Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England 9781442682993

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UTOPIA, CARNIVAL, AND COMMONWEALTH IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

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CHRISTOPHER KENDRICK

Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2004 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8936-4

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Kendrick, Christopher, 1953Utopia, carnival and commonwealth in Renaissance England / Christopher Kendrick. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-8936-4 1. English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism. 2. Utopias in literature. I. Title. PR418.U8K45 2004

820.9'372

C2004-901668-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Chapter I. Utopian Differences i. Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx ii. Defining Beginnings: Utopia 28

3

Chapter II. Carnival and Utopia i. Utopia as the Negation of Carnival 74 ii. Carnival Strikes Back: Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme

86

Chapter III. Utopia and the Commonwealth i. Conjuring Revolution in the Dialogue of Counsel

112

112

ii. The Body Politic and Utopia in A Dialogue of Pole and Lupset 135 iii. A Discourse of the Commonweal, the East Anglian Rebellion, and the End of the Smallholding Utopia 169 Chapter IV. Sprung Desire and Groups in Flux: On the Politics of the Utopian Impulse in Marlowe and Shakespeare i. Travesty, Allegory, and the Political Effectivity of Renaissance Drama 198 ii. Marlowe and the Utopia of Sprung Desire 218 iii. Groups in Flux in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I 227

vi Contents Chapter V. Flights from the Tudor Settlement; or, Carnival and Commonwealth Revised i. Nashe's Lenten Utopia 238 ii. The Imperial Lab: Discovering Forms in The New Atlantis 288 Notes Index

333 371

Acknowledgmentss

This study is the result of an ongoing, long-term project, and most of the debts I feel obliged to acknowledge accordingly go an unusual way back. I've discussed aspects of the project, especially early on, with Allen Frantzen and Margaret Ferguson, and have profited greatly from their learned insight and savvy advice. In a letter I've often revisited, Michael McKeon commented with great care and acuity on an early version of my argument about Utopia; I've tried to answer his criticisms in writing the section on Utopia here. Fredric Jameson read the whole manuscript at an advanced stage, and as usual gave me better advice than I entirely knew how to use, and kind encouragement that I very much could. Richard Halpern and Jim Holstun read and commented on long and unwieldy swathes of the work along the way; I've come to depend on their generous feedback, and find that I am constantly engaging with their work and viewpoints. Joseph Loewenstein provided formative commentary on the whole work, for which I'm immensely grateful. And I've owed more than I can say, all through, to Carl Freedman's conversation and commentary. (Still it is worth stating that if I have not once cited his Critical Theory and Science Fiction [Wesleyan University Press, 2000], that is because I might have on practically any page.) Suzanne Rancourt and Barbara Porter at the University of Toronto Press have been remarkably congenial and skilful editors, and I want to express my thanks to them, as well as to Judy Williams, for her sensitive and meticulous copy-editing. Finally, I'd like to dedicate the book to Kasturi Haldar and Lev Haldar Kendrick, who progressed in cheerful leaps and bounds all through its latter stages.

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UTOPIA, CARNIVAL, AND COMMONWEALTH IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

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Chapter I. Utopian Differences /. i. Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx

The first section of this chapter will formulate some basic generalizations about Utopia, the literary genre and the discursive thing. Section 2 will discuss some key aspects of Thomas More's De Optimo Rei publicae statu deque nova Insula Utopia, first printed in 1516, usually just called Utopia, and by most accounts, as by this, a founding generic work. The aim of the chapter will be to offer a view of Utopia, and a reading of Utopia, which will situate them in the period covered by the essays that follow, the English Renaissance or early early-modern. I will begin by rehearsing a position on genre. 1. Axioms about Genre Genre in one sense is a traditional, pre-modern category; if late- or postmodern sea-changes in subjectivity have revived it somewhat, this is largely as a practical matter; it remains a seemingly secondary, typically academic topic, today, and this precisely in garden-variety academic discourse. That this is an objective modern illusion, that genre is an essential and indeed inevitable category of cultural analysis, becomes evident upon any serious attempt to think historically. Literary-historiographical perspectives of all sorts tend to associate genres with periods or moments, to conceive them as enjoying a special relationship with definite times and places. So, for example: the writerly novel is associated with early twentieth-century Europe, or high modernism; the historical novel with early nineteenth-century Scotland and France and with mid-century Russia; the novel itself with eighteenth-century England or, more generally, with modernity. Or to take examples from pre-novelistic,

4 Utopian Differences

'fixed-form' genres: romance is associated with the early and high middle ages, and the 'tale' with the later; choric drama with the emergence of the city-state; pastoral lyric and the satiric novella with the Alexandrian epoch. One could go on for some time citing examples, and the reservations, qualifications, and contradictions they would elicit would amount to an argument how complex a matter such association is. Without pretending to do justice to the complexity, I will propose here two axioms about what goes on, what the mind is doing, in such associations, and then draw from these an inference. First axiom. Such associations generally assume relationships of dialectical formative influence between genre and period. Something there was, on the one hand, about the social life and culture of early imperial Rome and early eighteenth-century London, for example, some distinctive set of features, some significant situation exceeding mere 'moral corruption' in either case, that asked or demanded to be expressed in satire, and that put its impress on the form, or forms, it took. And usually it is assumed, on the other hand, that the genre so impressed played a significant representational role, and thus contributed to shaping or characterizing the culture and society from which it emerged. So early imperial Rome was a satiric society in the sense that it knew itself significantly through satire.1 Second axiom. Reflection suggests that such positive associations are generally bound up with others, largely negative in kind. So: satiric and loco-descriptive, and not epic, poetry in the earlier part of eighteenthcentury England (though of course much epic was written). Or: along with the writerly or modernist novel, as its twin, the formula novel for popular consumption, and no longer the ordinary readerly novel. Or again: late nineteenth-century Utopia presupposes, coexists with, satire, but not of the traditional or fixed sorts found in invective and the verse letter. It thus becomes clear that the associations, the situations of dialectical formative influence, are systemic - that individual associations assume, or understand themselves within, the more or less definite presence of genre-systems - which systems, it stands to reason, know their proper determinations and determinacies, their more comprehensive formative influences, too. Inference. The history of a literary genre, then, ought to involve the description of a series of sections or periods of formative influence, and its positioning within the sequence of generic systems. On the face of it, it would seem unlikely that any given genre will know a continuous history: a history, for example, in which, from one period to the next, new,

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx 5

richer developments disclose themselves from within the possibilities of the genre's signifying structure or form. Since it is understood that historical periods are different, since they are constructed to take account of real change, it should follow that, as between periods, discontinuities, displacements, surprising new starts feature regularly. On the other hand, insofar as the general signifying properties of genres do remain the same, one expects continuities to disclose themselves - analogies of situation, function, meaning - across periods as well. So it is not that stories will not emerge, cannot be told, about individual genres. It is that the stories will likely include episodes in which the protagonist is relieved mysteriously of some one or more of its favourite powers or employments, finds itself upstaged by the neighbour across the way, or, when most expectant, like poor Dapper in The Alchemist, finds itself immobilized, as if muffled in a closet, for an incalculable time, only later to emerge to light with much to say but having to adapt its grievances to the new situation. Again, it will not be that genre-stories cannot have beginnings, middles, and ends. It is that these need not be ordered chronologically. So one can imagine a generic beginning— a situation of formative influence in which the actual signifying elements of a genre come together - coinciding with a middle- a situation in which these elements are put most fully and effectively to work. Or one can imagine an end - a situation in which it becomes impossible to practise a given genre any more (as, for example, with the end of epic in the modern world of prose, according to Hegel, or the end of Utopia in the late capitalist world of achieved or attainable possibilities, according to Marcuse) - one can imagine such an end being followed by a middle, or indeed a beginning, in which new and unforeseen conditions of possibility emerge to free the epic or Utopian signifying material once more. 2. Axioms about Utopia So much for the implications of ordinary literary-critical generic understandings. Now for understandings of Utopia. Most critics familiar with the Utopian tradition, I venture, would consider two periods as particularly eventful and significant for the Utopia, assumed as a beginning and a middle respectively: the Renaissance and the nineteenth century. This common historical understanding could and should be questioned, of course. What about the various ideal states/societies projected in the period of the Greek city-states and after as the real beginning of the Utopia? What about the Enlightenment, a period rich

6 Utopian Differences in Utopias, as a better middle? Or how about the 1920s (the Soviet 1920s especially) or the American (post-) 1960s (with its remarkable science fiction writers: Le Guin, Piercy, Russ, Delany, Dick) as new beginnings and ends? Such questions have force, but I would suggest that they can readily be fitted in with the general situation of formative influence presupposed by the common understanding. The understanding is that Utopias thrive when there is a strong sense of entrenched, extensively damaging contradiction on the one hand, and of alternate social possibilities on the other. So Fourier and Owen, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, respond from different redoubts to the counter-revolutionary entrenchment of capitalism, and Bellamy, Morris, Wells, and Gilman, around the turn of the next, to the shift to monopoly or imperial capitalism. And so Renaissance Utopias respond to the impasse of feudal society, and either to the nascence of capitalism or the emergence of the absolutist state. These latter formulations retain their interest and usefulness partly because their generality makes them pre-Cold War; or rather, they are indifferent, they do not take sides on what appears now as the first long phase of globalization (more accurately termed 'Americanization'). When I think, in any case, of the parts I find uninteresting in what writers usually find it in themselves to say about Utopia or Utopias, they are very often conducting that old battle in some way, or rehearsing once more the lessons so well and tirelessly learned from it. In critics specializing in the modern, especially, one finds the theme and assumption that the Utopia is inherently dystopian because totalitarian, or, to much the same end, the belabouring of an opposition between the closed Utopia (read Stalin) and the open Utopia (read America). I will not be arguing that Utopias cannot be dystopian, or pose questions of openness vs. closedness; but to take these matters as generally defining, it seems to me, is to make a category-mistake. Nor is the Cold War usually far away when Morris's News from Nowhere is dismissed, or celebrated, for its archaism, its nostalgia. Or when Fourier is represented as a psychological freak. Or when we find the old Renaissance scholars telling their pupil-readers that Utopiaisjust a light joke (C.S. Lewis) or to be taken as a product of Reason devoid of a sense of sin and the need for mercy, of Christian Love (R.W. Chambers), or come upon equally formidable recent scholars treating it as an early example of self-consciously immature Renaissance pastoral (Harry Berger) or a demonstration of the illusory character of an apparent collective freedom (Stephen Greenblatt).

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx 7

One would think that the notion of Utopia as inherently totalitarian would now begin to lose its obviousness. A purpose in what follows is not to fight the Cold War, of course, since there is no winning that - but to 'return' to the more general propositions aforesaid, and to defend them against both good- and bad-willed attempts at obfuscation by rewriting them in a new way. My main argument will be that the (Renaissance) Utopia bespeaks, and is tailored to provoke recognition of and reflection upon, a certain kind of contradiction, contradiction determined by (archaic) uneven development. I will approach the argument first by the roundabout route of reflecting upon some key nineteenthcentury Utopian moments - high points, in my book, from the Utopia's middle period. 3. News from Nowhere: Collective Choice, and Historicity as Uneven Development The first is William Morris's Nervsfrom Nowhere (1890), surely one of the more successful Utopias ever to be imagined in respect of the basic question any straightforward Utopia poses for the reader, and must itself then face. Would I, should I, be happy in this society? Or again, to bring out the difference of 'should': is this description's claim upon me, that I should recognize it as depicting happiness, legitimate? It is hard to imagine a careful reader of News from Nowhere in good conscience answering this question in the negative. Thus, it is true that Morris's take on the erotic is rather orthodoxly romantic; so that the sexual politics of News remains distinctly old-line feminist, at best, and heterosexist. And again, though Morris's is a version of a workers' Utopia, it is decidededly not an urban- or factory-proletarian one, so that its class politics are not classically socialist. Still, in light of the text's processing of its own assumptions or prejudices, the modern feminist, or gay, or the classically socialist, reader who holds this very much against Morris must feel herself to be as small as the individual of property so stuck on matters of mine and thine that he refuses even for a few imaginative hours to give up wanting a stake and a family he can call his own. I would attempt to explain how this is, and to specify the novel's situation of formative influence, by discussing three instances from it. There comes a moment in the trip up the Thames, to a harvest festival, that occupies the latter part of the book, when Morris's dreamer expresses his wonder that the manner of negotiating changes in the river-depth has not changed. As they wait for a lock to fill, the traveller asks his host

8 Utopian Differences

why a better system has not been devised: 'I have been wondering, as we passed lock after lock, that you people ... have not invented something which should get rid of this clumsy business of going upstairs by means of these rude contrivances.'2 It transpires, of course, that the system of locks is part of the great rebirth of handicraft traditions that Morris envisions as the end and motivating force of his Utopian revolution. Never is it so clear in Morris's narrative as when his journeyers, relaxing from the work at hand, waiting for the lock to fill, are gently impressed by the beauty of the countryside, that the return to an artisanal ethos and aesthetic, the rendering of the handicrafts mentality into a cultural dominant, involves an attack on the whole modern idea of efficiency, and indeed on the experience of time that capitalism and the middle classes were still in process of making normative, were inventing and assuming into existence. It is so evident in part because the lock, we are told, exists as the result of trial and error. This English society of the year 2102 could construct a 'better' - more efficient - system - and indeed did, and put it into effect - but has gone back to the lock upon finding that the improvement was unsatisfying. All this is thoroughly Utopian, and accordingly quite complicated. I will note two basic things. First, you are presented with the idea, the picture, of a people standing back and consciously choosing their mode of living from among a number of options, an assumed series of available traditional and possible — forms (customs, institutions, and so on). And second, at the same time, a notion is present of a logic of development, of a kind of system finding itself or gradually falling into place through the medium of the aforesaid choices. Or, to put this last more precisely, the notion is of a sub-system - call it the sub-system of river travel being fixed upon by, and fitted in with, a larger arrangement of social relations, an arrangement by no means all of a temporal piece. The most memorable evidence for this last, what could be called the temporally pastiche quality of Morris's vision, comes in a previous instance from the trip. The traveller notes that the Thames is trafficked 'by craft of one kind and another. The most part of these were being rowed like ourselves, or were sailing, in the sort of way that sailing is managed in the upper reaches of the river; but every now and then we came on barges, laden with hay or other country produce, or carrying bricks, lime, timber, and the like, and these were going on their way without any means of propulsion visible to me -just a man at the tiller, with often a friend or two laughing and talking with him' (185-6). Force-barges these are called, powered by a more 'advanced' sort of

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx 9 engine than steam. We can be told no more than this: for the narrator to ask questions would be for him to ruin his cover as a stranger from another country rather than from the deep past. It is the only place in the story proper in which the problem of how to dispose of what we today call technology begins to be handled.3 For the renaissance of handicrafts has not gone along with the wholesale destruction of 'modern technology' but with its cultural and ideological demotion and economic specification. The nineteenth century, it is allowed, was great at making tools to make tools, machines to make machines; and this talent has been preserved and cultivated in all those fields of activity - one has no good sense of how extensive they are which are not susceptible of being turned back into arts. One gathers that somewhere in Morris's English garden-Utopia, inconspicuous in the midst of the clearings and cultivated plots, force-factories do their silent, machine- as against labour-intensive, work. One gathers this, because it is neither narrated nor exposited, in this pamphlet novel of some two hundred pages, except in the paragraph in question. The effect of this passage and moment in Morris's construct is, again, thoroughly Utopian. One might say that it works and it doesn't; or again, that it works in two ways, one of which involves a betrayal of inadequacy. It works. The inconspicuous barges, by fitting so easily, signify some unforeseen new combination of handicrafts and modern technology, in which the 'natural' mode of production is comfortably dominant, shaping the 'modern' so surely that it need not even be known in the average Utopian's everyday life. It doesn't work, or works by betraying inadequacy. Because machine technology's current social dominance is known, the reader looks for some specification as to how it is organized and disposed, how its subordination is managed. In the absence of such, the idea of indirect cognition or apperception as the best form of knowledge, truest to and responsible for the made countryside, is hollowed out, struck with a question. One wonders about the engine imperceptible to the senses, the factories just over the hill, and the country begins to take on the quality of a mere artifact, a landscape. This limitation on Utopian vision is consistent with Morris's initial purpose in writing News from Nowhere, which was polemical: he wanted to reclaim socialism, or the vision of the socialist future, from Edward Bellamy's white-collar, bureaucratic rendering, and to do this needed to demonstrate no more than that his handicraft-workerist model was at least comparably feasible.4 Such a limitation is also presumably a main reason for Morris's subtitling his work A Utopian Romance— rather than,

10 Utopian Differences say, A Utopian Novel, which would imply more circumstance, if not sociological completeness. Yet such marked incompleteness is itself a distinctive feature of literary Utopias, whose paradoxical negative mission, as has been often noted, is to show the impossibility of sketching a consequent vision of social happiness whole and without contradiction - thus to remind the reader of the historical boundedness, the historicity, of the social and political imagination; to demonstrate, that is, that thought in fact is not free.5 My third defining instance from the book comes at the end of the traveller's journey upstream. By now he has made himself known to Ellen, the beautiful native woman with whom he has fallen in love, and has stirred up her historical sense, her sense of her society as fragile achievement. This issues in Ellen's testimonial to her love of nature remarkably, if oddly, moving in spite and on account of the didacticism and melodrama of the rhetoric. The old house that epitomizes Nature here is Morris's Kelmscott (as Morris's privileged audience would have understood), a modest sixteenth-century manor. 'Yes, friend, this is what I came out for to see; this many-gabled old house built by the simple country-folk of the long-past times, regardless of all the turmoil that was going on in cities and courts, is lovely still amidst all the beauty which these latter days have created; and I do not wonder at our friends tending it carefully and making much of it. It seems to me as if it had waited for these happy days, and held in it the gathered crumbs of happiness of the confused and turbulent past.' She led me up close to the house, and laid her shapely sun browned hand and arm on the lichened wall as if to embrace it, and cried out, 'Oh me! Oh me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it, - as this has done!' (220)

Ellen's access to Nature in the raw is channelled here through the authentic collective labour of the medieval past, the building traditions which, in Morris's Ruskinian understanding, were cut off by Renaissance magisterial-perspectival culture. The point I would make, though, is a little more complicated: that context predicates her secular-pagan passion, not just on the survival of the past, but on a generalized sense of social uneven development, on what might be called the historical prestidigitation, and consequent relativity, of social forms. Insofar as the Utopia is felt as an effect of a new precarious combination, a principal

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx 11 effect is to estrange the perennial human questions of the relation to Nature and of death. What is the general situation of formative influence in play in these three key episodes? Taken together the first two moments clearly cast the present under the threat of the completion of what would come to be called, in the next phase of development, Taylorism - the rationalization through analysis of the actual labour processes, which tended either to eliminate the form of, or to withdraw from any individual's experience, the 'immemorial' handicraft methods.6 At the same time, the text's reversal of the relationship of dominance existing between the two modes of labour in 'actual social reality' - where machinofacture was the stronger, and obviously the wave of the future - testifies to a determinant tension between these, as bound up with and representing potential ways of life, in the present. It is not just a matter of the passing away of a particular way of making some products, then; rather what is involved is a struggle between elements that represent something more, ways of life or cultures - the symbolic prerequisite, so to speak, of social revolution. Finally, the third instance, Ellen's celebration of Nature across the gap of the lost past, testifies especially to (a sense of) the 'objective' historicity of human species-being, the determinate contingency of collective identity, the ineluctability of uneven development. A word about this last is in order. The Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel has best taught the lesson that one of capitalism's distinctive features is the extent to which it internalizes and thrives upon structural differences between social systems, the mode in which it orchestrates 'uneven development.' Capitalism so distinguishes itself by virtue of the drive for surplus profit (a profit in excess of the average) enforced by competition. For Mandel, this drive or ceaseless search means that Marx's concept of 'so-called primitive accumulation' — the host of actions by which wealth in sufficient mass to operate as capital proper, self-accumulating value, was prised from the pre-capitalist people - is not to be understood as a historical moment, or not only that, but as an organic or systemic one too. The organicity of primitive accumulation is the strictly economic explanation for the division between core and periphery characteristic of the capitalist market, hence for such basic features as the persistence of pre-capitalist forms and spheres within the developed and developing core, and the predatory/preservative character of imperialism, with their complex and unpredictable effects on the total system. My suggestion is that Morris's work, particularly in the passage of

12 Utopian Differences Ellen's ecstasy but generally as well, is reflecting and making use of this entrenchment of primitive accumulation, that it recognizes and conducts with singular clarity the modern Utopia's mission of conjuring with the new sort of modalized contingency, the peculiarly abstract specificity, of capitalist uneven development. In no other Utopia is uneven development so clearly and poignantly an ultimate, and limiting, theme. Morris's especially advanced sense of this mission helps to explain both his will and his ability to accomplish what Utopian writers and thinkers are notoriously not supposed to be able to do, namely provide a plausible account of how their Utopia is to be achieved, given the sorry reigning state of affairs: I refer to the chapters on 'how the change came,' whose impressive realism is achieved by the rendering of determinate contingency in action, and thus in which we might see Morris contending in a less magical way than in the Utopia proper with the felt proposition that chance has become capitalist, is now securely orchestrated. And it helps to explain why the imperial allegory projected by Morris's island of handicrafts, by comparison say to the sinister allegory in Wells's The Time Machine (1905), strikes as so benign, for all the vision's nominal Englishness (which is to say its nationalism and racism); for the struggle for handicrafts is figured as a nativist struggle against de facto colonizing powers, and 'true Englishness,' accordingly, lined up in solidarity with the colonized abroad. 4. Fourier: (Anti-Revolutionary Schematism, Fiction as Project To the proposition that the Utopia responds to, and fashions its alternate world from, systematic uneven development, two corollaries may be added. These are especially prominent in the life and work of Charles Fourier, about whom it has been said that he incarnated the Utopia at least as thoroughly as Hegel the dialectic. To appearances, Utopia was much the less comfortable commodity to hold within oneself. Utopia had exhibited what might be called a biographical presumption from the seventeenth century (Bacon and Campanella on) - a tendency to take over the life of its author, which determines the slippage from genre to discourse, and which partly accounts for the difficulty of keeping the history of Utopia separate from the history of all-consuming social projects. Surely Fourier's central idea of the passional series - or, in its local habitation, of the phalanstery - gives every indication of having seized and ridden him. So that the sensitive and diligent modern reader cannot help feeling that the prophetic and the cosmological registers

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx

13

for which Fourier's work is probably still today most notorious, and which have so often been used to discredit its usefulness (usually by critics who prefer more readily accessible superstitions: those on offer, for example, from the apostles of the various Christianities and of the 'free' marketplace) - the sympathetic reader feels that these are to be understood in an inner sense as necessary rhetorical devices or adjuncts, as first solutions to the problem of how you present such a thing adequately. What is the phalanstery? Only a minimal description is wanted here. The resumes tend to begin with Fourier's notion of Nature as an expression of God's intentions, and his conviction that his Utopia spells out, at last, God's plan.9 Yet, though it seems clear that these were biographically necessary assumptions, you could describe the phalanstery apart from this notion and conviction. But you could not describe it without explaining specifically human nature as Fourier understood it. The key theses here are those of the primacy of the passions, and of their divison into twelve main kinds: the five sensual, the four social, and the three distributive. After this, one needs to understand two things about Fourier's individuals. (1) They are conceived as passional complexes, whose unity or integrity, as passional types, comes as the result of Naturally arranged modes of combination, and whose relation to the whole is constituted by what might be called providential-statistical patterning. And (2) they require for fulfilment to be put into contact with other individuals, that is to be put into groups; the passional development of individuals requires a complicated patterning of groups and groupactivities, an intricate, systematic, and self-revising function of social arrangement. Or, to put this last the other way round, the groups-inseries that permit and promote complex passional realization and development — i.e., the various possible phalansteries — in fact come first: they constitute human nature, they are the true individuals in the wake of whose formation the individual in the paltry sense that we recognize, to do with the consciousness of a particular body, will prove to be a very different thing from what we currently believe it to be. Whence comes the idea of the phalanstery? What are its formative influences? Fourier has had an excellent modern biography, which traces the positive lineages about as authoritatively and imaginatively as one could hope: it shows that for all Fourier's religion and magical cosmologism, and in spite of his express animosity to Enlightenment thinkers, the basic ideas of passion and the passional complex come from them.10 Though it cannot be demonstrated so positively, a similar thing

14 Utopian Differences

is recognized about the French Revolution; yet it is especially here, in Fourier's relation to the Revolution - both to the durable, imperfect event and the elusive, moving idea - that his Utopia's situation of formative influence, it seems to me, is to be located. In living through it he was adamantly against it, yet surely his utopianism was revolutionary, not just in the sense of being bold, radical, envisaging great change, but in a stricter sense, that the idea of the phalanstery logically depended on the notion, invoked for the first time as such in his day, of social revolution the notion, that is, of a politically enforced social transformation, a movement from one social system or structured collective way of life to another. How exactly was this so? The phalanstery-idea clearly shares with the revolution-idea the premise that - pace Mrs Thatcher - society exists. In other words, both assume that what we loosely call society is the product of systematic determination not consistently accessible as such to its individual members, or that society is always a matter of a - totally or generally - structured collective way of life. This too was an Enlightenment idea, whose finished or philosophical articulation was accomplished by the Scottish school under the rubric of the 'mode of distribution.' It has not been pointed out that Fourier's phalansterysociety, his Harmony, can be thought of as a future mode of distribution; but it clearly is that, once one understands that 'distribution' is rewritten by Fourier, restored to its truth, as a passional matter. Another shared premise clinches this point. Just as the concept of the mode of distribution went along with the practice, or emerged from and secured the medium, of what might be called epochal history, and just as revolution marked a climax in this history, so phalanstery-society seems to call for exposition against the backdrop of a passional world history; Fourier worked out his own, characteristically distinctive, rendition of the stages (the barbarian, the savage, the civilized, the combined or harmonian). But if the phalanstery needed to be understood in relation to previous modes and phases of social organization, it is not clearly shown to be the end of history; or if it is this last, it is not as the unconscious, but logical goal of struggle across all the past phases, but as the system to make the inefficiencies and incompetencies of previous systems transparent, in light of which previous pathologies were to become simply pathetic. Here we come to what the phalanstery-idea does not share with the revolutionary one, which at one level is to be explained by Fourier's opposition to the Revolution itself. The full-fledged notion of revolution tended (and still tends) to depend on a principle of possible ascension

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx

15

through the stages, a movement which almost necessarily involved some notion of structural imbalance or contradiction as an ultimately progressive function; it was integral to the task of revolution to activate this contradiction, to struggle to push it on through, so as to 'solve' it. Fourier's Utopian historical scheme does not entirely divorce itself from, but it does demote in importance, the diurnal-political work of contradiction. One can readily understand, I think, the signature move which still gives his work its incomparable brilliance - his thoroughgoing grasp of the social as the passional - as both cause and effect of this demotion. For if the achievement of the true passional make-up in some phalanstery society of the future might be conceived as coming as the result of a kind of passional struggle, this struggle is not of the sort that involves the forcing of political contradiction, or the potentially violent pitting of socio-economic class against class. The phalanstery learns and takes a great deal from military organizations, true, but it is not a war-machine in the military sense; and the exfoliation of passions that it is destined to release, frenetic and leisurely all at once, cannot readily be conceived as the dialectical consequence of any concerted struggle between political sides or parties. This retreat from or demotion of contradiction, then, which is pretty clearly to be understood as a determinate response to the career of the Revolution itself - its domestic stalling and entrenchment, its long march through the Continent - is one with Fourier's stress on system, with the schematism that seems indissociable from, indeed constitutive of, the Utopian impulse. The orientation does not mean that uneven development disappears as an informing or limiting Utopian theme. Rather it is projected less as a force within the existing system than as a principle behind, and constitutive of it, less as contradiction and specific struggle than as combinatory and general play of arrangement. The phalanstery-idea indeed presumes something like a renewal of the sense of internal estrangement that attended, that seems to have been necessary to, the discovery of the concept of the mode of distribution itself. This sense was given with a difference to the Scottish school, in their privileged epistemological position of the outside insider, l but it would seem also to have been a distinctive effect of the moment of emergence of a full-fledged capitalist market, of capitalism itself as a complete functioning system, upon its Anglicization in the early and middle years of the eighteenth century. The phalanstery-idea involves a return behind and through the Revolution to the experience peculiar to this aborigi-

16 Utopian Differences nal moment of historical autonomization, of the freeing, hence relativizing, of the systems or levels: the experience of what might be called objective subjectivity, of gazing as if from a distance at one's own individuality, now more acutely felt as such for being known as determined; or more simply an access, a hypertrophy, of the structural-comparative sense. But it returns to this moment of internal estrangement in displacing it into the scheme itself, into the quotidian of passional life that it structures. Any reader of Fourier will remember that one of the writing's most extraordinary traits consists in the relentless drive and correlatively refined ability to organize the material all the way down, as it were to divide and distinguish minutely among passions and passional species. This trait, which clearly amounts to a passion in its own right - the anatomical passion, call it - is put at the service of what 'in our world' is essentially the socialite's reason for being, that of creating 'interesting situations.' One cannot read for long without recognizing that this distinguishing feature of Fourier as writer is (to be) a general object of consumption in his Utopia. Not that the citizens of the phalanstery are not to deploy this passion themselves, to take an active part in arranging their lives; but some will do so less than others, and in any case the passion's active exercise must always be emulative in a sense, must always amount to a specific activation of the passional combiriatory (Nature). The one constant pleasure in the phalanstery, and the one most general pleasure among all the other specific pleasures, will be that of appreciating one's own gratifications as the products of the grouping of groups. It amounts, in effect, to the projection of a new sort of political sense, and sensibility; and it is in this way, then, that the internal estrangement produced by the emergence of the mode of distribution as category is preserved in, taken into, Fourier's Utopia as a positive theme. The phalanstery-Utopia's situation of formative influence, the relation to the Revolution that expressed itself in schematism, helps to explain the curious political nature of the Utopia. Two writers by whom I have been much influenced, Darko Suvin and Louis Marin, have stressed the literary character of Utopia. Suvin says that Utopia is a fiction.12 Marin, in an essay rehearsing approvingly Marx's opposition to Cabet's Icarie experiment, has it that Utopia is not a political project.1 Any genre or kind of writing, of course, is susceptible to misunderstanding and misuse; a work of genre-criticism pushing a particular line (that epic is an aristocratic form, for example) is implicitly telling you how not to read or use it ('epic is not to be read as the product of an organic society'). Still, Suvin's and Marin's formulas taken together suggest that Utopian texts

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx 17 tend to be susceptible to misuse with a difference, and more specifically that there is something about Utopian fictions that makes it easy to mistake them for political projects. If you take Fourier as exemplary Utopian, you readily understand why this is. For his notion was that once a minimal phalanstery-unit was put in place - no matter how nasty and brutish its 'outside environment' - the new distribution of passions, so different from what was available on the outside, would be certain to yield undeniable results; and the new, the true, Nature that began to disclose itself would exercise an ungovernable attraction over even the most hostile segments among the civilized witnesses. Indeed, that Fourier's life, after he had conceived his Utopia, largely consisted in attempts to secure patronage and space for the implantation of his scheme in sufficient quantity to succeed, surely is not to be taken as an accident, or as a failure of intellect or nerve on his part. Rather it was a matter of keeping faith with his construct, with the kind of thing it was, its schematic or modal or machine-like character. What I called before the biographical presumption of Utopia is chiefly owing to this schematism; if it is not to be considered as a discursive constituent, it is at least an immediate discursive effect. It may be strictly true to say that the Utopian fiction is not a political project; still the very insistence with which such propositions are put suggests something else - that the fiction tends to the status of a political machine.14 5. Marx: Utopia as Mode of Production, and as Necessary Cultural Laboratory The third Utopian high point I will address is Marx, and more particularly the texts, and moments, of the Grundrisse (or more precisely the section called Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations) and the Paris Commune. This will give me the opportunity to provide the bare bones of a position on the relation between Utopia and Marxism, to my mind a vexed and often misunderstood matter. My main proposition will be that the Utopian form sketches the limits of a Marxist politics by foregrounding the difficult question of (especially working-class) culture and consciousness. That there has existed no consensus within Marxism on the relation to the Utopia, to its practice and tradition, is evident, for example, in the different stances taken by Louis Marin and Ernst Bloch,10 two of the best and most influential Marxist theorists of Utopia. Bloch takes Marxism as the culmination of the Utopian tradition, whereas the

18 Utopian Differences Althusser-influenced Marin is largely concerned to distinguish the practical or figurative knowledges generated by consequent Utopias from the conceptual and scientific knowledges produced by Marxism. For all his reputation for heterodoxy, Bloch's approach is more amply warranted, I would suggest, by Marxism's foundational texts. Yet, though Marin's way of marking a break between Utopia and Marxism seems to me in error, one can learn much from it: above all, he leaves one with an appropriately problematical sense of Marxism's difference with respect to Utopia. The chapter mentioned before on Marx's response to Cabet offers a useful way into the problems.16 It is easy to see why the chapter is comparatively well remembered. Marin evidently wanted to clarify, and show the sanction for, what he had been arguing in other chapters about the function of Utopia (more specifically in its relation to science): hence a chapter of commentary on one of Marx's best-known and most incisive encounters with Utopian tradition in the form of a specific practical project. Moreover, he wanted to demonstrate the mode of relationship, presumably the compatibility, between the technical terminology he devised for the reading of Utopian texts, a terminology indebted especially to poststructuralist idioms, and Marxist political discourse: what Marin does in the chapter is to quote a passage from Marx's text and then restate it, draw it out to greater length, test it, in the terms he has developed in preceding chapters. One wants to say that Marin is successful in his main aim. The chapter has a brilliantly clarifying effect, and the slogan, illuminated here, that Utopia is an ideological critique of ideology, entered into academic-critical parlance and is still manifestly useful. Yet it is a confusing clarity on reflection. Much of the initial effect, surely, comes from the obvious force, in its conjuncture, of Marx's criticism of Citizen Cabet's plan. To take a number of committed and right-minded people from the home country to set up a new community in America will be to do damage to the cause of the People in France by depriving it of militants; at the same time, it will eventuate in the demoralization of the militants, for the evils against which they have declared in France aren't just the result of the active agency of tyranny, they are systemic and generally shaping, they have shaped the assumptions and characters of the militants themselves - as will become depressingly obvious, though maybe only to outsiders, when the militants set up shop anew in their imaginary vacuum and create for themselves all the same old problems; Citizen Cabet's Utopian plan betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of class struggle,

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx 19

then, and indeed of the ~ole of the thought of a better society, of Utopia, within it. All this is lucid and wise, and tends toward the axiomatic; one wants to clutch to one's breast the perception about class struggle as a total sort of agency, and of its conduct then as involving working on oneself by struggling against the enemy. Marx can be understood as sketching an appropriate attitude toward utopianism in general, and Marin has some warrant for generalizing from it in his commentary - for formulating slogans. Yet just as clearly Marx's journalistic text is conjunctural in its main intent, and Marin's commentary crosses a divide from the particular to the general, turning Marx's points into rules. Hence the confusion - which perhaps hovers around the edges of Marx's text, but shows up clearly in Marin's, in the questions that the poststructuralist formulations are to keep you from asking. One question has to do with the distinction between the site of class struggle and that of the Utopia, or of the political project that Utopia is not. Cabet's plan makes the distinction easy. But not all practical Utopians have wanted to go far away; and most have wanted to be watched. Fourier's desire was to set up a minimal phalanstery within France; it was the effects of its 'success' — which Fourier, who certainly was under no illusions as to the systematic effects and nature of 'evil,' knew could only be the merest travesty of what combined society might actually make possible - that he was banking on. Would Marx say that Fourier misunderstood the nature of class struggle, and was unwittingly wishing to remove good people from the important action? Yes, probably; but it is not such an easy call. And what it makes clear is that Marx would likely not want to rule out the possibility of a conjuncture or of any number of conjunctures in which the practice of the Utopian enclave would prove appropriate, as the most sensible way of conducting, or the only possible way of continuing, the struggle. Marin's generalized commentary does not allow for the probability. In relegating Utopia to the realm of exclusively signifying practice, it unwittingly tends to depend on or project something like a myth of the barricade as model for class struggle, hence to reduce the realm of possibilities for a Marxist politics. Different from the question of site is that of the intrinsic political efficacity of Utopia, of Utopia as political machine. One might approach this matter by reflecting on what is finally meant by the opposition, insistent in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, between Utopian and scientific socialism, since the opposition seems clearly to have been forwarded as part of a claim for the superior political efficacity of Marx and

20 Utopian Differences Engels's theory. Yet it is worth stressing that the relative rationality claimed for scientific socialism is not of a simple sort. The complexity is perhaps plainer in Marx's later work than in the Manifesto. In Capital, for example, Marx uses the term 'science' in at least three ways. First, he uses it to distinguish between the developed discourse of political economy and the relatively ad hoc observations of those who wrote about economic and commercial affairs before the full emergence of the capitalist market. Political economy, at least the best of it, was scientific according to Marx, even though bourgeois (in the sense of'capitalist') in its basic point of view and so doomed to continuing error and misrecognition. Second, he used 'scientific' more or less as what is called a genre term, to distinguish between two levels and regions of current economic discourse; and here, the opposing term to 'scientific' is 'journalistic' or 'empirical.' Third, Marx frequently used 'scientific' as a term of judgment, that is to distinguish between good and bad economists; and here, as sometimes in the former sense, the opposing term to 'scientific' is generally 'vulgar,' as in 'vulgar political economy.' From these uses, one infers that the distinguishing criteria of scientific thought for Marx are to do with a given economic work's distance from the immediate interests, the spontaneous ideologies, of parties in the economy, and with its relative internal (or logical) consistency; put another way, a scientific work was one that kept in view the objective logic of the economy, more or less independently of particular players' roles or interests — or yet more simply, one that securely recognized its object. Once you understand 'scientific' this way, as involving a distance from immediacy and a certain sort of orientation to the truth, then it is readily apparent that the term could be used with much justice of Utopias themselves, both discursive and practical. One could use it to distinguish between 'modern' and 'pre-modern' Utopian projects, for example: Fourier's as a scientific Utopian project by comparison, say, to Winstanley's pre-scientific proposals in The Law of Freedom. Or one could use it to distinguish between better and worse Utopian fictions of the same period: Wells's scientific 'scientific romances' as against Hudson's vulgar ones. That the term is not ordinarily used this way is mainly owing to the attraction of Utopia to socialism, and the role that so-called Utopian socialism plays in the prehistory of the working-class movement called communism. Now on the one hand, and first and foremost, the substitution of scientific for Utopian is to be taken as a demarcating and periodizing gesture. The analogy with the history of political economy is illuminat-

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx 21

ing, partly, in that it tends to attribute an intellectual or cognitive value to the Utopian dimension of previous 'immature' socialisms - a value that Marxism, as the intellectual sponsor of the communist movement, should have it as its mission to systematize and deepen. In another, related regard, the analogy in its imperfection raises a question. To call pre-scientific socialism Utopian suggests a uniformity and a kind of coherence or consistency that is not remarked on as a feature of early political economy; one does not find Marx in Capital referring to works anticipatory of political economy as refracting the later vision through any comparable kind of prism. Why this peculiar coherence, and what is the role of the specifically Utopian in scientific socialism? Meanwhile, on the other hand, it must be confessed that it is easy not to see the questions just raised because the substitution (of 'scientific' for 'utopian') clearly also functions politically and pejoratively to mark communism/Marxism off from rival socialisms; and indeed the pejorative usage can be and has been taken to mean that Marxism distinguishes itself from previous socialisms by either demoting or eliminating their Utopian component. What particularly needs rebutting here is the view, frequently encountered, that Marx and Engels's separation of scientific from Utopian socialism - both their scepticism toward Utopia in a strict sense, and their antagonism to it in the -political arena - betokens a faith in abstract reason, or in their own superior intellectual powers or rigour. One sees what is generally and rightly recognized to be the Marxist suspicion of Utopia, the ban on florid if not graven Utopian images of the communist future, presented in this light often: as motivated, that is, by a rash desire for purity, a properly intellectual hubris. These sins, of course, are then often used to explain the graver ones that lie down Marxism's road. Now one cannot be sure of course that intellectual hubris did not play some part in the actual writing of the narrative, in the Manifesto, of socialism's emergence. But strictly speaking, the substitution of 'scientific' for 'utopian' there is meant to signal a major change in the nature of the working class - its (imminent?) 'maturation' - and with it a shift in the relationship between socialist intellectuals and the people who make up the movement. The ban on Utopia might be understood partly to mean that there is something about the maturation of the working class - something about its newly perceptible and abstract unity as a wage-labouring class - which does not conduce to detailed, but only to general, projections of a better society. More surely, though, it marks a

22 Utopian Differences

recognition on the part of socialist intellectuals of their difference from their privileged object of knowledge, as it were - 'the proletariat in course of definition in class struggle.' And the reasoning that follows from this recognition, and which largely explains the ban, can more plausibly be presented as modest than hubristic. One needs to note that serious Utopian projections, schemes for a better society, must in the nineteenth century anyway be literary, or better novelistic, in the sense that they must work toward representation of, toward giving a feel for, a different and better daily life. If this imagining of a happy quotidian is under the obligation of presenting itself impersonally, it obviously cannot actually be arrived at that way; on the contrary the imaginer of Utopia will need to make use of the most intimate and indelibly personal feelings and interests if the projected quotidian is to appeal, to be consequent. The scientific-socialist intellectual can hardly expect to leave his difference - likely a class difference - behind when he comes to compose. No, the one thing she can be sure of is that for all her honourable intentions her Utopia will not be either workingclass or for everyone. Better, then, to hold to bare essentials (e.g., that new forms of collective property will have to be devised) when speaking of communism. Hence the slogan, and the attitude, in classical Marxism, of 'waiting on the masses,' of depending on the movement to adumbrate, and gradually to define, the better society, and looking to assist in its emergence rather than to imagine, to try to tell other people, what it is. This ascetic attitude, this modesty, would seem to stand more to reason in periods of political crisis, when consciousness of struggle is generalized and the present is not felt to be likely to last a long time. There has been a broad consensus among leftist intellectuals, exacerbated by the 'experience of defeat' upon the collapse of the Soviet bloc but predating it by some few years, that this - the classical Marxist - attitude toward Utopia and Utopian socialism was unsatisfactory, was unnecessarily restrictive from a philosophical as well as a political point of view. Though with the reservation that the choices made by the principal agents in the history of socialism have been dominated by a darker necessity than is usually allowed, I would not hold against the political part of the consensus, nor perhaps finally against the logical or philosophical. What I do want to contend, though, is that the attitude of waiting on the masses implies a seemingly paradoxical negative or sheerly practical utopianism. For not only does the sceptical attitude betoken a distrust of one's own native instincts (as those of someone aligned with,

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx

23

but not of, the proletariat); it also can speak of a faith that the future social arrangements of 'communism' are somehow in material existence, even if to be actualized in struggle. Such a faith is most in evidence in Marx himself in his text on the Paris Commune.17 It will be recalled that Marx's prior judgment was against this revolutionary attempt on the part of the Parisian popular forces - which issued in the seizure of the city and the setting up of a popular government - and that his retrospective analysis does not change the assessment, does not see the Commune as other than doomed from the start. Nonetheless, Marx's excitement and enthusiasm over the Commune's internal activities are unmistakeable. The Commune's attempts, in the midst of and as a way of preparing for counter-revolution, to set up a popular government, are treated as annunciatory flashes. This is the People, the active working class, beginning to solve the problem of what communist democracy will be; their actions will necessarily have a claim, will be repeated with a difference, in revolutionary movements of the future. There is no need to deny the presence of a commemorative aspect in Marx's treatment of the Commune's internal political activities as objective discoveries; it is partly a way of honouring the dead. And one could certainly exaggerate the objectivity ascribed to the discoveries, and the extent consequently of their claim on future movements. The highly specific nature of the conditions making for the Commune, its conjuncturality, is appreciated, and it is understood that just as the Commune will not happen again, neither will the exact measures it enacted be reinstated. But on the whole the effect is of the general disclosing itself in and through the particular. And part of the explanation for this reading of the Commune is to be found in the central Marxist notion of the mode of production:18 the Communards, by virtue of their position in the political struggle, and their structural relationship to the working class, have it given them in their momentary clearing to activate forms of organization that will belong to the new society. My suggestion is that this text is Utopian in positing communism itself as something like a machine exerting its force, tending to self-assembly, in the present, in the agency of the People. The analyst, the individual writer, cannot describe this machine except as and when it is enacted by the working class in struggle. But it is 'there.' What is happening, then, in the writing on the Commune, is that the utopianism proper to Marxism, or scientific socialism, and with it the proper relationship between the socialist intelligentsia and the working

24 Utopian Differences

class, is being exemplified, put in practice. To return to Marin's chapter on Marx and Cabet: it may be that Cabet's Utopian project misunderstood the nature of class struggle, it may be that there is something about Utopia as a kind of discourse or as a genre that conduces to, that encourages such misunderstanding; but it does not follow that class struggle itself does not include a necessary and salient Utopian dimension. And this means that the opposition Marin constructs between Utopian figurative practice and scientific conceptual understanding is to be taken as a more problematical and provisional affair than he tends to admit. For nothing is more conceptual than the idea of the mode of production; yet it is this, more particularly the idea of the communist mode of production, that in its empirical existence supports the practice of Utopia, and that is understood in a sense to figure the incomplete Utopia set up by the Commune. But the schematic figuring that Marx traces in The Civil War in France is more complex than I have so far discussed. We can broach some part of the complexity by noting what seem the two most evident objections to Marx's understanding of the Commune-as-incomplete-Utopia. One objection has to do with the (general) assumption that the working class should have to hand the appropriate tools, the rules of government that will be, or lead directly to, those of communism, in this moment of emergency and great duress, by virtue of what it is - by virtue of the shape that has been given it in its constitution as Labour, as a class, and by virtue of its struggle against the system constituting it as such. Granted that capitalism has created the conditions for its nemesis to rise up in the form of a working-class movement; what assures that the movement, that the working class in the basic forms of organization given and achieved, should harbour a new mode of production? The second objection has to do with the notion that the Commune is 'modern' or represents a modern working class. Was not the Commune, insofar as it was a class, the product of an older urban working class, not of the factory but of the traditional crafts; and do not the political proposals depend on the self-governing customs of the crafts? Why assume that the Commune was a first breath rather than a last gasp? The general form of an answer to these objections is to be found, I think, in the section of the Grundrisse that is usually called Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, perhaps the most Utopian of Marx's texts.19 This choice of title makes sense; the term 'economic formation,' precisely because of its doubtful synonymity with 'mode of production,' is commendable. But it is worth noting that an alternative title, something like

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx

25

'A Genealogical Prehistory of the Proletariat,' has its qualities: 'genealogical prehistory' because the text's rudimentary constructions of previous economic formations are constitulively comparative, and above all keep in mind the comparison with the capitalist formation, in which everything is now, with the expansion of the capitalist market, seen willy-nilly to end up; 'proletariat' because the focus tends to be on the organization of labour in the succeeding formations, and on the structure of perception provided to the labouring classes within them. Two points should be made about the economic formations in this genealogy. First, there is a notion that a limited number of such have existed and are possible. The text does not project a pre-capitalist world in which a hundred economic formations have blossomed, but one that is considerably more straitened than that, for both logical and historical reasons. Second, while the narrative is only overarchingly chronological, and though the passage from one formation to another is not presented as ineluctable, still the notion is that the formations develop out of and in relation to one another, that the history in question is one of new constructs being formed on the basis of others; so that a later formation, for example, does not involve the simple obliteration of the social relations of the previous, but rather involves their variable redisposition. Capitalism is something of an exception here, existing at a greater distance from the other formations than they from one another, not by virtue of its coming later but because of the abstract character, the 'generality,' of exploitation under it (or in other words of the profit motive), dependent as that is on the sundering of the labouring class from its means of production. Yet precisely by reason of this distance from the pre-capitalist formations, because of the generality of its determining forms, the capitalist economy is capable of redisposing the past forms in particularly trenchant and thoroughgoing ways. Indeed the perception hovers Marx never states it as such - that capitalism must in some way make use of the past, of the possibilities that have been materialized before and are consequently, at least as a rule, available for redisposition, in the course of managing its own contradictions, of coming up against its own limits. It is by this route that the Grundrisse looks forward to and validates Mandel^ proposition about the orgariicity of primitive accumulation, the orchestration of uneven development under capitalism. But it is also by this route that these pages look beyond capitalism, and raise the question of whether uneven development is in fact orchestratable, or of being brought entirely inside the system. Much has been

26 Utopian Differences written in the last few years of Marx's contemporaneity today, with the Manifesto as proof text. But if one wants assurance of Marx's appreciation of capitalism's resilience and dynamism, its capacity for indefinite expansion, Capital (above all volume 3) is really the work to read and cite. In their focus on the working class and communism, the Manifesto, and especially Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, have more to do with a possible future of the current contemporaneity. For in this section of the Grundrisse, because of the analytic view on the working class as a stage itself, what is true of the capitalist economic formation is true of the working class, perhaps with an urgent difference: its very abstraction puts it under the constraint of redisposing its past, of realizing, and of coping and contending with its current condition by recurring to and rearranging forms now residual and hence increasingly cultural. Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations emits a strong Utopian effect partly because the constructs are pheriomenologically rendered, angled toward questions as to how the world appeared to human actors when labour was shaped in these various ways; the analytical journey thus stands to a would-be Utopian novelist as a series of invitations to narrative representation: what would characters whose vision is bracketed in this way or that be like, and how to render this kind of consciousness in a story? in what modern institutions or fields of relation does one find the best analogies or residues? One might see a novelistic analogy to Marx's text, for example, in the situation in Philip K. Dick's Clans of the Alphane Moon, where rival nations on earth struggle to make contact with the foreign moon on which many years before they have dumped colonies of the better-known mental pathologies, each of which has since created its own pathologically determined social environment, its own kind of progress. But it is the felt necessity of proletarian relationship and recurrence to the past, the discrepancy intrinsic to working-class identity and struggle themselves, that especially lends Marx's text its Utopian character. This vision of the working class, as necessarily unevenly developed or proceeding byway of overde termination, provides the context in which to answer the objections to the Commune essay I raised before. And it provides the theoretical basis for his willingness to entertain a hypothesis, not so many years after the Commune, that has sometimes been presented as a radical departure: that a certain kind of peasant community, in a certain situation, might serve as foundation for a break with capitalism, as the cornerstone of socialist society. My theme, with respect to Marxism and Utopia, has been that a kind

Defining Middles: Morris, Fourier, Marx 27

of utopianism, that the Utopian idea and indeed the form, was integral to classical Marxism - this despite its scepticism, and precisely through its scepticism. Marx's anti-utopianism, if it is legitimate to speak of such, was a paradigmatic Utopian response, whose situation of formative influence consists in the consolidation and expansion of capitalism, especially in its core but also in its periphery, with the revelation of the shocking reach and abstraction, the very systematicity of the system. The role of Utopia within Marxism was basically bifold. First, its mission was to disclose and give for thought the question of the place of modes of production in class struggle. Second, its role was to foreground, and offer tentative solutions to, the problem of the generality of the working class; in this respect its chief aim was — or some would say should have been - to situate, with respect to one another and the social whole, the spontaneous ideologies and customs of the various sections of this class. If the former function would seem to lead out of literature in the direction of basic questions of political ontology, the latter, more cultural function would seem to lead back in, while forcing the recognition that political being is always a matter of narrative situation. This has obviously been a very partial sketch of the Utopian genre and discourse in what I have called its relatively developed, middle period. Still, enough ground has been covered to warrant a brief summary of key points. I have argued that the developed Utopia presupposes a notion of history as progressive and epochal, whose each phase is defined by a distinct, in principal all-encompassing, social system, but in which salient amounts of uneven development between systems or phases are the practical rule. The developed Utopia dislocates history to open up a view of new, yet extant, social possibility, accentuating and refashioning the signs of uneven development to answer, arid most often implicitly to universalize, the desires of an existing social class. In doing so it typically raises sharp questions about the role of systems themselves, or more specifically about the laws of motion determined by modes of production, in social struggle, and about the mode of unity of classes.

Chapter I. Utopian Differences Lii. Defining Beginnings: Utopia

The foregoing sketch of basic themes and formative situations is offered as in principle definitive of the Utopian genre and discourse in the West European nineteenth century, when the Utopian signifying materials were comparatively richly developed. Let us turn now from this middle to a beginning of the story, to the Renaissance Utopia, and to More's literary construction of the thing itself, where we will expect to see the elements discussed either adumbrated or actually coming together. The argument of the present section can be outlined by adding to another striking formulation from Marin: Utopia, he says, portrays 'a wish in a free image of itself.' The wish in Renaissance Utopias is a class wish, usually some sort of smallholder's wish. And the free image gives the wish to be understood as subject to unevenly developed contradiction, to concentrated uneven development of what I will call an archaic sort. We can approach these theses by thinking upon the superiority of Utopia as a Renaissance Utopia. 1. The Peculiarity of Utopia This superiority is of a symptomatically revelatory nature, speaking of a difference of Renaissance Utopias or imagined other worlds in general by comparison with those that came before and after. One can see how this is if one attends to the way in which Frank and Fritzi Manuel handle this period in their magisterial opus, Utopian Thought in the Western World - more of an intellectual than a literary history, I would note, an attempt to cover the idea of Utopia rather than the form. 2 Representing the period as witnessing 'the birth of Utopia,' they devote three chapters

Defining Beginnings: Utopia

29

1 Plan of Sforzinda

to it. The first is on More's text. The second is on mid-fifteenth- to late sixteenth-century Italy: the Manuels concur with the consensus that the Italian city-states were the most prolific and influential generators of Utopia, while venturing an interesting and plausible case that it was the earlier architectural texts of Albert!, Filarete, and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, with city plans typically fusing circle and square, overlaying grids with radii (figure 1), which were especially vital and of lasting value, as against the philosophical Utopias of the later sixteenth century that generally owed some debt to More.3 Their third chapter is on Anabaptism, more particularly Thomas Muntzer's 'utopia of the common man,' which was attempted at the climax of the German peasants' revolt, and crushed, in 1525.

30 Utopian Differences

A literary work in England, an architectural movement in Italy, a radical-religious upheaval in Germany: the idea of Utopia moves around a lot, culturally as well as geographically, in emerging. But there is a sense in which these Utopian instances have a geopolitical location in common. If one sees the development of strong absolutist states centred in what became Spain and France as the most consequential political event of this period, then the Utopias share a peripheral situation. North Italy, southern Germany, England - they were close enough, certainly, to feel the pull and threat of foreign absolutisms, when not suffering their interventions; they were affected and afflicted by aspects of the same late-feudal dynamic to which absolutism was a response, and were subject to absolutist motions themselves, while proving unable or unwilling, at least in the short and middle terms, to develop equivalently strong state formations. It is tempting to speculate that the emergence of the historic Utopian ideas in these places, however predictably different in some basic features, has something to do with their situation on the periphery of the new absolutisms. Yet there is a more striking asymmetry about this categorization. This consists in the cultural position of Utopia itself as an idea. The Manuels present Renaissance and Anabaptist Utopias very much as products of their specific socio-cultural situations, indeed as authored by their environments; and between the two they elaborate a very neat set of similarities and oppositions. It will be worth conveying some part of these. The Renaissance Utopia was essentially urban and architectural - or to put this another way, it marked a rare moment in the history of architecture in which architecture was understood as an immediately political discipline, educating and guiding its users, and in which the architect's prime object to work upon and (re) build was the city; its urbanity was aristocratic (in the technical sense of elitist, committed to a belief in the necessity and the actual existence of 'the few,' a small class of better people), yet not Platonically unconcerned with the many: it was obliged rather to place and provide for all urban classes within the city walls. The Anabaptist Utopian idea assumed the dominance of town and village rather than city; it would take the form of a hegemonically rural rather than an urban commune; and the commune aimed for had no precise architectural image associated with it, but was rather a matter of general conditions being secured, of land and spirit for all. It was of course anti-aristocratic, a people's Utopia: unlike Luther's, Muntzer's Gospel was available first of all if not exclusively to those who had known significant suffering, namely the expropriated and the working poor;

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yet the social levelling, the community of property, it had in mind was not absolute but relative, based as it was on traditional commonfield farming, the differential rights of usufruct. The radial city was a secular idea, and even the magical connotations of its symmetry were spatial. The peasant Utopia was apocalyptic, hence constitutively temporal and ambiguously, not to say confusedly, futuristic, in the familiar apocalyptic way - intent on making providence happen now. Accordingly the Anabaptist Utopia was more of a movement than a text or set of texts; it was expressed in, it came to a kind of consciousness in, Muntzer's sermons, but the printed texts were not so important to the thing itself as the architectural treatises were to the Renaissance Utopia. At the same time, it is part of the culture-authoredness, as well as the class character, of the Anabaptist Utopia that it should have been disseminated in print, Germany of course being advanced in this area; just as the radial city's appropriate medium was the manuscript, the plans taking on a different, less Utopian meaning when later printed, and so removed from exclusive, aristocratic-urban hands. Finally, one can contrast the position of the articulators in relation to the people, the classes, whose Utopias they fashion: Muntzer and behind him the whole radical reforming clergy figuring as patrons of the peasant movement, bestowers of solidarity and hope, and hence bearing responsibility for the ultimate stupidity of the pitched battle, even while the fact of this responsibility testifies to the contradictions afflicting the movement; Filarete and di Giorgio Martini, for all their busy ambition, remaining very much the objects of patronage, their precision and totalizing mania then speaking less of the engineer's social unease than of petty despotism's desire for absolute control and its correlative insecurity, the vulnerability of the financial bourgeoisie to threats from below and above or from outside the city's walls. The question is on reflection a glaring one as to how Utopia fits in here, as to what sort of peripheral context it expresses. You surmise that the Manuels want you to see that More's text stands as a synthesis in some respects of Italian and German Utopian features or themes. Most crucially, Utopia is an urban society, like the architectural Utopia, but one whose regional horizon is the nation, like the Anabaptist, and which is predicated on the primacy of agriculture, the sharing out of agrarian tasks. Again, one sees that Hythlodaeus combines the roles of preacher and architect-engineer, while the real More relates as spokesperson to both monarch and common man. Their perception of its synthetic status partly explains, perhaps, why the Manuels treat it first, out

32 Utopian Differences of chronologic order.4 But the Manuels' principal reasons for starting with More must be (1) to acknowledge the work's greater fame and influence, its 'eternity,' associated as this is with the fact that More's punning title 'took,' that he has been allowed to have named the idea of which they write the history; and (2) to suggest its relatively unconditioned character, its 'universality' - this latter even while the German and Italian situations of the idea are conceded a relevance from afar, a remote explanatory value. The Manuels have little to say about the local socio-cultural origins of More's imaginary island, little for example about More's London, its situation with respect to the rest of the country, or about England in its external relations: one will learn much more about these from reading Book I of Utopia than from reading their chapter.5 Insofar as they attempt to explain the work's difference - its irony and its comprehensiveness — they refer to intellectual and psychic contexts rather than socio-political or properly cultural ones. They stress the instrumentality of More's humanism, making much of his imitative competition with the Republic, on the one hand, and his connection to Erasmus, marked by his circulation of the work within Erasmus's great network, on the other. And they dwell on the pathos of More's personality as it emerges from his collected corpus and from the biographies, which they diagnose, crudely maybe but with much reason, as morbidity, a hypertrophy of the death drive; it was this that mounted as a support arid a defence that peculiar instrument of objectivity that was More's humour, as consummately on display through his final days and death as in Utopia. Their title for the chapter 'The Passion of Thomas More' designates both of these works equally - the martyrdom as well as the little book. Clearly, these emphases take the place of social explanations, and thus are doing work they should not be doing. Yet I would not want to claim that the displacement has no reason. For the island of Utopia is not presented as a consummation to be wished by its chief audience, but as an enigmatic fact. It is the irony arid literariness of the work - which have everything to do with, which indeed in the main consist in, this literality - that partly remove the vision of what could be from any specific locality, that make it seem less authored by an environment and more by a person. The irony of Utopia testifies conspicuously to More's having gone further, seen further, into the Utopia-idea than Muntzer or Filarete. This relates to a key attribute, to which I will return in a moment: that the rendering of the world as fact, the excess irony and

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wit of Utopia, in marking it off tend to allot it an interpretive privilege with respect to other Utopian visions. Meanwhile, the chief intrinsic point of the irony is to create a certain uncanny effect: its suggestion is that Utopian social arrangements are somehow present in the world that we know, yet blocked from appearing as such - that the institutions and customs described are all determined alternatives, in the sense of being forms at once blocked out, that is, inscribed in the field of possibles, and yet finished off, or in other words refused a point of entrance into the sphere of the actual, consigned to extreme subordinacy or quasi-spectrality. The effect is complicated and impresses as deeply researched; one readily understands why it should be understood as reflecting a particular disposition's, or a particular learned group's, attitude toward or judgment upon the socio-cultural present, rather than as the expression of a social-political environment or situation. Yet the literary distance that distinguishes Utopia is rather more upon than from its environment. Utopia does a great deal to indicate the sociopolitical situation of its authorship. A feature I have in mind is the series of analogies between the Utopian isle and England that break into the reader's consciousness as he makes his way through Book I; that between Amaurotum and its two rivers, and London and the Thames and the Fleet,6 is the best case in point, but there are several others. This not only enhances the uncanny quality of Utopia; it surely speaks of whence it comes. But the really pertinent aspect here is simply the first half of More's text.7 In my experience everybody likes Book I: More scholars, Renaissance scholars; critics of all persuasions; one's students, who are the most common readers today; but also the common reader in the old sense. In fact, people tend to like it better than Book II. Yet it is not usually treated as an integral part of Utopia, and it is not often recognized how rare it is. One can begin to see how much a part of the total work Book I is if one attends to the temporal paradoxes attaching to its introductory status. One of these concerns Utopia's (Book II's) rhetorical as against its fictive role. It is easy to forget that Utopia is an arguing point in the socalled debate on counsel described in Book I, a disagreement about whether Hythlodaeus, or such well-informed men as he, should accept and seek employment by the governments that exist. Hythlodaeus mentions Utopia and then describes it in order to prove the falsity of Morus's traditionalist claim that the communal property he (Hythlo-

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daeus) has just advocated would lead to an end of all authority and universal sloth (104-5). An argument from things seen, Utopia is intended thus to vindicate Hythlodaeus's critique of private property as well, his contention that this institution, and the attendant measurement of wealth by money, lie at the root of all social ills, including the one at hand, namely the authoritylessness, the impossibility, of good counsel. Book II marks the end of the counsel debate only in the sense of being the last claim made out loud. Morus, it will be remembered, closes the work by deciding not to continue the argument about counsel further (it is late in the day, and Hythlodaeus might not brook further criticism), while assuring the reader that he has not been won over by the description but rather found several things in it absurd, above all the central tenet of things held in common and a moneyless economy. It remains unclear whether Morus feels that Hythlodaeus has simply been 'saying the thing that is not,' in the phrase of Swift's Utopian horses, or (the likelier alternative, I think) that the Utopian customs described would network here (in Europe) given the way common sense has been constructed. But what is clear is that the debate goes on, it is not over, at least as far as Morus is concerned, hoping as he does that the parties will have a chance to return to it on a later occasion. From this rhetorical angle, the work's title is a misnomer, then; it might better be called 'Whether the Learned Cosmopolitan Should Counsel or No.' In other words, from this angle Book II is but an episode in the debate begun and turned over in Book I. But if, in this sense, Book I comprehends Book II, II remains of course the reason for the work's being, and I a pretext, a way of presenting the thing itself effectively. This is clear in many respects, not least a simple fictive one. Hythlodaeus's position in the debate - that the learned man is under no obligation to lend his wisdom so far as he can to princes - is not, when put generally in this way, novel, but increasingly familiar, a more or less Erasmian one. But he holds it with an absolute and utter difference, and you cannot miss that this difference is owing to his having seen Utopia, his having been in it. In More's fiction, that is, Hythlodaeus's experience in Utopia, the confident comparative vision of things European it has given him, is clearly responsible for the counsel debate's taking such a dramatic and radical form, and for its becoming rather more than a debate on a stock question for humanists, more even than a presentation of the difficult political dilemma of the bearers of Renaissance learning in a time of great change; Utopian experience is responsible for its becoming a discourse on the change itself, some-

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thing like a structural history of the present. Book I is the best sort of pretext, then - so goes the paradox - in that it has been transformed into something else, something self-contained and in itself incisive, by the text it exists to serve. One can appreciate this last paradox from a greater distance if she accepts Erasmus's information that More wrote Book I after he had completed the description of Utopian society in II,8 and asks after the motives for the addition. The first thing that comes to mind is that Book I was added to portray the major problems, in existing European arid English society, that make Utopia desirable, the problems that Utopian society can be seen to have 'solved' or moved beyond; in providing a contrasting context, Book I lends point to (many places in) the description that might be lacking, or that might be missed, if it stood alone. From this point of view, More backtracks in Book I, in order to make II more cogent. But it seems hard to rest content with this essentially rhetorical view of the satire of Book I. One comes to understand that the problems pointed up and satirized are not just to be overcome or negated in Book II, but rather that they are conditions of the society envisaged there. Thus, for example, to put this in terms of the reading experience, one recognizes in Book II that the propertylessness of the Utopians, their communism, has been anticipated, positively prepared for in a sense, by the burgeoning vagrancy, the demography of theft, exposited in I;9 and that the Utopians' utterly ignoble philosophy and conduct in the military sphere must give some credit to the absolute monarch's conduct of foreign affairs, as sketched by Hythlodaeus in another part of I. More generally, you gather that the shifting dynamism of Utopian society as described, the troublesome oscillation of the description from register to register, level to level, owes much to the mobile complexity of the society or societies so deftly sketched in Book I. Understood thus, Book I's mission is not so much to clarify II by showing the European problems Utopian society 'overcomes,' but rather to show how Utopia is in fact built from these problems, to give a sense of how what are for us problems are for them solutions. It has been suggested that the final aim of the most consequent Utopias is to direct the reader back to the present as history, a history now comprising contradictions-which-are-also-possibilities.10 Utopia at any rate surely does this, and in this regard More is not backtracking in Book I; he is rather following out the logic of the shifting and mobile image of society he 'began' by providing. If one accepts this, that the end, and yet the condi-

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tion, of a thoroughgoing Utopia is to discover the chief contradictions to which it responds as conditions of possibility, then the discursive corollary is that the end and condition of Utopian description is the practice of a discourse that discloses the present as contradictory possibility, a kind of writing that I would here call dialogical history. Such writing is constitutively indicative or indirect, not in the sense that one must take into account all dialogical positions involved, must add them together somehow in order to arrive at the truth, but rather in that the discursive movement from one point of view or position to another - and here it should be stressed that Hythlodaeus's speech is itself ceaselessly dialogical in Book I, very often so in II, in the sense of rehearsing and judging arguments - this movement gestures to a beyond, a structural horizon in the form of a situational dynamic that loosely determines all available positions. I do not mean to suggest that Hythlodaeus's position is not the most comprehensive one positively articulated. It clearly is. But his dialogue - for the dialogue is mostly his - does not occupy a place of truth so much as point to it, open it up; its aim is not to describe explicitly, but to create a sense of, an objectivity — to produce a recognition-effect, then, which analysis can try to pin down. The movement that I would fix on as particularly crucial to identifying Utopia's 'objective situation,' the socio-cultural site from which it springs, occurs in, or as between, the first two of the three episodes in the debate on counsel. Hythlodaeus tells, in the first of these episodes, of a conversation in which he participated, in Morus's country, England, at Cardinal Morton's table, and of how he failed to do any good when he chose to lend his wisdom as to how theft should be punished. He speculates, in the second, about what would happen, were he to be present at a session of the French king in council, if he should go against the Machiavellian tide and give plain and creditable advice. Though the moral messages to be drawn from the episodes are broadly the same - that Hythlodaeus does not fit, that good counsel has no place in the power structures that exist - the movement indicates the peculiar situation of More's Utopia, at once internal yet peripheral to the great change of the moment, the installation of absolutism. The debate at Morton's table, on what punishment is appropriate for thieves, devolves in Hythlodaeus's hands into a discourse on the sources of dispossession. This is said to stem especially from (1) the disbanding of feudal retinues, which is understood to be a European-wide phenomenon, and (2) the practice, introduced as a specifically English thing, of

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wholesale enclosure to make way for sheepfarming. The latter point is made in a passage on England's ravenous sheep that came to be the most famous and influential passage in Book I, indeed in the whole work; and it may with justice be seen as the centre of gravity of the episode. What we have in it, and in the episode, is a brutal critique of what Marx was to dub 'so-called primitive accumulation' - a critique perhaps unrivalled in its literary power and reach, but less remarkable in its day than now for its perspicacity and indignation, the idea of presenting wholesale enclosers as industrious and thrifty types not yet having occurred, since you did not need to be a lawyer to know the laws that were being broken. Hythlodaeus's hypothetical scene at the French king's court has as its contrasting centre of gravity the new, more or less European-wide, scenario of dynastic power politics and intrigue, a stage to which England is not central but no stranger either. It is a notable result of this scene's indirect limning to leave a question behind as to whether Hythlodaeus's traditionalist recommendations - that the king should strive to rule well those subjects he has and knows rather than acquire new territory, that he should consider their wealth rather than his own, and so on - could indeed work given the surround of nefarious calculation and intensifying power, which can hardly be expected to dissipate because one of its denizens has decided to be virtuous. Now Hythlodaeus's move from England to France traces some part of the path of the individual author's various allegiances, recording More's position as English lawyer-diplomat and Erasmian humanist. But more important in the context of Book II, something is being said about England itself, as a country of superior or especially salient overdetermination. The hypothetical move to France is to a centre of absolutism, but it is not utterly away from England, which figures prominently, and as an active player, in the French counsellors' machinations. For English absolutism was of course emergent and on its way, with many traditionalist martyrs yet to reap. If it was to remain different, and truncated, if it was not to produce its own army and state nobility, that was because the country's landholding class was busy solving the late feudal crisis by additional means: by primitive accumulation on the land as well as, and before, the towns. It was primarily because of the nascence of an independent agrarian capitalism in the countryside that a more firmly established absolutism was not eventually needed or, perhaps, possible. This, then, is how the peculiarity of Utopia, how its placelessness relative to the other (Renaissance Italian and Anabaptist) Utopias of its day, is to be explained; or rather, this is how the work itself explains its seem-

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ing 'universality,' its relative abstraction from local needs and desires by dialogically indicating the specifically English confluence of basic solutions, by gesturing toward the fluid moment of English absolutism's overdetermination by agrarian capitalism, as its authoring context. Utopia's relative otherness and indeed its impossibility correlate to the work's structural grasp of its socio-political environment, an understanding or recognition made possible (though not assured) by the uneven development of that environment itself, by England's distinctive peripheral sitation. One begins to see as subserving more than just a psychological logic the passion that according to the Manuels accounts for Utopias difference and its relative authority, its special purchase on the meaning of 'other worlds' or 'ideal societies' in the period - and this in spite of the manifestly greater positive influence exercised over subsequent periods by architectural and Anabaptist Utopias. I will comment on the nature of Utopia's period authority in a moment. First, though, let me pause to suggest that More's Utopia is not just English by virtue of its abstraction. The Manuels are certainly right to convey the impression that Utopia is culturally less clearly marked than the Italian and German Utopias, even if they both proved better able to travel. The Italian passion for building, the German passion for populist religion - these traits are visible in Filarete's radial city and Muntzer's commune; meanwhile, the defensive posture of the former and the attempt to fuse country and town in the latter testify to what might be called their respective cultural predicaments, the autarky of the Italian cities and the equality obtaining between town and country in Germany. As against such manifest markers, Utopia's cultural Englishness involves a shrewd assessment of underlying traits. It is necessary to note that this quality complicates, and undermines to an extent, the manifest pattern of opposition, in Book II, between traits Utopian and European (hence English); to put it another way, it sets up a counter-tendency of response. So, to take a clear example of an understood opposition, Hythlodaeus contrasts the cultural retentiveness of Utopia with the forgetfulness of Europe. The Utopians profited immensely in the past from a single windfall of classical learning, and are taking up where they left off upon their second encounter with it, through Hythlodaeus and company. Would Europeans have done this? Have they done it? Of course not. Again, in striving to negate the invidious effects of a money economy, the Utopians have equipped themselves with a spontaneous indifference to the whole complex theatre associated with state as well as class power in Europe - the wealthy

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shows, the spectacular nimbus, aimed at by what Robert Brenner calls the political accumulation intrinsic to the feudal economy.12 Europe, by contrast, has been busy cultivating a deep susceptibility to this conspicuous consumption, figured so unforgettably as a properly savage condition in the episode of the Anemolian ambassadors. But if the audience can be expected to recognize its savageness, to see the reason of this depiction, that of course raises the question whether it is utterly vitiated by the training. The pattern of opposition solicits not only judgment but reflection on the cultural sources of the judging ability. Partly because More writes as a Londoner, hence slots Morus into the role of Hythlodaeus's gull in that capacity, these sources would appear to be especially English: so, when Morus recurs at the end of II to the popular love of splendour, he is clearly a bit of a fool, showing himself to be not up to the 'high humanist' axiom about the relativity of feeling to custom that Hythlodaeus has been demonstrating all through. And then whose butt is he, who laughs at him first if not More, the real town bumpkin, the cleverer for being from the provinces? But it is especially a matter of 'family resemblance,' of characteristics altered and mixed but the same, or which you recognize as the same because you know the individual's progeny. I will single out three main traits here, all of which might be grasped under the broader rubric of 'pragmatism': the Utopians' anti-noble attitude toward warfare, their anti-asceticism, and their rationality in religious matters. The Utopians' military ethos puts one in mind of the stereotypical idea of the English yeoman as the military backbone of the country: uneager to fight, of course, but expeditious and effective when once in action. The other two traits, anti-ascetism and unsuperstitiousness, are admittedly harder to argue as family traits. As for anti-asceticism, which it should be remembered turns out to involve a decidedly philosophical, and not a sensual, hedonism, I would suggest that the allusion, in the story of how King Utopus conquered the warring sects and provided them with a tolerant monotheism while separating them from other nations, to England's own late conquest by Christianity instigates in context a speculation that the people of England have come through conversion with libidos relatively intact, have been less scarred by Sin than even, or especially, their Mediterranean cousins, retaining a wintry paganism. Such a basic attitude is of course quite compatible with religious scepticism, understood not as a tendency to irreligion but as a critical focus on essentials of the faith. The anti-clericalism shared by all ranks of the country might be taken as sign and symptom of a sceptical mentality;

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surely the comparative calmness with which the public underwent the alterations of the next seventy years or so is better evidence. It is of its very nature that such an unmarked resemblance as that argued here should remain somewhat speculative, a matter of a general feeling rather than of precise observation. But if the resemblance is there, if one is to recognize Utopian pragmatism as akin to a pragmatism specific to the English, then that heightens the sense of Utopia as at once a real and yet blocked possibility. 2. Utopia's Authority: Homogeneity in Perspective Now let us come back to the question of Utopia?, relative authority, its relationship to the other projected better societies, the other Utopias, of its time. The novelty of More's work, I would argue, effectively draws a distinction between Utopia and the others (the other imaginary better worlds before and around it), a gesture which then pulls at least some of those around it in its train. What is the other sort of possible better society projected by Utopia? Maybe the best category to fit all is that of the ideal society or commonwealth. And what is the difference, then, between the Utopian better world and that of the ideal commonwealth? The Utopia is not a goal to be striven for, which one can be sure will never be achieved for the reason that human objects in this world are never perfect. Such a description would fit the Italian city, for example, or even the Anabaptist commune, either of which knows that its fulfilment in this fallen world will at best be in the spirit and not the letter. But the Utopia is to be understood as existing now, as a concrete possibility. At the same time, the Utopia presents itself as blocked from actualization, as an impossibility, in its integrity. This testifies to its existence as a political image, or in a political rather than an ethical register, ideal societies never acknowledging service to a reality principle in this way. If it is possible for a Utopia to be effective in the world by virtue of the institution of some of its individual measures, that goes against the holistic grain of the genre, that is not the way it asks to be used really, the way it wants to be effective. The ideal society situates itself more serviceably in the world in this respect, and is hence in this sense more 'realistic,' less fiercely imaginary. This is the place to offer two words of digression, one about the implications of Utopia's authority with respect to literary sources, the other about the problems of generic definition it poses. If you understand Utopia's uncanny quality as its defining feature, then it takes little effort to

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see that its author learned more from recent travel reports (Vespucci's is the one explicitly credited) and from popular communal fantasies than from Plato or even than from Lucian and Erasmus. Here, especially with respect to Plato, I am swimming against the tide of scholarly opinion, which tends to take it as creed that the Republic is More's main authority, the work from which he has learned most, and which he imitates. Perhaps it is not wrong to say this. But then the imitation in question is of an unusually wrenching sort. A good part of the problem stems from the ordinary understanding, or rather reverent misreading, of Plato's fascinating text - an elitist and reactionary attack on the Athenian polis which justifies itself by way of a banal confusion between the kind of work done by the cobbler at his last and the judge or governor in his court or office. At any rate, More's little book, in re-visioning labour and bringing politics squarely back into the picture (as what it is - as a social question and not one of technique), transforms Plato's ideal utterly, and leaves this masterwork very much behind, leaves it seeming very much a thing of the past in its basic orientation. The relationship to Lucian's scepticism in general, and Erasmus's Praise of Folly in particular, is of a very different sort. Insofar as Folly breaks free into irony, and thus comes across as a kind of epistemological machine, one is more impressed by the continuity between Erasmus's praise of Folly and Hythlodaeus's praise of Utopia than by any difference between them. Yet the popular wisdom animating the works of Lucian, and occasionally set free in Erasmus, remains a relatively licensed strain: it is never allotted the uncanny independence of Hythlodaeus's description. The other word of digression that it seems appropriate to include here concerns the difficulty of recognizing a Utopian work. Grant the axiom that any genre is to be described in three ways: in terms of form, conventions, and content; narrative or signifying structure, sets of topoi, and world-view or meaning-effect. It should not then be contentious to say that individual works which admit their generic belonging equally in all respects are generally rather rare, and tend in fact to be, in their exceptionality, defining instances. From here it is not far to acknowledging that individual works often are not actually o/the genre they would be or pretend to be. There is the fact, and problem, of simple failure epics that don't make it, that don't muster an appropriate meaningeffect, but which are not readily classifiable otherwise. And then there are all the cases where appearances are deceiving - romances in pastoral clothing, melodrama passing itself off as tragedy - not to speak, of course, of mixtures. Granted that a high incidence of failure and impos-

42 Utopian Differences ture are generally the rule, it is readily understandable why any attempt to take simple stock, to list all the examples of a given genre, unless it defines its criteria superficially, is of its nature deeply interpretive, and hence necessarily debatable. But if you accept the position that what I have been calling its uncanny quality is a defining meaning-effect of the Utopian work, then coming by a dependable list of Renaissance Utopias will be contentious indeed. This is not so much because of the ineffability of uncanniness. Rather, more empirically, it is because a great many Renaissance works that present themselves as Utopias are rather what may be called ideal societies or commonwealths.13 Descriptions that deploy the travel narrative or equivalent forms or formulas in order to reshape the ruling class to approximate to one of its better self-images, and celebrate the order that follows therefrom, are generally ideal societies. Patrizi's La Cittd felice, written soon after an Italian version of Utopia,]4 is a good example of this, as is, with some more interesting quirks, and for all this text's irony, Burton's Utopian excursus in Democritus Jr's preface to his Anatomy of Melancholy. The rule seems to be that a 'utopian' ideal commonwealth must register some kind of uncanniness in order to be felt to resist that uncanniness, in which case it then might make critical sense to include such a commonwealth in the category, the list of Utopias; but then the paradox is that it will be a more successful Utopia if the effort to resist goes awry, if it fails at what it attempts. This will be my argument about Bacon's Utopia - that Bacon wants to present his society as an ideal commonwealth, on the whole, but fails to do so, and thus writes a rather successful Utopian work. The other main reason for the difficulty of drawing up a list of Utopian works is that the meaning-effect in question seems perhaps unusually detachable from the narrative form and topoi that 'first' gave rise to it. So, for example, I will argue that Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, which mixes the form of the miscellany with that of the praise of the city, creates a Utopian meaning-effect, and is in fact a more consequent Utopia than Bacon's. The paradoxes involved in defining Utopia lie thicker on the ground, the dilemmas deriving from the difference between generic structure and meaning-effect, description and thing, are hornier, than in most cases, and my strategy in what follows has generally not been to try to find a way around them, but rather to stress the interpretive character of definition itself. These definitional problems lead back to the issue at hand, of Utopias authority as an other world in relation to the Manuels' other sixteenthcentury variants. I asserted before that Utopia draws a line between itself

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and the ideal societies around it, some of which it then pulls in its train. I have just observed that many straightforward Utopias after Utopia are either really ideal commonwealths tout court, or strive to be by resisting Utopia; and I have suggested the detachability of the Utopian meaningeffect, its discursive unimbeddedness. I would now qualify the observation about Utopias that are not Utopias, and suggest that from the angle of Utopias incisive difference, of its peculiar authority, Patrizi and other early writers of ideal societies who called their works Utopias were not resisting the Utopian uncanny so much as accepting an inevitability. For a time, the Utopian ideal or thing possessed a deal of interpretive or contextualizing power; Hythlodaeus in saying his thing that was not was saying a thing with a great capacity to disturb. The suggestion, in other words, is that the detachability of the Utopian meaning-effect is a period feature, that the idea remains relatively discursively uriimbedded and correspondingly powerful, up till the phase from Bacon and Campanella on, of what the Maiiuels in their suggestive historical scheme call the Christian or cosmopolitical Utopia, but which might equally well be called the imperial or absolutist one. If you consider Utopia alongside the radial city and the radicalreformed ideal - a thing that Utopia itself, for all its detachment, encourages you to do: it was published on the cusp of Luther's break, before More could have had positive knowledge of the Reformation, but I am thinking of More's later equation of Utopia with Luther's invisible church and his recognition of the inevitability of Protestant misinterpretation; and as I will straightway discuss, the frontispieces make it reasonably certain that Utopian homogeneity partly reflects an encounter with Italian perspective - then it has the effect of questioning their respective serenity and zeal. Utopia in its proximate distance from these works tends to cast them in its image, to render them uncanny by highlighting their tensions and problems and infiltrating them with its distinctive take on determinacy, its understanding of contradictions as conditions of (im)possibility. It is worth showing how this is with respect to the architectural Utopia before turning to the specific quality of uneven development in II, its disequivalence with itself. I would suggest that the sort of effect Utopia tends to have on the radial city can be witnessed at work in the woodcut frontispieces to Utopia itself, more particularly in the second of the two, which appeared in the 1518 (Basel) edition (figure 3), two years after the first (Louvain) (figure 2). And I will use the woodcuts as a way into an analysis of Book II as well. l()

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2 Map of the Island of Utopia (1516)

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3 Map of the Island of Utopia (1518)

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This will entail paying some close attention to the pictures. A similarity and a difference stand out on an initial comparison. They are alike in being patently inadequate, either as pictures or as maps; indeed they do not attempt realistically to portray Utopia or any part of it as it is described in More's text. Rather, they amount to a series of pictorial notes whereby especially salient features are recorded or evoked: the fact that Utopia is an island is noted, the existence of a principal city, of a river associated with the city, and so on. To say this implies that neither woodcut appears to perform a salient interpretation, neither plays anything readily recognizable as a critical or exploratory role in relation to More's text. It is not just that they do not try to answer the physical question as to the island's half-moon shape - the size of the bay, for example (the 1516 picture is more 'accurate' here in at least including the bay, but there is no attempt at verisimilitude).' More importantly, the woodcuts do not directly truck with the pictorially exciting first pages of Book II, which convey a striking new shaping of social space: I am thinking here especially of the abolition of the boundaries between country and city, of the democratization of the city, and of the often noted and deplored homogeneity of the island - the planned distribution of cities across the land, demographic control, and so on. It is a new spatial backdrop, but an abstract one, which might be materialized and explored pictorially in various ways. But this is a challenge to which the woodcuts, at least on a first gaze, are unresponsive. If alike in this respect, the woodcuts differ in technique. The conventions used in the Louvain engraving are old-fashioned and crude, I would guess wilfully so. Those of the second are more modern, if not thoroughly of the Renaissance. Perhaps most strikingly, a perspectival scheme is employed to situate the island. Not that the Louvain woodcut is entirely pre-perspectival. Though there is evidently no systematic practice of perspective, the effect of distance is certainly rendered. This is not only a matter of the difference in size between the ship and pinnace in the foreground, and the buildings in the background, nor of the wave-lines, which function as half of a grid; it also penetrates the island: the tower at the back of the island, though smaller in fact, is evidently to be imagined as the same size as the tower guarding the bay in front, and lines up with it to direct the eye toward something like a vanishing point. But this last is an exception. For the most part the island is presented to our eye face-on, parallel with the picture plane. (This is why it is easier to read than the 1518 map.) There is a fairly stark split, then, between the rough-and-ready perspec-

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live of the island's surroundings, and the frontal view of the island itself, or between what we might call foreshortened space and didactic space. In the 1518 woodcut, this split has been done away with in a modernizing restoration process, yet preserved as trace in the form of a trompe I'oeil. 'Restoration' refers to a possible witty reference in this illustration. Father Surtz, in his notes to the Yale edition, suggests that the last letter of the 'NOR' on the ship's pennant in the foreground, which corresponds to a corresponding 'NO' on the 1516 pennant, means restauro: 'Novimagus restored,' where 'restored' has the sense of a Renaissance retrieval or rebuilding. Perhaps this is a stretch; but amidst the arch irony of the prefatory material, the cleverness of the artist's simplehearted seriousness certainly ought not to be held against its credibility. Whether or not Surtz was right, the point to stress is that the 1518 map does not undertake to represent the Utopia described in More's text but to update the previous woodcut. The island no longer lays itself obligingly flat before our gaze but stretches toward the horizon in a more or less systematically rendered perspectival space. Noteworthy features assisting in or contributing to the illusion are the Albertian guide figures (Hythlodaeus and More); the angling of the ship; the density of the wave-lines, which creates a greater effect of solidity; the smallness of the buildings in the background; and last but not least, the garland that dangles from the picture plane, bearing the titles 'fons Anydri,' 'Ostium anydri,' and 'Amaurorum urbs.' It is particularly this garland that, when deciphered, forces the eye to construct perspectival space, to make the island recede, against the resistance of the sea's horizontals. For the density of the waves works two ways, to retard perspective as well as to enhance it. Yet it is the garland which is most important to the preservation of split as trace. What is difficult to fathom, what makes its role as elucidator hard to grasp initially, is that the sign 'Amaurorum urbs' is further from the thing itself, in 'real space,' than the two lower signs are from their referents. This is why the garland when first noticed seems to pull the island up for inspection, and the eye can never put this effect entirely behind it, partly because the perspective is not done all that skilfully.18 This restoration of didacticism by trompe I'oeil, this oscillation between near and far, comes across as a bad but witty joke once one sees it. At the same time, as do many anamorphoses, it emits an uncanny effect, and strikes as an abstract pictorial equivalent of Utopian textual play, that characteristic swimming of the Utopian image that happens as the description returns upon itself, fleshing in what already has been out-

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lined by recourse to a different logic or at a different level. It thus puts the woodcut into some degree of harmony with the Utopian text's wit, if not its irony. Still, what is the purpose of the joke? Why doggedly restore a patently inadequate initial representation? The answer is to be found in the discursive text of Book II itself. And it is in soliciting the answer, in directing one back to the text, that the woodcuts are indirectly, but significantly, interpretive. For the 1516 woodcut's inadequacy, its lack of interest in the challenge posed by the text, does find a certain authority in the text itself. The woodcut's focus on the capital city at the expense of the island, its virtual moating of Amaurotum with the river, picks up on the turn in the text from island to city. All the cities are the same, we are told, so to describe one is to describe them all; why not describe the capital then, which is different from and better than the rest for being central and for being the capital (114—17)? Marin casts this as an exemplary Utopian discrepancy, masking as it does an insoluble social contradiction (how to think democratic or homogeneous political representation, politics, power).19 From the present coign of vantage, what is crucial about the synecdoche is that it tends to mark off, as beyond the space of discussion, questions concerning the island's social shape. What relations exist among the cities 'in fact'? What is the relation between social-economic (or demographic) to political space, of country to nation? The 1516 woodcut in a sense follows the lead of the text, then, in not keeping with the breakthroughs, and the attendant concrete questions, of the first few pages. And the 1518 'update' maybe seen to heighten this particular disengagement, in a strategic move part and parcel with its homogenizing the space of the picture. Warren Wooden has noticed how the 1518 map, for all its comparative sophistication, is in some respects less accurate, in some less exact, than the 1516: his general reference is to the fact that the island no longer presents itself directly to the viewer, so that some items are blocked by others (he especially notes that the dangling captions partly obscure what they label) .2() This is significant, but more crucial is what happens to cities other than the capital, or to the idea thereof. For the 1516 map, if it focuses on the capital at the expense of the island, does at least make allusion to the other cities, and to Utopian social-spatial homogeneity and what it entails. Note the fortress-like buildings distributed at equal intervals around the outer ring of the island. These must stand for cities - they are really, one gathers, larger than their notations; and the bunch thus may be taken as a figure for all the other cities, for the homogenous space of the country.

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This sort of figuration does not survive the update, partly because the addition of modelling and detail works against it, but more because the buildings' situation in illusionistic space makes them too particular to serve as synecdoches. The new space would do this even if the buildings in question, those on the (now thinner) outer ring, had not been diminished in size, varied in form, and placed against the sea, so that they seem to have taken on a protective, fortress function even as they have been removed from fortress guise. As for the large buildings that remain, the two inside the circle of the river above the labels and the church-like building at the far end of the island: if they stand for anonymous cities and the rest of the island they do so less clearly and effectively than the 1516 fortress-buildings do. They introduce symmetry, and the triangle they compose chimes with the arms of the garland; but their relation to the capital city, and to the text, remains a puzzle. Now this last change is a complex and in some ways a paradoxical thing. One might have expected the systematic introduction of perspective to make possible and to accompany a renewal of interest in the social shape of Utopia, premised as this is on a regard for, a deep assumption of, social-spatial homogeneity. Such is not the case: perspective goes along with a diminution of interest in the island's total shape, and the heightening of the island's fortress-like character combines with the preservation of its 'medieval' openness to make the space of the island seem somehow a clot in the perspectival scheme, to mark it off from, lift it out of, the abstract space to which it nonetheless belongs. Evidence that this last twist is not an accident can be found in the other 1518 woodcut (figure 4), that found on the first page of Book I, which depicts the space in which Utopia is enunciated. In the two-thirds of this picture on the right, Hythlodaeus, Morus, and Peter Giles sit together in Giles's garden, Morus, in the middle, curiously embedded in the vegetation, reaching out to an apparently animated Hythlodaeus; on the left Giles's servant comes, with what is perhaps a pitcher, from the house, which blends into a view of Antwerp. The item to stress here is the presence of another garland, which brackets the garden-scene and master humanists from the city and sets them forward in the picture space (this explains why they are so big relative to the buildings; note the awkwardness of the declining garland-branch, this time deprived of any placard, which marks the separation). There is again a kind of division effected within the illusionistic space of the picture, and the most emphatically perspectival space, as we might call it, is identified as 'utopian' by virtue of being the space of the conversation. The garland in

4 Garden Scene, by Ambrosius Holbein

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both pictures marks out the act and product of humanist conversation and conjecture as occupying a specially vivid and realistic space, even as it calls in question the relation of this space to the external homogeneous world, and perhaps underscores its fantastic character. The pictorial phenomenon here is that of a perspectival space that hedges itself both in and out. It will be clear that its thematic significance in the 1518 map is paradoxical: one can read the space as barren, the result of a wilful flight from what is most interesting, most authentically Utopian, in the text of Book II. On the other hand, at a formal or figural level, one can read it as that which is most positively Utopian about the map, as a way of giving to be seen the tensions that animate the text's homogenizing assumption, as uncanny visual nowhere. There is a sense, then, in which the 1518 woodcut does manage to match what I have called the Utopian meaning-effect, that impression that the foreign society described, so far distant, is actually quite near, actually exists in the known everyday world - inheres in the pores of early sixteenthcentury English social space. Backing up now from this analysis of the illustrations, we can see that it has done two things. It has put us on the track of what I have called homogenization in the text of Utopia, a theme or logic that I will pursue further in a moment. And it has shown how the woodcuts raise the question of the significance of perspective with respect to the Utopian image, the question of its capacities. In doing this last it offers a useful link with the Utopia of the radial city, which was of course very much conditioned on the rediscovery and codification of linear perspective. I want to suggest that the link encourages one to grasp the radial city as involving something like an anamorphic conflation of levels, or again a dialectic between near and far, between the radial and the rectangular. It provokes the recognition that radiality is conditional upon the existence of a perspectival grid, and yet with its ranked segments attempts to defend against the grid's homogeneity in conferring a particular shape upon it. The opening of a gap between radiality and grid, circle and square, lets in some relevant content that otherwise is blocked out: namely the fact of the existing urban fabric (s), and the relationship to an agrarian surround; and the grid offers a way of levelling these aspects, and yet expressing them, heightening their difference, with the result that the fantastic dimension of the radial town comes to be felt as expressing their impulses. Insofar as the 1518 woodcut, or insofar as Utopian homogeneity itself, directs one to the discrepancy between the rectangular and radial grids, it encourages one to see the radial city as unequal

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to itself; it tends to de-positivize it, to make its true referent an impossibly contradictory situation rather than a plan for reconstructing anew. One finds kindred strategies, kindred questions raised about the Utopian capacities of perspective, in fifteenth-century Italian painting. Perhaps it will be sufficient here to refer to an illuminating section of Ernst Bloch's great The Principle of Hope, in which he treats as indirectly but deeply Utopian that basic formal innovation which was the relationship between figure and ground in Renaissance painting. You can see Bloch's point if you consider Piero's late and often reproduced painting of an ideal city, which would seem a rather plainspoken variant of a perspectival Utopian setting (figure 5). In itself such a painting seems remarkably sterile and unavailably other; it is only when you begin to ask questions of context, when you see it as fragment or envelope, when you ask what sort of society, really, or what sort of ruling class, would be at home in this kind of townscape, that the architecture begins to become Utopian. Put another way, the painting begins to become available if it is understood as involving a reversal. Piero brings the backdrop or ground of a narrative painting or portrait, often enough involving ideal architecture and/or landscape, into the foreground and poses it before us as a kind of character in its own right. Seen this way, he is acting on the basis of the formal innovation just mentioned, which might alternately be described as the separation out of ground, arid which followed upon the codification of perspective. This permitted the establishment of a dialectic between (realistic) foreground and (idealized) background whereby the mysterious character of the background is conferred upon, even as it is paradoxically inferred to derive from, the physiognomies in front. Bloch writes suggestively of this dialectic in Jan van Eyck's Brera Madonna, which features an idealized Gothic city on an island in the background, and in Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks, where the grotto-esque landscape helps impart depth and mystery to the face. I would enter a third example of the convention into consideration, perhaps typical in its very singularity: Mantegna's Vienna St Sebastian (figure 6). The painting's foreground places the saint's agony against the ruin of a Roman column; of the arrows that pierce him, those in neck and brow stand out, since they have entered from what seem impossible angles. Behind this figure, bisected by the column, an impressive landscape stretches out. Attention reveals something curious: it is all part of the same landscape - a single wall stretches across the base of the hill in back - but it belongs to different times. On the saint's oi

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right, where the archers responsible for the saint's condition are trudging over the near hill in contemporary costume, the larger, far hill is scattered with ruins: this is evidently fifteenth-century Italy. On the saint's left, a lake dominates, on which boats ply their trade - and there are no ruins: this is evidently the late Roman period, or perhaps the perennial quotidian of the workaday world, or perhaps both. Jack Greenstein argues that the temporal discontinuity of the ground marks an effort to locate the efficacy of the saint's martyrdom, to stress the paradoxes of its work in time.22 I will only suggest here the possibility of a less strictly theological, more frankly allegorical reading, according to which the painting casts the suffering of the present at once as a matter of, and yet as following from the inaccessibility of, differential temporality. The question of the good society is far away in the painting; it is certainly not Utopian in any straightforward sense. Still, the saint suffers in a space very like Utopian space. In this way, the painting tends to confirm Bloch's assertion that the Renaissance dialectic between figure and ground produces more authentically Utopian effects, however indirect, than any other conventional pictorial strategy. 3. On Utopian Rigour (i): Objective Subjectivity The more suggestive readings of Utopia tend to have it that the text wants to deliver a representation that is visualizable, an image or picture of the other society- that the picture's coherence, its self-consistency, its rigour, is held up as an ideal or main goal; and that the meaning of Utopia has to do then with its failure to achieve this goal. So Marin, in what is for me the most instructive reading, has stressed the work's strong pretence of rigour: it is because the description aims at completeness and consistency that one can show with great precision how and why it fails. The markets, for example: Raphael tells us that there are markets for goods and comestibles alongside one another in the centre of every quarter of the Utopian city - and, in view of the size of the cities, these market spaces could not be small. Yet if you consider carefully the plans for residence and dining, sketched with much spatial precision, you find that they account for the entire space of the city, and that it is very difficult to imagine a way of inserting markets in the quarter's centres without throwing these plans off. To trace the motives for the shape of the residential layout is then to specify the interests that conflict with the economic ones in play in the markets. Marin's is by no means the only good reading to make much of the

5 Perspective of an Ideal Town, by Piero della Francesca Urbino Gallery

6 St Sebastian, by Mantegna. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

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text's failure to live up to an initial pretence of detailed consistency. For Richard Halpern, this pretence is a logical one, maintained so as to be punctually deflated throughout, and resides in the Utopian philosophy or organizing ideology of use, which involves the systematic calibration of desire in light of its objects of consumption, and a corresponding reduction of 'things' such as clothing, say, or pleasure or the sacred, to 'themselves merely.' This ideology is understood as an attempt to negate the irrational effects of exchange-value, precociously intuited as a system by More; the failure of the attempt is manifest in a number of what seem excessive or unnecessary sanctions, such as the restriction on travel, which conjure up the desire they are meant to control, or again, in the strange twist by which the Utopian ban on money exchange works as a mechanism to accumulate an ever larger mass of wealth; and the moral of such inconsistency is the necessity and primacy of the uncalibrated expenditure of desire, of Bataillean excess.'4 In a third variant of this sort of reading, Alastair Fox has argued that the pretence of consistency is a chronological affair, a matter of an initial impression, and that succeeding sections of Book II are increasingly inconsistent with what has come before. The section on warfare is for him the definitive break, when the reader must give over the effort to make things add up to a single picture. Fox holds that the process by which incoherence establishes itself records More's discovery of the autonomous properties of fable.25 Finally, Stephen Greenblatt's beautiful biographical reading of Utopia, in his chapter on More's self-consciousness, presents a fourth possibility, casting Utopian coherence as shifting, as appearing solid and illusory by turns. More's aim in Book II, Greenblatt argues, is to describe a world in which the network of role-playing and transparent illusion constitutive of actual European social or public life, and equally and yet more urgently the private self which in its knowledge and truth defines itself against the world of illusion, are unnecessary and inconceivable. Greenblatt's summary of Book II's constructive strategies is worth repeating here; he offers it when addressing what is for him the vexing matter of the Utopians' individual anonymity: 'The problem with envisaging such distinct, named individuals is not simply that More has used the family to eliminate the dense network of corporate bodies that once differentiated men and then used communism to eliminate the individuating power of the family, but that he has greatly restricted [by recourse to practices of shaming] any sense of personal inwardness.'26 For shaming, which Greenblatt sees as a cultural dynamic or kind of organization, just

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as the family is a political and communism a socio-economic one, I would prefer a term to refer to the unitary quality and prominent role of 'public opinion' in Utopia. But this passage is exemplary in conveying both a sense of different basic logical moments in the construction of Utopia and the apparent consistency of the whole. Yet paradoxically, the other side of this recognition of Utopia's purposive coherence is for Greenblatt a sense of the representation as mere show. His preferred figures for the space of Utopian representation are those of stage and playground on which impulses otherwise forbidden are allowed to disport themselves - figures he evidently sees as informing the reading process itself, and which obviously tend to cast Utopian consistency as specious, and the will to change the world as a mere fantasm. Of these four ways of taking Book IPs pretence of consistency, Fox's rendering, though put to implausible ends, seems to me the most nearly satisfactory; he conveys the sense of a consistency on the move through the succeeding sections of II, of the process of retroactive resituation of prior logics enforced on the reader, that even Marin tends to miss, but that is utterly basic. It is this that Greenblatt is overlooking when he implies that, because the reader comes to see all the institutional/constructional strategies as equally subserving a single purpose (that of selfcancellation, a particular Renaissance version of the death drive), he gives over the attempt to reconcile or totalize them, and so to imagine 'what life would be like'; this means that the strategies lose their objectivity, along, paradoxically, with the self-cancelling drive itself, a subjective matter now reduced to the status of the merely subjective, of figment. To the contrary, I would hold that one retains the sense of a few basic, and partly overlapping, logics, whose mode of relationship, whose compatibility, is questionable, to the end - with the result that the problem of Utopian subjectivity, of what it would be like, is left up in the air rather than eclipsed. Perhaps the best way of proving this reading is to focus on Hythlodaeus's authority in Book II, which, though marked as an issue, is generally overlooked. Let me preface this with the observation that it would be surprising if More had not more or less consciously considered the questions at stake. In Book II, a society is described in which the collective subject, hence the individual subject, is constituted differently from what it is in Europe in at least four basic ways. (1) In matters economical, everyone is first and foremost a manual labourer, and considerations of production are the primary organizational ones. (2) In matters moral, the Utopians are philosophically hedonistic, relatively unaffected by though cognizant of ascetic dispositions. (3) Their

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thinking and practice of military affairs is utterly defensive, pragmatic, situational. And (4) their religion is purely positive (that is, unscarred by sacrifice) and ethical. These are major general differences, and the Utopian gambit is to describe them not as hypotheses but as facts. So the question as to how, or from what position, it would be possible to represent such a society, so manifoldly different from your own, would seem an unavoidable one. More's solution to the problem is not to show his narrator floundering more or less desperately about to contact, and learn, a radically different type of consciousness from his own.27 Nor is it that used by Montaigne in his short essay 'The Parsimony of the Ancients,' for example, though this is more relevant, in which classical customs that contrast sharply with modern ones are described without authorial comment, leaving the reader to attempt to moralize the implicit contrast as he will.28 It seems often to have been judged that the point of view in II is 'objective,' that the writing is 'white' and the authority of the ultimate sort that calls no attention to itself. But this is an odd mistake, for II is generally an arguing book; the arguments are perhaps not so clearly connected to a personality, a personal reaction to the problems of the socio-political moment, as they are in I, but they are being made, and there is a general affinity. To put it more exactly, there are three main attitudes of presentation in Book II. (1) There is the attitude of bare or straightforward Utopian description, usually coloured by an approving judgment. (2) There is the attitude of appraisal (usually approval) of the institutions. This clearly has the interested European reader for its addressee, and includes inferences not restricted to what Hythlodaeus has seen, but to what the existence of Utopia should make obvious. It makes for a description trained on the logic, or better the self-understanding, of the institutions described; in other words, the Utopian reason (s) for valuing health as the primary pleasure, or for using gold for slaves' chains and chamberpots, are made to stand out - Hythlodaeus implicitly or explicitly renders his understanding of the ideology of the institution in question as he describes it. And (3) there is the attitude of a report on public opinion or consensus, of the Utopian way of thinking about the things in question; this attitude is marked off from the former attitude by explicit reference to Utopian opinion ('they say,' 'they believe'), though frequently mixed up with it, in that Hythlodaeus, whether explicitly or implicitly, makes an argument for the Utopian arguments, shows the logic of their ideology; it tends to be distinct, then, from the first attitude, too, by the quality, the intensity, of the presenter's approval.

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This last attitude, in particular, works in practice to raise questions about Hythlodaeus's authority. I will cite two significant examples. One comes in Hythlodaeus's final remarks, his summary peroration. He finishes this by diagnosing pride as the terrible suckfish that ruins European societies and praising Utopian institutions for stripping pride of its milieu, for giving it no context, no realm of invidious difference, within which to operate. Hexter singled the passage out as the great moral of Utopia, and as usual he missed a crucial point.29 It will be remembered that Morus's response to the peroration, and to the whole of II, is to claim that parts of II have been absurd - out of keeping with popular opinion and needs, and so implausible. We have seen that this reaction, which intends to cast doubt on Hythlodaeus's authority (Morus's implication is that Hythlodaeus has either misinterpreted what he has seen or lied about it), undercuts Morus's own, in that he seems not to have understood that Hythlodaeus's brief in good part has been to show that popular customs and opinion are relative and variable. Elliott has observed that a result of Morus's patent inadequacy here is to lend authority to Hythlodaeus and his story, and surely this is right;30 yet, especially since Morus has raised a question as to whether Hythlodaeus has seen adequately, another effect is to heighten the reader's sensitivity to Hythlodaeus's commentary, to whether the moral of the story he has told in his description fits the message he finally draws from it. And insofar as Hythlodaus's peroration has implied that Utopian communal institutions have been contrived to negate the ever-active force of pride, that message is hardly spot-on. Rather what the 'story' at least can be taken to have shown is that 'pride' as ever-active force is the effect of social relations and institutions, that original sin is the fantasm projected by the European practice of private property. This is a complex and ambiguous moment: one might account for Hythlodaeus's not being up to his text, his material, by seeing the resort to theology rhetorically, as a preacherly convenience (his audience is Christian, and will understand what otherwise would be perplexing); or one might point to several signs that the theological reference is pertinent precisely because Utopia is shown to exist in connection to and tension with Europe or a European-seeming foreign-policy environment. What can be safely said is that the passage raises the question of Hythlodaeus's relation to Utopian subjectivity, and makes one wonder whether even he has been capable of 'getting it,' of understanding it in a way other than the sheerly conceptual and occasional. This last instance I would present as an example of a moment, a consis-

60 Utopian Differences tently felt aspect of the text's representational strategy. A consequence of this aspect is that an indeterminate but crucial part of the Utopian mentality is registered as 'unknown in itself,' as insecurely within ken: the reasons Hythlodaeus supplies for Utopian institutions generally sound good in themselves, they 'have their reason,' but it is rarely entirely clear that this second reason, the reason of the reasons, is what the Utopians actually tell themselves, what they actually 'live.' And the effect of this ambiguity is not to produce sudden depletions of realityeffect, as Greenblatt would have it, when one sees More's biographical (or our European) motives implicit in all the components of the construct; the effect is rather the opposite, to free Utopia into a problematically interested, more consequently objective, Otherly place. The nature of this place, the conditions of its possibility, are given to be seen with special salience in my other example concerned with Raphael's authority and Utopian self-consciousness. I suppose that the episode of the Anemolian ambassadors has been and is the best known in Book II, better known than the other memorable little anecdotes and narrative bursts (the zealous neophyte, the anti-humanistic monkey) which have been generally recognized to crystallize problems in the description. This is perhaps because of the clarity with which the Utopian excess of meaning figures in it. Part of the reason for such passages, a modern reader must feel, is to give us a sense of Utopian daily life - in this case of the practical consequences of the Utopian disposition, and practice, of money, still closely tied to its exemplary vehicle, gold, and to displays of splendour and political power. This it does to a considerable extent - though the modernizing resonance of 'daily life' should of course be marked, and it should be kept in mind that the narrower aim of the episode, which Raphael states as such, is to teach a lesson about the relativity of feelings to customs: 'these customs so different from those of other people also produce a quite different cast of mind' ('diversas ... animorum affectiones') (150-1). The star of the anecdote is to be Utopian feelings; more fully, the episode is to show us how the Utopians' practice of money leaves them feeling about (Western) gold and splendour. And Raphael's story certainly focuses on Utopian feeling. It tells of fairly remote foreign ambassadors, of course, who assume that the Utopian poverty of display means real poverty, and think to dazzle the citizenry by parading in full regalia. It was a sight to see how [the ambassadors] strutted when they compared their finery with the dress of the Utopians, who had poured out into the

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streets. But it was just as funny to see how wide they fell of the mark, and how far they were from getting the consideration they thought they would get. Except for a very few Utopians who for some good reason had visited foreign countries, all the onlookers considered this splendid pomp a mark of disgrace. They therefore bowed to all the humblest of the party as lords, and took the ambassadors, because of their golden chains, to be slaves, passing them by without any reverence at all. You might have seen children, who had themselves thrown away their pearls and gems, nudge their mothers when they saw the ambassadors' jewelled caps and say, 'look at that big lout, mother, who's still wearing pearls and jewels as if he were a little boy!' But the mother, in all seriousness, would say, 'Quiet, son, I think he is one of the ambassadors' fools.' Others found fault with the golden chains as useless because they were so flimsy any slave could break them, and so loose that he could easily shake them off and run away anywhere he wanted, foot-loose and fancyfree. (153)

The Utopian reaction is notably diverse: Raphael constructs a scale of feelings and knowledges - from the Utopians with foreign experience to the average (male?) citizens to mothers to older children. A rather complicated machinery of reception, then: but the attentive reader for Utopia will want to ask whether Hythlodaeus's picture is complicated enough, or at least entirely adequate. It is the average Utopian's response that especially seems questionable, I think on its face but especially after one has read about how Utopia manages military affairs. Suffice it to say that military management is presented as the reflection of a strategic reason grown to be second nature, a dimension in other words of public opinion or common sense; and that bribery of the opposing side's forces figures so prominently that it is difficult to imagine a general incomprehension of why it can be expected to work, or in other words of the way money works in Europe. So you return to the ambassadors passage, when you learn about the Utopian military, and wonder how to take the average Utopians' lack of knowledge. Now there is ambiguity here, and not of an utterly reducible sort - interpretive options are projected some of which exclude others and others of which don't or perhaps don't. One better option is to see the average citizen's reaction here as suggesting something about the relation between local lived experience, or rather the knowledge associated with it, and theoretical knowledge about other countries; the point is that these knowledges do not coincide, and that a people acting spoil-

62 Utopian Differences taneously upon its customs will feel differently than it should if it kept, if it could keep, all it knows in mind. This is a better option than the more usual ones, either of seeing the inconsistency as betraying the work's utterly playful (i.e., nonsensical in the sense of meaningless) character, or of having it mark the limits of the social-political imagination - not that these latter two possibilities (one might associate them with Greeiiblatt and Marin respectively) are discreditable. But a yet better reading is that Hythlodaeus simply misunderstands the average Utopians' actions, or in other words that the passage does not show Hythlodaeus to be so sure-handed a teacher as he would want to be, that it shows him inadvertently exemplifying the difference in 'affectiones' as well as telling about it. In light of the importance of national defence, it makes no sense that the average Utopian not know how money and splendour work in neighbouring societies. But it would make good sense for them to pretend not to know. That Hythlodaeus has failed to understand a sublime scene of ironic collective intimidation31 is signalled especially by his saying that the Utopians 'bowed to the humblest of the party as lords.' Why would Utopians locked into their own customs, customs that exclude a noble class and much of the reverence that goes with it, do this? 'Dominis,' the word translated as 'lords' here, has a more general sense, arid might just be taken contextually in sheer opposition to 'servis' ('servants' in the sense of 'urifree workers'). But it seems more plausible that Raphael is projecting his own categories onto the foreigners. This is another passage, then, in which he does riot 'get it' (Utopian subjectivity, the point he means to be teaching). The play of feelings actually depicted is remarkable. But the play of feelings enacted is more complex yet, arid contributes to a deepening of the theme (that of feeling's relativity to custom) almost to the point of subverting it. Part of the value of the episode is that it clues one to the respect in which the European encounter with the New World was integral, as catalyst, to the discovery of Utopia. For the ultimate force of the passage depends in good part on a carnivalesque inversion. This works on (even as the passage discredits) an opposition between the civilized and the tribal-savage which was only beginning to assume ideological prominence in More's period, largely as a way of explaining the vulnerability of American societies and of justifying their exploitation. The passage has the civilized ambassadorkings in their splendour making their moral claim to the putatively New World, the savage space of Utopia; and showing themselves and their European counterparts up to be savages indeed, their more metallic

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splendour just as naked and meaninglessly arbitrary to the Utopian gaze as the occasional befeathered magnificence of the Americans would be to it, or was to the European. The inversion works by shock; it is meant to degrade, to uncrown, to bring down to material reality, in the classically carnivalesque way taught by Bakhtin. But the grounding is Utopian in that it depends on, and calls attention to, the symbolic interaction of three 'systems' (Utopian, European, Tribal), and projects an understanding of the money-function, or of its place, in terms of them. The implication of a third society, that is, or of its idea, tends to displace attention from the question of feeling's relativity to custom; especially because the Utopian practice of money has been so clearly grounded in their communal property system, the question tends to concern the relativity of custom itself to deeper or larger institutions or arrangements; one's focus is diverted to properly Utopian space, that of a systematized or modalized humanity, that in which feelings may be understood as the effects of different systems and (or in) their interaction. I have said 'one's' in this last clause, meaning 'the reader's'; but it is worth noting that if anyone, any subjectivity in the text, is represented as inhabiting this space, what I would call the space of archaic uneven development, it is the Utopians themselves, whose difference, whose unreadability to Hythlodaeus, can then partly be grasped in terms of this more immanent, more conscious relationship to their own determinacy, to their understanding of themselves as effects of system and systemic play - to their more vivid living, then, of their own materiality. 4. On Utopian Rigour (ii): Uneven Development and the Sense of a System These last two examples were focused on Hythlodaeus's authority in relation to the Utopians, but they have illustrated something important about the status of Utopian subjectivity in the text, as abstract positivity. In the same way, the pretence of a logical consistency in II works to summon a rather different thing into existence as if behind it or underneath it, a scheme that we cannot confidently deconstruct because it is not there, not entirely described, but which is clearly more mobile, more plurally dynamic, and different in its dynamics, than the presentation allows. Perhaps the best way of evoking the sense of the whole in question here is by observing that there have been several hypotheses as to where Utopia 'begins,' as to which of its various moments is the core hypothesis. So George M. Logan, for example, conjectures that the logic

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of Epicureanism was what most interested More.32 R.W. Chambers thought that Utopian rational religion came first.33 Hexter made a case that the familism so important to the organization of space and economy was More's root idea.34 Though I know of no argument that the whole experiment began with military pragmatics, several (witness Fox) have found that moment the crucial one for interpretation, the one where the game is given away. And communal property has so obvious a claim that one feels some of the preceding conjectures have been elaborated in order to deny it, and thus restore social respectability to the text. So the cases are not equally plausible. Yet all are plausible enough to encourage one to ask how or what it is that creates the impression, in the separate departments, that More began here, that he started to work from the peculiar ground of this material - the sacred, the ethical, the political - on up and outward. The best answer to the question so asked is what I have called Utopian homogeneity. This, I have already suggested, goes relatively unexplored in Utopia. But another way of putting things would be to say that spatial homogeneity, or in other words perspectival space, is rendered as the same sort of abstract positivity as Utopian collective subjectivity, as a thing all too evidently there but only indirectly knowable. How is this managed? How is the effect of one enveloping space created? It is not a matter of the descriptions starting from basics in each area, but rather of a structural homology running through them all. This takes the form of a congruent opposition between general and particular, or between primary and secondary beliefs or practices, or between a common dimension and differencing ones. The congruence is clearest among economic, ethical, and religious areas. Economically, the opposition is between farming, the occupation shared by everyone in this urban society, and the various basic crafts, of which every Utopian is required to cultivate at least one. Utopian carpenters, weavers, blacksmiths are 'first of all' agrarian workers. (This is parenthetically the context in which Utopian familism is to be understood, or in other words the marked absence of guilds and fraternities from the towns; familism amounts to the return of these institutions to the household, the guild form as it were of traditional agriculture.) In the ethical or philosophical area, the opposition is between health, as the most basic and abstract object of pleasure, and what one would call particular drives, kinds of pleasure that involve the gratification of a particular organ, the release of a specific tension.'3 If there is a reluctance to see

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this as an opposition, it may help to understand the insistence upon health as a valorization of desire and a recognition of its essential abstraction, in the face of its derivative, particular realizations. Theologically, an abstract and highly ethicized monotheism is supplemented by a variety of specific tributary cults.36 The other permanent area, the military, does not fit in so clearly here - a telling discordance; still, on reflection, an opposition begins to appear between an essential strategy of symbolic intimidation - mobilizing above all the vast monetary wealth of Utopia - and secondary ways involving the actual shedding of blood. ^ The point is that the structural homology here, between the more general and the more particular, the primary and the secondary or supplementary, creates a sense of a single underlying and unifying space or system. Such spatial syntax, I would argue, can only be conditioned on the basic uneven development dialogically indicated in Book I, between an emergent absolutism and nascent agrarian capitalism: their fraught cohabitation it was that permitted More, if not exactly to explore, then to project so consequently the radical possibilities, the figurative and organizing power, of perspectival space. At the same time, I would not leave the impression that each of the four areas has an equal claim to coming first, that Utopian religion, for example, has just as immediate or as shaping a relationship to the island's homogeneity as do the other areas. Two areas, rather, stand out as primary (or perhaps as primary and supplementarily secondary). Utopus's donation of the Utopian religious beliefs, it is true, is put at the origin of the story of Utopia, such that the division into monotheism and pagan practices, a ground-religion and individual cults, almost stands as a figure for an equivalent structuring of the economy. Still, communal property constitutes the very condition and instrument of the Utopian island's demographic shape, which is utterly unlike anything in Europe (though probably closer to Holland and northern Italy than elsewhere): fifty-two equidistant cities of a hundred thousand people, each served predominantly by the hinterland farmed by its citizens. How does communal property make for such a demographic breakthrough? By an increase in production that makes the numbers supportable. And it makes for this by virtue of amounting to a universal imperative to work. Communal property means a quasi-exponential increase in the quantity of labour available to society, and along with this the ability to abstract from it arid analyse the labour-function. To put this another way, the homogeneity of Utopian social space is visibly conditioned upon a certain abstraction

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from labour, or the emergence of the labour-function as such. The paragraphs on this function, then, the page and a half on the arrangement of work - this, I will wager, is the strongest part of Utopia, and if things start anywhere, they start here. The analogy between the unhoused tenants and yeomen of Book I and the propertyless citizens of Utopia suggests that the micro-processes of English primitive accumulation are particularly responsible for this focus; though neither the rather different abstraction thrown upon local spaces by absolutist centralization, nor yet the disequivalence between these basic moments, can be discounted as determinants either. What particularly needs to be stressed about these pages, though, is not their ultimate determinacy, but rather the logic they understand and project as existing between production and consumption. Halpern reflects an erroneous consensus when he argues that asceticism, or the idea of reducing consumption to a minimum, of a bare definition of need, holds sway in the Utopian economy/ True, there is certainly a notion that the Utopian people's needs have been altered and reduced in many areas by comparison with a European norm. This reduction is understood first of all as the more or less automatic result of the elimination of 'luxury production' as it exists in European class societies. At the same time, a different sort of luxury production is presented as the aim of the Utopian reorganization of labour: above all the production of free time, which is normatively to be spent in intellectual discussion and activity - a collective luxury whose extra-economic character is indicated by the fact of its being only generally referred to, never specifically described. More importantly in economic terms, the labour regime, whose primary feature is that every citizen will contribute six hours a day to the common effort, is clearly presented as aiming, not at bare sufficiency, but at a surplus. Utopian working arrangements are not calibrated to produce just enough, but much more, an indefinitely greater quantity, and this means that particular economies or reductions of consumption are qualified at root as arbitrary, in the sense that they reflect collective decisions that might have been otherwise.39 Take the notorious example of Utopian clothing, or of the sartorial drive. Such a lot of critical handwringing has been done over the Utopian decision that all should dress the same, that is, that dyeing arid fine-tailoring cloth is an invidious waste of time! How could More not recognize the human need for variety of dress, or for profligate expenditure? or alternatively, surely he did recognize these things, and intended his audience to recoil? So most modern commentators have responded to this Utopian QO

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custom. But is it not sufficiently clear that what is at stake is a properly economic choice as to how to manage the collective work and libido?: that the Utopians have chosen not to lay labour out for dye, though they might have without breaking their bank; that they have chosen to use their labour in other ways, on a building stock, for example, which would have struck any European state as hopelessly extravagant - all the while keeping in view the desirability, indeed the necessity, of a surplus. This is to hold, against Halpern, that the notion of use in Utopia has not fallen under the spell of exchange-value, has not been reified to irrational ends; rather it is registered as a matter of social relations and collective decision. At the same time, of course, the choice to repress the sartorial drive, the choice to live what Raphael gives to be understood as a rather spartan ethic on the whole, is not only to be understood as a matter of preference. Rather it is presented as constrained: constrained by a known logic, that is, in the sense that spartan dress and ethics are meant to prevent the development of invidious differences, or more properly of the late feudal class dynamics of which the differences are the stuff. The idiot question evidently posed by Utopia itself, since so many critics ask it, is 'Why this constraint? Haven't the Utopians broken with the private property system, haven't they put the instabilities and insecurities of the money form behind them? Why then shouldn't they be able to let up on themselves, dress up and have a good time once in a while? Why should they retain, in their new society, such a strong sense of the dangers of "freedom"?' Note that it is usually, tellingly, put this way, though the Utopians are depicted as remarkably free in most basic respects - not just freer than contemporary Europeans, but than modern Americans; and that this should clue one to the fact that what is really being deplored is the quality and role of public opinion, of consensus, in Utopia. Halpern, who recognizes this last, nonetheless writes some interesting pages arguing that Utopian desire is inexplicable in its own terms, that Europe must be understood as Utopia's unconscious, providing it with the desires against which it strangely enacts a great part of its legislation.40 Admittedly, it appears this way at times, though of course this appearance may always be attributed in good part to the thematics of mediation - to Raphael's interestedness, the text's dialogism, and their corollary limitations as purveyor of Utopian ways and means. But the principal answer to the question 'Why the constraint?' is that Europe figures in the fiction not as Utopia's unconscious but as its environment. Perhaps the crit-

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ical obliviousness to this point is to be accounted for by the stress on Utopia's constitution as such as an island, in a moment of rupture with the mainland, and by the undoubted presence of an ideal of self-sufficiency in Utopian self-understanding. But these do not necessarily signify actual independence, of course, and More takes pains to make isolation impossible. The Utopians lack a vital resource, iron, and so must trade for it with money economies;41 and the section on military ways leaves no doubt that a proactively defensive military policy is necessary to Utopia's safety - or in other words that the surrounding countries are like European countries in that the rule is predation (and by preference, of course, against wealthy, weaker, countries). The pages on Utopian military thinking are decisive here in that they leave no doubt that Utopia must defend itself against, must carve out a counteracting space within, the logic of absolutism. They thus have a powerful retroactive effect: they force a recognition that what has been presented as good in itself, a free choice of a particular collective happiness, is also to be understood as a set of defensive measures. The insistence on producing a surplus of food, to take the crucial example: it is not just agrarian common sense (one never knows what the next crop will be, and so on) freezing into a system; it is the result of the need, for survival's sake, to generate money, which Utopian military wisdom makes not only the sinews but the skeleton arid flesh of war. And one goes back to the demographic picture of Utopia, so salient in its difference, and realizes now that the density and symmetry of population is not just an economic good, or a good-iii-itself; it has from the beginning been the realization of a mercantilist fantasy, a phantom intended to discourage absolutist ventures. The Utopian military thing, then, is the second candidate for prime mover, for the shaping force of Utopian homogeneity. Its determination-at-a-distance of Utopian economic decisions, the retroactive ambiguity its description puts in motion, is understood here to be a privileged moment, recording as it plainly does the coexistence of, the gap between, economic and political strategies in its peripheral subtext. Yet just in its privilege it occupies an exemplary role with regard to the other Utopian areas, attributing to them a similarly ambiguous occupation of the general Utopian habitus, a similarly oscillating and supplementary relation to the other areas, in which all take part in the accommodation of the general to the particular. It has a definitive value, then, in the modelling of Utopian space; it 'finishes' the pretence of rigour so salient in Book II, it stamps it as what I called before a consistency on the move.

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The retroactive ambiguity has a paradoxical reflexive effect on the total image of Utopia. By extending the dichotomy between general and particular (or primary and secondary, or inside and outside) operative in each department onto the relationship among departments, it projects, beyond or behind the particular compromised homogeneity of Utopian social space as it is, an idea, a possibility of homogeneity, of uniform or abstract space. One might say then that it produces an uncanny sense of perspectival space as receding while enclosing, as a possibility for now necessarily untapped. This is the formal effect in which is registered the particular disappointment, mentioned before, attendant upon the inability or refusal of the text to follow up politically on its radical initial discovery of homogeneity. Among other things, this is sociologically to pinpoint the theme of vanity in Utopia, beloved especially of Christian critics, in a relatively unfamiliar way - as the effect of specifically absolutist pressure fading into 'the way things are.' Perspectival space is a death to think here not so much because of its determinacy as its non-determinacy, its spectral existence as a foreign power within what is represented or described.42 But setting the Utopian socius into or against a backdrop of a truly homogeneous space is, as should be clear, but one effect, and that a more or less tangential one, of the Utopian military thing and its foreign yet characterizing logic. Its more central effect is, by modelling or finishing actually existing social space, to create a sense of a system. This effect might best be explained by observing that the military section does not just introduce ambiguity into the Utopian economy, it rather adds to an ambiguity that already exists, sufficiently to make it clear that a comprehension in terms of simple agency, or in terms of the motives of the Utopian collective agent(s), is strictly unattainable, for the reason that the conventions arid institutions set up to achieve motives have been overdetermined, as it were, into a system. Thus, with reference to the surplus, and the associated imperative to Utopian demographic growth: before its desirability for defensive reasons dawns, there is a small group of motives, some explicit and some implicit, none of them sufficient to account for the facts. I will note only two. There is the desire to produce free time (a humanist-inflected desire, one might say, since it is for cultural and literary development), which can only be assured by keeping minimal labour sanctions in force (everyone must work an irreducible minimal amount to ensure that everyone has free time). And again, implicitly but unmistakably, the insistence on continually generating a surplus amounts to a celebration of the collective pro-

70 Utopian Differences ductive capacity itself, a motive that remains discernibly carnivalesque even as it rationalizes the traditional festive symbolism of surplus.43 The foreign policy imperative when it arrives does not of course negate these motives (or others), nor does it put them in a clear relationship with one another; but neither does it come to expose the incoherence, the unmappability, of the scheme, and so (as Marin sometimes has it) the strictly critical character of the entire fictive project. Rather the revision it enforces, the ambiguity it adds, is creative: it makes for a sense of a system on the move, one determined and composed by the shifting relations of general and particular, primary and secondary, inside and outside, a legacy of past as much as a construct of present motives, which the Utopians themselves, marked thus as positively Other (if differently motivated from us, yet like us in being unevenly and multiply so), are probably better at operating than articulating. Now it is by way of what I have called its formal syntax, by virtue of the retroactive effect in question here becoming normative, that Utopia assumes the unorchestrated or archaic uneven development of its moment, which is its condition of possibility, as an ulterior theme. What does Book II have to say about it? what does the theme mean? I would venture that it functions in two basic ways. Especially insofar as Utopian society is cast in motion, putatively in the direction of a more just accommodation of general to particular, the text can be taken as pointing toward the possibility and desirability of orchestration, or of a more or less self-conscious system in the sense in which I have been using the word (and recommending, of course, the lineaments of the society sketched as a likely way of achieving it). But insofar as the retroactivity must be taken as the system, or as the sign of uncontrollably contingent uneven development, the text functions alternately to heighten the reader's awareness of uneven development as a predictably unpredictable force and to inure him to its shock. 5. The Class Wish: Humanism as Would-Be Smallholding Culture Up to now we have dealt much more with the freedom of the image in Utopia - or with the determinacy of that freedom, the environment of Utopian happiness - than with the wish itself, the native source of the happiness wished for. It may be that uneven development is in a limiting sense what Utopia is about; that is not the same thing as to say that uneven development is Utopia's cause, in the sense of being or providing the force that brought it into existence in the first place. For that one

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looks of course to social groups or collectives, and in the case of Utopia one need not look long or hard. Consideration especially of the reconfiguration of the relation between country and city, and agrarian and urban labour, in Utopia leaves little doubt that More's alternative society could only represent the wish of the middle class, more specifically of the small propertied class, which was probably numerically preponderant, and enjoying in More's lifetime the latter phase of the day that would be enshrined in the myth of Merry Old England.44 I would be brief here, yet not so short as Raymond Williams was in his remarkable The Country and the City. The natural ideal is then the recreation of a race of small owners, and this is projected in the island of Utopia. ... But in the island paradise it is not quite to be all things in common. It is to be, rather, a small-owner republic, with laws to regulate and protect but also to compel labour. The social experience behind this is clear. An upper peasantry, which had established itself in the break-up of the strict feudal order, and which had ideas and illusions about freedom and independence from the experience of a few generations, was being pressed and expropriated by the great landowners, the most successful of just these new men, in the changes of the market and of agricultural techniques brought about by the growth of the wool trade. ... Thus a moral order is abstracted from the feudal inheritance and break-up, and seeks to impose itself ideally on conditions which are inherently unstable.43 Williams presents himself as stating the obvious and minimally necessary, and I can think of few passages on Utopia that say so much about it so economically. Yet the brevity testifies, certainly to an ungenerous, and perhaps to something of a missed, encounter, which itself asks for diagnosis. From Williams's side, it is perhaps especially a matter of his being a market socialist already in 1973, thinking that there ought to be felt no gaping incompatibility between middle-classness and communism, and wanting accordingly a somewhat more tenacious and realistic grappling with basic economic questions (I have expressed my own disappointment in this regard, though especially apropos of the politics of the economy). From More's side, on the other hand, what is involved is a sense of the patent absurdity of middle-class communism - an obviousness that discourages economic consequence, any serious pursuit into the questions of how the system might work, or of what the hardest problems would

72 Utopian Differences turn out to be. That is, More's image of collective happiness features a basic paradox. It is a smallholder's paradise in that it secures conditions of work and reproduction to all, and in that it fashions a remarkably tight collective solidarity, thus projecting an image of identity and overcoming the chief political impasse of this most fissured and disparate of classes (and divided above all between town and country). But it secures industry and unity by sacrificing property and family, the two main things that this class lives for, that make it what it is (the latter survives, true, but in a radically different, demographic fashion, its privacy, the border dividing its fortunes from those of the nation, having been dissolved). It is to be grasped as an unimaginable sacrifice, part of whose very purpose is to highlight the political disunity of the smallholding class, the unusually wishful character then of its basic wants. As class fantasy, this might seem an exercise in futility; but it is also just here that the work is at its most potent and dangerous. I would venture that Williams is wrong in his suggestion that More passes off the interests of what is really a small class faction as that of a large group or of everyone. If that were the case, such elaborate defences would be out of place - this dimension of Williams's diagnosis applies to a somewhat later period of greater middle-class stratification and disunity. In the 1516 situation, the fantasy's futility solicits reflection on the numerical preponderance, hence the huge power, of the smallholding class, in the face of its de facto powerlessness. In discussing Marx's Utopia, I suggested that one of its basic functions was to raise the question of working-class culture, or of the relationship between the industrial working-class and socialist culture. More's work activates a similar thematic, but it is approached from the opposite direction, not from the fact of a class to the question of appropriate culture but from a type of culture, or the new literacy of humanism, to the question of appropriate class. For the significance of Hythlodaeus's refusal of Morus and Giles's vocational counsel, and of the imperative to counsel, to snap into place, one need only recall that Hythlodaeus is both literally and figuratively a true humanist. Literally he is learned in the appropriate way, properly versed in the texts and the significance of Greek; and figuratively his travel experience amounts to a realization of the notion of learning as travel, and the humanist stress on the practicality of the classics. When such a figure opts out of the princely palace, a claim is being made about where the new literacy really 'belongs,' or a hypothesis is suggested as to its cultural potential, its cohesive power. Remember here that all Utopian citizens are given roughly the same

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daily allotment of time for learning and literacy as they are required to work - one supposes that this quantity is more than that available to Morus, whose excuse for taking so long to set Hythlodaeus's story down is that his work and family responsiblities leave him no time for literature; so that, to drive the point home, ordinary people in Utopia enjoy better conditions of learning than do responsible humanist householders in Europe. Remember, again, the exceptions to the work-learning ratio. Some people in Utopia prefer to use their free time to learn second trades instead of to cultivate literary literacy, while others, distinctively inclined to the latter, on being recognized are exempted from the six-hour labour requirement; this variation is to be expected, it seems, it is natural, and does not so much indicate the eternity of manual and intellectual 'classes' as the continuity of intellectual with manual work. One may go so far as to say that it is the Utopian agreement about the place and nature of learning in the good life that is given to be understood as rendering Public Opinion a peculiar impersonal and powerful force, that stamps Utopian subjectivity with its solidary and unknowable difference 'from us.' The island's anti-philosophical philosophism,46 then, amounts to an answer as to what the new literacy means, or ought to mean, if it were properly instituted as a culture. Meanwhile, and finally, this particular disposition of humanism, and its role as the paradoxical lynchpin of a smallholding class wish, makes for a sharp contrast with the other, more historically influential, Utopian ideas, the Renaissance arid Anabaptist, in which versions of humanist learning serve aristocratic and plebeian (or poor) interests, respectively. One does not want to lose the vision of the diversity of Utopia, and of humanism, that this contrast opens up. Yet the very clarity of the contrast, the availability of humanist mediation to such different interests, indicates that Utopia owes its crystallization as such in this period to a general humanist desire for class grounding. And beyond this, the sociological self-awareness of Utopia, as expressed for privileged example in the parallel between the conditions of labour and learning just noted, suggests that its understanding of the class basis of the true good society is stronger and more searching than that of the other Utopias.

Chapter II. Carnival and Utopia ILL Utopia as the Negation of Carnival

This chapter will address the relationship between the Renaissance utopia and that gamut of representational practices that has come to be called Carnival. Its contention will be that there is a salient relation between these two things, however different they might at first appear (the one thing in the first place a literary genre, the other a set of popular conventions and customary practices). This relation, however, is not simply one of identity or subsumption (wherein the literary Utopia expresses one version of the 'topsy-turvy world' projected by Carnivalesque practices, or vice versa), but rather one of peculiarly vexed and antagonistic mutual presupposition. More specifically, I will argue that More's text silently presents Utopia as the negation of Carnival, as its impossible logical end. This implicit theme is then seized on, and emphatically rewritten with the accents reversed, in Rabelais's Four Books. And this original collision or missed encounter between Utopia and Carnival, if it does not govern the subsequent Renaissance history of the Utopian genre, has a definitive value within it. 1. Utopia's Debt to the Land of Cokaygne My argument to this point about the Utopian genre's preconditions might be faulted for having little to say about the acknowledged literary 'sources' of Utopia. This chapter will not make good the lack, though it should be stressed that the failure is not meant to imply that the narratives of the early voyages of discovery (especially Vespucci), for example, or Plato's Republic and the whole classical Utopian heritage, were not important influences in More's text.1 But to understand the determi-

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nacy of such literary influences with respect to Utopia, so I would argue, one needs to understand them, too, within the socio-economic and political conjuncture or force-field constructed in the previous chapter section. Carnival, when considered in the context of this field, as increasingly paradigmatic festival, seems finally a more significant narrative source than either of these. Let us begin by addressing how Carnival 'appears in' Utopia. This will entail reconstructing Carnival, at least in some of its aspects, by the way; and will lead to questions about Carnival's place in the social field in More's period. Carnival manifests itself in More's text in two main - closely related but distinguishable - modes. The first mode is less positive than structural. Utopia makes a large gesture toward Carnival in the latter's capacity as a species of schooled collective improvisation, as the everyday medium of demotic political commentary, of sanction and threat. Recent writers on popular festive practice have been virtually unanimous as to this dimension - that is, as to the general continuity between popular morality ('the moral economy') and the thematics of Carnivalesque 'theatre' - and have stressed the exploratory, as well as the protective and monitory, functions of festive improvisation within traditional cultural codes. Thomas More's knowledge and experience of such improvisation goes far toward explaining one of the strongest and most memorable features of Book II: I am thinking of the specifically collective creativity of the Utopians, as put on display in the episode of the Anemoliaii ambassadors, but also as evoked, for example, in the episode of the proselytizing Christian neophyte (after suffering much denigration of their traditional religions, they apparently with little formal consult arrest him, find him guilty of public disorder, and banish him) or the account of their reception of Greek books (a predilection having shown itself, a picked few devour them for the sake of the social body). Such gestures, their considerate spontaneity always understood as against 'what would be done in Europe in this case,' lend a Carnivalesque colouring to Utopian agency in general. They affect even sections such as that in which the political system is described, making it possible to imagine an understanding in which the state is the result of some similar - if more complicated — reactive but creative, exercise of practico-collective morality, and thus in its inertness a merely secondary or figurative phenomenon. Indeed, as was hinted in chapter I.ii, the episodes of active group decision have the effect of calling in question the appropriateness to its object of the discursive medium of Book II - insofar as this inclines toward the argumentative rather than the theatrical, and tends to present the socius as a fixed

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system. Should Utopia be understood as a kind of homeostatic body-inmotion, constructing itself through improvisitory application of customary codes? Does the description itself misrepresent action-according-tocustomary-root-principles as narrowly rule-based and legalistic? It is worth noting that such discursive misrepresentation would go some way toward explaining both the disappointment that has been expressed at the end of so many readings, to the effect that Utopia does not live up to its promise, that it really would not be a nice place to live after all, and also the routineness with which readers (of diverse political persuasions) get basic things about it wrong.5 The link suggested here is not a 'positive' one: apart perhaps from the ambassadors episode there are no unmistakable references to Carnival in Utopia (a significant absence), nor so far as I know are there letters extant, for example, in which More acknowledges participating in Carnival jeux d'esprits when young, or explains that the remarkable force or energia of his Utopia derives from their memory.6 But I suspect that it would be difficult to overestimate the significance of Carnival in this respect for the revolutionary character and appeal of More's work. Second, Carnival is present as a species of Utopian representation in its own right , or in other words as the vehicle, the material source and referent, of the literary genre of Cokaygne. It is generally allowed that Carnivalesque representational practice typically mixed some positive notion of an alternative state of affairs into its travesty and satire, indeed that it was a crucial part of its work to project some vision of a better world that once was or might be. It is also recognized that there was a literary genre in existence correlating to that vision: the assumption would seem to be that in those texts of Cokaygne that exist, the writers' extrapolation from Carnival accounts for a characteristic specification of the pre-existing topoi of the Golden Age, of paradise and the garden of delights, and of topsy-turviness.9 One witnesses the distinctive popular-peasant impress in the two features that most clearly distinguish the Cokaygne fantasy from within these topoi: (1) its 'gross materialism' and (2) its privileged fulfilling of the gastronomic libido, its 'reversal' of the state of hunger. To these specific differences can be added an element of scepticism. It is arguable that the Carnival-utopia projected in Cokaygne was of its nature elusive, ambivalent, sceptical - as aware of its own contradictoriness as something so ramshackle could be. But it seems certain that its literary realizations, coming scarred into our hands as they do with literacy and its attendant prejudices, tend to be

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yet more sceptical than the 'original.' Consider the following long passage from A.L. Morton's translation of the early fourteenth-century poem 'The Land of Cokaygne,' which has often been taken as the most finished representative of the genre. In Cokaygne we drink and eat Freely without care and sweat, The food is choice and clear the wine, At fourses and at supper time, I say again, and I dare swear, No land is like it anywhere, Under heaven no land like this Of such joy and endless bliss. There are rivers broad and fine Of oil, milk, honey and of wine; Water serveth there no thing But for sight and for washing. Many fruits grow in that place For all delight and sweet solace. There is a mighty fine Abbey, Thronged with monks both white and grey, Ah, those chambers and those halls! All of pasties stand the walls, Of fish and flesh and all rich meat, The tastiest that men can eat. Wheaten cakes the shingles all, Of church, of cloister, bower and hall. The pinnacles are fat puddings, Good food for princes or for kings. Every man takes what he will, As of right, to eat his fill All is common to young and old, To stout and strong, to meek and bold. 10

The satire against monks, not unlikely a clerical 'addition,' perhaps helps initially to enable the fantasy, to make it more imaginable - it is understood that monks were already living rather well in their cloisters; but this is at the expense of the peasant Utopia's superficial plausibility. However sceptical it was 'in itself,' the main point to make is that

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Cokaygne indeed existed as a literary genre, and that the sixteenth-century readership would have recognized that genre as one of Utopias literary sources. I want to suggest now that for all the obvious differences, Utopia's debt to Cokaygne is in fact profound: that Utopia may be said structurally to depend on the Carnival Utopia. Utopia shares, and revises, three of Cokaygne's basic 'themes.' First, it recasts what Cokaygne has to say about work. Granted that what is often said about Cokaygne, that it is all about excess consumption, knows its truth. Still, there is more truth in saying that Cokaygne is implicitly all about the division of labour, both insofar as the consumption-time depicted represents a reversal of the people's daily schedule (in which work-time bulks large), and insofar as its pleasures and delights represent a fantasy of the division of labour's end. And if the peasant Utopia masquerades as a monastic Utopia, as it does in 'The Land of Cokaygne,' if it achieves a certain comic plausibility this way, the root message is so much clearer, that there would be enough and more for everyone if the ruling classes were abolished. Utopia may be taken to appropriate this implicit or formal message and give it explicit thematic status. Second, Utopia rewrites the theme of consumption itself. Though it is often said that More's text does riot indulge consumption fantasies in the manner of Cokaygne, still the stress on material abundance in Book II is explicit and insistent; with the exception that the most brazen consumption-fantasy of Utopia, what takes the place of eating, tends to go without saying. This is the educational- or book-libido: what the Utopians do with the vast amounts of time rescued from work is read (and attend lectures, and so on). Utopia thus effects a reversal of Cokaygne's disposition of consumption (explicit theme) and the division of labour (implicit theme). Once grasped, this reversal strikes, indeed, as subversively Carnivalesque. Third, Utopia takes over from Cokaygne the 'thematic attitude' of scepticism. The carnival Utopia, as just noted, was animated by scepticism, or in other words was intrinsically ironic. One generally thinks of Utopia's irony as a humanist product; but its difference from that of Cokaygne has less to do with learning in itself (More's etymological puns, for example) than with the kind of plausibility claim registered in Utopia, which stems from the scope of the imagined social transformation; and this difference can appear more a matter of degree than quality. At any rate, it seems safe to say that Utopia has learned from Carnivalesque representation at least some part of that ontological uncanniness - the sense that the faritasied place is here and yet impossible -

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which distinguishes it from previous, and from many later, learned Utopias. The intricacy and structural importance of the above features should go far to justify the claim that Utopia is dependent on Carnival, or that it was conceivable only (if partly) on its basis. We can go farther now, or at least make the claim more plausible, if we note two historical tendencies, the one to do with Carnival itself, the other with Carnival-utopia. The first tendency emerges especially from Davis's and Ladurie's works. It is that Carnival and festive practices became more heuristic or exploratory in the early modern period - this in reaction of course to the depth and gravity of the changes taking place, perhaps above all (at least in France) to state-centralization. The historical studies thus complement and corroborate one of the major theses of Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World, that Carnivalesque representational practice was in process of coming into an epistemological privilege, taking on an unwonted interpretive power in this general period. The second tendency I derive especially from Carlo Ginzburg's intellectual biography of a late sixteenth-century Friulian miller nicknamed Mennochio, a heretic and a more or less solitary radical who was questioned and eventually put to death by the Inquisition." One of Mennochio's scandalous beliefs was in the imminence of a 'new world,' a more just and equal society, and Ginzburg glosses this belief by putting it in the context of sixteenth-century peasant Utopias and Cokaygne texts, some few of which survive. What is interesting about Ginzburg's discussion in the present context is the extent to which the irony or cynicism of his Cokaygne texts is evidently merely for the censor; and what is striking about Mennochio's belief in a new world is the proximity of Utopia and Cokaygne in it, or the fact that, while definitely a belief in the imminent actuality of a better society, it is couched partly in the imagery of Cokaygne. The tendency inferred here consists, then, in this imagery's being stripped of its 'merely wishful' or purely fantasy character; or to put this another way, it consists in its being deployed to support an attitude and a thematics quite other than 'peasant resignation.' Taken together, and grasped as responses or reactions to 'absolutism' and nascent capitalism (or more precisely, the disruption and reorganization of agriculture in Northern Italy by the growth of mercantile capitalism) respectively, these tendencies make it possible to speculate that Carnival - which had 'always and everywhere' been associated with old and Other habits and ways of life, with a pagan construction of the world12 - was changing its nature in the early part of the early modern

80 Carnival and Utopia period, was coming to be associated with new possibilities, and becoming more intellectual as it were, more cognitive. And it is not too far from here to wondering whether Utopia ought not to be seen as being born from this vector, or as evolving out of Car nival-in-historical-mo tion. 2. Utopia and the Category of the People Say that these last speculations are on track. The question that then poses itself is: 'Why does not the Utopian genre, on first coming together, acknowledge its dependence more frankly and clearly?' For the intricate displacement involved in its relationship with the thematics of the Cokaygne generic set, which I earlier suggested testified to Utopia's structural dependence, could also of course be seen as a sign of the distance between the genres, if indeed not of Utopia's outright disavowal of any debt to Cokaygne. And modern critical consensus has been to discount, though from various motives and in different ways, Carnival/ Cokaygne as a determinant structural source of the sort that I am arguing here. Those who see more wit and irony than serious social vision in Utopian communism tend to read Carnival out of More's reversals and irony by 'humanizing' them, setting them in the Lucianic (which is to say, literary) tradition of 'jest-in-earnest.' Those who take the vision more seriously tend either straightforwardly to cast Utopia as an 'unpopular' place, or to see Utopia as depending on Cokaygne more or less strictly in the sense of defining itself against it, opposing it. Thus Raymond Williams's remarks in The Country and the City on the social interest lying behind Utopian communism, while mainly at the expense of the vision's realism, presume as well its remoteness from real popularity.13 And Richard Halpern, while insisting on Cokaygne as a Utopian pre-text, sets the Utopian attitude to objects in stark opposition to Cokaygne's: whereas Cokaygne is anti-ascetic above all, and knows objects only that they may be massively and orgiastically consumed, spent, wasted, Utopia is a land of eternal moderation, where objects are seen and regulated in the light of their bare use. Halpern does not imply, like Williams, that Utopia is anti-popular through and through; but he does suggest that the governing attitude advocated in Utopia is antagonistic to that put on display in Cokaygne, or in Carnival.14 Though the position here is that Utopia owes more to Carnival than is commonly allowed, it seems evident that the consensus as to Utopian un- or anti-popularity is largely on target. What I wish to do now is specify this quality's motives and limits. First, as for wwpopularity (for

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the distinction offered between un- arid anti- is one with a difference, and one can understand Utopia's relation to Carnival unantagonistically in part): two aspects of Cokaygne understood as Carnival-projection, two pointed Carnival themes, go far toward explaining - in a more or less purely technical way - the general displacement, the 'merely' structural character of Carnival, within the Utopian text. The first of these themes presupposes the division of Cokaygne's public into plebeian and ruling classes, and involves that respect in which Carnival, in the very self-immersion of its practices, constitutes a spectacle put on by the plebs for their rulers to remind them of the limits of their power. The message conveyed by Cokaygne to the rulers is that the Utopia of consumption they enjoy relative to the common people is not properly their own, however things may seem in the ordinary daylight hours, but originates with Nature and the People. Or to put this another way, and with the advantage of hindsight, Carnival Utopia reminds the natural rulers of their own superfluity with respect to the forces of production, or of the extent to which these latter, unshaped and as it were only managed by them at a great remove, remain a part of Nature. But if this is one of Carnival's important roles in society, we have a 'neutral' reason for Carnival's submergence in the text of Utopia, arid for the absence of Carnivalesque ceremonies from the Utopian year, so far as we know it. It is simply verisimilitude. For on the one hand, utopian-Carnivalesque gestures would have no proper audience in Utopia, class division having been dissolved; and on the other hand, if the forces of production have not been removed from their slumber in Nature's embrace, they have been roused or remodelled to a considerable extent - so that the message of Natural Abundance is no longer appropriate exactly, or at least is not one that Utopia needs or wants to hear. The second more or less neutral reason for Carnival's submergence has not to do with its politics but its theology. This, notoriously, was shifting, tricky, and always of great practical complexity, owing to Carnival's normatively ambiguous position within, but not entirely within, the dominant religion. Thus the Utopia of consumption in Cokaygne could be read as expressing an understanding of and attitude toward the body and its pleasures, whether pagan or peasant-materialistic, radically divergent from any orthodox Christian one. Or it could be read as a strictly purgative or pre-Lenten exercise, all the consumption-feats of Cokaygne rendered in imminent retrospect so many expressions of Sin, and so many confirmations then of the doctrine of Original Sin. Now More's Utopians are indulgent to the doctrine of Sin, of course, or at least to

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the ascetic drive which tends to be associated with Sin, as a reaction to it. But the culture depicted is resolutely - if rather mildly and stoically hedonistic: that this is the one issue on which Hythlodaeus expresses reservations, the one feature of Utopian society to which his powers of empathy do not extend,15 is perhaps More's way of signalling that what is involved here is a deep-cultural affair, not just a matter of dogma but a way of living the body. This decision on More's part - to equip the Utopians with different dispositions, to place them on the other side of a cultural divide from Hythlodaeus and ourselves - also surely helps to explain why the Utopians are given no Carnivalesque celebrations, and why his own alignment of his style with that of the literary jest-in-earnest tradition, which came to him having already effected a sublimation of the Carnivalesque, is appropriate. For the theological signals sent by expressly Carnivalesque gestures would be the wrong ones; or at least, such gestures would require a rather complicated apparatus of explanation if their inclusion were not to saddle Utopian subjectivity with contradictions of a basic but unstimulating sort. These last two points might be used to make a case that Utopia's uncarnivalesque ethos and description do not stem from grief with the People at all, or in other words with Carnival as properly understood, in its popular context. Still the consensus that Utopia is not just un- but arz^-popular seems finally to be right, if undemonstrable other than by reference to the general atmosphere of the fantasied place. Rather than arguing this atmospheric case here, I will simply take it as understood, arid attempt to formulate the main motives for Utopia's anti-popularity. These will correspond, logically enough, to what I have suggested are the chief preconditions of the form; casting them as motives will necessarily involve putting them in relation to, and in contention with, basic characteristics, or indeed motives, of Carnival culture. The first, political, motive is implicit in Williams's evaluation of More's motives in Utopia. These, he suggests, are to fulfil the ideals of the yeomanry and master craftsmen and retail traders - what the times had to offer in the way of a respectable middle class. He was evidently especially referring to the ethic of use and moderation that holds sway everywhere in Utopia, the utilitarianism and indeed the collective possessiveness, as it might be called, of its citizenry. Granted the accuracy of this class diagnosis,16 it is not difficult to grasp why the Utopians should apparently be accepting of the rituals of traditional Christianity without taking over those of Carnival. It might be useful, nonetheless, to refer here to a compelling resume of the logic of Carnival that deserves to be

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better known, Henri Lefebvre's brief general history of the festive fact in 'Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside.'17 Lefebvre's argument is that the Village Feast, in early agrarian societies of various types, aimed in its excess at a dual end. The feast was first of all a sacrifice made to Nature - or better and more originally a bluff wager laid down in its direction; as such it was meant to elicit good weather and the next year's crop. But second - a somewhat less conventional idea, this, and the source of Lefebvre's use here - the wasting of resources was an act upon the social body itself, intended to ensure that all members would be playing the ongoing game with Nature with the same stakes and against the same odds - a levelling act, in other words, which preserved equality, hence the community as such. This dual purpose subsists, on Lefebvre's view, through much subsequent overdetermination and reconstruction, even into the period between the wars, in which he was writing. The mentality written into the paradigmatic feast of Carnival and its practices, then, is that of the - enforced - absolute wager. And Carnival's proper 'author' or subject, we might say, is one with little or nothing, or put another way one with only everything, to lose. In more practical or political terms, since inequality was the rule everywhere from very early on, this meant (and where Carnival retains anything of its original vigour, means) that Carnival precisely in its communal aspect - i.e., as a festival - was 'for the poor' above all. Salutary as it has been, the emphasis of most recent studies on the diversity and complexity of Carnival and festive practices in the early modern period makes it easy to neglect or overlook a basic fact of logic or meaning such as this. But it seems clear enough that the fact was understood well enough all through early modern Europe.18 The people to whose interests Utopian utilitarianism most closely answered, for example - to return to my main argument now — would have understood it, and they were not people with little or nothing to lose. Thus Carnival is not observed in Utopia, and its signs rarely figure in the text. The second, more socio-economic, reason for Utopian animosity toward Carnival has already been touched upon in the comment above on Utopia's remodelling of the labour process. I have argued that Utopia's peculiar relativization of social forms was conditioned on England's particularly salient uneven development, the centralization of the monarchy being accompanied, both motivated and hampered, by nascent capitalism in several quarters of the land. Such contingency (of textual and 'subtextual' relativization) is surely most evident, both as enabling and limiting, in those paragraphs in which what we would call

84 Carnival and Utopia the Utopian economy is sketched. This, as I have argued, is the Utopian core of the work: a whole new relation between intellectual and manual labor, the crafts and agriculture, the country and the city is partly mapped, partly summoned up, and then the questions posed - most basically about the socio-political shape of the island-state - the further description called for, backed away from. The turn to the central city of Amaurotum, once again, is the key move: questions about the total shape of the island are replaced by questions about, arid more sufficient and ample descriptions of, the state and superstructures; yet the imperfection of the synecdoche, one's memory of the country and its importance in the initial scheme, makes for a characteristic ambiguity, or wavering, in the total image of the island. The point to stress now is that the Utopian core is at once the most and least Carnivalesque thing in the work: any number of great reversals or inversions taking place, which yet upon examination are not reversals at all really: the theme of the People's independence, and indeed its purposive gaiety on display, yet transformed, pointedly dangerous and threatening to the ruling classes, indeed more dangerous, and above all more interesting, than Carnival was equipped to be. A threshold has definitely been crossed: the threshold between Nature and Culture, one could say, though it needs adding that it is a question, from the Utopian point of view, of what was once natural becoming cultural. What is clearly enough at stake is that the Utopian view of labour and the labour-process is tendentially post-centralized, or in other words is objectively aligned with the view of the state. Carnival by comparison tends to be premised on a pre-capitalist, 'natural' division of labour: accordingly, the social 'commentary' it is equipped to convey, both as a single cultural event or thing and as a set of dissociable practices, is of a different kind and scope - its satire typically more stable, and more strictly monitory arid local, and the relativity it conjures up intended to undo the perennial repression or forgetting of natural facts or constants. Insofar as the threshold referred to is owing to different basic formal 'sets' on the world (e.g., on the categories of Nature and of the State), insofar as the antagonism of Utopia to Carnival reflects a break with precapitalist or pre-modern assumptions, the animus involved comes to seem less a matter of More's (or of More's vehiculation of some middleclass faction's) intention, and once again, though more profoundly, a rather neutral affair. This is the level, I think, at which the peculiar - displaced and abstract - impress of Carnival upon Utopia can best be understood, involving an initial denial and a refiguring or translation of

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its logic on the basis of that denial. It is this difficultly paradoxical, largely unconscious, relationship I intend to capture when I say that Utopia in More's work emerges as the negation of Carnival (or of Cokaygne). Meanwhile, grasping the relationship as unconsciously registering a socio-economic shift does not preclude seeing Utopia's inhospitality to Carnival as the effect of a third, more conscious and strictly cultural motive yet to be mentioned: More's humanism, or more specifically the notorious ambivalence of the humanists toward popular literary and cultural forms, from which More the biographical individual by no means wholly escaped. For if the term inhospitality is not unwarranted, still the traces arid hints of Carnival are clearly, both positively and structurally, there: the contemporary, informed reader might well have understood More in Utopia to be consciously classicizing, and so lending dignity to, a current popular form. Such a more or less self-conscious imitative project in fact helps explain how the unconscious positing of Utopia as Carnival's negation came about.

Chapter II. Carnival and Utopia //. ii. Carnival Strikes Back: Rabelais's Abbey ofTheleme

Rabelais's Abbey ofTheleme episode has often been treated, in the textbook histories of Utopia, as the next Renaissance example after More.1 Its inclusion in generic history makes sense, finally, in a way that that of Montaigne's essay on cannibals, to take another problematical example, does not. True, Theleme creates no reality effect equivalent to that of 'Of the Cannibals'; nor does it speculate with equal sociological sharpness about the nature of human happiness. In these two far from insignificant matters of 'spirit' Montaigne is more Utopian, and Rabelais's episode lacks. But Rabelais explicitly engages the conventions of the formal Utopia in the Theleme episode, as Montaigne's essay does riot. The difficulty is in saying whether Theleme is a foreshortened Utopia or a parody of one. My brief will be that it is parody, but of a species finally less derisive than fascinated, less satiric than cognitive, giving off much of the original enigmatic charge of mime. This will be to hold that the parody is Carnivalesque in a not un-Bakhtinian sense of the term. The point of Rabelais's Carnivalization of Utopia, I will argue, is both to rebut Utopias social message and to critique its sources. 1. Theleme as Allegorical Cokaygne The notion that Theleme is a Carnivalized Utopia might be questioned from either side. It may reasonably be wondered whether such a fragmentary sketch can have much in common with a Utopia. And it can be asked what Friar John's kingdom - in its more realistic emphases apparently a courtier's paradise, a place of high love and etiquette - has to do with Carnival. This last is evidently a question that Bakhtin in his work

Carnival Strikes Back: Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme 87 on Rabelais thought over, giving it, however, no simple answer. Let us begin here. It will be recalled that the medieval Carnival, in Bakhtin's construction, operated a series of inversions, all aimed at that nimbus assumed by authority that is one of the chief forms taken by ideology in presecular societies, whose intended effects are summed up in the term 'uncrowning.' In Carnival uncrowning, the body politic - official society — is re-figured against and as the cosmic body of the People. The relatively finished and normatively classical features of the 'ruling-class body' are revealed accordingly to be but anomalous parts, selfimpressed excrescences, of the grotesque whole, the ever-productive and unfinished popular body. So that at the end of Carnival, official society has been degraded by being drawn down to the level of, or into, the People; it has been renewed or revitalized, in a sense, by the same equation; and not least, it has symbolically been put in its place, it is reminded of its actual marginality in relation to the social whole.2 Rabelais degrades, renews, reminds, working with imagery taken from Carnival; according to Bakhtin, the Four Books is a Carnivalesque text. Unsurprisingly, mainstream Rabelais scholars, invested in high learning, have generally denigrated this view.3 It will only be useful here to dispose of one of the more sophisticated objections to it. This is that Bakhtin does not adequately take into account the difference between the festive thing that was Carnival and the book that Rabelais wrote; Bakhtin, it is claimed, does not theorize literary as opposed to festive uncrowning, or textual 'Carnivalization' as a process.4 This complaint does not derive from an attentive reading of Bakhtin's work. For on the one hand, Bakhtin partly assumes, partly argues, that Rabelais's moment is marked by a fluid cross-fertilization of forms and media, so that, supposing a Carnival text might be oxymoroiiic to conceive or difficult to produce in some periods, there is nothing incoherent about the notion in Rabelais's. And on the other hand, he carefully casts Rabelais's textual appropriation and peculiar systematization of Carnival imagery as part of a more general process in which Carnival was moving from being a specific feast or time to being the exemplary festival, taking on a kind of conceptual value in doing so. But if it is not a problem to see how Carnival uncrowning works in Rabelais's text in general, it is hard at first to see anything like it happening in the Theleme chapters. The main reason for the difficulty is that the episode contains hardly any references to the grotesque body, or in other words that Bakhtin's Carnivalesque system of imagery is largely

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absent from it. Unless the elaboration of the monastery's building and its denizens' characteristic dress is seen as grotesque in its very excess an inviting option to which we might want to return, but doubtful in light of this excess's 'realism' - what emerges in the central chapters must be allowed to be a strikingly refined and upper-class, if not exactly an official, place, a decidedly courtly humanist figment. And Bakhtin's references to the Theleme episode in Rabelais and His World acknowledge its exceptionality, representing it as subscribing to a different, apparently more purely humanist, poetic.5 The implication generally seems to be that Theleme is a discordant and inferior moment within the total work. But at times there is a suggestion of a kind of irony from without: that is, that if taken in the context of the whole, Theleme does not mean what it says on its own.6 I want to retain Bakhtin's hesitation as to whether Theleme is to be taken literally or ironically, on its own or in context; and to hold that this hesitation ought to be seen as an objective fact about the text, difficult to grasp as such because the mark of contradiction. To do this it seems important to specify what might have been intended by the second option, allowing that Bakhtin could have been less hesitant about doing so himself. For the irony involved is not researched. It works by way of underground recognition that Theleme's discordance is itself in harmony with the aesthetic of the grotesque body, that the reversal of expectations involved — Friar John's monastery a refined, courtly place! - is in consonance, though an abstract or second-level consonance, with the Carnivalesque principle of inversion. The consequences of this recognition are at once sharp and equivocal. At the formal or textual level, it casts Theleme as but one member of the grotesque textual body which is the Four Books; yet the very abstraction of the recognition involved, the very formal character of the discordance, tends to make it an exemplary episode, hence to encourage one to see it as the key, the episode that brings unity to the rest. At the level of the message (or better, of the form of content), the discordance in question assumes a rather more specific form, yet still an abstract one. What emerges, in the middle chapters of Theleme, is a version of Cokaygne - definitely that - but a Cokaygne that has been reinverted, if you will, or suffered a gentrifying alteration. Not an Island of Food and Sex, peopled by gluttonous and lecherous monks, simultaneously objects of satire and obvious stand-ins for the People;7 but rather something like a Renaissance Palace and Grounds occupied by nobly bred men and women, hungry for fashionable display, refined

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love, conversation, games, and hunting, whose representational status (are they objects of satire? do they stand for the People?) would hardly be in question were it not for the dim recognition of the process in question, their roles in a new Cokaygne. The effect here is complex, but it does not go against Rabelais's grain to reduce it to two moments. Recognizing the 'courtiers' as substitutes for peasants makes the Renaissance hungers figure Food and Sex, in a sense, thus reintegrating them into the popular body. But at the same time it strikes the various hungers, which persist in their literalness, with a question mark, it renders them arbitrary - as if they intrinsically had it in them to attach themselves to, to signify, a host of things. To resort to Lacanianism, the hungers or needs are cast as desires, or under the aspect of Desire - which is to say that Theleme becomes allegorical in this moment. The emergence of allegory may be grasped as the consequence of a prolongation, and a generalization from within, of Carnivalesque travesty, and does not so much comically relativize this vision of noble libidinal release as haunt it with a sense of disappointment and impasse. And it is partly as a comment on and a reaction against this moment, one cannot help speculating, that Rabelais concludes Theleme by staging and debunking allegory itself, in the form of Mellin's prophetic doggerel, which he places at the foundations of his Utopian site. 2. On the Historical Moment of Bakhtin's Rabelais

It might be objected against this reading of the episode as metacarnivalesque that it is not in fact Bakhtinian, that it is rather inward and convoluted by comparison with his construction of Rabelais in Rabelais and His World. Bakhtin, it might be maintained, simply meant this: that the apparent 'unpopularity' or 'purely humanistic' character of the Theleme episode must seem odd, hence equivocally serious, in light of the carnivalesque strategies presiding in the broad whole. On this reading, Theleme is hollowed out by its surroundings in much the way official ceremonies, in medieval culture, were debunked by the unofficial festivals attached to them. Note though that the latter reading is not consistent with Bakhtin's general line on carnival in Rabelais's practice, according to which official and Carnivalesque 'discourses' are re-disposed in relation to each other, and Carnival assumes a pervasive epistemological and poetic role that it had not enjoyed before. To see Theleme as taking part in a de

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facto abstraction of Carnival principles, to grasp it as a second-level or rarefied Cokaygne, is thus in keeping with the spirit of Bakhtin's construction, I would argue, however out of harmony it may seem with the letter. Such a meta-Carnivalesque reading accords, in particular, with the part of Bakhtin's book that tells the story of Carnival's change and demise. It will be worth a digression into some of the complexities and seldom cited difficulties of Bakhtin's text and theory to show how this consonance is, before we return to Rabelais and demonstration by reference to the 'text itself.' It will be remembered that Rabelais and His World sketches in broad outline a grand historico-discursive narrative. This narrative comprises three main episodes, whose distinguishing characteristics have to do with the quality and the disposition of popular culture, the carnivalesque, with respect to the larger cultural field. These episodes might be called, in terms that though very loose do reflect Bakhtin's gross emphases, the medieval, the (early?) Renaissance, and the Enlightenment or modern. In the medieval, a healthy popular culture, though excluded from official or paradigmatically ruling-class institutions and culture, exists in the open or on the outside of said institutions, flourishing in unspoken but generally understood fixed tension with them. In the Renaissance, the invisible barriers between official and festive fall away, the tension is unfixed, and as popular culture, liberated, becomes more unified, consolidates itself, it acquires an interpretive or ideological power and scope previously unknown to it; it becomes possible for a writer such as Rabelais to situate himself in society, to take his bearings, on the basis of or from popular symbolic practice. In the modern situation, the festive has lost restricted and general critical meaning, having been relegated to the figurative margins once again in being individualized and classified as mere recreation, as momentary relaxation and release. This narrative offers a plausible context in terms of which to understand the abstraction of Carnival covertly carried out in the humanist garb of the more Utopian part of the Theleme episode. What needs underscoring is the ambiguity of the Renaissance episode in Bakhtin's historiographic story. He is concerned to make a case for Rabelais as a miraculously original and multifaceted writer, and for his world as a window of time in which a plethora of formal opportunities discovered themselves, in which everything seemed possible and a great deal was. He clearly casts Rabelais's art as a step beyond, an advance upon, that of the preceding epoch; this advance depends centrally upon

Carnival Strikes Back: Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme 91 his moment's, and his, liberation and generalization of popular culture, of Carnival. Now it is not to discredit the case Bakhtin chooses to make for Rabelais as revolutionary writer, in Rabelais and His World, but only to suggest that it is partial in its emphases, to note that the liberation-generalization of Carnival asks also to be read another way - not as the definitive opening up of cultural possibilities but as the beginning of their shutting down, the initial stage of that sundering of the popular-festive from the communal, of that individualization and abstraction, which marks the modern. At any rate, herein lies the ambiguity: that the moment presented as the high point of the series, the moment of achievement, of cultural consummation, is also presented as that of a decisive falling off. The disequivalence between focal objects in the medieval and Renaissance episodes of the historical narrative tells especially of this ambiguity. Bakhtin's interest, in those sections of his book in which he describes popular culture before Rabelais, is trained on the relation between institutions and discourses clearly marked as official and popular (liturgy vs. festival; court vs. marketplace). His interest, when he comes to the Renaissance, is in the writer Rabelais. Did a new institutional set-up subtend and support Rabelais's formal experimentation and blending? Though Bakhtin reports that the character of the festive year and of popular culture generally was undergoing a change, this is not described in detail; nor is it cast as a new 'settlement' but rather as an ongoing process. If there is an institutional framework that corresponds to the medieval one it is the vernacular printed book itself— not a framework, then, really, but a site. Thus it is easy enough for retrospect to cast Bakhtin's Rabelais less as (unconscious) revolutionary for the People than as the of course innovative commemorator of a culture now or soon to be no more. Or to put this more sharply: if one refuses to forget that Bakhtin's Rabelais bases himself upon and participates in the generalization/abstraction of Carnival, then one can feel that a more appropriate image for Rabelais's work than that of Carnivalesque revolution is that of pure Carnivalesque expenditure, where the expenditure in question is understood as destructive or deforming, ruining the very Carnivalesque material on which it feeds. The abstraction from the Carnival paradigm animating Theleme, along with its associated dubious 'popularity,' can readily be fitted into this other way of placing the story's accents; or better, it can be understood as speaking of the ambiguity in question.

92 Carnival and Utopia Having noted the ambiguity, how to diagnose Bakhtin's apparent obliviousness to it? The temptation is to see it as the result of what consensus considers Bakhtin's two great, if understandable, mistakes about Carnival and the People. Many have criticized Rabelais and His World for its wholesale valorization of Carnival. The People, we are told, can be very bad at times, too, and Carnival associated with invidious ends. Bakhtin must know this, but hardly allows it. Second, many have criticized him for opposing popular to official culture so cleanly, as it were, for claiming such a pure divide. For carnival and the other festivals were sanctioned in medieval times, if not set up, by the ruling powers; the marketplace which constituted the festive's quotidian location was never, in medieval societies, simply a place of popular freedom. And then all the big Renaissance fairs were staged by the big capital of the day. Again, Bakhtin cannot not know these things but seems to have forgotten them, perhaps mainly for the sake of his - commendable, antiStalinist - politics. These objections have perhaps been best and most influentially put by Stallybrass and White, though they content themselves with a more or less disciplinary diagnosis of the problems' immediate cause: Bakhtin's folkloric approach led him to credit Carnival with unadulterated Utopian value.8 Their own subtraction of folklore, in the positive arguments of their work, leaves them with a more strictly discursive notion of Carnival than is found in Bakhtin, which they offer as a more historical one as well. Some such discursive or symbolic rewriting of Bakhtin, it might be noted, has tended to follow from the making of his major sin out to be the mythifying of the people. Now it could be shown that Stallybrass and White's discursive rewriting of Carnival as transgression or hybridization is finally a de-historicizing move. What will be useful to argue here, though, is that the naiveties Bakhtin commits himself to (Carnival's glorification and separateness) have been misunderstood, that these simplifications might better be grasped as the results, or better as the tokens, of a theoretical narrative more complicated than, and different from, the one Bakhtin has generally been understood to have written. Still, Stallybrass and White were right to point to Bakhtin's dependence on folklore as the disciplinary source of the problems, and to guide the reader to Bakhtin's later, long essay, 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,' where the folklore is more forthrightly and rigorously presented.10 But one ought immediately to add that Bakhtin's version of folklore is not the sort that one is used to meeting

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every day, and that it might be better simply to call it a kind of Marxism, or Marxist narratology. For Bakhtin's interest, in the chronotope essay, is less linguistic or discursive and more narrative than in the more influential 'Discourse in the Novel': he undertakes to canvas the - comparatively rather few - basic ways in which time has been configured in space by Western prose story, the assumption being that these chronotopes then come to form the raw material, or rather the minimal stock of basic paradigms, from which the novel (or any narrative) fashions itself. That these various chronotopes conform to different social experiences of time, and thus in however loose a way to historically specific social formations, becomes clear when we come to the Rabelaisian chronotope, which Bakhtin first describes as the result of a cluster of themes or 'imagistic series' - the anatomical series, eating and drinking, defecation, and so on. The thread common to these series, which makes them into a cluster or distinct chronotope, is the idea of the human body not the individual but rather the species body - as centre, as organizer of the space-time continuum. ' These typically Rabelaisian semes are then revealed, in the next section, to re-articulate, even as they are predicated upon, a primitive chronotope, which Bakhtin links to the conquest of agriculture and the associated emergence of a collective human identity as Worker (or to the mode of production generally known in the Marxist tradition as the Asiatic). Bakhtin's notion is that Rabelais falls back on or reinvents the primitive chronotope, saliently preserved in medieval ritual and literature, to mount his attack on the official hierarchical world view. Put more sharply, Bakhthi in this essay casts Rabelais as resurrecting, and elaborating a new expressive form for, an archaic mode of being in time - an aboriginal peasant or Asiatic mode.12 Once seen this way, two closely related questions clearly pose themselves, I would argue, even if Bakhtin does not explicitly address them. The first question is: How is it possible for Rabelais to resurrect peasant temporality? And here, though Bakhtin's answers all take a cultural form, it does not seem far-fetched to think that he is assuming a corresponding social-political development or emergence, for it has been recognized for some time that the heightening of class struggle on the land which characterized most of late medieval Europe issued, in France, in a limited victory for the peasantry, or for the village (or in what at least would have seemed a victory from the English peasant point of view). The second question is: How is one to conceive of this temporality's adequate contemporary institutionalization - that is, in a social space

94 Carnival and Utopia beyond that of Rabelais's text? And here all that need be noted is that Bakhtin's presentation of the primitive-agrarian chronotope offers no suggestion that there is a chance of actually returning to this moment, to earlier social relations, in Rabelais's day. Indeed, it offers no suggestion that he understands the Asiatic mode as ever existing purely, or as ever anything more than a construct or structure in the Althusserian sense, a sort of absent presence. The argument here should now have come into view. It is that Bakhtin's glorification/separation of the People (indeed, his glorification of Rabelais) can and ought to be read as the way in which a resolutely culturalist Marxism (emphasis on both terms) marks the autonomy of the cultural. It was Althusser's great virtue to have taught that such autonomy should be thought by way of overdetermination, or in other words as the effect of an excess of mediation. Bakhtin manages the problem of mediation, of how to conceive the relation between base and superstructure, in another but perhaps related way: by explicitly not managing it, so to speak, but in this way posing it as a question. This means, to return to Stallybrass and White, that Bakhtin's use of folklore and attendant valorization of the People and Carnival should not be taken as Utopian in the invidious, simply positive sense of the term, but rather in the 'true' sense, of posing questions about the mode of existence of textualized social relations. As for the understanding of Theleme — its abstraction, and the ambiguity that we previously noted - two things can now be observed. First, if one sees a Marxist problematic of modes of production governing the analysis of the Rabelais book, though explicitly absent, it helps explain why Bakhtin accents the positives of Rabelais's moment, treats it as a separate cultural settlement before the fall into abstraction/individualization. Whether the theoretical model involves simply a notion of Rabelais's text as exemplifying and instantiating a new and discrete mode of cultural production, or the notion of an ulterior relation between the text or cultural mode of production and an emergent mode of production (which might have but did not in fact become dominant)13 - in either case the key thing to register and stress is Rabelais's difference, both the departure involved in his resurrection/discovery of a new form and his text's internal, nigh systemic consistency. One is required by the model, then, however intimately they cohabit, to separate two kinds of abstraction, that involved in consolidating the popular text, in fashioning festive motifs into a dominant hermeneutic, and that involved in the marginalization of the festive, which leads to the shattering of the collective subject.

Carnival Strikes Back: Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme 95 The second observation is that this model offers a way of understanding the relation between these two kinds of abstraction, between the second and third phases of the macro-historical narrative: precisely that of overdetermination or uneven development. Bakhtin avails himself of this way in the chronotope essay when he sees the aristocratism that he had either been troubled by or had neglected in Rabelais and His World as congruent in certain of its features with the agrarian chronotope (though the features must be archaized and exaggerated to fit in). So the hero-worship so laboriously evidenced in chapters 26-8 of Quart Livre to mark the death of du Bellay (all nature mourns on his spirit's departure as at the death of Pan) is quite plausibly cast, in its chthonic quality, as a spontaneous expression of the popular.14 Likewise Theleme's selection of courtly body-culture can here be grasped as but a symptom of the popular focalization through the body: in other words, rather than being disturbed by Theleme's courtly humanism, Bakhtin sees that humanism itself being 'reshaped from without' by the controlling chronotope.15 And it seems evident that what I have offered thus far by way of a reading of Theleme (seeing it as a courtly version of Cokaygne, abstract insofar as it involves reversing reversals, substituting for substitutes) can be readily accommodated into this scheme, and the ambiguity noted cast as a 'stratified' or overdetermined one. It might be objected of my argument thus far that it has effected an unexpected reversal. I was to show how Theleme carnivalizes Utopia; but begin to drift into a demonstration, through Bakhtin, of the proper way of reading Rabelais's carnivalesque book as Utopian. This reversal should have cast additional light on Utopia's dependence on carnival in its original moment. But it is now time to substantiate and further articulate the reading of Theleme as meta-Cokaygne by reference to Rabelais's text. 3. The Engagement with Utopia What yet needs to be demonstrated is that Rabelais indeed engages Utopia.16 As the episode begins, it is presented, after all, not as an antiutopia but as an anti-monastery. It will be remembered that this is Friar John's 'abbey of his own devising,'17 his reward for having played so active a role in the Picrocholine war. The monk's kingdom naturally taking the initial form of a monastery, Theleme begins to be constructed step-by-step, according to the Carnivalesque principle, a loose one of course, of reversal or contrariety. Since actually existing monasteries are

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single-sex, Theleme will be co-ed. Since, in monasteries, women are considered polluted, it will be the practice that the places tainted by the religious men who accidentally enter Theleme must be scoured. Since the rule of 'hours' governs ritual observances in actually existing monasteries, ritual will be free in Theleme.18 This kind of negation - by inversion or contrary - certainly does not disappear in the chapters that follow. The next but one, Chapter 54, in which we read the inscription on Theleme's gate banishing ugly lowborn hypocrites and welcoming noble true believers, may be understood to continue, even as it deepens and renders impersonal, the process of Carnival negation. I would hold that such negation finally presides, and do not think it wrong to say that Theleme is, last as it is first, an anti-monastery. But with Chapter 53 - no longer a performance of social-textual construction, a conjuring into existence before our eyes, but a factual description set in the past tense, in which the establishment has thus become a finished thing - the negation on which Theleme is founded has clearly changed to become something much akin to Utopian negation, which, as Marin has shown, works in terms of 'neither this nor that.' So the building described in Chapter 53 is less like a monastery than a palace, but probably better described as neither a monastery nor a palace. The sartorial cornucopia of Chapter 56 ('How the religious men and women of Theleme were dressed'), certainly opposed to monastic habits except in its obsessiveiiess, might seem more courtly; yet by virtue of its variety and sensibleness, and above all in its uninvidious existence for itself, it distinguishes itself from that. And if the conduct of love and of everyday life distinguishes itself first of all from monastic practice, it conforms only on cursory consideration to a courtly or an aristocratic one. So it is that the reconfiguration of ideological-social space characteristic of Utopia - what Marin characterizes as the logic of the neutral emerges in these chapters. And this is attended by the beginnings of protective discourses or explanatory systematizing narratives. Note, for example, the cursory description of the craftsmen's quarters around Theleme wood, apparently thrown in at need to make the abundance of apparel plausible (202). Or again, more centrally, note the little disquisition on the nature of the free and well-born will, in the chapter on how the Thelemites conduct themselves, introduced for protective reasons (203). We can see now that the abstraction ingredient to Theleme-asCokaygne is mediated and indeed determined by this turn to Utopian

Carnival Strikes Back: Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme 97 space, the shift from negation by reversal to the negation of the neutral. Since context, as will be shown shortly, leaves little doubt that the movement, the opening out, in question is a self-conscious, protracted allusion to Utopia, it is not too much to say that Theleme asks to be read as a deliberate engagement with the work and genre of Utopia. And this engagement coincides with - one may wonder whether it does not produce - that specifically about the episode which has been felt to be anomalous with respect to Bakhtin's construction. Let us now return to the two moments or messages which we saw to be inscribed in the form of content before, and specify them in the context of this engagement with Utopia. In the first place, the relation to Utopia entails that Theleme is not just an anti-monastery; it is also, and perhaps more profoundly, an antiUtopia, which attacks Utopia partly under cover of Friar John's specific animus, partly byway of the analogy between monastery and island. The protracted allusion leaves little doubt that Rabelais intends to be saying something against Utopia, and the broad-grained moral is that Utopia has too much in common with a monastery, that it is a repressive and artificial construct. This is a gestural, rather than a precisely trained polemic; and one would be hard pressed to pronounce authoritatively as to what ideological motives animated Rabelais's expression of corporate class-consciousness: Bakhtin generally wanted to see Rabelais as sympathetic to the people, but it seems more plausible to understand Theleme as an aristocratic vehiculation, and sublimation, of peasant attitude. Corporate consciousness it is at any rate, and its fundamentally conservative aim is to discredit Utopias 'philosophism' or privileging of reason, most particularly the twin notions that you can reconstruct society so as to do away with class hierarchy and that you can refashion and rationalize the various pleasure-drives so as to do away with their dependence on figuration, their production of illusion, and render them non-invidious. These Utopian assumptions are implicitly stigmatized as false populism: Carnival does not mean that the People doubt the truth of blood or want to do away with the nobility; they recognize it, admire it, want to be it rather. Nor is Carnival's debasing of noble pleasure (refined love, say), its gross materialism, meant to imply that refined love is simply false, but rather to make the point that all pleasure is illusory, or bound up with illusion, with the mask, with figuration. Rabelais's polemical aim, then, might be described as that of lending credence to Morus's concluding comment in Utopia, to the effect that

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the island is all a pipe dream because people need splendour. But he does this in such a way as radically to reinterpret that statement. Let us recall the terms of Morus's chief objection to Utopia. He especially finds absurd 'the basis of their whole system,' their 'communal living and their moneyless economy.' Without property or money, 'the true ornaments and glory of the commonwealth' in the common view are 'utterly subverted [evertitur]' - he means 'nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty.'19 Within Utopia, the chief problem with this objection lies in its failure to grasp the logic of Hythlodaeus's construction, according to which 'common opinion' as we know it must fall away with the elimination of property and money and the social classes predicated on these institutions, to be replaced by an opinion quite different which it has been the object of much of Hythlodaeus's monologue to describe. Or again, one might say that the problem with the objection is that it does not grasp its own (sociological or instrumental) logic, since property and money are understood as the institutional means by which to produce certain attitudes or ways of feeling, certain (as we would say) cultural effects. Morus's assumptions about (a human) nature come across, in good part, as illicit - as static, not thought through by comparison with other assumptions. Rabelais's corroboration of Morus's assertion does away with such illicitness. In its polemical aspect, Theleme retrospectively casts the attitude toward property, money, splendor, honour in Utopia as unnatural and expedient - and by implication as unpopular, as respectably middleclass in the sense before described. Property and money are conditions, certainly, of Theleme, even if the precise property relation is ambiguous and odd; Gargantua, having granted John the land for an abbey out of his own estate as free leasehold, pays down 'in cash twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and thirty-one long-wooled sheep' for the building's construction and furnishing, and a comparably grand sum annually for its upkeep,20 in what may be read as a Carnivalesque reversal both of the typical lease arrangement and of the situation in Utopia (where sheepfarming depletes England of true nobility). But they are 'detached' conditions: property and money cannot be suspected to be integral to Thelemite pleasure, any more than the splendour of the noble dress and life conducted at the monastery can be felt as politically expedient, as having in view for example the awed submission of the craftspeople who are nonetheless described as the necessary supports of this life. One is driven to say that from the vantage of Theleme, Utopias

Carnival Strikes Back: Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme 99 assumptions about nature appear as naturalism; whereas the assumptions about Nature ingrained in Theleme itself are non-reflective, active ones, manifesting in the form of an energetics rather than a philosophy. And when conclusions are drawn from the assumptions, as seems necessary, we might preserve their difference by saying that they form the beginning of an ethics or ethical axiomatics, something different from a philosophy and which would present itself as more basic, more immediate, than that. Do what you will: Theleme's difference with Utopia is not finally over communism, note - for Theleme might itself be described as a communist institution, its facilities and essential trappings, even seemingly the clothing, stamped as collective or class property - but presumably over, what Utopia holds in common with the monastic institution, its regulation of daily life, which reguladon is assimilated to Law, understood finally as a form of prohibition. It should be clear that at the level just described, or in other words as a response to, a symbolic putdown of, Utopia, Theleme is motivated by class prejudice: Theleme is commonly referred to as an aristocradc Utopia, and, as long as the populist determinadon of the aristocradsm in question is kept in mind, with good reason. At the same time, at another level the class prejudice can be understood as the registration of a different fundamental set on Nature, the labour process, and the State. Theleme's 'energetics' of Nature presupposes the impossibility of remaking the labour process, of pulling it from the grip of Nature. It thus reflects the inherent Carnivalesque assumption as to the disequivalence and antagonism between production and consumption, producers and consumers, written into the order of things. It is the encounter with Utopia that renders this a visible assumption, so to speak, or that brings the prejudice to disclose its sociological basis, to present itself as a basic set on things; while at the same time rendering it deeply paradoxical - indeed problematizing it, pitting it against itself. We have returned to the moment we referred to before as the allegory of desire - when the reader is encouraged to wonder whether these nobly born denizens of the new Cokaygne are still stand-ins for the people in a sense, or whether they are just who they are and what that might be, what their passions signify; but with the difference that we can now see that the question of desire is not only abstract - that the point is not simply to point up the arbitrariness of the passions - but necessarily possesses a sociological dimension. I can perhaps best clarify this last step in the analysis by referring to a chief textual symptom of the allegorical shift, the presence of two

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moments, which I have been expositing: I mean the ambiguity of 'nobly bred' - Frame has it 'free, well born, well bred' (126) - a quite traditional ambiguity, which has often been used by critics to deny or overlook the aristocratism of Theleme (or the respect in which it is a polemic against Utopia) or to make of the episode a simple allegory ('the secret of Theleme is that it is Evangelical, a place of gospel goodwill'). 21 From the current vantage, one sees that the traditional ambiguity serves as a pretext by which to raise the question of passion's social conditioning, or to open passion to modalization. One can understand this questioning and opening partly in terms of the systematizing and regrounding effects of quasi-Utopian neutralization. The Thelemites are like monks/nuns, like nobles, like courtiers, like humanists, yet not like any of these either. And why are they not? Because it is understood, at some level, that the environment of Theleme, contrasting as it does with actually existing environment(s), must produce different virtues, different subjects. But the problematization of basic Carnival assumptions about nature is clearest in the moments of Utopian 'rationalization' mentioned before. So it is with the final sentences of the chapter on how the Thelemites apparel themselves, where one learns, first, that they can be so fine without its costing great effort because in Theleme the servant class is exceptionally knowledgeable and efficient; and then, second, the clothing is produced mostly close to hand, by workmen whose quarters are just off the grounds proper; and who are abundantly and steadily supplied with the necessary raw materials by one Seigneur Nausiclete, importing from the isles of Perlas and the Cannibals. In one sense, this oscillation of monastery/manor into an exotic village may be understood as a perfectly logical extrapolation from traditional agrarian assumptions about consumption and production: the need for a determinate amount and quality of apparel dictates guild production, imposes the necessity for limited trade (a mercantile moment, marked by Nausiclete), requires some form of exchange with a hinterland. What would be a new way of organizing socio-economic life (production, exchange, consumption), the Utopia of a contemporary Cokaygne, begins to materialize before our eyes. In another sense, of course, it is a bit of nonsense, a parody whose butt is Utopian extrapolation/rationalization; but this sense too - insofar as it nonetheless marks, perhaps more clearly than the former sense, the necessity of systemic support for the pleasure in question (the sartorial drive) — raises the question of the true social form as it were of the spontaneous pleasure fixed on. It thus

Carnival Strikes Back: Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme 101 encourages one to think of, to apprehend, the particular pleasure drives, the selected instantiations of group will, as Utopian figures (and this in a fuller-bodied sense than is usually intended by the term 'utopian figure'). This last seems a genuine and profound Utopian effect; the reader might begin to doubt the accuracy of my description of the episode as a carnivalization of Utopia. Why not call Theleme rather a utopianization of carnival, or allow that it may be taken either way? My sense that this is a decidable issue, and that the Utopian dimension should be read as remaining subordinate, derives in the main from the nature of the question most pressingly and hauntingly raised in and by this dimension. That question concerns the nature of collective or group identity, and I would assert that the properly Utopian 'set' must tend to prevent the matter from being posed so directly or in itself, must hence prevent it from coming off as a miracle. What are the sources of group will, and how can it be conceived in operation? how does it happen and work? The passage of description that addresses especially the latter issue is one of the better examples of a Silenus's box in all of Gargantua, as elusive and beautiful as it is simple and banal. What can we say of it? That identity is based on a relation between a number of people and a one, an individual, in which the number forms itself into a group around the one? that this forming involves at once an assumption of the individual's pleasure for the group arid a sacrifice to that pleasure by it? By this freedom they were moved to laudable emulation all to do what they saw a single one liked. If some man or woman said: 'Let's drink,' they all drank; if one said: 'Let's go play in the fields,' they all went. If it was to fly a bird or to hunt, the ladies, mounted on fine hackneys, with their proud palfrey, each carried on her daintily gauntleted fist either a sparrowhawk, or a lanner, or a merlin. The men carried the other kinds of hawks.22

Or should we just say these people have very good manners, that the passage shows group will to depend on and consist in politeness? Maybe so, but then the passage itself encourages one to think rather precisely about politeness, hence to strip it of a veil that seems in some sense constitutive. It accordingly can make one realize the importance, if one had not, of the future tense (this, I take it, and not the subjunctive) in Theleme's slogan, thus in a sense literalizing it and draining it of polite-

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ness. FAY CE QUE VOULDRAS: translated literally, the slogan means 'do what you will want'; 'do what you will,' the ordinary translation, holds a hint of the future, but does not permit literalizing precision. Such precision makes it a harder, and perhaps more thoughtful, slogan than it is usually understood to be. The difficulty lies of course in the difference between tenses. If you want to put the difference as a contradiction, you can say that it is impossible to do in the present what you will want in the future, if the point of the future tense is that the want in question does not exist yet (i.e., if the point is that you do not know yet what you want). If you want to put the tense difference as a paradox, you can say that you (the individual, the group) exist in the present only in prospect of (consent to) a future desire. It seems clear enough that this option is there in the text, in the description of group activity just quoted: that there is pressure to take the passage as empty or metaphysical, marking the simple impossibility of doing what you will; and that there is pressure to understand it as something like an eternal paradox of identity, of vital group existence. But in context, above all in view of the Cokaygne paradigm, this latter pressure is stronger, arid directs the reader to consider the paradox's social basis, as it were - to ask what model of activity or deep structure assures the security of the group's existence in 'the present in prospect.' And - in the larger context - I cannot believe that a courtly model of agonistic etiquette, such as had been recently, and already influentially, enshrined and reflected on by Castiglione, is sufficient to serve: it is too 'individualist' for that. Literalization rather makes for the 'superposition' of this model onto the more ritualized and anonymous model associated with Carnival, and Theleme's temporal paradox may thus be grasped as reflecting and rendering that basic split between production and consumption, work and pleasure, Group and Individual, which we have seen to be written into the form of popular collectivity. What I am trying to say about this second, quasi-neutral dimension of Theleme, and about this most essentially Utopian of its effects, is that even here Theleme remains distinct from Utopia in two infinitesimal but basic respects. First, in its focus on the human material of Utopia, as it were, the dynamics of the collective or (more accurately it seems) the group (whereas Utopia, for all its vivid allusions to spontaneous collective ventures, for all its conjuring up of a new kind of collective subject, does not place its direct focus here, but on the system's reason, on mechanism, on organization). And second, in its implicit and 'singular' situation of this dynamic within the horizon of a traditional or pre-

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capitalist paradigm of social-collective activity - Theleme as a new Cokaygne, however got up and refined (whereas Utopia tends to cast its system as the effect, or under the aspect of, a combination of such paradigms, attempting to locate itself in a space beyond, ungoverned by, any one form). It will perhaps help to clarify this second distinctive difference if we recall Bakhtin's procedure in the chronotope essay, and put things in his terms. He moves from discussing the Rabelaisian chronotope in itself to a construction of the ur-chronotope Rabelais depends upon: this latter narrative existed no longer as such or in itself, but can be derived from Rabelais's work - in other words, Rabelais's text makes the primitive-agrarian chronotope accessible in a way it had not been before, it restores to current consciousness, in a sense, the defining outlines of that type of culture or mentality which concided with and marked the conquest of agriculture. What I am suggesting then, in Bakhtin's terms, is that Rabelais's ambiguous limning of the species at its best in Theleme, his celebration and adumbration of a truly honourable group in motion, might be taken to depend on this archaic sort of social space-time, or rather through its very singularity (its relative 'freedom' from the bodily series) to enact a return to, indeed to resurrect with a questionable difference, the one authentic model of collective consciousness, in Bakhtin's testimony, to exist. It seems worth adding here that this vision of Rabelais as alienating the structure of primitiveagrarian Identity from within, so as at once to renew it and render it dynamic, flexible in appearance, connects immediately with the notion and theme of Rabelais as a celebrant of Progress, understood as ongoing human conquest of Nature — a theme which has generally been dismissed, by those in the Bakhtin industry as well as Rabelais scholars, as anachronistic and sovietically interested (it has evidently made one think of five-year plans), but which would actually seem to have abundant warrant in the text, as I will glance at below. But for all its suggestion of Carnival's prospective power as figure arid force, for all its estrangement and flexing of primitive-agrarian spacetime, Rabelais's exercise in Utopia remains within accustomed contours in two motifs that seem to emerge more ineluctably than polemically, more as a result of some basic traditional intuition of what is possible than as the sign of motivated hostility. I am thinking of the fact that the descriptions of the daily activities leave the impression that it is a large group, while the chapters on Theleme's building allot space for more residents than it is easy to imagine bonding and re-bonding in the

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manner described in the quotation above. Do the Thelemites break up into a number of groups? Or are we to understand that they are constituted differently with respect to 'the one and the many,' such that they can form larger authentic groups?: these are the questions that the reader-for-utopia asks, and it seems clear that the ambiguity as to whether Theleme is a large group or a small society derives from the nature of Carnival itself. The politics of Carnival, we are told, are always local, never general (i.e., 'national' or 'class' or 'ideological'). But closer consideration of the issue in this passage makes one suspect that it would be better to understand Carnival's locality in terms of the kind of agency or will involved: the spatial ambiguity in question, that is, would seem to stem from the difficulty of identifying the composition and scope of Carnivalesque activity, whose normative (partial) anonymity gives sufficient clue that even when it happens in groups, it is not simply group activity. And I am thinking as well of Theleme's gradual situation in a kind of liminal temporality, of its turning before our eyes from a permanent community into something more like a boarding school, an extended proving ground for true nobility. When we gather early on that Theleme is for the young, this does not in itself infringe its status as an independent society. But when we learn at last that people only stay in Theleme for a period of time before returning, the better for their stay, to society outside, the impression is conveyed that the group spirit of Theleme can be maintained only for a time. This changes things: Theleme turns at last into something quite different from a Utopia, and this would seem to answer to the cyclicity of Carnivalesque time. 4. Utopia Consumed by the Land of Cokaygne These last two distinctions, reminding us that Rabelais's Utopia is but a small episode in his work rather than its reason for being, lead to the question of the place of Utopia in the work as a whole (insofar as one can speak of the Four Books as a single work). I will restrict myself here to Theleme's relation to literal references to Utopia and to its significance within a positive thematics of Utopia. It is not to be disputed that, though Utopia's name is not spoken in the Theleme episode, the episode is to be connected with explicit references to Utopia in Book II where it is cast as the land of Pantagruel's residence and rule, and in Book III, Chapter 1, where the story is told of how Pantagruel ensured peace in the conquered land of the Dipsodes by settling it with Utopi-

Carnival Strikes Back: Rabelais's Abbey of Theleme 105 ans. These references offer corroboration of Rabelais's irreverence toward Utopia, if there was a doubt about it; what I have called Theleme's polemical dimension ought indeed to be understood as exposing the motives behind these cheerful fillips in passing. One is tempted to group the two references together with Theleme itself, and read them as the signs, either of a carnivalesque processing of Utopia (if we take the first three books in their order of composition), or of a more structural and perhaps more complex engagement with Utopia (if we consider them as they appear in the finished work). It has been suggested that by making Utopia Pantagruel's home, in his initial (1532) work, Rabelais was signalling his affinity with Thomas More: more particularly, the superior popularity of Pantagruel - the proximity of its contents to its original and to jest-book material, and its comparative literary simplicity, but above all its sounding of egalitarian themes - has been said to comport with Utopia?, attack on courtly values and sympathy with the poor.23 These seem sensible observations; at the same time, it would be a mistake to take Rabelais's making Pantagruel king of Utopia as a simple act of solidarity. For of course it is a kind of Carnivalesque debunking also, in which Utopia's communist high seriousness is eliminated from its definition. If Utopia is taken in or consumed in Pantagruel, it is digested in Gargantua (1534). This is the place to observe that the Abbey of Theleme is only the most prominent and explicit Utopian episode in Book I. The questions raised by the prophecy found at Theleme's foundation, in the last chapter of this episode, are typical: is the true evangelical community Utopia? or is a better model to be found in a good game of tennis?'24 These questions reflect back, through Theleme itself, on previous moments, especially on the enclave of Chapters 23 and 24 (where a small humanist community is limned in the process of telling how Gargantua was finally successfully educated), and on the tripe festival, above all Chapter 5, 'Les propos des bien yvres,' where the narrative assumes the form of a recording apparatus for that entity which emerges when people drink and eat and dance festively together. Theleme can be seen retroactively to stand as the culmination, and perhaps the imperfect combination, of such (anti-)Utopian moments. The overt thematization of Utopia partly explains why Utopia no longer figures as the fantasy home of Rabelais's good giants, but is silently replaced, in the episode of Pichrochole's war, by France, or rather by Rabelais's home country, evoked at times, as has often been noted, with remarkable particularity, in a way seemingly calculated to

106 Carnival and Utopia call forth analogies to the poignant and fantastic realism of the background landscapes in Renaissance paintings. But it is not just that such 'realism' attends naturally upon the increasing seriousness, the thematization, of Utopia. Since in a sense Theleme is the episode that ends the story of the Pichrocholine war, it stands to reason that the story should be read for traces of a diagnosis as to Theleme's necessity; in other words, the war should be read in relation to the abbey in something like the way Book I relates to Book II in Utopia, as exposing the basic problems to which Utopia responds. If read this way, Rabelais's diagnosis, unsurprisingly perhaps, has less to do with the positive decomposition of communities than with the friction between them (or their segments). Pichrochole's absurd exaggeration of absolutist desire may be seen as taking the place of More's omnivorous sheep; and Rabelais's little fable clearly links this desire, and indeed traces its origin, to whatever it is that has got into the bakers of Lerne that makes them feel themselves too good to sell their grapes to the shepherds of Seuilly (Chapter 25).25 It is to the restratification spoken of here, and to such acts of communal wilfulness, that Theleme, in its capacity as factory for true noble group or communal will, can now be seen as a complex and imperfect answer. So much for the digestion of Utopia. What remains is for it to be expelled, and this happens, briefly and rudely, as Rabelais's work turns another corner at the beginning of Book III. We learn that Gargantua solves the problem of how to manage the country of Dipsody, which his son conquered at the end of Book II, in exemplary fashion: by repopulating it with natives of Utopia, which now takes on a somewhat nebulous status as 'the other country' over which Gargantua rules. This is ideal strategy, we are told, not so much because the Utopians are an amazingly fertile people, who thus, for the strictest territorial reasons, on account of their ever-burgeoning mass, are good colonizing material; but rather more because they are miraculously faithful subjects - whose loyalty, what is more, has proven inexplicably contagious, so that they can be counted on to bring true subjecthood to the Dipsodians (261-2). Rabelais's wit burgeons here: what makes the reference to Utopia especially rude is that it works through a literary equivalent of anamorphosis. That is, Rabelais responds to 'real' facets of Utopia, gives it to be seen as if from another 'valid' point of view. Thus his making of the Utopians into colonizing instruments glances at the Utopia's 'incidental' colonizing ventures (suggesting with mock naivety that 'this could have been the reason for imagining Utopia in the first place'); while the chapter as a whole returns Utopia to the Machiavellian problematic

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from which it was Hythlodaeus's professed ambition to opt. And his casting of them as remarkable breeders alludes to the curiously demographic character of Utopians in Hythlodaeus's discourse itself, the sense conveyed that in living more reasonably they also live somehow more immediately and consciously as, or at the level of, a mass. Insofar as anamorphosis is involved in the Utopians' debunking, insofar as the debunking continues a kind of play characteristic of Utopia, one might understand it as somewhat Utopian. But this picture of Utopians as unthinking copulators for the king is above all a Carnivalesque vale, fittingly unceremonious, to the whole topic (genre and theme) of Utopia. There are no further references to Utopia or Utopians in Book III (1546), and none in Book IV (1552); and though the idea of Utopia certainly hovers over the action of these books, it is no longer a main centre of interest in the work. In a sense, then, Rabelais puts Utopia definitively behind him here. Can the effects of this little drama of engagement or incorporation on the whole work be more specifically registered than this — that is than by saying that the idea of Utopia continues to hover, whether over the problem of Panurge's desire in Book III, or over the mechanics of the various island-anatomies of Book IV? I do not want to claim that the encounter with Utopia was necessary for the radical changes, the new departures undertaken in these books. But I would be so positivistic as to hold that Theleme does appear in retrospect, by virtue of formal and thematic links, to have been instrumental in these changes, arid that it thus helps stamp them with Utopian value. I will note two such apparent instrumentalities, one taking the guise of a formal, and the other of a conceptual, parallellism. The formal motif definitely emerges with the Pantegruelion chapters, which close Book III (Chapters 49-52). This motif, and episode, might be characterized as an enigmatic Utopian supplement. One becomes aware of an analogy, as one reads the Pantegruelion chapters, between this episode and that of Theleme. It is a similarly unexpected panegyric, which signifies by virtue of its explicit inconsequence with respect to the more or less unified narrative that has preceded. The analogy in discovering itself highlights the Utopian character of Pantagruelion, and directs the reader's bemused attention both to the episode's relation to the preceding narrative of Panurge's desire (for a wife, and to know her truth in advance), and also to its relation to the other books' endings. The Pantagruelion chapters, by virtue of their Utopian connotation, might be understood to bring to light Theleme's unconscious reliance

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on the natural economy, and to redirect it into 'productivism.' If Theleme elliptically gestured toward productive or peasant nature as the guarantor of the (aristocratic) group will, these chapters are rather more specific in locating the Utopian magical substance in the domain of a naturally determined production. If we consider these chapters as translating Utopia from place to thing, if we see them in the light of the analogy with Theleme as describing a no-thing that is also a good-thing, a symptomatic relationship emerges between Rabelais's work of description, his imitation/parody of Pliny,26 and the original research that goes, or went, into the discovery of the objects of subsistence, whereby merely natural things suddenly revealed their true (social) nature, fell into place as conditions of the human community. Meanwhile the mind, forced to search for some link between Pantagruelion and Panurge's desire/quest comparable to that which is felt between Theleme and the Pichrocholine war in Book I (or between Books I and II in Utopia], finds it in the related themes of knowledge or learning and of magical or wild substance. The latter link works something like an imagistic riddle: how to ensure the truth of one's (the male) desire? How to control the unruly female thing? Panurge should try clothing his wife in Pantagruelion, it is obvious. But the comprehensibility of this image, of woman kept from fire by Pantagruelion, depends on the final episode's simultaneous evacuation and deepening of the theme of learning, its transformation into a question of collective work. So much for the analogy's inward effects; but it moves us outward as well. The reading operation involved here, whereby a later, more or less descriptive or non-narrative episode is read as being generated by, as enigmatic answer to, the main body of the narrative, tends to place its impress upon the other two books, so that Epistemon's time in hell, in Book II, and the episode of the Group Pause or of the Stock Questions, just off the island of Chaneph, in Book IV, take on value as enigmatic Utopian supplements as well. In full context, then, this is to say that Theleme appears to trigger the practice of a certain sort of narrative shape or syntax - what we might call a Utopian narrative semantic, in which the placement of the supplementary Utopian episode calls for a rereading of the main body of the narrative as providing the problem and conditions to which the little Utopia itself answers. This semantic both contrasts with and overdetermines the more strictly metaphoric, and more typically carnivalesque, image of allegory offered in the preface to Gargantua, that of the Silenus box.

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I have said that the other respect in which Theleme communicates Utopian value within the whole work is more conceptual. But I would allow that on closer consideration the links in question here are as formal as they are conceptual; while it is also the case that, unlike the connection with Pantagruelion, these links would seem to dissipate Utopian value fully as much as to produce or highlight it. In Book IV, the travel narrative passes through an unevenly allegorical terrain motivated by constantly varying quotas of fantastic-cognitive and satiric intent. The islands of Book IV differ from Theleme less perhaps by virtue of their status, as a rule, as satiric objects than by being 'one-topos' places: airy people, belly worshipers, pope obsessives, personifications of Carnival and Lent - they are implicitly presented as unfolding from a single concept or seme. It would seem that the islands' status as 'uni-topias' determines a peculiar sort of cognitive interest, trained less on how the workings of these 'societies' match up with the workings of actually existing society (which is what Darko Suvin's formula of 'cognitive estrangement' has mainly in mind) than on the unfolding of the topos, the logical extrapolation of the seme, in itself. So that in a strong sense, Book IV is fantasy first, and satire, when it is satire, second; ethical judgment is introduced and generally at work but it is not primary; whether the places are good or bad is not of their essence, and thus - in this sense - they are purer Utopias than Theleme (or than Hythlodaeus's island society). One sees here an analogy - or is it a homology? between the seme-ism of Rabelais's quest-fantasy and the mechanism, the institutional machine that lies at the heart of the most compelling Utopias, as Jameson has argued in some remarkably illuminating pages; and it would be possible to understand Book IV as continuing the Carnivalesque attack on Utopia after the fact of its subsumption, by more advanced, indirect and deconstructive means. In any case, it is one effect of the single-topos islands that they reflect back on Theleme and make it legible as 'mere fantasy' - not as a version of a good place necessarily, but as the island of 'what you will,' of free will. But Utopia is hardly a main topic of Book IV; Carnival itself is that. So it would seem to make more sense to put things the other way round, and to cast Book IV as enacting not a further episode in the Carnivalization of Utopia, but rather its reverse. This is the moment to observe that what we called the seme-ism of Book IV is precisely a Carnival characteristic, an aspect of the grotesque aesthetic, arid that if it is used in a sense against Utopia it is yet more clearly used to displace and disrupt traditional Carnival motifs. The theme and process that the Theleme epi-

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sode, by dint of its allegorical or 'meta' character, can retrospectively be seen to institute is that of the anatomization of Carnival. As process this is a reflection of, as theme a reflection on, that abstraction which Bakhtin represented to be taking place in Rabelais's time, and cast as the active condition of his compositional method. One sees the anatomization of Carnival most clearly in the Fastilent episode and in the mockepic battle between Pantagruel's people and Carnival's forces. Those scholars who have found in the latter episode proof that Bakhtin got it wrong - 'Look,' they say, 'Rabelais is having his good Pantagruel fight against Carnival, not with it, so he must not like Carnival; and anyway, the episode trivializes Carnival's very idea' - would seem to miss the point that the displacement and trivialization of the ritual are what this episode is about, are the deep object of the satire.28 But the ambivalence generated by Carnival's anatomization culminates, and may best be understood, in the Caster episode, more particularly in the juxtaposition of Carnival and Lenten menus, each equally wild and opulent (690-3). The satiric reference here is evidently to Church-sanctioned, iieo-aristocratic ways of getting round Lent, ways implicitly cast as socially normative (the Belly's stratagems). The first point to make about Rabelais's attitude is that the passage is in keeping with the valorization of the natural economy, the paradoxically naturalist productivism, implicit in Theleme and apparent in the Pantagruelion panegyric. That Lent has been made just as Carnivalesque as Carnival, as far as diet goes, is a remarkable accomplishment in its way, and Rabelais indeed celebrates that accomplishment here. But on the other hand, the Lenten opulence marks an impasse, the point at which Carnival itself has been so displaced as to lose its defining character; and this victory of Lenten appetite, this paradoxical eclipse of substantial categories from within by way of materialist illusion, evidently lies at the source of the grim cynicism that pervades the Caster chapters. The Belly's subjects cannot be truly said to be free; still, they are doing what they will, and so Theleme stands, retrospectively, as a prototype of Caster's island. In its abstraction, as a place of desire, Theleme is now felt to take part in the movement that ends with the demise of substance, and which determines the bitter cynicism of Rabelais's late work. If this last analytical sketch is right - if, even after Utopia has been expelled from the main generic storyline of the Four Books, its idea lingers on to shape the way events are put together and to diagnose basic

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changes in satiric strategy and feeling-tone - then the relation between Utopia and carnival is a centrally structuring issue in all Rabelais's writing. To make a thoroughgoing case for that, however, goes beyond my purpose here. What I hope to have demonstrated is that in the Abbey of Theleme episode at the end of Gargantua, Rabelais returns Utopia to its disavowed origins, subjecting it to specifically carriivalesque animus in doing so; and that, in staging the relation between Utopia and Cokaygne as a missed encounter, he thematizes it, he makes the question of the relation to carnival a Utopian problem.

Chapter III. Utopia and the Commonwealth IILi. Conjuring Revolution in the Dialogue of Counsel

A strain of thought about Utopia, then, a Utopian line, exists in Rabelais's Four Books. Rabelais agitates against Utopia by returning it to Carnival, while at the same time using its form to test carnival-narrative itself, thus backhandedly conceding it a place and force. Now Rabelais's encounter is chiefly with Utopia 'proper,' with the quality of More's peculiar Cokaygne, or in other words with Book II. In the English literary tradition, comparable stagings of the antagonism between Cokaygne and Utopia are not to be found till the later sixteenth century. But the rendering of society in Utopia s first book did not have to wait so long to be critically, if implicitly, addressed. In this chapter I will consider two works of political literature that may be fruitfully understood as rewritings of Book I, hence as agitating against Utopia from its other side, against More's discovery of dialogical history. Thomas Starkey's A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (composed c. 1529-33) and Sir Thomas Smith's A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (composed 1549) are humanist 'what is to be done' pamphlets, books of would-be practical policy recommendation, of urgently hopeful counsel. In this they are very different textual creatures, let there be no mistake, from Utopia, which was not a 'what is to be done,' but a 'what is, and is not to be done,' book. This means that even the more literary aspects, from a modern point of view, of Starkey's and Smith's pamphlets turn out to be non-literary - 'incomplete fictions,' they have been called2 - whereas all the unliterary elements of More's pamphlet are undoubtedly made literary by its form. Yet before Starkey and Smith say what is to be done, they must prepare the ground by offering a description of the present and its problems; each devotes at

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least half of his pages to a canvassing and diagnosis of current contradictions. It is in these parts of the works, particularly the diagnoses and arrangements of problems, that the reader feels a filiation with More's Book I, and it is especially these parts that will be the focus of the next two sections of this chapter. My general argument will be that in the course of disposing problems and fitting policy recommendations to them, largely by virtue of their comprehensiveness, Smith and Starkey engage a thematic of uneven development. Their dialogues thus disclose Utopian moments in which history resumes its dialogical form, as impossible contradiction; which will be to say that against their will these texts begin to become literary in the modern sense. At the same time, though I will work toward this general argument in the next two sections through more or less immanent or formalistic readings, another crucial discursive-situational condition of Utopia will become manifest: namely its dependence on the idea of the commonweal, or on that idea's imperative status, its incipience as a culture. The Dialogue and A Discourse both centrally invoke this term, and have often been read as privileged examples of commonwealth writing, the most consequent attempts extant to elaborate a commonwealth ideology, distinguishing themselves by their secular focus from Latimer's sermons and Crowley's complaints, the other well-known commonwealth kinds/ The guiding assumption here will be that commonwealth 'values' (or 'discourse' or 'language') ought to be understood as expressing and as responding to the crisis of the moral economy in this period:4 the commonwealth idea amounted to an attempt to legislate, and to articulate as an ideology, the social understanding, the communalist values, with which carnival practices were diurnally associated. Precisely as an ideology, 'commonwealthism' might be thought of as aversion of Ciceronian republicanism reflecting England's distinctive heritage of class relations. On the one hand, insofar as it involved an attempt to legislate on behalf of the popular sense of justice, the so-called moral economy of the common people, in the face of dramatic and ongoing socio-economic change, it spoke of the social strength of the yeomanry and smallholders generally.5 On the other hand, insofar as it was an official ideology, typically involving a call to ruling-class discipline and what were in effect centralizing reforms, it testified to the comparative class unity of the English nobility.6 If Utopia, and with it the Utopian genre, come after Carnival in a certain sense, they come in a similar sense before the elaboration (the 'ideologization') of the commonwealth idea. If Utopia enacts an antagonistically belated rationalization of Cokaygne, it offers a

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premature rebuke to what was to be commonwealth culture. This chapter section will briefly discuss the commonwealth idea, arid then show how Book I engages it. The next two sections will offer readings of the dialogues themselves. But first, a word on how, and by whom, the Dialogue and Discourse have been and are read. They will be familiar to, perhaps they will even have been read by, most sixteenth-century literary scholars. But they have been better known and read by historians of the period. They used to be tapped especially for their superior journalistic merit, quoted to exemplify the (or an) informed sixteenth-century percepdon of enclosure, say, or confessional strife. So R.H. Tawney, for example, called on Smith's Discourse to explain aspects of the agrarian problem. More recently, the belated literary turn in history departments has renewed interest in them, now not so much as reflecting but as making history, creatively intervening in discursive situations, or manipuladng or changing the existing political languages. So Smith is seen as employing 'a polyvalent, humanist, and Protestant language of social analysis and policy'8 or as originating political economy. Both these last ways of seeing Smith are plausible and penetrating, and I have been influenced by them, as I have been influenced by at least one new reading of Starkey's politics. One would be foolish not to welcome such readings, not least since they whet the interest of literary critics by making the texts formally legible in a way they were not before. Yet it will be clear that the nature of the interest in these texts in what follows is somewhat different: more nai've in that it is especially to do with the truth-value of what they have to say about social-economic arrangements; and more sophisticated, maybe, in that it is more concerned with narradve rhetoric than with 'political languages' (the figure with which Skinner, Pocock, and the new historians of political thinking designate their object of study).9 1. The Tendency of the Commonweath Imperative

Starkey's and Smith's works are put together often, and one imagines this has to do with an analogy between their situations of intervention, the stories they play a part in, as well as with their discursive similarity. The works were written in response to extraordinary social and political crises, hence in moments of decisive opportunity, when the character of class struggle was being set for the indefinite future. The sweep of analysis and of proposed remedy in each evidently registers both upheaval and opportunity. At the same time each work makes a claim with a per-

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sonal bias, a claim that is also a plea. The claim is that humanist qualifications offer one a privileged perspective on the social (Starkey parades his humanist learning, while Smith wears his more quietly). The plea is for the particular humanist's advancement. It may indeed be that the situation, in which a sharp and genuinely thoroughgoing socio-political crisis confronts a new and perilous literacy, defines the genre of the commonwealth dialogue to an unwonted extent, more than originating situations of formative influence usually do define genres. One sees that a myriad of later avatars might be identified - 'the decline of the humanities and their future,' for example but hesitates to take the step either of lifting the latter into the commonwealth genus, or of lowering the commonwealth works into the kind they do constitute, whatever it should be called ('construct-a-crisis books'?); and the hesitation is not only because there have been so many dishonourable avatars. Much at any rate hinges on the recurrence in the works of the specific term, commonweal (used interchangeably with commonwealth), to appearances extremely general and yet possessed of great period resonance and specificity. Maybe this is only because it was still taken so seriously, or thought to mean something. Both Starkey and Smith take the common weal for granted as a generally accepted social ideal, as a normative term with real content. Both begin from an assumed universal recognition that the contemporary social status quo has deviated in basic respects from the true commonwealth; the shared object of their recommended reforms is to (re)found within England the form of the perfect commonweal. The deviation is understood to be sufficiently far-reaching that the reforms too must be deep and broad, must take the shape of something like a systematic program; in articulating rationales for these programs, the humanists are fashioning political ideologies in the narrow sense of the term, ideologies that are then offered as organic to commonwealth attitudes. The suggestion is that the ideal of the commonwealth was in some ways a shared pretence, or felt imperative, or sense of urgency waiting to be inflected in a particular direction, more than a positive idea. In this context it is worth stressing how broad and diffuse a phenomenon the imperative is. Commonwealth 'literature' is usually associated with the periods in which our two dialogues appeared, and thought of as sponsored by the Cromwellian reform and Somerset's protectorate.10 It tends to be thought of as a rhetoric shared by, or divided between, humanists and Protestants, and expressing county or provincial interests (though much more directed against the growing importance of Lon-

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don than of the court). There are good reasons for these associations. Nonetheless, commonwealth literature is not to be limited to the mid1530s and late 1540s. It has plausibly been dated as far back as the midfifteenth century.11 And what are generally recognized to be commonwealth statutes and measures were promulgated from the early years of Henry VIII's reign throughout the sixteenth century, achieving their most complete and systematic expression in 1563, with the comprehensive labour legislation contained in the Statute of Artificers of that year. Nor was the commonweal written or agitated for only by humanists and Protestants (or, in the 1530s, by those tending to Protestantism). The merchant Clement Armstrong and the lawyer Christopher St German were significant Commonwealth pamphleteers in the 1530s, writing from and about their respective trades; and that certain elements in the Pilgrimage of Grace, for example, mobilized around commonwealth slogans suggests that they were not inherently anti-Catholic.12 All this indicates that commonwealth ideas and values amounted to a shared orientation of some duration, an important aspect of national culture for a considerable time. Put another way, that the ideology is difficult to characterize can be understood as stemming precisely from its nationalcultural status. If the commonweal were invoked as a known value, as it often was, and left to call up associations on its own, then hardly anyone would declare against it. It acquired enemies only when it was translated into programs and ideologies, or in other words, most generally when the government attempted or threatened to specify and enforce commonwealth values in practice. Nonetheless, as in Starkey and Smith, it was tentatively turned into (contentious) programs and ideologies (or into a political ideology). It was in the nature of struggles throughout the period, it seems, that the commonweal had to be formulated. That said, we can attempt to specify further the characteristics of this culture always on the brink of being formulated into ideology. There seems to be consensus about two characteristics, both general enough, but some specification of which should allow us to approximate a description. One is a positive point: all commonwealth writing (explicitly or implicitly) defines the true commonwealth as a social state of affairs in which the common interest is being served, and as against a state of affairs in which private (or selfish) interests reign. The other characteristic feature is comparative in kind, and must be described first of all as a typical emphasis or orientation: commonwealth culture is distinguished by the extent to which it is concerned with social-economic matters and measures.13

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One wants to insist both on the definitive character of the opposition between common and private good (such that if it is not expressly stated or clearly assumed, then it follows that the text one is reading is not a commonwealth text), and also on the habitual question-begging generality of this opposition, or in other words on its comparative indeterminacy, its contextual character. 'Private' (or 'selfish') in particular is often unspecified, and can mean and do different things in different commonwealth texts, and in the several places of the same text: it can mean 'estates,' 'corporations,' 'individuals,' or some combination thereof, and projects various identifications of the 'common' accordingly. Semantic slippage is the rule, and can be taken to testify to the peculiarly composite, mixed and mobile character of the British social substance in this period; it might indeed at times, as in Starkey and Smith, be seen as a practical recognition of such relative disorganization. Consequences as to commonwealth reformers' politics and political self-understanding ought not to be drawn too quickly from the common-private opposition. It is often stressed that this opposition, and the emphasis on the common interest, are traditional. Whether preachers, humanists, or organic social reformers like Armstrong, commonwealth writers virtually always had some conservative, graded model of common happiness, of the social whole, in mind when they made recommendations. Their image of the true commonweal was organically hierarchical, projecting corporations as so many virtual estates, and the kind of justice they agitated for was of a distributive sort appropriate to that image. If the unfixed, sliding reference of 'private weal' registers the decoding of post-feudal relations, that does not keep the commonweal from maintaining its traditional associations; the common weal/ private interest opposition was not typically intended, then, to disorient or to level. Still it is of some significance that the conservative Thomas Elyot, in the Book of the Governor, refused the term 'commonweal' because of what seemed to him its levelling implications.14 Could he have been reacting partly against Hythlodaeus's argument that private property lies at the root of virtually all social evil, and at what he may have perceived as a general humanist willingness to take this central tenet behind Utopian communism all too seriously, too unironically, with intellectual placidity? Recall here, again, that More's book is only called Utopia by convention - that its real title, in Robinson's later translation (1551), was Concerning the True Commonwealth and the Island of Utopia. And note that Busleiden and Bude, perhaps the worldliest among More's praisers,

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both single out More's attack on property for particular approval in their commendatory epistles. Literary communism would likely have seemed especially irresponsible in light of the spontaneous communalism on endemic display in agrarian riots and popular protest generally, which seems often to have made play with the term 'commonweal' and some of the language associated with it; at any rate Elyot lets on that he has heard and read commonwealth being used to mean communism somewhere, indeed that this is the accepted meaning of the term. But if this knowing exaggeration was partly Utopian aftershock in a period of ongoing crisis, it seems likely that Elyot was also simply reacting against the populist implication still carried by the term because a certain notion of distributive justice had not yet been erased from what seemed its etymology. Preaching or writing that the copyholding peasant and family have as much of a right, owing to their effort toward peopling and provisioning the country, to the bread on which they subsist as does the lord to the meat and wine on which he makes his more comfortable repast in accordance with the heavier responsibilities attaching, and the dignity requisite, to the task of good governorship - this can seem dangerously egalitarian in a society suffering from economic and poilitical dislocation, and frequently living under threat of famine. Likewise when measures were urged or legislated, in the name of the common interest, to preserve the small peasant on his holding, for example, or when institutional redress was sought for the complaints of provincial companies against the increasingly privileged London companies, with the aim of restoring some sort of proper balance between towns and city — such measures could not unjustly be read as egalitarian in context, and might constitute innovative, radical steps, whether they took the form of proclamations or (more commonly) statute law, or more especially if they were embedded in a legislative program where none had before existed.15 This is the central paradox of commonwealth ideology: that its graded model of the social whole, its fast grip on an outdated version of distributive justice, though a conservative ideal 'in itself,' was in practical context and in its very formal existence innovative, was radical. It was radical in practical context because the social changes under way were so general and consequential that the attempt to impose or legislate for the conservative ideal, the attempt to re-grade or remodel the social formation, must inevitably take on the character of dramatic adjustment and adaptation. It was radical in its formal existence because said dramatic adaptation was regularly enjoined from a central governor's point

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of view, and called for action by the state. It thus tended to strengthen the monarchy, or King-in-Parliament. This is to say that commonwealth discourses and projects, even the most apparently conservative and banal, were engaged in a massive receding operation,16 in which the very opposition between common and private was necessarily being tested and redefined. And this recoding was largely a matter of what we would call social and economic recommendations: anti-enclosure measures, proposals to replenish towns and restore town crafts, regulations on the price of corn, laws against hoarding and to regulate the carrying trades, poor and vagrancy laws, and so on.17 The social-economic emphasis was by no means exclusive, but evident enough, especially when compared with the more political emphasis of continental political ideologies - when compared with the constitution-making genius of the Italian city-states, for example, and the emphasis there on the sources of political legitimacy; or with the interest, in France, in the relation between older corporate entities and the newly sovereign power of monarchy. Perhaps the most crucial part of the explanation for this British emphasis on the economic is itself political. Not that the social-economic upheaval, and the nascence of capitalism, was not behind it all; but this might have been handled in various ways. The British landed classes had been comparatively unified for some time, and the wars of the mid- to late fifteenth century had taught them the importance of unity anew. Thus absolutist centralization was not so stark: it went along with, or in large part took the form of, the construction of British particularism - with the ceding (or where necessary the forcing) of judicial-political power to (or onto) the countries' 'natural' rulers.18 A political crisis there was, then, but not of a sort to estrange political power. The big happenings, the big questions, appeared, roughly speaking, to be socio-economic - hence commonwealth culture's obsession with the way in which the kingdom produced its bread, and with how much cloth it produced, and how. This is not to say, of course, that Commonwealth thinkers were not concerned with the state or its form. They wound up, I have suggested, proposing a new role for the state; but they did this necessarily as it were, largely as a result of their considerations of wealth - of matters of production, circulation, and distribution. I want to propose something further now about the character of commonwealth economic description and analysis, namely that it tended in the direction of constructing the economic as such, or in other words of piecing together and recognizing a unified economic dynamic abroad

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and at work in the realm. Let it be conceded that your typical commonwealth description of what it was that needed rectifying was very much a mixed bag of empirical observation and conventional complaint, and that there was much difference of opinion in the first place as to what the real problems were and in the second as to whether they were then of a piece. But the proposition ought not to be a controversial one that two of the problems most complained of can be, and were frequently, yoked in a phrase: 'the decay of towns and of tillage.' Whether these two developments were coming to be seen as interlocking aspects of a single transformation - that, I suppose, is a legitimate subject for disagreement. You do not find it argued, true, in the equivalent contemporary terms, that the move to sheepfarming, and to the more economic use of manorial holdings in general, conditioned, and was itself reinforced by, the growth of the broadcloth trade, and the correlative growth of London itself, and of the London market; or that the 'economic' pressure on the land and the growth of London, themselves co-determinant, both contributed to the quickened tempo of the ongoing struggles within provincial towns' industries and crafts, hastening the subordination of artisanal to mercantile elements, the emergence of livery companies dominated by merchants. But the decline both of tillage and of towns was explicitly associated with the growth of the woollen industry and of London - tillage because sheepfarming was part of the woollen industry (dominated by London), and because depopulation was often seen as providing the city's growing numbers; towns because of the contrast between their decay and London's (relative) prosperity. It is tempting to say simply that specific causal connections between the enclosure movement, the growth of London, and the decay of provincial towns were too obvious not to be drawn. Many such connections certainly became commonplaces: Smith's argument in A Discourse, for example, that the import of foreign goods, chiefly in exchange for wool, undermined local production, was something of a refrain. What Arthur Ferguson called the 'search for [the] cause' of agrarian and urban maladies can begin to be read, then, as a search for 'reinforcement effects,' for multiple and mutual determination. The recognition and feel for such quasi-systemic effects in social reality, however, are perhaps best witnessed not in the description of the problems themselves, but in the proposals for their solution, where the mutual reinforcement of various measures is often anticipated. It seems to be a sort of discursive or generic rule that such proposals are more or less convincing, more or

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less rhetorically effective, to the degree to which they casually incorporate such anticipated reinforcement, which then tends to project by implication a comparably structured kind of reinforcement, a dialectic of decay, as already obtaining among the grievances of town and countryside. Thus the vision, informing the best commonwealth writing, of a replanted, rebuilt, and/or reurbanized nation, in which the New Poverty and Vagrancy will have been positively reduced, instead of being 'managed' and badgered into docility, may be seen to premise itself upon, to evoke in defining itself against, a newly centred or 'national' scheme of the social order, a loose image of a spatial dynamic in which both countryside and provincial towns depopulate in the general direction of, and as if under the gravitational pull of, London. Once the object of reform is constituted in terms of this emergent, unifying model of change, what were before grasped as so many separate offences against or deviations from the proper order of things, what were prone to be felt and denounced as private transgressions against some norm or norms inherent in the very idea of community, assume an appearance which, if in some ways less heinous and dangerous, yet requires reforming consideration and intervention of a new order. The spectre of a new 'distributive' Utopia roused by commonwealth writings must have aggravated, it is true, the spontaneous sense of justice, of the common family's native right to subsistence at a just price, on display, for example, in bread riots, and associated with the moral economy of popular morality, whose persistence into the eighteenth century in plebeian culture E.P. Thompson has provocatively documented. Commonwealth writing's mere 'outlining' of the new dynamic, it could be argued, its very imperfection or insecurity, made paradoxically for the intensification of the desire, associated with the moral economy, to find a single scapegoat for the threat to subsistence - typically some version of a middleman who exploits his position and function to job, not just the people, but the nation (thus Starkey casts a good deal of opprobrium on unproductive monks and friars in their multiplicity, and Smith has it in for haberdashers, the purveyors of frivolous, unnecessary merchandise). But while aggravating traditional senses of (in)justice and modes of recourse, commonwealth writing at the same time tended to resituate - and in resituating, to alter - the list of grievances and indeed the moral economy itself; the grievances took on a national character, and the problem of preserving the moral economy's equilibrium was becoming, at any rate in tendency, more of a political-economic problem, one whose solution was to be legislated from the centre.

122 Utopia and the Commonwealth 2. Book I's Critique of Commonwealthism

Before turning to the efforts of Starkey and Smith to give concrete form to the commonwealth imperative, let us consider how More's work figures in relation to this tradition of discourse. You could make the case that Utopia is the first and most incisive of the commonwealth dialogues, for it certainly addresses commonwealth issues frontally. There can be no doubting that Hythlodaeus's Utopians have arranged their social affairs so that the common interest rules over private interests; by eliminating many if not most categories of the private, they of course have set matters up so that the common interest cannot not be served. And, however important matters of moral philosophy and religion are in Utopia, there is no denying the island's socio-economic bent, no doubt that the reorganization of the labour process and labour relations, if itself partly programmed by the Utopian moral philosophy of pleasure, nonetheless 'comes first,' in the sense that it conditions that philosophy's realization in everyday life, and is basic to all the island's remarkable achievements. More specifically, and even granted its anamorphic character in detail, it can now be seen that Utopian communism decisively solves the two problems which I have suggested are most basic in commonwealth writing. While more or less expressly preserving the capital city's superiority and centrality as a port, Hythlodaeus's island does not suffer from depopulation toward the centre. If Utopian arrangements were put in practice in Britain, the kingdom would be replanted, resettled, and rebuilt with a vengeance. The virtues of Hythlodaeus's island would have been all too apparent from a commonwealth point of view, just as apparent as its impracticality, its being utterly out of reach in its integrity. So if Utopia can be seen as the wish-fulfilment of a class of many factions, the smallholding class, it might also be read as an ideal projected by a peculiarly diffuse national ideology, as offering a compelling, hallucinatory solution to the problems entrenched in the culture of the commonweal. Neither of our commonwealth dialogues, let us stress, wants anything of the hallucination. So sober is their refusal of Book II that they need not even say whether Utopian arrangements are impractical in themselves or for England. Their return of the commonwealth ideal to English reality is implicit in the setting and circumstances of their dialogues. Starkey's choice of Pole's ancient estate of Bysham, where 'the image and memory of [Pole's] old ancestors of great nobility'19 might move him to a sense of the deep responsibility commingled with his blood, smacks of aristocratism, while Smith's comparative practicality

Conjuring Revolution in the Dialogue of Counsel 123 and popularity are connoted by his recruitment of a quasi-Chaucerian array of characters from representative professions for his dialogue, and its location in a tavern in some provincial town. But if both Star key and Smith cast the communism of Book II as irresponsible, if Utopia's fundamental or integral impracticality turned it, from their point of view and at last, into a scrap-heap of reforming ideas from which the serious policymaker was at liberty to draw and adapt as his needs should dictate, still one imagines that its rationality exerted a kind of pressure on them, and served as a standard against which they had to measure their own efforts, when it came time to propose remedies to the commonwealth's problems. One imagines this because Starkey and Smith by no means reject or refuse Book I, the book which paves the way to Utopia, to which Hythlodaeus's island stands in some sense as the only consequent answer. On the contrary, Starkey and Smith can be seen as continuing in their own places and times the project implicitly begun but, from their points of view, too quickly derailed, in the dialogue of counsel. They aim to take up again the critique of society, the canvassing of problems and points of view, which Hythlodaeus enters upon in his argument with More and Peter Giles, though carrying it only so far as was necessary to expose the impracticality and impossibility of the very idea of counsel. After having 'completed' the critique, rehearsed the gamut of problems, they will then be in a position to prove their practicality, to offer adequate counsel in the form of a program of reform. If we define the commonwealth dialogue this way, as a humanist correction of More's dialogue of counsel, we are given a view of a set of basic questions haunting the form as such, even if Starkey and Smith are not keen on expressly raising them. The questions concern first of all the reception of the commonwealth program, or, to put it another way, the political position of the humanist counsellor. They are raised in Book I, for example, by the fact that Hythlodaeus, in spite of himself or inadvertently, does indeed fulfil the role of a good commonwealth counsellor at Cardinal Morton's table. This is a suggestive fact, one which, if considered in context, has much to say about the practice of the commonwealth imperative. It will be remembered that Hythlodaeus portrays himself as the central speaker at Morton's gathering, and that Morton is an attentive listener, despite all the interference from the members of his motley guests: the lawyer who touches off Hythlodaeus's ire, and the episode, with his panegyric to English justice; the odd would-be fool, or semijester as I would call him, who suggests that the poor might profitably be

124 Utopia and the Commonwealth transformed into lay clerics; and the friar who zealously defends his order against the charge of vagrancy. Toward the end of his denunciation of English justice, Hythlodaeus turns from analysis to recommendation. He does this in an impulsive and peremptory way at first, breaking into a litany of the social vices allied to thieving, and listing what we might call spontaneous commonwealth remedies, 'reactive' measures that were almost certainly already traditional. It is not quite clear at whom these imperative clauses are aimed, but they evidently manifest an inner vehemence: To make this miserable poverty and scarcity worse, they exist side by side with wanton luxury. ... Look at the cook-shops, the brothels, the bawdyhouses and those other places just as bad, the wine-bars and ale-houses. Look at all the crooked games of chance like dice, cards, backgammon, tennis, bowling and quoits, in which money slips away so fast. Don't all these pastimes lead their devotees straight to robbery? Banish these blights, make those who have ruined farmhouses and villages restore them or hand them over to someone who will restore and rebuild. Restrict the right of the rich to buy up anything and everything, and then to exercise a kind of monopoly. Let fewer people be brought up in idleness. Let agriculture be restored, and the wool-manufacture revived as an honest trade, so there will be useful work for the idle throng, whether those whom poverty has already made thieves or those who are only vagabonds or idle servants now, but are bound to become thieves in the future. Certainly, unless you cure these evils it is futile to boast of your justice in punishing theft. Your policy may look superficially like justice, but in realtiy it is neither just nor expedient. (64—7)

Morton does not respond directly to this peroration, instead redirecting Hythlodaeus' attention to the problem at hand, which concerns the appropriate punishment for theft. Hythlodaeus, after suggesting that many more appropriate punishments than hanging could be devised, then, in an extended passage, tells of the best method he knows. This is the method practised by the Polylerites, a society whose lack of fame, Hythlodaeus explains, is owing to the seclusion made possible by a natural fortification of mountains, the military protection of the Persian king, and their own inclination to live quietly and in peace (which latter is so pronounced as to justify their paying for Persia's protection). They handle the problem of theft (and one supposes, of several other sorts of crime) by making those convicted the slaves of the state.

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The advantages attaching to this scheme are several in practice. First, and of strictest importance, the punishment is just: not so harsh as hanging, and mitigated by the absence of manacles, but harsh enough, since the slaves work long hours (they live only to work), and appropriate to the crime, since the slaves, having tried to get something for nothing when free, are now made to work for their basic subsistence, thus to understand the value of labour. Second, when you compare this method with the English one of hanging criminals, the labour that the slaves are forced to provide, whether to state projects or private contractors, is so much gravy. Note that the power of this particular appeal resonates peculiarly, even though Hythlodaeus's primary reason for recommending the Polylerite method must be simply on the score of justice. Third, state slavery is as effective an admonition or deterrent as hanging; the case can indeed be made, and it is implied, that Polylerite slavery is a more effective deterrent, since the contemporary suffering, at least, of the hanged criminal must be a somewhat speculative quantity, even if his body is left to moulder, whereas the durable travail of the slave, while less horrific, nonetheless counts in the public gaze as an empirical fact, especially since slaves are encasted, constituted as a visible class. And fourth, it is arguable that slavery constitutes less of a threat to public safety, to Order, than the English system of mass hangings. Or at least it presents a negligible threat. Polylerite thieves are deprived of family ties as well as of property, and while being marked out from the rest of Polylerite society as a discrete class, are situated (both topographically and legally) so as to be without means of organizing or bonding together as such. This is an impressive bit of utopianizing, of course — striking both for its explicit humanism (unmanacled Polylerite slavery can be seen to emerge from Roman manacling of criminals, and this demonstrates the value of humanist knowledge freely managed) and its express and copious pragmatism (it answers very clearly both to a moral or judicial problem and a socio-economic one). Marin has read the passage as a sort of dress rehearsal for Utopia proper, which offers a quasi-microscopic vantage on the Utopian process itself, or more properly on the Utopian 'break' from reality, and from the determinate issue to which its dictates tend to restrict attention (in this case, the question of justice for thieving felons).20 His argument that Polylerite enslavement of criminals does not just solve the problem of justice, but ought rather to be read as a response to the larger, manifestly social, problem, of what we might call the New Poverty, is compelling: in effect what is happening is that a

126 Utopia and the Commonwealth new kind or new imagistic concept of class (the atomized class of capitalism, of which the proletariat is exemplary) is invented as a homeopathic anodyne to the pulverizing spectacle of poverty, become so general and disturbingly mobile a phenomenon that it might better be called an atomizing force. The passage, then, offers corroboration of the view that the ulterior aim of Book I, and the dialogue of counsel, is to situate the origins, the conditions of possibility, of the Utopian break. But if this is so, then the passage also includes a moment of reflection on the possible effects of Utopia, the manner of its reception within the constrained world it leaves behind, for the response to Hythlodaeus's mini-utopia is diverse and progressive, even if it is not entirely to his satisfaction. First, the lawyer whose celebration of English justice prompted Hythlodaeus's intervention replies that the Polylerite measure 'could never be practiced in England without putting the commonwealth in serious peril. And so saying, he shook his head, made a wry face, and fell silent. And all the company signified their agreement in his opinion' (71-2). Then Cardinal Morton remarks that its practicability and peril are hard to judge, such punishment never having been tried before in England; but proposes that it might safely be tried out, on only a few criminals at first, at the king's discretion - adding that vagrants might also be included in this experiment, current methods of punishing them having proved no more effective at preventing their crime than hanging has in eliminating robbery. All the company then praises Hythlodaeus's plan, extolling as a particularly brilliant touch the Cardinal's idea of tacking on vagrants. The semi-jester next offers that the poor still need to be cared for, and jokingly suggests their assimilation into the Church as lay clerics and nuns; this leads to the friar's inept attempt to join in the clowning, and to the altercation which brings Hythlodaeus's time at Morton's table to its - pointedly inconsequential - end. Now one point that might be read into this episode, and more particularly into Morton's response - a moralizing, conservative point, but nonetheless an available one - is that it provides Morus's and Giles's position on counsel with supporting evidence. For even if the episode trails off into silly rivalry, demonstrating that the discussion cannot be maintained at a serious level, still an exchange has taken place between Hythlodaeus and Morton, and the whole company, hidebound in its foolishness as it may be, has been invested with a new idea. This idea might well travel to other judicious aristocrats' tables, and Morton himself would seem certain to try it out on Henry. Hythlodaeus, in other words, might be regarded as having unwittingly told a counsellor's

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success story. He has not been playing the game exactly as Morus advocates at the end of Book I, he has not really been behaving decorously; still he has won Morton's tacit agreement as to the injustice of the law against theft. Furthermore, he would seem to have infected Morton and company with his outlandish point of view at least to this extent - that by the end of the episode, they are playing at utopianizing. That neither Morus nor Giles seizes the opportunity of moralizing on this 'success' perhaps has less to do with Raphael's presenting it as a failure than with the fact that he has stuck to his principles in the scene. He captures the Cardinal's attention by questioning the justice of English law, but wins a definite (if qualified) positive response only with the Polylerite example, or in other words in what approximates to his Utopian capacity. Notably enough, when the indignant humanist intones some more or less spontaneous (hence seemingly more pragmatic) commonwealth solutions, the Cardinal brings him back to the specific problem of suggesting a better law for theft. Since, on hearing Raphael's example of a good law, the thoughtful Cardinal then suggests broadening the law's range of application to include vagrants as well as thieves a move which has the effect of throwing emphasis back on the law's specifically social rationality - it would seem that he ignores the commonwealth solutions as much because he has heard this sort of thing before, and is already, by 1516, tired of them, already aware that they will not work, than because they are inappropriately general or policy-oriented. But if the measures associated with the commonwealth do not secure effects, we ought not to exaggerate the success of the Polylerite example, which is a mini- or single-issue Utopia to begin with. It is true of course that the company's exercise in the Utopian mode debases the genre (and this even before its invention, a few pages on). It is also noticeable that Morton, while tentatively accepting the Polylerite example as a worthy one, modifies it in a pragmatic direction, devising simple means by which it might be made a controlled experiment. Again, Hythlodaeus's fancy idea might have received less thoughtful and less gracious entertainment from a less gifted aristocrat - though it would seem that the Cardinal is an exemplary aristocratic not just in the sense of being a particularly good one but in the sense of being in some sense typical (the traces of More's undoubted social conservatism are surely unmistakable in his representation), so that we are not to think of Hythlodaeus in this scene as merely being lucky in his choice of aristocrats, but rather as encountering English political culture at its most pristine. In any case, even if we regard Morton as exceptional, these qualifica-

128 Utopia and the Commonwealth tions do not so much detract from Hythlodaeus's 'success' as they point to the fact that any policy recommendation, whether Utopian or 'responsible' (pragmatic and tactful), will necessarily be mediated and altered, most likely dramatically, both in light of its audience's capacities and by considerations of feasibility. The 'success' of Hythlodaeus's mini-utopia thus implicitly, but rather immediately, raises questions of a rhetorical sort, questions which if they are pursued turn, as is the way with rhetorical questions, into situational (or in other words social) ones; and these questions should have been pointed for those later writers who undertook to rewrite the dialogue of counsel. Rhetorically considered, the success of the Polylerite example/ model makes one wonder why - especially since it is bound to be adapted anyway - political counsel should not take an expressly Utopian form. Why, for example, do the practical remedies that commonwealth writers typically present themselves as offering have a greater claim to efficacity than do the Utopian schemes which they repudiate as being overly ambitious or intellectualizing? Somewhat more narrowly, might one not make a case, against Morus's later lecture, couched in terms of rhetorical decorum, on the virtue of fitting in at court, that this episode shows a certain rhetorical utility to adhere to the Utopian's impatiently intellectual attitude, and thus to the Utopia's anti-traditionalist outlandishness? But then, is not a diplomatic, rhetorically oriented Utopian somewhat of a contradiction in terms? Would not a rhetoric based on the Utopia's interruption of reality, the Utopian's especially indignant passion, be an extremely paradoxical one, something more or other than a rhetoric? If a concrete example of such a rhetoric exists, it must be figured in the person of Cardinal Morton, who, while immersed in matters of rhetoric, in fact serving as a constant arbiter in matters of style (note his criticism of the friar's zeal, for example, and that all the company waits on him to see whether a joke is allowable or not), is yet clearly above it. He takes an interest in the Polylerite form of imprisonment, not because of Hythlodaeus's style, but because he is talking substance, because such enslavement would seem tailored to the social situation Raphael has sketched, to the massive presence of the New Poverty. Insofar as Morton is an exceptional aristocrat (one capable of seeing through to the substance of issues), his response makes it clear why there should be a need for a diplomatic utopianism, and thus why the question whether it is possible is significant. But it does this by disregarding rhetoric, in a sense leaving it behind.

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The questions about the rhetorical efficacity of Utopia may thus be seen to arise in - and in their strictly rhetorical form, to mask - a particular kind of social situation, one in which the scope of social solutions is being tentatively redefined in response to the problems they are meant to redress, and in which the very categories of practical and impractical are perforce called into question. Especially if we take him as the typically exemplary aristocrat, Morton's cautious approval of the Polylerite custom dramatizes what we might call an objectively Utopian situation, the moment of risk or danger in which, the older and accepted solutions having proved to correspond to problems that do not exist any more, or to be nowhere in relation to the problems in the current configuration, it is necessary to acknowledge that a radically new kind of solution may be in order, that the only truly traditional response may well be an un- or anti-traditional one. But if this, and not some conservative moral, is the message of Raphael's 'success' when it is gone into - if a more or less Utopian break with traditional reality is called for, and Hythlodaeus's undiplomatic impatience is objectively determined in the sense that it answers to the new logic of the English situation - then one may wonder whether Morus's failure to go into it, his apparent blindness to Hythlodaeus's effectiveness, is not to be figured into the picture of English political culture provided us at Cardinal Morton's table. His extreme 'pragmatism,' his keen sense and ready acceptance of the counsellor's operational limitations, might be seen as equally determined by the general situation, as a diametrically opposite response to Hythlodaeus's which nonetheless marks a break with tradition — but a break in the direction of rhetorical self-consciousness, which might be diagnosed simply as a flight from the New Poverty if it were not so clearly compatible with neo-aristocratic 'solutions' involving the refinement and retrenchment of the ruling class through education. This last association (of Morus's 'diplomatic' humanism with a neoaristocratic position) must of course remain tentative, for it is at most barely implicit in the text. If it were spelled out in so many words, if Morus were not just to tell Hythlodaeus that he had to abide by or at least start from conventions of discourse when practising counsel but that his responsibility as counsellor consisted mainly in the elevation of these conventions, the refinement of noble culture, this agenda would not likely seem adequate or indeed congruent to the situation as described in Hythlodaeus's dialogue. It is safe to say this, because such questions are implicitly posed as to whether even the 'substantive' solu-

130 Utopia and the Commonwealth tion to theft provided by the Polylerite example would be commensurate to English conditions. Raphael's mini-utopia may be finding its way, but it clearly, if indirectly, raises serious questions of congruency and control as it does so. It should be stressed that the moment of the Cardinal's tentative and modified approval of Hythlodaeus's plan is definitely registered as a moment of risk and danger. Hythlodaeus only offers this example, it will be remembered, as a superior sort of punishment to hanging. Though his critique of justice had made it clear that social measures are called for, the example has not been submitted in that capacity. If one wanted to be charitable to Morus, one could hold that this palpable incommensurability between the problems Raphael has exposed and the solutions Raphael has been allowed to propose is what keeps Morus from arguing from Hythlodaeus's 'success' at Morton's table: for if he were to do that, Hythlodaeus would be able to point out that the venerable Morton had really only heard a small part of what he needed to hear. As things stand, the limitation imposed on Hythlodaeus's expressed aim is indirectly indicated by the colloquy's movement by assocation through the burgeoning 'non-industrious' ranks, the variegated category of the idle. This series begins with the Cardinal's addition of vagrants to Hythlodaeus's proposal, a suggestion which keeps the discussion within the penal domain even if it might be thought more utilitarian than equitable: is it just for vagrants to be enslaved for life if they have not been caught stealing? The semi-jester continues and completes the series by taking up where the Cardinal left off. His proposal that the poor should be provided for by making them lay members of monasteries is as facetious, of course, as his assertion that the social problem presented by begging friars has been coincidentally resolved by the Cardinal's extension of the enslavement program to vagrants. But this is deep play. I believe Hythlodaeus rather underestimates this man's capacities as a fool. By passing from vagrancy to poverty in adding to the Cardinal's addition, by crossing the thin line between criminality and innocence (for poverty in itself was not technically a crime), the semijester surely glances at the harshness of the Cardinal's measure -just as he makes a gibe at the Church's expense in the incidental suggestion that enrolment in a monastery is, penally speaking, the virtual equivalent of enslavement. The depth of the wit here, I think, adds to the force of the series, or increases one's sense of the logic that runs through it. Not only, then, does this sequence underscore the limitedness of Raphael's official aim in offering the Polylerite example; it also, more

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urgently, indicates the de facto generality of his measure's scope, its potential as a piece of social engineering, and indeed its implicit design on all of English social relations. The additions to Hythlodaeus's plan, the plan's movement or germination (for this is how it strikes one), call its adequacy as a social measure into question in two different ways. On the one hand, they call attention to the measure's partiality to thieves, and to the limits of its effecdveness as a social measure on that account. The plan might be more effective: there is no reason, from the social point of view, that it should not be extended to other 'nonproductive,' 'noncontributing' members of the commonwealth. And if it were, then it might be adequate to the problem of idleness. But on the other hand, its germinating effects suggest that there is something inherently expansive about the plan itself, that its secret generality will realize itself. The question that unconsciously presses on us here is whether the measure might not in fact be too adequate, in a sense, as a social measure, whether it might not be tailored so effectively to the new problem in fact calling for reform (the New Poverty) that it threatens the status quo which has come to control that problem by denying it. By the end of the episode, then, an additional ambiguity has been conferred on the lawyer's noncommittal response to Hythlodaeus's scheme: 'the lawyer replied that such a system could never be practised in England without putting the commonwealth in serious peril. And so saying, he shook his head, made a wry face, and fell silent' (71-2). Initially one is inclined to read the lawgiver's wry face as phony wisdom in the ways of the world - the sort of knowing, anti-Utopian traditionalism that masks ignorant self-interest. One thing disturbs this reading even before Cardinal and jester add to Hythlodaeus's measure. The Polylerites are described as extremely peace-loving people, almost ignobly so. They pay tribute to the Persians so that they will not have to worry about arming for their own defence. It would seem that this native docility implicitly helps to explain how penal enslavement can work for them; collectively subject to another state as they are, individual Polylerites have been prepared to bear slavery to a second state — their own — relatively 'bravely.' Such docility contrasts, however, with the self-image of the English at this date. And this contrast, though the lawyer does not articulate it, is presumably part of the reason for his scepticism. He does possibly have some reason, in any case, other than hidebound professional interest and ignorance. The extension of the plan pretty clearly provides him with yet more reason, and perhaps even motivates his silence. For who would want to

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talk about it? Not only would the penal slaves be congenitally militant, freeborn types, if the plan were put in effect in England. But they would be so many as well. Who knows to what such a measure might lead? The question of adequacy raised here then, in this second sense, does not have to do with whether Hythlodaeus's penal reform is really congruent with his (penal and social) aims, whether the plan is sufficiently radical to solve the actual problems. Rather the question has to do with whether the plan's de facto generality, its logical momentum as an inherently Utopian measure, is not incongruent with its supposedly limited (penal) aims; it is whether the Utopian potential of the plan, in the determinate context of England, might not take over, overriding its specific, limited aims, and result in insurrection. The success of Raphael's single-issue Utopia must go unmentioned, perhaps, not mainly because it is so small or limited, but rather because, assembling in its wake the elements of a narrative of revolution, it provokes an unacceptably dangerous fantasy a fantasy whose unruly end (and only whose end) returns, elaborately overdetermined and edited of course, in the dominant Utopian social arrangements of Book II. For though the free Polylerite slaves might seem at first glance to find their Utopian counterparts in the slave caste, their deeper affinity is really with the militantly peaceful Utopian citizen body itself, which in depriving itself, just as the Polylerite slaves have been deprived, of the conditions that make social vice inevitable, has similarly enslaved itself into virtue. This is where the mini-utopia, the radically traditional commonwealth proposal, can be seen in retrospect, and contradictorily enough, to tend. I would pause to underscore here that it is the very movement of the dialogue in this little episode which both subtly indicates and masks the incongruity of this quasi-Utopian exemplum, its patent inadequacy and revolutionary potential, in and to its situation. This is dialogical history, as I am using the term here, at its strongest and most exemplary, whose ambition is to incorporate contradiction and impasse into its very formal substance - to let the contradiction which constitutes the truth of the moment speak in the associations linking the series of interventions, thus animating the whole arc of the dialogue with its force and mobility. But even if the incongruity and unevenness of Raphael's proposal were not implicitly underscored just as it is left behind, even if the reform were not situated within and in relation to English political culture in this series of responses, its incongruity would still be apparent. This is because of the context in which the plan is introduced, above all because of the sweeping power and hyperbolic trenchancy of Raphael's

Conjuring Revolution in the Dialogue of Counsel 133 indictment of English 'justice.' It does not seem an exaggeration to say that what Raphael is really searching for in this indictment is the social logic that lies behind the New Poverty, or what amounts to a new kind of determinacy. The single place in which he comes closest to finding this determinacy, his most powerful representation of it, leaves the reader with a keen sense that poverty is not a state but part of a social process, hence with a vivid feeling for how thin are the lines separating the thief from the vagrant and the vagrant from the poor. Morton and company's responses to Raphael's reform might justifiably also be seen as responses to his image of England as the habitat of ravening sheep. They are not the last to be affected by the image: because the passage is cited so often by modern historians, we perhaps tend to discount it as exceptional. It is exceptional, but the ravening sheep are referred to again and again in More's century - few passages of social analysis can have been so influential: '"Yet this is not the only force driving men to thievery. There is another that, as I see it, applies more specially to you Englishmen." "What is that?" said the Cardinal. "Your sheep," I said, "that commonly are so meek and eat so little; now, as I hear, they have become so greedy and fierce that they devour human beings themselves. They devastate and depopulate fields, houses, and towns. For in whatever parts of the land sheep yield the finest and thus the most expensive wool, there the nobility and gentry, yes, and even a good many abbots - holy men - are not content with the old rents that the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury without doing society any good no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive harm."' (60-3)

Hythlodaeus moves here from the figurative and general (for the suddenly ravenous sheep must initially stand for all the ruling class) in the direction of the literal and particular (i.e., to those members of the ruling classes who hold land where the best sheep can be raised). What makes the figure a particularly memorable one is its initial generality. If the sheep were specified, the figure would not suggest a basic adjustment in class relations, and its impersonality or objectivity might more narrowly serve a moralizing and as it were strictly political purpose that of showing the greed of some ruling-class members for the bestial thing it is. The figure does do this last, of course; it serves the manifest purpose of the rest of the paragraph. But as is, it also, in its impersonal

134 Utopia and the Commonwealth objectivity, raises questions as to why the ruling class should suddenly have turned so rapacious - it estranges the traditional sin of greed - and offers itself as the best representative of the systematic force involved. Standing as it does both for the greed of a few, the personal-political oppression traditionally associated with feudalism, and a more general sort of constraint, the hunger of English sheep thus offers quasi-experiential access to the great logical paradox involved in 'so-called primitive accumulation,' namely that it involves two different kinds of dynamic at once, that it is only after primitive accumulation has merged into (capitalist) accumulation proper that one can see, and say, that it was part of this dynamic all along, and that the access of greed suffered especially by bad landlords and abbots was but a crucial step in capitalism's selfassembly. It is this fractured determinacy conveyed in Hythlodaeus's indictment, I would suggest, that lies behind the paradoxes involved in Hythlodaeus's Utopian penal reform, and motivates the additions to it. It is the social situation he sketches in his exchange with Morton to which we are encouraged to look if we want to understand why Raphael's success as a counsellor is also a failure, why it leads to Utopia. Now Starkey's and Smith's dialogues are expressly anti-utopian texts. Both begin by answering in the affirmative the question whether humanist knowledge can accomplish anything worthwhile through counsel, and go on to sketch reforms which, if far-reaching, are offered as practical. Nonetheless, or rather just for this reason, Hythlodaeus's little exercise as a social reformer poses some searching questions to them. Or more precisely, it exposes the problems (of rhetorical and social-situational adequacy) which the commonwealth dialogue must answer without seeming to do so, or which it must try to prevent, especially in its literary dimension as I will argue, from ever coming up. It thus suggests a way of reading these dialogues - a way of reading them against the grain, so to speak, or against themselves. I will not be claiming in the readings which follow that Starkey's and Smith's dialogues ought to be understood as repressed dialogical histories, exactly, yet less as repressed Utopias. But I would suggest that by engaging in and with dialogic history, these works indirectly conjure with Utopia. This implicit generic contest contributes significantly to the meaning of these works, and can hardly be counted as any more extraneous to the history of Utopia than is More's Book I.

Chapter III. Utopia and the Commonwealth HIM. The Body Politic and Utopia in A Dialogue of Pole and Lupset

Pole and Lupset was probably begun after Henry VIII's desire for a divorce had become the principal contradiction affecting the British state, imbuing the more diurnal and geologic problems of religion, society, and economy with its quality of personal emergency. Not unlikely, Starkey finished as late as 1533.] If so, he would have seen an initial busy stage of the administrative reorganization associated with Thomas Cromwell's reign as chief minister, and would have known that his dialogue might serve as one model of reform (there were others) from which Cromwell could extract his legislative initiatives, his hopeful future Acts of Parliament; and that the idea, strong in the Dialogue, of an active citizen nobility of indefinite extension, might serve as an inflecting metaphor for the whole procedure. Starkey could also by 1533 have foreseen the great land-grab that lay ahead and hence sensed the logic set in play, which was to be so massively and crucially determinant - in the middle run of the spasmodic but resolutely inevitable character of the English Reformation, and in the long run of the tenacious independence and molecular power of the gentry class: his attack on the corruption of monasteries, and his recommendation that some monastic buildings might be used as sites for schools for noble youth, can be read as justifying their expropriation, certainly, but also as warding off the dissemination of church lands.3 But whatever his consciousness of administrative reorganization and Reformation, Starkey's more immediate design when he put quill to paper is clear: his initial audience must have been the dialogue's hero and his patron, Reginald Pole, along with Pole's circle of English humanists at Padua, and by putting his patron to work in his dialogue formulating and solving the mother country's

136 Utopia and the Commonwealth problem, he would have meant both to encourage Pole to return and assume the patriotic duties enjoined on him by his joint status as leading aristocrat and leading humanist, and also to make the case for his own (Starkey's) superior ability to serve if he should return.4 1. Vagueness of a Systematic Sort A first reading of Pole and Lupset will likely leave behind three main impressions. Two of these concern specific features of the text. First, one will be struck by its unusually thoroughgoing and ornate use of the body politic analogy. Second, one will remember Starkey's zeal on behalf of an elective, conciliar monarchy, and the associated desire to reconstruct and upgrade the nobility. The third impression is a less locatable one, and concerns the scope and clarity of the reforms proposed, the final picture of 'reformed England': while the reforms are clear and definite enough taken individually, and comprehensive enough taken together, they yet seem vague in some elusive, but systematic way. A main aim here will be to describe and explain this last impression, of systemic indeterminacy. It is especially because of it, I will argue, that questions of fit or adequacy tend to be raised, and that the reform program takes on a latent Utopian dimension. This will be to propose that the body politic analogy is partly Utopian in practice; for though the vagueness is not reducible to the use of the body analogy, it has much to do with it. And it will be to suggest a symptomal significance for Starkey's conciliarism. Let me stress to begin that the vagueness in question is not mainly to be accounted for as a generic matter - as owing to the inherent ambiguity of constitutions or indeed of any sort of 'written society.' A written constitution must of course always be somewhat general, or vague, in relation to its possible instantiation(s), because it is not possible to specify its operation in a given social-political context. To put it in linguistic terms, the signified of even the most thoroughly elaborated constitution will be to a degree affected - changed and blurred - by (one's knowledge of) its referent. If you abstracted Starkey's dialogue into a set of laws, the result would be a fictive constitution. This would be incomplete and in some areas extremely general; but as constitutions go, it would not be remarkably so. One could argue, indeed, that rewriting the dialogue as a constitution would reduce the systematic ambiguity in question. For the abstraction

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would tend to remove individual reforming propositions from the social and institutional problems they are supposed to remedy, from their 'sources' in reality. It would thereby lessen the tendency and the will on a reader's part to look for an overarching logic of reform, a pattern of revision. It would thus remove just the sort of ambiguity in play in the Dialogue, which stems from the relation of individual reforms to their social-political context, on the one hand, and their coordination, their role in an overall strategy of reform, on the other, and which affects the whole more than it does the part. There is a strong sense in which the more certain one is about the substance of the successive particular measures in the Dialogue, the less certain one is about what the whole system would amount to, and how the reformed commonwealth would differ, in its social relations and power structure, from the status quo. The vagueness is structural, then, an overarching indeterminacy. Hence it is not solely to be explained by the high incidence of compromise solutions in Pole and Lupset. These compromises are usually framed in terms of the contrasting dictates of reason or nature, on the one hand, and custom or tradition, on the other; and when they are elaborated they provide the dialogue form with the obvious justification that it at other times may seem to lack. Thus, to take an especially significant example, Pole introduces a criticism of the system of primogeniture practised by the landed class. It discriminates against younger sons and leads to gross disparities of wealth and living conditions within noble families. He concludes firmly that the practice should be abolished; all meritworthy sons should inherit equally. But after Lupset protests that partible inheritance, while it might answer to the demands of abstract justice, would level the landed classes and soon eliminate the distinction that makes them the governing group, Pole concedes that the custom of primogeniture has its reason, too. That the families who govern must do so on the basis of the unitary ownership of vast tracts of land is not an idea with which he is finally prepared to contend. So a compromise is hit upon, which on its face would seem a happy one for the aristocracy. Large landed property must, to preserve these families' distinction, continue to pass to the eldest son, more systematic care being taken than is practised currently to see that the younger sons have the wherewithal to maintain their dignity. But the ordinary nobility's generations must endow all sons with land equally (105-9). This is but one of many such compromises, though one of the more consequential ones in terms of its presumable ramifications, if it were instituted, on existing power relationships. What I would notice is that,

138 Utopia and the Commonwealth while the compromise reform proposed is a fairly definite one in itself, and while the main intention of the compromise is the 'pragmatic' one of preserving the aristocracy's distinction and power, there is still room for uncertainty as to the measure's ramifications, or more particularly as to the social logic it is finally to be understood as subserving. This is especially because of the logical paradox involved in the compromise. On the one hand, by virtually ensuring the continuing integrity of large landed property, it would fix the higher nobility in its role as 'natural' ruling class; this is to be done, evidently, for reasons of expediency, because there needs to be a clearly defined ruling class. By the same token, in forcing partible inheritance on the lesser nobility, the measure would damage this class faction's political position. Yet on the other hand, it at the same time would establish the lesser nobility as the more 'reasonable' class. Having been deprived of the irrational practice of primogeniture, all its sons would seem to have a fair chance. So will not virtue, at this social level, be more likely to go unthwarted? Thus the compromise leaves behind it basic questions as to how power is finally to be configured within the ruling class, and as to the social relation between gentry and higher nobility - questions, in other words, about the envisaged polity's total shape. 2. Situating the Body Politic I would propose that such moments of compromise are manifestations of a principle which seems finally to infect the very social space projected by Starkey's tract, and whose privileged - and largely determinant - discursive expression is the body politic analogy itself. The figuring of society or polity as human body, the analogy between individual bodysoul and social organization, would of course have been familiar to Starkey from many texts and places. It was one of Aristotle's favourite strategies for thinking political relationships, to take one important example;5 and Cicero, to take another, had a special weakness for images of the riven body politic. The thinking and the rhetoric of these authors had been influential. But the works that tell you of these things are not very useful when they come to Starkey. For Starkey's singlemindedness with the analogy, and more particularly the remarkable thoroughness with which he attempts to translate the social into the body figure's terms, makes of it, if not a new thing, then a more difficult metaphor than it usually was, and at least in many places a strange one. It does not seem too much to say that Starkey takes the analogy utterly

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literally, as if it were a concept, or, better, that he attempts to turn it into a conceptual apparatus in the course of the Dialogue. If it were not for this programmatic attempt, I doubt that the tract's vagueness would impress as a systemic affair, as indeterminacy. The relationship among its main parts, and among the elements of its reform program, would not seem of such pressing consequence. How to explain the defamiliarizing rigour with which the analogy is put to work? It has proven difficult not to invoke 'deep-seated conservatism' or 'medievalism' on Starkey's part, though this has then been understood in different ways. Tillyard, for example, in an advertisement for Pole and Lupset in Burton's edition, remarks that the 'whole scheme, the correspondence between the body politic and man's microcosm, is a medieval commonplace'; and he implies the scheme's happy coexistence with specifically Renaissance features, or rather its easy accommodation of them within its own (medieval) domain, drawing a suggestive analogy with 'Bishop West's chapel in Ely Cathedral, where classical detail is applied to Gothic forms.' Ferguson, too, sees the informing corporal analogy as a medieval, conservative feature, but as one which is more or less residual now, and whose schematic or organizing presence can be felt to obstruct the 'search for cause' characteristic of humanist texts of the early to middle years of the sixteenth century. These assessments of the role of medievalism conflict, and would seem irreconcilable as framed. I would propose, though, that if one attends carefully to the role of the body analogy throughout the work, one can begin to see how both assessments are to a limited extent justified - how, that is, the analogy is at once controlling and obstructing, of the moment and residual. First, however, we need to bring the difference of opinion into sharper focus, and we can do this by considering the high incidence of redundance in the dialogue. From a modern aesthetic point of view, the amount of repetition in Pole and Lupset is a great flaw. One suspects that if Starkey only said things once, the tract would be much more widely read, and there would be a tradition of (literary) interpretation (discussions of its thematics of counsel, its dialogical irony, and so on). A good part of the reason for the redundance lies in the complexity of the body analogy as Pole initially sets it out. Just as the individual's happiness may be evaluated, so Pole tells us, by considering first the state of his body with a view to its health, strength, and beauty in that order - then his means of support, and finally the state of his mind or soul, so may a commonwealth's happiness be judged by attending first to its 'material'

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conditions, then to its wealth, and then to its 'politic order.' To discuss the body politic, its source of maintenance, and its politic order without a good deal of incidental repetition would be difficult, and would require I think a degree of categorical refinement which, if one possessed it, might well render the analogy itself superfluous. But Starkey complicates things further, and seems at points wilfully to introduce unnecessary redundance into his exposition - as when, for example, after having explained, under the rubric of the commonwealth's health, that there is too much luxury production, he then, under the rubric of beauty, proceeds to discuss the condition of the individual members of the social body: not only do we thus learn, a second time, of the dearth of peasants and overabundance of luxury craftspeople, we are also presented with a preliminary exposition of the problems with the political composition and constitution of the nobility, problems which will be exposited again, more fully, when Pole and Lupset come to the rubric of the 'soul' of the commonwealth, that is, of political order. Such wilful redundance, it is worth noting, forces one to reconsider the motives that might be behind 'redundance in general' in the dialogue. And no doubt what seems bad or problematical about the dialogue from a modern, literary-aesthetic point of view is partly to be understood as playing a part in a reprogramming strategy which assumes the pedagogical virtue of repetition in light of the frailty of reason and the perdurable strength of custom. In other words, the high incidence of repetition in Pole and Lupset is intended to invest the 'reason' of its reform program with something like the force of custom. It is intended to serve as a mnemonic technique, and to arm the reader against the return to an ordinary social reality that does not 'spontaneously' project the sort of diagnoses and remedies featured in Pole's counsel. Recognizing this reprogramming, mnemonic function of redundance need not commit one, however, to a position on its relation to the dialogue's historical moment. Tillyard and Ferguson could agree that the redundance is pedagogically intended in part, while differing as to its ultimate appropriateness to the message delivered. One might plausibly contend, on the one hand, that the methodical elaboration of the body analogy witnesses an essentially scholastic desire for argumentative articulation - for completeness and clarity for their own sake, as it were;8 that most of the redundance testifies to an unwillingness to let anything go unsaid, to leave any part of the program unmarked in the form of the dialogue itself; and that it is wrong, though all too easy, to take this

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unwillingness as a desire to say something more and other than is said, or to specify the relation between parts more concretely. Against this, on the other hand, Ferguson's impression that the analogy is both incongruous and analytically inadequate can readily be defended. Whether it expresses a desire for clarity or no, is not the very extension of the analogy unusual (if not unprecedented), and does not the insistent intrusion of the figure as such suggest the arbitrariness or artificiality of the dialogue's program of topics? Does not the redundance resulting from the analogy betoken then a will to impose upon the situation so as at once to prevent its being seen in its own form, and then perhaps to produce, through distance, a sense of a form not there? One can begin to understand how both these readings are possible, and how the body politic analogy itself may be felt to be both of its moment and out of date, adequate and inadequate, natural and unnatural or arbitary, if one considers the context in which it is introduced. This context concerns the relation between natural and positive law: what is of particular interest for us here is the role played by the body politic metaphor in relation to the law of nature. It is a critical axiom in the dialogue, exposited in the first book as stemming from the nature (the 'high dignity') of man himself, that all states have certain functions, hence certain values, in common, even if different states realize these functions and values in different ways. Thus all states possess systems of justice which are intended to promote 'comparable' living, or in other words mutually helpful relations among men and women; in all states temperance is taken to be a virtue and God is reverenced; and so on (30-6). But, for reasons that remain unexplained, it seems to be a property of these basic values, inscribed as the law of nature in the social and institutional arrangements of all states, that they cannot be encoded or instituted in pure form. The frequent figuring of these laws as seeds, which must be cultivated if they are to thrive and put forth fruit, gives the impression that the law of nature is not to be conceived in terms of a finished text or model, but rather as a set of 'originating impulses to good,' and as providing a quasi-instinctual matrix, at once crude and highly general, within whose basic confines all social and cultural development must take place, or whose abstract terms it must progressively embed and specify. It is because of the curiously imperfect perfection of the natural law, in other words, that positive or civil law is necessary, whose naturally ordained function is to bring natural law to a finished state. If there were no differences of time and place, there would perhaps

142 Utopia and the Commonwealth be only one positive law. But there are such differences, and positive law, to do its job of specifying or cultivating natural law responsibly, must take them into account, must adjust its axioms to the particular soils and climates furnished by particular peoples and sorts of custom. Thus positive law exists in several versions: it is irreducibly plural, and thereby more 'particular' than it might seem to the individuals governed by one of its versions. It seems worth noting here that the split between natural and positive law founds a certain general perspective, a quasi-Utopian prospect of remarkable benevolence, from which differences between different polities and cultural traditions - and even the most shocking differences of the worst-rated foreigners (Turks or Jews) - can be understood as 'convenient' (coritextually appropriate) means of cultivating natural law. But the split also marks out some notable ambiguities within the idea of the body politic. It will be useful to draw out three further points about the relation between natural law and positive laws. The first is that the relation makes positive laws artificial in two distinct senses. Each civil law is wholly artificial, on the one hand, in that natural law cannot simply be 'naturally' perfected, but must be 'civilized' - cultivated, particularized, finished - by laws, customs, institutions that are by definition other than it — other than natural, thus artificial. But each civil law is more or kss artificial, on the other hand, in that there are better and worse laws or to put this another way, in that while all sets of positive law must deviate to some extent from nature, some, whether because of the incompetence of their framers or because of the unpropitiousriess of the cultural soil from which they arise, deviate more than others, and are thus more artificial (in the sense of being positively against nature). The second point concerns the peculiar relation set up between the natural law and the received custom upon which positive law must always work. Insofar as custom is prior to positive law, it contains the law of nature. Insofar as custom is thought as crude, as relatively unformed and in need of working, moulding by positive law, it resembles the law of nature in occupying the same position vis-a-vis codes wrought by men. Sets of custom are thus substantially and logically assimilated to the natural law, and can indeed be glancingly identified with that law. So it is easy to confuse, indeed it is impossible not to confuse, the action of any given civil law, when formulated, upon and within a given customary context, with its necessary elaboration of, its inevitable transgression against, natural law. The third point has to do with the fact that the relation between natu-

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ral and positive law is habitually figured in terms of cultivation. Positive laws preserve and bring to fruition those seeds of the natural law that the Creator planted when he brought human societies into being. Though the seeds in the figure are vegetable in kind,9 the production of natural bodies is involved, and that is enough: the body politic metaphor is never far away when the relation between natural and civil law is bruited; it is figuratively, if problematically and insecurely, caught up in its play of general and particular. I want to suggest now that this relation between natural and civil law, set forth in Chapter 1 of the dialogue, is akin in some ways to the relation between the weal of the individual and the perfect commonwealth developed in Chapter 2. Or more precisely, I would suggest that the latter relation aligns itself with the former, so that the two terms of the body politic analogy take on something of the force of an opposition so that, in other words, when Pole in Chapter 2 develops the critical terms of the analogy, one's sense is that this individualizing or 'embodying' of the commonwealth renders it positive in much the same peculiar sense as any version of civil law is positive. Thus the analogy of the individual weal or of the body is situated, in the introductory books in which the dialogical agenda is set out, such that the progress through the agenda, the concretization of the analogy, is defined in advance as an inherently fraught, problematically artificial attempt to mediate and specify natural law, a necessarily imperfect realization of the perfect form of the commonwealth. And if the analogy is so situated, it begins to be easier to understand how its development can impress at the same time as attempting the condign articulation of the reform program-insite and obstructing its true logic from emerging. For given the prominence of the analogy in the dialogue's progress, one cannot but be aware, continually if at times dimly, of the slippage from the natural to the positive (or artificial) which defines the reformed commonwealth's conceptual place. But it is one thing to say that the body analogy is defined paradoxically, as of necessity artificially natural, and that in its application it is more or less consciously conceived as specifying the natural commonwealth convenient to a particular time and place, and thus as involving necessary indefinite slippage, as deviating at least to some extent from, not just nature or natural law, but the time and place, the customary context, itself. It is another thing to show that the analogy's elaboration, by virtue of what I want to call the corporal space that it imposes, can be felt to interfere with or obscure the presentation of that time and place

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in its true form or determinacy. Contending that Starkey has not just applied some classical detail within the frame of the natural law/civil law opposition, but has rather classicized the opposition itself, with the result that it is more straitened, more slippery and troublesome, than its medieval 'original,' would not bring us any nearer to doing this, though if true, as I think it is, it would encourage us to see the incommensurable equation of natural with civil law as the symbolic trace of a struggle between two different kinds of social space or determinacy. What is more to the point here is to note why the notion of the natural law, and with it the analogy of the body, are introduced in the first place. At the beginning of the Dialogue, when Pole is resisting Lupset's attempts to draw him out (into a political life finally, but into political discussion for the moment), his initial reservations as to his own capacities, and as to the relative value of the active as against the contemplative life having been overcome, he sets another sort of objection in Lupset's way: You said right now that this civil life was a politic order and, as it were a conspiracy in honesty and virtue, stablished by common assent. This meseemeth bringeth the whole matter in more doubt than it was yet before, yea, and bringeth all to uncertainty and plain confusion. For the Turks will surely say on their behalf that their life is most natural and politic and that they consent togidder in all virtue and honesty. The Saracen, contrary, upon his behalf, will defend his policy. ... The Jew constantly will affirm his law to be above all other, as received of God's own mouth immediately. ... So that by this mean it appeareth all standeth in the judgment and opinion of man, insomuch that which is the very true politic and civil life, no man surely by your definition can affirm with any certainty. (28-9)

The argument here that the divergence between the world's main political orders might drain political life of meaning, and so might make against the thoughtful man's involvement in politics, would seem relatively novel. The possible borrowing from (and rectification of) Hythlodaeus's cynical concluding reflections on un-utopian Western societies as conspiracies leaves little doubt, I think, as to the provenance of the anxiety that motivates Pole's objection: what threatens to empty the political world of meaning is that specifically humanist sense of cultural relativity which in its most heightened form, as I have suggested, was predicated on the social experience of archaic uneven development, with its attendant relativization of social forms. Lupset's exposition of natural law and of the eternal partial relativity of civil law enters as the

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immediate response to this bad (if muted) vision. When we take this in we realize some part of the reason for the rigour with which the body politic analogy is applied. The corporal space projected by its methodization ought to be grasped, I think, as determinedly excluding the relativized, homogeneous space of More's Book II, which questions at their foundations all the customs and practices entered into it, and as preventing such critical plays of displacement as we saw to raise basic questions of adequacy about the penal reforms proposed in the Polylerite episode. Yet the very rigour and single-mindedness with which this analogy is put to work (and here it should be stressed that what is one of several ways of talking about the polity in Aristotle figures to all appearances as the only way in Starkey) makes one wonder whether it does not negatively register, or testify by adamancy of denial to, the incursion of uniform or relativized Utopian space. 3. The Body Analogy against Itself To show how this is the case, let us consider the body analogy more closely, and note a basic flaw in its apparent rigour. The figure has two distinct aspects, or might indeed be thought of as two analogies in one. On the one hand, there is the more strictly analytical analogy between individual virtue/happiness and that of the commonwealth. This involves the derivation of social categories of analysis which, once produced, can be used independently of reference to the individual or the shape of the body. On the other hand, there is the more imagistic and, so it would seem, indelibly ideological analogy between the individual body and the social collective. Social categories of analysis are derived here also, there is no denying it. But they tend to be linked to a notion (an 'image-notion') of the body itself as defining some sort of natural norm, if they do not indeed rest on an assumption of a substantive connection between the two shapes. I have not remarked on this doubleness before because it does not seem to me to be pronounced in Chapter 2, where the focus is on the derivation of social categories corresponding to health, virtue, and so forth, and thus where the stress tends to be analytical. But once into the books of diagnosis and remedy, it is difficult not to be aware of the analogy's 'doubleness.' This manifests itself most strikingly in two distinct ways. First - though this is a feature one does not become aware of till some way into the dialogue - there is a contrast between the programmatic use of the body analogy in the discussion of the body politic (the

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first half of the analysis), and its incidental use in the sections devoted to politic order (the second half). This vertical distinction between secdons may evidently be explained by the contrast within the body analogy itself: politic order corresponds to the soul or mind, and the soul does not so readily provide an imagery in terms of which to figure the relevant political disorders. Second, there is a contrast, within the sections diagnosing problems of the body politic, between the analytical flow of the discussion, whose aim is to identify a series of linked problems or flaws, and the illustrative underscoring of these problems by recourse to the body analogy, whose aim, apart from that of serving as hooks for the memory, is evidently to impart meaning to the flaws which they would not necessarily possess 'in themselves' (so that it is when we are told that underpopulation, for example, is like a consumption of the body politic that we know to what it really amounts). I would suggest that it is in this initial series of illustrations that the anti-utopian motives of the body analogy, of corporal space, are most plainly on display. Yet at the same time, insofar as the introduction of these illustrations effectively estranges the analogy's analytical from (what is now felt as) its more strictly rhetorical aspect, the series also helps to put in place the relativizing basis for a Utopia. Let us analyse the initial section of critique, in which the basic defects pertinent to the 'health' of the body politic are passed in review. After Lupset's initial summary of England's miserable condition, in which the decay of towns and tillage is stressed, Pole, warning against letting the mess lull one's powers of distinction (74), proceeds to the detailed anatomy of the country's failures. He develops four defects. First, and at least in one sense most fundamentally, he asserts that England has too few people - a somewhat controversial contention, which must make its way against Lupset's observation that, given the enforced idleness (i.e., unemployment) of so many of its people, it might rather seem that the country is overpopulated (75-9). Three empirical criteria are decisive here. One simply involves looking out over the land: Pole notes the great quantity of waste land in England, which could, if it were cultivated, feed mouths. The other criteria are comparative, and introduce what will be constant references. Pole notes that continental countries have far denser populations. And he observes, more tellingly, that England itself once boasted more people; the evidence for this apparently exists in the form of signs of decay rather than in that of written records, and so it is not exactly clear when the more populous period was. Their initial disagreement over the meaning of unemployment per-

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haps brings Pole to establish this as the next defect (79-81). The unemployment of the poor and of vagrants, though they evidently are included, turns out not to be the main issue. It is rather especially the servants of noble households, and their equivalent numbers in the clergy, who are counted as idle and doing no good for the kingdom. And Pole here, in refuting Lupset's suggestion that this extensive service class really represents the splendour of the realm, comes close to equating idleness with an anti-work ethic. The 'yeomanry' is associated with a hedonistic, old-aristocratic view of the good life. That is evidently why they stand for the whole class of unemployed. The critique of idleness then leads logically into, if it does not indeed render partly redundant, an attack on what we might call luxury production, the high number of people who are engaged in trades furnishing the body with vain pleasures, most of which are characterized as newfangled (those who make ornaments for clothing, who procure new meats and drinks, 'curious descanters and devisers of new songs' [82]). The attack here is not only on the vain occupations and vain pleasures in themselves, but is concerned with the imbalance in the division of labour, as between useful and luxury production, to which their proliferation leads (82-3). The fourth defect is even less localized, and less material than the preceding three; Pole hesitates as to whether to include it here or later before 'boldly' declaiming that it is a disease of the body (thus not primarily of politic order). The various occupations and ranks, he says, 'agree riot togidder'; the 'temporally grudgeth against the spiritualty,' and so on (83-4). In modern terms, the level of class resentment is very high. Though we might not glean it from Pole's remarks here, we can gather from the remedies that he later proposes that a particular material phenomenon is at issue under what is expressed first as a cultural or ideological problem (146). Pole would act against this universal envy by equalizing distribution somewhat and by fixing people in their occupations. (He would also, in the sort of casual afterthought that gives the term early modern much of the meaning it has, banish or execute 'seditious persons,' inveterate grudgers.) Social mobility, then, in a context in which income differentials as between the classes are increasing: this is the material specification of English society's final basic defect. Each analytical episode in this series is completed by an analogy to a disease. Underpopulation 'may well, as me seemeth, be compared to a consumption or great sklenderness of man's body. For like as in a consumption, when the body is brought to a great sklenderness there is lack

148 Utopia and the Commonwealth of power and strength to maintain the health of the same, so in a country, city or town, where there is lack of people there wanteth power to maintain the flourishing state of the politic body, and so it falleth into manifest decay, and by little and little worneth away' (78). The other three analogies are drawn out to similar length. Idleness is likened to a dropsy, in which the body is 'sollen with il humors' (the supernumerary servants and friars), and though 'nothing quick to labor,' 'boileth out with all vice' (81). 'Ill-occupation' or luxury production resembles a palsy, in which some body parts 'be ever moving and shaking ... but to no profit nor [true] pleasure.' And social mobility is like a 'pestilence'; for just as the plague, where it hits, destroys many people, so does the discord stemming from mobility destroy 'all good order and civility' (83). Now the immediate ideological effect of such analogical summaries is evident to us, and would have been so to contemporaries, even if they in some sense believed in the objectivity of the correspondences set out. The analogies drive home the gravity of the problems in question, representing them as mortal diseases, and in effect as sins, of the body politic. They convey a lively sense of the interconnectedness of all things social-political, and hence of the political consequences of individual actions and attitudes, and of the importance of cooperation. They justify (they present as natural] a hierarchical social order, though no very specific sort of hierarchy as yet. l But what is more crucial and interesting here is their effect on the apprehension of the described defects. In the first place, the analogies make the series stand out as a unit in a way that it might otherwise not. Consumption / dropsy / palsy / pestilence; underpopulation / unemployment/imbalanced division of labour/class resentment: the analogies make a string, and tend to accord the associated topics the status of a single signified. But for the string to unify the topics, the individual analogies must have punctuated the analysis; and it should be stressed that the analogies confer on the defects a distinctness and definiteness they otherwise would not possess. To take the best example, the treatment of idleness and of luxury production tends to run these phenomena together; both involve an invidious search for pleasure, and Pole's discussion, which verges on turning into a critique of hedonism, is marked by much redundance.12 The analogies break these two topics up, serving in effect to underscore what we would call their economic, as opposed to their ideological, character. In thus at once distinguishing and unifying the topics, however, the

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analogies tend to prevent the precise manner of their connection from being further thought on. At least, they do this so far as further written analysis is concerned, and this is determinative with respect to the form taken by the reform program. In distinguishing the topics, in other words, the analogies also help to impose what might be called the problem orientation of the dialogue. For once underpopulation has become a separate disease, the search for cause has reached a local terminus. Questions of causality, that is, tend to drop away, except in the most general of senses, in the form of a general reinforcement effect (disease produces more disease). Pole and Lupset no longer need to wonder why England's numbers have been depleted since the early fifteenth century, and when they return to propose remedies they can think simply in terms of encouraging propagation rather than in terms of staunching an existing depopulating dynamic. The body analogy works, here and throughout the dialogue, in good part to prevent specific interlocking dynamics from forming, thus to keep such questions of adequacy as we saw in Book I of Utopia from explicitly posing themselves. A basic, if implicit, task of corporal space is thus to hedge in what I have called dialogical history, to determine an environment in which totalizing or Utopian 'reform' is unthinkable. Yet it is not entirely successful at this task. For if, by separating the defects from one another, the analogies tend to prevent them from being thought on in their relation to one another, yet as we have seen, in their mnemonic function, they constitute the defects as a string; and this brings to view general questions as to the mode of unity of the topics, as to the exact nature of the connections obtaining among them. The body analogy thus paradoxically begins to accord the defects the status of, in the loose modern sociological idiom, a level Perhaps this would not be the case if one did not gather that the topics might be more clearly connected in a chain of mutual causation. At any rate, insofar as the analogy is indeed felt to limn an analytical level, it enters into a state of tension with itself, with the dimension that now appears more clearly and strictly rhetorical. Thus, because of its consistency, the analysis of defects stands in a potentially critical relation to the reform program in its very form, as a series of discrete remedies. And so the question is indirectly raised as to whether the body politic rhetoric is not unnaturally artificial. If it would be easy to exaggerate the extent to which diseases of the body politic are grasped as constituting a chain of cause and effect, so might one make too much of the 'quantitative paradoxes' that appear

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in this series, and virtually constitute a theme. It is unclear at first whether England has too few or too many people because there are too few in toto but too many idle or in the wrong occupations; there are too few industrial workers and yet too many, because they occupy the wrong trades; and so on. These paradoxes surely stem partly from the complaint literature (so many lawyers, so little justice; so many clerks, so few learned men), and communicate with the disease analogies insofar as they connote a quasi-humoral imbalance. If read this way, they contribute to a sense of the phenomena as proceeding indistinctly from a common source, or to a picture of heaped problems, related in the most general way. Nonetheless, the quantitative paradoxes solicit more analytical interest here than they do, say, at the end of Skelton's Speak Parrot. The first such paradox, for example, is expressly posed as a puzzle by Lupset, and is then definitively 'solved' by Pole: 'one showeth too few of welloccupied, and the other too many idle' (82). So in Pole and Lupset the paradoxes are involved in an effort to define the mutual relationships among excessive phenomena, if only by encouraging their distinction from one another. And in context the very difficulty of separating the phenomena out, the fact that they can tend to blend into one another, helps to create a sense that they are part of some larger movement moments, indeed, in a complex dynamic. This last effect would not be so strong, were it not for Starkey's reference to a past epoch in which England was more populated, and at least by implication more truly industrious and less racked by class envy. The reference is by no means systematic, and the question as to what has caused the social decline (for that is how it is seen), or as to how it might be explained, is not asked in so many words. Yet when Pole, faced with what appears the contrary evidence of massive unemployment, is forced to argue for underpopulation, and hangs his case largely on the evidence for a more productive and populated past, it is difficult not to ask why the wastes have expanded and population (especially on the land) receded. And though the question is not given a firm answer, what happens, when the problem of idleness is distinguished clearly as a separate problem from 'lack of people,' is that the tendency toward idleness comes to be felt as a partial explanation for the tendency toward underpopulation, and vice versa. Part of the reason, in other words, that there are too few people in general, and too few people well occupied (both these things are a part of underpopulation), is that there are too many in fact or virtually unemployed. If some of the 'unemployed' were resituated fruitfully - and here remember that Starkey's unemployed are 1 ^

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normatively not displaced peasants but supernumerary servants of the nobility and in the church - then the division of labour would have been redressed somewhat, and these people would have children (thus Pole expressly reasons [140-1]), and so with an increase in the birthrate the situation in general would improve. Not, I would stress, that the one disease-dynamic has been collapsed or wholly displaced into the other, or that the historical question about depopulation has been given an answer we might recognize as 'economic,' so that the question now becomes 'whence unemployment?' 'Lack of people' remains a problem in itself, a primary datum; and even while crying out for explanation serves as an explanatory context, in relation to idleness as well as to the other two defects. As far as idleness/unemployment goes, underpopulation helps partly to explain it in two distinguishable ways. First, it is fairly distinctly implied that the idleness of supernumerary servants can be supported because so much cultivable ground is not covered with productive tenants; the servants' extravagant consumption is subtracted from a fund which would be larger if there were more 'direct producers,' but which would have less to spare for them (the servants) since it would have to be divided among more hands. The second partial explanation is more subtle, and not so definitely implied; yet it is at the least made available. It is that the high incidence of servants in England represents a kind of compensation for 'lack of people.' This (partial) explanation suggests itself after Pole, intent on proving that servants are too numerous to an initially sceptical Lupset, once again introduces a comparative perspective: 'It is not to be doubted,' he says, 'but that here in our country of those sorts be over-many, and specially of them which we call serving-men, which live in service to gentlemen, lords and other of the nobility. If you look throughout the world, as I think, you shall not find in any one country proportionable to ours like number of that sort' (80-1). To this last point Lupset, who frequently expresses the more customary outlook of the English ruling classes, objects, as he did not object when England's dearth of population was comparatively established, that Pole construes the matter wrongly. 'In [these servants] standeth the royalty of the realm. If the yeomanry of England were not, in time of war we should be in shrood case; for in them standeth the chief defence of England' (81). Pole gets the better of the exchange when he points out that if the yeomanry (in this imminently archaic sense) is England's defence then England is in a bad way, for they are not militarily well trained. Yet by discrediting the

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pretence he has not necessarily discredited the motive. Lupset's high valuation of the yeomanry, and the link he makes (note the parallel phrasing) between their symbolic function (as representing the superior merit or nobility of the realm) and their defensive role, encourage one to speculate, in context, that the hypertrophy of the service class might itself be defensive - a reaction, on the part of the ruling class, to the vulnerability its comparative dearth of people must have signified, in a period when the basis of military strength in numbers was a commonplace. If we accept that this determination is suggested, then not only is the relation between the two 'defects' one of mutual reinforcement (which itself implies difference), but the reinforcement in question is partly a matter of the intersection between two different terrains of action, the national one on which depopulation occurs and is evidently mainly to be accounted for, and the international one on which the hypertrophy of the service class knows a part of its reason. If this is so, then the aim of the analysis in this 'sociological' section must be understood pardy to be that of defining the peculiarity of the English body politic, which entails fixing its relation to, its overdetermination by, the Continental context. Even if the analysis' focus does not securely include 'uneven development,' it seems clear that the remaining two defects are also implicitly comparative, and may be grasped as bearing the same relationship of mutual interaction with the previous 'defects' as we have seen these to bear on one another. Since the increase in luxury production caters to a desire for 'new fangled things concerning the vain pleasure of the body,' a desire and things often cast as 'foreign' in provenance, the comparison in this case would not be expected to be a straightforward contrast, nor need it be invidious to England; but on inspection Starkey rather carefully avoids castigating vain commodities as foreign: the only unmistakable reference to foreign vice comes when he includes in the ranks of the ill occupied 'all such marchands which carry out things necessary to the use of our people, and bring in again vain trifles and concetis' (82). Thus he would appear to go out of his way to preserve an implicit contrast here also: partly because the foreignness of the new luxuries is not stressed, it is quite clear that the increase in luxury production (or correlatively the deformation of the technical division of labour within the crafts and trades) is closely connected with the hypertrophy of the yeomanry, both stemming from it and reinforcing its worst features. The universal class resentment which we saw to stem from social

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mobility is so obvious a phenomenon that it needs no proof, says Pole, and meets no objection from Lupset. In light of the foregoing comparisons, however, one suspects that Pole's proof, if called for, would involve comparison, and indeed that the very positiveness with which this point is made simply indicates the transparency of the contrast between England and, say, France, on the score of geographic and occupational mobility. Especially as it is first introduced, in its more ideological manifestation as class resentment, mobility strikes one as a summary but phenomenal feature, the ultimate expression or effect of the first three defects. Yet the remedies proposed to overcome resentment, in revealing its basis in mobility, make it clear that it is a very solid problem. Indeed, since these remedies are more basic than those which are proposed to repopulate the country, it is possible finally to feel that the analytical movement in this series has not been from more material and basic defects to more phenomenal and ideological ones but has rather been toward the more general conditions with the widest range of effects. If understood as the natural effect of social mobility, class resentment perhaps better 'explains' (in the sense of serving as a condition of possibility for) ongoing underpopulation and continuing deformation in the division of labour than these features do it. 4. An Analysis of Feudal Decline Thus much to establish that the string of defects comes to be felt as constituting a level, and that it thus exists in a certain degree of tension with the 'rhetoric of the body.' We may now pause to ask what this causal dynamic is, or to what it corresponds in social reality. The temptation to read it as an economic dynamic is strong, in view of the opposition between the body politic and politic order (since politic order has much to do with the state, or with politics in the modern sense). And it is not wrong to understand it this way, as a critique of the economy — a critique in some ways more acute, indeed, than More's expose of primitive accumulation in Book I of Utopia. But one needs to understand what sort of economy is involved. For though the chain includes elements that 'belong to the economy' to a modern eye (social mobility, division of labour), its focus is not by any means on the production, exchange, and distribution of wealth. This is handled in another part of the discussion of the state of the body politic, that concerning its 'maintenance.' When we see that the criticisms of England's maintenance (which are hardly any more clearly

154 Utopia and the Commonwealth focused on the economic in the modern sense, by the way) may largely be read as drawing out or specifying the consequences and implications of this initial critique (which has been of the body's health), then it begins to be clear that the focus of this series is on the form of the feudal economy; or more precisely, it is on those aspects of socio-economic relations, the complex of 'deformations,' which together contribute to the ongoing and durable process of feudal decomposition. Special attention should be directed here to the first two defects, and Pole's insistence on their separation. In fact there is a good deal of overlap between these phenomena, as the remedies for lack of people demonstrate: these address the growth in numbers of unprolific classes, which are largely identical with the 'idle.' It might, then, seem that this is a distinction without much difference - that underpopulation and idleness (portmanteau problems as they stand) might be reformulated with advantage to yield one larger problem. Perhaps they might; but this would likely involve a subtle but decisive shift in analytical focus, from what is more a situation of systemic stalemate to some sort of systemic change. And it would thus reduce the analytical virtue of the current exposition, which hinges on Pole's implication that underpopulation is a prior and a more basic problem than idleness-unemployment. I noted before that the historic falling off in population was not explained by idleness or the other principal defects of the body politic, that underpopulation remained a 'primary datum.' I would add now that the remedies for underpopulation suggest that idleness has had its most significant effects upon population by preventing its 'natural' rebound, and that the string, insofar as it describes a mutually reinforcing chain of causes, a dynamic, does more to explain why population fails to recover than to explain how underpopulation came to be. In view of this, one comes to read underpopulation and idleness, together the two most basic, as problems of a different order. It thus seems possible to understand them as describing the dual effect of the principal contradiction of the feudal mode of production itself, that between lord and peasant, manor and village. Because 'extended reproduction' under feudal conditions meant the expansion of village lands, the system discovered its productive limits when available cultivable land was used up, and this discovery took the form of periodic demographic crises of great scale and force. Because, on the other hand, of the political character of manorial property, and because of the relative institutional disorganization of the nobility, the system seems organically to have determined what Brenner calls 'political accumulation' on the part of

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the ruling class, which might be defined briefly as a tendency to amass surplus power, whether in the form of followers or of the other material signs of privilege and wealth.14 Starkey's first two defects should be grasped as respectively registering the dynamic effects of these two basic feudal tendencies. And his separation of the defects, and positing of underpopulation as a logically prior and irreducible 'event,' may be supposed to have as its unconscious analytical purpose the registration of that moment when the more political contradictions of the feudal mode of production manifest on such a scale and in such a form as to hinder demographic recovery, the 'economic self-adjustment' which many historians see as having been written into the system up till the industrial revolution and 'modern times.'15 In other words, insofar as underpopulation is characterized as basic, the final three defects or causal conditions (whose significance as deformations in their own right is never questioned) appear to explain, not why depopulation happened, but why it is an ongoing affair, why England in its last century has not witnessed replenishment. Taken together, the 'conditions' or items in the series are trained on the various salient aspects of a post-feudal socioeconomic dynamic. The contrast with More's critique in Book I is instructive. Hythlodaeus's attack on the status quo is at its most savage and incisive when exposing primitive accumulation, and registering the double determinacy involved in it.16 The situation Starkey's less vividly narrative analysis describes is more stable. While he by no means obscures the fact of social struggle, and while he alludes to different causal factors, he ascribes to none of these causes the transformative power figured in More's ravenous sheep. Perhaps Starkey's anti-utopian shift back within the system can be understood as responding to a historic shift in the state of the class struggle on the land: Hythlodaeus's outrage probably responds to the recent trauma of the wholesale enclosures of the late fifteenth century, and reflects the impact on ruling-class opinion of peasantfreeholder consolidation against further such depradations.17 Only twelve to fifteen years later, when Starkey wrote, the outright enclosures, while not forgotten, would be remembered as somewhat of a historic anomaly; and the prospect of village decimation on a massive scale would seem remote: so the question posed with respect to the countryside would not have been how to save the village, but how to replenish it. But on another level, this difference of analytical focus is irreducibly generic. Starkey's more comprehensive description of problems or causes, his articulation of them as elements within a systemic dynamic, is

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the kind of description for which the commonwealth dialogue, whose ostensible purpose is to create a reform program, calls. Even if Starkey's actual analysis of the body politic stands out from and conflicts with the rhetoric of the presentation, even if the space of the analysis is more relativized and general than the corporal space projected by the body analogy, it is still less full of possibilities than the space created by Utopian critique, less unruly, less neutral in relation to its contents. The truncation of possibility is reflected in the quality of the questions of adequacy posed by the independence of Pole's 'analysis.' In the Polylerite episode in Utopia, as we saw, the question as to whether the institution of penal slavery would work as a form of punishment for crimes, and by extension as a way of solving the 'social problem,' in England, was a dangerous as well as a 'technical' one. It conjured up the thought of a vast class of dispossessed workers, unified by their slavery. The questions raised by the remedies proposed in Starkey's dialogue are more strictly technical. The remedies do not seem particularly volatile or dangerous in themselves, at least immediately, but they do seem either inadequate in scope or surprisingly extreme and far-reaching. Thus the triple prescription for underpopulation - that lay priests should marry, that nobles should establish worthy servants on waste lands, and that people with more children should pay fewer taxes offers rather local solutions to a general problem. By contrast, the remedies for the other three causes strike one as overkill. The cure for idleness, for example - universal forcible apprenticeship - seems draconically Utopian, especially since the problem of idleness stems largely from the increase in the size of noble households (142-4). One is not led to think of the risk involved if such a measure was put in force; one is led to wonder rather whether it is at all feasible, and who is meant to operate the new guild system, or the thorough revamping of the one in place, which is evidently intended.18 4. Noble Burghers?: The Temperate Return of the Body, and the Guild as Secret Model

This last question bears on the most telling indeterminacy in the text. I suggested before that the ambiguity of Starkey's reform program is comprehensive, stemming from the articulation of the various reforms. This is so, but it can now be added that there is one crucial positive ambiguity, which has not to do with how different proposals fit together, but stems simply from lack of specification. Just what part of the gentle class

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counts as noble in Starkey's scheme of things is unspecified, and whether the re-education of the nobility is feasible as he proposes it is debatable. But it is quite evident that Starkey envisages the cultural consolidation of the nobility and the extension of their political and social power. No doubt this rejuvenated and empowered nobility is to direct the (re)corporatization of cities and towns that is essential to Starkey's social program. But it is difficult to imagine that Starkey intends them to do this very directly, even if he does want the country gentry to have houses in the towns. So who are the more immediate directors, and why does Starkey not include an education program for them? The question has no one clear answer. Perhaps it is just that Starkey could not have Pole and Lupset cover everything, and this was not an area of his reforming concept that moved him (but of course if this is the case then one needs to explain why he was not moved). More likely, he thought that this was an area that needed comparatively little explanation, and simply assumed that the directors of recorporatization would be the current 'natural rulers' in cities and towns. Another possibility - the likeliest of all, and only on its face in conflict with the previous one - is that he did not bother with this problem because he could not specify how this directing was to take place. We can understand how both these explanations can be true if we turn again to the two aspects of the analogy of the individual, which we saw manifest themselves as a tension between rhetoric and analysis in the discussion of the body politic. It will be remembered that the twosidedriess manifests itself in another way in that part of the discussion devoted to politic order, namely in the cessation of any systematic rhetorical use of the body analogy. Politic order corresponds to the soul, and though we are told that the tyranny afflicting English politic order corresponds to and involves the rule of affections over reason, no series of analogies punctuates the discussion. The comparative absence of body images should by no means be construed to signify that the corporatist ideology of the body is no longer active. On the contrary, that absence underscores the superior unity, hence the privileged determinacy of the form of politic order in relation to the body politic. The rhetoric of the body politic, in other words, is not simply ideological in the sense of being anti-analytic. Rather it is there to enforce a certain analytical paradigm, to convey a certain concept of determinacy, in which politic order, which is roughly to say the political level, enjoys pride of place. I would stress the central antinomy. In the description of the body

158 Utopia and the Commonwealth politic proper, the rhetoric of the body, while apparently serving to single out problems and deposit them in memory as a cluster, in effect contributed to the emergence of a distinct analytical level, making it possible to perceive the form of post-feudal socio-economic relations as a dynamic. But now, when discussion moves to the state, we see the rhetoric of the body used to enforce the primary importance of politic order. Whereas in the description of the body politic the implicit question as to the historic origin of the kingdom's most grave and fundamental problem, that of underpopulation, is displaced or reoriented by the discovery, in Pole's exposition, of a dynamic of dissolution, in the discussion of politic order this question is given a straightforward, if still largely implicit, answer. Here Pole (and Starkey) would have it that underpopulation (and indeed the dynamic in which it is implicitly caught, and which has rendered it ongoing) is to be explained by the disorderliness and disorganization of the ruling class - by which he especially means the emergence of monarchical tyranny (100-4). Note that there is reference here too to a model past, a more constitutionalmonarchist one. One observes the beginning of a historical narrative in Starkey's exposition. But the essential point is that this second, more direct explanation of underpopulation and of feudal dissolution tends to cast the series, again, less as a dynamic and more as a cluster of effects, each of which stems from political disorder at the top of the feudal pyramid. The rhetoric of the body both determines and mediates, then, a latent antinomy between two concepts of socio-political determinacy, which is to say between two distinct ways of conceiving the current crisis. It determines the antinomy in spite of the comprehensively 'politicist' intent of the body analogy per se. This has consequences for how we read the reform program in its total design. There is no denying that the reform program is ambitious no matter how one looks at it, involving as it does the 're-corporatization' of the social formation at several levels: not just of crafts and trades in the towns, but also of the clergy (especially the higher or holier clergy), and, most crucially, of the nobility.19 Such re-corporatization is aimed at eliminating all the imbalances and the high degree of resentment afflicting the body politic. The plan would also involve at least two other salient changes in the social landscape, though these do not receive much emphasis. One concerns the law or the legal profession. Starkey would drastically simplify English law (either by substituting the Roman civil law for the common law, or, if this proved too radical, by reorganizing and rationalizing the

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common law itself, which he calls in its current state 'infinite'), and strictly limit the right of appeal from local to central courts (173-5). The new law would not just simplify the legal process, but would serve as an instrument in the consolidation of the nobility, in whose curriculum legal study would be compulsory, and who would dominate the courts to an unwonted extent. At one point Pole seems to suggest that only the nobility should receive legal training - a drastic change;20 in any case the clear desire is to turn the legal profession from a profession into a (broadly responsible) social class. The other change included in the re-corporatization plan is equally striking, though not developed at any length. To the extent possible, Starkey would urbanize the gentry and the nation. He would have the gentry keep town residences for civility's sake. More significantly, but less explicitly, the repopulation and rebuilding of towns and cities is a priority; he would give towns renewed control over suburban industry, and is most probably thinking of settling most of England's idle surplus population in industry of some sort (160-1). This is the place in which Starkey's Continental experience shows most strikingly, and somewhat incongruously. It seems clear that a main aim of re-corporatization is to put the conditions in place for English emulation of the sort of civic and cultural ideals and accomplishments he would have grown familiar with in Padua and Venice. But though the scope of Starkey's reform program is large, it is not definite. It remains ambiguous whether Starkey aims to reorder or to resituate the state; nor is it entirely clear where the reform program ends whether, that is, we see all its salient components. We might approach this ambiguity by noticing that, though programmatic use of the body analogy disappears when discussion moves to politic order, the analogy does make rather frequent, as if incidental appearances. Thus, in the section of the dialogue proposing remedies, when Starkey moves to remedies for politic order, an initial emphasis on the efficacy of these remedies, not just with respect to the soul of the body politic, but to the body itself, leads, through an analogy with the effects of temperance on the real body's health and a reference to Venice, exemplary for its temperance and physical health, to his first stipulation on this topic: that laws should be enforced to ensure the health of English subject-citizens. The stipulation is run together with an exhortation to imitate Venetian temperance in political matters, but the request for dietary laws is clear (163-4). The reference to the power of temperance makes rhetorical sense, because it is the virtue of which the English ruling class stands

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most in need: their besetting political sin is a tendency to tyranny, which is defined as the rule of the affections over reason. But the actual stipulation of dietary laws, and the insistence on the importance of healthy, disciplined bodies (temperance is notoriously a virtue of engrained bodily discipline, of habit) surprises, because it was not called for by the program. However important temperance is as a political virtue, the introduction of the dietary laws here seems excessive; it is as if the body analogy had taken on a materiality of its own will, and one wonders whether this is not partly in response to a rhetorical need for a break with the imagery of the diseased body that has been prominent up to now: the insistence on the bodily power of the (soulful) virtue of temperance, the stipulation of dietary laws, symbolically removes the noble political body, which is the body that will chiefly be at stake in this section, from the larger collective body which has already been diagnosed and received its treatment. Politic order is given a new, sane body on and with which to work. A little further on, the body analogy is used in a different way, to represent a political balance, a temperate constitution. The Constable of England, whose office Star key advocates resurrecting in order to 'counterpoise' the authority of the king and prevent tyranny, should not, as he previously did, have the power to call Parliament of his own will, but only with the approval or assistance of a Council. Thus his authority will be held in check, 'even like as the authority of the Prince may not rest in him alone, but in him as the head joined to his counsel as to the body' (165). Here the Council/body represents, riot just a balance, but engrained discipline as against the wilfulness of the solitary head. Politic order does not only inhere in the body of the properly constituted councils, but also in the (rationalized) law itself in which the whole nobility is to be trained. A later formulation alerts one to a metaphorical equation between the temperate body of the nobility and the body of the law: 'if the nobility were brought up in these laws, undoubtedly our country would shortly be restored to as good civility as there is in any other nation' (175). Law, as traditional teaching has it, is meant to work on and improve existing customs, eventually to become custom itself. The nobility for which the civil law has become custom would be the type of the temperate corporate body. This 'incidental' figuring of politic order as disciplined, sane body, this repetition of the figure within the analytical space that the body analogy itself has been used to outline, has a curiously disruptive effect. It is meant to tell us of the privileged determinacy of the soul, of noble

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ethics, of politic order within the body politic. In its redundance it awkwardly insists that it is here, at the level of the state, that the diseases we have encountered before can be definitively healed. But if this is what it insists, it 'inadvertently' suggests, on consideration, something else: namely that the tyranny to which the English ruling class is prone might be more the effect than the cause of the various diseases of the body politic, more determined by than determining of the ongoing socioeconomic dissolution, the post-feudal dynamic, which the discussion of the body politic brought to light. If we take things this way, if we read the internal repetition of the body figure as unconsciously staging and exacerbating the antinomy between socio-economic and political levels, then it begins to be clear that we can read the program for politic order, and indeed the re-corporatization program, in two distinct and opposing ways. Either it is an attempt to restore the state to its 'natural' shape, in the understanding that this restoration, apart from all particular social measures taken, will have a beneficient effect on the commonwealth, for the reason that the political 'level' naturally has determinative primacy, or that it is the only real order in the kingdom. Or it is an attempt to restore the state to the position of determinative primacy which the dissolution of the body politic has taken from it - an attempt which proceeds by incorporating nobiliary power at and from the centre, in effect displacing political power onto the state, even while remaking it in a more republican (or conciliar) form. On this reading, the re-politicizatioii of the social body is to some extent homeopathic in the sense that the displacement of the state depends on the dynamic of dissolution whose end it is meant to spell — and the displacement to the centre it involves is implicitly understood to have the refashioning of socio-economic relations, of the socio-economic dynamic, as an immediate goal. It is understood, that is, that the English nobility's tendency to tyranny is virtually another way of looking at 'idleness,' and that the retraining of the nobility that is so crucial to the reform program is mean! to do away with the force of 'political accumulation' (or at least to divert it, to replace the threat of force and symbolic intimidation as modes of political control with legal supervision and display). On this reading re-politicization will work both exemplarily or at a remove - i.e., through separation and displacement, through the centralized state and organically or directly - in the persons of the nobles, who constitute a significant part of the legal system as justices, who manage households or courts of their own, and so forth. But in both these regards, it defines

162 Utopia and the Commonwealth itself against the inherent tendencies, the socio-economic dynamic, of the body politic. Re-politicization in this sense is in one respect a more 'totalizing' operation than in the 'traditional' or 'official' reading. But in another respect - and precisely in that it implicitly poses 'totality' as a problem - it is less so, it is effectively incomplete or partial, for there can or should be no assumption here that once the state is in order everything will come right, the body politic miraculously heal itself in all its members. Given the urban bias of Starkey's republicanism, the problem of the imbalance within industrial production - so closely linked to idleness in Starkey's exposition of the body politic's defects - especially stands out as an area in need of further discussion, and of specific reforming measure. The interference of the traditional notion of the political and of political determinacy, the notion that the power that counts is based on land, presumably is largely to blame for this absence. The appointment of a few special officials to oversee building and the operation of the guilds may indicate that he has misgivings about the natural rulers of the town, but it also suggests that he sees no need for special training; perhaps the guilds and fraternities remain solid enough, in Starkey's eyes, that the redressing of industrial and urban problems is not thought to require a great deal of reorganization, perhaps, indeed, English urban social and industrial organizations served as a 'secret model' for Starkey's symbolic reforming of the nobility into a more exclusive and 'fraternal' ruling class, his recasting of law as the chief instrument of rule whose mystery they only are to be given the means to master. I doubt this last: though the Reformation ahead contributed greatly to the cultural decline of town guilds, this was evidently well under way by 1530.21 But in a sense this is a technical question, for the text is structured so as to superimpose the noble on the urban corporadon, and thus suggests that the 'idea' of a guild, at least, lies behind the new nobility of Starkey's plan. What happens, in other words, when no description of urban recorporatization materializes, is that the proposals for constitutional reform and noble education take on a symbolic force; they stand for the reform of the cities and of industrial organization, the cultural retraining of the urban middle classes, which needs to be undertaken and accomplished as a condition of the nobility's residing comfortably in the nation's towns, and presiding over their refinement of civility. From a literary point of view, at any rate, this is the dialogue's most compelling and incisive moment. In this symbolic dimension, in its totalizing par-

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tiality, Starkey's text at once raises the question of its own adequacy, and closes that question off: for it is only indicated that the towns must be reformed, and the indication usurps the place of discussion. It exposes the difficulty of 'situating' politic order vis-a-vis the body politic even while imposing the one on the other. It discloses the material seed (the guild) from which the new politic order, or at least the new noble order, has sprung, even while denying its political status. The reform program gestures at a(n unrealized) Utopia that lies beneath it, as its condition, and in the process of discrediting itself as such, emits a powerful Utopian effect. 5. Anti-Monarchism as Utopian Figure

I turn finally to the 'monarchy question' in Star key. Starkey's antipathy to unrestrained hereditary kingship stands out, as I have noted above. The measures to rationalize monarchical power are exposited at greater length than any other reform. The expatiation is partly owing to Starkey's feeling that his anti-monarchism was the most controversial of his opinions (Lupset unsuccessfully protests against the superiority of conciliar forms of government at first, and then wins Pole to the position that English tradition is so eiigrainedly monarchical that it would be hazardous and extremely inconvenient to abolish monarchy wholesale). But no doubt this reform seemed the most crucial to Starkey of those he proposes. One understands then why, though to my mind the monarchy issue is less interesting than those I have discussed, it should have become the principal object of the one academic controversy about Starkey. Several commentators have depicted Starkey as being 'ahead of his time' on this count. They observe accurately that he either argued for a Parliamentdominated monarchy, or favoured some concept of popular sovereignty, or both at once. In doing so, they argue, he looked forward to the constitutional monarchy, and the effective parliamentary supremacy, which it was to take the English ruling classes a century and a half of complicated struggle to work out for themselves. Even Quentin Skinner, much of whose work would seem to have it as a principal aim to show how difficult it was to evolve modern theories, and who is not one lightly to denominate a thinker a progressive, grants Starkey the attribute 'radical' - though he sees him not as a Whig before his time but as a thoroughgoing humanist republican out of his native element. Against such a view, Thomas Mayer, in the most versed study of Star-

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key's politics to date, has argued that if Starkey is considered as he should be, in his political context, then it is revealed that there was nothing progressive about him.23 The salient aspects of Starkey's context, in Mayer's construction, may be reduced to three. First, there was no parliamentary movement in Starkey's day; that is, no one was arguing for a constitutional monarchy, or anything like parliamentary supremacy. Instead, the chief oppositional force in relation to the monarchy - and this is the second point - was aristocratic anti-absolutism, which cannot be described as a movement really but rather as a constant pressure on the throne threatening to flare into faction at any political crisis, and tended to centre on Catherine during the probable time of the Dialogue's composition; its ostensible political aim was to return to 'traditional' monarchy, in which the big aristocracy would carry real quasi-hereditary weight in council. The third aspect of Starkey's context consisted in the kind of republicanism he was exposed to in early sixteenth-century Padua, which was far more compromised, far more aristocratic and nominal in its popularity, than that which was defended in the glory days of civic humanism — so compromised that not even a trace of real communal spirit was left behind. Mayer's argument is then that Starkey uses elements of this aristocratic republicanism on behalf of the older aristocracy, to argue for a return to traditional monarchy; he implies that Starkey's aim was largely to provide aristocratic conservatism with an ideological ballast it was felt to lack. Starkey's anti-monarchism, in any case, is not the least bit popular, nor is it pro-parliamentary; it is aristocratic — if it is radical at all, it is radically conservative. Mayer tends to cast Starkey as vehiculating the opinions of Pole, an indisputably old-aristocratic type with some pretence to a claim on the throne, in order to prompt him into the political field back home, on behalf of his own kind. And Mayer lays stress on some features of Starkey's plan which had not often been noted before him: that Starkey says little about Parliament's role outside of electing/ appointing a council to monitor each successive king's power on his assuming the throne, while assuring that the aristocracy will be well represented on both the privy and the parliamentary council; that the chief office of the parliamentary council features expressly as a resurrection of the old office of Constable, a traditional (noble) check on royal power; and that he proposes to accord the nobility a monopoly of the law. Now there is much to be said for Mayer's reading. The lesson of such contextualization is one that cannot be learned too often, and it is salu-

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tary to be reminded that Starkey's equation of hereditary monarchy with tyranny does not make him a 'real' republican, much less a liberal or a progressive. More importantly, it makes something of a red herring of Starkey's supposed 'outlandishness' by showing how republicanism could serve a quite 'pragmatic' role in the English ideological context. Yet this reading misses a good deal. Mayer's revisionist 'tough-mindedness,' his focus on explicit formulation and manipulation of political languages, and more particularly his assumption that what one really wants to know of a political tract is where its author's allegiances lie, leads him to make Starkey's program a rather more definite and singleminded affair than is warranted, and less ambiguous and contradictory. Nonetheless, for my purposes here, Mayer is useful in his very onesidedness; for by insisting on a definite reading of places where Starkey is ambiguous, he makes it possible to see the ambiguity more clearly as an objective feature, and thus to register the respect in which this expressly anti-utopian text is a Utopia manque. One consequence of Mayer's 'pragmatism' is to construe those 'really republican' remnants that persist in Starkey's discourse, all the language that might be construed as popular or democratic in tendency, as expedient device. Thus Starkey's polemic against hereditary monarchy as a form of tyranny ought not to be read as a defence of the virtue of anything like the whole political nation, but rather only of the (apparently very small) aristocratic elite, who will hold sway, Mayer tells us, in his councils, and maintain the king's power within strict limits. Now the first thing one notices about this reading is that it does not acknowledge the full force of Starkey's polemic against monarchy: it is hard to miss in a reading of the relevant section that though Starkey strongly prefers an elected monarchy to a hereditary one, and while if necessary he is willing to settle for a hereditary monarchy with strong limits on it, his first and most strongly felt position on monarchy is that it (any form of monarchy) is against nature and reason, that it is servile, that it argues rudeness and barbarousness on the part of the people who will settle for it.24 The compromise measures he eventually sets forward are very clearly offered, at one level, as a device by which the people can be weaned from this barbarousness; the measures are at least partly controlled, in other words, by a narrative of progressive civility. Mayer does not really register either the anti-monarchism, or the narrative of civilization, presumably because he sees both merely as a kind of ruse. But surely it is worth noting that holding to an outright antimonarchic position, even in principle, makes Starkey a rather awkward

166 Utopia and the Commonwealth defender of the English landed aristocracy's God-given obligation to rule. And again, if the anti-monarchism is just a ruse, if anything like a really republican program is historically inconceivable in Starkey's situation, then one might wonder for whom the ruse is produced. It does not make sense, in other words, to see Starkey's 'convenience,' the protested expedience of his measures on monarchy, as pure show. The least that might be argued is that the really republican remnant marks out the space within the text, Starkey's positive sense, of a political option that is unavailable to his moment. The second thing that strikes one about Mayer's reading is that he is rather arbitrarily selective in what he chooses to emphasize about Starkey's conciliar set-up.25 On the one hand, he stresses that Starkey does not have much to say about Parliament's role in checking the king's power, while making it a great point that he does not develop a notion of consent (the traditional way of conceiving, and upgrading, parliamentary power); instead, Mayer observes, Starkey devotes space to discussion of the parliamentary and privy councils. Now it is true that Starkey does not seem enthused about Parliament. But it is not entirely clear that we can conclude from this that he is against it. He does envisage the continuation of Parliament's traditional powers, explicitly casting it as the check of last recourse on the monarch's: the Parliament's council very clearly stands as the body to the head formed by its standing Council (the council which itself stands as the body to its own head, the Constable). If he does not spend any time delineating Parliament's constitution or function, that may be because he assumes that its function will remain the same; he is not innovating here, as he manifestly is in the case of the two narrower conciliar bodies, and so it need not mean anything in particular that he does not describe its role in detail. Meanwhile, that he does not invoke or develop the notion of parliamentary consent might cut more ways than one: this absence could indicate, not Starkey's lack of interest in, or downgrading of, the Parliament, but rather the reverse, and a basic respect in which its function has changed, in concept. For consent theory of course did not figure prominently in republican theory, but was rather at home in the context of delegating authority. On the other hand, Mayer stresses the elite character of the councils. There seems no question that Starkey had a great deal of respect for the big aristocracy's claim to a natural right to rule, and that he intends to make the program he is proposing amenable to aristocratic anti-absolutism in its initial stages. Nonetheless, it is not

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nearly so clear as Mayer makes out that the councils are rigged for oldaristocratic domination. We know that two of eight on the privy council, and four of twelve on the London or parliamentary council, are to be ancient lords of the realm; whether there are to be more aristocrats or not depends on our interpretation of Starkey's intent in passages that look intentionally vague, but which Mayer's own pragmatic leanings toward the aristocracy have no trouble reducing. More importantly, however, as Mayer himself seems to recognize, Starkey rests the ultimate effectiveness of the councils, the state of their discipline, on the discipline of the nobility at large, or in other words on the success of his proposed (re) education program. The aim of this particular program is to transform the nobility into a true governing class, to equip it to wield high judicial power; it is also, incidentally, to expand it, presumably out of the recognition that in its present numbers it is simply too small to exercise the weight needed to implement the envisaged social reforms. Mayer says about this last, curiously, that Starkey must have meant to raise the county gentry, rather than to lower the aristocracy, by making one category of nobility out of them. One imagines him trying to convince the average old aristocrat that this is how he should look on his reeducation. But the main point to make is that if Starkey is devising a plan for the revamping of aristocratic power he is also imagining one which involves its diffusion, in some sense, downwards. Lest the king be tyrannical, his power must be constrained and controlled by a Constable, whose power, lest it be tyrannical, must be controlled by a council, the power of which, if it is to be effective, must rest upon and work through an expanded class of natural rulers; whose power, if it is to be effective. ... This is riot to make Starkey out to be a democrat, or to say that he conceived expanding the traditional political nation. But it seems abundantly clear that Starkey's revision of kingship stands in some sense for a(n inconceivable) program of re-education all the way down. In this regard, as a Utopian figure, it directs one to his program's internal limits. This is the least one can say. But let me suggest, in conclusion, that if this Utopian dimension of Starkey's republican tinkering is set in the context of the analysis of the body politic which we discussed before, that is in the context of Starkey's more sociological 'language,' then it directs us to rather more than aristocratism's limits. From the perspective of the socio-economic dynamic of dissolution, Starkey's constitutional devices appear as an exceptional response tailored to answer to what is in feudal terms an exceptional situation, and the innovatory return to aristocratic control clearly calls for

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some equivalent remaking of the entire small-proprietorial class. Starkey cannot think this reorganization except as being imposed by the state, as if from afar. But that does not prevent his form, his version of the commonwealth dialogue, from reminding his readers of 'real' (or classical) republicanism's basis in petty agrarian production.26

Chapter III. Utopia and the Commonwealth ///. Hi. A Discourse of the Commonweal, the East Anglian Rebellion, and the End of the Smallholding Utopia

A Discourse of the Commonweal of England is addressed to a social and political landscape in turmoil. 1549 was the most remarkable year for social upheaval since the rebellion of Chaucer's time. Though neither the Western Rising nor the East Anglian uprising known as Kelt's Rebellion - both of which were underway in the summer, the colloquy's fictional time of occurrence - is specifically mentioned, Smith's discoursers often do refer to 'these uproars' (17), to 'business and tumults' (52), and so on.1 This is a style of reference that may partly reflect the nature and perception of village revolts in the colloquy's setting, the Midlands (where there was rioting against enclosure but no full-scale rebellion as in west, east, and south), while also according with the tract's representation of the riots as diffusely symptomatic of broader social problems. Not only does the Discourse designate the widespread upheaval of its occasion, and the secular agrarian riot of its historical moment, as relevant context; it also explicitly situates itself in relation to Protector Somerset's radical-conservative reforming measures, aimed at alleviating injustice and strife in the countryside. The Discourse's dialogue takes place after the sitting of one of Somerset's enclosure commissions, and represents an informal continuation by its head, an anonymous knight, of the 'official' attempt to assess the causes of social grievance and determine justice.3 Though the pamphlet is more secular, or at least less pious, in its attitude than was Pole and Lupset, Smith's assured correlation of socio-political upheaval with religious irresolution as well as with dearth lends urgency to the settlement of belief and practice: it thus registers its moment in this respect also, the moment when the religious reformation was in process of demonstrating - through popular mobili-

170 Utopia and the Commonwealth zation against superstition as well as through evangelical measures pushed for and enacted by the Council - its substantial hold on English elite and people alike, a fact of great consequence in the social struggles of the future.4 And finally, from the biographical point of view, though A Discourse does not impress one as so self-promoting a work as Pole and Lupset - though Smith, as Somerset's secretary and an important member of the Council, evidently feels no great need to demonstrate his humanist abilities - still, it was likely undertaken during a brief exile from his duties, and intended not just to infiltrate the discussion in Council, but to win back his position at the centre.5 If A Discourse addresses and registers a moment of many-fronted crisis, it does so remarkably serenely on the whole, conveying little if any of the panic that Smith himself evidently suffered during the summer of 1549.6 Perhaps it is the bivalence of commonwealth discourse, its status as spontaneous popular ideology and as statist rhetoric, that offers the most immediately plausible explanation for what has been cast as the discourse's prime achievement, its conquest (in tendency) of sociological distance and 'realism'; at any rate, the tendency has been taken to be most signally exemplified, or indeed consummated, in Smith's pamphlet. So Arthur Ferguson, in The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance, saw A Discourse as leaving behind reflexive organicist habits of response to social crisis in favour of a dynamic 'search for cause' looking forward, one gathers, to more modern modes of social analysis. According A Discourse yet more credit and more specific substance than that associated with a search, Neal Wood has recently made an impressive case for Smith's tract as the first work to articulate 'an economic conception of the state,' hence as the first work of political economy.7 I will not hold that such readings are wrong, exactly, for Smith's work is indeed in its way an admirably rigorous and objective piece of social analysis and policy-writing; and as will become evident I certainly think it anticipates political economy, whether it makes it there or not.8 But I want to show, as even Wood does not do, the class motives integral to the tract's objectivity. More specifically, my claim will be that Smith's pamphlet places its group of discoursers, who sit around a tavern table in a Midlands town trying to hash out what has brought the matters of the kingdom to their current sorry state, in implicit opposition to the novel institution of the rebel camp: it stood for a rather less popular commonwealth than the groups of protesters who stationed themselves outside towns, all over England but most concertedly in East Anglia, set up temporary communities and alternate courts, and negotiated demands for change with

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local and central governments. And more generally, I will show how A Discourse records, the closing-off of social possibilities as much as or more than it opens them up, how it enacts a salient restriction of Utopian vision from that offered either by the camps or by the preceding Utopian literary tradition. 1. Staging the Problem of Counsel A Discourse of the Commonweal has much methodologically in common, it will already be clear, with Book I of Utopia and A Dialogue of Pole and Lupset. The works address social and political landscapes afflicted by corruption and in crisis, not always taking care to distinguish one from the other. Each constructs the crisis in a survey of basic problems, and then recommends a remedy or remedies. Smith's diagnostic treats many of the same topics touched on by More and developed at length in Starkey - enclosure, the decay of towns, and the corruption of the clergy, to name some important ones. Like More and Starkey, Smith conducts his critique through dialogue, the dialogue, however, including a prominent monologic dimension; the relation between the two rhetorical modes is a significant concern and indeed a theme, consciously if implicitly so, in all three texts. This has everything to do with the topic that perhaps most manifestly links the works, the quintessential humanist problem of whether, and if so how, to offer counsel to the powers that be. Smith stages the problem quite differently from More and Starkey, in a way that asks, in light of all the similarities, to be read typically, that is for what it has to say about the state of the commonwealth discourse and project. Let us begin here. Two differences are particularly striking. First, it is notable that Smith's humanist, Dr Pandotheus, is a solitary intellectual, and that his learning's provenance and range of reference have been restricted. Utopia and Pole and Lupset were humanist dialogues in the sense that they featured discussion among humanistically inclined characters; this meant that they were (to different extents) European in address. Utopia's first audience was arguably Northern humanism, and its proposals, if especially derived from and intended for the English situation, were nonetheless applicable to the Continent. Starkey's two humanists concerned themselves specifically with England, but they manifestly applied the comparative standards afforded by European, mainly Italian, learning. In Smith, Pandotheus's closest relationship is with the Knight, the figure of real social and political power in the dialogue, a power of

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which his bluff good sense makes him worthy. But the Knight is marked off as a different occupational species from the Doctor - he is the Doctor's rival neither in learning nor in reason. The Doctor's humanism is distinguished not by participation in a Continental culture that marks his knowledge as the possession of a foreign group, but, in a new emphasis, by the breadth of knowledge it entails, its universality. Smith's reform program presents itself as the product of reason working upon the information provided it by a society composed of 'occupations.' This brings us to the second difference. If More's and Starkey's dialogues are more humanistic, Smith's colloquy is more distinctly, in formal appearance, a commonwealth work: it is not about, but of the commonwealth. The discussion in A Discourse is not between differently equipped humanists but between a humanist and four figures representative of the various estates: Knight, Merchant, Husbandman, and Capper. And this group is committed to a rather definite project from the beginning: as already noted, the colloquy takes place after the sitting of one of Somerset's enclosure commissions, and represents an informal continuation of the 'official' attempt to assess the causes of social grievance and determine justice. Critical knowledge of society will come, then, not through practice of refined humanist discourse but, in what is perhaps in literary terms something of a regression to an older method, through debate among the five main classes of the realm, which it is the function and prerogative of the humanist to monitor and to push to its conclusion. The rhetorical problem of the humanist's 'distance from the real,' of the potentially Utopian break within humanistic discourse, is indeed broached, but in a muted and minimal way, and no longer as a pointedly humanist problem.9 About to deliver himself of his most cherished recommendation, Dr Pandotheus suddenly evinces a stock reluctance to go forward; it is not for one so humbly situated as he to venture, even in imagination, into the secret domain of policy discussion. The Knight's impatient response routs the conventions of humanist modesty; he has the whole group of talkers constructing a fictive Commonwealth, and implies that they would all bear responsibility: 'What harm is it, though we imagined here a whole Commonweal among ourselves, so it be not set forth as though we would needs have it after our devise?' (108). The group may be as Utopian as it wishes; it must only not be adamant - one might say Hythlodaean - about it. As imaginary commonweal member, Smith's humanist no longer faces the agonizing possiblity of betraying or wasting his wisdom in trying to accommodate it to the political world. Thus Smith refocuses and deper-

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sonalizes the problem of counsel: in fact he does not advocate counsel precisely but an active interest in public affairs, and the publication of this interest's results in some form. This revision conforms, we will see, to a decisive shift within the commonwealth project. But it is what Smith's humanist actually brings to the council table, his Utopian idee fixe, that most eloquently speaks of a shift in the nature of the social situation in which he intervenes. In the negative sense of 'impractical,' the most Utopian thing about A Discourse is Smith's notion that England's religious dilemma could still receive a doctrinal solution by means of some Continental synod of learned clerks. Otherwise the reforms suggested are common or resemble closely measures that were later actually undertaken (his notion that industrial occupations should be revalued according to how much wealth they bring into the country, and that they should be promoted and privileged accordingly, was soon to guide official state policy). What is remarkable is how relatively satisfied with the status quo he seems to be, or in other words, how little he wants. This is not to say that some of Smith's suggestions would not have entailed dramatic change. The Doctor notes, for example, at the end of his treatment of the enclosure problem, in what seems almost an afterthought, that the interlacing of strips around villages has the effect of rendering cooperation imperative and so of obstructing enclosure; interestingly enough, he sees this effect as intentional, as the result of some past 'utopian legislator's' strategy, which he suggests should be continued: the 'entanglement of interests' characteristic of village farming should be reinforced, now, to prevent the loss of arable land and the social disintegration consequent upon enclosure and 'disentanglement.'10 Now this suggestion seems somewhat thrown out, and Smith's doctor does not expatiate on how strip farming should be consolidated. Still, if the state had fallen resolutely behind open-field and traditional strip farming this would have amounted to a major departure and might have changed the course of English agrarian development in untold ways. Likewise Smith's proposals for the rebuilding of towns, and for industrial policy, would have meant decisive structural change if they could have been effected.11 But in spite of this it is the modesty of his program which stands out if we remark the respective diagnostic claims of the three works. The critical idea of scandalous interest in Utopia is that private property lies at the core of contemporary social corruption, and that no reforms can be effective unless this problem is attacked. The Dialogue of

174 Utopia and the Commonwealth Pole and Lupset most expressly locates the corrupting source of malaise in hereditary monarchy and the associated decay of noble 'discipline'; the re-education and consolidation of the nobility that this tract hopes for is of course not so radical a transformation as More envisages, but it is clearly deeply critical of the very being, the everyday life, of the nobility as it currently exists, and would entail a drastic re-making. As against this, the most fervent wish expressed by A Discourse of the Commonweal is that money should be refashioned and restored to its true, and ancient, value. What the abolition of private property was for More in Utopia, so recoinage is for Smith in A Discourse. How can Smith feel recoinage to be so important? The beginning of an answer is not far to seek. The general rise in prices, in the 1540s, was extremely steep. A Discourse was not the only piece of writing to give the impression that it felt completely unprecedented, both for its gravity and because it was so hard to explain, and to treat it as the single most pressing among a number of 'complaints.' 12 Now no reader of Smith's tract can doubt that he was certain he knew the answer to the question posed by dearth (that is, by 'dearness of things,' an idea closely related to the modern 'inflation'): Henry's devaluations had set off a chain reaction which could only be reversed by going back to the source, and undoing what had been done. Given the gravity of the dearth and the profundity of Smith's moral certainty, it stands to reason that Smith would highlight his solution to what he sees as the crisis's principal contradiction. To this straightforward explanation we should add a biographical motive, stemming from Smith's brief and informal suspension as Somerset's secretary in early 1549. Smith did not come up with his theory of dearth as a consequence of having leisurely hours. Rather the reverse his explanation preceded his suspension, and was responsible for it. Devaluation had proved too seductive a way to manage state debt to have passed out of use with Henry VIII. Smith, according to his biographer, saw this policy as particularly disastrous, and repeatedly urged his 'master' to refrain from further adulteration. It was his persistence in the face of Somerset's recalcitrance that caused Smith's short fall from favour. ' In A Discourse, then, one thing happening is that Smith is defending his former counsel, and putting the problem of enclosure, which many people, not the least of them Somerset himself, saw as responsible for the dearth, in its proper subsidiary place. It goes without saying that Smith need not have reacted to his personal crisis by com-

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mitting his counsel to literature; nonetheless one strongly suspects that that crisis partly accounts for recoinage exhibiting the quality of an idee fixe in A Discourse. But the meaning attached to recoinage goes beyond what seems justified by biographical or rhetorical motives. For the strong impression given by the dialogue is that on recoinage 'things will return to normal' - which is to say, prices will fall, the pressure for enclosure will cease, and urban trades will begin to reorganize themselves as if of their own will. I would note that the incommensurability between putative cause (devaluation) and effect (general decay), and accordingly the scope of the remedy and the scope of the disease, has become particularly apparent by 1581, for by then Elizabeth has indeed restored the coinage, and Smith has inserted an explanation as to why what still is being pushed as a kind of cure-all failed to eliminate inflation, and as to where he had gone wrong (143-6). But even before this addition, the incommensurability is evident, and the Utopian significance of recoinage, as a measure that stands for a new systemic agency, is palpable. This sense of system reminds one of the great event in More's Book I, the discovery of contradictory systemic determinacy, figured most memorably and influentially by England's man-eating sheep (just as the relatively familiar logic of absolutism is compounded, in England, by the logic of enclosure, so the access of noble greed, as referred to by the sheep, is felt to stem from a more general agency). One wonders whether Smith's conviction of the existence of a single root solution, a kind of Utopian machine, is not partly owing to the filiation with Utopia, to the pressure put on his counsel by the stunning consequence of Book I's dialogical history. 2. A Mercantilist Fantasmatic There are more straightforward ways, admittedly, of grasping the Utopian significance of revaluation. Let us attend to the initial stages of the dialogue, and to the way in which it 'becomes critical' - that is, to the way in which the Doctor takes charge. The first sentence of Smith's preface, a fine humanistic period, focuses the key elements in this process: Considering the manifold complaints of men touching the decay of this Commonweal that we be in, moved more at this present than of long time past has been heard, some imputing it to one thing and some to another, albeit I am not of the King's Council to whom the consideration and refor-

176 Utopia and the Commonwealth mation of the same does chiefly belong, yet, knowing myself to be a member of the same Commonweal and called to be one of the Common House, where such things ought to be treated of, I cannot reckon myself a mere stranger to this matter; no more than a man that were in a ship which were in danger of wreck might say that, because he is not percase the master or pilot of the same, the danger thereof did pertain nothing to him. Therefore, having now some vacation from other business, methought I could not apply my study to any better thing than to make some discourse with myself. (11) The dialogue does indeed 'consider' manifold complaints. The first of its three books is filled with a series of them, at least one to each of the dramatis personae, their conventionality underscored by marginal headings ('Complaint of enclosures by husbandmen,' 'Complaint of dearth of victuals by artificers,' and so on). It becomes clear in the course of the initial series why complaints are 'moved more at this present than a long time past has been heard' - and when Smith says this it should be remembered that the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were the banner years of the complaint. What has added urgency to the traditional complaint is the 'dearness of all things,' which afflicts all complainers alike (save perhaps for the Doctor, as the Merchant usefully points out). This is not to say, however, that the complainers initially feel they are afflicted equally. Though the situation is by no means unruly - the characters are friends and acquaintances, after all, enjoying one another's company in a tavern - yet quanturns of class rancour are put on display, and animate the exchange. The Capper opines that he would put the Doctor and his kind to work if he could: 'In my mind it made no matter though there were no learned men at all in this realm' (23). The Doctor treats the Merchant's unctuous approval of his own complaint as if it had been an attack, saying that if anyone had licked himself whole in these hard times it is the Merchant's kind, arid suggesting that they make a practice of dumping good money abroad (33).14 The Husbandman complains that he cannot lease new land to farm for his money because the gentry are taking their lands into their own hands, and blames the dearth on their rack-renting. He is at times quite direct: 'you [the Knight] raise the price of your lands, take farms also and pastures to your hands which was wont to be poor men's livings, such as I am, and gentlemen [ought] to live only upon their lands' (19). With this the Merchant and Capper are in agreement: 'On my soul you say truth,

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quoth the merchant man, and the capper also said no less, adding thereto that it was never merry with poor craftsmen since gentlemen became graziers' (20). Not only, then, is there inter-occupational rancour. More significantly, there is concerted rancour, and a theory as to the main occasion of dearth is shared by Husbandman, Merchant, and Capper. Here, to clarify my argument, I would refer again to Arthur Ferguson's influential analysis of A Discourse.15 Ferguson cast the treatise as self-consciously and critically processing the complaint tradition, which was locked into an organic-feudal, backward-looking view of the world. Just as happened in the period at large, so in A Discourse the long passage of complaint issues in a more dynamic and critical orientation, in a 'search for cause' not necessarily saddled with conservative prejudices. What is most problematical about this case is not that it overlooks the relative consensus among the complairiers and the Doctor's role in undoing it, but its suggestion that the complaint is objectively static or backward-looking. A better term for the complaint's outlook in this tract, or at least for the complaints of Husbandman, Merchant, and Capper, would be 'corporatist.' When the Husbandman says that gentlemen should live on their own, he implies that they have been infringing on the traditional rights of 'poor men' such as he, and that they should 'go back' to keeping to themselves, according to 'the rule of their foundation.' This is traditionalist in form; but as always in situations of long-term thoroughgoing change, there comes a point at which traditionalist responses no longer look back but become radical themselves. Note that the complaint against gentlemen is different in kind from that against the other estatecorporations. When merchants are criticized for valuing their own interests, their own profit, against the profit of the nation, they are being criticized for one of the vices intrinsic as it were, and traditional to their profession. This is not the case with the complaint against the gentlemen; they are criticized for transgressing against even the traditional vices of the estate, and thus in a sense against the very corporate principle — which now needs redefinition if it is to be reinstituted. There is, in any case, general initial agreement as to the dire ultimate consequences of the gentlemen's greed. Not only have they brought about dearth by raising the price of land. They are also responsible for the tumults of the time. Since the Capper, in his own words, is 'scant able to live without debt or to keep any servants at all except it be an apprentice or two,' 'therefore the journeymen, what of our occupation and what of clothiers and other occupations, being forced to be without

178 Utopia and the Commonwealth work are the most part of these rude people that make these uproars abroad, to the great disquiet not only of the king's highness but also of his people. And need as you know has no boot' (20). And the Merchant agrees with the Capper's opinion: 'It is true.' The situation depicted in the first round of the dialogue, then, only corresponds very roughly to that described in the preface's opening sentence, according to which no one agrees on why the commonwealth is in a state of decay ('some imputing it to one thing and some to another'). Rather there is a good measure of agreement. Even though the Knight claims that he is forced to raise rents in order to maintain any sort of household, it is three to one against him that his kind are chiefly responsible for dearth, decay, and the threat of rebellion. Or it would be three to one against him, and this would be the consensus opinion, if it were not for Dr Paridotheus, whose 'neutral' presence and part in the argument keeps Smith's initial description from appearing grossly inaccurate. It might seem that the Doctor's role is to bring unity out of disunity, to provide a single compelling explanation for 'decay' where several competing ones had been current. This is his express rhetoric, evident from the moment he begins to 'think': 'Then, the Doctor, that had leant on his elbow all this while musing, sat up and said, I perceive by you all there is none of you but have just cause of complaint' (22). Each man, each estate to his own complaint; the Doctor's musing has not been much on the degree to which the complaints agree that the Knight's injustices are their ultimate cause. The Doctor's real strategy might better be described, then, in terms of the breaking of this initial consensus among those who are not landlords. He 'returns' the estates to their distinct complaints, unifying them in their singular disunity (the implication being that each estate bewails the 'cause' of decay proper to it), in order then to create a more positive unity. He creates this unity by means of an economic abstraction. The condition of this abstraction is money, or rather the assumed prevalence of a money economy. Money is part of a strategy, the beauty of which is that it permits the Doctor to reverse the initial charge laid against the knightly class, and to portray the Knight as the privileged victim of the new dearth. Under the Doctor's guidance, it becomes clear that Smith's cast of characters share certain conditions in common: that no one ever states these conditions as such (that the clarity in question is an assumed clarity) only makes the explanation offered on their basis the more powerful. All these characters depend equally, for the reproduction of their means of existence, on the buying and selling of commodities. Under

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the aspect of dearth at least, each is a merchant first and foremost. Each must continue to make a certain rate of profit on what he sells if he is to be able to buy the commodities necessary to keep his 'business' running as it ought. The Knight must sell his commodity, his land, at a price sufficient to support his household and status just the same as the Capper must sell his goods at a price sufficient to pay for his men and their means of production. What the new dearth teaches in the Doctor's hands is that all these estates are constitutively part of a money economy, in the sense that all depend in their daily existence on money as measure and medium of value. As participants in the money economy, they are equally the subjects, the passive agents, first and foremost - not of the king - but of a certain kind of causality - a more or less mechanical (or 'billiard-ball') causality, whose effects are registered with great vividness in those parts of the dialogue, for example, in which the company and the Doctor are attempting to track dearth to its source (e.g., 19-22, 39-41, 56-8). It is characteristic of this kind of causality, once set in play, always to have been initiated by someone else. Thus the Capper can profess that he has raised the price of the goods he produces because he must do so if he is to pay his men adequate wages, now that the Husbandman has raised the prices of his own goods (17-18). So it is that the Capper 'puts the burden from him,' in one of the characteristic phrases used to denote the shifting of blame. But the Husbandman has raised the price of his commodities because he must buy things from the Merchant. And so on. The chain is not endless, it is assigned definite limits. Nonetheless, the potential endlessness, and the ineluctable impersonality, of this sort of causality are clear enough; and the point to stress is that the characters'joint subjection to the fatality of the money economy, once dramatized by the Doctor, effectively binds them together into a new - more or less strictly economic - unity. The Doctor implicitly composes the estates into something resembling a class - or at least, his theory of dearth underscores the respect in which the various characters have come to share a basic interest insofar as they are property-owners dependent on the money form. In enforcing this theory and exposing the common interest he also, not incidentally, does away with the corporatist attack on the Knight, the claim that he has touched off the crisis by transgressing against the traditional rights of the other estates. Far from offending against it, the Knight suffers singularly from tradition because he is more bound to it than most. Whereas the other estates can raise the prices of their goods as they wish, the landlord class is forced to rent

180 Utopia and the Commonwealth some part of its land at customary rates.16 The Knight is very much a part of a money economy - he must sell his goods for money, and at an appropriate profit, if he is to reproduce himself; but he is not fully part of the market economy, in the sense that he is restrained from charging a market price for his 'good.' Thus the Doctor reverses the consensus as to the occasion of the dearth. Rather than being its main cause, the Knight is its main victim. The new unity, insofar as it is predicated on mechanical causality, is demarcated in two respects. It is implicitly and negatively defined, on the one hand, against those who are not 'householders' - against all the men and women who do not own property, or whose relationship to the money economy is more or less tangential (who set no important prices). On the other hand, it is positively and fairly explicitly bounded by two members of the money economy who yet exist outside it in a certain sense, or whose agency is marked as peculiarly active. First, the king - that is, the last king, or rather his ill-advised counsellors.17 Their decision to devalue the coinage as a way of resolving the state's debt is shown to have triggered the chain reaction of inflationary pricing. The dearth is unswervingly tracked to this source, and to what is presented simply as a disastrous miscalculation. Here we see the simple, fatal political cause, as it were, of the Doctor's economic abstraction. One should note, surely, that the reasons for the state debt go untreated. Yet this inconsequence does not really impress as notable in the Doctor's discourse, mainly because it is made to appear that the consequences of miscalculation must dwarf whatever problems made for the debt. Still, how was the miscalculation possible? Here is where the second agent enters the picture. The king's advisors have evidently assured him that the exigencies of social reproduction in a commodity economy would make his image substitute serviceably for real value (pure gold) as far as his subjects are concerned. The Doctor would seem to imply that they were not necessarily wrong in this assumption. If England were a self- contained economy, then the king could relieve his debt in this way without serious economic consequences: it would amount to an unproclaimed tax on all who used the cheapened medium. So at least the Doctor makes it appear.18 And this fiction can be maintained, the king's degradation of the national currency can seem reasonable and honest enough within national parameters, because the national economy is not in fact self-sufficient, but as dependent on commodity exchange as any one of the Discourses dramatis personae. The king's

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miscalculation becomes such, the vicious mechanical causality of money economy emerges to view, because of the decisive actions of another character, whom the Doctor's argument shows to have become the true ruler of England. This is the 'stranger,' the foreign merchant, whose refusal to take debased English coin at face value makes him both a figure of truth and the paradoxically active emblem, in a sense, of the new kind of causality associated with dearth. The stranger's elevation of his goods' prices is just as reflexive as any of the increases that follow. The Doctor's exposition makes it clear that the stranger refuses English money not out of malice - or not initially out of malice - but because it is actually worth less to him. He is dealing on other exchanges too, where money maintains its true or natural value, the same value that it has maintained since Aristotle's time at least, and he will take a loss, he will not be able to reproduce himself, if he makes an exception of English coin.19 Yet his intervention, however reflexive, has drastic consequences. Money drains from England overseas, and as inflation sweeps back into the country, English commodities are 'relativized,' wrenched free from any seeming natural framework, with a vengeance which subsequent economic history has long since made too familiar. Like, say, houses in late twentiethcentury California, mobile commodities seem to be worth nothing in comparison to their prices, arid it is the king of course who, as the largest landowner in the kingdom, is the biggest loser in this process. Thus the foreign merchant is presented with a marked ambivalence, and becomes the crucial figure of identity for the new class that the Doctor fashions into existence. More than the king, the stranger effectively becomes the other against whom the English economy and ruling class are defined. On the one hand, he is curiously 'neutral.' It is not at all hidden and repressed, it is quietly explained rather, that the stranger acts according to the same logic that the English representatives do when they raise their prices. He stands for the ineluctable truth of money and the market economy, and as a virtual presence within the national (English) economy he makes it impossible to deny England's dependence on the international market. On the other hand, dearth has made it clearer than before that the stranger is a competitor, however neutral he may profess himself to be - and it is worth noting that his neutrality is occasionally qualified by shrewdness and tenacity: he will insist in finding ways to get England's older better coins, and will sell trivial items if he can get away with it.20 What the stranger wants, after all, is to drain the national economy of bullion, thus causing gen-

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eral inflation, and then, having softened the country up, to steal its work out from under it, causing serious social dislocation. In this latter capacity, the stranger is symbolically central to what can be called a mercantilist fantasmatic. It is by implicit reference to the image of the stranger's real intentions, hence to the effective designs of other countries, that many of the Doctor's specific economic aims and policies (such classically mercantilist policies as increasing production and export of finished goods, and of attracting as much bullion to the country as possible) are formulated. Thus in this regard the stranger inspires what Adam Smith would have recognized as a contradictory reaction on the part of the money economy against the market. His demonstration of England's dependence on the external market triggers a paradoxical return to natural values, and to a model of economy whose aim is to ensure something like 'simple reproduction' or (national) subsistence as much as the power of the state. The answer to the question how revaluation can have (metaphoric) Utopian significance, then, is that it is the crucial condition to the 'successful' operation of this mercantilist fantasmatic. It is the initial, essential step toward the actual establishment of a kind of national-class solidarity whose lineaments Smith's inclusive Doctor has abstracted from the national debate and made it possible to 'consider.' The tacit assumption, at least- the Doctor never quite says this, but the ordering of problems and remedies implies as much — is that once the coin has been revalued and economic life is back to normal, it will be much easier to handle the other aspects of'decay.' Even the one 'uneconomic' problem dealt with in the discussion - uncertainty of religion - will become more tractable, it would seem; for the Doctor's major criticism of the clergy, whom he holds chiefly responsible for religious turmoil, is that they have had all for sale, and it stands to reason that the clerical moral reform he advocates, insofar as it involves withdrawing religion 'from the market,' will be more feasible when the goods that they too have to buy (or their church for them) while remaining in this mortal coil have dropped in price. This is all the more the case with the 'economic' and social problems. Here it is worth noting that the kind of measures Smith proposes for these, the instruments he favours, have evidently been derived from the experience of inflation as mechanical causality and are of a piece with revaluation. Smith has been celebrated for a precocious awareness of the utility of market incentives, of indirect rather than direct forms of governmental intervention in 'society.' Thus, for example, he argues against attempting to roll back enclosure through judicial action only,

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proposing instead to increase arable by freeing the overseas market in corn. But though this is a striking feature, it has been insufficiently appreciated, on the one hand, that such measures, in spite of their assumption of a market logic, are formulated in part as a reaction against the market, a defence against 'strangers'; and on the other that they emerge as organic to the Doctor's discovery of class, a discovery that is part of a tacit project to recruit the prosperous 'yeomanry' into the political nation. In other words, it has not been appreciated that these economic measures come toward the end of a deep narrative of transition projected through the course of the dialogue. 3. Dearth and the Construction of Class

In this narrative, dearth, caused by Henry VTII's devaluations, paradoxically turns inexcusable theft into happy error. One can distinguish four accomplishments. First, dearth has the effect of clarifying the causes of enclosure and of the decay of towns. This can best be seen in the case of enclosures. The pressure for enclosure is not a new thing. 'Everyone knows' that it predates the specific dearth of which the company complains, and this is presumably part of the reason it seems plausible to the Husbandman and the others to explain the dearth as the consequence of enclosures. But in the Doctor's consideration, the recognition of enclosure's diuturnity is lost. It disappears once the Doctor and the Knight combine to show how, given the dearness of all goods, lords must enclose (or raise rents, or take lands into their own hands) if they are to be able to maintain their households. The motives for enclosure are no longer the same. Whatever they were before, these motives are now simply economic, simply to secure reproduction. Thus dearth surreptitiously changes the causes of enclosure in clarifying them. One sees how, if a separate explanation of dearth is discovered, enclosure will have been rendered subject to another system, another order of events. Put another way, the economic abstraction is implicitly cast as something the dearth itself has effected. This abstraction, even if it introduces a kind of passive agency, is of course not experienced dispassionately by all concerned. It increases disunity, and determines what might without exaggeration be called a crisis of the commonwealth. And though there is not a great deal of emphasis on the fact that there are losers in this crisis other than the relative losers of landlord and king, it is evidently understood that the 'battle for simple reproduction' is not without its share of absolute casu-

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aides, and that its effects are not completely reversible. The Husbandman's remark might be remembered here about how poor men such as he are being deprived of land - a clear reference to the stratification of the yeomanry. And it should be noted that the Doctor's plan for revaluation ends there - it includes no measures to correct the wrongs that have been done on account of the devaluation.23 The narrative of dearth, then, is in effect one of a winnowing and a redistribution within and among the ranks of the estates whose commonality it clarifies and establishes. This third 'accomplishment' of dearth suggests something about how its fourth, the actual creation of (the new) class, is to be understood. In the 1549 version, this last moment is 'sealed' very punctually: class will be achieved, the new unity will have been paradoxically (and consciously) consolidated, upon revaluation, which, the Doctor emphasizes, must take place all at once. It would be disastrous, he says, in response to a query from the Knight, if it were decided to effect revaluation gradually: 'God forbid that you should advise the King to do so!' (103). All the money and all the procurable plate in the kingdom must be turned in to the mint at the same time, and recoinage/revaluation ideally carried out in an instant (108-9). It might be thought that this insistence on punctuality betokens an attempt to negate the effects of dearth utterly, and to return to things as they were before devaluation. Clearly the belief that one can restore a (mythical) pre-existing situation/system involving harmony among the 'estates' remains strong; and it is symbolically spoken of in certain aspects of the recoinage scenario as envisaged. It transpires that, since the 'surrender' of much plate will be required if a sufficient quantity of coin is to be issued, those who own most - the lordly class - will play a leading role in recoinage (109). And, though it testifies to Smith's realistic assessment of the difficulties involved, there would also seem to be symbolic significance in the fact that, as envisaged by the Doctor, it will be necessary for the country to return to an economically primitive phase, one of barter and production for use, in the initial stage of recoinage (110). Recoinage is to be attained through feats of noble sacrifice and ancient virtue. Yet this symbolic dimension is certainly not emphatic. The Doctor's explanation as to why the recoinage should be as instantaneous as possible is economic. It is a question of keeping the passive agency characteristic of the money economy from asserting itself. If recoinage were to be carried out gradually, then the difference in real value between recoined (good) and old (bad) coins would be sure to result in the

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siphoning of the good from circulation (104-5). The heroism envisaged is not really then a matter of peculiarly noble sacrifice or of ancient virtue. Rather it consists in the (paradoxically forced) assertion of a new class unity against the passive agency of the market, against a species of reflexive class treachery become peculiarly potent with the generalization of commodity relations. Revaluation will certainly not refound the estates-system, it is not really about effecting a return to things as they were before. It will rather consolidate the class whose unity dearth has revealed-in-creating, even while pitting its constituent parts against one another. It will consolidate this class on the basis of, yet against, the market upon which dearth has shown it to depend as its mediating element. If refounding is involved, that is because the very conditions that (logically) unify the class do so in unsettling it, and thus require an act of political will. If we keep this in view, the symbolism of return, indeed the continuing belief in a restoration of the old order, only serves to remind us that (economic) class emerges, as a moneyed class, in paradoxical reaction against the market. The anamorphosis involved in this refoundation, peculiarly stunted or latent because the more strictly symbolic significance of recoinage is so quiet and by the way, corresponds nonetheless to a crucial and contradictory uneven development within the English social formation, and indeed in its very stuntedness, if considered alongside the anamorphoses of More's Book II, speaks eloquently of a shift in the 'condition' of uneven development within the island-nation. In More, the anamorphoses that testified to the inadequacies of smallholding solidarity retain an enigmatic, exploratory, disinterested character. In Smith, the dislocation within the implicit concept of refounding, while testifying to the difficulty of imagining capitalist class solidarity, also communicates a vivid sense of the strategic possibilities opened up for manipulation by the emergence of class within an unevenly developed context, and by the intersection of different kinds or orders of social causality. 4. Copia and Causality

Which should not be taken to mean that the narrative of dearth is not possessed of an exploratory, more purely Utopian dimension. This dimension is paradoxically most manifest in an unusually copious moment in which the Doctor, flexing his intellectual muscles, indirectly celebrates the strategic power associated with the humanist's comprehensive theoretical knowledge. At the beginning of Book III, the Knight

186 Utopia and the Commonwealth asks Pandotheus 'what might remedy our griefs' (96). The Doctor responds initially with a discourse on reforming method; this takes the form of a gloss on Aristotle's aphorism, Sublata Causa tollitur effectus (the cause erased, the effect disappears). The Doctor finds the dictum inspiring; better than any other, it defines the task of the 'new clerk.' This task, on the face of it, is to locate the principal cause of problems, but the Doctor's string of analogies makes us aware that such location involves the clarification, winnowing, perhaps the re-creation of causality itself: For as I shewed you before, divers men diversely judge this or that to be the cause or occasion of this or that grief. And because there may be divers causes of one thing and yet but one principal cause that brings forth the thing to pass, let us seek out that cause, omitting all the mean causes which are driven forward by the first original cause - as in a great press going in at a straight the foremost is driven by him that is next him, and the next by him that follows him, and the third by some violent and strong thing that drives him forward, which is the first and principal cause of the putting forward of the rest that is before him; if he were put back and stayed, all they that go before him stay withal. To make this more plain unto you, as in a clock there be many wheels yet the first wheel being stirred it drives the next, and that the third, and so forth until the last that moves the instrument that strikes the clock. So in making of a house there is the master that would have the house made, there is the carpenter, and there is the stuff to make the house withal; the stuff never stirs till the workman do set it forward, the workman never travails but as the master provokes him with good wages, and so he is the principal cause of this housemaking. (96) These examples are evidently supposed to be redundant, and forceful by being so. Yet they are not: the causality which the Doctor takes as his privileged object of study, and whose new-found 'trickiness' founds his own vocational ambitions, wriggles from his grasp even in the midst of an exuberant demonstration of his ability to pin it down. Upon examination, an antinomy appears between personal and impersonal types of causality, between more passive and more wilful types of agency. Thus the second analogy, which compares the workings of society, or of any given 'problem-situation,' to those of a clock, homogenizes causality and casts it as force; while the third, classical-Aristotelian analogy, which compares the construction of society to the building of a house, implies differentiated 'levels' of causality and tends to cast it as will, or in terms of

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(human) decision. The move from the second to the third causal example both repeats and reverses, while clarifying, winnowing, redistributing, the antinomic movement contained in the first analogy to a press or throng of men.24 For in this analogy, the shift from men to things ('some violent and strong thing'), while introducing a new level into the causal situation, also depersonalizes what is at first a paradoxically personal causality-of-chain-reaction. This relationship among the analogies makes it difficult not to feel that the antinomy disturbs and undermines the project set out here, that of finding the principal cause (of any given problem-situation) in order to eliminate it. If Aristotle's principal cause may itself be thought mechanically, as a series of chain-reactions, how can one be sure of isolating an original cause, and how can one distinguish with such confidence among different levels of cause? What if the principal cause turns out to be 'some great and strong thing'? Evidently the contradiction in reality that corresponds to the antinomy here posed on the abstract plane of causality has to do with a sudden access of market logic, in relatively pure form, within the postfeudal economy, and the relation of this 'new' dynamic to older ones. We can see this more clearly if we take note of an involution in the Doctor's exposition. The Doctor is explaining how his method will be to find in turn the principal cause of each of the discussed grievances, and to propose solutions similarly in turn. According to this prospectus, each problem will have its own solution (or group of solutions). This is indeed how the Doctor proceeds. Nonetheless, because there is something like a principal problem, the inference is that the solution to dearth should have a more general impact, and decisively affect all the other problems. Such ramification is in fact understood, though unstressed, and serves as implicit justification for the relative modesty of the Doctor's program. But in the above passage it is not only possible to infer that the ordering of problems amounts to a preliminary, and crucial, outlining of causality, within which the narrower search for specific causes will have its delimited effects. One understands as well that the Doctor is celebrating the rearrangement of causality he has already effected in exculpating the Knight and discovering the passive agency associated with dearth. But more than this, one gathers that the Doctor is attempting to think in conceptual figure the difficult relation between the agency involved in dearth and the more local and wilful agencies involved in the various species of decay that pre-existed it. He is groping, in other words, toward an abstract but articulate 'total image' of the class society that revaluation is to found.

188 Utopia and the Commonwealth At this last, the series is not entirely unsuccessful. Its first effect, true, once we see the discrepancy between mechanical and artisanal causality, is to throw causality open rather than to provide a summary image of it. The series indirectly communicates a vivid sense of society as a site of struggle between contrary determinacies. At the same time, both logical and rhetorical strategies are shown to be on shaky ground. For logically speaking, once it becomes palpable that the current crisis has profoundly modified the nature of social causality itself, then it follows that the search for causes of individual problems requires articulation in the context of larger causal categories. The rhetorical agenda in the above passage, on the other hand, was evidently to demonstrate some achieved fusion of humanist and scholastic competencies, of verbal with logical power, the energetic repetition of example with the precise dissection of cause. But the effect of these vivid examples is to throw the precise nature of the Doctor's unity of skills in question, and to suggest that his particular brand of synthetic humanism is better at rendering the differences between distinct competencies visible than reconciling them. Yet, if this humanist flourish unwittingly reveals the philosophical inadequacy or incoherence of the Doctor's minimalist reform program, it may do so at the behest of another sort of compulsion, that of a narrative or symbolic logic. It may not provide an. adequately articulated 'positive causal image' of society, but it nonetheless offers, in its rehearsal of the problem of cause, something like an allegory of historical passage. It outlines the overdetermined political movement of its moment — a moment as yet incomplete but which A Discourse itself hopes to assist in delivering. In doing so, it adds a crucial element to the theodicy of dearth, and helps us to see more clearly what motivates this narrative, and what is involved in Smith's discovery/creation of class. 5. The 'Press of Men' as a Figure for Riot Two elements especially suggest an allegorical reading. One is the relation among examples noted above, wherein the second and third analogies reverse the antinomy between causalities contained in the first. The relation suggests, we saw, that the second and third analogies might be understood as attempting to solve a problem posed by the first. The winnowing, and redisposition of causality silently effected by the string of analogies, we also saw, is itself analogous to the clarification of social relations imposed by dearth in the underlying narrative of A Discourse. I would now propose that the latter analogy is symptomatic - that it ges-

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turally expresses or 'gives to be seen' a repressed memory or train of thought25 - and that the most significant aspect of the movement between causal analogies is that which replaces as principal cause the 'some great thing' of the first analogy with the owner-builder of the third, and which takes us from unruly press of men to orderly buildingsituation. It is the 'press of men,' the second key element, that gives the most to be seen by hinting at the context which makes the Doctor's search for cause an urgent matter. Why does the Doctor light upon this particular philosophical example? Part of the answer is easy to come by. It will be remembered that the summer of 1549, when A Discourse was almost certainly composed, was a moment of remarkable social and political crisis in England. It featured popular rioting and protest in virtually all the country's regions, concerted enough in the west, south, and east to deserve the name of rebellion. Smith himself was spending his retirement in none of these areas, yet was desperately fearful where he was, at Eton College. He sent a letter on 19 July 1549 to his former student and fellow secretary to Somerset, William Cecil,26 complaining initially that his physical state prevents him from coming to London: he has had hardly any sleep for a week, and when he does manage to drop off, sweats so abundantly that he doubts it does him good. He knows that 'all [people] that ever hath aught, be as weary of this tumultuous world as may be, and would be ready to help to the redress.' It is past time for Somerset to appoint 'one or more special men of trust in every shire' to see to it that his Proclamations are effective, authorizing them to muster militias of the trusty 'as need or occasion will be,' so that 'where they hear tell of any evil rule, or beginning of stir to be, there suddenly in the night to come with a sixty or a hundred horse, and take and lead away the stirrers before any more company be come unto them' (186-7). The letter's other urgent recommendation is that a part of the police force currently in operation be suspended; Smith is convinced that the system of night watchmen, 'in times past... well ordered,' is now in practice for the rioters: 'Let one of those Runabouts come, or Camp-man, to tell them news, straight they [watchmen] call up their neighbours, and make exclamations out of all truth and reason' (187). Stirrers, runabouts, camp-men: the vocabulary of riot and rebellion in use here characterizes it as unsettled and unsettling mobility, and the term 'watchmen becomes a part of this underscored lexicon in Smith's letter. He wants to suspend the watch, accordingly, so as to make inter-regional communication among rioters and rebels more difficult. One readily gathers that local shows of

190 Utopia and the Commonwealth force by 'all that ever hath aught,' under the direction of one or two trusty gentlemen in every shire, will then be more effective: 'if a great number of the boisterous were despatched, the realm had no loss' (188).27 A Discourse of the Commonweal does not use the 'gentle'jargon of riot so striking in Smith's letter, nor is the thought of riot full of blood and sweat. Still, as noted before, the commotions are a constant theme. The most pointed, and for our present purpose relevant, occurrence comes at the end of Book II, where an engagement of the Doctor with the Knight reveals charged differences of opinion within the body politic. The Doctor argues that, since the nation's defence depends on having treasure in the king's coffers, it is essential that 'none of our commodities should pass unwrought overseas.' This ban will keep money coming in rather than passing out, as it does now when England's own commodities, especially its wool and broadcloth, are finished abroad and then uttered back into the kingdom; and it will thus make for a well-sinewed monarchy at need (86-7). The Knight is of course not against having money in the kingdom, but 'many a great wise man,' he says, 'think it better that all our wool were sold over the sea unwrought than any clothiers should be set at work withal within this realm.' Why should wise men prefer depleted coffers to an abundance of clothiers? The Knight explains: 'They take it that all these insurrections do stir by occasion of these clothiers. For when our clothiers lack vent oversea, there is a great multitude of these clothiers idle, and when they be idle, they then assemble in companies and murmur for lack of living, and so pick one quarrel or another to stir the poor commons, that be as idle as they, to a commotion' (87). The Doctor's reply does not deny the risk involved in stocking the kingdom with clothiers and craftsmen; he only argues that this is a risk that can and must be lived with, as the best civilized examples overseas (e.g., Venice and France) show. But the Knight persists in his doubts; a little further on, he suggests a supplement to the strategy of nourishing clothiers: 'Also in France they have diverse bands of men of arms in diverse places of the realm to repress such tumults quickly if any should arise. If we had the like here, we might be bold to have as many artificers as they have' (92). Husbandman and Merchant both respond indignantly to the thought of settling mercenaries in the realm ('the stomachs of Englishmen would never bear that'); 28 the Capper, who is most directly involved here since it is his kind whose preponderance the Knight fears, is, perhaps significantly, silent. So the threat of insurrection has been entertained as a serious prob-

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lem, and has been shown to be a potentially divisive topic, in the last pages of Book II, before the group sits down to have supper at the beginning of Book III. This leaves little doubt that in the Doctor's first philosophical example involving the 'press of men,' there is some reference to the practice of riot. Pandotheus, while digesting his supper, is also digesting the previous conversation when he chooses this example. But the jostling press of men alludes to more than the problem of riot, and this is especially what gives the example symptomatic weight. In this image, the Doctor collapses the sort of passive agency associated throughout the treatise with dearth and the market onto the irrational and unruly movement we saw to be connoted by the jargon of riot in Smith's letter to Cecil, and long associated in ruling-class minds with gatherings of the people, the so-called many-headed monster. The connection between dearth and tumult is of course explicitly drawn in the treatise, and was traditional common sense. But it is made particularly sinister here, owing to the introduction of market logic and its collapse into an equation, which makes of riot a peculiarly involuntary and forceful affair. The problem posed by this equation, within and to the narrative of dearth, is how to separate the people from the market. The all-learned Pandotheus has already gone some way toward managing this separation, for he is evidently less informed than he would profess about the political practice of rioting. It was a sort of ruling-class wish-fulfilment that tumults were really tumults, unplanned manifestations of popular irrationality, involuntary in their aims and ends. Before substantiating this assertion, it should be conceded that the press of men example, taken literally, need not figure riot as irrational activity. If we read the example in the light of the Knight's explanation of riots, quoted above, we can speculate that the 'some great thing' setting the throng in motion might be something like a trade depression, rather than a simple physical agency; some such abstract social event would have it in its power to move the clothier with disgruntlement, who then communicates this sentiment to the lower classes, and so on. Yet there is little question that, as a reference to riot, the example of the press of men is derogatory. 6. The Humanist Tavern as Anti-Camp

MacCulloch's writing on Kelt's Rebellion shows that the ruling class must have known the rioting of 1549 to be carefully planned and executed.29 The rebellion was not centred on Norwich, nor was it originally

192 Utopia and the Commonwealth or ever really Kett's, as the myths based on contemporary printed reports have it. Rather it was spread out through East Anglia. Just after the summer assizes and quarter sessions, when county gentry were dispersed, riots broke out, gentry were taken as hostages, and camps were set up, in much the same fashion, outside the four key towns of Norfolk and Suffolk. These camps took over some of the political functions of the 'capitals': courts were held, most importantly, and justice distributed; past injustices were corrected. The rebels, MacCulloch suggests, may even have intended to take charge of the harvest if necessary. 'It would be unnecessarily patronizing to the substantial yeomen and townsmen who led the disturbances to suppose that they would not have been capable of making this sort of planning' (58). Nor was the rebels' stasis a sign of irresolution, as has often been assumed. The rebellion here was not against the centre but against the county gentry; this is why the East Anglian rebels did not march on London, as did the Western, but only addressed pleas to the centre for good government, while staying in their camps. The more significant messages were being sent to the county gentry and well-off townsmen who staffed the system of justice. I will note two crucial ones, both implicit in the practice of camping. No doubt there were logistical and political reasons for setting up camps outside towns rather than taking them over. Perhaps the greatest of these consisted in the magnetic attraction these camps must have exerted; the point would have been to stage the depletion of the towns' labour forces. These new temporary towns must also have been intended to bring country and city, village and town, together: a conglomeration of people, but outside the town walls. But I suspect that another logistical advantage of camps was more or less strictly symbolic. They must have been understood in relation to the tendency of the feudal and postfeudal surplus population to camp on common and waste land, and take it over when possible and desirable;' they would thus have expressed a willingness on the part of substantial yeomen and craftspeople just outside the ruling class to put themselves on the same level with the poor and dispossessed, to harness their physical and social force. Such symbolic solidarity would have represented a Tudor nightmare come true: the whole people become vagrants of the determined sort, their very manner of carrying themselves emanating the sturdy beggar's Great Refusal of work and 'mastery' and all the verities of civil living. The second message has to do not with how serious or willing the leading rebel element is in their demands, but rather with how capable on

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they are. It is apparent in the rebels' decision to stay there, in their camps, day after day, as well as in their setting up of a separate jurisdiction. MacCulloch makes the point incisively: 'for the gentry everywhere, the frightening lesson of 1549 was that those outside the magisterial class could get on very well without them until confronted with brute force' (58-9).3l The camps remind the gentry, in other words, that they are a true leisure class - that they play no significant role in organizing or directing production, and that the justice and order they claim to embody and impose on society is their prerogative no longer, if it ever was. Not, it should be stressed, that the yeomanry was proposing in this reminder to abolish the gentry, or to remove them permanently from the magistracy; their lesson to the gentry is issued from an ideological redoubt of their own, what MacCulloch suggests was a social fantasy of condign incorporation. The presence of this fantasy informs the famous list of demands made by Kelt's faction at Norwich: gentry were to keep their animals off village commons; they were not to 'hold spiritual livings,' or take money for serving other lords as bailiffs; private manorial courts were to be abolished; and so on. 'They sought,' to quote MacCulloch a last time, 'to exclude the gentry and the clergy from their world; they wished to recapture an imaginary past,' in which each social rank had 'its own functions arid each [interfered] as little as possible with the others' (47). 32 Let us now return to A Discourse, and recall the Husbandman's complaint against enclosers, and his opinion that a gentleman should live on his own. The principal aim of the Doctor's intervention is to show that this statement no longer means what it once might have, in the period which A Discourse casts as pre-inflationary times. For a gentleman to live on his own now means for him to reduce his household, since as a property-owner and a buyer of commodities he suffers from the dearness of things in the same way as (and indeed more than) the other members of the dialogue. The Doctor means, by inculcating some knowledge of the logic of buying and selling, to make it impossible to hold coherently to the fantasy of separate estates which Merchant and Capper seem willing, along with the Husbandman, to indulge. He intends, then, to strip them of the same fantasy that made their 'real life' counterparts willing to desert established political forms and transgress all orderly bounds by throwing in their symbolic lot with the poor against the countries' 'traditional' rulers, thus showing these rulers that they (their social inferiors) can rule. The informal group inquest in A

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Discourse might be thought of as an anti-camp, in which the social fiction of estates is transgressed in the other direction, in which the conditions of a new solidarity surpassing the symbolic are brought to light and rehearsed, in which the mutual dependence of the four members of the buying and selling class is made painfully clear. The paradox is that dearth itself, or the sudden access of market or mechanical causality with which it is identified, proves to be the unifying condition. But a socio-economic crisis need not work this way, to show the ruling classes their common interests, of course; and it was networking that way at the time of the treatise's composition, as the example of the press of men, to return to it once again, vividly if fleetingly reminds one. The great vague thing that is the market might exert its impersonal force in such a way as to level men down and do away with all distinctions - such at least is the ruling-class fantasy about the end of riot, and it is at least glanced at in the press of men - rather than to 'level them up' and preserve distinctions - such is the fantasy and the project of A Discourse. The weighty example communicates a sense of the pressure that the characters in the dialogue labour under in playing their allotted parts, and of the symbolic importance of the fact that the smallholding class for whom the dialogue is chiefly written are actually given speaking representatives. The class is of course not fully represented, for Husbandman and Capper are clearly responsible householders, in spite of their complaints that they are only poor men. But this is just the point: the example helps to situate the moment of the dialogue as that in which stratification within the smallholding ranks has developed to the degree where, in the face of the yeomanry's economic prosperity, cultural divisions are beginning to feel arbitrary and to crumble; but not to the point at which identification with the lower echelons of their class, and with the poor and dispossessed, has become an unthinkably dangerous venture. Nor are these smallholding representatives made to speak in a way that would entirely disappoint expectant condescension. They are, of course, erroneous in their main opinions, though emphatically not irrational - it would not be hard to argue that they come off as more reasonable than the Knight, even if the Doctor comes to the latter's defence. But the smallholding class does speak in A Discourse, if only that it may be shown departing from its fantasy of bounded estates. It is given representatives, if only that these members might be 'taken in': into the rationality which implicitly defines a new - a capitalist - class, and into the new political nation, which Smith will later famously define as 'a society

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or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by common accord and covenauntes among themselves, for the conservation of themselves.'33 And that the smallholding class is given speaking representatives, I would argue, marks A Discourse as the end of the particular commonwealth-Utopian line that More set in motion during his free time at Antwerp in 1516; it is the end of Utopia (and of the original Utopian epoch) both in the sense of marking its symbolic culmination (the incorporation of the small-proprietorial class into the nation) and its logical terminus (the elimination of the project for smallholding solidarity as a cohesive fantasy) ,34 As the smallholding class comes into its own, and disappears, the other problem of Utopia, that of uneven development, is displaced, as it were, into reality. We have a striking exemplification of this displacement in the Doctor's dissertation on the principal cause, in which what professes to be a neutral description of 'the way things work' in fact stages a struggle between shifting causal principles, and symbolically enacts a miraculous transition from one state of uneven development to another. It is often said that what is really new and important in Smith's dialogue is its recognition of market forces, and its (uneven) adumbration of'civil society' in the relative autonomy of the sphere of exchange. The example of the clock has been used to illustrate this point.35 We are in a position to see that while the illustration is not wrong exactly - the clock is indeed a striking and important image, and probably it is in some sense new - it nonetheless needs to be complicated, or contextualized, more than is usually the case. First, it should be observed that the clock as emblem of social causality emerges after, and at least partly in reaction to, the press of men. To point the allegory: Smith does not come up with a mechanical image of social causality because he is a farsighted, especially lucid thinker if this implies that he was somehow above the contemporary fray. He may indeed be far-sighted and lucid, but this special lucidity can be seen to be in immediate reaction to class struggle (the camps), and directly participant in that struggle, if on the ideological plane: the theodicy of dearth underlying Smith's dialogue hinges upon the exemplary humanist's discovery and strategic deployment of the mechanical causality associated with the market. Second, it needs to be stressed that the emblem of the clock is the second of three, that it mediates between the 'vexing' image of the press of men and the more traditional Aristotelian image of building, which latter stands out in context as a relatively reassuring (personal and will-ful) way of thinking causality. The 'final image' of society in A Discourse is

196 Utopia and the Commonwealth defined, not by the market, but by this series, in which the market plays a crucial, mediating role. The point is that the passive agency of dearth is made to emerge only that it might then be shunted overseas, if possible; the market emerges, in Pandotheus's discourse, to intervene against itself, and to offer itself as the negative foundation on which a new sort of political will, which yet preserves the verities of feudal estate or rank, may be consolidated. This is not to say that the market cancels itself, or vanishes in its act of mediation; I have already noted that the clock image disturbs the building image to which it leads: how does one think Aristotelian causality mechanically? The truth that dearth has brought home will remain after the dearth has passed, and must be lived with; the return to the traditional so earnestly expected and hoped for will be a return with a difference, and it is not yet certain what that difference involves. The implicit message to commonwealth thinkers is that thinking England from here on out will necessarily involve thinking the intersection of distinct, now more or less global, causalities; and, for those of truly English persuasion, will involve planning how to prevent fatal conjunctures. Third, and finally, it is worth stressing again the crucial and defining assistance of the humanist (which in this text means the comprehensively learned scholar) in the intervention of the clock's causality. It would seem that Pandotheus pays for his assistance by refracting its uneven contradiction into his own image. The split between humanist and scholar-cleric which we have seen to open up in the passage on causality gapes wider in the dialogue as a whole. Pandotheus plays the role of learned doctor early in the dialogue: his complaint in Book I is against the commonwealth's lamentable mistreatment of those who have studied and who know. He never gives up his claim to the position of knowledge — he goes on speaking knowledgeably throughout the dialogue. Yet it is noticeable to retrospect that the Doctor's early complaint is the one complaint that is not clearly 'answered' by the reform program he sets in place.36 No measures to protect or cultivate his kind of learning are announced - a puzzle, if also a relief, that education should be downplayed in a humanist-authored treatise. And in the final section of the dialogue, in which religious uncertainties are addressed, the Doctor himself seems to have undergone a change: he identifies himself straightforwardly as a cleric now, seemingly a member of the rank and file, whose chief task in the new settlement, as he tells it, will be to subtract the more commercial aspects from their religion and reform themselves morally, to learn the humility appropriate to their estate once

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more (127-33) ,37 Though laymen especially are to leave religious theory to the specialists, the impression given is that rank-and-file clergy, too, are to let their superiors in the church concern themselves with settling the burning doctrinal issues. Where and who is Pandotheus, at last? Perhaps we can take his combination of comprehensive learning and clerical modesty as a figure for some new learning, some new intellectual function, of the future.38 But the site from which this function will emerge goes unspecified. Humanism is effectively unsituated and disembodied in the course of the dialogue.

Chapter IV. Sprung Desire and Groups in Flux: On the Politics of the Utopian Impulse in Marlowe and Shakespeare IV.i. Travesty, Allegory, and the Political Effectivity of Renaissance Drama

The title of this chapter might well arch the readerly brow. Little has expressly been said about the politics of the Utopian impulse in Utopia or other Utopian works of the period, so why should we now learn about it on the late Elizabethan stage? And why Marlowe and Shakespeare, rather than a few plays that might be called Utopian, or that conjure with Utopia?1 Yet if little has been explicitly said about the politics of Utopia or the history of the work's political reception, the argument offered ought nonetheless to have made it clear why politically interested readings of Utopia continue to find diametrically opposed messages, and to phrase them so variously, in such considerable good faith. It is hard to know how to take a wish fulfilment that emphatically and elaborately recognizes itself as such; the politics will depend first on whether you accent the fulfilment or the recognition, and then on how. Or to put it in more literary terms, the political ambiguity characteristic of many Utopias stems from the peculiarly vexed relationship between form and theme, signifier and signified, in this genre - the seemingly inherent discrepancy between the impulse 'behind' Utopia arid its actual script or 'realization,' a discrepancy itself perfectly realized in More's discovery of 'noplace' as the place of the real ideal world.2 As for why, given that the present chapter is to deal with the utopianism of the late Elizabethan stage, it should start with politics, the answer is partly 'for the same reason that Elizabethan censorship attended more carefully to the stage than to printed books': in other words because live drama, at any rate in a pre-modern city or community, can pose political questions and possibilities with a dangerous

Travesty, Allegory, and the Political Effectivity of Renaissance Drama 199 immediacy that narrative cannot match. But it is also because the politics in their salience, especially of the better-known playwrights' work Shakespeare's above all, but Marlowe's as well - seem profoundly, indeed 'utopianly,' ambiguous, and on consideration the broad analogy (between the political effects of the Utopian genre and of the playwrights' work) does not seem accidental. Rather it is a matter of substantial congruence between the situations of the Utopian author and that of the Elizabethan playwright, this latter 'suspended' between people and state, between a popular dramaturgy not yet sundered completely from Carnivalesque matrices and an achieved and attenuated 'official commonwealthism,' between parodic arid allegoric dramatic and narrative modes. Indeed the situation of the playwright, so the argument of this part will go, accounts for the very informing presence of a Utopian impulse, for the routine implication of basic questions of human happiness and the habitually strong sense of blocked possibilities, in plays that have little expressly Utopian about them. The situation in its complex trarisitoriness helps to explain how Marlovian and Shakespearian dramaturgies could make the late Elizabethan stage itself into something of a Utopian machine. That the politics of both Shakespeare's and Marlowe's work is controversial is well known, and needs no arguing here. According to a plausible, hopeful, hypothesis, if a reading is to command belief and have consequences - as a political reading should aspire to do - it cannot be completely mistaken; it must not be too easily dismissible. If true, then the sundry polemical appropriations and politically interested readings, particularly of Shakespeare's plays, over the past three centuries provide evidence that the politics of this drama is either highly ambiguous, or singularly complex. It is at least plausible to suppose that there must be matter in the plays to provide support and fuel for the favoured sociopolitical fantasies of readers of many political persuasions; and moreover, not only that the material is there, but also that it must be peculiarly available or detachable, so that readers can take what they like from his productions, and indeed mobilize around it if they want and the situation serves, with a relative minimum of bother, hence with relatively little doubt or bad conscience. In this latter respect, indeed, Shakespeare's productions would seem to be less undecidable than Utopia; or rather one wants to say that they are too decidable, that it has been made too easy to find what one wants in them. The plays remind one less of Utopia the work in this regard than they do of a notable insti-

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tution within Utopia itself, that of the storehouse or common exchange, the truly 'free' market or anti-market - the centralizing place (s) where many of the goods are kept, and where the Utopian producer-consumers go to pick up what they need when they want it, at no cost and with little trouble. The virtue of beginning with this analogy is that it is obviously unsatisfactory in itself, vulnerable as the observation is to completion by any number of essentially apolitical readings. If one is content to stop here, and simply to enthuse at the multitude of meanings or the miracle of Shakespeare's 'comprehension,' the work that went into the plays' production becomes simply a labour of love to all humans, and turns 'synthetic' in an especially abstract and invidious sense. Beginning with the apparent abundance of Shakespeare's politics encourages one to specify the nature and conditions of possibility of the Shakespearean 'comprehensiveness'; it leads one to try to analyse the relative availability of apparently contradictory political readings of the plays, both as conservative and progressive, orthodox and subversive, hegemonic and resistant; and insofar as this attempt has as its aim the location of a formal structure or mechanisms - whatever it is in Shakespeare's plays, that is, that makes opposing readings available - one is led inevitably to raise the question of the politics of these mechanisms or structures themselves, hence of what I have been calling 'comprehensiveness' or availability. If one starts with the assumption of availability, then it is only by trying to understand how it is possible, thus to fix its meaning, that one can secure oneself against apolitical temptations; it will only then be impossible in good faith to equate the argument that different political readings are relatively readily available, in Shakespeare, with one that holds they are all equally available, one as good as another, because Shakespeare was 'above' politics. I will be arresting no unfamiliar suspects in the search for the causes of availability, though my path to the familiar ones will be as unusual as the diagnosis of the crime to be solved. First of all, though, it seems best to deal with the obvious objection to the general inference from critical disputes over Shakespeare's, or his plays', politics. It will be said that practically any writer's work would generate comparable disputes if the writer enjoyed the cultural authority accorded Shakespeare. I would agree that this is so, owing especially to the complex nature of the political effectivity of cultural, or at least literary, works - though I will then want to argue that Shakespeare's works remain peculiarly apt for controversy.

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The objection leads one to think about the question of how works exercise political agency or effectivity, a question that is of course a permanent problem, and which I will assume here cannot be 'solved' but only organized in more or less adequate ways. We might begin to organize it in a preliminary way by referring to a divide between two very general schools or types of politically minded readers: those who want commitment from their writers, on the one hand, and those, on the other, who want realism above all. This is a familiar modern dispute, by no means simply academic, and so seemingly perennial. Those who favour commitment tend to look for positive depictions of the working class or of women — of the group or groups who comprise the cause and virtually always emphasize or assume the importance of inspiration (or 'empowerment') through identification in the reading process. Those who favour realism look for the truthful depiction of women or of African-Americans, which will usually require their 'objective' positioning in the larger society represented; they will emphasize the importance of 'social mapping' within the reading process, the inherent utility of narratable social knowledge. Put so simply, the opposition appears on a little reflection an artificial dichotomy, and ought to be a false one. Unrealistic positive images defeat their purpose; or at least on average they do not work so well as realistic ones. And a realism that is not oriented by the interest and toward the improvement of some social group or class, a hopeless or completely uncommitted realism, is properly unthinkable: it would have no social point of view, and so would not be realism. Nonetheless, it is clear enough why this 'artificial' dichotomy is in fact a vital one, marking out the space in which a crucial choice must be made (whether by a writer or a reader); for a society in which a 'realistic' determination (a will to show the social system as it is) is easily reconcilable with the desire to provide admirable types - such a society is harder to know how to imagine today, when TV and Hollywood paradigms inform the general narrative environment, than it was in the period when the novel was the hegemonic genre. Few would disagree that in modern societies this opposition is an objective one, in the sense that it is 'to be lived with'; and is registered in our reading of narrative works as a determinate tension, whether slight or grave in the particular case, between different modes or moments of political effectivity. The problem with putting things this way, as we learn quickly once we start to think about the political meaning of Shakespeare's works and how such an opposition might help to explain disputes among critics, is

202 Sprung Desire and Groups in Flux that 'committed' and 'realistic' are modern or modernizing categories, presupposing as they do - what was evidently not yet presupposed in Shakespeare's time - a fixed distance between the author's consciousness and the social reality to which it attempts to 'do justice,' justifying itself thereby. We evidently need categories with less specific content in order to explore the problem; and upon reflection it would seem that the modern opposition between commitment and realism is but a particular incarnation of a tension inherent to cultural activity, which happens to be foregrounded in the notion, associated especially with the work of Kenneth Burke, of narrative as a symbolic act. We might call this the tension between the ritualistic or performative nature of narrative, on the one hand, and the representational or cognitive on the other. It would seem that the reader who looks for commitment or positive images is highly attuned to the active, or inevitably activist, dimension of all narrative, and what she looks for in a play or film is especially how it will immediately impress itself upon the audience's morale; the 'realist' reader will be interested in what the play shows, or in what it makes it possible to see and think of society's workings. The distinction between activist and cognitive political critics is not really part of the critical lexicon; still it is a working distinction, both in the sense that it applies and that it is understood. The best example I can think of to prove this is the difference between Lukacs and Brecht, as it flared up and attained some celebrity in the so-called Lukacs-Brecht debate, but also as reflected in their writings on Shakespeare. Lukacs was the more cognitively oriented critic: in the section on Shakespeare in The Historical Novel, for example, he argues that Shakespeare's greatness lies in the way his plots centre on socially exemplary conflicts and collisions, and thus reveal, 'with merciless clarity' (to use the translation of the cognitive phrase whose repetition only the most sympathetic readers can ever entirely forgive), the multiform class struggle of his day in all its complex inevitability. The assumption is that the vivid comprehension this revelation yields (not a cognition of society yet, since only a full-blown realism will achieve that) can ultimately only be 'progressive' in its effects, whether by demystifying and embarrassing the ruling classes, or by narratively situating and opening historical possibilities for the oppressed. Brecht, the more activist critic, was exasperated by this assumption. His discussions of Shakespeare find him focusing on class contradictions and struggles also; but what Brecht particularly emphasizes, what he particularly argues and likes, is how Shakespeare amasses, models, underscores these struggles in such a way as to confront the audi-

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erice with the knowledge conveyed, so as to provoke the playgoer/ reader into an 'experimental' and active assessment and critique which will not stop with the action of the play but carry over into the narrative of his life.3 The antagonism between the two critics was a complicated one. Like many of the more interesting such antagonisms, it strikes as both congenital and reasoned. That is, at one level it seems to have involved something like a personality clash, a primordial parting of the ways, on the status and function of narrative representation in general, which one would think could only be exposited, rather than argued further. But at a second, more developed and discussable level, it consisted in a difference on basic questions of narrative strategy, or (since realism was the highest value for them both) on how realism functions and is to be composed. The example can be useful here then by helping us to formulate a second distinction between modes of political effectivity. Added to the one we have already drawn, this will make for a provisional 'schematic map' of effectivity. To refer to the 'personality clash' first: it seems clear that Brecht retained what might be called (with no pejorative intent) a naive distrust and primitive reverence for narrative representation, more particularly of the theatrical sort. To believe in the achieved transparency of realistic representation, as Lukacs often seems to do, to believe that narrative can effectively efface itself from the social reality it describes, that it can offer up the structure of reality for calm cognition — this is to fall prey to the objectivist illusion that tends to haunt realistic ideals when they appear, the fantasy that the social referent pre-exists its own linguistic/narrative construction; and it is to set oneself up for ideological manipulation. It is this last, of course - ideological manipulation - that Brecht wants to prevent, or better, control. His primitive reverence for the power of narrative is not 'for itself,' he does not simply want to waken audiences to the creative/destructive force of the original work or image; rather he wants, not 'just' to present class struggle for cognition, but properly (i.e., critically, experimentally) to orient the reader toward it, or in other words to manage or control the orientation that any given narrative will already have. This second level of reflexive narrative consciousness, which is non-cognitive but presupposes or anticipates a mapping, cognitive function as its contradictory term, entails on writer-producer and critic a continuous monitoring of the rhetoric of narrative forms, and a critical dislocation of the ideological frame in and through which map-

204 Sprung Desire and Groups in Flux ping inevitably occurs, and which is thus intrinsic to narrative cognition. Not that Brecht feels one can step outside ideology; but he does argue the possibility of reorienting it, of inflecting it anew, of jolting it, as it were, into a new frame or set. Insofar as this 'rhetorical' disposition harbours within itself the desire to negate or 'transcend' ideology, to potentiate a truly informed cognition, it may be seen to presuppose its opposite second-level narrative moment (or dimension of effectivity). And it could in fact be argued that Lukacs himself, if read carefully, really belongs here, that he by no means discounts the inevitable ideological interestedness of any narrative system, however successfully realistic it is. For he can often be found holding that society is given to be cognized in its dynamic contradictoriness not as a positive image, exactly, but rather as an effect of totality.4 This effect is achieved at least partly by way of the friction between, the conjoint dislocation of, different forms or discursive ideologies; what is envisaged is a kind of negative mapping, in which the pre-given interestedness, hence the epistemological limits, of available narrative formats are made perceptible to the reader, so as to enable a kind of secondlevel, sceptical or epistemologically achieved, cognition. This makes the fourth position on our scheme of effectivity: Performative Cognitive Rhetorical Epistemological My initial reason for sketching this scheme is to make a case for the inherent structural complexity of the politics of cultural works. However abstract this scheme may be, however obviously in need of differential historical specification its categories are, it must apply in some form to the cultural practices of any societies in which a difference, or at least a tension, exists between performative and cognitive modes or dimensions of narrative. A given work must needs in practice produce, negotiate, deploy various modes of effectivity and the tensions among them - which is to say that its 'polities' must needs be complex or multiple. This is part of the reason, then, why one can be assured that the work of any writer as culturally influential as Shakespeare would be sure to generate differences of opinion: the reductive terms (progressive, conservative, and so on) which one finds to be absolutely essential to any consequent political criticism have many marks to hit, and will likely miss some of them: and this - setting aside all the juicy 'invalid' reasons for arguing over the political significance of texts - makes 'valid' disagreements possible.

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Moving now toward a consideration of the reasons for Shakespeare's superior merits as an object of contention, a thing which this scheme has put us in a fair position to do, let us consider briefly some of the major positions on Shakespeare's politics. The dominant view through the last half of the last century was that Shakespeare's plays were socially and politically conservative (as was Shakespeare himself, the thinking often goes). But one can distinguish between an older and newer way of arguing (or assuming) this position. The older way (thriving in the 1950s and 1960s) can be summoned up by invoking Tillyard and his influential Elizabethan World Picture.5 Its sponsors argued or assumed that people in Shakespeare's time were pre-ideological, and that their dominant image of their society was as an organic, cosmologically grounded hierarchy; these people held this view for good reason, since (even though they had the part about the stars and planets wrong) Shakespeare's society was indeed still relatively organic and hierarchical. Critics of this persuasion tended to cast Shakespeare's plays, when possible, as affirmative or 'iconic' allegories of monarchically and hierarchically provided Order.6 A problem with this sort of reading was that there was always an uneasy comprehension that the Elizabethan World Picture, if it really did play the role of dominant social image, was a late feudal, absolutist construction - a 'molar' receding of more 'molecular,' corporatist ideologies, we might say, in reaction both against the secular social mobility attendant upon ongoing depopulation and against aristocratic and gentry factional struggles. The 'allegorical' world-view was not a given thing, it had to be imposed and fought for; and Shakespeare's plays would seem manifestly to record, modulate, and comment on this imposition and struggle. Most New Historicist readings of Shakespeare began from scepticism about organic or natural hierarchy; they assumed, if not the reactive status of Early Modern Order or of absolutist spectacles of power, at least the necessity, and as a rule the necessary strategic or rhetorical complexity, of Order's construction. They tended to see the plays, then, not as simply 'supporting,' or allegorically invoking, absolutist-cum-patriarchal Order, but rather as taking part in the struggle involved in and over its assertion; or more precisely, since the dominant view continued to be that Shakespeare was conservative (or progressive in the sense of favouring the new traditions of Order), the plays were cast as the particularly influential because rhetorically exemplary vehicles of that assertion. The celebratory or allegorical character of the plays is often still affirmed here, but the accent tends to be placed

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on the ways in which various kinds of opposition or anxiety are exhibited or hinted at only to be defused or put in their places; arid the rhetorical work of legitimation is what the plays turn out to be really 'about.' Think, for example, of Montrose's celebrated essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream, which shows how the play indulges, plays out, and defuses vulgar patriarchal anxieties about a woman's wearing the crown, thus implicitly 'saving' the authority of the latter for celebration. Or think of Greenblatt's provocative discussion of the way Shakespeare repeatedly shows king and magistrate figures provoking anxiety in their subjects in order that they will then require constant surveillance, in order that a quasi-absolute power can be put in place to be celebrated. Montrose's more psychoanalytic essay tends to assume that Shakespeare's work is conservative in effect; Greenblatt's more directly political essay argues the case. But the essays agree as to the substantive nature of Shakespeare's politics, as to what he gives to be thought in taking for granted, so to speak, while seeing the real interest of Shakespeare's work to lie in the precise way in which it vehiculates ideology.7 Other readings of the cognitive and rhetorical/ideological 'moments' of Shakespeare's plays are naturally possible, though these two sorts or schools would seem to have staked a strong claim to their moments for the time being. But the point to be argued is that these two interpretations indeed correspond to logically distinguishable moments of the text, and that these moments are somehow especially distinguishable in Shakespeare. To get a better sense of how this is, we need to ask what sorts of reading would stress and correspond to the other two, the ritualistic and the epistemological, moments. As for the epistemological, I cannot see that any given school has a monopoly on it: so-called cultural materialist readings often focused on the way the plays undermine or 'give to be seen' the ideologies, both formal and substantive, that they must nonetheless in some sense proffer for the want of neutral forms. But those of Weimann's formulations, in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, which suggest that the attitude intrinsic to the inherited apparatus of popular dramaturgy enacts a silent critique of rulingclass codes of representation without serving as a replacement for them, seem to me still the most subtle articulation of the case for the primacy of an epistemological moment that we have.8 And if this is so, then one must grant that many of the numerous works (mostly New Criticalliberal) that attend to Shakespeare's use of mixed style, double plots, and so on, and discern a sceptical humanist message implicit therein, also make the case for an auto-critical or negative cognitive moment.

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The final, or first, moment, the most purely performative or ritualistic impulse, seems more difficult to pin down. It is no doubt true that the element of national celebration I have already referred to, and assigned a chiefly cognitive value, has a prominent ritualistic component. But national allegory centred on crown and aristocracy and was patently instrumental, patently supportive of, or secondary to, their power (it was in fact the displaced and centralized effect of Brenner's political accumulation). 9 A more radical distrust and respect for the power of narrative and dramatic representation in its own right almost certainly continued to attach to the popular elements among narrative and stage practices, however increasingly disassociated these were coming to be, as a main, paradoxical, function of the public theatre, from various traditions of religious and amateur drama and of festive misrule. As Michael D. Bristol has shown,10 the fundamental narrative attitude of popular drama, at least at its - exemplary - Carnivalesque extreme, is one of radical travesty: all the images of misrule, the reversals, the references to the material and the physical and the baser bodily functions, the mis-taking puns and nonsense, the mixing of categories and species, all these things speak of representation's original creative/destructive power in relation to its object(s), all work momentarily to level the stable structures of the signified, to pull back the Logos of the social order and prove it to be nothing but naked underneath its clothes. Carnival carries a message especially, of course, to the ruling classes, and pits itself against 'their' paradigmatic symbolic form, namely allegory: this message, inherent in the very form or act of travesty, is, as we have seen,11 part threat and part reminder: it underscores the dependence, the superfluousness, the nullity of the non-producing classes in the face of the bitter economic realities of preindustrial society, in relation to the huge power and preponderance, usually dormant but conspicuous, of Nature and of the producing classes themselves. Now Carnival and Carnivalesque entertainment do not only deliver this timely threat and reminder; they deliver other messages, serve other functions, as well, and it will be worth the while to take a detour here and present these. I will do this by loosely summarizing Bristol, who is very convincing in arguing that popular travesty serves as the formal support for two other kinds of aim.12 First, he shows that both oral and literary carnival forms virtually always disclosed an analytical, exploratory, anticipatory dimension if looked at closely. He alludes here to the historical work on early modern popular culture mentioned before, and to its rebuttal of the old

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idea that the festive culture was momentarily radical but perdurably conservative, or perdurably conservative in its very momentary radicalness. No doubt a Lenten backlash was always to some extent presupposed by the absoluteness of normative Carnival expenditure; 'peasant resignation' to the fatal life of chore was an anticipated general aftereffect of Carnival spontaneity. But the notion that misrule took place simply to provide Rule with a binary term by which to know itself, that reversal existed solely to define the proper Order - this smacks of a ruling-class outlook, and reflects the early modern attempt to disarm popular culture which Peter Burke casts as a trans-European phenomenon (witness the Jacobean court masque, where an attenuated Carnival is indeed introduced principally for the sake of Order's definition). Peasant resignation did not preclude carnival's serving pragmatic, political interests and aims: the narratives inscribed in the gestures and practices of carnival map social reality in the form of contradiction, they recast hierarchy as organic antagonism and struggle. Improvisatory misrule provided an apt collective vehicle for topical commentary, and for exploration both of social change itself, and of possible organizational responses to it. In this dimension, festive forms were based in, and dialogically testified to, the existence of a sober, lucid, and continuous tradition of popular commentary on topical events and the changes they bespoke, a commonsensical popular voice, chiefly to be found now only in fragments or as ventriloquized in ruling-class apologies. ' Second, Carnivalesque travesty expressed what can loosely be called Utopian desire in a more or less explicit, and expansive, way.14 A distinction between Cokaygne as spontaneous, and Utopia as disciplined, wish fulfilment, between Cokaygne as a fantasy of release from endless labour into boundless consumption, and Utopia as incipient social planning, a dream of institutional reorganization for the truly common weal, has often been made. But the practical looseness of the distinction betwen the two genres, their necessary interrelatedness both in individual 'works' and in the 'story of Utopia,' can perhaps best be grasped if we distinguish between the kinds of relativity they presuppose and propose for cognition. The peasant resignation implicit in the the story of the land of Cokaygne is surely not without its bitter metaphysical humour (which is of course not just bitter but partly spiteful, if it is often the case, as one suspects, that priests mediate the peasant wish in those poems that were recorded and have come down to us): 'Even though we do so much work, yet nature does a great deal more; it would be so easy for the land to be just a little more industrious, a little more consistent;

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then we could just work at the task of consuming; but that is not the way it is, so back to work.' The Utopia, on the other hand, was premised upon a feeling for the relativity of cultural forms, a sense philologically achieved and transmitted and most secure in the scholarly sphere, but newly provoked and emboldened by reports of encounters with primitive societies in the New World. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the Utopia presupposed and had as one of its effects the awakening of a sense of the relativity of beliefs and practices to the mediating (partly natural, partly social) category of custom. Now there is a significant difference between natural and customary relativity: a sense of the relativity of institutional practices to custom translates easily into a sense of the possibility of institutional, if not of structural, change; and of course More's Utopia did indeed, and does, provoke this feeling of political possibility, even if those critics are right who tell us that it does so only then systematically to undermine that feeling. But the logical jump from natural to customary relativity is not so great a one, and if we see More as definitively refocusing the object or aim of popular energies in that extremely ambivalent, and by intent as it were strictly symbolic, Carnival which is Utopia; if we see the Utopian tradition as in some sense securing this break by extending Carnival, 'fixing' it in institutions and putting it into print - then this would seem to presuppose that the jump is intrinsic to the heuristic, experimental impulse of the festive itself (and thus, as argued above, that popular culture had a more strictly Utopian level before More created Utopia). Bristol's discussion of carnivalesque prose by Dekker, Nashe, and John Taylor provides evidence of ongoing, constitutive negotiation and struggle between the two genres in England. It seems improbable that this tense negotiation was a strictly literary phenomenon; in other words, it seems likely that festive practice itself became in some instances more strictly Utopian in its wish-fulfilling dimension, even if the radical distrust inherent to travesty must have been corrosive of Utopian, as well as of allegorical, fixity, and blocked anything corresponding to Hythlodaeus's Utopian description from appearing on its fleeting gestural record. So the radical travesty paradigmatic of popular cultural forms, and directed above all at a symbolic stripping of the ruling class, did not preclude less purely performative activity; yet it perhaps set certain constraints on the analysis, organization, and anticipation it enabled. The question facing us at this point - to return from this digression to our map of effectivity and slotting of readings - is whether the popular devices and materials descending from popular theatre and given more

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or less directly into the hands of the professional acting companies were stable and sufficient enough to yield a totalizing reading (or a plausible misreading) comparable to the other three sorts of reading we have alluded to as prima facie evidence for the complex character of effectivity, and the relative discreteness of the moments in Shakespeare's text. If there has existed a carnival school of Shakespeare criticism, which argues the strong case, that Shakespeare's plays simply were, first and foremost, instances of Carnival, symbolic attacks on the ruling classes, I am unaware of it. Bristol's chapter on Shakespeare has the merit of suggesting that there could be such a school, and probably would be if class prejudice did not prevent critics from siding with Orderly order. His reading is of course performance and theatre-oriented, and labours under the appearance of an evidential disadvantage that all such readings do (the appearance, because of course even the most text-based readings, if offered as historical, have to make assumptions about the way the plays were staged and acted). He emphasizes the gravity of the problems involved in establishing a definitive text in Shakespeare and other playwrights of the period, and suggests that on the face of it this argues for a more improvisational, less humanist and author-centred, view of the plays than is ordinarily assumed; he notes that the theatres were built on sites associated with Carnival, outside the city limits, and argues that even Ann Cook, while making her case that Shakespeare's audience was more upper-class than had been thought, in effect conceded that the audience was largely popular;16 and he strongly implies that the acting was predominantly burlesque rather than illusionistic. But the case that the dominant symbolic mode of the plays as performed was travesty does not rest mostly on such reasoned hypotheses about performance and staging. Bristol shows that several of the plays are structured by, or consistently put at centre stage, an opposition between Carnival and Lent - probably the most exemplary basic opposition in both festive and popular-dramatic traditions: / and // Henry TV and Twelfth Night are the privileged exhibits here; Hamlet and King Lear are discussed as interesting variants, which displace and rework the same opposition; and this makes it clear enough that the opposition could be read as a controlling one in several, if not most, other plays.17 Bristol's readings suggest the deployment of two different plots of 'carnivalization,' two strategies of containing the more properly literary or textual elaboration, along with allegorical modes of representation, within a popular paradigm. On the one hand, as in Twelfth Night, the Carnival plot may be claimed to encompass or overrun all the foreign or

Travesty, Allegory, and the Political Effectivity of Renaissance Drama 211 more strictly 'humanist' material, so that the learned lessons on friendship, desire, identity, and so on are not just punctuated but inundated by the egalitarian, body-based truths of popular morality: 'the festive agon' (i.e., as represented in the confrontation between Sir Toby and Malvolio in the drinking scene) is the 'main action,' continuous with the wider world indicated in the clown's 'return from the outside' and in Malvolio's Parthian shot- Til be revenged on the whole pack of you.' In other words, Malvolio's last words look toward the Lenten recoil due to follow on Carnival's excessive expenditure in the work of consumption just as surely as one season follows on another. To prevent misunderstanding here, it is essential to underscore that Lent is experienced from the festive point of view as an inevitable reflux, and so as part of Carnival; that is, Lent is festive, i.e., popular and anti-ruling-class, too (only in this phase the people strip the ruling class of their power and identity by claiming that oppression is natural and self-inflicted). On the other hand, the Carnival plot may turn out to be directional; the struggle between Carnival and Lent may modulate into an epochal (rather than a seasonal) battle, leaving in its wake what is now a historical moral. So the Henry IV plays are at least implicitly presented as a Carnivalesque allegory of the festive's demise, its replacement by a more personally impersonal, monitored regime, a Lent in the image of Argus, which refuses to give up its day. But even in such plays as these, whose allegory of transition anticipates the encroachment, into the field of drama, of the author-centred text which Jonson will soon be attempting to write, Carnival has the last word. The Chorus's abrupt reminder at the very end of Henry Vthat all Henry's work served finally but to preface a lapse into the destructive expenditure of Civil War (a reminder, Bristol notes, that is only found, ironically enough, in the Folio version, the 'best,' most 'authoritative' text) - this concluding gesture reinstalls a popular, seasonal moral into the heart of the nation's past - and, since Hal prefigures Tudor monarchs, into the present as well. It is worth noting here that this reading does not exactly make Shakespeare's plays out to be progressive or 'radical'; since Bristol's concern is to argue that Shakespeare is popular to the core, and that carnival paradigms and travesty as a symbolic mode rule in his plays, he is in effect claiming that the plays are radically conservative - only for the people, for Carnival, and the way things have always been with them, rather than for the new monarchy and hierarchic status quo, and the organic Order they have 'always' represented. If Bristol discussed what it means, for example, that an allegory of transition should appear within

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the Carnival plot; or if he discussed the relation between Carnival and humanist-derived aspects of Shakespeare's theatre in more detail (since it can hardly be disputed that Shakespeare's plays were not simply festive occasions, any more than were the miracle or morality plays for that matter); if he had situated Carnival, articulated what must have been its new dramatic function, then the plays might not seem so radically or straightforwardly conservative, and one would have fewer basic questions, anyway, to ask. But as things stand, though the contemporary message this 'Carnivalesque' reading emits is different from that of the the world-picture school (and is one with which I would add that I am utterly sympathetic), it can be accused of simply turning the tables on the older view - thus of being equally one-sided, and perhaps of making the same mistake of taking a redeployment for 'the original.' Nonetheless, if it is probably an over-reading, Bristol's argument shows how a popular reading of the plays is just as possible, and approximately as adequate, as the iconically allegorical, world-picture one. It thus helps us, in the present context, make our case for the existence of a strong tension, a virtual antinomy, between initial performative and cognitive moments of Shakespeare's plays, which we can now see figured in the tension between the running modes of travesty and allegory, the insistent opposition between the consuming impulses of carnival 'embodiment' and courtly spectacle. Indeed, Bristol's failure to situate Carnival in relation to other of the plays' components, owing as it likely is to a desire to respect the radical dissolvent effect of travesty, has the merit of highlighting its resistance, at least when it features centrally in the plot, to 'constructive' receding, and thus points up the fundamental incompatibility between travesty and allegory, popular and courtly modes. The suggestion is, then, that this opposition has a privileged, primary status in Shakespeare's theatre (if not in all Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre), and that it is from this that all the drama and poetry come; in other words, that the acting companies and their more or less learned playwrights necessarily had it as a large part of their task to dispose, to rearticulate, this original opposition in some way, whether by exacerbating it, for example, or muting it, or displacing its terms as much as possible into dialogic and ironic modes. If the dialectic between modalities is thought of this way, as the pregiven symbolic framework within which dramatic and discursive elaboration takes place, then its peculiarly corrosive and far-reaching nature helps to explain both a general phenomenon, the manifest political

Travesty, Allegory, and the Political Effectivity of Renaissance Drama 213 ambivalence of much of the period's drama, and also, in the particular case of Shakespeare, how the plays can be so 'many-sided,' and generate such disagreements. For it would seem that Shakespeare's 'synthesis' of the dialectic is such as to preserve its terms in their clarity, indeed to make moments of them, instead of displacing and collapsing its terms so as to create a new, singular and single-minded, formal message, as I think Marlowe did. Yet of course the politics of Shakespeare and Marlowe is not just a question of formal manipulation, or of formal messages, it is 'also,' as both Lukacs and Brecht have it, a matter of portraying social groups through narrative, and, however indirectly, of orienting the public theatre audience in relation to their contradictions. Or rather, a formal or modal message can never simply be formal, because popular travesty and aristocratic spectacle/allegory are already oriented in more specific ways than so far suggested, already part of a complex struggle over who shall rule Britain and how it is to be run, which conditions what can and what will be seen and said through them. To give some sense of this complexity, this specification of what want to be abstract modes, it will be useful to comment further on the status of the 'popular inheritance' when the common players consolidated their professional position, and set it to work in the public theatres in the 1580s. We could do worse than to to start with Weimann's exposition of the progressive divorce of popular drama from corporate life in the sixteenth century (above all, with the decline of the mystery cycles and the professionalization of acting itself), and of how it was precisely by virtue of this dispossession of the drama that 'in England, the popular tradition became free, before it seriously declined, to enter into fruitful combination, especially with humanism.' It had not seriously declined, the assumption is, because de-corporatization was so rapid; and Weimann invokes the same precocious and uneven development of capitalism to explain why it was allowed to combine with the learned tradition, why the popular forms were permitted extensive rhetorical polish and elaboration on the public stage. Neither postfeudal nor neo-capitalist sections of the ruling class were capable of hegemony (of holding sway over state and society), or ready to try; thus there was a time of compromise and joint hegemony which took the form of 'nation-building' and resulted in that glorification of the Crown which is sometimes mistaken for absolutism itself. A major purpose of the 'humanist-populist spectacle' of the public theatre was to express, confirm, and explore this political compromise in the narrative and ideological fields; the drama worked, by

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analogy with the absolutist state in the political field, as a kind of 'laboratory' (Weimann'sword) of ideological development. Now one could cavil at certain aspects of Weimann's account. Its sociology does not conform entirely with Anderson's and Stone's stories of a steady but fatally stalled drive toward absolutism in Britain, still the best long-term structural accounts of the transition to capitalism available, but rather with a more continuous model in which the absolutist state itself serves as a kind of halfway house for capitalism. One might correct for this by stressing the natural-scientific implications of the laboratory metaphor, which discourage one from over-hastily assimilating the theatre to a linear-historical model, where it would play the inevitable role of producing forward-looking syntheses (the notion of science's ineluctable linear progress is of course not a scientific notion); it has already been noted that Weimann's notion of popular culture as constituting a 'margin of reserve' indicates that for him the Shakespeare play's final function is to disclose ideology as such. With these reservations, I would hold that Weimann's analysis gives one a better, more sophisticated viewpoint on the larger risks and interests involved in the public theatre than do, for example, the better-known New Historicist analyses, which as has often been observed tend to understand absolutism too readily in its own terms. Yet we need to ask why the crown itself backed the staging of the popular, since the crown's sponsorship of the theatres against the city aldermen was instrumental to its consolidation. Here it is difficult to resist the notion that Machiavellian motives were salient in the crown's distant (and vigilant) patronage, providing it with a means of ritually subjecting the city's freedom from without, and - more crucially - of receding popular material in a controlled context, where travesty's unbacked threat would take on a new quality, and lose its ability to intimidate. Whereas city authorities tended to see theatrical productions as riots on the verge of happening, the court saw them as riots not happening, as riotous energy being displaced, or perhaps better, provoked that it might be left with no object. As Greenblatt has shown, the little scene in I Henry IV in which Hal toys with an underling tapster maliciously tempting him to the thought of rebellion against his master (a rebellion that, with Hal's sponsorship, would be sure of success), then dropping him - might be taken as the allegory of this strategy in action.19 Such a strategy of (limited) control tends to suggest that the popular tradition, which we have seen as cohering around the practice and theme of carnival, was both threatening and useful, or at least not to be

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lost, from the crown's (and ultimately the ruling classes') point of view. From what has gone before, it is not difficult to see general reasons for this. But we ought not to assume that popular Carnival practices were changeless through decorporatization, and had precisely the same social valence when the players 'took them over' into a new framework, with the Court's permission, as they had, say, a century before. Weimann's demonstration of the 'internal development' of popular dramaturgy, its increasing complexity and 'realism,' must of course not be forgotten, and poses a sensitive issue; for it would seem that this very development likely weakened the connection between popular theatre and festivity. The increasing complexity and formal neutrality witnessed in the morality play, for example, might well have made the routinization of theatre (and of its carnival element) more politically feasible. Yet the connection constantly drawn between the theatre and riots testifies that in the authorities' minds anyway Carnival and the popular theatre maintained living links. Let us take the authorities at their word this once (remembering that this is as a rule a foolish thing to do), and assume that the popular (public) theatre, carnival festivity, and riots were not just semiotically connected (which is of course something, and perhaps all we need to assume here), but also 'objectively' linked practices, so that changes in one rather directly effected changes in the others. If we assume this, it becomes legitimate, even imperative, to ask what the pattern of rioting that took place through the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth century means. Roger Manning emphasizes two salient characteristics of these revolts, when considered as a group. One is that they were of such frequency and quantity that they can without exaggeration be called endemic. The other is that there were very few large riots, and most broke up quickly or were dispersed after having made their point. From this, he draws two inferences: that the massive popular discontent evident in the major riots of the earlier part of the sixteenth century had not been solved or alleviated; and that the increasing stratification of the small-producing classes had changed the scope and nature of protest - the leading element of these classes, what were now being called the 'middling sort,'21 no longer finding themselves willing, or no longer feeling it in their interest, to play their former organizing, sponsoring roles. This meant, certainly that riots were less dangerous, and perhaps that they were more dangerous, than they had been in the preceding period. Less dangerous, because they were demoralized more readily, and tended to fall apart. More dangerous, partly because it was easier for the parliamen-

216 Sprung Desire and Groups in Flux tary and/or state classes to ignore or forget them; but perhaps also because, in the event that they should acquire the representation of yeomen or people of the 'middle sort,' the combination would be something new, and might yield previously unencountered forms of 'disorder' (the unusually fierce reprisals against the leaders of the Midlands Revolt, the most sustained and serious uprising of the period for the reason that it did acquire yeoman sponsorship, are perhaps to be understood in light of this last connection). These revolts often took place on festival occasions, and more often used some part of the symbolism of festive misrule; Carnival was virtually inscribed in the practice of rioting. It need not follow, but it is at least a plausible inference, that the massive institution of Carnival, of the festive, underwent a similar shift: that it came to be associated with and 'attached to' the more populous people, the lower or poorer sort. It then would become both more and less unruly, more and less dangerous: easier to contain, and presumably less disciplined in practice; but freer, perhaps, whether in practical protests, in 'legitimate' holiday practices, or in the texts of its literary sponsors, to explore new contradictions, with more scope, from its new basis, to criticize. Arguments for festive practices and protests as heuristic, it should here be noted, seem to draw many of their examples from the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, arid perhaps this is no accident; perhaps the unfinished, fleeting character of riotous protest in England anyway corresponded to a heightening of its explanatory tasks and capacities. More interestingly and tellingly, what we might call literary practices of the Carnivalesque, in the prose of the later sixteenth century, manifestly mobilize the tropes of Carnival in more totalizing or Utopian ways (Nashe's work will be my case in point, as it is Bristol's chief one); though there are doubtless other determinants, one possibility is that they are responding to and from the new social situation occupied by Carnival. My point here is that if we understand this new status of Carnival practice - politically more vulnerable, but full of more theoretical potential, to put it crudely - as determining some part of the popular material whose staging is the public theatre's business, we obtain a more specific sense, both of what is involved in the court's Machiavellian patronage, its attempt to contain the popular in licensing its receding; and likewise of the constraints and possibilities inherent in the playwright's situation, in his negotiation of spectacle and travesty, his symbolic 'unification' of the nation's ideological resources. And as a result, one is led especially

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to search the plays for signs of Carnival-enabled critique, and for some species or equivalent of experimental utopianizing. Before turning to the analysis of Marlowe's form and of an example of a Shakespearean moment, it seems in order to summarize the situation of the playwright, specifically with respect to its Utopian potential. By background more or less popular, by training as a rule more or less humanist, working in an anomalously insecure and overdetermined profession, the playwright was of course the very type of social mobility and multiple allegiance. We might capture some part of the constitutive ambiguity involved when this individual set to work by suggesting that his project was both anti- and quasi-Utopian. This is a figurative expression of course, but I intend it to be a fairly strict one. The playwright was anti-utopian because he virtually had to figure some sort of compromise between popular and royalist/aristocratic ideologies: for several reasons he could not do the equivalent of opting out of the polity, a la Hythlodaeus, there lucidly and directly to expose (with whatever profound ambivalence or irony) the superfluity of the ruling class; he had to negotiate, to play the game on the commonwealth's behalf- and this is the aboriginally anti-utopian posture, as Book I of Utopia shows. On the other hand, the playwright's work involved him in deploying and elaborating the conventional devices and narrative material of the popular tradition within a new, more literary institutional framework, and to more neutral, more descriptive ends. In re-placing or extending popular and festive conventions into the newly liminal corporate space of the public theatre, and into the fictive nowhere, the mixed narrative space (both English and foreign, and so compositely other) that takes shape before the audience's gaze uncommented upon and as if by magic, the playwright assumes a role similar enough to what More played in writing Utopia to be called quasi-Utopian. Taken together, these aspects of the playwright's situation help to explain both the insistence and the marginality of this drama's allusions to Utopia. Bottom's brave dream whose song never gets written; Gonzalo's great arcadian plantation, a 'foolish' vision of no effect; the beggared Lear as a failed Utopus, the absolute abdicate king: such allusions read, in retrospect, like so many thwarted conjurings.

Chapter IV. Sprung Desire and Groups in Flux: On the Politics of the Utopian Impulse in Marlowe and Shakespeare IV. ii. Marlowe and the Utopia of Sprung Desire

With Marlowe, one can speak, not just of a characteristic style or dramatic procedure, but of something resembling a set generic form, to which he came to hold an original and absolute claim despite its medieval fixity. We might call the form 'fabular tragedy.' Now this new genre would seem tailored to foreground a distinctive style; it is a commonplace (one that mostly overlooks The Jew of Malta and Edward II) that the plays are but pretexts for the display of a magniloquent vein of poetry which pointedly condenses and orients the form's inner tensions.1 Marlowe's mighty line lucidly conveys a complex but definite attitude toward his audience, a certain set on society. It has perhaps been insufficiently stressed that the engendering of the sublime mode in English letters is accomplished through a deliberate display of social hostility and indifference. The body of the plays themselves should constitute evidence enough of these attitudes; but Marlowe's prologues, which do not so much present the plays as confront the audience with them, leave little doubt as to how we are to use their sublimity. Of Tamburlaine, for example, we are told: 'View but his picture in this tragic glass, / And then applaud his fortunes as you please.' And the Chorus introduces Faustus thus: 'Not ... in []the pomp of proud audacious deeds, / Intends our muse to vaunt his heavenly verse. / Only this gentles: we must now perform / The form of Faustus' fortunes, good or bad' (11. 5-8). Notice how the characteristic fleering snarl audible in the concluding phrases of both last lines ('as you please,' 'good or bad') slows down their rhythm, thereby securing the loftiness of the style. Neither passage encourages a moralizing or didactic criticism, however you take it. Both are ambiguous in the same way, in that they

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are at once blasphemously and descriptively intended. Blasphemously, on the one hand, because both statements transgress against, and taunt, the conventional moralizing assumptions the tragic audience has brought with it. The audience is invited to think in moral terms even as it is already led to suspect that these terms will be vain, because Marlowe will take them in vain. As Marlowe was in his life, so his plays have sometimes been accused of blasphemy; and one could do worse than to think of the plays as extended, elaborately embellished and defended, curses, wherein the laws of censorship itself - so diligently and indefatigably usurped and employed before they can be imposed by outside authorities - finally come to reek of profanity. As evidence of this profane censorship, witness that the above statements are not simply blasphemous, but must, on the other hand, be taken descriptively, as professions of authorial innocence: the audience can moralize if it pleases, and so may Marlowe on his own time; but during the production of the play, such is the nature of its material, he must be unconcerned by morality (and so must the audience be, insofar as it is included in the 'we' who perform the play). In their tragic production, Tamburlaine's acts and Faustus's fortunes exist prior to judgment, or so the prologues imply; the function of tragedy is not to moralize, but to record these acts and fortunes. Marlowe's tragedies, then - whether sublime or no, it should be added (in other words, The Jew and Edward //included) - are simultaneously hostile and indifferent, and are to be 'used' both as curses and records. This much has for some time been more or less commonplace; and it is not difficult to see how these two attitudes or 'functions' complement and reinforce each other. It is especially easy to see how the indifference of the tragic recorder lends a more exquisite quality to his blasphemy. So one is tempted to see 'hostile indifference' as a single coherent attitude, so to speak, and the blasphemous chronicles, the stunned, neutral tragedies, that result from it as harmonious textual consequences. But this would be a mistake, primarily because it will lead one to underestimate the significance of indifference, or of the tragedies as records. It is often said that blasphemy constitutes a paradoxical rebellion, if it is a rebellion at all, in that it relies for its effectiveness upon a residual belief in the sacred element that it abuses; if it actually undermines the sacred, it does so by becoming a mere metaphor, producing indifference through repetition. One may think more highly of blasphemy than is commonly said.3 But the point here is that Marlowe's is not, or not only, the indifference of the hardened blasphemer. It is

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more fundamental than that, and - especially in its assumption that tragic action is prior to morality, or to judgment - opens up questions, motivates meanings, to which blasphemy does not extend. This becomes somewhat clearer if we ask what larger generic forms the style-derived or 'intentional-attitudinal' impulses of curse and record mobilize. The blasphemous impulse would seem to manifest in a peculiarly primitive or unconscious kind of satire, whose demands for new material are felt especially to motivate the cannier turns of Marlowe's plots, such quest for new social totality as exists in the plays (which are still largely allegory in the older stylized sense, taking totality for granted). Indifference, on the other hand, determines, nothing like the convendonal chronicle, but rather what I will call, for lack of a better term, the fabular element of Marlowe's tragic dramas, intending fable to refer to their archetypal character, their proximity to fantasy, their 'underplottedness,' on the one hand, and to their Aesopian quality, their vexing irreducibility to morality, on the other. I will argue here that the ambiguity inherent in the formal attitude of Marlovian tragedy is only partly a 'harmonious' one; that curse and record, sadre and fable, ought instead to be read, however compressed they are, as separate, indeed antithedcal, moments of Marlowe's fabular tragedy; and that the incommensurability between these two moments may ultimately be seen to represent the fault line of the principal contradiction from which Marlowe writes, or in other words, to inscribe his contradictory orientation in relation to the class struggle. To argue this does not require analysing any one play in detail; it will serve rather to consider basic features shared by all or several plays. More particularly, I propose to set about a preliminary reading of Marlowe's discontinuous form by asking as to the respective objects of blasphemy and indifference, or in other words by addressing the question of the fabular form's content. Apropos of blasphemy, I have already suggested that Marlowe is especially attacking the moralizing conventions bequeathed to Elizabethan drama, and namely the whole tragic tradition best summed up by the Mirror for Magistrates.4 Since this tradition exhorts both religious and political piety and quietism, to attack it is to attack a lot. One wants to narrow things down; but we should observe that the very difficulty of distinguishing a privileged target is itself significant of the fundamental nature of Marlowe's hostility. Still, religion seems a good candidate for the privileged object of blasphemy; but then it must quickly be added that it is religion come under the spell of Machiavelli, absolutist religion, religion as policy.5

Marlowe and the Utopia of Sprung Desire 221 Marlowe loves to scandalize his audience with images of Machiavellian Christianity: think of Ferneze's expedient piety in The Jew of Malta, or of Sigismond's good Christian treachery in the first act of Tamberlaine II. Or again, think of Tamburlaine as scourge of God: does not the blasphemy of this claim attach to the idea that God might indeed work through such a grisly wonder, and in the suggestion that Tamburlaine might be a kind of sign from God, the symbol of a new - Machiavellian - order of religion? That Machiavellian religion is the object of malediction means, in turn, that political power itself is being taken in vain, or more precisely, that those who 'use' religion without acknowledging it, and above all the various absolutist states, are also cursed. Such a fundamental grievance can only stem, surely, from some basic class antagonism; it is this, as well as his un-Christian orientation, which makes one want to refer to the tragedies as blasphemous, and hesitate, until one recalls the ritual origins of the genre, before calling them satiric. Marlowe is not really interested in satirizing the excesses of clientage, for example; he does not write, as poets focused on the court tend to, in the name of some legitimate form of aristocratic power. Nor is there a 'good' religion to be found in Marlowe; though his own religious position, so far as it can be inferred, would seem ultra-Protestant, and lower class in its determinants. But the main point here is just that Marlowe in his tragedies abuses the social form, the institution, of power itself, and not some perversion of a 'true' power. This diagnosis poses a problem. For Marlowe does not only attack power's absolutist form, he also writes from it; one is tempted to say that he is almost as big a fan of power as many of the more Foucauldian New Historicists consciously or not showed themselves to be when New Historicism was in its early days. The question indeed rises as to whether absolute power is not the object of his indifference, what exists on the record prior to morality and blasphemy, what can only be affirmed but not judged or rejected. And the answer is that it is, but not in the form of an institution but rather as a more pervasive thing, a protean force. If there is one crucial theme or 'ideologeme' upon which Marlowe's tragedies are built, then it must be the boundlessness of desire, the contradictory absoluteness of the will. Marlowe's tragedies are tailored to convey and explore this ideologeme; they are records of boundless desire, of passion sprung free from conventional limits and ends. Thus does the elementary logic of his form come to light, whose constitutive features may all be enlisted as evidence of the primacy of desire. Witness, for

222 Sprung Desire and Groups in Flux example, the 'incremental repetition' of the plots, whose aim is to establish the fixity of desire, on the one hand, and to bring it by stages closer to a confrontation with the limits that constitute the preconditions of its boundlessness, on the other. Or consider the inconsistency of the characters, which reflects lack of concern with plausibility canons. Or again, think of the manifest and unapologetic telescoping of incident; the tendential drift toward melodramatic declamation; and finally, of course, the mighty line itself, as it is used in Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus. All these features reflect and convey sprung desire. In addition to its intensity, desire in Marlowe exhibits two distinguishing features. First, it is absolute, or single-minded, in relation to its object. Tamburlaine wants conquests, military fame, kingdoms; Faustus wants superhuman knowledge; the Jew of Malta, money; Edward II, young male favorites. Second, as should be clear from this array of objects, desire in Marlowe is malleable; that is, it always has something arbitrary about it, it has no one privileged object. Evidence of this is not only to be found in the gamut of plays itself, but also in each of the plays mentioned, in the encounter that each character has with his desire's preconditions or limits. So Tamburlaine, though all for conquest, seems to grant Beauty motivational primacy (V.ii.72 ff.); so Faustus must be constantly diverted, once he has chosen magic, from the recognition that his true desire is for God; so the Jew of Malta is forced to realize that to accumulate money he needs someone else to rule, and that he cannot do both at the same time (V.ii); so Edward discovers, after he surrenders his crown, that his chief want is the crown and not 'friendship' (V.i.51-83). The truth of any one desire is always elsewhere; but this elsewhere is not occupied by the same object. Desire is thus even shiftier than it will come to be in its Freudian incarnation. As in Freud, so in Marlowe, desire travels in several currencies, but in Marlowe there is no privileged or determinant currency. Desire is defined, indeed, in terms of the search for a condign currency. For a perfect image of desire in Marlowe, you can do no better than to consider Barabas's opening soliloquy - really a declamation to the audience - in The Jew of Malta. The Jew is a connoisseur of money: he scorns silver, admires gold, likes diamonds and precious jewels even better. Clearly the perfect form of currency would harbour all value within a geometrical point. Barabas would horde value itself; but there is no currency for that. The boundlessness of desire is dialectically linked to its arbitrariness, to the absence of any ultimate object. All the same, one wants to know

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what this desire is 'really for.' One necessarily asks as to the determinants of desire's boundlessness. For hints as to these, one seems compelled to look for peculiarly privileged currencies, on the one hand, and for adjuncts of desire, on the other - obsessive motifs or ideologemes that seem to come up 'along with' desire, which might provide a diagnosis for it, which might explain its absoluteness. Let us mention four such diagnoses here, each of which might be expanded into a fullfledged reading of Marlowe's tragic form. First, there is a rhetorical diagnosis, provided by the consistent verbal melodrama, the hyperbole of the plays, which comes virtually to be a theme in its own right. Expanded, this diagnosis might read that plays of absolute desire are what happen when the humanist emphasis upon rhetoric is set free on the stage. Second, there is a political diagnosis, suggested by the pervasiveness of Machiavelli, and of the absolutist problematic. According to this reading, it is the fantasm of absolute power that empties the world of significance, making it at once necessary and impossible to desire any one thing. Third, there is a religious diagnosis, provided especially by the pervasiveness of hell, or of an eschatological framework, in the plays. If this were expanded, it would cast the tragic boundlessness of desire as the effect of the religious crisis of the English Reformation and its deep anxieties. Taken together, rhetorical, political, and religious diagnoses suggest that desire's absoluteness must correspond to some more basic transformation, a shift at what 'we' would call the level of socio-economic relations. A clue to this shift, a fourth diagnosis, is to be found in the recurrent motif of the unclassed, yet popular hero. The 'riot-inspired' early scenes of Tamburlaine, in which Tamburlaine's charisma is clearly predicated upon his popularity, his expression of a collective desire for liberty, offer the best example of this ideologeme. But Faustus is originally of common stock; the Jew is certainly declasse in relation to official Maltese society, and he proves to be most in his element with Ithamore and the conycatchers; Edward II metaphorically popularizes himself, travestying the name of monarch in the aristocrats' scandalized eyes, in his friendship with Gaveston. 'Declassement' is pervasive, and offers the most direct and positivistically plausible explanation for the springing of passion into desire's boundless intensity. Absolute desire appears most cogently and simply as the expression of declassed popularity. I would now hold that this motif ought to be read as a testimony and response to the incipient but increasing atomization of the English polity

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in this period of the transition to capitalism, and to the vexed position of humanism as a representative ideology in this context. The point to make about atomization is that it is a generalized phenomenon: the disappearance of feudal personality of relationship where it existed, the exacerbation or replacement of traditional paternal or avuncular relationships by more strictly economic ties, has by the late sixteenth century been effected in the towns, in the crafts and industries, as well as on the land; and this growth of mercenary relations subsumes the political sphere as well, insofar as its political corollary, or dialectical precondition, is the emergence of the absolutist state,6 which, as incarnated in the court, constitutes the very homeground of insecurity. Atomization was already partly responsible for the startling symbolic equation drawn, for example, in Book I of Utopia, between the exemplary atomized citizen (in this case, the beggar thief) and the king.7 Both are unhoused (though the king only metaphorically), and they are equally insecure and 'determined' in their actions. Marlowe's fables of declassed kings, magi, merchants, and shepherds clearly rely on a similar symbolic equation of the powerful and the pitiful, presupposing the levelling in fantasy of all subjects. But they make this presupposition to a different end. The general drift of fabular drama is to make universal declassement the indifferent historical ground of the fantasy of absolute power, of boundless desire. One should already be able to see how this drift is not just a reflection of atomization, but rather a strategic response to it and the class configuration that it determines. Marlowe may have nothing to curse the ruling class with but the moral fable, which they live by. But though they live by it, the fable does not really belong to them - so Marlowe, in the fable, indifferently affirms. Marlowe restores the fable to its premoral rights in the face of, in defiance of, the ruling class. He opens its (their) sacred closure up to History's winds. But one can better understand the logic of this move if one sees it in relation to the problems of humanism, and Marlowe's 'affiliation,' by training and temperament, to this social grouping. The humanists' coherence as a class or class faction was always tenuous, precisely because they were an ideological class. Insofar as they formed a separate class, they necessarily existed to represent some other (putatively ruling) class's position, or to seal the differences between different classes; to use Gramsci's term, they were always in tendency a /^gtfmorry-making class. The more acute humanists were thus constantly forced to ask themselves whether they were willing to represent the class or classes in

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a position to rule - whether, as 'More' and Peter Giles counsel in Book I of Utopia, they will play by the rules of the game and give counsel, or whether, with Hythlodaeus, they will opt out, and choose to live in utopia. That Utopia even exists, that opting out is proposed as a serious option, constitutes evidence, I have argued, that the humanists' profoundest representative relation, their elective affinity, was - not with the court or aristocracy, as is usually assumed, and for which there is naturally an abundance of positive evidence - but with the diffuse but powerful class of smallholders, from which most humanists incidentally hailed. Utopian communism represented a fantastic solution to the problem of how this smallholding class could assert its own interests, and affirm its virtually metaphysical solidarity, in the face of absolutism and emergent capitalism. Now Marlowe in his way and at his level was perhaps even more ambivalent and less willing than More, when it came to serving Tudor despotism; nor can he be seen, so plausibly as More again, as capitalism's sponsor. But by his time, the smallholding class has become so divided that its problems have become insoluble even by hypothesis or in fantasy: the — inclusive - middle-class Utopia has receded, and with it perhaps the instigating basis from which a more detailed and soberly positive critique of the stalled Tudor absolutism might be carried out. We have noted above the increasing respectability of the yeomanry and the emergence of a class language of 'sorts.' This is the place to observe the emergence of a coherent Elizabethan underclass - coherent, at least, as represented and satirized in dramatic and pamphlet fiction which also testifies to the increasing stratification, if not the dissolution, of that paradigmatically atomized class of small proprietors for whom More wrote. It seems plausible to suppose that Marlowe had, or felt he had, to make a fatal choice with which part of the smallholding class he would throw in his lot; and the evidence tempts one to believe that, while he hedged his bets some, he threw it in finally with the underclass. But the underclass's place in the process of production, when identified with, would seem to limit its typical critical function to that of cynically mirroring other spheres of society; and it would seem to project, though a powerful, yet a rather abstractly totalizing Utopian impulse, an archetypally carnivalized Utopia of power-flow and reflexive, or spectacular, consumption. For the serious 'populist' humanist, this is not enough, and breeds frustration. But Marlowe does the best he can by levelling social hierarchy in the boundless desire of fable, and by suggesting that the power driving absolutism derives, ultimately, from the underclass -

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that the underclass is more than just a mirror, not merely paradigmatic, but the privileged locus of History. Unruly history erupting in the form of the fable - this, for Marlowe, is the only viable critique of the powers that be. Yet in its way it is stronger than satire, however primitive; and it is not to be reduced to any simple sort of cursing.

Chapter IV. Sprung Desire and Groups in Flux: On the Politics of the Utopian Impulse in Marlowe and Shakespeare IV. Hi. Groups in Flux in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I

The foregoing reconstruction of the impulse behind Marlowe's tragic form is doubtless too summary. To argue that Marlowe displaces the privileged modal opposition between travesty and allegory into a generic antinomy between satire and fable is to simplify a great deal, to make the plays out to be more like one another, in their essential features and purposes, than they actually are. Yet this simplification is easier to arrive at, and will seem more legitimate, than any we can make about Shakespeare, whose dramatic productions (even within individual genres, as for example that of tragedy) exhibit much more formal variety, and whose poetic style cannot with any pretence of accuracy be associated with a single characterizing term such as 'sublime.' With Shakespeare, it would seem, a summary reconstruction cannot even be attempted; to generalize about the basic impulse behind his production, to describe his particular way of negotiating the opposition betwen popular and ruling-class modes of representation, one must look for particular devices or mechanisms, ways of handling forms or genres rather than forms themselves, or for a general term or terms to describe such ways. I have already implied that rather than trying to displace the initial opposition utterly in order to overcome it, Shakespeare lets it be seen and felt the better then to work on it; I will now suggest that he manages this by means of a habitual and various practice of parody, whose extension through the play, and whose imperfections and interruptions, prevent it from assuming a single definite meaning. A comparison with Marlowe will help highlight Shakespeare's 'moments.' In Dr. Faustus, there is a comic subplot centring on the adventures of one Robin, a clown, who having been impressed with the

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conjuring show of Wagner, Faustus's man, absconds with his book, apparently intending to use it to lewd ends (the bawdier A-text version of this plot has Robin telling the audience, on absconding: 'now will I make all the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure stark naked before me'); 1 in the play's event, however, Robin only calls on Mephistopheles to help him get away with a petty crime, and is apparently as frightened by him as those he has wanted to scare off.2 He winds up associating with the drunken crew of itinerants (carter, horse-courser, and a certain Dick of unspecified occupation) who have been victimized by Faustus's pranks in the latter half of the play and whose rebellious intrusion into the Duke of Variholt's manor Faustus encourages so that he can then put it down, charming them into dumb examples of Order.3 It should be allowed that this subplot does not seem finished in either A or B text; perhaps it existed in a more elaborate form, and was more complexly articulated in relation to the tale of Faustus's life and death. Nonetheless its essential function as parody seems clear. There is no denying that Robin is there partly to travesty Faustus's lofty ambition, to reduce Faustus's heretical magic to a crude material level; his unwitting mimicry of Faustus shows Faustus's ambition up as a lower-class and perversely rebellious affair. It might seem, then, that a Carnival element is working simply to moralizing, Orderly ends here. Yet, though one can certainly satisfy oneself with this reading if one wants, it misses all that is singular in Marlowe's hero, that respect in which Faustus is very much a post-Reformation creation, a period Everyman. Robin mimics Faustus, not just in respect of his practising bad magic to dubious ends, but in respect of the restlessness and arbitrariness of his magical impulse (Robin wants all the young women of his parish, but settles for a drinking cup). It is absolute desire itself, in its religious aspect, that is really being travestied. Thus the plot has two basic functions. First, it works to heighten and lend point to a primitive satire on the religious ambition of the age, reducing ruling-class manipulation of and anxiety over its religion to the level of the bodily urges of the 'lower sort' (and that the moralizing appearances cannot be cleanly separated from this sharper, more destructive effect, that the subplot provides Faustus's scandalous desire with a traditional cover or alibi even while giving it the force of blasphemy - this only increases the satire's force, rendering its criticism the more savage). Second, and especially in its extension and its ultimate merger with the main action, the subplot attributes additional, and

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indicative, social texture to Faustus's fable, thus tendentially diagnosing or locating Faustus's desire as a popular 'symptom.' According to this reading, the gravity that pulls Faustus some way down the social ladder and into the milieu of the jestbook is not so much of a moral-theologic as a sociological nature. If there is an allegorical point, it is not so much a moral as a descriptive one: namely, that it is from the jestbook world that Faustus's story - and his lofty desire - proceed. And on this reading, the encounter between Robin's milieu and Faustus's magic, in the scene at the Duke of Vanholt's, does not have as its message that evil will take care of itself, but rather gives off a curious Utopian effect: in bringing the tavern world into the manor and transforming it into dumb spectacle, Faustus elevates Robin and company to the level of the historical spectacles he has been entertaining the ruling class with hitherto, and attributes to them some of the same alienating power that those spectacles have.4 The homeostasis occurring at the end of this scene, after Faustus has turned the itinerants' drunken triumph and curiosity against them, suspending their unruly Carnival, provides the audience with a paradoxically charged image of underclass power: Faustus deploys and fixes the energies of the alehouse at the heart of the manor. The First Part of Henry IV features a somewhat similar use of parallel plots, at least with regard to the following two elements: that the 'subplot' centring on Falstaff is an itinerant or underclass plot (with the significant difference that in this case the underclass is - largely but not wholly because of Falstaff - glamorized, and more or less expressly criminal) ; and that the lower-class action loses its uniformity midway through the play, and merges with the main action as Falstaff goes to war. This subplot is of course much more developed and complex than the Roger plot extant in Faustus. That in itself might be used as an indication that it is being deployed to essentially different ends. But I would want to argue that even if this plot were not so developed, even if we were only shown the outline of the Gadshill robbery and its aftermath, it would still have a different effect from Marlowe's underclass plot. Once we grasp the analogy between the Gadshill caper and the fight for the crown occupying the aristocratic characters in the play, the Falstaff subplot does promote or send off a 'shock effect' which seems momentarily primary: the immediate message of this analogy, which focuses on the theft and countertheft of 'sacred' property, is that rulingclass relations are precisely as honourable as the relations among carters, ostler, and the 'setter' Gadshill in the splendid little atmospheric scene Shakespeare includes to introduce the Gadshill business (II.i),

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and that Henry IV's attempt to arrogate legitimacy for himself is exactly as noble as the foundered Falstaff's desperate pleas for his horse. The initial effect of the subplot, in other words, once perceived as parody, is to strip the main action of such glamour and such legitimacy as it might seem to have on its own. But this reading, though it by no means 'wears off or fades away, does not have the exclusive sting it might otherwise have (that the reductive reading does indeed have in Faustus). This is partly because the aristocratic action is already rather clearly set out as a Machiavellian powerstruggle, and the various codes of honour, right, and national unity already defiled, or at least marked out as expedient, to begin with: after seeing Henry intentionally provoke the Percy conspiracy into action in I.iii, and in the course of witnessing the older Percies manipulate Hotspur into a leadership role in the rebellion, putting him at grave risk for the sake of his charisma, the audience can hardly find itself greatly scandalized or surprised by the message sent out by the subplot's mimicry of the main action, the message that all is theft. It might indeed be argued that this parody serves less to underscore and clarify the real moral sense of the aristocratic action than to put some of the joy, some of the zest of consumption, back into plunder (thus clarifying, in true Carnival fashion, what these political games are really, or should be, all about). But the more strictly momentary character of the parody's critical reduction is also partly owing to the ample space and specific stress accorded the corpulent person and ceaseless self-parody of the embodiment of plunder's joy, for these are hardly required for the purposes of debunking. It seems undeniable, instead, that Falstaff s self-aggrandizing theatrical dominance has as one of its salient effects to make an allegory of him, a disorderly figure of Order. This reading doubtless becomes more 'correct' in the course of the play (and of II Henry IV), after Falstaff has been separated from Hal, and his vices grow more vicious and decadent (this last in the strict sense of depending on the former status which still characterizes him, his knighthood). But this allegorical reading is no more lasting, and I believe less dominant, than the cynical one, partly because this reading too seems somewhat irrelevantly general in relation to the treacherous politics practised among the contending aristocratic groups, but also because the peculiar stress laid on Falstaff s modus operandi in his milieu, and on the visible sign, the literal grossness of this mode, encourages the audience to ask what use is being made of it. Of course the audience can hardly help

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asking this question, or seeing the two plots and milieus in more specific, and as it were dialogical, interrelation, given the presence of a character who is clearly and expressly in a position to make use of Falstaff, and whose dramatic vocation is evidently to bring the popular and the courtly together in some novel fashion, namely Hal. Hal's relation to both groups to which he belongs - the court which he is of but not, for the better part of the play, in; the tavern retinue which he is in but not of- is complex, and his 'synthesis' of the two groups in the play's career, if it is right to call it that, is notoriously hard to read. Nonetheless I think it is clear that, though Hal professes to be using his swaggering reputation simply as a foil for the time when he reveals his true character, metaphorically staging a Carnival to end all carnivals,6 he is actually profiting more than he will allow from his time spent with Falstaff and among tapsters and knights of the moon. It is enough, perhaps, to note that though Hal does not ever acknowledge as much, he has enlisted his retinue from the tavern milieu in order to put distance between himself and Henry's court. His strategy is to provide himself not just with one, but with two retroactive alibis. After he has emerged from the tavern into the light of day, claiming as his own his truly honourable identity, it will be clear that he was never really in the tavern, never partook of its sins. But neither, more importantly, was he in Henry's court, nor was he a party to Henry's great crime (the usurpation) -for when that was played out, as the miracle of his transformation will testify, it wasn't the court, it was the tavern that he was not in. Can it be a coincidence that while cultivating this strategy he is killing the time in witty dialogue among con men and with a master, indeed a creature, of alibi? For Falstaff is not only adroit at exculpating himself from specific crimes; his ceaseless self-parody might be said to constitute a continuous alibi, the 'technical' means by which Falstaff distinguishes himself from his group, by which he secures a position very much in but not quite of it. It has frequently been recognized that Falstaff is a distorted figure for the popular, an anti-popular representative of the People. His insistence on his superiority to the others in Hal's retinue quite clearly reflects his gentle status; it is a constitutive trait, by no means to be dismissed as 'simply' humorous. But that Falstaff s humour, his selfparody, in fact comprises the rhetorical dimension of this paradox, both identifying him with and distancing him from the 'people,' has been less often observed. If we read Hal's strategy and Falstaff s manner thus, it would seem difficult to take Hal's contempt for the tavern milieu, his denial that

232 Sprung Desire and Groups in Flux there is much there to be learned or known7, at face value; and it becomes impossible to feel that Hal's strategy only coincidentally engages him in repartee with a master of alibi. Instead we are led to take Hal's denial, his own status as an anti-popular popular figure, either as testimony that he has learned something from the tavern milieu - i.e., that he is imitating Falstaff with the freedom of the good humanist rhetorician - or as situating evidence, as indication that he is responding to the same or similar pressures as Falstaff at his own level. The distinction is an important one; but either way, the audience is clued as to the 'dialogical' or synthetic significance of the later phases of Hal's career. So for example, however earnest one chooses to play Hal's rigid adherence to the romantic appearances of an obviously outdated military code of honour (as witness his offer of a single combat to Hotspur, and his final eulogy on his victim [V.iv.86 ff.]), his effacement before the traditional values can be understood as the antithetical correlative of Falstaff's self-parody, a kind of wilful immersion in the group which leaves the locus of one's real identity similarly in doubt. Likewise, whether Hal actually means his 'gift' of the dead Hotspur to Falstaff this way or not, it imposes itself partly as a concession that Falstaff has indeed been largely responsible for Hal's kill and waxing honour, that these are indeed 'collective' accomplishments. In this dialogical reading or moment, then, the point of the parody is neither to debunk traditional or courtly orderly values nor to justify them. Its aim is rather to posit and explore positive and negative relations, homologies and differences, between popular and ruling-class groups or milieux; and its chief focus is on the dynamics and relations of what we might call groups-in-flux, or in other words on atomization in its effects, not on desire as such, but on group dynamics and relations, and on the collectively oriented modes of behaviour, the rhetorics, that characterize them. This said, it should be allowed and stressed that Shakespeare's exploration is structured so as to make possible and tolerate a high degree of ambiguity (in the particular dimension or moment in question). Even if we read Hal, against his will, as imitating Falstaff in some way, much remains to be determined about the political significance of this imitation, about just how Falstaff is used. Even if we see the point of the parody as that of establishing and exploring quasisystematic relations (homologies and differences) between ruling-class and popular actions or group dynamics, much remains to be determined about the issue, the ultimate rhetorical effect, of the parodic dialogue. This indeterminacy or ambiguity, I would now suggest, has

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everything to do with, it is itself determined in a general way by, the dynamic instability of the groups as represented; while it is more specifically and 'mechanically' effected by the malleability of the company's modes of dramatic representation. Let us consider briefly what I take to be the climactic event of the play, that in which, after hearing Hal's inadequate obituary, Falstaff rises from his feigned death, descants indignantly and eloquently on what it means to counterfeit, and then stabs the 'truly' dead Hotspur on the pretext that he might be counterfeiting death too, but 'really' to steal Hal's honour (V.iv.lll ff.). Strict allegorical and Carnivalesque readings are equally available here, and have an equally limited or local validity. Falstaff s 'murder' of the dead Hotspur is as dishonourable as Hal's slaying of the live one was noble, on the one hand. But on the other hand, Falstaff s parody of Hal's kill is more true to its essence than the act itself, and strips it of its honourable identity by showing it up for what it really is: for in the long view which the parody keeps before us, Hotspur's defeat has been set up before, and Hal's victory over Hotspur merely the contingent, bloody end of a career whose contours have been predetermined by Henry and the older Percies, merely the confirming episode in what is really a collective political butchery. Falstaff s glorification of counterfeiting as a way of life,8 in its contrast with his murder of Hotspur, does not cover over this interpretation of Hal's act, but only renders Hal's butchery the more 'natural,' the more deeply Carnivalesque: we laugh at the inevitability of Death even as we recognize the nasty political contingency of this particular death. Yet, because of the specific dramatic context in which this reversal takes place, the strictly Carnivalesque sense of Falstaff s gesture, its stripping of (Hal's) Honour and celebration of natural-popular energy, is muted and largely displaced. Since Falstaff s attack on Hotspur is at some basic level intended for Hal — since it responds to Hal's over-hasty obituary, and by extension to his withdrawal from the popular milieu his show of superfluous violence offers itself rather pressingly, in its dialogical immediacy, as an image of— displaced — personal and class antagonism. And it is largely because Falstaff s violent repetition of Hal's act is replete with such specific antagonism, I think, that on a reading of the play's text anyway one cannot help feeling that the 'real' function of Falstaff s murder of the dead Hotspur is, not to strip Hal's act momentarily of its spurious honour, to expose it for what it is, but rather to drain the new Honour of all blame, to provide Hal with a scapegoat. This displacement of the Carnival moment, this dialogical redisposition of Carnival

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parody, would seem clearly to speak of the class basis of the new monarchical regime for which Hal is coming to stand. Cutting rather crudely through a great deal of condensation, part of the narrative message would seem to be that English 'absolutism' crystallizes on the foundation of a fixed antagonism between two basic and diffuse social groupings (the older aristocracy and the common people), and in response to a constant threat of disorder at its base which it has itself helped to promote. But it is difficult to determine precisely how this displacement was oriented in the performance, and thus what the politics of the play were at this crucial level. Was, for example, the displacement put on display as well as being enacted? And if it was put on display - if we are given to see Carnival itself, the popular mode, undergoing a kind of displacement and reconstruction, along with Falstaff and the tavern scene, in the course of the play - then how is the display oriented? what does it encourage, what does it make possible, to be thought or done? It will be understood that this difficulty is an 'objective' one; that the dialogical instability would most likely have been impressed upon the audience, have been rendered more or less thematic, in some way; and that, insofar as such a theme calls for explanation, the play diagnoses its own orientational instability by reference to the shifting, mobile nature of the milieux or groups presented. This is not to say, of course, that the play is utterly unstable at the dialogical level (whatever that would mean), or that the orientation of Carnival's displacement would not have been inflected in different, definite ways depending on the way the play was performed. I would suggest, indeed, that the dialogical instability of the play in textual form (i.e., when imagined on stage) has the effect of throwing a great deal of signifying emphasis on, and was itself partly determined by the relative importance of, the strictly theatrical aspect of the play's production, and more particularly by the variability of dramatic modes of presentation. To know what the scene in which Falstaff stabs Hotspur's corpse finally meant, to assess how its ambiguity was weighed and deployed in performance, it would be necessary to possess more hard information than can probably now be gathered about how the actor who played Falstaff presented his part in this episode. This would not entail learning how the actor in question understood, or was given by Shakespeare and the company to understand, this scene (though that would of course be important too) so much as ascertaining the extent and quality of the 'burlesque' or 'self-expressive' element in the role of Falstaff as presented. It seems clear enough that Falstaff must have been presented in

Groups in Flux in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I

235

a more popular, 'self-expressive' (or non-illusionistic) manner than were the other roles, and that in some scenes he is quite the traditional Vice, quite burlesque: the actor must have called a good deal of attention to his person when Falstaff laments his predicament before Gadshill (II.ii.10 ff.), for instance, and when he explains how he has gone about collecting his tattered troops (IV.ii.ll ff.); and whenever Falstaffs prodigious bulk is mocked (and these occasions are of course extremely numerous) some self-reference must have been involved - especially since Falstaffs fat was most likely in large part exposed stage apparatus, visible prop (whether it took the form of pillows, straw, or some other stuffing). Just how burlesque Falstaff was played makes a good deal of difference to the significance of the play's parody, as can especially be seen in the climactic scene. For if, for example, the actor presented Falstaffs resurrection and savage attack in a grossly burlesque or selfexpressive manner, that would presumably release the strictly Carriivalesque moment of the parody in a relatively pure and striking fashion (though such a presentation would not prevent the displacement of the Carnivalesque - i.e., the scapegoating of its disorderly travesty, and specification and fixing of its antagonism — from being registered, nor would it necessarily keep it from being registered somewhat critically). But the textual evidence seems to suggest that Falstaffs presentation, if uneven and occasionally frankly burlesque, was normatively more nuanced and 'transitional.' What is happening, in Falstaffs staging, is that a popular acting style, popular self-presentation, is being written into the role itself, is coming to characterize a specific mode of behaviour in a particular group (and, by extension, a group dynamic). In Falstaffian self-parody, popular self-presentation takes on illusionistic or representational force, and one imagines that it was at least partly this nuanced and mixed mode of dramatic presentation - not new but more brilliantly and securely put into practice than it had been before - that made Falstaff such an event in the history of the theatre. If this is so, then it seems unlikely that the climactic scene would have been played in gross burlesque. It is more probable that the actor's rendition of the climax exploited the ambiguities inherent in its displacement or redeployment of Carnival, subtly calling attention, in doing so, to the prerogative of his own technique, his own craft - it can hardly be an accident that Falstaffs ruminations on 'counterfeiting' contain a selfexpressive panegyric to the acting trade9 - and that his performance of the parody's ideological tensions varied depending on the theatrical circumstances and occasion - so that sometimes the scapegoating of Fal-

236 Sprung Desire and Groups in Flux

staff might be highlighted in such a way as to estrange it and encourage questioning reflection, thus giving it a critical force; sometimes the class antagonism implicit in Falstaff s gesture might be rendered prominent while the parody and its displacement were allowed to remain more or less within illusionistic confines; and so on. We might think, then, of a scene such as this as a Utopian theatrical moment, in which Shakespeare's theatre has things as many ways as it can, both celebrating the apparent abundance of its symbolic capacity, and testing the limits of its ideological power, in focusing the decisive signifying differences as much as possible in the gestural, purely theatrical dimension of acting conventions. Danby's oft-cited formulation, that the Elizabethan theatre came to constitute an organ of social thought,10 seems particularly appropriate and adequate when applied to a scene such as this (and to a practice of parody such as we have in I Henry IV), in which the theatre is demonstrably flexing and questioning its representational capacities, as long as we remember that even such questioning is, in ultimate motivation and in effect, inherently ideological. But I do not think that the play's 'thought' stops quite here, with a celebration of the theatre's ability to capture the general outlines of a class dialogue in complex flux, and a tacit admission of its inability to disengage from the dialogical conflict utterly, to fix and assess it in some neutral way. Or to put this another way, one may locate, in such extremely theatrical moments as this one, a more positive attempt to figure the conditions of the dialogue's possibility, and thus to specify the parody's own cognitive limits. This attempt takes the form of an indirect or incidental (i.e., theatrically provided) diagnosis of the homology between popular and aristocratic group dynamics; its trace appears especially in the accruing significance of the figure of plunder or baggage, in the extremely condensed or symptomatic character of this 'theme.' The question implicitly posed by the parodic dialogue is, of course: what makes for the homology between aristocratic and conycatching groups? what accounts for this structural levelling (and the effective evisceration, above all, of the feudal code of honour)? One may of course follow Tillyard (and many others) here, and say simply that Shakespeare's assumption is that Bolingbroke's usurpation has this as its consequence; I do not doubt that this message is there, but it would seem to be an important effect, a totalizing virtue, of the parodic structure to make us look for more than such 'high-political' explanations. It leads us to look, instead, for some form of third party, some middle man or group; and what the figure of baggage does, in its recur-

Groups in Flux in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I 237

rence, is indirectly expose the obvious - that the absent middle is not absent at all, that it is very much there, and motivates much of the play's action. Consider the Canterbury pilgrims at Gadshill, so willing to give up their goods to Falstaff and his inept highwaymen, who evidently wind up bound and gagged, so much baggage, on stage (II.ii). Consider Falstaffs vagrant army, 'food for powder,' the stand-ins for those in a position and with the wealth to buy their way out of service (FV.ii). Splendidly resonant, condignly theatrical scenes these, whose accruing, indefinite 'message' is reactivated both by the climactic gesture in which Falstaff rises and kills the potentially active plunder that Hotspur has now become, and by the concluding 'image' of Falstaff as Hal's middleman (baggage before, baggage behind). That message must be to this effect: that the very stuff of plunder has somehow become an active force for itself, and that those absent parties who have bought themselves out of the war, and produced the vagrant army, are really the action's main movers. In the plunder theme, or in other words in the play's epistemological dimension, Shakespeare's theatre gestures toward the anonymous force of what in Marxism is called primitive accumulation, and toward the agency, not of a group, but of a class. But this agency (which is, then, what necessitates the new form of kingship that Hal obviously represents) does not seem to be available for secure representation: if it may be spoken of as a presence on stage, then one would have to say that it is presented rather than represented; or, better, that class is 'there' (arid that the epistemological moment exists as such in this play) by virtue of the shifting difference between presentational and representational dramatic modes.

Chapter V. Flights from the Tudor Settlement; or. Carnival and Commonwealth Revised V.i. Nashe's Lenten Utopia

Thomas Nashe's reputation among Renaissance scholars seems to have declined over the last few years. In the older historicist understanding, he figured as a sub-canonical writer. He had not managed to find a narrative form in prose so significant as what the unquestionably canonical writers (Spenser and Shakespeare) discovered in poetry and drama. But partly because of that - or because his texts' relative incompleteness was the other side of a ceaseless, exuberant experimentalism - Nashe could count as a representative Elizabethan, and his various essays be read as raw or partly processed material, indicating in their very defects, and above all in their rhetorical and lexical voracity, the narrative habits and dispositions indigenous to the period. Then, around twenty-five ago, when New Criticism met theory, Nashe became a writer who could inspire real enthusiasm, partly because it was felt that his visceral energies had till then only been appreciated, not analysed or explained; and he received some searching criticism.2 But with theory's drift into the newscholarly and canon-constructing environment called cultural studies, Nashe seems to be losing his appeal; as always a writer first, a stylist, he evidently does not fit readily into the new canons, which are generally content-oriented even when the theory behind them seems fancy.3 Trade consensus now has him as at best an interesting, but over-appreciated, writer (where 'over-appreciated' means 'done'). Though resurrecting Nashe goes beyond my scope here, I feel he does have still unappreciated qualities, the most important of which I will try to present. My brief is the comparatively narrow one of showing how he is an interesting writer in the context of the general topic of Utopia and popular festivity. To introduce the topic, I will begin by compar-

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 239 ing the utopianism of his form to that of his close peer Marlowe. This will issue in a brief analysis of Nashe's signature work, Piers Penniless, whose aim will be to demonstrate how the narrative syntax of the Nashe pamphlet typically raises allegorical-Utopian questions. The body of the chapter section will then be devoted to an extended analysis of Nashe's last, most Utopian work, Nashes Lenten Stuffe: The Praise of the Red Herrynge. 1. The Ideology of Style and Narrative Form in Marlowe and Nashe The extent of the similarity between the two writers' biographical situations should first be registered: Nashe like Marlowe a middle-class provincial, university-educated but un-degreed, and of somewhat dramatically unsettled personal circumstances though (and partly because) quite stably committed to London and to writing as his fixed interest in the kingdom. One may extend the list of similarities to their self-definitions as writers, their choices of careers and identities. Marlowe, on the evidence, seems surer of his medium and what he wanted to do, a more committed and secure dramatist than Nashe was a prose writer. \fet, granted that one cannot be certain that Nashe would not have written more plays if given the chance, he does seem to have recognized prose as the medium for which he had been chosen, and the miscellany (or gallimaufry) as his form. 4 And finally, what may be said with considerable justice of Marlowe's drama - that the writing came first with him, that plot, platform, and all was in some unusually strong sense a pretext for verbal performance, and especially for the display of the mighty lineb something like this may be claimed yet more justly of Nashe's pamphlets. If we further specify these last two similarities, a picture begins to appear of the writers' related but divergent relationships to the popular and to Utopia. Let us begin with the question of the privileging of style or verbal performance. I want to say that Nashe's style, and the motives for its privileging, are more impersonal or 'objective' than Marlowe's. This will seem wrong at first: one might think that a competent dramatist's relation to language must necessarily be more objective than a pamphleteer's on account of the range of situations and characters to be conveyed in almost any dramatic plot. And insofar as the process of matching speech to gesture and situation, marked by Weimann as one of the drama's great distinguishing accomplishments in this period, is well under way in Marlowe, it is indeed the case that he 'has more dis-

240 Flights from the Tudor Settlement tance' on his characters' styles than Nashe does on his personae's (if persona is even the right term, and does not already imply more distance than typically exists between 'author' and 'speaker'). Yet there is another, perhaps more significant sense, one more specifically to do with the writers' privileging of style, in which this is not so, indeed in which it is the other way around. One can address the matter by invoking the received opposition between rhetoric and style, or between more rhetorical and more individualistic or personal styles. It may be mainly because one thinks of Marlowe's great speeches against the background of previous dramatic declamation (Gorboduc, for example) that it does not seem incongruous to characterize them as practices of style in the limited, individualistic sense. Not that Marlowe's monologues are to be understood as emanating from his unique bodily recesses; much will have to happen - conventional prose rhetoric, for example, be much more immersed in and estranged from everyday speech - before Barthes's radical understanding of style (as articulated in Writing Degree Zero) can come to seem normative. But they do impress as having been crafted, or chiselled from the block of dramaticdeclamatory convention, if with expressly humanist-rhetorical tools, yet from the angle of a particular vision, an individual attitude and sensibility. Nashe's way with language, his basic intention with regard to it, contrasts with this by virtue of its rhetoricism: the unconscious understanding is that language-practice is such an indelibly collective affair that the desire to put something like one's personal stamp upon it, to give it individual finish, goes against its grain. This is a difficult point to fix, much less to prove. It helps to compare Marlowe's stylistic response to his dramatic 'background' to Nashe's creation of his own, looser, more mature style, evidently in good part out of and in reaction to Euphuism, with the anti-Marprelate assignment as efficient cause.6 One is not tempted to use a sculpting or narrowing metaphor for the selection involved in that creation. To the contrary, Nashe, in de-artificializing his language somewhat, would seem to have opened his manner up so as to reintroduce, if not everyday speech, then at least a central relation to popular rhythms, idioms, and modes of figuration. This last moves close to the essential issue. For it is not so much a matter of Nashe's making prose more inclusive, or of his writing a more various style than his prose forebears and peers, or than Marlowe. It is more a question of Nashe's mode of address, which is consistently I am tempted to say uniformly — Carnivalesque. It seems a plausible

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 241 conjecture that the prose pamphlet was Nashe's chosen medium largely because it made possible a degree and kind of popularity unavailable or difficult of realization in other media, even the dramatic one. From the pamphlet's first sentence, Nashe can play the clown; print allows him to pretend to talk - he rarely, if ever, drops all trace of an oral persona and thus programmatically to mix tendentially popular and oral-performative conventions with those of writing and reading. A consequence of this seems to be that, though Nashe is manifestly interested in effects of mixture, in playing stylistic levels off of one another, no one strain emerges as characteristic, or peculiarly 'his own.' When one speaks of a sense in which Marlowe's plays are pretexts for verbal performance, displays of style, one is mainly thinking of the monologues and the mighty line. Nashe's privileging of style knows no equivalent - more or less purely humanistic - moments. Even the loftiest passages are animated by oral-performative conventions, or, loosely speaking, by carnivalesque and collective principles. Nashe's stylistic objectivity, understood in this sense, and the comparative intensity with which he privileges rhetorical performance, may be understood to correlate to the mixed, loose character of his form as well as what one feels to be the insecurity, relative to Marlowe, of his commitment to it. I have said that his favoured form is the miscellany, but it would be better to put it that his pamphlets take the form of superimposed miscellanies: what frequently happens in Nashe is that a certain narrative set or form (often enough a mixed bag itself) gives complete or partial way to some other, miscellaneous one. So for example Piers Penniless, having shifted from its beginning as a first-person complaint narrative into a satire on the seven deadly sins in their present state, turns into a treatise on the nature of the devil and demons. Even the exception proving this rule, The Unfortunate Traveller, though it qualifies as picaresque rather than as miscellany, is relatively miscellaneous, uneven picaresque. This process of narrative overdetermination, the superimposition of the miscellany form, may partly be understood, I am suggesting, as the effect of Nashe's commitment to style, the fact that the Carnivalesque rhetorical process 'comes first'; it may be read as an expression of the tendency of this process to resist focalization, and to spill over the bounds of its appointed occasion. But it stands to dialectical reason that the correlation should be read the other way as well, and that Nashe's Carnivalesque commitment to style be seen both as a symptom of, and an attempt symbolically to resolve, problems of narrative content or ide-

242 Flights from the Tudor Settlement

ology. There are two generally accepted ways of diagnosing the latter, each of which involves an antinomy that does not seem readily to lend itself to focalization or symbolic resolution in a linear narrative, but to call for more strictly serial or repetitive expression. The diagnoses are not unrelated, but neither can the one be reduced to the other. The first way, most tellingly exposited by Milliard, posits a clash between Nashe's politics and his particular position within society, or in other words between his social ethic, on the one hand, and his occupational ideology, on the other. Milliard tends to cast the conflict as one between old-fashioned, idealistic commonwealth values - the great virtue of his book is to have demonstrated Nashe's earnest subscription to such - and the practical needs and newfangled notions of a humanist who would live by writing. If critics have generally underestimated how old-fashioned Nashe was, Milliard submits, this is because he so clearly and so self-consciously represents in his own person the social type he makes it his mission to denounce, that of the preening newfangled upstart. Milliard's formulation seems apt and unassailable, as long as one understands the adjectives attaching to the clash - 'old-fashioned' vs. 'newfangled,' 'idealistic' vs. 'practical' - as designating its appearance. For commonwealth values, always to a great degree a ruling-class reflection of that 'moral economy' that was inscribed in popular festive practices, should be understood, I would suggest, as having come into being as an ideology tout court in the Elizabethan period, after having been something more like an indeterminate set of programs or a habitus seeking to reinstall itself. And accordingly, the emergence to prominence of the category and stereotype of the upstart, no newer really or more accurate than commonwealth ideas, should be thought of as happening in tandem with this shift, or indeed as the projection and bad conscience of commonwealth ideology. The virtue of putting things this way, in terms of a new ideological matrix, is that it tends to keep one from understanding Nashe's narrative and stylistic habits too readily as quasi-hysterical reaction (triggered, say, by old-fashioned incomprehension) or as simple traits or reflexes (for example of his overweening ambition to impress as a writer); instead, one is encouraged to consider Nashe's style, for example, and the place it occupies, as a way of rendering commonwealth ideology, as well as a reaction to the shift to it. The second accepted way of diagnosing Nashe's basic narrative or ideological problem could indeed be taken as sketching the stylistic response to the antinomy just described, if the creation of personae be understood as a matter of style. It is said that the roles of clown and

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 243

preacher are mixed in Nashe's tracts, or compete without either one attaining a clear dominance, often to puzzling effect: one does not know whether one is reading a sermon or a kind of game, a free parody. I would make three observations by way of trying to situate this pervasive dichotomy in Nashe's work. First, that though it is tempting to align it with the previous opposition by matching up sides - Nashe's persona as preacher expresses the commonwealth man in him, while he plays the clown in his capacity as upstart - the antinomies do not in fact match up in that way. While one may assume that they are determined by the same general change or contradiction, they direct one to different issues of content: the former to questions concerning the relation between social distribution and class construction, the latter to questions concerning the relation between religion and popular culture. Second, the status of the clown-preacher ambivalence as intended or unintended seems unusually uneven and in question. Rhodes, for example, who has best described the dichotomy, casts Nashe himself as riven by it - Nashe, that is, does not really play with the opposition; even when he thinks he is, it plays him - while allowing that this incoherence makes his work richer and more interesting than that of those who followed directly in his line. Hutson, by contrast, would cast Nashe as exposing or laying bare, and thus to a certain extent controlling, the contradiction between roles. I think that Hutson's way is better, but then the laying bare in question is clearly a reactive measure, a partial revelation from within the space of contradiction itself - there is no question of Nashe gaining control over the contradiction by exposing it. The point I would make is not so much that Nashe's negotiation of roles is variable (that he is clearly sometimes more of a clown than a preacher, sometimes less so, sometimes both/and or neither/nor), as that it highlights the matter of authorial intention or control, puts it in question to an unusual extent. Third, I would suggest that the insistence of this last question stems in large part from the ambiguous status of the dichotomy, or more precisely from a disequivalence within it. I said before that one might consider the dichotomy between clown and preacher as a stylistic response to the problem posed by commonwealth ideology's consolidation; but on consideration it would seem preferable to separate the construction of personae, as basically a thematic affair, from the adoption of a general stylistic stance or attitude to language, which seems in Nashe, and is I think generally, the result of a prior decision. If we make this separation, analysis then discloses that the clown-preacher dichotomy is undecideable thematically but not stylistically, for Nashe's attitude to

244 Flights from the Tudor Settlement

language is fairly consistently popular-festive in nature. This accounts, I think, for a certain imbalance in the battle between personae, which one does not find Rhodes acknowledging: the texts of Nashe's great sermons always seem infected by parody, but the reverse does not seem to be the case - complaints are not often heard that the more purely jestful, gaming episodes emit a moralizing odour. And it means that the clash between roles ought to be understood to designate a problem at the level of content (albeit of course involving form), to which Nashe's privileging of popular style may then be read as a kind of allegorical or symbolic response. How is Nashe's narrative form (the superimposed miscellany) determined by these two dichotomies? And what, if his style is to be taken as a response to them, is it saying? We might approach these questions by coming back to the comparison with Marlowe, and asking about the relation of his form (fabular tragedy) to the problems that allegedly account for Nashe's incoherence. Can one say that these were Marlowe's problems too? Not really, I would hold, though the judgment obtains in significantly different ways in the two cases. The clown-preacher dichotomy was not a problem for Marlowe in the sense that the plays may be felt to have solved it, or to situate themselves beyond it, in a quasi-Utopian way. They have something of both in them, but are neither homily nor festive spectacle. It is true that the general features of public-dramatic form, its juxtaposition of popular and learned dramatic practices, would seem tailored to the solution of this problem. But the fact that Marlowe's plays can be misread as homilies, that their didactic elements can be taken straight, shows that the form did not do all the work - that Marlowe himself did much of the tailoring. In any case, the point is that Marlowe's choice of medium and form enables him to solve, or patently to find a way around, a problem of attitude or orientation that is consistently foregrounded as such, as a problem, in Nashe's prose. Marlowe's relation to the other dichotomy that seems to bedevil Nashe's satire, between categories of commonwealth and upstart, is in some ways more interesting. The problem of clown vs. preacher seems at least pertinent to his work, otherwise it would not feel right to say that Marlowe solved it. But this other diagnosis as to Nashe's anomaly or incoherence does not seem pertinent in this way, and that must evidently be because Marlowe's work does not register the world through the categories in question. A case for the idea of the upstart could be made: Gaveston and Spenser, in Edward II, are muted versions thereof.

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 245 And the protagonists of the other great plays - The Jew, Tambuiiairie, Faustus - what are they but Great Upstarts? Well but, for reasons already discussed, something changes with the shift into the upper case, and with their being made so representative. We might put it that they are not upstarts because the position of the upstart has been universalized in Marlowe, such that it has come to seem a condition of the subject rather than of any one, a matter then of what I have called 'sprung' or 'absolute' desire. And this is why the commonwealth ideal does not really figure in Marlowe's plays, why they emit no wish, as do Nashe's works, for a commonwealth Utopia, or if they do only in the most circuitous and negative way: as an ideal that is no longer; as an after-image of the once-possible. True, there are positive images of collectives-at-work in Marlowe, small groups active in carnivalesque intrigue; but if these might be said to have allegorical Utopian value, it is not a commonwealth Utopia they shadow. Perhaps I should stress here that the comparison under way is not intended to reflect on the writers' biographical viewpoints or attitudes, on what we would call their personal politics and the way they saw the world. They may have had the same politics; Marlowe have been just as good a commonwealth man as Nashe when holding forth at the alehouse of an afternoon. What is in question is the choice and use of literary media and form, and the way these give the world to be seen and acted upon, and in this regard Marlowe is not a commonwealth man: his work does not hold forth the possibility of some return to commonwealth ways, nor does it judge actually existing society by comparison with some fantasy image of a more hospitable, more kindly and socially responsible, merrier past. Whereas Nashe's does on frequent occasion, if often with strain and irony. It might seem that this makes Marlowe a less Utopian writer than Nashe. And in a simple positive sense of the word 'utopian' this is so. But in another sense - a negative and stricter one, which is to be grasped from the angle of the opposition I have developed between utopia and carnival - Marlowe is the more Utopian writer. The Utopian dimension of fabular tragedy has not yet been sufficiently stressed. Marlowe provides his audience with fables of transgressive fortune which at once trigger and stifle its moralizing habits. The plays ought to be used as moral fables, it seems, but precisely because of their abstract, hyperbolic character, they resist being used that way. They must be received instead, at one level as attacks on, at another as enigmatic records of, what is happening now. The life-forms and the moral formulae the plays

246 Flights from the Tudor Settlement put on display, at once familiar and exotic, banal and enigmatic - these have become Utopian in a relatively strong sense. And if they do not broach questions about the good society, they do have estranging value - that is, the forms and formulae, now hollowed out and rendered foreign, elicit a strong sense of relativity, and provoke some of the same questions as Utopia in its cognitive aspect (in what sense are the principles on display here real, or of 'our' world? and how do you get there from here?). This Utopian dimension, I argued, stems from a refusal akin to Hythlodaeus's in face of the prospect of counsel, and is supported by a deepsymbolic identification, not with the smallholding class proper, but with it in its atomizing potential, or with the underclass that was solidly established enough to achieve representation by the middle Elizabethan years. Positive evidence for this identification was found in two thematic elements - the prevalence of scenes of class-transgression or -mobility (what I called declassement), and the pervasiveness of Carnivalesque scheming and hi^jinks within the plots. I want to suggest now that the second theme appears as subordinate to the first in Marlowe — that the Carnivalesque is thus to a significant degree divorced from the popular by serving, insofar as it is motivated by sprung desire, as a sign of declassement. One senses that Marlowe's identification with the underclass is less powerful, more strictly instrumental, than More's with the smallholding class in Utopia - this to the degree perhaps that Marlowe is the more popular writer. Still, his use of Carnival proceeds from an understanding of basic categories that is similarly levelling and instrumental. If More's Utopian understanding of the division of labour, which is deeply influenced by Carnivalesque practice and perspectives, effectively refashions the economy in a modern form, then Marlowe's deep-Carnivalesque understanding of social class may be said effectively to refashion the notion of the state or of political power. Nashe's deployment of Carnivalesque rhetoric finally remains 'traditional' in its understanding and mobilization of the popular. It betokens a different sort of identification with the people than Marlowe's, what might be called a sliding identification with the middling sort: Nashe certainly, at points in his work, casts in his lot much more clearly and positively with the conycatching or roguish underclass; but this element seems less hostile and alienated than as fantasized by Marlowe, and Nashe's identification with it but a moment in what is a broader dramatization of attachment with the whole people. And, rather than being situated on the ground of commonwealth ideology's supersession, Nashe's practice of the Carnivalesque conforms to the shadowy precedence of

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 247 this idea in the pamphlets, and indeed the comparison with Marlowe makes it possible to see Nashe's style, in its independence and objectivity, as an attempt to keep the commonwealth idea alive, as both a figurative enactment of, and a search for, the common collective body. I would stress that the assertion of basic difference suggested here between Marlowe as a more Utopian and Nashe as a more carnivalesque writer - should not be taken to indicate that Nashe refused to see the problems Marlowe did, that Nashe's work is not written about and from the same basic changes. It is rather a question of how their work responds to or mediates these changes, and with what 'attitude.' To attempt to put this as generally and concisely as possible: If both writers address themselves to the (late feudal) decorporatization that radically affected the status of all classes in England, and which both ravaged popular cultural forms and rendered them as suspended potential, Marlowe understands this general movement more as if from outside and in the past tense, as atomization and in terms of desire. Whereas for Nashe, the great corporation of the commonwealth is still only in the process of breaking up, as it were, and so it remains as a pressing horizon; decorporatization is understood more immanently, in terms of a conflict of groups-in-flux. Marlowe's finished form would seem tailored to make decorporatization palpable as determinate and singular force; to memory at any rate - and because of the incremental plotting, the plays are unusually memorable - fabular tragedy impresses as a kind of gestural statement, a statement of contradiction, directed from the position of the underclass to that of the ruling class. Nashe's superimposing pamphlet, again, assumes a more immanent relation to decorporatization, staging it as struggle or process; and neither its message nor its negotiation of the class configuration, its allegorical participation in class struggle, is so pointed or so nearly univocal as in Marlowe. Rather than focusing a statement, Nashe's privileging of style appears to make for what might be called an oscillation of content, a kind of engrained after-effect of message. This raises questions of a potentially allegorical sort about the parts of the miscellany in their relation to one another questions about the total shape of the tract and hence of the commonwealth to which it typically refers.

2. A Utopian Narrative Syntax A consideration of Piers Penniless his Supplication to the Devil, more particularly of its episodic syntax, will show how this last is. I noted before that the pamphlet divides into three main episodes. The initial episode, that

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in which the treatise's speaker/writer complains of his poverty and of the plight of learning and talent in the current grim times, is much the shortest. The second, the supplication proper - which amounts to a free-form satire of the seven deadly sins in their current incarnations is the longest, and is usually taken as the tract's reason for being, its body. But there is an extended episode after the supplication, whose official business is a question-and-answer session in which Piers inquires of the devil's messenger, the knight of the post, as to the truth about the 'devils commonwealth.'9 How these episodes relate to one another is a question any reading must answer in some way, if it is only to decide that they relate sheerly by happenstance (i.e., by virtue of Nashe's having had these bits around and slung them together), or, in what seems to me the more natural response, to put it off with the sense that there are some significant latent connections that you and the discourse have yet to pin down. Nashe himself, in a late 'Parenthesis' of metacommentary, anticipates the reader's perplexity and consternation, and overtly lends his backing to the former explanation, while insinuating the latter. Whilst I am thus talking, me thinks I heare one say, What a fop is this, he entitles his book A Supplication to the Diuell, and doth nothing but raile on ideots, and tels a storie of the nature of Spirits! Haue patience, good sir, and weele come to you by and by. Is it my Title you find fault with? Why, haue you not seen a Towne surnamed by the principall house in the towne, or a Nobleman derive his Baronrie from a little village where he hath least land? So fareth it by me in christning of my Booke. But some will obiect, whereto tends this discourse of diuils, or how is it induced? Forsooth, if thou wilt needs know my reson, this it is. I bring Pierce Penilesse to question with the diuil, as a yoong nouice would talke with a great trauailer; who, carrieng an Englishmans appetite to enquire of news, will be sure to make what vse of him he maie, and not leaue anie thing unaskt, that he can resolue him of. If then the divell be tedious in discoursing, impute it to Pierce Penilesse that was importunate in demanding. (240)

The examples given to explain the title (principal house, little village) leave one wondering whether the speaker's supplication is then the best or worst, the most or least significant, thing in the book, and whether it might not in some sense be both. The explanation of the question-andanswer session, palming it off on the character of the persona, specifically on his English curiosity, would seem to encourage us to turn the

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 249 pamphlet into a drama, and to unify it by reading satire, session, and all somehow in terms of 'character development,' as manifestations of the English disposition. This explanation too, then, links the question of unity with that of the persona, and suggests at once that Piers is of little significance (since Nashe at one level has to be taken as using Piers to fob the reader off, to duck his question) and somehow key. Meanwhile, the second sentence ('Have patience,' etc.) leaves a lingering impression that the question of how the parts fit together has not been fully addressed yet, that it will be answered a little further on; so one waits (fruitlessly, as one half-expects to do) for the final shape to reveal itself. The passage shows, then, that the relation between episodes is an issue in the pamphlet itself; it might be said to 'thematize' the relation: indeed its deferral, which is closely related to the oscillation of content I spoke of before. But let us move to the episodes themselves, and first to complaint and satire. Piers's initial complaint looks as if it is leading to a fairly straightforward offer: Devil, I will be your man (I will give you rny soul) if you will be my patron (if you will give me money). And indeed, Piers's letter to the devil, which turns out to be the satire on the seven deadly sins, is evidently to be taken this way, as enacting the traditional sale of his soul, even though the offer is not or only very rarely put in so many words. The offer remains understood partly because a second rhetorical purpose rather quietly intervenes - that of convincing the devil that it would be easy for him to fulfil his part of the deal (to provide for Piers in this world, i.e., to give him money): to make room in London the devil need only transport a few sinners to hell where they belong Piers will assist him in identifying them. But then this last proves a big, if easy, job; so it is that the text of the letter offering the devil Piers's soul becomes satire. This curious motivation of the satire - its initial status as a plea to the devil for space - is never, I think, entirely forgotten; even though the complicated framing apparatus tends to recede for long stretches and the satire to stand as its own justification, indeed just because of this tendency, it haunts the reader's apprehension. One somewhat eerie twist to transpire is that Piers's offer does not cost him so much as it would in ordinary times, since England, above all London, is replete with sin: where he lives is Hell, so to consign his soul to the devil is not to lose much. But a more significant, and disturbing, ambiguity arrives when the real answer dawns to the question how satire serves as supplication, hence how it continues the story begun in the complaint. This reason strikes most forcefully when the satire seems to lose its way or to have

250 Flights from the Tudor Settlement devolved into something else - in other words, in those several instances where the sins format is overrun with material belonging to other paradigms (jests, for example, and apologies for poetry and the stage). The awareness crystallizes that it is Nashe-Piers's performance - for the devil, for us - that counts, and with this the clowning dimension of his rhetoric, prominent all along, assimilates itself to the peculiarly amoral wickedness, the humorous evil, of the popular Vice. Satire serves as supplication partly, and crucially, in that it provides a showcase for Nashe's bravura performance of topics, his clowning rhetoric; the sins material is as good as any other with which to impress the devil-patron. It is at this point - when Nashe's more or less constant privileging of verbal performance or style is thematized by the movement of the tract, we might say - that the relation between the first two episodes, between 'subjective' complaint and 'objective' satire, attains clarity. Put another way, the question of the precise relation between episodes is both diminished and recontextualized to uncertain ends in the moment that Nashe emerges as a particularly vexing sort of Vice. If this be seen as a version of Horatian self-implication, then that satiric strategy here would seem largely unconscious; and the shift is peculiarly unruly, for it raises questions concerning the contemporary ethical valence of Carnivalesque rhetoric, of travesty, itself, and by implication makes the verbalperformative impulse a chief object of criticism and wonder. The final effect on the satire 'proper' is quite different from that of self-implication in Horace, where the satirist's wisdom about his own complicity in that which he criticizes redeems his moral authority. The supplicatory motive in Nashe is not wise. Rather, in a first instance - when one first fathoms that the sins are its mere pretexts - it detracts from the explicit satiric criticism, or indeed empties it of meaning. And then, in a kind of reflux, it lends the same criticism something like ritual force. It is worth pausing here to connect the novelty of Nashe's strategy with the newness of his deadly sins. Hutson has explained the newness well. Nashe's satire, she argues, addresses the peculiar situation in which the mercantilist and commonwealth programs and propaganda influentially espoused in Edward's reign, and assembled and put to work early in Elizabeth's, having succeeded to a great degree in transforming the economy for the better, refuse to allow that their mission is accomplished, and linger on as an objectively hypocritical system of imperatives, serving as a stalking horse for all manner of fraud and vice and above all as a kind of false conscience vexing the capacities of the kingdom's imagination with the kneejerk slogans of self-sufficiency, industry,

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 251 and thrift. The capacities of satire in the 1580s were among those vexed; Nashe's predecessors had not caught up with the new moral world of 'the first consumer society.' Nashe's dual aim in Piers, according to Hutson, is to update sin, and to expose the bankruptcy of the dominant moral language. The former aim is especially evident for example in Nashe's personification of Dame Niggardize (167), which Hutson compellingly shows to be a type of mercantilist thrift, and thus a specimen of former virtue now become vice.10 The latter, more pervasive and definitively successful aim, is achieved through parody - the mocking display of the antiquated catalogue format in its inadequacy, and its clowning dismemberment. I would suggest that the process, written into the episodic syntax of the tract, by which Nashe-Piers comes to the fore as Vice, and the role of the satire as supplication becomes clear, both matches and contributes to the rendering of the shifting moral world, to the sense of mysteriously blocked transformation. But more than this - and here I would differ with Hutson, who sees Nashe's parody as a distancing device - the movement in question has the effect of making Nashe's act a part of the general problem; through it, the privileging of verbal performance, or rather its distance from, or neutrality with respect to, content, is linked to the question, consistently raised in the satire, as to the status of the commonwealth ideal. The final turn of the pamphlet poses no evident riddles, and especially at first seems flat and, even for a gallimaufry, tacked on. In one sense, of course, this inconsequence establishes yet more clearly the priority of the persona, or of the clowning rhetoric. But the performance, no longer for the devil, turns into a much drier and writerly sort of parody, and for long stretches seems to have gone dead as a sentence-bysentence enterprise.11 Certainly, though, it persists structurally, or in other words inheres in the relation of this episode to the previous: there is carnivalesque humour in the placement of the section, exemplifying as it does the same back-to-front logic that inspires Nashe to dose his tract with an epistle to the reader followed by praise for the patron. Having composed his letter to the devil and arranged for its delivery, Piers thinks to inquire as to who the would-be patron really is and whether he exists or not. Is Hell really like London, as some say, or is it more the traditional place where you are tortured by your sins? And is the devil just a name for the wicked things that people do to one another, as some opine, or is the catechism right and does he exist as a spirit? The knight of the post plumps resolutely for the old answers; but the parodic structure encourages us to take these answers with grains of salt, and the

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questions as to the status of spirits and the devil as in some sense real or objective ones. Partly by virtue of the split ritualism of the satire that has preceded, the questions reflect back and lead one to wonder whether the blocked society Nashe writes about and from does not project a similarly ambivalent take on the supernatural, and whether it might not respire a different kind of religious belief than did the (mythical) older commonwealth. My point is that these questions too concern the total shape of Nashe's society, and that this focus (if one can call it that) is especially determined by the episodic syntax of the pamphlet, as an effect of the oscillation of content that it imposes. 3. Carnivalizing the Praise of the City Consensus concerning Nashe's Lenten Stuffe: The Praise of the Red Herrynge seems to be limited to the proposition that it is the most enigmatic of his kettles.12 Those who have not liked it have tended to take it, at one sense of its tide's word, to be formless nonsense, a long and unforgivably intentional bout of rhetorical excess. Those who like it tend to see the excess as being redeemed, either by virtue of the vigour and skill animating it, or by a serious moral purpose the like of which is not to be found in the other tracts. So, in an example of the former sort of approving response, J.B. Steane has praised Lenten Stuffe in that it approaches to the status of pure literature, is about nothing but the pleasure of its own consumption; the difficulty of the pamphlet is here largely understood to be the result of the reader's grasping after connections and reference, of his mistaking the way the tract is to be used.13 In an example of the latter, Bristol stresses the work's Carnivalesque utopianism, and argues for its embodiment of a festive popular morality still very much alive in the 1590s; here the difficulty of the pamphlet is largely explained as the result of our historical distance from Nashe's moment.14 The argument I have made thus far, about the role of Nashe's style in his form, does not reduce the difficulty, or the enigma, of Lenten Stuffe; but it should make it more comprehensible how his most free-form work, the one in which content seems most emphatically a pretext for style, should also be his most Utopian. Yet it is worth observing that Lenten Stuffe is not so directly a Carnivalization of Utopia as is Rabelais's 'Theleme.' Nashe does not engage Utopian conventions in the way that Rabelais did,15 nor again does he throw so sharply into focus the meta-Carnivalesque question of group constitution and dynamics. True, Nashe makes use of an explanatory prolego-

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 253 menon somewhat reminiscent of the Utopia's travel narrative format, Lenten Stuffe might be called Nashe's Fortunate Traveller: in an opening episode of autobiographical complaint, he tells how he came to know and appreciate Yarmouth - it has served him as safe haven during a time when there was a warrant out in London for his arrest for having co-written a play, now lost, called The Isle of Dogs}6 But, though Yarmouth is cast as a place of miraculous difference, a town of health and sanity unknown elsewhere, and though one can thus see how Nashe might have adopted a mock-utopian role for his persona, in which the various wondrous features of the provincial topos are reported back to a (London) audience so ignorant in its sophistication as to be virtually foreign, this is not what happens in the second episode of the tract, in which Nashe describes and praises Yarmouth. The conventions invoked, rather, and to which Nashe theatrically goes about giving his singular treatment, are those of the praise of the city genre (laudatio urbis). That Nashe's panegyric fashions itself from the less splendid, more empirical and antiquarian, English equivalent of this form makes it in one way more Utopian than, say, Bruni's praise of Florence, the most famous Renaissance specimen of the genre.1 Its materials are typically written records rather than anecdotes of origin, arid yield something closer to mere description than Bruni's republican legends. But the principal assumptions written into the materials of any laudatio are altogether less 'sociological' than the Utopia's. One accounts for the town in its dignity by excavating what might be called its natural history (the chronicle of its founding and accumulation of privileges, its demographic vicissitudes, its wealth and power as indexed in the condition of its buildings and people, the quantity of its taxes, and so on); by committing it with its peer cities (where it is understood that the town's worth derives from being a member of this group, as well as from its superior distinctions); and by comparing its current state to a recent, often less thriving, past. Nashe's work certainly does not run through all the topoi; he professedly skips things in his keenness to arrive at the last and longest episode, his praise of the kippered herring, which he presents both as the consummation of his panegyric of the town and as that in respect to which it is in some sense but a pretext. Nonetheless, the pamphlet Carnivalizes the praise of the city genre, not the Utopia; this indeed is how the pamphlet becomes Utopian: as a result of Nashe's festively driving the laudatio beyond its customary bounds. Lenten Stuffe, like Piers Penniless, divides roughly into three main parts, then: the short autobiographical section explaining the circumstances

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of Nashe's stay in the town (153-6) introduces the relatively dogged pages of history and description (157-73), which in turn give way to the long panegyric of herring (176-226). This last section moves, we should note, from presenting a case for herring's claim to being the most characteristic and useful English commodity (178-92), to the performance of a series of jest-like fables explaining how herring came to occupy its current role. And in its (the last episode's) first part, the description of the town's economy and social relations is taken up again, if in a different vein, because proving herring's utility requires reference to what the trade does for the town and its social relations. Let us turn to the way Nashe represents these relations, or in other words mainly to the second episode. There is hardly any question, of course, of Yarmouth being so different from the other actually existing port towns of its peer group as an interesting Utopian city is from actually existing ones. Though superior and distinctive, Yarmouth is not other in kind, and accordingly does not solicit a Utopian measure of sociological interest. But it has its merits. Nashe singles out for special praise that it is relatively egalitarian without being democratic. Put another way, it is a town in which the function of hierarchy, of rank, remains legible in commonwealth terms. Late feudal money-power has not worked its evil magic on class relations, so the town is cast, in the following key passage, as supporting a. relatively large, and correspondingly undifferentiated, patriciate, and as taking pride in doing so. All Common wealths assume their prenominations of their common diuided weale, as where one man hath not too much riches, and another man too much poverty: Such was Platos community, and Licurgus and the olde Romans laws of measuring out their fields, their meads, their pastures & houses, and mealing out to euery one his childes portion. To this Commune bonum (or euery horse his loafe) Yarmouth in propinquity is as the buckle to the thong, and the next finger to the thumbe; not that it is sibbe or cater-cousins to any mungrel Democratic, in which one is all, & all is one, but that in her, as they are not al one, so one or two there pockets not up all the peeces; there being two hundreth in it worth three hundred pounde a peece, with poundage and shillings to the lurtched, set aside the Bailifes four and twentie, and eight and fortie. Put out mine eye, who can, with such another bragge of any Sea towne within two hundred myle of it. (168-9) What accounts for Yarmouth's relative equality, for the fact that the town's commercial wealth remains relatively concrete and benign,

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 255 spreads itself through the social body, produces no mongrel forms? One finds the beginning of an answer in the parallel, unfinished but clearly there in the above passage, between land, as the basis of Plato's and Lycurgus's and the old Roman communities, and herring, as the basis of Yarmouth's original settlement. It implies an image of Yarmouth's founding act as a wholly transparent, political distribution of fish, every man his own to begin eating and selling. This equation between land and fish is helped along, and complicated, by a typical and telling bit of verbal play in the latter part of the fourth sentence above: 'Pockets ... pieces ... pound ... poundage and shillings. ... lurched.' 'Three hundred pound,' as linked to poundage, can seem to refer to a quantity of herring; and 'shillings,' linked to 'lurched,' sound a little like - they ought to be - fish. This sort of play is recurrent, and makes Yarmouth out to be a place where money's signifying role remains tied to fish - where the primary commodity suffuses all wealth in its odour. At the same time, it figures Yarmouth as a yet more Lenten place: it puts into currency a shadowy analogy between the town members themselves and a school of fish. The pamphlet offers two main reasons for Yarmouth's virtue. These reasons are established in the Carnivalesque rhetoric of the pamphlet at least as forcefully as by being stated, and they are closely related, particularly in figure. Still, it is useful to separate things out. The first reason, alluded to by the school analogy above, has to do with the natural history of Yarmouth, particularly with its precarious status as territory granted by and won from the sea. If put logically - and it is more difficult to put this logically than the second reason — it would state that because a collective effort of a magnitude and desperation unknown to other urban communities has been required to win and preserve Yarmouth from the sea, Yarmouth enjoys a kind of solidarity, a quality of collective existence, likewise unknown. Arguments might easily be brought against this reasoning from the town's ancient constitution. So what if the town was established in a great collective effort long ago? How does that have anything to do with more recent wrestings of the town from the sea, such as that in 1561, when the patriciate hired a Dutch architect over to unsilt its harbour?18 Where in that is the collective blood and sweat? But it is impossible to argue with Nashe's incessant Carnivalization of this Yarmouth myth; one may only note it in distancing oneself from it. Imagery of sea giving place to land, of crowds thronging on sand and water, of shifting batties between sea, land, ships, crowds, abound in Nashe's narration of

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Yarmouth's history.19 Its effect is to bring what might be called the theme of the carnivalesque wager up close to the present, to cast the town as founding itself upon the wager, living it. What luck, the moral goes, that the sea (or Nature) made and makes it necessary for Yarmouth to tear itself from its embrace, to win its gift of existence in risking all the members of the corporate body. The second reason for its virtue has to do with the nature of Yarmouth's economy, specifically of course with the nature of the herring industry. Put logically, this reason has two parts. It helps here to compare herring with wool, a contender with herring, as Nashe specifically has it at one point and as perhaps is to be understood passim, for the status of most pristine national product.20 Wool's reputation had recovered somewhat since the early part of the century, but it still was hard to represent it as 'by nature' a commonwealth commodity. If sheep could figure the devourers of the nation, wool shipped overseas as broadcloths symbolized its fleecing. Not so with the herring. Nashe spells the first part of this reason out himself. behold, it is euery mans money, from the King to the Courtier; euery housholder or goodman Baltrop, that keepes a family in pay, casts for it as one of his standing prouisions. The poorer sort make it three parts of there sustenance; with it, for his dinnier, the patchedest Leather piltche labaratho may dine like a Spanish Duke, when the niggardliest mouse of biefe will cost him sixpence. In the craft of catching or taking it, and smudging it Marchant and chapmanable as it should be, it sets a worke thousands, who Hue all the rest of the yeare gayly well by what in some fewe weekes they scratch vp then, and come to beare office of Questman and Scauinger in the Parish where they dwell; which they could neuer have done, but would have begd or starud with their wiues and brattes, had not this Captaine of the squamy cattel so stoode their good Lord and master: Carpenters, Shipwrights, makers of lines, roapes, and cables, dressers of hempe, spinners of thred, and net weauers it giues their handfuls to, sets vp so many salthouses to make salt, and salt vpon salt; keepes in earnings the Cooper, the Brewer, the Baker, and numbers of other people, to gill, wash and packe it, and carrie it, and recarrie it. (179-80)

Neither the passage, nor the economy spoken of, is simple; but the gist is clear enough. Because the herring is readily available and inexpensive in Yarmouth and environs, it lowers the cost of living, thus aiding poor families especially. And because obtaining, preparing, and

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 257 distributing it is a complicated affair which must be centered locally (so the assumption), the herring breeds work, which means lessening unemployment and poverty. Hence Yarmouth's solidarity and relative equality. The second thing about the herring economy is not spelt out, but is strongly implicit. Herring is more natural than wool in that its production and distribution are more seasonally determined. Though Nashe never says this in so many words, one imagines that the herring trade was particularly busy before and during Lent. Nashe does affirm that he writes the pamphlet during Lent - that is one reason for the title - and I imagine he expects the reader to understand that the trade is putting him on work too, or, more particularly, that in putting a bundle of herring stories into circulation in the last part of his pamphlet he is contributing his mite to the general effort and stir (one thinks of Rabelais's comparison of himself to Diogenes working over his tub, as his way of participating in the war effort, in the preface to his Third Book). Nashe's hyper-active blazoning might be taken then as a sign of Yarmouth's Lent - hardly classically lenten in character. But the more important festive event in Yarmouth's year, the more truly Carnivalesque season, comes in the fall, when the fish move, and Yarmouth is the site of a great herring fair. This is clearly, for Nashe, the town's defining moment. He refers to it often, and his initial description of it is peculiarly vivid and memorable - worthy of long quotation: without some obseruant glaunce I may not dully ouerpasse the gallant beauty of their hauen, which, hauing but as it were a welte of land, or, as M. Camden calls it, lingulam terrae, a little long of the earth betwixte it and the wide Maine, sticks not to mannage armes and hold his owne vndefeasably against that vniuersall vnbounded empery of surges, and so hath done for this hundreth yeere. Two mile in length it stretcheth his winding current, and then meetes with a spatious river or backwater that feedes it. A narrow channel or Isthmus in rash view you would opinionate it: when this I can deuoutly averre, I beholding it with both my eies this last fishing, sixe hundreth reasonable barkes and vessells of good burden (with a vantage) it hath given shelter to at once in her harbour, and most of them riding abrest before the Key betwixt the Bridge and the Southgate. Many bows length beyond the marke my penne roues not, I am certain: if I doe, they stand at my elbow that can correct mee. The delectablest lustie sight and mouingest object, methought it was, that our He sets forth, and nothing behinde in number with the inuincible Spanish Armada, though they were

258 Flights from the Tudor Settlement not such Gargantuan boysterous gulliguts as they. ... That which especiallest nourisht the most prime pleasure in me was after a storm when they were driuen in swarms, and lay close pestred together as thicke as they could packe; the next day following, if it were faire, they would cloud the whole skie with canuas, by spreading their drabled sailes in the full clue abroad a drying, and make a brauer shew with them then so many banners and streamers displayed against the Sunne on a mountaine top. But how Yarmouth, of itselfe so innumerable populous and replenished, and in so barraine a plot seated, should not onely supply her inhabitants with plentiful purueyance of sustenance, but prouant and victuall moreover this monstrous army of strangers, was a matter that egregiously bepuzled and entranced my apprehension. Hollanders, Zelanders, Scots, French, Westerne men, Northren men, besides all the hundreds and wapentakes nine miles compasse, fetch the best of their viands and mangery from her market. For ten weeks together this rabble rout of outlandishers are billetted with her; yet in all that while the rate of no kinde of food is raised, nor the plenty of their markets one pinte of butter rebated, and at the ten weekes end, when the campe is broken vp, no impression of any dearth left, but rather more store than before. Some of the towne dwellers have so large an opinion of their setled provision that, if all Her Maiesties fleet at once should put into their bay, within twelue dayes warning with so much double beere, beefe, fish and bisket, they would bulke them as they could wallow away with. Here I could breake out into a boundlesse race of oratory, in shrill trumpeting and concelebrating the royall magnificence of her gouernment. (157-9) The figurative logic here - the link between harbour/mouth and town market, both of them as unassuming in appearance and as amazingly copious in fact as Jesus' bread and fishes - is strikingly powerful. One will have begun to see how Nashe's carnivalesque performance of the descriptive material turns Yarmouth into a virtually Utopian place. But let us hold off from this for a moment, and try to consider what might be logically gleaned about the seasonality of the economy from Nashe's way of representing the period of the fair, more specifically his reaction to the town's provision for it. His is of course a spectator-consumer's wonder, which appears not to want to pry into the mechanisms by which the town furnishes the exorbitant demand of its suddenly cosmopolitan environs during the fair. Some inferences may be drawn nonetheless, if not entirely aligned. The reference to the town's 'settled

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 259 provision' implies that the larders and granaries are amply stocked at all times of year, while the stress on how bottomless these prove to be at fair-time, along with Nashe's turn to the remarkable political ordering of the town, suggests that special stocking must have been undertaken against the coming of the fair and that this was perhaps directed by the town's governors. One gathers one economic and political reason here - in the need to prepare for the fair, for collective hoarding - why the seasonality of the herring trade might make for greater than average corporate unity. At the same time, the figurative logic of Nashe's wonder suggests another, more strictly cultural, way in which the seasonality of the herring trade might contribute to Yarmouth's relative virtue. For if it makes the markets' copiousness seem miraculous, in the same move it poses a question. Whence does all the provision come, the wealth by which the city makes more wealth? This is not a rhetorical question; or, better, the book's rhetoric makes it clear that the question has a best answer (not that this is to take away from the miracle of the town's copia). That answer is 'from the herring': the value it has produced for the city rises up, appears in the form of the abundance of wares and their good constant prices, just as the herring themselves rise up in the sea at this time. But another answer, or a reasonable translation of this one, would read: 'from the people of Yarmouth, moulded into a collective entity by the herring and by its festival, spontaneously working to fill its markets.' The effect of Nashe's wondering attitude, then, is to make the festival seem quite a profound or organic affair. And insofar as that is the case, or in other words insofar as the herring trade dictates the rhythms of collective life in good part, one is free to infer that it holds the town together. It will perhaps already be clear how the economic explanation as to Yarmouth's authenticity as a commonwealth is principally made at the level of rhetoric or figure. To focus on a characteristic industry or trade is a typical practice of praisers of cities; though to focus as exclusively as Nashe does on the herring trade already reflects his Carnivalization of the raw materials the town offered him. But then to liberate the herring - to make it the personification of the city, to praise the city by praising the fish - this is the enabling, the essentially Carnivalesque move, which sets loose a host of significant equations, determines a proliferation of especially full-bodied, concretely meaningful, praisings, even while calling into question the form of the laudatio itself by casting it into the mode of travesty. Herring is fairly common and a common man's fish, yet something of a delicacy; it is a relatively collective fish, yet when

260 Flights from the Tudor Settlement

smoked it becomes more of an individual; it is unassuming yet cosmopolitan, unprepossessing but sexy (or at least fertile), a hard worker but well travelled. These oxymora apply too to the citizens of Yarmouth, having changed the things that need changing (or have the changes already been made, and does the application work the other way round?). The figurative work is done, as should be clear, throughout the second, town-description, episode as well as in the third, praise of the herring, part - perhaps more effectively there. The personification/ analogy links up with the imagery of Yarmouth's battle for existence, and thus reinforces, but gives comic inflection to, the theme of the Carnivalesque wager. For a major connotation is that a kind of collective gaiety characterizes the Yarmouth quotidian, though that is rarely described with any directness. 4. Yarmouth as Mercantilist Fantasy

So much for how Nashe presents and explains Yarmouth's singular virtue as commonwealth. I want now to introduce the uncontroversial observation that Nashe's praise of Yarmouth's economy and social structure conforms to contemporary economic prescriptions and ideals which may loosely be called mercantilist, and that his carnival rendition of the town indeed makes of it a certain kind of mercantilist fantasy. In Britain in the sixteenth century, at least, the set of axioms that tends to go by the name of mercantilist was largely reactive: directed toward correcting the ravages wrought by agrarian change, especially depopulation and endemic poverty, and reversing the decline of towns; and toward remaking in particular the lower middle and lower classes (or in other words, to restoring the smallholding class). Lenten Stuffe situates Yarmouth somewhat ambiguously in relation to the changes to which mercantilism responded and to the current conjuncture, hence to mercantilism itself. On the one hand, the town tends to be cast as a survival: it is a natural, a good example of mercantilist prescriptions precisely because it never needed them. On the other hand, it is recognized in various ways that Yarmouth's prosperity is in fact of a new order and sort, presupposing a dramatically altered context that involved, for one thing, a greatly increased demand for its chief product, and, for another, a labour market composed of the poor and needy to take up low-wage work in ancillary trades: it is a mercantilist exemplum, then, in the sense of having put the general prescriptions to work with great success. This ambiguity is partly attributable to the history of the town itself,

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 261 which evidently came through the century relatively unscathed by decorporatization, experiencing decline but nothing like 'desolation.' It is also conditioned on herring's having 'always' been Yarmouth's primary industry, long before fish came to be a favourite commonwealth (mercantilist) commodity. Yarmouth hopped on no bandwagon, so neither is Nashe in praising it; he identifies himself with an older wisdom, that of the town, while joining something like a chorus of contemporary agitators for fish. To understand why fish should have been a favourite mercantilist commodity is not hard, but some summary generalizations about mercantilism are helpful. 21 It seems to have exhibited two great interdependent passions, to have had two main foci. The better-known focus was on the balance of trade between countries, with a view toward increasing the quantity of specie in the home country and at the disposal of its state. The other focus was on the state and activity of the domestic labour force, with a view toward enhancing this most basic of raw materials and establishing the country's 'self-sufficiency' insofar as this, in a context of international trade conceived as ineluctable, was possible. The link between these two passions is not far to seek: a country whose labour force was more skilled and active would not only be more nearly self-sufficient, it would also likely be in a position to export more value, hence to enjoy a more favourable balance of trade and bring in more bullion than if its labour force were underemployed or relatively unskilled. More bullion meant, among other things, the power to bring in more foreign raw materials upon which to set its labour force to work, so as further to enhance it — and so on. The double focus determined a somewhat paradoxical attitude toward primary products, 'real' raw materials. Because raw materials of value in themselves could be sold unworked or unfinished for a profit, they could be seen as something of a snare; territories such as the Lowlands, which were not naturally rich but rich by virtue of their labour, were much admired, and a causal link could be posited between their natural poverty and their industriously produced wealth. Yet, given the international market and the struggle for raw materials (or to embody skill in them), not to be rich was to be vulnerable: so the dream country was nonetheless one with an ensured, rich supply of primary products which it 'finished' itself (whereas the nightmare country was one that was naturally rich but poor in its labour force, which was thus forced to export its raw materials and buy them back at higher prices as finished goods, depleting its coffers). Then again, because specialization of the

262 Flights from the Tudor Settlement national economy was seen as rendering a country vulnerable and because the campaign to enhance the labour force was in part, in all the Western countries, a campaign against existing poverty and unemployment, the utility and necessity of finding and founding new industries, of discovering new raw materials with and upon which to reskill and diversify the labour force, was more or less taken for granted. (And it is worth noting here that the concern evinced in this search, and in mercantilist approaches generally, for the condition of the labour force, for the actual quality of life of working people, stands to hindsight as distinguishing mercantilism from modern political economy, marking it as relatively humane.) One sees, then, the multiple attractions of fish. First, as is clear enough from Nashe's pamphlet, its procuring and processing both directly and indirectly made work for many people; establishing a successful fishing industry required the construction or help of a plethora of ancillary trades - it entailed the putting in place of something like an economy. Second, a negative reason, making and processing this primary product did not necessarily throw people out of work; it was not destructive first in order then to be productive, as were sheep for wool. A third reason also has to do with the territorial externality of fish. Fish - at least sea fish - offered a terrain in which the not so secretly predatory nature of the (mercantilist) country's labour force (always competing even in its self-sufficiency, exercising a potential magnetic draw upon the raw materials of other countries) could be - relatively harmlessly - deployed; as an especially industrious (and accordingly untempting) raw material, one, in other words, whose very discovery and possession were the result of collective initiative and labour, it possessed the value of a certain demonstration effect. Thus, though it may seem odd to call Nashe's militantly singular lark of a pamphlet mercantilist, it is definitely that in several of its main emphases: certainly in its straightforward thematic stress on how many people are given work by the herring trade, but also, and more tellingly, in its more eccentric, and rhetorical, stresses, namely on the miraculously fertile nature of the fish itself, and on the collective struggle required for its exploitation, the presupposition of labouring activity to its construction as a raw material. Indeed it should be becoming apparent how Nashe's Carnivalesque performance of the descriptive materials pushes Yarmouth from being a place that simply conforms to mercantilist prescription, into a place of mercantilist fantasy. Another way of putting this last would be to say that

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 263 the Carnivalesque positioning of Yarmouth is what makes it more of a mercantilist than a commonwealth ideal town: a model of good government, yes, but only after and in consequence of its being an example of a good economy. And this is the place to remark and emphasize the inversion involved, blindingly obvious in spite of all the overdeterminations, in the key carnivalizing move, Nashe's blazoning of the herring.22 Though this move is offered as a natural thing in a sense, it cannot be missed either - above all in the pamphlet's third episode, when Nashe shifts his ministrations explicitly to the fish and leaves the town behind - that it is Nashe's choice, and as such it asks to be read as a militant gesture (tactful to the extent that any offence taken would seem ungenerous), locating the town's identity as it does, and giving it free rein in its status, not as a political corporation, but as a commercial site, as a market. We now need to return explicitly to the status of Nashe's style, to the notion of its objectivity, its distance from content, and underscore its peculiar effects, the particular oscillation it determines, in this pamphlet. It may have already been gathered that the independence or distance of style is virtually thematized, in Nashes Lenten Stuffe, in the relation between episode two (in which content bulks cumbrous and crude) and episode three (in which the appetite for rhetorical performance is unleashed), and as a question of authorial position (how finally does Nashe fit in Yarmouth?). In episode two proper, the rift is manifest, not simply in Nashe's reflexive asides and expressions of various intentions, usually of obligation, with regard to his material though these are of course habitual - but more crucially in the reader's recognition that Nashe's business here is to condense and perform that material, to translate it into his hyperbolic idiom - in the fact, in other words, that he is so clearly 'giving Yarmouth the treatment,' as I have put it before. It is this, and the sense that the treatment is never complete, the translation never even intended to be utterly effected, that makes it seem somewhat inaccurate to say, as I have in the previous paragraph, that Nashe pushes Yarmouth from being a place of mercandlist prescription to a place of fantasy, or that he makes it a commercial site rather than a political corporation. The effect is rather of a layering. Yarmouth-as-mercantilist-fantasy is superinduced upon a more prosaic Yarmouth whose description is understood, a Yarmouth merely a passing good example of a commonwealth town. It is because the town remains visible for what it is, somehow, it is because its mercandlist reality remains legible, that the questions we have been seeing raised at and by the level of style, by Nashe's rhetoric, tend to gravitate to, and re-pose

264 Flights from the Tudor Settlement

themselves at, the level of content. I have been saying that Nashe makes Yarmouth into a mercantilist Utopia, in a sense, by carnivalizing it, by casting it in carnivalesque figure. But the effect of the layered image of Yarmouth is to raise lingering questions of congruence and agency. Is the superinduction of a Utopian profile something that Nashe does to the town, or is it something that the town elicits for itself, working through our author? I have tried to show how this question is raised by Nashe's peculiar form in order to deepen what is after all a conventional meaning. Of course Nashe wants us to understand that his pamphlet, the very image and form of its periods insofar as they are admirable, draws sustenance from Yarmouth; of course his celebration will seem successful to the degree that the town is felt to celebrate itself in him. But the specific suggestion that this convention is made to offer is hardly conventional. It is that mercantilist-commercial society constitutes, or might in certain inflections constitute, the 'natural' basis for a new and different, but more authentically carnivalesque culture than obtains in the nation at large. In other words, Nashe in Lenten Stuffe might be seen to be representing the mercantilist town as the material basis of a new Carnival-Utopia, a modern rationalized version of Cokaygne. 5. London and the Paradox of the Copious Commodity But if it suggests that Yarmouth's cultivation of the sea founds radical cultural possibilities, Nashe's single-minded praise of herring indicates at the same time the limitations inherent in Yarmouth's position. Probably the chief way in which the limitations are communicated to the reader is through the emotional arc of the third episode: this is undertaken with a great mustering and show of celebratory high spirits, but seems over time to be swamped with resentment and bad feeling. If the loss of original purpose and attitude stems conspicuously from Nashe's personal trouble and displacement, clearly it cannot be solely chalked up to these; the reader must ask why Yarmouth's 'atmosphere' has not prevented the impasse, and recognize that it is not so effective an enclave as Nashe makes out, even while drawing the called-for contrast between the Yarmouth scene and the London (or national) one which is responsible for Nashe's bitterness. The limitations have everything to do with Yarmouth's status as enclave, its relation to London and nation, though in what might be called a neo-Carnivalesque move the social contradiction in question is

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 265 embedded in, is both masked and disclosed by, a seemingly natural one. It will be clear enough how Nashe's focus on the herring trade tends to hem Yarmouth in from without, to mark it as the one place in the country defined by herring. It needs to be noted now that this focus misrepresents commercial reality somewhat, and a respect to be registered in which the focus makes Yarmouth a paradoxical mercantilist town. No doubt that the herring was Yarmouth's most important product, or that it marked the corporation's self-image like no other: though herring looms nowhere near so large in Henry Manship's description of the town, finished twenty years after Nashe's visit, it looms.23 The little episode with which Nashe kicks off the third section, in which he tells how a town native explained, to Nashe's admiration at the splendour of the town fabric, that it emanates from the herring, likely has some basis in reality, though it seems unlikely that even atypical Yarmouthers talked the way this one does, in Nashe's manner but yet more effusive, yet more in search of outlandish phrases smacking equally of the inkhorn and city streets (174-5). All the same, Yarmouth's late sixteenth-century prosperity was not solely owing to the herring trade, but was linked to the prosperity of its region - Norfolk was one of London's main granaries - and of Norwich - already probably the second city in the kingdom, one of the few provincial cities to profit from the large socioeconomic shifts of which London's dramatic growth was both symptom and cause, and for which Yarmouth served as port. There were other major trades, in other words - most notably in grain, coal, and wool and Yarmouth's great success - marked off especially from the decline of its historic rivals the Cinque Ports — probably had more to do with its situation in relation to region and provincial centre than in relation to the fish in the sea.24 The people of Yarmouth would have known these things, of course, even if the town's (self-)image remained inordinately tied to herring. This leads us to a paradox about Nashe's picture of the city's economy, and opens up a clearer view of the Utopian role of herring in Lenten Stuffe. Nashe certainly allows that Yarmouth works at other trades than fishing, but gives the impression that these trades come from it. The town economy's diversity is in accord with mercantilist dicta, and that the fishing industry ramifies to such an extent, founds so much, is all to that industry's credit from their point of view; but Yarmouth's status as a single-crop economy in the representation's last analysis jars with the same dicta. Nashe's focus on herring, then, his construction of it as the one commodity on which the plethora of goods made and cir-

266 Flights from the Tudor Settlement culated in Yarmouth depend, can be seen to play a role, to allot herring a role, akin to that of King Utopus's trench in Thomas More's work. King herring's selection of Yarmouth, in Nashe's myth, is the unthinkable break with reality, the unmercantilist, un-utopian act that makes the mercantilist Utopia possible, and accordingly around it and in it, so to speak, all the problems to which it founds the solution return and swarm. And this is the place to observe that, though neither the laudatio format nor Nashe's manner permits the sort of systematic logical situation of Yarmouth typical of Utopian works, the beginnings, at least, of a neither-nor logic may be gleaned as attaching to the paradox of a diversified single-crop town economy. Yarmouth is not, on the one hand, what Clark and Slack designate a new town - a centre dependent on some one or two economic functions, hailed into being or new salience by the great changes under way, and accordingly relatively vulnerable to external powers; it has more history and solidity than that.25 On the other hand, the description (s) of its diversity, and the very implication that it is first and foremost an economic entity, separate it from more tra'ditional incorporated towns. Yarmouth's paradoxical status calls up tendencies in motion, emerging realities, but eludes even while elucidating the categorical framework in which towns are coming to exist; in national context, this elucidatory escape from the going state of affairs, from actually existing town logics, has the effect of suggesting the potential existence of several similar pockets within the terrain of the kingdom, something like a Utopian level that awaits habitation. This last dimension of the work - that in which it attempts to define a different sort of town in relation to going possibilities — may be the most interesting thing about it. But as I said before, the context of the comparable towns is not the one on which the paradox of the copious single commodity trains the vision. The vision is turned rather upon bigger fish, upon a series of equivalent - frontal or positive or Carnivalesque oppositions: the relation between the many trades and the basic one is like the relation of Land to Sea, which is like the relation of Culture to Nature: one is encouraged to contemplate the incommensurability between the two terms and the enormous, if miraculous, contingency of Culture. For however heroic Yarmouth's effort to establish itself solidly, the sea will always be larger, and must help out, must do most of the work, if it is to continue to exist. What is felt to be especially unruly here - the best and most telling figure for Nature's placeless and unfathomable will - is the herring's gravitation to the region around Yarmouth at

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 267 spawning time. Yarmouth's superiority at processing herring comes in for emphasis, but this does not diminish the sense that the fish's proximity is indispensable. The arbitrariness and precariousness of its 'choice' is communicated figuratively throughout the second episode, but is especially vivid in Nashe's herring stories (above all in the first one, 'Hero and Leander,' about how herring came into being, since its migration to England is so casually rendered as a happenstance, an incidental thing; but also in the others in the string, since they seem chosen at random, as if from a sea of stories). What is happening, then, is that Nashe uses Yarmouth's commercial agriculture to rephrase the Carnivalesque opposition between Nature and Culture, Production and Consumption: this rephrasing is to complex ends, but which might be called Lenten insofar as the margin ever won by Labour over Nature seems qualitatively less secure, the wager a yet more all-or-nothing affair, than in received Carnival tradition. So much, then, for the purely natural limitations of Yarmouth's paradoxical Carnivalesque prosperity. But there is clearly a social antinomy caught up here too, to which the paradox of the prolific commodity, it seems to me, does direct one's attention. I return to the fact that Yarmouth's wealth tends to be figured by fish, that everything in Yarmouth is brought into the ambit of the Carnivalesque Lenten signifier. In the second episode, this is largely done by verbal play and figure, but even apart from figure, the narrative context is such that, for example, in a relatively prosaic section indexing the town's wealth by reference to the taxes it raises, you understand the taxes in terms of, or as proceeding from, fish. The substitution or superimposition of fish on money contributes to the communal feel of the town, as I have indicated, and can readily be understood to be animated by much the same rationale as led to the enhancement and degradation of gold in More's Utopia. By the same token the substitution cuts two ways, or redounds upon itself; insofar as fish represent money, they underscore its centrality, harbour its abstract power. Thus, in the series of associated oppositions rehearsed before, the dual focus characteristic of mercantilist thought, on money and labour, is superimposed, articulated now as an opposition. This articulation, it seems to me, conveys a basic truth about mercantilism. In it one may see the paradox of Yarmouth's herring economy enacting a silent and more or less general critique of contemporary economic thought, 'giving it to be seen' that mercantilism thinks value in two discrepant ways, as embodied means of exchange and as craft skill,

268 Flights from the Tudor Settlement and thus that its dual focus is really an aporia disguising a contradiction. Suffice it to say here that the dual focus was the way the opposition between the exchange-value and use-value of the mercantilist commodity finally manifested itself, and that it issued especially in a constitutive ambivalence on the part of the state as to the use, whether more protective and enhancing or predatory, whether more 'capitalistic' or feudal, of the bullion horde which, as the privileged sign of politico-economic health, was the end and beginning of mercantilist policy. And this ambivalence determined and was one with a basic ambiguity as to the definition of the kingdom or country, whether it consisted in state or society, which was part and which whole. Now Nashe's construction of Yarmouth, more specifically the paradox of the copious commodity which frames his representation, would seem to leave no doubt as to the best answer to this latter question, even if the abstractness of herring insistently poses it. The town is a mercantilist fantasy partly by virtue of its service to the kingdom. But it is so serviceable because of what it is; and it is what it is, clearly, that counts most. Yarmouth is never more than a part of the kingdom; but it is a part that wants to define, or metonymically to be, the whole. In its dimension as fantasy at any rate it leaves no doubt that the object of mercantilist policy is the series of communities of which Yarmouth is representative (society, then, and not the state). Yet this last is a wishful dimension, marked as such by herring's exchange value, the general limitation implicit in the abstract gesture toward a larger market. But this gesture does not remain so abstract as I have implied. Nashe's Yarmouth does indicate the aporia of mercantilism as such (i.e., it has a certain internadonal reference and value); but in what I would present as a second, yet more critical moment the Carnivalesque signifier gestures toward a specifically national horizon. It is probably true that fish defined wealth in Yarmouth, in some sense not easy to specify really usurped upon money's role as measure and medium; yet we know also, and Nashe knows, that fish is wealth by virtue of being convertible to money on a market larger than that defined by the town itself - to put this another way, that fish is in a sense money, whose very existence founds the possibility of a larger market and whose flows are determined by it. An analogy is thus determined - largely unconsciously but all the more surely and naggingly for that - between the movement of the herring (of the Sea, of Nature) and the movement of the market. And since Nashe is celebrating Yarmouth's new prosperity, this latter cannot but be associated with the structural shifts in the

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 269 market referred to before, as well as with mere circulation. What is referred to above all is the growth of London, newly emergent as the centre of the country's economy, which plays a - sometimes explicit, sometimes shadowy, but consistent - role, from the tract's first pages, as Yarmouth's great Other, that Foreign Power against which the town must define itself, and in relation to which, one comes to understand, it is both something prosaic and old, and yet something very new and strange, something that must kick and struggle to win its place. The unconscious equation of London with the sea with which Yarmouth must wage a daily battle for existence introduces, of course, a rather different perspective on the question of state and society, part and whole, than the fantasy endeavours to secure. To underscore this point about the limitations given to be seen by the paradox of the diversified singlecrop economy, or by the fish metaphor, I would remark here a nuance of 'red herring' which Nashe probably did not intend but which is there all the same. The wit of the subtitle depends in good part on a sense of the phrase red herring that is still current - red herring as a false lead or thing of no consequence (traditional questions of morality, for Machiavelli, and social class before the nineteenth century, for revisionist historians of the 1980s and 1990s, are red herrings in this sense).26 Yarmouth proves, according to Nashe's text, the proposition that the red herring is no red herring: it has been a very good lead, for the town, a thing of great substance indeed. But in the present context we see that there is an important sense in which the red herring, in Lenten Stuffe, is something of a red herring in relation to money, London, the market, the things that really count. Or again, in this context we see that these latter things are the real red herring, in the less often encountered, but still current sense of 'that which you can't catch, which will always get away, and which you know to be crucial precisely on that account.' A final word now about the ambiguity of the perspective this last equation — of London with the sea, of money with the real red herring — offers. I would want to suggest that a certain exactitude resides in the unconscious vagueness of London's position vis-a-vis Yarmouth, and in the symbolic play whereby it figures the market, or money, or simply itself. Insofar as London stands for the market and its movement, insofar as it is made out to be a bigger fish than Yarmouth in the sea of the market, it may be said without much licence to be a figure for emergent capitalism. But insofar as London is conjured up as itself, as the place where the money is, the one independent Urban Identity of another order from Yarmouth, it figures above all political power of an uncapi-

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talist or unnatural sort. The primary context, in the pamphlet, in which London is identified as malign Power is biographical: since Nashe has had to decamp thence, it comes to be associated, more and more patently in the course of the third episode, with a new and particularly invidious censorship, an upstart element of prickly neo-aristocracy and niggling obsequious lawyers. Nashe directs no express fire against the London merchant companies, which strove to be national monopolies; but I would suppose this is because he did not need to: the implication, for example, in his Hero and Leander story, of a kind of natural affinity between Asia Minor and Yarmouth (or more properly East Anglia) would have been understood by contemporaries, without the recognition's even being noted, to signify the nullity of the great companies' pretensions; and an analogy automatically slides into place whereby Nashe's relationship to neo-aristocratic censorship contains within itself, signifies, Yarmouth's relationship to that other neo-feudal force, the London trading companies.2 I would clinch the point about London's ambiguity as Yarmouth's great Other, and lead into the final phase of my argument, by remarking a striking moment in the third episode, in which an allegorical dimension discloses its presence in one of Nashe's herring tales. The explanation as to how herring became the king of fish takes the form of a mock-epic fable. A hawk released inadvertently from shipboard, finding it convenient to sate his hunger on unusual, watery prey, meets a quick fate himself in the mouth of a marlin. The birds will not forgive, they recruit the aquatic species of their family, war is declared, the fish must organize. And then, just before herring's election as king, comes the moment I mean. We learn that the whales and larger sea creatures, unthreatened by birds and indifferent to the whole affair, are naturally not on the roster of candidates for election. A bit after this, once Nashe has narrated the herring elected king, he ends the tale abruptly, passing over entirely any rendition of the expected battle. If there is satisfaction and significance in this curt close - the whole point of the fable, you see, is to situate the herring securely as its peers' superior, and not to celebrate bloody herring deeds - then there is to retrospect something positively sublime about the earlier moment, which places herring and all small fry in relation to ominously neutral powers of the same element but another order. The odd resonance of this moment - I had noted it as a particularly nice touch, something that must have peculiar significance, before I brought to analytic consciousness the imbrication of London in the chain of Carnivalesque oppositions and the big city's

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 271 ambiguity, as metaphor for overtly hostile (neo-feudal) power and as metonymy for ominously dynamic (capitalist) element - this resonance indicates the importance of a kind of mapping function to this tale and the whole tract. And deciphered, it crystallizes the realization as to what a complex piece of protest Nashe manages in his Lenten Stuffe - threatening the Ruling Powers, at one of its discourse's limits, with their own marginality in relation to the new Nature that they nonetheless have helped bring into being, and in the same gesture making a kind of ecological claim for the People's solidary right to existence. At this last limit, I would argue, Yarmouth-as-Cokaygne amounts to something relatively new - a Utopia of the capitalist niche. 6. Nashe's Herring Legends: A Utopian Allegorical Machine This last paragraph, it may seem, prevents my remaining argument more than it leads into it, suggesting as it does the unconscious thematics of Nashe's herring stories. But it says nothing yet about the movement or function of the entire section, and that will be my chief concern here. My argument will be that the progress of the section allegorically rehearses, even as it offers to resolve, the problem of Yarmouth's position vis-a-vis London; and that the section achieves a kind of structural triumph, finally, by diagnosing Nashe's basic antinomy as writer - what might be called his eternal orientation to the passage — by reference to that position. I need first to show (1) that there is narrative movement in this section (though as usual in Nashe it is discontinuous movement, neither entirely overt nor evidently sustained), then to make the case (2) that the allegory pertains especially to, works through, this movement. Along with this, I need to stress (3) that the associations in question are overdetermined — loose, discontinuous, overlapping; in other words, that the figuration is allegorical in the proper sense of that word. (1) To show that there is movement is easy, at least up to a point. Nashe's herring legends are to tell the larger tale of how herring's current relationship with Yarmouth came to be. They participate, then, in what we might call a narrative of acculturation - where 'acculturation' applies both to herring and to Yarmouth, since telling how herring came to occupy their place in human (Yarmouth) society is to mark the essential conditions and stages of Yarmouth's prosperity and virtue. This larger narrative is largely explicit, even if it is not really brought to official conclusion. The first mock legend, of Hero and Leander, tells how

272 Flights from the Tudor Settlement herring came to be, and how they came to Yarmouth (195-201). The second, a fabliau of a war between birds and fishes, tells how in the war herring 'scrambled up to be king of all fishes' (201-4). The third, about a man who sold rotten herring to the Pope, memorializes the discovery of curing herring (204-12). The fourth story, of a cropshin's winning a legal case against a turbot for 'a violent rape of his heart' (216), is then something of a problem, since it does not speak - clearly at any rate - of a fourth stage, a further advance (216-19).28 And a fifth story, though advertised (220), is not told.29 The official purpose, and thematics, of the sequence are disrupted, then, after they are established. Why? The incompletion evidently reflects the interference of another kind of movement in the sequence, which might be called an unofficial movement as long as it is remembered that unofficial does not mean implicit, or which might be simply called autobiographical as long as it is remembered that more is at stake in Nashe's story than his personal interest. I have already touched on this movement above; it will help to understand its place in the pamphlet, and the allegorical dimension, if we turn, before describing it, to the main reasons for all the herring stories in the first place. The basic motives are of two sorts; the official ones (mostly to do with Yarmouth) are less explicit, or more understood, than the unofficial ones (mostly to do with Nashe). Why praise Yarmouth in the herring, rather than in its leading families or fraternities? One major reason is evidently the modesty of the latter, who would rather let their virtues be imputed to Nature and the town as a whole than blush to see themselves praised. Another official reason, almost an implication of this last, is that Yarmouth on account of its modesty lacks the mythology that it truly deserves and which would strengthen its collective identity. Nashe as unconstrained outsider, so it is understood, is thus in a position to make up for a virtuous deficiency of the town, to perform for it a valuable service - to provide its insignia with a legendary history equivalent to what noble families were drawing up for themselves all around it. There is nothing inappropriate about this history's being cast in Carnivalesque mode, as travesty: to the contrary, therein lies the sign of Yarmouth's virtuous difference, though that the stories arrive as a gift from outside must seem paradoxical. For it should be stressed that Nashe in this section is understood as fashioning the legendary history from whole cloth: that is, he is not working up a set of stories that have been given him by the town in advance but rather bringing them, from extraneous sources, to the town.30 The break with the preceding epi-

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 273 sode, in which Nashe was constrained by the town and its records, is radical, and is indeed made out to be the very motive of the section: Nashe cannot wait - to add his name to the list of authors who have praised nonsensical or trivial things, true, but above all to be free, to show what he can do 'on his own.' The author's freedom: here then we have an unofficial but unmissable motive for praising the town in the herring. The point to be stressed is that if unofficial and official motives are considered together they indicate that a paradoxically harmonious, and to an extent an allegorical relationship will preside in this section between Yarmouth and its 'representative.' Nashe will be free to express himself, or at least his rhetorical desire, and in doing so will express Yarmouth, or provide it with the narrative material wherewith more securely to mark off its collective identity. (2) But the allegorical relationship between Nashe and Yarmouth insists in this section by virtue of the autobiographical movement or story traversing the sequence. As observed above, the story is one of high spirits followed by bad feeling, of Carnivalesque release and recoil. But this story's middle episodes, it must be confessed, are not so clear as beginning and end. One way of referring to them is to imagine the main title unfolding its significance over the section's course. Lenten Stuffe has somewhat special reference to this part, since it is here that Nashe exhibits his exclusive wares; and it seems to me that in its dynamics the section does indeed offer an exposition of what is contained within Nashe's tub of a title. 'Yes, of course, he has told us that he wrote in Lent, and so he is giving us the fish stories he knows.' So goes the first gloss on 'Lenten stuff.' 'You might expect his mood to be sour, since he has been pretty much banished to what would be a Lenten place for him, a provincial town. But the place does not seem to have damped his spirits. Even Nashe's Lenten stuff, it turns out, is Carnivalesque. The best revenge is living well.' So goes the second application, which presides up at least to the third story. And then: 'Check that. This stuff is really pretty Lenten after all. And it is a very aggressive and hostile kind of penance that he is doing.' So the third, which presides through that part of the section in which Nashe directs himself to the censoring institution arid baits would-be censorious readers. This autobiographical movement overtakes the official framework on the occasion of the fourth tale, as I said before. Before and apart from this, one sees its signs in two related developments: a move from fable to jest, from moralizing to conycatching tale; and the increasing violence contained in the tales themselves, which is a matter of manner as well as

274 Flights from the Tudor Settlement matter. And one can conjecture that a paradox about the beast fable conditions both more celebratory and more splenetic phases of the movement in question.31 On the one hand, the beast fable is identified as a naive form, a relatively popular genre, good for children. Whatever the Isle of Dogs was, one imagines that it was not first and foremost a beast fable (if the characters were animals, they would still have been people first, as in Volpone)\ so one can imagine Nashe's enthusiasm in the early stretches of this section as accompanying what for him was an escape from sophisticated constraint, from adult sense and censorship. On the other hand, of course, the beast fable, precisely because of its simplicity, is coded as a suspicious genre, indeed in Nashe's day inherently political insofar as it was intrinsically allegorical. This, one imagines, lies behind the recoil, and explains the grim humour, since almost any other choice of kind would do better, in Nashe's attempt to defang censorship by claiming innocence, asserting he only exists for the tale. I have been labouring to 'make a middle' for this autobiographical movement or discontinuous narrative in order to present a case for an analogical relationship with the official narrative of acculturation. But even without the analogy between progressive acculturation and disenchantment, the disruption of the official narrative, the superimposition upon it of something as if from the outside, implies a relationship between two 'logics' or 'levels,' the superimposing one of which has to be associated with Nashe's personal experiences, with the memory of London and his banishment therefrom. And it might be better to give up on a middle in the unofficial narrative, and to say that the relation is between different dynamics - between, say, a familiar Carnivalesque pattern of release and recoil working at the biographical level, and what would be a new and newly stable sort of Carnivalesque dynamic working in the story of acculturation. In that case, the difference between levels, the incompatibility between dynamics, can be understood to speak of a problem, a systematic uneven development, within Yarmouth culture, and the usurpation to mark the limits of Yarmouth's independence visa-vis London and within what is not yet the national economy. Something like this is true if there is a middle too - that is, if we are to understand Nashe as telling (or furthering) a story about himself in the course of his tales of herring. What difference does the middle make then? A fine but a significant one: it is the difference between an allegorical situation, occasionally actualized, and an allegorical machine, the difference between Nashe as interested party, sympathetic outsider inside, and Nashe as a Utopian figure. On this reading the unremarked

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 275

disruption of the official series is what seals the allegorical relationship, proves its continuity. And the allegorical mixing of stories is what makes it possible to understand the herring itself, the culture it founds in Yarmouth, to be speaking through Nashe in his defiant attack on the censor, standing judgment on the unnatural and anti-Carnivalesque bottling up of story which it has presumed to effect. Put another way, through the allegorical machinery, Nashe puts himself in position to use the herring against his banishers, to deliver a particularly satisfying curse. Again, the allegorical machinery is what allows Nashe to give unusual social concreteness to the theme of the Utopian thing. For herring certainly is presented as a Utopian thing in Lenten Stuffe, and as such calls up Rabelais's chapters on Pantagruelion. There is a reversal of course: Pantagruelion is a name, an imaginary thing, looking for a referent, where the herring in Nashe is a real referent looking to be imagined adequately, whose proper character or real social name has yet to be discovered. In Rabelais one finds oneself wondering at times whether the riddle does not have a banal, real answer (is this magical thing reallyjust hemp, or a close relative?); in Nashe one can wonder whether the banal thing he describes is not really much more than what it seems. This is perhaps not such a great difference in effect; both ways with the thing estrange the Real, Nashe to what are more concrete Utopian ends, not by virtue so much of the reversal as the allegorical additions. I noted in Rabelais a secret allegorical relationship, whereby the work of description figured the unknown collective work that gave birth to the agrarian paradigm, gave 'natural' significance to a system of objects, produced a second nature that could be selected from by a Bakhtiniaii chroiiotope. This relationship obtains as well in Nashe's rendition of the Utopian thing: it is what is developed and complicated into what I have called an allegorical machine. So it is that Nashe's herring stories, or rather his performance of them, is given the character of a search for Utopia, for the truth of the herring or of Yarmouth and oceanic agriculture; and so it is at the same time that the limits of the search are indicated, the impossibility of the Utopian object exposed and concretely explained, by Nashe's disruption of the legendary history. (3) Thus much to demonstrate the principal allegorical reference in Lenten Stuffe, which involves an identification between Nashe and Yarmouth, but which works positionally above all - Nashe is like Yarmouth in that his relation to London is similarly one of complex antagonism, would-be independent dependence. It is time to stress now that allegorical things are more complicated than this, that the

276 Flights from the Tudor Settlement 'machine' is overdetermined and uneven (sporadic in operation). The overdetermination is partly to do with the (figurative) position of herring itself, which I have been equating with Yarmouth above in a way that the reader has probably noted with some reservations: herring of course does not simply signify Yarmouth, it is its own animal too, so there is a third term, at least one, involved in the principal allegorical relationship. But above all, Nashe's relation to the cities is not just one-way. For all the identification with and enthusiasm over Yarmouth, Nashe represents, he is, London when there - so that if one wanted to be ruthless to the identification one could moralize the spleen against the censor by saying it just shows you cannot take the city out of the boy. Another way of putting this is that as a writer Nashe was a Londoner. This is not just a question of his vocabulary's resonance - though arguably it is Nashe's discursive distance (which if it was not simply a matter of his being a Londoner was certainly bound up with it) that makes his very 'treatment' of Yarmouth a feasible project. It is a matter too, for example, of the book market and of patronage. No doubt Nashe would hope to find more readers for this work in Yarmouth than in other towns, and he does send an abstract appeal or two for support and sponsorship in its direction (though to the town body at large, and not to the patriciate or any particular leading man). But he could not have lived off his Yarmouth sales, and Yarmouth alderpersons (evidently a notably conservative lot) 32 would not have been Nashe's best market for patronage. The impression given is that Yarmouth's kindness to Nashe, the 'patronage' for which he repays it with his work, was essentially a kind of good fellowship. Would the hospitality have held up indefinitely? much past the point when Nashe's aura, as something of a local boy who had made himself notorious in London, began to dissipate? Nashe had political reason, of course, for not naming his friends; yet the nature of his support remains more of an inference than it need have been; the Utopia of a nonpatronizing society, of patronage as town fellowship, is very much on the margins, connoting perhaps some reserve. In other words, Nashe marks his identification with Yarmouth as somewhat abstract, renders it as wish-fulfilment. The gratitude and appeals for further friendship do not preclude the exhibition of a certain distance, and this last in fact amounts to a way of thematizing the problem of Yarmouth's relation to the capital, the pressure of London. At the same time, as will be evident by now, our author is very much the urban outsider, neither of London nor of Yarmouth. And this

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identity-position, too, amounts to an overdetermination of the allegorical machine set up in the praise-of-herring section, and begins indeed to turn it into something else, back into something less like a machine and more like a situation or topography. It works this way because of Nashe's relation, as urban outsider, to two other corporate entities, groups this time rather than towns. As is his wont, Nashe frames his work with parodic dedications to what we might call moral patrons. His opening, official dedication is to Humphrey King, tobacconist, fellowwriter, friend, from whom his hope is to receive, in return for the dedication, a can of brownbill when he should next visit him in London. Not much is known of King: he would seem to stand for a social element and a Rabelaisian group spirit, a plebeian Mermaid's tavern, at the same time as there is no reason to think he was not Nashe's good friend. One could say that he is Yarmouth-in-London - the fellowship Nashe expects to enjoy in the future with him connects with, leads into, that which Yarmouth has shown him; but then King is not from Yarmouth, and it is surely significant, too, that Nashe's most earnest conjuring up of good times and intimate evocation of group spirit comes in the praise of his dedication rather than that of his main text. Nashe begins, then, by dedicating his work to a single individual who represents a certain sort of group activity. He concludes, in turn, by claiming that the work has been a gift to the corporation of fishermen, the first literary work to accord them the respect they deserve. This group, too, might be understood to represent the spirit of Yarmouth, yet it is invoked as possessing its own identity and principle of solidarity apart from the town. Nashe's closing address is evidently to them less as an official institution (guild or corporation) than as a group sharing a solidary code and free-spirited ethos; and it would seem to be the labouring sailors he has mainly in mind: No more can I do for you [fishermen] than I haue done, were you my god-children euery one: God make you his children and keep you from the Dunkerks, and then I doubt not but when you are driuen into harbour by foule weather, the Kannes shall walk to the health of Nashes Lenten-Stuffe and the praise of the redde Herring, and euen those that attend vppon the pitch-kettle will bee druncke to my good fortunes and recommendums. One boone you must not refuse mee in, (if you be boni socii and sweete Oliuers,) that you let not your rustic swordes sleepe in their scabberds, but lash them out in my quarrel! as hotely as if you were to cut cables or hew the main mast ouerboord, when you hear mee mangled and torne in

278 Flights from the Tudor Settlement mennes mouthes about this playing with a shettlecocke, or tossing empty bladders in the ayre. (225) A more vivid kind of imaginary bonding is enacted here, too, than in his expression of gratitude to Yarmouth proper. So even though both dedications can be understood as ways of echoing and extending Yarmouth's ethos in and into other parts of the nation, they also have the effect of instituting an opposition between towns and groups, placeaffiliation and group-affiliation. And insofar as this overdetermination leads to a complicated vision of the country as groups and sites in flux, it both distracts from the principal tension or contradiction between Yarmouth-Nashe and London, and communicates a sense that the principal opposition itself is to be understood within a larger, pulsing system of micro-forces. But this last, again, is a tendency or impulse within the allegorical framework. There is no question of its displacing completely the analogy between Yarmouth's and Nashe's positions vis-a-vis London from the (largely unconscious) attention. So the rhetoric of the stories, Nashe's style in its freedom, is still to be understood largely as answering to Yarmouth. One could indeed see just their freedom or singularity as part of Nashe's point. A town's legends are supposed to be important for what they convey; their narrative and verbal style is accordingly to be plain and self-effacing — dignified, of course, but nothing to call attention to itself. The understood - incoiigruous-Carnivalesque - proposition in Nashe's third episode is that that's not the right style for Yarmouth's legends to travel in. The Carnivalesque medium of the legends will become, in a sense, the crucial message that they convey. 7. Carnivalesque Medium as Legendary Message The second feature story strikes me as the most successful, stylistically speaking. But it is the story about how herrings came to be, and came to Yarmouth, that makes claims for itself, and whose style I will discuss here; Nashe leaves no question that he wants his audience to remember Marlowe's just printed version of the legend.33 Here he is, talking of Hero's failed attempt to resuscitate her lover: Downe shee ranne in her loose night-gowne, and her haire about her eares (euen as Semiramis ranne out with her lie-pot in her hand, and her blacke dangling tresses about her shoulders with her iuory combe

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 279 ensnarled in them, when she heard that Babilonwas taken), and thought to have kist his dead corse aliue againe, but as on his blew iellied sturgeon lips she was about to clappe one of those warme plaisters, boysterous woolpacks of ridged tides came rowling in, and raught him from her, (with a minde belike to carrie him backe to Abidos.) At that she became a franticke Bacchanal outright, & made no more bones but sprang after him, and so resignd vp her Priesthood, and left worke for Musaeus and Kit Marlowe. The gods, and gods and goddesses all on a rowe, bread and crow, from Ops to Pomona, the first apple wife, were so dumpt with this miserable wracke, that they beganne to abhorre al moysture for the seas sake. (198) On the one hand, the reference to Musaeus and Marlowe observes the necessary legendary pretence that theirs were secondary, worked-up versions of the story; it is implied, contrariwise, that our author was there when it made news. On the other hand, the reference recognizes explicitly, what his whole way with the story refuses to let us take for granted, the difference between the story itself and its telling, between narrative raw material and the work of style. And in this regard, of course, Hero leaves work for Nashe too, whose version commits itself with Musaeus's and Marlowe's. It commits itself, then, for comparison with a work which itself was offered as first arid foremost a stylistic experiment and tour de force, as something new and strange in English verse. And nothing could be more different from Marlowe's poem than Nashe's insistence on the posteriority of style to content (that is, his alienation of content). Hero and Leanderis an imitation or free translation, of course, and everyone knows that Marlowe is not making the story up, but that is beside the point. For Marlowe writes a fragment of what we might call amatory epic',^4 its theme is desire finding itself, making its way, and its success depends on the shockingly assumed absence of conventional (for example, Spenserian) moralization, indeed even of Ovidian condescension and the replacement of such belittling understandings by a remarkably literal epic fate. For the shock to register appropriately, over time, the reader must 'be there' in the action; you must see the story that you already know unfolding, in the epic way, as if for the first time, but limning now the magical immanence of erotic desire. Meanwhile, stylistically, the great event is Marlowe's construction of a moderately ornate, but active, middle style for his narrative, which is punctuated regularly by, and which seemingly dispels the need for larger meaning in, the portentous compression of the great aphoristic couplets.

280 Flights from the Tudor Settlement For Marlowe's oscillation between narrative description and aphorism Nashe substitutes a 'periodic' rhythm. I mean this literally: the narrative material, to appearances, is rendered somewhat arbitrarily, cut up into segments (gestures, scenes) some of which are then given the treatment, relayed in periods which, expressly likened to the crashes of a dance and the beating of waves, come to feel like so many experiments, essays, or (the best and deepest metaphor) verbal wagers in the face of the legend. Within the verbal material of the period itself, one becomes aware of two impulses or movements. One might simply be called extravagance or self-reference: by this I refer to the dimension of sheer play or nonsense in Nashe's verbal strings, especially to what might be called the humanistic striving for copia (all the flexing and generation of phrases and idioms against, and from out of, one another) and to the incessant 'materialization of the signifier,' associated with festive speech (the puns, plays on the letter, etc.). It is characteristic of Nashe's prose in general, but especially of this pamphlet, to make the former seem but an aspect or outgrowth of the latter. The other periodic impulse is mock-heroic or bathetic, involving the constant slippage from one (high) register to another (low) one: it is there, for example, in the quotation above, in the terms 'lie-pot,' 'ensnarled,' 'blue-jellied sturgeon lips,' 'woolpacks.' Now it is important to say that, while the bathetic effects are incessant and insistent, to the point that they might seem a main reason for telling the tale, still their target is not really Marlowe. Nashe is not particularly respectful, but he is not trying to show the poem's take on the story up as too solemn and full of itself (as Dryden and Pope will later do to Paradise Lost, for example). The difference between mediums would make this difficult in any case, and then Marlowe's poem was not very high to begin with. Furthermore, though bathetic substitution is most prominent here, it is present throughout the stories, if not indeed a constant of Nashe's style. We might call such bathos decontextualized or free-floating Carnival debasement, and as such, viewed strictly as a stylistic phenomenon, it raises the question of what it is for, or in other words of what its context is. But if we consider the bathos in this story as part of a larger change in the rhetoric of the story itself or of narrative style, then we can see it as a part of a recontextualizing strategy. This strategy is at work in the play on 'hero' that, one imagines, sparked Nashe's use of the tale. Hero = herring: wild, but it answers a question that is left in suspense in Marlowe. The suspense - the absence of any sort of filiation with English matter - was part of Marlowe's point; it went along with his removal of

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 281 the poem from other binding conventions, or in other words with the focus on erotic desire. Nashe's recasting and re-accenting of the story makes as if to restore the epic context, virtually overlooking eros in the process; it replaces desire in and with groups, or rewrites it as the attraction and repulsion of groups and places. So, for example, Hero's decision to have Leander if she can is not so much a matter of erode ardour as it is a form of revenge on her family for cooping her in virginity's tower. In the passage quoted above, the comparison with Semiramis does its comic best to make us forget that Hero's tower is isolated, at a deliberate remove from any great city or its fate. The reference to Abidos wanting Leander back does something comparable. I would note particularly here the 'boisterous woolpacks of ridged tides,' which set desire in a mercantilist framework (the seas are made stronger, you see, by association with the busy trade in wool), and reveal an allegorical link between Sestos-Abidos and Yarmouth-London, which in turn shows up Leander's imminent translation to ling and quartering off Iceland as revenge and wish-fulfilment: underscoring as it does that London has no fish it can call its own - terrible fate! - and situating Yarmouth in operative relation to the ocean, the international market, rather than to its big rival. And finally, Nashe's story is not done until all three parties to the erotic fact have been translated. Hero's 'nurse or Mother Mampudding,' when she saw her mistress carried away by 'those rough-headed ruffians' the waves, dropped 'as dead as a door nail, and never mumped crust after.' Partly because she 'was a shrewish snappish bawd,' the gods turn her into mustard. Hence mustard's sharpness, and 'that Hero and Leander, the red herring and ling, never come to the board without mustard, their waiting-maid.' Mustard, then, as a figure of the third, and precisely as such, as a figure at once of desire and the group: this puts everything on the table, in good Carnivalesque fashion. There is no such happy ending in Marlowe, of course, whose story was appropriately left unfinished, in suspense. Nashe's bathetic ending moors Marlowe's sprung desire in the closure of a Lenten Cokaygne image, a little allegory of the group-in-flux cohering, enjoying a kind of epiphany. 8. Allegorical Politics and the Crisis of Carnivalesque Poetics This last has been to show that Nashe's periodic style creates or carries with it a kind of Carnivalesque ontology. What I am trying to suggest is that his originality lies in situating this ontology in respect of Yarmouth and the sea, in such a way as to summon up and conjure certain funda-

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mental wishes and fears. The situation summons the fears up, above all, by suggesting Yarmouth's vulnerability to London and contingency; it conjures them by evoking a larger contingency, making that out to be Yarmouth's proper element. Now I want to return to the narrative movement of the story-string that I spoke of before as sealing the main allegory (Nashe = Yarmouth); more particularly, I want to consider the increasing violence of the stories, and something crucial that happens, byway of it, to the allegorical positioning of Yarmouth. Stylistically considered, this movement might be understood as a displacement of the bathetic substitution practised in 'Hero and Leander' into a more frankly aggressive register; or alternately, the movement might be seen as involving displacement from the level of style to the level of narrative content, as the stories themselves become more expressly militant. Since the stylistic level struck in the legends does tend to carry an implicit imputation as to Yarmouth's social level, one thing happening here is that Yarmouth is attaining respect, rising along with the herring (as it becomes king and then assumes royal red). But as I noted above, Nashe only signals the intention of telling a heroic tale; this is in the second story, which he cuts off abruptly before the battle begins. The violence contained in the next story, about the man who discovers the curing of herring, turns out to be a manifestation of the national prejudice against the papacy - an honourable, utterly sanctioned trait to be sure but hardly heroic, expressed as it is in what is essentially a jest or conycatchirig tale. What is happening here is clear enough, in both official and unofficial storylines. Unofficially or autobiographically, the jest looks toward Nashe's attack on the London censor, and affords him a preliminary triumph at his expense (which is not enough). The category of superstition makes the link: just as the idolatrous mindset sets the papal court up for humiliation, so it is the censorship's petty fetishizing of the individual story-feature that both characterizes it and overwhelms Nashe with fuming ire. Officially, on the other hand, the Pope is more or less the Pope, and something is being said about Carnivalesque religion a la Yarmouth. There is a complicated theological point, some paradoxical middle way, at least vaguely implicit - papal ornament and pomp, all the prestigious paraphernalia of collective worship, are red herrings, are simply nowhere, in respect of true religion; yet Yarmouth knows how to handle, to cultivate, to treasure the herring better than any other place. There is a less vague and implicit patriotic point: the tale associates Yarmouth with the one authentic proto-nationalist ideology, anti-

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papism, a much more powerful and organizing English sentiment than, for example, the cult of Elizabeth. What is crucial in all this, when the stories are put together, is that what I have called Nashe's own sliding identification with different factions or elements of the smallholding class is attributed to Yarmouth in its representative capacity as good English town. That is, even as Yarmouth is elevated by the movement, the increasing violence, of the stories, it is also demoted, from the felt status of a more or less respectably middle-class place, to the position of the conycatcher, that 'smallholder' whose distinction from the vagrant, whose most precious capital, resides in his wits, his boldness, and his willingness to use them. Unofficially, this position is accorded it vis-a-vis London; officially, the position is accorded to Yarmouth and the whole nation that it represents vis-a-vis the great Catholic powers (not just the papacy, of course, but the absolutist monarchies). And my main proposition is that the analogy thus put in place between Nashe's class position and Yarmouth's social-geographic position, its place in the social formation, does some good cognitive work, however necessarily blurry it remains around its edges. It helps to bring both Nashe and Yarmouth, class and social geography into better representational focus, and manages to explain one set of problems in terms of the other. To figure Yarmouth as a conycatcher in relation to London, and England as one in relation to the great European monarchies - this was rather good, it captured or put in perspective an important truth or two and was potentially useful, not least because of the sympathy directed toward the conycatcher, and the shaft of light shed on the nature of class, or of the middle class, and its potential for solidarity. At the same time, the analogy helps to motivate and explain Nashe's unevenly acerbic turn against the censorship in the latter part of this (third) episode; and it provides the literary and aesthetic questions that arise there with an unusual depth of reference. Nashe's anger and anxiety come across lucidly in this attack; yet the attack's precise terms are hard to follow. This is partly because Nashe muffles his blows by separating the censorship itself, and the real powers that be, from the parasitic and upstart class of lawyers and informers that surround them, and blaming the sad state of affairs, in which a serious writer cannot take pen in hand and write even of a silly subject like herring without fearing crucifixion, on the latter element. But though this is a consistently put defence it is yet more transparently lame, and so poses no major problem for the understanding.

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What is more puzzling, first, is an ambiguity as to just what characterizes the censorious or parasitic reading, and what the true or proper reading that is opposed to it. On the one hand, the problem with the censorious reader seems to be that he must have a key; no matter how innocent the passage or fable, there must be some darker purpose. And against this trait, Nashe's implication tends to be that poetry is intrinsically light, or simply itself - which is to say, wwallegorical by nature, opposed to reference, indeed to meaning. On the other hand, the parasitic reader grabs his darker purposes arbitrarily from whatever individual surfaces or passages happen to accommodate them; he does not read to the end of the period or episode or story, is indeed by nature indifferent to the constraints imposed by context upon meaning, i.e., to the totality or integrity of the poetic work, or indeed of its units. And against this trait, Nashe is evidently committed to a notion as to the complexity, the inherent contextuality, of fictive signification. Neither operative theory of reading is necessarily incoherent with itself; yet it is notable that Nashe's positions are harder to fit together than the censors.' I am tempted to fit them together this way: that reference or meaning is to be sought, not positively or through simple oneto-one correlations (where 'cob' means Lord Cobham), but byway of a constant shuttling back and forth between word and period, narrative fact and emergent context, a shuttling based in, but rewriting to a degree, the 'signifying ontology' of travesty. Yet it is quite possible to see this late episode as throwing it up in the air whether we are to conceive Lenten Stuffeas having 'external reference' at all. A second reason for the difficulty of understanding the attack stems from Nashe's implicit recognition of a deep affinity between the parasite's code of reading and Carnivalesque 'materialization,' which also consists in an ostensibly surface-oriented 'taking out of context.' Certainly it is no exaggeration to say that Nashe, in the attack that is meant to stigmatize the lawyerly reader and mark him as different, rushes to meet this reader's expectations, to give him what he wants. Here he is, decorating his turbot story with some suspicious nonsense, mockingly providing the censor with bait: This speech was no spireable odor to the Achelous of her [the turbot's] audience; wherefore she charged him by the extreeme lineaments of the Erimanthian beare, and by the priuy fistula of the Pierides, to committe no more such excruciating sillables to the yeelding ayr. (217)

Nashe's Lenten Utopia 285 It's evident that a sharp hostility expresses itself through nonsensical rhetoric here, or in other words through something quite unconnected to the hostility itself; for all the mockery, then, the effect is to make the censor's grasping for allegorical straws, his reading of the worst intentions into seemingly innocent passages, all the more plausible. Again, insofar as Nashe's resentment takes him from his planned discourse, it might be said to obliterate contextual constraint, and thus to make it more difficult to read to the end of his periods, to take the work contextually. The more unmitigated or 'forgetful of itself the attack becomes, the heavier the irony used, so much the less authentically Carnivalesque it becomes; and again, it does not seem to me to over-read to see Nashe as at least unconsciously recognizing this situation in its risk, and that the parasitic reader is him - his projection, his necessary double. This identification is hard to sort out, yet is indelible; and Nashe's intimacy with the Lyncean crew, limned in here, reflects back (or forward) on his relations with the various other good-fellowly groups and places, and changes their feel, imparts a paranoid potential to them. A certain crisis is acted out in this late and difficult section of the pamphlet, then, a crisis of Carnivalesque poetics, which it is the virtue of this particular work to situate in relation to the shifting social geography of Britain at the turn of the century. Before trying to find a formula for the crisis, I should add in a dimension not yet explicitly mentioned. The parasitic reader at whom Nashe vents his spleen, and the neo-aristocrat standing at an opportunistic distance behind him, are animals native to a certain print culture. Plato says in a famous passage touting the virtues of spoken dialogue that writing cannot defend itself. The printed period may be less static, but it is still slow, and the parasite and neo-aristocrat batten on this sluggishness to make it say just what they want. An opposition between oral and print culture starts to take shape here, and to align itself with the chain associated with oceanic agriculture. Nashe's wager, clearly, is to effect a Carnivalesque merger between oral and written rhetoric in print; the threat is that the ground for such a merger will be washed away by the reading habits encouraged by the growing sea of print. If he wins a local victory over this threat in Nashes Lenten Stuffe, if he overcomes the crisis of Carnivalesque poetics, then it is by staging them. Here he is, in a moment of remarkably affecting, and yet strikingly odd, pathos - the climax of the work on the reading offered here - realizing that his attack on the censor has gone amok, and foregrounding, I take it, the whole complicated problem of context.

286 Flights from the Tudor Settlement Stay, let me looke about, where am I? in my text, or out of it? not out, for a groate: out, for an angel: nay, I'le lay no wagers, for nowe I perponder more sadlie vpon it, I thinke I am out indeede. Beare with it, it was a pretty parenthesis of Princes and theyr parasites, which shall doe you no harme, for I will cloy you with Herring before wee part. (219)

Note that Nashe's performance of this realization moves from the more oral-performative to the more written: 'Not out, for a groat; out, for an angel' is juggler's business; 'now I perponder more sadly' evokes the arrested pen of the thoughtful author. What is he thinking with his pen in the air? what does he mean by 'I think I am out indeed'? I imagine that he wants the reader to figure him pulling back from his attack, and allowing himself the recognition that he really has, given his circumstances, gone too far, or beyond acceptable bounds; I imagine also that he intends us to figure him as realizing the impossibility of his biographical situation (between two cities with no place obvious to go in his writing career). It is not far from this last to the symptomatic meaning, which as often is the plainer: that given the shifting geography the work has turned out to be about, it is difficult to imagine what being in would be; that 'outness' is necessary, a condition to be accepted in both its prospective exhilaration and its telltale melancholy. Or again, in somewhat different terms, we might formulate the basic problem Nashe has come up against, and the crisis of poetics itself, as follows. His whole work, I have argued, is toward making parts that do not add up - episodes one through three, London, Yarmouth, and the herring - yet adumbrate a whole; toward figuring as a unity a shifting context of a corporation-market that consists, and yet does not consist, in its parts. How would he not find the hypocritical reader's taking him out of context, for what profess to be the most noble (patriotic) reasons, supremely irritating? He would like to be in a position seriously to be so taken. Let us lift our own heads now, go back over some part of our text, and perponder. I have argued that Nashe's favoured form, the superimposed miscellany, had an indefinite but consistent social-topographic reference, that its clutter stood for the singular overdetermination of the late Elizabethan social formation, effectively a capitalist society that did not understand itself as such. Nashe's possession of the form put him in a position, given the fortuitous bit of bad luck that sent him to Yarmouth, to compose an especially consequent Carnival Utopia. Lenten

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Stuffe implicitly casts the town as blessed by virtue of its occupation of a privileged place in the country and its economy; its representation as a separate, singularly Carnivalesque place is predicated on its relative cultural independence, perceived as at once established and threatened by economic growth and transformation. From one angle, that of the history of the Carnivalesque, the significance of Lenten Stuffe lies in the fact that Carnival, displaced into prose style, assumes a directly Utopian role by making Yarmouth a fantastic place, and thus lifting it into figurative status. From another angle, more properly to do with the history of Utopia, the pamphlet's significance resides in the fall of Utopia into a place on the map of the nation, the claim made for a definite locale as an effectively Utopian place. Considered as a substitution strategy answering to the end of the original, relatively inclusive Utopian moment, the originality of this move consists in its representation of a stratified smallholding class as if it were one. But in the movement by which Yarmouth comes to stand for a perduring smallholding interest, Nashe's descriptive miscellany also testifies to a change in the nature of place and of the town itself; it figures a new and more integral relation between categories of general and particular, system and part, than we have seen to obtain previously. Yarmouth-asutopia is most saliently premised, in other words, on an early phase of capitalist abstraction.

Chapter V. Flights from the Tudor Settlement; or, Carnival and Commonwealth Revised V.ii. The Imperial Lab: Discovering Forms in The New Atlantis

1. The New Atlantis and Utopia: Forces and Relations of Production In histories of the Utopian idea, The Neiu Atlantis (1627) tends, reasonably enough, to be grouped with Campanella's City of the Sun (c. 1602) and Andreae's Christianopolis (1619), and cast as figuring a new Utopian wave in Europe, whose ingenuous proto-scientific and imperial designs in fact consign the Irony, the probing social-epistemologic interest, of the founding work for which they profess such enthusiasm (Utopia, 1516) to the dustbin for a time.1 But the connection of The New Atlantis to Utopia is also made more immediately. To Renaissance scholars, a direct link seems natural because More and Bacon are great examples of Renaissance men, models of the new civility 'before' they were authors (in ways that Campanella and Andreae were not): it is partly thus that the Utopia is recognized as an exemplary Renaissance genre, even though there was only one produced (More's) of major literary value. By historians of the genre, on the other hand, The New Atlantis is directly opposed to Utopia because it can be cast (again, as Andreae's and Campanella's works cannot be) as opening up a divide within the Utopian genre that proves to last. This is the opposition between utilitarian or technological Utopias, on the one hand, and romantic or anthropological Utopias on the other. The New Atlantis describes a society much like the European in most cultural respects, but which has been profoundly changed for the better by virtue of the institutionalization of natural science. In Bensalem, we learn, many of the techniques by which resources are produced have been improved; but we are given to understand that the occupational

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structure of society, the way in which work is organized, remains broadly the same. To put it in the Marxist terms to which the opposition in question clearly correlates, Bacon writes (however reluctantly and qualifiedly, in ways that will become clear) a Utopia of the forces of production, and in doing so reveals Utopia to have been a Utopia of the relations of production. If the opposition between forces and relations of production is anachronistic, there seems little use in denying its pertinence. What seems worth doing, rather, is to question the simple descriptive adequacy of the terms. Thus in reading the early pages of Book II of Utopia, where the manifold benefits of a communist organization of labour are described, one finds the impression hard to resist that the very raw materials of Production have been made over, that something like a quantum leap in productivity is associated with the magically sudden increase in social 'free time.' Surely the effect of technological progress is rendered, even though Hythlodaeus insists that the time is freed up for the most part simply in consequence of everybody's working, rather than by the introduction of new techniques. And the sense of technological change is no wonder after all, considering that such a thoroughgoing collective reorganization of labour amounts to a transformation of one of the crucial elements in the forces of production. There is no equivalent effect in The New Atlantis of an increase in collective human power. Though a transformation in the forces of production is the great fact about Bacon's Utopian island, the change is not represented but asserted, and it is most effectively conveyed by indirection, as one meaning of the pervasive theme of the secret. Bacon does not reflect directly on general economic arrangements (on relations or forces of production) at all, and it is paradoxically because of this elision of the economic, in his vision of what is nonetheless a more efficient and comfortable society, that Utopiaseems in retrospect 'nontechnological.' The last contrast owes less, I would stress, to the importance of natural philosophical knowledge, in Bacon's Utopia, than to his location of science in a single institution, Salomon's House, whence abundance, health, and peace, in the form of new inventions, new physic, and something like a faith in national Progress, emanate to society at large. King Utopus, in More's work, becomes eponymous by refashioning preutopian society 'from the ground up.' Solamona, the equivalent figure in The New Atlantis, bequeaths his name explicitly, though ambiguously, to a corporate institution within Bensalem.4 Now insofar as The New Atlantis is focused on a particular institution,

290 Flights from the Tudor Settlement and attempts thus to separate out a particular problem, it resembles a single-issue Utopia of the sort exemplified in More's Book I by the Polylerite enslavement of felons.5 Its 'generic position' is thus an objectively paradoxical one, determining, as shall be shown, a curious ambiguity about the edges of the 'less Utopian' parts of Bacon's Utopia, an effect as of the suspension of the elements of what would be an ideal commonwealth in what remains, what refuses to give over being, Utopian space. Ultimately this effect testifies to an ongoing shift in the situation of uneven development to which consequent Utopias always respond, suggesting a closing down, a recession of possibilities, and at the same time their massing or solidification, within actually existing social space. More immediately, however, the generic positioning of The Neiv Atlantis corresponds to a peculiar authorial ambivalence, and bespeaks a surprisingly direct and self-conscious relationship to More on Bacon's part,6 which justifies the 'biographical' critical connection between Utopia and The New Atlantis. For Bacon is not unaware of his work's paradoxical relationship to Utopia, and indeed wants to encourage its consideration, to turn the inevitability of the comparison to use. His one explicit reference to More's work - a virtually tongue-in-cheek revision of Utopian 'courtship' - provides the clearest evidence for this. Whereas each Utopian is to see her prospective partner naked, and approve, before the marriage is settled, Bensalemite custom delegates the task of viewing to family friends of the same sex. I have read in a book of one of your men, of a Feigned Commonwealth, where the married couple are permitted, before they contract, to see one another naked. This they dislike, for they think it a scorn to give refusal after so familiar knowledge. But because of many hidden defects in men and women's bodies, they have a more civil way; for they have near every town a couple of pools, (which they call 'Adam and Eve's pools'), where it is permitted to one of the friends of the man, and another of the friends of the woman, to see them severally bathe naked. (478)7

This is a pragmatic and face-saving revision of Utopian custom in the interest of modesty, on the one hand; but also surely an allegory of the mediation of Utopian desire, of a holding at bay of the Utopian object itself, marked as overseen by the decorous predilection of the author. Meanwhile, that Bacon's work can be understood as an attempt to write a Utopia of the forces of production helps to explain what I take to

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be the modern reader's relative indifference to it.8 Living as we are through a period of protracted economic recession in which the socalled third wave of technological innovation proceeds apace, a period in which the distinction between the welfare of the capitalist system and the welfare of even the national population at large becomes ever more palpable, and in which the notion of progress is fatally attached to the chip and the net, something would be wrong if we did not find it difficult to respond to a Utopia which makes social salvation out to lie in sheer scientific-technological advance.9 In this situation, it seems salutary to remember that Marxism was originally supposed to have overcome the opposition between utilitarianism and romanticism, and to have valorized neither forces nor relations of production as against the other; and it is worth reminding ourselves that all periods are not our own, and that there are moments in which the 'technological imagination' need not be allied with spurious Utopias, may indeed harbour the only authentic Utopian departures available. This essay will attempt to deepen Ernst Bloch's essential point as to the fundamental break constituted by Bacon's notion and representation of the social regulation of invention.10 To do this will involve focusing on Bacon's description of Salomon's House itself, and considering the broader social implications of what is in effect Bacon's refashioning of intellectual labour, both as process and as function. 2. The Laboratory as Critique of Method

But if the refashioning of intellectual production is what is being proposed in the description of Salomon's House, it is striking that next to nothing is said about the theory of knowledge-production, Bacon's new method itself, which should, so it would seem, justify and shape the institution. The Fellow of the College, who tells the narrator some of its secrets in the last episode of this unfinished work, offers no discourse on method. Rather he provides a mission statement (480); an extended description of the House's physical plant (480—6); a brief catalogue of the 'employments and offices of our fellows' (486) ;n and a yet briefer summary of 'ordinances and rites' (487). On reflection, of course, Bacon's strategy of presentation in the section is orthodox Utopian procedure, in which description of the way things are in the foreign place stands in for its impossible theory, the theory that can no more be thought through than it can be received.12 What stands out in the description are two imbalances:, first, and more impressively, as between

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'plant' and labour; and second, within the envisaged division of labour, as between the collection and production of experiments.13 Why is so much space accorded to the description of the college's multifarious laboratory - its 'possessions,' its 'preparations and instruments' (480)? And why is this description so purely paratactic, at least to initial appearances? The concise and orderly description of the division of labour conveys at least an outline of the scientific labour process, but the itemization of places and tools gives little sense of the physical shape of the House. The impression easily acquired from the paragraphs describing the lab is that they comprise a wish list, unwieldy because struck off, as wishes will be: they amount to proto-scientific daydreaming, which naturally, in an environment where labour is cheap, gravitates toward material equipment. Another striking feature of the 'preparations and instruments' section lends itself to a similar explanation, in terms of wish-fulfilment. This is that the places and objects described would often seem to be ends — wondrous accomplishments of the House's application of scientific method - much more than they are means to further experimentation. Put more precisely, so many of the objects described (whole new animals, tremendously improved cannon) seem to be proofs of power that the places housing them take on a marvellous quality too, come to seem more like wonder-cabinets than places of experiment. Now one of course ought not to rush to call this feature a contradiction: it will be a chief aim of any laboratory science to improve the instruments with which it works, the laboratory itself. And I do not believe that any of Bacon's instruments can be said definitively not to be a means, to be exclusively an end. Even the well which contains 'a water which we call Water of Paradise, being, by that we do to it, made very sovereign for health and prolongation of life' (481) - even this particular topos of the Water of Life can be understood to make further, more refined, experimentation possible.14 Still enough is here, surely, to suggest a kind of interference with the description's main aim, inasmuch as such features, while ascribing a magical character to the lab, do not help to clarify the scientific institution's structure or mode of operation. And it is difficult not to attribute the interference, once again, to a structuring proto-scientific fantasy.15 Nonetheless, there are good scientific reasons - reasons, that is, stemming from Bacon's inductive method - for the imbalance as between plant and labour, and for the introduction of works into the context of preparations for works. The latter feature is especially to be accounted

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for by reference to the category and practice of 'Experientia Literata,' and its classically supplementary - secondary-but-integral - status within the Baconian program.16 To show how the category fits in, I must say something about the object of scientific knowledge in Bacon's theory, which was most fully exposited in The New Organon. True knowledge consists, according to Bacon, in the knowledge of the repertory of forms: that set of primary substances and/or motions which make up the primary ingredients of matter, whose relationship to the actual world of objects is figured, with remarkable adequacy, by the relationship of the alphabet to language.17 Accordingly, a 'true' or scientific experiment is one that aims at the knowledge of one or more of these root principles, a form or set of forms. Such experimentation of course will always be founded on what is currently known of forms - which is to say that it could not be founded on much, to Bacon's mind, at the time of his writing. A fuller or truer course of experiment would be founded on a better knowledge of forms, and the fullest on a complete knowledge. Later science, it seems, will proceed with a confidence as to its results presently unimaginable, indeed so great as to render the term 'experiment' virtually oxymororiic. This accomplished science Bacon will call natural magic, since its results, though certain, will not be comprehensible to the naked eye.18 Now it is conceivable that the miraculous things appearing among the instruments in Salomon's House might be accounted for as effects of such magic. The magical effect of the decryption is surely not accidental. But if the Father and his fellows have progressed to the actual knowledge of forms, if they have become natural magicians, then he is holding back a great deal of what would presumably be simple information, and costing European scientists a good deal of effort, when he restricts himself to a description of the institution. So, though the possibility of such a deep secret is a marked, and ominous, aspect of Bacon's Utopia, it seems more probable that the House has still much to learn before attaining to natural-magical status. The works that obtrude into the description are thus more surely understood as the effects of 'Experientia Literata.' They have issued, that is to define this term now - from literacy in the cultural records and discourses of experimentation, however diverse and disorganized these might remain; from a mere reading knowledge in the products of nature's language, as it were, rather than from a grasp of the principles that combine to make the language what it is. The opposition is between experiments conducted with the knowledge of forms expressly in view,

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and those conducted in the 'mere' hope of attaining practical effects (e.g., a more efficient watermill); the former will be formulated in accordance with the emerging principles of Bacon's inductive method, while the latter are framed in a more or less ad hoc way, by analogy with other experiments or on the basis of previous ill-comprehended results, and, if they are successful, are so more or less by accident. Bacon claims that virtually all important inventions of the past have been discovered in this way, as if by accident; and though the eventual aim of the new method entails the systematization of invention, hence the reduction of the significance of accidental results, he does not in fact expect the rate of accidental discoveries to decrease with the implementation of his program. Rather, with the increasingly systematic collection of experiments and communication among different experimenters and areas that he envisages - with what we might call the centralization of the experimental function - he expects that the number of accidental discoveries will proliferate. Thus such discoveries will be less accidental than they were before, and literate experimentation's results go by the name of anticipations of nature: they are understood as providing a foretaste of what method based in the knowledge of forms will do.20 Experientia literata is accordingly integral to the new science, and deserves a discrete place in the great instauration, riot only for pragmatic or propagandistic reasons (though these are not unimportant), but also because it may assist in, may hasten, the approach to forms. Unlike the new method itself, which remains to be fully unearthed, experientia literata emerges as such with the institutionalization of science, and thus stands as the material mark of a difference in humanity's relation to nature attendant upon that event. The occasional indistinction between instruments and works, in the section on preparations and instruments, does not simply reflect the raw fantasy of the would-be scientist, then; or if it does, it does so in recording this shift, in testifying to the new character of accident, the potentially anticipatory character of all experiment, within the Utopian institution. The comparative expansiveness of the lab, on the other hand, answers to the potential centrifugality of Baconian induction, another mark of its inaugurative status. As noted, the object of this induction is to locate those rudimentary bits of matter-cum-motion that Bacon, with what Perez-Ramos calls his characteristic, and misleading, lexical conservatism, terms 'forms'; or to put this in a way which lays stress on how the husk of an Aristotelian notionality continues to work even after it has been broken with, its object is to penetrate, through superficial (mate-

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rial and efficient) levels of causality, to the really moving formal causality. Though Bacon's break with the Aristotelian notion of form was premised on late sixteenth-century schoolbook revisions thereof which reduced it to a principle of motion,22 his rendition of formal causality was singular. And he by no means understood that great strides were being made in the discovery of these singular creatures (i.e., in the definition of any one form, or any subsets of them). Given the assumption of an underlying, motivating alphabet, and in the absence of successful research programs, it can readily be understood why Bacon's method should cast its net wide, concerning itself with as many phenomena in nature as possible. The scope of Baconian induction seems to have been coextensive with all of nature's workings; in principle as from practical necessity, it envisaged the immediate setting in train of a totalizing logic - rules of formal combination coming to light in necessary pace with the disclosure of forms themselves, the discovery of any one form imbricated with that of all the others. By its nature it requires a radical - a revolutionary rather than a reformist - departure from previous methods, and the 'indulgence' of the Father's description may be grasped as rigorously symptomatic of this revolutionary character. It takes a continent to discover a form.23 If, then, the admixture of works with instruments in the description can be explained by reference to Experientia Literata, and records the effects of the institutionalization of science, the paratactic amplitude reflects the totalizing, centrifugal character of the new method: signalling the scope of the institution's object, it suggests the breadth of the institution itself. I have now shown that the peculiarities of the estate of Salomon's House are not the result of unreflective wish-fulfilment. The value of showing this does not lie in reducing but rather in depersonalizing the wishful dimension of the representation, in according it the character of ideology-critique: it might be said that the Father's litany of possessions gives expression to, thus gives to be seen, those distinctive traits which are precisely most problematical and yet most forceful, weakest and strongest in Bacon's proposed program for new learning. And it may already have begun to be grasped that the desire for a lab expressed in Salomon's estate is not only that, that it cannot stay within itself, but betrays a social significance that goes beyond it; that, to put it in modern idiom, Bacon's attempt to figure transformed forces of production cannot keep from betraying an allegory of new social relations. In a moment I will present a case that the description of Salomon's House,

296 Flights from the Tudor Settlement of its estate/lab in particular, is the place in which the class fantasy behind the Utopia is most clearly expressed; and further, that the description symptomatically indicates the social bases of Bacon's method and project, the deep-structural conditions making it thinkable. But before moving to this, I should pause to take account of the objection some readers will raise to such a reading. It is worth doing this partly because it will help to clarify the generic composition of The New Atlantis. 3. Ideal Commonwealth as Eschatological Utopia The objection would not be to the claim that Bacon, in providing a description of his ideal scientific institution, reveals some peculiarities, weaknesses, and so on, and makes it (more) possible to criticize his idea of science. The objection would rather be that Bacon's work is really an ideal commonwealth rather than a Utopia, and that as such it does not ask to be read as implicit ideology critique, but tends rather to discourage in advance, indeed to defuse, any assumption of a socially cognitive attitude.24 The received distinction between ideal commonwealth and Utopia is generally understood, I think, to be basic and slippery.25 In the early modern it pertains especially to the situation of works in the theological field, and above all to their operative understanding of Sin. So, for example, it is absolutely crucial, in More's Utopia, that Sin be repressed from the framework of the Utopian description, and that it return as if from outside - in the verbal puns for example, or in another way in the holy sects (the Buthescras) who irrationally insist on sacrificing those pleasures that constitute much of the Utopian meaning of life, and who are respected for it.26 In what one calls the ideal commonwealth, by contrast, Sin is there even if not spoken of, it is the material cause, as it were, of the commonwealth's constitution, the object of all its legislation. Just as it served in pre-modern Christian societies as a principal explanation as to why governing classes were needed,2 so in the ideal commonwealth Sin means that hierarchy and patriarchy persist, and explains why they tend normatively to take on stronger, securer forms. The assumption of Sin also radically affects the way the ideal commonwealth presents itself to the reader, or asks to be understood. One may say that the ideal commonwealth is both more and less realistic than the Utopia: more realistic, in that in acknowledging the fact and force of Sin it offers its solutions as plausible ones; less realistic, in that,

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given Sin's nature, its solutions must be stamped as inevitably, intrinsically marred, and to be hoped or wished for only - whether in the sense of being dependent on grace, or simply in the sense of being an ideal, and so unattainable in fact. Now that Bacon assumes Sin, that he does not intend to adopt an anthropological or neutralizing attitude toward this central Augustinian tenet, is plain enough. An emblem of his orthodoxy in this regard, and of the text's generic status as ideal commonwealth, might be found in the mien of his Father, who 'had an aspect as if he pitied men' (478)28 this would seem the classic attitude of the Christian pater, which one understands to descend to the Father from Bensalem's Solon figure by way of that providential charitable act whereby Salomon's House was founded and Bensalem separated from other kingdoms (469-71). If this seme (of ruling-class pity/charity) strikes one as unusually brazen, that is perhaps because it can afford to be: because it does not direct itself at the political effects of the fall (the need of the people to be governed, saved from their own unruliness) but - much more - to the medico-physical ones (disease, early mortality, and so on). But this need not change its general significance. The apparent contradiction in this attitude in context - if the Father's institution has liberated Bensalem's people into physical health and sanity, why pity them? - bears a perfectly traditional reading: it implies, on the one hand, that the Father 'can only do so much' - that is, it acknowledges the depth of Sin in the people; while, on the other hand, it stands as the curiously external mark of selfconsciousness on the Father's part, the self-consciousness of Sin that justifies his own distinction, which is to say the place and role of the governing classes. If one takes Salomon's House as being adequately coiitextualized by this seme, one is not encouraged to see the description as testing or critiquing Bacon's project; the magic-cabinet dimension of the description, for example, and its very fervour, might indeed be read as inevitable signs of pride, of the division of the will. If this is a strain in the text, it is not a controlling one. Rather the ideal commonwealth is utopianized, and this does not happen entirely against Bacon's orthodox intentions. To see how this is, we need to set the pitying Father in the larger 'orthodox' thematic of which it is a part; or to put it in a way which already begins to call orthodoxy in question, we need to consider what any reading will recognize as the ideological pragmatics of the work. It is part of the rhetoric of the text, surely, to encourage a pragmatic perspective, that is, to highlight the rhetorical agenda itself. So it is crude, but it is called for, to say that Bacon's chief

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aim is to image his scientific idea in action, so as to sell it; but that selling it requires not just a positive image: that just as importantly he wants to establish two closely related, and more or less negative, social propositions: (1) that the project is not incompatible with social hierarchy; and (2) that it is not incompatible with generic Christian worship. These two negative agendas are apparent and insistent from early in The New Atlantis. Before the ambassador can throw up his hands, and swoon with happiness and gratitude that the wayward travellers are Christians (249), differences in the islanders' deportment and dress have established that distinction reigns among them (248). Before pursuing these agendas' textual instantiation, let us note that the claim about religion is frequently made in virtually all of Bacon's scientific texts, that the claim is urgent enough figuratively to structure the texts' proposals, and that it is in spite of itself notoriously ambiguous. Bacon urges early and late that his new method, the Great Instauration, has no designs on religion, and leaves church matters as they were. The Bible and the Book of Nature are two different books, and, if written by the same author, are in different languages, and require different modes of interpretation. Let the clergy (and after them of course all believers) keep the Bible, and matters of faith, to themselves. Let natural philosophers and experimenters go freely about the interpretation of the Book of Nature.29 Bacon leaves religion and the church as they were, then, he is utterly unthreatening - that is the first, and most insistent claim. But then and if he doesn't cry it from the rooftops, he does say it explicitly - this newly distinct demarcation between domains amounts to a kind of change, and religion has Bacon and science to thank for making its own tasks clearer. One might even consider this separation between the Books as a continuation or corollary of the Reformation. And finally something much more positive is suggested, and for the most part figuratively maintained, about the place of Baconian science in the Reformation. Think, above all, of the attack on idols in The New Organon; and think of the apocalyptic language which accompanies Bacon's announcement of his project. ° The notion here - and it is not compatible with the more insistent, merely segregationist, position just mentioned, yet surely cannot be deemed unintentional - is that the Great Instauration, Bacon's revolution in knowledge, is in effect a new, and perhaps decisive, step in Reformation, signifying and ushering in the approaching Apocalypse. Now the episode in The New Atlantis in which the relation between

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Christianity and the scientific institution is explicitly broached and managed is of course that in which the head of the Stranger's House relates the legend of how Bensalem was Christianized (464-5). The people around the coastal town of Renfusa receive a vision of a Cross of Light, out at sea; an Ancient from Salomon's House orchestrates the reception of said vision - declaring that what they witness is an authentic miracle, and receiving the message of the vision in the form of the Bible, which has been deposited in an ark at the base of the cross, already in its canonical version even though this has not yet been determined in Christianity's 'homeland.' Plainly enough, the readiness and humility with which the Ancient accepts news of the new religion is intended to underscore that Science is no threat to established religion, and to make a clearheaded natural philosophy appear the ground of harmony, of consensus, in religion. Equally plainly, in allotting the Ancient the role of first interpreter of religion, and of grounding it as such, the legend raises a question about the authority of the two institutions relative to each other; the ambiguity of science's demarcating function in Baconian ideology is emphatically recorded by this story. But the anxiety about religion, and the question of religion's place in this ideal commonwealth, are registered more vividly and to greater generic effect by a chain of references which situate the New Atlantis myth within a specifically Christian imaginary. Bensalem explicidy exists within an alternate Christian space-time. But there is much effort taken to familiarize it further: to associate it with heaven-on-earth, to cast it as an immediately pre- or post-apocalyptic society. These efforts include such mundane references as that before happening upon the wondrous land the sailors 'gave themselves for lost men,' yet 'did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who showeth his wonders in the deep' (457); and that they tell the head of the Hospital, after he has granted them permission to stay for six weeks, that it seemed 'we had before us a picture of our salvation in heaven,' and a little later, among themselves, 'that we were come into a land of angels' (462-3). They include, less obviously, the fact that several nations are represented in Bensalem's population, and that Joabin, a Jew - who has not converted to the Christian faith, at least yet, but has been completely converted by their political and social order - is one of the three main witnesses to Bensalemite institutions (475-6).31 More reconditely, Elizabeth McCutcheon has shown how Bacon makes such concerted use of a cluster of symbols (cherubim, the colour blue, the ark of the covenant), associated first with Solomon's Temple, but secondarily, through the Book of Revela-

300 Flights from the Tudor Settlement tion, with the Last Things, as to turn them into insignias of the political order in Bensalem.32 She even suggests that part of the reason for the ninefold division of research in Salomon's House is to secure an allusion to the pseudo-Dionysian angelical hierarchy (this too was associated with the ark in the Temple) ,33 The idea would seem to be that a somewhat different typological history obtains in the Bensalemite church and state than has been activated in Europe: in Bensalem, natural philosophy stands as the - advanced - antitype of Solomon's Temple. Salomon's House, in experimenting with, experiencing, nature, has reconstituted it as Ark. The presence of this chain, or of what we might call religious allegory, has a paradoxical effect. This is so, even if the intended purpose of this subdued allegory (and it should be emphasized that the allegory is not consistently on display, but is at most a frame that occasionally discloses itself) was to allay the anxiety about religion that hounds Bacon's autonomous natural philosophy. For the typological 'frame' will not let Salomon's House simply mean what it means. On the one hand it casts the House as described as a replica of what it will be, as necessarily somewhat fanciful. When one sees the pseudo-Dionysian ladder behind the hierarchy of researchers, does not this distract and detract from the actual logic of the division of knowledge-labour? On the other hand, in revealing the House as a thoroughly apocalyptic structure, the frame attributes a heterodox meaning to its achievements. What is involved is apparently a metonymic misreading of the Fall, a mistaking of the effects of Original Sin - in this case, the various Idols that inhibit the growth of knowledge, and the sickness and poverty that follow hard on - with the thing itself.34 The angelic aura of Bacon's scientists suggests that they are on the other side of the Fall, that the members of the House at least have lifted themselves into a new order of (Christian) being, and that they thus inhabit Nature in a new way. 'The subtlety of nature,' says Bacon in the tenth aphorism of The New Organon, 'far surpasses the subtlety of sense and intellect, so that men's fine meditations, speculations and endless discussions are quite insane, except that there is no one who notices.' A strictly Utopian explanation for the Father's pitying aspect would be that it is the effect of his occupying a position approximating to that of the absent observer evoked here, the no one who notices. His pity must have as object the inadequacy of the ordinary human sensory apparatus - Sin, if you will, but in an unusually epistemological sense, as habitual error or missing of the mark, rather than in the moral form of infection of the will.

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The general point is that, however much the chain of religious references may have been intended to allay religious anxieties and assert the Reformative role of science, its actual function is to 'estrange' the ideal commonwealth set, and to situate Salomon's House within a questionable - utopian-eschatological - space. The answer to the question as to whether Salomon's House is pre- or post-apocalyptic is evidently that it is neither one nor the other exactly.36 While clearly posing or 'deriving from' this alternative, it exists beyond it; in a sense then resolving it but questioning it in doing so - keeping the problem, for example, in the reader's consciousness as to the relation between the new scientific clergy and 'old' religious one in a way it would otherwise not be, suggesting that the emergence of the one might in fact have to do with, be conditioned on, the crisis of the other. The religious framework, this is to say, does paradoxical Utopian work (it could be argued that it is the most strongly Utopian feature of The New Atlantis), helping to ascribe to Bacon's institution the quality of an objective phantom, an illusion projected even as obstructed by the Real. 4. Possessive Corporatism and Imitation What are the sources of the House's objectivity? We can recur here to its methodically wishful peculiarities - the intrusion of ends into means, which marks the institutionalization of science, and the expansive breadth which marks its totalizing character - and note that they make for a spatial enigma correlative to the temporal one just noted. Salomon's House is not just one institution among others: it is exceptional not only in the sense of being spiritually central though literally marginal, but in the sense that it requires more space than the margin. Two verbal formulas direct one to the motives of the house's vexedly synecdochic status: the repeated phrase 'we have'; and a related group of formulations which include 'we represent,' 'we demonstrate,' and 'we imitate.' I want to venture that these two kinds of formulation come to mean the same thing, or rather that we have comes to mean we imitate. The phrase 'we have' must usually be taken in a legal sense, to denote corporate (as opposed to national) possession.37 This is the evident sense, for example, when the Father notes, as he often does, that what the House has, 'you' do not - where 'you' stands for Europe, but also for natural-philosophical enthusiasts such as the narrator.3 That 'we' has an exclusive reference is most unmistakable, though, when the Father distinguishes between the foundation and society, and insists that the

302 Flights from the Tudor Settlement House keeps patents on hand even of those inventions it allows to circulate in Bensalemite society: 'you must know that of the things before recited, many of them are grown into use throughout the kingdom; but yet if they did flow from our inventing we have of them also for patterns and principals' (484). Taken as a string, the 'we have's breathe the spirit of what might be called 'possessive corporatism.'Just as the philosophy of possessive individualism, when enunciated in the next generation, will found itself upon the assumption of the rights attaching to the individual's ownership of his own labour power, and just as this assumption is predicated upon an individualist physics of appetitive motion, upon the discovery/ construction of the mechanical body;39 so, I would argue, Bacon's possessive corporatism aspires toward a new kind of corporate identity, founded upon something like the ownership, not of labour-power, but of access to Nature-as-body, predicated upon the group's theoretical discovery of nature as storehouse of Forms, rudimentary bodies-in-motion. This last predication is clearer in the 'we imitate' string, which, if it is not precisely synonymous, then comes to feel exchangeable with the 'we have.' For Salomon's House, if a thing is 'had,' it is imitated, and vice versa; possession of natural objects and places comes to seem a function of a certain mode of activity upon them. It is worth emphasizing comes to, for the effect alluded to emerges over the course of the description. As does also the imitation string: there is a stack of verbs to describe the House's activity upon and with its equipment, and 'to imitate' only comes to the fore in the later paragraphs. Early on, the favoured transitive terms are 'use' (as in 'we use these towers, according to their several heights and situations, for insolation, refrigeration, conservation,' etc. [481]) and, more often, simply 'make' or 'make by art' ('And we make [by art] in the same orchards and gardens trees and flowers to come earlier or later than their seasons'; 'we have also means to make diverse plants rise by mixtures of earths without seeds ... and to make one tree or plant turn into another' [482]). But later - to be precise, with the paragraph on mechanical arts and after - a more striking, often somewhat puzzling transitive set, of which 'imitation' sticks in the mind, tends to take over: We have also furnaces of great diversities, and that keep great diversity of heats; fierce and quick; strong and constant.... But above all, we have heats in imitation of the sun's and heavenly bodies' heats, that pass divers inequalities and (as it were) orbs, regresses, and returns, whereby we produce

The Imperial Lab: Discovering Forms in The New Atlantis 303 admirable effects. Besides, we have heats of dungs, and of bellies and maws of living creatures, and of their bloods and bodies; and of hays and herbs laid up moist, of lime unquenched, and such like. (484) [my italics]

In the next paragraph the Father observes that We have also perspective-houses, where we make demonstrations of all lights and radiations, and of all colours; and out of things uncoloured and transparent, we can represent unto you all several colours; not in rainbows, as it is in gems and prisms, but of themselves single. We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines; also all colorations of light: all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions, colours: all demonstrations of shadows. (484)

Then, after a paragraph on what is apparently a separate house for precious stones, we move to 'sound-houses': We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter-sounds, and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. (485)

And so on. Through the concluding four paragraphs - i.e., in the perfume house, the engine-houses, the mathematical house, and the 'houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions, and their fallacies' (486) — this verbal string (imitation-representation-demonstrationmultiplicatiori) reigns. The terminology of imitation tends, then, to replace that of using and making as we move through the description. In a moment I will suggest a reason, having to do with the ordering of the series of places, for this replacement: it is not just the result of Bacon's refining his lexicon as he conducts his description, of his discovering the proper terms for what it is that the House does, how it acts with and upon its instruments. But first I want to suggest that precisely this last is in fact the unconscious

304 Flights from the Tudor Settlement impression taken away in the reading process. We can put it this way: one makes a connection similar to that which one makes in the quotation above about heats, only the connection is retroactive, or pertains to the whole list of 'preparations.' In reading the sentence about the heats of dungs and maws, does not one at first perceive that the House actually has a collection of dungs, maws of creatures, and so on, and then realize that, no, what it has is varieties of heat, in substrates unknown — sanitary, 'neutral' furnaces (where 'neutral' means first of all, in this case, 'more manageable, presumably, than maws')? Just as the House possesses 'heats in imitation of the sun's and heavenly bodies' heats,' in other words, so it has managed to separate dungs' heats from their ordinary source or locus: it has them 'in imitation,' too. So it is with the early part of the description, once one has been through some part of the imitation section. One realizes that the creatures, the new animals and plants, for example, are to be understood in some unimaginable way as imitations or representations of animals and plants. The immediate effect of this realization, I think, is to make the creatures seem fake, to suffer a loss in solidity. But imitation strikes further back. Just as the planets themselves are estranged, become arbitrary constructs, when their heat is detached from them, so the shadowy places of Salomon's House, the components of the lab itself, are turned into potential replicas of themselves. Insofar as the Fellows knowingly deploy them, insofar as they are possessed, they are imitated things (true) apparitions of themselves. This is why the final paragraph, describing the house of juggling, bemuses. As the House's whole aim is to produce imitations of things, shows of Nature, it seems rather paradoxical, arid difficult, to separate off a place where mere imitations are deployed. No sooner does imitation come to be established as the House's true activity than a distinction between true and false imitation is pressed; it is hard not to feel that mere show is ostracized because the whole house is show. What the verbs bring to the fore, then, is the curious oiitological status of the House's equipment, and of the House itself, as a true imitation, a set of fabricated sites that cast doubt upon the conventional, created notion of site. How to account for this status, the impression determined by the replacement of making with imitating? Immediate ideological explanation is not hard to find. The secondarybut-true status of the House faithfully corresponds to - translates and gives a feel for - a crucial tension in Bacon's achieved method: or what might better be referred to as the moment in his epistemology in which

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one 'language' both gives place to, and alternates with, another. This is the moment in which Bacon both breaks through and systematically redeploys his version of the sceptical impasse, that programmatic institution of doubt which famously marks the beginnings of modern science and philosophy. He does this, as Perez-Ramos has shown, by forwarding a concept of operative or maker's knowledge. It is seen most clearly, and registered as a kind of translation operation, in the text in which Bacon's method is most systematically presented, The New Organon, and especially in the early sections of Book II. There, where it is a question of describing the approach to forms, Bacon says in so many words that any form may be 'expressed' in two ways. Either 'substanlively' - that is, it may be described in terms of the specific properties or arrangements obtaining in a species of matter-cum-motion which constitute it as such, as a form. Or 'operatively' - that is, any form may be formulated as that putative series of steps taken upon matter-cum-motion which will result in the production of that form. Rudimentary elements may be known then, they exist so far as we are concerned, either as inherent laws or as formulas-for-action. But if these expressions are translatable or in a sense interchangeable, they are not of equal value epistemologically. Rather operative definitions - call them recipes - are given both a practical and 'technical' priority. Let it be granted that recipes are linked to definitions, and hence are more than simply interchangeable with them, in the sense that they always presuppose the possibility, at any rate, of some future substantive description; rules-for-action do not come without a 'prior' notion of laws-in-motion. Nor does Bacon have a notion or conscious desire that they could or should. The maker's knowledge ideal does not keep the ultimate aim of his science from being to know for knowing's sake; a final fantasy is still implicit in Bacon of the philosopher in his chair, having come into definitive possession of nature's code, inventing new substances and creatures simply by taking thought upon his stock of rudimentary definitions. Still one only knows one knows when one puts a formula for a form into practice and it works: when one has the recipe. Substantive definitions, though and just because they are based on inferences from recipes' success (i.e., from informed experience), do not come with kindred proper guarantees. Since the work upon forms, in experiment, routinely takes place at a level largely inapprehensible to sense-perception, the inference from the success of any given recipe is inevitably and always conjectural in a way that the recipe itself is not. Thus forms-as-

306 Flights from the Tudor Settlement laws, in Bacon, are marked with an intrinsically hypothetical character, a tentativeness; the maker's knowledge emphasis gives them the quality of things-in-themselves. When Bacon is most equal to himself in Novum Organon - in the places his best recent interpreters like best - he is clear that the process of form-definition is approximative and properly interminable. More consistently, though, he conveys the strong impression that formal definitions must be kept in motion if they are to be good, to have a hope of being true; which means that they must be tested experimentally, recast into recipe and reinferred from its success - or in a word rendered operative insofar as that is possible. The imitative status of Salomon's House transcribes the peculiar ontological effects of Bacon's epistemological emphasis: the sense of Nature retracting or receding beneath its forms insofar as these can only be known 'artificially,' by means of human arrangement or work; but then an echoing sense of Nature itself as authoring construct, as the original source of imitation itself, a fertile storehouse of recipes in motion. One may venture that the status of Salomon's House as imitative gives to be seen a desire Bacon perhaps did not know he had - to live operatively, or in recognition of Nature as imitation, somehow outside definition. Now this desire verges on being a desire for another sort of sensory apparatus, one fitted to Forms, one that need not vex Nature, or perhaps better, that vexes Nature as a matter of course. Let us now note, what was passed over before, the more or less mundane reason for the shift from making to imitating in the description of the plant and activities of Salomon's House. The shift occurs with the movement from 'elements' to the 'senses' as generally organizing descriptive categories. When the Father describes experimenting upon or with the senses rather than the elements, he tends to speak of imitating or representing rather than making. This, one supposes, is because when one works upon the content of sense perception it is impossible to avoid the mediation of representations (whether these take the form of images, tastes, or whatnot). In the sound-house, the substance the fellows work with is composed of 'representations,' or bits, of sound, and to refashion auditory substance or language is to give the impression of reconstituting hearing itself. This is the place to observe that, though Bacon, in limning his negative problematic, never singles it out as 'its own problem,' still it is sense perception that is the most irreducible idol, and which ultimately conditions the recession of Nature under investigation, the phantom character of substance. There is some hope of reducing other idols, or at least

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of neutralizing them, through method. A person can possibly discipline himself to forego the human passion for seeing more order in things than there is, his own proclivity to discover distinctions or resemblances, and to project finished forms, everywhere (roughly put, the Idols of the Tribe). You might be able to take steps against generalizing unduly from personal predilections, whether these are innate or acquired, ruling passions or special knowledges (Idols of the Cave). You can possibly estrange yourself from the lexicon of everyday discourse, in which so many errors, including, it would seem, perceptual errors, are entrenched (Idols of the Marketplace). And there is even reason to believe a person can wean herself, through method, from Aristotle, and from the other philosophers who spin out and sophisticate the errors of everyday discourse (Idols of the Theatre). 40 But though habituation in the new method can perhaps retrain or re-educate the sensory apparatus to an extent, there is no hope that it can render it spontaneously adequate; there is evidently no eliminating the breach between sense perception and the Forms that make up Nature's alphabet. Within Bacon's system then the inadequacy of the senses is the condition for his method's being hopeful in the full sense of the term, as involving a desire for a radically new and different existential ground, a paradoxical desire which, in recognizing its own inadequacy, also discovers the evidence for the possibility of its fulfilment; it is the chief inner reason for the totalizing, revolutionary character of the House and of the method, and for the invocation of the (theological) context of creation. In this hopeful aesthetic context, then, in which Salomon's House stands as the impossible anticipation of a new sensory apparatus, the new method as figure for a new sense organ, 'imitation' asks to be read not just in an Aristotelian sense but in something like a literary, more specifically a humanist, one. If the protocols of the New Method, as worked out in Book II of Novum Organon, seem impossibly exacting and endless when all is said and done, that will perhaps seem less bothersome if one compares them with the 'rules' or axioms of literary (or Erasmian) imitation theory. Those rules, it will be remembered, stress the necessity of taking measures against the impressive positivity, the clasping charm of the older paradigm-text, just as much as the need for a sustained quasi-philological encounter with it, an internalization or familiarization-by-stages. The perfected imitative faculty which those rules aimed to create also produced 'doubtful' ontological effects, akin to that of Nature receding beneath her Forms in Bacon, though upon the ground of (cultural) history: I refer to the paradox that only a liter-

308 Flights from the Tudor Settlement ary imitation which effectively recognizes the impossibility of repeating the master text has the chance of disclosing its historical singularity, hence of 'bringing it back' to view even while enhancing its otherness, causing it to evanesce in its very familiarity. If one thinks of Salomon's House as a kind of ultra-consolidated, redirected humanist circle, if one thinks of the inductive habits there presumably inculcated by analogy with the rigorous, but still quasi-intuitive, practice of literary imitation and I believe the 'imitation' string encourages the connection then the mixture of exactingness and fantasy in Bacon's method, and more especially the scope of its focus, become somewhat more comprehensible. 5. House as Class: The Livery Company as Instigating Figure But I would stress a salient respect in which Baconian method would seem to be unlike literary imitation - namely that it is much more indelibly and immediately a corporate product and possession. It designates an epistemological stance, a dislodging and active resituation of the subject within nature, conceivable as the result of a new and fairly large sort of group organization, not on the basis of an individual subject's activity. Few humanists had so keen an appreciation of what was after all a period axiom, that human practices and identities are collective achievements. 'Certainly,' Bacon concludes in the essay 'Of Custom and Education,' 'the great multiplication of virtues upon human nature resteth upon societies well ordained and disciplined. For commonwealths and good governments do nourish virtue grown, but do not much mend the seeds.' We will now be taking no great leap if we claim that The New Atlantis gives it to be seen that Bacon's desire for a scientific institution carries along with it a class desire, amounting in effect to a desire for a new kind of class being. To say this last is to say that the text does exceed itself; it is not meant to be an obvious statement. Anyone would agree that Bacon envisaged a new class in the sense that he wanted for his project a sizeable number of researchers, who would be unified by their common - ambitious - purpose. One sees this everywhere in Bacon's work as well as in The New Atlantis. What I am claiming is that The New Atlantis makes it apparent that Bacon wanted rather more than a class in this sense (of a large number of researchers): that his method, to be realized, requires a new social class. From the perspective of generic history, More's original Utopian fantasy of smallholding solidarity is

The Imperial Lab: Discovering Forms in The Nerv Atlantis 309 winnowed and replaced, in The New Atlantis, by a no less urgent, but more specialized, hallucination, that of an independent intellectual noblesse de robe. Their corporate recomposition of their possessions, I am arguing, is more significant here than the House's 'official' relationship with the government. What this was to be, one can of course only infer: the Laws that according to Rawley were to have been described in the remaining part of the work, had Bacon not been so pressed, would perhaps have spelt it out. One can be reasonably sure that Bacon's constitution would have been absolutist in its phrasing. But in the text that exists Salomon's House obviously does enjoy a certain independence and a deal of power as an institution, such that several have wondered whether Bacon's failure to write a whole Utopia does not cover political heresy.43 We have already seen that the Fellows decide themselves whether to publish new inventions, which implies a rather thoroughgoing control over their operations. The House is depicted as carrying huge, unforced moral prestige such as most kings would envy: the Fellow's entrance into the city, for example, however ostensibly modest it is in show (only a litter, with no wheels!), is accorded royal fanfare. And then, most significantly - in this work in which the theme of the secret is so pervasive and in this society in which simply giving to be known is cast as the greatest charity the House is explicitly made out to occupy the place of the secret and to hold a monopoly of charity-knowledge. For the people of Bensalem, it is evidently the unknown thing with which they identify and which singles them out, lifts them above all other peoples or nations. All this — the House's independence, its moral prestige and authority, its occupation of the place of the Secret — is important. But what is decisive in casting the institution as a class in the strong sense is the House's mode of activity/possession as implied in its positive description. Once the 'theme' of imitation has come to the fore, its retroactive scope is not limited to the early part of the description of the House and the notion of possession as simple objective ownership; rather it affects all the signs, however muted, of cultural difference. These had already been associated with an increase in Bensalem's productive capacities over Europe's, had come to signify a higher level of efficiency and comfort, and to connote peace. Now, however, the differences are linked, not simply to a set of new labour processes in operation somewhere cleaner shops, no doubt, such as we know not, at work behind the doors of Bensalem's cleaner streets - but to a new kind of social being: what accompanies and determines the massive change in the forces of pro-

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duction, in modern terms, is finally felt to be an equally momentous change in the relations of production. To put it another way, so as to make the formal slippage clear: the theme of imitation decisively overdetermines the theme of secrecy, transforming it from a late absolutist motif into a proto-capitalist one.44 The 'secrecy' of Bensalemite society would seem unquestionably to be an important part of the strategy by which Bacon means to convince his audience of the social neutrality of his scientific project, its non-threatening character: only this one institution introduced, or changed from what it was, everything else left much as it was, still see! what a massive difference, and all to the good. But with the emergence of imitation and the effects it produces in Nature, the principle of secrecy seems to characterize the workings of Nature itself in this society, hence not just to be a mask for, but to be ingredient in a new social dynamic.45 An objection here leads to a discussion of the second part of the description, and the human material of the House. It will be said that this is a remarkably small social class if that is what it is: thirty-six people all told, plus novices and apprentices, and servants. Now the first thing to note here is that the smallness is part of Bacon's propagandistic point. His project needs no army, but simply a few good men. If Bacon's House amounts in a sense to a peculiar late version of a Renaissance rearistocratization plan, it represents the tiniest of aristocracies - not really a social class, indeed, but only the court that might epitomize it, the barest state to discharge its interests. Yet of course the thirty-six are not mainly organized like a court or council; they represent a much more streamlined and efficient outfit than these, on the one hand, and a more agglomerate one on the other. Whence, then, does the idea of this particular division of labour come? Let me review the relevant contenders for the role of most determinant paradigm. The House's organization of its staff calls up the structure of the late royal household, its division between collection and invention in particular evoking the marked split in the household between ceremonial and governmental roles; but it seems altogether denser and more intensively organized than contemporary household courts. The House's division of labour, with all the text-wringing and -crunching it entails, also evokes both the jurisprudential quotidian and contemporary attempts to bring order to the various laws and courts;46 but the legal institution, too, perhaps because of its essentially administrative role, is much more disparate than the House. Nor, though Rawley refers to it matter-of-factly in his headnote as a college, does the House's divi-

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sion of labour conform markedly to known colleges - not even to the mechanically oriented Gresham College, which was founded in 1597 in response to many of the same pressures and developments that instigated Bacon's instauration and which he must have found stimulating.47 The House's division of labour is not modelled on an idea of a monastery, though of course the House's position out of and yet in the world of Bensalem society strongly evokes that of the traditional cloister. Nor, last and least, can the unworldly model provided by the Dionysian hierarchy be convincingly claimed to be a very determinant one, save in the respect of marking the division with the sacred number nine. Now the institutions of a Utopia generally define themselves by negation, as Marin has shown; they are 'neither this nor that' institution in the known world (so Fourier's phalanstery, for example, is neither a town nor a factory). That Salomon's House should be distinctively different from the institutions just mentioned, then, is unsurprising. Neither is the House modelled directly on a guild or livery company. But it is not a livery company with a special, determinative, difference. The names given by the corporation to its various areas of induction are directive in this regard. We have three that collect the experiments which are in all books. These we call Depredators. We have three that collect the experiments of all mechanical arts, and also of liberal sciences; and also of practices which are not brought into arts. These we call Mystery-men. We have three that try new experiments, such as themselves think good. These we call Pioners or Miners. (486)

Just as London and English towns have companies in various spheres clothiers, drapers, weavers, dyers, haberdashers, and so on - so Bensalem has its companies in the sphere of induction, which would seem every bit as natural to the Father, at any rate, as London's trades to the reader: the Father's series of summary sentences are not illuminating or mnemonic for him, but rather reflect the patience of the good teacher; that they are illuminating for the reader is a sign of Europe's underdevelopment in this whole line of trade. One might pause here to claim a certain paradigmatic value for this passage within Bacon's corpus, and more especially for the chain of sobriquets, in which Bacon, playing at bringing the new thing which is true intellectual labour, the proper division of the work of knowing, into being as by fiat, is enjoying himself greatly. Surely

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Bacon was never more himself than when designating, and naming, fields of intellectual activity which, though they did not exist as yet, should, or which existed but in an unrecognized and underdeveloped state. Now if it is an accident, it is a fortuitous, revelatory one that these particular acts of dubbing, by dint of the guild analogy, imply a main theme of the great instauration, namely the (need for the) replacement of a contemplative, conversational notion of knowledge with an active, interventional one, and the correlative elevation of the mechanical arts themselves as so many modes of experimental knowledge. When stating the case, in his other works, for the handicrafts as species of learning, Bacon's reference was to their progressive character, to the fact of diurnal development and change as well as to the recent great breaks, the select yield of revolutionary inventions (gunpowder, printing, the compass) that had so changed the world. But the current passage raises a question whether Bacon's instauration is not owing to the mechanical arts in a yet more positive way: as conditioning images or figures, by virtue of the very instability and dynamism of their polities. This last suggestion will need some explaining, both because the Father's description of the staffs organization does not seem on its face to have much to do with instability, and because influential recent historiographical work on the guilds in Bacon's period has stressed their continuing political and cultural efficacy, painting them as great conservative sources of stability. Let me address this last matter, and the question of the guilds themselves, first. The historiographical work in question directs itself against an image that it finds projected in much writing on late sixteenth-century London of the city as a perilous and degraded place, and of its populace as impoverished and unruly. The scanty record of rioting and arrests for vagrancy suggests that it was not so bad as that, and the main reason it was not, it is maintained, was the guilds. Modern common sense says that the unprecedented and unplanned growth of the metropolis in a society undergoing a steep secular fall in wages must have overwhelmed the predominantly local and traditional modes of containment and coping, resulting in a nasty and brutish urban life. Hence, in large part, the received picture of earlymodern London. But modern common sense does not know organizations like the craft guilds, which strongly supplemented and shaped the functions of police, church, and family. 'Worlds within worlds,' the guilds preserved the verities of status difference and father and son, prevented private and public from coming apart, protected a meaningful quotidian.48

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If one finds this a convincing case, it is easy to understand it as superseding another, older image of the guilds in this period as undergoing, and suffering from the stresses of, rapid change themselves. So the point that needs emphasis here is that this does not follow, that it is a false understanding.49 Perhaps the guilds were to thank for preserving the urban fabric; this does not mean, and it remains to be shown, that they were not changing and under a deal of strain, that they were not proving to be economically inadequate, at the same time. The two cases are different in kind, the modern one bearing the imprint of a certain ('Laslettian') sociology and the older one deriving from political economy. The relation between them has yet to be demonstrated, though it might be expected that on investigation they would be found to be mutually supplementary constructs on the whole, pictures from different angles of one and the same social reality, or indeed that the recent view of the companies as successfully fending off the threat of disorder simply presupposes the older view of them as the very locus of change, rather than confuting it. The older understanding referred to comes principally from the economic historians Unwin and Fisher, especially the former's Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.' They were concerned to elaborate, and in Fisher's case criticize and sophisticate, a more or less Smithian macro-narrative, in which the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries figure as a transitional period of great movement and crisis in commerce and industry. These years witnessed ongoing separation and struggle between industrial and commercial sections of various trades within the towns and in the city; said separation and struggle, the inevitable consequences of expansion and development, were more particularly caused by the escape of much industrial activity outside town limits, and in turn determined a reconfiguration of relations between rural and urban industry. Industrial Organization divided its period into two phases or moments: (1) the moment of the livery company, dating from around the middle of the sixteenth century: this guild type was the product of roughly two centuries' amalgamation of handicraft guilds - its polity, then, bearing a somewhat uncertain or arbitrary relation to any given mystery - and is understood as achieving a fraught compromise between industrial and mercantile elements, represented by the yeomanry and the livery respectively;51 and (2) the moment of the patent or what we might call the artificial monopoly, dated from around the turn of the century: this was marked, on the one hand, by the small masters' desire to free themselves from an increasingly alienated arid

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oppressive commercial class, and on the other by the mercantilist desire to coordinate an entire trade in the interests of state and nation. In a stimulating essay on the exploratory character of this latter moment, Fisher notes that Bacon himself played a significant role in setting up one of the more interesting monopolistic failures: a kind of state joint-stock guild, centred in the Midlands, whose aim was to regulate the production and trade, domestic and foreign, of English cloth.52 So much for the state of the guilds. Let us now return to the Father's categorization of the staff of Salomon's House. I said before that this division seems stable enough on its face. I want now to suggest that if considered more closely it can be seen to leave some questions open, and to disclose some incongruities, which correspond suggestively to Unwin's moment of the patent. One of the division of labour's more puzzling, and often discussed, features is the strongly marked distinction between the collectors of experiments, of data, and those who think upon them, who decide what the data mean, and so what further experiments to undertake on their basis. What most impresses one about this division between the empirical and logical moments of the inductive process is that on inspection it is so insistently a separation, involving something like a considered faith in the comprehensive randomness of collection. How else to explain the delegation of experimental space to the pioneers, whose job it is, evidently, to fashion experiments according to custom or personal predilection, and not on the basis of the House's acquired knowledge? Such faith in collection per se clearly records the problematical character of the distinction between tabulation and interpretation at the heart of Bacon's notion of method, a constant in his thought but one which surfaced rather brutally in the form of the later compendia, above all in Sylva Sylvarum. The intellectual problem itself is of course not first of all or indeed finally to be explained by reference to the uneven development of industrial organization in Bacon's moment. What can be claimed, first, is that an analogy is there in the text: that the general, and somewhat indefinite, division between collectors and redeployers of data in Bacon's categorization calls up the unstably fixed division between craftsmen and merchants in the livery company. And second, the analogy would seem to function in the text at once to expose the intellectual problem, to image it, to give it to be seen as such, and yet to go some way toward justifying the division between more manual and more intellectual labour by making it seem a form precedented in the deep order of things. Meanwhile, this basic division is cut across and to a certain extent

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covered up by the form of the series, which affects to outline a single complex process. It will have been noticed already how the coinages ('Compilers,' 'Merchants of Light') create for the auditor/outsider a sense of unknown professional identities, with unknown work-related habits, prejudices, and so on, and suggest that the offices enjoy a certain amount of autonomy vis-a-vis one another. This does not interfere with the analogy to the livery company, which, as noted, was the product of agglomeration. But the apparent harmony of the House's series suggests a contrast with the volatility of the companies, many of which were in danger of coming apart, especially in Unwin's phase of patent monopoly: I suspect that the echo of Genesis's fiats in the Father's dubbings ('Let there be Depredators. Let there be Dowry-men') would have called up the creation of new patents, which were sometimes a result of invention whole-cloth, but more usually the result of struggles within companies (as in the cases of the feltmakers and pinmakers, which established themselves in 1611 and 1614 respectively).53 And the proliferation of offices produces some uncertainty as to whether the proper analogy is with a single company or with the fairly nominal but famous confederation of the twelve livery companies of London. Both the relative autonomy of the offices and the uncertainty of reference make it more difficult not to ask a question which the reader would pose anyway, namely how many people are in the House. One wonders whether the number of novices and apprentices, and of 'servants,' is not much greater than the Father would have us guess whether, in other words, the various offices are not in fact what we would call departments.54 This might seem impossible in the case of the largest group, the twelve Merchants of Light, whose task it is to travel incognito in foreign lands and bring back the 'books, abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts' (486), since retinues would presumably make passing 'under the names of other nations' harder. But if any thought at all has been given to the actual labour of such comprehensive collection, then 'twelve' here must mean 'twelve plus a considerable number of followers.' And then, when we consider the complexity and evident copiousness of the plant, it is clear that it would require a great number of servants to operate it. This facet involves a caricatural resemblance, perhaps, to the livery company, since that was partly defined by an increase in the number of journeymen and the employment of wage labour. A further question is raised in turn as to how to conceive of the effective membership of the House: presumably novices and apprentices are

316 Flights from the Tudor Settlement members, partake of the House's imitative possession of Nature, because the House's future depends on their education. What of servants? How much do they know? To what extent are they of the House? To consider the question is to realize that the issue of the scope of knowledge, of where it begins and ends, is simply a constitutive problem of the House's division of labour - an outstanding intellectual question, and problem, in Bacon, which appears in his Utopia as determining a social question as well. Suffice it to say that one answer to the question is that we are to understand the constructive action which is knowledge as the possession of the whole House. In this view the staff in its explicit and understood division of labour comes to seem a figure for a whole mode of production within the mode of production, for a social function and quantity indefinitely bigger, we can only say, than it appears. It is worth noticing that the typological dimension of the description (the shadowy Dionysian hierarchy), insofar as it contributes to our sense of the House's status, reinforces this sense of house as figure for its function, synecdochic for a social class; for angels, of course, differ in kind from men, and their sundry demarcated ranks, since indefinitely numerous, have what we might call a statistical or demographic quality to them. All this to show that the description of the House's division of labour in itself does not yield so solid or stable an image as it is evidently at first meant to seem, and that the final effect of the guild analogy is to depositivize the House. I want now to suggest that this de-positivizing effect connects especially with two general features of the House's plant, touched on previously but not singled out as such, to bring the staff more securely within the Nature-as-imitation theme. The first of these features consists in the rough division between outdoor or naturalagrarian and indoor or domestic-industrial spaces of the lab, between manor and shop paradigms, which coincides with the opposition between possession and imitation discussed above. In this context the idea-image of the labour-force as guild makes it clear that the rewriting of possession as imitation addresses the problem of rural industry, amounting to a symbolic translation of manor into shop which would give the shop itself a new meaning and status. The second, closely related general feature is not so punctual an affair; it consists in what I would call the sheer topicality, the spacelessness, of the House's establishment. The Father's closing description of the staffs ritual procedures, its method of securing its ethos and commemorating itself, presuppose a nuclear site of some sort; and the notion of the staff itself as inhabiting a single place, some fortress lab in

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the wild beyond the pale, is never given up. Yet the lab cannot be envisaged as contained in one place, and an alternate image of it emerges as a series of quasi-invisible sites strewn across the society of the island-continent, filling its pores with those neutral media in which, for example, the heats of maws and dungs, the lights of suns and stars, can rest in themselves, in their purity. In this feature's context, the de-positivizing of the guild image tends to pull the staff into this sheer topicality, this spaceless place of the lab, and to attribute to the lab's very form an imitative status. It is time now to back up and reflect on how the guild analogy works, and what it means that it works as it does. As I have stressed the slipperiness of the analogy and the questions it raises, something crucial has not been kept to the fore: I mean the strong sense in which the House is not like a guild but is one - the main message of the Father's naming of the offices. As I have said, the labour process or 'mystery' that a guild came into existence to protect and control was, for Bacon, knowledge in the strongest sense: natural philosopical knowledge, in Bacon's conception, is to be modelled on the mechanical arts rather than on the arts of the schools. It differs from them in principle only in its improving and synthetic orientation, and this difference, it is understood, will become less salient as natural philosophy comes into its own, takes on a controlling character, imparts its ethos and aims to the arts. Its putative rightful status as a second-level craft, as the mystery of mysteries, should have made it a breakthrough art for Bacon, privileged by virtue of its superior autonomy and reflexivity. This is to suggest that Salomon's House in its time was to be seen as something like a state joint-stock guild - where the phrase 'something like' pertains not to 'guild' (since the House is one), but to 'state' and 'joint-stock' (since though the House is an institution of the state it enjoys an unspecifiedly great autonomy from it, and though it is independent and self-supporting it is not owing to outside investors). As such, it would have been the guild to make more such guilds possible: that is, Bacon's House amounts, in one respect, to a symbolic resolution of the problems affecting industrial companies in the present. But nothing like a natural philosophical company existed of course, and in this respect the livery company model is an analogy. My tenor has been that insofar as this is a structuring analogy, it is as important for the questions it raises, the anamorphoses it conditions, as for any clear image it provides. It happens this way, I would suggest, because the image of the guild appealed to is itself marked by imperfection and

318 Flights from the Tudor Settlement incongruity, the result of the unevenly developed contradiction of the thing itself. Bacon's deployment of the guild idea(s) winds up activating the aporias of its current incarnation, and this is what de-positivizes the House, makes it swell, makes it a figure. So it is that what presents itself as, or what wants to be a wish for, an institution, slides or is broadened into a wish for a class. I have more than once noted that this wish is most clearly indicated by the imitation theme, by the adumbration of a new lived relationship to Nature in its rudimentary component acts. In this context it can be added that this amounts to envisaging the Utopian class primarily in terms of a discovery of a new labour process or set of processes. We have come back to the theme of The New Atlantis as a Utopia of the forces of production, and can now venture the reason as to why it should be this way, why new relations of production should be imagined as new forces. I would stress that this reason is a positive rather than a defensive - a molecular-economic, so to speak, rather than a molar-political - one. It is not, that is, that Bacon wishes for a new class and mode of production in this way so as to get around censorship or avoid seeming to want to upset the established political order. Yet neither is it that Bacon is simply extrapolating from broad alterations in the mechanical arts themselves, for example from some dramatic increase in the tempo of technological change. Rather the really moving changes at the level of handicraft production would seem to have concerned sheer scale and the associated separation (given the existing social conditions) of production and distribution. These it was that determined the fluctuation of company structure, the political crises of the guild form that Unwin studied. And this crisis in turn - so goes my hypothesis - had the effect of estranging the labour process from itself, revealing it as raw material to be worked on, of making it seem, as if by contagion, similarly arbitrary and potentially changeable. Or put another way, it created a situation in which the political forms themselves could figure forth unknown changes in the mysteries, the perdurable techniques and practices, they were meant to represent and organize.55 If this is an accurate diagnosis of the House's questionable positivity, if Bacon's ideal institution figures, or swells into, a Utopian society as the effect of minor political struggles around, or reacting back upon, labour processes, then that helps to explain why the Father's gospel conveys, along with a sense of Nature as multifarious and dynamic potential, a sense of it as an obstacle come up against, of definitive impasse. The

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wonders mentioned, if exciting, contribute more to this latter sense, for they do not add up to a structural image of malleability. But more telling is the falling away of literary form in this section, and the badness of what persists, of that which is most literary in the description. The Father's pomp and solemnity, and the continuation of the theme of the secret - now in a fair way to being unmotivated, since the pretext of the episode is that the time has come for the House to spill the beans about itself- tend toward parody; they slide, that is, from being signs of the House's sacred gravity, its superior productivity, to being the obvious covers, the giveaways, for the fact that there is nothing there, or only the familiar facts, underneath Nature's clothes. One might consider this, presumably inadvertent, opening of a subdued carnivalesque dimension the revenge of generic form upon content for being used badly; but it is paradoxically not an un-utopian effect, reminding one as it does of the etymological meaning of'utopia' ('no-place'). This is to suggest, in turn, that the House episode helps to disclose and illuminate an ambiguity that habitually hovers about Baconian induction, and infects his presentation of it.56 Induction is consistently presented as a systematic and comprehensive way of investigating Nature, a method of inventing experiments and putting them together so as to isolate first principles: though it projects no time-frame of discovery, in principle it ensures (not a continuous, but) a progressive approach to Nature in its paradigms, an approach which will be marked by the uncovering of a series of effective practices. Experiment here is conceived as a comprehensive process. On the other hand - and this is partly because of the oceanic, if riot infinite, number of imaginable experiments, but also evidently because of problems with and doubts about the method itself — induction is presented as a way of setting up short cuts to the truth, of organizing experiments conceived now as forays into the unknown (rather than as eliminations of it). In this way, induction itself is projected as a foray or a wager, a way of provoking Nature, the new labour processes, to disclose themselves, rather than a measured approach, a sure thing. These themes - of foray and wager are present in The New Atlantis, but betraying a sense of impasse closely connected to the theme of imitative recomposition (hence of the secret). Plant a colony in the spaceless place of Nature; put it to work; and wait for Nature to return to form, the true work to disclose itself. Bacon's wish for a new social class, which masquerades as a desire for an institution, is in a strong sense (a wish for) a wager.

320 Flights from the Tudor Settlement 6. The Imperial Gambit

Let us turn finally to the story leading up to Salomon's House. I want to show how the thematics of the House episode participate in the geopolitics of the imaginary travel narrative, and I will do this by showing how the opposition between narrative figures of foray/wager and of network or systematic enclosure informs the whole work. A preliminary word is perhaps appropriate as to the relative determinacy of imperial and domestic-economic problems. It might appear, since geopolitical antinomies come second in my order of presentation, that the assumption is they do in reality too. I confess that in spite of Harvey's bon mot about Bacon writing science like a Lord Chancellor I find it hard to think of him as a statesman first, before he would be a scientist. But it certainly need not be seen that way; and the argument of this section is that Bacon's Utopian narrative renders geopolitical antinomies as integrally involved in domestic-economic ones, hence suggesting that they condition and model the freeing of the labour process, the distance between guild polity and economy, just rehearsed.5 Bacon's plan was evidently to stick to a travel narrative format through the body of the work. As Timothy Reiss has observed, the episodic structure of this format reflects Bacon's epistemology. Bensalem is to be sketched in a series of inductive soundings or forays. We do not have the sociological categorization of More's Utopia, with its pretence of comprehensiveness and fmitude, but rather a series of episodes in which parts of Bensalemite society are severally encountered and relayed, often from perspectives marked as singular. But even 'real' travel voyages tend to be romance, and Bacon's method of presentation does not entail so much contingency as Reiss implies. By the time the text breaks off, narrative expectations have been set in place that cast doubt on whether what at first looked like accident was really so. The story in question involves a gambit on Bensalem's part, and, on the narrator's, a complex betrayal of his people. The possibility that the travellers will effectively betray their nation by willingly leaving it is indirectly broached when the Head of the Strangers' House explains how the wise Solamona, when laying down the laws that isolated Bensalem from the known world, had provided for the occasional accidental visits from foreigners that the country must expect to suffer: That king also, still desiring to join humanity and policy together ... did

The Imperial Lab: Discovering Forms in The New Atlantis 321 ordain that of the strangers that should be permitted to land, as many (at all times) might depart as would; but as many as would stay should have very good conditions and means to live from the state. (470)

So of course only a very few European visitors have gone back home, and their news must have been dismissed as raving. The possibility of betrayal is explicitly established a little further on, and as a temptation, not just for the plebeian element in the crew, but for the narrator and the ruling element as well.59 But when it came once amongst our people that the state used to offer conditions to strangers that would stay, we had work enough to get any of our men to look to our ship, and to keep them from going presently to the governor to crave conditions. But with much ado we refrained them, till we might agree what course to take. ... We took ourselves now for free men ... and obtain [ed] acquaintance with many of the city, not of the meanest quality; at whose hands we found such humanity, and such a freedom and desire to take strangers as it were into their bosom, as was enough to make us forget all that was dear to us in our own countries. (472)

The expectation created here is of course not that in the text's closing pages we will find we have been reading a screed entrusted to a bottle, but rather that the traveller will prove able to resist the siren material comforts of enlightenment for the higher pleasure of spreading the good news of them. This plot thickens when it transpires that the House has been waiting for our particular traveller, to divulge some part of its mystery to him. The text does not state the House's reason for talking. But evidendy it is part of a deep plan for which times are ripe: our narrator will not be encouraged to betray his country but rather to take what he has heard back. What can one conjecture about the House's motives? We are not meant to doubt, of course, its benevolence. Just as it has decided to communicate those patents to Bensalem society which have made life there more commodious, so it has decided to go public to the known world with its most important patent - its own idea - for the world's good. But the question is, what makes it prudent to publish its idea abroad now? And the expected answer must evidently have to do with the relative readiness of both societies.60 Expectation is that Bensalem's readiness will have to do with strength

322 Flights from the Tudor Settlement - strength of two sorts. On the one hand, one imagines that the House's generosity conies from confidence in the idea of the organized naturalphilosophical institution itself. Remember that the House originated as the positive part of a twofold strategy to settle Bensalem in peace and stability after a period of dangerous conflict (the other, negative part of which was to sunder it from known and New Worlds). The experiment has proven so successful in isolation that the House now deems it prudent to try it abroad; there is no more need for isolation. On the other hand, the House's epochal decision can be understood as somewhat murky advertisement for another sort of success, and strength. It stands to reason that the House feels it has little to fear from the known world, even if, say, its idea should find itself in the wrong hands, and prove vulnerable to misuse by them. While the Father mentions in passing that great leaps have been taken in ballistics, no hints are dropped of special military preparations. Perhaps they do not need to be - the very title 'New Atlantis' calls up a possible military meaning of technological superiority; still it seems significant that it actually goes unsaid. For what is made clear is that Bensalem is a much more populous society than anything the narrator knows. I refer to the description of the Feast of the Family, a kind of rationalized fertility ritual staged to honour the lucky father upon the occasion of his having thirty blood descendants capable of responsible civic participation. The state pays for these rites, considering itself the father's debtor from then on; and, what is most remarkable, it is not uncommon for men to dis-enfeoff themselves in this way. Since the populousness of a state was still a key military criterion, the episode suggests a reason for the House's feeling safe. Yet, past a certain density, population could be reckoned a problem; so that, given the extreme stress on Bensalem's fecundity over more than two millennia, Rabelais's joke at the beginning of Tiers Livre about Utopians as ideal colonizing material61 perhaps knows a pertinence here as well. The text encourages one to wonder, that is, whether the House's benevolent decision might be backed not only by strength but by a certain need, by demographic pressure. And at this point, the choice projected before for the narrator between betraying his country and bringing good news back to it starts to break down. For if the House's decision to publish its idea is a geopolitical gambit, then the narrator's prophecy will involve a complex form of betrayal. Let us call this horizon of narrative expectation the epochal romance - though one should straightway qualify this by noting that 'imperial romance' would do about as well, and that choosing the former over the

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latter is to favour the story's symptomatic, exploratory aspect over its propagandistic. Bacon's decision to make his travellers Spanish especially works to highlight the narrative's epochality and to deepen the theme of fortune; but it also renders the propaganda more exquisite. Its immediate motives are equally to do with considerations of plausibility and symbolism. An expedition to the Far East by way of the West was statistically far more likely, so to speak, to be Spanish than English. But the expedition is Spanish also, and not Dutch for example, because Spain was the great European power, and an opposition is thus set up between Bensalem and Spain as opposing empires. Now for readers of the only existing 'translation,'62 the English one - since, whatever one's politics, Spain was still the great rival in 1625, the most dangerous nation - this creates a peculiarly uncanny effect: the New Atlantis is situated as the other of the Other, and so distanced and magnified at once. Clearly this makes the threat it constitutes greater, not least because as Spain's opposite number, Bensalem's offer of knowledge-power is extended first to it: the question is thus raised, what if Spain adds organized natural philosophy to its strengths? The fear inspired by this question, associated with the idea of Spainas-New-Atlantis, does not prevent the recognition that this idea is of a new thing. And particularly in light of an overdetermination of the Spain-Bensalem opposition, the recognition accompanies another, more exploratory and hopeful, reading of the developing epochal narrative. The overdetermination results from Bensalem's isolation, its odd existence as island-continent. This tends to short-circuit Spanish mediation, to situate Bensalern as England's direct other. So: perhaps the new thing that the New Atlantis speaks of and is turning itself into - this isolate 'empire for increase,' in Harrington's later phrase, this great spaceless- country of the knowledge guild - need not be thought of as tendentially Spanish. Perhaps our narrator - whose actual subjecthood the reader of the English tends to forget - is being asked to betray his literal to his de facto country. The possibility and hope are there that England, as a prosperous, populous country without an army, depending on the navy and trading companies for protection and increase, is in a better position than Spain to become the New Atlantis, a successful universal empire. This sliding triangle of opposition established by the epochal romance - or forming its casing, since neither Spain nor England figures as a positive character in the story proper, though they are what it is all about - knows its less slippery analogon in the body of the narrative,

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in the rewriting of the Atlantis myth. It will be recalled that Bacon specifies Plato's myth as referring to a remote past ('about three thousand years ago, or somewhat more' [467]) characterized by cosmopolitan prosperity, in which trade and emigration were vigorously conducted across oceans. He casts what is now the New World as (the old) Atlantis, while splitting it into two, the countries of Goya (or what is now Peru) and Tyrambel (Mexico). These states, not only highly developed but evidently also unusually predatory, mounted expeditions of conquest against Bensalem and the Mediterranean region respectively, and shortly after being rebuffed, suffered catastrophe in the form of a flood, which reduced their populations to mountain remnants and devastated their civilizations. Now on one hand, this story ranges Eurasia and Bensalem alongside one another against the Old Atlantis, as non-aggressive and fortunate regions who have not suffered a devastating cultural break. On the other hand, as a founding story its very purpose is to distinguish Bensalem from Eurasia. Bensalem's decision to isolate itself - to practise its own internal trade with its hinterlands and cultivate its natural philosophy — casts it against Eurasia as well as Adantis, themselves now opposed as places of 'commerce' and 'empire' respectively. This latter opposition, between commerce and empire, projected in the moment or by the movement of New Atlantis's emergence, I take to be seminal:63 it marks the contradiction, the macro-political problem, to which the project of seclusion/cultivation responds, that which it aims to overcome. How to conceive an empire that is not defined - driven and riven - by war or commerce and their attendant dangers? The institutionalization of true learning is clearly a large part of the answer to this question, though the epochal romance frame that makes it discernible as a response also makes it clear that it is not everything. In what remains, I want to suggest two things. First, that the travel narrative's romance encasement reads isolation as 'cultural regression' in the sense of a regression both to and in culture, and makes Salomon's House itself legible as part of this larger movement of Utopian negation. And second, that the generic feature of the Utopian break, the rupture necessary to make the alternate society thinkable, which in Bacon's work takes the relatively plausible form of seclusion and cultivation, is figured into the very being of the learning community, characterizing their mode of activity on, and in relation to, Nature. We can begin to see how Salomon's House is part of a larger cultural 'regression' if we notice that Bensalem's more programmatic and active

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isolation of itself, relative to Europe's passive or merely fatal isolation, rewrites a crucial turn in the mythic history of science that Bacon forwarded in various ways in several works and that he evidently in some way believed in. According to this, the new method is a rediscovery; it or something like it had been known by ancient wisdom up through the pre-Socratics, after which Plato and especially Aristotle replaced its active, instrumentalist model of knowledge with a magisterial, conversational one.64 The epochal romance, in this regard, is about a contest: a contest between a society that never suffered, that warded off, Aristotle, and that militantly kept the ancient wisdom alive, and ourselves, hapless victims of a talkative, merely rhetorical model of knowledge. In the story of Bensalem's wager, of the narrator's betrayal, the consequences of the West's fatal decision are coming home to roost, with obvious propagandistic connotations. But the consequences do not stop there. This becomes clear if we consider that the decision to isolate and cultivate knowledge defines itself first of all against the moment of commercial connection, and insofar as it is positively wilful aligns itself with, or is 'like,' war. This leaves one to understand Socratic learning, insofar as it passively favours the hierarchies that be, as aligned with commerce, compatible with the commercial disposition to 'regularity.' A logic is set in play, in other words, whose purpose is not to show the superiority of pre-Socratic to Socratic learning; but rather to realign the two learnings so as to show the way beyond the macro-political antinomy between imperial war and commerce, to use them to figure a post-imperial - or should one say truly imperial? - society. A reminder is in order here as to a qualifying theme repeatedly sounded in Bacon's proselytizing works. He is not against Aristotelian formalism per se, and its aim of producing masters who speak, and defend the old verities, ably; rather there is a place for such conservative learning, when it is a matter of propagating the social order (it is not so clear when it is a matter of examining, of understanding, the social order), and what Bacon is against is the false use, the misapplication, of the Aristotelian method.60 The question thus rises as to whether Socratic-Aristotelian learning figures in Bensalem, and how it has been revised if it does. Clearly, Salomon's House embodies the old (pre-Socratic) new learning. Does anything take the place of the conservative, magisterial-rhetorical wisdom of Aristotle? If Bacon had gone on to write the Laws, if he had perfected his Utopia, we might not have to content ourselves with attending to the logic of the narrative soundings. But as things stand, everything

326 Flights from the Tudor Settlement points to the Feast of the Family as the representative, the institutional embodiment, of Aristotelian wisdom, or as the institution that tells us something about how this wisdom ought to be embodied. We can begin to see how this is if we consider the narrative significance of an episode that is accorded, in terms of plot, an undue amount of space. I refer to the description of the American people after the flood, the descendants of a backwards woods culture who are said not to have had the time to evolve a complex state and society, but who tend to be cast all the same as not in process of doing so, as at an impasse, hence as types of mere survival, the 'poor remnant of human seed' (468), stagnant stirps of Nature. Bacon greatly exaggerates Acosta's depiction of Native American decadence here, though surely he would have been able to perceive it as Spanish, and Jesuit, propaganda.66 Partly he does so for a plot reason, as we have already seen: the destruction and deterioration of the American states is what makes Bensalem's foreign policy of isolationist experiment-gathering possible. But the lingering on the image of decayed remnants suggests logical or symbolic motives. There are two connections, which taken together help to make the Feast legible as an example of 'rhetorical learning well applied.' First, the Americans as a merely surviving remnant unable to recreate itself contrast both with Salomon's House as advanced tribe homing in on Nature's first principles, and with the productive families, the families seemingly on their way to turning clans, adumbrated by the description of the Feast. More than this, it tends to make both these latter moments understandable as 'withdrawals from the state,' or as aspects of a wilful retreat to culture that opposes itself to the Americans' pathetic retreat. Second, largely through the seme of decay, the Americans are linked with Europe and its comparative stagnation, and more particularly with a specific sub-cause of that stagnation, the Aristotelian monopoly of the universities, with their customary contentions and passions, as arbitrary and frivolous as the Americans' caparisons of birdfeathers. It is particularly this relationship of double opposition, the symbolic role of the American survival as a mediating degree zero of culture, that brings the idea of Aristotelian conservative wisdom into the New Atlantis, attributing to the narrative soundings a redistributing function and rendering Aristotle's 'true' message as that of a general return to paternalism evident especially in the Feast of the Family. The Feast of the Family can be, and usually is, read simply as smacking of early modern patriarchalism, or, a little differently, as involving the imagination of a society in which patriarchy is healthily accentuated.

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Such readings, though in keeping with ideal commonwealth conventions and no doubt encouraged by the letter of the text for propagandistic reasons, are misapprehensions. For it seems clear that Bacon's text is in process of conjuring up a revision of patriarchy as it was known, or a return rather to an aboriginal form, what for lack of a better word I would call paternalism, which involves a remaking of sexuality and sexual desire itself so that it works, within formal confines gendered male, with approximately the same certainty, the same minimal margin of error, as the syllogism. When the Feast of the Family is read together with the related description, by the admiring Jew Joabin, of Bensalem's practice of monogamy, its remarkable chastity, one begins to gather that the misuse of Aristotelian pedagogy is connected, as it nearly must have been in Bacon's problematic, with corollary historical deformations. These, Joabin's speech indirectly suggests, are to be located in whatever has caused chastity to be understood as a female virtue first and foremost. 'It' - and not 'she' - 'is the virgin of the world' (476), he says, and goes on to portray the European system of marriage and sex-love as a huge waste and misuse of reproductive (normatively male) energy.67 Chastity is not overtly gendered in the passage; or better, it is understood to be male insofar as it involves sexual energy. This, it is worth observing, is the main sense of the positioning of the wife in the Feast of the Family: The Tirsan corneth forth with all his generation or lineage, the males before him, and the females following him; and if there be a mother from whose body the whole lineage is descended, there is a traverse placed in a loft above on the right hand of the chair, with a privy door, and a carved window of glass, leaded with gold and blue; where she sitteth, but is not seen.(473)

It is not that she has to be hidden so as to cover up the annoying truth that, as a saying favoured by feminists of all waves has it, paternity is always in doubt. Except for the rare miracle, paternity is never in doubt, after all, but only the identity of the specific father; and Joabin's celebration is of a social-sexual system which removes this latter doubt by appealing to, by sacralizing, paternity as a general function. So the mother is plainly hidden, is staged as an absent witness, to testify to paternity's not being in question, to its being the only reproductive force. What Bacon is implicitly attacking in these episodes, then, is whatever

328 Flights from the Tudor Settlement it is in Europe that has made for the loss of reproductive energy, whatever institutions and conventions are mainly responsible for the gendered symbolics of desire and an understanding of sexuality as incorrigibly deviant. This means, most proximately, courtly love in all of its ambit; and here one thinks of the extremely anti-romantic profile discernible in some few of Bacon's Essays: 'as if man,' he writes in 'Of Love,' 'made for the contemplation of heaven and all noble objects, should do nothing but kneel before a little idol [the adored woman], and make himself a subject, though not of the mouth (as beasts are), yet of the eye' (358). But beyond this, and more dangerously and interestingly, it aims at a dominant Christian acceptation of sexuality as an inherently martyring dimension of subjectivity, which is generally understood to have been crystallized by Augustine, and to have been incorporated more securely into Christian cultures generally than other AS theological innovations. Here I think of the peculiarly distant Erastianism of Bacon's religious interventions, as if he were the ideal person to manage a settlement on account of his freedom from the general restlessness, his religious unmusicality.69 And one wonders whether this return with a difference to classical paternalism does not have as its ulterior aim to constitute an unpatriarchal or unjealous monotheism, one which leaves everyday rituals of family and community less suspect, less potentially decadent in their gendered positivity. But with this last we venture, perhaps, too far into the unknown of the Utopian text. The point is that in the epochal romance the Feast of the Family is cast as part of the same isolationist, reductive movement that sundered the continent from the globe and separated out an institution of natural philosophy. Put another way, the House of Salomon becomes legible as part of a larger strategy which involves 'returning' to local institutions, freeing them into themselves or autonomizing them, to a degree, in relation to the state. This thematic connection between the House and the Feast raises some questions about their specific relationship. Part of this, the propagandistic part, is relatively clear: the House makes the Feast a routine affair by increasing longevity, and reducing the incidence of mortal disease. One wants to say 'by reducing infant mortality,' but this is evidently an anachronistic category; and the thirtyperson family is rather conceived mainly as the effect of a superior husbanding of the paternal seed. Is the House then itself responsible for the new attitude toward sexuality, the resituation of Aristotle so as to make him in the first place a paternalist? Indeed, has the House been responsible for, not just the re-evaluation and resituation, but the

The Imperial Lab: Discovering Forms in The New Atlantis 329

recharging of the paternal function? The very independence of the Feast suggests not - suggests indeed that the scientific project may profit from an environment in which local forms have been sprung free from a territorialization by the state. At this point, one gathers then that the opposition between Aristotelian and Natural Philosophical learning is predicated on a deeper affinity; that the autonomization of the family goes along with, is part of, the same regressing, resituating movement as is involved in the formation of Salomon's House, now read as the isolation/autonomization of the guild-form; that this localizing movement constitutes an imperial, geopolitical strategy. And it is worth pausing to remark here that it is in respect of what is given to be shown by the epochal romance that Bacon's Utopia reveals its greatest affinity with that other major literary Utopia of the moment, much more marked by identification with More's text even if composed in another country and on behalf of another empire, Campanella's City of the Sun.70 The inductive principles of Baconian natural philosophy do not lend themselves to the overwhelming, positive consistency provided by Campanella's prophetic astrology, so much on display in the concentric shape of his fortress city. But The New Atlantis testifies to Baconian science's being as integrally, if less immediately, linked to the thought of empire, indeed to an imperial strategy. And if Bacon's normative Utopian subjects are comparatively uninvolved in the knowledge-revolution that makes the new society possible - if they do not live in the midst of its imagery, and come to internalize it in the way one internalizes the buildings that one lives in, as Campanella's subjects do — still they participate with their bodies in the inductive movement of knowledge-production, the isolation of, the homing in on, natural forms. There is an equivalent notion of a determinant radiation of knowledge through the body politic. Equivalent - but of course with nothing of Campanella's terrifying coherence. Bacon's imperial strategy operates by way of the freeing of local institutions, the uneven development of traditional cultural forms into dominant, political-social, ones; it implies the idea of a state that becomes empire by receding, by allotting traditional institutions space to discover themselves. And paradoxically, it is when the strategy is seen as such, as a whole - that is, it is when the movement of induction is grasped as part of, as entailing, a broader movement, when induction becomes social, then - that a basic question is raised about it, that it begins to suffer an identity crisis. For the imitative recomposition practised by the House is thus linked to, is joined up with, a gesture on the

330 Flights from the Tudor Settlement part of the whole body politic. This gesture is constitulively ambiguous: it is evidently to be grasped as a general isolation and return to Form(s); but it cannot but be felt also as a more or less calculated wager - as a kind of emulative activity, in other words, whose purpose is not in fact to imitate the nature out or in there in its true rudiments, but rather to conjure it forth, to bring it into being by winning an emulative response. Let us review some main points in the analysis offered, and attempt to put the argument in final perspective. I have argued that The New Atlantis, in its unprecedented intention a technological Utopia, fails as such, but succeeds in unadvertised ways, featuring both more and less social engineering than is at first apparent. A key part of Bacon's message is that instituting a new scientific guild might dramatically improve the quality of social life while leaving its basic structures virtually unchanged. But analysis of the shape of the guild's laboratory and division of labour, and of its secretive situation in its island-society, shows it to be a figure for a new, paradoxically self-constituting, state-industrial class. And consideration of the narrative logic of the earlier episodes of Bacon's story of foreign encounter has revealed that the social isolation of the scientific guild is not exceptional, but rather that there is a systematic tendency to autonomize institutional spaces. Baconian induction, the natural-philosophical search for corpuscular forms, begins to figure in his Utopian work as a search for social forms, whose aim of imitative recompositiori is of indefinite but potentially totalizing scope. By comparison with Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, Bacon's substitution strategy is in one sense partial, in that it involves selecting an industrial section from the smallholding class, and generalizing a philosophically inflected form of guild ideology (possessive corporatism), rather than finding a socio-spatial analogon for the whole stratified class. In respect of its implicit projection of this ideology onto an entire social space, however, Bacon's strategy keeps faith with the scope of the original Utopian design and moment. This makes possible a more frontal, or less allegorical, engagement with the other, structural, condition of the Utopian genre, the uneven development whose form and pressure it is a mission of the Utopian work to contend with and convey. Here the big news is the replacement of Utopian incongruity, of uncanny absurdity, with a less lively, and altogether simpler, sort of spatial play: what I have called the spacelessness of Salomon's House (and by extension of Bensalem), the peculiar absence of ligatures that makes for the difficulty of relating part to whole, of situating institutions with respect to the elu-

The Imperial Lab: Discovering Forms in The Neiv Atlantis 331 sive, dispositional and dis-enfeoffmg state. The aporia here is trained on the unfolding role of the state. On the one hand, The New Atlantis is clearly envisaged as the result of a thoroughgoing reorganization of society by the state; as such, it looks toward, and indeed greatly influenced, many of the serviceable, state Utopias of the mid- and late seventeenth century. On the other hand, the main role of the state in Bensalem seems to be to recede; in this respect, The New Atlantis is anything but a state Utopia. This spatial effect, the most authentically Utopian feature of the work, is the essential trace, it should be clear, of the constitutive uneven development of Tudor and Stuart England, now disposing itself more pointedly as a systemic tension between (tendentially absolutist) state and (capitalist) society. Yet if, next to More's work or even Nashe's, this version of uncanniriess leaves one with a sense of limits clamped down on the reach of social figuration and indeed of social possibility, it registers the pressure for intensive social change keenly as well, motivating the apocalyptic dimension of The Nerv Atlantis with an urgency not associated with its deployment in other of Bacon's works.

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Notes

I.i. Defining Middles 1 It should probably be noted that the position here is that even in the literary histories or genre studies that do not interest themselves in specifying such formative influences, an assumption as to their presence and efficacy is nonetheless made. 2 William Morris: 'News from Nowhere' and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 191-2. Subsequent page numbers will be to this edition. 3 The problem is explicitly broached, and Nowhere's solution to it described in the abstract by the historian old Hammond (126-7: 'All work which would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery; and in all work which it is a pleasure to do by hand machinery is done without'). But the story of the immensely improved machinery is not forthcoming. 4 See Wilmer's introduction, xxxiii-xxxiv. 5 This is a theme in FredricJameson's writings on Utopia; see, for example, 'Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse,' in Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986, 2:75-101. 6 For Taylorization, see Harry Braverman's classic Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). 7 Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), esp. ch. 3. The original German edition was published in 1972. Without expressly saying so, Mandel was resituating the locus of uneven development as this term had been most influentially deployed by Trotsky himself in his History of the Russian Revolution and The Revolution Betrayed. In Trotsky the term referred to

334 Notes to pages 12-23 the structural effects within a given national system of the interaction with other national systems; to use Althusserian jargon, it characterized social formations rather than modes of production. 8 See Perry Anderson's chapter on Morris in Arguments within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980). 9 See, for example, the way sections are organized in The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, ed. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), and Harmonian Man: Selected Writing of Charles Fourier, ed. Mark Poster (New York: Anchor Books, 1971). I should say that, while I have read most of Fourier's The Theory of Social Organization in the French, my understanding of him has been gathered for the most part from Beecher and Bienvenu's collection. 10 Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 11 See Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 219-21. 12 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 13 Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (1973; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984), ch. 14. 141 would note that the two features I have added to the nineteenth-century Utopia in this section are present in News from Nowhere, though not so saliently as in Fourier. The schematism of Utopia is inherent in the depiction of handicrafts as a controlling system, a system of systems: Morris's essential trick is to invert the prevailing scheme, to imagine handicrafts controlling machinofacture rather than the other way round. That Morris's utopic scheme too is a political project-fiction is felt particularly when the recognition dawns that Nowhere is envisaged as present and available now - that from a later, post-utopian perspective its structures of feeling and of economy will be understood as having been emergent in 1890. 15 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 16 Marin, Utopics, ch. 14 17 See Karl Marx, The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune (New York: International Publishers, 1940), esp. section III, 54-69. Note that this text was printed by Marx in English, as the 'Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on The Civil War inFrance, 1871.' For stimulating reflections on the significance of the Commune to the development of Marx's thought, and on the Commune generally, see Kristin Ross,

Notes to pages 23-33

335

The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 21-5 and passim. 18 The point can be seen in the following, expressly anti-utopian, passage, the most famous and arguably the most elegant in the sketch: 'The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made Utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant' (my italics). 19 This is the title used in the separate edition introduced by E.J. Hobsbawm, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, trans. Jack Cohen (New York: International Publishers, 1965). I have used the translation by Martin Nicolaus in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 471-514; Marx's heading for these pages is there translated as 'Forms which precede capitalist production. (Concerning the process which precedes the formation of the capital relation or of original accumulation).' I.ii. Defining Beginnings 1 Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (1973; Atlantic Hghlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984), 246. He is explaining why Disneyland is a failed Utopia. 2 Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 117204. 3/See ch. 5 of Utopian Thought in the Western World. 4 Handling More's work unchronologically last, though, might have made this reading of the relationship clearer. I would note by the way that a chronologic ordering might have been used to suggest that Utopia leads the Utopian idea from the city of the elite, of ranks, to the country of the plebeian class. 5 Note though that this is not a harsh criticism, for Utopia contextualizes itself in unusual depth, as will be shown shortly. 6 Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams, and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 116-17. Page numbers in the body of the text will refer to this edition. 7 For an interesting reading of the relation between Books I and II, and

336 Notes to pages 35-43

8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15 16

between Utopian descriptions and their explanatory introductions in general, see the chapter 'Polysemy of Atopian Discourse' in Michele Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (London: Athlone Press, 1989). See Erasmus's letter to Ulrich von Hutten, Epistles of Erasmus, trans. Francis M. Nichols (London: Longmans, Green, 1917), 3:398. See Richard Halpern's chapter on Utopia in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), in particular 152-5. See Fredric Jameson, 'Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse,' in Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986, 2:75-101. See, for example, Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23. See Robert Brenner's final essay in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For an attempt to clarify this received distinction, see J.C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) (his term for the ideal society is 'perfect moral commonwealth'). For a related categorization, based on differences in 'content,' see Miriam Eliav-Feldon's distinction between communist and welfare Utopias, which latter do not attempt to remove but to blunt contradictions, and content themselves with levelling the social hierachy somewhat (Realistic Utopias: The Ideal Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance 1516-1630 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], ch. 4); though this is not a formal (i.e., generic) distinction, it is certainly interesting and useful, and bears in a general way upon the one I am drawing here. Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, La Cittd Felice (Venice, 1553); reprinted in Utopisti e riformatori sociali del cinquecento, ed. Carlo Curcio (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1941), 121-42. See David Weil Baker, Divulging Utopia: Radical Humanism in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 66. One does not know who is responsible for the 1516 map; the 1518 map is credited to Ambrosius Holbein, the famous Holbein's brother. See Surtz's notes in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, ed. Edward Surtz, SJ, andJ.H. Hexter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 276-7.1 imagine that in most cases such woodcuts would have reflected the stationer's contacts and desires, and the engraver's abilities and intention, more than the author's wishes. If this was the case with Utopia, my reading of the woodcuts

Notes to pages 46-59 337 would still hold, to my mind. But my guess is that in this case, More would have taken an interest, and have likely had Erasmus see to it that his wishes were known and respected; and the phrasing of my reading will occasionally reflect this assumption. 17 Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 33-46, reviews some cartographical precursors and subsequent renderings, reminding one that maps are still relatively new and strange in the early 1500s, and offers a sharp reading of the 1518 woodcut in particular. For observations on the relationship between, and inadequacies of, the maps, see esp. 38-41. The difference between pictures and maps had not yet been materialized so distinctly as it was to be by the end of the century; still it seems accurate to say that both woodcuts are quite picture-like maps. 18 This trompe I'oeilis subtly reinforced by the fact that the building at the back of the island, which ought to be a fortress but looks more like a church, is a bit bigger than it seems it should be. 19 Marin, Utopics, 120-1. 20 W.W. Wooden and John N. Wall, Jr, 'Thomas More and the Painter's Eye,' Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 15 (1985), 231-63. 21 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 2:799-802. 22 Jack M. Greenstein, Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 3. 23 Marin, Utopics, 121-42. 24 Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, ch. 4. 25 Alistair Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), ch. 6. It is true that More had not written anything like Utopia before; but it seems rather late in the day, all the same, for him to be learning such a lesson (hence my judgment as to this case's implausibility). But supposing that he was learning it, the question remains as to why fable 'breaking free' should deposit particular meanings, and not others. 26 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44. 27 I think of H.G. Wells's The First Men on the Moon and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, in which latter the sentient and intelligent foreign element takes the form of the ocean of another planet. 28 The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 224. 29 J.H. Hexter, More's 'Utopia': the Biography of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 71-81.

338 Notes to pages 59-75 30 Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 46-9. 31 Note that the aloofness of the Utopians with foreign experience, on this reading, is part of the game, and contributes to the sublimity. 32 See Logan's insightful introduction in Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation (note 6 above), xxxi. 33 R.W. Chambers, Thomas More (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1935), 125-30. 34 J.H. Hexter, 'Introduction,' Utopia, The Complete Works ofSt Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 4:xli-xlv. 35 See in particular 172-5. 36 See esp. 218-19. 37 The symbolic intimidation is referred to as 'skill and cunning,' 204-5. 38 Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, esp. 151-61. 39 Of course, Raphael sometimes tends to provide a doctrine of natural or minimal need; my argument is that the actual Utopian set-up urges a relatively arbitrary definition, a notion of needs as relative to a collective definition and as changing. 40 Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 144-50. 41 Utopia, 146-7. 42 It is worth taking a final look at the woodcuts at this point, and noting the superscription upon them, undeniable if imperfect and busy, of death's heads. What should particularly be stressed about the 1518 map is the way in which, when the image is seen, it tends to make the arms of the garland into horns, which in turn seem to fasten the island to the neighbouring lands. If the viewer recalls perspective and reattaches the garland to the picture frame, the skull recedes (and becomes less evil in losing its horns). 43 See chapter III below. 44 For fuller exposition of this, see my 'More's Utopia and Uneven Development,' boundary 2, 13, nos. 2-3 (1985), 233-66. 45 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 44-5. 46 Cf. the translation of the 'quatrain in the Utopian language,' in the prefatory matter of Utopia: 'I alone of all nations, without philosophy, have portrayed for mortals the philosophical city' (22-3). Il.i. Utopia as the Negation of Carnival 1 But concerning the Republic, see 41 above, and for the New World, 62. 2 See Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford:

Notes to pages 75-7

3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10

339

Stanford University Press, 1975); E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York: George Braziller, 1979); and Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985). These works may be understood partly as more 'empirical' confirmations of Mikhail Bakhtin's seminal insistence on Carnival's interpretive value in Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). This book first appeared in English in 1968, having been published in Russian in 1965. Utopia, 221-3. Utopia, 179-81. To list the most frequent mistakes: it is said that Utopia is a static society, even though it is manifestly presented as changing and open to change; it is cast as regimented and unfree, even though it is remarkably non-prescriptive; it is made out to be needlessly aggressive and symptomatically imperialistic when it is clearly conceived as existing, like England, in proximity to predatory state formations. Note though that a species of clowning, of playing the fool, was an indelible aspect of the biographical image More left of himself. A telling marker of More's lay difference from Erasmus, the clear equivalent 'in life' of More's literary Lucianism (his practice of the jest-in-earnest with which Lucian had come to be associated), it may be understood as situating his literary imitation of Lucian as specifically decontextualized Carnivalesque practice. Note that a similarly limited role is ascribed to fools by the Utopians: 'They are very fond of fools, and think it contemptible to insult them.' The person 'who gets not only no use from a fool but not even any amusement - a fool's only gift' will not be allowed to look after him (192-3). I intend 'Utopian' here in a general sense. See Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, ch. 12, and esp. Bristol, Carnival and Theatre, esp. ch. 6. See A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1952), ch. 1. Morton, TheEnglish Utopia, 217-19, lines 16-24, 45-64. For the poem in the Middle English, see Transactions of the Philological Society (Berlin: A. Asher and Co., 1858), part 2, 156-61. FJ. Furnivall, who edits it here, calls it 'the airiest and cleverest piece of satire in the whole range of early English, if not of English, poetry.' Dorothee Metlitzki reports that the term 'Cokaygne' is of Arabic origin. See her The Matter ofAraby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977): 'The first description of a Western paradise of

340

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Notes to pages 79-87

the senses called "Cocagne" is found in a French poem of the thirteenth century. A medieval Dutch version follows the French fairly closely, while the Middle English poem ... preserved in a manuscript of the fourteenth century, is a more freely conceived composition that culminates [sic] in a satire against monks and nuns' (211). Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,*1980), 112-21. Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, ch. 12. See above, 71-2. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), ch. 4. Utopia, 158-61. But see above, 72. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (New York: Verso, 1991), 201-27. The book was published in French in 1947. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 203-4 and part 3. II.ii. Carnival Strikes Back

1 I have used Guy Demerson's edition of the works, with its facing-column translation of Rabelais's text into modern French: Rabelais, Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973). The Theleme episode is on 190-207 of this edition. 2 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), chs. 3, 6, and throughout. 3 In addition to the works of Screech and Berrong referred to below, see Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), and Gerard Defaux, Pantagruelet Us Sophistes (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). See Carla Freccero's note on the 'Bakhtin controversy' in Rabelais scholarship in Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 46-7. 4 See, for example, Samuel Kinser, Rabelais's Carnival (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). He ends by claiming that Bakhtin's text 'in fact inculcates a sense of Rabelais' semiotic mode of developing textuality: the systematization of images, not the representation of Rabelais' populist orthodoxy, is Bakh tin's secret theme' (257). But Bakhtin does not represent Rabelais as an orthodox populist, as Kinzer must know; and as I note here and further on, there is nothing secret about the theme of 'systematization.'

Notes to pages 88-98 341 5 Cf. 138-9: This is not a popular-festive mood but a court and humanist Utopia, which has rather the flavor of Princess Marguerite's circle than that of the marketplace. ... Theleme is not in line with Rabelais' imagery and style'; and also 431. 6 Cf. 135: 'Even the lines which in a different context or taken separately would be completely serious (Theleme, Gargantua's letter to Pantagruel, the chapter about the hero's death) acquire in their context an overtone of laughter; the reflexes of surrounding comic images react on them'; and 453. 7 Cf. 77, above. 8 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), esp. 6-19. 9 Perhaps it is enough to say that 'transgression' and 'hybridization' refer to psychological and symbolic exigencies unless redefined; and Stallybrass and White do not provide the redefinition. Which is not to deny the interest of many of their specific historical criticisms (see for example their remarks on fairs and marketplaces on 34-40) and of their particular findings. 10 In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84—258. The essay is dated 1937-8 in this volume. 11 The Dialogic Imagination, 167-206. This is section 7 of the essay, entitled 'The Rabelaisian Chronotope.' 12 The Dialogic Imagination, 206-24; section 8, 'The Folkloric Bases of the Rabelaisian Chronotope.' 13 Henri Lefebvre's remarks in his Rabelais (Paris: Les Editeurs Francais Reunis, 1955), 93, on the importance of Lyons, which 'gave an amplitude unknown of in villages to feasts and carnivals,' and whose fairs, printing presses, and chapbook peddlers ('colporteurs') 'provided Rabelais with the figure of the giant,' are especially suggestive in this context. Lefebvre's presentation of Rabelais as a festive writer, drawn up so far as I know without a knowledge of Bakhtin's work, is generally compatible with it. 14 The Dialogic Imagination, 201-2. Contrast Lefebvre, Rabelais, 187, on this point. 15 The Dialogic Imagination, 178,92,240-2. 16 The following discussion is indebted to Carla Freccero's stimulating reading of the Theleme episode in Father Figures, ch. 4. 17 See The Complete Works of Francois Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 116. 18 Rabelais, Oeuvres Computes, ed. Demerson, 190-1. Subsequent page numbers in parentheses are to this edition. 19 Utopia, 246-7.

342 Notes to pages 98-113 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

Frame's translation, 118. See M.A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 191. Frame's translation, 126. See Richard Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in 'Gargantua and PantagrueV (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). See ch. 58. See Henri Lefebvre's suggestive remarks on the significance of the Pichrocholine war in Rabelais, 58-63. See Demerson's note 5 to ch. 49, 542-43. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 52-60. See, for example, Kinser, Rabelais's Carnival, 249, where this interpretation comes across in the claim that there was 'no broad undifferentiated populace into which [Rabelais] was pulled regardless of intent. ... the people seemed [to Rabelais] more like the Sausages, inconstant and silly.' As if it were part of Bakhtin's case that the People was undifferentiatedly consistent and wise! An individualistic reading such as the following also misses the basic point: 'the repeated references [in Book IV] to food, to swallowing, to replenishment and to appetite, form a pattern which ends by making of one's conduct at table a kind of moral touchstone' (Thomas M. Greene, Rabelais: A Study in Comic Courage [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970], 93). Ill.i. Conjuring Revolution in the Dialogue of Counsel

1 It will be remembered that I argued Book I's integrality to the genre of Utopia above (33-8); and I will be carrying that observation to its logical conclusion in considering these responses to Book I as part of the Utopian tradition. 2 KJ. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogue (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1985). 3 See, for example, Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965), a study to which I am much indebted; and Whitney R.D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth 1529-59 (London: Athlone Press, 1970). The view of commonwealthism here is also indebted to R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922, Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1962); Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward Viand the Protestant Reformation (New York: Palgrave Press, 1999); esp. 122-6, which put a stirring case for the inherence of commonwealth values in the evangelical reformation at mid-century; Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Repre-

Notes to pages 113-17

343

sentation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 4 See McRae, God Speed the Plough, esp. chs. 1 and 2. 5 For the persistence of the moral economy in popular understanding and political struggle into eighteenth-century Britain, see E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991). 6 For this assessment of English class relations, see Robert Brenner's final essay in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in PreIndustrialEurope, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 253-8, and the references there cited; and see R.H. Hilton, 'Feudalism orFeodaliteand Seigneuriem France and England,' in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), 227-38. 7 R.H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912; New York: Burt Franklin, 1967). 8 Paul Fideler, 'Poverty, Policy and Providence: The Tudors and the Poor,' in Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse, and Disguise, ed. Paul A. Fideler and T.F. Mayer (New York: Routledge, 1992), ch. 7, 207. 9 'Language' does not in fact seem to me a particularly apt figure for what they are talking about- the older 'code,'just because of its fuzziness, seems better - but this is not the place to go into the matter. 10 For Cromwell's reform program, see G.R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). For Somerset's, see Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth; M.L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1975); and MacCulloch, The Boy King, 41-52. 11 David Starkey, 'Which Age of Reform?' in Revolution Reassessed, ed. C. Coleman and D. Starkey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 13-27. 12 John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 149-53. 13 See Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth 1529—59, chs. 7-10; and Neal Wood, The Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. ch. 2. 14 The Boke Named the Governour, ed. H.H. Croft (London: C. Kegan Paul and Co., 1880), 1:2. Elyot says that 'public weal' and not 'common weal' is the proper translation of'res publica'; 'common weal,' he says, means 'communism.' (For exposition of the philological reasoning, see Wood, The Foundations of Political Economy, 127-8.) This is almost as if Aristotle had given over the term 'politeia' because among its various meanings it owned a demo-

344 Notes to pages 118-19 cratic one. However idiosyncratic, Elyot's attempt to excise the term from the native political vocabulary ought, I would note, to be considered in conjunction with his choice of genre in The Book of the Governor, his decision to rehearse moral philosophy for the benefit of the kingdom's hereditary magistracy. In restricting himself to an exposition of the virtues to be cultivated by the good governor, he implicitly defines the humanist's educative task as a relatively formal and abstract, a primarily moral and textual, affair: it's not for the humanist to undertake social criticism and recommend substantive social reform, a la Hythlodaeus and the 'commonwealth men' who come after him; it would evidently be presumptuous for him even to entertain the question whether to serve or no. The job prepared for him is both more strictly pedagogical and mundanely philosophical, entailing the initiation of the ruling classes into a higher form of literacy, and a concomitant refining of their manners and morals, effected above all, evidently, by the absorption through familiarity of classical moral exempla and axioms; this educative project was conspicuously tailored to enhance the uniformity and cultural solidarity of the natural ruling classes, as well as to render them more capable justicers and, more important yet, worthier counsellors to their prince. Elyot's refusal to allow that 'commonweal' was the English equivalent of res publica, in other words, corresponds to a limitation of the humanist's social function, his range of appropriate intervention; Elyot's dislike for the word is not just a quirk, but part of a larger program. See David Weill Baker's chapter on Elyot in his Divulging Utopia: Radical Humanism in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 76-105. 15 Elton, Reform and Renewal. 161 am uneasy about using this term insofar as it can lead to the oversight of a significant comparative fact which I may not have stressed sufficiently in the text: namely, that the term 'commonweal' was coming to carry connotations of a specifically English heritage of class relations. Two commonplace observations mark out the consciousness of this difference, I think, on the part of the ruling classes. It was often complained, first, in this period that would later be celebrated as the (end of the) yeoman's heyday, that the people were less well off than they had been in times past. But, second, it was also noted that the British common people always had been more affluent, and were still in much better shape, than were their like in most places on the Continent, particularly France. 17 See J.W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (1928; London: Methuen, 1957), 151-2; and esp. Wood, Foundations of Political Economy, ch. 3 and throughout. 18 See again Brenner's final essay in The Brenner Debate, and for the codetermi-

Notes to pages 122-36 345 nacy of centralization and particularism in Britain - a crucial point Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (1972; New York: Routledge, 1996), and Ann Hughes, The Causes oftheEnglish Civil War (New York: St Martin's Press, 1991). 19 Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Reginald Pole & Thomas Lupset, ed. Kathleen M. Burton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), 21. 20 Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (1973; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984), ch. 4. Ill.ii. The Body Politic and Utopia in A Dialogue of Pole and Lupset 1 For a review of positions on the dating of the manuscript, and an argument for a relatively early dating (1529-32), see Thomas F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 3; note that Mayer allows that Starkey may have been making minor revisions as late as 1534. 2 For Cromwell's reform program, see G.R. Elton, Reform and Reneival: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). Perhaps the Dmfogwwas used this way after Starkey had moved into Cromwell's employ in 1534 — even though its conciliarist-republican disapproval of hereditary monarchy would not seem calculated to have qualified it for any very prominent utility. 3 Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Reginald Pole & Thomas Lupset, ed. Kathleen M. Burton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), 169-70. Page numbers in the body of the text will refer to this edition. I cite this text throughout, as I find it more readable than Thomas Mayer's scholarly edition, Thomas Starkey: A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (London: Royal Historical Society, 1989), against which I have nonetheless checked all the more important passages to the argument offered here. (Mayer's edition was produced mainly to preserve the 'paleographic evidence' - the crossings-out, additions, and so on - available in the the single manuscript copy of the text. It seems worth noting, since modern editors usually do not, what common sense says about such evidence: that one generally cannot know how important the revisions whose signs are preserved in a given manuscript were in the composition of the work.) 4 For Starkey's ambitions, see Mayer's work, cited in note 1 above, and Alistair Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 227-8.1 would note that in my judgment Fox, and to a lesser extent Neal Wood in his chapter on Starkey in The Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley: Univer-

346 Notes to pages 138-48

5

6 7 8 9

10

11 12

sity of California Press; 1994), exaggerate the extent of Starkey's positive borrowing from More's Utopia, and underestimate the significance of the formal relationship between the two works. For Pole, see Mayer's biography, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Note that, though Pole had criticized the king's divorce in 1532, it was not till 1536, when he finally published a letter reprimanding Henry for breaking with the church, that it became clear he would pursue his prospects in the traditional church. It's worth noting here that though Starkey, in the methodologically oriented first stages of the dialogue, makes a show of grounding himself on both Aristotle and Plato and finding the differences between them only apparent or semantic, he yet has Pole allow a bias toward Aristotle, as the thinker 'more conforming himself to the common judgment of man' (43). For overviews of the political and literary uses, respectively, of the body analogy, see Paul Archambault, The Analogy of the "Body" in Renaissance Political Literature,' Bibliotheque d 'Humanisms et Renaissance, 29 (1967), 21-53, and Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). Note Archambault's affirmation as to the distinctiveness of the body analogy in Starkey's text: 'No other political work of the period allows the image so much importance, and dwells with such insistence upon its variant forms.... In Starkey's work, rather than being merely an instrument of thought, the analogy becomes an entire system of expression' (43). Burton's edition of Dialogue, v. Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965). Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian Books, 1957). Note, though, that the seeds are spoken of as being in man's heart, and that man is cast as allowing them to degenerate, 'overcome by sensual pleasure' and 'by worldly occasions ... over-run' (34); the cultivation/education analogy is present in any case, but occasionally the seeds are human too. The compromises staged between reason and custom might be seen as manifestations of this formal indefmiteness at the level of content, though they are problematical 'reminders' insofar as they suggest that some parts of the reform program are not contextual compromises but sheerly natural or reasonable. See Barkan, Nature's Work of Art. Neal Wood, in his summary and commentary on this part of the Dialogue, actually fails to note that two defects are itemized and not one - an uncharacteristic error of textual 'fact' for this very careful writer; see The Foundations of Political Economy, 138-44.

Notes to pages 150-69

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13 For example: 'So lytyll dyscressyon, and so myche reasonyng; / So myche hardy-dardy, and so lytelle manlynes; / So prodigalle expence, and so shamfulle reconying; / So gorgyous garmentes, and so myche wrechydnese.'/o/m Skelton: Poems, ed. Robert S. Kinsman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 93, 11. 456-9. 14 The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in PreIndustrialEurope, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 236-42. 15 Robert Brenner, 'Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Modern Europe,' The Brenner Debate, 15-24. 16 See the comments on Book I's murderous sheep in the previous section. 17 J.A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450-1850 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1977); M.W. Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (London: Lutterworth Press, 1954). 18 It is worth noting that the incongruity of these remedies lends credence to the idea that the final three defects take part in a dynamic which explains why depopulation is ongoing: the reason for 'underkill' in the case of the remedies for lack of people might be that it is assumed that population will naturally replenish if the other three problems are rectified. 19 I will return to this shortly. 20 'This is one thing necessary to the education of the nobility, the which only I would should be admitted to the study of the law' (127). 21 Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 22 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 1. 23 Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal 24 For example: 'For what is more repugnant to nature, than a whole nation to be governed by the will of a prince, which ever followeth his frail fantasy and unruled affects? What is more contrary to reason than all the whole people to be ruled by him which commonly lacketh all reason?' (104). 25 Neal Wood gives a more neutral description of these arrangements than Mayer, but has nonetheless, in my judgment, been unduly influenced by him; see The Foundations of Political Economy, 146-8. 26 See Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy (New York: Verso, 1988). III.Hi. A Discourse of the Commonweal 1 A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, Attributed to Sir Thomas Smith, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,

348 Notes to page 169 1969). Page numbers given in the text will be to this edition. It should be noted that the Discourse only made it into print, accredited to one W.S., in 1581. Dewar's case for the attribution to Smith, in The Authorship of the "Discourse of the Commonweal,"' Economic Historical Review, 2nd sen, 19 (1966), 388-400, and as summarized in the introduction to her edition of the Discourse, xxii-xxiv, seems to leave little room for doubt, and I assume Smith's authorship here; but should the attribution be proven wrong, my main argument would not be vitiated. Note, too, that although Smith lets on, toward the end of A Discourse's preface, that the work is intended for an audience of only one, a friend and fellow counsellor ('since this is between us two to be weighed only and considered and not to be published abroad ... I trust [the work] can offend no man' [12-13]), the elaborateness and finish of the work suggest that it was intended for circulation, however select. This - that the work was decidedly published, in manuscript form - is supported by the fact that five copies are extant; see Dewar's appendices to her edition. 2 See Diarmaid MacCulloch, 'Kelt's Rebellion in Context,' in Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 39-62, and Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions (New York: Longman, 1997), ch. 6. Somerset appointed commissioners to hold inquests into enclosure violations in six Midlands counties. 3 A first set of hearings was to determine the causes of distress, while a second, begun on 8 July in response to the commotions, was actually empowered to undo enclosures and other acts ruled to be unjust (see Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation [New York: Palgrave Press, 1999], 46); the relative calm of the Discourse suggests that its setting is the earlier group of hearings, though there is no way of knowing for sure. MacCulloch's discussion of the motives for Somerset's 'commonwealthism' (41-52) casts him as equal parts earnest populist and would-be despot. This seems a juster, and is certainly a more nuanced and interesting, picture than that to be found in M.L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1975). It seems to be the consensus opinion of contemporaries and modern histories alike that Somerset's policies served to trigger the eastern and southern rebellions by creating expectations of redress. For contemporaries, see MacCulloch's discussion, just mentioned; for modern historians, see, for example, Dewar's introduction, xix, and Paul A. Fideler, 'Poverty, Policy and Providence: The Tudors and the Poor,' in Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse and Disguise, ed. Paul A. Fideler and T.F. Mayer (New York: Routledge, 1992), 206.

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4 See MacCulloch, The Boy King, ch. 3; and, for popular reformation especially in the city, Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 5 See Dewar's introduction, xxiii-xxiv, and her Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office (London: Athlone Press, 1964), 50-1. 6 See section 5 below. 7 See Arthur Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965) (Ferguson first worked the argument out in 'The Tudor Commonweal and the Sense of Change, 'Journal of British Studies, 3, no. 1 [Nov. 1963], 11-35); and Neal Wood, The Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), ch. 9 and throughout (an earlier, shorter version of the argument about Smith appeared as 'Foundations of Political Economy: The New Moral Philosophy of Sir Thomas Smith,' in Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth, ed. Fideler and Mayer, 140-67). David McNally also makes some sharp remarks on the tract's economic precocity in Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 26-8. Keith Wrightson follows Wood in his brief remarks on A Discourse in Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 154-8, and proceeds to show that Smith's recommendations presided over much of Elizabethan economic policy, and the attempt therein to 'reconcile commodity and commonwealth.' 8 How one decides this question will depend on one's answer to the more general question as to whether mercantilism is a form of political economy or not. The related question might be noted here as to whether Smith is appropriately described as a commonwealth thinker: both Ferguson and Wood cast him as beginning from Commonwealth axioms about private and common interests but then as breaking through to another, certainly more modern and perhaps fundamentally different, perspective. It seems to me objectively ambiguous whether Smith is a commonwealth thinker. Note, though, that if a strong desire to redress the plight of the lower orders be made a key constituent of commonwealth writing, Smith would not qualify. (I owe this consideration to discussions with James Holstun, who would not group Smith with Crowley and Latimer.) 9 See above, Ill.i. 10 'But of late, divers men, finding greater profit by grazing than by husbandry, have found the means either to buy their neighbors parts roundabout them or else to exchange with them so many acres in this place for so many acres in another whereby they might bring all their lands together and so enclose it. For the avoiding whereof I think verily that it was so of old time ordained

350 Notes to pages 173-81

11 12

13 14

15 16

17

18

19

that every tenant had his lands not all in one gobbet of every field but interlaced with his neighbor's lands' (121). Note that the passage suggests that critical claims to the effect that Smith was moving 'toward a conception of economic process grounded on an acceptance of self-interest' need considerable qualification; the quoted phrase is from Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56, but McRae is echoing what has become a commonplace. The deploring phrase 'entanglement of interests' is taken from Cressy Dymock, Plan for a Division of New Lands (London, 1652); it epitomizes the attitude of many improving pamphlets. SeeJ.A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450-1850 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1977). See 121-6 of A Discourse. See Tudor Economic Documents, ed. R.H. Tawney and Eileen Power (London: Longmans, 1924), vol. 3. For an estimate of the rate of inflation, see Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions (New York: Longman, 1997), 76. Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office, 50-1. The Merchant had just drawn a general conclusion on the heels of the Doctor's complaining about the plight of the learned, and evidently the good Doctor has been put off by what he feels to be the Merchant's usurpation of his faculty; it is for him to approve or disapprove of complaints, and to summarize what has gone before. See particularly his 'The Tudor Commonweal and the Sense of Change' (cited in note 7 above). See 39-41, 80-1. Note that the Knight himself first expresses the opinion that his kind are worst hurt by the dearth, and that the Doctor's role is to corroborate him, to render his opinion fact by bringing system to it. 'DOCTOR. Yet, perchance [the blame] goes further yet [than the king's commandment]. Yea, to such as were the first counselors of that deed, pretending it should be to his Highness' great and notable commodity' (101). Consider the following formulation by the Doctor: 'Well a man may change the name of things, but the value he cannot in any wise to endure for any space, except we were in such a country as Utopia was imagined to be that had no traffic with any other outward country' (105). He is of course conveniently misremembering the basic facts about More's island society (which must import iron, and defend itself against a generally hostile foreign environment), changing its value while preserving its name. See, e.g., 43-5: 'DOCTOR. ... [foreign merchants] come not always for our commodities but sometimes to sell theirs here, knowing it here to be best vendible, and to buy in other countries other commodities. ... And our coin

Notes to pages 181-90 351 is not so allowed in other places as it is here; wherefore the stranger should be a great loser if he should take our coin for his wares. He had then lever bring his wares to other places where he might have coin current in all places. ... KNIGHT. Yea, no doubt that is the policy of all merchants.' Also see 68 ff. 20 See, for example, 46-7, 61-5. 21 See 56, 118-20. 22 See 38-42. The express statement of proof is as follows: 'And though [the Husbandman] does defend himself for his payment to you [the Knight] by color of a law, yet he seems to confess thus much, that the law compels you to take little for your land and that there is no law to restrain him but he may sell his wares as dear as he list. It is enough for your purpose that you take in hand to prove that this dearth rose not first at your hand' (42). 23 More exactly, and tellingly, it includes measures to correct only the losses that will be suffered upon revaluation by those who have bought or rented additional land during the period of high prices. See 115-16. 24 Note that the possibility that 'him' in the first example might mean 'it' is ruled out by the Doctor's later reference to this example: 'But as I have said before of men thrusting one another in a throng' (98). 25 Note that what especially accounts for the repression is the combination of mob and market referred to below. The theory of symptomatic reading alluded to here is originally of Althusserian provenance (see especially Althusser, parts 1 and 2 of Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster [London: New Left Books, 1970]; Pierre Macherey, 'Jules Verne: The Faulty Narrative,' in A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978], 159-248; and Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory [London: New Left Books, 1976]), and depends on the notion (associated especially with Fredric Jameson's work) that the unconscious is always political, but has passed into much general practice. 26 The letter is printed whole in Patrick Fraser Tytler, Esq., England under the Reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, vol. 1 (London, 1839), 185-9, to which page numbers in the text refer. I am indebted to James Holstun for having located it and alerted me to its significance. It may be worth noting that Smith's fearful sleeplessness and sweating accords with the picture that emerges of him in Dewar's biography as an unusually nervous and suggestible type, blessed in the possession of a compliant body. 27 This last clause comes later in the letter, and refers to 'Lord Grey's doing,' in the west; the sentiment, however, is clearly not restricted. 28 It seems worth noting that the nineteenth-century biography has Smith serv-

352 Notes to pages 191-3

29

30

31

32

ing as chief ambassador on a mission to Charles V's Council in Brussels in July 1548, and achieving one of its two main purposes, that of raising two thousand mercenaries for deployment back home. See John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1820), 33. (This mission does not make it into Dewar's biography.) The central government, notoriously, did make significant use of mercenaries to put down both western and eastern rebellions in the summer of 1549. MacCulloch's article, 'Kelt's Rebellion in Context,' in Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 39-62, is what I will mostly be referring to here, since its focus is on the logic of the East Anglian rebellion from the people's point of view, or of 'low polities' as the historians are now designating the political agency of the subordinate classes. Page numbers will be given in the text. But see also, for 'fuller' treatments that have less to say about popular organization, his discussions in The Boy King, Tudor Rebellions, and - perhaps most suggestively with respect to Somerset's intentions - Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), ch. 10. For an interesting article on Somerset's role with respect to the East Anglian rebellion, arguing that the key to the event lies in the intersection between high and low politics, see Ethan Shagan, 'Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: New Sources and New Perspectives,' English Historical Review, 144 (1999), 34-63. See Keith Thomas, 'Another Digger Broadside,' Past and Present, 42 (Feb. 1969), 57-68. The Diggers aligned themselves more directly than the East Anglian camps with the fugitive tradition of squatting; but the two movements, for all their differences, ought to be seen as having in common an implicit, dissident interpretation of the tradition as vital. See my 'Preaching Common Grounds: Winstanley and the Diggers as Concrete Utopians,' in Writing and the English Renaissance, ed. William Zunder and Suzanne Trill (London: Longman, 1996), 213-37. In a note, he adds: 'hence the shrill tone of denunciation of the rebels' barbarism and enormities in the [contemporary] narratives' of the uprising. It should be stressed that what MacCulloch shows to be the basic facts about the rebellion are not to be found in these narratives. I would recall here my previous remarks about the irrelevance, come a point of no return, whether a vision of change is 'backward' or 'forward' looking. To say a person or group is 'nostalgic,' of course, generally implies a lack of realism on the nostalgic one's part; but one finds little nostalgia in the the rebels' social demands, and then it has always been recognized that the eastern rebels were predominantly evangelical ('forward looking'?) rather than

Notes to pages 195-7

353

traditional in their religious profile, hence happy with Somerset's reformation. It is worth noting that MacCulloch's later works, while they have not focused on the logic of the rebellion from below, have not tended to condescend in the way that the last-quoted formulations do either. In the paragraph that follows, I am assuming that Smith himself casts the vision of a commonwealth of separate estates as nostalgic. 33 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. L. Alston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906), 39-40. Yeomen, in this text, are defined against unfree men (i.e., that 'sort of men which doe not rule' - 'day labourers, poore husbandmen, yea marchantes or retailers which have no free lande, copiholders, and all artificers' [46-7]) - and in relation to, or just below, the 'lowest sort of gentlemen,' which they might well become, as 'they [gentlemen] be made good cheape in England' (39). 34 Compare here Neal Wood's comments on Smith's inclusion of the Husbandman and Capper, which make the move out to be remarkable for its popularity: The Foundations of Political Economy, 205. 35 See Wood's very incisive and useful remarks: The Foundations of Political Economy, 213-15. 36 Wood, The Foundations of Political Economy, 230-2, takes the long early complaint about the universities as an expression of the reform program on this issue, and suggests that Smith's recommendations for university reform are more radical than even Starkey's. He is certainly right that Smith recognizes and stresses the importance of the universities living up to their ideal, but Smith does not rewrite the ideal, as Starkey, in recommending that the whole nobility be legally trained and turned into a kind of legal class, does. And why should only the university reforms not be returned to, and elaborated, in the third part? I continue to think that, considering that this is a humanist tract, eduational reform is downplayed. 37 Sale of sacramental services and the use of multiple benefices come in for most criticism. Note that the Doctor hopes that if the prelates do not reform such matters, God should 'send our magistrates temporal the mind to reform these things with their secular power and to study for the reformation of them rather than for their possessions' (133). This position is more evangelical than traditional, clearly, and can be seen as very much of the Edwardian moment, in which evangelical councillors were pushing the reformation forward. Yet the Doctor's extremely pragmatic attitude toward religion, and his call for a continental synod to decide the differences between the two main schisms (surely an anachronistic gesture by this time), would not have pleased the more convinced evangelicals. The ambiguity here fits in with what one knows of Smith's religious reputation: his closest (or most

354 Notes to pages 197-205 profitable) associations were with evangelicals, but he had to defend himself against charges of being a 'neuter in religion.' (See Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith, 32. MacCulloch, writing of his role in Edward VTs reign, characterizes Smith as a 'forward evangelical' [TheBoy King, 48, 126], while Dewar casts him, more plausibly I think, as Machiavellian. Anne McLaren, 'Reading Sir Thomas Smith's De Republica Anglorum as Protestant Apologetic,' Historical Journal, 42, no. 4 [1999], 911-39, convincingly shows how Smith's later work of constitutional description deployed strategic elements that tended to be identified as Protestant; insofar as it casts Smith as rather politique, however, her argument does not dispel the impression that Smith's apologetic was relatively 'secular' in motivation. Perhaps it is worth noting that Dewar's attitude toward Smith's religious pragmatism is not at all admiring, but sour: she sees him as a cold fish.) It may also be noted that the ambiguity about the Doctor's lay or clerical status corresponds to an ambiguity about Smith's own status (Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, 29-30). 38 As Neal Wood says, 'Smith emerges as an early prototype of the modern social scientist' (The Foundations of Political Economy, 218). IV.i. Travesty, Allegory, and the Political Effectivity of Renaissance Drama 1 In the books that trace the story of the genre, The Tempest is the usual entry. 2 Jameson begins his essay on romance ('Magical Narratives,' in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981]) by noting that genre itself is defined by a duality between semantics and structure, and stresses the opposition between Utopian impulse and script in his essay on Marin. 3 ForLukacs, see The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); for Brecht, see Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964). The so-called Brecht-Lukacs debate, which attracted interventions from other well-known Marxist culural thinkers, is anthologized in Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977). 4 See Jameson's argument about the category of totality in his chapter on Lukacs in Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 5 E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943). 6 It is important to keep this, more special, use of the term 'allegory' - accord-

Notes to pages 206-15 355 ing to which there is a more or less stable, one-to-one relation between sign and referent - separate from the more ordinary and general sense of the term, as inevitable, and inevitably overdetermined, narrative figuration. 7 Louis Montrose, '"Shaping Fantasies": Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,' Representations, 2 (1983); Stephen Greenblatt, 'Invisible Bullets' and 'Martial Law in the Land of Cokayne,' in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 8 Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), e.g. 176. 9 See above, chapter Ill.ii. 10 See Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985), esp. ch. 4. For the best historical tracing and treatment of popular dramaturgy, see Weimann's book. 11 See above, chapter II. 12 Bristol, Carnival and Theater. 13 See Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989), esp. 32-52. 14 I say 'loosely' because, as argued in chapter II, the Cokaygne fantasy written into or alluded to by many carnival and popular-dramaturgical practices is partly 'pre-utopian.' 15 Bristol, Carnival and Theater, ch. 5. 16 The shrewd point here is that Cook is really arguing against her will that many of the people who undeniably did get in really couldn't afford it - they should have been more responsible than to spend almost all their week's wages on a play! - and thus makes a better case for the theatre as concrete carnival than Harbage did. See Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). 17 It is precisely its structural centrality in all or most of Shakespeare's plays, one might argue from this position, and not just the corollary fact of mixing of styles, that later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics find offensive, especially in later Shakespeare. 18 Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 161-78. 19 Greenblatt, 'Invisible Bullets.' 20 Roger Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 21 For the language of 'sorts,' see Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982).

356 Notes to pages 218-28 FV.ii. Marlowe and the Utopia of Sprung Desire 1 In the following sketch I have been influenced especially by the following works on Marlowe: Stephen Greenblatt, 'Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play,' in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 193-221; Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Clifford Leech, Christopher Marlowe: Poet for the Stage (New York: AMS Press, 1986); Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 75-133. 2 Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. J.B. Steane (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 105,11. 7-8 of the Prologue. Subsequent citations will be from this edition. 3 For the classic interpretation of its function in popular culture, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), esp. ch. 2. For stimulating reflections on blasphemy in Marlowe and the historical reception thereof, see David Riggs, 'Marlowe's Quarrel with God,' in Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Emily C. Bartels (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1997), 39-58. 4 The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1938). 5 Greenblatt, 'Invisible Bullets,' in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Allan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). 6 For a classic argument that the Tudor monarchy was in principle absolutist, see Joel Hurstfield, 'Was There a Tudor Despotism after All?', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1967), 83-108. 7 See my 'More's Utopiaand Uneven Development,' boundary 2, 13, nos. 2-3 (1985), 233-66. 8 See Rogues, Vagabonds, & Sturdy Beggars: A Neu> Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature Exposing The Lives, Times, and Cozening Tricks of the Elizabethan Underworld, ed. Arthur Kinney (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). rV.iii. Groups in Flux in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I 1 DrFaustus, in Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed.J.B. Steane (London: Penguin Books, 1969), III.iv.3-5.

Notes to pages 228-38 357 2 III.iv.64ff. 3 IV.vii.lOSff. 4 So anyway do I think this scene should be played. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Robin and company are merely struck dumb, charmed, and not, as both Benvolio and the Pope are, abused. 5 I have used The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974). 6 See his soliloquy at the end of I.ii. 7 This is how he moralizes the scene in which he befuddles Francis the Drawer (II.iv): 'They call drinking deep, dyeing scarlet, and when you breathe in your watering, they cry "hem!" and bid you play it off. To conclude, I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour, that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life.' It strikes me that calling drinking deep dyeing scarlet is rather clever; taverns sold urine-soaked ashes to dyers, who used it in the making of dye - so the editorial note informs us; the idea of the expression then is, 'We're not wasting time, we're getting a job done here.' There may be better jokes, but this hardly testifies to a dull group intellect. 8 'Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit. To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to countereit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.' 9 It is a panegyric when you recall, as Joseph Kramer pointed out to me, that actors, notoriously, made a living by pretending to die. 10 John Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), ch. 1. 11 'Come bring your luggage nobly on your back' (V.iv. 156).

V.i. Nashe's Lenten Utopia 1 See, for an example of the sort of stance referenced here, McKerrow's 'memoir' of Nashe in vol. 4 of his edition; though the expressly evaluative remarks are notably sour and moralistic. See The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London: Oxford University Press, 1905). 2 Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Margaret Ferguson, 'Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. The "News of the Maker" Game,' English Literary Renaissance, 11 (1981), 165-82; Jonathan Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Stephen S. Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); Robert Weimann, 'Fabulaand Histona: the Crisis of the "Universal Consideration" in

358 Notes to pages 238-52

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12

13 14

Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller,' in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 181-96; and Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). I have also profited from reading the recent article by Henry S. Turner, 'Nashe's Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe(l599),' ELH, 68, no. 3 (2001), 529-61. Perhaps a conclusion to be drawn is that it is easier to dislodge sub-canonical works from their status than canonical ones; or again, that what is in fact meant by remaking a canon (when the canon has many years behind it) is the substitution of one set of sub-canonical texts for another. On the gallimaufry, see Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque, ch. 4. But note the qualifications to this in FV.ii above. See G.R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962). Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe. See above, chapter III, and Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context. For the phrase, see The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, 1:236. Subsequent page numbers given in the text will be to this edition. It is a weakness of Hutson's otherwise illuminating analysis of this work that she has nothing to say about its last part. Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context, ch. 12. Hilliard, in The Singularity of Thomas Nashe, 82, notes that the section is largely taken from a Latin demonological tract by Pictorius (1563), and suggests that Nashe includes it to make up for the irony of the previous supplication. The work was registered on 11 January 1599, and evidently printed shortly thereafter. In June of that year, Archbishop Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft issued a proscription against all Nashe's and Gabriel Harvey's books (the two had engaged in a vicious comic exchange in the mid-1590s); so far as is known Nashe published no more. See Steane's introduction to Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 40-4. Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985), ch. 5. It might be noted that the divisions here, between readers for form and for content, style and message, jest and earnest, tend to emerge in the reception history of many major works of the general species of literature that Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 309-12, dubbed Menippean satire. More's Utopia drives the tension here to an ultimate limit: its earnest is so earnest that it is very hard to take in jest.

Notes to pages 252-6 359

15 16 17

18 19

20

Nashe's Menippean Utopia differs from More's work, on the one hand, in that the formal feature, the jest, that asks to be appreciated for itself is not a persistent irony but rather Nashe's concerted practice of Carnivalesque rhetoric; and on the other hand, in that its earnest, the alternate urban reality described, is so sober, so completely plausible. Harington's Metamorphosis of Ajax, another Menippean work of paradox published only a few years before Lenten Stuffe, shares this latter distinguishing trait: 'in emphasizing the true merits of his invention [the flush toilet],' Donno notes, 'Harington somewhat alters the cast of essential triviality characteristic of the mock encomium while still retaining its method and technique.' See Sir John Harington', A Neiv Discourse of a Stale Subject, called 'The Metamorphosis of Ajax,' ed. Elisabeth Story Donno (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962), 19-20. See II.ii.95-6 above. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, 3:152-7. Bruni's encomium was a direct imitation of Aelius Aristides' Panathenaicus, a second-century celebration of Athens; see Hans Baron, 'Imitation, Rhetoric, and Quattrocento Thought in Bruni's Laudatio,' in his From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 157-71. Most European early modern urban encomia stem from native descriptive conventions, for which seeJ.K. Hyde, 'Medieval Descriptions of Cities,' Bulletin of theJohn Rylands Library, 48 (1966), 308-40. For a discussion of early modern conventions in descriptions of London, see Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 135-67. For a copy of the chronological table from which Nashe is working in this part, seejoannis Lelandi... deRebus Britannicus Collectanea, ed. T. Hearne (Oxford, 1715), 285-8. See Henry Manship, The History of Great Yarmouth, ed. Charles John Palmer, FSA (Great Yarmouth: J. Russel Smith, 1854). 'In the time of King Herroldeand William the Conqueror this of Yarmouth grew to a setled lumpe, and was as drie as the sands of Arabia, so that thronging theaters of people (as well Aliens as Englishmen) hiued thither about the setting offish and Herring.' (162). A little further on: 'In the raigne of King Henriethe first, King Steuen, King Henriethe second, and Richard de cordeLyon, the apostacie of the sands from the yalping world was so great that they ioynd themselues to the maine land of Eastflege, and whole tribes of males and females trotted, bargd it thither, to build and enhabite' (163). One could cite many more examples. He lists wool first among a series of contenders (corn; lead, tin, and iron; butter and cheese). Of course wool was in fact, at least in respect of the proportion it represented of the national product, the superior contender.

360 Notes to pages 261-9 21 The classic work on mercantilism is Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935). I have profited in some ways from D.C. Coleman, Revisions in Mercantilism (London: Methuen, 1969), but have relied on the (somewhat discrepant) understandings of Perry Anderson, in Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), ch. 1, and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980). Roughly speaking, Anderson casts mercantilism as an absolutist ideology, laying stress on its predatory — politico-military — view on international economic matters, while Wallerstein presents it as an early (and recurrent) capitalist ideology. 22 See, for a comparable view, Hutson's sharp remarks on Nashe's depiction of Yarmouth as an anti-aristocratic and relatively democratic place, in Thomas Nashe in Context, 254—7. She and Turner both note that Nashe's praise of the herring trade knew precedents in previous sixteenth-century economic writings, notably Robert Hitchcocke's A Politique Platt (1580). 23 Henry Manship, The History of Great Yarmouth, e.g., 120. 24 See A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558-1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 10 ff. 'The renewed prosperity of Lynn and Yarmouth arose from a growing demand in England for grain and coal. In times of dearth London imported grain from Lynn, but the largest and most regular demand for corn came from the coal-mining and saltmanufacturing areas of north-east England - a demand which was fully met by the merchants of Lynn. Their grain ships returned with cargoes of coal, totalling thousands of tons annually, some of which was discharged at Lynn and Yarmouth for shipment up river into seven or eight counties, the rest being carried to the Thames where these merchants held a large stake in the provision of London's coal supplies. The complementary trade in grain and coal proved so profitable to East Anglian merchants that they began to invest heavily in new ships. ... This new shipping enabled them to displace the Dutch merchants when war with Spain disrupted Dutch domination of the carrying trade' (11). 25 Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition 1500-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 26 The OED gives the first instance of 'red herring' in the sense of 'false lead' as occurring in 1686; my guess is that the sense was current in 1599 - Nashe himself refers to the practice that apparently lent itself to this sense, of using the herring to create a scent - but in any case the term was certainly current in the sense of 'that which falls outside the basic categories,' and this is not far from the idea of a 'false lead.' Meanwhile, of course, the red herring retains its 'low' status, and the best or most dignified town is uncrowned and

Notes to pages 270-8 361 revivified in being shown to be based upon it - the Carnivalesque play works this way too. 27 Hutson, again, is very good on Nashe's representation of Yarmouth's relationship to London, and makes the point about the London monopolies; see Thomas Nashe in Context, 253-9. It should be clear that in this topographical thematic Westminster generally counts as part of London. The order for Nashe's arrest came from the court, and the licensing system for books was controlled by the central government rather than by the city; but London and its authorities evidently offering Nashe no protection from these, his pamphlet's conflation of political centre and city is readily understandable. 28 A cropshin, Nashe tells us, is 'one of the refuse sort of herrings' (216). 29 Note that two short initial stories, of Midas eating gold and Dionysus stripping Jupiter, offered facetiously as herring allegories (198-9), occupy something of a limbo status. 30 Note that the town arms featured 'three lions rampant with herring tails'; it had been 'conferred by Edward III in recognition of the townsmen's major contribution to the victory of the English fleet at Sluys in 1340' (Perry Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth 1660-1722 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], 37); it is as if Nashe replaces the lions with (aggressive) herring. 31 See Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Note that Patterson, though concerned to argue the politically tendentious character of beast fable, simply assumes its association with an audience of young readers; consider the following sentence: 'It seems inarguable [i.e., indisputable] to me that Lydgate established an English tradition of political fabling as a form of resistance to unjust power relations, which ran continuously alongside (or beneath) the more conventional and conservative notion that the content of fables was merely ethical, and that they could, therefore, serve as benign texts in the elementary education of children' (47). (The modern category of children's literature, of course, did not exist in the Renaissance.) 32 See Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth, ch. 1. 33 The following remarks on Marlowe's poem have been influenced by its treatment in James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and especially by Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), ch. 2. See, for a stimulating argument that Marlowe's whole career was directed against Spenser's 'Elizabethan' ideology and poetic, Patrick Cheney, Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, CounterNationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); ch. 11 treats Hero and Leander:

362 Notes to pages 279-90 34 The suggestion, in other words, is that Marlowe dignifies the matter of the epyllion to that extent that another genre-term is warranted. V.ii. The Imperial Lab 1 The Manuels refer to the Utopia of Bacon's period as the cosmopolitical Utopia. See Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979). 2 See especially the section 'Their Occupations,' in Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams, and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 124 ff. 3 See, for discussion of secrecy in The New Atlantis, Rose-mary Sargent, 'Bacon as an Advocate for Cooperative Scientific Research,' in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 163, and the several references there cited. Sargent notes that secrecy is an objective problem in Bacon's scientific project. See also William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), who presents (323) the secretiveness of Salomon's House as residual, while stressing the important role Bacon played overall in the move from a scie uific culture of'secrets to public knowledge' (ch. 10). 4 The Governor of the Strangers' House conjectures to the travellers that the house must be named after the Salomon of the Old Testament, rather than, as others have thought, after Solamona himself: 'Some think it beareth the founder's name a little corrupted, as if it should be Solamona's House. But the records write it as it is spoken. So as I take it to be denominate of the King of the Hebrews, who is famous with you, and no stranger to us.' Part of Bacon's point here must be to stress Bensalem's common ancient heritage with Europe; Solamona is Bensalem's Solomon especially by virtue of recognizing the importance of the common Solomon. I quote from Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 471. This is the best-annotated edition, and more easily available than Spedding et al. (for which see note 35 below); subsequent page numbers refer to it. 5 It is worth recalling here Louis Marin's suggestive analysis of the Polylerite episode as a sort of halfway house to Utopia, revealing Utopian thought in its unfolding, as process. See III.i.2 above. 6 After More's work, no formal Utopia was published in Britain until The New Atlantis, one hundred and ten years later. Amy Boesky rightly underscores the oddity of the hiatus, and reflects interestingly on its significance, in

Notes to pages 288-92

7

8

9

10 11 12 13

14

363

Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 11,74. I should allow that the last sentence is ambiguous, and that I conjecture from context that the bridegroom's friend is female, and the bride's male; I also think it unlikely that the friends are to do the viewing together, though the formulation allows the possibility. In any case, if not so much of a scorn, would an intended find it any less unpleasant to be rejected by a second party? One doubts it, especially since the viewing's objectivity would seem to have to make it more 'terminal.' Why Adam and Eve's pools?: to mark this as a stage in the remaking of the primal marriage, of course, and then to stress the innocence of the viewing; but also to underscore the practice's role in keeping the race populous and pure (since those of defective shape will not pass muster for marriage). Not that there has not been much good recent critical writing on it, as subsequent references will testify. But it tends to focus on other aspects of the text than the Utopian core, the form of the House itself and its implied position in the social body. (The really groundbreaking recent work has been within that branch of philosophy called the history of science [viz. Rees and PerezRamos, in note 17 below]). For analysis of the causes of the protracted recession, see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the World Economy, 195098, in New Left Review, no. 229 (May/June 1998). Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 654-7. This part does have general implications for method, which will be discussed below. Remember here that Utopia emerges, in More's work, as the only answer to Morus's traditional objections as to the feasibility of community of goods. Rose-mary Sargent nicely stresses both these features in her commentary on Salomon's House, in 'Bacon as an Advocate for Cooperative Scientific Research.' I would note that whereas Sargent speaks of Bacon describing a 'practical division of labour' in the 'preparations' section, the most that can be said is that he describes general aspects of what Marx called the technical division of labour (as opposed to the social division). One learns little about how the plant is actually put to work or 'practised.' Are there botanists, animal husbands, specialist technicians of sound, or sight? One cannot tell from the description of occupations. Likewise, though Bacon's Father refers to the public or common use of the House's 'instruments' - 'we have circuits or visits of divers principal cities of the kingdom; where, as it cometh to pass, we do publish such new profitable

364 Notes to pages 292-4 inventions as we think good' (488) - this practice only raises the question of the relation between the House's production and the larger (Bensalemite) economy; it does not definitively compromise the purpose of the Father's description (to sketch the preparations and instruments), or the integrity of the House's operations (on which the last quotation rather painstakingly insists). 15 One imagines, though, that the quasi-magical productivity of the space and objects described aims as much at luring the much-needed patronage as at fulfilling a properly biographical wish. Bacon's imaginary relationship to the new science he hoped for was always dual: his role as 'instaurator' was never separable from that of patron, or of the butler-patron who provides patrons. 16 See Lisa Jardine, 'Experientia Literata or Novum Organum? The Dilemma of Bacon's Scientific Method,' in Francis Bacon's Legacy of Texts, ed. William A. Sessions (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 47-68. 17 Cf. a statement such as the following, by the best commentator on Bacon's speculative philosophy, which underscores the controlling character of the analogy in Bacon's problematic: 'With this physics [of spirit and matter] would come the ability to decode nature's deeper structures and knowledge of all the letters of the alphabet necessary for constructing the "syllables," "words," and "sentences" of the new philosophy.' See Graham Rees, assisted by Christopher Upton, Francis Bacon's Natural Philosophy: A Transcription of MS Hardwick 72A with Translation and Commentary (Halfpenny Forge: British Society for History of Science, 1984), 57. For an authoritative discussion of Baconian form, 'a notion transitional between the "substantial forms" of late Scholasticism and the "internal structures" and "real essences" of the Corpuscularians' (67), see Antonio Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon's Idea of Science and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 67-80 and passim. 18 See Aphorism IX of Book II of The New Organon, and note the division between physic and metaphysic in Book II of The Advancement of Learning, in Francis Bacon, ed. Vickers, 199-202: 'the true Natural Magic, which is that great liberty and latitude of operation which dependeth upon the knowledge of Forms, I may report deficient' (202). 19 It seems unlikely to me, then, jbaceVickers's note (800) stating that the Interpreters of Nature have made it to the true induction, that we are to imagine they have. 20 See Aphorisms XXV-XXXV of Book I of The New Organon, and Bacon's description of the fifth part of the great instauration in 'The Plan of the Work,' in TheNeiv Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23.

Notes to pages 294-7 365 21 Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon's Idea of Science, 232. 22 Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 23 This is the place to recall that the alternate name for Salomon's House is the College of the Six Day's Works. The name is apparently there to assure the reader of the compatibility between science and religion; it is of a piece with, for example, the fable of the donation of Christianity to Bensalem (464-5). But the title has a more positive significance than this defensive one, in that it renders the College's works coextensive with the Creator's, setting the story of their invention against that of God's creation. Though it is not the only one, the Genesis account provides a principal organizational scheme in the Father's description of his House's physical facilities. The Father moves from places designed to discover things about the elemental and mineral 'levels' of creation, to places concerned with the vegetable, the animal, and then on to 'higher' spheres having to do with human constructs and inventions. Salomon's House takes all of creation as its ultimate - and immediate - object of knowledge and of'improvement,' and may be understood as reviewing the Six Days' Works, and in a sense replaying the story, in its daily operations. 24 For the Utopia as a socially cognitive genre, see Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), and Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (1973; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984). 25 For a useful discussion of the difference between the Utopia and the 'perfect moral commonwealth,' as he calls it, see J.C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), though Davis misses the essential point, that whereas ideal commonwealths offer the ruling classes an idealized image of themselves, to be used as a model, Utopias skew the image to cognitive ends. 26 Utopia, 228-9. 27 See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (1972; London: Penguin Books, 1991), ch. 8. 28 See Vickers's note on this phrase. Rossi, quoting from Bacon's Redargutio philosophiarum (but probably with Bacon's sketch of the Fellow in mind too), observes that 'a chaste patience, a natural modesty, grave and composed manners, a smiling pity are the characteristics of the man of science in Bacon's portrait of him,' stressing that this portrait is directed against the Faustian stereotype of the occult philosopher as overweeningly restless ('Bacon's Idea of Science,' in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Peltonen, 33). One suspects that Bacon did not feel that a change in social context would change the meaning of the scientific demeanour.

366 Notes to pages 298-307 29 See especially Book I of The Advancement of Learning, 122-6 in Francis Bacon, ed. Vickers; but the theme is recurrent in Bacon's works. 30 See Paoli Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 64. For a stimulating discussion of the relation of religion to science in Bacon generally, see John Channing Briggs, 'Bacon's Science and Religion,' in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Peltonen, 172-99. 31 There is reference to the pre-Apocalyptic conversion of the Jews. 32 Elizabeth McCutcheon, 'Bacon and the Cherubim: An Iconographical Reading of the New Atlantis,'1 English Literary Renaisssance, 2, no. 3 (Autumn 1972), 334-55. 33 McCutcheon, 'Bacon and the Cherubim,' 346. 34 It is, incidentally, a misreading that the popular materialistic religion that came into its own during the Civil War years rendered easy to make, and helps to explain Bacon's appeal to such as Winstanley, to whose writing this construction of Sin is central. See Hill, The World Turned Upside Down. 35 The New Organon, ed. Jardine and Silverthorne, 34. The clause I have italicized reads, in the Latin, 'nisi quod non adsit qui advertit.' See The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman and Co., 1858), 158. 36 For perceptive remarks on Bensalem's eschatological status, see Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 92-3. 37 Sometimes, true, the 'we' of the phrase might be taken to refer vaguely to Bensalem, more than to the scientific foundation; sometimes, especially if taken on its own, the phrase can simply be taken to mean 'there are in the House.' 38 One gathers that the narrator has been chosen for special knowledge by virtue of this difference. 39 See C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), esp. ch. 2. 40 See Aphorisms XXXVIII-LXVIII of The New Organon. The 'incompetency of the senses' ('incompetentia sensum' -Aphorism LII) is grouped under Idols of the Tribe, as a species deficiency. It is noteworthy that many formulations in the section blend 'incompetency' into the restlessness of the intellect, associated with the drive for premature intellectual closure. I would stress that while Bacon's corpuscularism is quite important in determining the irreducible character of the breach between sense-perception and its objects, it is not the exclusive or even decisive cause. If the senses are removed from Forms because of their grossness, they are also disabled by the sheer fact of their locality and by their generally being attuned only to physical, and not

Notes to pages 307-13 367

41 42

43

44

45 46

47

48

49

spiritual, body (see Aphorism L). For the significance of corpuscular invisibilia in seventeenth-century science, see Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). See Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 148-53. Francis Bacon, ed. Vickers, 419-20. Note that the opposition is between governments, conceived as 'merely' regulatory or encouraging, and social groups themselves, conceived as creative or constituting. Witness that so sober a commentator as Perez Zagorin allows that 'the impression we gain from the work in its unfinished state is that the true authority in Bensalem is Salomon's House,' in his Francis Bacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 173-4. For secrecy as an absolutist theme in The New Atlantis, see John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), esp. 140-50. See Briggs, 'Bacon's Science and Religion,' 185-92, on the centrality of what he calls the 'principle of encryption' in Bacon's scientific and social thought. See Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon, 187-203, for an informed brief description of these attempts; and, for an argument that Bacon's scientific ambition, and the shape of his inductive idea, stem from his legal knowledge and practice, see Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See, though, Gaukroger's remarks, in Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy, 163-4, on Bacon's apparent lack of interest in Gresham College, which had been endowed by an uncle. See Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Joseph P. Ward, Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and especially Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). I would disagree, then, with what Keith Lindley, a good historian, says about Rappaport's work, that it 'replaces the original work of G. Unwin which laid great stress on a build-up of conflict within companies arising from the oligarchical form of their government' (Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London [Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997], 159). Lindley appears to be citing a common understanding among historians that Unwin has been superseded. My feeling is that he ought to have been, but if he has been it is not by Rappaport et. al. If he were really to be superseded it would be by someone who addressed his basic assumptions, and this would most likely be done from

368 Notes to pages 313-19

50

51 52

53 54 55

56

within the field of economic history. Another way of addressing the relationship between the new writing on companies and the old is to observe that Rappaport's effort is effectively one of re-periodization: he musters data for the claim that guilds continued to function as guilds in the 'medieval' sense (controlling the economy, providing legal services, preventing excessive stratification, distributing 'social welfare,' and so on) until the mid-seventeenth century, when he allows that they ceased to do so. But he offers no explanation as to why they should have ceased to do so. Perhaps he means the reader to understand that the economic laws of motion which Unwin and Fisher attempted to establish as the matrix of organizational change only then really succeed in disrupting the social fabric. If so, the rhetoric of his study is misleading: it ought to bill itself as offering a qualification of a previous picture, rather than as a new departure. George Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1904; London: Frank Cass, 1972), and FJ. Fisher, London and the English Economy (London: Hambledon Press, 1990). Unwin, Industrial Organization, 68 ff. Fisher, 'Some Experiments in Company Organisation in the Early Seventeenth Century,' in London and the English Economy, 43-60, esp. 57-9. Bacon served as warden for the company. Though letters are extant, printed in Spedding et al., The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 12, chs. 5 and 7, recording Bacon's nearly contemporary, and mostly monitory, participation in the socalled Cockayne project, I find no extant references by him to this venture. Unwin, Industrial Organization, 159, 166. See Sargent, 'Bacon as an Advocate for Cooperative Scientific Research,' 161. For a contrasting but related use of The New Atlantis to locate a model for Bacon's notion of natural-philosophical work and discovery, see Michele Le Doeuff, 'Man and Nature in the Gardens of Science,' in Francis Bacon's Legacy of Texts, ed. Sessions, 119-38. The case is for gardening (and especially the practice of grafting), involving as it does an experimental modelling from without of processes whose inner workings remain unknown, and she quotes from the manorial part of the description of the House to make it. The evidence suggests that Bacon was avid about gardening, and perhaps it did inform his way of thinking about the arts in general. My reading of the House episode suggests, though, that the split between forces and relations of handicraft production was probably more determinative in his coming by the bi-levelled maker's knowledge notion of intellectual production. Cf. Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon's Idea of Science, 294: Tn the conceptual mist which preceded the emergence of the new scientific rationality, Bacon's

Notes to pages 319-27 369 inductio ... was an attempt to conceptualize the conflicting values of the faculties involved in the hand and the mind, the ant and the spider.' 57 For a stimulating argument that it is misguided to search for an underlying unity between Bacon's roles, and recommendations, as scientist and politician, see Markku Peltonen, 'Politics and Science: Francis Bacon and the True Greatness of States,' Historical Journal, 35, no. 2 (1992), 279-305. 58 Timothy J. Reiss, 'Structure and Mind in Two Seventeenth-Century Utopias: Campanella and Bacon,' Yale French Studies, 49 (1973), 82-95, esp. 92. 59 Despite Vickers's comment (see his note to the phrase 'foremost man,' occuring at 458, on 790) that Bacon's narrator is the head of the crew, we only know that he is a leading member, and his incidental commentary works to bring out his identification with the few, the ruling class of the ship, as against the many. 60 It is worth noting that Europe's readiness might very well have to do with Bacon's publication of the Instauration. For an informed and interesting reading of Bensalem's role with respect to Europe in terms of an absolutist thematics of intelligence, see Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence, 140-50. For interesting comments on the House's intentional obscurity, see John Channing Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 172-74. 61 They are ideal because they reproduce so rapidly and because they are such loyal subjects. 62 The point here is that, though The New Atlantis was only later translated into Latin, its first version, according to the fiction, should be in Spanish or Latin; so the reader feels that he ought to be reading a translation. 63 Note that this is to suggest, against Peltonen's position (see note 57 above) that Bacon felt no need to align his natural-philosophical and imperial doxa, that his Utopia at some level undertakes their reconciliation. 64 See, for example, for the pre-rhetorical ancient learning, Aphorism LXXI of The New Organon, and the preface to The Wisdom of the Ancients. 65 See, for example, the closing paragraphs of the preface to The New Organon. 66 In fact, in spite of Vickers's assured comment that Bacon relies on the work, it is not clear to me that he takes anything from Acosta's natural history of the Americans, which has them victimized by manifold species of idolatry at the devil's instigation. He of course need not have found the idea of cultural decay here. For evidence that Bacon really believed that American societies' backwardness was the consequence of a devastating flood, see his essay 'Of Vicissitude of Things.' 67 See 476-7. Prostitution, late marriage, and the disregard for 'issue' attendant upon 'bargain' marriages come in for special fire.

370 Notes to pages 328-9 68 See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), esp. part 3. 69 See, for example, 'An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England,' in Francis Bacon, ed. Vickers, 1-19. 70 See Anthony Pagden's chapter on 'Tommaso Campanella and the Universal Monarchy of Spain,' in his Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 37-64.

Index

absolutism, 30, 36, 66, 68, 79, 119, 214, 221, 224; and dynastic politics, 37 Acosta, Joseph de, 326, 369n66 'Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England, An' (Bacon), 370n69 Aesop, 220 Alberti, Leon Battista, 29 Althusser, Louis, 94, 351n25 Alchemist, The, (Jonson), 5 Allen,J.W., 344nl7 amatory epic, 279 Anabaptism, 29; its Utopia, 30-1, 38, 40 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton), 42 Anderson, Perry, 214, 334n8, 360n21 Andreae, Johann Valentin, 288 Archambault, Paul, 346n5 Archer, Ian W., 367n48 Archer, John Michael, 367n44, 369n60 Aristides, Aelius, 359nl7 Aristotle, 138, 181, 186, 187, 195, 196, 294, 325

Armstrong, Clement, 116, 117 Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance, The (Ferguson), 170 Asiatic mode of production, the, 93, 94 Atlantis myth, the, 324 atomization (capitalist or late-feudal), 126, 223-4, 247 Augustine, St, 328 Bacon, Francis, 42, 288-332, 368n52; Essays, 328; idols, theory of, 306; induction, theory of, 293-5; New Atlantis, The (see separate entry); Neiv Organon, The, 298, 300, 305-6; Thomas More, relation to, 290 Baker, David Weil, 336nl5, 343-4nl4 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 63, 79, 86-95, 3389n2, 340n2, 341nnlO-15, 356n3; on increasing abstraction of Carnival, 89-95, 110; on Carnivalesque inversion and uncrowning, 87; primitive chronotope, 93-5, 103, 108; Rabelaisian chronotope, 93, 275; Theleme episode, reading of, 88-90

372 Balibar, Etienne, 351n25 Bancroft, Richard (archbishop of Canterbury),358nl2 Barkan, Leonard, 346nn5, 11 Baron, Hans, 359nl7 Bartels, Emily C, 356nl Barthes, Roland, 240 Beecher, Jonathan, 334nlO Bellamy, Edward, 6, 9 Beresford, M.W., 347nl7 Berger, Harry, 6 Berrong, Richard, 342n23 Bloch, Ernst, 17-18, 52-3, 291, 334nl5, 337n21,363nlO body politic, analogy of, 136-53; two aspects of, 145, 157 Boesky, Amy, 362 n 6 Boke Named the Governour, The (Elyot), 117-18, 343nl4 Braden, Gordon, 361n33 Braverman, Harry, 333n6 Brecht, Bertolt, 202-3, 213, 354n3 Brecht-Lukacs debate, 202-3, 354n3 Brenner, Robert, 39, 154, 207, 336nl2, 343n6, 344nl8, 347nl415, 363n9 Brigden, Susan, 349n4 Briggs, John Channing, 366n30, 367n45, 369n60 Bristol, Michael D., 207-11, 216, 252, 338-9n2, 339n6, 355nnlO, 12, 15, 358nl4 Brown, Peter, 370n68 Bruni, Leonardo, 253, 359nl7 Bude, William, 117 Burke, Kenneth, 202 Burke, Peter, 208, 340n 18 Burton, Robert, 42 Bush, M.L., 343nlO, 348n3

Index Busleiden, Jerome, 117 Cabet, Etienne, 16, 18-19, 24 Campanella, Tomasso, 12, 288, 329 camping, 1549 rebels' practice of, 170-1, 192-4 Capital (Marx), 21 Carnival: and Cokaygne genre, 76-80 (see also Cokaygne); disequivalence between production and consumption assumed by, 99, 102, 267; divided audience of, 81; and division of labour, 84; exploratory character of, 79, 207-8, 216; group activity in, character of, 100-2, 104; and improvisation, 75; inversion, practice of, 62, 87; and Lent, 110, 208, 210-11; and 'peasant resignation,' 79, 208; and popular dramaturgy, 199; and rioting, 216; and travesty, 207, 209-11, 228; theological ambiguity of, 81-2; in Utopia, 75-9; Utopian genre, relation to, 74-111,112, 208-9; as wager, 83 Cartelli, Thomas, 356nl Castiglione, Baldassar, 102 Catherine of Aragon, 164 Chambers, R.W., 6, 64, 338n33 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 169 Cheney, Patrick, 361n33 Christianopolis (Andreae), 288 Cicero, 113, 138 Cinque Ports, the, 265 City of the Sun, The (Campanella), 288, 329 civic humanism, 164 Civil War in France, The, (Marx), 23-4 Clans of the Alphane Moon (Dick), 26 Clark, Peter, 266, 360n25 Cohen, Walter, 356nl

Index Cokaygne, 74, 208 (see also Car nival); consumption fantasies in, 78; division of labour in, 78; gastronomic libido in, 76; 'gross materialism' of, 76, 97; as literary carnival, 76; and Rabelais's Theleme, 86-90; scepticism of, 76-7, 78; Utopia, thematic relationship to, 78-9 Coleman, D.C., 360n21 commonwealth, idea and discourse of, 113-21, 170, 199, 242, 344nl6 (see also dialogue of counsel); and common vs. private interest, 11618; contextual egalitarianism of, 118; and 'decay of towns and tillage,' 120; and distributive justice, 117, 121; as felt imperative, 115-16; measures associated with, 118-19, 124, 127; and moral economy, 113, 121; social-economic emphasis of, 116, 119-20; and the State, 118; and Utopia, 122-33 communism: and working class, 23-6; and peasant community, 26 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Eiigels), 19-20 complaint tradition, the, 176-7 Concerning the True Commonwealth and the Island of Utopia (Robinson), 117 Cook, Ann Jennalie, 210, 355nl6 Country and the City, The (Williams), 71-2,80 Crewe, Jonathan, 357n2 Cromwell, Thomas, 115, 135, 345n2 Crowley, Robert, 113 Dan by, John, 236, 357n 10 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 52 Davis,J.C., 336nl3, 365n25 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 79, 338n2

373 Defaux, Gerard, 340n3 Dekker, Thomas, 209 Delany, Samuel K., 6 Delia Francesca, Piero, 52, 54 Demerson, Guy, 342n26 Dewar, Mary, 347-8nl, 348n3, 349n5, 350nl3,353-4n37 dialogical history, 36, 112, 132, 149 Dialogue Between Reginald Pole & Thomas Lupset, A (Starkey), 112-14, 135-68, 169, 170, 171, 173, 345n3; body politic analogy, use of, 13653; compromise solutions in, 1378; contrasting concepts of sociopolitical determinacy in, 158; constitution genre, relation to, 136-7; corporal vs. homogeneous space in, 145; critique of late feudal crisis, contrast with More's, 155-6; defects of body politic, four chief, 146-8; elective monarchy, proposal for, 136; and English law, 158-9; and feudal-economic decline, 153-6; gentry, urbanizing the, 159; guild system as secret model, 156—63; monarchy question in, 163-8; natural and positive law in, 141-4; nobility, re-education of, 157, 160, 162, 167; Parliament, role of, 166; primogeniture in, 137-8; re-corporatization program, ambiguity of, 161-2; redundance in, 139-40; reform proposals, problems with, 156; re-polidcization in, 161-2; republicanism of, 162-3, 164, 165; systematic vagueness in, 136-8; tyranny as disorganization of nobility, 158; Utopian dimension in, 136, 144-5, 146, 149, 1623, 165, 167

374 dialogue of counsel, the, 112-34, 156; and problem of Utopian rhetoric, 128-9; and questions of adequacy or scope, 129-31; as rewriting Book I of Utopia, 112-13, 134 Dick, Philip K., 6, 26 Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, A (Smith), 11214, 120, 169-97, 347nl; and camping, 170-1, 192-4; causality, types of, in, 186-8; class motives in, 170, 176-7, 185, 193-5; complaint tradition in, 176-7; copia in, 185-8; counsel, problem of, in, 171-3; dearth, theodicy of, 183-5; and East Anglian rebellion, 189-95; enclosure problem, treatment of, 173-5, 183; foreign merchant ('stranger'), depiction of, 181-2; humanism of, 172, 186, 188, 191, 196-7; incorporation, fantasy of, 193-4; mechanical causality in, 179-80; mercantilism of, 175-83; modesty of reform program in, 173-5; money as unifying agent in, 178-80; money vs. market economy, 180, 185, 187; myth of refounding, Utopian dimension of, 184—5; occupations in, 172; Pandotheus's change in, 196-7; and rebel camps, 170-1; recoinage (revaluation) in, 174-5, 182, 184-5; restriction of Utopian vision, 171, 185, 195; riot and the market in, 18991; smallholding speakers in, 194— 5; tavern as anti-camp in, 194; and uneven development, 185, 187, 195; and Utopia, 171-3, 195 'Discourse in the Novel' (Bakhtin), 93

Index Dr. Faustus (Marlowe), 218, 227-9, 230, 245 Drydenjohn, 280 du Bellay, Joachim (Seigneur de Langey), 95 Dymock, Cressy, 349-50nlO Eagleton, Terry, 351n25 Eamon, William, 362n3 East Anglian rebellion (Kelt's rebellion), 169, 170-1, 189-93 'economic formations,' 24—5 Edward II (Marlowe), 218, 222, 244 Edward VI, 250, 353-4n37 Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, 336nl3 Elizabeth I, 175, 250 Elizabethan drama, esp. late, 198217; allegory, 'iconic,' in, 205, 207, 212; audience of, 210; crown's sponsorship of, 214—17; moralizing conventions bequeathed to, 220; and popular dramaturgy, 199, 207, 213; travesty as mode in, 207, 210-12, 227 Elizabethan World Picture, 205 Elliott, Robert C., 59, 338n30 Elton, G.R., 343nlO, 344nl5, 345n2 Elyot, Thomas, 117-18, 343nl4 Erasmus, Desiderius, 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, 307, 336n8, 336-7nl6, 339n6 Essays (Bacon), 328 Euphuism, 240 fabular tragedy (Marlovian), 218-26, 244; atomization, response to, 223-4; declassement in, 223-4; hostile indifference of, 218-20; and the Carnivalesque, 246; curse and record, incommensurability between, 221-2; humanism's role

Index in, 224-5; and identification with underclass, 224-6, 229; satire and fable, 219-22; sprung (or absolute) desire, primacy of, 221-3, reflexive explanations of, 223-4; and Utopia, 245-6 Ferguson, Arthur, 120, 139, 140-1, 170, 177, 342n3, 346n7, 349nn7, 8 Ferguson, Margaret, 357n2 feudal mode of production, 39; principal contradiction of, 154-5 Fideler, Paul, 343n8 Filarete (Antonio Averlini), 29, 31, 32, 38 Fisher, F.J., 313, 314, 368nn50, 52 Fletcher, Anthony, 348n2, 350nl2 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel' (Bakhtin), 92-3, 103 Four Books (Rabelais), 74, 86-111; Abbey of Theleme episode, 86-9, 94-104; Gargantua, 105; Quart Livre, 95; Pantagruel, 104-5; place of Utopia in the whole, 104—11 Fourier, Charles, 6, 12-17, 19, 20, 311; and human nature, 13; passional series, 12-14; and revolution, 14; and the socialite's passion, 16 Fox, Alastair, 56, 57, 64, 337n25, 345n4 Freccero, Carla, 340n3, 341nl6 French Revolution, 14, 15 Freud, Sigmund, 222 Frye, Northrop, 358nl4 Furnivall, F.J., 339nlO garden of delights, the, 76 Gauci, Perry, 361nn30, 32 Gaukroger, Stephen, 367nn41, 47

375 genre: and dialectical formative influence, 4, 6; and genre-systems, 4-5; history of, 4-5; and period, 3-5 German peasants' revolt (1525), 29 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 6 Ginzburg, Carlo, 79, 340nll Giorgio Martini, Francesco di, 29, 31 Golden Age, the, 76 Gramsci, Antonio, 224 Greenblatt, Stephen, 6, 56-60, 62, 206, 214, 337n26, 355nn7, 19, 356nnl,5 Greene, Thomas M., 342n28 Greenstein, Jack, 53, 337n22 Gresham College, 311 groups-in-flux, 232-4, 247, 278, 281 Grundrisse (Marx), 17, 24-6 guilds (livery companies), recent historiographic work on, 312-13 Guy, John, 343nl2 Halpern, Richard, 56, 66, 67, 80, 336n9, 337n24, 338nn38, 40, 340nl4 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 210 Harbage, Alfred, 355nl6 Harington, Sir John, 358-9nl4 Harrington, Thomas, 323 Harvey, William, 320 Heckscher, 360n21 Hegel, G.W.F., 5, 12 Henry TV, Part I (Shakespeare), 21011, 214, 229-37: and atomization, 232; Falstaff, modus operandi of, 230-2; groups-in-flux in, 232-4; Hal, relation to Falstaff of, 231-3; parody, exploratory role of, 232, 234-5; plunder theme in, 230, 2367; popular 'self-presentation' in, as

376

Index

blended with 'illusionism,' 234-5; underclass plot in, 229-35 Henry IV, Part II (Shakespeare), 210 Henry VIII, 116, 135, 174, 183 Hexter, J.H., 59, 64, 337n29, 338n34 Hibbard, G.R., 358n6 Hill, Christopher, 365n27, 366n34 Hilliard, Stephen S., 242, 357n2, 358n7,358nll Hilton, R.H., 343n6 Historical Novel, The (Lukacs), 202 Hitchcocke, Robert, 360n22 Holbein, Ambrosius, 50, 336nl6 Holstun, James, 349n8 Hudson, W.W., 20 Hughes, Ann, 344-5nl8 humanism, 32, 33-5, 51, 69, 70-3, 78, 95, 144, 170, 171, 188; and commonwealth ideology, 115-34; and communism, 117-18; Northern, 171; and popular cultural forms, 85; and popular dramaturgy, 213

Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 218, 221, 222, 245 Jones, Whitney R.D., 342n3, 343nnlO, 13

Hurstfield,Joel, 356n6

Leech, Clifford, 356nl

Hutson, Lorna, 243, 250-1, 342-3n3, 357-8n2, 358nn8, 9, 10, 360n22, 361n27 HydeJ.K., 359nl7

Lefebvre, Henri, 83, 340nl7, 341nl3, 342n25 Le Guin, Ursula, 6 Lem, Stanislaw, 337n27 Lent, 110,208,210-11,257 Lenten Stuffe (Nashe), 42, 252-87, 330; allegorical machinery in, 2718; and the beast fable, 274; Carnivalesque style in, 263-4, 278-81; and Carnivalesque wager, 260, 264, 267; and censorship, 270, 282, 2835; copious commodity, paradox of, 267-8; critical reputation, 252; groups-in-flux in, 278, 281; Hero and Leander episode, 270, 278-81; herring, role of, in, 255, 259-60, 265-6, 271-87; London in, 269-70;

ideal commonwealth (or society), 40; definition of, 42 Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Unwin), 313 Isle of Dogs, The (Jonson-Nashe), 253, 274 Jacobean court masque, 208 Jameson, Fredric, 109,333n5,336nlO, 342n27, 351n25, 354nn2, 4 Jardine, Lisa, 364nl6, 365n22

Kelmscott Manor, 10 Kendrick, Christopher, 338n44, 352n30, 356n7

King Lear (Shakespeare), 210, 217 Kinser, Samuel, 340n4, 342n28 Kramer, Joseph, 357 Lacan, Jacques, 89 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 79, 3389n2, 339n8, 340nl2 'Land of Cokaygne, The' (anonymous), 77 Laslett, Peter, 313 Latimer, Hugh, 113 Law of Freedom in a Platform, The (Winstanley), 20 Le Doeuff, Michele, 335-6n7, 368n55

Index market, figuration of, 268-9; as mercantilist fantasy, 260-4, 267; middle sort in, 283; patronage in, 276-7; praise-of-the-city genre in, 253-4; and print culture, 285; Utopian dimension in, 266, 271-8; violence in, 282-4; Yarmouth as conycatcher, 283; Yarmouth as market, 263, 268-9; Yarmouth's solidarity and economy, presentation of, 255-9; Yarmouth vs. London in, 264-8 Leslie, Marina, 337nl7, 366n36 Lewis, C.S., 6 Lindley, Keith, 367n49 Logan, George M., 63, 338n32 London, 32, 115, 120, 121, 249, 251, 253,264-8,311,312,315 Lucian, 41,80, 339n6 Lukacs, Georg, 202-3, 213, 354nn3, 4 Luther, Martin, 30, 43 Macchiavelli, Niccolo, 36, 106, 220, 230 Macchiavellian Christianity, 220-1 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 191-3, 342n3, 343nlO, 348nn2, 3, 349n4, 350nl2, 352nn29, 31, 353-4n37 McCutcheon, Elizabeth, 299, 366nn32-3 McKerrow, Ronald B., 357nl McLaren, Anne, 353-4n37 McNally, David, 349n7 Macpherson, C.B., 366n39 McRae, Andrew, 336nll, 342n3, 343n4, 349-50nlO Macherey, Pierre, 351n25 Mandel, Ernest, 11, 25, 333n7 Manley, Lawrence, 359nl7 Manning, Roger, 215, 355n20

377 Manship, Henry, 265, 359nl8, 360n22 Mantegna, Andrea, 52-3, 55 Manuel, Frank and Fritzi, 28, 31, 32, 335nn2, 3, 362nl Marcuse, Herbert, 5 Marin, Louis, 16, 17-18, 24, 28, 48, 53, 57, 62, 70, 125, 311, 334nnl3, 16, 335nl, 337nnl9, 23, 345n20, 354n2, 362n5, 365n24 Marlowe, Christopher, 198, 199, 217, 227, 279-81; biography, 239; and blasphemy, 219-20; class affinities of, 225; and clown-preacher dichotomy, 244; and Nashe, 239-47; set generic form, 218 (see also fabular tragedy); prologues, 218-19; and the upstart figure, 245 Martin, Julian, 367n46 Marx, Karl, 17-27, 37, 334nl7, 335nl9; ascetic utopianism of, 213, 27; Capital 21; Civil War in France, The, 23-4; Communist Manifesto, 19-20, 21, 26; Grundrisse (Precapitalist Economic Formations), 17, 24-6; on Voyage to Icarie (Cabet), 18-19; and mode of production, 23-6; notion of science, 20; and working class, 23-4 Mayer, Thomas, 163-7, 345nnl, 4, 347nn23, 25 Meek, Ronald L.,334n 11 mercantilism, 67, 175-83, 260-4, 314, 349n8; double focus of, 261-2, 267 Merry Old England, 71 Metlitzki, Dorothee, 339nlO Midlands, the, 169, 314 Midlands Revolt, the (1607), 216 Midsummer Night's Dream, A (Shakespeare), 206, 217

378 Index Mirror for Magistrates, The, 220 miscellany genre, the, 42, 241, 244 mode of distribution, 14-15 Montaigne, Michel de, 58, 86, 337n28 Montrose, Louis Adrian, 206, 355n7 moral economy, the, 113, 121, 242 More, Thomas, 3, 28, 29, 105, 153, 155, 266, 308, 335n6, 336nl6, 339n6; knowledge of Carnivalesque improvisation, 75; personality and martyrdom, 32 Morris, William, 6 Morton, A.L., 77, 339nn9, 10 Muntzer, Thomas, 29, 30, 31, 32, 38 Musaeus, 279 Nashe, Thomas, 42, 209, 216, 238-87, 331; anti-Marprelate pamphlets, 240; biography, 239; clownpreacher dichotomy in, 242-4; and commonwealth idea, 247; critical reputation of, 238; festive rhetoric, ethics of, 250; and groups-in-flux, 247; Lenten Stuffe (see separate entry); and Marlowe, 239-47; middle sort, sliding identification with, 246, 283; miscellany as favoured form, 241, 244, 247-52; narrative syntax of, 247-52; oral and written in, 241, 286; Piers Penniless (see separate entry); social ethic vs occupational ideology, 242; style, objectivity of, 239-41; upstart, role of, 242 New Atlantis, The (Bacon), 42, 288332; Aristotelian method, proper use of, 325-7; Bensalem's wager in, 320-2; carnivalesque dimension in, 319; and class desire, 308-14; courtship in, 290; commerce vs. empire in, 324; epochal romance

in, 322-32; and eschatology, 300-1; 'Experientia Literata' in, 293-4; experimentation, as systematic effort and as foray, 319-20; Feast of the Family episode, 322, 326-8; forces and relations of production in, 295; forms as object of scientific knowledge, 293, 305-6; and ideal commonwealth, 290, 296-301; ideological pragmatics of, 297; imperial motives in, 320-32; idols, theory of, in, 306; imitation in, 301, 310, 316-17, 318; induction in, 293-5, 319, 330; knowledge-production, absence of theory of, 291; laboratory, peculiarities of, 291-6; and livery company as model, 31117; maker's knowledge epistemology in, 305-6; natural philosophy as second-level craft, 317; New World, story of, in, 321; and patent, moment of, 314; paternalism, return to, in, 326-8; possessive corporatism in, 302; religion and science in, 298-300, 365n23; religious framework, role of, 301; scope of knowledge, problem of, 316; secret, theme of, 289, 310; and sexlove, European, 327; spacelessness of, 307-8, 330; as technological Utopia, 288-92; and travel-narrative format, 320-1; and uneven development, 318; and Utopia, 288-91 New Criticism, the, 238 New Historicism, the, 205-6, 214, 221 Neiv Organon, The (Bacon), 298, 300, 305-6, 364nnl8, 20, 366nn35, 40, 369nn64-5 New Poverty, the, 121, 125-6, 128, 131,133

Index New World, encounter with the, 62, 209, 338nl News from Nowhere (Morris), 7-12; and artisanal aesthetic, 8; pastiche quality, 8-9; problem of technology in, 9 Norfolk, 265 Norwich, 191, 265 'Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside' (Lefebvre), 83 'Of the Cannibals' (Montaigne), 86 'Of Custom and Education' (Bacon), 308 'Of Love' (Bacon), 328 'Of Vicissitude of Things' (Bacon), 369n66 Ovid, 279 Owen, Robert, 6 Padua, sixteenth-century republicanism of, 164 Pagden, Anthony, 370n70 Panofsky, Erwin, 346n8 Paradise Lost (Milton), 280 Paris Commune, the, 23-4, 335nl8 'Parsimony of the Ancients, The' (Montaigne), 58 particularism, British, 119 Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco, 42, 43, 336nl4 Patterson, Annabel, 355nl3 Peltonen, Markku, 369nn57, 63 Perez-Ramos, Antonio, 293, 305, 361n31, 363n8, 364nl7, 365n21, 368n56 perspective (linear or Renaissance), 10, 43-53, 69 phalanstery (Fourier's), 12-17 Phythian-Adams, Charles, 347n21

379 Piercy, Marge, 6 Piers Penniless (Nashe), 239, 247-52, 253; complaint and satire in, 24950; and Horatian self-implication, 250; Nashe as Vice in, 250 Pilgrimage of Grace, the (1536), 116 Plato, 41, 324, 325 Pliny, 108 PocockJ.GA., 114 Pole, Reginald, 122, 135, 164, 3456n4 political accumulation, 39, 154-5, 161,207 political economy, 20, 114, 170 political effectivity of cultural works, 200-14; and performative vs. cognitive aspects of narrative, 202-4; and rhetorical vs. epistemological modes of effectivity, 204 Pope, Alexander, 280 popular dramaturgy, 199 possessive individualism, 302 praise-of-the-city genre, 42, 253-4; and Carnivalesque rhetoric, 254-5 Praise of Folly, The (Erasmus), 41 Principle of Hope, The (Bloch), 52 Quart Livre (Rabelais), 107, 109-10 Rabelais, Francois, 74, 86-111, 252, 257, 275, 322, 340nl, 341nnl7-18; affinity with Thomas More, 105 Rabelais and His World, 79, 88, 89 (see a&oBakhtin); criticisms of, 92; folkloric approach of, 92, 94; historicodiscursive narrative in, 90-5; official and popular in, 91 radial city, 29-31, 38, 40, 51-2 Rappaport, Steve, 367n48 Rawley, William, 309, 310

380 Rees, Graham, 363n8, 364nl7 Reformation, the, 43, 135, 169-70, 298 Reiss, Timothy, 320, 369n58 Renaissance painting: figure and ground in, 52-3 Republic, The (Plato), 32, 41, 74, 338nl revisionism, historical, 165 revolts in the later sixteenth century, pattern of, 215 Rhodes, Neil, 243-4, 357n2, 358n4 Riggs, David, 356n3 Robinson, Ralph, 117 Ross, Kristin, 334n 17 Rossi, Paoli, 365n28, 366n30 Russ, Joanna, 6 St German, Christopher, 116 Sargent, Rose-mary, 362n3, 363nl3, 368n54 Scottish Enlightenment, 14, 15 Screech, M.A., 342n21 Sforzinda, plan of (Filarete), 29 Shagan, Ethan,352n29 Shakespeare, William, 198, 199, 22737, 238; 'comprehensiveness' of his drama, 200; and his drama's 'momentary' character, 213; parody, practice of, 227; political effectivity of his drama, 200-13; political positions on, 205-7, 210-13 Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre (Weimann), 206 Shapiro, James, 356nl, 361n33 Skeltonjohn, 150, 347nl3 Skinner, Quentin, 114, 163, 347n22 Slack, Paul, 266, 360n25 smallholding class, stratification of, 215,225

Index Smith, Adam, 182 Smith, A. Hassell, 360n24 Smith, Sir Thomas, 112-15, 121, 1223, 134; situation in 1549, 170, 1745, 189-90, 351n26 'so-called primitive accumulation,' 11-12,25,37,66,134,153,155, 237 socialism, Utopian vs scientific, 20-1 Somerset, Duke of (Edward Seymour), 115, 169, 170; reforming measures of 1549, 169, 172, 348nn2, 3 Speak Parrot (Skelton), 150, 347nl3 Spenser, Edmund, 238, 279, 361n33 sprung (or absolute) desire, 221-4, 245 squatting, tradition of, 192 Stallybrass, Peter, 92, 94, 341 nn8, 9 Starkey, David, 343nll Starkey, Thomas, 112-15, 121, 122-3, 134, 345nnl9, 2 Statute of Artificers (1563), 116 Steane,J.B., 252, 358nl3 Stevens, Walter, 340n3 Stone, Lawrence, 214, 344-5nl8 Strypejohn, 351-2n28, 353-4n37 Surtz, Edward, SJ, 47, 336nl6 Suvin, Darko, 16, 109, 334nl2, 365n24 Swift, Jonathan, 34 Sylva Sylvarum (Bacon), 314 Tamberlaine (Marlowe), 218, 221, 222, 245 Tamberlaine II (Marlowe), 221 Tawney, R.H., 114, 342n3, 343nn6, 7

Taylor, John, 209 Taylorism, 11

Index Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 217, 354nl Thatcher, Margaret (Mrs), 14 Theleme, Abbey of, 86-111, 252 (see also Four Books); as allegorical Cokaygne, 88-9, 94-5; as new Cokaygne, 103; as anti-monastery, 95-6; as anti-utopia, 96-9; as aristocratic Utopia, 99; and communism, 99; engagement with Utopia, 97102; group activity in, 100-2; irony and abstraction of, 88-9; liminal temporality in, 104; negation by inversion and by the neutral in, 957; 'nobly born' inhabitants, 100; its rule ('do what you will'), 101-2; Pichrocholine war, relation to, 106; sartorial drive in, 100-1; and Utopian narrative semantic, 108 Thomas, Keith, 352n30 Thompson, E.P., 121, 338-9n2, 343n5 Tiers Livre (Rabelais), 106-9, 257, 322; Pantegruelion episode, 107-8, 275 Tillyard, E.M.W., 139, 140, 205, 236, 354n5 Time Machine, The (Wells), 12 totalitarianism, 6 Trotsky, Leon, 333n7 Turner, Henry S., 357n2, 360n22 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 210-11 Tytler, Patrick Fraser, Esq., 351n26 uneven development, 10-12, 25, 213; of archaic sort, 28, 63, 83, 113, 152, 195, 330, 331 Unfortunate Traveller, The (Nashe), 241 Unwin, George, 313-14, 315, 318, 367n49, 368nn50-l, 53 Utopia (More), 3, 6, 29-73, 171, 173,

381

185, 198, 199, 209, 217, 224, 225, 246, 266,267, 296, 320, 329, 335n6, 341nl9, 358nl4, 362n2, 363nl2, 365n26; Anemolian ambassadors episode, 39, 60-3, 75; attitudes of presentation in, 58-9; authority of, 38, 40-53; Cardinal Morton's table, episode of, 123-32; and Carnivalesque inversion, 70, 78 (see also Carnival); Christian neophyte episode, 75; clothing in, 66-7; and Commonwealth ideology, 122-33; communism in, 35, 57, 64, 65, 712, 80, 84; debate on counsel in, 336; courtship in, 290; and England, 33-40; European environment of, 67-8; familism in, 64, 72; Greek books in, 75; half-moon shape of, 46; and hedonistic ethics, 39, 57, 64, 67, 80, 82; homology between areas of, 64—9; humanism of, 70-3; and ideal commonwealth, 40; as imitation of The Republic, 41; individual anonymity in, 56; intellectual activity in, 66, 69, 72-3, 78; iron in, 68; irony of, 32-3; literary sources of, 40-1, 74-5; markets in, 53; and military arrangements, 35, 39, 57, 61, 64, 65, 68; money in, 603; Morus's objections to Utopia in, 98; Northern humanist audience of, 171; original sin in, 59; and philosophy of use in, 56, 66; political ambiguity of, 40, 198; political system in, 75; Polylerite episode, 1248, 156, 290; popularity, its lack of (un- and antir], 80-5; and pragmatism, 39-40; public opinion in, 57, 61, 67, 73; punishment of theft in, 36; ravenous sheep in, 37, 133,155,

382 Index 175; and rational religion, 39, 57, 64, 65; (fictive) reception of, 1268; relation between Book I and Book II, 33-8; relativity of feeling and custom, 60-3; effect of rigour in, 53-70; and the smallholding class, 70-3; social-spatial homogeneity (demographism) of, 46-9, 64, 69, 107; subjectivity in, 57-63, 64, 73; uncanniness, 33, 40, 42, 69, 78; and uneven development, 37-8, 63, 64-70; woodcut frontispieces to, 43-52 Utopian genre: its biographical presumption, 12, 17; and Carnival, 7485 (see also Car nival); expression of class wish, 70-3; class diversity of, 73; and the Cold War, 6-7; the cosmopolitical or imperial Utopia, 43; and happiness, 7; the idea of collective choice in, 7-8; and impossibility, 9-10; and Marxism, 17-27, 72; in nineteenth century, 6-27; and periodization, 5-7; political ambiguity of, 198; and political projects, 16-17; politics of, 40; problems of definition of, 41-2; Renaissance Utopia, 6, 7, and peripheral situation of, 30, 36-7, 74; schematism of, 15-17; and the sense of social systematicity, 8-9; and uneven development, 10-12, 37; utilitarian vs. romantic versions of, 288-91; and working-class culture, 24-7, 72 Utopian Thought in the Western World (Manuels), 28-33

Venice, 159, 190 Vespucci, Amerigo, 41, 74 Vickers, Brian, 364nl9, 365n28, 369nn59, 66 Volpone (Jonson), 274 Voyage to Icarie (Cabet), 18-19 Wall, John N., Jr, 337n20 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 360n21 Ward, Joseph P., 367n48 Weimann, Robert, 206, 213-14, 215, 239, 355nn8, 18, 357n2 Wells, H.G., 6, 20, 337n27 Western Rising, the (1549), 169, 192 White, Allon, 92, 94, 341nn8, 9 Whitgift,John (Archbishop of Canterbury), 358n 12 Williams, Raymond, 71-2, 80, 82, 338n45 Wilmer, Clive, 333nn2, 4 Wilson, Catherine, 366-7n40 Wilson, KJ., 342n2 Winstanley, Gerrard, 20, 366n34 Wisdom of the Ancients, The (Bacon), 369n64 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 347n26 Wood, Neal, 170, 343nnl3, 14, 344nl7, 345nl, 346nl2, 347n25, 349nn7, 8, 353n34-6, 354n38 Wooden, Warren, 48, 337n20 woollen industry (British), 120, 256 Wrightson, Keith, 349n7, 355n21 Writing Degree Zero (Barthes), 240 Yarmouth, 253-87 Yelling, J.A., 347nl7, 349-50nlO Zagorin, Perez, 367nn43, 46

Van Eyck, Jan, 52