Impressive Shakespeare: Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama [1° ed.] 1472465326, 9781472465320

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Impressive Shakespeare

Impressive Shakespeare reassesses Shakespeare’s relationship with “print culture” in light of his plays’ engagement with the language and material culture of three interrelated “impressing technologies”: wax sealing, coining and typographic printing. It analyses the material and rhetorical forms through which drama was thought to “imprint” early modern audiences and readers with ideas, morals and memories, and— looking to our own cultural moment—shows how Shakespeare has been historically constructed as an “impressive” dramatist. Through material readings of four plays—Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale—Harry Newman argues that Shakespeare deploys the imprint as a self-reflexive trope in order to advertise the value of his plays to audiences and readers, and that in turn the language of impression has shaped, and continues to shape, Shakespeare’s critical afterlife. The book pushes the boundaries of what we understand by “print culture”, and challenges assumptions about the emergence of concepts now central to Shakespeare’s perceived canonical value, such as penetrating characterisation, poetic transformation and literary fatherhood. Harry Newman is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Material Readings in Early Modern Culture Series editors: James Daybell, Plymouth University, UK and Adam Smyth, Balliol College, University of Oxford, UK

The series provides a forum for studies that consider the material forms of texts as part of an investigation into the culture of early modern ­England. The editors invite proposals of a multi- or interdisciplinary ­nature, and particularly welcome proposals that combine archival ­research with an attention to theoretical models that might illuminate the reading, writing, and making of texts, as well as projects that take innovative approaches to the study of material texts, both in terms of the kinds of primary materials under investigation, and in terms of ­methodologies. What are the questions that have yet to be asked about writing in its various possible embodied forms? Are there varieties of materiality that are critically neglected? How does form mediate and negotiate content? In what ways do the physical features of texts inform how they are read, interpreted and situated? Recent in this series: Text, Food And The Early Modern Reader Eating Words Edited by Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher Reading Drama in Tudor England Tamara Atkin The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature Rachel Stenner Impressive Shakespeare Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama Harry Newman

For more information on this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/literature/series/ASHSER2222

Impressive Shakespeare Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama

Harry Newman

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Harry Newman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-4724-6532-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-58800-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Victoria

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements A note on the text List of abbreviations Introduction: the stamp of the Bard ‘My dear Keats’: impressions of ‘WS’ 1 Metaphors and material readings 7 The structure of this book 10 1 Technology, language, physiology Sealing, coining, printing: interrelated technologies 14 The language of impression and early modern metaphor theory 21 Early modern physiology: imprinting and imprinted subjects 27 2 ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’: commoditised character and the technology of theatrical impression in Coriolanus Valuing the imprint of ‘character’: theatre, charactery, criticism 43 Translating Plutarch, coining Coriolanus 49 Metatheatrical impressions: Burbage’s ‘painting’ and the technology of wounds 53 Sealing knowledge: the theatrical contract and the imprint of silence 60 3 ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’: sealing and poetics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare’s ‘special impress’: materialising and gendering Dream’s poetry 71

ix xi xiii xv 1

14

41

69

viii Contents Seals in early modern material culture, rhetoric and drama 76 The ‘transfigured’ audience: signs and seals of poetic transformation in Dream 81 4 ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’: Measure for Measure, counterfeit coinage, and the politics of value Counterfeiting in the name of the King: Jacobean coinage and the King’s Men 101 Metatheatrical counterfeiting: the Duke’s economy of value 107 Adapting ‘old-coined gold’: canonical value and the stamp of Thomas Middleton 111 5 The printer’s tale: books, children, and the prefatory construction of Shakespearean authorship The infant-text and the prefatory ‘Shake-scene’ 122 Dramatic paratexts, theatricality and the ‘paper stage’ 129 ‘[T]he fathers face’: prefacing Shakespeare’s book, 1623 135 The printer’s tale retold: paternal likeness in The Winter’s Tale and the preliminaries of the First Folio 139 Conclusion: canon, reproduction, ethics Impressions past, present and future: Shakespearean drama in the age of mechanical reproduction 159 Shakespeare and the ‘print of goodness’: the ethics of the imprint 163 Works Cited Index

98

119

158

169 195

List of figures

I.1 G  old signet ring, late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 1 1.1 Venn diagram of the language of impression in early modern England 22 2.1 Image of Coriolanus at the beginning of the “Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus” in the second edition of Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (London, 1595), 235.  RB 21400, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Image produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission 51 3.1 Letter from Lady Dorothy Stafford, Westminster, to Elizabeth Hardwick Talbot, Dowager Countess of Shrewsbury, 13 January 1600/1.  Folger Shakespeare Library, Cavendish-Talbot MSS, X.d.428 (120) folio 2 verso. By permission of Folger Shakespeare Library 85 4.1 Uncirculated set of three commemorative £2 coins, representing Shakespearean comedy, history and tragedy (2016). The Royal Mint retains copyright ownership © 98 4.2 Obverse and reverse of a Jacobean ‘Unite’ (1604–9, minted in Edinburgh), a gold coin worth twenty shillings. British Museum, Coins and Medals, GHB,S.159.  © The Trustees of the British Museum. The Latin legend on the obverse reads ‘IACOBUS D[EI] G[RATIA] MAG[NAE] BRIT[ANNIAE] FRAN[CIAE] & HIB[ERNIAE] REX’ (‘James, by the grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland’). The reverse legend, ‘FACIAM EOS IN GENTEM VNAM’ (‘I will make them one nation’), 105 is from Ezekiel 37:22 (see Grueber no. 533: 101)

Acknowledgements

I’m indebted to John Jowett and Tom Lockwood, who supervised the PhD thesis that was this book’s starting point with great skill, k ­ nowledge and generosity. Their guidance and scholarship has long since c­ ontinued to influence my work. Ewan Fernie and Tom Healy examined the ­thesis with rigour and insight, giving valuable advice for taking the project ­forward. More recently, Tiffany Stern and Emma Smith have been ­incredibly ­generous in offering advice, support and encouragement. ­Special thanks go to Eoin Price, Sarah Dustagheer and Derek Dunne, friends and collaborators who have read substantial drafts of chapters and offered detailed feedback that has improved the book ­significantly. Working with these excellent scholars to organise a conference at the ­University of Kent (“­Meta-Play” with Sarah) and two seminars at ­meetings of the S­ hakespeare Association of America (“Reprints & R ­ evivals” with Eoin, and “Shakespeare & Counterfeiting” with Derek) have been the ­highlights of my career so far, and crucial to the ­development of this book. I ­appreciate the editorial and practical support ­provided by Erika Gaffney at Ashgate, and—more recently—Bryony Reece and Michelle Salyga at Routledge. I’m grateful to James Daybell and Adam Smyth for inviting me to publish in their wonderful “Material Readings in Early Modern Culture” series, and for their enthusiasm and intellectual ­generosity at conferences that have proved pivotal. For other kinds of advice, support and friendship, I would like to thank Hugh Adlington, Catherine Alexander, Richard Ashby, Roy Booth, Meghan Carafano, Christie Carson, Jessica Chiba, Catherine Clifford, Kerry Cooke, José A. Pérez Díez, Michael Dobson, In-Hwan Doh, Jennifer Edwards, Graeme Forbes, Letty Garcia, Daisy Murray, Edward Gieskes, Declan Gilmore-Kavanagh, Paul Hamilton, Sujata Iyengar, J­ uliet John, Andy Kesson, Peter Kirwan, Jillian Linster, Eleanor Lowe, Georgie Lucas, Laurie ­Maguire, Joshua McEvilla, Cathleen McKague, Kate McLuskie, Lucy Munro, Sarah Olive, Emily Oliver, Deana Rankin, Catherine Richardson, Kate Rumbold, Derek Ryan, Kiernan Ryan, Mohamed Salim-Said, Dong-ha Seo, John Settle, Will Sharpe, Elizabeth Sharrett, Daniel Starza Smith, Helen Smith, Pete Smith, ­Simon Smith, Andrea Stevens, Erin Sullivan, Yu Umemiya, Yolana ­Wassersug,

xii Acknowledgements Kate Welch, Emma Whipday, Martin Wiggins, Clare Wright and ­G illian Wright. I’m also thankful to my undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Kent and Royal Holloway, University of London, for lively and stimulating discussions, and invigorating “Paper Stage” play ­readings, which have shaped my own thinking about Shakespearean drama and early modern literature more generally. I’m grateful for permission to reprint material from some of my ­previously published work. Chapter 2 appeared in a similar form as an article under the same title in Renaissance Drama 45.1 (2017): 51–80 (© 2017 Northwestern University). Chapter 3 incorporates passages from “‘A seale of Virgin waxe at hand / Without impression there doeth stand’: Hymenal Seals in English Renaissance Literature”, Lives and Letters 4.1 (2012): 94–113, courtesy of Xmera Ltd. Parts of Chapter 5 ­appeared in “‘Printer, that art the Midwife to my muse’: Thomas ­Freeman and ­ idwifery in R ­ enaissance ­England”, the Analogy between Printing and M in The Book Trade in Early ­Modern ­England: Practices, Perceptions, ­ ictoria ­Gardner (London: Oak Knoll Connections, ed. John Hinks and V Press and The British Library, 2014), 19–44, and “Reading Metatheatre”, an article first published in ­Shakespeare Bulletin 36.1 (2018): 89–110 (copyright © 2018 by Johns Hopkins University Press; reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press). Research for this book would not have been possible without the generous financial support I have received from several institutions and organisations. My PhD at The Shakespeare Institute was funded by a School of Humanities Research Scholarship from the University of ­Birmingham. Conference travel grants were provided by the University of Kent and Royal Holloway, as well as the Society for Renaissance Studies, Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft and the Wellcome Trust. I’m lucky enough to be writing these final words in the Folger ­Shakespeare Library, where I’m being supported by a short-term fellowship. My parents Rosemary and David, and my brother Daniel, have been incredibly supportive throughout the whole process. They have always taken an interest in my work and shown great belief in me. I  want to thank them for their love and encouragement. I’m grateful ­ other-in-law, Corrie, for her good humour and inexhaustible to my m ­hospitality during periods of writing in Canada out of term-time. My final thank-you is the most important of all. My wife Victoria Yeoman has made me a better scholar and a better person. As a fellow early modernist and insightful reader, she has helped me to think beyond my discipline, and in particular to appreciate materiality in new ways. Without her endless love and support, this book would simply not exist. I dedicate it to her.

A note on the text

Citations of plays and poems authored or co-authored by Shakespeare refer to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. S­ tanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 2nd ed. (2005). The exceptions are the four plays on which the book focuses, for which I have used single editions: Peter Holland’s Arden edition of Coriolanus (2013) and his ­Oxford ­edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1994), N.W. Bawcutt’s O ­ xford ­edition of Measure for Measure (1991) and John Pitcher’s Arden ­edition of The ­Winter’s Tale (2010). Citations of prefatory materials to early publications of Shakespeare also refer to The Oxford Shakespeare (“­Commendatory ­Poems and Prefaces (1599–1640)”, lxix–lxxv), excluding the preliminaries to the First Folio of 1623, for which signatures and verse line numbers are provided. For texts authored or co-authored by Ben Jonson, excluding his ­contributions to Shakespeare’s First Folio, I have used The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, gen. ed. David Bevington, Ian Donaldson and Martin Butler, 7 vols (2012). Unless stated otherwise, citations of plays authored or co-authored by Thomas Middleton refer to Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, gen. ed. Gary Taylor and John ­Lavagnino (2007), sometimes called the “Oxford Middleton”. Where I cite primary sources directly, quotations retain original spelling and punctuation, including i/j and u/v usage, and ­preserve ­italicisation and capitalisation. Unless stated otherwise, dates in ­parentheses ­following titles (of dramatic and non-dramatic texts) refer to the year of first publication. Dates of the first performances of plays, given when r­ elevant, are taken from DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks.

List of abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used to refer to online databases: DEEP

 EEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, ed. Alan D B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser EEBO-TCP  E arly English Books Online Text Creation Partnership

LEME L exicons of Early Modern English, ed. Ian Lancashire

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OED Oxford English Dictionary

Introduction The stamp of the Bard

Figure I.1  G  old signet ring, late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. © ­Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

‘My dear Keats’: impressions of ‘WS’ On 4 March 1818, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote a letter to his friend John Keats after learning of the discovery, in Stratford-­upon-Avon (near Holy Trinity Church), of a gold signet ring bearing the initials ‘WS’ carved in reverse and joined by tassels in the form of a true lover’s knot: My dear Keats/ I shall certainly go mad!—In a field at Stratford upon Avon, in a field that belonged to Shakespeare; they have found a gold ring and seal with the initial thus—[the seal is sketched here, with ‘WS’ in a double circle] a true Lover’s Knot between; if this is not Shakespeare who is it?—a true lover’s knot!! I saw an impression to day, and am to have one as soon as possible—As sure as you breathe, & that he was the first of beings the Seal belonged to him—O Lord!— (Rollins no. 66) Today the ring—dated to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth c­ entury— is held at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) in Stratford-­upon-Avon (1868-3/274; see Figure I.1), where it serves as a tourist attraction despite

2  Introduction its uncertain provenance.1 For the bardolatrous Haydon in the early nineteenth century, the seal not only belonged to the literary genius who was ‘the first of beings’, but also embodied him like a relic: ‘if this is not Shakespeare who is it?’2 While the SBT gift shop now sells replicas of the ring as jewellery, Haydon’s excitement lay in the knowledge that it was a seal, with the capacity to reproduce itself by making impressions in wax, and that he could secure an impression to call his own. Keats’ reply to Haydon on 21 March 1818 also anticipated the prospect of acquiring a seal-impression, although he expressed some doubt as to the genuineness of the object: ‘[I]n sooth, I hope it is not Brumidgeum [i.e. cheap, counterfeit]—in double sooth, I hope it is his—and in tripple sooth I hope I shall have an impression’ (Rollins no. 70). While Keats here uses ‘impression’ to refer to a material seal-impression made by the signet ring, the ‘impression’ that really interested him was the mental one he was forming as an enthusiastic playgoer and reader of Shakespeare’s works, and as a participant in the Romantic literary-critical movement being led by William Hazlitt under the influence of figures such as ­Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, the concept of the mental imprint was central to Romantic attitudes to Shakespeare’s transcendent imagination and sublimity. The writings of both Hazlitt and Keats show they ‘believe in the importance of finding a personal “impression” of a play, for this is a test of the “gusto” or “sensation” with which it is presented’ (White 48). And for Keats, Shakespeare’s ‘negative capability’—broadly defined as ‘the receptivity necessary to the process of poetic creativity’ (Drabble 700)—meant he was as much the wax as he was the seal, an author whose imaginative agency was enhanced by his susceptibility to what he and Hazlitt recognised as the ‘natural impressions’ of objects and events.3 From this perspective, Shakespeare’s powers of ‘expression’ were drawn from qualities that made him an exemplar of what Ralph Waldo Emerson, a few decades later, would call ‘impressionable man’.4 Keats and Hazlitt are often said to have laid foundations for later critical (and even public) attitudes towards Shakespeare, enacting lasting influences, for example, ‘on ideas of creative genius, on the relations between the page and the stage, on the possibilities of poetic language’ (Poole 1). Their literary and theatrical use of terms such as ‘gusto’, a word taken from painting, was relatively new at the time and has long since fallen out of fashion. However, their use of what I call the language of impression drew on a technological lexicon with a long history and a significant afterlife in Shakespeare studies. Today the word ‘impression’, which derives from the Latin imprimere (‘to imprint’ or ‘to press in’), is more often used figuratively than literally, to refer to sensations and the mental formation of ideas, judgements and memories (OED impression n. 6a, 6b, 7). It also retains its technological and material meanings,

Introduction  3 denoting various kinds of marks, or actions producing marks, on surfaces through pressure (OED n. 1a, 2a, 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d). In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, ‘impression’ was part of an explicitly technological lexicon (including words such as ‘impress’, ‘imprint’, ‘print’ and ‘stamp’) used to describe the instruments, methods and products of the ancient technologies of wax sealing and money coining, and the more recent technologies of medal-making and typographic printing. At the same time, early modern writers increasingly deployed this language figuratively to represent impressions of mind, body and soul, yet almost always with an awareness that they were applying a technological lexicon to human experience. Chapter 1 of this book will explore in detail the importance of this lexicon in early modern England, explaining the linguistic, cultural and material confluence between the technologies of sealing, coining and typographic printing. It will also analyse the literal and figurative applications of the language of impression, which—long before the Romantics—was crucial to articulations of the powerful cognitive, physiological and even spiritual effects of literature and theatre. While its material and technological origins are now less recognised, the language of impression still plays an important part in modern critical discourse on early modern drama, especially in rhetorical formulations of Shakespeare’s impact on audiences and readers. For instance, in Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance Erika T. Lin writes that certain scenes, characters and actions ‘imprint themselves indelibly on the mind of theatregoers’ (23), and in The Shakespearean ­Metaphor Ralph Berry contends that ‘Shakespeare has an exceptional sense of … the impress of language on the human mind’ (5). Such statements construct Shakespeare as ‘impressive’ in a sense that arose in the late eighteenth century, ‘characterized by making a deep impression on the mind or senses’ or ‘able to excite deep feeling’ (OED adj. 3). But ­Shakespeare and his texts are also often represented as susceptible to the pressures of history, culture, literary influence and textual mediation, and therefore ‘impressive’ in the (now obsolete) early modern sense of the term, ‘capable of being easily impressed’, or ‘impressible’ (OED adj. 1). In Shakespeare’s Universality, for example, Kiernan Ryan claims that Shakespeare’s plays ‘transport our imaginations back to the age in which they were written, an age whose indelible imprint can be traced in every line’ (10). And Alan Galey, anticipating the future of the Shakespearean corpus, discusses digital projects which ‘treat Shakespeare’s texts not as signals from the past to be purged of interference, but as bearers of impressions made by non-authorial agents (collaborators, players, audiences, readers, editors) that intervened in the material and cultural histories of Shakespeare’s works’ (312). The language of impression has a rich and nuanced history in ­Shakespearean criticism, which has been shaped by discourses beyond

4  Introduction literature and drama—indeed, early critics may have been influenced by the philosopher David Hume’s distinction between ‘ideas’ and ‘impressions’ in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739; OED impression n. 6c).5 But we can look back further than the rise of bardolatry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for rhetorical constructions of Shakespeare as an ‘impressive’ dramatist. Leonard Digges’ prefatory poem to John Benson’s 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems asserts the timeless currency of Shakespeare’s plays as ‘old-coined gold, whose lines in every page / Shall pass true current to succeeding age’ (“Upon Master WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, the Deceased Author, and his ­POEMS”, ll. 63–64).6 For Digges, writing in the early 1630s, it is in part the mint-like printing press which has ensured the enduring value of the long-dead Shakespeare’s ‘old-coined gold’, so that no reader can question the worth of ‘what he sees set out / Imprinted’ (ll. 6–7). Digges had also been one of the prefatory writers responsible for the preliminaries to Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623, which asserted—in the words of James Mabbe—the late dramatist’s ‘printed worth’ (“To the memory of Master William Shakespeare”, l. 3, [π B]1r). The second edition of the Folio (1632) is prefaced with an epitaph by John Milton (also in the 1640 Poems) which highlights the volume’s capacity to make its mark on the reader: ‘[E] ach heart / Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book / Those Delphic lines with deep impression took’ (“An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatic Poet, William Shakespeare”, ll. 10–12).7 For these paratextual commentators, Shakespearean drama both prints and is printed, and ­Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’ lies both on the page that enacts his authorial identity for present and future generations, and in the hearts and minds of audiences and readers. How might these early attempts to monumentalise and canonise Shakespeare in print be related to the ‘WS’ seal found in Stratford-­uponAvon in the early nineteenth century? Conceptualisations of S­ hakespeare as an ‘impressive’ dramatist, I will show, have their root in the lan­ ngland, guage and material culture of the imprint in early modern E and—­significantly—in the role of the imprint in Shakespearean drama itself. From a certain perspective, the ‘WS’ seal—a visual marker of identity with the capacity to generate endless impressions—embodies ­Shakespeare’s long-recognised power to impress, and his reproducible authority in printed form. From another perspective, its dubious authenticity as ‘Shakespeare’s signet ring’ aligns its impressions with ideas of false prints or even counterfeiting, reminding us of the presence of the initials ‘W.S.’ on the title pages to Locrine (1595), Thomas, Lord Cromwell (1602) and The Puritan (1607), playbooks misattributed to ­Shakespeare in order to capitalise on his growing commercial reputation in the book trade.8 Either way, the seal has been re-constituted as it has travelled—to borrow Jonathan Gil Harris’s phrasing—‘historically through multiple stages of discursive and economic production’ (“Shakespeare’s Hair”

Introduction  5 484), up to and including its current curation and replication. Unearthed at a time when Shakespeare had long been heralded as the greatest writer that ever lived, it was re-formed into ‘the stamp of the Bard’ by the pressures of bardolatrous discourses. But important elements of these discourses had already been shaped by a material culture of which the seal was part. Whether or not the seal belonged to Shakespeare, it was part of a material culture of seals, coins, medals and printed texts, a diverse but cohesive ‘print culture’ that was essential to social, cultural, economic and political exchange and transaction in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, and with which Shakespeare and his contemporaries engaged both literally and figuratively in their writings. This book argues that Shakespearean drama engages with the language and material culture of three interrelated ‘impressing technologies’— sealing, coining and printing—in order to interrogate the formation and destabilisation of identity and authority. The self-reflexive nature of this engagement invites audiences and readers to recognise the ‘impressive’ values of drama, and Shakespearean drama in particular. The concept of the imprint, I show, is integral to ideas of authenticity, transformation and exchange in Shakespeare’s plays, ideas which shaped perceptions of drama both in Shakespeare’s lifetime and beyond it, when he emerged as an ‘impressive’ dramatist. Combining book history, material culture and rhetorical theory through historicised close readings of Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale, I analyse Shakespeare’s language of impression in relation to a variety of early modern texts. These texts include ‘literary’ works by authors such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker and John Donne, but also medical writings, pro- and antitheatrical tracts, philosophical works and rhetorical manuals. As a whole, Impressive Shakespeare seeks to connect the figurative and the material imprint in Shakespearean drama, and thus to reassess the dramatist’s relationship with ‘print culture’ with a much broader sense of the term than is traditional.9 In doing so, it demonstrates that S­ hakespeare and his contemporaries recognised the material and rhetorical forms of performed and printed drama as shaping meaning and contributing to processes by which plays ‘imprinted’ audiences and readers with ideas, morals and memories. As I have already suggested, the idea of the imprint—in the early modern period and since—plays an important role in paratextual and critical discourses that negotiate the ‘literary’ status of Shakespearean drama. The book’s concern with the history of criticism and S­ hakespeare’s perceived impressiveness in various historical periods, including our own, will be addressed throughout. For this reason, criticism features prominently in the discussion, often present as a subject of study rather than as a secondary resource, because I analyse critical language and ideas as well as engage with relevant scholarship. It is not my aim to show

6  Introduction that Shakespeare is more or less impressive than other early modern dramatists, but rather to investigate the significance of material and rhetorical origins for ideas that are integral to the canonical status of his drama as impressive, in performance and in print. By engaging with ideas of identity and authority, I argue that the materially informed language of impression in Shakespeare’s plays has contributed to the formation of critical concepts and discourses which are now crucial to how we think about Shakespeare and early modern drama more generally. These critical concepts include dramatic character (Chapter 2), the transformative power of poetry and rhetoric (­Chapter 3), discourses of counterfeiting and canonical value (­Chapter  4) and Shakespeare’s association with literary fatherhood and immortality in the form of printed literature (Chapter 5). Shakespeare, I show, shapes the language by which he is shaped, participating in his own canonisation as an impressive dramatist who imprints minds, hearts and souls around the world and across time. In making these arguments, Impressive Shakespeare connects and contributes to rapidly developing fields of research in early modern studies, including theatre history, book history, material culture and medical humanities. In particular, it builds on the work of scholars who have addressed the metaphorics of the imprint and the language of impression in early modern literature and culture, thinking beyond ‘our own print-centred ontology’ (Helen Smith, “A Man in Print?” 63) to consider sigillographic and numismatic impressions (i.e. seals and coins) as well as typographic impressions. Most notably, in “Imprints: ­Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes”, Margreta de Grazia explores how ‘the mechanics of the imprint … worked itself into the semantics of the period, wending its way through discourses beyond the literary, into pedagogy, anatomy, law, and finance’ (“Imprints”, 42–43).10 However, by analysing the role of the imprint in specific Shakespeare plays, and in discourses about drama and Shakespeare in the early modern period and beyond, this book offers new ways of thinking not just about Shakespeare’s engagement with ‘print culture’, but also about the formation of his canonical identity and authority. Crucially, the notion of the imprint was central to what scholars have identified as the ‘psychophysiology’ or ‘psychophysicality’ of early modern playgoing and reading,11 and it ultimately became integral to value systems that have placed Shakespeare at the centre of early modern literary studies, privileging him as the period’s most impressive author. In this respect, the book joins a discussion about how Shakespeare might have participated in his own canonisation. Lukas Erne has contended that he did so by adapting his plays for publication as an ambitious and successful ‘literary dramatist’ (Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist; Shakespeare and the Book Trade), and Kiernan Ryan claims his proleptic imagination enabled him to inscribe ‘the tidal pull of futurity’ into his plays, writing from ‘an egalitarian standpoint

Introduction  7 that is still in advance of our time’ (Shakespeare’s Universality 9, 15).12 I argue, however, that Shakespearean drama advertises its literary and theatrical value by deploying the imprint as a self-reflexive trope. In the plays on which this book focuses, the language of impression invites reflection on what makes Shakespeare’s plays impressive, from penetrating characterisation in Coriolanus and poetic transfiguration in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to generic and canonical value in Measure for Measure and ‘printed worth’ in The Winter’s Tale. Concerned with the self-reflexive or ‘meta-’ qualities and functions of the imprint, the book contributes to new developments in the study of metatheatre in early modern drama.13 An investigation into the language and material culture of the imprint in Shakespearean drama requires a methodology that negotiates the complex relationship between the material and the metaphorical. In what remains of this Introduction, I explain this methodology, which I call ‘material reading’, before summarising the book’s individual chapters.

Metaphors and material readings This book offers new ways of thinking about the production and reception of language and especially metaphor in Shakespearean drama, both on the stage and the page.14 My larger methodological approach to Shakespearean drama and its metaphorical networks aims to produce ‘material readings’ of individual plays—that is, close readings which focus on the relationship between language, materiality and history. In some ways, this approach is comparable to ‘historical metaphorics’, a methodology that involves—as Adam Max Cohen puts it in Shakespeare and Technology—‘the examination of various imagery types and the concomitant study of the historical and cultural contexts of those types’ (8). Unlike other studies that employ historical metaphorics, however, Impressive Shakespeare is concerned not so much with what Shakespeare’s imprinting metaphors can tell us about the world in which he wrote, as what they can tell us about the texts in which they occur, and the interpretive pressures to which they have been subjected in the history of criticism. This requires a different critical technique to Cohen’s ‘citational approach’ (8), which is why each of my last four chapters provides a close reading of a single ­Shakespeare play. In producing close readings that focus largely on metaphors, it is important to recognise that dramatic metaphors are inextricably bound up with other elements of drama such as plot, character and stage conventions. This is a point which imagery critics of the 1930s and 1940s—for all their admirable sensitivity to linguistic detail and aesthetic effects—overlooked or underplayed in their representation of plays as dramatic poems made up of patterns of imagery.15 More recent

8  Introduction studies of Shakespeare’s metaphors have usefully emphasised the importance of historical and cultural contexts, while still highlighting the dramatic functions of metaphors in constructing the worlds of the plays and the characters that inhabit them.16 Little has been written, however, of metaphors’ material contexts. While the connections between metaphors and material culture have been explored and theorised in disciplines such as anthropology and archaeology,17 they are yet to be investigated at length in early modern literary studies despite the ‘material turn’ and the rise of ‘new materialism’.18 As a critical practice, material reading can illuminate metaphors’ relationship with materiality, both as figures of rhetoric that drew on knowledge of early modern material culture, and as elements of language that were experienced through material forms. As a long-established metaphor in philosophical discussions of metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, the imprint offers us a way of negotiating the complex relationship between the literal and the figurative, the material and the immaterial. Aristotle, fascinated by the ghostly absent presence of a seal in the wax that bears its figure (but not its matter), used the idea of ‘the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp’ to articulate the inseparability of body and soul and of matter and form (De Anima 412b). Producing material readings of Shakespeare’s metaphors as rhetorical ‘figures’ requires sensitivity to both the imprint and the wax: it reveals the inseparability of metaphor and materiality as mutually influential and overlapping fields of semantic production. Given traditional associations of metaphor with the abstract and the immaterial, one might be surprised at the physicality of definitions of the figure in early modern rhetorical manuals. In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham claims that metaphor—or ‘the figure of transport’—involves ‘a kinde of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or conueniencie with it’ (V4v). ‘Wresting’ was a forceful action of twisting, tugging or wrenching, something you could do to corks, pegs and bolts as well as words or their meanings (OED v. 1a, 2a). In fact, ‘wrests’ were tools you could find in a joiner’s workshop (OED n.1 6a), and indeed elsewhere Puttenham compares the poet to ‘the Carpenter or Ioyner’ (Ll2v–Ll3). Other rhetorical theorists used similarly physical verbs in their definitions: metaphorical words were words that had been ‘translated’, ‘transferred’, ‘transported’, ‘borrowed’ and ‘altered’, acted upon in a way that disrupted their relationship with their ‘natural’ or ‘proper’ meanings. I will return to early modern metaphor theory in Chapter 1, but it is significant that metaphors were conceived of as the product of doing things with words or even treating words as things.19 On the early modern stage, metaphors functioned as part of the action, enabling actors to wield words as props in order to produce psychophysiological

Introduction  9 impressions on audiences. This idea makes it easier to see metaphor as part of the ‘embodied phenomenon’ that was performed drama, involving ‘a conjunction of bodies, properties and words consumed in a bounded space by a particular audience’ (Richardson 34). Shakespeare’s dramatic metaphors often connected these bodies, properties and words in ways that challenged categorical boundaries between the material and the figurative. The undeniable physicality of metaphors on the early modern stage is illustrated by one of the rare occasions on which Shakespeare actually uses the word ‘metaphor’. In All’s Well That Ends Well (first performed c.1603), the clown Lavatch takes the destitute Paroles literally when he claims to ‘smell somewhat strong of [Fortune’s] strong displeasure’ (V.ii.5–6), holding his nose and asking him to stand downwind. Paroles, desperate for Lavatch to deliver a letter, tries to reassure him: PAROLES:  Nay,

you need not to stop your nose, sir. I spake but by a metaphor. CLOWN:  Indeed, sir, if your metaphor stink I will stop my nose, or against any man’s metaphor. Prithee, get thee further. PAROLES:  Pray you, sir, deliver me this paper. CLOWN:  Faugh! Prithee, stand away. A paper from Fortune’s close-stool, to give a nobleman! (V.ii.9–15) This is, on one level, good clowning: Lavatch’s feigned misunderstanding mocks the courtly pretensions of Paroles’ language (his name is French for ‘words’). But the exchange, along with the jokes about ‘Fortune’s close-stool [a portable cabinet containing a chamber pot]’ and the letter as toilet paper, makes a key point about dramatic metaphors, which is that they cannot be disassociated from their material origins in the speaking, gesturing, odour-producing bodies of actors. In performance, the actor playing Lavatch could even indicate that Paroles has bad breath, and thus his metaphor (or meta-‘Faugh’) literally stinks. This is a metaphor that gets in your nostrils as well as in your ears. I would suggest that we can extend our thinking about the relationship between rhetoric and materiality by considering a material culture of metaphor in Shakespearean drama. It is crucial to recognise that dramatic metaphors were informed by and evoked real objects with which dramatists and audiences came into contact outside the theatre, and sometimes—in the case of coins, for instance—inside the theatre. 20 Lavatch’s reference in All’s Well to ‘Fortune’s close-stool’ builds on the audience’s visual, bodily and olfactory experience of portable lavatories. But as well as drawing on shared knowledge and experience of material culture, dramatic metaphors contributed to—and were nuanced by— the materiality of drama itself, from theatrical spaces, props and the speaking bodies of actors, to the printed pages of playbooks. How, I ask

10  Introduction in Chapter 2, might the metaphor of the ‘stamp of Martius’ have been inflected by the spectacle of the body of Richard Burbage, the celebrity actor audiences paid to see speak, bleed and die as the protagonist of Coriolanus? And in what ways, I consider in Chapter 5, did the printing metaphors in The Winter’s Tale signify for readers of the play in the First Folio of 1623, whose prefatory materials emphasise Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’? The material readings presented in this book try to show sensitivity to the ways in which the metaphorics of the imprint in Shakespearean drama are inextricable from the materiality of the stage and page, and from the material experiences of early modern audiences and readers in a culture that recognised drama as impressive in more than just a metaphorical sense.

The structure of this book The critical practice of material reading, then, works to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s metaphors challenge the binary opposition between the figurative and the material, and reveals the complex linguistic, material and historical networks activated by the language of impression in dramatic contexts. This book investigates those networks and their relevance to ideas of identity and authority in Shakespearean drama, both as it was performed and printed in early modern England, and as it has been interpreted in the history of criticism. Chapter 1 addresses historical and cultural contexts that will be important throughout, exploring the role of the imprint in early modern ideas about technology, language and physiology. This is followed by four chapters which each focus on a single play while locating it within a wider literary and cultural landscape. Chapter 2, “‘[T]he stamp of Martius’: Commoditised character and the technology of theatrical impression in Coriolanus”, investigates what makes a character ‘impressive’ in early modern theatre, focusing on the machine-like protagonist Coriolanus, who stamps and is stamped with wounds. Considering the role of the imprint in early modern ideas about performance, psychophysiology and ‘character’, I argue that the concept of impression is integral to the play’s self-reflection on the commoditised human transactions of commercial theatre, and has shaped critical discussions of characterisation in Shakespeare studies from the Romantics to the present day. Chapter 3, “‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’: Sealing and poetics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, explores the relationship between rhetorical figures and sigillographic figures (or seal-impressions) in Dream. It considers the role of figuration, disfiguration and transfiguration in the play’s interrogation into the nature and effect of poetry. The recurring image of the wax ‘figure’, I argue, acts as a site of intersection

Introduction  11 for ideas of erotic and rhetorical transmission that are essential to the language and action of the play, and which have played a dominant role in critics’ understanding of Shakespearean poetics as fertile, transformative and impressive. Chapter 4, “‘[S]tamps that are forbid’: Measure for Measure, counterfeit coinage, and the politics of value”, investigates the obsession of Shakespeare’s early Jacobean play with counterfeiting—numismatic, theatrical and political—at a time when the King’s Men and their plays, like new Jacobean coins, bore the stamp of king and patron James I. Measure, I argue, uses the language and imagery of coinage to negotiate its status as a debased comedy counterfeited by the King’s Men, placing the counterfeiting Duke at the centre of its economy of theatrical and political value. Addressing the revisionary stamp of Thomas Middleton on the play in the early 1620s, I consider the canonical value of the play during its afterlife, showing that Measure’s generic and authorial ‘problems’ are often couched in a numismatic language of stamping, corruption and purity which influences how we value Shakespeare. Chapter 5, “The printer’s tale: Books, children, and the prefatory construction of Shakespearean authorship”, builds on the previous chapter’s concern with canonical value by addressing Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’. The chapter considers the role of The Winter’s Tale in the early development of Shakespeare’s reputation in print as an immortal father of literature, focusing on the play’s relationship to the influential preliminaries to the First Folio of 1623, where it was first printed. I argue that the play’s recurring print metaphors are part of Shakespeare’s wider appropriation of paratextual rhetoric as a means to engage with concepts of paternal likeness, legitimacy, immortality and theatricality. In turn, I suggest, these aspects of The Winter’s Tale impacted on the themes and language of the First Folio’s paratexts, which have historically shaped critical and public ideas about Shakespeare’s literary value. Consolidating the book’s arguments, the Conclusion addresses questions about reproduction and ethics in Shakespeare studies, and explores their implications for the processes and effects of canonisation. The example of the imprint as conceptualised in Impressive Shakespeare, I suggest, offers insights into the ‘mechanical reproduction’ of Shakespearean drama across history, and the ethical transaction between Shakespeare and the critic.

Notes 1 For detailed discussion of the signet ring, which was found in 1810, see Stewart 295–300. 2 This is the kind of response the actor David Garrick had encouraged half a century earlier by displaying a collection of relics at his temple to Shakespeare

12  Introduction in Hampton (built 1756). These relics included, strangely enough, a signet ring bearing the initials ‘WS’ (Shapiro 32). 3 One of the observations on King Lear in Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), underlined and annotated by Keats in his copy, is That the greatest strength of genius is shewn in describing the strongest passions: for the power of the imagination, in works of invention must be in proportion to the force of the natural impressions, which are the subject of them.’ (qtd. in Ou 67–68) See Ou for detailed discussion of Keats and negative capability. 4 Meehan shows that Emerson’s discussion of Shakespeare’s ‘power of expression’ in his portrait of “The Poet” in Representative Men (1850) is linked to his concept of ‘impressionable man’ (81). 5 Burns discusses Hume in relation to Maurice Morgann’s Shakespearean criticism (193–97). 6 Freehafer argues that Digges’ commendatory verses about Shakespeare’s plays were written between 1630 and 1634, and were probably intended for the Second Folio of 1632 (66). 7 For extended discussions of Milton’s language of impression in this poem, see Galey; and Mann, “The Orphic Physics” 240ff. 8 See Ch. 2 of Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, on authorial misattributions to Shakespeare (56–89). 9 Initially developed as a concept by Elizabeth Eisenstein, ‘print culture’ is now generally used to refer ‘not simply … [to] the presence of [printed] books in a society, but … a widely diffused social knowledge of, and familiarity with, books and with the culture of buying, borrowing, lending, reading and handling these physical items’ (McElligott and Patten 5). 10 See Thompson and Thompson as well as Helen Smith, “A Man in Print?” and de Grazia, “Imprints”. These essays explore the rhetoric of print culture in relation to the language of manuscript production and non-typographic forms of printing, especially sealing and coining. Also see Gordon, “The Renaissance Footprint” on the metaphorics of early modern print culture, and how it appropriated the cultural meanings of other non-typographic forms of impression, including relics and sacramental wafers as well as footprints. 11 See Hobgood 6–7, Craik and Pollard 5–8, and Craik 2–3. Also see Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’ 193–94 on the role of ‘imprinting’ in early modern conceptualisations of the physiology of reading. 12 Also see Cheney’s arguments about how Shakespeare ‘participates in his own historical making’ through self-conscious strategies of ‘literary’ or ‘counter-laureate’ authorship as a hybrid ‘poet-playwright’ (Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright 10; Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship 17). 13 For some of the latest work in this field, see the special issue on “Metatheatre and Early Modern Drama”, ed. Sarah Dustagheer and Harry Newman, Shakespeare Bulletin 36.1 (2018). 14 Acknowledging its long-established status as a master trope, I use the term ‘metaphor’ broadly. In a general sense, the word is applicable to related figures of comparison such as simile, allegory, metonymy, synecdoche, catachresis and metalepsis, which have been identified as versions or relatives of metaphor by various rhetorical theorists since the classical period. The beliefs that metaphors are elliptical similes (Aristotle, On Rhetoric 3.4; Quintilian 8.6.8) and that allegories are extended metaphors (Quintilian 8.6.14; Puttenham X4r–v) are particularly well established. See Lyne, Shakespeare 30–31 on metonymy, synecdoche, catachresis and metalepsis as forms of

Introduction  13

15 16 17 18

19

20

metaphor. Sometimes, of course, it is more appropriate to refer to these figures specifically when considering their theatrical or literary effects. For critiques of imagery criticism, see Muir; and Weimann. See, for example, Anderson; and Fahey. See, for example, Christopher Tilley. This book has benefitted from engagement with scholarship that has investigated materiality not just on the stage and page but also as manifested in ‘the forms, uses and meanings of physical objects in everyday life’, as Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson define material culture (10). Key studies of the relationship between early modern literature and material culture include Richardson; de Grazia, Quilligan and Stallybrass, eds; Fumerton and Hunt, eds; and—with a focus on staged properties—Harris and Korda, eds. For critiques of the emergence of ‘New Materialism’, see Harris, “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects”; and Bruster, “The New Materialism”. Words were often recognised as things, especially by rhetorical theorists, who believed that—as Margreta de Grazia puts it—‘[l]inguistic virtuosity require[d] exercise in wielding the material properties of words’ (“Words as Things” 233). De Grazia observes ‘a long tradition … of denying words the status of things’ so that they can ‘represent things or matter’ (231), beginning in the seventeenth century with the rise of the Royal Society (232). Playgoers would often have had coins on their person, and used them to gain entrance to theatres, something made clear by the excavation of coins and ceramic ‘money boxes’ from the sites of early modern playhouses (Bowsher and Miller 63, 133–35, 214).

1 Technology, language, physiology

How was the imprint conceptualised in early modern English culture, and how was it used as a conceptual tool in theories of art, knowledge and reproduction? In order to understand the significance of the imprint in Shakespearean drama and the discourses that Shakespearean drama has generated, it is important to recognise that in early modernity the imprint was integral to ideas (both old and new) about language and rhetoric, epistemology and sensory experience, the mind-body relationship, and the transformative impact of drama on audiences and readers. This chapter engages with a variety of overlapping contexts that inform my individual readings of Shakespeare plays in the chapters that follow. The contexts I investigate, which can broadly be categorised as technological, linguistic and physiological, help to illustrate the rhetorical nexus between identity, authority and the imprint in early modern ­England. Following a discussion of the material and social relationships between the technologies of sealing, coining and printing, I consider the lexicons of the language of impression and investigate early modern metaphor theory. Finally, I explore medical and spiritual beliefs that suggest the human subject was understood to think, sense, communicate and breed by giving and receiving physiological impressions.

Sealing, coining, printing: interrelated technologies The technologies of sealing, coining and printing were most obviously related through their production of material imprints. Integral to each was an act of impression, the transmission of texts and/or images onto a receptive surface through an exertion of pressure with appropriate equipment. Sealing involved the impression of molten wax adhered to a document with a signet, coining the impression of a heated metal disc on both sides with coin-dies, and printing the impression of moist and absorbent paper with inked lead type, woodcuts or copper-plate engravings. The connections between the technologies, however, went far beyond this. Their ‘technological confluence’, to borrow a term used by Adam Max Cohen, was material, functional and linguistic in nature.1 These points of intersection help us to understand why the three technologies were

Technology, language, physiology  15 figurative resources for describing many of the same human experiences. This section explains the ways in which the technologies were related, and illustrates the coherence of the concept at the centre of this book, the early modern imprint. Sealing and coining are much older technologies than movable type, which was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Strasbourg in the 1440s and first used in England by William Caxton in the 1470s. 2 The first known seals were made in the Near East in the late sixth millennium BCE (Collon 9). Modern coinage (i.e. metal discs stamped with designs on both sides) is thought to have originated in Lydia in the seventh century BCE (Deng 51). The fields of sigillography and numismatics often intersect because of the interrelated histories of the production and use of seals and coins, as well as medals, which flourished in Renaissance Italy and started proliferating in Jacobean England (Cook 16). 3 There is reason to believe that ‘the idea of stamping coins may have derived from the use of the stamp-seal to make circular impressions’, and despite differences in social functions, the marks on coins and seals were, from their inception, both ‘distinctive authenticating impressions, reproducible as numerous instances from a single source’ (Seaford 117).4 This was also the case in early modern England, where seal-impressions authenticated documents, and coin-impressions authenticated the fineness and weight of coins’ metal. Furthermore, both seals and coins were used in economic transactions, the former often authorising bonds that promised payment of the latter. Although early modern writers would not necessarily have been aware of sealing and coining’s interrelated histories, most would have associated the technologies with one another. This is not only because of their overlapping functions and links to authority, authenticity and ownership, 5 but also due to similarities between their material processes and products. Both sealing and coining involved heating a substance before imprinting it with a stamp that bore an intaglio-carved design, thereby producing an impression in relief. Sigillographic and numismatic designs traditionally looked very similar: small and round, seal-impressions and coins bore portraits or iconic images (especially heraldic designs), and were sometimes surrounded by an inscription or ‘legend’.6 Some seals were even impressed on both sides in a similar manner to coins (Boutell 318). Unlike sealing, performed by men and women from all levels of society throughout the country, coining was a centralised, state-controlled process that was only carried out legitimately in one place, the mint in the Tower of London, later known as ‘The Royal Mint’.7 However, almost everyone came into contact with coins, many would have been familiar with their designs, and some illegally engaged in coining themselves.8 A number of the chief engravers of coin-dies in the mint were partly or entirely responsible for executing royal seals and seals of office (Challis 42–43). Like coins, royal seals bore portraits of rulers and represented

16  Technology, language, physiology their authority. Both types of impression enabled sovereigns to speak to their subjects in absentia, authenticating documents or coinage. The forging of royal seals and the forging of coins were associated forms of treason. Edward III’s oft-cited Treason Act of 1351 condemned those that ‘counterfeit the King’s Great or Privy Seal, or his Money’ (­Statutes 25 Edw. III Stat. 5, cap. 2). Various forms of abuse were also treasonous. Thus in the anonymous play No-body, and Some-body (1606; first performed c.1605), the character Somebody is condemned by King ­Elidure to ‘Suffer the death of traitors’ for ‘abasing of thy Soueraignes Coyne, / And traitrous impresse of our kingly seale’ (I2v). The links between sealing and coining help to explain why they occupy a similar place in the imaginations of so many early modern writers. In Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Venus combines the imagery of seals and coins as she responds to a kiss from Adonis: Pure lips, sweet seals in my soft lips imprinted, What bargains may I make still to be sealing? To sell myself I can be well contented, So wilt thou buy, and pay, and use good dealing; Which purchase if thou make, for fear of slips Set thy seal-manual on my wax-red lips. (ll. 511–16) The commonplace kissing/sealing trope is nuanced by Venus’ identification of the seal as the mark of authentication on a financial contract. She hopes for further seal-like kisses, which will form further ‘bargains’. Through the allusion to sealed ‘bargains’, however, the kisses become not just seals but also coins to be given in payment. Venus offers to ‘sell’ herself for more kisses on the condition that Adonis declares his coins to be genuine rather than ‘slips’ or counterfeits (OED n.4 a). To do this he must set his personal seal or ‘seal-manual’ on her lips (with a pun on ‘man’), which are as red as sealing wax. Venus develops the metaphor further in the next stanza. She reinforces the kisses/coins trope by telling Adonis that ‘A thousand kisses buys my heart from me’ (l. 517). ‘What is ten hundred touches unto thee?’ (l. 519), she asks him. Here ‘touches’ means not just kisses but also the official marks impressed into tested plates of gold or silver to indicate they are of standard fineness (OED n. 5b) and therefore—unlike the metal used to produce ‘slips’—fit to be minted into coinage (Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen 177n.). Through dexterous manipulation of imagery and language, then, Venus figures herself as both wax and metal under the impress of Adonis’ lips.9 The dual allusion to seals and coins testifies to the close relationship between two technologies that had been associated for thousands of years. Typographic printing was in many ways a significantly different kind of technology to sealing and coining. The impression made during the printing process was visible primarily because the surface of the material

Technology, language, physiology  17 receiving pressure absorbed a transferrable substance, ink, from pieces of type cast in relief, rather than from a recessed matrix. Nonetheless, like the imprinting of seals and coinage, relief printing was also ‘inherently deformative’ in that it involved the reshaping of a yielding surface; the printed page had ‘its own three-dimensional topography, comprising a little world of craters and buttes produced by the letter press’ (Gordon, “The Renaissance Footprint” 481). Sealing and coining would have been recognised by many as two of the most important technological antecedents to what Samuel Daniel called ‘the new inuented stampe of Printing’ (H1v). Michael T. Clanchy observes that ‘[t]he European type of printing invented by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century depended on technologies of metallurgy—in engraving, punching, casting and compressing—which had been developed for coins and seals centuries earlier’ (309). Recognition of this technological continuity sheds light on instances in which printing is referred to in close conjunction with allusions to sealing or coining or both. In Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News (1631; first performed 1626), a play that satirises the early-modern news trade, references to sealing and coining reinforce the hypocrisy of Cymbal and Fitton in refusing to print their newspapers.10 The entrepreneurs claim that ‘when news is printed, / It leaves … to be news’, whereas when ‘’tis but written / … / Though it be ne’er so false, it runs news still’ (I.v.50). In response, Pennyboy Junior observes that some ‘ha’ not the heart to believe anything / But what they see in print’ (I.v.53–54). Cymbal and Fitton’s denigration of those publishers who take advantage of the popular belief that print authenticates news (‘that’s an error / Has abused many’ (I.v.54–55)) is undermined when they describe their own news as figuratively coined and literally sealed: CYMBAL:  [A]ll shall come FITTON: CYMBAL:  With the Office

from the mint – Fresh and new stamped – seal: Staple Commodity. (I.v.62–63)

Their news will be printed after all, only they are relying on an older impressing technology than other news producers in order to authenticate and commodify their stories: sealing. These sealed texts, having been coined in the ‘mint’ of the news office or ‘staple’, will be exchanged for real coins at the rate of ‘Twopence a sheet’ (I.v.65). Clanchy argues that ‘[t]he seal was the forerunner of printing as it reproduced script from a metal exemplar in a repeatable series’ (330), contending further that sealing anticipated ‘the automation of writing’ because it was ‘a harbinger of literacy’ that ‘brought literate modes even into remote villages’ (317).11 De Grazia goes so far as to say that the printing press was ‘an aggregate of seals or signets: so many typebodies to be set and locked into a chase and pressed mechanically to produce an imprint, on absorbent paper instead of malleable wax’ (“Imprints” 43). Shakespeare seems to have been aware of printing’s similarities to

18  Technology, language, physiology sealing. It is often observed that in 2 Henry VI, the rebellious Jack Cade’s condemnation of printing and the production of paper is anachronistic: ‘[T]hou hast caused printing to be used, and contrary to the King his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill’ (IV.vii.33–35), he tells Lord Saye.12 Caxton did not bring printing to ­England until 1476, about twenty years after Cade’s rebellion in the 1450s, and the first ­English paper mill was probably built in the 1490s (Cohen 79, 195n43). A few scenes earlier, however, Cade’s anti-literacy manifests in a denunciation of wax sealing, which certainly was used in the 1450s: ‘Some say the bee stings, but I say ’tis the bee’s wax; for I did but seal once to a thing and I was never mine own man since’ (IV.ii.75–77). R ­ eferring to his unwise sealing of a legal document which consisted of ‘the skin of an innocent lamb … scribbled o’er’ (IV.ii.73–74), Cade reveals an unhappy experience of sigillographic ‘printing’. Before either of Cade’s technological references, sealing is identified as a form of printing by Queen Margaret, who upon kissing Suffolk wishes that the kiss could be ‘printed in thy hand / That thou mightst think upon these lips by the seal’ (III. ii.347–48). This moment in court anticipates Cade’s identification of both forms of printing as inherently corrupt technologies: Suffolk is the Queen’s secret lover and the sealed kiss a mark of disloyalty to the king. By denouncing both sealing and printing in his rants against materials and processes that empower the literate and enable class oppression, Cade encourages us to associate the technologies with one another. The technological continuity between the two forms of printing bridges the historical gap to which the anachronism draws attention. As technologies of reproduction, it is perhaps not surprising that sealing, coining and printing were common metaphors for human generation. In his Annotations upon all the New Testament (1650), Edward Leigh draws on well-established analogies when he declares that ‘a child in generation receiveth from his parents member for member’ in the same way that ‘the paper from the Presse receiveth Letter for Letter’ or ‘the waxe from the Seale print for print’ (S4r). For most scholars, the significance of such analogies hinges on the word ‘reproduction’. ‘In the English Renaissance’, de Grazia compellingly observes, ‘comparisons of mechanical and sexual reproduction, imprints and children, seemed to multiply, as if the new technology of the printing press revitalized the ancient trope’ (“Imprints” 34). The fact that ‘reproduce’ and ‘reproduction’ were not used to refer to procreation until the mid-seventeenth century, nor the duplication of texts and images until the eighteenth (OED reproduce v. 1c, 3; reproduction n. 1f, 3), should by no means prevent us from using the terms. But we should consider that these tropes of ‘reproduction’, apparently undergoing multiplication themselves in this period, owed much to the copiousness and fecundity of the language of impression, which connected the ‘reproduction’ of texts, images and bodies long before the process was named as such.

Technology, language, physiology  19 Consider, for example, the concluding couplet to “Sonnet 11”, in which Shakespeare plays upon the technological similarities between sealing and printing by conflating the two technologies. The poet entreats the fair lord to perpetuate his beauty by having a child: ‘[Nature] carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die’ (ll. 13–14). What does ‘print’ mean here beyond ‘reproduce’? Given the word’s multivalency, it could be part of the sealing metaphor (OED v. 1a, 3b). However, ‘copy’—an allusion to Nature’s copia or plenty—had various textual and typographic senses,13 but not a sigillographic one. Furthermore, the verb ‘die’ may allude to an edition going out of print, an eventuality that Nature, as the venturing stationer who owns the ‘copy’, wishes to avoid. Helen Smith argues that ‘the poem makes reference not to the dissemination of a text but to the inverted reproduction of a seal or signet’ (“A Man in Print?” 63). I would suggest, however, that ‘copy’ posits a supplementary typographic meaning in the reader’s mind, allowing ‘print’ to evoke both sealing and printing, especially when read in printed form. The couplet certainly connects mechanical and sexual reproduction, its powerful rhyme sounding out the reproductive copying and coupling, but it is the language of impression that generates semantic play in the mind of the reader. Printing’s technological relationship to coining has implications for how we understand ideas of linguistic creation and value in early modern England. It is evident that goldsmiths with experience in coinage production made significant contributions to the early development of typographic punches and matrices (Usher 240, 244–45, 253–54), and printers’ devices seem to have their origins in coins as well as seals.14 Like coins, printed texts were mass-produced for public circulation. The manufacture of both involved a division of professionalised labour in workshops overseen by figures of authority (the master worker of the mint and the master printer). The importance of this division of labour is emphasised in Thomas Bowes’s translation of Pierre de la Primaudaye’s The Second Part of the French Academie (1594), which makes a detailed comparison between the individual ‘office[s]’ of printing-house workers and of ‘them that stampe money’. Whether employed in a printing house or the mint, a worker ‘abideth in his owne office, and goeth not beyonde his appoynted boundes and limites’ (337–38). Coining was an increasingly common metaphor for the printing press’s primary function, the production and circulation of words (OED coin v.1 5c; mint n.1 3). If, as Ben Jonson noted of neologisms in Discoveries (1640), ‘the publick stamp makes the current money’ (ll. 1365–66), then the public institution of the theatre was a linguistic mint.15 ­Bemoaning the closure of the commercial theatres in the mid-­seventeenth century, the poet and playwright Richard Flecknoe characterised the stage as ‘the Mint that daily coyns new words, which are presently received and admitted as currant’ (103). Shakespeare was well aware of the value of newly coined

20  Technology, language, physiology words in the theatre. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, a play which repeatedly reminds us of the potential for words to be perceived as things to be circulated, altered and exchanged like tokens of value,16 the bombastic Spanish braggart Don Adriano de Armado is memorably described as ‘A man of fire-new words’ who has ‘a mint of phrases in his brain’ (III.i.176, 162). ‘Fire-new’, applicable to freshly minted coins, was itself a fire-new word (OED adj.), and seems to have been coined in early performances of Richard III (c.1592; I.iii.256), although those reliant on the OED and EEBO-TCP might only recognise the word as material and current after it was printed and circulated in the 1597 and 1598 quartos of Richard III and Love’s Labour’s Lost.17 The big question here is about how words and metaphors are born, how they come into material existence. Words and metaphors were coined in theatres, but for many early modern writers, the printing press was also a kind of mint, not just because words were commonly conceived of as coins, but also for the reason that some authors published their work in exchange for money. ‘The Presse is his Mint’, John Earle scathingly writes in a character sketch of the “Pot-Poet” (Micro-cosmographie, 1628), ‘and stamps him now and then a sixe pence or two in reward of the baser coyne his Pamphlet’ (E9v). Shakespeare may not have treated the press in this way, but he knew that the commodification of printed texts within the book trade created a fluidity of exchange between printed texts and printed coins: in Act 4 of The Winter’s Tale, the peddler Autolycus sells printed ballads on stage, swapping them for what he later calls ‘stamped coin’ (IV.iv.729). The commodification of Shakespeare’s own texts in the book trade shows that the value of what Leonard Digges called the dramatist’s ‘old-coined gold’, or even his ‘fire-new words’, has been largely dependent on his printed circulation since the late sixteenth century.18 Early representations of the dramatist’s ‘printed worth’ would most likely have been inflected by the cultural and rhetorical conflation of the typographic and the numismatic. The three impressing technologies on which this book focuses, then, were interconnected, and not just because they all involved an imprinting action. One of the most important points of comparison between sealing, coining and printing was that the impressions they produced all represented an authority, whether of an individual, business, institution or the state. But the authority of these stamps could be abused in a variety of ways. Seals, coins and printed texts could all be counterfeited. As I will show, Shakespeare demonstrates a preoccupation with the concept of the illegitimate imprint, which he often uses to represent forms of identity and authority seen as counterfeit, such as bastardy and infidelity, false fancy and misconception, simulation and disguise. At the same time, however, Shakespeare recognised more positive associations of counterfeiting with the processes and products of artistic fashioning, imitation and creation (OED counterfeit adj. and n. 3a; v. 8a, 8b, 8c, 9a): according to Philip Sidney, mimesis

Technology, language, physiology  21 was ‘a representing, counterfetting, or figuring foorth’ (An Apologie for Poetry C2v). That Shakespeare was himself identified as a counterfeiter (poet, actor, imitator, plagiarist) complicates the historical construction of his work’s authenticity, power and cultural value in opposition to the concept of the counterfeit, especially in authorship and attribution studies.19 In the next section, I focus on lexicons of impression and theories of metaphor in early modern England, both of which played crucial roles in Shakespeare’s own ‘counterfetting’ and ‘figuring foorth’ as a dramatist.

The language of impression and early modern metaphor theory As some of my examples have already demonstrated, the close relationship between sealing, coining and printing was reflected linguistically in early modern England. Terms we readily associate with the printing press, including ‘print’, had a range of meanings, including sigillographic and numismatic ones. Although appropriated to refer to the processes and products of the printing press from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the noun and verb ‘print’ were originally terms used to refer to sealing, coining and inscription, and they continued to be used as such throughout the early modern period (OED n. Etymology, 1a, 5a; v. 1a, 2a, 3a, 3b, 4). Naming the technology ‘printing’ was in fact a metaphor that became commonplace over an extended period of time, as William Caxton’s early typographic uses of ‘print’ and ‘imprint’ indicate. 20 We should take seriously Heidi Brayman Hackel’s statement that ‘early modern England might be most accurately defined as a “culture of print” only if we retain the full and varied contemporary sense of that word’ (26). 21 Shakespeare and contemporary writers’ engagement with ‘print culture’ was influenced by their attitudes to the cultural effects of sealing and coining, older impressing or ‘printing’ technologies which had been an important part of social and linguistic relations for a much longer period and continued to impact everyday life. In “‘A Man in Print’? Shakespeare and the Representation of the Press”, Helen Smith explores ‘the multiple connotations of “print” and “press” in the plays of Shakespeare’ in order to ‘call into question the assumptions of our own print-centred ontology, and extend our understanding of how print overlapped and interacted with other modes of textual production’ (63). She demonstrates that [t]he vocabulary of the printing press in early modern England occupied the same linguistic space as a number of persistent earlier meanings: meanings which continued to inform the terms of textual production, and which complicate our understanding of early modern textual cultures. (71)

22  Technology, language, physiology The concept of ‘linguistic space’ is useful when trying to understand the lexical relationship between sealing, coining and printing. Throughout this book, I use ‘the language of impression’ to encapsulate all the non-technical terms from the lexicons of sealing, coining and printing that refer to the materials, processes and people involved in the technologies’ acts of impression. The Venn diagram (Figure 1.1) is a spatial representation of the language of impression in early modern England. It was created using OED, EEBO-TCP, LEME and Sandra K. Fischer’s Econolingua, restricting searches to 1550–1642. 22 The terms are identified as nouns (n.), adjectives (adj.), verbs (v.) and/or adverbs (adv.). The diagram illustrates the linguistic confluence between sealing, coining and printing.23 It shows that although certain words and phrases were particular to each of these impressing technologies, a large number of terms were shared. The technologically ambiguous words that are particularly important to this book, ‘print’, ‘imprint’, ‘impress’,

PRINTING

print (adj.), print off (v.), in print (adv.), stationer (n.), edition (n.), copy (n.), compositor (n.), pressman (n.), press (n.)

sheet (n.), leaf (n.), paper (n.), page (n.), ink (n.)

seal (n., v.), wax (n.), signet (n.), chafe (v.), impressure (n.), temper (v.)

SEALING

printer (n.), slip (n.) stamp (n.), print (n., v.), imprint (n., v.), impress (n., v.), impression (n.), press (v.), character (n.), figure (n.), form (n.)

mark (n., v.), counterfeit (n., v., adj.), stamp (v.), character (v.)

coin (n., v.), coiner (n.), coinage (n.), mint (n., v.), metal (n.), current (adj.), moneyer (n.), strike (v.), touch (n., v.)

COINING

Figure 1.1  V  enn diagram of the language of impression in early modern England.

Technology, language, physiology  23 ‘impression’ and ‘stamp’, were applicable to all three of the technologies and occur repeatedly in Shakespeare’s texts, often in direct reference to sealing, coining or printing. 24 Apart from ‘impression’, all of these words could refer to an impressing instrument as well as the imprint it made. ‘Print’, ‘imprint’ and ‘impress’ were generally interchangeable as both nouns and verbs within each of the technologies, but ‘stamp’ was more readily associated with sealing and coining than printing. In Shakespeare’s texts, sometimes the technological ambiguity of the language of impression cannot be resolved. As I suggested in my reading of the final couplet of “Sonnet 11”, Shakespeare exploits the a­ mbiguity of these words, using them to draw on material and social aspects of more than one technology at the same time. In Chapter 2, I suggest that the representation of wounds as ‘stamps’ and ‘impressions’ in Coriolanus alludes to two impressing technologies, sealing and coining. Indeed, the play’s representation of the ‘stamp of Martius’, a phrase I interpret in relation to both Coriolanus’ concealed wounds and his seemingly inaccessible character, would have had the potential to invoke the origins of Shakespeare’s protagonist in printed sources (especially Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch), and—once the play was printed in the First ­Folio—his identity as a component of Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’. Shakespeare actively participated in the development of the language of impression, both by coining words like ‘fire-new’ and by using existing words in new ways. Consider, for example, the noun ‘impressure’, normally glossed as a synonym for ‘impression’. By using ‘impressure’ in several of his late Elizabethan comedies in the material sense of a ‘mark made by pressure’ (OED n.1 2), Shakespeare seems to have been re-­purposing a term occasionally used since the mid-1590s to mean a ‘mental or sensuous impression’. 25 In Twelfth Night (first performed c. 1602), ‘impressure’ designates a physical seal-impression, but retains its figurative association with the imprinted mind or heart, allowing Shakespeare to connect a material imprint to the shaping of characters’ and even audiences’ cognitive and emotional experiences. Viola’s lament ‘How easy is it for the proper false / In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms’ (II.ii.29–30) resonates a few scenes later when the seal on a letter found by Malvolio—apparently written by Olivia—becomes the focal point of the stage: ‘By your leave, wax—soft, and the impressure her Lucrece, with which she uses to seal—’tis my lady’ (II.v.88–90). Earlier a metaphor for the deceived female heart, impressed wax materialises as a distinctly female seal-impression on what is in fact a counterfeit love letter written by the waiting-gentlewoman Maria to produce false impressions on Malvolio. For the audience, the Lucrece seal’s physical qualities would have been communicated by not only exposed red wax on the outside of a letter (or perhaps black wax to represent Olivia’s mourning), but also by Malvolio’s potentially descriptive ‘soft’, 26 and the onomatopoeia of the surprising noun ‘impressure’. Its hard ‘p’ bears

24  Technology, language, physiology down on the soft consonants and open vowel, 27 mimicking both the act of sealing and the erotic pressures to which Olivia—in the imagination  of the increasingly delusional Malvolio—will be receptive. In the context of Malvolio’s eroticisation of the letter and the breakable seal, the link to Lucrece, a victim of rape, lends a sinister edge to his comic interaction with an epistle addressed not to him but ‘To the unknown beloved’ (II.v.89). 28 The sonic resemblance between ‘impressure’ and ‘Lucrece’ may have helped audiences to visualise the seal via their familiarity with Lucrece as a clichéd image for a woman’s seal ring (Stewart 59), and even as a popular emblem of print in the book trade. 29 In performance, ‘the impressure her Lucrece’ exists as much in the minds of the audience—subject to the impressures of language—as it does in the prop. 30 Shakespeare’s careful and experimental use of the relatively unusual noun ‘impressure’ exemplifies his inclination to use and shape the language of impression, especially when negotiating between the material and the metaphorical. The Venn diagram excludes ‘technical’ language used by those with specialist knowledge of sealing, coining and printing (seal-engravers, workers in the mint, printing-house employees, etc.) on the grounds that these lexicons were not widely recognised in early modern England. (Notably, Shakespeare is less likely to have been familiar with technical print terminology—‘puncheon’, ‘chase’, ‘quoin’, ‘platen’ and ‘tympan’, for ­example—than contemporary writers who had worked or lived in printing houses, such as Henry Chettle, Anthony Munday, Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey.31) It is significant, however, that sealing, coining and printing shared technical terms. A case in point is the noun ‘matrix’ or ‘matrice’.32 ‘Matrix’ was used to refer to ‘a metal block in which a character is stamped or engraved so as to form a mould for casting a type’. Scholars have noted that the typographic ‘matrix’ linked printing to procreation because it was a medical synonym for ‘womb’. 33 This is a compelling observation because, according to the first comprehensive English printing manual, Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683–84), typographic matrices were combined with a ‘mould’ to help form anthropomorphic pieces of lead type, each of which had its own ‘body’, ‘feet’, ‘shoulder’, ‘neck’ and ‘face’. 34 OED suggests that ‘matrix’, derived from the Latin for ‘mother’, mater, was used to mean ‘womb’ from the early fifteenth century. The word is recorded as being applied to type-founding from 1587, and from 1520 in French. There were also sigillographic and numismatic matrices. In sealing, a matrix is the engraved signet designed to imprint wax, like the seal carved by Nature in “Sonnet 11”. In coining, it is ‘an engraved die used to strike a coin or medal’. So whereas typographic matrices were engraved or imprinted to help form a mould for the casting of metal bodies used to print, sigillographic and numismatic matrices were themselves printing instruments and therefore more comparable to the punch used

Technology, language, physiology  25 to imprint the type founder’s matrix. 35 While OED’s earliest example of ‘matrix’ being used as a sealing term is from as late as 1724, the first record of ‘matrix’ occurring in a clear numismatic sense is from 1611, and this is antedated by Richard Huloet’s dictionary of 1572, which defines a ‘Stampe’ as a ‘forme, or matrice, wherewith the printe of the money is made’ (Ss1v). It is possible, then, that in this case the language of typography was influenced by the language of numismatics when ‘matrix’ was coined in the printing house. While the etymologies of words such as ‘matrix’ would probably not have been familiar to Shakespeare and most other early modern writers, they are indicative of the wider linguistic and cultural confluence of the technologies of sealing, coining and printing, and may have informed the rhetorical phenomena I am investigating. These rhetorical phenomena almost always involve metaphor. Metaphor was theorised in vernacular rhetorical manuals with which, as scholars such as Patricia Parker (e.g. Literary Fat Ladies) and Jenny C. Mann (Outlaw Rhetoric) have shown, Shakespeare and contemporary writers engaged. Such manuals include Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (1553, reprinted into the 1580s), Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577, 1593) and George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589).36 Put simply, metaphor was understood as an act of substitution whereby one word replaced another in order to communicate a meaning indirectly. However, the language that rhetorical theorists used to convey this basic principle of substitution suggests the finer nuances of early modern metaphor theory. Also known as the figure of ‘transport’ or ‘translation’, metaphor was widely recognised as the transference of a word from its proper signification to an improper but comparable one. The conceptualisation of metaphor as a movement was reinforced by the ancient Greek and Latin terms for the figure, metaphora and translatio, which both literally meant a ‘carrying across’. Thus the English terms ‘metaphor’ and ‘translation’ were themselves metaphors. Early modern rhetorical theorists were strongly influenced by classical definitions of metaphor. In Poetics, Aristotle describes metaphor as ‘the movement [epiphora] of an alien [allotrios] name from either genus to species or from species to genus or from species to species or by analogy’ (1475b; trans. Kennedy, On Rhetoric 295). He also observes that ‘to use metaphor well is to discern similarities’ (1459b; Halliwell 115), a point he reiterates and expands in On Rhetoric (1405a).37 Definitions of metaphor in early modern rhetorical manuals also generally focus on the concepts of movement, alienation and similarity, but their specific forms of expression are revealing. For Wilson, a metaphor or ‘translation’ is ‘an alteration of a word from the proper and natural meaning to that which is not proper and yet agreeth thereunto by some likeness that appeareth to be in it’ (198). Peacham defines it as ‘artificial translation of one word, from the proper signification, to another not proper, but yet

26  Technology, language, physiology nigh and like’ (3). Puttenham categorises metaphor as one of ‘the figures which we call Sensable, because they alter and affect the minde by alteration of sence, and first in single wordes’. As noted in my Introduction, he identifies metaphor as ‘the figure of transport’, claiming it involves ‘a kinde of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or conueniencie with it’ (V4v). Throughout Arte, Puttenham also refers to metaphor as ‘an inuersion of sence’ (S2v). These definitions, as I have already observed, impart a sense of language’s physicality, and although metaphor was recognised as a necessary part of language, the rhetorical theorists of Shakespeare’s day presented metaphor in a largely negative light: it was unnatural, artificial, deceptive and even violent. Nonetheless, these theorists praised the unrivalled power of metaphor as a rhetorical figure. Richard Sherry’s commendation of metaphor as the ‘chyefe’ of the ‘vertues of speche’ in his Treatise of Schemes & Tropes (1550) conveys sentiments also expressed in later rhetorical manuals: ‘None perswadeth more effecteouslye, none sheweth the thyng before oure eyes more euidently, none moueth more mightily the affeccions, none maketh the oracio[n] more goodlye, pleasaunt, nor copious’ (C4v). Sherry’s emphasis on metaphor’s capacity to bring things before the eyes follows the classical tradition, 38 and while Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson observe that focusing on the way in which metaphors produce visual ‘images’ can obscure their wider range of functions (59–61), it is significant that the early moderns recognised the rhetorical figure as stimulating people visually as well as aurally. In this sense, spoken metaphor behaved like performed drama, which—as antitheatricalists lamented—had an impressive power to activate the sense of sight as well as hearing. ‘[S]uch is our gross and dull nature,’ writes Philip Stubbes in his Anatomy of Abuses (1583), ‘that what thing we do see opposite before our eyes, do pierce further, and print deeper into our hearts and minds, than the thing, which is heard only with the ears’ (Pollard 117). We might ask which ‘thing’ is more real, the staged thing Stubbes claims pierces and print our hearts and minds, or the metaphorical thing Sherry says is shown before our eyes. But if performance assaulted the senses with impressions, then dramatic rhetoric and especially metaphors were central to that material process. Oratory or eloquence—particularly when communicating passion—was supposed to imprint the hearts and minds of both speaker and listener.39 ‘[I]f we intend to imprint a passion in another,’ observes Thomas Wright in The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604; first printed 1601), ‘it is requisit first it be stamped in our hearts’ (174), a rule which applied to ‘passionating’ actors as well (OED passionate v. 2). According to rhetorical theorists, the impressiveness of metaphors (an idea to which I will return in Chapter 3) was thought to lie primarily in their capacity to imprint the memory. In The Garden of Eloquence, Peacham compares metaphors to imprints in his section on

Technology, language, physiology  27 “The comparison of Metaphors”: ‘In respect of their firme impression in the mind, and remembrance of the hearer, they are as seales upon soft waxe, or as deep stamps in long lasting mettall’ (14). Peacham makes the imprint a simile for metaphor, something to which it is comparable. But the relationship between the literal and the figurative is strained because the statement that metaphors produce a ‘firme impression in the mind’ is presented as factual.40 The concept that metaphors impressed minds seems to operate by metaphor itself, but it was founded on beliefs about how the mind worked and its relationship to physiology.

Early modern physiology: imprinting and imprinted subjects This section explores how imprinting metaphors in plays, poems and prose fiction by Shakespeare and others corresponded to contemporary theories about physiology, which were often articulated through the language of impression and especially sealing images. In doing so, it draws on medical and philosophical texts that were directly or indirectly influenced by ancient writers, especially Plato, Aristotle and Galen. In early modern England, representations of people’s minds, bodies and souls as impressed were not always metaphorical. Contextualising the language of impression in relation to early modern physiology illustrates the precariousness of the boundary between the figurative and the literal. Gail Kern Paster, in work on the ‘psychological materialism’ or ‘psychophysiology’ of the humoral subject, has warned against our post-Enlightenment tendency to dematerialise emotional and cognitive processes and ‘find abstraction and bodily metaphor where the early moderns found materiality and literal reference’ (12, 26). While some of Shakespeare’s imprinting ‘metaphors’ can be literalised, not all of them should be. This is because many of them clearly are metaphors (or even similes, in which the act of comparison is made explicit), but also for the reason that often their poetic and dramatic effects rely on the metaphorical or ‘translative’ process that they cause audiences and readers to experience. It is significant, however, that even the most figurative of Shakespeare’s imprinting metaphors are sometimes informed by widespread physiological beliefs and would have been understood by many as allusions to physiological phenomena. It was widely believed that the brain—generally divided into the faculties of imagination, reason and memory—was literally impressed when it received sensory information, and that its retention of that information relied on the preservation of those impressions. As today, the noun ‘impression’ could mean ‘an effect … produced on the intellect, conscience, or feelings’ (OED n. 6b). ‘Print’, ‘imprint’, ‘impress’ and ‘impressure’ had similar meanings,41 and are employed by Shakespearean characters to describe the workings of the brain. Cymbeline counsels the desirous

28  Technology, language, physiology Cloten about Innogen, who has been recently separated from Posthumus: ‘She hath not yet forgot him. Some more time / Must wear the print of his remembrance out’ (Cymbeline II.iii.40–41). Hamlet promises to ‘wipe away’ from his book-like brain ‘all forms, all pressures past’ so that there is sufficient space in his memory for the ‘commandment’ of his father’s ghost (I.v.98–104), a spirit that Gertrude later claims is ‘the very coinage of your brain’ (III.iv.128).42 Despite OED’s categorisation, such usages were not necessarily entirely figurative, although their origins may have been. ‘Imagine’, instructs Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus, that our minds contain a block of wax, which in this or that individual may be larger or smaller, and composed of wax that is comparatively pure or muddy, harder in some, softer in others, and sometimes of just the right consistency … [W]henever we wish to remember something we see or hear or conceive in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint them on it as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring. Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know so long as the image remains; whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression we have forgotten and do not know. (191c–e) Aristotle similarly used sealing to explain sensory impressions in De Anima: By a “sense” is meant what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter. This must be conceived of as taking place in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold. (424a) The concept of the mind as wax to be sealed (and sometimes metal to be coined) played an important role in ancient philosophical discourse, especially in the field of epistemology, and continued to be influential thereafter.43 In the early modern period, the language and imagery of impression was common in explanations of how the brain sensed, remembered, thought and imagined. Sir John Davies’ philosophical poem Nosce Teipsum (1599) elucidates the power of sense: ‘This power in parts made fit, fit objects takes, / Yet not the things, but Formes of things receiues; / As when a Seale in Waxe impression makes, / The print therein, but not it selfe, it leaues’ (G1r). In his Art of Rhetoric, Thomas Wilson writes of sight—which ‘containeth the impression of things more assuredly than any of the other senses do’—that it ‘printeth things in a man’s memory as a seal doth print a man’s name in wax’ (240).44 The ‘imagination’ or ‘fantasy’ was described as both imprinting and being imprinted by ideas and images. While comparisons of the brain to wax, metal or paper were illustrative figurations, it is evident that many

Technology, language, physiology  29 believed the mind was actually impressed through cognitive activity. As part of the humoral body, the brain was thought to be—like the womb with which it was often equated—nourished by phlegm, a substance that made it cold and moist (Iyengar 43, 45). In The Problemes of Aristotle (1595), a collection of questions and answers about medical issues, it is claimed that the brain is moist so that it ‘easily may receive every impression, which moisture can best doe, as it appeareth in wax, which doeth easily receive the print of the seale’ (1597, B2r-v).45 De Grazia suggests that beliefs about the brain’s impressionability were widespread enough to influence pedagogical practices: school children were taught their most difficult lessons at the hottest time of day so that they would be more receptive (“Imprints” 36). The classroom was a space in which young minds were thought to be literally fashioned or ‘in-formed’.46 Children had long been thought to have particularly impressionable minds. ‘Youth and white paper take any impression’ was proverbial. Another proverb, ‘soft wax will take any impression’, was often applied to children (Morris Palmer Tilley Y44, W136), and in the same vein Roger Ascham writes in The Scholemaster (1570) that ‘the pure cleane witte of a sweete yong babe, is like the newest wax, most hable to receiue the best and fayrest printing’ (E2v). For many writers, guided by patriarchal ideology, extreme mental impressionability was also a characteristic of women. In An Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton asserts that women are ‘As capable of any impression as materia prima [the prime matter of the universe] it selfe, that still desires new forms’ (232). Women, who supposedly lacked the reason necessary to control their fantasy, were thought to have particularly impressionable imaginations. In the translation of Pierre le Loyer’s French Treatise of Spectres (1605), we are told that fear ‘doth easily imprint sundry imaginations in their [women’s] mindes, like as a man would make in waxe, an impression of some character with a Ring or Signet’ (Ee3r). Shakespeare sometimes engages with the concept of women’s heightened mental impressionability. ‘[M]en have marble, women waxen minds’, declares the narrator of The Rape of Lucrece, ‘And therefore are they formed as marble will. / The weak oppressed, th’impression of strange kinds / Is formed in them by force, by fraud, or skill’ (ll. 1240–43). Here, mind blurs with body because the raped Lucrece has just suffered a sexual impression ‘by force’ at the hands of Tarquin, earlier described as even less yielding than erodible marble (ll. 558–60). Women were said to have impressionable minds because of the physical constitution of their bodies. As Kaara L. Peterson writes, ‘Galenic humoral theory maintained that the cold, wet temperament of the female body left women’s minds soft and impressionable to the literal imprinting of ideas’ (125). Isabella apparently subscribes to this view of women in Measure for Measure when she conflates physiological and mental susceptibility through the word ‘credulous’: ‘[W]e are soft as our

30  Technology, language, physiology complexions are, / And credulous to false prints’ (II.iv.130–31). ‘Complexion’, synonymous with ‘temperament’, had a medical sense of the combination of the humours in a certain proportion (OED complexion n. 1a; temperament n. 3). The belief that women had soft complexions meant that patriarchal figurations of their bodies as wax, metal or paper to be imprinted by men through sexual acts had a medical foundation. As de Grazia observes, analogies between sex and imprinting reinforced the Galenic ‘one-sex model’, wherein female genitals were homologous to male sexual parts but inverted due to a lack of heat: ‘[Imprinting] techniques involved, like the act of copulation itself, inverse commensurate parts, either in relief or intaglio, raised or sunken, the reproduced image an inside-out version of the reproduced original’ (“Imprints” 44).47 In fact, the image of an impression had been used to illustrate the one-sex model in the pseudo-Galenic Latin text Anatomia Vivorum, probably written by Ricardus Anglicus in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century (Prioreschi 343): One can compare the relation which exists between the instrument of reproduction in the man and the instrument of reproduction in the woman to the relation that exists between the seal which leaves its imprint and the impression of the seal in the wax. The woman’s instrument has an inverted structure, fixed on the inside, whereas the man’s instrument has an [e]verted structure extending outwards. (Qtd. in Jacquart and Thomasset 37)48 While the one-sex model does help to elucidate the logic behind many sexual imprinting metaphors in early modern texts, some of them seem to challenge rather than support this physiological theory, which was being questioned by certain medical writers.49 This is often true of those tropes that do not follow the typical man-imprints-woman formula, in which women are represented as the impressing instrument and men as the impressed material rather than vice versa. Women seal men’s lips with kisses, impress their hearts with love and stamp their foreheads with cuckolds’ horns (‘The cuckold’s stamp goes current in all nations’, observes Matteo in Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore (1604; xv.477)). Not all bodily imprinting metaphors fit one mould, and thus they draw upon a variety of early modern theories about sexuality and physiology, some of which contradict one another. From at least the late medieval period, human generation had been compared to the sealing of wax and the minting of coins.50 Lucilla’s declaration about the relationship between a father and his child in John Lyly’s work of prose fiction Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) is informed by a rhetorical tradition that was perpetuated by medical and philosophical texts: ‘[A]s the soft wax receiveth whatsoever print be in the seal and showeth no other impression, so the tender babe, being

Technology, language, physiology  31 sealed with his father’s gifts, representeth his Image most lively’ (53). Representations of the child as imprinted by the father bore the influence of not only Aristotle’s theory of generation wherein ‘The female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape’ (Generation of Animals 738b), 51 but also the centrality of the imprint in Christian theological discourse. G.W.H. Lampe demonstrates that the language of sealing, and—to a lesser extent—coining, plays a significant role in the New Testament and writings of the Church Fathers.52 Particularly relevant to the procreation/sealing analogy is the notion of the seal of the divine image: [B]y virtue of his divine creation there was impressed upon man the image of God … [T]his “seal” was set upon him by the Logos [the Son of God], who is the exact and exhaustive likeness of God, the perfect and complete image of the Father. (Lampe 248) John Donne, who used the language of impression when writing about both erotic and spiritual experiences, built on this tradition in a sermon preached at the Earl of Exeter’s chapel at St John’s in Clerkenwell in 1624: God sealed us, in imprinting his Image in our souls, and in the powers thereof, at our creation; and so, every man hath this seale, and he hath it, as soone as he hath a soule: The wax, the matter, is in his conception; the seale, the forme, is in his quickning, in his inanimation; as, in Adam, the waxe was that red earth, which he was made of, the seale was that soule, that breath of life, which God breathed into him. (Sermons 6: 158–59) For many, representing the father’s contribution to procreation as an imprint would have evoked God’s imprinting of man with his image. If the child was legitimate, the analogy could transform his begetting into a god-like act of self-reproduction. If the child was illegitimate, it could show the father to be abusing God’s image by reproducing it without authorisation. Since medicine overlapped with theology, it is not surprising that medical texts often discussed the idea that God’s image was imprinted in man. The prefatory epistle to The Problemes of Aristotle (1595), perhaps gesturing to the book’s own genesis in print, tells readers that God made man a Microcosme or little worlde, and in him printed his owne image and similitude, so liuely, that no power what soeuer is able to blot it out. This image and similitude is the soule and vnderstanding, which he would neuer haue printed in man, vnlesse he had first made him a bodie of a substance fit and apt to receiue that impression (A2v).

32  Technology, language, physiology Later in the same text, during an explanation as to how children are ‘successiuely ingendred in the wombe’, it is stated that after twenty-four days the ‘substance’ of the new life is ‘made so thicke and sound, that it is able to receiue shape and forme: because that a fluid and running substance keepeth no impression, and so euery day receiueth some other disposition vntill his birth’ (F2r). Like man new-made, the enwombed subject was fit and apt to receive impression. Representations of impregnation as imprinting linked the womb to the impressionable brain, drawing a connection between biological and mental ‘conception’.53 The role of the imprint in explanations of both cognition and pregnancy contributed to the idea—at least as old as Socrates’ presentation of himself as a midwife who delivers the thoughts of men (Plato, Theaetetus 148e–151d)—that the brain and the womb functioned similarly. In Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 77”, the poet tells the fair lord that, once committed to the ‘vacant leaves’ of a gifted book, ‘thy mind’s imprint’ (i.e. both cognitive impressions and written notes) will be ‘children nursed, delivered from thy brain’ (ll. 3, 11). In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Holofernes claims that his thoughts are ‘begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion’ (IV.ii.68–70). As today, the ‘pia mater’ was an anatomical term for ‘a thin, vascular, fibrous membrane which is closely applied to the surface of the brain and spinal cord’ (OED n. 1), but its name (literally ‘tender mother’) was thought to denote its function. ‘[I]t is called Piamater’, writes Thomas Vicary in his Profitable Treatise of the Anatomie of Mans Body (1577), ‘because it is so softe and tender ouer the brayne, that it nourisheth the brayne and feedeth it, as doth a louing mother vnto her tender childe’ (D1v). Like the brain in the pia mater, the child in the womb was subject to impressions. As The Problemes of Aristotle indicates, early modern medical writers sometimes use the language of impression to illuminate the invisible processes experienced by the foetus in the womb, especially in order to explain the physical form of infants once born. At the same time that printing presses and printed texts were being compared to wombs and children (see Chapter 5), the womb was being identified as a place in which children were imprinted. These ideas about the womb, furthermore, were increasingly being circulated in print: they appear in vernacular medical texts and midwifery manuals published in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In his anatomical work Mikrokosmographia (1615), the physician Helkiah Crooke addresses the ancient question of how children come to look like their parents, observing that ‘all formation … that is, all power to set the seale or figure or difference vpon any thing proceedeth from the seede alone’ (285). By ‘the seede’, Crooke is not only referring to the father’s semen because, like many early modern medical writers (Eccles, Ch. 5), he subscribes to the Hippocratic and Galenic ‘two-seed theory’, the belief that an embryo

Technology, language, physiology  33 is conceived through the interaction of seed emitted by both men and women during orgasm. One cause of parental resemblance, according to Crooke, is ‘the formatiue faculty ingenite with [natural to] the seede’. In this model, the male seed must dominate the female seed in order to assert the father’s authority.54 If the ‘forming faculty’ of seed, which contains the ‘Idea’ of all the infant’s ‘parts’, is able to worke freely and at liberty and be not interrupted by any thing in the whole time of the conformation [i.e. fashioning] …, it euer more setteth that stamp vpon the Infant which is in the seed it selfe, and so the children become alwaies like vnto their Parents; wholly to the father if the fathers seede doe alwayes and totally ouercome, and altogether to the mother if the mothers seede haue the victory: In some parts to the father, in others to the mother if any part of the seed of either be ouercome by the other. (311) Medical writers who employed the language of impression to explain procreation evidently drew on and adapted Galenic as well as Aristotelian embryology. Following tradition, Crooke declares the influence of parents’ imaginations on the form of their children. ‘Imagination or Cogitation’ has the power to ‘setteth a new seale vppon the tender and soft nature of the childe’, thereby disrupting seed’s forming faculty and making the child look unlike its parents in some way (311). In other words, impressions of the parents’ minds could cause physical impressions of the child’s body. As the sixteenth-century French surgeon Ambroise Paré puts it, ‘that which is strongly conceived in the mind, imprints the force into the infant conceived in the wombe’ (978). Medical writers emphasised the strength of the mother’s imagination, establishing a strong link between pregnant women’s brains and their wombs and giving endless examples of the phenomenon that came to be known as ‘maternal impressions’.55 The mother’s imagination was thought capable of impressing the physical form of the child during both conception and pregnancy, thereby causing ‘deformities’ and even ‘monstrosities’. Medical manuals and works of natural history traded stories about white women giving birth to black children as a result of imagining or looking at portraits of black men during conception: ‘such is the force of a naturall impression’ caused by ‘cogitation of and vpon … blacke and deformed Moores’, writes Edward Topsell (606).56 During pregnancy, women’s imaginations were thought capable of impressing their children if they experienced shock or unfulfilled longing. Thus in Child-Birth or, The Happy Deliuerie of Women (1612), Jacques Guillemeau advises pregnant women not to ‘cast their eyes vpon pictures or persons which are vglie or deformed, least the imagination imprint on the child the similitude of the said person or picture’ (26). Crooke

34  Technology, language, physiology explains that birthmarks can occur because ‘Oftentimes the Imagination of that thing is imprinted in the tender Infant which the mother with childe doth ardently desire’, and so ‘the spirituall forme or abstracted notion’ of a fig or mulberry ‘is sooner fastned vppon the Infant then vpon the wombe, because an impression is sooner made in soft waxe then in hard yron’ (311). Whether or not they read medical texts, a wide range of writers seem to have known about maternal impressions. 57 Several different Shakespearean characters allude to the phenomenon. In Richard III, the misshapen Duke of Gloucester laments having been ‘rudely stamped’ (I.i.16) in the womb.58 In the final scene of Cymbeline, Guiderius is identified as the king’s son by ‘a mole, a sanguine star’ on his neck (V.iv.365), a birthmark similar to that of his sister Innogen (II.ii.37–39). Belarius describes this ‘evidence’, whose revelation causes Cymbeline to refer to himself as a ‘mother’, as a ‘natural stamp’ (V.iv.367–70). Shakespeare was apparently aware of maternal impressions as well as other physiological phenomena that incorporated the concept of the imprint. This chapter has shown that the language of impression was integral to early modern discourses of technology, economics, rhetoric, theology and physiology. In particular, the pervasiveness of this language suggests that the concept of the imprint was crucial to ideas of identity formation: the mind, body and soul of the early modern English subject were thought to make and receive new impressions every day (indeed, even before birth). Shakespearean drama engages deeply with the role played by these psychophysiological impressions in the formation and destabilisation of identity. It also gestures towards the impressiveness of drama itself as an affective social and cultural interaction, one that encouraged audiences to meditate on the relationship of the individual to society. The early development of Shakespeare’s literary reputation during the seventeenth century depended in large part on the idea that his works could enact psychophysiological transformations, both in performance and in print. As Katharine Craik and Tanya Pollard observe, ‘[b]ooks and plays were among the external agents capable of profoundly altering humoral balance, implicating readers and theatregoers in complex processes of transaction or exchange’ (7). That these processes were often conceptualised through the language of impression urges us to see performed as well as printed drama as participating in a kind of ‘print culture’. Playgoing was recognised by both theatre’s adversaries and defenders as a psychophysiological experience which impressed and shaped spectators. While in the 1580s Philip Stubbes warned that plays could pierce and print hearts and minds, several decades later Thomas Heywood celebrated in An Apology for Actors (1612) that ‘lively and well spirited action … hath power to new mold the hearts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt’ (Pollard 221). If the ‘purpose of playing’ was—as Hamlet puts

Technology, language, physiology  35 it—to show ‘the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (III.ii.20–24), that purpose was achieved by exacting forms and pressures on audiences who would have recognised themselves as impressionable entities. As I argue in the following chapter, those creatures we now call ‘characters’ were seen as vehicles of these theatrical impressions. Although not human, characters’ simulation of humanity lay in their capacity to both imprint and be imprinted, like the real people who paid to see them personated. Character, I contend, is one of several critical concepts whose origins lie in the rich early modern contexts of the language and material culture of the imprint, and Shakespeare’s engagement with those contexts.

Notes 1 See Cohen 171–77 for the concept of ‘technological confluence’ in early modern England and certain of Shakespeare’s texts. 2 On the early history of printing in England, see Hellinga. 3 On the interdisciplinary relationship between sigillography and numismatics, see Morrisson. Scholars have noted and discussed the close relationship of medal production to technical innovations in seals and coins (Stahl; Cook 12–14; Loewenstein 218–19n27), and even the printing press (Flaten 651). See Scher, The Currency of Fame on the history of medals in early modern Europe. 4 See Seaford 115–24 on the relationship between seals and coins in ancient Greece, where each coin type originated from ‘the personal seal or badge of the authority responsible for its use’ (Rutter 357). The development of sealing was in turn influenced by coin technology (Collon 10). 5 While Seaford argues that in ancient Greece coin-marks, unlike sealmarks, did not represent ownership (118–19), in early modern England—as Wortham explains—‘the sovereign’s head stamped on coins reminded the bearer that … the pecuniary value of coins was in an important sense the sole “property” of the king’ (352). 6 See Boutell, and Cherry on the relationship of seals and coins to heraldry. 7 On the state’s ‘institutional centralization’ (51) of the production of coins, especially in the sixteenth century, see Deng 50–58. 8 On widespread practices of counterfeiting and other abuses of coinage in early modern England, see Gaskill, chs 4 and 5 (123–200). 9 Though less common than the analogy with sealing, kissing is represented as stamping a coin in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634; first performed c.1613). Theseus tells Hippolyta ‘I stamp this kiss upon thy current lip— / Sweet, keep it as my token’ (I.i.215–16). 10 On the play’s relationship with the news trade in the 1620s and 1630s, see Chartier. 11 Seals have always been closely associated with the invention of writing (Collon 9; Shendge). 12 It is possible that the Cade scenes in 2 Henry VI were written by Marlowe rather than Shakespeare (Craig 70–77). 13 OED n. 4a, 6a, 8a, 9a, 9b. Sense 8a (‘the original writing, work of art, etc. from which a copy is made’) or 9a (‘manuscript (or printed) matter prepared for printing’) of the noun ‘copy’ seem to be the most appropriate textual senses of the word here.

36  Technology, language, physiology 14 For Shell, ‘[c]oins were the first widely circulating publications or impressions in history’ (Economy 64). Jaffe suggests that early modern printing, and especially printer’s devices, were developed from coining technology. On the probable sigillographic origins of printers’ devices, see H.W. Davies, Ch. 7 (104–14). 15 Watson observes that ‘[w]ith a remarkable persistence, the coining of words was associated with the coining of currency in this period’, further showing that ‘familiar terms of monetary debate … pervade [early modern] discussions about imported vocabulary, as does (on the spectrum from approval to disapproval) the terminology of profit, minting, mining, credit, borrowing, theft, and counterfeiting’ (“Shakespeare’s Coining of Words” 87). Also see Watson, “Coining Words” on dramatic neologisms as ‘featured products’ manufactured and sold by playwrights as they competed for ‘market-share in a theatrical economy that was partly a new store of words’ (49–50). 16 See Woudhuysen, “Introduction” 16–33 on Love’s Labour’s Lost as a play that interrogates the relationship between words and things. 17 Shakespeare later used ‘fire-new’ again in Twelfth Night (III.ii.20) and King Lear (V.iii.130). 18 Shakespeare’s modern reputation as ‘the most fertile coiner of words in the history of the English language’ is an unsubstantiated commonplace which—as Jürgen Schäfer has shown—grew out of the greater accessibility of Shakespeare in print (than Thomas Nashe, for example) to compilers of OED (Schäfer 60). 19 For a modern example of this, see Brian Vickers’ ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare. Vickers uses ‘counterfeiting’ in ‘the metaphorical sense of presenting anonymously authored work as Shakespeare’s’ (xii). In characterising misattribution as a form of counterfeiting, Vickers subscribes to an analogy with a long history. In a religious tract published in 1624, Thomas Gataker condemned authors who misattributed their own work to others through a comparison to the personation of counterfeiting actors: ‘they make their coined creatures, like plaiers on a stage, sometime to act one part, and sometime another’ (62). 20 Caxton’s carefully coins ‘print’ as a noun in a typographic sense at the end of his translation of Raoul Lefèvre’s The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473/4; OED n. and adj. 2 print 7a), the first book he printed in English: ‘I haue practysed & lerned at my grete charge and dispense to ordeyne this said book in prynte after the maner & forme as ye may here see’ (K8r). He also used the awkward phrase ‘in enprinte’ to describe printed texts (OED imprint n. 2). 21 Brayman Hackel is primarily concerned with connections between manuscript and print and does not discuss seals or coins, but she productively focuses on ‘scribble’, ‘print’ and ‘publish’, showing they ‘had more fluid meanings in the early modern period, and all reflect a network of overlapping oral, aural, visual, and manual experiences’ (25). 2 2 This approximate date range for the ‘early modern’ period includes the first publications or performances of all the texts which this book cites as using the language of impression prior to the closure of the commercial theatres. 23 There is much, of course, that the diagram does not show, and it is not fully representative of how this book engages with the language of impression. It does not show that some of the shared words were more commonly applied to one or two of the three technologies. For example, while ‘printer’ could refer to someone who stamped coins, it was far more often a term for someone who printed books (OED n. 2a, 2b). The diagram does not

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24

25

26 27 28

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display semantic fields other than sealing, coining and printing. It therefore obscures the fact that many of the words and phrases had other meanings and did not always pertain to those three technologies. As nouns and verbs, for instance, ‘press’ and ‘impress’ were used by Shakespeare and others to refer to the enlisting of men in the army or navy through force or payment (OED press n. 3 1a, 1b, and v. 2 1a, 2; impress n. 2 , and v. 2 a), although this sense may be related to the numismatic field insofar as to ‘press’ or ‘impress’ soldiers was ‘to stamp men in one’s own mold by paying them money’, sometimes called ‘press-money’ (Fischer 108). Some of the words in the diagram were applicable to other technologies and even other impressing technologies. For example, ‘coin’ (OED v. 3a) and ‘coinage’ (OED n. 4) were used in descriptions of the official stamping of tin blocks of standard weight. See OED: print n. 1a, 5a, 7a, 8a, 9a, 10, 11, 12a, 13, adj. 1 1a, and v. 1a, 3a, 3b, 8a, 9a, 9b, 10; imprint n. 1, 2c, and v. 1a, 2; impress n. 1 1a, and v. 1 4, 5a; impression n. 2a, 3a, 3b, 3c; stamp n. 3 5a, 5b, 6, 12a, 12b, and v. 4a, 5a, 5b, 6. OED has no direct references to coins for ‘impression’, but it was a numismatic term. In Samuel Rowley’s play When You See Me, You Know Me (1605), for example, Henry VIII condemns Cardinal Wolsey for having ‘Vnknowne to vs stampe[d] in our royall coyne / The base impression of your Cardinal hat’ (K4v). Shakespeare has the first recorded use of ‘impressure’ to mean a ‘mark made by pressure’ in As You Like It (first performed c.1599; III.v.23), Troilus and Cressida (first performed c.1602; IV.vii.15) and Twelfth Night, as the discussion that follows will show. Examples for the sense ‘mental or sensuous impression’ in OED (n. 1 3) are predated by references to the ‘impressure(s) of conceit’, for instance, in Michael Drayton’s poem Endimion and Phoebe (1595; E1r). The term is, of course, related to ‘pressure(s)’, which is used twice in Hamlet (first performed c.1601), in Q2 (1604) and F1 (1623), as a new coinage to mean a ‘form produced by pressing; an image, impression, or stamp’ (OED n. 1 6; I.v.100, III.ii.24). While ‘soft’ could be Malvolio’s instruction to himself to calm down, it is potentially a reference to the softness of the recently sealed wax (Stewart 60). My thanks to Ewan Fernie for suggesting the onomatopoeic qualities of ‘impressure’. Highlighting the ‘ugly joke’, de Grazia observes that Lucrece’s ‘very name connects her to the sealing process, for it suggests two types of creases’, one epistolary and the other labial (“Imprints” 41–42). For further discussion of the symbolism of the seal and letter in this scene, see Harry Newman, “A seale of Virgin waxe” 109–10. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw the publication of a play (by Thomas Heywood, printed 1608) and several poems about L ­ ucrece, including Shakespeare’s commercially successful The Rape of Lucrece (1594; re-printed three times by 1600). Engraved and woodcut emblems of Lucrece were printed in many books. The printer-bookseller Thomas Purfoot (active c.1542–1615) had three different printer’s devices of Lucrece stabbing herself, and his print-shop could be found—according to title pages—‘at the signe of the Lucrece’ (Jacobson 100–2). One of Purfoot’s Lucrece devices appears on the verso of the title page to the anonymous play The Triall of Treasure (1567), and also at the end of the book in some copies. My thanks to John Jowett for bringing this example to my attention. The unusual form of ‘impressure’ in Twelfth Night corresponds to another Shakespearean coinage earlier in the comedy, ‘expressure’. Maria anticipates that the vain Malvolio will see in her obscurely worded letter ‘the expressure of his eye, forehead, and complexion’, wherein ‘he shall find himself

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38 39

40

most feelingly personated’ (II.iii.151–53). The letter’s ‘expressure’—either Maria’s verbal description or the image of Malvolio it encodes (OED expressure n. b, c)—is fittingly sealed with an ‘impressure’. Combined with the theatrical verb ‘personated’ (OED personate v. 4a), Olivia’s ‘expressure’ gestures to the way in which the letter will script Malvolio’s ridiculous performance (a theatrical expressure) as someone other than himself in order to please Olivia. On Chettle’s ‘mediation between the print trade and literary authorship’ (141), see Jowett, “Henry Chettle”. Munday was Chettle’s friend and worked as apprentice to the printer John Allde (148). Nashe and Harvey engaged in their print-focused pamphlet war during the 1590s and, for a time, lived and worked with the printers John Danter and John Wolfe, respectively (Nicholl 224–26; Jowett, “Credulous” 98). For my references to OED in this paragraph, see matrix n. 1, 6a; matrice n. Etymology, 1a, 2. OED treats ‘matrix’ and ‘matrice’ as different terms, but they were probably variants of the same word. I use ‘matrix’ to encompass both words. See, for example, Brooks, “Introduction” 16–17. De Grazia (“Imprints” 43–49) and Maruca (327–30) use Moxon’s manual to make similar observations about the anthropomorphism and sexualisation of the press and its reproductive processes. The first French printing manual, published in 1567, compares the stamping of a character in a typographic ‘matrice’ to the imprinting of a seal in wax (qtd. in de Grazia, “Imprints” 44). For discussions of early modern beliefs about metaphor that consider rhetorical manuals, see also Anderson; and Lyne, Shakespeare, Ch. 3. Richard Field printed and published Puttenham’s Arte and printed the second edition of Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence. The stationer was Shakespeare’s Stratford contemporary and was involved in the publication of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and “The Phoenix and the Turtle” (ODNB, “Field, Richard (bap. 1561, d. 1624)”). All citations of Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence refer to the second edition of 1593. For Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric, I refer to Peter E. Medine’s modern edition of the 1560 text. For detailed analysis of Aristotle’s concept of metaphor, see Ricoeur 7–43. Also see the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, which states that metaphor ‘occurs when a word applying to one thing is transferred to another, because the similarity seems to justify this transference’ (4.34.45). Having identified metaphor as ‘the most common and by far the most beautiful’ trope, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria defines it as when ‘[a] noun or a verb is accordingly transferred, as it were, from that place in the language to which it properly belongs, to one in which there is either no proper word, or in which the metaphorical word is preferable to the proper’ (8.6.4–5). See Mack on the availability and influence of Rhetorica ad Herennium (14–17) and Institutio Oratoria (22–23) in Renaissance Europe. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric 3.10–11, Cicero 4.34.45, and Quintilian 8.6.19. Identifying ‘impression’ as ‘a metatechnical term in discussions of form within the language arts’, Mann shows that early modern defences of poesy ‘specify the material effects of the force of eloquence by referring to its ability to leave “impressions” on its audience, and allusions to the power of poesy often insist on its superior ability to impress itself upon the world’ (“The Orphic Physics” 237–38). In the preceding section on “The use of Metaphors”, Peacham tells us that metaphors ‘leaue such a firme impression in the memory, as is not lightly forgotten’ (13).

Technology, language, physiology  39 41 OED print n. 2b, v. 2b; imprint v. 3a; impress n. 1 2b, v. 1 3; and impressure n. 1 3. 42 On the exact technological resonances of the speech in which Hamlet refers to ‘the book and volume of my brain’ (Hamlet I.v.103), see Stallybrass et al., “Hamlet’s Tables”. Gertrude’s use of ‘coinage’ to mean that which is ‘made, devised, or invented’ is apparently itself a new coinage (OED coinage n. 6). 43 On classical epistemology, see Everson. Krell explores the influence of Plato and Aristotle’s metaphors of imprinted wax on later philosophers’ engagement with ideas about memory. Pasanek’s chapters on “Coinage” (50–68), “Impressions” (137–58) and “Metal” (174–90) discuss the ancient rhetorical traditions that informed eighteenth-century representations of the mind as impressionable. 4 4 See Clark on sight and vision in early modern culture and science. 45 Here I have cited the 1597 edition because the Bodleian’s copy of the 1595 edition on EEBO is faded. 46 OED inform v. 6a. Thomas Thomas’ Latin dictionary of 1587 defines informatio as ‘[i]nformation, fashioning, a knowledge naturally impressed in the minde of man’ (Gg1r). 47 Laqueur argues that the one-sex model strongly influenced people’s understanding of sexual difference in the early modern period. 48 Following Lochrie, I have changed Jacquart and Thomasset’s second ‘inverted’ (presumably a mistake) to ‘everted’ (17). 49 See Schleiner, “Early Modern Controversies”, and Helen King, The OneSex Body on Trial on challenges to the one-sex model in the early modern period. 50 See Park 257–59. It is difficult to say when the tradition began. In two texts composed in the early twelfth century, William of Conches compares the human form in the womb to an imprinted seal and an imprinted coin (Dronke 173, 176). 51 Aristotle claims that male semen is a tool with which the father shapes the passive matter that is the superfluous blood of the mother’s womb, imparting it with soul, form and movement: The female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape; this, in our view, is the specific characteristic of each of the sexes: that is what it means to be male or female. Hence, necessity requires that the female should provide the physical part, i.e., a quantity of material, but not that the male should do so, since necessity does not require that the tools should reside in the product that is being made, nor that the agent which uses them should do so. Thus the physical part, the body, comes from the female, and the Soul from the male, since the Soul is the essence of a particular body. (Generation of Animals 738b) Although Aristotle does not use the language of impression here, his description of male seed fashioning female blood without itself contributing material recalls his use of sealing images in De Anima to explain the relationships between soul and body, form and matter, and stimulus and sense. 52 Also see Bedos-Rezak (especially 1522–26), who demonstrates that the sealing metaphor’s ‘semantic range’ was ‘extended’ by ‘Christian discourse and liturgy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries’ (1522). She discusses the relationship between seal and coin metaphors at 1524–25n92. Nygren explores the concept of ‘spiritual numismatics’ in the Renaissance, focusing on interpretations of Christ’s response to a coin stamped with Caesar’s image in

40  Technology, language, physiology

53 54

55 56 57 58

Matthew 22:21: ‘Render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s’ (465–71). De Grazia, “Imprints” 32–35; Park 260–63. It was sometimes observed that male seed was more powerful than female seed. In The Birth of Mankind (1560; first published 1545), the physician Thomas Raynalde claims that ‘the seed and sperm that cometh from the woman’ is ‘not so strong, firm and mighty in operation as the seed of man, but rather weak, fluey, cold, and moist, and of no great firmity’ (39). Galen had asserted that ‘the female semen is exceedingly weak and unable to advance to that state of motion in which it could impress an artistic form upon the fetus’ (303). For discussions of maternal impressions in early modern medical texts, see Park and Daston; Bates, Ch. 1; and Hull Geil 50–55. Mazzoni (Ch. 1) traces the history of theories about the phenomenon. Also see, for example, Problemes of Aristotle (1595), E2r; Crooke 311; and Paré 978. For allusions to maternal impressions in non-Shakespearean early modern literature, see Gordon Williams 2:703 (under ‘imagination’). ‘Rudely’, which could mean ‘with rough or unskilful workmanship’ (OED adv. 5a), might suggest a coining image. Later in the play, however, Gloucester’s mother tells him he is deformed because he was ‘sealed in thy nativity / The slave of nature and the son of hell’ (I.iii.226–7).

2 ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ Commoditised character and the technology of theatrical impression in Coriolanus

Who’s yonder That does appear as he were flayed? O gods, He has the stamp of Martius, and I have Beforetime seen him thus. (I.vi.21–24)

Speaking in response to the spectacular entrance of Martius during the battle of Corioles, the amazed General Cominius recognises the enigmatic anti-hero of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus—so bloody that he appears ‘flayed’—because of his ‘stamp’. Here ‘stamp’ could mean ‘physical or outward form’,1 or it may be a reference to Coriolanus’ characteristic stamping of his feet (I.iii.34; R.B. Parker 193n). The word, however, also evokes the image of an imprint, casting his wounds as newly stamped impressions. 2 Coriolanus’ identifiable ‘stamp’ is the blood that covers him: earlier, he enters ‘bleeding, assaulted by the enemy’ (I.iv.65SD). The analogy between wounding and imprinting persists in the play, encouraging the idea that Coriolanus is a kind of technological entity. 3 In his tribute to Coriolanus following the battle, Cominius refers to ‘His sword, death’s stamp, / Where it did mark, it took’ (II.ii.105–6), representing a warrior who efficiently imprints his victims with death. The image corresponds with the protagonist’s later boast that Aufidius ‘wears my stripes impressed upon him’ (V.vi.109). But Cominius’ recognition of the ‘stamp of Martius’ indicates Coriolanus also has wounds impressed upon him, violent imprints which mark Martius out as Martius, apparently rendering legible a character that often seems more machine than man. Cominius’ onstage reading of the wounded Coriolanus’ ‘stamp’ provokes questions about what makes a character ‘impressive’ in early modern theatre. Largely ignored in criticism, the play’s persistent language of impression—invoking technologies of sealing, coining, medal-­making and printing—urges a reassessment of the tragedy and especially its dominant main character, whose power to impress in the theatre rests heavily on the fleshly imprints he later refuses to show the people in the marketplace. Critics have traditionally seen Coriolanus’ wounds as

42  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ interpretable (if unstable) signs of his elusive identity and humanity as a character, whether analysing the protagonist in psycho-sexual, socio-­ political or theatrical terms.4 In an influential essay, Cynthia Marshall focuses on Coriolanus’ wounds to analyse ‘the specifically theatrical effects that produce an impression of subjective identity and of its fullest dramatic achievement, character depth’ (“Wound-Man” 95). For ­Marshall, ‘subjective identity’ is the operative term, but how might we theorise and historicise the enduring idea that theatre works to produce in audiences an ‘impression’ of subjectivity, interiority or character depth? What is the relationship between Coriolanus’ identity as an inhuman killing machine who stamps and is stamped with wounds, and his theatrical impressiveness as a character capable of conveying an internal as well as an external ‘stamp of Martius’ to audiences? And what might focusing on the transmission of this imprint in the playhouse tell us about the commoditised emotional and cognitive transactions involved in the early modern commercial theatre? This chapter investigates how Coriolanus negotiates the value of the characterological imprint, focusing on its protagonist and his wounded body in order to analyse the technology of theatrical impression in the early modern commercial theatre. I argue that the technological concept of the imprint in Coriolanus, inflected by its connections to discourses of character, psychophysiology and Plutarchan narrative, is integral to the play’s metatheatrical self-reflection on the commoditised human transactions involved in commercial theatre, and the formative pressures exerted on dramatic characters by market forces. Through violent resistance to his identity as a reproducible commodity of the theatre, Coriolanus’ characterological value in performance is paradoxically generated by his refusal to participate in forms of imprinting, exchange and transaction that are necessary for his very existence as a character in the theatrical marketplace. In making these arguments, I show that the play sheds light on critical language surrounding characterisation—a term etymologically linked to technologies of engraving, imprinting and inscription (OED characterize v. 1)—and the widespread belief that Shakespearean ‘character’ is a unique brand which both takes and gives the universal imprint of humanity. The first half of this chapter demonstrates that the play’s engagement with ‘character’ as a word and concept—despite its modern associations with humanity and interiority—is inextricably tied to the impressions involved in material, technological and commoditised transactions. My argument that Coriolanus participated in a complex discourse of imprinting and character in the seventeenth century sets up the second half of the chapter, where—focusing on the role of Richard Burbage—I show that the play’s metatheatrical elements force the audience to reflect on an economy of theatrical impression that depends on both Coriolanus’ resistance to characterisation and the performance of that resistance by

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  43 the actor playing him. Looking first at the technology of wounds, and then at the functions of silence during the intercession scene, I suggest Coriolanus’ impressiveness as a character does not lie in the revelation of his humanity. Rather, it lies in the play’s metatheatrical negotiation of our knowledge that he is a creature marked by his cultural production, an artificial entity crafted to make an impression on audiences conditioned to think they are paying to receive the ‘stamp of Martius’.

Valuing the imprint of ‘character’: theatre, charactery, criticism In this section, I investigate the treatment of character in Coriolanus, by both critics and the play itself, in relation to the historical intersection between the discourses of character and impression. My focus is on the moment of the play’s inception in the early seventeenth century, when— I suggest—character was a new technology of impression in a theatrical culture still coming to terms with its commodification. But that moment needs to be analysed in light of the larger, ongoing history of character and its relationship to ideas of impression, which started long before the rise of English commercial theatre and continues today as critics locate the value of Shakespearean characterisation in its capacity to ‘imprint’ minds, hearts and souls. Here I address critical attitudes to characterisation in Coriolanus before turning to the philology of ‘character’ as a term that connects theatre to imprinting technologies, psychophysiology and Theophrastan charactery. In doing so, I show that the play challenges modern definitions and valuations of character, which typically frame the concept in relation to humanity and subjectivity, and in opposition to materiality, technology and commodification. This contextualisation of character in Coriolanus will later be crucial to my argument about what makes the play’s protagonist and his wounds ‘impressive’ in the theatre. In particular, it lays the foundations for my claim that Coriolanus’ wounds are not—as is so often claimed—signs of a universal humanity lying just beneath the surface.5 Conversely, the wounds are signs of his identity as something other than human, a ‘character’ conspicuously subject to the market forces of early modern commercial theatre and especially the imperative to make an impression on paying audience members. All dramatic characters are something other than human in that they are not people but heavily mediated representations, collaborative products (often lucrative ones at that) brought about not just through the technical labour of dramatists and actors, but also ‘the emotional, cognitive, and political transactions … between actors and playgoers’ (Yachnin and Slights, “Introduction” 7).6 While it would be a mistake to say that dramatic character has nothing to do with being human, certain scholars have conceptualised characterisation in early modern theatre as a material and technological phenomenon. Douglas Lanier

44  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ has argued that in performance character depended on ‘the mechanics of exteriority’ as the actor worked ‘to craft and display a set of physical marks … legible to an audience’ (83), and Justin Kolb has addressed ‘the technical and quasi-scientific process of character creation … as text, properties, and actors were combined in theatrical space to create an automaton, a complex, quasi-human artefact that performs humanity’ (46–47). Our understanding of Coriolanus needs reassessing in light of these ideas, and more broadly the emergence of ‘new character criticism’, whose productive attention to the philology and historical contingency of character has started to re-establish it as a useful critical concept.7 The way in which Coriolanus ‘performs humanity’ has long failed to impress traditional character critics. Strongly influenced by A.C. Bradley, Harold Bloom laments that ‘[i]nwardness … vanishes in Coriolanus, and never quite makes it back in later Shakespeare’ (583). A few critics have suggested, however, that what Coriolanus seems to lack as a character (whether ‘inwardness’ or something else) is essential to a play which—as Emma Smith puts it—‘subjects the notion of character itself to sustained, ironic analysis’ (“Character” 102).8 Michael Goldman (“Characterizing Coriolanus”) and Cynthia Marshall (“Wound-man”) have interpreted Coriolanus’ inscrutability and unlikability as engaging with questions about how far a character’s ‘inner dimensions’ can be known or accessed by an audience in performance, and Stephen Orgel has shown the protagonist’s relevance to our understanding of the extent to which a character—whether or not he expresses a desire to be ‘author of himself’ (V.iii.36)—is bound by his playtext (“What is a Character?” 103, 108). Like Marshall’s concern with the ‘impression of subjective identity’, Goldman’s conclusion unintentionally brings into play Coriolanus’ language of impression and character’s etymological origins in the imprint: The communicability of character—as an internal imprint we can carry away with us from the theater, something which possesses us, in mind and in body, as an actor’s body possesses us—this is the basic currency of all great drama. (167) Goldman’s metaphors of impression and currency are part of a long, ongoing history of critical efforts to articulate what is impressive about Shakespearean characterisation: since at least the Romantics, Shakespeare’s dramatis personae have been identified as making ‘impressions’ on audiences or readers, and even as bearing the ‘stamp’ or ‘hallmark’ of the people and frameworks involved in their creation or enactment.9 Ironically, this kind of language may have its roots in antitheatricalists’ descriptions of the effects of performance following the rise of commercial

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  45 theatre in the 1570s, as they decried poetry’s t­ ransformation—as ­David Hawkes puts it—‘into a commodity to be traded on the market’ (79). Alert to the psychophysiology of playgoing, antitheatrical tracts represented actors as ‘characters’ in a very literal sense: players perpetrated and suffered moral corruption because—like Coriolanus on the battlefield—they had the capacity to impress and be impressed, to wound and to be wounded. As noted in Chapter 1, Philip Stubbes observes in The Anatomy of Abuses (1583) that plays influence audiences because ‘what thing we do see opposite before our eyes, do pierce further, and print deeper into our hearts and minds, than the thing, which is heard only with the ears’ (Pollard 117). Stephen Gosson’s Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582) links two kinds of counterfeiting in the ‘markets of bawdry’ that were theatres, acting and producing false impressions: ‘vice is learned with beholding, sense is tickled, desire pricked, and those impressions of mind are secretly conveyed over to the gazers, which the players do counterfeit on the stage’ (Pollard 107–8). John Rainolds’ Overthrow of Stage-Plays (1599) asserts that actors were also at risk of wounding and imprinting themselves: playing immoral parts ‘worketh in the actors a marvelous impression of being like the persons whose qualities they expresse and imitate’, and ‘often repetition and representation of the parts … engrave the things in their mind with a pen of iron, or with the point of a diamond’ (Pollard 174). In other words, actors are characterised by the parts they play, as well as vice versa. Whether celebrated or condemned, the technology of impression in the early modern commercial theatre is best understood in relation to the history of ‘character’ as a word and a concept, which also illuminates Coriolanus’ remarkable uses of the term in around 1608 when it was first performed. In the early seventeenth century, the figures represented on stage were not ‘characters’, but ‘speakers’ or ‘persons’, a word derived from the Latin persona, literally a mask used by a player (OED person n. 1, Etymology). It was not until the 1660s that John Dryden explicitly used ‘character’ to mean a ‘personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a … dramatist’ (OED n. 14), although—as I will show—this sense had been gradually emerging for a long time. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ‘characters’ were primarily things created through technologies of inscription, engraving and impression (OED n. 1, 3a). These senses were rooted in the ancient Greek kharaktêr (χαρακτήρ), variously used to mean an instrument for engraving, stamping or branding, the distinctive marks stamped onto coins or seals (and sometimes wax tablets) to identify types or values, or—by metaphorical extension—distinguishing marks or features of human bodies and language that signified morals and attitudes.10 The term was applied to the literary genre of character-writing, pioneered in the fourth century BC by Theophrastus.11 Theophrastus’ Kharaktíres (Χαρακτήρες) was a collection of brief sketches (or ‘impressions’) of

46  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ inappropriate social behaviour embodied by human examples, such as ‘the miserly man’ or ‘the flatterer’, not individuals but—like stamps on seals or coins—reproducible types whose ‘actions are infinitely repeatable, their stories iterative narrations’ (Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters 38). The various meanings of kharaktêr were eventually carried forward into the English ‘character’, although the word was by no means semantically stable in the early modern period, not least because ­writers—­including Shakespeare—were experimenting with its figurative potential.12 Sensitive to performance’s ‘mechanics of exteriority’, dramatists used the word to explore concepts of personhood, particularly the notion that outer marks can signify inner qualities. Early commercial playwrights made much of what could be impressively ‘charactered’ in faces through a combination of verbal description and the actor’s countenance and expression.13 Thus in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Part 1 (1590; first performed c. 1587), Tamburlaine reads Theridamus’ valiantness in ‘Characters grauen in thy browes’ (B1r). At first sight, the shipwrecked Viola’s use of ‘character’ in Twelfth Night has a similar function. She makes a moral judgement of a sea captain based on his appearance and behaviour: ‘I will believe thou hast a mind that suits / With this thy fair and outward character’ (I.ii.46–47). Apparently tautological, ‘outward character’ posits the concept of ‘inward character’, the invisible imprints and inscriptions made on the mind, heart and soul by God, nature, experience and education, like the ‘precepts’ Polonius instructs his son Laertes to ‘character’ in his memory (Hamlet I.iii.58–59), or indeed the ‘forms’ and ‘pressures’ Hamlet desires to erase from ‘the table of my memory’ (I.v.98–101).14 The use of ‘character’ as a metaphor to negotiate between legible external marks and veiled internal impressions suited the theatrical project, a commercial enterprise which often involved projecting psychological depth through a play of verbal and physical surfaces. When Coriolanus was first performed in around 1608, ‘character’ was already being used to mean ‘the face or features as identifying a person; personal appearance as indicative of something’ (OED n. 10). According to OED, the word is used in this sense in Coriolanus. ‘I paint him in the character’ (V.iv.26), Menenius assures Sicinius after his description of the vengeful Coriolanus as a god-like war machine: The tartness of his face sours grapes. When he walks, he moves like an engine and the ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a corslet with his eye, talks like a knell and his hum is a battery. (V.iv.17–21) As Karen Newman observes, however, Menenius’ prose description and use of ‘character’ allude to the newly revived literary genre of character-­ writing (Essaying Shakespeare 118–20).15 Early modern character sketches generally consisted of ‘witty epitomes of representative individuals in

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  47 relation to their professions, nationalities, idiosyncratic beliefs or presiding temperaments’, such as the courtier or the puritan (Beecher 11).16 ‘Characters’ were distinctly printed commodities, both because they were viewed as reproducible impressions of human identity and behaviour, ‘stampes or impressures, noting such an especiall place, person, or office’ (Brathwait A5v), and because they owed their commercial success to the technology of printing. A collection of sketches now known as Overbury’s Characters went through four ‘impressions’ (i.e. editions) in 1614 alone, and was repeatedly augmented with new characters over the course of its long print history.17 But it was the publication in 1608 (the year Coriolanus was probably first performed) of Characters of Vertues and Vices, ­Joseph Hall’s translation of Theophrastus’ Kharaktíres, that rejuvenated the ancient genre and diversified the lexicon of ‘character’. In his preface, Hall styles this kind of writing as ‘charactery’ as he reflects on the moralistic nature of character sketches or ‘characterisms’ composed by ancient character-writers (soon to be known as ‘characterists’): ‘[They] bestowed their time in drawing out the true lineaments of euery vertue and vice, so liuely, that who saw the medals, might know the face’ (A5r).18 The metaphor of forging portraits in medals (a relatively new technology in ­England) reinforces charactery’s etymological connections to engraving and imprinting (Karen Newman, Essaying Shakespeare 119), but it also engages with the concept—essential to dramatists as well as ­characterists—of what is revealed by features charactered in faces. Faces, however, can be difficult to read. Aufidius fails to recognise the shabbily dressed Coriolanus in Antium despite seeing ‘a command’ in his face, and the point is reinforced by the comic exchange that follows between servants who claim they ‘knew by his face that there was something in him’ (IV.v.62–63, 156–61). Menenius mocks the idea that a face can be read for character when rebuffing Brutus and Sicinius’ claim that he is ‘known well enough’ (II.i.44): I am known to be a humorous patrician, and one that loves a cup of hot wine, with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t; said to be something imperfect in favouring the first complaint, hasty and tinder-like upon too trivial motion; one that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning. What I think, I utter, and spend my malice in my breath. … And though I must be content to bear with those that say you are reverend grave men, yet they lie deadly that tell you you have good faces. If you see this in the map of my microcosm, follows it that I am known well enough too? What harm can your bisson conspectuities [i.e. purblind vision] glean out of this character, if I be known well enough too? (II.i.45–63) Here ‘character’ refers both to Menenius’ own face, the supposed ‘map of my microcosm’, and to his provocative character sketch of himself as ‘a humorous patrician’.19 Whatever an audience can ‘glean’ from either

48  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ of these characters—the actor’s face and his spoken characterism—will inevitably fall short of the unknowable true nature of Menenius’ identity. However, something emerges from their combination, and his embodied performances of charactery (both here and when he ‘paints’ a ‘character’ of Coriolanus) translate ‘character’ to the stage in a way that participates in the semantic reshaping of the word in dramatic contexts. ‘Charactery’, significantly, was also a form of shorthand or ‘secrete writing by Character’. 20 Like writing a character sketch, a kind of ‘short emblem: in little comprehending much’, 21 shorthand involved omission, compression and—for readers—the ‘gleaning’ or gathering of information out of brief marks and symbols. In the theatre, dramatic character similarly had to be gleaned from the shorthand of an actor’s expressive face, and from the elliptical impressions offered to the audience by performance more generally. ‘[B]y and by thy bosom shall partake / The secrets of my heart’, a troubled Brutus tells his wife Portia in one of Shakespeare’s earlier Roman plays, ‘All my engagements I will construe to thee, / All the charactery of my sad brows’ (Julius Caesar II.i.304–7). For the knowing audience, Brutus’ sad brows are secret symbols that express his mind as he frets on the morning of the Ides of March. Scholars debate the etymological and conceptual relationship between Theophrastan charactery and dramatic characterisation, 22 but it is clear that early modern dramatists were influenced by the work of characterists. The most obvious place for charactery in drama was the comedy of humours because it dealt in stock types with fixed physiological and psychological dispositions.23 Coriolanus, however, is one of a generically diverse cluster of plays from circa 1606–14 (i.e. before the publication of Overbury’s Characters) which seem to link charactery, satire and onstage personation through variants of the word ‘character’, contributing to its development both linguistically and conceptually.24 John Webster, himself a characterist, is particularly notable for the way he creatively incorporates charactery into his plays (in prose and verse) with great sensitivity to the semantic range of ‘character’. 25 Shakespeare, Webster and others show awareness of the differences—often noted by critics—­between charactery (seen in terms of fixity, reproducibility and reducibility) and characterisation (depth, development and uniqueness), 26 but they also suggest a degree of fluidity between the rhetorical performances of characterists and those of dramatists and actors as they worked collaboratively to inscribe legible dramatis personae through authoritative ­semiotic acts. First performed during the rise of English charactery and the attendant diversification of the language of character, Coriolanus participated in the recoinage of ‘character’ in the theatrical marketplace, helping to give it currency in the playhouse. Underlying this process, however, was an acute and shared awareness amongst dramatists of the word’s material and technological meanings. Despite the term’s post-­Romantic association with humanity and what A.C. Bradley called ‘the stuff we find within ourselves’ (12), dramatists’ metaphorical application of ‘character’

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  49 to dramatis personae had the potential to highlight their status as technological entities or inhuman automata designed to make money. Although critics have highlighted conceptual advantages to investigating the philology of ‘character’ and related terms, 27 the widespread use of the language of impression in critical discussions (whether or not in response to the etymological link to kharaktêr) is rarely in service of the concepts which, this section has shown, lie at the heart of the history of ‘character’ and its appropriation by early commercial dramatists: materiality, technology and—most significantly—commodification. The ‘currency’ of Goldman’s ‘internal imprint’ may have value in a critical market that privileges the ‘impression of subjective identity’. However, we need to recognise that, from their inception, early modern dramatic characters were commodities, things inscribed by their exchange value in the theatrical marketplace and, as entities inextricable from the form and content of commercial drama, thoroughly ‘conditioned’ by what Douglas Bruster calls the ‘representation market’ of early modern ­England (“The Representation Market” 2). 28 Characters’ inexhaustible value, economic and aesthetic, rests in their technological capacity to mark and be marked through transactions, as they are stamped by those who bring them into being (dramatists, actors, editors and—of course— printers) and make ever-new impressions on those that encounter them (audiences, readers, critics). In order to demonstrate that Coriolanus is an emblem of this process, and to anticipate my analysis of the character’s value within the play’s economy of impression, I now turn to his ‘coinage’ in and from translations of Plutarch’s Lives.

Translating Plutarch, coining Coriolanus Coriolanus’ participation in a discourse of character and impression sheds light on the play’s relationship to Plutarchan narrative, which—I will show—has played an important role in the perceived value of the characterological imprint in Shakespeare, and in the theatrical marketplace that Coriolanus self-reflexively represents. If, as I have been suggesting, Coriolanus’ status as a ‘character’ is reinforced by his identity as one who stamps and is stamped, then it can also be linked to the play’s primary source-text, Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (1579), which Shakespeare probably consulted in its second edition of 1595 (Holland, Coriolanus 33). ­Marshall posits Plutarch’s Lives as crucial to ‘the evolution of the early modern concept of character or subjectivity’, claiming that Shakespeare’s dramatisation of Plutarchan narrative established ‘our culture’s prevailing model of character as one that is at once intensely performative and putatively interiorized’ (“Shakespeare” 74, 73). However, if our ‘prevailing model of character’ is not only performative and interiorized but also impressive, then linguistic and visual manifestations of ‘character’ in early modern translations of Plutarch’s Lives are revealing.

50  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ Plutarch’s figures were not identified as being or having ‘characters’ in Shakespeare’s lifetime: for North, Coriolanus and the others are rather ‘persones’ or ‘personages’, terms which suggested theatrical potential. But North’s translation of Plutarch’s reflection on the nature of his project at the beginning of the life of Alexander the Great returns us to ideas of character: [M]y intent is not to write histories, but onely liues. For, the noblest deedes do not alwayes shew mens vertues & vices, but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sporte makes mens naturall dispositions [êthos] & manners appeare more plaine, then the famous battels wonne …. For like as painters or drawers of pictures, which make no account of other partes of the body, do take resemblances of the face and fauour of the countenance, in the which consisteth the iudgement of their manners and disposition: euen so they must giue vs leaue to seeke out the signes and tokens of the minde onely. (Plutarch 1595, 717) The term North translates as ‘naturall dispositions’, êthos, did not come to be translated as ‘characters’ until much later. But the stated mission of seeking out ‘the signes and tokens of the minde’ resonates with plays that negotiate the relationship between inward and outward ‘character’ on the stage, and the analogy of painting or drawing portraits with special attention to ‘the face and fauour of the countenance’ anticipates the project of characterists.29 In John Evelyn’s 1693 translation of the life of Alexander, Plutarch’s aim lies not in seeking the mind’s signs and tokens, but ‘penetrating into, and describing the secret Recesses, and Images of the Soul’ (Plutarch 1693, 246). Plutarch here sounds like the Shakespeare admired by Dryden in the late seventeenth century, a dramatist believed to have privileged access to the depths of human nature: ‘Shakespear had an Vniversal mind, which comprehended all Characters and Passions’ (b3v). Shortly before Dryden may have provided editorial services for Henry Herringman during the production of Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio of 1685 (see Massai, “Taking just care”), he was involved in Jacob Tonson’s collaborative translation of Plutarch’s Lives, the first volume of which was prefaced by Dryden’s own “Life of Plutarch” (1683). This prefatory biography highlights the powerful effects or ‘impressions’ Plutarch’s penetrative characterisations could produce in the minds of readers. Dryden explains that biography is superior to historiography because ‘the vertues and actions of one Man … strike upon our minds a stronger and more lively impression, than the scatter’d Relations of many Men, and many actions’. For Dryden, Plutarch’s way of writing sets a moral stamp on readers that they take pleasure in receiving. And the pleasure lies in the intimacy of the encounter: [H]ere you are led into the private Lodgings of the Heroe: you see him in his undress, and are made Familiar with his most private actions and conversations … you see the poor reasonable Animal, as naked as ever nature made him. (Plutarch 1683, 90, 94)

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  51 Plutarch’s method of character construction, he suggests, is in fact a stripping away, a voyeuristic intimation of knowledge that oversteps the bounds of privacy, and this is what makes it impressive. It is no coincidence that this process of laying bare an inner or private life is what Shakespeare became celebrated for in the eighteenth century and beyond, or indeed that the Coriolanus of Shakespeare’s play seems so passionately to resist that process. The ‘stamp of Martius’ should emerge and make its mark on us through a process of penetrative characterisation, yet this is not the case. The language of impression found in Shakespeare’s play is absent from the “Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus”, but like each of the lives featured in North’s book, it begins with a coin-like image. 30 Printed below the title is an elaborately framed numismatic profile of an armoured man encircled by the legend ‘CORIOLANVS PA[TRICIVS] RO[MANVS]’, ‘Coriolanus the noble Roman’ (see Figure 2.1). This printed woodcut of a coin or medal stamp—what Plutarch and his contemporaries would

Figure 2.1  I mage of Coriolanus at the beginning of the “Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus” in the second edition of Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (London, 1595), 235.  RB 21400, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Image produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

52  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ call a kharaktêr—provides a visual context for the character Cominius recognises as having the ‘stamp of Martius’, and indeed for Menenius’ performance of charactery as he forges Coriolanus’ face into an inhuman and unresponsive profile through his prose description. We cannot know what kind of impression this kharaktêr made on Shakespeare, but it urges us to consider the ways in which characters are circulated between different literary contexts and incorporated into different value systems through source-work and adaptation. Shakespeare’s wide-­ ranging and—in the case of North’s t­ ranslation—extensive use of source materials in this play makes apparent his awareness that Coriolanus, first coined as a character in antiquity, had passed through many hands before his own (Livy, Dionysius, Plutarch and ­William Painter, to name but a few). In Shakespeare’s play, however, the coined becomes the coiner. ‘As for my country I have shed my blood, / Not fearing outward force’, Coriolanus asserts, ‘so shall my lungs / Coin words till their decay’ (III.i.78–80). This character apparently stamps words as well as wounds, minting language with each disdainful breath as if he were— in Zvi Jagendorf’s words—‘the hero of a one-man economy that boldly distinguishes itself from the market and the getting, spending, exchanging of ordinary men’ (464). But to whose profit does Coriolanus ‘Coin words’? Every syllable uttered by Coriolanus, however assertive of his autonomy, contributes to the linguistic economy of a play whose commercial success was partly dependent on its verbal riches, including the protagonist’s inventive insults and his many coinages, such as ‘under-crest’ (I.ix.70), ‘unaching’ (II.ii.147), ‘bewitchment’ (II.iii.99), ‘interjoin’ (IV.iv.22), ‘unmusical’ (IV.v.60), ‘virgined’ (V.iii.48), ‘unvulnerable’ (V.iii.73) and ‘counter-sealed’ (V.iii.205). 31 The representation of Coriolanus as a coin in North’s book is apt considering Shakespeare’s dramatisation may well have earned the King’s Men a pretty penny, especially given that it could have been staged at Blackfriars, their expensive new indoor playhouse. 32 Although Plutarch’s life of Coriolanus provided Shakespeare with the raw materials for his dramatic character, it was the dramatist and his company that transformed him into a money-maker in the theatre. First performed at around the same time Thomas Dekker dubbed the theatre ‘your poets’ Royal Exchange’ (Guls Horne-booke 27), Coriolanus poses important questions about the impact of theatre’s commercialisation on characterological identity and value. By seeking to exclude himself from a theatrical economy of impression on which the value of character depends, Coriolanus effectively marks himself out as a character who does not want to be a character, denying his parasitical dependency on the actor paid to play him. After the battle of Corioles, much of the play’s action is driven by Coriolanus’ desire to avoid having his noble worth circulated and judged in the ‘market-place’ (II.i.227; II.ii.158;

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  53 III.i.32, 113, 334; III.ii.94, 105, 132), a space which somehow doubles as the Roman forum and the early modern commercial stage itself. In order to analyse Coriolanus’ resistance to commodification and his unstable relationship with the actor playing him (who must, ironically, perform that resistance), I will now consider his theatrical impressiveness in relation to the metatheatrical representation of his wounds, the ‘marks of merit’ (II.iii.161) he is obliged to show in exchange for the ‘voices’ or votes of citizens he believes were ‘created / To buy and sell with groats’ (III.ii.9–10).

Metatheatrical impressions: Burbage’s ‘painting’ and the technology of wounds With its connections to discourses of character, psychophysiology and Plutarchan narrative, the technological language of impression in Coriolanus helps us to understand the significance of the long-established critical idea that character is—in Goldman’s words—‘an internal imprint we can carry away with us from the theater’, or—as Marshall puts it—‘an impression of subjective identity’. It is important to consider, however, exactly what makes Coriolanus and his wounds impressive in the theatre. In the second half of this chapter, I build on my contextualisation of the relationship between character and imprinting by analysing how Coriolanus self-reflexively interrogates the processes by which the value of the characterological imprint is communicated in commercial theatre. Focusing on wounds and then silence as metatheatrical devices available to Richard Burbage, whose celebrity has a role in the economy of impression, I show that the play both advertises and seems to withhold the ‘stamp of Martius’ in order to inflate its dramatic value for paying audience members, who are encouraged to believe they have a contractual right to access Coriolanus’ character and feel the imprint of humanity. In its focus on impressions made and denied in theatricalized spaces, the play not only makes impressions on audiences but gives them impressions of the manner in which those impressions are given. As such, the play has the potential to make its mark on audiences not by exposing a universal humanity beneath Coriolanus’ resistant surface, but rather by exposing the technology of theatrical impression essential to the production and marketing of ‘character’ in the early modern commercial theatre. So often central to analyses of Coriolanus, the protagonist’s wounds have made their mark on critics, who tend to see them as key to understanding his character. In particular, psychoanalytical critics have read the injuries as tokens of repressed or concealed shame, vulnerability, dependence and femininity. 33 Whether or not we agree with these readings, the importance of the wounds cannot be denied. Shakespeare conspicuously departs from Plutarch in having Coriolanus refuse to show

54  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ his scars in the marketplace (Plutarch 1595, 244), and the wounds are spoken about obsessively (even fetishistically) by Volumnia, Menenius and the people, as exemplified by the third citizen’s graphic image: ‘[I]f he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues in those wounds and speak for them’ (II.iii.5–7). Marshall argues that Coriolanus’ attempt to ‘halt the process of signification’ by resisting the wounds’ exposure enables audiences and critics to recognise his ‘characterological presence and plenitude’, as they speculatively ‘assign Martius’ motivation for his refusal, granting him an inner dimension of considered action’ (“Wound-man” 96, 95, 103). However, thinking beyond Marshall’s semiotic investigation into how Coriolanus’ wounds (and the interiority they suggest) signify in the theatre, we need to consider how the play uses wounds to ask questions about the commercial theatre of the early seventeenth century, and more specifically the commercial theatre’s technology of impression. In the theatrical marketplace, value for money depended on audiences’ experience of psychophysiological impressions, the imprints of heart and mind condemned by Stephen Gosson and Philip Stubbes and celebrated by defenders of theatre: ‘What can sooner print modesty in the souls of the wanton’, asks Thomas Heywood in An Apology for Actors (1612), ‘than by discovering unto them the monstrousness of their sin?’ (Pollard 244). If the imprint of character is now valued by Goldman and like-minded theatregoers as ‘the basic currency of all great drama’, in Coriolanus it cannot be separated from the protagonist’s bodily imprints, whose worth depends on their capacity to impress an internal audience of citizens in the Roman marketplace and—by ­implication—external audiences in a theatrical marketplace sustained by an economy of impression. Although often read as signs which threaten to reveal ‘that he too is human, a creature of flesh and blood’ (Hatlen 401), or even as ‘tokens’ or ‘gateways’ to ‘the mysterious inner self’ (Marshall, “Wound-man” 100), the play frames the wounds as a theatrical technology. They are a metatheatrical device which urges contemplation not of what makes us human, but of what makes a character impressive in a commercial theatre that trades in humanity as a technological product. Coriolanus’ imprinted wounds are central to the metatheatricality of a play which repeatedly urges the audience to think about the relationship between Coriolanus and the actor playing him, and more specifically the actor for whom the part was almost certainly written, Richard Burbage.34 Coriolanus’ disgust at the idea of pretending to be someone he is not often manifests in theatrical language, which casts the marketplace as a kind of stage. ‘It is a part / That I shall blush in acting’ (II.ii.143– 44), he says of the ritual of showing his wounds to the people in the marketplace. And when he is later told by his mother to return and apologise

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  55 to the people, he declares: ‘You have put me now to such a part which never  / I shall discharge to th’ life’ (III.ii.107–8). The irony that these words were in all probability spoken by Burbage, widely celebrated as being—along with Edward Alleyn—the most talented and recognisable tragic actor of his day, would not have been lost on early seventeenth-­ century audiences. All the more so if we accept Eve Rachele Sanders’ argument that, in denouncing role-playing, Coriolanus ‘rehearses all the stock arguments of the antitheatrical pamphleteers in order to defend an essentialist stance’ (391). He objects to acting on the grounds that he might be somehow contaminated by the part he plays, or ‘surcease to honour mine own truth, / And by my body’s action teach my mind / A most inherent baseness’ (III.ii.123–25). ­Coriolanus believes that acting will feminise, infantilise and debase him, causing him to experience an irreversible transformation (see especially III.ii.112–21). ‘Would you have me / False to my nature?’ he asks Volumnia, ‘Rather say I play / The man I am’ (III.ii.14–16). Here Coriolanus means he wishes only to be his true self, but the lines suggest that his entire identity, and in particular his masculinity, is nothing more than a performance. 35 Such language plays with the audience’s consciousness of the permeable or penetrable boundary that separates character and actor, and the protectiveness that Coriolanus/Burbage shows towards his wounds relates to anxiety about the integrity of that boundary. For Marshall, Coriolanus’ theatrical metaphors suggest that ‘[t]he splitting off of the theatrical other, the “part” to be played or rejected, defines the characterological self’ (“Woundman” 104–6), but from another perspective the commercial success of Burbage’s ‘part’ lay in his ability to negotiate between his theatrical self and the characterological other. The protagonist’s body is the site of this tension and confusion between actor and character. While actors are often said to ‘inhabit’ or ‘embody’ characters, the play’s complex representation of corporeal agency and ownership urges us to question who is inhabiting whom. And indeed who is imprinting whom: we might think of Burbage as making his transformative mark on Hieronimo, Hamlet and other popular characters, but Coriolanus also highlights Burbage’s vulnerability to—in John Rainolds’ phrase—the ‘marvelous impression’ that imitating characters makes on actors. In response to questions it raises about the relationship between actor and character, the play encourages us to look for answers in the wounds imprinted on the body they share. The impressiveness of Coriolanus’ wounds, as experienced by the audience both visually and linguistically, is mediated by what Paul Menzer calls ‘the technology of the actor’s body’ (143). The representation of the body shared by actor and character as pierced or wounded disrupts the relationship between an actor’s knowable outside and a character’s unknowable inside, and the technological status of Coriolanus’ wounds

56  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ as imprints suggests their potential to reveal his internal impressions, the inner ‘stamp of Martius’. Blood would seem to be a powerful agent of transmission for this stamp: for Cominius on the battlefield, the ‘stamp of Martius’ is—in part at least—the blood that covers him. We might see onstage bleeding as impressive because of what it implies about identity leakage between actor and character in a play whose protagonist could be said to haemorrhage character despite himself. The body which seems to bleed, or to have bled, is indicative of a fluidity or rupture between the identities of actor and character. For actors, this meant stage blood could facilitate convincing personation. If contemporary tributes are anything to go by, Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage were—among other things—great bleeders. When Thomas Nashe in Pierce Penniless (1592) celebrated that playgoers could watch the wounded Talbot on the stage and, ‘in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding’ (The Unfortunate Traveller, and Other Works 113), he was probably indirectly praising Alleyn, lead actor of the Strange’s Men when they performed 1 Henry VI in c. 1592 (Foakes 16). Similarly, Burbage was described in an anonymous elegy on his death in 1619 as being able to play a part ‘So lively that spectators … / …, whilst he but seem’d to bleed, / Amazed, thought even then he died in deed’ (Wickham et al. 182). While the illusion would have been largely produced by the speech, gesture and expression of Alleyn and Burbage, the accounts identify stage blood as a medium of characterological representation, and therefore something essential to the cognitive transaction and exchange of impressions that took place between actor and playgoer. To put it another way, the technology of the stage facilitated the artistic processes or techniques by which the actors brought characters to life (ironically, in these cases, by killing characters off). The metatheatrical framing of Coriolanus’ blood, however, demarcates the ‘stamp of Martius’ as performative in nature, exposing the impact of stage blood on audiences as a counterfeit impression indebted to the machinery and special effects of commercial theatre. The blood that covers Coriolanus is described as a vizard that has ‘masked’ him (I.viii.11) and a cloak or garment that has ‘mantled’ him (I.vi.29). 36 Most strangely, Coriolanus himself calls the blood ‘this painting / Wherein you see me smeared’ (I.vi.68–69). While Marshall has argued that the character’s bloody exhibitionism grants the audience ‘visual intimacy and hence … a knowledge of Martius that is subsequently denied to the plebeians in the marketplace’ (“Wound-man” 107), Andrea Stevens has shown that Coriolanus is actually represented as wearing his blood as a kind of costume that conceals rather than reveals. For Stevens, Coriolanus’ reference to his blood as ‘painting’ alludes to use of paint or ­water-soluble pigments to represent blood on the early modern stage. Thus, Coriolanus undermines stage blood’s association with realism and

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  57 ‘severs [it] from its relationship to vulnerability and … sympathetic identification’ (52). Despite their disagreement, both Marshall and Stevens implicitly suggest Coriolanus’ blood is instrumental to how he makes his mark on audiences in search of the imprint of character. Unconsciously echoing Marshall’s ‘impression of subjective identity’, Stevens works towards the conclusion that the language and spectacle of the bloody protagonist produce ‘the theatrical impression of interiority’ (64), gesturing towards the man behind the painted mask.37 From a certain perspective, the man behind the painted mask (both the persona and the bloody vizard) was Richard Burbage, and—as a portraitist as well as an actor—painting was Burbage’s thing. Burbage seems to have been the model for Webster’s character sketch of “An Excellent Actor”, included in the sixth edition of Overbury’s Characters (1615), which celebrates the illusion of the player’s artistry (‘what we see him personate, we think truly done before us’), but also alludes to Burbage’s talent for painting (with an additional suggestion of cosmetics): ‘He is much affected to painting, and ’tis a question whether that make him an excellent player or his playing an exquisite painter’ (Beecher 277).38 If Burbage’s mimetic skill of personation is like the art of painting, then so too is Webster’s verbal portraiture. 39 Webster was not necessarily thinking of Burbage as Coriolanus, but the painting reference resonates with both Menenius’ characterism of Coriolanus as the merciless conqueror (‘I paint him in the character’) and the gruesome warrior at the battle of Corioli, who uses stage blood to paint himself in the character, communicating ‘the theatrical impression of interiority’ on the stage of the battlefield. Whether or not Coriolanus’ reference to his blood as ‘painting’ gestures towards the painter/actor Burbage’s personation of him, it is apparent that for the protagonist blood (as mask and mantle) facilitates theatrical agency, enabling him to perform his hypermasculine identity as ‘a thing of blood’ (II.ii.107). For Lois Potter, the blood can be read as a protective disguise: Dressed in his own blood as in a costume, he does not show his wounds to the audience any more than to the Roman populace, and, in this double-bluff, it is his refusal to show them that makes them real. (119) But to what extent can we say that Coriolanus’ wounds are ‘real’? Whereas the protagonist revels in the theatrical agency of his blood on the battlefield, he is horrified at the thought that he must treat his wounds in the same way in the marketplace to make a commoditised impression on the ‘many-headed multitude’ (II.iii.15–16). The ‘price o’th’ consulship’ (II.iii.72–73) is to perform two tasks for the citizens: he must show them his wounds and speak courteously of his service,

58  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ theatrically supplementing wounds with words. Having declared to the senate that ‘It is a part / That I shall blush in acting’, Coriolanus snarls at the thought that he is obliged To brag unto them “Thus I did, and thus”, Show them th’ unaching scars which I should hide, As if I had received them for the hire Of their breath only! (II.ii.146–49) Here Coriolanus performs his performance, as it were, anticipating Volumnia’s later ‘Action is eloquence’ speech: ‘Go to them, with this bonnet in thy hand, / And thus far having stretched it…’, and so on (III.ii.74–87). Sanders contends that with the deictic expression ‘Thus I did, and thus’, Coriolanus ‘imagines an exchange in which he uses those marks as a visual aid to accompany a sales pitch about himself to the crowd’, a scenario in which ‘the scars are no longer the sign of something real (his deeds in war) but of something unreal (feats the audience is deceived into believing he performed “for the hire / Of their breath”)’ (399). Coriolanus fears that showing his wounds and talking about them publicly in return for the people’s voices or ‘breath’ (we might remember that the commercial success of dramatists and actors depended on the ‘breath’ of audiences)40 will somehow make the wounds unreal, transforming them into stage properties and debasing the ‘stamp of Martius’. The irony is that if Burbage did show ‘unaching scars’, they would have to be props. Although it is not clear how wounds and scars were staged, it is evident that they were. The prologue to the 1616 Folio text of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour (first performed 1598) even indicates that scars were staged differently to wounds. During a critique of playwrights who over-rely on the technology of the stage to entertain audiences (rolling cannonballs, rumbling drums, exploding fireworks, etc.), the prologue mocks actors who with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars, And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars. (Prologue.9–12) In this reference to plays about the War of the Roses (including Shakespeare’s), the prologue alludes to backstage methods by which actors create an illusion of cicatrization. The technology of the stage parallels the technology of actual wound-healing techniques, through which real wounds could be ‘brought to’ (i.e. transformed into) scars.41 Relying on not medicine but artifice, actors functioned as their own physicians

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  59 as they transformed wounds into scars, and—as Jonson laments—such illusions provided entertainment for audiences of plays written to ‘purchase’ their ‘delight’ (Prologue.5). Coriolanus withholds this type of entertainment. While the protagonist is clearly concerned about his wounds’ transformation into scars, he has a private sense of healing and bodily self-ownership that conflicts with a public or even commercial desire for ‘large cicatrices to show the people’ (II.i.144), as Volumnia puts it. Coriolanus tells the citizens he has ‘wounds to show you which shall be yours in private’ (II.iii.75–76), but if internal or external audiences are expecting to be—as Dryden puts it in his “Life of Plutarch”—‘led into the private Lodgings of the Heroe’, they are left sorely disappointed. Crucially, Coriolanus also resists a public desire for talk of his scars, telling the senate ‘I had rather have my wounds to heal again / Than hear say how I got them’ (II.ii.67–68). His anxieties about public ceremonies and displays that might in some way interrupt the transformation of his open, bleeding wounds into closed, unbleeding scars reflect the potential anxieties of playwrights and actors about exhibiting wounds to audiences. Because the play was likely staged at Blackfriars, a smaller theatre than outdoor playhouses like the Globe, and one where audience members paid extra for proximity, any fake scars would probably have been highly visible to many spectators. If gallants sitting on the stage at indoor performances were—as Thomas Dekker claimed—close enough to ‘examine the play-suits lace, and perhaps win wagers upon laying tis copper [rather than gold]’ (Guls Horne-booke 29), they would have had ample opportunity to inspect (and mock) counterfeit scars. But because Coriolanus refuses to exhibit what he claims are ‘Scars to move laughter only’ (III.iii.50), Burbage would not have given himself fake scars in the tiring-house. Just as the citizens and the audience share an identity because they are both denied visual proof that Coriolanus is really wounded, the character and actor are bound by the fact that they cannot show their wounds. ‘I cannot’, declares the protagonist, ‘Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them / For my wounds’ sake to give their suffrage’ (II.ii.135–37). Neither can Burbage, for he lacks physically what the character lacks psychologically: the ability to show wounds. Appropriating W.B. Worthen’s term, Marshall suggests that Coriolanus’ injuries present a ‘seam’ between actor and character, ‘testifying at once to the artifice of the stage and to the felt subjectivity of the character’ (“Wound-man” 101), but it is the absence of wounds on Burbage’s body that threatens to expose the artificiality of his transformation into Coriolanus. The play urges us to view the wounds not as a ‘seam’ but a ‘stamp’, a mark which—despite its potential signification of ­authenticity—suggests the possibility that Coriolanus is an authorised and reproducible product, a hallmarked commodity created by external agencies for the theatrical marketplace. Coriolanus’ resistance to the exposure of this ‘stamp’ in order to retain a sense of his own agency

60  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ complicates his impressiveness as a character. Paradoxically, Burbage’s performance as the character, which impresses the audience, is sustained by the character’s refusal to put on an act that will impress the citizens.

Sealing knowledge: the theatrical contract and the imprint of silence What is at stake in Coriolanus’ failed performance in the marketplace, and Burbage’s performance of that failure, is the contract or bond— between consul and voting citizens, actor and paying audience—that depends on knowledge-exchange and cognitive impressions. In this final section, I show that Coriolanus’ stamp-like wounds manipulate the audience’s contractual expectation of those impressions, before investigating the role of silence in the intercession scene (V.iii), in which the audience’s experience of the characterological imprint is once again mediated by ideas of failed performance and resistance to transactions promised by the theatrical contract. Like Coriolanus’ wounds, I argue, his silences are metatheatrical devices used to expose the technology of theatrical impression and negotiate the value of the ‘stamp of Martius’ in the theatrical marketplace. Coriolanus’ scars have the capacity to impress the citizens in a manner comparable to how—according to contemporary writings—actors’ personations made psychophysiological impressions on audiences. Once cicatrized into a scar, perhaps even one that stands out from the body’s surface, a wound is not just an impression but also a stamp that can make impressions of its own. But Coriolanus, unwilling to circulate the ‘stamp of Martius’, declines to impress the citizens by displaying his wounds: CITIZEN:  You have received many wounds for your country. CORIOLANUS:  I will not seal your knowledge with showing them.

I will make much of your voices, and so trouble you no farther. (II iii.102–6)

Here ‘seal’ means ‘confirm’ (as at III.i.143), but it retains its literal meaning of ‘place a seal upon (a document) as evidence of genuineness, or as a mark of authoritative ratification or approval’ (OED v.1 1a). The word anticipates the literal seal-impressions of contract and confirmation that Coriolanus will refer to later in the play: the ‘counter-seal[]’ (V.iii.206) that ratifies his pledge not to attack Rome and the staged ‘seal o’th’ Senate’ (V.vi.83) on the peace treaty he orchestrates between the Romans and the Volscians. Indeed, the seal Coriolanus refuses to make in the marketplace is not necessarily metaphorical. By showing his wounds, Coriolanus would—according to the physiological belief, discussed in Chapter 1, that sight ‘printeth things in a man’s memory’—be making a literal impression on the minds of the citizens. It was believed that

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  61 ‘knowledge’ actually could be impressed, and the scars’ technological status as stamps reinforces this idea. Coriolanus is content to aggressively stamp wounds and words that assert his masculine dominance and autonomy as a technological entity, but sealing the citizens’ knowledge by showing his wounds and theatrically ‘counterfeit[ing] the bewitchment of some popular man’ (II.iii.99–100) is something he cannot do. To use his wounds as seal- or coin-like tokens of value in the marketplace would involve forming a perverse economic bond or contract, pledging a loyalty that does not exist. Unlike Menenius, who claims he has ‘almost stamped the leasing [i.e. falsehood]’ (V.ii.23) in praise of the protagonist, Coriolanus is not willing to make a counterfeit impression. Of course, making counterfeit impressions is exactly what audiences expected actors to do. Denying that expectation jeopardises the value of cognitive transactions promised by the actor-­audience contract of commercial theatre, a contract which playgoers—as the Scrivener reminds us in the induction to Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1631; first performed 1614)—had to ‘put to [their] seals’ by handing over money before the play began (Induction.114–15). The wounds’ concealment frustrates the citizens’ desires (‘no man saw ’em’ (II.iii.162) they shout in unison), but the audience is also frustrated, left wanting more. Just as the citizens feel cheated at not being shown the wounds in exchange for their ‘voices’, paying spectators might well have felt cheated at not being shown artificial wounds. In the Roman marketplace, the wounds are ‘currency in a political/economic exchange that breeds votes in return for a certain amount of nakedness and verbal display’ (Jagendorf 465). In the theatrical marketplace, they are tokens of interiority whose exposure and exposition have been anticipated as sealing the audience’s knowledge of a man cast as an unattainable and impenetrable object of desire, a character not ‘known well enough’. Primed to view the wounds as a form of legible shorthand or ‘charactery’ expressing Coriolanus’ inner worth by ‘marks of merit’, the audience is denied not only the chance to view the semiotic markings that denote his dramatic character, but also the opportunity to have their hearts and minds—in the words of Philip Stubbes—‘pierce[d]’ and ‘print[ed]’ by that character. Paradoxically, the audience’s impression of the character is a response to language and action which mark him out as unwilling to commit to a characterological transaction, as unwilling to make an impression. The protagonist, then, is prepared to give and receive wound-­ impressions while fighting on the battlefield, but not while acting in the marketplace. However, Coriolanus does eventually yield to impressions in a context that he recognises as theatrical. During the metatheatrical intercession scene, in which Coriolanus is persuaded not to destroy Rome by his mother, his wife, his son and Valeria, the ­protagonist takes on the role of both actor and spectator (Sanders 406–8). Having greeted his wife Virgilia, the moved Coriolanus represents himself as an actor

62  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ who cannot remember his lines: ‘Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my part, and I am out / Even to a full disgrace’ (V.iii.40–42). And following his capitulation, he declares that ‘the heavens do ope, / The gods look down, and this unnatural scene / They laugh at’ (V.iii.184–6). In between these two moments, however, Coriolanus gives Volumnia audience in a public forum (alongside Aufidius and other Volscians), watching as she theatrically ‘delivers a powerful series of formal speeches, and guides the movements of the supplicants to achieve maximum effect’ (Sanders 406). Coriolanus is an onstage spectator, and the audience sees his heart deeply pierced and printed by the performance put on for him. Whereas before Coriolanus has received impressions only in order to reinforce his identity as an invulnerable machine, this theatrical experience apparently causes him to soften and receive impressions in sign of his humanity, behaving like the earth on which he kneels to make an ‘impression’ in sign of ‘deep duty’ to his mother at the beginning of the scene (V.iii.50–52), and the wax of ‘the seal o’th’ Senate’ that later confirms his capitulation. He yields to these impressions primarily because of Volumnia, who performs ‘a mother’s part’ (V.iii.169) with great effectiveness, transforming Coriolanus from a hard-hearted warrior to a tender-hearted ‘boy of tears’ (V.vi.103). What Coriolanus’ seeming transformation and emotional impressionability does to an audience’s perception of his character depends on the actor’s performance, and particularly his actions, gestures and expressions during Volumnia’s long speeches. While this is often read as a scene in which Coriolanus discovers or reveals his humanity,42 our experience as an audience is determined by the technology of the actor’s body as it performs that humanity, and the metatheatricality of the scene does not allow us to forget how instrumental the actor is. If the ‘stamp of Martius’ makes its mark, it is a stamp conspicuously wielded by Burbage as he artfully lets his mask slip, exposing characterisation as an impressive technology of commercial theatre, and as central to the transactions promised by the theatrical contract. The imprint of Coriolanus’ character in this scene is textured not just by metatheatre, but also by charactery. The hard-hearted character that Burbage personates at the beginning of V.iii is also represented by the character sketch Menenius ‘paints’ in the following scene. ‘When he walks’, says Menenius, ‘he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading’ (V.iv.18–20). Burbage also had to behave ‘like an engine’, not just because the protagonist is represented as a war-machine throughout the play, but also because the actor’s body is an elaborate mechanism expected to move and speak in the right way and at the right moment in order to achieve dramatic effects. The character Menenius paints—that of the merciless conqueror— is unperformable (how does an actor make his face so ‘tart’ that it ‘sours ripe grapes’?), but so too is the part Coriolanus has given himself as he prepares to ‘stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  63 other kin’ (V.iii.35–37). Herein lies the paradox of the scene: as in II.iii, the actor must deliver an impression of Coriolanus’ character to the audience by skilfully performing a botched performance. Crucial to this process are two apparently scripted silences that may not have been immediately interpreted in the theatre as scripted. The first is during Coriolanus’ first exchange with his wife Virgilia, referred to earlier in the play as his ‘gracious silence’ (II.i.170): CORIOLANUS:  These eyes are not the same I wore in VIRGILIA:  The sorrow that delivers us thus changed

Rome.

Makes you think so. CORIOLANUS:

Like a dull actor now I have forgot my part, and I am out Even to a full disgrace. Best of my flesh, Forgive my tyranny but… (V.iii.38–44)

In most modern editions, Virgilia and Coriolanus share a line. The First Folio, however, starts a new line with ‘Like a dull actor now…’, allowing the possibility of a significant pause after Virgilia’s incomplete line.43 Coriolanus’ statement about being ‘out’ may well be an aside (Brockbank 288n), and therefore a rare example of the protagonist directly addressing the audience. If held long enough, the pause has the potential to prompt audience members to think that the actor may have forgotten his lines before he turns to them and speaks as the character about exactly that scenario.44 The moment is theatrically impressive both because it gives us what Ros King calls an ‘excruciating silence between husband and wife’ (159), and because it opens up a traumatic space between speechless character and apparently ‘dried up’ actor. The audience form an impression of a man in the real-life situation of forgetting his lines until—speaking directly to the audience as ­Coriolanus—he forces them to recognise that impression as applicable to the character’s situation in the world of the play. Their experience of the character’s apparent introspection, in effect, is an impression of an impression. The silence between Coriolanus and Virgilia anticipates the silence between him and his mother when he finally capitulates, which is marked in the First Folio by an unusual stage direction: VOLUMNIA:  I

am hushed until our city be afire And then I’ll speak a little. ([He] holds her by the hand, silent.) CORIOLANUS: O, mother, mother! What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope, The gods look down and this unnatural scene They laugh at. (5.3.181– 85)

64  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ Again, we have a scripted silence followed by theatrical language, this time referring to an audience of Homeric laughing gods. The actual audience are forced to read Coriolanus’ private thoughts and emotions in the actor’s physical gestures (especially his holding of Volumnia’s hand) and facial expressions.45 At Blackfriars, Burbage’s illuminated and perhaps tear-stained46 face could have functioned as a legible ‘character’ and—in Menenius’ phrase—a seeming map of Coriolanus’ microcosm. For many, the moment of capitulation serves as emotional payoff for an audience who have long been starved of signs of sympathetic vulnerability and humanity.47 For those in search of a characterological imprint, the silence and emotional outburst can deliver a potent impression, a sense that Coriolanus is finally opening up and showing—in Bradley’s phrase—‘the stuff we find within ourselves’. But there is a question as to whether the character they are given access to is the same as the character that has shut them out over the course of the play, especially given Coriolanus’ earlier comparison of his wavering resolution to the uncertainty of an actor ‘out’ of his ‘part’. The silence after Volumnia’s final speech is an opportunity for the actor both to communicate characterological ‘depth’ and to heighten the audience’s awareness of his own presence. Prompted to perform the vulnerability and impressionability of a character whose identity has been largely constructed by concealed woundedness, the actor is able to seal the audience’s knowledge of the character with authority, but he can also do so through an apparent loss of control which aligns him with the character’s vulnerability. The longer the silence, the more likely audience members are to think the man they are looking at is not Coriolanus but a fallible actor who is ‘out / Even to a full disgrace’.48 It is a metatheatrical silence that facilitates the audience’s engagement with both the concealed humanity of the character, and the technical skill (or perceived incompetence) of the actor performing that humanity. If the audience finally has their knowledge sealed by the inner ‘stamp of Martius’ as he melts into a ‘boy of tears’, the moment does not erase the identity of the actor who makes that impression, a point reinforced by Coriolanus’ metatheatrical reference to ‘this unnatural scene’. It is a moment in which the audience might feel the characterological impression many of them have paid for as part of a theatrical contract, what Goldman calls ‘the internal imprint we can carry away with us from the theater’, but it is also a moment that shows them the stamp which makes characterisation possible. In investigating how the ‘stamp of Martius’ is valued, withheld and transmitted in Coriolanus, this chapter has argued that the technological language of impression is central to the play’s self-reflexive interrogation of theatrical affect and characterological identity in the early modern commercial theatre. Coriolanus’ imprinted wounds are not so much signs of humanity as stamps with the technological capacity to deliver an impression of humanity. In communicating the value of the

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  65 characterological imprint, the wounds mark him out as a theatrical commodity to be consumed in a contracted economic transaction by the audience, who are repeatedly urged to contemplate their own impressions by the play’s metatheatrical devices. Although it continues to be marginalised by character criticism, Coriolanus participated in the formation of discourses that are still crucial to how audiences and critics understand characterisation, a process inflected by its technological and material origins in the imprint. Today, ‘character’ is associated more with humanity than technology, but Coriolanus uses the concept of the imprint to connect the craft of play-making and the machinery of the stage to what Charles Lamb in the early nineteenth century—dismissing the materiality of performance—called the ‘internal machinery of the character’ (Coldwell 41). The game Coriolanus plays with the exposure of imprinted wounds, and later with silence, critiques the very processes by which audiences and critics try to procure an impression of character depth and seal their knowledge of a universal humanity. That these concepts remain central to the cultural value of the Shakespeare ‘brand’, another term rooted in concepts of impression,49 makes the character who stamps and is stamped in the theatre a poignant figure for understanding Shakespeare’s impressiveness and impressionability as a cultural phenomenon. In the next chapter, I turn to another impression advertised by Shakespearean drama and sought by audiences and critics: the transformative imprint of poetry.

Notes 1 This is the definition of ‘stamp’ for which these lines are cited in OED (n. 3 13f). 2 Holland notes that ‘stamp’ is used in such a way that ‘the image shifts across the word from being a flayed figure who may have suffered at the hands of Martius, bearing his stamp, to Martius himself who carries his own impress’ (Coriolanus, 198n). 3 On Coriolanus as a technological entity, see Sawday. 4 See, respectively, Adelman, Jagendorf and Sanders. 5 Mousley, for example, argues that the wounds are central to a ‘universalising effect’ in which the play ‘brings Coriolanus down to earth and forces him to recognise his “only human” needs and vulnerabilities’ (115, 128). 6 ‘Transaction’ is also a key term for Burns, who defines character as a ‘transaction’ or ‘creative perception, which constructs both observer and observed as its subjects’ (2). 7 On the key figures and priorities of new character criticism, see Yachnin and Slights, “Introduction”, and Ko. 8 For Emma Smith, Coriolanus illustrates Shakespearean tragedy’s concern as a genre with ‘the contingent, mobile, and evasive notion of “character” itself’ because the play resists all means by which ‘dramatic identity might be secured—through family, through social position, through soliloquy, through naming, through contrast with the other, through consistent action, through self-knowledge’ (“Character” 103).

66  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ 9 On Maurice Morgann’s combination of the language of character with the language of impression in his Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (London, 1777), see Burns 193–98. For A.C. Bradley in the early twentieth century, the ‘greatness of the tragic hero’ has a distinct connection to ‘the centre of the tragic impression’ (14). In the 1970s, E.A.J. Honigmann championed Shakespeare’s ‘impressionistic devices’ of characterisation (4). A more recent example is Yu Kin Ko’s reference to the ‘hallmarks of Hamlet’s singular character’ (10). 10 My explanation of kharaktêr as a term is primarily informed by OED character n. Etymology; Burns, especially 5–6, 30–34; and Diggle 4–5. 11 On Theophrastan character-writing, see Diggle’s edition, and Smeed. 12 For detailed discussion of the semantic shifts of ‘character’, see Rorty. On Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ use of ‘character’ and related terms, and the implications for how we think about character today, see Palfrey 240–49, and Goldberg, “Shakespearean Characters”. 13 See Neill, “A book”, where he discusses the relationship between character, faces and emotion in early modern theatre, considering the significance of the language of impression. 14 On the language of character and impression in Hamlet, see Burns 8–10 and 132–55. 15 Also see Magnusson. OED misleadingly dates the first use of ‘character’ in this sense to 1645 (n. 12a). 16 For more on character-writing in early modern England, see Smeed 1–46, and Bos, especially 148ff. 17 The title of the first edition of 1614 was A Wife now the Widow of Sir Thomas Ouerburie … Whereunto are added Many Witty Characters, and Conceyted Newes; Written by Himselfe, and Other Learned Gentlemen his Friendes. See Beecher 11–15, 104–8, 395 on the print history of the volume. 18 OED charactery n. 2; characterism n. 3; characterist n. 1. 19 Holland (Coriolanus 219n) and Neill (“A book” 251), respectively, interpret ‘character’ as meaning character sketch and face, but I would suggest the word signifies both of these. 20 OED n. charactery 1a, 1b; character n. 3c. The quotation is from the full title of Timothe Bright’s manual Characterie (1588). I would like to thank Tiffany Stern for encouraging me to explore the significance of this sense of ‘charactery’. 21 “What a Character Is” (Beecher 293). 22 See Karen Newman, “Charactery” (Essaying Shakespeare 111–22); Christy Desmet, “Persistence” 50–52; and Beecher 49–50, 51–54. 23 See McCabe. The published playtexts of Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) and The New Inn (1631) are prefaced by lists of dramatis personae which introduce the ‘persons’ and ‘actors’ of the plays through short, satirical prose sketches identified as ‘character[s]’ and ‘characterism[s]’. 24 These plays include John Day’s Isle of Gulls (first performed and published 1606), Induction, A2v, Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607; first performed 1606) I.i.5, and Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (first performed and published 1611) Prologue.26, as well as the Webster examples that follow in the next note. 25 It is generally accepted that Webster authored over thirty characters for the sixth edition of Overbury’s Characters in 1615. See New Characters in Webster, vol. 3, 439–533. Antonio’s characterisms of the Duchess and her brothers towards the beginning of The Duchess of Malfi (1623; first performed c.1614, I.i.142–97), which delineate each sibling’s ‘inward

‘[T]he stamp of Martius’  67

26 27 28

29

30

31 32 33

34 35

36

37

Character’ (I.ii.147), are framed by the image of ‘three fair Medalls / Cast in one figure, of so different temper’ (I.ii.176–77). The description recalls Joseph Hall’s medal metaphor (‘who saw the medals, might know the face’), although the point is that the stamped form of the human face—an ‘outward character’—can actually disguise one’s true nature or ‘temper’. Also see The White Devil III.ii.78–102 (first performed and published 1612). Citations of Webster’s plays refer to Webster, vol. 1. Some critics have been particularly eager to distance Shakespearean characterisation from early seventeenth-century charactery. See, for example, Palfrey 241–42. See, for example, Bourassa. My definition of characters as commodities inscribed by their exchange value is influenced by Arjun Appadurai’s anthropological theory of ‘the social life of things’. A recent exception to the critical neglect of the concept of character as theatrical commodity or commoditised theatrical process is Preiss, “Interiority”. Preiss explores the idea that dramatic interiority was ‘a site-specific technology’ (48) closely related to the use of enclosed playhouses charging standard admission from the 1570s onwards. The claim that Plutarch was familiar with Theophrastus’ Kharaktíres ‘cannot be substantiated’ (Diggle 26 and n77), but Plutarch’s historical characters bear some resemblance to Theophrastan characters, and his interest in êthos is significant given that—as Burns notes—‘Diogenes Laertius labelled the Theophrastan ‘characters’ ethikoi characteres, that is, characters dealing with ethos’ (34). On the bibliographical tradition of using numismatic images to illustrate the lives of Roman emperors, empresses and their families, or kings, queens and other great personages, see Cunnally, especially Ch. 6 (52–69) and Ch. 9 (95–104); and Swann 110–12. I would like to thank Barrie Cook, Curator of Medieval and Early Modern Coinage at the British Museum, for bringing this tradition to my attention. See OED undercrest v.; unaching adj.; bewitchment n. 1; interjoin v.; unmusical adj. 2; virgin n. and adj., Derivatives v.; unvulnerable adj.; counterseal v. On the cases for and against Coriolanus being a Blackfriars play, see the introduction to Holland’s edition (Coriolanus 73–77). See especially Adelman, and Sprengnether. Readings of the wounds as tokens of femininity rest in part on the bawdy connotations of words like ‘cut’, ‘sore’ and ‘wound’. For many critics, while Coriolanus’ wounds should be signs of masculine dominance and strength (‘Every gash was an enemy’s grave’ (II.i.152), proclaims Menenius), they have the potential to ‘evoke the female aperture’ (Kahn 153). On the probability that the part of Coriolanus was written for and played by Burbage, see van Es 113–14, 237–38. See, for example, Kahn 154–55. It is not just the political arena that is theatricalized. General Cominius’ eulogy before the senate represents the battlefield as a stage on which Coriolanus has always confidently acted out his role as a manly warrior. He describes Coriolanus during his first battle at the age of sixteen as if he were a boy actor: ‘In that day’s feats, / When he might act the woman in the scene / He proved the best man i’th’ field’ (II.ii.93–5). Hester Lees-Jeffries suggests Coriolanus would have been literally as well as metaphorically ‘mantled’ in blood, with the actor wearing ‘a garment—a shirt, perhaps—saturated in blood’ (66), anticipating his ‘gown of humility’ (II.iii.39), another ‘surrogate skin’ he wears in the marketplace (74–75). For more on how blood may have been staged in the early modern period, see Munro, “Stage Blood and Body Parts”.

68  ‘[T]he stamp of Martius’ 38 On the link to Burbage, see Beecher 378n186, and Webster, vol. 3, 448 and 527n12–13. 39 On portraiture as a common analogy for acting, rhetoric and charactery, see Burns 123–24. 40 See, for example, Prospero’s solicitation of the audience’s ‘Gentle breath’ at the end of The Tempest (Epilogue.11–13). 41 Konrad Gesner’s The Newe Jewell of Health (1576), for example, recommends an oil compound ‘which auayleth & cureth by a marueylous maner woundes, … in that it closeth them, and bringeth those to a scarre’ (V5r). 42 See, for example, Sawday 163. 43 The significance of the First Folio’s lineation here is discussed by Ros King (158–59). 4 4 For Arbery, the silence means that ‘the audience’s identification wavers for a moment between the character and the actor who plays him’ (276). 45 There are many examples of this from reactions to modern productions. Ormsby surveys critical responses to the silence in Trevor Nunn’s 1973 RSC production at the Aldwych Theatre, starring Nicol Williamson: ‘critics focused on the great control with which Williamson manipulated his facial expressions …, read[ing] in the minutiae of the actor’s bodily movements the anguish that Coriolanus felt’ (103). 46 Coriolanus later tells Aufidius ‘it is no little thing to make / Mine eyes to sweat compassion’ (V.iii.195–96). 47 This is how Brockbank seems to interpret the silence (59–60). 48 Alan Howard usually held the silence for over thirty seconds in the 1977 RSC production (Holland, Coriolanus 436). 49 In her exploration of the significance of applying the term ‘brand’ to Shakespeare, Rumbold observes that the word allows us to recognise ‘Shakespeare as marker and mark’ in modern culture (“Brand Shakespeare?” 37; OED brand n. 4a, 5).

3 ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ Sealing and poetics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In the first scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus gives Hermia threatening advice upon her refusal to marry Demetrius, the man chosen by her father Egeus: What say you, Hermia? Be advised, fair maid. To you your father should be as a god, One that composed your beauties, yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power To leave the figure, or disfigure it. (I.i.46–51) The Duke of Athens’ comparison of Hermia to a ‘form in wax’ or ‘figure’ stamped into existence by her father has been read as an uncompromisingly patriarchal model of biological reproduction and ‘a fantasy of male parthenogenesis’.1 In an influential essay, Louis Adrian Montrose contends that Theseus ‘represents paternity as a cultural act, an art: the father is a demiurge or homo faber, who composes, in-forms, imprints himself upon, what is merely inchoate matter’ (70). Indeed, the representation of Hermia as a foetal imprint stamped by her father on the formless, wax-like womb of her mother draws on contemporary explanations of human generation and of the seal of the divine image, both discussed in Chapter 1. In light of Chapter 2, the analogy might seem to reinforce Hermia’s status as a ‘character’, a stamped thing produced through the cultural act of play-making, or even—from a Romantic perspective— the product of the god-like Shakespeare’s fertile imagination engaged in character-creation. However, the image of a figure in wax, and especially a figure under threat of disfiguration, proves semantically pliable in Dream, coming to stand for and connect a range of identities, experiences and transactions. Theseus’ simile is one of many allusions to sealing or figuring in the play, which build on the material and figurative roles of wax sealing in legal, social, spiritual, cognitive and erotic transmission. The Duke’s speech follows Egeus’ accusation that Lysander has ‘stol’n the impression’ of his daughter’s ‘fantasy’ by ‘giv[ing] her rhymes’ and

70  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ ‘interchang[ing] love-tokens’ with her (I.i.28–32), suggesting the imagination’s capacity to stamp and be stamped by rhetorical and material transactions. Theseus later tells Hermia she has to decide whether she wishes to die, marry Demetrius or live as a nun by ‘The sealing day betwixt my love and me / For everlasting bond of fellowship’ (I.i.84–85), with reference to both the legal sealing of a binding marriage certificate and the erotic sealing of sexual consummation. By contrast, Hermia’s assertion of her ‘virgin patent’ (I.i.80) and refusal to give Demetrius ‘sovereignty’ (I.i.79–82) conflate her virginal body with legally inviolable letters patent, sealed with the Great Seal. If the first scene seems to present—in distinctly legal terms—Hermia’s sealed body as a fiercely contested site of signification that can be figured, re-figured and disfigured by patriarchal forces (ruler, father, husband), the rest of the play offers us forms of imaginative and artistic figuration, enacted through love, magic, dreams and drama. Peter Quince’s malapropism during the mechanicals’ rehearsal—‘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’ (III.i.55–57)—recalls both Theseus’ threat of disfiguration and anticipates the botched play-within-a-play, in which the mechanicals really do disfigure the parts they figure. And Hippolyta’s reflection on the reported experience of the lovers in the forest, with ‘all their minds transfigured so together’ (V.i.24), connects figuration with the play’s instances of cognitive and literal transformation or ‘translation’, from Bottom’s metamorphosis into an ass—‘Thou art translated!’ exclaims Quince (III.i.113)—to Lysander and Demetrius’ mental transformations when drugged by Puck and Oberon. By comparing Hermia to a ‘form in wax’, then, Theseus contributes to a complex network of references to figuration, disfiguration and transfiguration that is crucial to the play’s language and action. But Theseus’ simile is itself a rhetorical figure, and one with the potential to make a psychophysiological impression on audience members as well as on Hermia. In a ‘rhetorical reading’ which argues that the play investigates the ‘power of rhetoric to disfigure or transfigure both individual and culture’, Christy Desmet observes that ‘Theseus’ effort to affirm [Egeus’] power involves him necessarily in the world of rhetorical figures. As it turns out, Egeus is only “like” a God, Hermia “like” a form in wax. The sign of patriarchal power is no more than a trope, a simile weaker even than its root metaphor’ (“Disfiguring Women” 300–1). Theseus has the power to renounce the analogy which asserts the authority of the father just as he later exercises his prerogative as Duke to ‘overbear’ Egeus’ ‘will’ (IV.i.178). For Joseph Loewenstein, by contrast, it is the materiality of the seal which weakens the ‘form in wax’ as a ‘sign of patriarchal power’. In an essay which investigates seal-­ matrices as personal accessories in early modern England, Loewenstein explains that although sealing was a form of self-authentication and

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  71 identification, seal-impressions were unstable signifiers because they were often pliant, friable or even misrepresentative. Thus when Theseus employs the sealing trope ‘to counter the matriarchies that haunt him: both Hippolyta’s Amazon polity and the tyranny of the Elizabethan moon’, it ‘all but betrays his vulnerability: threatening Hermia with disfiguration flaunts the peril to which patriarchal descent is subject, the impermanence of patriarchal impression’ (203–4). As a figurative and a material sign, the wax seal could both assert and undermine patriarchal authority. This chapter explores connections between sigillographic and rhetorical figures, forms in wax and what Theseus—in his critique of the poet—calls ‘the forms of things unknown’ (V.i.15). It investigates how Dream uses the concept of the wax seal to interrogate the relationship between the figurative and the material, especially as mediated by poetry and the imagination. Drawing on seals’ material, rhetorical and dramatic contexts in early modern England, I show that the play’s self-­reflexive language of figuration, disfiguration and transfiguration has the potential to shape audiences’ understanding and experience of poesis in the theatre, causing them to perceive it as impressive and transformative. Addressing the history of criticism, I argue that Dream and its networks of figuration have played an important role in how critics materialise and covertly gender Shakespeare’s poetic creativity. Following a discussion of critical contexts that considers the play’s historical role in attitudes to Shakespeare’s language and poetry, the chapter explores the material culture of seals and their place in rhetoric and drama in the early modern period, before applying these contexts to the play.

Shakespeare’s ‘special impress’: materialising and gendering Dream’s poetry Christy Desmet is one of a number of modern critics to have produced what she calls a ‘rhetorical reading’ of Dream. Patricia Parker has uncovered networks of word-play in the comedy (e.g. ‘preposterous’, ‘rude’, ‘mechanical’, ‘partition’) which expose ideologies of class and gender. Most significantly, Parker argues that Bottom and his fellow artisans’ association with the craft of joinery connects them to a range of rhetorical and material processes, ‘from the joining of words into the constructions of reason, logic, and “Syntaxe” … to the joining of bodies into the one flesh of marriage and the joining of the body politic into the harmonious whole’ (“Rude Mechanicals” 49). More recently, Raphael Lyne has argued that Dream is Shakespeare’s ‘most explicit engagement with cognitive rhetoric. As well as the repeating spectacle of characters trying to deal with disorienting experiences [through rhetoric], we also find a reflection on the roles of metaphor and simile in that very process’

72  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ (Shakespeare 106). And Jenny C. Mann has contended that the play ‘describes the workings of its own plot with the metatechnical terms common to the English art of rhetoric’ (Outlaw Rhetoric 143), such as ‘changeling’, ‘turning’ and ‘translation’. Dream has been identified as a play concerned with the material as well the rhetorical (e.g. Richardson 181–87), and even as a play whose most cherished passages of poetry depend on an ‘investment in material culture’, as with Helena’s speech to Hermia about their shared childhood experience of needlework (III.ii.201–14; Bertolet 160). The audience’s appreciation of what Desmet calls the play’s ‘art of rhetorical ornament’ (“Disfiguring Women” 300) depends, in large part, on its language’s material ornamentation, and especially its ekphrastic poetry as ‘a kind of patchwork of things’ (Richardson 185). How might we reconcile readings of Dream as a play about rhetoric on the one hand, and a play steeped in material concerns on the other? In emphasising ‘the material culture of metaphor’, my Introduction suggested that rhetoric and materiality can never fully be separated in early modern drama. Dream is a play which questions how and when rhetorical figures become material things, asking where the figure becomes the wax, as it were. Considering the material culture of sealing may, as Loewenstein has shown, illuminate both the ‘potency’ and ‘vulnerability’ suggested by Theseus’ figurative reference to ‘a practice that models and focuses the personal encounter with the material world, and the claims of persons thereon’ (204). I want to suggest, however, that Theseus’ comparison of Hermia to a ‘form in wax’ is intimately connected to the play’s meditations on the gendered and material force of rhetorical figures as ‘the forms of things unknown’. Further, I argue that the analogy models a long-established critical attitude to the language of the play, which has been widely heralded as Shakespeare’s most ‘poetic’ and ‘imaginative’ dramatic work. Like Hermia the ‘form in wax’, the poetry of Dream has been represented as the product of a fertile, transformative and impressive author, one whose audiences and readers desire to be ‘By him imprinted’. The recent treatment of Dream as ‘a rich anthology of poetic styles’ (Desmet, “Disfiguring Women” 300), and even as a play about rhetoric and poesis, is part of a long critical history of valuing the comedy as a treasure-house of beautiful poetry. 2 Dream’s poetry was widely borrowed by other poets and playwrights from the early seventeenth century onwards, as well as by manuscript commonplacers. 3 It was tapped for quotations exemplifying beautiful and inspiring poetry in printed anthologies from as early as Joshua Poole’s English Parnassus (1657), and in the eighteenth century it became one of the plays most cited by collectors in search of Shakespearean poetic ‘Beauties’.4 For such admirers, Shakespeare was not dissimilar to Egeus as represented by Theseus, a composer of beauties and a fertile imprinter. In The

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  73 Beauties of Shakespear (1752), reprinted into the twentieth century, William Dodd claims that the selected passages fulfil Dionysius Longinus’ definition of the sublime, as translated by William Smith in 1739: ‘[Writing] whose force we cannot possibly withstand; which immediately sinks deep, and makes such impression on the mind as cannot easily be worn out or effaced’ (I:xvi–xvii). Thus the extraction, curation and marketing of Shakespeare’s poetry in the form of collected ‘beauties’ or ‘gems’ contributed not only to a sense of Shakespeare’s universality and authorial propriety, 5 but also to ideas of his transformative force and impressiveness as a dramatic poet (rather than a dramatist writing for the stage). As well as being central to quotation books, Dream was integral to the Romantics’ conception of Shakespeare as an impressive poet with an exceptionally creative imagination. Responding enthusiastically to what Schlegel described as the ‘glowing colour’ of Dream’s verse, Coleridge declared the play ‘one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical’ (Kennedy and Kennedy 82, 109), and Keats’ own poetic aesthetics were strongly influenced by the play’s language (White, Ch. 4). Hazlitt claimed the play’s poetic and imaginative qualities made it unstageable: The reading of this play is like wandering in a grove by moonlight: the descriptions breathe a sweetness like odours thrown from beds of flowers. … The Midsummer Night’s Dream, when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. … Poetry and the stage do not agree together. … Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and tells according to the mixed impression of all that has been suggested. (Kennedy and Kennedy 92) Hazlitt’s analysis is inflected by language and imagery borrowed from the play. Reading the play is like being one of the wandering lovers in the enchanted forest, its language as intoxicating as the sweet, odorous flowers of the bank on which Titania sleeps (II.i.249–52), or perhaps even the ‘little western flower’ (II.i.166) used to transform the affections of Lysander and Demetrius. Hazlitt suggests that while performance fails to capture the imagination, Shakespeare’s poetry (anthologised in quotation books as choice ‘poesies’ and ‘flowers’) streaks the mind’s eye of the reader, producing a powerful ‘mixed impression’ distinct from ‘the actual impressions of the senses’ experienced by audiences (Kennedy and Kennedy 92). If the poetic qualities of Dream stole the impression of Hazlitt’s fantasy, he was not alone. Critics throughout the late eighteenth and

74  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ nineteenth century emphasised the ‘power’ and ‘purity’ of its poetry, variously seen as the product of a ‘creative and fertile fancy’ (Charles Dibdin in 1800), ‘fervid and creative power’ (Nathan Drake in 1817) and—with some criticism of Shakespeare’s supposedly immature and excessive use of rhyme—a ‘youthful and lively imagination’ (Edmond Malone in 1790). Emphases on the vigour, youthfulness, flow and fertility of the ‘sportive and exuberant’ imagination (Elizabeth Griffith in 1775) that produced Dream—Shakespeare’s ‘offspring’, according to Drake—were complemented by articulations of the impressiveness and over-powering force of the play’s language and atmosphere, as in the observations of the American Denton Jacques Snider (1874): ‘Its weird ethereal scenery captivates the purely poetical nature, its striking sensuous effects impress the most ordinary mind’.6 Such reflections on Dream’s poetry and Shakespeare’s distinctly gendered powers of creation were nuanced by a sense that the play had gifted audiences and readers with a meta-discourse on dramatic and poetic creativity, a sense shared by a number of modern critics.7 The play-within-the-play was important to this idea—‘the play plays itself playing, it is its own spectator’, Snider observes (Kennedy and Kennedy 246)—but responses to and celebrations of the play’s poetry were most strongly influenced by Theseus’ critique of the poet’s ‘fine frenzy’: ‘[A]s imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’ (V.i.14–17). Despite Theseus’ scepticism, these lines have long been read as indicative of Shakespeare’s own attitude to poetry (Kennedy and Kennedy 27–28), and were widely appropriated by critics and artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to express his ‘inspired genius’ (Pressly 32–34, 51–52).8 William Dodd’s Beauties of Shakespear blazons the speech on its title page as an emblem of S­ hakespearean poetics. I will return to Theseus’ speech and its dramatic context later. My point here, however, is that historical criticism of Dream has represented Shakespeare’s poetic and imaginative authority, characterised as forceful, transformative, fertile and impressive, in terms that draw on Theseus’ speeches—in the first and last scenes of the play—on the father’s ability to imprint a ‘form in wax’ and the poet’s capacity to ‘bod[y] forth / The forms of things unknown’. The application of Theseus’ two images of figuration—bound by the idea of ‘authorial power’ (Kanelos 239)—to Shakespeare’s creative processes has influenced conceptualisations of his authorship. Labelled in Dodd’s Beauties of Shakespear as “A Father’s Authority” and “The Power of Imagination” (I:73, I:87–88), Theseus’ models of genesis and of poesis have been appropriated and combined in critical discourse to groom a material image of Shakespeare’s transformative powers of language and rhetoric, and develop a patriarchal poetics in discussions of Shakespeare and Dream. The gendered and

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  75 material terms in which early critics articulated the power exerted by Shakespeare’s poetry continued to resonate in later expressions of the impressive force of his language. Writing in the 1930s, the influential new critic Caroline Spurgeon declared that Dream bore the ‘special impress’ of Shakespeare’s imagery, leaving readers ‘amazed and bewitched by beauty and the strange power of the poet’s pen’ (263). Variously presenting the play, its readers and audiences as shaped or imprinted by Shakespeare, critics have effectively repurposed Theseus’ image of Hermia as a ‘form in wax’ to explain Shakespeare’s processes of composition, poesis and dramaturgy, representing him as a parthenogenetic author whose work bears his ‘special impress’. Such a way of thinking might seem at odds with more recent critical approaches, but scholars have continued to reproduce the logic of the Duke’s sealing simile, consciously or not. For Janyce Marson, the characters of Dream are themselves ‘but a form in wax’, creatures ‘not exclusively of their own making’ (20); for Maurice Hunt, the language of play shows Shakespeare ‘marvellously fashioning an artifact of deficient and provocative voices’ (233). Artistic and cultural ‘fashioning’ is crucial to Montrose’s still dominant essay “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture”. For Montrose, while ‘Theseus’ lecture on the shaping of a daughter is a fantasy of male parthenogenesis’ in which the father artfully ‘composes, in-forms, imprints himself’ (70), the play’s implicit analogy between ‘the fashioning of children, subjects, and plays’ provides a model for articulating Dream’s relationship to cultural production and—more broadly—the new historicist project of demonstrating the impressions exchanged by literature and history.9 Finishing with Theseus’ description of the poet’s ‘fine frenzy’, through which Dream ‘obliquely represents the parthenogenetic process of its own creation’, Montrose concludes: In its preoccupation with the transformation of the personal into the public, the metamorphosis of dream and fantasy into poetic drama, A Midsummer Night’s Dream … dramatizes—or, rather, meta-­ dramatizes—the relations of power between prince and playwright. To the extent that the cult of Elizabeth informs the play, it is itself transformed within the play. … Dream is, then, in a double sense a creation of Elizabethan culture: for it also creates the culture by which it is created, shapes the fantasies by which it is shaped, begets that by which it is begotten. (Montrose 86) Here Dream’s ‘creation’ finds articulation in a telling combination of the language of Theseus on ‘shaping fantasies’ and Pericles on his rebirth at the sight of his lost daughter Marina, ‘Thou that begett’st him that did thee beget’ (Pericles xxi.183).10 Despite his departures from the

76  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ historical critics I have been critiquing, Montrose evidently shares their preoccupation with the idea that Dream is a ‘dramatic poem’ which both shapes and is shaped, that it is, in effect, both the wax and the seal-­ matrix that ‘in-forms’ and transforms it. Such a way of thinking, I want to suggest, is related to early modern attitudes to the impressiveness of certain poetic forms and to the seal as a symbol of poetic agency and authority. In order to contextualise the critical concepts I have been discussing as well as the play’s language of figuration, disfiguration and transfiguration, the next section investigates the place of wax sealing in early modern England, showing how seals connected ideas of material, rhetorical and erotic transmission and transformation in the cultural imagination.

Seals in early modern material culture, rhetoric and drama Seals, a term used to refer to both seal-matrices and seal-impressions, were—etymologically speaking—signa or ‘signs’ (OED seal n.2 Etymology), and their place in early modern culture made them integral to how people at all levels of society understood processes of signification, both material and rhetorical. As material signs of personal (as well as familial and institutional) identity, agency and ownership, seal-impressions were part of ‘one of the chief practices for materialising and authenticating individuality and thence, for extending the sway of the subject across time and space’ (Loewenstein 205). As metaphorical signs, they were so widely appropriated that they imitated the malleable and recyclable substance from which they could neither be conceptually nor materially ­separated, wax. Sealing, as I showed in Chapter 1, was a well-­established metaphor in philosophy, theology, medicine and wider literature for articulating spiritual, erotic, psychophysiological and epistemological transactions and transformations, not to mention the technology’s centrality to metaphysics (via Aristotle’s ontological preoccupation with the relationship between ‘the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp’) and wax’s role in Cartesian dualism and rationalism.11 More pervasive than printing and even coining as a trope in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, sealing was an invaluable rhetorical resource for representing the figuration and disfiguration of identity and authority, as well as mimesis in poetry and drama—what Philip Sidney calls ‘counterfetting, or figuring foorth’. In this section, drawing on material contexts from epistolary and legal culture, I investigate the significance of sealing’s copiousness as a rhetorical figure, and its role as a model for rhetorical transmission through poesis and performance. Even the most abstract sealing metaphors were informed by and evoked the materiality of real seals in early modern England, objects with which many writers, readers and audiences would have been familiar.

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  77 Seals—often in combination with signatures—authorised and authenticated a wide range of manuscript documents, from those pertaining to matters of state (e.g. royal patents, charters, proclamations) to those concerning personal business and correspondence (e.g. bonds, wills, letters).12 Theseus’ ‘sealing day’ may gesture towards the figurative matrimonial sealing enacted by exchanging rings, joining hands and kissing (as at The Taming of the Shrew III.ii.122–23), and even sexual consummation. But ‘sealing day’ and ‘seal day’ were legal terms occasioning the authentication of writs, bonds and patents,13 and the Duke’s reference to an ‘everlasting bond of fellowship’ suggests a sealed marriage licence bond.14 In the case of private letters, seals served the extra function of security, acting as what Innogen in Cymbeline calls ‘locks of counsel’ (III.ii.36): unsealing a folded letter meant that an illegitimate reading would be evident unless the perpetrator had the skill and materials with which to replicate the seal. However, forgers practised ‘the art of undetectably removing and reapplying seals to intercepted letters’ (Daybell 107), and works of rogue literature and legal depositions suggest that seal counterfeiters, sometimes called ‘jarkmen’, were able to reproduce official seal-impressions by carving their designs into materials such as wood, horn or bone to create counterfeit seal-matrices.15 In order to seal a legal document or (appropriately folded) letter,16 the sealer would adhere molten wax and make an impression in it with a seal-matrix. Whether circular or vesical (pointed oval) in shape, the face of each seal was engraved with a design in reverse. Pressing a seal-matrix into soft wax produced a mirror-image of the design standing in relief. Sometimes seals were not affixed directly onto documents but appended to them using suspended tags such as strips of parchment. The latter were usually imprinted not just on the obverse (the front side) but also on the reverse using a ‘counter-seal’ (OED n. b). While Montrose describes the wax in which—according to Theseus’ analogy—Egeus imprinted Hermia as ‘merely inchoate matter’, sealing wax was a manufactured commodity. Sealing wax consisted primarily of bees-wax or sometimes—from the sixteenth century onwards— shellac, mixed with resin and a colouring agent. It was usually red, but other colours were also used (e.g. black, blue, green), often to signify something about the document or its author. Black wax, for example, communicated that a letter-writer was in mourning. Seal-matrices came in a range of shapes, sizes and designs, and were made of a variety of materials. The most important royal seal was the Great Seal or ‘broad seal’, consisting of two large circular interlocking matrices of heavy cast bronze or silver capable of impressing wax on both sides simultaneously. Smaller royal seals included the Signet Seal and the Privy Seal.17 Official seals’ designs generally depicted the people or institutions whose authority they represented: royal seals bore portraits of the monarch; monastic seals pictured their buildings, specific saints or biblical images; and

78  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ local seals presented emblems related to their towns (Daybell 105). ­Personal  seals were usually metal signet rings, but they could also be hand or desk seals (seals with handles) or fob seals (small seals attached to chains).18 Loewenstein notes that the preferred material was bronze, ‘though silver, gems, and, for the poor, lead are not uncommon; in the sixteenth century, steel and iron come into more common use’ (216n11). A range of designs were carved into personal seals, including heraldic shields and crests, images of animals, emblems and mottoes, and even visual puns on owners’ names and professions (Daybell 105). These designs were often surrounded by Latin legends that identified individuals by name or otherwise. The fact that so many seal-matrices were designed to reproduce texts or images which represented their owners reinforced the status of seal-impressions as personal signs of identity. A wide variety of people owned and used seals, including the middling sort.19 Some people owned more than one. We know from John Donne’s surviving correspondence that he had at least three seals: one bearing an image of a sheaf of snakes, another portraying a wolf rampant surrounded by a sheaf of snakes, and a third—acquired after his ordination in 1615— depicting Christ crucified on an anchor (Daybell 106). Donne’s complex use of sealing metaphors in both his love poetry and religious writings has been analysed by critics, 20 but certain references to seals in his letters suggest the extent to which material and rhetorical forms in wax were interrelated in the period. ‘I kisse your hands,’ Donne ends a letter to Sir Henry Goodere in around April 1615, ‘and so seal to you my pure love’ (Letters to Severall Persons 105).21 Now that this letter is only extant in print, this seal appears resolutely figurative, but the presence of a fleshly red seal on the letter would have embodied Donne’s absent-present kiss. Inducted into the erotics of wax by Ovid and others, authors such as Donne, Marlowe and Shakespeare were alive to the sexual symbolism of sealing’s material processes: rubbing, melting, imprinting and—for the receiver of private letters—ripping and tearing. 22 As ‘an impression-­ taking substance which has all the softness, malleability, inconstancy, and so forth of patriarchy’s Eternal Feminine’ (Thompson and Thompson 77), wax was an inherently gendered material in the early modern period, and sealing was a common analogy for not just procreation, but also kissing, seduction, adultery and rape, normally with an emphasis on men’s capacity to dominate, possess and transform women. 23 Whether seen as legitimate or illicit, ‘defloration’ could be represented by the imprinting of a seal, but also by seal-breaking or unsealing (that routine act of disfiguration in epistolary culture), with the suggestion that letter seals and hymens had similar functions of authorising, authenticating and securing private textual and sexual spaces. The patriarchal bent of such analogies was sometimes subverted by their contexts, and the common image of men sealing or unsealing women was undermined by the

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  79 existence of women’s seals, male malleability or inconstancy, and ideas of counterfeiting. 24 However, all sealing metaphors, even if not explicitly erotic, were inflected by the inescapably gendered dynamic of the relationship between the wax and the seal-matrix, and the association of forms in wax with erotic exchange and transformation. Like the father’s generation of life and the lover’s erotic activity, the poet’s use of rhetoric and especially his creation of metaphors and images found ‘A local habitation and a name’ in the sealing analogy. ‘As the seale leaueth the impression of his forme in waxe’, we read in the anthology of prose excerpts Politeuphuia: Wits Common Wealth (1598; first published 1597), ‘so the learned Poet, engraueth his passions so perfectly in mens harts, that the hearer almost is trans-formed into the Author’ (Ling H3v). 25 Dramatists were also ‘poets’, so such analogies had implications for the perceived impressiveness of performed drama. Classical scholars have identified the seal or sphragis—most notably the seal of the ancient Greek poet Theognis and Orestes’ seal in Sophocles’ Electra—as a symbol of dramatic as well as poetic art and authority (Woodbury; Batchelder). As a material sign that could stand for artistic agency and social exchange in the early modern period, the seal was an appropriate model for both poetic and dramatic representation. ­Hamlet’s definition of the ‘purpose of playing’ as showing ‘the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (III.ii.20–24) is arguably part of a network of sealing references in Hamlet, culminating in the signet which Hamlet (like Orestes) inherits from his father, and uses to counterfeit a commission (V.ii.48–54). 26 Poets and dramatists were not only sealers but also coiners, a metaphor that lent itself to negative as well as positive representations of their art. Stephen Gosson’s condemnation of theatre’s counterfeit forms is consistent with his railing, in a dark reflection of Sidney’s celebration of poetry’s ‘counterfetting, or figuring foorth’, against the abuses of poets who ‘run to the shop of their old devises, defacing olde stampes, forging newe Printes, and coining strange precepts’ (The Schoole of Abuse B2r-v). If, as Gosson claims, play-­going ‘gazers’ were corrupted by ‘those impressions of mind … which the players do counterfeit on the stage’, they were also imprinted as hearers by the counterfeit poetics of dramatists who cast the moulds for actors’ rhetorical performances. But what in particular made poetry so impressive? For a number of rhetorical theorists it was imagery and especially metaphor, the figure widely identified by critics as central to Dream’s poetic force and to its reflections on poesis and rhetoric. Thomas Wilson defines the relationship between image and place (‘any room [in the memory] apt to receive things’) through a sigillographic simile: ‘even as in wax we make a print with a seal, so we have places where lively pictures must be set’ (237). In a comparison I discussed in Chapter 1, Henry Peacham

80  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ suggests metaphors’ power lies in their capacity to imprint the memory: ‘In respect of their firme impression in the mind, and remembrance of the hearer, they are as seales upon soft waxe, or as deep stamps in long lasting mettall’ (The Garden of Eloquence 14). Peacham’s alternative impressions, ‘seales upon soft waxe’ and ‘deep stamps in long lasting mettall’, combine to suggest memory’s susceptibility to metaphors, the social bonds and exchanges they facilitate, and their durability (and perhaps currency, if the metal is coinage) once transmitted. The tendency of Peacham and other rhetorical theorists to gender and eroticise figures of rhetoric encourages us to recognise such representations of imagery and metaphor as ideological. 27 In particular, the image of ‘soft waxe’ was often used with bawdy suggestion, as in William Davenant’s The Cruel Brother (1630) when Castruchio forcefully justifies a rape to the victim’s serving-woman: ‘Do not I know women / Are a kind of soft wax, that will receive / Any impression?’ (IV.i.35–37). Suggesting men can also break the ‘hard wax’ of ‘cold’ chastity (IV.i.39–43), Castruchio’s vile metaphor alerts us to the sinister implications of Theseus’ representation of Hermia as a ‘form in wax’ vulnerable to disfiguration, especially in light of his own history of rape, documented in North’s translation of Plutarch’s “Life of Theseus”. The language and imagery of imprinting, coining and especially sealing, then, were used to materialise and implicitly gender the figurations of early modern poetry and theatre. However, commercial drama also had a more obviously material relationship with sealing in the late sixteenth century. In addition to the circulation within and between plays of sealed letters and other documents as props, the legitimacy of acting companies’ enterprises depended on the offstage presence of letters, bonds, licences and letters patent bearing authenticating seals. 28 The 1572 Act for Restraining Vagabonds, renewed and expanded in 1595 when Dream was probably first performed, stipulated that playing companies needed to be able to present a licence bearing the hand and seal of their patron (Pollard 18n68; Wickham et al. 62–63). Records of such licences indicate anxieties about the use of spurious or unauthorised licences. The back of a 1595 “Copy of a Players’ Company Warrant” for Francis Coffyn and Richard Bradshaw, for example, bears a 1602 memorandum by the Mayor of Chester, Hugh Glaseour, warning that the licence had been revoked by Lord Edward Dudley, and that the company should not ‘play in this citty nor els where opon pain of punishment’. 29 The many sealed documents that appear in plays performed by the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594–96, such as Hubert’s warrant in King John (IV.ii.216), Aumerle’s conspiratorial pledge in Richard II (V.ii.56) and Shylock’s bond in The Merchant of Venice (IV.i.138), may have invoked—for the actors at least—the legal documentation that established the company and its privileges in 1594. 30 Theseus’ representation

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  81 of Hermia as a ‘form in wax’ imprinted by Egeus alludes to his own sigillographic agency, not only as a law-maker with the capacity to set an uninfringeable seal on what Hermia calls her ‘virgin patent’, but also as a patron whose stamp of approval on his ‘sealing day’ can—as Snug says—turn the amateur actors into ‘made men’ (IV.i.17). If, as Montrose argues, the ‘cult of Elizabeth’ informs the play, then so too does that Elizabethan form in wax which manifested the royal power of the ‘imperial vot’ress’ (II.i.163), the Great Seal affixed to proclamations, letters patent, charters, grants and certain writs and warrants (Beal 179). While poets, dramatists and actors would probably not have seen, for instance, the second Great Seal of Elizabeth, designed by Nicholas Hilliard in 1584–86 (Beal 181), the Great Seal was crucial to literary representations of political authority, as indicated by its centrality as a symbol of power in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII: Cardinal Wolsey is forced to ‘render up the great seal’ (III.ii.230). It was also—ultimately—essential to theatrical legitimacy. The patronage system derived from authority granted by patents issued under the Great Seal, following the precedent set when Leicester’s Men secured a patent in 1574 (Streitberger 132). Thus in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster, Tucca metatheatrically promises the actor Aesop ‘a monopoly of playing confirmed to thee and thy convey [brood, i.e. acting company] under the emperor’s broad seal’ (V.iii.103–5 and n.). Even the bureaucratic power embodied by the seal of Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels potentially echoed in Theseus’ paper-shuffling ‘manager of mirth’ Philostrate (V.i.35; Penry ­Williams 59), depended on a royal patent issued in 1579 and revised in 1581 (Wickham et al. 70, 78). 31 Sealing’s wide reach as a technology and semantic richness as a metaphor helps to explain its pervasive presence in literature of the period. However, the seal’s status as a model for the power of poetry and drama, and even as a material sign of commercial theatre’s legitimacy, meant that seal allusions in plays could contribute to plays’ self-reflexive engagement with ideas of rhetoric, performance and artistic creation. In the final section of this chapter, I turn my attention more directly to Dream and its self-reflexive qualities as a play fixated on figuration, disfiguration and translation. Building on the contexts discussed, I argue that the gendered language and materiality of wax sealing illuminates how the play negotiates between the material and the rhetorical, and how it advertises its own poetry as impressive and transformative.

The ‘transfigured’ audience: signs and seals of poetic transformation in Dream The sealing imagery in the first scene of Dream is crucial to how the play introduces concepts of rhetorical and poetic agency. The analogy

82  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ between Hermia and a ‘form in wax’, I have shown, looks both forward to critical perceptions of Shakespeare as a parthenogenetic and impressive poet, and outward to sealing’s roles in early modern material culture, rhetoric and drama. But within Dream’s network of allusions to figuration, imprinting and translation, Theseus’ simile is a response to a metaphor in Egeus’ public tirade against Lysander for having ‘bewitched the bosom of my child’ (I.i.27): Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes, And interchanged love tokens with my child. Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung With feigning voice verses of feigning love, And stol’n the impression of her fantasy With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gauds, conceits, Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats—messengers Of strong prevailment in unhardened youth. With cunning hast thou filched my daughter’s heart, Turned her obedience, which is due to me, To stubborn harshness. (I.i.28–38) Egeus’ accusation is that, through the mutual exchange of rhetorical and material ‘love tokens’, Lysander has ‘stol’n the impression of her fantasy’. The latter phrase is normally taken to mean something like ‘stamped his image on her imagination by secret trickery’ (Holland, Midsummer 135n), but the ambiguity of ‘stol’n’—possibly meaning ‘secretly taken’ as well as ‘secretly given’—suggests an exchange of imaginative impressions which complements a material ‘interchange’ of tokens, and the line potentially also implies the erasure of former impressions, as one chafes and re-uses sealing wax. 32 Egeus is indeed primarily concerned with Hermia’s pliability (and lack thereof) as his legal property, as Thompson and Thompson suggest: ‘Hermia is presented as soft in the wrong way (“unhardened”) in respect of Lysander’s unauthorized courtship, and correspondingly hard in the wrong way (“harsh”) towards her father’ (78). But in focusing on Hermia’s susceptibility and ignoring Lysander’s impressionability, critics tend to reinforce Theseus’ reduction of her to a ‘form in wax’ (albeit a partially tempered, partially congealed piece of wax). If, as I argued earlier, Theseus’ model of reproduction has also become a model of Shakespeare’s poetic creativity, Egeus’ accusation that Lysander has ‘given her rhymes’—apparently in the wider sense of ‘verses’ (OED rhyme n. 2a)—fits the compulsion to see the imprinted Hermia as an emblem of poetry’s transformative and even erotic agency, its material impact on the memory and imagination. While Egeus dismisses Lysander’s poetry by associating it with what he sees as trifling gifts, he also affords the suitor’s ‘rhymes’ a material force, suggesting that they—like the gifts—are ‘messengers / Of strong

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  83 prevailment’ which have ‘stol’n the impression of her fantasy’. Anticipating Theseus’ hostile portrait of ‘the poet’, Egeus’ condemnation of Lysander’s poetry resonates strangely with critical celebrations of Shakespeare’s: Lysander’s verses have ‘bewitched’ Hermia as Spurgeon claims readers have been ‘bewitched’ by Dream’s poetic imagery, and ‘stol’n the impression of her fantasy’ in the same way the play’s ‘striking sensuous effects’ have left their mark on Snider’s and other critics’ imaginations. Lysander is associated with the poetic ‘counterfetting’ criticised by Stephen Gosson and celebrated by Philip Sidney: as Barry Weller notes, for Egeus ‘the impression Lysander has made on his daughter is … counterfeit, produced by “verses of feigning love” sung “With faining voice”’ (74n4). However, as with Theseus’ critique of the poet, Egeus’ denunciation of Lysander’s seductive ‘rhymes’ involves conspicuous rhetorical devices, contributing to the poetics of a play which would have been understood as a product of ‘feigning’ (from fingere, meaning to form or mould). Most significant is the punning repetition of ‘feigning’ itself (consistently spelled ‘faining’ in both Q and F), with reference to Lysander’s soft/deceitful voice and his affectionate/false love. 33 The homonyms reproduce one another, occupying the same position at opposite ends of the line, helping to frame the central word ‘verses’. The line is fashioned or feigned in a way that mimics Lysander’s bewitching and impressive force as a feigning suitor to his daughter, but also as part of a speech designed to make a rhetorical mark on Theseus as Duke and judge. While Montrose sees Theseus as ‘[b]orrowing Egeus’ own imprinting metaphor’ (70, my emphasis), the mode of rhetorical transmission is more akin to the technology at issue. The Duke rhetorically imitates Egeus’ metaphor, but not before altering the figure: his simile is a modified reproduction of an impression: What say you, Hermia? Be advised, fair maid. To you your father should be as a god, One that composed your beauties, yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power To leave the figure, or disfigure it. Stamping his own will on the situation, Theseus compares Hermia to the father’s imprinted ‘figure’, but makes it clear that the father’s authority depends on the Duke’s own figure of similitudo, a likeness within his power to disfigure and denounce as counterfeit. Desmet may see Theseus as producing ‘a simile weaker even than its root metaphor’, but the ducal seal holds sway over the father’s, and the ruler’s measured figure allows him to make his mark conspicuously, creating an image

84  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ which not only asserts his authority within the play, but has also influenced many critics’ understanding of the play’s imaginative, aesthetic and cultural effects. Seals and rhetorical figures may denote forms of agency and authority, but we should also consider the subversive potential of the impression, which can unmake the man who made it. ‘I did but seal once to a thing and I was never mine own man since’, laments Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI. While Theseus’ sealing image exerts power over both Hermia and Egeus, Hermia’s implicit reappropriation of the Duke’s figure enables her to assert the sovereignty of her subjecthood. Told that she must die, marry Demetrius or—as a new third option—‘abjure / For ever the society of men’ (I.i.65–66), she seizes upon the alternative despite Theseus’ warning against ‘withering on the virgin thorn’ (I.i.77), declaring her virginity belongs to her alone: So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord, Ere I will yield my virgin patent up Unto his lordship, whose unwishèd yoke My soul consents not to give sovereignty. (I.i.68–82) The term ‘virgin patent’ is usually glossed as ‘entitlement to virginity’ (Holland, Midsummer 137n), but letters patents were—as noted in a late seventeenth-century dictionary—‘Open writings sealed with the broad-seal of England, enabling a man to do or enjoy what otherwise of himself he could not’ (Coles, Y1r). Loewenstein suggests that Hermia imagines her body as a document, her hymen as a seal—not pliant, not friable, but sturdy. She refuses to pass from close to patent. … For Hermia the secrecy secured by the seal is the last bastion of a self-possession and a right to self-authentication asserted over against the patriarchal seal. (209) The idea that Hermia ‘refuses to pass from close to patent’, however, may overlook the material detail of Hermia’s metaphor. ‘Letters close’ were sealed shut as a security measure and unsealed as a matter of course, but ‘letters patent’—from patens, ‘lying open’ (OED patent adj. Etymology, 1a)—were open by definition, their double-sided pendant seals representing power and privilege. Theseus’ simile may indeed gesture towards private correspondence, with Hermia as a ‘form in wax’ to be broken or disfigured like a seal on letter designed to be torn open (see Figure 3.1). But the implied ‘document’ of Hermia’s metaphor is secure because it is ­ ouble-sided Great neither closed nor secret. Her hymenal seal, like the d Seal appended to patents, authorises and publicises her virginity as sanctioned by the state and not to be broken unless yielded. The metaphor,

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  85 translating Theseus’ simile, presents us with a multidimensional ‘form in wax’ which communicates not passivity and subjugation, but the legitimate agency of a woman who holds ‘sovereignty’ over her own body and soul.

Figure 3.1  L etter from Lady Dorothy Stafford, Westminster, to Elizabeth Hardwick Talbot, Dowager Countess of Shrewsbury, 13 ­January 1600/1. Folger Shakespeare Library, Cavendish-Talbot MSS, X.d.428 (120) folio 2 verso. By permission of Folger Shakespeare Library.

86  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ Within the play, Hermia’s ‘virgin patent’ repurposes the authority of Theseus’ figurative seal, but it is also part of the play’s wider imaginative investment in Elizabeth I’s ‘pervasive cultural presence’ (Montrose 62), as it gestures to the stamp of the ‘Virgin Queen’, on which the legitimacy of commercial theatre depended. Reduced by Theseus to a sign of her father’s authority and agency, Hermia’s allusion to Elizabeth’s Great Seal draws on its aura of female power and ‘sovereignty’. Elizabethan audiences would probably not have thought of a ‘virgin patent’ as being ‘By him imprinted’. What is at issue, I want to suggest, in Hermia’s renegotiation of her agency and integrity as a seal or ‘form in wax’, is the nature of signs and signification more generally. Dream is a play that explicitly negotiates the legitimacy, stability and power of its theatrical and rhetorical signs, whose integrity rested on the sealed licence that newly authorised the Chamberlain’s Men. The sealing images clustered in the first scene of the play colour what Desmet calls ‘a courtroom drama’ (“Disfiguring Women” 309), contributing to a dispute over Hermia’s legal, social, sexual and even spiritual identity. But the seal metaphor is more than just a patriarchal rhetorical figure that is adopted, repurposed and subverted by different characters with different agendas. Seals’ association with poetic agency and authority urges us to see the image of imprinted wax as integral to the play’s self-reflexive concern with signs, figurations and impressions enacted through poetry and drama, including metaphor as a figure comparable to ‘seales upon soft waxe’. It is this aspect of the play that has shaped many critics’ understanding of Dream’s poetic and imaginative processes as transformative, impressive and even erotic. Egeus’ early association between poetry and the imprinted imagination would seem to capture critics’ investment in Dream’s seductive powers of poetic enchantment: Shakespeare the dream-poet gives ‘rhymes’ to audiences and readers, transforming them by stealing the impression of their fantasies. Such a view is largely the result of Romantic conceptions of Shakespeare’s poetic genius. It also, however, bears the influence of the play’s own representation of the relationship between poetry and transformation. Highly self-aware in its framing of lyrical speech-acts as metamorphic, Dream forces audiences to recognise the transformations enacted by the ‘rhymes’ they are given, both in the wider sense of ‘poetry’ and in the sense of the specific poetic device whose remarkable frequency in the play has long split critical opinion. 34 Central to the play’s poetics of transformation is the magical flower, whose ‘force in stirring love’ (II.ii.75) shows not Hermia but her male suitors to be forms in wax, as their love is disfigured and refigured by its metamorphic properties. 35 Whether or not we see the flower as ‘an emblem of the transforming powers of poetry and art’ (Riemer 199),

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  87 the metamorphoses of Lysander and Demetrius are poetic transformations, enacted through and leading to distinctive verse forms that invite reflection on poetry’s power to enchant, impress and transfigure. While streaking the juice of the flower on their victims’ eyelids, Puck and Oberon speak in trochaic tetrameter catalectic, a distinct verse form that produces heavily stressed rhymes (II.ii.33–40; II.ii.84–89), also spoken by the witches in Macbeth. Consider, for example, how Oberon gives rhymes to the sleeping Demetrius: Flower of this purple dye, Hit with Cupid’s archery, Sink in apple of his eye. When his love he doth espy, Let her shine as gloriously As the Venus of the sky. When thou wak’st, if she be by, Beg of her for remedy. (III.ii.102–9) The incantation is part of the metamorphic process. While the ritual charms the ‘eye’, the audience’s experience of the transformation is shaped by the sonic reproduction of that impressionable organ in Oberon’s recurring rhyme, as well as the peculiar thumping verse form, which is used repeatedly by the play’s fairy characters, including in the passage Coleridge labelled ‘a speckless diamond’: ‘Now the hungry lion roars…’ (V.i.362–91; Kennedy and Kennedy 110). The actor applies the juice of the flower on stage, but the ear tingles with an aural impression that is framed as bewitching. The moment of poetic enchantment offers audiences a model for how to respond to the poetry of the fairies, celebrated by so many early critics, and even the play’s language more generally. In the poetic anthology Imagination and Fancy (1844), whose extracts are said to present poetry ‘in its element, like an essence distilled’, Leigh Hunt—friend to Hazlitt, Keats and Shelley—conflated the poetic force of Shakespeare and the fairies: ‘He knew … that fairies must have a language of their own; and hence, perhaps, his poetry never runs in a more purely poetical vein than when he is speaking in their persons’ (Kennedy and Kennedy 145, 146). The verse spoken by the drugged Lysander and Demetrius as they ‘Beg … for remedy’ from Helena also has implications for the audience’s response to Dream’s poetry. While the suitors ‘“disfigure” Hermia with their metaphors’, they elevate Helena through ‘litan[ies] of Petrachan cliches’ (Desmet, “Disfiguring Women” 314). Hermia and Helena’s appearances have not changed, but they are transformed by the suitors’ language. Refigured by Lysander and Demetrius’ rhetoric, Helena is granted her wish to be ‘translated’ into Hermia (I.i.191),

88  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ primarily through the figure of metaphor or ‘translation’. 36 When Demetrius awakes after Oberon has applied the love juice to his eyes, he searches for appropriate metaphors to translate or fashion Helena into a goddess: O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine! To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne? Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow! That pure congealèd white—high Taurus’ snow, Fanned with the eastern wind—turns to crow When thou hold’st up thy hand. O, let me kiss This princess of pure white, this seal of bliss! (III.ii.137–44) Demetrius’ blazon as he catalogues and rejects metaphors (crystal is too muddy for her eyes, Taurus’ snow too black for her skin) fails to make its mark. It is pointless for Lysander and Demetrius, as Helena puts it, ‘To vow and swear and superpraise my parts / When I am sure you hate me with your hearts’ (III.ii.153–54). Framed by Puck as part of a comedic play-within-a-play (‘Shall we their fond pageant see?’ (III.ii.114) he asks Oberon), Demetrius’ translations of Helena constitute a peculiarly unimpressive rhetorical performance, inept enough to anticipate the mechanicals’ botched poetry in the interlude. The speech’s culmination in the metaphor of ‘this seal of bliss’ connects it to the recurring sealing imagery of the first scene (especially Theseus’ ‘sealing day’, denoting the blissful union—legal, spiritual and erotic—of marriage), but as with Egeus’ ‘stol’n the impression of her fantasy’, it is unclear who is supposed to be sealing whom. There is a suggestion that Demetrius wants to seal Helena’s hand with a kiss, but it is also implied that in giving her hand Helena would be sealing Demetrius with a pledge. As he waxes lyrical in his altered state, Demetrius shows himself as much a subject as an agent of impression and translation. Helena’s angry rejection of the blazon that emblematises her, and of the sealing kiss that would authorise it, reduces Demetrius’ poetic solicitation to a failed attempt in rhetorical transfiguration. Nonetheless, his series of couplets recall the transformative ‘rhymes’ Lysander is reported to have given Hermia before the play begins, and even—in the previous scene—Puck’s ‘translation’ or ‘transport’ of Bottom into the ass with whom he has an affinity, invoking the figure of metaphor. 37 We are compelled to see Lysander’s and Demetrius’ ‘Petrachan cliches’ as counterfeit verses, the ravings of madmen under the influence. But a counterfeit identified enhances the value of a true-made ‘seal of bliss’. Demetrius’ ineffectual blazon invites greater appreciation of Shakespearean poesis, heightening a sense that elsewhere the play woos us with powerful metaphors which imprint the memory—as Peacham puts it—‘as seales upon

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  89 soft waxe’, and with authentic poetic ‘beauties’ which make—according to Dodd—‘such impression on the mind as cannot easily be worn out or effaced’. As observed earlier, one such lauded passage is Theseus’ critique of the poet at the beginning of the final scene. The Duke’s mocking description of the poet’s ‘fine frenzy’, an invocation of the Platonic notion of furor poeticus, depends on a parallel with the ‘shaping fantasies’ of ‘Lovers and madmen’ (V.i.4–5), and thus gestures back to Lysander’s and Demetrius’ comic poetical furies. Apparently inserted by Shakespeare during revisions (Holland, Midsummer “Appendix”), and endlessly extracted by commonplacers, anthologists and critics, Theseus’ representation of poesis is remarkable for its self-contained poetic qualities: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (V.i.12–17) If, as critics such as Mark Stavig (1–2) have argued, Theseus is specifically describing the production of metaphor, 38 it is significant that the image of ‘imagination bod[ying] forth / The forms of things unknown’ is itself a metaphor, and one that returns us to the cluster of sealing images in the first scene. The idea that the poetic imagination gives a form, body and shape to things formless, bodiless and shapeless recalls the Duke’s comparison of the genitor Egeus to a sealer imprinting molten wax, transforming and bringing order to an amorphous substance. In this sense, Theseus’ poet is a patriarchal shaper of female matter, producing metaphors which act on the memory ‘as seales upon soft waxe’, transforming listeners’ hearts ‘As the seale leaueth the impression of his forme in waxe’, even ‘disposing’ or rhetorically arranging the unruly matter of words. 39 At the same time, however, Theseus evidently recognises the poet as a subversive figure, an ally of the lover and one whose rhetorical tricks—like Lysander’s ‘rhymes’, which impregnate or ‘impress’ Hermia’s ‘fantasy’—are a kind of illicit erotic transmission. In order to capture the poet’s mode of materialisation, Theseus coins a phrasal verb, ‘bodies forth’, meaning ‘gives mental shape to’ (OED body v. Phrasal Verbs 1). Linking the corporeal verb to Sidney’s ‘figuring foorth’, Heinrich Plett reasonably suggests it evokes ‘the act of birth’ as well as ‘the plastic appearance of the mental image itself’ (122 and n37). Given early modern associations of creative thought and imaginative activity with conception, labour and birth, the metaphor could be maternal rather than paternal in nature, betraying Theseus’ anxiety about

90  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ the poet’s unregulated powers of creation and setting up a tension with his earlier sigillographic image of ‘male parthenogenesis’. As discussed in Chapter 1, the imagination’s capacity to imprint and be imprinted was central to the perceived threat of maternal impressions, a kind of disfiguration glanced at in Oberon’s protective blessing of the married couples’ future issue against ‘blots of nature’s hand’ and ‘mark prodigious’ (V.i.398–405; Paster and Howard 300–1). Theseus’ coinage retains its currency in Shakespearean criticism, but it is more often applied to the labour of performing actors who ‘bodied forth’ texts and characters on the early modern stage than to Shakespeare’s own imaginative labours as a dramatist.40 However, the Duke’s focus on the material shaping of ‘the poet’s pen’, which does not ‘body forth’ but ‘Turns’ like a craftsman, has given a whole host of commentators a symbol of Shakespeare’s creativity, and one amenable to his perceived identity as a generative father of literature.41 The ‘special impress’ of the imagery in Dream, Spurgeon writes, induces wonder at its origins in the ‘beauty and the strange power of the poet’s pen’. Compelling evidence that Theseus’ critique of the poet was the product of Shakespeare’s revising, reflective hand as it reshaped the text seems only to reinforce the idea that Shakespeare’s own poetics are at issue.42 The ‘poet’s pen’ writes itself as the seal-matrix imprints itself, always urging its absent presence in the text. Theseus’ conclusion that the lovers are merely the victims of the ‘tricks’ of ‘strong imagination’ (V.i.18) is challenged by Hippolyta: But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of a great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable. (V.i.23–27) Hippolyta’s speech is often read as a defence of imagination and the rhetoric by which it operates (e.g. Lyne, Shakespeare 105), or even ‘the values of art, the consistent and coherent shape it may give to imaginative experience’ (Young 140). The term ‘transfigured’ resonates with the various translations, figurations and disfigurations that have been described, threatened and enacted over the course of the play, urging us to recognise ourselves as ‘transfigured’ by its rhetorical and theatrical artistry. Critics have readily obliged. ‘Transfiguration is the method and the glory of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, declares Harold Bloom, rather too confident that Hippolyta is ‘speaking for Shakespeare’ (Marson xi–xii). While more measured, other critics have still championed ‘transfigured’ as the play’s self-reflexive watchword, a key to understanding its imaginative and poetic processes.43 For James L. Calderwood, one of the first critics

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  91 to analyse the play’s self-reflexivity at length, the ‘collective transfiguration’ Dream brings about in the theatre is its means of self-reproduction: ‘The play survives the occasion of its performance … by imprinting its illusions in the minds of its audience, where it receives a new and enduring life’. Calderwood’s account of Dream’s life-­giving impression of itself inevitably returns us to Theseus’ patriarchal model of reproduction, although this time the god-like sealer is not Egeus but Shakespeare, the ‘high priest of subjectivity’ (Shakespearean Metadrama 142). My intention here is not to refute the idea that Dream transfigures its audiences or readers, but rather to suggest that the widespread belief that it does has something to do with the way that the play subtly advertises itself and especially its poetry as impressive and transformative. The process is partly structural. Theseus and Hippolyta’s debate at the beginning of the final scene invites reflection on the imaginative and rhetorical experience of the play so far. But it also anticipates the mechanicals’ interlude, for which the ‘transfigured’ lovers become cynical audience members, taking cruel pleasure in mocking a performance that disfigures rather than transfigures. Just as Hippolyta’s ‘transfigured’ offers critics a way of articulating ‘the method and the glory’ of Dream, Peter Quince’s malapropism ‘disfigure’ serves commentators on the prosaic mechanicals’ poetic and theatrical endeavours, especially what Patricia Parker calls ‘their repeated disfiguring or deforming of … the ordered “chain” of discourse’ (“Rude Mechanicals” 54). When Quince states at the rehearsal that one must ‘say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine’, he reproduces the word used by Theseus in his warning to Hermia that her father can ‘leave the figure or disfigure it’. Disfiguration confusingly becomes a kind of figuration: while Quince linguistically disfigures ‘figure’, the correct verb for theatrical presentation, he also refigures Theseus’ ‘disfigure’ into a comic sign of representation. The comic slip ‘liberates the audience from the specter of the symbolic violence with which Hermia … is threatened’ (David Hillman 82), but it also instructs them how to interpret the mechanicals’ blundering performance and especially their stylistic vices as they enact symbolic violence on rhetoric and poetry. These vices can be identified and categorised, from Quince’s paroemion (‘He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast’ (V.i.146)) to Bottom’s battologia (‘O night, O night, alack, alack, alack’, ‘Now die, die, die, die, die’ (V.i.170, 300)) and hypallage (‘I see a voice. Now will I to the chink / To spy an I hear my Thisbe’s face’ (V.i.191–92)).44 But Dream posits disfiguration as the over-arching figure for these rhetorical abuses, which—especially for those in search of ‘beauties’—throw the play’s poetic transfigurations into sharp relief. When Bottom mars his line about what the devouring lion has done to Thisbe (‘lion vile

92  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’ hath here deflowered my dear’ (V.i.286, my emphasis)), he returns us to Oberon’s prized speech about the creation of the metamorphic love-in-idleness, ‘Before, milk-white; now purple with love’s wound’ (II.i.167; Holland, Midsummer 247n). Regularly plucked from the play, Oberon’s speech itself soon came to be seen as a kind of ‘flower’ with the power to enchant. As rhetorically effective as Quince’s mispunctuated prologue (V.i.108– 17) is deficient, Puck’s epilogue negotiates the audience’s experience of Dream as a poetic transfiguration, distinguished from and yet complemented by the disfiguration of the interlude. It disguises itself as an ‘excuse’ for the play, the term used by Theseus when refusing an epilogue to the interlude (V.i.347–49). However, delivered at the end of Theseus’ ‘sealing day’, the epilogue acts as a transformative seal that authenticates the play’s metamorphic and poetic qualities. Epilogues sometimes playfully solicited a legally binding ‘seal’ of approval from the audience in the form of applause (‘set your hands and Seales to this’, requests Captain Tucca at the end of Dekker’s Satiro-mastix (1602; M2v–M3r)), and indeed Puck ends the play by asking the audience to ‘Give me your hands’ (V.i.428). Yet in focusing on the audience’s perception of what has happened to them in the theatre, the epilogue also reinforces the idea that Dream has enacted a kind of cognitive seal by—in Calderwood’s words—‘imprinting its illusions in the minds of its audience’. Puck’s play/dream analogy allows the audience to identify with the collectively ‘transfigured’ lovers, who try to make sense of what they perceive to be dreams (IV.i.186–97), or even the ‘translated’ Bottom, who believes he has ‘had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was’ (IV.i.202–3). The analogy hinges on a conditional clause (‘If we shadows have offended, / Think but this…’ (V.i.414–15)): if the play has not offended but rather pleased, we can recognise the play as something more material and potent, ‘more yielding than a dream’ (V.i.419), and yet still comparable to a dream in its appeal to, or even dependence on, the fertile imagination.45 ‘Yielding’ is implicitly gendered in that it connects the audience’s perception of the play as an artistic product they have co-created (something yielded by the imaginative work of dramatist, actors and audience) to the play’s preoccupation with the resistance and yielding of women to male force and patriarchal law. The verb is used four times in the first scene (I.i.69, 80, 91, 119) as Hermia and her virginity are repeatedly represented as something to be yielded; indeed, as a ‘form in wax’ Hermia is reduced to a sign of her mother’s wax-like yielding.46 Like ‘bodies forth’, ‘yielding’ may even suggest a birthing image (OED yield v. 8a; see Pericles xxii.69), presenting Dream as a kind of poetic changeling child, to be cared for by the audience. Puck’s ‘yielding’, like Hippolyta’s ‘transfigured’, has been seized upon by critics, especially those intent on capturing the play’s poetic productivity. R.W. Dent, in his influential reading

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  93 of Dream as Shakespeare’s ‘defence of poetry’, concludes that ‘poetic imagination can be … far “more yielding” than most dreams’ (102). Puck ostensibly speaks against such claims for the play’s capacity to yield and transfigure, echoing Theseus’ dismissal of players as insubstantial ‘shadows’ (V.i.210, 414). But the play invites resistance to its closing gesture of self-erasure, urging us to recognise the metamorphic powers of poets and ‘shadows’ just as Theseus’ critique of ‘shaping fantasies’ gives way to Hippolyta’s articulation of the lovers’ transfiguration. The epilogue’s content is significantly nuanced by its poetic form. Spoken in rhyming couplets and primarily in trochaic tetrameter catalectic as he offers to wake the audience from a dream-filled slumber, Puck’s artful apology for ‘this weak and idle theme’ (V.i.418) parallels the charming of Titania, Lysander and Demetrius, reinforcing a sense of the play’s impressive poetic enchantment. Puck gives the audience rhymes directly in a language and form the play has taught them to recognise as transformative. This chapter has argued that Dream’s long-established centrality to celebrations of Shakespeare’s impressive and transformative poetics, so often implicitly gendered in critical discussions, is heavily indebted to the play’s self-reflexive metaphors of figuration, disfiguration and transfiguration, which engage with the language and material culture of wax sealing. Given that sealing is now an obsolete technology, it is curious that critics—albeit prompted by Shakespeare’s own language—continue to use sealing metaphors to tackle big issues in Shakespeare studies.47 For all its appeal as a possible relic of the Bard, the ‘WS’ seal dug up in ­Stratford-upon-Avon in the early nineteenth century (see Introduction) would have been recognised as an everyday object by Romantic critics such as Coleridge, Hazlitt and Keats. Today, it stands as an archaic museum piece viewed by people unlikely to have direct experience of the material culture of sealing. Most modern critics’ access to seal-matrices and forms in wax is limited to work in archives, actual or digital. Our increasing historical alienation from the once quotidian technology that represented artistic agency and authority would seem at odds with the persistent belief that modern audiences and readers are fashioned, impressed and transformed by Shakespeare’s language and poetry. However, part of the modern appeal of being imaginatively ‘transfigured’ by Shakespeare lies in the idea of distance, whether temporal or spatial. The dramatist’s power to impress is recognised as transhistorical and transnational, an idea reinforced by his cultural reproduction and translation. While Dream offers critics alternative models of reproduction (one wonders, for instance, how things might be different if Helena’s recollection of her and Hermia’s collaborative needlework as ‘two artificial gods’ (III.ii.203–14) was widely adopted as a model of Shakespearean authorship and poetics), Theseus’ patriarchal figure is likely to continue to capture a widespread desire to be ‘By him imprinted’.

94  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’

Notes 1 ‘Parthenogenesis’, meaning ‘reproduction from a gamete without fertilization’ or—more literally—‘virgin birth’, is often applied by critics to Theseus’ model of reproduction (OED parthenogenesis n.). Here and throughout the rest of the book, I use the term ‘parthenogenesis’, and refer to ‘parthenogenetic’ fathers, poets and authors, in order to identify fantasies of paternal self-reproduction informed by patriarchal ideologies of procreation, poesis and authorship. 2 My discussion of this history draws on Kennedy and Kennedy 1–5, 10–11. 3 For examples of extracts from Dream in manuscript commonplace books, see Estill 97, 176–77, 186, 222n55. 4 On the rise of Shakespearean quotation books, see de Grazia, “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks”. 5 On the growing sense of Shakespeare’s authorial propriety in quotation books during the eighteenth century, see Rumbold, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century Novel 26–34. 6 Kennedy and Kennedy 80, 84, 66, 60, 84, 245. 7 For example, see Young, R.W. Dent, and Riemer. 8 See Mowat on the continued treatment of Theseus’ speech as representative of Shakespeare’s ‘spontaneous, inspired authorship’ (347). 9 Responding to Montrose’s essay, Greenblatt declares that ‘history is not simply discovered in the precincts surrounding the literary text or the performance of the image; it is found in the artworks themselves, as enabling condition, shaping force, forger of meaning …. And the work of art is not the passive surface on which this historical experience leaves its stamp but one of the creative agents in the fashioning and re-fashioning of this experience’ (“Introduction” viii). 10 Bruster notes Montrose’s turn to Pericles here (Quoting Shakespeare 34). 11 On the importance of wax to Descartes, see de Grazia, “Imprints” 63–67. 12 The following discussion of the material culture and social functions of sealing draws on: Daybell 48–51, 105–7; Stewart, Ch. 1 passim; Daniel Starza Smith; and Beal, ‘Great Seal’ (179–81), ‘papered seal’ (281), ‘pendent’ (292), ‘seal’ (370–72). 13 In Heywood’s If You Know Not Me (1605), King Philip declares ‘this is our sealing day / This our states busines; is our signet there?’ (F1r). 14 Shakespeare’s own marriage licence bond of 28 November 1582 once had two seal-impressions attached to it, but they have since disintegrated (Gray 33–35). The rite of matrimony had not been officially considered a sacramental seal since the Reformation, but the language of sealing rhetorically reinforced the idea that wedding ceremonies publicly contracted man and wife in the eyes of the law. 15 On seal counterfeiting in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, see Long 247, 258–63. Also see Gordon on ‘counterfeit correspondence’. 16 Letters were folded and sealed in various ways, all of which allowed ­letter-writers to conceal their messages (see Daybell 49–50; Stewart 50–55). A standard technique was the ‘tuck and seal’ method. The letter-writer would fold a bifolium letter twice horizontally and twice vertically before tucking the loose left end inside the right. Tempered or molten wax would then be inserted into the resulting seam and a seal-matrix pressed onto the paper covering the wax to create an impression. Often, however, wax was placed over the seam and directly imprinted by the matrix, producing an exposed seal-impression. Certain letters, especially love letters, were sealed over silk floss that had been tied round the folded document as a sign of intimacy and affection (see Heather Wolfe).

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  95 17 On royal seals, see Beal 179, 371. 18 See Beal 371–72. Seidmann discusses fob seals in detail. 19 Loewenstein states that ‘[b]y the fifteenth century, the seal-matrix was part of the normal furniture of commercial life for Englishmen and Englishwomen above the middling sort, and for many of the middling sort as well’ (206). ‘The middling sort’ normally refers to affluent merchants and citizens in the social stratum between the poor and the landed elite, but see Barry and Brooks for detailed definitions and debates. Sometimes seals were used by people other than their owners, including family members and secretaries (Daybell 106). While certain personal seals were extremely expensive, others were quite affordable and at the turn of the seventeenth century some cost no more than a few shillings (Daybell 51). 20 See, for example, Takiguchi 145–54, and Schleiner, Imagery 104–21. 21 The example is discussed by Daniel Starza Smith. 22 See Lyne, “Lyrical Wax” for an analysis of the ways in which Marlowe and Donne translated and imitated Ovid’s erotic analogies between bodies and impressionable wax. 23 For examples, see Gordon Williams, ‘impression’ (2:705–6) and ‘seal’ (3:1210). 24 For detailed discussion of the erotics of sealing and seal-breaking, see Harry Newman, “A seale of Virgin waxe”. 25 A possible source for this quotation is in Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas’s epic poem L’Uranie (first published in La Sepmaine in 1578), translated by James I and published in his Essayes of a Prentise, in the Diuine Art of Poesie (1584): ‘[A]s into the wax the seals imprent / Is lyke a seale, right so the Poet gent, / Doeth graue so viue [vividly] in vs his passions strange, / As maks the reader, halfe in author change.’ (E2r) 26 On literal and metaphorical seals in Hamlet, see Stewart 267–72; and Loewenstein 210–14. Mary Thomas Crane’s paper for the 2016 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, “Form and Pressure in Shakespeare”, argues that Hamlet’s references to memory (I.v.98–104) and theatrical representation (III.ii.20–24) in terms of form and pressure are derived from Plato’s and Aristotle’s sealing similes (discussed in Chapter 1 of this book), and engage with a ‘post-classical physics of pressure’ which ‘can help us understand Shakespeare’s conception of the relationship between theatrical forms and an audience’. My thanks to her for allowing me to read and cite her paper. 27 On the gendering and eroticisation of rhetoric in early modern England, see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies. Desmet discusses Puttenham’s feminisation of rhetoric in relation to Dream (“Disfiguring Women” 302–5). Sharon-Zisser, who sees certain early modern rhetorical treatises as aligning metaphor with ‘a phallic masculinity giving pleasure and ensuring procreation’, contends that in Peacham’s comparison ‘the vocabulary of elocution is crossed with the vocabularies of numismatics and sexual difference’, that is, the difference between ‘the stamp and the stamped, form and formed’ (181, 180). I would suggest that the sigillographic image of Peacham’s comparison also contributes to and nuances its implicit gendering and eroticism. 28 See Northway, especially 83–84 on letters patent, which ‘gave touring actors protection from provincial officials based on the letters’ ability to communicate authority by means of the patron’s status’ (84). 29 See Records of Early English Drama: Cheshire (including Chester) 1:293, BL Harley MS 2173 f 81* (10 November). Thanks to Derek Dunne for bringing this example to my attention. See his article “Rogues’ License” on

96  ‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’

30

31 32 33 34 35

36

37

38

39

40 41

spurious theatrical licences, and on licences more generally, in early modern literature and culture. On the establishment of the Chamberlain’s Men, see Gurr, especially Ch. 1 on “The Plan of 1594”. Gurr’s theory of the creation of a ‘duopoly’ in 1594, shared by the Chamberlain’s Men and Admiral’s Men, should be read alongside revisionary accounts of that year, such as Syme, “The Meaning of Success”. The fact that Theseus’ ‘manager of mirth’ in the Folio is Egeus invites a link between the ‘form in wax’ of the parthenogenetic father and the bureaucratic seal of the Master of the Revels. I am grateful to Ewan Fernie for his advice on my reading of this line. Holland, Midsummer 135n. See OED feign v. 3a, 8a, 12a, Etymology; faining adj.; feigning adj. 2, 4. On critical debates about the poetic virtues of rhyme in Dream from the eighteenth century onwards, see Kennedy and Kennedy 25. Holland (Midsummer 164n.) suggests the source for this flower can be found in Lyly’s Euphues and His England (1580), in which the mathematician Psellus speaks cynically of a herb ‘called anacamsoritis, a strange name and doubtless of a strange nature, for whosoever toucheth it falleth in love with the next person she seeth’ (258). Love is repeatedly conceptualised as an ‘impression’ in Lyly’s text (274, 295, 316), and Psellus’ speech is itself prompted by an inquiry from Philautus about sorcery and medicine that can ‘work the minds of all women like wax’ (256). Although in Dream the flower is also used to drug Titania, it is significantly the male rather than the female lovers that are transformed by it. Lyne observes that ‘translation’ was synonymous with metaphor, and contends that ‘Helena’s commitment to the power of rhetoric extends even to a hypothesis that she herself can be transformed by metaphor’ (Shakespeare 112). As both a verb and an adjective, ‘translated’ was used to refer to the transformation enabled by metaphor (OED translate v. 2c, translated adj. (Derivatives of v.)). Further to observations by Parker (Literary Fat Ladies 93, 122) and Lyne (Shakespeare 124) that the ‘translated’ Bottom (III.i.113, III.ii.32) represents the transformative power of the figure of metaphor or ‘translation’, it is significant that Starveling refers to Bottom as having been ‘transported’ (IV. ii.4). Both a figuration and a disfiguration, Bottom’s metamorphosis recalls Puttenham’s definition of the figure of ‘transport’ or metaphor: ‘a kinde of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or conueniencie with it’. Lyne suggests that ‘The forms of things unknown’ recalls a phrase in Peacham’s definition of metaphor in the 1593 edition of The Garden of Eloquence. According to Lyne’s transcription, Peacham states that memory is ‘the principall efficient of a Metaphore’ partly because ‘it possesseth the formes of unknowne things’ (Shakespeare 88–89). Peacham’s phrase is in fact ‘the formes of knowen things’ (Peacham 3), but Lyne’s point stands that both Peacham and Shakespeare are concerned with ‘the ability to think new thoughts by means of metaphor’ (89). Patricia Parker contends that ‘“disposition” … connects the patriarchal control of a formless, shapeless, and potentially unruly female “matter” to the ruling (and proper joining) of words in discourse, their ordering and shaping’ (“Rude Mechanicals” 65). See, for example, Patricia Parker, “Rude Mechanicals” 45. See Ch. 5 on Ben Jonson’s celebration of Shakespeare’s ‘well torned, and true filed lines’ in the First Folio, which show how ‘the fathers face / Liues in his issue’.

‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’  97 42 For Lyne, the revision transformed Theseus’ speech about the lover and the madman into ‘one through which to appreciate the strange inventive power of the poet’, and ‘suggests heightened attention and a kind of discovery as the play began to reflect on its own medium’ (Shakespeare 106). 43 See, for example, David Hillman 82, and Kanelos 240. Mann curiously marries Theseus’ and Hippolyta’s language in her attention to the ‘transfigurations bodied forth by Dream’ (Outlaw Rhetoric 121). 4 4 See Plett 477–88 for detailed discussion of the mechanicals’ rhetoric in the interlude. Critics have convincingly demonstrated that the recurring figure of hypallage, or ‘the changeling’, is integral to the play’s character substitutions and structural logic, and even ‘embodied in the play’s literal “changeling” boy’ (Patricia Parker, “Rude Mechanicals” 60). Also see Desmet, “Disfiguring Women” 306–9, and Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric, Ch. 4 (118–45). 45 My thanks to Laurie Maguire for drawing my attention to the significance of the epilogue’s opening word ‘If’. 46 Wax was often described as ‘yielding’ to impressions, as at Venus and Adonis ll. 565–66. Calderwood’s reading of Theseus’ ‘form in wax’ speech suggests that the mother’s body is conflated with, or even replaced by, the virginal body of her daughter, ‘who is now being asked to assume the feminine passivity associated with her conception’ (Midsummer 8). 47 Watt, for example, uses a sealing metaphor to try and capture comedy’s relationship with tragedy in Shakespearean drama: ‘we can say the signet ring of comedy leaves its impression on the bloody wax of tragedy and that it succeeds as comedy because it has touched the tragic but come away untainted’ (119).

4 ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’ Measure for Measure, counterfeit coinage, and the politics of value

In 2016, the Royal Mint celebrated Shakespeare’s ‘literary legacy’ 400 years after his death by producing three £2 coins, endorsed by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, bearing images representative of Shakespearean comedy, history and tragedy (see Figure 4.1). These coins, now in circulation, might seem to embody the long-­established idea that Shakespeare’s

Figure 4.1  U  ncirculated set of three commemorative £2 coins, representing Shakespearean comedy, history and tragedy (2016). The Royal Mint retains copyright ownership ©.

‘[S]tamps that are forbid’  99 plays have cultural currency, from early assertions that his plays are—in the words of Leonard Digges in the early 1630s—‘old-coined gold’, to modern critical evaluations of Shakespeare as ‘a form of symbolic capital that circulates in the culture like unalloyed gold coin’ (Charnes 155). It is appropriate, however, that these Shakespeare coins, which certainly are alloyed, were released amid heightened anxieties about the stability of British currency, and the introduction of new measures to combat the counterfeiting of £1 and £2 coins.1 For many, coins bearing the name of Shakespeare—celebrated as ‘the gold standard of literary value’ (Ryan, Shakespeare 160)—might help secure public faith in the integrity of British currency, but the circulation of these little stamps of the Bard in an uncertain economic market urges consideration of how we value Shakespeare theatrically, culturally, politically and ethically. Paul Yachnin has addressed ‘the making of theatrical value’ in relation to the early modern theatre’s ‘project of institutional legitimation’ (xiii), and Jeremy Lopez has argued for the inseparability of aesthetic value and canonical history in early modern drama studies. The question of Shakespeare’s relationship to cultural value in the twenty-first century has been brought to the fore by Kate McLuskie and Kate Rumbold, with productive focus on ‘the agents and social processes that create [cultural] value’ (3). 2 In this book I have already engaged with questions of characterological value (Chapter 2) and rhetorical value (Chapter 3) in the early modern theatre, and the implications for how we value Shakespeare as modern critics and audiences. In this chapter, however, I show that Shakespeare’s own language of numismatics and counterfeiting offers insights into modern and early modern debates about the theatrical and generic value of Shakespearean drama. Focusing on Measure for Measure as a play whose numismatic imagery responds to specific theatrical, material and economic contexts of Jacobean England, I argue that Shakespeare and Middleton (the play’s adapter) use ideas about coinage to interrogate different forms of reproduction and circulation. As a result, I contend, the play engages with discourses that continue to be central to critical articulations of Shakespeare’s susceptibility to cultural forms of adulteration, debasement and counterfeiting. The persistent desire to view Shakespearean drama as ‘old-coined gold’ requires what I call ‘the politics of value’ in early modern studies, 3 whereby the reproduction of Shakespeare’s cultural value depends on the preservation of his canon’s ‘purity’ and the devaluation of other dramatists. Responding to recent work on the political, social and moral meanings of money in early modern literature, I ask what coinage and numismatic discourse can tell us about theatre history, authorship and canonisation. Stephen Deng has persuasively argued for the centrality of a ‘poetics of coinage’ to ‘conceptions of state formation’ in early modern England (1), and David Landreth has demonstrated that by using money ‘to present matter itself as a basis of social meaning’, Renaissance writers make the

100  ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’ coin—‘at once a thing and a relation’—an object for the inseparable discourses of ontology, ethics and politics (6–7). But what was the importance of early modern numismatics to the economy of theatrical mimesis in the early modern period, when the playhouse was identified as a commercial arena of artistic ‘counterfetting … forth’ (in Philip Sidney’s words)? And how might what Deng calls the ‘poetics of coinage’ apply to Shakespeare’s cultural currency after his death, and the politics of Shakespeare’s value as a modern institution built on the exclusion of authors, reproductions or attributions that are ‘counterfeit’, ‘debased’ or ‘spurious’? Measure for Measure speaks to these concerns by making the concept of the counterfeit central to its interrogation of politics, sexuality and theatre. Long recognised as ‘a play about value’ (Nigel Smith 197), Measure is remarkable for its use of numismatic imagery to connect illicit forms of sexuality and reproduction with the transmission of political power. The puritanical Angelo sentences Claudio to death for impregnating Juliet before marriage because he refuses ‘to remit / Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image / In stamps that are forbid’ (II.iv.44–46). This metaphor, however, calls into question Angelo’s own legitimacy as the deputed ruler of Vienna. When the Duke offers Angelo his commission in the first scene of the play, the deputy—whose name recalls the gold ‘angel’ coin worth ten shillings—requests in vain that ‘there be some more test made of my mettle, / Before so noble and so great a figure / Be stamped upon it’ (I.i.49–51). Angelo would seem to prove himself a man of base metal once tested in the realms of political and sexual experience, a counterfeit and counterfeiter whose hypocrisy associates him with the forbidden stamps he condemns. Claudio and Angelo, however, are not the only characters to be associated with false or debased coinage. The disguised Duke, who ‘utters a debased “angel” upon the market, and reaps profits upon its recall’ (Landreth 130), orchestrates a bed-trick and head-trick that substitute heads and maidenheads as if they were coins of the same denomination (Shell, The End of Kinship 128, 129). As a slanderer, Lucio can be described—as Nestor does Thersites in Troilus and Cressida—as ‘coin[ing] slanders like a mint’ (I.iii.193; Deng 126). Even Isabella, whose zealous spiritual and sexual purity invites comparisons with Angelo, identifies herself as ‘credulous to false prints’ (II.iv.131) and participates in the deception of the Duke’s bed-trick. For Deng, the play illustrates political tensions between rulers and the ruled at a time when coinage was central to the rhetoric of moral regulation and social justice: The coining metaphors in Measure for Measure ultimately reveal both the state’s strategy of equating coining crimes with other immoral acts as well as subjects’ refusal to grant the state a monopoly over the terms of justice that permit such arbitrary comparisons. (104–5)

‘[S]tamps that are forbid’  101 My concern is rather with how the play uses counterfeiting to address the state’s relationship to drama, and in particular to respond to James I’s construction of himself as an arbiter of ‘true value’. I read Measure as a play that self-reflexively negotiates its own value as a ‘counterfeit comedy’, analysing its numismatic motif in relation to two specific historical moments: 1603–4, when the play was first composed by Shakespeare and performed by the newly minted ‘King’s Men’; and 1621–22, when the play was revised or ‘re-stamped’ by Thomas Middleton after Shakespeare’s death. These historical moments are crucial to the play’s engagement with the politics of value in a period when drama and coinage were crucial media for the representation of Jacobean political power and identity. They are also important for thinking about how and why the play has since acquired a problematic status as a kind of counterfeit or debased coin in the celebrated ‘treasury’ of the Shakespeare canon.4 For my purposes, then, the value of Measure lies not only in its numismatic responsiveness to specific early modern ideas about politics and theatre, but also in its coin-like afterlife as a canonical text whose value has been proclaimed, tested and challenged in critical and cultural marketplaces.

Counterfeiting in the name of the King: Jacobean coinage and the King’s Men Although long recognised as an important part of Shakespeare’s cultural value and a literary treasure, Measure has historically been seen as a kind of counterfeit, a bad penny in the canon. In the early nineteenth century, Coleridge declared it ‘the single exception to the delightfulness of Shakespeare’s plays’, and ‘a hateful work, although Shakespearian throughout’ (Geckle 80). Its uncertain generic denomination, its unsatisfying and ethically ambivalent ending, and—more recently—its complex textual status as a posthumously adapted text have encouraged critics to question its authenticity and purity as a ‘Shakespearean comedy’. Not content with its categorisation as a comedy in the Folio, critics have restamped the play as a ‘dark comedy’, ‘tragi-comedy’ and ‘problem play’, or even—along with other ‘problem plays’—an ‘­un-Shakespearean’ Shakespeare play. 5 Measure is still often grouped with other misfit, hybrid plays like Troilus and Cressida, which—Michael Neill has shown—exhibit their status as generic ‘counterfeits’ or ‘bastard-works’.6 Responding to Measure’s numismatic imagery, Landreth suggests the play highlights its ‘uncomfortably coercive comedy’ by having the Duke—in a sovereign act of ‘generic shaping’—coin a happy ending of ‘renewed allegiance and four marriages’: ‘[T]he comedic resolution … seems as enforced upon the Duke’s audiences, onstage and off, as the Duke’s “stamp” first was upon Angelo’ (131, 147). Indeed, critics have long tried to test the play’s generic mettle, increasingly aware that it self-consciously invites such trials.

102  ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’ However, the ‘problem’ of Measure—like All’s Well That Ends Well— has of late become authorial as well as generic, and we must now contest not only Coleridge’s assertion that it is a ‘hateful work’, but also his conviction that it is ‘Shakespearian throughout’.7 Analyses of Measure’s textual genetics have revealed that, while originally composed by Shakespeare in 1603–4, the play bears the revisionist stamp of Thomas Middleton. Bibliographical, historical and stylometric evidence shows the play was expurgated of blasphemous oaths and sacred nouns following the 1606 Act of Parliament to restrain abuses of players, and adapted by Middleton for a stage revival in late 1621 or early 1622.8 For many scholars, Measure’s textual reshaping at the hands of Middleton, which I will discuss later, is as problematic as the Duke’s generic reshaping of the play at its end. Neither entirely comic nor completely Shakespearean, then, Measure bears a spurious identity as a ‘Shakespearean comedy’. How might the play’s persistent status as a kind of counterfeit in the history of criticism be related to its own obsession with counterfeits and counterfeiters that pervert and enforce economies of law enforcement, moral regulation and comedic resolution? Measure, I suggest, uses a numismatic motif to negotiate its value as a counterfeit or debased comedy in response to specific contexts of theatre history, coinage and politics in Jacobean England. Here I address these historical contexts, analysing the play’s responsiveness to the political relationship between coinage and drama, two forms of production on which James I set his stamp as sovereign and royal patron following his ascension to the English throne in 1603. I show that Jacobean control and transformation of coinage and drama— bound by the discourse of counterfeiting—are crucial to understanding the play’s reflections on value in politics and theatre. They are also essential to understanding its afterlife as a play whose value and legitimacy as a ‘Shakespearean comedy’ have never quite escaped question in Shakespeare studies, a field in which the drama/coinage analogy remains influential. The playhouse and the mint were analogous institutions in the early seventeenth century. Playwrights and actors ‘coined’ words, plots and characters, but more significantly drama and coinage were connected by the idea of reproducing political authority. Kings and dukes were represented on stage before socially diverse audiences, and coins—like ­medals—were ‘vehicles for the depiction of authority, inscribed with realistic portraits of rulers’ (Cook 12–14). This connection was particularly pertinent to the issue of royal patronage: in 1603, the new royal family took over the patronage of several London theatre companies, including the Chamberlain’s Men, now the King’s Men.9 Paul Yachnin argues that Measure’s ‘pattern of coin imagery registers the unease consequent upon the King’s Servants’ commercial success’: Coins were legitimate only when they bore the impress of the King’s face; similarly, the King’s countenancing of the drama legitimated

‘[S]tamps that are forbid’  103 the players, and also increased the taking in of coins from the public audience. However, … since “the coin,” which was supposed to be able to “pass current” between the model of market value on the one hand and that of transcendent, or “sovereign,” value on the other, could not in fact mediate between these incommensurable ways of valuing, it had to remain always in jeopardy of being discovered to be counterfeit itself or of discovering the falsity of the countenance that impressed it. (79–80) In questioning who was ‘misappropriating’ (80) whom in the relationship between a self-promoting patron and a commercially opportunistic acting company, Yachnin presents us with a paradox: the King’s Men were counterfeiting in the name of the King. Having had sovereign grace imprinted in them through the ‘stamp’ of patronage,10 an impression materialised by the seal authorising the Royal Patent enrolling them into James’ service on 19 May 1603,11 the company was able to make false impressions on audiences—what Stephen Gosson calls ‘impressions of mind … which the players do counterfeit on the stage’—at a greater profit than ever before. This theatrical counterfeiting also depended on the audience’s active participation and complicity. Audiences were required to fund the enterprise and pass the play as ‘currant … under the infalible stampe of [their] iudicious censure, and applause’,12 but also to coin actions and events—as the Chorus puts it in Henry V—‘In the quick forge and working-house of thought’ (V.0.23). Yachnin’s discussion of coinage in his reading of Measure serves his claim that in the play Shakespeare ‘makes sexual desire the scapegoat for the illegitimacy of his activity as a commercial playwright’, thereby ‘shift[ing] the ground of his legitimation of the theater from the public to the private’ (78, 77). However, if we read the play in relation to numismatic and economic contexts of 1603–4, when the play was first composed, it becomes apparent that Shakespeare was responding in very specific ways to moral and political anxieties about coinage in early Jacobean England, as he self-reflexively negotiated the play’s value as a debased comedy counterfeited by the King’s Men. Composed prior to its first recorded performance before the King at Whitehall on 26 December 1604, and very likely after the ascension of James I on 24 March 1603,13 Measure’s recurring coin imagery responds to early Jacobean policy and propaganda at a time when freshly minted coins were the primary means of public access to the countenance of the first Stuart king of England. James I was careful throughout his reign to avoid the political dangers of debasement (the systematic reduction of coins’ precious metal content), a practice widely criticised as hypocritical and historically associated with counterfeiting crimes demonised by the state (Deng 94, 104, 126). His proclamations concerning coinage, however, were clearly motivated by a desire to manipulate numismatic value

104  ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’ and the public’s perception of it. In two proclamations published at the beginning of his reign over England, on 8 April 1603 and 16 November 1604, James presented himself as a ruler intent on protecting the ‘true value’ of the realm’s coinage, a recurring phrase in Jacobean proclamations for coins.14 Given the possible dates of Measure’s composition, the play’s coin allusions may have been influenced by one or both of these proclamations. The first probably appeared before composition began.15 If the play had not been completed by mid-November 1604, the later proclamation could also have had an impact on Shakespeare’s composition. The fact that the proclamation was published less than six weeks before the first recorded performance of Measure provides a significant historical context for early audiences’ reception of the play’s coin imagery, especially the royal audience of late December. Two weeks after he ascended the throne, James released “A Proclamation declaring at what values certaine Moneys of Scotland shalbe currant in England” (8 April 1603). The proclamation valued the Scottish silver coin known as the ‘Marke’ at thirteen and a half pence, and the gold ‘Six lib. [pound] piece’ at ten shillings, making it—as the 1604 proclamation stated—‘equal to the English Angel’. The 1603 proclamation claimed that the King was establishing the ‘true value’ of these Scottish coins in England in order to facilitate ‘Commerce and Trade betweene his loving Subjects of both his sayd Kingdomes’, but its actual purpose was to legalise coins being brought to England by James and his train (Larkin and Hughes 7n1). This reason was made more explicit in the 1604 “Proclamation for Coynes” of 16 November, which acknowledged that the valuation of the six-pound piece had disrupted the English economy, but also claimed the real problem was that ‘the English Coynes of Golde are not in regard of the Silver Coynes, of the true proportion between Gold and Silver accustomed in all Nations’. The central aim of the 1604 proclamation was to ‘enhance’ gold, making it twelve rather than eleven times more valuable than silver. Here was a change indeed in the commonwealth: the value of gold had increased considerably. Although different to debasement, the enhancement of money still shifted the relationship between coins’ intrinsic and extrinsic value and had an impact on economic transactions, with negative consequences for many subjects. The 1604 proclamation presented the enhancement of gold as a correction, a necessary adjustment of the bimetallic ratio that would limit ‘the transportation of Gold out of this Realme into forraine Countries … because the said Golde moneys are more worth in their true value, then here they were allowed’. As Simon Wortham observes, by claiming to establish the ‘true’ or natural relationship between the intrinsic and extrinsic value of coins (and especially gold coins), James was constructing himself as an essentialist, committed to a ‘conception of value in which the relation between the object and the sign was held to be immanent,

‘[S]tamps that are forbid’  105 direct, and unmediated’ (346–48). The proclamation seemed to herald a golden age of economic prosperity. It triumphantly announced the introduction of ‘new coynes both of Gold and silver to be made of several stampes, weights and values, but of one uniforme Standard and allay, to be currant within this our Kingdome of Great Britain’. Introduced after a declaration of commitment to ‘true value’, these coins were presented as symbols of the strength and legitimacy of James’ newly united British Empire. This was especially true of ‘One piece of Gold of the value of Twenty shillings sterling, to be called The Unite’, stamped with ‘Our picture’, ‘Our Armes Crowned’ and ‘Our stile’ (see Figure 4.2). The ‘stile’ or inscription, a proclamation from the previous month had stated, was ‘a meanes to imprint in the hearts of people, a Character and memorial of … Unitie’.16 However impressively symbolic, the usefulness of the high denomination unite in day-to-day commerce was questionable. Many may have felt dubious about the alteration of the bimetallic ratio in favour of such coins. The 1604 proclamation anticipated these doubts by presenting the King’s assertion of his authority over coinage as a legitimate act performed in service of his people: Although it be most certaine, that nothing is more appropriate to the Soveraigne dignity of Princes, then the ordering of their Moneys, and setting them at such Prices and Valuations, as they shall think convenient upon necessary causes; Yet haue We alwayes bene of opinion, that just Princes should not use the libertie of their Power

Figure 4.2  Obverse and reverse of a Jacobean ‘Unite’ (1604–9, minted in Edinburgh), a gold coin worth twenty shillings. British Museum, Coins and Medals, GHB,S.159. © The Trustees of the British Museum. The Latin legend on the obverse reads ‘IACOBUS D[EI] G[RATIA] MAG[NAE] BRIT[ANNIAE] FRAN[CIAE] & HIB[ERNIAE] REX’ (‘James, by the grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland’). The reverse legend, ‘FACIAM EOS IN GENTEM VNAM’ (‘I will make them one nation’), is from Ezekiel 37:22 (see Grueber no. 533: 101).

106  ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’ in Abating or Enhauncing the Prices of Moneys, without all respect to the Common benefite of their Subjects. (99–100) Whether or not the enhancement of gold was enacted with ‘respect to the Common benefite of [James’] Subjects’ is debatable. While the enhancement reinforced the crown’s authority by ‘representing sovereign money as a passive expression of a form of essential value (gold)’, the increase in the value of gold devalued silver and perpetuated its scarcity (Wortham 348, 342). Many subjects, especially those whose monetary wealth consisted primarily of silver, may have questioned whether the proclamation was establishing the ‘true value’ of gold. Were gold coins really worth as much as the new king said they were? Measure’s numismatic imagery puts pressure on the unstable relationship between the intrinsic and extrinsic value of coins, and gold coins in particular. When pleading with Angelo to spare her brother’s life, Isabella contrasts the prayers with which she intends to ‘bribe’ him (II.ii.147) with ‘fond sicles [shekels] of the tested gold, / Or stones whose rate are either rich or poor / As fancy values them’ (II.ii.151–53).17 Her point that the value of gold coins is determined by ‘fancy’ may have resonated with audiences recently affected by the 1604 proclamation. The name of the man to whom Isabella speaks, Angelo, would for many have called to mind the ‘angel’, the gold coin which the 1603 proclamation had made equal in value to the similarly weighted but less pure Scottish six-pound piece.18 The angel took its name from the image of Archangel Michael slaying a dragon stamped on its obverse side (Baker 86). At 23 carats and 3 and a half grains (99.48 per cent fine), ‘angel gold’ was the purest type of gold used for coins (Challis 257, 303), and this was probably why it had a reputation for being abused and counterfeited.19 From the deputation scene onwards, the purity of Angelo’s ‘mettle’ is called into doubt, and the action reveals that the ‘outward-sainted deputy’ (III.i.90) is only ‘angel on the outward side’ (III.i.526). 20 For audiences in 1604, the ‘false seeming’ (II.iv.15) of a character associated with a gold coin might well have been inflected by the state’s recent enhancement of gold. The rise and fall of the coinlike Angelo is a process that the Duke recognises to be—in the words of the 1604 proclamation—‘convenient upon necessary causes’ rather than for ‘the Common benefite of [his] Subjects’. Early Jacobean audiences could have interpreted Measure’s numismatic language as part of a bold politico-economic statement that questioned the integrity of the nation’s currency at a time when James I was manipulating the realm’s coinage for political ends. When the King’s Men performed the play before their sovereign and patron at Whitehall during the Christmas revels of 1604, their counterfeited gift was one that darkly reflected the King’s preoccupation with public perceptions of his relationship to value systems.

‘[S]tamps that are forbid’  107 If, as Yachnin suggests, the politics of coinage were intertwined with the politics of drama, royal patronage and theatrical value in the Jacobean period, the contestable assertions of ‘true value’ in James I’s proclamations for coins in 1603 and 1604 bring us to the issue of the ‘true value’ of theatrical counterfeiting, especially that of the King’s Men once newly enhanced by the stamp of James I. For Yachnin, the value of a King’s Men play was destabilised by its precarious position between the models of market value and of sovereign value. Yet, James’ representation of himself as a restorer of gold’s ‘true value’ in his proclamations for coins was symbolic of a desire to elide the difference between market and sovereign value, and indeed between intrinsic and extrinsic value: the King’s stamp, whether on ‘new coynes … of one uniforme Standard and allay’ or on the new-minted creatures and commodities of the King’s Men, supposedly determined the only value the commonwealth needed to know. For better or worse, King’s Men plays such as Measure entered the theatrical marketplace marked by a sovereign who was publicly constructing himself as an essentialist arbiter of ‘true value’.

Metatheatrical counterfeiting: the Duke’s economy of value In recognising Measure’s investment in the intersections of political, theatrical and numismatic value in early Jacobean England, there is a danger of allegory. While the Duke should not be equated with James I, 21 the centrality of his stamped ‘figure’ taps into anxieties about James I’s efforts to control the ‘true value’ of both coinage and theatre with his own stamp in 1603–4. There is something distinctly ‘Jacobean’ about the Duke’s political concerns with measuring, testing and valuing his subjects’ mettle, and the theatrical self-consciousness with which he does so. His manipulations, I suggest here, construct a political and theatrical economy that has the potential to control the audience’s valuation of this King’s Men play. The Duke has been interpreted as manipulating an economy of coinlike political subjects as he himself circulates unobserved and oversees their ‘sexual, verbal and mercantile transactions’ (Yoshihara 70). ‘Like the invisible hand of the market’, Deng contends, ‘the duke places himself at the center of a system of mysterious replacements and substitutions whose terms of equivalence are allowed to change over time’ (131). The play encourages us to conceive its bed-trick and head-trick in economic and numismatic terms, as heads and maidenheads are exchanged and effectively monetized. For Isabella, responding to economic language introduced by Angelo’s proposal that she ‘lay down the treasures of [her] body’ (II.iv.96) to save her brother, Claudio’s death is ‘the cheaper way’ (II.iv.106). Her peculiar declaration in soliloquy that her brother would

108  ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’ ‘tender down’ or ‘yield up’ twenty heads before allowing her ‘to stoop / To such abhorred pollution’ (II.iv.181–84) is suggestive of the reproduction of disembodied royal heads stamped on coins, and even of the rate of exchange for high denomination coins such as the Jacobean unite, a ‘piece of Gold of the value of Twenty shillings sterling’. In proposing a bed-trick which will ‘Pay with falsehood false exacting’ (III.i.235), it is the Duke who seems—like death, another ‘great disguiser’ (IV.ii.173)— to make ‘all odds even’ (III.i.41). The play’s political economy is shaped not only by the play’s explicitly numismatic metaphors and puns (‘coin’, ‘stamp’, ‘figure’, ‘mettle’), but also by the repetition of terms with subsidiary meanings relating to coinage. ‘Slip’, a colloquialism for a counterfeit coin with which Shakespeare was evidently familiar (OED n.4 a; e.g. Romeo and Juliet II.iii.43–46), is used as both a noun and a verb in the play to denote moral, sexual, legal and political ‘slippages’ or margins of error. 22 Julian Lamb has highlighted the significance of a more technical numismatic term, ‘remedy’, meaning the margin within which minted coins could vary from the standard fineness and weight (OED n. 4). With an allowed tolerance of 0.83 per cent on silver and 0.52 per cent on gold (Challis 24), slippage from the legal standard was ‘lawful’ or legitimate so far as the law would ‘allow’ it, in the terms of Pompey and Escalus’s debate (II.i.213–18). In Measure, Lamb shows, ‘remedy’ is used both to reinforce the intolerance of the ‘precise’ (I.iii.50) Angelo as he refuses to spare Claudio—‘no remedy’ is echoed (II.i.268, 272; II.ii.48; III.i.61)—and to characterise the Duke’s proposed solution. ‘[T]o the love I have in doing good a remedy presents itself’ (III.i.201–2), he tells Isabella, recalling her declaration to Angelo that all souls were ‘forfeit’ until ‘He that might the vantage best have took / Found out the remedy’ (II.ii.74–76). 23 The self-sacrificing remedy of Christ, who paid off man’s debt with his own divine currency, 24 contrasts with the Duke’s fleshmongering of others’ heads and maidenheads. 25 The Duke essentially operates in a political economy with arbitrary remedies of allowance for slips in law, morality and even comedy. Crucially, the Duke’s manipulations are not only economic and numismatic, but also distinctly theatrical. Measure’s metatheatricality and generic self-consciousness place the Duke at the centre of a theatrical economy as well as a political one, as he mediates the audience’s moral responses to the play’s various substitutions, and negotiates the value of this not-so-comic comedy. While the Duke has been identified as a ‘surrogate dramatist’ (Scott-Warren 111; also see Leggatt 358ff), ‘metadramatic manipulator’ (Richard Hillman 5) and even ‘actor-­ monarch-director’ (Dawson 335), recognising him as a ‘counterfeiter’ enables us to appreciate his metatheatrical role in relation to the play’s numismatic motif and its preoccupation with perceptions of value. His status as a counterfeiter is suggested throughout the play, from the first

‘[S]tamps that are forbid’  109 scene when he displays concern for his stamped ‘figure’ (I.i.17) but ‘leaves unquestioned / Matters of needful value’ (I.i.55–56), to the final scene in which he problematically presents himself to his subjects as a weighing judge and to the audience as a coiner of comic form. As with questions of politics and justice, the question of Measure’s ‘true value’ in the theatre is negotiated through the play’s language of measuring, weighing, purity and counterfeiting. The Duke attempts to control this discourse and offer it to the audience as an instrument of theatrical and generic judgement. Ultimately, however, the numismatic language helps the audience to recognise that they have been short-changed. The Duke’s pronouncement against Angelo’s life is both a culmination of the play’s language of payment, exchange and measuring, and a metatheatrical gesture to the play’s balance-­ promising title: The very mercy of the law cries out ……………………………………… “An Angelo for Claudio, death for death; Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.” (V.i.409–12) And yet to the very end the Duke shows himself to be, as Lucio brands him, ‘an unweighing fellow’ (III.i.400). 26 His final acts of mercy as he rediscovers ‘an apt remission’ (V.i.501) in himself—‘your evil quits you well’ (V.i.499), he tells a baffled Angelo—are essential to the play’s comic form, but provoke the sense of dissatisfaction expressed by Coleridge: ‘Our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo’s escape’ (Geckle 80). The paying audience remain unpaid even as the comedy is reshaped to fulfil its generic promise. The end of Measure resonates with David Scott Kastan’s definition of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’: ‘They are generic mixtures, or generic mutations, that lead us to withhold our endorsement by making the gratification of desire [for a happy ending] appear so willfully manipulated and contrived’ (“All’s Well” 579). In this respect, generic value in Measure is comparable to characterological value in Coriolanus. Just as Coriolanus inflates the value of dramatic character—or the ‘stamp of Martius’—by both advertising and withholding it (see Chapter 2), Measure negotiates its own value as a comedy by fulfilling and perverting the audience’s desire for a comic ending. As a metatheatrical counterfeiter, the Duke coins a comedy, but in such a way that the audience cannot let it pass current, cannot give it their seal of approval. This is not just a turn of phrase. Epilogues, as noted in Chapter 3, asked audiences to set their ‘hands and seals’ to plays by applauding, and Measure is concerned with seals as well as coins, especially as signs of authority and legitimacy. Central to the audience’s sense of the play’s

110  ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’ theatrical and generic value is the idea of the Duke’s ‘figure’. 27 ‘What figure of us think you he will bear?’ (I.i.17), the Duke asks Escalus of Angelo before his deputation in the first scene. The line is widely interpreted as a numismatic metaphor because Angelo later uses the word to represent himself as a coin stamped by ‘so noble and so great a figure’ (I.i.50), yet the Duke may be alluding to ‘the ducal stamp on the seal of the commission’ (Lever 4n). In the first scene of Shakespeare’s primary source-text, George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1578), the deputation of Promos (Angelo’s counterpart) is authorised by sealed letters patent. A stage direction specifies that Phallax, Promos’s corrupt advisor, ‘readeth the Kinges Letters Patents, which must be fayre written in parchment, with some great counterfeat zeale’ (B1r). ‘[C]ounterfeat’ identifies the large seal-impression as a prop, but the word nonetheless suggests the potential illegitimacy of the deputation and even the inauthenticity of theatre, which renders all objects, actions and speeches counterfeit. 28 Whetstone’s ‘counterfeat zeale’ may have resonated with Shakespeare as he wrote Measure after his company had received sealed letters patent licensing them to counterfeit in the King’s name. Shakespeare’s play contains no equivalent stage direction, but it does stage the Duke’s ‘figure’ in the form of a seal that both is and is not counterfeit. ‘Look you, sir’, the disguised Duke tells the Provost after proposing the head-trick, ‘here is the hand and seal of the Duke. … You know the character, I doubt not, and the signet is not strange to you’ (IV.ii.188– 91).29 The document is authentic insofar as it bears ‘the hand and seal of the Duke’, but counterfeit because it is a prop in the theatre, stamped with a ‘counterfeat zeale’, and a prop in the world of the play, where the Duke needs to authorise his fake identity as a friar and persuade the Provost to pass one head off as another. The sealed document authorises the Duke not only to stage his own re-legitimation at the expense of Angelo, one whose ‘worth and credit / [is] sealed in approbation’ (V.i.245–46), but also to stage a comedy for an audience who are wondering how the play’s problems will be resolved. The Duke’s own ‘figure’ thus legitimates his comic reshaping of the play, and the audience’s own seal of approval is apparently not needed. Measure has no extant epilogue requesting that the audience ‘express content’ (All’s Well, Epilogue.3): the value of this counterfeit comedy rests on ‘the hand and seal of the Duke’, and perhaps also on the hand and seal of James I as the new patron of the King’s Men. As such, the play’s various seals, literal and metaphorical, supplement its motif of coinage, contributing to our sense of the Duke as a metatheatrical counterfeiter who paradoxically creates and debases the play’s value for audiences. With this character at its centre, Measure is startlingly open about the dependence of its ‘true value’ on the counterfeit currencies of political and theatrical authority.

‘[S]tamps that are forbid’  111

Adapting ‘old-coined gold’: canonical value and the stamp of Thomas Middleton How does this reading of the play relate to the literary and canonical value of Shakespearean drama? Ideas about Measure’s ‘true value’ may have been historically influenced by its early life as a ‘King’s Men play’, but its afterlife as Shakespeare’s ‘old-coined gold’ is, I suggested earlier, problematised by Middleton’s presence as an adapter. As I will show, that which is Middletonian (or potentially Middletonian) in the Shakespeare canon has been devalued by association with ideas of impurity, corruption and counterfeiting in discussions of authorship. Measure’s preoccupation with value and counterfeiting is strangely appropriate to recent arguments about its authorship, and the value judgements so often involved in detecting and refuting non-Shakespearean elements in the Shakespeare canon. Debates arising from attribution studies seem to echo the play’s own fascination with methods of testing and measuring, not to mention its concern with authentic and counterfeit stamps of authorship, from the disguised Duke’s material proof that he acts with ducal authority—‘here is the hand and seal of the Duke’—to Angelo’s condemnation of bastardisers who ‘coin heaven’s image / In stamps that are forbid’.30 Just as ‘moral purity’ is ‘the metric of value in Shakespeare’s Vienna’ (Deng 122), an idea most apparent in the spiritual trials of Angelo and Isabella, notions of authorial purity are comparatively central to Shakespeare studies, and have long been important to ideas of the Shakespeare canon. ‘All that he doth write / Is pure his own’, Leonard Digges declared in the 1630s, denying that Shakespeare’s creation of his ‘old-coined gold’ involved any borrowing or collaboration (“Upon Master WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE”, ll. 17–18, 63). Middleton’s contribution to Measure has been positively characterised as textual ‘reshaping’ or ‘reformation’, but the language of impurity, corruption and debasement persists in discussions of collaboration and revision, and debates about who wrote what and why it matters continue to be coloured by morally inflected language about the payment of ‘credit’ and ‘tribute’ to authors. 31 Measure’s newly emerged identity as a posthumously adapted play, a product of diachronic collaboration, has destabilised its place in a canon which still privileges solo-authorship despite evidence that ‘collaboration was the standard mode of operation within the early modern English theater’ (Masten, “Playwrighting” 358). Being told that you have, in a kind of authorial bed-trick, taken Middleton for Shakespeare is not welcome news for many critics, whether they accept it or not. Some see the Middletonian ‘finger prints’ detected in Measure, Macbeth and—most recently—All’s Well as counterfeit stamps fabricated by those intent on disintegrating (and thus devaluing) Shakespeare’s canon, forcing his work ‘into a Middletonian mould’ (Vickers and Dahl 14) as if out of a desire, in Angelo’s

112  ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’ words, ‘to put metal in restrained means’ (II.iv.48).32 For those who reject Middleton’s presence in these plays, the dramatist celebrated by the Oxford Middleton as ‘our other Shakespeare’ (Taylor, “Thomas Middleton” 58) has become a kind of counterfeit Shakespeare. 33 For those who accept but do not like it, Middleton is a counterfeiter or corrupter of the Shakespearean text. So while I am well persuaded that Middleton adapted Measure in 1621 or 1622, my argument about ‘the stamp of Thomas Middleton’ relates to the perception of Middletonian adaptation as an act of corruption or counterfeiting, whether perpetrated by Middleton himself or by scholars accused of misattribution. Middleton’s kinship with the counterfeiter in Shakespeare studies opens up questions about the degree of self-­consciousness with which Middleton enacted his stamp on Measure in the early 1620s, a time when Shakespeare’s ‘true value’ in the King’s Men repertory and as literature was—like gold throughout the Jacobean period—under enhancement. Middleton’s adaptation, I suggest, not only responds to numismatic and economic contexts of that historical moment, but also negotiates the growing reputation of Shakespeare’s plays as ‘old-coined gold’ uncontaminated by collaboration or non-­authorial revision. It is unknown exactly how Middleton came to adapt Measure in 1621–22. John Jowett suggests its urban, satiric qualities would have appealed, and that the play probably ‘influenced Middleton long before he adapted it’, as he became more ‘concerned with the politics of the libido and the economics of sexual exchange’ than any other dramatist of the period (Measure 1544). The play’s numismatic imagery would likely have been part of the attraction. Middleton was deeply engaged with politics and economics in the early 1620s, as demonstrated in A World Tossed at Tennis (first performed 1620; co-authored with Rowley), The Nice Valour (1622; possibly co-authored with Fletcher) and A Game at Chess (1624).34 Throughout his career as a dramatist, he explored the relationship of coinage to sexuality, morality, politics and—more self-­ reflexively—theatre and genre, as shown in A Mad World, My Masters (first performed c.1605), The Revenger’s Tragedy (c.1606), The Roaring Girl (1611, co-authored with Dekker), A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) and The Changeling (1622; co-authored with Rowley). 35 In late 1605 and/or early 1606, Middleton collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens, a play—like Measure—deeply invested in questions of money and value, and whose dialogic co-authorship is most apparent in its treatment of gold and debt (Jowett, “Middleton and Debt”). If Middleton’s additions to Measure, especially his emphasis on Vienna’s ‘poverty’ (I.ii.82), were responsive to England’s ongoing economic depression from 1619 to 1624 (Jowett, Measure 1544–45), it is significant that the concerns about Jacobean coinage discussed earlier would have been even stronger in 1621–22 than in 1603–4. The enhancement

‘[S]tamps that are forbid’  113 of gold in relation to silver, begun in 1603–4, had continued throughout James’ reign, leading to a desperate shortage of silver coinage that impacted day-to-day transactions. 36 Gold became ‘too valuable for use’ despite its representation as ‘the “true” and constant touchstone of value’, and ultimately its enhancement caused ‘economic stasis’ (Wortham 342–43). Proclamations released between 1611 and 1622 indicate heightened anxieties about the abuse, melting down, reformation and exportation of coins’ precious metal for ‘private lucre and gaine’, and the release of a new series of high-value coins made out of ‘fine Angel gold’ in July 1619 further devalued silver. 37 By the early 1620s, England’s place in the international market economy was dangerously insecure, causing fluctuations in coin values (Ryner 110–14). Of particular concern was the movement of English coinage abroad, where it could be passed on at a profit, and the domestic circulation of foreign coins, which—while needed to remedy a scarcity of coinage—were in danger of being overvalued, especially once diminished through practices such as clipping. 38 In a passage from Measure that has been confidently identified as Middletonian, the entrance of the bawd Mistress Overdone during a brothel scene prompts a debate in which venereal diseases are linked to foreign coinage: Behold, behold, where Madam Mitigation comes! I have purchased as many diseases under her roof as come to— SECOND GENTLEMAN: To what, I pray? LUCIO: Judge. SECOND GENTLEMAN: To three thousand dolours a year. FIRST GENTLEMAN: Ay, and more. LUCIO: A French crown more. FIRST GENTLEMAN: Thou art always figuring diseases in me, but thou art full of error; I am sound. (I.ii.43–52) LUCIO:

Here ‘French crown’ is both a bald head indicative of syphilis (the ‘French disease’) and a gold French coin, and ‘dolours’ are painful diseases as well as ‘dollars’, the English name for silver German ‘thalers’ or Spanish pieces of eight. Just as foreign coins infiltrated the English economy and circulated alongside coins such as the English angel, venereal diseases have infiltrated the bodies of Lucio and the two gentlemen. For Deng, the numismatic puns ‘intimate genuine concern about dangers from foreign coins circulating within England’, whereby the ‘blood of the body politic’ represented by coinage became ‘“contaminated” by the foreign’ (162). There is a long tradition of reading this passage as Shakespearean; for N.W. Bawcutt, ‘French crown’ is ‘a favourite joke of Shakespeare’s’ (Measure 94n). However, if we recognise it as a Middletonian interpolation,

114  ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’ the language of disease, contamination and foreign coinage functions differently. Middleton may have been responding to heightened anxieties about coinage in the late Jacobean period, when the diseased English economy had been brought to its knees by foreign wars and the international market economy. But in the context of modern authorship debates, the passage speaks to fears about textual ‘corruption’ and the supposed contamination of the economy of the Shakespeare canon by foreign agents such as collaborators and adapters, or even by attributionists intent on recirculating Shakespeare once reformed ‘into a Middletonian mould’. Given the play’s wider association of coinage with reproduction and the transmission of authority, we might even read Middleton’s disease/coin puns as tokens of his self-consciousness as an adapter of Shakespeare, after whose death we can detect ‘the first stirring of that nostalgic concern for a lost authenticity which has been one of the major conflicting imperatives throughout Shakespearian stage history’ (Wiggins, “The King’s Men and After” 39). Plays like Measure and Macbeth were fast becoming highly valued classics in the repertory of the King’s Men, especially after the death of Richard Burbage in 1619. Middleton, while not constrained by modern views of Shakespeare’s literary value, may have made his revisionary stamp with some awareness that he was altering Shakespearean currency. That Middleton was alert to the play/coin analogy is clear from his city comedy A Mad World, My Masters (c.1605). Written about a year after Shakespeare composed Measure in its original form, and performed by the Children of St Paul’s, it features a play-within-a-play called “The Slip”, staged by the trickster Dick Follywit so that he can rob his grandfather Sir Bounteous Progress. One meaning of ‘slip’—noted earlier— was a counterfeit coin, and this is highlighted when Sir Bounteous and Master Penitent realise they have been duped: PENITENT: Faith, they were some counterfeit rogues, sir. SIR BOUNTEOUS: Why, they confess so much themselves. They said they’d

play The Slip. (V.ii.191–93) Yachnin sees “The Slip” as ‘not self-representation (of Paul’s Boys), but a parodic projection of “counterfeiting” onto the adult “public” companies’, such as the King’s Men (76). Yet Middleton recognised that parody itself was a form of counterfeiting, a kind of artistic creation that could capitalise on the theatrical value of popular plays. Not long after Mad World, and probably at the same time as or shortly following his collaboration with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens, Middleton wrote The Revenger’s Tragedy for the King’s Men (first performed c.1606). Neill shows that The Revenger’s Tragedy’s numismatic imagery registers its generic status as a ‘counterfeit’ or ‘bastard’ play that cross-breeds tragedy, satire and history (152). However, the play also inscribes itself as parodic

‘[S]tamps that are forbid’  115 ‘slip’ or counterfeit of Hamlet (first performed c.1601), which—probably revived by the King’s Men between 1606 and 1608—would itself have been experienced and valued in light of the intertextual relationship between the plays.39 There is a big difference between Middleton’s parodic counterfeiting of Hamlet in The Revenger’s Tragedy and his theatrical adaptation of Macbeth, Measure and (possibly) All’s Well later in his career, but he may well have recognised himself as having to play the silent counterfeiter with Shakespeare’s ‘old-coined gold’. Middleton’s posthumous freelance ‘piecework’ on Shakespearean plays (­Taylor, “Thomas Middleton” 37), invisible until recently, was performed at a time when Shakespeare’s value was starting to be defined in relation to uncontaminated solo-authorship that required no revision. Two years after Middleton adapted Measure, the First Folio would construct Shakespeare not only as a solo-author, but—as I will discuss in the next chapter—the parthenogenetic father of his playtexts. The revisionary stamps of the dramatist that Ben Jonson had called ‘a base fellow’ (Informations to William Drummond, ll. 124–25) were not acknowledged. Created and recreated at two different times by two different dramatists, Measure and its numismatic motif can be seen as responsive to James I’s patronage of the King’s Men and his political commitment to the ‘true value’ of coinage, as well as—for Middleton in the late ­Jacobean period—to Shakespeare’s growing posthumous reputation as the author of ‘old-coined gold’. The play/coin analogy, applied in the period to explore ideas about patronage, commercialism, legitimacy and theatrical value, continues to inflect critical articulations of literary value and Measure’s problematic place in the canon as a generic and authorial counterfeit. Measure, most critics would agree, cannot be properly represented by any of the Shakespeare £2 coins issued in 2016, but the play’s value lies largely in the way it both bears and resists the stamp of ‘Shakespearean comedy’.

Notes 1 See The Royal Mint’s website, especially www.royalmint.com/discover/ uk-coins/counterfeit-one-pound-coins and www.royalmint.com/discover/ uk-coins/new-one-pound-coin. Issued in 2017, the twelve-sided £1 coin was declared to be ‘the most secure coin in the world’, and has several features designed to prevent counterfeiting (Connington). For information about the counterfeiting of £2 coins, see “Fake Two Pound Coins” on the website for Willings Services Limited: www.coin-mech.co.uk/counterfeit-two-poundcoins.html. 2 See especially Ch. 3, “Value and Shakespeare” (51–82), on how Shakespeare’s plays dramatise questions of value, and the implications for our understanding of the value of Shakespeare as a cultural object today. 3 I borrow the term ‘the politics of value’ from Arjun Appadurai’s discussion of commodities and ‘the social life of things’. My discussion of Measure as coin-like in this chapter suggests the advantages of thinking about the

116  ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’ afterlives of plays in relation to Appadurai’s anthropological theory about the movement of objects through history. 4 My thinking on the ‘counterfeit’ status of Measure for Measure has been influenced by Karen Newman’s consideration of Timon of Athens’ ‘problematic canonical status’ in relation to Shakespeare’s perceived ‘cultural capital of unquestioned value’ (“Cultural Capital’s Gold Standard”, Essaying Shakespeare 96–110; 101, 99). 5 On Measure as a ‘problem play’, see Tillyard, and—more recently—Richard Hillman. The idea that the problem plays are ‘un-Shakesperean’ is articulated, for example, by Ornstein (29). 6 Neill argues that the counterfeit generic status of plays such as Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy are emblematised by their stage bastards Thersites and Spurio (Putting History 144–45, 150–52). 7 For arguments for and against the presence of Middleton in All’s Well, see Maguire and Smith, and Vickers and Dahl. In The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, Loughnane argues at length that Middleton ‘added new material to All's Well that Ends Well, most likely as a revival for the King’s Men after Shakespeare’s death at some point between 1616 and the setting of the Folio’ (320). 8 See Taylor and Jowett 107–236, 248–321; Jowett, “Audacity”; Jowett, ed., Measure; Taylor and Lavagnino, eds, 417–21, 681–89; Bourus; Bourus and Taylor. 9 See Wiggins, “The King’s Men and After” 23–24. 10 Patronage of various kinds was conceptualised as a stamp on a coin. William Rawley’s dedication of Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1627) to Charles I declares that ‘this Worke affecteth the Stampe of your Maiesties Royall Protection, to make it more currant to the World’ (Bacon ¶1v). 11 In the patent James I declared that ‘We … license and authorise these Our Servants … freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing comedies, tragedies, histories, enterludes, morals, pastorals, stage plays and such others’ (Wickham et al. 123). Modelled on the 1574 patent for Leceister’s Men, the King’s Men’s patent depended on three bills, the Privy Signet bill, the Writ of Privy Seal and the royal patent itself, and was ultimately authorised by the affixing of the Great Seal (Barroll 127). 12 “The Stationer to the Understanding Gentrie”, in Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster (1628), A2v. 13 The New Oxford Shakespeare places the play’s original composition ‘in the second half of 1604’ (Taylor and Loughnane 555). Wiggins offers a best guess of 1603, but identifies the play as Jacobean (British Drama no. 1413: 59–64, 59). 14 These proclamations are reproduced in Larkin and Hughes, no. 3: 7, and no. 47: 99–103. All references to Jacobean proclamations are to this edition. 15 Hammond notes that the 1603 proclamation for coins may have ‘caught’ Shakespeare’s ‘imagination’ (516n20). 16 Larkin and Hughes no. 45: 94–98; 97. This proclamation, released on 20 October 1604, declared that ‘The Name and Stile of KING OF GREAT BRITTAINE, FRANCE, AND IRELAND, DEFENDER OF THE FAITH, &c.’ was to be ‘from hencefoorth used upon all Inscriptions upon our currant Moneys and Coynes of Gold and Silver hereafter to be minted’ (97). 17 ‘Shekel’ was a ‘general term for any coin’ (Fischer 119). 18 According to the 1603 proclamation, the six-pound piece was 22 carats in fineness and a sixth of an ounce in weight. The angel had a similar weight

‘[S]tamps that are forbid’  117

19

20 21 22 23

24

25

26 27 28

29 30

of 80 grains, but its fineness was 23 carats, three and a half grains (Kenyon 128–29). Baker notes that the angel was ‘frequently counterfeited on the continent’ and was ‘perhaps the favorite gold coin among the “clippers”’ (87, 91). In Chapman, Jonson and Marston’s Eastward Ho (1605), the goldsmith’s apprentice Quicksilver refers to the ‘washing’ of angels when he declares he can ‘take … off twelvepence from every angel, with a kind of aquafortis, and never deface any part of the image’ (IV.i.181–82). Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet Lantern and Candlelight (1608) refers to the coining of ‘light angels’ which are ‘nailed up for counterfeits’ (99), alluding to the practice of fixing counterfeit coins to posts so that they could be recognised more easily. Indeed, references to ‘angels’ as ‘light’ were common (e.g. 2 Henry IV I.ii.159–62). Angelo’s dealings with Isabella seem to reveal that, like a coin, he is twofaced, and is in fact not an angel but a devil (II.iv.16–17; III.i.66, 93; V.i.30, 294–95). Quarmby has demonstrated that the theory that the Duke is a portrait of James I is based more on critical and political bias than on historical evidence. See I.iii.21 (OED let v. 1 28c); II.ii.65, V.i.475 (OED v. 1 8c); and III.i.145 (OED n. 2 1a). On the multivalence of ‘slip’ in the play, see Yachnin and Neilson. See Lamb on these instances of ‘remedy’ in the play, especially 388–92. Lamb argues that while the Duke’s remedy seems to offer a solution to Angelo and Isabella’s precision, it is ‘merely a further attempt at precision that seeks to liberate a human agent from the burden of use. … Where Christ forgives our imprecisions, the Duke aspires to precision of his own making, thus inferring that Christ’s forgiveness can be foregone’ (392). I would like to thank Julian Lamb for corresponding with me and sending me an earlier draft of his reading. According to John Donne in a sermon of 1622, for example, Christ was coined ‘in a new Mint, in the wombe of the Blessed Virgin’ (Sermons 4: 228; Deng 117–18). See my discussion in Chapter 1 about the role of sealing and coining in early modern ideas about spirituality, redemption and the divine image. Shell argues that by orchestrating the bed-trick and head-trick, the Duke acts as a merchant or even a usurer (he profits from the exchanges), behaving like the ‘fleshmonger’ (V.i.335) Lucio posits him to be (The End of Kinship 125, 127). For Deng, Lucio’s phrase ‘undermines the duke’s ability to judge equivalence’ (130). Focusing on money and sexuality in Measure, Yoshihara investigates the Duke’s concern with ‘the mechanical reproduction of his “figure”’ as a stamp of political authority (70). In early modern stage directions, the adjective ‘counterfeit’ is used to differentiate stage properties from the objects they represent, but also to identify objects and actions as forged or faked within the plots of plays. For examples, see Dessen and Thomson’s entry for ‘counterfeit’ (58). Even if a genuine, authentic seal were used to represent the seal on Promos’ patent, it would still be rendered ‘counterfeat’ by its theatrical context. Here ‘signet’ probably means seal-impression rather than seal-matrix (OED n. 2a), although it is possible the Duke also shows the Provost a signet ring. In fact, ‘heaven’s image’ is itself an example of revision. In censoring the text after the 1606 Act of Parliament to restrain abuses of players, the

118  ‘[S]tamps that are forbid’

31

32

33

34

35

36 37

38 39

reviser—not necessarily Middleton—was forced to play the counterfeiter and alter ‘God’s image’, despite its Biblical origins (Genesis 1:27; Jowett, Measure 1563n). Consider, for example, Vickers and Dahl’s condemnation of the attribution of parts of All’s Well That Ends Well to Middleton by Maguire and Smith, whom they present as trying ‘to detach All’s Well from its place in Shakespeare’s canon, treating it as an isolated and suspect oddity’ (14). ‘The Roman definition of justice’, Vickers and Dahl conclude, ‘was “Suum cuique tribuere”, render to everyone his due. Whether you like the play or not, All’s Well is all Shakespeare’s’ (15). Taylor states that The New Oxford Shakespeare is ‘based on the fundamental ethical principle of giving people credit for the work they have done’ (“Artiginality” 20). As noted already, the concept of counterfeiting is central to Vickers’ work in attribution studies (see Chapter 1, note 19 on his ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare). In Shakespeare, Co-Author, Vickers argues against the presence of Middleton in Macbeth (123–25; also see Vickers, “Disintegrated”), and does not address the possibility that Middleton adapted Measure. See the previous note on All’s Well. Rasmussen discusses resistance to the idea of Middleton’s presence in Measure (“Collaboration” 133–34). For critiques of Taylor’s efforts to canonise Middleton as ‘our other Shakespeare’, see Bate, “Dampit and Moll”, and Erne, “Our other Shakespeare”. See the introductions to the plays in the Oxford Middleton on these political and economic contexts and their relevance (ed. Taylor and Lavagnino). Taylor and Loughnane note that the adapted Measure addresses similar issues (556). See Yachnin on Mad World (75–76); Neill on The Revenger’s Tragedy (Putting History 149–65); Forman on The Roaring Girl; Karen Newman, “Goldsmith’s Ware” on A Chaste Maid in Cheapside; and Ryner on The Changeling. From 1611 to 1621, an incredibly high 95–99 per cent of coins issued from the mint were made of gold (Gould 241–42). These proclamations were published on 18 May 1611 (Larkin and Hughes no. 117: 262–63), 23 November 1611 (no. 122: 272–76), 23 March 1615 (no. 147: 336–38), 4 February 1619 (no. 183: 422–24), 31 July 1619 (no. 189: 436–39), 7 February 1620 (no. 196: 460–64) and 11 June 1622 (no.  227: 540–43). The quotations are from Larkin and Hughes 262 and 437. For relevant proclamations, see Larkin and Hughes no. 124: 279–81 and no. 129: 290–91. On the relationship between The Revenger’s Tragedy and Hamlet, see Felperin 160–70, and McMillin. Knutson discusses the revival of Hamlet (124–25).

5 The printer’s tale Books, children, and the prefatory construction of Shakespearean authorship

Although not available in print until more than twelve years after it was first performed in c.1611, The Winter’s Tale concerns itself with the printed book trade. The play alludes to printed as well as oral ‘old tales’, including its own primary source-text Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588), and stages an encounter in which printed commodities—­ Autolycus’ broadside ballads—are expertly flogged. As Aaron Kitch and other critics have highlighted, print is also a central metaphor in the play, which displays an ambivalent attitude to the reproduction and dissemination of printed texts.1 The Winter’s Tale’s recurring analogy between sexual and textual reproduction draws into relief its concerns with ideas of paternity, authenticity and art. At several points, characters articulate the physical resemblance of children to their fathers by representing them as printed books. In Act 1, the newly jealous Leontes, anxious that his son Mamillius is a bastard, examines the child’s face as if it were a textual reproduction of his own: ‘Art thou my boy? … / … Hast smutched thy nose? / They say it is a copy out of mine’ (I.ii.120– 22). In Act 2, Paulina exhibits the face and body of the newborn Perdita in order to prove to Leontes that, ‘Although the print be little’, she is ‘the whole matter / And copy of the father’ (II.iii.97–98). And in Act 5, Leontes tells Florizel how much he looks like his father Polixenes by figuring his mother as a printer or publisher: ‘Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince, / For she did print your royal father off, / Conceiving you’ (V.i.123–25). In all of these examples, which I analyse closely in the final section of this chapter, the objective of the analogy is to determine whether or not the ‘copy’ is accurate and therefore legitimate. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the reverse of this analogy was frequently made in prefatory materials to printed books for the same reason. Prefacing authors, editors and publishers represented texts as children in order to make assertions about how accurately and legitimately they had been reproduced through printing. Readers of the volume in which The Winter’s Tale was first printed, Shakespeare’s posthumous First Folio of 1623, were instructed in a eulogy by Ben Jonson to ‘Looke how the fathers face / Liues in his issue’. And still we look. Despite postmodernist

120  The printer’s tale challenges to traditional notions of authorship, Shakespeare holds the popular gaze as a literary father-figure comparable to Roland Barthes’ ‘Author-God’, existing ‘in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child’ (145), 2 and the Folio—now widely accessible in digital forms—is fetishized as ‘The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare’, a living monument ‘born’ almost 400 years ago in William and Isaac Jaggard’s printing house.3 The circularity of the rhetoric reinforces the myth of Shakespeare’s self-reproduction: Shakespeare gave us a book, the book gives us Shakespeare. Building on the previous chapter’s investigation into the canonical value of Shakespearean drama as ‘old-coined gold’, this chapter examines the concept of Shakespeare’s literary value or ‘printed worth’, as James Mabbe described the First Folio. It argues that The Winter’s Tale’s recurring figuration of human procreation as typographic printing played an important role in Shakespeare’s early canonisation in print as the parthenogenetic father of his playtexts and, by extension, an immortal father of literature. The chiastic structure of the chapter imitates Shakespeare’s reversal of the analogy between sexual and textual reproduction, the most prevalent of a range of sexual tropes that—as Wendy Wall has shown— served key rhetorical and social functions in printed prefatory materials.4 I begin by discussing the printing/procreation metaphor in prefatory contexts, and finish by analysing the procreation/printing metaphor in a dramatic context. The first half of the chapter investigates prefatory materials as Shakespeare’s dramatic sources, illustrating the significance of their material, rhetorical and theatrical qualities. I focus on the prefatory concept of the ‘infant-text’ and the importance of Robert Greene, author of Pandosto and the central figure in the ‘Shake-scene’ controversy of 1592–93, when Shakespeare was accused of plagiarism (literally ‘kidnapping’). Going on to address the First Folio and The Winter’s Tale in the second half of the chapter, I argue that by appropriating and adapting a trope inextricably associated with preliminaries, Shakespeare imported prefatory concepts into a dramatic context in order to exploit their theatrical potential. In doing so, Shakespeare ultimately influenced the composition of the Folio’s canon-shaping preliminaries in late 1623, as the King’s Men re-licensed and then prepared to revive The Winter’s Tale for a court performance early in the new year. While scholars have highlighted resonances between the Folio’s preliminaries and its first play The Tempest,5 I argue for the importance of the play that bookended the Folio’s comedies, a work deeply invested in prefatory rhetoric and especially ‘printers’ tales’ of textual reproduction and transmission. The Winter’s Tale’s configurations of paternity, print and theatricality offered rhetorical models to Ben Jonson and the Folio’s other prefatory writers as they negotiated the collective transition of Shakespeare’s plays from the stage to the page, and constructed the ‘printed worth’ of Shakespearean drama on a kind of ‘paper stage’.

The printer’s tale  121 These arguments build on the work of stage-to-page criticism, which—as Tiffany Stern characterises it—applies methodologies of theatre history and book history to investigate ‘the collaborative, multilayered, material, historical world that fashioned the Shakespeare canon’ (Making Shakespeare 5–6).6 At the same time, however, I want to highlight Shakespeare’s rhetorical agency in his own canonisation, and the impact made—albeit unintentionally—by his language of impression on the First Folio’s representation of his ‘printed worth’. In focusing on the mutual shaping and exchange of prefatory and dramatic texts, the chapter enters into conversation with recent scholarship on early modern ‘paratexts’, a term now regularly applied to preliminary and terminal materials such as title-pages, dedicatory epistles, addresses to readers, commendatory poems and character and errata lists, as well as ‘theatrical paratexts’ like inductions, choruses, prologues and epilogues.7 Despite their historical marginalisation, paratexts played (and continue to play) a central role in shaping the meanings of early modern texts, and—to borrow Stern’s term—helped to ‘fashion’ the literary canons of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As Chris Laoutaris observes, the composition of the opening nine leaves of the First Folio ‘would have an incalculable impact on the shaping of Shakespeare’s legacy for centuries to come’ (48).8 Paratext studies have been strongly influenced by Gérard Genette’s coinage and definition of paratext as a kind of ‘threshold … that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back’, and a ‘transitional zone between text and beyond-text’ (1–2, 407). There has been resistance, however, to the ‘spatial dislocation’ implied by the Genettian ‘paratext’—‘para-’ meaning ‘by the side of, beside’ (OED prefix1)—and the idea that paratexts are ‘marginal’ to or ‘detachable’ from the text of which they are part (Massai, “Shakespeare” 3, 1).9 Without abandoning the useful concept of textual liminality,10 we can productively think of paratext—drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theoretical work on the parergon—as ‘a space which both frames and inhabits the text’ (Smith and Wilson 7). Building on my investigation of the ‘meta-’ qualities of the imprint throughout this book, this chapter responds to Sonia Massai’s call for early modern paratexts (especially dramatic paratexts) to be read as ‘metatexts’, on the grounds that they are transformative documents with metamorphic agency (“Shakespeare” 3–4). While I refer to ‘paratexts’, ‘prefatory materials’, ‘preliminaries’ and ‘front matter’ because of concerns with thresholds, framing and anticipation,11 the discussion that follows could be said to focus on the metatextual qualities of early modern paratexts, especially the First Folio’s preliminaries: their intertextual and transformative relationship with dramatic texts, their self-reflexive and metaphorical commentary on the reproduction of texts, and their historical shaping of critical and public ideas about literary value.12 Like paratexts, Shakespeare’s plays

122  The printer’s tale are increasingly being recognised as ‘deeply metatextual’ because they are ‘as much aware of their incarnation as material objects circulating in manuscript and print as of their inherently dramatic concerns’ (Helen Smith, “A Man in Print?” 61). Similarly self-conscious in their representations of print, theatre and ‘author’-ship, The Winter’s Tale and the First Folio’s preliminaries are important case studies for the investigation of intersections between metatheatricality, metatextuality and paratextuality in early modern drama, and the role these intersections played in producing Shakespeare’s canonical value in print. Significantly, prefatory materials often negotiated the value and legitimacy of books by conflating the typographic with the sigillographic or the numismatic, taking advantage of the confluence between technologies of impression discussed in Chapter 1. The representation of printed texts as stamped seals or coins served a metatextual impulse to comment on print culture and shape the metaphorics of the book trade. A printed letter could be validated as ‘a patent Pasport’ under the ‘Seale’ of a successful stationer’s press (Barclay A2v). Men ambitious ‘but to be in Print’ coined texts ‘like Slips, that shame their Mint’ (John Davies, The Muses Sacrifice A1r). A dedicatory epistle could transform an author’s book into the ‘seale of my thankful hart’, a sign of affection for and duty to a patron (Wecker *2v). A patron’s name at the front of a humble publication could ‘make it current’, like ‘the face of Alexander stamped in copper’ (Lyly 156). Such examples illustrate the centrality of the imprint to the metatextuality of prefatory materials, but they also reinforce this book’s contention that what Samuel Daniel called ‘the new inuented stampe of Printing’ was conceptualised in relation to older technologies of impression. Thus while this chapter focuses on ‘print culture’ in the sense relating to the creation, circulation and use of printed books, it is alert to the possibility for the concept of the infant-text, and the idea of Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’, to be inflected by the language and materiality of seals, coins and even medals.

The infant-text and the prefatory ‘Shake-scene’ Usually written and printed last but appearing to the reader first, prefatory materials were temporally and spatially peripheral to the ‘main text’ in their production and consumption, and often ‘highly self-­reflexive’ (Smith and Wilson 3) in their commentary on the book’s creation.13 The objectives of prefatory writers, which included authors, translators, compilers, editors and publishers,14 were to advertise, legitimise, protect and provide semantic frameworks for the texts they were introducing, although sometimes these aims were subverted to advantageous effect.15 Prefatory materials would have been seen not just by book-owners, but also by potential customers, who could see ‘title-pages separately printed

The printer’s tale  123 and hung up on the posts of the city’ (Stern, Documents 55), and leafed through front matter in places of sale like St Paul’s Churchyard. ‘It is now publique’, write John Heminges and Henry Condell in their address to the readers of the First Folio, ‘& you wil stand for your priuiledges wee know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first’ (π A3r). Investigating the commercial functions of front matter and its ‘genres of liminality’ (16), Michael Saenger explains the prefatory advertising strategy of ‘metaphoric induction’ (96): Publishers used metaphors and metaphor-like configurations to ­involve—or, to put it more strongly—to implicate a variety of perusers into potent imaginary relationships which continue through the point of purchase, with the promise of a differed satisfaction once the world of the book becomes more fully assimilated through private reading. (97) Books were banquets to be enjoyed, journeys to be taken, buildings to be entered, maids to be seduced. These unfolding stories of the text’s material life, what we might call ‘printers’ tales’, invited readers to buy into and play roles in pleasurable fictional narratives of bibliographical production and circulation. A common form of ‘metaphoric induction’ was the printing/procreation analogy, which developed ancient and medieval traditions of comparing textual with sexual reproduction, and books with children.16 As well as birthing, printing was figured by prefatory writers as the conception, gestation, swaddling or dressing of an infant-text. Producers and consumers of printed books—authors, patrons, printers, publishers, booksellers, readers—were variously translated into fathers, mothers, godparents, foster-parents, midwives, nurses and gossips. Dedications appealed to aristocratic patrons to act as legitimating godparents, or as charitable guardians who could foster infant-texts with nourishment, shelter, habiliment, education and entertainment.17 ‘[L]et me be bould to entreate your fauourable acceptance of them’, William Corkine writes to prospective patrons of his book of songs, published in 1612, ‘that you will not let this Booke be made an Orphant in his birth, but that it may be a Childe of your fostering, and liue under your protections’ (E2v). Increasingly, stationers and editors were cast as midwives, threshold workers who brought privately conceived products into the public eye by facilitating and overseeing the delivery of texts into print.18 In certain contexts, the stationer-midwife was celebrated. Almost five years after he co-financed the First Folio, and perhaps orchestrated the composition of its preliminaries, Edward Blount declared to readers his obstetrical function as the publisher (and maybe an editor) of John Earle’s Micro-cosmographie (1628), a collection of character sketches: ‘I Haue

124  The printer’s tale (for once) aduentur’d to playe the Mid-wifes part, helping to bring forth these Infants into the World, which the Father [i.e. Earle] would haue smoothered’ (A2r–v).19 The midwifery trope, however, could also cut the other way. In the dedication to a vitriolic religious tract, clergyman Andrew Willet denounced the publications of his adversary ­R ichard Parkes as ‘abortiue brats’, referring himself to ‘the midwiues that brought them out, I meane the Stationers that printed them’ (­L oidoromastix (1607), ¶¶4r). As figurative midwives (or nurses or gossips), stationers could— whether male or female—be viewed as threatening female influences that disrupted patriarchal models of textual reproduction, wherein the work of the author-father was merely duplicated or, in Leontes’ telling phrasal verb, ‘print[ed] … off’. 20 Celebrating the ‘artificiall Immortalitie’ of books (‘in euery next impression [they] finde a new being’), the translator William Shute declared them ‘the only issue, wherein our Wiues cannot defraude us’ (Fougasses 1612, A2r–v). Yet a recurring idea of the printing/procreation trope in prefatory materials was that stationers and editors, the necessary but suspected midwives of the book trade, could and did defraud authors of their books. Prefatory complaints about abusive book trade practices entangled the infant-text in the discourses of deformity and illegitimacy. Editions were ‘deformed’ because of errors made during authorial composition, transcription, editing or printing, and ‘illegitimate’ because of a lack of authorial consent, the use of inauthentic manuscripts or publication without legal rights. Such was the ‘procreative rhetoric’ of prefatory addresses, Douglas A. Brooks writes, ‘[b]otched, deformed and/or untimely born books filled the stalls of St Paul’s Churchyard, and many of them were orphans or bastards, without author/fathers—or author/ fathers who wanted to acknowledge their paternity’ (“This Heavenly Boke” 108). That Shakespeare was familiar with prefatory procreative rhetoric is clear from its presence in books we know he read, and others he is likely to have read. Shakespeare provided dedications for his epyllia Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) himself, but he probably perused the preliminaries to other of his early publications. These included Robert Chester’s dedication to Loves Martyr (1601; A3r–v), featuring Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle (‘To the World I put my Child to nurse’, Chester declares), and the unsigned address to the ‘ever reader’ of Troilus and Cressida (1609), presenting it as a ‘birth’ of Shakespeare’s ‘brain’ (l. 4). Many of Shakespeare’s sources are also prefaced by procreative rhetoric. In the address to readers of the comedy Humour Out of Breath (1608), a probable source for Polixenes’ presence and behaviour at the sheep-shearing festival in The Winter’s Tale (Bullough 131–32, 219–21), John Day ‘turn[s] a poore friendlesse childe into the world’ and ‘preferre[s] him to your seruice’ ([A2]r).

The printer’s tale  125 Philip Sidney’s romance The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590) was the source-text for the subplot of King Lear, and influenced a number of Shakespeare’s other plays, The Winter’s Tale among them (Bullough 125–26, 199–202; Andrews). Published posthumously, the first and subsequent editions of Arcadia are prefaced by a dedicatory epistle Sidney wrote for his sister, the Countess Mary Herbert. The epistle accompanied an incomplete manuscript (the ‘Old’ Arcadia) he sent her in the late 1570s or early 1580s, apparently only intended for private circulation. 21 In Sidney’s dedication, the author presents himself as an ashamed father with infanticidal impulses, and his text as a deformed child in need of protection: I could well find in my harte, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child, which I am loath to father … [I]f you keepe it to your selfe, or to such friends, who will weigh errors in the ballaunce of good will, I hope, for the fathers sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in it selfe it haue deformities … [H]is chiefe safetie, shalbe the not walking abroad; & his chiefe protection, the bearing the liuerye of your name. (1590 ed.; A3r-A4r) Sidney was writing about a manuscript, but the dedication’s appropriation for a printed edition adds a layer of meaning to his language of reproduction and exposure. In the 1593 and later editions, the dedication is followed by an epistle “To the Reader” from Hugh Sanford, secretary to the Countess, who explains that the Countess has repaired the ‘disfigured face’ with which the work ‘appeared to the common view’ in 1590. Sanford represents the 1593 edition as an infant-text, adapting the conceit of Sidney, [w]hom albeit it do not exactly and in euery lineament represent; yet considering the fathers untimely death preuented the timely birth of the childe, it may happily seeme a thanke-woorthy labour, that the defects being so few, so small, and in no principall part, yet the greatest unlikenes is rather in defect then in deformity. (¶4v) As Melissa Hull Geil observes, Sanford’s reformulation of Sidney’s metaphor causes ‘[t]he meaning of deformity and defect [to] alter because their referent has changed from a manuscript (actually, multiple manuscripts), to myriad printed texts that have currency in the early modern marketplace’ (105). 22 Whereas Sidney locates the fault in himself, Sanford gestures towards editors and stationers as potential agents of defect and deformity. The prefatory figure of the infant-text illuminates Shakespeare’s relationship with Robert Greene, whose prose pamphlets—as Steve Mentz highlights (73)—were the most conspicuous sources for The Winter’s

126  The printer’s tale Tale. Shakespeare took his main plot, most of his characters and some language from the highly successful romance Pandosto (1588), which had been reprinted at least five times before The Winter’s Tale was performed. 23 The cozening exploits of Autolycus the peddler are informed by the coney-catching pamphlets (1591–92), Greene’s exposés of criminal ruses. The name Mamillius was probably an adaptation of the heroine’s name in the romance Mamillia (1583, 1593). It has been argued that Shakespeare’s decision to borrow heavily from well-known pamphlets by Greene was in part a response to the plagiarism accusation in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, a pamphlet published posthumously in 1592 (Mentz; Baldo). The attack on Shakespeare occurs in a letter “To those Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance” at the end of the pamphlet. The paratextual epistle warns certain playwrights (the ‘University Wits’ Marlowe, Nashe and George Peele) that there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shakescene in a country. (Carroll 84–85)24 In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare makes his plucking of Greene’s feathers conspicuous. He gestures towards his primary source Pandosto, first published over twenty years before the play was staged, by repeatedly reminding the audience that the events of this newly dramatised Tale resemble (and even outdo) those of an ‘old tale’ (V.i.28, V.i.60, V.iii.117). 25 It is even possible that Autolycus, not in Pandosto, is used to negotiate Shakespeare’s relationship with Greene and his texts. The character is a thieving rogue ‘littered under Mercury’ (IV.iii.25), ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’ (IV.iii.25–26) who sells cheap print of dubious ­authenticity—broadside ballads. Autolycus has been read as a portrait of Greene (Mentz 77ff.; Newcomb, Reading 123–24), Shakespeare himself (Robert M. Adams 102–3; Pitcher 9) and a composite of Greene and Shakespeare (Baldo). In his prefatory texts, Greene often describes his pamphlets in much the same language as Autolycus refers to his printed ballads and other merchandise: ‘toys’ (IV.iv.324), ‘trifles’ (IV. iii.26), ‘trinkets’ (IV.iv.606) and so on. Greene’s dedication to Pandosto (A2r–v) asks the Earl of Cumberland to ‘cast a glaunce at this toy’, and his address to the readers of the 1583 edition of Mamillia (A3r) critiques authors who disingenuously claim their books are ‘more meete for the Pedler then the Printer, toyes, trifles, trash, trinkets’, before saying his work is worse than theirs. The borrowing from Greene in The Winter’s Tale and the figure of Autolycus suggest that Shakespeare had Groatsworth in mind during composition, but an investigation of the paratexts that framed and were

The printer’s tale  127 generated by the ‘Shake-scene’ insult in the early 1590s demonstrates its relevance to the play’s recurring connection of procreation and printing. The publication of the attack caused a stir, and a few months later the controversy was addressed in the epistle “To the Gentlemen Readers” of Henry Chettle’s Kind-harts Dreame (1592; A3r–A4v), printed—like Groatsworth—by John Wolfe and John Danter for William Wright. In the preface, Chettle, who elsewhere refers to himself as a ‘printer’ and a ‘compositor’ (Jowett, “Henry Chettle” 156, 158), identifies himself as the editor of Groatsworth. He denies allegations that he wrote the detraction himself, but apologises for not having censored it. Chettle praises Shakespeare for ‘his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious [i.e. elegant] grace in writting, that aprooues his Art’, and claims that he edited and transcribed Greene’s manuscript without adding anything to it. This is a printer’s tale indeed, for, as John Jowett has shown, building on Warren Austin’s stylistic analysis, Chettle was the originator of either all or most of Groatsworth: the accusation of literary theft was ironically part of a forgery. 26 Towards the end of Chettle’s preface, he claims that the controversy has caused him to identify himself as the author of Kind-harts Dreame: ‘Had not the former reasons been, it had come forth without a father: and then shuld I haue had no cause to feare offending, or reason to sue for fauour’. The ‘father’ of the book identifies himself by signing the preface ‘Henrie Chettle’, expanding the initials on the title page. Having denied paternity of Groatsworth, Chettle must declare it for Kindharts Dreame. This procreative trope produces a rhetorical link with the prefatory materials of Groatsworth, which suggest that Greene is the newborn text’s mother. An epistle from “The Printer to the Gentle Readers”, signed with the initials of the publisher William Wright, asks us to ‘Accept it favourably because it was his [i.e. Greene’s] last birth and not least worth’ (41). This is followed by an unsigned address “To the Gentlemen Readers”, seemingly from a dying Greene but probably actually by Chettle (Carroll 9–10). The prefatory voice commends the work ‘to your favourable censures, that like an Embrion without shape, I feare me will be thrust into the world’ (42). The preface to Kind-harts Dreame, then, builds on the procreative rhetoric of the prefatory materials to the text it attempts to authenticate, encouraging readers to conceptualise literary authorship in terms of parenthood. Chettle suggests that in this case we should take title pages, prefatory statements and signatures at face value: Greene is the mother of Groatsworth, and Chettle is the father of Kind-harts Dreame. By implication, Greene has accused Shakespeare of being not just a plagiarist but plagiārius, a kidnapper or thief of children. 27 The belief that one’s literary offspring were vulnerable to abduction was sometimes voiced in prefatory contexts, even in the early 1590s. In the dedication to Churchyards Challenge (1593), the author Thomas Churchyard expresses his hope that

128  The printer’s tale his printed works ‘shall not be called bastards, nor none aliue will be so hardy as to call them his babes, that I haue bred in my bowels, brought forth and fostred vp’ (A2r). Because of its paratextual dynamic, the ‘Shake-scene’ controversy offers a context for not just Shakespeare’s use of Greene’s texts in The Winter’s Tale, but also the play’s obsession with the examination, loss and recovery of book-like children or heirs whose paternal origins are under question. Yet Shakespeare may have responded to the controversy in the early 1590s as well. A matter of months after Chettle self-­consciously fathered Kind-harts Dreame, Shakespeare deployed his own procreative rhetoric in a prefatory context. Venus and Adonis (1593) was published with a signed dedication from Shakespeare to the Earl of Southampton, like The Rape of Lucrece the following year. In the dedication to Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare asserts his parenthood as he draws on the traditional dedicatory figuration of patron as godfather: ‘if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather’. Descriptions of the work as a ‘burden’ and ‘labour’ earlier in the dedication contribute to the conceit, and ‘heir’ specifies a text/ heir analogy, which Shakespeare revisits and reverses in The Winter’s Tale through a focus on the book-like Perdita as a lost heir. Shakespeare refers to Venus and Adonis as ‘the first heir of my invention’ because it was ‘the first work to be published under Shakespeare’s name, and, unlike the early plays, was written with a view to posterity as well as to immediate profit’ (Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen 11). He represents not composition but publication as the moment of Venus and Adonis’ birth. The use of the future tense (‘I shall be sorry’) suggests the deformities he fears are those that may be brought about by the printing process. Indeed, the dedication was probably written while the poem was being printed because the preliminaries went to press last. 28 Given the timing of Venus and Adonis’ publication, it is possible that Shakespeare’s dedicatory trope alludes to the ‘Shake-scene’ controversy and refutes the accusation of plagiarism. 29 The use of the term ‘invention’ is revealing. ‘Invention’ was the ‘power of mental creation or construction’ (OED n. 4), a capacity for originality often represented as female fertility.30 During a satirical dramatisation of the book trade in the anonymous second part of The Returne from Pernassus (1606), the writer Ingenioso traffics his offspring to the printer John Danter: ‘[F]urnish mee with mony … and Ile suite thy shop with … the gallantest Child my inuention was ever deliuered off’ (B3v). Yet ‘invention’ was also a specific rhetorical term that meant ‘the finding out or selection of topics to be treated, or arguments to be used’ (OED n. 1d), a respected literary activity distinct from plagiarism. Venus and Adonis has a primary source in Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1567). However, Shakespeare’s dedication indicates that the poem should be seen not as a collection of stolen feathers nor an abducted

The printer’s tale  129 child, but as an heir of his invention, a legitimate infant formed through literary selection and adaptation, brought to birth through publication and due to inherit praise won by its parent. Signing the dedication that identifies the text as his own child, Shakespeare repudiates the recent accusation of plagiarism. Perhaps it is true of Venus and Adonis as well as Kind-harts Dreame that ‘Had not the former reasons been, it had come forth without a father’.

Dramatic paratexts, theatricality and the ‘paper stage’ For some, the dedication to Venus and Adonis is simply a means to the end of securing patronage. However, Shakespeare’s interest in preliminaries also registers in his plays, which demonstrate knowledge of paratexts’ bibliographical and rhetorical make-up. Here I consider Shakespeare’s application of this knowledge, and explore the relationship between drama, paratexts and theatricality. I focus on the emergence of the concept of the ‘paper stage’, which was ultimately central to the construction of Shakespeare’s dramatic authorship in print. Allusions to preliminaries in Shakespearean drama are often remarkable for their investment in material detail. In The Taming of the Shrew (1623; first performed c.1591), Lucentio’s servant-boy Biondello advises him to marry Bianca: ‘Take you assurance of her, cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum: to th’church take the priest, clerk and some sufficient honest witnesses’ (IV.iv.91–93). The Latin phrase, meaning ‘with the sole right to print’, appears on many title pages and colophons printed from the late 1530s onwards, and indicates a publisher’s legitimate monopoly of a text for which he has ‘assurance’, or ‘legal evidence of the conveyance of property’ (OED n. 4).31 Like a publisher, Biondello quips, Lucentio must proclaim his exclusive legal right to reproduce. But the exact meaning depends on the specifically paratextual allusion. Rather than telling Lucentio to print copies of his wife, which would contradict the patriarchal model of self-reproduction, Biondello is suggesting Lucentio should make a title page of Bianca. Title pages, which could bear not just declarations of publishers’ rights but also author attributions, pledges of authenticity, stationers’ imprints, majestic Latin tags and elaborate frames, helped to advertise the legitimacy of publications. 32 When Biondello later refers to Bianca as the ‘appendix’ (IV.iv.102) Lucentio must bring to church, he makes another paratextual allusion. 33 Although title pages appeared at the beginning of books and appendices usually came at the end, both paratexts were typically ‘appended’ to main texts at the end of the printing process. Sometimes they were even printed on the same piece of paper because ‘the preliminaries of pamphlets were sometimes arranged as an outset conjugate with the final leaves of the text, and wrapped round the rest of the text’ (Gaskell 108). By figuring Bianca as a title page and then an appendix, Biondello represents her as

130  The printer’s tale a paratextual aid, a document that can be printed and appended through marriage in order to legitimise Lucentio’s reproductive activity. Shakespeare, as this example indicates, appropriated prefatory rhetoric in dramatic contexts, especially in order to conflate printed books and sexed bodies. But in what respects were prefatory materials suitable for dramatic appropriation? As a genre, drama had a peculiar relationship with preliminaries. It was not unusual for a playtext to be printed with nothing more than a title page to preface it. 34 This is the case for all editions of Shakespeare’s plays before the First Folio, apart from the quartos of Troilus and Cressida (1609) and Othello (1622). Dramatic works were less often prefaced by addresses to readers and especially dedications than other kinds of texts, in part because certain objectives of these materials could be achieved through theatrical paratexts such as prologues, epilogues, choruses and inductions.35 John Fletcher suggests prefaces and prologues have common aims in the address to readers of his ‘pastorall Tragic-comedie’ The Faithfull Shepheardesse (1610?): ‘IF you be not reasonably assurde of your knowledge in this kinde of Poeme, lay downe the booke or read this, which I would wish had bene the prologue’ (¶2v). Like prefatory materials, theatrical paratexts had a liminal status and function; the prologue in particular ‘ushered its audience over an imaginary threshold’ into a playworld, and its performance ‘may have constituted a kind of professional threshold for actors’ (Bruster and Weimann 36–37). Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai usefully caution that Genette’s concept of the paratext as a threshold is ‘only helpful so far as it is understood as a fluid textual space that often merges with the active world of the play’ (1:xv). Theatrical paratexts, however, often emphasised their liminality in order to negotiate conceptual thresholds that were integral to the performance as well as the publication of drama, thresholds between play-world and real-world and between private and public. As in prefatory materials, procreative rhetoric could serve this function. In the induction to Jonson’s The Staple of News, the Prologue tells the ‘Gossips’—a word applicable to birth attendants (OED n. 2b)— sitting on the stage that there are a set of gamesters [i.e. actors] within in travail of a thing called a play, and would fain be delivered of it; and they have entreated me to be their man-midwife, the Prologue, for they are like to have hard labour on’t. (Induction.55–59) The play was performed in 1626, but when it was published in 1631 (and finally sold in 1640) the Prologue, stationer-like, played the midwife in print, once again delivering the dramatic work into the world, although the ‘thing called a play’ had been reborn as a different kind of infant. 36 The Winter’s Tale uses a theatrical paratext, Time’s interim chorus, to articulate an idea expressed in the prefatory materials to Pandosto:

The printer’s tale  131 The Triumph of Time. At the midpoint of the tragicomedy, Time turns his hourglass and takes us forward sixteen years, marking his speech as a threshold or ‘gap’ (IV.i.7) between the tragedy of the past and the comedy of the future.37 His address functions as a prologue and perhaps even—in printed form—a preface to the second half of the play. One way in which Time guides us between times and genres is by employing the language of parturition. He anticipates the birth of events to come by asserting his ‘power / To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour / To plant and o’erwhelm custom’ (IV.i.7–8). He also identifies himself as the labouring mother of what will ensue: ‘[L]et Time’s news / Be known when ’tis brought forth’ (IV.i.26–27). Time’s birthing language alludes to the Latin motto that appears on the title page of every edition of Pandosto that Shakespeare could have used: ‘Temporis filia veritas’, meaning ‘Truth is Time’s daughter’ (Pitcher 79, 81). Shakespeare’s theatrical paratext imports a prefatory concept into a dramatic context in order to negotiate temporal and generic thresholds. Aspects of prefatory materials, then, were performable through theatrical paratexts. But even in their own right, preliminary texts were, or had the potential to be, theatrical. Prefatory reflections on the metaphorics of the book trade set up a theatrical relationship between vehicle and tenor. Procreative rhetoric involved casting and role-playing: authors played parents, patrons played godparents, publishers played midwives, and so on. The theatrical inflection of Edward Blount’s declaration that he will ‘playe the Mid-wifes part’ as Micro-cosmographie’s publisher is no coincidence: it heightens the prefatory drama of his re-entrance onto the stage of the book trade almost five years after his last publication, Shakespeare’s First Folio.38 This kind of rhetoric was particularly resonant in the context of published drama. Dedicating his posthumous publication of Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman or A Reuenge for a Father (1631; first performed 1602), Hugh Perry playfully declares himself ‘fayne to Act the Fathers part’ for the play’s ‘new birth’ in print (A2r). In the 1650s, during the closure of the commercial theatres, the actor-turned-publisher Alexander Gough would be cast as ‘Midwife’ to John Ford’s old play The Queen (1653; first performed c. 1628) in a prefatory poem which calls for stationers to ‘make the press act’ when ‘the stage is down’ (R. C., “To Mr Alexander Goughe”; A3r).39 Prefatory materials could also mimic, or offer models for, dramatic form and characterisation. The ballad-selling scene of The Winter’s Tale is comparable to the theatrical “Conference betweene a Gentleman and a Prentice”, which introduces Samuel Rowlands’ Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete (1602; A3r–A4r).40 The “Conference” is a dialogue between a savvy printer’s apprentice and a customer who is intent on purchasing ‘all Greenes bookes in one Volume’ but ends up buying ‘a new Booke new come foorth’—Rowlands’ pamphlet itself. With his talent for pitching a text, the apprentice is a prefatory analogue for Autolycus, who

132  The printer’s tale performs the marketing spirit of so many title pages and prefatory addresses to readers, and sells printed commodities which—as discussed earlier—are related to ‘Greenes bookes’. Such examples suggest the theatrical potential of preliminaries and illustrate Gary Taylor’s characterisation of bookshops as ‘performance spaces’ (“Making Meaning” 56). But they also raise questions about how literary value was created by merging discourses of theatre and print. In Theatre of the Book 1480–1880, Julie Stone Peters argues that the relationship between theatre and print was inflected by metaphors of ‘the performing book’ and ‘the textuality of performance’ (109). The conceit of ‘the performing book’ was most often articulated in preliminaries to playbooks, giving us cause to question Lukas Erne’s description of prefatory materials to printed drama as ‘extraneous to the theatrical experience’ (Shakespeare and the Book Trade 123). A short address to the reader just before the first page of Thomas Dekker’s satirical comedy Satiro-mastix (1602; first performed 1601) presents a list of errata as dramatic characters that will feature in the theatrical experience offered by the playtext, and invites readers to participate through correction: IN steed of the Trumpets sounding thrice, before the Play begin: it shall not be amisse (for him that will read) first to beholde this short Comedy of Errors, and where the greatest enter, to giue them in stead of a hisse, a gentle correction. (“Ad Lectorem” A4v) Reconceived as exerting theatrical agency, the errors have the capacity to enhance rather than depreciate the literary value of the book, especially for those readers who recognise the play as Dekker’s not-so-gentle correction of Jonson in the War of the Theatres. It was not only playbooks, however, that were framed as theatrical or performative. Thomas Randolph’s posthumous Poems with the Muses Looking-Glasse: and Amyntas (1638) is prefaced by a book/actor trope in Joseph Howe’s commendatory poem: ‘Me thinkes the book does act, and we not doubt / To say it rather Enters then Comes out’ (**3r). Thomas Nashe’s preface to Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) invites the reader into this Theater of pleasure, for here you shal find a paper stage streud with pearle, an artificial heau’n to ouershadow the faire frame, & christal wals to encounter your curious eyes, whiles the tragicommody of loue is performed by starlight. (A3r) For Nashe and his mentor Robert Greene, the true theatre of print culture was the pamphlet, ‘ten or so sheets of paper on which to perform with the utmost literary virtuosity’ (Scott-Warren 87). Although Greene

The printer’s tale  133 was a dramatist, it was through his pamphleteering that—according to Gabriel Harvey—he earned his epithet as ‘the king of the paper stage’ (Foure Letters (1592), 9). In early modern studies, the ‘paper stage’ can usefully be defined as a performance space constituted by not only the materiality of the text, but also readers’ engagement with that text through physical and imaginative interactions with printed playbooks, or even other kinds of literature. Yet from the term’s inception, the star of the paper stage was the author. While the concept of the paper stage would ultimately become central to political negotiations between theatre and print during the Interregnum and Restoration,41 its early use by and for pamphleteers with strong authorial personae in the early 1590s, especially Greene, is significant. Greene’s reputation as ‘the king of the paper stage’ made him the appropriate figure of authority to cast Shakespeare the actor-playwright as an ‘upstart Crow’, even from beyond the grave. But early efforts to canonise Shakespeare celebrated his hybrid identity as actor and playwright, and deployed the idea of the paper stage to illustrate his literary value. In the First Folio, James Mabbe asserts Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’ by dramatising the author’s emergence from ‘the Graues-Tyringroome’ in the form of a book: Wee thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth, Tels thy Spectators, that thou went’st but forth To enter with applause. (ll. 2–5) The theatrical metaphor hints at the dramatic fiction of the volume’s preliminaries: the Shakespeare who enters with applause is in character as the Folio’s ‘Shakespeare’, an authorial persona constructed by a complex network of compilers, publishers and prefatory writers. Like the late Greene in the early 1590s, the Shakespeare of the First Folio is a king of the paper stage. Books, then, were represented by prefatory writers as actors or paper stages, and those who produced and consumed books were assigned and acted out various roles. As Peters observes, the conceit of ‘the performing book’ was reversed in the notion of ‘the textuality of performance’. Actors were sometimes figured as walking and talking books whose bodies, faces and gestures could be read by spectators as they saw plays ‘published’ on the real stage (Peters 109, 111, 238). An example of the actor/book trope that mediates between theatre and print occurs in John Webster’s “Induction” to the third quarto of John Marston’s The Malcontent (1604), which, according to its title page, has been ‘Augmented by Marston’ and includes ‘the Additions played by the Kings Majesties servants. / Written by Jhon Webster’ (1). In the induction, a young gallant played by William Sly asks three actors of the King’s Men (Richard Burbage, Henry Condell and John Lowin playing themselves) why they

134  The printer’s tale have chosen to perform the play when ‘another company ha[s] interest in it’ (ll. 75–76). The other company was the Children of the Queen’s Revels, who had already performed the play at Blackfriars, probably in 1603. Condell’s response to the gallant’s question indicates that The Malcontent—whose protagonist has an alter ego called Malevole—was fair game because the children’s company had stolen a play of theirs featuring the character ‘Jeronimo’, perhaps The Spanish Tragedy or the lost First Part of Jeronimo: ‘Why not Malevole in folio with us, as Jeronimo in decimo-sexto with them? They taught us a name for our play: we call it, One for Another’ (ll. 77–79).42 Condell playfully draws attention to the difference in size between the adult body of an actor from his company (the onstage Burbage) and the body of a boy actor from the children’s acting company, representing them as large and small printed books, respectively, a ‘folio’ and a ‘decimo-sexto’. Upon seeing this, a reader might have considered the size of the book in his or her hands. As a quarto, it is bigger than a decimo-sexto and smaller than a folio, an appropriate size given that it is, according to Condell, the product of a clash between decimo-sexto- and folio-sized actors. But unlike the first and second quartos published earlier in the year, it is an expanded version of the play: the book, like the actors, is larger. Such considerations suggest that Condell’s metaphor negotiates the translation of the play from the stage to the page. Occurring in a printed theatrical paratext, the joke corresponds to the paratext that precedes the induction, Marston’s address “To the Reader”, which prefaces all three quartos published in 1604. Marston apologetically expresses his hope that ‘the unhandsome shape which this trifle in reading presents may be pardoned for the pleasure it once afforded you when it was presented with the soul of lively action’ (6). While Marston privileges performance over print, the media are connected by the theatrical verb ‘present’ (OED v. 4b, 6b). In a prefatory text only available to readers, Marston highlights the performativity of the playbook by comparing it to a presenting actor. The book-actor’s supposed unhandsomeness is belied by the fact that the printed playtext is handsomely trimmed with marginal stage directions signifying the play’s ‘lively action’, which, as Holger Syme has shown, create ‘a theatrical effect in print—a surrogate sense of embodiment’ (“Unediting the Margin” 152).43 In the following theatrical paratext, which has been presented to spectators and now readers, Webster reverses Marston’s analogy by having Condell suggest the textuality of performances carried out by book-like actors. Combined in the preliminaries of the third quarto, Marston’s and Webster’s paratextual metaphors suggest both the reversibility and the theatrical potential of prefatory book/body rhetoric. As I show in the second half of this chapter, the transmission of specific forms of this prefatory rhetoric between The Winter’s Tale and the preliminaries to the First Folio contributed to Shakespeare’s early canonisation in print.

The printer’s tale  135

‘[T]he fathers face’: prefacing Shakespeare’s book, 1623 Shakespeare, I have argued, was alert to the theatrical potential of paratextual rhetoric throughout his career, especially printing/procreation and book/body analogies, and was particularly sensitive to the paratexts of Robert Greene and the ‘Shake-scene’ controversy of the early 1590s. But how did Shakespeare dramatise ‘printers’ tales’ and other prefatory narratives of textual reproduction in The Winter’s Tale, almost twenty years after Greene’s death? And how did this dramatisation influence Shakespeare’s canonisation and the representation of his ‘printed worth’ in the First Folio of 1623? The long-observed ‘bookish’ qualities of The Winter’s Tale are part of the play’s self-conscious fascination with sexual, artistic and technological forms of reproduction, from Hermione’s pregnancy, to Perdita and Polixenes’ debate about botanical grafting (IV.iv.77–103), to Giulio Romano’s Nature-aping sculpture (V.ii.95–97).44 Little has been written, however, on the significance of the play’s concerns with print and reproduction to its own textual reproduction in the First Folio, and its canonisation in print. Aaron Kitch contends that by linking the mechanical labor of print with the human labor of childbirth, the play demonstrates a cultural link between the fantasies of authentic paternity and identical printed copies but also stages the defeat of both models by exposing the flaw of print as an authorizing institution. (45–46) I would suggest the trope creates ‘a cultural link’ not just between paternity and print but also between drama and prefatory materials, the context in which ‘the mechanical labor of print’ and ‘the human labor of childbirth’ were traditionally analogised. The meanings of allusions to print, reading and reproduction in The Winter’s Tale are determined by their responsiveness to, and ultimate influence on, paratextual rhetoric and materiality. Building on the contextual work of the first half of this chapter, the second half explores the rhetorical intertextuality between The Winter’s Tale and the First Folio’s preliminaries. That the Folio’s preliminaries employ procreative rhetoric is not remarkable in itself. But the manner in which they do so allows them to explore the same set of relationships that The Winter’s Tale interrogates through its invocations of printing and other forms of reproduction: nature and art, authorship and paternity, textual authenticity and paternal likeness, printed perpetuity and immortality, and print and theatre. After a discussion of the rhetorical cohesion of the First Folio’s preliminaries, and the prefatory writers’ contact with each other and The Winter’s Tale, I offer close readings of passages in the play which draw on prefatory rhetoric. In doing so,

136  The printer’s tale I show that The Winter’s Tale’s dramatisation of ‘printers’ tales’, prefatory narratives of textual reproduction, strongly impacted how the Folio’s prefatory writers articulated and visualised Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’ as an immortal father of literature. In turn, the paratexts these writers produced have shaped critical and public perceptions of the dramatist’s literary value up to the present day. Financed by the publishers William and Isaac Jaggard, Edward Blount, John Smethwick and William Aspley,45 the printing of the First Folio in the Jaggards’ workshop took almost two years, and was completed in late 1623. Bibliographical evidence shows that the preliminaries (π A6 (π A1 + 1) [π B]2) were the second-last part of the book to be printed, the last being the late addition of Troilus and Cressida (Blayney, The First Folio 21). Accepting Peter Blayney’s contention that the preliminaries were printed in late October or early November (The First Folio 18), it is likely that the majority of the Folio’s prefatory texts were composed shortly before this, during October 1623. Along with a title page bearing an engraved portrait of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout (on the recto of a leaf normally inserted between π A1 and π A2), a “Catalogue” of the plays (π A6r) and a list of “the Principall Actors” ([π B]2r), the Folio is prefaced by seven texts. Ben Jonson’s “To the Reader” (signed ‘B.I.’) is a poem relating the Droeshout engraving to the rest of the book (π A1v). John Heminges and Henry Condell—commonly identified as the Folio’s ‘editors’, but better known as ‘compilers’—address their dedicatory epistle to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, the Herbert brothers (π A2r–v). The address “To the great Variety of Readers” is also signed by Heminges and Condell (π A3r). This is followed by Ben Jonson’s poetic eulogy “To the memory of my beloued, The Author, Mr William ­Shakespeare, and what he hath left vs” (π A4r–v), and then Hugh Holland’s sonnet “Upon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenicke Poet” (π A5r). After the “Catalogue” is a poem by Leonard Digges called “To The Memorie of the deceased Author” ([π B]1r). This sits above a short poem entitled “To the memorie of M. W. Shake-speare” and signed ‘I.M.’ ([π B]1r), which was probably written by James Mabbe (Wells et al., A Textual Companion 164). We do not know to what extent the prefatory writers consulted one another during composition, but it is likely that the project was a collaborative effort. Several of them knew each other well, and some had already worked together in prefatory contexts.46 Heminges and Condell had both been members of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men since 1594 and had acted together in a number of plays written by Jonson.47 The compilers were also acquainted with Digges, who knew Mabbe from Oxford University and a trip to Spain in 1611. Jonson and Holland were once schoolmates. Jonson wrote a long prefatory ode for Holland’s epic Pancharis (1603), and Holland returned the favour by composing a poem for Jonson’s Sejanus (1605). Both Jonson and Holland helped to preface

The printer’s tale  137 Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde (1604; first printed 1601) and Thomas Coryate’s Crudities (1611). Prefatory poems by Jonson and Digges commend Mabbe’s translation of a Spanish work of prose fiction by Mateo Alemán, The Rogue, published in 1622 by Blount, one of the Folio’s publishers. Also published by Blount in 1622 was Digges’ translation of Céspedes’ Gerardo, which, like the Folio, was dedicated to the Herbert brothers. The idea that the First Folio’s prefatory writers worked together and influenced one another in the process is reinforced by the thematic and rhetorical cohesion of the preliminaries. Words, images, ideas and emphases recur and combine to give the impression of a unity of purpose and expression.48 Each prefatory text contributes to the concept that, despite his death, Shakespeare lives on in the form of a book that will ‘make [him] looke / Fresh to all ages’ (Digges, ll. 6–7). The Folio’s preliminaries consistently present the texts they introduce as authentic and legitimate. The plays are proclaimed by the title page to be ‘Published according to the True Originall Copies’ and described at the head of the list of actors as ‘Truely set forth, according to their first ORIGINALL’. In Shakespeare Verbatim, Margreta de Grazia shows that the preliminaries deploy an ‘extended genetic and genealogical trope’, connecting the plays to a ‘paternal matrix’ which communicates ‘stability and uniformity’ (48; see 37–41). The Folio’s prefatory writers collectively represent the printed plays as Shakespeare’s posthumously delivered offspring, progeny with the capacity to immortalise the author through their textual embodiment of his mind. In the dedication, Heminges and Condell employ the book/orphan trope, representing the Herbert brothers as foster-parents to children who have ‘out-liu[ed]’ ‘their parent’: We haue but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians … onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our SHAKESPEARE, by humble offer of his playes, to your most noble patronage Jonson’s eulogy draws on the idea of paternal likeness, comparing the playtexts’ materialisation of Shakespeare’s intellect to a child’s resemblance of its father: Looke how the fathers face Liues in his issue, euen so, the race Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines In his well torned, and true filed lines. (ll. 65–68) The metaphor of ‘well torned, and true filed lines’ is an allusion to the craftsmanship of the labouring ‘playwright’ in the original sense of the word, coined by Jonson himself (OED n.).49 But the preliminaries

138  The printer’s tale repeatedly suggest that the Folio’s power to offer an immortalising likeness of Shakespeare lies in its status as a printed book, and thus the procreative motif invokes the reproduction enacted through the craft of printing. As observed earlier, Mabbe refers to Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’ as he dramatises the author’s grand entrance into the book trade ‘with applause’, representing the Folio as a paper stage. It is repeatedly implied that Shakespeare’s death was necessary for his rebirth and perpetuity through publication (de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim 40–41). In Heminges and Condell’s dedication, Shakespeare’s printed plays are both his ‘consecrate[d] … remaines’ and his ‘Orphanes’. The book may, as Digges puts it, ‘out liue / [Shakespeare’s] tomb’ (ll. 2–3), but it is itself a kind of tomb as well. The argument for a rhetorical link between the First Folio’s preliminaries and The Winter’s Tale is supported by the fact that at least three of the prefatory writers were familiar with Shakespeare’s play. Although the only person we can be sure read the whole play closely is Ralph Crane, the copyist who prepared the manuscript from which it was printed (Pitcher 350–56), we know that Heminges, Condell and Jonson came into contact with it. As players for the King’s Men, Heminges and Condell would have acted in The Winter’s Tale, the earliest recorded performance of which was at the Globe on 15 May 1611. The Winter’s Tale was a point of playful exchange and contention between ­Shakespeare and Jonson. The dance of countrymen in satyr skins at the sheep-­shearing festival was probably reprised from Jonson’s masque Oberon, which was performed at court on 1 January 1611 (Pitcher 70–72, 394–95). Having seen Shakespeare’s play, Jonson criticised it in the induction to Bartholomew Fair (first performed 1614; ll. 95–99), and in a conversation with William Drummond in 1618 or 1619 (Informations, ll. 156–57). Not long after the publication of the First Folio in November 1623, The Winter’s Tale was revived by the King’s Men for a court performance at Whitehall on 18 January 1624 (Astington 180). 50 It is difficult to say when the revival was first planned or if it consisted of more than a single court performance. On 19 August 1623, Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, granted a licence to ‘the king’s players’ for ‘An olde play called Winter’s Tale’, noting that ‘Mr. Hemmings’ had given ‘his worde that there was nothing profane added or reformed, thogh the allowed booke was missinge’. As John Pitcher observes, a reasonable explanation for the entry in Herbert’s records is that ‘John Heminges, one of the King’s Men, had sought a licence for the revival of The Winter’s Tale that the company was planning for the Christmas season’ (358). It is quite possible, then, that preparations for the play’s revival were in progress during the composition of the Folio’s preliminaries in October 1623. As sharers in the King’s Men, Heminges and Condell would have been preparing for the revival and probably rehearsing to

The printer’s tale  139 act in it. This is one reason why The Winter’s Tale might have been the Shakespeare play at the forefront of their minds as they wrote their dedication and address, and possibly—in their self-­proclaimed authoritative role as the Folio’s ‘Presenters’ (π A2v)—orchestrated the preliminaries as a whole. The thought that Heminges and Condell were simultaneously preparing for the performance and the publication of The Winter’s Tale urges us to consider the media through which the play was presented. 51 It was initially experienced through the gestures and sounds of actors’ bodies, and its court revival allowed it to be experienced in this way again (albeit by an elite audience). Its printing tropes, arguably fitter for play-reading than play-going, anticipate the play’s bibliographical destiny in the First Folio, a book which literalised the metaphors by translating speaking bodies into printed texts, dramatic characters into typographic characters. However, in light of ideas of ‘the performing book’ and ‘the textuality of performance’, the process was not one of straightforward remediation. 52 The play’s literal and metaphorical forms of print would have had particular resonance in the early modern public playhouse, where printed pamphlets and books (probably including playbooks) were marketed and sold to spectators by hawkers, mercuries and Autolycus-like peddlers (Stern, “Watching as Reading” 137–42). The authors of the First Folio’s preliminaries, influenced by The Winter’s Tale’s dramatic presentation of ideas about print, effectively theatricalized Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’, assimilating the vitality and interactivity associated with performance while also highlighting print’s value as a monumentalising and enduring medium. 53 Yet it is worth considering the potential impact of experiencing The Winter’s Tale’s print metaphors in print on early readers of the First Folio, and on their engagement with the materiality of the unusual object in their hands, ‘the first folio book ever published in England that was devoted exclusively to plays’ (Blayney, The First Folio 1). The rhetorical intertextuality between The Winter’s Tale and the preliminaries that market and frame the Folio as a whole suggests that while Shakespeare—as Heminges and Condell note—was not alive ‘to be exequutor to his own writings’ (A2r), his bookish tragicomedy could have played a crucial role in his canonisation in print.

The printer’s tale retold: paternal likeness in The Winter’s Tale and the preliminaries of the First Folio Soon after Leontes wonders whether or not Mamillius’ nose is a ‘copy’ of his own, he tells Hermione and Polixenes that ‘Looking on the lines / Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil / Twenty-three years’ (I.ii.153– 55). Leontes reads the ‘lines’ of his son’s face to test how accurate a ‘copy’ it is. He believes that the child who resembles his father advertises

140  The printer’s tale not only the legitimacy of his paternity but also immortalises him by embodying his former self. Thus he experiences (or pretends to experience) his inspection of Mamillius as a ‘recoil’ back to his youth. Leontes’ textualising focus on the ‘lines’ of Mamillius’ face anticipates Jonson’s representation of Shakespeare’s ‘well torned, and true filed lines’, which show ‘how the fathers face / Liues in his issue’. Like Jonson, Holland fixates on the permanent ‘lines’ of verse in the Folio, which he contrasts with the short ‘line’ of Shakespeare’s biological life: ‘For though his line of life went soone about, / The life yet of his lines shall neuer out’ (ll. 13–14). While Leontes looks for himself in the ‘lines’ of Mamillius’ ­‘copy’-like face, Jonson and Holland look for Shakespeare in the printed ‘lines’ of the Folio, which they suggest have given the author a form of life that will never end. Paulina panders to Leontes’ child/book fantasy when she attempts to persuade him that the newborn Perdita must be his daughter: Behold, my lords, Although the print be little, the whole matter And copy of the father—eye, nose, lip, The trick of’s frown, his forehead, nay, the valley, The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles, The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger. (II.iii.96–101) The combination of ‘print’ with ‘copy’, and perhaps ‘matter’, ‘mould’ and ‘frame’, makes the metaphor primarily, although not exclusively, typographic. 54 Thanks to ‘Nature, which hast made it / So like to him that got it’ (II.iii.102–3), Perdita is an accurate and therefore legitimate printed reproduction of the manuscript ‘copy’ that is her father. At the same time, the technological indeterminacy of the metaphor (as with ­L eontes’ earlier comment on Mamillius’ nose, ‘They say it is a copy out of mine’) is significant. Exploring the ‘productive ambiguity’ of ‘print’ and ‘copy’, Helen Smith suggests that—as well as a printed text—Paulina could be representing Perdita as a clearly written manuscript, a sealed royal patent, a stamped ‘royal’ or coin, or a portrait etched in brass (“A Man in Print?” 62–66). The ‘print’-like Perdita anticipates the authenticating ‘holy seal’ on the Apollonian oracle staged in the next two scenes (III.i.19; III.ii.127), whose ‘truth’ is also denied by Leontes (III.ii.135–38), and the ‘stamped coin’ for which Autolycus exchanges commodities that include ballads perceived as ‘true’ because ‘in print’ (IV.iv.729, 260–61). Yet the image of a printed book dominates because Paulina’s rhetorical set-piece alludes to the metaphorics of printed prefatory materials, a paratextual space where—as discussed in this chapter’s introduction—writers tended to conflate the typographic with the sigillographic and numismatic. Paulina’s public presentation of Perdita as an infant-text recalls the presentation of books to patrons

The printer’s tale  141 through dedications seeking their seal of approval and endorsement. She approaches the Sicilian court with Perdita as dedicators approached patrons, by claiming to seek godparents and blessings. Holding Perdita, who is wearing a ‘bearing-cloth’ (III.iii.112) or christening gown, ­Paulina tells Leontes she has come for ‘needful conference / About some gossips [i.e. godparents] for your highness’, and later claims that ­Hermione ‘commends’ the child ‘to your blessing’ (II.iii.39–40, 65). Paulina employs the procreation/printing metaphor in her address to the ‘lords’ of the Sicilian court for the same reason that dedicators employed the printing/procreation metaphor in their addresses to ‘Lords’ such as Pembroke and Montgomery: to illustrate a legitimising likeness in an appeal for pity from those who can offer protection. Paulina’s speech is echoed by Jonson’s ‘Looke how the fathers face / Liues in his issue’, but also Heminges and Condell’s dedicatory representation of the Folio’s playtexts as ‘Orphanes’ in need of ‘Guardians’. Not long after her presentation of Perdita, Leontes contemptuously refers to Paulina as ‘Lady Margery, your midwife there’ (II.iii.158), alluding to midwives’ association with unsubstantiated gossip and identifying her as an unruly, prating woman. 55 But the King’s identification of Paulina as a midwife reveals much more about her behaviour in this scene, and in the play more generally. 56 As David Cressy observes, ‘[i]t was the midwife who swaddled the child and presented it to the waiting father’ (61). It was also customary for midwives to remark that children resembled their fathers in order to get a reward. 57 Bound by oaths, the early modern English midwife had an ‘official role as paternity testifier, the theory being that women under duress of labor were more likely to speak freely and truthfully about their behaviour and partners’ (Bicks 3). Appropriating the obstetrical figure’s capacity to prove newborns lawful, Paulina ‘plays the midwife’s judicial role as guarantor of legitimacy’ (Jenstad 93). ‘Plays’ and ‘role’ are crucial terms because ­Paulina’s ­midwife-like behaviour is just an act: she was not even present at Perdita’s birth. The manner in which she, like Edward Blount, attempts to ‘playe the Mid-wifes part’ makes her comparable to prefacing editors and publishers who claim to have brought legitimate infant-texts to light. Like them, Paulina theatrically unveils an infant to the world in order to save it from oblivion. As one who plays the midwife and asserts the legitimacy of a textual infant, Paulina can be linked to Mistress Tale-Porter, the midwife whose name, along with those of her gossips, validates Autolycus’ printed ballad about an implausible monstrous birth: Here’s one to a very doleful tune, how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden … Here’s the midwife’s name to’t, one Mistress Tale-Porter, and five or six honest wives’ that were present. Why should I carry lies abroad? (IV.iv.262–71)

142  The printer’s tale The midwife’s name conflates the monstrous birth and the printed ballad. She is, through her obstetrical work, the gate-keeping ‘porter’ of labouring women’s ‘tails’ or genitals (OED tail n.1 5c).58 But she is also, through her signature on the ballad, the conveying ‘porter’ who helps to deliver the ballad’s gossip-like ‘tale’ into the public domain as a legitimate printed account and a valuable commodity. 59 Autolycus, something of a tale-porter himself in that he carries ballads, borrows the midwife’s authority to authenticate the ballad, declaring it ‘Very true, and but a month old’ (IV.iv.267). For Kitch, concerned with how print’s stability as an authorising institution was undermined by anxieties about excessive and illegitimate textual reproduction, Autolycus’ broadside ballad is ‘figured … explicitly as offspring brought to the print marketplace by a midwife’ (59), and raises questions about ‘the play’s own hybrid generic status as a “mongrel” tragicomedy’ (44). Yet the strong association of midwiving printed texts with paratextual rhetoric is crucial. Like Paulina the ‘midwife’, Mistress Tale-Porter and her gossips are representative of publishers and other prefatory writers who sign prefatory materials and tell printers’ tales about newborn books, inscribing them as ‘true’ in various senses (not just truthful but also accurate or legitimate). Audiences and readers might laugh at the credulous Mopsa’s declaration that ‘a ballad in print’ is always ‘true’ (IV.iv.260–61), but authors of paratexts to books of all kinds—including the ‘Truely set forth’ First Folio—traded on the constructed credit of print as a medium of seeming authority,60 and on persuasive tales of supervised births. Alert to anxieties about print expressed by Samuel Daniel and other early modern writers,61 The Winter’s Tale satirises Mopsa’s naïve faith in the medium. However, her response to Autolycus’ printed ballads is—as Lori Newcomb has argued—part of the play’s ‘ongoing conversation about alternate truth claims and competing media’. For Newcomb, ‘Mopsa’s words literalize and materialize the central question of textual truth posed by the oracle of Apollo in act 3’ (Reading 128–29). As a manuscript scroll, the oracle from Delphos seems a world away from Autolycus’ cheap printed ballads, but its authenticity as a material document derives from a fetishized imprint that guarantees its truth: ‘the holy seal’ (III.ii.127) stamped by a ‘divine’ or ‘priest’ (III.i.19, III. ii.126), effective midwife to the word of Apollo. Denoting both textual truth and the chaste truth of Hermione,62 the Apollonian seal strangely anticipates the printed ballads peddled by the Mercurial Autolycus and fetishized by Mopsa. Leontes’ rejection of the divinely imprinted document (‘this is mere falsehood’ (III.ii.138)) comes soon after his rejection of an infant presented as his printed reproduction (‘My child? Away with’t’ (II.iii.130)). Contemporary paratextual comparisons of presses and print patronage to seal-stamps reinforce the parallel. The Sicilian court views the stamp of the seal on the oracle with the same reverence as Mopsa does the stamp of the press; the prints of Mercury remember

The printer’s tale  143 the print of Apollo. The play’s anxious contemplation of questions of textual truth and the value of print, I would suggest, draws on tensions between Apollonian and Mercurial impulses in early modern paratexts, as they framed texts and constructed notions of authorship.63 As they negotiated Shakespeare’s relationship to print, truth and value, the First Folio’s prefatory authors would no doubt have preferred to see themselves as Apollonian priests than as Mercurial Tale-Porters. In reality they were both, responsible for selling and sacralizing Shakespeare at the same time. Heminges and Condell’s demand that the general readers of the Folio ‘buy it first’ follows their ‘consecrat[ion]’ of the author’s ‘remaines’ to the Herbert brothers (π A3r; π A2v). John Milton’s epitaph on Shakespeare in the Second Folio of 1632, apparently written with The Winter’s Tale in mind (Paul Stevens 385–87), alludes to Apollo’s sealed oracle in order to articulate Shakespeare’s value and impressiveness: ‘[E]ach heart / Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book / Those Delphic lines with deep impression took’ (ll. 10–12). ‘Delphic lines’ suggests the ancient manuscript scroll staged in Act 3, but the idea that the book communicates its value by making a ‘deep impression’ on readers’ hearts returns us not only to the Apollonian seal but also to the typographic impression of the Folio, whose ‘printed worth’ depended on its mechanised reproduction and sale. While Autolycus’ reference to Mistress Tale-Porter persuades his customers of the ballad’s validity, Paulina’s attempt to play the midwife with Perdita proves unsuccessful. Unlike Mopsa and Dorcas, the king is not persuaded that the printed product brought before him is ‘true’. Convinced of Perdita’s illegitimacy, he makes an orphan of her, commanding Antigonus to ‘bear it / To some remote and desert place’ (II.iii.173–74). The phrase recalls Sidney’s expression of his desire to throw away Arcadia: ‘I could well find in my harte, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child, which I am loath to father’. Leontes’ rejection of Perdita dramatises prefatory representations of books as outcast by authors. It also, however, captures the potential cruelty of dedicatees. Leontes is like both the author who will not acknowledge his own infant-text (­Perdita ‘hath been cast out … / No father owning it’ (III.ii.85–86)) and the patron who refuses to foster an infant-text fathered by someone else (‘I’ll not rear / Another’s issue’ (II.iii.190–91)). Once cast out without anyone to care for her, Perdita is, like an unattributed and unpatronised book in the market, left ‘Without … mercy, to it own protection / And favour of the climate’ in ‘some place / Where chance may nurse or end it’ (II.iii.176–77, 180–81). For books, that place was St Paul’s Churchyard, where textual bastards and orphans waited for book-browsers to offer them a new home. For Perdita, it is the ‘The deserts of Bohemia’ (III.iii.2), where she must wait to be found, if at all, by a kind stranger. When a shepherd stumbles across the abandoned child, he—like Paulina—represents her as a printed book:

144  The printer’s tale What have we here? Mercy on’s, a bairn! A very pretty bairn. A boy or a child, I wonder? A pretty one, a very pretty one – sure some scape; though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door work. They were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here. I’ll take it up for pity. (III.iii.68–75) The Shepherd claims he is not ‘bookish’, meaning studious (OED adj. 2a), but his response to Perdita, a beautiful child wrapped in expensive clothing, parodies a book-browser’s first impression upon perusing the ‘pretty’ front matter of a new book. Having ‘read’ the child’s outward appearance, the Shepherd decides to ‘take it up for pity’. In doing so, he plays the gentle patron that agrees to foster an orphan-text. In a market where the patron was being ‘eclipsed by … the economic and interpretive importance of the reader, the “patron” of the work as buyer and consumer in the modern sense of the term “patronage”’ (Marotti 22), dedicatory appeals for foster-parents—visible to all readers—were not designed solely for the aristocrats to whom they were addressed. Furthermore, addresses to readers gave members of the public the opportunity to prove themselves better parents than authors and patrons. The epistle from “The Prynter to the Reader” in Arthur Brooke’s undedicated translation of a French exegetical work, The Agreement of Sundry Places of Scripture (1563), explains that the discontented author’s absence from the printing process has rendered the printed text an unwanted ‘orphane Babe’. The publisher Lucas Harrison asks the reader to ‘accept to your patronage’ the book, reasoning that ‘it is not the least tryal of mercy, to father the fatherlesse’ (¶1v). In a prefatory poem to his erotic poetic sequence Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), Barnabe Barnes displays Leontes-like cruelty when he banishes his infant-text into the wilderness of the printed book trade, where only a common book-buyer can save it: GO bastard Orphan packe thee hence, And seeke some straunger for defence: ………………………………………… Some goodman that shall thinke thee witty, Will be thy patrone, and take pitty. (A2v)64 By taking ‘pity’ on Perdita and deciding to foster her, the Shepherd—a wandering ‘goodman’ or commoner—performs the role of the caring parental reader for whom such prefatory texts were designed. But what exactly does the Shepherd ‘read’? The things that accompany baby Perdita serve a similar function to preliminaries because they help to acquire protection, a new home and a foster-parent for the abandoned child. Although ‘pretty’ in herself, Perdita is by no means

The printer’s tale  145 an unprefaced or ‘naked’ book. Her respectable social status is signified by the fact that she is wearing ‘a bearing-cloth for a squire’s child’ (III.iii.112) and ‘The mantle of Queen Hermione’s; the jewel about the neck of it’ (V.ii.32–33). Lying not far from her is ‘gold’ (III.iii.119), which has been left to ‘breed’ her (III.iii.47). Perdita’s attire and the gold come from Pandosto (Pitcher 421, 444), but she is also accompanied by Antigonus’ unsigned letter of introduction, referred to as her ‘character’ (III.iii.46) and ‘the letters of Antigonus … know[n] to be his character’ (V.ii.33–35). During the reunion of Leontes and Perdita, reported in the play’s penultimate scene, these materials serve as ‘evidences’ that ‘proclaim her with all certainty to be the king’s daughter’ (V.ii.32–35, 37). On the coast of Bohemia, they also help Perdita to find a father in the form of the ‘read[ing]’ Shepherd. After the failure of his wife’s dedicatory-style presentation to Leontes and the ‘lords’ of the Sicilian court, Antigonus must offer Perdita to an unknown member of the general public. This reflects the traditional structure of books (including the First Folio), wherein the address to readers comes after the dedication. Perdita’s attire, the gold and the letter are stage properties that help Antigonus to make the rejected child more attractive to whoever finds her. The clothes and the gold translate the prefatory garments and external riches of a printed book into a theatrical context. Prefatory materials were represented as clothes that could attract the reader to the textual body they protected and adorned.65 ‘THIS Play comming accidentally to the Presse’, writes Thomas Heywood in his address “To The Reader” of The Golden Age (1611), ‘I was loath (finding it mine owne) to see it thrust naked into the world, to abide the fury of all weathers, without either Title for acknowledgement, or the formality of an Epistle for ornament’ (A2r). The idea that Perdita’s garments function like the outer layers of a book is reinforced by a later book-binding metaphor. Referring to Florizel’s costume for the sheep-shearing festival, Perdita worries to think what his author-like father would think if he saw his royal son ‘obscured / With a swain’s wearing’ (IV.iv.8–9): ‘How would he look to see his work, so noble, / Vilely bound up?’ (IV.iv.21–22). That Florizel is probably wearing ‘a shepherd’s sheepskin jacket’ (Pitcher 74) enriches the metaphor: sheepskin was used to make cheap leather for bookbinding (Gaskell 147). We do not learn the content of the letter left with Perdita, but it is clear that, like so many epistles to readers from publishers, it offers an explanation as to how the infant it accompanies came to be there.66 The letter does not name any parents, but it must name the child, who becomes known in Bohemia as ‘Perdita’, the title Antigonus is instructed to give her by Hermione in a dream (III.iii.31–33). By naming her Perdita, the feminine form of the Latin perditus, meaning ‘lost’, ‘abandoned’ or ‘desperate’ (Pitcher 141n), Antigonus’ letter inscribes the infant as a vulnerable orphan in need of protection. ‘[T]he fate of all Bookes

146  The printer’s tale depends upon your capacities’, Heminges and Condell tell the readers of the Folio. The fate of Perdita, the Shepherd is made aware, most certainly depends on him. While parents nurture and protect, however, they also correct. The bookish metaphor of the unbookish Shepherd is nuanced by his repeated use of the word ‘scape’. A variant of ‘escape’, ‘scape’ ostensibly refers to the sexual transgression of a lady-in-waiting whose secretive ‘work’ has resulted in an illegitimate birth: one sense of ‘scape’ was ‘a breaking out from moral restraint’ (OED scape n.1 2, escape n.1 7). However, ‘scape’ could also refer to a printing error in a book (OED scape n.1 3, escape n.1 6a; Pitcher 240n); the term was used in errata lists at the beginning or end of printed books, commonly referred to as ‘faults escaped’ or just ‘scapes’.67 By identifying Perdita as a ‘scape’ in need of help, the Shepherd aligns himself with the wide range of readers who participated in textual production by correcting errata by hand.68 (In due course, early readers would mark up copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio with corrections.69) The material practice of correction could be represented in paratexts as part of the reader’s role as a kind of foster-parent. In a prefatory poem to his Workes (1630), “Errata, or Faults to the Reader”, John Taylor sounds like he is giving advice to a parent, urging a lighttouch approach: [I]n your reading mend each mis-plac’d letter, And by your judgement make bad words sound better. Where you may hurt, heale; where you can affect, There helpe and cure, or else be not too strict. (A4v) Such rhetoric, here used ironically, was designed to instil in readers a duty of parental care, and negotiate with their desire to help shape the text. When the Shepherd reads Perdita as a ‘scape’, he emphasises that she needs his help and that he wants to foster and ‘affect’ her as readers did their markable books. Whereas Paulina represents Perdita to the disbelieving Leontes as a perfect typographic ‘copy of the father’, the Shepherd reads her as a typographic error or bastard ‘scape’. But the Shepherd is wrong; Perdita is legitimate. For readers of the Folio text, Leontes’ and the Shepherd’s misreadings of Perdita are corrected by the play’s terminal character list “The Names of the Actors” (303), probably composed by Ralph Crane, which describes Perdita as ‘Daughter to Leontes and Hermione’.70 Even the setting of Perdita’s discovery, the sea coast of Bohemia, ironises the Shepherd’s bookish scape-finding. While Ben Jonson would mock the placement of a shipwreck ‘where there is no sea by some 100 miles’ and the eighteenth-century editor Thomas Hanmer would correct ‘Bohemia’ to ‘Bithynia’, a region with a coastline in Asia Minor, the geographical ‘error’ now tends to be seen as a careful ‘preposterous inversion’

The printer’s tale  147 designed to ‘alert early audiences to the unreality and make-believe that was to follow’ (Pitcher 100–2). The play itself cautions against the impulse to correct without due consideration. The Shepherd’s figuration of Perdita as a ‘scape’ is also odd insofar as it suggests textual imperfection despite his own observation that Perdita is a well-formed, ‘pretty’ child. His representation of illegitimate procreation as a printing error reflects the misleading prefatory tradition of linking unauthorised publication with bad editing and printing. Although in reality the quality and accuracy of an edition were rarely related to the legality of a publishing venture, prefatory writers frequently connected infant-texts’ ‘deformities’ to their ‘illegitimacy’.71 This false association is made by Heminges and Condell in their address to the readers of the First Folio, placed after the dedication in which they portray the collection’s plays as ‘Orphanes’ in search of ‘Guardians’: [A]s where (before) you were abus’d with diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that exposed them: euen those are now offer’d to your view cur’d and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceiued the[m] According to Heminges and Condell, the disfiguring errata of former publications are the direct result of the ‘frauds and stealthes’ of print piracy: all ‘impostors’ are ‘injurious’, a sham midwife will always mangle the baby. The rebirth of the plays in the legitimate Folio has, they claim, ‘cur’d’ them of their deformities, restoring them to their originally ‘conceiued’ and error-free form. Despite its many textual errors, the absence of an errata list in the Folio’s paratextual apparatus reinforces the fictional narrative behind a ‘cur’d and perfect’ Shakespearean dramatic corpus, a narrative attested by Heminges and Condell’s subscribed names as Autolycus’ ballad is by the name of the midwife Mistress Tale-Porter. Caroline Bicks demonstrates that the midwife was regarded as an ‘agent of deformity or perfection’ (100) who controlled the size and shape of newborn bodies: ‘when she swaddled the malleable newborn or pressed its head, she molded it into either a deformed or perfect figure’ (4). And because infants’ deformities were thought to signify illegitimacy, the midwife’s body-shaping capacities meant she could produce both legitimate and illegitimate forms when presiding over births (Bicks, Ch. 3). Heminges and Condell’s implication is that, unlike the ‘injurious impostors’ they condemn, they and others responsible for the publication of the First Folio are superior midwives who have demonstrated their capacity to reform and legitimise infant-texts. Like Blount, who co-financed the venture, the compilers ‘playe the Mid-wifes part’, putting their acting skills to use in a prefatory context. As early literary

148  The printer’s tale commentators and canon-shapers, they share a metaphorical identity with the historical critics and editors identified—in Arthur Sherbo’s phrases—as ‘Shakespeare’s Midwives’ and overseers of the ‘Birth of Shakespeare Studies’. Heminges and Condell’s assertion that the Folio’s playtexts have been printed as Shakespeare ‘conceiued’ them precludes the influence of the gestative processes of publication. The seamless transition between Shakespeare’s ‘mind and hand’, which ‘went together’ according to the compilers (π A3r), has supposedly been imitated in the translation of his plays into print. The suggestion that the Folio brings to birth the same texts that were formed during Shakespeare’s conception of them is comparable to when Leontes, still entertaining the child/book fantasy after so many years, represents conception as printing in his speech to Florizel: Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince, For she did print your royal father off, Conceiving you. Were I but twenty-one, Your father’s image is so hit in you, His very air, that I should call you brother, As I did him. (V.i.123–28) Here, the father is represented as a manuscript text on ‘royal’ paper,72 the faithful or ‘true’ wife as the printer or publisher who printed him ‘off’ when she became pregnant, and the son—who bears his ‘father’s image’—as the accurately printed and legitimately published text.73 Leontes’ praise of Florizel’s mother parallels Heminges and Condell’s praise of themselves and others responsible for the publication of the ‘Truely set forth’ Folio. While the producers of the Folio have printed Shakespeare’s infant-texts ‘as he conceiued the[m]’, Polixenes’ wife’s printing is the moment of conception. Birth merely brings into the world a pre-formed product, offering a perfect image of Shakespeare’s mind and Florizel’s father, respectively. Like Paulina in her exhibition of Perdita, Leontes represents Florizel as a printed likeness of his father. Paulina’s and Leontes’ focus on physical resemblance suggests a connection to pictorial as well as textual reproduction. The First Folio offers a printed pictorial likeness in the form of Droeshout’s copper-plate engraving of Shakespeare, whose placement on the title page really does allow us to ‘Looke how the fathers face / ­Liues in his issue’.74 Jonson’s short poem “To the Reader” on the adjacent page relates Shakespeare’s portrait to Shakespeare’s book: This Figure, that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut; Wherein the Grauer had a strife [W]ith Nature, to out-doo the life:

The printer’s tale  149 O, could he but haue drawne his wit As well in brasse, as he hath hit His face; the Print would then surpasse All, that was euer writ in brasse. But, since he cannot, Reader, looke Not on his Picture, but his Booke. In its articulation of the accuracy with which Droeshout ‘hath hit / [Shakespeare’s] face’, Jonson’s praise of the engraver’s work echoes Leontes’ commendation of Polixenes’ wife’s printing of her husband, whose ‘image’ is ‘so hit’ in Florizel. Like Leontes, who represents Florizel as a reproduction both of his father’s human ‘image’ and of a figurative manuscript copy, Jonson links image and text. John Jowett observes that in Jonson’s poem [t]he word “print” acts as a crucial hinge between pictorial engraving of the person and the poet’s words as set in type … [U]nlike Shakespeare’s “figure”, his “wit” cannot be engraved in brass, but it can be represented in lead type. (Shakespeare and Text 85, 90) Jonson may ostensibly differentiate the portrait from the texts that follow, but he also indicates that they both rely on the printer’s art. ‘This Booke’, Digges tells Shakespeare, ‘When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke / Fresh to all ages’ (ll. 5–7). The same is true of the eternally fresh-faced portrait, because, although originally engraved in ‘brasse’ (i.e. copper-plate), it has been printed as part of the book. Jonson tells us to ‘looke / Not on his Picture, but his Booke’, yet once he has imbued the imaged author with a supernatural aura it is difficult to look away, or to forget it once the page is turned. The prefatory poem, in other words, posits the idea that the author is the text and the text is the author. The First Folio’s preliminaries and especially the presentation of the Droeshout engraving may have been influenced by the language and behaviour surrounding Hermione’s statue. Like the statue, whose life-like resemblance of Hermione holds its viewers in awe, the Folio is a posthumous reproduction that is presented as a monument.75 ‘Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe’, Jonson rhapsodises in his eulogy, ‘And art aliue still, while thy Booke doth liue, / And we haue wits to read, and praise to giue’ (ll. 22–24). Much of the preliminaries’ commendation of Shakespeare seems to echo Paulina’s praise of the statue: As she lived peerless, So her dead likeness I do well believe Excels whatever yet you looked upon, Or hand of man hath done. (V.iii.14–17)

150  The printer’s tale Here ‘dead likeness’ means ‘exact representation’, but it has a secondary sense of ‘representation of the dead’. As a posthumous book-monument, the Folio is similarly a ‘dead likeness’ of one who ‘lived peerless’ because, as Jonson declares in his eulogy, Shakespeare outshone his contemporary playwrights (ll. 29–30). Jonson’s description of the Droeshout portrait as a figure ‘Wherein the Grauer had a strife / [W]ith Nature, to out-doo the life’ recaptures the sense of wonder elicited by Hermione’s statue, whose maker, Giulio Romano, ‘could put breath into his work’ and ‘beguile Nature of her custom’ (V.ii.96–97). ‘Graver’ connects the work of the engraver to that of the sculptor (OED n. 2a, 2b), but another possible meaning of the word—noted by Chris Laoutaris—is ‘grave-maker’. Laoutaris’ convincing argument that Jonson’s poem and Droeshout’s engraving ‘together reproduce the function of post-reformation tomb effigies which often looked directly at the viewer rather than upwards towards God’ (52) strengthens the connection to Hermione’s statue or ‘dead likeness’, which—held in a ‘chapel’ (V.iii.86)—similarly invokes tomb sculpture and funeral monuments.76 Behind the First Folio’s posthumous canonisation of a literary father stands the mesmerising ‘dead likeness’ of Hermione as a petrified mother.77 For both Shakespeare and Hermione, however, petrification and entombment are tempered by theatricality and rebirth. In the metatheatrical final scene of The Winter’s Tale, staged by Paulina the ‘midwife’, Hermione’s statue miraculously comes to life in a moment of Ovidian depetrification. Hermione’s statue, as it turns out, is not a statue at all. It is Hermione herself, who has been standing, according to the opening stage direction, ‘like a Statue’ (Ccr). So too has the actor playing her, who imitates a character imitating an object. Before Leontes’ eyes, Hermione emerges from her ‘natural posture’ (V.iii.23) and ‘hangs about his neck’ (V.iii.112), recalling Leontes’ representation of her in Act 1 when he identifies Polixenes as ‘he that wears her like a medal, ­hanging / About his neck’ (I.ii.305–6).78 Unique in Shakespeare’s canon, the ­image of a ‘medal’ is significant in a play so invested in artistic and technological reproduction. Portrait medals, despite their association with numismatic studies, were a form of commemorative sculpture, and were often illustrated in biographies as objects with the ‘primary purpose of conferring immortality’ (Scher, “Introduction” 1). Leontes’ comparison of Hermione to stamped or cast medal (when seen as unfaithful) strangely anticipates her imitation of engraved stone (when seen as faithful) in the form of Romano’s commemorative statue. But the Hermione who hangs from her husband’s neck is warm, alive and about to speak—she is more than just an aestheticised object or ‘dead likeness’. A similar spectacle to the animation of Hermione’s statue is promised to the Folio’s readers as they gaze at the engraved ­Shakespeare. Gary Taylor suggests that the portrait’s prominence can in part be explained by the fact that Shakespeare was an actor: ‘[P]eople who had

The printer’s tale  151 seen his plays, the very people who might be most tempted to buy this book, had also probably seen him, acting in those plays and in other people’s plays’ (“Making Meaning” 67). While the Folio’s preliminaries repeatedly remind us that the volume is a posthumous publication, they also gesture towards the idea that the actor-playwright is, like Hermione, only playing dead. His grave is not a grave; it is ‘Deaths publique tyring-house’ (Holland, l. 12) or ‘the Graues-Tyring-roome’ (Mabbe, l. 2), phrases which remind us that Hermione’s statue would probably have been discovered in the literal tiring-houses of the Globe and Blackfriars when Paulina drew back a ‘curtain’ (V.iii.59, 68, 83) hanging over the central entrance to the stage (Lori Leigh 143). Mabbe’s theatricalization of Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’ is reinforced by his allusion to the theatrical practice of doubling, when he suggests the playwright’s posthumous performance in print both surpasses and appropriates the art of the actor: An Actors Art, Can dye, and liue, to acte a second part. That’s but an Exit of Mortality; This, a Re-entrance to a Plaudite. (ll. 5–8) On the First Folio’s paper stage, Shakespeare is reborn and lives on. And it is the reader who, looking on his bibliographical monument, has the capacity to make the petrified text ‘be stone no more’ (V.iii.99). Thus the metatheatrical depetrification of Hermione’s statue is a model for the metatextual resurrection of Shakespeare and rebirthing of his dramatic corpus in the First Folio. If there was an anxiety in the early modern period that printed publication ‘threatens stillness and fixity’ as well as offering ‘the promise of birth and parental continuity’ (Helen Smith, “A Man in Print?” 71), The Winter’s Tale powerfully suggested to the Folio’s prefatory writers strategies for reconciling death and rebirth, entombment and reanimation, textual monumentalisation and theatrical vitality, as they canonised Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’ for posterity. Shakespeare’s bookish tragicomedy, I  have argued, influenced the volume’s preliminaries by dramatising ‘printers’ tales’ and exploiting the theatrical potential of prefatory rhetoric, with particular sensitivity to the paratexts of the ‘Shakescene’ controversy of 1592–93. The Folio’s prefatory writers’ contact with The Winter’s Tale and with one another means that rhetorical transmission was possible, especially given the recent re-­l icensing and upcoming court revival of the play. Shakespeare, it seems, was indirectly responsible for the marketing and framing of the publication that helped to establish his reputation as a father of  literature who is—in Jonson’s words—‘not of an age but for all time’ (“To the memory”, l. 43).

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Notes 1 For readings of the play’s print metaphors, see Kitch; Helen Smith, “Print[ing]” 180–86 and “A Man in Print?” 62–66; Newcomb, “Monumental Bodies” 248–49; and Thompson and Thompson 71–73. On metaphorical and staged books and texts in Shakespeare more generally, see Scott; Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship; Cohen, Ch. 3 (65–90); and Kinney. 2 See Taylor, “Artiginality” for a discussion of Shakespeare’s authorship after postmodernism. 3 See Hooks on the continued fetishization of the First Folio as Shakespeare’s monument and a ‘sanctified object’ (186). First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare was the title of an exhibition which toured the USA in 2016, organised by the Folger Shakespeare Library, The American Library Association and the Cincinnati Museum Centre. Productively exploring metaphors of gestation and birth in her ‘biography’ of the First Folio, Emma Smith suggests the Folio’s ‘birthday’ was actually its first recorded purchase by Edward Dering on 5 December 1623, ‘the beginning of the book’s life and the launch of an extensive history of interactions with different owners, readers, and contexts over almost four centuries’. For Smith, Shakespeare’s posthumous book is ‘a suggestive case study for Roland Barthes’ provocative concatenation of the death of the author with the birth of the reader’ (Shakespeare’s First Folio 17, 3, 18). 4 See especially Ch. 3 of Wall, “Prefatorial Disclosures” (169–226), where she explores the language of illicit sexuality in a range of prefatory materials, tracing ‘a pervasive cultural phenomenon in which writers and publishers ushered printed texts into the public eye by naming that entrance as a titillating and transgressive act’ (172). 5 Connor argues that the preliminaries to the First Folio present ‘a capitalist extension of an argument Shakespeare seems to make in The Tempest, a play that defines a book’s value by its relationship to theatrical performance’ (228). Also see Hooks 187–89. 6 For stage-to-page criticism, see Brooks, From Playhouse; Peters; Straznicky, ed.; Holland and Orgel, eds.; and Paul. 7 On Shakespeare’s paratexts, see Massai, “Shakespeare”; Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade 90–129; and Stern, Documents. For early modern paratexts more generally, see Smith and Wilson; and Berger and Massai. The term ‘theatrical paratexts’ is used by Massai (“Shakespeare” 1). ‘Paratext’ is sometimes also applied to marginal devices or notations in print (e.g. act and scene divisions, speech prefixes, stage directions), and to manuscript marginalia. 8 On the role of the Folio’s preliminaries in the construction of Shakespeare as a canonical author, see Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare 2–25, and de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim 21–48. 9 On the general applicability of Genette’s paratextual theory and terminology in early modern studies, see Smith and Wilson. 10 See Sherman, “On the Threshold” on the appropriateness of Genette’s threshold metaphor to ways in which early modern paratexts constructed notions of textual liminality. 11 Although they sometimes appeared at the end of books (see Sherman, “Beginning”), paratexts were usually placed before main texts. Furthermore, they were typically intended to be experienced by consumers before they read main texts and sometimes even before they bought books. 12 See Harry Newman, “Reading Metatheatre” for a full discussion of the ‘meta-’ qualities of dramatic paratexts and especially their relevance to metatheatre.

The printer’s tale  153 13 Prefatory materials were usually the last thing to be printed (Gaskell 7–8, 52, 108), and often on ‘independent units or sub-units of paper’ (Massai, “Shakespeare” 2). They were also typically the last thing to be written: late printing may have been caused by late writing or vice versa. 14 Generally speaking, printers were not prefatory writers unless they were also publishers. For useful definitions of and distinctions between the early modern printer, publisher and bookseller, see Blayney “Publication” 389–92. For want of corresponding early modern terms, I use ‘editor’ and ‘publisher’ throughout this chapter. 15 For instance, the representation of a book as illegitimate or unauthorised was potentially good advertising, as Saenger observes (20). 16 The early modern printing/procreation trope has been addressed by a range of scholars, in prefatory and non-prefatory contexts. See Brooks, ed., Printing and Parenting; Saenger 113–16; Hull Geil; and MacFaul 7–10. On the patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies of the reproductive metaphor, see Masten, Textual Intercourse, and Guy-Bray’s anti-­ teleologic approach. 17 On this analogy, see Bergeron 31–32, 39–40, 62, 67, and Fumerton 59–62. 18 For an extended discussion of this trope, see Harry Newman, “Printer”. 19 In Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor, Massai suggestively appropriates Blount’s prefatory statement for one of her subheadings, “‘Playing the Midwife’s Part’: The First Folio and its Publishers” (149). On Blount’s possible role in and influence over the prefatory materials to Shakespeare’s First Folio, see Scragg, and Massai, “Edward Blount”. In the latter, Massai contextualises the Folio’s ‘parental trope’ in relation to ‘textual strategies’ deployed by members of the Sidney-Herbert-Montgomery circle (139). 20 The ‘female influences’ I refer to are figurative. Helen Smith highlights that between 1550 and 1650, about 8 per cent of British stationers were actually women (“Print[ing]” 163–64), but ultimately suggests that this did not inspire or affect the midwifery metaphor, which was part of the language of reproduction used by both male and female stationers ‘to express a host of anxieties about social status, publication and authorship’ (186). For more on women’s involvement in the book trade in early modern England, see Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’. 21 See Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, Ch. 10 on the circulation of Arcadia in manuscript. 22 Also see Fleck on the importance of Arcadia’s prefatory materials to ideas of ‘textual progeny’. 23 See Newcomb, Reading on the publication and reception history of Pandosto. 24 All citations of Greene’s Groatsworth refer to Carroll’s edition. 25 See Mary Ellen Lamb 126–32, and Newcomb, Reading 117–19. As Newcomb observes, ‘the narratological self-consciousness of The Winter’s Tale has been recognized as a meditation on the play’s relationship to its prose source’ (117). 26 See Jowett, “Johannes Factotum”, especially 481–85. In his edition of Groatsworth, Carroll comes to similar conclusions about its authorship (1–31). 27 OED plagiary adj. and n. Etymology. On the link between plagiarism and child abduction, see Ricks 27–29. 28 This can be posited because the title page and dedication are the constituents of signature A, a half-sheet of two leaves, making the printing separable from the poem, which begins on signature B1. I am grateful to John Jowett for bringing this to my attention. 29 Jowett makes a similar argument about another of Venus and Adonis’ prefatory statements, the Ovidian motto on its title-page, which elevates

154  The printer’s tale

30 31

32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39

40 41

42 43

Shakespeare above the marketplace at the same time as advertising his worth: ‘Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flauus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua’, meaning ‘Let what is cheap excite the marvel of the crowd; for me may golden Apollo minister full cups from the Castilian fount’ (“Credulous” 102–3). Also see Jowett, “Shakespeare’s Metamorphosis” 319–25. Patricia Parker demonstrates that rhetorical ‘invention’ was characterised as a fertile female (Literary Fat Ladies, Ch. 2). The inscription, less common towards the end of the sixteenth century, became a regular paratextual feature following a 1538 Henrician proclamation addressed to stationers. The ambiguity of the Latin (it can also be translated as ‘with the privilege of printing only’) has caused debate as to whether it might refer to the approval of a text’s content for publication by the crown. See Clegg 9–10, 227n30. It is generally thought that the person responsible for the content of a book’s title page was the publisher, who financed the publication process, held legal rights over the text and stood to lose or gain by the venture (Farmer and Lesser 78–79). As today, an appendix was an ‘addition subjoined to a document or book’ (OED n. 2). On the general scarcity of prefatory materials in single playbooks, especially before the Jacobean period, see Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade 99–110. Saenger observes shared characteristics between front matter and inductions (99), and states that ‘[p]rologues to plays, when printed, function as prefatory verse epistles to the reader’ (116). Also see Peters 173. On the unusual circumstances of the (non-)publication of Jonson’s 1631 ­Folio, see William P. Williams. Stern highlights what seems to be Time’s reference to an earlier speech of his (‘remember well / I mentioned …’ (IV.i.21–22)), concluding the figure ‘once intervened on at least another occasion, of which this single chorus is the last vestige’ (Documents 107). Taylor observes that, despite publishing an average of 3.4 books a year from 1603 to 1623, Blount did not publish another book for four and a half years after the First Folio (“Making Meaning” 61). See Nicosia on Gough and other ‘player publishers’ in the 1650s, who ‘reverted to the language and imagery of acting and the stage to reiterate the performative nature of their printed works’ (489). Although identified as the play’s ‘publisher’, Gough seems to have had an editorial role in the publication of The Queen, facilitating the movement of the stage script to the printing house. My thanks to Marissa Nicosia for her private correspondence on Gough and The Queen. For a detailed discussion of this prefatory text, see Newcomb, Reading 101–4. Willie’s chapter “The Paper Stage” (25–51) focuses on drama printed between 1647 and 1660, a period when ‘the paper stage is transformed into an abstract public space where social and political concerns may be articulated and fashioned’ (28). Also see the forthcoming special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, “Performance and the Paper Stage, 1642–1695”, ed. Emma Depledge and Rachel Willie. On the theatrical contexts of this exchange, see Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels 18, 134–35, 174–75. Syme analyses the marginal stage directions of Q1 Malcontent as an example of the practice by which Marston and Jonson, collaborating with printers and publishers, ‘used the page’s specific signifying systems to recreate a

The printer’s tale  155

4 4 45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52

53 54

55 56 7 5 58

59 60 61 62

set of effects characteristic of the stage’ (“Unediting the Margin” 144). Q2 and Q3 also have marginal stage directions, with some textual variation. On The Winter’s Tale and Shakespeare’s romances more generally as ‘bookish’, see Knapp 232–44. On the publishers of the Folio, see Rasmussen, “Publishing the First Folio”. The following information in this paragraph is drawn primarily from Scragg 119–20; Chandler 162–63; and entries in ODNB. We know from the cast lists following Jonson’s playtexts in his Workes (1616) that Heminges and Condell acted in Every Man in his Humour, Every Man out of his Humour, Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist and Catiline, which were probably first performed in 1598, 1599, 1603, 1605, 1610 and 1611, respectively. Laoutaris compellingly writes of the Folio’s front matter that ‘its various elements should not be read as isolated or static set-pieces. Rather they produce meaning and, crucially, ascribe authorial value, cumulatively and in dialogic relation to each other’ (49). On the relationship between the labour of the playwright and artisanal craftsmanship, see Taylor, “Artiginality” 23–26. The Winter’s Tale’s popularity is suggested by the fact that it had already been performed at court in November 1611, February 1613 and April 1618, and would be again in January 1634 (Orgel, “Introduction” 80). We do not know how similar the text of the play revived at court was to the First Folio’s text. It is unclear whether the Folio’s version ‘represents a play-text from the missing licensed text or a later version’ (Healy, New Latitudes 114). The notion that The Winter’s Tale’s bookish qualities are somehow less meaningful in performance was challenged by the innovative staging of books in David Farr’s 2009 RSC production, which ‘sought to unpack the various levels of storytelling within the play, creating a world that unfolded as from the pages of a book’ (Kirwan 319). On the relationship between theatricality and print in the First Folio’s preliminaries, also see Connor, and Donaldson. Kitch sees Paulina’s language as alluding specifically to the printing press, and notes the technical typographic meanings of ‘matter’, ‘mould’ and ‘frame’ (43, 65n2), but—as I go on to discuss—the technological ambiguity of the metaphor is important. ‘Margery’ was a name for unruly women that was commonly applied to midwives (Pitcher 216n). On Paulina’s identity as a ‘midwife’, see Bicks 33–42 and 183–85, and Marion Wells 255–57. See, for example, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII V.i.169–70, 175. The representation of the vulva as the ‘door’, ‘gate’ or ‘port’ of the womb was common in early modern literature (Gordon Williams 1:405–6, 2:585– 86, 2:1073–74). Towards the beginning of The Winter’s Tale, Leontes uses ‘gates’ as a metaphor for female genitalia (I.ii.196). See Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’ 49–52 on the role of the midwife in legitimising early modern monstrous birth pamphlets. See Johns on the relationship between print and credibility in early modern England. Johns demonstrates that ‘[p]rinters and booksellers were manufacturers of credit’ (33). See Healy, “Trewly wrote” on Samuel Daniel’s ‘extreme reflection of an anxiety around print and what may be termed its democratic tendencies’ (51). As de Grazia notes, the unbroken ‘holy seal’ anticipates the oracle’s revelation to Leontes that ‘his wife’s seal (that is, his seal on her) was also never violated’ (“Imprints” 42).

156  The printer’s tale 63 Jowett’s “Shakespeare’s Metamorphosis” addresses the play’s relevance to ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Mercurial’ models of authorship, reading Autolycus’ subversive vitality as a sign that ‘Shakespeare ultimately embraced the notion of art as popular, commercial, perhaps even dishonest’ (320). 64 The disingenuousness of this poem’s suggestion that the book is not good enough for aristocratic patrons is exposed by the dedications that follow the main text and are signed by the author (*1r–*2v), whose name appears nowhere else. 65 See Helen Smith, “This One Poore Blacke Gowne” on paratextual ‘[m]etaphors of clothing and nakedness, of books as dressed and undressed bodies’ (195). As books were often sold unbound, the sartorial metaphor could illustrate that prefatory materials physically protected main texts from wear and tear. 66 Although Antigonus’ letter is a manuscript document, it arguably represents a printed prefatory epistle. In this sense, it is comparable to Falstaff’s duplicated love letter in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which Mistress Page claims he will print ‘with blank spaces for names’ (II.i.62–70), thereby alluding to ‘early modern printed dedications that could be and were addressed to more than one recipient’ (Helen Smith, “A Man in Print?” 67). 67 The errata to Hugh Broughton’s work of exegesis, A Treatise of Melchisedek (1591), are entitled “Scapes in printing at which if the Reader stagger, let him reade thus” (₵4v). 68 On errata, errata lists and correcting practices in early modern English books, see Smyth, Ch. 3 (75–136). In Used Books, Sherman explores the variety of ways in which early modern readers marked printed books. 69 For analysis of examples, see Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio 148–61. 70 On the First Folio’s seven character lists, see Emma Smith, “Canonization”. 71 The ‘deformities’ wrought by typographic errors and the ‘illegitimacy’ brought about by unauthorised (or illegal) publication were usually caused by different people. Although the publisher occasionally doubled as the printer, the printer was ‘responsible only for the quality of the printing’, and ‘[i]f the manuscript had been illicitly obtained, or if any rules of the Stationers’ Company were evaded or broken, the responsibility lay with the publisher’ (Blayney, “Publication” 391). 72 Helen Smith observes that ‘royal’ here may be ‘a pun on the size of paper used in prestigious folio volumes’ (“A Man in Print?” 63). ‘Royal paper’ could refer to paper for writing as well as paper for printing (OED royal adj. 11a). 73 While Leontes’ metaphor may also allude to other forms of printing, it is made primarily typographic by the phrasal verb ‘print off’, which does not seem to have been used to refer to sealing, coining or writing in manuscript. The earliest use of ‘print off’ I have found after Shakespeare’s is in the third volume of a travel narrative by Samuel Purchas (Purchas His Pilgrims (1625), 383). 74 My thinking here is indebted to Helen Smith, who links Paulina’s presentation of Perdita as a form of ‘print’ to the Droeshout engraving: ‘Set within its 1623 Folio context, the phrase may … suggest a printed likeness that is pictorial rather than typographical’ (“A Man in Print?” 65). 75 On Hermione’s statue and the First Folio as comparable monuments, also see Newcomb, “Monumental Bodies”. Newcomb argues that the Folio playtext of The Winter’s Tale is ‘uniquely poised between impulses that I call monumentalizing and spectacular, impulses that evince very different conceptions of the body’ (240).

The printer’s tale  157 76 On the connection of Hermione’s statue to tomb sculpture and funeral monuments, see Belsey, and Chalk. 77 Writing an epitaph on Shakespeare which would appear in the Second Folio, John Milton would also turn for inspiration to Hermione’s statue. As well as the Apollonian oracle, the statue seems to have been in Milton’s mind as he expressed Shakespeare’s capacity to induce ‘wonder and astonishment’, and ‘make us marble with too much conceiving’ (ll. 7, 14). For detailed discussion, see Paul Stevens 385–87. 78 For Rovee, Leontes’ reference to Hermione as a ‘medal’ shows that she is ‘transformed into an aesthetic representation long before the celebrated statue scene’, but his suggestion that the allusion is to ‘a portrait miniature’ (88) seems unfounded given that ‘medals’ were exclusively stamped or cast metal objects.

Conclusion Canon, reproduction, ethics

Focusing on questions of identity and authority, this book has made two interlinked arguments about the role of the imprint in Shakespearean drama. Firstly, invested in ‘print culture’ in a broad sense of the term, Shakespeare engages extensively with the reproductive technologies of sealing, coining and printing, deploying the imprint as a self-reflexive trope in order to advertise the ‘impressiveness’ of his plays to audiences and readers. Secondly, consciously or not, paratextual commentators and later critics have reproduced the logic of this trope, appropriating the language of impression to capture the value of Shakespearean drama in relation to ideas of character, poetry, genre and literary authorship. These ways of thinking and writing about Shakespeare have persisted in early modern drama studies. Shakespeare continues to participate in his own canonisation as an ‘impressive’ dramatist. Weaving these two arguments together through material readings of individual plays, the chapters have shown how the formation and circulation of imprints in Shakespeare’s play-worlds invite reflection on the ‘impressive’ values of Shakespeare in real-world marketplaces, including the playhouse, the book trade and—looking beyond the early modern ­period—the critical marketplace. Imprinted wounds in Coriolanus gesture to the communication of character as a psychophysiological impression to paying audiences in the theatre, and critique post-Romantic celebrations of the unique stamp of Shakespearean character. Images of seal-impressions and forms of figuration in Dream suggest the transformative effects of dramatic poetry, and inform critical articulations of the ‘transfiguration’ of Shakespeare’s audiences. The motif of counterfeit coinage in Measure marks the play out as a counterfeit comedy coined by the King’s Men, inviting a play/coin analogy that enables the long-­established valuation of Shakespearean drama as ‘old-coined gold’. Literal and metaphorical prints in The Winter’s Tale prompt ideas of authorship as literary fatherhood, and—via the preliminaries to the First Folio—­Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’. Although rooted in early modern ideas about language, technology and identity, the concept of the imprint still underpins dominant ways of thinking about what makes Shakespeare distinctive as a dramatist, and reinforces his place at the centre of the canon.

Conclusion  159 In this conclusion, I want to suggest that the example of the imprint as conceptualised in Impressive Shakespeare offers new insights into questions of reproduction and ethics in Shakespeare studies. It allows us to rethink the mechanical reproduction of Shakespeare across time, and recognise that the plays are ‘designed for reproducibility’, to use a phrase applied to new art forms in the early twentieth century by the cultural critic Walter Benjamin. The imprint’s moral provocations invite discussion of the ethical transactions between Shakespeare and the critic. Drawing on the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ theorisation of self-other relations, we can view critical appropriations of Shakespeare’s language—another form of reproduction—in terms of ethical receptivity as well as ethical action, and better understand the mutual ‘shaping’ and ‘impression’ involved in the relationship between Shakespearean drama and critical discourse.

Impressions past, present and future: Shakespearean drama in the age of mechanical reproduction The imprint in Shakespearean drama, this book has shown, invariably signifies processes of reproduction, whether technological, artistic or sexual. Shakespeare’s self-reflexive investment in reproductive technologies of impression as a means of exploring the nature of poetry, theatre and books invites questions about the plays’ own reproduction as cultural objects and works of art, during Shakespeare’s life and beyond.1 For Walter Benjamin in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935–36), Shakespeare is an example of traditional, pre-­ modern art whose ‘aura’—its authenticity, authority and ­uniqueness—is lost through processes of mechanical reproduction, of which printing is just one kind. ‘[T]he technique of reproduction’, he writes, detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. (221) Benjamin claims it is only in modernity, with the rise of photography and film, that ‘the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility’ (224). Yet Shakespeare’s engagement with the imprint in his own time, often in relation to his craft as a dramatist, suggests a preoccupation with how drama—and his drama in particular—is reproduced on the stage and page, and its capacity to make endless impressions on audiences and readers. In this respect, Shakespearean drama advertises its own value as a reproducible art object, even at those moments when—like Benjamin—it

160  Conclusion seems concerned with the preservation of authenticity and uniqueness. As discussed in Chapter 2, even Coriolanus’ resistance to his identity as a reproducible ‘stamp’ to be transmitted to the audience (a ‘character’ in both theatrical and technological senses) draws attention to his exchange value as a commodity that can be performed again for new and returning audiences. Taking Shakespeare on the stage as an example of undiminished authenticity, Benjamin contends that ‘[t]he aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor’; if filmed in a studio, ‘the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays’ (229). The case of Coriolanus, however, suggests that the actor himself was a kind of reproductive technology; Richard Burbage was expected to craft and communicate the ‘stamp of Martius’ (or indeed of Macbeth) to paying audiences on any given day. Shakespearean drama has always entered the public sphere bearing marks of mediation and reproduction, and proudly so. Of course, Shakespearean drama’s reflections on its own reproducibility do not always use the concept of the imprint. Standing over the assassinated Julius Caesar, Cassius asks: How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, In states unborn and accents yet unknown! (Julius Caesar III.i.112–14) Often appreciated for its aesthetic value as a metatheatrical speech-act which merges the past, present and future, Cassius’ question is also product placement for a Chamberlain’s Men play that audiences could pay to see again and again in repertory and revival, or even a play that continues to be ‘acted over’ on the modern stage. The moment advertises the value of the play’s ritualised reproduction on stage. This is only one of many examples in which Shakespearean drama anticipates and invites its own reproduction, inscribing itself as a ‘work of art designed for reproducibility’ long before the age of Benjamin. Yet the imprint is conceptually powerful because it allows us to think about the reproduction of drama on both the stage and page: both play-goers and play-readers were understood to experience psychophysiological impressions. While the imprint in Shakespearean drama is informed by the language and material culture of ancient and early modern reproductive technologies, it also makes audiences and readers look to reproductive technologies of the future, to forms of mechanical reproduction ‘yet unknown’ to Shakespeare, Benjamin or even us. From William Caxton’s coining of ‘print’ as a typographic term in the 1470s to present-day references to digital ‘imprints’, the language of impression connects reproductive technologies of the past, present and future,

Conclusion  161 enduring and adapting even as technologies become obsolete. We do not know what new technological impressions Shakespeare will come to bear in the future, but by engaging self-reflexively with the imprint, Shakespeare’s plays identify themselves as works of art ready for present and future ages of mechanical reproduction. 2 This way of thinking is at odds with readings of Shakespeare as a ‘man of the theatre’, a dramatist who did not look beyond the playhouse as a site of publication or reproduction. Having argued that Shakespeare wrote his plays for the theatre and not the book, David Scott Kastan turns to more modern media: ‘Now Shakespeare has once again been thrust into a medium other than the one he chose for himself—the brave new world of electronic texts—but this one, of course, ‘tis new to him, one he never even imagined’ (Shakespeare and the Book 111). Alluding to the final scene of The Tempest, Kastan here represents Shakespeare not as Prospero, as the tired allegorical reading has him, but as Miranda, staring in wonder at shipwrecked ‘goodly creatures’ from a homeland she has never known, what she calls a ‘brave new world’. ‘’Tis new to thee’ responds a world-weary Prospero (V.i.184–87). Perhaps thinking along similar lines to Kastan, in 2018 the Folger Shakespeare Library launched Miranda, their new digital asset platform. While Kastan depicts his transhistorical Shakespeare as being passively, even unwillingly, ‘thrust’ into a digital world through processes of remediation, it is significant that he borrows Shakespeare’s language to describe a form of technological reproduction beyond Shakespeare’s wildest dreams. Miranda does not know the ‘brave new world’, but she names and envisions it. The imprint in Shakespearean drama does something similar in relation to reproductive technologies of the future. Shakespeare’s language of impression, this book has emphasised, is deeply embedded in the material culture of ancient and early modern technologies. Yet it also insists on confluence between old and new forms of mechanical reproduction, and presents the imprint as a mark of futurity as well as a cultural trace of the past. ‘Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die’, the poet enjoins the fair lord at the end of “Sonnet  11”, adapting a sealing metaphor to suggest the reproductive capacities of the printing press. To ‘print’ is to speak to posterity, to enter the traffic of future as well as present ‘print cultures’. Although Kastan turns to Miranda’s ‘brave new world’ to articulate Shakespeare’s digital future, The Tempest offers a more obvious passage for contemplating Shakespeare’s future reproduction, albeit with darker implications. When Prospero accuses Caliban of attempting to rape his daughter, Caliban reveals unsettling dynastic ambitions: PROSPERO:

Thou most lying slave, Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have used thee,

162  Conclusion Filth as thou art, with humane care, and lodged thee In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate The honour of my child. CALIBAN: O ho, O ho! Would’t had been done, Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else This isle with Calibans. MIRANDA: Abhorrèd slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill. (I.ii.346–55) Miranda’s ‘print of goodness’, an image that dances between the reproductive technologies of sealing, coining and printing, is a response to Caliban’s dark fantasy of self-reproduction, in which rape is a means of thrusting both Miranda and Prospero into his brave new world of ‘Calibans’. The ‘s’ of ‘Calibans’ signifies his iterability, gesturing—in combination with ‘print’—to the remarkable reproductive capabilities of the printing press. (Indeed, Caliban-like creatures were printed and sold in monstrous birth broadside ballads, comparable to those sold by Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale.) The Tempest repeatedly uses Caliban to explore ideas of reproduction and—conversely—uniqueness. The idea of his iterability is curiously echoed later in the same scene when Prospero tells Miranda Ferdinand is ‘a Caliban’ by comparison to ‘th’most of men’ (I.ii.481–84). Caliban’s strangeness as a ‘monster’ suggests he is one of a kind, and therefore—Trinculo jokes—would be a valuable commodity in England: ‘There would this monster make a man’ (II.ii.30). Yet the metatheatrical nod to Caliban’s presentation on the ­English stage as a theatrical commodity marks him out as a reproducible trope of the playhouse, what Ben Jonson—echoing Stephano (III.ii.3)—called a ‘servant-monster’ (Bartholomew Fair Induction.95). Caliban’s fantasy of authoring ‘Calibans’ is also reduced to a scatological joke when Stephano pulls his friend Trinculo out from underneath Caliban’s gabardine: ‘How cam’st thou to be the siege of this mooncalf? Can he vent Trinculos?’ (II.ii.104–5) Central to the exchange between Prospero, Caliban and Miranda is a conflict concerning who should be printing whom. Caliban’s body bears Prospero’s ‘stripes’ because his mind is supposedly unresponsive to the pedagogic design of Miranda’s ‘print of goodness’. Yet his vision of ­‘Calibans’ posits Miranda as the impressionable matter, and ­himself— in a patriarchal model addressed throughout this book—as both unique printing instrument and reproducible printed form; a single inexhaustible stamp distributes itself in the form of infinitely repeatable impressions. In the context of Shakespeare’s reproduction, this disturbing image perverts the notion of Shakespeare as Miranda, entering a brave new world of electronic texts and other modern media. But the history of criticism has treated Shakespeare more like Caliban in his own dark

Conclusion  163 vision, as somehow unique and reproducible at the same time. Modern articulations of the ‘unique’ or ‘singular’ impressions captured or made by Shakespeare draw on the same rhetoric as eighteenth-century celebrations of his work as bearing ‘its Author’s mark, and Stamp upon it’, as Charles Gildon wrote of Shakespeare’s poems in 1710 (Foster 57). ‘Upon the most insignificant of his beauties’, declared the German dramatist and critic Gotthold Lessing, ‘is an impress stamped which to all the world proclaims: “I am SHAKESPEARE’S!”’ (qtd in Novak and Guffey 342). In such formulations, the imprint functions as an inimitable mark of authenticity and uniqueness (‘I am SHAKESPEARE’S’) at the same time as it denotes Shakespeare’s reproducibility, allowing him to speak to ‘all the world’. As discussed in Chapter 5, from as early as the First Folio, Shakespeare’s printed plays were presented—like Caliban’s ‘Calibans’—as the progeny of a parthenogenetic father, one whose ‘face / Liues in his issue’. ‘[E]uen so’, continues Ben Jonson in his eulogy, ‘the race / Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines / In his well torned, and true filed lines’. In Jonson’s own true filed lines, the word ‘Shakespeares’ is a possessive without an apostrophe, giving us ‘Shakespeare’s mind and manners’ in modernised texts. Until ‘minde’, however, it flickers as a plural, envisioning ‘a race / Of Shakespeares’ not unlike the race of Calibans glimpsed in The Tempest. Assertive of Shakespeare’s ‘printed worth’ as a solo-author who outshone contemporary writers, the First Folio sought to establish the powerful paradox that Shakespeare’s singularity as a dramatist made him uniquely reproducible as a book. Jonson’s opening poem “To the Reader” promises an authentic experience of Shakespeare’s unique ‘wit’ to those who look on the reproduced object that is ‘his Booke’. For this Benjamin at least, the mechanical reproduction of uniqueness is possible. Of course, Shakespeare probably did not see himself as Miranda, Caliban, Prospero or any other dramatic character. Yet his preoccupation with reproduction, and especially his self-reflexive language of impression, encouraged contemporaries to think about the plays as reproducible forms on the page and stage. These qualities of the plays have also since shaped critics’ and editors’ understanding of what it means to reproduce Shakespearean drama, in media known and unknown to Shakespeare himself.

Shakespeare and the ‘print of goodness’: the ethics of the imprint Suggesting that Shakespeare’s modern reproduction has a model in Caliban’s vision of an isle of Calibans as much as it does in Miranda’s brave new world of goodly creatures has ethical implications. Caliban is a would-be rapist, whose dynastic ambitions have been debated in

164  Conclusion relation to his identity as an enslaved colonial subject, and a persecuted racial ‘Other’. 3 Miranda’s response to Caliban is part of a speech that was habitually reassigned to Prospero by editors until the early twentieth century on the basis of moral arguments about how teenage girls should and should not speak (Orgel, “What is a Character?” 107). Her scorn for Caliban as an ‘Abhorrèd slave, / Which any print of goodness wilt not take’ invites questions about the ethics of the imprint, in the plays and in Shakespeare studies. What does it mean to take, or not take, the ‘print of goodness’? Arguing that Miranda’s larger speech anticipates racist Enlightenment ideas about the reasonable subject, Jonathan Goldberg reads the phrase as part of another kind of reproductive fantasy: ‘the attempt to form Caliban as proper pedagogic object is also one that aims to make him a form of Miranda, as she herself, taught by her father, was informed by him’ (“The Print of Goodness” 236). For Goldberg, Miranda casts Caliban’s lack of susceptibility to her pedagogic printing of goodness as a failure to take the graft of humanity, an incapacity which she suggests justifies his enslavement. Whether or not the play shares Miranda’s and Prospero’s view of Caliban as a slave by nature is a matter of extensive debate. Redemptive readings of the play as it appears in the Folio have to deal with the problematic identification of Caliban in the terminal character list as ‘a saluage and deformed slave’ (B4r), a description sometimes emended or omitted in modern editions.4 Nonetheless, together Caliban’s and Miranda’s reproductive fantasies highlight that the transaction between printing subject and printed object (whether it takes, does not take or is impressed by force) is ethically charged. Driven by its own reproductive fantasies, the pedagogic project of humanist education has cultivated an imperative to find the ‘print of goodness’ in Shakespearean drama, and to be receptive to it: the plays are traditionally assumed to be ethically well intentioned and edifying, or ‘good for us’. 5 While this book has not, as such, subjected the language of impression to moral analysis, it has suggested that the imprint in Shakespearean drama engages with ethical debates, and is sometimes ethically dubious. As discussed in Chapter 3, Dream’s images of forms in wax, and attendant ideas of figuration, disfiguration and transfiguration, advertise a patriarchal poetics that has been accepted and developed in the history of Shakespeare criticism. Chapters 2 and 4 addressed pro- and anti-theatricalist debates about theatrical counterfeiting, and the coining of characters and plays for profit in exploitative economies of artistic production. The prevalence of discourses of counterfeiting and contamination in scholarship suggests the moral nature of arguments which, for instance, condemn attributionists and editors for forcing Shakespeare ‘into a Middletonian mould’. Metaphors of print in The Winter’s Tale, explored in Chapter 5, reinforce Leontes’ textualising and monumentalising impulses as a jealous and misogynistic husband,

Conclusion  165 obsessed with women’s faithful or ‘true’ reproduction of fathers in the form of children. That Shakespeare’s dramatisation of ‘printers’ tales’ seems to have shaped ideas about the reproduction of Shakespeare as a literary father in the First Folio and beyond is a cause for concern. Leontes’ bookish jealousy lives on in the editorial ethics of textual reproduction, from Heminges and Condell’s condemnation of ‘stolne and surreptitious copies’, to the persistence of ideas about texts as ‘piratical’, ‘corrupt’, ‘contaminated’, ‘legitimate’, ‘pure’ or ‘faithful’, and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ quartos.6 Both Shakespeare’s use of the imprint in his plays, and the critical appropriation of his language of impression, are at times morally questionable. This raises questions about the ethical nature of transactions between Shakespeare and the critic, especially as regards the transmission of metaphors from Shakespearean drama into academic discourse, which in turn influences attitudes to and experiences of the plays. As this book has shown, the language of impression is an important example of this process: Shakespeare shapes the language by which he is shaped. While critical expressions of Shakespeare’s impressive force are usually removed from the material contexts of early modernity, they are more than just dead metaphors, and offer rhetorical and ideological models for thinking about his plays. However, more broadly, we can ask: what are we doing to Shakespeare, and what is Shakespeare doing to us, when we appropriate his language and imagery to interpret his work? I refer here to the ethics of another form of reproduction, one to which Walter Benjamin ascribed a ‘transcendent force’ (39): the critical act of appropriation known as ‘quotation’. ‘Appropriation’ might suggest ideas of seizure, repossession and the victimization of Shakespeare-as-hostage. But recent work on the ethics of appropriation in Shakespeare studies, influenced by Emmanuel Levinas’ theorisation of self-other relations, emphasises Shakespeare’s participation and agency in acts of appropriation. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin suggest that Levinas’ vision of ethics makes it possible to see appropriating texts as hostages instead of, or in addition to, as hostage-takers. In other words, both Shakespeare and its appropriations can be the actors and the acted upon, the self and the other, sometimes in the space of a single creative act. Most important, each party can be held ethically accountable in its reception of, and receptivity to, other works. (4) How does this way of thinking apply to critical appropriations of Shakespeare’s language as part of the interpretive process? What is at stake in the exchange of metaphors between the critical self and the Shakespearean other, or the Shakespearean self and the critical other?

166  Conclusion Beyond Kastan’s appropriation of Miranda’s ‘brave new world’, Impressive Shakespeare has attended to the phenomenon of critics quoting or echoing Shakespearean language in new contexts to reinforce their readings of the plays, or their ideologies more generally. Hippolyta’s word ‘transfigured’, in her description of the lovers in Dream, is central to Harold Bloom’s and other critics’ articulations of what the play does to audiences. The jacket of Brian Vickers’ book about authorial attribution, ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare, is adorned with Shakespearean quotations about counterfeits in early modern type. I must implicate myself as well, for appropriating ‘stamp of Martius’, ‘print of goodness’ and other Shakespearean phrases and images to critical ends. There are distinctions to be made, of course, between cited quotations, unsigned quotations that toy with readers’ knowledge or memory, and conscious or unconscious echoes and allusions.7 But the appropriation of Shakespeare’s language outside its literary context has always been an ethical transaction. The Romantics’ experimentation with Shakespearean quotation as a form of critical interpretation, including associative play with imagery and unconscious or semi-conscious allusion (Ritchie and White 132–34), was underpinned by ethically charged concepts such as Hazlitt’s ‘sympathy’, which recognised Shakespeare’s ‘exceptional capacity to be appropriated’ (Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions 5).8 More recent celebrations of Shakespeare’s language as ‘an inexhaustible mine from which we quarry an imaginative wealth’ (Brown 76) unintentionally suggest images of exploitation. When early paratextual commentators echoed the language and imagery of Shakespeare’s plays (Jonson presenting ‘the fathers face’; Milton extolling ‘Delphic lines’ and their ‘deep impression’; Digges celebrating ‘old-coined gold’), they presented themselves as readers with a duty of care to the late dramatist and the books that embodied him, as readers—in the Levinasian model of interpersonally encountering the work as an ‘other’—with an ethical responsibility ‘to become engaged even to the point of being in a sense remade’ (Buell 12). Remembering Hermione’s statue, Milton declares Shakespeare’s capacity to ‘make us marble with too much conceiving’. As early critics, however, Jonson and the others also wrote with an opportunistic sense that they could remake Shakespeare in their own images, as shapers of Shakespeare. In this respect, they were precursors to later generations of interpreters who ‘have imprinted their own ideology on the plays and on the mythological construct of Shakespeare’ (Marsden 1). Yet the critical appropriation of Shakespeare’s language suggests that the imprint works both ways. To quote or echo Shakespeare out of context in critical discourse is to shape and be shaped, to impress and be impressed, to display ethical action and ethical receptivity. In modern criticism, ethical reflection on the subjective role of the critic as shaper as well as shaped found early expression in Stephen Greenblatt’s exploration of ‘self-fashioning’. ‘[I]t is everywhere evident

Conclusion  167 in this book’, writes Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), ‘that the questions I ask of my material and indeed the very nature of this material are shaped by the questions I ask of myself’ (5). The self-­ fashioning critic recognises his own ‘manipulative, artful process’ (2), using the language of fashioning and shaping that is his topic to articulate the limitations and virtues of ‘cultural poetics’, now known as ‘new historicism’. Appropriately, the preface to the 2005 reprint of Greenblatt’s book was titled “Fashioning Renaissance Self-­Fashioning”. The language of fashioning and shaping remains central to how we understand both the early modern subject and the modern critical subject. Even my own claim that Shakespeare shapes the language by which he is shaped echoes the final sentence of Louis Adrian Montrose’s famous new historicist essay “‘Shaping Fantasies’”, as he, in turn, draws on the language of Dream and Pericles. Dream, he concludes, ‘shapes the fantasies by which it is shaped, begets that by which it is begotten’. My suggestion is not that rhetorical transmission between Shakespeare’s corpus and criticism of that corpus is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but that it involves a twoway ethical mingling of Shakespeare and the critic which makes it more difficult to distance ourselves morally from Shakespeare than from his contemporaries. Metaphors can achieve important critical work, but in making Shakespeare’s metaphors our own, we make ourselves part of their complex moral histories. Shakespeare, himself a borrower of words and metaphors, is complicit in the appropriation of his language. He was aware of the intertextuality of early modern theatrical culture, in which dramatists borrowed, imitated and parodied others’ (and each other’s) language, and commonplacing audiences and readers extracted, noted and re-used quotations in non-dramatic contexts.9 As argued in Chapter 3 in relation to Dream, Shakespeare advertised the value of his poetry to early audiences. Dramatic neologisms were ‘featured products’ in the early modern playhouse (Watson, “Coining Words” 49), and so were metaphors and dramatic language more generally. The example of the imprint, however, suggests that Shakespeare offered his language as not just a commodity, but also an interpretive tool for understanding his plays. Whether or not that language has been used as intended by critics cannot be determined, but it is central to their understanding of themselves as shaping, and being shaped by Shakespeare. Over the course of this book, Shakespeare has emerged as both impressive and impressionable, as agent and patient, or—in the formulation set up in the Introduction—as the signet and the wax. The concept of an ‘impressive Shakespeare’ is always ghosted by a ‘susceptible Shakespeare’, one whose assertiveness as an affective, engaging and transformative dramatist depends on his receptivity to non-authorial agents, and historical and material contexts, in his own time and beyond. Shakespeare’s texts are now widely recognised to be ‘bearers of impressions

168  Conclusion made by non-authorial agents (collaborators, players, audiences, readers, editors) that intervened in the material and cultural histories of Shakespeare’s works’ (Galey 312). We need to recognise, I would suggest, that the ethical transaction between Shakespeare and the critic is one of mutual impression and mutual receptivity. The language and material culture of the imprint, of course, is just part of understanding that transaction, and just part of understanding the rhetorical forces in the story of Shakespeare’s canonisation. Yet the example of the imprint in Shakespearean drama demonstrates the importance of attending to the role of metaphorics in the worlds represented by his plays, and in the critical and material histories of the plays themselves.

Notes 1 For detailed discussion of Shakespeare’s modern ‘reproduction’ through criticism, editing and performance, see Howard and O’Connor, eds.; and Erne and Kidnie, eds. 2 For some of the latest work on Shakespeare and new media, see O’Neill, ed. 3 On ethical debates surrounding Caliban’s attempted rape, see Slights 372–75. 4 See Harry Newman, “Paratexts and Canonical Thresholds” 315. 5 For discussions of the educational value of Shakespeare, with attention to the role of moral agendas, see St. Clair 140–57 on the Romantic period, Baldick on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Olive on recent decades. 6 On the moral implications and sexual politics of such terminology, see Cloud; Maguire 15–16; and Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, Ch. 3 (68–100) and Ch. 4 (101–31). Even John Pitcher’s innocent observation, in the latest Arden edition of The Winter’s Tale, that the compositors who set the Folio text were ‘pretty faithful to the manuscript in front of them’ (365) strikes an odd note in the context of a play that repeatedly conflates sexual and textual fidelity. 7 For definitions of and differences between kinds of ‘quotation’ and ‘allusion’, see Maxwell and Rumbold 5–10. See Maxwell and Rumbold’s collection on Shakespeare and quotation more generally. 8 Bate focuses on Hazlitt’s quotation of Shakespeare in the final chapter of Shakespearean Constitutions (185–201). Also see Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination on the Romantics’ ‘allusive relationship’ (4) with Shakespeare in their poetry and criticism, and especially the role of ‘unconscious allusion’ (36–39). 9 See Bruster, Quoting Shakespeare on the intertextuality or bricolage of early modern drama.

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Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. adaptation: ‘invention’ 128–9; revision 101–2, 111–15; sourcetexts 23, 49–52, 96n35, 110, 120, 124–6, 128 antitheatrical tracts see Gosson, Stephen; Rainolds, John; Stubbes, Philip Aristotle 8, 25, 27, 28, 31, 33, 39n51, 76 authenticity see counterfeiting; printing (typographic); seals authorship: attribution/misattribution 4, 21, 102, 111–15, 164, 166; collaboration 111–15; as craft 65, 90, 137; and literary fatherhood/ paternity 119–57; see also ethics/ morality; plagiarism ballads (printed) 20, 119, 126, 140–3, 162 Benjamin, Walter 159–63, 165 Bloom, Harold 44, 90, 166 Blount, Edward 123–4, 131, 136, 137, 153n19, 154n38 Brayman Hackel, Heidi 21 Brooks, Douglas A. 124 Bruster, Douglas 49, 130 Burbage, Richard 10, 53–60, 62, 114, 133–4, 160 the canon 158–68; and the imprint as self-reflexive trope 5–7, 158–63; ‘purity’ and ‘contamination’ of 11, 99, 111–15; and Shakespeare’s First Folio 119–22, 133, 135–51; see also authorship; prefatory (and terminal) materials; value Calderwood, James L. 90–2, 97n46

Caxton, William 15, 18, 21, 160 character 41–68: as coinage 51–2, 102; as commoditised technology 42–4, 49, 53–4, 64–5; criticism 43–4, 49, 65; etymology/philology 45–6; as psychophysiological impression 45, 54; see also value character sketches 20, 45–8, 57, 62–3, 123–4 Cheney, Patrick 12n12 Chettle, Henry 24, 127–9, 131 Cohen, Adam Max 7, 14 coinage 98–118; ‘angel’ coin 100, 104, 106, 113; neologisms as 19–20, 52; origins of 15; printing press as mint 4, 20, 122; theatre as mint 19–20, 102–3; ‘unite’ coin 105, 108; see also counterfeiting; ethics/morality Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 2, 73, 87, 93, 101–2, 109 commoditisation see character; value Condell, Henry 123, 136–9, 141, 143, 145–8, 165 counterfeiting 11, 20–1, 98–118, 158; bastardy and illegitimacy 20, 31, 101, 111, 114, 119, 124, 143–4, 146–7; and genre 101–2, 108–10, 114; as material practice 15–16, 77, 103, 106; poetic 79, 83, 88; theatrical 45, 61, 79, 102–7, 110, 164; see also authorship; Middleton, Thomas; plagiarism Crooke, Helkiah 32–4 Daniel, Samuel 17, 122, 142 Daybell, James 77–8 De Grazia, Margreta 6, 13n19, 17, 18, 29, 30, 137

196 Index Dekker, Thomas 30, 53, 59, 92, 112, 132 Deng, Stephen 99–100, 103, 107, 111, 113 Desmet, Christy 46, 70–2, 83, 86, 87 Digges, Leonard 4, 20, 99, 111, 136–8, 149, 166 disfiguration 69–71, 76, 78, 80, 84, 87, 90–2; see also rhetoric Donne, John 31, 78, 117n24 Droeshout, Martin 136, 148–51 Dryden, John 45, 50–1, 59 Elizabeth I 75, 81, 86 Erne, Lukas 6, 132 erotics see patriarchy; rhetoric; seals ethics/morality: and antitheatricality 26, 44–5, 54; authorship and attribution 111, 118n31; and coinage 99–100, 102, 103, 108, 112; of the imprint 163–8; see also character sketches; counterfeiting; patriarchy; ‘problem play’; quotation fantasy see imagination; reproduction the First Folio (1623) 11, 115, 119– 22, 133, 135–51; see also Blount, Edward; the canon; Condell, Henry; Digges, Leonard; Heminges, John; Holland, Hugh; Jonson, Ben; Mabbe, James; prefatory (and terminal) materials Fletcher, John 81, 112, 116n12, 130, 155n57 Galen 27, 29–30, 32–3, 40n54 Galey, Alan 3, 167–8 gender see patriarchy; rhetoric; seals Genette, Gérard 121, 130; see also prefatory (and terminal) materials; theatrical paratexts genre see counterfeiting; ‘problem play’; value Goldman, Michael 44, 49, 53, 54, 65 Gosson, Stephen 45, 54, 79, 83, 103 Greenblatt, Stephen 94n9, 166–7; see also new historicism Greene, Robert 120, 125–8, 132–3, 135 Hall, Joseph 47, 67n25; see also character sketches Hazlitt, William 2, 73, 87, 93, 166

Heminges, John 123, 136–9, 141, 143, 145–8, 165 Heywood, Thomas 34, 54, 145 Holland, Hugh 136–7, 140, 151 humoral medicine see psychophysiology imagination 27–9, 70, 82–3, 89–90, 92–3; maternal impressions 33–4, 90; Shakespeare’s imaginative agency 2, 6–7, 86, 69, 72–4, 83, 86, 87, 90–1, 93; see also psychophysiology; reproduction; the sublime immortality see authorship; reproduction impression, language of 2–7, 21–4, 27, 34, 158, 161, 163–5; technical language 24–5; technological ambiguity 19, 20, 22–3, 140; Venn diagram of 22 James I 11, 101–7, 110, 115; see also patronage; royal proclamations Jonson, Ben 17, 19, 58–9, 61, 66n23, 81, 115, 130, 132, 146, 162; contributions to Shakespeare’s First Folio 119, 120, 136–8, 140, 148–51, 163, 166 Jowett, John 112, 127, 149 Kastan, David Scott 109, 161, 166 Keats, John 1–2, 73, 87, 93 Kitch, Aaron 119, 135, 142, 155n54 knowledge: and the audience 43, 44, 47–8, 51, 56–7, 60–5; bibliographical 129–30; education and ‘in–formation’ 29, 46, 164; epistemology 8, 14, 28, 76; of material culture 8, 9; medical 27–34 Landreth, David 99–101 Laoutaris, Chris 121, 150, 155n48 legitimacy see counterfeiting; midwives and midwifery; printing (typographic); seals Levinas, Emmanuel 159, 165–6; see also ethics/morality likeness: God’s image 31–2, 69, 100, 111; paternal 11, 119, 125, 135, 137–41, 148; pictorial/sculptural 148–50; see also metaphor; reproduction

Index  197 Loewenstein, Joseph 70–2, 76, 78, 84 Lyly, John 30–1, 96n35, 122 Lyne, Raphael 71, 90 Mabbe, James 4, 120, 133, 136–8, 151 Mann, Jenny C. 25, 38n39, 72 manuscripts: bonds 61, 70, 77, 80; commonplacing 72, 167; letters patent 70, 77, 80, 81, 84–6, 103, 110, 140; licences 77, 80, 86, 138; and printed publication 124, 125, 127, 138, 140, 148; private letters 23–4, 77, 78, 80, 84, 85, 145; scrolls 142–3 markets see value Marlowe, Christopher 46, 78, 126 Marshall, Cynthia 42, 44, 49–50, 53–7, 59 Marston, John 133–4 Massai, Sonia 50, 121, 130 material culture see knowledge; metaphor; seals ‘material reading’ (as methodology) 7–10 maternal impressions see imagination ‘matrix’ 24–5 medals 3, 5, 15, 24, 41, 47, 51, 67n25, 102, 122, 150 medicine see knowledge; psychophysiology memory 2–3, 26–8, 32, 46, 61, 79–80, 82, 88, 89, 166; actor forgetting lines 63–4; commemoration and monumentalisation 4, 98–9, 120, 137–9, 149–51, 164–5; see also knowledge; psychophysiology metaphor: and ethics 165–7; and materiality 7–10, 20, 23–4, 26–7, 61, 72; and paratexts 121, 123; and simile 12n14, 27, 70, 83–4; theories of 8, 25–7; as ‘translation’/‘transport’ 8, 25, 27, 70, 87–8, 96n36, 96n37; see also memory; seals metatheatre see self-reflexivity Middleton, Thomas 30, 66n24; and Measure for Measure 11, 99, 101, 102, 111–15; see also counterfeiting midwives and midwifery 32, 123–4, 130, 131, 141–2, 147–8, 150 Milton, John 4, 143, 157n77, 166 mimesis 20–1, 76, 100

Montrose, Louis Adrian 69, 75–6, 81, 83, 86, 167; see also new historicism Moxon, Joseph 24 Nashe, Thomas 24, 56, 126, 132 new historicism 75, 94n9, 167 Newcomb, Lori 126, 142, 153n25, 156n75 Newman, Karen 46–7, 116n4 numismatics see coinage one-sex model 30; see also Galen Overbury’s Characters 47, 48, 57, 66n25; see also character sketches Ovid 78, 128, 150, 153–4n29 pamphlets 20, 125–6, 129, 132–3, 139; see also Greene, Robert; Nashe, Thomas ‘paper stage’ 120, 129, 132–3, 151 paratexts see prefatory (and terminal) materials; self-reflexivity; theatrical paratexts Parker, Patricia 25, 71, 91 parthenogenesis 69, 74–6, 82, 90, 94n1, 115, 120, 163; see also reproduction Paster, Gail Kern 27 patriarchy: and physiology 29–34, 69; and poetics/rhetoric 70–2, 74, 78–9, 84–6, 89, 92–3, 164; and rape 24, 29, 80, 161–4; and textual reproduction 123–4, 162–5; see also authorship; parthenogenesis patronage: book-buyer as patron 144; textual 116n10, 122, 123, 128, 137, 140–1, 143; theatrical 11, 80–1, 101–7, 110, 115; see also James I Peacham, Henry 25–7, 79–80, 88–9, 96n38 Peters, Julie Stone 132, 133 plagiarism 21, 120, 126–9 Plato 27, 28, 32, 89 Plutarch 23, 42, 49–4, 59, 80 poetics 98–118; see also counterfeiting; patriarchy; rhetoric; seals; self–reflexivity; value prefatory (and terminal) materials 119–57; addresses to readers 123, 144–9; appendices 129–30; and canon-shaping 4, 120–1, 147–8, 166; character lists 67n23, 146, 164; dedications 122, 123, 125,

198 Index 128–9, 137, 140–1, 144; and drama/theatricality 129–34, 139, 150–1; errata lists 121, 132, 146, 147; and the infant-text 123–9; as ‘paratexts’ 121–2, 130; title pages 122–3, 129–30, 137, 148–51 ‘print culture’ 5, 21, 34, 122, 158, 161 printing (typographic) 11, 119–57; and deformity 124, 125, 128, 147; and legitimacy 119, 122, 124, 129–30, 137, 139–42, 146–8, 165; and procreation 18–19, 24, 32, 119–20, 123–9, 131, 135, 137–48, 151, 163; relationship to sealing and coining 14–21; and truth 140–3, 148, 164–5; see also prefatory (and terminal) materials; reproduction ‘problem play’ 101–2, 109; see also the canon The Problemes of Aristotle 29, 31–2 psychophysiology 27–34, 76; of playgoing and reading 6, 8–9, 34–5, 45, 54, 60–65, 70, 158, 160; sensory impressions 2–3, 14, 27–9; see also character; imagination Puttenham, George 8, 25–6, 96n37 quotation: commonplacing and anthologising 72–3, 87, 89, 167; ethics of 165–7 Rainolds, John 45, 55 reproduction 18–19, 135, 159–63; digital 161; fantasies of 69, 75, 140, 148, 161–4; narratives of textual reproduction (‘printers’ tales’) 120, 123, 136, 142, 165; and political authority 100, 102–3, 107–8; sonic 19, 83, 87; technologies of impression 14–21; theories/ models of human reproduction 30–4; and uniqueness 162–3; see also Benjamin, Walter; character sketches; counterfeiting; patriarchy; value rhetoric 10–11, 70–2; abuses of 91–2; ‘figures’ of 8, 70–2, 79–80, 83; gendering and eroticisation of 72, 74–5, 89, 95n27; paratextual 11, 119–57; and transfiguration 88, 90–92; see also metaphor; patriarchy; value

rhetorical manuals see Peacham, Henry; Puttenham, George; Wilson, Thomas Richardson, Catherine 9, 72 royal proclamations 103–7, 113 Ryan, Kiernan 3, 6–7, 99 Saenger, Michael 123 seals 1–2, 10–11, 69–97; erotics of wax 23–4, 29–30, 78–80; and identity 5, 76, 78; materiality and functions of 76–8; and metaphor 27–34, 76, 79–80, 86, 89, 93; origins of 15; and poetic agency 79–80; and theatrical legitimacy 80–1, 86, 103, 109–10; see also counterfeiting; manuscripts; psychophysiology; rhetoric self-reflexivity: metatextuality 121–2, 151; metapoetics 74–5, 81–93; metatheatre 7, 423, 53–65, 107–10, 122, 150–1, 160, 162; see also the canon sensory impressions see psychophysiology Shakespeare, William: All’s Well That Ends Well 9, 102, 110–12, 115, 116n7, 118n31; Coriolanus 7, 10, 23, 41–68, 109, 158, 160; Cymbeline 27–8, 34, 77; Hamlet 28, 34–5, 46, 55, 79, 115; Henry VIII 81; King John 80; King Lear 12n3, 36n17, 125; Love’s Labour’s Lost 20, 32; Macbeth 87, 111, 114, 115, 160; Measure for Measure 7, 11, 29–30, 98–118, 158; Merchant of Venice 80; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 7, 10–11, 69–97, 158, 164, 166, 167; 1 Henry VI 56; Othello 130; The Rape of Lucrece 29, 37n29, 38n36, 124, 128; Richard III 20, 34; Romeo and Juliet 108; “Sonnet 11” 19, 23, 161; “Sonnet 77” 32; The Taming of the Shrew 77, 129–30; The Tempest 120, 161–4; Timon of Athens 112, 114, 116n4; Troilus and Cressida 37n25, 100, 101, 116n6, 124, 130, 136; Twelfth Night 23–4, 36n17, 46; 2 Henry IV 117n19; 2 Henry VI 18, 84; Venus and Adonis 16, 38n36, 97n46, 124, 128–9; The Winter’s

Index  199 Tale 7, 10, 11, 20, 119–57, 158, 162, 164–5 Sidney, Philip 20–1, 76, 79, 83, 89, 100, 125, 132, 143 sigillography see seals Slights, Jessica 43, 168n3 ‘slip’ and slippage 16, 108, 114, 122; see also counterfeiting Smith, Emma 44, 152n3 Smith, Helen 6, 19, 21, 121, 122, 140, 151, 153n20 Spurgeon, Caroline 75, 83, 90 Stern, Tiffany 121–3, 139 Stubbes, Philip 26, 34, 45, 54, 61 the sublime 2, 73 Taylor, Gary 112, 115, 118n31, 132, 150–1 technology see character; impression, language of; reproduction theatrical paratexts 121, 130; choruses 103, 130–1; epilogues 92–3, 109, 110; inductions 61, 130, 133–4, 138, 162; prologues 58–9, 92, 130 Theophrastus 45–8, 67n29; see also character sketches Thompson, Ann 26, 78, 82 Thompson, John O. 26, 78, 82 transformation: drama as transformative 14, 34–5, 45,

55; and paratexts 121; poetic 6, 10–11, 71–6, 79, 81–93, 158; see also metaphor; psychophysiology; rhetoric value 98–118; canonical/literary 4–7, 11, 99–101, 111–15, 120–2, 132–3, 135–6, 143, 151, 158–60; and character 42–4, 60–1, 65; generic 7, 99, 101–2, 108–10, 114–15; and language 19–20, 52, 167; poetic/rhetorical 72–5, 91–2, 167; politics of 99–100; see also coinage; counterfeiting; patronage Vickers, Brian 36n19, 111–12, 118n32, 166 violence see disfiguration; wounds virginity 70, 78, 84–6, 92; see also Elizabeth I; patriarchy; seals Wall, Wendy 120 wax see seals Webster, John 48, 57, 66–7n25, 133–4 Wilson, Thomas 25, 28, 79 wounds 10, 23, 41–3, 45, 53–61, 65, 158; see also character; self–reflexivity Yachnin, Paul 43, 99, 102–3, 107, 114

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