaristocratic protagonists. Before the curtain rises, however, he had once been “sold to slavery” (1.3.140), an assertion that, if true, renders his social mobility in marrying the daughter of a Venetian senator all the more impressive. Othello shares with the protagonists of domestic tragedy a rise to social prominence, one that is similarly not as secure as he would like it to be.5 In fact, Othello’s claims to social, and thereby tragic, standing are even more problematic than those of his predecessors. He is always on the fringe of social respectability, and the difficulties that attend his tragic representation further indicate Shakespeare’s engagement with, as well as his innovations to, the conventions of domestic tragedy. There have traditionally been two camps in regard to Othello criticism: those who regard him as a noble character worthy of tragic

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representation, versus those who, á la Rymer, believe he is never able to acquire the proper tragic status (Cartwright 1990: 162). Shawcross notes the duality in Shakespeare’s depiction of the Moor: Othello “is representative both of the average human who can be hoodwinked by design and fall victim to jealousy and inferiority complex and of an allegoric or mythic figure” (44). He is a mythic Prometheus who in killing his own wife steals fire from his life and becomes a “coxcomb”, “gull”, “dolt/As ignorant as dirt” (5.2.12, 240, 170–71). The division is germane to the play’s association with domestic tragedy: Othello is the quintessential example of a character whose liminal social position renders his tragic representation problematic. For Henry Adams, the distinguishing characteristic of domestic tragedy is, again, “the humble station of the hero” (viii), and Othello is too grand in Adams’s eyes to fit the paradigm. Othello’s champions, especially early in the twentieth century, cite his commanding stage presence—his “grandeur”—as justification for his casting as tragic lead. Helen Gardner considers him such a “noble” character of epic—“Homeric”—proportions as to be “unflawed” (1988: 173, 179). For A. C. Bradley, Iago is “vulgar”, while Othello is “large and grand, towering above his fellows”—even, he suggests, the most noble of all Shakespearean heroes (19, 28). While this is a tad grandiose, Bloom’s assertion that “we need to restore some sense of Othello’s initial dignity and glory” seems apposite in the face of modern debunkers (1999: 433). As an attempt, perhaps, to restore that understanding, scholars have examined the socio-cultural status Othello would have had in Venice. In order to avoid another crossing of the Rubicon, the Venetian government employed foreigners such as Othello to lead their military (Levith 1989: 31; McPherson 73). Othello is seemingly selfpossessed when the play opens, able to command himself and others with aplomb: “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them” (1.2.60; Adamson 1980: 119; Loomba 1994: 175). Knight noted that, traditionally, “soldiership is almost the condition of nobility” (107), a point corroborated by Lewis Lewkenor in his translation of Gasparo Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice : Yea and some forrain men and strangers have beene adopted into this number of citizens, eyther in regard of their great nobility,

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or that they had been dutifull towardes the state, or els had done unto them some notable service. (1599: 18) Othello has “done the state some service” (5.2.349) and claims status not only for what he has done but also for his “great nobility”: I fetch my life and being From men of royal siege, and my demerits May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune As this that I have reached. . . . (1.2.21–24) One could argue that his (self-proclaimed) royal pedigree establishes his tragic status in a way that clearly sets him above merchants such as George Sanders and land speculators such as Arden. Unfortunately for Othello, the play never returns to this lone hint of his birth: if he is of royal birth, he was at some point “sold to slavery” and redeemed into Venice where he is a general, neither more nor less. Given his extravagant claims about his past, which include the contradictory accounts of the handkerchief’s origins, one scarcely knows whether to credit his claim to royalty. What is certain is his deference to the Venetian senators: “My very noble and approved good masters” (1.3.79) is hardly the discourse of an equal; he “is depended on yet distrusted [by them] in a way characteristic of servants” (Dolan 111). Othello insists, “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul/Shall manifest me rightly” (1.2.31–32), yet what title is that, exactly? Othello’s claim is tantalizing: the generalship (if not his phantom royal origins) almost establishes his claim to tragic representation, yet it is striking how Shakespeare simultaneously undercuts such a claim. Even as a general, Othello’s marriage to Desdemona, a senator’s daughter, is without question a step up for him in the social hierarchy. The fact that they elope is most likely an attempt to obviate Brabantio’s certain opposition to the marriage (1.3.196–98). Iago emphasizes the material prospects Othello can look forward to: “Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carrack./If it prove lawful prize, he’s made for ever” (1.2.50–51). Recalling Arden’s own accession of property, and thereby of social and tragic stature, Othello is also a new man as the play opens. Iago’s metaphor of boarding

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conveys with his usual coarseness the Moor’s ascendancy: the oxymoronic land carrack [ship] confers upon Othello a socioeconomic status he otherwise would not have. Iago’s hypothetical, “If it prove lawful prize”, with Desdemona objectified both as “it” and as the “prize”, makes us aware that the legitimacy of the match is at issue. Can one with his race, religion, and social stature marry one of her orbit, and—this is the question in any domestic tragedy—do we accept his later fall and representation as a tragic protagonist? Let us begin with religious objections to the marriage. William Vaughan declares, “Among all the societies of this life, there is none so naturall, as that between man and wife” (M8v). Brabantio informs the Senate that Desdemona, “err[s]/Against all rules of nature” (1.3.102–03) by marrying Othello, and one can readily count the “natural” rules she transgresses. Henry Smith’s A Preparative to Marriage warns that it is against nature for old men to marry young women (1591: B6), and also admonishes, following 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Be not unequally yoked with infidels” (D6), the taint of which Othello is never able to cast off. The association of Moors with Turkish infidels is a longstanding one,6 and the Turks, as Daniel Vitkus demonstrated, were known to convert slaves. Although Othello repeatedly claims his status as a Christian, in contemporary religious paranoia to have “turned Turk” once signaled future susceptibility to re-conversion. Thus, Othello’s potential embodiment of Islam furthers his socially precarious position in Christian Venice. The character of Othello, like the land from which he originates, “is a theatrical embodiment of the dark, threatening powers at the edge of Christendom” (160).7 Othello’s skin color further complicates his tragic representation. Desdemona has married her social inferior, “the thick-lips” (1.1.68), to use Roderigo’s racist metonym for Othello. Miscegenation was widely considered to be unnatural (Maus 1995: 122), the likely result of which would be, as Iago informs Brabantio, “you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans” (1.1.115–16). Even though blacks were in England by 1554, they were enslaved, considered by many to lack reason, and associated with monstrous sexuality (Aubrey 1993: 221–23). From Richard Hakluyt to Samuel Purchas, travelers to or from Africa associated blacks with unusual sexual appetites. Leo Africanus, whose The History and Description of Africa Shakespeare

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probably knew, declares that Moors are “prone to venerie” and that “they have great swarmes of harlots among them; whereupon a man may easily conjecture their manner of living” (1600: 180, 187). When Brabantio refers to the “gross clasps of a lascivious Moor” (1.1.129), he is only confirming the cultural prejudice to which scholars such as Anthony Gerard Barthelemy have called our attention. Othello is unique as a black-skinned protagonist. His role can be distinguished both from those in which blacks are simply stage villains—Aaron in Titus, for instance—and from those in which they are, to use Eldred Jones’s term, “dignified oriental ruler[s]” such as Morocco in The Merchant of Venice (1994: 39; Barthelemy 1987: 91; Loomba 169). Elizabeth issued a royal proclamation banning blacks from England in 1601; the presence of a black leading character, the eponymous hero of his own tragedy, must have created a “spectacular charge on the stage” in 1604 (Aubrey 231, 221). Once again, Rymer is an infallible guide to the shock of Othello’s elevation to tragic status. He warned his readers not to follow Desdemona’s path lest they come to the same shame: “First, This may be a caution to all Maidens of Quality how, without their Parents consent, they run away with Blackamoors . . .” (132). For Rymer, white aristocratic women do not mix with black Moors because the latter could never, in his view, have a social stature commensurate with that of “Maidens of Quality”: The Character of that State is to employ strangers in their Wars; But shall a Poet thence fancy that they will set a Negro to be their General; or trust a Moor to defend them against the Turk? With us a Black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter; but Shakespear would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or Small-coal Wench: Shake-spear, would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord. . . . (134) Lest we think Rymer represents some sort of aberration in western consciousness, consider Coleridge’s abhorrence a century later: Can we imagine [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth,—at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves? . . . as we are constituted, and

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most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness. . . . (1818: 385–86) Both comments, despite their outrageousness, deserve scrutiny. As Fowler remarks, “The first phase of the critical act should be construction—that is, determining the features of the work intended. . . . What signals, it asks, were originally sent?” (256). If Rymer and Coleridge, both astute critics in their own right, are to be believed, then the initial reaction by many theatergoers must have been one of shock. Shakespeare is not, to use Coleridge’s language, “so utterly ignorant” in his choice of protagonist; the title indicates that he chose Othello with deliberation and specificity. With his choice comes the consequence that audiences considered his skin color and his potential turn to Islam as marks of inferiority, and thus of his unworthiness for tragic representation. By virtue of these two qualities alone his social standing is more tenuous than that of Arden, John Page, or any of the other protagonists in domestic tragedy. At the same time, Othello’s liminal stature—his marginal status on the fringes of aristocratic society—reminds us of them, even as Shakespeare deepens the problems attending his tragic representation. Rymer and Coleridge were highly influential in the reception of Othello, yet the play does much of their work for them: “thick-lips” (1.1.68); “old black ram” (90); “devil” (93); “Barbary horse” (114); and “erring barbarian” (1.3.358). Although Othello can be incorporated into society as a warrior, the idea of his doubling as a prospective lover and spouse to Brabantio’s white daughter is troubling even for those Venetians most sympathetic to him. The Duke himself rationalizes the union by insisting to Brabantio that Othello’s inner virtue, which is conveniently color-coded, outweighs his skin color: “If virtue no delighted beauty lack,/Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (1.3.292–93). Not to be outdone, Iago offers an insinuation as racist as anything Rymer and Coleridge could muster: Not to affect many proposèd matches Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,

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Whereto we see in all things nature tends— Foh! One may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. (3.3.245–49) Accepting Iago’s logic, Othello posits the same potential cause of her alleged adultery: “Haply, for I am black” (3.3.279). He too cannot believe that Desdemona would forsake the “wealthy curled darlings” of Venice for one of his complexion. He would disown his own tragic representation. Altogether, Othello never lets us forget that these indices of Othello’s social status—his quasi-aristocratic standing, if not birth as well; his potential embodiment of Islam; and his skin color—work in concert against his representation as tragic protagonist. If Othello does have at least an ethos of tragic nobility about him, as earlier critics argued,8 he becomes split, his “magnitude cut in half”, as the play unfolds (Adelman 1997: 128). Self-divided though he may be, Othello’s putative status as noble is always kept before us—characters call him “noble” nine times in the play9—as if to question, as we now do with the iteration of “honest” Iago, the nature of the term. Does it refer to his social status or, as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath would have it, to inner character or subjectivity? The play, interestingly enough, gestures towards both answers. Initially at least, Othello’s character and commanding stage presence render him a typical and thus unexceptional tragic protagonist. Today his social status hardly raises an eyebrow among audiences and critics accustomed to seeing Death of a Salesman and its epigones with their representation of nonaristocratic protagonists. Othello may appear to modern sensibilities as no different from a Lear or Macbeth, but Rymer’s incredulity registers more accurately the radical move Shakespeare made in elevating Othello to tragic stature: He bestows a name on his Moor; and styles him the Moor of Venice: a Note of pre-eminence, which neither History nor Heraldry can allow him. Cinthio, who knew him best, and whose creature he was, calls him simply a Moor. We say the Piper of Strasburgh; the Jew of Florence ; And, if you please, the Pindar of Wakefield: all upon Record, and memorable in their Places. But we see no such Cause for the Moor’s preferment to that dignity. (131–32)

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If audiences do not know Cinthio’s source tale, then they are unaware of the Moor’s nonaristocratic origins, especially since Othello claims, as we have seen, royal birth, and the play confers a pseudo-title on him as well in its own title. For Rymer, however, Othello’s race, religion, and color are secondary considerations; what matters is that, together, they render Othello socially inferior to Desdemona and, ultimately, to the tragic status Shakespeare gives him. Beginning with his introductory header, Rymer’s comments are littered with attacks on Othello’s claim to nobility: “Thoughts, in Othello, in a Horse or Mastiff, more sensibly express. Ill manners. Outrageous to a Nobleman” (131). It gets worse, though for purposes of the play’s association with the domestic tragedies, better: “Should the Poet have provided such a Husband for an only Daughter of any noble peer in England, the Black-amoor must have chang’d his Skin, to look our House of Lords in the Face” (139). When Othello insults Desdemona in Act Four, Rymer is outraged: “What Poet wou’d give a villanous Blackamoor this Ascendant?” (157). Desdemona’s murder is simply too much for Rymer to bear: [Othello] had the opportunity . . . to save the poor harmless wretch. But the Poet must do everything by contraries: to surprize the Audience still with something horrible and prodigious, beyond any human imagination. At this rate he must out-do the Devil, to be a Poet in the rank of Shakespear. (156) Rymer is correct in all the wrong ways. Othello is a violation of (or, rather, an innovation in) tragic decorum, one fully in keeping with, even as it pushes beyond, the domestic tragedies. Shakespeare does everything indeed by contraries in a way that surprises the audience, but the surprise was probably not as great to audiences familiar with the domestic tragedies and their representation of traditionally comic characters in tragic roles. For Rymer, Shakespeare’s generic sins are grave, injecting as he does “so much farce and Apocryphal Matter in his Tragedies. Thereby un-hallowing the Theatre, profaning the name of Tragedy” (145). Rymer, again, does not know the domestic tragedies as such, nor does he recognize, as Cohen remarks, that “a genre like

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tragedy continues despite the fact that it is reconceptualized by ‘domestic’ tragedy; it is not abandoned despite serious changes in the economy” (209). Shakespeare’s changes in the economy are serious enough for Rymer and subsequent critics to overlook Shakespeare’s masterful reconceptualization of the genre: he raises the representation of the socially suspect to the nth degree in the character of Othello.

IV Othello in fact wants to write himself into the genre of domestic tragedy. The problem, of course, is that he is not, like John Frankford, Thomas Arden, and George Sanders, a cuckold. Nonetheless, he searches for the evidence, the absolute certainty, that Desdemona has cuckolded him and, thus, rendered him the protagonist of his own domestic tragedy: “I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove . . .” (3.3.204). He insists on precisely the kind of “ocular proof” (3.3.376) that Frankford had in A Woman Killed when he discovered, offstage, Anne and Wendoll in flagrante—yet another intertextual reverberation between the two plays. Othello would like to envision himself as a wronged cuckold, the protagonist of his own domestic tragedy. He manufactures his own tragic status; he even lays claims to Jobian status: Had it pleased heaven To try me with affliction, had they rained All kind of sores and shames on my bare head, Steeped me in poverty to the very lips, Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes, I should have found in some place of my soul A drop of patience. . . . (4.2.49–55) He could, he tells us, outlast Job and lose everything, including his social status. But he has a sticking point: But there where I have garnered up my heart, Where either I must live or bear no life,

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The fountain from the which my current runs Or else dries up—to be discarded thence! (ll. 59–62) Modern discourse on cuckoldry runs to the effect that men are vainly concerned about losing the purity of their patrimony. Othello has none; his concern, rather, is about being “discarded”, having his love thrown away as if it were nothing. That, for him, is utter isolation. Although critics have written perceptively in regard to the genre’s attention to the material objects of the house, we ought not to forget the plays’ focus on domesticity extends to the intangible ties of marital love. Consider, for instance, Frankford’s encomium to connubial bliss: But the chief Of all the sweet felicities on earth, I have a fair, a chaste, and loving wife, Perfection all, all truth, all ornament. If man on earth may truly happy be, Of these at once possess’d, sure I am he. (iv.9–14) Grady’s view that the class element remains latent in Othello seems largely a result of its own attention to married love. If Othello is a “class aspirant” (Stallybrass 264–65), it is equally important not to read him as one who seeks social status for its own sake. Othello’s social status is not, in the end, what preoccupies him; it is, at it was with Frankford, the stability of his marriage: If it were now to die, ’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear My soul hath her content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate. (2.1.189–93) Although one cannot discount Othello’s social aspirations, they pale before his professed love for Desdemona. His problem is that the love he needs he already has, and the drama of domestic tragedy he creates destroys his marriage, which is the usual trajectory of the form.

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V Another part of the genre’s domesticity, as numerous critics have remarked, is its use of interior spaces and material objects: “Cushions, carpets, pewter and silverware literally marked the difference between being ‘anybody’ and being ‘somebody’; they gave individuals identity within the power structures of the town” (Richardson 194). One can readily see why conspicuous consumption would be important for new men trying to establish their social and tragic credentials; we know, for instance, that Anne Frankford’s costume for the original production of the play cost more than the play itself (Gurr 2009: 82). As a further element of this material culture of the plays, we need to remember that Arden was murdered with a pressing iron, and several of the murders take place in the marital bed as well. Like Othello, Desdemona also appears to be a recognizable type— patient Griselda—often associated with the genre. “There is a certain domestic femininity about her”, as Knight remarked of her in an older but accurate vein. She has “‘house affairs’ (had Cordelia any?) . . . She talks of ‘to-night at supper’ (3.3.57) or ‘to-morrow dinner’ (3.3.58) . . . We hear of her needlework (4.1.197), her fan, gloves, mask (4.2.8)”(107–08). Knight omits the cooking skillet and handkerchief, both of which further domesticate her and the play. Yet she is not easily tamable. Desdemona comes closest to finding that sense of social and personal stability that Othello sorely lacks. Despite her murder, a death anticipated in Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and others within the subgenre, Desdemona’s character offers a glimmer of hope that one is not simply left on the verge of nihilism, radically decentered from any sense of a stable self. Desdemona has not “turn’d” Turk (4.1.261), nor is she the “subtle”, “cunning whore of Venice” that Othello construes her as (4.2. 21, 93). Othello wants to read her into the convention of the adulterous wife of domestic tragedy. Emilia recognizes his constructed fiction: “For if she be not honest, chaste, and true,/There’s no man happy; the purest of their wives/Is foul as slander” (4.2.18–20). Interrogated

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herself—“Are not you a strumpet?”—Desdemona’s reply is unambiguous: No, as I am a Christian. If to preserve this vessel for my lord From any other foul unlawful touch Be not to be a strumpet, I am none. (4.2.84–87) If one were looking for an innovation on the adulterous wife of certain domestic tragedies, one need look no further than Desdemona, who defies the accusation even in the face of death: “his unkindness may defeat my life,/But never taint my love” (ll. 167–68). The convention of the wife of easy virtue in certain domestic tragedies was followed by—indeed, it was part of her repentance—the convention of the wife as submissive victim of her husband’s wrath: “Instead of powerful, murderous Alice Arden, we find versions of Griselda such as the wife in A Yorkshire Tragedy and Anne Frankford in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (printed 1607)” (Berek 170). Desdemona overturns the convention of the adulteress at the same time as she becomes another example of the utterly submissive wife that one finds in the genre. Desdemona’s devotion is too unwavering, fanatical, but its verisimilitude lies in the depths of her love, just as the rationale for Othello’s appalling murder is equally and bizarrely comprehensible only in the same distorted light. Desdemona willingly sacrifices herself to her husband’s murderous enmity; he in turn kills her “else she’ll betray more men” (5.2.6).

VI As I have argued, the character of Othello emerges from the fecundity of Shakespeare’s imaginative engagement with the form of domestic tragedy as he knew it on the English stage. Othello even writes himself into the form as one who seems to have attended these performances and fears that now he is no longer simply a spectator. Just as he scripts his own domestic tragedy, so too he must, if he is to be true to generic form, make his exodus by way of his own scaffold

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speech at play’s end. Iago is famously silent even though he knows almost everything. Othello who knew nothing until his final moment of recognition, nonetheless wants to narrate the story of his fall. He claims a right to center stage; he will not let the curtain fall just yet: “Soft you; a word or two before you go./I have done the state some service, and they know’t” (5.2.348–49). As a domestic tragedy, Othello would be generically incomplete without his scaffold speech. Henry Hitch Adams was the first to notice the scaffold speech as a recurrent feature of the subgenre: “‘Scaffold speeches’ become tiresomely familiar in the domestic tragedies. . . . Confession was considered one of the required parts of repentance, and writers lost no opportunity of making the repentance scenes realistic” (66). Shakespeare, too, loses no opportunity. Othello’s sense of anguish is palpable: he has “[thrown] a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes” (ll. 357–58) so easily deceived, now manifest his belated contrition. His speech is clearly one of repentance, and as such it is tied not only to the genre but to the pamphlet narratives we saw in Chapter 1 where the dying scaffold speech is a prominent feature of the form. Othello’s recently acquired self-knowledge is still incomplete, as he speaks “Of one not easily jealous” (l. 355); his assertion must be counterpoised by the trifle of a handkerchief and the value he ascribed to it. His impersonal (thirdperson) reference to himself as “one” signals his own attempt, like that of his wife, to exonerate him of the murder. Shakespeare transforms the morality play framework that Adams found in domestic tragedy; Othello’s reference to Iago’s nonexistent hooves is the vestigial remnant of the mysteries and moralities. As infernal as his depredations are, Iago’s evil has both a human face and agency. In Othello’s scaffold speech, what we see is a character who considers himself both culpable and blameless, worthy and unworthy to pronounce upon his own fall from greatness. Realizing that his domestic tragedy only came into being when he killed his wife for her non-existent adultery, Othello speaks of himself as “one that loved not wisely but too well” (l. 354). Like Hamlet, he calls for an accurate accounting of his life from future biographers: “Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, /Nor set down aught in malice”

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(ll. 352–53). To speak of him as he is will be difficult; even to situate him firmly in the role of tragic protagonist has taxed his interpreters. Othello’s scaffold speech is, as it has to be, the play’s parting connection to the domestic tragedies. Its delivery from his bedroom, which he transforms into the place of execution by way of taking “a turban’d Turk” “by th’ throat” as he does now to himself, registers again the complex way Shakespeare alters the genre from within its very roots (ll. 363, 365). With his bed as scaffold, the private, domestic space is transformed into a public portal for viewing the confession as well as his demise. “Look on the tragic loading of this bed” (l. 374), Lodovico tells us as a final reminder of the incongruity of public and private in domestic tragedy. Othello’s impressive social mobility is unable to confer upon him a noble and, hence, tragic status that one can easily identify. He in fact affirms his own nonaristocratic status just as Old Carter had in The Witch of Edmonton, referring to the rudeness of his speech (1.3.81), and here to himself as “a circumcised dog” worthy of historical erasure. Critics have been slow to acknowledge Othello’s affiliation with Arden of Faversham and the other domestic tragedies, largely, I suspect, because Shakespeare plumbs tragic representation in Othello more deeply than his predecessors had in the domestic tragedies, pointing the way, in the end, to a more inclusive sense of what constitutes worthiness for tragic representation. It is true that Shakespeare never returned so closely to domestic tragedy, but after Othello, where could he have gone? His exploration of social mobility finds its consummation in Othello’s race, ethnicity, religion, and social class. Just as Shakespeare had pushed the form of revenge tragedy to its limits in Hamlet, Othello nearly exhausts the possibilities of domestic tragedy. Cassio’s final judgment of Othello, “For he was great of heart” (5.2.372), could be said of almost any of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. Such an assessment places him, in Cassio’s eyes, on an equal footing with his social superiors, even as his social position marks him as suspect when placed alongside Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Coriolanus, and others. Shakespeare certainly knew the longstanding convention of representing high aristocratic and mythic figures in tragedy, and he could

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hardly have avoided seeing the domestic tragedies’ innovative use of nonaristocratic protagonists. The social status that had rendered problematic the tragic representation of such figures finds its fullest exploration in the ambiguous social status accorded to the exotic Moor. Shakespeare seems to have chosen Othello not in spite of his liminal standing in Venetian culture but precisely in recognition of the dramatic potential such instability would bring to the play. Nuttall’s sense that Othello is “not in any straightforward manner [a domestic tragedy]” (133) is exactly what one would expect of Shakespeare’s nimble engagement with various literary forms and genres. With Shakespeare’s ingenious selection, Othello represents the richest variation on the form, one that, as we will see in the next chapter, extends to Desdemona’s uncanny death.

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Chapter 5

From the Miraculous and Monstrous to the Uncanny

This chapter will culminate with an examination of a bizarre moment in Othello: Desdemona’s momentary deathbed revival (or resurrection) during which she exonerates Othello for his murdering her and places the blame on herself (5.2.127–28). The moment has analogues in a number of the domestic tragedies and functions as yet another convention of the subgenre. Because this particular convention is quite unusual, it is distinctive and virtually exclusive to the domestic tragedies; that Shakespeare employs it is a straightforward signal of Othello’s generic affiliation. A genre, as we discussed in Chapter 1, is constituted in large measure by the shared use of identical or similar conventions; the nonuse of such conventions is what excludes others from the group. Determinations of generic belonging are not always easy to make, but the use of unusual or distinctive conventions enables us to make such judgments, especially in difficult cases. I will examine three variations of the convention: the miraculous, the monstrous, and—most prominently—the uncanny. The presence of the miraculous and monstrous, though they are conventional features of the subgenre, is shared by other plays of the period as well, though perhaps with less frequency. Even so, what emerges most frequently and distinctively in the domestic tragedies are events that are best described as belonging to the realm of the uncanny. Taken together, all three phenomena are related in one particular way: the miraculous has clear religious implications, as does the monstrous, which is frequently allied to the infernal or satanic in the subgenre.

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The uncanny, by definition, is different: “partaking of a supernatural character; mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar” (OED). The religious or supernatural is still present in the uncanny, but its manifestation is more numinous, less sectarian in JudeoChristian or other terms: it is spiritual in a broad, often undefined, sense. The uncanny leaves us with epistemological uncertainty as to the presence of divine intervention,1 and offers instead mysterious, uncomfortably strange, and even weird phenomena. Since the uncanny is the most recurrent and distinctive feature of the domestic tragedies, it will be the central focus of this chapter. All three phenomena typically occur within another convention; namely, the murder-will-out topos of the subgenre. The monstrous inevitably concerns the gruesome and graphic spousal murders, infanticides, and other sensational acts that occur in the domestic tragedies; the miraculous is the countervailing movement that brings about the revelation of the murderer. Adams read the plays almost solely in this light. In the lengthy subtitle to English Domestic Or, Homiletic Tragedy, he announces that the domestic tragedies use “Striking Examples of the/Interposition of/PROVIDENCE . . .” (italics in original). Adams refers to what he regards as the intervention of divine justice—the miraculous—to reveal or at least mark the murders. Surely David Attwell is correct when he observes that Adams tends to overlook “the secular dimension of the play[s’] homiletic function” (1992: 336), yet Adams nevertheless has a valid point: the plays repeatedly invoke the supernatural in their depiction of these crimes and the inevitable revelation of whodunit. What Adams read too narrowly, while more secularly minded critics dismiss it altogether,2 is the repeated use of the uncanny not so much to reveal the murder but to mark it indelibly, if indefinably. I will examine a number of examples as a way of leading up to and concluding with Othello where both Desdemona and Roderigo come back, if only momentarily, from the dead. As bizarre as these two events seem, they resonate with similar manifestations of the uncanny in the subgenre, and in particular with the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women, another domestic tragedy that Shakespeare knew and drew upon in Othello.

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I Let us begin with one end of the spectrum: the representation of the miraculous in Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies. Adams calls the play “a sermon in dramatic form” (108), and of all the domestic tragedies, this play most resembles the moralities to which he would connect them. Speaking to his allegorical counterparts Avarice and Truth, Homicide tells us as the play opens that Thomas Merry kills for “the love of golde” (1601: C3). Abetting the play’s moralizing is Homicide’s initial speech in which he claims to seek out those who will “Soil their well addicted harts:/With rape, extortion, murther . . .” (A2v). Apparently, given the popularity of the subgenre in the first decade of the seventeenth century, audiences could not get enough of this material. Recall from the Introduction the “spectacle of inhumanitie” (D2v) that begins with Merry’s slaughter of Thomas Beech, after which Merry begins to cut the body, and bindes the armes behinde his backe with Beeches gartere so that he can dispose of the corpse piecemeal and thus try to evade detection (E2). The slaughter is not over, however, as the stage directions detail Merry’s killing of a potential witness—Beech’s servant boy, Thomas Winchester: “When the boy goeth into the shoppe Merrie striketh six blowes on his head & with the seaventh leaves the hammer sticking in his head . . .” (C4). The macabre presence of Winchester’s body is also visible to everyone; the hammer protruding from his head seems intended to evoke shock at the monstrosity of the act. Such heinousness seems to elicit, in Yarington’s moral calculus, miraculous intervention. With Beech’s body dismembered and scattered, a series of serendipitous discoveries locate the various parts, which are then reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle into an approximation of his once-intact body (G2). Such discoveries in the service of early modern forensics induce a waterman to exclaim, “Beholde the mightie miracles of God”, and the Second Neighbor confirms the attribution as an instance of “God’s wondrous works” (G2v). Wondrous indeed, but as any good criminalist knows, identifying the body is not the same as identifying the killer. The characters nonetheless remain confident that divine justice will reveal the murderer: Williams, Merry’s complicitous

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servant, fears for his master: “The Lord is just, and will revenge [Beech’s] blood” (B4v). The waterman, too, joins the chorus: “Such close illusions God will bring to light,/and overthrowe the workers with his might” (I1v). Having killed Winchester, Merry breathes a sigh of relief and defies the ability of any power, divine or secular, to bring him to justice: “Now there is left no meanes to bring it out” (G3v). But in domestic tragedy murder will out: “divine justice employs the agency of Providence to keep a man from enjoying his ill-gotten gains in his earthly life” (Adams 111). Murder and its accompanying irreverence do not go unpunished. Williams, from whom Merry had exacted a promise of silence, cannot keep his word when his friend Cowley asks him, “Knowst thou the actors of this murderous deed,/ And wilt conceal it now the deed is done?” Williams, who has to be one of the worst co-conspirators in human history, replies, “What? Shall I then betray my maisters life?” (H3v-H4). In this none-too-subtle dramaturgy, a minor and unaesthetic miracle is wrought: Williams realizes his revelation only after the equally slow-witted Cowley belatedly points it out to him. The drama virtually collapses into a morality play, with Merry giving a scaffold speech in which he blames his murders on “the inciting of that foe of man,/ That greedie gulfe, that great Laviathan,/did halle me on to these callamities . . .” (K2). Satan is the Leviathan, but Merry hopes for another miracle to counteract his sins in the hereafter: “the blood of Jesus Christ hath power,/to make my purple sinne as white as Snowe” (K1v-K2). Two Lamentable Tragedies evokes monstrous evils only to have the other half of the dialectic, the miraculous, expose and triumph over them to “teach all other by this spectacle” (K2v). The play insists on the power of providence to win the day. What is striking, however, is the relative anomaly in this play’s invocation of miraculous intervention. The other domestic tragedies, while allowing for divine intervention, move in the direction of the uncanny. Let us take as an initial example Dekker, Ford, and Rowley’s late The Witch of Edmonton(1621), which demythologizes the miraculous and monstrous but still maintains the indelible imprint of the uncanny. The play is based in part on John Goodcole’s pamphlet, The wonderful discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, published earlier that year. Goodcole’s polemical tract fueled hysteria by justifying Sawyer’s

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execution as a witch, which took place on 19 April 1621. The play, by way of contrast, redeems her, and adopts a tactic similar to that of another witchcraft treatise—Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1584). Banned by James I, whose own Demonology (1597) attacked its claims, Scot’s work argues that alleged instances of witchcraft are either nonexistent or explicable by rational means: witches “are women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; poore, sullen, superstitious . . .” (C4). Such is an apt depiction of the play’s Elizabeth Sawyer, who asks for a “few rotten sticks to warm” her; Old Banks, the landowner, will not allow it, and beats her instead (2.1.20, 26 SD). Abused and mistreated, Sawyer invokes the devil, and his “familiar” appears in the form of a dog. Dolan observes that “in representations of domestic crime, the threat usually lies in the familiar rather than the strange” (4). Being murdered by one’s spouse is the typical threat in domestic tragedy—Frank Thorney murders his first wife, Susan, in the main plot—but the dog represents another incarnation of evil in a domestic pet (220). “In the grotesque”, as Bakhtin remarks, “all that was for us familiar and friendly suddenly becomes hostile. It is our own world that undergoes this change” (1984: 48).3A talking dog as the Devil or his factor is an image of grotesquerie, and purports to represent the monstrous in the quotidian. The spectacle of a talking dog is grotesque, yet since it probably has to be played by a person in costume, the spectacle is in danger of converting into comic relief. The difficulty of representing the dog persuasively on stage as the Devil points to the lack of credibility the play as a whole accords the monstrous. If the dog is not a credible devil, neither is Elizabeth Sawyer a credible witch. She is simply a scapegoat. If anything goes wrong in the village of Edmonton, they immediately blame her: “Our cattle fall, our wives fall, our daughters fall and maidservants fall; and we ourselves shall not be able to stand if this beast be suffered to graze amongst us” (4.1.12– 14). Sawyer denies the charges against her (4.1.74), and transgresses the gendered boundaries of witchcraft lore by returning tit for tat: “Men in gay clothes, whose backs are laden with titles and honours, are within far more crooked than I am, and if I be a witch, more witch-like” (4.1.87–89).To equate impoverished spinsterhood with witchcraft is both superstitious and misogynistic. As Comensoli notes,

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the playwrights “discredit supernatural causations by treating witchcraft as a complex social construction” (1999: 121). Sawyer also serves as the link between the subplot and the main plot, the domestic tragedy proper. Thorney tells us that Sawyer in her capacity as palmist had apparently predicted Frank’s bigamy: “’Twas told me by a woman,/Known and approved in palmistry,/I should have two wives” (2.2.117–19). Tom, the dog, is always around when monstrosities take place, including when Frank kills Susan, whereas Sawyer is absent from the scene. Nonetheless Old Carter. The witch, that instrument of mischief. Did not she witch the devil into my son-in-law when he killed my poor daughter? Do you hear, Mother Sawyer? . . . Did not you bewitch Frank to kill his wife? He could never have done’t without the devil. Elizabeth Sawyer. Who doubts it? But is every devil mine? (5.3.21– 23, 26–28) Certainly not, as devilry litters the stage: Thorney’s master, Sir Arthur Clarington, believes Frank has a “devil” in his blood (1.1.78–79); Old Thorney calls Frank a “devil” and his plan to commit bigamy “monstrous” (1.2.156–60); “beggary and want” are two social “devils” preying upon the gentleman with no inheritance (1.1.18–19); and some amorous “devil” bewitches Cuddy Banks to fall in love with Kate Carter (2.1.219–21). It is fair to say that with such metaphorical devils everywhere, real ones are nowhere. Instead, we are left with personal and social monstrosities. Frank does not shift blame to Satan, or to Sawyer, or to the dog; he accepts responsibility for his self-professed “monstrous” faults (5.3.89– 90). Whereas providence intruded into Two Lamentable Tragedies, human evil here holds sway; divine intervention is notably absent. Sawyer’s own unmerited death proceeds unimpeded and “none of the villagers is punished through any real or symbolic intervention of Divine Providence, as would be expected in homiletic tragedy” (Comensoli 1989: 55). The discovery of Thorney’s crime also offers a telling contrast to Williams’s providentially tinged revelation of Merry’s name in Two Lamentable Tragedies. In The Witch of Edmonton,

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Frank simply forgets to wash the bloody knife in his pocket and is caught in unmiraculous fashion as Kate searches his clothes.The Witch of Edmonton does not go so far as to deny the presence or reality of the devil, but it does suggest that whatever demonic powers there may be, they work through willing human agents. Yet for all its debunking of the miraculous and monstrous, we are left with Tom, the dog who, because he speaks, leaves us in the realm of the uncanny. The Witch of Edmonton wants to locate human evil not in cosmic forces but in social constructions and personal, willful corruption; the talking dog is an anomaly that is not so reducible. Sawyer does sell her soul to the devil in the guise of Tom. We are almost in the realm of Two Lamentable Tragedies, but with the play’s unrelenting emphasis on the human face of evil, the dog is not so infernal as human: “These dogs”, Sawyer cries out against her antagonists, “will mad me . . . pray torment me not” (5.3.41, 44). I would suggest that the talking dog leaves us with a residuum of the uncanny, a medial, and perhaps theatrically mediating, position between the simplicity of divine intervention and the equally simplistic dismissal of the supernatural. The domestic tragedies (including Othello) do feature the miraculous and monstrous, but as conventions they are less prominent than the more ambiguous uncanny, which becomes a distinctive feature of the subgenre. For his part, Adams may mistranslate bizarre phenomena in the plays into overly simple categories such as direct divine intervention, but he was correct that there is something supernatural, something quite weird and mysterious, present. What he noticed is the uncanny.

II What is remarkable about the presence of the uncanny in domestic tragedy is that it is typically not the result of authorial embellishment or fabrication; the facticity and historicity of these bizarre events are attested to in records that serve as the basis for their dramatic representation. Recall from the Introduction Anthony Munday’s account of three “strange things” that were seen on the nights immediately after the murder of Page of Plymouth: “an ugly thing formed like a bear,

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whose eyes were as it had been fire, bearing about him a linen cloth”; a raven hanged itself from the mainmast of a sunken ship; and this “ship was all this while aground, lying with her stern to the shore, and suddenly the said ship turned herself round and brought her stem where erst her stern did lie which did alight upon the head of a ship’s mast, sunk at the end of the town . . .” (64). How does one explain these occurrences? As providential intervention? If so, to what end? To some sort of monstrous—devilish—mischief? To what purpose? Such phenomena resist rational explanation, nor do they fit into some sort of metaphysical system; they do, however, seem to “partak[e] of a supernatural character” while remaining irreducibly mysterious and weird, which is of course the definition of the uncanny. Arden of Faversham offers a good example, as it gestures toward the uncanny in one instance, and seems to embrace it fully in another. Let us begin with its gesture in the direction of the uncanny. When the conspirators were unable to kill Arden in Paul’s churchyard because of the presence of witnesses, Greene urges them to find “some other place/Whose earth may swallow up this Arden’s blood” (3.117–18). Dick Read in turn curses Arden for having denied his wife and him a plot of ground on which to live: God, I beseech thee, show some miracle On thee or thine in plaguing thee for this. That plot of ground which thou detains from me— I speak it in an agony of spirit— Be ruinous and fatal unto thee. Either there be butchered by thy dearest friends, Or else be brought for men to wonder at. . . . (13.30–36) In order to remove his corpse from the scene of the crime, the conspirators carry Arden outside in the midst of a snowstorm. Stow informs us that the murderers believe the rapidly falling snow will literally cover their tracks: “In the meane tyme there fell a great snowe in so much that they commynge in agayne into the house thowght that the snow woulde have coveryd theyr fotynge (but sodeynly by the good

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provydence of God, who would not suffar so detestable a murther longe hydden) it stint snowynge they not consyderynge the same, but thinkynge all had been sure” (Hyde 121). Adams likewise argues that providence reveals the murderers to the authorities (106), and Alice’s assurance that the snow will conceal the location of the crime is met with Susan’s matter-of-fact, “But it [i.e. the snow] had done before we came back again” (14.357). The play reports this as a meteorological fact; Holinshed and Stow, on the other hand, regard it as divine intervention. Murder does out in the play, but it is by no means clear that the playwrights adopt the religious reading of their sources: the play is grounded in existential reality rather than in metaphysical speculation. This is not to deny a role to providence in the snow’s having stopped falling on 15 February 1551; it is merely to suggest that the play leaves indeterminate the significance of its having stopped. Perhaps the moment partakes of the supernatural, but only perhaps. Yet there is a distinctly uncanny occurrence later in the play. In the epilogue, Franklin tells us the legend of Arden’s bodily imprint in the field where he was taken: Arden lay murdered in that plot of ground Which he by force and violence held from Reede, And in the grass his body’s print was seen Two years and more after the deed was done. (10–13) As Read had prophesied, people visit the site. Holinshed gives us his account: This one thing seemed very strange and notable touching master Arden, that in the place where he was laid, being dead, all the proportion of his body might be seen two years after and more so plain as could be, for the grass did not grow where his body had touched, but between his legs, between his arms, and about the hollowness of his neck, and round about his body; and where his legs, arms, head, or any other part of his body had touched, no grass growed at all of all that time, so that many strangers came in

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that meantime, beside the townsmen, to see the print of his body there on the ground in that field. . . . (1066) Holinshed tells us that Arden lay in the field he had “most cruelly taken” from Cooke’s widow. As “many hundreds of people came” to that field, “wondering about him”, Holinshed adds a final marginal gloss: “God heareth the tears of the oppressed and taketh vengeance: note an example in Arden” (1066). Holinshed suggests God intervenes first to reveal Arden’s murderers, and then a second time to reveal Arden’s cruelty toward his own neighbors. This is to suggest, rather grandly, that God directly intervenes twice in the Arden story, and on opposite sides—first on behalf of Arden, then on behalf of those whom he allegedly mistreated. In an earlier gloss, Holinshed calls the imprint of Arden’s body simply “A wonder”, a noun whose indeterminacy resonates with the uncanny: supernatural, yes, but weird, mysterious. Let us next take a look at Walter Calverley’s murder of two of his children and his subsequent fall from his horse just before he can kill a third son. As with Arden, Middleton’s A Yorkshire Tragedy resists easy resolution of its own spectacular events as well as the transformation of the uncanny into something else. Consider Calverley’s tragic (and literal) downfall. Having just killed two of his children, and riding to kill the third, Calverley is thrown even though his horse is on perfectly flat ground (1605: 8.4–6). In “Two most unnaturall and bloodie Murthers” (also 1605), the pamphlet Middleton used as his primary source for the play, Walter’s fall is twice ascribed to divine intervention: And his hart had made sharp the knife to cut his own infants throte, (O God how just thou art) his horse that flew with him from his former tragedies, as appointed by God to tie him from any more guilt, and to preserve the infants life, in a plaine ground, where there was scarce a pibble to resist his hast, the horse fell down and M. Calverley under him. . . . (in Cawley & Gaines 1986: 109) By way on contrast, the play’s version of the event refuses to attribute Walter’s fall in any direct way to providence. Middleton depicts the fall as a logically inexplicable phenomenon and, cannily enough,

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leaves it as such. Calverley calls it “chance” (8.4), and while this may be the case, it seems unlikely: the odds of his horse falling at precisely the moment he is about to reach his third child are slim, especially given the flat ground upon which he is riding. But the suggestion of some supernatural, mysterious influence remains tantalizing. Later, a penitent Walter blames Satan for leading him astray from the primrose path, but again we never know with any certainty if Satan was really behind his murders, just as we don’t know whether providence effected a miraculous fall from the horse. The pamphlet labels Calverley’s murder of his children as “monstrous” (Cawley & Gaines 109), and similar references keep surfacing in the play. Walter accuses his wife and an unnamed gentleman of committing adultery—the preeminent object of concern in domestic tragedy. The man retorts, “No, monster, I will prove/My thoughts did only tend to virtuous love” (2.156–67). When Walter later attempts to kill his wife, another man, this time a servant, rushes to stop him: Husband. Servant. Husband. Servant.

Tug at thy master? Tug at a monster. Have I no power? Shall my slave fetter me? Nay, then the devil wrestles; I am thrown. (5.38–40)

At Calverley’s inquest, another gentleman asks, “What made you show such monstrous cruelty?” (9.14). Not content simply to present us with stage spectacle, Middleton soon examines the nature of Walter’s behavior. The play offers, in part, a socioeconomic explanation for Walter’s infanticides—he despairs at the impending impoverishment his dicing will bring upon the family. Yet the play also locates his monstrousness in some subhuman, perhaps even demonic, power. Walter’s gambling woes lead him to curse his wife, who declares him to be “so much unlike/Himself at first, as if some vexed spirit/ Had got his form upon him” (2.37–39). This first hint of his demonic possession is reiterated on numerous occasions,4 and culminates in his scaffold speech where the devil, now that his work is done, leaves him: “now glides the devil from me,/Departs at every joint, heaves up my nails” (10.18–19). If this is the devil, “he is not the old personal Devil of the miracle and moral plays”, as Arthur Cawley observes, but

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“the Devil brought up to date in the guise of demonic possession” (1966: 12). Is this, then, simply a bona fide case of the monstrous in the form of demonic possession? The play refuses a definite answer. Calverley’s obsession with dicing had rendered him willing, Faustuslike, to “take up money upon his soul,/[and] Pawn his salvation” (4.88–89). He may have been influenced by the devil to an extent, but he remains morally responsible for his actions, and he accepts the possibility of damnation for his mortal sins: “Farewell ye bloody ashes of my boys;/My punishments are their eternal joys” (10.57–58). One may wish to believe that Walter was demonically possessed, but the play resists easy closure. The same is true of Othello, a play that resonates with A Yorkshire Tragedy and Two Lamentable Tragedies. Iago is a Vice figure from the medieval moralities who is also associated with the devil, even if Othello fails to find the corresponding cloven hooves when he looks at his feet. Having declared that particular legend a mere fable, Othello turns to another bit of old lore: “If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee”, and then proceeds to stab him. As if to confirm the antecedent in Othello’s conditional proposition, Iago responds, “I bleed, sir, but not killed” (5.2.295–96). As with the writers of other domestic tragedies, Shakespeare is not writing a morality play—Iago is not an otherworldly fiend—but vestiges of the tradition remain intact. Iago is after all one of the few principal characters who lives beyond the temporal boundaries of the play, and he seems to revel in the demonic attribution. He does appear to be virtually invincible, a “hellish villain” (ll. 379–80), and he associates himself with the monstrous: “Hell and night/Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light” (1.3.404–05). Likewise, after the brawl in Act 2, Othello declares, “’Tis monstrous. Iago, who began’t?” (2.3.211). The syntactic juxtaposition of “monstrous” and “Iago” subtly furthers the association. Yet if he is not a devil, is this just human evil? Perhaps, though I would suggest that the play instead configures Iago as belonging to the uncanny: seeming to partake of the supernatural, but mysterious. We intuit his hold over the Moor, but we do not quite understand its power: his promise to Othello, “I am your own forever” (3.3.495), is weird, “uncomfortably strange” . How does one, after all, explain his villainy? No one from the time of Coleridge has yet given a satisfactory

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answer. The uncanny has some affinity with the negative capability for which Keats praised Shakespeare: it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. . . . (1817: 66) Shakespeare evokes the monstrosity of Iago’s actions without fully explaining them, leaving us wondering at the enigma he presents. Middleton, too, leaves us with a sense of awe at the enormity of Walter Calverley’s murders, his most “unnatural traged[y]” (10.23), even as he refrains from channeling its uncanny events into readily explicable phenomena. The historical Walter Calverley likewise remained a singularly enigmatic figure, even in death: Put formally on trial he bravely refused to plead—which meant that his estate, instead of being confiscated, would remain in the family—and consequently brought upon himself the horrific punishment of la peine forte et dure, pressing to death, in which stones or weights were piled upon him until the breath was literally crushed out of his body. (Wells 2008: 175) The play, too, ends with the silence of his impending death, and we are left, as with Arden’s body and Iago’s villainy, wondering at what we have just seen. T. G. Bishop (1996) calls this the theatre of wonder; I call its particular manifestation in domestic tragedy theater of the uncanny.

III With the preceding examples in mind, let us now connect two occurrences from A Warning for Fair Women with Desdemona’s strange response on her deathbed to Emilia’s, “Oh, who hath done this deed?”: “Nobody; I myself. Farewell” (5.2.127–28). In the space of

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one line she blames herself and exonerates her husband for his murder of her. What is even more odd, uncanny really, about her speech is that it is given presumably after she has died—Othello takes pains, as we will see, to make sure of her death prior to the speech. The First Folio (F1) version of the play (1623) makes the moment of her death even more clear than does the first quarto (Q1: 1622), and thus it appears that Shakespeare made no authorial mistake, that he intended to give Desdemona postmortem speech. It is thus a bizarre moment in the play, one that almost defies explanation—almost, that is, until one situates the moment in the context of the uncanny in the other domestic tragedies, especially A Warning for Fair Women. Between seven and eight o’clock on the morning of 25 March 1573, a captain by the name of George Browne, in love with Anne Sanders, killed her husband, George, and a servant, John Beane, on Shooters Hill in Kent as Beane and Sanders were going on a business trip. The play’s version of the events appeared approximately twenty years after the murders, and it takes as its primary source Arthur Golding’s A Briefe Discourse, which was published in 1573—the same year as the murders—and reissued in 1577 (Cannon 70). In his preface, Golding, a staunch Calvinist minister, expressed concern lest anyone revel in the bloody spectacle he was about to recount: thou shalt not look for a full discoverie of every particular bymatter appendant to the presente case, which might serve to feede the fond humor of such curious appetites. . . . Moreover, when God bringeth such matters upon the stage, unto ye open face of the world, it is not to the intent that men should gaze and wonder at the persons, as byrdes do at an Owle, not that they should delight themselves & others with the fond and peradventure sinister reporting of them. . . . (216, 226) Apparently having no such scruples, the playwright indulges the spectacle of each of the murders in its turn. First, after Browne murders Sanders, the dead man speaks from seemingly beyond the grave:

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San. Jesu receive my soule into thy handes. Bro. What sound was that? It was not he that spake, The breath is vanisht from his nostrils. ............................... Who was it then that thundred in mine eares, The name of Jesu? Doubtlesse twas my conscience. . . . (1389– 91, 94–95) The moment has the uncanny written all over it. Browne offers an explanation, but we as spectators are left wondering how to interpret the incident. No clear answer is offered: Browne attributes it to his conscience, but the text contradicts him by attributing the words to the apparently deceased, or momentarily resurrected, Sanders, who presumably would speak the line in performance. Sanders is not the only character to speak from virtually beyond the grave. Consider Browne’s slaying of John Beane, which clearly resembles, as we saw in the introduction, that of Thomas Winchester in Two Lamentable Tragedies. Beane has “Tenne wounds at least, and deadly ev’ry wound,/And yet he lives . . .” (ll. 1680–81). He is the only witness in the state’s case against Browne, yet the wounds are so extensive that he is unable to do much of anything, including speak. He is, in effect, virtually comatose. To his neighbors, Beane’s lingering life is “past beliefe” (l. 1917)—a miracle, in fact, since he has “so much losse of blood” (l. 1916). Even if one could offer a medical reason for his sustenance, the play insists on the uncanny at the moment Browne is brought before him: his stanched wounds begin to bleed afresh; he stirs for the first time in two days; and, finally, he opens his eyes to declaim, “Yea, this is he that murdred me and Master Sanders” (ll. 1981–2002). Beane then “sinckes down” and dies, but the state has its case and the playwright his domestic tragedy: murder will out. These uncanny phenomena bring us in contact with Othello, which is perhaps not a generic surprise given the plays’ historical proximity: probably written sometime in the early to mid-1590s, the anonymous A Warning was once part of the Shakespeare apocrypha (Berek 179, 186n1).5 In 1597–98, the Chamberlain’s men acquired A Warning,

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which they apparently retired in 1599 after presumably having performed it on one or more occasions (Knutson 60, 45). Shakespeare seems to have invoked A Warning as early as Hamlet in 1600. At one point the anonymous playwright of A Warning relates a story of a Norfolk woman That had made away her husband, And sitting to behold a tragedy At Linne a towne in Norffolke, Acted by Players traveling that way, Wherein a woman that hath murthered hers Was ever haunted with her husbands ghost: ................................... She was so moved with the sight thereof, As she cryed out, the Play was made by her, And openly confesst her husbands murder. (ll. 2037–48) The passage reverberates in Hamlet’s Hum, I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions. . . . (2.2.589–93) As Thompson and Taylor remark in the Arden 3 Hamlet (1996: 60), it is possible that Shakespeare picked the story up elsewhere, or even invented it for his own use, independent of A Warning. Both possibilities, however, are unlikely given his knowledge of the play.6 Bullough believed that A Warning “was probably Shakespeare’s source” (1973: 38). I would suggest an even stronger possibility of Shakespeare’s indebtedness to A Warning in John Beane’s recovery from his deathlike torpor in order to identify his killer. Recall that Roderigo is stabbed by Iago after his own failed attempt to kill Cassio. After Iago screams in mock outrage, “Oh, murderous slave! Oh, villain!”, Roderigo’s last line in the play, apparently spoken even as he is being stabbed, suggests his almost immediate death: “Oh, damned Iago! Oh, inhuman

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dog!” (5.1.61–64). What is often overlooked is that this is not Roderigo’s last speech act in the play. At the end of the play, Cassio relates his discovery of Iago’s crimes: There is besides, in Roderigo’s letter How he upbraids Iago, that he made him Brave me upon the watch, whereon it came That I was cast; and even but now he spake, After long seeming dead, Iago hurt him, Iago set him on. (5.2.334–39, italics mine) After long seeming dead: Roderigo does not linger in life as long as Beane had, but the similarity between each man’s uncanny recovery in order to implicate his murderer is at the very least suggestive of a connection. What strengthens the association is Shakespeare’s second, and almost certain, use of material from A Warning in his depiction of Desdemona’s death. In Cinthio’s source tale, Disdemona’s death is straightforward. Having been struck from behind by the Iago character and feeling herself near to death (for the Ensign had given her another [second] blow), called on Divine Justice to witness to her fidelity, since earthly justice failed; and as she called on God to help her, a third blow struck her, and she lay still, slain by the impious Ensign. (Bullough 251) Shakespeare includes this material, having Desdemona declare “Oh, falsely, falsely murdered!” and “A guiltless death I die” (5.2.120, 126), yet she speaks these lines at an uncanny moment. I have discussed elsewhere variants in her death scene between Q1 and F1 (2009: 87–94). What the differences boil down to is the precise moment at which Desdemona—like Sanders before her— dies. Desdemona’s “O Lord, Lord, Lord!” in Q1 becomes Emilia’s “My lord, my lord! What, ho! My lord, my lord!” in F1 (5.2.88). In Q1 she still seems alive at this point, albeit in her death throes, as in the case of Cinthio’s Disdemona. In F1 she is no longer speaking—Othello in fact misidentifies Desdemona as having spoken Emilia’s line:

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What noise is this? Not dead? Not yet quite dead? I that am cruel am yet merciful; I would not have thee linger in thy pain. So, so. (5.2.89–92) Desdemona is probably already dead at this point in F1, yet it is possible that what he “detects is some sentient movement or sound from his wife” (Benson 2009: 89). His “so, so” is an attempt on his part, then, in both Q1 and F1, to be “merciful” and finish the job so that she does not have to, as he says, “linger in thy pain” . An actor performing this scene then has to make it more excruciating by taking sufficient time to smother her further in order to make sure that she is dead. Cinthio’s slaying is quick and sure, the moment she dies is clear; Shakespeare’s version is both more protracted and painstakingly thorough, yet the moment of her death is more ambiguous. Emilia’s importunate knocking continues, and Othello calls out, “Who’s there?” (5.2.92). Notice his continuing delay before opening the door to Emilia; he wants to make absolutely sure of Desdemona’s death: Yes, ’tis Emilia.—By and by.—She’s dead. ’Tis like she comes to speak of Cassio’s death.— The noise was here. Ha! No more moving? Still as the grave. Shall she come in? Were’t good?— I think she stirs again. No. What’s best to do? (94–98) He is presumably all this time continuing to smother her, and the speech continues another six lines before Emilia again asks to be admitted to the bedchamber. Othello takes ample pains to make sure that Desdemona is dead, and relents only once he has satisfied himself that the job is done. One cannot absolutely rule it out, of course, that she is still somehow lingering in life, as Beane had done, but it appears unlikely. If, as is more likely, Desdemona is dead, then she has either been momentarily resurrected7 or is speaking from beyond the grave in the same uncanny fashion as Sanders had. I am not the first merely to observe the similarity: both Bullough (180n2) and Ernst Honigmann, the editor of the Arden 3 Othello (1996: 314n115), note this unmistakable echo of Sanders’ death, yet neither of them

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alludes to the important generic connection between A Warning for Fair Women and Shakespeare’s play. Q1 includes a stage direction, “she dies”, which, if authorial, indicates Desdemona dies only after she exonerates her husband and says her valedictory “Oh, farewell!” F1 has no such stage direction, thus allowing for the possibility that she died when Othello took such pains (in both F1 and Q1) to kill her, and now, like Sanders, speaks posthumously. Even if one accepts Q1’s reading of Desdemona as somehow not having been killed before her final words (as in Cinthio’s straightforward account), she still closely resembles Roderigo’s and Beane’s inexplicable lingering in life to reveal their respective murderers. Either way one wants to interpret it, Desdemona’s death has domestic tragedy, and in particular A Warning for Fair Women, within its sights. A director and cast can perform it either way. Unfortunately, her speech exonerating Othello is frequently cut from performance because it is so uncannily bizarre—she is seemingly dead, after all. Yet it would scarcely have seemed unusual to audiences familiar with domestic tragedies and the uncanny phenomena they contain. Shakespeare thus offers us two instances of the uncanny in Roderigo’s and Desdemona’s deaths, and also gives us two variants on the murder-will-out convention of the genre: Roderigo, long seeming dead, implicates the murderous Iago, while Desdemona exonerates rather than implicates her husband. True to form as yet another patient Griselda of domestic tragedy, she accepts the blame for her murder and deflects it away from Othello. If she could, Desdemona would frustrate the genre’s inevitable revelation of the murderer, but Othello will have none of it: “She’s like a liar gone to burning hell!/’Twas I that killed her” (5.2.133–34). Shakespeare toys with the usual trajectory of the subgenre, but in the end Othello follows the same path—only, however, after the twin flourishes of Roderigo’s revelation of Iago’s crime and Desdemona’s attempt to cover Othello’s up. Adams’s comment that in domestic tragedy “divine justice employs the agency of Providence” to reveal the murderer hardly seems adequate for the complex configuration that one finds in Othello, not to mention Arden and other domestic tragedies as well (111). Desdemona’s valedictory words, “Commend me to my kind lord”, are presumably spoken in all sincerity—she is, before and after her death, another

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willing “woman killed with kindness” . Despite her sincerity, the irony in referring to Othello’s kindness is not lost on the audience. As another spousal murder, Desdemona’s death returns us to domestic tragedy proper, and Shakespeare heightens the effect by having it take place—as in Page of Plymouth—on their bed. Shakespeare could have followed his source in Cinthio’s tale and simply have had Desdemona say her final words and then die. Yet he amplifies the scene, making Othello’s killing of her a protracted affair, in the end giving us the impression that she speaks, uncannily, from beyond the grave. He could also simply have had her, as in Cinthio’s account, declare her innocence. But Shakespeare has her first declare her innocence and then exonerate Othello as she places the blame squarely back on herself: “Nobody; I myself” . Such a bizarre, and supererogatory, comment makes sense (as do so many of the details in the play) in light of Shakespeare’s conscious engagement with domestic tragedy. Arden’s bodily imprint on his land speaks for itself in his death; John Beane lingers in an apparently comatose state for days, only then to recover uncannily in the presence of the murderer, whom he implicates; Sanders appears to speak from beyond the grave. The uncanny abounds in the subgenre, and thus it is hardly a surprise that Shakespeare, who knew many of the domestic tragedies, gives us postmortem murder-will-out speeches in both Roderigo’s and Desdemona’s death scenes. At a certain point, one has to conclude that such numerous and striking correspondences between the domestic tragedies and Othello are no accident but rather an attempt on Shakespeare’s part to write his own domestic tragedy.

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In her definitive critical biography of Milton, Barbara Lewalski observes of Paradise Lost that Milton’s epic defines itself against the traditional epic subject—wars and empire—and the traditional epic hero as the epitome of courage and battle prowess. His protagonists are a domestic pair; the scene of their action is a pastoral garden; and their primary challenge is, “under long obedience tried”, to make themselves, their marital relationship, and their garden—the nucleus of the human world—ever more perfect. Into this radically new kind of epic, Milton incorporates many particular genres . . . (2002: 460–61). Anticipating Milton by over a half century, Shakespeare rewrites the traditional tragic hero in Othello. His protagonist couple resemble Milton’s “domestic pair”; the scene of their action is not the “tented field” “of broils and battles” (1.3.87, 89), but the bed where Desdemona is murdered. Their bed, which like Milton’s pastoral garden is another nucleus of the human world, serves also and ironically as the site of the destruction of their marriage. Othello’s fall is not from the heights of social preeminence but from within where his “soul hath her content so absolute” in Desdemona’s love (2.1.191). Theirs could hardly have been a more perfect union gone awry. Milton, taking his cue from what he believes to be divine fiat, allows Adam and Eve to be exiled “hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow” (12.648), a mutual solace that Shakespeare ruthlessly denies his own archetypal pair. And Shakespeare’s play is no less tragic, Milton’s poem no less epic, for being domestic.

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One question that remains is why Shakespeare chose to write a domestic tragedy. No doubt he was captivated, as many of his playwriting peers seem to have been, by many of the features and conventions that the domestic tragedies brought to bear on the English stage, not least of which was the presence of the uncanny. But more crucially, as Holbrook observes of these plays, “it is tempting to see their interest in areas of social life traditionally ignored by tragedy as a modification, perhaps a rejection, of an aristocratic mode” (87). While I do not view the domestic tragedies as rejecting the use of aristocratic characters, they do represent a downward modification of tragic decorum in their use of nonaristocratic new men such as Arden, Page, and of course Othello. Thomas Arden’s presence on the tragic stage must have created a stir in light of the longstanding use of only aristocratic or mythic figures, yet the evidence of the thirty other domestic tragedies suggests that the move was not only accepted, but also enjoyed a considerable vogue among playwrights and audiences alike. Shakespeare could have chosen to represent a simple yeoman farmer as in The Witch of Edmonton or some other nonaristocratic character such as Thomas Arden. Yet Shakespeare in Othello seems not to be visiting domestic tragedy for the first time, but revisiting the genre. Given his ostensible authorship of the middle sections— roughly scenes iii–ix—of Arden of Faversham (Kinney 2009: 99), the question then becomes why he might want to revisit the subgenre approximately a decade later. A possible answer lies in Peter Ackroyd’s sense of Shakespeare’s modus operandi: “Shakespeare seems primarily to have borrowed from himself. He was a self-plagiarist who reused phrases, scenes and situations [. . . .] In his late plays he can sometimes revert to an earlier style, as if all stages of his growth were still within him [. . . .] That was how his imagination worked. It took on archetypal forms. In the process of imitating himself, however, he also revises himself; he knew by instinct what was worthy to be preserved, so that there is a continuing process of self-distillation.” (2006: 238) Even if Shakespeare did not collaborate on Arden, a case that seems increasingly unlikely, Othello nonetheless appears to be a distillation

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or refinement of Arden as well as the other domestic tragedies he knew so well. And what Othello allows Shakespeare to do is to probe further than the other domestic tragedies could into the representation of the arriviste as tragic subject. Othello’s skin color, race, and even his religious faith work in concert to complicate and render his social standing problematic. If Thomas Arden’s claim to the social stature requisite for tragic representation is dubious, what are we to make of Othello’s? The play raises numerous questions in relation to the tragic subject: how do we account for Othello’s ambivalent sense of his social inferiority to Desdemona on the one hand, and his sense of wounded dignity on the other? He appears both worthy and unworthy of her because of his liminal status, and his own sense of his ambivalence—as “one not easily jealous but, being wrought” (5.2.355)—is represented to us continually in the play. At times, Othello feels as though Desdemona has committed a grave sin against his dignity; at others, he thinks he had it coming for marrying up and, misogynistically, for marrying at all (3.3.258). What the discussion of the preceding chapters leads to, in my view, is that Shakespeare in Othello is examining the very ontology of the tragic hero. What is it about Othello or any protagonist that allows for his or her representation on the tragic stage? If domestic tragedy suggested for the first time that nonaristocrats were capable of tragic representation, Othello explores the same terrain, ultimately expanding the focus beyond the limit of external social status. The word “noble”, which the play uses repeatedly to describe Othello, becomes as indeterminate as “honest” is for Iago. To put the matter wryly, Othello is as noble as Iago is honest. We are left wondering what nobility means in relation to his tragic casting and representation. Hamlet’s famous opening line—“Who’s there?”—reverberates with equal force in Othello. Is it nobility of birth or nobility of character that qualifies Othello for tragic stature, or is he, in Emilia’s identification, an ignorant dolt unworthy of tragic casting (5.2.170–71)? What happens when we add his skin color and ethnicity? Do these qualities add to his status as a tragic figure; do they diminish it as they do in the eyes of Thomas Rymer? What about his ambiguous religious status? Is the play tragic because the Christian Othello misread his wife as

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having “turned Turk”, or is it tragic because the Christian Desdemona is killed by her infidel husband? Shakespeare is able to raise questions about the ontology of the tragic hero by way of domestic tragedy’s use of nonaristocratic tragic subjects. Shakespeare drives a wedge through the opening provided. Germaine Greer credits him with having created a theatre of dialectical conflict, in which idea is pitted against idea and from their friction a deeper understanding of the issues emerges. The resolution which is reached is not the negation of the conflict, but the stasis produced by art.(2002: 23) The history of criticism with regard to the character of Othello is one of contrarieties. Shakespeare builds these clashing readings of Othello into his character by means of rendering him such an unconventional subject whose representation is, in the end, a direct challenge to tragic decorum. It would be easy to say that Shakespeare provides no answer as to tragic ontology, but I think otherwise: the fact that he wrote Othello indicates that tragic stature goes well beyond social class to include categories such as race, ethnicity, and religion. Shakespeare’s list in Othello is not exhaustive, but it is most certainly explorative. With his usual profundity, too, Shakespeare returns us to what Aristotle noted were the origins of tragedy: Though the poets began by accepting any tragic story that came to hand, in these days the finest tragedies are always on the story of some few houses, on that of Alcmeon, Oedipus, Orestes . . . or any others that may have been involved, as either agents or sufferers, in some deed of horror. (1450b1) The deeds of horror in these plays render the domestic tragedies, and especially Othello, every bit as stageworthy as their aristocratic peers in the genre. Despite his sense of outrage at Shakespeare’s play, even Rymer had to grudgingly acknowledge, “From all the Tragedies acted on our English Stage, Othello is said to bear the Bell away” (138). Aristotle has a distant memory of poets “accepting any tragic story

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that came to hand”, and this is precisely what Stow, Holinshed, and the Arden playwrights—Shakespeare presumably among them—also did when Thomas Arden’s story came to their attention for its possible use in chronicle history and, later, on stage. Since Aristotle thought the heart of tragedy lay in the plot, the domestic tragedies with their spousal murders lend themselves to tragic staging quite nicely, but Othello also internalizes the tragedy away from the externals of birth and into much more interesting terrain. Once Arden, Page, Cox of Collumpton, and others began to appear on stage, we have the beginnings of a democratization of tragic decorum that was only fully realized in the twentieth century with works such as Death of a Salesman. Yet these are humble beginnings, and we must not overestimate the minor modification in tragic decorum that the other domestic tragedies represent: they concern themselves with social status alone. It is only when Shakespeare purposefully alters his sources in order to render Othello’s stature tenuous in myriad ways that we have a work fully exploring the limits of tragic subject position. What does it mean to be a tragic subject? That one is of noble birth and has suffered greatly? Aristotle suggests that both elements are typical of what he saw, but he also points to an even more ancient past where great loss and suffering—irrespective of pedigree—constituted a sufficient condition for tragic representation. In this sense, Othello is, like all the domestic tragedies, a perfect candidate for the tragic stage. Taking its cue from the domestic tragedies, Shakespeare’s play anticipates and lays a foundation for the tragic representation of ordinary people, which characterizes modern drama in particular, and art in general. Othello is subtly but radically democratic. The Arden playwrights felt the need to justify Arden’s tragic status by emphasizing his social stature, a need that Shakespeare at least pays deference to in having Othello claim royal birth (1.2.21–24). If Othello can or should be believed about his own exotic past, then the play follows the model and decorum of classical tragedy. But his royalty appears to be a mirage or mere phantom, a fiction of his own creation. Even if it were true, his social standing is continually undercut and destabilized until we are left with a man who, in thinking he has lost his wife’s love, believes he has lost the only thing worth

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having. What Shakespeare suggests, in his subtle but typically precocious way, is that it is not “complement extern”—the outward trappings of social stature or pedigree—that matter, but the inner, subjective experience that renders Othello’s story, and Othello itself, a tragedy. His end is tragic not because he falls from heights of social greatness, but because he mistakenly believed that his beloved wife, the woman closest to him, had betrayed him. This is at the heart of domestic tragedies and the spousal murders they depict. Questions of generic classification or belonging require, as I have noted, careful judgment to see whether a work bears enough “family resemblances” to warrant its inclusion in a particular genre. Othello leaves little doubt of its resemblance to the other domestic tragedies through its continual use and adaptation of the conventions characteristic of the form: a “love triangle” and subsequent spousal murder, the revelation of which—murder-will-out—is often attended by the miraculous, monstrous, and especially by the uncanny; the use of interior spaces—home, kitchen, bedroom—as well as domestic items—pressing iron, handkerchief, bed linens, poison; the adulterous wife quick to submit to the importunate suitor; the patient Griselda who suffers at the hands of her angry husband; confession and repentance; scaffold speeches; and the continual blurring in domestic tragedy of the distinctions between public and private. As we have seen, Shakespeare complicates the form in various ways, combining, for instance, the patient Griselda type in his depiction of Desdemona with the contrasting woman of easy virtue who appears in several domestic tragedies, but only in Othello’s fevered imagination here. Shakespeare gives us Desdemona as Griselda and Desdemona as whore. Such evocation of the subgenre’s conventions and his brilliant innovations on them testify to his mastery of the form. Hamlet belongs to the subgenre of revenge tragedy, nearly subverting the form through Hamlet’s tortuous deliberations and inaction, yet his revenge does come. Othello similarly employs and adapts the conventions of domestic tragedy, investigating all the while the tensions between tragedy and domesticity, between tragic seriousness—including the protagonist’s requisite high stature—and the comedic elements we usually associate with the domestic. Moreover, Shakespeare could have employed these conventions without recourse to

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specific plays and incidents, but as we saw in Chapter 4 he draws freely and directly upon A Warning for Fair Women in Desdemona’s valedictory speech and upon A Woman Killed with Kindness in numerous ways. That Shakespeare knew many of the domestic tragedies, and appears to have collaborated on Arden, makes his use of the subgenre’s conventions perfectly comprehensible. His use of those conventions is sustained and deliberate enough to reach a point of critical mass in Othello where the play’s affinities with domestic tragedy cannot be reasonably denied. To invoke incidents, lines, actions, props, character types, and other conventions from plays all belonging to a specific genre is to forge an unmistakable and intentional link to them. Othello is, in short, another member of the family. Thomas Arden’s ambivalent status as a gentleman worthy of tragic representation is continually before us in a way that resonates with Othello’s own sense of his tragic self as one who, “Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe . . .” (5.2.357–58). Yet as his own simile attests, Othello’s fall is not from aristocratic, much less royal or mythic heights, and in this he is no different from Arden, George Sanders, John Page, or John Frankford. His fall, like that of his peers in the subgenre, is nonetheless precipitous, and it takes place within the domestic space of the home and family, and psychologically within the mind and feelings of those who are crushed by infidelity and other grave faults of the human heart. The recent scholarly interest in the home and in the “domestic” as the term is variously understood is one reason why the reputation and critical standing of Arden and A Woman Killed have been on the rise. And that interest in the domestic must also be why we recognize Othello as the epitome of the form; that is, as a singularly thoroughgoing exploration into the relations between tragedy and the domestic. Shakespeare became increasingly interested in those relations in plays ranging, for instance, from Romeo and Juliet to Coriolanus, a play that focuses on the increasingly vexed relationship between a mother and her son. Othello is not a radical departure from but a continuation of those concerns. The fons et origo lies in Shakespeare’s early work, including Arden, which adumbrates many of the same issues. In a scene that the young Shakespeare probably wrote, Mosby’s mind misgives as to whether he should kill Arden—“Disturbed thoughts

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drives me from company/And dries my marrow with their watchfulness” (8.1–2)—in part because he cannot be sure that Alice, like Desdemona later, will not betray more men, himself included: But what for that I may not trust you, Alice? You have supplanted Arden for my sake, And will extirpen me to plant another. ’Tis fearful sleeping in a serpent’s bed, And I will cleanly rid my hands of her. (39–43) His murderous indecision runs back and forth from Thomas to Alice; she, too, soon shares his misgivings, telling him, “It is not love that loves to murder love” (58), a line of exquisite irony: Alice will be killing the husband who loves her out of her own perverted love for Mosby. Alice’s line finds a distinct echo in Desdemona’s deathbed conversation with her husband: OTHELLO DESDEMONA OTHELLO DESDEMONA

Think on thy sins. They are loves I bear to you. Ay, and for that thou diest. That death’s unnatural that kills for loving. (5.2.41–44)

Just as Desdemona is soon put to death, Scene 8 in Arden ends with Alice and Mosby’s reconciliation and mutual resolve to murder Thomas Arden in the name of love. Enmity within the home had interested Shakespeare since at least the writing of The Taming of the Shrew, a play that enshrines domestic violence by suggesting Petruchio can tame his wife as a falconer would his bird: starvation, forced sleeplessness, and “hooding” her by making her agree that it is whatever time of day or night he says it is (E. Berry 2001: 95–132). Desdemona proves to be another untamed “haggard” whom Othello can dispense with, though in the end he kills her rather than merely disown her and let her go (Benson 2006: 191–93, 199–207). Spousal murder is nowhere else present in the Shakespearean canon,1 but potential or actual domestic violence is a recurring issue in Shakespeare’s self-distillation. Hamlet’s abusive

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treatment of his mother is one example, though most often Shakespeare locates the violence in couples where jealously threatens to undermine the spousal bond. Consider, for instance, the marriage comedies: Hero’s alleged infidelity to Claudio and Benedick’s earlier, apparently all-too-real infidelity to Beatrice in Much Ado; the undertone of strife in Theseus’s wooing of Hippolyta with his sword (MND 1.1.16); and Rosalind’s putting Orlando on notice that she “will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen . . . more giddy in my desires than a monkey” (AYL 4.1.142–46). She warns Orlando, half playfully, that he can keep a watch on her wayward wit “till you [meet] your wife’s wit going to your neighbor’s bed” (ll. 160–61). Adultery thus envisioned, she whimsically reverts to the truth: “Oh, coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love” (ll. 197–98). Jealousy in marriage points to the depth of the love and, consequently, to one’s vulnerability to be harmed as well as one’s capacity to inflict harm. Shakespeare’s late romances point to a darker strain that is ultimately, if only partially, redeemed: Posthumus’s desire to kill Imogen for her alleged infidelity with Iachimo; and Leontes’ wildly irrational belief of Hermione’s adultery in The Winter’s Tale. With Alice Arden’s “It is not love that loves to murder love” and Desdemona’s, “That death’s unnatural that kills for loving” we are reminded of the fearful paradox these plays depict: that men and women in the most intimate of human relationships sometimes turn murderously against their partner. The reason is not difficult to understand given the nature of sexual jealousy, especially within the exclusivity of the marriage bed. Enjoying the bliss of Desdemona’s company as they reunite in Cyprus, Othello declares, “If it were now to die,/’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear/My soul hath her content so absolute . . .” (2.1.189–91). He could almost endure the loss of everything—except for her love, which is “where”, he tells us, “I have garnered up my heart,/Where either I must live or bear no life . . .” (4.2.59–60). Such loss is, for him, inconsolable. For her part, Desdemona anticipates the unnaturalness of a love that kills, even as she refuses to renounce her love in the face of death: “his unkindness”, she notes, “may defeat my life,/But never taint my love” (ll. 167–68). Shakespeare reminds us in their love of the destructive potential

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adultery has, and this is absolutely consistent with the modus operandi of the domestic tragedies. Spousal murder can happen to mythic figures, as in Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon in reprisal for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia, or to royalty, as in the life of Herod the Great and the killing of his wife. It also happens to provincial householders such as the Ardens or Thorneys. What matters is not the social standing of the victim, but the “kingdom” of the home, great or small, that is thus destroyed. In one sense, these plays are private affairs, far removed from the state matters that are the norm in conventional tragedy. Would it were so simple. Arden emerges from Holinshed’s misgivings concerning the “impertinent” “private matter” of Arden’s life, an echo of which can be heard in Othello’s “private and domestic quarrel” (2.3.209). These plays direct us to the primacy of the home, and a play such as Othello goes so far as to suggest that the integrity of the state can be compromised by the disintegration of the family. One does not need to be a sociologist to see how the family undergirds the larger polity, or how damage to the family can imperil the wellbeing of the state in ways as harmful as external threats. Despite foundering at sea, the Turks’ goal of dismantling the Venetian political and military structure in Cyprus is accomplished from within. And with few exceptions, spousal murder is the signature event in domestic tragedy. Theirs was an age that regarded adultery with deadly seriousness, both by those willing to commit it and by those willing to punish it. Adams located the homiletic as a feature of these plays, amply evident in the preachiness of the scaffold scenes and in the expression of religious contrition. Anne Frankford, for instance, implores her husband’s forgiveness: Out of my zeal to Heaven, whither I am now bound, I was so impudent to wish you here; And once more beg your pardon. O good man, And father to my children, pardon me. Pardon, O pardon me! My fault so heinous is That if you in this world forgive it not, Heaven will not clear it in the world to come. (xvii.82–88)

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The moment, generic to the bone, stands in contradistinction to the spurious rapprochement of the adulterous lovers—Anne and Wendoll here, but Alice and Mosby, and other couples as well. Frankford hopes for divine clemency as well as their eventual, otherworldly, reconciliation: Even as I hope for pardon at that day When the Great Judge of Heaven in scarlet sits, So be thou pardoned. Though thy rash offense Divorc’d our bodies, thy repentant tears Unite our souls. (ll. 105–09) Othello offers a similar, and similarly poignant, exploration of the theme. Just as Anne Frankford had, Othello fears as he addresses the wife he has just murdered that there will be no redemption, much less reconciliation for them: “When we shall meet at compt,/This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,/And fiends will snatch at it” (5.2.282–84). She shall be his judge; her oracular look will be enough to consign his soul to hell. In light of his love for her and the utter despondency he feels at having murdered her, the point comes home with force. The jealousy that is treated with a lighter touch in the comedies, and at least partially overcome in the romances, finds itself unexpurgated in Othello, the green-eyed monstrosity to which Iago unerringly points (3.3.179). That murderous impulse is repeatedly realized on stage in the smothering of Desdemona and John Page, the braining of Thomas Arden, the starvation of Anne Frankford, the stabbing of George Sanders, and so on. Finally, I would like to return to the claim made at the outset of this book that Shakespeare takes domestic tragedy to the nth degree, pushing the form well beyond what it had been before he decided to write Othello. To give one more instance of this, let’s take a look at how Shakespeare underscores spousal murder in the play. He could have simply had Othello kill Desdemona and left it at that—that single spousal murder, as I argued earlier, constitutes prima facie evidence of the play’s engagement with the domestic tragedies. But that seems to have been too easy for Shakespeare—it had already been done numerous times in the domestic tragedies antedating Othello.

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I suspect, too, that he wanted to communicate his awareness of the conventions of domestic tragedy by going further than his predecessors had. In order to rivet our attention on the signature event of the spousal murder, he complicates it just as he had in The Comedy of Errors with the single pair of twins he found in Plautus’s Menaechmi—he doubles the effect. Although I have talked exclusively of Othello’s spousal murder because it overshadows the other killings in the play, we should not overlook Shakespeare’s second spousal murder: Iago’s slaying of Emilia. Shakespeare could have elected to have Othello kill her when she enters the bedchamber and exclaims against him that Desdemona “was too fond of her most filthy bargain” (5.2.164). He ostensibly draws his sword in response to the insult, and she even incites him—“Do thy worst!” (l. 166)—to do violence against her. As if this were not enough, he also believes Emilia knew of and was complicit in the alleged affair (4.2.1–22). Thus, he has good reason to kill her, yet he refrains from doing so. The killing is left—not by Othello (who apparently does not want her death) but by Shakespeare—to her husband. Emilia is Shakespeare’s invention, and she is of especial interest because he not only creates her, but makes her Iago’s wife, a wife who admits that, if the price were right, she would commit adultery: for “who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch?” (4.3.78–79). Just as Othello does with Desdemona, Iago suspects Emilia has cuckolded him (1.3.388–89). But she, too, belies such easy virtue, and even indicts her husband for his crimes and thus foils his treachery. In the midst of the convention of wives of easy virtue, she and Desdemona are none such. The only perfidy is Iago’s, yet in his typical way of turning virtue to pitch, he considers his wife’s public revelation of her private stealing of the handkerchief a violation of their marital vows. What is especially intriguing as she speaks is the homespun domesticity of Iago’s veiled threats: “Go to, charm your tongue”; “Zounds, hold your peace”; and “What, are you mad? I charge you, get you home”’ (ll. 190, 226, 201). He wants the quasi-legal right of speaking in loco uxoris, and wants her to consider what they know between them as a private and domestic matter that is best discussed at home. Emilia’s response is defiance: “Good gentlemen, let me have

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leave to speak./’Tis proper I obey him, but not now./Perchance, Iago, I will ne’er go home” (ll. 202–04). His final exhortation is clearly a veiled threat from a paterfamilias to his subject—“Be wise and get you home” (l. 230)—and serves as a third and final iteration of their domestic space. Emilia’s “I will not” is a momentary suspension of her domestic, deferential role. When Iago stabs her, an amazed Gratiano can only offer a running commentary: “The woman falls! Sure he hath killed his wife” (l. 244). Two lines later, with Iago having fled, Gratiano once again registers his disbelief—not so much at the murder per se as at Iago’s having murdered his own wife: “He’s gone, but his wife’s killed” (l. 246). Shakespeare dilates upon a second, almost throwaway, uxoricide, which allows him subtly to underscore the spousal murders of the subgenre. And with the murders of Emilia and Desdemona at the hands of their respective husbands, Shakespeare’s domestic tragedy draws to its not quite-so-perfunctory close with Othello’s convoluted scaffold speech and self-execution. Othello represents the culmination of the form, drawing upon the numerous conventions of domestic tragedy even as Shakespeare deepens them in his typically complex fashion. But at the root of Othello lie not only Arden of Faversham, Page of Plymouth, A Warning for Fair Women, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and the other plays in their putative representation not of matters of state, but of the more pedestrian—and fundamental—relations between a husband and wife, private matters that loom large in domestic tragedy. It is time to recognize Othello as a domestic tragedy because it communicates this turn inward to the private and intimate sphere of the domestic, not as a substitute for de casibus tragedy, but as its corrival.

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Notes

Introduction 1

On the attribution of the play to Middleton, see Wells 2008: 174–80, as well as the play’s inclusion in Taylor and Lavagnino’s Thomas Middleton: The Complete Works (2007). 2 Yorkshire and Arden also appear in the 1664 folio. Both A Yorkshire and A Warning belonged to the Chamberlain’s Men, and Knutson considers it likely that the company also acquired Arden, though this is less certain (59). 3 Collington further argues that The Merry Wives of Windsor is a “mock domestic tragedy”, an intriguing claim with which I cannot agree. Collington makes no meaningful distinction between domestic tragedies and a comedy such as Merry Wives: many of the features of domestic tragedy are unusual in tragedy, not in comedy (e.g. protagonists drawn from “the middle ranks of society” [194]). 4 Lyne Bret, a native of Plymouth, attempted a second, eighteenth-century, adaptation of the story, but his redaction was never performed and was only published elsewhere in an abbreviated transcript (Whitfeld 67–71; Wright 51). We have no way of knowing whether it was indebted to Jonson’s earlier version. 5 Chanter claims that the names of Stone, Priddis, and Stone are recorded in “the parish registers” (11), but St. Peter’s was the only parish in Barnstaple at the time. When I checked with the Devon Records Office, I learned that none of the names of those involved in the murder was listed as having died or been buried either in or outside the churchyard there. Chanter includes the diary of Philip Wyot, the town clerk of Barnstaple from 1586 to 1608; Wyot records of February 20th, “The gibbet was sat up on the Castle Green and xviii prisoners hangd, whereof iiii of Plymouth for a murder” (97). The murder was almost certainly that of Page, and the three male conspirators were probably hanged along with the maid. With Ulalia presumably having been burnt at the stake, it is unlikely that there would have been any remains left to be buried. In any event, there is no record of her death or burial at St. Peter’s, either. 6 Scarlet is also the printer identified on the frontispiece of Munday’s 1591 “Sundry Strange and Inhumane Murders”, which Marshburn and Velie reprint as the frontispiece to Blood and Knavery.

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Chapter 1 1.

Ralph Cohen responded at length to each of Jameson’s, Foucault’s, and Derrida’s critiques of genre study (203–06). I will focus on the most serious and pervasive of these critiques: the idea that genre is merely a classification system. 2 On this point, see Gadamer 1999: 340, 324; Jauss 13; and Shawcross 197. 3 The idea is one of continual change and adaptation: genre helps us, in the words of Lawrence Danson, “to recognize the work’s affinity with or, just as importantly, its distance from other works . . .”; “to see how a work’s originality is wrested from old materials . . .” (5, 144). 4 Or, as Shawcross remarks, “recognition of the genre helps us place the [work] within its assumptions and contexts, both to enhance meaning and to effect its evaluation against others of its class” (33). 5 Genres and subgenres that they “arise”, as Cohen remarks, “at particular historical moments, and as they include more and more members, they are subject to repeated redefinitions or abandonment” (210). 6 Although Wine does not consider the setting of the plays in his definition of “domestic”, more recent critics, as we shall see, make Englishness central to the form. 7 It is true that the Poetics was not widely known in England until 1623, the year of its English translation. Moreover, nearly all the domestic tragedies were published before 1623; Aristotle, therefore, could hardly have been a direct influence. But his precepts concerning Greek tragedy were, indirectly at least, widely disseminated and enjoyed considerable influence on the development of the genre (Herrick 34). 8 Alexander Leggatt acknowledges that while the Elizabethans had no extensive, codified theories of tragedy, there were theoretical treatises, both on the continent and in England, that influenced the development of English tragedy (127). In France, for instance, the hierarchy was firmly in place in the sixteenth century: “Thought on tragic [subject material] did not change significantly throughout the century. . . . A similarity could be traced with respect to the style required by tragedy (lofty) and the characters (great)” (D. Stone 1974: 9–10). Consider Lazare de Baïf’s introduction to his 1537 translation of Sophocles’ Electra: “Tragedie est une moralité composée des grandes calamitez, meurtres & adversitez survenues aux nobles & excellentz personnaiges” (in D. Stone 9). The same hierarchy applied throughout Europe. See also Orgel 1979: 113. 9 “Cothurnata” means “wearing the buskin”, the boot Athenian tragic actors wore. 10 On Sidney’s views of the subject, see also Stump 44. 11 Orlin nowhere reconciles Cinthio’s comments here with his conformity with the standard view on tragic decorum, which he expressed in Discourse on Comedies and Tragedies (1543). In an earlier essay, Orlin had also acknowledged the universal prescription that the tragic protagonist in early modern drama had to be royal or noble (1991: 27–56).

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Notes 12

13 14

15

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A few critics (Vitkus 170, Shawcross 44, and Sturgess 12–13) do view the play as a morality, though for the most part they acknowledge that only the vestiges of the genre are present in the play. See, too, Hara’s account (1999: 13–14). See L. Stone (1966 and 1967); Wrightson (2003); Cressy (1976); and Fletcher and Stevenson (1985). It is beyond the scope of this book to speculate on the reason(s) why these plays fell out of vogue in the 1620s: it may have to do with weariness with the form, or with changing tastes, or with any variety of causes, the elucidation of which I leave to others. My goal is to demonstrate Othello’s participation in the genre, which was thriving when Shakespeare wrote his play around 1603.

Chapter 2 1

Hyde reprints Stow’s account in Appendix 3 of her text. Further references to Stow’s manuscript are to Howe’s transcription, and I retain the early modern spelling (minus the i/j substitution) so as to distinguish it more readily from Holinshed’s Chronicles, which I have modernized here. 2 In the margins of his text, Rainolds provides cross-references for his sources: Seneca for the Agamemnon story, Tacitus for Livia, and Holinshed’s Chronicles for the story of Arden’s murder. 3 For an exhaustive account of the literary and other uses to which the story was put in the early modern era, including that of an earlier (and lost) play, Murderous Michael, which was apparently performed before Elizabeth in 1579, see Kinney 2009: 79–80. 4 All references and quotations to Arden are to Wine’s edition of the play. 5 It is possible that another domestic tragedy with a protagonist of similar—dual—social stature preceded Arden, but I think it unlikely, and Arden remains by default the earliest extant example of a domestic tragedy that we have. 6 OED, s.v. “master” 7 Hyde provides a useful correction to Orlin’s influential account (1994: 63–64) of Arden as the wealthiest inhabitant of Faversham. 8 Peacham grudgingly admits, “such are the miserable corruptions of our times” that “wench[ing]” is a mark of the gentry.” Clearly, though, his ideal lies in marital fidelity (C3-C3v). His notion of the gentleman coincides with the ideal of Christian humanism espoused by Thomas Eliot and Roger Ascham, among others. 9 OED, s.v. “ribald” . 10 OED, s.v. “goodman” . 11 It is possible but unlikely that Alice is merely clarifying exactly whom she means by “Master Greene”: there is only one Greene in the play, and Mosby knows him well. Likewise, her clarification could not be for the audience, which has already been introduced to his character. Thus, if Alice’s clarification is simply used as a means of identification, it is uncharacteristically cumbersome for

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a playwright whose concision has already enabled him to introduce, in the first ten lines of the play, the complex business of Arden’s profiting from the dissolution of the monasteries. 12 Part of this may have to do with the economy of characters: the mayor does so much because of the need to simplify and not add other characters from the Privy Council. But Lord Cheine is in the play and could be used, but he plays no role in the play’s version of the inquest, and is not even mentioned or on stage.

Chapter 3 1

As Hirsch further remarks, “an interpreter’s preliminary generic conception of a text is constitutive of everything that he subsequently understands, and that this remains the case unless and until that generic conception is altered” (74). Rymer never alters his generic conception.

Chapter 4 1

Although the OED lists and defines “uxoricide” as “One who murders his wife”, there is no corresponding entry for “mariticide” . The adjectival form “mariticidal”, “husband-killing”, is, however, listed. 2 Calverley’s attempt to kill his wife is unsuccessful; he only wounds her. That he is a filicide rather than a spousal murder represents another variation on the intrafamilial domestic violence of the plays. 3 I thus cannot agree with Richardson’s assertion that “[t]here is no murder” in Frankford’s punitive estrangement of his wife (150). 4 Frank Thorney in The Witch of Edmonton is a notable exception; he is, technically, a bigamist rather than an adulterer. The effect on his first wife, however, is all one. 5 In several respects, Othello seems to be a Marlovian figure whose rise resembles that of Tamburlaine. Nevertheless, he does not rise quite to the heights of a Tamburlaine, and there is a certain indelible domesticity about Othello that further distinguishes him. Private matters—especially domestic ones—are pushed aside by Tamburlaine, while Othello lavishes attention on them. I noted in Chapter 1 the confluence of Marlowe’s work with that of the domestic tragedians; Shakespeare seems acutely aware of both trajectories. 6 OED s.v. “Moor” . 7 Vitkus further argues that Othello’s color and his ethnic origins recall “the ur-Moor, Mohammed”, whose ecstatic trances associate him with Othello’s epilectic-like seizures (155). Even if one does not accept a direct association with Mohammed, Othello does seem to represent for the Venetians the potential of their worst nightmares. More recently, Jonathan Bate has made an intriguing case for Piall Bassa who had fought for Selimus, the Turkish emperor, against the Christians, “and was raised to the rank of Basso. . . .

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Like Piall, Othello has risen from an obscure background to become a great general and in so doing changed his religion. But he is a reverse renegade” (2009: 279). 8 Critics hostile to the notion of a noble Othello have of course discarded racialist sentiments in favor of the view that Othello’s unworthiness has less to do with his social status than with his unstable character traits, or unstable subjectivity. 9 At 1.2.94; 2.1.291; 2.2.1; 2.3.132; 3.3.101, 213, 383; 4.1.272; 4.2.67.

Chapter 5 1

The definitive work in this area is Henry Ansgar Kelly’s Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare’s Histories (1970). Kelly focuses on the issue of whose side, if any, Providence takes in political struggles. My interest lies in the audience’s difficulty in attributing divine intervention to seemingly miraculous events. 2 At the end of 2 Tamburlaine, Marlowe’s eponymous hero torches the Koran and challenges, “Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power,/Come down thyself and work a miracle” (5.1.185–86). Greenblatt comments on the decisive moment: Tamburlaine falls ill, and when? When he burns the Koran. The one action which Elizabethan churchmen themselves might have applauded seems to bring down divine vengeance. The effect is not to celebrate the transcendent power of Mohammed but to challenge the habit of mind that looks to heaven for rewards and punishments, that imagines human evil as “the scourge of God” . . . the homiletical tradition is continually introduced only to be undermined by dramatic spectacle. . . . (202–03) The moment is not as straightforward as the simple iconoclasm Greenblatt posits. Tamburlaine’s book burning seems to incur divine displeasure: the act immediately precedes his falling ill, and while Marlowe teases us with the possibility of a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, the connection between the two events is too strong for it simply to be ascribed to an overactive imagination. The issue is whether a scene that tantalizes us with the prospect of divine intervention undermines a homiletic tradition, or reinforces it at long last. With Adams and Greenblatt in mind, it seems to me as inappropriate to deny as to assert a priori the possibility of the miraculous. 3 As we will see, Bakhtin might just as well have been describing the uncanny, which as part of its definition (derived from Freud) refers to that which is “uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar” (OED). 4 See, for instance, 2.146; 3.26; 5.35, 40; 7.2–6, 27–28; and 9.7. 5 Cannon notes that the exact date of the play’s composition is especially difficult to determine. All we can say with certainty is that it was composed somewhere “between the middle of the 1580s . . . and 1599” (48). It surely was composed prior to 1599.

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6

Taylor and Thompson suggest that Bullough’s “assertion assumes that there must be a source, and that it is unlikely that Shakespeare could have thought of such an idea for himself ” (60). Shakespeare certainly could have thought of it on his own had the story of the Norfolk woman not been in circulation, but it is unlikely that he did so: the story was in circulation, and Hamlet appears only one year after the performance of A Warning by the Chamberlain’s men. Bullough rightly lists A Warning as a probable source. Given the other connections between Othello and A Warning that I discussed in the introduction as well as Shakespeare’s double evocation of the play in Roderigo’s and (as we will see) Desdemona’s deaths, Shakespeare was intimately familiar with the play and borrowed from it in multiple ways. 7 I had explored this possibility in Shakespearean Resurrection (2009: 87–97), though I now think that Desdemona’s speaking here has more to do with the uncanny than it does with the miraculous, i.e. the Christian resurrection from the dead. The latter is typically reserved for recognition scenes between characters reuniting after a long absence.

Conclusion 1

I am not here including Arden as part of the canon. It is also true that Claudius kills Gertrude with the poisoned chalice (Ham. 5.2.291–313), but his doing so is unintentional and accidental. It is an act of involuntary manslaughter, which distinguishes it from the willful homicides one encounters in the domestic tragedies.

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Index

Adams, H. H. 31–2, 36–9, 41, 46, 51, 75–7, 86, 95, 103, 106, 117, 122–4, 127, 129, 139, 150 Arden of Faversham 2–3, 6–9, 14, 16, 19, 22, 31, 35–6, 39, 45, 47–59, 76–80, 88, 92–3, 95–7, 104, 115, 118, 128–30 and chronicle sources 60–2, 66–74, (see also historiography and drama) and class antagonism 62–5 and social climbing 37, 65–8, 77 Shakespeare's coauthorship of 7–8, 142 Arden, Thomas, dramatists’ ambivalent representation of 52, 57, 68 murder of 49 political connections 56–7 and social mobility 56–7, 66–8 Aristotle on tragedy 31–2, 36, 98, 144–5, 156n. 7 Bakhtin, Mikhail 125, 159n. 3 Booth, Stephen 87–8 Cohen, Ralph 26, 34–5, 112–13, 156n. 1 Comensoli, Viviana 41, 46, 62, 80, 125–6 Danson, Lawrence 18, 25, 27, 81, 86–7 Dekker, Thomas 6, 9, 13–15, 124 Derrida, Jacques 23–4 Dolan, Frances 59, 65, 78, 85, 88, 104, 107, 125 domestic tragedy, canon of 6 conventions, adultery 16, 61–4, 77–9, 83, 86, 88–9, 95–7, 102–4, 131, 146 domesticity 5, 15, 22, 71, 73

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Englishness 5–6, 40, 50–1, 81–3, 156n. 6 Griselda figure 116 household weaponry 11, 16, 49, 91, 99, 115, 146 locative titles 15, 92–3 love triangles 102–3 miraculous and monstrous, the 20–1, 38, 121–7, 131–3, 146 murder-will-out 12, 15, 21, 88, 122–4, 129, 135, 139, 146 nonaristocratic protagonists 3, 7, 18–19, 31–51, 77, 100, 111, 119 public/private dichotomy 53, 61–2, 69–71, 73–4, 81, 83, 150, 158n. 5 scaffold speeches 41, 102, 116–18, 124, 131, 146, 150, 153 spousal murder 1–2, 4, 7, 15, 19, 35, 41–2, 46–7, 51, 62, 79, 83, 88, 122, 150 uncanny, the 16–17, 20–1, 121–4, 127–30, 133–5, 139–40, 142, 146 women of easy virtue 116, 146, 152 defined 30–1 and misogyny 4–5, 20, 28, 63, 77–80, 86, 104 and morality plays 4, 37–41, 77, 117, 123–4, 132 rise of 35–41, 89 sensationalism of 1–2, 71, 109 Shakespeare's knowledge of 7–9 and social mobility 42–8 Foucault, Michel 23 Fowler, Alastair 24–5, 27–9, 31, 91–2, 110 genre, and classification 18, 23–9 and interpretation 24, 27, 91

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Index

172 and literary experimentation 29–30, 116, 141 Shakespeare's use of 87–9 and tragedy 31–3 Gurr, Andrew 40–1, 45, 115

25–7,

3, 15, 21–2, 27, 35, 43, 75, 81, 86, 92–3, 98, 105, 118, 136, 143, 146, 160n. 6 Helgerson, Richard 54, 56, 62, 69–73 historiography and drama 2, 15–16, 19, 35, 49–54, 74, 89, 124, 130–1 Holbrook, Peter 46, 50, 142 Holinshed, Raphael 19–20, 48–50, 52–4, 60–2, 64, 66–71, 73, 78, 84, 92, 129–30, 145, 150 Hyde, Patricia 46, 49, 56–7, 83, 157n. 1, 7 Hamlet

Jonson, Ben King Lear

9, 13–14

75, 92, 98

Marlowe, Christopher 33–4 McQuade, Paula 4, 20, 86 Middleton, Thomas 6, 7, 22, 130–1, 133, 155n. 1 Munro, Lucy 41–2 Nuttall, Anthony

85–7, 119

Orgel, Stephen 50, 83–4, 88–9, 156n. 8 Orlin, Lena Cowen 1, 19, 36–8, 41, 46, 56, 67, 77, 81–3, 88, 156n. 11, 157n. 7 Othello, conventions of domestic tragedy, adultery 104, 111, 113–17, 131–3, 146, 149–52 domesticity 22, 80–2, 85–6, 91, 114–15, 146, 152, 158n. 5 Englishness 5–6, 82–3 Griselda figure 115–16, 139, 146 household weaponry 16, 91, 99, 146 locative title 15, 92–3 love triangles 16, 78–80, 85, 96, 102–3, 146

9781441194701_txt.indb 172

miraculous and monstrous, the 119, 132, 151 murder-will-out 139–40 nonaristocratic protagonist 105–7, 110–12, 118, 142–4 public/private dichotomy 6, 74, 81, 83–5, 118, 146, 150, 152–3 scaffold speech 102, 116–18, 153 spousal murder 22, 97–100, 140, 145–6, 148–53 uncanny, the 17, 21, 119, 121–2, 132–40, 142 and the democratization of tragedy 5, 21–2, 141–5 and misogyny 143 and race 4, 18, 108–10, 112, 118, 143–4 (see also Rymer, Thomas and critique of Othello) and social mobility 103–5 Page of Plymouth 9–17, 22, 88, 92, 97, 99, 103, 127–8, 140, 153 Richardson, Catherine 2–3, 42, 80–1, 115 Romeo and Juliet 86, 99, 147 Rymer, Thomas 28 critique of Othello 2, 16, 20, 75, 89–93, 106, 109–13, 143–4, 158n. 1 Shaffer, Brian 86, 103 Stow, John 19–20, 48–9, 52, 60–2, 64–6, 68, 70–1, 78, 83, 128–9, 144, 157n. 1 Two Lamentable Tragedies 1–3, 6, 37–8, 77, 82, 96, 123–7 Warning for Fair Women, A 6–8, 21, 37, 39, 54, 88, 97, 122, 133–9, 147, 153, 155n. 2, 160n. 6 Wells, Stanley 133, 155n. 1 Whigham, Frank 19, 45, 63–5 Wine, Martin L. 31, 40, 50, 156n. 6, 157n. 4

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Index Witch of Edmonton, The 6, 13, 47, 58, 77–8, 96–7, 102, 118, 124–7, 142 Woman Killed with Kindness, A 6–8, 22, 37, 39–41, 76–8, 80, 96–7, 102–3, 113, 115–16, 147, 153

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Wrightson, Keith

173 43–4, 54, 157n. 14

Yorkshire Tragedy, A 6–7, 14–15, 35, 37, 45, 77, 96–7, 102, 116, 130–2, 155n. 2

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