Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England 9781861898432, 1861898436

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Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England

Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England JULIET

FLEMING

REAKTION

BOC)KS

For Seth 'And he said, let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, exept thou bless me. '

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 79 F arringdon Road, London EC I M 3JU, UK www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2001 Copyright © Juliet Fleming 200 I All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fleming, Juliet Graffiti and the writing arts of early modern England I. Graffiti - England - History - 16th century 2. Writing in art England - History - 16th century 3. Calligraphy - England - History 16th century 4. Graffiti - England - History - 17th century 5. Writing in art - England - History - 17th century 6. Calligraphy - EnglandHistory - 17th century I. Title 75 1.7'3'0942'0903 ISBN

I

86189°893

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION

9

1

Graffiti

2

Whitewash 73

3 Tattoo 4 Pots

7

29

79

113

REFERENCES 165 BIBLIOGRAPHY 204 PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 217 INDEX 219

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the resources of the Clarke Library, Los Angeles; the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA;

Cambridge University Library; and the Bodleian Library,

Oxford. An Ahmanson Getty Fellowship at UCLA's Centre for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies (1991-2) and the generous support of colleagues at the University of Southern California allowed me to begin work on it; Gary Tomlinson helped me finish it, which is why the last chapter is better than what goes before. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass have been teaching me for over a decade, and I have never thanked them properly. Specific intellectual debts are acknowledged at the beginning of each chapter. For those accrued over years in Philadelphia, Cambridge,

MA,

Los Angeles and Cambridge, England, I would like to

thank the Junior and Senior Fellows of the Harvard Society of Fellows (1988-g1), especially Ezra Getzler, [oseph Koerner, Leslie Kurke, Dwight Reynolds and Seth Schwartz; the members of the Cambridge Alternative Medieval Seminar; and Crystal Bartolovich, Phillipa Berry, [oseph Boone, Georgia Brown, Dympna Callaghan, Stefan Collini, Katherine Craik, [onathan Crewe, Lowell Gallagher, Simon Jarvis, David Kastan, Lisbet Koerner, Marjorie Levinson, Claire McEachern, Matthew Rowlinson, Elaine Scary, Nancy Vickers and Wendy Wall. Christopher Cannon knows that I could not have written this book without him. He does not know how grateful I am for his loving support and shining example. Earlier versions of 'Graffiti' appeared in Criticism (Winter

7

1997) and in Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds, Renaissance

Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia, 1999); 'Tattoo' appeared in RES (Spring 1997) and in Jane Caplan, ed., Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History (Reaktion,

8

2000).

Introduction

Es handelte sich darum, aus einem Gedicht ein Halstuch zu machen. [It is a question of changing a piece of poetry in to a scarf.] Waiter Benjamin, letter to Gretel Adorno

This book investigates writing practices such as graffiti, tattooing and the inscription of verse on implements, clothes and other objects in early modern England. The incidence of graffiti in this period has never been documented as such; the occurrence of tattooing there has been unknown; while inscribed objects, though often carefully preserved, are not usually considered as literary works. In recovering these practices, I have been prompted, in more or less equal parts, by archival curiosity, a theoretical interest in the nature of writing and a conviction that we tend to understate the social range of the practices of literacy (including that of literature) in earlier periods. In accordance with this last aim, I argue in my first chapter that early modern England was paper-short. As a result, the unleisured of every class wrote (usually in chalk, charcoal or marking stone) on walls, furniture and other suitable surfaces (illus. I). This argument has consequences for the literacy statistics of the period (some people may have been able to sign their names in chalk but not with a pen), as well as for the history of schooling (it may explain the absence of desks in the Elizabethan schoolroom). Beyond this, however, Elizabethan graffiti invite us to imagine a practice within which writing and drawing are not fully distinguishable, and the page is no longer an important boundary. To discover the extent of this practice, and its imbrication

9

in the oral and pictorial registers of the period, is to wonder anew not only 'What is a text?' but, before and besides that, 'What is writing? What kinds of reading and writing skills - skills of which we are now largely ignorant - may have constituted literacy at such a moment?' The same questions propose themselves when we encounter a description of the youthful Henry VIII as he appeared before Catherine of Aragon in purple satin 'all of cuttes with H. and K., every edge garnished with frysed gold, and every garment full of poysees, made of letters of fine gold';' and in accounts of a coat purchased by Charles VII of France in

1414,

embroidered with

1,500

pearls, a third of which spelled out the words and musical notation of a song, 'Madam, I am the most joyous of men'." To contemplate a song of pearl, or a 'poysee' ('posy', 'poesie') 'made of letters of fine gold' - or, alternatively, a miniature book in an ornamental binding designed to be worn at the waist - is to be unable to distinguish between a poem, a jewel, an acoustical structure and a feat of embroidery. During the English Renaissance, language entered into relations with the material world that are sometimes surprising to modern readers. Where evidence of these relations survive - where, for example, a poem describes itself as having been written on a window (John Donne's 'A Valediction on my name, in a window')we have tended to ignore them. So the locations that such poems claim for themselves are understood to be imaginary, and their evocation within the poems duly 'conceited'. But paper was not necessarily the most obvious, or suitable, medium for writing in early modern England (nor, for that matter, was paper as 'immaterial' as it has since become). In a society where the choice of appropriate material support for texts cannot be taken for granted, those supports remain importantly visible, provoking a series of questions that are not so easily addressed to our own writing economy. 10

Buy mark·if)~ Aoftcstmarking Ront·1 bu)

Much profit in their ufe doth lie i I've markilll RoII~' ofcoloar red, Paffin~ load, or drcb1a~k Lead. 1

c.

Wh, II

As ~( If

COli

Abo

Detail of a hawker selling marking stones, from a Cries ofLondon broadsheet, British Museum, London.

1620.

In Renaissance studies, uncertainty as to what is and is not a text has long been the practical achievement of sophisticated editorial theory and textual bibliographical practice. In each case, the aim to establish the 'best' text is maintained against a potentially overwhelming series of material choices. To edit an early modern text is to consider the mutually influential procedures of its composition, revision, copying, editing, proof-reading, printing and binding, and the possible impact on them ofdistribution, censorship and accident. Potentially endless editorial work is kept in check by the 'author function' (which limits a text to what its 'author' intended or produced), by other regulatory functions such as the practices of labour and the market, by considering the needs of a modern reader or by some other variant of 'common sense'. But these principles are heuristic, and beyond them, as editors know, lies the material chaos out of which a text is born. In what follows, I have tried to ignore some of the principles of limitation that have made modern editorial work possible, while retaining its knowledge of the social and physical materiality of texts. A different approach to the question 'What is a text?' (and, more particularly, 'What is writing?') in early modern England is provided by the early work of Jacques Derrida and the writings of those Renaissance critics who have been most attentive to it} In what follows, I have used theoretical questions to keep in play some of the uncertainties that practical editorial work (if it is to be practical) must suppress. As far as I am concerned, a 'text' is a piece of writing that has been established as such for reasons that are themselves material, historical and ideological. The notion of a 'text' represents the assumption that a certain form of consciousness has been able to dictate the terms of its own material constraints, and consequently remains, in some crucial sense, unbound. It is for this reason, of course, that the 'text' earns its privileged status as a register 12

through which the mind may express itself freely. But my own project is engaged with the other end of the expressive spectrum, where matter appears to bind thought - where, for example, an inscription may take the form of the implement on which it appears. While some of the literary forms that have been documented for the early modern period (hieroglyphs, ideograms, acrostic poems, imprese, emblems, mottoes and other 'devices') are governed by this inscriptional mode, it is one that now seems to display, in its esoteric literalism, an almost magical way of thinking about the physical properties of language. The ostentatious materiality of sixteenthcentury literary writing - the fact that it is born of and bound in matter - is something that has long interested readers, who have sometimes understood it to result from the imperfect survival of 'old allegorical ways of thinking' in the English Renaissance, and who have tended to understand its characteristic forms as being early prototypes of more properly literary genres. 4 Such judgements are useful and have permitted sensitive description of the forms in question. My aim, however, has been to forget the grounds on which such judgements are made - to hold in abeyance a knowledge of what literature is, while believing, for the while, in an historical moment when, as Marx put it, 'matter smiled at man with poetical sensuous brightness'." In what follows, I often invoke George Puttenham's late sixteenth-century treatise on vernacular poetry, The Arte of English

Poesie (1589), and I share his interest in those sensible elements of language that he addresses most fully under the rubric 'Of Proportion'. Puttenham's modes of 'poetical proportion' include, as one might expect, acoustical structures such as metre, rhythm, rhyme, measure and stanzaic form. 6 More unusually, he argues not only that stanzaic forms have moods (which, as if they were musical keys setting the relation between intervals and tones of a scale, make

0 F P II 0 P 0 R T IO N. L Ill. 11.

70

lengthcs wirh relation one to anorher J which lnaner Of Stllfltfi, tf:t eucu wrrhout rcCpdt ofthe tlme,do:halrcr rhenature ofthe POC'~ lic~l1clll1.lkc It cuhcr hghr;r or grnuccfJr more merry.or H!QUrn . full, and m.n)' W,,)'''' palhon, rc eo the care and harr of the hc.1m (eemU1~ (or this pOtnt t.llt1t our maker byhis m~fur~s and concerdcsot(undr)' proportions dorh counrerfnc the hannonicall runesof the vocalland inllr uruenrall i'vluGckcs . fu the Doy;rnb«.u(c hisfall"f.lIrcs and comp.ffe bediuersfrom tlmee of the Phngw" rhe PbY~(kll hkcwife from the L;d"", and all tluee Iromrite£./ltn ,"".to/uP'?'and l om"" , luounting andf.tlhng from note to norefuchas beto them peculiar, and With more or lefTe I..Cureor prccipancu, Euen fo bydrucrfirieof pl. cillg and Icnuaeion ofyour meafinesandconcords) afhorr WIth ;)long and by narrow or wided,'hnecs,or thicker or rhmucrbdlowmg ofthcm )'our propoinons difier, and breedetha variableand nr4

Ill;

5 A net-shaped poem on the Church as fisher of men, from Andrew Willet, Sacrorum Emblematum (Cambridge: John Legat, 1592).

In the past, 'they were called Nenia or apophoreta' - that is, things to be carried away. Puttenham's first examples of the genre are 'new yeares giftes' (occasional verses) and short poems 'printed or put upon' a dish of'suger plate' and taken home at the end of a banquet as a kind of party favour. Other examples of the posy include verses on fruit trenchers and in rings, and the mottoes, emblems, imprese, coats-of-arms and other heraldic or signature devices with which the Elizabethan court decorated itself." Such poetry, says Puttenham, is 'made for the nonce' - that is, it is designed to mark a specific occasion or to serve a particular purpose. The posy is the form that poetry takes in its fully material, visual mode, as it exists in its moment, at a particular site. Paradoxically, such poetry is portable ('something to be carried away') precisely because it has not achieved, and does not hope to achieve, the immaterial, abstracted status of the infinitely transmissible text. In what follows, I use the term posy to refer to all forms of poetry (portable or not) that understand themselves to be written on 20

something'." If this is a class from which nothing that has been written can finally be excluded, its purpose is to display poetry in its full visual contingency. In truth, such contingency extends from writing's 'unique existence at the place where it happens to be' to its occurrence within a discourse network that is the historical product of institutional practices and technologies.'? A full account of poetry's materiality would, moreover, be able to cover the occurrence of poetry in sound as that is governed by a further range of acoustical and other material determinants. Here, however, I restrict myself to a consideration of the posy in its stubbornly visible, inscriptional form. In this book, the concepts 'matter', 'material' and 'materiality' are rarely used in a Marxist sense (that is, to describe the relation between human consciousness and the set of social realities - including artistic labour power - from which it derives). They appear, instead, within the register of a more traditional materialism that pits consciousness directly against matter. To use this register is to return to an intellectual moment - that of the English Renaissance which lacked a systematic bifurcation between real and thought objects, and consequently apprehended matter not as that which is deprived of meaning but as a principle of structure that underpins all meaning. If such work seems designed to produce, rather than resolve, the mystery of the relation between the mind and the world, its final aim is to render legible the intellectual and aesthetic concerns of a period that had much to say about that mystery. Puttenharri's statement that posies are 'made for the nonce' underlines their status as things purpose-made: they are material because occasional (as, for that matter, are many of the poetic genres that Puttenham describes). But in Elizabethan poetry, the phrase 'for the nonce' or 'for the nones' is itself used as a metrical stop-gap: it is material in the sense that it has physical extension. Often chosen to rhyme with 'bones' or 'stones', the phrase makes its appearance 21

(in Chaucer, and later) as language whose main function is to fill a line: Behold my picture here well portrayed for the nones, With hart consumed and fallyng flesshe, 10 here the very bones. 18

'For the nones' is an example of language that exists to fill space (or, in the case of spoken poetry, time). Calling attention to itself as a sensible deployment of words beside the question of meaning, the phrase suggests that poetry may be a function of what Puttenham calls the 'number, measure and weight' of language as these exist as structural principles within a material world. The way of the posy differs from that of the poetry that displaced it, the effectiveness of whose haunting modes is predicated on the presupposition of an originating human presence that is more or less coterminous with the suppression of matter. The different poetic frisson generated by the posy as it calls language into being as a tangible thing is now less familiar. But we should still be able to recognize that the figure poems, craft ethos and strangely literal taxonomies of Puttenham's treatise are evidence less of his inadequacy as a poet (though that may be considerable) than of his commitment to a linguistic aesthetic predicated on the recalcitrant exteriority of language to meaning. While this exteriority (or 'literality') may be a function equally of sound or of sight, to modern readers it is perhaps most readily apparent, in its excess, as a set of visual effects. Puttenham's aesthetic did not long survive its moment in the English Renaissance (although differently configured concerns with the visual matter of language both pre- and postdate it and occur in other intellectual traditionst.'? The attempt to recreate it allows us to describe the existence of poetry in places where it is not usually found - on walls, bodies, clothes and other objects. It may also help us to identify the poetic effects of other writing 22

(including that by women) that has hitherto been discounted on the unexamined ground of its being 'overly literal'. Art historians have recently begun to describe Tudor painting in terms of a vernacular tradition that is concerned to render the appearance, rather than the meaning, of what it reflects." Where Tuscan art of the same period is committed to the rendition of threedimensional space and the suppression of its own physical nature, what may be called non-Albertian painting stresses pattern and colour rather than fixed-point perspective and continues to draw attention to itself as a painted surface. Such, it has been argued, is the case with Tudor painting, which is 'absorbed in the appearances and material textures of the world";" And such, Foucault suggests, is the case with language in its characteristic Renaissance mode: In the sixteenth century, real language is not a totality of independent signs, a uniform and unbroken entity in which things could be reflected one by one, as in a mirror, and so express their particular truths. It is rather an opaque, mysterious thing, closed in upon itself, a fragmented mass, its enigma renewed in every interval, which combines here and there with the forms of the world and becomes interwoven with them: so much so that all these elements, taken together, form a network of marks in which each of them may play, and does in fact play, in relation to all the others, the role of content or of sign, that of secret or of indicator."

Within Foucault's Renaissance episteme (a term he uses to refer to the intellectual and technological unconscious of the period), a word is a thing and is therefore only partly legible as a word, while things bear hidden signatures and appear, to those who can rightly read them, as words.V To the extent that Foucault's model preserves the sense that matter activates meaning beyond itself (through the operation of its

'secret conveniences'), it has some affinities to the famous symbolist tendency of medieval art to portray everything 'in a single visible plane'. The reduction of the visible world to a two-dimensional writing surface is a recurrent theme in the writing arts with which I am concerned, as well as in our own response to them. Posing the geometrical problem of the difference between inside and outside, the single plane stands as a figure for the strange subjectivity effects that can be located in matter. So medieval art is sometimes said to exist as a surface because it admits no absolute separation between facts and values, the sensuous universe and its subjective signification: 'depth is not spatial, objective, but rather linked to the meaning of the elements represented.' Such painting is not organized for the perception of the subject apprehending it: 'every precept is a sign charged with meaning, but I am not its cause or its centre; it is a "symbol" referring ultimately to transcendence.Y" But Foucault's Renaissance episteme modifies this transcendental model (whereby all things have meaning in the eye of God) by the addition of one founded on the play of difference (so that signs are linked to what they indicate through resemblance, which is itself a sign). And within this capacious pre-Cartesian system, knowledge is concerned with structure rather than with meaning, and finally takes the form of divination rather than of faith. Foucault's suggestion that sixteenth-century language, like the other things of the world, is more fully visible than meaningful begins to lay the ground for an aesthetic within which to read writing practices where meaning appears to exist within, rather than in spite of, the sensuous elements of writing. These elements include not only those physical contingencies of the printed or manuscript page that may obtrude themselves, distractingly, on those who are trying to read but also the full colour, extension, style and location of writing that is not seeking apotheosis as a text. The affinity between

the vernacular painting and writing arts of early modern England which suggests itself here is more than close: in fact, the distinction between the two as they occur in the modes with which I am concerned .is, while sensible and necessary, predicated on their fundamental synesthesia. The disciplines of art with which we are familiar are founded on their ability to distinguish meaning from its physical media and to abandon the latter as extraneous. An aesthetic that, on the contrary, embraces what has been called 'the presupposition of exteriority' finds itself instead in a material continuum where there is no difference between painting and writing; no difference, again, between writing on paper, a wall, copper, wood, a body or an axe; and no difference, finally, between writing and other visual patterns." My working supposition that the taxonomies of contemporary thought are founded, quite precariously, on the abeyance of matter is derived in part from Derrida, who famously positioned 'archewriting' as the ground that metaphysics forgot. In OfGrammatology, by way of remembering, Derrida called for an investigation into 'all the investitures to which agraphie' (the graphic writing system in its widest sense) is submitted. Such an investigation would not only consider the substances, instruments, technologies, economic systems and historical specificities of writing's graphic forms but also the psychological investments with which the operations of reading and writing are charged.t'' Foucault's Renaissance is a fruitful place in which to begin this 'cultural graphology', for, in its description of language as 'a thing inscribed in the fabric of the world', it represents an apparent exception to Derrida's rule that the Western philosophical tradition is characterized, from Plato to the present, by its systematic 'disdain of the signifier'."? Furthermore, where logocentrism has tended to privilege the speaking voice as the domain of presence, Foucault's episteme presupposes 'an absolute

privilege on the part of writing'. It thus represents a case study (imaginary or not) of an intellectual system that should offer local habitation for that poetics of the literal that, for Derrida, would constitute a properly literary criticism. 28 Should, but does not. Foucault's critics have resisted both the chronology and the totalizing tendency of his episteme by pointing to the continuing importance of speech in the linguistic theory and practice of the Renaissance. This is a charge that might be answered in the first instance by the simple expedient of remembering that speech is itself a material art. The theory and practice of language as an acoustical phenomenon do not impact on Foucault's argument for the 'ancient solidity of language as a thing', for sounds are also things. More consequential, however, is the fact that speech is not an instance of self-presence in language but is itself a form of archewriting. For Derrida, the 'priority of writing' that Foucault claims for the Renaissance could include any 'grammatological' linguistic effect - any moment in which the material foundation of signification appears to displace or defer the full presence of meaning, a deferral that can be initiated by the voice as well as by writing. But it must be admitted that the evacuation of human presence by the literality of the signifier is not what Foucault had in mind when he described the sixteenth-century world as 'a vast open book' that 'bristles with written signs'. On the contrary, if Foucault and the sixteenth century for which he speaks privilege writing, they do so because it is writing, rather than voice, that has become the mode in which the 'living being' of language manifests itself. For Foucault, sixteenth-century language is part of a culture within which writing has not only primacy but also presence. He argues that the Renaissance 'remembered' (or produced as a screen memory) that 'it is the primal nature of language to be written'; that 'the sounds made by language provide no more than a transitory and

precarious translation of it'; and that God is present in the world as writing."? Signification as such 'does not exist' (except, we could imagine, in a derogated vocal register), while written signs 'shine in an endless dispersion' of their 'raw' or 'primitive being'. Foucault's formulation, which draws presence out of voice and gives it to writing, is powerfully explanatory of some of the linguistic effects with which I am concerned. While these effects cannot pretend to account for the totality of Renaissance writing, they do comprise one of its characteristic modes. But this is, of course, not the end of logocentrism. For if the letter is elevated within Foucault's Renaissance episteme, this is done in order that it may replace voice as the bearer of transcendental value - that it may, in fact, exteriorize human and divine thought through demonstrating, in writing, what one seventeenth-century writing master called 'the thoughtes of the minde ... without the voyce'.3° To the extent that Foucault's episteme may be read as an attempt to adjudicate between the ocular and the auricular in terms of their relation to presence, it may be said to unnecessarily restrict its own claims to describe the intellectual specificity of Renaissance knowledge, even while attending to its local effects. I am arguing, instead, for a Renaissance episteme that embraced and accorded intellectual consequence to - the sensuous and material elements of both written and spoken language, and that produced literary forms whose purpose was to arrest the reader with the proposition that visual and acoustical matter is structured before writing and speech begin.

27

ONE

Graffiti A big part of graffiti is to be able to appreciate the past. Dream, graffiti writer from Oakland'

.At the end of the Welspring ofwittie Conceights (1584) occurs a set of 'Certaine worthie sentences, very meete to be written about a Bedchamber or to be set up in any convenient place in a house'." The appendices to Thomas Tusser's A hundreth good pointes ofhusbandry, lately maried unto a hundreth good poynts ofhuswifery (1570) similarly include a series of something called 'Husbandly Poesies' - 'Poesies for the hall', 'Posies for the Parler', 'Posies for the gest's Chamber' and 'Posies for thine own bed Chamber'i' These two sets of poems bear witness to the surprising fact that the Elizabethan householder was advised to write on his, or her, own walls. Evidence that such advice was followed is furnished by two Hertfordshire properties, on whose interior walls selections from Tusser's posies can still be read (illus. 6, 7).4 It is my proposition that drawing and writing on walls was widely practised in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; that it was sanctioned there in ways that are foreign to ourselves, and troubling to the categories within which we recognize graffiti; and that this is something that we have not cared to know about the age of Shakespeare. Catching me writing my name on the wall of the gym, the headmistress of my junior school once uttered the memorable line

6 Sixteenth-century wall-painting at Pirton Gr ange, Pirton, Herts. The text is also found in Thomas Tu sser, A hundrethgoodpointes. . . (1570): 'what better fare than well content , agreeing with thy welthe / what better ghest, than trustie friend, in sicknes and in health / what worse despayre, than loth to dye for feare to go to hel / what gre ater faith than trust in god, through christ in heaven to dwell / Pray to god continually: And learne to knowe him rightfullie.'

'Do I come to your hous e and write on the walls?' The proposition

was traumatic not only because today we think of graffiti as being a largely adolescent activity, but also because while writing on the walls of schools, prisons, municipal toilets, and other public places ha s still to be specifically forbidden , the prohibition against writing on the interior walls of a house is now deeply internalized.> The difference between texts that are written on , and texts that are merely attached to, the interior of a hous e will immediately suggest itself here. But such a distinction is itself a consequence of the prohibition against writing directly on the fabric of a wall, and it is one that the Elizabethans did not themselves make.

30

7 Sixteenth-century wall-p ainting at Ansells End F arm, Kimpton, H erts . The text is also found in Tu sser, A hu ndretb good pointes . . . : '[W hat better th ought, than think on] God, and daily him to serve / [Wh at bette r gift than to the poor, that] ready be to sterve. / What better fayre [than well cont ent, agreeing with thy welth e] / Wh at myrth e to ... / What better gheste, then tru stie friend es, in sicknes and in health ...'

A wall-painting recorded in a chur ch at Llantwit Major, Glamorgan by E . Clive Rouse (as part of a decorative scheme dated 1604) comprises a painted frame (illus. 8). The space it demarcates

asks to be filled; but to wonder wh ether thi s is m ore properly done

31

8 D raw ing by E. Clive Rouse of a wall-painting at Llan twit Major, Glamo rga n, dated ,604.

by pasting a document within the painted embrasure, or by writing or drawing directly on to the plaster there, is to encounter a characteristic tension within Elizabethan decorative art. 6 Appearing to elide the difference between what is 'real' and what is not, so that the painted frame is as it were invited to imitate itself, the Llantwit painting proposes a representational economy unsusceptible to neoclassical questions of taste. In visual art, this economy attaches full importance to the painted surface, which appears not as a window on to something beyond itself, but as a material thing." Lucy Gent argues that Tudor paintings in general are governed by the logic, ascribed by Panofsky to pre-Renaissance art, whereby a painting is understood as 'a material surface covered with lines and colours which could be interpreted as tokens or symbols of three-dimensional objects'i'' She suggests furthermore that in the decades before Albertian conceptions of painting began to be assimilated in England, paintings 'were in some senses thought of as forms of surface or

wall-cladding'i? Where paintings are more readily painted on than hung on walls, questions of the appropriate surface on which to write or draw - and, beyond this, questions as to what is meant by a 'surface' - admit no easy answer. Early modern English contains no term to denote graffiti writing - a fact suggesting not so much that the vice was unknown, but that the activity was not distinguished from other writing practices, and not yet considered a vicc.!" Like pornography, with which it often shares a site, graffiti in its modern sense is an effect of categorization. In its political dimension it appears against the grid of what we understand to be the difference between public and private, professional and amateur, authorized and unauthorized. I I But modern graffiti is also a form of painting or writing that, uniquely, announces itself as being written 'on' something. It is, indeed, the visible placement of modern graffiti that constitutes its scandal as a form of writing that,

33

exceptionally, is understood to befitting space. That the Elizabethans did not see it this way, or rather that they saw most or all writing as having both extension and location, is one of the burdens of this chapter. Graffiti, almost by definition, is produced in media and on sites that make its long survival unlikely. Scratched rather than chiselled, or written in the even more ephemeral media of charcoal, chalk, marking stone, smoke and blood, early modern graffiti was presumably swiftly obliterated. Graffiti does survive, notoriously, on the interior walls of the Domus Aurea in Rome, whose ancient and delicate decorative paintings are partially obscured by the signatures and comments of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists and tourists who came to see them.'? The Domus Aurea has been taken as evidence that the impulse to write graffiti is simply human, and simply transgressive. But in the last 30 years a very wide range of drawings and inscriptions, both religious and secular, has been recovered and documented from the interior walls and pillars of England's churches, and provides incontrovertible evidence that graffiti writing was once sanctioned in ways now foreign to ourselves.f The difficulty of recognizing the graffiti of the past in its own terms is illustrated by Susan Sontag's essay on the paintings of Pieter Saenredam and Gerhard Houckgeest, seventeenth-century Dutch painters whose spare church interiors display their own signatures as if scratched on the church piers along with the other graffiti drawings recorded there. Somewhat against the visual evidence of Saenredam's Interior ofthe Buurkerk at Utrecht (1644), Sontag argues that graffiti would have been 'invariably read ... as the trace of small children', and understands its presence in the paintings as a 'mild profanation' of the sacred space, and a gesture of self-deprecation on the part of the artist, 'as if he too, were an artless vandal' (illus. 9). Correctly noting that the graffiti seems to be 'without

34

9 Pieter Saenredam, The Interior ofthe Buurkerk at Utrecht , 1644, oil on oak. N ational Ga llery, Lond on.

aggression' in the paintings, Sontag is led to theorize a past world in which 'trespass is not a threat', so that the graffito functions as a sort of Protestant gargoyle, 'an element of charm in the majestic visual environrnent;'" Alternatively, one could imagine a world in which graffiti is not a trespass. In fact, medieval and Renaissance church graffiti is so common in England that Doris Jones-Baker recently developed a taxonomy of its customary locations and forms: giants and windmills on towers; boats low down on pillars; priests' names and dates on the jambs of the priest's door; and portraits of traditional parish 'characters' such as the local giant cut in the places where their costumes and props were stored. IS Surviving graffiti constitutes an important record of religious and secular parish life: Jones-Baker notes that the majority of fourteenth-century musical notation survives in the form of church graffiti, where it was written as a mnemonic aid to church musicians and officials. 16 Church walls are also the register for political events, signatures and portraits of local people, burial inscriptions, and secular drawings, mottoes and comments. The post-Reformation graffiti documented by Violet Pritchard in churches around Cambridge include an Elizabethan gravedigger with his implements, flowers, the reminder 'Mors comparatur umbre que semper sequitur corpus' ['Death is like a shadow, which always follows the body'], and the lines 'fare well all clere Melawdy / fare well all ladyes and'.'? And Izaak Walton records that, after Donne's burial, 'some unknown friend, some one, of the many lovers and admirers of his vertue and learning; writ this Epitaph with a cole on the wall, over his grave', in the church where he was buried: Reader! I am to let thee know, Donne's Body only, lyes below: For, could the grave his Soul comprise? Earth would be richer then the skies. 18

After centuries of interior alteration, much less graffiti writing survives in secular interiors. But in the course of her search for church graffiti, Pritchard documented several instances in the domestic buildings of Cambridgeshire. At Sawston Hall (the house where Mary Tudor was staying when she heard of Edward's death), Pritchard found a graffito of the head of a Spanish soldier and two inscriptions in a stone mantelpiece: 'Owine male donique male scribe' ['Owen writes an evil script when writing evil things']; and from avid's Remedia Amoris: 'Igne levatus hyerns' ['Winter is alleviated by fire']. Mantelpieces were clearly a popular site for graffiti writing: three inscriptions survive over a fireplace in the Old Vicarage at Little Wilbraham. The first is a riddle: I am in the fier and yet am cold Let him that can this riddle unfold Yf the fier be little and wether cold 'Tis easy this riddle to unfold.

Underneath a different hand proposes a solution: 'I hope I do this riddle unfolde / In sayinge that this stone is coulde.' The third inscription is incomplete: 'Amore sau [...]co sauciando perio periendo spero, sperendo rem in iscor' ['By love I am wounded. By wounds I gain experience; by experience hope; by hoping'].'? And over the fireplace in the Old Treasury at St John's College, Cambridge, are several signature inscriptions by former fellows of the college, some of them dated. Among those identified by Malcolm U nderwood are Roger Ascham (1542), John Taylor, Thomas Fowle, Thomas Randall (1575), Gabriel Duckett (1570), William Fulke (1565), Laurence Washington, WaIter Barker (1572) William Coell (1572), [arnes Smith (1577), Edward Alvey (1574), Thomas Playfere and Robert Spalding (illus.

10, I I). Underwood speculates that the names were written under the influence of wine served in the auditor's chamber at the times of

37

IO Graffiti signatures of Robert Spalding (Fellow 1592-1604) and Gabriel Duckett (Fellow 1563-72) from the fireplace in the Old Treasury, St John 's Colleg e, Cambridge.

account." I am arguing, instead, that graffiti writing was as common, and as unremarkable, in domestic interiors as it was in the churches of early modern England.

I I Dated graffiti signature of Edward Alvey (Fellow 1570-76) from the fireplace in the Old Treasury, St John's College, Cambridge.

I I

Although I and others sometimes use it as a noun singular, the word graffiti is a plural noun; and, as if to illustrate how strangely inflected are the notions of agency that centre on its production, there is no verb to describe the action whose mark or trace the graffito is. In eighteenth-century England the Italian term sgraffiato, derived from the Latin to cut or scratch in stone, became current in

39

the context of pottery manufacture to refer to the process of cutting through a glaze to expose different-coloured clay underneath (pottery so decorated is known as 'incised ware'). The difficulty of locating the graffito - the idea that it is at one and the same time imposed on and discovered beneath the surface of a wall, and can therefore be thought of both as a wound and an instance of recovery (or, rather differently, as being at once additive and an index of wear) - is a paradox that has continued to haunt the term; dictating, for example, our own distinction between graffiti which culpably obscures the past and graffiti as a potent record of that past. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the word graffiti did begin to imply the operation of the unauthorized activity whose results decorate and articulate our own public spaces, but the term was still sheltered from opprobrium by its imbrication with an antiquarian historiography. Following the publication in 1856 of Raphael Garucci's Graffiti of Pompeii, the best-known graffiti were those which had been uncovered there, and they seemed to nineteenth-century commentators such as

J.

A. Symonds to have the

'power to reconstruct the past and summon as in dreams the voices and forms of long since buried meri'." Symonds does not see graffiti as the signature of an irresponsible newcomer, but as the trace of a person long-vanished. Graffiti writing has often been accorded paradoxical value as a form of expression whose infantile or atavistic character allows it to function as a conduit for instinctive or unconscious forces. Within an aesthetic economy that understands art as being born from personal resistance to a dominant culture, the marginal may be privileged as the depository of authenticity." And ancient graffiti (which historians distinguish from formal inscriptions on the uncertain grounds that the former are done 'in a free hand') are still sometimes read as if they constituted a special form of the minor mode: one in which voices of the past, unmodified by

dictates ofgenius, official form, or imperial ideology, registered themselves and were miraculously preserved." The authenticity effect that yesterday's graffiti can produce today depends on its association with the voice rather than with writing - or, rather, with the displacement of presence from voice to writing that graffiti seems to effect. That such a displacement can never be totally achieved is indicated by the fact that, even where it is accorded special privilege as the speaking writing of the past, graffiti remains something spectral, 'the voices ... of long since buried men' that Symonds heard as he contemplated the graffiti of Pompeii. Thus graffiti's simple utterance, 'X her mark', prompts questions that are rarely addressed to writing outside the realms of lyric poetry: who speaks? from where? what do you want of me? The hysteria with which modern Anglo-Americans encounter their own graffiti has a primarily political dimension, for the appearance of graffiti in a public space presents itself as a statement about the unpropertied that brooks no answer." But graffiti is over-determined as the medium of the socially disaffected, for, within a culture that discounts matter as that which has no meaning, graffiti will always appear to be the mark of a human subjectivity that survives and protests its own radical dispossession. It is my argument, however, that graffiti writing appeared differently to the early modern English, whose intellectual economy was predicated on a socially constituted subject and on notions of authorship that were collective, aphoristic and inscriptive, rather than individualist, lyric and voice-centred." Operating on a natural world divinely marked for human notice, and dealing with truths it understands to be already extant, early modern writing is readily perceived by its practitioners as tending towards non-subjectivity that is, towards a writing that requires no subjective position of enunciation. If I write a sentence from Tusser on my wall ('What

better bed than conscience good, to pass the night with sleep?'), whose utterance is it? Neither mine nor Tusser's: it is a commonplace, it 'speaks for itself. So Erasmus celebrated proverbs as 'symbols' in which ancient wisdom was 'contained ... They were so deeply respected in old times', he adds, 'that they seemed to have fallen from heaven rather than to have come from men. "And know

thyself descended from the sky", says Juvenal.,26 The strange effects produced on us by Elizabethan wall-writing result in part from the fact that in it we encounter the denotative writing of the past through the prism of a reading practice predicated on modern notions of subjectivity.27

I I I

The term 'worthy sentence' ('meete to be written about a Bed-chamber') is a tautology, for the Renaissance sentence is already a wise saying that announces itself as such. It is written 'in a pointed manner': one designed to indicate its special provenance among the various registers (classical, biblical, proverbial) of the exhortational mode. The word 'posy', on the other hand, is a syncopated form of poesie: its sixteenth-century meanings are not always distinct from those of its parent category, but include the short poem accompanying the picture of an emblematic device, a small collection (usually culled from a larger 'garden') of the 'flowers' of rhetoric, and a motto written on a ring or a piece of tableware. 28 Graziano derides Nerissa's ring in The Merchant of Venice as 'a hoop of gold, a paltry ring, / That she did give me, whose posy was / For all the world like cutler's poetry / Upon a knife - 'Love me and leave me not' (5,

I,

147-50). While formally a posy must be short ('as woman's love, or the posy of a ring', says Hamlet), its defining characteristic is to be written in such a way that its material embodiment forms an impor-

tant part of its meaning. The posy, in short, is a saying or poem that is pointed by being written on something. I have already described how George Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie, defined a posy as a short and portable epigram, commonly painted 'upon the backsides of our fruit trenchers of wood' or used 'as devises in rings and armes and about such courtly purposes'r'? For Puttenham, the posy was the exemplary form of poetry at the court of Elizabeth I. Pinned to trees and curtains, set upon conduits, and wrapped around gifts; or plaited into bracelets, embroidered on to clothes and copied into books, the posy played a crucial role in the material exchange of favours that articulated life at court. As material forms, posies were classified, in part, according to a once fluid and now vanished taxonomy of location. Samuel Daniel, for example, comments, 'This word mot signifieth as much as Gnome, a short sentence or Posie, whose places are divers. Some use to set them upon gates, as that which (according to the Poet) was set on Hell gate.'3 0 The posy is the written form that calls attention to the fact that writing is 'set' on something. Under other circumstances, when text is legible as such, the paper and ink that subtend it go unobserved; and any material facts that such a writing may record about itself ('I am black ink / white paper / made of rags / disposable') will be glossed as textual effects. It is only when we encounter writing where we do not expect to see it, wrought in materials or on surfaces that then become visible as 'writing matter', that we confront the material properties of the graphic trace." It is worth insisting that the posy - a piece of writing with physical extension - cannot exist as text in the abstract. To make a distinction that would have been incomprehensible to his readers, Tusser's 'Husbandly Poesies' are patterns for posies rather than the things themselves: it is the householder who, copying them on to her walls, or cutting the book in order to paste them there, makes a posy 43

from a text. It follows that, within the history of English literature, posies as such have not survived. Read within the context of the 'Elizabethan Miscellany', the posy is at once condemned for and relieved of its material form and purpose. To the extent that these are remembered - 'These sentences following were set upon conduits in London, against the day that King [ames came through the city, at his first comming to the Crowne' - the posy appears quaint.f' But the Elizabethan quaint is a category that only comes into visibility at the same time as that of the essentialized, abstracted text. Pilgrimage to Shakespeare's birthplace - and for that matter the no less dusty labour of editing his works - presupposes the existence of a Shakespearean text beyond the accidents of the written trace. It is as if, today, the literary effect depended on the denial or occlusion of certain forms of linguistic matter. But the Elizabethans understood reading and writing differently, as procedures for the gathering, storage and redeployment of well-framed wisdom.V Within such a regimen, writing is that which frames truth to catch the eye or memory: like the stylistic devices of brevity or ornament, writing can, in and of itself, add weight to a sentence.It While the advent of print technology (like the invention of the phonetic alphabet) is usually understood to be coterminous with, if not identical to, an increase in intellectual and technological abstraction, to the early modern English it may rather have represented a mode of materializing thought more densely. In

The art ofmemory (1621), John Willis lists the procedures of condensation and displacement that produce memorable representations. Such representations or 'ideas' can be either 'direct' (where the image of a goat stands for a goat), or 'oblique ... whereby the thing to be remembered is obliquely or indirectly signified'. Willis distinguishes three types of oblique idea: the 'relative' (that is, the metonymic), the 'subdititial' (the metaphoric) and the 'scriptile' (the

44

12 Sixteenth-century wall-painting over a fireplace from No. Barley, Herts.

2,

Lower Farm,

written): 'a Scriptile idea is, whereby the thing to be remembered, is supposed to be written on a plaine white table hanged up in the midst of the opposite wall '. Within the imagined space of his memory system, Willis advises that ideas be stored in the places they would occupy in real life. Thus a 'libell or Epigramme' is 'supposed to be written in a paper, and pasted upon the opposite wall'; if the idea is 'a Proclamation or Title page of a Booke' it should be 'pasted unto the wall'; if it is 'a new pamphlet . . . it is fastened to the wall with nailes')5 Tessa Watt has already described early modern alehouses, and, to a lesser extent, domestic houses, as places where printed texts and visual imagery were disseminated. She notes contemporary accounts of inns with 'rows of ballads' pasted on the walls and cites William Cornwallis's description of an inn where 'not a Poste, nor a painted cloth in the house, but cryes Feare God'.36 As Watt's work shows, inns and alehouses were not unique in this respect: the Elizabethans did not buy their books ready bound, and hard covers compete with walls as the proper place to store or display at least some kinds of written text. Putting itself on display for the purposes of memory

45

and education, striving (even in its new print formats) to be decorative, Elizabethan writing embraced its status as a material thing.F The recurrence of flowers in Elizabethan wall paintings may thus be less 'naturalistic' than it seems today: the flower is a flower of rhetoric, while a collection of flowers on a wall (a posy) is a figure for a text (illus. 12). While today these appear as inverted metaphors or conceits, painted flowers once expressed that fusion between figure and thing that Foucault takes to be characteristic of early modern thought.

IV

It is the working assumption of local historians that the writing that survives on the walls, doors and windows of the Elizabethan interior has been copied from more properly 'textual' sources, and this is certainly the procedure suggested by Tusser and Fister. 38 Surviving inscriptions can occasionally be traced to proverb collections, or to the influential emblem books of Alciati and Whitney: in Have With

You to Saffron Walden Nash scoffs that Erasmus's Adagia have been 'all snatcht up for painter's posies'i '? But for Erasmus himself, if the posy is a proverb materialized, the proverb is a posy in potentia;

'Sustine et abstine: Bear and Forbear. For a long time now [these two words] have been current as a proverb among educated men, and well do they deserve to be inscribed on walls and columns everywhere, and to be engraved on every ring.'?" As Erasmus sees it, the proverb is a community resource. It has no single origin: wherever it appears, it seems to have 'fallen from the sky'. So the fact that a painted text that survives on a domestic interior in Oxford - 'In the morninge earlye Serve God devoutlie' - is more or less replicated in a recorded 'saying' of Katharine Dowe, dairy woman at Sibton Abbey, Suffolk - 'Arise earelie / Serve God devoutly' - does not put

the two texts in any traceable relation of material contiguity or influence with each other." But the example does suggest a deep reciprocity between oral and written texts: one, furthermore, that argues for the importance of walls as the register of proverbial wisdom. In Dowe's case we cannot usefully ask whether her 'saying' (which was recorded by her son), was transcribed, or spoken, or both; whether she and her son understood it to have been composed by her (or rather, since the lines appear in variant forms in many fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript and printed sources, to have been re-composed by her) or only adopted as her own. A productive indistinction between written and oral texts in early modern England allowed, and was in turn deepened by, a widespread inscriptional praxis that (unconcerned with the question of textual origin) adopted rather than disowned the writing on its walls. As a result, many Renaissance texts could be said to be governed by class and technological dialogisms that - for all that they have since become illegible within the texts that survive - may still provide us with evidence of subjectivities and poetic practices that are otherwise irreparably lost. So, in Little Morton Hall, Cheshire, two lines survive engraved on a window: 'Men can no more knowe a woman's mind by kaire / Than by her shadow judge what clothes she weare.' The lines may derive from two in Donne's poem 'Twicknam Gardens': 'Nor can you more judge woman's thoughts by teares / Then by her shadow, what she weares.' But in this instance we cannot be certain that the graffito does not predate the poem; nor that Donne, whose undatable poems are highly self-conscious about their own locations, did not find or indeed write some of his best lines on walls. Thomas Coryate regularly copied down verses he encountered written on or in houses on his continental travels; while Nicholas Bacon presented [ane Lumley with a manuscript copy of the sententiae he had had

47

painted in his long gallery at Gorhambury.f' As the product of writing habits characterized by the circulation, rather than the origination, of texts, the contents of Elizabethan common-place books are as likely to have been read off, as written on to, windows and walls. According to the sermon given at her funeral, Anne Clifford decorated the walls, hangings, and furniture of her bed-chamber with 'sentences or sayings of remark': She would frequently bring out of the rich Store-house of her memory, things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors and with these her Wals, her Bed, her Hangings, and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make their descants upon them. So that, though she had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a Iibrary.t"

Like Montaigne, who wrote 54 sayings from biblical and classical sources on to the rafters of his library (many of which reappear in his Essais), Clifford is here engaged in an intellectual practice - the culling and deployment of the 'flowers' of wisdom - that is highly characteristic of English and continental humanism.r' BL Ms Royal 18 D ii, an early sixteenth-century manuscript largely devoted to a genealogy of the Percy family, records 32 proverbs, all pertaining to the topic of music, which were 'inscribed' on the walls and ceilings of the New Lodge, Leckinfield, when it formed part of the estate of Henry Percy, Fifth Earl of Northumberland (1486-1527).45 In The

Compleate Gentleman (1634), Henry Peacham identified Arundel House as the 'chiefe English scene of ancient Inscriptions'

which master John Selden (the best and learnedest Antiquary in this kingsome) hath collected together under the title Marmora Arundeliana. You shall finde all the walles of the house inlayde with them, and speaking Greeke and Latine to you. The Garden especially will afford you the pleasure of a world of learned Lectures of this kinde.

Describing the Long Gallery at Pinkie Castel, Musselborough, whose ceiling Alexander Seton caused to be thickly painted with Latin inscriptions, coats of arms, and emblematic devices, Michael Bath suggests that one available model for the English and Scottish Long Gallery was the Athenian Stoa Poikil« or 'Painted Gallery', in which Zeno taught with the aid ofPolygnotus's historical and moral wall-paintings.i'' It is undeniable that some instances, and perhaps even some forms, of parietal writing (that is, writing done directly on to the wall) are socially derogated in the early modern period. In [oseph Hall's distopic Fooliana (1605), the 'houses are all passinglie well painted within, especially with the names of their ancestry, their guests, and acquaintance, gracefully delineate with coale and candle': an error of taste that Hall underlines with a marginal note: 'rnuro bianco carta di matto: A white wall is a foole's book.'47 George Herbert repeats the joke in his Outlandish Proverbs (1640) - 'A white wall is the paper of a foole.' And when unrequited love reduces the hero of Robert Parry's Moderatus (1595) to the status of ladies' man and 'Scholler', he regrets the days when 'a sturdy Morglay' (a sword) was more fitting to his humour 'then a sillie wall-washing paultrie pensile'. But Priscus's self-contempt is not confined to the fact that he has been driven to write love poetry on walls: it includes the more general production of 'fine cowched wordes'.4 8 The English humanists and those they influenced may finally have felt the stigma of charcoal on whitewash no more keenly than they felt the stigma of

49

print. And the practice ofearly modern wall-writing may have materially informed not only memory systems based on imagined interior 'places', but also the mental topography of the intellectual system that manifested itself in the keeping of common-place books.t? In fact, I imagine the whitewashed domestic wall as being the primary scene of writing in early modern England. In 1585 Samuel Daniel noted that 'men all naturally take delight in pictures, and even little children as soon as they can use their hands at libertie, goe with a Cole to the wall, indeavouring to drawe the forme of this thing or that'.5 0 Ten years earlier, John Hart felt that the way to maximize the benefit of his new reading method was to inscribe its alphabet on as many walls as possible: 'if the figures with their letters wer drawen on the walles, pillers, and postes, of churches, tounes and houses, they moughte muche helpe and further the ignorant of alletters, to atteine to readc'." But it was not only children and the educationally disadvantaged who availed themselves of the writing space provided by the whitewashed wall. The writing that survives from the Elizabethan period was produced by people who had the technological and financial resources for the laborious procedures of securing paper, pen, and ink. 52 The poor, the hurried and those (it may have been practically everybody) unconcerned with the extensive circulation and long survival of their bons mots wrote with charcoal, chalk, stone and pencil. That the bulk of early modern writing was written on walls, and was consequently both erasable and in our own scheme of things

out ofplace, is a proposition with consequences for current assumptions about the constitution and statistics of literacy and schooling in the early modern period.V Beyond this, it prompts us to imagine, in an age to which is ascribed the inauguration of 'proper' writing, a widespread, and in contemporary terms multiply undisciplined writing practice. For within Elizabethan wall-writing, drawing and

so

writing are not fully distinguishable, while defacement operates as a principle of textual production. Thus Henry Wotton's Courtlie

Controversie ofCupid's Cautels (1578) likens the fickle affections of a young woman to 'a fayre white wall, which receyveth all impressions, and if a man striketh his hande thereon, all which was coloured is wyped away'.54 Elizabethan wall-writing is a practice whose easily made and easily erased products cannot be taught, reproduced or sold as commodities. It is, in short, graffiti, as that appears within an intellectual economy that values the utterance of common-places, and tolerates the appearance of writing as a thing among things.

v In Puttenham's work, posies belong within a larger class, the 'epigramme', a category of writing which, 'short and sweete (as we are wont to say)', includes the posy, the epitaph ('an inscription such as a man may commodiously write or engrave upon a tomb in few verses') and the anonymous public inscription.F' Puttenham considers the best contemporary examples of epigrams to be those associated with Pasquino, one of Rome's 'speaking statues'; on whom, according to John Florio, 'all Satires, Pasquins, rayling rimes or libels are fastened and fathered', a practice that continues to this day (illus. 13, 14).56 Spoken, according to the conceit, by the statue itself, the epigram (or 'pasquinade') allows expression of those 'bitter taunts, and privy nips' which erupt within men in society. Directed sometimes against a neighbour and sometimes, in carefully contained circumstances, against the state, the epigram registers the oppositional, playful and somatic impulses of the civil subject.V In the case of the pasquinade, the epigram attains the non-subjective status of Erasmus's sky-fallen proverb when it takes its place as a public utterance 'fathered' on a mute object.

13 Antonio Lafr ery, 'Pasquino' (one of Rome's thr ee speakin g statu es), engraving from Speculum magnificientiae romanae (1550).

14 'Il Balbuino', another of Rome's speaking statues.

The location of Puttenharn's epigram in Elizabethan England and Augustan Rome associates it with graffiti in the modern sense: this Epigramme is but an inscription or writing made as it were upon a table, or in a window, or upon the wall or mantell of a chimney in some place of common resort, where it was allowed every man might come, or be fitting to chat and prate, as now in our tavernes and common tabling houses, where many merry heads meete, and scrible with ynke, with chalke, or with a cole such matters as they would every man should know, and descant upon.l" Puttenham does not especially deprecate such wntlOg, which he associates with the dissemination of information from an anonymous source. Under different circumstances [onson's Lovewit displays equal equanimity when he returns from the country to

53

discover that graffiti writers have been busy in his London house: Here, I find The emptie walls, worse than I left 'hem, smok'd, A few crack'd pots, and glasses, and a fornace, The seeling filled with poesies of the candle: And MADAME, with a Dildo, writ 0' the walls. 59

'Poesies of the candle', usually glossed as stains caused by candle smoke, can also mean (what to the modern householder would be much the same thing) verses, slogans, or signatures written on the ceiling in candle smoke: additions to the word Madam, and the drawing of a dildo - or alternatively to the text of a ballad called 'Madam with a dildo' or to a portrait of a woman with a dildo - that have already been written on Lovewit's walls. 60 Tolerance of anti-social activities is one of Lovewit's characteristics; and his easy embrace of smoke-writing is not shared by one speaker in Herrick's Hesperides (1648), who includes in his list of necessities for a happy retirement home a modest but weather-proof roof, 'And seeling free / From that cheape Candle Bau/dry'," In Beaumont and Fletcher's Phylaster, the King vows to expose the courtesan Megra, 'make ribal'd rimes, / And sear thy name with candles upon walls', while Megra threatens to retaliate by publicizing the Princess's love affair: 'Your dear daughter shall stand by me / On walls, and sung in ballads, anything."? In the opening scene of The Alchemist, Face threatens to hang Subtle 'in picture', 'write thee up bawd in Paules' , and 'have all thy tricks ... told in red letters: And a face, cut for

thee / Worse than GAMALIEL RATSEY'S' (I, I, 90-102). Herford and Simpson gloss 'red letters' as alluding to 'rubricated titles and headings ofold books'; but red ochre stone is one of the more common media in which Renaissance wall-writing survives, and the notorious centre aisle and churchyard ofSt Paul's Cathedral is a likely site for the exposure threatened by Face: a graffiti portrait of Subtle on the

54

gallows, with slogans describing his crimes. 63 Jonson's interest in graffiti writing is further recorded in an epigram to Inigo Jones, that advises him to 'Seek out some hungry painter, that for bread, / With rotten chalk, or cole, upon a Wall / Will well designe thee; to be viewed of all.,64 The elaborated taxonomy (almost a rule of genre) that once determined the appropriate materials, locations and subject matter of Elizabethan wall-writing has, like most of the writing itself, been lost. Candle smoke seems to have been a derogated medium, proper vehicle for the set of sexual anxieties whose parietal articulation may have constituted the primary discourse of pornography in early modern England. But even candle writing is by no means uniformly reproved, and should be read in the context of the widespread practice of graffiti writing in other media. When Spenser's Colin Clout says of the English court that 'all the walls and windows there are writ, / And full of love, and love, and love my deare', or when the speaker in Fulke Greville's poem records how he used to find his name 'by Myra finely wrought' in the chimney, we have tended to read the lines as if the locations they ascribe to poetry were metaphorical. But, as Rosemary Freeman notes, the sixteenth century was an age when 'it was natural and intelligible for a man to scratch an emblematic poem on his friend's window pane, taking the brittleness of the glass as his "picture" and his theme'.65 The practice of writing on windows is attested both in poems such as Herbert's 'The Posy' ('Let wits contest, / And with their words and posies windows fill'); and in the survival from the period of inscribed window panes, and of 'writing rings' (diamonds set in high bevels with one point outwards) designed to mark glass. 66 If John Foxe is to be believed, Princess Elizabeth used such a ring to record her deliverance from her enemies when, on leaving Woodstock, where she had been under house arrest, she 'wrote with

55

her diamond, in a glass window, "Much suspected by me / Nothing proved can be. Quoth ELIZABETH, Prisoner.?"? Less well supplied during her imprisonment in the Tower, Lady [ane Grey still managed 'certain pretty verses written ... with a pin: "Do never think it strange, / Though now I have misfortune; / For if that fortune change, / The same to thee may happen. / [ane Dudley"'.68 Such poetry forms part of the considerable archive of verse that survives from the period scratched and carved into prison walls; and is evidence of a type of graffiti writing familiar today/" But Thomas Fuller records a line written under happier circumstances, on a window at court, by Raleigh: 'Fain would I climb yet fear I to fall', to which the Queen is alleged to have replied by writing underneath 'If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.?" In Ar't Asleep Husband (1640), Richard Brathwaite remarks 'I have sometimes read written in a window with a diamond, by one, it seemed, who was not settled in his Choice ... these lines If[ might chuse, [ knowe not which were best,/ She that is naked, or is neatly dresst.' Brathwaite found an answering opinion on another pane:

'If [ might chuse, ['de have her such ane one/

As shce wasfirst created, bone on bone: / And in that naked-nature posture have her/ When th' Serpent with an Apple did deceive her.'7 1 In The English Gentleman and English Gentlewoman .. . with a Ladies Love Lecture (1641), Brathwaite records three further instances of window-writing conducted antiphonally between men; as well as the sentiments of four 'brave resolved' women, who expressed 'the nobleness of their thoughts in these proper imprezes, which with their Diamonds they left writ in the panes of their own chamber windowes': The device of the first was this:

It is not in the power offate To weaken a contented state.

And the second scornes to fall short of her resolution: Fortune may sundry Engines finde, But none to raze a noble minde,

The third in contempt of Fortune, inlargeth this subject: Shouldfortune me distresse, My minde would be no lessee

The fourth, to shew her affection true Toutch, attests her constancy in this: Fate may remove Life, but not love.

2

7

These small collections, if not invented by Brathwaite, constitute the imperfect register of an interactive, material, and popular poetic practice whose thematic resources include a debate concerning the comparative permanence of texts and their material supports.P There is extensive literary and non-literary evidence that the early modern English did not hesitate to write on walls as well as windows. One of the few surviving poems of Elizabeth I, '0 fortune, thy wresting wavering state', was written on a wall at Woodstock, where it was seen and copied down by Paul Hentzner in 1597.74 A character in John Grange's Golden Aphroditis (1577) relieves his feelings at having been denied access to his mistress by writing 'Veni, vidi ... upon the gallerie doore', while another entertains his fellow guests by writing 'with a redde oker stone upon the skrene of the hall' a long and riddling poem that invites a written response." The lover in W. M.'s The Man in the Moone (1609) is advised 'If shee useth you hardly either in words or deeds, or countenanceth any of your enemies or evill willers, set it downe in your table-bookes, and write it upon the wal in your bed-chamber, that you may at al times better remember them: and consider if she tendered you she wold not wrong you.?" In Wits, Fits, and Fancies

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(1614), Anthony Copley includes two instances of graffiti writing

under the heading 'Of Emblemes, Poesies, and Endorcements'. The first tells of a page who, seeing his master's device of a half moon 'engraven upon a wall, wrote underneath it with a coale, Nunc Ilena: viz. Bee it never at full'. The second anecdote concerns a man who, 'seeing his enemies Armes drawne upon a walle with a coale, drew the like underneath', with parodic additions.F Finally, in Samuel Sheppard's The Loves ofAmandus and Sophronia (1650) the imprisoned Sophronia 'taking a coale from the hearth', writes a series of verses on the wall of her chamber, including her own cpitaph.r" Political commentary, erotic fixation, personal slander and the perfomance of signature are still recognizable as appropriate themes for graffiti writing. Less easily assimilated to that category today are the games, recipes, school lessons, memorials, house rules, prayers, extracts from the Bible, memoranda to the self and advice to others that the early modern Europeans wrote on their walls.?? The apocryphal seventeenth-century English account of Nicholas Flamel's successful alchemical projection records that, in the process of puzzling over the symbols discovered in an ancient book, the French alchemist 'caused to bee painted within my Lodging, as naturally as I could, all the figures and portraicts of the fouwth and fifth leafe', while John Dee noted that the Prague study of the astronomer Hajek was decorated with 'things manifold written very fairly', 'very many

Hieroglyphical Notes Philosophical', 'verses over the door' and a description of the alchemist's work on the south-side wall. 8o John Hoskyns drew portraits of his servants, with Latin distichs, on the outside walls of Morehampton, his country seat. 8I And in the country parson's house described by George Herbert, 'Even the walls are not idle, but something is written or painted there which may excite the reader to a thought of piety; especially the 101 psalm, which is expressed in a fair table, as being the rule of a family.'82

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In Chapman, Jonson and Marston's Eastward Ho (1605), Touchstone traces his fortune as master goldsmith to the sober practices described in and exemplified by the writing on his shop walls: Did I gain my wealth by ordinaries? no! By exchanging of gold? no! By keeping of gallants' company? no! I hired me a little shop, bought low, took small gain, kept no debt book, garnished my shop, for want of plate, with good wholesome thrifty sentences - as, 'Touchstone, keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee'; 'Light gains make heavy purses'; "Tis good to be merry and wise.' (I, I, 52-60)

A successful merchant whose social values are both criticized and ratified, Touchstone is a familiar figure on the early Jacobean stage. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, proverbs are perhaps coming into conflict with new notions of subjectivity, originality and authenticity in writing; and the emphatic redundancy of Touchstone's 'wholesome thrifty sentences' - "Tis good to be merry and wise' - seems designed to reflect criticism both on the practice of reducing philosophy to a set of personalized truisms, and on a generation and a class for whom moralizing is, at least on stage, fast becoming a signature effect. Newly read as the engrossing of common to particular interests, the humanist intellectual practice of textual 'gathering' now appears emblematic of a mercantile success predicated on an otherwise unlocatable lack of generosity. For Touchstone holds that capital is founded in the first instance on the industry and thrift of his own class - 'Did I gain my wealth by ordinaries? no!' - and is thus able to imagine the capitalist mode of production as one that has called itself into being 'Touchstone, keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee.' The palpable sense that there remains something unaddressed in Touchstone's account of the genesis of his fortune registers itself here as a contradiction between his economic and intellectual practices. Instead of

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'plate' Touchstone hoards 'sentences'; he wisely puts his money to work at the same time that he apparently takes texts out of circulation to display them on his walls. Within a fully capitalist regime such as our own Touchstone is revealed as a fetishist of the text someone who inappropriately values writing for its magical efficacy in his own life. His vulgar misappropriation of a text 'properly' considered to be the property only of its author is underwritten by what now appears to be the old-fashioned and inappropriate practice of materializing text as wall-writing.V

VI

The simple visibility of graffiti as such vanishes when it is considered within a culture which practised a wide variety of wall-writing. 84 The Elizabethan interior as it has survived under the auspices of the National Trust presents us with a potent instance of domestic peace. Chastely whitewashed, or wrapped in the decorous and domestic pleats of the famous 'linen-fold' panelling, it seems to preserve for us the graceful silence of the pre-commodity home. In fact, brightly painted walls and ceilings formed the decorative focus of most rooms in Tudor and Stuart England; surviving rooms display an exuberance of colour and design that, together with the inclusion of trompe l'oeil and figurative effects, and a tendency to continue patterns over studs, panels and beams, proves uncongenial to modern taste. 8s Tapestry and wainscotting apart, Tudor and Stuart methods of interior decoration included ballad sheets and tables pasted directly onto the wall, or attached to cloth hangings; 'wall papers' produced specifically for the purpose by printers who recycled spoiled pages by printing decorative patterns (sometimes incorporating mottoes) on their backs; and painted cloths. 86 These last so regularly contained writing that they became known for their

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sententiousness: Shakespeare's Tarquin reminds himself, 'Who fears a sentence or a old man's saw / Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe' (The Rape of Lucrece, 244-5); while an exchange between [acques and Orlando (As You Like It, 3, 2, 266-70) equates painted cloths and posy rings as the sites for the moral truism: Jacques:

You are full of pretty answers. Have you not been acquainted with goldsmith's wives, and conn'd them out of rings?

Orlando: Not so; but I answer you right painted cloth, from whence you have studied your questions.V

From the middle of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the seventeenth, wall-painting was perhaps the most common form of interior decoration. Painted walls (and, for that matter cloths) are not best understood as 'poor man's tapestry': each constitutes a medium and a practice with its own technical opportunities and sophisticated generic conventions, and each found a place in wealthy as well as more modest interiors. Documenting more than 300 surviving wallpaintings in the 1930S, Reader classified them as 'arabesque' work in black and white, 'naturalistic' floral ornament painted in rich colours, panels divided by strapwork and filled with cartouche, representations of tapestries and other hangings, and figure subjects taken from contemporary pastimes and from biblical and classical sources. 88 Any of these decorative schemes could contain writing: as a whole they comprise a field of art that deserves more serious critical attention than it has hitherto received. Produced in a period that spans the English Reformation, Elizabethan wall-painting necessarily addresses itself to the vexed (and state-legislated) imbrication of word and image: its ideal analysis would proceed under the aegis of a calligraphic term (perhaps calligramme, or graf, if graffiti will not do) that encompassed word and image, and did not presume to 61

know the difference between writing and painting.f? Archaeological evidence gathered by Reader and others shows that the writing on the interior walls of the Elizabethan house included classical sententiae, biblical verse and commentary, prayers, heraldic mottoes, injunctions to fear God and obey the Prince, exhortations to charity and righteous living, and reminders of mortality.?" Typical of the last, with its tropes of flowers and clay, and its theme of the insubstantiality of earthly life, is the inscription recorded by Reader from a farmhouse in Chiddingly, East Sussex: In lyfe theare ys no suer staye For fleashe as flower doth vade awaye This carcas made of slyme and claye Must taste of deathe theare is no waye. While we have tyme then lett us praye To god for grace bothe night and daye.?'

Stoke Poges Manor House, built by the Earl of Huntingdon in 1553, has a series of painted sayings in one room, of which Reader found the following still legible: 'Feare the Lord, Obey the Prince', 'Love thi neighbour', 'Beware of Pride', 'Speak the truth' and 'Bear no malice'; while on the wall of a four-room cottage in Chalfont St Peter Reader found the black-letter inscription: 'When any thing thou takest in hand to do or Enterpryse / fyrst markewell the fynall end there of that maye Aryse. Fear God.'9 2 That wall-painting could be associated with an adherence to outlawed religious practices is suggested by a passage from Alexander Barclay's Argenis (1625), where Timoclea hides Poliarchus in a secret vault left by 'the first Builders' of the house, whose access was hidden beneath the floorboards of her chamber: In the entrance, a little way was playstered, that it might be adorned with Letters and Pictures. But the dampe ayre, not

quickened by the Stars influence, had somewhat blemished the Imagery: yet there was to bee seene the Portraiture of an Altar, and a man putting his counterfeit Frankincense into this fire: over which these Verses were to bee, though hardly, read: You Gods, that here below, your worship have; Be this loves Palace, or grim Pluto's Cave, Or hee that doth in his blue armes enfold Earths Globe, doe here his three-forkt Scepter hold: This Vault still faithfull to the Lords maintaine: No treachery, no theft this darknesse staine.... Let rest and peaceful silence still appeare, Whilest this chaste Family burne Incense here. All guilty soules let hellish horror fright, But good men here enjoy a quiet night. 93

Secret chapels are very likely to have been decorated with the kinds of wall-painting newly prohibited in parish churches; and it is easy to imagine the discreet painting of forbidden images, on a more modest scale, on the interior walls of recusant households. But the images and political statements that survive from the period are more commonly uncontroversial; they range from the ubiquitous 'Obey the Prince' to the inscription of Elizabeth's motto, 'Semper Eadem', at an inn in County Dublin. While the dominance of such exhortations may suggest the extensiveness of Tudor state supervision, or the possibility that public and private spheres were not yet distinct from each other, slogans such as 'God save the Quene' (like the coronation mugs that are the very type of British domesticity) may serve instead to remind us that dynastic or nationalist sentiment is a reassuring thing.?" The Elizabethan domestic interior may have been comfortable to its occupants not because it offered refuge from state interference, but because it provided a personal field within which the subject who had learned to desire her own political subordination was permitted - indeed instructed - to write.

Such, after all, is the burden of the two nearly identical passages from Deuteronomy (6: 4-9 and

I I:

18-21) that underpin the practice

of wall-writing in post-Reformation England, and that were themselves often written on domestic walls (illus. 15).95 Tyndale rendered the first as follows: Hear Israel, the Lorde thy God is Lorde only and thou shalt love the Lorde thy God with all thy ne hearte ... And these wordes which I commaunde the this day, shalbe in thine herte and thou shalt whett them on thy childer, and shalt talke of them when thou art home in thyne housse and as thou walkest by the waye, and when thou lyest doune and when thou rysest upp: and thou shalt bynde them for a sygne uppon thyne hande. And they shalbe papers of rembraunce betwene thyne eyes, and shalt write them uppon the postes of thy house and uppon thy gates.

Against this passage, which is crucial to the Reformation project of a vernacular bible, Tyndale inserts the barbed marginal note, 'It is heresy with us for a laye man to loke of gods worde or to reade it.' He goes on to explain his choice of the term 'whett' (from the Hebrew root ShNN, to sharpen or repeat), as meaning 'exercyse': exercise your children in God's commandments, and put them into use or practice with them. A marginal gloss to the Geneva Bible elaborates on the meaning of Tyndale's term: 'some read, ye shall whet them upon thy children: to whit, that they may print them more depely into memorie'. The Christian has God's truth imprinted in her mind and heart through education as well as through Grace: the pedagogic trajectory whereby repetition is transformed into memory can be explained, here as nowhere else, as the action of Grace itself. 96 The Reformed Christian is thus advised, following Deuteronomy, to rehearse God's truth in conversation, bind it on hand and

15 Wall-painting over a fireplace at Feering House, Feering, Essex. The text is

Deuteronomy 6: 4-9.

brow, and copy it on to walls. Luther pleased himself with imagining 'the whole Bible to be painted on houses, on the outside and the inside, so that all can see it'; while Calvin, equally sensitive to the fact that the distracted householder may need to be continually reminded of his duty, advised, 'Let us have Gods lawe written, let us have the sayings of it painted on our walles as in tables, and let us

have things to put us in minde of it early and late.'97 Indeed, Calvin argues that God holds memory aids to be so necessary that He

repeats the injunction to write them (in Deuteronomy 6: 4-9 and again in Deuteronomy 1 I: 18-21). The Bible text thus enacts what Calvin understands to be the burden of its own passages: 'This repetition therefore is not superfluous, where God telleth us again, thlat] it is good for us to have his lawe written everywhere.Y Some Reformers showed themselves more chary of the prosthetic nature, and the material dimension, of such mnemonic devices. The Bishop's Bible (1578) glosses Deuteronomy 6: 9 by explaining that the injunction to write 'upon the postes of thy house, and upon thy gates' means nothing 'but continual meditation of the lawe'; while [oseph Hall, arguing that it is not the outward show but 'the heart and reins (that] are those that God looks after', used the same passage to illustrate the difference between Christians and Pharisees: God charged them to binde the Law to their hand, and before their eyes, Deut. 6 wherein, as [erorne and Theophylact well interpret it, he meant the meditation and practice of his Law: they, like unto the foolish Patient, which when a Physitian bids him take that prescript, if they could but get a list of parchment upon their left arme next their heart, and another scroll to be upon their forehead ... thought they might say with Saul, Blessed be thou ofthe Lord, I have done the commandment ofthe Lordi"

But surviving wall-writings such as the Chiddingly inscription suggest that the pious Elizabethan did indeed go to bed at night and wake in the morning in the written shadow of the Law: 'Therefore at night call unto minde / how thou the daye hast spent: / Praise God, if naught amisse thou finde: / if ought, betimes repent."?" Such admonitions, concerned as they are with testing, counting and timeliness, are over-determined in their early English context, posing both in their content and in themselves the crucial 66

question of whether there is ever time or place for repentance. Pace Calvin, the repetition of God's law within a predestined world is precisely superfluous; the wall-written prayer (and by extension any prayer) is reduced to the statement of an intention to pray - or to remember to pray.'?' What, after all, following Deuteronomy, should one write on posts, gates, and frontlets for the eyes? - nothing more nor less than the injunction to do so. But what has one done in doing this? The answer, even for Calvin, is nothing at all, for the only 'true decking', the one that makes us acceptable to God, is already to 'beare his Lawe in minde'. Calvin attempts to displace the carnal potential of the writing practices he endorses by displacing it first on to women (who he finds would do better to beautify their bodies, clothes, and houses with 'remembrance of Gods lawe' than with 'bracelets and other fine toyes'); and then on to the Jews, who in their use of mezzuzot and tefillin took an 'excellent lesson' and 'turnd it into a charme and sorcerie ... lyke to the Agnus Dei in popery, and such other geugawes as the papists hang about their necks'."? For Calvin, to believe in the efficacy of words in their material dimension is to commit precisely the idolatry that the passage warns against. So, even as he writes on his walls, the Reformed Christian must 'marke that God will not bee served by the wrytynge of some sentence of his lawe upon a post or a doore, or at the entry of a house', and undertake instead the impossible achievement of ensuring that that law is 'so engraven in our heartes, as it may never be wiped out again'.':" Impossibly, and therefore fruitfully, Reformed Christianity structures itself across the problem of the signifier, the problem that is the material dimension of language.

VII

The set of anxieties that graffiti has the power to cause within the differently constituted modern home finds powerful expression in a passage from Daniel (5: 5-30), here from the King James Bible: In the same hour came forth fingers ofa man's hand, and wrote over against the candles upon the plaister of the wall of the king's palace, and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote . .. and this is the thing that was written MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN ... This is the interpretation of the thing, MENE: God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. TEKEL: Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting. PERES: Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. .. In that night was Belshazzar King of the Chaldeans slain.

The sinister charge of this passage derives from the way in which it positions the coming of death as a truth at once too certain and too terrible to be known.l'" Belshazzar's magicians can read but cannot understand the writing on the wall: its interpretation is reserved for Daniel, famous in the Authorized version for his skill at the 'shewing of hard sentences and dissolving of doubts' (Daniel 5: 12). Mene is from the Hebrew root to count or number; Tekel from the root to weigh; Peres from the root to divide: each word can also signal a unit of money: a mena, a shekel, a fraction of a shekel. The inscription can thus be translated either as 'Counted: pounds, shillings, and pence' or as 'Counted: numbered, weighed, and divided'v'"" It is Daniel's correct interpretation of the inscription that instantiates its fatal meaning: in the same moment that the prophet speaks, Belshazzar is weighed and found wanting, his kingdom divided, his death sealed. Patricia Parker argues that the figure of the partition or wall is used in the Bible to evoke the deferred but relentlessly approaching

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end of days; and writing on the wall still figures for us, as it did for Belshazzar, the sinister and strangely collapsable hiatus between a sentence and its execution. l06 It is not death itself but the coming of death that has the power to transfix the terrified king: Belshazzar's unexplained end ('in that night was Belshazzar ... slain') is determined by his own fear of death, and figures what Otto Rank described as 'the strange paradox of the suicide who voluntarily seeks death in order to free himself of [an] intolerable thanataphobia'."? Cousin to the oracle, which drives its victims to the doom it seems to warn against, the writing in Belshazzar's palace operates within twentieth-century narratives of subjectivity as an instance of repression's capacity to fixate the subject at a particular site, where he or she awaits in terror the return of the repressed. The appearance of the mysterious writing on the wall has subsequently become a master parable in narratives of the uncanny. 108 Among the phenomena that produce intense feelings of being in the presence of the uncanny - 'that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar', as Freud puts it in his famous essay - are coincidences or repetition effects, which 'force upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable' (as when the reappearance in daily life of a certain number suggests itself as an indication of an allotted span of life); a hand cut off at the wrist (especially one able to move on its own); death, live burial, and the return of the dead.I'? The story of Belshazzar's feast, with its disembodied writing hand, its enigmatic inscription, and its numerical puns that seem both to predict and to bring about the king's death, underwrites all subsequent instances of writing on the wall, and adds its legendary freight to more localized effects of the uncanny (effects that in early modern England included the fact that walls were significantly friable, and were used as hiding places for live and dead bodies, charms, treasures, and documents).llo

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But a point Freud deems worthy of 'special mention' is that an uncanny effect is 'often and easily' produced when 'a symbol takes over the full functions and significance of the thing it symbolises'. For us, this uncanny inversion of the function of the symbol seems present wherever writing puts itself in the place of the text. So, in Donne's 'Valediction of my name, in the window', the graffiti signature appears to take over the function of permanency that it is supposed merely to illustrate: 'As no one point, nor dash, / Which are but accessaries to this name, / The showers and tempests can outwash, / So shall all times finde mee the same.' Here language seems to collapse into its sensible form - the name dies (because it cannot be where writing is) and yet lives on as a material trace. It is, however, a marked fact that in the age of Elizabeth, in spite of the Reformation concern over idolatry, language does not seem to be aspiring to full transparency, and is still tending to accord full - but not uncanny - presence to its own material supports. The possibility that a graphic trace is an ideational form within which the real and the represented is one and the same (a possibility embraced by all sixteenth-century wall-writing) is explicitly thematized by a painting recorded by Reader in Pittleworth Manor, Hants (illus. 16). This scheme comprises a pattern of pomegranates (one of the devices of the House of Aragon) and foliage, painted as if on a brocade tapestry which appears to hang in folds, like a curtain that could be withdrawn. Attached to the 'surface' of this imaginary cloth are a series of trompe l'oeil labels bearing sentences, including the following: 'Thus lyvyng all waye dred we death and diing life we doughte.' The sentiment is conventional, combining the scriptural admonition that our days are as a shadow on the earth, with the more stoic proposition 'Life is but a dream and death wakes it'. But its location here, within a painting whose purpose is to stage the contrafactual wish to pass through the surface of a wall, or, alternatively, to enter an

7°

16 Early sixteenth-century wall-painting from Pittleworth Manor, Hants.

imaginary deep space within it, allows itto comment on a representational technique that makes no distinction between exterior surface and interior meaning. For the curtain that hangs at Death's door is not a copy of something that exists elsewhere, but has come into being only here, where the real and the simulated show themselves to be one and the same. By the second half of the sixteenth century, plaster was made according to a process that produced intense heat, and columns of steam, from the admixture of water to limestone. It required the further addition of animal hair, and so offered a rich material and metaphorical field for those who wrote about, on, and in it. 1 1 1 Blood, charcoal, marking stones of all colours, smoke, lead, diamonds and glass also have consequential material properties of their own; and

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writing in each of these media could invoke the over-determined terms of 'shade' or 'shadow' to address the fact and consequence of its own inscription. For the shade or shadow is a trace or spectral form from which the substance has departed; it is the type of what is fleeting or delusive, and a figure for life itself. 112 Furthermore, the two terms shared a semantic field within which drawing and painting, prefiguration and following, displaying and hiding could not be distinguished from each other. 1I3 Using its own material status to signal and elaborate its recurrent themes of signature, death and the end of days, and their common tropes of flowers; bodies, wounds, shadows, farewells and graves, Tudor wall-writing was thus able to embrace and acknowledge the complex representational pleasures and anxieties that it found contained in even the graffito's most simple and paradigmatic instance, 'I was here'.

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TWO

Whitewash Consciousness occurs each time there is a surface such that it can produce what is called an image. That is a materialist definition. ]acques Lacan

In 'A Note Upon the "Mystic Writing Pad'" (1924) Freud remarked that, as aides memoires, writing surfaces are always limited in one of two ways. A writing surface that retains indelible marks (such as ink on paper) is 'soon exhausted', and will, moreover, store information long beyond the point at which it might be required again. A writing surface that may be wiped clean, such as chalk on slate, has neither problem, since it 'retains its receptive capacity for an unlimited time', while the notes upon it 'can be destroyed as soon as they cease to interest me, without any need for throwing away the writing-surface itself'. Its disadvantage, however, is that it cannot preserve a permanent trace: 'If I want to put some fresh notes on the slate, I must first wipe out the ones which cover it.'! As Derrida redacts Freud's argument: A sheet of paper preserves indefinitely but is quickly saturated. A slate, whose virginity may always be reconstituted by erasing the imprints on it, does not conserve its traces. All the classical writing surfaces offer only one of the two advantages and always present the complementary difficulty."

The purpose of Freud's meditation is to discover a writing apparatus he can use to model the relations between perceptions, consciousness,

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and memory in the Pcpt.-Cs. system.l He found what he was looking for in the 'mystic writing pad', a child's writing tablet from which notes could be magically removed by the simple expedient of lifting a sheet of semi-transparent paper from (and thus ending its contact with) a block of dark wax beneath it. Of particular interest to Freud is the fact that the writing that disappears easily and permanently from the paper 'is retained on the wax slab itself and is still legible in suitable light'. Combining the two incommensurable functions of receptivity and retention 'by dividing them between two separate but interrelated component parts or systems', the Mystic Pad thus models the relation between perception and memory as these function within 'the inexplicable phenomenon of consciousness'. In Writing and Difference, Derrida has much to say about Freud's argument, and the way in which it works towards, but stops short of, that 'cultural graphology' for whose emergence he was also calling in OfGrammatology. Here he concerns himself with the more restricted category of 'psychoanalytic graphology' as that comprises an analysis of the ways in which writing instruments hypercathect (call attention to), and so produce as objects ofconsciousness, particular perceptions and memories.' Keeping in play the status of the Mystic Pad as psychical model or exemplum - that is, as something that is itself an aid to those processes of consciousness it would describe - Derrida's essay finds in writing (in a techne or verbal tracearchetrace - that is at once a machine and an idea), that interface

between the neurological and the psychical which both founds and escapes the project of psychoanalysis. But the whitewashed wall could be argued to comprise a writing apparatus that fulfilled the functions of receptivity and retention long before Freud found them combined in the Mystic Pad. Tied to neither the spatial decorums (including those of defacement and erasure), nor to the mnemic capacities, of the paper page, it offers itself as an ideal object of 'the

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new psychoanalytic graphology'. For if the archetrace haunts the entire history of Western metaphysics - if, that is, perception is always subject to that organized mode of delay to which Derrida gives the name of writing - the new discipline would necessarily concern itself with historically and technologically specific experiences both of that delay, and of the modes of consciousness that can be predicated on it. Early modern wall-writing was, as I have demonstrated, ephemeral. Written in marking media that were in effect (though not necessarily) less permanent than ink on paper, it made its appearance on surfaces from which it could be either wiped clean or over-written; and its functions were in large part occasional. In her account of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century church graffiti, Doris [ones Baker suggested that part of the church fabric was often used as a 'parish noticeboard' from which erasures were made by water, scraping, or successive coats of limewash.> I imagine that similar procedures were followed with domestic walls, the occasional or regular deletion of whose contents allowed them to retain both their receptive capacities, and their ability to display information in such a way as to catch the eye, and activate attention or memory. It is true, of course, that writing, even in ink, can be 'erased' ('scraped out') from paper (for that matter, any writing that was not finally erasable would not be writing at all). As [onathan Goldberg has demonstrated, early modern writing instruments included a knife which might be used to remove ink from vellum or paper by scratching.' But such erasures are neither readily effected nor infinitely repeatable: they are possible, but not practical. The cutting or burning of pages aside, marks left by ink on paper are more easily erased by being crossed or blotted out. These techniques are not fully distinct from each other; and each may be said to preserve what it deletes. For while, as Calvin's translator Thomas Norton puts it,

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the blot seeks 'utterly ... to deface' writing 'out of mennes remembrance', to systematically blot the name of the Pope from the pages of a book is to produce a blot as that name.? Again, to cross or 'expunge' ('prick out') writing is to mark it, more or less memorably, for erasure: it is, in effect, to write it again. Clearly, then, paper does preserve writing that has been effaced from it. But neither blotting nor crossing can restore a clean writing surface, each, indeed, operates at the expense of its further receptivity. It seems that we are back at the problem outlined by Freud as the achilles heel of the mnemic apparatus: writing can be permanently retained, or regularly erased - but not on the same surface. But the whitewashed wall is a writing apparatus not entirely governed by the tension between these two functions. Whitewash is a composition of lime and water: in the sixteenth century its cognates include 'whiting', 'white-lime', 'size' (lime and water to which glue has been added) and plaster or 'pargett' (a mixture of water and gypsum used to cover walls and also, when mixed thickly, for work in relief). To 'wash' a wall in the period is to clean it not by removing what was on it, but by covering it with a fresh surface whitewash. Limewash does not restore the original writing surface, but creates a new one in the act ofobliterating the old. And crucially, beneath the new surface and whatever contents it may acquire, the original writing remains - which is why the whitewashed or pargetted wall is an emblem for hypocrisy. That such writing can be recovered is demonstrated by the work of today's conservators, who can now retrieve pre- and postReformation paintings from the whitewash, plaster and panelling that obscures them. I argued above that early modern wall-writing was a. practice that materially informed not only memory systems based on imagined interior 'places' but also the mental topography of the intellectual system that manifested itself in the keeping of

common-place books. But we can add to this that its practitioners had at their disposal a writing apparatus that gave specific material form, not only to such artificial memory aids, but also to that marking for attention of memories and perceptions that is consciousness itself. At least at the level of analogy at which Freud deployed the Mystic Pad, this would be the case whether or not the early modern English knew or intended that their graphic and pictorial work would one day re-emerge from the surfaces behind which it was hidden. In fact, however, the retentive, protective and reversible properties of plaster and whitewash (which today's conservators may use to re-cover, and so protect, fragile wall-paintings) were fully understood in Reformation England, where they could be used by priests, parishioners and householders to preserve, rather than to deface, prohibited images.f Eamon Duffy has already suggested that 'the reversibility of whitewashing was an established fact' both among iconoclasts and among those who resisted them: in the early 1580s 'some well-wishers' of the older tradition had rubbed at the whitewash covering a painting of the Passion of Christ in Chichester Cathedral so that it was now 'almost as bright as ever it was'; while the curate of Ashford in Kent was accused of having improperly destroyed a wooden font cover painted with popish images by causing it to be merely 'slubbered over with a white wash that in an hour may be undone', so that it stood 'like a Dianae's shrine for a future hope and daily comfort of old popish beldames and yong perking papists'." The whitewashed font cover suggests to its detractors the presence of a representational logic which could re-attach the affect of an image to the marks left behind by its destruction. But the 'daily comfort' of the old extends to become 'the future hope' of the young: recusent parishoners are comforted not only by the continued, though hidden, presence of the object of their veneration; but also by the thought that current preservation may lead to future restoration.

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Whitewash is not the only method of reversible erasure designed to meet the exigencies of the English Reformation: prohibited passages in books were lightly pasted over, or scored through so lightly that their original contents were unaffected; altar-stones and holy-water stoups were buried; saints' images were deprived of their identifying marks and asserted to be portraits of local benefactors. But as a surface from which data could be both erased and retrieved, the whitewashed wall subtends and improves on these methods, while its scope extends beyond moments of state or even self-censorship. To the extent that a wall can reproduce ('from within') writing that has once been erased from it, it provides a better model for consciousness than Freud's Mystic Pad.!'' Beyond this, however, it constitutes a writing apparatus whose relation to consciousness is more than analogical in early modern England. For, as we have seen, the scriptural precedents that governed the practice of wall-writing there - Deuteronomy 6: 4--9 and 11: 18-21; Deuteronomy 27: 2-3 (which contains Moses's command to the people to set up an altar of stones, 'and plaister them with plaister: and ... write upon them all the words of this law'); and Daniel 5: 5-30 - each understood the wall as the site of a hypercathexis (a writing) whose function was to draw attention to things already known. The whitewashed wall 'represents' consciousness (to use a term that vexed Freud) as the reactivation of memories and perceptions that have been stored within writing: it may be considered as the mystic but practical apparatus through which early modern consciousness appears to itself in an historically and psychically specific form.

THREE

Tattoo

It is the oddness of a structure that is at issue. [acques Lacan

According to Arnold Rubin, tattoo artist and theorist who popularized the term, for the past quarter-century the West has been enjoying a 'tattoo renaissance'; a movement characterized both by refinements of conception (such as the influence of Abstract Expressionism, and the introduction of the 'photo-realistic' tattoo, black graphic 'tribal' styles, Japanese designs and imagery adopted from the mass-media), and by technical developments such as single needle techniques, an extended palette and the refinement of procedure and equipment facilitated by the rise of mail-order suppliers, newsletters and conventions. Unlike earlier or less elite tattooists, artists of the tattoo renaissance may have professional art training and some association with the larger art world. They increasingly specialize in large-scale, custom designs and recognize and value each others' work. 'Being a tattoo artist', they say, 'is different from being a good tattooist." But the tattoo renaissance comprises not so much the rebirth or development of technique as the social relocation of a practice; the elevation of tattooing into a socially elaborated art form is coterminous with its gentrification. As a consequence, Western tattooing is now divided against itself in terms of class. On the one hand, it

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advances serious claims to be considered a 'high' art, whose products are governed by canons of taste and knowledge, and shown in galleries and museums. On the other hand, tattooing remains, in theory and in fact, a demotic practice whose products include prison- and home-made tattoos, as well as those done in commercial studios to more or less standard designs. The difference between 'art' tattooing and the 'rough neck, silly aspects' of the commercial trade is one on which tattoo artists such as Rubin insist." But they also acknowledge that this difference is not absolute. For tattoo art not only re-deploys the codified motifs of commercial practice (the 'international style'), but the perceived importance of tattoo as an artistic medium derives in part from its articulated deracination vis

a vis

middle-class aesthetic values. Tattoo art understands itself to

be, at some level, outre: like the European Renaissance itself, and similar movements before it, it is a movement predicated on a culture clash of which it is the reified effect. The re-engrossing of the scandalous affect that the middleclass projects on to its 'outlaws' has been a standard high cultural practice. In the case of tattooing, the results are predictable. To its own practitioners and clients, tattoo art now figures the domain of authenticity - of the properly expressive, and (as the precipitate of 'opposition') of the individual. So Rubin considers the tattoo to be the repository and expression of 'unconventional, individualistic' values;' while for Michael Bakaty and others it is 'the only form of human expression we have left that has magic to it. Everything else is academic.'4 Tattoo artists may even dismiss the work of commercial tattooists on the grounds that it is the derivative product of reproduction and commodification - procedures understood to be inimical to the work of art." Indeed, the desire to class tattooing among the arts drives some of its elite practitioners to read ritual, supernatural and therapeutic elements into their own work with the

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same lack of discretion that Walter Benjamin attributed to the early theorists of film. 6 But it is worth observing that the therapeutic effect that often accompanies the acquisition of a tattoo within our culture is explained by tattoo artists using intellectual protocols that have been borrowed, at least in part, from more established accounts of the ethical and therapeutic functions of the arts. Within tattoo's newly gentrified economy, its traditionally marginal social status and its association with ancient or primitive cultures only enhance its value as a form of expression, like graffiti, whose 'low' character allows it to function as a conduit for 'unconscious' or 'instinctive' forces. Here the archaic, pre-individual drives of the Freudian unconscious are re-interpreted, and given new valence as the creative 'drives' of individuals alienated from contemporary 'mass society'. Or, as Governor Jerry Brown testified at the opening of California's Tattoo Expo in 1982: Once the power of the tattoo [was] intertwined with those who chose to live beyond the norms of society ... Today the realm of the outlaw has been redefined: the wild places which excite the most profound thinkers are conceptual. 7

Under the aegis of the California Expo, tattoo put its 'wildness' (here troping, among other things, the middle-class erotics that attached to Brown) to work in support of the liberal-libertarian coalition represented by the State Governor. Tattoo's uncanny power to affront (and so arouse) the liberal subject is a power of horror that largely coincides with the special effect identified by Julia Kristeva under the name of 'abjection'." To the person without tattoos, this horror articulates itself in the first instance around the question of permanency. The 'problem' with tattoos, we say (as if we were all being forced to get one, this minute) is that they are indelible - 'You can never get a tattoo off.' The striking persistence

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of this complaint indicates its support within the social unconscious. The fantasy (since, even before laser technology allowed their removal, it was always possible to write over, and so change, a tattoo) is one that admits in the first instance to the negative possibility that the subject is named on the body. (The debate about tattooing is thus in part a debate about whether 'individuality' can survive certain modes of representation.) The suggestion that identity is constituted not in the depths but at the outer surface of the subject is experienced by the cartesian cogito as a type of claustrophobia: nominor

ergo sum.' So the thought of something sticking to the skin is ever a deep affront; even within a comic register it evokes Hercules trapped inside the poisoned shirt of Nessus. A protective covering that displaces and so destroys that which it should protect, the tattoo can be thought of as a poisoned (that is, poisoning) name: like other names, it wounds by threatening to reduce the subject to a function of itself. Tattoo artists and practitioners, on the contrary, understand their art as being 'anti-repressive'. Tattooing in prison is felt to be an affirmation that (at least) this body is yours; while artists such as Don Ed Hardy differentiate their practice from that of earlier American tattooists by invoking their own departure from the use of 'flash' or pattern sheets. Where once customers chose tattoos from such sheets and so 'had to fit their individual psyche into pre-congealed images that were often very out-of-date', today's tattoo artist functions as 'a kind of therapist: a vehicle to help people channel their unconscious urges to the surface'. 10 British tattooist Chinchilla argues that she can see, as her clients cannot, what 'crawls beneath their skin ... everything I ink on people is already inside them, their history, sleeping creatures or saints, I only open up the skin and let it out, succubus, cherub, bike, snake, Betty Boop with a dildo'.II It is at this moment in the tattoo renaissance - when tattooing comes to see

itself, in Kristeva's terms, as a form of semiotic writing - that women enter the field as its practitioners and customers. Arguing from an identity position predicated on the assumption that women have privileged access to the semiotic (that mode in which the drives of the pre-Oedipal phase manifest themselves through, but against the grain of, language) female tattoo artist [amie Summers was able to pull rank on the pro-feminist Hardy in the 1980s by complaining that, in spite ofhis own claims, his 'mastery oftechnique and tendency towards intellectualization' produced only 'highly accomplished surface decoration, rather than the revelation of interior states' which had come to be her own sole objective." This debate between Summers and Hardy demonstrates the extent to which tattoo artists can remain wedded to a classical, idealist aesthetic that is strikingly at odds with the nature of tattoo. To tattoo is precisely to 'decorate' the surface, to produce the skin as surface, to apprehend the contours of the body as that which vacillates between the psychic and the material. It is to suggest that, in the deft formulation of Michel Thevoz, 'there is no body but the painted body, and no painting but body painting';" It is because Chinchilla accords less privilege to 'inner depth' (and understands what depth there is as inhabited by such historically contingent forms as Betty Boop) that she is able to make unusually full account of the skin as a writing surface on which ideas are enmeshed in matter. Her formulation of the tattoo as an inner demon at once expelled and held at the border of the subject also provides a usefully precise figure for abjection. For in Kristeva's work, the abject is a boundary phenomenon. Neither inside nor outside, at once 'an excluded ground' and 'a border that has encroached upon everything', the abject is 'something rejected from which one does not part'v'" Both conceptually and in fact, a tattoo is caught in the same

impossible situation:

the defining feature of tattooing is that it is the making of indelible pigmented traces which are inside or underneath the skin ... behind what seems like a transparent layer ... The basic schema of tattooing is thus definable as the exteriorization of the interior which is simultaneously the interiorization of the exterior. 15

Lodged on the border between inside and outside, the tattoo occupies the no-place of abjection. Abjection can also be thought of as a boundary effect within the functioning of the psychic apparatus itself: as something midway between the procedures of symptom-formation (understood as the somatic expression of something repressed) and sublimation (the deflection, without repression, of a drive). This interim position between symptom production and sublimation is one that is attributed to the tattoo when it is understood as a self-inflicted wound - at once a mark that abjects the bearer, and an assertion of control over abjection.l'' One of Chichilla's customers stressed the therapeutic aspect of such wounding: 'I feel that what one does is ritualistically abrade the skin over the spot where a mark already existed. This, that rose through my muscle and psyche had always been there."? Here tattooing exemplifies Kristeva's definition of the artistic experience as something 'rooted in the abject which it utters and by the same token purifies'.18 At the frontier of what is 'assimilable, thinkable,' functioning to collapse the boundary between subject and object, tattooing is (to those who have no fear of names) an act of catharsis par excellence. However constructed, tattoo's claim to effectively represent the interior of the psyche is one of the things that permits its elevation into an art form in the West. Another is the irreducible authenticity - the aura - that a tattoo carries as a result of its 'unique existence at the place where it happens to be': the simple fact that because its

medium is the living body, a tattoo cannot be reproduced.'? (Of course, looked at from a different angle, the fact that tattoo takes the living body for its medium, and so proposes that there is nothing about that body or the person in it that is more unique than itself, is precisely what disqualifies it from being considered art.) But the special consequence of tattooing as an art medium - perhaps the radical principle of its function as art - may finally depend on its evocation of the geometrical concern that structures Kristeva's formulation of abjection, and may be said to comprise the simple proposition that is a figure in two dimensions. This figure may be variously thought of as one that is all surface, or one whose inside is also its outside. As a creature of the surface, a tattoo is an example of the first: as a disturbance to that surface, it is an instance of the second. Even where it is not deliberately recursive - a woman with a tattoo of a woman (with the tattoo of a woman) embracing deaththe tattoo is an image of regression without recession, a geometrical paradox that marks the impossible profundity of the surface on which it is inscribed;" In The Skin Ego, Didier Anzieu tests two dependent hypotheses: 'what if thought were as much an affair of the skin as of the brain? And what if the Ego - now defined as a Skin Ego - had the structure of an envelope?' Anzieu begins his argument (one he sustains through the display of an astonishing and convincing array of cutaneous fantasies) with the observation that the organ of consciousness, the cortex (Latin: 'bark', 'shell', or 'rind') not only sits as 'a sort of cap' on the white matter of the brain, but is embryonically a development of the surface of the early foetus, an introverted and reticulated 'skin'. 'We are faced then, with a paradox: the centre is situated at the periphery.':" Anzieu notes this paradox is replicated in Freud's model of the psychic apparatus, according to which the ego 'is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a

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surface';" To cite, as Anzieu does, Paul Valery, 'We burrow down in vain, doctor, we are ... ectoderrn l'V

Valery's proposition 'C'est qu'il y a de plus profond dans l'homme, c'est la peau' has important resonance within the work of reconception that constitutes modernism and post-modernism. It is a proposition illustrated by the recurrence of the figures of fold, veil and fan of Derrida's Mallarrne; as well as in Derrida's own important concept of the hymen ('the fold in a lining by which it is, out of itself, in itself, at once its own outside and its own inside; between the outside and the inside, making the outside enter the inside and turning back the antre or the other upon its surface'); in the rhizome and fold of Deleuze and Guattari; and in Lyotard's work on discourse and figure. 24 But the uncanniness of the profound surface whose primary figure is the skin is not new in modernism: indeed, one might consider it to be one result of the replacement of the 'flat' plane of medieval representation with the perspectival space of the Renaissance. So Michelangelo's famous portrait of the artist as a flayed skin on the wall of the Sistine Chapel (1535), and Juan de Valverde's drawing of an anatomized figure carrying his own pelt (1560) seem, today, to be freighted with surplus violence, one that

resides in the revelation of two specific facts." The first, revealed by the successive removal of surfaces that comprises the art of anatomy, is that the body is nothing but surface. The second is that while death happens in three dimensions, the skin, in two, can survive." Within this new, Euclidean space, the two-dimensional skin functions as a material remainder that haunts the 'objective' spatial depth within which the Cartesian subject is driven to locate itself. The uncanny aspect of the skin as something that is always both dead and alive - the dead but sensate surface from which all psychic experience is finally derived - may be confronted in the comparatively recent story of Alfred Corder, sentenced to be hanged 86

and dissected for his notorious murder of Maria Marten in 1828. After death Corder's body was skinned, tanned and used to bind a presentation copy of the printed account of his life and crime.? So treated, the skin becomes the material embodiment of abjection. When, in tattoo, the skin gives its own strange half-life over to a newly 'living' image, it similarly asks and complicates the question of what becomes of our mortal envelope, either at the Resurrection or at the morgue. But there is still another dimension to the intellectual distress for which tattoo stands as a figure. For although we say, with horror, 'a tattoo lasts forever' - as if, within our cultural or psychic economy, permanence were a recognized evil- most tattoos last only as long as the body endures, which is to say not as long as ink on paper. It may be that disapprobation of tattoo's permanence has a political, as well as a psychic, dimension. For where classical economic theory recognizes three types of property; the intellectual, the real or 'immobile' (land) and the moveable (chattels), tattoo announces itself as a fourth type: a property that is at once mobile and inalienable. And here inalienability shows itself to be a disconcerting quality in property, as if not only the value but the propriety of property depended on its capacity to be exchanged. As is suggested by the popular narrative of the tattooed man who ends up on the wall of an unscrupulous art dealer, a tattoo is a property that, for a variety of ethical and practical reasons, cannot be sold. 28 Tattoo thus readily connotes a blockage in the free circulation of commodities that is understood to constitute economic health in the West: it is partly in this capacity that it has always been used to figure both the improvidence of the class that does not native peoples.

posse~s,

and the culpable economic naivety of

I I

Pain and history seem tied together. Tattoo International

According to popular tradition and the OED, the word 'tattoo' made its first English appearance in James Cook's account of his voyages to the Polynesian basin, published in London in 1769. Historians locate the origins of contemporary European tattooing in Cook's return from his South Sea islands voyage of 1774 with the tattooed Tahitian known to the British as Omai; the 'noble savage' whose appearance sparked a tattooing vogue among the English aristocracy.'? It is one of the gaps in the history of Western tattooing that the movement of tattooing from the centre to the margins of British culture has been assumed (as a 'trickle-down' effect), rather than documented. Equally unaccounted for in the history as it stands, is the alacrity with which certain groups of Europeans, from ships' crews to the monarchy, apparently adopted the practice in the eighteenth century. For the Europeans had already encountered and documented tattooing in the Americas, Asia and Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - in these earlier instances, or so the account runs, without being tempted to try it for themselves." The most useful recent account of the history of tattooing in Europe is Alfred Gell's brilliant analysis of tattooing as an encounter phenomenon. Gell argues that Western notions about tattooing derive from the overlay of perceptions of tattooing as a 'stigma of the class Other' (the tattooed sailor or criminal) with 'perceptions of the practice as characteristic of the ethnic Other - the tattooed native'. But Gell is concerned with Western tattooing only insofar as its practices and assumptions inform surviving European descriptions of tattooing in Polynesia; and he follows standard accounts of Western

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tattooing when he begins his own with the assumption that 'tattooing, as it is now practiced in western countries, originated as a consequence of European expansion into the Pacific';" I propose, instead, that tattooing was occurring in Europe at the same time that European travellers documented its presence in the Americas, Asia, Africa and later in the Pacific. The possibility that Polynesian tattooing reinflected, rather than began, an indigenous practice of European tattooing will not in itself explain the particular social patterns that it has subsequently assumed in the West. But it may enable us to see tattooing more clearly, both as the symptom of a colonial encounter, and as an instance of a cultural practice that is typically under-registered by the societies in which it occurs. Performance artist Genesis P-Orridge recently outlined a selfconsciously 'alternative' history for British tattooing: The Romans found the Britons covered in ... tattoos. The heritage of the pagan Britons was to be heavily tattooed, but of course we're not told of our tribal, integrated, celebratory culture in school. The history has been stolen and turned into a perversion called Christianity.

Like Jamie Summers, P-Orridge understands tattooing as an instance of the elevation of the semiotic into a principle of signification: the tattoo or cut is a 'symbolic key' that 'makes you open to your own unconscious'. P-Orridge goes on to argue that societies that practise tattooing and scarification have been and will be characterized by a benign relational ethics, and to suggest that, before the coming of the Romans, the Britons maintained a balanced relationship with the environment.f For Britons both ancient and New Age, it seems, tattooing evidences man's proper and ethical acknowledgement of the semiotic processes of life and death. This 'alternative' history of British tattooing is not in serious

conflict with the accounts that locate its genesis in the eighteenthcentury contact with Polynesia: there is room for both in a history of Britain. But it does bring into view an important set of meanings that structure demotic tattooing in Britain today, where 'Celtic' designs may be used to articulate engagement with, for example, the concerns of Scottish nationalism, or with the particular type of environmentalism associated with Wicca. Besides, as it happens, tattoo's alternative history is largely correct. In the years leading to the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne, the antiquary William Camden (newly interested to argue for the tribal unity of the British people) marshalled evidence from classical and other sources to prove that both the Picts and the insular Celts had been 'painted peoples', set apart from later invaders by 'their staining and colouring of their whole bodies' with woad, and 'their cutting,pink-

ing, and pouncing of their flesh'.33 'Listing', 'rasing', 'pricking', 'pinking' and 'pouncing' are the interlinked English terms for tattooing before the middle of the eighteenth century: Samuel Purchas says of the Algonquian Indians that 'the women' ... with an Yron, pounce and raze their bodies, legs, thighes, and armes, in curious knots and portraytures of folwes, fishes, beasts, and rub a painting into the same, which will never out'.3 4 The English term 'pounce' was associated with writing as well as with face-painting: pounce is a powder used dust cheeks, transfer embroidery designs through a perforated pattern, or prepare parchment to receive writing. To pounce may be to bruise, puncture, emboss, or engrave; to slash or jag the edges of a cloth for ornament; or to polish or erase. A pounce may be an engraving instrument, a tattoo, or a 'pink'. Pinking (the cutting out of holes, figures or letters, to display skin, undergarments or linings of a different colour) is a mode of ornament readily associated with excess; its depravity (which consists in the interesting proposition that is a superfluous

9°

taking away) is regularly adduced in late sixteenth-century attacks on sartorial excess. Finally a 'list' or 'race' is a slit or scratch, a cut that marks. But to rase is also to remove by scraping or rasping, to erase. Remarkable in this early modern constellation of terms for tattoo is the fact that they each propose a logic of the mark whereby one can mark by detraction, detract by addition. In this they register one of the formal paradoxes that structures today's aversion to tattooing, as well as to graffiti. In his Historie of Great Britaine (161 I), a book whose frontispiece depicts a tattooed ancient Briton (illus. 17), John Speed echoed Camden's account of ancient British tattooing: Solinus likewise speaking of the Britaines saith, their Country is peopled by Barbarians, who by means of artificial incisions of sundry formes, have from their childhood divers shapes of beasts incorporate upon them; and having their markes deeply imprinted within their bodies, looke how their growth for stature, so doe those pictured characters likewise increase ... These skarres by Tertullian are tearmed Britannorum stigmata, The Britaines markes ... and of this use of paint-

ing both the Britaines had their primitive derivation, and the Picts (a branch of British race) a long time after, for that their accustomed manner, were called Picti by the Romanes, that is, the painted people.v

Like Solinus and Camden before him, and many after him, Speed is arrested by the paradox of the tattoo as an image fixed on a moving, in this case expanding, surface.3 6 Later in his account he reproduces and glosses Claudian's description of Caesar's military triumph over the Picts - 'Perlegit exanimes Picto moriente figuras: On dying Picts he reads the breathless shapes, as if the Beasts so lively portraited on them, seemed to lie dead together with the murdered bodies of the Picts.'37 Redolent of sympathy for the Picts, Claudian's proposition, underlined by Speed, is that as the tattooed image 'lived' on the skin, so it should 'die' in a gesture of respect for the body that supported it.

17 Portrait of an ancient Briton showing tattoo work, from the frontispiece in John Speed, The Historic ofGreat Britaine (London: G. Humble, 1627).

The empathy of the proposal depends on its acknowledged impossibility; an impossibility borrowed wholesale from the strange object (one that may be equally thought of as a dead image on a live skin, or as a live image on a dead skin) that is a tattoo. The larger question of a tattoo changing as the body changes, expanding or contracting in all its parts without entirely altering their relation to one another, is a formal proposition of some consequence: one dealt with in the field of geometric topology under the rubrics of diffiomorphism and homeornorphism; and one that Lacan uses in his discussion of anamorphosis to illustrate his formulation of the gaze as something excessive to perspectival optics. 38 But in the work of Speed and his contemporaries, the formal proposition of an object that moves and grows, but can never change, takes on a primarily political dimension: one within which the tattoo comes to stand as the sign of the irreducible difference between Europe and its others. For the antiquaries and their sources, tattooing and body painting among the ancient Britons went hand in hand with the further distinguishing tribal practices of gynarchy and nakedness. The fact that the Picts were, as Tacitus puts it, 'subject to the government of women', was fodder to the antiquarian argument that the Picts were descended from the ancient Britons: 'neither [tribe] marking] any distinction of sex for government, or exclud[ing] women from bearing sceptre.'39 Writing at the end of Elizabeth I's long reign, Camden and Speed may have felt there was nothing especially barbaric in the ancient British tolerance for female rule.t" But when he addresses himself to the legendary nakedness of the Picts and Britons, Speed follows his sources in concluding that his ancestors went naked through their ignorance of cloth manufacture and other rudimentary arts of civilization, as well as through a desire to display their body markings. In Speed's account, that is, the tattoo is the mark of the Briton as barbarian. 93

Even now, little is known about Pictish civilization and culture: a few inscrutable inscriptions aside, written sources are more or less limited to classical accounts of the Picts as primitive barbarians, and (for the period after the conversion) the sparse comments of Adoman and Bede." But these sources are almost unanimous in their claims that both the Picts and other ancient British tribes tattooed; and the recent discovery by archaeologists of Scythian and Pazyrak bodies with extensive tattoo work may indicate that the element of fantasy in classical accounts of British tattooing resides less in the assertion that the barbarians tattooed, than in the implication that the Roman soldiers did not.t" The accuracy of the record aside, Speed's apparent purpose in invoking ancient British tattooing ('to propose unto the eyes of our now glorious and gorgeous Britaines, some generall draughts of our poor and rude progenitors') is to demonstrate the ancient identity of the British 'race': a national group marked and set aside by its use of tattoo and body painting.f But the tattoo also marks a different, and conflicting, national concern. Housed in tents, dressed in skins, and eating sparely; ignorant of God, agriculture and the value of gold, the Picts of the antiquarian account bear striking resemblance to the New World inhabitants whose existence was fast becoming a focus of British attention at the end of the sixteenth century. Under the pressure of this moment of encounter, the figure of the tattooed Briton finds itself pressed into the service of the newly emergent discourse of comparative ethnography. The first volume of Theodore de Bry's famous work America I (Frankfurt, 1590), published simultaneously in Latin, English, French and German, reprints Thomas Harriot's account of the English expedition to Roanoke of 1585, A briefe and true report of the new

found land of Virginia (London, 1588), together with 13 illustrative engravings.t" Largely based on paintings of the South-eastern Algonquians made by John White, artist recorder to the first Roanoke

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expedition, the series also includes two engravings based on the work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, artist to the earlier French expeditions to Florida of 1562-5.45 A fuller set of Le Moyne's images of the Timucua people, with his written commentary on them, and his own account of the attempted French colony, was published by de Bry as America 11 (Frankfurt, 1591).46 White and Le Moyne both recorded the practice of tattooing in their paintings of the native Americans. At least as engraved by de Bry, Le Moyne used tattooing in his paintings to posit an unexpected similarity between the body decoration of the Timucua, and the slashed, pinked and rased clothing of the French (illus. 18). Le Moyne's account of Laudonniere's attempt to establish a Huguenot foothold in Florida is unusually sensitive to the impact made on the Timucua by the arrival of the French. So while he points out to his reader that 'istos Regulos, eorumque uxores, corporiscutem puncturis quibusdam varia picturas imitantibus ornare' ['All these rulers and their wives decorate the skin of their bodies with a kind of tattooing, in imitation of various painted designs'], Le Moyne also records that the Timucua were 'somewhat astonished when they noticed the difference between the smoothness and softness of our bodies and theirs, and the unfamiliar clothing we wore' .47 In Le Moyne's work, the difference between the Europeans and the Native Americans is produced through the proposition of an underlying similarity: European and American figures are often represented in very close juxtaposition, or in poses that reflect each other (illus. 19). The paintings are vulnerable to the charge that they 'idealized' (that is, 'Europeanized') their American subjects: the majority of them were probably reconstructed from memory following Le Moyne's dramatic escape from the colony; and they are not held to be of the same ethnographical value as the work of his contemporary John White. 48 But Le Moyne, whose characteristic

9S

18 Theodore de Bry (after a painting by [acqu es Le Moyne de Morgues), detail from 'In cerui exuvio Soli consecrando solennes ritus ' [The offering of a stag to

th e sun '] , engr avin g from America Il (Frankfurt, 1591).

' 9 D e Bry (after a painting by Le Moyne de Morgu es), detail from 'Excubitorum socordia ut pun itur' [T he execution of negligent sent ries'], eng ra ving from America /I.

style is that of a gentle but sustained mannerism, idealizes European as well as Native American figures; and does so as part of a deliberative inquiry into the question of what it means to be civilized. So he advises readers that Christians have much to learn from the Timucua in terms of temperance, and 'deserve to be handed over to these base uncivilized people and brutish creatures to learn restraint' .49 The proposition that civilized peoples may learn civility from the uncivilized is a conventional piece of social criticism: it is nevertheless part of a serious attempt to theorize the ethical consequences of a colonial encounter. John White did not include the arrival of the Europeans in his record of Roanoke: only two surviving paintings show scenes of the colonists, and those are of Puerto Rico. 50 Thomas Harriot, with whom White worked closely to compile a full account of the area of the Roanoke landings, took a markedly functionalist view of Algonquian culture. The first edition of his Briefe and true report ofthe new

found land of Virginia was addressed to the English 'Adventurers, Favourers, and Welwillers of the action', and assures them that 'in respect of troubling our inhabiting and planting, [the Algonquians] are not to be feared; but ... shall have cause both to feare and love us, that shall inhabite with them' (Sig. Er v), Arguably, it was precisely Harriot's and White's refusal to concern themselves with their own relationship to the Algonquians that renders their account of Native American culture more ethnographically accurate than that of Le Moyne. White's illustrations corroborate Harriot's account of body painting and tattooing among the Carolina Algonquians: according to de Bry's comments on the images, 'the Princes of Virginia ... ether pownes, or paynt their forehead, cheeks, chynne, bodye, armes, and legges'; while Secotoan women of rank are similarly 'pownced', with the addition of a 'chaine' around their necks, 'either

98

pricked or paynted'Y De Bry's apparent uncertainty as to whether the body markings of the various Algonquian tribes were 'pricked' and ' pownced ' or 'painted ' has led Paul Hulton to argue that 'tattooing was probably confined to the women, while painting was used widely by both sexes'Y In fact de Bry's hesitation concerns the distribution rather than the incidence of tattooing among the men and women of the different Algonquian groups; and he argues further that the Algonquian warriors had 'marks rased on their backs' for purposes of identification. An engraving of these marks, together with a key linking them to the names of different chiefs, is the final image in the series illustrating 'the fashions of the people' in America I (Sig. D4v) (illus. 20).

20

De Bry (aft er a painting by John White), 'Aliq uot Herourn Virgini ae Notae',

or 'The Marks of sund rye of th e C heif mene of Virginia', engraving from Ame1'ica I (Fr ankfurt, 1590).

99

De Bry then concludes the volume with 'Some Picture of the Pictes which in the olde tyme did habite one part of great Bretainne', in order, as he says, 'to shew that the Inhabitants of great Britain have bin in times past as savage as those of Virginia' (Sig. El). In his introductory remarks to these engravings, which show three heavily tattooed Picts, and two untattooed ancient Britons 'from neighbouring tribes', de Bry implies the images were copied by John White from 'a oolld English cronicle' (Sig. El). The engravings are accompanied by a commentary which details the weapons, ornaments, hairstyles and body decorations of the Picts; and explains, in accordance with the engravings, that the Picts 'did paint all their bodye'; the men affecting suns, monsters and snakes (Sig. Erv); while the women wore the moon and stars, figures of animals and abstract designs (Sig. E2v). But the image which was to prove the most memorable to his contemporaries was de Bry's Truue picture of a

yonge dowgter ofthe Pictes, an engraving which shows a female nude wearing a sword, holding a spear, and 'painted over all the body ... of sondrye kinds of flours, and of the fairest that they cowld feynde' (illus. 21).53 Pace de Bry, this image at least is based on the work not of John White, but of Jacques Le Moyne; whose painting, A Young

Daughter ofthe Picts (watercolour and gouache on vellum, 25.7 x 18,4 cm) is now in the Yale Center for British Art (illus. 22). This painting is anything but a historical record of Pictish life. In fact, executed as it was in the same years in which Camden was working on his account of the tattooed ancient Britons, A Young Daughter ofthe Picts functions to destabilize the antiquarian record by producing, in most improbable guise, an image of one of its cherished, but tentative ideas. To the extent that this image pretends to be an objective, ethnographic record of ancient British life, it also functions to display the wilfulness of ethnography itself. Le Moyne's Pict stands to the front of a landscape, in the mid100

distance of which can be seen the people and, improbably enough, the buildings of a small but prosperous Pictish town. She stands in a relaxed but artificial pose, her face turned half right, her body half left; her right hand on her hip, she carries a slim spear in the left. Her carefully tended hair falls in virgin profusion down her back; while except for an elegant iron necklet and girdle, from the last of which a curving sword depends from the impossible support of a golden chain, she is naked. Most striking, of course, is that the young Pict's body is painted or tattooed from neck to ankle with a variety of flowers, among which Paul Hulton has identified the single and double peony, delphinium, hollyhock, heartsease, double columbine, orange lily, tazetta narcissus, cornflower, rose campion, yellow-horned poppy, mourning iris, tulip and marvel of Peru.l" Hulton points out that, when the painting was made, the last three varieties had only recently been introduced to Western Europe from America and the Balkan peninsula. He concludes 'it was anachronistic indeed of Le Moyne to adorn a Pictish maiden with such newly arrived flowers'. 55 But Le Moyne, author of a volume of woodcuts of beasts, birds and plants intended for decorative patterns, and responsible for a large group of exquisite watercolour drawings of plants (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), would certainly have known what he was doing in decorating the body of an ancient Briton with the marvel of Peru. The deliberate anachronism is one in a series of gestures designed to mark the wit of this thoroughly mannerist painting. In its entirety, Le Moyne's painting constitutes a series of visual and verbal puns, ranging from a joke concerning the impropriety of 'painting' (touching) a nude; to a meditation on the sixteenth-century English word 'pink', which signifies not only a tattoo, beauty, or excellence, but also a flower. 56 As a 'pink', the young Pict is herself an instance of the flors florum, the 'flower of flowers' which is the conventional floral trope for heavenly and / or earthly love.V In its 101

21

De Bry (after a painting by Le Moyne de Morgues), Virginis Pictae icon Ill, or

The Truue picture ofa yonge doiogter ofthe Pictes, engraving from America I .

22 Le Moyne de Morgues, A Young Daughterofthe Picts,c. 1585-8, watercolour and gouache on vellum. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven .

insistent proposition that woman is like a flower - a proposition which involves both a reversal between form and content, and a selfconscious refusal to distinguish between the real and the figural- Le Moyne's painting reveals itself as the painting not of a woman, but of metaphor itself. Its purpose, in brief, is to evoke admiration for the impossible achievements of pictorial representation.

A Young Daughter ofthe Picts was painted in London c. 1585-8, while Le Moyne was living in Blackfriars as a Huguenot refugee. While the painting may, Paul Hulton suggests, owe something in style to the miniatures of Hilliard and Oliver, in conception there is little like it among contemporary English paintings.T Certainly Le Moyne's wit was lost on his peers, or at least hidden from them by de Bry, who bought the painting from Le Moyne's widow, and

engraved it as an illustration of the historical appearance and manners of the Picts. De Bry's elliptical comment on the engraving may indicate his own reservations about this use of Le Moyne's image: according to him, the daughters of the Pict were 'painted over all the body, so much that noe men could not faynde any different, yf they had not use of another fashion of paintinge, for they did paint themselves of sondrye kinds of flours, 'and of the fairest that they could fende'. Like Le Moyne, who had suggested that Timucuan tattooing was done 'in imitation of various painted designs', de Bry is uncertain how to distinguish between tattooing and the use of body paint. But the larger problem he is facing here is that, according to his own evidence, girls are tattooed with flowers, women with animals and planets. The paradox was given sharper formulation by Speed, who, in reproducing four of de Bry's engravings, two of the Picts and two of neighbouring British tribes, added tattoo work to the female ancient Briton. Speed comments:

1°4

By these varieties of picturing (if some have not misinformed us out of their alleged ancient Authors) those people so distinguished themselves, that their married women were knowne by ha ving pictured on their shoulders, elbowes, and knees, the heads of some four beasts, as Lions, Gryphons, etc. On their belly, the Sunne spreading his beames: on their Pappes, Moones and Starres etc. On their Armes, thighes, and legges, some other fancies of their owne Choice. But for their Virgines, their whole body was garnished over with the shapes of all the fairest kinds of flowers and herbes; which (to speak indifferently) could but yield, though a strange, yet no unpleasing aspect ... yet, this scruple will not easily be removed (if it be true, that from their childhood their prints increased with their bodies) how those, who being Virgins, had no prints but of hearbes and flowers, becoming Wives, were so easily transformed into Beasts or heavenly creatures.P

A marginal note identifies the source of possible 'misinformation' as 'the Appendix to Harriot's Virginia'; all the same, Speed is happy enough to reproduce and further disseminate the error, which now takes the form of a conundrum. A tattoo is forever, a virgin is not: a tattooed flower may grow with the body, but it cannot grow into an animal or star. Standing, in Speed's account, in the place that Derrida calls the hymen ('Neither future nor present, but between the two'), the daughter of the Pict suggests not so much the developmental trajectory of ancient or primitive peoples, but their irrevocably barbarian status. Looking back over Britain's hybrid past, Camden had been moved to take stock of his present moment: Since that for so many ages successively ensuing, we are all now by a certain ingraffing or commixtion become one nation, molified and civilised with Religion, and good Arts, let us mediate and consider, both what they were, and also what we should be. 60

IOS

In his comments on the figure of the young female Pict, Speed introduces a wrinkle into Camden's account of the progress of British civilization, using the isotopic property of the tattoo (which may grow, but cannot change) to illustrate the impossibility of getting from past to present, or from America to Europe, while remaining the same. In so doing he raises the spectre of an incommensurability that is no longer confined, as Le Moyne confined it, to the structure of the signifier, but has become instead a question of cultural codes. Within the terms of the uneven cultural grammar that is the ground on which the early modern antiquarians began to work out a discourse of British national sentiment, the tattooed ancestor stands for a barbarian past that is at once acknowledged and disavowed. That tattooing, the 'Britannorum stigmata' as Camden calls it, is the fetish permitting this avowal-that-is-not-one explains, I think, the curious combination of levity and anxiety with which tattoos are treated in the antiquarian account, as they have been treated ever since. But the fact that the early modern English described tattooing in other times and places as a foreign practice, one whose technologies and functions were unknown within their own culture, should not be taken as evidence that they did not tattoo themselves. For pace Camden, and others after him, tattooing survived the coming of the Romans and Christianity to Britain. Famously, tattooing is prohibited in Leviticus 19: 28 ('You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you'). But in his letter to the Galatians 6: 17, St Paul seems to suggest that tattooing is an acceptable sign of Christian commitment; one that may, indeed, be preferable to circumcision: 'For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision ... From henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.' The practice of branding or tattooing for Jesus was recorded by the fifth-century Greek 106

historian Procopius of Gaza; by the seventeenth-century traveller Fynes Moryson; and by Emile Durkheim and others as a practice still extant within the Eastern church in the twentieth century." Reviewing the evidence for tattooing in medieval Irish and HibernoLatin literature, Charles MacQuarrie concludes that tattooing in medieval Europe had a bifurcated set of associations. On the one hand it was associated with the wounds of Christ (with what, after St Francis, came to be known as the stigmata) and with the writing that appears on Christ's thigh in Revelations 19:16; on the other it was associated with paganism and outlawry." In 786

AD

Adrian's

Papal Legates reported tattooing among members of the church in Northumbria; an 'injury of staining' ('tincturae injuriam') they condemned if done for purposes of pagan superstition, but were prepared to allow if undergone for the sake of Christ. 63 William of Malmesbury stressed the second, derogated meaning of tattoo when he described the English at the time of the Norman conquest 'laden with golden bracelets, their skin tattooed with coloured designs' [armillis aureis brachia onerati, picturatis stigmatibus cutem insigniti]; and went on to suggest that they imparted the barbaric practice to the invaders. 64 But throughout the medieval period it was common practice for pilgrims to have themselves tattooed in Jerusalem, returning home bearing indelible marks as evidence both of their journey and of their commitment to the service of God. The Jerusalem tattoo was a common sight in fifteenth-, sixteenth- and even seventeenth-century Europe. As the English traveller George Sandys recorded in his eye-witness account, 'They use to mark the Arms of Pilgrims, with the names of Jesus, Maria, Ierusalem, Bethlehem, the Ierusalem Crosse, and sundry other characters.f? Although the Reformation technically put an end to pilgrimages from Protestant countries, travellers continued to make the difficult journey to Jerusalem from Scotland and England. Protes1°7

tants though they were, the majority went on to receive tattoos, either at the site of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, or in Bethlehem, which seems to have been something of a tattoo centre. 66 According to Edward Terry, who was with him when he died in India, Thomas Coryate had had a Jerusalem cross put on his left wrist, and a cross, three nails and the inscription Via, Veritas, Vita on the right while in Jerusalem. Coryate evidently wore his tattoos with pride, understanding them as a type of stigmata, as Terry recounts: All these impressions were made by sharp Needles bound together, that pierced only the skin, and then a black Powder put into the places so pierced, which became presently indelible Characters, to continue with him so long as his flesh should be covered with skin: And they were done upon his Arms so artificially, as if they had been drawn by some accurate Pencil upon Parchment. This poor man would pride himself very much in beholding of those characters, and seeing them would often speak those words of St Paul, written to the Galatians, Gal 6. I 7 (though far besides the Apostles meaning) I bear in my body the marks ofLord [esus."

Fynes Moryson and his brother, who visited Bethlehem in the company of some French pilgrims, took pains to avoid getting tattooed, since it was a procedure they associated with the Roman church: And when our consorts at Bethlehem printed the signe of the Crosse with inke and a pen-knife upon their armes, so as the print was never to bee taken out, wee would not folow them in this small matter, but excused our selves, that being to passe home through many kngdomes, we durst not beare any such marke upon our bodie, whereby wee might bee knowne.i'''

But another Scotsman, William Lithgow, one of [ames I's courtiers, had no such qualms, and received extensive tattoo-work in Jerusalem.

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There he elaborated a standard pattern (a Jerusalem cross) with some devices of his own designed to celebrate the union of the Scottish and English crowns: In the last night of my staying at Jerusalem, which was at the holy grave, I remembring that bounden duty, and loving zeale, which I own unto my native Prince; whom I in all humility (next and immediate to Christ Jesus) acknowledge, to be the supreme head, and Governour of the true Christian and Catholicke Church; by the remembrance of this obligation, I say, I caused one Elias Bethleete, a Christian inhabitour of Bethleem, to ingrave on the flesh of my right arme, The neverconquered Crowne of Scotland, and the nowe inconquerable Crowne of England, joyned also to it; with this inscription, painefully carved in letters, within the circle of the Crowne, Vivat Iacobus Rex. 69

In the 1640 edition of his text, which he dedicated to Charles I, Lithgow included a woodcut illustration of his tattooed cross and crown, and described a third tattoo which he now claimed to have had added beneath them (illus. 23): Returning to the fellow two pisasters for his reward, I fixed these lines for King James Long may he live, and long may God above Confirm, reward, increase his Christian love: That he (bless'd king of men) may never cease To keep this badge, the sacred prince of peace. And there's the motto of his maiden crown Haec nobis invicta miserunt, ne' er won.?"

Lithgow's tattoo is particularly interesting in that it is partially detached from its religious context as it matches Cross with Crown, and the name of Christ with that of James I ('Prince of Peace'). In the figure of William Lithgow, returning tattooed to the

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Tb. Arms tI lmt/4lIrI.

23 William Lithgow's tattoos : a Jerusalem cross and the united crowns of Scotland and England, from his The Totall discourse, ofthe Rare Adventures etc. (London: J. Oakes, 1640).

Kinglo:fllff ~~l'!Jl" ~,

.

English court, we can no longer refuse to recognize the Renaissance tattoo. Our certainty that the British did not tattoo themselves during the early modern period marks us as the descendants of Camden and Speed, British men and women for whom tattoo is visible as the mark of an ethnic status we have long claimed, as a nation, to have outgrown. If the tattoo now has a generalizable function across different cultures it is precisely to stand as the mark of 'foreignness': Gell notes that at the moment of encounter, the Polynesians thought 110

of tattooing as a foreign practice - as one adopted, for example, from a different island in the archipelago, or from the European sailors who, increasingly tattooed, moved among them." The tattoo may be thought to have achieved its status as the mark of strangeness or barbarity by force of analogy, since it is itself caused by the introduction of a foreign body under the skin. As such, it stands as a ready figure for the border skirmishing that defines conceptual relations between the inside and the outside of social groups, as well as between the inside and the outside of the body. Such formulations, however, depend on an historically specific, Cartesian, conception of the embodied self, and its relation to the signifier; and may be less pertinent when applied to the subjects of early modern Europe. To those who witness it from the outside (that is, from positions of historical, cultural, or social distance), the tattoo appears as a scandalously prosthetic act of naming - one that labels, rather than divines, the essence of a person or thing. So when Harriot argues that the Algonquian warriors wear tattoos 'whereby it may be knowen what Princes subjects they bee', the warriors appear to us to be dispossessed of their capacity for self-determination even as their identity is recognized.?" Here the tattoo marks the self as foreign because it forces an encounter with the fact that names support (indeed constitute) the identity of the subject. To the extent that the early modern English were more at home with the importance of names than we have since become, they were also more at home with tattooing; more able, that is, to read it as one naming practice among many. Speed, for example, readily imagines the Picts' tattoos as the honorific mark of rank - the 'badges of their Noblenes, thus endamasked'; while Simon Forman, the Elizabethan astrologer, branded himself on the left arm and right breast with the astrological 'characters' that governed his destiny, in order, as he said, to 'better his constellation'F' It could be said that in early modern III

England all men and women are marked, because the operations of the names that possess were still understood. Names cause identity retroactively: within a culture that does not resist this fact they may, after all, divine the truth of what they label. The seventeenth-century identification of tattooing as something foreign or barbaric heralds the replacement of this culture and its naming practices with one that newly reprehends the capacity of language to involve itself with what it describes. Under the aegis of this new order, where the signified is held to exist before signification, a continued belief in the efficacy of names and the value of material signs appears fetish istic. It is consequently projected onto the barbaric other, and ever after read back as that other's sign.

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FOUR

Pots

Hence the problem of pots. ]aeques Lacan

In Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Stephen Greenblatt demonstrates the benefits of allowing literary critics to pursue and analyse the operations of the imagination within such discursive registers as 'history, theology, natural history, and law'. This is not, however, to remove the distinction between literary and non-literary texts: for, as Greenblatt sees it, the European encounter with the New World 'brought close to the surface of non-literary texts imaginative operations that are normally buried deep below their surface {unlike works of literature where these operations are prominently displayed}'. Since Greenblatt's point is that many types of discursive works contain imaginative operations, his definition of literature finally depends on distinguishing what he calls the 'playful' functions of the imagination from those that are engaged in social or political 'work': The Tempest is literature because it intends to be, Columbus's log-book is not. I Greenblatt's practical definition, which derives from the Kantian proposition that the beautiful is that which tends towards no purposive end, is heuristically useful and critically consequential. It allows him to demonstrate and distinguish from each other both the

reliance of political actors on fictive paradigms, and the dependence of literature on geopolitical facts. Generalized to the point where it becomes the claim that literature is that set of discursive formations that we recognize as such, it is, furthermore, virtually unfalsifiable. But what ifit could be demonstrated that there are works that have all the determinant characteristics of playfulness, discursivity, imagination and self-display that are not recognized as literature? Questions of value (whereby some literary objects will be found to be so 'bad' as to be literary objects no longer) are beside this point, except as they serve to distract attention from the fact that there are classes of 'non-literature' entirely contained by, and rendered mute within, that category of 'literature' which is the object of most twentiethcentury literary analysis. These subsumed cases might include articles of non-European representational practice which survived (and were also generated and even recorded by) the encounter with the Old World, but which today prove extraordinarily difficult for Western-trained scholars to locate and analyse. In this chapter, however, I want to address some European representational practices, the imaginative playfulness of whose self-display is indubitable, but which have never been considered, nor have sought to be considered, as works of 'literature'. Rather than seeking to re-situate these practices as literature, my aim is to demonstrate that, in even its most anti-essentialist mode, the category of 'literature' works to limit (albeit in sometimes productive ways) our understanding of the writing of the past. I want to argue for the existence and consequence, in early modern England, of a writing practice which was understood not as an inscriptional art, but as an inscriptional action whereby the intelligence ofthe maker registered itselfin matter. This practice represents a collapse of that distinction between the sensible (as apprehended by the senses) and the intelligible (as apprehended by the faculty of

reason) on which writing more usually depends. To call the distinction into question is one consequence of the work that Derrida calls 'graphology'; and to argue for a historical moment when the distinction between the letter and the spirit could be differently understood, is the aim I have derived from such work. Within the practices I seek to describe writing has meaning in excess both of its signified content, and of its easily recognized aesthetic dimensions - a meaning that has to do with the fact of its appearance in matter. For a line of poetry may be measured, euphonious and conceptually pleasing; its inscription (ink on paper, chisel on stone, slip on earthenware) may be well designed and executed; its appearance at the place where it happens to be may be of particular material consequence. But beyond this lies a set of cognitive experiences that might be grouped under the general heading of phenomenology as that describes the mind's encounter with itself as it encounters the sensible world." Such experiences include the apprehension of visual and aural shapes and rhythms and the development of propositions concerning the mind's relation to the body; they are shaped by the operation of the life and death instincts, and by our own libidinal cathexes to instruments of speech and writing. The apprehensions generated by such experiences are by no means primitive, or themselves instinctual; they are the grounds and register of advanced thought. But the difficulties in the way of their recognition within definitions of literature that have no apparent need for them - that have, indeed, some interest in not attending to them - are many. If the protocols governing the exercise of writing as a sensible phenomenon in early modern England could be in part recovered, they might begin to suggest ways of approaching some of those representational practices that seem most recalcitrant to our knowledge or pleasure when we encounter them in other cultures. When Derrida worked over the account given by Levi-Strauss in Tristes

lIS

tropiques (1955) of the culture of the Nambikwara Indians of Brazil, his purpose was to demonstrate that the anthropologist was wrong to suggest that the Nambikwara knew neither writing, nor hierarchization, nor violence, until these were introduced by his own presence among them.> That the indigenous society was, by LeviStrauss's own account, both violent and hierarchical, was easily demonstrated; and since Levi-Strauss had used writing as a metaphor for everything that escapes the ethos of the natural, Derrida was able to argue that 'all societies capable of ... bringing classificatory difference into play' - including the Nambikwara - 'practice writing in general' (109). On his way to this definition of 'arche-writing', however, Derrida noted that the evidence adduced by Levi-Strauss to support his claim that the Nambikwara had no writing 'in the colloquial sense', could be used to support an argument that they did. Derrida quoted a passage from Levi-Strauss's early dissertation on La Vie

familiale et sociale des Indiens Namiktoara (1948), from which the passage in Tristes tropiques derives: The Nambikwara of group (a) do not know anything about design, if one excepts some geometric sketches on their calabashes. For many days, they did not know what to do with the paper and the pencils that we distributed to them. Some time later, we saw them very busily drawing wavy lines. In that, they imitated the only use that they had seen us make of our notebooks, namely writing, but without understanding its meaning or its end. They called the act of writing iekariukedjutu, namely: 'drawing lines', which had an aesthetic interest for them."

In Tristes tropiques, Lcvi-Strauss concluded again that the Nambikwara 'have no written language', while 'apart from making a few dotted lines or zigzags on their gourds ... they do not know how to draw'. Derrida objected as follows. First, that words designating 116

'writing' have a metaphorical meaning equivalent to 'drawing lines' in all cultures: the Nambikwara term is not therefore indicative of an impoverished or mistaken grasp of the concept. Secondly, that to exclude the Nambikwara from writing 'properly speaking' on the grounds of their 'aesthetic interest' in drawn lines is to assume, as anthropologists may not, that one can isolate aesthetic value from purposive social function. Up to what point is it then legitimate, asked Derrida, 'not to call by the name of writing' the geometrical sketches that the Nambikwara put on their calabashes - or, for that matter, the 'wavy lines' with which they marked the anthropologist's paper? It is important to bear in mind that we are dealing here not with arche-writing, but with writing 'properly speaking'. That is, even within its 'narrow sense', there is room for uncertainty as to what writing is. This uncertainty is rendered particularly legible when one writing culture encounters another (we could imagine the Nambikwara asking themselves whether Levi-Strauss was engaging in writing, 'properly speaking' when his own, undecorative, wavy lines had no immediately apparent social function). For Derrida, 'to refuse the name of writing to this or that general technique of consignment' is one of the hallmarks of ethnocentrism; its partner is the hyperbolic admiration Europeans may accord ideogrammatic and hieroglyphic writing systems, finding there a symbolic or intellectual or occult efficacy apparently lacking in our own. But even in the case of the cultural traditions and systems with which we are familiar, we do not know where and when writing begins - and this, also, is Derrida's point. Writing 'in the narrow sense' confounds the question of its own identity because it emerges imperceptibly from arche-writing; because it is not, as it appears, exterior to speech or thought; and because it mediates between consciousness and the material world while participating in both.

117

But if the name of writing cannot be denied to the 'dotted lines' and 'zigzags' on the gourds of the Nambikwara, can it be withheld from the geometric and other designs with which, for example, the early modern English decorated their pottery? In what follows I argue that the early modern English were disposed to recognize all graphic traces as being affectively consequential; and that this fact works to undo those definitions of writing on which, as modern literary critics, we have come to rely.

I I

In The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, Puttenham introduces his case for the meaningful structure of writing's visual shapes through the discussion of 'Geometricall figures' or pattern poems.I He develops the argument that 'ocular representations' yield pleasure and instruction in excess of their content in two further chapters, one on 'the device or embleme' and another 'Of the anagramme, or posie transposed'. According to Puttenham, emblems originate as 'short, quicke and sententious propositions', such as the 'devices of armes' and the 'amorous inscriptions' that he saw used at court. Because of their extreme brevity, such sentences require explanation, 'for which cause they be commonly accompanied with a figure or purtraict ... the words so aptly corresponding to the subtiltie of the figure, that aswel the eye is therewith recreated as the eare or the minde'. The picture 'unfolds' the words by adding cognitive weight - through 'colour or figure' as well as through 'muett show' - to the meaning of the emblem. In his later discussion 'Of Ornament', Puttenham distinguishes between 'auricular' figures of speech (those characterized by Enargia or material beauty or efficacy) and those figures he calls 'sensable' (which possess Energia, the capacity to stir the intellect). But the most effective figures are those he calls 'sententious',

118

which combine both functions, 'and all at once beautifie and give sence'. As Puttenham sees it, meaning cannot be separated from its material forms: the mind, which 'is not assailable unless it be by sensible approaches', uses ears and eyes to 'apprehend the sence' enfolded in aural or visual matter." For Puttenham, the device is a composite genre that includes 'liveries, cognizances, emblemes, ensignes, and impreses' and obscures the structural and functional differences between them. Thus the device may be embodied in a variety of materials, and employed in divers functions: a man may put it 'into letters of gold and sende [it] to his mistresses for a token'; he may have it 'embrodered ... in any bordure of a rich garment' for his own or another's wear; or he may use it as a quasi-heraldic device on flags, weapons and escutcheons. But whatever its particular use, the general purpose of the device is the same: to insinuat some secret, wittie, morall and brave purpose presented to the beholder, either to recreate his eye, or please his phantasie, or examine his judgment or occupy his braine or to manage his will either by hope or by dread, every of which respectes be of no little moment to the interest and ornament of civilllife.

Devices are concerned not to imitate the natural world, but to create new objects of thought, giving 'marvell to the beholder' by producing effects of pleasure, hope or dread in the mind that apprehends them. They are works of ingenuity, artificial things devised by art to distract or 'occupy' the mind by inviting it to supply the concepts to which they gesture; and they function to absorb the intellectual energies that they call into activity. To those who might object to his description of such 'vanitites as are to none edification or instruction, either of morall vertue, or otherwise behoofull to the common

wealth', Puttenham points out that 'all the most serious studies of man' are, to the wise man, 'trifles', while to understand that fact is to begin to wean the soul from its investments in the phenomenal world. That is, it is because of its commitment to 'play' that the conceit may be an exercise in ethos or character-shaping. But the device is also, and most pressingly, an instance of the imagination at what Greenblatt calls 'work': that is, as it engages beholders in the purposive concerns of'civilllife'. As a design adopted by a particular person or family - as, that is, a 'cognizance' or token by which recognition is accomplished - a device constitutes the conscious exhibition of a 'proper' name? The examples Puttenham gives of this figure are each attributed to a king, emperor or general; that which he most admires is the device of the 'King of China' which shows two snakes entwined in 'amorous congress', the smaller with its mouth in that of the larger, and 'words purporting ... love and fear'. This imprese 'implies' the reciprocal obligations between Prince and subject: strength, justice and mercy on the one hand; love, obedience and fear on the other. Puttenham is moved by the beauty of this design and the 'subtillitie' of its conception, but he is also impressed by the 'princely pollicie' of its use in China. For there, he says, it is embroidered, in materials appropriate to each man's degree, on the outer garments of all government and court officials, who consequently represent the king's authority whenever they appear in public.f How does this device, one 'of much sharpness and good implication', do its work, which is to tend 'to the interest and the ornament of the civilllife'? As a cognizance (strictly speaking, a device borne for distinction by all the retainers of a noble house), the impresa provides the wearer with an identity derived not from his own name, but from that of the master he serves. But self-alienation and identity are correlatives: the liveried official is a beneficiary of the power that names him; anyone wearing the device is 'esteemed 120

and reverenced ... for the kings sake' - and would also, 'for the king's sake', experience self-esteem. Here Puttenham uncovers the reflexive logic of royal power: 'for without feare and love the soveraigne authority could not be upholden, nor without justice and mercy the Prince be renowmed and honoured of his subject'. A king is a king because his subjects treat him as such; subjects treat him as such because he is a king; and the set of social relations that comprise this double-bond is registered in the device that enforces it. While Puttenham chooses what he understands to be an extreme example of the efficacy of devices (saying he can find no European device to match the Chinese for 'gravitie ... braverie, honour and magnificence'), the proposition that clothes make the man, producing consequential identity-effects in himself and in those who behold him, was familiar enough to his contemporaries. Peter Stallybrass has recently argued that clothes functioned to 'materialize' (to create, as well as to articulate) social relations in sixteenth-century England; where, he suggests, they helped produce a social order within which a subject's identity was experienced through, rather than opposed to, a proper valuation of objects." Within this order (one that might be described as an economy of conscious feelings about labour value), to feel pleasure or dread in the presence of an object is to understand 'civill life' rightly as the product of humanly worked materials. But if early modern English culture could be said to be characterized by an apprehension of the objective world that - unlike our own - is unalienated from the material specificities of its objects as the products of labour and the embodiments of use-value, the mechanisms of that apprehension (and the 'valuing' of objects that it brings in its train) are still unexplained. 10 Unexplained, that is, is the logic whereby an object shaped by the art of man operates as a machine to 'occupy the brain and manage the will' of those who behold it. 121

As guarantees of the power that they serve, the whole use of Puttenharn's devices is to serve as objects of exchange. That is, their value is determined and secured not in themselves, but by the authority they represent: to this extent devices take a commodityform auant la lettre, appearing in fetishistic guise as the 'objective form' in which a particular set of social relations present themselves (and demand tribute) as if they inhered in the device itself. The two terms Puttenham uses to describe the operational power of devices as they 'insinuat' (infiltrate, subtly convert, hint) or 'imply' (enfold, involve, carry the truth of) their purpose, and transmit it into the mind of the beholder, both speak to this structure of inversion or misrecognition. For if the device is different from the meaning it 'enfolds' or carries, it still asks to be taken as something saturated with meaning. It is an object whose meaningful identity both causes and is produced retroactively by the 'hope and dread' within which the subjects of imperial power come to recognize themselves. If Puttenham delights in this operation, which he considers adds to the 'braverie, honour, and magnificence' of power, it is in part because he relishes, for himself and for others, a relation of servitude towards centralized authority - one he is consequently prepared to recognize as the expressed content of worked objects. But Puttenham's politics -like those of other men and women - are developed in relation to his experience of the signifier. Puttenham conceives of The Arte ofEnglish Poesie as his own 'device' - the badge of himself as poet or 'maker'. But he offers this evidence of his ingenuity to the Queen in acknowledgement of the fact that it is she who is the time's 'most Excellent poet' who, by her 'Princely purse favours and countenance', makes 'the poore man rich, the lewd well learned, the coward couragious, and vile both noble and valiant'. I I Holding that a subject's identity derives not from himself but from 122

his Queen, Puttenham signifies his own readiness to be 'made'. 12 In doing so, he confronts and enjoys a wider representational logic that finds comfort in apprehending the very externality - to meaning, and to the subject himself - of a symbolic order. From the perspective of knowledge, this order is irrational (it finds its rich, learned and valiant among the poor, the ignorant and the cowardly) - but irrationality is the expression of its authority. Puttenham's device is efficacious in promoting 'the interest and ornament of the civilllife' because it allows the beholder to give himself up to a representational system whose radical externality to knowledge is the grounds for his confidence in its transcendent motivation.

I I I

The most 'trifling' of Puttenham's conceits is the anagram 'or posie transposed'c! Like some other of his figures, the anagram is recommended for those with time on their hands: since it is both difficult to achieve, and governed by luck, it is a suitable court pastime - one particularly 'rneete ... for Ladies, neither bringing them any great gayne nor any great losse unlesse it be of idle time'. Alteration without gain or loss is the formal rule of the anagram, a figure whose use is, as Puttenham says, 'to breed one word out of another not altering any letter nor the number of them, but onely transposing of the same'. While fun with anagrams may not result in a loss of money or reputation, the figure holds its dangers, as Puttenham seems to have discovered for himself when he decided 'to make some delectable transpose of her Maiesties name' - when, taking three words of the Queen's title, Elissabet Anglorum Regina, he found two sentences to emerge: 'Multa regnabis ense gloria' ['By thy sword shalt thou reign in great renown'], and 'Multa regnabis sene gloria' ['Aged and in much glorie shall ye raigne'].

Puttenham's account of this game of sortilege is strikingly injudicious: emphasizing the strange ease with which the sentences appeared, and insisting that no one before him had met with equal 'felicitie' in the game, he takes them for 'a good boding, and very fatallitie to her Maiestic'; and furthermore imputes it to be 'no litle good luck and glorie to myselfe, to have pronounced to her so good and prosperous a fortune'. Although he introduces his discussion of anagrams with the warning that they should be used 'without superstition', ascribes his success in the exercise to his 'own wish' to find a 'good boding' (which is, he says, 'a matter of much moment in such cases'), and cautions that the result may not be taken as a 'destinie or fatal necessity', Puttenham still emphasizes the supernatural quality of his own experience with the device. For after the success of his initial attempt, he 'tossed and translaced' the same letters 'five hundreth times', but could never make another successful transposition 'of some sense and conformitie to her Majesties estate'. Puttenham acknowledges that he may simply lack the skill to make further, appropriate sentences out of the words he has assigned himself (raising the possibility that he may have discovered, but dismissed as nonsensical, less auspicious sentences); and he consequently professes himself ready to yield, 'if any other man by triall happen upon a better omination, or what soever els ye will call it'. But he also stresses that an anagram is largely a game of chance, and deliberately leaves open the possibility that his discovery of the 'thankefull newes to all England' encoded within Elizabeth's title is itself an 'omination' - a prognostication drawn from an omen.'" Puttenham may have intended his anagrams to be understood as nothing more than a compliment to Elizabeth, a monarch whose power was sufficient to make men want to believe in the divine or occult 'mysterie' of her name and title. But the cancellation in some copies of the text of the eight pages dealing with emblems and

anagrams suggests that some of Putten ham's contemporaries understood the passage to be claiming the status of a prognostication. The attitude of the Tudor state towards prophecy and other acts of divination was self-contradictory: they were regarded as being at once 'vain' or 'fond', and of diabolical origin (an attitude that is only partially explained by the fact that one of the ways in which a prophecy of political upheaval may come true is by a populace acting on the assumption that it is true). In 1541-2 Henry VIII's parliament made it a felony to predict the future of those who bore certain animals in their heraldic devices, or certain letters in their names; and further measures against such prophetic activity were passed or renewed in 1549 and 1563.15 Acts of prognostication for private purposes were equally liable to prosecution: in 1571 a York schoolmaster was bound over 'not to intermeddle hereafter with any predictyons or with sorceryes charmings or the vayne art of astrology'; in 1563, in the same diocese, Sir John Beston was enjoined to deliver to the ecclesiastical court 'suche books as he hath concernynge the practices of conjurations and speciallie Plato Spere and Pithacoras Spere and such lyk'.16 The 'spheres' of Plato and Pythagoras are instruments that allow a practioner to discover 'the fatal destiny of every man' by manipulating arithmetical values assigned to the letters of his name (illus. 24).1 7 Their intellectual justification derives from an understanding of number as the basic principle of the universe, whereby numbers are at once pure forms (uncreated, unchanging, having values assigned by God) and the mode in which these values make themselves known to the senses. 'Intermediate betwixt Corporeals and Incorporeals', as one contemporary has it, numbers allow Pythagorean metaphysics to interrelate conceptual form and physical matter along the axes of harmony and proportion.J'' Within a magical praxis, Pythagoreanism can function as the proposition that, 125

because the sensible and the supra-sensible are not fully distinct, but are bound together by the shared logic of mathematical form, nothing happens by chance. 'Plato Spere and Pithacoras Spere and such lyk' can then unfold a man's destiny because the letters of his name have innate numerical valences which function as the sign of his place in the scheme of things. 19 In his study of popular magic, Keith Thomas names the intellectual traditions that fed the supernatural arts in early modern England, arguing that practices derived from 'medieval religion' and Anglo-Saxon or classical magical arts are finally distinct from those based in the learned, neo-Platonic study of magic that had emerged in the Italian Renaissance, and been spread to Northern Europe through the works of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa.:" But there is still something to be said for imagining an intellectual praxis that had amalgamated these traditions, added to them modes of magical thinking specific to Protestantism, and produced a set of propositions that had in common the fact that they could be at once believed and disbelieved. I am not arguing that the early modern English, individually or as a whole, did not believe in the efficacy of what they themselves thought ofas occult forces. I am arguing, instead, that belief has its modalities as well as its contents; that these reflect a culturally variable ratio between knowledge and belief; and that in one (or perhaps more) of its modes, belief and something that (to those outside it) gives the appearance of unbelief may amount to much the same thing." When Elizabeth I sent the Earl of Essex a protective coin to guard him on the 1597 expedition to the Azores, and when in 1601 the Lord Treasurer's secretary fainted in the middle of a debate, and members of parliament discussed the incident, 'some saying it was

malum omen, others that it was bonum omen', the Queen and her subjects were acting as if they believed in the efficacy of amulets and 126

2; 8

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aft"

tu tbe t1pptr halre~ pour matter tf)all 'it. tunl~. anti QI tlie nrtI}tr b!lfe.,tt Il)aU be cnftl : antitl)1.tI mal' f!~ Itne. aU tuat l!t oeGte to kno\1Je. ilnll if ~ 1UoaIIJe know 1nbtflJtr ~ 8JaIl ent~ l'satt'lolUt

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fe Oitlbd'oJe, IU1l\tue t'OAtfntlainDer, wf«ln mtbe-'nm ant 1'1Ila,al bit,... tbtn if tt lR! in tI,e "PP" balfe t'DU W • I.JlUtt ~ requtl, aM If ttbe in the nettm pqrte,It tI contr~ f!!. tbuJ nla! lIII be It al 111ft' tWRtJ pDU .GIIt

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24 The Wh eel of Pythagora s', from Christophe de Ca ttan, Th e Geomancie,

tr ans. Fr ancis Sparry (Lo ndo n, 1591).

omens - whatever they actually believed, their actions would have been the same." This is no simple question of hypocrisy or coercion; for if we cannot know whether the Queen really thought an Edward III noble would keep her favourite safe, that is in part because the Queen's belief had been materialized, and so dissociated from her own consciousness, in the act of finding and giving the coin. Elizabeth herself may not have known what she believed, not because she was confused, but because her belief was lodged in a material practice beyond or beside her knowledge of it. She was thus in a position to re-encounter her own belief in the form of a coin that has magical properties, even as she may not have consciously held that such things could exist. The mode of belief whereby conviction is carried in material objects and actions (rather than in what, today, is more strictly called the mind) is neither confined to early modern culture, nor uncontested there." In early modern England it formed the grounds on which a Protestant sensibility accused its religious others of idolatry, and waged (though lost) the battle to establish the purely symbolic nature of its own rites and practices. Nevertheless, the generality of a cognitive practice whereby humanly worked objects have a mysterious, alienated status even outside a system of exchange that would render them liable to commodity fetishism, is characteristic of the early modern era. Indeed, it is this cognitive practice, whereby alienated intellectual labour comes back in the form of objects and practices invested with occult powers, that (overlooking its proximity to our own experience of the aesthetic) we today identify as magical thought. Because Puttenham's discussion of anagrams is not fully secured within the discursive field of magic, but occurs instead within an analytic register that pushes him to choose between the truth and the falsity of their claim to possess divinatory powers, his description of the figure is particularly useful in allowing us to track

the confrontation - in the space of a single mind - between a selfknowledge that is sceptical of 'ominations', and a surviving confidence in them. Such partial scepticism as Puttenham displays in the face of the supernatural cannot be fully explained as the symptom of a transition from an early modern to a modern episteme: it is, on the contrary, a feature of magical thought itself. Thus, while Puttenham knows that he alone is responsible for the felicitous omination by anagram of Elizabeth's fate, he continues to act as if he believed in its oracular status. He describes in detail how he came to try his luck where others had failed, justifies. the particular spelling of the Queen's name with which he worked, and stands by the result both in the text and in his decision to send that text to the printer (pp. 123-4). Both Puttenham's actions, and the more general procedure whereby intellectual labour returns to the originating subject in magically enhanced form, may also be understood as manifestations of the particular form of self-love to which Freud gave the name of narcissism. For Freud, narcissism occurs when a subject's libido is withdrawn from external objects and recathected to the ego. But, as Lacan points out in his famous essay on 'the mirror stage', the ego is nothing more than that unified image of the self that is founded on the model furnished by another person. Narcissism is not then a state independent of inter-subjective relationships; on the contrary, it is the amorous captivation of the subject by an ego-ideal derived from a relationship with the

other." The pleasure of anagrams is similarly structured: their aim is to produce a feeling of self-worth which their author enjoys as if it were reflected onto him by a system that is both indifferent and attentive to his desire. Feeling himself a pawn in the anagram gameas the conduit but not the author of its sentences - Puttenham's pleasure in the device involves an appeal to a system that is at once random, unintelligible and presumed to know. Holding the seeker's

129

meaning for him, the anagram 'returns', in the form of a prophetic truth, his own subjective force from within what looks (on the one hand) to be insensible matter, but from what is experienced (on the other) as the intentionality of the system itself as that corresponds to the seeker's desire.

IV

Paradoxically, inscription alone - although it is far from always doing so - has the power of poetry, in other words has the power to arouse speech from its slumber as sign. ]acques Derrida

In his discussion of wonder, which he takes to be 'the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference', Stephen Greenblatt uses different but analogous terms to describe this encounter of the early modern subject with a material realm outside itself. Demonstrating that wonder is generally conceived by early modern thinkers as a faculty of the imagination and an affair ofthe heart (although, as he shows, it can also be thought to occur in the mind as a seizure or failure of reason), Greenblatt argues that wonder is a mode of mediation between the subject and its objects that precedes or bypasses knowledge, linking 'whatever is out there with inner conviction'. One of the most interesting examples of this phenomenon in Greenblatt's account, and one that proves uniquely difficult to address, is writing - something which is equally (if not identically) a wonder to denizens of the Old and the New worlds. Careful not to endorse the belief whose psychic benefits he documents - that the Europeans alone possessed what Samuel Purchas called the 'literall advantage' of writing - Greenblatt notes

13°

but leaves unspecified the mysterious aspect that writing turns to the Europeans themselves." But in his 'Discourse of the diversity of Letters used by the divers Nations in the World', which Greeblatt cites, Purchas argues, as others before and after him have done, that writing divides 'Civill ... Sociable and Religious' societies from those 'esteemed Brutish, Savage, and Barbarous'. Purchas elaborates this position by claiming that 'want of Letters hath made some so seely as to think the letter it selfe could speak, so much did the Americans herein admire the Spaniards'. Even in Purchas's own account, this 'seely' (undefended or unlearned) apprehension of letters is no reliable index of what Greenblatt sees as a 'massive cultural difference' between the New and the Old worlds. For the civil benefits of writing are all derived from an assumption that the letter itself can speak. Thus Purchas holds that where speech occurs 'once, at the present, to the present', writing allows a man both to hold conversations with the sages of the past, and to 'survive himself' as a teacher of future generations - 'therefore the dead were esteemed the best companions and faithfullest Counsellors ... in their writings still living to performe those Offices'. And it is not only human knowledge that lives on in writing, for thereby God 'holds conference with men, and in his sacred Scriptures, as at first in the Tables of Stone, speakes to all'.26 According to Purchas, writing allows the voices of our gods and ancestors to speak to us out of paper and stone; and while it is naive to overlook the technology that underpins this process (as, in Purchas's view, the Americans seem to be doing), it would be barbaric to imagine that we could do without the intentional guidance of the dead as that reaches us through the medium of the letter. Thus, if it is one of the purposes of poetry to produce the marvellous - to 'please the phantasie ... or occupie [the] braine' with wonder - in early modern England that purpose was partially filled

by the letter itself, in its appearance as a compound of natural matter and artificial form magically disposed to transmit and receive intelligence. With hindsight, we might say that the signifier operated in the period as an image that neither imitated the world, nor expressed the mind, but was at one and the same time both part of the sensible world, and a mode of displaying the perceptual and intellectual complexities of man's lived engagement with that world. Such an argument presupposes the sensitivity of early modern culture to the phenomenality of visual and aural perception in the domain of the signifier - a sensitivity such as is registered in Purchas's inventory of the divers writing 'instruments ... materials .. . [and] figures of Letters' that the world has known: some writing with Pencils as the Japonites and Chinois, others with Pens, others with Instruments of Iron as the Malabars, of Gemmes, Brasse also, or other metall, in Table-bookes, Leaves, Barkes, Wood, Stone, Aire, Sand, Dust, Metall, Paper, Cloth, Parchment, and innumerable other materials: in the forme also and manner, with Quippos in Stones or Threads, as in Peru; with Pictures, as in Mexico, and the Egyptian Hieroglyphikes; with Characters, each expressing a word or thing, not a letter, as the Chinois, Japonites, and our Arithmeticians and Astronomers in the figures of their Arts; some with fiery Torches. .. the most have used letters, which by Art are disposed to frame all words, and hath beene the most complete kind of writing which ever was.'?

The 'fiery Torche' or beacon, included last in this list because it is both the instrument and the 'character' of a script that may be written with fire in night 'aire', is borrowed from Purchas's own account of a signalling system that was devised by an English captain during the Turkish siege ofOlimpach. 28 Its inclusion adds the material register of brightness to those of depth, line, colour and shape that allow

the various 'national scripts' to make their appearance in the world. Purchas's fire-writing is a signifying system whereby flashes of light are indexed against the letters of the alphabet. Its quality of intermittence renders it a powerful instance of what Merleau-Ponty, following Heidegger, identified as 'the fundamental story' of the visual arts - the 'principle of a genesis of the visible', whereby a painting seems to bring itself into being as a 'delineation' within matter." In contrast to representation, which concerns itself with reproduction or adequation, delineation is the mode it). which matter appears to produce or signify itself. Fire-writing (and equally, though differently, graffiti writing) will strike even a modern sensibility as instances of writing uncannily caught in the act of its own appearance. But in early modern England, writing in any of its media could appear as an act of autofiguration - as, that is, a delineation that closed the gap between material signifiers and ideational signifieds in the experience of signification itself. Purchas and his contemporaries were consequently alert, both to the appearance of writing in non-alphabetic forms, and to the oneiric resonance that accompanies even a book-bound, alphabetic, script.

v The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book. ]acques Derrida

The proposition that literature is discursive may appear unexceptionable. But discursivity (from 'discourse' - the 'spoken or written treatment of a subject in which it is handled at length') owns a material quality of length or duration that is rarely scrutinized as such. A discourse is a communication in language that has extension in time

133

or space ('how shall we discourse the freezing hours away?' asks Arviragus in Cymbeline). Like the work of reason, as that may be said to proceed from sensory perceptions to ideas, or from premises to consequences, discursivity seems wedded to the material form of the line. Indeed, in Of Grammatology Derrida argues that, while writing 'in the narrow sense' is 'rooted in a past of non-linear writing', linearization has since imposed itself as the norm on all writing systems, where it functions to bind writing to traditional notions of temporality ('homogeneous, dominated by the form of the now, and the idea of continuous movement, straight or circular') and, hence, ontology. More than this, linearization has proved so indispensable to Western thought that it can no longer be recognized as being merely prosthetic to that thought: 'the enigmatic model of the line is thus the very thing that philosophy could not see when it had its eyes open on the interior of its own history.'!" The line, that is, is the material but unacknowledged form that thought must now take. But Derrida is interested to stress that linearization represents 'only a particular model, whatever might be its privilege'; and he notes the increasingly visible inadequation of this model to the 'delinearized temporality' and 'pluri-dimensionality' of contemporary thought: 'what is thought today cannot be written according to the line and the book, except by imitating the operation implicit in teaching modern mathematics with an abacus.' That is: there was a time before the linearization of thought and writing, and there will come a time after it. Derrida also suggests that, in spite of its universal dominance, the linear norm 'was never able to impose itselfabsolutely'. This is the case not only because there are acts of cognition that can occur outside it, but because the linear norm is set to function as a

limit, and so opens the very questions it appears to close. Derrida gives these questions the names of idifferance' and 'spacing', and together they demonstrate the contingencies of graphic phoneticism

and of the philosophical system that relies on it. But even beyond this, we could say that, as regards writing, the linear norm is a heuristic ideal that survives as such by refusing to countenance two questions: How long is a line? Is it broken or constituted by that which articulates it? In truth, the linear norm is opposed, as well as confirmed, by that particular organization of intellectual space that Derrida takes to be its greatest triumph. For the printed book represents not only a peculiar infolding of space, but one whose 'linearity' is achieved by the disordering and regathering of lines. To compile a book is to reorganize the linearization of thought and writing that went into the composition of the text in the first place: it is to reverse, cut and fit lines to the design of the page; and to assemble those designs (half of them inverted) out of numerical order on the printer's block. The linear form that results from this process - the printed book - thus represents less linearization as such, than the imposition of linearity as a graphic norm; and the occasional survival of pages and gatherings out of numerical sequence can serve to remind readers of the contingencies of the material practices behind it. The specificity of linearization as a model for writing, and its potential inadequacy to some kinds of thought, can be thrown into relief by writing schemes that utilize non-linear deployments of time and space, but only if we can allow ourselves to recognize that these schemes have their own rules for the production, restriction, and registration of meaning. Viewed from the perspective of our own Kunstwollen the language of flowers appears to be an inefficient code, impoverished both by its lack of grammar, and by the presence within it of an unregulated, three-dimensional, multi-sensory syntax. According to this view, a posy of flowers is not a poem, but an assemblage of semiotic elements that cannot be further combined into a restricted and therefore consequential utterance. The posy

thus appears to be an appropriate register for the famous distraction of Shakespeare's aphelia: 'There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you. And here's some for me' (Hamlet 4.5.178-9). But within the play aphelia's posy of herbs is not a 'document in madness' because it is predicated on the erroneous belief that flowers can fully embody and represent thoughts: rather, it is the register of a mind that, in spite of its madness, can still find appropriate material forms for itself: 'thoughts and remembrance fitted.'!' aphelia's unravelling of her posy is an act of exegesis ('we may call it herb of grace o'Sundays. Of you must wear your rue with a difference'), an act Laertes finds unbearable to witness because it is itself the appropriately realized emblem of aphelia's situation: 'Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, / She turns to favour and to prettiness.' In the early modern period non-discursive forms are less an index of the mind's unreason than they are a source of the aesthetic pleasure that links reason and imagination together in the production of knowledge. The early modern nosegay was a writing practice that had at its disposal a choice of somatic registers through which to display that special indistinction between natural objects and rhetorical figures that was its particular mode of compliment. Replacing linearity with the three-dimensional registers of design, colour, texture and smell, it straddled the cusp between what Derrida calls 'writing in general' ('differance' as rendered visible in any material or social register) and writing 'in the colloquial sense' (a graphic code). It was by no means unique in this respect: [oan Evans points out that it is 'sometimes quite difficult to distinguish emblematic designs, generally of a naturalistic kind, from the flower and animal patterns of Elizabethan jewellry'; while the Elizabethan decorative arts as a whole worked to explore, and ingeniously and variously answer, the question of where and when writing precipitated out of the gestures of pictorial representation.f' But the sixteenth-century

posy is particularly apt to display the fact that non-discursive writing is not readily distinguished from other man-made or naturally occurring patterns - wherein lies that recalcitrance to full referentiality that constitutes its particular force. That sixteenth-century writers were interested in such nondiscursive literary forms as could arise from the abrogation of linear writing is demonstrated by their development of a full spectrum of emblematic genres to explore the relation of letters, words, pictures and their various media, not only to each other, but also to elements left deliberately absent or missing from the device, such as the textual context from which a motto has been taken. (That some scorned such devices is illustrated by Camden's account of that 'most ridiculous ... foolery', the rebus, whereby those who 'lack'd wit to express their conceit in speech' could 'use to depaint it out [as it were] in pictures' .)33 But writers also drew attention to the written line itselfas one of thought's own devices, attending in particular to that ideal of continuity that is represented by the circle. Thus, according to Puttenham, the 'most excellent of all the figures Geometrical' that a poet might attempt is 'the Roundell or Sphere'. The circle's 'many perfections' include its real and conceptual capaciousness (its circumference considered as a linear distance encloses a maximum area, while as a figure for unified perfection the circle'contains' all other figures); the fact it has 'no speciall place of beginning nor end' (and so is an image of God or eternity); and the fact that its lack of angles renders it 'most voluble and apt to turne, and to continue motion, which is the author of life'. In Pythagorean terms, which he is adapting here, the circle is an emblem of the conceptual realm, and Puttenham consequently refrains from giving concrete examples of the figure, offering instead two poems which propose, but do not enact, the 'resemblance of the Roundell to God, the world and the Queene'. Nevertheless, for the courtly maker who does wish to 'fashion

his meetre in Roundel', Puttenham suggests it can, in fact, be done; by writing 'either with the circumference, and that is circlewise, or from the circumference, that is, like a beame, or by the circumference, and that is overthwart and dyametrally from one side of the circle to another'i-" Lines extending 'from the circumference' would appear like the spokes of a wheel, or the outline of a star; those contained 'by the circumference' would produce the shape of a solid sphere. Both devices can be achieved in two dimensions, and could have been reproduced on the page, ifPuttenham and his printer had so chosen. A line of writing that runs 'with' or around the circumference may also exist in two dimensions, but unless the characters are very small, or the circle they inscribe very large, the script will have a splayed appearance, as if to suggest that two-dimensionality is an impoverished scheme of vision. Writing 'with the circumference', that is, asks to be realized in a curved plane: and as it occupies more and more complex surfaces, early modern writing can be said to be striving to take its place in three-dimensional space. This extension of the written line may occasionally be found as an architectural effect in early modern England (as, for example, when writing is continued around the walls of a room), but it is the more particular concern of a set of writing practices that includes the manufacture of posy rings and hair-bracelets and the inscription of other jewels and talismans. Wherever it appears, it invites the question of the relation, to meaning, of space and spacing - of the appearance and disappearance of the line. Collections of mottoes or posies written for rings may be found in many printed and manuscript common-place books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; several of these have been documented by [oan Evans, who records that Harleian MS 6910, which was written soon after 1596, contains over 400 posies for rings. Posies were often designed to remind the wearer of a particular fact

or piece of advice: 'I have don if you yeeld not soone', 'Let reson rule', 'Keepe a meane', 'No hell to a dissembler'. Evans cites the will of Nicholas Fenay, a Yorkshire yeoman who died in 1617, leaving his son 'my signet, or ringe of gould, having these letters, N.F., for my name thereupon ingraven, with this notable poesie about the same letters, viz Nosce teipsum, to the intente that my said son, William Fenay, in the often behoudlinge and consideringe of that worthy poesye may be the better put in mynde ofhimselfe and of his estate'}5 As conceived by Nicholas Fenay, the mnemonic function of the posy ring is governed by the same set of assumptions that prompted Thomas Elyot to advise the wise householder to paint 'some monument of virtue' on his walls, wherby other men in beholdynge may be instructed, or at the lest wayes to virtue persuaded. In like wise his plate and vessaile wolde be ingraved with histories, fables, or quicke and wise sentences, comprehending good doctrine or counsailes; wherby one of these commodities may happen, either that they which do eate or drinke havyng those wisedomes ever in sighte, shall happen with the meate to receive some of them: or by purposinge them at the table, may sussitate some disputation or reasonynge: wherby some parte of tyme shall be saved, whiche els by supfluouse eatyng and drinkyng wolde be idely consumed.

Elyot's account of this decorative practice derives from Erasmus's long description of a country house, in which walls, doors, galleries, flowerbeds and wine-cups are decorated with improving images and sentences. 36 'Who could be bored in this house', asks one guest, when among so many painted forms there is 'nothing inactive, nothing that is not saying or doing something?' Writing is positioned throughout the house and gardens to catch at the eye and activate the memory: religious texts and images remind the host and his

139

guests of the way to salvation, and encourage them to pray; emblematic plants and animals carry various moral lessons; and painted birds and other trompe l' oeil effects cause wonder at 'the cleverness of nature ... the inventiveness of the painter, [and] in each the goodness of God'. In Erasmus's description of the country house the written sentence largely works, as I have argued that domestic graffiti worked, to remind the householder and his guests of truths contained not in letters themselves, but in the human heart. But finally, at dinner, Eusebius's guests listen to a 'short passage from Sacred Scripture' to ensure the presence of Christ among them - 'May he mingle with all our food and drink, so that everything may taste of him, but most of all may he penetrate our hearts!' - and here words seem to be accorded the power to enter into the minds of men through a process of carnal rather than intellectual absorption.F Eusebius's claim that the spiritual presence of Christ may be invoked by the recitation of a scriptural text is transformed, in Elyot's redaction, into the proposition that wisdom may be instilled through a physical encounter with, rather than a close study of, good advice.3 8 This encounter retains some of those magical qualities that dictate the use of texts as talismans in the early modern period; and mottoes on posy rings, which, by the sixteenth century are generally designed to be worn unseen on the ring's inner shank, are designed at least in part to engage those forces of sympathy which once bound the different elements of the material and spiritual world, and disposed them to recognize each other.J? But as if unhappy with the proposition that moral precepts may be accidentally swallowed, Elyot goes on to suggest another use for them, also derived from Erasmus, and that is to provoke virtuous conversation. For Elyot, virtuous conversation is virtuous because it prevents a worse alternative: it saves the time that would otherwise be spent in 'superfluous eating and drinking'.

Here moral virtue is understood not as something that may be ingested, remembered or invoked, nor even as a habit that becomes easy and pleasant o~ce it is established: instead it is an exercise whose aim is to bring itself into being. Under this dispensation, virtuous precepts are morally instructive not because they teach us to be good, but because in reading them we are being good indeed. Thus William Fenay is under a paternal injunction 'often' to see and consider his father's initials and the adage Nosce teipsum, in order that he may be 'put in mynde of himselfe and of his estate'. If he wears the ring, whose motto was in this case written on its outside, he complies with the first part of this mandate. But how is he to accomplish the second? Clearly, William's knowledge of himself is not expected to be the achievement of introspection: on the contrary, it will be the product of his encounter with an adage that is at once proverbial and paternal, the prescript of another. 'Know thyself is not here an invitation to personal knowledge: it is an injunction that comes from the social order, and is embodied in one of its devices. But while the adage is what J. L. Austin calls an implicit performative (one that it can be translated by the performative 'I advise you to know yourself'), the performative act is in this case effected not by the speaker, but by the interlocutor, who, in his 'often behoudlinge and consideringe of that worthy poesye', repeatedly activates its power." Using his father's utterance to know himself, William Fenay experiences an indistinction between thought and prescript which allows proverbial wisdom to appear as live writing - that is, as a separated piece of self. 41 Other posies recorded in Harleian MS 6910 appear to be more explicitly performative in that they contain greetings and promises, or announce themselves as pledges or gifts: 'A knot knits love', 'All I refuse and thee I chuse', 'This, With Mee'. A promise is a speech act that executes itself in the utterance; and a ring that carries such a

promise seeks to ground the performance within its own material being: 'As endlesse is my love as this.' As far as a modern reader is concerned, the ring will appear to be acting as a material witness because the promise is not all it pretends to be. A promise takes its

meaning from its anticipated end; it leaps across a current absence, or lack of means ('Farre off, yet not forgot', 'A token to present the absent') towards a future where it may be cancelled or redeemed: 'Finish my desire.' To such a reader the posy ring seems to know as its recipient and even its donor may not - that a promise guarantees only that a vow has been made: it is because a promise refers only to itself that a further pledge is necessary in the form of a ring: 'True love with continuance, Keepe this in remembrance.' But even this additional token cannot bind the future: a gold ring may be 'Pure and endlesse', but it is only the narcissism of the recipient that allows such a ring to function as security against the changes that time may bring: 'A gadge to love, not to remove.' The survival of ring posies in collections, where they are shorn of their occasions, into an age such as our own, that equates the proverbial with the trivial, and looks askance at the over-valuation of material things, increases the difficulty of imagining what an earlier society once found so satisfying in their production. However, the working distinction between performatives (utterances that accomplish an act) and constatives (descriptive utterances), on which our own judgement of posy rings is based, is scarcely pertinent to the sixteenth century's own understanding of a more generalized, and differently valenced, linguistic performativity. The manufacture of posy rings in early modern England is predicated on the assumption that words are matter imbued with intelligence that act to produce or reproduce images in the imagination, memory and soul. Words so deployed, in comprising a promise, constitute a reality - 'I am fast bound his that gave me this'.

Posy rings often work to underline the structural match between themselves and their inscription: 'Bent to content', '''One, two" written as you may begin with either word', 'A freend to the end'.4 2 They thus draw attention to the line as a material mode of continuance and return - one which actively performs the thought it represents. To bring linearization to consciousness as one of writing's consequential affective investments is also the purpose of a 'shackle' (an armlet of corded gold) that the Duke of Anjou gave Elizabeth I in 1582, inscribed 'Serviet [etiam] dulcis quem torquet Eliza' ['He is still the servant of sweetness whom Elizabeth twists']. However one imagines this motto to have been inscribed (either 'with the circumference, and that is circlewise' as Puttenham would say, or on an inset or attached plaque), Anjou's jewel is designed to underscore the appearance of writing in the world as it encounters the particular organizations of space and time that accompany the decision to write (and indeed to live) 'by the line'. But the emblematic genre that most fully explores the relation of linearization to life and thought is perhaps the hair bracelet, a braid of human hair within which was woven, or otherwise attached, a brief written sentence. In The Academy ofEloquence (1654), Thomas Blount records a set of posies ostensibly purpose-written at the request of a woman who had been found in the 'pretty, harmless employment' of 'weaving hair bracelets'. These posies are similar to those devised for rings, both in their sentiments, and in the fact that several of them take, as their theme, the circular line: 'Nec fallit nec fallitur', 'A se convertir in se', 'Unus: una: unum'. But a hair bracelet need contain no writing at all: it may exist as a naked 'wreath of haire' such as is imagined to crown the dead speaker's arm in Donne's poems 'The Funerall' and 'The Relique'. Hair bracelets were given as love tokens (in A Midsummer Nights Dream, 1.1.33, Egeus accuses Lysander of having seduced Hermia 'with bracelets 143

of [his] hair' and other 'conceits'), and were also used as memorials of the dead. The conceit of Donnc's two poems is to attribute both functions to the bracelet at once: in 'The Funerall' the speaker imagines his own burial, with hair bracelet, as involving that of the woman for whose love he has died; while in 'The Relique' the 'bracelet of bright haire about the bone' is understood as a body part sufficient to summon the soul of the beloved to the speaker's grave at the Day of Judgement. Each poem ostensibly understands the hair bracelet to represent an instance of what it calls 'idolatrie' ('The Funerall') or 'mis-devotion' ('The Relique') - a practice that involves, interchangeably, overvaluing a woman, taking a part for the whole, and mistaking an object for what it represents. But each poem finally demonstrates not only that love must misvalue its objects in order to exist, but that human understanding operates through fetishized material forms. Donne's poem is designed to invoke, as the most consequential debate concerning the relationship of spirit to matter in the early modern period, the question of Christ's presence in the Sacrament of Mass. The hair bracelet is a 'mystery, the signe you must not touch': like the Body of Christ, which unites communicants by incorporating them into the Church of which He is the head, the hair bracelet binds the speaker's body parts 'and makers] mee one of all'. As the Blessed Sacrament changes bread and wine into the flesh and blood of God incarnate, and wreaks material benefits in the bodies and souls of those who witness it, so the hair bracelet binds the thoughts of Donne's mistress into a sensible form that consoles the speaker as a manifestation of her grace towards him. And the speaker is finally able to return the thought in kind (both to his mistress, and to himself); for with its interlaced, alternating long and short lines, the poem itself takes the form of a hair bracelet. While this poetic'device' can be read as evidence of Donne's capacity to force linguistic matter

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to accommodate and illustrate a 'conceited' thought, the intellectual purpose of the poem is to explore the process whereby ideas are made, registered and apprehended as material forms, and whereby sensible life is lived as it is thought. For as the product of the brain, and as an object that manifests itself in lines neither dead nor alive, hair is a metaphor for writing 'in the narrow sense'. But cut, braided, and joined into the sensible form of a purposive disruption or wrinkling of a line, it becomes an instance of writing 'in general' as that shows itself to be at once the work of human agents and the manifestation of a pattern that precedes and survives them.

VI

Das Geschriebene hohlt sich. [That which is written grows hollow.] Paul Celan

In her essay 'Muteness Envy', Barbara Johnson asks a series of questions about pots: Why does Keats choose to write about an urn? ... Is an urn somehow overdetermined as an example of a thing? When Martin Heidegger had to choose something as an example of a thing in his essay 'The Thing,' he chose a jug. And when Wallace Stevens placed an exemplary object in Tennessee, it was a jar. What is it that might make an urn impose itself? Why does Cleanth Brooks entitle his New Critical Treatise on poetry The Well-Wrought Urn?

[ohnson answers her own questions by suggesting that urns are metaphors for the relation between form and content, expression and intention - and thus for language, as for poetry, itself. Furthermore, as a figure for the human body, no less than as a container for 145

that body's ashes, the urn seems to conflate object- and subjecthood in such a way that its material passivity (the fact that it is speechless because inert) appears to be a form of deliberate taciturnity. The urn is not mute, but (like writing itself) it 'does not directly answer the questions the spectator might ask'. In [ohnson's hands the urn becomes an emblem both of 'the idealization of muteness' that characterizes the aesthetic tradition, and for the political paradox whereby power seeks to represent itself as its own, silenced, victim.f What Johnson calls 'muteness envy' - the speaker's envy of the silenced, meaning's envy of matter - is the subject ofJacques Lacan's sustained meditation on 'The Subject of Sublimation', a subject on which Freud's work had remained incomplete.t" According to Freud, an instinct is sublimated when it is channelled, according to a new, non-sexual aim, towards a socially valued object: 'When the satisfaction of one [drive] is denied by reality, the satisfaction of another may offer total compensation. They behave in relation to each other like a network, like communicating channels that are filled with water.'4S This image has puzzled commentators, but Freud surely had in mind something like the piece of pottery popular in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known as a 'nest of cups' or 'fuddling cup' - a group of individually thrown pots with interconnected bodies, whereby liquor poured into one cup could slowly disappear and reappear in another (illus, 25). For Freud imagines the drives as being structured like a hydraulic machine, whose differential effects are achieved by the flow of liquid, and hence the transformation of energy, from one place to another; and a fuddling cup exists in order to draw attention to itself as a mechanism of displacement. A fuddling cup is ostentatiously non-utilitarian, for it operates at the expense of the drinker's first aim. Furthermore, although its form makes reference to the 'tyg', a multi-handled drinking cup

25 Fuddling cup with four individually thrown pots, earthenware with blue paint on white glaze , inscribed with the dat e '1649', London, 1649. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

designed to be passed from hand to hand during communal drinking sessions, the fuddling cup is designed to frustrate the question of equitable portions, while starting a series of jokes as to what it means to pour liquid from one body into another (to fuddle means to confuse, especially with alcohol) (illus. 26). To call it a 'curiosity' or 'conversation piece' is, however, to ascribe to the fuddling cup a function that is beside the point of its particular capacity of channelling liquid from site to site. The fuddling cup is a toy machine whose primary purpose is the action of making a liquid disappear and reappear. The social consequences of this action, whether they be to provoke conversation, perform a joke, or imitate the form of a human body, are adventitious to this primary aim.

26 'Tyg' drinking cup, with four double-l ooped handl es and pads of clay stamped with the initials 'G.R.', a lion passant, a fleur -de-lys, half an ang el and the date ' 1654', red-brown earthenware with whit e clay und er lead glaze, Wrotham, 1654. Fit zwilli am Museum , Ca mbridge .

In two essays on toys and play, WaIter Benjamin argued not only that play determines the form of a plaything, rather than the other way round ('a child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play with sand, and so he turns into a baker'), but that playthings allow children to 'gain possession' ofthemselves within life's 'basic rhythms' as these declare themselves in their 'simplest forms' in games with inanimate objects such as stick and hoop, whip and top, marble and king-marble. Here Benjamin has in mind Freud's account of his grandson's game with a cotton reel in 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', and the 'basic rhythms' he invokes may be understood as the social and somatic forms through which psychical impulses discharge themselves.t'' Benjamin's playthings may thus be said to 'model' the drives by providing them with material pathways through which to run. As aesthetic objects they are neither mimetic (of something outside the subject), nor expressive (of some internal thought or passion). Instead, as the material forms (hoops, tops, marbles) of actions (bowling, spinning, throwing) which offer the drives determinate aims, these playthings, like fuddling cups, belong to a category of art objects that might be called the prosthetic. Such objects have a particular relation to the human figure because they rehearse the discharge of psychic tensions that may otherwise be worked off vis

a vis another human being.t? They thus posit the

possibility of a psychic indifference between themselves and animate life - between, say, a collection of rags and a mother, a nest of cups and a lover. It is this, I take it, that forms the poetic burden of all crockery. The proposition that the human body is, as Abraham Fleming put it, a 'brittle bottle framed out of clay' was given specific form in sixteenth-century England by the bulbous stoneware beer-jug known as a Bellarmine (illus. 27).4 8 Decorated at the neck with an applied, moulded relief of the face or mask of a bearded man, and commonly

27 Bellarmine jug, salt-glazed stonewa re with applied moulded relief decora tions of a bearded mask and th ree medallions of the Duchy of [ul es, Cleves and Berg and the date '1585', Ge rman, 1585. F itzw illiam Museum, Cam bridge.

used for the serving of beer, Bellarmines drew attention to the difficulty of distinguishing a clay vessel from the human body - especially under the influence of alcohol. Two of Ben [orison's characters make this joke themselves: a customer at The New Inne calls his landlord 'a lug, Fac'd with a beard' (1.4.14); while Whit says of a fellow-drinker in Bartholomew Fair 'Hee has wrasteld so long with the bottle, heere, that the man with the beard hash almost streeke up hish heelsh' 4.4.188-9°). While the substance of the joke is that man is not a bottle, it works because the consanguinity of flesh and clay is not wholly alien to early modern thought, but is a kinship argued, for example, by the slip mottos found on two pieces of contemporary crockery, which suggest that it may be no foolish thing to recognize yourself in, and take advice from, a pot: 'You and I are Earth 1661' and 'For erthe I am' (illus. 28). Speaking crockery is thus more than a conceited literalization of the most common metaphor for mortality, for it proposes a continuity not only between clay and flesh, but also between shaped clay and the deep structures of human cognition. Indeed, Bernard Rackham, one of the first historians of English ceramics, understood the traditional potter's work to constitute an affective utterance or gesture, one brought into being by the mind's unmediated encounter with the world: 'a soft but cohesive and stable material like clay lends itself to the instantaneous conveyance through the fashioning hands to the thought or impulse of a moment ... everywhere are tokens of a busy human mind at work, and fingers itching to impress themselves on the plastic material'. Rackham's desire for a gestural sign system that is not fully disembedded from the material world, but operates as a direct interchange between mind and matter, is impelled by nostalgia for a pre-commodity age (he finds that the 'vitality' given to early pottery by 'the touch of the potter's hand' was destroyed by the advent of steam powerj.i? Nevertheless, the propositions that he

28 Square bottle inscribed 'lAMES WANEL: ND FEARE GOD THE LORD AND FAST AND PRAY ABCDEFGHIKLM THE', and Metropolitan ware jug inscribed 'FOR ERTHE I AM', both red earthenware with white slip-trailed decoration under lead glaze, Harlow, Essex, 1630-60. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

makes here - that the impulses of the mind must take material form, and that material forms may consequently be understood as coagulated human thought - offer useful purchase on the early modern writing practices with which I am concerned. For it is my argument that the purpose of such practices is, at least in part, to underline the role played by brute, somatic and intellectual matter in the generation of meaning. Judging from the vessels that survive, speaking crockery was not uncommon in the first half of the seventeenth century, when pots were decorated - either in slip, or in sgraffito - with the alphabet, with the names of their makers, recipients, or contents; with poems;

with royal arms or guild insignia; with the advice to drink (or, alternatively, to 'Bee not drunke'); or with one of the pious exhortations characteristic of 'Metropolitan' slipware ('Remember God', 'Fast and Pray and Pitty the Poor Amend Thy Life and Senne No More 1656') and 'When This You See, Remember Me. Obay God's Wourd'."

But, as Barbara [ohnson's argument may be taken to suggest, a pot need not be decorated with writing in order for it to be understood to be entertaining thought. And while, within [ohnson's essay, urns and vases withhold their thoughts from man, early modern pottery of the type I am considering works to express itself, through a variety of material effects, as a sensual entity of considerable structural complexity and psychic consequence. Metropolitan ware was made in Harlow in the first quarter of the seventeenth century from clay fired to a bright red or brown, decorated with white slip (thin clay that could be poured or trailed on to the body of the vessel from a spouted can), and heavily glazed. It was often inscribed with pious and other mottos, but its decoration could also comprise simple geometric patterns, 'groups of dashes, wavy lines and the like'. These patterns are now judged, as LeviStrauss judged the 'dotted lines' and 'zigzags' on the calabashes of the Nambikwara, to be aesthetically 'unimaginative', 'consisting of rather crudely drawn zigzags or herringbone designs' (illus. 29).5 1 Whether applied to pottery manufactured for the population ofseventeenth-century London, or to the calabashes made for the indigenous peoples of twentieth-century Brazil, the judgement is one that scants the question of the purpose of such decorative schemes, while finding them adventitious both to. the utility, and to the beauty of the vessels on which they appear. For the written history of pottery is organized by a conceptual distinction between the utensil and the art object. On the one hand, the pot is held (erroneously) to be the 'primordial feature of human industry', the first tool; on the other it 153

29 Metropolitan ware mug, red earthenware with white slip- trailed deco-

rati on un der lead glaze, Harlow, Essex, 1630-60. Fitzwilli am Museum, Cambridge.

is encountered as a decorative object (assuming fanciful forms, or offering itself as the vehicle for glazed, painted or incised patterns). The privileged term in such histories is usu ally utility: ' pots were first made for a practical purpose, that of containing things: their int ention was originally just to be useful, wh atever ornam ent may have been worked on their surface, as it often was even in the earl i154

est times.Y Forms and decora tions tha t add ress or enha nce a vessel's usefuln ess are th en found to be beautiful; th ose jud ged adve ntitious to function are not. But , we could ask, is 'conta ining things' a pot 's first and only function ? A nd is th is containing fun ction itself always or only ' practical'? C learly some pots have in th e past been design ed not to contain any thing, but to provide a surface for painting and w riting. Thus Rackham observes th at ancient G ree k potte rs 'a imed at p rovid ing th e best possible recipient of the paint er 's design s'; while in early modern Europe earthe nwa res coated with tin enamel (Italian ma jolica, French faience, and Dutch and Eng lish Delftwar e) offered painter s

30 Two-han dled posset pot, origi nally with two loop handl es and a spout

between, inscribed 'LYDI A MO UNT FORD H ER POT 1700', brown eart henwa re with black and white painted and tra iled slip decoration under lead glaze, 1 7 0 0 . F itzw illiam Museum, Cam bridge.

not only a hard, white ground on which to work, but also the chance to add lustre to, and permanently secure, their colours under a highly fusible glaze. 53 Writing appears with some frequency on tincoated earthenware, as if to provide a gloss on its more pictorial representations. Portraits of mythical, allegorical, or real figures may be given names; mottoes elaborate emblematic or non-emblematic images; shields, coats-of-arms, and guild insignia may carry their own sentences. But are we justified in assuming that the writing is there to clarify the picture? Writing also appears on tin-coated earthenware accompanied only by abstract patterns, or by the white ground and clay body of the vessel (illus. 30). Even here we could say that the shape, colour and lustre of the pot are pictorial representations (of matter worked in a particular way), and that such pots are, like other emblematic objects, drawing on the semantic connotations of their own material components to elaborate a thought that is subsequently labelled with a text: 'For you and I are erthe.' But to argue this is to demonstrate that we could also reverse the terms in all these cases - to argue, that is, not only that the pictorial images are there to clarify the text, but that the pot itself may exist for the purpose of bearing writing (illus. 31). The strangeness of Levi-Strauss's conclusion that the Nambikwara did not know how to draw because they drew only on their

calabashes is here thrown into sharp relief. For if Levi-Strauss's information is correct, calabashes constituted the specialized and appropriate site for drawing among the Nam:bikwara, who may even have regarded their primary function as the bearing of 'geometrical' designs. Clay pots may have had a similar status in archaic Greece, where, according to William Harris, the largest group of the approximately one hundred inscriptions that survive from the eighth and seventh centuries

BC

'served to identify the owners of ceramic

vessels'. That is, at a moment when it was 'still a most impressive

achievement', wntmg appeared (and largely, though it may be disproportionately, survived) on pots. 54 As writing became more wide spread in the ancient world it appeared on stone, wood, leather, lead, papyrus, and wax and clay tablets; but pot shards, which were portable and easily marked with paint, chalk, charcoal or a sharp implement, represented one of the most readily available writing surfaces and might be considered the scrap paper of the ancient

31 Dish with the text of a ballad, 'The Alom ode or ye Maidens Mode

Admir'd & Continue' d By ye Ape Owl and Mistris Pu ss', and the date '1685', English Delftware with dark blue paint on light blue enamel , 1685. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

157

world. If one of the pot's primary functions is to contain things, another has always been to display writing or drawing. Writing so displayed has at its disposal a particular set of physical properties, the most obvious of which is its existence in three dimensions. Forever in the act of vanishing, or re-appearing, around a curve, such writing makes explicit the role of the materiality of space within the act of understanding . While Rackham is surely right to argue that the horizontal 'girth grooves' that appear in a hand-thrown pot are a 'pleasant variation on the convex surface' because they add to 'the assurance of that capaciousness which is the very purpose of the article being made', girth grooves and other horizontallines also function as a meditation on linear circularity itself a meditation only enhanced by those vertical patterns which attempt to slow or halt the eye's pursuit of the vanishing line. 55 I take it that the decorative schemes on early modern pots, as well as on the calabashes of the Nambikwara, function, at one and the same time, to underline the capaciousness of the vessel, to model a particular (and in each case culturally specific) notion of subjectivity and its relation to the objective world, and to explore the appearance of arche-writing in the visual field.

VII

The task is to see the riddle. Martin Heidegger

One of the most notorious art works produced during the twentieth century was Meret Oppenheim's 'Lunch in Fur', first exhibited at an exhibition of Surrealist art in Paris in May 1936 (illus. 32). This object, a cup, saucer and spoon, covered with fur, was widely admired by members of Oppenheim's Surrealist circle for its realization of one

32 Meret Oppenheim, Object (Le Dejeuner en fourrure}, 1936, fur-cover ed cup, saucer and spoon . The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

cardinal principle of Surrealist object art - 'traquer la bete folie de l'usage'. For Andre Breton, 'hounding the mad beast of function' meant, in part, redefining or blocking the purpose of objects.t" The fur cup is a Surrealist object becaus e, like one of D ali's melting watches, it sets itself against its own function - in this case by inviting its viewers to imagine the shocking, impossible pleasure of drinking from it. Oppenheim's piece could, however, be heard to teach a slightly different lesson: that whil e it may be one of the primary purposes of a vessel to contain something, containing something is not alw ays a purposive function. Lacan developed Freud's discussion of sublimation by arguing that the drives are not only, as Freud had said, 'extraordinarily plastic' and easily converted into each other (as, for exam ple, when sexual energy is converted into artistic activity), but that they are from the start diverted from their ends. For Lacan, a drive seeks not to possess 159

its object, nor to establish a register for its aim, but to encounter the impossibility of its own satisfaction, and in his early work this impossibility takes the positive form of das Ding - that Thing 'in the real' which, entirely outside language and the unconscious, can never be possessed. Lacan offers as 'the most general formula' of sublimation - a formula that provides him with a definition of art - that 'it raises an object ... to the dignity of the Thing'. A sublimated object is one that assumes an imaginary function as an embodiment of the void around which the drive circulates, and so comes to represent the unattainable substance of enjoyment. It is as a mode of representing the necessary frustration of the drives that, not only Oppenheim's fur cup, but also another, early modern, ceramic object may be understood. Popular in England throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, puzzle-jugs were shaped to withhold their contents from the drinker. Because this aim is defeated once their secret has been learned, puzzle-jugs were individually designed and made - 'che sono cose che non ha regula', as one sixteenth-century observer commented.V By and large, however, a puzzle-jug had a hollow lip, furnished with spouts, which communicated via hidden channels with the bottom of the jug. Liquid could be sucked from the correct spout when a particular combination of air holes were stopped with the fingers, but because it was contained largely in pipes, the upper body of the jug could be pierced through - as if to demonstrate to the drinker that she sought its contents in vain (illus. 33). The puzzle-jug is a sublimated object in Lacan's terms because it is a mirage - a device used to stage the phantasmagoric appearance of das Ding within a material form. The first example that Lacan himself gives of a sublimated object is a collection of empty matchboxes 'laid out in an extremely agreeable way' whereby each box is linked to the next by the slight displacement of its drawer. Because of its copulatory structure, this 160

33 Metropolitan ware puzzle-jug with single spout and perforated neck, inscribed with the initials 'S.L .' and the date '1632', red earthenware with white slip-trailed decoration under lead glaze, Harlow, Essex, 1630-60. The loop handle forms a tube connecting three sucking spouts on the rim (one now missing). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

collection is expressive of the libido; because it is a collection (and one organized by a principle ofdisplacement), it is expressive of the sublimation of the libido. But what makes the collection art for Lacan is the fact that it is able to represent 'the Thing that subsists' in the emptiness of a matchbox: 'this Thing, all forms of which created by man belong to the sphere of sublimation, this Thing will always be represented by emptiness, precisely because it cannot be represented by anything else - or, more exactly, because it can only be represented by something else. But in every form of sublimation, emptiness is determinative.' One of the easiest ways for an object to achieve the status of a Thing is, consequently, for it to assume to appearance of a container. Although Lacan does not pursue the issue here, the sublime object is one that has an inside - a side that comes into being as the involution of a surface. The experience of das Ding is thus accessible, as Lacan points out, in 'very elementary' as well as in very elevated cultural registers. His second instance of sublimation concerns the signifier itself, as a meaningless material element made by human hands. The 'first of such signifiers' is the vase or pot, which Lacan, following Heidegger, locates at the interface of 'earth and sky', raising matter from the former in order that it may receive something from the latter. The vase 'creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it' and it is on the basis of this first 'fabricated signifier' - a signifier made from, but now irreducible to, matter - 'that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world' and signification begins: Now if you consider the vase from the point of view I first proposed, as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing. And that is why the potter ... creates the vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, just like the

mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole. Everyone makes jokes about macaroni, because it is a hole with something around it ... The fact that we laugh doesn't change the situation, however: the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or hole in the real is identical.

The pot is the first object organized around emptiness, and it thus represents the creation of a void in the real on which representation is predicated. For Lacan, such representations are the proper end of art; and its 'sublime objects' are consequently those which produce the fetishized emptiness which simultaneously ends and avows the continued indifference of matter to signification. Lacan's equation of the sublime object with the work ofart effectively erases the history of art, by understanding it as a set of variable encounters with the problem ofdas Ding; an encounter which is held to be the invariant meaning of art in general, as distinguished from its local forms. This invariant meaning, the thing that all art works 'mean to say', and the first function of a vase considered apart from 'its use as a utensil' is nothing other than matter's refusal to speak to man; and here the 'mute' vases of the Western tradition join hands with that class of signifiers which, according to Lacan, 'signify nothing other than ... signifying as such'. Why, after all, do oracles speak from jars and bottles, if not to demonstrate their profound withholding from human affairs? Why do mugs and bottles talk to men, if not to suggest that what they have in common is only that which is meaningless? But the withholding of matter from signification is not a transhistorical, transcultural fact: if Keat's urn is silent, and if Lacan's vase finally says nothing, that is because they are being judged according to intellectual and aesthetic protocols that observe, more or less rigorously, a distinction between the sensible and the intelligible (circumstances under which the wish that matter might speak is predicated on the knowledge that it will not). The worrying of this distinction was a recurrent

concern of Freud (for whom writing oscillates between its material and psychic status as it acts to organize the circulation of psychical energy between the unconscious and the conscious); as it has been since, both for Lacan (who gives primacy to the material element ofthe signifier in the generation of concepts); and for Derrida (in his call for a 'psychoanalytic graphology' that could begin to account for our libidinal investments in writing's material forms). A theory of cognition derived from the work of Freud, Lacan and Derrida cannot hope to explain the operation and status of writing in the early modern period. It can, however, loosen some of the restrictions which literary criticism otherwise imposes on its objects; and in so doing it opens space for an interpretative method that can imagine, if not fully account for, writing systems different from its own. It has been the argument of this book that the early modern period had a way of understanding the relation of writing to the mind, and to the world outside it, that was not that of representation or reference. This relation (which can be found within, if it does not characterize, all the visual and aural arts of the period, in their demotic as well as their esoteric registers), proposes a mode of knowledge that simultaneously thinks through matter and accords it a sensibility of its own. The mystery of the early modern pot to contemporary thought has several determinants: like all historical artefacts, it is cathected as an object suspended between past and present; like all commodities, it is caught between use and exchange values; like all pots, it is faced with the general question of what constitutes the purposive, and what the aesthetic. Beyond this, however, it is the product of a way of thinking that held the natural and fabricated world to be structured by a nonpropositional intelligence shared with the human mind. It is only where this way of thinking is forgotten that the category of literature becomes necessary, as a newly specialized deployment of language working to restore matter to meaning.

References INTRODUCTION

[oseph Hall, Chronicles (London, 1809), p. 517; cited in [oan Evans, English jewellry from the Fifth Century AD to 1800 (London, 1921), pp. 78-g. Evans describes a number of emblematic jewels containing writing in the possession of Elizabeth I, including a set of enamelled gold buttons given to her by Sir Christopher Hatton, with letters of seed pearl spelling 'Tu decus omne tuis', and a necklace with the word Durabo and true-love knots, also in pearl (p. 93). 2 'Sur les manches est escript de broderie, tout au long, le dit de la chanson, Madame, je suis plus joyeulx, et notte tout au long sur chascune des-dittes deux manches - 568 perles pour former les nottes de ladite chanson, ou il a 142 nottes, c'est assavoit pour chacune notte 4 perles en quarre etc.' From Leroux de Lincy, Paris et ses historiens (Paris, 1867), p. 475, n.; cited in Marina Warner,joan ofArc: The Image ofFemale Heroism (New York, 1981), p. 170. 3 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978); OfGrammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976): 'Where does writing begin? When does writing begin? Where and when does the trace, writing in general, common root of speech and writing, narrow itself down into "writing" in the colloquial sense?' (p, 74). My own project is indebted to [onathan Goldberg's brilliant redaction of Derrida in Writing Matter: From the Hands ofthe English Renaissance (Stanford, 1990)' Similar work in the field of Renaissance studies includes Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979), and Derek Attridge, 'Nature, Art, and the Supplement in Renaissance Literary Theory: Puttenham's Poetics of Decorum', in Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to james joyce (Ithaca, NY, 1988), pp. 17-45. 4 Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948), p. 20 and passim. I

5 Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, 1977), P·15 2 . 6 In 'Puttenham and the Oriental Pattern-Poem', Comparative Literature, VI (1954), pp. 289-3°3, A. L. Korn suggests that Puttenham originally intended in Book 11 to consider all poetry as an example of musical proportion, and that he later developed a theory of geometrical proportion ('proportion in figure') to account for the 'ocular representations' whose description was a late addition to the book. 7 George Puttenham, The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, ed. E. Arber (Kent, OH, 1970), pp. 1° 4-1 4, 268- 7° . For an encyclopaedic history of pattern poetry in the West, see [ererny Adler and Ulrich Ernst, Text als Figur: Visuelle Poesie uon der Antike bis zur Moderne (Weinheim, 1987). Discussions of the English context for Puttenham's figure poems include Margaret Church, 'The First English Pattern Poems', PMLA, LXI (1946), pp. 636-50; Peter Daly, Literature in the Light ofthe Emblem: Structural Parallels between the Emblem and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Toronto, 1979), pp. 123-33; Jeremy Adler, 'Technopaigneia, Carmina Figurata, and BilderReime: Seventeenth-century Figured Poetry in Historical Perspective', in Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook, IV (1982), pp. 107-47; and D. Higgins, 'The Corpus of British and Other EnglishLanguage Pattern Poetry', Visible Language, xx/r (1986), pp. 28-51. 8 'For though the poore Gentleman laboreth greatly to prove, or rather to make, Poetrie an art and reciteth as you may see in the plural number some pluralities of patterns and parcels of his owne Poetrie with divers pieces ofPartheniads and hymnes in praise of the most praiseworthy, yet whatsoever he would prove by all these, sure in my poore opinion he doth prove nothing more plainly then that which M. Sidney and all the learneder sort that have written of it do pronounce: namely, that it is a gift and not an art.' In Lodovico Ariosto, Lodovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso translated into English Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington, ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford, 1972), p. 2. 9 To the extent that visual poetry falls outside the voice-centred logocentrism of 'Western' metaphysics, it may well be called 'Eastern' (as these two politically consequential terms are used designate matters of intellectual taste). On the relationship of Puttenham to his 'oriental' sources, see Korn in 'Puttenham and the Oriental Pattern-

166

Poem', who points out that while shaped verses are found in Turkish, Persian and Chinese poetry of the period, they are governed by acrostical systems that defy translation into English, and certainly do not survive in Puttenham's geometrical shapes. Korn concludes that while Puttenham may have heard about Eastern types of pattern poetry, his understanding of them was 'deeply coloured' by the neoPlatonic 'cult of proportion and his own Elizabethan version of the espritgeometrique'. 10 In 'The Figured Poem: Towards a Definition of the Genre', Visible Language, xx/r (1986), pp. 8-27, Ulrich Ernst defines the 'carmen figuratum' as 'a lyrical text (up to modern times generally also a versified text) constructed in such a way that the words - sometimes with the help of purely pictorial means - form a graphic figure which in relation to the verbal utterance has both a mimetic and symbolic function' (p. 9). Stressing the dual components of 'poetry' and 'figure' but according precedence to the former, this careful definition excludes all forms of shaped prose, epigrams, micrography, calligrams, emblems, word labyrinths and verse texts (such as those of the Koran) whose shape does not illustrate their content. Conversely, Puttenham's treatise collapses the distinction between poetry and prose while positing a Pythagorean continuity between visual and aural forms. I I See John Hollander, Visionand Resonance: Two Senses ofPoetic Form (New Haven, er, 1985): 'the ear responds to the dimension of natural experience, the eye to that of convention' (p, 248 and passim). 12 In Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1989), pp. 147-83 and passim, Martin Elskey follows Foucault in arguing for the importance of the visually perceived word in the English Renaissance, an importance he attributes to the meeting of 'humanist and Hebraic interests' on the terrain of the new print technology. In Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993), p. 4, Mary Thomas Crane argues that the gathering and framing of texts formed the basis for an 'inscriptive' (rather than a voice-centred) intellectual practice that was characteristic of English humanism and 'developed alongside and in partial resistance to the individualistic, imitative, imaginative, and artistocratic paradims for selfhood that we tend to associate with the English Renaissance'. 13 Adler, 'Technopaigneia, Carmina Figurata, and Bilder-Reime', p. 109.

14 According to Dick Higgins (using Puttenham's terms), there are 'a mass of altars, lozenges, and "trickets displayed" among the manuscript poems of [oseph Beaumont in the Wellesley College Library (Higgins, 'English-Language Pattern Poetry', p. 263). Pattern poems may occasionally have lost their forms in the transition from manuscript to print. So the 'first' English pattern poem, in Stephen Hawes, Conoercyon ofSwerers (London: W. de Worde, 1509), is sufficiently tentative to persuade some readers that it is not a pattern poem at all, while illustration 5 in this volume, Andrew Willet's net-shaped Latin poem on the Church as a fisher of men, in Sacrorum Emblematum (Cambridge: John Legat, 1592), sig. D4 f , has gone unremarked. IS Puttenham, The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, p. 72. 16 In Visible Words:A Study ofInscriptions in and as Books and Works of Art (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 2-5, John Sparrow defines the inscription in its widest sense as 'anything written upon anything else'; more narrowly as 'a sequence of words designed to be read with the eye'; finally as a literary form whose lines are determined 'not by the requirements of metre or of an intended visual pattern' but by the desire to enhance meaning by visual form. 17 The phrase is from WaIter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1985), p. 220. For further exploration of the material contingencies that may determine literary production in a particular historical moment, see Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA, 1990). 18 'The Picture of a Lover', in Tottel's Miscellany, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA, 1966), p. 161. 19 Foucault makes the same point as he describes the dissolution, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, of 'the profound kinship of language with the world ... There is nothing now, either in our knowledge or in our reflection, that still recalls even the memory of that being. Nothing, except perhaps literature - and even then in a fashion more allusive and diagonal than direct' (The Order of Things: An Archaeology ofthe Human Sciences [New York, 1973], p. 43). 20 For example, see Lucy Gent, "'The Rash Gazer": Economies of Vision in Britain, 1550-1660', and Gloria Kury, "'Glancing Surfaces": Hilliard, Armour, and the Italian Model', in Lucy Gent, ed., Albion's Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550--1700 (New Haven, CT, 1995), pp. 377-94,395-4 26. 21 For an account of this non-classical, anti-Albertian tradition in

168

22 23

24

25

26

27 28

29 30

Renaissance art, see Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, er, 1980), and Svetlana Alpers, The Art ofDescribing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, IL, 1983). For the extension of this argument to a slightly later period, see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age ofDiderot (Berkeley, 1980). Foucault, The Order ofThings, p. 34. Foucault's Renaissance sign is ternary in structure: it requires not only a mark, and the content indicated by it, but also a resemblance or similitude to link the two. Since, however, 'resemblance is the form of signs as well as their content', signs, similitudes and their referents cannot preserve their difference from each other but collapse into a single form. Signatures are the special marks that identify the similitudes that would otherwise remain hidden. But signatures are, in their turn, similitudes - they can be recognized only because they too possess affinity to what they reveal (The Order of Things, pp. 17-45). [ean-Ioseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY, 1990), P 174. According to David Wellerby, 'the presupposition of exteriority' is one of three premises which, derived from the work of Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, underlie Freidrich Kittler's 'post-hermeneutic' criticism. See David Wellerby, Foreword, in Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. xii. In Writing Matter, [onathan Goldberg takes up Derrida's call for a 'cultural graphology', using the regulation of handwriting in early modern England as his own case study for the operations of logocentrism within it. Foucault, The Order ofThings, p. 38. 'Despite several attempts made by Freud and certain of his successors, a psychoanalysis of literature respectful of the originality ofthe literary signifier has not yet begun, and this is surely not an accident. Until now, only the analysis of literary signifieds, that is, non-literary signified meanings, has been undertaken' (Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 230). Foucault, The Order ofThings, p. 38. David Brown, The New Invention, Intituled Calligraphia (St Andrews: E. Raban, 1622), sig. ***I v _ 2 f ; cited in Goldberg, Writing Matter, p. 187. The privileging of writing within Foucault's episteme finds

local confirmation within Renaissance linguistic theory, which is sometimes brought to assert that speech is the vocalization of letters, rather than that writing is stored speech. For a discussion of this, and the wider relation between speech and writing in the English Renaissance, see Goldberg, Writing Matter, pp. 173-229.

GRAFFITI

I am grateful to Jayne Archer, Crystal Bartolovich, Georgia Brown, Mark Burnett, Muriel Carrick, Katherine Craik, lan Donaldson, Margreta de Grazia, David Kastan, John Kerrigan, Tom Luxon, Peter Stallybrass, Malcolm Underwood and the late Jeremy Maule, who each furnished me with examples of wall-writing. 'Brothers need to start knowin' where it started from. There's a lot of writers out there who are just comin' out the blue and not knowin' a damn thing about the history of graffiti, you know? I think a big part of graffiti is to be able to appreciate the past. I'm talkin' about brothers like Phase 2, Skeme - the man Skeme from New York, mad skills, you know? It's cool to know that a lot of the writers out here, that are old school, have heard of these brothers and have much respect for them. You know, a lot of youngstas comin' up have never heard of them' (Dream, interviewed in Urb magaseen, XXVII [1993], p. 49). 2 We/spring ofwittie Conceights, trans. William Fister (London, 1584). For example: 'Certaine worthie sentences, very meete to be written about a Bedchamber or to be set up in any convenient place in a house: I. The good Son, grafteth goodnes, whereof salvation is the fruit But the evil planteth vices, the fruit whereof is damnation 2. Therefore, at night call unto minde how thou the daye hast spent: Praise God, if naught amisse thou finde: if ought, betimes repent' (sig. N 3V). 3 Thomas Tusser, Five Hundreth Points ofGood Husbandry, united to as many ofgood huswiferie (London, 1573). For example: 'Husbandly Poesies for the hall I. Frend here I dwell, and here I have, a little worldly pelfe: which on my frend I kepe to spend, as well as on my selfe ... Poesies for the parler 1

17°

As hatred, is the serpent's noysome rod; So frendship, is the loving gift of God. 2. The dronken frend is frendship very evill, The frantike frend is friendship for the Devill. 3. The quiet frend, alone in worde and dede Great comfort is, like ready golde at neede ... Posies for the ghests Chamber I. The sloven and the carelesse man, the roynish nothing nice, to lodge in chamber comely deckt, are seldome suffered twice ... Poesies for thine owne bed chamber 2. What better fare, then well content, what mirth to godly welth What better gest, then trusty frend, in sickness and in health? 3. What better bed, then quiet rest, to passe the night with sleepe, What better worke, then dayly care, fro sinne thyselfe to keepe. 4. What better thought, then think on God, and daily him to serve, What better gift than to the poore, that ready be to sterve? 6. What worse dispaire, than loth to die, for feare to go to Hell? What greter faith than trust in god, through christ in heven to dwel' (sig. X3r_ y r). For further examples of 'wise sentences' to be set on walls, see Thomas Deloney, Strange Histories (London, 1607; reprint in Percy Society Reprints, 111/2 [ 1 8 4 1 ]), p. 70. 4 On a wall at Sharlowes Farm, a further fragment from Tusser, 'neight with slepe, what better' (Five Hundreth Points, sig. Y'), is just visible in a frieze above a painting of men playing the flute. 5 So deeply internalized is the modern prohibition against domestic graffiti that ancient historians will read their survival as 'evidence' that the building or room in question had a public function. See also Alfred Loos, 'With children it is a natural phenomenon, their first artistic expression is to scrawl on the walls erotic symbols. But what is natural to the Papuan and the child is a symptom of degeneration in modern man' ('Ornament and Crime', in Alfred Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture, ed. L. Muntz and G. Kunstler, trans. Harold Meek [London, 1996], p. 226). 6 Armando Petrucci describes the blank plaque as the extreme phase of 'the progressive obliteration of the sign' in Baroque monumental art, although he notes that the mature works of Michelangelo also demonstrate a tendency to leave plaques blank (Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture, trans. Linda Lappin (Chicago, IL, 1993), pp. 45,3°). As Petrucci realizes, to prepare a place for writing, and I.

then to leave it blank, creates even as it prohibits a desire for writing. For a description of printed texts (such as pictures, poems, prayers, catechisms, mementos of death, devotional guides) designed to be stuck on walls, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 217-53. 7 For illuminating discussion of Northern traditions of 'absorptive' (as opposed to three-dimensional) picturing, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art ofDescribing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983), and Gloria Kury, "'Glancing Surfaces": Hilliard, Armour, and the Italian Model', in Lucy Gent, ed., Albion's Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550-1660 (New Haven, er, 1995), pp. 395-426. 8 Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art ofAlbrecht Diirer, 4th edn (Princeton, NI, 1971), p. 247. 9 As Gent points out, this view 'helps account for why so many paintings of the period are worked out as large surfaces ... Such pieces seem conceived as versions of tapestry and do not match a tradition of the painting as an autonomous art object' ("'The Rash Gazer": Economies of Vision in Britain, 1550-1660', in Gent, ed., Albion's Classicism, pp. 382-83). 10 For a good account of graffiti writing as a contemporary practice, see Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford, 1991), pp. 206-33. Reading graffiti as a signature effect, one that exists not 'in the singular work, but in a process of rampant reproduction' and so figures 'a crime in the mode of production', Stewart argues that the tradition of graffiti writing should be dated only from the late 1950S and early 1960s. For a longer, and excellent, cultural history of graffiti, see Adam Gopnik and Kirk Varnedoe, High and Low: Modern Art/Popular Culture (New York, 1991), pp. 66-99. I I In 'Con safos : Mexican Americans, Names, and Graffiti', journal of American Folklore, LXXXVIII (1975), pp. 132-42, Sylvia Ann Grider demonstrates how conceptions of graffiti vary between cultures by arguing that Mexican-Americans may not regard graffiti as a defacement of public property. 12 Nicole Dacos, La Decouuerte de la Domus Aurea et laformation des grotesques a la Renaissance (Leiden, 1969), pp. 139-60. 13 Church graffiti from the same period have been found in Norway and France; see M. Blindheim, Graffiti in Norwegian Stave Churches c. 1350-1550 (Oslo, 1985); Asger [ern et al., Signes graves sur les eglises de

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I'Eure et du Caloados (Copenhagen, 1964). A member of the Situationist International movement (1957-61), [orn understood the graffiti he documented as an expression of the spirit of popular liberation; see Anne-Charlotte Weinmarck, Nordisk Anarkiism (Arhus, 1980), p. 85, and Gopnik and Varnedoe, High and Low, p. 9I. Susan Son tag 'The Pleasure of the Image', Art in America, LXXV (November 1987), pp. 126,130. For further discussion of Saen red am's church paintings which usefully stresses the lack of a clear boundary between painting and writing in Dutch art, see Alpers, The Art of Describing, pp. 169-22 I. Doris Jones-Baker, 'The Graffiti of Folk Motifs in Cotswold Churches', Folklore, XCII/2 (1981), pp. 169-85. Doris Jones-Baker, 'Medieval and Tudor Music and Musicians in Hertfordshire: The Graffiti Evidence', in Hertfordshire in History: Papers Presented to Lionel Munby (Hertfordshire, 1991), pp 22-45; idem, 'English Medieval Graffiti and the Local Historian', Local Historian, XXIII/I (February 1993), pp. 3-19. Eamon Duffy suggests that the fact that musical notation survives on church walls as it does not elsewhere is in part a consequence of the introduction of the first English Prayer Book in 1549, whose 'switch from Latin to English immediately rendered obsolete the entire musical repertoire of cathedral, chapel, and parish church' (The Stripping ofthe Altars: Traditional Religion in England 14°0-1580 [New Haven, CT, 1992], pp. 464- 5). Violet Pritchard, English Medieval Graffiti (Cambridge, 1967), p. 54. Izaak Walton, The Lives ofDr John Donne, Sir Henry Wootton, Mr Richard Hooker, Mr George Herbert (London, 1675), p. 77. Pritchard, English Medieval Graffiti, pp. 171-80. Translation mine. Malcolm Underwood, 'The Old Treasury and Its Graffiti', Eagle, LXVIII/288 (1980), pp. 23-6. John Addington Symonds, Studies ofthe Greek Poets (London, 1873), p. 242. Raphael Garrucci, Graffiti de Pompei, znd edn (Paris, 1856). For a brief account of the historical documentation of Pompeian graffiti, see Gopnik and Vardenoe, High and Low, p. 70, who are themselves led to conclude: 'On these walls, as nowhere else, a wealth of oaths and imprecations, drawings and historical references, prayers and obscenities, put the flesh (sometimes all too weak and human) of daily life back on to the noble skeleton of an idealized ancient culture.' Gopnik and Varnedoe, High and Low, pp. 72-4.

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23 As its title suggests, this is the governing assumption of Helen H. Tanzer's The Common People of Pompeii: A Study ofthe Graffiti (Baltimore, 1939), p. 83: 'Messages, tags of verse, pleasant thoughts of friend and sweetheart, bits of self-glorification and the like all allow the people to reveal themselves to us.' 24 See Stewart, Crimes, p. 209. 25 See Mary T. Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993), p. 6. 26 Collected Works ofErasmus, 86 vols (Toronto, 1982--92), vol. 31, p. 13. 27 Michel Foucault argues that the author-function characterizes the mode of existence of a text: 'An anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author. In this sense, the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation and operation of certain discourses within a society' (in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY, 1986), p. 124. I am suggesting that early modern parietal writing was produced at a moment when the presence or absence of the author-function was not the dominant criterion for classifying texts. 28 Robert Hayman represents himself as having gathered flowers and 'intreated slips' from the spacious garden of'Owen's booke ... to make himselfe a poesie' in Certaine Epigrams out ofthe first foure bookes of the excellent Epigrammatist, Master John Owen, trans. R. Hayman (London, I 628). For a useful discussion of the posy as a metaphor for a collection of rightly chosen rhetorical 'flowers', see Crane, Framing Authority, pp. 177-9. 29 George Puttenham, The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, ed. E. Arber (Ohio, 1970), p. 72. For a wide selection of trencher verse, see Proceedings of the Society ofAntiquaries, second ser., X (1885), pp. 2°7-16; second ser., XII (1888), pp. 201-23; and A. H. Church, 'Old English Fruit Trenchers', in A. H. Church et al., Some Minor Arts as Practised in England (London, 1894), pp. 47-54. In Donne's poem 'To Sir Henry Goodyere', the poet chides himself for offering moral truisms, when 'Tables, or fruit-trenchers teach as much'. 30 The Worthy Tract ofPaulus [ouius, contayning a discourse of... Imprese, trans. Samuel Daniel (London, 1585), sig. A5 f • 31 The phrase 'writing matter' is taken from [onathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands ofthe English Renaissance (Stanford, 1990). Following Derrida's suggestion in OfGrammatology, Goldberg

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undertakes a local 'cultural graphology' - a study of the material practices, institutions and ideologies of English Renaissance handwriting. As he points out, the book centres 'on the formations of a new "high" literacy, and on the manuals directed at this ideological project', and 'can only glance at the sites that these books preclude, sites that vitally contradict their regulatory aims' (p. 9). I remain indebted to the theoretical formulations of Goldberg's work as I examine some 'alternative' sites of Elizabethan handwriting. Percy Society Reprints, 111/2 (London, 1851), p. 71. See Crane, Framing Authority, pp. 12-38. See Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 217-53. For an interesting and detailed account of the early Tudor practice of setting 'worthy sentences' on walls, see Greg Walker, Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith and Political Culture in the Reign ofHenry VIII (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 99-119. Walker cites the examples of Leconfield Castle, the seat of the 5th Earl of Northumberland, which had a dialogue between Youth and Manhood engraved on a chamber ceiling, the counsels of Aristotle in the 'garret of the garden', and a disputation between Sensuality and Intellect over the bath (p, 101); Lumley Castle, whose chamber was decorated by the sixth Lord Lumley with verses concluding 'the world passes away, Christ does not pass away: worship not that which passes away' (p. 105); and Henry's own palace at Nonsuch, 'a three dimensional structure every face of which was utilized to offer improving representations' (p. 110). John Willis, trans., The art ofmemory sofar forth as it dependeth upon places and ideas (London, 1621), p. 47; discussed in Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (New York, 1966), pp. 201-2, and in Watt, Cheap Print, p. 221. Watt, Cheap Print, p. 219. Rosemary Freeman argues that the sixteenth century enjoyed 'a very much closer relation between literature and decoration than has ever existed since' and uses her study of emblems to illustrate both 'the literary nature of contemporary decoration' and 'the decorative nature of contemporary literature' (English Emblem Books, p. 98). See also Watt's useful documentation and discussion of 'godly tables'that is, printed broadsides characterized by the schematic arrangement of words. Designed to be displayed on walls, these tables 'fill in a gap in the English visual tradition: they show how the seventeenth-century English Protestant tried to give his religion

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visual expression using the printing press' (Cheap Print, pp. 217-53). Such tables often use brackets, acrostics and other visual word games, as if to replace memorable images with visually memorable texts: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English pattern poems should be reread in the context of this tradition. In 'Looking at Words: The Representation of Texts in Dutch Art' (The Art ofDescribing, pp. 169-221), Svetlana Alpers argues that writing is given a 'separate but equal place' in Dutch painting as an object of sight with no particularly privileged signifying status. See, for example, Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 183, 192, and Muriel Carrick, 'Wall Paintings in Feering and Kelvedon', Historic Buildings in Essex (Essex, 1985), pp. 328-39. Izaak Walton records the disastrous progression from book to wall of a witticism ('Legatus est vir bonus peregrere missus ad mentiendum Reipublicaie causa' ['An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country']) that Henry Wootton wrote in a companion's common-place book: 'As it was, it slept quietly among other sentences in this Albo, almost eight years, till by accident it fell into the hands of Jasper Scioppius, a Romanist, a man of restless spirit and a malicious pen; who with books against King james prints this as a principle of that religion professed by the King, and his Ambassador Sir Henry Wootton, then at Venice, and in Venice it was presently after written in several glass windows, and spitefully declared to be Sir Henry Wootton's' (Reliquae Wottonianiae [London, 1651], sig. C"-C2 r ) . Thomas Nash, Have With You to Saffron Walden (London, 1596). Collected Works ofErasmus, vol. 34, p. 10. Since 'Susteine, absteine' is the title of a broadside ballad which begins 'Susteine, absteine, kepe well in your minde / Beare and forbeare, have ever in remembrance' (London, c. 1555), there is every chance that the proverb was everywhere pasted on walls and columns, and from there copied on to rings. For the mural itself, see Philip Mainwaring Johnstone, 'Mural Paintings in Houses: With Special Reference to Recent Discoveries at Stratford-Upon-Avon and Oxford', journal ofthe British Archaeological Association, XXXVIII (1932), pp. 75-100. For an account of Dowe's saying, see A dairy Booleefor good huswives (London, 1588). The texts derive from a group of Middle English advice poems (a subset of what are known as the 'Precepts In-ly') beginning 'Arrise errly / And serve God devoutly' and consisting of sixteen lines in most

42

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45 46 47

48 49

manuscripts, with all lines ending in -ly. See Albert E. Hartung, ed., A Manual ofthe Writings in Middle English 1050-1500 (New Haven, er, 1993), vols IX, p. 2991; x, p. 3703. Thomas Coryate, Coryate's Crudities (Glasgow, 1905), pp. 2,91,213. Bacon also had sentences on his porch, in his hall, in the small banqueting house in his orchard and on the door to the oak wood. See Elizabeth McCutcheon, Sir Nicholas Bacon's Great House Sententiae (English Literary Renaissance Supplements [1977]), p. 18. Edward Rainbowe, A Sermon Preached at the Interrment ofAnne, Countess ofPembroke (London, 1677), p. 48; cited in Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 139-4°. See Crane, Framing Authority, pp. 3-76. For Montaigne's sentences, 'tracees au pinceau sur quarante-six solives et deux poutres transversales', and the two commemorative inscriptions written on the wall of his study, see P. Bonnefon, 'La Bibliotheque de Montaigne', Revue d'histoire litteraire de France, 15 July 1895, pp. 3 13-71. For a brief account of these inscriptions, see Francis Cooper, 'The Leckingfield Proverbs', Musical Times, CXIII (June 1972), pp. 547-50. Michael Bath, 'Alexander Seton's Painted Gallery', in Gent, ed., Albion's Classicism, pp. 96-100. [oseph Hall, Mundus Alter et Idem (London, 1605); trans. John Healey, The Discovery ofa New World (Cambridge, MA, 1937), p. 103; see also George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs: Selected by Mr G. H. (London, 1640), no. 839. Robert Parry, Moderatus (London, 1595), sig. E V • Elizabeth McCutcheon makes a similar argument concerning the sententiae painted on the walls of Sir Nicholas Bacon's long gallery at Gorhambury (Sir Nicholas Bacon's Great House Sententiae, pp. 20-21), as does Paula Anderson in 'Learning to Read Architecture in the English Renaissance', in Gent, ed., Albion's Classicism, pp. 251-3. Michael Bath suggests that the 'speaking pictures and sententious texts' of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century painted ceilings in Scotland 'functioned as memory places' and notes Mulcaster's recommendation of the use of walls to furnish literal memory places within a classroom: 'If the nine Muses and Apollo their president were painted upon a wall ... they would serve ... for places of memorie' (Richard Mulcaster, Positions ... for the Training Up of

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Children [London, 1581], sig. Aaz"; Bath, 'Alexander Seton's Painted Gallery', p. 107). Daniel, Worthy Tract, sig. Ar", John Hart, A Methode or comfortable beginning (London, 1570), sig.:IIe.ii r. See Goldberg, Writing Matter, pp. 59-1°7. For example, Harold Love's passing assumption that 'the teaching of writing in petty schools must always have been hindered by the absence of desks', and David Cressy's definition of literacy as 'the ability to set down words on paper', will be affected by the proposition of a widespread practice of wall-writing. See Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), p. 87; and David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), p. 59. U sing the capacity to append a signature to a document as his literacy test, Cressy concluded that more than two-thirds of men and more than four-fifths of women were illiterate in seventeenth-century England: 'Their marks ranged from the simple scrawl of someone who had never held a pen to the elaborate sketch or diagram of another whose dexterity was some compensation for his illiteracy.' Cressy's illiteracy rate consequently includes not only those who can read but not write but also those who can write with charcoal or marking stone but not with ink. Henry Wotton,A Courtlie Controuersie ofCupid's Cautels, trans. H. W. (London, 1578), p. 144. Puttenham, The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, pp. 68-72. The word epigram is derived from the Greek term for inscriptions on the stones, pottery and papyri of the Archaic period. Examples include the two lines on 'Nestor's goblet', the imperfect sentence that survives on a Dipylon jug and the brief address in which a tombstone or votive tablet typically 'spoke' to the passerby, For an account of the poetics of the 'speaking object' in Ancient Greece, see [esper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropolgy ofReading in Ancient Greece, trans. [anet Lloyd (Ithaca, NY, 1993). Puttenham, The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, p. 69; John Florio, Queen Anna's New World ofWords (London, 161 I), p. 30. For another English account of Pasquino and his fellow statue Marforio, see Fynes Moryson, A n Itinerary ... (New York, 1907), vol. I, p. 288: 'At one end of this market place, in a corner of a street opposite to a publicke Pallace, is the statua of Pasquin, upon a wall or a private

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61 62 63

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house, which hath neither armes nor feet, they being cut off by passangers in the night. For all libels, even against the Pope himself, use to be made in forme of a dialogue, and fastened upon the statua of Pasquino, and another of Marforio ... they two bearing the persons one of the question maker, the other of the answerer.' See Thomas Elyot's introduction to his Pasquil the Playne (London, 1540), sig. A2 f : 'Pasquillus, that speaketh moste, is an image of stone, sittinge in the citie of Rome openly: on whom ones in the yere, it is leful to every man, to set in verse or prose any taunte that he wil, agayne whom he list, howe great an asate so ever he be.' For a brief comment on the use of graffiti for unofficial political commentary in early modern Italy, see Peter Burke, 'The Uses of Literacy in Early Modern Italy', The Social History ofLanguage, ed. P. Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 36-7. Puttenham, The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, p. 68. The Alchemistcx, 5, 38-42. I follow Herford and Simpson in reproducing the typography of the Folio (London, 1616), where small capitals usually denote a proper name, italics a proper name or a term or art. Ben [onson, Ben [onson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1950). Since the word dildo both means 'refrain' and can operate (like 'hey nonny nonny') as a nonce word that makes up a refrain, and since a candle could be used as a dildo, this does not begin to exhaust the meanings of 'MADAM, with a dildo, writ 0' the walls'. See Stephen Orgel, 'On Dildos and Fadings', American Notes and Queries, V (1992), pp. 106-10. Robert Herrick, Hesperides, or the works both human and divine (London, 1648). Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Phylaster. Or, love lies a-bleeding (London, 1620),2.4. 147-50. Ben [onson, vol. x, p. 58. Harold Love argues that early seventeenthcentury news of the type traded in the nave of St Paul's was an 'oral commodity' which was exchanged 'with no reliance on writing' (Love, Scribal Publication, p. 195). While the reading and writing of graffiti are rarely registered in the historical record, their likely presence complicates the nature of such 'oral' exchanges. Ben [onson, 'To a Freind an Epigram of Him', in The Complete Poetry ofBen [onson, ed. William B. Hunter (New York, 1963), pp 396-7. Freeman, English Emblem Books, p. 7.

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66 The poem's first stanza records Herbert's 'personal motto', 'Less than the least / Ofall thy mercies, is my posy still' (George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, ed. Louis L. Martz [Oxford, 1986], p. 474). In 'Dulnesse', the poet castigates himself by remembering his earlier work: 'Where are my lines then? my approaches? views? / Where are my window songs?' On diamond writing rings, see H. C. Smith,jewellery (London, 1908), p. 260. 67 John Foxe, Actes and Monumentes (London, 1563), p. 1714. 68 Ibid., p. 922. 69 E. A. H. Fenn, 'The Writing on the Wall', History Today, rxx/r (June 1961), pp. 4 19-23. 70 Thomas Fuller, History ofthe Worthies ofEngland (London, 1662), Mmr; cited in L. Bradner, The Poems ofQueen Elizabeth I (Providence, 1964), p. 7. 71 Richard Brathwaite, Art Asleep Husband (London, 1640), p. 10. 72 Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentleman and English Gentlewoman ... (London, 1641), pp. 256,448, 45 I. 73 Ibid., p. 430. See also Brathwaite's description of the 'wanton damasella who portrayed the affection of her heart in as light an imprese; writing these lines with her Diamond in a window: The choicest Cates soon'st cloy the appetite,/ One is too stale a dish to feed delight' (p. 143), and the wronged wife, 'when like a fruitfull vine, shee had brought forth many faire and promising branches to a debaucht husband, by whose profuser courses, her hopes which she has stored in her numerous progeny, perished, and her selfe through griefe irrecoverably wasted; she wrote these pensive lines with a Diamond in her Chamber Window, to give a living shadow to her lasting sorrow: Up to the Window sprung the spreading Vine,/ The dangling Apricoclie, and Egglantine;/ Since when, that vine, and branches too were found,/ Shred from their root, laid sprawling on the ground.' (pp. 351-2). 74 Paul Hentzner, Itinerarium (Nuremburg, 1612), p. 144; cited in Bradner, Poems, p. 71. 75 John Grange, The Golden Aphroditis (London, 1577), sig. L4 f - M. 76 W. M., The Man in the Moone (London, 1609). 77 Anthony Copley, Wits, Fits, and Fancies (London, 1614), pp. 174-5. 78 Samuel Sheppard, The Loves ofAmandus and Sophronia (London, 1650), pp. 5-6. Sophronia's epitaph is set off in the printed text by an ornamental border, as if to emphasize its status as an inscription. 79 Watt documents the extensive range of painted and printed texts 180

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produced for the walls of Christian households in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Cheap Print, pp. 217-53). To 'set' something in a table may be to do no more than arrange the lines for easy and memorable reading. Nicholas Flamel, Nicholas Flamel his Exposition (London, 1624), p. 16; John Dee, A True and Faithfull Relation ofWhat Passedfor Many Yeers between Dr John Dee ... and Some Spirits (London, 1659), p. 212; and see R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf11and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576-1612 (Oxford, 1975), p. 204. Louise Osborn, The Life, Letters, and Writings ofJohn Hoskyns (New Haven, 1937), pp. 20-56,212-13; Mark T. Burnett, "'The Trusty Servant": A Sixteenth-Century English Emblem', Emblematica, VI/2 (Winter 1992), p. 244. George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple. Or, the Country Parson (London, 1675), p. 49. Touchstone's 'wholesome thrifty sentences' are best understood in terms of the tradition of godly tables documented by Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 217-53. The following account is dependent on the work of Francis Reader, who recorded surviving English domestic wall-paintings in the 1930S (,Wall-paintings of the r oth and early 17th centuries recently discovered in Bosworth House, Wendover, Bucks.', Archaeological Journal, LXXXVII (1930), pp. 71-97; idem, 'Tudor Mural Paintings in the Lesser Houses of Bucks.', Archaeological Journal, LXXXIX (1932), pp. I 16-73; idem, 'Tudor Domestic Wall-Paintings 1', Archaeological Journal, XCII (1935), pp. 243-86; idem, 'Tudor Domestic WallPaintings II', Archaeological Journal, XCIII (1936), pp. 220-62. Watt usefully digests and elaborates Reader's work (Watt, Cheap Print, pp. I 79-253). Following Reader, Watt puts the height of the vogue for English wall-painting at 1530-80 and suggests that its decline may be attributable to 'the growing ownership of paintings and prints as we now know them [which] changed ideas about what "art" should be, and made the use of every odd surface for painting seem oldfashioned and inferior' (Cheap Print, p. 199). In 1568, Herman Schinkel, a Delft printer, answered charges that he had printed prohibited ballads by claiming 'that they were printed in his absence by his servant, and on his return he refused to deliver them and threw them in a corner intending to print roses and stripes

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on the other side, to paper attics with' (James Knowles, 'Papering Rooms', Notes and Queries, second ser., 11 (July 1856), pp. 7-8); see also Reader, 'Tudor Mural Paintings', p. 163. H. Jenkinson, 'English Wall-Paper of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', Antiquaries Journal, xv (1925), pp. 237-53, argues that although very few have survived, decorative printed papers were 'both plentiful and popular in their day' and were used not only to decorate walls but also to cover books and line boxes. Reader, 'Tudor Domestic Wall-Paintings 1', p. 246; Watt, Cheap Print, p. 219· Reader, 'Tudor Mural Wall-paintings', pp.1 19-20. The term calligramme was used by Apollinaire to describe his experimental poem-pictures (Calligrammes [Paris, 1918]). An imagistic arrangement of text ('non rebus sed verbis', as it were), the calligramme has its own ancient, modern and post-modern history. Like the rebus, of which it is the inverse, the calligramme stages a confrontation between word and image. According to Gopnik and Varnedoe (High and Low, p. 70), it was Garrucci (1856) who extended the meaning of graffiti to include drawings as well as inscriptions. Contemporary graffiti writers sometimes use the termgrafto describe their own conflation of word and image. For discussion of the Protestant tradition of 'visual stories', see Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 185f., 224, where she notes that the term table describes a broadside or painting 'caught somewhere between decorative "imagerye" and the schematic arrangement of printed words'. Tessa Watt cites William Bullein's description of an inn whose parlour is decorated with painted cloths 'with pleasaunte borders aboute the same, with many wise sayinges painted upon them' and with emblems and Latin inscriptions painted on the walls and chimneys. She concludes, as I would not, that this is a 'literary' rather than a 'realistic' description (Bullein, A dialogue ... wherein is a goodly regimente againste the fever pestilence, 3rd edn (1573), sig. K V ; Watt Cheap Print, p. 193). Reader, 'Tudor Mural Paintings', p. 12I. For a fuller description of this inscription and the decorative scheme that contained it, see Mainwaring Johnstone, 'Mural Paintings in Houses', p. 75. A broadside ballad expressing identical sentiments, in slightly different order, was printed in 1555 by John Tysdale, and again in 1566 by William Powell; it begins 'Remember man both night and daye /

Thou must nedes die, there is no nay / Thy mortall body formed of clay / Will sone resolve and passe a waye.' 92 Reader 'Tudor Mural Paintings', p. 120. 93 John Barclay, Barclay his Argenis, trans. K. Long (London, 1625), pp. 12-14. 94 Watt suggests that as texts such as 'Feare God' may have held talismanic power for the people who wrote them on their walls; alternatively, once it had become familiar it might 'simply have faded into the background like "Home Sweet Home" on a nineteenthcentury American sampler' (Cheap Print, p. 220). 95 The text of the first passage survives on a wall in Feering, Essex (see Carrick, 'Wall Painting', p. 6; Watt, Cheap Print, p. 217), and in Kelvedon, Essex (see Fred Roe, 'Tudor Wall Painting at Kelvedon', Connoisseur, LXXXV [January 1930], p. 24). 96 Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: On Milton's Theology and Poetics (Chicago, 1993), p. 5, cites this passage in the context of a discussion of repetition and memory. On the importance of the classical sententia as a form that is not only memorable in itself but that has the power to bring the reader to consciousness of what she knows, and so appears to 'speak the language of oracles', see McCutcheon, Sir Nicholas Bacon's Great House Sententiae, p. 45. 97 See Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down went Dagon (Chicago, 1986), p. 35; Watt, Cheap Print, p. 185. 98 John Calvin, Sermons on Deuteronomy, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1583), p. 473. 99 [oseph Hall, Works (London, 1634), vol. I, p. 379. 100 Fister, Welspring, sig. N3 V • 101 Watt notes that Elizabethan edifying ballads, even those that are 'thoroughly Protestant', display 'little sense of a predestined elect': characteristically, they continue to represent grace as a gift that is offered by Christ to all and is available up to the last minute of life (Cheap Print, pp. 105-6). 102 Calvin, Deuteronomy, p. 276. Samuel Purchas, by contrast, describes Jewish observance as the type of prophylaxis acceptable to Calvin: 'The sentence Hear Israel etc. and another sentence is to be written on the postes ofthe House. He which hath his Phylacteries on his head and arms, and his knots on his garment, and his Schedule on his doore, is so fenced he cannot easily sinne' (Purchas his Pilgrimage [London,

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1613], p. 154)· Calvin,Deuteronomy, p. 473. For an account of early modern exegesis of Daniel 5, see Eileen Reeves, 'Daniel 5 and the Assayer: Galileo Reads the Handwriting on the Wall', Journal ofMedieval and Renaissance Studies, XXI (1991), p.12. A. S. Peake, Peake's Commentary on the Bible, ed. M. Black and H. H. Rowley (London, 1962), p. 596. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York, 1987), p. 14. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Harry Tucker [r (Chapel Hill, Ne, 1971), pp. 77-8. Rank quotes Dorian Gray: 'I have no terror of Death. It is only the coming of death that terrifies me.' See also Schwartz, Remembering, p. 102. Having consulted her devils as to the future, and caused their riddling answers to be 'ingraven' on the walls of her tower, the wicked heroine of Morindos sees a gloss or 'signification' appear under each one, predicting her early death and eternal damnation: 'These three promises she regarded as Oracles, and believed that through them her earthlye happines should never end: but suddainely this violent joy, turned into an extreame griefe, for as she stood contemplating of these never-ending delights, there entred invisiblie into the chamber, one of the black potentates of hell, and under every one of these superscriptions, ingraved theses significations ... These dismall and ominous revelations, were no sooner ceazed uppon, by the eyes of this accuresed Queene, but all the partes of her body trembled with feare: not a member but the terror threof distempered: now feare of Gods vengeance by little and little entred into her heart, and the quivering thought of hell's damnation filld her bosome full of despaire: without all hope of salvation' (The Famous and Renowned History ofMorindos a King ofSpain ... and Miracola, a Spanish Witch [London, 1609], sig. BV_Bf ) . Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny', in The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London, 1953-73), vol. XVII, pp. 2 I 7-56. The French Rogue (London, 1672), p. 45, describes 'a rarity' found in Dieppe: 'it was a Mans Head that had been found in an old Ruinated Wall, inclosed in a Pewter-vessel made for that purpose'; see also 'A Prophecie found in a wall, in a Carthusain house in the County of

Somerset Anno Dom. 1548 by a Mason', Cambridge University MS Bb* 1°43. I I I The practice of mixing animal hair in plaster is a fact remembered in A Midsummer Nights Dream by both Thisbe, who begins her lewd and inadvertent analogy between the wall and the body of her lover with 'My cherry lips have often kiss'd thy stones, / Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee' (5. I. 193-4), and Theseus, who defends Snout's performance of the wall by asking 'Would you desire lime and hair to speak better?' (5. 1. 163). 112 Glossing the phrase 'Nebula in pariete: A shadow on the wall', Erasmus commented, 'Ausonius in one of his letters ... speaks of shadows on a wall as things of no substance, like dreams: "Have you never seen," he says, "a shadow painted on a wall?" The title of the poem appended to that letter interprets this as something frivolous and empty; for a shadow is a thing too insubstantial to be represented in colour' (Collected Works, vol. xxx, p. 2 I 0). I 13 Graphite (called plumbago, English antimony or black lead) was discovered in Borrowdale in the middle of the sixteenth century; before this, lead styluses were commonly used to rule lines and margins and to draw on paper. See Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History ofDesign and Circumstance (New York, 1990).

WHITEWASH

2

I am grateful to Muriel Carrick and Tobit Curteis for providing me with technical information about the recovery of early modern wall-painting, and to Margaret Aston, Christopher Cannon, Brian Cummings and [arnes Simpson for allowing me to discuss the claims of this chapter with them. I

The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans. and ed. [ames Strachey (London, 1953-73), vol. XXIX, p.227·

[acques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL, 1978), p. 222. 3 In Freud's work, the perception-consciousness system (Pcpt.-Cs.) - at least to the extent that it is topographically conceived - receives information both from the outside world (in the form of sensations which impress themselves on the pleasure-unpleasure scale) and from 2

4

5 6 7

8

9

internal sources (in the forms of memories revived from the unconscious). Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology (Chicago, 1976), pp. 74-93; 'Freud and the Scene of Writing', in Writing and Difference, pp. 196-231. Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference and Speech and Phenomena were each published in 1967: 'Freud and the Scene of Writing' originated, Derrida says, as a lecture designed to develop 'certain propositions' advanced in OfGrammatology . Doris Jones-Baker, 'English Medieval Graffiti and the Local Historian', Local Historian, XXIII/I (February 1993), pp. 3-19. Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands ofthe European Renaissance (Stanford, 1990), pp. 63-80. Cf. 34 and 35 Henry VIII: 'Persons, having anie bibles ... whith anie suche annotacions or preamble shall ... cutte out or blotte the same, in such wise, as they cannot be preceived nor red' (in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, ofthe Reign ofHenry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdiner and R. H. Brodie [London, 1862-1910]). Early modern wall-paintings that survive today do so because, rather than in spite, of the fact that they were covered. Paintings are destroyed by the application of covering materials whose chemical properties are close to their own. But limewash will remain distinct from paint that has been prepared with glue (distemper) or with oil, while plaster can be mixed to a density that will not penetrate the painted surface. In The Guild Chapel Wall Paintings at Stratford-uponAvon (New York, 1988), Clifford Davidson describes the less-than-vigorous iconoclasm with which, in 1563, Shakespeare's father John undertook to 'remove' the Chapel wall-paintings: those in the chancel were partitioned off behind a temporary wall or screen; those in the nave were whitewashed (and rediscovered in 1804 when the whitewash was taken off); while the Dance of Death on the north wall of the nave was allowed to remain uncovered at least until 1576 (when it was seen by John Stow), and only covered subsequently by panelling. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping ofthe Altars: Traditional Religion in England 14°0-1580 (New Haven, 1992), p. 583; quoting from Albert Peel, ed., The Second Part ofa Register (London, 1915), vols 11, p. 191; I,

P·239· 10 Cf. Freud: 'It is true, too, that once the writing has been erased, the Mystic Pad cannot "reproduce" it from within: it would be a mystic

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pad indeed if, like our memory, it could accomplish that' ('A Note upon "The Mystic Writing Pad''', p. 230).

3

TATTOO

With thanks to [oseph Koerner for suggesting that I write on abjection, and to Phillipa Berry, [oseph Boone, Dympna Callaghan, Stefan Collini, Katherine Craik, Ezra Getzler, Martin Hyland, Rayna Kalas, Charles MacQuarrie, Steven Melville, Francesco Pellizzi, David Rollo and Einar Steingrimsson for information and comments. I Marcia Tucker, 'Tattoo: The State of the Art', Artforum (May 198 I), p. 44. For further details of the tattoo renaissance, see Arnold Rubin, 'The Tattoo Renaissance', in A. Rubin, ed., Marks ofCivilization: Artistic Transformations ofthe Human Body (Los Angeles, 1988), pp. 233-62; and Clinton Sanders, 'Organizational Constraints on Tattoo Images: A Sociological Analysis of Artistic Style', in I. Hodder, ed., The Meanings of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression (New York, 1989), pp. 232-41. 2 Rubin, Marks ofCivilization , p. 258. 3 Ibid., p. 260. 4 Tucker, 'Tattoo: The State of the Art', p. 43. 5 See Don E. Hardy, Forever Yes:Art ofthe New Tattoo (Honolulu, HW, 1992), p. 15: 'Nonexclusionary and defiantly beyond the commodification inherent in all other mediums, tattooing is a universal body language bridging cultural differences with direct expression.' 6 Waiter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1985), p. 227. 7 Quoted in Rubin, 'The Tattoo Renaissance', p. 255. 8 Julia Kristeva, Powers ofHorror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982). 9 Describing the Cartesian cogito as 'the presence, inside man, of the celebrated little fellow who governs him, who is the driver', a notion 'already denounced by pre-Socratic thought', Lacan offers instead his own formulation of the subject, a subject properly symbolized by the barred'S' [$] 'in so far as it is constituted as secondary in relation to the signifier'. The bar may be thought of as the stroke or notch of the signifier that, marking the subject off, situates him as such. The

difference between Lacanian and Cartesian models of the self, the one 'marked' and the other not, may be grasped by considering that the Lacanian subject is instantiated as a tattoo: 'The subject himself is marked off by a single stroke, and first he marks himself as a tattoo, the first of the signifiers' (Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York, 1981], p. 141). 10 Hardy, Forever Yes, p. 52. I I Tattoo International, CLV (November 1994), p. I I. 12 Rubin, 'The Tattoo Renaissance', pp. 257-8. 13 Michel Thevoz, The Painted Body (New York, 1983), p. 7. 14 Kristeva, Powers ofHorror, pp. 3-4. 15 Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (Oxford, 1993), pp. 3 8-9. 16 Gell suggests a socio-historical explanation for the radical bifurcation in the meaning of tattoos: 'whereas in non-hierarchical societies bodymarkings reveal an immanent self which is inside the body, and can be made to appear on the skin, in hierarchical societies body markings are brands imposed from without, and signify the suppression of the devalued body' (Wrapping in Images, p. 26). In today's Western societies, where a significant proportion of the population is tattooed, the case is less clear cut, and the tattoo is understood as being simultaneously a symptom and the effect of sublimation. Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso touched on the strange double nature of the tattoo in his analysis of the signs of criminality. Arguing that a disposition to criminality was inborn, the result of an ontogenetic deficit, Lombroso included among the signs of criminal tendencies large jaws, high cheekbones, handle-shaped ears, 'insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake' (Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man ... [New York, 191 I], p. xv). In Lombroso's list, tattooing occupies the place of a hinge between physical symptoms and social characteristics: actively chosen by those who bear them, the tattoo is the product of an irresistible, biological disposition to become tattooed. Lombroso's conclusion, and the deductive method that produced and reproduced it, were taken to their logical conclusion by his contemporary Adolf Loos: 'If someone who is tattooed dies in freedom, then he does so a few years before he would have committed murder' ('Ornament and Crime' (1908), in L Miinz and G. Kiinstler, AdolfLoos: Pioneer ofModern Architecture,

188

trans. Harold Meek [London, 1996], pp. 226-31).

17 Tattoo International, CLIII (June 1994), pp.

IQ-I I.

18 Kristeva, Powers ofHorror , p. 17. 19 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 220. 20 Describing the 'propensity for interpreters to regard tattooing as a kind of writing, legible if one just knew how to read it', Nicholas Thomas notes that apprehension of the curvilinear forms characteristic of Maori moho as 'scrolls' constitutes 'an effort to read the visual for what it [is] not ... Interpretative desire is defeated from the start if designs take the form of an archaic bearer of writing, a scroll which appears as such only in profile, its text surely there but unnecessarily seen. If only it could be looked at from a different angle, pleads the reader' (Nicholas Thomas, 'Kiss the Baby Goodbye: Kowhaiwhai and Aesthetics in Aotearoa New Zealand', Critical Inquiry, XXIIII [1996], pp. 93-4). The skin is a two-dimensional surface which at once provokes and defeats a desire for depth. 21 Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, CT, 1989), p. 9· 22 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans. and ed. [ames Strachey (London, 1953-73), vol. XIX, p. 26. 23 Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 60. The figure whose depth is a feature of its surface, or the figure whose surface is, like that of a manifold, without edge, is a recurrent motif in contemporary French theory. It is encountered in the Mobius strip that Lacan chose as an emblem for the journal Scilicet; in his figure of the mitre (a self-intersecting surface projected into three-dimensional space) in the seminar on identification; and in the other 'fundamental' topological objects (such as the Klein bottle and the Borromean rings) that organize his late work. Lacan cautions that, in everything concerning topology, 'one must always be very careful to avoid attributing it with any kind of Gestalt function'. But he goes on to demonstrate the pleasure to be gained from imagining biological life's 'touching strivings after topological configurations' (especially when that life form is the erect, uncircumcised penis), and finally insists that only topological considerations can provide us with appropriate images to organize our thought 'when it is a question of something inside that is also outside' (Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 147). Pressed on his use of topological figures - 'Is topology for you a method of discovery or of

189

exposition?' - Lacan replied with enigmatic caution: 'It is the mapping of the topology proper to our experience as analysts, which may be taken in a metaphysical perspective' (ibid., p. 90). In Lacari's writing, the fact that the Ego 'has' (or may be thought to have) the structure of a Mobius strip goes some way towards accounting for its perversion and alienation. Anzieu's more complaisant conception of the Ego leads him to consider the Mobius-strip configuration as being specific only to borderline states (The Skin Ego, p. 124). But both theorists link psychic disturbance, pathological or not, to what they understand as geometrical disturbance; as does Kristeva when she describesjouissance as 'a 'structure' that is skewed, a topology of catastrophe' (Powers ofHorror, p. 9). It is here that the question of the appropriateness of using topological figures to represent psychic phenomena may be raised - a question that, for the mathematician, marks a border dispute between the hard science of mathematics and a humanistic discourse that takes mathematical truths either as metaphors or as models for psychic entities and effects. At issue is the fact that in mathematics, topological figures carry no affect: the Jordan curve theorem, for example, demonstrates the difficulty, but not the trauma, of proving that there are such concepts as inside and outside. Viewed from the perspective of mathematics, the purchase that topological paradoxes have on the humanities, their capacity to provoke and model intellectual anxieties, would dissolve as soon as those figures were properly - that is, mathematically - understood. But such a view is motivated by suspicion of the productive conflation in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis between bodily organ and image, between causal explanation and hermeneutics. It is consequently a suspicion that disables from the start any attempt to understand Lacan's account of the 'Cause' at work in the midst of the field of hermeneutics. For further discussion, see Slavoj Zizek, The MestastasesofEnjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London, 1994), pp. 29-54· 24 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara [ohnson (Chicago, IL, 198 I), p. 229; Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London, 1993); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987); [ean-Francois Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris, 1971). For Derrida, Mallarrne's fold marks the place at which conventional literary criticism fails, and the work of

25

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29

deconstruction begins: 'Now, if we can begin to see that the "blank" and the "fold" cannot in fact be mastered as themes or as meanings, if it is within the folds and blankness of a certain hymen that the very textuality of the text is re-marked, then we will precisely have determined the limits of thematic criticism itself (pp. 245-6). Lacan's use of topological figures to describe the problematic relation of inside and outside is illuminated by Derrida's discussion of that relation as 'the matrix of all possible opposition' and of writing as the term or practice that 'opens up' the 'very possibility' of these oppositions 'without letting itself be comprehended by them' (pp. 1 °3- 4). For a discussion of the difficult conditions under which Michelangelo worked on The Last Judgment, and the real and fantasized cutaneous discomfort such conditions provoked, see R. Leibert, Michaelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study ofHis Life and Images (New Haven, er, 1983), pp. 33 1 - 60. For a discussion of anatomy as a method for revealing order which causes decay, see Devon Hodges, Renaissance Fictions ofAnatomy (Amherst, ME, 1985). J. Curtis, An Authentic and Faithful History ofthe Mysterious Murder of Maria Marten (London, 1828). The volume is now in Moyses Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds. In the course of his discussion of primitive accumulation, Marx offers a parodic, 'nursery tale' account of the genesis of capitalism, one predicated on a division between the 'frugal elite' and the 'lazy rascals ... Thus it came to pass, that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter finally had nothing to sell except their own skins' (Capital, vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes [New York, 1977], p. 872). The bottom line that presents itself to Marx and, he imagines, to even the most irresponsible theorists of capitalism, is the human skin - the commodity in which no one, even the person who owns it, has the right to trade. In actuality, the tattooed skin can be bought and sold but not without raising profound questions concerning human and property rights. For a description of the reception of Omai in Britain, see Harriet Guest, 'Curiously Marked: Tattooing, Masculinity and Nationality in Eighteenth-Century British Perceptions of the South Pacific', in John Barrell, ed., Painting and the Politics ofCulture: New Essays on British Art, 170~I850 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 101-34. For an extended

30

31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38

discussion of the impact of European exploration on Polynesian tattooing, see Gell, Wrapping in Images. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (London, 1617), contains many descriptions of tattooing reproduced from the accounts of European travellers (see, for example, pp. 487, 571, 743, 813, 853, 876, 955,95 8). Gell, Wrapping in Images, p. 10. A. [uno and V. Vale, Interview with G. and P. P-Orridge, Research, XII (1991), pp. 164-81. William Camden, Britannia, or, a Chorographicall Description ofthe most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. P. Holland (London, 1610), p. 115 and passim. In discussing the history of the Scots, Camden underlines his purpose in arguing for the racial unity of the ancient peoples of Britain, and incidentally demonstrates the difficulty of producing a tactful account of Britain's barbarian past: 'So far am I from working any discredit unto them, that I have rather respectively loved them alwaies, as of the same bloud and stoke, yes, and honoured them too, even when the kingdomes were divided: but now much more, since it hath pleased our almightie, and most mercifull God, that wee growe united in one Bodie, under one most Sacred head of the Empire, to the joy, happinesse, welfare, and safetie, of both Nations' (p. 119). Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, p. 955. John Speed The Historie ofGreat Britaine (London, 1627), p. 167; see also Camden, Britannia, p. 31. In [oyce's Ulysses, D. B. Murphy bears three tattoos, one 'a young man's side face looking frowningly rather ... See here, he said, showing Antonio. There he is cursing the mate. And there he is now, he added, the same fellow, pulling the skin with his fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn' (Ulysses [London, 1986], p. 156). For a discussion of Murphy's tattoos, see J. Levine, '[ames Joyce, Tattoo Artist: Tracing the Outlines of Homosocial Desire', James Joyce Quarterly, XXXI/3 (1994), pp. 277-300. Speed, The Historie ofGreat Britaine, p. 182; see also Camden, Britannia, p. I IS. Lacan introduces a tattoo to illustrate 'a dimension in the field of the gaze that has nothing to do with the vision as such', a dimension that may be apprehended operating within 'all the paranoic ambiguities' to which distortion may lend itself. 'How is it,' he continues, 'that

nobody has ever thought of connecting this with ... the effect of an erection? Imagine a tattoo traced on the sexual organ ad hoc in the state of repose and assuming its, if I may say so, developed form in another state' (Four Fumdamental Concepts, p. 88). Lacan's imaginary organ is, in his own argument, something of a chimera: one that briefly stands in for the 'gaze as such' - that is, for the desire that articulates itself through optical distortion. But it is worth remaining with the tattooed penis long enough to note that in the stretching of the tattoo image, we confront the propositions that semblance is subject to physical laws, and that the image has an internal structure having nothing to do with appearance. 39 Camden, Britannia, p. 30. In The Historie ofGreat Britaine, Speed goes so far as to compare Queen Elizabeth to Bodicea, 'another Great Lady of British race ... whose juste, wise, and resolute kinde of Government hath justified that Custome of our old Britaines and Picts ... that they made no difference for the Soveraigne command, yea, and used to warre under the conduct of women' (p. 183). 40 The association of tattooing with the rule of women reaches beyond its historical justification; where it emerges in the discourse of modern anthropology, it is often used to mark the double abjection of native cultures. So [oseph Dowd suggested tattooing was a practice 'which probably originated at a time when the matriarchate was universal and before children came to have individual names. Instead of giving a special name to each member of the family or tribe, all of the same blood on the mother's side were designated by a common tattoo mark' (The Negro Races: A Sociological Study [London, 1907], p. 42). In his 1898 essay 'Matriarchy among the Picts', Heinrich Zimmer also linked the two practices when he insisted that tattooing, like matrilinear descent, was a savage custom not properly associated with the Aryan community; see Charles MacQuarrie, 'Insular Celtic Tattooing: History, Myth, and Metaphor', Etudes celtiques, XXXIII (1999), p. 159· 41 The question of whether or not the Picts tattooed themselves has not been fully addressed. Part of the evidence for ancient British tattooing, as Claudian, Solinus, Camden, Speed and others point out, is comprised by the Roman name Picti (the painted men) and the ancient British name Priteni (people of the designs). See MacQuarrie, 'Insular Celtic Tattooing', pp. 160-68. 42 For an excellent account of tattooing in Greek and Roman antiquity,

43 44

45

46

47

see C. P. [ones, 'Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity', in Journal ofRoman Studies, LXXVII (1987), pp. 139-55. Distinguishing the practice from branding, Jones argues that the incidence of tattooing for decorative, religious and punitive purposes was sufficiently widespread that 'the word stigma and its cognates could be used in Ptolemaic Alexandria and Neronian Rome to refer to tattooing without any fear of misinterpretation' (p. 140). I am resisting [ones's conclusions that tattooing was confined to the bodies of slaves, criminals and barbarians, and that from the Middle Ages to modern times it was known as a living tradition 'only to travellers to the orient, or, from the late eighteenth century on, in the South Pacific' (p, 155). Speed, The Historie ofGreat Britaine, p. 179. The first Roanoke expedition, for which John White acted as official recorder, was led by Sir Richard Greville under the patronage of Raleigh from June 1585 to June 1586. In July 1587, White returned to Roanoke as governor of 'the city of Raleigh in Virginia'. Shortly after his arrival there, he went back to England in search of further provisions and assistance; on returning to Roanoke in August 1590, he found the settlement deserted. See Paul Hulton, America 1585: The Complete Drawings ofJohn White (Chapel Hill, Ne, 1984). Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues accompanied the French commander Rene de Laudonniere on his expedition to Florida in 1563 and 1565. Laudonniere's expedition journal was published by Hakluyt in France in 1586, and in London in English in 1587 and 1589. Le Moyne left France as a Huguenot refugee sometime after 1573, settled in Blackfriars as a painter and engraver under the patronage of Mary Sidney and WaIter Raleigh, and died in 1588. See Paul Hulton, ed., The Work ofJacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a Huguenot artist in France, Florida, and England (London, 1977). Theodore de Bry was a Flemish goldsmith, engraver and publisher with Protestant sympathies. In 1587, he was commissioned to engrave Thomas Lant's drawings of Philip Sidney's funeral procession; on a return visit to London the following year, he purchased Le Moyne's paintings from his widow. Two of Le Moyne's Florida paintings were used to illustrate America I (1590), which is dedicated to WaIter Raleigh; the rest appeared in America 11 (1591): see HuIton, The Complete Drawings ofJohn White. De Bry, America I, pl. 39; trans. by HuIton, The Work ofJacques Le

Moyne de Morgues, p. 151. See Hulton, The Work ofJacques Le Moyne de Morgues, p. 70. Ibid., P·148. Hulton, The Complete Drawings ofJohn White, p. 9. De Bry, America I, sig. AV, A2 f • Hulton, The Complete Drawings ofJohn White, p. 28. White is known to have made direct copies of Le Moyne's work, and it is possible that de Bry was working from such a copy when he engraved The Truue picture ofa yonge dowgter ofthe Pictes. For an account of the complicated relationship between the work of Le Moyne, White and de Bry, see Hulton, The Complete Drawings of John White, pp. 17-18. 54 Hulton, The Work ofJacques Le Moyne de Morgues, p. 164. 55 Ibid., p. 57· 56 The sixteenth-century French word fleurdelise carries some of the same determinants: Randall Cotgrave's Dictionarie ofthe French and English Tongues (London, 161I) defines the verb fleurdeliser as meaning 'to set a flowerdeluce between the shoulders with a hot yron (the mark of a rogue;) also, to flourish, beautify, sticke, set thicke, with Flowerdeluces'. 57 J. Peterson, 'Writing Flowers: Figuration and the Feminine in Carmina Burana 177', Exemplaria, VIII (1994), pp. 1-34 (24)· 58 Hulton, The Work ofJacques Le Moyne de Morgues, p. 178. Although he seems, like de Bry, to have enjoyed the patronage of Raleigh and the Sidney family, at his death Le Moyne was still in possession of the painting, which he had also, on an earlier occasion, refused to sell to de Bry. While Hulton concludes that A Young Daughter ofthe Pictes was painted for no occasion other than the exercise of Le Moync's own virtuosity, it is possible that the painting constituted something of an in-joke aimed at Camden. 59 Speed, The Historie ofGreat Britaine, pp. 180-2. 60 Camden, Britannia, p. 110. 61 Fynes Moryson, A n Intinerary ... (London, 1617), vol. I, pp. 233-4; Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms ofReligious Life, trans. J. W. Swain (London, 1976), p. 232. See also J. Carswell, Coptic Tattoo Designs (Jerusalem, 1956), and L. Keimer, Remarques sur le tatouage dans l'Eqypte ancienne (Cairo, 1948). 62 MacQuarrie, 'Insular Celtic Tattooing', pp. 28-9. 63 See A. Sinclair, 'Tattooing - Oriental and Gypsy', American

48 49 50 51 52 53

Anthropologist, n.s., x/3 (19°8), pp. 361-88 (369); MacQuarrie, 'Insular Celtic Tattooing', pp. 12-13. 64 W. Stubbs, De gestis regum Anglorum (London, 1887 and 1889), vol. 11,

P·305· 65 George Sandys, A Relation ofa Journey begun An.Dom. 1610 (London, 1615), p. 56. See also Henry Maundrell's laconic but detailed account in A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter 1697 (Oxford, 1707), pp. 445-6: 'March 27 [1697] - The next morning nothing extraordinary passed, which gave many of the pilgrims leisure to have their arms marked with the usual ensigns of Jerusalem. The artists who undertake the operation do it in this manner. They have stamps in wood of any figure you desire, which they first print off upon your arm with powder of charcoal; then, taking two very fine needles tied close together, and dipping them often, like a pen, in certain ink, compounded, as I was informed, of gunpowder and oxgall, they make with them small punctures all along the lines of the figure which they have printed, and then, washing the part in wine, conclude the work. These punctures they make with great quickness and dexterity, and with scarce any smart, seldom piercing so deep as to draw blood.' For a set of traditional tattoo patterns, and a careful description of the history of the practice in Jerusalem, see Carswell, Coptic Tattoo Designs. 66 In his seventeenth-century account, Melchisedech Thevenot suggests that tattooing is the characteristic practice of both pilgrims and a Christian sect living in Bethlehem: 'Nous emploiames tout le Mardi 29 Avril a nous faire marquer les bras, comme sont ordinairerment tous les Pelerins, ce sont des Chretiens de Bethlehem suivant le rit Latin qui font cela ... Us ont une petite canne ou sont deux aiguilles, qu'ils trempent de terns en terns dans l'ancre melee avec du fiel de boeuf, et vous en piquent suivant les lignes marquees par le moule de bois ... les marques restent bleues, et ne s'effacent jamais, parce que le sang se melant avec cette teinture d' ancre et de fiel de beuf, se marquer encor dedans sous la peau' (Voyages de Mr de Theuenot [Paris, 1689], pp. 638-9). 67 E. Terry, A Voyage to East India (London, 1655), sig. E8 r- v • 68 Moryson, A n Itinerary, p. 237. 69 William Lithgow, A most delectable, and true discourse, ofan admired and painful! peregrination in Europe, Asia, and Africke (London, 1614), sig. R3-R3v.

70 William Lithgow, The Total Discourse ofthe Rare Adventures etc. (London, 1640). By Lithgow's own account, the Jerusalem official who saw the tattoo was 'greatly offended with me, that I should have polluted that holy place with the name of such an arch-enemy to the Roman church' (p. 269). 71 Gell, Wrapping in Images, p. 10. 72 De Bry, America I, pl. 23. 73 Speed, The Historie ofGreat Britaine, p.182; Simon Forman, Volumen Primum, voI. 11 (1609); Ashmole 1494, fols 586v-587f.

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Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder ofthe New World (Chicago, 1991), pp. 1-25. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology ofPerception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1999), esp. pp. 203-346. Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1982); Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (London, 1984), p. 388. Claude Levi-Strauss, La Vie familia le et sociale des Indiens Namiea/ara (Paris, 1948). George Puttenham, The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, ed. E. Arber (Kent, OH, 1970), pp. 1°4- 14. Ibid., pp. 206-7. For an interesting contemporary collection of court devices or 'impreses' (distinguished from emblems on the grounds that where the latter propound 'some generall instruction to all', impreses are 'borne by noble and learned personages, to notifie some particular concern of their own'), see William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain (Toronto, 1984), pp. 177-91. Puttenham, The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, p. 119. Peter Stallybrass, 'Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage', in M. De Grazia, M. Quilligan and P. Stallybrass, eds, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 289-3 20. For a stimulating discussion of this issue, see Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object ofIdeology (London, 1989), pp. I I- 129: 'the real problem is not to penetrate to the "hidden kernel" of the commodity the determination of its value by the quantity of work consumed in

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its production - but to explain why work assumed the form of the value of a commodity, why it can affirm its social character only in the commodity-form of its product' (p, I I). Puttenham, The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, p. 21. Several of the imprese recorded by Camden register the logic whereby personal identity is derived from submission to a sovereign authority: for example, 'He acknowledged his essence to be in his gratious Soveraigne, which bare a Sunne-diall, and the Sun setting, adding OCCASU DESINET ESSE [He ceases to exist when it sets] ... Upon his Princes Favour he wholy relied, which devised the Sunne shining upon a bush, subscribing SI DESIRIS PEREO [If you depart I perish] ... He referred Fate, Fortune, and all to his Soveraigne, which drew for himself the twelve houses of heaven, in the form which Astrologians use, setting downe neither signe nor planet therein, but only placing over it this worde, DISPONE [Ordaine]. The like reference had he which only used a white Shield, and therein written, FATUM INSCRIBAT ELIZA [Let Eliza write my destiny], (Camden, Remains, pp. 183-6, translations R. D. Dunn). Puttenham's account of this figure (and most of his examples of it) derive from [oachim du Bellay, La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse (1549), sig. E3 v • Du Bellay defines the anagram as 'cete inversion de lettres en propre nom, qui porte quelque devise convenable a la personne', commenting that it is 'fort vulgaires en notre Langue, et non moins ancienes entre les Grecz'. For other anagrams made on the Queen's name during her reign, see Camden, Remains, pp. 146-8. See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline ofMagic (New York, 197 I), pp. 39°-432; and Sharon L. Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 18-20, 57-61. See J. S. Purvis, Tudor Parish Documents ofthe Diocese ofYork (Cambridge, 1948), p. 198. William Warde, trans.,Arcandum (London, 1562). For a brief discussion of this and other fortune-telling devices, see Thomas, Religion and the Decline ofMagic , pp. 238-9. Thomas Stanley, The History ofPhilosophy, znd edn (London, 1687), p. 522. See S. J. Heninger, Touches ofSweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, CA, 1974), pp. 71-145. In a discussion of anagrams that is dependent on Puttenham's and borrows many of his examples, Camden ascribes both the fashion for

anagrams and their superstitious application to the French, who 'exceedingly admire and celebrate this facultie, for the deepe and farre fetched antiquitie, the piked fines, and the mysticall significations thereby: for that names are divine notes, and divine notes do notifie future events; so that events consequently must lurk in names, which onely can be pried into by this mystery. Affirming that each man's fortune is written in his name, as Astrologians say, all things are written in heaven, if a man could read them.' The close relation between anagrams and what he calls 'the forbidden superstition of Onomantia, or South-saying by names' troubles Camden, both here and in his earlier discussion of Christian names. For to decipher destinies out of names, as the Greeks and others did, appears to him to be both 'vain ... as though the names and natures of men were sutable, and fatall necessitie concurred heerein with voluntary motion, in giving the name' and dangerous, as representing the first step towards more subversive activities. On the other hand, Camden, like Puttenham, holds that to believe in the 'significative' or 'ominous' properties of names, and therefore of anagrams, is not unreasonable and may produce 'a delightful comfort and pleasant motion in honest mindes' (Remains, pp. 142-3). Unlike the state, which prohibited onomantic activity as both devilish and misleading, Camden seemed to find the production of anagrams to be a useful way of thinking about the future as long as it is acknowledged that they have no supernatural force. 20 Thomas, Religion and the Decline ofMagic , pp, 222-31. 21 Defining a belief as a truth produced by the imagination, where "'truth" means many things ... and can even encompass fictional literature', Paul Veyne has usefully argued for 'the plurality of the modalities of belief in ancient Greece: 'Throughout the ages a plurality of programs of truth has existed, and it is these programs, involving different distributions of knowledge, that explain the subjective degrees of intensity of beliefs, the bad faith, and the contradictions that co-exist in the same individual.' See Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, trans. Paula Wissig (Chicago, IL, 1988), p. 27. 22 J. S. Corbett, The SuccessorsofDrake (London, 1900), pp. 167-8; The Journals ofall the Parliaments during the Reign ofQueen Elizabeth, ed. Sir S. D'Ewes (London, 1682), p. 688; cited in Thomas, Religion and the Decline ofMagic, pp. 232,625.

23 In The Sublime Object ofIdeology, p. 43, Zizek uses Lacan's work to argue that a fundamental externality of belief and desire to the self is constitutive of the modern subject: 'The externality of the symbolic machine ("automaton") is therefore not simply external: it is at the same time the place where the fate of our internal, most sincere and "intimate" beliefs is in advance staged and decided. When we subject ourselves to the machine of a religious ritual, we already believe without knowing it; our belief is already externalized in the religious ritual; in other words, we already believe unconsciously, because it is from this external character of the symbolic machine that we can explain the status of the unconscious as radically external- that of a dead letter.' Zizek's 'modern' subject has no very precise historical location; and his analysis of its relation to more or less authoritarian, and not always fully capitalist, ideological formations may be of great interest to historians of early modern Europe. 24 I have taken this formulation of narcissism from J. Laplance and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language ofPsychoanalysis, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (London, 1973), pp. 255-7· 25 Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, p. 22. 26 Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow, 1905), vol. I, p. 486. 27 Ibid., vol. I, p. 492. 28 'The Travels and Adventures of Ca ptai ne John Smith ... begun about the yeere 1596', in ibid, vol. VIII, p. 326. 29 See M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL, 1968), and Mikel Dufrenne, In the Presence ofthe Sensuous (Atlantic Highlands, NI, 1990). 30 Derrida, OfGrammatology, pp. 85-6: 'The concept of linearization is much more effective, faithful, and intrinsic than those that are habitually used for classifying scripts and describing their history (pictogram, ideogram, letter, etc.). Exposing more than one prejudice, particularly about the relationship between ideogram and pictogram, about so-called graphic "realism," Leroi-Gourhan recalls the unity, within the mythogram, of all the elements of which linear writing marks the disruption: technics (particularly graphics), art, religion, economy. To recover the access to this unity, to this other structure of unity, we must de-sediment "four thousand years of linear writing".' 31 Margreta de Grazia argues that Ophelia's posy, like Hamlet's tablets,

200

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36

37 38

39

'defies the metaphysics of mind and matter: as if mind could be held in the hand' ('Soliloquies and Wages in the Age of Emergent Consciousness', Textual Practice, Ix/I [1995], pp. 67-92). [oan Evans, English Jewellery from the Fifth Century AD to /800 (London, 1921). William Camden, Remains, p. 139. Puttenham, The Arte ofEnglish Poesie, pp. I IQ-I 3. [oan Evans, English Posiesand Posy Rings (London, 1931), p. xvi, citing Surtees Society, Fabric Rolls ofYork Minster (Durham, 1859), Glossary, p. 350. Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor (London, 1531), vo1. 11, chap. 3, fo1. I I I. Desiderius Erasmus, 'Convivium Religiosum', in Collected Works ofErasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto, 1997), vo1. XXXIX, pp. 175-2°7. Elyot is also remembering Erasmus's recommendation that a young prince should have good precepts always in his sight: 'It is not enough just to hand out precepts to restrain the prince from vices or to incite him to a better course - they must be impressed, crammed in, inculcated, and in one way and another be kept before him, now by a suggestive thought, now bya fable, now by analogy, now by example, now by maxims, now by a proverb. They should be engraved on rings, painted in pictures, appended to the wreaths ofhonor, and, by using any other means by which that age can be interested, kept always before him' (Erasmus, The Education ofA Christian Prince, trans. L. K. Born [New York, 1936], pp. 144-5)· Ibid., pp. 179-83. The possibility that intelligence may be received into, and consequently transmitted through, matter is explored in a comic register in the fifth book of Gargantua and Pantagruel, when Panurge's quest to the oracle of the Holy Bottle is rewarded by the discovery that he can fill his soul 'with all truth, wisdom and philosophy' by drinking. The Holy Bottle speaks the 'panomphaen word ... Trinc', and the meaning of this 'universally understood' word is glossed when Panurge is led to drink from a book-shaped bottle of wine - as if truth may be literally decanted into humans. See Francois Rabelais, The Five Books ofGargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Jacques Le Clercq (New York, 1944), pp. 831-5. In the dedication ofEuphues and his England to his female readers, John Lyly asks them to conceal their censure of his work, 'writing 201

40

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43 44

45

your judgments as you doe the posies in your rings, which are always next to the finger, not to be seene by him that holdeth you by the handes, and yet knowne to you that weareth them on your hands' (Euphues and his England [London, 1580], sig. 2v ); cited in Evans, English Posiesand Posy Rings, p. xix. For a useful discussion of speech act theory and its application to literary texts, see Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca, NY, 1983). Margreta de Grazia makes the same argument in relation to Hamlet's tables: 'What relation can commonplaces have to Hamlet's own thoughts? Can the proper articulate itself through the common? The unique express itself through citation? Could consciousness be structured like a collection of sententiae?' (,Soliloquies and Wages', pp. 77-8). The Diary ofJohn Manningham ofthe Middle Temple 1602-1603, ed. Robert P. Sorlien (Hanover, NH, 1976), p. 124; cited in Evans, English Posiesand Posy Rings, p. 83. Barbara [ohnson, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 120-53. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis: 1959-1960 (Seminar 7), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Potter (London, 1992), pp. 87-167. The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London, 1953-73), vol. xv,

P·345· 46 'The Cultural History of Toys' (1928) and 'Toys and Play: Marginal Notes on a Monumental Work' (1928). Mindful of Freud's demonstration that repetition is a mode of mastery and abreaction (a mode, that is, of pleasure), as well as a manifestation of the death drive, Benjamin suggests that these basic rhythms take their place within 'the great law that presides over the rules and rhythms of the entire world of playrthe law of repetition' (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings [Cambridge, MA, 1999], vol. 11, p. 120). 47 Benjamin: 'In all probability the situation is this: before we transcend ourselves in love and enter into the life and often alien rhythms of another human being, we experiment early on with basic rhythms that proclaim themselves in their simplest forms in these sorts of games with inanimate objects. Or rather, these are the rhythms in which we first gain possession of ourselves' (ibid., p. 120). 202

48 Abraham Fleming, A Panoplie ofEpistles (London, 1576), p. 190. Bellarmines are thought to have been named in mockery of the short stature, round figure and hard face of Cardinal Bellarmine, a figurehead of the Counter-Reformation. See L. G. G. Ramsay, ed., The Connoisseur New Guide to Antique English Pottery, Porcelain, and Glass (London 196 I), p. 19. 49 Bernard Rackham, Medieval English Pottery (London, 1972),

pp. 29-3°· 50 See R. L. Hobson, Catalogue ofthe Collection ofEnglish Pottery in the British Museum (London, 1903); William Burton, A History and Description ofEnglish Earthenware and Stoneware (London, 1904); Bernard Rackham and Herbert Read, English Pottery (London, 1972); and Bernard Rackham, Catalogue ofthe Glaisher Collection or Pottery and Porcelain in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1935)· 51 Griselda Lewis, A Collectors History ofEnglish Pottery (London, 1969), p. 24. 52 Bernard Rackham, Vases: Or, the Status ofPottery in Europe (London, 1943), p. 4· 53 Ibid., p. 9· 54 Since, in the same moment, making pots was a far less impressive achievement than writing, it is less likely that a name inscribed in the clay before firing served to identify a vessel's owner than that the vessel was made and fired in order to display, in writing, its owner's name. But see William V Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA, 1986), pp. 46-7· 55 Rackham, Medieval English Pottery, p. 30. 56 Andre Breton, Cahiers d'art, 1-11 (1936), p. 22. Cited in [osef Helfenstein, 'Against the Intolerability of Fame: Meret Oppenheim and Surrealism', in Meret Oppenheim: Beyond the Teacup, ed. J. Burchhardt et al. (New York, 1996), p. 29. 57 Puzzle cups are 'things which have no rules' in their manufacture. See Cipriano Piccolpasson, I Tre Libri Dell'Arte del Vasio, trans. Ronald Lightbrown and Alan Caiger-Smith (London, 1980), p. 23. For a description of four Tudor and Stuart puzzle-jugs, see Rackham, Catalogue ofthe Glaisher Collection ofPottery, vol. I, pp. 5-6.

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216

Photographic Acknowledgements The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the following sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it: Photo by the author: 14; courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum:

I;

by

permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library: 2-5,17-21, 23, 25-3 I, 33; by permission of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London: 8; © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge: 25-31,33; reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA: 24; © 2001 Museum of Modern Art, New York: 32; by permission of the Trustees of the National Gallery, London: 9; courtesy of Princeton University Libraries: 13; photo by Peter Rogers, reproduced courtesy of Margaret Carrick: 15; by permission of the Royal Commission of the Historical Monuments of England, © Crown Copyright: 6-7, 12; courtesy of the Master, Fellows and Scholars of St John's College: IQ-II;

by permission of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum,

London: 16; courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art (Paul Mellon Collection): 22.

21

7

Index Page numbers in italics signify illustrations. abjection 81, 83-4, 87 acrostics 13, 19 Adler, Jeremy 19 aesthetic values 79-81, 83, 113-14, 117- 18,136,146,149,153-5,

blots 75-6 Blount, Thomas 143 body, as writing surface 22, 82-3, 93- 112 book, as writing apparatus 9- 10,

160-64 Alciati, Andreas 46 Americans, indigenous, as seen by

45, 135 Brathwaite, Richard 56-7 Breton, Andre 159 Britons, ancient 89-94, 100-1°7

Europeans 90,94-9,1°4,131 anagrams I 18 Ansells End Farm, Kimpton, Herts. 31 Anzieu, Didier 85-6 Ascham, Roger 37 Austin, J. L. 141 Bacon, Nicholas 47 Bakaty, Michael 79 Barclay, Alexander 62-3 Bath, Michael 49 Beaumont, Francis 54 Bellarmine jugs 149-51,15° Benjamin, WaIter 21, 81, 84, 149 Bethlehem, as tattoo centre 107, 108'

Calvin, John 65-6, 67 Camden, William 90-91,100, 105- 6, 110, 137 capitalism, pre-history of 59 Chinchilla 82 Clifford, Anne 48 clothes 121 as writing surface 10,22, 119-21 cognition 13-16,21-2,27, 115, 118, 121-3, 125,128,132,134,15 1 common-place books 48, 50, 76 consciousness 12, I 17 as writing surface 25, 73-5, 78, 85 Cook, James 88

Copley, Anthony 57-8 Cornwallis, William 45 Coryate, Thomas 47 tattooed 108 Cries ofLondon I I crockery 149-58 Daniel 5: 5 68, 78 Daniel, Samuel 43,5° death instinct 115 de Bry, Theodore 94- 1°4, 96, 97, 99,102 decorum 15-16 Dee, John 58 Deleuze, Giles 86 Delftware, English 157 Derrida, Jacques 12, 105, 115, 164 Dissemination 86 OfGrammatology 25-6, 115-117, 134-6 Writing and Difference 73-4 Deuteronomy 6: 9 64-7, 78 devices 118-23, 137, 144, 156 differance 134, 136 discursivity 133-4 Domus Aurea 34 Donne,John 10,36,47,7°,143-5 drawing 9, 50-51, 116-17, 136, 153-6 Duffy, Eamon 77 Durkheim, Emile 107 education 46, 50, 64 Elizabeth I 90, 122-4, 143 anagrams on her name 123-4, 129 220

belief in amulets 126-8 as graffiti writer 55, 56, 57 Elyot, Thomas 139-41 emblems 13,20, 118-23, 137, 156 epigrams 19,45,51-3 Erasmus 42,46,51,139-4° erasure 5°-51,73-6 ethnography, early modern 94, 100, 106, 110 Evans,Joan 136,138 Feering House, Feering, Essex 65 fetishism I 12, 128, 144 of commodities 122 of writing 59-60 figured poetry 16-19, 22 Fister, William 29, 46 Flamel, Nicholas 58 Fleming, Abraham 149 Fletcher, John 54 Florio, John 5 I Forman, Simon I I I Foucault, Michel 23-7 Foxe, John 55-6 Freeman, Rosemary 55 Freud, Sigmund 164 Beyond the PleasurePrinciple 149 on the 'Mystic Writing Pad' 73-5,77-8,85-6 on narcissism 129 on sublimation 146, 159 on the uncanny 69-70 fuddling cup 146- 7, 147 Fulke Greville 55 Fuller, Thomas 56

Galatians 6 106, 108 Garucci, Raphael 40 Gell, Alfred 88-9, 110-1 I Gent, Lucy 33 geometrical figures 24 as modes of thought 85-6, 93, 106 Goldberg, [onathan 75 graffiti signatures 38,39 Grange, John 57 graphology 25,74-5,115,134,164 Greenblatt, Stephen 113-14,120, 130-3 1 Guattari, Felix 86 gynarchy 93 hair bracelets 138, 143-5 Hall, Joseph 49, 66 Harriot, Thomas 94,98, 105 Harris, William 156-7 Hart, John 50 Heidegger, Martin 154, 162 Herbert,George 49,55,58 Herrick, Robert 54 Hoskyns, John 58 Houckgeest, Gerhard 33 Hulton, Paul 99, 101, 104 humanism, English 37-9, 48-50,

59 iconoclasm 77'-8 Imprese 13,20, 119-20 inscriptions 9, 13, 19-21,39-4°,47, 51, 138-42 intellect, its relation to matter 15- 16,21,44,114-15,118-19,

121-3, 125, 128-3 0, 132-7, 140, 144-5, 151-2, 163- 4 JamesI 9°,108-10 Jerusalem, as tattoo centre 107-9 jewellry 10, 17-18, 136 [ohnson, Barbara 145 Jones-Baker, Doris 36, 75 Jonson,Ben 53-5,59-60,151,153 Kristeva, Julia 81, 83 Lacan, [acques 93, 164 das Ding 160-63 on 'the mirror stage' 129 on sublimation 146, 153, 159-64 Lafrery, Antonio 52 Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques 95-106,96,97,102,103 Levi-Strauss, Claude 115-17, 153, 156 Leviticus 19 106 linearization 133-8,143-5,158 literacy 9-10, 50 literature, definitions of 9, 44, 113- 14,118,133, 164 forms of 13,4 1, 135-8, 142,

143-5 practices of 47, 57 Lithgow, William 108-10, 110 Llantwit Major, Glamorgan 32 Luther, Martin 65 Lyotard, [ean-Francois 86 macaroni 163 magic 13,60, Ill, 124-3°, 140 221

marking stones I I ~arx,}(arl 13,21 matchbox 160-62 materialism 121 materiality, definitions of 12-13, 21

Parry, Robert 49 Pasquino (speaking statue) 5 I Peacham,rIenry 48-g phenomenology I IS, 133 Piccolpasso, Cipriano 160 Picts, the 90-g1, 100-107, I I I

matter 13,20-23,27,33-4,43-6, 114-15, 118, 121, 128, 146, 163- 4 ~cQuarrie, Charles 107

pinking 9°-91, 101 Pirton Grange, rIerts. 30 Pittleworth Manor, Hants. 71

memory 44-6,5°,65-7,73-8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 133 metre 13-14, 21 Metropolitan ware 153-6, 154, 161,161 Michelangelo 86 Montaigne, Michel de 48 Moryson, Fynes 1°7-8 names 82,111-2,120-21 narcissism 129-30 Nash, Thomas 46 Norton, Thomas 75 Omai 88 omination 124-3° Oppenheim, Meret 158- 60, 159 P-Orridge, Genesis 89 painted cloths 60-6 I painting 23, 25, 33, 60-63, 7°-7 2, 99, 155-6 Panofsky, Erwin 33 paper, as writing surface 9-10, 25, 73-6,87 Parker, Patricia 68 222

plaster 7 I, 77 Plato's sphere 125-7 Polynesia 88-g, 110-1 I pornography 33,54,55 posies 10, 19-27, 29,4 2-46, SI, 54 of flowers 46, 101-4, 135-7 in hair bracelets 143 in rings 138-43 posset pot 155 pouncing 90, 98-9 printed page, as writing surface 9, 19,24,43-6,74,135,138 Pritchard, Violet 36-7 Procopius of Gaza 107 prognostication 125-3° prophecy 125-3° proportion, poetical 13-16, 22, 125- 6 proverbs 42,46-7,59,143 psychoanalysis 74 Purchas, Samuel 90, 130-33 Puttenham, George 13-22,14,15, 17,43,5 1-3,118-25,137-8 puzzle-jugs 160-62 Pythagorus 125- 7, 137 Rackham,Bernard 151,155,158

Reader, Francis 61-2, 70 rebus 137 recusancy 62-3,76-7 Reformation, English 62-7,77-8, 107-8, 128 Revelations 19 107 rhythm 13 Romans, in Britain 89,91, 106,

1°7 Rubin, Arnold 79-80 Saenredam, Pieter 34-5,35 Sandys, George 107 senses 15-16 sententiae 42,47-9, 59, 118- 19, 138-4 1, 153 Seton, Alexander 49 Shakespeare, William 42, 6 I, 134, 136, 143 Sheppard, Samuel 58 sight, and cognition 118-19 and poetry 14, 16-19, 21-2, 27, 118 and writing 24 signifier, as sublimated object 67, 72,78,84,162-3 skin, as border 83-6, I I I as uncanny object 82, 86-7 as writing surface 82-8, 108 Son tag, Susan 34, 36 sound, and cognition 118-19 and poetry 10, 14-15, 18-19, 21-2,

26-7 spacing 134, 138, 158 speech 26-7,41 speech act 141-2

Speed, John 91-4,92,1°4-6,110 Spenser, Edmund 55 St John's College, Cambridge, fellows of 37-9 St Paul's Cathedral 54 Stallybrass, Peter 121 stanzaic form 13- I 4 subjectivity 24, 41-2, 5 I, 59, 82, 84, 86,111-12,120-23, 129,13°, 146, 158 sublimation 84, 146, 149, 159-64 Summers, [amie 83 surface, as intellectual problem 40,83-6, Ill, 138, 162 Surrealism 159 Symonds, J. A. 40 Terry, Edward 108 text, circulation of 43,45-51,

59-60 definitions of 12,20, 24,43-4 oral 47 thanataphobia 69 Thomas, Keith 126 Tottel's Miscellany 22 Tusser, Thomas 29-31,3°,31, 4 1-3,46 'tyg' drinking cup 148 Tyndale, William 64 Underwood, Malcolm 37-8 Valery, Paul 86 Valverde, Juan de 86 wall-papers 60 223

walls, as writing surfaces, 9, 22, 25, 29-7 2,75-8,138-40 Walton,Isaak 36 Watt, Tessa 45 White, John 94-8, 99, 100 whitewash, as writing surface 50, 74-8 Whitney, Geoffrey 46 Willet, Andrew 20, 20 William of Malmesbury 107 Willis, John 44-6 windows, as writing surfaces 10,

55-7 world, as writing surface 24-7 Wotton, Henry 51 writing, definitions of 9-10, 12, 24-7,5°-5 1,61-2,7°,74, '115-18,136,145

arche-writing 25, 74-5, 116- 17,145,158 as autofiguration 132-3, 145 in a circle 137-8, 143-4 civil benefits of 13°-31,139-41 diverse forms of 132-3, 153, 156-7, 164 in the New World 115-18,

13°-33 non-linear 134-8, 143-5 as object of wonder 13°-33, 145 as ornament 44, 46, 153 as pledge 141-2 on pots 152-8 writing rings 55