Guise and Disguise : Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance [1 ed.] 9781442675575, 9780802029560

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Guise and Disguise

Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance

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Guise and Disguise Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance

Lloyd Davis

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1993 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-2956-6

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Davis, Lloyd, 1959Guise and disguise: rhetoric and characterization in the English Renaissance Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-2956-6 i. Disguise in literature. 2. English drama Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 History and criticism. 3. English drama iyth century - History and criticism. I. Title. PR658.D58D3 1993

822'.309'3

093-094026-1

This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the English Department of the University of Queensland.

To Rachel and Fred

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX

Introduction: Disguise in the Renaissance 3 1 The Rhetoric of Characterization 19 2 Political Acts 53 3 The Allegorical Subject 91 4 The Figure of Woman 129 Epilogue: Tragedy and Disguise 167 NOTES 173 INDEX 213

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Angus Fletcher, Richard C. McCoy, and Tom Hayes, who read earlier versions of the text and made detailed suggestions. David Adams discussed much of this material with me and helped me to think it dirough. At the University of Toronto Press, first Prudence Tracy and then Virgil D. Duff gave long-range support. Thanks are also due to Margaret Allen, Tessie Griffin, and John Leonard for helping to prepare the text. A section of chapter 3 first appeared as 'Passing, Subjection and the Elizabethan Rhetoric of Obedience' in Southern Review (Australia) 24 (1991) 244-58. My greatest support, as always, comes from Julia. I also want to thank Rae and Fred, as well as Pauline, Alan, and Annabelle for dieir warmth and support.

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Guise and Disguise

Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance

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Introduction

Disguise in the Renaissance

there being nothing wherein Nature so much triumpheth as in dissimilitude. Sir Walter Raleigh Preface to The History of the World

in any case, what is shown, shows itself only under a Verkleidung, a disguise, and an ill-fitting one it often is. Jacques Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

A concern with characterization comprises a conceptual axis through much thought and literature of the English Renaissance. Texts from many different genres address issues of character, its authenticity, modes of representation, and functions in interpersonal relations. Character is viewed as a discursive phenomenon, as a sign of personal identity, and as a bridge between individual existence and social surrounds that can reveal fundamental connections between them despite their apparent separation: 'In few,' Montaigne concludes towards the end of the 'Apologie of Raymond Sebond,' 'there is no constant existence, neither of our being, nor of the objects.'* Character may be consistent or fragmented, either guiding or emerging through behaviour that fluctuates between emotional extremes and displays conflicting, contradictory passions. The vicissitudes of Faustus' last night, from his ecstasy with Helen to his dread of God's fierce looks, exemplify this sort of discontinuity. Another kind of character complexity is depicted in figures who step outside the action to ponder their behaviour, as when Hamlet marvels at the player's show of grief compared to his own. In this case, charac-

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Guise and Disguise ter compounds into 'meta-character,' and the relation of surface demeanour to deeper feelings and motives begins to be explored. Hamlet is absorbed with his varying parts, the way he acts as a son and heir, a revenger, a courtier, a lover, a scholar, and so on.2 Here, roleplaying is not simply a factor of dramatic production but is itself thematized and examined. Such instances of discontinuity and variation acknowledge the breadth and depth of the concept of character. The range of roles that a single figure presents, along with the effects of those roles for that figure and for others, reveals character as a function of personal, interpersonal, and discursive relations. The dimensions and workings of character are often developed in Renaissance texts through the motif of disguise. In a study of the significance of dramatic disguise, M.C. Bradbrook contends that, rather than a simple change of personal appearance, disguise is 'the substitution, overlaying, or metamorphosis of dramatic identity, whereby one character sustains two roles.'3 Considered straightforwardly, disguise represents a calculated effort by a character to resolve problems or realize goals through manipulating identity in certain situations. We might, then, expand Bradbrook's definition of dramatic disguise to suggest that beneath the surface significance of dual roles and deception more complicated notions of identity and motivation are raised. Initiated at a certain point in time, worn, and then removed either by choice or, notwithstanding resistance, 'upon compulsion,'4 disguise concentrates the dramatistic and rhetorical processes through which character is enacted and depicted. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, these processes become recurring features in representations of social character through literary and non-literary texts. The motif of disguise suggests that personal identity is not conceived as essentially or originally present through a broad stream of the period's social discourse. There may never be a 'disguise-less' character; instead, it is the degree or intent of deception and the control over the effects of disguise that vary. Further, in this interpersonal network the implications of disguise can soon pass beyond any one wearer's intentions. Citing Hamlet again, we may note that the prince's initially confident plan, 'As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on,' ends up leading him through convoluted considerations of individual agency, social identity, and interaction.5 Putting on an antic disposition places the cultural norms, traditions, and premises of character and selfhood under great pressure. A motivated manipulation of at least two identities, disguise signifies the complexi4

Introduction ties of mutability and interaction associa d with the concept of character in early-modern thought. These complexities also have historical derivations. The main line of development that will be examined here is the western rhetorical tradition, which offers various notions of character that seem to have influenced Renaissance texts and that are useful in thinking about them.6 Like many of the dissembling figures in these works, disguise may fulfil unequivocal or ambiguous functions in relation to prevailing values and thought. Depending on the forms of representation, it can reinforce or challenge ideas of singular selfhood and perceptions of others as individuals. The 'disaraid' Duessa, for example, shows that knowledge of others is a dialectical process. As personified dissemblance, she is falsely perceived as true but can be truthfully known as false: 'Such is the face of falshood, such the sight / Of fowle Duessa, when her borrowed light / Is laid away, and counterfesaunce knowne.'7 The uncovering of her disguise finally appears to fix Duessa's egregious nature and that of disguise as well, die two being fused in 'the face of falshood.' Yet without the initial 'counterfesaunce,' neither the general operation of disguise nor her specific identity could be disclosed. In this case, the gradual uncovering of disguise, before the Red Cross Knight and the reader, inscribes the allegory's moral theme. Alternatively, this kind of sequential interplay between disguise and revelation may be crucial to the advantages to be gained by dissemblance. lago compares himself to sinfully tempting devils who 'suggest at first with heavenly shows, / As I do now.'8 He sees his own 'show' as presently perfected and complete, and believes it can be disposed of later when it suits him. Conceived in these terms, lago's disguise expediently hides itself as it is seen. The key issue is who controls the meaning of its disclosure, the wearer or the audience. Even if a disguise is not recognized as such, to be effective it must still be perceived. For the disguiser's plan to work, his or her show must be seen and yet ignored, a double process that sociologist Erving Goffman sees as a condition of all interactions: 'Just as the current situation prescribes the official guise behind which we will conceal ourselves, so it provides for where and how we will show through.'9 Disguise signifies a type of philosophical and semiotic paradox that operates in and underlies social actions. Question: What sign disappears as soon as it appears? Answer: The sign of disguise. Within a traditional semiotics of character, disguise might be held to refer eventually to a 'real' identity. Yet if the revealed identity depends on the effacement of another, it would seem to fall short of a personal 5

Guise and Disguise telos and appear instead to be marked by its concealment of and difference from the identity it 'transcends.' In this sense, once a disguise has been donned, its wearer can never simply take it off, either to return to an original self or to attain an ultimate one. Its unpredictable effects remain in force for the wearer and observers, as lago himself comes to see: 'This is the night / That either makes me, or foredoes me quite' (¥.1.128-9). He realizes that his destiny, and that of the others, will be a product of the lingering, ambiguous presence of an improvised identity.10 From a historical perspective, the complexities of characterization that are represented by disguise develop and recall the classical rhetorical concept of 'ethopoesis,' the making of character.11 Disguise draws out the opposition within the rhetoricians' word, the two semantic elements of which coalesce and strive against each other. Charactermaking is problematic, since either 'ethos' or 'poesis' may determine its meaning. A notion of character pre-exists and orders the making of character; or, character is always being made: ethopoesis or ethopoesis. Similarly, disguise may point to a directing character behind it or may suggest that character is not controlled but contingent. These alternatives denote an opposition between essentialist and representational notions of selfhood, a continuing conflict in philosophical and rhetorical theory that can be traced back to the attacks of Socrates and Plato against the sophists. The ambiguity of disguise, either confirming or deferring an archetypal self, recalls this conflict, and in so doing suggests the conceptual and historical depth of Renaissance ideas of character. The western rhetorical tradition provides a central context out of which the period's modes of and attitudes to characterization develop. In their various versions of ethopoesis, Renaissance texts review and conceptualize the rhetorical and dramatistic processes of literary and social character construction.12 In sixteenth-century England 'disguise' is one of a cluster of terms, including 'seeming,' 'counterfeiting,' 'dissembling,' and 'dissimulation,' that link character to concepts of representation and relate selfhood to theories of discourse. The interrelation between disguise and identity reproduces a structure of discursive subjectivity that is implicit in the word 'character.' For the latter's ambiguous etymology conveys notions of selfhood and signification. The meaning of the Greek word charakter changes from one who engraves, imprints, or writes, through the tool used in these operations, to what Warren Ginsberg has called the 'decisive shift in the word's semantic history ... from an active to a passive sense; both agent and instrument 6

Introduction become less important than result. By the time "charakter" first appears in Greek literature, in the Suppliants of Aeschylus, it already meant the impression stamped on a coin.'13 Character becomes an effect - the engraved, the stamped, the perceived - that recalls its causal process. It produces and is produced, works as signifier and signified, and in addition, as emphasized by the connection to money, it is a token of social exchange and value. 'Character' combines semiotic, personal, and interpersonal factors. Disguise is a figure that enables these ethopoetic notions to be grasped, depicted, and then related to ideas about selfhood current in the Renaissance. It suggests the diachronic process of concept formation and use, wherein traditional forms and notions of character are related to contemporary constructions of the self. To us such constructions may appear 'preCartesian,' but as Rosalie Colie notes, 'the concept of "self" is best conceived as a generic ' novum repertum1 for texts of the period;14 and its newness is part of a revision of rhetorical character. In enumerating certain senses of the word 'self,' such as the ego, the intrinsic person, the subject of consciousness, or one's nature - all of which resound in Descartes's conclusion 'that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking'15 - the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that these senses did not emerge in English until the late seventeenth century (references are to Traherne, Dryden, and Berkeley). In Middle English, 'self was used with a possessive pronoun as either a reflexive or an emphatic personal pronoun. The usage seems to have been grammatically expedient, with little or no philosophical connotation of the intrinsic person. A figurative usage, recorded in 1605, seems more the opposite of the later intrinsic sense, for it is akin to the expressions 'other self,' 'second self,' and generally implies 'a counterpart of oneself.' Rather than signifying the self as an origin and unity - ego, intrinsic person, the subject of consciousness - the 1605 usage suggests a self-guise, an indelible trace of disguise already on the self that precludes the modern senses. Two references from Shakespeare's plays are used by the OED to illustrate the meanings of disguise. Both convey the concealing of identity to deceive others: 'Kent; who in disguise, / Follow'd his enemy king'; and, 'Ned, where are our disguises?'16 The traces of premeditation in these uses imply that disguise is motivated guise, the latter's meanings in this period including usual manner, behaviour, attire, and external appearance. These senses are evident, for instance, in Philip Henslowe's inventory of the 'playing apparel' of the deceased Edward Alleyn; included among the 'antik sutes, jerkings and dublets' are a 7

Guise and Disguise collection of 'guises,' presumably the clown's facial masks.17 The OED also notes a negative use of guise in 1662 as an assumed appearance or pretence. The meaning of guise seems to point in two directions: to a consistent selfhood or one's usual manner; and to disguise, a changeable external appearance that might be purposefully falsified and manipulated. Goffman notes that most of the time role-playing is accepted by others as not contaminating the player's personality. 'However, should an individual fake a role,' the difference between guise and disguise can become a key issue used to judge the player's self.18 Self, guise, and disguise are, then, integrally connected since guise mediates between the other two, and disguise implies not one but two opposites, a contradictory and a contrary, an unmotivated guise and selfhood. The three terms represent a dialogue between self and 'non-self that informs a person's behaviour and speech as well as the responses of his or her audience. The shifting relationship among the terms rather than their oppositions seems to be what's at stake.19 Many Renaissance texts develop this interplay and its notions of compounding identity. A simple instance again appears in Henslowe's note that he 'Bowght a robe for to goo invisibell.'20 The success of such a stage prop, confirmed by Henslowe's sharpness as a manager, suggests that audiences readily accepted the appearance of this kind of guise as an index of its own and its wearer's absence. A verbal analogue to this visual link between selfhood and guise emerges with the dramatic aside. Shakespeare's early plays, for example, use the aside to announce to die audience that personal deception is in train. The convention works as a double sign of character revelation and effacement, while the 'hidden mind of a character is leaked to the audience.'21 In / Henry W, Humphrey of Gloucester and Winchester swap lines that confirm their characters to the audience and to themselves, while they try to deceive each other: 'So help me God, as I dissemble not!' / 'So help me God, as I intend it not!' (111.1.140-1). The echo between the two lines emphasizes their function as markers of the use of disguise. The aside's sudden change of address and tone indicates a register of self-revelation that, in turn, discloses the surrounding discourse and appearance as a means of self-concealment.22 Through the Henriad, this deceptive rhetoric of disguise expands formally and thematically from the aside into the soliloquy. First in the covert scheming of Plantagenet, and then, more extensively, in Richard of Gloucester's projections through 5 Henry W and Richard 7//,23 the relations among dissimulation, selfhood, and desire are drawn out in increasing detail. Catherine Belsey has argued in Lacanian terms that 8

Introduction in Jacobean plays the soliloquy represents a disjunction within the speaking subject, which is repressed but still forces its expression.24 Perhaps more generally, the political scheming in these earlier soliloquies reveals the function of disguise in allowing themes of identity and motivation to be addressed and represented through 'an art form that flourishes precisely when selfhood and self-speaking come to be cardinal issues for early modern culture.'25 The shift from aside to soliloquy marks a sharpened awareness of multiple selfhood, through 'the relation of the speaker to himself as someone about whom he is speaking.'26 Disguise is a central topos in this emergent rhetoric of self-reflection, evaluation, and intentionality. The rhetorical and dramatistic processes of guise and disguise work, as was noted above, across social as well as theatrical texts and performances, and influence the reception and responses to such texts. An involved case appears in The Courtier, when Frederick Fergoso advises that at a court masque 'it were not meete ... a prince should take upon him to bee like a prince in deede'; he should wear a 'false visage' like the other courtiers. This is done, however, not to escape from the role of prince but to assert it more effectively from behind the mask: 'the prince stripping himselfe of the person of a prince, and mingling him selfe equally with his underlinges (yet in such wise that hee may be known) with refusing superioritie, let him chalenge a greater superioritie, namely, to passe other men, not in authoritie, but in vertue.'27 The mask both hides and reveals princely virtue, and, like Duessa's 'counterfesaunce,' its concealment intensifies the disclosure. By having its revelation withheld and timed, disguise can help translate identity into power. Even indirectly participating or assisting in such unmasking may realize cultural capital. As Stephen Orgel has noted, a constant task for court playwrights was 'how to create a masque figure that the king can portray or, conversely, how to create a figure that will serve as an adequate representation of the monarch beneath the masque.'28 The equivocal signs of characterization may assume a pressing social and political importance for the monarch, the masque author, and, in addition, the audience. In Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Wolsey proves his loyalty by reading the king's mask as proof of the royal person (l.iv.77-86). The masque does not simply hide a sovereign identity but signifies a domain where complex social aspects of character and characterization - selfhood, interpersonal relationships, and hierarchies - are being enacted, tested, and perhaps rewarded. Disguise is in effect a cultural touchstone for ideas about character. 9

Guise and Disguise Through disguise three functions of Renaissance characterization can be emphasized that relate it first to the tradition of rhetorical ethopoesis and the influence of classical thought, and then to the break in the structure of subjectivity marked by the Cartesian cogito and indicated in the modern senses of 'self noted above. These functions are as follows: i) Disguise foregrounds the interplay and conflicts between vision and language in the production of self and persona. It recapitulates the etymologies of character and ethopoesis, disclosing the signifying structure of selfhood. Disguise depicts a semiotics of characterization. 2) As a process of personal palimpsest, disguise establishes ordinal and temporal hierarchies among primary, secondary, and possibly more personae. It reproduces the dialectic between essentialist and non-essentialist selfhood. Disguise inscribes a metaphysics of characterization. 3) An early-modern form of rhetorical ethopoesis, disguise expresses character as a dialogic process between the disguiser and others. It stages the interactions of individual motives within interpersonal and cultural contexts. Disguise represents the ideology of characterization. This study will examine these functions by interpreting a range of texts that theorize and practise characterization. The majority of the texts to be considered were written under Elizabeth's late and James's early reign; however, reference will also be made to Continental works that had been translated and become part of the cultural scene, being cited and alluded to by English texts. In addition, works from before and after this period, such as Erasmus' Praise of Folly and Hobbes's Leviathan, which seem to anticipate or review key questions of character, will also be considered. I relate these texts and their notions of character to the tradition of rhetorical ethopoesis. This tradition, especially through the disputes over sophistical discourse and persona, informs conceptions of disguise and characterization to a significant degree. The conflict between sophism and Platonism - which in itself denotes a fundamental shift from the positive preoccupation with dissemblance and flux that appears in Homer and in pre-Socratic philosophy - endows ethopoesis and the processes of characterization with an underlying, binary pattern of self versus other that is frequently adapted to conceptual, personal, and ideological concerns. Differences in the signs and meanings, ideas and qualities, and social values of disguise and character are organized through this basic dyad. Disguise is a topos of selfhood for Renaissance texts. It works thematically in poetry and fiction such as The Faerie Queene, the Arcadia, and early picaresque novels; it is a motif in philosophical, religious, and 10

Introduction political tracts; and, as a theatrical device, it is frequently employed in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. These thematic and formal uses should not efface the reflexive relations between disguise and discourse, rhetoric and selfhood. As noted above, disguise complicates the identifying of a speaker at the origin of speech and of meaning, for it relies upon the misidentification, the location and deferral, of such a figure. Like rhetoric, disguise comprises a motivated display that seeks to elicit definite responses while not being detected. An unnoticed disguise - not die same as a disguise that, aiming not to be discerned, realizes anonymity - fails. Dis-guise thus suggests a doubled guise, which exceeds a 'usual manner' of self-presentation. It exemplifies a figured selfhood and styled construction of persona. At the same time, dis-guise implies the negation of guise, a disavowal of mannered demeanour analogous to an orator's open denial of effort and design. An intrinsic and ambivalent rhetoricity concentrates in disguise. Not merely is it presented by Renaissance works, it lies at the centre of their participation in and representation of discourse, character, and the relationship between them. Disguise is an ethopoetic trope that enables connections between the social and the personal to be textually reproduced; and it is a meta-rhetorical figure that suggests the differential and representational processes that relate language to selfhood.29 Disguise is often used in Renaissance depictions of the prince, the courtier, and the androgynous woman, figures who foreground the processes and premises of character that run through the period's political and sexual discourses. These characters are not conceived singly but reflect the self-other dyad, being represented through pairs of opposed figures - king and usurper, subject and traitor, man and woman. Notions of power, subjection, sexuality, and their orthodox realization or subversion are treated through conflicts between these pairs. Ideally, power is held to flow from an essentialist kingly self, subjection is the goal of the courtier's actions, and sexuality is ordered through a separation and hierarchy of male and female. Yet the double process of characterization effected through disguise places these ideals within a cultural dialogue. As some Renaissance social theorists, and more recent ones as well, have proposed, ideological functions and challenges may both be realized through the effects of dissimulation. Disguise becomes an ambiguous trope that represents the naturalization of power and the reworking or possible undermining of dominance.30 The personae of sovereignty, subjection, and gender are revealed as authoritative but not unquestioned images of selfhood. 11

Guise and Disguise The use of disguise in fashioning such figures turns them into complex hybrids who interrogate their own ideal presence and position in the social structure.31 In the differences between disguise and ethos that generate characterizations of the prince, courtier, and androgyne, the problems and processes of cultural identity are presented and worked through. Such issues were written about in a wide range of genres. As a recurring trope, disguise instils many of them with ambiguity. When conceived as hybrid figures, the king, courtier, and androgyne are often characterized through three types of dialogic discourse, each of which foregrounds the equivocal aspects of rhetorical and dramatistic identity. While kingship is considered in numerous types of texts from handbooks on how to rule to history plays - a dialogic, satirical discourse captures the complexities of political power expressed in the opposition between usurper and king. The focus of satire on a preexisting, unequivocal discourse parallels the usurper's deviant reference to an essential royal self. In similar rhetorical terms, allegory is the genre that most suggestively inscribes the courtier's trials of loyalty, for its mimetic duplicities and guises mirror his or her efforts to fulfil and manipulate the code of subjection. Thirdly, the trope of metonymy, which in using a part or element of something to stand for die rest seems based on a kind of semiotic dissimulation, figures a sexual hierarchy wherein an androgynous woman, in part, reproduces a male persona. The mixed forms of romance and tragicomedy often represent this metonymic sexual ethos.32 We will see that these three genres - satire, allegory, and metonymic tragicomedy - inscribe the nexus of rhetoric and character through which the political and sexual implications of disguise are represented. They re-present and concentrate a number of discursive forms and preoccupations from a broad range of social discourses. Since disguise is a dramatistic as well as a rhetorical concept, complex, ideologically compressed images of disguise appear in the theatre.33 Satirical, allegorical, and androgynous dramatis personae are important cases for the analysis of disguise in the English Renaissance. The involved workings of hybrid, metadramatic figures have often been noted in Shakespeare's work.34 A play such as A Midsummer Night's Dream can be read as a prolonged study of dramatistic identity, ranging from the attempts of Theseus and Oberon to direct the desire of others, to the lovers' confusion of identities and relations in the forest, to the performance of 'Pyramus and Thisby' by Bottom and his friends before the court. The Dream represents varying ideas 12

Introduction of character as that which functions interpersonally in 'real' life and also figures in theatrical staging, a distinction itself questioned by Puck's epilogue, where the 'real' and dramatic spheres are equated as 'a dream' (v.i.43o). A few lines from the play may suggest the complicated layers of its representation of selfhood. In Act three, scene one, the would-be actors have entered the forest to rehearse. First they allocate the roles, and in Bottom's eagerness to play all the parts, we note an awareness of the zeal for role-playing. A problem then arises concerning how to present moonshine on the stage. Although lacking Henslowe's professional insight into theatrical illusion and effect, Peter Quince nonetheless spurns Bottom's suggestion that they let the real moon shine in through a window. Instead, 'one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine' (m.i.59-61). In this instance of more or less ordinary language, there seem to be at least six notions of 'self: i) the corporeal 'one,' capable of physical movement and presence, coming and arriving; 2) the verbal and cognitive 'one' able to enter the field of discourse 'and say'; 3) the speaker's spoken self, distinguished from the initial 'one' who comes and says, a 'he' who is represented as acting and speaking; 4) the 'he' as actor or role-player who deliberately disfigures or presents; 5) the representing 'person' or dramatic character, the signifier of the role-player's disfiguring; 6) the represented being of Moonshine, the signified of the role-player's disfiguring. There is a movement from physical selfhood, through its cognitive, discursive, and dramatistic practices (its increasingly demanding semiotic skills), to the highly socialized, symbolic behaviour of acting in the institution of the theatre. Within this schema of personhood there is scope for further complication through the ambiguity of the phrase 'to disfigure, or to present.' On the one hand, the two infinitives could be rendered synonymous by the 'or,' and refer only to one mode of role-playing, that of disfiguring. If this is the case, matters are only slightly simplified, for the meaning of 'disfigure' is itself ambiguous: has Quince mistakenly said it when he really intends 'to figure';35 is he (or the dramatist) making a sardonic comment, or even a serious point of dramatic theory, about the ability of actors, who always mar or deform the figure of their characters; is Quince claiming that the actor disguises (a meaning of disfigure until 1713) 'the person of Moonshine,' thus adding another twist to the representational screw, one that disguises - erases, defers - the representation?

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Guise and Disguise If, on the other hand, 'or' distinguishes 'to disfigure' from 'to present,' is it being suggested that there are two opposed methods of representation? The first would disguise Moonshine, that is represent it through its deformed 'person,' semblance, or guise, always acknowledging a separateness from the 'real' Moonshine. The second method - indeed, it seems to correspond to method acting - would 'present' Moonshine itself, letting 'the person of Moonshine' shine through the transparent actor, who for the time has no existence beyond that role. These lines seem to note the changing acting styles of the period as well as acknowledging historically significant shifts in semiotic and conceptual issues of representation and of action itself.36 Shakespeare's plays do offer significant examples of the ethopoetic processes and effects of disguise. They form a sort of historical repository of notions of royal, courtly, and sexual identities. As often seems the case, his work presents a paradoxical norm for critical reference - normative through the apparent centrality of its language and themes to Renaissance literature and its consequent function as a yardstick for other texts from the period; yet paradoxical by virtue of the seemingly exceptional force and extent of its representations. In this critical situation, where 'Shakespeare' seems to constitute an unavoidable reference point for other works, the three texts analysed here in greatest detail, Marston's The Malcontent, Lyly's Campaspe, and Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, are chosen not simply because they reveal further instances in which disguise is written about and depicted. They also either exceed or fail to fulfil the 'Shakespearean': for example, Lyly's plays are commonly judged to prepare the way for Shakespearean comedy and romance, which is then initiated with Love's Labor's Lost, The Malcontent is seen to replicate the innovations of 'comicall satyre' in Troilus and Cressida and of 'disguised ruler plays' in Measure for Measure; Philaster is often held to derive from Hamlet but then to add a stylized Jacobean rhetoric. Through such 'excesses' and 'limitations,' these works reflect the ambivalent, excessive, and negating effects that disguise may have in relation to social and discursive norms of identity and character. Their very difference and distance from the Shakespearean text seem to reinscribe the dialogic oppositions between deviant disguise and authentic selfhood. For it is the latter, from Johnson's preface on, that is frequently seen as crystallized in a Shakespearean 'general nature,' 'common humanity,' and 'essential character.'37 Indeed, one of the advantages of using ethopoetic disguise as a key concept to study Renaissance discourse is that it enables ego-oriented

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Introduction appropriations of early modern selfhood, frequently constructed through readings of Shakespeare's work, to be questioned. By deferring the 'idea and idealization of the autonomous human and humanist subject,' the rhetoric of disguise seems to anticipate and preemptively to deconstruct what Joel Fineman labelled the 'historical hegemony of Shakespearean characterology.'38 This is not to say that figures of disguise have not been used to realize such idealizations. C.L. Barber's celebratory reading of sexual normalcy into Twelfth Night epitomizes such manoeuvring: the disguising of a girl as a boy in Twelfth Night is exploited so as to renew in a special way our sense of the difference. Just as a saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it, so a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation ... with sexual as with other relations, it is when the normal is secure that playful aberration is benign. This basic security explains why there is so little that is queazy in all Shakespeare's handling of boy actors playing women, and playing women pretending to be men.39

This kind of conceptualization of disguise would guarantee certain cultural ideals and myths of selfhood. First, it sets character as the authentic and determinant origin of disguise, even where disguise is a type of reflexive deception. It is not surprising, then, to see an earlier version of this notion of disguise in Romantic criticism of Shakespeare. Disguise signifies the truth of 'human nature': 'Nobody ever painted so truthfully as he has done the facility of self-deception, the half self-conscious hypocrisy towards ourselves, with which even noble minds attempt to disguise the almost inevitable influence of selfish motives in human nature.'40 Next, disguise is seen as ideologically oriented to the affirmation and resolution of true identity. Selfhood is the goal of disguise: 'the comic heroines undergo a temporary and self-willed loss of identity; they stage finite and controlled performances at the end of which everything is as it was to begin with.'41 Thirdly, disguise is considered a means, perhaps a therapy, through which mature individuality and full humanity can evolve and develop. Disguise realizes self-knowledge: 'Once Rosalind knows herself and what she wants, she can remove what has been her self-protective disguise ... Just as an actor's role is a disguise, so also is gender a disguise, and all disguises must be removed for people to be themselves ... if we can accept our sex instead of hiding it behind the 15

Guise and Disguise disguise of gender, we will have established a base upon which to build human fulfillment.'42 Lastly, disguise becomes a means of affirming the 'normal' range of personal relationships and hierarchies. Disguise socializes selfhood: 'The assumption of a male identity is essential to Viola's definition of herself as woman. It suggests the objectification of conflict, allows her to act out her ambivalence, and enables her to assume a role more appropriate to the demands of nature and society.'43 In each of these interpretations, Shakespearean disguise and character are positioned within ideologies of essentialist selfhood. Yet it is the mythology of such a subject, deriving from the Platonic tradition, that the process of ethopoetic disguise places in cultural question for the Renaissance. As a recurring figure of selfhood, disguise reminds us that ego-oriented readings of Renaissance texts may in fact be anachronistic. Such readings interpret the texts in terms of a socially unified 'self,' which, it might be argued, is implied in the texts but nonetheless postdates them in terms of wider discursive use. Moreover, and of greater importance for this study, disguise registers neither the control nor the loss of selfhood, but its conflicting, often ambiguous processes and conceptions. Disguise marks a discourse through which ideals of ethopoetic origins and goals and theories of social and individual interaction confront each other. In this view, disguise works as a central motif for representing the cultural dialogism, rather than any particular thesis, of selfhood. The roles of the three main figures to be discussed in the middle chapters - the malcontent Malevole, the beautiful slave Campaspe, and the deposed prince Philaster, each threatening and resettling the social order in the plays' worlds - may indeed suggest relations between individual identity and social stability as well as such psychological patterns as the ideological quest for identity. Yet each figure is portrayed through binary relationships that convey the dialectic of self and other. Further, this dialectic is played out for the stakes of power and desire. Politics and sexuality are represented jointly in the licentiousness of the court that Malevole attacks, in the inverted imperial order where Alexander vies with his subject Apelles for the love of a slave girl, and in the rumours of his mistress's affair with the young Bellario that mire a distracted Philaster in princely inaction. Through these connected themes, the three texts interrogate the essentialist tradition of ethopoesis by revealing that ideals of selfhood are always ideologically motivated. The primary focus of The Malcontent on kingship studies character as a function of archetypal origin. The concern of 16

Introduction Campaspewith subjection suggests identity as the goal of the ethopoetic process. And finally, through figuring androgyny, Philaster both contemplates the impact of individual sexual identity on the surrounding social context and juxtaposes the preceding notions of selfhood as archetypal or in process. These texts depict dominant conceptions of character in Renaissance thought - the archetypal, ideological, and interactive - while investigating their semiotic, metaphysical, and ideological presuppositions. Before turning to literary versions of disguise, it is necessary to attempt to unpack the effects and determinations of these presuppositions on social thought about personality and identity. How might such implicit notions construct a rhetoric that can portray for English Renaissance culture an 'increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process?'44 By examining, first, the notion of the sign that underlies this rhetoric, and then the ethopoetic heritage that the period takes and develops from the classical tradition, we can begin to perceive a conceptual and historical framework of the processes and effects of self-representation. It may then be possible to turn to various political, religious, and moral tracts, rhetorical treatises, and poetic and dramatic works in order to investigate not the forms but the dialogic functions that selfhood played in Renaissance thought. I emphasize the phrase 'dialogic functions' since the subtext to this study is that the subject of self-fashioning, the figure in disguise, is not entirely 'the ideological product of the relations of power.'45 Confronting these determining relations are acts of resistance, and in different texts and contexts disguise may be used to represent both processes. Through the dialogism of disguise it is, then, possible to take up the invitation offered at the end of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning to rethink the process of hegemonic subjection. The autobiographical allusion of those final pages foregrounds an ambiguous desire both to accept and to defer the 'overwhelming need to sustain the illusion that I am the principal maker of my own identity,' as the last sentence has it. What sounds in the epilogue is a nostalgia for the self that is darkened by the awareness of its own ideological production and thus seeks to restrain the irresistible attraction to an imaginary ethopoetic goal. It remains unclear whether even this equivocal caution is not a last conceptual grasp for self-presence, a reaction-formation to a growing belief in a wholly determined selfhood: 'the human subject began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society.' 17

Guise and Disguise As Karen Newman has recently commented on the reading of Othello in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, it is in the very perception of the ideologically circumscribed self that the critic envoices the desire for 'an ontological subjectivity.'46 May not dialogic disguise enable both the 'relations of power' and their alluring antithesis, the transcendent 'maker' or auto-ethopoet to be questioned? Through the differential structure of its endless unveilings, disguise would preclude a tragic nostalgia for a lost selfhood by revealing the omni-absence of 'a "human nature" that,' as the philosopher Hans Blumenberg puts it, 'has never been "nature" and never will be ... [that] makes its appearance in metaphorical disguise.'47 This non-existent nature or self-fashioned absence — with its realization that selfhood is always dressed in yet another 'invisibell' robe - may be the ethopoetic alternative that the epilogue of Renaissance Self-Fashioning, though unable to utter it, would ask for. To which the figure of, or in, disguise replies, 'I speak therefore I am not.'

18

Chapter One

The Rhetoric of Characterization

Action is eloquence. Cariolanus III.ii.76

As soon as we say 'character,' or personnage, we are in the theater, but a theater that offers no exit, that takes in everything, that substitutes itself for a nonrepresentational reality. Helene Cixous 'The Character of "Character"'

The shifts in traditional notions of signification that take place through the sixteenth century provide an important context for the recurring figures of disguise and dissimulation in Renaissance texts. In addition, these changes are one of the key indices of the period's relationships to previous and subsequent eras. Lauro Marlines has noted that a post-structural conception of historical writing considers that 'historians normally turn historical events into signs, whereupon all written history becomes an account of the history of change in systems of signs.'1 In this view, disguise would be a revealing signifier for interpretations of the period. Its various and pervasive social functions compress a semiotic shift that may contrast and relate Renaissance discourse to that of other eras. Through the 'change in systems of signs' represented by disguise and related notions, many cultural and ideological aspects central to the period can be conceptualized and investigated.

I In The Order of Things Michel Foucault locates the social and historical

19

Guise and Disguise principles of the world picture described by Lovejoy and Tillyard within a system of signification that was premised on the similitude between res and verba. While allowing for the post-Babel separation of sign and object, this resemblance does not grant the sign a discursive otherness to the object: 'the signification of signs did not exist, because it was reabsorbed into the sovereignty of the Like.'2 Signs present the world. Foucault argues that by the seventeenth century diis traditional understanding had given way to one of signified representation: 'signs were then part of things themselves, whereas in the seventeenth century they become models of representation.'3 This process of change from medieval and Renaissance presentation to neoclassical representation forms the background against which disguise and its related terms feature. Indeed, the trope is used to inscribe and contemplate the implications of such shifting semiotic and discursive ideas. The effects of these changes extend in various social directions and into different genres and media. John Ruskin, for instance, emphasized that the significance of the Renaissance stones of Venice lay in such features as the 'confessed incrustation' that covered the Godiic and Byzantine structure of St Mark's - the cathedral as palimpsest.4 The broader implications of this sort of textual layering have recently been considered by Jean Baudrillard, who claims that a historical, semiotic shift is epitomized by the period's innovative use of stucco as a sort of architectural disguise. The plaster that is added to the basic structure is not an inert layer; rather it 'imitates everything ... and is prestigious theatrically because [it] is itself a representative substance, a mirror of all the others.'5 After the rigid semiotic hierarchies of the Middle Ages, an era of 'the obliged sign,' stucco marks 'the era of the counterfeit (the time of the double and the mirror, of theatre and the games of mask and appearance).'6 These textual layers, building upon and nearly effacing the older structure, become one means through which the Renaissance was able to work out and denote for itself its relationships to and differences from earlier periods, in order to promulgate myths of its civilizing progress.7 Foucault goes on to relate the change in signification to the structure of the human sciences in the ensuing neoclassical era, in disciplines that presupposed the truth of signified representation in terms of its 'transparency and neutrality.'8 The split between sign and object does not, however, only produce a naturalized accuracy. Rather, as Baudrillard suggests, it realizes an opposition between two types of representation: 'It is in the Renaissance that the false is born along 20

The Rhetoric of Characterization with the natural.'9 The development of representational models of meaning and of notions of layered textuality opens up the possibility of misrepresentation. It is within this dialectic that disguise assumes its semiotic import. Many of these notions are raised in regard to language in sixteenthcentury handbooks on rhetoric and poetics. Central topics for these texts include the dissociation of language from a natural, immediate base and, consequently, its representational function. In his lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric, John Rainolds construes rhetoric as a system that has no specific content or reference: 'rhetoric can aptly and ornately handle any material whatsoever; it has, in fact, no subject matter particular and proper to itself.'10 The separation from the materiality of content and meaning frames rhetoric in formal terms. Rhetorical language is viewed as a means not of making things immediately present but of 'handling' or re-forming material. The process occurs because rhetoric is not 'proper to itself - it neither refers to its own essence nor is naturally present in itself but is representational. A language not 'proper to itself is the linguistic version of the shift to representation and the counterfeit outlined above. Moreover, through implications of the 'proper' that will be discussed below, such language has a particular bearing on conceptions of character and characterization. The handbooks also consider the development of representation in terms of the relationship between ordinary and figurative language. This relationship is conceived in a number of ways. First, figurative language is considered as an exception to common usage, one that overtly displays its representational function: 'A Figure is a certaine kinde, either of sentence, Oration, or worde, vsed after some new or straunge wise, much vnlike to that which men commonly vse to speake,' asserts Thomas Wilson.11 In The Arte of English Poesie George Puttenham writes: 'As figures be the instruments of ornament in euery language, so they be also in a sort abuses or rather trespasses in speech, because they pass the ordinary limits of common vtterance.'12 Here, figurative language reinforces the limits of common speech even as it markedly surpasses them. This ambiguous effect of the figural underlies myths of its constructive cultural function. These myths suggest a second conception of figurative language that denies its deviant effects. Many authors - including Wilson, Puttenham, and Sir Philip Sidney - describe eloquence as instrumental in the founding of civilization. In this case, figurative language is the exception that proves (the) rule. Its persuasiveness enables social integration to occur and to be imposed, despite personal opposition and antipathies: 'such 21

Guise and Disguise force hath the tongue, and such is the power of Eloquence and reason, that most men are forced, euen to yeeld in that which most standeth against their will.'13 Figurative language exemplifies a myth that discourse is the basis of the epochal transition from nature to society. These tales of language and society form a meta-rhetorical allegory of the transformation of the natural into the cultural - eloquence is both a figure for the transformation and the means through which it occurs. Sidney's Defence of Poesie presents one version of this allegory. It celebrates language's power to refashion a natural realm that circumscribes the human and non-human. The poet, 'lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into an other nature.' Poetry creates an alternative world through a mimeticism that changes, by improving, what it reflects: 'Poesie ... is an Art of Imitation ... a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth.'14 For Sidney, poetry is not concerned with merely accurate signification, which is left for historical and philosophical works. In contrast to Rainolds' notion of a purely formal rhetoric, Sidney also sees that language can intervene in the content, generate new material, and convince people to accept it. Poetic representation is not a transparent mimetic process. At the same time poesie is not anti-nature; rather, it 'figures forth' the potential perfection of the natural. This notion of poetic mimesis reinstates the natural tenor that it might seem to displace. Sidney theorizes an ideal cultural poetic that fulfils natural process. In so doing, he also aims to synthesize presentational and representational rhetoric, in order to preclude the traditional Platonic charge of unnatural presentation that was levelled at poesie: 'Now for the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.'15 Other writers specify that the rhetorical key to naturalized representation is the trope. Less preoccupied than Sidney with Platonism's rhetorical ethics, they explore the trope's counterfeiting function. The conceptual focus begins to shift away from language as a naturalized process and towards its representational effects. The theoretical weight falls less on an opposition between truthful and false presentation than on the representation-misrepresentation dialectic. Thus in The Arcadian Rhetoric, Abraham Fraunce observes that 'Brauerie of speach consisteth in Tropes, or turnings; and in Figures or fashionings. A Trope or turning is when a word is turned from his naturall signification, to some other, so conuenientlie, as that it seeme rather willinglie ledd, than driuen by force to that other signification.'16 This explanation suggests that speech works through a dialogical 'naturall signification' 22

The Rhetoric of Characterization that always implies 'some' conceptual 'other.' The word's artificial meaning is realized 'conuenientiie' and 'willinglie,' and this lack of semantic pressure suggests an initially multiple signification rather than an unequivocal, natural tenor. At times Rainolds' lectures show a similar awareness of ambiguity in natural signs: 'when one thing can be understood rightly for a second, and can be put in place of the second, we think it has the same force and possesses a similar nature.'17 The process of figural substitution involved here implies that nature, rather than determining the substitution, is itself judged through the effects of the representation. Fraunce's dialogic conception of language and 'naturall signification' is widely shared, by both proponents of plain style like Sir John Cheke and cunning rhetoricians like Puttenham. When commending Thomas Hoby on his translation of The Courtier, Cheke applauds that 'our tung [doth] naturallie and praisablie utter her meaning, when she bouroweth no counterfeitness of other tunges to attire her self withall, but useth plainlie her own.'18 Though praising Hoby's English, Cheke acknowledges, as he rejects, the possibility of a less than self-sufficient language. The ambiguity of his own words implies that 'our tung' is not uttered in ideal simplicity but in 'her own' counterfeit attire, which then reproduces an English nature. Puttenham's definition of 'Metaphora,' the primary 'sensable' trope (one that appeals to die understanding rather than the ear), employs a similarly sophisticated notion of nature: 'There is a kinde of wresting of a single word from his own right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinity or convenience with it.'19 Though presumed to be absolute, nature reveals degrees of 'unnaturalness' once related to or represented within discourse. 'Nature' itself becomes an ambiguous trope that may reinforce or interrogate myths of essence and Tightness. Even if its effects seem to be reinforcing, the possibility of a figural supplement to nature that these writers raise suggests a semantic and conceptual lack. Nature becomes and needs its own trope. Though presumed to be originally whole, nature awaits the figure of nature to realize wholeness; it reveals an a priori dependence on its own representation. Polixenes' words to Perdita convey the paradoxical interplay between these essentialist and differential notions of nature: 'This is an art / Which does mend Nature - change it rather; but / The art itself is Nature.'20 As Derek Attridge has said of the tropic function of nature in texts of the period, 'it stands both for that which is itself, in total self-sufficiency, and that which is necessarily incomplete and in need of repair.'21 23

Guise and Disguise Through these discussions of natural and artificial rhetorics, which finally imply their interrelation rather than opposition, a discursive conception of selfhood is also being inscribed. The personified tongues and words, 'her meaning,' 'his signification,' suggest that ideas of characterization are involved in these semantic and stylistic issues. In an essentialist view, the trope of nature may connote 'selfsufficiency, wholeness, and plenitude: that which is without self-division or self-consciousness, and without dependence on anything exterior to itself.'22 Yet most of the references surveyed above seem far from unequivocal. Even Sidney's idealist version of a poesie that perfects nature begins with the refashioning of the poet's ethos 'into an other nature.' These theorizations of nature and trope replay the classical etymology of the 'proper' - from proprius, 'one's own' - that was used to register an ideal fusion of selfhood and discourse, identity and meaning. Quintilian's remarks on the proper exemplify this ethopoetic reference: 'Words are proper [propria] when they bear their own meaning; metaphorical, when they are used in a sense different from their natural meaning.'23 Implicit in this notion of original and natural meaning is a prediscursive, essentialist ethos, existing prior to and in control of meanings that are always its own. For Quintilian, metaphorical meaning serves only to reinforce the structure of properness by its overt deviation from it. In this way, the classical rhetorical tradition complements a philosophical essentialism that would also circumscribe the operations of metaphor. And, as Derrida's comments on the effect of the philosophically proper intimate, in both rhetoric and philosophy what is at stake is the valorization of a unitary selfhood and identity: within the horizon of, the circular reappropriation of literal, proper meaning ... the philosophical evaluation of metaphor always has been ambiguous: metaphor is dangerous and foreign as concerns intuition (vision or contact), concept (the grasping or proper presence of the signified), and consciousness (proximity or self-presence); but it is in complicity with what it endangers, it is necessary to it in the extent to which the de-tour is a re-turn guided by the function of resemblance ... under the law of the same.24

The turns and tropes of metaphor threaten the metaphysical, corporeal, and pre-verbal presence of the essentialist ethos. Wilson's definition of a trope rehearses this stylistic, semantic, and personal complex and signifies its wide acceptance as a basic discursive 24

The Rhetoric of Characterization principle during the sixteenth century: 'A trope is an alteration of a worde or sentence, from the proper signification, to that which is not proper.'25 This type of connection between selfhood and discourse appears frequently in other Renaissance texts. The connection does not simply operate 'figuratively' but implies the continuing conceptual effect of die proper, as selfhood's natural state or its ideological goal. Moreover, it works in this way for both traditionally essentialist and sceptical contemporary viewpoints. In The Courtier, for example, Count Canosse emphasizes the need for maintaining an original unity between style and meaning by using conventional Christian images of the self: 'to divide the sentences from the words, is the deviding of the soule from die bodie, which can not bee done, neither in the one nor in the other, without destruction ensue upon it.'26 In discursive and philosophical contrast, Montaigne observes a series of analogies between his essays and ethos, in which the indeterminable sense of the text reflects the impossibility of self-knowledge: 'There are a thousand indiscreet and causall agitations in me ... Even in my writings, I shall not at all times finde the tracke, or ayre of my first imaginations; I wot not my selfe what I would have said, and shall vexe and fret my selfe in correcting and giving a new sense to them.'27 In both cases, a prior image of discursive selfhood as either unified or discontinuous motivates the stylistic and hermeneutic judgments. The possibilities of impropriety that Wilson, Canosse, and Montaigne consider antithetically reflect a traditional construction of language wherein a self, present in and for itself, is the premise of proper, natural speech. Through the terms of a representational rhetoric that develops during the sixteenth century, this originating ethos and its belated, dependent speech are re-examined. One is not conceived separately from the other, and the process of representation may undermine the notion of absolute, personal origin. In Fraunce's definition of Prosopoia - 'a fayning of any person, when in our speach we represent the person of anie, and make it speake as though he were there present' - any personal presence, that of another or of oneself, is reliant upon 'fayning' representation.28 Puttenham, by ascribing a widespread dissimulation to speech, intimates that motives of selfhood thoroughly pervade language: 'To be short euery speech wrested from his own natural signification to another not altogether so natural is a kind of dissimulation, because the words bear contrary countenance to th' intent.'29 'Contrary countenance' assumes a crucial discursive role. Dissimulation allows both the 'natural' and counterfeit 'signification' to be read; the 'contrary countenance' simulta-

25

Guise and Disguise neously conceals and reveals a supposedly natural one. Beneath this surface play of semantic identities lies a motive that may never be fully articulated except through its 'contrary,' an 'intent' that contradicts itself, a meaning in disguise. The representational semiotics introduced in late-sixteenth-century rhetorics and poetics reveals a dialogic complex of personified language and rhetorical selfhood. Neither refers unequivocally to an original identity or meaning through which discourse could be ordered. Instead, language and selfhood become paradoxical functions of each other. The prominence of a representational rhetoric of characterization both continues and alters certain ideas of classical rhetoric. As noted above, Wilson's view of 'proper signification' is traditional; however, the subsequent work of Fraunce and Puttenham on counterfeit representation questions the grounding of signification in an authentic selfhood. The theorizing of representation in terms of nature, figurative language, and the trope thus sets up a semiotic network through which disguise starts to function as a motif for a linguistically complex selfhood. The revision of the 'proper' extends to the tradition of an essentialist ethos that, through the influence of Platonism, had determined an enduring rhetoric and metaphysics of character. In reaccentuating the ethopoetic figure of the proper at the intersection of language and selfhood, Renaissance discourse both revises sophistical conceptions of character, which the dominant rhetorical and philosophical traditions had sought to suppress, and reveals the function of these conceptions across an extensive range of cultural arenas and activities.30 II

One of the notable points in John Rainolds' rhetorical curriculum is the restricted role that is given to the emotions. Rainolds maintains that Aristotle's Rhetoric 'demonstrates that arguments are the chief supports of oratory, and that emotions are their ornaments; arguments are like the very body of oratory, and emotions are like an accessory.'31 He portrays a rhetorical body whose corporality is in effect de-physicalized by being made logical rather than emotive. It is an ideal corpus, marked by an abstract steadiness that the emotions, the 'disorders and diseases of the soul,' would undermine (135). The opposition between argument and emotion suggests a philosophy of character full of social implication: 'let us avoid thinking that the emotions can be safely aroused in a well-governed state. They are the 26

The Rhetoric of Characterization handmaidens of injustice and the subverters of states' (131). The emotionless body, now the patriarchal body politic, circumscribes individual and state. As in a Platonic republic, only certain 'virtuous' feelings and behaviour are allowed: 'Thus we are goaded on by the emotions, as if by spurs, to perform all honourable things. The faults which are censured we loathe, the virtues which are praised we love' (141). Guaranteed by passive verbs, the anonymity of censurer and praiser, whose pronouncements 'we' echo, intimates an ethopoetic hegemony. This slippage between rhetorical and social bodies reappears through many political and religious texts of the period to characterize the individual in terms of cultural orthodoxies. Richard Hooker, for example, construes the law as a process of physical socialization: 'A law is die deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge yourselves to be any part, then is the law even your deed also.'32 Against this conformist, legal speech-act he contrasts puritan discourse, which works persuasively to upset the personal and political corpus through 'inuring your ears with reproof of faults especially in your governors; an use to attribute those faults to the kind of spiritual regiment under which ye live.'33 Emotive, rhetorical speech may generate an individualized response of political disobedience.34 In the Basilicon Doron, King James similarly attacks puritans for their 'contempt of the ciuill Magistrate ... in leaning to their owne dreames and reuelations.'35 Their 'owne' ideas assert a selfhood extrinsic to the body politic. James warns Prince Henry against rhetorically induced, self-oriented deviation from accepted, stable patterns of understanding: 'beware ye wreast not the word to your own appetite, as ouer many doe, making it like a Bell to sound as ye please to interpreted36 The circumscription of meaning entails proper socialization. The personal embodiment of oratory apparent in such orthodox political thought is founded upon a construction of rhetorical character that can be traced beyond Aristotle to the Platonic dialogues. The importance that Rainolds attributes to argument recalls the privileging of truth and reason over emotive persuasion that is maintained in the dialogues and characterized in the figure of Socrates. Plato's mentor exemplifies both a prediscursive selfhood, 'an embodiment of essence' who Verifies the central self,'37 and a selfless discourse with no political motive or emotion - 'you must be careful not to let me deceive you ... disregard the manner of my speech,' Socrates warns his judges.38 Through this reciprocal relation between selfhood and discourse, the figure of Socrates relates Platonism to a process of characterization

27

Guise and Disguise that is constructed in and prefers the terms of presentational rhetoric. The philosophical opposition between essentialism and non-essentialism is related to a binary form of character as self and non-self, Socrates and the sophist. In Plato's strictures against sophism an 'antirhetoric' of characterization is valorized.39 The Socratic character and its dualistic distinctions represent a significant break with both the earlier thinking of the pre-Socratics and contemporary sophistic theories.40 Nonetheless, the rupture was periodically challenged through classical times. In book three of De Oratore, Cicero's spokesman Crassus attacks Socrates for separating 'the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together ... This is the source from which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain.'41 This Socratic anatomy, which will determine the rejection of the emotive body in Rainolds' rhetoric and in the Cartesian cogito, marks the emergence of a specific conception of selfhood. It signifies a translation of ethopoesis into the 'ideology ... of an "I" who is a whole subject,'42 and whose wholeness is prediscursive. 'Socrates' exists prior to any representation and is thereby held to realize an essential truth of character. He figures an ethopoetic ideal that both opposes sophistic tactics of contingency and determines the forms of characterization that will be privileged in discursive theory leading to and beyond the Renaissance. This essentialism influences the central ideas of character across theoretical, social, and literary texts. Its effects run from dominant dicta purely on character construction, such as the words of Horace in the Ars Poetica, 'if you boldly fashion a fresh character, have it kept to the end even as it came forth at the first, and have it self-consistent,'43 through to what Foucault sees as a 'will to knowledge,' which, having emerged in the Platonic separation between true and false discourse, still continues 'to exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse.'44 At the same time, and as various readers of Plato have noted, the privileged Socratic character frequently displays a non-essentialist persona. The ideal ethos represents a selfhood whose distinguishing mark is a sophist-like disguise. Again Cicero was one of the early commentators to discern this paradox: 'what impressed me most deeply about Plato in that book [ Gorgias] was, that it was when making fun of orators that he himself seemed to me to be the consummate orator.'45 In his study of irony, Kierkegaard held that Socrates personified ironic dissemblance; his rivalry with the sophists arose not 28

The Rhetoric of Characterization through antithesis but because they 'stood for the same position ... Socrates overcame the Sophists in a certain sense precisely because he himself was the greatest of the Sophists.'46 Rather than being in unequivocal opposition to sophism, Platonism is dialogically entwined with it and often, as G.B. Kerferd has argued, takes its starting points from sophistic theories.47 On the one hand, then, Platonism establishes paradigms of authenticity for characterization. These, in turn, influence the types of character and the ways character can be presented, by constructing a figure that, even in its falseness, must be accurately and truthfully portrayed. The dialogues set up the dominant tropes of ethopoesis. For example, Isocrates' Antidosis, even though it is a rival's response to Socrates' Apology, still aims to 'show ... the truth about my character ... to compose a discourse which would be, as it were, a true image of my thought and of my whole life.'48 Isocrates' 'true image' presupposes both the accuracy of its presentation and the ethical validity of the life it portrays. The rhetorical means of characterization and the moral qualities of character are interwoven through true discourse. Indeed, elsewhere Isocrates claims that the primary value of practising and studying authentic oratory as opposed to sophistry is ethical self-improvement: 'those who desire to follow the true precepts of this discipline may, if they will, be helped more speedily towards honesty of character than towards facility in oratory.'49 Subsequently, rhetoric becomes even more firmly tied to moral values; Quintilian presents oratory as the key to the social education of the 'good man,'50 and this tradition is maintained through the Middle Ages, when rhetoric serves as 'the integrating factor of all education,' and then in the Elizabethan grammar school.51 As a corollary to this ethically positive rhetoric of character, Platonism also represents the ethopoetic attributes of falseness and immorality in the figure of the sophist. This character is depicted in clear contrast to Socrates in the early works Gorgias and Phaedrus. It is, however, in the later dialogue, simply titled Sophist, that the most significant portrayal of the figure is attempted. Aided by a compliant Theaetetus, Plato's spokesman, the Stranger, works his way through to a definition of sophistry as a type of discursive disguise: The art of contradiction making, descended from an insincere kind of conceited mimicry, of the semblance-making breed, derived from image making, distinguished as a portion, not divine but human, of production, that presents a shadow play of words.'52 The Stranger utters this definition 'with perfect truth' (268d), a presumption whose correctness seems 29

Guise and Disguise guaranteed by the laborious dialectic and definitions presented earlier in the dialogue. This notion of truth is linguistic and personal. The Stranger speaks and exists 'with perfect truth' in opposition to a figure whom he finally calls 'the authentic Sophist,' a sardonic oxymoron according to the earlier definition. The process of argument the Stranger uses to guarantee his 'perfect truth' is one of definition through division: 'let us set to work again and, as we divide the kind proposed in two, keep to the right-hand section at each stage,' he counsels Theaetetus (264d-e). This logic formalizes the ethical dichotomy concerning character; what H.D. Rankin has called the 'binary assumption' of Platonic thought thus reinforces the moral argument by seeking to preclude conceptual interaction.53 The ideal structure of truth and of true character is not only the end of argument but the means of realizing that end. Through this logical approach, the Stranger may subordinate the sophist ethically and reveal his negative 'nature': 'Holding fast to the characters of which the Sophist partakes until we have stripped off all that he has in common with others and left only the nature that is peculiar to him' (2646). This 'peculiar' character must be defined as aberrant through the 'truthful' means of argument used to realize it. Early on in the Sophist, the term 'character' is used to discriminate between the truth and falsity of statements (262e). Shortly thereafter, in regard to two propositions about Theaetetus, the Stranger then says Uiat 'the true one states about you the things that are as they are ... Whereas the false statement states about you things different from the things that are' (263b). Recalling its derivation, the meaning of 'character' in the dialogue alternates between linguistic and personal reference, but the link here seems to be made through an underlying principle of ontological truth: 'what sort of character can we assign to each of these? One is false, the other true' (263b). Character is, then, being used by Plato as neither a solely personal nor an entirely rhetorical idea. In terms of character, the sophist combines these concepts into what may be called a false discursive being: 'We have brought to light the real character of "not-being,"' declares the Stranger (258d). But it is a character that defies truthful presentation: 'by this time the sophist has appeared in so many guises that for my part I am puzzled to see what description one is to maintain as truly expressing his real nature' (232b-c). The sophist exists outside an enlightened discourse. He prevents others from obtaining a clear view of himself by taking 'refuge in the darkness of not-being' (254a), a realm of metaphysical and rhetorical falseness. There he confuses that which the Stranger 30

The Rhetoric of Characterization seeks to order — discursive selfhood: 'the Sophist possesses a sort of reputed and apparent knowledge on all subjects, but not the reality ... by means of words that cheat the ear, exhibiting images of all things in a shadow play of discourse' (233c-234c). 'The shadow play of discourse' both represents the sophist and is used by the sophist to misrepresent himself. It involves a dramatistic process of speech and selfhood that, it will be seen, some later rhetoricians continue to consider and develop in ambivalent terms. Plato, however, constructs an ethopoetic complex in which character is to be conceived in a double form of truth or falseness. This ethical-ontological opposition can be quickly adapted to ideological contexts, as self versus other transforms into 'us versus them.' Integral to this ideological potential, and assisting in its deployment of social and moral power, is the formalization of the binary ethos into the conditions of speech. This process is effected by Aristotle's rigid distinction in the Rhetoric between the characters of speaker and audience. Aristotle conceives of rhetorical character in relation to 'the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word ... The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker [ethos]; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind [pathos].'** With regard to the first, Aristotle continues, 'Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is spoken so as to make us think him credible ... his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses' (i356a). Through the second, 'persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions' (i356a). The speaker is granted verbal control over the characters of his audience and himself. The discursive self can now realize intentionality. Aristotle makes it clear that ethos and pathos are of crucial concern to the orator: the orator must not only try to make the argument of his speech demonstrative and worthy of belief; he must also make his own character look right and put his hearers, who are to decide, into the right frame of mind ... it adds much to an orator's influence that his own character should look right and that he should be thought to entertain the right feelings towards his hearers; and also that his hearers themselves should be in just the right frame of mind. (i37?b)

Dialogue is precluded. The speaker's authority reiterates that of the Socratic figure; however, the ideological implications are concealed, 31

Guise and Disguise less by invoking a moral guise of archetypal goodness than by having the notion of priority fixed in the pragmatic conditions of rhetorical address. An ethics and politics of monologic control are naturalized as the structure of speech. In moving on to other issues, those of elocutio rather than turntaking, Aristotle explains that the effects of ethos and pathos are realized through style, an intentional form that implies the speaker's affective control and pre-discursive presence: 'This aptness of language is one thing that makes people believe in the truth of your story: their minds draw the false conclusion that you are to be trusted ... this way of proving your story by displaying the signs of its genuineness expresses your personal character' (I4o8a). Stylistic decorum may express pre-verbal character: 'Each class of men, each type of disposition, will have its own appropriate way of letting the truth appear ... If, then, a speaker uses the very words which are in keeping with a particular disposition, he will reproduce the corresponding character' (i4o8a). Both kinds of persuasion, through pathos and ethos, rely on a metonymic structure of identification, where style comprises a partial set of signs of a whole character. The referent of these metonymic signs is either a prediscursive presence who controls the subsequent delivery and enactment of speech,55 or a passive audience unable to participate in the formulation of the exchange. To justify the implications of power and control in this model of speech, Aristotle reproduces the binary ethos of the Platonic dialogues: 'Words of ambiguous meaning are chiefly used to enable the sophist to mislead his hearers' (i4O4b). It is only with this phantom sophist, the morally marked speaker, that the ideological strategies of discursive control and misrepresentation are acknowledged, even though the bulk of the Rhetoric is a source book of psychological and verbal ploys with which to render the audience receptive, and it continued to be read as a psychological text throughout the Middle Ages.56 The metaphysical and formalist conceptions of rhetoric that Plato and then Aristotle set up comprise three steps: i) the structuring of character into a series of oppositions based on truth and falsity; 2) the introduction of a hierarchy into the oppositions through which self and truth are ethically and metaphysically valorized; 3) the structuring of this hierarchy into the conditions of speech, based on the speaker's authority and control over the audience. The result is a hierarchy whose logic seems to efface the hegemonic stakes of the discursive model.57 Rhetorical performance, however, reveals that these formalized conceptions of ethos and essence are signs of ideological interac32

The Rhetoric of Characterization tion. Just as the Socratic persona paradoxically defies the antirhetorical views of Platonism while envoicing them, so this rhetorical essentialism questions its own formal, idealized concepts by disclosing their involvement in the motivated processes of characterization. Accordingly, under the heading of delivery, the speaker is continually advised through the handbooks to 'disguise his art,' as Aristotle puts it.58 Within this expedient advice lies a more significant recognition of the splitting of the subject at the moment of speech. It is similarly recommended and silently recognized throughout a text like the Rhetorica ad Herennium. First, one is to begin with the 'subtle approach ... covertly, through dissimulation'; then, throughout a speech, 'good delivery ensures that what the orator says seems to come from his heart'; and in regard to content, 'one must cite examples that are draughted expressly to conform to the pattern of the art. It is afterwards, in speaking, that the orator's skill conceals his art so that it may not obtrude and be apparent to all.'59 Even the moralizing Quintilian commends the cautious dissemblance of oratorical style: 'Above all it is necessary to conceal the care expended upon it so that our rhythms may seem to possess a spontaneous flow, not to have been the result of elaborate search or compulsion.'60 Despite the overtly ethical program of rhetorical instruction and its essentialist premises of the proper, the practice of delivery discloses rhetoric and speech as social drama, the participants involved in verbal conflict and manipulation. 'Orators,' writes Cicero, 'are the players who act real life.'61 The sophist is the critical, conceptual foil that seems to guarantee the presence of an ethos which, removed from the particularities of social and historical interaction, would hover in the realm of the formal, the archetypal, and the universal. It thus becomes a standard ploy for all who would teach the truth of rhetoric to pronounce the antisophistical integrity of their version along with its purely edifying motives. Yet through the praxis of delivery, the sophist is also seen to inhere within the persona of the disinterested rhetorician, even within Socrates himself. As Cicero notes, either Socrates was defeated in argument by Gorgias, 'and Plato's famous dialogue is untrue,' or he 'was more eloquent and fluent and ... a fuller and better orator.'62 Both results challenge the archetype of prediscursive presence. The personae of delivery reveal the hidden characters of a speaker who embodies not a fixed, pre-social identity, but motives and designs that may alter as the audience participates in and affects the rhetorical exchange. The ethopoetic process of character is thus closer to that 33

Guise and Disguise which Aristotle describes in the Poetics than to the essentialist construct implied in the Rhetoric. For in the Poetics there is, so to speak, no one behind the speaker's character, which is seen as the making of choices in the face of 'circumstances where the choice is not obvious' and cannot be predetermined. There is no original, causal self but only that which responds: 'those speeches convey no character in which there is nothing whatever which the speaker chooses or avoids.'63 Character becomes an interactive, dialogic process. This dramatistic view discloses the interpersonal and ideological functions of characterization that underlie the archetypal ethos of rhetorical theory. The dialogues themselves offer numerous instances of character in and as social process. Rather than a 'disinterested pursuit of knowledge' that has made 'the word Platonism synonymous with the word philosophy,^ a more realistic description of how a Socratic dialogue shapes up can be found in Erving Goffman's notion of 'character contests,' which 'allow a contestant to pit his capacity for dissembling intentions and resources against the other's capacity to rile or cajole the secretive into readability.'65 Furthermore, the dialogues are not only the kind of microsocial contest that Goffman examines; their historical context points to the aristocratic class motives that also underlay Platonic opposition to the sophists.66 Indeed, a general rule concerning social discourse would seem to be that whenever someone denounces the rhetoric of another speaker or group the stakes are ideological. Accordingly, when reconsidering John Rainolds' division between emotion and argument within a rhetorical body politic, we can conclude that the ideological implications of presentational rhetoric and philosophy continued to be influential through to the sixteenth century.67 In the later period, dramatism along with sophism becomes the target of idealist and often reactionary viewpoints. The essentialist character is opposed to a dramatistic ethos that comprises social, theatrical personae as well as the rhetorical speaker. Stephen Orgel notes that 'Theater in 1605 was assumed to be a verbal medium. And acting ... was a form of oratory; the Renaissance actor did not merely imitate action, he persuaded the audience through speech and gesture of the meaning of the action.'68 Francis Bacon seems surprised to find himself maintaining that there is a strong connection between 'action' and oratory: 'A strange thing, that that part of an orator which is but superficial, and rather the virtue of a player, should be placed so high [by Demosthenes] above those noble parts of invention, elocution and the rest.'69 The process of delivery continues to un34

The Rhetoric of Characterization dermine the idealist premises of rhetoric, by suggesting the efficacy of the 'superficial' and the split discursive ethos. This dramatistic notion of rhetoric entails a representational conception of character as that which functions on and off the stage, in transactions between different social spaces and groups. In the Renaissance period, it is widely recognized that while claims might be made for rhetoric as an ideal vehicle for truth, it also works as 'a general semiotic of tactics' that aims 'to seduce, captivate, or invert the linguistic position of the addressee.'70 The equivocal process of ethopoetic rhetoric, as the making and unmaking of individual and social character, becomes of prominent concern. Ill

In An Apology for Actors John Heywood stresses that dramatic training supplements a young man's education. The traditional trivium is capped by a lesson in rhetorical performance that will help transform formal knowledge into cultural effect, mak[ing] him a bold sophister, to argue pro et contra, to compose his syllogisms, cathegoricke, or hypotheticke ... [WJithout a comely and elegant gesture, a gratious and bewitching kinde of action, a naturall and familiar motion of the head, the hand, the body, and a moderate and fit countenance sutable to all the rest, I hold all the rest [of oratorical skills] as nothing. A delivery and sweet action is the gloss and beauty of any discourse that belongs to a scholler.71

The scholar's persona comprises a range of verbal and bodily gestures that must be acquired and practised. In spite of Francis Bacon's surprise, Renaissance rhetorics frequently place an emphasis on gesture or 'action' as an important supplement to 'voyce'; gesture works as another overt marker of the conceptual shift from self-presence to selfrepresentation. Abraham Fraunce pays detailed attention to the positioning of the middle finger which can 'point at or shove ... affirme and asseruere ... [and] urgeth.'72 Peter Burke has suggested that generally there was an acute, everyday awareness of the weight of such gestures: members of subcultural groups, such as 'homosexuals ... employed hand signals to identify each other in public.'73 The interchange between formalized rhetorical and dramatic codes of gesture and a general semiotics of social behaviour suggests that the stakes of self-performance were recognized and wagered at all cultural levels. 35

Guise and Disguise This kind of awareness of identity as dramatistic and rhetorical is also implied by John Webster's definition of the 'excellent actor,' for whom 'Whatsoever is commendable in the grave Orator, is most exquisitely perfect in him,' and by Richard Flecknoe's eulogy of Burbage, written in 1664: 'He had all the parts of an excellent Orator (animating his words with speaking, and Speech with Action) his Auditors being never more delighted then when he spoke, nor more sorry then when he held his peace.' The possible difficulties in making transitions between one's different personae were also recognized, as the remarks of Edmund Gayton observe: 'I have knowne my selfe, a Tyrant coming from the Scene, not able to reduce himselfe into the knowledge of himselfe till Sack made him (which was his present Physick) forget he was an Emperour, and renew'd all his old acquaintance to him.'74 Psychological as well as interpersonal processes were commonly conceptualized in such dramatistic and rhetorical terms. Even the passions could be so considered. Thomas Wright underlines that they both operate semiotically - 'it cannot be doubted of but that the passions of our minds work divers effects in our faces'75 — and are structured like a language: 'For that we cannot enter into a man's heart and view the passions or inclinations which there reside and lie hidden ... even so we must trace out passions and inclinations by some effects and external operations. And those be no more than two: words and deeds, speech and action ... for in words as in a glass may be seen a man's life and inclination ... whereupon grew that old proverb ... Loquere ut te videam, "Speak, that I may know thee"' (165-6). Initially, Wright proposes that the passions are the original cause of facial and verbal expressions and are signified by them. Yet there is also an assumption of iconicity, of resemblance between the passions and discourse, that seems to disrupt the causal hierarchy. And in the case of persuading others, that is, in rhetoric, this iconicity is itself generated discursively. Before being signified externally, the passions must be inscribed within: 'Cicero expressly teacheth that it is almost impossible for an orator to stir up a passion in his auditors except he be first affected with the same passion himself ... If I must be moved by thy persuasions, first thou must show me by passion thy persuaded thyself ... if we intend to imprint a passion in another it is requisite first it be stamped in our hearts' (211-12). The rhetorical speaker moves his audience through passion, but that passion is already internally imprinted and stamped by the speaker's self-persuading, as Cicero indeed describes: 'the very quality of the diction, employed to stir the feelings of others, stirs the speaker himself even more deeply 36

The Rhetoric of Characterization than any of his hearers.'76 Montaigne suggests a similar process, where 'what we speake, we must first speake it unto our selves, and before we utter and send the same forth to strangers, we make it inwardly to sound unto our eares.'77 The reflexivity of this 'method oratory' precludes the passions' separation from or priority to the rhetorical process of character. In contrast to some recent interpretations that would construe Renaissance theories of the passions causally, either as physiological effects of the humours or as moral deflections from a transcendental identity,78 Wright's view situates the passions within a non-essentialist schema of character, a sophistic 'ethos of rhetorical self-fashioning,'79 which defers an originally prediscursive selfhood. Such a schema deviates significantly from that emphasized in the traditional program of Tudor education as exemplified by Rainolds' lectures, and suggests that, as with all curricula, the ideological values and implications of the program were also contested. Nonetheless, it is this curriculum's rhetoric of self-presence that has been consistently regarded by critics as the pedagogical base for sixteenth-century authors, audiences, and readers, and any interrogations of its essentialism have tended to be ignored.80 Such critical accounts construct a direct causal and pedagogical chain that leads from the classroom to the meanings of literary texts, with characterization seen as the product of various rhetorical techniques that were practised in the schools - controversial, 'antilogistic dialectic,' and in utramque partem.Sl In each case, this chain begins with the formal isolation of personality in prediscursive presence. By adopting this perspective, such accounts remain within the ideology of presentational rhetoric. Airman's The Tudor Play of Mind is the most recent instance. At various levels throughout this extensive study, a consciousness immediately present in and for itself is imputed. Initially, it is the audience of the plays that is depicted in these terms: 'the plays functioned as media of intellectual and emotional exploration for minds that were accustomed to examine the many sides of a given theme.' These minds remain above dramatic discourse and conflict, having been 'produced' by the Tudor grammar-school. This model of already-constituted consciousness is then transferred to the structure of the plays, which work by 'supposing certain persons, in a certain place, at a certain time, under certain circumstances, to be confronting a general question in their own terms.' These predetermined characters mirror the predetermined audience. They engage in a restricted type of dramatic dialogue, envoicing already extant 'posi37

Guise and Disguise tions' and 'opinions': 'The dialogue represents what we might call the primary stage in the hypothesization of a question. Its antithetical positions are represented by specific persons ... whose function is to put forth varying opinions in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the matter at hand.' The characters themselves are constructed in restricted terms, 'simply fictional hypotheses that function as the author's instruments of inquiry.'82 This functioning is ultimately taken to signify the presence of a controlling 'author,' a figure recently rumoured to be dead, and who may not have been conceptually born till late in the seventeenth century.83 The effect of this kind of interpretation of rhetoric and drama is, in the first place, to restrict the cultural range and sources of the plays' meanings. In class terms, the themes would be constrained to those topoi generated for and by the restricted social group of grammarschool pupils. In discursive terms, the dialogism of the plays would be strictly curtailed, and they would exemplify the contrast Bakhtin makes between 'dramatic dialogue' and dialogic discourse: 'dramatic dialogue ... is not a clash of two ultimate semantic authorities, but rather an objectified (plotted) clash of two represented positions, subordinated wholly to the higher, ultimate authority of the author.'84 This leads to the second consequence of the critical reliance on presentational rhetoric. Such a conception isolates a transcendental ethos prior to speech. This essentialist move is precisely that which ethopoetic disguise interrogates. Critical accounts like the above are not, then, simply trying to present a picture of the influence of Renaissance rhetoric; rather, they represent only one part of, and hence buy into, an enduring ideological contest over the cultural values and functions of selfhood in rhetorical and dramatistic discourse. The point is that character and disguise, rhetoric and drama, inevitably assume diverse and often conflicting values within religious, political, and ethical discourses throughout the English Renaissance. With their conceptual contradictions, as well as the freight of ambiguity from their use in classical times, these terms take on central roles in many different ideological and social disputes. Marlowe's The Jew of Malta offers a sharp instance: "tis the Hebrew's guise / That maidens new betrothed should weep a while.'85 'Guise' here both denotes a social custom and glances suspiciously at ulterior designs.86 A background of cultural and religious division is connoted, in which one group's behaviour is disparaged by others. Guise and disguise make up a concentrated motif, which both reflects the period's general view of 'the histrionic quality of ,'87 and suggests specific social strategies 38

The Rhetoric of Characterization and purposes that may underlie acts of characterization. Baudrillard emphasizes that Renaissance 'simulacra are not only a game played with signs; they imply social rapports and social power.'88 In the cultural debate over essentialist, rhetorical, and dramatistic character, the ideological values of disguise and selfhood - through which political, social, and sexual relations get played out - are negotiated and defined. IV

Oppositions between Platonism and sophism resurface through Renaissance texts in the differences among and within humanist, sceptical, and pragmatic conceptions of selfhood. These perspectives, each often containing a number of quite varied viewpoints, employ the images of guise and disguise but with contrasting attitudes towards their ethopoetic and dramatistic implications. Disguise is used to speculate on the relations between selfhood and discourse, on the workings of discourse in itself, and on the social context and stakes of many works. Furthermore, through foregrounding notions of motive, guise and disguise disclose ideological functions and purposes that are frequently hidden by the idealism that may resound in the metatheatrical motif. Anticipating Sidney's celebration of poetic counterfeiting, a text like Juan Luis Vives' 'Fable about Man' rejoices in mutability and selffashioning. As Sidney will synthesize poesie with the natural order to realize perfection, so Vives fuses dramatism with human nature to envisage the latter's quintessence: 'Verily, man, peering oft through the mask which hides him, almost ready to burst forth and revealing himself distinctly in many things, is divine and Jupiter-like, participating in the immortality of Jupiter himself.'89 Pietro Pomponazzi's 'Immortality of the Soul' adopts a related viewpoint, holding that human powers of imitation incarnate a universal principle of nature: 'there is nothing in the world which because of some property cannot agree with man himself; wherefore man is not undeservedly called a microcosm, or little world. Therefore some have said that man is a great marvel, since he is the whole world and can change into every nature, since to him is given the power to follow whatever property of things he may prefer.'90 In the nineteenth century, Jacob Burckhardt will characterize this idealism in the critically influential figure of I'uomo universale, whose 'conscious object,' he infers, was 'the harmonious development of ... spiritual and material existence,' and who was energized by the 'impulse to the highest individual development.'91 39

Guise and Disguise The imaginative and critical potency of this figure would seem to derive from its fusion of personal ethopoesis with a trajectory of cultural progress. These notions of dramatistic mutability are determined by visions of personal synthesis and transcendent unity that recall a Platonic metaphysics and rhetoric of self-presence. Pomponazzi exemplifies diis underlying essentialism, for as Cassirer remarks elsewhere, in his philosophical system such unity assumes the proportions of a universal myth in which life 'means nothing but existence in an individual form and in a completely individual configuration ... the basic experience of individual life has also become the key to the whole of nature.'92 Goffman's account of the paradox of 'character' illuminates how the continental humanists could imagine an ideal synthesis of character and essence in the dramatistic terms often used to question such presence: 'On the one hand, it [character] refers to what is essential and unchanging about the individual - what is characteristic of him. On the other, it refers to attributes that can be generated and destroyed during fateful moments ... Thus a paradox. Character is both unchanging and changeable.'93 The humanist image of dramatistic man seems to invoke this paradox but in fact resolves it, by reinscribing the dramatic and changeable as man's unchanging quality. In an apparent contrast, that seems to denote a historical shift in sign systems, at the beginning of the neoclassical period, Descartes bases his persona on the cessation of mutable selfhood. A static, formalized ethos - 'my design was singly to find the ground of assurance' - and an isolation of consciousness are afforded through a withdrawal from a dramatistic space of action to a metaphysical space of being and seeing, with Descartes 'desirous of being a spectator rather than an actor in the plays exhibited on the theatre of the world.'94 Yet this antitheatrical watershed was in effect foreseen by Vives as the telos of humanity. In his fable, the gods, astonished at man's mutability, beg Juno to make him a god, 'a spectator rather than an actor ... When the gods saw man and embraced their brother, they deemed it unworthy of him to appear on stage and practice the disreputable art of the theater.'95 This goal suggests the continuing essentialist underpinnings of Italian humanism and the Cartesian subject.96 Sceptical perspectives of writers like Erasmus, Montaigne, and, later, La Rochefoucauld interrogate this essentialist ethos through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Erasmus' The Praise of Folly, written early in this period, immediately rejects any simple control of ethopoesis by opening with Folly's self-negating portrait: 'Who can 40

The Rhetoric of Characterization better describe me than myself? Unless by chance someone knows me better than I do myself.'97 Folly has no existence independent of her embodiment in others. Her attempt at self-portrayal thus implies the illusion of others' efforts; for while thinking that they present themselves accurately they are depicting (their own) folly. Folly becomes a deceptive premise of self-awareness; she both affords and precludes the possibility of self-presence: 'I do not belie the interior of my heart by my outward appearance. I am always myself and they who take for themselves the title and bearing of wise men are unable to disguise me even though they walk about like apes in purple robes or asses in lion skins' (102-3). In later announcing the theatricum mundi dieme, Folly represents human existence as histrionic without criticizing or lamenting the loss of an original authenticity: 'For what else is die life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform ... Everything is done under pretence, but this play could not be performed in any other way' (119). In this way, Erasmus' text avoids a nostalgia for lost essence that often motivates satirical and tragic depictions of selfhood's ignorance and mortality during the sixteenth century.98 Montaigne struggles to realize this kind of equanimity as he ponders the loss of an ideal ethos. His essays move from rejecting mutable selfhood, for the sake of an essential innerness, to sceptically seeing mutability threaten any self-conception. In 'Of Repenting' he spurns histrionic pretence: 'Every one may play the jugler, and represent an honest man upon the stage; but within, and in bosome, where all things are lawfull, where all is concealed; to keepe a due rule or formall decorum, that's the point.'99 This impulse towards innerness is also expressed in the prefatory 'To the Reader,' which would justify the author's rejection of worldly trappings: 'Had my intention beene to forestal and purchase the worlds opinion and favour, I would surely have adorned my selfe more quaintly, or kept a more grave and solemne march. I desire therein to be delineated in mine owne genuine, simple and ordinarie fashion, without contention, art or study; for it is my selfe that I pourtray' (1:15). Yet while Montaigne conceives of this interiority, he finds it difficult to depict: 'What hereafter I shall be, will be but halfe a being, I shall be no more my selfe. I daily escape, and still steale my selfe from my selfe' (11:367); 'I cannot settle my object; it goeth so unquietly and staggering, with a naturall drunkennesse. I take it in this plight, as it is at th' instant I ammuse my selfe about it. I describe not the essence, but the passage' (111:23). He considers that the attempt at introspection divorces him from himself: 'If one were, he should either be in another or in himselfe: if he be 41

Guise and Disguise in another, then are they two: if he be in himselfe, they are also two, the comprizing and the comprized'(11:233). And by pressuring 'To the Reader,' we note that the 'selfe' it portrays remains in an 'ordinarie fashion' that cannot be unequivocally 'naturall.' As Montaigne significantly jokes, 'my naturall forme discerned, so farre-forth as publike reverence hath permitted me' (1:15); he inevitably appears in a social guise. The self-portrait with which La Rochefoucauld opens his Maxims invites similar interpretive pressure. In it, he seems to question the discursive, cognitive, and physical means through which selfhood can be recognized. His confessed melancholy leaves him 'with scarcely any conscious knowledge of what I am saying,' unable even to control his facial expressions, T think that when I have corrected myself within I shall still keep unfortunate signs without.' While he may be conscious of this lack of control, objective awareness becomes uncertain when he tries to describe the shape of his face: 'mine is either square or oval, but which of the two it would be very hard to say.'100 This foreclosure from self-recognition rehearses a visual trope of ethopoetic alienation that recurs throughout Renaissance texts and picks up Plato's image of sophistical darkness. It suggests a conflictual interplay between essence and guise that is triggered and often figured by images of the 'mirror stage.' Thomas Wright speculates on the impossibility of self-knowledge in just such terms: 'we see other men's defects directly and our own by a certain reflection - for as no man knoweth exactly his own face because he never see it but by reflection from a glass ... even so by a certain circle we wind about ourselves.'101 The acceptance of visual self-recognition may conceal a lasting self-ignorance. The ambivalence that emerges in Montaigne's and La Rochefoucauld's writings oscillates between nostalgia for and rejection of an ideal ethos. This conflict is circumvented at the end of The Praise of Folly, when Folly's ironic costumes and personae make way for a selfhood whose spiritual passage beyond individuality is celebrated. Erasmus develops the neo-Platonic image of the lover leaving the bounds of his own body: 'He who loves vehemently no longer lives in himself but in what he loves, and his joy is in proportion to his withdrawal from self and his preoccupation with what is outside himself (172). As in Peter Bembo's paean to love in The Courtier, this ecstatic love is crystallized by the soul's flight to God, a process consisting 'in the first place of an absorption of the body by the spirit ... Then the spirit will be in a marvelous manner absorbed by the Highest Mind ... In this way the entir an will be outside of himself.'102 In Bembo's 42

The Rhetoric of Characterization account, the soul sees its link with 'Angelike beautie ... (in a manner) she waxeth dronken and beside her selfe, for coveting to couple her selfe with it.'103 The human soul realizes its own essence, and escapes self-alienation, by transcending itself and fusing with a divine other. The splitting into inner and outer selves and the fluidity of the spirit are based on the orthodox Christian dichotomy of body and soul, a fundamental conception of dual selfhood throughout the Renaissance, and one that paves the way for the Cartesian dichotomy. In Erasmus' famous account in The Handbook of the Militant Christian, post-lapsarian man exists as a disordered body politic of soul and body: 'they can neither be separated without the greatest suffering nor live together without constant war.'104 Here, even for the faithful, identity is not unified or static but a continual struggle between opposing selves. In the Institutes, Calvin presents a similar duality but, in contrast to Erasmus, emphasizes unity over conflict: 'there is in man one person formed of two compounds ... these two different natures constitute one person ... a communication of properties.'105 The trinity offers the model for this conception of the human individual. In his discussion of the tripartite God, Calvin defines persona as subsistence or substance, intimating some important aspects of sixteenth-century notions of character.106 For through what Kenneth Burke notes as the etymological 'paradox of substance,'107 Calvin's definition implies that the substance of persona is its extrinsic guise, a relative rather than absolute conception of character.108 It takes powerful faith or law to avoid relating this paradox to God himself, in order to question his essential substance: 'the three persons, in whom God alone is known, subsist in the Divine essence.'109 Hooker exemplifies the doctrinal elevation of God above such questions of persona: 'Our God is one, or rather very Oneness, and mere unity, having nothing but itself in itself, and not consisting (as all things do besides God) of many things. In which essential Unity of God a Trinity personal nevertheless subsisteth, after a manner far exceeding the possibility of man's conceit.'110 If not adhering to this religious language-game, we might question its contradictory notion of unity or, from historical distance, admire its paradoxical complexity 'we do not disjoin the persons from the essence, but interpose a distinction between the persons residing in it.'111 Either response on our part would acknowledge that incorporated within an orthodox, essentialist version of selfhood lies a notion of multiple and differential personae.

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Guise and Disguise In religious texts less encyclopaedic than the Institutes, the idea that character might comprise a number of personae is often seen as immoral. Underlying this view is an idealism for a united, pre-lapsarian self, long since lost to the treachery of the great deceiver, 'the first / That practised falsehood under saintly show.'112 The ethics of ethopoesis are determined by a Christian version of the essentialist myth. Daniel Dyke's puritan The Mystery of Selfe-Deceiving exemplifies the construction of a complete moral code on the basis of selfhood. Beginning with self-deception, he envisages a chain effect of social deceit: 'Nothing more easie than for a man to deceive himselfe; for the heart by reason of the great wickednesse thereof, is a bottomlesse and unsearchable gulfe of guile: insomuch as none can know, not only anothers, but not his owne heart.'113 Secular man's inability to know himself signifies an innate propensity to deceive others. Dyke emphasizes the use of 'Dissimulation and Simulation; in dissembling and concealing that which indeed is, and in feigning and counterfeiting that which indeed is not.' The counterfeit persona may threaten the cultural code of ethics by reversing its fundamental principles of appearance: 'These of all other are the most secret deceits, which are thus mantled and masked with the disguised pretences of speciall love and kindnesse.'114 Such inverted signs of goodness necessitate a deeper scrutiny of character. As with Duessa in Spenser's epic, selfhood becomes a moral allegory. The equating of external guise with motivated disguise posits an inner ethos that can be correctly read as good or evil; however, as Hobbes warns, the skills of such ethical literacy have to be carefully learnt and practised: 'the characters of man's heart, blotted and confounded as they are with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrine, are legible only to him that searcheth hearts.'115 The inner self may also be part of a discourse of disguise, and thus undermine any simple internal-external opposition within the self. Dyke accuses those who dissemble evil intentions of acting 'politiquely.' Machiavelli, of course, commends the 'politique' benefits of compounding self-representation, which may be realized through 'a rhetoric of imposture or of seeming to be.'116 He urges the prince 'to imitate the fox ... But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler.'117 As a traditional folk image, the fox is always already disguised; the prince is advised to imitate it and then to hide the imitation, that is, disguise the disguise of a disguised character. Throughout this compounded dissembling when interacting with others, the 'original' prince remains 44

The Rhetoric of Characterization at a considerable distance in which, as we saw in the less notorious advice of Fergoso in The Courtier, lies the key to his political success: 'Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are.'118 The gap between political appearance and essence - the ideological space of disguise - realizes power. Dyke's attack against Machiavellian politics illustrates a movement from spiritual to political and ethical reference in the discourse of disguise. In England, Machiavelli's name becomes a widely used epithet for immoral figures such as the 'damn'd Machiavelian' of whom Marston writes in the second satire of Pygmalion's Imaged It also works as a synonym for hypocrisy, and is used by Nashe to define the latter in Pierce Penniless: 'all machiavellism, puritanism, and outward glozing with a man's enemy ... all Italianate conveyances.'120 The last phrase also suggests that disguise, hypocrisy, and 'machiavellism' become entwined in a rhetoric of cultural stereotypes that is reinforced by international political events such as the war with Spain. The authenticity of the English character is contrasted with the shady dissemblings of Mediterranean and Catholic types. Ben Jonson presents a comically paranoid version of this view in Sir Politick Would-be, but Thomas Wright also offers it with more serious jingoistic effect, when addressing the reader in The Passions of the Mind: 'Our people for most part reveal and disclose themselves very familiarly and easily. The Spaniard and Italian demurreth much, and selleth his secrets and his frienship by drams ... he will show a countenance of friendship although he intendeth revenge ... In fine, he can dissemble better his own passions, and use himself therein more circumspectly, than we can do' (84). Built upon a general ethical censure of hypocrisy, disguise becomes an accusatory epithet to be used against foreign as well as domestic foes. Accordingly, in Elizabethan London representations of disguise are often held up as a key aspect of the theatre's immorality and profanity. Renaissance antitheatricality employs an ethico-religious thesis against the drama. As emerged in Platonic antisophism, this principled attack also often entails a defence of class hierarchies through asserting an 'essentialist ideology that sees identity as God-given and unchanging, rather than as forged through participation in social process.'121 In this ideology, the denunciation of disguise remains a key trope. Defenders and opponents of the theatre focus on its influence on the audience. Letters from the Lord Mayor object that 'shifts of cozenage' could be copied by the audience, and in The Gull's Handbook Thomas Dekker attacks the theatre's supposedly edifying ends: 'And whereas 45

Guise and Disguise you say there are good Examples to be learned in them, Trulie so there are: if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cosenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the Hippocrit, to cogge, lye, and falsifie.'122 On the other hand, a defender of the stage like Nashe's Pierce emphasizes that the foul ends to which deceivers come, along with their tricks of deception, 'are most lively anatomized' in plays for the audience's instruction and edification.123 As rhetoric had functioned in the Socratic period as the central theme through which the disputes over essentialist and dramatistic identity were waged, so in the English Renaissance the key figure is theatricality itself. In both cases, the ideological values of character are debated through conflicting views about the ethical, political, and religious implications of disguise and selfhood. In contrast to humanist and religious idealism, which would resolve compounded personae into an essential unity, and the scepticism about such transcendence, in the course of the sixteenth century there also emerges an increasingly pragmatic recognition of the effective functions of personal mutability and theatrical selfhood in different social contexts. As noted, Machiavelli's work exemplifies such pragmatism in regard to politics. Despite his contempt for the expedient effects of delivery, elsewhere in the essays Bacon also adopts a pragmatic perspective towards various social activites: 'a man's person hath many proper relations which he cannot put off. A man cannot speak to his son but as a father; to his wife but as a husband; to his enemy but upon terms.'124 Identity, he asserts, is dependent upon symbolic social rules, and the force of the repeated 'cannot' is that these rules, while comprehensible, are beyond an individual's control and construct these 'proper relations.' The irony of 'proper' is now that, as in Bacon's use, 'one's own' implies the socially determined. In the preface to the Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton's justification for writing in the guise of Democritus suggests a similar awareness of the social expedience of role-playing: ' 'Tis not I, but Democritus, Democritus dixit. you must consider what it is to speak in one's own or another's person, an assumed habit and name - a difference betwixt him that affects or acts a prince's, a philosopher's, a magistrate's, a fool's part, and him that is so indeed.'125 Burton claims a persona, yet the ensuing explanation would conflate the T with the guise of Democritus, and so undermine the former's priority. The alternative voices, 'one's own or another's person,' are distinguished and linked. The 'or' seems to intimate the difference between the voices; yet it also suggests that 'one's own' and 'another's' can be substituted for 46

The Rhetoric of Characterization each other as synonyms. Both 'one's own' and 'another's person,' and not merely the second, are 'an assumed habit and name.' This complicated notion of the proper, as 'one's own or another's person,' is then related to various social roles. Burton emphasizes the 'difference betwixt' one who 'acts' a 'part' and one who 'is so indeed.' Again the distinction is slippery, since being so 'indeed' may suggest being so through one's actions or in-deed. Any neat distinction between 'him that affects or acts ... and him that is so indeed' collapses. A prince, philosopher, magistrate, or fool 'acts,' that is, does deeds and 'affects.' Although there remains an idealized 'him,' it can never be reached through the 'difference' separating it from a 'part' that the "Tis not I' rather than the T speaks. Acting defers the self, transforming it into an 'assumed' guise or persona. Underlying Burton's explanation is the period's acute awareness of the social polysemy of agency. The gravedigger in Hamlet announces the basic set of meanings that 'action' seems to hold: 'an act hath three branches - it is to act, to do, to perform' (V.i. 11-12). The distinctions suggest an act's varying effects, depending on the social context in which it is carried out, while also registering its ambiguous connections to and disjunctions from the agent. Forestalling any presumption of fusion between deed and doer, action may indicate the actor without plainly defining or revealing his or her motives.126 Ben Jonson's work provides useful examples of the ways in which this range of rhetorical and dramatistic notions of guise, disguise, selfhood, and agency moves between literary texts and the surrounding social discourse. In an important essay, Thomas M. Greene has noted Jonson's equivocal attraction both to the 'centered self and, 'in spite of himself,' to the dissembling rogues, like Volpone and Face, who reject fixed identity for the sake of material gain and social mobility.127 Running through Jonson's work, this ambiguity derives from and re-presents the traditional rhetoric of characterization, and can also be seen as influencing Jonson's own ethopoetic project - constructing the Author of the 1616 Workes.128 The fragmented observations in Timber aptly suggest the conflicting notions of ethopoetic identity. At some points, the text recapitulates a form of Platonism and deems language a visual revelation of the intrinsic self: 'Language most shewes a man: speake that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired, and inmost parts of us, and is the Image of the Parent of it, the mind. No glasse renders a mans forme, or likenesses, so true as his speech.'129 Elsewhere, and as is often the case in the plays, Jonson conceives of language as a more complex 47

Guise and Disguise social process. In Timber, he compares it to fashion to underline the omnipresent cultural influences upon 'naturall' identity and gender: 'But now nothing is good that is naturall: Right and naturall language seem to have least of the wit in it ... Nothing is fashionable, till it bee deform'd; and this is to write like a Gentleman. All must bee as affected and preosterous as our Gallants cloathes, sweet bags, and night-dressings: in which you would thinke our men lay in like Ladies' (581). Jonson then echoes the ethopoetic scepticism of Montaigne, maintaining that the dramatistic means of social interaction preclude any return to an original ethos: '/ have considered, our whole life is like a Play: wherein every man, forgetfull of himselfe, is in travaille with expression of another. Nay, wee so insist in imitating others, as wee cannot (when it is necessary) return to our selves' (597). These maxims reproduce the dominant conceptual metaphors of selfhood that are used during the Renaissance - language, drama, vision, and mimesis. Such ethopoetic tropes are directly related to social action and practice in Jonson's plays, through some characters' premeditated schemes and through others' more or less unwitting efforts at self-representation.130 Many figures exploit disguise to make money and to seek sexual pleasure. Volpone's performance as the mountebank exemplifies this double intent, by enabling him to dupe his audience and to catch sight of Celia. Disguise may also be used officially, in attempts to enforce order and punish transgressors; Justice Overdo pretends to be a madman, 'for the Commonwealth.'131 In contrast, the self-referential consequences of disguise see characters mislead themselves into accepting imaginary constructions of selfhood. Morose's verbal self-absorption - 'All discourses but my own afflict me' - generates his own deception.132 Jonson depicts the effects of imagined identities that cannot function socially and rebound upon a pretentious idealist like Sir Epicure Mammon, who is always keen 'To gull himself.'133 In such figures, Jonson first satirizes 'the self-dramatizing instinct by which people seek to make sense of their lives,'134 and then more deeply interrogates the imaginary goals of self-dramatization held by characters oblivious to the determining cultural limits of ethopoesis. Jonson's work also recapitulates and examines many of the discursive motives of disguise that appear through the period. In Timber he embraces the persona of the cultural poet, 'he which can faine a Common-wealth (which is the Poet) can governe it with Counsels, strengthen it with Lawes, correct it with ludgements, informe it with Religion, and Morals' (595). Yet Subtle's sardonic portrayal of Sir Epi48

The Rhetoric of Characterization cure's alchemical ambitions for nature distances itself from and questions the kind of idealism that inspired Sidney's Defence. The materialism and social reductiveness that may covertly drive such visions are intimated: 'He will make / Nature asham'd of her long sleep: when art, / Who's but a step-dame, shall do more than she, / In her best love to mankind, ever could ... he'll turn the age to gold.'135 Through pairing characters like Volpone and Mosca, Jonson also makes various subde distinctions between the aims and desires of disguise. In his opening soliloquy, the fox suggests that he enjoys the continual process of self-dissemblance more than the realization of ethopoetic goals. The gold that he acquires functions more as a marker of successfully staged identities than an end in itself: 'I glory / More in the cunning purchase of my wealth, / Than in the glad possession.'136 In contrast, Mosca's soliloquy of self-praise both satirizes and reproduces the dramatic essentialism that Vives and Pomponazzi had celebrated. While the parasite personifies the sophistical tropes of selfpresence, and 'can rise / And stoop almost together ... be here, / And there, and here, and yonder all at once,' self-pride lures him on to envisage reality in his own image, 'All the wise world is little else, in nature, / But parasites or sub-parasites.' Despite his cynicism, an essentialist, even narcissistic, ideal determines Mosca's self-portrait: 'I fear I shall begin to grow in love / With my dear self.'137 These dramatic representations of selfhood may also address the period's complex conceptions of the body politic. Through introducing a range of disguised characters, Bartholomew Fair stages the links between individual and group bodies and their effects on a social politics. On the one hand, dissemblance is used egoistically, in attempts to distinguish the individual from the group. Rabbi Bussy's continual equivocations over the attractions of flesh (human and pig) envoice this self-serving process under the cover of doctrine and righteousness. Quarlous' response to the puritan as 'A notable hypocritical vermin' combines the ethical disapproval of Dyke's and Nashe's attacks against machiavels with those of the politico-religious suspicions of Hooker.138 On the other hand, a figure like Ursula, the 'Body o' the Fair,' uses dissemblance to dissolve the distinctions between individual and group identity.139 The play's final gesture towards a banquet that includes everyone on the basis of their common 'flesh and blood' recalls images of the transcendence of individuality that Erasmus uses at the end of The Praise of Folly. In emphasizing the corporeality of union with the other, Jonson's version does not simply contradict Erasmus' spirituality but synthesizes notions of body and soul, individ-

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Guise and Disguise ual and group, in line with myths of materialized spirit and communal identity that Montaigne, for example, also reiterates: 'Some have said, that there was a generall soule, like unto a great body, from which all particular soules were extracted, and returned thither, alwayes reconjoyning and entermingling themselves unto that Universall matter."40 Jonson's work exemplifies the circulation of tropes of disguise and selfhood between social and literary texts as well as the equivocal attitudes to ethopoesis that are held in England during the Renaissance. Disguise and dissimulation are related directly to cultural issues such as making money, justice, morality, religion, and sexuality. Identity itself is seen as dramatistic, while the desires that motivate identity are represented in a constant process of translation and sublimation into social actions. Jonson's ambivalence towards ethopoetic processes - a simultaneous disapproval and enjoyment of their threats to the 'centered self - represents one of the period's deep perceptions about selfhood and society: that social relations are built upon the ambiguous and ultimately impossible repression of disguise. For private disguise, even if used successfully by a machiavellian prince or merchant, remains in theory opposed to orthodox, socially approved identity. On the other hand, through its sublimations and repression, and just as the sophist guarantees rhetorical righteousness, the figure of disguise enables orthodox identity to be conceived. Consequently, the repressed disguise always remains on the verge of disrupting the orthodox identity that it antithetically affords. Disguise is at once a threat to and the aberration that reinforces the proper ethos. The various citations considered in the preceding pages delineate a range of issues and texts where self, guise, and disguise function as important tropes and presuppositions for social discourse. The incidental quality of many of these texts' various allusions suggests a broad, often implicit acknowledgment of character as dramatistic, rhetorical process. Hobbes will later sum up many of these views, underlining the connections among representation, disguise, and character, as well as indicating their cultural and ideological functions: The word person ... signifies the face, as persona in Latin signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as mask or vizard: and from the stage, hath been translated to any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals, as theatres. So that a person, is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in

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The Rhetoric of Characterization common conversation; and to personate, is to act, or represent himself, or another; and he that acteth another, is said to bear his person, or act in his name. (168-9)

For Hobbes the notion of person as representation forecloses a natural identity. He moves from the etymological origin of persona in the theatre to the broader social connotations that span the institutional settings of'tribunals' and the everyday scenarios of'common conversation.' The pragmatics of persona preclude the essentialist ethos. The proper ethos is one best suited to its social context and function.141 These conflicting social and literary views of disguise and selfhood - as ultimately transcendent, sceptically self-threatening, or contextually functional - reflect the classical philosophical and rhetorical controversies and relocate them in contemporary social situations. In this process of relocation an important change in the representation of selfhood also takes place. Renaissance discourses often tend to depict the ideological values of character and characterization overtly. This is not to say that prior to these texts character had been held to lack cultural significance; rather, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, character, its appearances, processes, and effects are conceived as central to the operation and the value of social practices. In this view, and whether in essentialist, teleological, or functional versions, character reveals the complexities of cultural acts and relationships. If selfhood always signifies connections between the social and the personal, then through the disguise topos, Renaissance texts represent the premises and motives within these links, and question the ideologies of closure that character may be used to express.

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Chapter Two

Political Acts

And while I am waiting there, in comes the King in a plain common riding-suit and velvet capp, in which he seemed a very ordinary man to one that had not known him. Samuel Pepys, 19 August 1661

Power of any kind must be clothed in effective means of displaying it, and will have different effects depending upon how it is dramatized. Erving Goffman The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

I In discussing and representing political processes, many texts from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods focus on the role and character of the prince. The secrets of social rule and hierarchy seem bound up in the royal person. Various works, such as popular pageants performed during Elizabeth's coronation, plays about usurpers and restoration, handbooks on how to reign like Machiavelli's The Prince or King James's Basilicon Doron, all contemplate this figure, concentrating the complexities of political rule and power into personal signs and symbolic identity. One of the notable features of this identity is its multiplicity. Spenser explains, using a familiar image in the letter to Raleigh on The Faerie Queene, that the monarch 'beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady.'1 The figure initially suggests the sovereign character's symbolic range, from chastity to beauty to power, more than its specific embodiments. Throughout his poem Spenser then presents numerous

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Guise and Disguise images of the queen - Una, Belphoebe, Britomart, in addition to the faerie queen - to represent different facets of this complex figure and flesh out the myth of the two bodies. The people of London likewise offered varied regal images during their new queen's celebrations through the city. The allegories of both poet and populace veil as they disclose the multiplicity of royalty, for the sovereign self remains beyond the sum of its different depictions: 'as the first declared her grace to come out of the house of unitie, the second that she is placed in the seate of government staied with vertue to the suppression of vice, and therfore in the third the eight blessinges of almighty god might well be applied unto her: so this fourth now is, to put her grace in remembrance of the state of the commonweale.'2 In the final reciprocity between the queen and commonweal we see that the mythology of multiple sovereignty envelops both ruler and ruled: 'A ruler, seeing himself "from within," might be expected to know that he is not divine; yet he may feel the motives of "reverence" as strongly as a lowly peasant witnessing, at a respectful distance, a royal pageant.'3 A selfconscious usurper like Claudius can still seem convinced of his sanctity when spurning a rebellious assault: 'Let him go, Gertrude, do not fear our person: / There's such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would.'4 Laertes' abrupt change in tone then suggests that even a fractious subject may share with his prince this 'mystic participation' in the state.5 In the second half of the sixteenth century, when the first theories of absolutism are beginning to be propounded,6 this mystery is officially held to devolve to the prince from God. In the Institutes, Calvin announces the descent of the royal person from the divine. Princes are 'the viceregents of God [and] in themselves exhibit a kind of image of the Divine Providence.' God is the source of their actions as well as their status, for 'the magistrate, in inflicting punishment, acts not of himself, but executes the very judgements of God.'7 Following Erving Goffman, the divine and royal images can be seen as exemplifying notions of sacredness, ceremony, and presentation implicit in any idealization of selfhood: 'the self is in part a ceremonial thing, a sacred object which must be treated with proper ritual care and in turn must be presented in a proper light to others.'8 While God epitomizes the sacredness of selfhood by attracting the greatest amount of 'ritual care,' his 'viceregent' is another figure for whom care and presentation are crucial. In the third book of the Basilicon Down, 'Of A Kings Behavior In Indifferent Things,' for example, James I reveals a neurotic awareness that none of his actions is indifferent. Each is

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Political Acts potentially significant, and like Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, James feels ambivalent about this value: 'I love the people, / But do not like to stage me to their eyes; / Though it do well' (1.1.67-9) • He counsels Prince Henry on the constant perils of eating, sleeping, dressing, speaking, and acting in public, 'where all the beholders eyes are attentiuelie, to look & pry in the least circumstance of [your] secreatest driftes.'9 The secrets of the royal person contain the essence of political practice. His corporality becomes its very figure: ye have two eyes, signifying great foresight and prouidence, with a narrowe looking in all things; and also two eares, signifying patient hearing, and that of both the parties: but ye have but one tongue, for pronouncing a plaine sensible, & vniforme sentence; & but one head, & one hart, for keeping a constant & vniforme resolution, according to your apprehension: having two handes and two feete, with many fingers and toes for quick execution. (203)

This anatomy marks a process that appears throughout many orthodox Renaissance conceptions of kingship. The sequence of bodily pairs eyes, ears, hands, feet - suggesting the doubleness of person and the two sovereign bodies, resolves into a transcendent unity that would synthesize the royal self. Political discourse in the early-modern period often intertwines crucially with such notions of selfhood. Rhetorical and dramatistic traditions of characterization come into play, with the dialogue between essentialist and disguised identities being used to articulate political orthodoxies and conflicts. Through a series of concepts that derives from Aristotle's Politics, the ethics of ethopoesh are used to order these contesting political values; as Fredric Jameson notes, 'the very presence of a dualistic structure makes it quite inevitable for the mind to assimilate that opposition to the fundamental ethical one, and to sort the opposing terms into a good and a bad one.'10 In this dualistic tradition of political personae the sophistical other appears, openly in the repudiated figures of the tyrant and usurper, more covertly, and interestingly, in admissions of the ceaseless concentration needed by the prince to realize a regal demeanour. This second discourse of character supplements the archetypal order based on the royal self, revealing a practice of political disguise that fashions the princely persona while concealing its function. A process of ethopoesis assumes an ambiguously central part in the discourse of royal presence. It both represents the sovereign mystery and exposes the idealism and sacredness that would enshroud the prince. 55

Guise and Disguise James's fusion of bodily and personal doubles into a transcendent single figure reveals character-making as a major Renaissance resource for the powerful, widely used in gaining, exercising, and justifying political rule. Ethopoesis frequently serves and preserves an essentialist rhetoric of royal selfhood. It is, however, a paradoxical service, one that may destabilize the doctrine of political essence it constructs. The frequently noted theatricality of power, which stages royal personhood, may simultaneously leave it in conflict, short of realization just as the character seems completed. This chapter will consider a range of representations of this ethopoetic paradox, from texts like James's Basilicon that seem to portray the royal self within grasp, to satires of kingship like Marston's The Malcontent that reveal the internal fragmentation of a rhetoric of royal selfhood. Like any rhetoric, that of sovereign essentialism can also be challenged from without. Once enunciated, it confronts reinterpretation and ideological questioning. The elaborate machinery of censorship that was constructed under Elizabeth and continued under the Stuarts attempted to forestall this dialogical fate. The Acts of Supremacy, of Uniformity, and the Queen's Proclamation 509, all put in motion in May of 1559, established a set of laws and restrictions over what could be legally presented in interludes, plays, song, rhymes, or other 'open words.' Under the scrutiny of the Master of Revels and of the ecclesiastical and political licensing authorities, nothing 'heretical, seditious, or unfit for Christian ears' was to be printed or performed." As Annabel Patterson has argued, such legislation does not put a stop to reflection on or criticism of official state practices. Censorship is 'a joint project, a cultural bargain between writers and political leaders,' a continuing process in which issues of authorial intention, reader response, generic representation, subject matter, and social meaning are being negotiated.12 Chambers claims that the period's repeated proclamations and orders 'suggest that no absolutely effective method of suppressing undesirable publications had as yet been attained,' and that the opposition between officialdom and texts was being constantly reinforced. This oppositional model is revised by Patterson's terms, whereby a new law signifies a reworking of 'the implicit social contract between authors and authorities.'13 The 'contract' is drawn up by both parties, and perhaps only in the instant of an act's proclamation can it be said that the authorities are calling the shots in the negotiations. Such seems to have been the case in the bishops' decree of 1599, 'That noe Satyres or Epigrams be printed hereafter: That noe English 56

Political Acts historyes be printed excepte they bee allowed by some of her maiesties privie Counsell: That noe playes be printed excepte they bee allowed by suche as haue aucthoritie.'14 The ban focuses on specific challenges to the social order, outlawing what Rosalie Colie might call the overt 'countergenres' to official discourse.15 The three genres, satire, history, and drama, were doubtless felt by the authorities to be appropriate ones, since they had been used recently to envoice criticisms of the status quo, in works like the verse satire of Joseph Hall and Marston and the historical drama Sir Thomas More.16 Yet these generic targets were also impossible to hit cleanly, for they were not employed exclusively by opponents of order. In identifying these oppositions to official discourse, the decree nonetheless does conceive of the countergenres as narrowly antithetical. By doing so it attempts to depict opposition as authority's belated inverse - fixed either in the past, as historical imagination, nostalgic for an archetypal republic, or in mimetic genres controlled by 'real' mechanisms like the office of Master of Revels and the Stationer's Register. Both limits would serve to reinforce authority as the univocal, true text of presence and power. Yet the countergenres are not always outside and opposed to this paradigm. As many new historicist studies have shown, drama and history may not contradict orthodox political discourse but are often central strategies, both to attack opponents and to legitimize power. And because they are used officially, history and drama can have an ideological double voice - a dialogic function similar to that often attributed to satire - that complicates their straightforward identification against authority. It is the discursive naivety of the authorities, a will to oneness of the word, that leads to this restricted view of the countergenres. Indeed, during the late 15905 and early iGoos the bishops' three countergenres interact significantly in representing and questioning the mysteries of royal rule. As satire moves from verse and prose to drama, history plays about the lives of kings are succeeded by a genre that Leonard Tennenhouse has labelled 'disguised ruler plays' and that, despite a narrative of restoration, unsettles presumptions of royal identity and power.17 If censorship is negotiable, as Patterson proposes, then these generic and thematic shifts are to be seen in dialogue with, not only subject to, attempts to impose textual and semantic authority. The changing genres and subject matter that emerge, as drama, satire, and history supplement one another, disturb the ideal, unified reference of the sovereign word. Hence plays like Measure for Measure and The Malcontent suggest that

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Guise and Disguise princely performance is itself generically unstable, too liable - like the disguises central to their narratives - to slide into hypocrisy, as Vincentio's disillusioned lament over his deputy announces: 'O, what may man within him hide, / Though angel on the outward side!' (lll.ii.27i2). On the one hand, such axiomatic criticisms of authority are quite easily monitored because they mirror, and so can be re-enlisted as, official sentiments that would distinguish between the 'vsurpingTyran' and the 'lawfull good King.'18 On the other hand, this obviousness can serve to conceal a deeper anatomy of political discourse in which dissemblance is a key trope. In this case, the transition from dramatizing historical identities to presenting disguised princely figures and the intertwining of history and satire would target not individual figures themselves but the essentialist rhetoric of political ethopoesis. The effect that develops through these changes in genre and characterization is less that of overtly mocking or criticizing die prince than of declining to participate in the sovereign mystery. It is intimated that underneath their guises, with their rhetorics of power and identity, the usurper and the prince are one.19 II

The oppositions within official political rhetoric can be perceived in classical texts on politics that remained influential for many Renaissance authors. Despite the clarity of the definitions in book three of Aristotle's Politics, for example, there is a repeated suggestion that political concepts are dualistic rather than singular. The most notable instance comes in the classification of constitutions, where each 'correct' form is defined against its 'perversion': aristocracy and oligarchy, polity and democracy, monarchy and tyranny.20 Aristotle calls each of the second forms a 'perversion' not because the structure of political power is different from that of the first form, but because the goal is different, as in the case where kingship 'with a view to the common interest' (i279a) changes to 'tyranny ... a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only' (i279b). Aristotle concludes that none of the three perverse forms aims to profit the common interest, but each deviates towards sovereign self-realization and promotion. The paired types of constitution are evidence of a restricted dialogism in Aristotle's political thought. Each concept presupposes an antithesis, but one that does not suggest an alternative political structure, only the possibility of a contradictory practice: 'the good citizen 58

Political Acts ... should know how to govern like a freeman, and how to obey like a freeman' (12770); 'kings rule according to law over voluntary subjects, but tyrants over involuntary' (i285a), and so on. Every political agent implies at least one opposite number - king:tyrant; king:subject - plus a corresponding set of opposite or perverse actions - kingship:tyranny; obedience:rebellion. The structure is further restricted in that Aristotle's analysis is organized by an ethical idealism that is clearly apparent in the third book's last section on the education of the king. We discover that the product of this education is precisely comparable to the good man: 'the same education and the same habits will be found to make a good man and a man fit to be a statesman or king' (i288b). Now while in the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle rejects a single definition of the good, he does define 'human good' as an 'activity of soul in accordance with virtue,' and virtue as the 'state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well.'21 A strong ethical status underlies such conceptions of king and man, as it does those of goodness and virtue. The effect of Aristotle's analysis is to fix these ethical categories as structural principles and to orient die practice of politics towards the good 'state.' The Aristotelian analysis reifies ideal kingship as a type of ethical selflessness by separating and repressing its antidiesis in political theory. This repression occurs in various ways. First, there is overt differentiation, as when Aristotle contrasts the monarch to the tyrant through the unexplained presumptions of concepts like 'common interest' and 'willing subjects.' Next are the covert distinctions made when an ideal king is portrayed; his deeds, presumed to be for the benefit of all, implicitly contrast with the self-seeking actions of a tyrant or an unsuccessful ruler. Such, for example, are die efforts of Cyrus in organizing his empire after conquering Babylon, depicted by Xenophon in the Cyropaedia, an influential portrait of kingship in the period.22 The characterization of Cyrus underlines the ruler's selfless, ethical influence both in performing his own duties and as a model to subjects: 'he thought that it was not possible to incite others to good and noble deeds, if he were not himself such as he ought to be ... he believed diat he could in no way more effectively inspire a desire for the beautiful and the good by endeavouring, as their sovereign, to set before his subjects a perfect model of virtue in his own person.'23 These sentiments, in addition to controlling subjects' behaviour, provide an ideal of regal conduct whose presumed moral value ensures good leadership and censures other modes of ruling.24 59

Guise and Disguise A univocal ethos of kingship, deriving from such classical models, motivates many official images of royal power in the Renaissance. It echoes, though with imminent irony, in the classic Shakespearean maxim of eternal selfhood and power, 'for always I am Caesar.'25 In the Basilicon Down, James signals this ethos by warning his son against compromising kingly unity. The first book, 'Of a Kings Christian Dvetie towards God,' repeats the moral imperatives of the Cyropaedia, but frames them in Christian terms: 'As he cannot be thought worthie to rule and command others, that cannot rule and dantone his owne proper affections and vnreasonable appetites ... Neither can any thing in gouernment succeed wel with him ... as comming from a filthy spring, if his person be vnsanctified' (25). Political success depends on self-rule and righteousness, which are later presented as involving a singular coherence between the king's inner self, 'inwardly garnished with true Christian hvmilitie,' and a public persona that must 'eschew outwardly before the worlde, the suspition of filthie proud hypocrisie and deceitfull dissimulation' (51). While 'eschewing the suspicion' of hypocrisy may not mean eschewing hypocrisy itself, James's words overtly portray the king as an ideal ethical and ethopoetical union. The second book, 'Of a Kings Dvetie in His Office,' recalls both Xenophon and Aristotle. In so doing the Basilicon begins to reveal and suppress an increasingly ambiguous ethos of royal power and personhood. Following Cyrus, James suggests to Henry 'by your behauiour in your own person, and with your seruantes, to teache your people by your example: for people are naturallie inclined to counterfaite (like apes) their Princes maners' (53). The irrepressible, parenthetic distaste hints at the assertion of power and division within such 'teaching.' Any union between people and ruler seems threatened by this class contempt. The diffidence Shakespeare's Henry V feels towards the men he urges on to victory is comparable. Though admitting to Bates, Court, and Williams that 'the King is but a man,' he jealously marks his inability to 'sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,' echoing his father's tired complaints. Even when embracing his men as brothers, Henry first emphasizes the condition he then grandly overlooks in each soldier, 'be he ne'er so vile.'26 Similarly, James devalues the people's vision while acknowledging to Prince Henry that it must always be considered. Subjects ultimately cannot perceive the mysteries of kingship, though they are to be led into believing that they can do so: the people that see you not within, cannot judge of you, but according

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Political Acts to the out-warde appearance of your actions and companie; which onely is subject to their sight. (109-11) It is a true olde saying, That a King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazinglie doe beholde: and therefore althogh a King be neuer so praecise in the discharging of his office, the people, who seeth but the outward part, will euer judge of the substance, by the circumstances. (163) The warning that the people misinterpret royal actions implicitly commends manipulation of the king's 'outward part,' and acknowledges a functional split in the ideally unitary person. James's scepticism concerning the perceptions of the people seems quite different from the visual indulgence Elizabeth would allow her subjects.27 On her passage through London the day before the coronation she has them not only see her but instruct her about her coming role. In these various pageants the people sought to signify knowledge of her past and future and to imply their interdependence within the state: 'her grace by holding up her handes, and merie countenance to such as stoode farre of, and most tender and gentle language to those that stode nigh to her grace, did declare herselfe no lesse thankefullye to receive her people's good wille, than they lovingly offred it unto her ... on eyther syde ther was nothing but gladnes, nothing but prayer, nothing but comfort.'28 On the surface, Elizabeth's open reciprocity is contrary to the withdrawal of selfhood that James expounds. The point of the contrast lies less, however, in an absence of self-representation on the queen's part than in the opposing types of monarchsubject relations that the two sovereign figures connote. In James's case, the splitting of selfhood suggests the divorce between the king and his subjects. Whereas Elizabeth's demeanour realizes power through the guise of mutuality, James's dual persona would ensure successful rule through sovereign separation. Ironically, in the Basilicon such detachment is at first attributed only to the antithesis of the ideal king. Like Aristotle, James labels this figure 'tyrant,' identifying him through self-seeking traits of sophistical disguise, hypocrisy, and dissimulation. James then attempts to present an intrinsic opposition between the two figures, 'the true difference betwixt a lawfull good King, and an vsurping Tyran': 'The one acknowledgeth himselfe ordained for his people ... the other thinketh his people ordayned for him ... & counterfeiting the Sainte while he once creepe in credite, will then ... frame the common-weale euer to

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Guise and Disguise advance his particulare' (55). The repudiated practice is isolated in the discredited figure, the 'vsurping Tyran.' Despite James's acknowledgment of the necessary function of royal 'counterfaiting' before misperceiving subjects, the process is ethically and ideologically differentiated between kingship and tyranny. The truth of this difference would guarantee archetypal kingship, and rehearses the traditional idealist definition that 'the true ruler does not naturally seek his own advantage but that of the ruled.'29 While we might expect the Basilicon Down to be a depiction of exalted kingship, the parallels among its idealization, the categories of traditional political theorizing, and the ethopoetic oppositions descending from Platonism can also be noted. This tradition of political thought is, however, pressured by Renaissance texts that reaccentuate its essentialist rhetoric by picking up the half-concealed inconsistencies. The deconstruction of an ideal princely ethos can be traced through the interactions of dramatic, historical, and satiric representations of political personae. The bishops' decree discerns the generic sources but misperceives the rhetorical process of this political dialogism. Ill

Whom, or what, does Richard II see when he looks into the mirror? As he turns from the paper the Earl of Northumberland urgently thrusts forward, a confession of 'accusations, and these grievous crimes / Committed by your person and your followers / Against the state and profit of this land,'30 the mirror's personal, even narcissistic connotations seem to exemplify Richard's political obtuseness. At times the latter has already appeared in clumsy, simple-minded manoeuvres like banishing Bullingbrook but ignoring his wooing of the 'common people' (l.iv.24), or hastily seizing Gaunt's estate and then placing the protesting Duke of York in charge of England while Ireland is invaded (n.i.219-21). Yet Richard is not simply evading or oblivious to the charges. Rather he finds them unrelated to the scene's import, since it is only after the fact that they will be used to justify the compelled transfer of power, 'by confessing them, the souls of men / May deem that you are worthily depos'd' (rv.i.226-7). The metrically stressed 'deem' ironically, and for Richard irrelevantly, implies certain judgment only within the Lancastrian construction of opinion and events. Richard's certainly in the absolute significance of the present comprises at once a historical and an ethopoetic essentialism. The king interprets his deposition in the same way that he has 62

Political Acts interpreted his reign, as the effect of an intrinsic political identity: 'Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king' (HI.ii.54-5). Part of this naturalized ethos is its historical and temporal presence. Earlier, as Bullingbrook and Gaunt fell from him, Richard had envisaged himself as fused with time, borne along by it into the future: 'The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he; / His time is spent, our pilgrimage must be' (11.4.153-4). He had ignored York's admonition that his assault on the 'charters and ... customary rights' of 'Time' entailed a threat to his own identity: 'Be not thyself; for how art thou a king / But by fair sequence and succession?' (I.ii. 195-9). It is a warning that both presupposes the timeless historicity of the sovereign ethos and foresees its demise, an outcome that Richard himself finally recognizes: T wasted time, and now doth time waste me' (v.v.49). In the deposition scene, however, when first trying to comprehend his fall, Richard introspects upon the role of a kingly self that would dominate all his opponents' acts. When he says that he 'can see a sort of traitors here. / Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself, / I find myself a traitor with the rest' (rv.i.246—8), he ponders his loss of power in reflexive terms that disclose a royal persona who determines the collapse of its own political career: 'I find myself a traitor.' The conflict between soul and body explains for him a self-defeating motive that nonetheless perpetuates an essential causality: 'I have given here my soul's consent / T' undeck the pompous body of a king' (249-50). He profoundly personalizes politics, implying his own determining part in the ritual of uncrowning: 'Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown' (181). Like Lear, he presumes that a king can command and so control the fall from power. In constructing his deposition in these terms, Richard uses the traditional rhetoric of the body politic. The conflict-ridden body was at once a physical, military, political, and spiritual topos. Its classical roots and application in Renaissance politics are suggested by Menenius' fable of the belly in Coriolanus, while its renovated spiritual reference during the Reformation era resounds in Erasmus' Handbook of the Militant Christian. Like Erasmus, though writing in the Jacobean period, Thomas Wright reverses tenor and vehicle of the image that Menenius invokes; political tyranny figures the body's disorder: 'a reasonable soul ... like an Empress was to govern the body, direct the senses, guide the passions as subjects and vassals by the square of prudence and rule of reason, the inferior parts were bound to yield homage and obey. Then Self-love upstarts ... allured with the bait of

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Guise and Disguise pleasure and sensuality proclaimeth wars and rebellion.'31 The reversibility of the metaphor implies the strength of the cultural equation between politics and the body. The ideological effect is to conceive politics on the basis of eternal human 'nature' and thus foreclose critique of the sovereign ethos, state, and their timelessness: 'man is by nature a political animal... the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual.'32 In contrast, the introduction to Leviathan proposes that the Commonwealth is 'but an artificial man.'33 This metaphorical shift affords Hobbes the scope to investigate the strategies of power and the historical relativity of their artifice, thereby developing earlier Renaissance interrogations of political ethos. It is such a change in the history of the state's ethopoetic rhetoric that the deposition scene in Richard II dramatizes. Hence Richard's imperatives - 'Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown' - royal commands renouncing command, reveal a last effort by sovereignty to control its own fall. His possession of the crown resounds in the emphasized 'me,' a sort of signature that unnames itself through the uncanny import of the order, one that renounces its power as it is uttered, authorizing the loss of authority. The belief in royal essence - 'My crown I am' (rv.i.igi), a Caesar-like absolutism determines the king's paradoxically self-negating words: 'Ay, no, no ay; for I must nothing be ... Now mark me how I will undo myself (rv.i. 201-3) ,34 Richard continues to articulate his dilemma through an essentialist political rhetoric, or, more precisely, by lamenting this rhetoric's loss. The usurpation splits the kingly verba and res: 'I have no name, no title, / No, not that name was given me at the font, / But 'tis usurp'd ... know not now what name to call myself (rv.i.255-9). The 'given' names of Richard and king are rent from permanent relation to him, revealing the imaginary signification of his personhood and kingship. An enduring political semiotic, in Foucault's phrase 'the sovereignty of the Like,'35 is being undermined by the revelation of the discursive contingency of kingly character. It is at this moment that Richard calls for the mirror. Recalling Corinthians and the seventh book of the Republic, gazing into a mirror at such a moment is a highly charged emblematic act, its significance oscillating between vanity and self-knowledge.36 A strong humanist faith in sight seems to have been prevalent. It has been studied in detail in Ernst Cassirer's essay on the 'subject-object problem' in Renaissance philosophy. For Cassirer, figures like Galileo and in particular Leonardo, because of his work in art as well as 64

Political Acts science, exemplify a widespread intellectual prepossession with visible form, where 'the limit of vision is also, by necessity, the limit of conception.' Leonardo's 'ideal of science aims at nothing but the perfection of seeing,' and his art insists on the 'visually real ... True and objective necessity is found in vision.'37 This faith in vision extends to and is deepened by the mirror; in 'How the Mirror Is the Master and Guide of Painters' (1492), Leonardo recommends that painters use a mirror to check the accuracy of their work and perception: 'The mirror ought to be taken as a guide.'38 For those such as Leonardo, the technologically improved mirrors of the time are assumed to extend and rectify the essential power and truth of human sight: 'since you know you cannot see yourself / So well as by reflection, I, your glass, / Will modestly discover to yourself / That of yourself which you yet know not of.'39 The king thus takes up the mirror to read in his face the true cause of his fall, 'in the very book indeed / Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself (rv.i.274-5) • He desires to see the prediscursive ethos of 'glassy essence.'40 As Althusser comments, The humanist-religious ideological function of the human face is to be the seat of the "soul", of subjectivity, and therefore the visible proof of the existence of the human subject with all the ideological force of the concept of the subject.'41 Yet Richard flings the mirror away, claiming at first that its image is falsely superficial: 'O flatt'ring glass ... Thou dost beguile me!' (279-81). Next, in response to Bullingbrook's dry remarks, he construes the mirror's image as an ironic icon of his emotion, reinforcing the mythic 'structure of misrecognition'42 that underpins his desire for royal ethos: The shadow of my sorrow! Ha, let's see. 'Tis very true, my grief all lies within, And these external [manners] of laments Are merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul. There lies the substance ... (iv.i.294-9)

Even as he is forced to reject it, the schema of mirror-perception drives Richard more deeply into a floundering political essentialism that grasps at selfhood as an oxymoronic 'substance' that cannot be seen or heard. The antihumanist theme of flawed perception that Montaigne, for example, identifies in 'Sebond' as the source of human error - 'This discourse hath drawne me to the consideration of the senses, 65

Guise and Disguise wherein consisteth the greatest foundation and triall of our ignorance'^ underlies this failure of vision. The scene implies the ideological process of self-misrecognition and its political corollary, the loss of power. To sustain the 'substance' of the royal person, a revised notion of the political sign is needed, one that enables a simultaneous exploitation and denial of this misrecognition.44 Richard smashes the mirror, since its failure to signify why he has fallen discloses the limit of his personal vision and power. To him it treacherously reflects the false absence of an ironic link between his lightly scarred face and his internal grief, a link that would still signify himself as the cause of his deposition. Moreover, he observes this mirrored absence qua absence; he trusts that he sees what is not there, just as he ultimately believes that he and not his opposite has the power to dissolve his kingly self: 'Standing before the sun of Bullingbrook, / To melt myself away in water-drops!' (rv.i.261-2). Yet that very discontinuity between Richard's 'external [manners] of laments' and his 'tortur'd soul' represents an alternative ethos of kingship. Where Richard sees only absence, the 'flatt'ring glass' reflects the presence of that absence, the presence of the absence of ethopoetic truth. As emerges in the subsequent histories, where Henry rv and his son see it clearly revealed in the prince's 'second mirror,' the present absence of ethopoetic truth constitutes the entrance into a revised political discourse.46 IV

By the time Richard II is written, the representations of the royal persona have long been acknowledged. James already considers it a commonplace in the Basilicon Doron: 'Kings being publike persons ... are as it were set (as it was saide of olde) upon a publicke stage' (12). Shakespeare's play, like Spenser's reference in the letter to Raleigh and Hobbes's later comments on sovereignty as a dual 'personation' - 'whosoever beareth the person of the people ... beareth also his own natural person'46 - thus contemplates an established ethos of political guise. As Kantorowicz's study of the 'king's two bodies' has shown, the process of double characterization was systematized into official political culture through the work of Tudor lawyers in the sixteenth century. Edmund Plowden's Reports, written during Elizabeth's reign, defined the concept by revising the history of kingship, disclosing a presence that is seen as having always existed even if it were not always recognized or used. The idea is not that sovereignty has changed but

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Political Acts that more is now understood about it: 'the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal ... But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal.'47 A flexibly expedient symbol, used by jurists to establish, defend, and centralize the crown's powers, the royal duality invents a historical myth of kingship that, despite its utility, remains within an ideal and essentialist conception of political personhood. For the key to the symbol's operation is the paradoxical immateriality of the king's body politic, which 'cannot be seen or handled.' It is this mysterious corpus - a 'mystic fiction' as Kantorowicz calls it and not the 'mortal' body natural, that generates royal power. In part the essentialism results from the notion that the king's two bodies are copied from Christ's twin nature: 'Royalty, by this semireligious terminology, was actually expounded in terms of christological definitions.' The Tudors institute an overarching politicoreligious discourse, a 'crypto-theological idiom,' which legitimizes their role (thematically important in light of the break with Rome), occults it, and empowers it.48 Essentialism becomes a strategy of disguise, and the religious tones help to conceal this expedience. Shakespeare's second tetralogy reflects this Tudor idiom in Henry rv's recurring intention, first announced soon after the usurpation, to 'make a voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.' In the opening of / Henry IV, Henry's motive has changed slightly (or simply become more apparent, 'to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels,' as he later puts it): 'Therefore friends / As far as to the sepulchre of Christ ... Forthwith a power of English shall we levy.' The plan becomes an obsessive quest after righteousness, and even Henry finally realizes its irony, as he dies in a room called 'Jerusalem.'49 Hence to label Richard II 'the tragedy of the King's Two Bodies' clouds the important distinctions between nostalgic and pragmatic notions of essential kingly identity that are raised as power passes from Richard to Henry. The crucial feature depicted is the invention of a dialogic rhetoric of self-representation. That Richard 'is stripped of every possibility of a second or super-body'50 signals not the end of an essentialist ethos but its remoulding into a manipulable, dramatistic discourse of political character. The possible workings of such a discourse are key topics for a number of writers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 6?

Guise and Disguise Machiavelli offers the best-known program for the use of ethopoetic doubleness: 'Machiavelli's princes recognize that social life is a theater, a set of manipulable fictions through which they can control others and ensure their own power.'51 His recommendations of fox-like disguise and deception seek to insulate the prince from the dangers of possessing and actually observing virtuous qualities, thereby halving this doubleness.52 For Machiavelli, 'The inner logic of power politics - and it is in essence, a logic of unlimited power - operates in all activities of the ruler.'53 Feigning and dissembling are part of this logic. Another aspect, which relates just as importantly to ethopoetic power, is the avoidance of self-deception inspired by the flattery of others.54 Its destructive effects, emblematized by Richard's smashing of the 'flatt'ring mirror,' are dramatized more fully by Shakespeare in Timon of Athens. Only at his demise does Timon realize the effects of those 'Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites, / Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears.' Yet Apemantus has already implied that a flattered prince plays a part in his own fall: 'He that loves to be flatter'd is worthy o' th' flatterer.'55 So James, construing flattery as a kind of sovereign masturbation, cautions Prince Henry against 'that filthy vice of Flattery, the pest of all Princes, and wracke of Republickes ... I fore-warned you to be warre with your owne inward flatterer.'56 The risk of flattery is that it lures the prince to relapse into an imaginary conception of his personal, political desire. Bacon's Essays also stress, and in effect show through their rhetorical dissembling, the efficacy of disguise. 'Of Simulation and Dissimulation' advises readers to 'set it down, that an habit of secrecy is both moral and politic,' and that 'The best composition and temperature is to have openness in fame and opinion, secrecy in habit, dissimulation in seasonable use, and a power to feign, if there be no remedy.'57 Though acknowledging dissimulation as part of political strategy, Bacon divorces it from a putatively archetypal politics, full of true words and actions, that may not prevail in human 'arts of state and arts of life': 'Dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy or wisdom, for it asketh a strong wit and a strong heart to know when to tell the truth, and to do it. Therefore it is the weaker sort of politics that are the great dissemblers' (76). No specific examples of strong wits and hearts are provided, despite the endorsement of the inductive approach elsewhere: 'For knowledge drawn freshly and in our view out of particulars, knoweth the way best to particulars. And it hath much greater life for practice when the discourse attendeth upon the example, than when the example attendeth upon the discourse.'58 68

Political Acts Political discourse remains the exceptio o this sort of logic. Instead, the strategic deployment of truth is underlined, with truth becoming a guise prefatory to dissimulation: 'Certainly the ablest men that ever were have had all an openness and frankness of dealing, and a name of certainty and veracity ... and at such times when they thought the case indeed required dissimulation, if they then used it, it came to pass that the former opinion spread abroad of their good faith and clearness of dealing made them almost invisible' (76-7). The equivocal 'name of certainty and veracity' unsettles the openness of 'openness.' The motive of such dealing becomes 'former opinion,' always pre-existing action, deferring recognition, and realizing the mysterious invisibility that Machiavelli sees as both means and culmination of princely power: 'Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are.'59 This weighing of archetypal politics against worldly practice expands upon the Tudor attempt to use essentialist identity to ground a political discourse that cannot be contradicted. The archetypal ethos is never realized or revealed but is introduced as an 'arbitrary stop' to create an ideal politico-personal figure that can always be adduced to justify practice.60 This rhetorical move enables Bacon to describe and use dissimulation in his essay without appearing to condone or be implicated in it, and so illustrates Stanley Fish's notion of Bacon's 'premorality.'6' The avoidance of an immoral position is, however, a precise tactic of ethopoetic power. The 'pre' of premorality, realized through its archetypal reference, is a trope that denies its involvement in power contests, while all the time controlling the rhetoric that represents and conceals political origins and goals. As the 'arbitrary stop,' the sovereign ethos is 'the secret of a discourse that is no longer only ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determinate position of power, the impossibility of a determinate position of discourse.'62 'Of Simulation and Dissimulation' is more politic than Machiavelli's treatise in the sense that it perfects the dissembling tactics Machiavelli recommends, and is inscribed through them. The essay distances itself from its topic by avowing the honourable thematic goal of revealing the truth about dissimulation. In contrast, The Prince admits a deliberate link, 'my intention being to write something of use to those who understand.'63 This confession of intention, which contradicts every dissimulative strategy, fixes the text and its author within univocal moral terms that determine the character of the 'Machiavel' in political and popular discourse during and beyond the sixteenth century. 69

Guise and Disguise In this light, Richard Ill's (and later lago's) continual boasting to the audience of his schemes and deceits - 'I can add colors to the chameleon, / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, / And set the murtherous Machevil to school'; 'And thus I clothe my naked villainy / With odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ / And seem a saint, when most I play the devil'64 - reproduces Machiavelli's blindness to the relatively easy construction of such words as immoral and their use in reinforcing the ideological orthodoxy that he, like Richard III, seems to question and threaten.65 Bacon's essay establishes 'two discursive structures in a single space,'66 one that simulates the ethical ideal it cannot present and one that disguises its inscription of dissimulation. This ambiguous representation exemplifies a political practice whose aim is not simply 'to imitate the fox ... [since] it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well,' that is, to disguise the disguise.67 'Of Simulation and Dissimulation' is an acute exercise of political ethos, since it is organized through the same practice it discusses, dissimulative semiotics. In contrast, The Prince holds up its rejection of a 'classical and medieval political theory [that] had been subordinated to traditional ethics,'68 thereby allowing its re-enclosure in these traditional terms. By effacing the anti-ethical Machiavel, Bacon's essay consummates machiavellian discourse, foreclosing reference to an author and origin of deception and affording the ethopoedc political function an intense mobility. The political ethos is manipulated through a strategy whereby the prince disappears and reappears in the guise of an ideal political and rhetorical persona. In a sense alluded to above, this concealed absence is parallel to the 'disappearance' of the author as we move from Machiavelli to Bacon's text.69 The parallel's appropriateness is due to both the etymology of authority, which recalls the personal-discursive roots of 'character,' and the historical links between the development of the neoclassical author and the absolutist ruler in the early i6oos.7° Later in the seventeenth century, Hobbes elaborates these connections when he considers political ethopoesis in terms of the 'personation' of power, whereby people 'appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person ... And he that carrieth this person, is called SOVEREIGN, and said to have sovereign power, and every one besides, his SUBJECT.'71 Hobbes explains that, in the process of personation, authority usually remains with those represented: Of persons artificial, some have their words and actions owned by those

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Political Acts whom they represent. And then the person is the actor, and he that owneth his words and actions, is the AUTHOR: in which case the actor acteth by authority. (169) For that which the representative doth, as actor, every one of the subjects doth, as author. (193)

In political personation, however, the author-subjects are subjugated to the 'fictional or hypothetical unity of author and actor in the artificial person,'72 and in effect relinquish their personhood for his: 'they that are subject to a monarch, cannot without his leave cast off monarchy ... nor transfer their person from him that beareth it' (178). The cause of this reversal is the monarch's ideal representation, an ideal, Hobbes then suggests, that originates not from the archetypal essence of politics or from the monarch, but from the strength of the dramatistic artifice of the covenant that establishes personation: 'when the authority is evident, the covenant obligeth the author, not the actor; so when the authority is feigned, it obligeth the actor only; there being no author but himself (170). The authoritative self derives from feigned characterization. And as in the case of the royal Tudor bodies, when this character is forged its range of authority is powerfully elastic, expanding through the discourse that established it: 'Reputation of power, is power ... what quality soever maketh a man beloved, or feared of many; or the reputation of such quality, is power' (ii4). 73 Once die political character has been fashioned, it depends on die continuing representation of its ethos - either through simulation of the 'quality,' or dissimulation of 'the reputation of such quality.' Though Hobbes posits a first act of feigning, he imputes no single, original sovereign essence. Instead he lists the kinds of qualities through which this character can be sustained: practical - 'Good success is power'; communal - 'Affability of men already in power, is increase of power'; intellectual - 'Reputation of prudence in the conduct of peace or war, is power'; societal - 'Nobility is power ... where it has privileges'; rhetorical - 'Eloquence is power'; and aesthetic 'Form is power' (115). Ideal power can be characterized only through a sequence of acts that has no initial ethos and finally no end: T put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power' (123). The telos of political acts is a ceaseless encore - 'he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more' (123) - in the attempt to construct an essentialist character where no such archetype exists. 71

Guise and Disguise This ethopolitics is vividly represented through the trope of disguise in the subsequent plays of Shakespeare's second tetralogy. The selfdeferring dramatism of this sovereign rhetoric is underlined. Marie Axton has remarked that in the period, 'As long as men could accept as politically viable a vision of the monarch's two bodies, dramatists were perhaps best equipped to express its subtle complexity ... A dramatist could simultaneously express the ideal and the realities of political power.'74 The suitability and relevance of the drama derive in two key ways. First, the symbolic mode of theatrical performance parallels the covenant between monarch and subjects that establishes the sovereign persona: 'it is only through convention that the spectator takes stage events as standing for something other than themselves.'75 Secondly, as Stephen Orgel notes in regard to the practice of power, 'Theatrical pageantry, the miming of greatness, is highly charged because it employs precisely the same methods the crown was using to assert and validate its authority.'76 Although I will later expand on the implications of the theatre's connection with politics in terms of dramatic and rhetorical performance, we may note the possibility that the inclusion of drama in the 1599 decree was based on it. Rather than perceiving drama as a counterdiscourse to politics, the bishops may have seen it as a generic partner. It is the staging of this partnership that they sought to prevent. Disguise pervades the Henry TV plays, being comically introduced in both parts with Poins's plans to trick Falstaff, first in the woods and then in the tavern. The political usefulness of disguise is initially voiced in Hal's soliloquy, where we also hear the control of biographical time and historical unfolding that Richard II had sought: So when this loose behavior I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men's hopes, And like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. (I.ii.2o8-i5)77

In the first place, Hal's soliloquy is, like Richard Ill's asides, a revelation to the audience of machiavellian 'means of self-authorization.'78 But as Steven Mullaney also notes, the speech reveals 'a prince who plays at prodigality, and means to translate his rather full performance 72

Political Acts into the profession of power.'79 In this sense, Hal's words are addressed to himself and outline a course of action and acting that he will follow without second thoughts until the eve of Agincourt. Yet within this far-sighted scheme of theatrical 'seeming' (2 Henry IV V.ii.129), in fact determining it, is a self-reification, apparent in the reverberating use of the first-person pronoun that evinces Hal's belief in his controlling agency. In these terms, this 'loose behavior,' a guise that can be thrown off at will 'when he please again to be himself (l.ii.aoo), will purposefully misrepresent and be ordered by his princely ethos, a rhetorically controlled split suggested by the opposition 'my word I am.' The speech discloses a political and personal presence similar to that in Elizabeth's remark: 'We princes ... are set on a stage in the sight of all the world.'80 Though seeming to admit dependence on the audience, the queen empowers her backstage self. An intrinsic ethos lies behind the double subject 'We princes,' imputing a royal essence that always precedes and determines her openly staged persona in the manner that James himself commended. Hal's prodigality, commented on by his foes and friends in the play and 'the favorite Elizabethan version of the Prodigal Son story,'81 also functions as an equivocal confession of dependence on and reciprocity with his two audiences, the one in and the one watching the show. Such behaviour works as a type of reverse flattery, encouraging the people to believe in their communal authority over the prince. That Hal 'in one quarter of an hour ... can drink with any tinker in his own language' (Il.iv.i8-i9) is a sign less of his dependence on this folk discourse than of his appropriation of it, by 'incorporating a certain popular vigor within the legitimate body of the state.'82 It is a charismatic ploy that sees the 'lads' bespeak their own subjection in a 'public idiom' that is taken from and returned to them loaded with their own domination: '[they] tell me flatly ... when I am King of England I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap' (lI.iv.n-15).83 In this respect, despite the king's anxieties, Hal is very much heir to one who transfixed the 'desiring eyes' of the people,84 and who in response to the northern rebels echoes, in the following scene, his son's soliloquy: 'I will from henceforth rather be myself (l.iii.5).85 Henry's recurrent concern for Hal's demeanour thus seems misplaced, though his admonitory comments to Hal on his own use of a humble guise further reveal the effectiveness of dissimulation, especially when linked to religion: 'I stole all courtesy from heaven, / And dressed myself in such humility ... Thus did I keep my person fresh and new, / My presence like a robe pontifical' (m.ii.5O-6). In effect, Hal suc73

Guise and Disguise ceeds his father long before Henry dies (twice foreshadowed, when Hal impersonates Henry in Part i II.iv.445-59, and tries on the crown in Part 2 rv.v.41-3), employing a politics of disguise beyond Henry's awareness, as the Earl of Warwick notes: 'The Prince but studies his companions' (Part 2 rv.iv.68). The two parts of Henry TV depict an increasing political, military, and rhetorical exploitation of disguise. It may be seen as dishonourable and then used to accuse others. The man of action Hotspur sneeringly denounces Henry: 'by this face, / This seeming brow of justice, did he win / The hearts of all that he did angle for' (rv.iii.82-4) • Yet Henry himself charges the Shrewsbury rebels with having proclaimed their grievances 'To face the garment of rebellion / With some fine color that may please the eye / Of fickle changelings and poor discontents' (V.i.74-6). Disguise is then starkly presented as the key to political survival in the battle scenes. Douglas slays Blunt, 'Semblably furnish'd like the king himself (V.iii.2i), and later confronts 'the king himself with the bemused 'Another king? they grow like Hydra's heads ... What art thou, / That counterfeit'st the person of a king?' (v.iv.24~9). His words echo the specific question of Henry's legitimacy while also suggesting the more general function of 'counterfeiting' in the exercise of power. In 2 Henry IV, Prince John manipulates his 'princely word' (rv.ii.66) to deceive the rebels. His actions seem to exemplify Poins's earlier sardonic phrase, 'a most princely hypocrite' (II.ii.54-5), but they also win a machiavellian palm: 'Although deceit is detestable in all other things, yet in the conduct of war it is laudable and honorable; and a commander who vanquishes an enemy by stratagem is equally praised with one who gains victory by force.'86 The figures of princely self-fashioning throughout these plays, and in the texts of Machiavelli, Bacon, and Hobbes, disclose the deployment of an equivocal ethos that aims to realize 'a common power, to keep [men] in awe, and to direct their actions to the common benefit' - disguise as hegemonic strategy.87 Now while the revelations of these texts may suggest that they are not wholly absorbed within this ethos, that they stand outside it and recognize its workings, they do not seem to formulate a political process other than that founded on the essentialist political subject. Their position is reflected in Douglas's repeated slaying and unmasking of counterfeits and renewed searching for the 'king himself; he continually confronts and reveals the absence of royal selfhood but remains certain of its ultimate existence. In revealing the ethopoetic manipulation of princely essence, these texts mirror the official production of that character, and in duplicat74

Political Acts ing 'precisely the same methods' of realizing power, as Orgel puts it, they remain circumscribed within and contribute to the 'cunning power' of a naturalized political discourse by recycling its key ethopoetic tropes.88 These works' references to history recycle the essentialist presumptions of royal ethopoesis. The figures and actions from the past that fill the texts of Machiavelli, Bacon, and Shakespeare's can be used to judge or analyse the present, as the bishops no doubt suspected in !599-89 At the same time, however, the historical dramatization and reference effect a process of 'idealist mimesis' crucial to political discourse,90 and sustain its impact upon audiences being subjected to history through the restaging of events and characters that had realized power and now do so again. When the chorus of Henry V summons 'A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene' (I Pro 3-4), recalls France, Southampton, Harflew, and Callice, and asks that the audience suspend disbelief 'For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings' (I Pro 28), 'eche out our performance with your mind' (ill Cho 35) - in addition to rehearsing the scenes and locations of history and revealing the monarch's dependence on the dramatistic covenant, the play reproduces Elizabeth's and James's royal strategy of praising the audience's creative power, beguiling the audience to participate in the 'imaginary puissance' of the royal person (I Pro 25). Such willing participation applies the lessons of the past to the present and sets up their future service. As Hobbes was aware, and the group dynamic of a theatre audience suggests, such consent is highly contagious: 'For where a man seeth another worshipped, he supposeth him powerful, and is the readier to obey him; which makes his power greater.'91 The dramatistic political ethos thus seeks to limit the possibilities of opposition, by anticipating and enclosing them in a completed historical drama. The official alternations from essentialist to disguised character disarm the revelations of theatrical power made by the texts we have considered. It is where the ideal mimesis underlying political characterization is deliberately not used, where the character of history is revised and Sir John Oldcastle makes way for Falstaff, that a genre which interrogates politics more powerfully, through rhetoric less easily enclosed, comes into play.92 Although Hal's rejection of Falstaff is foreshadowed in his first soliloquy, it responds to rather than simply recognizes the knight's satirical guise as a challenge to any ethopoesis. With the dismissal, the new king attempts to regain control of the discourse of character by de-realizing Falstaff and recreating himself and 75

Guise and Disguise his personal history in his own essentialist image: 'I know thee not, old man ... I have long dreamt of such a kind of man ... Presume not that I am the thing I was ... I have turn'd away my former self (V.v.4758) ,93 This kingly reformation biographically parallels the historical and politico-theological strategies employed by Tudor sovereigns and lawyers - hence Hal's reliance on the Lord Chief Justice (who himself refers to the doctrine of the 'second body' at V.ii.QO). Falstaff s exaggerated performances, in which he plays both Henry IV and Hal as mouthpieces of his own worth, parody self-enactment as a means of gaining power. On the one hand, as Terry Eagleton notes, 'Falstaff is in one sense an indifferent actor, playing only himself, at ease within his own voluminous space and incapable of deferring or dissembling his appetites.'94 His physical!ty seems apolitical, the absolute materiality of all his personae precluding the expedient use of artificial identities. On the other hand, his language revels in its hyperbolic falseness and ham theatricality - 'sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff (Part 1 Il.iv.475-6) - and deliberately magnifies the dissimulations of political self-fashioning until they cannot be disguised. In this view, Falstaff embodies a carnivalesque critique of the traditional ideologies of political identity and the essentialist control of Hal's 'formal majesty' (Part 2 V.ii.133). Just as he reduces the concept of honour, first to an empty verbal sign - 'What is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air' (Part i V.i.133-5) - then to a visual sign of death 'honor is a mere scutcheon' (140) - so Falstaff disrupts politics by revealing the dissemblance of selfhood and the fictivenenss of the historical image. Where politics tries to represent itself as a traditional discourse of archetypal character, Falstaff exposes a body politic built on the sophistic powers of 'sherris-sack ... deliver'd o'er to the voice, the tongue ... the face ... and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits,' powers that override any royal inheritance of 'cold blood' (Part 2 rv.iii.96-125). Even in the scene of his rejection, Falstaff is unable not to see Hal's words as 'but a color' (V.v.86), a political trope that inevitably separates meaning from form. The transformation from historical to satirical characterization discloses this separation. By generically re-presenting political acts without changing their content, this shift challenges the politicization of discourse through its own signs and topoi. The Praise of Folly provides a significant model of this rhetorical process. At one point Folly opines that no prince can assume the full responsibilities of his position - 'he would neither be able to rest nor eat with any security or serenity.'95 76

Political Acts Her words anticipate James I's, Henry rv's, and Prince Hal's complaints about the burdens of sleepless power. Unlike these self-justifying complaints, Folly's remarks lead away from the prince's sufferings to note his compensatory actions, performed 'in due form under various official titles so that even though unjust they will seem to have some appearance of justness' (154). Rather than lamenting the 'hard condition / Twin-born with greatness' as does Henry V (iv.i.233-4), Folly suggests that the trope of the two bodies is exploited for personal satisfaction under the guise of 'various official titles,' the sort of expedient fusion of ethos and power, selfhood and state, that echoes in the triumphant political romancing of Henry V: 'for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine. And, Kate, when France is mine and I am yours, then yours is France and you are mine' (V.ii.173-6).96 Folly continues the satirical line by reviewing the signs of power. She portrays the prince amidst the key emblems of rule: Now first seat him on a golden chair, the chair symbolizing the union of all the virtues; next give him a crown adorned with precious gems, this symbolizing that he ought to surpass all others in every heroic quality. In addition to these hand him a scepter, an emblem of justice and of a devoted heart and soul; and last of all place on him a scarlet robe, symbolizing the love and fervent respect that he ought to have for the realm. If any prince would try to uphold these symbols, even if it meant giving up his life, then I am sure he would have the honor to be ashamed of his depravity. (155)

Royal presence threatens itself by being unable to 'uphold these symbols.' The props used to stage political acts reveal the same reliance on representation that is the key motif in interrogations of royal presence. In generic terms, the traditional rhetoric of power confronts the satirical reaccentuation of its tropes of dissimulation and disguise, an inversion of essentialist ethos that historical mimesis cannot depict.97 As Folly notes, the encrowned and enthroned prince whom she has just portrayed now anxiously turns to those very adornments: 'He would fear that some satirist might turn this whole solemn affair into ridicule and sarcasm' (155). The satirist would 'turn' or trope the rhetoric of political selfhood by revealing its covert dialogism. The 'solemn affair' is neither opposed from a perspective outside its representations nor questioned from the controlled viewpoint of a royal soliloquy, but subverted 77

Guise and Disguise through the imaginary reference of its own rhetoric and display. In Bakhtin's terms, authority is disturbed by an 'internal dialogization' and 'internally undecided and two-faced' discourse that forestall the effects of any censorship.98 The discontinuous semiotics that articulates and guarantees essentialist authority, surveyed above in numerous sixteenth-century versions - the king's two bodies, royal theatricality, historical drama - simultaneously generates the potential undermining of sovereign selfhood. The endless quest for and representation of power that Hobbes recognizes as the fate of the powerful is the endless opportunity for power's satirical, dialogic subversion. Hence the impossibility of banning discursive opposition through political decree. In the first place, opposition responds through generic and sub-generic transplants, from history to 'disguised ruler' plays, from printed verse to drama, that skirt around the decree." Proclamations like that of 1599 are thus belated, in inception and application. They respond to texts and performances already in circulation, while the introduction of revised laws suggests the failure to anticipate adaptations. Secondly, and more significantly, is that to proscribe drama, history, and satire, politics would have to outlaw its own discourse, which is interwoven with these countergenres. And as The Praise of Folly suggests, the textual contact is concentrated at the 'nodal points' of political discourse, the tropes of representation and disguise that construct the royal character.100 Like drama and history, satire reproduces political discourse, but in doing so disrupts its naturalized structure. Satire is, as it were, power's semiotic other, repressed by authoritative discourses as they construct themselves, and thus always verging on revealing itself from within and rupturing the official line. As Ronald Paulson's definition suggests, satire quite precisely matches power's symbolic acrobatics: 'Being a rhetorical form, satire invariably engages in casuistry and inconsistency - often at the expense of the coherence of its fiction. The significant characteristic of the satiric symbol is its flexibility.'101 Satire exposes and questions the ethopoetic idealism that determines political rhetoric. The mirror stage of Richard II thus aptly symbolizes the dialogism that links power and its countergenres. The royal command that renounces authority exemplifies the self-subversion of political essentialism, a process that develops and intensifies as the ideal reference to historical figures and the synthesis of personae in the history plays of the late 15905 move towards the reaccentuations of satire in the early years of the seventeenth century. It is the function and 78

Political Acts structure of this dialogic ethos, resounding through both the traditional rhetoric of the royal speaker and the immediate social context of the change in monarchs, that John Mars ton's play The Malcontent represents. .

V Marston's career as a writer intersects repeatedly with the attempts of Elizabethan and Jacobean authorities to constrain dramatic and satirical works. He is noted for his run-ins with other authors, especially Joseph Hall and Ben Jonson, as well as with officials. His satires were publicly burnt in 1599, and he fled imprisonment for his share in the writing of Eastward Ho. On the basis of a note in the Privy Council Register for 8 June 1608, John Marston committed to Newgate,' Chambers speculates that he was the author of a lost play satirizing James that caused controversy in that year.102 Marston then disappears from the historical record until 1616, when he re-emerges as a clergyman in Hampshire. That his renegade career as an author ends so respectably - a small version, in English literature and religion, of Donne's life - suggests the ongoing negotiations between censured and official discourses and characters. In a poem praising his own Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image, Marston announces himself as 'a barking satirist,' who will turn his eye upon 'This Janian bifront, Hypocrisy.'103 This focus continues in the disguised-ruler plays he writes after the decree against printed satires - Antonio and Mellida, Antonio's Revenge, The Malcontent, and The Fawn. In these plays the attack on courtly pretension and hypocrisy, 'The giddy sea of humour,'104 is deepened by its reference to the ruling figures themselves, who comprise a range of incompetents, usurpers, and princes, striving to seize or retain power. The general relation between these characters and the discourse of political selfhood can be gleaned from the fate of Duke Andrugio in Antonio and Mellida. Having lost his throne to a machiavellian rival, he is bereft of country, people, and heir, and is left lamenting the impotent body natural: 'There's nothing left / Unto Andrugio, but Andrugio' (HI.i.59-6o). The Malcontent was registered in the first year of James's reign, with three quartos appearing in 1604. It was probably written in 1603, and its tone is informed not only by Marston's background as a writer of revels at the Inns of Court and a satirical poet105 but by the social uncertainty prompted by Elizabeth's death and her successor's very different accession to the throne. James's arrival seemed marked by

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Guise and Disguise negative signs - an outbreak of plague, his unwillingness to appear in public, the influx of Scottish courtiers, and an extravagant foreign queen.106 The spread of anticourt feeling (as well as professional rivalry with the 'little eyases') motivated the stealing of the play by the King's Men from the Children of the Queen's Revels. The social satire enjoyed by private audiences at Blackfriars was winning wider popularity, and Marston took the opportunity of the new production to add substantially to the text.107 These factors - from the writer's past career to the change in sovereign to changes in the script - suggest a network of the kind of motives that underlie the meanings of literary texts. Appearing in the 'early years of James's reign ... when satire and censorship are jockeying for a new relationship,'108 The Malcontent is a dense field in which the values, rhetoric, and genres of Renaissance ethopolitics interact. The central character is the disguised Malevole/Altofronto, the satirist-prince. Unlike the detached observer-speaker of verse satire, here the satirist is totally involved in the action, the chief intriguer. The practical effects of satire are foregrounded, for while Malevole at times speaks as the conventional satyr-satirist, 'his railing now has an added function: it not only opens up moral infection but becomes the instrument which Altofronto uses to regain his dukedom.'109 The play depicts the dialogic movement between satiric and political discourses, the hinge between them being the double character Malevole/Altofronto, and the consequences of such movement. On the one hand, Malevole's doubleness illustrates the role-playing open to all speakers, who join and leave various scenes, employing different registers in accord with context and audience. As court malcontent, 'a Lord of Misrule authorized to castigate the Duke and his courtiers,"10 Malevole has access to many different scenes, from the bawdy to the conspiratorial, and yet is anchored in none of them - 'the disguised figure can gaze on the state from a position outside of the social matrix.'111 The character's verbal flexibility and range are further extended by the Altofronto persona, who speaks in tones of deep sincerity to himself and to the faithful Lord Celso, and seems to establish the ethical and discursive norms against which the c rtly and satirical rhetorics are distinguished. On the other hand, Malevole's doubleness discloses the specific interaction between politics and satire. Through his disguise, the theatrical ploy that generates the double character, the malcontent embodies the dissimulation through which these discourses intersect. He characterizes the nucleus of a deep concern with the essentialism 80

Political Acts and subversion of authority that the latter's dependence on rhetoric entails. The play continually emphasizes the importance of language in fashioning a persona that can be used to hold and win power and yet questions both the authenticity of such an ethos and the legitimacy of its rule. In the world of The Malcontent, 'satire becomes a potent political weapon' whose power is both admired and suspected.112 Having adopted the malcontent disguise after a lack of dissimulation had led to his deposition, Malevole recreates a historically righteous and intrinsic ethos, which he uses to support and justify his actions. He admits that 'I wanted those old instruments of state / Dissemblance and suspect' (I.i.221-2), an inability to dissemble and perceive dissemblance in others. The reasoning anticipates Prospero's recollections in The Tempest, 'neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of my mind' (l.ii.Scj-o/o). Both figures construe their former political naivety as virtue: 'so slept in fearless virtue, / Suspectless, too suspectless' (Malcontent l.i.225-6); 'my trust ... had indeed no limit, / A confidence sans bound' (Tempest 1.11.96-7); both blame their falls on a rival who joins with a powerful neighbour to overthrow them; and both ignore their complicity in their depositions, the situations of unrest their inattention fostered. Like the grievances over the sleepless burdens of kingship, the complaints of Altofronto and Prospero represent a self-justifying trope of the rectitude of fallen power. A mixture of political and moral values, it typifies the displacement of machiavellianism onto one's opponents, recommended by Bacon, and is realized by rewriting the political and personal past. Malevole's disguise can then work, like Prospero's magic, as a means of asserting a historically legitimate power even while deposed: Well, this disguise doth yet afford me that Which kings do seldom hear, or great men use, Free speech: and though my state's usurp'd, Yet this affected strain gives me a tongue As fetterless as in an emperor's. (I.i.201-5) He operates through a mode of speech whose idiosyncrasy at first seems to limit it to an excessive personality: This Malevole is one of the most prodigious affections that ever conversed with nature ... The elements struggle within him; his own soul is at variance within herself (1.1.25-36). But the eccentric idiom is another layer of his disguise, T may speak foolishly, ay, knavishly, / Always carelessly, yet no one thinks it fashion / To poise my breath' (l.i.206-8). Malevole's speech con-

Si

Guise and Disguise nects the personal and the political, while concealing their connection. His railing has simultaneous effects, venting frustration, deepening dissemblance, furthering political goals. The exaggerated demeanour is never apolitical but enshrouds his persona all the more impenetrably with the mystery and secrecy that James I holds as essential in the Basilicon, what Franco Moretti calls 'the arcanum imperil of disguise.'113 With diis princely rhetoric, Malevole can uphold official power, attack its deviant forms, and inscribe its idealized past. As Bacon discusses in the essay on dissimulation, Malevole links himself to an archetypal realm of pure politics in order to represent his righteousness. He condemns the present and, by using ideal images of history, depicts a golden age, personified by Altofronto and his confidant Celso, 'in whose hands old Ops may put her soul' (I.i.2i8). Altofronto's lack of temporal skills - 'I could not time it, Celso' (l.i.222) - becomes a gesture towards 'the ideal of every restoration culture: to abolish the irreversibility of history and render the past everlasting.'114 Contrasted to this historical idealization, and so assuring its continued reference, is the current court with its 'atmosphere of overpowering, nearly irresistible corruption.'115 In Malevole's view, sexual immorality exemplifies Genoa's fallen political state. Mendoza 'broad-horns the duke' (l.i.249), while Maquerelle advises the ladies on sexual potions and allurements and organizes a new lover for the duchess Aurelia. Rather than simply offending Altofronto's ethical norms, her lectures on the importance of appearance — 'believe me, preserve and use your beauty' (II.iii.42) - adapt Malevole's lessons on disguise to sexual politics. This connection is again raised when Mendoza plans to wed Altofronto's surviving wife, to consolidate his position by substituting himself sexually as well as politically for his rival: 'her friends might strengthen me and my faction ... wise men do love great women, to ennoble their blood and augment their revenue' (111.1.310-15). However, this Ops to Altofronto's Saturn, the 'true-faith'd duchess' Maria (I.i.236), resists Maquerelle's and Malevole's offers on behalf of Mendoza (V.ii.97-129). She too is a nostalgic figure of a mythic past of sexual, moral, and political constancy. Mendoza denounces the scheming ways of women after Aurelia, another rival's wife, rejects him. He displaces his own machiavellianism - made clear, as in Shakespeare's early plays, through numerous asides such as 'Who cannot feign friendship can ne'er produce the effects of hatred' (l.ii.183-4) - onto those 'mistresses in dissembling, only con-

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Political Acts stant in unconstancy, only perfect in counterfeiting: their words are feigned, their eyes forged, their sighs dissembled' (l.ii.94-7). The anxieties caused by political rivalries and dissemblings are repeatedly transferred to fears of women's sexuality. Misogyny functions as a political topos - it goes back, for example, to Aristotle's criticisms of Spartan women - that excuses and defends masculine power.116 In a type of reverse sublimation, men's sexual susceptibility to women displaces vulnerability to the power of their own dissimulations. The political system partly preserves itself by externalizing and blaming its internal threats on women, reifying political personae as an essential maleness. Malevole's disgust with die court's women, a typical trait of the malcontent character, reinforces his conservative place within a patriarchal politics.117 The dangers of politics are also suggested in The Malcontent by the image of the wheel of fortune. Malevole introduces it as a veiled warning to Mendoza, who ignores him: 'No vulgar seed but once may rise and shall; / No king so huge but 'fore he die may fall' (1.1.323-4). He later uses it again to explain the reappearance of Altofronto before the previous usurper, Pietro: 'He needs must rise who can no lower fall ... wonder not I rise; / For who can sink diat close can temporise?' (rv.ii. 173-7). The final question explicitly contrasts the wheel to political skill and disguise, fortuna versus virtu, yet neither is unambiguously dominant. Political success and failure remain unpredictable in all aspects except their inevitable inversion. Finally, Maquerelle connects the image to the play's sexual politics: 'we women always note, the falling of the one is the rising of the other' (V.ii.42-3). Her sarcasm reduces the portentousness of Malevole's couplets. These images of fortune and sex represent a deeper systemic inconstancy. Despite their scheming, Pietro and Mendoza fall victim to Malevole, just as Altofronto had to them. This repetitive structure of political failure picks up the recurrent theme of Shakespeare's histories and tragedies. In relation to the politics of ethopoesis, it suggests the ever-present risk of the prince's lapse into an imaginary conception of power and selfhood. Mendoza's dreamlike response to his own deposition exemplifies this self-induced fall: 'do I dream? or have I dreamt / This two days' space? where am I?' (V.iii.iGi—2). Such uncertainty results from the split ethos that underlies and generates political power but that cannot always be controlled. The prince may lose track of his own dissimulations and, like his opponents and subjects, take his persona for himself. Malevole and Altofronto concentrate this instability in their 'personal' discontinuities, which depict the always-dissolving

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Guise and Disguise unity of political discourse and selfhood. This uncontrolled process derives from sovereign power's basis in naturalized disguise. Marston's malcontent thus embodies the intersection of two contradictory ethopolitical messages: a historical invocation of past sovereignty, that includes a denunciation of the licentious present; and a contemporary discourse of dissembling. In his role as satirist, Malevole attacks the second message through the first. Altofronto believes that this is all he does, and that he can finally restore the pristine message and the character it articulates for him: 'And as for me, I here assume my right, / To which I hope all's pleas'd' (V.iii.2io-i i). Yet Malevole complicates and unmasks the limits of this idealism by having deceptively used it to regain political power. Like the history or drama of power, the satire of power is an ambiguous genitive that registers contradictory meanings. Satire is not always simply opposed to power but can function in more complex dialogical relations, first to win dominance, as does Malevole, and then to question the power it has gained. Satire becomes the discursive double of sovereign power, undermining as it recalls the premise of an unequivocal word spoken from a single source, and subverting the political idealism towards which it gestures. In addition to reflecting the discursive acrobatics of power, satire also shares with politics a reliance on an ethopoetic ideal. 'For the satirist especially, the establishment of an authoritative ethos is imperative.'118 In both cases the 'imperative' guise leads to discursive imperium. This awareness of the satirist's dramatic ethos was prominent in Renaissance conceptions of satire, which traced the genre back to the vetus comoedia and expected it to display rhetorical conformity between character and speech.119 Malevole presents himself as the standard Elizabethan satyr-satirist, his opening words attacking the conventional targets of the church, the court, 'common actions, flattery and cozenage; common things, women and cuckolds' (I.i.6i-2). Initially, he continues the satirical persona Marston had used in his poetry, adopting an antisocial stance, fashioning himself by his opposition to immorality.120 Yet as Alvin Kernan notes, the Elizabethans were also aware of the satirist's attraction to his targets, manifested in his exaggerations and tormenting of them, which Malevole also exemplifies when he informs and then mocks Pietro about his cuckoldry (l.i.nSff), or urges Altofronto's duchess to marry Mendoza (V.ii.97129).121 In these cases, the malcontent deliberately threatens the moral and political ideals whose restoration he seeks. The personal dimension of this contradiction lies in Malevole's conflictual desire to 84

Political Acts see Altofronto's faith in his wife dashed as she accepts Mendoza's offer. The prince would foster 'immorality,' like Vincentio in Measure for Measure, in order to justify its wider denunciation and suppression.122 Malevole soon reveals that the tormenting of others is part of a larger plan of vengeance and social control; for his targets, The heart's disquiet is revenge most deep' (l.i.igS). He uses his disguise to alter the self-conceptions of others and to instil authority within the communal ethos. The satiric persona does not extricate him from the political scene but is his means of engaging with it through manipulating his disguise or, as the stage directions put it, 'shifteth his speech' (l.i.255): 'I find the wind begins to come about; / I'll shift my suit of fortune' (lll.i.228-9). The malcontent guise constructs Malevole's fate. His longest burst of satirical railing is aimed not against politics in itself but against the immorality of Pietro, who still has thoughts of regaining his position from Mendoza (iV.ii. 139-53). Pietro's subsequent resignation of his claim enables Malevole to use him as an ally in his own cause. Familiar antipolitical topoi - 'man is the slime of this dungpit, and princes are the governors of these men ... there goes but a pair of shears betwixt an emperor and the son of a bagpiper' (iv.ii. 145-9) - create political opportunities. The frequently noted conflict between Malevole's two roles doesn't so much challenge the satirist's ethos as disclose the ambiguous identity at the centre of political practice. Critical perceptions that 'Altofronto acts the part so well that it appears natural to him; it is not all impersonation,'123 while assigning Marston a vision of the world as stage, tend to efface the play's ideological connections to the dissimulative process of power. To interpret Malevole in terms of selfparadox, self-dramatization, or self-cancellation may efface the play's representation of the politics of selfhood.124 Malevole himself seems on occasion to sense a human emptiness that inheres in his roleplaying; yet unlike many psychologically oriented critics, he promptly recalls its practical usefulness: 'O God, how loathsome this toying is to me! that a duke should be forced to fool it... better play the fool lord than be the fool lord' (v.ii. 139-42). The Malcontent thus represents the political stakes of ethopoetic rhetoric and the theatrical process of politics. In the closing scenes, Malevole regains power through intensifying his performances, deferring princely essence in order to realize it. Emphasizing his satyrsatirist role he removes any likely opposition from Pietro; pretending to die in front of Mendoza, he increases the latter's hubris. Finally, 85

Guise and Disguise Malevole exploits and rewrites Mendoza's celebratory masque to gather his allies for the deposition. In addition, the deliberate lapses in Malevole's role-playing are just as effective as these intensifications. Stephen Greenblatt has noted that sovereigns' theatricality has a double effect: in displaying their power it also 'draw[s] their audience toward an acceptance of that power.'125 A break in performance can be equally effective. When Malevole lets his disguise fall to reveal Altofronto, he legitimizes his right to power for both his audience in the play - Celso, Pietro, and Ferneze - and the audience of the play. Like the speeches of Hal or the Chorus of Henry V, his asides and soliloquies are politic set pieces that win him the audience's support and undermine the views of the other characters. Hence the observation 'Armed with the knowledge that the duke is deceiving the other characters until a moment propitious for his undisguising, the audience anticipates the punishment of the immoral characters even as they parade their folly and wickedness'126 ignores the manipulation that is being exercised. It is less that the audience is 'armed' or empowered by Malevole than that such admissions represent the process by which the charismatic prince gains support. As Weber writes, 'he does not derive his "right" from their will, in the manner of an election. Rather, the reverse holds: it is the duty of those to whom he addresses his mission to recognize him as their charismatically qualified leader.'127 These glimpses of the 'real' Altofronto crystallize this recognition and set up our interpretive 'duty.' Malevole's unmasking quickly leads to his restoration. It seems to signify an absolute end of theatricality and the re-emergence of a historical politics in a similar way to Prospero's renunciation of 'rough magic' (Tempest V.i.5O). As in Shakespeare's play, the absence of gruesome punishments for offenders generates a comic ending; Altfronto tells Mendoza, 'I scorn to hurt thee' (V.iii.i76), eschewing power's symbolic modes of discipline. He subordinates theatricality to a political and moral 'reality.' No longer ignorant of dramatic effect - 'th' inconstant people / Love many princes merely for their faces / And outward shows' (V.iii. 186-8) - he controls it from the assured vantage point of legitimate authority. Having passed sentence on the chief offenders, he dismisses the other courtly flatterers - 'The rest of idle actors idly part' (V.iii.aog) - and reclaims not his part but his 'right.' The resolution seems to re-establish moral, sexual, and political order, removing the need for Malevole's satiric attacks, reuniting Altofronto and Maria, and replacing authority in its position of historical righteousness.

128

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Political Acts In short, Altofronto's ethopoetic power asserts itself absolutely, controlling internal disruption and censoring other viewpoints. This sort of interpretation of the play's ending dutifully echoes the ideology of restored power: 'Malevole's sudden seizure of power and rapid restitution of order renders the preceding events of the play into shadowy illusions.'129 A strict dichotomy between authority and illusion is reimposed, one that decrees the insubstantiality of any challenge to its version of events, an official revision of history that sanctions and orders Altofronto's two bodies while publicly putting an end to the politics of dissemblance. Although it heralds the return of ideal politics, the conclusion of the play also suggests the continued deployment of disguise. This occurs in two manoeuvres: first, as an accusatory strategy, Altofronto locates disguise wholly within the deeds of the others; second, in his open repudiation of disguise, Malevole conceals his use of it. The unmasking is quickly enacted with no further reference to it; the suggestion is that what was used to regain power couldn't have been disguise because now it's all revealed. The ending not only justifies the means but reinterprets them, preparing for the further use of dissimulation in the guise of openness. Spurning the deceptions of disguise as ignoble and illegitimate, Altofronto reappropriates access to an archetypal ethos. The words that renounce one guise - T here assume my right' — surreptitiously whisper the donning of another - a persona based on the truth and essence of sovereign 'right.' Such sceptical implications in the play's conclusion did not go completely unheard by Jacobean authorities. Philip Finkelpearl notes that, in the third quarto of 1604, the political allusion of Altofronto's lines 'th' inconstant people / Love many princes merely for their faces / And outward shows' (V.iii. 186-8) was generalized, 'princes' being changed to 'men.' This alteration has effects that have been recapitulated by many interpretations of The Malcontent, as ideological significance is generalized into moral philosophy and the charismatic process of the legitimation of power is hidden. The censoring of Marston's play reveals both an official power over discourse, to disguise it in ethical and hegemonic terms, and the limits of this power. For the alteration also records royal concern over criticism of its rule, and suggests the uncertainty of a power that, in its very assertion through censorship, reveals its acute awareness of oppositional views/30 The play's rapid closure seems to assure the efficacy of Altofronto's action, by de-satirizing the political text and reifying the political persona in the same way that Hal's abrupt dismissal of Falstaff does. 8?

Guise and Disguise The dramatic ending is then supplemented by an 'Imperfect Ode,' which, in warning against over-ingenious intepretations - 'too nicebrained cunning' - simulates the official voice, impersonating the presence of the author Marston as a chastened function of authority.131 Despite this warning, the emerging concern of the ode is not that the play will be recognized as satirically critical by opponents of authority but that it will be so interpreted by authority itself: 'Immodest censure now grows wild, / All over-running.' It ends by emphasizing the inevitable satire in the play's subject matter, beyond the intention of any author, unavoidably inherent in the most 'chaste' inscription by 'a pen / Which still must write of fools, whiles't writes of men.' The 'immodest censure' that would change 'princes' to 'men' now rewrites 'men' as 'princes,' through its own rules of synonymy, impelling the text once more towards satire. The Malcontent depicts a sequence of transfers of power to different members of an aristocratic class. Despite the process of metonymic substitutions, its conclusion implies that power returns to its proper place and person. This result would be realized through an ideal figure who defines the essential relationships among the other characters, reaffirming social and sexual order. The connection between the play's structure and the restoration of official power also informs the prefatory To the Reader,' which beseeches us not to look 'maliciously' for precise political criticisms. The play is aimed not against the status quo but against those who would contemn 'established unity.' It is a social 'comedy' that 'may modestly pass with the freedom of a satire.'132 Such a generic interpretation of the play sounds ironically if satire is illegal, as after the 1599 decree, when to 'pass with the freedom of a satire' officially means to have no social passage or circulation. In this situation, the 'freedom of a satire' suggests at most an allowed liberty, a muted form that signifies power. Yet the freedom of satire ambiguously suggests a discourse that, in the guise of conformity, evades restraint and questions the sanctioned form and content. The missed target of authority's censure, satire's double voice represents the lack of finality of political acts. The genre's ambiguous deference to authority is reflected by Malevole's use of disguise, which disrupts as it achieves Altofronto's restoration, revealing that the play's ending is not a final step but the beginning of an ethopolitical process that must be continually maintained. Royal disguise undermines its own authority, usurping essentialism through a 'perpetual and restless desire' for power that precludes its own fulfilment. But this unending desire, concealed and 88

Political Acts disguised as the realization of rule, is recognized only after power and persona are lost: 'Thus play I in one person many people, / And none contented,' observes the deposed Richard II (V.v.gi-a). The dualistic rhetoric of the royal person fragments the archetypal political 'I.' Appearing within a year of change in the gender and person of the English monarch's body natural, and with the consequent pressure upon the social rhetoric of the body politic, Marston's discourse of the satirist-king unmasks the historical, sexual, and political mysteries of princely ethos.

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Chapter Three

The Allegorical Subject

There are many different forms of this ruler-ruled relationship, and the quality of the rule depends on the quality of the subjects ... Aristotle The Politics

I do profess to be no less than I seem. King Lear l.iv.12

I In an essentialist perspective, an ideal self originates ethopoesis. Character traits are signs of this original presence, but they may also intimate a gap between the self and the roles it plays in social contexts. Even an archetype of imperial ethos can be suspect, as the prologue to Marlowe's The Jew of Malta suggests: 'What right had Caesar to the empire? / Might first made kings' (14-15). If the circumstances of 'might' rather than inherent qualities of 'right' produce rule, the double nature of sovereignty, the 'king's two bodies,' can be adduced. During the Renaissance, and as discussed in the previous chapter, sovereignty is often conceived as a model of essentialist selfhood and then contemplated from various angles to see what it shows about such an ethos. A recurring question throughout Hamlet is whether the prince's archetypal self has been lost - 'O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! ... Th' expectation and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form' (m.i. 150-3). The play finally suggests, to a possibly sceptical audience, its eventual restoration at least as an unrealized ideal: 'he was likely, had he been put on, / To have prov'd most royal' (v.ii.397-8). Measure for Measure tests princely essence by holding Angelo, and by implication Vincentio himself, up

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Guise and Disguise against an archetypal duke: 'What figure of us think you he will bear?' (l.i.lG). The Malcontent combines these two approaches, presenting a number of contenders for the throne - Altofronto, Pietro, Mendoza who are tried, found lacking, and superseded by the double, disguised figure of the satirist-prince. These representations of essentialist selfhood have two implications for the period's understanding of the structure and processes of identity. First, the original ethos is seen as ambiguously detached from a power whose exercise, through theatricality and dissemblance, contradicts its source.1 Secondly, what could be called the teleology of disguise is re-evaluated. Complementing the essentialist premise is the presupposition that a disguise such as Malevole's is goal-directed and, like Prince Hal's 'purposed noble change,'2 leads to an ultimate revelation of the royal self- ethos as ideal origin and end. Rather than unequivocally endorsing such idealism, these texts inquire whether the goal of princely disguise can be eventually realized or whether it is continually deferred through an ethopolitical paradox of 'imaginary puissance' where, taking up the Lacanian line, 'To "master" the self, to understand it, would be to realize its falsity, and therefore the impossibility of coinciding with one's self.' The goal of sovereign selfhood would infinitely recede.3 The questions regarding this ideological view reveal that character is conceived not only in terms of the presence or absence of an archetypal ethos but also in relation to a target identity that might be envisaged as happily attainable or regrettably out of reach, as troublingly unapparent or ignored without concern, as disconcertingly or soothingly lost. In any case, following the law of 'imaginary puissance,' it would seem that such a target is not simply attained at the right moment, as Hal and Malevole presume. While the guises used by Renaissance royalty are ideally structured through archetypal and teleological images of selfhood, these selves and the essential confidence they afford are not always available to all persons. Instead, identity becomes part of an uncertain process of characterization that lacks both an ideal origin and an end. The ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel calls this kind of process 'passing.'4 Although he examines passing specifically in relation to an 'intersexed' figure, Garfinkel's observations seem relevant to a range of social and personal situations in which the paradigms of character performance are unclear: 'In the conduct of her everyday affairs [Agnes] had to choose among alternative courses of action even though the goal that she was trying to achieve was most frequently not 92

The Allegorical Subject clear to her prior to her having to take the actions whereby some goal might in the end have been realized' (184). Unable to aspire towards a definite goal of selfhood, someone in Agnes's situation (though not necessarily intersexed) can construct one 'only over the course of the actual interaction, as a function of actual participation, and by accepting the risks involved' (146). The risks and uncertainties of passing suggest new facets of the ethopoetic process and three crucial aspects of Renaissance rhetorics of character: i) While feeling that they are ideologically oriented, passers may not know whether they've arrived till they're there, and they might never know; character can't always be thought of in the past tense. 2) Aimed at realizing a chosen social status, character is an interactive, interpersonal process, 'a contingent, practical accomplishment ... produced in concert with others,' that uses observation and mimesis. 3) Passers develop a persona that they suppose matches their goal in order to gain that goal; therefore while it's important to choose models who fulfil and depict the chosen character, passers can't always be sure they have chosen such models and their actions will often involve conscious gambles.5 In contrast to the essentialist dissimulations of sovereignty, passing is represented by many Renaissance texts in terms of subjection - a risky, ongoing practice where obedience to the monarch is the cultural norm against which character is evaluated. A subject can never become king, yet he or she may attain a status that signifies a certain socially placed identity, or a personally acceptable one,- or both. Such an identity is always marked by the possibility of its loss — the fall from grace, the change of patron, the emergence of a new favourite or rival. This range of social and personal interactions is played out between the poles of obedience and conformity, rebellion and exposure, as subjects attempt, through various strategies of dissimulation, to negotiate and improve their social situations. Subjection is figured in these terms in such Renaissance works as Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, Puttenham's rhetoric, TheArte of English Poesie, and the courtly texts of a writer like John Lyly. In these texts and others, subjection is depicted as a mode of selfhood that seeks to anticipate the ideological demands of the social order by constructing flexible rhetorics of selffashioning. In many aspects of these rhetorics, figures of disguise have a central function, through enabling the subject to manipulate the terms of his or her submission. By first considering the structure of obedience and the ethopoetic constraints and norms it attempts to impose, the discourse of subjection and the social scope it affords can 93

Guise and Disguise be examined. Through rhetorical strategies of passing, the subject portrays images of selfhood that may mirror and distort the official order of identity. II

In the address to the reader in the Basilicon Doron, James I articulates a doctrine of subjection whose key motif is the power of perception. James warns 'all godlie and honest men, to be very warie in all their secretest actions ... since the deepest of our secrets, can not be hid from that al-seeing eye, and penetrant light, pearcing through the bowles of verie darknesse it selfe' (12). The king, who is himself subject to a higher vision, provides a model of obedient subjection and of the empowered sight that enforces subjection upon others. He is a figure to be observed, imitated, and obeyed.6 Elizabeth summed up her own reign in similar terms in her last speech to Parliament, suggesting through a religious reference the final relativity of power: 'in my governing this land, I have ever set the last Judgement Day before mine eyes, and so to rule, as I shall be Judged and answer before a higher Judge.'7 This double function reveals the sovereign's identity with and against the people, able to exemplify or compel obedience, and, perhaps most conveniently for the prince, to do both at once. Such was the sovereign model offered to Renaissance monarchs by Cyrus, who 'acquired the so-called "king's eyes" and "king's ears" in no other way than by bestowing presents and honours ... and people are everywhere afraid to say anything to the discredit of the king, just as if he himself were listening; or to do anything to harm him, just as if he were present.'8 Here the people are led to impersonate the king by consenting to and reproducing his perspective rather than practising their own: 'Practical wisdom only is characteristic of the ruler ... The virtue of the subject is certainly not wisdom, but only true opinion.'9 Subjects may then be rewarded by attaining a more or less esteemed social character - 'he is a citizen in the highest sense who shares in the honours of the state' - diat encourages 'opinion's' continued reproduction, for the shared honours implicate the recipients more deeply in the system that grants the honours.10 In the classical tradition expounded in Aristotle's and Xenophon's works, die system of obedience is structured through ethopoetic repetition, the imitation of character as portrayed by the sovereign, along with the rewards such imitation might bring. A central Elizabethan text that reproduces this structure is the 94

The Allegorical Subject Homily on Obedience. The homily is constructed through repetition, in numerous citations from the Bible, references to Tyndale's authoritative The Obedience of a Christen Man (1535), and the regularity of pronouncement and publication (eleven Elizabethan editions). Its rhetorical style also exploits repetition to great effect, in order to represent a mimetic discourse of repetitive order. A rhetoric of obedience inscribes this ideal through the chorically recurring statement that 'the high power and auctoritie of kinges, with their makyng of lawes, judgementes, and officers, are the ordinaunces, not of man but of god, and therfore is this word (through me) soo manye times repeted.'11 The prince obeys and imitates God, and both are obeyed and imitated throughout the realm, the latter practices being exemplified in this case by the transparent, anonymous homilist who ventriloquates his superiors' words. The stylistic repetition includes the syntax and grammar of individual sentences, with the doubling of verbs, modifiers, and substantives. The first sentence reads: 'Almightye God hath created and appoynted all thinges, in heaven, earth, and waters, in a mooste excellente and perfecte order' (60). The formal importance of the homily's opening underlies its thematic circularity. It takes the audience quickly through the origin and end of creation, before disclosing that they are the same, that they reproduce each other. The syntactical movement from 'Almightye God' to 'perfecte order' anagogically signifies the conceptual repetition - order is God, God is order - that is the homily's motive. As the homily continues, the more immediate aim of its rhetoric of obedience and repetition is revealed. Tautology manifests Elizabethan ideology: 'God hath sent us his hygh gyft, oure moost dere soveraygne Lady Queene Elizabeth, with godly, wyse and honorable counsayle, with other superyors and inferiors in a beautiful order and goodly. Wherefore let us subjectes do our bounden duties, gevyng harty thankes to god, and praying for the preservation of this godly order. Let us al obey even from the botome of oure heartes, all theyr godly procedinges, laws, statutes ...' (61). The duty of subjects is to obey social order and perpetuate its pattern. Obedience penetrates them internally to 'the botome of [their] heartes.' It inscribes a bodily subjection whose very organs can be anatomized.12 As James warns in the Basilicon, obedience, while an internalized disposition, is also an omnipresent physical sign to be read by 'superyors.' The awful lines that warn of disloyalty's ineluctable exposure imply that faithful subjection is likewise always perceivable: 'let noo man thinke that he can 95

Guise and Disguise escape unpunyshed, that committeth treason, conspiracie, or rebellyon, agaynste his soveraigne Lord the king, thoughe he commyt the same never so secretlye, either in thought, worde or dede ... For treason wil not be hid: treason wil out at the length' (67). The statement is at once ideologically descriptive and prescriptive. It conveys that what it says about the relation of king to subjects is fact, that 'superyors' have this mysterious power of discernment, and that subjects, in spite of all their efforts, unavoidably exist but to be read by that sun-like 'med'cinable eye ... [which] posts like the commandment of king, / Sans check, to good and bad.'13 The congregation learns its social semiotic role as it would a language, through disciplined hearing, imitating, and repeating: 'Thus we learne by the worde of god, to yelde to our kyng, that is dewe to our king' (69).14 These dues comprise the financial - 'taxes, customes, trybutes, subsedies'; the respectful and moral - 'honor, obedience ... love and feare'; and finally, the discursive. The subjects' fated role is to speak for their ruler just as she would speak for herself. Only through doing so will their worldly and eternal happiness be assured: 'Let us heartely thanke God for his great and excellent benefits and provydence, concerning the state of kinges. Let us pray for them, that thei maye have god's favoure, and god's proteccion ... And let us praye for ourselves, that we may live godlye, in holy and chrystian conversation ... So we shall live in true obedience, bothe to oure most mercifull kyng in heaven, and to oure mooste Christian Quene in earth' (70). In such prayers the subjects consent precisely to imitate and pre-dict the sovereign's personal, political discourse. The imitation can extend beyond simply repeating what the queen says to alertly anticipating what she would but might not be able to do or perceive. A hegemonic program of speech, perception, and action is prescribed. Thus the queen's proclamation after the Essex rebellion attempts to draft her subjects into a permanent force, always on duty, to police sedition on her behalf: 'they shall doe well (and so wee charge them) to give diligent heede in all places, to the conversation of persons not well knowen for their good behaviour, and to the speaches of any that shall give out slanderous and unduetifull wordes or rumour against us and our government.'15 Obedience constitutes the natural goal that subjects should aim to reach along a trajectory of loyal selfhood. The Archbishop's speech on the customs of bees in Shakespeare's Henry V is typical of the way in which topoi from Aristotle's and Pliny's natural histories are used in the period to naturalize and dehistoricize order: 'Therefore doth 96

The Allegorical Subject heaven divide / The state of man in divers functions, / Setting endeavor in continual motion; / To which is fixed, as an aim or butt, / Obedience; for so work the honey-bees, / Creatures that by a rule in nature teach / The act of order to a peopled kingdom.'16 From the perspective of authority, subjection is the people's natural state, and such a state, as the Archbishop notes, has its eternal 'rule' in the 'act of order.' The seeming paradox that nature is modelled on social order is resolved, neatly, by the originating naturalness of order - the universality of 'degree' and of the 'moral laws of nature.' 17 The proclamation of Elizabeth's accession is addressed to 'all maner peple being naturall subjectes,' to whom the queen promises the love and care of her 'med'cinable eye' in return for 'the dyeuty which belongeth to naturall, good and true loving subjectes.'18 Subjection assumes its place and value in a system of obedient exchange. While the homily reinforces natural obedience and order, its warnings against conspiracy suggest that these ideals also anticipate the antithesis of rebellion. Nature is not necessarily disrupted by this opposition, for rebellion is recurrently conceptualized in relation to order. In the first place, loyalty or conspiracy can be emphasized to reinforce sovereignty and subjection: just as rejoicing at a royal procession reveals and inspires obedience, so does the frequent publication of accounts of seditious acts. Secondly, as determined by the royal perspective, sedition is always already circumscribed within official discourse. This process tries to prevent sedition from becoming a radical act by turning it into a merely deviant imitation of obedience. The persona of the rebel is likewise prescribed by the character of the ideal subject. For example, the government pamphlet 'A Discoverie of the Treasons Attempted by Francis Throckemorton' (1584) uses a number of strategies to relocate rebellion within official order. This relocation is made easier since Throckemorton seeks less to subvert the social and political structure than to replace the figure at its apex with Mary Stuart.19 The pamphlet is narrated in a double-voiced manner; its presenter, 'Q.Z.,' quotes Throckemorton not to disseminate his views but to depict the official re-enclosure of deviance, a discursive process that is framed as just and natural. It occurs through the definitive characterization of both Throckemorton and the pamphlet's readers as the queen's obedient subjects. The pamphlet starts by addressing and wooing the 'gentle reader' with all the trappings of verisimilitude: 'a true report ... which comming to my handes by chance from a gentleman, to whom it was

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Guise and Disguise sent into the Countrey, I have presumed to commit the same to the print.'20 A pair of characters is introduced, an innocuous narrator and a random gentleman, who appear simply to reproduce rather than manipulate an already extant text for the benefit and edification of the readers. They provide models of the submissive reception of the social text. These common fictional tropes seem to refer the pamphlet to the order of a recognizable, already-known external reality, the readers' reality of truth and chance, city and country. Their effect, however, is the beguiling inverse - readers are lured within the official discourse of 'discoverie.' For just as much as Throckemorton's are their own words and actions cited and represented as seditious and exposed, guilty and yet known. They are made to confess their own treason and are then brought back, chastened and loyal, to order. The pamphlet shows great sensitivity to rumours that the accused has been unjustly treated. This apparent defensiveness becomes the means of implicating the audience, since, such as allowe of practices and treasons against her Majestic, do alwayes inteprete both of the one and the other, according to the particular affections that doe possesse them, that is, to the worst. And forasmuch as the case of Throckemorton at this time hath bene subject to their sinister constructions, and considering that lies and false bruites cast abroad are most commonly beleeved, until they be controlled by the trueth: it hath bene thought expedient in this short discourse to deliver unto your view and consideration, a true and perfect declaration of the treasons practised and attempted by the said Throckemorton against her Majestic and the Realme ... (146)

One either spreads or believes the rumours, in either case challenging the view that 'her Majestic was justly and in reason perswaded to put him to his triall' (146). The implication of guilt jolts and subdues, coercing support for Q.Z.'s account or forcing an admission of treachery: the text 'may in reason satisfie, though not all, yet such as are not forestalled, or rather forepoysoned and infected with the lies and untruthes alreadie spred and delivered in favour of the traitor and his treasons' (146). After his capture, Throckemorton is continually urged to confess: 'more earnestly pressed to confesse the trueth,' 'perswaded in very milde and charitable maner, to confesse the trueth,' finally handed over to those who are 'to assay by torture to drawe from him the trueth' (147-8). The parallels among earnest pressing, which in itself 98

The Allegorical Subject intimates physicality, mild persuasion, and torture - all equally the means of disclosing truth - suggest the physical, moralistic, and ideological fashioning of character that is being imposed. The subject's ethos becomes a hegemonically moulded body. Throckemorton's confession is not needed to discover the truth of obedience and subjection but to publicize and personify it, in short, to stage it.21 The power of discovery belongs only to Throckemorton's questioners; the accusations have already established the truth about him. He cannot be the subject of truth or of confessional speech, only an object whose admissions are required not to reveal knowledge but to reposition rebellion within the circle of subjection, to re-establish the mimetic order of obedience, and publicly to exemplify this taking place. Hobbes's later definition of punishment illuminates this threefold process: 'an evil inflicted by public authority, on him that hath done, or omitted that which is judged by the same authority to be a transgression of the law; to the end that the will of men may thereby the better be disposed to obedience.'122 The shift from the singular 'him' to the plural 'men' underlines the rhetorical pathos of punishment, its construction of an obedient social character for and in the audience.23 Throckemorton's initial torture within the Tower has prevented this sort of overt recharacterization, leading to the advent of questioning 'brakes' and the subsequent pamphlet, which aims better to dispose the 'will of men.' The denouement to this narrative of discipline comes in Throckemorton's 'submission verbatim written with his owne hand' (157). The text is an index of the reassertion of ethopoetic order, offering an exemplary model of seemingly self-inscribed identity and character, an expressive discourse of the body to the loyal reader, and a preview of the inevitable abjection that awaits the seditious one. Throckemorton's self-debasement reinforces the interrelating characterization of subject and sovereign: 'Most excellent Prince, and my most gratious Soveraigne, sith to mee the most miserable of all your Majestie's poore distressed subjects, being justly condemned by the ordinarie and orderly course of your Majestie's Lawes, there resteth no further meane of defence but submission: vouchsafe, most excellent Prince, graciously to accept the same' (157). The power of the official word lies in appropriating subjects' means of characterization. This appropriation is then repositioned as the a priori origin of all characters who are loyal to themselves and to the monarch; in knowing thyself, the traditional goal of moral philosophy, one finds the prince. Obedience would foreclose an ethopoetic discourse that might depart from such knowledge by constructing a

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Guise and Disguise falsely and sophistically personalized or private selfhood. This foreclosure is represented in various texts through the period as a self-imposed constraint of character, like that imaged above in the inscriptions of Throckemorton's 'owne hand.' Thus in his biography of Sidney, Fulke Greville epitomizes Sidney's loyalty by noting his decision to 'instantly sacrifise all these selfnesses to the duty of obedience.'24 In contrast, disobedience and treachery become, as it were, functions of a deviant personal choice that perverts one's authentic ethos. Hobbes observes that various 'diseases of a commonwealth ... proceed from the poison of seditious doctrines' often grounded in the assertion of individual viewpoints and character, such as, 'That every private man is judge of good and evil actions'; that 'whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin ... [which] dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil'; that 'every private man has an absolute propriety in his goods; such, as exdudeth the right of the sovereign.'25 The privatized depictions of the subject threaten to infect the civic order of identity. The disloyal emphasis on 'selfness' would culminate in asking whether the sovereign identity is itself beyond subjection, a question that would relativize the ideal ethos and remove the prince from his archetypal place. As another seditious doctrine, Hobbes names the 'opinion ... that he that hath the sovereign power is subject to the civil laws' - that is, that the sovereign's ethos is comparable to the subject's. He contests that it is the sovereign's duty, benefit, and security to ensure 'the instruction of the people in the essential rights which are the natural and fundamental laws of sovereignty' and thus forestall through means like the Homily on Obedience — such comparisons.26 In the Institutes, Calvin likewise stresses that the people must not diverge from the official perception of order: The first duty of subjects towards their rulers, is to entertain the most honourable views of their office, recognising it as a delegated jurisdiction from God, and on that account receiving and reverencing them as the ministers and ambassadors of God.'27 Similarly, John Donne, in his Christmas sermon of 1624, preaches that 'Subjects are to look upon the faults of Princes, with the spectacles of obedience, and reverence, to their place, and persons, little and dark spectacles, and so their faults, and errors are to appeare little, and excusable to them.'28 All these orthodox pronouncements reinforce the social hierarchy of character and characterization by emphasizing the paradoxically individual choice of compulsory modes of vision and speech. Indeed, such sermons, tracts, and punishments generate a vast discourse of ethopoetic obedience that is central to the political order. 100

The Allegorical Subject Recalling the Platonic roots of rhetorical essentialism, we could see this discourse as conceived on the basis of what J. Hillis Miller has called ' "Platonic" repetition ... grounded in a solid archetypal model which is untouched by the effects of repetition.'29 The royal word announces a model of selfhood that is to be copied by subjects according to their position in the hierarchy. Treason is the poorest of imitations, and the traitor ignores his designated identity. Yet even so he remains within a structure of repetition and obedience that would prescribe the characters of all those to whom it refers. HI

Any monolithic effect of this ethopoetic discourse was, however, resisted, challenged, and often just ignored during the Renaissance. Critics and historians such as Bakhtin, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Michael Bristol have examined the general workings of unofficial, carnivalizing subcultures in French and English early-modern society, subcultures that in many ways continued on regardless of authority.30 But resistance also took place in specific encounters with official rituals, images, and discourses. Foucault notes occasions when scenes of punishment were inverted, as the crowd glorified the prisoner and attacked the officials. The authoritative displays became 'ambiguous rituals,' comprising 'a whole mass of discourses' and of roles that lacked a single author.31 On the basis of Elizabethan court records of those tried for slander, Louis Adrian Montrose underlines the 'varied and causal ways the royal body - and the royal fiction - might be manipulated by the queen's subjects,' especially where an 'oral and often scurrilous counterdiscourse carnivalized the official cult of mystical royal virginity.'32 In Measure for Measure, Lucio exemplifies diese sorts of attacks against sovereignty, prompting the Duke's exasperated question 'What king so strong / Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?' (111.1.187-8). In a sermon of 1618, John Donne warns against, and so acknowledges, a constant tendency to subvert official discourse that arises from everyone's intrinsic, post-Edenic ethos. To question the word is 'a leaven so kneaded into the nature of man, so innate a tartar, so inherent a sting, so inseparable a venim in man ... a naturall infirmity, which the strongest men, being but men, cannot devest.'33 And in 'Of Coaches,' Montaigne speculates on die reciprocal relationships between the characters of the sovereign and subjects whereby it is the king who realizes his identity belatedly, in response to others: 'taking the matter exactly as it is, a King hath 101

Guise and Disguise nothing that is properly his owne; hee oweth himselfe to others. Authority is not given in favour of the authorising, but rather in favour of the authorised.'34

In these views, the monarch lacks absolute authority but finds himself or herself portrayed within an ongoing process of mutual characterizations, where subjects contradict as well as imitate the royal word. The historian G.R. Elton has suggested that Elizabeth's court was less a setting of official stability than 'the centre of political power struggles.'35 Applying this observation to the idealized discourse of obedience, we may note two consequences that reinterpret ethopoetic subjection. The first is that subjects have their own powers of characterization. They can depict the prince, other officials, and themselves in roles that they choose. The cast of guises and personae is not ultimately determinable from a single sovereign script. Secondly, the range of 'genres' in which characters can be represented is also unfixed. Officials can be carnivalized and ordinary figures honourably represented in the discourse of the 'velvet life.'36 The hierarchy of ethopoesis is open to revisions that may disrupt the official mimetic genres of characterization. Rather than an ordained ethopoetic language based on obedient imitation of the sovereign word, the discourse of character relating ruler and ruled can be conceived in Bakhtin's terms as 'an intense interaction and struggle between one's own and another's word ... a process in which they oppose or dialogically interanimate each other.'37 Subjection expresses varying versions of official discourse that generate changing characters and roles for speaker and audience. Obedience closely imitates the official word, or at least is viewed as doing so, while rebellion is perceived as contradictory. The system is complicated, however, for as Michel de Certeau suggests, the official faith in visual rule over the subject's body may in itself act to conceal what goes on: The ruling order serves as a support for innumerable productive activities, while at the same time blinding its proprietors to this creativity.'38 Sight implies blindness, and between these two poles may come a range of activities and speech that challenge, to varying extents, both the royal word and the official powers of surveillance. Subjection becomes, then, an experimental discourse, with its speaker keenly attuned to audience understanding and response. In addition to reviewing the consequences of previous utterances, he or she must weigh present and future options for interaction, balancing the demands of the official order against impulses of 'selfness.' As Richard Lanham remarks on the responsibilities of the courtier, 'Each individual must learn, in addition to a symbolic vocabulary of word 102

The Allegorical Subject and gesture, how to read his own gestures as others read them ... The self at any time comprises a series of experiences and potential experiences, a drama enacted and yet to be.'39 The practice of subjection is based not only on the doxa of fixed identity but on the 'belief that character can be dramatically acquired and lost.' It sees its participants continually adapting their personae in a risky quest for character that may or may not be fulfilled and where 'gambling is the prototype of action.'40 IV

Court attendance significantly intensifies the practice of subjection and increases the stakes of characterization. The court offers the greatest rewards for obedience and, as a result of the enveloping official structure, the greatest risks of being perceived as acting rebelliously.41 Consequently, the subject is pressured into negotiating the contradictions between obedience and 'selfness' through developing a 'language of passing'42 that will both realize 'the ethos of submission'43 and enable a continuing search after changing personal goals. For the Elizabethan court, Puttenham's TheArte of English Poesie is probably the most detailed guide to constructing this discourse. As Montrose notes, Puttenham introduces a 'conception of poetry as a body of changing cultural practices dialectically related to the fundamental processes of social life ... [through] his pervasive concern with the dialectic between poetry and power.'44 One of the key elements in this dialectic is the character of the courtier-poet. Puttenham studies the genres of ethopoesis open to the courtier and develops one that supplements mimetic identity through tropes of dissimulated selfhood. The visual and verbal means of obedient imitation are superseded by an allegorical ethos. The geography of the court can be mapped in two ways. The first is drawn from the vantage of authority and obedience, as Frank Whigham explains: 'The queen is imagined to occupy the center of a circular social cosmos ... her central location orients or "places" her subjects where they belong.'45 This map presents the queen as origin of the realm. The characters of subjects are determined through their hierarchical relations to her and, especially within the court setting, through the pressure towards epideixis that she exerts upon their speech.46 The court's Petrarchan discourse tends to reinforce a naturalized relationship of love and subjection. A short exchange between King Edward and Lady Grey in 3 Henry VI suggests, however, that the 103

Guise and Disguise Petrarchan tropes may have been elicited more by Elizabeth's sovereignty than by her sex: 'An easy task, 'tis but to love a king,' suggests Edward, to which Lady Grey replies, That's soon performed, because I am a subject' (in.ii.54-5). The performance of love is built upon a basis of submission. Puttenham suggests an alternative rhetorical map, in which the queen is displaced. Instead of simply being praised as the subject of epideixis, she is herself characterized and becomes the product of discourse, especially that of 'a learned and a Courtly Poet.'47 Puttenham analyses speech as persuasive, artificial, and oriented to the speaker's goals: 'Vtterance also and language is giuen by nature to man for perswasion of others, and aide of them selves ... For speech it selfe is artificiall and made by man, and the more pleasing it is, the more it preuaileth to such purpose as it is intended for' (8). Speech may deploy power over others, reworking the relationship between speaker and audience by moulding their characters in new ways. Poesie's royal aim can have various ethopoetic effects, for as Joel Fineman has shown, the rhetoric of praise is ambiguously referential. While representing another person, it establishes 'a kind of grammar of poetic presence that controls the way the poet can articulate himself.'48 Praise of the queen can empower or disable the courtier, resituating him in the interpersonal hierarchy. The courtly poet may refashion this extant hierarchy, changing a naturalized milieu that includes elements of the social as well as the physical world. Puttenham describes various relations between the poet and nature, which range from his being 'onely a bare immitatour of natures works,' to 'an ayde and coadiutor to nature,' then 'an alterer of [nature's actions] ... a surmounter of her skill,' and lastly, 'an encountrer and contrary to nature, producing effects neither like to hers, nor by participation with her operations, nor by imitation of her paternes, but makes things and produceth effects altogether strange and diverse ...' (303-4). These poetic possibilities parallel the range of actions open to the courtier within the 'natural' structure of subjection, each moving farther from obedience towards rebellion. Sidney's Defence of Poesie celebrates such a non-mimetic poetic possibility in terms of the poet's freedom from submission: 'Onely the Poet disdeining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into an other nature.'49 In comparison to Puttenham's treatise, the Defence often appears unworldly, lacking the other's sharp awareness of the social stakes of discursive ambivalence and manipulation. This lack seems to emerge in Sidney's 104

The Allegorical Subject own frustrated courtly career, exemplified by his egregious letter to the queen, bluntly advising her not to marry the Due d'Alencon. In the biography, Greville turns this directness into praise, describing Sidney as restoring 'amongst us the ancient Majestic of noble, and true dealing ... his heart and tongue went both one way,' an asophistical refusion of form, content, and selfhood that, on account of these traits of univocal character and language, is politically ineffective.50 At any rate, Sidney's image of the poet's 'other nature,' when related to a more subtle interplay of identities within the court hierarchy, as it is in Puttenham's treatise, suggests the possibility, from inside the status quo, of a supplement to the order of character. Puttenham begins to develop this non-mimetic notion of discursive selfhood by conceiving of poetry as a compounded semiotic process rather than a singularly oral or visual one, thereby allowing for the functions of bodily and linguistic elements of self-representation. Poetry becomes visual and verbal behaviour. The Arte's discussion of concrete verse forms, emblems, and the synaesthetic functioning of poetry relates to a 'public life at court [that] was governed by a rhetorical imperative of performance ... a matter of doing, and so of showing.'51 Moreover, everything can signify in more than one way: 'it so falleth out most times your occular proportion doeth declare the nature of the audible: for if it please the eare well, the same represented by delineation to the view pleaseth the eye well and e conuerso ...' (85). These reciprocal connections between the verbal and visual foreground the semiotic sensitivity in the court. Not only are the different sorts of poetic texts individually legible, but they refer to each other through different media and channels. The courtier's speech and actions must likewise interrelate decorously to be effective means of characterization. Through this intertextual notion of discourse and its implications for self-representation, Puttenham's Arte rewrites a mainly visual semiotics of character that Castiglione had treated in The Book of the Courtier and that, on account of its specular structure, finally remains located within the official scheme of identity. Castiglione considers verbal processes in the comments on concealing one's self-praise as a means of selfdefinition: 'all doth consiste in speaking such thinges after a sorte, that it may appeare that they are not rehearsed to that end: but that they come so to purpose, that he cannot refraine telling them, and alwaies seeming to flee his owne prayse, tell the truth.'52 In addition, by interrelating the functions of the verbal, visual, and bodily in the telling of jokes, Bernard Bibiena is able to develop some notion of the 105

Guise and Disguise discursive doubleness of character through 'diverse signification,' 'dissimulation,' and deception.53 Yet Bibiena's discussion comes as a digression, and generally Castiglione's courtly tactics remain visually determined. Sprezzatura is described as a visual guise: 'a certaine disgracing to cover arte withall... which we for this time terme Recklesnesse ... the true fountaine from the which all grace springeth ... it imprinteth in the minde of the lookers on, an opinion, that who can so sleightly doe well hath a great deale more knowledge than in deede he hath' (46-9). The effects of 'recklesnesse' rely on its being clearly if not consciously perceived by the viewer.54 The specular motif grows stronger with Count Canosse's misogynistic criticisms of women for breaking the rule of sprezzatura by using cosmetics and overtly flaunting their charms and intentions: 'these faultes that I talke of, take this grace from you: for they proceede of nothing els, but of curiousnesse, whereby ye discover openly unto every man the over great desire that yee have to be beawtifull' (66). Again we can note the displacement of male anxiety over the difficulties of negotiating patriarchal politics onto critiques of women's behaviour and sexuality. Sprezzatura remains a masculinist ideal of subtle, visual conspicuousness, a seeming absence of intention that must remain apparent to others.55 On the following night, Frederick Fergoso continues and develops this theme of dependent visibility. The courtier should aim to 'feede the eyes of the lookers on with all the thinges that hee shall thinke may give a good grace' (96). Like Puttenham, Fergoso stresses the wide-ranging effects of appearance but continually organizes them through the other's perspective: 'all the behaviour, gestures and manners, beside wordes and deedes, are in a judgement of inclination of him in whom they are scene' (118). By exercising the judgment and power of the onlookers, the courtier reaffirms their priority and his reliance on it. Sprezzatura never seeks total disguise but always leaves a trace that reconfirms the viewer's powers of perception, appreciation, and reward, and hence the courtier's submission.56 The repeated reference in Castiglione to sight prescribes a character whose behaviour is visually determined. Although sprezzatura allows for ambiguity, it is a defensive manoeuvre - 'a certain warie dissimulation' as Fergoso calls it (132) - that seeks to insulate the courtier from his observers and so acknowledges their control over and ratification of his identity. It responds to and within the system of characterization ruled by a royal vision that would identify and establish the social place of each subject. Castiglione repeatedly emphasizes that the duty of the courtier is loyal service to the prince, after which his own character 106

The Allegorical Subject may be approved and formed. He is to use his flexibility to 'turne all his thoughts and force of mind to love, and (as it were) to reverence the prince hee serveth above all other thinges, and in his wil, manners and fashions, to bee altogether plyable to please him' (206) in 'the training and helping forwarde of the Prince to goodnesse' (261). This visible ethos of submission reinforces the determinate 'sovereignty of the gaze,' to use a phrase from Foucault's work, where to be a subject is to be the object of that gaze.57 The legend commonly used to illustrate such submission (perhaps suggesting a link to Foucault's study of medical perception) was that of Alexander the Great, who reverses the doctor-patient relationship by testing his physician Philip of Acarnon. In The Passions of the Mind, Thomas Wright recounts the episode from Plutarch and concludes: 'By this example superiors may learn to conjecture the affections of their subjects' minds by a silent speech pronounced in their very countenances.' The discourse of subjection is again naturalized and constrained to that which can be perceived by 'superiors.'58 The visual imagery used by Castiglione and Wright implies the official surveillance of what subjects can say and think. The efficacy of authority's gaze structures interactions between subject and sovereign into obedience. On the one hand, unofficial 'affections' are either found out or, because of the inevitability of their discovery, repressed. On the other hand, authority remains insulated, removed from the reciprocating gaze of the subject, by a code of decorum that it institutes and manipulates. Thus Wright contends that it is not 'good manners that the inferior should fix his eyes upon his superior's countenance; and the reason is because it were presumption for him to attempt the entrance or privy passage into his superior's mind, as contrariwise it is lawful for the superior to attempt the knowledge of his inferior.'59 Within this visual submission, the subject by necessity wears Donne's 'spectacles of obedience.' It is into this economy of visual control that Puttenham introduces his system of rhetorical figures and schemes. Because of their discursive complexity, the figures cannot be entirely contained within the courtly order: 'so be they also in a sorte abuses or rather trespasses in speach, because they passe the ordinary limits of common vtterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceiue the eare and also the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certaine doublenesse' (154). Moreover, they specifically contest the sovereign gaze by expressing 'a duplicitie of meaning or dissimulation vnder couert and darke intendments' (154) that disrupts visual obedience. They form a process 107

Guise and Disguise of anti-surveillance that recalls the sophist's 'darkness of not-being.' Puttenham acknowledges the surreptitious potency of the figures and anticipates official censure by including such censure in his own description and seeming to agree with it. He approvingly relates the banning of figures by Areopagites 'as meere illusions to the minde, and wresters of vpright iudgement' (154), but then goes on to describe them, just as approvingly, in great detail. The most important of the 'sensable figures altering and affecting the mynde' is 'the Courtly figure Allegoria, which is when we speake one thing and thinke another, and that our wordes and our meanings meets not' (186). Puttenham underlines its machiavellian utility for courtiers, counsellors, and even princes. Despite its authoritative uses, the main effect of allegory, 'the chief ringleader and captaine of all other figures,' is to transform the existing hierarchy of rank, releasing the courtier from his established status. While to use allegory is to wield power - 'Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare1 (186) - the courtier's aim is less that of absolute rule than of the power to pass from prescribed social positions. He seeks a process rather than an impossibly final goal. Allegory disrupts a mimetic structure of character by supplementing visual identity with a rhetorical ethos that generates new genres of selfhood: 'we may dissemble, I meane speake otherwise then we thinke ... vnder couert and darke termes ... aswell when we lye as when we tell truth. To be short euery speach wrested from his owne naturall signification to another not altogether so naturall is a kinde of dissimulation, because the wordes beare contrary countenaunce to th' intent' (186). This figural disguise relates the rhetorical process of allegory to attempts at self-representation that exceed the visual limitations of 'countenaunce,' the order of identity that Wright perceives as being in force and within which Castiglione's courtier acts. In closing the Arte, Puttenham states that it is the 'profession of a very Courtier ... cunningly to be able to dissemble' (299). The 'very Courtier' is by now a paradoxical figure, who recalls Plato's 'authentic sophist.' Indeed, dissimulation is necessary to the courtier to such an extent that 'the figure Allegoria ... not impertinently we call the Courtier or figure of faire semblant' (299). Attesting to the affirmative possibilities of this discursive passing, the courtier, now 'a living trope,'60 personifies allegory as 'faire' rather than 'false semblant.' In so doing, he gains access to a rhetoric of characterization that is not determined by the mimetic ethos but can afford changing figures of 'selfness': 'he could dissemble his conceits as well as his countenances, so as he neuer speake as he thinke, or thinke as he speaks, and that

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The Allegorical Subject in any matter of importance his words and his meaning very seldome meete ... or is it not perchance more requisite our courtly Poet do dissemble not onely his countenances & conceits, but also all his ordinary actions of behaviour, or the most part of them, whereby the better to winne his purposes & good aduantages ...' (299-300). Producing no certain character or settled corpus of thoughts, expressions, and words, Allegoria instead offers a means of manipulating 'all ordinary actions of behaviour' in order to realize 'purposes and good aduantages' that cannot be pre-set in the changeable social context of the court. The courtier's dissemblings are not choreographed against a backdrop of ideal identity or in view of a definitely attainable one. They comprise a risky business of constructing a character while already participating in the context for which that character is wanted. Allegoria inscribes the courtier's attempts to work his subjection. The meanings of gestures, speech, and demeanour may be reaccentuated for purposes of 'selfness' while continuing to reproduce official models of identity.61 Through such 'beau semblant' (158), the courtier accepts the hierarchy of character and the concepts that inform obedience repetition, sight, and nature. Yet while imitating this naturalized structure of roles and characters, the subject also develops a persona that might evade its final determinations. He may question the ideal priority of the sovereign word and, as Montrose puts it, 'impose upon the fictions whose enforced acceptance signifies his subjection the marks of his own subjectivity.'62 The dissimulations of the allegorical ethos disturb the mimetic order of submission and allow subjection's discursive passage to commence. V The tensions within the work and life of John Lyly depict the risks and gains of the courtier's passing. Despite being a relatively successful court writer, Lyly never won the position of Master of Revels on which he had set his sights. The acceptance of his plays seems only to have increased his expectations and hopes, and although in his view 'literature [was] a kind of courtship display of general secular capacity,'63 it ultimately failed to translate into the realization of social goals. In an earlier and different context, humanist learning had formed the basis of an admired social ethos, and as Jerrold E. Seigel notes, Italian humanists 'as men of eloquence found a place in the society of their day.'64 In the late-sixteenth-century English court, however, eloquence could guarantee no privilege but might contribute to the 'actions of 109

Guise and Disguise behaviour' through which a subject could seek to realize social and personal ideals. The prolonged failure both to effect his own identity and to gain advancement adds an ironic sharpness to Lyly's depictions of the relations between the Queen and her subjects, a recurrent theme through his prose and dramatic works. It is tempting to see the fulsome praise of Euphues, Endimion, and Phao for their royal mistresses as envoicing Lyly's own anxious desire, which, because of such barely veiled importunacy, drew no response.65 Yet in more complex ways, the euphuistic and allegorical styles of these texts signify a process of literary and social decorum through which the subject and sovereign can interact, each working to derive meanings from the dialogue that will transform or reinforce their respective positions. Rather than wholly anchoring Lyly's work in imputed personal aims and failings, the self-conscious style reveals a more general courtly condition — the courtier's attempt to fashion and use an ethopoetic rhetoric that affords a recognizable identity with the possibility to change or develop, while satisfying the prevailing cultural imperatives of obedience to and praise of the sovereign ideal. In this ambivalent, discursive process, the key concepts and tropes of the mimetic ethos of subjection are also drawn into question. Lyly's most striking early celebration of obedience and submission appears in Euphues and His England. In the chapter 'Euphues Glasse for Europe,' the hero offers a description of 'the manners, the conditions, the gouernement and entertainement' of England, 'a place in my opinion ... not inferiour to a Paradise.'66 The glass is an epideictic reflection of Euphues' homeland and queen as edifying models for the 'Ladyes and Gentlewomen of Italy' and the rest of the continent. The mirror image reveals the English social hierarchy as the natural ideal, with Elizabeth as its crowning glory. She crystallizes England's perfection in her own, which all but transcends Euphues' attempts at description. His sight is subject to a sovereign who, as the image of light, is the basis of his aesthetic vision: 'an other sight there is in my Glasse, which maketh me sigh for griefe I can-not shewe it ... the more I go about to expresse the brightness, the more I find my eyes bleared, the neerer I desire to come to it, the farther I seme from it' (203-4). The Petrarchan excesses and euphuistic style not only figure the absoluteness of Euphues' loyal submission in visual terms of dependence on the sovereign, but, as will be seen, are also used to negotiate, without presumption, a complex range of relations between the author and the royal reader. no

The Allegorical Subject Euphues can overcome this near inability to portray the Queen only through the strength of his loyalty. He contrasts himself to Apelles who, on the one hand, epitomizes royal artists as the favourite painter of Alexander, yet who, on the other, depicts his prince through skill rather than faith: 'Let Apelles shewe his fine arte, Euphues will manifest his faythfull heart, the one can but proue his conceite to blase his cunning, the other his good will to grinde his coulours' (204). Faithful imitation derives from the sovereign's archetypal nature rather than from the artist's own talent. The source of Euphues' epideictic skill and ethos is his queen and his loyalty to her. This equivocal attitude to the court artist's work - it alone can reproduce the sovereign's glory, yet it does so only through the power of that glory and not its own talent - appears elsewhere in Lyly's work, perhaps most strongly as he takes up the classic Elizabethan depiction of the Queen as Cynthia, in his last play, Endimion. Here it is remarked to the virgin Queen that, 'They are thrise fortunate that Hue in your Pallace, where Trueth is not in colours, but life, vertues not in imagination, but execution' (rv.iii.48-5O). The neo-Platonic values of truth and virtue cannot be represented by the artistic imagination alone, but are revealed through the presence of the Queen in her court, and are then grasped by others. She is the archetypal source of these ideals for her subjects. Euphues' artistic failure to reproduce this essence of beauty and chastity - 'excelling in the one Venus, in the other Vesta (209) - is all the more testament to Elizabeth's ideal nature and the artist's humble adoration and dependent skill and selfhood. The discourses of art, subjection, and selfhood are intertwined. Euphues celebrates the endless aesthetic work of imitating an archetype whose inimitable perfection raises the process of obedient service to a near-ideal, lifelong state: 'Happy are they, and onely they that are vnder this glorious and gracious Sovereigntie: in-somuch that I accompt all those abiects, that be not hir subiectes' (208). The process of reciprocal characterization between the subject and sovereign, noted above in the consequences of the traitor Throckemorton's confession, is celebrated and embraced as it is imposed. Under such a monarch, the court itself approaches a religious righteousness, quite appropriate to Elizabeth's role as the virginal Anglican figurehead, and seems 'rather a Church for divine service, then a Court for Princes delight' (216). The courtiers themselves become uncharacteristically exalted as religious votaries, an idea suggested elsewhere in Lyly's work by Endimion's devotion to Cynthia. The ill

Guise and Disguise praise is so lavish and the reflection of Elizabeth so blinding that Euphues finds himself forced to withdraw from the conventions of epideictic display, which threaten to erase rather than construct his ethos. By portraying the sovereign ideal with such devotion, the praiser risks reducing himself to a mere function or expression of her perfection. Within this reduction lies the graver risk that he will reveal the ethos of obedient selfhood as merely the imaginary epideictic trace of a unrealizable ideal.67 His 'faythfull heart' seems about to expire in its own rhetoric of praise, 'being in this Laborinth, I may sooner loose my selfe, then finde the ende' (215). The ecstatic loss, comparable to Peter Bembo's neo-Platonic invocation at the close of The Book of the Courtier, here defers the more earthly goals of courtly selfhood. The mimetic ethos risks undoing itself in the process of its realization. This passage from Euphues overtly employs the major tropes of subjection. The emphases on vision and light, imitation, loyalty, selfabandon - in short, the 'politics of visibility*™ - recapitulate the motifs of submission that structure the rhetoric of obedience. At the same time, they are invested with a sublimated Petrarchan quality. The courtier's sexual submission, in his inability to approach the ideal object of desire, is an implicit theme in the Elizabethan ethos of subjection. In Lyly's work it often appears as an overpowering, impassioned faithfulness that the male characters must strive to suppress, lest they presume to know the virgin Queen's desire. Endimion's guarded avowal to Cynthia illustrates: 'Such a difference hath the Gods sette between our states, all must be dutie, loyaltie, and reuerence; nothing (without it vouchsafe your highness) be termed loue' (V.iii. 168-70). This submissive desire, which nonetheless must be expressed, compels the male subject to use an indirect, allegorical address that conceals the sexual stakes of his faithfulness to the Queen but may also alter his relation to her and lead him away from an unambiguous identity, despite his apparent servility. The Queen's archetypal nature makes it impossible to approach her or represent her realistically; indeed to attempt to do so openly would be to devalue her sovereignty. Like the numerous portraitists of the Queen, Euphues employs allegorical modes of representation and praise in order to express and sustain her sovereign mystery. On the one hand, such allegory remains politically and thematically conservative in order to reflect the official hierarchy of character relationships; as Angus Fletcher notes, 'allegorical works present an aesthetic surface which implies an authoritative, thematic, "correct" reading, and which attempts to eliminate other possible readings.'69 On the other hand, 112

The Allegorical Subject Euphues takes a decided chance in attempting to portray the ideal. His efforts will either fall short of the queen's celestial glory - the respectful performance, but one that might also be construed as a sort of parody or desecration - or, if he appears to think that he can realize her glory, he may be taken as implying that she is merely earthly and perhaps subject to the imagination of others. The process of allegorically representing the Queen thus needs to be accompanied by a denial of intentional effect, that in itself may deprive the courtier of any reward. Allegorical praise aims to satisfy both subject and sovereign yet risks disturbing the delicate relationship between them. Like Spenser, Lyly is acutely aware of 'how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed.'70 Euphues feels compelled to include an explicit 'loophole' to try to tie down a text that he senses might inevitably be beginning to err: 'though it be not requisite that any should paynt their Prince in England, that can-not sufficiently perfect hir, yet it shall not be thought rashnesse or rudenesse for Euphues, to frame a table for Elizabeth' (204). He appeals to his audience to ignore any rash, rude effects that his praise might cause. The loss of rhetorical control menaces the author, as the allegory threatens to invert subjection, transforming loyal intentions into possible insult. Euphues' loophole signifies submission to a more powerful audience, plus an awareness that allegorical praise might inscribe a challenge to the hierarchy of character. It attempts to compensate for a discursive selfhood, which, despite its mimetic reference, continually risks straying from its sovereign model. At the same time, the means of realizing the rewards of loyalty reveal to the subject a tempting 'selfness,' in the prevention of epideictic selfsubmergence, that might exploit the dissimulations of Allegoria. Although Euphues requests the audience to set the limits of his meaning within the realm of obedience - to impose an interpretive authority that would fix his identity - even this request might be read as a cover. The rhetoric of allegory and praise thus commits him to a doubly uncertain status within the court: it opens up a range of selfserving meanings that might tempt the courtier's text; and, despite affording loopholes to deny 'selfness,' the allegorical rhetoric may also trigger its own suspicious reception. Lyly uses a similarly cautious strategy in the court epilogue to Campaspe. It doesn't merely flatter the Queen but asks her to establish the play's worth, and insinuates that she is 'its true creator.'71 Indeed, the playwright and actors admit that their fate, along with the play's, is in her hands, once again acknowledging the intertwining of courtly

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Guise and Disguise rhetoric, performance, and selfhood: 'As yet we cannot tell what we should tearme our labours, yron or bullyon; only it belongeth to your Maiestie to make them fitte either for the forge, or the mint... so can there be nothing thought good in the opinion of others, vnlesse it be christened good by the iudgement of your selfe.'72 They subject their discourse to hers, and in so doing submit their performance of identity to her power of 'christening' and 'iudgement.' The Queen's part in the play, then, is more than visual, and anticipates the royal roles that structure the Jacobean masques: 'For all the Court plays ... the Queen must have appeared to the rest of the audience as practically part of the production.'73 Surpassing a merely participatory role, the Queen authorizes the very text of the play, assigning its place and value within the social order - 'yron or bullyon' - and thus Lyly's as well. Campaspe dramatizes a similar process of watchful obedience. There are numerous links among the themes of the play, the circumstances of its court presentation, Lyly's personal position as a subject, and the cultural process of submission. Alexander, who emerges as 'a controlling royal figure, who could end the play by rejecting the errors and re-establishing the right,' seems to reflect Elizabeth's authorizing function.74 In finally making the match between Apelles and Campaspe, Alexander both contents his subjects and exercises his power over them.75 That he does not take Campaspe for himself seems to depict a limit to the sovereign's power; Alexander himself says: T perceiue Alexander cannot subdue the affections of men, though he conquer their countries' (v.iv. 127-9). Yet the lovers have remained fearfully dependent on his goodwill, disguising their love from themselves, from each other, and from Alexander, until he commandingly asks: 'dissemble not Campaspe, do you loue Apelles?' (V.iv.121-2), exercising the prince's will to know and so master his subjects' desire. Lyly appears to be both questioning and affirming sovereign control over identity and sexuality. It was noted earlier that the relationship between Apelles and Alexander seems to have held emblematic significance for many Renaissance writers. Euphues compares himself to Apelles, and doubtless, to court artists such as Lyly, the painter personified the goal of the sovereign favourite. Castiglione's courtiers also pay attention to this relationship. They recount the Campaspe story, seeing it as Truely a worthie liberallitie of Alexander, not to give onely treasure and states, but also his own affections and desire, and a token of verie great love towards Apelles.'76 Campaspe is here characterized as a transferable 'token' of the men's homosocial, political relation. She is personally 114

The Allegorical Subject absent from the courtiers' version, and serves merely as a pretext for their discussions of masculinist notions of beauty, loyalty, and subjection.77 For Castiglione's men the political system is wholly patriarchal, and their idealized reading of Plutarch's tale underlines a seemingly mutual, homoerotic love between prince and male subject that finally absorbs the latter. Such reciprocity in fact figures a system of obedience that would subsume all difference and all subjects within an imaginary politics of patriarchal sovereignty's 'desire for the same, for the self-identical, the self (as) same.'78 Castiglione's image of impassioned male loyalty binding courtier to monarch exemplifies the idealized official version of mimetic subjection. The sovereign ethos is envisaged as the subject's own narcissistic goal, one that transcends any personal identity in a structure of royal 'autoeroticism more or less deferred or differentiated into the autological or homologous representations of a (masculine) "subject."'79 The female figure, who signifies otherness and heterogeneity within this system, threatens to divert Apelles' submissive aim from the official goal. Castiglione's courtiers would thus emasculate Campaspe's function, by presuming first that her desire duplicates the homoerotic courtly model and that she 'was sore agreeved to chaunge so great a king for a painter,' and secondly that Alexander's gift is 'a token of verie great love towards Appelles,' and thereby reinforces the masculinist bonds. The homogeneity of this sexual politics, the dependent desire of the subjects, and the courtiers' self-congratulatory reading (for it is their bond to the prince as much as Apelles' that they admire)80 exemplify the orthodoxy of Castiglione's portrayal of submission. In Lyly's version of the story, the relationship of Alexander and Hephestion, especially as it emerges in the latter's bellicose, misogynistic speeches, recalls this mimetic obedience. Alexander himself intimates its homoerotic subtext: 'Mee thinketh, Hephestion, you are more melancholy then you were accustomed; but I perceive it is all for Alexander' (v.iii.i-2). Nonetheless, through the romantic intrigue between Campaspe and Apelles, which develops from Alexander's initial capture of and love for Campaspe, the play stages a movement beyond the homogeneous submission to sovereign desire that resounds in the tale's homoerotic politics. Yet the text also suggests that this variation is able to proceed only on the basis of sovereign desire. This imperial model of conduct and identity looms over the lovers' clandestine romance, forming the cultural background against which they will practise their allegorical passing towards the possibility of alternative sexual and personal identities. Lyly picks up the 'latent pun on courtH5

Guise and Disguise ship [that] conflates political and sexual submission,'81 and, through the vicissitudes of a series of love affairs between Alexander and Hephestion, Alexander and Campaspe, Alexander and Apelles, and Campaspe and Apelles, represents opportunities of self-realization that might evade if not subvert the sovereign demand for subjection. Alexander initiates these possibilities by providing a pattern for imitation that ironically challenges his authority. Falling in love with Campaspe, he risks the loss of both self- and imperial control. He recognizes the politico-personal connection but is unable to constrain its impending loss: 'I loue Campaspe, a thing farre vnfit for a Macedonian, for a king, for Alexander' (ll.ii. 19-20). In terms of the social hierarchy, his desire risks inverting the order of obedience, as Hephestion's euphuistic speech against a politically and sexually transgressive love warns: 'What! is the sonne of Phillip, king of Macedon, become the subject of Campaspe, the captive of Thebes?' (Il.ii.3i-2). Underlying this inversion is a twofold change to visual authority. First, Campaspe's vision realizes an absolute power over Alexander, who is 'drawn within the compasse of an idle alluring eie,' by 'eies ... framed by arte to inamour' (II.ii.33-44). Secondly, as a result of Campaspe's beauty, which doesn't adhere to the pattern of ideal mimesis, Alexander loses the sovereign power of perception: I, but she is bewtiful; yea, but not therefore chast: I, but she is comly in al parts of the body: yea, but she may be crooked in some part of the mind ... Bewty is like the blackberry, which seemeth red, when it is not ripe, resembling pretious stones that are polished with honny, which the smother they look, the sooner they breake ... Hermyns haue faire skinnes, but fowle liuers; Sepulchres fresh colours, but rotten bones; women faire faces, but false heartes. (H.ii.45-57)

Hephestion's speech combines the perceived threats of a heterogeneous desire, the misogynistic topoi claiming woman's inauthentic ethos, and the double disruption of visual submission into a warning against the loss of an ideally synthesized masculine sovereignty.82 Campaspe is not shown to be deliberately pursuing this disruption. It is a consequence of her subjection, which is itself epitomized by the fact that she is a slave, and thus combines the chief categories of powerlessness notoriously nominated by Aristotle. Hephestion's jealous insistence that Campaspe is trying to escape is more a function of his sudden realization of a threat to his own macho-martial relationship with Alexander, and he attempts to relocate her all the more securely 116

The Allegorical Subject within the order of subjection. He would alert the sovereign gaze to the treacherous disjunction between desire and submission that Campaspe's sex and beauty seem to embody. Alexander presents the realities of her political situation more accurately in response to Hephestion, with what Peter Saccio calls his own 'definition and description of royal desire.'83 Such desire would circumscribe Campaspe: 'it is a king that loueth ... Alexander doth loue, and therefore must obtaine ... I am king, and will command ... what is that which Alexander may not conquer as he list? ... I am a conqueror, she a captiue' (11.11.91-106). For all the flourish of these martial and political images, his mastery is not absolute. Despite her enforced obedience, Campaspe still introduces a heterogeneous politics of desire into the homogeneous politics of power, reversing the roles of sovereign and subject, emperor and lover. Alexander's martially minded courtiers Clytus and Parmenio bemoan a lingering phallic demise 'from his harde armour to his softe robes' (rv.iii.12). The complexities of a nonmimetic heterosexuality challenge the univocal politicized system of masculine identity. Alexander was valorized in the classical and Renaissance periods as a model of chaste disregard for sex. North's translation of Plutarch recounts that 'Even from his childhood they saw that he was given to be chast. For though otherwise he was very hot and hasty, yet was he hardly moved with lust or pleasure of the body, and would moderately use it.'84 This chasteness seems the symbolic counterpart of his martial might and essentializes Alexander's power as a type of Platonic asexuality. A similar symbolism of intangible virginity was also taken up by Elizabeth to realize power over her male courtiers: 'An emphasis on the virginity of that royal body transforms the problem of the monarch's gender into the very source of her potency.'85 As a powerfully mysterious absence, her chastity exerts a control over her subjects that, precisely because of its imperceptibility, reinforces the visual register of power. Alexander's subsequent loss of mastery through the stirring of his desire might additionally intimate the tenuousness of the Queen's visual symbolism - its limits within a political system that could turn the virgin Queen 'from female monarch into symbolic virtuous womanhood,' as a means of re-enclosing her passively within the values of a patriarchal moral code.86 In its reflections upon the myth of imperial chastity, Lyly's play seems to suggest that one of the key tropes of the Elizabethan rhetoric of power could also enfeeble sovereignty, subjecting the Queen to those whom she would command just as it is Alexander's chasteness that disarms him before Campaspe. 117

Guise and Disguise The tensions produced by the dramatized court's sexual politics do go on to destabilize its hierachy of power and identity. A range of varying kinds of obedience and 'selfhess' is depicted through the grumblings of Hephestion, Clytus, and Parmenio, who bemoan the loss of the old ways, the servility of the 'humanist' philosophers, led by Aristotle and Plato, who look to new courtly opportunities (suggesting some gentle self-satire on Lyly's part?), the contempt for court and Athenian society voiced by the satirical Diogenes, and the festive unruliness of the lower orders in the servants Granichus, Manes, and Psyllus. Lyly presents the gamut of subjection's responses to authority. The various relations to order and rule imply the contradictions within obedience that may emerge and reverberate once the sovereign ethos is challenged. In a context where the political and sexual complexities of Elizabeth's reign saw her male subjects play roles of either paternal advisers or Petrarchan wooers, seeking to share and usurp her authority or to remain in filial, courtly obedience, Lyly seeks to thread a delicate text, suggesting without presumption, beseeching without abjection. Elizabeth is ambiguously figured as the imperial Alexander and the chaste but powerful Campaspe. Apelles, who paints both of them, is Lyly's ideal self-portrait, winning Campaspe through Alexander's beneficence, an act that commends and exemplifies die Queen's favour, while also showing her successfully wooed or mastered by the court artist. Each interpretation allegorically veils Lyly's relation to the Queen, representing his efforts to please her - poets are 'cunning Princepleasers' writes Puttenham87 - to control her actions, and to attain his desired status. The play's main dramatic action and interest represent Apelles' attempts to negotiate the vicissitudes of subjection. Within the context of Alexander's disrupted power and identity, the court artist lacks a defined mimetic model through which he can construct himself and so is forced to begin the risky process of fashioning an identity that he cannot fully foresee. Apelles deceives Alexander in the very attempt to obey him through visual imitation. The process of loyal representation commits him to break faith with his sovereign and then to disguise this rebellion by visual and verbal figures that try to evade the sovereign gaze. The combination of Campaspe's beauty, Apelles' painting, and Alexander's perception allegorically represents the workings and limits of visual submission, replaying the central tropes of the discourse of subjection. Apelles' opening words in the play emphasize the difficulty of painting perfect beauty, evoking a neo-Platonic rhetoric of reality and 118

The Allegorical Subject representation that has already been linked to the interplay between sovereignty and subjection. His complaints are dismissed by Alexander, who, now rapt with Campaspe, essentializes the works of nature against the protean efforts of Apelles: 'I wil shewe you that finished by nature, that you have beene trifling about by art' (II.ii. 159-61). Alexander exalts himself, his love, and the object of his love to the archetypal stratum. His idealism establishes and is established as the sovereign image of desire, a model to be imitated by his subjects and a law to obey. As the object of sovereign desire, Campaspe is she whom all subjects seek and the ideal beyond their conception, while that desire itself can be copied by others but never fulfilled. In the next scene, set in his studio, Apelles envoices the intention and inability to paint Campaspe's portrait. His efforts express his commanded, mimetic, sexual aim and simultaneously subject him to an ideal beauty that for the moment seems to symbolize Alexander's imperial presence rather than signify itself: 'Lady, I doubt whether there bee any colour so fresh, that may shadow a countenance so faire ... but come madam, will you draw neere, for Alexander will be here anon' (ill.i.1-2, 17-18). Subsequently, in the very attempt to reproduce Alexander's princely perception of Campaspe, Apelles finds his own gaze inevitably drawing him out of the rhetoric of obedience and into that of his own desire. The coy Campaspe notes the painter's ulterior discourse: 'I am too young to vnderstand your speache, thogh old enough to withstand your deuise: you haue bin so long vsed to colours, you can do nothing but colour' (111.1.13-15). The pun on 'colours' paints and figures of speech - suggests the emergence of Apelles' rhetorical 'selfness,' an allegorical ethos that breaks his subjection to Alexander. Apelles falls into this conflict through the very attempt to obey and copy the ideal desire of Alexander. Count Canosse claims in The Book of the Courtier that as an artist, 'Apelles conceived a farre greater joye in beholding the beautie of Campaspes than did Alexander, for a man may easily believe, that the love of them both proceeded of that beautie.'88 Here too is suggested the ulterior course to which Apelles' vision, in following his sovereign's, commits his desire. This mimetic circuit is at first figured aesthetically in the portrait he tries, as commanded, to paint. It then appears sexually when he falls in love with Campaspe. The repetitive structure of obedience becomes conflictual through no deliberate effort on Apelles' part, just as Campaspe herself unwittingly disrupts Alexander's self-command. Through an imitative loyalty that is itself imposed by the sovereign, the subject unavoidably H9

Guise and Disguise challenges royal desire. Rene Girard's notion of 'mimetic desire' helps to explain this process of subjection that unavoidably results in conflict.89 An impossible mimeticism - a result of the archetypal sovereign nature, its pragmatic attempt to forestall rivals, and the presumption of the obedient subject's self-effacement - is commanded in the oxymoronic order 'imitate me / don't imitate me.'90 The contradictory structure of such submission, which first presumes and then denies the subject's agency, produces the inescapability of rebellion. In desperation the subject turns to allegorical imitation to realize and to disguise a 'selfness' that is both enjoined and forbidden. Apelles' love intensifies the more he paints Campaspe - that is, the more he involves himself in the mimetic process. His servant Psyllus sardonically notes: 'the better he shadowes her face, the more will he burne his own heart' (III.ii.5-6). In the process, Campaspe stops being the passive object of his love simply because she incarnates sovereign desire. She herself has become his sovereign, the blinding ideal who can't be represented: 'I shall neuer drawe your eies well, because they blind mine' (III.iii.i-2). Her 'so absolute a face' (III.iii.7) is now an archetype in a new ideal order of love and submission: 'It is not possible that a face so faire, & a wit so sharpe, both without comparison, shuld not be apt to loue' (HI.iii.47-8). Like the self-contradictory rebellion of a Throckemorton or the Marlovian protagonists, Apelles does not question the essentialist premises of this structure of desire. He remains within its univocal hierarchy and passes from one form of mimetic subjection to another through the Petrarchan rhetoric afforded by Elizabethan culture. The painter portrays his own emerging allegorical ethos through the figure of Jupiter, who in various disguises won the different maidens he has depicted (III.iii. 10-20). The god's absence from these pictures suggests, however, that Apelles suppresses a conquering self-image. Jupiter is an ambiguous figure for Apelles, for while suggesting the sexual success of disguise, he also figures the presence of imperial desire, which the painter dare not imitate. (It is not the disguised god but the hapless maidens Apelles has painted.) Accordingly, Campaspe shows a greater capability of resisting Apelles' hesitant advances than Leda, Europa, and others were able to muster against Jupiter. She adopts an imperious air, which, combining with Apelles' own uncertainty, enables her to withstand him: 'fall to that you must doe, not that you would doe' (III.iii.5O-i). Her commands, while for the moment envoicing her control, also bespeak the suppression of her own love for Apelles and continue to register her obedience to Alexander. 120

The Allegorical Subject In the following scene Alexander visits Apelles and Campaspe in the studio. He is certain that Apelles will not have been able to portray Campaspe's beauty, the ideal corollary to his sovereignty. As the king quizzes his painter over the latter's technique, a direct clash between the sovereign's and subject's desire commences. Apelles responds by challenging the order of visual subjection through allegorical, figured speech. Initially Alexander notes that the painter cannot recreate the essential pattern of nature. Apelles responds with the ambiguity Puttenham recommends, neither overtly attacking nor simply echoing his sovereign. Asked where he usually begins a painting, Apelles suggests the face. Endorsing his own imperial vision, Alexander disagrees: 'I would begin with the eie, as a light to all the rest' (lll.iv.72). The painter's compliant reply admits Alexander's sovereignty, thus following Thomas Wright's counsel that the inferior not challenge his superior. At the same time, he asserts another identity from within the order of subjection, one that relativizes the sovereign ethos: 'If you will paint, as you are a king, your Maiestie may beginne where you please; but as you wold be a painter, you must begin with the face' (lll.iv.735). Apelles continues, equivocally veiling his love for Campaspe, counting on his power to dissimulate his meanings before the king even as he expresses them: Alex. When will you finish Campaspe? Apel. Neuer finishe: for alwayes in absolute bewtie, there is somewhat aboue art. Alex. Why should not I by labour bee as cunning as Apelles? Apel. God shield you should haue cause to be so cunning as Apellesl (m.iv.8o-5)

This is a rhetoric of 'false semblant.' Oriented around the subject's 'selmess,' it articulates meanings that contradict the sovereign discourse even as they seem ironically to submit to it, generating loopholes that can be emphasized if needed.91 The image of Campaspe's inimitably 'absolute bewtie' that he will 'neuer finishe,' and that therefore seems to confirm Alexander's unparalleled desire, can reflect Apelles' own boundless passion. These ulterior intentions are depicted in the ensuing soliloquy, a personal discourse through which the subject might temporarily evade official perception, or at least imagine such evasion. Bemoaning the fact that Campaspe is Alexander's - 'alas! she is the paramor to a prince. Alexander the monarch of the earth hath both her body and affection' (HI.v.28-30) - Apelles decides fur121

Guise and Disguise lively to disfigure the portrait so Campaspe will have to return to his studio: 'wit must work, where authoritie is not ... I will by deuise giue it a blemish' (lll.v.56-8). The 'blemish' is an allegorical trope of disguise that inscribes his desire and disrupts the mimetic, visual order. Seeming to signify a mistake on his part and hence showing the limit of his aesthetic subjection, it is the dissimulated opportunity for him to renounce submission and to realize desire by avoiding overtness: 'as good it were to vtter my love, and die with deniall, as conceale it, & Hue in despaire' (lll.v.59-6i). The second half of the play sees the emergence of Campaspe's own attempt to fulfil her desire for Apelles, as she contradicts the disgruntled passivity that Castiglione's males attributed to her. She voices her love in a short soliloquy that also reveals the use of disguise to allegorize her visual homage to the king and escape subjection's despair: 'better thy tongue wagge, then thy heart break ... women that cast their eies vpon kinges, may place their hearts vpon vassals' (rv.ii.4-n). Her visual submission to the monarch dissembles the aim of her desire. Apelles then enters, and a complex lovers' dialogue begins. They each cautiously pass towards their desired identities as lover and beloved but remain sharply conscious of their subjection to Alexander and their unsureness of the other's motives. They attempt to represent and dissemble their love, uttering it while leaving no trace of it. The scene is like two courtly rivals, sounding each other out through equivocations and ambiguities. Yet the dialogue has an even sharper edge, for the apparent rivalry, expressed in the witty thrusts of courtly love, disguises an identity mutually sought, one that would transgress the law of sovereign desire.92 Their words, ever mindful of the 'king's eyes and ears,' pay due to Alexander while allegorizing that respect: Apel Whom do you loue best in the world? Camp. He that made me last in the world. Apel That was a God. Camp. I had thought it had beene a man. But whome do you honour most, Apelles?

Apel. The thing that is lykest you, Campaspe. Camp. My picture? Apel. I dare not venture vpon your person. (lV.ii.37-44)

Campaspe's initial reply is taken by the painter to repeat the myth of Alexander's divinity. Her next veiled reference to Apelles as her 122

The Allegorical Subject maker, however, reaccentuates the surface meaning of her subjection and draws forth her desire in response to his.93 At the same time, Apelles' responses rework the hierarchy of desire by replacing the forbidden ideal - Campaspe's person - with its copy. As Paulina's statue of Hermione confounds Leontes' preconceptions and leaves him at first 'mock'd with art,'94 so Apelles' antimimeticism seeks to resist the political, personal, and sexual impositions of sovereign power. His art has fashioned an allegorical nature that seems to imitate the essential order but does so in order to supersede it. The portrait is a pictorial version of the courtly wit and rhetoric of Allegoria - perhaps an ideal image for the effects of Lyly's own writing. As Lacan notes on the play of trompe I'oeil, such a text may threaten the very origins of Platonic essentialism: 'The picture does not compete with appearance, it competes with what Plato designates for us beyond appearance as being the Idea. It is because the picture is the appearance that says it is that which gives the appearance that Plato attacks painting, as if it were an activity competing with his own.'95 Campaspe's painting now signifies the telos of desire and the realization of the courtier's identity: Camp. What will you saye if Alexander perceiue your loue? Apel I will say it is no treason to loue. Camp. But how if he wil not suffer thee to see my person? Apel. Then will I gase continually on thy picture. Camp. That will not feede thy heart. Apel. Yet shall it fill mine eye: besides the sweete thoughtes, the sure hopes, thy protested faith, wil cause me to imbrace thy shadow continually in mine armes, of the which by strong imagination I will make a substaunce. (rv.iv.6-14)

The subject excludes the sovereign gaze from his own system of desire. The lovers' 'protested faith' exceeds the mimetic order and attains fulfilment through its own imaginative power. They now envisage Alexander's love as artificially imitative. It appears as a politic emotion that narcissistically seeks itself as its own ideal goal, proceeding through the power of an absolute demand that neither permits nor wants anyone else to respond: O Apelles, thy loue commeth from the heart, but Alexanders from the mouth ... They [kings] place affection by times, by pollicie, by appointment; if they frowne, who dares calls them vnconstant? if bewray

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Guise and Disguise secretes, who will tearme them vntrue? if fall to other loues, who trembles not, if he call them vnfaithfull? In kinges there can be no loue, but to Queenes: for as neere must they meete in maiestie, as they doe in affection. (rv.iv.2O-3i)

The sovereign word, which would command all, compels the king to a reflexive desire in which royal 'affection' meets only its own 'maiestie,' or rather - following the ethopolitical law of imaginary desire - misses as it only 'neere' meets its own 'maiestie.' The goal of this dissembling subjectivity is, however, only fleetingly experienced. Lyly's play does not stage an image of liberated selfhood. In his next soliloquy Apelles recounts the renewed subjection to visual control. He has found himself relocated within the mimetic hierarchy, with the subversiveness of his allegorical discourse exposed: 'I fear me Apelles, that thine eies haue blabbed that, which thy tongue durst not. What little regard hadst thou! whilst Alexander viewed the conterfeite of Campaspe, thou stoodest gazing on her countenaunce!' (v.ii.i-4). With the subject's and sovereign's gazes juxtaposed, Apelles' dissimulations become ineffectual, and the system of visual power is reasserted. Although Apelles focuses on Campaspe herself while Alexander looks at her 'conterfeite,' the directness of his vision and its lack of disguise, instead of realizing his love, resubject him to an identity that for a time he had evaded: 'O loue! I never before knewe what thou wert, and now haste thou made mee that I know not what my selfe am?' (V.ii.8-9). The desire that had led him to the point of fulfilling his 'selfness' now appears only to have concealed a deeper, ideologically structured ethos that returns to enforce submission all the more powerfully for its temporary eclipse. Lyly shows that in the pervasive structure of obedience, 'selfness' is something that the subject may grasp only through the retrospective recognition of the loss of his desire. It is an identity received rather than realized. The play's final scene shows the restoration of sovereign vision and the order of obedience. Apelles merely replies to Alexander's questions with a defeated irony that is dependent on his prince's pleasure: Alex. ... Apelles, what peece of worke haue you in hand? Apel. None in hand, if it like your maiestie: but I am deuising a platforme in my head. Alex. ... Is it nothing about Venus? Apel. No, but some thing aboue Venus. (v.iv.75-8i)

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The Allegorical Subject Alexander has no trouble in interpreting such remarks. Having tricked Apelles into showing frantic concern for Campaspe's portrait, he dismisses the explanation that painters get as engrossed in their works as do lovers in the beloved. The mimetic relationship between reality and art, ideal and copy, that had been allegorically disrupted is now reaffirmed in archetypal form, as the subject's 'colours' and allegorical figures are uncovered by the prince, 'You lay your colours grosely; though I could not paint in your shop, I can spy into your excuse' (V.iv.04-5). The final union between Campaspe and Apelles depends on Alexander, who contemptuously dismisses the prospect of their love: 'Go Apelles, take with you your Campaspe, Alexander is cloied with looking on that which thou wondrest at' (V.iv. 138-40). With this command the monarch abstracts his gaze above his subjects and reasserts the mimetic order of vision, desire, and subjection. In coming together, Campaspe and Apelles acknowledge the sovereign power and their dependent position with Thankes to your maiestie on bended knee' (V.iv. 141). Like the playwright, they have waited to be 'christened good by the iudgement of your selfe' (Epi 16), and so consentingly participate in their own submission.96 Yet unlike Lyly, whose courtly allegories never actualized his courtly aims, the lovers find themselves 'honoured' and 'blessed' (V.iv.142-3), their dissemblance bringing reward and contentment at the imperial court. The play sublimates its author's frustrations, allegorizing the possible realization of 'selfness' despite the constraints of subjection. By so doing, Campaspe represents the limited pressure that subjects may themselves exert against the sovereign system of obedience while working within it. Rather dian attempting an open defiance that would call forth the martial power of Alexander, through their disguised romance Apelles and Campaspe compel the monarch to question the mode of his own rule. He is forced to revalue the relativity of his status and its interdependent links with those whom it commands. The ideals of power - archetypal sovereignty and perception - are demystified and revealed to the monarch: T perceiue Alexander cannot subdue the affections of men, though he conquer their countries' (V.iv. 127-9). Subjection no longer unequivocally confirms power but discloses the latter's own imaginary constructions. The dissembling mimesis of obedience confronts the sovereign ethos with its own essential image - 'I perceiue Alexander - an image that is as unrealized as it is desired. For the ethos of imperium either remains unfinished, in an endless quest for symbolic power, with always 'an other to subdue,' or foresees its own demise, that 'I wil fall in loue': 'It were a shame Alexander 125

Guise and Disguise should desire to commaund the world, if he could not commaund himselfe. But come, let vs go, I wil try whether I can better beare my hand with my hart, then I could with mine eie. And good Hephestion, when al the world is woone, and euery countrey is thine and mine, either find me out an other to subdue, or of my world I wil fall in loue' (v.iv.i5o-5). Bowing before power, the subject nonetheless reveals the sovereign's own submission. VI

Campaspe represents a process of subjection that negotiates and resists rather than duplicates the ruling rhetoric of selfhood. The subject reproduces that rhetoric's key tropes of vision, repetition, and obedience allegorically, changing the ideological meaning of selfhood that they hold within the official scheme. At the same time, Lyly's court drama does not escape the ideological constraints of this rhetoric; in reproducing these tropes it cannot offer a radically different set of social or linguistic terms through which the subject can re-present himself or herself and in so doing subvert the sovereign system. The structure of subjection must be manipulated from within. The subject passes towards an uncertain identity that is partly revealed and partly withheld by a sociopolitical structure that aims to essentialize identity and to foreclose such passage. In this sense, Campaspe offers an ambiguously illuminating conception of individuality. Within the context of an imperial power that would determine identity as would Alexander's and perhaps Elizabeth's courts, the gestures towards 'selfness' that are made by Apelles and Campaspe assume the significance of ideological challenge. The desire for an individuality, even one that may never be openly asserted, has destabilizing effects upon the sovereign order, effects glimpsed above in Alexander's self-doubting final words. At the same time, and in a way that Puttenham's confident rhetoric may not, due to its acceptance of the impossibility of its own fulfilment, Lyly's notion of subjection doubts the ideal 'selfness' at which it aims even while passing towards it. Through the imposition of an imperially determined, symbolic identity - the obedient subject - Lyly's characters are restrained and are compelled to restrain diemselves from the goal of an idealized selfimage. The imperial court enforces a triply ambiguous condition of ethopoetic selfhood: it commands an identity; in doing so, it impels the discontented subject to search out another, preferred identity; and, by retaining its command, it enforces the subject's recognition of the 126

The Allegorical Subject risks, limits, and final unattainability of the ethos he or she seeks. The sovereign structure of obedience both sets the subject's desire for selfhood in train and discloses the impossibility of its realization. In this way, the subject is positioned, through his subjection, to avoid the type of misrecognition that awaits the princely dissembler, whose very authority conceals from him his absorption within the ethopolitical paradox. Lyly's subjects conceive their self-deferring ethos through desire. As in Garfinkel's case study on passing, it is sexuality that induces them to leave their designated social positions. The ideological relationship between power and sexuality that surfaced through The Malcontent and in the patriarchal musings of Castiglione's and Alexander's courtiers was misogynistic. The idealized masculine identities of prince and subject were in part depicted through positing their essential priority and unity against a deviant femaleness. In contrast, the hesitant reciprocity between Apelles and Campaspe enables them to work out a social identity precisely because it acknowledges its interdependence with the other. The function of the sexual other in the discourse of selfhood moves between these two poles in many Renaissance texts. Often imaged as woman, the other threatens and is spurned by the masculinist political ethos, in the rhetorical line marked out by Aristotle in the Politics; or, the other is embraced in order to fulfil a lack within the political ethos - the kind of androgynous completion of the body politic that the lovesick Orsino contemplates with Olivia, 'when liver, brain, and heart, / These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and fill'd / Her sweet perfections with one self king' (l.i.36-8). James I used a similar image of sexual union, in somewhat more conventional terms, in his inaugural address to Parliament: 'I am the husband, and the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife.'97 In these late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean utterances, a theme of androgyny begins to supplement misogyny in signifying the state. The interplay between these two topoi, androgyny and misogyny, forms another dimension in the ethopoetic rhetoric of the period's sexual politics.

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Chapter Four

The Figure of Woman

A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion; William Shakespeare, Sonnet 20

Thus is she manifest and exalted, even as she is masked and lost, in discursive parades that set her outside her self; ideally offered to the oratorical disputes between men. Luce Irigaray The Speculum of the Other Woman

I Near the end of her essay on disguise in Elizabethan drama, M.C. Bradbrook asserts that after Shakespeare stopped writing for the stage the 'deeper implications of disguise ... did not long survive,' suggesting that dissembling characters could no longer aptly represent issues of selfhood and identity. Even by 1609 a certain predictability is found in the motif. The example is taken from Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster. 'Bellario's true sex is not revealed till the end, though by this time any theatrical page might be assumed to be a woman in disguise.'1 In this view it seems that an audience accustomed to stage effects and plot twists, its sophistication registered in the exclusive cost of attending the private theatres, automatically expects such reversals of appearance and persona. Many plays in the period show the donning of transvestite garb and include complaints against the distresses of sexual disguise. The heroine of Lyly's Gallathea laments, 'O woulde the gods had made mee as I seeme to be, or that I might safelie bee what I seeme not'; Shakespeare's Viola declaims, 'Disguise, I see thou 129

Guise and Disguise art a wickedness.'2 In these confessional asides, the process of sexual dissemblance is made a thematic issue. With the recurring treatment of the processes and dilemmas of cross-dressing, even for plays like Epicoeneand Philasterwhere the cross-dresser is disguised from the start, the impact seems to reside less in startling revelations than in a gradual build-up and complication of familiar issues and theatrical tropes. In performance a 'theatrical competence' shared by spectator and actor could emphasize such themes and consider gender as a key part of the dramatic process.3 Transvestite roles could be exaggerated to remind the audience who is and isn't wearing the pants. Numerous scenes allow for such emphasis: Lyly has Gallathea and Phillida try to learn from each other how boys behave; Shakespeare provides the comic duel between Cesario and Aguecheek; Ganymede embarrassingly faints when hearing of Orlando's wound; and Epicoene could swagger every now and then. No doubt there were extra insights and pleasures to be gained for those who watched and didn't suspend disbelief. And perhaps the more readily these insights were had, the more they were to be enjoyed: in recognizing the male actor beneath a female character impersonating a man, or beneath a male character who pretends to be a woman; glimpsing roles and identities baroquely but not opaquely layered on top of and relativizing each other. On account of these frequently compounding theatrical cues - the sort of plot and character reversals that Virginia Woolf wryly uses to exemplify the Elizabethan period in Between the Acts — Bradbrook infers that androgynous disguise was, if not passe, a generic commonplace that audiences anticipated, understood, and were satisfied to see again.4 The period's continuing religious and moral debates over theatricality, disguise, and 'excesse of Apparrell,'5 especially in reference to sexuality and gender, undermine this thesis of pervasive acceptance of dramatic cross-dressing. The plays' cultural context informs their critical perception. As Jean Howard has recently noted, theatricality and dress were often seen to challenge an 'official ideology of social stasis' that sought to reinforce gender and class distinctions.6 A well-known Elizabethan exchange over theatrical cross-dressing had pitted Rainolds against Gager and Gentili, the former arguing that 'even the shortest use of women's clothing is sufficient to stir up unclean passions' in both actors and audience. Rainolds combines homophobic and misogynist themes to attack a 'lust' compounded by seeing boys dressed as women.7 This dispute over theatrical costume exemplifies conservative religious-moral disapproval and suspicion towards fashion in the period. 130

The Figure of Woman The 'Homilie against Excesse of Apparrell' warns of the threats to social rank: 'that euery man behold and consider his owne vocation, in as much as GOD hath appointed euery man his degree and office, within the limittes whereof it behoueth him to keepe himselfe. Therefore all may not looke to weare like apparell, but euery one according to his degree, as GOD hath placed him' (103). It goes on to reveal both a specific focus against women's dress and sexual desire, citing the patristic source of Tertullian, and an anxious concern over the blurring of gender distinctions through the disguisings of fashion: 'For the proude and haughtie stomacks of the daughters of England, are so maintained with diuers disguised sortes of costly apparell, that as Tertullian an auncient father saith, there is left no difference in apparell betweene an honest matrone and a common strumpet. Yea many men are become so effeminate, that they care not what they spend in disguising, euer desiring new toyes and inuenting new fashions' (105). The disputes over costume and fashion were to grow in number and intensity under the Stuarts, less on account of a rising tide of puritanism than, as Margot Heinemann points out, because of the increasingly complex array of cultural, political, and religious attitudes that theatre and fashion were taken as signifying.8 Though cross-dressing may have begun to lose dramatic surprise, perhaps to the point of being predicted by theatre audiences, it retained an urgent social significance that could circumscribe the throne, with Prynne being punished for slandering the queen in Histriomastix. These opposing social functions and effects of dress, cross-dressing, and theatricality reveal their complicated relation to the period's sexual politics. On the one hand, dramatic transvestism might be seen to challenge cultural impositions of gender and identity. Such is Phyllis Rackin's view that in 'inverting the offstage associations, stage illusion radically subverted the gender divisions of the Elizabethan world.'9 In these critical terms, the attacks and pronouncements against theatricality and dress respond to such subversive gestures. On the other hand, gender divisions may not have been as rigid as some critics might suggest; the concerns of the homilies seem to acknowledge that more flexible images of sexual identity were in social circulation outside the theatre. In addition, the place of the stage was shifting from the liberties of 'whatever could not be contained within the strict bounds of the community"0 to a more central, fixed locus, with the opening of private theatres complementing court performances, shows at the Inns of Court, and royal and mayoral processions. Along with this shift, images of transsexual disguise seem to have been being 131

Guise and Disguise accommodated if not co-opted by an urban ideology that was starting to fragment and limit rituals of inversion and misrule11 and to reconsider the social roles of women as attitudes towards marriage and the family began to alter.12 Despite definitive interpretations by modern critics, then, dramatic cross-dressing frequently evades univocal readings as either subversive or stabilizing. It may work normatively or transgressively, within the theatre and without, representing the range of cultural functions that gender performs. Specific attitudes towards androgyny as a type of worrying deviance are doubtless being worked through in the hybrid figures of dramatic cross-dressing. Yet as the contradictory evaluations of these androgynous images suggest, they also serve to convey and question general myths and concerns about sexuality. As Harold Garfmkel affirms in his study of sexual passing, the 'intersexed' figure discloses the 'omnirelevance of sexual statuses to affairs of daily life' by compressing, juxtaposing, and disturbing a 'community of understandings' that would envisage sexuality as 'a natural fact of life,' and in so doing efface it 'as a natural and moral fact of life."3 Dramatic androgyny, which Bradbrook and others seem to consider a predictable reversal of either dramatic or social personae, is more interestingly used to stage the complex ambiguities of sexuality and the social construction of gender. It interrogates conventionalized cultural and literary discourses through which apparently straight male and female characters can be depicted.14 In introducing practices of expedient change that are socially and personally motivated, transvestite disguise undermines commonsense presumptions of gender as a 'temporally identical thing over all historical and prospective circumstance and possible experiences ... the self-same thing in essence.'15 It relates sexual identity to the ethopoetic processes of characterization and so opens up questions concerning the motives that underlie sexuality and the desires that interact with gender. The juxtaposing of a 'natural' and a disguised sexual ethos suggests the dialogic conflict between essentialist and sophistical notions of selfhood. Particularly in plays of the period, where confusions among characters are commonly reconciled by confessions of 'true' selfhood, the interpersonal and social stakes of gender are highlighted. Reviled and accepted, socially marginalized and enclosed, androgynous disguise concentrates a contested ideology of sexual identity. In so doing, and as the repeated references of the homily on apparel to the Bible and to Tertullian suggest, it rehearses feminist and misogynist themes from the classical and Christian canons and 132

The Figure of Woman enables many Renaissance texts to engage this discursive context. As well as being a familiar theatrical device and social concern, crossdressing figures in a textual tradition of gendered characterization and the rhetorical construction of sexuality. This tradition will be examined in this chapter by considering the connections dramatic cross-dressing has, first with the rhetorical practices of epideixis and misogyny, both of which seek to presume and construct unambiguous gender roles, and then with an androgynous ethos that emerges in a range of Renaissance texts through the speech act of confession. A text's confessional revelation may serve more to question the determined gender that its preceding discourse of character has already presumed than finally to confirm its characters' sexual identities. The structure of the androgynous figure is metonymic. It represents the interchange of parts and names of identities. The deep ethopoetic reference of rhetoric, implicit in the conception of the 'proper' as that which is self-sufficient and self-possessed, re-emerges in the disruptions to univocal meaning and identity that Elizabethan definitions of metonymy note: when a word hath a proper signification of the owne, and being referred to an other thing, hath an other meaning.'6 Metonimia, when of things that be nigh together, wee put one name for another.17

Through these definitions, metonymy may either exchange meanings or, by virtue of its marked rhetoricity, reaffirm 'proper' meaning.18 It inscribes the dialogic process of androgyny, for in terms of gender, cross-dressing relocates social-sexual roles, parts, and names, with similarly ambiguous effects of stabilization and subversion. In the deeper rhetorical logic that informs many Renaissance texts, however, the conventional, naturalized order of gender and discourse is based on man, and woman signifies a deviation from masculine essence. Ian Maclean has traced this order to the hierarchical thinking of Aristotelian metaphysics: In the distinction of male and female may be discerned Aristotle's general tendency to produce dualities in which one element is superior and the other inferior. The male principle in nature is associated with active, formative and perfected characteristics, while the female is passive, material and deprived, desires the male in order to

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Guise and Disguise become complete. The duality male/female is therefore paralleled by the dualities active/passive, form/matter, act/potency, perfection/ imperfection, completion/incompletion, possession/deprivation.19

We might add a further parallel, the rhetorical duality of the proper and the figurative, with its implications for self-representation. In this opposition, woman embodies figurative speech; she is the rhetorically improper persona who may disrupt or confirm the categories of gendered ethos. Typically, this metonymic femaleness structures androgyny in two ways. First, it may disguise maleness and cause androgyny, as in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew, 'if the boy have not a woman's gift / To rain a shower of commanded tears, / An onion will do well for such a shift' (Ind i. 124-6). Here the onion is not only an external prop that enables the boy to act like a woman; it also signifies the dissembled guise of crying that women characteristically assume to produce certain emasculating effects upon men. Secondly, femaleness emerges through the guise of 'masculine usurp'd attire' and forms the end point of androgyny.20 In each case, a prior male ethos is corrupted by a belated feminizing that metonymically constructs androgyny.21 Femaleness can be the cause of androgyny, as in Taming, or its effect, as in Twelfth Night and Philaster. In both cases, the possibility of corruption confirms the prior presence and wholeness of the male ethos. The causal exchange in these examples reifies an original maleness and woman's belated figural function. Such logic is also metonymic in structure; as one of Peacham's examples of the trope suggests: 'when the efficient cause is understood of the effect... when the effect is gathered by the efficient.' This interchangeable causality reinforces the function of androgyny as a rhetorical motif in texts of the period, one that affects their discursive logic and tropes.22 The metonymic structure engenders the proper order of meaning, wherein a privileged 'male' tenor holds an essential priority as 'the underlying idea or principal subject which the vehicle or figure means.'23 This order posits the representing female figure as a supplement to the 'principal subject.' The underlying meaning of maleness is displaced into a feminized and feminizing figural discourse and acquires a consequent androgyny in its characterization. The logic intrinsic to this rhetoric again works with ambiguous cultural effects. On the one hand, it may envisage an original male ideal as threatened by the figural self-difference introduced through an emasculating vehicle or trope. On the other hand, this rhetorical logic may also 134

The Figure of Woman function to grant masculinist discourse a presence and an influence that are based upon the absence of an archetypal androgynous figure. Such seems to be the moral of Aristophanes' myth of the hermaphroditic origins of sexual love in the Symposium: 'So you see, gentlemen, how far back we can trace our innate love for one another, and how this love is always trying to redintegrate our former nature, to make two into one, and to bridge the gulf between one human being and another.'24 Aristophanes' lost third sex explains and naturalizes the existing hierarchical relationship between the sexes; it is this relationship's origin and its eternal goal. Through a similar mythic structure, figurative language was often seen as the archetypal norm that originates and justifies social institutions. Cicero's classic statement in De Oratore on 'the highest achievements of eloquence' was picked up by rhetoricians like Wilson and Puttenham, who held that poets 'were the first law-makers to the people, and the first politicians, devising all expedient means for th' establishment of Common wealth.'25 Through these interconnected myths of rhetorical, sexual, and social origin and reunion, the threat to patriarchal discourse of a figurative androgyny that emerges in other contexts may be defused, again with a suggestion of the social ambiguity of the androgynous image. This mythic discourse underlies the dramatistic motif of transvestite disguise. The essentialist ethopoetic tradition, re-envoiced by male speakers in patriarchal contexts, may be interrogated rather than simply inverted by the androgynous figures. Androgyny conveys neither an antithetical nor a confirming social deviance; rather the figure may confound cultural priorities and systems of gender and identity by revealing their ambiguous interdependence. As a kind of femininized masculinity, androgyny exemplifies the uncertain ethopoetic effects of the trope of disguise, which sets up various categories of identity like the prince and the subject and then calls them into question through the equivocal terms that constitute them. The rhetorical means of establishing and expressing these categories exposes them to dialogic challenge. As a tragicomedy, a hybrid genre that 'combines old sexual discourses in new ways,'26 a sexual-disguise play like Philaster stages a similar disruption of notions of gender and identity and their function in social order. Indeed, Beaumont and Fletcher's text seems a particularly significant example of the ethopoetic issues raised by an androgynous rhetoric. With many similar texts it can be considered 'as a play about masking, about the conscious and unconscious assumption of false identities and about levels of self-knowledge and self135

Guise and Disguise deception,' as Coppelia Kahn observes of Twelfth Night.*17 Yet in contrast to such Shakespearean versions, Philaster does not conclude with sociosexual order seemingly restored, even though the protagonist regains his throne and wins his beloved. The androgynous figure Bellario/Euphrasia remains outside the political-marriage finale, a reminder of social limits imposed on and by orthodox sexuality and proper selfhood. The character exceeds the return to the norms of gender and identity, the restoration of 'personal and interpersonal "oneness"' that often seems central to the denouement of Shakespearean romantic comedy.28 Such exclusion foregrounds questions about the neat closure of events in Twelfth Night that are half-hinted at in Orsino's final speech, which registers Viola's continuing androgyny, the constant dependence of gender on guise, and his own ambiguous desire. Like Rosalind's epilogue to As You Like It, these words toy with the idea of transvestism, sustained beyond the theatrical frame, while seeming to reject it: 'Cesario, come - / For so you shall be while you are a man; / But when in other habits you are seen, / Orsino's mistress, and his fancy's queen' (¥.1.385-8). A marked supernumerary within the play's social world, Bellario also serves to focus the stylistic excess often attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher's work onto questions of gender and self-representation. This excess is often contrasted unfavourably with Shakespearean discourse. As Bradbrook's comments suggest, Beaumont and Fletcher are seen to be flawed, their defects due to their relative belatedness to Shakespeare. Indeed, against Shakespeare's prior, proper, and singular corpus, their collaborative work is constructed in terms of a discursive deviance not dissimilar to that of androgyny. It offers no univocal image of the author. Its unresolved ambiguities can be seen as signs of incompletion in comparison to the late romances, typically considered as 'genres of wish-fulfillment' and of personal synthesis.29 It is also regarded as a kind of decadence that parasitically threatens the integrity of Shakespeare's text, either by corrupting earlier masterpieces and paragons of characterization, or, as when Fletcher worked with Shakespeare on The Two Noble Kinsmen, by vitiating the bard's efforts and very identity: 'He and Beaumont had pulled Hamlet down to the comic level of Philaster; now Shakespeare's Palamon and Arcite could be irreverently handled in the same play as Shakespeare was presenting.'30 If not decadent, Beaumont and Fletcher's style is regarded as 'rhetorical' in a merely figural sense, where 'we consciously follow the ebb and flow of Philaster's passion, responding to his diatribes and laments as declamatory exercises.'31 In this view, the text's 'spatial 136

The Figure of Woman design' formalizes its characterization, placing 'ultimate stress ... less upon the nature of the participants than upon the artifice which employs them.'38 Just as androgyny may concentrate key notions of gender and identity, the intensity of this 'artifice,' rather than leading away from characterization, may test the ethopoetic process through which generically and socially standard characters, especially the heroic male protagonist, are portrayed. The rhetorical rhythms of Beaumont and Fletcher's work put into question both the subjective investments that motivate self-representation, and perhaps the not-unrelated critical investments that motivate the icon of Shakespeare. For running through and determining these criticisms of their work is a consistent psychological essentialism that derives from early-nineteenth-century celebrations of the Shakespearean rhetoric of character, a tradition exemplified by Schlegel's contrasting comment that Beaumont and Fletcher's 'poetry was not an inward devotion of the feeling and imagination, but a means to obtain brilliant results. Their first object was effect.'33 The political and sexual dilemmas in Philaster that are concentrated in the triangle of Philaster, Arethusa, and Bellario rest on die identity of the last. The androgynous woman is here central to personal and social certainty. Her characterization seems to reveal both the discursive presuppositions of gender and the inconsistencies of identity that these presuppositions would suppress. The discontinuity of selfhood and gender emerges most tellingly in the impassioned speeches of the protagonist, Philaster. In their extreme fervour, and indeed through their resounding misogynistic echoes of Hamlet, his complaints against Arethusa and Bellario soar beyond the 'proper' norms of the heroic male. In her pivotal and inconstant role, Bellario both triggers this androgynous rhetoric and then seems to restore its gendered balance at the play's end. Her word discloses the instabilities of a masculinist discourse that pursues its ethopoetic goals through the figure of woman, its rhetorical 'master mistress.' For this project inevitably deconstructs the masculine ideal it aims to realize through revealing the figure of woman within that ideal. Woman is the figural difference that both guarantees and denies the telos of masculine characterization.34 The significance of Bellario's androgynous disguise lies, then, not only in its display of themes of sexual self-knowledge and deception but in its revelation of the discursive means through which sexual selves can be known and deceived. Citing dramatic and non-dramatic precursors through the over-determined trope of androgyny and a familiar story-line of usurpation, restoration, and sexual politics, Philaster replays a rhetorical tradition of gendered ethopoesis.

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Guise and Disguise II

The main features of this ethopoetic tradition can begin to be seen in the classic rhetorical texts of male praise for woman, Gorgias' and Isocrates' encomia on Helen. Their well-wrought styles disclose a paradoxical relationship between the speaking male and the spoken female, the two figures that the encomia necessarily depict. The man's praise, which begins by presuming his separate perspective upon woman, gradually intertwines them, as he becomes reliant on her figure or image to portray himself and so fulfil what Joel Fineman calls 'the cogito of praise ... "I praise therefore I am."'35 This interdependence destines the loss of an original ethos that the speaker would understand as uttering his words of praise and then being reinforced by them. Androgynous disguise constructs a similar ambiguity regarding a prior ethos, not only for the disguised figure but for others who find their own gender and identity being disturbed by his or her presence. If the paradox of praise is 'not simply the negation of straightforward praise but, instead, its peculiar imitative double, a rhetorical doubling,'36 then androgyny is, like misogyny, an analogue of praise, as the ethopoetic doubling of straight gender. The classical encomia instigate this sexual doubling in a rhetoric of characterization that later works will both imitate and revise. Gorgias' text initially reacts to the canonical dominance of a proper, heroic, male ethos that derives from the Homeric works and that casts Helen antithetically as a perpetual 'reminder of the calamities.'37 The orator will conclude by claiming 'I have removed by my speech a woman's infamy' (31), construing the speech as his own heroic rescue of the fair sex.38 Though saving Helen from cultural blame, the Encomium deprives her of any agency, characterizing her as the object of male strength, speech, and desire - 'she was seized by force, or persuaded by speeches, (or captivated by love)' (23) - all of which are seen as functions of each other and are reproduced by the speaker's own powerful rhetoric: the persuader, because he compelled, is guilty; but the persuaded, because she was compelled by his speech, is wrongly reproached ... The power of speech bears the same relation to the ordering of the mind as the ordering of drugs bears to the constitution of bodies ... Things that we see do not have the nature which we wish them to have but the nature which each of them actually has; and by seeing them the mind is moulded in its character too ... So if Helen's eye pleased

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The Figure of Woman by Alexander's [ie, Paris'] body, transmitted an eagerness and striving of love to her mind, what is surprising? (27-9)

This ancient, mechanistic account of perception empowers Paris' sexual identity and weakens Helen's. Her love is an effect of perception, and her perception is an effect of Paris' original presence. She experiences the same kind of passive sight and selfhood that Shakespeare's Cressida complains about - 'The error of our eye directs our mind' (V.ii.io6) - where woman's random gaze is cognitively overpowering, subjecting her emotionally and sexually to the masculine presence she observes.39 Paris' persuasive mastery thus forms a rhetorical parallel to his pre-verbal, visual essence. Together they construct a discourse of masterful desire and sexuality that reifies male speech on the basis of female pathos. Gorgias' self-congratulatory closing consolidates this pattern. He assumes a rhetorical control analogous to Paris'. Helen, the apparent topic, is overshadowed by a speaker whose own discursive pleasure emerges as the ultimate motive of the Encomium: 'I have removed by my speech a woman's infamy, I have kept to the purpose which I set myself at the start of my speech; I attempted to dispel injustice of blame and ignorance of belief, I wished to write the speech as an encomium of Helen and an amusement for myself (31). The confessional statement of intentions reveals a self-reflexive aim that realizes satisfaction more from its own words than from women and that represents itself metonymically through the figure of Helen. She is the occasion for a rhetorical narcissism to exercise and enjoy itself by declaiming upon favourite topoi, which, as E.R. Curtius suggestively defines, generally work as 'intellectual themes, suitable for development and modification at the orator's pleasure.'40 In this view, Helen is an effect of praise that reveals and satisfies the male ethos. As Lauren Silberman has noted, Spenser seems to criticize this reductive transposition of female character through the legend of Britomart: 'Here haue I cause, in men iust blame to find, / That in their proper prayse too partiall bee, / And not indifferent to woman kind.'41 Men's 'proper prayse' of the other is a process of self-praise and definition, that also erases woman's role in history. Gorgias' Encomium at first seems to acknowledge Helen's historical causality. Through her beauty she produces, though not the Trojan war itself (caused by 'great reasons'), the rhetorical tradition of the Trojan war: 'In very many she created very strong amorous desires; with a single body she brought together many bodies of men who had great pride 139

Guise and Disguise for great reasons' (21). If the physical and martial priority of the men seems momentarily displaced by and dependent on Helen's 'amorous' influence, this inspirational effect is in turn eclipsed by the history of their discourse and action. Her causal role is used to undermine her own agency. These historical and subjective transpositions between cause and effect also appear in Isocrates' 'Encomium on Helen.' Early in the text, Helen is the vehicle through which men's great deeds can be spoken of: 'I think this will be the strongest assurance for those who wish to praise Helen, if we can show that those who loved and admired her were themselves more deserving of admiration than other men.'42 As topos, Helen allows these male feats to be eternally replayed in oratorical arenas and verbal battles - masculinist rhetoric as warfare.43 Isocrates' title echoes Gorgias' title, and he vigorously attacks his rivals: 'They ought to give up the use of this claptrap, which pretends to prove things by verbal quibbles, which in fact have long since been refuted, and to pursue the truth' (4). 'Helen' figures the truth of Isocrates' speech as opposed to the 'eristic disputations' of others (6), and he glorifies her beauty as a sign of virtue, which is 'the most beautiful of ways of living' (59). As sign, Helen is then precluded from the virtue won by men and seems only to serve as a pretext to man's utterance, which circulates among a closed male audience: 'while it is partly because of Homer's art, yet it is chiefly through her that his poem has such charm and has become so famous among all men' (65)Despite her rhetorical effacement, Helen assumes a responsibility for male discourse through both the metonymic interchange of cause for effect and the paradox of praise. As figurative vehicle she allows her praisers not merely to talk of her but to speak. Only on the basis of her metonymic effect - that is, on the basis of her silence - can the linked ideals of male sexual, military, and oratorical performance and pre-eminence be represented, as the orator tries to display his own archetypal ethos. However, Helen's figural function as a metonym of male virtue sets up a rhetorical process that from the start defers this singular ethopoetic goal. The male speaker is reliant upon her. The encomia necessarily employ an androgynous rhetoric, with woman as vehicle, that undermines the hierarchy of univocal gender and masculine identity that the epideictic structure presumes to reinforce. This ambiguous rhetorical relation between man and woman continues and intensifies in the Renaissance reproduction of the classical topoi. The subservient discursive function of woman appears in various 140

The Figure of Woman texts, quite strikingly in Cymbeline for example, where it motivates the bet between Posthumus Leonatus and lachimo on Imogen's virtue, a bet that is in effect an 'oratorical dispute' at her expense, and one that values its own words above her. If, Posthumus says, lachimo wins, 'I am no further your enemy; she is not worth our debate' (l.iv.i65-6). On the other hand, what Thomas Greene calls the 'heuristic' form of Renaissance imitatio, which emphasizes derivation plus distance from the original,44 seems to draw out questions concerning woman's rhetorical place and the hierarchy of gender it is used to represent in the classical works. Marlowe's 'interrogative text' DoctorFaustus uses Helen to dramatize the fall of the protagonist's essential Christian ethos. Rather than confirming his selfhood, she marks its sexual loss, an ironic inversion of the neo-Platonic soul's union with the godhead: 'Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss: / Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies. / Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again' (xviii.101-3).45 In Troilus and Cressida, masculine ideals of virtue, figured in the encomia through Helen's incomparable beauty, are challenged by Thersites' cynicism, which would rewrite the Trojan war as a discourse of male jealousy, 'All the argument is a whore and a cuckold' (II.iii.68). He demythologizes the tradition of martial masculinity given to the Renaissance through the classical tradition, as does La Rochefoucauld in his seventh maxim on the rivalry of Augustus and Antony, by affirming that its motive lies in a jealous desire for absolute, heroic selfhood that nonetheless is determined by its mediation through the sexual other and rivalry with other men.46 These Renaissance revisions of classical plots and personae represent a fractured structure of gender. The hierarchical order of male and female, with its attendant oppositions of whole and part, tenor and vehicle, is not simply reversed; instead the possibilities of their dialogic relationship are raised. The essentialism that underlies the encomia is complicated as the male ethos reveals its interdependence with woman even when, as in misogynistic texts, she is openly repudiated. Although it is the negative form of epideixis, misogynist rhetoric reproduces the structural paradoxes of gender inscribed in the encomia. Within the recurring disclaimers and criticisms of female character and the implicit justifications of male identity sounds a discourse of androgynous ethopoesis.47 HI

Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique adopts a consistently misogynistic tone that both rehearses the masculinist premises of the rhetorical 141

Guise and Disguise tradition and exposes them to the paradox of ethopoetic gender. It opens with an epistle to Lord Dudley that expresses themes of rhetorical domination and desire. The epistle is epideictic; yet unlike the encomia on Helen and more like a love sonnet, it seeks to woo its addressee - to persuade Dudley to offer support and patronage. As well as stroking the noble ego, the letter reveals a conflict of desire between praiser and praised, in the request and rejection, superiority and inferiority, that underlie its address: 'If pleasure maie provoke vs, what greater delite doe wee knowe, then to see a whole multitude, with the onely talke of man, rauished and drawne which way he liketh best to haue them?'48 Wilson makes explicit the rhetorical desire that was noted in narcissistic form in Gorgias' speech. He gives a sensual twist to the conventional description of the orator's aims to 'instruct, move and charm his hearers,'49 depicting the interaction between the wills and passions of speaker and audience in terms of sexual domination that were not unfamiliar in the Renaissance. Relations between the passions and the will were commonly coded into terms of gender and power, with the will sometimes being stereotyped as an empowered female, because of its exceptional sway. Thus in A Helpe to Discovrse, a sort of everyman's commonplace book, the anonymous authors instruct that 'Will is as free as Emperor, cannot be limitted, barred of her liberty, or made wil by any coaction, when she is vnwilling.'50 Here a misogynist trope, suggesting the inversion of the patriarchal body politic that Elizabeth could represent, underlies the explanation of the will's power and forms the basis of a common image of psychological affect. Wilson's model of rhetorical pleasure reproduces a visual, verbal, and sexual hierarchy of provocation and stimulation. 'Wee' watch the male orator watching the results of his words; and in each case watching is full of knowing delight. The masterful orator moves and positions the passive audience, taking them 'which way he liketh best to have them.' Their multitude increases his mastery and 'our' voyeuristic pleasure. This appreciation vicariously connects 'vs' to him within his system of pleasure, for we enjoy what he enjoys even if we don't do it ourselves. The implication is that, having watched and entered this visual order, we could do it too. Wilson himself assumes a double role as the virile orator and the aroused observer, his company with 'vs' removing any offensive hint of emasculation for Lord Dudley. The sexually loaded description feminizes the orator's audience, subjecting its passion to his will. The monologic rhetorical address that derives from Aristotle, with its effects of pathos, is sexualized. The 142

The Figure of Woman audience's pleasure in its ravishment remains dependent on the speaker's primary, causal desire. The imagery of ravishment indicates the gendered presumptions of the rhetoric: an opposed audience and speaker, with 'maleness' supposedly precluded from the former and fixed within the speaking function. Yet a male presence reappears in the specular pathos of 'delite' that 'wee' - a second audience including the author, Lord Dudley, and other would-be rhetoricians - feel from watching and hearing the speaker's still-primary verbal desire. This second male function, although it is not the addressed, feminized audience but one that voyeuristically observes and listens to the masterful speaker, reflects the impressed passivity and pleasure of that first audience. The resultant ambiguity of male pleasure as ravisher and ravished - the ravisher ravished - inheres most strongly in the paradoxical role of 'Wilson' himself, who as the enjoyer of this rhetoric is, like Gorgias, the narcissistic object of his own discourse. The epistle tries simultaneously to establish a conventional hierarchy of verbal gender and to suppress the androgynous ethos that thereby emerges. As the Arte continues, the system of macho rhetorical pleasure is reinforced by the transfer of the male audience's passive pleasure to woman. This stereotyping builds to a cliched misogynist joke that would preclude woman from speech. Tracing this development through Wilson's text reveals the metonymic structure of androgyny implicit in its masculinist rhetoric. Explaining what he calls the first kind of oratory, 'praise, or dispraise,' and thus again suggesting the importance of epideixis, Wilson notes that when speaking about people their sex is an important theme: To bee born a manchilde, declares a courage, grauitie, and constancie. To be borne a woman, declares weaknesse of spirit, neshnesse of body, and ficklenesse of mind' (i3).51 Gender is an essential sign of one's physical, emotional, and cognitive self. The emphasis on birth suggests a pre-social fixedness to these traits. Since gender 'declares' them, it becomes a discursive form that, through an apparently natural priority, presents a zero degree of social contingency. And as the truths of character uttered at birth by gender seem incontrovertible, they may function rhetorically as commonplaces. Nature and gender reinforce each other to establish a uniform type of encomiastic speech that becomes the model for other rhetorical genres. Uniformity exerts a certain pressure upon the way in which topics are to be represented. A predilection for similarity and consistency is a function not only of content but of rhetorical form, as Wilson demonstrates in an example from a set piece on love: 'Naturall love, 143

Guise and Disguise is an inward good will, that we beare to our parents, wife, children, or any other that be nigh of kinne to us, stirred thereunto not onely by our flesh, thinking that like as we would loue ourselues, so wee should loue them, but also by a likenesse of minde' (33). This homogenization of love into terms of nature and inwardness is achieved through the use of 'similitude,' which is later defined as 'a likenesse when two thinges, or more then two, are so compared and resembled together, that they both in some one propertie seeme like' (188). In this scheme, similitude is a figure of comparison that does not deviate from proper meaning as does metonymy ('when a word hath a proper signification of the owne, and being referred to an other thing, hath an other meaning' [175]). Through the visual notion of resemblance, similitude revises difference as a unitary 'likenesse,' recalling the narcissistic ethos that would structure masculinist rhetoric. The slippage between the discursive functions of likeness is then exemplified by its rhetorical pressure on the topic of love. Likeness bases different types of love on self-love, 'like as we would loue ourselues, so wee should loue them,' and then locates this 'Naturall love' in an 'inward good will' that preserves the patriarchal family of 'parents, wife, [and] children.' The narcissistic motive translates love into a unity founded on the intrinsic identity of male selfhood and its 'inward' will. On this basis, love's place in a reflexive order of masculine identity and desire is established. As a rhetorical form, likeness represents a number of culturally valued relationships. In its construction of love, it inscribes rules of personal interaction that seem to foster altruism and direct desire outwards. The premise of this orientation to the other, however, is a masculine self-identity, perhaps not so much assumed as sought, that remains as the object of desire. Thomas Wright suggests the presence of this specular self-identification within love, prior to one's male self turning to another, when it seems that the narcissism is projected: 'The ground of every man's love of himself is the Identity of a man with himself, for the lover and beloved are all one and the same thing.'52 Likeness determines the relations between self and other by structuring their difference through the essential identity of selfhood. In this visual construct, women are conceived as complementary to male identity for the sake of social and sexual harmony. As an example of exhortation, Wilson quotes a letter by Erasmus that urges his male correspondent to marry: 'leaning to Hue single, whiche both is barraine, and smally agreeing with the state of mans Nature ... giue your selfe wholy to most holy Wedlocke' (40). The letter's implied program 144

The Figure of Woman is that woman is to give herself to 'mans Nature,' a primary 'state' that determines the social and religious orthodoxy symbolized by 'holy Wedlocke.' Yet since man requires woman to realize this 'state,' his incompleteness and dependence on her are also intimated. It is woman's faithfulness to this structure that sustains society and raises marriage above other personal relationships. Erasmus distinguishes the wife by her unequivocal identity - her intrinsic opposition to any kind of dissimulation - which allows for her full union with man: 'when others are matched together in friendship, doe we not see what dissembling they vse, what falshood they practice, & what deceiptful parts they play ... whereas the faithfulness of a wife is not stained with deceipt, nor dusked with any dissembling' (54). Implicitly attacking traditions of male bonding, these remarks intimate the inauthenticity and incompletion of the masculinist ethos. They try to construct a univocal role for woman in order to salvage the naturalized image of cultural continuity and male identity, and in so doing paradoxically note that identity's dependence upon her. This dependence is suppressed and revealed as Wilson's text continues. At one point the male speaker is instructed on the effectiveness of contrast. The notion does not, however, suggest a heterogeneous rhetorical principle that would subvert the valued order of likeness that has already been established. Contrast is figured through woman's appearance and morality, social indices of her sexuality that deviate from the ideal norm of a homoeostatic ethos. As likeness signifies man, contrast or inconstancy becomes the sign of woman within a code of cultural tropes. The speaker's control over contrast, its availability as a figure to be used by him, contrasts him to it. This control implies his discursive status and the fixed order in which contrast, like Spenser's Mutabilitie, is conceived, as an antithesis subsequent to natural likeness: 'By contraries set together, things oftentimes appeare greater ... set a faire woman against a foule, and she shall seeme much die fairer, and the other much the fouler ... if any one be disposed to set forth chastitie, he may bring in of the contrary part whoredome, and shewe what a foule offence it is to Hue so vncleanly, and then the deformitie of whoredome, shall much set forth chastitie' (125) .53 Once again, within a logic of juxtaposed appearances, contrast's, and thus woman's, difference is constrained by certain priorities. This visual hierarchy both establishes woman's threat to homoeostatic character and seeks to control it through a misogynist attack against dissembled and mutable sexuality, imaged here as elsewhere in denunciations of her beauty and make-up.84 The female trope of contrast - 'she can 145

Guise and Disguise turn, and turn; and yet go on / And turn again' - is subject to the discursive norm of male likeness.55 Her sophistical inconstancy offends the male speaker's verbal and rational consistency. In Wilson's example, the contrasted term reinforces the patriarchally valued first term and affords it a moral priority. The orator would order woman's character, and thereby his own, through a hierarchy of the verbally, sexually, and ethically proper. It is a hierarchy that includes linguistic form. The values of the proper are perceived in a masculinist grammar that would synthesize nature and culture: 'yet in speaking at the least, let vs keepe a naturall order, and set the man before the woman for maners sake' (167). The passage from 'naturall order' to 'maners sake' suggests the mythicizing of rhetoric, as the order of gender becomes the grammatical structure of speech. The formal limitations of woman's discursive place are 'naturall' conditions that seek to control her unnatural volubility, 'that endless daily talk frequented by women.'56 At their extreme they preclude her from utterance: 'What becometh a woman best, and first of all? silence. What second? silence. What third? silence. What fourth? silence. Yea, if a man should aske me till Domes daie, I would still crie silence, silence: without the which no woman hath any good gift, but hauing the same, no doubt she must have many other notable gifts, as the which of necessitie, doe euer followe such a vertue' (202). Silence, die lack of speech, would ideally characterize woman and, as it does for Jonson's Morose, denote her possession of other traits - 'gifts' granted to her by man - that are socially valued. Wilson's views disclose the silence that die encomiasts implicitly valued in their portraits of Helen's physical beauty. It signifies a symbolic passivity that has two related consequences. First, woman's silence would restrict her to a cultural role as audience, unable to speak or act socially except to facilitate the speech of men, as Duchess Elisabetta and Emilia Pia do for Castiglione's courtiers.57 Secondly, the constraints of silence limit her speech to the rules of a masculine hermeneutic, and she is cast, using Cixous's terms, ' "within" the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier.'58 A visual structure of rhetoric that sees the male ethos as the proper origin of speech, from the rules of grammar to the conventions of epideixis, is enjoined upon woman. She is openly to reflect male speech. A discursive ethos that might express a hidden motive is explicitly proscribed in her social discourse and demeanour, as John Donne emphasizes in the Christmas sermon of 1624. Citing Saint Cyprian, and so recalling the misogynistic rhetoric of the church 146

The Figure of Woman fathers, he announces: 'It is not enough for a virgin to bee a virgin in her owne knowledge, but she must governe her selfe so, as that others may see, that she is one, and see, that shee hath a desire, and a disposition, to continue so still ... She must appeare in such garments, in such language, and in such motions ... as they that see her, may not question, nor dispute, whether she be a maid or no.'50 The onus on woman's utterance and action is that it be overtly perceptible to 'others,' precluding the interpersonal inconstancy of'dissembling' that Erasmus had feared. Donne's emphasis on the virgin intimates the urgency of univocal female ethopoesis for elementary social structures. Cultural truth depends on woman's words about herself, as Castiglione's Lord Gasper graphically emphasizes in describing the dangerous consequences of woman's sexuality, dangers that may lie not so much in her actions themselves but in what she may say about them: 'they may apply their force to keepe themselves in this one vertue of chastitie, without the which children were uncertain, and the bond that knitteth all the worlde together by bloud ... should be loosed.'60 'Chastitie' is a symbolic rather than a natural category, applied here to woman's speech as well as her actions. It works to characterize her sexuality univocally, in the fixed and certain terms favoured by masculinist rhetoric. In spite of the limits imposed on woman's speech, actions, and rhetorical role, her word assumes a central function in defining cultural truths. It can form the basis of interconnecting and reinforcing networks of personal, familial, and sociopolitical structures, as an early exchange in The Tempest between Prospero and Miranda suggests: Thy father was the Duke of Milan and A prince of power. Mir. Sir, are not you my father? Pros. Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and She said thou wast my daughter; and thy father Was Duke of Milan, and his only heir And princess no worse issued. (l.ii.54-9)

It is the word of Prospero's wife that constructs these reciprocal relationships of paternal and patriarchal identity.61 Though marginalized by encomiastic rhetoric and, as Prospero's sceptical tone intimates, easily positioned within misogynistic speech, the figure of woman assumes a pivotal function in a potentially unstable masculinist discourse of social and personal values. She is the antithesis - contrast 14?

Guise and Disguise that can anchor male speech and selfhood in the truth of likeness; or, through her inconstancy, she can undermine the structure of properness she is used to shore up. As Donne's, Gasper's, and Prospero's emphasis on admissions of chastity suggests, this ambiguity radiates from woman's sexual identity within the ethopoetics of gender. In the third book of the Institutes, Calvin also warns against this ambiguity, perceiving its effects in the connections between the instability of woman's speech, identity, and sex and a subversively dramatistic reality. He is dismissing the practice of confession as a mere show of truth-telling. Three times the commentary notes the eclipse of univocal gender through the androgynous effects of woman's confession. It seems that because of its traditional function as 'the true discourse on sex/ confession is also empowered to disguise this truth, to conceal it at the supposed moment of revelation.62 Such concealment is represented here as an effect of a feminizing speech. In arguing against confession, Calvin seeks to preclude this disruption of words and gender, where confession functions as an androgynous speech act. These remarks extend the implications of confession from a specifically religious ritual to a wider genre of sexual self-revelation. Calvin's dicta were of course central to arguments against the stage, particularly on questions of gender and cross-dressing.63 Although discussing the practice of confession, he touches on the same theme, the dramatistic relation of truth to gender. And in a work as relentlessly serious as the Institutes, this section's use of (or attempt at) sarcastic humour seems to highlight this concern and the incredulity with which Calvin contemplates the possible confusion of sexual identity. Calvin begins his remarks on confession by typically attacking the medieval theologians. His caustic tone recalls the agonistic efforts of Gorgias and Isocrates in using the figure of Helen against their rivals: 'when these worthy fathers enjoin that every person of both sexes (utriusque sexus) must once a-year confess his sins to his own priest, men of wit humorously object that the precept binds hermaphrodites only, and has no application to any one who is either a male or a female.'64 Confession triggers a blurring of sexual differences in what is depicted as a wholly male ritual: the male penitent addresses a priest, according to rules that are either enjoined by 'fathers' or ridiculed by 'men of wit.' Confession is both the pretext of this scene of male discourse and that which disrupts it, by introducing a feminizing hermaphroditism. The confessional revelation of sexuality does not reinforce this masculinist order and the discrete roles of those who 148

The Figure of Woman envoice it, but serves generally to androgynize them, as occurs in the ideal scene of oratory that Wilson depicts. These traces of equivocal gender emerge only when confessional truth is represented. Calvin does not object to revelations that are not verbalized but remain unmediated disclosures to God and so recognize his transcendent presence: 'the surest rule of confession is, to acknowledge and confess our sins to be an abyss so great as to exceed our comprehension' (549). The unspoken confession redefines the self in its original submission to God. Its truthfulness lies in the 'abyss,' an absence of human speech and 'comprehension,' which in turn signifies the pure presence of selfhood prior to discourse. In contrast, the uttered form of 'auricular confession ... a thing pestilent in its nature' (550) disrupts man's submissive essence. The popish rhetoricity and staging of confession corrupt the inner identity of man as determined by God, and suggest the links between Calvin's antitheatricalism and its misogynistic premise. For this order of unspoken confession to God is also the model for woman's discursive relation to man, a silent subjection whose 'auricular' transgression recalls her natural talkativeness. The clearest signs of the corruptions caused by confession emerge for Calvin in a sort of feminized sexual theatre: 'a certain matron, while pretending to confess, was discovered to have used it as a cloak to cover her intercourse with a deacon' (541). Confession becomes a motivated sexual disguise that is both worn 'as a cloak' and enacted by a noticeably eager woman. It then generates a larger confusion of sexuality that ranges from the hermaphroditism noted above, to the implied passivity of the deacon's male sexuality, to the traditional prohibitions in 'the innumerable acts of prostitution, adultery, and incest, which it produces in the present day' (551). The portrayal of the matron and the emphasis on her desire weight Calvin's denunciation of confession against the sexual duplicity of woman's speech. However, her performance provokes his own voyeuristic pleasure at the popish ritual. His criticisms reflect the suppression of self-threatening pleasure in Rainolds' attack on theatricality65 and anticipate Wilson's scene of passive, narcissistic delight at rhetorical expertise. The matron's theatrically disguised word undermines the truth of male sexuality. It is analogous to the verbalized confession that taints the penitent male. In this scheme of confessional, religious discourse, woman represents the corruption of the soul through speech. She embodies a sexualized rhetoric that may threaten the intrinsic male ethos. The figure of woman, though widely conceived as secondary and 149

Guise and Disguise external to the primary ethos, suggests this internalized confusion to other authors during the Renaissance. Even the passion of heterosexual love may realize androgynizing effects, as it fragments essential male character. In the long section on love melancholy, Burton writes of lovers' loss of humanity and ratio, which he conceives as male virtues: 'at last insensati, void of sense; degenerate into dogs, hogs, asses, brutes; as Jupiter into a bull, Apuleius an ass ... For what else may we think those ingenious poets to have foreshadowed ... but that a man once given over to his lust ... is no better than a beast.'66 The divine mutability that Vives saw as epitomizing human nature here signifies the sexual loss of man's identity. The sort of 'interinanimation' that a younger Donne could celebrate in The Ecstasy' assumes a self-negating potency for Thomas Wright when 'hearts were more present, in thoughts and desires, with such bodies where they liked and loved than with that wherein they sojourned and lived.'67 Donne himself preached on Easter Day 1625 that 'no outward enemy is able so to macerate our body, as our owne licentiousnesse.'68 This image of the crossover between outwardness and inwardness implies a sexual deconstruction of essentialist or proper selfhood. The sermon's ensuing comments on the 'licentious man's' self-induced ruin can either suggest that the female inconstancy which threatens maleness from without is a figure for man's own inconstancy, his intrinsic androgyny, or imply the reverse, that man's internal ruin is a metonym for the extrinsic threat of woman.69 This confounding of the 'true' relation of the sexes, and of individual male identity, recalls the collapse of the imaginary structure of praise that the narcissistic reference of the encomia had implied but not acknowledged. The rhetorics of praise and of confession form a dialogic complex. Both may undermine the masculinist ethos, by revealing the sexual and discursive paradoxes of its essentialist premises. Yet where the epideictic structure would seek to displace this disclosure onto the figure of woman, by making her the object of praise or of attack, confessional rhetoric unveils such strategies and undermines the proper ethos that they represent. The attempt to displace self-subversion is most frequently inscribed through the epideictic switch from praise to misogyny. Misogyny seeks to preserve selfhood by denouncing woman, but in doing so admits its rhetorical interdependence with the other. In Cymbeline, for example, having boastingly praised Imogen's virtue, as Collatine did of Lucrece, Posthumus later denounces both himself and her in a generalized attack against the figure of woman. The change from praise to mis150

The Figure of Woman ogyny leads him first to imitate the discursive inconstancy that is the mark of woman, and then to confess that what corrupts the male tenor, his archetypal self-image, is an imperceptible, inner, female trace. It contradicts the visual ideal of the masculine ethos and already resides within: 'Could I find out / The woman's part in me' (II.v.iQ20). Posthumus' rhetorical progression through praise, misogyny, and confession reproduces the determined discursive path that androgynizes masculine self-representation. The rhetorical function of woman is that of an ethopoetic metonym for a male identity that is endlessly incomplete. Rather than merely serving his self-portrayals, woman names the continual disruption of male ethos and desire. Montaigne laments this process in 'Sebond' in terms of The lustfull longing which allures us to the acquaintance of women, seekes but to expell that paine, which an earnest and burning desire doth possesse us with, and desireth but to allay it thereby to come to rest, and be exempted from this fever.'70 The sequence of desire, pain and fever, and 'lustfull longing' that drives 'us' to women, suggests a continuing metonymic deferral of desire.71 It locates 'woman' as the ultimate effect of this desire rather than its cause. She externalizes masculine dissatisfaction, giving it a verbal and personal goal — 'woman' - that may then be construed as its origin. The external placement displaces cause and effect. While subjecting woman to man's discourse, and making her its misogynist target, this metonymic shift also grants her a figural potency. Her externalization as the goal of man's desire realizes, through 'the irony of the "peripety,"' her internalization as his motive. She functions as the 'synecdochic representative' of his discursive desire, 'represent[ing] the end or logic of the development as a whole.'72 Despite her secondary function as the object rather than the speaker of traditional rhetorical pieces, woman is the 'master-mistress,' androgynous key to the representation of man and herself. The metonymic logic that structures these forms of rhetoric inscribes the splitting of the male ethos and tenor that occurs through the attempt at self-representation. The figure of woman is an ambiguous trope of masculine ethopoesis. She unsettles his own modes of characterization, exemplified by the epideictic inversions between himself and her, and shifts the place of her own speech in the verbal structure, through the androgynous effects of confessional truth. IV

Theatrical versions of androgynous disguise in the Renaissance fre151

Guise and Disguise quently portray this ambiguity in social dramas where the male ethos is initially idealized. A number of plays by Beaumont and Fletcher depict the androgynous process and its effects on exemplary male identities such as the brave prince and the loyal subject. In works like A King and No King and The Maid's Tragedy these topics are addressed through pairs of characters, who represent male and female ethopoetic processes in conflict. In Philaster the conflict is compressed within the androgynous characterization of Bellario and Philaster. As noted earlier, the heightened rhetoric of these plays serves to foreground the ethopoetic discourse through which the characters confront each other and the conflicts of gender and identity within themselves. There is a rhetorical rhythm, frequently developed through the alternation between epideixis and confession, whereby male characters first imply the imaginary structure of their own identity in its relation to others before having the presumptions of this structure undermined and being in effect 're-characterized.' A King and No King begins after the conquest by Arbaces, king of Iberia, of his Armenian foe Tigranes. The classical ethopoetic trope of military virtue and self-realization is immediately cited. Arbaces orders Tigranes to marry his sister, and though not naming her, he praises her highly. Her beauty is the counterpart of his martial prowess, and the encomiastic strains and images reflect his opinion of himself: 'shee can doe as much / In peace, as I in Warre; sheele conquer too / You shall see, if you have the power to stand / The force of her swift lookes.'73 These lines reiterate many of the themes of masculinist rhetoric. Arbaces reflexively praises himself and uses his sister to show his own qualities. She is unnamed, since her identity is irrelevant to his self-portrait; however, it later becomes ironically apparent that she is not named because Arbaces is wholly ignorant of her identity, and of his own, and of the relationship between them. The common love-war conflation also suggests the place of woman in man's martial rhetoric. As Helen's beauty did for the ancient heroes and orators, his sister's beauty figures Arbaces' archetypal power, which is military and rhetorical, a fusion of body and spirit. Unlike Helen, whose passivity was strongly implied, in this play the woman is a rival to active male power. Her 'swift lookes' have the physical 'force' that Arbaces displayed on the battlefield, and while her character seems dependent on his report, it is soon to realize effects that will overturn his speech and thought. Nonetheless, for the moment Arbaces presumes a priority that his sister, Panthaea, initially reinforces, through her first selfless words, inquiring into 'My brothers health' (ll.i.78), 152

The Figure of Woman and then in her comments on the language of his letter to her: The kindest words, He keepe um whilst I live / Here in my bosome; theres no art in um, / They lie disordred in this paper, Just / As hearty Nature speakes um' (ll.i.201-4). She internalizes the naturalized guise with which her brother's words invest themselves and imprints his fashioned ethos upon her own body. Yet as the following scenes reveal, and in a similar way to that in which Campaspe affected Alexander in Lyly's play, her subjected body and beauty subvert his social persona, revealing its ethopoetic inconstancy. Having returned to the court, Arbaces sets about making the match between Tigranes and Panthaea, despite his sister's taking it 'Something unkindly ... To have her Husband chosen to her hands' (m.i.23). He does so by proclaiming his absolute authority, a speech act that would decree his univocal will: 'I must have her know / My will, and not her owne must governe her ... Shee should be forest to have him, when I know / Tis fit: I will not heare her say shee's loth' (lll.i.4-2o). Arbaces' illocutionary power forecloses Panthaea's opposition, subjecting her discursive will, anticipated in her spoken 'lothness,' to his. He outlaws her speech and imposes the cultural regimen of woman's chaste silence. This rhetorical authority is soon undermined. On seeing Panthaea, Arbaces silently struggles against his rapid falling in love. The sight of her disrupts the discourse of praise he had formerly controlled. In a confessional aside he notes his own self-loss - 'Speak, am I what I was?' (Hl.i.So) - which he then tries to counter by invoking solidly male, military imagery. In confusion at his incestuous desire, he threatens anyone who says that the woman standing before him is his sister, decreeing that 'Shee is no kinne to me, nor shall shee be; / If shee were any, I create her none' (Hl.i. 161-2). While the overt royal word strives to master the personal passion and the social identities that have produced this dilemma, his further asides emphasize the onset of deep pain similar to that acknowledged by Montaigne. Though addressed to the self as a type of inner speech, these asides do not reinforce Arbaces' identity but express its social, moral, and spiritual loss: ... you are naught to me but a disease, Continuall torment without hope of ease; Such an ungodly sicknesse I have got, That he that undertakes my cure, must first Overthrow Divinity, all morall Lawes, And leave mankinde as unconfinde as beasts ... (111.1.190-5)

153

Guise and Disguise In commanding Panthaea and her supporters' silence with Lear-like obstinacy — 'Let me not heare you speake againe ... No man here / Offer to speake for her' (lll.i. 198-201) - he indicates the failure of his command, and ironically admits her significance and power in his discourse. Panthaea becomes an externalized sign of his inner sexual confusion: 'Incest is in me / Dwelling alreadie' (111.1.330-1). She is blamed by him as the cause of his internal distress, a female figure who concentrates the conflicts between his individual desire and social order. Panthaea becomes a synecdoche for the play's paradoxical title, whose male, political categories - king / no king - hinge on her equivocal role. We see this kind of social and personal dependence on woman elsewhere in Beaumont and Fletcher's work. In The Maid's Tragedy, Amintor's response to his new wife Evadne's confession of her affair with the king not only challenges his self-conception - 'What a strange thing am I?' he asks (Il.i.3i8) - but also threatens the reciprocal, masculinist code of honour that supposedly sustains the social relationship between sovereign and subject: 'The thing that we call honour beares us all / headlong unto sinne' (rv.ii.3i6-i7). Evadne's actions disrupt Amintor's conception of obedience, driving him to a confused contemplation of regicide. Similarly, in the scene where Arbaces and Panthaea meet alone, her admission of love for him brings them closest to transgression, as they alternately embrace and fly from each other (rv.iv.iff), and in his next speech we see Arbaces resigned to a life of sin and hell (v.iv.i-n). However, in A King and No King such catastrophe is avoided by the further revelation that Arbaces and Panthaea are not brother and sister. Their love, having threatened the social order, finally restores it. Following the pattern of Shakespearean resolutions, the unravelling of the secrets of identities and birthrights stabilizes a confusion of personal and social positions, in which the loss of kingship and selfhood had threatened - 'the whole storie / Would be a wildernesse to loose thy selfe / For ever' (V.iv.286-8). Arbaces' loss of royal preeminence translates into personal happiness, while Panthaea gains crown and husband. The characters' relations are co-ordinated by a benevolent cultural system that reconciles social and individual personae and is celebrated in the final lines: 'Come every one / That takes delight in goodnesse, helpe to sing / Loude thankes for me that I am prov'd no King' (V.iv.351-3). The removal of the incest threat is based on the reassertion of Arbaces' and Panthaea's familial and personal difference. The play's 154

The Figure of Woman conclusion is prepared through a separation of identities that enables order and relationships to be reimposed. Although Arbaces loses his dominant role, the structure of character is reaffirmed through the distinctions between man and woman, sovereign and subject, which grant everyone their social place. Philaster, however, lacks this final and total ordering. Despite the betrothal of prince and princess and the restoration of the Sicilian crown, someone is left out. The androgynous character Bellario/ Euphrasia exceeds the conventional resolution. She cannot be fitted into the ideal pattern of youthful consummation and cultural continuity: T grieve such vertue should be laied in earth / Without an Heyre' comments Philaster (V.v. 197-8). This ending gains further significance as it differs in the two quarto versions. In the first quarto of Philaster (the second is the copy-text), Bellario is set to marry the courtier Trasiline, thus fulfilling the narrative pattern of plays like As You Like It and Twelfth Night, where marriage serves to close the plot on a note of social renewal. Bellario's isolation in the second ending seems to recall the exclusion of troubling characters like Jacques and Malvolio from the romantic endings of those plays, figures who question the ideal prospect of sociosexual regrowth. Robert K. Hunter has simply suggested that the first ending of Beaumont and Fletcher's play is either 'authorial early drafts later recast into dramatically superior Q2 form,' or 'not authorial.'74 These claims need to be reconsidered in view of the later ending's overt rejection of the conventional romance conclusion. In re-marking its later deviation from the generic norm it initially upholds, Philaster highlights the equivocal function of androgyny in both constructing and challenging the social system. The significance of Bellario's exclusion may seem arbitrary, especially as she rejects the king's offer to find a noble match for her and pay her dowry. Her refusal and the plot's thematic remainder momentarily appear idiosyncratic: Never sir will I Marry, it is a thing within my vow, But if I may have leave to serve the Princesse, To see the vertues of her Lord and her, I shall have hope to live. (V.v.i87-9i)

However, Bellario's personal wilfulness masks a broader social process that relies on and constructs her metonymic role. To apply Girard's terms to this dramatic resolution, Bellario functions as a scapegoat, a 155

Guise and Disguise 'surrogate victim,' whose final isolation is a relatively non-violent sacrifice in order 'to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric.'75 She rights a society disrupted, before the play's events commence, by the deposition of Philaster's father from 'his fruitfull Cicilie (l.i.24). Along with her chastity, which retains a strongly positive symbolic value (and is crucial to the denouement), Bellario's androgyny is the central element that affords her scapegoat function. Through doubled gender, she may represent all the other characters, a sociosexual vehicle that works through the similarities between her ambiguous self and them. At the same time, her hybrid but abnormal likeness to everyone also represents the degree of difference and distance that is required for the scapegoat figure to be cast out and social synthesis to take place. Bellario is alternately similar to man or woman; her similarity to both makes her different from each; and she also signifies the hermaphroditic links between them - 'the persistent doubleness, the inherent twinship' - that could underlie Renaissance conceptions of sexual selfhood.76 In Philaster, it is this sort of symbolic flexibility that makes the androgynous woman suitable for the sacrificial role. The metonymic complexity marks Bellario as the central figure in the text's sociosexual thematics. The symbolic power of her persona is further strengthened by the mystery of her disappearance and return, which, in effect, doubly charges her identity, since she returns twice, once in each gender.77 The other characters come to understand Bellario's androgyny in these constructive terms, as the key to their drama's stabilizing conclusion. By emphasizing her individual role in events, they naturalize the sociosexual structure of their community as that which she has disrupted. Her disguise seems to them first to have created the social danger, and the confession of her 'true' sex then restores harmony, exemplifying Donne's conception of the cultural centrality of woman's unequivocal persona, 'as they that see her, may not question, nor dispute, whether she be a maid or no,' with 'maid' marked for Philaster and the others as female and chaste: tell me why Thou didst conceale thy sex; it was a fault, A fault Bellario, though thy other deeds Of truth outwaigh'd it: All these Jealousies Had flowne to nothing, if thou hadst discovered, What now we know. (v.v. 146-51)

Philaster makes Bellario's disguise the pivotal factor for the events. In 156

The Figure of Woman so doing, he ignores the social and sexual causes of her disguise, the differences between royalty and nobility, male and female, and the conflict between personal and social desires, that she explains prompted her action: 'I knew / My birth no match for you, I was past hope of having you' (V.v. 174-6). His interpretation replays the metonymic transposition of woman's actions from social effect to social cause. Bellario gives what Othello would call 'ocular proof of her femaleness when she 'discovers her haire,' a euphemized bodily token of her sex, to her incredulous father (V.v. 112). She is thereby relocated as an object of a controlling masculinist gaze. Through observing her sex, the group recognizes and sorts itself out. Her revealed body, in its gender and overtness, is immediately fixed within the social hierarchy and has that hierarchy inscribed and imposed on itself. Its ambiguous gender becomes a cultural synecdoche, with 'the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.'78 This multiple function of the body as personal, social, and textual, recurs through the play. The subtitle, Love Lies a-Bleeding, connotes the social, personal, and sexual disintegration that seems about to begin when Philaster turns on both Bellario and his beloved Arethusa.79 As noted, the drama seems to avoid this dissolution through sacrificing the androgynous scapegoat in order to represent what Andrew Gurr has called 'the orthodoxy of selfhood.'80 This interpretation, the one that the characters themselves wish to accept, sacrifices or ignores Bellario's desire for the sake of social, moral order and of an orthodox ethos conceived in masculinist terms. Bellario's heroism typically involves the chastening of her sexuality.81 Her double scapegoat function as cause and effect serves finally to conceal the extremes of collapse to which order has been stretched at the expense of her sexuality. The ambiguous processes of gendering are not restricted to this overtly androgynous character but, as Gurr suggests, apply equally to the orthodoxy of selfhood that seems finally to be reinforced for all the characters. Bellario's self-exposure serves not only to settle the dilemma but, more subtly, to disrupt it, through implying the continuing ambiguity of Philaster's character, the exemplary ethos represented by the play. Her confession, as the sort of androgynous speech act abhorred by Calvin, registers the confusion of his desire and identity. For in announcing the truth of her own gender, Beliario reveals the androgynous truth of Philaster's, which underlies his heroic male ethos and echoes equivocally throughout the play and the closing scene. The 157

Guise and Disguise apparent realization of this ideal masculine ethos in the betrothal to Arethusa and the restoration of the throne is undermined, as we will see, by his final muted admission of a split desire for an androgynous ideal. An interpretive response based on the ethopoetic synthesis of the conclusions of Shakespearean romance seems unable to account for the hero's 'schizophrenic unity,' which emerges in the course of the play.82 Like Hamlet, Philaster opens amidst an ongoing political intrigue that seems to set the stage for a tale of brave and decisive action. The king of Calabria has usurped the Sicilian throne from Philaster's father yet remains unable to have the prince killed because of the masses' love for him. Three courtiers inform us of this and of their secret support for Philaster, whom they praise as a heroic figure. They themselves are, however, compromised by having helped the usurper: 'My selfe drew some blood, in those warres, which I would give my hand, to be washed from,' admits their leader Dion (l.i.24-6). Because of this uneasy situation the king hopes to arrange his daughter Arethusa's marriage to a foreign prince, Pharamond of Spain, in order to produce a legitimate heir and, through machiavellian policy, 'to bring in the power of a forraigne Nation, to awe his owne with' (1.1.38-9). The drama concentrates key cultural ideas in a situation that rapidly includes marriage, sex, and the fates of Arethusa, Philaster, and all of Sicily. Philaster's confused situation is politically and personally interwoven. The object of the people's and the courtiers' admiration, he is a much eulogized figure, the model of male virtue, 'the bravery of his age' (III.i.6). The paradox of this praise is its disabling effect upon him. The fine words of others make him a passive figure, incapable of acting in the very way that his praisers envisage. Like the object of the classical encomia, Philaster is used to signify masculinist ideals and, because he is so used, is cut off from them. His character is androgynized, being reduced to a traditionally feminized passivity through the praise of his ideal maleness. This encomiastic paradox works most strongly through the words of the prince's dead father. Philaster feels possessed by his father's spirit, which urges him heroically to seize power: now he tells me King, I was a Kings Heire, bids me be a King, And whispers to me, these are all my subjects: ... dives

158

The Figure of Woman Into my fancy, and there gives me shapes, That kneele, and doe me service, cry me King: But I'le suppresse him, he's a factious spirit, And will undoe me: (1.4.269-76)

The spirit echoes at the deeper levels of Philaster's mind, filling his consciousness with past, present, and future possibilities for selfhood. He struggles to fulfil these discursive images of himself, the ethoi that others have constructed for him and that he has only partly internalized. His dilemma is to reconcile these images with those that he makes for himself. The command to fill the father's place arises from Philaster's uncertain and reluctant interiorization of his father's word, a word he wishes both to obey and to resist - obeying through regaining the throne, but resisting through his love for the daughter of his enemy. His contradictory response reveals the effects of confounded desire in his own inaction.83 This inner dialogue between the positive and negative sides of his encomiastic image is then opposed externally by the word of the present king, who commands Philaster's obedience: 'Be more your selfe, as you respect our favour' (I.i.257). The tension between 'your selfe' and 'our favour' inscribes Philaster's struggle with an internally conflicted subjectivity in the face of an externally imposed subjection. A stable point within this conflict soon emerges in his relationship with the princess Arethusa. Although she embodies his rejection of the father's word, the king's daughter is also a political and personal foil to Philaster and enables him to grasp a sense of self through these contrasts: 'Nature, that loves not to be questioned / Why she did this, or that ... never gave the world / Two things so opposite, so contrary, / As he and I am' (1.11.23-7). Her idealizing love for him, though starting from the encomiastic perspective of others, seems to allow him to accept the image of selfhood presented in their words. The sense of oppositeness allows Philaster to feel a stability of self. He can then act positively for the first time, as he expediently suggests that they employ his 'trustiest, lovingst, and ... gentlest boy / ... To waite on you, and beare our hidden love' (l.ii.i38-4O; emphasis added). The boy, a sign-vehicle of Philaster's secret, intrinsic desire, will ground him in an externalized selfhood and emotion, a process that has commenced already, through the reflexive effects of the praise of the boy that he expresses to Arethusa. This 'boy' is of course Bellario, who, from the start, is thus loaded with the meanings, intentions, and desires of others. When Philaster 159

Guise and Disguise relates the circumstances in which they met, he casts Bellario as the object of perception and language, asserting his own active masculine status through speaking of him, 'I have a boy ... Hunting the Bucke / I found him' (l.ii.ni-14).84 Bellario's persona, however, is a complex figure. His gender seems constantly to undermine the maleness that it signifies, and Philaster is taken mainly with his 'pretty helpelesse innocence' (l.ii.123) • Rather than simply feminizing the boy, Philaster's perception suggests the interplay of gender and desire in himself through his reaction to Bellario's attention to him: 'The love of boyes unto their Lords, is strange' (ll.i.57). Again we might see Beaumont and Fletcher's play taking up a submerged theme of Shakespearean romance and revealing it as a central topos in the sexual discourse of selfhood. Philaster's words and later actions make overt Orsino's ambiguous recognition of Viola through Cesario, which the courtier Valentine wryly notes - 'he hath known you but three days, and already you are no stranger' (l.iv.2-4) - and which Orsino himself equivocally admits: 'thy small pipe / Is as the woman's organ, shrill and sound, / And all is semblative a woman's part' (I.iv.32-4). While Philaster would attribute the love all to the boy, and distance himself from its homoerotic aim, his response to its strangeness intimates his own part in their androgynous rapport. Subsequently, he will love Arethusa only indirectly, through the love of a boy for himself, a love whose activeness once again ironically casts him passively as its object. This sensed androgyny in Bellario seems to make him the ideal gobetween, as one who always metonymically signifies the other. At the same time, Bellario's mediation disrupts the course of desire between lover and beloved, most obviously by detouring their discourse through himself and his passion for Philaster, which makes his accounts of their love vehicles for his own wish-fulfilling romance. This role as messenger also inscribes the androgynous and narcissistic doubling of the lovers' desire, which, while seeking out the other, also chooses its own image in the hermaphroditic envoy. Such messages of doubled desires are similarly sent in Twelfth Night, as Viola observes, 'My master loves her dearly, / And I (poor monster) fond as much on him; / And she (mistaken) seems to dote on me' (ll.ii.33-5). As Derrida has noted, these repetitive and redoubling effects lie deep within the discursive function of the archetypal love-messenger, 'the son of Hermes and Aphrodite,' Hermaphrodite, who represents the self-deferring course of desire.85 When he sends Bellario to Arethusa, Philaster admits that 'Thy love doth plead so prettily to stay, / That (trust me) I could weepe to part with thee' (lI.i.4O-i). He mourns the loss of the 160

The Figure of Woman androgynous boy and his ideal love, and like Orsino 'finds himself in the position of not being die object of desire but the desiring subject.'86 In her turn, Arethusa learns of Philaster's affection through Bellario's reports of his distracted behaviour (II.iii.50-62). She enjoys imagining herself as wholly reliant on these accounts, delighting in their figural representation more than the 'truth' they might signify: 'thou knowest, a lie / That beares this sound, is welcomer to me, / Then any truth that saies he loves me not' (lI.iii.64-6). An ambiguous process of homosexual, heterosexual, and narcissistic desire is thus in train before Megra, caught sleeping with the Spanish prince Pharamond, accuses Bellario and Arethusa of having sex. Megra's charge translates the unasked but already disruptive questions of Bellario's gender and the others' desire into social effect, setting the sexual plot off on an even more convoluted course. At this point, too, the apparent revelation of Bellario's identity becomes linked to wider social events. The three lords, scheming for Philaster's return to power, seize upon the news, believing that ' 'Twill move him' to assail the king (III.i.35). They anticipate the sublimation of his disappointed desire into direct political action. However, Philaster's desire implodes, die cataclysmic images with which he responds to the courtiers' revelation signifying the upheaval of his own body politic and the fracturing of the princely ethos (111.1.67-149). The loss of a heroic masculine identity that motivates Hamlet's speeches against Ophelia and Gertrude becomes one of the later play's key motifs. Megra's accusation is immediately accepted, suggesting the social investment in woman's sexual word. Acts three and four comprise a sequence of speeches among Philaster, Arethusa, and Bellario, through which the effects of their deceived and deceiving claims reverberate. The discursive dependence on Bellario's guise is compounded by the effects of Megra's lie. Whereas before the lovers had unwittingly responded to the redoubling of their desire through Bellario, they now react deliberately but no less emotively, assuming that they know the full significance of their personal and sexual relationships. Their images of each others' deceptions underpin a sense of pained selfhood. Philaster's violent threats against the others might suggest that this knowledge reinforces his own identity, granting it a masculinist power. Yet Bellario's mysterious guise continues to call forth a response that undermines as it determines this imagined male ethos: 'Tell me thy thoughts; for I will know the least / That dwells within thee, or will rip thy heart / To know it; I will see thy thoughts as plaine, / As I doe now thy face' (ni.i.226-9). Through the violence of his 161

Guise and Disguise rhetoric, Philaster believes that the truth of Bellario can be seen and known, and that this truth, tested in combat with his rival, would prove the independence of the 'I.' Yet his admitted misperception of Bellario's face undermines the motivated urge to see himself through this antagonist. In the face of the other he perceives not a self-defining rival but his lover's desire, which calls forth his own self-confounding love. The ensuing exchanges record a chain reaction of misrecognition that spreads from one character to the next, investing each through the illusory guise of the others. Despite his vengefulness, Philaster is unable to strike Bellario, as his anger gives way to his homoerotic vision: 'I must love / Thy honest lookes, and take no revenge upon / Thy tender youth' (III.i.273-5). Though stopping short of physical action, he still derives a narcissistic pleasure from his rhetorical despair and, like Hamlet, uses the misogynistic topoi he fires at Arethusa to consolidate the truth of his male persona against her falseness: 'that foolish man, / That reades the story of a womans face, / And dies beleeving it, is lost for ever' (m.ii. 117-19). In a bitter soliloquy, he denounces 'the dissembling traines / Of womens lookes' (rv.iii.3-4), as well as Bellario's 'misbeseeming' and 'dissembling trade' (rv.iii.27,33). His accusations against them seek to reaffirm his own 'authentic' ethos. Arethusa, shocked by his outbursts, appeals to Philaster for 'constancy,' and then introjects his misogyny, doubting herself but at the same time trying to defend her desire through turning on Bellario as a 'dissembler' (m.ii. 134-6). In his despair Philaster focuses on first one figure and then another. His passion wildly substitutes different personae, including himself, as the cause of his dilemma but is satisfied with none. He swings from asking Arethusa to slay him, to stabbing Arethusa and Bellario, to bitter self-reproach at his cowardice for doing so. In focusing first on himself, he wishes to cast himself as the victim of his own heroism, a stoic self-assertion. He then turns on Arethusa and Bellario, aiming to kill each of them to save his identity.87 The irony of these acts of masculinist violence is deepened by the willingness of his female victims, who bare their bodies to his dagger. As they seek to fulfil their desire for him, their passivity prevents him from attaining the active ethos he seeks. In these coital scenes of stabbing and of love 'lying ableeding,' the heroic persona is all but eclipsed. (As comic relief, a country nai'f enters and, his rustic sense of honour shocked, tries to defend Arethusa.) It is only after this impassioned violence starts to subside that Philaster begins to recognize the absence of the ethos he has been 162

The Figure of Woman seeking. His madness figures a rhetorical passage towards selfhood, leading him through epideictic images of the other to the confessional realization of his own intrinsic lack and a subdued 'equilibrium' that emerges from 'beneath the cloud of illusion, beneath feigned disorder.'88 When the king asks Arethusa whether her attacker was Philaster, she answers, 'Sir, if it was he, / He was disguised.' Her remark strikes Philaster as totally enlightening, suggesting the deeper nature of his self-confusion: 'I was so: oh my stars! / That I should live still' (FV.vi. 127-9). The uncovering of a disguise he has not controlled explains for him the inconstancy of selfhood through these events. At the same time, and beneath his awareness, these terms link him to the inconstant rhetorical image of woman and disclose the androgynous structure of his identity and behaviour to this point.89 As Bellario had done, Philaster now functions as a surrogate victim, a crucial sign in the social system whose value is contested by others. The king wishes to kill him so as to end the political turmoil, but the courtiers foresee that Philaster's death would spark another round of reciprocal violence. Instead of executing him, the king sends Philaster to quell the rioting citizens (V.iv.iff). Social (dis)order, like his father's spiritualized word, speaks through him, granting him roles that he does not control but that determine his identity. Finally, his heroic ethos is set up through the ideal reciprocity between himself and society, symbolized in the restoration of the crown and his marriage to Arethusa, which together form an image of sociosexual completion: 'enjoy Philaster / This Kingdome which is yours' (V.v.2io-ii). The political equation between the state and the prince seems to figure the resolution of the dilemmas of selfhood and identity that have plagued the whole community. These forms of closure are, however, realized only when the figure of Euphrasia is revealed through Bellario's identity. Philaster's selfrealization and the parallel restoration of social harmony depend on this discovery. Euphrasia is brought into the resolution by the other characters, who first threaten Bellario with death and torture if he doesn't reveal the truth, and then reconcile her disguise through their sense of the events' happy ending, inviting her participation in it. Arethusa, who alone might now find this androgynous figure a threat, herself issues the invitation: 'I, Philaster, / Cannot be jealous, though you had a Lady / Brest like a Page to serve you, nor will I / Suspect her living heere: come live with me, / Live free as I do; she that loves my Lord, / Curst be the wife that hates her' (v.v.igi-6). Exemplifying Erasmus' ideal of womanly certitude, Arethusa locates the previously 163

Guise and Disguise disruptive signs of sexual ambiguity within the heterosexual order of marriage, where Bellario's love for Philaster is simply evidence of his desirability. The power of the reordered society to absorb these signs reveals its reinforced strength and the sureness of the characters' renewed identities. In hindsight, the disruptions seem to have been necessary to realize this return to political and personal ideals. Bellario has purged the system and proven its ethopoetic integrity and propriety, which are rehearsed in the play's closing maxim: 'Let Princes learne / By this to rule the passions of their blood, / For what Heaven wils can never be withstood' (V.v.2i6-i8). The secret of the woman behind Bellario's guise seems to reassert Philaster's maleness and explain the disruptive attraction the androgynous figure had held for him. The female tenor of this figure would thus reveal the constancy of his character, which instinctively recognized in the disguised identity before him the sociosexual subjection of Euphrasia and so all along was seeking to assert his natural mastery: I was past hope Of having you. And understanding well, That when I made discovery of my sex, I could not stay with you, I made a vow, ... never to be knowne Whilst there was hope to hide me from men's eyes For other then I seem'd; that I might ever Abide with you ... (V.v. 175-83)

The hopeless love, a desire that is forsaken as it longs to be 'discovered' (first by herself and then by Philaster), the virgin's vow, and the determination of her persona by 'men's eyes' - all these responses comprise a chain of disguises that Euphrasia is compelled to fashion anew within the masculinist discourse of desire. Her final revelation continues to represent the operation of this discourse; rather than allowing her selfhood to be realized, it imposes the cultural paradigms of sexual character upon her, in chaste service to Philaster. Beaumont and Fletcher's text thus dramatizes in broad social terms the subversive and the stabilizing effects of identity and gender upon the representation of selfhood. The disguise of Bellario metonymically inscribes the conflicts between recognized and suppressed dimensions of sexuality, as other characters bewilderingly respond to the ambiguous signs of her androgyny. Their confusion is expressed in the sud164

The Figure of Woman den reversals of knowledge and emotion triggered by a series of set rhetorical speeches, the encomium and the confession, through which characters first presume the relationship between themelves and others and then reveal the 'truth' of these relationships. The formality of this rhetorical structure does not, however, efface the dramatic 'personality' of the characters, as many critics of Beaumont and Fletcher claim, but suggests the restrictions and conflicts of a discourse through which characters attempt to construct themselves and to interact with each other. The use of the encomium and the confession refers Beaumont and Fletcher's characterization to the rhetorical traditions in which relations between man and woman, and the process of sexual identity itself, were often depicted. Bellario's revelation of her true gender is, then, the confessional speech act that seems to revise the relationships between the characters, allowing the social and discursive hierarchy of proper meaning and identity to be reaffirmed. As woman, she seems to reveal that the difference between male and female lies first in the intrinsic identity of each as a separate sexual being, and then in the subjection of woman to a masculinist ethos. At the same time, Bellario's confession is a revelation of androgyny, and of ambiguous identity not only in herself but in those who perceived her as a boy and responded to her disguised love. Such a one, of course, is the heroic Philaster. He resumes his identity on the revealed image of Bellario's femaleness, reproducing the essentialist structure of praise. Yet even as he seems to realize and resume this character, Philaster confesses to an ethos that resides within and breaks through the proper: But Bellario, (For I must call thee so still) tell me why Thou didst conceale thy sex ... (v.v. 145-7)

The inexplicable compulsion of his parenthetic 'must call' registers the excess of androgynous disguise, an ethopoetic trope that reveals the sex it conceals and rejects the identity it envoices. V The interplay of personal and interpersonal identities in androgynous disguise stages the conflicting effects of the ethopoetics of gender. Through this rhetorical and dramatistic trope Renaissance texts may articulate conservative cultural and historical concepts of sexual 165

Guise and Disguise selfhood. The objectifying, self-defining genres of encomium and misogyny are prominently used in such conventional representations. At the same time, the confessional speech act functions recurrently through this discursive tradition to undermine the epideictic pairing of sexual self and other, male and female. An ambiguous ethos emerges in the process of self-revelation, even where such confession presumes its own univocal utterance through the shedding of past disguises. The rhetoric of confession defers sexual self-presence. In this way androgynous disguise complements the ethopoetic process that marks the rhetorics of sovereignty and subjection. Strategies of disguise and character-making reveal and challenge the political and sexual motives of power, obedience, and desire that structure and underlie Renaissance discourses of essentialist selfhood. It is therefore significant that the three dramatic genres and corresponding figures that have been considered - satire, allegory, and tragicomedy; malcontent/prince, courtier, and androgyne - all function dialogically by both invoking and interrogating the tropes of discursive selfhood. Such dialogism is the key to the hybrid ethos that is fashioned by disguise. Each of these genres is also marked by a certain thematic undecidability or unfinishedness, which reflects the paradoxical impossibility of removing a disguise and ending its social significance, once it has been knowingly or even unknowingly assumed. This complex of rhetorical functions makes disguise a critical trope for the Renaissance discourse of selfhood. Within specific ideological contexts, it figures the limits of images of selfhood and of genres of self-representation. Or perhaps it is better to say that disguise figures the limits to the limits that such images and genres would set up. For in always anticipating, even as it defers or denies, its final divestment, disguise reveals the ongoing process of selfhood. It is a process that, though framed by presumptions of origin and completion, enacts a dialogic, unfinished, and hybrid identity.

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Epilogue

Tragedy and Disguise

Haply you think, but bootless are your thoughts, That this is fabulously counterfeit, And that we do as all tragedians do. Thomas Kyd The Spanish Tragedy rv.iv.y6-8

'Illusion had failed. 'This is death,' she murmured, 'death.' Virginia Woolf Between the Acts

In the revenge scene of The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd stages a concatenation of dramatic disguise. The noble actors in the masque are costumed for their parts, and the princely audience perceives them both in character and as their royal selves. On the surface, Hieronimo's script casts actors and audience in recognizable roles - Balthazar, playing the part of Soliman, woos a disconsolate Perseda, played by Bel-Imperia, while the king, viceroy, and duke exchange jokes about the apparent acting out of real love. Indeed, these parts hardly seem roles at all, so familiar do the actors and audience find them. They would play themselves, and in doing so they move the drama to its violent end of killing and suicide. Beginning with Kyd's play, dramatic tragedy becomes a major genre through which the interaction between selfhood and disguise is represented during the English Renaissance. In many plays, the process is depicted through the motif of revenge, which, as Scott McMillin notes, 'involves the experience of self-loss ... when a new role, answerable to this radical experience of loss and injustice, must be improvised.'1 The irony of Hieronimo's transformation from knight marshal to secret revenger lies in the reversal of a social persona that had seemed to him univocally rooted in a Christian, humanist code of justice. He 167

Guise and Disguise feels forced to work out a different identity and uses disguise in his attempt, 'by a secret, yet a certain mean, / Which under kindship will be cloaked best.'2 Hieronimo's goal and efforts exemplify the ethopoetic ratio between act and agent: to realize vengeance he must become a revenger. Vengeance seems to offer a path to an active, perhaps heroic identity.3 Yet revenge is also circumscribed by a complex set of orthodox ethical, legal, and religious values. These values ultimately signify an ideology through which the identity that vengeance might provide remains subject to a divine figure: 'vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord' (Romans 12:19). Thus Calvin explains that Christians are 'not only forbidden to thirst for revenge, they are also enjoined to wait for the hand of the Lord, who promises that he will be the avenger of the oppressed and afflicted. But those who call upon the magistrate to give assistance to themselves or others, anticipate the vengeance of the heavenly Judge. By no means, for we are to consider diat the vengeance of the magistrate is the vengeance not of man, but of God.'4 The ideology of vengeance is circumscribed by a hierarchy of power and obedience that seeks to determine individual action and will. Dramatistic and verbal agency are foreclosed, and any covert desire for retribution must be renounced - one may not enact, 'thirst,' or 'call' for vengeance. This official system of revenge would prescribe the avenger's ethos through authoritative subjection. Revenge tragedy concentrates the sociopersonal context through which the Renaissance rhetoric of selfhood is practised. In juxtaposing the individual will with prevailing cultural codes, tragedy and revenge reproduce the ethopoetic significance of the works we have considered and which Robert Weimann has underlined as central to early-modern discourse: 'It is the dialectic between identity and relationship, between individual action and social circumstance, which is at the centre of the greatest of changes in the newly achieved art of Renaissance characterization.'5 Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies consistently recapitulate the range of character types, motives, and ideological conflicts that appears in other literary genres such as history, satire, allegory, romance, and tragicomedy, as well as in rhetorical, political, religious, and philosophical writings. They manifest a textual process that does not merely entail the indecorous mingling of styles and personae that Sidney complains of in The Defence ofPoesie,6 but replays

the discourses diat surround and penetrate the rhetorical 'subject in process.'7 The tragic collage of character, setting, and speech stages the ideological density that affects and determines ethopoesis. The 168

Epilogue genre's recurring cast of dethroned princes, malcontent and misogynist courtiers, and subjects of varying degrees of loyalty depicts social selfhood as an interactive process that works through an ethopoetic rhetoric charged with the ambiguous tropes of power, obedience, and desire. In this rhetoric, the topos of tragic death registers the inconclusive possibility of self-performance amidst a conflictual context. It parallels the different kinds of ethopoetic paradox noted in other genres such as satirical power, allegorical obedience, metonymic gender, and confessional ambivalence. Tragic death is a figure of ethopoetic contradiction. It inscribes the irreconcilable difference between an imagined or idealized selfhood and symbolically imposed sexual, political, and personal identities.8 At the same time, the tragic loss of self-presence can also be seen as leading to a reification of an absent ethos. Tragedy gestures paradoxically towards such an ideal absence by denying the possibility of ethopoesis as a self-deferring process. Only in death can tragedy envisage selfhood beyond illusion. Yet in deconstructing all illusory goals of identity, tragedy rejects the tactical, social possibilities of rhetorics of disguise and passing. It assumes that they operate ideologically when, as we have seen, these rhetorics often serve to interrogate the self as telos. Tragedy discounts disguise by construing it as a restricted, temporary deviation that finally returns to and reinforces a schema of essentialist selfhood. In this way it seeks the revelation or stripping away of disguise as much as do the dominant codes of surveillance. Tragedy cannot finally depict selfhood as an ambiguous social process that might constantly and dialogically rework the official means of selfrepresentation. Instead, it remains fixed upon an archetypal selfhood that, in the genre's darkened Platonism, must dwell, finally rather than originally, beyond representation. This generic fixation on an unrepresentable ethos serves to reposition Renaissance tragedy within a historical trajectory of essentialist selfhood and its corollary of official identity. The thoroughgoing subversion of dramatistic identity in Jacobean tragedy serves as a kind of antimasque to the certitudes of selfhood heralded by the Cartesian cogito. Together, the Discourse on Method and the Meditations re-present the ethopoetic myths that inform lateShakespearean romance. Having taken on board the split selfhood revealed by tragedy, the Cartesian text moves towards a definitively synthesized ethos in which 'my mind and body compose a certain unity.'9 Prior to articulating the cogito as his version of the proper, Descartes languishes in the tragic topos of the split self. This is a 169

Guise and Disguise prominent stage in such tragicomic autobiography. We might compare Augustine's account of his early misunderstanding of sin: 'I still thought that it is not we who sin but some other nature that sins within us ... The truth, of course, was that it was all my own self, and my own impiety had divided me against myself.'10 For Augustine, sin signifies a split selfhood, the self as its own alien other, which faith alone will re-fuse. Though he gradually shifts the tenor of the imagery from religion to metaphysics, Descartes must likewise first grasp the root of self-division: 'I found myself involved in so many doubts and errors, that I was convinced I had advanced no farther in all my attempts at learning, than the discovery at every turn of my own ignorance.'11 It is a recognition of misrecognition. For Augustine and Descartes, perceiving the locus of error marks the turning-point in selfnarration and knowledge. This revelation enables them to express a discourse of self-realization. It is the point from which the proper can be reached. The tragic hero shares this revelation but does not get past it; indeed, because of it he rejects the possibility of selfhood. Tragedy remains on a dialectical pathway to the wish-fulfilment of ethopoetic romance. The two genres separate after the moment of selfrecognition; yet this moment of generic complicity is what allows tragedy to be appropriated, as Jonathan Dollimore has discerned, for an essentialist orthodoxy based on 'man's defeated potential. But it is a kind of defeat which confirms the potential,' and leads to 'the "tragic" belief in human essence."2 In terms of this study, the key generic marker that would link tragedy to essentialist selfhood (conceived either spiritually and metaphysically as do Augustine and Descartes, or politically, sexually, and discursively as in the texts examined in preceding chapters) is the overt repudiation of rhetorical and dramatistic disguise. In its vision beyond disguise, tragedy reproduces this disavowal and would erase a dialogic ethos that both generates and interrogates the ideals of individual and social character through which identity may be constructed and reworked. Despite the radical deconstruction of essentialist ethos that can be reread in tragedy, the genre reveals a recurrent will to silence that invokes the prediscursive self. It is an antirhetorical movement that, in rejecting any image of the proper, also renounces the ambiguities of disguise and the processes of ideological negotiation made possible through representational identity. The final silence of tragedy inscribes the end of rhetoric and of cultural resistance through ethopoesis. It would be possible to show that the dramatistic closure of many works is determined by this tragic will to silence. It is figured in stoical 170

Epilogue terms in Julius Caesar. 'So fare you well at once, for Brutus' tongue / Hath almost ended his live's history' (V.v.39-40). Hamlet's 'dying voice' pre-empts a final ethopoetic word: 'O, I could tell you - / But let it be ... the rest is silence' (V.ii.337-58). Othello's 'bloody period' culminates an epitaph, envoiced on others' behalf, which announces the speaker's righteous alienation from his self-image (V.ii.338-56). The tragic action of King Lear, initiated by silence, closes with Lear's futile howls against 'heaven's vault,' and his ironic dying vision of Cordelia's lips.13 Macbeth's famous speech spurns the theatrical discourse of existence as 'Signifying nothing' (v.v. 19-28), a dismissal that sounds again in Bussy D'Ambois's final denunciation of a rhetorical life as 'nothing but a courtier's breath.'14 This study of tragic silence could start with Kyd's ornately styled play, whose narrative closes with Hieronimo's bodily renunciation of rhetoric when he bites out his tongue, having realized vengeance through theatrical staging.15 But of course there is another script running through this particular revenge performance. The actors and audience are participating in plays that they don't know about — the one that Hieronimo has devised, the 'acting of revenge' (rv.iii.3o), and the 'tragedy' that Revenge produces for Andrea's sake (l.i.gi), which comprises the 'spectacles' that finally please his soul (rv.v.12). Kyd's text is the last in this sequence. The roles that are consciously adopted for the royal masque serve finally to hide these other parts all the more deeply from the characters. The personae they assume conceal their identities, and the words through which they enact their roles propel them towards parts that they are unaware of. It is a type of speech that, without their knowledge or control, characterizes them, rather than one they can use to present themselves: 'Each one of us must act his part / In unknown languages' (rv.i. 172-3). Dramatic disguise works through a similar type of language, one which is unknown in that, as for those in this scene of revenge, it confronts its speakers with consequences of identity that they cannot always anticipate and of which they may never be conscious. The language of disguise reveals the place of the speaker in personal, social, and historical contexts that have established the grounds, and often the traditions, of character before speech and identity begin to be performed. As Hieronimo's actors and audience learn, the personae that they assume conceal factors that determine their personal fate. Rather than a way of controlling and manipulating self and situation, their guises become the means through which they are subjected to that situation. They set their identities in cultural process. 171

Guise and Disguise This reversal in the effect of disguise, the way that it seems to pass out of one's control, is reflected by its repeated failures, incompletions, and unveilings. In Renaissance texts, the antic dispositions of disguise rarely work as simply as they are intended but continue on in uncertain effect. They involve characters in ambivalent conflicts of selfhood when, for varying reasons, the image of a singular ethos may seem or be sensed as more troubling than a multiple one. Though disguise places character in cultural contexts and is a way of engaging with them, it does so by confusing social, political, and sexual roles. Disguise generates hybrid personae such as the usurping prince, the dissembling subject, and the androgyne, all of whom bring the visual, linguistic, and behavioural terms of selfhood into conflict through being unable to control the cultural effects of what they've put on. Their disguises remain personally unfinished and so shake the premises and goals of their own and others' identities. These chains of disguise effects defer the ends of self-representation; yet, unlike tragedy, they do not reject the representational process in itself. Rather they use it to relativize historical, mimetic, and epideictic ideals of characterization. The hybrid genres of satire, allegory, and tragicomedy subvert essentialist modes of ethopoesis. In so doing, they fragment the monologic voice of the proper speaker that underpins the dominant rhetorical tradition of characterization. These baroque figures in early-modern texts show that disguise functions less to hide and reveal those who wear it, than to question the cultural premises of what they wear and of who wears what. Renaissance disguise reveals the dialogic, social process of a rhetorical ethos.

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Notes

Unless otherwise specified, all references to Shakespeare's works are to The Riverside Shakespeare ed G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1974). Introduction: Disguise in the Renaissance 1 Michel de Montaigne 'Apologie of Raymond Sebond' in Essays 3 vols trans John Florio (London: Dent 1965) 11:323 2 Cf Robert Weimann 'Mimesis in Hamlef in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman eds Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen 1985) 275-91 3 M.C. Bradbrook 'Shakespeare and the Use of Disguise in Elizabethan Drama' Essays in Criticism 2 (1952) 160 4 'I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I,' proclaims Falstaff: / Henry IVU.iv.24O. 5 Hamlet I.v. 171-2 6 In Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage (New York: St Martin's 1990), Edward Burns also examines the relationship between rhetoric and Renaissance drama, emphasizing the notion of character as social transaction represented in both traditions. Burns focuses on the importance of this relationship for theories of dramatic performance and audience response. 7 Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene I.viii.4Q in Spenser: Poetical Works ed J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979) 8 Othello n.iii.352-3 9 Erving Goffman Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press 1986) 573-4. Goffman's emphasis on the determining effects of situation on agent will become increasingly important for this study.

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Notes to pages 6-8 10 On lago and improvisation, cf Stephen Greenblatt Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980) 227ff. 11 In The Use of Pleasure, vol 2 of The History of Sexuality trans Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage 1990), Michel Foucault sees ethopoesis at work through the 'rules of conduct' and 'functional devices' that classical society imposed on its citizens to 'shape themselves as ethical subjects' (13-14). Whereas Foucault considers selfhood as ethical process, I consider it as representational. One approach stresses 'etho,' the other 'poesis.' The word allows a range of different accentuations. 12 As well as Burns's Character, see Leonard Tennenhouse Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen 1986) 52-3; William J. Kennedy Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press 1978) 5-16; and Patricia Parker Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen 1987), who argues that the influence of rhetoric transforms Renaissance plays from literary to social texts, fully implicated in 'the order of discourse and the discourse of order' (96). 13 Warren Ginsberg The Cast of Character: The Representation of Personality in Ancient and Medieval Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1983) 14. As Burns notes, the Greek term 'tends to return us to the production and interpretation of signs in writing and reading' (Character 5). Character is used in this sense in Renaissance plays: 'Know you the hand? 'Tis Hamlet's character' (rv.vii.5i); 'You know the character to be your brother's?' (Learl.ii.62). 14 Rosalie Colie The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press 1973) 91; cf Lawrence Stone The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1977) 225; Greenblatt Renaissance Self-Fashioning 1-4. 15 Rene Descartes The Discourse on Method in The Rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz (Garden City NY: Anchor 1974) 63 16 King Lear V.iii.22O-i, I Henry IV 11.11.78 17 Henslowe's Diary ed R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1961) 293 18 Goffman Frame Analysis 286 19 Ibid: 'What is important is the sense he provides through his dealings with them of what sort of person he is behind the role he is in' (298). As we will see, this 'sense' can always be manipulated, the person 'behind' turning out to be another role. 20 Henslowe's Diary 325; cf the invisibility that Marlowe's Faustus requests

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Notes to pages 8-12 from Mephistophilis: Doctor Faustus ed John D.Jump (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1979) ix.g-13. 21 Goffman Frame Analysis 513 22 In Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, I55O-I77O (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986), Jean-Christophe Agnew notes that 'players used verbal asides to reveal the motives that their disguises merely insinuated' (no). 23 2 Henry VI i.i.214-59, 111.1.331-83; 3 Henry wm.ii. 124-95, V.iv.68-93; Richard III\.\.\-4\, l.ii.227-63 24 Catherine Belsey The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen 1985) 42-54 25 Angus Fletcher 'Iconographies of Thought' Representations 28 (1989) no 26 Goffman Frame Analysis 512 27 Baldassare Castiglione The Book of the Courtier trans Thomas Hoby (London: Dent 1948) 100 28 Stephen Orgel Thejonsonian Masque (New York: Columbia University Press 1981) 22 29 Jacques Derrida invokes 'disguise' to question language as a 'system of "hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak'": Of Grammalology trans Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1976) 7. 30 Relevant Renaissance theorists include Machiavelli, Bacon, and Hobbes, as discussed in ch 2, Castiglione and Puttenham in ch 3, and Calvin in ch 4. For recent opposing views on ideology and disguise, cf Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan 1978) 198-9, 216-17, on the hegemonic function of disguise, and Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life trans Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984) xix-xx, 39, on the anti-surveillance tactics generated through disguise and sophistical rhetoric. In History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics trans Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press 1979), Georg Lukacs defines dialectics as the 'simultaneous recognition and transcendence of immediate appearances' (8). 31 On the 'structurally interrogative' effects of hybridization, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen 1986) 58ff; on its relations to social identity, see Michael D. Bristol Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen 1985) 69-70. 32 For the textual function of metonymy, cf Roman Jakobson's thesis that the figure underlies genres such as realism and cubism, where displacement and condensation are central: 'Two Aspects of Language and Two

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Notes to pages 12-14

33

34

35

36

Types of Aphasic Disturbances' in Fundamentals of Language ('S-Gravenhague: Mouton 1956) 77-81. In ch 4, below, the way androgyny involves the rhetorical displacement and condensation of sexual parts and roles is considered. Notions of selfhood and language are of course a concern of much Renaissance poetry as well - Petrarchism's preoccupation with 'the incomprehensible changeability of the self in love' (Gary Waller English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century [London: Longman 1986] 85), or the sonneteer's 'awareness of the distance between what is within him and what his language is capable of uttering' (Anne Ferry The 'Inward' Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne [Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983] 97). For example, Anne (Barton) Righter Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus 1964) 84 and passim; more recently, Louis A. Montrose 'The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology' Helios 7 (1980) 51-74; Barry Weller 'Identity and Representation in Shakespeare' ELH 49 (1982) 339-62 Cf the relevant annotation to A Midsummer Night's Dream ed Wolfgang Clemen (New York: Signet 1987); also see David Marshall 'Exchanging Visions: A Midsummer Night's Dream' ELH 49 (1982) 546, 553, and Barry Weller 'Identity Disfigured: A Midsummer Night's Dream' Kenyan Review 7 (1985) 77On the emergence through the Renaissance of the modern connection between action and 'an autonomous agent/ see Frank Lentricchia Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983) 113-14. Hamlet's advice to the players is the best-known view on acting written by Shakespeare, though whether it is his or the scholarly prince's is uncertain. In either case, the second method of representation, erasing the fustian actor's presence, is preferred. This opinion seems to reflect the assumed development of acting styles through the 15905 and after, in 'the move from a declamatory, stylized drama, such as that of Marlowe and the early Shakespeare, to the more natural, open style we associate with the mature Shakespeare and such contemporaries as Webster and Middleton - where, for all the rhetorical cunning, we hear the sound of a natural speaking voice': Alexander Leggatt 'The Companies and Actors' in J. Leeds Barroll ed The Revels History of Drama in English vol 3, 1576-1613 (London: Methuen 1975) 115. Edmund Gayton's remarks from 1654 also seem to acknowledge links between theatrical and everyday acting: 'some passions counterfeited long, whether of griefe or joy, have so alter'd the personaters, that players themselves ... have been forc'd to fly to Physick, for cure of the disaffection, which such high penn'd humours, and too passionately and sensibly repre176

Notes to pages 14-18 sented, have occasion'd': A.M. Nagler A Source Book in Theatrical History (New York: Dover 1952) 127. B.L.Joseph Elizabethan Acting (London: Oxford University Press 1964) describes the period's method before concluding that 'Stanislavski would have approved wholeheartedly' (4). 37 Samuel Johnson Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose ed Bertrand H. Bronson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1966) 241-4. On the effects of a humanist critical tradition, cf Jonathan Dollimore Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984); and on the development of character as a central critical category starting in the eighteenth century, see Brian Vickers 'The Emergence of Character Criticism' in Stanley Wells ed Shakespeare Survey 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981) 11-21. 38 Joel Fineman 'Shakespeare's Ear' Representations 28 (1989) 7 39 C.L. Barber Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1959) 245. Barber's 'queaziness' marks the deep, corporeal level at which the disguised, in this case androgynous, character might strike the critic. 40 Augustus William Schlegel A Course of lectures on Dramatic Arts and Literature trans John Black (London: Henry G. Bohn 1846) 369 41 Linda Bamber Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1982) 41 42 Robert Kimbrough 'Androgyny Seen through Shakespeare's Disguise' Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982) 26-7 43 Helene Moglen 'Disguise and Development: The Self and Society in Twelfth Night Literature and Psychology 23 (1973) 15 44 Greenblatt Renaissance Self-Fashioning 2 45 Ibid 256 46 'Greenblatt implies as somehow anterior to identity-as-performance an essential self, an ontological subjectivity, an Edenic moment of black identity prior to discourse': Karen Newman ' "And wash the Ethiop white": Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor eds Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York: Methuen 1987) 150. Cf Laura Levine's claim in 'Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642' Criticism 28 (1986), that in Greenblatt's text 'the notion of the self as a manipulable construct seems underwritten by an older sense of the self as a "deep psychic structure." ... The notion of a self abides even in the very attempt to get rid of it' (122). 47 Hans Blumenberg 'An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric' in Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and 177

Notes to pages 18-23 Thomas McCarthy eds After Philosophy: End or Transformation'? (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press 1987) 456 Chapter One: The Rhetoric of Characterization 1 Lauro Martines Society and History in English Renaissance Verse (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1985) 127 2 Michel Foucault The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage 1973) 43 3 Ibid 129. On the relevance of Foucault's argument in The Order of Things to sixteenth-century literature, cf Robert Weimann 'Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theatre' Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988) 401. 4 John Ruskin The Stones of Venice ed Jan Morris (Boston: Little, Brown 1981) 84 5 Jean Baudrillard Simulations trans Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e] 1983) 88 6 Ibid 85, 98. Cf Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason trans Richard Howard (New York: Vintage *973) °n an emerging semiotics of madness that subverts the overdetermined meanings of Gothic symbolism: 'So many diverse meanings are established beneath the surface of the image that it presents only an enigmatic face' (20). 7 Thomas M. Greene The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press 1982) 3 and passim 8 Foucault Order of Things 56 9 Baudrillard Simulations 87 10 John Rainolds's Oxford Lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric ed Lawrence D. Green (Newark: University of Delaware Press 1986) 221 11 Thomas Wilson The Arte ofRhetorique ed G.H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon 1909) 170 12 George Puttenham The Arte of English Poesie ed Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1936) 154 13 Wilson Arte ofRhetorique A.vii; cf Frank Whigham Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984) 3. 14 Sir Philip Sidney Defence of Poesie in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney 3 vols ed Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1963) 111:8-9 15 Sidney Defence 111:29 16 Abraham Fraunce The Arcadian Rhetoric ed R.C. Alston (Menston: Scolar Press 1969) A2 17 Rainolds's Oxford Lectures 105

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Notes to pages 23-7 18 In Baldassare Castiglione The Book of the Courtier trans Thomas Hoby (London: Dent 1948) .7 19 Puttenham Arte of English Poesie 178 20 The Winter's Tale IV.iv.95-7 21 Derek Attridge Tuttenham's Perplexity: Nature, Art, and the Supplement in Renaissance Poetic Theory' in Patricia Parker and David Quint eds Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1986) 265 22 Ibid 270 23 Quintilian Institutio Oratoria trans H.E. Butler (London: Loeb 1969) I.v.7i 24 Jacques Derrida 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy' in Margins of Philosophy trans Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982) 270 25 Wilson Arte ofKhetorique 172 26 Castiglione The Courtier 56 27 Michel de Montaigne 'An Apologie of Raymond Sebond' Essays 3 vols trans John Florio (London: Dent 1965) II:28o 28 Fraunce Arcadian Rhetoric G2 29 Puttenham Arte of English Poesie 186 30 On the wide role of rhetoric in Renaissance cultural thought and practices, cf Joel B. Altnnan ' "Preposterous Conclusions": Eros, Enargeia, and the Composition of Othello Representations 18 (1987) 131-2; Patricia Parker 'Shakespeare and Rhetoric: 'Dilation' and 'Delation' in Othello' in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman eds Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen 1985) 70; Brian Vickers 'On the Practicalities of Renaissance Rhetoric' in Brian Vickers ed Rhetoric Revalued: Papers from the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1982) 133-41. 31 Rainolds's Oxford Lectures 117. Further references will be included in the text. 32 Richard Hooker Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity ed A.S. McGrade and Brian Vickers (New York: St Martin's 1975) 83 33 Ibid 78 34 On the politically and psychologically individualizing effects of Protestantism, cf Angus Fletcher 'Iconographies of Thought' Representations 28 (1989) 106. 35 The Basilicon Down of King James Wed James Craigie (Edinburgh: Blackwood 1944) 16 36 Ibid 29 37 Richard A. Lanham The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press 1976) 42-6

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Notes to pages 27-32 38 Plato Crito 173-18a in The Collected Dialogues of Plato ed Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985). References to Plato's dialogues are to this edition. 39 On 'antirhetoric' in the dialogues, see Paolo Valesio Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1980) 41-2; on the loaded binary structure of Platonism, see Jacques Derrida 'Limited Inc a b e ..." Glyph 2 (1977) 236. 40 Cf Roger Moss 'The Case for Sophistry' in Vickers ed Rhetoric Revalued 207-24. 41 Cicero De Oratore trans E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge: Loeb !979) Hl.xvi.6o-i 42 Helene Cixous 'The Character of "Character"' New Literary History 5 (1974) 385 43 Horace Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica trans H. Rush ton Fairclough (Cambridge: Loeb 1978) 125-7 44 Michel Foucault 'The Discourse on Language' in The Archaeology of Knowledge trans Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon 1982) 219. In this essay, Foucault tends to ignore the opposition to Platonist categories, which, as the above quotation from De Oratore shows, did remain in force. 45 Cicero De Oratore I.ix.47 46 S0ren Kierkegaard The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates trans Lee M. Capel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1965) 168 47 G.B. Kerferd The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981) 173 and passim 48 Isocrates 'Antidosis' in Isocrates 3 vols trans George Norlin and Larve van Hook (Cambridge: Loeb 1961-6) 11:6-7 49 Isocrates 'Against the Sophists' in ibid 11:21 50 Quintilian Institutio I.Pref 9 51 Ernst Robert Curtius European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages trans Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon 1953) 77; cf James J. Murphy Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press 1974) ix and passim. 52 Plato Sophist 268c-d. Further references will be included in the text. 53 H.D. Rankin Sophists, Socratics, and Cynics (London: Groom Helm 1983) 19 54 Aristotle Rhetoric in The Works of Aristotle 12 vols ed W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon 1908-52) XI: 13563. Further references to the Rhetoric will be included in the text. 55 Cf the a priori presence of a regulating agent in the definition of delivery as the 'graceful regulation of voice, countenance, gesture,' in the

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Notes to pages 32-5 anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium trans Harry Caplan (Cambridge: Loeb 1968) I.ii.13. 56 Cf Vickers' Introduction in Rhetoric Revalued 19. 57 Cf Michel de Certeau's view of Aristotle as 'the author of a great "strategic" system' in The Practice of Everyday Life trans Steven F. Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984) 38. 58 Aristotle Rhetoric 14045 59 Rhetorica ad Herennium I.vii.ll, III.xv.24, rv.vii.io 60 Quintilian Inslitutio ix.iv.147 61 Cicero De Oratore Ill.lvi.2l4 62 Ibid Ili.xxxii.i29 63 Aristotle The Poetics trans W. Hamilton Fyfe (London: Loeb 1946) VI.24 64 Huntington Cairns 'Introduction' in Collected Dialogues of Plato xvi 65 Erving Goffman Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Pantheon 1967) 240 66 Cf Kenneth Burke A Grammar of Motives (Cleveland: Meridian 1962) 173 and Takis Poulakos 'Epideictic Rhetoric as Social Hegemony: Isocrates' Helen' in Charles W. Kneupper ed Rhetoric and Ideology: Compositions and Criticisms of Power (Arlington: Rhetoric Society of America 1989) 156-66. In History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics trans Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press 1979) Georg Lukacs notes the asocial idealism of pure Platonic logic (203), and the general lack of social reference in the ancients' thought (219-20). 67 In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum 1987), Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno remark on the reality effect of Platonic and Aristotelian categories for subsequent thought (22). 68 Stephen Orgel The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press 1975) 17 69 Francis Bacon The Essays ed John Pitcher (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1987) 94 70 De Certeau Practice of Everyday Life 39 71 John Heywood An Apology for Actors in A.M. Nagler A Source Book in Theatrical History (New York: Dover 1952) 124-5 72 Fraunce Arcadian Rhetoric K3. The most detailed handbooks of dramatic and rhetorical gesture from the period are John Bulwer's Chirologia and Chironomia, published in the 16405. They are discussed in detail in B.L. Joseph Elizabethan Acting (London: Oxford University Press 1964) and Jean-Christophe Agnew Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 7550-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986). 73 Peter Burke 'Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London' in Barry

l8l

Notes to pages 35-8

74 75

76 77 78

79 80

81 82 83

84

Reay ed Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Groom Helm 1985) 33 Nagler Source Book in Theatrical History 126-8 Thomas Wright The Passions of the Mind in General ed William Webster Newbold (New York: Garland 1986) 109. Further references will be included in the text. Cicero De Oralore II.xlv. 191 Montaigne 'Apologie of Raymond Sebond' Essays 11:151 See respectively Lily B. Campbell Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (New York: Barnes and Noble 1967) and J. Leeds Barroll Artificial Persons: The Formation of Character in the Tragedies of Shakespeare (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press 1974). Stephen Greenblatt Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980) 164 For examples of this explanation of characterization, especially in relation to the drama, see Joel B. Altman The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of English Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978); Jonas Barish Benjonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1967); Charles Osborne McDonald The Rhetoric of Tragedy: Form in Stuart Drama (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1966); Walter J. Ong Tudor Writings on Rhetoric' in Studies in the Renaissance vol 15 (New York: Renaissance Society of America 1968) 39-69; Alexander H. Sackton Rhetoric as a Dramatic Language in Benjonson (New York: Octagon 1967); Eugene M. Waith The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven: Yale University Press 1952). Waith Pattern of Tragicomedy 97ff, McDonald Rhetoric of Tragedy I38ff, Altman Tudor Play of Mind 43ff Altman Tudor Play of Mind 6, 43, 65, 68, 105 Cf Roland Barthes 'The Death of the Author' in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang 1977); Michel Foucault 'What Is an Author?' in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1977); Francis Barker The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen 1984) 49. Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics trans Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984) 188. In Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and The Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen 1985), Michael D. Bristol suggests that Bakhtin's critique of dramatic dialogue relates to the post-Renaissance period, since Renaissance drama was 'created before the collapse of the theater as a strong social institution' (24).

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Notes to pages 38-41 85 Christopher Marlowe The Jew of Malta ed Richard W. Van Fossen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1964) n.iii.326-7 86 On the use of 'guise' as social custom (in terms of dress), with a similarly incredulous undertone, cf Shakespeare's 2 Henry w I.iii.42-3: 'My Lord of Suffolk, say, is this the guise, / Is this the fashions in the court of England?' 87 Greenblatt Renaissance Self-Fashioning 253 88 Baudrillard Simulations 88 89 Juan Luis Vives 'Fable about Man' in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr, eds The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1948) 388 90 Pietro Pomponazzi 'Immortality of the Soul' in Cassirer et al eds Renaissance Philosophy of Man 376 91 Jacob Burckhardt The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy 2 vols trans S.G.C. Middlemore (New York: Harper and Row 1958) 1:147 92 Ernst Cassirer The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy trans Mario Domandi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1979) 140 93 Goffman Interaction Ritual 238 94 Rene Descartes Discourse on Method in The Rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz (Garden City NY: Anchor 1974) 59. On Descartes's revision of 'the space of the essentially human,' see Frank Lentricchia Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983) 94, and cf Burke Grammar of Motives: 'Descartes was as influential as any philosopher in directing the turn from dramatist to scientist terminologies' (225). 95 Cassirer et al Renaissance Philosophy of Man 391 96 Like Socrates, Descartes can be considered a paradoxically sophistical figure. In the Meditations on the First Philosophy (in The Rationalists), the cogito is realized through an intense, ethopoetic process of self-persuasion and inner speech: 'I had the persuasion that there was absolutely nothing in the world ... was I not, therefore, at the same time persuaded that I did not exist? Far from it; I assuredly existed, since I was persuaded' (119). At the same time, however, representational language also involves a continual risk to the cogito: 'For although, without at all giving expression to what I think, I consider all this in my own mind [that, 'I see the wax'], words yet occasionally impede my progress, and I am almost led into error by the terms of ordinary language' (125). Language is an ambiguous path and threat to the self, and the cogito becomes a function of Cartesian stage fright. 97 Erasmus The Praise of Folly in The Essential Erasmus ed John P. Dolan

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Notes to pages 41-4 (New York: Meridian 1983) 102. Further references will be included in the text. 98 Cf Foucault Madness and Civilization on the foreclosure of reason and death through folly (14-17). 99 Montaigne 'Of Repenting' Essays 111:27, with ensuing references in the text 100 La Rochefoucauld Maxims trans Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1986) 25-6; cf Jonas Barish The Antithealrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press 1981) 213-19. 101 Wright Passions of the Mind 312; cf Jacques Lacan on the mirror image, which 'symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination': Ecrits: A Selection trans Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton 1977) 2. 102 Erasmus Praise of Folly 172 103 Castiglione The Courtier 319 104 Erasmus The Handbook of the Militant Chrstian in Essential Erasmus 43 105 John Calvin The Institutes of the Christian Religion 2 vols trans Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids Mich: Wm B. Eerdmans 1966) 1:416. For a summary of the influence of Calvin in England, see A.G. Dickens The English Reformation (London: Batsford 1964) 197-201. 106 Calvin Institutes r.lli 107 Burke Grammar of Motives 23, and cf Lentricchia Criticism and Social Change 74. 108 For a link between this notion of substance and more recent conceptions of persona, cf Victor Turner's sense of the latter as a 'role-mask, not the unique individual': Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1974) 237 109 Calvin Institutes 1:124 no Hooker Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity no; cf Wright's awed admiration in The Passions of the Mind: 'What shall I say of you three sacred persons in Trinity, distinguished really, and yet indistinct essentially; doth not his distinction cause a difference, and this admirable union an inexplicable consonance?' (230). in Calvin Institutes 1:134 112 John Milton Paradise Lost rv. 121-2 in Milton: Poetical Works ed Douglas Bush (London: Oxford University Press 1974) 113 Daniel Dyke The Mystery of Selfe-Deceiving: Or, A Discourse and Discovery of the Deceilfulnesse of Mans Heart (London 1642) 2 114 Ibid 12, 14-15 115 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (Cleveland: Meridian 1963) 60. Further references are to this ition and will be included in the text.

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Notes to pages 44-7 116 Sebastian de Graza Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989) 292 117 Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince in The Prince and the Discourses (New York: Random House 1950) 64 118 Ibid 66 119 John Marston The Works 3 vols ed Arthur Henry Bullen (Hildesheim: Georg Olms 1970) 111:272 120 Thomas Nashe Pierce Penniless in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other WbrfoedJ.B. Steane (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1972) 121 121 Jean E. Howard 'Renaissance Antitheatricality and the Politics of Gender and Rank in Much Ado about Nothing in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor eds Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York: Methuen 1987) 168; cf Bristol Carnival and Theater 115, and Lisa Jardine's discussion of sumptuary legislation in Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester 1983) 141-62 . 122 Thomas Dekker The Gull's Handbook in Nagler Source Book 114-15, 129 123 Nashe Pierce Penniless 114. For a detailed summary of equivocal evaluations of the theatre, see Margot Heinemann Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980) 200-36. 124 Bacon Essays 144 125 Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy 3 vols (London: Dent 1968) I:i2i 126 Cf Andrew Gurr 'The Elizabethan Stage and Acting' in Boris Ford ed The Age of Shakespeare (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1982) 245. In From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications 1982), Victor Turner notes that 'The very word "ambiguity" is derived from the Latin agere to "act"' (102). Agnew's Worlds Apart offers a detailed analysis of the interplay among the ambiguities of action, agency, and the fast-developing economy of late-sixteenth-century London, in 'the calculated misrepresentation of private meanings in the negotiated relations among men and women' (60). 127 Thomas M. Greene 'Ben Jonson and the Centered Self in The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press 1986) 194-217 128 Cf Bristol Carnival and Theater ngff, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen 1986) 70-7. 129 Ben Jonson Timber: Or, Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter in Ben Jonson 10 vols ed C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson

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Notes to pages 47-54 (Oxford: Clarendon 1925-52) VIII:625. Further references to Timber-will be included in the text. 130 Cf David Norbrook Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1984) i82ff on Jonson's dramatic interest in dissemblers. 131 Ben Jonson Bartholomew Fair ed E.A. Horsman (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1962) ll.i.i-2 132 Ben Jonson Epicoene, or The Silent Woman ed Edward Partridge (New Haven: Yale University Press 1971) ll.i-3 133 Ben Jonson The Alchemist ed F.H. Mares (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1967) H.iii.282 134 Robert N. Watson ' The Alchemist and Jonson's Conversion of Comedy' in Barbara Keifer Lewalski ed Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1986) 336 135 Jonson The Alchemist l.iv.25-9 136 Ben Jonson Volpone ed David Cook (London: Methuen 1962) l.i.3O-2 137 Ibid m.i.i-33 138 Jonson Bartholomew Fair I.iii.133 139 Ibid Ii.iv.69; cf Stallybrass and White Politics and Poetics of Transgression 64-5140 Montaigne 'Apologie of Raymond Sebond' Essays 11:257 141 For related comments on this section of leviathan, see Stephen Greenblatt 'Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture' in Parker and Quint eds Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts 222; Agnew Worlds Apart 99-103; Frank Whigham 'Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess ofMalfi' PMLA 100 (1985) 175Chapter Two: Political Acts

1 Spenser: Poetical Works ed J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979) 407 2 'The Quene's Majestie's Passage through the Citie of London' in Arthur F. Kinney ed Elizabethan Backgrounds: Historical Documents of the Age of Elizabeth I (Hamden: Archon 1975) 29-30. A fifth pageant depicted Elizabeth as Deborah, the prophetess and judge of Israel. 3 Kenneth Burke A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press 1969) 306-7 4 Hamlet W.v.123-5 5 Burke Rhetoric of Motives 307. In Anticourt Drama in England 1603-1642

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Notes to pages 54-7 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1989), Albert H. Tricomi notes that the doctrine of the two bodies provides the 'conceptual framework' through which problems of sovereignty (Tricomi emphasizes allegiance) could be explored (90). In this chapter I will be examining the rhetorical and dramatistic structure that this framework itself depends on. 6 Perry Anderson Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB 1974) 49 7 John Calvin The Institutes of the Christian Heligion 2 vols trans Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids Mich: Wm B. Eerdmans 1966) 11:655, 659 8 Erving Goffman Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Pantheon 1967) 91 9 The Basilicon Down of King James V7ed James Craigie (Edinburgh: Blackwood 1944) 12. Further references will be included in the text. 10 Fredric Jameson The Ideologies of Theory: Essays ig71-1986 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988) 1:55 11 E.K. Chambers The Elizabethan Stage 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon 1923) 1:318-20, 111:159-62, IV:263. In Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980), Margot Heinemann claims that censorship grew under James (36-7). This view has been questioned by Philip J. Finkelpearl ' "The Comedians' Liberty": Censorship of the Jacobean Stage Reconsidered' English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986) 123-38; Janet Clare ' "Greater Themes for Insurrection's Arguing": Political Censorship of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage' Review of English Studies 38 (1987) 169-83 contests that censorship, especially concerning class issues, decreased during James's reign. 12 Annabel Patterson Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1984) 7; cf Heinemann Puritanism and Theatre 14-15. 13 Chambers Elizabethan Stage HI: 162, Patterson Censorship and Interpretation W 14 Chambers Elizabethan Stage III: 168-9 n4- The decree is fully reprinted in Richard A. McCabe 'Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops' Ban of 1599' Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981) 188-93. 15 Rosalie Colie The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press 1973) 32 16 McCabe ('Elizabethan Satire') notes that in this case the status quo was being conceived in 'predominantly political, rather than moral' terms (189), and that satire and epigrams were to be more rigorously policed than histories and plays (190). 17 Leonard Tennenhouse 'Representing Power: Measure for Measure in Its

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Notes to pages 57-60 Time' in Stephen Greenblatt ed The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman: Pilgrim 1982) 139. Tennenhouse develops this discussion in Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen 1987). 18 Basilicon Doron of James VT 55 19 The dialogic response to the bishops' ban that these generic shifts represent thus complicates Tennenhouse's premise that 'variations in the behavior of power ... determine the differences by which we distinguish literary genres': Power on Display 16. Variations in genres may equally determine the ways the powerful behave. 20 Aristotle Politics in The Works of Aristotle 12 vols ed W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon 1908-52) X:i2979b. Further references to the Politics will be included in the text. 21 Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics in Works IX: logGa, iog8a, iioGa 22 Note Edmund Spenser's comments to Raleigh, praising both Cyrus and Xenophon's depiction as a model for his own efforts: 'Xenophon [is] preferred before Plato, for that the one in the exquisite depth of his Judgement, formed a Commune welth such as it should be, but the other in the person of Cyrus and the Persians fashioned a gouernement such as might best be: So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule' (Poetical Works 407). Spenser echoes the arguments for the advantages of poetry over history and philosophy, as well as the invocation of Cyrus, from Sidney's Defence. 23 Xenophon Cyropaedia trans Walter Miller (London: Loeb 1943) III.i.12-21 24 On Cyrus's control of his subjects through 'lavish giving' and setting up jealous rivalries amongst them, see ibid Vin.ii.7,22,28. In The Use of Pleasure, vol 2 of The History of Sexuality trans Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage 1990), Michel Foucault also notes the links among ethics, politics, self-formation, and the avoidance of tyranny, citing Xenophon on Cyrus (80-1, 173-4). 25 Julius Ca«arl.ii.2i2 26 Henry vrv.i.ioi, 268, and rv.iii.62. Cf Stephen Greenblatt Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press 1988) on the theme of sleeplessness 'in the literature of the governing classes in the sixteenth century' (54). On the 'social prejudice' underlying Henry v's populism, cf Annabel Patterson Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell 1989) 91. If enviously invoking the masses is one of the period's self-defining tropes of power, we can contrast Henry Vl's hapless idealization of the 'homely swain' as a sign of his political impotence (3 Henry wn.v.2iff).

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Notes to pages 61-5 27 Cf Jonathan Goldberg 'Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power' in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman eds Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen 1985) 116-37. 28 Kinney ed Elizabethan Backgrounds 15 29 Plato Republic I.347d in The Collected Dialogues of Plato ed Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985). Cf the reference to the Republic that opens William Baldwin's dedication to A Mirror for Magistrates (ed Lily B. Campbell [New York: Barnes and Noble 1960] 63): 'Plato among many other of his notable sentences concerning the government of a common weale, hath this: Well is that realme governed, in which the ambicious desyer not to beare office.' 30 Richard II IV.i.223-5. Further references will be included in the text. 31 Thomas Wright The Passions of the Mind in General ed William Webster Newbold (New York: Garland 1986) 98 32 Aristotle Politics 12533 33 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (Cleveland: Meridian 1963) 59 34 Herschel Baker, the editor of Richard II in the Riverside Shakespeare, notes the recurring use of negative words beginning with the 'un-' prefix throughout the play: see the annotation to 'undeaf at H.i.iG. 35 Michel Foucault The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage 1973) 43 36 Cf Herbert Grabes The Mutable Glass: Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance trans Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982) 216. For a general history of the mirror including the Renaissance, the period when the modern mirror was developed, see Benjamin Goldberg The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1985). 37 Ernst Cassirer The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy trans Mario Domandi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1979) 157-8 38 Quoted in Goldberg Mirror and Man 152 39 Cassius to Brutus, Julius Caesar l.ii.67-7O. A Mirror for Magistrates exemplifies the faith in visual perception as politically and morally edifying: 'here as in a loking glas, you shall see (if any vice be in you) how the like hath bene punished in other heretofore' (65); 'a myrrour for al men as well noble as others, to shewe the slyppery deceytes of the waueryng lady [Fortune], and the due rewarde of all kinde of vices' (68). 40 Measure for Measure II. ii. 12O 41 Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays trans Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review 1971) 238. For a 'humanist-religious' read-

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Notes to pages 65-8 ing of this scene, see Peter Ure 'The Looking-Glass of Richard if Philological Quarterly 34 (1955) 219-24. 42 Althusser Lenin and Philosophy 219 43 Michel de Montaigne 'Apologie of Raymond Sebond' in Essays 3 vols trans John Florio (London: Dent 1965) 11:306 44 For the psychoanalytic subtext of misrecognition in Richard's gaze, see Jacques Lacan's essay on the mirror stage in Ecrits: A Selection trans Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton 1977), and Ned Lukacher 'Anamorphic Stuff: Shakespeare, Catharsis, Lacan' South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989) 863-98. On the symbolic structure of politics in Shakespeare's history plays, cf Harry Berger, Jr 'Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text: The First Three Scenes of the Henriad" in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman eds Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen 1985) 210-29. 45 The phrase 'second glass' is from Sebastian de Grazia Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989) 313. 46 Hobbes Leviathan 188 47 Quoted in Ernst Kantorowicz The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957) 7. Cf Weber's remark that 'in the main, it has been the work of jurists to give birth to the modern Occidental "state"': From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology trans and ed H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press 1947) 299. Also Michel Foucault, 'a fundamental historical trait of Western monarchies: they were constructed as systems of law, they expressed themselves through theories of law, and they made their mechanisms of power work in the form of law': The History of Sexuality vol 1 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1981) 87. 48 Kantorowicz King's Two Bodies 16, 19 49 Richard II V.iv.49-5O, a Henry IV l.v.213-14, / Henry 7VI.i.i8-22, 2 Henry IV PV.V.232-4O 50 Kantorowicz King's Two Bodies 26, 40 51 Wayne A. Rebhorn Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli's Confidence Men (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1988) ill; cf Jonas Barish The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press 1981) 96-8, and Phyllis Rackin Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (London: Routledge 1990) 74-5. 52 Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince in The Prince and the Discourses (New York: Random House 1950) 64-5 53 Joseph Anthony Mazzeo Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press 1964) 138-9

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Notes to pages 68-70 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68

69

70

71

Machiavelli The Prince 87 Timon of Athens IIl.vi.94-5, l.i.226-7 Basiticon Doron of James VI115 Francis Bacon The Essays ed John Pitcher (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1987) 77-8, with ensuing references in the text; cf Jean Baudrillard's more recent study, Simulations trans Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e] 1983): 'Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of polities' (10). Francis Bacon The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (London: Oxford University Press 1969) 214 Machiavelli The Prince 66 Cf Baudrillard Simulations 31. Stanley Fish Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press 1972) 118 Baudrillard Simulations 34-5 Machiavelli The Prince 56 3 Henry WIII.H. 191-3, Richard III I.iii.335-7 On Machiavelli's ideological circumscription, cf Jonathan Goldberg James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1983) 79 Fish Self-Consuming Artifacts 124 Machiavelli The Prince 64 Mazzeo Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies 145; cf Rebhorn Foxes and Lions 19, Alan Sinfield Literature in Protestant England 1560-1660 (London: Groom Helm 1983) 89, and Machiavelli's overt debunking of such Renaissance ideals as Xenophon's portrait of Cyrus and Roman honour in the Discourses 319-20. A slight rewriting of part of Michel Foucault's essay 'What Is an Author?' makes the point: 'Writing [ie, politics] unfolds like a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind. Thus, the essential basis of this writing [politics] is not the exalted emotions relating to the act of composition [ruling] or the insertion of a subject [prince] into language [power]. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject [the prince] endlessly disappears': Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1977) 116. Cf Leah Marcus on 'the emerging Renaissance preoccupation with personal and political authorship': Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press 1988) 206. Hobbes Leviathan 176-7. Further references will be included in the text.

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Notes to pages 71-4 72 Victoria Kahn Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985) 170 73 Cf Marie Axton The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society 1977), who explains that the two bodies was neither fact nor orthodoxy but worked 'to express a precarious balance of power between the king and the state' which 'could be redefined with each fresh application of the theory to a contemporary situation' (x). 74 Ibid 146 75 Keir Elam The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen 1980) 27 76 Stephen Orgel 'Making Greatness Familiar' in Greenblatt ed The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance 45; cf Goldberg James I xii; Jonathan Crewe Hidden Designs: The Critical Profession and Renaissance Literature (New York: Methuen 1986): 'Theatricality ... begins in the moment of this fall into politics ... drama is born as the hegemonic instrument of the ruling caste' (26); Greenblatt Shakespearean Negotiations: 'Theatricality ... is not set over against power but is one of power's essential modes' (46); the 'Henry plays confirm the Machiavellian hypothesis that princely power originates in force and fraud' (65). 77 Cf Paul A. Jorgensen ' "Redeeming Time" in Shakespeare's Henry TV* in Shakespeare: Henry IV Parts I and II ed G.K. Hunter (London: Macmillan 1970) 231-42. 78 Tennenhouse Power on Display 83 79 Steven Mullaney The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988) 81 80 Quoted in J.E. Neale Queen Elizabeth I (London: Jonathan Cape 1958) 277 81 Herschel Baker 'Introduction' to Henry rv, Parts I and 2 in The Riverside Shakespeare 843 82 Tennenhouse Power on Display 84 83 On 'public idiom,' cf Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan 1978) 61-2. 84 Richard //V.ii.14 85 Cf Rebhorn Foxes and Lions 24, on the similarities between Henry IV and Hal; for the Oedipal complexities of their relationship, see Harry Berger, Jr 'What Did the King Know and When Did He Know It? Shakespearean Discourse and Psychoanalysis' South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989) esp 846-62. 86 Machiavelli Discourses 526; cf Northumberland's view in 3 Henry W. 'It is war's prize to take all vantages' (I.iv.59).

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Notes to pages 74-6 87 Hobbes Leviathan 176 88 Cf Jean Baudrillard's argument concerning Marxism in The Mirror of Production trans Mark Poster (St Louis: Telos 1975) 29-31: Tailing to conceive of a model of social wealth other than that founded on labor and production, Marxism no longer furnishes in the long run a real alternative to capitalism ... Marxism assists the cunning power of capital,' 89 Cf Walter Raleigh's concern in the preface to The History of the World: 'It is enough for me (being in that state that I am) to write of the eldest times; wherein also why may it not be said, that in speaking of the past, I point at the present, and tax the vices of those that are yet living, in their persons that are long since dead': in Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books ed Charles W. Eliot (New York: Collier 1969) 114. 90 Jonathan Dollimore Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984) 71 91 Hobbes Leviathan 315. On this choric effect in Henry Vcf Robert Weimann 'Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theatre' Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988) 415. The possible fusion of past and present through the image of history is exemplified in the Chorus of Act 5, where the return of Henry V from France is likened first to the Roman triumph of a 'conqu'ring Caesar' and then to the impending return of 'the general of our gracious Empress ... from Ireland' (V.Cho 25-34). That Essex's failure in Ireland would lead to his rebellion and execution suggests, however, the undecidability of the historical meaning advanced by the Chorus. Similarly, the epilogue to Henry V ironically foreshadows the loss of France and the 'bleed[ing]' of England that occur after Henry's death, setting in train 'a self-referential cycle that ends by interrogating the entire project of historical mythmaking': Rackin Stages of History 61. 92 For a recent summary of research into the change from Oldcastle to Falstaff, including its complication of ideas of censorship, see Jonathan Goldberg The Commodity of Names: "Falstaff" and "Oldcastle" in / Henry TV* in Jonathan Crewe ed Reconfiguring the Renaissance: Essays in Critical Materialism (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press 1992) 76-88. Rackin also notes that Falstaff disrupts the project of Tudor historiography: Stages of History 234-5. 93 Cf Rackin Stages of History 241. 94 Terry Eagleton William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986) 16. On Falstaff s subversive, carnivalesque dimensions see Robert Stam Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1989) 97 and Michael D. Bristol Carnival and Theater:

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Notes to pages 76-9 Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen 1985) 206. 95 Erasmus The Praise of Folly in The Essential Erasmus ed John P. Dolan (New York: Meridian 1983) 154. Further references will be included in the text. 96 Cf Tennenhouse Power on Display 69; Rackin Stages of History 168, 175; Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner Shakespeare: The Play of History (London: Macmillan 1988) 80; Patricia Parker Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen 1987) 131-2. 97 Folly's list of symbols echoes in Richard if s renunciation of his sovereign props as he 'undoes' himself (rv.i.2O3-i5) and also in Henry V's soliloquy (rv.i.259-68). On the latter cf Richard C. McCoy "Thou Idol Ceremony": Elizabeth I, The Henriad, and the Rites of English Monarchy' in Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F.E. Weissman eds Urban Life in the Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press 1989) 258. 98 Mikhail Bakhtin Problems ofDosloevsky's Poetics trans Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984) 198 99 Cf Oscar James Campbell Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino: Huntington Library 1938) 100 In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge trans Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1 984), Jean-Francois Lyotard contends that persons are constituted at the 'nodal points' of discourse (15). 101 Ronald Paulson 'The Fictions of Satire' in Ronald Paulson ed Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism (Englewood Cliffs Nj: Prentice Hall 1971) 349. On satire as rhetorical rather than mimetic, using other literary forms to represent its satirical meanings, cf John Scott Colley John Marslon's Theatrical Drama (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature 1974) 24-5, and James S. Baumlin 'Generic Contexts of Elizabethan Satire: Rhetoric, Poetic Theory, and Imitation' in Barbara Kiefer Lewalski ed Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1986) 444-67. 102 Chambers Elizabethan Stage 111:428 103 John Marston The Works 3 vols ed Arther Henry Bullen (1887; Hildesheim: Georg Olms 1970) 111:268. Further references to Marston's work are to this edition and will be included in the text. The Malcontent is in vol I. 104 John Marston The Fawn II.i.590 105 See Philip J. Finkelpearl John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1969) 83-124.

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Notes to pages 80-3 106 Tricomi Anticourt Drama 3-12 107 Ibid 13; George K. Hunter 'Introduction' in The Malcontent (London: Methuen 1975) xli-liii; Ann Blake '"The Humour of Children": John Marston's Plays in the Private Theatres' Review of English Studies 38 (1987) 477 108 Hunter 'Introduction' The Malcontent xxix 109 Alvin Kernan The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press 1959) 212 no Finkelpearl John Marslon 185 in Tennenhouse 'Representing Power' 144; cf Mikhail Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays ed Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press 1981) 163, on the satiric freedom afforded by the clown's mask. 112 Kernan Cankered Muse 214. To read Malevole in these terms is not to ignore the play's comedy - 'Humor is part of every social system and can be analyzed as one social process affecting the system': William H. Martineau 'A Model of the Social Functions of Humor' in Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul E. McGhee eds The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues (New York: Academic 1972) 103. 113 Franco Moretti '"A Huge Eclipse": Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty' in Greenblatt ed The Power of Forms 21 114 Ibid 23 115 Finkelpearl John Marston 180 116 Aristotle Politics I26gb; cf Machiavelli Discourses 111:26 'How States Are Ruined on Account of Women.' For discussion of the relations between sex and politics in Marston's play see Finkelpearl John Marston 190, T.F. Wharton ' The Malcontent and "Dreams, Visions, Fantasies"' Essays in Criticism 24 (1974) 265-6, and Michael Scott John Marston's Plays: Theme, Structure and Performance (London: Macmillan 1978) 31. Rackin notes that Tudor history was written both without and against women: Stage of History 161. 117 On malcontent misogyny, see Peter Stallybrass 'Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed' in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers eds Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986) 133-4, and Dympna Callaghan Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of King tear, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil (New York: Harvester 1989) 125-38. The misogynist focus on women's disruptive political effects can be seen throughout Shakespeare's plays, beginning with Joan Pucelle in I Henry VI and Tamora in Titus Andronicus. Leah Marcus suggests that one of the enduring con-

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Notes to pages 83-8 texts for this focus is the ambivalence concerning Elizabeth, 'a set of suppressed cultural anxieties about the Virgin Queen, her identity, and her capacity to provide continuing stability for the nation': Puzzling Shakespeare 53. 118 Maynard Mack 'The Muse of Satire' in Paulson ed Satire 195 119 Kernan Cankered Muse 57-63 120 On Marston's satiric self-fashioning see Anthony Caputi/o/in Marslon, Satirist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1961) 23, and James Edward Siemon 'Disguise in Marston and Shakespeare' Huntington Library Quarterly 38 (1975) H5 121 Kernan Cankered Muse 114-24 122 Cf Jonathan Dollimore 'Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure' in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield eds Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985) 72-87. 123 R.W. Ingram John Marston (Boston: Twayne 1978) 108 124 For interpretations of Malevole/Altofronto along these lines, see Ejner J. Jensen John Marston, Dramatist: Themes and Imagery in the Plays (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English 1979) 68, 74 (a new critical focus on 'tension'). For metatheatrical emphases see G.K. Hunter's introductions to Antonio and Mellida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1965) and Antonio's Revenge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1965), and Colley John Marston's Theatrical Drama 40-5, 127 (who explicitly dismisses the play as a study of political practice since 'there is no lasting and significant purgation of the causes of political folly and knavery' [126]); Finkelpearl John Marston 186, 193; Ingram John Marston 86, 100, 158-9; Wharton "The Malcontent' 262, 268. On the lack of essential selfhood see Siemon 'Disguise in Marston and Shakespeare' 118 and Scott John Marston's Plays 27, 31. On an ideological rather than psychological basis for interpreting Renaissance texts, see Dollimore Radical Tragedy 249-50, and 29ff for the relation to Marston's work. 125 Greenblatt Shakespearean Negotiations 65 126 Caputi/o/m Marston, Satirist 180-1 127 Weber From Max Weber 246-7 128 On the prince's reordering of sexuality, cf Tennenhouse 'Representing Power' 139, 150. 129 Colley John Marston's Theatrical Drama 148 130 On the editorial changes to the quartos, see Finkelpearl John Marston 192 and Hunter 'Introduction' The Malcontent xxiii-xl. 131 Cf Jonson's warning against overzealous interpreters - the 'state-deci-

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Notes to pages 88-94 pherer' or 'politic picklock' - in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair (lines 122-3). 132 Marston Works 1:198 Chapter Three: The Allegorical Subject 1

2 3

4

5

6

7 8 9 10

Cf Robert Weimann 'Society and the Individual in Shakespeare's Conception of Character' in Stanley Wells ed Shakespeare Survey 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981) 26 2 Henry IV TV.v.i 54 Jane Gallop Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985) 84. Cf Marguerite Waller 'Usurpation, Seduction, and the Problematics of the Proper: A "Deconstructive," "Feminist" Reading of the Seductions of Richard and Anne in Shakespeare's Richard in' in Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers eds Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986) 164 Harold Garfinkel 'Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person, Part l' in Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity 1989) 116-85. Further references will be included in the text. See ibid 167, 181-2, and passim. On related classical notions of ethical and ideological selfhood, gained through 'transformations that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object,' see Michel Foucault The Use of Pleasure (vol 2 of The History of Sexuality trans Robert Hurley [New York: Vintage 1990]) 28-9. On character as gamble see Erving Goffman 'Where the Action Is' in Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Pantheon 1967) 149-269. On the king's double function as seer and seen, cf Jonathan Goldberg James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1983) 148. Quoted in Arthur F. Kinney ed Elizabethan Backgrounds: Historical Documents of the Age of Elizabeth I (Hamden: Archon 1975) 334-5 Xenophon Cyropaedia trans Walter Miller (London: Loeb 1943) Vlii.ii.9-i2 Aristotle Politics in The Works of Aristotle 12 vols ed W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon 1908-52) 12770-12783 On this process of implication at the Elizabethan court, cf Lawrence Stone The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford: Clarendon 1965) 464, Frank Whigham Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984) 12, Louis Adrian

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Notes to pages 94-9

11 12 13 14

15 16

17

18 19

20 21

Montrose 'Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form' ELH 50 (1983) 443, Leonard Tennenhouse Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen 1987) 30. Quoted in Kinney Elizabethan Backgrounds 61. Further references will be included in the text. On the anatomy of subjection, cf Francis Barker The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen 1984) 74ff. Troilus and Cressida I.iii.gi-4 On the culturally mnemonic effects of repetition, cf Marion Trousdale Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1982) 57Quoted in Kinney Elizabethan Backgrounds 326 Henry vi.ii. 183-9. On the use of nature as a motivated ideological myth, see Derek Attridge 'Puttenham's Perplexity' in Patricia Parker and David Quint eds Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1986) 269; cf Roland Barthes Mythologies trans Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang 1987) 142-3 Troilus and Cressida l.iii.85-94, II.ii.184-5. This is the ideology of 'a background of order ... a larger cosmic order ... this single order' that E.M.W. Tillyard reproduces in The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus 1960) v. Tillyard acknowledges that it is 'one of the genuine ruling ideas of the age' (v, emphasis added). Quoted in Kinney Elizabethan Backgrounds 5 Cf Stephen Greenblatt's discussion of the structural limit to the desire and ambitions of Marlovian rebels, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980) 203-9; also note Jonathan Dollimore Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984) 109-19 and Wayne A. Rebhorn's discussion of the contradictions of rebellious aristocratic emulation, which are exemplified by Essex: 'The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar" Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990) 75-iu. Quoted in Kinney Elizabeth Backgrounds 144. Further references will be included in the text. On the 'discursive hegemony' of Elizabethan torture, locating truth in the material reality of the prisoner's body, see Elizabeth Hanson 'Torture and Truth in Renaissance England' Representations 34 (1991) esp 56-61; and on links between 'legal and theatrical rituals' and the 'problems of discovering an inward truth,' see Katherine Eisaman Maus 'Proof and Consequences: Inwardness and Its Exposure in the English Renaissance' Representations 34 (1991) 29-52.

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Notes to pages 99-102 22 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (Cleveland: Meridian 1963) 277 23 Cf Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison trans Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage 1979) 38-9: 'the criminal who confessed came to play the role of living truth ... the role of voluntary partner in the procedure'; also Steven Mullaney The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988) 112 on the effects of confession for the 'rhetorically designated, directly addressed audience.' 24 Fulke Greville The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon 1907) 76. Sidney also uses the word 'selfness' in sonnet 61 of Astrophil and Stella. 25 Hobbes Leviathan 286-8 26 Ibid 288, 297 27 John Calvin The Institutes of The Christian Religion 2 vols trans Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids Mich: Wm B. Eerdmans 1966) 11:668 28 The Sermons of John Donne ed Theodore A. Gill (New York: Meridian 1961) 95 29 J. Hillis Miller Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1982) 6 30 Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World trans Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press 1968), Natalie Zernon Davis 'The Reasons of Misrule' in Society and Culture in Early-Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1975) 97-123, Michael D. Bristol Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen 1985) and 'Lenten Butchery: Legitimation Crisis in Coriolanus in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor eds Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York: Methuen 1987) 207-24 31 Foucault Discipline and Punish 65, 68 32 Louis Adrian Montrose The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text' in Parker and Quint eds Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts 312 33 Sermons of John Donne 38-40 34 Michel de Montaigne 'Of Coaches' Essays 3 vols trans John Florio (London: Dent 1965) 11:134. Cf Raleigh's The Lie' lines 13-16: Tell potentates they live / Acting but others' action, / Not loved unless they give, / Not strong but by a faction': in Sir Waller Raleigh: Poems ed E.A.M. Colman (Sydney: University of Sydney 1977) 48. 35 G.R. Elton Tudor Government: The Points of Contact' Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Series 5 vol 26 (1976) 225. Cf Perry Anderson Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB 1974) 49, Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner Shakespeare: The Play of History (London: Macmillan 1988) 25.

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Notes to pages 102-5 36 Thomas Dekker The Shoemaker's Holiday ed Paul C. Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press 1968) V.i.39 37 Mikhail Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays ed Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press 1981) 354 38 Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life trans Steven F. Kendall (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984) xxii 39 Richard Lanham The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press 1976) 152 40 Goffman Interaction Ritual 237, 186 41 Stone Crisis of the Aristocracy 399 42 Patricia Parker Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen 1987) 88 43 Richard C. McCoy Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 1979) 5 44 Montrose 'Gentlemen and Shepherds' 435-6. Annabel Patterson has noted Puttenham's disapproval of popular revolt. At least on the surface, his advice on working the system seems restricted to the courtier class: Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell 1989) 39. David Norbrook, in Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1984), also remarks on Puttenham's courtly conservatism (78-9). This conservatism may be more ambiguous than Patterson and Norbrook suggest. While Puttenham's ideas do refer to courtiers, he does speculate on and suggest ways of challenging enforced class positions. As Patricia Parker notes, it is after dismissing treason and its trope amphibology that Puttenham turns to the courtly trope AUegoria with its more subtle possibilities of success as a social tactic: Literary Fat Ladies 99-100. 45 Whigham Ambition and Privilege 67 46 Cf Heinrich F. Plett 'Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Renaissance England' New Literary History 14 (1983) 597-621. 47 George Puttenham The Arte of English Poesie ed Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1936) 158. Further references will be included in the text. 48 Joel Fineman Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press 1986) 7 49 Sir Philip Sidney Defence of Poesie in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney 3 vols ed Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1963) Hl:8 50 Fulke Greville Life of Sidney 35 51 Whigham Ambition and Privilege 32-3 52 Baldassare Castiglione The Book of the Courtier trans Thomas Hoby

2OO

Notes to pages 106-10 (London: Dent 1948) 38. Further references will be included in the text. 53 Ibid 138-70; cf Freud Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious trans James Strachey (New York: Norton 1963) 214 on jokes' discursive 'double face.' 54 On this limit of dissimulation in Castiglione, cf Daniel Javitch Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978) 57 55 On the absence of intention, see Goffman's comments on 19505 'cool,' especially the point that as soon as one acts as if one has 'cool' it's gone. His remarks on composure generally illuminate the process of sprezzatura: Interaction Ritual 222-32. Cf Garfinkel's comments on 'carelessness': 'Passing' 171-2. 56 'Everything he says, eveiything he does, is designed and coded to be read': Roger Kuin 'Sir Philip Sidney: The Courtier and the Text' English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989) 254 57 Michel Foucault The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception trans A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage 1973) 89 58 Thomas Wright The Passions of the Mind in General ed William Webster Newbold (New York: Garland 1986) 110 59 Ibid 111 60 Montrose 'Gentlemen and Shepherds' 440 61 In this sense, Puttenham's text goes farther than Javitch's reading of the courtier as one who 'is deemed most becoming when he disguises a particular intention, disposition, or ability by cultivating an appearance of its contrary': Poetry and Courtliness 36. Allegoria seeks to resist being 'deemed' and to deconstruct contraries. Within a highly judgmental milieu it can always offer the courtier an out - that his intentions have been misunderstood. In this sense, Allegoria exemplifies what Mikhail Bakhtin calls, in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (trans Caryl Emerson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984]), the 'word with a loophole ... the retention for oneself of the possibility for altering the ultimate, final meaning of one's own words' (233). 62 Montrose 'Elizabethan Subject' 331 63 G.K. Hunter John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1962) 34 64 Jerrold E. Seigel Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1968) 254 65 Cf Hunter's recounting of Lyly's numerous and increasingly shrill petitions to the queen, John Lyly 85-7.

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Notes to pages 110-17 66 The Complete Works of John Lyly 3 vols ed R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon 1902) II: 189. Further references will be included in the text. 67 On this paradoxical risk cf Fineman Shakespeare's Perjured Eye 85. It is a similar sort of self-submergence in epideictic convention that Astrophil struggles against at the beginning of Sidney's sonnet sequence. 68 Peter Stallybrass 'Reading the Body: The Revenger's Tragedy and the Jacobean Theater of Consumption' Renaissance Drama 18 (1987) 122 69 Angus Fletcher Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1964) 305 70 'Letter of the Authors' Spenser: Poetical Works ed J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979) 407 71 Cf Philippa Berry Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Roudedge 1989) 120. Jonson makes the same kind of move in many of his masques as well as in the epilogue of the court performance of Bartholomew Fair. 'Your Majesty hath seen the play, and you / Can best allow it from your ear and view ... This is your power to judge, great sir, and not / the envy of a few.' 72 Lyly Works 11:360. Further references to Campaspe will be included in the text. 73 Peter Saccio The Court Comedies of John Lyly: A Study in Allegorical Dramaturgy (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1969) 16 74 Hunter John Lyly 204 75 On Elizabeth's analogous matchmaking (and blocking) role, cf Stone Crisis of the Aristocracy 600-5. 76 Castiglione The Courtier Si 77 Cf Elizabeth Cropper 'The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture' in Ferguson et al eds Rewriting the Renaissance 181, 190. 78 Luce Irigaray The Speculum of the Other Woman trans Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985) 26; cf Berry Of Chastity and Power 117-18. 79 Irigaray Speculum 28 80 Cf Jonathan Dollimore 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection' Renaissance Drama 17 (1986) 76. 81 McCoy Sir Philip Sidney 17 82 Cf Berry Of Chastity and Power 117. 83 Saccio Court Comedies 59 84 Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians trans Thomas North (London: David Nutt 1895) IV:3O1. Foucault notes the classical admiration for such 'athletes of self-restraint': Use of Pleasure 2O. 85 Montrose 'Elizabethan Subject' 315

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Notes to pages 117-23 86 Lisa Jardine Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester 1983) 174 87 Puttenham Arte of English Poesie 17 88 Castiglione The Courtier 82 89 Rene Girard Violence and the Sacred trans Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1977) 146: 'by the example of his own desire ... the model conveys to the subject the supreme desirability of the object ... desire itself is essentially mimetic, directed toward an object desired by the model ... Two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash. Thus, mimesis coupled with desire leads automatically to conflict.' 90 Ibid 148 91 Cf Fulke Greville Life of Sidney 153-4: 'a new counsell rose up in me, to take away all opinion of seriousnesse from these perplexed pedegrees; and to this end carelessly cast them into that hypocriticall figure Ironia, wherein men commonly (to keep above their workes) seeme to make toies of the utmost they can doe.' Abraham Fraunce considers irony as abbreviated allegory in The Arcadian Rhetoric (ed R.C. Alston [Menston: Scolar Press 1969]) A4: 'Ironia is a Trope, that by naming one contrarie intendeth another ... This trope continued maketh a most sweet allegoric.' 92 Cf Jacques Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton 1981) 107: 'It is no doubt through the mediation of masks that the masculine and the feminine meet in the most acute, most intense way.' 93 This exchange between Campaspe and Apelles would exemplify what is often seen as the playful debate of Lyly's work, deriving from the in utramque partem rhetorical exercise: Hunter John Lyly 118-26, 272-9; Saccio Court Comedies 54; Joel B. Altman The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of English Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978) 196; Jocelyn Powell 'John Lyly and the Language of Play' in Harold Bloom ed Elizabethan Dramatists (New York: Chelsea House 1986) 12-25. Such interpretations restrict the allegory in Lyly's work to an intellectual form. Following Puttenham's lead, we can see such rhetoric as both reproducing and resisting an ideology of subjection that constructs Lyly's own work and desires as well as those of his characters. As Karen Newman writes in Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character: Dramatic Convention in Classical and Renaissance Comedy (New York: Methuen 1985) of Love's Labor's Lost - whose rhetoricity is much influenced by Lyly - 'The courtiers, represented by Berowne, are unable to escape from the disguise language represents' (89). The subject speaks, and is spoken by, Allegoria,

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Notes to pages 123-31 94 The Winter's Tak V.iii.Giff 95 Lacan Four Fundamental Concepts 112 96 On the subject's participation in his own subjection, cf Mullaney Place of the Stage 94. 97 Quoted in Jonathan Goldberg 'Fatherly Authority: The Politics of Stuart Family Images' in Ferguson et al eds Rewriting the Renaissance 3 Chapter Four: The Figure of Woman 1 M.C. Bradbrook 'Shakespeare and the Use of Disguise in Elizabethan Drama' Essays in Criticism 2 (1952) 167 2 The Complete Works of John Lyly 3 vols ed R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon 1902) ll.i-4-5, Twelfth Night Il.i.27 3 Cf Keir Elam The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen 1980) 874 Virginia Woolf Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1941) 88: ' "About a false Duke; and a Princess disguised as a boy; then the long lost heir turns out to be the beggar, because of a mole on his cheek; and Ferdinando and Carinthia - that's the Duke's daughter, only she's been lost in a cave - falls in love with Ferdinando who had been put into a basket as a baby by an aged crone. And they marry. That's I think what happens," she said, looking up from the programme.' 5 'An Homilie against excesse of Apparell' in Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup eds Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (i54?-i57i) (Gainesville: Scholars' Fascimiles 1968) 102-9. Further references will be included in the text. 6 Jean E. Howard 'Renaissance Antitheatricality' in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor eds Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York: Methuen 1987) 167 7 J.W. Binns 'Women or Transvestites on the Elizabethan Stage?: An Oxford Controversy' Sixteenth Century Journal 5 (1974) 1.13 8 Margot Heinemann Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980) 21, 200-36; cf Jean E. Howard 'Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England' Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988) 422: 'Dress, as a highly regulated semiotic system, became a primary site where a struggle over the mutability of the social order was conducted.' 9 Phyllis Rackin 'Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage' PMLA 102 (1987) 38; cf Michael

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Notes to pages 131-4 D. Bristol Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen 1985) 167, Jonathan Dollimore 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection,' Renaissance Drama 17 (1986) 77. 10 Steven Mullaney The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988) 22 11 Cf Natalie Zemon Davis 'The Reasons of Misrule' in Society and Culture in Early-Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1975) 116, Jonathan Haynes 'Festivity and the Dramatic Economy of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair" ELH 51 (1984) 654-68, Richard Wilson ' "Is this a holiday?": Shakespeare's Roman Carnival' ELH 54 (1987) 31-44. 12 Cf Lawrence Stone The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1977) 135 and passim, Mary Beth Rose The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1988) 3 and passim. 13 Harold Garfinkel 'Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person, Part i' in Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity 1989) 118-24 (original emphasis) 14 Cf Stephen Orgel 'Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women' South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989) 7-29; Howard 'Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle' 428, 439-40. 15 Garfinkel 'Passing' 133 16 Thomas Wilson The Arte ofRhelorique ed G.H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon 1909) 175 17 Henry Peacham The Garden of Eloquence ed R.C. Alston (Menston: Scolar Press 1971) C.ii 18 As suggested in ch l, in its distinction between the 'proper' and the figurative, the old rhetoric initiated more recent theories of the relation of metaphor and metonymy to the subject's speech - for example, the speculations of Roman Jakobson ('Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances' in Fundamentals of Language ['SGravenhague: Mouton 1956]) on their role in Freud's work on dreams and the language process generally (notions developed by Lacan). 19 Ian Maclean The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980) 8; Michel Foucault, in The Use of Pleasure (vol 2 of The History of Sexuality trans Robert Hurley [New York: Vintage 1990]), notes the importance for masculine self-formation of ensuring the oppositions remain intact (47). 20 Twelfth Night V.i.25O 21 Carla Freccero, in 'The Other and the Same: The Image of the Her-

205

Notes to pages 134-7 maphrodite in Rabelais' in Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers eds Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986), traces depictions of woman's belated androgynizing effect on man to the Metamorphoses: 'in Ovid's account, hermaphroditism becomes a curse, the reduction of an essentially masculine nature' (150). 22 Peacham Garden of Eloquence C.ii. On the related metonymic function of woman in medieval discourse, see R. Howard Bloch 'Medieval Misogyny' Representations 20 (1987) 10. 23 I .A. Richards The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press 1965) 97 24 Plato The Symposium igic-d in The Collected Dialogues of Plato ed Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985); cf Freccero The Other and the Same' 145-6. 25 Cicero De Oratore trans E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge: Loeb 1975) I-viii-34, George Puttenham The Arte of English Poesie ed Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1936) 7 26 Rose Expense of Spirit 9-10 27 Coppelia Kahn 'The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family' in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn eds Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1980) 227 28 Joel Fineman Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press 1986) 301 29 Coppelia Kahn 'The Absent Mother in King Lear1 in Ferguson et al eds Rewriting the Renaissance 49. This reading of romance seems to derive from Northrop Frye The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum 1967): 'Translated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality' (193). On the critical dismissal of Fletcherian tragicomedy as 'decadent,' cf Rose Expense of Spirit 181-5 and Dollimore 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression' 73. 30 Clifford Leech 'Introduction' to The Two Noble Kinsmen in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Two Noble Kinsmen (New York: Signet 1986) xxxi 31 Arthur C. Kirsch Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1972) 41 32 Kirsch Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives 47; cf Eugene M. Waith The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven: Yale University Press 1952) 42, 184; Andrew Gurr 'Introduction' in Philaster or Love Lies a-Bleeding (London: Methuen 1969) xxx.

206

Notes to pages 137-9 33 Augustus William Schlegel A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Literature trans John Black (London: Henry G. Bohn 1846) 468. This psychological essentialism often turns sexual; see Simon Shepherd's discussion of efforts to establish a suitable male heterosexuality for the bard and his work, 'Shakespeare's Private Drawer: Shakespeare and Homosexuality' in Graham Holderness ed The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1988) 96-110, and Joseph Pequigney Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985) 49-5134 Cf Joel Fineman 'The Turn of the Shrew' in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman eds Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen 1985) 153, Terry Eagleton William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986) 65, Laura Levine 'Men in Women's Clothing: Antitheatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642' Criticism 28 (1986) 135-6; in 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression,' Dollimore suggests a related reading of Fletcher's Love's Cure: 'a relegitimation of masculinity coexists with an ironic critique of it' (73). 35 Fineman Shakespeare's Perjured Eye 267 36 Ibid 65 37 Gorgias Encomium of Helen ed and trans D.M. MacDowell (Bristol: Bristol Classic 1982) 21. Further references will be included in the text. 38 Like Eve, the betrayer or mother of mankind, Helen was also used to defend women. In Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Brighton: Harvester 1984), Linda Woodbridge notes that Helen served as 'one of the frequentest exempla of both formal defenders and attackers' (127). This reversibility again suggests the figural ambiguity of woman. 39 Cf Rose Expense of Spirit 206. Note Frank Lentricchia Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983) 114 on philosophy's parallel deconstruction of the female subject through privileging a rhetoric of reason over 'feeling.' 40 Ernst Robert Curtius European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages trans Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon 1953) 70. The humorous tone of Gorgias' conclusion may not mock Helen. As Maclean comments on Cornelius Agrippa's De nobilitale et praecellentia foemini sexus (1529), 'the humour may indicate the impossibility of discussing in serious terms the proposition of woman's equality, and therefore represents a strategy of discourse which is subversive in intention' (Renaissance Notion of Women 91). Woodbridge, however, emphasizes that the majority of misogynist Renaissance texts do adopt a jesting tone (Women and the English Renaissance 31 and passim).

207

Notes to pages 139-43 41 Edmund Spenser The Faerie Qiieene IH.ii.l in Spenser: Poetical Works ed J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979); Lauren Silberman 'Singing Unsung Heroines: Androgynous Discourse in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene in Ferguson et al eds Rewriting the Renaissance 259-71 42 Isocrates 'Encomium on Helen' in Isocrates 3 vols trans George Norlin and Larve van Hook (Cambridge: Loeb 1961-6) 111:22. Further references (to paragraph numbers) will be included in the text. 43 Cf Cicero De Oratore Ii.lxxx.325, Richards Philosophy of Rhetoric 24, Kenneth Burke A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press 1969) 52. Recalling Puttenham, we might note that his switch in the rhetoric of rhetoric, from warfare to courtly diplomacy, reflects a change in late-Renaissance ideals for male aristocratic behaviour; see Lawrence Stone The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford: Clarendon 1965) 244. 44 Thomas M. Greene The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press 1982) 40 45 Jonathan Dollimore Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984) 109 46 La Rochefoucauld Maxims trans Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1986) 37-8; cf Rose Expense of Spirit 200-1, and Rene Girard 'The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida in Parker and Hartman eds Shakespeare and the Question of Theory 188-209. 47 On the interrelation of encomium and misogyny, cf Paolo Valesio Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1980) 271 ni5; Dympna Callaghan Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of King Lear, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil (New York: Harvester 1989) 125; R. Howard Bloch 'Chaucer's Maiden's Head: "The Physician's Tale" and the Poetics of Virginity' Representations 28 (1989) 127. 48 Wilson Arte of Rhetorique A.iii. Further references will be included in the text. 49 Quintilian Institutio Oratio trans E.H. Butler (London: Loeb 1969) Ill.v.2 50 W.B. and E.P. A Helpe to Discovrse, or A Miscelany of Merriment (London: 1619) 119; cf Lily B. Campbell Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (New York: Barnes and Noble 1967) 99 51 In The Book of the Courtier (trans Thomas Hoby [London: Dent 1948]), Lord Gasper, Castiglione's 'aggrieved misogynist' (Joan Kelly Women, History, and Theory [Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984] 39), makes a similar observation: 'when a woman is borne, it is a slacknesse or default of nature' (196).

208

Notes to pages 144-50 52 Thomas Wright The Passions of the Mind in General ed William Webster Newbold (New York: Garland 1986) 242; cf La Rochefoucauld's maxim 262: There is no passion in which love of self rules so despotically as love' (Maxims 72). 53 See Spenser Faerie Queene Vll.lviii 54 For example, Campaspe Il.ii.31-57, Epicoene 1.1.109-44, Hamlet \l\.\. 106-49, Othello II.i. 100-66, Castiglione The Courtier 66-7, Michel de Montaigne Essays 3 vols trans John Florio (London: Dent 1965) 11:193, Wright Passions of the Mind 188, The Sermons of John Donne ed Theodore A. Gill (New York: Meridian 1961)154; cf Callaghan Woman and Gender 118, Bloch 'Medieval Misogyny' 9-15. 55 Othello lV.i.254-5; cf Peter Stallybrass 'Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed' in Ferguson et al eds Reuniting the Renaissance 137, Catherine Belsey The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen 1985) 149. 56 Wright Passions of the Mind 120; cf I Corinthians 14:34, Belsey Subject of Tragedy 191, and Parker Literary Fat Ladies 106-17, 125, especially 112, where Parker notes a similar deployment of nature in Peacham's Garden of Eloquence and Richard Sherry's Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550). 57 Cf Kelly Women, History, and Theory 34-5. 58 Helene Cixous 'The Laugh of the Medusa' Signs i (1976) 887 59 Sermons of John Donne 104 60 Castiglione The Courtier 219; cf Howard 'Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle' on the 'strong discursive linkages ... between female crossdressing and the threat of female sexual incontinence' (420). 61 Cf Stephen Orgel Trospero's Wife' Representations 8 (1984) 1-13. 62 Michel Foucault History of Sexuality vol i An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1981) 61; cf Elizabeth Hanson 'Torture and Truth in Renaissance England' Representations 34 (1991) 67 on the potential ambiguity of sworn speech in criminal trials. 63 E.K. Chambers The Elizabethan Stage 4 vols (Oxford: Claredon 1923) 1:248; cf Howard 'Renaissance Antitheatricality' 169 on the links between women and acting. 64 John Calvin The Institutes of the Christian Religion 2 vols trans Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids Mich: Wm B. Eerdmans 1966) 1:540. Further references, all to vol i, will be included in the text. 65 Cf Dollimore 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression': 'For John Rainolds the boy transvestite destroyed the fragile moral restraint containing an anarchic male sexuality' (65). 66 Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy 3 vols (London: Dent 1968) 111:154-5; in 'Nobody's Perfect' Orgel suggests that heterosexuality was

209

Notes to pages 150-9 generally conceived as more of a cultural threat than homosexuality (26). 67 Wright Passions of the Mind 249 68 Sermons of John Donne 151 69 Cf the two conclusions Levine draws from her study of antitheatrical texts - either 'there is no such thing as a masculine self or there is 'something horrendously "other" at the core of the self: 'Men in Women's Clothing' 136. 70 Montaigne 'Apologie of Raymond Sebond' in Essays 11:193 71 Cf Jacques Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis trans Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton 1981) 154. 72 See Kenneth Burke A Grammar of Motives (Cleveland: Meridian 1962) 516-1773 Beaumont and Fletcher A King and No Kingl.i.i88-Qi. All references to Beaumont and Fletcher are to The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon 10 vols ed Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1966). A King and No King and The Maid's Tragedy are in vol 2; Philaster is in vol i. Further references will be included in the text. 74 Robert K. Hunter 'Introduction' to Philaster'm Dramatic Works 1:383, 385 75 Rene Girard Violence and the Sacred trans Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1977) 79, 8 76 Greenblatt Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press 1988) 78 77 On this motif, see Mary Douglas Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge 1966) 95. 78 Ibid 115 79 The publisher's address to the reader before the second quarto of 1622 uses this complex of bodily imagery to justify itself as the true edition: 'Courteous Reader. Philaster, and Arethusa his love, have laine so long a bleeding, by reason of some dangerous and gaping wounds, which they received in the first Impression ... assuredly they will now find double favour, being reformed, and set forth suteable, to their birth, and breeding' (l:375)80 Gurr 'Introduction' Philaster Ixvi 81 Cf Lisa Jardine Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester 1983) 186. 82 John F. Danby Poets on Fortune's Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher (Washington: Kennikat 1962) 201-2 83 Cf Lacan's notion of 'the drama of Hamlet as the man who has lost the way of his desire': 'Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet' in

210

Notes to pages 159-69 Shoshana Felman ed Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading - Otherwise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1982) 12. 84 On masculinist self-fashioning through hunting and love, cf sonnet 67 in Spenser's Amoretti. 85 Jacques Derrida The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond trans Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987) 145 86 Tennenhouse Power on Display 63 87 Cf Dollimore 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression': 'Masculinity is rooted in a sexual violence performed inseparably against both men and women' (75). 88 Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason trans Richard Howard (New York Vintage 1973) 34. Foucault also notes the revelatory function of madness in 'the tragicomic structures of preclassical literature' (34). 89 Cf Lear's continuing struggle against the feminizing Hysterica passio, King Lear l.iv.296-9, ll.iv.56-8, H.iv.296-9. Epilogue: Tragedy and Disguise 1 Scott McMillin 'The Figure of Silence in The Spanish Tragedy' in Harold Bloom ed Elizabethan Dramatists (New York: Chelsea House 1986) 38 2 Thomas Kyd The Spanish Tragedy ed J.R. Mulryne (London: Ernest Benn 1974) ill.xiii.23-4. Further references will be included in the text. 3 Cf Frank Whigham's discussion of Bosola's motives, 'Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi PMLA 100 (1985) 181. 4 John Calvin The Institutes of the Christian Religion 2 vols trans Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids Mich: Wm B. Eerdmans 1966) 11:667; cf Hieronimo's soliloquy at IH.xiii.i-44. 5 Robert Weimann 'Society and the Individual in Shakespeare's Conception of Character' in Stanley Wells ed Shakespeare Survey vol 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981) 29; cf Thomas Hyde 'Identity and Acting in Elizabethan Tragedy' Renaissance Drama 15 (1984) 93-114. 6 Sir Philip Sidney The Defence of Poesie in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney 3 vols ed Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1963) 111:39 7 Julia Kristeva Revolution in Poetic Language trans Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press 1984) 37ff 8 Cf Weimann 'Society and the Individual' 29; Joel Fineman Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press 1986) 303; Franco Moretti ' "A Huge Eclipse"; Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty' in

211

Notes to pages 169-71

9

10 11 12

13

14 15

Stephen Greenblatt ed The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman: Pilgrim 1982) 19; Jonathan Dollimore Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984) 148-9, and 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection' Renaissance Drama 17 (1986) 57; Hyde 'Identity and Acting' 103-5. Rene Descartes Meditations in The Rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz (Garden City NY: Anchor 1974) 167-8. Though Descartes wishes to locate selfhood wholly in the mind and asserts it 'is entirely and truly distinct from my body' (165), he remains unable not to acknowledge that 'the nature of man, in so far as it is composed of mind and body, cannot but be sometimes fallacious' (174), an admission that jeopardizes the status of the cogito. Angustine Confessions trans R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1987) 103 Rene Descartes The Discourse on Method 41 Dollimore Radical Tragedy 49, 157; cf Catherine Belsey The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen 1985) 86. In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason trans Richard Howard (New York: Vintage 1973), Michel Foucault also links the cogito and the classical tragic hero, through their opposition to madness: 'the Cartesian formula of doubt is certainly the great exorcism of madness ... A law which excludes all dialectic' (109). Like Descartes, the classical 'tragic character found a somber truth of day ... the tragic hero - in contrast to the baroque character of the preceding period - can never be mad' (ill). King LmrV.iii.258-60, 311-12; cf Lear's image of impervious heaven to the 'counter-mured' walls that give Hieronimo's 'words no way' (m.vii. 10-18). George Chapman Bussy D'Ambois ed Maurice Evans (New York: Hill and Wang 1966) V.ii.132 On Hieronimo's silence cf Jonas A. Barish 'The Spanish Tragedy, or the Pleasures and Perils of Rhetoric' in J.R. Brown and B.A. Harris eds Elizabethan Theatre (London: Arnold 1966) 82. On theatricality as a means of vengeance, cf Hamlet II.ii.588-605, The Revenger's Tragedy V.iii, and also The Malcontent V.iv.

212

Index

Acting 14, 36, 47, 1761136, 18511126 Allegory 5, 12, 44, 54, 108-9, 112-18, 120-5, 166, 169, 172, 2031193 Althusser, Louis 65 Androgyny 17, 132-7, 138-40, 143-50, 152-65, 172, 205n2i, 2ion6g Aristotle 27, 32-3, 61, 94, 133-4, 142; Nichomachean Ethics 59; Poetics 34; Politics 58, 83, 127; Rhetoric 31-3, 34, 55 Augustine, St: Confessions 170

Bradbrook, M.C. 4, 129, 130, 132, 136 Burckhardt, Jacob 39-40 Burke, Kenneth 43, 2ion72 Burton, Robert: Anatomy of Melancholy 46-7, 150

Bacon, Francis: Essays 34, 35, 46, 68-70, 74, 82 Bakhtin, Mikhail 38, 78, 101-2, i82n84, 20in6i Baldwin, William: A Mirror for Magistrates i8gnn29, 39 Barber, C.L. 15, I77n39 Baudrillard, Jean 20, 39, I93n88 Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher 135-7; -A King and No King 152-5; The Maid's Tragedy 152, 154; Philaster 14-17, 129, 134-7, 152, 155-65, 2ion79 Belsey, Catherine 8

2o8n5i Censorship 56-7, 78, l87nil Certeau, Michel de 102, i75n3O Chapman, George: Bussy D'Ambois

Calvin, John: Institutes 43, 54, 100, 148-9, 157, 168, i84niO5 Cassirer, Ernst 40, 64-5 Castiglione, Baldassare: The Book of the Courtier (trans. Thomas Hoby) 9, 23-5, 42-5, 93, 105-8, 112, 114-19, 122, 127, 146-7,

171

Characterization 3-7, 9-17, 21, 26, 29-35, 37-9, 40-51, 55, 67, 71-6, 92-3, 99-100, 102-3, 105^9, 132-7, 146, 151-2, 165, 167-72, I73n6, I74ni3, 175H22, I77nn37, 39, i82n8o, I92n73 Cheke,John 23 Cicero: De Oratore 28, 33, 36-7, 135 Cixous, Helene 28, 146 213

Index Dekker, Thomas 2001136; The Gull's Handbook 45-6 Derrida, Jacques 24, 160, 1751129, 1801139 Descartes, Rene 7, 10, 28, 40, 43, 169-70, 183111194, 96, 212009, 12 Desire 16, 88-9, 110-27, 131, 138, 142-3, 149, 151, 158, 160-4 Dialogism 8, 10-14, 16-18, 22-3, 26, 34, 38, 56-8, 62, 78-9, 80-4, 102, 132, 141, 150, 160, 166, 172, 1741119, i88nig 'A Discourse of the Treasons Attempted by Francis Throckemorton' 97-9, ill, 120 Disguise 4-6, 7-8, 9-18, 19-21, 26, 38^9, 44-51, 55-6, 61, 67-78, 80-9, 92, 106-8, 120-4, 127, 129-37, 157, 161, 164, 166, 167-72, I75n3o, i83n36, i86ni3o Dollimore, Jonathan 170, I77n37, I96ni24, 207034 Donne, John: Sermons 100, 101, 107, 146-7, 150 Dramatism 4, 6, 8-9, 34-9, 40, 50, 55, 76, 86, 92, 130, 148, 170, i86n5, 192076 Dyke, Daniel: The Mystery of SelfeDeceiving 44, 45, 49

83-7, 91-2, 101-2, no, 127-37, 142-7, 152-65, 168, 174011 Fineman, Joel 15, 104, 136, 138, 2O2n67 Fletcher, John. See Beaumont Foucault, Michel: The Birth of the Clinic 107; Discipline and Punish 101, iggn23; 'The Discourse on Language' 28, 180044; The History of Sexuality I74nn, i88n24, igon47, I97n5, 2O2n84, 205019; Madness and Civilization 163, i84n98, 2iin88, 2i2ni2; The Order of Things 19-21, 17803; 'What Is an Author?' i82n83, 1911169 Fraunce, Abraham: The Arcadian Rhetoric 22, 25, 26, 35, 203091 Frye, Northrop 206029 Garfinkel, Harold 92-3, 127, 132 Gender 130-5, 137, 142-9, 156-7, 160, 164-6 Girard, Reoe 120, 155-6, 203089 Goffmao, Erviog 5, 8, 34, 40, 54, I73n9, I74ni9, I97n5, 201055 Gorgias 33; Encomium of Helen 138-40, 142, 207040 Greeoblatt, Stephen: Renaissance Self-Fashioning 17-18, I74nio, I77n46, igSnig; Shakespearean Negotiations 86, I92n76 Greville, Fulke: The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney 100, 105, 203ngi

Eagleton, Terry 76 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 53, 61, 75, 94, 96, 102, 110, 113, 117, 118, 142, 1950117, 2O2n75 Erasmus, Desiderius 144-5; The Handbook of the Militant Christian 43, 63; The Praise of Folly 10, 40-2, 49, 76-7, 78 Ethopoesis 6-7, 10-18, 24-6, 27-35, 38-51, 55-6, 59-62, 66, 68-78, 80,

Hall, Joseph 57, 79 A Helpe to Discourse 142 Henslowe's Diary 7-8

214

Index Heywood, John: An Apology for Actors 35 Hobbes, Thomas: Leviathan 10, 44, 50-1, 64, 66, 70-1, 74, 75, 99, 100 'An Homilie against Excesse of Apparell' 131 Homily on Obedience 95-6, 1OO Hooker, Richard: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 27, 43, 49 Horace: Ars Poetica 28

Lyly, John 93, 109-10, 2Oin65; Campaspe 14, 16, 17, 113-27; Endimion ill, 112; Euphues 110-13; Galathea 129-30 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois: The PostModern Condition 78 Machiavelli, Niccolo 45, 46, igin65; Discourses 44, I9in68, I95nii6; The Prince 55, 68-70, 74 Marlowe, Christopher: Dr. Faustus 3, 141, !74n2O; The Jew of Malta 38, 91 Marston, John 57, 79; The Malcontent 14, 16, 56, 57-8, 79-89, 92, 127; Pygmalion's Image 45, 79 Metonymy 12, 32, 133-4, 140, 143-4, 151, 156, 160, 169, I75n32, 205ni8 Misogyny 83, 106, 115-16, 127, 130-7, 138-41, 142-51, 162, 166, 169, I95nnii6, 117, 2o8n47, 2ogn54 Montaigne, Michel de 40, 48; 'An Apologie of Raymond Sebond' 3, 25, 37, 50, 65, 151; Essays 41-2, 1O1-2

Identity 3-6, 9-18, 24, 43~5i, 53-8. 63, 67-9, 92-4, 100, 101-3, 110-23, 126-7, 144-5, 148-50, 152-65, 168-72 Irigaray, Luce 115, 129 Isocrates: Antidosis 29; 'Encomium on Helen' 138, 140 Jakobson, Roman I75n32, 2O5ni8 James I, King of England 127; Basilicon Doron 27, 53, 54~5, 56, 6o-2, 66, 68, 82, 94, 95-6 Jameson, Fredric 55 Jonson, Ben 47-50, 79; The Alchemist 48-9; Bartholomew Fair 48, 49, 2O2n7i; Epicoene 48, 130; Timber 47, 48; Volpone 45, 48, 49

Nashe, Thomas: Pierce Penniless 45, 46, 49 North, Thomas: Plutarch's Lives 117

Kantorowicz, Ernst: The King's Two Bodies 66-7 Kierkegaard, S0ren 28 Kyd, Thomas: The Spanish Tragedy 167, 171, 2i2nni3, 15

Obedience 93-101, 101-3, 107-9, 112-26, 127, 154 Orgel, Stephen 9, 34, 72, 74 Ovid: Metamorphoses 2O5n2i

Lacan, Jacques 92, 123, i84nioi, I9on44, 2O3ng2, 2ion83 La Rochefoucauld, Francois, Due de: Maxims 40, 42, 141 Lentricchia, Frank 176, 2O7n39 Lukacs, Georg !75n3O

Passing 92-4, 109, 122-6, 132 Peacham, Henry: The Garden of Eloquence 133

215

Index Petrarchanism 103-4, no, 118 Plato: Gorgias 29; Phaedrus 29; The Republic 64; Sophist 29-31; Symposium 135 Platonism 6, 22, 26, 27-34, 39-47, 62, 101, 108, in, 117 Plowden, Edmund: Reports 66-7 Pomponazzi, Pietro: 'Immortality of the Soul' 39-40 Power n, 16, 17, 32, 53-7, 60, 64, 66-9, 84-9, 92, 108, 116-18, 125-7, 168 Praise 104-6, 110-13 Prynne, William: Histriomastix 131 Puttenham, George: The Arte of English Poesie 21, 23, 26, 93, 103-9, 118, 121, 126, 135, 200n44, 2Oin6i, 2031193

Satire 12, 41, 56-8, 62, 77-8, 80-8, 166, 169, 172, i87ni6, I94nioi, I95nin, ig6ni2O Selfhood 7-10, 15-18, 24-6, 27-31, 37, 39-51, 54-6, 60, 65, 76-7, 83-5, 92-4, loo-i, 103, 105-8, 112-25, 126-7, 132-7, 141-50, 157-64, 166, 167-72, I76n33 Sexuality 16, 131-7, 139, 145-9, 157 Shakespeare, William: As You Like It 155; Coriolanus 63; Cymbeline 141, 150-1; Hamlet 3-4, 14, 47, 54, 91, 161, 171, I76n36; / Henry IV 7, 67, 72-6, I73n4; 2 Henry TV 73-4, 75-6, 92, I92n85; Henry v 60, 75, 77, 86, 96-7, i88n26, i93ngi, I94n97; / Henry VI 8, I95nil7; 2 Henry W l83n86; 3 Henry VI 8; Henry VIII 9; Julius Caesar 60, 171, i8gn39; King Lear 171, 2i2ni3; Love's Labor's Lost 14, 2O3n93; Macbeth 171; Measure for Measure 14, 55, 57-8, 91-2, 101; A Midsummer Night's Dream 12-14; Othello 6, 146, 171; Richard n 62-6, 67, 68, i8gn34, i94r»97; Richard III 8, 70; The Taming of the Shrew 134; The Tempest 81, 86, 147-8; Timon of Athens 68; Titus Andronicus I95nii7; Troilus and Cressida 14, 97, 141; Twelfth Night 127, 129-30, 134, 136, 155, 160-1; The Two Noble Kinsmen 136; The Winter's Tale 23, 123 Shakespearean romance 12, 136, 158, 160, 169, 170 Sidney, Sir Philip 2Oin56; Arcadia 10; Astrophil and Stella I99n24; The Defence of Poesie 22, 39, 49, 104-5, 168 Signification 19-25, 32, 64

'The Quene's Majestie's Passage through the Citie of London' 53, 54 Quintilian 24, 29, 33 Rainolds, John 130, 148; Oxford Lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric 21, 22, 23, 26, 28, 34 Raleigh, Walter: The History of the World I93n8g; 'The Lie' I99n34 Representation 4-6, 12-14, 17, 20-6, 51, 71, 77-8, 92, 119, 136, 172, I74nn Rhetoric 5-6, 9-11, 12-17, 21-6, 26-35, 35-7, 45-51, 55-6, 62-4, 69, 72, 77-9, 80-2, 89, 93, 108, 110-26, 132-7, 138-41, 143-51, 152, 162, 165, 170, I74ni2, I79n30, i8on39, i86n5, 2O5ni8 Rhetorica ad Herennium 33, i8on55 Ruskin, John: The Stones of Venice 20

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Index Vives, Juan Luis: 'Fable about Man' 39,40

Sir Thomas More 57 Socrates 6, 27-33, 46 Sophism 6, 28-34, 39 Sovereignty 53-8, 61, 75, 9i~3, "5, 121-5, 166 Spenser, Edmund i88n22; Amoretti 2iin84; The Faerie Queene 5, 10, 44, 53-4, H3, 139, 145 Subjection 11-17, 93, 94, 96-7, 102-3, 107, 109-26, 126-7, 153, 166, 168, I98ni2, 2O3n93, 2O4ng6

Weber, Max 86, igon47 Wilson, Thomas: Arte of Rhetorique 21, 24, 26, 133, 141-6 Woolf, Virginia: Between the Acts 130, 204n4 Wright, Thomas: The Passions of the Mind in General 36, 37, 42, 45, 63-4, 107, 108, 121, 146, 150, i84niiO

Theatre 45-6, i85nni2i, 123 Tragedy 167-72 Tragicomedy 12, 135, 166, 172, 2o6n29 Tyndale, Matthew: The Obedience of a Christen Man 95

Xenophon: Cyropaedia 59, 94, i88nn22, 24

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