The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture 9780754601159, 9781138263352

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The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modem Culture

Dedicated to the memory of Gareth Roberts (1949-1999)

The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modem Culture

Edited by

Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton

I~ ~~o~t!~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Rout/edge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2000 Darryl! Grantley and Nina Taunton The editors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data The body in late medieval and early modem culture 1. Body, Human- Social aspects 2. Civilisation, medieval I. Grantley, Darryll II. Taunton, Nina 306.4 US Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The body in late medieval and early modem culture I edited by Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Body, Human- Social aspects- History. I. Grantley, Darryll II. Taunton, Nina HM636.B62 2000 306.4- dc21 00-058293

ISBN 13:978-0-7546-0115-9 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-138-26335-2 (pbk)

Contents List ofFigures

vii

Contributors

viii

Introduction Nina Taunton and Darryl/ Grantley

Gendered Bodies

2

The Politics of Self-Mutilation: Forms ofFemale Devotion in the Late Middle Ages Claire Marshall

11

3

The Constructions and Deconstructions of Gendered Bodies in Selected Plays of Christopher Marlowe Doris Feldmann

23

4

Armour, Flows and Bliss: Liquefactions of Gender in The Faerie Queene Book II Barry Taylor

33

5

'0 Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain': Violence and the Mother's Body in Elizabethan Drama Felicity Dunworth

51

Occupational Bodies 6

The Body Archival: Re-reading the Trial of the Earl of Somerset Alan Stewart

65

7

A Camp 'well planted': Encamped Bodies in 1590s Military Discourses and Chapman's Caesar and Pompey Nina Taunton

83

CONTENTS

Vl

8

'A bodie of presence': Early Modem Education and the Elite Body in the Writings of Richard Mulcaster Darry/1 Grantley

97

Mystical Bodies

9

Regimen Animarum et Corporum: The Body and Spatial Practice in Medieval and Renaissance Magic Stephen Clucas

10

The Bodies of Demons Gareth Roberts

11

The Miraculous Royal Body in James VI and I, Jonson and Shakespeare, 1590--1609 Lawrence Normand

113 131

143

Bodily Otherness 12

'Seeing' Contagious Bodies in Early Modem London Margaret Healy

13

'All protean forms in venery': The Textual and Apparitional Body in John Marston's Verse Satires Clif!Forshaw

169

14

Travellers' Tails: Bodily Fictions in Early Modem Narratives of Cultural Difference Susan Wiseman

187

157

Notes

203

Bibliography

227

Index

245

List of Figures 9.1

Sloane MS 3851, fol.l14v

122

9.2

Sloane MS 3851, fol.114v

122

9.3

Sloane MS 3851, fol.115r

123

9.4

The ceremonial space for the operation with 'five spirits of the north', Reginald Scot, Discouerie of Witchcraft, p. 414

124

Solomon's circle from 'The experiment ofBealphares', Reginald Scot Discouerie of Witchcraft, p. 420

124

9.5

Contributors Stephen Clucas is lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He works primarily in the field of early modem intellectual history and the history of science. He has published essays on Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib and Margaret Cavendish, and is editor of a forthcoming volume of essays, John Dee: Interdisciplinary Essays in English Renaissance Thought. Felicity Dunworth teaches English literature at the University of Kent and also for the Open University. She has a particular interest in early drama, and her most recent research examines the role of the mother figure on the Elizabethan stage. She has contributed to an edition of Paragraph which focused on motherhood, and has also made a contribution on patronage and economics in early modem theatre to New History of English Drama, ed. D. Kastan and J. Cox (1997), in collaboration with Kathleen McLuskie. Doris Feldmann is Professor of English Literature at the Friedrich-AlexanderUniversitat Erlangen-Niirnberg. She has published on the cultural politics, and particularly on the sexual politics, of Renaissance and eighteenth-century drama and on politics and fiction in the nineteenth century. Cliff Forshaw took his DPhil on Satirical Personae in Elizabethan Satire at Oxford. He is also a poet; he was a Hawthomden Writing Fellow 1998, and currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Bangor. Poetry collections include: The Dade County Book of the Dead (1995) and Strange Tongues (1994). Darryll Grantley teaches in the Drama department at the University of Kent. He has published Wit's Pilgrimage: Drama and the Social Impact ofEducation in Early Modern England (2000), has co-edited Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture with Peter Roberts (1996), and has contributed to several books on medieval drama, early modem drama and theatre, and modem American drama.

CONTRIBUTORS

ix

Margaret Healy is lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. She has published several articles on bodily pathologies in early modem culture and her forthcoming monograph is entitled Fictions ofDisease: Bodies, Plagues and Politics in Early Modern Writings. Claire Marshall is a lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published articles on medieval literature and culture, and has recently completed a book, Piers Plowman, which is forthcoming. Lawrence Normand lectures in English at Middlesex University. He has published essays on Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Jacobean court culture in Scotland and England. Forthcoming are an edition of witchcraft texts (with Gareth Roberts) and a critical biography of W.H. Davies. He is currently editing a volume of essays on early modem drama and witchcraft. Gareth Roberts lectured in English at the University of Exeter until his untimely death in 1999. He published several essays on magic and witchcraft in Renaissance poetry and drama, and is author of The Open Guide to Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' (1992), The Mirror of Alchemy (1994) and The Languages of Alchemy (1997), and co-editor (with Marianne Hester and Jonathan Barry) of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (1996). Forthcoming are Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI's 'Demonology' and the North Berwick Witches (co-edited with Lawrence Normand), and the Arden 3 edition of The Comedy ofErrors. Alan Stewart teaches in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London. He is the author of Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (1997); Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon 1561-1626, with Lisa Jardine (1998); and Philip Sidney: A Double Life (2000). He is currently preparing a new edition of Bacon's Correspondence. Barry Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Studies at Staffordshire University. He is the author of Vagrant Writing: Social and Semiotic Disorders in the English Renaissance (1991), and of articles in early modem studies, and in contemporary popular fiction and cultural theory. He is currently working on Middleton's comedies as part of a study of configurations of the masculine body in early modem culture.

X

CONTRIBUTORS

Nina Taunton is a lecturer in English at Brunei University. She has contributed to the journals Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama and Erfurt Electronic Studies in English. She has published two Occasional Papers in the Thomas Harriot Occasional Papers series, on Marlowe and Shakespeare. Her book, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare's Henry V, is forthcoming. Susan Wiseman is a Reader in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is co-editor of Women, Writing, History 1640-1740 (1992), Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon (1998) and On the Borders of the Human with E. Fudge (1999). She is author of Aphra Behn (1996) and Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (1998).

1

Introduction Nina Taunton and Darryll Grantley The late medieval and early modem body has been attracting critical attention for well over a decade now. Poststructuralism, evolving beyond semiotics (though never abandoning it altogether) has sent critics down paths which merge the semiotic with the somatic. Incorporating the principles of semiology as a means of interpreting varieties of discourses around the body, critics have increasingly resisted assumptions about the grounding of culture in language with its universal system of codes and structures (and therefore ultimately unifying objectives) towards the altogether more bumpy terrain of bodily signifying practices. On its journey from linguistic to somatic signification, the body has wound round itself a spiral of proliferating and competing discourses. To quote Keir Elam quoting Julia Kristeva: [t]he reaction against the linguistic tum and its prophylactic sterilizing of the body has been what we might term the corporeal tum, which has shifted attention from the word to the flesh, from the semantic to the somatic' - a tum 'pre-announced in Julia Kristeva's notion of the preverbal and pre-semantic semiotic chora, the battleground of the subject's competing bodily drives which 'makes the semiotized body a place of permanent scission.' (1996, 143) 1

Cultural historians, literary scholars and feminist theorists, having rescued the body from the margins of critical attention and having intensively investigated it and its parts from the point of view (for example) of the material, the ludic, the camivalesque and the grotesque, are now turning their attention to areas still unincorporated into the mainstream of poststructuralist studies of premodem corporeal materiality. 2 Indeed, the fertile field of studies on the body more traditionally associated with the human sciences -biology, anthropology, sociology, medicine - is now being thoroughly picked over for multiple and multilayered semiotic-somatic meaning, while the totalizing impulse of semiology has now more or less been superseded by theories which stress instability, plurality, scission and discontinuity- and which reinscribe the body into narratives of difference and otherness. In what he calls the 'body boom' in Shakespeare studies, Keir Elam lists a 'ghost army of early modem organisms

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NINA TAUNTON AND DARRYLL GRANTLEY

to anatomize. The Shakespearean critical industry has become the Shakespearean Corps' (1996, 142, 144). The boom has extended way beyond the bodies in Shakespeare. Embracing interdisciplinarity and postmodernism, writers on the early modern body continue to make their own significant contribution to a corpus of works travelling full circle from rejection of totalizing philosophies which assume the universal in the particular to a deeper appreciation of the unstable, the discontinuous, the fragmented and the marginal in pre-modern culture. For example, as Jonathan Sawday has discovered, the early modern vogue for anatomies, both textual and corporeal, could betoken both an interest in the workings of the insides and outsides of human (and animal) bodies, and fears that textual/corporeal parts, once atomized and anatomized, never reassemble into the whole that they once were. In The Body Emblazoned, he explores the paradoxical function of dissection, which provided a means both of expanding knowledge of the body, and of breaking up the philosophical and religious body of knowledge whose goal was universality and completeness (1995, 1-15). The present volume intervenes in debates such as these, with a collection of essays which demonstrate that work on the body continues to break new ground. In moving away from Shakespeare somewhat, the essays carry forward debates about grotesque, spiritualized, mortified, unaccommodated, sexualized, institutionalized, textualized, regimented, destabilized, demonized, dissolved bodies into areas reaching beyond existing Shakespeare criticism. Taking as its chronological starting point the female body of late medieval devotional literature, the volume proceeds to a consideration of the representation of gendered bodies in literature. It then examines sixteenth-century occupational orderings of the (male) body in education, the civil service and the army, and involves explorations into a variety of rituals for the purification, ordering and disciplining of the flesh. It includes enquiries into the miraculous royal body, demon bodies and the 'virtual' body of satire, and ends in the late }eventeenth century with dramatic representations of the diseased body, and the grotesque bodies of travellers' tales as signifiers of racial difference. The volume as a whole pushes forward postmodern notions of the body as a site for competing discourses. It provides new dimensions to fantasies, rituals and regulations in narratives ('fictions') of the body as identifications of forms of knowledge unique to the early modern period. Each of the essays sheds new light on how these late medieval and early modern narratives function to produce specialized and discrete languages of the body that cannot be understood simply in terms, say, of religion, philosophy or physiology, but produce their own particular forms of knowledge. Thus the essays materially contribute to an understanding of the relationship between the body and spatial knowledge by giving new bearings on epistemologies built upon pre-modern

INTRODUCTION

3

perceptions about bodily spaces and boundaries. They address these issues by analysing forms of knowledge constructed through regulations of the body, fantasies about extensions to the body and creations of bodily, psychic, intellectual and spiritual space. The essays pose important questions about how these epistemologies offer different investments of knowledge into structures of power. What constitutes this knowledge? What are the politics of corporeal spaces? In what forms of knowledge about spatial and bodily perceptions and practices are these early modern narratives embedded? What ideologies shape and contain them? The collection deliberately incorporates a period range which encompasses considerable cultural and ideological shifts that impact upon perceptions of the body. The choice of essays in the volume recognizes both continuities and discontinuities between perceptions of the body in the medieval and early modern periods. By way of illustrating these, it is useful to compare examples of the representation of the body in one genre - the drama separated by a century and a half. The mid- to late fifteenth-century play Wisdom, Who is Christ, is in many ways a traditional medieval morality in which the action consists principally of the corruption of the soul through sin, and its subsequent redemption. 3 What makes the play a slightly unusual example of the genre is that the central protagonist, rather than being an embodied everyman figure, is represented in an abstracted way as a disembodied soul. The disembodiment of the soul has a particular point in the moral scheme of the play, since the piece incorporates (though it does not actually stage) reference to the medieval devotional trope of the debate between the soul and the body. This trope articulates a long medieval tradition of religious discomfort with corporeality which was to endure through the Renaissance and beyond, despite the advent of humanism. In Wisdom, Who is Christ, the corruption of the soul comes about precisely through the satisfaction of physical appetites. The body becomes entirely moralized and only exists in the play as a concept within a process of constant cosmic struggle, in a way that can be argued to be entirely consistent with the theocratic world-view of pre-humanist medieval culture. Leaping forward some hundred and forty years to the early seventeenth century, an apparently rather different conception of the body is to be found at the centre of King Lear in the heath scene, where Lear says to and of the wretched beggar that Edgar has become: 'Is man no more but this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Here's three on 's are sophisticated, thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art' (3.4.92-7). The sensibility here appears to be at considerable variance with that found in the earlier play. Though this scene presents man as bereft of those dignities which distinguish him from the beasts, and might be

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NINA TAUNTON AND DARRYLL GRANTLEY

considered to present an antithetic view to that of humanist aspiration, its humanism is evident in the way in which bodily reality is recognized, if not embraced. Whereas the fifteenth-century play advocates a disavowal of the body, a theological perspective that might be considered particularly medieval, here the body is brought into play as the only sure reality of human existence. 'Unaccommodated man' is somehow the real man or 'the thing itself', albeit that he is a 'poor, bare, forked animal', whereas in the medieval play there is a clearer separation between the soul and the body, the former being by implication what is real about human life (particularly in the context of cosmic moral struggle for the soul of man). However, if this is the point of difference between the two visions, a similarity is also present in that both incorporate a tension between the attempt to validate the quality of humanity through distancing it from the physical or animal (either in circumstances of life, or in more spiritual and moral ways) on the one hand, and a recognition of the hard reality of human existence as being grounded in the corporeal on the other. In both visions can be discerned a conflict between the striving towards an ideal of humanity, whether in theocratic or in humanist terms, and an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that corporeal existence reduces man to far less than his aspiration would have him. It is the same opposition between the striving to god-like dignity and the reality of material existence that is the source of the anguish in Hamlet's impassioned speech: 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god- the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?' (2.2.293-8). Aside from the issue of corporeality as an aspect of human identity, both texts also use the physical body as a powerful signifier. In Wisdom, Who is Christ, though it is the soul rather than the body that is the topic of the play, it is by means of the actor's body on stage that the corruption of the soul is demonstrated. At the outset of this highly ceremonial play, the Soul (Anima) enters in a cloth of white and gold and there is a detailed direction for her magnificent dress. When, however, the Soul has been compromised by the corruption of its component parts, Mind, Will and Understanding, she re-enters in a state of physical defilement, and there is the direction: 'Here rennyt owt from wnder pe horrybyll mantyll of pe Soull seven small boys in pe lyknes of dewyllys and so retome ageyn' (912 s.d.). Although it is done by different means and for somewhat different purposes, the way in which the decline into nakedness of Edgar in King Lear is used to parallel the stripping away of Lear's kingly pomp is a not wholly dissimilar use of a corporeal image. Of course these texts are both works of drama, and the physical aspect of representation, particularly bodily reality, is ever present in a way that is not always true of other forms of writing. However, an interest in the human body

INTRODUCTION

5

might be considered a natural produ,ct of humanist interest in the material and philosophical realities of terrestrial existence. Renaissance humanism quite understandably propelled the contemplation of the human body to the centre stage of early modem culture, whether in respect of the human form in art, or the body as material for self-fashioning, as a source of metaphor, as a commodity of exchange, as a powerful dimension of gender conflict, as a site of contention over sexuality, as a source of political or magical power, or as a signifier of otherness, to name but a few facets of this potent focus of cultural discourse. The essays in this volume engage all these topics and more, but the historical remit of the volume has deliberately not been restricted to the early modem period. This has been in order to give recognition to the fact that, paradoxically within the theocratic and persistently anti-carnal discourses of the medieval period, the body had a powerful role to play. The humanist engagement with the body reposed on a long tradition of intense, if sometimes uncomfortable interest in corporeality. In the veneration of Saints and relics, the body had a major part to play as a signifier, commodity, object of worship and source of magical power. This was reinforced in the written culture in the Saint's legend, the most ubiquitous form of popular writing from the Conquest to the Renaissance. The body as a source of metaphor was also a recurrent feature in medieval writing. The body of the Virgin Mary - particularly as the human vehicle of the incarnation of Christ - was one of the more evident examples of this, as in some of the Marian devotional lyrics in which every part of the Virgin's body became loaded with some doctrinal significance. It is thus with the acknowledgement that there are as many continuities as distinctions between medieval and Renaissance or early modem culture, that this collection attempts to straddle both, though beyond opening in the late Middle Ages and closing in the late seventeenth century, there has been no attempt to arrange essays chronologically. They are arranged, rather, in four broad topic areas defined by a focus on gender, on work, on the mystical and on otherness. The four essays grouped under 'Gendered Bodies' investigate aspects of the blurring of the semiotic-somatic dichotomy. It is Claire Marshall's contention that the disciplinary technologies of fasting and flagellation, originally designed to suppress and control the female body, evolved into strategies of empowerment, becoming a way of accessing the sacred whilst bypassing clerical authority. Thus the theme of bodily inscription is carried forward into the realm of gender politics. The religious life of women in the later Middle Ages was conceived as one of chastity and enclosure. Holy women were ideally sealed away from the world and silenced. These practices were intended to correct the female body's natural grotesqueness and its identification with the corruptions of the flesh. However, late medieval female piety, often expressed through extreme displays of emotion and violence which inscribed the female body by wounding and mutilation, blood, disease and self-

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NINA TAUNTON AND DARRYLL GRANTLEY

starvation could be used to challenge the very structures that had first positioned these women. This bodily route to the sacred was enacted in the work oftwo late medieval mystics: Margery Kempe and St Bridget of Sweden, and Marshall's essay explores the manner in which their exemplary practices of affective spirituality, with its focus on the bodily, fed debates about the growth of lay piety at the end of the Middle Ages. The second essay in this section, which deals with Marlowe's plays in terms of gender categories, responds to the semiotic-somatic tension by arguing that Marlowe's plays dismantle the seemingly stable, uniform and extralinguistic notions of masculinity and femininity, as represented by male and female bodies, in order to expose these conceptions as ideological and semiotic constructs - that is, as gendered bodies which signify and negotiate relationships of power. Feldmann looks at representations of 'manliness' and its bodily signifiers in these plays through the heroes' desire (as in Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris) to fix bodies in order to fix meaning and power. Yet textually, the body, and above all the female body, appears in excess of all classifying categories, as the vanishing point of legibility and authority. Barry Taylor's contribution takes the disappearance of gender-defining boundaries a stage further. He considers Book II, Canto xii of Spenser's The Faerie Queene as symptomatic of the dissolution of binary classifications set up within the structure of the poem as a whole. He singles out the tableau of the naked, 'effeminated' body of the boy knight Verdant as a means of accessing the relationship between critical readings which express anxieties about the self-cancelling impulses of the poem as a whole, and the trope of fluid femininity. The essay negotiates the submerging of semiotic-somatic distinctions by an interrogation of the collapse of the seductive power of the bodily pleasures experienced by the reader in the Bower of Bliss episode into anxieties about dissolution of bodily boundaries. Taylor treats this collapse as an analogue of the poem's structural divergence from traditional (masculine) shape-defining epic forms. Felicity Dunworth's work rounds off the first section's preoccupation with the embroilment of the semantic with the somatic. All four essays associate violence with the feminine - through self-mutilation, passivity, dangerous fluidity - and Dunworth contributes to this association by showing how complex concepts of maternity used and compounded the function of maternal corporeality as a material and emblematic signifier of violence. This violence, Dunworth argues, has the power to evoke multiple responses to the plight and suffering of the mother, and the essay considers the means by which these responses are harnessed together in representations of private outcomes to public friction. Represented both rhetorically and by means of dramatic spectacle, the mother's body, simultaneously inscribed as predator and victim,

INTRODUCTION

7

functions both as carrier of diegetic capability and multiple meaning as emblem of suffering. In the next section, 'Occupational Bodies', knowledge of the body is arrived at in various ways, through sectioning (dissecting) social or cultural difference explored in new contexts: educational ones, gentle and non-gentle status, inscriptions of the body into institutional spaces that have the aim of securing regimes of power but have instead an undermining effect, obliterations of the body in scriptorial practices which in their anxiety to preserve the secrets of unspeakable and unthinkable crimes on the body have the effect of obliterating it altogether. The first essay in this section notably extends recent critical focus (begun by Francis Barker in The Tremulous Body) on the propensity of the corporeal in early modem writing to collapse into the textual. In his reworking of the papers relating to the infamous Overbury murder, Alan Stewart argues that the abused body of Thomas Overbury ('the body personal'), the focal point of the trials of Frances Howard and the servants involved in the murder, materially disappeared into a body of paperwork ('the body archival') which significantly proliferated in James I's reign. But while the material body of Overbury was jostled, in the indictment of Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset, husband of Frances Howard and intimate friend of the murdered man, from centre stage by the body archival, the two bodies - the personal and the archival - continued to be bound together. Stewart argues that the intimate transactions of the secretaries in the secrecy of their closets away from the public sphere of political action were, along with the transactions which generated them, inseparable in the minds of contemporaries, because of their figuration as physically intimate, sexual relations. Stewart finds embedded in the Attorney-General Francis Bacon's plans for the prosecution a strategy which displaces the crime perpetrated upon Overbury's body onto a far greater crime against the body- that of sodomy. Thus one kind of bodily danger is averted through reports and letters, only to re-emerge, literally inscribed as a menace alarmingly multiplied in the proliferation and circulation of correspondence to do with the case. Nina Taunton next looks at the relationship between the textual and the corporeal from another angle - the preoccupation with training and containing the bodies of soldiers textually in the military conduct books which proliferated in the war-tom years of the 1590s. Taking the regimentation of the fighting body as both an index of power and as an articulation of the anxieties of powerlessness, the essay examines in the manuals and an exemplary dramatic text the obsession with military spaces as a hallmark of a decade when the need to create a standing army was being most urgently pressed. In a discussion about military orderings of space, this essay examines the connection between the military camp's status as a 'territorial assemblage' (that is, as practised space, defined by the bodies of soldiers which inhabit it and the regulated

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activities performed within it) and its status as a written narrative capable of producing meaning in more than one medium. Darryll Grantley's work explores the corporeal-textual contradiction from the standpoint of the relationship between the semiotics of elite status and the somatic practices involved in its construction. Mulcaster's 'bodie of presence' both draws attention to the actuality of the material body and underscores the elitist nature of the social conditions in which humanist education played such a crucial role in training the body. Inscriptions of the body onto the broader canvas of social identity emerged in debates between those theorists who sought to defend the position of the established landed elite and those who championed the cause of the 'new men' as educational challenges to notions of the innateness of the quality of nobility already being put into question by economic changes and social mobility. Grantley concludes that though the debates of the sixteenth century appeared at first sight to interrogate essentialist notions of gentility, Mulcaster's theories, in their articulation of the social foundations of the ethos of physical rigour in the education of boys illustrate the fact that what they did was simply change the terms of reference. The essays in section 3, 'Mystical Bodies', continue the work of moving forward from existing publications on the body and of providing hitherto unfamiliar theoretical perspectives. Stephen Clucas's essay contributes to the interrogation of the tension between semiotic and somatic meaning by examining ritualistic practices and spatial organization of the 'bodily fictions' of Christian magic. Along with Claire Marshall's work on subjection of the female body to rituals of purification and mortification as a route to the divine, this essay continues the work of additional insight into early modem insistence on the corporeal in mystical writings despite the continuing sway of medieval thinking on the rupture of body from soul. Taking as his starting point Merleau-Ponty's assumption that space is created by lived experience, and is thus inseparable from the subject who inhabits it, Clucas sets up a line of enquiry into the nature of the body produced by the consecrated spaces of early modem magic. The essay draws upon a diverse array of cultural practices involved in medieval and Renaissance theurgy to examine the rigorous codification of the body through pietistic regiment and forms of asceticism stipulated by bodily hygiene, abstinence, symbolic vestments and bodily practices such as prostration, genuflection and so on. These practices, Clucas argues, constitute an attempt at creating, through semiotic strategies, a somatic 'vessel' for an idealized corporeality of the practising subject. In 'The Bodies of Demons', Gareth Roberts takes matters spiritualcorporeal into the realm of black magic, and poses the question of whether demons have bodies which function like the bodies of human beings, particularly in terms of sexuality and sexual fantasy. He looks at how these

INTRODUCTION

9

matters are negotiated in familiar dramatic texts ranging from Middleton, Ben Jonson, Donne and Spenser, to not-so-familiar ones such as Aquinas, Caesareius of Heisterback, Walter Map and William of Auvergne. In these texts, revelations on the composition of the bodies of demons, and medieval stories of Saints' lives that incorporate anecdotes of couplings between humans and demons, function partly as vehicles for sexual fantasy and partly as devices for the regulation of women and married sex. However, Roberts concludes with an exposition of demonology in Middleton's The Witch that reveals, beneath the veneer of misogyny inscribed into Continental demonology which are its sources, an impulse, embedded in the comic burlesque of the witches, towards a communality of women which has 'agency, freedom and fun'. The political dimensions of the mystical body are examined by Lawrence Normand in his discussion of the supposed miraculous powers of the royal body. He argues that James VI and I, despite both his promotion of the idea of divine ordination of kingship, and his interest in the phenomenon of witchcraft, rather sought to distance himself from ideas of the healing powers of the king's touch. Though James was willing to promote the idea of the king as a power against demonic forces, one factor animating his scepticism of the healing potency of the royal body was his Protestant suspicion of the superstition of much popular belief and practice. Another. was the fact that, despite James's strong adherence to the philosophy of divinely appointed kingship, his political practice was essentially pragmatic. Normand goes on to examine reflections of the idea of mystical royalty in the work of various writers, most notably Jonson and Shakespeare, contending that, though these writers were happy to indulge and flatter James's beliefs in certain respects, their treatment of the issue of divine or miraculous kingship reveal a pronounced tendency to demystify monarchy. The first paper of the final section, 'Bodily Otherness', moves the reader from the grotesque practices of Middleton's witches to the appearance on stage of a grotesque female body deformed by syphilis. Using this startling image to initiate her discussion of sixteenth-century perceptions of 'pocky bodies', Margaret Healy examines the cultural sigification of contagious bodies in city spaces. Her contention is that discourses about the spread of disease had enormous ramifications for the 'dirty' poor who lived in the hastily built tenements at London's boundaries, and revealed tensions beneath the surface of London's rapidly changing shape and social structure. Throughout the period 1480-1620, literature helped construct perceptions about, and responses to, disease. Vivid personifications of syphilis and bubonic plague formed popular stereotypes and prompt her inquiry into how these stereotypes gave rise to blame cultures, and the relation between the materiality of illness, the myths which emerged around them, and medical and social ordering practices. Focusing on the adjacent surfaces between popular medical, religious and

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literary writings, the essay explores some of the ways of 'seeing' the two most densely symbolic bodily afflictions of the early modem period. Literary grotesques are next examined as Cliff Forshaw considers the way in which bodily physicality is constructed in early modem satire, and particularly the satirical writing of John Marston. He argues that the corporeal reality of the satirist as a figure in Marston's writing is apparitional since it is reduced to the functions of the observing eye and describing tongue. This is evident in Marston's adopting the persona of a crude and psychopathic malcontent, W. Kinsayder, who as both voyeur and 'Barking Satyrist' has his own metamorphic identity determined by his function as satirist. Equally, the 'rough poetry' of this fictional persona denies bodily reality to his targets, though they are constructed as obsessed with corporeality themselves, as their physicality is distorted into the grotesque forms required by his satire. The notion of the 'seeing' reader is also elaborated in the final essay of the volume. Susan Wiseman argues that certain seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury travel narratives of racial difference powerfully generate images of the body which produce the textual effect of 'seeing double' for the reader- that is, of enabling the reader to experience contradictory pleasures and positions. Thus the reader of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is positioned in the way that the reader of travel narratives is. Tails seen on the native body work as a means of registering criminality and difference; yet in creating the effect of 'reading in mythic categories', they simultaneously enable readings that acknowledge similarity by permitting disbelief at the same time as encouraging belief in such monstrous embodiments of difference as persons with tails. Wiseman, by recourse to Freud's theories of disavowal and the uncanny, in an intricately woven argument, repeatedly returns to her original question of textualcorporeal complications - that is, of how we are able to understand the way that colonial discourse 'superimposes iconic and mythic categories on the body and even gives them tails'. She concludes that early modem stories of distant places set up circuits of disavowal in terms of both the fiscal and the exotic that allow for the mingling of the real with the fantastic, and that thes~ narratives both manufacture difference and reveal anxieties about the cultural nature of this difference.

2

The Politics of Self-Mutilation: Forms of Female Devotion in the Late Middle Ages Claire Marshall Female devotion in the Middle Ages is often discussed in terms of the misogyny and dualism of the period. It is not difficult to see why this should be so. The construction of the female body in medieval science and theology alike focused on gaps, orifices and symbolic filth. 'Woman' was positioned in the principle of disruption in the human psyche: the flesh. Her body was seen as pervious and excessive and her character both corruptible and corrupting. Consequently, the need to repair the natural accessibility of the female body became a moral and spiritual imperative in the medieval church's approach to women. Woman's natural susceptibility to sin and defilement was to be corrected through moral and physical enclosure (Thomasset, 1992, 43-69; Lochrie, 1991, 13-55). The move towards enclosure for religious women can be seen at work at a number of levels. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's work on the female Saints' lives and devotional treatises that make up the early thirteenth-century Katherine Group - a collection originally intended for a group of well-born anchoresses- has demonstrated how the themes of virginity, bodily enclosure and both symbolic and literal death are worked out in such a fashion as to indicate the way in which physical, spiritual and institutional levels overlap and inform each other (Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne 1992, xv- xx; WoganBrowne, 1994, 164-94; Wogan-Browne, 1994b, 24-9). Along with a Letter on Virginity for the Encouragement of Virgins the collection contains three virgin martyr legends. In essence, the lives of Juliana, Margaret and Katherine tell the same grisly story of a woman who chooses torture, dismemberment and execution rather than marriage and seduction. The material was presumably intended to demonstrate that female holiness is primarily about intactness, enclosure and the maintaining of an unbroken body, and the imagery surrounding the sign of chastity demonstrates the overlap between physical and moral categories: 'God died for us, the beloved Lord, and I am not afraid to suffer any kind of death for his sake. He has set his mark on me, sealed me

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with his seal; and neither life nor death can divide us again' (Millett and Wogan-Browne, 1992, 53). The seal has a plural significance. It refers both to the spiritual seal that binds the virgin to Christ and to the woman's physical virginity which preserves her flesh from defilement. Yet it is clear that the potentiality for corruption is always there in the female body, a fact which no doubt accounts for the prevalence and importance of the dead virgin as the dominant representation of female sanctity. Only death can assure perpetual virginity: the place where women's weak bodies can no longer be tempted or violated and instead achieve a final union with the perfect bridegroom, Christ. In these texts the best virgin, as Wogan-Browne remarks, 'is always a dead virgin' (1994b, 24). The Katherine Group is generally understood to have a history of textual association with the famous middle English guide for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse (Millett and Wogan-Browne, 1992, xi-xl). The practice of anchoretism demonstrates the links between bodily containment and spiritual purity: the holy woman's enclosure ensures her perpetual virginity through the enactment of a symbolic burial. The insistence on enclosure as the defining mark of sanctity finds expression in the Ancrene Wisse when the author recommends an imitation of Christ's suffering on Calvary that will effect a total shut-down of the body. In an ingenious, if somewhat perverse imitatio ·Christi, Christ's broken body is interpreted in such a way as to remind women to shore up their own vulnerable bodies against corruption. 1 Evidence from the Katherine Group and the Ancrenne Wisse suggests a model of sanctity based on sealing the body within strict physical and spiritual boundaries. Yet even here it is possible to construct counter-readings of the material which operate against the overtly manipulative, misogynistic and often prurient nature of the writing. This is most readily seen in the virgin martyr legends where the humiliations and extreme physical tortures endured by the female Saint facilitate her empowerment and entry into language. Saint Margaret, for example, is at her most articulate when, through her tortures, she can condemn her enemies and give testimony to God: 'Oh!' she said, 'wretches, you senseless fools, what do you expect? If my body is tom apart, my soul will be at peace among the righteous, through sorrow and bodily pain, souls are saved.' (Millett and Wogan-Browne, 1992, 53)

The legends follow a pattern whereby the Saint's v1rgm body is opened through torture to her lover Jesus, and the more her body is broken, the noisier and more empassioned her testimony becomes. The pattern of empowerment through suffering is repeated in the lives of female Saints and mystics from the later medieval period. The broken body

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of Christ, rather than urging these women to closure and silence, inspired them to break, wound and mutilate their own flesh in an imitatio Christi which gave them authority to speak from the body. The eroticism of their affective spirituality is pronounced and it is no coincidence that late medieval female piety is notorious for its noise and extreme displays of emotion. In imitation of Christ's bodily suffering and the pursuit of spiritual perfection, women starved and beat themselves to enter into a relationship with Christ in which the erotic and spiritual come together in ecstatic visions in which the women frequently speak of God as lover: of tasting him, of kissing him and becoming soaked in his blood (Walker-Bynum, 1987, 151-86; Walker-Bynum, 1991, 190) Perhaps not surprisingly then, the lives of the female Saints and mystics make difficult reading and pose uncomfortable problems for many readers. It is certainly true that (male) historians have traditionally been rather squeamish in their approach to this material and to its displays of bodily excess and emotion. In a much-quoted passage on late medieval mysticism and affective spirituality, the historian Dom David Knowles focuses on what he calls the idiosyncratic nature of this form of devotion. He sees it as a second-rate, inferior and, interestingly, contaminating form of spirituality: 'This stream of [pure spirituality] continued to flow till the reign of Henry VIII, but there is some evidence that from the beginning of the fifteenth century onwards it was contaminated by another current, that of a more emotional and idiosyncratic devotion manifesting itself in visions, revelations and unusual behaviour' (1955, 222-3). 'Unusual behaviour' is presumably a way of drawing a discreet veil over practices that embarrass and offend. However, it is not only male theologians and church historians who find this material difficult. In a paper which starts with a description of the emaciated, battered, bound and bleeding St Rose of Lima ( 15 86-1617), the Christian writer and feminist Sara Maitland has made a valiant and impassioned attempt to come to terms with what she calls the 'penitential excesses and morbid fanaticism' of female Saints and mystics. She is speaking here not only of the Middle Ages: Women deform their faces with glass, with acid, with their own fingers, they bind their limbs, carve up their bodies, pierce, bruise, cut and torture themselves. The most highly praised mystical writings speak of Christ's love in terms of rape. [These women] abase and abuse themselves. They do it for love of Jesus and the church applauds them. (1983, 127)

From this it should be clear why in The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir wished to interpret the devotional woman's identification with Christ as one based on a shared identity as passive and victimized: 'the girl is overwhelmed to see that man, man-God has assumed her role' (1976, 686). And indeed why

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the medievalist Sarah Beckwith should pose the question of 'whether female mysticism exists to act out [patriachy's] most sexist fantasies, to reinforce the relegation of "woman" to a transcendent, mystified and mystificatory sphere where female masochism is spectacularly redeployed in the pose of crucifixion' (1986, 36). Yet it is possible to read these women's lives as something other than case studies on self-hatred and as the masochistic product of the dominant ideologies that constrained their lives. There has been a great deal of interesting work on patterns of late medieval female sanctity and mysticism over the last decade that has gone a long way to rewriting the manner in which late medieval bodily devotion can be accounted for. I am thinking here specifically of the work of historians and literary critics such as Caroline Walker-Bynum, Karma Lochrie, Sarah Beckwith and Laurie Finke, all of whom, from different theoretical stances, have contributed to the subject's reformulation. Here I wish to produce my own response to the way the subject has been reconstituted and to think through some of its implications for my work on late medieval piety, lay spirituality, and heresy at the end of the Middle Ages. In particular, I am interested in the contention that, although the discourse of the female mystic was originally constructed out of disciplines designed to regulate the female body, it is, paradoxically, through these same disciplines that the mystic ~chieved her power. Laurie Finke has argued this point in Foucauldian terms, suggesting that the disciplinary technologies of mantric prayer, flagellation, fasting and vigils become, for the mystics, a method of consolidating spiritual power and authority: In the Middle Ages torture was not regarded simply as a form of punishment. It was, as Foucault has shown, a technique and a ritual, a semiotic system which must 'mark the victim.' Torture inscribed on the victim's body the signs of the ruler's power. It was one of the most visible displays of that power, an art, that competed with other visual displays of theocratic rule. The marking of the victim's body signifies the power that punishes. In the ' excesses' of torture, a whole economy of power is invested. In her excesses, the mystic becomes at once torturer and victim. This, it seems to me is the whole point. The mystic's painher inflicting of wounds upon herself- grants her the authority to speak and to be heard. Her body bears the marks, the 'signs' of her own spiritual power. (1993, 41-2)

It is, therefore, the excesses of the female mystics that mark them apart. Finke

stresses that at no time did the church condone severe fasting and selfflagellation. The issue seems instead to be about regulating women's bodies

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and their devotional practices, as the following extract from the eighth section of the Ancrene Wisse demonstrates: She should not wear a belt of any kind next to her skin except with her confessor's permission, or wear anything made of iron or hair or hedgehog skins, or beat herself with them, or with a scourge weighted with lead, with holly or with thorns, or draw blood, without her confessor's permission. She should not sting herself anywhere with nettles, or scourge the front of her body, or mutilate herself with cuts, or take excessively severe disciplines at any one time to subdue temptations. (Millett and Wogan-Browne, 1992, 137)

The passage does not forbid outright beating or drawing blood, but rather the practice of these disciplines without the confessor's permission. 'Excess', however, is forbidden and again it would seem that the issue is one of control: the enclosed female religious may not authorize the inscription of her own body with the instruments of pain. Finke argues for a continuity of tradition among the lives and writings of the female mystics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; younger women very self-consciously modelled their lives and their writing on those of their predecessors and reveal similar strategies for transcending the secondariness of the female body. Yet the reception of these women differs widely across time and space, thus pointing to the need to be very culturally and historically specific in the exploration of the social meaning of their devotional practices. My own interest, then, is in trying to uncover a social politics of female bodily devotion as it can be explored in the early fifteenthcentury Book ofMargery Kempe. 2 Margery Kempe's Book is sometimes called the first autobiography in the English language. It describes the life of a wife and mayor's daughter from Lynn and offers a unique account of one woman's entry into language, albeit via the good offices of members of the male clergy, as Margery herself was illiterate. Margery's account of her life is littered with direct and indirect intertextual references to other Continental saints and mystics from whom she borrows narrative tropes. She was particularly influenced by the married Saint and mother, Bridget of Sweden (1303-73) as well as Mary of Oignies (d. 1213). The first steps Margery takes towards her self-fashioned spiritual life can be found in the accounts of these women's lives: she practises marital chastity, secretly wears a hair shirt, fasts, performs vigils and spends hours on end in mantric prayer and the ' byddyng of many bedys'. Later, like Mary of Oignies, she develops a bodily language of devotion which involves excessive crying and weeping at the thought of Christ's Passion. In fact, Margery's sobs and roars become her trademark and are a source of much contention - she is often required to restrain herself as her outbursts disrupt public worship.

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However, Christ's own voice offers an authoritative interpretation of Margery's shift from private fleshly mortification to a display of the bodily language of excess, which accompanies Margery's spiritual union with him: 'Fastyng, dowtyr, is good for hong be-gynnars & discrete penawns ... & yet it is not parfyte . . . And I haue oftyn-tymes, dowtyr, teld the that thynkynd, wepynd & hy contemplacyon is the best lyfe in erthe' (Kempe, 89). Yet this is not enough for Margery and at various points in the text she imagines for herself the ultimate martyrdom .. She would like to be slain for the.love of God and to 'be bowndyn hyr hed and hir fet to a stokke & hir hed to be smet of wyth a scharp ex for Goddys lofe' (ibid. 29-30). Elsewhere, not unlike Angela ofFoligno's wish to 'go through squares and towns naked, with fish and meat hanging around her neck', she wants to make a public spectacle of her penitance: to be 'leyd nakyd on a hyrdil, aile men to wonderyn on me for pi loue ... & pei to castyn slory & slugge on me, & be drawyn fro town to town euery day my lyf-tyme, hyfthu wer plesyd perby & no mannys sowle hyndryd' (ibid. 184). That these fantasies are charged with a unmistakeable eroticism is perhaps acknowledged by Margery's insight that her display may be injurious to men's souls. Significantly, they testify to the way that Margery understood the legends of the martyrs and the self-inflicted humiliations of the mystics: supreme bodily suffering is the ultimate testimony of her love for Christ and her imitatio Christi, a route to empowerment. Nevertheless; if Margery's exposure to hagiography and mystical writings taught her that bodily devotion could be a bid for power, by her own testimony it is equally clear that her practices often gained a social meaning which was quite other than that which she anticipated. In her Book Margery's body and what it means becomes hotly contested as her devotional practices are constantly being read and re-read in different ways by her husband, her community and the secular and spiritual authorities. Willy-nilly, Margery becomes embroiled in a number of key issues concerning late medieval lay piety and heresy, especially where her lifestyle and her ambitions seem to encroach onto the territory which was strongly defended by the clergy. The ecclesiastical monopoly on preaching and the clerical control of access to the Eucharist are important issues here, as Margery's strategies for transcending the cultural limitations of her gender intersect interestingly with the concerns of an institution under threat from contemporary Lollard heresies. Margery's practice of fasting is a case in point, and here I would like to take into account Caroline Walker-Bynum's ground-breaking study, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. Walker-Bynum's book elaborates an anthropology of symbol and ritual in order to explore the food practices of the medieval mystics. Rather than reading the self-starvation of these women as a product of self-hatred or symptomatic of a kind of 'holy anorexia', Walker-Bynum sees such practices as keying into a cultural understanding of food which

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encompasses both suffering and fertility. Her argument is that late medieval piety conceived of Christ's body as food, and described his suffering and bleeding as a mother giving birth and lactating. The food practices of the mystics are, in this account, a way of gaining power and giving meaning: their bodies not only mirror a maternal God, but also provide a means of controlling and manipulating family and authority. For Walker-Bynum, the body becomes a site of empowering possibilities, and the fasting practices of the women are seen not as a way to punish the vile and contaminated flesh, but as a means of embracing its potential (1987, 227-9). Walker-Bynum's study points to the manner in which frequent fasting was often accompanied by the desire for more and more frequent holy communion. She discusses a whole tradition of Eucharistic visions in which women's fasting practices and their relationship to the ritual of communion can be seen to be acting out this bodily means of empowerment. As a mark of holiness, religious women often petitioned for the right to frequent communion. Experience taught the church that granting this privilege could have unfor-eseen results. Walker-Bynum's own account reveals how women's Eucharistic visions often became a kind of 'show trial' for clerical immorality and negligence. There are cases in which women would battle for the right to frequent communion with the local church and then, on receiving it, gag on it or vomit it out because it had been consecrated by a corrupt priest (ibid. 2279). Margery Kempe's manipulation of fasting practices confirms the cultural association with communion and Eucharistic visions. Perhaps more importantly, however, through the details of Margery's narration we are also given some insight into the way her activities exist in an ongoing dialogue about communion, transubstantiation and the social meaning of Christ's body. In the very first chapter of the Book Margery describes how she lived for a long time unshriven of a particular sin, as she thought that: 'why! sche was in good heele hir nedyd no confessyon but don penawns be hir-self a-loone, & all schuld be for- houyn, for God is mercyful j-now. And perfor pis creatur oftyntymes dede greet penawns in fastyng bred & watyr & other dedys almes wyth devowt preyers, saf sche wold not schewyn it in confession' (Kempe, 7). Thus, Margery's pentitential procedures are taking place outside the institution of the church. In her retrospective account of the crisis which followed her near death in childbirth, she sees these initial self-fashioned penances as promptings from the devil. However, Margery's institutionally unauthorized fasting continues in her account, where it is initially underwritten by the authority of Christ and only later by the church itself. Margery recounts a vision of Jesus in which he not only sanctifies her fasting, but suggests that it should be marked by frequent access to the Eucharist as an outward sign of holiness and ecclesiastically mediated favour:

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CLAIRE MARSHALL Also, my derworthy dowtyr, lm must forsake pat pow louyst best in pis world, & pat is etyng of flesch. And in-stede of pat flesch thow schalt etyn my flesch & my blod, pat is pe very body of Crist in the Sacrament of pe Awter. Thys is my wyl, dowtyr, pat pow receyue my body euery Sonday, and I schal flowe so mych grace in pe pat aile pe world xa1 merue!yn perof. (ibid., 17)

The promise that Margery should receive holy communion weekly should be understood in light of the very limited access ordinary parishioners had to the Eucharistic body of Christ. The late Middle Ages saw an increasingly rigid monitoring of this access by the clergy, and parishioners would normally only receive communion once a year. Anticipation of clerical hostility to this extraordinary mark of divine favour is perhaps to be found in the manner in which Jesus hastens to reassure Margery at this point: 'Drede the nowt, dowtyr, for thow schalt haue vyctory of al thin enmys. I schal yeue the grace j-now to answer euery clerke in the loue of God.' Margery confides her vision to an anchorite, and she relates the woman's response: 'Dowtyr, ye sowkyn euyn on Crystys brest, and ye han an emest-peny (a pledge) ofHeuyn' (ibid., 18). The metaphor used by the anchorite to legitimize Margery's vision precisely confirms the connection Caroline Walker-Bynum has uncovered between food, suffering and fertility: the suffering, feminized Christ provides food for his hungry spouse, as Margery drinks the blood from the wound in his side. This narrative thread is then seemingly discontinued until Chapter 16 when Margery approaches the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, and asks that he 'grawnt hir auctoryte of chesyng hyr confessour & to be howselyd euery Sonday, yyf God wold dysposen hir therto, vndyr hys lettyr and hys seel thorw al hys prouynce' (ibid., 36). He readily assents and, to Margery's great surprise, will take no 'syluer er gold' even for the writing and sealing of the letter. What Margery (and apparently Jesus) had not anticipated was that her devotion to the Eucharist could be co-opted as a useful public and popularist articulation of faith at a time when the Doctrine of Transubstantiation was being hotly debated. The issue here is one of local control. Arundel, who played a crucial and very active role in the church's assault against Lollardy, presumably believed he could make good political capital out of Margery and use her voice to shore up the rituals and central mysteries of the church. Yet, despite Margery's evident wish to be accepted by the hierarchy of the church, she does not always escape censure. In some ways this may seem curious, as the key aspects of her devotion - her worship of the Eucharist, frequent confession, pilgrimages and devotion to the holy family - are all totally orthodox. In part, the difficulties she encounters seem to relate to her mobility and to her self-imposed separation from her local community. However, even within the context of parochial worship and even when, as in

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the case of her desire for frequent holy communion, her devotion has been underwritten by the archbishop's 'seel', her behaviour is disruptive and transgressive. In Chapter 56 Margery relates how Christ's Passion working in her soul causes her to weep and cry during mass. Her tears are so noisy that that 'prestys durst not howselyn hir opynly in the Chirche but preuyly in the Priowrys Chapel at Lenne fro the peplys audiens' (ibid., 138). This strategy of separation and containment is not entirely successful; because she has been 'putte owt of chirche' her roaring during mass increases so much that it takes two men to 'heldyn hir in her armys tyl hir cryng was cesyd'. She claims the cause of her tears to be the 'habundawns of lofe pat sche felt in pe precyows Sacrament, whech sche stedfastly beleuyd was very God & Man in pe form of breed'. The problem, however, seems to lie not in the sentiment, but in the method of giving testimony. Margery is setting herself apart as both sign and transmitter of God's word and, although she is reconfirming belief in the Eucharist, she does so through a language of bodily excess which signals the special grace she receives from the Lord. In a conversation with Christ, he confirms this to be the case and authorizes the public broadcasting of her weeping: 'Dowtyr, I will not han my grace hyd pat I heue pe, for pe more besy pat pe pepil is to hyndryn it & lette it, pe more schal I spredyn it a-brood & makyn it knowyn to aile pe worlde' (ibid., 138). Eventually, following complaints from the monks at the chapel her confessor, Master Robert, arranges for her to receive communion at the parish church of Saint Margaret. A reported conversation reveals the difficulty for the local clergy: whether they like it or not, they are charged by the Archbishop of Canterbury's letter 'by vertu of obedyens' to hear Margery's confession and administer holy communion to her as often as she requires (ibid., 139). In some ways, this episode epitomizes the inherent contradictions in the mystic's project of making public a private and personal experience of God. Here the difficulty arises because Margery's spiritual union with Christ and her devotion to the Passion find a public outlet in roaring and weeping which somehow has to be assimilated into the communal act of Eucharistic worship. Her faith in the Eucharist may well encompass the idea of an embodied community of the faithful, but her actions are individualistic and, moreover, constitute an alternative and improvised sign of and route to God's grace. Mass in the later Middle Ages was more about spectacle than participation and the danger here, aside from the insistence on frequent participation, is that Margery's performance may overshadow the priest's. It is presumably for this reason that the priest at Saint Margaret's eventually devises a strategy of witholding the consecrated wafer from Margery until she is quiet: sche cryed so lowde pat it myth ben herd al a-bowte pe Chirche & owte of pe Chirche as sche xulde a deyid perwyth pat sche myth not receyuen pe Sacrament of pe prestys handys, pe preyst turnyng hym a-geyn to the

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awter wyth pe preciows Sacrament, til hir crying was cesyd. And pan he, tumyng a-geyn to hir, xuld minystyr hir as hym awte to do. (ibid., 139)

The priest's ruse is evidently designed to control Margery's outbursts, but it also has the effect of making her individualistic performance a part of the ritual itself: she becomes an integral part of the spectacle whereby God is made flesh. The difficulty of assimilating Margery's form of worship into the community is also found in her account of her 'participation' in the feast of Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi processions were an urban and essentially bourgeois phenomenon. Their purpose was to display the right relation of the community to each other in the presence of God and this relationship, sanctified by the priest's re-enactment of Christ's sacrifice in the ritual of consecration, depended upon both social collectivity and differentiation. The procession was a ritual enactment of the metaphor of society as a body, played out in such a way that the hierarchical structure of society was displayed through a metaphor for organic unity (James, 1983, 3-29). Margery problematizes her relation to the social body and exposes the myth of its inclusivity. As a married woman she would have been allowed a part in the procession, which consisted of clergy, town officials and laity. Yet her behaviour during the procession disturbs her fellow worshippers and results in her expulsion from it. Her weeping and 'boystows sobbyng' causes one woman to reprimand her sharply: 'Damsel, God hef us grace to folwyn the steppys of owr Lord Ihesu Christ' (Kempe, 107). By addressing Margery slightingly as 'damsel' - a term more usually applied to young unmarried women - the woman is calling into question Margery's fitness to process at all, as young women were not included in the ranks of the predominantly male ritual. Margery's response is to stage an alternative imitatio Christi from her position of self-imposed marginalization. She is taken to a house where she cries 'I dey, I dey' and roars 'wondirfully'. In the process she draws to herself a small band of admirers- and she herself becomes an alternative 'minde' (ibid., 107). 3 The leading medievalist and materialist David Aers has recently played down the idea that Margery Kempe's imitatio Christi subverts established structures of power. In a thought-provoking article on the dominant representations of Christ's humanity at the end of the Middle Ages, he claims that the strategies of abjection and self-inflicted suffering found in the writing of the mystics did not pose a serious challenge to the hegemony of the church. He states: 'Margery Kempe's greatest moments of risk, in fact, were when she was suspected of being a Lollard, of being a preacher, not of being one who practiced the "abjection" or the "delicious grovelling" recorded by Lochrie and Walker-Bynum' (1995, 107-25). In a sense, this has to be correct. When Margery is cross-examined at York, for example, the archbishop is primarily keen to know whether she will

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disrupt his diocese by teaching the Gospel, which is, of course, expressly forbidden to women, but practiced by the Lollards. Even though he is ultimately convinced of her orthodoxy, he insists that she is escorted out of the area. However, here Aers is focusing on just one of the interpretations brought to bear on Margery's lifestyle and in so doing he overlooks the fact that it is through her self-inflicted privations that she has entered the public arena at' all. What makes Margery's Book so unique is its profound commitment to the dialogic nature of meaning. It may be true, as Laurie Finke says, that the mystic's pain and bodily inscriptions grant her the authority to speak, but it is equally the case that The Book of Margery Kempe testifies to the contested and plural meanings of the mystic's 'language of excess' as it enters the public domain. Moreover, despite the orthodoxy of Margery's beliefs and her cooption by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, it is clear that the form taken by her devotion could still have destabilizing consequences. Margery's Eucharistic worship is a case in point. The troubled history of the clergy's attempts to incorporate her testimony to the enfleshment of God into the rhythms and rituals of local parish worship lays bare the mechanisms of clerical control of the sacred and demonstrates how the lay body of a bourgeois woman and selfstyled bride of Christ threatened that control.

3

The Constructions and Deconstructions of Gendered Bodies in Selected Plays of Christopher Marlowe Doris Feldmann In his book A Lover's Discourse, a useful compendium of received ideas, Roland Barthes associates man with presence and woman with absence: 'Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction ... in any man who utters the other's absence something feminine is declared' (1978, 14). Here it would be possible to assemble a collection of passages from literary and philosophical texts in order to show what the scholars of gender studies mean by gender constructions. Barthes's text represents a male subject whose symbolic position and identity within a cultural order is defined by the female as the determining 'other'. The difference between masculine and feminine is thus grounded on ideology and on semiotics rather than on biology. Concepts of gender refer to relationships based on power and meaning which, although they may include the physical body, are not directly determined by sex. Accordingly, masculinity and femininity and their bodily representations can be regarded as results of historical processes, as psychological and social constructs. In gender studies, scholars seek to revise the discourses of gender by deconstructing texts centred on male or female ideals and stereotypes as represented by male or female bodies, and by analysing gendered bodies as culturally specific and constantly shifting forms of discourse. As a discursive practice which questions the existence of a stable, unified subject, gender as a category encourages critics to highlight the discursive processes involved in the dynamic production of meaning as inscribed through gendered bodies. Hence, for the scholars of gender studies the body is always a discursive body, a way of signifying and negotiating relationships of power, and thus a site of contestation and disagreement. The English Renaissance has become the focus of interest for scholars of gender studies because Elizabethan texts are regarded as early representations of typically modem notions of gendered bodies. Although the concerns of women's studies and (in recent years) of men's studies figure largely in Shakespearean criticism (for example Barker

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and Kamps, 1995), Marlowe's texts have not yet been subjected to gender critiques of this kind. The body as it is figured in Marlowe's plays has been investigated by some scholars, but readings supported by gender theories have not been attempted. 1 A reason for this may be that Marlowe does not represent the literary 'mainstream' or 'male stream' in the way that Shakespeare does. Implicitly, however, critics have always focused on certain conceptions of gender when interpreting his plays. The common feature of (so-called) liberal humanist readings of the plays is a commitment to the idea of a seamlessly unified self, commonly called 'man', a self which is both assertive and masculine. In this context, critics most often see the plays as dramatic assertions of their male author's 'mastering will' (Symonds, 1884, 135) and each of the male protagonists as mirroring some aspects of the Renaissance 'aspiring man' (Dollimore, 1984, 112). Essentialist interpretations are saturated with universalistic notions of male archetypes. In such interpretations, Dr Faustus is the immature magician, Tamburlaine the aggressive warrior, and Edward II the weak king and the feminine lover (Levin, 1952, 134, 51, 111). In psychoanalytic interpretations, too, masculinity is assumed to be an automatic, settled norm. In such critiques, the plays become symbolic expressions of a male psyche, of an exclusively male sexual identity- an identity, however, which is only supposed to be 'satisfactory' (Kuriyama, 1980, 107) if it is heterosexual. Critics may, of course, be quite justified in assuming that the overall concern with masculinity is entirely appropriate to the conventions of Elizabethan theatre. In this 'transvestite theater' (Greenblatt, 1988, 88), the presence of an allmale cast alone implies that the Elizabethan concept of gender was teleologically male (Laqueur, 1990, 63-148). Thus Marlowe's plays, when staged, constituted types of masculinity and femininity which differed from those implied by the written texts. Dido, Queen ofCarthage, for instance, a court drama for boy actors, relies heavily upon the physical nature of the performers, upon their bodies. In calling attention to the sexual immaturity and precociousness of the boy actors (Cope, 1974, 319), the play ridicules the posturing of its hero and calls attention to the constructed, fictive nature of heroic manliness. Moreover, by showing male actors in female subject positions within a symbolic system of order, that is, the order of the stage, Elizabethan theatre productions seem to suggest that the conceptions of male and female are semiotic constructs:2 within the topography of the staged body, gender classifications are merely constituted by outward appearances or signs. The question which immediately arises is whether this also holds for the dramatic texts themselves. In this essay I will be arguing that Marlowe's plays dismantle the seemingly stable, uniform and extralinguistic notion of masculinity and femininity as represented by male and female bodies, in order to expose these conceptions as ideological and semiotic . constructs, as bodily fictions. I will outline some of the textual processes and ideological tensions implied in the representation of gendered bodies - bodies which, as

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discourses, signify and negotiate contemporary relationships of power. Moreover, I will try to outline the editorial implications and theoretical consequences of the gender contexts found in Marlowe's plays. More than any other Marlovian hero, Tamburlaine has been regarded as the very emblem of manhood. 3 In fact, the play abounds with definitions and discussions of masculinity - a masculinity whose contours are more sharply defined by its juxtaposition with femininity. Other characters describe Tamburlaine as 'manly' (Tamburlaine, Part I, 2.1.11 ), and his martial conduct exemplifies masculine virtu, that uncompromising strength of will essential to the successful ruler. Tamburlaine's 'crises' arise from confrontations with the feminine. In his love for Zenocrate he runs the risk of acting in an effeminate way by subjecting himself to her will: 'But how unseemly is it for my sex, I My discipline of arms and chivalry, I ... To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint!' (Part I, 5.2.111-14). Within the conventions of the warrior ideal, however, Zenocrate's body becomes Tarnburlaine's property and a sign of his control over the subversively 'other' - a symbol vital to the exercise of patriarchal power: 'And every warrior that is rapt with love I Of fame, of valour, and of victory, I Must needs have beauty beat on his conceits' (Part I, 5.2.117-19). Tamburlaine exhibits his anxiety about his masculine identity, and his compulsion to define it through binary oppositions, even more clearly in the second part of the play. Indeed, a series of episodes in Part II, centring on the body, reinforce a sense of the hero's waning authority. As Tamburlaine draws his sense of masculine identity exclusively from a patriarchal ideology, he is disturbed to find that his sons, whom he perceives as extentions of ·his own masculine body and as guarantors of the principle of patrilinearity, appear to resemble Zenocrate.4 Tamburlaine asserts his masculinity by violently suppressing the supposedly 'other', apparently the only way in which he can, conceive of reacting: he kills Calyphas, whom he calls an 'effeminate brat' (Part II, 4.1.164), because Calyphas explicitly rejects Tamburlaine's masculine code as being '[m]ore childish-valourous than manly-wise' (Part II, 4.1.17). In Part I, it is Mycetes, who forms one extreme on 'a scale of manhood' (Steane, 1964, 63), with Mycetes at the bottom and Tamburlaine at the top. In this way, Marlowe depicts masculinity as something which is neither biological nor stable. Masculinity is, on the contrary, open to interpretation. Just like the play's critics, the play's characters judge Tamburlaine's masculinity in accordance with their own values and interests and with their own patriarchal yardsticks. Indeed, it is Tamburlaine's body which is insistently the object of interpretation. One ofhis opponents calls him a 'monster turned to a manly shape' (Part I, 2.6.16); one of his admirers describes him in terms of the 'classical' body by comparing his outward appearance to that of Achilles.5 Despite the comments of most of its interpreters, the play reveals Tamburlaine's own concept of sovereign masculinity to be a construct, a discursive strategy that has specific ideological functions. In

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presenting a hero who never renounces his claim to total mastery and who pursues his masculine self-assertion to the end, Marlowe's play explores the limits oql).e hero's masculine discourse. In the following, I will outline some of the semiotic uncertainties and political anxieties implied in this fiction of absolute masculine authority. Textuality must be seen as an important paradigm for Tamburlaine's masculine identity and power.6 The twinship of sword and word, of conquering and naming, is echoed throughout the two parts ofthe play. Tamburlaine: Yet would I with my sword make Jove to stoop.

I will confute those blind geographers

And with this pen reduce them to a map, Calling the provinces ... After my name ... . (Part I, 4.4.80-86)

In presenting himself as the sole maker of history, Tamburlaine uses the sword, a powerful phallic symbol, to express the construct of masculinity as male authorship, a construct modelled on the self-contained phallus as the determining signifier. He centres his arguments on the sovereignty of the engendering self and on what from his point of view is his god-given privilege to determine meaning himself. His self-definition as the 'Scourge of God' (Part II, 4.1.156) serves as the transcendental origin or end of his violent gestures of self-assurance: 'I must apply myself to fit those terms, I In war, in blood, in death, in cruelty' (Part II, 4.1 .157-8). A logocentric textual system in which 'words are oracles' (Part I, 3.3.102) admits no gap between promise and performance, between the signifier and the signified: the hero seeks to banish indeterminacy and to put an end to semiotic deviation by relentlessly turning words into concrete actions and visible objects. Thus he exchanges his shepherd's costume for a suit of armour; he locks up kingly bodies in cages, uses them as footstools and harnesses them for his chariot; and corpses become 'sights of power' and ' objects fit for Tamburlaine' (Part I, 5.2.413 and 414). From the perspective of a binary logic, sight resembles language in emphatically dividing subject and object from each other. The visual spectacles on stage are thus meant to sustain the hero's verbal fantasies of total domination by making his power fully visible through tortured, wounded and slaughtered bodies and by 'freezing' these in static tableaux (Thurn, 1989, 14). Marlowe dramatizes the impossibility of such closure, however, by showing how Tamburlaine is unable to continue his mode of self-definition except in terms of verbal and nonverbal signs, extreme differences and violent acts of suppression. In this respect, the scenes of fixing, binding, harnessing or embalming bodies, as well as the mechanically repetitive nature of the plot, measure the instability that

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underlies Tamburlaine's system of signification. Meaning is produced through a process that constantly defers meaning on to other differential elements rather than through the static closure of binary oppositions. Thus the map brought to Tamburlaine at the end of Part II symbolizes the gap in and limits of the hero's phallogocentric discourse: it suggests the absence of total conquest, ironically mocking a hero whose body is tortured by, as Tamburlaine believes, a daring god. The conqueror is himself conquered by death. Similarly, Tamburlaine's attempts at establishing a stable definition of masculinity by applying the categories of patriarchal discourse are ironically subverted in the course of the play. Patriarchy depends upon the erection of such controlling differences as male-female, active-passive, husband-wife and subject--object. Tamburlaine strives to constitute and sustain himself as a masculine subject by transforming Zenocrate into an object. In these acts of appropriation or colonization, in which the female body is described in Petrarchan terms, however, elements of insecurity and ambiguity creep in. Tamburlaine completely fails in his efforts to gain control over Zenocrate's body by first taking it captive, then aestheticizing and idealizing and finally embalming it. In treating Zenocrate's body as a sign of patriarchal rule, Tamburlaine attempts to make the feminine function as an extension of the masculine principle. When Zenocrate dies, however, she becomes 'the author of (Tamburlaine's) death' (Part II, 2.4.56) and thus achieves a position of power over the hero. As a virtuous wife and mother, who makes male reproduction possible, Zenocrate plays an ambivalent role, for she blurs the binary oppositions on which Tamburlaine's patriarchal discourse is based. Seen in the context of the masculine principle of competitiveness, she has already crossed the boundaries of traditional femininity: she is accused of unfaithfulness for breaking her engagement with Arabia. While serving as a symbol for Tamburlaine's rise, Zenocrate becomes involved in his transgression. In doing so, her status becomes morally questionable. As the hero cannot regard Zenocrate as the passive, enclosed body, he comes to doubt his fatherhood and thus his position of sovereign masculine authority. 7 In view of the problems of legitimacy and succession connected with Queen Elizabeth I around 1590, such displacements in the traditional gender system were politically explosive. In the context of Elizabethan economics, the radical instability of the meanings of masculinity and femininity, as represented by the female body, is even more apparent. As the symbolic property of husbands and fathers, some of the female characters in Marlowe's plays assume the qualities of a typically modem form of ownership, that is, of capital: they are components of a universally accessible and mobile market economy, and as such they are 'free' (Stallybrass, 1986, 128). In The Jew of Malta, for instance, the merchant Barabas, in equating his daughter with his money in the famous analogy '0 girl! 0 gold!' (2.1.57), loses influence over both. Having put Abigail up for sale like a commodity, he forfeits his authority as a father. In A Massacre at

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Paris, Guise's socio-political position becomes blurred and uncertain because of his wife's supposed infidelity - an uncertainty which is presented in terms of female sexuality and which is bound up with questions of reading and interpreting: Guise: ... hath my Jove been so obscur' d in thee, That others need to comment on my text? Is Guise's glory but a cloudy mist, In sight and judgement of thy lustful eye?

(4.1.27-32)

The play discusses the rupture of gender boundaries as a rupture of social boundaries, with the Duchess of Guise described within the context of the economic language of commodities and enclosures. When Mugeroun threatens Guise's property by trying to take away his wife, a soldier says to him: 'you ... forestall his market ... and whereas he is your landlord, you will take upon you to be his, and till the ground that he himself should occupy, which is his own free land; if it be not too free- there's the question' (4.5.4-9). At this point, Marlowe presents a paradox that is central to positions of power achieved by social or economic advancement: these characters represent themselves by overcoming or subverting the existing social structures and by adhering to the traditional gender boundaries, although these are subject to the same processes of change. Tamburlaine, too, suspends traditional gender concepts together with other socially contingent values: he treats his enemies 'without respect of sex, degree, or age' (Part I, 4.1.63). In this play, the gender stereotype of the virgin, which was especially relevant at the time, is used to demonstrate the view that the validity of feminine attributes is dependent on historical circumstance. In the construction of Queen Elizabeth's public image, the stereotype of the virgin was used to symbolize a power associated with inviolability (Montrose, 1988, 48-51). Tamburlaine invalidates the sexual and political analogy between the virginal body and the state as hortus conclusus, for, when the virgins of Damascus come to him as suppliants of the city, he orders his soldiers to run them through with lances. With this act of phallic aggression, the play can be seen to negotiate some of the contemporary political uncertainties connected with the rule of a woman, especially since the hero inverts yet another gender discourse Queen Elizabeth used to enforce her claims to absolute power. From the repertoire of pastoral conventions, she chose the figure of the shepherd in order to channel male strategies of power into an act of amorous devotion. The courtiers or 'shepherds' were made to woo 'Eliza, Queene of shepheardes' (Montrose, 1980, 153), in an unassumingly peaceful Arcadia. In this sense, in rising from shepherd to ruler, Tamburlaine articulates an ideological tension underlying these propagandist discourses of gender. In his various parodies of male courtship within the context

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of the pastoral mode, Marlowe heightens the contemporary discussion of courtly discourses of gender. The position of putative patriarchal power is inverted the moment the material basis of the feigned love relationships is exposed. In The Jew of Malta, for instance, it is not an amorous courtier who quotes the famous invitation, 'live with me, and be my Jove' (4.2.116), but the slave lthamore. He is not addressing the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, but a prostitute whom he apostrophizes as 'Love's Queen' (4.2.112) and who is merely taking advantage of the slave for her own economic gains. By displacing the meaning of masculinity (for example, by puns on 'man' as a male and as a servant) to the point of tautology ('[A] man's a man' [4.4.15]), Marlowe reveals the rhetorical nature of gender concepts.8 Whether in the form of ideological or of semiotic constructs, Marlowe does not give masculinity and femininity any substantial meaning. Instead, gendered bodies appear as results of heterogeneous processes of interpretation, thus enforcing a crisis ofreferentiality and authority. Edward II illustrates the extent to which masculinity and femininity are dependent on conscious attempts at formal, bodily representation for and by others. In the play Marlowe probes the problems of gender stereotypes by introducing androgynous characters and role reversals (Deats, 1988, 25-8). Queen Isabella shifts from the feminine role of Patient Griselda in the first two acts to the role of the aggressive, callous and 'mannish' woman in the final scenes. Isabella's indomitable will to act and to speak for herself reveals that her feminine passivity is a fac.:ade and an instrument of power in its own right: the ostensibly patient Griselda actually initiates much of the play's action. The highly unconventional hero violates all the expected external forms, including bodily gestures (Bevington and Shapiro, 1988, 268), of demonstrating his masculine status as king. He wears fashionable, feminine clothes;9 his public appearances are governed by private desires; and he behaves in a disrespectful way towards his barons. Edward rejects those patterns of behaviour commonly used to establish a masculine identity. In defining himself by private love affairs and in depending on his favourites, he deliberately chooses a feminine position, which Marlowe's contemporaries would have considered derivative. His 'homosexual' love 10 takes a narcissistic form: Edward identifies so completely with his lover Gaveston that he fuses his bodily identity with that of his lover, and in doing so creates an undifferentiated oneness. He says to Gaveston: 'Kiss not my hand: I Embrace me, Gaveston, as I do thee. I Why shouldst thou kneel? know'st thou not who I am? I Thy friend, thyself, another Gaveston!' (1.1.14(}-43). 11 Within the assumed frame of reference of the medieval notion of the king's two bodies (Kantorowicz, 1957), Edward can be seen to abuse or even prostitute both. When Edward invites Gaveston to share the body of the king, he means both, the body natural and the body politic, for he places the royal seal and the treasury at Gaveston's disposal. In failing to differentiate between his own identity and the context in which this identity is

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defined, between his private and physical, and his public and mystical body as a king, Edward loses Gaveston, his crown, his name, his body and his life. Thus the catastrophe of no-difference appears as the ultimate enemy of identity. Moreover, Marlowe seems to imply that masculine identity depends upon a consciously constructed notion of gender differences, on embodiments of gender and of social and political hierarchies. It should be noted, however, that Edward's opponent, the archetypically masculine Mortimer, whose sense of self is characterized by sharp role differentiation and domination, fares no better. In situations where everything is debated, contested and structured within maledominated political, social and economic contexts, positions of masculine power and identity tum out to be unstable and artificial. As Mortimer naively assumes that he can master his own discourse, he remains blind to the fact that his masculine position is also a product of processes of signification and to the fact that his bodily existence is dependent on the interpretation of texts by others. 12 In this context, the letter Mortimer sends to Matrevis is climactic because it is indeterminate. By making a radical distinction between signifier and signified, Mortimer is unable to fix the meaning and thus the effect he achieves in his discourses: Edward III interprets the letter in a non-literal way and, in doing so, he reactivates its marginalized meaning, namely the instigation to murder Edward II. When Mortimer and Queen Isabella are arrested, although they have not been proven guilty, Marlowe shows that the normative authority of Edward III's interpretation rests on brute mechanisms of empirical violence rather than on denotative meanings. Edward's violent acts and the way he presents the bloody head of Mortimer refer back to the rhetorical violence that underwrites the bodily violence and strips away the reassuring seal of self-identity. Marlowe depicts Edward III's representation of the body politic as a public image, as a semiotic construct that has to be learned and performed. Edward's behaviour, his body language at the end of the play (the way he puts on his funeral robes and publicly shows his tears as signs of his 'grief and innocency' [5.6.1 02]), may be proper for his status as a king, and it may be proper for his gender, but it may also be propaganda. In his plays Marlowe deconstructs meaning in general, and the meaning of gendered bodies in particular, into the determinants of political or social contexts and individual readings. This has far-reaching implications for literary research, for it forces us to revise received critical approaches. The characteristic aim of patriarchal textual and literary criticism is to reconstruct the creator's original intention in a stable, authoritative, authentic body of texts, a body we can think of as the author's legitimate heir. Gender studies have shown that this approach is questionable. We cannot merely treat Marlowe's texts as 'primary' material. The texts are gendered constructs, which result in part from editorial decisions, and both these elements influence the way in which gendered bodies are depicted. In Tamburlaine, for instance, editors regularly change the original reference to the

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hero's arms and fingers as 'long and snowy' (Steane, 588 n.2) to 'long and sinewy' (Part I, 2.1.27). In doing so they have suppressed an implicit pun and the feminine connotations associated elsewhere in the play with paleness and the colour white (Cutts, 1973, 45), and they have done so in favour of a more homogeneous bodily fiction of masculinity. My own method of interpreting Marlowe's plays, I must admit, is not entirely free from the rhetorical violence of gender discourses either. I have dealt with masculinity and femininity as textual objects, over which I at least implicitly claim a kind of mastery. It may be that I am seeking to transform gendered bodies into knowable and controllable objects of feminine discourse, and in doing so I am both reversing and echoing Tamburlaine's fiction of masculine authority. Such gender differences and such claims for discursive mastery dissolve into fictions when seen in analogy to Marlowe's plays. Tamburlaine's allegedly endless desire for power and knowledge is subverted in his own discourse: Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet's course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, That perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. (Part I, 2.7.21-9)

Within the ruthless irony of Marlowe's texts, materialist concerns and, as Marlowe demonstrates in Dr Faustus, bodily desires provide an anticlimax to a seemingly limitless discourse of knowledge. 13 My own discourse is just as endoriented because it aims at proving the importance of gender within the discourses of and about Renaissance drama. Nevertheless, these discourses remain, like those of Marlowe, open to further inscriptions and interpretations.

4

Armour, Flows and Bliss: Liquefactions of Gender in The Faerie Queene Book II Barry Taylor The 'all-seeing' god lives inside your own skin, in your peripheral areas, in your body's orifices and musculature. He is a part of the perception of pleasure itself; he is the one who converts pleasure into anxiety. The punitive god-figure owes his effectiveness (in the culture of 'mopping up') to the fear that phenomena of dissolution may occur along the borders of the body. The same fear makes the protective god-figure possible. Klaus Thewelheit, Male Fantasies 1

In Book II, Canto xii of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Spenser's testing of the virtue of temperance culminates - for chivalric hero and reader alike - in the viewing of an unclothed and displayed male body, post-coitally drained; the body of the young knight Verdant, unmanned by Bliss in the bower of the temptress Acrasia. In the casting aside of Verdant's armour, and its exposure of his detumescent, 'effeminated' body, Spenser finds his most condensed image for the Canto's primary thematic conflict, between the armoured defensive surfaces of a dutiful '-masculinity, and the erosive force of a liquid and liquefying femininity. This thematic opposition is related to tensions which inform the Canto's disposition oftime and space, and the phenomenology of its represented locations; tensions between epic purposefulness and the dilations of romance, forwardness and retrogression, seascape and landscape, groundedness and wandering, the contained and the overflowing. My approach here to these informing oppositions - all of which cluster connotatively about the climactic conflict between the male armoured body' and its disarming, leaky, female other - will start from a critical anxiety which is strongly registered throughout the long history of commentary on Spenser's poem. This anxiety derives from a suspicion that The Faerie Queene not only fails to sustain convincingly the binary structure which underpins its formal and thematic architecture, but, more damagingly still, that the poem itself partakes of the characteristics and values which form the negative poles of its informing

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oppositions. My discussion of the tableau of Verdant in the Bower of Bliss reads that scene as one of the key points where this self-undermining potentiality of the poem is realised, a scene where the collapse of the poem's thematic architecture is rendered visible in the staging of a 'male' body which momentarily evades the binary classification of gendered bodies underpinning the poem's declared project, 'to fashion a gentleman'. What then, is the relationship between critical anxieties about the poem's potential for self-cancellation, and the trope of 'leaky' femininity? 2 Book II, Canto xii of The Faerie Queene is beyond doubt the wateriest passage of a poem which has frequently been charged - most notably, in twentiethcentury criticism, by G. Wilson Knight - with a compromising structural fluidity: [The Faerie Queene] tends to split, dissolve: the whole into books, books into Cantos, Cantos into events, events into descriptive luxuriance. The proper organic process is reversed . . . Instead of building up and cohering, the poem is always decomposing. Its finest units, being so independently fine, are ... rich rather with a cancerous and upstart vitality, drawing attention from the whole they should serve. Hence the baggy, bulgy, loose effect, the fluidity. (1939, 14)

Wilson Knight reworks in the terms of his own moralizing organicism the formal complaints raised against the poem by Spenser's neoclassical critics. For Thomas Rymer in 1674, Spenser's structural inconsequence is figured as a wandering from epic tradition and example: Though besides Homer and Virgil he had read Tasso, yet he rather suffered himself to be misled by Ariosto, with whom blindly rambling on marvellous adventures, he makes no conscience of probability . . . They who can love Ariosto will be ravished with Spenser, whilst men of juster thoughts lament that such great wits have miscarried in their travels for want of direction to set them in the right way. ('Preface to Rapin', 167- 8)

For John Hughes, in the process of developing a measured defence of Spenser, the poem represents an overwhelming of epic rules by a 'torrential' force of invention: The author seems to be possessed of a kind of poetical magic . . . His abundance betrays him into excess, and his judgement is overborne by the torrent of his imagination ... indeed the whole frame of (the poem)

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would appear monstrous if it were to be examined by the rules of epic poetry as they have been drawn from the practice of Homer and Virgil. ('Remarks on the Fairy Queen', 301-2)

Rymer's image of Spenser seduced from the straight path of epic tradition by Ariosto signals something shared by these characterizations of the poem's weaknesses: that Spenser and his poem are deemed to represent negative forces and states which echo the dangers confronting the poem's own chivalric protagonists. Rymer's 'blindly rambling' Spenser reproduces one of the basic dynamic units of the poem's structure, the tension between the chivalric quest and an endless proliferation of amorously motivated detours. 3 Hughes's 'magician' Spenser, overwhelming judgement with his torrential generation of images, mirrors Archimago, the presiding evil genius of Book I. And in Hughes's overbearing torrent and Wilson Knight's imagery of fluid decomposition, we are immersed in the dangerous wateriness which confronts Guyon in Book II, Canto xii, and which will be my main subject here. The paradox which emerges from these accounts of the poem, then, is that The Faerie Queene is charged with being itself the embodiment or realization of energies - divagation, dissolution, imaginative excess - which it is the duty of the fable's protagonists (and, by implication of its enlightened reader) to struggle against. In each case, too, this fear of a self-cancelling logic at work in the poem is figured in an aporetic image of sterility-fertility: in Hughes it is the fertilizing torrent of invention which produces something 'monstrous' (302); in Rymer (following the logic ofhis allusion to the amorous 'wanderings' within the poem) a seduction of Spenser by Ariosto which leads the former to have 'miscarried', and which may be reiterated in the fate of the unwary reader 'ravished with Spenser'; in Wilson Knight it is a reversal of the 'proper organic process' of composition which produces disaggregated units 'with a cancerous and upstart vitality' (14). It seems from this that if something overflows in and through The Faerie Queene, it is a force which threatens to dissolve the boundaries between states and categories which the poem - if it is to sustain its claims to be a vehicle of godly instruction - must insist upon as distinct and distinguishable: the creative as against the corrupted imagination, fertility against sterility, the teleological thrust of epic against the detours of romance, the poem against its own represented and implied 'enemies'. Hughes associates monstrousness in the poem with a critical difficulty in establishing the difference between Spenser's 'faults' and 'excellencies' ('Remarks', 301). What distinguishes Book II, Canto xii, however, is that here Guyon encounters not some nameable and opposable monstrosity but monstrosity as de-differentiation itself. In its staging of a protracted encounter between the fundamental desire for demarcation and distinction on the one hand, and on the other a deconstituting force of liquefaction - a force which erodes the poem's essential categories and the boundaries established between

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them - this Canto is a key passage in the poem's struggle with its own contradictory energies. 4 That struggle reaches its climax in the play of the sorceress and temptress Acrasia's gaze over the face of her unmanned victim Verdant, a gaze which is at once liquefying and parching, blissful and deathly. As I shall be arguing in more detail below, this watery dissolution of the difference between pleasure and mortification at the scene of Bliss also involves - in the image of the effeminated, un-armoured young knight - a mulching of gender differentiations which are fundamental to the project declared in Spenser's prefatory letter to Raleigh: 'to fashion a gentleman ... in virtuous and gentle discipline' (p. 15; my emphasis). 5 Book II, Canto xii begins with its epic protagonist adrift in mid-ocean, a state which is imagined as the stripping away of particular perilous encounters to arrive at an experience of non-specific perilousness itself: 'Two dayes now in that sea he sayled has, I Ne ever land beheld, ne living wight, I Ne ought save perill, stil as he did pas ... ' (II. xii. 2). The poem's immediate response to this state of perceptual becalming ('stil as he did pas' evoking a peril both perpetual and static) is the Boatman's order to the Palmer to 'stere aright, I And keepe an even course' (3) between the Gulf of Greediness and the Rock of Vile Reproach. The void of oceanic peril is countered by a willed resumption of epic pilgrimage and the confident address of moral allegory to the specific dangers presented by the Gulf and the Rock. The Palmer's allegorizing commentary on those hazards, from which their 'even course' delivers the voyagers, reasserts the viability of the poem's ethical and hermeneutic systems in response to threats which are visible and nameable in ways which the experience of 'pure' perilousness may not be. The moral discipline of steering right is dramatized in the strenuous navigation of a course between Rock and Gulf, and relates connotatively to the Aristotelian discipline of balanced virtues and faculties summed up in the term 'temperance' represented by Guyon himself. 6 The episode also reasserts the Palmer's exegetical discipline, by which the sensory 'vehicle' of experience is abolished in the act of seeing through to its veiled spiritual significance. This is a continuous enactment within the narrative of the mode of reading which the poem's ideal reader (a reader engaged by the project of being fas~ioned as a gentleman) is to bring to the poem itself: a vigilant mistrust of the various and magnificent sensual allurements of the signifier, and the latter's eradication in a disciplined reading-through to the allegorical signified. 7 Having reconfirmed these basic protocols for the benefit of both Guyon and the Book's other fallible and impressionable readers, the poem now exposes its adventurers to a different order of threat. This next encounter, with the Wandering Islands, is not so readily accommodated within the categories of moral allegorization, because it represents a dissolution (and specifically a watery decomposition) of the

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perceptual and epistemological bases of allegorical categorization itself: For those same Islands, seeming now and than, Are not firme Iande, nor any certein wonne, But straggling plots, which to and fro do ronne In the wide waters ... Yet well they seeme to him, that farre doth vew, Both faire and fruitful!, and the ground dispred With grassie greene of delectable hew ... But whosoever once hath fastened His foot thereon, may never it recure, But wandreth ever more uncertain and unsure. (II.xii.ll/12)

Here, to wander from the even course of temperance would be to set foot on a ground which is already wandering. The prospect of a return from the fluidity and boundlessness of oceanic 'peril' to sure ground would be frustrated in the discovery that the ground is itself liquidly unstable. In order to contain the danger that the Islands seem to pose, it would be necessary to pass through them and arrive on land from which it would be possible to look back and distinguish between one's present sure-groundedness and the illusion of security offered by the Islands. Clearly the movement of the adventurers - past these mid-oceanic islands towards a landing on ground which then appears, by implication, as a mainland - can build such a passage and the reassurance it offers into a reader's barely conscious acceptance of the Canto's narrative dynamic. However, a reading that is less carried away by the Canto's epic impetus may note the ways in which the characteristics of the mainland on which the adventurers set foot merely reiterate those of the Islands they have had to avoid in order to arrive there safely. The perilousness of the Islands is, according to the Ferryman, a perceptual and epistemological one - they look steady, but are in fact wandering and unstable. They also appear 'faire and fruitfull' (12), with the implication that their false-seeming stability also brings with it foulness and sterility. This trope of apparent natural fertility covering over its sterile opposite is then developed in the connotations of artifice raised by the description of trees 'with leaves apparelled' and 'deckt with blossomes dyde in white and red' (12). The Islands are dangerous, then, because they are an insubstantial and artificial construction posing convincingly and alluringly as natural. As any reader familiar with critical readings of the Bower of Bliss episode will recognize, and as we will be reminded in the following discussion, this difficulty in distinguishing the natural from the artificial reproduces precisely the moral-epistemological 'problem' which has established that later passage of the Canto as a persistent, and, it is usually felt, central, Spenserian

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crux. 8 In other words the danger presented by the Wandering Islands - the possibility that there is a fundamental difficulty in differentiating the categories on which the poem's moral-epistemological system rests- is not one which is passed through and left behind in the passage towards a ground from which it will be nameable and distinguishable, but is active (indeed, has its textual epicentre) in the 'mainland' Bower as well. The conceptual difficulties presented by the opposition between nature and artifice are particularly visible in the critical reading of the Bower episode which asserts most strongly that the opposition is unproblematic - that offered by C.S. Lewis in The Allegory ofLove (1936, 324ft). Here Lewis is responding to criticisms of Spenser which complain that where the poem needs to establish a clear distinction between the (malign, destructive) Bower and the (benign, generative) Garden of Adonis (in III, vi, 29ff.), there is in fact an absence of adequate differentiation. To admit such an erosion of distinction in this particular case would be a fundamental challenge to the poem's overall integrity and moral efficacy, as Lewis clearly sees: the entire moral-educational project of the poem would seem to rest on establishing this fundamental opposition between a principle of natural generation and reproduction on the one hand, and an agency of deceptive imitation on the other. Lewis insists on the clarity of the poem's differentiation between the Bower and the Garden: 'the one is artifice, sterility, death: the other nature, fecundity, life' (326). The similarity between the two loci serves only to emphasize the crucial distinction which the poem establishes between them: '[t]he similarity between them ... is the similarity of the real to the pretended and of the archetype to the imitation. Diabolus simius Dei' (326). This shows very clearly what is at stake in maintaining the opposition between Bower and Garden, artifice and nature: the ability to distinguish between the reality created by God and the artifices of the Devil, to be able to keep reading the world as morally coherent creation rather than as deathly simulation. At this point Lewis stresses that throughout the poem Spenser is clear in placing the artificial always in 'evil' contexts, but with one exception. This, he notes, is the description of the House of Alma earlier in Book II (II, ix 50 and 53). Here, 'the cells of the brain are internally decorated with pictures because this is the obvious, perhaps the only way of allegorising the fact that the external world enters as image into the human mind' (326-7). The fundamental distinction between nature and artifice collapses here in the admission that the natural process of sensory registration is always already a matter of representation. Representation ('artifice, sterility, death') already 'contaminates' the natural process of seeing the supposedly self-evident difference between reality and representation. This momentary troubling of Lewis's account reminds us that the need for clear distinction between the Godly original and its devilish simulation, while it may be as strongly felt in

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Spenser's poem as in Lewis's criticism, is something that the poem, with its sustained thematic engagement with disguise, sorcery, mistaken identity and sensory bewilderment, struggles to establish on an absolute ground. The danger that the fundamental distinction between nature and artifice may not be legible, which the reader is invited to localize in the figure of the Wandering Islands, is one which, therefore, threatens to overflow: towards the Bower later in the Canto, and, as we shall see, back into the natural I artificial bowers and arbours of the Cymochles I Phaedria episode in Canto vi. Where the poem tries to establish its footing on the sure ground of substantial identities and bounded differences, there is a danger that it may only discover an uncontainable erosion of boundaries and leakage of essential categories into one another. As the Canto progresses, it becomes clear that its most assertive strategy for localizing and containing this liquefying force is to ascribe it to a demonized femininity which, in its deviation from the opposed categories of masculine rectitude and feminine virtue, will once again be recuperable within the poem's ethical and epistemological binarisms. I will be arguing that even these reasserted solidities undergo dissolution in the flows of Bliss at Acrasia's bower. At the adventurers' nearest approach to one of the floating islands a woman appears on its shore: one who appears at first to be merely a 'daintie damzell' (14), but whose raucousness and lewd language soon reveal her to be 'the wanton Phaedria' (17). This is Guyon's second encounter with Phaedria, who appears in Canto vi of this Book before the sea voyage is undertaken, as the resident ferry-woman of the Idle Lake. At this earlier point she identifies herself to Guyon's current opponent Cymochles as a servant of Acrasia (II.vi.9). The episode in which she ferries Cymochles across the Lake, diverting to an island where, 'laying his head disarm'd I In her loose lap' (II.vi.14) she lulls him asleep 'with liquors strong' (II.vi.18), reproduces or anticipates the narrative shape and image-repertoire of the narrative passage in her mistress's Bower. I take this remarkably detailed foreshadowing of the Book's climactic scenario to function in two contradictory ways. The first is to confirm retrospectively the attempt to localize the deconstituting force associated with the Wandering Islands in a wanton femininity which operates independently of them; Phaedria goes to work on Cymochles long before the Islands come in view. At the same time, the earlier Phaedria episode represents a retrospective 'leakage' of the nature I artifice problem represented by the islands. Looking back from Canto xii, it becomes clear that the 'Iitle nest' to which Phaedria leads Cymochles in Canto vi is only one in a series of natural-artificial, fertilesterile, blissful-deadly locations which includes the 'Arbour' where Cymochles is first discovered by his brother's servant (II.v.28-35), the Wandering Islands, and the Bower of Bliss itself. Here is Phaedria's 'nest':

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BARRY TAYLOR As if it had by Natures cunning hand, Bene choisely picked out from all the rest, And laid forth for ensample of the best ... Trees, braunches, birds, and songs were framed fit, For to allure fraile mind to carelesse ease. (II. vi.12/ 13)

From this perspective, the anticipation in Canto vi of the epistemological crux which Canto xii tries to localize in the Wandering Islands (and which then returns in the Bower) is another sign of that problem's insistence through the Book. The difficulty of distinguishing sure from wandering ground, and the natural from the artificial, even as their absolute difference must be asserted, returns wherever the figure of the alluring bower is repeated. In each case, the wandering of the true into the false, the natural into the artificial, is 'fixed' by the displacement of this 'original' dissolution of categories and relations onto the figure of the wilfully deceptive woman. The undoing of essential differences is assigned to a malign agency which, in its own dramatization of the oppositions between true and false, male and female, reconfirms the categories and distinctions which it has appeared to challenge. As might be expected, this demonization of femininity-as-liquidity has its correlative in the Book's characterization of masculinity: as bounded, solid, and, specifically, as armoured. The armoured body, as the material expression of a contained and tempered physical state, with the shield as the site upon which patrilineal identity is heraldically emblazoned, is the embodied sign of martial I courtly masculinity in Spenser's poem. To be a gentle-man is to be armoured: carefully fashioned, tempered by exposure to hazard, sealed and seamless, integrated and unbending. The stress in this Book on being armoured against sensory experience suggests that to be well-tempered - the Book's presiding idea - is less to do with the harmonious balancing of qualities which is foreshadowed in the term's Aristotelian heritage than with the tempering, or hardening, of hot steel in cold water, a violent conversion of life-producing energy into defensive rigidity. The masculine name is inscribed upon an armoured ground which is constructed through the violent exclusion of the fluid and indeterminate, which is named 'feminine' .9 The discarding of one's armour - the temptation to which the green knight Verdant succumbs at the Bower of Bliss - is in this light an uncanny action. How, if armigerousness is of the essence of gentle-manliness, can it be put aside? What, if armour is of the essence, emerges from the inside when armour is discarded? How is that puerile, unarmoured thing to be designated, in relation to which armour/masculinity would then appear as detachable, supplementary, prosthetic?

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His warlike annes, the idle instruments Of sleeping praise, were hong upon a tree, And his braue shield, full of gold moniments, Was fowly ras't, that none the signes might see; Ne for them, ne for honour cared hee, Ne ought, that did to his aduancement tend, But in lewd loues, and wastfullluxuree, His dayes, his goods, his bodie he did spend ... (II.xii.72-3, 79-80)

The Bower is the stage, and Verdant's disarmouring is the cue, for a drama of unmanning in which the poem's basic gender differentiations are at once asserted and undermined. The poem could contain the threat of Verdant's derogation of manliness if it were a question of a fall into a corresponding, differentially marked and embodied femininity. The scene of Bliss, however, involves a staging of gender symbolization in collapse which leaves intact none of the gendered 'substances', positions, relations, or looks through which the poem's 'epic' epistemology secures itself. The tableau of Verdant's abjection at the hands of the arch-seductress is clearly one directed towards the male reader envisaged in Spenser's prefatory comment to Raleigh and implied in the poem's generic and intertextual codings. The ideal reader of Canto xii is the young man who would allow the poem to educate him out of the error into which his fictional counterpart, Verdant, falls. For this reader, invited into identification with the armoured hero, the poem's epic dynamic, and the educational-disciplinary discourses which the latter carries, the state of disarmed Bliss represents a fatal detour from the straight path of epic masculinity. For him, Verdant's nakedness signifies a regression from the achieved masculinity still figured in the freestanding tumescence of the armour, into the formlessness and insipidity of the feminine. Here the separability of the armour is the sign of the phallus as the anchoring point of an inescapable symbolic order which fixes and substantiates gendered identities. In relation to that order, the boy's unarmoured and naked body represents an evisceration of identity, a falling away from the masculine position secured in the symbolic into the pallid formlessness of 'feminine' nonbeing.10 Working against this epic construction of the scene of Bliss and of the relationship between the body and its discarded armour is another mode of encounter between tableau and reader which arrests the forward dynamic of epic, and seems to parody the educational-allegorical imperative to look through the sensual surface, by giving just enough physical description of the boy and setting the scene in such a way as to imply his nakedness, without actually showing it:

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BARRY TAYLOR There she had him now layd a slombering, In secret shade after long wanton ioyes ... The young man sleeping by her, seemd to bee Some goodly swayne of honourable place, That certes it great pittie was to see Him his nobilitie so foule deface; A sweet regard, and amiable grace, Mixed with manly sternnesse did appeare Yet sleeping, in his well proportioned face, And on his tender lips the downy heare Did now but freshly spring, and silken blossomes beare. (72/79)

This coyness of address arrests the reader's gaze at a point where, far from being abolished, the sensual impact of the body is teasingly evoked. In this position the reader actively collaborates in constructing an erotically energized image of the naked boy to complement the explicit blazon of Acrasia's thinly veiled body in stanzas 77 and 78. The image of the boy is thereby shifted from the register of the moral exemplum towards that of the homoerotic blazon, a rhetorical set-piece particularly associated with the contemporaneous genre of Ovidian narrative verse. 11 As I have suggested, the ideal epic reader is one who looks through alluring and deceptive surfaces; the reader of the Ovidian blazon is one happily arrested at and by physical surfaces and sensual impressions. The reader who assumes the position of erotic spectator in the Bower effects a decisive displacement of the terms and relations that underpin the scene's exemplary staging of gender. The male body in Bliss is undone through its heterosexual attraction to the female body, a condition which is figured as a collapse into 'femininity'. That feminization of the male body then produces a new erotic object which threatens to set going again the original, dangerous circulation of heterosexual desire, where male readers are aroused by a body marked 'feminine'. This time, however, the 'feminine' body is male, and elicits a homoerotic gaze (in such a way, however, that the relation between heterooriginal and homo-supplement has become quite inscrutable). From this reading position, questions of what male readers desire by way of gendered objects, and of how to define and locate the 'feminine' body which sets the whole cycle of masculine desire and dissolution going, have overflowed the bounds imposed upon them by the epic perspective. In fact, this 'erotic' reading of the scene of Bliss, which for clarity's sake I have separated out as an alternative, 'aberrant' interpretative option, is installed 'within' the preferred reading, as the grounds of its possibility. In order for Spenser's ideal reader to realize the exemplary force of the passage, he must register imaginatively both the male body's fall into the 'feminine', and the erotic impact of this new male body, if the latter's 'femaleness' is to

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reconfirm the danger of the 'original' desire for the feminine. To de-eroticize the blazon in order to preserve the integrity of the exemplum would only be to undermine the idea of the feminine as fatal erotic force which the passage depends upon for its exemplary impact. The reader who is to learn that his desire for women is dangerous must enter into the 'erotic' reading position and the desire it activates for the undecidable male/female body from an undecidable position of hetero/homosexual looking, if he is to be brought back to the position the poem tries to construct for him. In terms of the poem's narrative logic the self-troubling of the epic reading position which I have been describing would have an equivalent effect: a 'stalling' of epic momentum in a static, scenic disclosure of 'feminine' inertia as the perpetually disavowed ground of masculinity's epic self-realization. Here one would bring into play a further reading of the boy's unmanned body in Acrasia's embrace which would emphasize the scene's allusions to the maternal cradling of the infantile body and to the iconography of the pieta. 12 This would suggest a reversal of epic narrative logic and its placing of the inert male body: in this reading Verdant's unmoulded form is the sign of an 'original' infantile state, undecidable in terms of gendered identity because it is prior to the prosthetic engrafting of masculinity. From this position the infantile body in Acrasia's arms is suspended in a pre-Oedipal state; the hanging armour representing an identity structured by the phallus which is not yet assumed, is indeed resisted by the inertial force of a maternally orientated jouissance. 13 The pathos of Verdant's position would for this reading be caught up with a nostalgia for an imagined state before masculinity sets in; for a puerile (green) unfixedness and fluidity which is abjected at each moment that the armour of masculinity is strenuously assumed. 14 The invocation of the pieta would then recast Acrasia's pity for Verdant ('Wherewith she sighed soft, as if his case she rewd' [73]) as an acknowledgement of the entry into adult masculinity as a kind of death. In this account, the armour would appear as a form of drag, to adopt Judith Butler's use of that term: the sign of an hyperbolic (rigid) masculine identification which makes visible its own constitutive denial in the figure of the 'fallen' but desirable boy and the homoerotic gaze he elicits. 15 The armour hangs then at a spatial, psychic and temporal threshold where the epic world of publicly assumed, fixed identities (the order centred on the phallus/armour) is subjected to a principle of reversability. Armoured masculine identity is seen as being both inevitable, only to be avoided or abandoned through a collapse into formlessness and death, and at the same time as a prosthetic supplement to a temporally prior state in which the identities and relations of the epic order are decomposed, liquefied. This scenic and temporal placing of bliss as pre-Oedipal jouissance allows the visualization of a process which in fact exceeds the temporal logics

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of both epic and nostalgia. This is a process which 'takes place' in the threshold space which links and divides the Bower and the poem's epic 'universe'; one in which the gendered constitution of the symbolic order of epic is made visible. 15 'Constitution' here has its active verbal sense; the leakages and blurrings of the threshold afford us a glimpse of the active fabrication of' essential' symbolic differences. The complications of reading in the Bower suggest that what the poem must constantly repress is the possibility that where it seeks stable ground for its crucial discriminations and oppositions it will find only a watery sliding of categories one into another. The naming of this threat as 'feminine' is no more than an imaginary fixing and displacement of a principle of liquefaction which overflows and erodes all the poem's foundational categories, 'feminine' and 'masculine' among them. The all-pervading wateriness of the Canto sets up an associative flow which links gender dissolution to this general epistemological collapse through a succession of related images; of oceanic becalming, of temptation by the water-bound Phaedria, the mermaids, and the maidens in the fountain, the intoxicating drinks offered by the unwomanly Excess and the unmanly Genius, the 'Infinit streames' of the Bower's central fountain, and the water sports of'naked boyes' and 'wanton Maidens'. This flow of liquid imagery reaches a culmination in the extraordinary exchange of bodily fluids between Acrasia and Verdant in the Bower itself: And all that while, right over him she hong, With her false eyes fast fixed in his sight, As seeking medecine, whence she was stong, Or greedily depasturing delight; And oft inclining downe with kisses light, For feare of waking him, his lips bedewd, And through his humid eyes did sucke his spright, Quite molten into lust and pleasure lewd; Wherewith she sighed soft, as if his case she rewd. (73)

Just as our reading of the broader scenic disposition of relationships between Acrasia, Verdant and the armour revealed a dissolution of essential' categories, so too a closer reading of this stanza uncovers a similar activity of reversal, whereby terms to be held in opposition or clear distinction at the epic, morally educational level of reading can be seen to be bleeding into each other, overflowing the boundaries which 'properly' hold them apart. The epic construction of the scene - vampiric female poised triumphantly over her drained and powerless prey - is already disturbed in the second line of this stanza, where it is his sight which holds her eyes 'fast fixed'. This brings into play a reading of desire in which the masculine 'prey' entrances and captures the feminine 'predator', and where the 'fixing' of imaginary positions

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in erotic fascination is a reciprocal process. This sense of 'bliss' as an encroaching reversability of positions and relations is carried further in the next line, with its image of Acrasia as the one 'stung' by a desire which seems, in her enthralment, to proffer itself as its own 'cure'. This figure is further confirmation that the stanza's imaginative engagement with the intersubjective flows of desire cannot confine itself within the bounds dictated by the poem's epic 'masculinist' programme. That is underlined again by the remarkable word at the centre of the next line, where the desiring of desire as its own cure is re-imagined as Acrasia 'greedily depasturing delight' (my emphasis). 16 This is a feeding (which is also an extraction of vital juices, a dessication of green grasses) that destroys its source of nourishment as it proceeds. If the previous line gives us an image of desire as a disease which is also its own medicine, here (in a reversal of that reversal) to desire is to consume what sustains desire. The stanza, in other words, dramatizes desire as an intersubjective structuring of flows and refluxes in which the fixed identities and relations suggested by the scenario of sexual victimage begin to float loose. The fluid circuitry of the second half of the stanza takes the process to a point at which the question of where this 'evil' liquefaction originates becomes difficult to decide. Her (moist) kisses 'bedew' his (dry) lips, but then she (parched, in keeping with the logic of depasturing) sucks his (liquid) spirit through his 'humid eyes'. Here the moist surfaces of lips and eyes are membranes across which a capillary exchange of dryness-fluidity proceeds, rather than the moralized one-directional flow of the victim-and-prey scenario. The fluid intermingling of bodies at these sensitized surfaces is an imaging forth of the intersubjective flows of erotic enthralment and their erosion of the fixed subject positions and imaginary relations which underpin the epic moralization of the scene. The scene reaches its climax in the image of the soul sucked from the body through the 'humid' eyes: the expense of spirit is the evacuation of a vital liquid, a drying and withering of the verdant bud. Sixteenth-century usage allows 'soul' and 'semen' to come together here in the single word 'spirit', and the pun clinches the moral economy of fluids which the Book as a whole deploys: fellatio becomes a consumption of the soul, femininity-as-fatal-flow breaking the seal of the armoured male body, delivering it up to leakage, spill, waste. 17 However, that punning coexistence of soul and sperm can also be read in a contrary way: as anima spirit is that which interfuses spiritual principle and material being into the stable, tempered state that constitutes a (masculine) subject; as semen, spirit represents a source ofleaky fluidity (in other words, of a fallen, 'female' worldliness) at the generative root of masculine identity. If semen is what harbours the spirit (anima) of masculinity (and the contemporary trope of ejaculation as spending, indirectly invoked in stanza 80,

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supports this view of semen as masculinity's stored and guarded property) then masculinity as unbreached solidity can only manifest itself by leaking, must spend in order constantly to be re-stored. 18 It is this unadmitted dependence of armoured masculinity upon that which it expels into an abjected exteriority, an intersubjective opening which is defensively construed as a breaching by uncontainable and eroding flows, which armour exists to keep at bay. The leaking of armoured masculinity towards its fluid, abjected exterior, a leaking which reveals the 'prior' interiority of what is excluded, sets up an oscillation which overflows the rigid demarcation of inside/outside. Masculinity, then, would be this wave-like oscillation between an imaginary integrity and its self-eroding leakiness. Armour is a fixing of the imaginary solidity of masculine identity, which would otherwise dissolve, spill over into the non-self-identities of intersubjective flow. 19 How might the troubling of the assumption of masculinity in the poem impact upon the reader it seeks to educate into manliness? We can begin to answer by looking at the relationship between reading, idleness and the refusal of heroic masculinity. The state of erotic entrancement into which Cymochles (from the Greek: 'wave-like') periodically collapses in Canto v, for example, is characterized in terms of mental relaxation, an indulgence ofthe imagination in 'idle dreme', a passive enjoyment of visual pleasures: And now he has pourd out his idle mind In dainty delices, and lauish ioyes ... He like an Adder, lurking in the weeds, His wandring thought in deepe desire does steepe, And his fraile eye with spoile ofbeautie feedes; Sometimes he falsely faines himselfe to sleepe, Whiles through their lids his wanton eies do peepe To steal a snatch of amorous conceipt ... (II.v.28 and 34)

If idleness is consistently related to the feminine in this period, then the indulgence of the imagination, and specifically of the erotic imagination, in the reading of 'light' matter is also frequently identified as one of the main avenues to idleness that women must avoid. 2 Cymochles's passive, daydreaming state, the furtive look which 'steale[s] a snatch of amorous conceipt' (my emphasis) evoke an idleness which is closely related to the preachers' vision of the fate awaiting the indulgent reader of sensual 'matter'. As Patricia Parker notes: 'Otium, or idleness, is traditionally the attraction of pastoral, as it is also of the fatal Bower of Bliss ... ' (1987, 56). Idleness, in other words, is not only a danger represented in the poem but one carried within the repertoire of poetic modes which Spenser's epic encyclopaedically embodies (and not just by the pastoral). This is another version of the self-disturbing logic that troubles Wilson Knight, and one which

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presents the danger that the poem itself may work upon its reader in ways directly analogous to the effects visited by the Bower on the unwary knight. Parker, citing Keats, talks of the Bower exerting 'a 'dumb' and paralyzing 'charm' (1987, 66) which is defeated by the poet's 'spell of words'. However, this overlooks the fact that idleness in Book II is not simply the 'dumb' absence of directed epic energies, but has its own counter-discourse. If it is possible to have rallying cries for inertia, the Book echoes with them. The poet's spell of words cannot simply oppose a counter-principle which, far from being 'dumb', is one of that spell's manifestations (one recalls here Hughes's image of Spenser's 'poetical magic' ['Remarks', 301], and its collapsing ofthe difference between author and Archimago ). The call to idleness in Book II is made principally in Phaedria's song to Cymochles, praising the avoidance of 'fruitlesse toile' (II. vi 17) - Phaedria's haunt being, of course, the Idle Lake- and in the mermaid's song to Guyon, which foreshadows sex not as arousal, but as rest: 0 tume thy rudder hither-ward a while: Here may thy storme-bet vessell safely ride; This is the Port of rest from troublous toyle, The world's sweet In, from paine and wearisome turmoyle. (II.xii.32)

The threat of sexual pleasure in Book II has less to do with a loss of control in erotic fervour than with the luring of men into this disarmed state of idleness. In fact, as these songs imply, the male desire for rest, which Book II externalizes as female temptation, is a drive which is 'internal' to the masculine subject, one dragging it towards quiescence and a disinvestment from the armoured state of achieved masculinity. It is for this reason that the mermaid's song of sexual temptation is a close reprise of Despair's praise of death to Red Cross in Book 1: 'Sleep after toile, port after stormie seas, I Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please' (I.ix.40). Janet Spens cites this passage in her discussion of accidie as one of the poem's recurring tropes: 'This passion of melancholy, paralyzing action and leading to the desire of death ... For Spenser the chief temptation had always seemed to be to accidie, to succumb to that deep, passionate lethargy' (1934, 1221130). Accidie, in other words, represents a death drive which resists the integration of the masculine subject in its 'mature' armoured state, and the female temptation to idleness is only a belated objectification of this internal force (and the discourse) of Despair. In the tension between the poem's epic narrative impetus and the discourse of accidie enunciated in the Book's lyric, pastoral, carpe diem and Ovidian 'voices', the conflicts 'inside' the diegesis overflow into a conflict within the Book's own repertoire of poetic modes, and between different potentialities in the reader's 'realization' of the Book.

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The connection between Cymochles's periodic idleness and a sensual practice of reading is then one clue to the poem's construction of its own imaginary male reader. That reader is caught, in Book II, in an oscillation between two unsustainable modes of reading. The first is the one to which Cymochles's erotic daydreaming alludes: an idle, sensual reading, digressive, involuted, resistant to epic teleology and allegorical meaning, lingering in a 'voluptuous' embrace of the signifier. The second is the strenuous allegorical mode practised and imparted by the Palmer: one that abolishes the worldly signifier, destroying it in the hermeneutic passage to the abstract truth which it veils. This is the mode of reading that, as a technique for the step-by-step eradication of 'feminine' materiality, supports in its every foray the construction of armoured masculine identity. The first mode is unsustainable because a reader who persisted in it would convert Spenser's epic into one of the conventionally denounced erotic romances which can lure the male reader, Cymochles-like, into 'feminine' idleness. This is a possibility that Spenser acknowledges in the poem's prefatory letter, with its defence of his chosen mode of 'historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, then for profite of the ensample' (p. 15). The Pahner's mode is unsustainable in another sense, because its total and instantaneous extinguishing of the sensory dimension of signification represents an ideal practice which is a logical and human impossibility. This, and its incompatibility with Spenser's Protestant commitment to an active virtue engaged with worldliness, is marked in the difference between the Palmer as tutor and Guyon as his fallible student. 21 The reader of Book II, as constructed by the poem itself, is, in other words, caught in a version of the imaginary oscillation between fluid 'femininity' and defensive 'masculine' rigidity which structures the vision of gendered positions 'inside' the narrative. The third reading position, that is supposed to offer an escape route from this bind, is clearly the one into which Guyon is being educated as the narrative unfolds. This is a tempered reconciliation of worldly engagement and spiritual discipline, sensual openness and allegorical detachment, in which the reader's desire for sensual digression is redirected into the pursuit of epic closure and the symbolic relation to the desire of Gloriana/Elizabeth that fixes and authorizes masculine identity. In hermeneutic terms, this would be a mode of allegory which moderated the rigour of the Palmer's method, preserving the sensory impact of the signifier even as the truth it veils becomes visible, a mode which would reconcile utile and ductile, 'variety of matter' and 'the profit of the ensample', in a pragmatic accommodation of ethical discipline to 'the use of these dayes seeing all things accounted by their showes, and nothing esteemed of, that is not delightfull and pleasing to commune sence' (p. 16). 22 What is suggested by the repetitive path of Guyon's journey, and by the

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violent eradication of the Bower with which it ends, is that this 'tempered' position is equally untenable. Guyon's narrative - insofar as it cannot be the Palmer's transcendence of narrative temporality and embodiment - must oscillate between repeated episodes in which the hero is solicited by a 'feminine' idleness and sensuality, and a disciplined response in which the temptation is passed by or eradicated. Worldly temptation must perpetually spring back in another guise if the armoured masculine subject is to keep finding occasions for its own self-actuation. Guyon's destruction of the Bower is an eruption of the violence inherent in this oscillation, the frustration of the will to transcend by its dependence upon that which it must perpetually invoke and abolish in order to declare itself. That untempered frustration makes repetition in Book II a sign of thematic insistence that is also the unacknowledged mark left by the traumatic return of its abjected Other. The Book's structure of wave-like repetition creates slippa~e in the poem's narrative transmission, a recursive idling which drags entropically on the poem's 'virile', epic dynamic.Z 3 To be in time, to be tempered like Guyon (and unlike on the one hand Gryll, the porcine recidivist among Acrasia's 'victims', and on the other the superhuman Palmer) is to live in this self-cancelling relation between willed progression and compulsive repetition, which is also the time of the poem's reading. The only way the poem finds to dam its own self-eroding leakages is to have its male hero tempered in the other, contrary, sense of being armoured, rigidly sealed from worldliness and its recursive flows. Masculinity here is the armour subjects are to put on to defend themselves against living as temporal and embodied beings, in that state of fluid irresolution which the poem names 'woman'.

5

'0 Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain': Violence and the Mother's Body in Elizabethan Drama 1 Felicity Dunworth This is not an essay about Hamlet. But it seems appropriate to begin with the cry of perhaps the most famous mother in English drama to introduce the preoccupation of this discussion, which explores the function of motherhood in the structuring of drama during the period in which Shakespeare was writing. Despite a frequent assertion that mothers feature little in Elizabethan plays (Rose, 1991; Mack 1979), I wish to show that motherhood was, in fact, everywhere, and crucially so. In particular, I wish to show how the mother offered dramatists the opportunity to organize and to configure the representation of conflict; constituting a figure where oppositions could be situated, played out and yet contained. This is not to suggest that motherhood always meant the same thing in the plays of the period, or worked in the same ways. Indeed, it is the aim of this essay to show how complex and how flexible a concept maternity could be, and to demonstrate its consequent value in drama. In Hamlet, I suggest, Shakespeare is utilizing and complicating an already established dramatic function of the mother's body, and it is that convention, and its implications, which this essay will explore. Dramatic representation of the mother figure had always tended to be associated with narratives that also depicted violence. From the frantic mothers who fought Herod's soldiers in Mystery plays2 to depictions of the suffering, or potential for suffering, of their archetypal sister the Virgin Mary which was so carefully adumbrated in Marina Warner's classic study (1976), medieval Christian culture demonstrated and developed a tradition which used maternal suffering and grief in conjunction with violence to demonstrate the personal and private consequences of public, political conflict? This tradition became central to the strategies of both Protestant and Catholic polemicists during the English Reformation, when both sought to appropriate the mother as a central figure in their programmes of propaganda, not only in the rhetoric of pamphleteers but in state-sponsored drama such as John Bale's viciously antiCatholic Kyng Johan and its rejoinder, the Marian play Respublica, in what

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Marina Warner has characterized as 'a struggle to monopolise the rhetorical image' (1996, 318). Both Bale's beleaguered Widow Englande and Respublica's long-suffering eponymous heroine are mothers whose anguished separation from their children depicts a kind of psychomachia of state in which the mother allegorically figures the threatened and violated nation. 4 By depicting her anguish, redolent of both love and grief, these plays continue a tradition of making the mother figure the focus of an emotional account of political concerns, provoking in their audiences an affective response which is designed to incite an active engagement with the topical matter at the centre of the drama. 5 Both Respublica and Kyng Johan took the morality play as their model, a genre which was informed by an appreciation of drama as a vehicle of religious and moral instruction, and which routinely used allegory as a means of fulfilling those aims. Classical plays, which became especially influential in elite performances in the second half of the sixteenth century, were understood to perform a similar allegorizing function. The successful accommodation of pagan myth within the framework of mainstream Christian culture had, of course, been facilitated over centuries (Seznec, 1953, 84).6 Writing in the Senecan style which was so highly commended by critics such as Sidney meant not only imitating Latin rhetoric ('stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca's style') but also using drama for purposes of pleasurable moral instruction.7 Such commentators appreciated what they perceived to be the didacticism and morality inscribed in the narrative of these pagan plays, so that they seemed to lend themselves, by a familiar pattern of exegesis, to an exposition of contemporary political preoccupations, as Marie Axton has shown (1977). For example, the courtier George Gascoigne joined his Gray's Inn colleague Francis Kinwelmarshe to recast Euripides's Phoenissae as the story of Jocasta in a dramatized political allegory for performance at court.8 Gascoigne freely added to and adapted his source (even adding marginal glosses to the text) to emphasize the play's engagement with contemporary political concerns, in particular the problem of the Succession. Gascoigne's Jocasta watches her family, 'Against itself to Levie threatning armes (Whereof to talke my heart it renders in twaine)' (1.1.7-10), figuring the divided nation, and its analogue the divided family, through the emblem of her heart cleft in two. As Marie Axton has shown, Jocasta, despite the play's pretensions as a classical piece, (advertised as 'A Tragedie written in Greeke by Euripides, translated and digested into Acte'), 'often speaks as the morality figure Lady Respublica' (1977, 54). Jocasta herself draws attention to her dual function as a narrator of brutal conflict, 'whereof to talke ... ' (establishing her plight as an allegory of state), and as its material signifier; the incarnation of the strife she describes; her broken heart an emblem suggestive of a bittersweet mix of mother's love and mother's pain.

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The imitation of classical dramatists appears to have prompted a shift of emphasis, so that the allegorical possibilities inscribed in the figure of the mother operate alongside a focus upon the mother's body as a site of both love and suffering. The consequent combination of violence and motherhood produces a particular kind of dramatic pleasure9 in which the satisfaction of seeing a moral tale properly worked through is enhanced by (perhaps even subordinate to) the 'delight' induced by an affective response to the mother's plight. This function of the mother figure as the embodiment of emotion (facilitating an affective audience response) is usefully read alongside the work of contemporary sociologists who argue for emotions 'as existentially embodied modes of being which involve an active engagement with the world and an intimate engagement with both culture and self (Bendelow and Williams, 1998, xvi). Bendelow and Williams go on to argue that 'embodiment' of emotion, in their terms, does not only refer to material or conceptual representations of the body. Rather, they suggest that it 'lies ambiguously' across a series of fundamental dualisms such as mind-body, nature--culture and public-private (ibid.). Taking this analysis to a study of Jocasta allows a fuller appreciation ofher dual function in the play, offering a reformulation of its subject in terms of personal suffering. In this, the mother operates as Bendelow and Williams argue that emotion does, to 'provide the "missing link" between "personal troubles" and "public issues" of social structure' (ibid., xvii). In the four plays that this essay will address, pity and pleasure are incited by an association of the mother's body with violence, an association which is especially refined and developed in the revenge plays of the last decade of the sixteenth century. The first, William Alabaster's adaptation of Groto's La Dalida, the Latin play Roxana, 10 was performed at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1592. The effectiveness of the performance, in a play which the author asks 'to be delivered in a ranting manner' is recorded, perhaps with some irony intended, by Thomas Fuller: [Alabaster's] tragedy of Roxana admirably acted in college, and so pathetically that a gentlewoman present thereat (Reader, I had it from an authour whose credit it is sin with me to suspect) at the hearing of the last words thereof, Sequar, Sequar, so hideously pronounced, fell distracted, and never after fully recovered her senses. 11

Whether or not the story is true, it suggests that the performance was a success, deemed admirable and pathetic and thrilling enough to cause collapse in its female audience. Certainly it is a violent play. Its climax involves a messenger speech which describes the protracted torture of a mistress by a wife. The messenger recounts at length and explicitly how the victim was bound and flogged before having a sword placed between her hands and forced to kill her

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own children who are later served up as a meal to their errant father. The messenger's speech is punctuated by the appearance of the ghost of the primary avenger, the victim's father (killed by her lover) who exclaims with delight at what he is hearing. 12 There is a tension between the revulsion which allegedly precipitated the gentlewoman's collapse in Fuller's anecdote, and a fascination with the processes of torture, which here operates through a rhetorically constructed focus upon the abuse of the mother's body culminating in an absolute repudiation of her maternal status. Roxana's motherhood is in fact cancelled out, or at least reversed, by the return of the flesh of her children into the body of the father whence they originally came. The mother's body becomes here the carrier of a series of contradictory meanings - she cannot be a good daughter because she is the mistress of her father's murderer; she is a mistress, outside the social and hierarchical structures which are the norms emphasized in the play; she is a mother who commits infanticide, compelled though that may be. As the embodiment of these contradictions, she constitutes an intersection between incompatible narratives: the classical/Italian revenge tale in which conflict between two men is figured horribly through the persecution of one woman by another (Atossa boasts that she has outdone Medea in her crime, and, indeed, tortures Roxana in a room decorated with images of Medean atrocities, p. 208), and the traditional moral narrative which insists that women who upset or threaten conventional hierarchy should rightly and properly be punished. The almost unbearable but at the same time exquisitely pleasurable moment (for the avenging ghost as well as for the audience) where motherhood - with all its potential meanings so clearly adumbrated in the text - is repudiated with appalling violence, seems to be offered up in this play not as metaphor but as analogue. A link between political and sexual corruption is here emblematized by the punishment of the mother who becomes a kind of scapegoat, the embodiment of both. It is of course possible to read in this, as Lisa Jardine does, anxieties about the status of women in marriage and paternity (1983, 96), or following the view of Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, as an indictment of 'thorough English inflexibility and atavism on the matter of marriage' (1997, 240). Both readings seem somehow inadequate, though, in the face of the ferocity of the violence that is recounted. It is perhaps more satisfying to extend such analysis by a reading which recognizes the mother figure here as the object offetish: 13 the source of both disgust and pleasure, the contradictions inscribed in her tortured body signalling a maternity simultaneously emphasized and denied, both 'the symbol of something and its negation' (Agamben, 1993, 34). 14 The maternal body thus functions, in a sense, metonymically to demonstrate the impossibility of reconciling the conflicting demands of social, moral, mythic and literary narratives and so is obliterated both physically and figuratively. 15 As a play which is perhaps concerned with

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representing matters of state but clearly also with academic matters associated with the development and appropriation of a variety of literary and dramatic narratives, Roxana demonstrates the functionality of the mother as a figure whose complexities and contradictions offer a unique pleasure - one which is produced in part by the pathos located at the disjunction between the meanings that Roxana here embodies. The potential for overdetermination always present in representations of maternity is turned to dramatic advantage through a resort to fetishism, where the irreconcilability of the multiple meanings carried by the mother in this play functions to produce theatrical delight. Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus centre upon protagonists who are also fathers, men who are forced to take their revenge outside of the structures of the state with which they are closely associated. In both plays the state is shown to undermine the man - both plays are about disconcerted masculinity, perhaps- so that he resorts to crime and, in both cases, feigned or actual madness, as the narrative unfolds. These men are clearly understood, though, to retain some control over their actions even when exhibiting insanity; their plight is set against the assertion of another kind of madness: the extraordinary and destructive power of unbridled maternal emotion. Lisa Jardine links Alabaster's Atossa to Tamora in Titus Andronicus, seeing both as part of a tradition which 'is careless of verisimilitude in the interests of the frisson of horror to be derived from such representations of threatening womanhood'. For Jardine, figures like Atossa and Tamora offer a theatrical pleasure specifically to men: Off stage, the male member of the audience recognises the representation of perennially threatening women (perennial source of horror) ... and recognises equally its absurd excessiveness. No woman of his will ever get this out of hand, and hence the representation is equally a source of delight. (1983, 97)

Jardine is right to associate the excessiveness of the representation of these figures with the generation of pleasure, although perhaps that excess operates as part of a rather more complex dramatic strategy than she allows. In Titus Andronicus, the maternal, as a metaphor for the state and as figured in Tamora, contributes to a problematizing of political ideology. 16 At the core ofRome is a thirst for blood that ultimately brings the nation to the point of collapse, a thirst linked to, and emblematized by, a dangerous and pervasive maternity at its heart. Jonathan Bate emphasizes a thematic opposition between Titus Andronicus and Tamora, something which he finds reproduced in Henry Peacham's well-known drawing of a scene from the play. 17 Taking this opposition together with Jardine's point about the pleasures of excess, I suggest that in Titus Andronicus these pleasures are provoked by a tantalizing threat to

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the established order of things from an overabundant and aggressive maternity; the thrilling spectre of unbridled maternal desire. This threat is figured in the first scene, which depicts the ritual burial of Titus's sons. The funeral procession culminates in a speech from Titus that opens with a salutation to a personified, female state, 'Hail Rome, victorious in thy mourning weeds', and ends with a specific site, the family tomb: 0 sacred receptacle of my Joys, Sweet cell of virtue and nobility, How many sons hast thou of mine in store, That thou wilt never render to me more! (1.1.92-5)

Titus addresses the tomb as a wife, a lover, the container of his children. The psychoanalytic implications of this have been explored by a number of critics in the last three decades, most notably by David Willbern, who suggests that Saturninus's address to Rome at the beginning of the scene voices a similar address to a city which is overwhelmingly maternal: 'Rome, be as just and gracious unto me I As I am confident an.d kind to thee. I Open the gates and let me in' (1.1.60-63). In this reading, Saturninus's address ' implicitly voices a desire for maternal affection and acceptance'. Willbern continues: 'the wishedfor opening of the gates is latently sexual and highly ambivalent: entry into the mother's body, in both genital and oral terms, is unconsciously as terrifying as it may be pleasurable' (1978, 161). In this analysis, the open gates of Rome, like the gaping tomb of the Andronici, functions (in a similar way to the body of Roxana in Alabaster's play) as the point of intersection between discordant discourses, but here the mother is not victim but predator. A disturbing and deliciously threatening predominance of the maternal resonates ironically at moments where masculine, martial victory is most celebrated. The tomb works metonymically to suggest the monuments of the 'Capitol', so emblematizing the success of the martial state, but a state in service to a feminine mother Rome. It is at the same time a greedy maternal receptacle, a sweet 'cell' which is also an earthly grave, an image of civic statuary that combines with the fecund earth to receive the corpses ofthe hero's children. 18 Rome and the tomb operate as ambivalent concepts, signifying both the personal sacrifice which is part of an understanding of the successful, masculine, martial and politic, and, simultaneously, a subversive, earthy, greedy maternity that has reclaimed the bodies oftwenty-one ofTitus's offspring (Wynne-Davies, 1991, 135-9). 19 This maternity is actualized in the stage figure of Tamora, at first presented as a pitiable mother who pleads for the life of her eldest son and later as a vengeful Medea figure bent upon terrible revenge. Despite the fact that she spends most of the play in the second role, one of the play's earliest spectators included a drawing of Tamora in his depiction of the play showing her as

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apparently dignified and supplicant. As Marion Wynne-Davies has asked, 'why did Peacham choose to depict Tamora as royal and sympathetic?' (1991, 34). For Wynne-Davies the answer is in 'the play's rejection of the common stereotyping of women into virgins and whores'. She argues that: 'Instead, it appears both to enact and to confuse these treatments of women: feminine power and female sexuality are inextricably linked, simultaneously provoking and repressed' (ibid.). This not entirely a move away from the certainties of straightforward typology, however, relying as it does upon a familiar link between femininity, madness, and the disintegration of the state. 20 Titus's refusal of clemency, despite Tamora's desperate resistance to the Roman rituals that require the life of her son, provokes the release of a furious and rapacious maternity which is analogous to that signified by the tomb in its drive towards real degeneration and chaos. Tamora's plea to Titus to 'stain not thy tomb with blood' is also a kind of threat, imagining as it does the defacement of the Roman monument by the heathen blood ofher son (1.1.119). Articulated by the frantic mother, this cry of and for blood associates that blood with maternity, and with the threatening potential of the maternal body. Bate's point about the opposition of Tamora and Titus is significant here. As Peacham draws it, the Queen of the Goths kneels royal but supplicant, her regal status demonstrating her potential power just as her physical position indicates her present powerlessness. Behind her, her children and her foreign lover attest to the havoc that the uncontrollable forces of maternal revenge and female sexual desire will wreak upon the Roman and his conventionallydressed companions. The Peacham picture demonstrates a confrontation between the certainties of the civilized state and the unleashed potential emblematized by Queen Tamora and her train. The first scene of the play similarly sets up an opposition in which Titus, ostensibly in control, is in fact placed at the mercy of an abundant, consuming maternity that is already in the process of bringing about his destruction. The figure of Tamora offers a spectacular and sustained realization of the excess of maternity that characterizes the corruption of Rome. Maternity infects her role as Saturninus's wife, 'A loving nurse, a mother to his youth', and she produces a foreign bastard child instead of a Roman heir (1.1.333). It is the language in which she expresses even her sexual desires: 'hounds and horns and sweet melodious birds I Be unto us as is a nurse's song I Of lullaby to bring her babe asleep' (3.2.27-9). The pervasive maternity figured by Tamora exists, moreover, outside the parameters of the dramatic action. Rome is already greedy for blood, Tamora is already a mother, when the narrative begins and so it is beyond the control of the Romans who struggle against it. David Willbern situates Lavinia as the symbolic opposite to this, representing an alternative Rome, the 'pure and virtuous mother' who is under attack. 21 Certainly, it is Lavinia's potential as the locus of a non-threatening, controllable maternity,

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and thus a suitable vehicle for the continuation of patriarchy that is set against Tamora's fearsome maternal status, a status forged in an unfamiliar time and place beyond the scope of the play. It is not femininity but maternity that infects Rome. It is thus appropriate that the emblem of this poisonous and pervasive motherhood should be annihilated at the end of the play, which closes with the image of her body being thrown 'to beasts and birds to prey' (5.3.198). In Titus, it is the impossibility of containing the maternal that provides the primary dynamic of the play. In Kyd's Spanish Tragedy the potential for violence implicit in the maternal is instead turned upon itself in a world dominated by policy that is impervious to either the threats or the pleas of the mother. In this play it is the impotence of maternity which offers a pathetic testament to the immorality of the political machinations that constitute the main plot. Isabella, wife of the avenging hero Hieronimo, has no narrative function other than to appear at three crucial points in the play to emblematize first through grief for her murdered son, then consequent madness, and finally suicide, the drive towards revenge which structures the play. She operates in this pseudo-Senecan drama as a familiar combination of fury and mother, articulating the need for revenge while at the same time signifying this necessity through the excesses of her grief-stricken state. Michael Hattaway has described the way in which this play operates as a sequence of scenes, 'a sequence of performed actions', and Isabella's part fits well with his analogy with opera, three brief appearances which work like arias to offer a kind of immediate emotional and dramatic satisfaction as well as to push the dynamic of the play forward to its inevitable denouement (1982, 106). Kathleen McLuskie has drawn attention to the importance of Isabella's role in contributing to 'making revenge an emotional as well as a plot necessity, adding to the play's dramatic power' (1989, 131-2), a point that I wish to take further here. 22 Isabella's first appearance is to join her husband in a lament before the hanging body of their murdered son. 23 Her function here is not more than conventional, a kind of choric support for Hieronimo's calls for revenge, emblematizing and articulating the grief which is essential to the revenge motif, but her part is nevertheless crucial. The evocative spectacle of the mourning mother looking up at her son's corpse clearly evokes the tradition of iconography that links motherhood with loss, which was discussed at the beginning of this essay. Michael Hattaway takes for granted the emotional appeal of Kyd's reworking of this convention, writing that 'these images need no comment: they are the stuff of popular baHads but also of high art' (1982, 122). His point can perhaps be developed to describe this scene as combining the pious sympathy elicited by visual reference to Christian iconography with the voyeurism more usually expressed in popular commercial literature where the

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intimate experience of personal grief becomes, for the observer, a source of prurient pleasure. The mother here is at once venerable and ridiculous, more so when she next appears, 'running lunatic' and, in a futile gesture, cutting down the arbour where her son was hanged (Act 3, Scene 8). Hattaway draws attention, again, to the importance of spectacle when he explains how 'Isabella's rich court robes would have been replaced by a loose and tom smock, her tied-up hair and headpiece replaced by a long flowing wig, the conventional stage symbol of distraction' (1982, 124). The familiar image of the distracted mother that I have argued to be conventionally emblematic of public and private breakdown is here part of a process of transformation. This process ends with Isabella's suicide where, in a pathetic combination of the Christian icon of grief and a classical avenging fury, she opts for a Senecan death as she calls for revenge and then stabs herself in 'the hapless breast that gave Horatio suck' (4.2.37). There is a tension between the Senecan notion of honourable suicide and the Christian sin of Despair here, which is both complicated and elucidated by the mother's reference to her own body that becomes the point of articulation between those conflicting possibilities. The maternal breast is a site of both shame and honour, an emblem both of humankind's bestiality and of idealized maternity. The manner of Isabella's suicide, simultaneously courageous and cowardly, enables the revenge motif to refer both to Christian guilt and Classical shame. Revenge here is desirable for the reputation of the public person, but requires punishment for the good of the spiritual self. Overburdened with meaning like Roxana, Isabella figures both the political and personal implications of 'policy' while emblematizing their irreconcilability. Hattaway says that descriptions of the play 'do not imply a single hero but see the tragedy as that of a family or dynasty', and suggests that what would sell it would be 'a reminder of those great scenes in the play that had caught the imagination ofthe audience' (1982, 106). I would argue that the focus upon the mother's body here is exactly what allows this interplay of concepts of private family and public dynasty; the two brought together by the bitter-sweet and contradictory pleasures induced by the spectacle of the victimized mother, first tortured by madness and then stabbed through her breast, dead upon the stage.24 The mother's body, both alive and dead, is similarly and spectacularly utilized by Christopher Marlowe in the two Tamburlaine plays. 25 Despite these being among the most violent plays in the Elizabethan theatre, Zenocrate, uniquely in the plays addressed in this essay, transcends any association with violence; she is responsible for no deaths and herself dies of natural causes. But it is her apparent disconnection from the carnage that surrounds her which is interesting here. In Part I an important contrast is made between Zabina, the wife of Bajazeth, Tamburlaine's conquered enemy, and Zenocrate, the hero's

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prospective bride. Before the battle in which Bajazeth will be defeated, he celebrates Zabina's success as a mother of 'three brave boys': Zabina, mother of three brauer boies, Than Hercules, that in his infancie Did pash the iawes of Serpents venemous: Whose hands are made to gripe a warlike Launce, Their shoulders broad, for complet armour fit, Their lims more large and of a bigger size Than all the brats ysprong from Typhons loins: Who, when they come vnto their fathers age, Will batter Turrets with their manly fists. Sit here vpon this royal chaire of state, And on thy head weare my Emperiall crowne (1201-ll)

Bajazeth's eulogy provokes a response from Tamburlaine which Simon Shepherd sees as a 'fetishising' of Zenocrate's glacial beauty and chastity (1981, 183): Zenocrate, the louliest Maide aliue, Fairer than rockes ofpearle and pretious stone, The onely paragon ofTamburlaine, Whose eies are brighter than the Lampes ofheauen, And speech more pleasant than sweet harmony: That with thy lookes canst cleare the darkened Sky: And calme the rage ofthundring Iupiter: Sit down by her (1215-27)

Shepherd sees the women here as objects in what he characterizes as a male competition. If this is true, such an objectification of the female (particularly when, as in this scene, such attention .is drawn to their visual significance) serves to heighten the meanings of the female body in terms of the perpetuation of patriarchy through their capacity to reproduce the dynastic line. Bajazeth's rhetoric, coloured by references to classical mythology which emphasize the solidity and power of the dynastic heritage he describes, enhances the visual significance of his crowned and enthroned queen whose motherhood is central to her meaning. The effect of this emphasis upon Zabina's personal success as a mother of children who reproduce their father's warlike disposition, and, because of this, her political success as a queen, is to make her the emblem of the established, apparently unassailable, political structures that the upstart Tamburlaine repeatedly challenges. Tamburlaine's retort is to place his princess beside Zabina, 'adorned with my Crowne, I As if thou wert the Empresse of the world' (1222-3). Zenocrate, in contrast to Zabina, has no

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sexual history. It is her potential as a future wife, queen and mother which Tamburlaine celebrates here. Marlowe here brings together two paradigms of femininity and allows a play of irony between them; the older mother and the pale girl are placed together as if to show up one another's deficiencies rather than as icons of female qualities. The dramatic rhetoric draws attention to the differences between them as first the men compete in language over the importance of their women and then the women bicker about the superiority of their men. This verbal competition tends to undermine the iconic value of the spectacle of the two female types, so setting up an ironic resonance between them. Zenocrate's peculiar status here, not quite wife, not yet mother, indicates both her implication in Tamburlaine's future success, and foreshadows her detachment from it. After Bajazeth's defeat and subsequent suicide, Zabina, like Isabella in Kyd's play, runs lunatic and kills herself. Her mad speech, in prose which stands out from the blank verse of the rest of the scene, offers an evocative cluster of images which suggest an obvious typological link between her particular circumstance as Tamburlaine's victim and the timeless suffering of maternal grief: 0 Baiazet, 0 Turk, 0 emperor, giue him his liquor? Not I, bring milk and fire, and my blood I bring him againe, teare me in peeces, give me the sworde with a ball of wildefire vpon it. Downe with him, downe with him. Goe to my child, away, away, away. Ah, saue that Infant, saue him, saue him (2090-95)

The spectacle of the mad mother, together with the chaotic images in this speech, operate to dismantle the concept of successful maternity and queenliness that Bajazeth set up so thoroughly in his celebration of Zabina quoted earlier. Against the solidity of the Classical mythology invoked by the Emperor to celebrate his queen, is set one of the most chaotic and pathetic episodes of the Christian story; that of the massacre of the Innocents. The milk and the blood of maternity are set against images of fire and sword and shown to be inadequate. Zabina's final cry before she dies, 'Hel, death, Tamburlain, Hell, make ready my Coch, my chaire, my iewels, I come, I come, I come', reinforces pathetically the sense of the futility of all that was celebrated by her husband, as neither her function as mother nor the trappings of wealth and royalty have any currency in the face of the new power structures that Tamburlaine is setting in place.Z6 Motherhood's crucial function in maintaining patriarchy, articulated by Bajazeth and undermined by Tamburlaine's triumphs in the first play of the pair, recurs as a concern in Tamburlaine II. Like Zabina, Zenocrate has produced three sons, but, ironically, sons who are reproductions of their mother

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rather than their father. Marlowe constructs a witty play upon the conventional dramatic rhetoric of patriarchy which asserts a physical resemblance between father and son as a way of reinforcing the strength of the dynastic line, by making the womanish appearance of the hero's children a source of anxiety, undermining Tamburlaine's dynastic ambitions. Tamburlaine himself articulates this anxiety when he and his family first appear in the second play in a scene where the hero arranges his family into what Judith Weil characterizes as 'a portrait group', an emblem, we might think, of his triumphant progress and dynastic success (1977, 134). Despite the confirmation of these things offered by the family tableau, Tamburlaine's words reveal a crucial instability at its heart: But yet me thinks their looks are amorous, Not martiall as the sons of Tamburlaine. Water and ayre being simbolisde in one Argue their want of courage and of wit, Their haire as white as milke and soft as Downe, Which should be like the quills of Porcupines, As black as Ieat, and hard as Iron or steel, Bewraies they are too dainty for the wars. Their fingers made to quauer on a Lute, Their armes to hang about a Ladies necke: Their legs to dance and caper in the aire: Would make me thinke them Bastards, not my sons, But that I know they issued from thy wombe, That neuer look'd on man but Tamburlaine. (II, 2590-603)

Patriarchy here has been struck where it is most vulnerable, the incubation of the child within its mother's body, where a bastard might be sustained, or a monstrous prodigy might be nurtured before entering the world to upset the established order?7 Marlowe uses this to set up an ironic reconsideration of his hero's achievements, so spectacular and yet ultimately so precarious. While Bajazeth's son, Calapine, exhibits his father's qualities in a daredevil escape from captivity, Tamburlaine's eldest boy, Calyphas, disdains his father's triumphs, preferring the company of his mother: But while my brothers follow armes my lord Let me accompany my gratious mother, They are enough to conquer all the world And you have won enough for me to keep. (II, 2634-7)

This speech again depends upon its visual context for effect. The spectacular impact of son and mother, so physically alike, together on the stage creates a

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link between them which challenges the play's- and the hero's- construction of masculinity as martial, active and aggressive. The transmission to her sons of Zenocrate's womanishness problematizes the dynastic ambitions that are implicit in martial endeavour, so that maternity, essential for the continuation of the patriarchal line, is shown to be also its greatest liability. After Zenocrate's death, the antipathy between father and son spills over into infanticide when Tamburlaine kills Calyphas for staying in his tent during a battle and refusing to fight. (3794) This is the point where, says D.J. Palmer, Tamburlaine 'has turned upon Nature' (1968, 77). Nature triumphs here, I would argue, through the mediation of the body of the ostensibly powerless captive girl who mothered his offspring. Just as, in Tamburlaine I, the spectacle of Zabina's mutilated body - the body that had mothered 'brave boys' - emphasized the futility of dynastic ambition, so the death here of Tamburlaine's son, physically so like his mother, demonstrates the limits of the hero's aspirations. Serene and supportive as a wife, beautiful beyond compare as a lover, Zenocrate is in the end the unwitting agent of public and private disaster on a grand scale; the collapse of both family and empire. Tamburlaine, who asserted power over even those universal concepts that are traditionally gendered feminine, 'I hold the Fates bound fast in yron chaines, I And with my hand turn Fortunes wheel about' (Tamb. I, 369-70), in the first play, discovers the inadequacy of such claims in the second, an inadequacy which is emblematized by a pervasive and malignant maternity, transmitted through the conquered princess whose body bore, and left her mother's mark upon, his children.28 In all the plays I have discussed, the mother's body, whether asserted through rhetoric or realized as dramatic spectacle, is inscribed with a sense of inevitable violence. The theatrical embodiment of the maternal brings into play a complex and contradictory set of meanings which assert the mother's potential both as a vicious predator, and as a vulnerable victim, at once frightening and pathetic. Thus overdetermined, the dramatized mother carries the narrative potential to figure both as the signifier and as the carrier of conflict, and, in the suffering that leads to her inevitable destruction, its emblem.

6

The Body Archival: Re-reading the Trial of the Earl of Somerset Alan Stewart The body of Sir Thomas Overbury refused to die. Incarcerated, cut off from human contact, poisoned repeatedly by foodstuffs, it was finished off ultimately by an enema of arsenic, administered by an apothecary's boy. The multiple abuses to which that body was subjected were minutely reconstructed in the trials of the servants involved in the killing, and in the trial of Frances, Countess of Somerset. But in the arraignment of her husband, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, Overbury's body is significantly absent. What I shall suggest in this essay is that this apparent absence reveals massive anxieties about another body, what I shall call 'the body archival' - the increasingly organized and complex paperwork which underpinned Jacobean government. I choose to name this a 'body' because, as I hope to. show, since this paperwork was generated through intimate secretarial relations, often closeted off from public political life, it was impossible for contemporaries to unpick the notion of archives from the transactions which produced them. These transactions very often were figured as, and understood as, physically intimate, even sexual relations. Thus, the body archival is always bound up with what we might call 'the body personal'.

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The aura of the king's body personal has been newly buffed over the last quarter century. In a 1977 essay, David Starkey extended the argument of Ernst Kantorowicz's classic study The King's Two Bodies that the king's own person, his corporeal symbolism, was used to define his constitutional position, especially in England. 'Only in legal discourse,' Starkey insisted, 'did the king's physical person symbolise merely the private aspects of kingship; ordinarily it was infinitely more resonant' (1977, 188). Turning attention away from purely legal discourse, Starkey gave power back to the reality, the corporeality of the king's body, seeing it as an essential instrument of political

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management (1977, 189). The charisma of the royal body 'rub[bed] off onto those physically nearest to it: therefore ambassadors should be 'right trusty and near familiars' (PRO SP 1 I 19 fol. 200, quoted in Starkey, 1977, 201). The Privy Chamber's power was founded in its access to the king's body: 'Privy Chamber office is defined (through the limitation of the entree to the private apartments) in terms of the right to give intimate attendance on the king; but the ability to represent the king's person in its fullness is limited to the Privy Chamber; so representation itself must depend on intimacy. Intimacy, that is, is the vehicle through which the Privy Chamber symbolise the king' (Starkey, 1977, 207-8). In conclusion, Starkey argued that this was 'a coherent and developed system of symbolism, centred on the human body: the king's person was the most expressive symbol of his office; the persons of his body servants were the fullest representations of their master; and finally, the mechanism by which this latter representation was achieved - the symbolism of intimate attendance- was a type of body symbolism as well' (1977, 220). Starkey's arguments for body symbolism are developed- influentially for subsequent readings of Tudor and Stuart politics - in the collection of essays The English Court, where the bodily/political dynamics of James I's reign are analysed by Neil Cuddy, as 'the revival of the entourage' (1987, 173). Cuddy argues that from James's accession in 1603 'the Bedchamber displaced the Privy Chamber as the focus of the monarch's private life ... The balance of power swung away, increasingly, from the Privy Council and a bureaucratminister towards the Bedchamber and the royal favourite.' This gave those closest to the king's body in the Bedchamber real power - and for several years, the favourite among favourites was Sir Robert Carr who in December 1607 was sworn Gentleman of the Bedchamber- by 1614, Cuddy writes, Carr was de facto head of the Bedchamber (1987, 181). Starkey's and Cuddy's analyses would seem to be borne out by contemporary observers, who closely scrutinized the king's body. In the Basi/ikon Doran, written for his son and heir Henry, James himself notes the importance of 'a Kings outwarde behauiour in indifferent things ... howe they should serue for trunshe-men (truchmen, interpreters), to interprete the inwarde disposition of the min de, to the eyes of them that cannot see farther within him, and therefore must onely iudge of him by the outward appearance' (B4r). 1 Devoting his entire third book to 'a Kings Behaviovr in Indifferent Things', James asserts that: It is a true olde saying, That a King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazinglie doe beholde ... the people, who seeth but the outward part, will euer judge of the substance, by the circumstances: and according to the outwarde appearance, if his

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behauiour be light or dissolute, will conceiue prre-occupied conceits of the Kings inward intention. (14r-v) These 'indifferent actions' cover everything: 'as foode, sleeping, rayment, speaking, writing, and gesture ... pastimes or exercises, and vsing of companie for recreation' (14v-15r). This last leads to the question of access, as James advises: Let not your Chalmer be throng & common in the time of your rest, aswell for comelinesse, as for eschewing of carrying reports out of the same. Let them that haue the credite to serue in your Chamber, be trustie & secrete; for a King will need to vse secrecie in many thinges. (16v-I7r) Here, access to the chamber importantly means access to 'secrecie',2 which is also evident from the few extant letters exchanged between James and his favourite Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. James demonstrates favour through physical access to his body, especially in the intimate space of the Bedchamber. When James writes to Somerset in 1615 passionately deploring the deterioration of their relationship, he declares that 'ye have deserved more trust and confidence of me than ever man did: in secrecy above all flesh, in feeling and unpartial respect . . . [I]n those points I confess I never saw any come towards your merit: I mean in the points of an inwardly trusty friend and servant.' That 'inward trust' leads to a 'licentiousness of freedom' between patron and favourite: 'The greatness of that trust and privacy betwixt us will very well allow unto you an infinitely great liberty and freedom of speech unto me.' Somerset's angry tirades against James are accompanied by a refusal to share his bedchamber, a circumstance which greatly upsets the king: 'I leave out of this reckoning your long creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnest soliciting you to the contrary, accounting that but as a point of unkindness.' James argues that he has shown his love towards Somerset by the usual signs of favour: 'What can or ever could thus trouble your mind? For the exterior to the world, what can any servants expect of their prince but countenance or reward? ... have ye not besides your own infinite privacy with me, together with the main offices you possess, your nephew in my bedchamber besides another far more active than he in court practices? And have ye not one of your newest kinsmen, that loves not to be idle, in my son's bedchamber?' 3 In another letter, James takes Somerset to task for the withdrawal of one aspect of his service. 'How ye can give over that inward affection and yet be a dutiful servant, I cannot understand that distinction.' 4 'Inwardness' here is designated

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as a special area of 'service', signalled and guaranteed by physical access and intimacy. Such physical intimacy was, of course, vulnerable to accusation. Alan Bray has shown how both a demonized sodomy and an acceptable male friendship shared signs of 'a physical closeness': the shared bed, the public kiss or embrace, a rhetoric of intense emotional affect. Bray also suggests that by the end of Elizabeth's reign, the 'potential ambiguity about intimacy between men' was changing, 'for the protecting conventions that ensured that it was seen in an acceptable frame of reference were often absent by the end of the sixteenth century' (1990, 15). This would make sense of the distaste with which some viewed James's favour, shown by his physical intimacy, publicly displayed, with the favourite du jour. Roger Coke wrote that: 'The King had a loathsome way of lolling his arms about his Favourites' necks, and kissing them' (Amos, 1846, 34). Anthony Weldon described how James 'hung about his (a favourite's) neck, slabbering his cheeks ... lolled about his neck' (ibid., 36-7). Lord Thomas Howard wrote that Somerset ' was so decidedly the Court Favourite, that the King would lean on his arm, pinch his cheek, smooth his ruffled garments, and, when directing discourse to others, nevertheless gaze on him' (ibid., 9). This suspicion of James would surface again in analyses of the Overbury affair. 5 Thomas Overbury met Robert Carr while travelling in Edinburgh in 1601. He remained his intimate friend and counsellor after Carr caught the attention of the king two years later, and embarked on his meteoric rise. According to P.R. Seddon, 'Overbury's literary gifts, his sophistication and his knowledge of the court compensated for Carr's educational and social deficiencies' (1970, 49). Overbury' s rewards were inevitably less spectacular than his friend's- a knighthood, an appointment as server to the king- but the two men remained close until Carr declared he was in love with Frances Howard, the wife of the third Earl of Essex. Overbury at first helped Carr's suit, writing love-letters to the countess; but when marriage was mooted, soon expressed his discontent, and alienated his friend. Without Carr's support, Overbury became vulnerable to the ploys of powerful enemies at court and, after refusing a proffered diplomatic mission, he was committed to the Tower of London in April 1613. Newswriter John Chamberlain immediately read the situation as concerning James's relationship with Carr, now Viscount Rochester. As he wrote to Dudley Carleton on 29 April: 'The King hath long had a desire to remove him (Overbury) from about the Lord of Rochester, as thincking yt a dishonor to him that the world shold have an opinion that Rochester ruled him (James) and Overburie ruled Rochester wheras he wold make yt appeare that neither Overburie nor Rochester had such a stroke with him. ' 6 Overbury subsequently died, still imprisoned in the Tower, on 15 September 1613; on 4 November, Rochester was invested as Earl of Somerset;

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and on 26 December, Somerset married the now-divorced Countess of Essex. Sir Thomas Overbury was all but forgotten. But in the late summer of 1615, word reached Secretary of State Sir Ralph Winwood that Overbury's death had been the result of foul play. The Keeper of the Tower, Sir Gervase Elwes, was summoned, and eventually admitted that Overbury had been killed by an arsenic-laden enema, administered by an apothecary's boy, and that Elwes had kept quiet because he was afraid of impeaching 'great persons' - no less great than the Earl and Countess of Somerset. James ordered a full inquiry on 13 October 1615, to be headed by Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke. Coke's commission of inquiry uncovered several attempts to poison Overbury before the fatal enema, originating in the Tower's kitchens with a Mrs Turner, who had links with the Countess of Somerset. Turner, Elwes and Deputy Keeper Richard Weston were arrested; on 17 October the Somersets were put under house arrest. The minor players confessed their guilt and were hanged in November. The countess quickly confessed when the murder inquiry was turned in her direction. Somerset, however, maintained that he had not been complicit. Somerset was arraigned at Westminster Hall on 25 May 1616, the day after his wife, in a hearing that lasted over seven hours. I proceed from the assumption that Somerset was guilty as charged, but, like his prosecutors, my enquiry deliberately takes a different path. I focus on the way in which the crown case, led by Attorney General Sir Francis Bacon, depicted the relationship between Overbury and Somerset (Bacon consistently referred to Carr by his most elevated title, although the events under scrutiny dated to before that promotion). I shall suggest, as others have, that the portrait of intimacy or inwardness that he presents is always a displacement of anxieties concerning the particular inwardness of Somerset and James. But I shall also contend that this inwardness, premised on their physical intimacy, becomes particularly threatening in another, textual area. Bacon, of course, no doubt had his own agenda for such a prosecution: although previously a protege of Somerset, he had by now hitched himself to the rising star George Villiers. Somerset's downfall would be the final consolidation of Villiers's ascent as principal favourite (Jardine and Stewart, 1998, Ch. 13). Nonetheless, his method of insinuating Somerset's guilt - which was entirely successful points us towards a new understanding of the nature of Jacobean inwardness.

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Letters litter Somerset's trial. 7 Overbury's servant Henry Payton saw a letter of his master's to Somerset with the words: 'Ifl die, my blood lie upon you.'

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(978) Payton testified that Overbury sent a letter to him, via Deputy Keeper Weston, to carry to Somerset with the message that the powder the earl had sent him had made him sick ('given him in one night 60 stools besides vomits', 978). Lawrence Davis, another Overbury servant, testified that he had seen some of his master's letters, 'wherein he writ that the lord of Rochester was even with him' -letters that were lost, but later found and identified by Davis. Overbury's letters to Somerset were quoted in court - they had been 'left in trust' in a cabinet by Somerset with the antiquarian and collector Sir Robert Cotton, who had given them to 'a friend of his in Holborn, one Mrs. Farneforth' (or Farnworth); Mrs Farnworth, 'to the intent they might be safely kept', had given them to her former landlord, a merchant in Cheapside, saying they were 'some writings that concerned her jointure' (980). One John Simcocks testified how packets of letters from James's ambassador to Spain, Sir John Digby, addressed to the king, were opened by Overbury, who 'took brief notes for my lord of Somerset', and then forwarded them to the earl via Simcocks; others from James's ambassador to the Spanish Netherlands, Sir Thomas Edmondes, to the king, went the same route. Letters were read from Somerset to Overbury's mother and father, telling them to leave London (9845). Mention was made of 'continual posts' between Somerset and his wife, revealed by the countess's servant James Franklin (985-6). There were letters from Northampton to Somerset (about Overbury, 'prompting the Lieutenant' so that he would be 'very perfect in his part'), that turned up in the box which moved from Somerset to Cotton to Mrs Farnworth to the Cheapside merchant (986-7). There were letters from Somerset to Northampton, which were delivered after Northampton's death in 1614 by Sir Robert Cotton back to Somerset, which he burned the evening before he was committed to the custody of the Dean of Westminster (987). Somerset sent powder (allegedly to induce vomiting) to Overbury in a letter, carried by Lawrence Davis (987). The countess showed Franklin letters she had received from her husband (988). Franklin testified that he had bought poisons which were sent to Overbury, 'wrapped in a paper, written with a Roman hand', and Lawrence Davis testified that he 'saw this letter' (988). Franklin testified that 'in a letter which my lady told him was sent her from my lord were these words, "That he wondered things were not yet despatched."' From this, it would appear that letters contained the 'truth' of the case, and their presentation in court was designed to bring this truth to light. But this is not, I will suggest, the way in which the prosecution worked. In addition to several extant transcripts of the trial proceedings, we have Attorney-General Bacon's meticulous planning for the prosecution, undertaken with the full participation of the king. 8 From these notes and the trial transcripts, another plan becomes apparent- one which sidelines the murder ofOverbury's body in favour of a more heinous crime.

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In his disingenuously 'simple Narrative of the Fact', Bacon, opening for the prosecution, alleged that Overbury 'for a time was known to have had great interest, and great Friendship with my Lord of Somerset, both in his meaner Fortunes and after' ('Charge', C3v). He became 'a kind of Oracle of Directions unto him', and claimed that 'the Fortune, Reputation and Understanding ofthis Gentleman ... proceeded from his Company and Counsel' - the particular charge of this boast was made clear by Bacon's comment that 'this Gentleman' was 'well known to have had a better Teacher' - namely, the king ('Charge', C4r). Bacon argued that the 'excess (as I may term it)' of the SomersetOverbury friendship led inevitably to 'mortal Hatred on my Lord of Somerset's part, burst[ing] forth into violent Menaces and Threats on both sides' ('Charge', C8v). Overbury, realizing that he was about 'to be dispossessed of my Lord here', turned to 'stronger Remedies, supposing that he had my Lord's Head under his Girdle, in respect of communication of Secrets of Estate, or (as he calls them himself in his Letters, Secrets of all Natures) and therefore dealt violently with him, to make him desist, with menaces of Discovery of Secrets, and the like'. The countess's hatred for Overbury was then matched by another, 'of a deeper and more Mineral Nature from my Lord of Somerset himself; who was afraid of Overbury's Nature, and that if he did break from him and fly out, he would mine into him, and trouble his whole Fortunes' ('Charge', CSv). The 'mortal Hatred coupled with Fear' ('Charge', C8v), the 'Bitterness, a mortal Malice or Hatred, mixed with deep and bottomless Fears' ('Charge', C7v) shown by Somerset towards Overbury was rooted in 'Fear of discovering Secrets. Secrets (I say) of a high and dangerous nature' ('Charge', C8v). They were not light, but 9f a high nature, for I will give you the Elevation of the Pole. They were such as my Lord of Somerset for his part had made a Vow, That Overbury should neither live in Court nor Country. That he had likewise opened himself, and his own fears so far, that if Overbury ever came forth of the Tower, either Overbury or himself must die for it. And of Overbury's part, he had threatned my Lord, That whether he did live or die, my Lord's shame should never die, but he would leave him the most odious Man of the World. And farther that my Lord was like enough to repent it, in the place where Overbury wrote, which was the Tower of London. He was a true Prophet in that: So here in the height of the Secrets. ('Charge', C8v-Dr)

The Somersets feared, continued Bacon, that unless he were carefully watched, 'Overbury in the mean time might write clamorous and furious Letters to other his Friends, and so all might be disappointed' ('Charge', C6v). Therefore Somerset devised 'the strange manner of his (Overbury's) close keeping', denying access to his father; refusing his servants' offer to be imprisoned with

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him; and effectively leaving him 'close Prisoner to all his Friends, and open and exposed to all his Enemies' ('Charge', D2r). Overbury 'could not feed but by their Hands, where he could not speak nor write but through their Trunks [speaking-pipes]'('Charge', C7r). Bacon's prosecution returns obsessively to the notion of 'secrets' 'Secrets of Estates', 'Secrets of all Natures', 'secrets ... of a high and dangerous nature' - but there is no attempt to name or define them. Commentators then, and at various times since, have assumed these 'secrets' to be sexual- the unnameable aspect of the relationship of Somerset and James which, it was feared, would come to light during the trial. Bacon's strategy not to lay out the contents of the letters left them secret and unnamed, and that which must not be named translates easily into the crimen inter Christianos non nominandum, sodomy - a reading facilitated by the vague but telling clues carefully placed: 'excess', Somerset's head under Overbury's girdle. At least one observer, Sir Simonds D'Ewes certainly read the evidence this way: in his journal entry for 22 August 1622, he recounted a conversation with a friend about sodomy (and the king's sodomy), which mentioned 'the letter in Sommersetts caskett, found by my lord Cooke, for which since the King never loved him and finallye that, in other cuntryes, men talked familiarly of it' (D'Ewes, 1974, 92-3). Yet, the fact that men were able to 'talk familiarly of it', were easily able to identify this supposed 'secret', suggests that it was what D.A. Miller has dubbed an 'open secret'. Miller argues that: 'It is ... a misleading common sense that finds the necessity of secrecy in the "special" nature of the contents concealed, when all that revelation usually reveals is a widely diffused cultural prescription, a cliche' (1988, 194-5). Rather, 'the social function of secrecy ... is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge'. He goes on to speculate that: 'No doubt an analysis of the kinds of knowledge that it is felt needful to cover in secrecy would tell us much about a given culture or historical period' (ibid., 206). The present enquiry seeks to further this speculation. I take it for a given that the open secret in the trial is the nature of the relationship between Somerset and James. What I shall examine here is 'the knowledge of the knowledge'- the mechanisms by which that open secret is sustained as both secret and open. 'Instead of the question "What does secrecy cover?'", Miller observes, 'we had better ask "What covers secrecy?" What, that is, takes secrecy for its field of operations?' (ibid., 207). Bacon continues deliberately to obfuscate the nature of the secrets, and shifts the intrigue onto the possession of secrets. Here, the field of operations is the complex administrative structures built on letters - the letters that threaten to undo the king and his favourite, and the letters with which Overbury threatens his erstwhile patron. Contrary to what we might expect, only in a few

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cases are passages or words from the letters quoted in court as incriminating evidence, what Bacon calls 'dark Words and Clauses' ('Charge', D2v). What is at stake here is the fact of the traffic in letters: the sending, receiving, carrying, reading, reading out, passing on, sharing, 'extracting', storing, losing, finding, hiding, mutilating, dating, sealing and burning of letters. Their 'secret' content, in all but a few cases, is not of consideration. Bacon felt the primary objective of the prosecution should be ' to prove the malice which Somerset bare to Overbury, which was the motive and ground of the impoisonment'. This he felt was the prosecution's 'only tenderness', since it needed 'to lay a foundation, that the malice was a deep malice, mixed with fear ... the malice must have a proportion to the effect of it, which was the impoisonment. So that if this foundation be not laid all the evidence is weakened.' In order to lay a sufficient foundation to explain the malice, Bacon therefore proposed a strategy, which would use as its opening gambit the correspondence between Overbury and Somerset:9 First, I shall read some passages of Overbury's letters, namely these: 'Is this the fruit of nine years' love, common secrets, and common dangers?' In another letter; 'Do not drive me to extremity to do that which you and I shall be sorry for.' In another letter; 'Can you forget him, between whom such secrets of all kinds have passed? etc.' Then will I produce Simcock[s], who deposeth from Weston's speech, that Somerset told Weston that if ever Overbury came out ofprison one of them must die for it. Then I will say that what these secrets are, I mean not to enter into particulars; nor to charge him with disloyalty, because he stands to be tried for his life upon another crime. But yet by some taste that I shall give to the Peers in general, they may conceive of what nature those secrets may be. Wherein I will take it for a thing notorious that Overbury was a man that always carried himself insolently both towards the Queen and towards the late Prince: That he was a man that carried Somerset on in courses separate and opposite to the privy council: That he was a man of nature fit to be an incendiary (seditious agitator, firebrand) of a state, full of bitterness and wildness of speech and project; That h.e was thought absolutely to govern Somerset, insomuch as in his own letters he vaunts, that From him proceeded Somerset's fortune, credit, and understanding. This course I mean to run in a kind of generality, putting the imputations rather upon Overbury than Somerset, and applying it that such a nature was like to hatch dangerous secrets and practices.

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It is the creation of this 'nature' which was 'like to hatch dangerous secrets and

practices' which takes Bacon away from consideration of bodily access, and toward a new notion of' inwardness'. At Westminster Hall Bacon introduced Somerset by alluding to his relationship with the king, and his relationship to the peerage, which he conveys by a simple body analogy: 'I know your Lordships cannot behold this Nobleman, but you must remember his great favour with the King, and the great Place that he hath had and born, and must be sensible that he is yet of your Number and Body, a Peer as you are; so as you cannot cut him off from your Body but with grief ('Charge', B6v). However, the next image, although still one of physical intimacy, suggested the direction his argument would take. James, he continued, had used 'this Gentleman heretofore, as the Signet upon his Finger (to use the Scripture Phrase)' ('Charge', B7v). This could be a reference to Haggai 2.23 - 'In that day, saith the LORD of hosts, will I take thee, 0 Zerubbabel, my servant, the son of Shealtiel, saith the LORD, and will make thee as a signet: for I have chosen thee, saith the LORD of hosts' signalling how James chose Somerset and put him in a place of great, intimate favour. More probably, however, Bacon was intending a more barbed reference, to Jeremiah 23.24: As I live, saith the LORD, though Coniah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence; And I will give thee into the hand of them that seek your life, and into the hand of them whose face thou fearest, even into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans. And I will cast thee out, and thy mother that bare thee, into another country, where ye were not born; and there shall ye die.

The 'signet' analogy therefore carries, in its biblical allusions, both the sense of being chosen for a place of great favour, and a deliberate, determined expulsion from that place of a favourite by an aggrieved lord. But the metaphor would have been more literally understood by the crowd packing Westminster Hall. 'Signet' implies not only close physical intimacy, but the use of the signet ring as seal. When in May 1612, Principal Secretary of State Salisbury died, Carr immediately began to assume some of the Secretary's functions, first writing letters under James's directions, and then in July 1612 being given custody of the signet (it was not until March 1614 that Sir Ralph Winwood was sworn in as Salisbury's successor). After Northampton's death in 1614, Somerset was given custody of the privy seal. Indeed, ironically, Somerset's detention was delayed by virtue of his possession of the seals: the commissioners reported that 'we had resolved to

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have committed the Earl to the Tower, before his Majty's coming to Whitehall, if he had not had the custody of the seals and other ensignes & ornaments of the Kings special favor. And the said seals and ensignes being taken from him, we hold it necessary that the said Earl be committed to the Tower'. 10 Bacon's casting of Somerset as secretary placed him in a very particular space, the subject of considerable anxiety in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, if the number of discourses on the post are any indicator. 11 As Angel Day asserts in his The English Secretorie, the secretary is not made primarily by 'the praiseable endeuour or abilitie of well writing or ordering the pen' (English Secretary, 1599, Nnv), but rather by his relationship with his master, a position 'which containeth the chiefest title of credite, and place of greatest assurance, in respect of the neerenesse and affinitie they haue of Trust, Regard, & Fidelitie, each with the other, by great conceyte and discretion.' His primordial quality, as the etymology - secret-ary demonstrates, is 'Secrecie, trust and regarde'; the secretary is a 'keeper or conseruer of the secret vnto him committed' (English Secretorie, 1592, P4v, Qr). Having suggested this complex, anxious relationship, Bacon proceeds to a lengthy discussion of the nature of the crime, which draws once again on the rhetoric associated with the secret-ary: 'impoisonment ... of Offences is the most secret: So secret, as if in all Cases of Impoisonment you should require Testimony, you were as good proclaim Impunity (exemption from punishment)' ('Charge', C2r). He then goes on to describe the particular nature of the Somerset-Overbury relationship in secret, secretarial acts: [T]his Friendship rested not only in Conversation and Business of Court, but likewise in Communication of Secrets of Estate. For my Lord of Somerset, at that time, exercising (by his Majesties special favour and trust) the Office of the Secretary provisionally, did not forbear to acquaint Overbury with the King's Packets of Dispatches from all parts, Spain, France, the Low Countries, &c. And this not by glimpses, or now and then rounding in the Ear for a favour, but in a setled manner: Packets were sent, sometimes opened by my Lord, sometimes unbroken unto Overbury, who perused them, copied, registred them, made Tables of them as he thought good: So that I will undertake, the time was, when Overbury knew more ofthe Secrets of State, than the Council Table did. ('Charge', C4r) 12

Overbury not only 'perused' the foreign intelligence, but undertook the functions usually undertaken by the clerk of the Privy Council, or the personal secretary of a principal secretary: making copies, entering the papers in a

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register, and 'making tables', that is, preparing a synoptical summary of the contents, to be speedily digested and retrieved by Overbury and others. 13 Significantly, it was at this point when, according to one manuscript witness of the speech, 'my Lord Somerset interrupted Mr. Attorney and demanded of him why he urged these impertinent and by-matters, done by the King's commandment?' Bacon replied that it was 'To show that as there was common secrets between you, so there were common dangers.' 14 He continued: Nay, they were grown to such an inwardness, as they made a Play of all the World besides themselves: So as they had Ciphers and Jargons for the King, the Queen, and all the great Men; things seldom used, but either by Princes, and their Embassadours and Ministers, or by such as work and practise against, or at least upon Princes. But understand me (my Lord) I shall not charge you this day with any Disloyalty; only I lay this for a foundation~ That there was a great communication of Secrets between you and Overbury, and that it had relation to Matters of Estate, and the greatest Causes of this Kingdom. (C4r-v)

Here the extreme nature of the 'inwardness' of Somerset and Overbury is defined as a relationship that should only exist between sovereigns and their ambassadors and principal ministers- in his plan, Bacon wrote these 'jargons ... and cyphers between them' were 'great badges of secrets of estate, and used either by princes and their ministers of state, or by such as practise against princes'. He also elaborated to James on the detail: '[Y]our Majesty was called Julius in respect of your empire, the queen Agrippina (though Somerset now saith it was Livia, and that my lady of Suffolk was Agrippina); the bishop of Canterbury Unctius; Northampton, Dominic; Suffolk, first Lerma, after Wolsey; and many others; so as it appears they made a play both of your court and kingdom, and that their imaginations wrought upon the greatest men and matters.' 15 In court, Bacon softened his attack slightly, citing jargons and . ciphers as the tools of 'such as work and practise against, or at least upon Princes', the other side of the coin. While Bacon introduces the question of disloyalty only to reject it, that taint remains. At heart, however, he is interested in the 'great communication of Secrets', which expressed 'itself in the elaboration of a language of 'ciphers and jargons' usually seen only in diplomatic and intelligence work. (Bacon's term 'jargon' seems to be one he coined to distinguish a verbal code from the written 'cipher': there is a reference in his A True Report of Dr Lopez his Treason [1594] to letters being 'written in jargon or verbal cipher'.) 16 In the later examination of Lawrence Davis, the nature of Overbury's secretarial functions was elaborated. Davis testified that:

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There was a packet of letters and sealed, which, as he takes, came from Sir J. Digby, directed to the King; and his master (Overbury) opened it, took brief notes for my Lord of Somerset, and sealing it again, sent both the notes and packet to him. Another of this he saw his master have at Newmarket from Sir Thomas Edmundes to the King, out of which, after he had taken extracts, he sealed it up again, and sent both back by this examinant to my Lord Somerset. (981)

In Somerset's own examination, he had admitted some 'jargon': 'amongst many other characters for names that passed between Sir T. Overbury and him, Simonist was for Sir H. Nevil, Wolfy for the now Lord Treasurer, Ductius for my Lord of Canterbury'. Bacon exclaimed: 'In good faith these two made plays of all the world besides themselves; but though it were a play then, it hath proved tragi cal since' (981 ). In his brief speech of defence, at the end of his trial, Somerset claimed that the king had sanctioned Overbury's quasisecretarial role: 'For the great trust and communication of secrets between Overbury and me, and for the extracts that he took of ambassadors' letters, I confess this; I knew his ability, and what I did was by the king's commission. For other secrets, there was never any betwixt us' (993). Bacon's prosecution demonstrates that suspicious 'inwardness' is not merely a matter of physical intimacy, pace Starkey; rather, it might reside in the inwardness effected by the traffic of 'inward letters'. This contention is . supported by the final stages of the prosecution case, fronted by Serjeant Crew, on Somerset's actions after the murder. It was' at this point that, in Crew's phrase, ' my lord begins to sew fig-leaves', by attempting 'practices to suppress all testimonies' and 'to surprize all letters'. He sketched how the earl went about the 'suppressing of letters': Lawrence Davis, after his master's death, made suit to serve my lord, then his suit was rejected; but last summer, fearing this might break out, sends Rawlins to him, proffers him all courtesy, and desires that he would send to him all those letters and copies of letters, which had past between sir T. Overbury and him. Davis did so; and upon this my lord gave him 301. (989-90) 17

After the arrests of Weston and Mrs Turner, Somerset also sought to regain 'a trunk, wherein were many letters', at the house owned by Weston's son Richard's master. Somerset provided 'a private warrant under his hand & seal', 'in a cellar to pretend according to the pretext of his warrant to search for Bonds and writings concerning Mrs Hynde (Mrs Turner's sister), the purpose in truth being to search for writings concerning Mrs Turner' .18 He caused a poursuivant named Poulter to engage a constable 'to break it open, and to send

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unto him those bundles of writings that were in it' (990). The constable, George Errat, testified that because he was 'shewed ... a part of the warrant only, but not all', he would not obey; Poulter then 'got smiths himself to break open the house and doors, and found in the cellar a box and bag of writings, where he saw the name of Mrs. Turner, and those were carried to my lord' (991). 19 Beyond his attempts to retrieve incriminating letters, Somerset attempted to destroy and tamper with other papers. In his opening statement, Bacon had charged that Somerset's guilt could be detected in the fact 'that you suppressed, as much as in you was, Testimony: That you did deface, and destroy, and clip, and misdate all Writings that might give light to the Impoisonment'(C8r). Crew expanded on this accusation: Now for those letters that passed betwixt my lord of Northampton and you; thirty of those you had sent him, were delivered you after his death by sir R. Cotton; and all these the night before your commitment to the dean of Westminster you burnt. For those letters of Overbury's that you had, sir R. Cotton advised you not to bum, but keep them: And all of them being without dates, Cotton told you there might be such dates given them as would be much to your advantage: So you gave him order for that purpose, to give dates to those letters. According to your directions he did so; but not till after Weston's Arraignment: And then understanding at what time the poisons in the indictment were said to be delivered, he dated some of them with a purpose to cross the Indictment: and some of the letters he razes, some pastes, some pares, as they were advantageous or disadvantageous to him; and all this to obscure the fact. (990)

On this point, Somerset's defence was minimal: '[C]oncerriing the dates, you need not trouble yourself, for it now grows late, and I shall have very little time to answer for myself. I confess, sir R. Cotton delivered me back those letters I had sent my lord of Northampton, and that I burnt them; and that some parts were cut off as impertinent' (991 ). Cotton admitted the offence, but blamed the earl, asserting that Somerset 'delivered into his hands many of sir T. Overbury's letters; and that he cut and dated them by my lord's direction; and that he put in dates the next day to some of the letters, after Weston's arraignment'(991). The focus on Cotton's involvement points us in the direction of the prosecution's real concerns. Over the next few years, Cotton was to come under increasing attack from 'the authorities', usually in connection with his vast holdings of manuscript materials. These attacks have usually been ascribed to the power of such materials to provide embarrassing precedents in legal cases, but here his actions are of a far more practical nature. One contemporary, Gilbert Gerard, wrote of Cotton 'counselling and advising my

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Ld. of Sommersett how to clear himselfe: for wch purpose he anihilated some of S' Tho. Overbury's letters and pasted little peeces of them on Boardes for hys advantage, all wch acts after the fact do make him accessary'. These were, Gerard wrote, 'foule matters'. 2 Cotton's actions indicated the importance of the materials in which he dealt - and, at the same time, their intense vulnerability. So why all this concern about papers going astray? There may be a clue in a letter written by Overbury just before his murder, also produced at the trial. This shows that Overbury understood precisely how to use his knowledge to damage his erstwhile friend - and again, it is not primarily through its content, but in the manner of that content's revelation. Writing from the Tower to Somerset, Overbury threatened to disclose incriminating 'secreates .. . past betwixt you & mee' .21 The letter opens with Overbury attempting to recapture a space within which he might speak directly to Somerset: 'This paper comes under seales; & therfore shalbe bolde to speake to you as I usde to doe my selfe.' In common with many an 'inward letter', the context (sender and recipient) is not evident from formal signs such as address and signature. Instead, its form, 'under seales', guarantees a space where Overbury may speak directly, and unguardedly, to Somerset. Overbury understands that Somerset told his brother 'y1 my unreuerent style (in previous letters) should make an alienation betwixt you & mee hereafter: at least such a one, as we should neuer be as we had bin'. Here, Overbury's epistolary style is invested with the power to alter the nature of his relationship with Somerset. Overbury describes himself as one 'to whome you owe more than to anie soule liuing, both for your fortune, understanding, & reputation'. Somerset has broken his ' uow': 'Your sacrificing mee to y1 woman; 1 holding a firme frendship with those y' brought mee hither; & keepe mee here, & not make it 1 first Act of anie good tearmes w1h to set mee free; & restore mee to 1 selfe againe. And you bid my brother keepe your intent secreat: y1 you might steale away with your wickednes. But y1 shall not bee.' These charges are repeated and expanded later in the letter. Overbury's plan against Somerset's secretness is to make open the nature of their friendship:

°

im

You & I will come to a publicke triall before all ye freindes I haue: they shall know what wordes haue past betwixt us heretofore, of another nature than theise. And I pray you keepe you my lettres, y1 may see how much I forget y' L:P in my style. I shalbe upon y" racke; you at y' ease, negligent of mee, & I must speake calmely .. . by God since I came in, I haue not found y' aduantage of a straw, by no not so much as a seruant in my extreame sickenes, nor my friends free to speake my last wordes to: When I had obserued this, y' bittemes of my soule cannot conceale it selfe in lettres.

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In order that 'this wickednes may neuer die', Overbury claims that I haue all this uacation wrote ye storie betwixt you & mee, from ye first hower to this day: what I found you at first; what I found you when I came; how I lost all y" great ones of my countrie, for studying y' fortune, reputation, & understanding; how manie hazzardes I haue runne for you; how manie gentlemen, for giuing themselues to you a stranger, are now left to y" oppression of y' enimies; what secreates haue past betwixt you & mee; & then, for ye last part, how when you fell in loue wth y1 woman, as soone as you had wonne her by my letters, & after all y" difficultie being past, then used your owne for common passages (then you used y' owne, & neuer after but denied, concealde, & jugled betwixt y' man [Overbury] & y' selfe) & upon y1 cause there came manie breaches, as Huntingdon, Newmarket, after at Whitehall.

Most intriguing however, is the manner in which Overbury plans to make this 'storie' public: All theise particulars I haue set downe in a large discourse, & on Tuesday I made an end of wrighting it faire, & on Friday I haue sealed [it] upon under eight seales, & sent it by a friend of mine, whome I dare trust, (taking his oath not to open it) I send to him & then to call all my freindes, noble & gentlemen, & women, & then to read it to y"m, & take copies of it & I haue uowde to haue wrote y" truth, This I thinke lou will not denie a worde. So thus yf you will deale thus wickedly w mee, I haue prouided y1 whether I die or liue, y" nature shall neuer die, nor leaue to [be] y" most odious man aliue.

Overbury displays great confidence in the damage which could be wrought by information contained in an emphatically private letter - with eight seals coming to general view. So, in a case dealing with a poisoned body, all we hear of is letters. And, as if by some inevitable mad logic, the rhetorics of poisoning and letters merge in what must be one of the most inept uses of 'jargon' ever devised. During Somerset's arraignment, the court heard how the countess wrote letters to the Lieutenant of the Tower, telling him to avoid certain of the 'tarts and jellies' which she was sending, because 'there are letters' in them (987-8). The countess's letter to Sir Gervase Elwes, about the 'letters' in tarts, was read in court, and Elwes testified, tellingly, that: 'By letters, my lady meant poison, but the word was then used to clear his eyes' (990). It's only when poison is called letters, when the bodily danger is transmuted into the textual, that Elwes finally understands the enormity of what is going on. Ultimately, I suggest, the prosecution in Somerset's trial was at pains not to cover up his relationship with James, nor even to see him properly convicted of the murder of Overbury. It desired rather to clamp down on the

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ways in which important paperwork - the stuff of secretarial, diplomatic and judicial transactions - as being compromised by James's inwardness with his favourite- and in turn, by that favourite's inwardness with his favourites. In the madly proliferating and errant letters can be ,tracked a society's fears that the transactions which should be properly locked in the closet were running rampant; that dangerously tied to the body personal, the body archival was about to spill its secrets.

7

A Camp 'well planted': Encamped Bodies in 1590s Military Discourses and Chapman's Caesar and Pompey 1 Nina Taunton Questioned about the preponderance of spatial metaphors in the Order of Things and their usefulness in talking about institutional orderings of space, Michel Foucault referred his answer specifically to shifts and changes in knowledge in the seventeenth century, where the spatialization of knowledge was one of the factors in the constitution of this knowledge as a science. If the natural history and the classifications of Linneas were possible, it is for a certain number of reasons: on the one hand, there was literally a spatialization of the very object of their analyses, since they gave themselves the rule of studying and classifYing a plant only on the basis of that which was visible. They didn't even want to use a microscope. All the traditional elements of knowledge, such as the medical functions of the plant, fell away. The object was spatialized. (Rabinow, 1991, 254)

In this construction of knowledge as science through 'spatial techniques' (254) Linnaeus classifies plants not according to what was said about them in the writings of the past, nor even by means of a microscope, but by a mobilization of the space they created as the defining condition in which they became objects of study. The principles of classification were thus drawn from the composition of the plants themselves; from illustration and from their textual reproduction through print. Significantly, Foucault then extends his example to the military camp, where knowledge and power can be reproduced through architecture and 'where the military hierarchy is to be read in the ground itself, by the tents and the buildings reserved for each rank. It reproduces precisely through architecture a pyramid of power' (255). The shape of this pyramid emerges through the regimentation of the bodies - or, more precisely, the corporate body of soldiers - which define it.

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The title quotation of this paper - a camp 'well planted' (Martial Discourses, 416) thus signals its subject- the ordering and investigation of a specialist form of knowledge through its creation by the orderly placing of large numbers of soldiers' bodies and the exertion of spatial control over them. Adopting Henri Lefebvre's understanding of the production of space as an integration of actions and concepts, this essay will expand Foucault's model of the constructions of power through 'textual reproduction' into a discussion of the significance of spatial concepts in texts circulating in the 1590s which expound military technologies of power through regimentation of soldiers' bodies. These writings deal with choices of location for the military camp and the significance of strategies for the domination and appropriation of bodily space (Lefebvre, 1994, 164-7) once the camp is produced. I suggest that around the ordering of this particular kind of institutional space there lurks the fear of impotence stemming from the border anxieties (the loss of place and space) occasioned by late Elizabethan military campaigns in France and the Netherlands where large numbers of men's bodies were laid waste. In elaborating the notion of war as discourse, serving multiple functions through a variety of texts and with symbolic as well as literal significance, the treatises of war circulating in the 1590s yield a variety of spatial techniques and regimes for enclosing the military body to ensure its safety and therefore its continuing effectiveness as a fighting force. Thinking of these writings as textures amalgamated from structures and forms designed to accommodate a fighting force - but as textures which cannot be fully understood as textual productions if separated from the bodies that inhabit and act in the space produced, 1 I nevertheless hope to bring into focus as literary productions texts which are not usually read discursively. Taken together with Chapman's Caesar and Pompey I aim to show how all of these writings coalesce into a debate around formations of space and spatial practices in the art of setting up camp. This involves an examination of the problems of ordering, containing and defending large numbers of potentially uncontrollable bodies as a means of addressing post-Armada border anxieties. There is a sense in which the provision of safeguards in the treatises may be understood as a move towards the process of organizing power relations from reading 'the ground itself in order to both dominate and appropriate the space that is to contain a body of fighting men. Following Lefebvre, 'dominated' space in the military environment of the camps would be space that men have carved out from nature for their own particular purposes. Dominated space is distinct from 'appropriated' space- that which an army has taken over wholesale for its own specialized uses, but without necessarily carving it up or working on it to alter its character or shape in any major respect. Though defined in separation· from one another, these two categories frequently merge (Lefebvre, 1994, 164-5). In the military manuals,

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domination and appropriation of space commences with the choice of location. The works of Leonard Digges (supplemented by his son Thomas), Matthew Sutcliffe, William Garrard (all of which are on the library shelves of Henry Percy, ninth Earl ofNothumberland), together with Raymond de Fourquevaux and in addition to Northumberland's manuscript writings, 2 accentuate the need to dominate space, not merely to appropriate it. The means by which this is achieved is to establish the camp as a major (though moveable) stronghold so that it flourishes to all intents and purposes 'like unto a little Citie' (Alnwick, W.11, fol. llv; Instructions, 191), able to withstand surprise and sustained attack from the enemy. The military writers draw out this distinction by agreeing that location should be selected in the first instance on the basis of strength and mobility, though this is not enough to guarantee the camp as a stronghold. The construction of the military camp as a dominant space able to withstand attack must incorporate the Roman belief in the superiority of art over nature. Rather than lodging in a place where there are ditches, rivers, trees, mountains: or some other rampar that doe make the place strong of it selfe, [the Romans] used a farre better manner: for they regarded not so much the strength of a place that was naturallye strange, as to place their campe where that they might helpe themselues by their arte, in which they trusted aboue all things: and sildome would they campe in any place, how strong so euer it were, if it were not large enough to range all their Battailes in, according unto their militarie discipline, in which dooing they might alwaies keepe one selfe same forme of lodging; for the place was subiect unto them, and not they vnto the place'. If on the other hand 'you tary not in a place but dayly remove', it is enough simply to 'have your carriage about the campe'. (Instructions, 184) 3

In other words, nature must be shaped by advocating what is in effect the domination of space by the men who inhabit it. Sutcliffe contributes to the art versus nature debate by advising commanders to fortify their camp the Roman way, with 'trenches xij foote deepe and xv foot broad' and 'bastyons which shall haue small artillery in them' (Practice, 138), if they intend to stay put for any length of time.4 Thus the mobilization of space in the camp does not involve haphazardly settling down on a mere whim, observing, in Fourquevaux's words, 'no general rule' other than natural situation ('which seldom doth fall out fit'). It is important to impose some sort of order on the existing multifarious shapes of a camp which range from the 'crooked' to the 'triangular', the 'too long', the 'round' and the 'square'. An even more important reason against setting up camp in 'strong places' is that by learning 'one self same forme, and manner of lodging, without variety at any time' an

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army minimizes the risk of being caught unawares by the enemy 'before that the campe could be fortified' (Instructions, 199). Merely to appropriate space, then, is not enough. It is much better to ensure safety by transforming the landscape to accommodate the fundamental requirements of regimentation and mechanical reproduction of forms for the battlefield into forms for orderly encampment. This could well be a reason for the multiplicity of bodily regimes and ways of arranging regiments of bodies that appear in Northumberland's numerous diagrams and flow-charts on camp layout (Leconfield MS 137, loose, Alnwick MS 512, fols 7, 102, 110, 114, 118). His schemes are drawn upon temporal and seasonal distinctions. The manner of distributing the bodies of encamped soldiers (that is, the manner in which the soldiers are summoned for inspection of provisions, positions and appearances) will be affected by whether it is to be a short-term or long-term settlement (Alnwick MS W.l1, fols 12r-13r; Alnwick MS 512, fol. 103), and whether it is for winter or summer quarters when the enemy is near or far off (Alnwick MS 512, fols 103, 106). Also affected will be the ways in which the men are measured out in clusters for guard and baggage duties as well as in tercios, regiments and maniples in readiness for battle formation on the field (fol. 94). In addition, Northumberland sets out the structure of the camp according to the whether it is to be raised as a day (fol. 118) or night camp (fols 110, Ill). If the 'raysing it of (fol. 118) is to be in the day, then the officers are sent in advance to measure out the camp master's quarters and those of the captains of horse and foot whilst the rest of the army perform the tasks of 'casting vpp the defences', building officers' quarters and impailing the camp by ditch and parapet (fol. 118). The choice of place according to these considerations rather than geographical advantage, and the shaping and fortifying of the camp with carriages in preference to natural barriers, can also be thought of in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'territorial assemblages'. These are brought into being by processes and institutions that set up systems of signs (which occupy space) in conjunction with other interacting environments. Territories are defined by the bodies that occupy them and the actions which shape them: hence Deleuz and Guattari's description of the functions of territorial assemblages as those presuming 'a territory-producing expressiveness' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, 312, 315).5 In terms of the disposal of large numbers of soldiers' bodies, the placement and erection of a camp establishes itself as a particular kind of territory and its meaning emerges through the shaping of natural resourses, in combination with the soldiers who inhabit it. In sixteenth-century discourses of war the camp also achieves meaning through its status as a written narrative. It is a 'signifying practice' (116) insofar as the siting of it (its space) participates in a narrative structuring in which it is set up at a point between its 'actualization' and its inscription into war discourse as a

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whole. As a 'territorial assemblage', the construction of a camp can be conceptualized as a combination of actions which are 'transformed' into 'terms' whose definition derives from divergent contexts and multiform conventions successively established in the course oftime. Since territories are given 'spatial' status only by those who inhabit them, reliance on soldiers' learnt and practised skills in reproducing the same form in camp as on the battlefield, and gathering information, takes precedence over searches for advantageous locations which might or might not materialize. If by chance no hospitable natural conditions presented themselves then Fourquevaux, for example, believed that those commanders who left things to topographical chance rather than ensuring beforehand (by dominating space) that their men are practised in creating favourable conditions for encampment for their armies had a lot to answer for and got no better than they deserved. (Instructions, 199). Since encamping in a sixteenth-century military context is also to do with mobilizing language, it can be thought of as being involved in a double action- that of signs as well as practices upon the soldier's regimented body. The space occupied by the body of an encamped army is analogous to the space occupied by the spoken word. Like speech, it occupies the ambivalent area between the text and the actualized. In de Certeau's formulation, the 'space' of a camp 'is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization'. It is, to use his own succinct example and analogy, 'a practiced place' in which 'the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers'. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, that is, a place constituted by a system of signs' (de Certeau, 1984, 117; Lefebvre, 1994, 142-4). In these texts dealing with the camp's organization of time and matter, the signifying terms are: the 'ordering' and the 'placing' of a camp so that it is by its very structure open for inspection, modification and supervision at all times- and the model as always is the Roman one. Following the Roman model, the manuals advocate that preparedness and discipline are best established and maintained by routine and regularity. Each man must know not only his own place and function in the camp but also everyone else's (Instructions, 201). Thus the speed and facility with which encamping is achieved are important considerations for Fourquevaux and the others; even more so as they are overarched by the need to organize things in order to see (in the senses of to keep in view, to perceive, to understand) and to observe (in its double sense of to keep a watch over and to obey) - and above all to know. Thus 'the texture of space affords opportunities ... to a spatial practice that it does indeed determine, namely its collective and individual use: a sequence of acts which embody a signifying practice' (Lefebvre, 1994, 57).

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What circumstances gave rise for the need of these narratives of space and place? The requirement for order, visibility and above all geometricallydefined knowledge in the detailed directives on setting up camp (along with the regimentation of the numerically-determined clusters of bodies within it) was, I suggest, a way of counteracting the fears of a full-scale invasion by strengthened Spanish troops in the years 1595 to 1597. This re-formed body of hostile fighting men lent new urgency to issues of defence. Large numbers of Spanish soldiers had occupied Brittany and Picardy (McCaffrey, 1992, 184-6; Wernham, 1994, 28-30, passim). Though Spanish landings on British shores just a few years after the defeat of the 1588 Armada were easily repulsed (at Cawsand Bay, for example, and twice on the Welsh coast) (Boynton, 1971, 190-91) and though there was plenty of advance warning in January 1597 of the re-formation of the Armada, when the Spaniards did finally arrive at Falmouth the country was taken by surprise. The civilian body was no longer safely enclosed by natural or national boundaries. It was fortunate that nature intervened- gales dispersed the Spanish fleet- for man's agency was lacking: Essex's ships were nowhere in sight. The Hampshire troops were not aware of the enemy fleet's proximity; the bands had not been mustered for a year (Boynton, 1971, 197-9; Wernham, 194, 189-90; McCaffrey, 1992, 123-4, 130). In 1599, the final attempt on Spain's part to invade English shores again gave rise to panic-ridden reports (varying from day to day) on the Armada's size and whereabouts. John Chamberlain, writing from London on 1 August 1599 to Dudley Carleton in Ostend, describes the 'shrill' alarms of'the enemie at our doores. The Quenes shippes are all making redy', men are being trained, and 'every man els to have his armes redy ... Here is likewise speach of a campe to be raysed at Tilbury' under the command of the Lord Admiral Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham; 'that which makes me doubt most and thincke all is in goode earnest, is that Sir Fra: Vere is certainly sent for out of the Lowe Countries with 2000 of his best souldiers' (1939, i, 78). This time the Hampshire forces under Hunsdon and Mountjoy were ready to march to the coast, orders from the Earl of Cumberland provided for blockades on the Thames, Robert Sidney's most experienced soldiers were ordered home from Flushing and there was talk of raising an army in Kent (Boynton, 1971, 197; Wernham, 1994, 267-72). Though this turned out to be another false alarm (in keeping with those of 1596) it nevertheless 'bred such a consternation' in London and there was 'such a cry of women, chaining of streets, and shutting of the gates as though the enemy had been at Blackwall' (Chamberlain 1939, i, 81).6 An essential component of defence was the accumulation of different kinds of knowledge necessary for discovering details of how the enemy sets up camp. William Garrard gives the fullest account of the stages involved in acquiring such knowledge. A 'worthie Cauallier' accompanied by a

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'hargabusier who is 'a man of valour' should consider 'with great diligence and wisdom' what are the methods of defence adopted by the foe. This information should be gathered by 'warily and discreetly view[ing] and overview[ing], search[ing] and go[ing] through every place' and should be taken down 'in writing, in notes, in plaine draughts and painting' in order to make a 'full discourse of everie particular' to his commanding officer. In other words, nature cannot be trusted or guaranteed to provide defences against hostile forces: the strength of an army will be scattered if it does not take steps to safeguard its own sources of power by the skill of its members in constructing a stronghold for itself. This meticulous gathering of information by observation of detail must be recorded in writing so that this knowledge may 'when it is requisite' be 'disclose[d]' and 'discouer[ ed]'. Such visual and textual knowledge must include the environs and situation of the camp, so that the reconnaissance officer can 'render accompt with good reason of all these things in discourse like a politike and practised souldier'. Thus a range of communicative skills, including ratiocination, play their part in forming spatial knowledge through the regimentation of bodies. Above all, the exercise of judgement is advocated: 'let him with good deliberation and aduisement, and not rashlie make manifest and apparent euery small particular thing' but present it all in tabular form, so that the general may take in the information at a glance (Arte of Warre, 122-9). Place is thus translated into space by the double action of actualization and written practice: the particular placing of the camp is defined by military theorists and 'transformed into space' (de Certeau, 1984, 117) by the soldiers it contains. And space is thus 'produced' by being conceptualized, lived- and read (Lefebvre, 1994, 143-5). Applied to the military camp, the threat of enemy encroachment, and organized resistance to it, can be viewed as a reduplication from within of the laws and coercive devices of the authorizing power. If in addition armed resistance can be explained as stemming in part and in some way from an overspill of its own controlling mechanisms, then it can be be regarded as reactive rather than initiating. The manual writers express fears about exposure to threat and attack from outside the parameters of the camp, and fears about internal resistance to and rebellion against the controlling authority. A desirable location acts as a container for soldiers' needs, fears, anxieties and uncertainties - contingencies that would otherwise have to be met by overstepping the camp's boundaries by raiding or desertion. One practical outcome of this is that there are many instances recorded of soldiers leaving strongholds established in garrison towns and taking up long-term residence in the locality, so that it becomes impossible to keep records of numbers, personnel or inhabitants of the stronghold with any degree of accuracy. As a consequence there can be no clear understanding of its . effectiveness as a defensive fighting force (Hale, 1985, 135). A desirable location will also exert

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a control over men pressed into service - an anarchic force with potentially subversive energy which must be controlled. These men are invested with socially constructed identities the minute they (unwillingly) enter military service - identities which create an energy, a fighting force which power harnesses to itself. In the military camp, breaks with authority must be safeguarded against, by the selection of a 'commodious' terrain (commodious, that is, for the containment of potential rebellion, resistance from within and the repulsion of and resistance to forces from without). In the choice of a desirable location, the military writers seek to combat fear of disintegrating boundaries by taking on the mantle of impregnability of institutional power structures - ones that are invulnerable to any kind of onslaught. As such they would contain subversion from the inside and attack from the outside. The two camps in Caesar and Pompey In the writings examined so far, a premium is placed upon the military camp as a 'territorial assemblage' in the way it organizes and mobilizes space for the body of an army. Chapman's tragedy Caesar and Pompei illustrates in important ways the need to set up and control movements within the camp. Even more importantly, the play's depiction of the struggle for supremacy between two model Roman leaders and their armies demonstrates ways in which the issues preoccupying the manual literature on encampment as a strategy of empowerment are translated into another genre for representation in another medium. The play opens with the advent of the rival armies of the two generals outside the gates of Rome. Both are threatening peace and empire, and whilst each justifies the presence of his armed forces in the name of protection against Cataline's conspirators and presses his own right of entry, each in fact wants to rule. As an exercise in dominating and appropriating space, each pursues the other until Pompey 'flew upon his foe with such a rapture ... And gave so fierce a charge' (2.2.10-40) that Caesar's followers tum tail and run. In order to retrieve his position and regain the advantage over Pompey, Caesar perceives that it is counter-productive to run after his own deserters ('we contend in vaine I To stay these vapours') and decides to 'raise campe' even though Pompey is still hot on his trail. His 'ill-lodg'd army' has for the moment to pitch according to necessity rather than favourability (2.3.2-4), and therefore do without 'all things fit' for the supply of a fighting force. What the 'motions and remotions' of the two rival camps in this play entail can be clarified by Michel de Certeau's distinction between strategies and tactics - concepts crucial to any military practice. De Certeau defines a strategy as 'the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a

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subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an "environment". A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper ... and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it' (de Certeau, 1984, xixxx, 34-9). According to these criteria strategies for pitching camp will involve planning ahead the kind of terrain that will afford maximum advantage over the enemy from the point of view of ground, distance and visibility (his, not yours). In contrast, a tactic is 'a calculus which cannot count on a "proper" (a spatial or institutional) localization, nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality ... A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place ... it has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances' (de Certeau, 1984, xix). That is, a tactic involves the seizure of opportune moments. It has no base from which 'to stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep' (de Certeau, 1984, 37). Since a tactic is characterized by the kind of mobility that depends upon taking advantage of whatever the moment has to offer, it cannot be accommodated to consistent planning. It would thus seem that a combination of strategic and tactical knowledge and good sense are a requisite of military discipline. Strategy and policy in encamping play a major part in determining the outcome of a campaign (and of individual battles within it), and good tactical practice requires a commander not only to pitch camp in the most favourable conditions available but also to ensure if possible that his enemy has the worst of what natural resources are able to offer. As an example of tactical opportunism, Pompey is immediately able to follow up his 'subversion' (2.3.22) of Caesar by setting up his own camp in a location that contains all the benefits lacking in his adversary's ad hoc arrangements. As a result of 'the happy issue' (2.4.3) of having 'beaten back' (2.4.2) the 'charge of our fierce foe' Pompey now finds his army amply storde With all things fit to tarry surer time, Reason thought better to extend to length The warre betwext us; that his little strength May by degrees proue none.

(2.4.23-7)

Since Pompey is able to 'capitalize' upon his 'acquired advantages' (de Certeau, 1984, 36), his tactical seizure of the moment becomes a strategic strength, for he is able to follow up his temporary advantage over Caesar by capitalizing on the favourable location of his camp. Because it affords shelter, protection and easy access to food, Pompey need neither dissipate his men's

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strength nor deploy manpower in the task of securing his camp or foraging for food. Chapman's Pompey is mindful of manual advice on these points. Northumberland has a flow-chart on the disposition of a long-term camp which also helps to fill out the details of Pompey's arrangements for 'tarrying' his troops. In a camp set up in summer, with the enemy close by, long-stay camps should be located near a river and a wood and fortified by ditches 6 foot high, 24 foot broad and 6 foot deep; parapets above 12 but below 14 foot which are 6 foot thick and deep should be 'seated for perseruation of the dissipline on a plainne' (Alnwick MS 512, fol. 103). Having snugly settled his own troops into quarters 'With all things fit to tarry surer times', Pompey can well afford to defer head-on fighting. It is in Caesar's interest to engage his 'best and ablest soldiers' in 'direct set bataile I Of matchelesse valours' before 'their defects ofvictuall' have vitiated 'their tough nerues' (2.4.28-31). But it is in Pompey's interest to force them into motion, ande and there; Enforcing them to fortifying still Where euer they set down; to siege a wall, Keepe watch all night in armour: their most part Can neuer beare it, by their yeares oppression, Spent heretofore too much in those steele toyles. (2.4.33-8)

Pompey's tactics are obvious: to keep the enemy on the move, forcing them to shift camp often and re-entrench each time. In this way he avoids direct confrontation with Caesar's fiercest and most valiant contingents (where he might well lose the day) by forcing them into setting up camp in a situation where their energy is expended upon labours and duties intensified by unfavourable conditions. Cato gives his seal of approval to these superior strategies and in addition points to a more humane advantage: 'I so aduisde, and yet repent it not, I But much reioyce in so much saued blood I as had beene pour'd out in the stroke of battaile' (2.4.39--41). He is concerned to preserve the intactness of the soldiers' bodies as a necessary part of the process of safeguarding boundaries against Caesar, and he rejoices that no blqod need be spilled in Pompey's stabilizing and containing project for his own camp. There are, however, other considerations to be taken into account. Even though Pompey's force is in the ascendant, the advantage does not remain with him. Framed by the favourable prognostications of the soothsayer and other presages of success reported by Crassinius (like the springing up of a palm tree beside the statue of Caesar), the following scene demonstrates the positive side of having to up camp at a moment's notice: the ease with which it can be dismantled can allow Caesar to act upon a thought. No sooner does he think to raise his camp than all his tents are 'downe for swift remotion' (3.2.40--41).

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These attributes of speed and mobility are reinforced by the efficiency with which the scouts execute their function. While Caesar's soldiers are 'enflamed', Pompey's are fearful. Here the scout's chief role of relaying accurate information is supplemented by the giving of good advice on the basis of the disarray observed in Pompey's camp. His soldiers' bodies, and by extension the body of his army, are all out of control: 1 Scout: Anne, anne, my Lord; the vaward of the foe Is rang'd already. 2 Scout: Answer them, and anne: You cannot set your rest ofbattell vp In happyer houre: for I this night beheld A strange confusion in your enemies campe, The souldiers taking armes in all dismay, And hurling them againe as fast to earth, Every way routing; as th'alarme were then Giuen to their army.

(3.2.46-54)

Back in Pompey's camp we see that this is all too true and that he has signally failed to press home his advantage. One of the most damaging effects of uncontrolled camp behaviour is on obedience to orders. Essex's defiance of the instructions of the queen when he was in France on his first command is a good example of bodies in disarray. Essex's risking his own, his brother's and his soldiers' bodies in order to indulge his desire for heroic action had tragic consequences for all. Tragic consequences occur to soldiers when commanders follow their own inclinations; the instance of Essex's mad dash to Compiegne issued in exhaustion, fever and death. In brief, this escapade erupted out of Essex's impatience for action no matter what. Crazy to head the English army that was to help Henri IV of France lay siege to Rouen, Essex finally won the grudging consent of his sovereign to take his troops out to Normandy. Having landed at Dieppe, however, he was told not to move until Henri had ratified his side of the bargain. Both Essex and Sir Roger Williams decided not to heed the express instructions of Elizabeth, and rode a hundred miles to Compiegne to carouse with Henri for two hours. From Elizabeth's point of view, the journey was a pointless one - and its immediate effects were certainly injurious. The men who rode with him, his 'tangerine soldiers', were exhausted on their return, he himself fell ill with fever, and the troops remaining in Dieppe were cut off from England's allies. Most devastating of all was the news of his younger brother Walter's death in a 'seemingly pointless skirmish' in a preliminary foray just outside Rouen, undertaken in Essex's absence. The queen, outraged at his disobedience, made him come limping home in disgrace. 8

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The play, too, illustrates the disruptive consequences upon the body of soldiers of failure to obey a commander's orders. Pompey finds that his instructions as 'soueraigne Captaine of so many I Armies and Nations' (4.2.56) are ignored. His captains, while: 'Vrging fight, I Yet fly about my campe in panick terrors: I No reason vnd~r heauen suggesting cause' (4.2.7-9). The prognostications favourable to Caesar are confirmed by his adversary, who stands to lose: And what is this but euen the Gods deterring My iudgement from enforcing fight this mome? The new-fled night make day with Meteors, Fir' d ouer Caesars campe, and falne in mine, As pointing out the terrible euents Yet in suspence. (4.1.5-15)

Pompey's loss of power is figured in terms of the 'panick terrors' of his captains, and the 'strange confusion' of his camp where soldiers, instead of keeping to their allotted places and defined tasks, are 'every way routing'. In Pompey's camp, the bustle of the night has degenerated into the 'dismay' of purposeless activity, with soldiers aimlessly picking up weapons and 'hurling' them down again. His initial project, to profit by the 'motion and remotion' of Caesar's makeshift arrangements in order to attenuate his 'little strength' and make it into a war of attrition where by degrees Caesar's superior forces 'may by degrees proue none', thus comes to nought. In sum, Caesar and Pompey has its part to play in the discursive strategies of castrametation. Following manual precept, the play stages the process of producing space for authorizing bodies and bodies of soldiers by both Caesar and Pompey as commanders of rival camps capitalizing on whatever natural advantages are available for location. Yet they are by no means willing to rely solely upon natural advantages for the one to gain ascendancy over the other. Thus the considerations for setting up camp in the manual literature work as a mise-en-scene for the play as well as for any actual camp through the orderly placing and supervision of soldiers' bodies. The staging of a 'commodious' camp for each of the rival commanders in the play involves the mobilization of the 'art' of technology which reshapes nature according to the exigencies which give shape to the camp. The form of the camp is not generated by natural advantages; its purpose, position and boundaries (in other words, its defining contours) must be constructed by art, not nature. Paying heed to manual dictum on conditions that favour prolonged sojourn in one place, Pompey creates a long-term camp outside the walls of Rome. Caesar on the other hand has recourse to alternative sets of procedures that govern the setting-up of short-stay camps. These schematic provisions for

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both 'actual' and 'staged' camps themselves subsume a variety of forms and bodily regimes that are a product of particular kinds of space. Pompey's longterm camp, for example, may be classified as 'appropriated' space in that it forges space out of a set of prevailing natural conditions; yet his soldiers' bodies are out of place. Caesar's encamping procedures, by contrast, 'dominate' successive spaces by the speed with which they can be set up and dismantled - that is, his practices usurp space and render it void and sterile. In addition, the body of his army is well regulated. However, these rival camps both dominate and appropriate space - and the manuals configure these two inseparable concepts in their provision for a combination of strength and mobility of the camp, both in its triumph of technology over natural resources and in its disposition of military bodies (in battlefield order) in already-existing space.

8

'A bodie of presence': Early Modem Education and the Elite Body in the Writings of Richard Mulcaster1 Darryll Grantley Richard Mulcaster was the most important educational theorist of the second half of the sixteenth century and, as the head of the Merchant Taylors' School, also a prominent educator who numbered among his pupils Edmund Spenser, Thomas Lodge and Thomas Kyd. At the heart of his theories of education was a concern with the training and development of the body, and he devised a large range of exercises which constituted a complete educational programme. However, though this focus on the body had a specific pedagogical objective, it was not innocent of broader cultural implications and had inscribed in it preoccupations with social identity that are, as I hope to show, themselves products of social change and anxiety in the period. I will begin by briefly discussing these contexts before moving on to a closer consideration of the body in Mulcaster's educational theory. The social and cultural framework in which Mulcaster was working and writing was fraught with contradiction. On the one hand the realities of social mobility and expansion of education led to the increasing recognition of the reach of individual ability across the whole social spectrum, and of the educability of the non-gentry. Also apparent was the rise to wealth and power of several members of that section of the population. On the other hand there was the manifest endurance of principles of social hierarchy based on status categories which were of diminishing relevance to the economic and social system that was emerging, most acutely exemplified ,by the continuing demarcation line between gentle and non-gentle. The debate about the right to gentle status and preferment on the basis of personal worth on the one hand, or noble birth on the other, was a recurrent one in the late fifteenth century and in the following one. The argument is rarely articulated with such a clear-cut conclusion in favour of sheer virtue and ability as in an early airing in Heriry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres written in the 1490s. In that play the victory of

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personal worth over birth is unequivocal. However, in many texts that rake over the question, and others which reflect it obliquely, the value of elevated birth is constantly championed even when the argument for the importance of personal deserts is being made. An example of this occurs in a 1555 tract, the /nstitucion of a Gentleman, in which the ideal is argued to be a combination of personal worth and aristocratic or gentle birth: Gentil gentil is he, which is borne of noble kynred descendynge of gentle blud, as son to a duke, an Erie, a Baron, a lord or more lowe, sonne to a knight, or an Esquier, (for these be degrees of nobilitie,) hauyng ioyned in hys gentle house, gentle maners and noble condicions, whyche is the cause of the addycyon of thother worde called gentle: and so hauing a gentle heart agreeing with hys gentil house, he is therby called Gentil gentle. (B4v)

Generally, however, in the sixteenth century the emphasis was on defending the importance of noble descent, which was the thrust of the argument in a wealth of texts on the issue. 2 That there should be a persistence in the value placed on elevated birth is perhaps to be expected in a society organized on a fiercely hierarchical basis, in which the signifiers of status continued to be based on a system that owed its structure to the transfer of status through kinship relationships and lineage, even if the new conditions favourable to social mobility were permitting positions of power to be taken by 'new men' not born to an expectation of them. As to Fulgens and Lucres, its conclusion is unsurprising given that it was written for a patron who was himself a 'new man', John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, who is likely to have had a determined perspective on the matter. The issue of education is, needless to say, an essential element not only in the debate but in the matter of social mobility generally. On the one hand the superiority of their upbringing is what is most often cited by apologists for the pre-eminence and power of the established nobility. On the other, the acquisition of an education was the principal means for 'new men' to gain office and power and it also conferred on them much-prized gentle status if pursued to graduate level.3 Furthermore, the business and institutions of education were not discrete from the affairs and administrative structures of the realm; there was a strong connection between certain institutions of education and the centres of power, such as the court. The Inns of Court are perhaps the most significant example, being not only a nursery for officers of government (a function actively promoted by Lord Burleigh), but occupying a social role in the culture which centred on the court. After the Reformation the government appointment of secular vice-chancellors was part of a process by which the universities became in some senses institutions of state. And the Inns, the universities and the elite schools in and around the capital also had an entree into the world of the court by

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providing dramatic entertainment for the crown. These factors, together with the fact (or what we hope is a fact) that educators have an inevitable influence on the thinking of their society, combine to give the business of education a fairly central place in the social history of the period. These changing social and economic realities of the sixteenth century inevitably presented challenges to the established perceptions of rank. In writings about the issue, nobility is frequently conceived in terms of 'virtue'. Furthermore, the moral state of the soul is connected to the inculcation of physical rigour through discipline and bodily formation. Dilwyn Knox has convincingly suggested that the humanist manuals on refined comportment were influenced by, and even represented a continuation of, the religious notion of disciplina corporis in the clerical manuals on behaviour for the monastic orders (1991, 107-35). However, Knox goes on to point out that the secular approach (as evidenced by Erasmus's humanist thesis in his De Civilitate morum puerilium) involves separating man from the sort of brutish physicality which characterizes animals (ibid., 117).4 Certainly, a detachment from dependence on physical appetite becomes one important aspect of what defines the ideal of a noble spirit. In an entirely secular frame of reference, Anna Bryson has cogently argued that the refinement of manners, specifically to distance the gentry from the grosser aspects of physicality, was an increasingly important part of what distinguished them as a 'status group' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 5 It is revealing that in Fulgens and Lucres, though there is a 'right' and 'wrong' side to the debate between the two elite protagonists, they are united in their cranial contest by being segregated from and implicitly contrasted with the bodily coarseness of the servants, who are most strikingly represented in their scatological game at the centre of the play. In the context of the social flux and debate in the period, the views and theories of educational theorists thus become significant social documents. Elyot's The Governour (first printed in 1531) has long been recognized as such, and perhaps to a lesser extent the work of Vives, Ascham and other contemporary writers on education as well. These humanist educational theorists of the early part of the century tend, however, to view the matter of education from the point ofview of the noble elite. Both Elyot and Ascham (in The Schoolmaster, printed posthumously in 1570) deplore the neglect of education by the nobility, because they view the consequence of this as being the erosion of the power and position of the established elite in favour of the children of'mean men'. Elyot complains: Pride is the first cause of this inconuenience. For of those persons be some which without blame dare affirm that to a great gentilman it is notable reproche to be well lemed & to be called a great clerke: which

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name they accounte to be of so base estimation that they neuer haue it in their mouthes but when they speke any thynge in derision. (Governour, 43r)

Ascham charges: The fault is in your selues, ye noble mens sonnes, and therefore ye deserue the greater blame, that commonly, the meaner mens Children, come to be the wisest counsellors and greatest doers, in y" waightie affayres of this Realme. And why? For God will haue it so of his prouidence: because you will haue it no other wise by your negligence. (Scholemaster, 13v)

By the time Mulcaster came along later in the century (his two works on education, Positions· and the Elementarie, appeared in 1581 and 1582 respectively), there had been a considerable increase in the use of public educational facilities, especially universities, by the nobility and gentle classes, 1 and perhaps it is for this reason that Mulcaster, a public schoolmaster, adopts a somewhat different position. While stopping short of advocating a universal system of education, he actively supports the idea of making education available to people of all ranks, and even to girls. His views on the ability of girls to benefit from education is revealing of his interest in the body, as his estimation of both their value and their capacities for learning resides in their bodily potential (or perceived lack of it): As for bodies the maidens be more weake, most commonly euen by nature, as of a moonish influence, and all our whole kinde is weake of the mother side, which when she was first made, euen then weakened the mans side. Therefore great regard must be had to them, no Jesse, nay rather more then to boyes in that time. For in proces of time, if they be of worth themselues, they may so matche, as the parent may take more pleasure in his sonnes by law, then in .his heires by nature. (Positions, 176).

Like other humanists such as Ascham and Elyot, Mulcaster argues from the point of view of the good of the whole commonwealth and points out that some people, irrespective of social rank, are endowed with extraordinary intellectual qualities (Positions, 145). He warns that the country will suffer if education is confined to a certain group: 'If all riche be excluded, abilitie will snuffe, if all poore be restrained, then will towardnesse repine. If abilitie set out some riche by priuate purses for priuate preferment: towardnesse will commende some poore to publicke prouision for publicke seruice' (ibid, 138). He also appears to advocate a sort of Platonic meritocracy:

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Plato in his wished common weale, and his defining of natural dignities, appointeth his degrees and honors, where nature deserueth by abilitie & worth, not where fortune freindeth by byrth and boldnes though where both do ioyne singularitie in nature and successe in fortune, there be some rare ieuell. Hereupon I conclude, that as it is necessary to preuent a great number for the quantitie thereof: so it is more then necessarie to prouide in the necessarie number for the qualitie thereof. (Positions, 138]

He seems to acknowledge the legitimacy of the use of education for social advancement in his suggestion that those most suitable for education are the middling sort: The midle sorte of parentes which neither welter in to much wealth, nor wrastle with to much want, seemeth fittest of all, if the childrens capacitie be awnswerable to their parentes state and qualities: which must be the leuell for the fattest to fall downe to, and the leanest to leape up to, to bring forth that student, which must serue his countrey best. (Positions, 140)

Mulcaster considers the question as a social theorist with a broad overview of his society; as suggested above, along with many other humanists, his conception of education proceeds from the perspective of the requirements of the state. He argues against a universal or too extensive provision, citing the danger of the overproduction of educated men: 'To haue so many gasping for preferment, as not goulfe hath stoore enough to suffise, and to 'let them rome helples, whom nothing else can helpe, how can it be but that such shifters must needes shake the verie strongest piller in the state where they liue, and loyter without liuing?' (Positions, 134). He goes on to assert: Scholers by reason of their conceit which learning inflameth, as no meane authority saith, become to[o] imperial to rest vpon a litle: and by their kinde of life which is allway idle they proue to disdainefull to deal with labour, vnlesse neede make them trot, or the Turkish captiuitie catch them, the greatest foe that can fall vpon idle people, where labour is looked for, and they not vsed to it.

(Ibid, 136)

These contentions also reflect the social tensions of the late sixteenth century. The overproduction of educated men did lead to considerable discontent, and it is the ways in which this dissatisfaction was expressed that is revealing about contemporary attitudes to the complicated and changing relationship between elite status and gentility on the one hand, and material advancement on the other. 2 In the Parnassus Plays, a university trilogy which appeared in Cambridge between 1598 and 1601, a recurrent theme is the poverty of educated men, the

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lack of respect for scholars shown by common people, and the material advancement of crude and unrefined men: in a sense the plays make an equation between the refinement of gentility and both the right to office and a materially comfortable life. They also articulate essentially the problem of increasingly open social and economic competition. 3 Mulcaster was himself in a position to experience very acutely the complications of the relationship between status and wealth. Born in 1530 or 1531, he came from a gentry family in the north of England, and through his work he had some access to the court: he staged a pageant for the queen in 1559, contributed to the entertainment staged at Kenilworth for Elizabeth in 1575, and he took his boys to perform at court on several occasions. However he had a problematic relationship with his tradesmen employers, the Merchant Taylors Company, whose school he ran, and he suffered relative poverty for much of his life. 4 He had therefore a personal experience of the contradictions thrown up by the conflict between traditional modes of understanding and ascribing social value, and the beginnings of deregulation in the economic system in late sixteenth-century society. In his writing he has an eye to the interests of the individual, and the problems that arise from the stifling of individual talent: 'An imperiall witte for want of education and abilitie, being placed in a meane calling will trouble the whole companie, if he haue not his will, as winde in the stomache: and if he haue his will, then shall ye see what his naturall does shoote at' (Positions, 137). He asserts that individuals of ability cannot, in any case, be kept down: 'He that beareth a tankarde by meanesse of degree, and was borne for a cokhorse by sharpenes of witte, will keepe a canuasse at the conduites, tyll he be Maister of his cumpanie' (ibid., 137-8). Mulcaster's theories on education are manifestly a product of the experience of the social flux of late Tudor England, and his writing shows a shrewd personal response to the social complexities of his time. These theories are consistent with his ideas on the question of social hierarchy, which in tum inform his conceptual engagement with the body. Despite his tendency towards promoting a meritocratic approach to education he sees, conversely, a role for learning in the support of the social status quo. Such contradictions and discontinuities are not uncommon in early modem social theorists (and are also present in non-theoretical representations). They are themselves indicative of the powerful and unresolved conflicts inherent in the situation outlined at the start of this discussion. Mulcaster suggests that different types of intelligence and education are needed for different social systems: monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. England being a monarchy requires minds which do not aspire too much, and have the capacity for obedience. He quotes the example of Greek subaltern magistrates: 'Their own obedience towards their superiors is more then a lure to reclame the peple, bycause their obsequiousnese to those that ar aboue them

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enforceth their vnder ones officiouslie to obay, both the chefe souerain, & also the[m] the[m]selues' (Elementarie, 14). He betrays something of an essentialist conception of social identity and rank in decrying those of the non-gentry aspiring to the gentry as 'counterfeat mettall' and refers to the story of the ass in the lion's skin (as with many other social theorists of the period, his justification for such conservative thinking resides in metaphor and analogy). His recommendation to the wealthy commonality reveals a profoundly conservative sensibility: As for riche men which being no gentlemen, but growing to wealth by what meanes soeuer, will counterfeat gentlemen in the education of their children, as if money made equalitie, and the purse were the preferrer, and no further regard: which cloister vp their youth as boding further state: they be in the same case for abilitie, though farre behinde for gentilitie. But as they came from the commen, so they might with more commendacion, continue their children in that kinde, which brought vp the parentes and made them so wealthy, and not to impatronise themselues vnto a degree to farre beyond the dounghill.' (Positions, 194) He advocates an extra element of education for the gentry: young gentlemen must haue some choice of peculiar matter, still appropriat vnto them, bycause they be to gouerne vnder their prince in principal places: those vertues and vertuous lessons must be still layd before them, which to appertaine to gouernement, to direct others well, and belong to (Positions, 193) Mulcaster goes on to argue that if a poor childe is 'wittie' a trade may still be appropriate for him, asking: 'do not all trades occupy wit?' (Positions, 146). Another dimension of Mulcaster's argument, and one which again reflects attitudes that are frequently explicitly made or implicitly inform many representations of the social order, is the connection between social position and moral worth. 5 Mulcaster goes on to provide an explicit rationale for this concept, with particular reference to the matter of education: the common man doth learne for necessitie at first, and aduauncement after: the greater personage ought to learne for his credit, and honour, besides necessary vses. For which be gentlemanly qualities, if these be not, to reade, to write, to draw, to sing, to play, to haue language, to haue learning, to haue health, and actiuitie, nay euen to professe Diuinitie, Lawe, Physicke, and any trade else commendable for cunning? Which as gentlemen maye get with most Ieasure, and best furniture, so maye they execute them without any corruption, where they neede not to craue. (Positions, 208]

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There are evident dangers in the acquisition of learning by the non-gentle, and it is liable to become, 'a bootie to corruption, where the professours neede offereth wrongful violence to the liberalitie of the thing' (ibid, p. 146). This ultimately circular argument not only offers a material justification of the differentiation between gentle and non-gentle, but proposes an educational and social policy to bolster that divide. Mulcaster's views on social hierarchy reach a point of focus in his ideas on the body, which constitute the cornerstone of his educational theories. Humanists sought to achieve a balance in the relationship between the body and the mind, and Mulcaster (with a clear reference to the rigours of disciplina corporis) makes a distinction between divines who 'punish the bodie, to haue the soule better, and ... Physicians, who looke a side at the soule, bycause the bodie is there best' (Positions, 123). He himself would put both aspects under the care of one master and, in a way that diverges somewhat from the religious conception, makes a connection between the quality of the body and the quality of the soul. In the light ofMulcaster's focus on the body, it is interesting that he uses body metaphors to describe the operation of the body politic in both his major educational texts; in Positions: For the bodie of the commone weale in proportion is like vnto a naturall

bodie, if any one parte be to great, or to small, besides the eye sore it is mother to some euill by the verie misfourming, wherupon great distemperature must needes follow in time, and disquiet the whole bodie. And in the bodie politike if the like proportion be not kept in all partes, the like disturbance will crepe thorough out all partes. (133-4)

This is developed further in the Elementarie: Likewise in these subaltern magistrates theie be no !esse carefull, bycause their places and functions concern euerie particular sinew, euerie particular vein, euerie particular arterie, naie euerie small filet, and finest string or strip in the hole bodie of anie common weall. Here lieth their choice of their learned wits, bycause theie take learning to be a leading qualitie, and therefor beseming the place, if it be fitted in person. These theie will haue fed and cherished with best matter, from the first time that theie be able to take anie pains either for bodilie exercise, or for trauell in learning, vntill theie be able to serue that publik tum, wherevnto theie ar destinate, & wherefor theie were so trained by publik foresight. (15)

Admittedly, human body-body politic metaphors were ubiquitous in the discourse of the period, but given Mulcaster's interest in the development of the human body and its social implications, they take on a particular force. The human body itself, in his view of the social order, becomes not only a signifier of

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status and authority, but actually a means of regulating power in a deference society: In the bodie theie require, that it be able for strength, and health to abide exercise the preseruer of the[m] both: that it be of good proportion and correspondent to the minde for trauell in studie, & if it maie be, to haue it personable withall, bycause personablenesse is an allurement to obedience, a gracious deliuerer of anie inward vertew, & somtime was estemed a thing most worthie of the principall seat. Was not Saul noted in his election to be king, to haue bene taller and more personable, the[n] the rest of the peple? Did not Thalestris the Amason Quene half contemn Alexander the great: when she saw his person to be of no great shew, whose name was so renoumed, as the report thereof did cause hir com to se him? Did not Euripides saie & Porphyrie vpon his word, that a bodie of presence is best worthie to rule? (Elementarie, 16)

This provides is a key point of connection between his social theories and his theory of educational practice; the role of education is to realize the superior signifying possibilities of the elite body. As I mentioned earlier, in his educational theory Mulcaster placed particular emphasis on the training of the body: the greater part of Positions is given over to describing various forms of physical exercise: 'lowd speaking, singing, lowd reading, talking, laughing, weeping, holding the breath, dawnsing, wrastling, fencing and scourging the top' and also ball games, walking, running, leaping, swimming, riding, hunting and shooting (pp. 50-54). Mulcaster's interest in the development of the body needs to be placed a little further into the context of social and educational developments in the period than I have done up to this point. The chivalric ideal had always placed a strong emphasis on this aspect of life, and physical accomplishment was readily seen as a natural aspect of elite identity to the extent that prowess in certain physical activities had come to be regarded as defining the nobility. 6 In Edward Hall's Chronicle (or Union ofthe Noble and Illustre Famelies ofLancastre and York) of 1542, a description of the physical strength and skill of the young Henry VIII and his companions implicitly links nobility with competence in athletic pursuits. Describing Mayday tilts in the second year of the king's reign, Hall remarks: 'Where the kyng behaued hymselfe so wei, and deliuered himselfe so valiauntly by his hardy prowes and greate strength that the prayse and laude was geuen to his grace, and his aydes: notwithstanding that divers valyaunt and strange persons had assayled hym and his aydes' (515). However, in the writings of the humanist advocates of education, and practically in the educational revolution of the period, these ideas of chivalric accomplishment as the hallmarks of nobility and gentility were being challenged by a combination of the need for the acquisition of more directly utilitarian skills on

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the one hand, and the refinement of behaviour as an ever more important signifier of elite social identity on the other. The ideas underlying this change were encapsulated in a letter to Colet early in the century from Richard Pace, a diplomat and later Dean ofSt Paul's (prefixed to Pace's De Fructu of 1502): When, two years ago, more or less, I had returned to my native land from the city of Rome, I was present at a certain feast, a stranger to many; where, when enough had been drunk, one or other of the guests - no fool, as one might infer from his words and countenance - began to talk of educating his children well. And, first of all, he thought that he must search out a good teacher for them, and that they should at any rate attend school. There happened to be present one of these whom we call gentlemen (generosus), and who always carry some hom hanging at their backs, as though they would hunt during dinner. He, hearing letters praised, roused with sudden anger, burst out furiously with these words. 'Why do you talk nonsense, friend?' he said; 'A curse on those stupid letters! all learned men are beggars: even Erasmus, the most learned of all, is a beggar (as I hear), and in a certain letter of his calls 'tTJV Ka-capa-cov 1tEVtav (that is, execrable poverty) his wife, and vehemently complains that he cannot shake her off his shoulders right into ~a8UKTJ'tEa 1tov-cov that is, into the deep sea. I swear by God's body I'd rather that my son should hang than study letters. For it becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow the hom nicely (apte), to hunt skilfully, and elegantly arry and train a hawk. But the study of letters should be left to the sons of rustics.' At this point I could not restrain myself from answering something to this most talkative man, in defence of good letters. 'You do not seem to me, good man,' I said, 'to think rightly. For if any foreigner were to come to the king, such as the ambassadors (oratores) of princes are, and an answer had to be given to him, your son, if he were educated as you wish, could only blow his hom, and the learned sons of rustics would be called to answer, and would be far preferred to your hunter or fowler son; and they, enjoying their learned liberty, would say to your face, 'We prefer to be learned, and, thanks to our learning, no fools, than boast of your fool-like nobility. ' 7

The problem was that too great an enthusiasm for physical accomplishments not only potentially stood in the way of the pursuit of formal education, but was also increasingly out of keeping with the changing role of the nobility in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Keith Wrightson has pointed out that: While the actual feudal relationship (the provision of military service in return for title to land) had decayed in the course of the later Middle Ages, the assumption remained that the English nobility and their gentry retainers were still distinguished above all by their capacity to bear arms. They were perceived as a military elite in the final analysis, and the coincidence of theory and practice was demonstrated both in the Crown's

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recognition of the necessity of tolerating (under licence) the practice of indentured retaining and in the actual significance of baronial retinues in the forces fielded in time of war or rebellion. In the course of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, this military role was greatly reduced in its significance. To be sure, high military rank long remained the prerogative of the nobility, while England's knights, esquires and landed gentlemen remained familiar with the handling of horse and sword, and not a few (or their younger sons and brothers) still sought careers in arms. Yet technological developments in warfare both reduced the primacy of the mounted arm in the field, and demanded a more specific training of the would-be officer. The long Tudor and Jacobean peace provided fewer opportunities for the acquisition of military experience, and the introduction of the lieutenancy system and the 'trained bands' reduced the dependency of the state upon noblemen and their retainers. The profession of arms became increasingly the preserve of a minority of trained and experienced specialists and devotees, rather than the distinguishing characteristic (at least in potential) of an entire estate of the realm. (1991, 37)

The pronouncements of those humanist theorists who were urging the elite to embrace education indicate an awareness of these changed circumstances, but they were careful not to disparage or reject physical pursuits absolutely. In The Governour Elyot includes and encourages all the traditional noble accomplishments, but he goes on to warn: These persones that so moche contemne lemyng, that they wolde that gentilmens children shulde haue no parte or very litle therof: but rather shulde spende their youth alway (I say not onely in huntynge and haukynge, whiche moderately vsed as solaces ought to be, I intende nat to disprayse) but in those ydle pastymes whiche for the vice that is therin, the commaundement of the prince, and the vniuersal consent of the people expressed in statutes & lawes do prohibite. (Book I, 44r)

Elyot is referring to gambling, but his comments about moderation in the traditional elite pursuits of hunting and hawking is significant. There are subtle but important differences in the attitudes to physical exercise and its value revealed in the writings of Elyot, Ascham and Mulcaster. Elyot, who was a theorist rather than a practitioner and who unequivocally directed his prescriptions to the elite, rather sought to curb the tendency of the nobility to an enthusiastic embrace of hunting, as the quotation above indicates. He recognized a value in physical exercise, but saw this entirely as a matter of promoting health for the purposes of equipping children to be receptive to education: 'Moreouer there be diuers maners of exercises: whereof some, onely prepareth & helpeth digestion: some agumenteth also strength & hardnesse of

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body: other serueth for agilitie and nymblenesse: so for celeritie or spedinesse' (Governour, Book I, 62v). This activity is part of a general physical programme to aid learning: 'Always I shall exhorte tutours and govemours of noble chyldren, that they suffer them nat to vse ingourgitations of meate or drinke, ne to slepe moche, that is to saye, aboue .viii. houres at the moste. For vndoubedly bothe repletion and superfluous slepe, be capitall enemies to studie, as they be semblably to helth of body & soule' (ibid., 42r). The activities he suggests are wrestling, running, swimming and swordplay. These pursuits, though listed as exercises 'which are necessary for euery gentilman' (ibid, 62r), he does not consider directly in terms of social or moral training. 8 Similarly Ascham, though he enumerates the physical qualities in parts of the body that 'serue learning' (Scholemaster, Book I, 7v), invests these with no particular social significance. The only physical activity in which Ascham shows a direct interest is shooting, and he views this almost entirely in terms of its utility to the realm. In The Scholemaster he does see noblemen of the court as ideally taking a lead in promoting the sport, but certainly makes no particular association between the activity and rank: for if but two or three noble men in the Court would but begin to shoote, all yong Ientlemen, the whole Court, all London, the whole Realme would straight way exercise shooting. What prayse should they win to themselves, what commodity should they bring to their countrey, that would thus deserve to be pointed at? Behold, there goeth the author of good order, the guide of good men.' I could say more, and yet not ouer much. (Book I, 22v)

In 1545 Ascham also published a manual on shooting, Toxophilus, which he addressed to both gentlemen and the 'yomen of England'. Mulcaster takes a considerably stronger interest in physical training and activity than either Elyot or Ascham, with much more fully developed social implications. The activities that Mulcaster advocates are a combination of physical exertions for the promotion of health, and the exercise of faculties that develop bodily control and foster the acquisition of social skills (rather as he promoted flay acting at Merchant Taylors' to teach 'good behaviour and audacity'). Mulcaster makes a particular advocacy of hunting which, he claims, combines all these exercises. Significant here is the educational institutionalization in a public sphere of activities that were principally associated with aristocratic leisure activities. Whereas Elyot and Ascham were both directing their arguments to the established nobility, Mulcaster as a public schoolmaster was in the business of helping to build the new elite in what was still a very conservative and hierarchical society. His pupils included those who

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would be 'new men', social aspirants who had not been born to a class culture that included activities such as hunting as a leisure pursuit. Physical accomplishment and the activities that developed it in fact take on a somewhat changed role in Mulcaster's educational theory. Exercises which developed a poise and command, and that had always been the province of domestic contexts of elite education, were now part of a public educational process which, in its more elevated sectors, was geared to producing a corpus of educated people who could run the country and the professions, and who had a shared system of social attitudes, values, behaviour and speech. The educational institutions had a prominent role in providing such a common code of behaviour, and modes of speech and thought for a ruling class increasingly diverse in its social origins. Certain schools were already emerging as elite institutions in the period and, in fact, they constitute the first cohort of the public schools as we now know them. The educational historian Joan Simon has suggested that grammar schools contributed to a development of the uniform speech of the educated class (1966, 364-5). Mulcaster himself recognized that 'We do attribute to much to toungues ... and esteeme it more honorable to speak finely, then to reason wisely' (Positions, 242). In this context, Mulcaster's advocacy of exercises takes on a particular meaning and function. By the sixteenth century chivalric accomplishments did not in themselves create a nobleman, though such activities were seen as appropriate to his social position: they had by this time become additional to the -man rather than a sine qua non. From being necessary training for the discharge of a real aristocratic martial role, they had become leisure activities, and then progressed to constituting signifiers of social status. Mulcaster's scheme takes these, and exercises like them, one step further: they become necessary to the project of equipping the body with fitness for elite status. Indeed, he declares explicitly the real purpose of the exercises: And as those qualities, which I haue set out for the generall traine in their perfection being best compassed by them, may verie well beseeme a gentlemanly minde: so may the exercises without all exception: either to make a healthfull bodie, seeing our mould is all one: or to prepare them for seruice, wherein their vse is more. Is it not for a gentleman to vse the chase and hunt? doth their place reprove them if they haue skill to daunce? Is the skill in sitting of an horse no honour at home, no helpe abroad? Is the vse of their weapon with choice, for their calling, any blemish vnto them? for all these and what else beside, there is furniture for them, if they do but looke backe: and the rather for them, bycause in deede those greate exercises be most proper to such persons, and not for the meaner. (Positions, 197-8)

The educated body thus becomes an apparently 'naturally' elite object. This forms something of a parallel with the practice of acquiring coats of arms, which

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had become shorn of its association with the martial activities related to it. In Mulcaster's conception of education for the elite, those 'greate exercises' are no longer either for martial ends, or simply a recreational end in themselves, but have the specific purpose of shaping social identity through bodily development. The process is perhaps analogous to Foucault's analysis of the operation of power in terms of its 'capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives' (1980, 39). If a harmonious society required the proper ordering of rank and authority, Mulcaster also sees exercise as part of the achievement of harmony in the body, and he cites Galen as an authority: Galene examining the thinges, which do please the displeased infantes, findes out that their naturall vnquietnesse is appeased by three naturall meanes, which the nurse vseth, the pappe to feede, the voice to still, the arme to moue. Wherevpon he concludeth that meat to nourish, Musicke to delite, motion to exercise be most naturall, which being so, then for the preservation of nature, she must needes haue her owne motion, which agreeth best with her owne disposition. (Positions, 108)

In its notion of exercise for the achievement of natural harmony, this idea is also related to the quality of sprezzatura as described by Castiglione in The Courtier; that is, the appearance of nonchalance in the performance of accomplishments that, in fact, require rigorous training to master. 10 This is part of the 'magicality' of elite status which is the aspect of power that depends on signification. 11 One scholar (A.S. Golding) has argued that 'the upper classes appeared fit to rule to the degree that the showed themselves to be free of the domination of the humours' (1984, 75-6). Mulcaster's ideas on the training of the body might thus be viewed in the context of an emphasis that appears to have been emerging in the sixteenth century on manners as a defining quality of the elite, 12 particularly in the face of the challenges posed by the emergent capitalist economy to the importance of other markers such as established wealth, kinship relations or land. His theories articulate the contradictions thrown up by these challenges, but they also change the emphasis in the conceptualization of social rank by providing a rationale for a ruling class which can lay claim to their status, not simply through social position or birth connections, but by virtue of essential bodily and mental superiority. Implicit in his theories are the insights derived from practice, that ultimately this superiority is particular to individuals rather than a class, though those individuals may go on to constitute a class. Perhaps most importantly, though, Mulcaster's position both permits the maintenance of the status quo, and at the same time legitimizes the mechanisms of social mobility by recognizing

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the need to accommodate the ability spread across the social spectrum. He does not resolve the contradictions of his society, but incorporates them in a scheme that has at least the appearance of coherence. What gives his arguments an impression of empiricism and respectability is their being focused on the body, though it becomes apparent that this is hardly 'unaccommodated man', and he eschews any radical project of social deconstruction which this basis of his theories might make available. A footnote on modem public schools: though sport and rigorous living to promote leadership qualities in the upper classes began formally to be promoted as the ethos of public schools in the nineteenth century, arguably the idea had its roots in education as early as Mulcaster, who made claims for the benefits not only of exercise, but also of 'small diet' and 'thin aparell' . 13

9

Regimen Animarum et Corporum:

The Body and Spatial Practice in Medieval and Renaissance Magic Stephen Clucas Whosoeuer ... being desirous to come to the supream state of the soul, goeth to receiue oracles, must go to them being chastly and devoutly disposed, being pure and clean ... so that his soul be polluted with no filthiness, and free from all guilt. He must also purifie his mind and body as much as he may from all diseases, and passions and all irrational conditions which adhere to it as rust to iron ... (Agrippa, 1651, 517)

When Cornelius Agrippa made these recommendations for the aspiring theurgic magician in 1509 1 he was drawing upon a number of traditions of Christian magical practice (or 'theurgy') which had been spreading through Europe for more than two hundred years. In this chapter I examine the articulation of these magical practices into a series of codified bodily and spatial regimes which relate not only to the increasing segmentation and hierarchization of social space into public and private sectors, but also to problematic conceptions of human agency which were in the process of radical transformation during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If, as Merleau-Ponty has suggested, our embodied experience of space is not to be understood as the orientation of the body as 'a thing in objective space', but as 'a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal "place" defined by its task and situation' ,2 and the 'place' of these possible actions 'calls up a subject capable of living in it' (1992, 250) my question is, what is the 'virtual body' of early modem magic pr theurgy, and what kind of subject does the phenomenal 'place' of magical practice 'call up' or produce? My exploration of theurgical practice will focus primarily on three relatively little-known varieties of medieval magic which circulated almost solely in manuscript form until the mid-seventeenth century: 'Pelagius Solitarius's crucifixional art' (De arte crucifzxi Pelagij Solitarij),3 the magical orations of the Liber consecrationis,4 and the various arts of pseudo-Solomonic theurgy or ars

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notoria. 5 These little-known registers of early-modem practice6 give us a unique access to a particular 'virtualization' of the late-medieval and Renaissance human body in which contemporary fears about instrumentalism and operativity were played out. In this essay I will be focusing on the consecration and purification of the body and its spatial analo~es (the 'sacred', 'privy' or 'secret' place of practice, and the 'magic circle') as a means of both performing and allaying the anxieties of agency. Both Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau have focused recent theoretical attention on the constitutive role of space in the production and perpetuation of social and cultural formations. Lefebvre accentuates the determination of the social use of space and their attendant signifying practices: 'the texture of space affords opportunities not only to social acts with no particular place in it and no particular link with it, but also to a spatial practice that it does indeed determine, namely its collective and individual use: a sequence of acts which embody a signifying practice' (1991, 57), while De Certeau emphasizes the spatial articulations of ideology, the 'spatial divisions which underlie and organize a culture' (1986, 68). I shall be looking at early-modem magic as a set of spatial practices in which the body and the body-in-space are made to signify, albeit in ways which were consciously or unconsciously transgressive, acting as vehicles for re-organizing culture, and as a means for reimagining man's relationship to the world. Ernst Cassirer's Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923-31) and Mircea Eliade's Le Sacre et le profane (1959) were amongst the first theoretical accounts of the role of 'sacred' or 'mythic' space in pre-modem societies, and their persistence in later forms of spatial organization. More recently Lefebvre has developed some of these metaphysical ideas in his analysis of sacred space in pre-modem societies, which he saw as the origin or 'cradle' of the 'absolute space' of capitalist societies (1991, 234-41). For Lefebvre the 'secret space, the space of sanctuary', that is a 'site (which is) ... circumscribed, demarcated by a perimeter, and characterized by an assigned and meaningful form', is 'at once and indistinguishably mental and social' (ibid., 240). My intention here is to show that the intensely secretive and private nature of the sacred space of magical practice 're-codes' or reappropriates the socially constructed spaces of orthodox Christian worship and the purificatory bodily regimes which those spaces 'called up' in order to actualize a new set of desires and power relations. Cassirer and Eliade both stress the creation of sacred space as an interruption of homogeneous space. For Eliade, 'Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different' (1959, 26), while Cassirer, who places more emphasis on sacredness as a construction, says that 'Hallowing begins when a specific zone is detached from space as a

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whole, when it is distinguished from other zones and one might say religiously hedged around' (1955, 99). The 'sacred precinct' is 'raised out of its surroundings, hedged around and guarded against them' (ibid., 85). It is a place which 'forms its own ring of existence, a walled-in zone separated from its surroundings by fixed limits' (ibid., 103). Cassirer also emphasizes the 'translation' or re-production, involved in this establishment of boundaries: mythical space, he says, is 'a "copying" in space of what is intrinsically unspatial' (1955, 85). What is the 'intrinsically unspatial' content of sacred space? Firstly it is the body, or rather, the embodied subject. The language of spatial orientation, as Cassirer argues, is 'usually taken from man's intuition of his own body: man's body and its parts are the system of reference to which all other spatial distinctions are indirectly transferred' (ibid, 90) and the 'objective world' of space 'becomes intelligible to the mythical consciousness ... only when it is ... analogically "copied" in terms of the human body' (ibid., 90). This is particularly true, I would argue, in the case of the 'sacred precinct' of the magic circle, which is imagined as an analogue of the human body, a protective boundary, carapace or 'skin' which protects the practitioner from alien intrusion. This copying of the body into space is itself a translation, however, and the 'virtual' or 'phenomenal' body here involves an idealizing projection, articulating in space the desire for an invulnerable body, and by extension (and more importantly) an invulnerable soul. This desire for invulnerability, I would argue, is closely tied to fears about the culpable nature of instrumental agency, and the 'task or situation' of the practitioner's 'virtual body' here is to operate on the world, but also to defend and legitimate that 'body' (or embodied subjectivity) from the imagined consequences of that operation. The early modern mind, I would argue, was habitually disposed to conceive of human power in direct relation to divine power, and particularly in relation to the divine limitation and proscription of the will. Cassirer argues that the production of mythical or sacred space is directly linked to man's instrumental relation to the world: 'The limits which the mythical consciousness posits and through which it arrives at its spatial and intellectual articulations', Cassirer suggests, are 'fixed on man's self-limitation in his immediate relation to reality, as a willing and acting subject' (1955, 85). The sacred spaces of medieval and early modern Christianities were zones in which the will and the desire for agency were mediated. Using precatory expressions of humility and abjection, and the prostration or inclination of the body in the act of worship to signify their powerlessness, Christian devotants paradoxically laid claim to, or opened themselves to receive the mediate or intercessory agency of God, Christ, Mary or the Saints. The magical (or theurgical) practices of the period appropriated (or perhaps simply extended, and

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developed) this intercessory use of space and the body to extend the limits of operative desire, to extend themselves as 'acting and willing subjects'. The intercessory space of the 'magic circle' answers to Eliade's defintion of the sacred precinct as 'the paradoxical place where ... (two) worlds communicate' (1959, 25). In this place the practitioner invokes and lays claim to a vicarious agency, willing in the name of a higher will, but separating itself in space from the imagined location of the intercessory power (the place where the spirit appears). The magical operator wills, and does not will (it is God's will), operates, but does not operate (the spirit operates, or God operates through the spirit), and this paradox is also figured in the space where the invocation occurs: the practitioner is there, and yet not in the self-same place as the power which is invoked. The space of power is inwardly divided Gust as the desire for power is inwardly divided by the consciousness of transgression). For Eliade, sacred space is an 'evocation of sacred forms', a 'calling up' of sacredness within a previously homogeneous spatial territory (ibid., 27). This evocation most commonly takes the form of a bodily activity (kneeling in prayer, or crossing oneself at the threshold of a church, for example). The body evokes the sacred in space: the 'techniques of orientation', Eliade says, are ' techniques for the construction of sacred space' (ibid., 29). A sacred space is a zone where one goes through a series of sacred motions. These motions include the fixing of limits or boundaries which 'establishes the order of the world' in microcosm - it is a 'cosmogonic moment' (ibid., 30). 'Consecrating a territory', Eliade says, 'is equivalent to making it a cosmos, to cosmicizing it' (ibid., 30); it copies into space an existence which is 'inhabited and organized', an existence in which the willing subject is protected and defended from the chaos and evil of the unknown, the 'extraterritorial' world outside of one's control (ibid., 29). Consecrated space thus represents, in spatial terms, the desire to control and organize the world, and one's existence in it. What follows then is an examination of the ways in which the body of the magical practitioner produces or imagines its desire in spatial terms. The imagination, Michel De Certeau has suggested, is 'space-producing' (1992, 189). The remainder of this essay will consider how the acting and willing early modem subject produced its desire for unimpeded and limitless operation in the 'phenomenal place' of magical practice. The ' crucifixional art' (ars crucifixi) attributed to Pelagius Solitarius is a medieval magical art which was circulating in copy-manuscripts in the late sixteenth century. The art is divided into three parts: the first part teaches the adept how to magically acquire the seven liberal arts and theology - a method so efficacious that it can instantaneously transform an idiot into a wise man. 8 The second part teaches how by a single glance (solum intuitum) at the crucifix, one can resolve any intellectual query. 9 The third part teaches how to

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use the crucifix to summon angels or spirits to answer any question which you ask, concerning the past, the present or the future, by means of dream visions. 10 In order for the art to be efficacious, the practitioner must subject himself to a strict bodily regime of abstinence, and possess a virtuous and chaste character: You must be pure from mortal sin, sober and unpolluted by women or other kinds of pollution, you should not be excessively full of food or drink, you should possess a tranquil mind, have been pure for three days, and not be melancholy or pre-occupied with other thoughts. 11 This ascetic purifying of body and mind is mirrored in the primary instrument of the art, the crucifix. This must be made by the practitioner himself ifac tibi fieri per manus sculptoris ymaginem) and be fashioned from 'new and unblemished oak, olive or laurel-wood, and must not have been previously used for any manual purpose, or have come from any filthy or unclean place' . 12 The more naturalistic and beautiful the image, the more effective it will be - it should be a complete and perfect image (Completa ... ymagine atque perfecta), wrapped in a transparent cloth, and kept in a casket of red wax when not being used in magical operations. The image should be consecrated during a missa de passione domini by a virtuous priest who approves of your proposed operations (BL, Harleian MS 181, fols 75v-76r). The chamber in which the art is to be practised also echoes the bodily purity of the practitioner. It is to be a 'secret chamber, which is clean, pure, free of cobwebs and dust, and locked': only the practitioner should sleep in it, and it should contain an altar-like table covered with clean linen, on which there are two candlesticks containing blessed candles. 13 The cleanness and the solitariness of the place in which the art is practised are warrants of its legitimacy and piety, as are the furnishings which consciously and sincerely parody those of church or chapel. The solitary chamber and furnishings are then sprinkled with holy water and incense, the crucifix is taken out of its casket, placed on the table, 14 and a series of petitionary orations are uttered before it, in which the operator confesses his sins and asks Christ to favour his actions and grant him access to 'the truth of all things and questions' (omnium rerum et quaestionum veritatem). 15 These requests for miraculous access to knowledge are accompanied by an appropriate repertoire of bodily gestures. The operator prays 'on bended knees, with the cross held in both hands' / 6 or with the forefingers of his right hand touching the foot of the cross. 17 He stands - or prostrates himself - before the image with arms oustretched in the form of a cross' 18 A more literal version of this imaginative somatic identification with Christ, or corporeal imitatio Christi, can be found in Robert Turner's seventeenth-century translation of the medieval Ars Notoria:

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STEPHEN CLUCAS When thou entrest into thy Chamber, devoutly kneel down before thy bed, saying this Psalm ... Then rise vp, and go to the wall, and stretch forth thy hands, having two nayles fixed, upon which thou maist stay up thy hands, and say this Prayer following with great devotion: 0 God, who for us miserable sinners didst undergo the painful death upon the Crosse ... [I] do this day offer up and sacrifice unto thee my Soul and Body ... (Ars notoria, 121-2) 19

After this the operator writes 'Alpha' and 'Omega' on his right hand (literally inscribing the name of Christ upon his body) and sleeps on his right side, with his right hand beneath his right ear, through which the divine communication presumably enters whilst he sleeps (Ars notoria, 124)?0 In Pelagius's crucifixional art the sequence of petitionary prayers and appropriate bodily gestures is also followed by a ritualized dormition. The operator rises from his prostrate position and circles the chamber, sprinkling holy water once more over the furnishings, the cross, and himself, before extinguishing the lights and lying down to sleep - either remaining silent or repeatedly chanting In nomine patris et jilij et spiritus sancti until he is asleep.21 The kind of synaesthetic verbal and bodily regime utilized in the crucifixional art was, of course, derived from existing medieval conventions of prayer and mortification which involved affective identification (either verbal or gestural) with Christ's body. 22 In another magical treatise describing 'The Roman secrett' - an art which purports to make 'Sathan' appear in a 'bright well burnished bason' in 'the likenes of a white Monke' -the operator claims power through an intensified version of conventional precatory invocations of Christ's body. The operator commands the spirit: by the Crowne of Christ by his head and by his teeth and eares and by his face and nose by his mouth and eyes by his tonge by his annes by his nailes by his thumbs by his fmgers sinewes and veines by his !eggs feete and the sowles of his feete by all his members in which he hath vouchsafed to suffer torments for the redemption of mankind ...23

Although the gestural and verbal forms of early-modem magic and orthodox devotion have areas of overlap, the objectives of theurgy (which lay claim to powers unwarranted by conventional prayer) are quite different from those of conventional worship. In Pelagius's crucifixional art, for example, the figure of Truth appears to the successful operators in person (persona/iter) while they sleep, communicating with them face-to-face, as one friend to another (ore ados, sicut amicus ad amicum) answering all questions, either openly, or allegorically (BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 80r). These questions range through the full encyclopaedia of medieval intellectual desires:

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through this art one can know the past, the present and the future; the counsels and secrets of the king, the use of spirits, the sins of men, and the nature of death. We can also know hidden thoughts, and future events; the whereabouts of hidden treasure, the identities of thieves and robbers, the health of friends or enemies, and the whole complement of the arts: alchemy, medicine, theology, and all other sciences or arts, one can understand omens ... (and) the powers of stones, incantations (colligationes verbarum), the names, offices and characters of good and evil spirits, the properties of creatures, and all other things in the known world. (BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 80v)

The only qualification for obtaining these powers is that the precepts of the art are rightly observed, that the body and soul be pure, and that the work be done with holy, clean and pure intentions. The practitioner must be 'dignified with holy merit' and be 'apt and disposed to experience visions', remembering briefly each day the Passion of Christ (BL, Harleian MS 181, fols 80v-81r). The co-optation of the external forms of Christian worship into a sequestered domestic space is also found in the medieval magical art known as the Liber consecrationis. Consisting of a combination of conventional prayer24 with nine specific magical 'orysons' or Latin prayers, with Hebrew and quasiHebraic incantational elements.25 The process begins in a conventional ecclesiastical space, whilst celebrating mass. In order to consecrate the book in which the 'orysons' are written, the shriven operator- who is instructed to be 'Cleane soothely in soule and in body' and to 'fast 9 dayes lenten fast standing praying devout and meeke solitary from earthly things and from fellowships sequestred' (BL, Sloane MS 3826, fol. 58r)- must smuggle the book secretly into mass: Go thou devoutly and divinely for to heare masse bearing with thee the booke in cleane syndall wrapped and then sothely the masse shall begynne or before putt thou the booke privily in a comer of the altar vnder the cloth where is said the holy gospell. And so thou shalt heare the masse attentively ... and pray God that he vouchsafe to hallow this booke. And when this masse is done, privily thou shalt take the booke and thou shalt come home. 26

The book is then taken to a private domestic interior which parodies the church space: 'putt it reverently vpon a table with sindall covered and made cleane in a Chamber suffumed'. The book is adorned like a Bible, with 'an holy stole (to the manner of a crosse)' and a 'holy girdle', and the operator deports himself as a devotant: 'bowing thy knees manly to the almighty thy face turned to the east' (BL, Sloane MS 3826, fol. 58v). The various magical arts attributed to Solomon, known collectively as the ars notoria, and putatively gathered together in a volume known as the Liber Salomonis or Liber Raziel, have many features in common with the arte crucifrxi of pseudo-Pelagius, and the Liber consecrationis, and are evidently a product of

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the same medieval intellectual milieu, in which non-Christian magical traditions (of Hellenic and Judaeo-Arabic provenance) are Christianized by the introduction of ritual and precatory elements, such as confession, psalmody, liturgy and the use of incense, holy water and blessed candles. Like the crucifixional art, the pseudo-Solomonic arts promise immediate access to unlimited knowledge. They also involve a series of petitionary orations, although these also include incantatory prayers which are supposedly written in a primordial ur-language, and include the revelation of 'semaphors' or secret names of God which themselves possess magical powers (an idea deriving from the Jewish tradition of the kabbalah). Unlike the crucifixional art, whose instruments are recognizably drawn from conventional religious worship, the pseudo-Solomonic arts utilize a number of ceremonial artefacts, including magical talismans, diagrams, characters, rings, candles, swords, belts, altars, mirrors and 'glasses', and the operations are often performed within the spatial confines of a 'magic circle'. As in the crucifixional art, the solitariness of the space in which the magic is performed is considered to be of the utmost importance. The practice must be undertaken in a secret, private and purified place: 'a secret place, such as in a church, a private courtyard, or a garden' ,27 'an house or a cleane place made cleane well with beesomes & washen &. watred & suffumed' (Liber Salomonis Raziel, B.L. Sloane MS 3846, fol. 130v). One must 'done saye with thys booke in none vncleane place ... but fastinge earlye in hollye ether priuye place; as with greate devotion kneelynge in holly churche, ether in thy chambre privilye' ?8 The operator must be 'alone ... unless he is a master of the art who is giving instructions in the operation' .29 The pseudo-Solomonic texts are also insistent on the need for ascetic regimen - the regimen animarum, which Gregory had bequeathed to the Middle Ages as the ars artium 30 - with its attendant mortifying corporeal practices. The practitioner must be 'well confessed, and fast on bread and water for three days, and he must not eat until all the stars are in the sky ... and give alms to the poor'. 31 He must 'fast during the days which he looks upon the diagrams' .32 He must only call on the angels and God 'after having acquired the grace of God' by 'good works, confession, fasting (and) chastity' (BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 57r). He must be 'pure and unpolluted, and make his devotions disingenuously, neither eating nor drinking' ?3 He must be 'very penitent and trewly confessed of all his sinnes, he must vtterly forbere the company of women and all there intycements, in so much that he may nott looke upon them ... (nor) kepe no company with wicked or sinfull men ... (and) lett not his apparryll be filthe but rather new, or elles very cleane waschyd' (BL, Royal MS 17 A. XLII, fol. 14v). Some of the texts also call for purifying suffumigations with amber, musk, aloe, mastick, thyme, myrhh, balsalm, and other herbs or spices,34 and the use of pure materials such as 'virgin parchemyn[t]' of 'silke or ... parchemyn[t] of a lambe or of a kidde virgin or of a ... fawne virgin' or ink made from 'cleane galls & ... good white

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wine' (BL, Sloane MS 3846, fol. 130r). The seventeenth-century physician Arthur Gauntlett of Grays Inn Lane records two schedules of 'Instructions' for operators, attributed to St Cyprian and Ptolemy, which draw on these precepts, which include the injunction to 'cleane thy Hands and feete before the sight of the Signes and Characters of Salomon', and cleaning 'thy hands and face and par[ing] ... thy nailes both ofHands and feete'. 35 The private and purified chamber and the shriven mind and body of the practitioner are thus mutually implicated in the magical art: both perform the function of fortifying, preserving, protecting and validating the practitioner and his actions (a constant theme in the precatory orations which make up the verbal component of the art), a function which they shared with the monastic regimes from which they drew their sustenance. 36 The solitariness and secrecy of the place is further emphasized by the spatial analogue of the magical circle - a private space within a private space which promises to empower and to protect the practitioner from harm. In the Gauntlett manuscript, for example, we fmd depictions of a series of magic circles associated with pseudo-Solomonic magical techniques. The circle is described as the 'fort' of the magician (BL, Sloane MS 3851, fol. 99r), and forms a spatial barrier to malign influences, just as his ascesis is a corporeal fortification and his prayers a spiritual fortification or protection from evil. The first circle (Fig. 9.1), for example, operates two levels of spatial exclusion: the first is a circle of 14 foot diameter, 'for the Master to stand or sitt in', whose perimeter is inscribed with the protective mediation of the names of the Apostles. The second is the separate 'Circle for the Spirit to appeare in', which is held distinct from the operator - its smaller size reflects the unequal relation between operator and performative spirit. The second circle (Fig. 9.2) also protects the 'Master' with protective insignia, this time sacred Hebrew words - such as 'Immanuel', meaning 'God is with us' - presumably within the protective circle, whereas 'without the Circle' is the 'Christall' shewstone which will serve as a visionary instrument, and as a 'container' for the spirit. The third pair of circles (Fig. 9.3) likewise depicts a circle bearing protective insignia (unusually allowing space for 'fellows' or co-practitioners, in what is more usually a solitary practice). Here the circle for 'the spirit to rise in' is surrounded by 'Characters that the spirit obeyeth' to which the spirit kneels, which are arranged 'in the circle towar[dJs you' (that is, towards the practitioner). These protective spatial constructions which are predicated on a masterslave relationship between operator and spirit, are echoed in the verbal formulations of the arts, which often include elaborate pleas for divine protection from malign spirits, as well as ' licence' or 'bond' orations37 which are virtually contractual documents insuring the operator of the spirit's obedience. These incantational documents, also known as 'vincula' (chains) or 'colligationes' (ties or bonds),38 are remarkable in their analogy with contemporary legal restraints compelling the socio-economic 'obedience' of the secular citizen.39

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Figure9.1 Sloane MS 3851, fol.114v

Figure9.2 Sloane MS 3851, fol.114v

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Figure 9.3 Sloane MS 3851, foi.IISr

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Figure 9.4 The ceremonial space for the operation with 'five spirits of the north', Reginald Scot, Discouerie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), p. 414

Figure 9.5 (Solomon's circle) from 'The experiment ofBealphares', Reginald Scot Discouerie ofWitchcrqft (London, 1584), p. 420

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What these spatial and verbal practices jointly inscribe is a particular relation to magical human agency, in which the desire to operate or practice is equally matched by a counter-desire: the desire not to be compromised by that operation. Constrained by religious imperatives which insisted on human powerlessness and humility, and the need for actions to be mediated by divine approbation (to do 'in God's name', 'according to God's will' or 'piously and devoutly'), early-modern conceptions of individual agency were increasingly seeking to articulate a space outside of these traditional constraints, although paradoxically unable to disentangle themselves from religious notions of 'legitimate agency'. Thus while the Solomonic art promises the operator powers to 'kill whome ye will', to 'cause danger bothe by se[a] and Iande' to 'distroy a kingdom or an empyre', 'to haue power over euery man' or to 'fonne a castell that shall neuer be dystroyed',40 it also infonns us that 'It is not possible that a wicked and vnclen man shulde worke truly in this arte' (BL, Royal MS 17. A. XLII, fol. 2v). Reginald Scot's Discouerie of Witchcraft (1584), while it purports to be a 'confutation of conjuration' which reveals the 'follies and falshoods' of necromancy and theurgy (430), goes to a great deal of pains to reproduce a series of magical operations in extenso from manuscript sources. These printed transcriptions are significant in two respects, firstly in that they provide us with evidence that medieval magical arts of the kind we have been examining were still being practised as late as the 1580s- Scot names one practitioner, 'T.R.', who had composed a magical manuscript 'written in faire letters of red & blacke upon parchment' in 1570 (393, 431) - and secondly, because the magical arts which Scot records contain interesting variations on the basic ceremonial themes we have already seen. In an operation designed to 'enclose a spirit in a christall stone', for example, we find an attempt to work with diabolic rather than the more usual angelic intennediaries. The art consists of raising the ' The five spirits of the north', whose names are Sitrael, Malantha (or Malanthon) Thamaor, Falaur and Sitami. These five 'infernall ... princes' , who are 'learned and expert in all arts and sciences', are amongst that angelic host who were 'cast out ... of paradise' by God, and are now 'exorcized' and commanded and constrained by the practitioner (in the names of God, Christ, the Virgin Mary and 'all the Saints') to appear before him 'in faire fonne and shape of mankind kings' in order that they might do the bidding of the practitioner, before being imprisoned in a 'christall stone or berill glasse' (Discouerie, 411-13). Whereas many of the arts insist upon the solitariness of magical practice, these spirits are obliged to appear to the practioner and his 'freends'. The space of the ceremony is also more complex (see Fig. 9.4) although the ascetic preparations and purified vestments are identical to those in other arts. The practitioner requests that God may 'grant' his 'power' to them as a 'constraint' on the spirits. The symbols of

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this power are in this case represented by the ritual use of 'five bright swords'. In the sacred precinct of 'some secret place', each sword is used to describe a circle on the ground. The sword is then used to write the name of one of the spirits in the circle and, 'standing in the circle', thee practitioner thrusts the sword 'into that name'. When the five circles are completed the practitioner kneels before the first circle with a 'christall stone' in his hands and begins an invocation to the spirits to 'fulfill all my desire and request' (Discouerie, 412). The spirits are constrained by this invocation, so that they 'may not depart ... without my licence', and the practitioner thus becomes their 'lord and maister' in a kind of spiritual parody of a vow of fealty. Placing the 'circled or round christall' between the practitioner's circle and the circles of the spirits, the spirits are then commanded to enter the stone (ibid., 413). The space of the ceremony is carefully articulated. The caption to Scot's illustration emphasizes the scale of reproduction, it is a 'figure or type proportionall'. This is because the circles are specified as being 'nine foote euerie waie'. This numerological stricture (nine was a number associated with angelic hierarchies, and as the product of 'squaring the trinity') is also underwritten by astrological imperatives (the space must be created during astrologically auspicious times). The form of the ceremonial space, which 'must be obserued and kept, in making the figure' (ibid, 414) is significantly orientated. Cassirer's observations regarding the orientation of sacred space are particularly relevant here. In sacred space, Cassirer argues, 'The zones and directions in space stand out from one another because a different accent of meaning is connected with them' (1955, 96). Direction in mythic space is more than a simple orientation in objective space, it 'carries specific feeling values' (ibid, 85) 'Each particular spatial determination' Cassirer observes, 'obtains a definite divine or demonic, friendly or hostile, holy or unholy "character'" (ibid, 98). This is certainly true of the ceremonial space in question, where the spirits are situated at the northern boundary - traditionally associated with alienation from God - while the consecrated swords used to create the circles and 'fix' the names (and thus the spirits themselves) are ranged along the southern boundary, a direction which was traditionally associated with the Holy Spirit (ibid, 102). The circle of the practitioner or 'master' (magister) is enclosed within a nested series of squares and circles each of which is inscribed with sacred signs or inscriptions (the pentangle, the cross, the nomina dei, and a ritual 'charm': 'dextera domini fecit virtute, dextera domini exaltauit me'). With its north-south, east-west orientation the magisterial space thus becomes a parody of the traditional sacred orientations of church architecture, at the centre of which there is the quasi-altar of the practitioner's location. The next operation, 'An experiment of Bealphares', uses a virtually identical magisterial space to that of the five spirits ceremony (see Fig. 9.5) although its construction, some of the ritual instruments and the bodily

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orientation of the practitioners are different. The objective of this 'experiment' (or experiential event), as in the previous ceremony, is the 'inclosing' of a spirit, that is the spatial containment of its potentially malign powers. This spirit promises to transport the practitioner from country to country, to fetch hidden treasure, and to perform other traditional magical feats. The practitioner makes the usual ritual ablutions, and establishes himself in his sacred territory, a 'privy place', detached from the surrounding territory, and then (like the practitioner in the ars crucifixi) writes one of the divine names (nomina dei)in this case ''1i' Agla '1i'' - on his right hand, and a series of magical characters on his left hand. In a parody of StJohn the Baptist, he wears a 'drie thong of a lions or of a harts skin' around his 'clean white cloathes', also inscribed with 'the holie names of God'. This is followed by a 'brest plate' of 'virgine parchment' sewn on to 'a peece of new Iinnen'inscribed with the words 'Homo sacarus, museo Iomeas, cherubozea' (Discouerie, 415-16), designating him as a kind of quasi-priest. 41 Like the five. spirits experiment, this ceremony allows for the presence of more than one practitioner, with the proviso that if one has 'a fellow to worke with thee, he must be appointed in the same manner'. The practitioner then takes an unused 'bright knife' and inscribes the sides of its blade with the same inscriptions as those made on his hands. With this knife he makes a circle (an act which repeats the 'detachment' of the sacred territory, a space-within-a-space), known as 'Solomon's circle'. The practitioner then enters the circle and the point of entry is 'close[d] again' with the knife. He then utters a prayer which is designed to expel evil from the space of practice (jugiat procul omne malignum), suffumigates the space with incense and prays to God to defend him from 'all evils' (ibid, 415-16). The practitioner then orientates himself (literally, turning himself 'towards the east') in order to recite a series of psalms and prayers, 'with meeke and devout devotions', before reciting the names inscribed on the 'holy girdle', blessing the circle with holy water, and sitting with his assistant 'backe to backe' in the 'middest' of the circle (ibid., 41 7); presumably this posture is designed as a further form of protection from malign influences (the practitioners here are literally 'minding their backs'). The spirit Bealphares is then summoned (or rather 'exorcize[d] and conjure[d]') in the name of God (Tetragrammaton) and the holy sacraments (but also by 'the truest and speciallest name of your maister' presumably the magical 'name' inscribed on the sword and girdle). The spirit is asked to appear 'visiblie, before this circle', the circle - as the invocation insists - 'being our tuition and protection', that is, a defence from diabolic incursion. When the spirit appears, the practitioner 'binds' him with a precatory conjuration, which invokes Christ, the angelic hierarchies, the sacraments, and so on (Discouerie, 417-18). These 'riall (regal) words' constrain the spirit to help the practitioner to find hidden treasure, but also to teach him all he needs to know in the seven liberal arts. The spirit is then

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despatched to another space 'the place predestinated and appointed for thee, ... [by] the Lord GOD', until he is required by the practitioner again (ibid, 419). According to a caption following the figure of the circle, it can also be made 'with chalke on the ground' if one wishes to conjure 'fairies' (ibid, 420). The anxieties which surround these 'operations', and their claims to supernatural agency, are articulated at every level of the event. The conventional powers of protection which are afforded by the cross, holy water, purifying suffumigations, the names of God, and other ceremonial insignia, the preparatory regime of abstinence, the prayers requiring protection, defence and immunity from evil, the creation of prosthetic spatial 'barriers' which form a secondary body that fortifies the practitioner from the spiritual powers which he summons - all of these precautions indicate a deep-seated uneasiness with respect to the desire for power which they are designed to meet. On the face of it, there is little to separate these ceremonies from the ecclesiastical ceremonies from which they borrow many of their elements. The essential difference between these 'magical' ceremonies and conventional liturgy and prayer is the element of compulsion. The contract between God and the orthodox devotant is without obligation on God's side. These ceremonies take the conventional Catholic devotional practice of petitioning God (impetratio) via intercessory mediators (like the Virgin or Saints) and extends it to a compulsory mediation which is claimed in the name of (or with the agreement of) God or Christ. The act of creating circles which enclose practitioner and spirit, forbidding malign osmosis between the spirit world and the privileged point of sacred access, spatializes the essential paradox of early modem magic, that those who craved and desired to augment their powers to operate in the natural and intellectual world, feared that desire and the potentially 'impious' claims to human agency which it entailed. It was only by replicating and manipulating the spatial divisions which underpinned and organized Christian culture that these new powers could begin to be imagined at all. Henri Lefebvre has asked: 'What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes ... whose code it embodies?' (1991, 44). What ideology can we see embodied in the space of medieval theurgy? Richard Kieckheffer has spoken of the intellectual constituency of magical practitioners as a 'clerical underworld', comprising a variety of disaffected groups - diocesan priests, clerks of minor orders, unreformed monks and friars - whose knowledge of religious ritual coupled with unorthodox ambitions led to necromantic practices (1990, 151-72). Although the historiographical validity of representing theurgical practitioners as an 'underworld' or 'subculture' in this way is questionable, Kieckhefer is probably correct in identifying the origins of theurgy as an 'overflow' of scholarly expertise from the monastic houses into the less-codified spheres of the secular world, and some specific links between 'heretical' religious movements and monastic

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outcasts have been recently identified by Dennis Martin (1986, 1988). Theurgical practices with their unorthodox deployment of ascetic ideals and contemplative space, to extend the boundaries of individual agency, could well be viewed in a similar light. Moving the sphere of licit human desires from the cloister to the domestic privy chamber, and out into the world at large, from ecclesiastical sureties to individually negotiated bonds and licences, from the humble subjected body to the fortified instrumental body, the magical arts of the fifteenth and sixteenth century constitute part of an assemblage which was increasingly territorializing the newly empowered and newly differentiated social spaces42 of the secular world through a reverent parody of pre-existentand pre-legitimated - ecclesiastical and monastic spaces and bodily practices.

10

The Bodies of Demons Gareth Roberts In Act 4, Scene 1 of Middleton's play A Mad World, My Masters (written c. 1605), the wonderfully (and aptly) named Master Penitent Brothel is having second thoughts about his adultery with Mistress Harebrain. In a scene of unexpected repentance, common in Middleton's plays, he turns on woman in general, whom he describes as morally and physically disgusting, in terms of a decaying and then a mechanical body: 'weakness, slime, corruption, woman!' (4.1.18), 'she consists of a hundred pieces I Much like your German clock, and near allied' (4.1.20-21). His disgust and remorse- and his earlier desires- are answered by the appearance of a succubus, a demon in the shape of a woman, who tries to jolly him back into his bad old ways with typically Middletonian innuendo; she begins: 'What, at a stand?' and goes on in much the same vein. In reply to Brothel's condemnation of her as a devil, the succubus, who has taken the shape of his mistress, Mistress Harebrain, poses a rhetorical question around which this essay revolves: Penitent Brothel:. Th'art a devil. Succubus: A devil? Feel, feel, man; has a devil flesh and bone?

(4.1.35-6)

The exchanges in this scene touch on a number of (to take up the succubus's word) long-standing demonological issues. Do devils have bodies? If they do not possess them, can they temporarily assume them? Can these bodies perform the normal bodily functions, particularly the sexual ones, and can they even generate children? A chapter in Jean Bodin's demonological treatise De Ia Demonomanie des Sorciers (Paris 1580) which discusses 'Si les sorciers ont copulation avec les Demons' (II, vii, fols 104-9) is typical of many similar discussions of this point.' And what is the understanding of Middleton's audience of this moment in the play and of the ontological nature of the succubus? This is the only supernatural event in the play and the succubus never appears again. Her appearance and behaviour in this scene tell us something about Penitent Brothel's fantasies- and fears- about women; as we would say these days, she externalizes some of Brothel's feelings. We learn

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later that the succubus appears in this scene in the shape of Mistress Harebrain with whom Brothel has had sex; she flirts, teases, dances and talks lasciviously. Brothel now violently and fearfully rejects the shape of the woman he had previously desired with equal passion. At her entrance in 3.2 he exclaims: 'There shot a star from heaven; I I dare not yet behold my happiness, I That splendour is so glorious and so piercing' (3.2.160), and as they leave together: 'Beyond this sphere I never will aspire' (3.2.174). I want to take this moment as a starting point for a brief examination of an area suggested by this scene in Middleton, using a variety of demonological texts and some early modern poems and plays. Elite demonology actually varies little; we can find the same ideas being discussed and the same theories rehearsed in late medieval Latin scholastic discussions as in English treatises from the seventeenth century (see Baroja, 1993, 19-43; Clark, 1993, 45-81.) This area is the question of the corporeality of demons in some texts and the management of sexual fantasy. The scene in A Mad World is representative of discussions of demons' bodies in that these were often focused on or evidenced by accounts of sexual contact with them. Theories about the incubus, a demon in male form, can be the receptacles for moments of sexual fantasy, some quite bizarre. My apologies in advance f()r some of what one historian of witchcraft called the 'unsavoury details' (Lea, 1957, Vol. 1, 157) in parts ofwhat follows. Questions about whether demons could have bodies were a sub-set of questions in Christian theology about the bodies of angels, as demons are fallen angels. Many church Fathers (for example, Irenaeus, Eusebius, Tertulliani allowed angels bodies, not bodies of flesh, 3 but subtle bodies appropriate to their spiritual substances (corpora subtilia) which are not material in any way we might normally understand materiality. By the time of Thomas Aquinas (midthirteenth century) who followed the opinions of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the orthodox belief was in the pure spirituality of angels and hence of demons (Aquinas, Summa, I a50.1 ). This left the problem of explaining what happened in biblical accounts when angels appeared to men and even, as Milton's Raphael did with Adam and Eve, ate with them (and the angels who visited Lot in Sodom or the angel who appeared to Gideon).4 To. cut a very long story short the standard theory was that angels (and devils) may 'assume (assumere)' a body of compacted air, which they move, but to which they are in no sense joined, to make it sensible to humanity.5 Devils may also temporarily animate corpses, as does the poor minor demon Pug in Ben Jonson's The Devil is an Ass ( 1.1.131-41 ). In early modern English poems this classic theory of spirits assuming or moving bodies of compacted air finds manifestation in Archimago's manufacture and manipulation of the False Una in Spenser's Faerie Queene, (l.i) in the context of highly-charged moments of dream and sexual fantasy, and also in Donne's 'To his Mistris going to bed' in

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the elaborately dense tangle of sexual fantasy, theology, biblical allusion and demonology in the lines where his mistress has stripped down to her shift. Lines 19-24 of Donne's poem mix Old Testament apparitions of angels, demonological tests to distinguish apparitions of good and bad spirits, and a joke that makes angels the cause of an erection. In such white robes, heaven's Angels us'd to be Receaved by men: thou Angels bringst with thee A heaven like Mahomets Paradice, and though Ill spirits walk in white, we easly know, By this these Angels from an evill sprite, Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright. (19-24)

The scholastic theory about the movement by spirits of bodies of air to make themselves sensible also informs the conceit of one of Donne's literally most 'metaphysical' love poems, 'Air and Angels', which ends with a comparison of men's love to the pure spirituality of angels and women's love to the bodies of compacted air which they assume. As an extension of the theory of the demonic body of compacted air, Aquinas explained in the Summa ( 1a 51, 3) and at greater length in De Potentia Dei (q. 6, art. 6, 7) how demons could apparently have sex and even apparently generate children. A demon moving a female body of air (that is, a succubus like Penitent Brothel's) acquires (in various disreputable ways) semen ejaculated by a man. Pausing only to change sex; the demon now in male form as an incubus has sex with a woman, who may indeed become pregnant as a result. Demonic speed and skill ensures that the semen does not evaporate during the journey, and the application of some warming mechanism (tum adhibenda aliquafomenta) keeps it at the right temperature (De Potentia, q. 6, art. 8). Legally any child is the offspring of the man whose semen was used. This ingenious theory is commonplace in later demonologies (Boguet, 1929, 33), and may have things to tell us about understandings of sex and gender in the late Middle Ages and the early modem period. Guazzo in his Compendium Maleficarum asks whether the devil can change people's sexes and concludes that since this can happen naturally, the devil can use these means (1, xvi, 579). Stories about incubi and succubi circulate particularly from the late twelfth century onwards. They appear in stories of Saints' lives, where the intervention of the Saint frees women from their depredations. Stories of incubi and succubi appear in Walter Map (c. 1140 - c. 1209) in his collection of anecdotes and gossip, De nugis curalium and in the Dialogus miraculorum of the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterback (c. 1180 - 1240). It is the twelfth century too (c. 1136) that sees Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of

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Britain which, unlike Geoffrey's main source Nennius, makes Merlin's father an incubus (his mother was a nun) and also has a character expound a bit of demonological theory about incubi to King Vortigen. 6 Merlin was the most famous offspring of an incubus, although some writers claimed that Luther was/ and that Antichrist8 will be begotten in the same way. Some discussions of incubi reflexively make the element of fantasy explicit, as when Henri Boguet asks whether demonic copulation only exists in the imagination ( 1929, 31 ), and Johann Weyer reports Cornelius Agrippa saying that such things are the ravings of old women who are deceived by dreams when asleep and deluded by imaginings of violent lust when awake (De Praestigiis Daemonum III, xxi, 239). Other discussions are more obliquely marked by sexual fantasy. For example the semen stolen by incubi was often supposed to be that ejaculated in night-time emissions, as a consequence of what Guazzo calls rather poetically 'a man dreaming of empty follies - a somniante viro illuso' (Compendium Maleficarum I, xi, 30). It is sometimes difficult to say whose fantasies we are hearing. William of Auvergne talks of the incubi themselves deluding women with fantasies of having sex: blowing into their wombs as the wind blows into the wombs of Portuguese mares, 'they delude these women with imaginery sex (cum illas fantastico illo concubito illudunt)' (De Universo, II, 25, 1071).9 Pausing only to tell the story of a rapist bear which had a happy ending (the children of this union became soldiers, and their features looked remarkably ursine at times), William says that he learned from one woman that when a demon had sex (ludificasset) with her, it came in quantities more than a thousand men could produce (cum sic ludificasset earn, videlicet concubitu fantastico, tanto jluxu seminis inquinavit earn ut mille homines non emitterent tantum). William goes on to say that incubi are also able to make women believe that sex happens fifty or sixty times, even though it was really only once or twice (ibid., II, iii, 25). I will pass over stories of devils with half erect penises as long as kitchen utensils (Remy, 1930, vi, 14), German nuns at Cologne who entertained incubi in the shape of dogs (Boguet, 1929, 34), and lesbian witches in Fez called in Latinfricatrices (women who rub) who had sexual relations among themselves and seduced girls pretending that they were incubi (Weyer, 1991, III, xxv, 248-9). The general point is that stories about incubi and succubi were vehicles for sexual fantasies. It seems to me that the sexual fantasy in discussions of bodily relations with incubi is sometimes managed with the intention of regulating varieties of sexuality, just as some commentators have suggested that witchcraft discourse generally was used to regulate women, especially during and after the Reformation (Roper, 1994; Zika, 1989). One wonders generally whether the many reports that sex with demons is not pleasurable, or even painful, that the devil's member and sperm are icy cold (Boguet, 1929, 31; Remy, 1930, vi, 1213; Guazzo, I, xi, 31), are not just examples of Stuart Clark's argument about

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the inversive economy of demonological discourse (that is, diabolic sex is the opposite of normal sex which is pleasurable and warm), but actually an instance of regulation. The fantasy is regulatory as it allows sex but not pleasure, just as food at the Sabbat was supposedly tasteless or horrible and the dancing there caused madness and abortions. An admonitory and moralizing intention is surely discernible in the repeated claim that the demons themselves did not get any pleasure from the sex, and also in the commonly made point that succubi operate partly to waste men's seed and so undermine the sacrament of marriage. Implicitly alluding to Corinthians 11:10, which hints at the attractiveness to spirits of women's hair, William of Auvergne says that incubi are allowed to plague women with beautiful hair in order to discipline women who revel in ornament and decoration and try to inflame onlookers with their beauty (De Universo II, 25, 1071 ). Henri Boguet exhibits the same mingling of fantasy and misogyny that one can observe in Penitent Brothel. He says that the devil has sex with women because he knows that they love carnal pleasures and there is nothing which makes a woman more subject and loyal to a man that that he should abuse her body. 10 An even clearer case is the debate as to whether even demons would stoop to sodomy, or whether they found it more distasteful than what Johanne Nider called 'simple fornication (jornicatione simplici). 11 The Malleus thought that even the lowest orders of devils would not stoop to sodomy and other vices against nature, performed outside the proper orifice (extra vas devitum ). The enormity of this is shown by the fact that all devils of whatever order abhor and think it shameful to do these things (Malleus, pars 1, q. 4). On the other hand, in probably the most bizarre instance of sexual fantasy about incubi that I have come across, the Dominican theologian and controversialist against Luther, Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio (Sylvester Prieras, 1460-1523), thought in his treatise De Strigimagis ... Libri Tres that the incubus did have anal sex, and indeed had a specially bifurcated penis so that it can abuse both orifices at the same time (videlicet daemonum incubum uti membra genitali bifurcato ut simul utroque vase abutatur). 12 Clearly, there is a misogynist strain in many of the treatments of this topic, perhaps most visible in the Malleus. One of the nastiest chapters in the Malleus (pars 1, q. 6) discusses the copulation of witches with devils and also considers why women are chiefly addicted to evil superstition; witchcraft, it argues, comes from carnal lust which in women is insatiable. In pars II, q. 1, Ch. 4, the Dominicans explain how it can all happen. One difference is that before 1400 incubi pestered women against their will, while now women submit to them willingly. The same misogyny, I shall now argue, is also there in John Milton's treatment of some biblical verses that were crucial in discussions of incubi. The

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idea of incubi was given support in Genesis 6:2 where we read that, at a time several generations on from Adam, but just before the flood: Videntes filii Dei filias hominum quod essent pulchrae, acceperunt sibi uxores ex omnibus, quas elegarunt. I Dixitque Deus: Non permanebit spiritus meus in homine in aetemum, quia caro est: eruntque dies illius centum viginti annorum. I Gigantes (Hebrew nephilim) autem erant super terram in diebus illis. Postquam enim ingressi sunt filii Dei ad filias hominum, illaeque genuerunt, isti sunt potentes a saeculo viri famosi. (Vulgate) The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came unto the daughters of men and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Historically, there were three exegetical possibilities about 'the sons of God': pious men (the sons of Seth), good angels sent to instruct humanity who were seduced by women and fell, and angels already fallen. In De Civitate Dei Augustine discussed the matter, rejected the idea that these were angels, favoured the idea that they were sons of Seth, but in passing says that angels did appear to men 'in bodies such a kind that they could not only be seen but also touched' and also mentioned that it is reported that: 'sievans and pans commonly called incubi, have often misbehaved with women, desiring and achieving intercourse with them' (XV, 23) but does not give a conclusive opinion on these matters. Early commentators took the passage to mean that they were fallen angels. 13 Milton takes up these verses in Genesis 6 in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and on those occasions develops all three traditions of exegesis of 'the sons of God'. 14 In book 11, when Adam with the archangel Michael's help has proleptic visions of Old Testament history, the second scene he sees (555-627) demythologizes the Genesis verses. In it Adam sees a settled and civilized society before the flood, populated by 'just men' (577) 'titled ... the sons of God' (622). Here Milton agrees with those who interpreted 'sons of God' to mean the just descendants of Adam. Adam is much cheered by the scene, but fails to notice that 'the daughters of men' who appear in this vision are a bad lot. Michael has to tell him that they are 'empty of all good wherein consists I Woman's domestic honour and chiefpraise' (616-17). One might have known, for the daughters of men appear as: 'A bevy of fair women, richly gay I In gems and wanton dress; to the harp they sung I Soft amorous ditties, and in dance came on' (582-4). I cannot help believing that Milton has court masquers in mind here, as he often does when he is thinking of the seductive and heady mixture of courtly women, love-poetry and music. 15

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This rendering of the fantasy (Adam is having a vision) demythologizes and disposes of the supernatural in the Genesis verses and also shifts the moral blame from the sons of God to the daughters of men as seducers in its description of just men 'fast caught I In the amorous net' of women (11.5867). Earlier in the poem, events in books 4 and 5 raise issues about spirits and bodies in various ways. Eve's dream in which she may or may not have eaten the apple is diabolically inspired by Satan who is discovered in the form of a toad at Eve's ear, behaving like an incubus and 'Assaying by his devilish art to reach I The organs of her fancy', or possibly interfering with her animal spirits (4.797-809). And although we have to wait until book 8 (614-30) for Adam to raise with Raphael the delicate subject of sex and what Empson so memorably called the angels' 'cosy interpenetration' (1961, 107), the issue of angelic corporeality is raised in the question of whether Raphael really eats (5. 432-43).11 is immediately after this passage that the 'sons of God' verses again leave their mark on the text of Paradise Lost. At the table Eve 'Ministered naked' to Adam and Raphael (5.444) and, the narrator goes on: If ever, then, Then had the sons of God excuse to have been Enamoured at the sight; but in those hearts Love unlibidinous reigned, nor jealousy Was understood, the injured lover's hell (5.446-50)

Given the rather dejeuner sur /'herbe situation and the allusion to those verses in Genesis there must surely be deliberate innuendo in 'ministered naked' (Shakespeare uses 'minister' for 'suggest' or 'prompt' in Measure for Measure). The fairest of all women is offered to the gaze of an angel and the fantasy of a so-far unfallen angel being enamoured is briefly entertained. 16 Indeed it seems that the narrator's rhetorical repetition 'then, I then' has almost the force of an encouragement to Raphael. In this reading it is again surely the daughters of men who are doing the seducing, not the sons of God; indeed their hypothetical enamouring is explicitly excused. Milton deploys the Genesis verses to admonish women. In Paradise Regained book 2, Satan calls a hasty council of devils in the middle air to advise him on how to deal with Jesus. Belial suggests tempting him with women ('Set women in his eye', 2.153). Of Belial we are told that he was: 'Belial the dissolutest spirit that fell, I The sensualest, and after Asmoda I The fleshiest incubus' (2.150-52). An impatient Satan responds with the Miltonic equivalent of 'We're not all sex-crazed like you, Belial' 'Belial, in much uneven scale thou weigh' st I All others by thyself (2.173-4) and reminds Belial and us of his earlier history, in a passage which

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incorporates the demonological reading of the Genesis verses, that the 'sons of God' were evil spirits: Before the flood with thy lusty crew, False titled Sons of God, roaming the earth Cast wanton eyes on the daughters of men And coupled with them, and begot a race (2.178-81)

We also learn that it was really Belial who pursued Ovidian nymphs such as Calisto and Daphne (2.182-91). Again women come off badly. Satan first pours scorn on these erotic adventures by the incubus Belial, in which women become attractive but trivial objects: Because of old Thou thyself dot'st on womankind, admiring Their shape, their colour, and attractive grace, None are, thou think'st but taken with such toys. (2.174-7)

Satan then is derisive about that very attractiveness, and praises figures such as Alexander the Great and Scipio who: 'have with a smile made small account I Of beauty and her lures, easily scorned I All her assaults, on worthier things intent!' (2.193-5). Again the verses have been managed to point up not so much the fault of the male spirits, but the dangerous, but this time also trivial, charms ofbeautiful women. I will end with an instance where it seems to me that the sexual fantasy often present in ideas about incubi is quite differently managed, where there is good reason to suppose that the demonological theories and fantasies are being mocked, while at the same time the very idea of the incubus is offered as one to be inhabited by female desire as a fantasy of freedom. This occurs in another of Thomas Middleton's plays, The Witch (c. 1615). Material in the play's witch scenes - especially features usually associated with Continental demonology, such as sex with demons - draws directly on Reginald Scot's sceptical Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). This was a work attacked by King James in the Preface of his Daemonologie for its Sadducism, that is for denying that there were spirits of any kinds, with or without bodies: 'Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed in public print to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft; and so maintains the old error of the Sadducees in denying of spirits' (see Anglo, 1977, 106-39). Although at times Scot seems to allow the real existence of spirits as entities, at others he says that in the Bible they are no more than metaphors, as in this passage:

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Where it is written, that God sent an evill spirit upon Abimelech, and the men of Sichem, we are to understand that he sent the spirit of hatred, and not a bulbegger (terrifying bogeyman). 17 Also where it is said; if the spirit of gelosie come upon him: it is as much to saie as; If he be mooved with a gelous mind: and not that a corporall divell assaulteth him. (1584, 428)

Scot discusses incubi in book 4 of the Discoverie only to ridicule the idea. For him they are part of a particularly Papist discourse of witchcraft. He thinks, for example, that stories about incubi were often devised to cover up the 'knaveries and lecheries of idle priests and bawdie monks; and to cover the same of their lovers and concubines', and he quotes with some enthusiasm the beginning of 'The Wife of Bath's Tale' about friars and limiters: 'There nis none other Incubus but hee'. More importantly he thinks belief in witchcraft and devils is part of what he and others describe as part of a Catholic 'carnal' understanding of scripture and spiritual matters in general. That is, Catholics take things - such as what happens in the consecration of the elements at the Eucharist - literally and in quite the wrong way. The metaphor is important. For example, Scot describes people who don't understand the description of spirits in the Bible in his sense as 'camallie minded' (1584, 507). 18 However, in the Discoverie Scot - for the purposes of ridiculing it transcribes, translates, and transmits at length the whole tradition of Continental demonology, suffused with the scholastic theories I have been glancing at in this essay, including large sections of Bodin and the Malleus where some of these extraordinary fantasies are inscribed. So Middleton's witches inherit the unsavoury activities of witches in Continental demonologies: they boil babies to make the flying ointment, they inhibit male potency and they have sex with and through incubi. Middleton, then, uses Continental demonology as he found it in the context of Scot's sceptical ridicule, and in addition (as I have argued elsewhere) he burlesques it in the rumbustious, comic and energetic doings of his witches (1993, 84-99). Indeed the technique is often to camivalize it in the Bakhtinian sense. To give one brief example, here is an exchange between the chief witch Hecate and her son Firestone. In it, the monstrosity of recipes for the flying ointment is farcically burlesqued. Firestone reports the drunken arrival of Almachildes and evokes a scene where witches are literally subverted, together with their magical instruments and grotesque Continental practices, in language suffused with ideas of food, drink, inversion, disorder, violent humour and Bakhtin's lower bodily stratum: (Enter FIRESTONE) Firestone: 0 mother, mother! Hecate: What's news with thee now?

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The baroque excesses of Middleton's witches include, as I have said, the employment of incubi. The witches talk about them with relish, and it is clear that they use the incubi and not the other way about. Here are some instances: Hecate: What young man can we wish to pleasure us But we enjoy him in an incubus? Thou knowst it Stadlin? Stadlin: Usually that's done. Hecate: Last night thou got'st the Mayor ofWhelpie's son. I knew him by his black cloak lined with yellow; I think thou'st spoiled the youth- he's but seventeen. I'll have him at the next mounting. (1.2.30-6)

Firestone goes out rambling with the Nightmare, a phenomenon that was sometimes identified with the incubus, but sometimes - interestingly - a rational explanation of it. One of Hecate's best lines is on the entry of Almachildes: 'Tis Almachildes - fresh blood stirs in me! - I The man I have lusted to enjoy. I I have had him thrice in incubus already' (1.2.196-8). I would suggest that the witch scenes in Middleton's play, as a result of their humour and energy and despite their excess and occasional monstrosity, offer fantasies of release and escape, especially in the masque-like 3.3 where the witches go off on one of their jaunts through the air- 'To ride in the air I When the moon shines fair. I And to sing and dance and toy and kiss' (3.3.65-7)- leaving the dejected Firestone alone on stage and envious: 'You must be gambolling i'th'air, and leave me to walk here like a fool and a mortal' (3.3'.77-9). My realization in teaching this play over recent years was that my reaction to these scenes was interestingly gendered. As male and demonologically informed, my reaction to these scenes was sober, horrified and indeed rather like that of the male demonologists who were ultimately the sources of most of their details. On the other hand, women students, especially mature students, often find these scenes a hoot and are struck by the witches' enjoyment, energy and generally the rather curious fun of these scenes. Middleton's witches, who live somewhere just outside Ravenna, have all the things women from Ravenna do not have: community, agency, freedom and fun, or at the very least have

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similar lives on much better terms. Consequently I am gradually beginning, at the risk of a Whiggish historical wish to detect progress, to see in the play's humour and burlesquing of demonological theory the seeds of Keith Thomas's 'decline of magic' and a time when the idea of the corporeality of demons in any form will be absurd, and the word 'devil' can only be a metaphor. And in the early modern period, even in such orthodox demonological writers as George Gifford and King James, one can detect a desire for a spiritual rather than Scot's 'carnal' understanding of some witchcraft issues, sometimes in relation to the very question of the corporeality of devils' bodies. In such a reading of these scenes in Middleton's play one may even be able to see a turning around of what is often one of the more misogynistic fantasies of the male demonologist; and in the doings of Middleton's witches, including their deployment of the incubus, some rather surprising opportunities for female members of Middleton's audience to experience fantasies of sexual satisfaction and freedom.

11

The Miraculous Royal Body in James VI and I, Jonson and Shakespeare, 1590-1609 Lawrence Normand In 1989 Diana, Princess of Wales boosted her growing fame by visiting AIDS sufferers in hospital and having herself photographed touching them. Patients, hospital workers and the public were 'amazed when she shook hands without wearing gloves', and an AIDS nurse declared, 'She is doing as much for AIDS sufferers as any doctor or nurse'. Whether she realized it or not, Diana was rediscovering for a secular age a royal charisma that would have been familiar to the subjects of Tudor and Stuart monarchs, for the royal body of the princess seemed to possess a mysterious power of healing. A 1556 manuscript illustration shows Queen Mary actually touching the neck of a woman suffering from scrofula, the royal touch offering the possibility of a miraculous cure, since monarchs were believed to partake in some way in divine power. 1 Diana was described as 'almost mystical' as she 'stroked and kissed her way through the AIDS hospitals of the world', even though no one claimed that her powers came from anything more supernatural than glamour and publicity (see Burchill, 1998, 158-63). The word 'glamour', however, with its old senses of 'magic' or 'enchantment', points back to the supernatural, and one of the themes of this essay: that the separation of magic from non-magic turns out to reveal their close involvement. Scrofula was the disease that English monarchs had been touching for from the reign of Henry II in the twelfth century. By Elizabeth's reign 'the ceremony took the form of a liturgical service during which the king or queen acted as officiating priest or minister, aided by his or her chaplain' (Hoeniger, 1992, 278). When James VI came to the English throne he was reluctant to perform the ceremony since he believed that the age of miracles was past. His advisers persuaded him to perform it, though he refashioned the order of service to remove what he, and his Scottish kirk ministers, considered superstitious elements: no sign of the cross over diseased patients, and no cross either, nor the word mirabile, on the gold angels distributed to sufferers. He did however utter the words, 'The King toucheth thee and God healeth thee', and

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touch the diseased parts of those brought to him, and hang the gold coin round their necks (Hoeniger, 1992, 282). 2 James's misgivings about the miraculous nature of royal healing may seem contradictory in a sovereign who caused such consternation and opposition among his English subjects by his claims for the divine right of kings. Loyalists happily cited the royal power of healing as a sign of the monarch's divine sovereignty. In 1602 William Clowes, one of Elizabeth's surgeons, wrote of how this 'grieuous malady is knowne to be miraculously cured and healed, by the sacred hands of the Queenes most Royall Maiesty, euen by Diuine inspiration and wonderfull worke and power of God, aboue mans skill, Arte and expectation' .3 There was in the ceremony of touching an irreducible element of magic. In Keith Thomas's words, 'the religious ceremonies which surrounded the royal power of healing were merely a protective framework for a more primitive piece of magic' (1973, 233). Traditional popular medicine often used charms or prayers (sometimes old Catholic prayers) along with stroking and touching and the use of charms to cure disease; and sometimes the special status of the healer - for example, the seventh son of a seventh son - had a part to play. Royal healing had all these features, the only difference being in its claim to represent divinely ordained power, while popular healing was represented by intellectuals as disordered superstition or even witchcraft. The royal touch existed within a network of ideas about the nature of royalty, and as a generally unchallenged piece of evidence for the reality of miraculous royalty, might have been used as an element in constructing absolutist ideas about kingship. Or it might simply be deployed as a piece of populist royal ceremonial. It existed uneasily at the conjuncture of several lines of thought, and at an interface of popular and elite culture, and could raise awkward questions about the sacredness, or otherwise, of monarchy. This essay explores aspects of royal charisma, epitomized in the miraculous ceremony of touching for the king's evil, broadening its discussion to the competing notions of royalty surrounding it. It appears that James VI and I, far from expanding ideas of divine kingship, kept them within certain limits; and that in the first decade of his English reign the cultural responses to these ideas, at least from Jonson and Shakespeare, were ambivalent, and encouraged scepticism to the whole notion of miraculous royalty. It was possible tothink of the monarch as not so much holding a sacred office as being a sacred person; and flowing from that personal sacredness came the supernatural power to heal, and indeed to rule with divine sanction or approval. Anointing at a coronation was what William Camden called in 1605 'a special note of majesty' specific to kings of England, France, Jerusalem, Naples and Scotland which gave monarchs powers of spiritual jurisdiction; and brought with it 'that admirable gift hereditary to the annoynted Princes of this Realme, in curing the King's Evil' (8). In popular opinion, it was the

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coronation ceremony of anointing with holy oil that created the monarch's supernatural powers. In Shakespeare's Richard II (1596) the king's quasidivine status is affirmed by his having been anointed. For Gaunt Richard's anointing took place 'in His [God's] sight' and made him 'God's substitute' (1.2.37-8); and for Richard 'Not all the water in the rough rude sea I Can wash the balm off from an anointed king' (3.2.54-5). Richard seems to believe that anointing confers real divine power such that: For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd To lift shrewd steel against our crown, God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay A glorious angel ... (3.2.58---61)

But he misunderstands that what he calls 'my sacred state' (4.1.209) - his sacred person and office- depends upon real power relations in the 'state' the political entity. In Shakespeare's dramatization of a monarch being 'unking'd' (5.5.37), Richard is destroyed by his belief in an ideology of divine right monarchy without an accompanying sense of realpolitik. When Richard abdicates he uses the language of divine right, still imagining that the only significant political relationship is that between himself and God, and that his royal tears are the only agents that can undo the effects on the royal body of God's anointing: 'With mine own tears I wash away my balm' (4.1.207). The ideas of divinely sanctioned monarchy that Shakespeare puts into Richard's mouth would have been familiar to his Tudor audience (see Belsey and Belsey, 1990, 11-35). The homily appointed to be read in English churches 'Against Disobedience and Wylful Rebellion' (1570) told congregations that 'God himself ... sometimes vouchsafe[s] to communicate his name with earthly princes, terming them Gods, doubtless for that similitude of government which they have or should have, not unlike unto God their king' .4 The homily insists on the horror of rebellion against the God-given ordination ofkings, which is presented as the model for all forms of rule. Richard II, however, offers another understanding of royal bodies in opposition to Richard's notion of mystical kingship. An idea of royalty is articulated that includes material possessions as well as legal and genealogical rights. York accuses Richard of seizing the 'royalties and rights of banish'd Herford' (2.1.190), a phrase signifying, as the Arden editor notes, the 'rights granted to a subject by the king' (62). Northumberland similarly defines the meaning of royalty to include the 'status or qualities' of the members of the royal houses of York and Lancaster when he refers, in relation to Bolingbroke and Richard, to 'the royalties of both your bloods' that sprang 'from one most gracious head' (3.3.1 07-8) of Edward III. Royalty here is not confined to one body like Richard's, singled out by coronal unction as the exclusive

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embodiment of divine sovereignty. Rather, it is one of a number of what Northumberland goes on to call 'lineal royalties', the hereditary rights and prerogatives rightly belonging to the royal descendants of a king. Bolingbroke's victory depends on his having the force of an army behind him, but also on being able to fashion an alternative notion of royalty for himself based on legal rights and heredity. Political theorists had long rejected the idea that coronal unction bestowed sacred status on a monarch because that would have given priests the power to make sovereigns (see Figgis, 1965, 8-9). In popular belief, however, it denoted supernatural validation; and in practice, when regimes were shaky, anointing was one way of claiming maximum legitimacy for a new ruler. When the one year-old James VI was crowned in 1567 while his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was still queen, he was anointed in a ritual in which the Protestant lords were determined to 'omit nothing whose absence might legally invalidate the deed' (Cooper, 1902, 18). John Knox and the extreme Protestants protested at what they saw as superstition. In 1590, when James's consort Queen Anne was crowned, James himself devised the form of the service that included anointing the queen. James was determined to defend the Scottish crown against Protestant claims that the church was the sovereign power in the state. The queen's anointing was one further skirmish in the long drawn-out war between crown and clergy that raged through the 1590s and beyond. The ministers objected to anointing if it was understood as effecting a connection between queen and godhead, declaring that to be 'a superstitious rite among Christians, borrowed from Jewes' (Calderwood, 1842-49, 95). They wanted the ceremony merely to symbolize the connection between queen and divine power. James's attempt to effect the sacralization of Anne was in order to create as much authority as possible for the beleaguered crown. In the Old Testament accounts of Saul, Samuel and David, coronal anointing was 'God's own method of establishing kings, transmitting charisma to them, and (in the words ofl Samuel 10:6) turning them into "other men"- that is, transferring them from the category of the profane to that of the sacred' (Clark, 1997, 620). In the end a compromise was reached concerning the meaning of anointing: the ceremony was declared to be simply 'a civill ceremonie' from which 'all opinioun of superstitioun' was removed (Calderwood, 1842-49, 95). The outcome left it uncertain whether James had succeeded in assigning sacred status to Anne through a divine mystery; or whether the ministers had turned the ceremony into one of merely symbolic actions. How far did James VI and I extend the logic of his ideas of the divinity of kingship? His ideas were remarkably consistent, although their emphasis shifted as the political environment and particular circumstances he found himself in changed. 5 In Scotland in 1590-91 James was involved in an outbreak of witchcraft accusations and trials, the North Berwick witch-hunt,

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and his notion of the sacrosanctity of kingship was given a boost by these events. The episode showed the power of witchcraft directly confronting the power of the king; and it provided James with the opportunity to claim mystical, God-given power for his office as it confronted and overcame the power of the Devil and his agents, the witches. It also provided irrefutable proof against the clergy's claims to be the sole and supreme voice of God on earth. In Daemonologie (written ?1591, published 1597) James voiced the conventional demonological view that if God decides to use 'his lawfull Lieutennentes' to strike against witches, then 'it is not in the Deuilles power to defraude or bereaue him of the office, or effect of his powerfull and reuenging Scepter' (51). A more populist account of the same witch-hunt is offered by the anonymous propaganda pamphlet, Newes from Scotland (published ?1591), which explicitly contrasts the magic of the witches with the supernatural power of the king. Daemonologie affirmed in theoretical terms the reality of witchcraft (though alluding to the circumstances of the 1590-91 witch-hunt); Newes from Scotland told the stories of the Devil's appearing to a group of witches and instructing them to direct their magic arts against the newly-wed James and Anne. The Devil 'did greatlye enveighe against the King of Scotland' declaring him to be 'the greatest enemy he hath in the worlde' (Harrison, 1966, 14-15). The pamphlet's political aim is clear in the way James is represented as being the linchpin in the natural and supernatural cosmic order as the mighty opposite of the Devil himself. A mystical kingship is fashioned as the reader is asked to consider how James managed to avoid the 'great danger to his person', and the whole country, by interrogating the witches face-to-face. The pamphlet aligns the king with God against the diabolic attachment of the witches: 'hee is the Lords annointed, and they but vesselles of Gods wrathe: he is a true Christian, and trusteth in God, they worse than Infidels' (ibid., 29). In these sets of inversions, James is aligned directly with God, with no need of God's ministers, and his escape from witchcraft is taken as a sign of God's particular favour to him. As Stuart Clark observes, James 'used the privilege of inviolability to set public magistrates like himself decisively apart from ordinary men and their concerns' (1997, 576). But after the crisis of the North Berwick witch-hunt finally subsided in 1596, James did not seek to augment the potential for charismatic kingship represented in Newes from Scotland and Daemonologie. In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies of 1598 he wrote that a 'King's office is properly defined' by his 'oath in the Coronation' to 'that great God, who placed him as his lieutenant' (1994, 65). And a king was placed in his office by the principles of primogeniture, for 'at the very moment of the expiring of the king reigning, the nearest and lawful heire entreth in his place' (ibid., 82). James based his claim on both the Scottish and English thrones on his right by lineal descent. When

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he referred to his kingly body it was to emphasize that it flowed with the blood royal. Addressing the English parliament in March 1604 he represented his 'Person' as a 'great blessing that GOD hath ... sent vnto you' since by 'descent lineally out of the loynes of Henry the seuenth, is reunited and confirmed in mee the Vnion ofthe two Princely Roses ofthe two Houses of LANCASTER and YORKE'. 6 The union of Scotland and England was urged on the same grounds of the king's body representing the body politic: it was, James asserted, 'that Vnion which is made in my blood' (1994, 135). It was God who made kings, not parliaments or people, and a king's office was (in imagery reminiscent of a masque) 'to glister and shine before their people, in all workes of sanctification and righteousnesse, that their persons as brifht lampes of godlinesse and vertue, may .. . giue light to all their steps'. James's Calvinist outlook is unmistakable here, even when he is celebrating a monarch's God-given splendour and charisma, in the quasi-religious duty that a king owes to the sole creator of that power. In The Trew Law, it was a king's having to answer to an exacting God that curtailed his excesses: should a king 'forget himselfe ... the sadder and sharper will his correction be ... [for] Ioues thunder-claps light oftner and sorer vpon the high & stately oakes, then on the low and supple willow trees; and the highest bench is sliddriest to sip vpon' (1994, 83). Although in divine right theory kings 'possess a monopoly of political power, which they derive from God alone' ,8 they are also constrained to answer to God for the performance of their awesome duties. James's idea that kings' power came directly from God was a 'central intellectual concern throughout his career . . . to protect the rights of kings everywhere against the assaults of Jesuits and puritans' (Sommerville, 1991, 59). But he equally emphasized 'the monarch's duty to rule according to law and in the public good'; 9 and in England after 1610 there is evidence that he turned to common law discourse when he addressed parliament about matters of English governance (see Christianson, 1991, 71-95). In matters of practical politics James acted rather more as his advice book on how to be-a king, Basi/ikon Doran, suggested'realistic, moderate rather than arbitrary, compromising' (Wormald, 1991, 52) - than as his book of political theory, The Trew Law, seemed to propose. But, as Jenny Wormald has shown, his English subjects, or their repres~ntatives in the Commons, were alarmed at the king's forthright enunciation of divine right political theory, failing to see that he tended to pragmatism not tyranny when it came to political action. There was a continuum running from ideas of divine right to absolutism to tyrannical rule. If a king claimed that his power came only from God, and that it was only to God that he answered for its exercise, then he might also claim the right to act like God who on occasion used his supernatural power to act miraculously outside his own natural laws. By analogy, a king could use his royal prerogative to act outside the laws and customs of his land. The king's

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touch was a royal prerogative which appeared not only to confirm the special relationship English monarchs had with God but might also be used to support their right to act in a way unconstrained by the law or precedent. If indeed it was the case that 'Monarchie [was] the trew pateme ofDiuinitie' (1994, 64), as James VI asserted in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, and that a king was fashioned by God as 'a little Goo to sit on his Throne, and rule ouer other nien' (1994, 12), as he wrote in Basi/ikon Doran, then it followed that the little God was able like the large one to perform miraculous acts. Just as God might, if he chose, set aside his own laws and perform a miracle, so a monarch might set aside his kingdom's laws and perform an act by virtue of his free and absolute authority, his royal prerogative (see Wootton, 1986, 29). The miracle of touching for the king's evil, a true miracle of healing, might have been presented as proof that the king did possess absolute and transcendent authority comparable to God's. At least one English political theorist extended the logic of James's thought beyond the limits the king himself had observed. In 1607 John Cowell, professor of Civil Law at Cambridge, in his law dictionary, The Interpreter, wrote that the king was 'above the Law by his absolute power'. 10 James was too shrewd a politician, and too influenced by Calvinism's horror of superstition, to follow this line of argument. He declined to deploy the divine gift of royal healing as evidence of the godlike nature of his rule, even though the 'royal miracle stands out above all as the expression of a certain concept of supreme political power' (Bloch, 1973, 28.). James knew, like Shakespeare's Bolingbroke, that the exercise of power required an ideology of divine right along with a sense of practical politics. The 'only miracle James actually claimed to have performed was a very Protestant one of textual interpretation. When the king was shown a letter seized from the Gunpowder plotters in 1605 which contained 'a generall obscure aduertisement ... of some dangerous blow' he 'did vpon the instant interpret and apprehend some darke phrases therein' to mean 'this horrible forme of blowing vs vp all by Powder', thus saving the lives of himself and the Lords and Commons. 11 This was mystical majesty operating with God-like insight at the centre of the 'miraculous Deliuery' and displaying its 'sparkles of the Diuinitie' (James VI and I, 1994, 150, 147). Jacobean writers, Jonson and Shakespeare notable among them, responded to more sharply defined ideas of royal divine right by subjecting them to persistent, if oblique, questioning. 12 When Ben Jonson wrote ' A Panegyre, on the Happy Entrance of James, Our Sovereign, to His First High Session of Parliament in This Kingdom, the 19 March, 1603' (that is, 1604) he promulgated images of royal power that depended on a supernatural source ' in that rich chain, I That fasteneth heavenly power to earthly reign' (ll. 21-22), and celebrated the fate that 'Was gently fallen from heaven upon this state' (1. 136) in the person of the new king (Complete Poems, 335, 339).

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But Jonson's poem is so constructed as to present James with as many sharp reminders of his kingly duties, and as many pointed warnings of what might deflect him from performing those duties, as praise. 13 The masque-like figure of Themis, representing justice, confirms James's divine right theory that kings 'by Heaven, are placed upon his throne, I To rule like Heaven' (11. 79-80); but she goes on to offer warnings about practical political behaviour. Kings should be aware that 'it is their fate, I Oft-times, to have the secrets of their state I Betrayed to fame', and so should 'take more care, and fear I In public acts what form and face they bear' (ll. 85-8). They are also threatened by their own 'voluptuous lusts' that might cause them to lose 'their name' (ll. 114); as well as the dangers of creating a vicious court in which 'One wickedness another must defend' (1. 119). More radically, Jonson presents James's political situation as he passed through the city to parliament as being dependent upon the people's support. In the flattering fiction of the poem Themis's warnings are redundant for James, since he already excels in 'these knowing arts' (1. 128). But the people, by also hearing what she says, are educated in the political ideas by which they can judge their king. Jonson depicts James as being 'not hot, or covetous to be crowned I Before men's hearts had crowned him' (ll. 142-3); and as keen 'to see, and do I What all men's wishes did aspire unto' (11. 149-50). When the people recognize this, they give out a 'lengthened shout, as when the artillery I Of heaven is discharged along the sky' (11. 153-4). Jonson has turned the political argument of the poem away from a celebration of James's heavenly sanction to a recognition that the people's approval too may have heavenly force. James's defeat of the North Berwick witches was taken to represent historical proof of the particular care God had taken of this particular king, of the sacrosanctity of his office and person. Newes from Scotland's stories of royal fortitude in the face of demonic attack pointed to the conclusion that 'authority was inherently sacred' (Clark, 1997, 552). That was a premise of the masques celebrating royal power and magnificence that were produced at the English court by Ben Jonson from 1605. The Masque ofBlackness ofthat year, while centring on Queen Anne as one of the twelve principal masquers, celebrated James as 'a sun' whose powers could miraculously effect transformations that would 'blanch an Ethiop and revive a cor'se' (1. 226). 14 This sun king's light 'sciental is and (past mere nature) I Can salve the rude defects of every creature' (11. 227-8), and turns living things to their perfect form. It was the first of several masques written by Jonson, from ideas first suggested by Queen Anne, and in collaboration with Inigo Jones as designer of the stage spectacle which, in Martin Butler's words, 'celebrated the dignity of the prince and choreographed the court into an act of homage to his magical centrality' (1990, 127-59, 136). The masque's purpose was political, though it presented its images of royal influence not so much to show how things

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actually were in the Jacobean court as how they ought to be. In this way Jonson's masques might act as a critique of royal quasi-magical power as well as a glorification of it. The Masque ofBlackness hovers, as all Jonson and Jones's masques do, on the borderline between the real and the fictional, as the legitimate power in Anne and James's real presences supposedly replaces or transforms what is imperfect or disordered. The contrast becomes more pronounced when Jonson developed the antimasque as a spectacle of the disorder that royal power will dispel, beginning with the antimasque of witches in the 1609 Masque of Queens. But the sophisticated spectator (or the reader of the printed texts) is meant to recognize the blend of fantastic and real in his masques. In everything he published Jonson 'was exploiting a conscious gap between the formal integrity of what he wrote and the possible ways in which it might be interpreted' (Dutton, 1996, 104). That gap appears as a source of wit and compliment in the dedication to Prince Henry that Jonson prefaced to the 1609 quarto of The Masque of Queens in which Jonson considers the particular conditions of a royal charismatic body as a prelude to indicating to the Prince the kind of patronage of writers and intellectuals such princely paragons should practise. Approaching the idea that a royal prince possesses a body endowed with heavenly powers, Jonson wrote that when he sees Henry's face, he is drawn to 'consider ... that doctrine' that 'every royal and heroic form to partake and draw much to it of the heavenly virtue'. Following the implications of this idea with deadpan logic, Jonson offers three ways in which this royal human-divine union might come about: it could be that 'a divine soul, being to come into a body, first chooseth a palace fit for itself, or, being come, doth make it so, or that Nature be ambitious to have her work equal' .15 Jonson claims not to know how royal persons receive heavenly virtue but he is certain that when such an ideal prince supports practitioners of the liberal arts, such as Jonson himself, the prince's glory appears 'in such subject's labours' as much as in the crown he wears or his image that appears on coins. Jonson proposes the idea of royal persons having quasi-divine status without committing himself to it; and as Richard Dutton observes, it is characteristic of Jonson 'both to pay the expected compliment and simultaneously to distance himself from the premises on which it would conventionally be based' (1996, 102). Jonson's main aim in the dedication is less to heap flattery on this 'most excellent prince and only delicacy of mankind' but more to make the political point that, even though some princes may not show heavenly virtue by their actions, they certainly ought to. Jonson and Jones's masques projected the ideal forms of royal power. Public theatre plays showed kings as being all too human. The very form of the theatre served to demystify monarchy, for it set 'English kings before an audience of commoners' as subjects for their contemplation and judgement

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(see Kastan, 1986, 460.). In the first years of James's reign, the plays, especially of the King's Men, offered a 'generally high level of political debate' (Parry, 1989, 24) dramatizing political arguments that intellectuals (like James VI and I) were conducting in print at a theoretical level. The masque, on the other hand, avoided 'the ambivalences and debates of human life' for its purpose was 'to transcend them' (Sharpe, 1987, 25.). Shakespeare's Macbeth (?1606) responded both to James's interest in witchcraft and to ideas of divine kingship. According to F. David Hoeniger, in the years just before its production the subject of the king's evil and 'its sanctified cure ... aroused ... much attention and some controversy' (1992, 276). That was part of a complex intellectual conflict about royal, ecclesiastical and natural magic, with Roman Catholics insisting on the reality of traditional supernatural actions, such as Saints and miracles, blessings and exorcisms; some Puritans, along with the adherents of Paracelsus, claiming that supernatural events were still possible; and Calvinists and Anglicans, to different degrees, limiting access to, and the manipulation of, the supernatural in church rituals and everyday life (see Hoeniger, 1992, 302). 16 Royal miraculous healing was awkwardly situated in the midst of these arguments; and it is no coincidence that the first published defences of the practice date from "this period, with William Tooker's Charisma Sive Donum Sanationis of 1597, and William Clowes's A Right Frutefull and Approoved Treatise, for the Artificial! Cure of that Malady Called ... The Evil/, Cured by Kynges and Queenes of England of 1602. Clowes, one Elizabeth's surgeons, considered the royal touching 'a more divine then humane worke' but confined the queen's miraculous power to medical use (49). Macbeth presents a view of supernatural royal bodies as sophisticated and equivocal as Jonson's. Unlike King Lear, it puts the magic back into monarchy, recounting the ritual of Edward the Confessor touching for the king's evil, and attributing to him 'a heavenly gift of prophecy' (4.3.159). Two related themes that Clark identifies in the literature of the royal touch - 'the divinity and sacrosanctity of monarchy' and its 'proximity to magic' (Clark, 1997, 666)- inform the play's political argument. As in Jonson's masques, the play's language of divine right ideology can be taken as denoting either real supernatural powers, or human fictions signifying unrealizable ideals. But unlike the masques, stage action springs, as it does in King Lear or in Shakespeare's history plays, from struggles for power within a court circle that can be interpreted simply in political terms. This doubleness allows the play at once to suggest supernatural kingship and to critique that notion. Through the character of Macbeth an audience can observe two versions of political reality, supernatural and human, in conflict. For Macbeth, ideology is experienced as images and language that themselves define and exert political power. He wishes to act like a Bolingbroke by seizing power and claiming royal

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legitimacy, but he cannot escape the royal mystique that he violates in murdering Duncan. As Macbeth, the ruthless killing machine of Act I, Scene 2, sets about murdering Duncan, the language of divine kingship runs through his mind, undermining the efficacy of the murder: virtues 'like angels', the 'deep damnation' of the killing, 'heaven's cherubin' proclaiming the deed (1.7.19, 20, 22). When Macbeth recalls the murdered Duncan, described by Macduff as 'a most sainted king' (4.3.109), his imagination attributes so much royal charisma to the royal body that red blood running on white skin .becomes his 'silver skin laced with his golden blood' (2.3.105), an iconography of superhuman, royal magnificence. Shakespeare fashions a protagonist who believes that monarchy is what James VI and I in Basi/ikon Doran calls 'the trew paterne ofDiuinitie' (1994, 64). For Macbeth, the king's anointed body is sacred, such that, 'Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope I The Lord's anointed temple and stole thence I The life o' th' building' (2.3.6().-{)2). Macbeth is torn between political expediency and charismatic kingship; he can neither shake off images of royal divinity nor incorporate them into his own kingship. Shakespeare makes it impossible for an audience too finally to decide between a supernatural or human interpretation of events. Characters repeatedly invoke the supernatural to interpret what the 'weird sisters' say. Banquo believes that the 'instruments of darkness' (1.3.123) may speak the truth in order to send a soul to damnation; Macbeth says the witches represent 'supernatural soliciting' (1.3.128); and Lady Macbeth thinks Macbeth is receiving 'metaphysical aid' (1.5.27). The mental world evoked by these phrases is the Christian cosmos that provides the right supernatural environment for both the 'sisters" agency and the miraculous healing of the English king. But the play can be interpreted either in a Christian mode or in terms of power politics. The witches may be the Devil's agents or they may be simply peasant women whose shrewdness is alien enough in a patriarchal, warrior culture to seem magical. Edward the Confessor may indeed miraculously cure scrofula, or he may signify superstitious, Roman Catholic sainthood, practising prophecy when the age of prophecy was past, and performing the same ritual healing about which King James was so uneasy.17 The account of the royal touch in Macbeth that Malcolm gives suggests that the English king enjoys easy access to supernatural power, 'Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand' (4.3.144); that the exchange ofking and heaven is mysterious, 'How he solicits heaven I Himself best knows' (4.3.151-2); and that the miracle is hereditary, 'To the succeeding royalty he leaves I The healing benediction' (4.3.157- 8). Malcolm's account of Edward's miraculous healing is set within the intensely political situation of gathering an army, testing loyalties, and building support for Malcolm's own claim on the throne. In Shakespeare's history plays, the king is presented as a symbol of continuity

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against the violence and disorder of dynastic struggle, one of the 'fictions of stability' that can be set against the upheavals of usurpation and civil war. In those history plays the claims and images of royal legitimacy, such as Richard II's claims of heavenly sanction, are shown to be 'largely factitious ... their value ... strategic rather than sacramental' (Kastan, 1986, 469). In Macbeth, as in the histories, the fiction of divinely-sanctioned royalty is used to claim that continuity and legitimacy can emerge from the confusion of human ambition, violence, weakness and failure. Malcolm's claim that 'the powers above I Put on their instruments' (4.3.241-2) to defeat Macbeth is like Richard Il's similar claim, except that Malcolm, unlike Richard, combines persuasive ideology with the capacity to be a successful, devious army commander. Shakespeare's version of magic and royalty is ambiguous, since the play offers evidence for both supernatural and human interpretations, and ambivalent, since those interpretive dimensions are unresolvable. In this indirect way Shakespeare puts the whole subject of divine kingship into question. A sceptical view of miraculous royalty is also evident in John Donne's Biathanatos (?1608). Though his comments are brief, Donne is aware, like Shakespeare, of the political conditions needed for monarchs to be able to claim thaumaturgical powers, and for those powers to continue to be convincing. He allowed the general possibility of magic 'to cure diseases by touch, or by charme', but, aware that 'vulgar owners of such a vertue would misimploy it', declared only royal, not popular use, permissible. Although such magical actions are 'forbidden by divers Lawes', he wrote, 'yet none mislikes that the Kings of England & France should cure one sicknesse by such meanes', since 'Kings are justly presumed to use all their power to the glory of God; So is it fit, that this priviledge of which we speak should be contracted and restrained' . 18 Donne's account, by conflating popular and royal magic, threatened the uniqueness of the royal touch, and recognized that the condition of this royal prerogative is that kings should rule well. The public performance of royal touching proved too potent a piece of royalist propaganda to be abandoned even by the Calvinist James VI and I, for it gave external confirmation of the reality of charismatic monarchy. Queen Elizabeth (like Princess Diana) deployed it to bring her 'face to face with the suffering crowds' (Bloch, 1973, 190). Though records are sparse she is known to have touched nine people at Kenilworth Castle in 1575, and thirty-eight at Westminster in 1597 or 1598 (Hoeniger, 1992, 278). Charles I regularly touched, especially after 1640, his touching being straightforwardly used by royalist writers as a trope asserting his divine royalty. In an epigram Jonson called Charles's power to cure the king's evil 'among the holy gifts of grace I Annexed to thy person, and thy place', and turned the idea both to thank Charles for a gift of £100 and to bemoan 'the people's evil too' that had led the king to dissolve parliament in 1629. 19 The adulation that Robert Herrick

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heaped on Charles in his 1648 volume Hesperides lacked either Donne's scepticism or Jonson's ironic detachment. Herrick made Charles's power to heal the essence of his godlike monarchy: his hand is 'the Branch of Heavens faire Tree', and he possesses 'that soft Charm, that Spell, that Magick Bough, I That high Enchantment'. The poet, kneeling for help, exclaims, '0! lay that hand on me, I Adored Cesar! and my Faith is such, I I shall be heal'd, if that my KING but touch' .20 Herrick elevates Charles to quasi-divine status by indiscriminately attributing to him both the royal prerogative of touching and popular magical powers (charm, spell, magic). For Charles and his predecessors the healing ritual, though merely one version of the kinds of magical healing practised by village wise women and healers for centuries, was performed as proof of royal legitimacy. It had to be separated from popular magic, and its political significance protected, so Charles's government 'declared relentless war against the competitors with the royal prerogative', especially those who presumed to touch for scrofula (Bloch, 1973, 208). But when one Valentine Greatrakes gained notoriety for his magical healing during the Commonwealth and Restoration, the political issues were thrown into relief. Greatrakes was an example of the popular use of magic that Donne had been concerned to ban, for by imitating the miracle of royal healing he exposed the fact that such power was dependent on political not supernatural conditions. He was associated with mystics and Puritan sectarians in the 1650s, and did actually touch for scrofula after 1660. He was denounced for claiming 'an healing ~ower, as well as the King; levelling his Gift as well as they would his Office'. 1 Although by the late seventeenth century, Protestant theologians were uneasy at the existence of the miraculous in the royal touch, they were constrained to acknowledge it for the sake of Christian polemic and Stuart legitimacy (Duffy, 1981, 256, 269). The royal touch appeared above a faultline that had a magical and a non-magical idea of monarchy on either side. Too valuable politically for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English sovereigns to abandon, it contained the seeds of a more absolutist model of kingship than was ever developed in England, even by Charles I. Although touching for the king's evil gave external confirmation of the reality of divine kingship, James VI and I, the king most often decried for articulating ideas of 'free monarchy', was the least keen among Tudor and Stuart monarchs on deploying this ceremony of sacred majesty. Jacobean writers played their part in limiting the scope of miraculous royalty by subjecting its ideas to sceptical questioning. 22

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'Seeing' Contagious Bodies in Early Modem London Margaret Healy The act of 'seeing disease' ... is socially coded in many complicated ways (Gilman, 1988, 3) During a theatrical entertainment before the Protestant court of the young king Edward VI (1547-53), a fallen-woman character named Dalila mounted the stage and progressed across it displaying her disfigured syphilitic body, lamenting: My senowes be shronken, my flesh eaten with pocks, My bones ful of ache and great payne, My head is bald, that bare yelowe lockes, Croked I crepe to the earth agayne, Mine eie-sight is dimme, my hands tremble and shake Where I was fayre and amiable of face, Now am I foule and horrible to se. (Anon., Nice Wanton, sig. B2r) The shocking stage transformation of Dalila's 'fayre' young body into a 'foule and horrible' signifier of contagious disease was undoubtedly calculated to raise audience anxieties about their own safety in the face of this all too common sixteenth-century affliction; but beyond an initial fearful gulp in response to this grim spectacle, how might the audience have responded? What did spectators ' see' in this curious cultural representation, and why was it considered worthy entertainment for a king? Modern biomedical models for understanding contagious disease are of limited use in unravelling what the 'pocky body' meant to the courtly spectator circa 1550: pathogenic micro-organisms like bacteria simply did not figure in the mental landscapes of our sixteenth-century forbears (though a rudimentary notion of infectious 'seeds' was gaining ground); 1 rather, moral politics and

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socio-religious issues were central components of' this 'disease'. How the audience interpreted Dalila's densely emblematic form at this precise historical moment can only be understood, therefore, through a painstaking process of reconstruction, of sifting through and making sense of the textual traces of disease from this period. In this Protestant propaganda play Dalila's body is, in fact, symbolic of Catholic corruption, of a deformed, sick and benighted religion: England's terminal decline with the moral, spiritual and physical degeneration of her inhabitants, can only be averted, it warns, through a more thoroughgoing conversion to the reformed religion. The cure for the spread of Dalila's affliction was thus the effective implementation of Edward VI's government's reforming policies which would rid the nation of the 'iniquitous' Popish types implicated in the transmission of the 'pocks'. The king and his counsellors might thus have felt deeply gratified witnessing this positive presentation of the Edwardian politico-religious position. As this striking example demonstrates, 'The act of "seeing disease"' is, indeed, as Sander Gilman's seminal work has argued, 'socially coded in many complicated ways'. Furthermore, this illustration confirms that in certain historico-cultural locations, the contagious body - a source of considerable personal and collective anxiety- can function as a highly-charged political site. In contemporary Western societies the discourse of medicine about disease, involving such tangible but low-affect culprits as microbes, aberrant physiology and dodgy genes, is so loud that it tends to drone out all the others (though not completely). As the fairly recent appearance of two anxietyproducing, transmittable, and life-threatening phenomena - AIDS and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease- in our own midst has served to amplifY, disease is never simply an objective biological issue: the understanding of bodily dysfunction, and the interpretation of the exterior signs of morbidity, are shaped by powerful behavioural, social, political and economic forces (Mack, 1991, 1-3). Diseases are, therefore, most appropriately understood as unstable constructs (this is not to diminish the importance of the biological component), which are historically- and culturally-determined. Medical discourses (like those of science), far from being rarefied, discrete forms of communication about the human body, can be shown to constitute themselves through their intersection with other discourses (Wright and Treacher, 1982, 8-15). It is now increasingly understood that analogies mediated through tropologicallanguage function centrally in connecting apparently disparate categories of knowledge, helping to render the mysterious more intelligible, more ordered, less fearful. As the cognitive philosopher Mark Johnson describes: 'metaphor is one of the chief cognitive structures by which we are able to have coherent, ordered experiences that we can reason about' (1987, xv). When a new disease syndrome occurs that fails to fit readily into current medical paradigms and to respond satisfactorily to available treatments (thereby evoking considerable

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fear) it is liable to be particularly heavily freighted with metaphors, myths and with socio-cultural values which inevitably influence strategies for its management and control. Susan Sontag's powerful diatribes against the metaphorization of disease, particularly in relation to cancer and AIDS (1977, 1989), served to draw timely attention to the very real and potentially painful consequences of this ubiquitous phenomenon for the sufferers of such illnesses: metaphors and myths are implicated in the stereotyping and blame structures that surround poorly understood diseases and influence both intervention and outcomes. Yet Sontag's positivist call for the abolition of the use of metaphorical language in relation to disease is unrealistic (1977, 3): integral to the interpretative system that human cultures have for making sense of and managing frightening biological events - especially those which are not amenable to science- tropes, myths and even blame structures can serve useful functions and are undoubtedly here to stay (Brandt, 1991, 94-5; Slack, 1991, 128). Perhaps the best we can do to minimalize the more negative offshoots of this process in our own time is to try to reach a more detailed understanding of the complex processes whereby biological events have interacted with sociocultural ones in the past. This essay will seek to explore some of the ways of 'seeing' the two most densely symbolic bodily and social afflictions of the period 1480-1620 - syphilis and bubonic plague. In early seventeenth-century England, a dominant fictional construction of the Pox or Pocks (as syphilis was then often termed) was the 'living death': a perfumed foreigner (usually French, Spanish or Italian) being slowly consumed by his disease, crouching in the 'hams' (a submissive pleading posture), given to lechery, and succumbing to the deceitful Venuses of London's bawdy houses. In The Hunting of the Pox (1619) J. T. Westminster claimed, for example, that his leading character, Morbus Gallicus, was an Italian gentleman born in Rome, who had contracted the disease in France from the Neapolitan courtesan, Veneris (sigs. B1v-B2r; cited in Anselment, 1988, 198). Such extraordinary and vivid personifications of the Pox tell us much about how the disease was popularly understood and its stereotypes at this time: the lecherous, luxurious and foppish male; the Roman Catholic (often these two types are conflated); and the prostitute (like Dalila). But how did these stereotypes arise, and what was the relation between the materialities of the illness and the myths which emerged around them? Undoubtedly the disease's reputed geographical origins helped shaped such myths; the signs and symptoms of the illness played their part too. Equally, perceptions of how the disease was spread were integral to such accounts; but the curious linkage between syphilis and Roman Catholicism is rather more elusive; perhaps I should commence at the beginning of the syphilis story. The terrifying and novel character of the ' french pockes' was eloquently described by the humanist writer Ulrich Von Rutten:

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It hathe pleased god, that in our tyme sicknesses shuld aryse, which were to our forefathers ... unknowen. In the yere of 1493 or there about this pestiferos evyll creped amongest the people, not only in Fraunce, But fyrst appered at Naples, in the frenche-mennes hoste (wherof it toke his name) whiche kept warre under the frenche kynge Charles, before hyt appered in any other place. (De Morbo Gallico, 1533, fol. lr)

The 'pockes' first appeared in Europe as an epidemic of dangerous proportions when the French king invaded Italy in 1494. Charles VIII's largely mercenary army of Flemish, Gascons, Swiss, Italians and Spaniards were, according to all Renaissance accounts, responsible for spreading the disease so rapidly and with devastating effect around the world. The external manifestations of the infection, and the pain and offensive smell associated with them, seem to have rendered it particularly fearful: 'They were byles, sharpe, and stondynge out ... from which came so foule humours, and so gret stynche ... their peynes were as thoughe they hadde lyen in the fyre' (De Morbo Gallico, 1533, fol. 2v). With the passing of several decades the disease became less virulent and more chronic in character, but its signs and symptoms remained extremely disfiguring and distressing: the physician Peter Lowe described the 'aboundance of externall ulcers and pustls, falling of haire, both of head, browes, and beard: griefe in the joynts, head, leggs, and annes ... chiefly in the night' (An Easy Certaine and Perfect Method, 1596, sig. B1v). With its prominent skin lesions and chronic progress, the new disease readily inherited the traditions surrounding the old, rapidly disappearing sickness, leprosy: Erasmus of Rotterdam described, 'the new leprosie, nowe otherwyse named Jobs agew, and some cal it the scabbes of Naples, through whiche desease they feele often the most extreme and cruell paines of deathe even in this lyfe, and cary about abodye resemblyng very much some dead coarse or carryn' (A Very Plesaunt and Fruitful Dialogue, 1533, 109). This is a cautionary depiction, apparently designed to impress on young people 'the safeguarding of their chastity' ( 1526, cited Thompson, 1965, 629): a living death, hell on earth, were of course the painful wages of sin. The new infection was particularly the legacy of the sinner because from its earliest occurrences its primary route of transmission - sexual intercourse - was clear. In his popular medical manual the physician Andrew Boord lists the ways the disease could be caught, which included sleeping in dirty sheets, drinking from an infected cup, and sitting on a contaminated privy; but he concludes authoritatively, 'specially it is taken whan one pocky person doth synne in lechery the one with another' (The Breviary of He/the, 1547, fol. 96r). Furthermore, it was rapidly apparent that this was a disease in which the sins of the fathers were visited on the children: reduced fertility, abnormal births and sickly offspring were all accurately connected with this

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particular infection. The hereditary nature of this affliction and its intimate association with sin and leprosy meant that it was often obliquely alluded to in Protestant discourses of original sin. The external manifestations of this infection functioned- in the manner of Job's 'agew'- to verify the presence of man's inner corruption through original sin, and to bring the elect to timely repentance. In the mid-sixteenth-century play by Lewis Wager, Marie Magdalene, for example, the personified abstraction, 'Knowledge of Sinne', is a repulsive pocky body (sigs. E4v-F1r). This horrifying embodiment of Marie's sick soul (and of the physical disease threatened by her whoredom) initiates her 'cure' -spiritual regeneration brought about by her conversion to the 'true faith' ofProtestantism. The Pox was loathed, feared and heavily stigmatized, and everyone sought to dissociate himself from it: it was always an infection of some other social or religious group, or of another nation. All the above features made this disease particularly attractive as a vehicle for polemics. As we have already begun to see, the English Protestant propagandists had a veritable field-day with this infection. Long depicted as lascivious by church reformers, Catholic clergy rapidly became blamed - together with their harlot partners - for the spread of the disease; and one particular 'harlot' was mythologized in Protestant historiography as the origin of the disease: the Whore of Babylon of Revelation 17 (the Roman church). In a 'medical' pamphlet prescribing 'Spirituall Physik' for 'dyverse diseases of the nobilitie and gentlemen of Englande', the Marian exile and 'doctor of Physik' William Turner recorded how thoroughgoing the stigmatizing tie between 'thys abominable Frenche pox' and Catholicism could be: 'There was a certeyne hore in Italy, whyche had a perillus disease called false religion ... all the kynges and nobilitie of the earth .. . they committed fornication wyth her ... and caught the Romishe pokkes' (A Newe Booke of Spiritual/ Physik, 1555, fol. 74r). Throughout this tract the symbolic diseased body is deployed to convey meanings in several dimensions simultaneously: physical, spiritual, moral and religious ideas converge in this physician's emotive and graphic account. Indeed, such densely symbolic bodily images are a common feature of sixteenth-century Protestant discourse which sought to emphasize the relation between the spiritual and worldly condition of the individual through the Pauline dictum to have the orderliness and purity of the 'inner temple' (the soul) match the condition of the 'outer temple' (the body). The influential reformer-physician Paracelsus (1493-1541) used the arrival of the new disease opportunistically to establish his own medical authority. He declared Galenic medicine heathen and outmoded; its physicians covetous (like Catholic priests); and its remedies ineffectual. He argued that new afflictions like syphilis required innovative approaches, and that the whole concept and practice of medicine required a radical overhaul (like religion). His answer was to formulate a rival myth of

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bodily functioning which was intensely spiritual and indebted to both alchemy and Neoplatonism. Furthermore he maintained that only physicians of the true faith were.effective combatants in the fight against pathogens. Discourses of disease are particularly sensitive indicators of areas of social 'dis-ease', instability and tension, at precise historical moments. Whilst representations in the manner of William Turner's were particularly frequent in the mid-sixteenth century, another type of stigmatizing tie came into play with a vengeance towards the end of the century. The surgeon-author of the most extensive treatise on the Pox from this period, William Clowes, pitched the entire weight of his professional authority against the social group, the 'uncleane persons' who, he maintained, spread this 'pestilent infection of filthy lust' and 'stinking sinne' to those of 'better disposition' (A Short and Profitable Treatise, 1579, Preface). This Bartholomew's surgeon advocates magistrates rounding up the 'idell'- diseased (the two are conflated)- 'rogues and vagabonds', and 'executing' upon them 'such severe punishment, as may terri fie the wicked wreches of the world' (sigs. A4v, B 1v-B2r). This medical discourse of disease clearly intersects with those of social control and religion. Anxieties about the growing numbers of poor, unemployed people in the capital were intense in the 1570s and in 1575 an Act had been passed covering both the punishment of 'vagabonds' and the relief of the poor, which prescribed the construction of 'houses of correction'. It seems, however, to have been largely ineffective and Clowes's tract might thus be construed as a call for tougher and more concerted initiatives to deal with what he terms this 'stayne' to the nation. There is no evidence that the Pox was more rampant among the poor, though there is ample to suggest that the 'better' sort went to great lengths to disguise its shameful presence in their bodies. The man-ofletters Barnabe Rich articulated the social guises of 'morbus gallicus' (syphilis): 'in poore men we use plaine dealing, and call it the Poxe, but in great personages, and a little to gilde over the loathsomenesse, we must call it the Gowt, or the Sciatica' (The Honestie of This Age, 1614, 41). As the seventeenth-century epidemiologist John Graunt noted in Natural and Political Observations (1662), social hypocrisy inevitably had considerable consequences for the accuracy of the recording of causes of mortality: 'I concluded that only HATED persons ... have died of this too frequent malady' (cited in Creighton, 1965, 428). Social anthropologists have demonstrated that when a 'too frequent' frightening 'malady' afflicts a community, the inevitable questions human beings ask (and which medicine is required to answer) are How? Why us? and Why now? (Meyer Fortes, 1976, xix). In the case of the Pox, sexual intercourse, sin and a rise in luxurious lifestyles (associated in the sixteenth century with religious and social corruption) went a long way to explaining the phenomenon, and help to account for the fact that the available 'treatments' for

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this incurable disease were excruciatingly painful and deeply unpleasant. Sufferers were smothered in mercurial ointments (which had their own disfiguring effects) and left to sweat in hot tubs for days on end; then bled, purged and placed on strict diets. Medicine could not cure the disease but it could exact spiritually improving punishments and perhaps function, thereby, to contain this blameworthy affliction. The second most widely written about disease of the Renaissance bubonic plague - prompted rather different responses to the 'How?' and 'Why?' questions. They tended to be far more unstable, diverse and compendious. In particular, 'how' the disease was caught, and therefore how you could avoid it, were the subjects of increasing controversy throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Major plague outbreaks occurred in England in 1498, 1535, 1543, 1563, 1589, 1603, 1625, 1636 and 1665. The 1563 epidemic was particularly severe, killing over 20 per cent of London's population. Understandably, there was a ready market for self-help manuals attempting to explain the disease and offer 'preservative diets' and medical 'remedies': twenty-three medical pamphlets dealing exclusively with plague were published between 1486 and 1604 (Slack, 1985, 68, 151, 23). Discourses of the plague thus flourished in the early modem period, inscribing and circulating a set of signs and symptoms increasingly specific to bubonic plague. It is clear from these that the 'plaguy' body shared with the 'pocky' body particularly gruesome and painful skin manifestations of its internal disorder. The physician Thomas Lodge declared, for example, that the plague was ' a popular and contagious sicknesse, for the most part mortall, wherin usually there appeare certaine Tumors, Carbuncles, or spottes, which the common people call Gods tokens' (A Treatise of the Plague, 1603, sig. B2v). He added, thoughtfully, that the plague was 'engendred by a certaine and more secret meanes then all other sicknesses' (sig. B3v). Similarly, the pamphleteer Thomas Dekker described at length the 'blew wounds', bodies like 'speckled marble', ulcerous running sores in groins and armpits, the 'carbuncles' and 'tokens' associated with this particular sickness, and proclaimed, 'It hath a Preheminence above all others: And none being able to match it, for Violence, Strength, Incertainty, Suttlety, Catching, Universality, and Desolation, it is called the Sicknesse' (London Looke Backe, 1630, sig. A4v). As these descriptions reveal, the signs, symptoms and medical facts of 'the Sicknesse' were shrouded in mystery and evoked immense fear: supernatural explanations were bound to be rife in these circumstances. Even the most pragmatic accounts of the sickness dwelt on its mysterious aspects. Thomas Paynell asked, for example, 'Why that some do die and peryshe of the foresayde sycknesse, and some not: and beynge in the sayde same citie or house, why one dothe dye, and another dyeth not?' (A Moche Profitable Treatise, 1534, sig A2r). He argued that the stars were

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responsible for spreading the plague. Sir Thomas Elyot lingered perplexedly over a 'cofer' (chest) of 'stuffe' (material) from an infected home which, when opened after two years, seemed to have retained the capacity to infect. He concluded, rather unconvincingly given the predominantly secular tone of this otherwise down-to-earth treatise, that this must be an instance of 'the powre of god ... above mans reason or counsell, preservyng or strykyng whom, whan, and where it shall lyke his maiestie' (The Castel of He/the, 1534, fol. 88r). Thomas Lodge was thrown by the capacity of fur collars to infect, and remarked on the flea bites on plague victims, whilst several plague pamphlets, including this one, recorded how rats seemed to leave their holes during an epidemic (sig. C3r). It is fascinating that all the clues about how the disease was actually spread by black rats and fleas were there, but they just made no sense in terms of the available medical paradigms. Thomas Lodge's treatise gives a particularly full account of the contradictory ways the disease could be understood in 1603, and illustrates how important non-medical texts were in the socio-cultural construction of a disease which effectively rendered the physician ineffectual. About the question of 'Why?' Lodge had no doubts: plague was a scourge sent by 'Almightie God ... for the amendment of our sinnes' (sig. B2v). To prove his point this humanist writer cites an eclectic pot-pourri of Christian and pagan sources: Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Celsus's De Medicina, and Homer's Iliad. On the matter of 'How?' the treatise is equally dogmatic in tone (again citing an enormous range of diverse authorities) yet confused: 'an infection of the Aire' (sig. B4r); 'Contagion ... an evil qualitie in a bodie, communicated unto an other by touch' (sig. B2v); dirt, stench, infected clothing; and unregimented, humorally imbalanced bodies were all implicated. At one point Lodge expostulates how 'government in life, or particular condition' (involving diet and hygiene practices) made no difference to one's chances in the face of this disease (sig. B1v), yet he goes on to detail at great length a plan of bodily management to eschew the disease. Additionally, as in Clowes's account of syphilis, certain disordered bodies were held particularly responsible for spreading the infection and Lodge recommended that these types be kept outside the city walls: 'vagabonds, masterless men, and (those) ofservile and base condition' (sig. F1v). In common with all early seventeenth-century medical writers, Lodge promulgates the theory that the unkempt, dirty poor living in overcrowded conditions in London's liberties and suburbs harboured the plague: 'For where the infestation most rageth there povertie raigneth among the Commons' (sig. A2r). The majority of London's elite clearly concurred: a growing obsessional anxiety concerning what lurked in the liberties and suburbs is evident in the city fathers' impassioned hygiene-ridden rhetoric. To some extent their fears about infection may have been justified: as the seventeenth

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century progressed the densely populated wooden slums (which attracted the black rat) at London's margins did become the focus of plague infection; though it is salutary to note that in 1593 half the reported plague burials still occurred within the City proper where London's wealthier citizens dwelt (Slack, 1986, 64). Increasingly from the late sixteenth century the borders of London had been represented by the city governors as the preserves of idleness, poverty, disorder, dirt, infection, contagion, unruliness, stench, rogues, vagabonds, vice and plague: in such discourses metonymic associations elide readily into metaphors and the marginal poor tend to become synonymous with stench, filth and plague. In the early seventeenth century, legislation to control the plague became inseparable from that aimed at ordering the 'unruly' bodies at London's social and geographical margins. Indeed, 'plaguy' bodies were becoming indistinguishable from criminal ones; the Puritan cleric and medical writer James Manning declared, for example: 'May not they be condemned for murtherers, which having plague soares will presse into companies to infect others, or wilfully pollute the ayre, or other meanes, which others are daily to use, and live by?' (A Newe Booke Intituled, 1604, 2). This extreme moralization of disease and the location of blame in its victims can only have been intensified by an early seventeenth-century medical vogue, associated with Neoplatonism and 'the Schoole of Paracelsus', which speculated that 'evil' qualities in a person might be 'caught' in the manner of plague contagion from unregimented persons (Bacon 1605: f.46r). Given this, it is hardly surprising that the City's front-line strategy for preventing the spread of the 'plague' was to keep undesirable types outside the City walls and to erect whipping-posts to punish those found transgressing the boundary. Finally, and most punitively, to satisfy the likes of Manning, an Act was passed in 1604 making the execution of careless plague victims a real possibility (though no one was actually executed). It would be easy to dismiss such 'ordering' policies as merely prejudicial and unjust, but we should be cautious: undoubtedly the construction of cordons sanitaires in seventeenth-century London during epidemics did help to control the spread of plague. This way of 'seeing' plaguy bodies (as poor, dirty and morally degenerate) was definitely not shared by all. It is possible to identify an English tradition of plague writing stemming from the Black Death which fixed the blame for God's scourge on the sins of the wealthy and England's governors: their lack of charity towards the poor incited divine wrath. This view is particularly common in the political pamphlets of sixteenth-century reformists and militant Protestants, namely William Bullein, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker, where 'rich extortioners' tend to be represented as greedy Papists or hypocritical, parsimonious Protestants (A Dialogue, 1564; Christes Teares, 1593; Newes from Graves-End, 1604). Thomas Dekker, in particular, went to great lengths to dismantle and ridicule contemporary medical accounts of the

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plague based on contagion which he felt resulted in the prejudicial, unkind management of London's poor. In opposition to the naturalistic contagion and poisoned air theories ('miasmas' were associated with the stench and dirt of the poor) found in the medical plague pamphets, Dekker promulgated the old biblical construction of plague as being spread across a city by God's good and evil angels. In Dekker's tracts, the poor were represented as innocent victims of the plague; conversely, the wealthy city governors and physicians who ran away from London in droves to escape it, were the culpable sinners. The disadvantage, indeed the dangers, associated with such supernatural-religious (and seductively humane) constructions of the plague should be stressed: they offer no practical, effective way of controlling the spread of infection. Theologically-driven ways of seeing 'plaguy bodies' circa 1603 were by no means uniform and they could be extremely punitive attaching immense blame to victims construed, as in this illustration, as lacking in courage and true faith: From the heart proceed (as Phisitions say) vitall spirits, wherby man is made active and couragious. If they by feare be inforced to retire inward, the outward parts be left infirme: as may appeare by the palenesse and trembling of one in great feare, so that as enemies easily scale the walles of a towne abandoned by souldiers; so the Plague (especially in a season disposed to infection) doth find readie passage into the outward parts of a man ... and feare (adversarie to faith) pulleth to the wicked the evill which he feareth (A Short Dialogue, 1603, 15)

Bamford, minister of Saint Olaves in Southwark, urged that the sound needed to be 'carefully preserved from (this) filthinesse and contagion' and that 'Princes and Magistrates (which we called sheapherdes) may and ought to be very carefill, to keepe the sound from the infected, and the infected from the sound, especially in assemblies' (7, 8). According to the Preacher in Bamford's dialogue, plague victims, like lepers of old, needed to 'have markes to be known by', and were certainly not welcome in 'the house of God' (7, 8). As the dialogue concedes, such measures to contain the 'evil' had greater negative repercussions for 'the poorer sort' who were perceived as the focus of contagion in 1603 (8). Clearly how an observer perceived disease-marked bodies in early modern London depended on a wide range of variables which might seem to us · initially to have very little if anything to do with disease as we know it. What is foregrounded by the above accounts of contagion is how sixteenth- and seventeeth-century discourses of disease, in fact, mediated a variety of interrelated bodily tensions (social, economic, religious); tensions experienced as destabilizing, anxiety producing, and in need of urgent address. This insight

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is crucial in any modern attempt to 'see', and account for, why representations of disease occur so frequently and in such a wide range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writings. Mary Douglas's theories of bodily symbolism seem particularly apposite in this context. In Purity and Danger, Douglas suggests that cultures which 'frankly develop bodily symbolism' may be using it to confront, make sense of and order perplexing and difficult experience: 'pains and losses' (1966, 120). The work of trope theorists such as Mark Johnson (discussed earlier) would appear to support such a thesis: he argues for the bodily basis of meaning, according metaphors of the body the central place in human imagination and reason (1987, xv). In the light of these theories it seems more than mere coincidence that the body and its metaphors were pressed especially strongly into locutory service at a moment in English history noted for what Christopher Hill has described as the 'confusion and ferment' of its 'intellectual life', when 'the vision of reality that had supported the rational consciousness of man for a thousand years was fading' (1965, 78). Refashioning bodies, imagining radically alternative bodily schemata and decrying degenerate, decaying and diseased bodies (like Dalila's in Nice Wanton), were surely integral features ofthis period's 'confusion and ferment', of its anxious and painful transition to the modern.

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'All protean forms in venery': The Textual and Apparitional Body in John Marston's Verse Satires 1 Cliff Forshaw Satire is as old as literature itself. It seems curious then, given that it is a far from alien presence in much Elizabethan literature, that as late as 1597 Joseph Hall could boast ofhis Virgidemiae or 'Harvest of Rods' as a 'first aduenture' in English satire and challenge 'the second English Satyrist' to come forth. Hall's claim, however- that he is the first to write formal verse satires closely based on Classical models - defines 'Satyre' in terms of the Roman genre rather than the medieval mode of Complaint, or a more general literary impulse. To open debate on the nature of this genre, and how far its pagan models could be naturalized into a contemporary Christian setting, Hall jokily adopts an authorial persona, conveniently and orthographically summarized as a 'Satyrist', which plays on the misconception connecting satire etymologically with the 'satyrs' of Classical myth.Z The mythic hybrid is emblematic of what Hall regards as the salient characteristics of Latin verse satire: Juvenal's savagery and Persius's obscurity and Stoicism, as opposed to Langland's Christian plain speaking. Hall's pun physicalizes a stylistic paradigm in his pagan 'auctores' to pretend that his 'satyres' are the rants of a wild yet Classical beast-man, but he excuses himself from the task of seriously embodying the persona: 'The ruder Satyre should go rag'd and bare: I And show his rougher and his hairy hide: I Tho mine be smooth, and deckt in carelesse pride' (Poems, 9). Others took the beastly 'hairy hide' more literally, briefly turning the vicious Satyrist into a modish manifestation of the Malcontent whose very physiology embodied discontent (see Babb, 1951, 96-9). The Malcontent, at the mercy of 'this blacke melancholy humour' which makes 'the spirit & mind darkish' and 'bringeth withall a kind of loathing and tediousness (La Primaudaye, Academie, 467), fathers the bastard Satyrist who is an outsider even within the confines of his body. He is filled with bodily loathing, but his disgust constantly invokes corporeality only to deny it: his anger is so visceral, his eye so intent on sexual detail, and his forked tongue both so rough in

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condemnation and so suspiciously lubricious in describing what it condemns, that his tirades collude to grant the body a primacy which poisons their morality.. This essay will examine the early work of the writer with best claim to be the 'second English Satyrist', John Marston, and particularly his strategies to 'disembody' not only his targets but, despite the studied carnality of his language, the idea of the author himself, as represented by the savage hypocritical persona of W. Kinsayder, through whom the 'satyres' are voiced. To examine these strategies, I will look at how the Satyrist figure embodied what Roman satire meant to the Elizabethans and how it could be used to question both Christian and pagan bodily attitudes. I will consider Marston's adoption of a metamorphic persona who, as both voyeuristic Ovidian and 'Barking Satyrist', denies bodily reality to himself and his targets. Both 'incarnations' are apparitional, their physicality reduced to spying on and describing the bodies of others. Each is little more than an eye or a tongue - yet even these, and the bodies they see and describe, are no more than the product of words and Marston refuses to allow his persona's words to become flesh. The smooth bodies of Ovidian verse are the fantasy of their smooth-tongued creator: their marmoreal flesh is deceptive, mere texts as stonily barren and as insubstantial as the lapidary style which creates them; the Satyrist's lustful beasts are likewise only animated by his rough poetry. Both Ovidian and Satyrist are self-created and self-confuting- 'I am my selfe, so is my poesie' cries Kinsayder (Poems, 95), metamorphosizing from voyeuristic Ovidian to spying Puritan Satyrist; Marston's ambiguous embodiment of a persona initially intended as an instrument of stylistic inquiry becomes a meta-satire on Satyre itself, querying its sexual, moral and authorial identities, as they focus on the physical body to recreate it textually. Hall's 'Satyr' pun interrogates the nature of formal verse satire and its classical antecedents: 'the harsh poesies' of 'the Roman antients, I Whose words were short, & darksome was their sence' (Poems, 33). Moving from the First Three Bookes of Tooth-/esse Satyrs to The Three Last Bookes of Byting Satyres, Hall ponders whether English can accommodate the 'in-bred bitterness and tartnes' of a Roman model which is 'both hard of conceipt, and harsh of style', as exemplified by Persius's 'difficultie and dissonance' or 'the soure and crabbed face ofluvenals' (Poems, 97-9). The Satyr in the Satyrist represents a crux where classicist meets Wild Man: the language of satire is harsh, not only because it is deliberately difficult and allusive, but because it is fuelled by untamable anger. In the Latin poem 'De suis Satyris', Hall echoes Juvenal's 'facit indignatio versum' with a further joky etymology which uncovers the Ire in Satire: 'Dum Satyrae dixi, videor dixisse Sat irae .... Ira facit Satyram' (Poems, 10). However, Hall lacks Juvenal's saeva indignatio: his first Satyres are, by his own admission, 'tooth-lesse', and even when equipped with teeth,

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his hope that from his 'quiet stile I Hence forth may rise some raging rough Lucile' seems forlorn (Poems, 83). If, for a Christian moral reformer, even rhetorical anger is suspect, then lust has clearer dangers. Allowed teeth, Hall's Satyr is still denied cloven feet and horns: 'Ecce nouam Satyram: Satyram sine cornibus!' (Poems, 10). Other writers attempted a more literal embodiment of the 'true and naturall Satyre'. From Langland on, Complaint, this 'childe of Playne dealing and Simplicitye' (Gascoigne, ii. 144), was often voiced through horny-handed rustic personae: plain-speaking Colins or Pierces whose manly forthrightness was implicitly critical of smooth-bodied sophistication and effete urbanity. In the late sixteenth century, however, the new breed of formal verse satirist, usually himself a city-dweller no matter how liminal, began to justify his rhetorical anger by rooting the rough tongue of Satire in the shaggy body of the savage Satyr. Despite the inherent contradiction of employing a vigorously pagan figure as a vehicle for Christian homily, even pious Complainants donned the Satyr's beast-skin. William Rankins, for example, unleashes 'shaggy Satyres' which 'doe forsake the woods' against the 'discourse' of 'Some gilded Braggadocchio'; yet, though his own 'shape be base and ougly ill', the Satyrist ignores the implications of his goatish hybridity while attacking others who 'Proteus-like ... change their peeuish shape' to do 'lustfull worke' (Seauen Satyres, 4, 13, 5). Though the dubious etymology had long been a commonplace, its ambiguities were barely acknowledged. Thomas Langley saw no contradiction that a genre 'onely ordained to rebuke vice' should be named after 'uplandyshe Goddes, that were rude, lassivious and wanton of behaviour' (Polidore Vergile, sigs. cii-ciii.). In his translation of Horace, Thomas Drant, noting that this 'instrument to pynche the prankes of men' may be named after 'the mossye rude, I Vncivile god', insisted that 'With taunting gyrds, & glikes, & gibes' it 'must vexe the lewde'. Drant, however, hesitating to 'vexe the lewde' by substituting an expanded treatment of Horace's satire on fashion for those parts of his original concerned with sexual misdeeds, only dons the beast-skin after he has 'shaued of his heare, and pared of his nayles' .3 Though Hall was a Cambridge academic and serious-minded cleric, Satyre's sharp claws particularly appealed to Inns of Court writers: young men trained in legal rhetoric, less interested in moral reform than flyting with their peers to make names as sophisticated wits. In the Inns, however, no writer epitomized the savage Satyrist as much as a beastly, yet curiously bodiless, Malcontent outsider: the hypocritically lewd and psychopathic W. Kinsayder. Though not published under his own name, Marston's Satyres were not truly anonymous; Marston was readily identifiable with his adopted persona: a swaggering bombastic 'Ruffian' (as an anonymous Cambridge student play described Kinsayder), whose 'oylie tearmes' and stewish 'Ram-ally

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meditations' dubiously mated forthrightness with prurience (Parnassus Plays, 241-2). Marston's persona is an entirely new creation growing out of the specific environment of the Inns of Court. Outside the Inns, most of the new Satyres differed little from the homiletic tradition. The distinctions between satire generally (and Satyre in particular) and Complaint boil down to the satiric intrusion of personality.4 Instead of Complaint's abstract moral depictions, satire tends to physicalize. Complaint may personify vices, but also shows virtue - hollow creations echoing with sententiae which lack the credible particularity of satire's grotesques. Complaint is conceptual, allegorical, corrective and unsophisticated: the impersonal interpretation of a religious system. Complaint requires transparent emblems; satire is opaque, stopping the eye with physical detail. The Complainant has little physical presence: a 'whining 'ghost', in Hall's words (Poems, 17); Satyre foregrounds the putative author to question his moral and bodily relationship to the world. Though Complaint is often dream-like, Kinsayder's nightmare of topsyturvydom more closely echoes pamphleteers such as Nashe, whose prose captures the oneiric logic of the carnivalesque, confuting bodily integrity through surprising juxtapositions and destabilizing authorial identity through distorted rhetorical mirrors. 5 Intending not to reform, but amuse, the satirist may mock his own propensity for anger, revelling in the absurd virtuosity of his inventive bitterness. It may be gallows humour directed at the human condition itself, but satire is fundamentally comic, whereas Complaint is essentially po-faced. Complaint is ameliorative, a sort of religious socialism, whereas satire tends to a despairing Hobbesian fascism: Man is a wolf to other men, but the dark lycanthropic vision makes us howl with laughter. Kinsayder's targets are largely body-worshippers. However, the bodies they worship, whether the obdurate idols of sonneteers or more pliant incarnations, resist true physical presence: little more than masturbatory stimuli, the more physical their description, the less the reality. The close-up focus is disintegrative, denying both metonymy and particularity: the sexual part stands not for the whole, but for variations upon itself. Desire is insatiable; unglutted by flesh itself, it negates the present and singular body to. yearn after the merely imagined. For Kinsayder, the body is polarized: either lifelessly stony or bestial, metamorphic and ultimately insubstantial. Marston exploits the Pigmalion myth, commenting on the narcissism of artistic desire, while elaborating a persona who is alienated from the body yet fascinated by its semblance. The artist (poet Kinsayder or sculptor Pigmalion) desires not the body itself, but the onanistic product of his own handiwork: the stony realization of imagined flesh. The myth is contextualized by allusions to the conventions of both amorist verse and the more sexually knowing Ovidian tradition. Sonneteers dedicating verses to a chilly marmoreal mistress and

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Ovidian cataloguing the metamorphic sexual adventures of pagan gods for the purposes of titillation or seduction deny the Christian reality of the body as both temple of the soul and charnel house. As false idol, the worshipped body is de-animated: a representation of illusion whose stoniness is both physical, implying barrenness, and metaphoric and so insubstantial; intangible as desire itself, it disembodies the desired, desirer and narrator of desire. · Kinsayder's protean corporeality is illusory. The persona is a shaggy hide for Marston to don or cast off. Marston compounds the illusion by allowing Kinsayder his own wardrobe of disguises through which to ventriloquize. These dummies are paradoxically disembodied through an obsessive insistence on carnality - a carnality Kinsayder can never achieve: he both creates and is created verbally, and, despite their crude vigour, his words never become flesh. The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image And Certaine Satyres and The Scourge ofVillanie both appeared in 1598. John Peter, like many who fail to grasp that Satyre may satirize itself, complains of 'an utterly insincere and possibly pathological performance' (1956, 176).6 Actually, 'performance' is the key. It is a virtuoso performance by a young writer yet to discover himself as a dramatist who was still studying law at the Middle Temple, where his father was a rich and respected Reader. 7 The theatricality of Marston's Malcontent impersonation mirrors the saturnalian reversals of the Inns Revels: a small world of masked performers and mock arraignments, whose courtly code, gentlemanly yet tending towards 'Ovidian venerie', betrays confusion as to whether body is to be idolized, exploited or feared. Though his impersonation mocks Kinsayder, through him Marston satirizes his chameleon peers for their ability to combine scurrility with sanctimony, satire with flattering courtship. Seeking to impress their fellows with scabrous wit, mistresses with honeyed words, and their betters, in the hope of preferment, with demonstrations of piety, these lawyer-writers, often epigrammatists -like John (later Sir John) Davies, 'Our English Martial!' as Everard Guilpin slyly called him (Skialetheia, 44)- take a pride in their moral as much as their literary versatility. Marston appropriates Davies's 'Chamelion Muse' and dresses her 'Hermaphrodite' devotees in drag. 8 Though epigrams were often seen as satyres in little,9 the epigrammatist and 'Barking Satyrist' move within different moral universes with very different presiding deities: the clubbable amusing realist Martial and the indignant vitriolic outsider Juvenal. Unlike Juvenal, Martial neither presents Rome as the garish, over-lit scenes of nightmare, nor uses rhetoric to pump up his characters to grotesque dimensions. Martial's desire to please sits uncomfortably with any satiric tendency. 10 He can be sycophantic: an amanuensis to the vanities of the powerful. Though acerbic, he relies on wit, irony and an urbane unshockable acceptance of life as it is. 11 Epigrams are

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discrete entertainments, symbolically cut off by the white, neutral, space defining the form: morally, these nugae are nugatory. 12 Juvenal's long unbroken verse paragraphs emphasize the ant-heap of city life, making the private public, and force thematic moral connections between apparently isolated instances. As more complex portraiture would impede the narrative's angry rhetorical flow, targets seem to merge bodily with one another. In Marston, the crowd is all: nothing is isolated except Kinsayder himself who observes the bodily frenzy and indignantly interprets it in terms of metamorphic lust. As an Inns of Court satirist securely placed fairly well in the hierarchy, Marston has no argument with the establishment itself, and mocks both chameleon social climbers such as John Davies, then in disgrace, and the fashionable Malcontent whose Satyre is born out of envy. In his play What You Will (1601 ?), one Satyrist-type, Quadratus, addresses another, Lampatho Doria, as a 'Don Kynsayder', a 'Canker eaten rusty curre' whose hate, malice and 'Envie' will traduce them 'unto publicke scorne.' The frowning Satyrist is a 'skrubbing railer whose course harden'd fortune' is cursed by 'Antypathy' and who 'Skoules at the fortune of the fairer Merit' (Plays, ii, 248-9). The traditional aetiology for railing - too much scholarship, lack of advancement leading to a choleric-malcontent temper- has, by the time of Marston's plays, been undermined by a fashion for Satyre which calls the psychology of that aetiology into doubt. The Satyrist is no longer an egregious rebel, but a modish accessory to every Inn and tavern conversation. Marston implies the Satyrist's railing, and bodily alienation, is based on lack of sexual success: Quadratus attempts to 'powre fresh Oyle' into Lampatho, tum him into a ' gallant' by schooling him in the rhetoric of courtship so he shall 'have a Mistresse' (Plays, ii, 279). Kinsayder is obsessed with lust, whether beastly lubriciousness or the 'oyle of sonnets', because he has neither in his dry life. Like much humour in all-male student circles, Marston's satire is fuelled by sexual innuendo, though this merges with literary attacks on amorist sonneteers, scurrilous brothel balladeers, Ovidians and amoral epigrammatists. 'Courtship', in both sexual and social senses, is seen as lascivious and idolatrous: a process that denatures both worshipped and worshipper, transforming the former into stony idol, the latter into beast or fetishistic object. As mere verbal corpus, Kinsayder tends to see the body in terms of text, and to sexualize literary genres: Satyre is sado-masochistic; the epyllion narcissistic; sonnets fetishistic. Curio, writing 'mournfull Elegies' on the death of his 'mistres Monkey' attempts to resurrect 'her pleasures buried' and so metaphorically replace the animal with himself (Poems, 150). Publius hates 'idolatries' and 'laughs that Papists honor Images', yet dedicates 'the oyle of Sonnets' 'Vnto the picture of a painted lasse' and worships her 'itch-allaying pinne' as a 'sacred relique' he might envy: a 'thrice happie prick' that 'in her

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haire didst stick' (Poems, 152-3). But Kinsayder is always implicated: as Satyrist he is sado-masochist; Curio's 'Epitaph vpon the Marble stone' echoes his stony Pigmalion; Saturio, wishing 'him selfe his mistres buske, I That he might sweetly lie, and softly luske I Betweene her pappes', mirrors the Satyrist's disembodied voyeurism: 'then must he haue an eye I At eyther end, that freely might descry I Both hills and dales' (Poems, 153-4). Grillus, turned to a pig by Circe, preferred to remain so. Kinsayder is Circe-like, but his creatures, discomforted by human form, like 'Gri/lus subtile-smelling swinish snout' endlessly sniff after baser incarnations (Poems, 82). Phrigio 'wish'd he were his Mistres dog'; Punicus, his 'Mistres Smug Munkey'; 'one would be a flea ... Another his sweet Ladies verdingall' (Poems, 154). Kinsayder parodies metamorphic Petrarchans such as Mathew Grove (Pelops and Hippodamia) 13 and Barnabe Barnes (Parthenophil and Parthenophe). Barnes, however, had already mocked such amorists' conceits: Parthenophil wishes he were his mistress's 'sweet wine, which downe her throate doth trickel, I To kisse her Iippes and Iyee next at her hart, I Run through her vaynes, and passe by pleasure's part' (Sonnet 63). This is clearly mocking. Unusually, the obduracy of the Petrarchan idol leads Parthenophil into vengeful rape fantasies and eventual consummation through the magical invocation of pagan deities. 'Buried' in the object of his lust, the Ovidian kills off the Petrarchan in himself, negating the virginity upon which Parthenope's identity is predicated. 14 Kinsayder, however, attacks not only Petrarchanism, which no matter how chaste remains idolatrous, but also the pernicious influence of Ovidian myth: 'beastly shape to brutish soules agree', 'when Gods to force foul rapes, I Will turne themselues to any brutish shapes' (Poems, 1545). Cataloguing the 'strange lust' of pagan gods provokes the moral 'Woe worth when beasts for filth are deified!' (Poems, 114). This is a fairly traditional stance. Rankins also sees both amorist and Ovidian verse as idolatrous: 'peest with Ouids excrements' and 'edicts' from 'the prowd Paphian queene' which 'force insatiat loue' and 'giue life to them that kill' (Seauen Satyres, 13-14). The animus spills over into an attack on the highminded Christian interpretation of pagan myth. Morality, both Rankins and Kinsayder claim, cannot be constructed out of 'Ouids excrements' -though this is exactly what Kinsayder is doing in trying to prove it. As 'the second English Satyrist', Kinsayder is sensitized to being forever second-rate. Interrogating ' Enuie', imitation and dissimulation, the satires become palimpsests, crowded with allusion and parody, and their targets mere palimpsests of bodies, continually recreated out of the flesh they devour, envy or imitate. The Satyrist's 'imitators of lewd beastilines' are a metamorphic menagerie, but in their linguistic cloaking and 'fantastique sute shapes', these nullities are 'Far worse then Apes' who would 'thinke it foule dishonour to their name, I Their beastly name, to imitate such sin'. The body

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disappears; behind the 'fusten sute I Is clothed a huge nothing' (Poems, 16061). In these echoing 'Halls' we are never sure who is speaking, trying to make his 'name'. These are not political satires, but Inn-jokes, about social and literary identity, in a small world where they meant much the same. For Kinsayder, whose 'most esteemed, and best beloued Selfe' (Poems, 94) is merely a body of words, defamation and plagiary are mortal threats. Timothy (1:9-11) places 'men stealers' between sodomites and dissimulators in his list of 'the ungodlie': 'to murtherers of fathers and mothers, to manslayers, to whoremongers, to buggerers, to men stealers, to liers, to the perjured'. A 'man stealer' was the literal translation of 'plagiarus' .15 Ironically, however, Kinsayder's metamorphic portrayal of character, his 'man-stealing' in several senses, relies heavily on perverting Virgidemiae. Identities are blurred: characters echo Hall, yet each has adopted 'anothers name'. The Satyrical body is disguised or deceptive. Women are 'puppets, painted Images', 'Glowe wormes bright I That soile our soules'; 'a celestial/ Angel, faire refinde', is 'so vizarded', 'so surphuled' that 'Too faces' manifest under her hood. Men, too, have painted themselves into shadows of femininity: lovers and hypocrites are protean '1-J;ermaphrodites'; even Hercules 'Lies streaking brawnie limmes in weakning bed, I Perfum'd, smooth kemb'd, new glas' d, faire surphuled' (Poems, 151 ). Though the Satyrist purging 'this Augean oxstaule from foule sin' declares himself the last remaining exemplar of bodily integrity, his attempt to 'awake impuritie, I And view the vaile drawne from thy villanie' betrays him (Poems, 19): it is the disembodied Satyrist, obsessed with viewing the 'vaile' of flesh, who cannot let impurity slumber and must prod it into activity. Religion, too, is seen in bodily terms. Puritans, such as Stephen Batman, condemned Catholicism as an idolatrous 'apish Religion' and a 'yoke of counterfeited carnality' (Golden Booke, sig. 2v) and St Paul emphasizes the inevitable degeneration of men who, having 'regarded not to knowe God', 'left the natural use of the woman, and burned in their luste towarde another, and man with man wroght filthines' (Geneva Bible, Romans, 1:24-8). Kinsayder connects Catholicism, as a turning away from God's true religion, with idolatry and perversion: its seminaries a 'source of Sodom vilanie', spreading 'monstrous filth' to English colleges where 'frie' are used 'like Phrigian Ganimede' (Poems, 113). Through the self-confuting rhetoric ofNashe, and his exemplar Aretino (who, as pornographer and satirist-blackmailer, had a reputation as an unreliable moralist and hypocrite), 16 the Satyrist confronts his classical patrimony in his contradictory bodily attitudes. Stoicism, the characteristic philosophy of the Romans and the general moral standard of its satirists, 17 stressed common ground with the Cynics; often, as Juvenal (XIII. 122) remarked, differing from them by no more than a shirt. Epictetus saw the Cynic

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Diogenes as an example of perfect wisdom, and the Heavenly Dogge was taken up in the Reformation as an example of practical Stoicism. 18 Despite his proclaimed doggedness- the name probably refers to 'docking the dog's tail or with castrating the dog (with a pun on marstone)' (Ingram, 1987, 40)/ 9 Kinsayder lacks the Cynic's serene disregard for public opinion, and his troubled prurience diametrically opposes Diogenes's calm acceptance of carnal appetite and bodily function. Though Satyrist and philosopher share similarly extreme and cheekily unconventional bodily strategies which rely on dramatic representation rather than logical argument, Kinsayder's bodily disgust seems almost a satirical reversal of what Peter Sloterdijk terms Diogenes's 'dialectic of disinhibition' (1987.103). Through Kinsayder, who admits 'huge errors lurke I In euery corner of my Cynic worke' (Poems, 98), Marston twists the Stoic-Cynic diatribe in an idiosyncratically Sceptical manner to question the pagan philosophy's bodily attitudes and its espousal by contemporary moralists. 20 Though a Christianized Neo-Stoicism had been popularized by Lipsius and Du Vair,21 others rejected Stoicism as a passionless 'stonie philosophie' which turned Man into a 'speaking Stone', 'a motiue statue' (Felltham, Resolves, i. 190-91)?2 Kinsayder interprets the body as either stony or animalistic but, taking no solace in such perceptions, is driven mad by them. His obsession with opinion, his anger, envy, intolerance, physical discomfiture, and prurient bodily disgust clearly comically discredit him as moral exemplar. As a Zen-like example of how not to be, his preferred epithets, 'snarling' and 'barking', turn Cynic to mad dog, discover the psychopath within the philosopher. Though he admires Epictetus 23 and writes a 'Cynicke Satyre' based on Diogenes, Kinsayder is the most unphilosophical of philosophers. Warning against the illusory nature of appearances, he continually mistakes shadow for substance; jeremiads against 'The Worlds Mightie Monarch Good Opinion' merely demonstrate that, by confusing Stoic 'Opinion' (the falling away from Right Reason) with his own reputation, he becomes the victim of both. However, his 'doggedness' is ambiguously 'Diogenicall' in that its wrongheadedness (and wrongbodiedness) paradoxically questions everything. Peter Sloterdijk identifies Cynicism as a 'Philosophy of Cheekiness.' Though many have dismissed it as: a mere game of satyrs, as a half-jovial, half-dirty episode ... In kynismos a kind of argumentation was discovered that, to the present day, respectable thinking does not know how to deal with ... what is it supposed to mean when this philosophisizing town bum answers Plato's subtle theory of eros by masturbating in public? ... Greek kynicism discovers the animal body in the human and its gestures as arguments; it develops a

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For the Greeks, dogs were shameless. Kinsayder's pantomimic cheekiness mocks Diogenes's 'Cynick friction' as 'lewd wit', just as the Satyrist's prurience provokes him to a shameless exhibition of pagan 'shame' in the name of Christian satire (Poems, 112). Ultimately, the dog Kinsayder wishes castrated is himself. His disgusted fascination with this 'carkass, lothsome, foule' (Poems, 155) disembodies his caricatures of carnality through its disintegrative emphasis on physical detail. Though insisting that 'the bodyes scumme all fatally I Intombes the soules most sacred faculty', Kinsayder is obsessed by this 'sinck of filth' (Poems, 135). The 'Cynick Dogge' Diogenes saw no men, only scoundrels and shadows; for Kinsayder, the body is apparitional, not despite, but because of its physicality: 'These are no men but Apparitions, I Ignes fatui, Glowormes, Fictions, I Meteors, Ratts of Nilus, Fantasies, I Colosses, Pictures, Shades, Resemblances' (Poems, 140). Yet his words feverishly conjure up these 'Pictures': the offspring of miscegenation between paganism and Pauline Christianity, the Satyrist echoes St Jerome, caught between classical satirical anger and moral reform, insisting on Mors per Evam, vita per Mariam, yet haunted by the apparitional lure of flesh. Jerome describes how even in the desert, where his 'only companions were scorpions and wild beasts', he often found himself 'surrounded by bands of dancing girls'. Though his face 'was pale with fasting' and 'limbs were cold as ice', his 'mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust kept bubbling up' before him when his 'flesh was good as dead' (Letter XXII, 'Ad Eustochium'). The denunciation of beastliness emphasizes the denunciator's hybrid nature; the Satyr-Satyrist is obsessed with caprine lust. However, though little more than an eye to observe sinful flesh and a tongue with which to lash it, his disembodied omnipresence in a world of chaotic carnality mirrors Man's bestiality: goatish physicality is apparitional, insubstantial as myth; men make beasts of themselves, burying themselves in the flesh of others, only to resurrect as ghosts. Likewise, Kinsayder mocks the insubstantial and duplicitous 'selves' of artful hypocrites, but mirrors their chameleonism. His only existence is self-created and verbal, yet his cast also depends on wordportraits being transformed into the illusion of flesh. 'Character' is phantasm, metamorphosis mere metaphor. Incarnation remains perversely verbal: the more grotesquely physical the bodily representation the less its actual substance. Curiously, Kinsayder begins his literary career not as barking Satyrist, but - almost its opposite - as a slippery Ovidian. The hybrid volume The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image & Certaine Satyres nods at the witty sexual sophistication of Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis while

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appropriating conflicting elements from the continuing tradition of Ovide moralise: particularly the ambiguous sensual hermeneutics of George Chapman's Ouids Banquet of Sence (1595). Chapman had paradoxically concerned himself, not with Metamorphoses, but with the author of the lovepoems, presenting a voyeuristic Ovid watching Corinna bathe as a parable of spiritual awakening through beauty, and an indirect attack on the lascivious strain in the Ovidian tradition. However, the poet falls prey to the spell of sensuality even as he describes it and prurience swamps any philosophical pretensions. Despite his claim that those with 'a radiant, and light-bearing intellect, will say that they can passe through Corynnes Garden without the helpe of a lantern' ('Epistle to Royden', Poems, 50), the reader is manipulated into the position of a voyeur watching another voyeur, Ovid. Through Kinsayder's epyllion, Marston elaborates the strategy and further distances us from the prospect of real flesh: the reader becomes a voyeur watching a second, Kinsayder, who watches a third, Pigmalion, who gazes upon the stony 'Image' of his own desire. Marston then collapses the structure as Kinsayder reveals himself as Satyrist intent on mocking both reader and the poet who needs 'Lanthorne & candle light' to illuminate the 'invisible, all mental spright' of his 'giberidge' (Poems, 160). Kinsayder is clearly compromised by his strategies as much as Chapman: this complex mise-en-abfme is meant to advance the sort of outright Puritan anti-Ovidianism represented by Stephen Batman's The Golden Booke of Leaden Goddes (1577), which warns that the 'filthy puddles' of pagan myth which 'phantastical braynes to themselued forged' can only lead to 'Apostacye, Atheisme, Blasphemy, Idolatry, and Heresie' (sig *2v). Kinsayder continually plays tricks on his readers. As the body's ironic sensual celebrant, he praises Pigmalion, whose desire for his own handiwork turned statue to flesh, yet he fixates upon the sexual possibilities of the statue before it is animated, and his epyllion, unlike Pigmalion's creation, as merely verbal construct, resists real sexual animation. Kinsayder can look, but he cannot touch, much less animate. Observing Pigmalion's congress with his statue, Kinsayder negates the tangibility of others' bodies and his own. As a complicated joke mating Satyre with metamorphic Ovidianism, Pigmalion echoes Thomas Lodge's hybrid volume Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), in which epyllion is hedged around with tongue-in-cheek authorial disclaimers, unreliable narrators, Petrarchan parodies and 'the delectable discourse of the discontented Satyre'. Lodge's narrator, adopting the persona of worldly sophisticate, ponders Scylla's undeserved petrification. His amoral pragmatism not only perverts Alciati, who had symbolized Scylla as Impudentia, or 'Shamelessness' (Emblemata, 1550, 76), but ironically comments on his own hard-heartedness: 'Ah Nimphes thought I, if euerie coy one felt I The like misshappes, their flintie hearts would melt' (Scillae, 27).

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Marston, taking his cue from Lodge, shows the spiritual petrification of his narrator as he gazes upon a statute transformed to flesh - a substance he can never touch or inhabit. The Pigmalion myth had long been subject not only to high-minded moralistic interpretation but also the fantasies of amorists dedicating sonnets to obdurate mistresses. Pigmalion was seen both as the paradigm of the persistent lover overcoming stony indifference and as an example of erotic folly bordering on idolatry. Scylla, as a punishment for her disdain for 'venery', was through the intercession of Venus turned to stone; in Pigmalion, the process is reversed, the metamorphosis being unusually 'upward'. Venus, however, remains as agent and Scylla's disinclination towards the opposite sex is tranferred to a male protagonist. Though Marston winks at the tradition of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's reluctant males, even when metamorphosed, Pigmalion's 'Image' remains forever passive, incapable of transformation into an aggressive female wooer such as Hero or Venus. Her body, whether stone or flesh, remains uncompromised by identity. She is never named, though she bears Pigmalion a son, Paphus: not only synonymous with narcissistic venery in the satyres, but ironically descriptive of the Satyrist himself as 'Cynick Dad' to his offspring (Poems, 112). 'The Argument of the Poem' incongruously combines the abbreviated forms of moralized Ovidian emblem books with an appeal to prurience. Despite a 'chast mind all the beauties in Cyprus could not ensnare', Pigmalion 'was so deeplie enamored on his owne workmanship, that he would oftentimes lay the Image in bedde with him, and fondlie vse such petitions and dalliance, as if it had been a breathing creature' (Poems, 50). Notwithstanding Pigmalion's disdain to yield 'amorous sute to any woman-kinde', Kinsayder eggs his creature on to actual sexual congress, even if the only woman in this masturbatory limbo is a statue (Poems, 52). The poet smiles at 'the foolery I Of some sweet Youths, who seriously protest I That Loue respects not actuall Luxury'. Knowing that the fashionable· Ovid is not moralise, he reworks Ars Amatoria: 'And therefore Ladies, thinke that they nere loue you, I Who doe not vnto more then kissing moue you.' 24 Nonetheless, Kinsayder's blazon to the statue's charms, and applause at Pigmalion's ludicrous seduction betrays him; 'Marke my Pigmalion', he declares, fusing poem ambiguously with 'Image' (Poems, 56). Like some god whose sexual proclivities drive him to miscegenation across the species barrier, .Pigmalion's lust transcends considerations of animation. The statue is the sexual object. By the standards of myth, Pigmalion is no more than usually polymorphously perverse; what is perverse is that the poet praises him as the paradigm of the active seducer, and claims Ovidian sophistication while his masturbatory hero strips naked 'That in the bedde he might haue more delight' (Poems, 58).

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Pigmalion is in love with the product of an imagination which plays tricks upon him: he thinks he sees 'the blood run through the vaine'; 'Then feares he is deceiu'd, and then againe' (Poems, 53). He mistakes the stony shade for the true body, for all is 'seems', all 'in his conceit'. Lacking either a real model or reservoir of natural imagery to draw on, he fails to distinguish between artifice and nature: 'Her breasts, like polish't Iuory appear' unsurprising since they are 'wrought in purest Iuorie' (Poems, 52-3). However, these conceits are not really Pigmalion's but the narrator's. In the dedicatory poem 'To his Mistris', Kinsayder woos a 'wanton Muse' who 'lasciuiously doth sing I Of Sportiue loue', hoping she 'like Promethean sacred fire, I In dead, and dull conceit can life inspire' (Poems, 51). Nonetheless, this ironically sexual 'Saint' remains as lifeless as any Petrarchan 'beauteous Angell', and the poet's unwitting pun on Batman's title reveals her stoniness: she is 'like that rare and rich Elixir stone' which 'Can turne to gold, leaden inuention'. Denied 'sweete blisse', Kinsayder cannot 'gladly write' her 'metamorphosis' (Poems, 51). The poet's 'Mistris' remains leaden: 'all's conceit - but shadow of that blisse' (Poems, 58), while Pigmalion's 'stonie substance of his Image feature, I Was straight transform' d into a liuing creature'. Kinsayder boasts of his 'Mistris all-excelling face' and compares this 'rare and beautious a creature' of 'proudest mortalitie' with Pigmalion's fair 'Image of a Womans feature', but her body is ironically denied by the comparison (Poems, 52). Pigmalion's mistress is literally statuesque, but Kinsayder's, constructed from the empty -words of lapidary amorist convention and the Ovidian afflatus of his 'wanton Muse', discovers the disembodied insubstantiality of both the most marblebreasted Petrarchan idol and the lascivious goddess of 'sportiue loue'. Kinsayder is as insubstantial and fictive as his iconic mistress. The solitary voyeur denies authentic corporeality both to observer and observed, for those he watches are merely figments of his own imagination, shadows of Pigmalion's initial obsession with the stony sensuality of own handiwork. Gazing on 'Loues pauilion', Pigmalion wishes only to 'winke, & winking looke againe, I Both eies & thoughts would gladly there remaine' (Poems, 54); behind him we see Kinsayder gazing on his own production: one voyeur spies upon another who is sexually aroused by stone. In the following satyres, Kinsayder claims the whole thing, including putting his 'Mistres in before', was a joke which 'wantonly displayes I The Salaminian titillations, I Which tickle vp our leud Priapians' (Poems, 65). Kinsayder's existence depends upon the very readers he is so keen to titillate, mock or scourge. His vitality must be constantly re-created through a reputation at the mercy of two sorts of bad readers: both regard him as the very sort of 'leud Priapian' he is attacking, though one denounces, the other praises him for it. He has denied bodily existence to both mistress and himself as an Ovidian, but Kinsayder's

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incarnation as robust Satyrist is equally fictive: a mere literary embodiment of the stylistic tropes hinted at by Hall's 'hairy hide'. Abandoning the jokily voyeuristic Mistress-Muse, Kinsayder invokes the sterner eye of Lynceus, proverbial for his piercing eyesight, to help him search out and see through sin. Rising out of the ashes of a poem he claims purposefully to have made 'suq}assing ill', the Satyrist regards his clear-eyed reincarnation 'as strange a metamorphosis' as any epyllionic transformation. Seeing his own faults clearly, he claims the authority to scourge others, but anger merges with a self-justificatory masochistic fervour emphasizing the body's bestial capacity for pain. Purging 'the snottery of our slimie time', Kinsayder turns 'Popelings discipline' (flagellation) on his own 'not imaculate selfe' (Poems, 108, 72, 66), rather than allow 'the whyps of Epigramatists' to lash him for 'dissembling shifts'. He rails against 'masked showes', yet as chameleon is one of them. The 'changing Proteans' 'tremble at a barking Satyrist' (Poems, 66), yet both are locked into a sadomasochistic contract as the punning algolagnic 'Satyres knottie rod' scourges villains who, as 'gentlemens disport', 'defile the sacred seate of God' in 'brothell pits' (Poems, 107). These bodies are fictive because they both negate nature and are literary fictions: created only to be transformed into beasts, and condemned for it. Like a perverse Calvinist God, Kinsayder predestines his textual bodies to hellish pleasures; forever outside time, they are tortured by sadomasochistic flames which do not purify but eternize suffering. In Skialetheia (1598), Marston's friend, rival and imitator, Everard Guilpin, presents his own satiric muse as prostitute and dominatrix. Other poets, he says punning on Pigmalion, 'are in hogsties housde, I Or else transformd to Goates lasciuiously'; satires and epigrams, however, which call 'a iade, a iade', 'heale with lashing, seare luxuriousnes: I They are Philosophicke true Cantharides I To vanities dead flesh. An Epigrame I Is popish displing, rebell flesh to tame' (Skialetheia, 6061). 'Popish displing' is a dissembling discipline: 'Cantharides' is Spanish Fly, both a rubefacient to gall skin and an aphrodisiac; whipping is penis- rather than penance-directed, aimed at a very literal resurrection of flesh. 'Now Satyre cease to rub our gauled skinnes', Kinsayder exclaims, sensing that his catalogue of 'strange Luxury', 'And new found vse ofVenis venery' (Poems, 76), does not reform, but creates sinners, turning both targets and readers to beasts. Pigmalion-like, the Satyrist, as metamorphic as the Ovidians he attacks, _ has created a 'hogstie' in his own 'Image'. Kinsayder boasts of his self-tranformation ('I that euen now lisp'd like an Amorist I Am turned into a snaphaunce Satyrist'), while denying that, unlike the 'vizarded-bifronted-/anian rout', he can change his 'hew like a Carnelian' (Poems, 72, 67). The 'all-canning wits' he observes are 'Mimick Apes', 'seeming shades', yet 'They are all the same, they seeme in outward show'

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(Poems, 71). Despite his vaunted individuality, the caprine metamorphosist is a punning mirror to 'Yon in capring cloak, a Mimick Ape I That onely striues to seeme an others shape' (Poems, 145). His boast, 'I am my se1fe, so is my poesie' (Poems, 95), decamalizes him as much as the ciphers his verse creates. Textual bodies metamorphose solely in the reader's imagination, animated by metaphorical shifts blurring both species and gender: 'A Goate doth stand before a brothell dore', but the gallant's 'new swept' chin invites imaginative recreation of him as some 'Ganimede'; an 'effeminate sanguine Ganimede I Is but a Beuer, hunted for the bed'. Brutus forcing his wife to take 'All protean forms ... in venery', commands the reader to recreate those forms (Poems, 78, 145, 105). The depiction of illicit sexuality as protean was not uncommon. Jonson's 'Sir Voluptuous Beast', instructs his wife how 'his GANIMEDE mou'd, and how his goate'; she 'her own cucqueane makes, I In varied shapes, which for his lust shee takes' (Jonson, iii. 34). 'Venery' is the primum mobile ofKinsayder's universe: the sun is a 'flame God' 'Glowing with lust' (Poems, 106). In such a light, the body is never what it seems. Like Diogenes demanding to see under the robes of effeminates (Diogenes Laertius, vi. 46), the Satyrist knows 'a codpis' is no indication of 'What sexe they are, since strumpets breeches vse,' and 'such Hermaphrodites I Such Protean shadowes so delude our sights' (Poems, 75). Kinsayder is continually surprised, his psychotic vision the result of unbidden verbal association. The spendthrift Luxurio provokes the proverbial 'A die, a drab, and filthy broking knaues, I Are the worlds wide mouthes, all devouring graues' (Poems, 111); 'drab' forces Kinsayder to caper into a rhapsoidia on sexual degeneration. 'Luxurio' implies 'lasciviousness', so both his father's ruined house and grave are seen in terms of venery, disease, and loss of self ('all comes off, I I haire and all'), giving rise to the grisly image of Luxurio wearing his father's 'halfe-rot finger in his hat' (Poems, 111). The once admonitory, now decomposing finger foreshadows a series of disturbing 'downward' sexual metamorphoses based around the priapic Luscus. Metaphor prepares us for metamorphosis: 'graue' gives rise to 'house'; 'house' conjures up the brothel. Kinsayder imagines not only the bawd within the house, the 'smug wench' attempting to 'quench' her 'sanguine heate' with 'her Monkey, & her instrument I Smooth fram'd at Vitrio', but the brothel of beasts and ghostly automata within the human heart (Poems, 112). The body is bestialized ('Monkeys', 'Veluet cap'd Goates, duch Mares'), objects fetishized, more real than the bodies they usurp. Luxurio's name and premonitory finger survive vestigially in the 'instrument' of 'female luxurie' out of which the priapic but unnatural Luscus appears miraculously to emerge. Puns catch him both leaving flesh and left behind: 'Luscus hath left his female luxurie I I, it left him'; Luscus ('one-eyed') is little more than a penis

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hardened into prosthesis. The name echoes an intermittent rhyming progression of shape-shifters (Ruscus, Tuscus, Fuscus); and anticipates his female counterpart, Lucea, who scorns 'her husbands luke-warme bed' for a' ioulting Coach, with glassie instrument' (Poems, 115). Dildoes mirror Luscus back from both ends of the satire; between the parentheses of two 'glassie instruments', he appears to metamorphose out of a dildo and back into one. The myths of Narcissus and Hermaphroditus, which echo behind almost all Elizabethan epyllia, resonate throughout the satyres; later Muto, whose name means 'penis' (Wharton, 1994, 4) proudly shows his 'new glasse-set face' until he appears to mutate, detumescing into Flaccus (Poems, 137). The body sees only the reflection of its own desire in the bodies of others, and so denies them. Erect, the male body is petrified: a one-eyed prosthesis both self-regarding and self-negating. In Nashe's The Chaise of Valentines, the narrator, initially voyeuristic and ineffectual, is made redundant by a 'Eunuke dilldo, senseless, counterfet': a one-eyed 'blynd-alluring boye' 'in thick congealed glasse', which 'usurps in bed and bowre' (Works, iii. 412). For Kinsayder, there is no communion: flesh loves only itself, sees only itself, has sex only with itself. The 'glassie instrument' is both narcis.sistic mirror for self-pleasuring and a stony apparitional transparency for Kinsayder to see through. Marston returns obliquely to the idea in Antonio and Mel/ida, where the narcissistic courtiers Castilio and Balurdo are mirrored by their pages Catzo (penis) and Dildo, who enters with 'a looking-glasse in one hand' for the 'setting of Faces' (Plays, i.37-8). In the epyllion, a masturbatory object becomes flesh; in the satyres flesh becomes dildo. The former metamorphosis is literal, the latter figurative, but the metaphorical world of the satyres not only mirrors the metamorphic world of the epyllion, but achieves an hallucinatory tangibility denied it. Forced by 'his old Cynick Dad', Paphus, to 'forsake his Pickhatch drab', Kinsayder asks 'what peece of lustfull flesh I Hath Luscus left, his Priape to redresse?' to answer: 'his Ganimede, I His perfum'd shee-goate'; 'At Hogsdon now his monstrous lust he feasts, I For there he keepes a baudy-house of beasts' (Poems, 112). Despite pleas that Paphus should 'let Luscus haue his Curtezan, I Or we shall haue a monster of a man', the 'old Cynick Dad' incarcerates his son, who succumbs to 'the Cynick friction'. But it is Kinsayder, the real 'Cynick Dad' (like Paphus, the Satyrist is the 'offspring' of Pigmalions Image), who has fathered Luscus, populated the 'Hogsdon' with beasts only to cancel their bodies, and emprisoned Luscus in the onanistic world ofDiogenes's 'lewd wit.' Created in his 'Image', these insubstantial creatures are ironic mirrors to Kinsayder's proud boast that his 'spirit is not huft vp with fatte fume' (Poems, 95). Any moral is undercut, however, when Marston sloughs the Satyrist's hairy hide to reveal himself as joker: 'Here ends my rage, though angry brow was bent, I Yet haue I sung in sporting merriment' (Poems, 173-4).

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Kinsayder consigns himself to 'euerlasting Obliuion', a bodiless limbo where his buried reputation can only be dug up by some 'hound'. Marston identifying himself as Theriomastix (Beast-whipper), asks 'each man to leaue enquiring who I am and learne to know himselfe' while, as verse satirist, he takes 'a solemne congee of this fusty world' (Poems, 176). He has scourged them all: Satyrists, Ovidians, Mythographers, Amorists, Puritans, Neo-Stoics; bodyworshippers and body-haters; stony sensualists and itchy-fleshed flagellants, but his whip has been yielded in the service of wit, not morality. Satyre's apparitional body has been a sophisticated textual joke, literary rather than moral criticism, intended to mock and entertain the chameleon heart of 'the Noblest Nourceries of Humanity and Liberty, in the Kingdome: the Innes of Court' (Jonson, iii, 421). Kinsayder's disembodiment literalizes his envious alienation from the Ovidian festival of wit. As outsider, moralist and literalist, he is the irritant turned symbolic figure of fun for mercurial young Wits intent on verbal self-creation. Beaumont joked his epyllion Salmacis and Hermaphroditus was 'so liuely writ' that the reader would 'Tume halfe-mayde with reading it'; Kinsayder takes the possibility 'literally'. While the 'second English Satyrist' directly questions second-hand Petrarchan poses already unfashionable in the Inns, his chameleonism indirectly interrogates modishness itself: the jagged obscurity of fashionably angry Satyre is as rhetorical as the Euphuistic style of a previous generation. The outsider mocks the sincerity of Juvenalian anger and implies that its adoption by Inn-siders is a factitious pose. The Satyres are 'sporting merriment', a Revels revue staged in the Season of Misrule. Their carnality is carnivalesque: both social hygiene and a celebration of mutuality; all belong to the same versatile body of 'all-canning wits' which proudly adopts the Chameleon Muse as a badge of omnicompetence. All belong except Kinsayder himself, the ghost at the feast whose envious gaze serves to remind the Wits of their essential unity in the playful communion of the word.

14

Travellers' Tails: Bodily Fictions in Early Modem Narratives of Cultural Difference Susan Wiseman I

This essay argues that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a particular textual effect of perception occurs in colonial discourse. The aim is to trace how the textual organization of mythic and iconic categories works to give the reader double, and contradictory pleasures. The essay analyses the production of a sceptical circuit of belief and unbelief in narratives and draws out the implications for reading practices. It traces this particular effect- a kind of seeing double- in fictional narratives and travel narratives spanning roughly 1660-1725 including Behn's Oroonoko, Struys's narrative of Formosa, and Mary Davys's The Merry Wanderer. Focusing on additions to the body, the essay discusses ideologies and perceptions which cause contradictions, even crises, in the meaning of what is seen; in the early modem period we might think about Galenic versus Vesalian anatomists who 'saw' the jumbled contents of the human body as resolving themselves into rather different shapes and logics. In such cases to say that the viewers, who recorded the event, were in any simple sense lying does not adequately explain the mechanisms or significance of the process. What is at issue is the power of narration to generate an image, an imagining. The texts examined here all offer overdetermined stories of the body. They are linked by their use of a particularly rich variety of form of narrative, neither (in the terms employed by critics from Watt to Lovell) 'realist' nor fantasy, but often offering coexistent within themselves the forensic, fantasy and the marvellous. 1 How does the organization of mythic and iconic categories affect perception and thereby offer the reader particular pleasures and positions? As Mary Louise Pratt and others have argued, the circumstances of each particular encounter are radically different and local; however, the tropes of seventeenthand eighteenth-century colonial discourse do share a certain transferability (Pratt, 1992). When Henry Louis Gates argues that 'It takes little reflection ...

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to recognize that these pseudoscientific categories of [race] are themselves figures. Who has seen a black or red person, a white, yellow or brown?' in literal terms he is obviously right (1985, 2-19, 6). But seeing and perception cannot be readily disentangled or distinguished and the effect of mythic perception is to make such things, indeed, widely visible. A model like this with its implicit recourse to false consciousness needs to be modified by analysis of the mechanisms of mythic perception. The effect of forensichallucinatory representation in writing is to make these things visible; to make or allow the reader to 'see green men', and to have the specific reading pleasures generated and problematically preserved for the colonial reader (for want of a better term) by this. In specific ways mythic representation generates kinds of perception, starting from the assumption that recourse to common sense in terms of what is 'seen' cannot work in relation to the reading process: exceptions generate a kind of reading in which the reader, both 'believing' and not believing, entertains two contradictory ideas at once. In analysing such paradoxes the idea of disavowal is helpful in suggesting the way in which such hallucinations worked in colonial travel narratives or narratives of difference. II

The body of the slave and its potential to be 'perfect' troubled the Greek political philosophy which was so signally rediscovered in the Renaissance. In the Politics Aristotle poses the problem of mental and physical perfection in relation to the physique of the slave: suppose there were men whose bodily physique showed the same superiority as is shown by the statues of gods, then all would agree that the rest of mankind would deserve to be their slaves. And if this is true in relation to physical superiority, the distinction would be even more justly made in respect of superiority of soul; but it is much more difficult to see beauty in a soul than in a body. It is clear that by nature some are free, others slaves. (1254b32, p. 69)

The visibility of the body makes it the easiest way of recognizing superiority. But because Aristotle is attempting to locate slavery as part of a system of natural justice, inevitably the potential perfection of a slave's body and mind tends to reverse the cultural order which might otherwise have been situated firmly in nature. He explains that some people have resolved it by arguing: One cannot use the term 'slave' properly of one who is undeserving of being a slave; otherwise we should find among slaves and descendants of slaves even men of the noblest birth, should any of them be captured and sold. For this reason they will not apply the term slave to such people but

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use it only for non-Greeks. But in doing so they are really seeking to define the slave by nature ... (and some) allow nobility of birth of nonGreeks to be valid only in non-Greek lands. This involves making two grades of free status and noble birth, one absolute, the other conditional. (Ibid., 1255a21, p. 72)

Slavery can only be produced as natural by the introduction of additional, acknowledgedly cultural, categories and Aristotle discusses systems of thought which maintain 'natural' slavery by figuring difference in 'naturally' hierarchized groups - an argument in which the bodies and minds of nonGreeks are inferior. Thus, the invention of the slave body as antithetical to the godlike Greek body is hard to maintain. As Aristotle's qualification hints, this solution remains unstable because it places excessive emphasis on the posited natural impossibility of a 'non-Greek' having a body like a Greek god. Leaping forward to different circumstances, not only was this coding known to the early modem world but it was both reinforced and changed by conceptions of difference emerging during the processes of early modem Christian colonization. These, as Margaret Hodgen notes, were in the sixteenth century extrapolated from biblical history to construct relations with other cultures in terms of the twin poles of similarity and difference, potentially Christian and other. 2 Such figures of difference, concentrated on the body and particularly on the organs of generation, are found throughout the period from John Bulwer's Anthropometamorphosis to de Foigny's discovery of the Antipodes as peopled by hermaphrodites (1693). We find the female narrator of the paradoxically-entitled Oroonoko or the Royal Slave registering the problem of the perfect body of the slave in figures of difference and similarity but within one body: He had nothing of Barbarity in his Nature, but in all Points address'd himself, as if his Education had been in some European Court. He was pretty tall, but of a Shape the most exact that can be fansy'd: The most famous Statuary cou'd not form the Figure of a Man more admirably turn'd from Head to Foot. His Face was not of that brown rusty Black which most of that Nation are, but a perfect Ebony, or polish'd Jett. His Eyes were the most awful that cou'd be seen, and very piercing; the White of 'em being like Snow, as were his Teeth. His Nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His Mouth, the finest shap'd that cou'd be seen; far from those great tum'd Lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole Proportion and Air of his Face was so noble, and exactly form'd, that bating his Colour, there cou'd be nothing in Nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome (III, 62). 3

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It is more than unlikely, of course, that Behn was ,deliberately re-posing the problem, but her narrative is disturbed (and fascinated) by precisely the sort of body that had troubled Aristotle - the beautiful male slave, like a Greek god as seen in statuary. Where Aristotle mentions that one solution is to make a rigid distinction between Greek and non-Greek this text sets up the rule and the exception in one being, giving th'e the description ofOroonoko's body the logic of a counter-counter-blazon: He had nothing of Barbarity in his Nature, His Face was not of that brown rusty Black which most of that Nation are His Nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His Mouth, the finest shap'd that cou'd be seen; far from those great tum'd Lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. (62)

A dual effect of reading is set up here, in which different and similar are contradictorily and comparatively present in one image. Even as the text tells us that Oroonoko is not African, it shows him to us initially as precisely that, in an effect of reading which makes us 'see' the thing which is not. Thus, it seems, the text's underlying assumption is that the initial image for the reader would be that of difference- that Oroonoko would 'look' African rather than Greek- and it is this image which is called up by the text in order to be painted over, made as near 'perfect' as possible. Thus the process of the description of Oroonoko first assumes that as readers expecting an African we ' see' the primary image of binary difference - the caricatured African face. Then by a comparative discourse, as in the condensations and displacements of dreamwork, the face of Oroonoko the prince ('royal') is superimposed on the negro slave face. Even as he becomes the exception, this very creation of Oroonoko from the physiognomic expectations that the text and the reader have of an African face bears witness to the process whereby, in Sander Gilman's words, '[s]pecific individual realities are .. . given mythic extension through association with the qualities of a class. These realities manifest as icons into which the individual has been placed' (1985, 223). Gilman calls attention to the workings of mythic perception which generates a doubleness of vision whereby a face-to-face encounter is inevitably in relation to, or overlaid by, an iconic category of perception. Mythic expectations organized around contrasts _ understood as opposites make two contrasting ideas available simultaneously. This is the process we can see at work in the description of Oroonoko as an atypical African - even as he breaks the rule of the iconic African face, the evidence of his existence reinforces that rule, and the dual identity remains traceable throughout the narrative in his dual naming - once as Oroonoko the prince (but the African prince), and secondly as Caesar the slave (but the

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Roman slave). He is compared to a mythic figure which the reader can see altogether more clearly than him, and which signifies difference. This is one reason why it is problematic to read Oroonoko, as many critics have done, as an abolitionist text. The superimposition of twin but contradictory figures in one in Oroonoko make him in a sense his own double; as an opposition he cancels himself. And the narrative ultimately produces him as dismembered, removing the features which signify twice, or were troubling, to produce him as different. His specific exceptionality, existing in the paradox of his royal qualities versus his slave status (both signified, contradictorily, upon his body by the narrator) is accentuated by a female narrator who offers our access to Oroonoko and who returns again and again to the strength of Oroonoko's body and his mental and physical prowess. Ultimately, in the verisimilar terms which this narrator disingenuously insists on, his royal nature causes him to rebel, an act which leads to him to be condemned to death. 4 The narrator is unable to intervene because at this point she is actually out of town - though this does not stop her from giving us a particularly vivid description of Oroonoko's castration, disfiguration and death. Oroonoko is tied to a stake to be killed: He had learn'd to take Tobaco; and when he was assur'd he should Dye, he desir' d they would give him a Pipe in his Mouth, ready Lighted; which they did: and the Executioner came, and first cut off his Members, and threw them into the Fire; after that, with an ill-favour'd Knife, they cut his Ears and his Nose, and burn'd them; he still Smoak'd on, as if nothing had touch'd him; then they hack'd off one of his Arms, and still he bore up, and held his Pipe; but at the cutting off of the other Arm, his Head Sunk, and his Pipe drop'd and he gave up the Ghost, without a Groan or a Reproach. . .. They cut Caesar in Quarters, and sent them to several of the chief Plantations: (118)

The first description centred on Oroonoko's face, and here again we first encounter his face firmly placed in relation to culture by the extraordinary addition of the pipe of tobacco. In the 1650s, when the story is set, tobacco was not yet a large export from Surinam, though all contemporary catalogues mention its cultivation (Lorimer, 1992; Williamson, 1923; Warren, 1667, 2-24; Earl of Berkshire, 1632, 15). However, it is particularly suited to colonial doubleness because, having been taken from native societies in the Americas, it then becomes that product which slave labour cultivated for Europe and therefore an iconic sign of European 'culture', civilization, though also an indexical sign of slavery. Thus Oroonoko/Caesar's European habits locate him in a cultural similarity to those who are burning him. But the shift in the narration of his execution is immediately from his European habit to the order

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of his execution, which focuses on the dangerous areas in which he is both other and similar, beginning with that object of colonists' fear and fascinationthe genitals - and progressing through those very features which were presented to us as marks of his exceptional quality - his nose, face and beautiful torso. At the level of verisimilar narrative, this violence is attributed to colonial governors who have managed to contain his rebellion. However, in terms of the logic of the text's own desire circulating around Oroonoko's body, it theatricalizes the destruction of the problematically undifferentiated body and, putting the pipe in the mouth of a slave whose body is subject to his captors, it reorganizes Oroonoko/Caesar's relation to culture so that the European culture - pipe - is once again external to him rather than him being a condensation of African and European. For the reader, the logic of the burning returns his body to difference as ordered by the focus of the knife on those places which endanger stable difference or stable similarity in Oroonoko/Caesar. The close intertwining of contradictory opposites in the slave and royal status of the hero are resolved only by the violent disruption of the perfect body, taken apart in relation. to the assumptions already articulated in the first description of Oroonoko. But as Oroonoko is returned to a naked savagery, rendered very monstrously different by the knife, in the dismemberment, the reader is also offered an escape from, or resolution of, Oroonoko's contradictory doubleness. In his 'savaging', the twin poles of 'savagery' and civilization are violently reinstated and the problematic double image is tom apart.

III If the vision of the body of Oroonoko involves a process of superimposition - a condensation and displacement like that of the dream-work, which is then undone in an orgy of narrative violence - a more extraordinary envisioning of the bodies of strangers is found in the tailed figure. While Oronooko's body was both similar and different, narratives of discovery in wild places are explicitly in search of difference and some of these narratives figure this difference by 'discovering' and presenting to the reader men and women with tails. This tailed figure,' then, involves both a transgression of the border between the human and the animal, and a perception of what is seen or imagined as simultaneously natural and marvellous. Although in the eighteenth century Lord Monboddo believed modem civilization to be sorely impoverished by the lack of contemporary tails, he was in a minority (Monboddo, 1768; Tyson, 1699). They were more usually seen as punishments. For example, men of Kent were considered to have tails because they pulled the tail from Thomas a Becket's horse. But people- more usually

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men - with tails begin at some distance from home. Dr Johnson, who did not believe they existed found them in the highlands, commenting that the Laird of Col 'is a complete islander ... if any man has a tail, it is Col' (see BaringGould, 1875, 151; Johnson and Boswell, Journey 363, see also 179, 219; Cloyd, 1972). A nineteenth-century Devonian writing on the subject locates them in Cornwall, confessing in helpfully Freudian language, 'I looked upon those who dwelt across the Tamar as "uncanny", as being scarcely to be classed with Christian people' (Baring-Gould, 1875, 145). Unconsciously the Devonian rediscovers the Renaissance formulation of difference versus similarity in terms of place in Bible narrative and brings in that doubleness which Freud finds in the uncanny as both different and secretly familiar. But what particular ideological work is undertaken by these punishments, occurrences at borders? The seventeenth-century perception of physical difference as monstrous and fascinating in its uncanny echo of the proper body is suggested in de Foigny's A New Discovery of Terra Australis Incognita (1693) in which a European discovers an Australia peopled not by men with tails but by hermaphrodites. These are described in tremendous detail, though in all the thirty years he lived with them the narrator 'could never discover how Generation work was performed amongst them'. In conversation with the Australian, he attempts to summarize European views of the body, explaining: 'I answer'd him, that Reason taught us a Being was perfect when it wanted nothing that that Constituted its Nature, and that therefore to add to it what good things another possesst, would not render it more perfect, but rather make it Monstrous' (67). However, by the late seventeenth century a radical scepticism had entered the minds of readers about travellers' tales (generated by both the prospectus and the more fantastic literature) and this, in combination with the properties of difference annexed to the native body by the tail, are both suggested in Jan Struys's account of travels, translated into English in 1684 as The Voyages and Travels of John Struys. When he comes to Formosa, 'a very fruitfull Island, but lies untill'd; the inhabitants being for the most part a lazy people', he encounters not only strange flora, fauna and animals called devils, but also a man with a tail: Their men are mostly well bodied and lusty, especially those in the Valleys, and Champane Country ... Their Women are but short in Comparison of the Men, yet are staring beauties; having a Full face, great Eies, a flat Nose, long ears with Breasts hanging down like a stitch of Bacon, and would have handsome beards too, if they did not pull up the hair by the roots ... Finally, I hold it uncertain whether this Island has had the name Formosa, seriously from the Land it's self, or Ironically from the Monstrous People that Inhabit it.

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SUSAN WISEMAN During the time that I was at Formosa, I heard often of Men with Tails: to which I never gave much heed, looking upon it as fabulous. Yet I will assure the Reader by alllawfull asservations, that I found it truth. For it happened that a Formosan of the South-Countrey was apprehended for an inhuman Murther, comitted upon a Clergy man. After the matter was examined and the Party pronounced guilty, he recieved Sentence to be burned. The day of Execution being come; the Murtherer was brought forth, and tied to a pale; As soon as his cloathes were stript off we saw his Tail, and learned from him, that all, or most, of the South Inhabitants had Tails. But as to the certainty of this I cannot say much, for that, not understanding his Dialect, they might be mistaken; only of this I solemnly aver that I am an eye-witness to it, and would be loath, to impose it upon any man's beleefifit were not truly so. (57)

The description of the women, echoing Protestant representations of Lust with dog-like ears and long breasts, prepares the way for fuller monstrosity, their masculine hairiness prefiguring the greater outrage of the tail. The tailed one, as usual, comes from a different part of the country (Bucher, 1981, 75). He is associated with criminality - the murder of a clergyman - and described as 'inhuman'. Unlike Oroonoko, he is presented as having no claim to similarity, but like Oroonoko, he is to be burnt for rebellion against the codes of his judges who have passed legal sentence on him. Thus the tail does not appear on any native body but on one involved in active rebellion against the codes of those who rule. Where Aristotle acknowledged that the body was problematic as a site for distinguishing between slaves and nobles, the attribution of a tail both signals the difficulty of distinguishing categories abjected from the human-like this native murdererand solves that problem. A tail acts as a sign of radical difference, and is to that extent reassuring. Yet its very existence points back to the anxiety of similarity which its emergence works to dispel. The tail suggests both animality and humanness and returns us to the earlier point, made in relation to Oroonoko, about seeing twice and hallucination. A model which says that Struys was engaged in deliberate lying (though that is, obviously, part ofwhat is happening) fails both to explain why the Europeans saw the native body as monstrous in this specific way, or to examine the way in which the possibility of 'believing in' this narration is placed for the reader. What do such hallucinatory textual phenomena signify? How do they work? Can they be said to imply - even reveal - certain psychic structuring of the reading subject (or between the narration and the reading subject) in narratives of difference under the sign of travel? The theory of drives offers a way of thinking about the appearance of tails. Freudian theory, for example, understands drives as aspects of psychic energy, as: 'capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge'

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(Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988, 121). Obviously, a tail is a wonderful figure for such a displacement, appearing as both a continuation of the spine I drive and an increase - literally an addition. The location of the tail, close to but not precisely at the site of the genitals, also suggests an invitation for the reader to see it in relation to the 'lower' drives- sexual and other bodily desires- and as pointing back towards them. The tail's location suggests the containment of difference and its continued maintenance, and as readers we are invited to read it as an embodiment of anxiety about the other. Thus tails embody or symptomatize the anxiety around similarity and dissimilarity so vividly dramatized in Oroonoko. If we, as readers, have faith in the narration, there is never any doubt that the native is different - both human and inhuman, natural and marvellous - because, after all, he has a tail. Sander Gilman has argued cogently that 'the presence of exaggerated buttocks points to the other, hidden sexual signs, both physical and temperamental, of the black female' (1985, 238). Gilman writes with regard to nineteenth-century European perception of black females where anatomical accuracy underpinning a mythic image assumed an importance hardly present in the early modem period. Nevertheless, Gilman's formulation is suggestive of how to trace the functioning of the tail in the seventeenth century travel narrative as signalling - both frighteningly and reassuringly - a 'native' designated as criminal. The tail, a useless, even ludic, addition to the body, nevertheless acts like a rudder, steering our interpretations, and supplies for the 'wild' body evidence of difference expressed as criminality. Struys's narrator insists on the veracity of his account, claiming to be 'an eye-witness'. Such insistence that the tail be grounded in the natural rather than the marvellous invites us to trace the enmeshing of the forensic and the fantastical. Arguably, emphasis on veracity incites doubt, or reminds the reader of the possibility of a sceptical response- and, furthermore, calls the reader's attention to the fact that the maintenance or removal of the tail is a process with implications for him- or herself. In telling it to us as the truth, the description does generate a truth of narrative representation - the writing makes for us a man with a tail. But, at the same time, the narrative anticipates a sceptical response. It offers a contradictory and simultaneous reading position in which we 'see' the tail- reassuringly presenting difference in a kind of hallucination - and we are also invited by the protestations of veracity to be sceptical about the existence of a monstrous appendage. Freud uses the term 'disavowal' to refer to a relation to the world which simultaneously accepts and denies actuality (his starting place being the discovery that the little girl has no penis). In relation to fetishism, Freud has argued for a complexity of response whereby the subject holds two contradictory positions at the same time: firstly, disavowal in relation to sexual difference, and secondly - in the very act of providing a substitute - the

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accepting of sexual difference predicated on the absence of the penis. In disavowal - which leads to the holding of contradictory positions simultaneously - the refusal to acknowledge is inextricably bound up with the acknowledgement of the very fact which is denied: the production of a substitute is produced precisely by the recognition of that fact. I would suggest that a similar kind of doubling ot holding of contradictory positions happens in this text. On the one hand it insists - potentially traumatically for any reader that took it absolutely- that this Formosan criminal had a tail. However, at the same time it insists on the possibility of the reader's having an incredulous response, and even invites it. This creates the effect reading in mythic categories: the Formosan is conjured up with a tail but this effect of radical and reassuring dissimilarity is entwined with a reading which, in being sceptical of difference materialized in the monstrous, tends also, paradoxically, to acknowledge similarity. If tails perform a generalized function of permitting the reader to maintain simultaneously incompatible positions in relation to the potential Greek-godlike similarity of the native masculine body, then women with tails further complicate the dynamic of similarity and difference. As Bernadette Bucher has noted, the image of nature uncorrected by culture and degenerated into wholly fallen nature is imaged by de Bry's drawings of the New World as 'old women, who lick their fingers dripping with juices ofhuman flesh' (1981, 115). Baring-Gould in his essay 'Tailed Men' (1875) gives contrasting reports about women with tails and concludes his survey with an account from the 1650s of an unsaleable tailed female slave, a Niam Niam, reporting that the abhorrence with which she was regarded was not attributed to her tail, but to the partiality, which she was unable to conceal, for human flesh ... They live in a state of complete nudity, and seek only to satisfy their brute appetites. There is among them no regard for morality, incest and adultery being common . . . It is difficult to tame them altogether; their instinct impelling them constantly to seek for human flesh ... (158-9)

In the case of this woman with a tail, it is associated not only with 'murder and rebellion (as with the Formosan) but with the disruption of all the most vital aspects of the nature-culture divide as signalled primarily by incest and cannibalism. 5 The tail, not the source of 'disgust', is the sign of the usurpations of the functions of culture- cooking, sexual relations outside the family- by a female who bears also an indexical sign of masculinity: the woman's tail points to a highly problematic confounding of nature and culture in the Baconian sense ofthe monstrous (as something in which the proper flow ofthe forces of nature have been impeded and misdirected) in her possession of a displaced proto-penis. In attributing a tail to a woman the text does not immediately

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contain the anxiety about similarity versus difference by locating it in a tail, but, because it is attributed to a woman, it sets off a further, or slightly different, dynamic of anxiety and reassurance. Here, the woman acquires something analogous to a penis, but which, ultimately, is not. The tail points to the monstrous possibility of female acquisition of the pe!J.iS, and also dispels any fear that she has one, by giving her a tail. The tail, then, for a woman can in this case be read as offering two narratives. First, such an addition suggests the potential to acquire masculinity; second, that possibility is foreclosed - she acquires not a penis but a tail: the tail exists instead. Thus the tailed woman produces what could be called a double circuit of anxiety in which fear about the possibility of establishing true difference produces the tail, but that in tum points to the penis. Thus the woman with the tail is designated as doubly monstrous, once in her (unfulfilled) potential to usurp male perfection, second in her monstrous acquisition of a parody of that perfection. However, even as the double movement of anxiety makes the woman doubly bad, the disavowal effect of belief and non-belief is maintained in the framing of the narrativ~ as a story 'told-to'. IV Where the description of Oroonoko figured similarity as imposed on difference, the texts which attribute tails to native bodies do so as reassuring · signs which hold in place the difference of the native. Yet at the same time they suggest, underlyingly, a problem of similarity. And as I have suggested, the significance of the tail is differentiated on gender lines with the female possessor of the tail, at least in the examples I have found, not precisely rebelling as in the murder of a clergyman ('inhuman' as we are told this act is), but representing in herself a failure to enter into culture or to separate nature and culture. In the penultimate section of this essay I want to bring together the drama of distinction and differentiation in relation to the native body as it was perceived by an early eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish writer, Mary Davys. Davys's narrative of interlinked tales, The Merry Wanderer, begins with a discursive reworking of the idea of the tail: When I had made a Stride from Ringsend to Ho/lyhead in Wales .. . and while we were at Supper in a very good Inn, we heard a great Noise, and the People very merry: at last one of the Maids came grinning in, and told us there was a Man without, who heard there was some of the wild Irish there, and offer' d her a Shilling to help him to the sight, for he had never seen any of them in his Life. She happening to have a little more Wit than he, came in with the Jest, to see how far we would encourage it; for my part, I was mightily pleas'd with the fancy, and bid the Wench earn the Shilling, and bring him in. Now, said I to my Company, does this Fellow Fancy we have Horns and Hoofs, and imagine Humanity alters as oft as

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SUSAN WISEMAN his own dull Fancy? Pray let us humour his opinion, and see how far it will go. The rest consented, and the Man (half afraid to come near the Monsters) enter'd with Eyes staring, and Ears and Mouth wide open, big with Expectation of seeing and hearing something very extraordinary. Come Friend, said I, you have, I hear, a mind to see some of the wild Irish. Yes, Forsooth, said he, an yo pleasen, but pray yo where are they? Why, said I, I am one of them. Noa, noa, said he, yo looken laik one of us; but those Foke, that I mean, are Foke wi' long Tails, that have no Clothes on, but are cover' d laik my brown Caw a whom with their own Hair. Come, said I, sit you down, and I'll tell you all; when I was three Years old I was just such a thing as you speak of, and going one day a little farther than I should have done, I was catch'd in a Net with some other Vermin, which the English had spread on purpose for us; and when they had me, they cut off my Tail, and scalded me like a Pig till all my Hair came off; and ever since I have been such another as you. Well, Forsooth, said he, yo tellen me Wonders, but pray yo, cou'd yo speak? Speak, said I, no I could only make a gasping inarticulate Noise, as the rest of my Fellow-Beasts did, and went upon my Hands as well as Feet, in imitation of them; but for any other Knowledge, I had it not till I got into English hands. Well, said poor Hodge, yo may bless the Day that ever yo met with that same Net: By'r Lady, I have often heard of the wild Irish but never saw any of 'em before.... Could you not let a Body see the Mark of that same Tail of yours, where it was cutten off? No, Friend, said I, that may not be so very decent; I find you are a Man of much Curiosity, but must beg you would take my Word for once without Ocular Demonstration (Vol. 1, 162)

This is an early anecdote in her book and among the rare ones in which she is reported as generating and taking part in the actual incident reported. The reader is positioned in the opening paragraph of the book as one who may dislike a book by an Irish writer on that ground alone. The ensuing story works in several different ways to infiltrate and destabilize the functioning of the tail. The narrator is female and of a much higher social standing than the ignorant 'Hodge', and she uses this contrasting status to change the significance of the tale of tails for the reader. To Hodge, she claims that she did have a tail until her third year- entering for him (though not for the reader) the myth of the tail-growing Irish. The text also cleverly points to the occlusion of sexual anxiety and curiosity about the native body given safe haven in the displacement on to the tail - a desire and occlusion specifically exposed when he asks, 'Could you not let a Body see the Mark of that same Tail of yours, where it was cutten off?' and she calls attention to the displacement by reintroducing the hidden question of sexual voyeurism - 'No, Friend, said I, that may not be so very decent; I find you are a Man of much Curiosity'. The narrator can be seen as working to undo mythic perception in the way the passage foregrounds the intense relationship between disgust and

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fascination in 'curiosity' (see also Smith, 1992, 4). Further, the sequence of inversions and substitutions in terms of cultural difference and gender serve to bring home the problem of the tail to its 'domestic' source. The narrator's tale to Hodge of how she became human mimics a story of the journey from degenerate nature into culture and language. The reader knows that the narrator is lying when she claims to have had the tail, but even as she takes control of the narrative she produces for Hodge she also takes control of the reader's position in relation to what is told. Obviously, the position offered to the reader here reverses that found in the Formosan story of tails. Here we know that the narrator is similar to us, Hodge's desire for tails is attributed to his incapacities in language and understanding (and his implied sexual indecency): he effectively fills the position occupied in the other narratives by the degenerate native/tailed man. Thus, the two positions of belief and disbelief in the native's similiarity to 'us' the reader (worked out in the superimposition of native/ideal images in Oroonoko and the narrator's insistence versus 'seeing' the freak in the story of the Formosan) are here radically split and hierarchized as 'truth' and 'fantasy'. Precisely the dual position of belief and disbelief, which was invited by the other narratives discussed, is addressed and reworked. This narrator's negotiations around the tail are extremely self-conscious interventions in the comforting position of disavowal constructed for the European reader of the tail in literature and travel narrative. In conjuring up the mythic-iconic image of the body as reassuringly monstrously different even as it is secretly familiar, the narrator mimics this position, but in attributing it to the labouring class fool Hodge she denies 'us' the reader access to it and positions us as acknowledging the real-similarity. She begins to take apart the structures of assumption supporting the tails not as narrative effects, but as part of a specific discourse of cultural difference and strangeness.

v To return to my original question, how can we understand the way travel writings (for want of a better term) superimpose iconic and mythic categories on the body and even give them tails? This cannot be answered in terms of individual producers of narratives, but in terms of discourses of travel and difference in the early modem period where distant places - both East and West Indies - were made productive in terms of both economics and exoticism. Thus, the 'real life' figures incorporated in Behn's fiction, Oroonoko, made Surinam productive for themselves in terms of both money and exotic values one of these figures had his agent send him stuff to furnish a closet.6 The circuit of disavowal in relation to native bodies and tails alternately reinforces exoticism and undermines it. Mary Davys's analysis of the 'wild Irish' provides one combing out of the tail by her ironic taking up the position of the

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tailed wild creature, de-tailed by being brought into the empire of the English.

It is clear from The Merry Wanderer that the work done by the tail to hold in

place the distinction between self and other was recognizable as mythic and that the sceptical reading, or the reading which held together contradictory positions, was able to become a complete demystification. This demystification, however, seems to be the result of reading positions and patterns of identification rather an effect of enlightenment. For, elsewhere, the tail is maintained. For Monboddo, the tail it is still 'seen' but its value is reversed. When he produced the first volume of his Origin and Progress of Language (Edinburgh, 1773), reviewers focused with horror on his arguments that culture could alter the body (arguments already set out in detail in An Account of a Savage Girl) but derided his arguments about men with tails like cats (177392; 1768, vi, vii, ix-xvii). The functions men with tails perform in Monboddo's narrative are significantly different from those in the earlier examples, but the Swedish narrative that the examples come from was published in 1647. Monboddo reports a description of a naval landing party in search of their comrades: when they landed, the men 'Yith the tails came about them in great numbers; but by firing their cannon they chased them away: but found only the bones of their companions, who had been devoured by the savages; and the boat in which they had landed they found taken to pieces, and the iron out of it carried away (1773-92, I, 236). The description combines (seen but unseen) cannibal consumption, a signifier of cultural difference and depravity especially, as suggested earlier, in the company of a tail. But Monboddo takes up the interest of these apparently different creatures in 'civilized' objects; their interest in the metal, for him, indicates that these tailed creatures are not so far, after all, from 'civilized' society. It was this sense of the closeness of the human and the inhuman, and the potential of one to be shaped by experience into the other which marks off Monboddo's interest in tails from the earlier circuits of disavowal and which suggests some of the shifts in perception around Enlightenment attitudes to reason and imagination. The critics of Monboddo's book ridiculed his obsession with tailed men, but were enraged by the idea that orang-utans or other animals might develop into humans. From being an indication of the way truth is bound to fantasy in narratives that work to produce difference, at the Enlightenment the tail becomes, for them a kind of dirty joke (which was deployed in relation to Monboddo's own proposals of marriage in later life). However, as Monboddo's account of tails indicates, the fear that difference might be cultural rather than natural- remains active. The Enlightenment brings us no closer to Levinas's sense that '[t]he other person as he comes before him in a face to face encounter is not an alter ego, another self with different properties and accidents, but in all essential respects like me'

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(1969, 13). Rather, it found different hallucinations, including those of race, to underwrite desired distinctions.

Notes 1. Introduction 1 "'In what chapter of this bosom?": Reading Shakespeare's Bodies' in Hawkes, Alternative Shakespeares 2, London, Routledge 1996, p. 143, citing Julia Kristeva, La Revolution du langage politique (1974, partial English translation in Moi, 1990, 89135).

Some of the most notable recent publications on the early modem body are Gent and Llewellyn, 1990, McMullan, Hillman and Mazzio 1997, and Fudge, Gilbert and Wiseman, 1999.

2

3 The play exists both in the late fifteenth-century Macro manuscript, and (in incomplete form) in the Digby manuscript 133, dating from around the tum of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It has been edited by Mark Eccles in The Macro Plays, 1969

2. Marshall: The Politics of Self-Mutilation: Forms of Female Devotion in the Late Middle Ages 1 Lochrie, 1991, 24-5; Lochrie draws attention to the over-ingenious nature of this imitatio Christi.

The edition I have used is that of Meech and Allen, hereafter referred to as Kempe. There is also a modem English translation by B.A. Windeatt. 2

Beckwith also comments on this episode, describing Margery's Eucharistic piety as a 'singling out, a mark of special religiosity' which detracts from the priesthood (1986, 94).

3

3. Feldmann: The Constructions and Deconstructions of Gendered Bodies in Selected Plays of Christopher Marlowe For examples of the few gender analyses, see Shepherd, 1986, 178-207, and Deats, 1988. For the application of (ungendered) concepts of the body, see Burnett, 1991.

1

2 For a summary of the critical views on the theatrical constructions of gender in the Renaissance see Shapiro, 1994, 3-7. 3 Shepard sees Tamburlaine as a character who tries to project the image of a hypermasculine soldier (1993, 734).

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Tamburlaine: But yet methinks their looks are amorous, Not martial as the sons ofTamburlaine.

Their hair as white as milk, and soft as down, Which should be like the quills of porcupines, As black as jet, and hard as iron or steel, Bewrays they are too dainty for the wars. Their fingers made to quaver on a lute, Their arms to hang about a lady's neck, Would make me think them bastards, not my sons (Part II, 1.4.21-32) 5 The allusion to this classical body (in Part I, 2.1.24), however, is highly ambiguous in terms of gender categories, for Achilles was dressed in girl's clothes when he was hidden by his mother.

For a general discussion of the power of texts and writing in Marlowe's plays, see Garber, 1984.

6

7 Tamburlaine's obsession with bodies and with maps can be read as the sign of a spatial anxiety or 'boundary confusion' (Daileader, 1998, 6) connected with changing anatomies and geographies in early modem culture. For parallels between the body and the world in the Renaissance, see Sawday, 1995, 23-4.

8 Similarly, Marlowe evokes and subverts the cultural stereotype of 'the Jew' as 'a representational space without a circumscribable identity' (Bartels, 1993, 100).

Mortimer objects to Gaveston's 'ultrafashionable' and 'effeminate' attire (see 1.4.405-17) because it indicates social climbing and social fluidity. For overdressing as a form of 'semiotic prostitution' in the context of political constructions of gender in the English Renaissance court, see Kuchta, 1993. 9

The terminology is misleading, since Elizabethan culture had no conception of 'homosexuality' as a form of sexuality in its own right. Shepherd uses the term 'sodomy', focusing on the ways Marlowe's constructions of homoeroticism in Edward II subvert the patriarchal structures of political authority and alienate manliness as a rhetorical construction (1986, 197-9 and 204-7). For a reassessment of the play and of Marlowe-criticism in terms of their (problematic) attitudes towards homoeroticism, see Comensoli, 1993, and DiGangi, 1997, 107-15. 10

11 There are other, similar utterances by Edward, for example.: 'Thow from this land, I from myself am banish'd' (1.4.119). Cf. also 2.2.37: 'They love me not that hate my Gaveston.' 12 For a similar association of bodies and texts, see for example the scene in which Edward tears up a piece of paper with Mortimer's name on it and says: 'So may his

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limbs be tom' (5.1.142). Marlowe plays with the Platonic notion of an inherent relation between name and essence, just as he probes the idea of the king's two bodies in terms of a (legal) fiction. For the ambivalences in the presentation of the king's body, especially in Edward II's downfall, his physical torture and anal 'crucifixion', see Viswanathan, 1981,86-91. , 13 On the relation between body and language from a theatrical point of view, see Birringer, 1984; on the deconstructive theatricalizations of power articulated by means of dramatic figures, see Grantley, 1996, 233-6.

4. Taylor: Armour, Flows and Bliss: Liquefactions of Gender in The Faerie Queene Book II Thewelheit, 1987, 413. My discussion here of the relationship in Book II between 'masculine' armour and 'feminine' fluidity is indebted to the (post-) Freudian conceptual framework Thewelheit develops from the work of Deleuze and Guattari and others. See particularly the subsection 'Streams' (249-300) of his Chapter 2, 'Floods, Bodies, Histories'. For an attempt to relate Thewelheit's work to The Faerie Queene more broadly, see Waller, 1994,29-37. 1

For a suggestive discussion of the relationships between femininity and leakiness in early modem comedies, and the Galenic underpinnings of the trope, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines ofShame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1993): Chapter I, 'Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy', pp. 23-63. More directly related to the concerns of this chapter is Janet Adelman's discussion of the relationship between 'heroic masculinity' and generative 'feminine' overflowingness in her discussion of Antony and Cleopatra in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, NY and London, Routledge, 1992), pp. 174-92. 2

Rymer, in effect, accuses Spenser of failing or refusing to follow Tasso in attempting to overcome the structural and moral errancy which the latter, along with Renaissance neo-Classical critics, identified in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. On errancy and divagation as structuring forces in Ariosto's poem, see Parker, 1979, 16-53. Parker cites Rymer's charges in her discussion of The Faerie Queene in the same book, countering them by noting that Spenser, far from falling inadvertently into an Ariostan errancy 'was quite consciously engaging the delights as well as the dangers of [romance]' (62). She accordingly sees Spenser's entertainment of the diversionary pleasures of his poetic form as being firmly and authoritatively subordinated to a controlling structure of dilatio, in which delay and deferral, as inevitable forms of human 'temporizing', are always contained by the transcendental perspective of eternal rest which beckons in the poem's final lines (1979, 62-4). My own argument is more doubtful of the poem's ability to elevate errancy into dilatio, and to persuade the reader of its access to any extra-temporal ground which might allow for a containment of, and mastery over, deferral and delay. 3

This inability of the poem to maintain the borderlines between its own informing oppositions is captured in Wilson Knight's summing up of its self-cancelling nature:

4

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'The Faerie Queene is itself one vast Bower ofBliss' (1939, 15). My reading aims to follow through some of the implications of this exemplary deconstructive insight. 5 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. and C. Patrick O'Donnell, Jr., Penguin, 1978. All stanza and page numbers cited in the text refer to this edition.

For the Aristotelian and related classical development of the idea of temperance, see the discussion and references in J. Cascallen's entry on the term in The Spenser Encyclopaedia (Hamilton et al., 1990, 680-82). 6

7 Cf. Quilligan, 1983, on the book's dramatization of the balancing of delight and instruction in the production and reception of the Renaissance epic: 'In a sense, the Palmer may schematize for us the reader's interpretative activities in allegory, that is, the process of labeling. Opposed to the interpretative Palmer, Guyon represents the reader's active affect, that which bends to the allure' (51).

8 See in particular the essays by Hazlitt, Lowell and Yeats (extracted in Alpers, 1969, pp. 131-8, 156-61, and 172-78 respectively) which help to establish the view of The Faerie Queene as an overcoming of moral instruction by the sensuality of the poetry itself, a view which can take celebratory or accusatory forms. Herbert Grierson (reacting, he states, to the defences of Spenser as a moralist by Milton and the former's modem editor de Selincourt) restates the argument in 1929: 'The moralist must convince us that the sacrifice [of 'the beautiful'] is required in the interest of what is a higher and more enduring good, that the sensuous yields place to the spiritual. It is this that Spenser fails to do imaginatively, whatever doctrine one may extract intellectually from the allegory' (1929, 54). Lewis's discussion of the Bower of Bliss episode is taking issue with this critical position. 9 This is one point of contact between my argument and Elizabeth Bellamy's psychoanalytical account of armour in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso: 'For Mandricardo, Ferrau, Gradasso, and others, a "libidinal relation" to the world requires not just a body, but a body ofarmor that can facilitate imitation of others. Armor is not just any object; it is nothing less that the promise of the attainment of a psychic wholeness' (1992, 109). 10 This is how Patricia Parker reads the scene, in her brilliant essay, 'Suspended Instruments: Lyric and Power in the Bower ofBliss' (1987). While I acknowledge this as the 'preferred' reading implied by the poem's epic framework and Spenser's declared intentions, my reading departs from Parker's in tracing a self-troubling of preferred readings through Canto xii, and in Book II more generally. Further notes below will indicate points where the differing implications of the two readings become _ particularly apparent. 11 The Ovidian narrative verse genre- the epyllion - is initiated by Lodge's Scylla 's Metamorphosis of 1589, which aligns its weepy and listless narrator and the similarly prostrated sea-god Glaucus with Adonis, 'the sweet Arcadian boy', who becomes the prototype for the genre's other dead or languishing boys fixed by a desiring female gaze with which, to different degrees, the reader is invited to identify. For examples of

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207

this trope's development into full-blown examples of what I have called the homoerotic blazon see Christopher Marlowe, 'Hero and Leander', First Sestyad, ll. 51-90; Michael Drayton, 'Endimion and Phoebe: Ideas Latmos', ll. 137-52; John Weever, 'Faunus and Melliflora', ll. 29-80; Francis Beaumont, 'Salmacis and Hermaphroditus', ll. 43-78. The texts are conveniently collected in Story Donna, 1963. 12 As Parker notes: 'Spenser's scene manages to evoke the iconography of both Virgin mother with her sleeping infant and the more sinister Pieta, a dead Adonis in the lap of a powerful maternal Venus' (1987, 57). Parker reinforces her description of the Pieta as 'sinister' by silently aligning it with a classical image where the relationship between male death and female sexuality is strong, rather than with the Christian tradition in which it originates, and where an emphasis on maternal grieving in the face of a death inflicted by a 'masculine' imperial political structure would seem more to the fore. My own reading reasserts this trope of maternal grief, in response to the poem's reference to Acrasia's pity for her victim in stanza 73, and in pursuit of an interpretation which keeps open the possibility of disturbances and ambivalence in Spenser's use of the tropes which Parker identifies as masterfully misogynistic. 13 Cf. Elizabeth Bellamy, again on Ariosto: 'Like Mandricardo, Gradasso vividly exemplifies the differences in the principles of psychic organisation between the romance and epic genres. If in epic the warrior subordinates himself to the higher ethical demands of culture-building and defense of empire, then romance suspends the warrior in a limbo of primitive narcissism and ethical infantilization ... '(1992, 104).

14 My use of 'abjection' here relates to Judith Butler's elaboration ofKristeva's use of the term, and of the related psychoanalytical concept of foreclosure: the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, 'inside' the subject as its own founding repudiation . . . This is a repudiation which creates the valence of 'abjection' and its status for the subject as a threatening spectre. Further, the materialization of a given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identificatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed. And yet, this disavowed abjection will threaten to expose the self-grounding presumptions of the sexed subject, grounded as that subject is in a repudiation whose consequences it cannot fully control. (1993, 3) At this point in my own discussion, the relationship between Verdant's body and his hanging armour is being read as a visualization precisely of the process of abjection as Butler describes it: the discarded husk of 'the materialization of a given sex' (the armour) uncannily co-present with that which must be excluded for materialization to happen (the 'unsexed' infans).

15 As Butler elaborates the term: 'drag exposes or allegorizes the mundane psychic and performative practices by which heterosexualized genders form themselves through the renunciation of the possibility ofhomosexuality, a foreclosure that produces a field of heterosexual objects at the same time that it produces a domain of those whom it

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would be impossible to love. Drag thus allegorizes heterosexual melancholy, the melancholy by which a masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility oflove' (1993, 235). From this perspective, and as my own discussion implies, the Spenserian hero appears as a drag knight. That threshold is presided over by two equivocally gendered gatekeepers, the unmanly 'male' Genius (Faerie Queene, 46-9) and the unwomanly 'female' Excesse (55-7), both also being bearers of intoxicating liquids which are violently rejected by Guyon. This association between the erosion of gendered identities and a seductive liquefaction is exemplified in the commingling of Bacchanalean and Circean motifs, and of phallic 'swell' and uterine receptivity, in the vinous overflow of Excesse: 'Whole sappy liquor, that with fulnesse sweld, I Into her cup she scruzd' (56). 16

17

Depasture: 'To consume the produce of(land) by grazing upon it' (Q.E.D.)

18 Cf. Breitenberg: 'ejaculation represents the supreme moment of masculine disempowerment and vulnerability - a literal and figurative "emptying out" of the masculine principle' (1996, 50).

19 The literary locus classicus for the interaction of soul and semen in the expenditure of 'spirit' is, of course Shakespeare's Sonp.et 129. Stephen Booth's commentary on this sonnet (1977, 441-2) traces the polysemic intrication of these terms lucidly, and cites Partridge's glossing (in Shakespeare's Bawdy) of 'expense' in its sexual sense, which Partridge supports with a splendidly un-Spenserian quotation from All's Well That Ends Well (II, iii, 272-74): ' He wears his honour in a box unseen, I That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home, I Spending his manly marrow in her arms.'

°

Cf. Breitenberg on the masculine body in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy: 'the body in Burton's text is an anxious male body, constantly under attack by the ungovernable forces within it, nervous about its own orifices, under siege by its own ('feminine') elemental fluidity' (1996, 47). This exposition of the relationship between this corporeal anxiety and the Elizabethan humoural theory informing the Anatomy is directly relevant to my more limited discussion in this chapter. 2

See, for example, Bullinger's discussion of the education of 'daughters and maidens' in his widely influential The Christian State of Matrimony, cited here in the 1541 translation by Miles Coverdale: ' ... let them avoid idleness, be occupied doing some profitable thing for your family, or else reading some godly book. Let them not , read fables of fond and light love, but call upon God to have pure hearts and chaste ... Books of Robin Hood, Bevis of Hampton, Troilus and such like fables do but kindle in liars like lies and wanton love ... If ye delight to sing songs ye have the psalms and many goodly songs and books in English right fruitful and sweet' (cited in Aughterson, 1995, 108). In the final phrase of this passage, Bullinger is aiming at a rigid delimitation of Horace's model of the reconciliation of utile and ductile in the literary text. The riskiness of Spenser's 'temperate' version of that balancing act is highlighted by the fact that it accommodates the romance and fabu1ar elements which Bullinger excludes in order to secure 'right reading'. See also the following note. 21

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

209

As Quilligan notes (1983, 50), this is why Milton refers to Guyon and the Palmer in the passage from Areopagitica praising a virtue tried in the arena of worldly error, against 'a fugitive and cloistered virtue'. The fact that the pamphlet is, of course, a defence of this necessary exposure to the perpetual risk of error in the specific context of reading, gives Milton's citation of Spenser a particular relevance to my discussion of allegory here. 22

In other words, right reading in Spenser's poem is staked on an allegorical mode which allows a moderation of the Calvinistic rigour of a Bullinger by an Horatian temperateness. Spenser finds that mode in the tradition of allegorical exegesis developed for the reconciliation of Ovid's Metamorphoses with Christian morality by medieval and early modem exegetes and translators. For Elizabethan writers, a key source for this exegetical tradition is Boccaccio's Genea/ogia Deorum, where allegorical interpretation is offered, famously, as the means for rendering Ovid's fables 'cum delectatione fructuosas'. Bullinger, directly echoing that phrase (see Note 21 above), confines the possibility of a reconciliation of fruitfulness and delight to the sacred text, grounding the moral purity of reading in an expulsion of 'Ovidian' licentiousness and sensuality. Spenser, following Boccaccio and, more immediately, Sabinus's Fabularum Ovidii Interpretatio (1554), stakes a 'temperate' Protestant ethics of worldly engagement on an allegorical hermeneutic which maintains a fluid and therefore unstable - intercourse between the worldly and the sacred. For Boccaccio, Sabinus and the tradition of Christian allegorization of Ovid, see Vinge (1967), particularly 130 and 346. On the relationship between the Metamorphoses, allegorical reading and Neoplatonic philosophy, see Taylor, 1991, 99-104 and 16973. On Spenser's 'education' of Guyon and the poem's reader in allegorical method, see Quilligan, 1983, 19-78. 23

24 A crucial difference between Patricia Parker's reading of Book II and my own is in the way each conceptualizes repetition. For Parker, the repetition of scenes of female temptation and domination within the book, and in the iconographic traditions which feed into those scenes, constitutes an endlessly self-reinforcing assertion of misogynistic tropes which bolsters Spenser's efforts at poetic mastery: 'The sense of resolute narrative movement and of re-enactment as a form of control is conveyed in the Canto of Acrasia by the resolutely "forward" movement (II, xii, 76-5) of Guyon's quest and by the aura of repetition and even deja vu in its imitation of earlier literary scenes, which suggests that the victory over its threatening female is in a sense already won ... ' (1987, 65). My own reading of repetition in Book II takes the contrary view, informed by Freud's in 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', that repetition is an unwilled reiteration of an 'original' impossibility in the will to mastery, and one in which the (foreclosed) 'thing' which is to be mastered keeps returning. Judith Butler's account of Lacan's understanding of repetition provides a useful gloss on this relationship between repetition and abjection: 'repetition is not only the mark that subjectivation has in some sense failed to occur, but that it is itself a further instance of that failing. That which repeats in the subject is that which is radically excluded from the formation of the subject, that which threatens the boundary and the coherence of the subject itself (1993, 249). For Parker, then, repetition reinforces both the poem's epic narrative dynamic and the ideological 'victory' it subtends. My sense that repetition retards one and puts in question the other is related to another difference in interpretation: for Parker the 'female' is a safely externalized and securely objectified

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'enemy', whereas my argument depends upon seeing it as an element in an intra- and inter-subjective process which is internal to the constitution of the 'masculine', and therefore not simply to be mastered or defeated. 5. Dunworth: '0 Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain': Violence and the Mother's Body on the Elizabethan Stage The quotation comes, of course, from Hamlet III iv line 156 (Alexander, 1965, 1056). The line appears in all versions of the play though slightly differently in the 1603 Quarto: 'Hamlet, thou cleaves my heart in twaine' (Holderness and Loughrey, 1992, 80). 1

2 See for example the Wakefield pageant of'Herod the Great' (Cawley, 1961, 122-50) and the Ludus Coventriae 'Death ofHerod' (Happe, 1985, 336)

This tradition was understood to carry contemporary meanings. A performance of the 'Death, Funeral, Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin' (from the much earlier Ludus Coventriae) could have been the play that sparked a riot in the midlands at the time of Henry VIII's rejection of Queen Katharine of Aragon. Intriguingly, the play appears to be written in a later hand than the rest of the cycle, something which has led at least one of its editors to conjecture that it had been inserted, for political reasons, during Henry's reign (Dodds, 1913, 393-408; Chambers, 1903; 418). 3

4 Bale's friend, the Protestant polemicist John Foxe, perhaps exploited this allegory most audaciously in his play Christus Triumphans, where in the opening scene both maternal type and antitype, the Virgin Mary and Eve, lament together over their lost children (Potter, 1980, 183).

Recent anthropological accounts stress the connection between the experience of emotion and the incentive to action (Heelas, 1996, 171-99). Heelas states that the main point of emotion is the focusing of attention, quoting, for example, Lutz's assertion that 'emotions are culturally constructed concepts which point to clusters of situations typically calling for some kind of action'. 5

Seznec argues here that the European tradition of reinterpreting Classical mythology went back at least to the Stoics.

6

7 A Defence of Poetry. (in Van Dorsten' s edition, 1966, 65). Sidney famously praises Gorboduc for both the quality of the rhetoric and for being 'as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain the very end of poesy' (ibid). 8 The edition I am using is that of Cunliffe, 1907. The version of the play by Ludovico Dolce from which Gascoigne and Kinwelmarshe were working had already been subject to extensive change; see Cunliffe, 1907, 244. 9 Aristotle's Poetics, (which, of course, informed Sidney's analysis), describes the cathartic effect of the fear and pity as something which is translated by Halliwell (1987) as 'pleasure' and by McLeish (1998) as 'satisfaction'. Philip Sidney associates 'delight' with both the satisfactions of well-constructed rhetoric and the gratification

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211

of a properly worked out moral, arguing that the pleasure engendered by these things endows instruction with the power to move and thus to act. This is an assertion usefully read alongside the modem anthropological view of the function of emotion; see Note 5 above. For an elucidation of Sidney's discussion see the Introduction to Stephen Halliwell's edition of the Poetics (1987, 46). Sidney reworks Aristotle's association of pleasure with both imitation and learning, coming close to a version of catharsis (with a Christian gloss) in his account of how 'stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration teacheth the uncertainties of this world.' (Van Dorsten, 1966, 65). Relatively recent and controversial readings of Aristotle (Wiles, 1980, Introduction and passim; Auslander, 1997, esp. 13-27) argue for catharsis as meaning 'clarification of incident', so referring to the point or place at which things fearful and pitiful are justified. Taken together, these readings offer a way into appreciating the notoriously vague concept of catharsis, offering an account of both its affective and cognitive functions. Certainly, in terms of my discussion, the mother both provokes an affective response by operating as an emblem, and offers clarification through her narrative/moral function. For a discussion of traditional and modem readings of catharsis see Wiles, 1980, 4-5, 126. See also McLeish, 1998, 18. 10 This play demonstrates allegiance both to its Senecan tragic model and what Robert Ornstein calls a 'robust Elizabethan fascination with ltalianate decadence' (1960, 61). At this time elite performances where Classical scholarship was exhibited continued, alongside an enthusiasm for reworking Italian adaptations of Classical narratives. Jean Seznec goes so far as to argue that the English got their Classical mythology mostly from Italian sources (1953, 312). 11 Thomas Fuller, in Worthies of England, quoted by Binns (1974, 211). Binns also quotes here the author's instructions concerning the delivery of the play. Fuller was perhaps quite aware of the need to be cautious about the veracity of such tales. The dramatist Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio had already told a version of the story of the fainting woman in his account of the first performance of Orbecce (Richmond-Garza, 1997, 242). Heywood famously deploys a version of the tale in his Apology for Actors (Sturgess, 1969, 15).

12 The edition I have used is that of Binns, 1974, and the page reference for this incident is 208. 13 Emily Apter discusses the problems associated with this concept in her first chapter, recalling Jean Baudrillard's comment that the term fetishism has almost 'a life of its own' (1991, 2). Here I follow Apter's suggestion that, as a theory, fetishism functions to simultaneously critique and implicate the very phenomena that it seeks to expose. Roxana demonstrates both a repudiation of maternity and a celebration of good motherhood. Similarly the play rejects violence at the same time as it offers a description of torture in delicious detail. As Apter says, 'the fetishist does indeed refuse to look, but in refusing to look, he stares. It is a "not looking," sustained paradoxically through visual fixation' (ibid., xiii).

14 Juliet Mitchell, likewise, writes that fetishists 'have their cake and eat it: they both recognise that women are castrated and deny it, so the fetish is treated with affection

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and hostility, it represents the absence of the phallus and in itself, by its very existence, asserts the presence of it' (1990, 85). 15 See Agamben, 1993, 32, for a full discussion of potential connections between fetish and metonymy.

Following Jonathan Bate's contention that 'Shakespeare is interrogating Rome, asking what kind of an example it provides for Elizabethan England' (1995, 17, 27), this maternity works as a metaphor which articulates Elizabethan anxieties about the failure of established law, particularly in view of an anticipated crisis of Succession. 16

17 Bate contends that 'The opposed gestures of Titus and Tamora are also the central gestures of the play: Authoritative command against supplication on knees with hands in a gesture of pleading' (1995, 42). 18 Marion Wynne-Davies pays particular attention to the importance of the image of the earth, 'The womb of the ultimate female body' in the play. Though her argument is rather different from mine, in that she seeks to contrast a patriarchal, imperial Rome with 'the all-consuming mouth of the feminine earth', her contention is nevertheless that the womb is important as 'one of the corporeal symbols of the play'. She also asserts that the play 'slides into unexpected similarities and contrasts which compel a reworking of expected and perhaps accepted gender identities' and her later reference to the play's 'series of almost unacceptable collusions' have been helpful in alerting me to the tensions that I wish to argue structure the production of theatrical pleasure in Titus (1991, 135-9). 19 See also Willbem who asserts that 'the equation of womb and tomb is central to the unconscious action of Titus Andronicus' (1978, 162). The idea that the womb was mobile (taken originally from Plato) and 'greedy' is now commonly asserted as dominant in early modem physiology (Eccles, 1982, 82-3). The demand from mother earth for blood is, as many critics have noted, made visually explicit not only in the spectacle of the tomb, but in the description of the hole in the ground into which Bassanius is later thrown before Lavinia is raped, so that both civic and pastoral Rome are shown in spectacle and rhetoric to be pervaded by a rapacious and devouring maternity (see Titus 1.3.198-200).

20 Roxana offers one such example in the figure of Atossa, Jocasta another. A closer analogue to Tamora, however, might be Queen Videna, the literally infuriated mother in Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, whose madness both figures and is induced by the civil war fought between her sons. In Studeley's translation of Seneca's Medea, the translator freely admits his alterations, which work to reformulate the story to depict the breakdown of the state. For example, the Chorus: 'All things are topsy turvy tumde I and wasted cleane to nought. I To passing great calamity I our Kingdome State is brought' (p. 281 ). In her first speech Medea declares herself to be in the thrall of uncontrolled passion: 'passions rack me too strong to endure delay; flames are burning my very marrow and my heart; here fear blent with anguish plies the spur'. In the 'argument to the tragedy, by the translator' with which Studeley opens his version of the play, attention is drawn to Medea's maddened condition as both a cause and a symptom of the collapse of order that is to follow (p. 245).

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213

21 'Both Lavinia and Tam ora may be seen as symbolic personifications of the female Rome. They enact contrasting aspects: the pure and virtuous mother, threatened with attack and invasion, who needs protection and rescue; and the dangerous, seductive, threatening mother,from whom one needs protection' (Willbem, 1978, 164).

McLuskie here argues for a 'functional' aspect of women's roles in theatre that serves to act upon narratives in which the female character may have no obvious determining role.

22

23

I am using Philip Edwards's edition of The Spanish Tragedy, 1977.

24 Critics including Hattaway (1982, 126) and Mulryne (1970, 112) refer to the problem of getting the body off the stage, as there are no stage directions to indicate how this might be done. Mulryne supposes that Isabella 'stumbles off. Hattaway speculates that perhaps Hieronimo comes across her corpse and carries it offstage himself, something which would more effectively utilize the emblematic potential of the dead mother's body.

All references to the play are from Tamburlaine the Great, in the Tucker Brooke edition of The Works of Christopher Marlowe (1910).

25

Blood and milk were associated through contemporary medical theory, of course, something which resonated with the conventional typologies that linked motherhood and grief (Paster, 1993, Ch. 2).

26

27 This idea is significant, for example, in Shakespeare's Richard III, and is set out in the soliloquy which opens that play.

Douglas Cole sees this in terms of a reversal of norms: 'Bravery in the son and love in the parent have been converted to cowardice in the son and hate in the parent.' If this is so, then it is Zenocrate who has been the catalyst for this conversion (1962, 118-19). 28

6. Stewart: The Body Archival: Re-reading the Trial of the Earl of Somerset My attention was drawn to James's discussion by Katharine Eisaman Maus; see Maus, 1995, 5. 1

2

On access to the chamber, see also Stewart, 2000.

James to Somerset, c. 1615. Lambeth Palace Library, London (hereafter LPL) MS 930,art.90;AJcrigg, 1984,335-44.

3

4

James to Somerset, c. 1615, LPL MS 930, art. 92; Akrigg, 1984, 341

On the Overbury case see Sparke, 1651; Wilson, 1653; Osborne, 1658; Goodman, 1839; Sanderson, 1656; Frankland, 1681; Amos, 1846; Gibbs, 1909; Parry, 1925; McElwee, 1952; de Ford, 1960; White, 1965; Matter, 1969; LeComte, 1969; Lindley, 1993; Somerset, 1997; Bergeron, 1999, Ch. 3 5

214 6

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

Chamberlain to Carleton, 29 April1613 in Chamberlain, 1939, 1: pp. 443

7 Unless otherwise stated, I have used the most accessible account: Howell, 1809, 911-1022, with occasional references to alternate readings from manuscript sources. 8

LPL MS 933 fo. 125 in Bacon, 1861-1874,5: pp. 286-9.

Bacon deliberately sidelined several pieces of evidence (which he detailed to the king) in order to concentrate on a central theme, and 'partly to observe your Majesty's direction to give Somerset no just occasion of despair of flashes'. At James's direction he also omitted a reference to allegations about a letter received by Somerset after Prince Henry's death which stated 'that the first branch was cut from the tree, and that he should ere long send happier and joyfuller news'. (As James pointed out, 'This evidence cannot be gevin in without making me his accuser, and that upon a verrie slight grounde.') LPL MS 933 fo. 125 in Bacon, 1861-1874, 5: pp. 286-9. 9

10

Ellesmere, Lenox, Zouch and Coke to James, 17 October 1615, in Amos, 1846, 41.

11

See Goldberg, 1990; Rambuss, 1993; Stewart, 1997, Ch. 5.

In his plans, Bacon wrote: 'Neither will I omit Somerset's breach of trust to your Majesty in trusting Overbury with all the despatches, things wherewith your council of estate itself was not many times privy or acquainted, and yet this man must be admitted to them, not cursorily, or by glimpses, but to have them by him, to copy them, to register them, to table them, etc.' 12

13 For an attempt to reconstruct the working practices of a clerk to the Privy Council, see Brewerton, 1998. 14 This line occurs in one manuscript witness: Cambridge University Library MS Ee.IV.12. 15

LPL MS 933 fo. 125 in Bacon, 1861-74, 5: pp. 286-9.

16 Bacon, A True Report of Dr Lopez his Treason (1594), in Bacon, 1861-74, 1: pp. 274-87 at 284. Bacon later repeated the terms: 'Thirdly; I will shew you, that all the King's Business was by my Lord put into Overbury's Hands: So as there is work enough for Secrets, whatsoever they were. And like Princes Confederates, they had their Ciphers and Jargons' ('Charge' ,Dr). See OED s.v. jargon sb. 4 (8: 194). For Bacon's interest in ciphers, see De augmentis scientiarum, in Bacon, 1856-61, 4: p. 445; Jardine and Stewart, 1998, 55-6. For his own work in intelligence gathering, see Jardine and Stewart, 1998, Chs 3-9; Hammer, 1999. 17 Davis confirmed that 'in summer last my lord sent Rawlins to him, to desire that if he had any letters, either from my lord to sir T., or from him to my lord, that he would send them by him; which he did: And for this my lord did afterwards send him by Rawlins 301' (991).

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215

18 Ellesmere, Lenox, Zouche and Coke to James, 18 October 1615, York House in Amos, 1846,38-9. 19 '[T]he Pursuivant finding divers writings concerning M" Tumor the constable said that those were not within the warrant, to whom the Pursuivant answered, that the naming ofM" Hynd was but a color to search for writings concerning his MafY and all such writings as concerned M" Tumor, which they found in a trunk which they broke up, and in a bag & box which they opened, the Pursuivant carried away with him.' Ellesmere, Lenox, Zouche and Coke to James, 18 October 1615, York House in Amos, 1846,38-9.

Gerard to Carleton, 14 June 1616. PRO SP 14/85 art. 77, cit. Sharpe, 1979, 135. Surprisingly, Cotton was only imprisoned for five months. Kevin Sharpe has argued that 'there is a hint in the evidence that Cotton deserted Somerset at the last moment'. 20

I quote here from a copy in British Library, London, Cotton MS Titus B. vii, fo. 483 a-b; the version in Howell, 1809, 980 is considerably shorter. 21

7. Taunton: A camp 'well planted': Encamped Bodies in 1590s Military Discourses and Chapman's Caesar and Pompey 1 This essay was given as a paper at the Making Contact: Natives, Strangers and Barbarians conference at the University of Alberta in October 1998. It forms part of a book length project entitled 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare 's Henry V (forthcoming). 2 Lefebvre, 1994, 132; he here draws limited parallels between theories of space and theories of language in terms of textures. Theories of space deal with textures only in so far as geometrical structures (lines, curves) are incorporated into some whole some texture - which gives them meaning. This meaning is only rendered by those that inhabit these (delimited) spaces. In order to understand spaces as textures consideration must also be given to margins, absences and presences which are lived but also interweave conceptually.

3 I have also included in my discussion Fourquevaux's Instructions for the Warres, first published in Paris in 1548. The edition I have used however is the Paul Ive translation which appeared in 1589 and with which Northumberland shows signs of familiarity, even though it is not now part of his library stock. I have used various collections of manuscript writings from the Alnwick and Petworth archives of the Northumberland estate, cited individually in what follows. 4

See also Northumberland, Military Affairs, fo1.13r

5

See also Northumberland, Military Affairs, fo1.13r

6 See especially pp. 311-50 for a fuller development of the notion of spatial compositions in terms of territoriality.

216

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

See also Coppin, writing to Robert Cecil, 9 August, 1599 to 'advertise' him of 'the strange rumours and abundance of news ... as there cannot be laid a more dangerous plot to amaze and discourage our people, and to advance the strength and mighty power of the Spaniard, working doubts in the better sort, fear in the poorer sort, and a great distraction in all ... to no small encouragement of our enemies abroad'. Salisbury MSS, ix, 2829. 7

8

All quotations and citations are from Holaday, 1987.

This summary of events draws upon McCaffrey, 1992, 467-70; Wernham, 1944, 312-34; Lacey, 1971, 83-90.

9

8. Grantley: 'A bodie of presence': Early Modern Education and the Elite Body in the Writings of Richard Mulcaster 1 This essay is based on a paper given as work in progress at the conference, Bodily Fictions at Brunei University in 1996. The work has now been published as Wit's Pilgrimage: Drama and the Social Impact of Education in Early Modern England (Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2000). There has been some reworking of the data in this essay, however, and additional material has been introduced to refocus on the issue of corporeality. 2 Examples include Gerard Legh, The Accedens of Armory (1562); Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical! Polity (1593-97); Pierre de Ia Primaudaye, The French academie (English translation by T. Bowes, 1586); Lawrence Humphrey, The nobles or of nobilitye (1563); Guillaume de Ia Perriere, The Mirrour ofPolicie (translated from Le miroir politique, 1576). See also Kelso, 1929.

3 Graduates had an almost automatic access to gentle status, as was noted by Sir Thomas Smith in his analysis of England, De Republica Anglorum: For whosoeuer studieth the Iawes of the realme, who studieth in the universities, who professeth liberall sciences, and to be shorte, who can live idly and without manuall labour, and will beare the port, charge and countenaunce of a gentleman, he shall be called master, for that is the title which men give to esquires and other gentlemen, and shall be taken for a gentleman. (1584, 27).

Knox also goes on to cite several instances in contemporary accounts of the world beyond Europe that stress the perceived bestiality of non-European peoples, in what he argues is a project of defining 'civilized' Europeans (ibid., 129-35). 4

Bryson's argument relates to the regulation of the body, and is highly pertinent to the present discussion (1990, 136-53). 5

On the increased use of universities by the elite, see Hexter, 1950, 1-20; Stone, 1965, 688; Stone, 1984, 264.

6

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

217

7 For an examination of the phenomenon in a slightly later period, see Curtis, 1965, pp. 295-316. 8 For a discussion of these plays in terms of their representation of scholarly poverty and discontent, see Grantley, 2000, 89-92.

9

For an account ofMulcaster's life and work, see DeMolen, 1991

Lawrence Stone describes this phenomenon in the period as a 'harmonization of axes', part of an idealized picture of a 'fully integrated society in which stratification by title, power, wealth, talent, and culture are all in absolute harmony' (1965, 36). 10

11 Castiglione lists physical exertions appropriate for a courtier (Hoby, Courtyer, Book I, D3r- D4r; see note 15 below. 12 Quoted in Fumivall 1868, xiii. The letter is in Latin and this is Fumivall's translation.

13 However, he does see dancing as able to help inculcate various virtues including prudence (Governour, Book I, 76v-85v). 14

See Ellis, 1800,419-21, 511-12, 603-4.

15 Baldessare Castiglione, II Cortegiano (1528) translated by Sir Thomas Hoby as The Courtyer (1561). Hoby puts it thus: 'to vse in euery thyng a certain Reckelesness, to couer art withall, & seeme whatsoeuer he doth & sayeth to do wythout pain, & (as it were) not myndyng it' (C2r).

16 See Schumpeter, 1943, 298. Kenneth Burke has remarked that the 'conditions for mystery' are set up by any personal and social distinction (1950, 115).

17 This might be seen in relation to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of bodily hexis as constituting social identity: 'Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking and thereby of feeling and thinking' (1990, 69-70). 18 R.H. Wilkinson has discussed the gentlemanly ideal inculcated by public schools from the nineteenth century: the attainment of a 'magic' aura of differentness which was vital to the political leadership, the importance attached to leisure, and the attitude towards privilege and duty. The essence of the gentlemanly ideal was that it identified social status with moral superiority (1966, 13). See also Mangan, 1981, on the athleticism movement begun by G.E.L. Cotton. All these aspects are present in some form in Mulcaster's theories.

9. Clucas: 'Regimen animarum et corporum': The Body and Spatial Practice in Medieval and Renaissance Magic 1 1509 is the date of the first manuscript version of the De occulta philosophia - see Yates, 1979, 38.

218

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

2 'My body', he says, 'is wherever there is something to be done' (Merleau-Ponty, 1992, 250).

I refer throughout to a late sixteenth-century exemplar preserved in British Library, Harleian MS 181 (16th century), fols 75r-81r: lncipit: 'Omnia bona in mundo scibilia, huius artis misteris hominis recte operantis intellectui' Explicit: 'Explicit experimentum de arte crucifixi.' Cf. British Library, Sloane MS 3846, fol. 182r: 'De arte Crucifixi pellagij doctrina non vulgaris.' I have silently expanded the contractions in this and all subsequent quotations from manuscript sources. 3

See for example, Libri consecrationis vel modus operandi, British Library, Sloane MS 3826 (16th century), fols 58 et seq., Sloane MS 3846, fols 156v-130r, Sloane 3853, fols 64-9, and Sloane 3854, fols. 68-76.

4

5 On this tradition see Thorndike's essay on 'Solomon and the Ars Notoria' (1923-56, II, 279-89), which reviews (albeit rather unsympathetically) a wide range of pseudoSolomonic manuscripts dating from the thirteenth through to the seventeenth centuries. For more recent work, see Camille 1998, 110-39 and Fanger 1998, 216-49. On the influence of the ars notoria in the sixteenth century see my articles on John Dee's angelic conversations (1999; 2000).

A comprehensive typology of medieval and renaissance magical practices has not yet been attempted, although Frank Klaassen's 'English Manuscripts of Magic, 1300-1500: A preliminary survey' (Fanger, 1998, 3-31) is an excellent prolegomena to this task. In his De vanitate scientiarum et artium, Agrippa mentions a number of contemporary forms oftheurgy: 'Of this schole are the Arte of Almandel, the Arte Notarie, the Arte of Paule, the Arte of reuelations, and many other things of like superstitions' (1569, 59v). The Sloane MSS in the British Library bear eloquent testimony to the popular dissemination of many forgotten medieval magical arts well into the seventeenth century. 6

7 On the phenomenological significance of the analogy between intimate space and the body see Bachelard, 1969, 3-73.

BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 75r: 'In prima parte docet septem artium liberalium atque Theologiae acquirendem', 'subito ex idiota et imperitissimo in omnia scientia, doctissimus redditur'. This topos was a commonplace in the medieval ars operativa. Almost identical claims are made for the ars notoria, the ars combinatoria of Raymund Lull and the ars memorativa. 8

BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 75r: 'Secunda docet quomodo ad solum intuitum Crucifzxi potest quis intellectualiter certificari de re omnia re dubia.'

9

10 BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 75r-v: 'Tertio, quomodo Crucifzxus per spiritum vel angelum in sompnis instruit ... Cum operationem Crucifzxi Ihesu Nazareni saluatoris nostri perficere volueris ad notitiam preteritorum, prestantium, et futurorum, mediante visione.' 11 BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 76r: 'Ei mundus a peccato mortali, nee pollutus mulieribus, neque alio quouis genere pollutionum: Eris sobrius, non nimium cibo et potu repletus,

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

219

sine turbatione mentis, sine pollutione per triduum, absque melancholia, seu occupatione fixa aliarum cogitationurn.' BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 75v: 'de ligno nouo et mundo quercino, aut oliuarum, aut lauri ligno; quod in nullo alio ante vsu fuerit manuali, neque in loco fetido et immundo fuit proiectum'. 12

13 BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 76r: 'cameram habeas secretam, nitidam, mundam, ab immunditijs aranearum, et pulueris, et clausam: Eisque solus dormiens in ea: Erit etiam seratus mundus, et in ea in modum altaris mensula mundis lintheis cooperta, et super earn duo candelabra cum cereis benedictis in purificatione ardentes.'

14 BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 76v: 'tandem profera crucem extra capsulam, super mensulam locando ... Postea aspergans mensam, lectum, cameramque totam, ac etiam teipsum aqua benedicta, et incensibus.' 15 BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 76r: 'placeatque operatio haec mea ... Conflteor tibi Domine Ihesu Christe ... ego nisi indignus et infoelix peccator.'

BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 78v: 'flexis genibus super terram et crucem ambabus manibus tenende'. 16

17

BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 79v: 'in genibus digites dextre manus super pedes crucifixi'.

BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 77r: 'stando in modum crucis expansis manibus, ante ymaginem', and ibid., fol. 79r: 'te prostemas crucis modo expansis manibus super terram coram cruce'. 18

19 On the use of the body as a form of 'sacrifice' see St Augustine's De civitate dei, X, 6: 'Our body also is a sacrifice when we discipline it ... provided that we do this as we ought for the sake of God, so that we may not offer our bodily powers to the service of sin as the instruments of iniquity, but to the service of God as the instruments of righteousness' (1972, 379).

20 'Having fulfilled these things upon the wall, descend unto thy Bed, writing in thy right hand Alpha and Omega: then go to bed, and sleep on thy right side, holding thy hand vnder thy right Ear, and thou shalt see the greatness of God as thou hast desired.' 21 BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 80r: 'surgens aspergas acqua benedicta lectum, crucem, cameram, per circuitum, ac teipsum, et extinctis luminaribus te dormitum reponas, nil aliud orando, aut loquendo intras In nomine patris et fllij et spiritus sancti'.

Cf. William Perkins's A Direction for the Governement of the Tongue according to God's word, published in 1592 (Workes, I, 440): 'So must the man of faith euen spread himself vpon the crosse of Christ, applying hands and feet to his pierced hands and feet, and his wretched heart to Christ's bleeding heart, and then feele himself warmed by the heat of God's spirit.' 22

220

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

23 'The Roman secrett touching the Spiritt called Sathan by which the Romans did vnderstand of things present past and to come: by W. Bacon', BL, Sloane MS 3851, fols 109v-110r. The author of the 'Roman secrett' is probably the astrologer William Bacon (1577-1653) author of A Key to He/mont (London, 1682). See also his Experimenta Magica, BL, Sloane MS 3846, fols 93-8. 24

BL, Sloane MS 3826, fol. 58r: 'all other good common orisons that thou knowest'.

25

The texts of these 'orysons' are given in BL, Sloane MS 3826, fols. 61v-65r.

26 BL, Sloane MS 3826, fol 58r-v. For a similar 'secret hallowing' of a magical instrument see BL, Sloane MS 3851, fol. 50v, which describes the consecration of a 'Crystalline stone or beryl' (lapidem Christallen vel/ Berelam).

Ars notoria, British Library, Harleian MS 181, fol. 19r: 'locum secretum, videlicet in ecclesiam, vel in atrium, vel in ortum'.

27

28 Ars memoratiua from the pseudo-Solomonic Booke of Vertues (Liber virtutis), British Library, Harleian MS 181 (sixteenth/seventeenth century), fol. 1v 29 Ars notoria, BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 26r: 'Item solus sit ... qui operatur in eis ... nisi esset magister artis, qui instrueret operantem.' Nobody 'other than the true partner of the teacher is allowed to be present whilst are the orations are pronounced, or the figures are viewed' (Alium vera socium prefer magistrem non lice! habere in inspectione figurarum, nee in pronunciatione orationum suarum ), ibid.

30 Gregory, Tractatus de cura pastora/is beati Gregorij pape, cap. 1,: 'ars est artium regimen animarum' (Regula, sig. a.jr).

31 BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 19r: 'ieiunabis in pane et aqua tribus diebus, non manducando, quosque in caelo stelle videantur ... et da pauperibus'. 32 BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 26r: 'ieiunandum est in ipsis diebus, quibus inspiciuntur figure'.

Honoryus the Sworne Booke, (Liber Sacer), British Library, Royal MS 17 A. XLII (late fifteenth/early sixteenth century), fol. 13v: 'Primo sit mundus operans non pollutus, et cum devocione faciat non astute non commedat neque bibat.' On the Sworne Booke see Richard Kieck:heffer 'The Devil's Contemplatives: The Liber Iuratils: the Liber Visionum and the Christian appropriation of Jewish occultism' (Fanger, 1998, 250-65) and Robert Mathiesen 'A thirteenth-century ritual to attain the beatific vision from the Sworn Book ofHonorius of Thebes' (Fanger, 1998, 143-62). 33

BL, Royal MS 17 A. XLII, fol. 13v. C£ also Liber Salomonis Razie/, BL, Sloane MS 3846, fol. 130v: 'he that shall write this booke oughte to be cleane & fasting & bathed & suffumed with precious aromatikes, that is with spices well smelling'.

34

Magical Tracts, British Library, Sloane MS 3851 (seventeenth century), an anthology of magical texts collected by 'one Mr Arthur Gauntlett, who professed Phisick, and lived

35

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

221

about Graies Inn Lane' (fol. 2v). The quotations here are from a schedule of rules for the prospective magical operator entitled 'Instructions ofPtolomie', fol. 3r. 36 On monastic regimes see Lawless, 1987, especially the text of Augustine's Praeceptum, pp. 80-103; Fry, 1981; Curran, 1989; Beckwith, 1993; Walker, 1987; Brooke, 1974. On the patristic background to monastic asceticism see Brown, 1989; Rousseau, 1978; Pettersen, 1990, esp. 'Disciplining the Body', pp. 95-103.

For an example. of the 'bond' oration see BL, Sloane MS 3851, fols 107r-109r. 'A Bonde'. For a 'licence' oration see ibid., fol106r: 'A licence for Sibilia to goe and come at all times' and Ars notoria, BL, Harleian MS 181, fol. 21r-v 'Contra Demones' . See also Scot's printed examples (Discouerie, 350-51, 358-362).

37

On Arabic sources of 'ligatures, incantations and adjurations' see Wilcox and Riddle, 1994. See also Richard Kieckheffer's chapter on 'Arabic Learning and the Occult Sciences' (1990, 116--50).

38

Cf. Cassirer's contention that 'the fundamental act of ' limitation' through which fixed property was first established in the juridical-religious sense, is everywhere related to the sacral order of space' (1955, 100). and his remarks on the 'sanctity of the threshold' and the protection of private property (ibid, 103). 39

40

Liber sacer, BL, Royal MS 17. A. XLII, fol. 6r-v.

41 The 'breast-plate' of Aaron (Exodus. 28:5:8--43) which had the words 'Holiness to the Lord' inscribed upon it was traditionally believed to have given him magical powers.

On the increasing 'privatization' of domestic space in the Renaissance, and its ideological significances, see Lefebvre, 1991, 268-75; Tuan, 1982, 56--85; Chartier, 1986. On the impact of privatized space in the monastic orders see Bauer, 1987.

42'

10. Roberts: The Bodies of Demons 1 Among these are Boguet, 1929, xi-xiii, 29--40; Remy, 1930, vi, 11-27; Weyer, 1991, III, xxi-xxi, 236--60.

Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 2, 30, 6--7; Eusebius, Praep. Evang. 4, 3, 8; Tertullian, De carne Christi 6, 9 (New Catholic Encyclopaedias. v. 'angels')

2

This was a consequence of the idea that everything created was corporeal: 'creatura omnis corporea est: angeli et omnes caelestes virtutes corporeae, licet non carne subsitant; ex eo autem corporeas esse credimus intellectuales naturas, quod localitate circumscribitur', Gennadius, Liber ecclesiasticorum dogmatum (New Catholic Encyclopaedias. v. 'angels'). 3

4

Genesis 19:1-22; Judges 6:12-22

5

'[A]d tempus ex aere corpora sumerent' (Aquinas, Summa 1a51,2).

222

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

His mother, a nun, confesses to king Vortigen that a l)andsome young man used to appear to her and made her pregnant. One ofVortigen's advisers explains to him that he has read in philosophers and histories that between the earth and moon live spirits half human, half angel: 'which we call incubus demons [quos incubos daemones appellamus ]', and these assume human form and have sex with women ( Galfredi Monumetensis Historia VI, xviii, 117). Another story about a demonic father is the romance Sir Gowther written c. 1400 (Mills, 1973, 148-68). 6

7

Eg. Boguet, 1929: xiii, 35; Guazzo, 1929, I, xi, 31; cf. Weyer, 1991, III, xxiii, 243-4.

8

Piero de Aquila, In. Lib. II, Sent. Dist. viii, q. 1 (in Lea, vol1, 157).

The story of Portuguese mares conceiving by the wind is originally from Pliny, Historia Natura/is, 8. 42. 9

10 '[C]ar aussi d'ailleurs n'y ail moyen, par lequell'homme se rende plus subjette une femme que d'en abuser' (1608, xii, 65) 11

Nider, 1692, 572 (cited in Lea, 1957, Vol. 1, 161).

Mazzolini, De Strigimagis, Rome, 1575, II, iii, punctum 5 (cited in Lea, 1957, Vol. 1, 161).

12

13 Fowler on Paradise Lost, 11, 621-2 notes that early commentators (Philo, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian) took Genesis 6: Iff to mean fallen angels lay with the daughters of men (cf. Paradise Lost 3.462-5 and 5.446-9). 14 In addition, Paradise Lost (3.463-5) locates the giants supposedly engendered by the sons of god and the daughters of men amid other things 'Abortive, monstrous or unkindly mixed' (456) that will eventually fill the Limbo of Vanity, which Satan discovers on his journey to earth.

15 Cf. Paradise Lost, 4.765-80. 'Amorous ditties' echoes the description of the worship of the devil that will become the Syrian god Thammuz, whose death is lamented by Syrian damsels 'In amorous ditties all a summer's day' (1. 449).

The sort of exegesis that interpreted the verses as telling of the seduction of good angels usually assumes that they had been sent on errands of instruction, just like Raphael's in the poem. 16

17 See O.E.D. s. v. 'bull-bear' and 'bull beggar', where the earliest uses of the former word occurs in anti-Catholic contexts. 18 Guazzo, discussing incubi, talks of their ability 'ad camis similitudinem palpabilia effingere' (1608, I, xi, 34).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 11

223

11. Normand: The Miraculous Royal Body in James VI and I, Jonson and Shakespeare, 1590-1609 The illustration is reproduced in Copeman, 1960, facing 99.

1

For an eye-witness account of James's performing the healing ceremony, see Rye, 1865, 151.

2

From 'Epistle to the Reader' (unpaginated) prefacing Clowes, 1602.

3

'An Homily Against Disobedience and Wylful Rebellion', reprinted in Wootton 1986,97.

4

5 See Christianson, 1991, 71-95, for James's accommodating 'his image of monarchy to fit the laws and history of his new kingdom' (74). 6

'A Speech in the Vpper Hovse of the Parliament' repr. in James VI and I, 1994, 134.

7

Basi/ikon Doran, repr. in James VI and I, 1994, 13.

8

J.P. Sommerville, 'Introduction', James VI and I, 1994, xvii.

9

Sommerville, 'Introduction', James VI and I, 1994, xv.

10

Quoted by Sommerville in James VI and I, 1994, xxv.

'A Speach in the Parliament Hovse' (9 November 1605), repr. in James VI and I, 1994 (147-58), 149.

11

12

For surveys of the cultural response see Tricomi, 1989; and Jordan, 1997.

13

See Goldberg, 1983, 120-22, for a discussion of this poem.

14

The Masque ofBlackness is reprinted in Lindley, 1995, 1-9.

15

See Lindley, 1995, 226 where the Dedication to Prince Henry is reprinted.

16

For an account ofRoman Catholic supernaturalism see O'Neil, 1987, esp. 90-91.

17 According to F. David Hoeniger, James made three requests on his accession to the English throne: that he not be served on bended knee, that the title Head of the Church not be applied to him (as it was properly Christ's), and that he not be asked to touch for scrofula, 'not wishing to arrogate vainly to himself such virtue and divinity, as to be able to cure diseases by touch alone' (1992, 281 ). 18 Selected Prose, 1987, 85; Donne goes on to give a detailed account of how the supernatural power to charm may be created: 'because what vertue soever the heavens infuse into any creature, man, who is AI, is capable of, and being borne when that

224

NOTES TO CHAPTER 13

vertue is exalted, may receive a like impression, or may give it to a word, or character made at that instant, ifhe can understand the time'. 'An Epigram. To K[ing] Charles for a Hundred Pounds He Sent Me in My Sickness. 1629', Poems, 205. See also 'A New Year's Gift Sung to King Charles. 1635', Poems, 227. 19

20

'To the King, To cure the Evill', Poems, 62.

21

David Lloyd quoted in Duffy, 1981,264.

22 For their suggestions and advice in the writing of this essay, I should like to thank Clarissa Thomas, Jonathan Hope, Sarah Hutton, Saul Frampton and Erica Fudge.

12. Healy: 'Seeing' Contagious Bodies in Early Modern London 1 A noted Italian physician, Girolamo Fracastoro, had put forward the idea of 'seeds' of disease in relation to syphilis infection in his famous epic poem which gave the disease its modem name, Syphilis sive morbus gallicus, published in 1530.

13. Forshaw 'All protean forms in venery': The Textual and Apparitional Body in John Marston's Verse Satires 1 This essay draws on my unpublished 1998 Oxford DPhil thesis, Satirical Personae in the Formal Verse Satires ofMarston, Guilpin and Others.

Isaac Casaubon authoritatively put the false etymology to rest (1 605, 28). Pierre Le Roy's A Pleasant Satyre or Poesie (English trans. 1595) saw satire both as 'containing euill speech' for reproving vice, and satura: a mixure of 'all sortes of writings, replenished with sundry matters, and diuers arguments, hauing prose and verse intermixed or mingled therewithall' (sig. Aa4v). 2

'Priscus Grammaticus de Satira', first prefaced to Thomas Drant's Medicinable Moral/ (1566, sig. A4v), reprinted in Horace his Arte of Poetrie, Pistles, and Satyrs Englished (1567, 189, 139). Drant attributes his definition to Priscus Grammaticusan early Grammarian, probably Diomedes, according to M.C. Randolph, (1941, 416-: 18). 3

4

For the differences between satire and Complaint, see Peter, 1965, Ch. 1.

5

For Nashe's use of the 'tricksterish energy of carnival', see Hutson, 1989, 115.

Clark Hulse, for example, ignores the ironic use of persona to regard Marston as creating 'a two handed-engine that smites both ways, that "nothing affirmeth" because it espouses and denounces every possible position' (1981, 70). This 'divided personality' argument reaches its extreme in suggestions of Marston's schizophrenia: see Schoenbaum, 1952, 1069-78. 6

7

For Marston as an Inns of Court writer, see Finkelpearl, 1969, Ch. 7.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 13

225

Davies's '•chamelion Muse' who frequents 'playes, revels, and triumphs', 'The house of fame, and Theatre of renowne', is both 'a laughter and a jest' and a shapeshifter. (Poems, 129, 163). For Davies as butt of the Inns of Court Revels, see Finkelpearl, 1969, Ch. 4. 8

'Satyrs are Epigrams; but larger drouen I Epigrams Satyrs are, but closer wouen', Robert Hayman, 'To the Reader', Quodlibets (1628) 61.

9

°

For Martial's desire to please, see his introduction to Book vii: 'si quid est enim in libellis meis placat, dictavit auditor'- 'if there is anything pleasing in my little books, the audience dictated it'. 1

11

Martial boasts his page smacks of man: 'hominem pagina nostra sapit' (x, 4).

In the preface to Book i, Martial declares his work to be entertainment, not morality: 'no intret Cato theatrum meum, si intraverit, spectet'

12

13 'Or else if Ioue would me conuert, I a blacke flea in her nest', Pelops (1587), sig, E3.

14 For Barnes's 'violation of not only his lady but also his Petrarchan tradition', see Dubrow, 1995,64-7. 15

Hall introduced the term 'plagiary' to English.

16 Thomas Lodge saw Nashe as 'a true English Aretine' (Works, iv. 63). Nashe claimed that 'of all stiles I most affect & strive to imitate Aretines' (Works, iii. 152) and describes him as 'one of the wittietiest knaves that ever God made' (ibid, ii. 2645). For a discussion ofNashe's Aretinian rhetoric, see Rhodes, 1980, 26-36. 17

For an account of Stoic influence in the Renaissance, see Monsarrat, 1984.

18 Anthony Stafford's Heauenly Dogge notes that 'Epictetus speakes more than a little in the person of this old Cynicke' and praises him as 'a vowed adversary to opinionated Vulgars' (1615, 10-11); Epictetus devotes a whole discourse to Diogenes (Manductio, iii. xxii).

In the 1599 edition of The Scourge, Marston reprinted an epigram which he claims 'the Authour Vergidemiarum, caused to be pasted to the latter page of euery Pigma/ion, that came to the Stationers of Cambridge'. The asterisked line 'The dog was best cured by cutting & *kinsing', is annotated 'Mark the witty allusion to my name' (Poems, 165). 19

20 To some degree, Marston may be seen as adapting Persius's protreptic techniques, rather as Donne does in his satires. Baumlin notes that Donne's 'espousal of Pyrrhonist skepticism marks a radical divergence from the stoic model', turning 'diatribe into a vehicle for doubt' (1991, 131-2).

226

NOTES TO CHAPTER 14

Lipsius's De Constantia (1584) translated by John Stradling as Two Bookes of Constancie (1594), and Du Yair's La Philosophie morale des Stoiques (1585?) translated by Thomas James as The Moral Philosophie of the Stoickes (1598) were influential in presenting Stoicism from a Christian point of view. 21

22 Heinrich Bullinger also accused the 'senseless Stoics' of turning men into 'blocks and stocks and senseless stones' (Decades I. vii-viii; IV. xxviii-xxxi). 23

Kinsayder signs off Certaine Satyres as 'Epictetus' (Poems, 92).

'Oscula qui sumpsit, si non etcetera sumet, I Haec quoque, quae data sunt, perdere dignus erit.' - 'He who has taken kisses but not the rest, deserves to lose even what was given' (Ars Amatoria, i. 669-70). 24

14. Wiseman: Travellers Tails: Bodily Fictions in Early Modern Narratives of Cultural Difference For a survey of tails in medieval, rather than early modern, writing see Jones, 1984, 192-219,esp. 203-8.

1

Hodgen, 1964; James A. Boon, offers a critique of Hodgen's lexical emphasis, while acknowledging her historical range (1990, 2-9). See also Pagden, 1982.

2

3

In The Works ofAphra Behn, ed J. Todd, Vol. 3; subsequent references in text.

4

For a full discussion of this see Ballaster, 1993, 283-95.

5 In a slightly different register, cannibalism 'itself is perhaps the locus of the visualized unseen. Tracing the understanding of cannibalism as a social practice from truth to sceptical counter narrative, Peter Hulme comments of the former, ' the primal scene of cannibalism as "witnessed" by Westerners is of its aftermath rather than its performance. At the centre of the scene is the large cooking pot ... and surrounding it is the "evidence" of cannibalism: the discarded human bones' (1998, 2-5).

Thomas Povey, 'Booke of Entrie of Forreigne Letters: 1655: 1656: 1657: 1658: 1659:1660', BL Add. Ms. 11411, f.14v.

6

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Index absolutism 28, 114, 144, 148, 149, 155, 189 Adelman, Janet Suffocating Mothers 205 n.2 Aers, David 20, 21 'Against Disobedience and Wylful Rebellion' 145, 223 n.4 Agrippa, Cornelius 113, 134 De Vanitate scientiarum et artium 218 n.6 AIDS 143, 158-9 Alabaster, William 56 La Dalida, adaptation of (see also Groto) 53 Roxana 55, 211 n.l3, 212 n.20 alchemy 119, 161 allegory 36, 37-8, 41, 48, 52-3, 118, 172, 206 n. 7, 206 n.8, 209 n.22, 209 n.23, 210 n.4 anchoretism, anchorites 11-12, 18 Ancrene Wisse 12, 15 angel(s)4, 117,120,125-7, 132-3, 136-7, 143, 145, 153, 166, 181, 218 n.5, 218 n.lO, 220 n.2, 221 n.3, 222 n.6, 222 n.13, 222 n.l6 animality2-4, 99,137,174,177, 192-4,201 Anne, Queen (consort of James I) 146-7, 150-51 anointing (see also unction) 144-6, 153 Apter, Emily 211 n.13 Aquinas, Thomas 9, 132 De potentia Dei 133 Summa 133 Ariosto, Lodovico 34-5, 207 n.13 Orlando Furioso 205 n.3, 206 n.9

Aristotle 36, 40, 189-90, 194, 206 n.6 Poetics 210-11 n.9 Politics 188 armour 26, 33, 36, 40-41, 43-9, 60, 205 n.l, 206 n.9, 207 n.14 asceticism 8, 117, 120, 125, 129, 221 n.36 Ascham, Roger 100, 107 The Schoolmaster 99, 108 Toxophilus 108 Augustine, St De Civitate Dei 136, 219 n.19 Praeceptum 221 n.36 Auvergne, William of9, 134-5 Axton, Marie 52 Bacon, Sir Francis 7, 69-78,197, 214 n.9, 214 n.12 A True Report ofDr Lopez his Treason 76,214 n.16 De Augmentis Scientiarum 214 n.16 Bale, John 210 n.4 Kyng Johan 51, 52 Bamford, James 166 Baring-Gould, S. 'Tailed Men' 196 Barnes, Bamabe 225 n.14 Parthenophil and Parthenophe 175 Barthes, Roland 23 Bate, Jonathan 55,212 n.16, 212 n.17 Batman, Stephen 176, 181 The Golden Booke ofLeaden Goddes 179 Baumlin, J.S. 225 n.20 Beaumont, Francis Salmacis and Hermaphroditus 185, 207 n.11 Beckwith, Sarah 14, 203 n.3

246 Behn, Aphra, 190 Oroonoko 10, 187, 189, 200 Bellamy, Elizabeth 206 n.9, 207 n.13 Bendelow G. 53 bestiality 59, 172, 178, 182-3,216 n.4 Bible 119, 138-9, 193 Black Death (see also plague) 165 Boccaccio, Giovanni Genealogica Deorum 209 n.23 Bodin, Jean 139 De Ia Demonomanie des Sorciers 131 Boguet, Henri 134-5 Boord, Andrew 160 Boon, James A. 226 n.2 Booth, Stephen 208 n.l9 Bordieu, Pierre 217 n.l7 Bray, Alan 68 Bridget of Sweden 6, 15 Bryson, Anna 99,216 n.5 Bucher, Bernadette 196 Bullein, William A Dialogue 165 Bullinger, Heinrich 209 n.23 The Decades ofHenry Bullinger 226 n.22 The Christian State of Matrimony 208 n.21 Bulwer, John Anthropometamorphosis 189 Burke, Kenneth 217 n.l6 Burton, Robert Anatomy of Melancholy 208 n.20 Butler, Judith 43, 205-6 n. 4, 207 n.l5, 209 n.24 Butler, Martin 150 Caesarius ofHeisterback Dialogus miraculorum 133 Calvary 12 Calvinism 148-9, 152, 154, 182, 209 n.23 Camden, William 144 cannibalism 196, 200, 226 n.5 Carleton, Dudley 68, 88, 214 n.6, 215 n.20

INDEX Carr, RoJ?ert, Earl of Somerset 7, 65-79, 213 n.3, 213 n.4, 214 n.9, 215 n.20 Castiglione, Baldesare 217 n.ll The Courtier 110, 217 n.l5 castration 177-8, 191, 211 n.l4 Casaubon, Isaac 224 n.2 Catholicism 51, 128, 139, 144, 152-3, 158-9, 161, 176, 223 n.l6 Celsus, Aulus Cornelius De Medicina 164 Chamberlain, John 68, 88, 214 n.6 Chapman, George 92, 179 Caesar and Pompey 84, 90, 94 Ouids Banquet ofSence 179 Charles I 154-5 Charles VIII (ofFrance) 160 Chaucer, Geoffrey 'Wife of Bath's Tale' 139 Christ 5, 12-13, 15-21, 115, 117-19, 125, 127-8,203 n.l, 219 n.15, 219 n.22, 223 n.17 Cinthio, Gianbattista Giraldi Orbecce 211 n.ll Clark, Stuart 134, 147, 152 Clement of Alexandria 222 n.l3 Clowes, William 144, 164 A Short and Profitable Treatise 162 A Right Frutefoll and Approoved Treatise .. . The Evil!, Cured by Kynges and Queenes ofEngland 152 Coke, Sir Edward 69 Coke, Roger 68, 214 n.1 0, 215 n.l8, 215 n.l9 Cole, Douglas 213 n.28 consecration 8, 16, 17, 19-20, 114, 116, 117, 119, 126, 139, 220 n.26 coronation 144-5, 147 Cotton, G.E.L. 217 n.l8 Cotton, Sir Robert 70, 78-9, 215 n.20 Coverdale, Miles 208 n.21 Cowell, John The Interpreter 149

INDEX

Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease 158 Crew, Serjeant 77-8 Cuddy, Neil 66 Da Prierio, Mazzolini Silvestro De Strigimagis ... Libri Tres 135 Davies, Sir John 173-4, 225 n.8 Davis, Lawrence 70, 76-7, 214 n.17 Davys, Mary The Merry Wanderer 187, 197, 200 Day, Angel The English Secretorie 75 death 11-12, 17,26-7,38, 43, 47, 59, 63,69, 70, 74,93,159-60,74, 191, 207 n.l2, 214 n.9, 222 n.15 De Beauvoir, Simone The Second Sex 13 De Bry, Theodore 196 De Foigny, Gabriel189 A New Discovery of Terra Australis Incognita 193 Dekker, Thomas 163, 166 Newesfrom Graves-End 165 Deleuze, Gilles 86, 205 n.1 demons (see also Devil) 2, 8-9, 131-5,138,141,150,221 n.37, 222n.6 demonology 9, 131-4, 138-41, 147 Devil, the 17, 38, 62, 131-5, 137, 139, 141, 147, 153, 193, 222 n.15 D'Ewes, Sir Simonds 72 Diana, Princess ofWales 143, 154 Digby, Sir John 70, 77 Digges, Leonard 85 Digges, Thomas 85 Diogenes 177-8, 183-4, 225 n.l8 Dolce, Ludovico 210 n.8 Donne, John 9, 155,223-4 n.l8, 225 n.20 'To his Mistris going to bed' 132 'Air and Angels' 133 Biathanatos 154 Douglas, Mary Purity and Danger 167

247

Drant, Thomas 171 Horace His Arte ofPoetrie Pistles, and Satyrs Englished 224 n.3 Medicinable Moral! 224 n.3 Drayton, Michael 207 n.ll drives, theory of 1, 195 Dutton, Richard 151 Du Yair, Guillaume, Bishop ofLisieux 177 La Philosophie Morale des Stoiques 226 n.21 Edmondes, Sir Thomas 70 education 2, 7-8, 38, 41, 44, 68, 97-109, 111, 189,208 n.21, 209 n.23 Edward II 24, (as play character) 29-30,204 n.ll, 204-5 n.12 Edward III 145, (play character) 30 Edward VI 157-8 Edward the Confessor 152, 153 Elizabeth I 27-9, 48, 68, 93, 102, 143-44, 152, 154 Elwes, Sir Gervase 69, 80 Elyot, Sir Thomas 100, 108, 163 The Governour 99, 107 epic 6, 33-7, 41-9, 206 n.7, 206 n.10, 207 n.13, 209-10 n.24, 224 n.1 Epictetus 176, 177,225 n.l8, 226 n.23 epyllia 174,179,182,184-5, 206 n.11 Erasmus, Desiderius 106 A Very Plesaunt and Fruitful Dialogue 160 De Civilitate morum puerilium 99 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of 88,93 Essex, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of 68 Eucharist, the 16-19, 21, 139 Euripides 105 Phoenissae 52 Eusebius 132

248 fasting 5, 14, 15, 16-17, 119, 120, 178, 220 n.34 femininity 6, 23-5,27,29, 31,33-4, 39-48,56-8,61,63,176, 205 n.1, 205 n.2, 208 n.20, 212 n.18 fetishism 54-5, 60, 174, 183, 196, 211 n.13, 211 n.l4, 212 n.l5 fiction(s), 2, 8, 10,23 25-6,31,41, 48, 150-52, 154, 159, 178-82, 187, 200, 205 n.l2 Finke, Laurie 14-15,21 Foucault, Michel14, 84, 109 The Order of Things 83 Fourquevaux, Raimond Beccarie de Pavie, Baron de, 85, 87 Instructions for the Warres 215 n.3 Foxe, John Christus Triumphans 210 n.4 Fracastoro, Girolamo 224 n.1 Franklin, James 70 Freud, Sigmund 10, 193, 195-6, 205 n.1 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' 209 n.24 Fuller, Thomas 53-4 Worthies ofEngland211 n.11 Galen 110, 161, 187, 205 n.2 Garrard, William 85, 88 The Arte ofWarre 89 Gascoigne, George 52, 210 n.8 Gates, Henry Louis 188 Gauntlett, Arthur 121 gender 2, 5-6, 16,23-31,36, 41-4,48,63, 133, 140, 183,197, 199, 203 n.1, 203 n.2, 204 n.5, 204 n.9, 207-8 n.15, 208 n.l6, Gerard, Gilbert 78-9, 215 n.20 Gifford, George 141 Gilman, Sander 158, 190, 195 Golding, A.S. 110 Graunt, John Natural and Political Observations 162

INDEX Greatrakes, Valentine 155 Gregory, St 120, 220 n.30 Groto, Luigi LaDalida 53 Grove, Mathew Pelops and Hippodamia 175 Guattari, F. 86, 205 n.l Guazzo, Francesco 222 n.18 Compendium Maleficarum 133-4 Guilpin, Everard 173 Skialetheia 182 Hall, Edward Chronicle or Union ofthe Noble and Illustre Famelies 105 Hall, Joseph 171, 181,225 n.l5 Poems 170, 172 Virgidemiae 169, 176 Hattaway, Michael58-9, 213 n.24 Heelas, P. 210 n.5 Henri IV (of France) 93 Henry (Prince) 66, 151,214 n.9, 223 n.l5 Henry II 143 Henry VIII 13, 105, 210 n.3 Herrick, Robert 155 Heywood, Thomas Apology for Actors 211 n.11 Hill, Christopher 167 Hodgen, Margaret 189, 226 n.2 Hoeniger, F. David 152,223 n.l7 Holy Spirit 126 Homer 34,35 Iliad 164 homosexuality (see also sodOmy) 29, 42-3,204 n.lO, 207 n.15 Horace 171,208 n.21 Hughes, John 34-5, 47 Hulme, Peter 226 n.5 Hulse, Clarke 224 n.6 iconography 10, 43, 58-9, 61, 153, 181, 187, 190-92, 199-200, 207 n.12, 209 n.24 incest 196 incubi (see also succubi) 132-41

INDEX infanticide 54, 63 Inns of Court 52, 98, 171-2, 173, 174, 176, 185, 224 n.7, 225 n.8 Institucion ofa Gentleman 98 Irenaeus 132 James I and VI 7, 9, 66-70, 72, 74, 76,80-81,141,143-4,147-55, 214 n.9, 223 n.2, 223 n.5, 223 n.17 Basi/ikon Doron 66, 148-9, 153 Daemonologie 138, 147 The Trew Law ofFree Monarchies 147-9 James, Thomas The Moral Philosophie ofthe Stoickes 226 n.21 Jardine, Lisa 54, 55 Jesuits 148 John the Baptist 127 Jones, Inigo 150, 151 Jonson, Ben 9, 144, 152, 154-5, 183 The Devil is an Ass 132 Masque ofBlackness 150-51, 223 n.l4 Masque of Queens 151 'A Panegyre, on the Happy Entrance of James, Our Sovereign' 149 Juvena1 169-70, 173-4, 176, 185 Kantorowicz, Ernst 65 Katherine of Aragon, Queen (consort of Henry VIII) 210 n.3 Kempe, Margery 6, 17, 20 Book of Margery Kempe 15, 21 Kenilworth Castle 102, 154 Kieckheffer, Richard 128 'Arabic Learning and the Occult Sciences' 221 n.38 'The Devi1's Contemplatives' 220 n.33 king's evil (scrofula) 143-4, 149, 152-5, 223 n.17 King's Men 152

249 'Kinsayder, W.' (pseud. of John Marston) 10, 170-85, 226 n.23 Kinwelmarshe, Francis 52, 210 n.8 Knox, Dilwyn 99,216 n.4 Knox, John 146 Kyd, Thomas 61,97 The Spanish Tragedy 55, 58, 213 n.23

Lacan, Jaques 209 n.24 Langland, William 169, 171 Langley, Thomas 171 Lefebvre, Henri 84, 87, 114, 128, 215 n.2, 221 n.42 Letter on Virginity for the Encouragement of Virgins 11 Lewis, C.S. 39, 206 n.8 The Allegory ofLove 38 Liber Consecrationis 113, 119 Linnaeus, Carolus 83 Lipsius, Justus 177 De Constantia 226 n.21 Lochrie, Karma 14, 20,202 n.1 Lodge, Thomas 97, 163, 164, 225 n.16 Scylla's Metamorphosis 179, 206 n.11 Lovell, Terry 187 Lowe, Peter 160 Ludus Coventriae 21 0 n.3 'Death of Herod' 210 n.2 Lull, Raymund ars notoria 218 n.8 ars combinatoria 218 n.8 ars memorativa 218 n.8 Luther, Martin 134-5 McLuskie, Kathleen 58,213 n.22 magic 5, 24, 34-5, 47, 110, 113-21, 125, 127-9, 139, 141, 143-4, 147, 150-55, 175,217 n.18, 218 n.6 Christian 8, 113, 120, 220 n.26, 220 n.35, 221 n.41 Maitland, Sara 13 Map, Walter 9 De nugis curalium 133

250 Marlowe, Christopher 25, 26, 30, 180, 204 n.6, 204 n.8, 205 n.l2 Dido Queen of Carthage 24 Doctor Faustus 31 Edward J/29, 204 n.lO Hero and Leander 178, 207 n.11 Jew of Malta, The 6, 27, 29 The Massacre at Paris 6, 28 Tamburlaine The Great6, 31, 59, 61, 63, 213 n.25 Marston, John 10, 170-74, 177, 179-80, 182, 184, 224 n.6, 224 n. 7, 225 n.20 Antonio and Mel/ida 184 The Metamorphosis ofPigmalions Image And Certaine Satyres 173, 178, 226 n.23 The Scourge of Villanie 173, 225 n.19 What You Wi//174 Martial 173, 225 n.l 0, 225 n.ll, 225 n.12 Martin, Dennis 129 Mary of Oignies 15 Mary, Queen {Tudor) 143 Mary Queen of Scots 146 Mary, Virgin 5, 51, 115, 125,210 n.4 masculinity 6, 23-27, 29, 31, 33, 40-41,43,45-7,49,55,56,63, 194,196, 197,203 n.3, 205 n.1, 205 n.2, 207 n.l2, 207-8 n.l5, 208 n.18, 208 n.20, 209 n.24 masques 136, 140, 148, 150-52 Mathiesen, Robert 'A thirteenth-century ritual to attain the beatific vision from the Sworn Book ofHonorius of Thebes' 220 n.33 Maus, Katerine Eisaman 213 n.l Medwall, Henry Fulgens and Lucres 97-9 Merchant Taylors' Company 102 Merchant Taylors' School97, 102, 108 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 8, 113 metamorphosis 178-84 Middleton, Thomas 139-41

INDEX A Mad World, My Masters 131-2 The Witch 9, 138 Milton, John 132, 135, 206 n.8 Areopagitica 209 n.22 Paradise Lost 136-7,222 n.13, 222 n.l4, 222 n.l5 Paradise Regained 136-7 Mitchell, Juliet 211-12 n.l4 Monboddo, Lord Edward 193,201 An Account ofa Savage Gir/200 Origin and Progress ofLanguage 200 Monmouth, Geoffrey of History ofthe Kings ofBritain 133 Mulcaster, Richard 8, 97, 101-3, 107-11,217 n.9, 217 n.18 Elementarie 100, 104 Positions 100, 104-5 myth(s) (see also mythology) 9-10, 20,52,54,114-15,126, 158-9, 161, 169, 172, 175,178-80, 184-5, 187-8, 190-91, 195-6, 198-200 mythology 60-1, 161, 210 n.6, 211 n.10

Nashe, Thomas 172, 176, 224 n.5, 225 n.l6 The Choise of Valentines 184 Christes Teares 165 necromancy (see witchcraft) Neoplatonism 100, 162, 165, 205 n.l2, 209 n.23, 212 n.l9 Newesfrom Scotland 147, 150 'new men' 8, 98, 108 New World 191, 196 Nice Wanton 157, 167 Northampton, Henry Howard, Earl of 70, 74, 76, 78 Northumberland, Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of85-6, 92, 145-6,215 n.3 orations 113, 117, 120-21, 220 n.29 Ornstein, Robert 211 n.10 Overbury, Sir Thomas 7, 65,68-73, 75-80,213 n.5, 214 n.l2,

INDEX Ovid42,47, 138,170,172,174-5, 178, 180-82, 185, 206 n.11 Metamorphoses 179, 209 n.23 Pace, Richard 105 Letter prefacing De Fructu 106 Paracelsus 152, 161, 165 Parker, Patricia 46-7, 205 n.3, 206 n.10, 207 n.12, 209-10 n.24 'Suspended Instruments: Lyric and Power in the Bower of Bliss' 206 n.10 parliament 148-50, 155 Pamassus plays, the 101, 172 Partridge, Eric Shakespeare's Bawdy 208 n.19 patriarchy 25, 27, 29-30, 58, 60-63, 153,204 n.10, 212 n.18 patrilinearity 25, 40 Paul's, St, Dean of 105 Paynell, Thomas 163 Payton, Henry 69-70 Peacham, Henry 55, 57 Perkins, William A Direction for the Governement of the Tongue according to God's word 219 n.22 Peter, John 173 Petrarchism 27, 175, 179, 181, 185 225 n.14 phallus 26, 28, 41, 43, 208 n.16, 211 n.14 Philo 222 n.13 plague, bubonic 9, 159, 163-6 Plato (see Neoplatonism) pox (see also syphilis) 159, 161-2 Pratt, Mary Louise 187 prayers 14-15, 116,118-21,127-8, 144 Privy Chamber 66 Privy Council 66, 73, 75, 214 n.13 Privy Seal 74 Protestantism 9, 48, 51, 146, 149, 155, 157-8, 161, 165, 194, 209 n.23, 210 n.4 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 132

251 Puritanism 148, 152, 155, 165, 170, 176, 179, 185 Raleigh, Sir Walter 36, 41 Rankins, William 171, 175 Respub/ica 51-2 revels (Inns of Court) 173, 185, 225 n.8 rhetoric 6, 29, 30-l, 42, 51-2, 54, 60-3, 68, 75, 80, 131' 137, 164, 171-4,176, l85,204n.10, 210 n.7, 210 n.9, 212 n.19, 225 n.l6 Rich, Bamabe 162 Rymer, Thomas 34-5, 205 n.3

Sabinus Fabularum Ovidii Interpretatio 208 n.23 sacrament 18-19, 127, 135, 154 sacrifice 20, 118, 219 n.19 Saints 5, 9, ll-13, 15, 115, 125, 128, 133, 152-3, 181 Salisbury, Robert Cecil, Earl of74 sanctuary 114 satire 2, I 0, 169-76, 178, 182, 184, 224 n.2, 224 n.4, 225 n. 20 Scot, Reginald 126, 141, 221 n.37 Discoverie of Witchcraft 124-5, 138-9 scrofula (seeking's evil) Seddon, P.R. 68 Seneca 52, 58-9, 211 n.lO Medea 212 n.20 seven liberal arts, the 116, 127 sexuality (see also homosexuality) 24, 28,42-7,54-7,65,72,131-5, 138, 141, 160, 162, 169, 171-4, 178-81, 183, 195-6, 199-9, 207 n.12, 207-8 n. 15,208 n.19 Seznec, Jean 210 n.6, 211 n.IO Shakespeare l-2, 9, 24, 144, 149, 180, 212 n.16 All's Well That Ends Well208 n. 19 Hamlet4, 51,210 n.l King Lear 3, 4, 152

252 Macbeth 152-4 Measure for Measure 137 Richard II 145, 154 Richard III 213 n.27 'Sonnet 129' 208 n.l9 Titus Andronicus 55,212 n.19 Shepherd, Simon 60, 204 n.lO Sidney, Philip 52,210 n.7, 210-11 n.9 Sidney, Robert 88 Simcocks, John 70 Simon, Joan 109 slavery 29, 121, 188-92, 194, 196 Smith, Sir Thomas De Republica Anglorum 216 n.3 sodomy68, 72,135, 176,204n.10 Solitarius, Pelagius 116, 118 'De arte crucifixi Palagij Solitarij' 113 Solomon (attrib.) 113, 119-21, 124-5, 127,218 n.5, 220 n.28 Liber Salomonis (Liber Raziel) 119 Somerset, Frances Howard, Countess of7,65,68-69 Sontag, Susan 159 Spenser, Edmund 9, 36-42,46-48,97, 206 n.l 0, 207 n.12, 207 n.15, 208 n.19, 208 n.21, 209 n.22, 209 n.23, 209 n.24 The Faerie Queene 6, 33-35, 132, 205 n.1, 205 n.3, 206 n.5, 206 n. 8 spirit (see also spirituality) 45, 99, 116-9, 121, 125-8, 135-9, 166, 169, 184, 208 n.l9, 222 n.6 spirituality 2-4, 6, 8, 11-16, 19, 36, 48, 59, 132-3, 141, 144, 158, 161, 163, 179, 206 n.8 Stafford, Anthony Heauenly Dogge 225 n.18 Starkey, David 65, 77 The English Court 66 Stoicism 169, 176-7, 185, 210 n.6, 225 n.20, 226 n.21 Stone, Lawrence 217 n.lO Stradling, John Two Bookes ofConstancie 226 n.21

INDEX Struys, Jan 187, 194-5 The Voyages and Travels ofJohn Struys 193 Stude1ey, John 212 n.20 succubi (see also incubi) 131-5 Sutcliffe, Matthew 85 syphilis 9, 157, 159, 161-162, 164, 224 n.l Tasso, Torquato 34, 205 n.3 Tertullian 132, 222 n.l3 theologians 13, 135, 155 theo1ogy4, 11, 13,116,119,132-3, 135, 155, 166 theurgy 8, 113, 115, 118, 125, 128-9, 218 n.6 Thomas, Keith 141, 144 Tooker, William Charisma Sive Donum Sanationis 152 Turner, Robert (trans.) Ars Notoria 117-18, 218 n.8 Turner, William 161-2 typology 57, 61, 213 n.26, 218 n.6 unction 145-6 Villiers, George 69 violence 5-6, 25, 26, 30-31, 40, 49, 51,53-4,58-9,63,71,103, 132, 134, 139, 154, 163, 192, 208 n.l6, 211 n.13 virginity 11-12,28,57, 120, 127, 175, 207 n.12 virtual body, the 2, 113-15 Von Hutten, Ulrich 159 De Morbo Gallico 160 Wager, Lewis The Life and Repentance ofMarie Magdaleine 161 Wakefield Cycle 'Herod the Great' 210 n.2 Walker-Bynum, Caroline 14, 17-18, 20 Holy Feast and Holy Fast 16

INDEX

Warner, Marina 51-2 Watt, Ian 187 Weever, John 'Faunus and Melliflora' 207 n.11 Westminster, J.T. The Hunting ofthe Pox 159 Weston, Richard 69-70,73,77-8 Wilkinson, R.H. 217 n.18 Willbem, David 56-7, 212 n.19 Williams, Sir Roger 93

253 Williams, S.J. 53 Wilson Knight, G. 34-5, 47, 205-6 n.4 Winwood, Sir Ralph 69, 74 Wisdom, Who is Christ 3-4 witchcraft 9 125, 128, 132, 134-5, 138-9, 141, 144, 146-7, 152 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn 11, 12 Wrightson, Keith 106 Wynne-Davies, Marion 57, 212 n.18