Renaissance Posthumanism 9780823269587

Citation preview

Renaissance Posthumanism

This page intentionally left blank

Renaissance Posthumanism

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano Editors

Fordham University Press New York

2016

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 First edition

5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

1.

What Posthumanism Isn’t: On Humanism and Human Exceptionalism in the Renaissance Kenneth Gouwens

2.

195

Beyond Human: Visualizing the Sexuality of Abraham Bosse’s Mandrake Diane Wolfthal

9.

167

Wooden Actors on the English Renaissance Stage Vin Nardizzi

8.

145

Oves et Singulatim: A Multispecies Impression Julian Yates

7.

120

Farmyard Choreographies in Early Modern England Erica Fudge

6.

99

A Natural History of Ravishment Holly Dugan

5.

64

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime: The Fundamentals of Gargantua Judith Roof

4.

37

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas: Thresholds of the Human and the Limits of Painting Stephen J. Campbell

3.

1

221

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions Lara Bovilsky

253

vi

Contents

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism Joseph Campana

283

Acknowledgments

317

List of Contributors

319

Index

323

Renaissance Posthumanism

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

Never, it seems, has there been a better time to take stock of the “the humanities” as a curriculum, or “the humanist,” one paid to teach this curriculum, as a vocation. In venues as varied as The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education, hardly a day goes by without yet another voice clamoring for or against the value of these areas of study or those of us paid to teach them. As Gary Gutting put it in November 2013, “ ‘Crisis’ and ‘decline’ are the words of the day in discussions of the humanities.”1 The “humanities” and “the humanist” are products of the Renaissance, when universities first created salaried positions for professors of “humanity”— grammar and rhetoric taught through classical authors such as Ovid and Terence (whose “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” or “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me” gave the curriculum its name)—but a growing number of scholars within the humanities are orienting their research variously toward “posthumanism,” “the posthuman,” and “the posthumanities.” This move toward “posthumanism” and “the posthumanities” would 1

2

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

seem to confirm the crisis in the humanities and, by extension, imply the obsolescence of touchstone texts and defining practices of the Renaissance. Do we live in an age in which the art, literature, and culture of the Renaissance have nothing to teach us? To the contrary, as this introductory chapter will show, the two most popular and seemingly disparate versions of “posthumanism”—the fantasies (or nightmares) of cybernetics and informatics in which human consciousness is downloaded, digitized, and disembodied, as described by N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman (1999) and the kind of critical animal studies that advocate against anthropocentrism in both ethics and aesthetics, as articulated by Cary Wolfe in What is Posthumanism? (2009)—are already contained within and can be elucidated by John Milton’s two epic poems: Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671). Thus, twenty-first century “posthumanism” proves far from unfathomable by or at odds with centuries-old “Renaissance humanism.” As our title suggests, this is not a book that takes contemporary theory and applies it to a distant and discrete historical period called the Renaissance; instead, we argue that theoretical and critical “posthumanism,” whether knowingly or not, has its roots in and remains an offshoot of “Renaissance humanism.” Renaissance humanists demonstrated how close reading and careful restoration of ancient texts could be an effective means of situating and addressing, if not solving or answering, the pressing philosophical problems of the present. Thus, Renaissance humanism underscored the significant advantage that expertise in grammar, rhetoric, ancient languages, and literature gave to any thinker or maker. In other words, the thinkers we associate with Renaissance humanism put an emphasis on textual criticism and historical context and championed the idea that old authors and texts remained full of new (or at least potential, not yet discovered or actualized) insights and ideas, concepts, and mindsets that might very well illumine even the most obscure and intractable problems of politics and life in general. Despite many claims to the contrary from contemporary critical posthumanists, Renaissance humanism was never a coherent or singular worldview, much less a rallying cry for “man as the measure”—or the center—“of all things.” This collection of essays by an impressive array of established and emerging scholars argues that contemporary “critical posthumanisms,” even as they distance themselves from particular iconic representations of the Re-

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

3

naissance (for example, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man), may in fact be moving ever closer to ideas of “the human” as at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality in works from the 14th to the 17th century. As posthumanists and early modernists alike now turn to address this weird tangle with the help of a series of thinkers associated with objectoriented ontology, actor-network theory, and new materialisms, one recommendation might indeed be that rather than importing the insights of a panoply of posthumanist approaches committed to righting the wrongs of humanism, we might think more clearly about the emergence of humanism in the Renaissance and whether it calls for correction, conversation, emulation, or some combination of all of these. What if critical posthumanisms of all varieties understood themselves as adopting the methods, practices, and temporal orientation of Renaissance humanism? Too often, instead, contemporary work in posthumanism presents itself as a rejection of Renaissance humanism when what it rejects is a straw man— albeit a straw Vitruvian Man—that bears little, if any, resemblance to Renaissance humanism qua the skeptical, critical, and irreverent close readings of ancient texts and cultures. A few recent examples will suffice to substantiate this claim. Pramad Nayar begins his book Posthumanism by claiming that “Literary texts that have since the Renaissance always shown us how humans behave, react and interact—indeed it has been said that literature ‘invented’ the human—have now begun to show that the human is what it is because it includes the non-human.”2 Rosi Braidotti kicks off the first chapter of her book The Posthuman with a similar invocation: “At the start of it all there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man’, formulated fi rst by Protagoras as ‘the measure of all things’, later renewed in the Italian Renaissance as a universal model and represented in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.”3 Finally, Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism? uses its introduction to allude to “ideals of human perfectability, rationality, and agency inherited from Renaissance humanism,” before explaining that “posthumanism names . . . a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon.”4 Ironically, what is being repressed, fantasized, and evaded in these accounts is nothing other than the historically specific phenomenon of Renaissance humanism itself. By reducing Renaissance humanism to a

4

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

handful of icons and caricatures (for example, da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man or Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare), which it then vehemently “opposes,” the critical posthumanism of Nayar, Braidotti, Wolfe, and others denies any connection to literary texts, artwork, or ideals of the past. But why? Critical posthumanists thus far have tended to accept and to adopt a par tic u lar historiographical narrative—an ideology—that posits “modernity” as a radical break, an irreversible rupture with the past. At the same time, they have largely conflated and confused Renaissance and Enlightenment humanisms so that a singular “humanism” has become almost synonymous with “modernity.” In this formulation, humanism also marks a break with the past, a break that we are now enjoined to break with in turn. One way to bridge the temporal gap separating the “Renaissance” from “Posthumanism,” which maintains this model of history, is to read the postmodern as a return of the repressed premodern (or early modern) and, similarly, “posthumanism” as a belated acknowledgement of—and rapprochement with— all those ways of thinking and being in the world that have been occluded and “othered” by humanism itself. This model of periodization results, for example, in claims that Galen’s pre- Cartesian embodied psychology resembles Antonio Damasio’s post- Cartesian neurobiology. Once we denounce the Enlightenment, we discover an affi nity with those the Enlightenment denounced. This account of historical progress, development, and change, indebted to Michel Foucault, implies that history consists of successive “mentalites” or worldviews ushered in by a series of epistemological ruptures. Another approach to the cognitive dissonance and temporal dysphoria conjured by the phrase “Renaissance Posthumanism” would follow the lead of Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern: that is, modernity never happened; there was no (Cartesian or Copernican) revolution that suddenly put an end to every thing that came before it. Thus, we do not need another revolution now; we do not need to denounce the moderns and the postmoderns and declare ourselves “post-post-modern”; or, more to our purposes, we do not need to distance ourselves from every vestige of Renaissance humanism in order to promote work in “posthumanities.” This alternative approach would suggest, as a corollary to “we have never been modern,” that “we have always been posthuman.” That is, we can fi nd companion species, systems theories, and critiques of anthropocentrism in the very same works

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

5

that, for Wolfe and others, serve as the exemplars of Renaissance humanism and early modernity. In other words, what we thought was “humanism” or “modernity” turns out to be just a case of highly selective reading (or, more provocatively, a failure to close read). Latour says his use of the “past perfect tense” suits his project, which he describes as “a matter of retrospective sentiment, of a rereading of our history.”5 Latour’s call for a retrospective rereading of historical sources echoes the “ad fontes”—or “to the sources”— admonition of the Renaissance humanists themselves. If one has never really read or looked closely at works of Renaissance humanism, then one’s (impoverished) view of it might look like nothing more than a decontextualized version of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Donna Haraway notes, in When Species Meet, “I cannot count the number of times Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man appeared in conference brochures for genomics meetings or advertisements for molecular biological instruments and lab reagents in the 1990s.”6 But Haraway herself is savvy enough to know that these contemporary appropriations of Renaissance humanism are simplistic and reductive and in no way capture the messy complexity of Da Vinci, the painter, sculptor, anatomist, geologist, botanist, architect, mathematician, engineer, and poet. Nor of course would Da Vinci really have been all of these “dif ferent things” at the time; so-called “Renaissance men” weren’t really working in many dif ferent (specialized, autonomous) disciplines.7 Ironically, according to this account, the very works and authors critical posthumanists have been critiquing and denouncing for their naïve and obsolete Renaissance humanism turn out to anticipate the critiques and to agree with the denunciations. Suddenly, the naïveté and obsolescence appear to be on the other foot. If Renaissance humanists were always already posthumanist, then the indignation expressed at the false consciousness inherited from them dissipates. As it turns out, critical posthumanists have never been the unwitting dupes or victims of someone else’s ideas; thus, we don’t need to throw off the mental shackles of an ancient elite culture in order to embrace a brave new world. We just need to read a bit more closely and to see that critical posthumanism has ideological allies and philosophical resources in Renaissance humanism itself. Even as some posthumanists have distanced themselves from a straw Renaissance humanism, a few Shakespeare scholars have made the case for a “Posthuman Shakespeare.” In “Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human

6

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare,” Henry S. Turner recommends that “we approach the early modern theatre as a kind of machine with which to fashion or to project artificial life, and that these forms of artificial life provide an example of what N. Katherine Hayles and Timothy Lenoir, among others, have described as a posthuman condition.” This approach enables Turner to discover Shakespeare, “the programmer and the coder,” developing brave new software to be run on the early modern platform stage or what he calls “the ‘new media’ of the late-sixteenth century.”8 Meanwhile, in “Posthuman Shakespeare per for mance studies,”  W.  B. Worthen sees a precursor to “the ubiquitous transience of virtual [digital] writing,” part of the posthuman condition as described by N. Katherine Hayles, in “the constitutive instability of [live] per for mance.” On mobile electronic devices, Worthen explains, “Writing is everywhere and nowhere, and like performance itself, seems constantly to be vanishing from view.”9 Again, twenty-first-century new media is presented as either a return to or an intensification of Renaissance modes and platforms. Finally, Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus’s collection Posthumanist Shakespeares, sporting the exposed circuitry of a cyborg’s head on its cover, also defines its project largely in terms of informatics. The first footnote to Herbrechter’s own essay, a footnote summarizing the argument of N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), puts the matter this way: “It is the present chapter’s and, indeed, the entire volume’s claim that this twentiethcentury transformation from human to posthuman via (information) technology needs to be historically challenged and recontextualized.”10 All three of these deployments of “posthuman” borrow the term from N. Katherine Hayles’s historical account of “how information lost its body” from the mid-twentieth-century Macy Conferences on cybernetics to Hans Moravec’s turn-of-the-twenty-first-century futuristic visions of a digitized and downloadable consciousness. This technological definition of “the posthuman,” however, is far from what most scholars, including but not limited to the aforementioned Nayar, Braidotti, and Wolfe, have in mind when they research, write about, and rally around “posthumanism” and “the posthumanities.” Indeed, writing a decade after Hayles, Wolfe laments that “the net effect and critical ground tone of her book, as many have noted, are to associate the posthuman with a kind of triumphant disembodiment.” According to Wolfe,

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

7

Hayles’s use of the term . . . tends to oppose embodiment and the posthuman, whereas the sense in which I am using the word here [the sense in which Braidotti and Nayar subsequently use the word] insists on exactly the opposite: posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being “after” our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from humanism itself, that Hayles rightly criticizes.11

We’ve come to a pretty pass when the very arguments made for “Posthuman Shakespeare[s]” risk confi rming, for critical posthumanists, the usual misconceptions of Renaissance humanism and its supposed ideals of free-floating code and ubiquitous but immaterial information. But, one might ask in response to Wolfe, what humanism, particularly, promotes “fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy”? Or is this merely another swipe at Descartes, whose historical fate of late has been to embody all that is wrong with Enlightenment thought? If so, it should be noted that Descartes, who philosophized as if he were not taking recourse to (let alone commenting on) any Greek or Latin sources, deliberately distances himself in this way from humanist precursors such as Montaigne. Both Turner and Worthen crystallize two interlocking tendencies that thus far have characterized work bringing the questions and concerns of posthumanism to bear on the Renaissance and vice versa. The first highlights a temporal paradox embedded in invocations of the posthuman and the premodern. Indeed, Worthen’s essay was one of many to appear in the inaugural special issue of postmedieval, a journal affiliated with the BABEL Working Group, edited by Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne (with an invited response by  N. Katherine Hayles) titled “When did we become post/ human?” As they move back and forth between interventions in the posthumanities and premodern phenomena, Joy and Dionne argue that “the question of why and how, exactly, the study of the premodern past might shed critical light on the post/ human future remains open and even problematic.”12 The second tendency is a related querying of the state, status, and definition of the human. Indeed, Joy and Dionne pin their claims for the importance of the humanities to this problematic when they claim “what might be at stake here is not only the future of the human itself, but also of the humanities.”13 Thus, much of the work on pre-Enlightenment posthumanisms seems to range somewhere between two poles of almost irresistible

8

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

attraction: “we were always posthuman” and “we were never human.” The temptation, one this collection struggles with as well, becomes merely to backdate the innovations of the posthumanities, finding Renaissance or earlier iterations of computers, viruses, cyborgs, and code, or to indicate the fuzzy contours of the so-called human in premodern eras and how the resulting uncertainty might impact contemporary thinking about contemporary things. Such gestures, neither erroneous nor outmoded, might be just the beginning of a conversation that leads, at least to our minds, to a larger conversation about what Renaissance humanism is, was, and could be in the future. Surely it is also no accident that as a certain engine of posthumanizing has roared to life, so too has a certain re-humanizing of the Renaissance. In the introduction to The New Humanists John Brockman quotes his own 1991 essay “The Emerging Third Culture,” which harkens back to C. P. Snow in its title. Brockman lavishes scorn on so-called humanists who have missed out on a veritable sea-change in culture: In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person today. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often non-empirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.14

Lost in spiral jetties of their thoughts, most intellectuals are obsolete, made redundant by scientists who make up a new “third culture.” “This new culture,” Brockman continues, “consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, have taken the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives.”15 The real humanists of the fifteenth century, Brockman argues, knew to take science seriously, whereas most academics don’t. Here’s another great moment of scorn: “In too much of academia, intellectual

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

9

debate tends to center on such matters as who was or was not a Stalinist in 1937, or what the sleeping arrangements were for guests at a Bloomsbury weekend in the early part of the twentieth century.”16 Renaissance Italy licenses yet another narrative about the human and its (supposed) values with science now the legitimate inheritor of humanism and the custodian of the human. In his role as popu lar izer of others’ “cutting edge” thinking, especially when comparing these innovators to Da Vinci, Brockman’s bombastic invocations of Renaissance humanism are akin to the conference brochures and magazine ads analyzed by Haraway. Nor is Brockman alone in this attempt to hold up the banner of humanism. Robin Headlam Wells’s Shakespeare’s Humanism trumpets on its dust jacket that “the idea of a universal human nature was as important to Shakespeare as it was to every other Renaissance writer.” Elizabethans were not, he insists, postmodernists before their times. Andy Mousley’s recent publications Critical Humanisms, Towards a New Literary Humanism, and Re-Humanising Shakespeare ask what might happen if we abandon certain dominant narratives about intellectual progress. In Critical Humanisms, Mousley articulates the problem as follows: “Critical theory, ran the narrative, was the brave new world, and all that went before it old, bad, usually bourgeois and most often humanist.”17 While trying to avoid the excesses of both “traditionalism” and “anti-humanism,” Mousley prefers an approach that returns to values, ethics, and the relationship between literature and life amongst other things. Indeed, the critical posthumanism of Nayar, Braidotti, Wolfe, and others does just that. Only now values and ethics no longer derive exclusively from, nor apply exclusively to, humans. Likewise, the relationship between literature and life encompasses more than merely human life; moreover, the relationships humanity has, or might have, with other life forms are equally important as interpersonal relationships between or among humans. Wolfe insists that “when we talk about posthumanism, we are not just talking about a thematics of decentering the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates,” but, instead, “we must take yet another step . . . and realize that the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist.”18 More specifically, Wolfe observes that too often impor tant work in the fields of critical animal studies or disability studies relies on the same “philosophical and theoretical frameworks used by

10

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

humanism” and, therefore, unintentionally “reproduce[s] the very kind of normative subjectivity . . . that grounds discrimination against nonhuman animals and the disabled in the first place.”19 To those unfamiliar with Wolfe’s work, the elision of critical animal studies and disability studies—or “nonhuman animals and the disabled [humans]”—might cause some unease. His point, however, is that a certain autonomous, able-bodied, even optimally reasoning and speaking “subject” has been privileged among philosophers and theorists to the point where perspectives or experiences of the world that differ in any way from this ideal are marginalized, if not excluded. Wolfe locates “the decisive turn of a thinking that is genuinely posthumanist” in the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann but in the history of philosophy the “completion of this other thinking that abandons subjectivity” is more often associated with the “turn” (die Kehre) in the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger, especially his 1947 “Letter on Humanism.”20 Heidegger censures humanism— including both the “Humanitas, explicitly so called . . . first considered and striven for in the age of the Roman Republic”21 and the studium humanitatis of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance—for situating the essence of humanity in the self or subject of the individual human being, which modern science had increasingly defined as just one being among others. Andy Mousley summarizes Heidegger’s turn away from humanism thus: In partial response to Sartre’s lecture, Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” (1947) represents an attempt to distance his own work from the French thinker and, more generally, from humanist-based philosophy. Heidegger argues that it is not justifiable to locate human beings at the centre of the universe or as the basis for all action. His attack is on metaphysical humanism as the unassailable vantage point for all understanding, which also includes the priority of “the individual” in Sartre’s thought . . . The crucial difference between Heidegger and Sartre is that the French phi losopher begins with the concept of the human self, whereas Heidegger bases his philosophy on Being (Sein).22

For Heidegger, in his own words, “what is essential is not the human being but being”; and being, he says, is the “the open region itself.” Just as Heidegger had used the word Dasein—“Being there” or, literally “there Being”—

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

11

instead of “humanity” in Being and Time, thus distancing his philosophy from the traditional language of metaphysics and subjectivity, his “Letter on Humanism” uses “openness” and “the open” interchangeably with Being, as in this sentence: “The self-giving into the open, along with the open region itself, is being itself.”23 Renaissance Posthumanism, too, reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human but it does so not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. Seeking those patterns of thought and practice that allow us to reach beyond the pre- and post- of recent thought, the contributors to this collection focus on moments where Renaissance humanism seems to depart and differ from itself. In this, we follow the lead of John Milton who returned to and reread the same passages from scripture, which hitherto had been used to prohibit divorce in order to argue that—when proper attention was paid to Greek diction, tone (notably hyperbole), and rhetorical context—Jesus, in fact, intended to license divorce on the grounds of spousal incompatibility for everyone except the literal-minded and hard-hearted Pharisees who opposed him. In returning to Milton, the embodiment of three centuries of Renaissance humanism, we find that his retelling of the Genesis story and his account of salvation through Christ, the loci classici of anthropocentrism and “human exceptionalism,” agree with critical posthumanism that “the human is what it is because it includes the non-human”; rejects the idea of “man as the measure of all things”; and levels the vaunted pretensions of the self-proclaimed “rational animal.” More importantly, while Renaissance Posthumanism might be seen as marking a return to theory as a lingua franca for conversations across historical periodization, our challenge is not to import current theoretical vocabulary into an earlier historical period (for example, Medieval Posthumanism, Romantic Posthumanism, and Victorian Posthumanism) but, instead, to show how this par tic u lar historical period, the Renaissance, has shaped and continues to shape the prevailing and pervasive terms, concepts, and discourses of twentyfirst century critical posthumanism, including “the open.”

12

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

Ad Fontes: “The Open” and Humanity as Disability in Paradise Lost Heidegger’s notion of the open is quite dif ferent from mine. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet 24

The question of the animal has been widely debated in critical posthumanism with philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway all invoking Martin Heidegger’s “the open.” Agamben takes the title of his book, The Open: Man and Animal, from Heidegger’s theory of “openness” (offenbar) as what is special and unique to humanity, what separates humans from all other animals, and what ultimately makes possible foundational philosophical notions of Truth and Being. According to Heidegger, nonhuman animals encounter countless beings but not as beings and they never encounter Being itself, or “the open,” or the world as such. Instead, nonhuman animals remain captivated to and spellbound by bundles of stimuli, such as the scent of the flower or the light of the sun, which at once provoke and place limits on their awareness, excitement, and movement. But, as Agamben notes, Heidegger borrowed his term, “the open,” from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. He also changed its meaning completely. As Agamben clarifies “in the eighth [Duino] Elegy it is the animal (die Kreatur) that sees the open ‘with all its eyes,’ in distinct contrast to man, whose eyes have instead been ‘turned backward’ and placed ‘like traps’ around him.” For Heidegger, by contrast, it is not the animal “that sees the open” but only humans.25 Derrida notes that both Rilke and Heidegger, despite their diametrically opposed views, speak in terms of “the abyss, and thus of the vertigo” that confronts every human attempt to think the animal.26 Haraway, as the epigraph that opens this section attests, faults Heidegger—and perhaps by extension Rilke—for assuming such an abyssal, vertiginous and unbridgeable rupture separating humans from what she calls their “companion species” and focuses, instead, on the ways in which humans and other animals have coevolved from the beginning of their respective existences on earth and continue to live, love, practice and compete (for example, in canine agility training) together. For “the open” to signify an enhanced, authentic, or heightened state of Being, as it did for both Heidegger and Rilke, it must refer, argues Haraway, to a “multispecies” “contact zone” rather than a realm reserved exclusively for either humans or non-humans.27

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

13

For all the ink spilt over “the open” in journals, books, blogs, and syllabi of late, little has been said about a more primordial sense of “the open” that has figured the separation of humans from animals—for better or worse, as Rilke and Heidegger respectively would have it— since Genesis. There a speaking serpent promises Eve, “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”; two sentences later the narrator tells us how Adam and Eve, after following the serpent’s advice, experienced something unlike every other animal in Eden: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (KJV 3.5, 3.7). Heidegger, a former Jesuit novitiate who had lectured on St. Paul and St. Augustine, consistently deployed a lexicon—including what he alternately characterizes as the “ruinance” or “fallenness” of Dasein—that is shot through with influence from the Genesis tradition. As such, he would have known that Rilke’s use of “the open” to suggest that, as Kari Weil has recently put it, “human consciousness is an obstacle to a knowledge we may have once possessed— a larger, less circumscribed, less rational way of knowing”—is ultimately traceable to the rabbinic and patristic attempts to make sense of this originary “contact zone,” to borrow from Haraway, “where species meet” and eyes are opened. 28 Agamben to his credit frequently looks to the Garden of Eden and to the Italian Renaissance in chapters covering Augustine, Aquinas, Pico, and Titian in The Open. But he never mentions John Milton. That is unfortunate because in none of his examples is the question of what philosophers in the Heideggerian tradition call “the open” as clearly at stake or as complexly figured. Heidegger proclaimed that “not even the lark sees the open,” and thus reserved ontological freedom and exposure to the world “as such” for humanity alone.29 Milton’s God, on the other hand, insists that not even humanity sees the open. God describes to Adam in Book 7 how he created humans to live on Earth, not in Heaven, “till by degrees of merit raised / They open to themselves at length the way / Up hither, under long obedience tried” (7.157–9). Just as Haraway argues that agility training makes it possible for humans and animals to enter “the open” together, God insists that much remains shut even to the perfect, prelapsarian Adam and Eve, whom he endowed with reason and free will and made in his own image, and that they will only experience—or “open to themselves”—heaven as the result of a

14

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

“long” program of obedience training. We might characterize the relationship between God and man the way Heidegger characterizes the relationship between man and animal: “an abyss lies between them.”30 Indeed, a close examination of Raphael’s oft-cited conversation with Adam, in which he explains the monistic continuum uniting all entities, reveals how Milton continued to insist on abyssal ruptures not only between God and man but also between angel and man. “Time may come,” says the archangel, “when man / With Angels may participate . . . / . . . or may at choice / Here [in Eden] or in heavenly paradises dwell” (5.493–4, 499–500). In the meantime, he counsels the newlyweds to “enjoy / Your fi ll what happiness this happy state / Can comprehend, incapable of more” (5.503–5, emphasis ours). Just as Heidegger (like Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant before him) equated animality with disability or incapacity (to speak, reason, and use tools), Raphael defi nes humanity—relative to the heavenly host—as a disability. But Raphael reiterates God’s stipulation: “Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit, / Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend / Ethereal, as we . . . / If ye be found obedient” (5.498–9, 501, emphasis ours). Sounding a bit like a salesman pitching timeshares in “heavenly paradises,” Raphael lets these first-time homeowners in on a little secret: Eden, the only Paradise they have ever known, is but one among many. At some point in the future, however, they might have a “choice” about whether to dwell on earth or in heaven but not until their “bodies . . . turn all to spirit” (5.497) From this short speech, Adam and Eve learn three things: There are more “Paradises” than just this one; they presently do not have a “choice” about where to dwell; and their bodies not only prevent them from seeing the other paradises, let alone choosing to dwell in one, but make it impossible for them to “participate” with Raphael and the “Angels.” Like Haraway, who criticizes Heidegger’s suggestion that profound boredom and detachment from beings in the world frees the human mind to contemplate Being itself, or “the open,” and posits instead that profound engagement in the world and immersive attempts to bridge the abysses or ruptures between species makes possible the kind of spontaneity, freedom, and mutual respect which she identifies as “the open,” Milton places humanity in the role of “companion species,” meeting and breaking bread with an angel, and in the process edging closer, in terms of a “capabilities approach,” to “human flourishing.” In Raphael’s promise that their “bod-

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

15

ies . . . [would] turn all to spirit,” Milton’s Adam and Eve do confront “the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy” that Cary Wolfe attributes to Renaissance humanism, but disembodied consciousness and human autonomy remain just that: unrealized fantasies about what might have been if only our “Grand Parents in that happy state” (1.29) had exercised obedience. Instead, of course, “our Grand Parents” (1.29) flunked obedience training. From Augustine onward, the doctrine of original sin meant that the defining essence of humanity, the image of God in man, had been ruined, possibly beyond repair. Martin Luther’s commentary on Genesis 3 indicates that “the slaughtered will, the corrupted understanding and the wholly defiled reason have changed man into an utterly altered being” (emphasis ours).31 With this proto-speciation and devolution in mind Milton’s prose tract “Of Education,” one of the last great works of Renaissance humanism, asserts that the purpose of schooling is to “repair the ruins of our first parents.”32 Exegetes have long puzzled over the talking serpent as well as what happened— and what it meant—when human eyes “were opened” and thus they “knew.” In the rabbinic and patristic commentaries this line signals the moment that humans, hitherto as blissfully ignorant of their nudity as all other animals in Eden, became self-aware and ashamed. Hence clothing. Augustine in De Genesi ad Litteram and Aquinas in Summa Theologica maintain in the words of the former, quoted verbatim in the latter, that we “must not imagine that our first parents were created with their eyes closed, especially since it is stated that the woman saw that the tree was fair, and good to eat. Accordingly the eyes of both were opened so that they saw and thought on things which had not occurred to their minds before, this was a mutual concupiscence such as they had not hitherto.”33 This concupiscence, or libido, vitiates the human will and results in its loss of control over the sex organs, which rebel against the intellectual soul, the image of God in man, in the same way that Adam and Eve rebelled against God himself. Thus, in Paradise Lost what Wolfe calls “the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from humanism itself” never were—and never will be—part of the human condition. Luther’s insistence that original sin “changed man into an utterly altered being” fits the definition of “post-human” in the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun referring to “a member of a hypothetical species that might evolve

16

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

from human beings.”34 By this defi nition, it seems that the “human,” for Milton, is merely a way station en route to one of two possible “posthuman” futures: one that was realized because of sin and one that was not. In retrospect, Raphael’s visionary promise that “Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit” resembles nothing so much as what Hayles describes in the opening anecdote of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) as “a roboticist’s dream that struck [her] as a nightmare,” namely Hans Moravec’s prediction that, in Hayles’s words, “it will soon be possible to download human consciousness into a computer.” Hayles’s book, as we have noted, tells the story of how “information lost its body,” beginning with the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “When information loses its body,” Hayles explains, “equating humans and computers is especially easy, for the materiality in which the thinking mind is instantiated appears incidental to its essential nature.”35 Both information and consciousness get figured as disembodied patterns or codes rather than as embodied presences. Indeed, when we consider that the “Ethereal” future Raphael foretells for Adam and Eve has no place for Death, which enters Eden through humanity’s disobedience, then this projected posthuman future bears a striking resemblance to “the notion of the ‘singularity,’ a concept first proposed by Vernor Vinge and taken up by Ray Kurzweil” in the 1990s: the singularity refers to the moment that human evolution makes the leap from biological bodies to silicon software, a moment eagerly anticipated by those, like Kurzweil, who plan to “live long enough to live forever.”36 Unlike Agamben, Derrida, Haraway, and Wolfe, all of whom look forward to and attempt to articulate a post-anthropocentric worldview, Moravec and Kurzweil exercise an unabashed anthropocentrism, which sees humans as leaving the dust of this world, our “companion species,” and our finitude or mortality behind as we “become posthuman.” Nor is such a vision of “paradise” or the afterlife confined to technophiles: At the end of 2014, at the request of the Vatican, the New York Times published a formal retraction of a report that Pope Francis had consoled a boy by telling him that he would see his dog in heaven. Contrary to original reports, Catholic Church doctrine does not hold that “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ,” nor that “Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”37

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

17

In Paradise Lost, however, Milton’s Satan transforms the abyssal rupture that Raphael has posited between humanity and the angels into the basis of an ethical appeal as he seeks to persuade Eve that the serpent, a nonhuman animal, has learned to contemplate Being itself, or “the open,” through an act of disobedience. If, as Agamben explains, Heidegger’s “Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored: it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation,” then Milton’s Satan in the guise of the talking serpent gives voice to such an awakening: I was at first as other beasts that graze The trodden herb, of abject thoughts and low, As was my food, nor aught but food discerned Or Sex, and apprehended nothing high: Till on a day roving the field, I chanced A goodly Tree far distant to behold . . . Sated at length, ere long I might perceive Strange alteration in me, to degree Of reason in my inward powers, and speech Wanted not long, though to this shape retained. Thenceforth to speculations high or deep I turned my thoughts, and with capacious mind Considered all things visible in heaven, Or earth, or middle, all things fair and good. (9.571–605)

The serpent claims to have transcended self-centered concerns about bodily appetites and survival—“my food . . . / Or sex”— and in the process to have arrived at an appreciation for “all things visible in heaven / . . . all things fair and good.” Not content with turning the distinction between human and animal topsy-turvy, Satan’s serpent, claiming that his newfound wisdom derives from a “goodly tree” (9.576), makes the lowly plant supreme above all. Like Raphael, Satan reminds Eve that she and Adam, like the other animals, remain captive to their par tic u lar environment, oblivious to “the open.” The keyword “open” appears nine times in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, where the subject of the poem, “man’s first disobedience,” finally takes place.38 According to Agamben, Heidegger maintained that “Only man, indeed only

18

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

the essential gaze of authentic thought, can see the open which names the unconcealedness of beings,” while “The animal, on the contrary, never sees this open.”39 Milton’s Satan qua the serpent, however, flips the anthropocentric script as part of his larger protrepsis (or exhortation) with a rhetorical question to Eve: “Shall that be shut to man, which to the beast / Is open?” This question, which marks the fi rst appearance of “open” in the book, carries even bigger existential stakes than Hamlet’s famously interrogatory “To be, or not to be.” Hamlet’s question flirts with suicide, the serpent’s with genocide: Humanity’s fate depends on it. Just prior to popping the question, an epic simile compares the serpent to “some orator renound / In Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence / Flourishd, since mute, to some great cause addressed” (9.670–2). Whereas Cicero—an “Orator renound,” whose style (“since mute”) Renaissance humanists emulated but failed to match— credited eloquence and rhetoric with having transformed savage animals into civilized humans, Milton’s Satan presents Eve with a nonhuman animal at once more eloquent and more civilized than Adam himself. As a Ciceronian sentence, the significance of the serpent’s query is withheld until its fi nal word, which arrives as the payoff to an intensity that begins mounting with two low-pitched hushing sibilants (“Shall,” “shut”) and culminates in what might have been a protracted, suspense-building, highpitched pair of hissing sibilants (“Beasssst / Isssss”). A recent “Biblically Annotated Edition” of the epic does not gloss this first appearance of the word but it does append a note to the word’s second occurrence, when the serpent promises Eve: “your Eyes that seem so cleere, / Yet are but dim, shall perfetly be then / Op’nd and cleerd, and ye shall be as Gods” (9.706-8). The note references the fi rst use of “open” in Genesis 3.5.40 The same edition also appends a note to the ninth and fi nal occurrence of “open” when Adam laments: “O Eve . . . / . . . since our Eyes / Op’nd we find indeed, and find we know / Both Good and Evil, Good lost, and Evil got, / Bad Fruit of Knowledge, if this be to know” (9.1067–73). This note, as one might expect, references the second use of “open” in Genesis in 3.7.41 Both speakers address Eve who undoubtedly hears an echo of the serpent’s trochaic substitution, a surprising stress on the first syllable in an other wise iambic line, in Adam’s identical “Op’nd.”But by keying two passages from the poem directly and unambiguously to the two sentences in Milton’s source, this annotated edition leaves unexplored— and altogether

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

19

unacknowledged—the way the Scriptural “open” grows in profusion all over Book 9. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, a lecture series that begins with a reenactment of Genesis 3 and concludes with a consideration of “the question of the animal in Heidegger,” Derrida calls not for the effacement or abolition of the singular line separating humanity from “the animal” but instead for the “delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line” in a way that “feeds the limit” (emphasis in Derrida). Already in Paradise Lost Milton is elaborating on and dilating Genesis, “complicat[ing] it,” as Derrida’s “limitrophy” calls for, by “multiplying its figures . . . making it increase and multiply.” 42 (Indeed, Milton even splits the eponymous moment in Scripture—“the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked”—in two. Milton’s Satan manages to dupe and to persuade Eve; Milton’s Eve then attempts to dupe or persuade Adam.) In Zoographies: The Question of the Animal, Matthew Calarco, an ardent advocate for the Derridean “critique of anthropocentrism,” expresses surprise and regret at Derrida’s continuing to speak in terms of a Heideggerian “rhetoric of abysses and ruptures between human beings and animals” and taking aim, if not at Darwinism and evolutionary theory (à la Heidegger), at what Derrida calls “a biologistic continuism” and “geneticism” that discounts any differences in kind between humans and animals as merely differences in degree.43 If, as Gordon Teskey clarifies, Milton’s metaphysics “bears a striking resemblance to that of his near contemporary Spinoza,” Milton appears to have viewed the material continuum comprising every thing from atoms to angels not as a justification for removing the singular line or limit—“the open”—that separates humanity from its companion species but, to the contrary, as a reason for redrawing and redoubling it so that, in Derrida’s words, “the frontier no longer forms a single indivisible line,” along the axis, for example, of speech or reason, “but more than one internally divided line.” 44 In other words, the line separating humanity from animality, like any given line in the Bible (or in Milton), is neither unambiguous nor unchanging but instead demands continual interpretation and will remain fraught with contradictions. Whereas Rilke, Heidegger, and Agamben implicitly draw “a single indivisible line”—the open— Milton anticipates Derrida in retracing and sometimes erasing a plurality of lines. For example, Adam appears to make a hard and fast distinction between humans and animals as

20

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

he explains to Eve in Book 9 that God desires not only “Labour” from them but also “Love”: Yet not so strictly hath our Lord impos’d Labour, as to debar us when we need Refreshment, whether food, or talk between, Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow, To brute deni’d and are of Love the food, Love not the lowest end of human life. (9.235-241)

The claim that “. . . smiles from Reason flow, / To brute deni’d” suggests that nonhuman animals, the brutes, can neither reason nor smile. Since smiles, moreover, prove “the food” of love, the reader might safely infer that nonhuman animals have never tasted—or felt—love either. But Adam’s argument here must be read in context: His words, no less than the serpent’s words later in the Book 9, aim to persuade Eve to take a specific course of action (namely to remain at his side instead of going off to garden alone). Only one day— and one book— earlier, while recounting to Raphael his earliest memories in Book 8, Adam noted how By quick instinctive motion up I sprung, As thitherward endeavoring, and upright Stood on my feet; about me round I saw Hill, Dale, and shadie Woods, and sunnie Plaines, And liquid Lapse of murmuring Streams; by these, Creatures that livd, and movd, and walk’d, or flew, Birds on the branches warbling; all things smil’d, With fragrance and with joy my heart oreflow’d. (8.259–66, emphasis ours)

In this context, smiles— and, by extension, both reason and love— are not exclusively human properties but instead belong to “all things” in Paradise. This point would appear to be reiterated later in Paradise Lost as “God foretells,” in the Argument to Book 10, “the final victory of his Son over [Sin and Death] and the renewing of all things.” And it is reiterated again in Book 11 as the archangel Michael reveals to Adam that on the last day “fire

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

21

[will] purge all things new, / Both heav’n and earth, wherein the just shall dwell” (11.900–1) Milton, whose adherence to and advocacy for a number of heretical ideas (including but not limited to Arianism, Arminianism and monism), here appears to flirt with, if not embrace, the heresy of universal reconciliation (or salvation), the doctrine that all souls—or, in this case, “all things”—will ultimately be reconciled to God. In other words, Paradise and eternity through Christ would be not restricted to humans. Is Milton unable to imagine a heaven without earth and our companion species? In the sequel to Paradise Lost, the reward for perfect human obedience turns out to be not rapture into another, disembodied realm of pure Being but, instead, wordless communion in this world alongside “wild beasts” (PR 1.310).45 Though Nayar contends that “Literary texts” have only recently “begun to show that the human is what it is because it includes the nonhuman,” it is noteworthy that Milton in his brief epic, Paradise Regained, places Jesus in the presence of “wild beasts” and thereby departs from his scriptural sources, Matthew 4.1–11 and Luke 4.1–13. In the Authorized King James Bible, the beginning of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness is described thus in the gospel of Matthew: “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.” The gospel of Luke likewise reports, “And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” Matthew and Luke are Milton’s primary sources for Paradise Regained because these are the only two gospels that specify the temptations Satan offers to Jesus in the desert and the conversations that ensue between the two adversaries. There is, however, a very brief (easily overlooked) mention of the encounter, without any details, in the gospel of Mark: Only there does one read that Christ “was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him.” Milton not only retains this textual minutiae from Mark but elaborates it so that these “wild beasts,” upon seeing Jesus, “grew mild, / Nor sleeping him nor waking harmed, his walk / The fiery serpent fled and noxious worm, / The lion and fierce tiger glared aloof” (1.310–13). Why, we might ask, did Milton, who elsewhere rails against “alphabetical servility” to and literalist interpretations of the Bible, feel it necessary to supplement and surround Jesus and Satan with nonhuman agents and actors?46 Also, how should we interpret or describe what

22

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

looks like a conversion, from “wild” to “mild,” of animals in Christ’s presence? What role, if any, does human “rationality” or “speech” play here? And, fi nally, how might Milton’s tableau justify or qualify Giorgio Agamben’s claim in The Open that “on the [messianic] last day, the relations between animals and men will take on a new form, and that man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature?” 47 First, we should note how differently Milton depicts Christ’s interaction with these “wild beasts” from how he first described human-animal relations in Paradise Lost. There, in Book 4, Adam and Eve are being entertained by what Donna Haraway would call their “companion species”: . . . About them frisking playd All beasts of th’Earth, since wilde, and of all chase In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den; Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw Dandl’d the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards Gambold before them, th’unwieldy Elephant To make them mirth us’d all his might, and wreathd His Lithe Proboscis . . . (4.340–7)

In Paradise Regained, however, Christ is neither at the center nor the concern of his companion species. These animals are not anthropomorphic but behave as we might expect: They flee from or else glare aloof at the human intruder. Second, we should note exactly which species have been selected to represent the nondescript “wild beasts” of Scripture: serpent, worm, lion, and tiger. In Paradise Lost, of course, Satan enters the body of “Th’infernal serpent,” “that false worm”; less memorably, however, Satan also disguises himself as a “Lion,” “Then as a Tiger” when he first spied on Adam and Eve (1.34, 9.1068, 4.402, 4.403). Milton surrounds Jesus with these animals in Paradise Regained as if to absolve them of their guilt by association with Satan in Paradise Lost. At the end of their interview, Milton’s Satan concludes that Christ himself is uncivilized, less than human, and even animal-like: Since neither wealth, nor honour, arms nor arts, Kingdom nor empire pleases thee, nor aught By me proposed in life contemplative,

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

23

Or active, tended on by glory, or fame, What dost thou in this world? The wilderness For thee is fittest place (4.368–73)

Jesus proves to be a sort of anti-Terence: Everything that is human is alien to him. Just prior to this exasperated outburst, Milton’s Satan seems certain that he had found a weak spot, a fondness, in Christ: “thou thyself seem’st otherwise inclined / Then to a worldly crown, addicted more / To contemplation and profound dispute” (4.212–14). The offer that Satan imagines Jesus will be unable to refuse consists of universal knowledge, especially that which could be found in Homer and the ancient Greek “tragedians,” whom he elevates to the status of “teachers best / Of moral prudence, with delight received / In brief sententious precepts, while they treat / Of fate, and chance, and change in human life” (4.261–5). Sounding like Horace, or Sir Philip Sidney, or the “epistle dedicatory” prefacing George Chapman’s English translation of Homer, Milton’s Satan supplies a staunch defense of poesy as a medium that both delights and instructs. Nor is this the first time that Milton has associated Satan with Renaissance humanism and its project to recover ancient eloquence and the arts of persuasion. Recall the epic simile likening the serpent to “some orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome” in Paradise Lost. But Milton’s Jesus rejects the curriculum credited in Milton’s time with curing the English language of its barbarism and cultivating proper English gentlemen. Rather than assume that Milton’s Christ is not affected, even altered, by the presence of these animals, just as they are affected by him, what if we consider how the “significant otherness” of these nonhuman animals assist Christ in becoming “human” while not becoming a “humanist”? In her discussion of participating in agility training with her dog, Cayenne, Donna Haraway describes “Training together” as a “multispecies, subjectshaping encounter in a contact zone fraught with power, knowledge and technique, moral questions—and the chance for joint, cross-species invention that is simultaneously work and play.” Though the sleeping arrangements among Milton’s Jesus and these “wild Beasts” are quite unlike the close cooperation involved in canine agility training, Haraway’s sense of “the open”—as a rare but rewarding moment of interspecies communication and coeducation across abyssal Heideggerian-Derridean ruptures—is nonetheless operative

24

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

here. Impervious to human eloquence and reason, these animals might be said to model the indifference, the utter lack of captivation and fascination, that Christ then uses to resist Satan’s arts of persuasion as well as the humanist curriculum, fit for a king, which is the piece de resistance in Satan’s smorgasbord of temptations and Milton’s own interpolation. Unlike the serpent in the Garden of Eden, these desert beasts neither talk nor listen to Jesus. Reason and speech do not necessarily enable an experience of the world or Being “as such”; even Heidegger acknowledges that more often than not reason and speech obscure and conceal as much of the world, and of Being, as they illumine or reveal. Reconciled to his animal nature, Milton’s Christ learns during his sojourn with the “wild Beasts” that his humanity consists of something other than right reason or speech; he is more than Logos incarnate. Just as a human sensitivity to and appreciation for eloquence is both a capability and a liability—insofar as the ablest rhetorician can use words to possess and move an audience in whatever direction the orator wishes—so too is human sight. At the end of Paradise Lost, Milton’s Michael does not merely narrate or tell the future history of humanity to Adam; he lets Adam see it for himself. But first Michael from Adam’s eyes the film removed Which that false fruit that promised clearer sight Had bred; then purged with euphrasy and rue The visual nerve, for he had much to see; And from the well of life three drops instilled. (PL 11.412–16)

Here we learn that Adam’s eyesight— our eyesight—is a disability: Human sight itself functions as a kind of “film” that permits us to see this or that individual being but blinds us to Being as such. Just as Michael must “purge” Adam’s “visual nerve” before he can perceive the future to come, so Milton, the blind poet, must guide us, his seemingly sighted readers. Just prior to partaking of the forbidden fruit, Milton’s Adam reasons that, given its position relative to the rest of God’s creation, humanity is too big to fail: Nor can I think that God, creator wise, Though threatening, will in earnest so destroy

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

25

Us his prime creatures, dignified so high, Set over all his works, which in our fall, For us created, needs with us must fail. (9.938–42)

God might threaten to liquidate their assets but were He to do so, Adam rationalizes, humanity’s collapse would bring down “all his Works” and by extension God’s own credit rating. Had Milton’s Adam read the same works of Renaissance humanism that Milton had read, works that inform the epic throughout, Adam would have learned, to the contrary, that humanity is a byword for failure: Petrarch, for instance, writes “I certainly believe that Aristotle was a great man who knew much, but he was a human and could well be ignorant of some things, even of a great many things.” 48 Erasmus, echoing Petrarch, confesses his thoughts on Saint Jerome: “I admit that he was a man of great learning, equally great eloquence, and of incomparable saintliness, but I cannot deny that he was human.” 49

The Chapters Milton is not alone, nor an exception, when it comes to Renaissance humanists who take up questions and concerns presently central to critical posthumanism. The contributors to Renaissance Posthumanism all seek to see differently and, in dif ferent ways, reveal how “posthumanism” is at once at home in and integral to the study of the “Renaissance”—and vice versa. Each of the chapters that follows represents an encounter with the paradox here called Renaissance Posthumanism. Kenneth Gouwens’s manifesto-like “What Posthumanism Isn’t: On Humanism and Human Exceptionalism in the Renaissance” points out that much of the discourse on “posthumanism” completely overlooks the “humanist” movement that arose over 700 years ago and remains influential, noting that the term “humanism” is a routine part of Renaissance scholars’ vocabulary with a meaning that critical posthumanists seem not to know. Taking, for example, Wolfe’s use of the Wikipedia entry on “humanism” as the foil for his brand of “critical posthumanism,” Gouwens slowly strips away accumulated misconceptions at the same time he explains the historically and

26

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

culturally specific uses of the Latin humanus, the Ciceronian humanae litterae, the eighteenth-century French humanisme, and the nineteenth-century German Humanismus. This grand tour of humanism—from Church Fathers, such as Augustine and Lactantius; through Renaissance figures, including but not limited to Ficino, Pico, and Montaigne; to twentieth-century historians and philosophers of Renaissance humanism, ranging from Kristeller and Cassirer to Grafton, Jardine, and Copenhaver—will be required reading for anyone working in the field of posthumanism or the posthumanities. After Gouwens reveals the radical critiques of anthropocentrism on offer in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, in addition to their classical precedents, one thing is clear: Wolfe’s brand of “critical posthumanism” is, ironically, anything but post-Renaissance. Stephen Campbell’s “Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas: Thresholds of the Human and the Limits of Painting” engages not only Renaissance humanism, in the eponymous late painting of Titian, and contemporary posthumanism, in the form of Giorgio Agamben’s anthropological machine, but also the troubled history of “humanism” itself, particularly as it figures in Erwin Panofsky’s reflections on Immanuel Kant in the 1940 essay “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline.” Campbell uses this essay to reconsider the problematic exclusion of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas from a substantial chapter on “Titian and Ovid” in Panofsky’s book on the painter: The “gratuitous brutality” on display in the Flaying of Marsyas was at odds, Campbell argues, with Panofsky’s perception of Titian as a “humanist.” Noting how the navel of the satyr Marsyas serves as the painting’s fulcrum, Campbell presents this late work of Titian’s as, among other things, “an inversion of one of the iconic Renaissance idealizations of the human (especially among Renaissance art theorists): the so- called ‘Vitruvian Man,’ a proportionallyideal, normative (and hence male gendered) image of ‘man,’ whose perfect bodily ratios allow him to be inscribed in a perfect square and a circle, with his umbilicus at the center.” Titian’s enigmatic image of a satyr stripped of his musical instrument and hanged by his hooves from a tree confronts its viewers with both the humanizing of the animal and the animalizing of the human. In Titian’s paintings after 1550, both the individualism that Jacob Burckhardt celebrated as the essence of Italian Renaissance culture and the intervals (or spaces between figures) that Panofsky viewed as signatures of Titian’s style give way, according to Campbell, to an inchoate materiality in

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

27

which “a kind of propulsive, overbearing force . . . propagates itself with crushing results . . . [and] finally amounts to . . . a reflection on forms of embodiment that call into question ‘the human’ as a bounded category.” Judith Roof’s “Rabelais’ Silenic Regime: The Fundamentals of Gargantua,” ingeniously appropriates the figure of the silenic box, whose description precedes the account of Gargantua’s birth in Rabelais’s scatological work of Renaissance humanism, as an object lesson about how “the outside is always a necessary part of the inside.” Roof is not playing the easy game of sifting through the content of Rabelais’s work in search of a “thematics of decentering the human.” Instead, her essay makes a much more difficult and interest ing move: It shows how the form of Gargantua and Pantagruel, a touchstone text of Renaissance humanism if ever there was one, is already engaged and playing with what Wolfe, citing Luhmann, calls “the formal dynamics of meaning that arise from the unavoidably paradoxical self-reference of any observation” (xx, emphasis ours). Posthumanism, according to Wolfe, is less about what is signified (animal and/or machinic “thematics”) and more about a particular kind of endless signification, “a thinking that does not turn away from the complexities and paradoxes of self-referential autopoiesis.” Roof’s essay, like the silenic box it celebrates, is a bravura performance of precisely this kind of thinking. Roof demonstrates that one need not wait for James Joyce or the Macy Conferences in order to see “self-referential autopoiesis” at work. Even better, in doing so, her essay gives the lie to the idea of a linear history that progresses through a succession of monolithic epistemes or totalizing worldviews (Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Modern, and so on). Better still is how Rabelais replaces such “ideas of precedence . . . linearity” (21) with a “technology of enclosures”—boxes and/or brackets all the way down—which confounds notions of inside and outside just as effectively as Luhmann’s “system/environment relation” or what Wolfe calls “the principle of openness from closure” (xxi). In other words, posthumanism is always (already) a necessary part of humanism: Inside cannot exist without the outside and vice versa. Observing how Gargamelle, Gargantua’s mother, gives birth to her son only after her fundament or anus slips out as a result of eating bad tripe (“having feasted on other insides as they turned her own insides were turned inside out”), Roof argues that a kind of critical posthumanism is at work not only in the thematic content of Rabelais’s fanciful box— adorned with “satyrs, harpies, harnessed stags,

28

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

saddled ducks, and bridled geese”—but in its literary form. Moreover, when one recalls how Erasmus also invoked the Sileni of Alcibiades in his Adages, the recursive temporality conjured in Roof’s account of a paradoxically posthumanist humanism (emphasis on the anadiplosis) begins to look as if it might be a condition of possibility for the Renaissance itself rather than a specific or particular invention of Rabelais. Holly Dugan’s “A Natural History of Ravishment” views Renaissance humanism as distinct from, but nonetheless connected to, medieval literature, in which Greek antiquity was already revered, for example in the Prose Life of Alexander. First showing how the prefatory matter to two dif ferent editions of George Chapman’s translation of Homer, an iconic work of Renaissance humanism if ever there was one, hold up “Alexander,” “the Macedon,” as a paragon of princely virtues, Dugan then demonstrates that what David Quint has identified as “a Renaissance debate over Alexander’s moral character, a debate whose larger subject was the didactic usefulness of reading history,” had already begun in medieval romance. These tales, however, leave readers to make their own interpretations and draw their own conclusions: For example, Alexander and his knights, confronted by “a large creature, naked and hairy, with the head and voice of a swine,” respond by taking a young damsel, stripping her naked, and setting her before the creature. This is a test of the creature’s humanity. When the swine-man tries to ravish the damsel, Alexander and his knights beat him, bind him to a tree, and burn him. As Dugan points out, “Alexander and his men fail their own test, abandoning the tropes of chivalry and medieval romance, ‘nakkening’ the damsel, and participating in her subsequent violation . . . Alexander searches the beast’s body for clues to understanding its violent response and fi nds none other than the context he himself orchestrated.” While Fluellen’s reference to “Alexander the Pig” in Shakespeare’s Henry V is a Welsh malapropism (for “Alexander the Big,” that is, “Alexander the Great”), Dugan notes how the mysterious “damsel in the wilderness” in this medieval romance about Alexander reveals not only “the gendered terrain on which the question of species boundaries is continuously posed” but also that Alexander and his men turn out to be “bigger pigs” than the swineman they burn to death. Dugan provides other ambiguous examples of Alexander’s encounters with wildness in the medieval romance and also explores how natural history texts of the Renaissance period— Conrad

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

29

Gessner’s influential Historiae Animalium (1558) and Edward Topsell’s A History of Foure-Footed Beastes (1607)— presented Alexander as a patron of naturalist treatises, especially Aristotle’s, by fusing representations of him as a proto-scientist with his legacy of conquest. As a result, what were once fables of medieval wildmen were transformed into “facts” about rapacious Indian apes. Erica Fudge’s “Farmyard Choreographies in Early Modern England” takes up Charis Cussins’s concept of “ontological choreography”—or rather John Law’s and Donna Haraway’s repurposing of it for describing “human-animal relations”—in order to introduce Renaissance scholars to the tacit, hands-on, and unrecorded songs, dances, and knowledges of the farmyard. Fudge urges scholars of Renaissance art and literature to look beyond the idealized, reason-obsessed, and elite products of courtly culture, as well as the more middle-brow archives of testators and scribes, and in doing so to radically rethink “intimacy” and “individuality”— Ciceronian and later Petrarchan rhetorical ideals—as frequently wordless relationships which, like friendship, extend across species boundaries. What could be more personal than private correspondence in familiar letters? Upping the ante on both Petrarch and “personhood,” Fudge invites us to “glimpse” that which we can “only begin to see” in written documents of the past: the unwritten and even unspoken day-to-day dance between woman and cow, ploughman and oxen. Because Renaissance Posthumanism brings together two historical periods (“Renaissance” signifying a rebirth of the ancient and “Posthumanism” a death of the modern), in order to ponder the problems of each through the possibilities of the other, there are precious few models for, as Fudge puts it, “how we might read” under this new dispensation. Fudge’s own essay is exemplary in this regard and will inspire those who read it to “shift what it is that scholarly interpretation is meant to, perhaps even allowed to do,” as she puts it, by adopting what she calls “care-filled” approaches to the silent partners of the past. Julian Yates’s tour-de-force “Oves et Singulatim: A Multispecies Impression” begins with a seemingly innocuous moment in Shakespeare’s Henry IV as Jack Cade considers “the skin of an innocent lamb” on which text is written. The essay might be described as an approach to the figure of sheep and the genre of pastoral at a historical moment marked by radical agrarian shifts as a result of enclosure practices. To be sure it is that, but to describe

30

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

it only as such would be to miss its primary intervention, which begins with encouragement from Donna Haraway who claims she has always sought “a much richer web to inhabit than any of the posthumanisms on display after (or in reference) to the ever-deferred demise of man. I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist.” Yates takes up this charge by seeking a “multispecies impression,” a general or generative text that “writes” whole orders of persons, other animals, and the land. Offering “a necessarily stenographic rendering of the story of enclosure in sixteenth century England” he examines the processes by which “human persons” and “sheep” were co-written as part of an ongoing anthropo-zoo-genesis. As a consequence, Yates traces not merely yet one more bestiary of curiosities, which alas much work in so-called animal studies in the Renaissance has descended to. Rather, we might say he investigates the Renaissance as the archive in which is recorded a particularly complex interpenetration of “the human” and “humanism.” “ ‘Human,’ if you like,” he argues, “marks the botched product of a chain of making that fails quite to close the black box of production—requiring instead an awful lot of work and an awful lot of disavowed negative feedback from the animal, plant, mineral, and planetary resources pressed to maintain it. Always, then, from the beginning, from before the beginning, ‘renaissance posthuman/ism,’ indicates that the human is a predatory, mimetic precipitate from one order of propositions that we judge now as badly articulated, inarticulate, and whose articulations we now judge poorly.” For Vin Nardizzi’s “Wooden Actors on the English Renaissance Stage,” the post in posthuman refers not to some sense of belatedness or temporal supersession but rather to an elusive figure in the theatrical archive: the wooden actor whose wooden failure to act well creates unexpected resonance with the wooden post in the playhouse. If grandeur of rhetoric is something we associate with Renaissance humanism just as excellence of acting we associate with the charms of Shakespearean stage, what if we assume, with Nardizzi, that woodenness is not a failure but a revelatory occasion? Woodenness reveals not only the constituent elements of the playhouse, to which materiality Renaissance plays often make reference, but also the human as embedded in woods as much as words. As Nardizzi puts it, a reference to woodenness in Renaissance drama “prompts audiences to imagine the potential indistinction between the wooden post’s

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

31

senselessness and the character’s unmoving body.” To seek for this figure— the wooden actor or the woodenness of acting—is to seek an illuminating disaster, which reveals “the excellent actor as a power ful humanist ‘technology’ that makes humans out of audience members.” Thus the project of “making humans” through excellent oratory and acting was not a practice to be demystified by later posthumanists; rather it was always contradicted from within as from the seeds of a certain humanism grew the “post-humanism” that already rejected a humanist project dedicated to making humans. Diane Wolfthal’s “Beyond Human: Visualizing the Sexuality of Abraham Bosse’s Mandrake” provocatively draws attention to Abraham Bosse’s etching of a mandrake, commissioned by the Royal Society, dated ca. 1650. This defi nitively “posthumanist” (that is, post-Renaissance humanism) and/or “proto-Enlightenment” (that is, a long-eighteenth-century) etching began as part of an attempt “to purge . . . any remnants of superstition and depend instead on observation.” Yet Bosse’s print, which shows the image of a woman’s lower body topped by foliage, proves remarkably similar to an illumination of the Ovidian tale of Apollo and Daphne from Christine de Pizan’s Épitre d’Othéa, which was presented to her patron, Isabella of France ca. 1410–11. The French and the English illustration, from the beginning and end of Renaissance humanism respectively, suggests in Wolfthal’s words “a strange continuity, or at least a recurrent interest, in a monstrous, hybrid, headless female creature.” Wolfthal queries, “Why are the two images so strikingly similar when the earlier one accompanied an interpretation of a classical myth, the later one was commissioned for a scientific text, and the two are separated by nearly 250 years?” Arguing that in medieval and early modern Europe there was no fi xed boundary separating human sexuality from that of plants, Wolfthal asks that twenty-first-century “critical posthumanism,” which thus far has evinced “a lack of interest in gender and sexuality,” look to fifteenth- through seventeenth-century art to “open up the possibility of envisioning additional genders and sexualities, including those that take us beyond the human.” For Wolfthal, as is the case in Dugan’s analysis, both the species-bending logic of the mandrake and all the narratives of humanist learning and scientific progress alike must come to terms with the too-often unexamined ways in which gender and sexed embodiment subtend the possibility of recognizing any form of human or humanism.

32

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

Lara Bovilsky’s “Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions” goes to the heart of Renaissance humanism and shows it to be much stonier— but no less passionate—than historians ever realized. Bovilsky’s reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar surprises with its central insight: “stony imagery does not really imply apathy in this culture, but rather a rich array of emotions.” Emotional stones? Indeed, among other remarkable revaluations of the language in the play, Bovilsky takes the familiar image of the “fl inty heart” and stands it on its head: whereas modern thermodynamics have led us to interpret “flintiness” as synonymous with “unyielding” or “unfeeling,” for Shakespeare and his contemporaries flint “was believed to harbor fire deep within it”—fire that could only be accessed and made available “through vigorous external stimulus.” Flint and other minerals thereby serve as conceptual resources for the play’s and broader culture’s analysis of political action, psychological taxonomies, and ethical philosophy. As Bovilsky puts it, the “play seems especially interested in the problem of ‘kindling’ the mineral bosom: generating emotions where they don’t spontaneously arise and exposing those that may be recalcitrant or concealed.” Caesar’s characters’ “mineral identity” explains their propensity for or resistance to being spurred to political emotion and action, as well as the material foundations of the most intense and difficult emotions humans may feel. Extending historical recovery of the meanings of the fluid humors, Bovilsky shows that early modern affects included solid states as well. In “H is for Humanism,” Joseph Campana considers the relationship between the human, humanity, and humanism through the letter H, the figure of the mirror, and, most potently, that purportedly quintessential figure of humanity: the child. Not only was this figure, the focus of so much humanist concern and, consequently, pedagogy, not precisely human in the Renaissance. More profoundly, the child demonstrates a quality we might call plasticity. Turning to the venerable trope of the mirror—or, as Hamlet might put it, the trope of holding a mirror up to nature—we discover in a series of troubled mirror moments a cascade failure of intelligibility of the human focalized on the child who has the all-too human capacity to infinitely mirror others. Thus, in a range of texts, from Juan Luis Vives’s A Fable About Man to Will Rankin’s anti-theatrical screed A Mirrour for Monsters to William Shakespeare’s metatheatrical Hamlet, man not only defies definition but seems to exist without positive attributes of his own. The fre-

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

33

quently privative accounts of humanity in the Renaissance are not solely instances of what scholars refer to as negative human exceptionalism, or privative accounts of the human.50 They are, in addition, indices of an interest in a kind of radical plasticity exemplified by the child who served to crystallize the species tendencies of the human. That the human is thus always the failure of the human is perhaps no surprise. That the human is thus also the site of constant reparative response—or maintenance— perhaps is similarly no surprise. The plasticity of the child figures an aspirational humanity linked to a radical mimetic impulse that places instances of imitation in a chain of intelligibility stretching from Renaissance humanist pedagogy to the mirror tests, mirror stages, and mirror neurons of posthumanism. Renaissance Posthumanism represents the first edited collection to focus on and to emphasize the humanism in both “Renaissance humanism” and “Posthumanism.” Our hope is not that these essays will fight anthropocentrism one close reading at a time but that they will renew a transhistorical and transcultural conversation—precisely the kind dreamt up by Petrarch and his successors, such as Milton—and rewrite our vision not only of the past but also the future of the humanities.

Notes 1. Gary Gutting, “The Real Humanities Crisis,” The New York Times, November  30, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com /2013/11/30/the -real-humanities-crisis/?_php = true&_type =blogs&_ r = 0. 2. Pramad Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014), 2. 3. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013), 13. 4. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv–xvi. 5. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 47. 6. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 7. 7. Rather, as Cary Wolfe says of critical posthumanists, they took “seriously the concept of autopoiesis—that systems, including bodies, are both open and closed as the very condition of possibility for their existence”— and so for them, as for us, “there can be no talk of purity” (What Is Posthumanism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010], xxiv–xxv).

34

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

8. Henry  S. Turner, “Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare,” South Central Review 26.1–2 (Winter and Spring 2009): 209. 9. W. B. Worthen, “Posthuman Shakespeare Per for mance Studies,” postmedieval 1.1–2 (2010): 221. 10. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, Posthumanist Shakespeares (London: Palgrave, 2012), 55. 11. Wolfe, xv. 12. Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne, “Before the trains of thought have been laid down so firmly: The premodern post/ human.” postmedieval 1.1–2 (2010): 5. As they argue, “the post/ human condition, then, in some respects, is thoroughly modern because of its important relation to certain technological and medical innovations that could not have even been imagined in the past” and yet they also note the persistent neglect of scholarly perspectives from premodern periods “even when that scholarship is concerned, as some of its definitively has been, with issues of the human and the animal, self and subjectivity, cognition and theory of mind, singularity and networks, corporality and embodiment, bare life and sociality, flesh versus machine, and so on” (4, 5). 13. Joy and Dionne, 7. 14. The New Humanists, ed. John Brockman (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003), 1. 15. Ibid., 1–2. 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/ Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 1. 18. Wolfe, xvi. 19. Ibid., xvii. 20. Wolfe, xix; Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ ” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeil (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 249. 21. Ibid., 244. 22. Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/AntiHumanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 46. 23. Heidegger, 255. 24. Donna  J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 367. 25. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 57. 26. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 66. 27. Haraway, 208–9.

Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism

35

28. Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 120. Heidegger, a former Jesuit novitiate who lamented “the fallenness of Dasein” and wrote in his “Letter on Humanism” that “The human being is not the lord of beings . . . [but] the shepherd of being,” had lectured early in his career “on such key Christian figures as St. Paul and St. Augustine.” See Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2007), 6, 24; and Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ ” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 260. 29. Quoted in Agamben, 57. 30. Ibid., 62. 31. Martin Luther, Luther on the Creation: A Critical and Devotional Commentary on Genesis; Based on Dr. Henry Cole’s Translation from the Original Latin, ed. John Nicholas Lenker (Minneapolis: Lutherans in All Lands Company, 1904), 259. 32. John Milton, The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: The Modern Library, 2007), 971. 33. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. The Dominican Friars (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), II-II, Q. 164, art. 2, ad. 9. 34. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Post-human,” http://www.oed.com .ezproxy.rice.edu /view/ Entry/263433?redirectedFrom= posthuman#eid. 35. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–2. 36. Hayles, “After Shocks: Posthuman Ambivalence,” postmedieval 1.1–2 (2010): 263. 37. Rick Gladstone, “Dogs in Heaven? Pope Francis Leaves Pearly Gates Open,” New York Times, December 11, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com /2014/ 12 /12 /world /europe /dogs -in -heaven -pope -leaves -pearly- gate - open -. html ? _ r = 0. 38. All references (to book and line) of Paradise Lost are to John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1998). 39. Agamben, 58. 40. John Milton, Paradise Lost: The Biblically Annotated Edition, ed. Matthew Stallard (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2011), 333. 41. Ibid., 345. 42. Derrida, 29. 43. Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 147. 44. Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 86; Derrida, 31.

36

Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano

45. All references (to book and line) of Paradise Regained are to John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1997). 46. John Milton, “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” in John Milton, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 202. 47. Agamben, 3. 48. Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, Vives, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 74. 49. Quoted in Alastair Hamilton, “Humanists and the Bible” in The Cambridge Companion to Re nais sance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 111. 50. Kenneth Gouwens describes “human exceptionalism” as a calibration of “what made humans distinct from and superior to other earthly creatures” (“Human Exceptionalism” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin [London: Routledge, 2007], 416). Laurie Shannon argues for a related concept of negative human exceptionalism that identifies the human as “a helpless, radically exposed animal that goes on (only) two feet . . . King Lear positions man not as the paragon of creation or even, in Hamlet’s sharp-toothed variant, ‘the paragon of animals’ (2.2.308). Man remains exceptional, certainly, but in King Lear he is creation’s negative exception” (Laurie Shannon, “Poor, Bare, Forked: Human Exceptionalism, Animal Sovereignty, and the Natural History of King Lear” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 no. 2 [2009]: 171, 169).

on e

What Posthumanism Isn’t: On Humanism and Human Exceptionalism in the Renaissance Kenneth Gouwens

As our own historical moment interrogates the boundaries of the human with unprecedented vigor, the emergence or at least popularization of the term “posthumanism” may have been inevitable. Of late, the prefi x “post” seems to hook up promiscuously to just about any concept one wishes: not only to structuralism, modernism, colonialism, and secularism, but even, improbably, to the “contemporary.”1 Whether this proliferation reveals creative transcendence of past thought or instead a forgetfulness or even denial of historical embeddedness, it surely attests to how routine our own moment’s assertions of novelty have become. “Posthumanism” demonstrably has heuristic value for scholars today who are seeking to move beyond entrenched anthropocentrist assumptions. Long after postmodernism has been encapsulated as an attitude or movement distinct to a span of a few decades, posthumanism may well retain salience as a descriptor for an enduring mentalité.2 But the application of the term to the thought and culture of the Renaissance risks creating serious confusion. In fact, for those 37

38

Kenneth Gouwens

seeking to understand conceptions of the human and the animal as articulated by fourteenth- through sixteenth-century intellectuals, “Renaissance Posthumanism” may rank among the least useful categories of analysis. Inasmuch as posthumanism has itself been a contested concept, the scholarly community owes a debt of gratitude to Cary Wolfe for defining and deploying that term with exemplary precision. Thanks to his recent What Is Posthumanism? the way now lies open for rigorous analy sis of how this emergent school of thought stands in relation to humanisms past and present.3 It bears mention, however, that the Renaissance, whether construed as periodic concept or cultural construct, receives negligible attention in Wolfe’s book: In fact, the word does not even appear in its index, nor do the names of canonical Renaissance intellectuals such as Francesco Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Desiderius Erasmus, or Michel de Montaigne.4 This may be understandable in that Wolfe succeeds in covering such a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors and musicians and in situating his conceptual framework with respect to Cartesianism, Marxism, deconstruction, cognitive psychology, and systems theory. Surely it would be a mistake to fault him for not making his book sufficiently expansive or complex. As Vergil wrote, non omnia possumus omnes.5 But for those seeking to define and analyze a distinctly “Renaissance” posthumanism, it is highly problematic that the humanism that Wolfe sets up as a foil resembles only marginally how leading scholars of intellectual and cultural history have used the term with re spect to Eu rope in the period extending roughly from 1250 to 1600. The differences are not mere quibbles: They bear strongly upon how we understand Renaissance thought. That understanding, in turn, may enable us better to comprehend how the “Humanist” movement of that era helped to prepare the way for current discussions of the human, and more generally may prompt us to appreciate our indebtedness to the past for tools and concepts that are too often put forward as unprecedented.6 In identifying a degree of coherence in uses of “humanism,” Wolfe quotes at length from the eponymous Wikipedia entry, including the following lines: Humanism is a broad category of ethical philosophies that affi rm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong

What Posthumanism Isn’t

39

by appeal to universal human qualities—particularly rationality. . . . In focusing on the capacity for self-determination, humanism rejects the validity of transcendental justifications such as a dependence on belief without reason, the super natu ral, or texts of allegedly divine origin. Humanists endorse universal morality based on the commonality of the human condition, suggesting that solutions to human social and cultural problems cannot be parochial.7

One must begin somewhere, and Wikipedia may be as good a place as any to eavesdrop on the Zeitgeist as it rattles its chains in the subbasement of contemporary (surely not “post-contemporary”) consciousness. But with respect to the Humanist movement in Renaissance Eu rope, it is wildly misleading. While many Renaissance intellectuals at times celebrated the dignity of humankind and appealed to the authority of reason, those were but some of the philosophical positions they advocated. These positions were not universally accepted tenets, and indeed were explicitly contravened in works by some of the key thinkers who have been appropriated as poster-boys for anthropological optimism. Second, contrary to the Wikipedian definition, the vast majority of Renaissance Humanists did in fact believe in transcendental justifications and in the partial revelation of divine truth: What they often doubted was their ability to discern that truth with precision, and they struggled with how to apply it constructively in particular situations. Third, following Aquinas and the consensus of Christian theological opinion, by and large they believed that human reason was incapable of empirically proving many of those beliefs that they held upon the authority of the Church. Fourth, with respect to Renaissance Humanists, the claim that “solutions to human social and cultural problems cannot be parochial” is exactly wrong. Instead, one finds a rhetorically based emphasis on the particularity of moral action in discrete situations, a position well articulated in the fourteenth century by Petrarch and widely shared by succeeding generations of Humanists. Wolfe’s own passing references to the Renaissance are similarly misleading. In particular, by treating Foucault’s Renaissance “episteme” as defi nitive, he reifies an interpretation that leading intellectual historians have utterly discredited.8 The present essay will first of all survey influential interpretations of Renaissance Humanism and highlight how it differs from other historical movements that have been termed “humanism.” Next, the essay will detail

40

Kenneth Gouwens

some of the conceptions of human dignity that Humanists articulated in the mid-fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Thereupon it describes how Renaissance thinkers, despite their near-universal acceptance of there being a clear boundary between humans and animals, at times explored the theoretical possibility of that boundary being permeable— a move that was in fact integral to their revival of ancient thought, not a rejection of that heritage. In closing, the essay argues that renewed attention to Renaissance Humanism can enrich current efforts to move decisively beyond the domination of the academy by Enlightenment rationalism, now doing so not only with the vigor of Foucault but with the rigor of systematic scholarly inquiry and documentation.

What Was Renaissance Humanism? Conceptions of humanism in the western tradition are readily traced to classical antiquity.9 Etymologically, “humanism” derives from the Latin humanus, meaning “whatever is characteristic of human beings, proper to man,” but in antiquity the word also had “two more specific meanings, namely ‘benevolent’ and ‘learned.’ ”10 In medieval Latin, humanus as “learned” fell out of usage, a gap reflected today: “In no modern language does a ‘humane’ person signify a ‘learned’ person.”11 For many classical authors, however, and in turn for the Renaissance Humanists, being learned was integral to being fully human.12 Following Cicero, the Humanists often stated that speech is what sets humans apart from animals: Eloquent speech, Cicero had claimed, first gave birth to civilization and has ensured its continuance; and humanae litterae, a written depository and vehicle of speech, serve as the foundation of learning.13 Yet when the term humanista appeared in fifteenth-century Italy, it had “no particular emphasis on all the values entailed by the Latin term humanus in its broadest sense,” but instead meant simply someone who taught what today we might call the classical tradition.14 As Giustiniani laments, “This meaning is unfortunately not familiar today to most people writing about humanism.”15 Prominent scholars of Renaissance thought, above all Paul Oskar Kristeller, have shared this lament and criticized the vagueness with which the term has been deployed. His influential solution was to sever its defini-

What Posthumanism Isn’t

41

tion from any given philosophical school or position: “I should like to understand Renaissance [H]umanism, at least in its origin and in its typical representatives, as a broad cultural and literary movement, which in its substance was not philosophical, but had important philosophical implications and consequences.”16 These Humanists tended to be professional rhetoricians, serving either as teachers of grammar and rhetoric or as notaries in princely or communal governments. They advocated a wide-ranging cultural and education program centered on the studia humanitatis—grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy—training in each of which included the study of Greek, and especially Latin, classical texts. Kristeller acknowledged that many Humanists did voice belief in the dignity of humankind and the importance of individual experience. But one looks in vain for someone being identified as a humanista on the grounds that he espoused such views. While Kristeller’s defi nition has provided a baseline for others’ refi nements, it tells us little about what made Humanism a culturally influential movement in the Renais sance. As William Bouwsma wrote in 1975, inasmuch as Kristeller’s definition “depends on the identification of a kind of lowest common denominator for [H]umanism, it may also have the unintended effect of reducing our perception of its rich variety and thus of limiting our grasp of its historical significance.”17 A key element missing from it is Humanists’ widely shared view that the encounter with antiquity could yield impor tant benefits for their own era. They believed that the pursuit of eloquence— persuasive rhetoric infused with moral purpose— could enable them to work positive change upon not only themselves but the society in which they lived.18 For pedagogues such as Guarino Guarini da Verona (1374–1460), this meant edifying the children of the elite to become responsible and effective in governing the state.19 Moreover, the values that Humanist education aimed to instill, when not explicitly Christian, were usually treated as complementary to Christian ity. Thus Guarino argued that his charges needed to know classical literature in order to understand the Church Fathers aright (Augustine, after all, had been a professional rhetorician before his conversion). In addition, he required that they regularly attend mass and go to confession. It was exceedingly rare for Humanists to advocate agnosticism, let alone atheism as the word is now used. 20

42

Kenneth Gouwens

Unsurprisingly, a yawning chasm existed between the claims of the most entrepreneurial pedagogues and the goods they actually delivered, a point made to withering effect by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine.21 From the outset, many of those educated in more traditional disciplines such as theology pointed to what they perceived as the severe limitations of Humanists’ classicizing. 22 Nor were they entirely wrong. When the Florentine Humanist Leonardo Bruni translated Plato and Aristotle into Latin, he made a hash of things, not least because of his innocence of the technical language used by philosophers over the centuries.23 By the sixteenth century, northern Eu ropean theologians including Noél Beda and Vadian were actually using the word humanista derisively, as a label for aspiring practitioners of the studia humanitatis whose lack of education in Scholastic methods and learning could make them look very foolish indeed.24 Those with both Humanistic and Scholastic training could be the most formidable critics of scholars who possessed only the former, as the distinctly second-rate Ciceronian stylist Pietro Alcionio (ca. 1480s?–1528) found out to his chagrin.25 In April of 1521, Alcionio published with the Aldine Press in Venice a volume comprising several translations of Aristotle, including ten books from the phi losopher’s writings about animals. The following year, however, he came under direct fire from the prominent Spanish scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573). Best known today for a later polemic in which he asserted on Aristotelian grounds that the Indians of the New World were natural slaves, Sepúlveda was deeply learned not only in classical philosophy but also in Humanist methods. Later on, in fact, the Emperor Charles V would appoint him his official chronicler. When Alcionio’s Aristotle appeared in 1521, Sepúlveda had already long been at work on a translation of the very same ten books on animals. Miffed at having been scooped, he proceeded to publish in 1522 a brief tract devoted expressly to highlighting Alcionio’s infelicities and errors.26 A rumor subsequently spread that, in an attempt to reduce the tract’s circulation, Alcionio himself had purchased as many copies as he could and burned them.27 The work itself, of which only one copy is known to have survived, is scathing: Like Bruni before him, Alcionio was out of his depth. Many, if not most, Humanists were not all that good at what they did, whether they were too slavish in imitating classical models, too ignorant of philosophy, insufficiently sensitive to theological nuance, or, as in Alcionio’s case, all of the above.28

What Posthumanism Isn’t

43

Nonetheless, even for the also-rans, immersion in ancient texts and imitation of the literary styles they encountered there prompted the development of a conceptual vocabulary that, when applied to the quite dif ferent values and circumstances of their own times, enabled them to think in new ways.29 While their effort to revivify classical and early Christian thought and practice in their own cultural context was intrinsically anachronistic, it stimulated innovation and, paradoxically, led to a new awareness of anachronism itself. Especially but not exclusively in the cases of individuals of outsized talent, the revival of antiquity thus fostered what is now called conceptual blending: a process that, as Fauconnier and Turner have argued, is the very stuff of creativity.30 Certainly the Renaissance Humanists themselves never invested humanista with anything approaching that sophistication. The word Humanismus came to be deployed with theoretical precision in 1808, when the German pedagogue Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer used it to refer to a curriculum consisting of the Greek and Roman classics that he believed should be instituted in secondary schools.31 Only in the 1840s, in the writings of Karl Hagen and of Georg Voigt, would Humanismus be used to denote “a historical event and an intellectual phenomenon in association with the Renaissance.”32 Voigt, in particular, developed a sophisticated conception of a movement he saw as beginning with Petrarch, whose recovery of the wisdom of antiquity (represented above all by Cicero and by Augustine) gave him the perspective to critique the Scholastic education of his own time. Most significantly, Voigt saw Petrarch as appropriating his ancient learning to become a champion of a new individualism.33 Much in Voigt has been superseded. For example, Ronald Witt has detailed how the Humanist movement began two generations before Petrarch, whose “individualism” (if such it was) bore little resemblance to nineteenth- and twentieth- century conceptions of that term.34 Voigt also too readily dismissed Humanists’ imitation of classical Latin as retrograde. Writing in an era of surging national sentiment, he believed that by investing so heavily in a non-native language, the Humanists had impeded the development of the vernacular that would be essential for the formation of a vibrant Italian national culture. Contra Voigt, subsequent research has established just how creative Humanism was as a cultural force.35 Nonetheless, Voigt must be credited with establishing the scholarly view of

44

Kenneth Gouwens

Humanism as a movement characteristic of the Renaissance, both in Italy and throughout Eu rope, that was distinguished by its appropriation of classical and early Christian antiquity. Already in the late eighteenth century, however, the French humanisme had come into use as a philosophical term unrelated to classical erudition, instead meaning a special regard for humankind, and soon the German Humanismus was deployed in a similar sense.36 Subsequent philosophers from Feuerbach to Marx to Heidegger worked their changes upon that definition: What, they asked, was humankind, and how could the “being” of a human become most fully realized?37 Presumably, Marx would have found congenial the dismissal of “transcendental justifications” in the Wikipedia entry. Certainly he would have had no use for the extensive Biblical scholarship in which many prominent Renaissance Humanists, above all Valla and Erasmus, engaged, which bore fruit in works of lasting significance.38 Neither would the Humanist Manifesto, published in the United States in 1933. Signed by thirty-four intellectuals, including the educational reformer John Dewey, this work was (in Giustiniani’s words) “an effort to replace traditional religious beliefs by stalwart confidence in our capability to achieve moral perfection and happiness along the lines and within the limits of our earthly nature.”39 The super natu ral and transcendental are replaced, in effect, with an endorsement and celebration of the individual and the goal of establishing “a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently co-operate for the common good.”40 Here, at last, is something that approaches the Wikipedian definition against which Wolfe positions posthumanism. But this kind of humanism, widely familiar today, fits so poorly with Renaissance thought that any application of the term “posthumanism” to the Renaissance ought only to be essayed with explicit recognition of its potential for anachronism.

Renaissance Conceptions of Human Dignity and Misery That many Renaissance Humanists articulated an optimistic view of the specialness of human dignity is not in question. In the later twentieth century, Charles Trinkaus wrote of fifteenth-century Italian Humanism that “it has been difficult to escape the sense of a gradual and powerful predominance

What Posthumanism Isn’t

45

of what is possibly the most affirmative view of human nature in the history of thought and expression. In making trial of his powers, man comes to be seen more as manifesting his inherent divinity than as risking the danger of transformation into the beast.” 41 In nearly a thousand densely packed pages of labyrinthine prose, Trinkaus documented this position with lengthy quotations, paraphrases, and analyses of major works by over a dozen thinkers, including Petrarch, Valla, and Pico. For Trinkaus, the contribution of Christian antiquity was central to the Humanists’ optimism. He highlights the importance to medieval and Renaissance thinkers of Augustine’s reading of Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” 42 For Augustine, man’s soul has been created in God’s image. By his intellect he rules over the animals, and his erect posture, which facilitates looking skywards, symbolizes his capacity for contemplating the divine.43 That these lines echo Cicero should not surprise: for, the converted Augustine believed that when properly appropriated, the treasures of pagan thought and expression could enrich Christianity.44 A century earlier, another influential theologian, Lactantius (ca. 240– ca. 320), in his De opificio Dei, had based his conception of human dignity not upon Genesis but upon the second book of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, from which he proceeded to draw conclusions that were congenial to Christianity.45 Lactantius, in particular, provided a model for how Renaissance Humanists could put to Christian use the writings and ideas of the “virtuous” pagans.46 Pico’s so-called “Oration on the Dignity of Man” represents a high point of eclecticism in its appropriation of non-Christian works from antiquity in the ser vice of what he conceived as a Christian enterprise. Here Pico drew upon not only patristic and classical precedents but also the Hebrew Cabala and Hermetic texts. More often than not, this work has been taken as an unqualified assertion of anthropological optimism. Among its most-cited lines is the following: “We [i.e., God] have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.”47 Such passages, indeed, have

46

Kenneth Gouwens

frequently been taken as a synopsis of Humanist thought. Thus, a leading authority on humans’ relationship to animals in Renaissance England has even referred to Pico’s “Oration” as the “manifesto” of Humanism.48 Closer examination of Pico’s oration, however, reveals a less sanguine appraisal of human nature. In a series of important articles, Brian Copenhaver has shown how badly German Enlightenment philosophers and their later followers, notably Ernst Cassirer, misrepresented the work. Incorrectly believing that De hominis dignitate (Concerning the Dignity of the Human Being) was the title Pico gave to the text, Cassirer cast him as (in Copenhaver’s words) “the thoroughly liberated pre-Kantian thinker who set philosophy on its progressive course”; he was “humanity’s encomiast and also its liberator; he put his mark on Renaissance thought with praise for human liberty and the ‘glorification of man.’ ” 49 On the contrary, Copenhaver asserts, the work’s aim was quite literally “a kind of death, the extinction of the self achieved by the mystic who ascends to union with God.”50 Its “opening hymn to free choice concludes that one must choose the Cherubic life and rise finally to the Seraphic blaze of divine union, a journey open only to those who abandon the body and flee the world.”51 Far from being an anthropocentric idealist, Pico here writes as a Christian ascetic seeking to escape earthly enfleshment. A select few of the cognoscenti—by no means a majority of humankind— could ascend within this lifetime to the level of the angels, but even they could do so only briefly, and never without divine assistance. This more austere vision turns out to have been integral to Pico’s thought.52 In his Sonnet 32, probably written years before the “Oration,” he framed an invocation of being created in God’s likeness with an unambiguous portrayal of frailty and absolute dependence: If, Lord, you elected me for heaven, Let Love no longer put me off from there, Nor let the skyward street be useless to me And gates of Pluto worthlessly broke through. You know that Death rules over all of us, that seven times a day the just man falls, that pleasant scenes are happy for the senses, that I am weak, the adversary strong. You know that you have shaped me with your seal, my Lord, in miracle and godlike mastery,

What Posthumanism Isn’t

47

and breathed the breath of life into my face. Therefore ignite my heart with love and faith And look for me if from the path I stray, You the shepherd, I the wandering sheep.53

Near the end of his life, Pico became an ardent follower of the austere friar Girolamo Savonarola, from whom he would receive the Dominican habit as he lay dying. When the “oration” is read with care and set in the context of Pico’s oeuvre, his late engagement with Savonarolan reform evidences not a rejection of past ideals, but instead an inflection of spiritual concerns that he had wrestled with and written about for quite some time.54 Like Pico, many other Renaissance intellectuals exhibited a profound awareness of their infirmity and imperfection and at times wallowed in the slough of human misery. Not infrequently, they viewed study itself as contributing to their deep unhappiness. Thus Petrarch’s own enthusiasms about human possibility were tempered with self-doubt, pessimism, and profound melancholy. Significantly, this melancholy (accidia) is not “the vice defined by scholastic theology and berated by popular preachers,” but instead “is related uniquely, if not exclusively, to the pursuit of learning and wisdom.”55 His follower Giovanni Conversino da Ravenna (d. 1408) proceeded to write a tract On the Misery of Human Life. And, the foremost Platonist in fifteenthcentury Florence, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), who suffered from what today might be diagnosed as severe depression, wrote eloquently in Three Books on Life of the “special enemies of scholars”—a list that included sexual intercourse, phlegm, and sleeping in the morning—and he suggested physiological remedies that could ameliorate one’s condition so long as one believed in their efficacy.56 But if scholarly pursuits placed men at par tic u lar risk of falling into extreme unhappiness, for all these writers a degree of misery was the natu ral condition of postlapsarian humankind when unaided by grace. For Ficino, religious despair itself was an affl iction that presented physiological symptoms to the Humanist doctor of souls.57 In fashioning this interpretation, Ficino drew extensively upon classical and early Christian authors, but in a way characteristic of the most brilliant of Humanists he creatively appropriated that material, blending concepts inherited from antiquity with the forms of piety and theology dominant in his own historical moment.

48

Kenneth Gouwens

Once proper weight is given to the religious investment of fifteenthcentury Humanists, the involvement of their successors in Protestant and Catholic reform does not surprise. Many of Martin Luther’s influential supporters and protégés were Humanists—most notably his successor Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), who corresponded with Erasmus for years and, unlike his mentor, remained sympathetic to him.58 Moreover, Humanists’ appreciation of historical embeddedness and their methods of textual criticism had a significant, arguably decisive impact upon Luther’s theological development.59 In 1520, he read with approval Valla’s tract denouncing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery, and he saw Valla as a precursor. He also enthusiastically adopted Erasmus’s edition of the New Testament in Greek— a book that at least fostered if not provoked criticism of theological tenets that had been built upon the Latin Vulgate.60 Of course, Luther’s soteriology differed drastically from that of Erasmus, and the latter never rejected the papacy itself. Both men, however, sought to reform their own times by the recovery and study of better texts of the Scriptures, by the reading of early Church Fathers including Augustine, and by returning the institutional Church to a purer, pre-medieval form. In addition, although they differed sharply in their evaluation of which classical authors were worth reading and of their usefulness in matters of theology, both thought it edifying to read Cicero and ancient historians.61 In Luther’s time, Humanists also figured prominently in Catholicism, both as functionaries in the papal bureaucracy and in many cases as champions of ethical and religious reform.62 Upon his election as pope in 1513, Leo X appointed two outstanding Ciceronian stylists, Pietro Bembo and Jacopo Sadoleto, as his domestic secretaries, and both would later be elevated to the cardinalate. In 1536, the panel of high-ranking churchmen that Pope Paul III (1534–49) appointed to assess the condition of the Church included not only Sadoleto but several other noted Humanists, including Reginald Pole of England and Gasparo Contarini of Venice, who served as its chairman.63 In 1539, Sadoleto famously (if unsuccessfully) wrote to the citizens of Geneva urging them to rejoin the Catholic fold.64 Two years later, Contarini served as papal legate to the ill-fated colloquy of Catholics and Protestants held in Regensburg.65 And, in the conclave following Paul III’s death in 1549, Pole was nearly elected pope. Their visions of reform did not carry the day.66 The Council of Trent (1545–63) gave unprecedented precision to

What Posthumanism Isn’t

49

the definition of orthodoxy on numerous points, and the Index of Prohibited Books promulgated in its aftermath included all of Erasmus’s works.67 Nonetheless, Humanist pedagogy and Latinity remained important. For example, Jesuit educational programs gave special prominence to Cicero; and his orations would remain a model for sermons preached before the popes.68 By the mid-1500s, however, the intellectual ecology of Eu rope was no longer suited to the kind of open-ended dialogue that Humanists had long championed.69 A century earlier, Humanists had enjoyed a culture of disputatio (disputation) in which learning was approached rhetorically. Their underlying mentality, as Christopher Celenza describes it, was inherently antidogmatic; it was “an agonistic way of thinking in which the public arena decides truth”; and it treated ambiguity as something that need not always be shunned.70 Thus, one could float a range of conflicting views without having to resolve the contradictions or even necessarily take sides.71 In the decades following Luther’s excommunication (1521), however, as learned discussions throughout Eu rope increasingly centered on establishing the absolute validity of fi xed points of theological interpretation, Humanist disputatio looked to be off-task. Meanwhile, Petrus Ramus assailed Humanists’ assumptions about eloquence: He directly attacked Quintilian’s assertion that the perfect orator must be a good man, a claim integral to Humanism and indeed to Erasmus’s philosophia Christi.72 Montaigne would question all of these assumptions, yet in the genre of the essay would model a new way for Humanists to draw upon classical erudition in their pursuit of useful knowledge of themselves and of the world.73

Renaissance Humanists on Distinguishing Men from Beasts Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the wide scope of opinions on the animal/ human divide among the ancients, who in turn bequeathed that rich legacy to the Renaissance.74 For the most part, they asserted humans’ superiority over the beasts. Thus, Aristotle, who allowed to animals some kind of phronesis (practical wisdom), maintained that they lack logos (whether that be taken as “reason” or as “speech”). They do not have the nous, unique to the human “soul”; and, while they are capable of vocalizing so as to communicate to their own kind about what is painful and what is pleasurable,

50

Kenneth Gouwens

words are not involved in that process, which cannot rise to the level of language.75 The Stoics drew the contrast more sharply. Consider Chrysippus (ca. 280–ca. 207 b.c.e.), whose famous metaphor of the dog and the cart, which he deployed to illustrate the relationship between free will and providence, tends to strike undergraduates today as gratuitously sadistic. As head of the Stoic school after the death of Cleanthes, Chrysippus may be the source for the centrally important tenet of later Stoicism that non-human species did not possess reason. For him, the hegemonikon, or “governing principle,” which was one of the eight constituent parts of the “soul” that human and non-human animals shared, was restricted in animals to their life, sensation, and impulse.76 Seneca (ca. 4 b.c.e.–65 c.e.) would press a harder case: The capacity for reason, he argued, is specific to man and, “when correct and complete, makes his happiness total.”77 Yet the Renaissance recovery of ancient texts facilitated renewed attention not only to the dominant voices that had championed human exceptionalism, but also to dissonant ones that had challenged human presumption to specialness and correspondingly elevated animals. In a tract entitled Whether Beasts Are Rational, Plutarch creatively retold the episode in book ten of The Odyssey in which Circe turned Odysseus’s men into pigs. In Plutarch’s version, one of these creatures, named Gryllus (which might be rendered “Oinker,” or, in honor of Orwell, “Squealer”), declined to be made human again on the grounds of his conviction that animals were superior to people. In another work, On the Cleverness of Animals, Plutarch argued more seriously that animals possess reason— and that it differs from human reason only in quantity, not quality. Also, in a work advocating vegetarianism, he asserted that animals actually do have language: Humans simply lack the ability to understand it. These ancient texts had a clear and significant impact upon sixteenth- century Humanism. Girolamo Rorario, who served as a nuncio for popes Clement VII and Paul III, rather freely appropriated much from Plutarch in his own Latin dialogue that similarly claimed, evidently whimsically, that animals use reason better than humans do.78 A mere five years later, Giambattista Gelli of Florence, in his Circe, followed in the same vein, though he modified the pessimism about human nature by having a phi losopher in the group, who had been turned into an elephant, ultimately acquiesce to being returned to human form.79

What Posthumanism Isn’t

51

Montaigne’s questioning of human exceptionalism in his Apology for Raymond Sebond (begun 1575) is probably more serious and certainly more poignant. Amidst proffering challenges to the reliability of perception, he writes: “The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant.”80 He even suggests of animals that “[i]t is a matter of guesswork whose fault it is that we do not understand one another; for we do not understand them any more than they do us. By this same reasoning they may consider us beasts, as we consider them.”81 But Montaigne’s commitment to this line of thought must not be overstated. For example, in the essay Of cruelty, written precisely when he was completing the Apology (1578–80), he states explicitly: “As for that cousinship between us and the animals, I do not put much stock in it. . . .”82 Thus his portrayal of animals’ reason did not extend so far as Descartes’s scathing critique of him on that point might lead one to believe.83 Nonetheless, in both these essays he put into play questions about the beasts’ resemblance to humans, and especially in the Apology he made potentially destabilizing observations about nonhuman animals having a capacity for rational thought and feeling and perhaps even a ludic sensibility: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”84 Significantly, no less than the assertions of human exceptionalism that Montaigne called into question, so too his own skeptical interrogation of them was indebted to classical models. In constructing his “new Pyrrhonism,” he drew extensively and creatively upon Sextus Empiricus, whose writings had appeared in Latin translations in 1562 and 1569.85 Perhaps mainly so as to annoy the Stoics, Sextus, like Plutarch before him, had attributed both reason and language to animals. Thus, if the revival of antiquity bequeathed to Renaissance intellectuals the building-blocks for their own master narratives, it also equipped them with some powerful tools and techniques for dismantling and arguably at times transcending those very narratives. To be sure, the assertion of human exceptionalism in Aristotle and Cicero had far greater influence on Renaissance thought, and in that respect could be cited alongside the Bible with its unambiguous statements on the subject. Ficino, for all his efforts to allegorize Plato and to incorporate classical wisdom within his Christian philosophy, was utterly explicit in defining the contemplation of the divine as the key element that distinguishes humans from beasts: “if man qua man is the most perfect of mortal

52

Kenneth Gouwens

animals, he is the most perfect of all especially on account of that gift, religion, which belongs to him alone and is not shared with other animals; therefore he is most perfect because of religion.” 86 Nonetheless, the minority reports of Plutarch and Sextus helped open the way to the questioning of human exceptionalism in Rorario, Gelli, and Montaigne.87

A Way Forward Far from being captured (whether or not they were conscious of it) in an episteme that served as a prison-house for thought and expression, Renaissance Humanists found in their revival of classical culture a means for historicizing, challenging, and transforming the culture of their own time. The dynamics of this development remain a subject of vigorous scholarly debate that has not resolved into a totalizing schema— a lack of closure that the Humanists themselves would have seen as a sign of vitality, and of the provisional success that typified their dialogical approach to the pursuit of truth. But there may now be an emergent consensus, at least among intellectual historians, on three major points. In the first place, the Renaissance recovery of antiquity may be conceived as more liberating than constraining. There was no totalizing episteme of Platonism to superintend or even straitjacket Humanists’ minds. On the contrary, as Ian Maclean has established and meticulously documented, “Aristotelianism, not Platonism, is the appropriate context in which to see the dominant universe of discourse of the day and . . . this philosophy can be shown to possess the resources for escaping its limitations.”88 The Scholastic tradition flourished into the seventeenth century: It did not simply disappear when the Humanists arrived upon the scene, and the innovations even of the Florentine Platonists had to be worked out in part against this backdrop. Pico della Mirandola showed himself capable of holding his own, if not triumphing, in debates both with other Humanists and with Scholastic theologians, and he shifted nimbly between the languages and modes of analysis of the two idioms.89 In short, the revival of antiquity, both classical and Christian, actually provided alternative modes for thought and expression that coexisted, and at times could blend creatively, with those that had become entrenched in the High Middle Ages. Antiquity be-

What Posthumanism Isn’t

53

queathed to the Humanists a conceptual vocabulary for understanding their own era in unforeseen ways.90 Thus, in analyzing how Lorenzo Valla read and appropriated Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, Anthony Grafton, a scholar critical of roseate idealizations of Renaissance Humanism, highlighted the potential of commerce with the classics to foster new insight in the best of minds: “The ancient text helped the modern reader to bend, even to break, what others defined as the restrictive rules of a classical genre. Valla’s library . . . was no hortus conclusus.”91 A second point of consensus is that Christian beliefs and values gave a distinctive shape to the Renaissance reception of the past. In seeking to resolve the confrontation of classical paganism and Christianity, the Humanists could appropriate a template from Late Antiquity: for, the early Church Fathers, both Latin and Greek, had struggled with how to reconcile Athens with Jerusalem.92 It is no mere accident that Petrarch carried with him a copy of the Confessions of Augustine, and that Pico’s vaunted oration drew substantially upon a text written by Nemesius of Emessa—both models being venerable bishops who had flourished around the year 400 c.e.. While Montaigne liked to strike the pose of the skeptic who refrains from judgment, even in the Apology he gave a nod to that religious faith which does not depend upon human sensation or reasoning for its validation. Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which appeared in 1860, somehow persists in persuading many non-specialists that Renaissance Humanist culture was essentially pagan. But that is emphatically not the dominant view among those who have actually worked in the field over the past half century. Finally, scholars agree in attributing importance to the social practice of disputation, which found concrete expression in written dialogues. For all the vitriol and pettiness that could pervade their learned debates, Humanists shared a belief in the power of rhetoric not only to persuade, but to help one assess what constituted moral action in discrete situations, to explore the particularity of human interaction, and to accommodate the provisional quality of one’s approaches to comprehending truth.93 In the later sixteenth century, when the exigencies of doctrinal correctness had reduced the scope for open-ended interchange, Montaigne invented a new genre that enabled the continuation, in monologic form, of the Humanistic exploration of the self and the world. The univocality of the essay should not prevent us from

54

Kenneth Gouwens

recognizing the role it gave to internal dialogue. Like Petrarch, Montaigne looked for provisional truths as manifested in particular situations, and he did so by combining what he learned through his own experience with a conversation (if an internalized, actively imagined one) with the ancients.94

Conclusion The time may be at hand for postmoderns to imitate the intellectual model of Renaissance Humanists. The “openness from close” that Cary Wolfe identifies as vital to the project of posthumanism was in many respects integral to Renaissance thought, not antithetical to it. Like the Renaissance Humanists, we too confront an uncertain intellectual landscape in which one has to forge a path amidst competing discourses and incommensurable approaches to the truth.95 Such terrain, whatever its pitfalls, may prove an invaluable site for creativity and innovation. Following the example of the Renaissance Humanists, we too may benefit from grounding our understandings of the present by creatively juxtaposing those conceptions, be they ever so posthumanist, in a responsible reconstruction of what has come before— a past whose relevance for us may, after all, be such that it figures as more than just a genealogical antecedent.96

Notes 1. For example, Duke University Press publishes a book series entitled PostContemporary Interventions. 2. Interestingly, K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), has traced posthumanism back to the architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. 3. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), especially xi–xxvi. 4. The philosopher and theologian Nicholas of Cusa (1404–64) is one of the few fifteenth-century figures to make cameo appearances, but the highly influential literati Leonardo Bruni (the best-selling author of the fifteenth century), Marsilio Ficino, and Angelo Poliziano do not. The most conspicuous omission

What Posthumanism Isn’t

55

may be Pico, whose so-called Oration on the Dignity of Man is often misconstrued as a battle-cry of Renaissance Humanism. See the discussion that follows. 5. Vergil, Bucolica, Eclogue 8.63 (“we cannot all [do] all things”). Although Wolfe discusses Aristotle’s treatise on animals, Vergil does not appear in his index, nor does Plato. 6. In the text that follows, “Humanism” and “Humanist” with a capital “H” refer specifically to an intellectual movement of the Renaissance that has been identified with that name. When “humanism” and “humanist” appear without the initial letter capitalized, they refer more broadly to deployments of the word without specific reference to the Renaissance. 7. Wolfe, xi. As of this writing, the online entry remains wide-ranging but is laudable in that it notes the difference between modern usages of “humanism” and the historian Georg Voigt’s use of Humanismus to describe the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance. On Voigt, see Paul F. Grendler, “Georg Voigt: Historian of Humanism,” in Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, ed. Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 295–325. 8. Wolfe, xv. See the discussion of Ian Maclean’s work in the material that follows. For Foucault’s description of “humanism” in its myriad forms, see “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 44–5. 9. The bibliography on this subject is vast. The present essay draws in particular upon a pithy survey by a distinguished philologist: Vito R. Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of ‘Humanism,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 167–95. For a useful summary of the place of Renaissance Humanism in American academia in the twentieth century, see Jennifer Summit, “Renaissance Humanism and the Future of the Humanities,” Literature Compass 9/10 (2012): 665–78. 10. Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus,” 168. 11. Ibid. 12. See the thorough entry on “humanitas” in Neulateinische Wortliste: Ein Wörterbuch des Lateinischen von Petrarca bis 1700, ed. Johann Ramminger (2010; online at www.neulatein.de). 13. Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus,” 169 (close paraphrase); Kenneth Gouwens, “Human Exceptionalism,” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin (London: Routledge, 2007), 415–34. 14. Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus,” 171. 15. Ibid. 16. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Humanist Movement,” in Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 3–23, at 22. See also Kristeller (1951), 95: “By [H]umanism we mean merely the

56

Kenneth Gouwens

general tendency of the age to attach the greatest importance to classical studies, and to consider classical antiquity as the common standard and model by which to guide all cultural activities.” For reasons of concision, the present essay passes over silently several major twentieth-century scholars of Renaissance Humanism including Giovanni Gentile and Eugenio Garin. For the significance of their interpretations with respect to Kristeller, see Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 16–57; James Hankins, “Two Twentieth- Century Interpreters of Renaissance Humanism: Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller,” in Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003), 1:573– 90. For pithy syntheses that move beyond Kristeller’s definition, see Ronald G. Witt, “The Humanist Movement,” in Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 2: 93–125; and the entry on “Humanism” by Christopher S. Celenza in The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 462–7. 17. William  J. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Transformations, ed. Heiko A. Oberman with Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (Leiden: Brill, 1975) 3–60, at 3. 18. For a now-classic statement of this position, see Hanna H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 497–514. 19. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth- Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 1–28, goes farther, describing Guarino’s school as preparing elite youth for their preordained role as members of the ruling class. For a measured corrective, see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), esp. 407–10. 20. For distinctions between early modern conceptions of atheism and how the term is used today, see Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 164–75. As James Hankins explains, Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) “clearly understands atheism in the broader, early modern sense of the word that includes not only persons who disbelieve in the existence of God, but persons who reject the dogmas and moral tenets of traditional Christian ity, either mainstream Protestantism or Roman Catholicism.” James Hankins, “Monstrous Melancholy: Ficino and the Physiological Causes of Atheism,” in Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and His

What Posthumanism Isn’t

57

Infl uence, ed. Stephen Clucas, Peter  J. Forshaw, and Valery Rees (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 25–43, at 27. 21. Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism, make this case with par tic u lar forcefulness, for example, in the introduction, xiv–xvi. 22. See, for example, Petrarch’s aggressive response to such critics in his famous invective, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr.  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 49–133. 23. James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 1: 29–81. 24. Johann Ramminger, “ ‘Nur ein Humanist . . .’: Einige neue Beispiele für humanista im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Renaessanceforum 3 (2007), 1–24 (www .renaessanceforum.dk). See also Carlo Dionisotti, “Ancora humanista-umanista,” in Studi in memoria di Paola Medioli Masotti (Naples: Loffredo Editore, [1995]), 67–71. 25. On Alcionio and his feud with Sepúlveda, see Kenneth Gouwens and Christopher S. Celenza, “Humanist Culture and Its Malcontents: Alcionio, Sepúlveda, and the Consequences of Translating Aristotle,” in Humanism and Creativity in the Re naissance, 347–80, with extensive further bibliography. 26. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Errata P. Alcyonii in interpretatione Aristotelis (Bologna: n.p., 1522). 27. Gouwens and Celenza, “Humanist Culture,” 351. Although the rumor may well be unfounded, for several centuries the work was believed lost. In 1992, I found a copy bound in with other texts, in the Marciana Library in Venice (call number 136.D.34.2). 28. For an account of Alcionio’s hyper-classicizing sermon delivered in the papal court and the ridicule with which it was greeted, see Kenneth Gouwens, “Ciceronianism and Collective Identity: Defi ning the Boundaries of the Roman Academy, 1525,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 173–95. 29. Kenneth Gouwens, “Perceiving the Past: Renaissance Humanism after the ‘Cognitive Turn,’ ” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 55–82. 30. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2003). For an application of their theories to Renaissance intellectual history, see Kenneth Gouwens, “Erasmus, ‘Apes of Cicero,’ and Conceptual Blending,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 71 (2010): 523–45. 31. Celenza, “Humanism,” 462; Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus,” 172 n.26; Lewis W. Spitz, “The Renaissance: Humanism and Humanism Research,” in Spitz, Luther and German Humanism (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 1996), essay I (pp. 1–31), at 1.

58

Kenneth Gouwens

32. Quotation from Spitz, “The Renaissance,” 1. See also Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 156–9 (on Hagen); 159–63 (on Voigt). 33. Grendler, “Georg Voigt,” 309. 34. Ronald G. Witt, “In the Footsteps of the Ancients”: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), especially 230–91 (Chapter Six: “Petrarch, Father of Humanism?”). 35. With respect to the fifteenth century, see Celenza, Lost Italian Renaissance, with discussion of Voigt at 10–11. 36. Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus,” 175, including reference (at n.38) to a 1765 journal article that included the following line: “L’amour géneral de l’humanité . . . vertu qui n’a point de nom parmi nous et que nous oserions appeler ‘humanisme’, puisqu’enfi n il est temps de créer un mot pour une chose si belle et nécessaire. . . .” 37. Ibid., 175–7 at 176, notes that “[i]n the Marxist view, humanism is human fulfillment and perfection, the natural aspiration of all who are thwarted from achieving it by economic need and workers’ exploitation, the inherent evils of all societies from their beginnings. By removing these obstacles, communism claims to achieve mankind’s moral advancement, but this is not possible without a thorough revolution both in society and in the individual, enhancing and pursuing the truly humane. Thus humanism can be considered the last goal and stage of communism, the realization of ultimate moral progress.” Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism (1946), with its emphasis on language, has however been compared to the tenets and practices of Renaissance intellectuals, a subject on which Renaissance historian Timothy Kircher is now writing. For a contentious but stimulating treatment of the subject, see Ernesto Grassi, Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1983). 38. See the discussion of Erasmus later in this essay. 39. Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus,” 178. See also Hankins, “Two TwentiethCentury Interpreters,” 584, who notes that the signatories of the manifesto sought to establish their organ ization as “a secular religion (complete with its own churches, liturgies, clergy and seminaries) and laid plans gradually to take control of liberal Protestant denominations and Reform Judaism.” 40. From Article 14 of the Humanist Manifesto, as cited by Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus,” 179. 41. Charles Trinkaus, “In Our Image and Likeness”: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 1: xiv. 42. Genesis 1:26, NRSV. 43. Trinkaus, Image, 181. 44. See for example Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).

What Posthumanism Isn’t

59

45. Trinkaus, Image, 183. 46. The humanist Giannozzo Manetti, for example, drew extensively upon Lactantius. For sophisticated interpretations of how both pagan and Christian writings from Late Antiquity provided models for Renaissance thinkers, see (in addition to Trinkaus, Image) Hankins, Plato; and Christopher S. Celenza, “Late Antiquity and the Florentine Renaissance: Historiographical Parallels,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 17–35. 47. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” in Renaissance Philosophy of Man, 223–54, at 225. 48. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 75. 49. Brian  P. Copenhaver, “Magic and the Dignity of Man: De-Kanting Pico’s Oration,” in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 295–320, at 307 and 309. 50. Copenhaver, “Magic,” 320. 51. Ibid. 52. The contemporary biography of Pico by his nephew Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, which Thomas More translated into English, reinforces a view of Pico as distinctly premodern. 53. The translation is that in Brian Copenhaver, “Studied as an Oration: Readers of Pico’s Letters, Ancient and Modern,” in Laus Platonici Philosophi, 151– 98, at 164. 54. With respect to the “oration,” Copenhaver has observed pointedly that “[o]nly a scrupulous regard for historical context will distinguish the reverent classicism that shaped Pico from a human-centered secularism completely alien to the pious mentality of his Christian age.” Brian P. Copenhaver, “Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni,” in Scribner’s Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul F. Grendler et al., 6 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999), 5: 16–20, at 19. Another of the keenest intellects in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle of Humanists in Florence, Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), also became a follower of Savonarola, and at his own request he was buried in a Dominican habit. 55. Lewis W. Spitz, “Man on this Isthmus,” in Spitz, Luther and German Humanism, essay XI (pp. 23–66), at 43. The subject of professorial pessimism remained commonplace among Humanists as late as Pierio Valeriano’s On the Ill Fortune of Learned Men, a dialogue set in 1529 that counseled a Stoic acceptance of the sufferings that accompanied the life of the mind. Interestingly, Valeriano also edited the Sphaera of Johannes de Sacrobosco, which Scott Maisano detects in the background of Shakespeare’s Tempest, 4.1.148–58. See Maisano’s chapter in the present collection. 56. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton: MRT&S, 1989), bk. 1, chap. 7; bk. 2, chap. 13.

60

Kenneth Gouwens

57. Hankins, “Monstrous Melancholy,” 30, notes that Ficino appears to be original in this opinion. 58. Spitz’s “Humanism and the Protestant Reformation,” Essay IX in his Luther and German Humanism, provides an authoritative and judicious overview of its subject. 59. See especially Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 237–93; and Spitz, “Luther and Humanism,” in Luther and Learning: The Wittenberg University Symposium, ed. Marilyn J. Harran (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1985), 69–94; repr. as Essay VIII in Spitz, Luther and German Humanism. 60. In fact, Luther based his German translation of the New Testament (1522) upon Erasmus’s Greek edition. On how humanist textual criticism helped prepare the way for theological revisionism in the Reformation, see Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). For example, Aquinas had built his conception of cooperating grace (gratia cooperans) upon the Vulgate’s problematic rendition of a phrase in I Corinthians 15:10. See Ibid., 57. 61. Erasmus’s appreciation for Epicurus and Lucian, in contrast, struck Luther as pernicious. 62. On this subject see especially John F. D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). 63. Contarini had been created cardinal in 1535; Pole and Sadoleto were elevated in December 1536. 64. The Genevan city council in turn asked Calvin (then in Strasbourg) to respond on their behalf. For the exchange, see John Calvin and Jacopo Sadoleto: A Reformation Debate. Sadoleto’s Letter to the Genevans and Calvin’s Reply, ed. John C. Olin (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 65. On his role in the colloquy, see Elisabeth G. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 186–256 (Chapter 4). 66. While Contarini and Pole advocated reforms that could be called “Erasmian,” neither found it politically helpful to have been friends of the Dutchman, who had lost favor in Rome years before his death in 1536. 67. The council was not, however, monolithic, nor as reactionary as it has often been portrayed as being: See John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 68. See, for example, Frederick  J. McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). On the Jesuits’ deep engagement with classical learning, see Robert A. Markys, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits: The Influence of the Liberal Arts on the Adoption of Moral Probabilism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

What Posthumanism Isn’t

61

69. Of course, even before the Reformation, freedom of expression had never been absolute. Pico again provides a telling example. He had composed the “oration” to introduce his Conclusions, a compendium of 900 theses on philosophy and theology that he published in Rome in 1486. He planned for these to be discussed in a conference he was organizing to be held there the following year. Pope Innocent VIII, however, kept the conference from happening, and went on to denounce all 900 of Pico’s talking points. 70. Celenza, Lost Italian Renaissance, quotation at 87. See also Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and David Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). Celenza and Marsh both contend that dialogues became less open-ended in the sixteenth century. 71. The dialogue, a favorite genre of humanists, both exemplified and performed this kind of interchange. 72. Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, 161–200. 73. On Montaigne’s often agonistic engagement with ancient texts, see Peter Mack, Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010). 74. See the highly useful survey of ancient opinion by Stephen T. Newmyer, Animals in Greek and Roman Thought: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 2011). See also Newmyer, Animals, Rights, and Reason in Plutarch and Modern Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2006). 75. See R. W. Serjeantson, “The Passions and Animal Language,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001), 425–44, on the subject more generally. 76. Newmyer, Animals, 3–4. For a more specialized treatment that attends in detail to the nuances and ambiguities in this instance, see Anna Eunyoung Ju, “Chrysippus on Nature and Soul in Animals,” Classical Quarterly 57 (2007): 97–108. 77. Cicero, Moral Letters 76.8–10, analyzed and quoted in Newmyer, Animals, 14–15. 78. Girolamo Rorario, Quod animalia bruta ratione utantur melius homine libri duo (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2005), written in 1544. 79. Giambattista Gelli, La Circe (Florence: Torrentino, 1549). See Benjamin Arbel, “The Renaissance Transformation of Animal Meaning: From Petrarch to Montaigne,” in Making Animal Meaning, ed. Linda Kalof and Georgina M. Montgomery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 59–80, at 73–74. Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 88–94, provides an accessible summary of the reception in England of Plutarch’s Gryllus as mediated by Gelli. 80. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 330. Some indictments of

62

Kenneth Gouwens

human arrogance by earlier Renaissance intellectuals similarly compared people unfavorably to animals. Thus, Leonardo’s tract on human cruelty (Della crudeltà dell’omo) pointed to the disastrous consequences for the rest of creation of man’s overweening pride (“ismisurata superbia”): See Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci compiled and edited from the original manuscripts by Jean Paul Richter, ed. Carlo Pedretti, 2 vols. (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 2:282. See also Alberti’s Theogenius, in which humans’ unsettledness and impatience can make them enemies of all creatures, including the entire human race and even themselves: Leon Battista Alberti, Opere volgari, ed. Cecil Grayson, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1960–73), 2:92–4. 81. Montaigne, Essays, 331. 82. Montaigne, Essays, 317. 83. Descartes allowed for the possibility of animals having emotions, but he denied that they had a rational soul or self-consciousness, and was equally emphatic in denying that they could speak. See Peter Harrison, “Descartes on Animals,” Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992): 219–27; René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, trans. Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 47–8. 84. Montaigne, Essays, 331. 85. On Montaigne and Renaissance skepticism, see Richard  H. Popkin, “Theories of Knowledge,” in The Cambridge History of Re nais sance Philosophy, ed. Charles  B. Schmitt et  al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 668–84, at 678–84; Jill Kraye, “Moral Philosophy,” in Cambridge History, 303–86, at 314–16; cf. Brian Cummings, “Animal Language in Renaissance Thought,” in Re naissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 164–85, at 179–82, whose interpretation is not persuasive and depends in part upon an error in translation. 86. Marsilio Ficino, De christiana religione, Chapter 1; passage translated in Hankins, “Monstrous Melancholy,” 35–6. Valla, in his Dialectical Disputations (1439; later revised), asserted human exceptionalism along somewhat dif ferent lines: Animals, like humans, had memory, intellect, and will, and therefore were called animalia (ensouled); but humans, created directly by God in his image and likeness, were distinct in being immortal, and for Valla this is the basis of human dignity. See Charles Trinkaus, “From the Twelfth-Century Renaissance to the Italian: Three Versions of ‘the Dignity of Man,’ ” in Renaissance Transformations of Late Medieval Thought (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 1999), IV: 63–80, esp. 76. 87. For an assessment of Shakespeare’s questioning of humanity’s status as unique, see Laurie Shannon, “Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 168–96. 88. Ian Maclean, “Foucault’s Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian Counterblast,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 149–66, at 149.

What Posthumanism Isn’t

63

89. Francesco Bausi, ‘Nec rhetor nec philosophus’: Fonti, lingua e stile nelle prime opere latine di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1484–87) (Florence: Olschki, 1996). On the surprising prominence of Scholastic theology in the library of another leading platonist of the fifteenth century, see John Monfasani, Bessarion Scholasticus: A Study of Cardinal Bessarion’s Latin Library (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011). 90. Ann Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Cf. Gouwens, “Perceiving the Past,” 67, on the need to move past the reading of literary sources in our conception of cognitive change. 91. Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 52. See also Marianne Pade, “Valla’s Thucydides: Theory and Practice in a Renaissance Translation,” Classica et Medievalia 36 (1985): 275–301, upon which Grafton explicitly draws; and now, Pade, “Thucydides,” in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, vol. 8, ed. Virginia Brown et al. (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 103–82. 92. For sophisticated interpretations of how Late Antiquity figured as a model for Renaissance thinkers, see Trinkaus, “In Our Image and Likeness”; Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance; and Christopher  S. Celenza, “Late Antiquity and the Florentine Renaissance: Historiographical Parallels,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 17–35. 93. On Petrarch’s rhetorical approach to truth in discrete situations, see Charles Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 94. Here one thinks of Petrarch’s Secretum, a dialogue he wrote for himself (there is no evidence that he circulated it) that consisted of a conversation between interlocutors named Franciscus (for Francesco Petrarca) and Augustinus (for the author of the Confessions). 95. The incommensurability of approaches to truth is central to recent discussions of “post-secularism.” For the idea of treating religious and secular mentalities as “complementary learning processes,” see Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” New Perspectives Quarterly 25, no. 4 (Fall, 2008): 17–29, at 27. For an ambitious effort to rethink the relationship of secularism and religion both in history and in our own time, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Taylor cautions (at 772) against too-ready acceptance of “mainline narratives of simple, cost-free supersession, whether narrated by Christians, or by protagonists of the Enlightenment.” The “story of how we got here” is, for Taylor, “inextricably bound up with our account of where we are.” 96. The author expresses thanks to Joe Campana, Scott Maisano, and Tim Kircher for their thoughtful comments on drafts of the essay.

t wo

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas: Thresholds of the Human and the Limits of Painting Stephen J. Campbell Since I have never seen the original, which comes from the collection of Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel and Surrey (died 1646) and is now in the Archiepiscopal Palace at Kromeriz, formerly Kremsier, in Czechoslovakia, I do not dare pronounce on the authenticity of the now almost generally accepted Flaying of Marsyas . . . It is admittedly difficult to attribute this painting to anyone else . . . but it is equally difficult to accept Titian’s responsibility for a composition which in gratuitous brutality (the little dog lapping up the blood) not only outdoes its model, one of Giulio Romano’s frescoes in the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, but also, and more importantly, evinces a horror vacui normally foreign to Titian who, like Henry James’ Linda Pallant, “knew the value of intervals.” In the Kromeriz picture no square inch is vacant.1

Erwin Panofsky’s 1940 essay “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” begins with the image of the aged Immanuel Kant sitting by his deathbed, having occupied a chair only after his physician has done so.2 For Panofsky, the very essence of humanism is contained in the words the philosopher then utters: “The sense of humanity has not yet left me.” Notwithstanding Panofsky’s attentiveness to the historically contingent meaning of the words humanitas in antiquity, humanae litterae in the Middle Ages, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s hominis dignitate, and Kant’s Humanität, he holds fast to the idea that this essence persists as a continuum from Cicero to his own day, when the values of humanism—the recognition of “human dignity and human frailty”—had to be defended against “determinists,” “authoritarians,” and, notably, the “insectolatrists”: “who profess the all-importance of the hive, whether the hive be called group, class, 64

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

65

nation, or race.” An arc is thereby inscribed in time connecting Renaissance Neoplatonists, Kant, and the expatriate intellectuals of the post-war era—for whom humanism signals a conception of being human in terms of tragic vulnerability, heroic in its rejection of authority yet “respect for tradition,” its liberal embrace of “responsibility and tolerance.” At the same time, art historians were among the inheritors of an “ambivalent” Renaissance legacy in which to be human was conceived as a state between divinitas, a transcendental rationality, and feritas, a wild or bestial state: Here Panofsky is at pains to point out that Giovanni Pico’s De hominis dignitate is less a profession of man’s centrality in the order of creation than of the unfi xed nature of the human between the divine and the bestial.3 Yet Panofsky’s humanist art history ultimately conceded little quarter to any ambivalence (not to mention outright differences) on the part of Renaissance humanists about the nature of the human, nor was Panofsky willing to countenance other humanisms discontinuous with the modern or the post-Kantian liberal ideal of the rational and the humane. The book Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic from 1969 was to be the ultimate litmus test of his self-consciously humanist iconological method (many would now regard it as an exposure of its shortcomings) as well as a bid to claim the great Venetian painter for a humanist pantheon of Dürer, Erasmus, Ficino, Botticelli, and Michelangelo. Yet the astonishing Flaying of Marsyas (see Figure 2-1), one of the most singular mythological paintings of the sixteenth century, was almost completely excluded from a lengthy chapter on “Titian and Ovid.” It appears only in the footnote quoted previously, in which the scholar expressed misgivings over Titian’s authorship of the picture, as troubling in formal terms as its subject was disturbing in its extreme cruelty. Artistic representation had in both respects been pushed beyond an acceptable limit; if this were Titian’s work, it would appear, it would make of Titian something other than a “humanist.” “Gratuitous brutality” has replaced “tolerance and responsibility.” However troubling to Panofsky’s idea of a philosophical art generated from humanist ideas, the picture’s disquieting qualities have not prevented repeated attempts by later iconologists to redeem it through allegorical exegesis. The painting has thus been made to yield up the secret wisdom of Renaissance Neoplatonists, Pythagorean harmony, and Dantean selfreflection, all of which are themselves stretched to their limits.4 Other critical

66

Stephen J. Campbell

Figure 2-1. Titian, Flaying of Marsyas, 1570–1575. Oil on canvas. Archbishop’s Palace, Kromeriz, Czech Republic. (Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

enterprises have attempted to map the painting onto bodies of Renaissance knowledge like medical anatomy and political theologies of absolutism.5 An equally vital account of The Flaying of Marsyas turns it into a harbinger of modernism, a performance of the materiality of painting itself, grounded in Titian’s extraordinarily gestural handling of the medium and in the manifest formal preoccupations of the design.6 And, inevitably, the painting has recently been claimed as a rejection of Renaissance humanism (which here is

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

67

Figure 2-2. Giulio Romano, Apollo fl aying Marsyas. Brown and black ink, brown wash, on gray washed paper, black chalk. Paris, Musée du Louvre. (© RMN– Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

taken to mean Platonizing, anti-materialist thought), its ethics, aesthetics, and models of representation.7 Not all of these accounts are attentive to the pictorial structure at large, which can best be grasped by comparison—by now a standard one—with the design by Giulio Romano for a fresco in a ducal residence at Mantua, clearly known to Titian (as was the artist himself) (see Figure 2-2). In the painting, Apollo’s victim has been turned to face the viewer so that his body is the dominant organizing element of the composition: The navel of the satyr Marsyas is effectively the fulcrum of the entire work. This makes Marsyas, very suggestively, into an inversion of one of the iconic Renaissance idealizations of the human (especially among Renaissance art theorists): the so- called “Vitruvian Man,” a proportionally ideal, normative (and hence male gendered) image of “man,” whose perfect bodily ratios allow him to be inscribed both in a perfect square and a circle, with his umbilicus at the center (see Figure 2-3). This is not Titian’s only departure from the Giulio design. The grotesque horror and cruelty emphasized in the earlier work—a response that seems to relish the graphic violence of Ovid’s text— is conspicuously absent in Titian’s version. The satyr’s torturers show a workmanlike absorption in their task, and Marsyas shows an unlikely patience— even a kind of poise—in the course of his ordeal. Giulio had blatantly underscored the sexuality—in some cases an emphatically animal sexuality—of his human and semi-human actors, to the point that Marsyas’s imminent castration is clearly signaled. That genital emphasis is nowhere to be found in Titian: Marsyas has his legs crossed, the musician with the

Figure 2-3. Leonardo da Vinci, The Proportions of the Human Body according to Vitruvius, ca. 1492. Pen and brown ink, brush and some brown wash over metalpoint on paper. Venice, Accademia. (Scala / Art Resource, NY)

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

69

viola da gamba is fully clothed, the other bodies are too inchoate in their rendering or are so screened by others that their sex is not visible. Again radically distancing Titian’s work from the affective register of Giulio’s design is the addition of a satyr child who stares at the viewer with an indeterminate expression (some have described it as tearful, although it could equally be a smile, or even a vacant glance), along with two domesticated dogs— a Titian signature motif— one lapping at the blood and the other panting and drooling in anticipation. It should finally be noted what has been retained from the Giulio composition: the syrinx, hanging from the same tree as its owner, seems even more paradoxically triumphant than it was, already, in Giulio’s design; and Titian makes more emphatic its elevation over the lira di braccio, Apollo’s own instrument, played by the rhapsodic Olympus to the left.8 The identification of the various characters is not as problematic as art history has often presented it— some commentators insist on seeing the gamba player as Apollo—yet the identity of the dramatis personae is clear from the Giulio invention. That said, their par tic ular identity as mythological characters in an Ovidian narrative may be less impor tant fi nally than the typological role of Olympus as lyric poet and Midas—the bearded older male in the posture of a melancholy philosopher—as a contemplative, or phi losopher. And here I think lies Panofsky’s problem: What is to be made of Poetry’s and Philosophy’s involvement (complicit? helpless?) to the slow, methodical, unemotive, and above all non-tragic annihilation of the marvelous creature Marsyas? Does their structural participation in the composition as a whole signal some deeper level of relationality? As is already implicit with the allusion to “Vitruvian Man,” there is a level of generality that removes the work from the sphere of anecdote or Ovidian historia. Notably, Giulio’s invention has been systematically adapted and amplified with additional figures, with the result that the array of living creatures are each definable by the sensory experience that grips them. All five senses are engaged: Apollo and Midas stand for sight, Marsyas himself for touch (in a rather extreme way), and Olympus the generation and perception of sound, while the dogs vigorously embody the senses of taste and smell. Finally, Marsyas bears little resemblance to any other artistic representations of Apollo’s victim made in antiquity or the Renaissance, where his human rather than hybrid qualities are almost always emphasized.9

70

Stephen J. Campbell

In Titian’s rendering, his generic character as a satyr— a hybrid of human and goat— assumes a new importance. Satyrs, three of whom appear in the painting, play a more complex role in the Renaissance imaginary than their often marginal status would suggest: They are figures both of the natural and the antique, and in the latter respect they constitute paradoxically classical bodies with their own artistic canon (for example the Della Valle satyrs now in the Capitoline Museum and the two Marsyas figures in the Medici collections). Figures of fable and poetical license, satyrs could also be seen (on the authority of Pliny and Diodorus Siculus) as a species or even a people dwelling in Libya or Ethiopia, “an ethnological rather than a biological phenomenon.”10 They enabled the positing of a kind of frontier limit of the human (depicted, like “wild men,” as primitive forest-dwelling family groups), as a monstrous double against which the category of the human created itself (as in Jacopo de’Barbari’s print series from ca. 1495 depicting battles between naked men and satyrs), or (in Piero de’Cosimo’s Lucretian-inspired Stories of Primitive Man) as a form of the pre-human, a natural and “savage” antecedent of man defined in terms of sexual vitality and appetite, but also—because like Marsyas they often appear as musicians—as an origin of culture and art.11 Satyrs and other mythological hybrids may be said to correspond with what Giorgio Agamben has called the premodern “anthropological machine”: “If, in the machine of the moderns, the outside is produced through the exclusion of an inside and the inhuman produced by animalizing the human, here [in pre-modernity] the inside is obtained through the exclusion of an outside, and the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal: the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form.”12 Yet finally it remains undecidable whether Titian’s painting is about the humanizing of the animal more than it concerns the “animalizing” of the human. Titian has radically stressed the continuum between divine, human, partly human, and animal bodies. The effacement of the sexual characteristics so central to the marking of difference between anthropomorphic and hybrid bodies in Giulio Romano’s version, together with the presence in Titian’s painting of “domesticated” as opposed to “wild” dogs, suggests not merely the operations of a “civilizing process,” but the drawing closer together of dif ferent orders of being.

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

71

To the question, why did Titian paint Marsyas in this way, and for whom, and when? it can only be answered that we know next to nothing about the painting. While it appears to have been in Titian’s studio at his death, we don’t know if it relates to a specific commission, or when it was begun, or even to what degree it could be said to be finished. Much about it seems unresolved or provisional; some regard elements like the boy with dogs, or the figure of Olympus, as by the hand of another artist, Palma Giovane.13 I am inclined, although in the absence of evidence, to see the painting functioning in the studio as an open and unresolved work, never intended for any specific client; it would have been the object of Titian’s ongoing intention over a period of years, even decades, as he prepared his other great Ovidian mythologies for King Philip II of Spain—works far closer to the mainstream of mythological gallery pictures that followed in their wake through succeeding centuries— and his dramatic late religious paintings. The canvas is a place where Titian goes to think; in fact, it is the deposit of several layers of pictorial thinking, and perhaps it never had to resolve or coalesce.14 (The same can be said of the late, unfinished, Diana and Actaeon in London [see Figure 2-4] where Titian recasts another narrative of divine vindictiveness against a semi-human victim in ways that even more radically depart from Ovid’s text.) It is, furthermore, one of a series of works produced by Titian throughout his career in which a dead or subjected body (usually that of Christ— examples include the Crowning with Thorns from 1542 now in The Prado and the 1576 Pietà for the artist’s own tomb, now in the Venice Accademia) is the subject of intensive scrutiny at very close range: a body which draws close engrossment to the extent that a specular relation almost becomes a tactile one, and where the corporeal object of attention has no reciprocal capacity to look back, to “hold” the gaze of other figures or the beholder on our side of the painting.15

Beyond Disegno and Colore It must now be asked if and how Titian’s Marsyas, a work without a known patron or context, can be accounted for historically. Some have connected the painting to the real-life flaying of a Venetian civic martyr, Marco Antonio Bragadin, at the hands of the Turks following their capture of the colony of

72

Stephen J. Campbell

Figure 2-4. Titian, The Death of Actaeon, ca. 1570. London, The National Gallery. (© National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY)

Famagusta in August 1571. Yet the depiction of an Ovidian fable seems like a curious response to a real-life atrocity: The report of Bragadin’s ordeal and its traumatic implications for Venice might more readily explain why work on the picture was broken off, not why it was begun. To claim, on the other hand, that such a painting arises entirely from an artist’s painterly concerns, even from a radical rethinking of the means and ends of painting itself, seems close to an ideological yoking of the Renaissance to a meaninglessly extended modernity: After all, it is an endgame, without progeny—it “goes nowhere.”16 What will be proposed here is that the later work of Titian is, to a large extent, conceivable as a remotivation of the painterly mark so that structural considerations of space, composition, relief, color, and colorito are all made to work toward the ends of fictive “vivification.” The enlivening force of art

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

73

was one of the desiderata of painting since Alberti called for it in the 1430s, yet enlivening for Titian entails a radical sounding out of painting as synaesthetic metaphor for human (and animal) sensation: Such a rendering is particularly intensified in scenes of violence, strife, or subjection. What first had to be overcome by the artist, however, was a critical production of himself and his work by his contemporaries. Titian’s painterly inquiry might be seen as a resistance to the limits in which his enterprise was cast by commentators who insisted on restrictive literary analogies. In his resistance to an imposed Petrarchan subjectivity, or expressive selfhood, Titian’s enterprise finally amounts to a more radical kind of anthropology: a reflection on forms of embodiment that call into question “the human” as a boundaried category. Titian said or wrote little on behalf of his own art. Remarks attributed to him suggest gestures of self-fashioning arising from a career holding his own in a combative field of artistic production organized around an increasingly restricted pantheon of canonical figures and artistic centers of importance. According to the Spanish Royal secretary Antonio Pérez, writing in 1603 more than thirty years after the artist’s death, Titian had once responded, when asked why he painted so broadly and thickly: “I am not confident of achieving the delicacy and beauty of the brushwork of Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio and Parmigianino; and if I did, I would be judged with them, or else be considered to be an imitator. But ambition, which is as natural in my art as in any other, urges me to choose a new path to make myself famous, much as the others acquired their own fame from the way that they followed.”17 What was this “new path”? To some extent, it has to do with aspects of his work that led contemporaries to cast him as a rival to leading artists beyond Venice— chiefly the Tuscan-Roman champion Michelangelo. There was, by mid-century, a critical establishment that rehearsed the oppositionality of Rome and Venice, of disegno and colore, of Michelangelo and Titian, Dante and Petrarch. Ludovico Dolce’s dialogue on art entitled Aretino (1557)—which both elaborated on and offered a rejoinder to Vasari’s 1550 Lives— appropriates Titian to a model of art defi ned according to social norms of civility, decorum, and behav ior in accordance with “nature.” Titian’s assimilation to a judicious norm of modern painting adapts not only the prescriptions of Alberti’s De pictura, but also of Baldesar Castiglione’s

74

Stephen J. Campbell

aestheticization of elegant moderation and restraint in Il Cortegiano.18 Dolce’s text is a Venetian rejoinder to the Tuscan Giorgio Vasari, whose prejudices against the Venetian school were apparent in the first (1550) edition of his Lives of the Artists, and Aretino in the dialogue is unsparing in its attack on Vasari’s hero Michelangelo. Dolce, however, avoided charges of regional partisanship by upholding the superior merits of the other great Central Italian painter, Raphael, over Michelangelo, and by characterizing Titian and Raphael in terms derived from Petrarchan literary aesthetics.19 Raphael, for instance, was held to be the equivalent of Petrarch for the pleasurable grace and “beautiful propriety” of his work.20 Titian is compared to the courtly poet Ludovico Ariosto, and praised like Raphael for appropriateness and decorum in his color, for rendering the “mellowness and softness” of nature. Dolce was here adopting the Petrarchan ideology of his fellow Venetian, Pietro Bembo, himself a friend of both Raphael and Titian. Thus identified alongside Raphael with a Petrarchan canon of pleasurable naturalism and alluring grazia, Titian could be opposed to Michelangelo, whose pursuit of difficulty, intellectual complexity, and disquieting energy aligned him with Dante.21 Michelangelo limited his art to muscular nudes in difficult poses and foreshortenings, so that “anyone who has seen one figure by him has seen them all”; he “does not take into account those distinctions between the ages and the sexes,” which Raphael and implicitly Titian handled so well. Titian finally combines the best of Raphael and Michelangelo, a perfect union of disegno and colore, so that he becomes “the Idea of perfect painting.” His early masterpiece, the Frari Assumption, unites “the grandeur and awesomeness (terribilità) of Michelangelo, the charm and loveliness of Raphael and the colorito proper to nature.”22 Titian, Dolce claims, “walks in step with Nature”; elsewhere, in a letter regarding Titian’s Venus and Adonis, he asserts that “every stroke of the brush belongs with those strokes that nature is in the habit of making with its hand.” Art historians have seldom questioned the adequacy of Dolce’s categories for discussing Titian’s work.23 Yet aspects of Titian’s later painting, from the 1550s through the 1570s, might make us wonder about the extent to which he appreciated the identification with Raphael, or “nature,” or “beautiful propriety.” With the Marsyas, the radical revision of a design by Giulio Romano—Raphael’s most outstanding pupil and his artistic heir—in itself suggests a desire to disassociate himself from the artist with whom he had

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

75

been coupled by Dolce. Even within three years of the publication of Aretino, Titian was painting in a style that appears to flout Dolce’s characterization of him. The 1564 San Salvador Annunciation (see Figure 2-5) pushes the limits of decorum, of naturalism, of grazia, of the structural role of color over disegno, and even of intelligibility (in the theophany of the Incarnation, objects in the picture—like the vase of roses near the Virgin—burst into flame). There is moreover little sense that Titian ever identified with Raphael or sought to reconcile the principles of Tuscan-Roman disegno with his own painterly facture: That was the role claimed by the younger rival Tintoretto and the protégée Veronese. When “Roman” models appear in his later work—we need only think of what happens to Giulio’s design in The Flaying of Marsyas—“reconciliation” seems very far from describing what is at stake. Titian’s Italian work by the 1550s, and in a few works from the preceding decade, increasingly distances itself from the oppositional terms (such as disegno/colore) characteristically favored by the literati. His work is sustained by another kind of tension— one that had intermittently manifested itself in his earlier works, where he showed a preoccupation with the differentials in sensory experience that the art of painting could engage: Above all, these are sight and touch—or as twentieth-century art history would have had it, the optic and the haptic. Or, as a literate person from Titian’s own time might have said, prospettiva and relievo. The former is activated in the spatializing interval of gazes that keeps figures in a painting apart as they regard each other or some object of privileged (usually sacred) attention, and the corresponding principle of viewing distance that keeps the beholder apart from the painting so he or she can grasp the whole. It is the gaze that separates Jacopo Pesaro from St. Peter in the earliest known Titian painting (c.1506; Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten), and more than a decade later in the Sacred and Profane Love (Rome, Galleria Borghese, see Figure 2-6), where now it is triangulated with the beholder: To see one figure look at the other, we keep our distance—and in so doing we are drawn into the relational logic of the painting, become part of it.24 The perspective mode sustains the decorous, ceremonial presentation and individualizing detachment of pictorial protagonists, especially in a votive subject with a donor portrait, or sacred narratives involving processional movement parallel to the picture plane: Instances include the Jacopo Pesaro

Figure 2-5. Titian, Annunciation, 1564–65. Venice, San Salvador. (Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY)

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

77

Figure 2-6. Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, ca. 1515. Rome, Galleria Borghese. (Alinari / Art Resource, NY)

Presented to St. Peter, the Scuola del Carità Presentation of the Virgin from 1536 (Venice, Academia), and shortly afterwards the Vendramin Family with a Relic of the True Cross of 1538 (London, National Gallery). Yet Titian will often confront these perspectival effects with metapictorial appeals to touch— sometimes in the form of classical reliefs with Dionysiac imagery painted in monochrome. To examine this dif ferent compositional order, we have to change our relation to the image, to draw closer but also to adjust to dif ferent conditions of pictorial illusion—the effect of figures raised on a surface rather than set within pictorial depth. In the Sacred and Profane Love of 1514, such a relief again presents an “other” pictorial order constituted by the violent and passionate collision of bodies: It depicts a scene of assault or struggle enacted between nude figures, several of whom are not clearly differentiated by gender. Titian goes even further here—the relief surface has been violently punctured by a pipe from which water flows from the fountain it contains to “our” side of the painting. The flow of water suggests a pictorial continuum extending toward and even engulfing the viewer, suggesting the prospect of bodily immersion in the painted world. Titian underscores this promise of an immersive connection of viewer and painting: At center, and aligned with the viewer, an infant Eros plunges his arm into the water of the fountain while also looking intensely at its surface (he could be described as an Eros-Narcissus, one who seeks to actualize the desire born from seeing by reaching forth and touching). We can return here to the remarks of Panofsky quoted at the opening: It was not just that Titian “knew the value of intervals.” The interval for this

78

Stephen J. Campbell

artist is crucially constitutive of his modes of pictorial organization, not just formally, but also as a dramatically or psychologically charged vector defined by the gaze of one or more of his pictorial protagonists. The interval is additionally charged— even eroticized—by the imminence of its closure, where seeing is the anticipation of touching. Such a coupling of seeing and touching is characteristic of the early mythologies for Ferrara like the Bacchus and Ariadne (1522; London, National Gallery), where the gap dividing the pulsating frieze of bodies is about to close. Ariadne is not just about to be drawn into a tactile conjoining with Bacchus who leaps from his chariot toward her; she becomes the figure of a beholder’s projectively physical immersal in the pictorial illusion, stepping into and caressing a painted surface.25 The spacing interval of the gaze, which generates pictorial depth, which generates the coherence and distinctness of bodies as they regard each other at a distance, continues to be charged with eros—as in the other works from the Ovid series, such as the Danae (versions in Naples, Capodimonte, and Madrid, Prado) and the Rape of Europa (Boston, Gardner Museum).26 At the same time, there is a growing sense of the insufficiency of Eros, and of the gendered codes of seeing and touching through which it is sustained. Thus, the gendering of sensory experience is taken to near parodic levels in the several versions of Venus with a Musician, a playfully bathetic and in some ways pointedly vulgar take on pictorial synaesthesia where sight, touch, and now also hearing are represented as analogous— even as seeking to transform themselves into each other— but irrevocably dichotomous (see Figure 2-7).27 Here, the interval is what is at stake: that which defines the frankly prurient gaze of the musician, who turns to gape at the mons veneris of the reclining goddess (herself in a state of haptic absorption in Cupid’s kiss or the caress of a lap dog) as his hands are occupied with lute or pipe organ. In two of the versions (both Madrid, Prado) the (pleasurable?) discontents of specular non-possession are driven home for the beholder as his own gaze is drawn into and contained by a rigidly perspectival garden landscape, a receding line of trees picking up the diminishing row of organ pipes in the foreground. The viewer’s prospect, and the musician’s, has a mutually intersecting “climax” in the form of an upward thrusting statue of a satyr, the centerpiece of a sputtering fountain in the distance above the hand of Venus.

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

79

Figure 2-7. Titian, Venus and the Musician, 1555. Madrid, Museo del Prado. (Album / Art Resource, NY)

By the 1550s, the interval in Titian’s mythological painting becomes increasingly fraught—more than perspectival distance through which bodies become visible to each other or the objects of each other’s erotic attention, it becomes a kind of propulsive, overbearing force within the painting, one that propagates itself with crushing results. It is no longer simply analogous to the space of subjective dispossession in Petrarchan desire; or perhaps it is the case that Petrarchan desire is revealed, after all, to be part of something more elemental and more threatening. I turn here to Rebecca Zorach’s 1999 essay “Despoiled at the Source,” a still refreshingly revisionist account of Titian’s facture and compositional strategies that sought to break the mold of ut pictura poesis and disegno/colore in favor of an address to bodily and gender thematics in the artist’s Diana and Callisto, made in the mid 1550s for Philip II (see Figure  2-8).28 Callisto, a nymph dedicated to Diana goddess of chastity, has been raped by Jupiter; her pregnant condition is here disclosed to the goddess who, with a damning gesture and furious look, expels her from the sacred company; she is subsequently transformed into a bear. Zorach notes the contrast between the

80

Stephen J. Campbell

Figure 2-8. Titian, Diana and Callisto. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. (Scala / Art Resource, NY)

elegantly articulated anatomy of the figure of Diana and the painful disarticulation of the figure of Callisto, seeing them in terms of dichotomized pictorial values in Titian: the role of line, of proportional design on one hand, and the construction of form through loosely applied and textural applications of color on the other. It is precisely this visible manipulation of paint that enables Titian’s powerfully material renderings of the body, yet it is accompanied by the risk of inchoateness, where matter threatens to prevail over form. Callisto thus embodies a principle of abjection that, for Zorach, is marked in Titian’s late painting: She draws the term from Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror to designate the absorbing yet potentially repellant analogies between paint, flesh, and oozing bodily matter of various kinds

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas 29

81

in the late work. The Callisto is read as a drama of subject formation: The maintenance of somatic self-possession is achieved through an abjecting of the other: “In contrast to [Callisto’s] abject incarnation of feminine physicality— a self dispossessed—is the figure of Diana, regal, contained, self-possessed, but also object of desire and possession. It is as if, in this picture, the abject must be set out of bounds in order to establish a sanitized female body. Diana’s body as body has thus, in Kristeva’s terms, ‘vomited itself out’; has adopted the smoothness of surface, paleness of color and gently curved body of one of Titian’s own reclining Venuses, propped up in an impossibly sinuous pose. Titian has created—for a king with a pronounced taste for erotic images— a goddess of strictly enforced chastity, a paradoxical fantasy of possessing the self-possessed, the unpossessable.”30 Given that the king’s spectatorship, and the maintenance of a privileged male subjectivity, provides the key historical framing in Zorach’s analysis, it is worth briefly considering its implications for some of the other paintings in the Philip II series. In Venus and Adonis, 1553–54 (see Figure 2-9), Adonis tears himself away from the embrace of Venus as his dogs catch the scent of a prey that will lead him into the landscape and to his doom. The episode is Titian’s invention; it does not occur in Ovid. In fact, there is little in Ovid that prepares us for the appearance of Adonis here, who is depicted in the manner of several of Titian’s female protagonists (we might think of the Flora in the Uffizi) with one breast bare. Ludovico Dolce here recognized what Titian was up to, although he characteristically saw it in terms of the painting’s generally voluptuous impact: “He has conceived of Adonis as being of a height appropriate to a lad of sixteen or eighteen, wellproportioned, handsome and graceful in every one of his parts, with a pleasing tint to his flesh in which extreme delicacy and the presence of royal blood are contained. And one sees that in the facial expression this unique master has aimed to convey a certain handsome beauty which would have its share of femininity yet not be remote from virility: I mean that in a woman it would embody an indefi nable quality of manhood, and in a man something of beautiful womanhood . . .”31 Thus Adonis’s struggle to break free of Venus can be seen in terms not just of the rejection of love as an effeminizing emotion (a theme that occurs in admonitions to princes), but a casting off—an abjection—of his own androgynous being. The result, alluded to in the forebodingly darkening landscape, is his destruction. And

82

Stephen J. Campbell

Figure 2-9. Titian, Venus and Adonis, 1553–54. Madrid, Museo del Prado. (Album / Art Resource, NY)

Titian’s Paduan follower Damiano Mazza later took the conjoined rear and frontal poses of Venus and Adonis as a model for his Rape of Ganymede (1575; London, National Gallery) where—if traced in outline—the boy’s fleshy body can be seen as an amalgam of those of Venus and Adonis (see Figure 2-10).32 Titian’s treatment of the story of Diana and Actaeon from 1556–59 (see Figure 2-11) is like no other in the sixteenth century; it completely departs from the Petrarchan reconfiguration of the ill-fated hunter as a lover thwarted by his cruel and elusive beloved.33 Making his way by touch, with arm extended (the resemblance to Ariadne’s gesture is not fortuitous), the fall of a curtain leads Actaeon into an unwelcome and unanticipated locking of gazes with the furious Diana, momentarily discomposed and undig-

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

83

Figure 2-10. Damiano Mazza (attributed), Rape of Ganymede, 1575–90. London, National Gallery. (© National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY)

nified in a pose that resembles that of Venus in the earlier painting. Here the interval again exerts its force: Actaeon starts backwards, as if repelled by dread or some other motive to detach himself from the assemblage of bodies beyond the curtain. A similar dimension of abjection or “throwing off” of the other in the interests of self-possession is at work, but it is by no means clear who is fi nally abjecting whom. These Ovid pictures are narratives of catastrophic separation or division where a male adolescent enacts or undergoes a fatal pulling apart from a female counterpart (usually one more powerful than himself). However, the array of inconsistently feminized qualities— corporeality, tactility, androgyny, chastity, a power-laden gaze—indicates that sexual difference might not

84

Stephen J. Campbell

be the fundamental concern, as distinct from a more primary preoccupation with difference/undifferentiation in itself. Moments of crisis in Titian’s late narrative painting are signaled through the rupture, the “aversion” of bodies, as when Adam, his fingers touching Eve’s breast, seems to recoil from her—as if trying to detach himself—in The Fall of Man (1565–70; Prado). Yet in the San Salvador Annunciation of 1564–65, even the Incarnation—the moment when the Word becomes Flesh—is depicted by Titian as the disruption of unity (refer to Figure 2-5). Heaven is sundered by the incandescent axis of the Holy Spirit’s descent toward the body of the Virgin that, in an iconography without precedent, splits the angelic hosts into two gendered groups: nude males performing the gesture of angelic salutation, clothed females enacting the normally submissive pose of the annunciate Virgin, arms crossed at the breast. Yet these poses are then reversed by the arm crossing Gabriel and the gesticulating Virgin below (as if at least holding out the promise of an impending coalescence of what has been sundered apart, however apocalyptic that might be). It is as if bodies have dispersed their own qualities onto other bodies, overflowing their own limits and becoming divided from themselves. The diminishing distinction of bodies from other bodies anticipates Titian’s ultimate pursuit of an integration of body-into-space. Turning back to the Venus and Adonis and the Diana paintings, we might equally observe that in those cases, too, some form of primordial unity or wholeness—whether an androgynous composite of the sexes, or Kristeva’s “semiotic” (the infant’s experience of unboundaried continuum with the body of the mother)—has been forced apart, violently subjected to differentiation. In every case, efforts of self-possession are predicated on a selfdispossession, the loss of an unsustainable plenary state where Adonis had resembled (and even been part of) Venus, where there had been a continuum of bodily symmetry between Diana and Callisto. In the case of the Diana paintings, the primordial wholeness was, in fact, that continuum of the goddess of chastity not only with her followers but also the wild places sacred to them, violated in one case inadvertently by Actaeon and in the other by the predatory Jupiter.34 There is perhaps also the suggestion that as a hunter Actaeon usurps Diana’s primary sacred prerogative; the subject of Titian’s late and unfinished Diana and Actaeon is her reclaiming of that role (without any textual warrant from Ovid; refer to Figure 2-4). Diana, like

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

85

Figure 2-11. Titian, Diana and Actaeon, 1556–59. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. (Scala / Art Resource, NY)

many other of Titian’s female protagonists, dominates the foreground and seems to embody fleshy tactility and relievo (see Figure 2-11). However, she also here commands an annihilating gaze, which, while plunging into depth, also abolishes the distinction of figure and field, surface and space, as much as animal and human, as Actaeon is transformed, torn apart, and pulverized into the pictorial ground. Now, more radically than in the earlier Diana paintings, the gaze of the goddess here precipitates a fatal abolition of the difference between body and space. Titian, intermittently, and over decades, constantly plays with the possibility of non-destructive self-dispossession, even if in forms that also figure its impossibility.35 It is as if “nature” and “naturalism” in Titian’s work is primarily a figure for such creative un-making (we might think of the

86

Stephen J. Campbell

strangely awkward montages of bodies, male/female, naked/clothed, where one looks grafted onto or even into the other, as in the so-called Three Ages of Man of ca. 1512–14; Edinburgh, National Gallery, or the Two Satyrs drawing in New York, Metropolitan Museum).36 A preoccupation with the boundaries of the human is also manifest in occasions where Titian juxtaposes human and animal life: This happens in some of the Arcadian landscape drawings,37 but there is a sense that the idiom of landscape in itself cannot sustain the intensity of these explorations, which give rise to some of his most anomalous works: Pictures that flout any principle of genre, their idiom is that of the synecdochic fragment, the enthymeme, or the emblem, a kind of naturalism rendered conspicuously fictive or hermetic. Such genre anomalies include the Allegory of Prudence (London, National Gallery) a hieroglyph image in which a composite of three human faces (a youth, a mature male, an old man) is juxtaposed with the heads of three animals (a wolf, a lion, a dog), or the late painting (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Ven Beuningen) in which a small child caressing a large dog appears alongside a lactating bitch with nursing pups—all rendered in a painterly bravura bordering on coarseness; the child’s face is rendered with a painterly density and an expressive opacity close to the satirino in the Flaying of Marysas.38 And in such a (non-) category we might assign a work that can be understood to ridicule the very principle of genre: the woodcut of c.1545 designed by Titian in which he takes satirical aim at one of the iconic works of the Classical canon, now also heavily identified with the Roman modern manner of Michelangelo: the Vatican Laocoön, here re-enacted by a trio of histrionic apes in a pastoral landscape (see Figure 2-12).39 Normally understood as a satire on Roman art ancient and modern, it signals at once the increasing irreconcilability of the idealizing, Central Italian “modern manner” with the cause of a mimetic art that “apes” nature. Yet this does not necessarily mean that Titian himself commits to a mimetic imperative, even as that was increasingly the position he was assigned by the pro-Venetian defenders of colore. The “Monkey Laocoön” could equally well be seen to disclose the insufficiency of mimetic art as currently practiced, the unsustainability of a painterly naturalism that was not referential to and in dialogue with an increasingly canonical tradition of art. And there is one further crucial invention by Titian that falls into this “naturalist-hieroglyphic” category: his own personal emblem of the she-bear, licking her inchoate cub into animal

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

87

Figure 2-12. Attributed to Nicolò Boldrini, after Titian. Caricature of the Laocoön. Ca. 1540–60. Woodcut. (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art [OASC])

shape in accordance with the Plinian lore on bears, with the motto Natura potentior ars, which as Mary Garrard has shown, can be translated as “art more powerful than nature” or “nature is the more powerful art.”40 The paradoxical double-sense might be taken to mean that art already exists among the order of things, is practiced by nature and its creatures (the she-bear and cub are highly suggestive as the self-image of the painter of Diana and Callisto), and yet at the same time, Titian’s art surpasses that performed by nature. The latter claim was commonplace among the literati such as Dolce, who wrote about Titian’s naturalism— but I believe that there is more at stake for Titian himself. At stake more crucially is the representability of “nature,” or what is implicated in any claim to represent it. This was a more urgent question for Titian than for those who blithely proclaimed him “the equal” or the “vanquisher” of nature. Titian’s “naturalism” was fi nally one rendered subordinate to his own painterly process as well as the fraught dialectics of his work, and it entailed a departure from the Petrarchan or Virgilian naturalism of the poets as well

88

Stephen J. Campbell

as from the specialist landscape or animal painters of his own time—Jacopo Bassano, Paolo Fiammingo, Vincenzo Campi, the Brueghels and their followers. Titian’s late painterly style, with its evanescence of form and density of space, constructs a world of phenomena, rather than describing one that pre-exists his: a dynamic, even catastrophic continuum of space and matter. His device of the bear suggests a view of nature characterized by play and errancy; at the same time, Titian was very probably aware of Lucretian materialist ideas of elemental collision at large in Venetian intellectual circles at the beginning of the century, and visualized by Giorgione in paintings such as The Tempest, a conception of a world of matter pervaded by collision and catastrophe that had little to do with the docile pastoral naturalism propagated by his literary partisans.41 Such a view of the cosmos—whether Plinian or Lucretian, governed by a living, fecund, and prodigy-generating nature or entirely by elemental strife—is increasingly at odds with the orthodox Aristotelianism pervading the Counter-Reformation world, the view of a natural order subject to a divine will and accessible to human reason, in which “monstrous” occurrences in nature signaled not its wondrous, “playful” creative errancy but the imperfections of the sublunary world.42 At the end of the day, the cosmos of Titian’s late painting is self-consciously poietic and fictive rather than descriptive, generated by painterly processes of making. It declares its distinction from descriptive mimesis through the figure of the monstrous composite, the body that has overflowed its own bounds, or the mythological hybrid— signs of a “prodigious” naturalism that has an increasingly diminishing place in the world of learning. Such is the dark cosmos of the late, unfinished Nymph and Shepherd (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), a painting where strangeness has been taken as the sign of Titian’s late insight into the “human condition” (see Figure 2-13). (It has, for instance, been celebrated as a romantic or utopian vision of heterosexual coupling by commentators from Panofsky to John Berger to Giorgio Agamben.43) The strangely juxtaposed couple— a man bearing a flute, a nude female reclining on a panther skin who turns her back to him—bears the signs of irresolution on Titian’s part, resulting in an impossible corporeal aggregate. Their pose suggests estrangement (they are, wrote Panofsky “so near in body yet so far apart in sentiment”); however, the curiously compressed left arm of the woman on which she leans also reads as an

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

89

Figure 2-13. Titian, Nymph and Shepherd after 1570. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. (Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

anomaly until we realize that this arm also seems to “belong” to the male figure, as if Titian wanted to insist on both his separateness from as well as attachment to the female. And that potential remains in the painting’s unresolved state—it is as if the shepherd still retains the capacity to exceed his own physical limits, to convert a possessive look into actual physical possession. The turbulent gloom of the picture also suggests an attempt (already implicit in the Laocoon caricature) to shake off the codes of genre, the mounting preoccupation of late-sixteenth-century literary theory and practice as the prescriptions of Aristotle’s Poetics became increasingly normative. Perhaps the ultimate refusal of the affective rhetoric prescribed for serious literary genres with the rising influence of Aristotelian literary theory is the Flaying of Marsyas: Here, it is as if animals and animal-human figures

90

Stephen J. Campbell

determine the tenor of response to the ordeal being portrayed, calling into question Aristotelian notions of pathos. Titian has progressed from a pursuit of painting as drama—narratives of passion and violence, of the suffering and desiring body, all staged to move the beholder—to a mode of painting as the imaging of other modes of bodily engagement with the world; toward an experience of embodiment without boundaries, as an experience of continuum. The Flaying of Marsyas is thus where two preoccupations of his art come together, are imposed on each other— the interest in the parahuman, the analogy of human beings with animals on one hand, the idea of painting as a sensory continuum on the other.44 The intersection of these two preoccupations stands behind the painting’s ritual or sacrificial as opposed to tragic character: flaying, the animal-human hybrid, and openness of the body to space are all states of being that are conjoined here, albeit obtained at a price, where something whole is torn apart in the process. The Flaying of Marsyas is the culmination of this preoccupation with bodies that might overcome their boundaries; the dissolution of bodies—not just that of Marsyas— and the radical equivalence between figure and ground, object and void—produces the sense of a flow of energy or vitality within a stable or monumental pictorial structure, which—as Panofsky correctly noted, no longer depends on the “interval,” the intersubjective vector. The viewer himself vacillates between the impact of the horrific subject and the perception of a radically new kind of pictorial order: We compare rivers of blood to the blood-colored ribbons that bind the satyr’s feet: a harmony, a near identity, between fixity and flow, where one looks like the other. Painting is pushed to its limits but we respond to a stable structure, as if the painting was itself a kind of body that addressed itself to our own, that demands to be perceived with more than just the eye. The painting, as Richard Wollheim observed about late Titian, has a skin: The skin is not smooth and impermeable but an endlessly open process of unblended matter, disquieting, but perhaps no longer “abject”: “The truth is that in this work the vitality of the human frame is projected beyond all recognizable bounds.”45 At a distance, the spectacle of the abject, suffering body is appalling; close at hand, it becomes absorbing, and solicits an array of other responses, which the figures surrounding Marsyas seem to model in their postures of immersive sensory engagement, melancholy rumination, or wonder. And let’s not

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

91

forget a whole other dimension of non-human engagement here, which is scarcely de-privileged—the engagement through taste and smell (the dogs), through the indeterminate but at least anthropomorphic emotion of the satirino, and fi nally through Marsyas. From his expression, this is not the Marsyas in Ovid who screams “why are you stripping me from myself?” This is a Marsyas who accepts an annihilation of boundaried personhood. The Marsyas serves as a dream of shattering, of the undoing/unfolding of the figure in its boundaries, of continuum of the body with matter, attained through an impossibly “non-violent violence,” as it was dreamed of in Dante’s invocation of Apollo and Marsyas.46 It is one thing for a poet to declare this, and quite another to paint it. Titian manages to do so beyond the language of allegory, by finding other ways of making such a transformation visible.

Notes 1. Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 171. 2. Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” originally published in The Meaning of the Humanities, ed. T. M. Greene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 89–118, subsequently as the Introduction to Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 1–26. 3. Panofsky, “The History of Art,” 2: “Pico says that God placed man in the center of the universe so that he might be conscious of where he stands, and therefore free to decide ‘where to turn.’ He does not say that man is the center of the universe, not even in the sense commonly attributed to the classical phrase, ‘man is the measure of all things.’ ” 4. For recent bibliography, see the entry by Sylvia Ferino-Pagden in Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting, exh. cat. (Venice: Marsilio, 2007), 232–5. The interpretative tradition, from post-Panofskyan emphasis on Neoplatonic harmony to more recent preoccupations with absolutist power and the violence of domination, is usefully summarized in Jutta Held, “Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas: an Analysis of the Analyses.” Oxford Art Journal 31 (2008), 183–94. In Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 193–6, the painting is linked to Titian’s interest in the “tragic genre” and informed by the contemporaneous reception of Aristotle’s Poetics. 5. See, for instance, Hans Ost, Tizian- Studien (Cologne: 1992), 158–9, linking the commission with a cycle of images of gods punishing transgressors for Mary of Hungary; on the image as an index of social tension and as autobiographical

92

Stephen J. Campbell

reflection, see also Augusto Gentili, Da Tiziano a Tiziano. Mito e allegoria nella cultura veneziana del Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1988), and Irene Tobben, Die Schindung des Marsyas: Nachdenken über Tizian und die Gefährlichkeit der Künste ein Essay (Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1997). On anatomical thematics see Daniela Bohde, “Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento,” in Bodily Extremities. Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, eds. F. Egmond and R. Zwijnenberg (London, 2003), 10–47. On the image of Marsyas in the Renaissance see especially Edith Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas in the Art of the Italian Renaissance: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Images (Newark,  N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1996). For case studies in the work of other (chiefly Florentine) artists, see Beat Wyss, “The Last Judgment as Artistic Process: The Flaying of Marsyas in the Sistine Chapel,” Res (1995), 62–77; Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 183–8; Charles Burroughs, “Monuments of Marsyas: Flayed Wall and Echoing Space in the New Sacristy, Florence,” Artibus et Historiae 22 (2001), 31–49; Fredrika Jacobs, “(Dis)assembling: Marsyas, Michelangelo, and the Accademia del Disegno,” Art Bulletin 84, (2002), 426–48; Todd P. Olson, “ ‘Long Live the Knife’: Andrea Sacchi’s portrait of Marcantonio Pasqualini,” Art History 27 (2004) 697–722; Stephen  J. Campbell, “Bronzino’s Flaying of Marsyas: Anatomy as Myth,” forthcoming in Il Corpo Trasparente, ed. Victor Stoichita (Rome: Erma di Brettschneider, 2013). 6. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 321–6; Bohde, “Skin and the Search for the Interior”; and Held, “Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas.” For Mary Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 228–2, the painting is allegorized as Titian’s own fantasy of castigation at the Apollonian hands of the prac titioners of Tuscan disegno: “Titian is punished twice: as Marsyas for being his natural and rustic self, and as Midas for affirming the “wrong” values of the colorists.” 7. Cranston, The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Figuration in Titian’s Later Paintings (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 12: “Materiality in all of these later paintings lodges us in the very physical stuff of the world, in the pleasures and dangers of embodiment, and in the situations and conditions that, in their immediate physicality, appear to resist thought and discourse and appear to confl ict with the Renaissance ideals that dominate our inherited notion and interpretation of the period.” 8. Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas, 133–41, nonetheless considers that the painting is to be understood as a triumph of “rational” Apollonian strings over the more base corporeal and rustic art of the satyr’s pipes. 9. See Wyss, The Myth of Apollo and Marsyas and Bohde, “Skin and the Search for the Interior,” for discussion of many other sixteenth-century treatments of

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

93

the subject. On antique exemplars known in the Renaissance see Ruth Rubenstein, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture of Apollo and Marsyas: Bacchic Imagery and the Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne,” in With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage 1434–1530, ed. Eckart Marchand and Alison Wright (Aldershot: Hants; Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998), 79–107. 10. Peter Mason, Before Disenchantment: Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion, 2009), 89. 11. Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg, 218, remarks that “Italian satyr families inhabited a spacious pastoral world that often included distant houses and towns, suggesting a continuum of town and country, culture and nature,” and cites several of Titian’s images of such coexistence, among them a drawing of nymphs and satyrs of c.1565 in the Musee Bonnat, Bayonne. See also Lynn Kaufmann, The Noble Savage: Satyrs and Satyr Families in Renaissance Art (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984). 12. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 37. 13. Notably Hans Ost, Tizian- Studien. 14. This is also the premise of Melanie Hart, “Visualizing the Mind: Looking at Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas,” British Journal of Psychotherapy 23 (2007), 267–80. Hart’s analysis, however, is strongly influenced by the autobiographical approach of Gentili, “Da Tiziano a Tiziano,” which rests on the identification of Midas as a self-portrait of the artist: “Through the use of the self-portrait we are urged to understand that what we can see is the content of the artist’s mind. This is Titian’s fi nal testament. We are looking at thinking. But what does ‘thinking’ mean?” She concludes that what is at stake is Titian’s humane selfdistancing from the psychotic violence represented by Apollo, eliding the Shakespeare-like humanistic genius of the painter with the healing compassion of the modern therapist: “Every thing the umbilicus symbolizes is of no account to Apollo. His divinity means that he has nothing to provide him with an authentic sense of connectedness between himself and the human world. Behind his omnipotence, the inability to be vulnerable, lies isolation, an absence of responsive feeling which denies him any understanding of ordinary creative expressiveness. This evokes in him catastrophic envy of the other who seems free of such limitations.” Ultimately, “Titian has given us an image capable of representing the states of mind involved in paranoid-schizoid and depressive functioning. He also describes dynamically their internal structures, their causes, the relationship between them, the function of oedipal triangulation, the causes of its failure, the result of its failure” (278). Titian is thus absolved from the violence staged in his own work, with which his very pictorial process is complicit. 15. Some secular examples are discussed in Campbell, “Naturalism and the Venetian Poesia: Grafting, Metaphor and Embodiment in Giorgione, Titian

94

Stephen J. Campbell

and the Campagnolas.” In Subject as Aporia in Italian Renaissance Art, ed. Lorenzo Pericolo and Alexander Nagel (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate Press, 2009), 115–43. 16. In terms of progeny, the one possible exception is the problematic version of the same composition or an earlier stage of it, now in a private collection. The effect is entirely dif ferent— spatial relationships are clearer and there is a deep landscape setting; Olympus has the leering character of the figures in the Giulio Romano Marsyas, and the little satyr with the hunting dog is omitted. See the discussion in Late Titian, 232–4. 17. Antonio Pérez, Segundas Cartas (Paris, 1603), 120v.–121r, quoted in Charles Hope, Titian (New York, Harper and Row, 1980), 118. 18. Castiglione’s influence is manifest, for instance, in the assertion that convenevole sprezzatura is better than diligenza. See the useful account by Michel Hochmann, Venise et Rome, 1500–1600, Deux écoles de peinture et leurs échanges (Geneva: Droz, 2004). 19. Dolce, Dialogue on Painting Entitled “Aretino,” in Mark Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 171–81. 20. Dolce, Dialogue on Painting, 173. 21. Michelangelo had clearly solicited this kind of identification in the Last Judgment, with its allusions to Dante and Virgil. See Bernardine Barnes, “Metaphorical Painting: Michelangelo, Dante, and the Last Judgment,” Art Bulletin 77 (1995), 65–81; also Una Roman d’Elia, The Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 120–8. 22. Dolce, Dialogue on Painting, 189. 23. For Daniela Bohde, the Flaying of Marsyas is to be understood as an allegory of the strife between the sharp contours of Apollonian disegno and the Dionysiac unfi xity of colore. Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe, 271–2; also Bohde, “Skin and the Search for the Interior,” 37–45. As what follows makes clear, I consider that this allegorization of disegno and colore might apply to a painting like Diana and Callisto, especially as discussed by Rebecca Zorach, although it is already less important than other oppositional effects in Titian’s painting. It is not, however, at issue in the Marsyas, in which Apollo hardly stands as a convincing embodiment of disegno and which, in general, appears untroubled by the disegno/colore distinction. 24. In the Jacopo Pesaro, another Eros figure inside the relief seems to reach forth from it, and to touch the key of St. Peter in the world of the “real” figures above the relief. Such meta-pictorial reflection suggests that the tactile qualities of the relief mode activate a continuum with the world around the image. For a more detailed treatment, see my article “Naturalism and the Venetian Poesia,” especially 128–34.

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

95

25. Campbell, Cabinet of Eros, 261–2, and I acknowledge here as well as there the debt to Michael Fried’s analy sis of Courbet’s Bathers in Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 152–3. 26. The terrified Europa is shown as just catching sight of a winged Eros, in a pivotal dramatic moment in which fear turns to desire, and—in Titian’s version of the myth—Europa assents to the “rapture.” 27. Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 121–5, interprets the sequence in terms of a classically Platonizing debate over the transcendental possibilities of hearing as opposed to sight. On the Venus with a Musician series and the erotic and homosocial dimensions of repetition in Titian’s Venus paintings, see Maria Loh, Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2007), 37–42. 28. Zorach, “Despoiled at the Source,” Art History 22 (1999), 244–69 (259). Although focused largely on one of the later works, its larger implications for late Titian have not been tested or explored, even while Zorach’s reading clearly anticipates (and in many respects goes further) than those of Daniela Bohde and Jody Cranston cited earlier as well as Garrard’s recent work on Titian, nature, and gender, “Art More Power ful Than Nature: Titian’s Motto Reconsidered,” in The Cambridge Companion to Titian, ed. Patricia Meilman (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), 241–61, and in idem. Brunelleschi’s Egg, 193–237. Zorach’s analysis is in many ways congruent with Richard Wollheim’s earlier (1990) exploration of Titian’s painting as bodily metaphor. Regarding Titian’s portrayals of The Rape of Lucretia, Wollheim remarks on the strange overflow of each of the protagonist’s conditions into the other: “Titian presents death as something, as some thing, that is discharged direct from one body on to, in to, another.” Painting As an Art, 321. 29. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 30. Zorach, “Despoiled at the Source,” p. 259. Such a view of the abjection by form (Diana) of inchoate matter (Callisto), however fraught, has for me a stronger analytical purchase than Garrard’s more idealizing recent view of the dynamics of form and matter in Titian’s later fables, where his “creativity draws metaphoric energy from the dynamic of real-life sexual intercourse . . . female ‘matter’ giving warmth, energy, physicality and grounding to the cold pattern that is mere design. In the Danaë composition [1553–54, Prado] the exchange of roles is involuted once again, for the receiving female, Danaë, represents form in a relaxed state, while the male god Zeus arrives as active matter. . . . Each element vitalizes the other, like perfectly matched sexual partners who take turns playing active and passive roles.” Garrard, “Art More Power ful than Nature,” p. 259. Not only does Garrard adhere to form/matter and disegno/colore as the key dynamic of Titian’s art, she understands it in terms of a utopian and (still)

96

Stephen J. Campbell

normatively gendered conception of sexual intercourse. Titian, the champion of colore, “must have accepted an identification with the feminine (260).” Yet, as Zorach shows, and as the analysis presented here further pursues, gender is a vexatious element in late Titian, the product of violent division, often divided inwardly against itself. Moreover, the caesura of gender is a marking of other divisions within a lost or precarious continuum of body and space that constitutes the driving preoccupation of Titian’s late narrative art. 31. Dolce, Letter to Alessandro Contarini, in Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino, 213. 32. Nicholas Penny, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth- Century Italian Paintings, Volume 2—Venice 1540–1600 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 93, laconically supports this view: “Mazza’s composition surely owes something to Titian’s Venus and Adonis, which Mazza must have known well (he had perhaps worked on some of the studio replicas).” 33. On the Renaissance reception of the Ovidian myth, see Leonard Barkan, “Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis,” English Literary Re naissance 10 (1980), 329–30. 34. In a noteworthy study of the Diana paintings as mythic structures, James Lawson, “Titian’s Diana Pictures: The Passing of an Epoch,” Artibus et Historiae 25 (2004), 49–63, argues that they deal with “human evolution in the inhabitation of the world,” where the non-reproductive self-sufficiency of Diana and the forests cedes to Venus, fertility, and the rise of agriculture: “Titian follows Ovid in telling of the defeat of Diana and of its consequences for human society under the patronage of Venus and Jupiter—the preparation of the world for the shepherd and the cultivator” (61). 35. The terms are drawn here from Leo Bersani and Ulisse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken, 1985), and Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 36. The two men differentiated by costume and class in the early Giorgionesque Concert Champetre (Louvre) seem to have provided the impetus for a more radical bodily fusion accomplished by two satyrs, in a drawing from the second decade of the 1500s now in New York (Metropolitan Museum); these in turn reappear, albeit in less radical guise, in the haptic frieze of demigods in the foreground of the Pardo Venus. For a fuller discussion of these instances, see Campbell, “Naturalism and the Venetian Poesia,” 135–9. 37. For instance, the Getty Nude Woman in a Landscape, in which the female figure (her upper body as densely obscured with drapery as her lower body is exposed) shares the foreground “edge” of the landscape with a goat and boar who look in her direction, and a flock of sheep; two young male shepherds are (characteristically) set in shadow at a deeper level in space. 38. For discussion of the painting and its relation to a portrait now in Kassel, Staatliche Museen, see the entry by Sylvia Ferino Pagden in Late Titian, 227–8. The picture seems less akin to the mythological group of Cupid with dogs in

Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas

97

the portrait, or to Veronese’s Cupid Taming Two Hunting Dogs in Munich (with which it is often compared), than to be a kind of intensification, in a dif ferent representational register— again signaled in the turbulent landscape beyond the figures. 39. On the woodcut, probably made from Titian’s design by Niccolo Boldrini, see H. W. Janson, “Titian’s Laocoön Caricature and the Vesalian-Galenist Controversy,” Art Bulletin 28 (1946), 49–53. Janson’s reading related the print to controversies not only about the authority of ancient art (and hence of Michelangelo) but about the authority of Galen as a source of medical knowledge; Galenists were alleged to derive their claims about human anatomy from the dissection of apes. For Maria Loh, “ ‘Outscreaming the Laocoon’: Sensation, Special Affects, and the Moving Image” Oxford Art Journal (Special Issue: Early Modern Horror), 34 (2011), 393–414, “It is the pathos of the body in physical pain and emotional anguish rather than a concern solely with the imitation of the ancient source that resonates in Titian’s work.” She observes that criticism subsequent to Janson failed to follow his analysis in confronting how “the empathetic scream of the suffering beasts invoked in the print for this hits upon the ethics of pain and spectatorship.” 40. “Art more power ful than nature,” 247. Garrard privileges the second reading in accordance with her understanding of Titian that insists on his identification with a feminine-gendered nature. 41. In an article on Lucretius in Venetian humanism and art circa 1500, “Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius,” Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003), 299–332, I made the following observation about the Lucretian resonance of Giorgione’s revolutionary technique: “The Lucretian flux and interaction of elements are figured in the atmospheric tonal unity for which the painter is so often praised. Giorgione’s rendering of this atmospheric density through a technique of blended, interpenetrating layers is a product of a synthetic perspective on the natural world, where the visual field is composed not of objects and void, as in previous painting, but as a totality of matter. Sky and air have been rendered with a palpable texture, with a sense of their intermingled composition from moisture, air, and fiery ether. Since Lucretius teaches that matter and vacuity do not exist separately in the cosmos, but in an endlessly mobile and tumultuous mixture whose incidental product is meteorological and geological phenomena and the existence of living things, Giorgione’s mode of rendering would have a special resonance for a beholder familiar with Epicurean cosmology (318–19).” The argument was misrepresented by Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 14–19, where it is alleged, among many opportunistic misreadings, that I am perpetrating a “transcendental” “Christianizing” analysis ( because I quote one theological reader of Lucretius, Paolo Giustiniani), and that I discount any afterlife for Lucretius after

98

Stephen J. Campbell

the condemnation of “Epicureanism” in 1516, insinuating that I am somehow oblivious to the popu lar Lambinus edition of the text (which I cite on pages 325 and 330). In fact, I made no claim regarding the 1516 condemnation other than raising the possibility that it may have reduced the availability of Giorgione’s painting to a Lucretian reading on the part of its early commentators (and I point out that Carlo Ridolfi in 1648 was quite capable of reading a lost painting by Giorgione according to the De rerum natura). In his disdain for “historicizing” readings, Goldberg’s own Lucretian analysis of Tintoretto’s Conversion of St. Paul is entirely uninformed by some of the most important work on the Renaissance Lucretius to appear in the years before his book, among them Alison Brown, “Lucretius and the Epicureans in the Social and Political Context of Renaissance Florence,” I Tatti Studies 9 (2001), 11–62, and Valentina Prosperi, ‘Di soavi licor gli orli del vaso.’ La fortuna di Lucrezio dall’Umanesimo alla Controriforma. (Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2004). 42. See Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 201–14. 43. Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 168–71; John Berger, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (New York: Prestel, 1996); Agamben, The Open, 85–7, with the proposal that the post-coital pair are depicted in a state of disoeuvrement, “a new and more blessed life, one that is neither animal nor human.” The original connection of the nymph’s left arm to the shepherd is disputed in Elke Oberthaler, “Titian’s Late Style as Seen in the Nymph and Shepherd,” in Late Titian, 113–23. 44. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 326, on the “shift in perspective” in late Titian: “That Titian should, in connecting the body so powerfully with suffering, retain the connection between the body and vitality is what establishes the shift in perspective” characteristic of the Flaying of Marsyas. The presence of animals can be seen to stand for this transfer from a human response of shock or horror to a “posthuman” seeing in terms of vitality. 45. Wollheim, Painting As an Art, 326. 46. Paradiso, I.20: Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue sì come quando Marsïa traesti de la vagina de le membra sue.

t h r e e

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime: The Fundamentals of Gargantua Judith Roof

What right have we to appropriate the work of a writer writing at the early enthusiasms of humanism as a representative of the “posthuman”?1 It seems like we are jumping the gun, if we understand the past as a narrative of progress through which ideas evolve in an orderly fashion from one set of assumptions to another. Gargantua, however, enacts a dif ferent conception of this narrative as well as a very dif ferent version of cause/effect relations that si multa neously depend upon a humanist environment and yet reveal the ways humanism had always already been borne by its apparent successor as a condition of its coming into being at all. This ambivalence operates from the very beginning of François Rabelais’s Gargantua, which features the monstrous birth not only of its eponymous hero, but also of a new technology of giving birth. This second innovation, though it recalls classical emergences of similar ilk (the birth of Bacchus from Zeus’s thigh), situates the human as already more than human and the act of birth as producing simulta neously offspring and ordure, the cardinal and the ordinal. Just as 99

100

Judith Roof

Gargantua’s style of emergence twins the emergence of subsequent world views, so it aligns with tropes that enact a similar relation between the outside and the inside, the classical and a chaotic organic world, and finally a renewed appreciation of mixed types, genres, and tropes. The telling of Gargantua is not merely the disordering of humanism; it is already a challenge to the ways of thinking that had privileged the human above other orders of being and had disentangled the human from the material of its existence. The circumstances of Gargantua’s birth suggest that the outside of the box is as important as the inside—that there is no precedence on either side, so much so that the relation of outside to inside, like the relation between signifier and signified, is at best ambiguous. The figure of the silenic box, whose description precedes the account of Gargantua’s birth, enacts the clash between humanism as the anticipation of interior significance, and the post-, extra-, differently humanist as the exterior’s pretext of delight and delay. An extensive description of Gargantua’s raiment and the device borne on his hat iterate the unruly relation between an exterior, a fascination with mixed species, and the ways processes of signification are ends in themselves. Gargantua plays with signification as a process without end; it is meaning. Hence enwrapped (and enrapt), Gargantua’s various enboxings reset the matrix of humanism at a new orificial site, at the edge of the container between a surface with potential depth and teratology, as the tale’s obsessive detailings reconfigure the distinctions between substance and subject, inside and outside, meaning and vehicle by which the humanist universe had already pretended to order itself.

[Unboxing the Box] In the beginning of The Most Fearsome Life of the Great Gargantua Father of Pantagruel Composed Many Years Ago by Master Alcofridas Abstractor of the Quintessence (La vie très horrifi cque du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel. Jadis composée par M. Alcofridas, abstracteur de Quinte Essence. Livre plein de Pantagruélisme) (1534),2 even before Gargamelle’s anatomically adventurous parturition, is the box. The “Author’s Prologue” (Prologe de l’auteur) to Gargantua commences with the description of a box, the “silenus” (silenes) to which Alcibiades compared Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. This “silenus” is

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime

101

named after another Silenus, the drunken tutor to Bacchus, a hybrid being with equine ears, legs, and tail. The silenus box, described as a “little box” from “ancient days” ( jadis petites boites) is, like Silenus, the tutor, a chimera, “painted on the outside with such gay, comical figures as harpies, satyrs, bridled geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, stags in harness, and other devices of that sort, light-heartedly invented for the purpose of mirth, as was Silenus himself, the master of good old Bacchus” [37; pinctes au dessus de figures joyeuses et frivoles, come de harpies, satyres, oysons bridez, lievres cornus, canes bastées, boucqs volans, cerfz limonniers et aultres telles pinctures contrefaits à plaisir pour exciter le monde à rire (quel fut Silene, maistre du Bon Bacchus)]. Like Silenus, the comically monstrous box contained good advice and wisdom, its drunken exterior belying its profound interior. As the tale’s initial metaphor, this comparison characterizes the story that follows as one, that, like its Silenic exemplum, appears to be one thing on the outside and another on the inside. So not only is the tale, Gargantua, a Silenus whose comedy hides its wisdom, even the tale itself is enboxed by this boxy allusion— a silenic Silenus. A figure of drunken comedy enfolds a drunken comedy that enfolds? For this we will have to wait and see. Although this classical allusion would seem to land what follows squarely within a humanist discourse, the Silenic box figures this humanism as always a part of and boxed within something else: as the ever-delayed inside bound to an outside that presumably looks nothing like it, that looks like nothing human at all, at least literally. The outside’s chimerical figures merge and jumble species and technologies—satyrs, harpies, harnessed stags, saddled ducks, bridled geese— all as the Author suggests, painted there for the “purposes of mirth” (37; pour exciter le monde à rire). The box, too, holder of “rare drugs” (les fines drogues) was, according to the Author, akin to Plato’s description of Socrates, whom the Author depicts as yet another Silenic box: “so ugly was his body and so absurd his appearance, with his pointed nose, his bovine expression, and his idiotic face” that nonetheless was “always concealing his divine wisdom” (37; tant laid il estoit de corps et ridicule en son maintien, le nez pointu, le reguard d’un taureau, le visaige d’un fol). “Had you opened the box,” the Author continues, “you would have found inside a heavenly and priceless drug: a superhuman understanding, miraculous virtue, invincible courage, unrivaled sobriety, unfailing

102

Judith Roof

contentment, perfect confidence, and an incredible contempt for all those things men so watch for, pursue, work for, sail after, and struggle for” (37; mais ouvrans ceste boyte, eussiez au dedans trouvé une celeste et impreciable drogue: entendement plus que humain, vertus merveilleuse, couraige invincible, sobresse non pareille, contentement certain, assurance parfaite, deprisement incryable de tout ce pourquoy les humains tant veiglent, courant, travaillent, navigent et batillent). Not only does the inside not match what one might anticipate from the outside, the “priceless drug” itself is not at all what most men seek, but instead an even greater understanding that eschews humanist endeavor, or at least typical human ambitions. The dynamic of differential outside and inside, of things not being what they appear to be, could be read as a lesson about not judging by appearances. Monstrous exterior portends exquisite interior. But what if the outside is actually a necessary part of the inside? What if, like Socrates, its wisdom is itself the unexpected, the “superhuman,” and the inside as hidden treasure could not be such without the outside being as it is? Appearances are both deceptive and not deceptive at all; Socrates both hides his wisdom and signals its perverse character. The figure of the figured box suggests that whatever the subsequent or interior value might be, it already only exists as a part of the more interest ing spelunking process of discerning the contents of a mirthfully deceptive container. Boxed by the box, what relation does this Prologue enact between outside and inside? What is its lesson about lessons— about assumptions, approaches, value, and the relation between some categories of the world and others? And is the Silenus finally deceptive at all, or does it only produce the illusion that somewhere there is an inside with meaning—an “inside” whose drug may be the effect of having laughed at the outside? Poised as it is as the opening figure in the Prologue, even the Silenus is an inside, a box within box, or as it turns out, a box within a box within a box, boxed by Gargantua’s elaborately lengthy title, The Most Fearsome Life of the Great Gargantua Father of Pantagruel Composed Many Years Ago by Master Alcofridas Abstractor of the Quintessence, itself a play on revived classicism. The title itself is boxed, preceded by the bracketed (i.e., yet again enboxed) label, “The First Book” (Livre premier) and followed by the descriptor “A Book Full of Pantagruelisms” (livre plein de Pantagruélisme). And now you may ask, “what is a ‘Pantagruelism’ and why does that characterization pre-

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime

103

cede the following chronicle if, as the title also tells us, Gargantua is the father of Pantagruel? The tale to come thus enboxes another tale— and another tale of apparent generation—to which it already refers before its own hero is born, and from which it takes its significance as both silenic surface and precursor. The child is the father to the man, but the man’s history enfolds the child’s, whose history has already made the father’s significant. The editors of the Penguin English translation (who cannot stop themselves from comparing Rabelais to Joyce as if somehow Joyce were yet another Pantagruel to Rabelais’s paternal Gargantua), tell us that this titular disorder was produced as an effect of the order in which the tales were written [The Second Book] Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes Given in His True Character Together with His Terrible Deeds and Acts of Prowess Composed by the Late M. Alcofribas Abstractor of the Quintessence (Livre deuxième, Pantagruel, roi des Dipsodes, resitué à son naturel, avec ses faits et prouesses épouvantables, composés par feu M. Alcofribas, abstracteur de quinte essence), having been penned previously in 1532 and Gargantua as a response to criticism of Pantagruel (and by an apparently revivified author) sometime in 1534 after Rabelais’s short sojourn in England. This history suggests yet another enboxing that would probably take the boxing too far; both the Pantagruelic son and England sileniate the Gargantua, whose advent in turn enboxes the son, but whose own birth redefi nes both birth and box. Time is a mise en abime.

[[Coverture]] The Author’s Prologue follows its silenic example with another figuration that seems, on its surface, to reverse the valence of surface and depth: “Have you ever picked a lock to steal a bottle? Good for you! Call to mind your expression at the time” (38; Crochetastes vous oncques bouteilles? Caisgne! Reduisez à memoire la contenance qu’aviez). Lock and bottle, the box now figured by the figuration of the secret, the bottle another box producing through metonymy yet another surface signification, your metonymic “expression”—your outside—which you could not possibly see, figuring some inside, your feeling, at the time, which presumably matches your anticipatory glee at the prospect of the bottle’s insides. In this instance, outside matches inside. Indeed, do judge the book by its cover and understand

104

Judith Roof

such covers as deixic yet challenging impediments pointing to the secret joy to which they already point. The figures of lock and bottle precede yet another figuration of the relation between outside and inside in the “Author’s Prologue,” this time one that focuses, like lock-picking, on some means of ingress as the desiring quest for matter—as a model for reading. “Or did you ever see a dog,” the Author continues, “—which is, as Plato says, in the second book of his Republic, the most philosophical creature in the world– discover a marrow bone?” (Mais veistes vous oncques chien rencontrant quelque os medulare? C’est, comme dict Platon, lib. ij de Rep., la beste du monde plus philosophe.) Again, the box, the dog and its marrow-bone enboxing Plato’s Republic inserted into the sentence as a dash interrupter. “If ever you did,” the narrator continues, “you will have noticed how devotedly he eyes it, how carefully he guards it, how fervently he holds it, how circumspectly he begins to gnaw it, how lovingly he breaks it, and how diligently he licks it. What induces him to do all this? What hope is there in his labour? What benefit does he expect? Nothing more than a little marrow” (38; Si veu l’avez, vous avez peu noter de quelle devotion il le guette, de quel soing il le garde, de quel ferveur il le tient, de quelle prudence il l’entomme, de quelle affection il le brise, at de quelle diligence il le sugce. Qui le induict à ce faire? quel est l’espoir de son estude? Quel bien pretend il? Rien plus qu’un peu de mouelle). A counter-example here offers another instance where the apparently denigrated insides meet expectations, where the figure suggests that reading is a gnawing in anticipation. And even if the dog anticipates only “a little marrow,” that marrow itself enboxes something else. “It is true,” the Author continues, “that this little is more delicious than great quantities of any other meat; for as Galen says in his third book, On the Natural Faculties, and in his eleventh, On the Parts of the Body and Their Functions, marrow is the perfect food concocted by Nature”(38; Vray est que ce peu plus est delicieux que le beaucoup de toutes aultres, pour ce que le mouelle est aliment elabouré à perfection de nature, come dict Galen, iij Facu. naturel., et xj De usu parti). Marrow, as the anticipated nourishment, enboxes yet another classical allusion, this time to Galen as the contents of the sentence valorizing marrow. The silenus returns, the animal’s animal enboxing these germs of wisdom worth gnawing for.

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime

105

But enough gnawing. All of this enboxing prologuing that seems to hint to some value within points, as you might expect to more of the same relation, more outside hinting at something else and providing just what you are looking for: Drink. Marrow. Mixed metaphors or metaphors of mixing where the inside and outside, as the Author has already demonstrated, though not one and the same, may be one and the same, the figure of the box a figure of gestation gestating the gestations that follow, for the box, like the lock, invites an opening, an ingress and egress, whose terms, though we might anticipate them to be dif ferent, we also anticipate will be the same. These terms themselves already play on a humanist play from what can only be described as the inside/out perspective of the box enboxing a box. . . . Gargantua, the tale of the father, succeeds Pantagruel, the tale of the son, and from thence takes its significance, its raison d’être. Except that it precedes it. But from circular order also derives the tale’s distempered cause/effect logics, which operate not in reverse, i.e. son before father, but as a technology of enclosures— son as already implicit in father, or better and more literally, in mother. What finally enboxes what? Does the son enbox the father who enboxes the son who . . . or is there a middle man, or better yet, middle woman like a text into which this patriarchal mise-en-abyme may be cast to return to itself, cast anew, as we shall see, and wiping the slate or whatever, clean? In Gargantua and Pantagruel, all phenomena are simultaneously enclosed by and enclose others. There is neither linearity nor chronology, but always a relativity— something that always exists because the other is there, an inside that exists because of an outside and vice versa. And so Gargantua, the father, himself has a father, authorized at the very beginning of Chapter I, “Of the Genealogy and Antiquity of Gargantua” (De la genealogie et antiquité de Gargantua) by the “Great Pantagrueline Chronicle” (la grande chronique Pantagrueline), which locates Gargantua and Pantagruel within a direct line of descent from giants, the authenticity of which is guaranteed by another Silenus, the lengthy “Corrective Conundrums” (Les Fanfreluches antidotées) occupying the entire second chapter, found hidden under a flagon in the center of an ancient monument itself marked by nine flagons. Although it is missing its opening, was scarcely readable on its elm bark pages, and was included, as the Author says, “out of reverence for antiquity” (par reverence de l’antiquaille), the Conundrum

106

Judith Roof

consists of fourteen eight-line stanzas of comic narrative of which the English translator comments: “there is very little sense in this riddle, though some critics have found in its references to the Pope, the Reformation, and to certain wars. We have not the answer, and probably there never was one. It is merely a parody of a kind of puzzle popular at the time” (45). Answer or none, the “Corrective Conundrums” offer yet another layer of Silenic joking before the matter, delaying and yet signaling the circumstances of Gargantua’s birth, which itself was surrounded by flagons and comparisons to antiquity. Like the Silenic box, the form of the tale is tied to its content, its outside/inside relation repeating itself while also enacting an unexpected relation between a kind of wisdom and its playful, silly, and hybrid exterior, which is, like Socrates, really all the more expected, both matching and exceeding what the exterior signals. Gargantua’s father was one Grandgousier who married Gargamelle, daughter of the King of the Butterfl ies. In the course of things as they “played the two-backed beast, joyfully rubbing their bacon together,” Gargamelle became pregnant (46; et faisoient eux deux souvent ensemble la beste à deux doz, joyeusement se frotans leur lard). She carried the child for eleven months, a sure sign of his impending greatness. So far, so good; the beastly beginnings reach to the gods, as the Author invokes Hippocrates, Plautus, Varro, Aristotle, and even Octavian’s daughter Julia, as Gargamelle’s gestic forbears. But after eleven months, “This was the manner in which Gargamelle was brought to bed,” the Author declares, “and if you don’t believe it, may your fundament fall out! Her fundament fell out one afternoon, on the third of February, after she had over-eaten herself on godebillios” (47; l’occasion et maniere comment Gargamelle enfanta fut telle, et, si ne le croyez, le fondement vous escappe! Le fondement luy escappoit une après dinée, le iije jour de febvrier, par trop avoir mangé de gaudebillaux). After the elaborate, classical lead-in, Gargantua’s birth is off-hand, the punch-line of a rhetorical joke—an anadiplosis—which equates one’s fundament with what would appear to be a baby. Fundament—meaning something like the anus or the matter metonymically associated therewith—appears to be the long-awaited inside. But Gargamelle’s fundament turns out not to be the baby but her own inside products cascading as the result of her having eaten the insides of fat oxen, which having been preserved for almost a year, needed to be eaten as they turned. Gargamelle, having heartily par-

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime

107

taken of slightly off tripe, occupies her nether regions with the effects of the feast, her insides, after having feasted on other insides, turned inside out. The inside, it turns out, is quite literally the inside twice over. So just as Gargamelle’s “fundament” falls out, so whatever has been in the box, the hinted fundamentals of humanistic orders—this marrow, this inner meaning— turns out to be an ordure that in preceding Gargantua is always his twin. But as you might expect, given the order already established in the tale, the falling fundament enboxes the account of the actual birth, which is itself enboxed by a chapter entitled “The Drunkards’ Conversation” (Les propos des Bien-Ivres) consisting of a series of unattributed declarations enacting the conversation of drunkards. Enboxed by yet another silenic prologue, the matter of Gargantua’s birth, or his birth as matter, commences. And it commences with his mother wishing for his father’s castration: “Ha,” responds Gargamelle. “Just like a man! You know what I mean well enough.” “My member?” he said. “By the blood of all goats, send for a knife if that’s what you want.” “Oh,” says Gargamelle, “God forbid! God forgive me, I didn’t really mean it. Don’t do anything on account of anything I say. But I shall have trouble enough today, unless God helps me, all on account of your member, and just because I wanted to please you.” (51–2) — Ha! (dist elle) tant ous parlez à votre aize, vous aultres hommes! — Mon membre? (dist il). Sang de les acbres! Si bon vous semble faictes apporter un cousteau. Ha! (distelle) jà Dieu ne plaise! Dieu me le pardoient! je ne le dis de bon coeur, et pour ma parolle n’en faictes ne plus ne moins. Mais je auray prou d’affaires aujourd’huy, si Dieu me ayde, et tout par vostre membre, que vous feussiez bien ayse.

As Grandgousier goes off to have another drink, Gargamelle commences her labor amongst “swarms of midwives” on “every side” (tas saiges femmes de tous coustez) but what she bears are “some rather ill-smelling excrescences, which they thought were the child; but it was her fundament slipping out, because of the softening of her right intestine—which you call the bum-gut—” (52; quelques pellauderies assez de maulvais goust, et pensoient que ce feust l’enfant; mais c’estoit le fondement qui luy escappoit, à la

108

Judith Roof

mollification du droict intestine lequel vous appellez le boyau cullier). At this point “a dirty old hag of the company” (une horde vieille de la compaignie) who had “the reputation of being a good she-doctor” (laquelle avoit reputation d’estre grande medicine) “made her an astringent, so horrible that all of her sphincter muscles were stopped and constricted. Indeed you could hardly have relaxed them with your teeth—which is a most horrible thought—” (52; luy feist un restrinctif so horrible que tous ses larrys tant feurent oppilez et reserrez que à grande poine, avecques les dentz, vous les eussiez eslargiz, qui est chose bien horrible à penser). “By this misfortune,” the account continues, “the cotyledons of the matrix were loosened at the top, and the child lept up through them to enter the hollow vein. Then climbing through the diaphragm to a point above the shoulders where the vein divides in two, he took the left fork and came out by the left ear” (52). [Par cest inconvenient feurent au dessus relaschezles cotyledons de la matrice, par lesquelz sursaulta l’enfant, et entra en la vene creuse, et, gravant par le diaphragme jusques au dessus des espaules (où ladicte vene se part en deux), print son chemin à gauche, et sortit par l’aureille senestre.] His first words, uttered upon his emergence were “Drink! Drink! Drink!” (52). (“ ‘A boire! à boire! à boire!’ ”) Gargantua’s tripe birth is engulped by the Bacchic promise of the box’s outside, itself elicited triply. The Author comments on this unusual birth, suggesting that if the reader doesn’t believe it, there not only is “nothing written in the Holy Bible which contradicts it” (rien escript es Bibles sainctes qui soit contre cela) but there are numerous precedents of unusual nativities from Bacchus himself born from Jupiter’s thigh to Minerva, Adonis, and Castor and Pollux: “But you would be even more flabbergasted if I were now to expound to you the whole chapter of Pliny in which he speaks of strange and unnatural births; and anyhow I am not such a barefaced liar as he was” (53; Mais vous seriez bien dadvantaige esbahys et estonnez si je vous expousoys presentement tour le chapitre de Pline auquel parle des enfantements estranges et contre nature; et toutesfoys je ne suis poinct meneur tant asseuré comme il a esté). Itself a Silenic box, Gargantua exemplifies that every inside is another outside; there is no inside, but only irregular, ambiguous relations significant in themselves. Nor is there chronology to this cause and effect; all already is, the one in place of the other, shifting and switching not as a trick or an illusion, but as an effect of understanding that one cannot have the meaning

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime

109

without the box: The box is the meaning and the meaning is the box. The slate of order and causality is wiped clean as one of Gargantua’s earliest notable achievements (apart from urinating on Paris) was his concerted trial-and-error development of the perfect ass-wiper, the neck of a living goose, an elegant experiment anticipating enlightenment positivism. Temporality also seems to fold upon itself, pleated, perpetually turning itself out as what it both had been and will become. There is no time; and yet all times co-exist, the classical with the local, the sacred with the profane, the human as both successor and precursor to the posthuman, which, if Rabelais is to be believed, was born with the birth of Humanism, one the fundament to the other’s achievement. In the end, history is that which enfolds as it unfolds and whose unfolding is a series of multi-temporal frames like holograms, time-lapsed and timeless, each referring to the other as if fi nally, temporality is itself like the Silenic box, scribed by the figures of fathers and sons, humans and animals, chimerae and flagons, all contemporaneous, commingled, and indistinct in their distinction. History does not repeat itself: History is repetition, the same movement again and again in a chronology so unfolded that it has fi nally become untrackable.

[[[Stylistic Devices]]] Commencing Chapter 8: “How Gargantua was dressed” (Comment on vestit Gargantua) is the statement that Gargantua’s “colors were his father’s white and blue” (son pere ordonna qu’on luy feist habillemens à sa livrée, laquelle estoit blanc et bleu) the significance of which the narrator delays. The colors are presumably the heraldic outside to the elaborate, lengthy, and detailed description of Gargantua’s outside, which, like the Silenic box, constitutes an edge between the giant child/man and the late chivalric culture he parodically amplifies. The child Gargantua’s voluminous outfit—his shirt, doublet, hose, shoes, cape, belt, gown, sword, purse, hat, plume, and elegant codpiece—required more than a thousand yards of various cloths, animal skins, feathers, and jewels. The narrator lingers on the description of the codpiece, which it seems, unlike the Silenic box, is designed to match the virtues of that which rests inside, not necessarily because the outside reiterates the inside, but because in this case the clothing is above all representational.

110

Judith Roof

The codpiece, however, has already appeared in the tale—in the “Author’s Prologue”—where the Author lists, among his other books, a treatise titled, On the Dignity of Codpieces (La Dignité des Braguettes). Evoked, then, from the third paragraph, the codpiece is already the outside to this inside outside, the term “dignity,” perhaps belying the description to come, which will be more regal than dignified, more hyperbolic than restrained. Like the Silenic box, the lengthy description of Gargantua’s outfit, which occupies three entire chapters, serves as an elaborate delaying technique characterized again by signifiers from mixed orders, and constituting a narrative pause between infancy and the signs of greatness (such as the invention of the goose-neck wiper) that arrive in childhood. Outsized like all of Gargantua’s couture, the codpiece’s “shape was that of a bowed arch, well and gallantly fastened by two fi ne gold buckles with two enameled clasps, in each of which was set a huge emerald, the size of an orange” (55; Et fut la forme d’icelle comme d’un arc boutant, bien estachée joyeusement à deus belles boucles d’or, que prenoient deux crochetz d’esmail, en un chascun desquelz estoit enchasée une grosse esmeraugde de la grosseur d’une pomme d’orange). “This fruit,” the narrator continues, “has an erective virtue, and is encouraging to the natural member” (55; Car . . . elle a vertu erective et confortative du membre naturel). The narrator’s sources for this wisdom, he reveals, are Orpheus’s Book of Precious Stones and Pliny’s “final book,” both of which list the merits of precious stones (55; ainsi que dict Orpheus, libro de Lapidibus, et Pline, libro ultimo). The ornamentation of the codpiece’s clasps in the form of two large emerald globes combines the virtues of both gem and citrus as a way not of signaling the prowess of what lies within but as a means of “encouraging” it. Despite the parenthetical reference to ancient sources on the virtues of gem stones, the narrator’s conflation of gem and fruit as an aphrodisiac—as “encouraging to the natural member”—is itself entirely an ornamentation (55). Like the codpiece “set with rich diamonds, precious rubies, rare turquoises, magnificent emeralds, and Persian pearls” (garniz de fins diamens, fins rubiz, fines turquoyses, fines esmeraugdes et unions Persiques), the reference to Orpheus and Pliny pours riches onto an already hyperbolically decorated surface, especially given the fact the sources attribute neither the emerald nor the orange with erective properties.3 In any case, issues of potency seem both unnecessary and premature in discussions of a twenty-two-month-old child

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime

111

who was born with a yard-long erection unless they also signal something yet to come. The codpiece’s detail is a mode of verbal delay that puts off and masks the signified behind the codpiece signifier, elaborating the codpiece as a way to extol what it covers, but which we will never again see. The narrator summarizes the codpiece as comparable “to one of those grand Horns of Plenty that you see on ancient monuments, one such as Rhea gave to the two nymphs Adrastea and Ida, the nurses of Jupiter” (55; vous l’eussiez comparée à une belle corne d’abondance, telle que voyez es antiquailles, et telle que donna Rhea es deux nymphes Adrastea et Ida, nourices de Jupiter). The Cornucopia derived, according to one genetic myth, when Jupiter broke off one of the horns of his nurse, Adrastea, who was not a nymph, but a goat. This goat’s horn continued to pour nourishment forth, but its bizarre metonym of teat conflated with phallic object produces an androgynous figure whose pointed fullness has miraculous qualities. The narrator compares the Horn of Plenty and its nourishing associations with the codpiece itself, “For it was always brave, sappy, and moist, always green, always flourishing, always fructifying, full of humours, full of flowers, full of fruit, full of every delight” (55; toujours gualante, succulente, resudante, tousjours verdoyante, tousjours fleurissante, tousjours fructifiante, plene d’humeurs, plene de fleurs, plene de fruictz, plene de toutes délices). In French, “codpiece” is braguette, or little braca, a Provençal word for knee breeches. Braguette refers to the piece of armor that juts where pants (or armor) legs meet. It is also the etymological root of the term “bracket,” which Gargantua does in excess, the brackets in the title only beginning a perpetual bracketing in which one account brackets another.4 The codpiece braguette is finally the bracket that contains . . . a bracket or better, braquemart (archaic slang for penis from the Dutch breecme or small saber). This suggests that in sum, Gargantua is itself like a large braguette, a codpiece covering a codpiece, brackets bracketing brackets, neither getting to the horn of the matter, whose suggestion itself magnifies its stature. The outside is always harbinger of another harbinger, while at the same time also standing metonymically for that which it delays. The braguette is, too, another instance of mixed species. The Horn of Plenty enjeweled codpiece is, like the detached goat’s horn, both a horn and a source of nourishment, a progenitor and itself the fruit. It is curiously ambivalent, its hyperbolic ornamentation suspiciously over-compensatory.

112

Judith Roof

The narrator, however, quickly allays fears on that point: “I will inform you now, however, that not only was it long and capacious, but well furnished within and well victualled, having no resemblance to the fraudulent codpieces of so many young gentlemen which contain nothing but wind, to the great disappointment of the female sex” (55; D’un cas vous advertis que, si elle stoit bien longue et bien ample, si estoit elle bien guarnie au dedans et bien avitaillée, en rien ne ressemblant les hypocriticques braguettes d’un tas de muguetz, qui ne sont plenes de vent, au grand interest du sexe féminin). The narrator, who by virtue of his having authored a book, On the Dignity of Codpieces, knows whereof he speaks. Worried for once about the relations among this layered series of outsides and insides, the narrator assures us that the outside indeed does match the inside, that the interior lives up to the surface, more like the flagon than the box. But again, like the Silenic box, what if the decorated codpiece is actually a part of what it covers, and by virtue of its covering, it reveals the family jewels precisely as jewels? The bracket brackets a bracket. By signaling a copious inside, the codpiece produces the inside as that which has already lived up to its bejeweled container. No fraud here as there is in so many “wind”y cases.

[[[[ Les Braguettes]]]] Like the Silenic box that signals the character of Gargantua’s motley biography in its elaborate delays and mélange of creatures, the braguette bracket signals something beyond a single sex, the single slitted cover bracketing an organ that is both breast and phallus, a hybrid of sorts. The inside, the narrator assures us, is “well victualled.” Nourishing. Its furnishing, like its covering, exceeds its function, not by being “brave, sappy, and moist,” but by being “Full of flowers, full of fruit,” attributes more characteristic of a womb. The hinted androgyny of the codpiece and its contents are akin to the hybrid figures on the Silenus. Appearing to be merely mythical creatures, their import is also a greater ambivalence about kind, a mystery that will not be solved by looking in the box, but which can only be understood in the relation between cod and piece, between braguette and braquemart. The codpiece’s jeweled ornamentation “set with rich diamonds, precious rubies, rare turquoises, magnificent emeralds, and Persian pearls” is a com-

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime

113

pendium of mixed messages, if we continue the narrator’s delving into ancient gemological erudition. In his Natural History, for example, Pliny the Elder lists the attributes of diamonds: “Adamas [the diamond], too, overcomes and neutralizes poisons, dispels delirium, and banished groundless perterbations of the mind” (408). Firelike, “carbuncles” [rubies] provide “proof against the action of that element” (420). The point even of these various adorning gems is not to guarantee any hidden quantity in the codpiece contents, but to signal the wearer’s potential— a potential already enhanced by an outside that magnifies, for one characteristic Pliny attributes to the emerald is its ability to magnify that which is in close proximity to it. The codpiece enboxing Gargantua’s androgynous equipment has its complement in the hat-medallion, “a fine piece of enamelled work set in gold plate weighing a hundred and thirty-six ounces, on which was displayed a human body with two heads turned towards one another, four feet and two rumps—the form according to Plato in his Symposium, of Man’s nature in its mystical beginnings; and around it was written in Ionian script: ‘ΑΓΑΠΗ ΟΥ ΖΗΤΕΙ ΤΑ ΕΑΥΤΗΣ’ (Charity seeketh not her own profit)” the device says (56; une figure d’esmail competent, en laquelle estoit pourtraict un corps humain ayant deux testes, l’une virée vers l’autre, quatre bras, quatre piedz et deux culz, telz que dict Platon in Symposio, avoir esté l’humaine nature à son commencement mystic, et autour estoit escript en letteres Ioniques: ΑΓΑΠΗ ΟΥ ΖΗΤΕΙ ΤΑ ΕΑΥΤΗΣ). But unlike the codpiece whose characterization requires five times the amount of text, the hat-medallion’s description ends with the Greek. The Greek, Aristophanes, to which it refers, however, is, like the obscured cod, himself bracketed by another Greek, Plato, whose description of Aristophanes’s tale of the doubled form of the originary three sexes is at odds with the figure described on the hat-medallion: “. . . the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and the same number of feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond.”5 The hat-medallion’s self-regarding heads alter Aristophanes’s outward-looking specimens, as does the doubled being’s indeterminate sex. The description, so fulsome about every thing else, neglects the sex of the figure, which is one of the points of Aristophanes’s story. Aristophanes’s story about the early state of beings describes doubled

114

Judith Roof

beings of three varieties: doubled males, doubled females, and a doubled being with one of each sex. As their doubleness threatened Zeus, he broke the beings into singles who thus spent their lives trying to refind their other halves. A partial explanation for romantic love, the account offers three versions: male homosexuality, female homosexuality, and heterosexuality.6 That the narrator turns this erudition in on itself suggests the selfcontemplation of a reconstructed doubled whole being. The device may stand for Gargantua himself as one such challenger. That the rumps instead of the heads are outermost aligns with the account’s focus on the rump and its products. The doubled, self-regarding heads on Gargantua’s head are like the Silenic box, commingling and troping classical allusions as itself a means of knowing—of messing with the order of things to achieve a greater wisdom as does the “bovine”-faced Socrates. The Greek motto “Charity seeketh not her own” itself contradicts the posture of the figure (which seems to represent self-regard more than charity) while extolling the generosity of Gargantua. The hat-medallion, like other exterior signifiers, offers a selfcontradictory, ambivalent cue. Of the three chapters describing Gargantua’s haberdashery, two focus on Gargantua’s colors with which his sartorial inventory commenced. Again, like the Silenic box, these are not what they seem to be, while being exactly what they seem. The narrator rejects traditional heraldic accounts of the meanings of colors, questioning their foundations: “Who is telling you that white stands for faith and blue for steadfastness? A mouldy book, you say, that is sold by pedlars and ballad-mongers, entitled The Blason of Colours. Who made it? Whoever he is he has been prudent in one respect, that he has not put his name to it. For the rest, I do not know which surprises me more, his presumption or his stupidity . . .”[57; Qui vous dict que blanc signifie foy et bleu fermeté? Un (dictes vous) livre trepelu, qui se vend par les bisouars et porteballes, au titre: le Blason des couleurs. Qui l’a faict? Quiconques il soit, en ce a esté prudent qu’il n’y a poinct mis son nom. Mais, au reste, je ne sçay quoy premier en luy je doibve admirer, ou son oultrecidance ou sa besterie]. In the place of these “foolish impostures” (58; impositions badaudes) the narrator offers a more “logical” scientific account of the disposition and effects of colors based on Aristotle and “Nature.” Using white as his specimen case, the narrator offers a scientific theory for white’s significations of “joy, solace, and gladness” ( joye, soulas et liesse) premised

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime

115

upon both a logic of binary opposition (if black means grief, then white, black’s opposite, must mean joy) and an argument about the effects of optics that is not far from contemporary cognitive science: “as externally white distracts and dazzles the sight, manifestly dissolving the visual spirits, according to the opinion of Aristotle in his Problems and writers upon Optics . . .” (61; Car—comme le blanc exteriorement disgrege et esparte la veue, dissolvent manifestement les espritz visifs, selon l’opinion de Aristotles en ses Problemes et des perspectifz . . .) The rest of the sentence is replete with scientific authority from Galen and Marcus Tullius to Avicenna. In the context of Gargantua’s livery, however, this extended quarrel with heraldry is, like the Silenic box, a cacophony of reason that ultimately suggests that heraldic colors signal nothing essential, but instead merely work by means of some physical impression. The rejection of a long tradition of heraldic signification in the middle of an extended description of clothing that commences with a heraldic claim is yet another instance of Gargantua’s anticipation of a posthuman shift in the logics and chronologies of ordering, whether that is a disturbance in the relations between outside and inside, signifier and signified, traditional meaning versus science, the order of precedence, or the virtues of matter—of booze and shit. His argument about the physiological operation of whiteness has very little to do with Gargantua himself. The narrator does not connect his diatribe on nature to any of Gargantua’s essential qualities. His quarrel is, instead, with method itself—with unquestioned received knowledge as opposed to a more scientific method by which the outside—white— may be physically linked to a physiological response. At the same, however, he makes the same kind of symbolic move as his heraldic predecessor, explaining that the French “like to wear white feathers in their caps. For by Nature they are joyful, frank, gracious, and kindly, and have for their sign and symbol the flower that is whiter than any other: the lily, that is” (61; voluntiers portent plumes blanches sur leurs bonnetz; car par nature ilz sont joyeux, candides, gratieux et bien amez, et pour leur symbole et enseigne ont la fleur plus nulle aultre blanche: c’est le lys). Bracketing Gargantua’s outfit, which is bracketed by an extended account of Gargantua’s childhood, this disquisition pits symbolic meaning against physiology while si multa neously extending symbolic meanings analogous to both the codpiece and the Silenic box. All of these finally enact a

116

Judith Roof

both/and: The outside is both the outside and the inside and vice versa. All is already all; a dynamic of bracketing and opening out relaces ideas of precedence, hierarchy, and linearity. Syllogisms (and chronologies) work both ways at once: Not only is the meaning of white not founded in tradition, but white reflects white’s effects and vice versa. The species of linear narrative typical of medieval epics combines with another kind of ordering—the mise en abime bracketing of ornamented brackets. This combination produces a series of layered challenges to traditions and ways of thinking enfolded within what appears to be the epic organ ization of the feats of a hero. The epic bows to the bracketed multi-dimensionality of descriptions, discussions, diversions, and divagations, all reflecting the Prologue’s opening Silenic figure.7 Gargantua fi nally is itself fi nished with a closing bracket. Paired with Chapter 2’s “Corrective Conundrum,” the book’s fi nal Chapter 58 offers “A Prophetic Riddle” [Enigme en prophetie]. Bracketed by a Conundrum and a riddle, the braguette, which is both Gargantua and which Gargantua turns out to have been, has always been a matter of interpretation. While Gargantua thinks the fi nal poem extols “the continuance and steadfastness of Divine Truth” (Le decours et maintien de verité divine), the interlocutor Monk suggests that the Riddle describes a tennis game: “You can read all the allegorical and serious meanings into it that you like, and dream on about it, you and all the world, as much as you ever will. For my part, I don’t think there is any other sense concealed in it than the description of a game of tennis wrapped up in strange language” (163; Donnez y allegories et intelligences tant graves que vouldrez, et y ravassez, vous et tout le monde, ainsy que vouldrez. De ma part, je n’y pense aultre sens enclous q’une dexcription du jeu de paulme soubz obscures parolles). Puzzling brackets enfolding, representing, hinting at an inside which, it turns out is no dif ferent from the outside, Gargantua (and Gargantua) is finally about that which les bragards brag, the term “brag” deriving from the same root as braguette. No matter how one thinks of it, no matter the import, symbolism, authority, or ornamentation, a codpiece still enfolds a cod. Whether the inside is a cod or mere wind, ordure or heir, booze or marrow, the illusion that any of these insides are anything other than some sort of outside depends upon acknowledging some difference between something marked as exterior and what it seems to hold. Gargantua’s birth and the tell-

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime

117

ing of his tale, coterminous as they are and enwrapped in the box of a box of a box (or bracketing the bracket holding the braquemard) predict that the inside has always been the outside and vice versa, that questing and desire, presumptions and anticipation are all that exist at whatever junction we imagine makes the edge. Whatever abject we assume has been shed and ejected is not abject but rather that which nourishes and empowers through a logic dif ferent from the tripe logic with which the work begins. If, in eating the stomach, Gargamelle’s stomach appears to fall out, so in giving “ear” to Gargantua, Gargamelle labors over the emergence of a new kind of speech: a speech whose joyous evocation of borders makes it finally borderless, rife with plenitude, liberated from nominalism, extending timelessly, enveloping the landscape by which it is enveloped in a glee that reinterprets the centering of humanity while it sheds traditional categories by which the very notion of a center could be construed. In the end, Gargantua’s perpetual boxing and bracketing decenter the human itself as a counter-impetus that, although it might be relegated to the hyperbolic fantasy of the work, also institutes an example of a world functioning without such a humanocentric order. Gargantua becomes the disruptive agent of this dis-ordering redistribution as his logic travesties and counters the logic by which he might have appeared in the first place. The parallels between Gargantuan logic and some of the tenets of contemporary posthumanist thought are less uncanny than they are the predictable effects of the systemic operations put into play by Rabelais’ imagining before the fact the ramifications of the endless mise-en-a box dis-ordure he commences. This is not, in the end, the binary and recontainable “carnivalesque,” but is instead the induction of a significantly dif ferent mode of thinking.

Notes 1. “Posthuman” has various meanings, but most simply, “it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from humanism itself” (xv). Cary Wolfe’s analysis of the term also asserts: “. . . when we talk about posthumanism, we are not just talking about a thematics of the decentering of the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates . . ; rather I will insist that we are also talking about how thinking confronts that thematics, what thought has to become in the face of those challenges”

118

Judith Roof

(What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, xvi). See also, Abraham C. Keller, “The Idea of Progress in Rabelais,” PMLA 66.2 (1951): 235–43, which argues that Rabelais’s writings participate in what Keller characterizes as “this union of scholars’ theoretical knowledge and historical perspective with the artisans’ practical approach and material scale of values which created the scientific movement and the modern idea of progress, of which science was at once the source, the demonstration, and the instrument” (236). Noting that the earlier works are enthusiastic about this “progress” while the later works return to the value of the classics, Keller suggests that “Rabelais’ progressive notions were present in embryo, or just below the level of consciousness, while he was writing along traditional lines” (238). The texts’ ambivalence toward both science and traditional suggests that the texts are enacting a somewhat dif ferent relation, not to the idea of progress, but to a question of methods of thinking. 2. All further references to page numbers are to François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955). 3. Pliny’s comments on the qualities of the diamond and the ruby are from Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 6. Pliny’s Book XXXVII of The Natural History does not list erective encouragement among the properties of the “smaragdus” or emerald but he does attribute smaragdus with the following characteristics: Indeed there is no stone, the colour of which is more delightful to the eye; for whereas the sight fi xes itself with avidity upon the green grass and the foliage of the trees, we have all the more pleasure in looking upon the smaragdus, there being no green in existence of a more intense colour than this. And then, besides, of all the precious stones, this is the only one that feeds the sight without satiating it. Even when the vision has been fatigued with intently viewing other objects, it is refreshed by being turned upon this stone; and lapidaries know of nothing that is more gratefully soothing to the eyes, its soft green tints being wonderfully adapted for assuaging lassitude, when felt in those organs. And then, besides, when viewed from a distance, these stones appear all the larger to the sight, reflecting as they do, their green hues upon the circumambient air. Neither sunshine, shade, nor artificial light effects any change in their appearance; they have always a softened and graduated brilliancy; and transmitting the light with facility, they allow the vision to penetrate their interior; a property which is so pleasing, also, with reference to water. Pliny, Natural History, ed. and trans. John Bostock, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu / hopper/text?doc =Perseus %3A text

Rabelais’s Silenic Regime

119

4. The Online Etymological Dictionary lists the noun “bracket” as coming from the “Middle French braguette referring to ‘codpiece armor’ (16c.), from a fancied resemblance of architectural supports to that article of attire (Spanish cognate bragueta meant both ‘codpiece’ and ‘bracket’) . . .” (http://www.etymonline .com /index.php?term=bracket&allowed_ in _frame = 0). 5. This is from Aristophanes’s Speech in Plato’s Symposium, Collected Works of Plato, 4th ed., trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953, 189c–189d, 520 to 193d–193e at 525) at http://www.anselm.edu / homepage/ dbanach /sym.htm. 6. Nan Cooke Carpenter reads the hat medallion device as evidence of Rabelais’s tendency to materialize Platonic ideas as well as a figure that links Platonic ideas with Christian ity. She also notes the way Rabelais takes up the currency of the figure of the androgyne in Renaissance French culture. Donald Stone points out the device’s inaccurate representation of Plato, and suggests that the easy answer is that “Rabelais clearly wanted the picture of the device to relate to its motto” (“Rabelais and the Androgyne,” Modern Language Notes 68.7 (1953): 425. 7. In her reading of the “architecture” of Gargantua, Martine Sauret thoroughly analyzes the ways the text locates itself quite literally between the ancient and the modern worlds, enfolding, interrupting, deviating. She says: “Le schéma du texte fait alors apparaître une enveloppe en forme d’opposition/ construction: elle présente la particularité de se répercuter a l’interieur des chapitres eux-mêmes.” (The pattern of the text then reveals an envelope formed of opposition/construction; it offers the distinctive feature of echoing the insides of the chapters themselves.”) “Gargantua en marge: dérive structurelle et humaniste,” L’Esprit Créateur 38, no. 1 (1998): 28.

fou r

A Natural History of Ravishment Holly Dugan

Late in the medieval prose Life of Alexander, long after the army has passed beyond the Pillars of Hercules and just after battling an army of giant beasts in a forest wilderness, Alexander and his army arrive at a river. There, on its bank, they encounter a large creature, naked and hairy, with the head and voice of swine.1 Perplexed by its lack of fear, Alexander orders his men to bring the creature before him. Unsure whether it is a wild animal or a human man, Alexander devises a strange test of its humanity: Fra þeine pay remowed and come till a grete ryuer, & luged þam þare. And as it ware abowte none, þare come apon þam a wilde man, als mekill als a geaunte. And he was rughe of hare all ouer, and his hede was lyke till a swine, And his voice also. And when Alexander saw hiym, he bad his knyghtis tak hym & bring hym bi-for hym. And when þay come abowte hym, he was na thynge fered, ne fled no ȝte, bot stodd baldly bi-for þam. And when Alexander saw that, he comanded þat þay sulde take a ȝonge damsell & nakken hir & sett hir bi-fore hym. And þay did soo. And, onane, he rann apon her romyandd as he 120

A Natural History of Ravishment

121

hadd bene wodd. Bot þe knyghtes wit grete deficcultee refte hyr fra hym. And ay he romyed & made grete mane. And Alexander wondered gretly of his figure. And þan he gerte bynd hym till a tree & make a fyre abowte hym & brynne hym. And so þay did.2 The army left there and came to a great river. And there, alone, they came upon a wildman, as tall as a giant. He was covered with rough hair, with a head and voice like a swine. When Alexander saw him, he ordered his knights to bring him before him. And when they surrounded him, he was not fearful; he did not flee, but stood boldly before them. And when Alexander saw that, he commanded that they should take a young damsel, strip her, and set her before the creature. And they did so. And, with the army watching him, he ran upon her as if he had been insane. But the knights, with great difficulty, reft her from him. And he roared loudly in complaint. Alexander wondered greatly of his figure. And then he ordered his men to beat and bind the creature to a tree, make a fire about him, and burn him. And so they did.

The damsel’s naked body comprises the whole of Alexander’s test of humanity. As such, it is as striking as it is inconclusive: Does the creature fail or pass the test? Does ravishment of human women mark the domain of the human or of the animal? That Alexander raises such questions is interest ing in and of itself; that he refuses to interpret the answers, and in fact grows bored with the very construct he himself proposed (and enacted), is perhaps meant to be instructive. Though Alexander and his army quickly move on from this encounter unscathed, the beast and the damsel do not. Their mutual abjection is at the heart of this tale, emerging only when one resists its narrative thrust to move on. As a literary narrative, it relies on familiar tropes of a vulnerable, young woman victim and of a beastly male assailant. Yet the test renders them quite literal: It posits a desire that transgresses species boundaries, but does not unsettle human hierarchies of nature or gender. In this way, it joins a host of tales about bestial ravishment that rely on a blasé paradox: that in a violent world filled with a stunning array of non-human actors, human women’s bodies are rendered desirable—and vulnerable—to a wide variety of animals, transcending what we might term “species boundaries.”3 In such tales, sexual violence emerges as trope to define humanity.4 This is the premise of Alexander’s test of the creature. In this article, I examine its structure, especially how various intellectual approaches have

122

Holly Dugan

interpreted its ambivalent ending. Tracing its iteration within three kinds of histories of ravishment, all of which take strikingly dif ferent approaches to how the creature is defined (while ignoring similar quandaries about the virgin), I argue that the tale and its ambivalent ending allow us to interrogate how certain configurations of sex and violence become “natural” while others remain oblique. Framed in this way, the tale’s narrative focus on human/animal binaries rather than gendered ones allows readers in the past (and perhaps in the present) to ignore the terrain on which the question of species boundaries is continuously posed. As a tale of bestial ravishment, perhaps, too, as a tale of rape, Alexander’s test provokes interpretation even as it denies it; as such, it reveals no hidden clues to unpacking lost histories of sexual violence other than a seemingly intransigent belief in sex that is knowable and desire that is culpable, regardless of sharp epistemic, historical, and cultural shifts around how we define rape, its victims, and its history.

Literary Histories: Animal Ravishment The beast’s attack is an eroticized assault, though one that confounds categorization. His status as a “wilde man” troubles the meaning of his actions. Alexander’s momentary disorientation at the end of the tale links literary traditions of medieval romance with literary narratives of sexual violence. Put simply, what kind of assault is this? Did Alexander and his knights interpret it as rape? Do we? Scholars have argued convincingly that wildness itself muddies the distinctions between human and animal, focusing instead on the structural differences between “chivalric” and “wilde” men. Scholars such as Susan Crane, Helen Young, and Hayden White have argued that the role of wildness in medieval literature is proximate, indexing a state of being rather than a categorical distinction.5 As Crane argues, “When wildness is nearby rather than exotic, humans can slide in and out of it.”6 Likewise, Helen Young argues that “wodewose”—the Middle English term for wildmen— captured a wide array of human/animal hybrids, but what links such disparate creatures is their liminal position in medieval texts (both figuratively and visually as marginalia), which she argues “calls into question” the fi xity of either category—human or animal— elsewhere in medieval literature.7 Similarly,

A Natural History of Ravishment

123

in Hayden White’s terms, medieval wildmen were men “with the soul of an animal,” yet “so degraded that [they] could not be saved by God’s grace itself.”8 Read in this way, wildmen—their bodies and their desires— structurally mimic those of men, yet we might wonder more about such symmetry in this tale, especially as it resonates across its long and varied literary history. For the beast’s nakedness also mimics the damsel’s, a fact that defi nes the human and the animal not through structural oppositions of reason or restraint but rather through shared experiences of violence. Alexander’s stunning test documents what we might describe, using the language of post-human and feminist theory, as “trans- corporeal” contact between human and animal bodies and their environment.9 Increasingly popular across medieval Europe, the romances of Alexander were heterogeneous and morally ambivalent. Its long literary history amplifies such ambivalence—versions of the Alexander tale have been translated into almost “every language of culture from India to Iceland” since his death and well into the Renaissance.10 It thus offers a unique opportunity to examine how a complicated medieval narrative of violence like this one came to be coded in other ways through its reception in the Renaissance. Two main texts comprise the source material for most of the medieval manuscripts in Middle English: the prose Life of Alexander and the alliterative verse Wars of Alexander. Both the alliterative romance Wars of Alexander and what is now recognized as the prose Life of Alexander were translated from Latin sources, now lost, in the fifteenth century. I have focused my attention on the prose version, though the encounter with the wildman is included in both versions of the tale.11 Both emphasize his role as a conqueror.12 By the time he encounters the creature in this episode, Alexander has conquered three-quarters of the world, including a host of wild creatures.13 The creature that Alexander and his army confront on the banks of the river emerges as part of this broader history: hairy and tall, with the head and voice of a swine, the creature is and is not recognizable as human. Its fearlessness seems to provoke Alexander at the start of the narrative, but after the violent attack on the naked girl, Alexander is left wondering more about its “figure,” a term that seems to connote both the creature’s morphology

124

Holly Dugan

(including its genitalia) but also its gestures, roaring and crying. Seized for its fearlessness and killed for its savagery, the creature responds to human provocation yet also surpasses it. In the aftermath of the attack on the young girl, the creature is undone, beaten and burned. Though the text does not use the word “ravishment,” it structures the meaning of the attack, both in terms of its provocation and in its consequences. The creature is male and the attack is of a naked, young girl, who is “reft” from “him” by “knights.” In this way, it is like other accounts of wildmen in medieval romances, in which wildmen emerge as worthy adversaries for aristocratic knights through their attacks on human women. The wildman’s rapacious desire serves as a justification for chivalric norms that defined knights as above and beyond common men; yet it also subtly critiques such value systems, through the ways in which the sexual desire for young women is shared by both knights and beasts.14 As Dorothy Yamamoto summarizes, medieval wildmen “derive their identity from what they are not.”15 They are not knights. As she argues, the beast is killed not for its desire for the woman but for acting on it: “It shows he lacks reason and restraint.”16 Even when compared with medieval narratives of sexual violence, where the meaning of what we now think of as rape (non-consensual penetration) is often only implied by tropes of what was then termed ravishment (voluntary or non-voluntary seizures of the body), this episode, with its triangulation of human and animal actors, remains oblique, especially the nameless damsel. Her surprising presence in the wilderness is not explained. Where did she come from? Was she travelling with the army? Did they happen upon her, too? She has no ethnicity, history, or narrative function other than provocation and violation. The narrative does not comment on the ease with which Alexander’s “knyghts” abandon their chivalric norms in order to “nakken” her. Sexuality is necessarily heterogeneous within a textual history as varied as this one; likewise, its discrete parts often chronicle surprising encounters between Alexander’s army and many “wondrous” creatures of the “east.” Some, however, are more wondrous than others: As Peggy McCracken argues, certain creatures (and the desires they provoke) retain “a mark of the strange” even within this cata logue of the worlds’ creatures.17 Focusing on the sexual encounters between Alexander’s army and a forest of floral-

A Natural History of Ravishment

125

maidens (whose virginity is restored nightly), McCracken demonstrates how certain configurations of sex and gender within the Anglo-Norman iterations of this tale reveal the wider potential of its poetic networks of textual transmission, a network that invited (and continues to invite) its readers “to share and to take, but not to take away, to join, to come again, to repeat” even as it chronicles Alexander’s role as “conqueror and collector.”18 The floral-virgins confound Alexander and his men, even as they welcome and conjoin with them, flouting the categories used to orient his way through the world and, for readers, through the textual network. McCracken’s analysis of the floral maidens within the Roman d’Alexandre tradition offers one example of how a representation of a transcultural sexual encounter orients and disorients meaning in a profound way within this vast textual network; Alexander’s encounter with the lone wildman and his sexual provocation of it to ravish a damsel in the English Life of Alexander, however, offer another. In many of the medieval romances of Alexander, conquests of women and of beasts are related; often, these conquests are intertwined.19 For example, in the prose version of his tale, Alexander’s birth is the result of an adulterous, bestial ravishment. Anectanabus, King of Egypt, desires Olympadas, wife of Philip, King of Macedon. A true magician, Anectanabus manipulates Olympadas into believing their sexual union is divinely ordained through false oracles, sleeping potions, and fi nally, transforming himself into an enchanted “wild dragon.”20 Olympadas conceives Alexander during this bestial ravishment. Wall-eyed, with the hair and voice of a lion, and teeth as bright as “tusks,” Alexander’s body betrays his birth; he is both Egyptian and Macedonian, human and animal, chivalric and wanton: He is born of violence and will conquer the world.21 Bestial ravishment is both unnatural and supernatural: It produces Alexander’s physical superiority. Elsewhere in the text, Alexander and his men often go to great lengths to protect damsels-in-distress. The narrative emphasizes how these acts of protection underscore Alexander’s Macedonian heritage and his adopted father’s chivalric norms rather than his biological father’s bestiality. His hybridity defines him as a king and as a leader.22 When Alexander is crowned in Babylon, for instance, it is reported that a woman gave birth to a strange child, half human and half animal, whose animal parts remained alive despite the fact that the human parts of the creature were dead. This

126

Holly Dugan

is interpreted as a prophecy of Alexander’s coming death and the “monster” is brought before the king: In the mene tyme whils Alexander was in babyloyne, a woma2 was delyuer of a knaue childe þe whilke fra þe heuede to þe nauyƚƚ had3 schappe of ma2, & was borne ded3. And fra þe nauyƚƚ downwardeȝ it had lyknesse of dyuerse besteȝ and was qwykke. Þis Monstre was take2 & broghte tiƚƚ Alexander; and als so2 als he saw it he meruaylle3 gretly þare-off, and gart come bi-fore hy4 a philosopher þat couthe of wiche-crafte, & aschede hym what it sygnyfye3. And whe2 þe philosopher saw it, he syghede, & saye wepan3 sayde vn-to hym: ‘Sothely wirchipfuƚƚ emperour,’ quoþ he, ‘þe tyme commeȝ nere that þou saƚƚ passe oute of this werlde.’ ‘Telle me,’ quoþ Alexander, ‘whareby þou knawes þat.’ And þe philosophre ansuerde & sayde: ‘My lorde,’ quoþ he, ‘þe halfe of þis Monstre þat hase þe schappe of ma2 & es ded3, betakens þat þou saƚƚ passe out of þis werlde in haste. And þe toþer party þat hase þe lyknes of dyuerse besteȝ & es on lyfe, betakynges þe kynges þat saƚƚ come after þe. Bot þare saƚƚ nane of þa4 be lyke vn-to þe, na mare þa2 a beste es lyke vn-tiƚƚ a ma2.23 While Alexander was in Babylon, a woman was delivered of an infant boy, who from head to navel, was shaped as a man and born dead. From the navel down, it resembled many beasts and was alive. This monster was taken and brought before Alexander, who immediately marveled at it, even consulting a philosopher expert of witchcraft. He asked the expert what it signified. When the philosopher saw it, he sighed, stared, and wept, saying unto him: “Soon, worshipful Emperor,” quoth he, “the time comes near that you shall pass out of this world.” Alexander replied, “Tell me how you know this.” And the philosopher answered, “My lord, the half of this monster that has the shape of man and is dead reveals that you shall pass out of this world quickly. And the other part that has the likeness of diverse beasts and is alive, signals the kings that shall come after thee. But none of them shall be like you, no more than a beast is like a man.

Alexander wonders greatly at this figure as well. Half alive, half beast, its spectacular survival, if we can call it survival, is disconnected from its human mother and her history, interpreted instead as relevant to the King. Though the philosopher works hard to provide an explanation of why this creature foretells of the emperor’s death, and his dramatically inferior successors, its hybridity emphasizes the ways in which human and animal morphology are linked throughout the narrative, connecting his seemingly human singu-

A Natural History of Ravishment

127

larity to other kinds of crossover creatures, both monstrous or other wise. Though the philosopher works to interpret the creature’s liminal status as something other than a reflection of Alexander’s own hybridic animality, the language of “witchcraft” can’t adequately explain the unnerving effect this has on the king. He is described as sorrowful, and in this version, it is this sorrow that prefigures his demise.24 Soon, Alexander commands Aristotle to minister his will.25 This makes his previous encounter with the wildman all the more surprising, emphasizing the ways in which human wonder at animal bodies and animal wonder at human bodies structurally mimic one another throughout the text. When surveyed by the solitary beast, Alexander and his men fail their own test, abandoning the tropes of chivalry and medieval romance, “nakkening” the damsel, and participating in her subsequent violation. The solitary creature, like the half-dead hybrid, vexes Alexander in a way that other wild creatures en masse do not. Consider, for example, the encounter that immediately precedes Alexander’s test: Abowte þat felde was a thikke wod3 of treesse beran3 fruyte; of þe whilke wilde me2 þat duelt in þe Same wod3 vsede for tiƚƚ hafe þaire fude, whase bodyes ware grete as geaunteȝ, and þaire clethynge ware made of skynnes of dyuerse besteȝ. And whe2 þay saw Alexander Oste luge þare, onane þare come oute of þe wod3, a grete multitude of þa4 wit lange roddes in þaire handȝ & bi-ga2 for to feghte wit þe oste. And þan Alexander commande3 þat aƚƚ [þe] oste schulde sette vp a schowte at anes. And also sone als þe wylde me2 herde þat [leaf 37 bk.] noyse, þay were wondere fere3 be-cause þay had neuer be-fore herde swilke a noyse. And tha2 þay be-ga2 to flee hedir & thedir in þe wod3. And Alexander & his me2 persue3 þa4 and slewe of þa4 vic xxx iiij. And þay slew of Alexander knyghtes xxvij. In þat felde Alexander & his oste leuge3 iij dayes and vetaile3 þam of þat fruyte þat growe3 in þe wod3.26 About that field was a thick wood of trees bearing fruit, which the wildmen that dwelt in the same wood used as their food. The bodies of the wildmen were as big as giants and clothed in skins of diverse beasts. And when they saw Alexander and his army camped there, in the sight of all of them there came out of the wood a great multitude of them with large rods in their hands and they began to fight with the army. Alexander then commanded his army to shout at them; some of the wildmen heard this noise and began to flee into the wood. And Alexander and his men pursued them and killed 634 of the creatures.

128

Holly Dugan

And they killed 27 knights. In that field, Alexander and his men camped three days and availed themselves of the fruit that grew in the wood.

In this encounter, the wildness of the creatures is both embodied and descriptive. Despite their large size, the creatures wear clothes and bear weapons, raising questions about their categorical status within the text. Alexander’s army seems vulnerable to their assault until Alexander commands them to shout: It is this sonic disruption that allows his army to triumph over the wild giants. They kill creatures that are vastly larger in size and numbers and enjoy, quite literally, the fruit of their labor. Yet even human voice emerges as something other in this confrontation with wildness, reduced to the sonic cacophony of violence. Alexander seems to acknowledge this. The cacophony of sound that shapes his army’s victory echoes in the cry of the creature, encapsulated within the narrative but rendered meaningless. Just like the function of the damsel and her naked body, the creature’s cry suggests a state of being that we might describe as abject. Alexander fails to interpret the cry, leaving readers to interpret its meaning. For me, it is this sonic marker that renders the text fascinating, inviting readers, momentarily, to grapple with all that has been left out of our scripts of sexual violence and to dwell with both the beast and the damsel in a space of abjection. To connect this moment with other complex and conflicted accounts of sexual violence would begin to fashion a very dif ferent kind of literary history, one that, in one critic’s words, “struggle[s] to bring within the ambit of language an experience, a state of human being, that—at least for [a] moment—is so unable to hold the defenses which constitute the subject who speaks that language in its essence seems an expression of that state and experience’s opposite: . . . [t]his is the space, the place, and the being of the abject.”27 Perhaps this is why the lone beast vexes Alexander in a way that the army of wildmen cannot: Meeting eye-to-eye forces Alexander to wonder about human/animal morphology in a way that meeting army to army does not. All the definitive markers of humanity—voice, reason, affect—are thwarted in this encounter. That which signaled their human triumph over wildness just three days before condemns this creature to death. Alexander searches the beast’s body for clues to understanding its violent response and finds none other than the context he himself orchestrated.

A Natural History of Ravishment

129

Legal History: “utterly confused categories” If literary histories of wildness demonstrate the complexity of meanings that emerge around the meaning of the creature’s body in this tale, then we might expect legal histories of ravishment to emphasize an equally vexed set of interpretations about the victim’s body, here a “yonge damsel.” Her youth is impor tant: As historians have shown, conviction rates in late medieval England depended more upon the age of the victim than any other aspect of the crime, both before and after the changes in the law issued forth in Chapter 34 Westminster II, passed by the Parliament of Edward II in 1285. Though the new law explicitly included “ravishment” of “a Woman, married, Maid, or other, where she did not consent, neither before or after,” while also increasing the punishment for conviction to “judgment of life,” in effect, the new codification did little to impact the rates of conviction in rape trials.28 It also failed to decrease the arrests of victims for “false appeals,” which punished those whose accusations did not lead to convictions.29 Yet it did gesture toward the complexity of codifying sexual violence: Consent, as the law suggests, could be given or withdrawn after the sexual act, gesturing toward the importance of language in narrating sexual violence, and in obfuscating its histories. The legal language of Chapter 34, Westminster II suggests this: The crime is codified as “rape” yet it relies on the language of ravishment to define its meaning. Ravishment was a curious affective state in late medieval and early modern law and literature, often signifying submission of one’s senses or seizure of one’s body by a wide variety of agents, including animals.30 From the Old French “ravir,” ravishment was not a gender-specific crime. Though feminist historians have documented the ways in which ravishment was increasingly coded as rape and raptus during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the former a crime of abduction and the latter a sexual assault of a virgin, ravishment remained an eroticized trope within medieval romance, particularly as a narrative feature that emphasizes both an “irresistible feminine beauty” and her status as victim.31 It thus raises questions about the intransient role of gender within fantasies of literary ravishment and also the very real effect of those fantasies on other kinds of narratives, including those that comprise legal and natural history.

130

Holly Dugan

Narratives of bestial ravishment cut across these categories, revealing the ways in which textual networks influence interpretation: In her foundational work on the role of ravishment within a wide variety of medieval literary genres, Katherine Gravdal argued that questions of literary interpretation were not wholly separate from socio-legal ones in medieval France. Rather, these diverse textual networks were linked via a “cultural ideology that support[ed] rape as a stock narrative device.”32 Though Gravdal’s point is about the cultural work ravishment performed, she cites the ubiquity of such tropes within a multitude of medieval French genres, including hagiography, Arthurian romance, the Reynart tradition of animal fables, and pastoral lyric, as well as in civil and canon law. Read together, these texts all work to deflect focus from an experience of embodied violation toward an aesthetic signification. Ravishment becomes a tale about chivalry; it resolves a moral quandary or reveals allegorical meaning, anything but capturing the experience of abjection. This literary deflection, Gravdal suggests, was a key component of the evolving legal categories that redefined raptus, a crime of theft against the father of the violated virgin, into rape, or a non-consensual sexual act (usually against a girl under the age of twelve). By the early sixteenth century (in England), rape was redefined as a sexual crime rather than a crime of property. “Ravishment” thus became a term that described involuntary, but usually pleasurable, sensory, sexual, or religious epiphanies experienced by humans. Its previous relationship to sexual violence and to animality emphasized the involuntary nature of these experiences, but in a ways that did not code rape in socio-legal contexts. Animality became a metaphor of human sexuality, rather than a threat to it. When the boundaries between humans and animals were sexually violated, it began to signal a dif ferent category than rape: buggery. Though defi ned as both a sin and a “crime against nature,” buggery emerged as a human transgression “against nature,” usually by a young male.33 In this way, it was linked to rape. The terms increasingly cited one another as early modern English law redefi ned both rape and buggery as non-consensual phallic penetration of a woman under twelve or of any sex with another man or with an animal rather than crimes of property in the early sixteenth century.34 Sodomy and buggery were linked under Henry VIII’s parliamentary statute of 1533, which decried both as the “detestable and abhomynable vice of

A Natural History of Ravishment 35

131

buggery commited with mankynde or beast.” Like rape, sixteenth-century anti-buggery laws began as attempts to regulate power and property, specifically Henry VIII’s over the ecclesiastical courts.36 In many ways, the term “buggery” itself is a lynchpin for understanding how late medieval prohibitions of sodomy are related to early modern ones and what Richard Wunderli describes as “the sudden appearance” of the 1533 anti-buggery law in England.37 From the Old French bougre for heretic and sodomite, buggery emerged as a vernacular term for both heretical and sexual sins, though the sixteenth-century statute reframes “unnatural” sexual acts in secular terms through human actants.38 Sir Edward Coke’s famous seventeenth-century interpretation of the law reinforced those meanings, while also explicitly expanding to include both the forced buggery of boys and women, citing a famous example of a “great lady” who “had committed buggery with a baboon, and conceived by it.”39 Coke’s interpretation of the law expanded it to include anal rape of boys and consensual bestiality between a male animal and human female, reinforcing a phallocentric logic across species divides through the trope of rape. What the law does not do is openly seek to prohibit a beast’s ability to force itself on a woman.40 Coke’s odd interpretation of male and female buggery emphasizes the structural relationship between bestial buggery and rape. As one critic puts it, buggery laws sought to regulate the line between bestial and human sexuality through legal prohibitions of human actions, rather than of animals: “Thus although it was possible by means of laws and prohibitions to attempt to keep the man out of the animal, it was rather harder to cast the animal out of the man.”41 The paradox of “unspeakable” bestial desire and the confusion it renders in legal discourse makes a certain amount of sense, for, as Bruce Smith reminds us, “Under the law, sexual crimes are never something sui generis.”42 Though Smith’s point emphasizes the “genus” of each juridical category, such a term also emphasizes that sexual desire can define as well as transgress species boundaries.43 The “animal in the man,” however, is metaphoric: Early modern buggery statues document that men must be on top of both material animals and the metaphoric animal within. This brief survey of medieval and early modern legal history suggests that when the borders between man and beast are imaginatively violated, humans are the instigators. Early modern sexual crimes emphasize that manliness is defi ned not through gender but through sexuality: A man’s ability to

132

Holly Dugan

violently penetrate all creatures around him is linked to a need to keep such desires in check. Alexander’s test of humanity both recognizes and resists such a conclusion, collapsing both the creature’s bestial desire for the naked damsel with the violence of the attack.44 In doing so, it demonstrates some of the ways in which implicit role of gender defines what we might term the natural history of ravishment.

Natural History: Alexander and Animals Alexander offered an important moral example within Renaissance humanist texts.45 As David Quint has argued, Aristotle’s tutelage of Alexander provided an important model for knowledge in action and Renaissance texts such as Elyot’s Boke of the Govenor in the first half of the sixteenth century and Chapman’s translations of Homer in the second.46 Within these Renaissance humanist traditions, some of Alexander’s acts of violence were reinterpreted as a metaphor of his animality, a quality that was subsequently overcome through later conquests. This, Quint argues, explains Fluellen’s odd joke in Henry V about “Alexander the pig,” a joke that criticizes “a tradition of humanist ideas about writing and reading history.” 47 Fluellen, a Welsh captain in Henry’s army, attempts to link Henry’s “gallant” abandonment of “the law of arms” (specifically his command to kill every French prisoner of war) to the genealogy of “Alexander the Big,” rendered in his Welsh accent as “Alexander the Pig.” Fluellen inquires, “What call you the town’s name where Alexander the Pig was born” (4.7:10–11)?48 After the brutality of the previous scene, in which Henry’s command is executed on stage, Fluellen’s gaffe purportedly offers comic relief, rendered at the expense of his own Welshness. When the Englishman Gower corrects “Alexander the Pig” to “Alexander Great,” Fluellen extends his meditation on Henry and Alexander’s greatness: “Why I pray you, is not ‘pig’ great? The pig or great or the might or the huge or the magnanimous are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations” (4.7:13–15). The joke turns on making an impor tant Renaissance allusion literal: Alexander rendered as pig, rather than big. Rape does not figure into debates about Henry’s greatness; nor do Fluellen (and Quint) consider its role in Alexander’s long and varied literary his-

A Natural History of Ravishment

133

tory. They focus instead on Alexander’s drunken murder of his best friend Cleitus. Quint’s analysis of Fluellen’s joke illuminates how this enables Fluellen to address the death of Falstaff, reframing Alexander’s history (and perhaps also Henry’s) as one fi lled with “unbridled” acts of violence even as it comes to represent a model of “greatness.” 49 In doing so, it allows Shakespeare to query which part of Alexander’s history do Henry’s actions resemble: those of Alexander the animal or those of Alexander the Great? At the heart of this odd and silly joke about Alexander the pig are larger Renaissance debates about historicism, humanism, and literary interpretation, filtered through the moral example of Alexander.50 Fluellen was not the only one to read Alexander’s history for “pigs.” Whereas Alexander’s wildness was increasingly interpreted as metaphoric, the creatures he encountered in his travels were not. Alexander’s encounters with wildness were of great interest to Renaissance naturalists, who increasingly interpreted his tales of conquest as documentary evidence about the natural world.51 Alexander’s many animal encounters throughout this varied literary history functioned as important source material, and he is cited by name in Renaissance bestiaries.52 Such reclassification, I argue, attempts to resolve textual ambivalence about human/animal morphologies through a renewed emphasis on classificatory schemas: wildness was mapped onto new contact zones, transforming unknown predators into classifiable animals. New world animals, especially simians and other newly discovered kinds of animals represented a threshold of knowledge: They were unnamed by Adam in the bible, absent from classical texts in antiquity, and, thus, challenging to Renaissance naturalists.53 Wildmen, however, could function as a placeholder for these unknown creatures; Renaissance bestiaries (unlike Fluellen) cite these literary wildmen not as pigs but as apes.54 Such interpretive links connected previous iterations of wildness as symbolic of metaphoric or epistemological crises of categories with an increasingly material, animal threat.55 Alexander the conqueror becomes Alexander the collector and wildmen become “angry” apes, raising questions about how tales of sexual violence embedded within this history were interpreted by Renaissance naturalists. One of the most popular, apocryphal tales about Alexander quoted by Renaissance naturalists involves an army of apes. In this tale, Alexander and his knights mistake a pack of wildmen, like the creatures encountered in the

134

Holly Dugan

woods of Actea and on the bank of the river, for an approaching human (and enemy) army. Outnumbered, they believe themselves to be vanquished. However, once Alexander and his men learn that they are apes, and not humans, they are relieved and the threat dissipates. Read within the medieval romance tradition, such a tale makes no sense: Alexander and his men are repeatedly attacked by fierce animal armies, including crabs, dragons, elephants, cynophali, bearded wildwomen, and armies of wildmen. Yet this apocryphal tale, taken out of context, reflects Renaissance naturalists’ anthropocentric view: apes pose no threats to human males, especially ones as powerful and strong as Alexander and his knights. They do, however, continue to pose threats to women. As such, this facet of humanist history connects to the grammars of rape and of animality charted previously. Consider, for example, Edward Topsell’s reframing of this tale in his massive tome, A History of Foure-Footed Beastes (1607), based on Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner’s influential, mid-sixteenth-century Historiae Animalium (1558). Gessner’s six volume encyclopedia aimed to catalogue all the world’s animals and knowledge about them; yet literary sources factor heavily within it, including classical and medieval narratives of Alexander. Gessner’s method was synthetic: He read and cited other sources extensively, including medieval sources, such as Magnus, as well as classical accounts, such as Pliny’s and Julius Caesar’s, creating a style of classification modeled on humanist literary practices.56 As such, Gessner’s interpretation of Alexander’s encounter with the beast reminds us that what we deem fantastical or outside the purview of material reality may not have always been so obvious. Topsell’s epistle emphasizes and extends his use of Gessner’s literary method, particularly its framing of disparate authorities through an interpretive strategy aimed at affirming the “truth” of Gessner’s “Hystory of Creatures, for the marke of a good writer is to follow truth and not deceivable fables.”57 Though Topsell connects such deceptions with the fact that many of the authors Gessner citers are “Heathen writers,” he quickly adds that he balances this lack of veracity through a plurality of perspectives: contained within is not all the world’s information about animals but rather all the world’s credible information about animals, “for in the mouth of two or three witnesses standeth euerie word and if at any time I have set down a single testimony, it was because the matter was cleare.”58 “Strange and rare thinges” are thus not “fictions, but Myra-

A Natural History of Ravishment

135

cles of nature, for wisemen to behold and observe to their singular comfort,” in awe of the “power, glory, and praise of their maker.”59 Pliny’s Natural History, including his account of Alexander’s relationship to Aristotle and natural philosophy, is one of the rare sources cited on its own in both Gessner’s and Topsell’s texts. In it, Alexander is depicted as one of Aristotle’s most devoted pupils and patrons; Pliny goes so far as to suggest that Alexander used his empire as an epistemological network to collect information about “any creature born anywhere” within its realm.60 Pliny’s depiction of Alexander was extreme (and historically inaccurate), yet many Renaissance naturalists readily believed it, citing it copiously in their own works.61 Gessner, like other Renaissance naturalists, went so far as to use this legacy to encourage would-be patrons of his own project, encouraging them to play the part of Alexander to his Aristotle.62 Renaissance representations of Alexander as a patron of naturalist treatises, especially Aristotle’s, expanded Alexander’s extensive and diverse medieval literary history, fusing representations of him as a proto-scientist with his legacy of conquest. This diverse literary history connected the centrality of Pliny’s encyclopedia to an expanding project of scientific knowledge about the natural world (evinced in works like Solinus’s Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium and Bede’s De Natura Rerum) to other genres that celebrated the conquests of Alexander.63 Though early medieval sources emphasized Alexander’s role as a pupil of Aristotle, later sources, including romances like the thirteenth-century French Roman d’Alexandre or the Prose Life discussed here, focused instead on the adult King’s conquest of Asia only cursorily mentioning Alexander’s childhood or Aristotle’s tutelage of the young prince. Yet Renaissance naturalists drew on both of these established medieval literary traditions, interpreting this diverse literary archive as historical evidence in their naturalist endeavors. The extensive descriptions of animals in the latter are validated through the clear links to Aristotle’s pedagogy and influential works on nature in the former. Both shape Gessner’s framing of Alexander and his “desire” for knowledge about animals: Epistemological knowledge about the natural world is linked to embodied desire, suggesting the implicit way in which the project of conquest was embedded within this humanist model of scientific inquiry. Bestial ravishment and medieval accounts of wildness could easily be recoded as empirical real ity. Gessner (and, by his example, Topsell) quotes Pliny’s

136

Holly Dugan

account directly, emphasizing Alexander’s ardent desire for knowledge about the natu ral world, especially knowledge about animals: Alexander is “enflamed with the desire to know the beasts and natures of creatures, appointed Aristotle (that infinite learned man) to write his books of creatures, commaunding many thousands, both in Asia and Graecia, which exercised Hunting, Hawking, Fishing, or that kepte Parkes, Heards of cattell, Fish-ponds, or any cages or other places and groues for Birds, to be at the commaund of the said Aristotle if neede were, to supply his desires in the knowledge of beastes.”64 Yet in this recoding, Alexander’s wonderment about animal morphology no longer occurs in the wild, but rather in the cages, parks, and enclosed spaces that mark the domain of the human. The space of the abject is erased even as it is recoded and reclassified as valid. Topsell’s History of Foure-Footed Beastes cites Alexander at least fifty times in eleven entries, including apes, dogs, elephants, elks, foxes, harts, horses, lions, mice, sheep, and the sphinx. Among these many citations, Topsell includes the following tale about Alexander and the army of apes, merging Alexander’s solitary encounter with the wildman into an parenthetical aside about the rapaciousness of apes: In India they are most aboundant, both Redde, blacke, greene, dust-colour, and white ones, which they vse to bring into Citties (except Red ones, who are so venereous that they will rauish their Women) and present to their Kings, which grow so tame, that they go vp and downe the streetes so boldly and ciuilly as if they were Children, frequenting the Market places without any offence: whereof so many shewed themselues to Alexander standing vpright, that he deemed them at first to be an Army of enemies, and commaunded to ioyne battell with them, vntill he was certified by Taxilus a King of that Countrey then in his Campe, they were but Apes.65

Here, wildness is displaced onto apes and Indians. Noting both that apes are so venerous and wild that they will “ravish their women” and that they “grow so tame” that they frequent markets, Topsell, like other Renaissance naturalists, interprets Alexander’s conquests alongside other ethnographic data. In doing so, monstrous, metaphoric medieval wildmen become material animals: apes so venereal that they will ravish “their” women. Renaissance naturalists seek to displace Alexander’s wonder into an account of the natural world, but such a move still acknowledges that animals can attack

A Natural History of Ravishment

137

humans. Animal ravishment here returns us, briefly, to moments of disorientation within this history as well that rely on gender to stabilize them. The pronoun “their” and its unclear possessive antecedent raises two critical questions that remain unanswered in the text: Who are these women and to whom are they supposed to belong—to the apes or to the Indian city dwellers? Displaced into an aside, the history of these women does not threaten the anthropocentric conclusion: the army of enemies was merely an army of apes.

Conclusion In her recent article on the available ways of describing and assessing sexual coercion in seventeenth-century England, literary critic Frances Dolan wonders how categorical shifts in approach, particularly feminist ones, have influenced our histories of sexual violence. Engaging recent arguments in favor of “taking a break” from feminist advocacy, particularly around questions of agency and culpability in the legal history of rape, so that something new might emerge, Dolan challenges such a configuration, particularly the illusion of such epistemic shifts. Such a hypothetical break, Dolan suggests, depends not only on a certain kind of feminism and the kinds of questions it affords but also on the way in which the illusion of epistemic change allows others questions to remain perpetually unasked. What might it mean, she queries, to understand sexual violence outside of the legal categories of victim and perpetrator and to engage instead with messier narratives of coercion and compulsion, narratives that remind us of the ways in which we are “continually expanding and revising our understanding of what rape is and thus what its history might include.” 66 These messy narratives of sexual violence might usefully expand how we think about the history of sexual violence, but only if we’re willing to grapple with the unstated, and all too human assumptions that gird our accounts of posthumanity. As Paula Rabinowitz reminds us, “the poshuman body is still saturated with the stories of humanity that circulate around it,” telling its stories “through those already told.”67 Those stories include rape narratives. That is the recuperative potential of this violent tale of ravishment of a nameless damsel by a braying beast, but it is also its risk. What happens to

138

Holly Dugan

the damsel? Did she, too, hear the beast’s cry and watch it die? What about the “great Lady,” codified in Coke’s description of buggery, whose desire rendered her and her child bestial in the eyes of the law— did she raise her child as human or baboon, or simply as her own? And what of the “Indian” women, “ravished” by “venerous” red apes, in Topsell’s tale: With whom do they align on the eve of this battle? How we begin to answer such questions will reveal our own cultural blindspots. As I have tried to show here, these tales of sexual abjection are powerful not only for what they emphasize— women’s perpetual status as rapeable—but also for what they eclipse, such as a phallocentric logic of sexuality that seems to transcend literary genres, epistemic and historical shifts, even species boundaries. This logic helped gird Renaissance interpretations of medieval literary tropes of ravishment as “natu ral” history; and it raises questions—at least for me— about our metaphors of desire that animate some posthuman theories, theories that call for an embrace of a widened network of actants and a more-than-human world. The damsel and the beast, both abject in medieval and Renaissance accounts of this tale, remind us that such an embrace has not always been volitional.

Notes I’d like to thank Eileen Joy and Karl Steel for reading the ugly, early draft of this essay years ago and Amanda Bailey, Drew Daniel, M. Lindsay Kaplan, Erika Lin, and Ayanna Thompson for reading the ugly, later draft this past fall. Their comments were invaluable. Thanks to Scott Maisano and Joseph Campana for their indefatigable patience and intellectual generosity, and to Nancy Rapoport for her careful editing. All errors, however, are mine. 1. This creature has garnered a lot of critical attention. See Susan Crane, Per for mance of the Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 229; Paul Hardwick, English Medieval Misericords: The Margins of Meaning (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), 137; and Dorothy Yamamoto, Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 155–9, for a few recent evaluations. 2. See J. S. Westlake, ed., The Prose Life of Alexander from the Thorton Manuscript (London: Publication for the Early English Text Society by K. Paul Trench Trübner & Co. and by H. Milford Oxford University Press, 1913), 89–90.

A Natural History of Ravishment

139

3. “Species boundaries” is a post-Darwinian phrase, signaling that there are natural distinctions between each species, which are central to current debates in genetic research. Research in biotechnology posits that a “universal” DNA code reveals such boundaries to be fluid. See R. A. Hindmarsh and Geoffrey Lawrence, Recoding Nature: Critical Perspectives on Genetic Engineering (Sydney,  A. U.: University of New South Wales Press, 2004), 65. This resonates within Donna Haraway’s argument that scientific practice is deeply embedded in “narrative, politics, myth, economics, and technical possibilities.” See Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Verso, 1992), 2. It is also relevant to discussions of sexuality: “Species boundaries, then, are set by the criteria through which each individual chooses its mate or mates from amongst a variable ‘population.’ ” See P. GravesBrown,  S. Jones, and Clive Gamble, Cultural Identity and Archaeology: The Construction of European Communities (New York: Routledge, 1996), 83. 4. In making this claim, I hope to underscore the ways in which it is counterintuitive to our understanding of how these terms mutually reinforced one another in the past. In doing so, I follow Jeffrey Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler’s provocative exploration of “how masculinity—which has for too long functioned as the universal category of being— can be unpacked and re-approached through the eclectic toolbox which the confluence of medieval studies, feminism, gender theory, and cultural studies provides.” See Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1997), xi. 5. For more on wildmen, see Susan Crane, Per for mance of Self, Helen Young, “Wodewoses: the (in)humanity of medieval wildmen,” AUMLA: Journal of the Australian Universities Modern Language Association Special Issue (2009): 37–49; Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archeology of an Idea,” in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximilian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 3–38; and Timothy Husband, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980). 6. See Susan Crane, The Per for mance of the Self, 161. 7. Helen Young, “Wodewoses,” 37. 8. Hayden White, “Forms of Wildness,” 18. 9. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 18. See also Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999), 110. 10. Daniel Selden, “Text Networks,” Ancient Narrative 8 (2010): 1–23, 12– 13, cited in Peggy McCracken, “The Floral and the Human,” Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Washington, D.C.: Oliphaunt Press, 2012), 65–90, 83. 11. See Gerrit H. V. Bunt, “The Art of a Medieval Translator: The Thornton Prose Life of Alexander,” Neophilologus 76, no. 1 (1992): 147–59. The Wars

140

Holly Dugan

of Alexander significantly expands the encounter with the wildman. For a discussion of this difference, see Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human, 156–7. 12. See George Cary and D. J. A. Ross, The Medieval Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 273. Cary and Ross argue that Alexander’s romance is modeled on courtly romance. But despite the fact that the “element of love” was “foisted upon Alexander, so that he became a conqueror not only of men but of women,” this emendation did little to alter the core concepts of the tale: “They altered the details of Alexander’s character, but his character could only be fitted to his career of conquest, and therefore his basic role as conqueror was to outlive and outgrow the courtly mask that was temporarily fitted upon him.” Ibid., 225. Furthermore, this “courtly conception of Alexander never found a footing.” See Ibid., 241, and Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 13. For more on Alexander’s history of conquest, particularly of the East, see Susan Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), Chapter 2. 14. Though some critics interpret the creature’s assault as defi nitive beastliness, or at least its lack of courtly, manly restraint, it is the creature’s stillness that provoked the test in the fi rst place. See Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human, 156. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. McCracken, “Floral and the Human,” 66. 18. Ibid., 90, 84. 19. Akbari, Idols, Chapter. 2. 20. Westlake, Prose Life. 5. 21. See Figure 1 Paris BN MS. Francais 9342, fo. 179 c. 1465, cited in Cary, Medieval Alexander, 47. 22. In her analysis of the Wars of Alexander, Christine Chism argues that Alexander’s mixed parentage betrays the text’s ambivalent vision of conquest: “The Wars of Alexander . . . describes what is si multa neously a conqueror’s dream and a xenophobe’s nightmare . . . After describing its hero’s Egyptian parentage and his effacement of this oriental origin, the poem is a mercilessly energetic description of his campaigns.” See Christine Chism, “Too Close for Comfort: Dis- Orienting Chivalry in the Wars of Alexander,” in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 23. Westlake, Prose Life, 110. 24. Ibid., 109. 25. Ibid., 110–11. 26. Ibid., 91.

A Natural History of Ravishment

141

27. Darrieck Scott, Extravagent Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 257. 28. In one study of 20 counties in medieval England, out of 142 cases brought between 1202 and 1276, 122 resulted in acquittal (86.96 percent). Between 1300 and  1348, the acquittal rate of rape was 89.7  percent. Barbara Hanawalt, in Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 132–4. 29. These arrests were typical in 49 percent of the cases of rape between 1208 and 1321. John Marshall Car ter, Rape in Medieval England: An Historical and Sociological Study (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985), 127, cited in Stephanie Brown, “Rape in Medieval England: A Legal History,” PhD Diss, Emory University, 2009, 1. 30. Corrine Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2001), 20. 31. Katherine Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 55. 32. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 1. 33. In many instances, buggery was seen as a more severe “crime” than sodomy. In his analysis of conviction rates for both sodomy and other categories of sexual crime, Smith uncovers that “Between 1553 and 1602 indictments for bestiality in the Home Counties assizes outnumber indictments for sodomy six to one. Once indicted for bestiality, a person was three times likelier to be convicted and executed than a person indicted for sodomy. When we examine the court record closely, the category of case to which sodomy seems most similar is not bestiality, as we might expect, but rape. Indictments for rape, like indictments for sodomy, usually involve youthful victims (at least half of the rape victims on record were children under 12) and the use of force. What is more, indictments for rape, like indictments for sodomy, had a rather small chance of ending in a conviction (30  percent in the case of rape, less than 20  percent in the case of sodomy), even if more than one witness could be produced.” Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 49. 34. One important distinction is that the legal history of anti-buggery and sodomy laws is mostly statutory, whereas rape emerged through common law precedence. See Richard Allen Posner and Katharine B. Silbaugh, A Guide to America’s Sex Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 35. On the relationship between property and sodomy, see Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 44–52, Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England, 40–5. On the relationship between property and rape, see Barbara Baines, “Effacing Rape in Early Modern Representation,” ELH 65, no. 1 (1997), 69–98.

142

Holly Dugan

36. 25 Henry VIII, c. 6, quoted in Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 49. This law was reenacted and expanded under Edward VI to include a greater attention to context and to protections of the convicted felon’s heirs. It was repealed under Mary, and reinstated under the second Parliament of Elizabeth. For more information on these specific variations, see Smith, Homosexual Desire, 45–7. 37. For example, the 1533 anti-buggery law famously denies the “benefit of clergy” defense. And, although the legal statute prohibiting rape first originated during the reign of Edward I, and had been amended by Henry VII to include a penalty against abducting women against their will, it was repealed during Henry VIII’s reign, changing punishment of death by priests, who “offend” women with “incontinency,” to forfeiture of all goods, chattels, debts. Medieval ecclesiastical courts rarely tried cases for sodomy: Richard Wunderli argues that only “one person out of 21,000 defendants in ecclesiastical court between 1470 and 1516 were accused of sodomy,” which suggests that the 1533 statute codified an already common practice: trying sodomy cases in secular court. This low number is in stark contrast to ecclesiastical court cases dealing with “natu ral” categories of lust: adultery, fornication, and prostitution. Richard Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of Amer ica, 1981), 83–4, cited in Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-and Postmodern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 246, fn. 41. 38. Wunderli, London Church Courts, 83. 39. Sir Edward Coke, “Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England Concerning High Treason and Other Pleas of the Crown and Criminal Causes” (London: Printed for A. Crooke [etc.], 1669), 59. 40. Such an event could conceivably fall under the legal concept of deodand, which sought to compensate victims when personal property or objects attacked. Sexual assault, however, was not covered under deodand. 41. See J. R. Simpson, Animal Body, Literary Corpus: The Old French “Roman de Renart” (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996). 42. See Smith, Homosexual Desire, 42. 43. For more on this link, see Carolyn Dinshaw’s influential discussion of sodomy as a “sinne against kynde” in Getting Medieval, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 6. 44. Dorothy Yamamoto, for instance, argues that “by showing that he is unable to control his animal lusts, he demonstrates to the onlookers that he lacks reason and is therefore not a man at all but a beast.” See Boundaries of the Human, 33. 45. See David Quint, “ ‘Alexander the Pig’: Shakespeare on History and Poetry,” Boundary 2 10.3 (1982): 49–67, 49.

A Natural History of Ravishment

143

46. Ibid. 47. All citations from William Shakespeare, Henry V, in Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, Katherine Eismann Maus (New York: Norton, 2008): 1471–548. 48. Quint argues that this is a poetic choice: “When Fluellen Welshes ‘big’ into ‘pig,’ the play sends up his version of history only to fall back on its own: where the minimal phonemic difference between two labial consonants attest to the inability of ‘historical meaning’ to be independent of the language through which it is transmitted” (“Alexander the Pig,” 61). 49. Ibid., 53. 50. Ibid., 61. 51. On Elyot, see Quint, “Alexander the Pig,” 53–5. See Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey (London, 1615), sig A3 r and Iliad (London, 1611), sig. *2 r. 52. Early modern naturalists increasingly modeled their relationship with patrons on those of Alexander and Aristotle, who dedicated his history of animals to his famous pupil and leader. See Findlen, Possessing Nature, 353. 53. Topsell’s History of Foure-Footed Beastes cites Alexander at least fifty times in eleven entries, including apes, dogs, elephants, elks, foxes, harts, horses, lions, mice, sheep, and the sphinx. 54. See Migeul de Asúa and R. K. French, A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), xv. 55. See, for example, William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, An Encouragement to Colonies by Sir William Alexander, Knight (London: Printed by William Stansby, 1624, 1630). 56. As Erica Fudge notes, this reclassification of the wildman into real animals “made concrete the fear of descent into the animal.” See Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Human and Beasts in Early Modern Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 58. 57. Topsell, sig. A4 v. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. “King Alexander the Great being fired with a desire to know the natures of animals and having delegated the pursuit of this study to Aristotle as a man of supreme eminence in every branch of science, orders were given to some thousands of persons throughout the whole of Asia and Greece, all those who made their living by hunting, fowling, and fishing and those who were in charge of warrens, herds, apiaries, fishponds and aviaries, to obey his instructions so that he might not fail to be informed about any creature born anywhere. His enquiries addressed to those persons resulted in the composition of his famous works on zoology, in nearly fifty volumes.” Pliny the elder, Natural History, 817.4, cited in Ogilvie, 94.

144

Holly Dugan

61. Ogilvie, 95. 62. For more on “Pliny’s ‘Natu ral History’ in the Middle Ages,” see Marjorie Chibnall’s essay in Empire and Aftermath: Silver Latin II, ed. T. A. Dorey (London: Routledge, 1975), 57–78. 63. These include a late-tenth-century Anglo-Saxon translation of the Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem as well as in the twelfth-century Spanish epic Libro de Alexandre. See Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf- manuscript (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 116–18. 64. Topsell, A History, sig B3 r. 65. Ibid. 66. Frances Dolan, “Re-reading Rape in The Changeling,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 11.1 (Spring 2011): 4–29. 67. Paul Rabinowitz, “Soft Fictions and Intimate Documents”: Can Feminism Be Posthuman?” in Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 95–112.

f i v e

Farmyard Choreographies in Early Modern England Erica Fudge

John Law’s moving essay “Care and Killing: Tensions in Veterinary Practice” was written in the shadow of the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic in the UK.1 In it, Law uses Silence at Ramscliffe, Chris Chapman and James Crowden’s record of the culling of cattle in Devon, as a prompt to track the complex nature of caring for farm animals. Chapman and Crowden’s book documents the devastation experienced in the southwest of England, and includes Chapman’s photographic images of a day—being repeated across the country— during which a government-appointed vet was required by law to oversee the killing of more than two hundred healthy animals on a “contiguous” farm; that is, on a farm that was not itself infected but was neighboring an infected one.2 Law notes the complexity and many layers of care evident in this event— care for the animals, for the farmer and his family, for the vet himself, and for the “bigger picture”— and he writes of care as “an unfolding embodied and material process.”3 The framing idea Law uses to describe the workings of the various practices and individuals 145

146

Erica Fudge

involved he takes from Charis Cussins’s studies of women undergoing fertility treatment—“ontological choreography.” Cussins states that this choreography is the “process of forging a functional zone of compatibility that maintains referential power between things of different kinds.”4 Translating her terms to the context of the farmyard Law writes that care “depends not so much on a formula as a repertoire that allows situated action.”5 There are rules involved in care, you might say, but they are there only in order to be bent. In fact, it is in the bending that care truly exists. Without the bending there is simply routine, mechanized engagement. Donna Haraway also uses Cussins’s idea of “ontological choreography” in her work.6 Writing of dog and human engaged in what she calls “the oxymoron of disciplined spontaneity,” Haraway goes on: The task is to become coherent enough in an incoherent world to engage in a joint dance of being that breeds respect and response in the flesh, in the run, on the course. And then to remember how to live like that at every scale, with all the partners.7

The “joint dance of being” is the choreographing of dif ferent ontologies into a collaborative movement, and “disciplined spontaneity” a fantastic representation of that dance, with its emphasis on the structures that provide the foundation for but don’t contain messy, chaotic—let’s call them emotional—relationships. The notion of choreography as applied to human-animal relations does not present them as issuing from a world of dominion, of superior and inferior. The “joint dance of being” focuses our attention on the coherence of the partnership rather than on the differences between individual members, even as those differences are maintained. Indeed, the idea of choreography emphasizes the shared understanding that is witnessed in care, and in carefi lled cross-species relationships. And I use “care-fi lled” here rather than “careful” because I think it is possible to have careful relationships that are not full of the kind of care Law and Haraway outline. Being careful might be a professional obligation, for example, whereas to be care-filled requires an engagement that goes beyond that, but which can still be possessed by a professional. A care-filled engagement is premised on attending to the other partner, watching the steps they make, following their lead, on the under-

Farmyard Choreographies

147

standing that that partner will also attend to you, watch your steps, follow your lead as the situation requires. The difference between being careful and being care-filled is, to use Law’s terms, the difference between adhering to a formula and being willing to improvise. In this context, choreography is more than a figure of speech; it is a model for a mode of being and of attending, and of being attended to. And it is a mode that is also, I think, in part available to those of us who watch the dance— even if that dance took place in the past. Scholars of past cultures may not be able to claim that the subject of their gaze is attending to them, but those scholars can themselves watch in the recognition that they will need to respond to what they see—that their position cannot be a fi xed one. From this perspective, new aspects of the past might become impor tant. Writing the history of animals, for example, might not only include the quantitative data that have been present in agricultural and economic history for years: the herd sizes, animal weights, numbers slaughtered, and so on. These are important, undoubtedly, but they offer a static image, if you like, rather than a glimpse of the movements that were required to maintain the herds, feed the animals and, ultimately, to kill them: and these movements, or the successful ones anyway—including those that lead to an animal’s death—were in some way collaborative.8 This essay will analyze some of the steps of the dances that took place between humans and animals in the southeast of England in the early seventeenth century. Going back to this period is interest ing not only because this is a time when intensive farming was beginning to emerge (increasing herd and flock sizes point to this).9 Focusing on the early modern period is also productive because it is also a moment when dancing had a particular cultural and philosophical meaning for some. For this reason, using the concept of “ontological choreography” to analyze human-animal relations in early modern England requires us to think about how that idea is itself historically and culturally situated: We need to consider carefully—or rather, in a care-filled way—whether using it is anachronistic. The concept “ontological choreography” thus offers an opportunity to think about human-animal relations in the past, but also to raise broader theoretical questions that have, I think, implications beyond thinking about the seventeenth century.

148

Erica Fudge

Dancing with Theory Donna Haraway’s conception of dancing as “disciplined spontaneity” is like John Law’s notion of care. If you recall, Law wrote that care “depends not so much on a formula as a repertoire that allows situated action.” Likewise, for Haraway care is an activity in which there are rules (there is discipline), but there is also freedom to express the rules in new, original ways (there is spontaneity). This is not how dancing has always been conceptualized. Records of courtly dance from the early modern period reveal that it was definitely not a place for improvisation or spontaneity. In his 1581 text, Le Balet Comique, for example, Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx noted the “geometric figures” in the ballet performed for Henri III at the French court that year, commenting: “These were all exact and well-planned in their forms, sometimes square, sometimes round, in several diverse fashions; then in triangles accompanied by a small square, and other small figures.”10 Placing it in a slightly dif ferent context, dance historian Jennifer Nevile notes a link between dancing and gardening in this period, and comes to a similar conclusion: Both, she writes, “are concerned with manipulating, controlling, and ordering space.”11 Renaissance gardens were planned and, like dancing, were geometrical—with the re-creation of “wildernesses” a development of eighteenth-century garden design. As such, these gardens did not reflect Haraway’s “disciplined spontaneity” or Law’s “repertoire that allows situated action”; they were a site of adherence, absolute adherence, to a plan.12 Likewise, early modern dance manuals present formulae that must be followed in order that this thing called dance might exist. Indeed, failure to follow the formulae reveals a horror within: Nevile writes that “Dancing taught the chosen members of society control over their body and over their actions.”13 Missing a step in this world is, by implication, a moral failure. And, as if to place it even more firmly in opposition to Law’s and Haraway’s uses of the concept of choreography, Nevile notes: “The rules and postural codes of courtly dance were part of the mechanisms by which the court made itself appear superior and inaccessible to the rest of society.”14 This is not a world of “respect and response in the flesh,” as Haraway put it, but of order, hierarchy, mechanism, separation. Many of the philosophical ideas that are too often taken as representative of the age are expressed in this world of courtly dancing. And just as

Farmyard Choreographies

149

dancing is regarded not as an expression of bodiliness but as a manifestation of control over the flesh, so key philosophical ideas of the period relegate the body to a secondary status and propose the centrality of reason— something possessed, it is argued, by humans alone. Humans’ possession of reason has implications for their relationship with the world as the capacity to exercise reason is frequently figured in terms of human power over nature, a power that must be expressed for the human to be truly human. Nature, indeed, is understood in this philosophy to be separate from the human, and brought into the human sphere only on human terms. This can be illustrated by three examples that reveal the analogous position held by vegetation, animals, and the human body: Plants are clipped into geometrical order and unwanted flora pulled up; a horse is trained in the dressage and vermin destroyed; and the body is taught to dance and intemperate urges repressed. Lust in the human, it seems, is equivalent to Shakespeare’s “noisome weeds which without profit suck / the soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers.”15 John Donne called for a “disafforestation” of the mind.16 In this philosophy, the body is merely a fleshy vessel for the human intellect, and it is the intellect that is the human. In this world, dancing— strange as it might sound—is therefore an expression of the rational mind. A perfect shorthand example of this perspective can be traced in John Milton’s Masque at Ludlow Castle, a courtly performance from 1634 that I keep going back to as I think about livestock in early modern England.17 I return to it because it is one of the most vivid expressions of what the orthodox philosophy of the age holds that a human should be. Milton’s masque celebrates human “temperance”: That is, it makes our ability to resist our physical urges the cornerstone of who we are. Control is everything, and this is staged in the masque’s conclusion: the performance ends with a “victorious dance / O’er sensual folly and intemperance.”18 Here, as elsewhere in the period, dancing is in opposition to fleshiness, not an expression of it. In Milton’s text, the monstrous tempter of humanity is Comus, the son of Bacchus (Dionysius, the god of wine and frenzy) and Circe (the witch who turned Ulysses’s followers into beasts with her enchanted food and drink). Following a familiar image of drunkenness, Comus is surrounded by animalheaded creatures—former men who have given in to their bodily urges and taken a drink from his poisoned chalice. Their transformation into beings with human physiques and animal heads reflects their failure of rational

150

Erica Fudge

control: They are simply beastly brained bodies. As one character puts it, such lack of temperance (he calls it “lust”) “imbodies and imbrutes” the “inward parts”19: by giving in to their physical urges these men have allowed their reasonable being to become animal. It is in opposition to these creatures that the dance is performed at the masque’s conclusion. Here the dancers are the antithesis of beastly headedness—they are not overwhelmed by the gut, but are humans with bodies that are under the control of the rational orders of the mind. Even as links between Milton’s work and the ideas about dancing and bodily control discussed earlier are clear, there are problems with assuming this to be the view that was representative of the age. Courtly entertainments, however much they reflect philosophical arguments of the day, offer an idealized view of the world that did not, of course, exist in reality. We know, to just offer one comic example, that moderation and masquing did not always go hand-in-hand. The diplomat Dudley Carleton’s 1605 letter about Christmas festivities in the court of James VI and I tells a sorry tale: Following the per for mance of Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness on New Year’s Day, Carleton notes of the rush from the hall: “in the coming out a banquet which was prepared for the King in the great chamber was overturned, table and all, before it was scarce touched.”20 Where Jonson’s masque extolled the virtues of James’s court and the monarch’s purificatory power, the actions of his followers on this occasion reveal something rather dif ferent: Their stampede places them among Comus’s herd and not the courtly dancers. Another issue that should remind us that the ideas in Milton’s Masque and the philosophical orthodoxy that underpins it are not fully representative of their age is that the masques, dance manuals, and philosophical treatises of the period reflect the world of only the elite. They are, without doubt, invaluable historical documents because they offer a lens through which we can witness vital debates and cultural movements; however, they offer us little insight into what it was like to live outside of the court or the university. But the problem is wider than this: Even when we do have printed materials that depict the worlds outside of the court and the university— and this essay focuses on the world of agricultural production—these texts are, inevitably, somewhat at a distance from the hands-on encounters that made up the daily life of many. Thus, printed animal healthcare regimens, which

151

Farmyard Choreographies 21

begin to emerge from the oral tradition in the late sixteenth century, all too often reduce hands-on knowledge to lists: to formulae in which individual animals are grouped into general categories—“Some Kine,” “Many Sheepe.”22 It is the nature of such texts to offer general advice rather than to be able to deal with the specific humoral make-up of a particular individual, of course, but that is just the problem: The printed form is inevitably generic. It could, of course, be argued, that the use of categories like “some” and “many” reflects a residual recognition that there are differences between animals of one species—that not all cows are the same and that only some will suffer from a particular malady. As such, a concept of individuality (which is at the heart of the possibility of the joint dance of being) remains visible in early veterinary texts, but it is so reduced that these works become formulae for care which themselves offer little room for situated action. They are, you might say, careful texts, but the care-filled engagements that make up daily life in successful agricultural production happen beyond their pages. What we don’t have many written records of in the early modern period are details of the daily encounters between humans and livestock: the ways of greeting, of checking, of simply living with other beings. There are questions I have that I can’t answer from the printed materials I have so far encountered: Did the woman of the house speak to her neighbors’ cows as she moved through the common field to milk her own animal, or did she save the conversation for just that one cow? When the ploughman sang to his oxen, as he apparently often did, why did he do this: for his own pleasure, or for theirs?23 Early veterinary texts don’t offer answers to these questions and yet these things might well have been crucial to the welfare of the humans and animals involved. There is a lack of evidence for the situated, emotionally charged inter-species interactions that emerge from simple proximity. Indeed, as if to symbolize this lack of record of the situated actions that make up human-livestock relations in the period, at the end of Milton’s Masque we do get a glimpse of some “country” rather than courtly dancers. These dancers are, however, dismissed from the stage by the per formance’s Attendant Spirit in telling language: Back shepherds, back, enough your play, Till next sunshine holiday. Here be, without duck or nod, Other trippings to be trod

152

Erica Fudge Of lighter toes, and such court guise As Mercury did first devise . . .24

Here, the shepherds—those who actually work with animals—are sent away. Their dance is regarded as “play”; that is, it seems to the court’s eye to be unregulated. And it is regarded as too bodily—as containing too much nodding. These men are in possession of too many ducks, you might say. This, I suggest, is symbolic of the presence of those who work daily with animals in many printed texts from the period. If we follow these texts—whether masques, healthcare manuals, or philosophical treatises—it is easy to miss the real engagements and to fi nd only abstract theorizations, practical generalizations. In the philosophical works I am thinking of here, for example, animals’ actions are reduced to the dictates of the body, while humans are moved by a higher force. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, to offer just one illustration of this orthodox position, Robert Burton writes that “The efficient cause [of movement] in man is Reason, or his subordinate Phantasie, which apprehends this good or bad obiect: in Brutes Imagination alone, which moues the Appetite.”25 That is, animals follow their senses without the capacity to interpret, or to judge good or bad. Following this logic, as Cicero knew, there can be no friendship with a beast,26 and thus any belief that one is being greeted with friendliness by an animal is a failure of reason.27 The scholarly world in which Cicero’s reading of friendship held sway is one in which speaking to cows is almost always regarded as a one-way conversation.28 It is a world in which sheep need to be herded.29 Indeed, for some in this world it seems that those humans who live too close to animals need to be herded too: “Back, shepherds, back” the Attendant Spirit of Milton’s masque says as the dancers with too many ducks are removed from the stage. They make way, of course, for dancers “of lighter toes,” whose movements reflect the priority of reason; whose dances are far from spontaneous. The concept of “ontological choreography” as it is used by Haraway and Law cannot, then, be applied in any simple way to thinking about early modern human-animal relations; this much is clear. But that does not mean that the possibility should be closed down. Rather, I think that taking up that twenty-fi rst-century idea to think about early modern culture offers a use-

Farmyard Choreographies

153

ful prompt to reassess both how we utilize current theoretical models when writing historically, and how we think about the past itself. First, the history of dancing tells us that this theoretical model—“ontological choreography”—is based on assumptions that are themselves historically situated. Dancing has not always been an act of “disciplined spontaneity” and so we must consider the possibility that the idea of the “joint dance of being” is too culturally specific to be used to analyze anything but contemporary relations. Second, thinking through the contemporary idea asks us to reassess our interpretation of the past: Using the concept of collaboration as an interpretive tool leads, for example, to a fuller recognition of the limitations of that orthodox early modern discourse for thinking about lived relationships between humans and animal. This leads to the third point: a recognition that the assumption that we can trace the world of the farmyard30 using printed materials might be, in part, a failure of historical understanding. This is not a new point, but is one that perhaps gets lost as those of us who work on past cultures engage with contemporary theoretical writing. Writing in 1990, for example, Donald Woodward noted a history of this idea in his study of manure: Some years ago [the Dutch agricultural historian] B. H. Slicher Van Bath retold the story of Marc Bloch’s reproaches to his colleagues for “skirting so timidly round the dung-heap” despite its crucial significance for human survival. In part this timidity was due to a distaste for the seamier side of life, but there was more to it than that: as Slicher Van Bath suggested, “it may be that it was less the bad smell than the uncertainties due to the scarcity of data, that kept them at a safe distance.”31

Fourth, what is brought to the fore about this printed early modern discourse when the concept of “ontological choreography” is introduced is the recognition that the evacuation of the hands-on from discussion comes from somewhere; it has a cultural position that is not innocent. As such, this body of thought can no longer be viewed as being simply representative of the age, or even as representative of a particular position of the age: It must be seen to be engaged in a fight to promote certain ideas as self-evident.32 Fifth, and obviously: Using the idea of collaboration as a way of thinking through human-animal relations in early modern society can only work if it is based

154

Erica Fudge

on evidence that the joint dance of being also existed back then. We cannot force an alien concept on to a world that has no parallel. As I will show in the second half of this essay, I believe that such evidence exists, but in the margins, off-stage. So, thinking about human-livestock relations through the conception of ontological choreography as Law and Haraway present it is not straightforward, but it is possible, and it produces a new step in that it asks us to look differently at the world we are attending to and at the world we are attending from. Attending to this other dancing, which can often only be glimpsed as it was all too often happening outside of print culture, reminds us that early modern society did not only occur in courts and libraries. It also happened in yards where writing took second place to milking (if writing had a place at all), and in fields where many spent more time in the company of animals than humans. There are texts in which we can begin to see the world of those who lived with and worked with animals in the fi rst half of the seventeenth century,33 and the rest of this essay will offer up some examples of what I am calling this early modern farmyard choreography in action. It will also raise questions— more generally applicable questions, I hope— about where knowledges come from, how we construct them, and what role the answers to those questions might play in understanding what is at stake in the work we do.

Farming Matters In a ballad dating from 1629, but originating perhaps earlier, the bickering spouses swap roles on the farm, revealing the separation of the genders in agricultural production in the period, with men working away from the house, and women working close to and inside it. In the ballad, the roleswapping wife goes out to the fields with little success (her lack of success depicted, you will note, in relation to the dominance of beasts, and her poor control of plant life): As she did sow the seed likewise, She made a feast for Crows and Pies, She threw a handful at a place, And left all bare another space . . .

Farmyard Choreographies

155

The sixth verse records the husband’s equivalent failure—in the dairy: He went to milk one evening tide, A skittish cow on the wrong side, His pail was full of milk, God wot, She kicked and spilt it every jot, Besides she hit him a blow o’the face, Which was scant whole in six weeks space.34

The woman, the ballad implies, would know how to cope with the “skittish cow”: She would know which was her “wrong side” and avoid it. The man has failed to see and understand this. It is, the ballad implies, the wife’s attentiveness, the care-filled nature of her relationship with the cow, which ensures the family’s provision of milk. In the practice of a successful dairy clear and unchangeable rules (formulae) do not work— all cows are not to be treated the same. In addition, in the orderly world in which women milk and men sow, the successful interactions between the woman and the cow reveal that both of the participants know the steps for that particular encounter; show that they are engaged in a joint dance of being. It is his ignorance of the fact that this particular animal requires an adaptation of routine, or rather that the adaptation is the routine for this animal,35 which leads to the husband’s painful failure. As well as this, the steps of this encounter are also, I suggest, expected to be known by the cow herself. If the wife approaches on the right side that assumes both her (the wife’s) knowledge and understanding and the cow’s. She (the cow) is being approached correctly—with care— and it is assumed in these circumstances that the cow will play her part too: She will not kick; she will give milk. As Vinciane Despret writes from her interviews with some modern cattle breeders: “it’s a matter of incessantly adjusting the intentionalities between animals and humans—I know that you know what I intend to do.”36 Here there is an understanding that is based on relationships between particular people and particular animals; there is an assumption of the possibility of communication, which is based not on, say, a theoretical analysis of language capacity, but on the evidence of experience. “When I open the doors,” says one of Despret’s interviewees, “the cows know I want them to go out.” There is a movement and a response— there is a dance. The interviewee goes on to admit, however, “but I don’t

156

Erica Fudge

know if they really want to go out.”37 This might look like a failure—an admission that communicating across the species barrier is not really possible. But having the thought that the cows might themselves “really want” something, anything, makes such breeders, for Despret, “perspectivists.” Their acknowledg ment of the presence of the cows as desiring individuals is not, she writes, an exercise of empathy; it is, rather, “a non-immediate form of knowledge which allows the construction of the perspective of those one knows. One does not put oneself at the place one populates the place with.”38 This is a dance; these are situated actions. Empathy, and even anthropomorphism, seem to speak too much of dominion to work here. Despret’s representation of the shared worlds of humans and animals comes in the form of tacit knowledge—“I know that you know what I intend to do”— and this opens up the possibility that perhaps it is shared but rarely articulated understanding that is the foundation of community. Maybe holding a door open for a cow who then walks out, and wondering whether that is what the cow really wanted to do and living with and through that entwined understanding and wonderment is how inter-species (and even intra-species) neighborliness is constructed. And such neighborliness is crucial to a conception of community, and to the stability, welfare, and health of all the participants. The importance of tacit knowledge—knowledge that escapes, or exceeds the text— also, unfortunately, separates the printed word from the day-today life of the farmyard. The early animal healthcare manuals, for example, attempt to document what is tacit, and so the tacit vanishes from the written record—not because it is written down, but because it can’t be written down. We thus need to be creative in thinking about where we might look for the tacit; how we might read for what is not said or written because knowledge that is tacit can only be glimpsed, and so we must adopt strategies that attempt to work around this; we must read widely and carefully—or rather, in a care-fi lled way: We must respond in new ways to what we see. To adapt an idea from another essay by Vinciane Despret (she’s writing about understanding sheep): We must learn to ask the documents interest ing questions.39 Another glimpse of this world of the farmyard can be found in the 1625 will of Roger Hull, a miller from Great Maplestead in Essex. Hull bequeaths three cows, one to each of his daughters. These cows evidence his care—for

Farmyard Choreographies

157

his children, but also for his animals: The daughters get a valuable commodity each, and the animals are guaranteed continued tending. Margerie gets “my Northerne Cowe,” Margaret gets “my ould Cowe,” and Suzanne gets “my Cowe wth the one eye.”40 The possessive adjective “my” is the first thing worth noting here: Some wills bequeath “a cowe,” or “one cow,” or “the cow.”41 “My” is important—but not because it depicts ownership (all animals in wills are, of course, owned objects—that is the nature of a will). “My” is important because it declares the relationship as primary to both human and animal; this is paternalistic, to be sure, but it also reveals Hull’s recognition of his responsibility. But there is more to it than that, as is visible in the other adjectives in Hull’s will. “Northerne” reflects a breed type, a cow from stock that originated in either the north of England or Scotland and which were frequently found among the herds of the southeast. Longhorned and hardy, this animal may be a means for Margerie to strengthen her herd.42 The “ould Cowe” in Hull’s will could be an animal that continues to live a productive life even after many years— a state that itself attests to care. Barren cows pulled the plough for up to ten years, apparently.43 But might it be possible, I wonder, that this “ould Cowe” is an animal that is no longer giving milk, and is not pulling the plough, but is kept out of sentimentality, or as company for other animals? Or could it be that both are happening: that this is an old cow who still works and to whom Hull the miller is sentimentally attached? That possibility offers up the potential for a very dif ferent kind of care to be visible in this formal legal document—to reinforce the idea that the dance in the farmyard is not only structured around productivity but also around intimacy. It is, however, only available as a guess—no solid evidence exists in the document itself. Finally, the one-eyed cow in Hull’s will is an animal who is likely to have received medical attention: An injury or a disease has been dealt with;44 care, once again, has been given. As well, this animal would need to have been treated differently from other cows because there would have been a recognition of her dif ferent engagement with the world: Coming up on her blindside may have had painful consequences. (Perhaps one-eyedness is the reason for the skittishness of the cow in the ballad?) The northern cow, the old cow, and the one-eyed cow cannot have received exactly the same treatment from the miller—there is no formula being followed here. There is situated action that allows these three

158

Erica Fudge

animals to live, and allows this man to bequeath to his three daughters what are simultaneously (and that simultaneity is important) cared-for individuals and valuable commodities. It is not just records of cows that can be used to propose the existence of something like collaboration in human-livestock relations. In 1634— the same year as Milton’s Masque was first performed—the concept of collaboration involved sheep and was truly social in that it took in many members of the community. Legal documents record how Thomas Mott, a laborer from Feering in Essex, sold five sheep and four lambs to William Jermyn of Coggeshall, a village about two miles north. In Coggeshall, Jermyn met Thomas Rand who, a deposition reads, “challenged” the ownership of two of the animals “& p’ved it to be his sheep and lambe beinge by him before putt to pasture amongst one goodman Ellis his sheepe in ffeering.” 45 The trail of possession here is a complicated one: If we work backwards from Jermyn the buyer, we go to Mott who sold the sheep and the lamb, then to Ellis who kept the sheep and the lamb, and then finally to Rand who owned the sheep and the lamb. And yet Rand, even at this remove, can “prove” the animals to be his own. His recognition is apparently not because of a woolmark or an ear-clip that physically denotes the animals as his, because if the sheep had such Mott could not, as he does, claim he took the animals in error thinking them to be his own. Mott’s deposition reads: goeing to washe his sheepe [he] lost one of them, and bringinge home the rest of his sheepe after they were washed beinge fower in number and three lambes they brake out of his ground into the highwaye, and when he went to fetch them in he found a mother sheepe and lambe wch then thinking as he saith it had bene one of his owne sheep that had brake awaie before the washinge.46

Without the woolmark, or ear clip, how, then, does Rand “prove” the unwashed sheep and lamb to be his? There is no legal record to give us an answer here—this dance is, once again, happening offstage. But could it be that Rand simply recognized the sheep and the lamb, just as he would recognize, say, another human? Virginia DeJohn Anderson notes that on an enclosed farm in this period “The number of animals . . . was few enough that farmers could identify each beast by its face and sometimes its name, much as they might recognize members of their extended family.”47 My one quibble with Anderson here is to suggest that, for many who worked with them day-in,

Farmyard Choreographies

159

day-out in this period, animals may have been understood not as analogous to members of one’s extended family but as actual members of it. Indeed, human and animal kin were intertwined in the yeoman John Nysum of West Mersea’s will. He traced a linked family lineage for both humans and cows in his bequest to his sister Rose of “the Redd Cowe wth the white face,” and to another sister Margaret “the bullock which came of Roses Cowe.” 48 But Anderson raises an interest ing point, which I want to end with, and which reminds us yet again of the limitations we face as we try to read for animals, as we try to piece together the farmyard choreography of early modern England, or—to recognize the wider problem at stake here—the history of care-filled human-animal interactions. Anderson claims that some of the animals on enclosed farms had names, so does Keith Thomas, who argues that dairy cows in this period were “always” given names.49 Such naming is a marker of individuality, inclusion: of, you might say, personhood. As such, animal names would offer further evidence for the joint dance of being. But the textual evidence for livestock animals having names is hard to find. Thus, for example, of the 491 cows specified as bequests in a dataset of 3720 wills in the Essex Record Office dating from 1620 to 1635, only seven of these animals—1.43  percent of all bequeathed cows— are given names. Why is this percentage so low? What might it tell us? I am sure that it does not reflect the reality of life with a cow in early modern England: I think Anderson and Thomas are right to assume many animals had names because I think it is inconceivable that one could live with another sentient being so closely, so intimately, over such a long period of time, and not give it a name— even if only to help in differentiating animals in their absence. And yet in the wills, where animals can be bequeathed quite carefully—and in a care-filled way, perhaps—names are rarely used. Instead, descriptions are given—“one black Cowe wth a white face, wth one black bullock wth a white face,” “A red Cowe, and a black bullock, “Twoe Cows Beasts one coloured reed and one browne young Cowe.”50 I am speculating (again), but I suspect that the wills, even as they offer us a glimpse of a world of illiterate people (74.53 percent of all the wills in the dataset are signed with a mark51), by their nature are restricting what it is that can be communicated. It is as if the farmyard must be left behind once the testator enters the world of the scribe; as if in almost 99 times out of 100 Nan, Evered, and Darbishire (some of the named cows) are transformed into members of a nameless, faceless herd. In

160

Erica Fudge

the writing of a will, or in the dictating of one’s final wishes to a scribe, the disciplined spontaneity of human-livestock relations is contained, and formula takes over. And the formula is almost all that we have a record for. Literally. The term “appurtenances” is used in just over 25 percent of all wills in the dataset: For example, the yeoman Richard Radley of Great Hallingbury leaves 8 acres of land to his son “wth all and singuler the appurtenances thereunto belonging.”52 In a will too late in date to be included in the dataset, Robert Warde, a gentleman of Wethersfield offers a good example of the use of the term: “All that my ffarme or myll called Shalford myll wth all the houses yards orchards gardens water courses dammes ponds lands meadowes pastures and Appurtenances to the same belonging . . .”53 An “appurtenance” is, in legal terminology, as the OED puts it: “A thing that belongs to another, a ‘belonging’; a minor property, right, or privilege, belonging to another more important, and passing in possession with it; an appendage.”54 In the context of bequeathing stuff appurtenanced to land, this can be a right to graze.55 But “appurtenance” is a term, I suspect, that is also being used in wills with less legal specificity: It is used to collect animals into a group; to not simply de-individualize them, but to render them (and I choose that word, “render,” deliberately56), as having no capacity to be individualized. Indeed, “appurtenance” is a term that is also used in wills to describe the relationship of bedding to a bed: Thus the husbandman John Basie of Great Birch in Essex leaves his son John “my trundlebed standing aloft in the chamber wth the greene Rugge the flockbed and the rest of the appurtenances”; and James Farme a yeoman from Ruislip in Middlesex bequeaths to his wife, Bridget, “the 2 beds and bedsteads standing in the parlour wt the aptenances thereto belonging.”57 When used in relation to land, “appurtenance” is, thus, I think, a shorthand term that allows the difference between a cow and a plough to be forgotten, and it is used in a quarter of the wills in the dataset. Such textual representation sucks the life out of the animals—it places them in a category with things with which it is impossible to have a joint dance of being. Things can have agency, of course,58 but they lack the capacity for reciprocity, for the responsiveness that dancing relies upon. What “appurtenance,” this use of the language of the scribe rather than the farmyard, reiterates is just how difficult it is to trace the ontological choreographies of human-livestock relations of the past. The written record

Farmyard Choreographies

161

does offer us glimpses of the world in which people and animals were engaged in a joint dance of being; but the very nature of that written record might mean that much remains lost. The tacit knowledges that underpin human-livestock relations are almost invisible. It is our job, I think, to find ways of working around— dancing with—this problem as we try to uncover more fully how it is that humans and animals have, do, and might collaborate in a joint dance of being. And in doing that job, I wonder if we might not also be shifting what it is that scholarly interpretation is meant to, perhaps even allowed to do? Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, and a pivotal figure in the development of current academic practice in the humanities and social sciences, drew out a difference between good and bad scholarly method as he examined the failures of natu ral history at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Writing of the value of experience—of empirical investigation—in Novum Organum, Bacon stated: no search has been made for a mass or store of particulars, suitable either in number or kind or certainty, nor in any way adequate to inform the understanding. On the contrary, men of learning, supine and easy-going as they are, have taken certain rumours of experience—as it were, tales and airy fancies of it—on which to base or confirm their philosophy; yet, nonetheless, they have accorded them the weight of legitimate evidence. And just as if some kingdom or state were to govern its debates and affairs, not on the strength of letters and reports sent by ambassadors or trustworthy messengers, but of the gossip of the townsfolk and the streets—that is exactly the system by which experience is brought into philosophy.59

Bacon’s call for empirical investigation marked the shift away from what he viewed as the “rumours” of earlier practice and perhaps made room for the Gradgrindian idea that “You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts.” I am suggesting, instead, that it might be necessary for those of us interested in recovering the worlds beyond the pages of animal healthcare texts, off the stage of masques, and outside of dance manuals to challenge some of the assumptions of our own disciplines: to reintroduce the “gossip” of the fields into our work. Perhaps we might need to stop placing the same emphasis on the provable and allow room for another kind of experience— a tacit one that may have been more important to human-animal

162

Erica Fudge

relations than any “diplomatic” clarity ever could be. I suggest that we might start to wonder, just as Vinciane Despret’s breeder wondered, as he engaged in ontological choreography with his cows: What did they, the animals, really want? What might it mean for an “ould Cowe” to be bequeathed in a will? Who is the real beneficiary of that bequest? There is no certain answer to such a question, but there are rumors, there is gossip, feeling, experience (not quite what Bacon meant by that word, I think), and taking them seriously could be the next step in the dance of animal history, a dance that will have implications for both the humans and the animals involved: And even for those, like us, who are watching. We need to know more than that a cow was, to adapt Bitzer’s defi nition of a horse, “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Thirty-two teeth, namely twelve premolars, twelve molars, and eight incisors.” We need to recognize that she might have been called “Nan”; have had a “wrong side,” perhaps because of an earlier eye infection; have been spoken to twice a day, day-in, day-out, by the same person for maybe fifteen years; that she was participating in a relationship of meaning, importance, and affect. We might not be able to read about this animal and her world in a single document—we might have to piece together her life from scraps, fragments, even from informed intuitions. She might only exist between the lines, in the margins, off stage. But she is there, and it’s our job to fi nd her. Somehow.

Notes 1. John Law, “Care and Killing: Tensions in Veterinary Practice,” in Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, ed. Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols (Bielefeld: Transcript Publishers, 2010), 57–71. 2. Chris Chapman and James Crowden, Silence at Ramscliffe (Oxford: Bardwell Press, 2005). 3. Law, “Care and Killing,” 64 and 67. 4. Charis Cussins, “Ontological Choreography: Agency Through Objectification in Infertility Clinics,” Social Studies of Science 26 (1996), 575–610, quotation, 600. 5. Law, “Care and Killing,” 67. 6. In When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 322 and 325, Haraway cites Cussins’s later work, when she writes under the name Charis Thompson.

Farmyard Choreographies

163

7. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 62. 8. The idea that an animal’s death might require cooperation between human and animal reminds us that collaboration can underpin even unequal relations. On animals’ contributions in the workplace, see Jocelyne Porcher and Tiphaine Schmitt, “Dairy Cows: Workers in the Shadows?” Society and Animals 20, no. 1 (2012), 39–60. 9. See Bruce M. S. Campbell and Mark Overton, “A New Perspective on Medieval and Early Modern Agriculture: Six Centuries of Norfolk Farming c.1250– c.1850,” Past and Present 141 (1993), 38–105. 10. Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx quoted in Thomas  M. Greene, “Labyrinth Dances in the French and English Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2001), 1422. 11. Jennifer Nevile, “Dance and the Garden: Moving and Static Choreography in Renaissance Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 3 (1999), 806. 12. See Andrew Cunningham, “The Culture of Gardens,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed.  N. Jardine,  J.  A. Secord, and  E.  C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially 38–47. 13. Jennifer Nevile, “The Early Dance Manuals and the Structure of Ballet: a Basis for Italian, French and English Ballet,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 13. 14. Jennifer Nevile, The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth- Century Italy (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 45. 15. William Shakespeare, Richard II 3.4.39–40, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 16. John Donne, “To Sir Edward Herbert, At Juliers” in John Donne: The English Poems, A. J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1986), 218. Lines 9–10 read: “How happy is he, which hath due place assigned / To his beasts, and disafforested his mind!” 17. See Erica Fudge, “The Human Face of Early Modern England,” Angelaki 16, no. 1 (2011), 97–110; and “The Animal Face of Early Modern England,” Theory, Culture and Society 30, nos. 7/8 (2013), 177–98. 18. John Milton, A Masque at Ludlow Castle (1634) in John Milton: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Writings, ed. Tony Davies (London: Routledge, 1988), lines 974–5. 19. Milton, A Masque, lines 463 and 469. 20. The letter is reproduced on http://www.oxford- shakespeare.com/ StatePapers14 /SP_14-12-6_ff_8-9.pdf (accessed November 21, 2013). 21. See Louise Hill Curth, Care of the Brute Beast: A Social and Cultural Study of Veterinary Medicine in Early Modern England (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 22. John Crawshey, The Covntrymans Instrvctor (London: Thomas Cotes, 1636), 10 and 15.

164

Erica Fudge

23. Alan Everitt, “Farm Labourers,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales: IV. 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 457. 24. Milton, A Masque, lines 958–963. 25. Democritus Ju nior [Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, 1624), 24. 26. Cicero writes that friendship is “neuer vnreasonable”: The Booke of freendeship of Marcus Tullie Cicero, translated by John Harington (London: Tho. Berthelette, 1562), 16r. 27. I have written about this in relation to Lance’s relationship with his dog Crab in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona in “ ‘The Dog Is Himself’: Humans, Animals and Self- Control in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in How to Do Things with Shakespeare, ed. Laurie Maguire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 185–209. 28. Michel de Montaigne might be an exception here: his essay “Of Friendship” was indebted to Cicero but his “Apology for Raymond Sebond” proposed that animals also have language, and that there is communication between humans and animals: “How could they not speak to one another?” he asks. “They certainly speak to us, and we to them.” Montaigne, “Apology” in The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (London: Everyman’s Library, 2003), 407. 29. See Fudge, “Animal Face,” 17. 30. I use the anachronistic “farmyard” as a catch-all term for human-livestock relations in this essay because the nature and spaces of these engagements are so varied in the early seventeenth century. The wills I am using as evidence are by, for example, a spinster with one “lame cowe”; a weaver with one mare, three cows, one bullock, three sheep, one hog and some poultry; a gentleman with twelve cows, two bullocks, forty sheep, twenty lambs and two horses; and a yeoman with forty cows, eighty sheep, and ten horses. The individuals vary in the nature of their economic relationship with animals as well: There are those who have a few for their family’s nutrition, and those whose occupations are directly related to producing and maintaining livestock. Essex Record Office (hereafter ERO), D/AMW 2/61 (1635); D/AMW 2/125 (1627); D/ACW 11/22 (1628); and D/ABW 43/178 (1620). 31. Donald Woodward, “ ‘An Essay on Manures’: Changing Attitudes to Fertilization in England, 1500–1800” in English Rural Society, 1500–1800: Essays in Honour of Joan Thirsk, ed. John Chartres and David Hey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 252. 32. I am reminded of Jonathan Dollimore’s discussion of E. M. W. Tillyard’s assertion that there existed an “Elizabethan World Picture.” Dollimore wrote that Tillyard’s “error, from a materialist perspective, is falsely to unify history and social process in the name of ‘the collective mind of the people’ . . . Tillyard’s world picture, to the extent that it did still exist, was not shared by all; it was an ideological legitimation of an existing social order, one rendered more neces-

Farmyard Choreographies

165

sary by the apparent instability, actual and imagined, of that order.” Jonathan Dollimore, “Introduction” to Political Shakespeare, ed. Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 5. 33. There is, of course, also archaeological evidence. See, for example, Richard Thomas, “Zooarchaeology, Improvement and the British Agricultural Revolution,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 9, no. 2 ( June 2005), 71–88. 34. MP [Martin Parker], The woman to the Plovv and the man to the hen- roost; or, A fine way to cure a cot-quean (London: F. Grove, 1629). 35. Cattle, according to Temple Grandin, appreciate routine and are upset by change. See Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism (1995, reprinted New York: Vintage, 2006); and Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow (London: Bloomsbury, 2005). On the implications of Grandin’s ideas for writing the history of animals, see Erica Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” History and Theory 52 (December 2013), 13–28. 36. Vinciane Despret, “The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds,” Subjectivity 23 (2008), 123–39; quotation, 134. 37. Quoted in Despret, “Becomings,” 133. 38. Despret, “Becomings,” 134. 39. Vinciane Despret, “Sheep Do Have Opinions,” in Making Things Public: Atmosphere of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). 40. ERO, D/AMW 1/273 (1625). 41. ERO, D/ABW 48/41 (1627); D/ABW 48/27 (1627); and D/ABW 49/50 (1629). 42. See Nicholas Russell, Like Engend’ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 123–4, and Joan Thirsk, “Horn and Thorn in Staffordshire: The Economy of a Pastoral County,” The Rural Economy of England: Collected Essays, ed. Joan Thirsk (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), 170. 43. Joan Thirsk, “Farming Techniques,” in Agrarian History, ed. Joan Thirsk, 186. 44. See Erica Fudge and Richard Thomas, “Visiting Your Troops of Cattle,” History Today 62, no. 12 (December 2012), 39–43. 45. ERO, Q/SBa 2/19 (May 31, 1634). 46. ERO, Q/SBa 2/19 (May 31, 1634). 47. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 90. 48. ERO, D/ABW 52/267 (1635). 49. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1983), 96.

166

Erica Fudge

50. ERO, D/ABW 52/267 (1635); D/ABW 49/229 (1629); and D/ACW 10/107 (1625). 51. This figure is suggestive: It is worth noting that a testator might be able to read but not write. In her 1625 will, the widow Joan Wood of Great Baddow, for example, bequeathed a Bible but signed with a mark. ERO, D/ABW 47/209 (1625). 52. ERO, D/AMW 1/226 (1627). 53. ERO, D/AMW 2/88 (1639). This is a rare use of “farm” in the period. 54. OED, http://www.oed.com /view/ Entry/9922?redirectedFrom = appur tenance#eid (accessed December 11, 2013). 55. Sara Birtles, “Common Land, Poor Relief, and Enclosure: The Use of Manorial Resources in Fulfilling Parish Obligations, 1601–1834,” Past and Present 165 (November 1999), 83. 56. On the many meanings of “render” see Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 20–28. 57. ERO, D/ABW 49/100 (1628); and London Metropolitan Archive, MS 9172 34/246 (1625). 58. See my discussion of this in “Renaissance Animal Things,” New Formations 76 (2012), 86–100. 59. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), trans. and ed., Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), Aphorism 98, 107.

si x

Oves et Singulatim: A Multispecies Impression Julian Yates In my experience, when people hear the term companion species, they tend to start talking about “companion animals,” such as dogs, cats, horses, miniature donkeys, tropical fish, fancy bunnies, dying baby turtles, ant farms, parrots, tarantulas in harness, and Viet namese potbellied pigs . . . [but] the category “companion species” is less shapely and more rambunctious than that. Indeed, I fi nd that notion, which is less a category than a pointer to an ongoing “becoming with,” to be a much richer web to inhabit than any of the posthumanisms on display after (or in reference) to the ever- deferred demise of man. I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist. —Donna Haraway, When Species Meet 1

In Act 4, scene 2 of Henry VI, Part II (1590/91), Dick the Butcher speaks the line that will be remembered: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” (4.2.71).2 Rebel-leader Jack Cade agrees, “Nay, that I mean to do.” But he pauses, adding these more open-ended lines that momentarily retard the proceedings: Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment; that parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? 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. How now? Who’s there? (4.2.72–6).

It is not clear what happens on stage at this moment. Does Jack hold the “this” to which he refers aloft, calling all eyes to parchment as the matter or substrate that backs the legal forms of writing in Renaissance England? 167

168

Julian Yates

What exactly does Jack see or touch as he remarks the “lamentable” gathering of resources (lambs and labor) necessary to its production? Half-jokingly, he rewrites the truths of common experience. Bees don’t sting but wax that bears the imprint of a human seal does. But the joke’s on him. For, once upon a time, he took upon himself the singular sovereign act of putting his name to a legal document and has “never [been his] own man since.” As we later learn he probably did not sign but made his mark—“like an honest plaindealing man” (4.2.94–5). Jack’s zoomorphic reanimation of the parchment registers the singularity of this act of “sealing” and the resulting deprivation. Jokingly, uncannily—the script is radically unstable—his voice momentarily transforms whatever it is he holds in his hands or sees back into a living, breathing skin. If we listen very carefully, perhaps we shall even hear the faint buzzing of the bees that made the wax.3 Jack’s skin memory is a common trope in the period, a turning or reordering of surfaces that discloses the splicing together of dif ferent kinds of matter and dif ferent states of animation (living and dead) that make up the built world.4 The zoomorphic play, the disorienting dose of reference, the palpable thisness of the encounter, produce a leveling effect. Jack looks into the parchment, touches it, and recovers the metonymic chain of variously animate and variously manufactured remains that enable a lamb to sting like a bee. The synaesthesic play of the lines registers the phenomenological “feel” of the rhetorical zoomorphism he employs. It registers the presence of a general flesh of being in the reduced forms we routinely accept and put to use: in this case, parchment, wax, and the apparatus of writing but also the deprivations that certain human subjects endure. Moreover, the biblical coding to the “innocence” of the resurrected lamb opens this infrastructure to other modes of being, still other contracts (sacral, pastoral, legal, economic) and collectivities than those under which he has had to “seal” and so lose himself. By recovering the occluded or silent actors that enable the writing of one particular world, Jack seeks to alter the relays for making or “writing” the world. In the break-neck violence that follows, Jack’s open-ended inquiry is lost. The scene quickly descends into something like a gruesome knock, knock, joke. “How now? Who’s there?” In walks the clerk of Chatham, right on cue. Emmanuel, Emmanuel who “can read and write and cast account” (4.2.79). He carries a “book in his pocket with red letters in’t” (4.2.83). The

Oves et Singulatim

169

“red letters” refer to the red ink used to rubricate or mark up a text. He also knows how to write several hands; signs his name as opposed to making a mark. And as Dick explains, Emmanuel is a phrase “they use to write . . . on the top of letters,” deeds, and legal documents (4.2.91). It means “god be with us.” Kill all the lawyers? Look, here comes one now: Emmanuel, the walking personification of institutional writing. They lead him off stage where they promise to string him up “his pen and inkhorn about his neck” (4.2.100–1). Emmanuel is only the first of a succession of killings all aimed at dif ferent forms of literacy or Latinity. Dick the Butcher’s knife “razes” (erases) all written forms along with all those who can write or sign their name. His knife does double duty. It functions both as a tool for correcting mistakes on parchment by scraping away the offending words and as a weapon for killing.5 Elsewhere, I have argued that Jack’s lament on behalf of a lamb that cannot now complain represents a minimal conservation of insurgent writing practices, attempts by differently literate social groups in Tudor England’s recent past to intervene in the writing technologies of their present by way of carefully orchestrated attacks on specific forms of writing.6 In this essay, I take up Jack’s invitation to inquire further into the infrastructure that he momentarily brings into focus. For his skin memory, a memory that sympathetically transfers the pain of the knife that flays the lamb to human skin that is stung by a seal, reveals the co-writing of human and other animal presents. It reveals what, following Donna Haraway, we might call the functioning of a multispecies archive or impression, a general or generative text that “writes” whole orders of persons, other animals, and the land. In wool-dependent sixteenth-century England this impression derives from the shifting relations between variously human persons, sheep, cows, goats, dogs, wolves, and grass as large swaths of land were transformed from arable, agricultural use or tillage to pasturage, recoding labor relations, land use, and status in the process. Rival polities of human and nonhuman entities (variously articulated “persons” and “sheep”) fought over this coding of labor and land that went by the name of enclosure. Thus, while in certain historical instances, the “rambunctiousness” of the “companion” or multispecies” may offer more progressive modes of relation than traditional forms of citizenship, the story to which Jack responds indicates that both routinely took and take positive and negative forms, hospitable or abusive

170

Julian Yates

configurations. “Man,” as the adage goes, “is a wolf to man,” but sometimes the teeth that do the biting, as in the story of enclosure movements that mark the first half of the sixteenth century, belong to sheep. Biopolitics serves as the reduced form of an ecological or zoo/bio/political production of worlds that articulates multiple forms of “life” that crisscross the lines of species.7 By the end of this essay, I hope to offer a correlative instance in which sheep find themselves invited to entertain a sovereignty comparable to Jack’s dawning awareness or entrance into writing—an instance in which certain historically particular sheep are invited to make their own “mark” and so to undo one order of species hegemony. They become partners in a multispecies writing machine that seeks to own its zoo/bio/bibliographical constitution. Along the way, I respond to the rubric offered by the title to this collection of essays by explaining how the advent of the posthuman re-grounds me in questions of rhetoric, in the turning of tropes and genres, and the way our archives are configured, which are the subjects of this essay. I provide a necessarily stenographic rendering of the story of enclosure in sixteenth-century England keyed to the way the language of pastoral, the co-writing of “human persons” and “sheep,” was and remains a contested and so potentially productive process. Attending to what we may think of as the pastoral prehistory to modern forms of governmentality has the virtue, I hope, of reminding us that the discourse is hardly monolithic and comes primed, as Michel Foucault was the first to acknowledge, with ample resources keyed to other possible modes of organization, still other forms of life, that hover at its edges or embed themselves in its interstices. As Jack’s skin memory implies, such possible openings remain hidden in plain sight even as their revelation as such may prove a little disorienting.8

Renaissance Posthuman/ism So, what order of statement should I hear in the phrase that gives its title to this collection of essays: Renaissance Posthumanism? Does it offer what sociologist Bruno Latour would consider a “well-articulated proposition,” a proposition that might have some predicative force, but which does not yet know what it shall make. Such a proposition would seek to constitute a

Oves et Singulatim

171

cosmopolitically correct rendering of our world, a rendering that seeks to make and to keep things as interest ing as possible?9 If the word “interesting” feels a little bland, then it might be best to hear it in its Latinate origin, meaning to dwell among or between (inter- esse), which discloses the ontological choreography that such a yoking of proper nouns (Renaissance and Posthumanism) or the modification of “Posthumanism” by an uncertainly adjectival “Renaissance” sets in motion. Who shall we all become by processing or modeling the world we co-make according to the logic that this phrase posits?10 Both terms remain, at best, catachreses, partial, insufficient, falsely temporal, perhaps more properly, topological markers. “Renaissance” designates a variously bounded chronological period, depending on when and where we locate ourselves, or, better still, a mobile, rhetorical troping of texts that refolds attitudes and gestures deemed “past” or “prior” in the ser vice of brokering some thing that will announce itself as “new”— a predatory or “proactive mimesis,” to borrow Tom Cohen’s phraseology, an archival politics that manages the half lives of concepts it wishes to discard, revamp, or reuse.11 “Posthumanism” might be regarded, likewise, as a topological prefacing or “post-ing” of and to the “human” that we may not locate in a singular historical moment. Even as we entertain the emergence of the term as the effect of the deterritorialization of life qua code by molecular biology, the advent of cybernetics, systems theory, or the rationalization and management of “life” by way of the homo-sacrilization of citizen consumers in the West, the cutting and re- cutting of the lines between bios and zoë via the bio/thanato/politics of western liberal democracies, such “events” disclose a familiar theme: the failure of the term “human” to close on itself as a non-self-contradictory category or ontology.12 “Human,” if you like, marks the botched product of a chain of making that fails quite to close the black box of production—requiring instead an awful lot of work and an awful lot of disavowed negative feedback from the animal, plant, mineral, and planetary resources pressed to maintain it. Always, then, from the beginning, from before the beginning, however seemingly anachronistic, “renaissance posthuman/ism” counts as a valid reference, the human a predatory, mimetic precipitate from one order of propositions that we judge now as badly articulated, inarticulate, and whose articulations we now judge poorly.

172

Julian Yates

To anticipate where this essay will end, the example Latour likes to give in order to explain what he means by “a well-articulated proposition” comes from the laconic elegance of primatologist turned sheep-observer Thelma Rowell. In the conference paper turned essay to which Latour responds, Rowell describes the way in which she decided to “watch . . . sheep in the same way [she has] . . . been watching monkeys.”13 Rejecting traditional ethological practices in which animals who appear to “spend the majority of their time doing nothing” are asked only the most boring of questions, “mostly to do with what they eat,” and under circumstances in which “sheep are not, generally, permitted to organize themselves,” Rowell allows sheep to orga nize their own social structure and then observes the results.14 In doing so, she decides to study sheep according to the protocols of primatology rather than those of traditional sheep ethology. As Latour observes, Rowell tries “ ‘to give [her] sheep the opportunity to behave like chimps, not that [she] believe[s] that they would be like chimps, but because [she is] sure that if you take sheep for boring sheep by opposition to intelligent chimps they would not have a chance.”15 The emphasis added here by Latour makes explicit the deliberate canniness of the strategy alongside the moral philosophical quotient of the language of gifting and the openness to surprise that characterizes Rowell’s attitudes. “By importing the notion of intelligent behav ior from a ‘charismatic animal,’ ” he continues, “she might modify, subvert, or elicit, in the understanding of sheep behav ior, features that were until then invisible because of the prejudices with which ‘boring sheep’ have always been treated.”16 Rowell refutes the routinized, same old logic of “boring sheep are boring sheep” because she “artificially and willingly imposes on sheep another resource coming from elsewhere [so] ‘that they could have a chance’ to behave intelligently.” Accordingly, Rowell operates by positing the following sentence or proposition: “sheep are intelligent chimps.”17 What makes Latour so giddily happy is the way this statement is premised on a constitutive and considered artificiality that foregrounds the way the experimental protocol serves as a trope, operator, or switch, that makes possible the formation or unfolding of other worlds than that with which it began. “It is because of this very artificial collage between unrelated animals— charismatic chimps and boring sheep—that [Rowell] can reveal what sheep really are,” or have now become. Citing Jakob von Uexküll’s “canonical tick” for comparison, the tick

Oves et Singulatim

173

kept alive without external stimulus in a laboratory for eighteen years, Latour offers that the beauty of a well-articulated proposition is that it “designates a certain way of loading an entity into another by making the second attentive to the first, and by making both of them diverge from their usual path.”18 Like Uexküll, Rowell constructs an experimental protocol that requires her to wait upon or to attend to her sheep, which may or may not then tell her which questions interest them and which do not. She has to remain attentive as her proposition plays out, keeping open the possibility that an altered choreography of beings, a re-forming of life and forms of life, might teach us something entirely new about what, once upon a time, had seemed so very familiar (sheep, chimps, human persons, laboratories, and so on). What then does it entail to hear in the yoking of “Renaissance” with “Posthumanism” such a call to comparative ethological thinking and modeling, a call to inquire into the way our discourses “load” dif ferent entities (creatures, texts, temporal effects) into discourse? It is this question of “loading” that I find, in part, laid out for me in the introduction to Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? which might be said to parse the stakes to be had in Rowell’s proposal that she investigate “sheep” as if “intelligent chimps.” As Wolfe offers, the question of posthumanism . . . far from surpassing or rejecting the human actually enables us to describe the human and its characteristic modes of communication, interaction, meaning, social significance, and affective investments with greater specificity once we have removed meaning from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on. It forces us to rethink our taken-for-granted modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes and affective states of Homo sapiens itself, by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of “bringing forth a world”—ways that are, since we ourselves are human animals, part of the evolutionary history and behavioral and psychological repertoire of the human itself.19

Such a provincializing of the human, our exposure to the myriad forms of other ways of being, knowing, and “bringing forth a world,” means attending very carefully to “the specificity of the human,” Wolfe elaborates, and

174

Julian Yates

“acknowledging that it is fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is . . . For Derrida, of course, this includes the most fundamental prostheticity of all: language in the broadest sense.”20 Like Rowell, who does not assume in advance that she knows what a sheep is, whether it is even right to speak of a singular historical sheep as opposed to a flock or some yet to be discovered intra-group, Wolfe invites us to take up a general project of re- description and re-thinking of our collective stories, an unmooring of all the landmarks (persons, texts, events) that constitute them. To this end, Rowell’s work has still more to offer us. For if this project of re- description or “re-loading” might fund a utopian desire to retrieve some less contaminated content, the historical equivalent of an “essential sheepiness”— some set of practices that we assume we can access or disinter from its archival substrates, and positivize as a stable description of the “past”—then, against this drive, we may remember that, for Rowell and for Latour, it is the artificiality of the experimental protocol, the way her decision to offer sheep access to the process of decision making in how they respond to or process her tests, that might make the difference. Sheep, chimps, human ethologists, and so on, may become dif ferent by and through the artificiality with which she proposes to model their behav ior. Crucially, then, the force to her troping of sheep as chimps depends on and derives from the artificial, formal, or media-specific conditions under which differently animated entities interact. The conditions of the scientific protocol make it possible for sheep to manifest as intra-groups, and, in effect, to historicize and particularize their own behaviors. Rowell operates on the basis that, as Isabelle Stengers is apt to point out, a technically well-modeled protocol (enabling sheep to say “no” to a question) is more likely to produce ethically well-modeled relations with other beings.21 For those of us housed in the humanities, in the semiotic or rhetorical charnel house of the collective, and who are trained to rake through the bones or, like Jack Cade, to re-inflate dead skins and make them speak, and so to produce effects of liveliness in our variously timed “presents,” Rowell’s attention to protocol might translate to the ways in which we model our object as an archive. Fictions, such as the canny, winking proposition to “treat sheep like chimps,” produce ontological categories that then require

Oves et Singulatim

175

further fictions to keep them in place or to change them. Paradoxically, then, even as human language might be understood to constitute merely one instance of a generalized question of coding, its privilege deterritorialized across the boundaries of species and kingdom, I argue that we find ourselves re-territorialized in questions of media, of form, genre, and trope. Such, for me, would be the expertise of something named a “literary critic” in the intellectual commons that the posthumanities might be said to convoke. If for Rowell and the likes of Haraway, then, the advent of the posthuman enables a properly modeled inquiry into the genomics of that animal designated “human,” understanding that genome to correlate to the interpenetration of dif ferent polities—fellow animals, bacteria, fungi, and so on—the human genome offering a material-semiotic archive of multispecies and companion species belonging that manifests in our cognitive abilities, perceptual apparatus, and ner vous system as forms of stimulus response, then, likewise, for us, our object becomes quite precisely a network of textual effects and their substrates. Our archives have always, from the beginning, from before the beginning, functioned as a multispecies impression. As a fi rst step, then, we could begin by owning that, beyond referring to a great mass of writing, the archive we take as our object, comes to us backed by substrates configured from the manufactured declensions of animal, plant, and mineral remains.22 Such a point extends beyond ephemeral wax tablets and parchment (sheep skin) to the paper of printed books in the period, whose covers, if they warranted one, were of sheep or goat or cow skin, and whose paper, in order that these books may be marked up by pens whose ink followed a dif ferent recipe than the ink that set the type, required the paper to be “sized,” treated with sheep or cow gelatin, in order to take an impression.23 To all these presences, we should add also those of the differently lively plants, and insects, and minerals necessary to the mobility of the graphic form. Such a beginning would return us to the ground of what was once described as a “poetics of the literal,” a mode of graphology, no longer purely “cultural,” that derives from Jacques Derrida’s grammatology, which, as you recall, maintains that there exists a history of technology, of the machine, the plant, and the animal, that is si multa neously and necessarily also a history of human life. Derrida’s staging of “the history of life . . . [or] differance as the history of the grammè” begins with the writing event of “ ‘genetic

176

Julian Yates

inscription’ ” and “ ‘short programmatic chains’ regulating the behav ior of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo sapiens.”24 Writing manifests as a question of coding—producing an object world via the backing given to writing by “graphic forms of various substances (materials: wood, wax, skin, stone, ink, metal, vegetable) or instruments (point, brush, etc, etc).”25 To which, in later writings, Derrida adds, the archive itself, email, the virtual, analog and digital, the dossier or file, the biblion (niche / depository and library)—folding the figure of “arche-writing” into a general, prosthetizing infrastructure of survivance, which disallows any stable opposition between organic and inorganic, event and machine, life and death, animate and inert, for such terms emerge out of its extended procedures of living on through and within the lives and deaths of other beings.26 Such a structure will be, always, then, in essence, a multispecies impression; generating differently expressed forms of animal, plant, and mineral being; a hierarchy of objects, its effects funded, still, and haunted by the “pluri-dimensionality” of still other modes of cognition that it linearizes and constrains.27 Such an archive extends beyond the question of media or the backing to writing to include the co-writing or mutual zoomorphism / anthropomorphism of humans and sheep in the discourses of pastoral care, which cast human persons as “sheep” or as both “sheep” and “shepherd,” and which render sheep “sheepish.” If we accept further Juliet Fleming’s thesis that sixteenth-century England was paper poor and that, therefore, the pluri-dimensionality of other modes of cognition than graphic writing marked the textual remains of the period in profoundly under-represented ways; that writing itself was subject to and in conversation with a “non-propositional mode of cognition that is the apprehension of proportion” and a “fully material, visual mode”; that writing was a working of matter; and we ally this account to Haraway’s model of the multispecies; then it becomes possible to reread texts past for those moments of contested writing, such as the synaesthesic, zoomorphic game Jack plays when he touches a parchment and refuses or finds himself unable to read the script thereon.28 In the place of either looking or reading, or by the oscillation of the parchment between the two, the material-semiotic “flesh” of Jack’s present, the carving up of the world into differently articulated beings, becomes knowable. This phenomenologically charged moment re-stitches the relationships between various creatures but it does not restore them.

Oves et Singulatim

177

On the contrary, these differently articulated and enabled “skins” serve as successive orders of media that host or merely “back” one another. That lamb is dead. Its skin remains in tooled form as the backing to one form of writing. So, now, Jack’s voice (also dead, bodied forth by the actor) reanimates the lamb in translated form. This nested structure of non-equivalent relations or parasitic effects in which beings serve as backing or screen for one another remains predicated, as Wolfe invites us to consider, on the finitude of dif ferent creatures. It requires a concerted thinking of the difference that differences make. Jack’s metaphorical stinging by the parchment translates, then, or plays host to, the long-past flaying of the lamb. For Rowell, things come a little more straightforwardly than they do for Jack. A little tinkering with the protocols of observation, treating sheep as if they were chimps, enables a field science to short circuit the routines by which several thousand years of botched or abusive ethology (selective breeding) came to write the discourses of pastoral and pastoral care under whose rubric we still essentially make do. Primatology serves here as what Latour calls a “trading zone between anthropology, zoology, evolutionary theory, ethics, conservation, and ecology.”29 Similarly, allowing our archives to behave differently by suggesting that they host a much broader and broadly defined conception of multispecies writing endows our readings of texts and events past with an unpredictable urgency, a sense of surprise at what we might find—the archive now awash with still other, mobile, morphing traces that we are at pains to recognize. And part of the challenge, for us, I argue, lies in discerning those encrypted or invisible acts of writing that leave no graphic impression or whose impression erases their particularity—the weft and warp of the archival substrate a sieve that captures only the residue of texts produced by differently literate groups.

Oves et Singulatim What I have suggested thus far amounts merely to a restatement of the way a built world exists as an elaborated network of animal and plant remains, declined by way of their use values, literal and metaphorical, their pressing to use as variously prosthetized instruments. Such a modeling accords with Susan McHugh’s recent call that we attend to how “story forms operate

178

Julian Yates

centrally within shifting perceptions of species life,” opening and closing certain avenues of thought and action, the interspecies relation coding unlicensed forms of human being and belonging and relating.30 In earlier periods, this call extends to the way dif ferent modes or genres maintain or rationalize dif ferent routines: georgic and pastoral parcel out land and leisure in an on-going metaphorization of agricultural labor and animal husbandry, but are subtended by a long story of utopian thinking (popular and academic) that inquires into the health of the Commons and the Commonwealth.31 Contested beings that live on the margins of these genres are England’s ever-growing flocks of sheep. Extolled, on the one hand, for their supreme usefulness, utilitas or “profit,” exiled from pastoral, they return in disguised form in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516 and 1518).32 Here, for example, is Leonard Mascall’s “A Praise of Sheepe” from his husbandry text, The First Booke of Cattell (1591), which inventories or blazons the exhaustive use values of a sheep: These Cattel (Sheepe) among the rest, Is counted for man one of the best. No harmfull beast nor hurt at all, His fleece of wooll doth cloath vs all: Which keepes vs from the extreame colde: His flesh doth feed both yonge and olde. His tallow makes the candles white, To burne and serue vs day and night. His skinne doth pleasure diuers wayes, To write, to weare at all assayes. His guts, therof we make wheele strings, They vse his bones to other things. His hornes some shepeheardes wil not loose, Because therewith they patch their shooes. His dung is chiefe I vnderstand, To helpe and dung the plowmans land. Therefore the sheep among the rest, He is for man a worthy beast.33

Like Edward Topsell, who sings in praise of the superlative “oeconomical profit” of English sheep, especially profitable and especially happy given the

Oves et Singulatim

179

Figure 6-1. “June”: manuscript illustration from Thomas Fella’s “booke of divers devises.” (Folger Shakespeare Library, V. a. 311)

absence of wolves in England, Mascall presents the sheep as a series of naturalized affordances.34 Every single part of the sheep appears destined or “written” for human use. Hence it is that the figure of the sheep serves as the emblem for Christian meekness and subordination before the divine. As an illustration from Thomas Fella’s manuscript Commonplace Book for June attests (see Figure 6-1), the scenes of shearing sheep stand as positive exempla of human labor against the uncertainly coded wine making that appears on the facing page. There is industry and care in the wine house. One figure attentively decants wine or grape juice from one barrel. But another guzzles down the fruits of their labor. The figures’ absorption in their tasks and pleasures reflects a negative version of the ethic of care and absorption represented by the labor of sheep farming on the facing folio page. Meanwhile, up in the raf ters, an uncertainly sexed person straddles the troughs below, a stream of urine and feces descending, either into the container holding the wine or behind it. “The very image of idelnese”35 is how the motto captures the scene, coding its uselessness and expenditure of resources. Meanwhile, the

180

Julian Yates

virtuously sheepy labors outdoors (milking, washing the fleece of the sheep, preparing for shearing) are described as follows: This hurtlesse beast with meeke moods yelds wool And skin to cloth our naked clotte of claye. He gives his flesh to feede our bellies full. Nought for him selfe he brings but for our staye.36

The world is one great sheepy buffet. And the sheep do not mind. Or, better yet, they have accepted that this is their purpose—to function as a series of animated use values for the burgeoning numbers of “naked clotte[s] of claye” who put them to use. It’s tempting to imagine Jack Cade reading these encomia, his being struck by the omnipresence of sheep products in his world. Replay Jack’s logic here and we might find ourselves feeling that this “clotte of claye” now resembles precisely some parasitic, predatory, mimetic, sheep-being or human-sheep hybrid— clothed in sheep, full of sheep, reading by sheep-light books bound in sheep, the words written on sheep or on paper steeped in boiled sheep bones. Beneficiary of natu ral law that he is, this warmly dressed, well shod, well fed Englishman has the means to provide for the pen, paper, and books in his closet as he is reading or perhaps writing a letter by candlelight. As he does so he reflects gratefully on the kindly nature of English sheep by celebrating their (here “his”—this is a ram) usefulness. While it may seem that the co-extensive zoomorphism / anthropomorphism to these encomia simply goes missing or remains unthought, it would be more accurate to say that it serves as the axiom or, in Foucault’s terms, the governing positivity, that decides which sentences are thinkable and writable but which also, necessarily, permits still other sentences and thoughts to be had— even as they may constitute mere nonsense or notyet-sense.37 Jack’s utopian day dreaming in Henry VI, Part II, for example, begins the process of de-realizing the ideality of the virtuous, self-sacrificing (or, more properly, always already self-sacrificed) sheep as naturalized antinarcissism. But, within the likes of Fella’s illustration, the logic of pastoral care manifests instead as a hierarchical series of metaphors that stabilize the contradictions that might arise from the cross cutting of the lines between bios and zoë that the motto sets in motion. Here, in other words, we watch and read the set of operations that co-write or co-make sheep as “sheep” and

Oves et Singulatim

181

“clottes of claye” as Christian (not yet human) persons, rendering the sheep virtuously “sheepy” and the clay gratefully “sheepish,” forced to read the sheep’s essence as the standard that his or her own Christian devotion should emulate. The “clotte of claye” is forced to shut tle between gratitude for his and her non-sheepy privilege that enables his and her use of the world and a sheepy insufficiency or sheep-envy as he or she addresses the divine shepherd. The post facto attribution of a “selfe” to the sheep, a “selfe” that is constantly sacrificed, available and attributable only by the sheep’s “use,” represents the logic of deprivation that funds the apparent universalism of the sheep as emblem of a perfect subordination to divine will and divine planning. Thus, as the mottos to Fella’s illustration imply, when you contemplate your own creaturely life, “clotte of claye” that you are, know that you must be or become a sheep, metaphorically, at least in your conduct with regard to the divine. Use the sheep. Eat the sheep. Shear the sheep. Boil the sheep down to make glue. But become the sheep in how you orient yourself toward your shepherd. For, as Foucault observes, it is the radically individualized articulation of each and every subject that is the essence of pastoral power’s management of the whole or the flock. That and also “the paradoxically distributive side” that auto-produces the dissident black sheep or the goat— the “very image of idelnese”—that must be discarded for the good of the flock.”38 “Omnes et singulatim” (all and one by one). Or, perhaps, to register the zoomorphic quotient or metaphorical troping that underwrites the phrase, we might venture, “oves et singulatim” (sheep and one by one)—the “clotte of claye” emerging out of but disappearing back into the figure of the sheep that stand for the many, the herd, the flock.39 Every day, everywhere they went, Jack and his betters, such as might afford and read Mascall’s or Topsell’s books, lived out a series of sheepy metaphors, oscillating between the position of sheep and “not-sheep.” These variously ovine or sheepy metaphors provided a set of formal or equipmental resources for all aspects of life and, on occasion, they were subject to playful or troubling inversions, transpositions, as in the likes of Jack’s utopian projects. Sometimes it was necessary, for example, to own up to one’s sheepiness while at other times it must be roundly denied. No apparent contradiction resulted. Sir Walter Raleigh’s worldly anti-pastoral self refuses an office he deems beneath him with the words, “ ‘I would disdayne it as miche to keap

182

Julian Yates

sheepe,’ ” but he finds no difficulty declaring his pastoral poetic willingness when it comes to Queen Elizabeth I to cast himself as both shepherd and “ ‘gentill Lamm.’ ”40 Yet as Raleigh also knew, there were times when it was important for a “not-sheep” shepherd of men to insist that he really was, in fact, a sheep or a lamb, such as when he found himself, along with everyone else, singing Psalm 23, and “lying down in green pastures,” “the Lord [his] Shepherd, and he his Sheep.” Or, perhaps one day he finds himself signing letters addressed to Queen Elizabeth I, with the epithet: “your majesty’s ‘sheep,’ and most bound vassal,” as did Lord Chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton in the early 1590s—Elizabeth coming to refer to him affectionately, as Robert Cecil would opine later in a letter, as “her mutton,” fantasizing Hatton’s presence with her as she recreated out on the “Downes covered with sheep.” Sometimes it is good for the human “not-sheep” to be a sheep— reassuring, or maybe even, given the right shepherd, a little sexy.41 Such were the benefits, as it were, of sitting at the end of a parasitic chain of persons and sheep, from which you extracted so very much “profit.” Eighty years or so before Mascall and Fella’s encomia, before Topsell’s giddy delight in the national merits of English sheep, however, Thomas More decided to think through the health of the Commonwealth by parsing out the available Ciceronian scripts for conceiving the role of rational counsel to the Prince against an argument for Platonic withdrawal. He tried to imagine how to fi x the ills of Tudor England and so came up with a text on the husbandry of a human animal, “The Truly Golden Handbook” for producing “The Best State of a Commonwealth” called Utopia (1516 / 1518). When he did so, very disappointingly, given the encomia we have read, he found very few well-used sheep in England.42 Indeed, in a famous moment, Raphael Hythlodeaus observes to Cardinal Morton at dinner that “ ‘Your sheep, which are usually so tame and so cheaply fed, begin now, according to report, to be so greedy and wild that they devour human beings themselves and devastate and depopulate fields, houses, and towns’ ” (65–7). He refers not to the evils of land enclosure per se but, as Joan Thirsk observes, to the preference for the conversion of land from corn / cow / sheep farming to pasturage— something we might register as the refolding of Mascall’s blazon into some perversely swollen wool-praising haiku or jingle, eliminating a sheep’s other uses such that a monoculture devoted to its wool emerges.43

Oves et Singulatim

183

In the first half of the sixteenth century, land enclosures were common, enabling sheep to graze on large fields and so sheep farming on a massive scale was geared to production of wool for export abroad. Not all enclosure was undesirable. But in Utopia, More takes aim at a very particular practice, animating the sheep of England as wolfish prosthesis of profiteering landlords with no regard for the Commons. He seeks to make visible what he regards as a corrosive iteration of a companion species (landlords and their flocks) as violent intra-group within an unreduced Commonwealth of Christian not-sheep “sheep.” Like Jack’s skin memory, More’s predatory flocks serve as a zoomorphic figure of the multispecies relation he diagnoses. He does so by momentarily promoting sheep up the food chain so as to animate or imagine the truth to the wolfish adage that “man is a wolf to men.” Here, as I remarked earlier, the jaws and the teeth belong to sheep and the flesh eaten is the lost livelihood of crops not cultivated and the grass eaten instead, grass that is then metamorphosed into wool and so capital. Raphael’s phrase travels through texts of the period. It returns with force in A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (1549), when the long suffering knight complains that he can only make ends meet by keeping sheep—to which the husbandman returns “sheep, sheep, sheep,”44 and in aphorisms such as “The more sheep, the fewer eggs a penny” and “We want foxes to consume our shepe” that circulated throughout the 1540s. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Raphael’s sheep lose their bite, his phrase having become a necessary item of ovine lore to be replayed, as it is by Topsell, as a curiosity, referring to depredations that now no longer matter as they once did, given the collapse of wool exports mid-century, and the downturn of cloth prices.45 During the reign of Edward VI, however, aggressive enclosures were at their height. And in March 1549, as M. W. Beresford tells us, “parliament granted Edward VI the proceeds of a tax on sheep coupled with a purchase tax on cloth.”46 As Beresford remarks, historians had long regarded the tax as never having been implemented, making it “the shortest lived tax in English fiscal history,” but, in fact, the measures were carried out, if spottily, and not particularly successfully. Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and Lord Protector during Edward’s minority, fell from power in the autumn of 1549 and the measures were repealed immediately under the Duke of Northumberland.47 The taxes were influenced by a group of third generation

184

Julian Yates

humanist clerics, politicians, and pamphleteers known as the “Commonwealth Men,” who, in this instance, sought to install a measure of commutative justice into the Tudor economy by discouraging pasturage and so stemming the conversion of arable land to pasture. The sheep tax required a census of flocks in England to take place on June 25, 1549, effectively maximizing the number of sheep by focusing attention on sheep-shearing season. Preparatory materials for the legislation reveal that in 1546, estimates of the number of sheep in England ranged between 8,407,819 and 11,089,149, but were revised downward by John Hales to 3,000,000 in a memorandum titled The Causes of Dearth, produced probably as part of the 1548 Commission on Enclosure.48 The proposed taxes were progressive, exempting commoners with flocks of under 20 sheep and charging them a halfpenny a head for less than ten and a penny a head for 11–20 (encouraging mixed sheep / cow / corn farming) and taxing flocks grazing on common land at a lower rate. The tax differentiated between three categories of sheep, each of which was to be taxed at a dif ferent rate: Ewes kept on enclosed ground for the greater part of any year, whether the enclosed ground were marsh or pasture: that is to saye, groundes not comen nor comenlie used to be tilled. The tax on these ewes was three pence a head. A tax of two pence a head on wethers and other shear-sheep on these same enclosed ground. A lower rate of three halfpence on all sheep on the commons or on enclosed tillage lands.49 Taxes calculated on sheep should only be paid, however, if they exceeded the usual taxes that would be paid on goods, effectively exempting small farmers and “if [the] sheep tax did exceed . . . property tax [a farmer] was only to pay the difference.” Estimates on the revenue that might be generated varied greatly. Implementation of the tax, as with any undesirable, centrally planned initiative of the Tudor regimes, was erratic, at best, and the local priests and “honest men of the village” named as census-takers failed in many cases to record the existence of any sheep at all—or were seemingly unable to identify one. In North Riding, only four or five villages were represented at all and in these the flocks consisted of two hundred sheep or less. Likewise, the

Oves et Singulatim

185

reduction in tax for sheep grazing on common land meant, predictably, that most of the sheep reported tended to be of this type. And “nowhere did the commissioners report flocks near the prohibited size of 2400” as mandated by an earlier act of 1533.50 The act met with widespread resistance— and was repealed at the end of the year when Parliament returned in November. Somerset was already under arrest and in the Tower of London his power fast diminishing as a result, in part, of the mass riots that summer, culminating in Kett’s Rebellion in July 1549. Still, the tax represented a strategic attempt to intervene in the dominant writing machine of the period, to rewire its relays, and so redraw the relations between human persons and sheep at a moment when rural distress fueled popular protest. Implicit to its terms and its mode of implementation is the language of Christian pastoral devotion, and the Preamble to the Act reminds landlords that they are but “tenants.” It calls on God to protect “this lytle Realme and us His poore Servants and little flock, taking to his charge and defence our little Sheparde.”51 Here the universalizing potential of the terms of pastoral care sought to remind those “clottes of claye” that had advantages that still they were on earth only for a “short staye.” Enter the Big Other or divine shepherd as we lose our differences to become his interchangeable sheep. Historically, particular sheep appear in the Act, but they do so only to the extent that they serve as relays (positive and negative) between differently abled human persons. The different rates of taxation, for example, seek to prescribe desired modes of land use by polities of sheep and human persons while discouraging others. Thus shall risk or “dearth” be managed by a zoo/biopolitical fi x. That said, still more immediate and violent particularization of sheep as historical beings contributed to the failure of the tax. Among other things, Kett’s Rebellion was vilified by commentators for its scenes of mass ovicide, as Kett’s rebels reversed Raphael’s figure of wolfish sheep by slaughtering an estimated “20,000 sheep” in order to feed themselves.52 Thus were sheep, extolled for their use values, put to use as a food item and deployed as a form of butchered, blood writing, the rebel’s knives razing the writing of the land that the Commonwealth Men had sought to legislate against. Once beaten, of course, Kett’s rebels became mere “sheep” again, “when they ran confusedly away” as the same chronicle opines—their quasi-utopian interruption of history merely a momentary fitting of the general text.53

186

Julian Yates

And such was indeed the fate of most rebels in the representational afterlife that summoned them back into being in pamphlet and on stage. In Act 4, scene 10 of Henry Part VI, Part II, for example, we meet an uncertainly bovine or ovine Jack “ready to famish” (4.10.1–10). He has climbed “o’er a brick wall . . . into this garden to see if [he] can eat grass or pick a sallet,” where he is dispatched by the otium (leisure / freedom from everyday tasks) seeking Alexander Iden. Iden prides himself on his self-imposed rustication from the “turmoils” of Court to “this small inheritance” his father has left him. “I seek not to wax great by others’ waning” (4.10.16–22), he remarks, or to “gather wealth.” “Sufficeth,” he adds, “that I have maintains my state, / And send . . . the poor well pleased from my gate.” Speaking from the same script of Platonic withdrawal that we fi nd articulated by Raphael in Book 1 of Utopia, Iden enters with a full tummy, perfectly at ease with his self-regulating body and the well-maintained boundaries of his estate. “Eden” in Holinshed turned “Iden” (or self-same) in the play comes upon Jack who snarls at him wolfishly. They draw and Iden kills him. Jack dies with famine on his lips—“O I am slain! Famine and no other hath slain me” (4.10.59) and “I, that never feared any, am vanquished by famine” (4.10.74). In Act 4, scene 10, in effect, we will have been watching the retraining of Jack’s mouth: no longer the self-predicating parliament of the land, the mouth of this wolfish sheep is denied flesh as he is forced to eat grass. But how then, if such is the fate of the likes of Jack, might we begin to replay the utopian possibilities preserved in Jack’s skin memory? What order of misconduct or conduct other wise might there to be had in the discourses of pastoral care? Here it is worth recalling, that in order to imagine the utopian res (thing / project), Raphael insists on a special regime for his listeners, More and Peter Gilles. At the end of Book 1, just as Raphael is about to describe Utopia proper, More begs Raphael for a complete description of the island. Raphael obliges but insists that it will take quite some time. “There is nothing,” he declares, “I shall be more pleased to do . . . but the description will take some leisure [sed res ocium poscit]” (108/109). The utopian “res,” the immersion More requests, demands something more than time. It demands leisure (“ocium poscit”) understood as a freedom from bodily and worldly concerns, freedom from competition, from industry, from work, from all that humanists heard in the word negotium or negocia. But such a state of leisure or finding oneself “at leisure” proved and proves perilously hard to

Oves et Singulatim

187

54

differentiate from idleness. And, for More, at least, who claimed to have written the text very precisely “per otium” (by or through leisure), it is the imminent return to the world of negotium that defends otium from accusations of withdrawal or mere idleness.55 Utopia or Eu-topia (the place of the well or the good) unfolds then in the interval between dinner and supper. It remains post or inter-prandial: It may only be spoken of or thought on a full stomach. For an inquiry into the way our discourses “load” dif ferent entities into one another, for entities to emerge as historically particular beings, food (figured as a drain on resources) must be a given. This is the state that Jack and Dick hope to bring about by and in their occupation of the City of London and their rerouting of its resources to feed their bellies. This is the state also that finds itself lampooned in Jack’s reduction to eating grass to fill his famished belly. Back then to the idling interruption of routines that Jack’s skin memory locates.

Time (Otium) for Sheep Brief as it may be Jack’s skin memory threatens a breakdown to the action of Henry VI, Part II. If Dick and his fellows listened to him, if they all paused to touch and feel the sting of parchment and wax, events might turn out a bit differently. The writing machine Jack and Dick seek to sabotage comes into view, becomes knowable, but it appears only to disappear, signaling the scarcity value that attaches to otium as it finds itself distributed throughout the collective. Jack and Dick, men of trade (negotium), gain little access to its heady state and when they do, they are more likely to be considered idle, as idle as the figure up in the rafters of Fella’s drawing, pissing into the wine vat. When they attempt their own forcible rewriting of the world, “razing” the text and raising their fellows, as they do so, they get caught up in a punitive mode of representation that writes them either as wolves or as sheep. If otium, in its utopian guise, codes an interruption of the world’s routines (negocia), an orientation to and conservation of openness, an opening of the general text to still other modes of writing, then how might it be extended to the Jacks and Dicks of the world? One answer, I think, lies in constitutively mishearing the question and posing it to the sheep that Jack figuratively becomes as he exits the play and that he hallucinates or sees in

188

Julian Yates

the parchment near his entrance. For, if it turns out that “sheep” do not constitute the anti-narcissism that Christian mottos proclaim them to, if they prove nasty, say, or rhetorically canny in their dealings with other sheep, then the constitutive zoo/biopolitical metaphors of governmentality would find themselves challenged or overwritten. One way to write the being we have called “human” differently is to alter the way “sheep” as well as the other beings (goats, dogs, wolves, ticks, etc) with whom we come into being are written also. Here the work of Rowell and her Yorkshire sheep as she inducts them into the protocols of ethological research discloses its biopolitical importance. As Latour observes, Rowell has to wait for and on her sheep to decide. They enjoin her to dif ferent gestures, thoughts, requirements, and postures than those she is used to, all in order for her to be what she considers a good scientist, which is to say a good host. As a reader tuned to pastoral motifs, I am inclined to read Rowell’s research as the latest chapter in the long story by which utopian thinking extends otium more broadly through our collectives. Rowell’s experiments open a space in which sheep gain access to the materials by which they are written. She offers them an opportunity to manifest as historical beings, there and then, here and now, and for the impressions that they make to count as writing worth keeping. Crucially, Rowell’s observations begin by removing an automatic question concerning competition. Every day she provides more food than is required, allowing sheep to fill their tummies and so move on to consider other questions than those of hunger. Thus may the res (the sheepy gathering) be told by sheep to the humans that attend on them. As Vinciane Despret records, Rowell’s “observations usually start in the morning, with the same ritual: she takes each of her 22 sheep a bowl of its breakfast. But what puzzles any outside observer is that there are not 22 but 23 bowls, that is, always one too many.” “Why this extra bowl?” asks Despret. “Is the researcher practicing a kind of conviviality?”56 The twentythird bowl is, as Despret hints in what seems like misdirection, about politeness, about offering to “sheep” the chance to transform the protocols of the observation. The presence of the bowl and so the surplus of food transforms the questions that Rowell poses of her sheep, removing or suspending an automatic question concerning competition even as it registers that he findings are inflected by her presence. The bowl “is intended,” De-

Oves et Singulatim

189

spret continues, “to expand the repertoire of hypotheses and questions proposed to the sheep . . . [but] to leave them the choice” of answering other questions than those posed to them. Rowell prepares the bowl, but it is her twenty-two sheep whose actions she records that co-write the scene that then unfolds. This twenty-third bowl becomes a way of entering sheep into a human / non-human writing machine in a way that permits or requires the “human” now merely to idle, to wait or attend. The future that it writes remains essentially blank, yet to be filled in, subject to routines that are as yet unmade. If the project of common becoming requires a cosmopolitical rewiring of abusive relays that disavow into joyful nodes of “becoming with,” then Rowell’s comparativist ethology aims to do precisely that by creating a protocol that allows sheep to cast off their sheepy skins and assert their place within a group Rowell posits: “all gregarious long-lived vertebrates capable of mutual recognition.” She does so by extending otium to her sheep. Modeled as a surplus order of temporality, less and more time, otium and idleness, always in too short or too great supply, Rowell instrumentalizes the trope in the form of a scientific technique. Sheep, for once, get the break, get to idle, and so are given the chance intervene and alter the multispecies writing machine that rendered them “sheepy.” It is they who require her to wait also. It is they who calibrate the temporality of the encounter. Through Rowell’s protocol, Jack, as it were, finally gets to see the lamb that was— though its innocence can hardly be a given. The Commonwealth Men may also finally get to count all those sheep and discover the world that might have been had their poll tax hit home. In modeling Rowell in terms of those who watched and waited on sheep in a sixteenth-century past, I have attempted to show the way the epistemology of comparative ethology today manifests in dif ferent historical moments encrypted in tropes and discursive forms that emerge out of pastoral discourses. Rowell’s protocol realizes some of the potential to be had in these fragmentary remains of futures that could be imagined but not realized or positivized. In effect, she rewrites the relation between otium and negotium across and through the boundaries of species difference, troubling the prepositional per that forces a human subject to shuffle back and forth between the worlds of thought and work, critique and poiesis. Instead, she and her twenty-two sheep constitute a circuit in which otium serves as an input to

190

Julian Yates

the writing machine they co-author. Rowell idles, waits on and for the sheep. They eat. And then move to other concerns / things that interest them, disclosing thereby a sheepiness whose substance unfolds less for us than through us. The results of such experiments as they might rewrite still other shared futures remains to be seen but the potential for them, the desire for them, was felt long ago in a set of historical moments designated as “Renaissance” and perhaps now as “Posthumanist.”

Notes 1. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 16–17. 2. Unless other wise indicated, all references will be to William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3. On the manufacture of parchment as indexed to numbers of claves or sheep, see Lucien Febvre and Henri Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerrard (London: Verso, 1976), 18 and more generally, Ronald Reed, The Nature and Making of Parchment (Leeds: Elemete Press, 1975). 4. For medieval analogues to this moment, see Sarah Kay, “Legible skins: Animals and the ethics of medieval reading,” Postmedieval 2, no. 1 (2011): 13–32; and “Original Skin: Flaying, Reading and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36, no. 1 (2006): 35–74. For a useful survey of instances in which leather (the skin of a sheep, goat, or cow) appears in Shakespeare’s plays, see Anston Bosman, “Shakespeare in Leather,” in The Forms of Re naissance Thought: New Essays in  Literature and Culture, ed. Leonard Barkan, Bradin Cormack, and Sean Keilen (New York and Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 225–45. Jack Cade’s skin memory stands as a power ful example also of what Erica Fudge has called the “persistent presence of the animal in the animal-madeobject” which has the effect of “actually produc[ing]” new agents.” Growing out of Actor Network Theory and thing theory, my reading of Jack’s lines and what I am calling a multispecies archive or impression is in deep sympathy with Fudge’s call to attend to the efficacy of what she names “animal-made-objects.” See Erica Fudge, “Renaissance Animal Things,” New Formations 76 (2012): 86–100, 94 for the quotation in this note. 5. On the knife as a tool for erasing or altering writing on parchment or vellum, see Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 59–107.

Oves et Singulatim

191

6. Julian Yates, “Skin Merchants: Jack Cade’s Futures and the Figural Politics of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II,” in Go Figure: Forms, Energy, Matter in Early Modern England, ed., Judith Anderson and Joan Pong Linton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 149–69 and 199–203. 7. “ ‘Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit’ (‘When one does not know him, man is not a man but a wolf for man’),” Plautus, Asinaria (495), quoted in Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 11. On the necessity of thinking the biopolitical with the so-called question of the “animal,” see Cary Wolfe, Before The Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 8. On the origins of government and governmentality in the discourse of Christian pastoral care, see Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), especially 115–216. 9. Bruno Latour, “A Well-Articulated Primatology: Reflections of a FellowTraveller,” in Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society, ed. Shirley  C. Strum and Linda  M. Fedigan (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 358–81. 10. On “ontological choreography” see Charis Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005), 8–11. 11. Tom Cohen, Ideology and Inscription: Cultural Studies after Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11. 12. Here I draw on Cary Wolfe’s invaluable What Is Posthumanism? and Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity Press, 2013). 13. Thelma Rowell, “A Few Peculiar Primates,” in Primate Encounters, 69. 14. Ibid., 65, 69. 15. Bruno Latour, “A Well-Articulated Primatology,” 367. 16. Ibid., 368. 17. Ibid., 374. 18. Ibid., 372. See also, Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Uexküll’s tick has obviously become especially “canonical” given its treatment in Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 45–7. 19. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? xxv–xxvi. 20. Ibid., xxv. 21. Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 216. For a Latourian inspired attempt to

192

Julian Yates

“sensitize” human subjects in precisely this mode, see Emilee Hache, Bruno Latour, Patrick Camiller, “Morality or Moralism? An Exercise in Sensitization,” Common Knowledge 16, no. 2 (2010): 311–30. 22. This point is made eloquently by Erica Fudge when she replays Stephen Greenblatt’s famously stated desire to “speak with the dead” as a question of the animal remains on which human history fi nds itself inscribed, see Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 1–2. 23. On sizing, see the pioneering work of Joshua A. Calhoun, “Legible Ecologies: Animals, Vegetables, and Reading Matter in Renaissance England” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2011). 24. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 84. 25. Ibid., 87. 26. See especially Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); the essays and lectures gathered together as Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); The Beast and the Sovereign vol. I (cited previously) and vol. II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 27. Recall that the effects of linearized writing derive from the subordination of “pluri- dimensional” to the “successivity” of the line, Derrida, Of Grammatology, 85–6. 28. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 15. 29. Latour, “A Well-Articulated Primatology,” 381. 30. Susan McHugh, Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 2. 31. The best account of this range of discourses remains Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 32. The term “profit” reads here as the technical humanist term for translating the Latin “utilitas” into early modern English. Perhaps the most formative use of the term for writers at the end of the sixteenth century is in Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1974). Throughout this text, Ascham uses the word “profit” to refer to a very broad range of uses that may be derived from natural and conceptual resources. 33. Leonard Mascall, The First Booke of Cattell (1591), O1v. 34. Edward Topsell, The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes (London, 1607), 2v and 626–7. 35. Thomas Fella, Commonplace Book, Folger Shakespeare library, MS V. a. 311, 51r–52v.

Oves et Singulatim

193

36. Ibid. 37. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 125–31. 38. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 169. On infinite, non-teleological subordination, see also, 176–8 39. Ibid., 128. 40. Quoted in Louis A. Montrose “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” English Literary History 50, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 439–42. 41. On the permutations and celebratory connotations of Psalm 23 see Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 181–90. Hatton’s letter is quoted in Agnes Strickland, The Lives of the Queens of England (London: George Bell and Sons, 1892), 321–2. See also, Religion, Politics, and Society in SixteenthCentury England, ed. Ian W. Archer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 42. The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed., Edward Surtz, S.J. and J. H. Hexter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), vol. 4, 1. All subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. On the Ciceronian and Platonic scripts to Utopia, see Quentin Skinner, “Thomas More’s Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility,” in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), II, 213–44. 43. Joan Thirsk, Tudor Enclosures (London: The Historical Association, Pamphlet No. 41, 1959). 44. A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (attrib. to Sir Thomas Smith), ed. Mary Dewer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969) 45. For an account of the wool trade in the period see Peter J. Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Macmillan & CO. LTD, 1962). For Topsell’s replaying of Hythlodaeus’s lines, see Topsell, The Historie of FourFooted Beastes, 626. 46. M. W. Beresford, “The Poll Tax and Census of Sheep, 1549,” in M. W. Beresford, Time and Place: Collected Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1984), 137. 47. Ibid., 137–8. 48. “Causes of Dearth,” in State Papers, Domestic, Edward VI, v, no. 20. Quoted in Beresford, “The Poll Tax,” 141. 49. Beresford, “The Poll Tax,” 145. 50. Ibid., 155. 51. Ibid., 144. 52. For similar proverbial statements see “The Decay of Tudor England only by the Great Multitude of Sheep” cited in  R.  H. Tawney and Eileen

194

Julian Yates

Power, Tudor Economic Documents (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1953) 3, 52. On Kett’s rebellion, see, Alexander Nevil, Norfolkes Furies; Or A View of Ket’s Campe (London, 1615) a translation of De Furoribus Norfolciensium Ketto Duce (1575), D3r 53. Ibid., K3r 54. On this distinction see Brian Vickers, “Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance: the ambivalence of otium (Part I),” Renaissance Studies 4, no. 1 (March 1990): 5–6. See also Part II in Renaissance Studies 4, no. 2 ( June 1990): 107–54. 55. In a letter to Ulrich von Hutten in 1519, Erasmus writes, “More had written the second part [of Utopia] because he was at leisure [per otium],” in Antwerp, “and the fi rst part he afterwards dashed off as opportunity offered [ex tempore per occasionem].” See, Opus Epostolarum Des Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–58), 2, 339. Quoted in The Complete Works of Thomas More, xv. 56. Vinciane Despret, “Sheep Do Have Opinions” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed., Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). 360. See also, Vinciane Despret, Quand Le Loup Habitera Avec L’Agneau (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2002), 137–8, 164–5, and 202–5. For Haraway’s commentary on Despret and Rowell, see When Species Meet, 33–5.

se v e n

Wooden Actors on the English Renaissance Stage Vin Nardizzi

In response to a theater history that downplayed structural affi liations between Renaissance humanism and sixteenth-century English drama, Kent Cartwright contends that the drama is a “remarkably apt and stimulating vehicle for humanist explorations of the problems of knowledge and human experience,” which include a “human ‘essence’ . . . that is inchoate, corruptible or improvable, requiring a kind of performance to be fully realized.” According to Cartwright, drama is particularly well suited to probing such problems precisely because its medium is the actor, whose “physicality in the theatre comes to reveal drama’s capacity for a mysterious doubleness.”1 Ascribed to the dramatist John Webster and published in 1615, the sketch of “An excellent Actor” affords a dif ferent view on the affiliation between Renaissance humanism and English drama. This short character study offers itself as an insider’s glimpse of how this kind of actor literally hooks an audience. By means of “a full and significant action of body” such an actor “charmes our attention.” “[S]it in a full Theater,” Webster elaborates, as if 195

196

Vin Nardizzi

asking us to close our eyes so that we can picture mentally the description that follows,2 “and you will thinke you see so many lines drawne from the circumference of so many eares, whiles the Actor is the Center.”3 As Heinrich F. Plett has observed, Webster’s depiction of theatrical geometry explicitly draws inspiration from the tradition of Renaissance emblem literature. His “allusion,” as Plett demonstrates,4 is to Hercules Gallicus, who appears in emblem books and in Latin and vernacular humanist writings after the printing of Lucian’s Heracles in fifteenth-century Italy (see Figure 7-1).5 “[D]raw[ing] to him” auditors, as he does in George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, by a “long chayne tyed by one end at his tong, by the other end at the peoples eares” and thus “by force of his perswasions,”6 Hercules Gallicus proves in Renaissance humanist contexts a “version of the orator-civilizer who leads people out of savagery.”7 Thomas Wilson’s gloss on this figure in The Arte of Rhetorique is standard fare: “his witte was so greate, his tongue so eloquent, and his experience soch, that no one man was able to withstande his reason, but euery one was rather driuen to do that whiche he woulde, and to will that which he did: agreyng to his aduise bothe in word & worke, in all that euer they were able.”8 What is most remarkable about Webster’s borrowing is that he casts the “French Hercules” whose “language” is “[a]s conquering as his club”9 in the role of an excellent English actor, not an ancient orator or a modern poet. In Webster’s character study, then, this emblem of “super-rhetoric”10 proves “an enchantment that is both spectacular and speculative, a combination of passionate attention and moral/intellectual understanding.”11 Whereas Cartwright comprehends drama as a humanist vehicle for probing the unstable nature of the “human” subject, Webster celebrates the excellent actor as the center point in an “affective technology”— the theater—that makes humans out of audience members.12 As a witness for this character type, Webster is, of course, biased. He is so much so that, in his view, the “excellent Actor” betters the orator: The actor makes “[w]hatsoeuer is commendable in the graue Orator” “most exquisitly perfect in him.” Webster’s view is also polemical. He crafted his description in response to “the imitating Characterist,” perhaps the Lincoln’s Inn law student John Cocke,13 who “was extreame idle in calling them [actors] Rogues” (n.p.). Webster’s riposte to this standard antitheatrical accusation relies on (and exceeds) a humanist precedent in order to detail the positive transformative effect that an actor can have on the audience:

Figure 7-1. From Les Emblemes de M. Andre Alciat (Lyon, 1548). (Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

198

Vin Nardizzi

Whereas Hercules Gallicus civilized listeners through the force of his eloquence and persuasions, the “action” of Webster’s actor “fortifies morall precepts with example” (n.p.), delighting and instructing audiences with representations of right living. In making this claim, Webster’s character sketch encapsulates the lengthier argument for the ethical utility of theater that his fellow playwright Thomas Heywood advanced in 1612 in An Apology for Actors. There, Heywood extols the “wise men of Greece” who “could by their industry, finde out no neerer or directer course to plant humanity and manners in the hearts of the multitude then to instruct them by moralized mysteries.” In consequence, the Greeks “excelled in ciuility and gouernement, insomuch that from them all the neighbour Nations drew their patternes of Humanity, as well in the establishing of their lawes, as the reformation of their manners.”14 Closer to home, Heywood heaps comparable praise upon the “liuely and well spirited action” performed in “our domesticke hystories.” Such performances, he contends, “hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.” “What coward,” he proceeds to ask rhetorically, “to see his contryman valiant would not bee ashamed of his owne cowardise?” (B4r). By these lights, “excellent” actors exercise through their “liuely and well spirited action” the “power” to cultivate (“plant”) and to create (“fashion”) in audience members a range of “manners” and virtues (from civic-mindedness to civility to valor) that fall under the general banner of “Humanity.” What an astoundingly lofty-minded and demanding task theater prac titioners, from Heywood and Webster to the actors they knew and wrote for, set for themselves in staging a play. What unruly beasts—so many “Beares,” as Samuel Purchas refers to them, led forward “by the ringed Snowts”15— audience members must have been when not subjected to the strong yoke of the Herculean player’s eloquent action inside the charmed circle of theater (see Figure 7-2). But even a pro-theater advocate like Heywood recognizes that theater’s success in its humanist task is contingent. It is so precisely because that success hinges on an uncertain variable—the actor in performance. In An Apology for Actors, during a moment that likely inspires Webster’s elevation of acting over classical oratory, Heywood offers snapshots of actors who fail to produce scripted affect in audience members. An actor could disturb the scene if he should “vse any impudent or forced motion in any part of the

Figure 7-2. From Achillis Bocchii Bonon, Symbolicarvm qvaestionvm de vniverso genere qvas serio lvdebat libri qvinqve . . . (Bononiae, 1574). (Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

200

Vin Nardizzi

body, [either] rough, or other violent gesture” or, “on the contrary,” if he should “stand” onstage “like a stiffe starcht man” (C4r). All such actors fail to employ their bodies as “rhetorical instrument[s]”16: For Heywood, they lack “a comely and elegant gesture, a gratious and a bewitching kinde of action, a naturall and a familiar motion of the head, the hand, the body, and a moderate and fit countenance sutable to all the rest” (C4r). But only one kind of bad actor unexpectedly suffers a total breakdown in eloquence and motion.17 This actor’s body appears, in Heywood’s account, as if it were a fabric treated with starch, which is a grain-based paste applied to clothing in order to stiffen it into the desired shape.18 As a result, he likely only breathes heavily (or barely),19 failing to communicate anything meaningful about his character or the scripted action through the medium of his body.20 As P. A. Skantze observes, the “language for failure” in theater frequently “suggests the stilling of motion— a ‘dud,’ gone ‘flat,’ a ‘flop,’ ”21 and to this litany of ways for naming theatrical failure we should add Heywood’s botanicized stiff. In this chapter, I term him the wooden actor. If we were to sketch a character study of the wooden actor, then we would do well to begin by noting that he falls far short of the excellent actor’s charming qualities and that there may be several and simultaneous reasons why he lacks them. He may be a “Neophyte-Player” for whom, as a character in Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels says, it is “vsuall to be daunted at the fi rst presence, or enter-view.” When so flustered, according to this play featuring the flop of a courtly status seeker, both the “young Grammattical Courtier” and his kin—the novice actor— suffer a “discountenance” that “dis-gallant[s]” them.22 The wooden actor could also come into focus as the “unperfect actor” of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 23 who “is put besides his part” because of “fear,” or stage fright;23 as a result, he “forget[s] to say” his lines (ll. 1–2, 5).24 Or he may be an actor thrown off script by an “audience [that] hiss[es]” at him, an “offence” that crosses Love’s Labour’s Lost’s Mote’s mind as he prepares to “present Hercules in minority” in that play’s pageant of the Nine Worthies (5.1.112–13, 115, 117). The presence of this kind of actor does not transform an audience in the positive ways that Heywood describes. Instead, the wooden actor all but transforms the theatrical circle into a snake pit, where audience members beset him in the guise of so many Miltonic serpents who emit “the sound / Of public scorn.”25

Wooden Actors

201

As these brief notices suggest, the wooden actor leaves scant tracks in the theatrical archive. We have evidence of excellent Renaissance actors, including Shakespeare,26 and even of those players who were prone to ham it up, but to my knowledge no theatergoer gushed about how woodenly an actor had performed over the course of a stage career. In order to bring this figure out of the shadows of the theatrical archive, I explore in the next section the nearly specialized vocabulary for describing styles of acting in Renaissance England.27 I do so with two further aims in mind. First, I outline a relation between the body of the “starcht” actor and the theater itself, which the Prologue to Henry V famously dubs “this wooden O” (l. 13). It is as if the botanicized actor becomes absorbed into the fabric of the theatrical structure: Immobilized, inarticulate, and unable to move his body, he appears little distinct from one of the wooden posts that supported the canopy overhanging the stage. With some playfulness, we may say that the wooden actor is post-human. In this moment inside the material theater, we can pursue Cary Wolfe’s posthumanist call “to describe the human and its characteristic modes of communication, interaction, meaning, social significations, and affective investments with greater specificity”28 and we can do so at the moment that these “modes” have failed. Second, I explore a complex meditation on the wooden actor in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, where Cesario, who is really Viola in disguise, fails to kindle Olivia’s love on behalf of Cesario’s master, Orsino. Cesario proves an inept “post,” in its sense as a messenger who acts Orsino’s part, in some measure because, as Olivia’s steward Malvolio reports, Cesario “stand[s]” outside her household’s “door like a sheriff’s post” (1.5.130–1). Cesario’s unyielding posture translates into unsuccessful acting during the audience that Olivia grants him, but, by the close of the scene, Cesario-Viola has improbably ignited Olivia’s desire for “him.” This moment exemplifies a queer and “productive failure,”29 but at the expense of Cesario’s express purpose of playing.

Some Versions of Renaissance Acting; Or, Searching for the Stage’s Wooden Actors By the turn of the seventeenth century, the term “personation” began to circulate in printed discourse to name “an Elizabethan development” in

202

Vin Nardizzi

styles of acting.30 In Heywood’s Apology, it appears in close proximity to his discussion of both the wildly inelegant and the “starcht” actor, for neither one performs “according to the nature of the person personated” (C4r). Webster’s character sketch helps to unpack Heywood’s redundancy, defi ning personation as a kind of perfect and uncanny mimesis: “for what we see him [the actor] personate, we thinke truely done before vs: a man of a deepe thought might apprehend, the Ghosts of our ancient Heroes walk’t againe, and take him [the actor] (at seuerall times) for many of them” (n.p.). As Meredith Anne Skura observes, the “typical praise” in the period “for good acting”— the successful personation of Webster’s excellent actor—is “lively.”31 There also tends to be a link in the theatrical record between such acting and the presumption that it will incite audiences to perform good deeds. Heywood commends English “domesticke hystories” because the “liuely and well spirited action” of “the Personater” encourages audience members to strive to be more valiant subjects (B4r). A story about Hercules watching a play that Heywood relates in an earlier part of the Apology employs these exact phrasings to describe theatrical success: “there was in his nonage presented vnto him [Hercules] by this Tutor in the fashion of a History, acted by the choyse of the nobility of Greece, the worthy and memorable acts of his father Iupiter. Which being personated with liuely and well-spirited action, wrought such impression in his noble thoughts, that in meere emulation of his fathers valor . . . he perform’d his twelue labours” (B3r). Since an enchanting tongue proves as formidable as the club in accounts of Hercules Gallicus (although he still retains this weapon in these stories), this story of a young Hercules at theater perhaps serves, in a recursive way, as a source for his potent eloquence. At least one of the great English Renaissance actors was remembered for such liveliness: Richard Burbage, the star of Shakespeare’s acting troupe who died in 1619. In a eulogy to this actor’s talents, we learn that Burbage played a “part,” perhaps Hamlet, “soe livly, that Spectators, and the rest / of his sad Crew, whilst he but seem’d to bleed, / amazed, [they] thought even that hee dyed in deed.” In another posthumous account of Burbage’s acting, an admirer recalls the actor’s turn as the tragic figure Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy: I have seen [him] paint grief In such a lively colour, that for false

Wooden Actors

203

And acted passion he has drawne true teares From the spectators. Ladies in the boxes Kept time with sighs, and teares to his sad accents As had he truely been the man he seem’d.32

The pairing of the actor’s liveliness with the passionate response that his personation generates in onlookers also crops up in the plays themselves. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which was composed some twenty-five years before Burbage’s death, Sebastian, who is really Julia in disguise, tells a fabricated story about a female role that “he” performed in a “pageant[] of delight” (4.4.151): For I did play a lamentable part. Madam, ’twas Ariadne, passioning For Theseus’ perjury and unjust fl ight; Which I so lively acted with my tears That my poor mistress, movèd therewithal, Wept bitterly . . . (4.4.158–63)

A lively performance, such as Burbage’s, thus seems to stick fast in the onlooker’s memory, and, in Julia’s case, one can prove the stuff of a persuasive screen narrative. Such per for mances also, as the preceding sampling suggests, mark a change in the terms used to articulate the theatergoer’s affective response to an actor’s compelling per for mance. Whereas the excellent actor figured as Hercules Gallicus subdues the ears of audience members, these lively actors, both real and fictional, charm spectators’ eyes into sobbing. It is worth remarking on the switch in sensory emphasis because, in Renaissance natural-historical contexts, weeping is identified as the sine qua non of human beings. In Pliny the Elder’s Historie of the World, which Philemon Holland translated in 1601, we learn that “man alone, poore wretch” arrives “all naked upon the bare earth, even on his birth-day, to cry and wraule presently from the very first houre that he is borne into this world.”33 Although nakedness is man’s primary condition,34 crying is his prime (“very first”) action. Indeed, man’s signature feature is weeping: In Holland’s Pliny, “in such sort, as among so many living creatures, there is none subiect to shed teares and weepe like him [man].”35 By such natural-historical logic, whose influence cannot be overestimated for humanist writers of the period, the examples of

204

Vin Nardizzi

spectators weeping at the sight of a lively actor personating death (in Hamlet) and grief for a loved one’s loss (in The Spanish Tragedy) or for a lover (in The Two Gentlemen of Verona) show spectators feeling their own enlivened humanity as its sign streams down their faces. But not all actors on the English Renaissance stage were so adept at their craft. According to George Chapman’s Widow’s Tears, one label for such a performer is the “overdoing actor.” This actor’s surplus of bodily movement and excess of noise strains dramatic representation: Such “gross[]” affectation is “so far forced from the life, that it bewrays itself to be altogether artificial.”36 We have already observed Heywood “aduise” the actor to refrain from “vs[ing] any impudent or forced motion in any part of the body, no rough, or other violent gesture”; we can note here that Heywood goes on to associate such inelegance with “ouer-acting trickes, and toyling too much in the anticke habit of humors.” As a result of such “ouer-acting trickes,” according to Heywood, “men of the ripest desert, greatest opinions, and best reputations, may breake into the most violent absurdities” (C4r). An old-hat at performing the “anticke habit” himself, Hamlet likewise employs that telltale prefi x of bad acting—“over”— several times in his well-known directions to the Players. “I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant” (3.2.11–12), he pronounces, and “o’erdoing” here seems to be glossed by the faults in acting Hamlet has just enumerated: He “mouth[s]” the “speech” as if he were “the town-crier” (3.2.1–3); he “saw[s] the air too much with [his] hand, thus” (3.2.4); and, in “tear[ing] a passion to tatters, to very rags,” he “split[s] the ears of the groundlings” (3.2.8–9).37 As if his counsel were falling on deaf ears, Hamlet then offers the professionals this “special observance: that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’t were the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone” will “make the unskillful laugh” (3.2.17–23). It is tempting to think that Shakespeare draws some inspiration from the bad actor’s handbook when, in Measure for Measure, he conjures onstage Mistress Overdone, a bawd whose refusal to heed the “[d]ouble and treble admonition” of Vienna’s moral policing “would make mercy swear and play the tyrant” (3.1.423–4). Might not that improbable scenario—“mercy”

Wooden Actors

205

in the role of “tyrant”—“o’erstep . . . the modesty of nature” as much as the over-doing actor whom Hamlet holds up for ridicule? In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses, who speaks as if his words were “music, wit, and oracle” (1.3.73), relates an account of offstage over-acting—a “ridiculous and awkward action”—that wildly contravenes all of Hamlet’s principles of style (1.3.149). He alleges that, in Achilles’s “tent” (1.3.145), Patroclus “acts” the “greatness” of Agamemnon with “[s]uch to-be-pitied and o’erwrested seeming” and “speaks” such “fusty [bombastic] stuff” “like a chime a-mending, with terms unsquared / Which from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropped / Would seem hyperboles” (1.3.157–61). Accompanying this distortive “ ‘imitation’ ” (1.3.150) is the ear-splitting noise that Patroclus supposedly “puts on” with his feet: “And like a strutting player, whose conceit / Lies in his hamstring,” he “doth think it rich / To hear the wooden dialogue and sound / ’Twixt his stretched footing and the scaffoldage” (1.3.152–6). (For this sequence not to embarrass the actor playing Ulysses by reducing him to a version of the “strutting player” he imagines offstage, this actor must be “versatile” enough to pull off the intertheatrical critique.)38 In response to Patroclus’s show, Achilles proves, in Ulysses’s report, an “unskillful” (Hamlet’s word) audience member: “From his deep chest [he] laughs out a loud applause, / Cries ‘Excellent!’ ” (1.3.163–4). Achilles will later misuse this term for describing the expert actor—“ ‘Excellent!’ ” (1.3.169)— when Patroclus takes on the role of Nestor. For his part, Nestor responds to Ulysses’s report as if he were an antitheatricalist, ascribing to these (unreliably?) narrated performances the cause of so much poor behav ior among other Greeks who could not have possibly witnessed them: “in the imitation of these twain / Who, as Ulysses says, opinion crowns / With an imperial voice, many are infect” (1.3.185–7). Nestor makes a series of accusations against “self-willed” Ajax, who “keeps his tent like him [Achilles], / Makes factious feasts, rails on our state of war / Bold as an oracle, and sets Thersistes” to “match us in comparisons with dirt, / To weaken and discredit our exposure” (1.3.188, 190–2, 194–5). Ulysses’s rehearsal of these private performances thus affords Nestor a model for comprehending a wider social malady infecting the Greeks: Ajax plays a version of Achilles to Thersistes’s Patroclus. At the center of this social ill, as Nestor tendentiously diagnoses it, are the over-acting player and his unsophisticated audience.

206

Vin Nardizzi

We would do well to think of liveliness and over-doing as two points on a continuum of theatrical style, keeping in mind that there are gradations between them and that neither quality fully nor consistently captures the skill of an actor on the English Renaissance stage. For actors, some scenes and some days in theater are just better than others. The “Neophyte-Player,” for instance, perhaps improved with mentorship, practice, and patience— or took up a new profession. Even so, Jonson’s depiction of this novice actor, “daunted at the first presence,” suggests that the over-doing actor has a counterpart on the other side of liveliness: The actor who, however fleetingly and for whatever reason, is “wooden,” in its sense as insufficiently dynamic. This actor is Heywood’s “stiffe starcht man,” a botanicized figure who may be the close kin of the actor Heywood describes as “stand[ing] in his place like a liuelesse Image, demurely plodding, & without any smooth & formal motio[n]” (C4r). Likening the un-lively actor to a Catholic idol, Heywood exploits Reformation discourses about unorthodox worship to intimate the effects of theater’s failure. The actor is a stone statue or a wooden stock, perhaps now petrified, and, because an actor’s onstage presence should condition an audience’s response in a humanist model of theater, we can infer that the audience, in turn, proves blockish, dull, and unmannerly. It would take a miracle—or, at least, a quick change in scene that removes this “plodding” actor from the stage—to re-enliven the theatrical occasion and re-set the dramatic settings. The “wooden actor,” which is my locution for the actor stuck in the center of such a theatrical fiasco, riffs on Heywood’s imagery. I have found no evidence (yet) of this exact phrase in the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury archives, but there is certainly a tendency in the period to imagine as wooden the attributes directly opposing over-doing and those that do not measure up to liveliness— that is, blockishness, senselessness, and torpidity. The speaker of the Seventh Song of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, for instance, derides as “wooden wits” those dim men who “see sweet beauty’s show” but “not that worth to know.”39 In “Of Boldness,” an essay that Francis Bacon frames with a discussion of oratorical “action”—“the virtue of a player”—we learn that “[e]specially it is a sport to see, when a bold fellow is out of countenance; for that puts his face into a most shrunken and wooden posture; as needs it must; for in bashfulness the spirits do a little go and come; but with bold men, upon like occasion, they stand at a stay; like

Wooden Actors

207

a stale at chess, where it is no mate, but yet the game cannot stir.” This “wooden” figure, stock-still as an impasse in a game of chess, is the proper subject of “satire,” not “serious observation,” Bacon further observes, because “great boldness is seldom without some absurdity” and “absurdity [is] the subject of laughter.”40 One bold character who is so dispirited is Shakespeare’s Orlando, who, after challenging and then defeating the wrestler Charles in As You Like It, cannot muster the words to accept Rosalind’s congratulations. He says to himself: “Can I not say ‘I thank you’? My better parts / Are all thrown down, and that which here stands up / Is but a quintain, a mere lifeless block” (1.2.215–17). By “better parts,” Orlando means his reason and capacity for speech, both affected perhaps by the grueling physical exercise in which he has just participated, and a “quintain”—his body—is a wooden object that was traditionally used in jousts and other military exercises and that required dexterity on the part of the human combatant, since failing to hit with a lance the target that extended from the post could result in the social embarrassment of a pratfall, if not more serious physical harm (see Figure 7-3).41 Not yet Orlando’s sparring partner, Rosalind exits because she cannot converse with “a mere lifeless block.” But she will subject to ridicule and laughter the bad poems that Orlando affi xes to other posts— the trees of Arden—later in the play. They are easy targets for her wit. By figuring “woodenness” as a concept, if not an exact term, in a theatrical vocabulary that describes an actor’s skill in personation, we illuminate a form of acting that, in terms of the success of mimesis, is ruinous. Although there is no record of how individual members of Shakespeare’s audience would have responded to the ineloquence of a flopped Hercules Gallicus, I suspect that many playgoers, whose reputation for rowdiness inside the theater is legendary, might well have followed Bacon’s sporting lead and taken a verbal (or heckling) run at the onstage quintain instead of modeling their behav ior on Rosalind’s more decorous example after the wrestling match.

Knock Wood: The Stage Post and the Actor’s Body Like so many Shakespearean plays, As You Like It encodes a complex reliance on the woodenness of the theatrical superstructure in which it was

208

Vin Nardizzi

Figure 7-3. From Joseph Strutt, Glig-gamena angel-deod, Or, The sports and pastimes of the people of England (London, 1810). (Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

staged. The woodenness of per for mance venues, such as the Globe playhouse, was potentially useful in some form to players and dramatists alike. Indeed, as Bruce R. Smith has shown, in acoustic terms, this woodenness was a necessary component of theatrical success: In his account, the Globe is a wooden “sound-making device” upon which actors played.42 Late in As You Like It, Orlando calls attention to the shape of this instrument and to

Wooden Actors

209

the kind of raw material out of which it was fashioned when he refers to Arden as “the circle of this forest” (5.4.34). In this deictic gesture, Orlando conscripts the full theatrical venue into the role of “this forest,” making the theater perform double duty: It transmits his words and ecomimetically generates a forest setting.43 In a range of Shakespeare plays that were staged across London, such gestures can also direct attention to one of the wooden stage posts holding up the stage canopy and, in so doing, call upon that post to take on the part of “tree.” Possible examples of post(s)-performing-tree(s) in this manner occur in As You Like It (2.5.26; 3.3.52), the Folio King Lear (5.2.1), Richard II (2.3.53; 3.4.26), Romeo and Juliet (2.1.30), Timon of Athens (4.3.223), and Titus Andronicus (2.3.277). On certain occasions, these posts might also perform the function of other wooden objects, from a makeshift gallows (“this tree”) in Titus Andronicus (5.1.47) to the wooden furniture of the storm-tossed ship at the start of The Tempest. My proposition is that we can comprehend more fully Orlando’s self-designation as a “lifeless” quintain in As You Like It if the actor playing him thumps one of the wooden stage posts while speaking these lines about his inarticulateness: Doing so would reinforce the link between Orlando’s blockishness and his body’s status as a wooden object. Similar stage business perhaps accompanies an exchange in The Comedy of Errors in which Dromio of Ephesus, who is referred to as a “senseless villain” (4.4.22), worries that his master will beat him as if he were a “post indeed” (1.2.64). Just lines later, his master does. The punch line that such visual punning, especially in As You Like It, prompts audiences to imagine is the potential indistinction between the wooden post’s senselessness and the character’s unmoving body.44 The cleverness of these puns affords us clues about those unscripted and unfortunate occasions when a wooden actor emerged onstage; in the case of The Comedy of Errors, the punning may suggest how audience members might like to have responded to the wooden actor. (On the other side of the acting spectrum, Hamlet would have the “fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant.”) However brief, such visual and verbal jokes at a character’s expense are oblique comments on the wooden actor, who is, we can infer, no more sensible than a stage post and who is incapable of playing properly upon the wooden instrument of theater. But these jokes are also part of the fabric of the drama, and they are part of a more seasoned actor’s script. In

210

Vin Nardizzi

these moments, then, we see an intertheatrical reprisal of the lifeless actor’s stiffening woodification. Out of theatrical failure, the drama produces comic success. Shakespeare’s richest scripting of rhetorical and theatrical failure occurs in an early scene of Twelfth Night,45 which depicts the hard fate of the wooden actor and wittily complicates his predicament first by enlivening him through verbal dexterity and then by making him sound appealing to his audience. In this scene, a “post” stands improbably at the center of an erotic “enchantment” (3.1.104).

The Erotic Post in Twelfth Night The opening scenes of Twelfth Night mobilize a discourse of theatrical production to articulate the business of love in Illyria. Having disguised herself as Cesario after the shipwreck and having garnered Orsino’s “favours” as a servant in “but three days” (1.4.1, 3),46 Viola-as- Cesario is preferred to the post of “Orsino’s embassy” (1.5.148). He will deliver as if he were Orsino a message to Orsino’s unrequited love, Olivia: “unfold the passion of my love,” Orsino directs his emissary, “Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith. / It shall become thee well to act my woes” (1.4.23– 5; emphasis added). The servant’s age makes him especially fit for this role because, as Orsino tells Cesario, Olivia “will attend it [the acting, the embassy] better in thy youth / Than in a nuncio’s of more grave aspect” (1.4.26–7). Perhaps in light of past failures to attract Olivia’s attention (1.1.23–31), Orsino instructs the actor impersonating him to be “clamorous” and uncivil, indeed undiplomatic, when he reaches Olivia’s household (1.4.20): Therefore, good youth, address thy gait unto her, Be not denied access, stand at her doors, And tell them there thy fi xèd foot shall grow Till thou have audience. (1.4.14–17)

In order to gain “access” to this prized “audience,” Cesario must prove physically intractable; he is the unexpected guest who pays no heed to codes of decorum. He must hold his posture “at her doors” as if he were a tree whose “fi xèd foot” enroots itself, metamorphically, into the ground. By such logic,

Wooden Actors

211

the key to being granted admittance, to personating Orsino, is unmitigated stubbornness. When Cesario arrives to Olivia’s, we learn that, despite Viola’s misgivings about delivering to another woman a message from the man (Orsino) whom she loves (1.4.40–1), Cesario initially excels at acting the obdurate role Orsino has described.47 Olivia orders her steward Malvolio to “dismiss” Orsino’s “suit” (1.5.93–4), but Cesario outwits Malvolio and proves “fortified against any denial” that Malvolio offers him (1.5.128). If Malvolio is to be believed in his relation of this offstage encounter with Cesario, the actor, clothed in Orsino’s “suit” or livery, has taken seriously the spirit of the charge to be unyielding. But Cesario also seems to have extended Orsino’s metaphor of enrooting himself as a tree: According to Malvolio, “yon young fellow” “says he’ll stand at your door like a sheriff’s post, and be the supporter to a bench, but he’ll speak with you” (1.5.123, 130–2). Later in the scene, Olivia will treat Cesario, in Cesario’s words, as a “feed post” or messenger when she offers him money at his departure (1.5.254). But in this earlier moment the un-feed messenger dares to comport himself as a post of a dif ferent sort: associated with the offices of the sheriff, this is a post— and then a bench’s “leg”—made out of wood. (Depending on the fittings of the theatrical space where the play is mounted, Malvolio could reinforce the puns about Cesario’s immobility at Olivia’s gates if the actor playing him gestures toward, or touches, a wooden post.) When Cesario fi nally gains Olivia’s audience and her lady’s maid Maria asks him to leave (“Will you hoist sail, sir?” [1.5.178]), he proves himself a wit with wood: “No, good swabber, I am to hull here a little longer” (1.5.179). In acting Orsino’s part, then, Cesario consistently imagines his body as anchored wood. Cesario’s insistence on the woodenness of his posture—post, bench, and ship’s hull— does not bode well for his mission. When he enters the interior of Olivia’s estate, he comes across as Jonson’s “Neophyte-Player.” Indeed, he does not even know which veiled woman, Maria or Olivia, is “the lady of the house” (1.5.160).48 In attempting to ascertain his intended audience and “not cast away [his] speech” (1.5.153), Cesario responds to questions (“Whence came you, sir?” and “Are you a comedian?” [1.5.157, 162]) that discompose him further: They put him “out of [his] part” (1.5.159)— the “poetical” “speech” of Petrarchism that he deems “excellently well penned” and that he has “taken great pains to con” and “study” (1.5.153–5, 172). Olivia has no

212

Vin Nardizzi

time for the speech’s obligatory “praise,” which includes unimaginative apostrophes such as “Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty,” and instead demands to know “what is important in’t” (1.5.151, 171). Cesario lacks the skill to skip ahead in his lines in order to get to the “heart of [the] message” (1.5.170) which, it turns out, resides in as inauspicious a place as “Orsino’s bosom” (1.5.198). Shortly after Olivia advises Cesario to pass over the unnecessary compliments, she admits that, although Cesario was “saucy at [her] gates,” she nonetheless “allowed [his] approach rather to wonder at [him] than to hear” him (1.5.174–5). But wooden actors do not invite audience members to wonder at them; rather, as Olivia initially does, they are likely to probe and mock the actor’s failure. And yet, when Cesario momentarily and then fully ceases trying to personate the precise part that Orsino has composed for this wooing scene, Olivia will begin to “hear” and be moved by Cesario in a new way. Olivia offers a clue to this shift in the term that she employs—“comedian”—to apprehend what Cesario is. The Norton Shakespeare glosses “comedian” as “actor,” but, as Mary Jo Kietzman has observed, it could also more broadly mean a comic actor who “subsume[s] aspects of the clown’s role.”49 Although Cesario declines the ascription (“No, my profound heart” [1.5.163]), he speaks in the next breath the first of many improvised riddles and equivocations (“and yet—by the very fangs of malice I swear—I am not that I play” [1.5.163–4]) that signal Viola-as-Cesario’s verbal kinship with Twelfth Night’s “allowed fool” (1.5.80), Feste.50 Tellingly, the scene in which Cesario fails at personating Orsino follows directly on the heels of an encounter between Olivia and Feste in which the fool wiggles out of being punished for his “absence” from the household (1.5.3). Olivia would have him forcibly “take[n] away” (1.5.33, 47), but Feste manages to forestall this punishment by means of undeterred verbal dexterity (1.5.50–64). Olivia succumbs in this exchange to Feste’s wit, not only confirming his position in her household, but also tasking him to “look after” her drunken kinsman Sir Toby (1.5.120). Shortly after Feste exits to attend to this duty, Cesario arrives to Olivia’s household without any intention of occupying the part that the fool has just vacated, but nonetheless finding himself in it when his scripted turn as Orsino flops.51 But whereas Feste aimed to soften Olivia’s reaction to his nonattendance, Viola-as-Cesario little knows what persuasions Feste has just accomplished and cannot predict the erotic response that her-his own improvisations—

Wooden Actors

213

52

the reverse of rote protestations of love—will generate. Only after Cesario departs and then, in a later act, receives from Malvolio the ring that Olivia alleges Cesario gave to her does Viola-as-Cesario realize that Olivia has indeed wondered at him and been “charmed” (2.2.16).53 In stepping outside his prescribed role, Cesario thus introduces an element of genuine surprise into the wooing scene. Although Orsino had imagined that unexpectedness would be part of Cesario’s script (“Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith”), Orsino thinks wrongly that a series of memorized lines will suffice to scale and capture the fortress of Olivia’s hard heart. Olivia proves this point when, in response to her query “How does he love me?” (1.5.223), Cesario supplies an inventory of staples from the love lyric—“With adorations, fertile tears, / With groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire” (1.5.224–5)—that she flat out rejects as unmoving rhetoric (“I cannot love him” [1.5.226, 231]). But Cesario, now accustomed to go off script, saves this exchange by feeding his own data into Orsino’s “discourse”: “If I did love you in my master’s flame,” he says, “With such a suff’ring, such a deadly life, / In your denial I would fi nd no sense, / I would not understand it” (1.5.233–6). Her interest piqued, Olivia asks, “Why, what would you do?” (1.5.236). Taking center stage,54 Cesario, in Lorna Hutson’s formulation, “improvise[s] a first-person fiction of abandonment in love [that] represents an ability to extemporize, to seize ‘the gifts of the moment’ and so illustrate the crowning glory of classical rhetorical education.”55 In responding to Olivia, Cesario also returns us to—and revises—the image of the “fixèd” tree that Orsino had directed Cesario to be. Make me a willow cabin at your gate And call upon my soul within the house, Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love, And sing them loud even in the dead of night; Halloo your name to the reverberate hills, And make the babbling gossip of the air Cry out “Olivia!” O, you should not rest Between the elements of air and earth But you should pity me. (1.5.237–45)

Steeped as this passage is in Ovid’s tale of Echo,56 it is difficult to tell if Cesario would build outside Olivia’s household a cabin of willow wood from

214

Vin Nardizzi

which perch he would sing or if, more provocatively, he would transform himself (“Make me”) into a singing willow cabin. Either way, in Cesario’s improvised rewriting of Orsino’s script, he would not simply “stand at her doors” like a tree (1.4.15) or “like a sheriff’s post” (1.5.131) until access to Olivia is granted. Instead, he would “make[] a lasting impression”57 by ceaselessly wooing Olivia from that spot, in the process conscripting “hills” and “air” to produce the sound of the name “Olivia!” as if it were on loop inside an echo chamber or theater. From (or as) the willow cabin, Cesario would move the natural world so that it too could help him move Olivia’s emotions. As Olivia says of this scenario, in understated wonder, “You might do much” (1.5.246). Cesario would do much precisely because he proves “the medium of elocutio”58: “Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit / Do give thee five-fold blazon” (1.5.262–3), Olivia remarks in excitement after Twelfth Night’s (surprisingly) excellent actor has exited the scene.

Post It In Ellen MacKay’s formulation, anecdotes about catastrophic errors and fatal mistakes—the story of an onstage gun accidentally killing audience members during a per for mance, for instance—“suppl[y] intriguing testimony of how the theater was thought to happen in early modern England: by careening off the course of its expected event and headlong into disaster.”59 The wooden actor’s failure, which wrenches the play’s script off its course, casts him as unmoving as a stage post, and presumably scrambles the affective expectations of that particular theatrical moment, could be the stuff of just such an anecdote. He is the Hercules Gallicus who cannot manage to keep his auditors’ ears chained and so, in loosening them, potentially generates havoc inside the theater. But to my knowledge, we have no full record of such theatrical disaster. Instead, we have the residue of the wooden actor’s onstage presence in scripted jokes about senseless and inarticulate characters (As You Like It’s Orlando and the momentarily thrown Cesario in Twelfth Night) and, implicitly, in Heywood’s pro-theater definition of what lively and overdoing acting styles are not. There is, then, no full acknowledgement of the wooden actor in the theatrical archive, but there is also a failure to forget or to wish him away entirely. With a wooden actor at the

Wooden Actors

215

center of the wooden O, theater inadvertently discloses the radical contingency of its success and, in so doing, runs the risk of unleashing audience members on the actor. When the theater of Hercules Gallicus failed as a humanist technology (and, of course it must have), it must also have confirmed antitheatrical polemic that, behind the walls of the wooden O, audience members behaved as if they were “brute beastes.” 60

Notes 1. Kent Cartwright, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18, 10. On humanism and its relation to the theater as encyclopedia and material space of performance, see William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 2. On the suppositional grammars of “characteristic writing” like Webster’s, see Aaron Kunin, “Characters Lounge,” Modern Language Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2009): 304. 3. The character of “An excellent Actor,” which is generally ascribed to John Webster, appears in an addition to New and Choice Characters, of Seuerall Authors (London, 1615), n.p. Further references are noted parenthetically. 4. Heinrich  F. Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 448. 5. See Lucian, Heracles, in Lucian Volume 1, ed. Jeffrey Henderson and trans. A. M. Harmon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 61–71. On humanist translations of Lucian, see Erika Rummel, Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 49. For a brief account of Hercules in humanist discourses, see Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 41–3. On Hercules Gallicus in humanist writings and image-making, see Edgar Wind, “ ‘Hercules’ and ‘Orpheus’: Two Mock-Heroic Designs by Dürer,” Journal of the Warburg School 2, no. 3 (1939): 206–18; Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 66–79; and Heinrich F. Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture, 513–16. 6. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 118. 7. Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, 70. 8. Thomas Wilson, “Eloquence firste giuen by God, and after loste by manne, and last repaired by God again,” in The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1560), n.p. The text also names this document “The Preface.”

216

Vin Nardizzi

9. Ben Jonson, Volpone, Or the Fox, 4.4.22–3, in Ben Jonson: Volpone and Other Plays, ed. Michael Jamieson (London: Penguin, 2004), 130. 10. Brian Vickers, “ ‘The Power of Persuasion’: Images of the Orator, Elyot to Shakespeare,” in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James  J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 418. I apply this phrase, which Vickers employs with reference to poetry in the context of Puttenham’s invocation of Hercules Gallicus, directly to the mythological figure. 11. Anthony Dawson, “The distracted globe,” in Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 93. See also William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias, 111–12. 12. Steven Mullaney, “Affective Technologies: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage,” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 71–89. Against an account like Webster’s, Mullaney reminds us that, although “Most Elizabethan authors who wrote about the induction of emotion in an audience have an oratorical, Ciceronian model in mind,” “theater is not oratory, and Elizabethan theater is quite often antiCiceronian in its affective practices” (83). 13. In “A Common Player,” the author deems the actor “a Rogue”; see John Stephens, Satyrical Essayes Characters and Others (London, 1615), 244. On the identification of this sketch’s author as John Cocke, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 82. 14. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), C3r, with a preface by Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland Publishing, 1973). All further references to this text are noted parenthetically and all emphases are in the original. 15. On the analogy between the ears enchanted by Hercules and bears chained by their keeper, see Samuel Purchas, Pvrchas his Pilgrim (London, 1619), 537. 16. Anthony Dawson, “Per for mance and participation,” in Anthony  B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England, 27; emphasis in original. 17. Since his lack of movement is unscripted, this actor’s immobility is distinct from the “scripted stasis” that Paul Menzer defi nes as a “signifying inhibition” of the passions. See Paul Menzer, “The Actor’s Inhibition: Early Modern Acting and the Rhetoric of Restraint,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 106, 104. 18. On the labor-intensive process of making starch and its multiple applications in the period, see Natasha Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 93–143.

Wooden Actors

217

19. On the fiction of absolute silence on the stage, see Heidi Brayman Hackel, “Staging Muteness in Middleton,” in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, ed. Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 342. 20. For a reading that “examine[s] dimensions of rhetoric that worked against th[e] humanist agenda” “for effecting social change” and instead focuses on “characters unable to ‘move’ (in both sense of the word—to move emotionally, and to move themselves forward into imagined plots) because they are stuck in awkward positions of vocal passivity and affective self-reference,” see Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 13. I shift the emphasis from “characters” to actors. 21. P.  A. Skantze, Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth- Century Theatre (London: Routledge, 2003), 16. 22. Ben Jonson, The Fovntaine of Selfe-love. Or Cynthias Revels, 3.1.1, 3–4, ed. W. Bang and L. Krebs (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1908; reprint: Vaduz: Kraus Reprint Ltd., 1963), 39. 23. On stage fright in the context of Elizabethan performance, see Meredith Anne Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 56–7. 24. All parenthetical citations to Shakespeare’s poems and plays are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edition, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2008). 25. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. 10, ll.508–9, in John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 1998), 349. 26. On Henry Chettle’s depiction of Shakespeare’s acting as “excellent,” see Meredith Anne Skura, Shakespeare the Actor, 1. 27. On the “incipient terminology” for describing “per formance” that developed in the period, see Mary Thomas Crane, “What Was Performance?” Criticism 43, no. 2 (2001): 178. 28. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxv; emphasis in original. On posthumanism in medieval and early modern literatures, see Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne, “Before the Trains of Thought Have Been Laid Down So Firmly: The Premodern Post/ Human,” postmedieval, no. 1/2 (2010): 1–9; and Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, ed. Posthumanist Shakespeares (Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 29. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 54. 30. Peter Thomson, “Rogues and Rhetoricians: Acting Styles in Early English Drama,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 329. For more information about “personation,” see Anthony Dawson, “Performance and

218

Vin Nardizzi

participation,” 22–3; and Jacalyn Royce, “Early Modern Naturalistic Acting: The Role of the Globe in the Development of Personation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 477–95. 31. Meredith Anne Skura, Shakespeare the Actor, 253 n129. 32. I quote both of these remembrances from Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 113–14. 33. Pliny the Elder, “The Proëme” to Book 7, in The Historie of the World, translated by Philemon Holland (London, 1601), 152; emphasis in original. 34. Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 142–3. 35. Pliny the Elder, “The Proëme” to Book 7, 152; emphasis in original. 36. George Chapman, The Widow’s Tears, 4.1.106–8, in The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies, Vol. 1, ed. Thomas Marc Parrott (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 407. 37. On Shakespeare’s complex engagement with the early-seventeenthcentury critique of such booming sounds, see Allison K. Deutermann, “ ‘Caviare to the general’?: Taste, Hearing, and Genre in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2011): 230–55. 38. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 71. On the Protean actor and his “expressive plasticity” and ability to “vary” his affect and body, see Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 41–3. 39. Philip Sidney, “Seventh Song,” ll.7–8, in Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 195. 40. Francis Bacon, “Of Boldness,” in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 361–2. On laughter as a social “corrective” meant to “humiliate” someone whose “mechanical inelasticity” and “rigidity” render his body “a thing,” see Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, introduced by Wylie Sypher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 67, 74, 97, 187; emphases in original. 41. On the historical uses of the quintain, see Joseph Strutt, Glig-gamena angel-deod, Or, The sports and pastimes of the people of England, 2nd edition (London, 1810), 103–12. 42. Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 208. 43. For a fuller account of this ecomimetic phenomenon in Shakespeare’s plays, see my Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 20–24. On ecomimesis, see Timothy Morton,

Wooden Actors

219

Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 54. 44. On the indistinction between human and wooden forms, see my “The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies: Prosthesis and Stump in A Larum for London,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 119–36. 45. On the “scripting” of the boy actor’s “vocal failure” in the drama, see Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 58. I have found Bloom’s account productive for theorizing how playwrights incorporated other forms of failure into the drama. 46. Much criticism on this play concerns ser vice, especially as it is vectored through eroticism and gender. Representative examples of such criticism include Cristina Malcolmson, “ ‘What You Will’: Social Mobility and Gender in Twelfth Night,” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 29–57; Lisa Jardine, “Twins and Travesties: Gender, Dependency and Sexual Availability in Twelfth Night,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Re naissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London: Routledge, 1992), 27–38; Keir Elam, “The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, Early Modern Intercourse, and the Fruits of Castration,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1996): 1–36; and David Schalkwyk, Shakespeare, Love and Ser vice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 122–42. 47. Helpful accounts of the script that Cesario fails to follow in the wooing scene include Jonathan Crewe, “In the Field of Dreams: Transvestism in Twelfth Night and The Crying Game,” Repre sentations 50 (1995): 101–21; Jami Ake, “Glimpsing a ‘Lesbian’ Poetics in Twelfth Night,” Studies in English Literature 43, no. 2 (2003): 375–94; and especially Mary Jo Kietzman, “Will Personified: Viola as Actor-Author in Twelfth Night,” Criticism 54, no. 2 (2012): 257–89. 48. For a reading attuned to the collective act of secret-sharing in this moment, see Julie Crawford, “Women’s Secretaries,” in Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, ed. Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 122–3. 49. Mary Jo Kietzman, “Will Personified,” 266. 50. On Cesario’s improvisations and clowning, see Cristina Malcolmson, “ ‘What You Will,’ ” 33–4; Jami Ake, “Glimpsing a ‘Lesbian’ Poetics,” 378; and Mary Jo Kietzman, “Will Personified,” 265–75. 51. After a later scene, in which Cesario converses with Feste, Cesario not only theorizes the structural position—the fool—that “he” had unwittingly occupied in the wooing scene (3.1.53–61), but also self-ascribes the label “fool” after a particularly dense bout of riddling with Olivia (3.1.135).

220

Vin Nardizzi

52. The classic— and much-critiqued— account of eroticism and “friction” in this play is Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66–93. 53. On the preternaturalness of the wooing scene, see Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 87–8. 54. On Cesario’s speeches as “theatricalizations of desire,” see Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), 132. 55. Lorna Hutson, “On Not Being Deceived: Rhetoric and the Body in Twelfth Night,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38, no. 2 (1996): 159. Hutson quotes Terence Cave in this passage and goes on to link Cesario’s “willow cabin” speech to Ovid’s Heroides. 56. The allusions are well documented by Anthony Brian Taylor, “Shakespeare and Golding: Viola’s Interview With Olivia and Echo and Narcissus,” English Language Notes 15, no. 2 (1977): 103–6. 57. Joseph Pequigney, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice,” English Literary Renaissance 22, no. 2 (1992): 209. 58. Lorna Hutson, “On Not Being Deceived,” 160. 59. Ellen MacKay, Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3. 60. Antitheatrical writers alleged that attendance at theater turned “reasonable creatures” into brute beasts. For examples of this sentiment, see Bryan Reynolds, “The Dev il’s House, ‘or worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 2 (1997): 166. See also Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 35.

e igh t

Beyond Human: Visualizing the Sexuality of Abraham Bosse’s Mandrake Diane Wolfthal

Two blind spots persist despite the outstanding research that has been published on posthumanism.1 First, most scholars have focused on the modern world, and in doing so have often flattened and distorted the cultural remains of the premodern past. For instance, although Cary Wolfe acknowledges that posthumanism does not necessarily postdate humanism, he presents humanism as a “normative” straw man against which posthumanism reacts. In doing so, he misrepresents the historical reality, ignoring the richness and complexity of Renaissance Europe.2 Medievalists have justly argued that we have always been posthuman—that is, we have always been hybrid creatures open to reconstruction, we have always been deeply connected to other species, and our experience has never been the measure of all things. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has observed that in the past human identity was “unstable, contingent, hybrid, discontinuous,” and Eileen Joy and Craig Dionne have affirmed that humans have always been “part-human,

221

222

Diane Wolfthal

part-something else.”3 Renaissance artists would have agreed, because they depicted mountains with human faces, men with wooden limbs, and monsters that assimilate human features.4 Another troublesome aspect of so many publications on posthumanism is their lack of interest in gender and sexuality.5 But it is precisely because these categories of analysis have been ignored that they remain power ful tools when used in conjunction with posthumanism. This article aims to shine light on both these blind spots by analyzing a premodern image that few would term “normative” and exploring it by means of both posthumanism and gender studies. My essay focuses on Abraham Bosse’s striking etching of a mandrake, dated ca. 1650, which was commissioned to illustrate an herbal produced in Paris under the auspices of the Royal Academy of Sciences (see Figure 8-1). An image of a woman’s lower body topped by foliage, Bosse’s print is strikingly similar in conception to an illumination of Apollo and Daphne from Christine de Pizan’s Épitre d’Othéa, which was presented to Queen Isabelle of France ca. 1410–11 (see Figure 8-2). Why are the two images so strikingly similar when the earlier one accompanied an interpretation of a classical myth, the later one was commissioned for a scientific text, and the two are separated by close to 250 years? On one level, Wolfgang Stechow has proposed that Daphne’s form was probably influenced by an image of a mandrake depicted as a nude body crowned by leaves.6 Similarly, Bosse may have known a slightly earlier version of the illumination of Daphne, one that was then in the royal library in Paris.7 But these images taken together not only bracket the beginning and fi nal years of humanism but also suggest a strange continuity, or at least a recurrent interest, in a monstrous, hybrid, headless female creature. This article will explore Bosse’s print by fi rst examining the meaning of the mandrake in medieval and early modern Eu rope, and then exploring the commission for which the etching was produced. In doing so, this essay will ask: What do images of the mandrake reveal about medieval and early modern posthumanism? What do they tell us about the human desire to acquire new capabilities, that is, to overcome the limitations of being human? And how do such representations further our understanding of medieval and early modern sex and gender?

Figure 8-1. Abraham Bosse, “Mandrake,” in Denis Dodart, Recueil des plantes dessinées et gravées par ordre du roi Louis XIV (Paris: Impr. royale, 1701), v. 2, pl. 76. (The LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden)

224

Diane Wolfthal

Figure 8-2. Cité des Dames Master and workshop, “Apollo and Daphne,” in Christine de Pizan, Epitre d’Othéa, ca. 1410–11. London, British Library, Harley 4431, fol. 134 v. (© British Library Board / Robana / Art Resource, NY)

Textual Accounts of the Mandrake A medicinal plant with powerful narcotic and hallucinogenic properties and tuberous branched roots that sometimes resemble human limbs, the mandrake was early on associated with both magical and anthropomorphic qualities.8 Around the year 65 c.e., the Greek physician Pedianus Dioscorides discussed the mandrake in his five-volume pharmaceutical manual, generally known by its Latin title, De materia medica, which explores more than five hundred therapeutic plants, animals, and minerals.9 Dioscorides focuses on how to prepare the mandrake for its medicinal functions as a narcotic, analgesic, and abortifacient, but also briefly introduces a sexual element by noting that the plant has a male and female form and that its root can produce love potions.10 De materia medica soon became the most impor tant phar maceutical treatise. Translated into numerous Eu ropean and Middle Eastern languages, it remained extremely influential throughout medieval and early modern times. Another first-century account of the mandrake also held great sway, Pliny the Elder’s encyclopedic Historia Naturalis, completed in 77 c.e. Like Dioscorides, Pliny focuses on the mandrake’s medicinal uses, relates that there are male and female mandrakes, and notes that they have special erotic powers. After observing that the root of the plant “bears a strong resemblance to the organs of either sex,” he adds, “if a root resembling

Beyond Human

225

the male organ should happen to fall in the way of a man, it will ensure him woman’s love.”11 Although Dioscorides and Pliny only briefly refer to properties that would today be characterized as paranormal, other ancient texts emphasize them. Both Genesis 30:14–16 and the Song of Songs imply that the mandrake is an aphrodisiac.12 Furthermore, perhaps because some species of mandrake belong to the nightshade family and their roots are poisonous, Flavius Josephus, writing in the first century, records that the plant must be uprooted in a special way in order to avoid disastrous consequences: It is not easily taken by such as would do it, but recedes from their hands, nor will yield itself to be taken quietly, until either the urine of a woman, or her menstrual blood, be poured upon it; nay, even then it is certain death to those that touch it, unless any one take and hang the root itself down from his hand, and so carry it away. It may also be taken another way, without danger, which is this: they dig a trench quite round about it, till the hidden part of the root be very small, they then tie a dog to it, and when the dog tries hard to follow him that tied him, this root is easily plucked up, but the dog dies immediately, as if it were instead of the man that would take the plant away.13

The conception of the mandrake varied over time and place and according to context: whether it appeared in a pharmaceutical text, an herbal, a commentary on the Song of Songs, a health manual, or a literary text. But medieval authors tend to emphasize the plant’s paranormal qualities. They agree that the mandrake looks human. For example, a fifth-century commentator on the Song of Songs states that “the mandrake resembles a human figure,” and Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiaire divin, dated eight centuries later, asserts that it looks “like the form of a man.”14 Similarly the two sentences that Josephus uses to instruct the reader on how to employ a dog to harvest the toxic root now recur in a highly embellished form. In the twelfth century, Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary includes a typical account of how to safely harvest the plant: The man who is to gather it must fly around it,—must take great care that he does not touch it;—then let him take a dog bound, let it be tied to it,—which has been close shut up and has fasted three days,—and let it be shown bread, and called from afar;—the dog will draw it to him. The root will break,—it will send forth a cry, the dog will fall down dead—at the cry he will hear; such virtue this herb has,—that no one can hear it but he must always die.—And if the man heard it,

226

Diane Wolfthal

he would directly die:—therefore he must stop up his ears, and take care—that he hear not the cry, lest he die,—as the dog will do which shall hear the cry.15

Guillaume le Clerc, writing around 1210–11, relates similar instructions.16 Medieval authors also greatly expand the mandrake’s magical properties. They relate that it has the ability to increase wealth and prevent accidents, and they also strengthen its links to sexuality.17 In her twelfth- century Physica, Hildegard of Bingen associated its “power for magical and fantastic things” with sex: If a man suffers lewdness through magic or through the burning of his body, let him take the female species of this herb that has been cleansed in a spring as previously mentioned and place it between his chest and navel for three days and three nights. After this, let him divide it into two parts and hold one part tied over each groin for three days and three nights. But also let him pulverize the right hand of this same image, add a little camphor to this powder, and eat it; he will be cured.18

Hildegard includes a variant recipe if a woman “suffers from the same burning.”19 Paradoxically the mandrake was believed not only to depress lust, but also to enhance fertility. As late as 1633, the herbalist John Gerade maintained that “Great and strange effects are supposed to be in the Mandrakes to cause women to be fruitfull and to beare children, if they shall but carry the same neere unto their bodies.”20 By the early sixteenth century a new belief emerged that further linked the mandrake with sexuality: it grew not only from the urine of hanged men, but also from their semen.21

Visualizing the Mandrake Images of the mandrake are found in a wide range of late-classical, medieval, and early modern herbals, bestiaries, pharmaceutical treatises, health manuals, and cosmographies that were produced from the sixth through the seventeenth centuries from Istanbul to western Europe for Muslim, Jewish, and Christian viewers. The earliest surviving images appear in the oldest known version of De materia medica, which formed part of a richly illuminated Byzantine compendium of six scientific treatises. Known as the Vienna Dioscorides, this codex is noteworthy not only for the high quality of its il-

Beyond Human

227

Figure 8-3. “Second author portrait,” in Pedianus Dioscorides, De Materia medica, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonesis Med. gr. 1, fol. 5v.

lustrations but also for their sheer number (almost four hundred).22 Completed in Constantinople in the year 512 for the Byzantine princess Juliana, it contains several illuminations that show the mandrake, including two author portraits of Dioscorides. The second one depicts at the right the physician writing his pharmaceutical treatise, which he holds on his lap (see Figure 8-3).23 At the left, an artist paints a mandrake root on a piece of parchment tacked to an easel. He turns back to look at his model, the plant held before him by a personification of epinoïa, the power of thought, who stands at

228

Diane Wolfthal

Figure 8-4. Constantinople, “Laserwort and Mandrake,” Pedianus Dioscorides, De Materia medica, mid–tenth century, New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, Ms. M. 652, fol. 107r. Purchased by J. P. Morgan (1867–1943), 1920.

the center of the composition. Both the image of the mandrake root held by epinoïa and the copy of it on the easel represent it as a human-shaped woody root capped by leaves. Byzantine illuminators sometimes further enhance the vegetal aspects of the figure by transforming its hands and feet into roots.24 Beginning in the twelfth century, numerous manuscripts depict the tale of a dog uprooting a mandrake while a human harvester off to the side holds his ears. This refers to the belief that the plant, when it is torn from the ground, emits a piercing shriek that causes listeners to go mad. But although most illuminators visualize the mandrake, whether alone or as part of a harvesting scene, as having both vegetal and human aspects, they invent a wide range of imaginative ways to represent it. A tenth-century Byzantine version of De materia medica shows the mandrake as a dancing, cross-legged form crowned by leaves and berries (see Figure 8-4). A thirteenth-century

Beyond Human

229

Figure 8-5. English, “Harvesting the Mandrake,” in Guillaume le clerc, Bestiaire divin, ca. 1250–75. Paris, Bib. nat., fr. 14969, fol. 61v.

English manuscript of Guillaume le Clerc’s bestiary represents two mandrakes, one male and one female, as humans who hang upside-down, their legs sprouting leaves and their hair rooted in the ground (see Figure  8-5). Christian, Jewish, and Muslim illuminators active in Spain, Italy, England, and Germany from the tenth to the fifteenth century continue the Byzantine tradition of showing the mandrake as a human body crowned by leaves (see Figure 8-6).25 These generally gender the mandrake male through a beard, genitals, or flat chest. And an Arabic cosmography of the seventeenth century shows mandrakes as leafy, amorphous shapes with raised verdant arms and bare human legs (see Figure 8-7). The mandrake appeared in another context between 1400 and 1700: its foot-long roots or imitations of them were carved and sold as amulets.26 These talismans were sometimes treated like people: They were bathed, clothed, and fed.27 But their occult status, which derived in part from the narcotic and hallucinogenic properties of the mandrake, meant that the possession of such

230

Diane Wolfthal

Figure 8-6. North Italian, “Harvesting the Mandrake,” Herbarium, ca. 1450–1500, Paris, Bib. nat., Latin 17848, fol. 20v.

figures could be dangerous. These amulets were believed to have demonic power and women who owned them were sometimes accused of witchcraft. In 1431, during Joan of Arc’s trial, she was asked if she owned a mandrake.28 Even as late as the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon and Pierre de Lancre still associated mandrakes with witchcraft, and in 1603 at Romorantin, near Orléans, a woman was hanged as a witch because it was asserted that she daily fed a mandrake carved in the form of an ape.29 Early modern sources

Beyond Human

231

Figure 8-7. Turkish, “Harvesting the Mandrake,” Qazwînî (al-), ’adjâ’ib almakhlûqât, seventeenth century, Paris, Bib. nat., Suppl. turc 1063, fol. 17v.

repeatedly note that carved mandrake roots were sold as apotropaic talismans. For example, Leonhard Fuchs’s New Kreuterbuch of 1542 relates that: the mountebanks and fakers hanging around the marketplace are peddling roots shaped in human forms, which they claim are Mandragora, although it is quite evident that they are fashioned and made by hand from canna roots carved in human likeness [and] afterward planted. At once small roots grow, which represent a beard and combed hair, and they take on the color of the earth so that they appear to be roots. There are many other fanciful stories they tell to wrest money from the ignorant.30

William Turner’s New Herbal of the 1560s confirms that mandrake roots “are counterfeited and made to look like little beings and are sold in England in boxes with hair and the form of a human being.”31 Many of the early modern authors reporting these practices were skeptical of the efficacy of such

232

Diane Wolfthal

Figure 8-8. “Mandrake” amulets belonging to Emperor Rudolf II. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv und Grafi ksammlung.

amulets, but their descriptions confi rm their humanoid appearance and widespread association with magical properties. But we need not depend solely on written sources for our knowledge of these carved figures. Although most have been lost, at least in part because they rarely belonged to a church or princely collection, a few survive. Two remarkably hairy examples belonged to the Wunderkabinett of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor who died in 1612 (see Figure 8-8).32 A third lies in a small wooden coffin in Dortmund, while a fourth was found in the convent of Wienhausen, wrapped in silk, placed in a covered box, and hidden under a nun’s choir stall.33 Another in Vienna raises his arms as if to suggest the Crucifi xion (see Figure 8-9).34 By contrast, an English example, which is also dated to the sixteenth century, may hold his huge penis (see Figure 8-10).35

Figure 8-9. Carved mandrake root in the form of a Crucifi x, fifteenth– sixteenth century, Schloss Ambras. (Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

Figure 8-10. Carved mandrake root, sixteenth– seventeenth century, London, Wellcome Museum.

Beyond Human

235

These last two figures show the pitted surface characteristic of the mandrake root, and in the Vienna example wispy roots have become hair and a beard. These liminal figures—whether illuminated or carved— occupy the space between human and plant, between art and nature, between sexual desire and religious spirituality, between science and the super natu ral. They are frightening or domesticated, haunting or friendly, assertive or modest, but all are envisioned as unstable, hybrid, monstrous forms. They are superior to mere humans because they derive magical properties from the mandrake, which enable them to overcome human limitations. Conversely they are more than mere plants with their human limbs and genitals, and their ability to emit sounds. Their association with sexuality is suggested not only through their nudity, but also through the enormous penis displayed by one of the carved mandrakes (Figure 8-10). Furthermore, viewers would have been familiar with the magical sexual properties associated with the mandrake not only in written texts, but also undoubtedly through popu lar oral culture.

Abraham Bosse’s Mandrake Perhaps the most striking image of a mandrake is Abraham Bosse’s, which appears in an herbal produced in Paris under the auspices of the Royal Academy of Sciences, which was founded in 1666.36 This volume was the result of an ambitious project, whose goal was to produce a comprehensive catalogue of plants using both traditional methods of classification and such modern techniques as chemical analysis. Claude Perrault, the founder of the Royal Academy of Sciences, initiated the project, and a team of scientists was assembled, which included Nicolas Marchant, who grew the specimens, and Claude Bourdelin, who performed the chemical experiments.37 Soon Denis Dodart gained control of the project and it is his name that appears as author on the first edition of the catalogue, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des plantes, which was published in 1676. Because the scientists believed that it would be easier to identify a plant from an image than from a verbal description, they hired three artists. Nicolas Robert furnished watercolor drawings for each plant species. Then,

236

Diane Wolfthal

Figure 8-11. Nicolas Robert, Mandragora, Paris, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Bibliothèque centrale. (© RMD– Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

over the years 1668–76, Robert, Abraham Bosse, and Louis Claude de Chastillon transformed them into etchings.38 The scientists wanted the illustrations to be clear and complete. For this reason, they asked the artists to draw from life, whenever possible; to show all observable phenomena, including roots, stems, leaves, flowers, and seeds; to indicate the size of the plant depicted; and, if the plant differed strikingly in its youth and in its maturity, to display both stages.39 They also wanted to purge their publication of any remnants of superstition and depend instead on observation.40 Of the hundreds of images produced, four show the mandrake. The first drawing, by Nicolas Robert, shows the leaves, flowers, and root, and adds at the top details of the petals in dif ferent stages of growth (see Figure 8-11). Because the scientists wanted to strip their catalogue of all the magical and superstitious elements that so often appeared in earlier herbals, they must have been pleased that Robert omitted the dog and harvester and instead focused solely on the mandrake. The anonymous etcher reduced the num-

Beyond Human

237

ber of leaves found in his model and omitted the details of the petals as well as the entire root.41 The root was probably eliminated because it was the part of the mandrake most closely associated with sexuality.42 Robert’s second drawing of a mandrake again shows the leaves, petals, and root, but now the root looks more human in form (see Figure 8-12). This drawing was transformed into an etching by Bosse (refer to Figure 8-1), who was hired for this project because of his extensive experience producing scientific prints. He had successfully illustrated a cata logue of medicinal plants, dated 1642, by Guy de La Brosse, founder of the Royal Garden.43 In 1669, at the same time that he was producing his botanical prints for the Royal Academy, Bosse illustrated a book of animals written by Perrault. Bosse’s print of a chameleon demonstrates his objective, scientific style (see Figure 8-13). The reptile is depicted as it appears in nature, in skeletal form, and with its principal organs represented.44 The botanists must also have been drawn to Bosse because he had demonstrated his vast knowledge of geometry and science in his treatise on printmaking, which was published in 1645. Furthermore his motto was “Reason above all,” which he inscribed on the frontispiece of his treatise on the architectural orders, completed in 1664.45 Considering his background, the scientists must have been shocked by Bosse’s etching of a mandrake. Although the printmaker closely follows the upper part of his model, he dramatically transforms the root, enhancing its human, female, and sexual aspects. Bosse extends the root almost to the knee, rather than the thigh, which places greater emphasis on the lower part of the form, that is, its fantastic and sexual aspects. He also modifies the mandrake’s genitalia. Whereas Robert suggests male genitals, but does not clearly indicate the sex of his mandrake, Bosse depicts female labia. In addition, the root’s smoother surface and rounder abdomen further suggest a woman’s body. The botanists demanded that Bosse correct the print, especially since the image contradicts its inscription, which clearly indicates that the mandrake is male.46 They termed the etching “a ridiculous affectation” and warned that “One mustn’t give into to one’s visions.”47 Yet what is an artist if not someone with visions? This tension between scientist and illustrator was far from unique. For example, in 1542, in his De historia stirpium, Leonhard Fuchs discussed his attitude toward engraved plates:

Figure 8-12. Nicolas Robert, Mandragora mas, Paris, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Bibliothèque centrale. (© RMD– Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

Figure 8-13. Abraham Bosse, “Chameleon,” in Charles Perrault, Description anatomique d’un caméléon (Paris, 1669). Etching, London, British Museum. (© Trustees of the British Museum)

240

Diane Wolfthal

We were especially careful that they should be absolutely correct, and we have devoted the greatest diligence to secure that every plant should be depicted with its own roots, stalks, leaves, flowers, seeds, and fruit. Over and over again, we have purposely and deliberately avoided the obliteration of the natu ral form of the plants by shading, and other artifices that painters sometimes employ to win artistic glory. And we have not allowed the craftsmen so to indulge their whims as to cause the drawing not to correspond accurately to the truth.48

The “troubling strangeness” of Bosse’s etching, to quote Françoise Borin, fascinates the viewer.49 Unlike earlier images of mandrakes, this one, through its superb illusionism, convinces us that the impossible is real. The root resembles a human body, with thighs, an abdomen, and female genitals, but a comparison to the illumination in Christine de Pizan’s Épitre d’Othéa (refer to Figure 8-2) makes clear that Bosse’s form is both more plant-like and more sexualized. Rather than showing Daphne’s soft, smooth, and sensuous skin, and her natural sway, Bosse depicts his figure with hard skin, the pitted surface and wispy hair roots typical of the mandrake root, and legs and hips that are inert and wooden. Furthermore, although Daphne lacks genitals, the mandrake displays pronounced labia that are separated and elongated, as if carved from a root. This perfectly expresses the difference in nature between Daphne, a woman who was suddenly transformed into a plant to save her chastity, and the mandrake, which was always a hypersexualized, humanoid plant. Whereas the illuminator constructs Daphne as a dichotomous hybrid creature, human below and plant above, Bosse envisions his mandrake as plant-like throughout, but with a root that is analogous to the human body. Bosse’s apparently unscientific portrayal has puzzled scholars, who generally agree that the artist valued reason.50 Some view his disregard for the wishes of the scientists as rooted in his independent and irascible personality.51 They point, for example, to his disagreements with Charles Le Brun and his expulsion in 1661 from the Royal Society of Painters and Sculptors.52 Perhaps, as someone who thought for himself, he chose to disregard Robert’s drawing and embrace another model. It is doubtful that either Bosse or Robert had direct knowledge of a living mandrake because such plants grew largely in southern Europe, and, even there, were far from common.53 They may have had access to the root of a mandrake, but a root would not naturally appear as Bosse shows it. Instead, the transformations he made to

Beyond Human

241

his model may have been sparked by either a carved root, or by an image of a mandrake. Bosse’s conception of a humanoid, woody body crowned by leaves and flowers is not unusual, and at least one carved root as well as numerous painted images make clear the mandrake’s hypersexualized qualities (see Figures 8-4, 8-5, 8-6, and 8-10). Furthermore, the lack of a fi xed iconography for the plant may have opened the door for Bosse’s imaginative portrayal of it. Producing such an image would, however, have seemed audacious because Bosse was employed to replicate Robert’s drawing not to create an original representation. Other scholars explain Bosse’s image by the persistence of medieval beliefs. Martin Kemp, for example, argues that the printmaker believed that “form and meaning must be regarded as inseparable—a system in which accidental configurations of mandragora roots . . . could indeed act as effective talismans.”54 Indeed, as Frances Yates and others have demonstrated, the transition from medieval to modern science was a slow and complex process, which Carl Goldstein has aptly characterized as “more often one of accommodation than rupture.”55 Ancient and medieval theories continued to hold sway. Goldstein has noted, for example, that Bosse’s etchings of the five senses, dated ca. 1638, show a “continued acceptance of the authority of the old occult philosophies. That is not to say, however, that the newer empirical sciences were thereby rejected.”56 Similarly, although Bosse was an advocate of reason and objectivity, he also clung to the millennium-long tradition of viewing the mandrake as a sexualized, humanoid plant. But what was the nature of the reason that Bosse valued above all, according to his motto? Kemp notes that the artist was “a dogmatic advocate of the objective validity of geometrical perspective.”57 But an impartial reliance on mathematics is not synonymous with the empirical observation that was so prized by the royal scientists. More importantly, it is unlikely that Bosse embraced the notion that art should depend on direct observation. Indeed he argued repeatedly that objects should be represented as they are, not as they appear to the eye. He emphatically asserted that “One must not draw as the eye sees.”58 Sheila McTighe justly interprets this statement as an “argument for a realism based on the measured and verifiably accurate spatial relations of a ground plan, diagram, or chart, not a realism of visual effects.”59 But if Bosse did not embrace observation, his image of the mandrake does coincide with two other contemporary scientific concerns. One is an

242

Diane Wolfthal

interest in anatomy, including human genitals. Reinier de Graaf’s Anatomy of the Genital Parts of Man and Woman That Serve Generation was published in 1668.60 The most influential treatise of marital hygiene, Nicolas Venette’s On Conjugal Love, appeared less than twenty years later.61 These volumes, which bracket Bosse’s work on the royal botanical treatise, introduced images of female genitals to a wide audience. The second scientific concern that coincides with Bosse’s image of a mandrake is the desire to demonstrate that plants and animals are analogous.62 For example, in the 1660s, when Bosse began to etch his botanical plates, Johann Daniel Majors proposed that sap circulated in plants much like blood in animals. This idea was, in fact, accepted by most of the scientists who worked on the Royal Academy’s plant catalogue.63 By the late seventeenth century these two concerns merged, so that, as Londa Shiebinger has demonstrated, “Systematic investigations into the sexuality of plants became a priority for naturalists.”64 To cite just one botanist, Nehemiah Grew, in his Anatomy of Plants, published in 1682, concluded: The Blade (or stamen) does not unaptly resemble a small penis with the sheath upon it, as its praeputium [prepuce]. And the . . . several thecae, are like so many little testicles. And the globulets [pollen] and other small particles upon the blade or penis . . . are as the vegetable sperm. Which as soon as the penis is erected, falls down upon the seed-case or womb, and so touches it with a prolific virtue.65

This methodological stance affected botanical illustration. An artist whose approach is strikingly similar to Bosse’s is Frederic Cesi, who in 1693 helped found in Rome the Academy of Lynxes, a society that was dedicated to the study of the natural sciences. Cesi was among the first to produce botanical drawings with the aid of a microscope, yet he also drew images of plants, such as the stinkhorn mushroom or Phallus impudicus, that strikingly resemble male human genitalia.66 David Freedberg has observed that at Cesi’s Academy “Over and over again the morphology of plants— and to a lesser extent their terminology—is sexualized in human terms.”67 But if Bosse’s interest in aligning plants with human sexuality is a mainstream seventeenth-century scientific concern, another aspect of his etching is not so easily explained: Why does he gender the mandrake female when the gender of his model, Robert’s drawing, may be male, the vast majority

Beyond Human

243

Figure 8-14. “Si tu la cherche la voicy,” frontispiece to the pamphlet L’Imperfection des femmes, seventeenth century, Marseille, Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Inv. #Helot 134 © RMN– Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

of carved and illuminated mandrakes are male, and the inscription on Bosse’s print clearly indicates that the plant depicted should be male? Common ideas about women may have reinforced Bosse’s vision of the mandrake. For example, his mandrake has no upper human body, no brain with which to think, no mouth with which to speak. In this aspect it resembles a frontispiece to a seventeenth-century pamphlet, L’imperfection des femmes, which shows a headless woman standing beside two sheep while holding a distaff (see Figure 8-14). In both prints, the reason for the lack of a head is clear: The female gender has no need to think in order to perform her essential

244

Diane Wolfthal

duties, whether as domestic worker or sexual being.68 Similarly, Bosse equates woman with nature, another popu lar idea.69 For example, an illustration from Adriaan van Spiegel’s treatise on embryos, De Formato Foetu, published in Padua in 1626, shows a woman’s womb as a flower, and a print by Martin Heemskerck depicts women as a source of life, in opposition to technology and culture (see Figure 8-15).70 Considering the mandrake’s association with fertility and abortifacients, with love potions and witches, Françoise Borin is probably right to interpret Bosse’s print as a representation of the ambivalence of nature. She concludes, “Bosse uses a mandrake to symbolize the female sex organ as both boon and curse, miracle-worker and harbinger of death.”71 But should we view his engraving as being primarily about women? What is gained if we interpret it not only through feminism, but also through posthumanism? It is true that below the waist Bosse focuses on the enlarged human genitals, but above, he shows only dense, lush, vibrant, sensual foliage whose intricate, elegant edges twist and turn and then part to reveal exquisite pale blue flowers growing deep inside. The vegetal aspect of this monstrous form enhances its seductive powers. This becomes especially apparent when we compare Bosse’s etching to its more banal model, Robert’s drawing (see Figures 8-1 and 8-12). Bosse was an independent thinker, and in his image of a mandrake he disobeyed the instructions of the scientists, perhaps because he wanted to represent a dif ferent kind of truth. Bosse has conceptualized the relationship between human and plant on the principle of resemblance, not as a point on a continuous spectrum or as a hybrid creature composed of vegetal leaves capping a human body. In doing so, he embraces the very essence of what the royal scientists wished to exclude: popular, unscientific beliefs. Through his image’s woody flesh, vibrant leaves, wispy root hairs, and exquisite flowers, Bosse pays visual witness to the magical powers of the mandrake, to its attraction as an analgesic and hallucinogen, to its associations with wildness, witchcraft, and the occult, and, yes, to its ability to evoke sexual desire and engender fertility. Just as Sarah Salih and James Schultz have reminded us that in the Middle Ages the great divide was not between gay and straight but between celibate and sexually active, just as Thomas Lacquer has posited a premodern one-sex

Beyond Human

245

Figure 8-15. Martin Heemskerck, Natura, ca. 1572, London, British Museum. (© Trustees of the British Museum)

model rather than a male/female dichotomy, so posthumanism opens up the possibility of envisioning additional genders and sexualities, that is, those that take us beyond the human.72 More researchers have explored this aspect in animals than in plants, as the essays in this volume show.73 In the medieval and early modern periods, animals were executed if they witnessed and then failed to prevent a rape, and sex with animals was a punishable offense.74 But just as there was no firm divide between humans and other animals in medieval and early modern Europe, so Bosse’s image confi rms that there was no fi xed boundary separating people from plants. Unlike his contemporary, the scientist Johann Daniel Majors, Bosse did not visualize the intimate relationship between plant and human in terms of similar circulatory systems. Rather, he imagined human’s entanglement with plants as something both more magical and sexual, and for that reason all the more potent.

246

Diane Wolfthal

Notes 1. I would like to thank Angeliki Pollali and Berthold Hub for inviting me to present an earlier version of the paper at the College Art Association conference in 2011, Joseph Campana for asking me to participate fi rst in the conference he organized on “Renaissance Posthumanism” and then in this collection of essays, and Vera Hambel for illuminating discussions on monsters and mandrakes. I also am grateful to Sheila McTighe and Asa Mittman, and Anne Catterall and Serena Marner of the Sherardian Library, Oxford. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Nancy Rapoport for her expert copy editing and to Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano for their many intelligent and generous comments on an earlier version of this article. 2. See, among others, Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), especially page 146 “normative modes of humanist subjectivity”; Cary Wolfe, “Introduction to the New Edition. Bring the Noise: The Parasite and the Multiple Genealogies of Posthumanism,” in Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xi (the notion that posthumanism does “simply come ‘after’ humanism” [xi–xxviii]). 3. J. J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xxiii; Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne, “Before the trains of thought have been laid down so firmly: The premodern post/ human,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 3 [1–9]. 4. Images of anthropomorphic landscapes are numerous. For one example, see Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dulle Griet, ca. 1562–64. For sod with faces, see Claudia Swan, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), plate VII. For wooden limbs, see Pieter Bruegel’s The Cripples in the Louvre, and Vin Nardizzi’s paper “The Body Prosthetic: Stump and the Early Modern Wooden Body” in this volume. For the title of Bruegel’s painting, which derives from a sixteenth- century inscription on the painting, see Roger H. Marijnissen and Max Seidel, Bruegel (New York: Harrison House, 1984), 51. For two of the many images of sex between monsters and women, see Paris, Bib. Nat. Ms. fr. 96, fol. 62v, Histoire de Merlin, ca. 1450–55 and London, British Museum, Burney Ms. 169, Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander the Great(Le faize d’Alexandre), trans. by Vasco da Lucena, Bruges, c. 1468–75. For monsters, see any number of dev ils in hell. 5. See, for example, Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? 6. Wolfgang Stechow, Apollo und Daphne, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 23 (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubne, 1932), 14–15. For this image, see also Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 134.

Beyond Human

247

7. See Christine de Pizan, Œuvres, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. fr. 606, fol. 40v. This volume was seized by King François I of France in 1523. See Paris, Musée du Louvre, Paris 1400: Les arts sous Charles VI (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004), 133. 8. The literature on the mandrake is voluminous. Among recent publications are Anne Van Arsdall, Helmut W. Klug, and Paul Blanz, “The Mandrake Plant and Its Legend: A New Perspective,” in Old Names— New Growth: Proceedings of the 2nd ASPNS Conference, Universität Graz, Austria, 6–10 June 2007, and Related Essays, ed. by Peter Bierbauner and Helmut  W. Klug (Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 2009), 285–346; Gerlinde Volland, “Mandragora—Ikonographie einer anthropomorphen Zauberpflanze,” Jahrbuch für Ethnomedizin und Bewußtseinsforschung 6 (1997): 11–38; and Vera Hambel, “Die alte Heydnische Abgöttische Fabel von der Alraun”: Verwendung und Beduetung der Alraune (Passau: Lehrstuhl, 2003). 9. Pedanius Dioscorides of Anazarbus, De materia medica, trans. by Lily Y. Beck (Olms: Weidmann, 2005), 280–1, IV, 75. 10. For van Arsdall, Klug, and Blanz, the male and female forms “do not refer to sex, but to two dif ferent species.” See “The Mandrake Plant and its Legend,” 287. See also Dioscorides, De materia medica, 280–1. 11. The quote is from Frederick Starr, “Notes Upon the Mandrake,” The American Antiquarian and Orriental Journal 23 ( July–August 1901): 261 (259– 68). For a variant translation, see Pliny, Natural History, ed. W. H. S. Jones (London: William Heinemann and Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), vol. VI, book XXII: IX, 309 (“radicem eius alterutrius sexus similitudinem referre, raro inventu, set si viris contigerit mas, amabiles fiery”). This passage concerns the Erynge, which John Bostock and Henry  T. Riley note is probably “the same as the mandrake of Genesis, c. xxx. 14.” See their The Natural History of Pliny (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), vol. IV, 397, n. 51. Later scholars continue to associate the Erynge with the mandrake; see Van Arsdall, Klug, and Blanz, “The Mandrake Plant and Its Legend,” 287. For the more narrowly phar maceutical passages, see Pliny, Natural History, ed. by W. H. S. Jones, vol. VII, 240–1. 12. Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 201. 13. For the mandrake’s toxicity, see Van Arsdall, Klug, and Blanz, “The Mandrake Plant and Its Legend,” 290. For their membership in the nightshade family, see The New Oxford Dictionary of English, ed. Judy Pearsall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1124. For the quote, see Flavius Josephus, The works of Flavius Josephus, trans. William Whiston (London: J. Richardson, 1822), vol. IV, 252 (Bellum Judaicum, vii. 6.3). 14. Van Arsdall, Klug, and Blanz, “The Mandrake Plant and Its Legend,” 320 (“similitudinem habet humani corporis”); George C. Druce, “The Elephant in Medieval Legend and Art,” Journal of the Royal Archaeological Institute 76 (1919),

248

Diane Wolfthal

43 [3–70]; The Bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc, trans. George Claridge Druce (Kent: Headley Brothers, 1936, 90. For the French, “A la forme d’ome,” see Robert Reinsch, Le Bestiaire. Das Thierbuch des normannischen Dichters Guillaume le Clerc (Wiesbaden: Martin Sändig, 1967, 367. 15. Thomas Wright, Popular Treatises on Science Written During the Middle Ages in Anglo- Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and English (London: R. and J. E. Taylor, 1841), 101–2. For a variant translation, see Druce, “The Elephant in Medieval Legend and Art,” 42. 16. Druce, “The Elephant in Medieval Legend and Art,” 43; The Bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc, trans. George Claridge Druce (Kent: Headley Brothers, 1936), 90. 17. Van Arsdall, Klug, and Blanz, “The Mandrake Plant and Its Legend,” 300. 18. Hildegard von Bingen, Hildegard’s Healing Plants, trans. Bruce W. Hozeski (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 51. 19. Hildegard von Bingen, Hildegard’s Healing Plants, 52. 20. John Gerarde, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London: Adam Islip, Joice Norton, and Richard Whitakers, 1633), 353. 21. For this legend, see Van Arsdall, Klug, and Blanz, “The Mandrake Plant and Its Legend,” 337. 22. For this manuscript, see Dioscurides. Codex Vindobonensis Med. Gr. 1 der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Kommentarband zu Faksimileausgabe, ed.  H. Gerstinger (Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1970) and the facsimile Otto Mazal, Der Wiener Dioskurides:Codex medicus graecus 1 der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Graz: Akademische Druck-u.Verlaganstalt, 1998–2000, 2 vols.). 23. For this image, see Dioscurides. Codex Vindobonensis, commentary volume, 32–3. 24. For other examples, see Van Arsdall, Klug, and Blanz, “The Mandrake Plant and Its Legend,” 305–7, figs. 8–10. 25. Among many others, see New York, Morgan Library, Ms. M. 652, fol. 314 (Constantinople, mid tenth century); Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Ashmole 1462, fols. 67 (female) and 45 (male) ( England, late twelfth century; Paris, Bib. Nat. Ms. Arabe 2850, fol. 12 (Spain, twelfth or thirteenth century); Paris, Bib. Nat. Ms. Latin 6823, fol. 98v (Pisa, ca. 1330–40); Paris, Bib. Nat. Ms. Latin 17844, fol. 54v (Northern Italy, second half of the fifteenth century); Paris, Bib. Nat. Ms. Latin 9333, fol. 37 (Rhine, fifteenth century); Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria di Pavia, Aldini Collection, Ms. 211, fol. 20v (Italy, fourteenth century). 26. For carved mandrake roots, see Vera Hambel, Verwendung und Bedeutung der Alraune. For six roots from Asia Minor that were exhibited in 1891, see Felix von Luschau and Paul Ascherson, “Sechs Mandragorawurzeln,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 23 (1891): 726–46.

Beyond Human

249

27. See Starr, “Notes Upon the Mandrake,” 262; Van Arsdall, Klug, and Blanz, “The Mandrake Plant and Its Legend,” 330. 28. For Joan of Arc, see The Trial of Joan of Arc, trans. and intro. Daniel Hobbins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 75, 127. 29. For Bacon, see Volland, “Mandragora,” 20. For Pierre de Lancre, see Gerhild Scholz Williams, On the Inconstancy of Witches: Pierre de Lancre’s “Tableau de l’inconstance desmauvais anges et demons (1612), trans. Harriet Stone and Gerhild Scholz Williams (Tempe: ACMRS, 2006), 139. Under the subheading “What the witches’ grease is made of,” de Lancre describes how “the Devil mixes the ointments with ingredients to make them sleep, like the root of the mandrake.” For the original French, see Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, ed. Nicole Jacques- Chaquin (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982), 136: “le Diable y mêle des choses qui endorment, comme de la Mandragore.” For the incident at Romorantin, see J. G. Frazer, “Jacob and the Mandrakes,” Proceedings of the British Academy 8 (1918): 67 (57–79). 30. Quote from The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs. “De historia stirpium commentarii insignes,” 1542 (Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants, ed. Frederick G. Meyer, Emily Emmart Trueblood, and John H. Heller (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), vol. I, 16, 608–9. For the original language, see Leonhard Fuchs, New Kreüterbuch [ . . . ] 1543. (Wiesbaden: Nikol, 2005), chap. CCI. 31. William Turner, A New Herball, Parts II and III, ed. George  T.  L. Chapman, Frank McCombie, Marilyn  N. Tweddle, and Anne Wesencraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); William Turner, A New Herball (Collen: Arnold Birkman, 1568), 45–6; Agnes Arber, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: a chapter in the history of botany, 1470–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 12. The original language is: “The roots are counterfited and made like little puppettes and mammettes, which come to be sold in England in boxes, with heir, and such forme as a naturall.” 32. Frazer, “Jacob and the Mandrakes,” 64. For a possible contemporary sketch of a mandrake talisman, see Rotraut Bauer and Herbert Haupt, “Das Kunstkammerinventar Kaiser Rudolfs II, 1607–1611.” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 72 (1976): xxi, fig. 7 (1–191). 33. For the Dortmund example, see Hambel, Verwendung und Bedeutung der Alraune, 105, figs. 20–1. For the Wienhausen root, see Horst Appuhn, Kloster Wienhausen. Band IV. Der Fund vom Nonnenchor (Wienhausen: Kloster Wienhausen, 1973), 51. 34. The mandrake root in the shape of a crucifi x is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. A second effigy, the so- called Eppendorf Mandrake, belongs to the same collection. For the latter, see Walter Hävernick, “Wunderwurzeln, Alraunen und Hausgeister im deutschen Volsglauben,” Beiträge zur deutschen Volks- und Altertumskunde 10 (1966): 18–23 (17–34).

250

Diane Wolfthal

35. This example is in the Wellcome Museum, London. For other examples there, see Martin Kemp, “Taking it on trust: form and meaning in naturalistic representation,” Archives of Natural History 17/2 (1990): 144, fig. 7 (127–88); Martin Kemp, “ ‘The mark of truth’: looking and learning in some anatomical illustrations from the Renaissance and eighteenth century,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 97, fig. 21 (85–121). 36. For this project, see Alice Stroup, A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth- Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences (Berkeley: University of California, 1990). For Bosse’s print of the mandrake, see Martin Kemp, “Taking it on trust: form and meaning in naturalistic representation,” Archives of Natural History 17 (1990): 128–9 (127–88); Françoise Borin, “Judging by Images,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer in A History of Women in the West. III. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, ed. Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 195–7 (187–254); José Lothe, “Mandragore,” in Abraham Bosse savant graveur, ed. Sophie Join-Lambert and Maxime Préaud (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France and Tours: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2004), 296–7; Alain Renaux, Louis XIV’s Botanical Engravings (Aldeshot and Burlington, Vt.: Lund Humphries, 2008), 86. 37. Stroup, A Company of Scientists, 70, 80. 38. Stroup, A Company of Scientists, 80. 39. Stroup, A Company of Scientists, 71, 75. 40. Stroup, A Company of Scientists, 79. 41. For this print, see Stroup, A Company of Scientists, 85, fig. 8. 42. Stroup, A Company of Scientists, 300 n. 43 notes that the “engraver discreetly omitted the root,” but doesn’t explicitly state why. 43. José Lothe, “Les livres illustrés par Abraham Bosse,” in Abraham Bosse savant graveur, 46–7; José Lothe, “Bosse . . . Catalogue des plantes cultivées . . . 1641,” in Abraham Bosse savant graveur, 218–19. 44. José Lothe, “Bosse . . . Nouvelles experiences sur la vipère . . . 1669,” in Abraham Bosse savant graveur, 290–1. 45. For Abraham Bosse, frontispiece of Traité des manières de dessiner les ordres de l’architecture antique en toutes leurs parties (Paris, 1664) with the motto “La raison sur tout,” see Sophie Join-Lambert, “Bosse et l’Académie royale ‘La Raison sur Tout,’ ” in Abraham Bosse savant graveur, 67. 46. The inscription reads “Mandragora mas” (male mandrake). 47. Stroup, A Company of Scientists, 82, especially note 43 for the original French: “La figure ne la represente pas masle par la racine mais plustost femelle et avec une affectation ridicule. Il la faut corriger. On ne doit pas donner dans ces visions.” This was not the only one of Bosse’s prints that the scientists criticized. Although his print of the Cymbalaria followed his model, that is, Rob-

Beyond Human

251

ert’s drawing, except for his elaboration of the landscape elements, the scientists found its flowers inaccurate. They also condemned as extraneous a pot and branch in the etching of a Gentianella, but they were harshest in their criticism of the Mandragora mas. See Stroup, A Company of Scientists, 82 and 300, notes 41–2. 48. Quote from The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs, 115. See also Janice Neri, “Introduction: Specimen Logic,” in The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. by Janice Neri (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xviii (ix–xxvii); Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 195. 49. Borin, “Judging by Images,” 195. 50. Recently, for example, Sheila McTighe has termed Bosse’s approach “rationalist.” See “Abraham Bosse and the Language of Artisans: Genre and Perspective in the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, 1648–1679,” Oxford Art Journal 21.1 (1998): 13 (1–26). 51. Colin Harrison, “Bosse Abraham,” in The Grove Dictionary of Art (New York: MacMillan, 1996), vol. IV, 468 (467–9); Join-Lambert, “Bosse et l’Académie royale,” 64. 52. Sheila McTighe notes other factors that may have contributed to his expulsion: his working-class background, his interest in genre scenes, his profession as a printmaker, and his Calvinist religion. She points to the expulsion of Huguenots from the Academy after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. See “Abraham Bosse,” 5. 53. Van Arsdall, Klug, and Blanz, “The Mandrake Plant and Its Legend,” 287–8. Leonhard Fuchs was sent a mandrake plant from Italy (see The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs, 1 83) and it is possible that the Royal Academy repeated this practice. 54. Kemp, “Taking it on trust,” 129. 55. Carol Goldstein, Print Culture in Early Modern France: Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 103. 56. Goldstein, Print Culture in Early Modern France, 103. 57. Kemp, “Taking it on trust,” 128–9. 58. McTighe, “Abraham Bosse,” 17: “Il ne faut pas dessiner comme l’oeil voit.” 59. McTighe, “Abraham Bosse,” 17. 60. For this book, see Reinier De Graaf, De mulierum organis generationi inservientibus, 1672. Facsimile, intro. by J. A. Van Dongen (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1965), p. 31 no. 13. 61. For this book, Le Tableau de l’amour conjugal, see Nicolas Venette, Conjugal Love; or, The Pleasures of the Marriage Bed (New York: Garland, 1984, 1st ed. 1750), and Jean Flouret, Nicolas Venette, médecin rochelais1633–1698 (La Rochelle: Rupella, 1992). See also Katherine Park, “The Rediscovery of the

252

Diane Wolfthal

Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1580–1620,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 179–93. 62. Michel Foucault noted that, to quote J. G. Merquior, “God had put a mark of signature on things (on every thing) in order to spell out their mutual resemblances.” See J. H. Merquior, Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 45; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1973, 1st ed. 1971, 1st French ed. 1966), 25–30. 63. Stroup, A Company of Scientists, 67. 64. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 19. 65. Quoted in Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 19–20. 66. See David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 236. 67. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx, 237. 68. For this print, see Borin, “Judging by Images,” 219. 69. For the classic study on this subject, see Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Feminist Studies 1.2 (Autumn, 1972): 5–31. 70. For these prints, see Borin, “Judging by Images,” 196 and 201. 71. Borin, “Judging by Images,” 196. 72. Sarah Salih, “When is a Bosom not a Bosom?” in Medieval Virginities, ed. by Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 4–32; James A. Schultz, “Heterosexuality as a Threat to Medieval Studies,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15, no. 1 (2006): 14–29; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 73. See Holly Dugan’s study in this volume, for example. 74. See an account of the trial of Thomas Weir, who was executed for the crimes of adultery, incest, and bestiality: Ravillac Redivivus . . . To which is Annexed An Account of the Tryal of . . . Thomas Weir (London: Henry Hills, 1678). For Crimes and punishments, including slaying animals who witnessed a rape, ca.  1315, a detail of the Sachsenspiegel in Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Codex Palatinus Germanicus 164, fol. 12v, see Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 100–7.

n i n e

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions Lara Bovilsky Where do you expect to fi nd the hearts of fl int that shall sympathize with yours? —William Godwin, Caleb Williams

I Describing the statue that will replace her after her death, the nymph in Marvell’s “Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn” imagines a commemoration whose simple iconography— dead pet at the foot of dead girl—belies its extraordinary incarnation of the power of affective attachment. The nymph’s statue, she tells us, will serve less as a monument to her own past existence than as a memorial of her loss of her beloved fawn. That is, the statue will conjure and preserve her exquisite grief for her pet, her death from this grief, and her grief’s power to survive in the absence of the relationship that engendered it and the fleshly body that experienced it. Of the disposition of the statue, the nymph instructs: Let it be weeping too—but there The engraver sure his art may spare, 253

254

Lara Bovilsky For I so truly thee bemoan, That I shall weep though I be stone.1

The purity of her emotions will ensure that no simulation of tears in marble is needed to produce the effect of crying; instead, the unallayed force of her loss will inhabit the statue, persevering in the weeping that both signals and expresses sorrow. In evoking the statue’s performance of emotive purity, the nymph seems to forget that the marble is artifactual, is separate from her. The statue is so perfect an image and vehicle for the grief that racks and shapes her that in her description, she elides the distinction between subject and figurative object. An objective, stony “it” becomes a weeping, stony “I.” This essay examines the nature and functions of such stony experience— the emotional fusion of “it” and “I” within an enabling mineral frame—in early modern England and the significance of mineral emotions for our understanding of a diverse group of phenomena in that period. These phenomena include early modern English taxonomies of psychological types and mechanics, theories of political agency, and principles of ethics. The use of stone to figure and explain extraordinary elements of human character, affect, relationships, and agency is widespread in English authors. I focus on Shakespeare (in particular, Julius Caesar) as providing some of the most interest ing and elaborated examples of such figurations, but as the above quotation from Marvell among others will indicate, Shakespeare is in line with his culture in drawing on a rich set of beliefs that fi nd common emotional ground between human and mineral. Exploring the nature of these beliefs extends recent work in Renaissance studies and elsewhere that has convincingly opened up the questions of the boundaries and specificity of the human. Our developing ability to historicize and understand the ways in which early modern subjects imagined humanity in a “relatively ecosystemic” context— one in which human beings conceptualized their natures as closely related to animals, plants, and even, I will suggest, mineral objects—and thereby existed in a time effectively “before the human,” refutes a historiography in which the early modern period as a whole followed some humanists in solely celebrating human exceptionalism.2 A compelling part of that refutation may be found in early modern uses of mineral and metal imagery to describe emotional experience, espe-

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

255

cially experience on the fringes of conventional human emotional and political attachments. Critics have seen this imagery—of weeping statues, of stony constancy, of rocky hearts and fl inty bosoms, of cruel wooden blocks insensitive to fiery passion—as presenting a Neostoic ideal of life without emotional perturbation and, conversely, as employed in mounting a critique of that ideal. (As we will see, when used to criticize Neostoicism, mineral imagery valorizes emotional components of human identity by depicting emotionless life as materially inhuman.) By contrast, I suggest that the language of mineral emotion posits a kinship both with human beings who feel too much and those who scarcely feel at all, via the surprisingly available subject position of stone or metal itself. Assuming, with theorists of “historical phenomenology,” that experience is shaped by the language that describes it, that “the very language of physiology . . . helps determine phenomenology,” we may read the rhetoric of mineral emotion as registering a unique early modern belief in the likeness of subject and object.3 Belief in mineral emotion is used to extend the range of human experience to encompass unusual extremes of affective intensity and unfeelingness. Both extremes are implicit in Marvell’s nymph’s fantasy of a stony, tearful, postmortem existence and in the myth of Niobe that is Marvell’s source for the image of the weeping statue, a myth most familiar to the early modern world in its Ovidian retelling. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid depicts Niobe as being turned to stone not, like Marvell’s nymph, to commemorate loss, but as a seemingly natural part of the experience of excessive grieving: Dumque rogat, pro qua rogat, occidit: orba resedit . . . Deriguitque malis: nullos movet aura capillos, In vultu color est sine sanguine, lumina maestis Stant inmota genis; nihil est in imagine vivum. Ipsa quoque interius cum duro lingua palato Congelat . . . intra quoque viscera saxum est. Flet tamen . . . And as she prayed the one she prayed for died. Then like a stone the childless matron sat— . . . There no motion Of the wind stirred through her hair, her color gone, Bloodless her melancholy face, her eyes

256

Lara Bovilsky Stared, fi xed on nothingness, nor was there any Sign of life within that image, her tongue Cleaved to her palate . . . Even her entrails had been turned to stone. Yet still she wept . . .4

The portrait of utter grief presents an exterior not just rigid but deathlike (“nihil est in imagine vivum”—“there is nothing of life in the image”). That is, the limits of the most intense affective experience lie paradoxically in death and in stone, and in this way the Niobe myth employs calcification as analogue both for hardness and, unexpectedly, for emotional softness, the capacity for extreme sorrow. Niobe’s transformation presents ultimate grief as too much feeling for a normal human frame to sustain, so that, precisely in order to sustain it, a greater firmness is willed out of flesh. At the same time, the perpetual crying of the hardened Niobe (as with Marvell’s nymph) dramatizes the force of emotional experience by showing that its liquid flow overpowers the hardness of rock or marble. In short, both solid and liquid figure Niobe’s overwhelming emotions. Affective excruciation is imagined as both pure rigidity (Niobe’s response of total stillness of hair, eyes, bowels) and as an outward-moving fluid force that exceeds all instantiations of rigidity. The density of stone figures the power and intensity of human emotional extremes, even while that stone is itself overcome by her tears, emotional force in another form.5 The tension between and among these elements can be felt the more strongly when we consider in aggregate recent explorations of the early modern passions. Literary critics and cultural historians recovering the conceptual scope and landscape of emotion in early modern texts have separately pursued or revealed three chief functions of mineral imagery in figuring emotion. First, imagery of stony impermeability may be used analogically to present the desirability of overcoming the turbulence of emotional experience. Stony constancy is preferred to emotional instability. Citing such a view, both Gail Kern Paster and Katherine Rowe point to Henry Peacham’s emblem of “the constant mind” as foundational. The emblem is worth another view (see Figure 9-1). Peacham’s image depicts a rock, rising above buffeting waves; Peacham reveals this to be “manlie constancie of mind” in the accompanying gloss. Nearby, a three-masted vessel represents a less

Figure 9-1. “Manlie Constancie,” in Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (London: 1612), 158. (Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License)

258

Lara Bovilsky

constant human subject in imminent danger both of being dashed to bits on the rock— a danger from constancy to which I will return— and of being consumed by the “piteous fire[s]” of the passions, rashly steered amiss by drives, desires, and worldly opinion.6 For Paster, the depiction of ship, waves, winds, and fires exemplifies the early modern view of emotional experience generally, which she argues occurs in a materialist and “pneumatic ecology,” from which perspective, it might be thought, Peacham’s rocky constancy may be only wishfully imagined. Likewise, Rowe uses the emblem’s endorsement of the mentality of the stable rock to describe a Neostoic condemnation of life lived under “the sway of turbulent humors.”7 Michael Schoenfeldt notes the impor tant role in countering “the volcanic instability of un regulated desire” played by positive images of “stony dispassion” in works by authors and ethical theorists including Spenser, Elyot, and Shakespeare.8 Secondly, and slightly more dynamically, imagery of metallic or mineral experience can figure the achievement of resolve and the activation of courageous temperament that Mary Floyd-Wilson has collated under the early modern term “mettle,” derived from the “metal” of “arms and armor” and from the language of ores and “earthy matter.” 9 For Floyd-Wilson, early modern folk used such literally substantive characterizations of an individual or, especially, a people, in the ser vice of a kind of social physics, to describe and explain the qualitative interactions of bodies and groups. Terms such as mettle mea sure “how the self interacts with the world: the degree to which one is open or detached, leaky or replete, languid or alert” and, we might add, literally and figuratively hard or soft.10 As Floyd-Wilson has shown, early modern ethnicities are understood and typified through such vocabulary, which registers the impact of the environment and other humoral non-naturals (including the passions) on the bodies with which they interact.11 In the case of mettle, though, a further admixture of individual or collective will (no doubt akin to Peacham’s will to constancy) is frequently on display. While Floyd-Wilson’s argument is concerned primarily with the temperaments characteristically associated with and available to a people or an ethnicity, readers of early modern (and later) texts will be well acquainted with adjurations to increase one’s hardness in less habitual circumstances, as on the battlefield or within the revenge plot in order to facilitate determined, capable action, as when Shakespeare’s

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

259

Henry V prays for improved martial strength, density, and staying power in a familiar idiom: “O God of battles! steel my soldiers’ hearts” (Henry V, 4.1.271).12 Even when not thus summoned in the hortatory mood, mettle is performative: the metallo-earthy rigor of mettle must be activated and revealed to be attested. Such hardening has much in common with Ovid’s Niobe’s ability to summon a rocky resolve in order to endure and express the unprecedented scope of her loss.13 A third set of tropes of mineral experience that has proven generative for historicizing emotion is less approving than those we have already seen. Early modern accusations of stony-heartedness may be used to discipline the subject whose personal or political disposition reveals a lack of natural human tenderness or a lack of appropriate human attachment.14 In this usage, a stony heart or bosom is one that both defaults ethically, neglecting human responsibilities for mercy or family feeling, and malfunctions ontologically, revealing a lack of naturalized human responses such as love or tenderness (conceptualized as softness). As Richard Strier has argued, the presence of critiques of Neostoic claims about the liabilities of life lived under the thrall of the passions (claims gestured to in Paster’s and Rowe’s accounts) shows that Neostoicism was countered by early modern theorists, such as Erasmus, Coluccio Salutati, and Reformation theorists including both Luther and Calvin, who remained “committed to stressing the importance of the emotional and affective in life.”15 Emotional life encompassed familial and political obligations in particular; in Strier’s account, horror at depictions of a person over whom emotions hold no sway is maximized in response to proverbial accounts of the Stoic sage who, unlike Niobe, encounters the loss of a child or the destruction of his homeland with apathetic calm.16 Such a person’s indifference to the most valorized of human attachments invites his depiction as ontologically, substantively dif ferent, and this difference is conveyed through the tropes of stone, iron, flint, and wooden blocks. Strier’s examples of critiques of Stoicism are rich in such imagery, which echoes the language of Stoic theory itself. In just such an idiom, Seneca (in Thomas Lodge’s translation) had insisted that the wise man is “inuincible” as stone: “Euen as there are certain hard stones which . . . will neither be cut, filed or . . . consumed by fire . . . euen so the heart of a Wiseman is solid.”17

260

Lara Bovilsky

To the critics of Stoicism, this language was self-indicting. For instance, in outraged response to his own depiction of the Stoic sage, Salutati reels off a string of derogatory classifications: “If there were such a person, and he related to other people like this, he would show himself not a man but a tree trunk, a useless piece of wood, a hard rock and obdurate stone.”18 As is characteristic in such excoriations, Salutati does not gloss his terms very far. The Stoic sage is “useless . . . hard . . . and obdurate,” but the force and implications of Salutati’s more interest ing name-calling, which recategorizes a human being as something (or indeed numerous things) generally seen as inhuman, are left suggestive and implicit. We know only that such recategorization results from a manner of political and social attachment so little touched by affective entanglement as to seem materially alien. But elsewhere, elaborated imagery of mineral identity does more than consider the advisability of passionate or dispassionate life. Mineral imagery constitutes a source of sensitive characterization, in which inhuman materiality yields substantial analytic purchase on human emotion and on ethical norms. Even when mineral identity is condemned, the apposition of affect and its mineral glosses may prove mutually complicating and enriching. For instance, in Richard III, Queen Elizabeth’s attack on Richard Gloucester for engineering the murder of his nephews employs mineral tropes in abundance in order to stress the reprehensibility of political and familial antipathy: No doubt the murd’rous knife was dull and blunt Till it was whetted on thy stone-hard heart . . . And I in such a desp’rate bay of death, Like a poor barque of sails and tackling reft, Rush all to pieces on thy rocky bosom. (Richard III, 4.4.227–35)19

In the image of her political, parental, and personal fortunes being dashed on Richard’s “rocky bosom,” Elizabeth exactly replicates the chief signifying units of Peacham’s emblem (disabled craft, deadly rocks), but in a manner that radically refigures the meaning of stone. This is the accusatory register of the discourse of mineral emotion, in which stone’s primary significances range from indifference to cruelty and an extreme activated anger. Here, the praiseworthy self-similarity of Peacham’s Manly Constancy has become a hardness supremely perilous to those who encounter it.20 In-

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

261

deed, the proximity of the terms of Elizabeth’s lament to Peacham’s scenario would seem to present another criticism of the affectless man. Her speech suggests that it is a slippery slope from the person who can witness the death of a child and the destruction of political order with calm, to the person who would seek those very ends. Even more than Salutati’s condemnatory list of inanimate woody and stony comparisons, Elizabeth’s speech reveals the psychopath latent in the Stoic sage. Yet if that is the case, once more, stony imagery does not really imply apathy in this culture, but rather a rich array of emotions. After all, Richard is not a Stoic sage, but is suffused in feeling. His hardness is, on the one hand, a kind of mettle—a Marlovian commitment to achieving his goals. In a nonstandard recasting of Floyd-Wilson’s concerns, Richard’s particular mettle also suggests a quasi-ethnic designation keyed to emotional style and abundance: as his mother will put it, he is “kind in hatred” (4.4.173).21 Richard, that is, hates his kindred, and he is a hating kind of being. As Elizabeth notes in the speech quoted previously, his very hardness of heart possesses a keenness (sharpness and eagerness) that turns heart into whetstone and that can augment and transmit kindred-hatred, in the form of murderous intent and ability, to the cousin-killing knife itself and, by extension, to all his kin, who lavishly reciprocate the hatred they attribute to him.22 To Elizabeth, the flinty heart and rocky bosom do not represent indifference to proper human attachments, so much as attention to the contours of the obligations such attachments confer, registered in the thoroughgoing flouting of those obligations. Richard’s stony-heartedness makes him no less sensitive to the nature of kinship relations for handling them with malignity. In English texts, the will to active or sustained cruelty is often figured in this way as fl int or stone. If, on the one hand, the fl inty bosom is imagined to facilitate cruelty by its impenetrability to the assaults of pity and so to stifle one kind of feeling, that emotional armor is itself stiffened by resolve or hatred, emotions which may intensify and batten on putting others in a pitiable state.23 Vendetta is productive of a fl inty bosom in a virtually paradigmatic fashion, so it is no accident that Richard Gloucester’s is the most familiar instance of this mineral organ, while such stony-hearted interiority is featured with regularity in the clan wars Shakespeare depicts in the history plays. In an earlier episode from Richard’s history, his antagonist Clifford wills himself to a similar degree of aggressive stoniness precisely

262

Lara Bovilsky

to accessorize what he calls his “flaming wrath.” Seeing his father’s body on the battlefield, Clifford claims “My heart is turn’d to stone: and while ’tis mine, / It shall be stony. . . . In cruelty will I seek out my fame” (2 Henry VI, 5.3.55, 5.3.50–60). Like Elizabeth describing Richard, Clifford assumes that stoniness is the proper ground for a powerfully incendiary emotion. We are a long way from the hearts that Seneca assumed would be by virtue of their stoniness invulnerable to such passions. Perhaps early modern subjects felt themselves so tossed on the nonnatu ral seas of affects and desires that they could no longer join the ancients in imagining a sustained constancy or apathy. In any case, I suggest that the preceding examples argue that early modern evocations of stony impermeability and hardness are generally put to use not to theorize or celebrate affectlessness, but rather to figure affect’s most intense embodiments. This would imply that the ecology of the passions is not just pneumatic or fluid, but possesses intriguing solid states as well. Nor does a stonily concentrated form of affect occupy a given position on a moralizing axis spanning praise and blame: Niobe and Marvell’s nymph’s rigid-and-melting grief is closely allied by this language with Richard Gloucester’s rich vein of rocky hatred. Emphasis on the strength of the attachments that provoke such stone formations within these narratives suggests that these are not stories of social isolation or interpersonal dysfunction, of the strange and deplorable appearance within a human community of an animated block of wood or stone (in the language of Salutati’s anti-Stoicism). Rather, these stories articulate extremes of what is possible to feel as a human being, broadening human ontology to include mineral identity.

II Human affect resonates with metal, wood, and stone, it would seem, at varied frequencies. The imagery of mineral emotion can evoke both passionless and maximally passionate being, both fervency for and indifference to political and interpersonal commitments. As we will see, mineral identity may also encompass the mediate position of emotional recalcitrance or other wise discontinuous experience of emotion. A surprisingly broad array of these figurations appears in Julius Caesar. Stony hearts are used to figure

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

263

multiple positions on the spectra of individual susceptibility to emotion and intensity of emotional experience; mineral identities are used to delineate both desirable and condemned subject positions. In Caesar, as in the other texts we have seen, mineral identity is tied to the experience of emotion generally, but particularly to the emotions of anger and grief. The play seems especially interested in the problem of “kindling” the mineral bosom: generating emotions where they don’t spontaneously arise and exposing those that may be recalcitrant or concealed. This is at fi rst primarily a political problem, taking two parallel forms: leaders’ or demagogues’ attempts to admonish or stir a froward public into appropriate or useful emotion; and, in a far more individualized and individualizing context, Cassius’s attempts to work on Brutus. In Brutus’s figuration, mineral identity will assume a taxonomic precision equipped with a subtle power to delineate psychology in ways that advance the political plot of the play but which also yield profitable insights into Shakespearean interests more purely directed at the elusiveness of agency and the bases of emotional flux. The play immediately suggests the urgency and utility of being able to kindle emotion, when in its opening scene, the tribunes Murellus and Flavius are galled by the plebeian craftsmen’s celebration of Caesar’s return and indifference to Pompey’s fate at Caesar’s hands. The means by which Murellus and Flavius exert political leadership is not by employing statute, force, or political debate (as, say, in Coriolanus), but by chastising what they characterize as the plebeians’ lack of emotions and by indicating which emotions may with propriety fill that void. To criticize the plebeians’ ingratitude and invigorate their piety, Murellus employs the language of mineral emotion in its disciplinary aspect: You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things! O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome, Knew you not Pompey? (1.1.36–8)24

While Flavius and Murellus specifically chastise the plebeians for their “ingratitude” (1.1.56), they also complain about other forms of insensitivity: the plebeians’ collective fickleness (in abandoning one hero for another, in siding always with the victor) and their resultant indecorum (treating a workday as a holiday, a murder as a festivity [1.1.1–29]).

264

Lara Bovilsky

Cruelty, additionally, is cited here. Not Richard Gloucester’s mindful, gleeful cruelty— the rebuked craftsmen lack the self-knowledge and calculated malevolence evident within Richard’s “rocky bosom.” Rather, the accusation is that the citizens’ stony cruelty consists precisely in their obliviousness to their unkindness: an insensitivity to their own and others’ emotions. Yet in this regard, Murellus’s characterization is deployed as a corrective, a self-consuming rhetoric. In shaming the craftsmen so that they become “tongue-tied in their guiltiness” (1.1.63), Murellus’s accusation that they are “worse than senseless things” suffices to goad them into sensibility. The charge of hardness of heart made here, even as it claims to equate certain men with discreditably insensate objects, in fact does the opposite, evidencing in its effects and in its intent that for men to be cruel blocks is impossible. The accusation and the chastened reaction it engenders enable a neat riff on group psychology and sociology: even cobblers with fickle or impulsive political attachments, the episode shows, will exert themselves that they might appear to shun cruelty or the reputation for it, to distinguish occasions of celebration from workday practice, and to honor the bonds of political allegiance even as time passes, all traits evidently comprehended under Murellus’s rubric “men” and not the rubrics “things” or “stones.” The effect of such ontological herding on the plebeians is evidently familiar to Roman politicians because Antony is later quick to recycle elements of Murellus’s rhetoric in one of his gambits at Caesar’s funeral. Antony charges that the plebeians, precisely because they are men and not inanimate objects, will respond to the revelations of Caesar’s love by being kindled to outrage over his murder: You are not wood, you are not stones, but men: And being men, hearing the will of Caesar, It will inflame you . . . (3.2.142–4)

Murellus and Antony seem to demonstrate a sure knowledge that their auditors will be particularly averse to and motivated by such characterizations. (In so doing, they instantiate a pattern in Shakespeare’s Roman plays in which mobs earn the contempt of their leaders by being readily acted upon in ways that, ironically in this context, tend to suggest their lack of active cognition and, to some degree, their representation as predictable objects,

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

265

parts of an unthinking, embodied whole—the very characterization to which they are represented as so averse.25) The similar political aplomb of their speeches notwithstanding, Antony and Murellus handle the question of mineral identity differently. Antony’s model presents mineral identity as a reductio ad absurdum. Antony underscores the difference between men and objects as a matter of the former’s combustible emotions, both in the content of his speech and in the ways he intends it to act on the crowd. Where Murellus adopts a posture of outrage at the stoniness of the plebeians, Antony more confidently and more straightforwardly insists on the plain negative. Men are not stones, as their natural responses to the evidence of political love reveal. Still, the distinction between men and stones may not be as clear as Antony’s negative implies. The guarantors of his model of humanity, those reactions of grief and anger (united in Antony’s agenda), are neither so reliable nor so natural as to occur spontaneously. Antony’s rhetoric is designed to produce them, after all, and he outlines their production in the future tense. In fact, his exhortation that the crowd answer to his description of human response (and eschew the bane of stony insensibility) is the means by which their emotions are kindled and their mettle aroused, even as his words insist that such kindling happens of its own accord. Meanwhile, the vocabulary with which he characterizes such emotional surges itself portrays the human being as a kind of flammable object, a housing for tinder or fuel: “it will inflame you.” Such metaphors of the crowd’s responsive passions tend to verify the public’s humanity by means of their resemblance to the combustible substances from which Antony is nominally insisting they are distinct, as if there is a kind of humanity in wood or fire itself.26 This sense of the crowd as a responsive, yet mineral entity is amplified when Antony invokes Brutus’s vaunted powers of oratory as a foil to his own. As every high school sophomore knows, Antony proceeds smoothly and simultaneously to critique Brutus’s glibness, to undermine Brutus’s future ability to explain himself to this same audience, and to compete with Brutus for rhetorical preeminence.27 Significantly, Antony’s image for absolute rhetorical mastery is precisely the ability to kindle not just stony men, but stone itself: “were I Brutus, / And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony . . . that should move / The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny” (3.2.219–23). It would seem, then, that stones are not unlike human beings, precisely in that

266

Lara Bovilsky

they too may be aroused or “move[d]” by appeals to their emotion. For Antony, it turns out, stones are resistant, but not ultimately impervious, to being inflamed with political intent.28 The image of potentially mutinous stones retroactively splits the difference between Murellus’s rebuke of the plebeians as stony and Antony’s insistence that they are not, by shifting responsibility for the crowd’s degree of emotional unresponsiveness in part from the citizens to the speaker.29 In this case, the emotional distinction between stones and men is not an absolute, but vanishes according to the rhetorician’s skill.

III If the relation of the crowd to models of mineral identity is thus complex and unstable (though in the main disapproving), the play will take up the problem of a difficult-to-kindle subject being worked on and affectively roused with greater interest and nuance with Brutus. The crowd is receptive and easily stirred by the rhetoric of those with political power; it is composed of undifferentiated and predictable subjects. By contrast, Brutus is regularly described as exceptional and analytically independent, rhetorically gifted and hence presumptively resistant to rhetoric himself. This characterization sets up the play’s attraction to investigating Brutus’s surprising susceptibility to being stirred by those who, like Cassius, wish to influence him. Brutus will be depicted becoming resolute in response to Cassius’s urging and Caesar’s rise to power, anxious before the assassination, uxorious when Portia forcefully urges marital claims on him, and irritable out of grief at Portia’s suicide.30 Just as the citizens are readily characterized and mobilized by being compared to or distinguished from stones, Brutus’s emotional shifts are suffused with quasi-taxonomic language of mineral identity. In particular, his description as a kind of flint is repeatedly given explanatory force for his passions. Attending to Brutus’s emotional fluctuations and the mineral discourse with which his affective movements are characterized produces a differently tragic Brutus and a more significant role for emotion in Julius Caesar than have generally been read. This attention also further extends our notion of mineral identity and its usefulness to the early moderns in explaining unusual or noteworthy emotional styles or types.

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

267

Those modern readers of the play who are interested in Shakespeare’s intensive exploration of Romanness in Caesar and who consider Brutus have naturally enough associated his characterization with newly popular Stoic principles of constancy and the suppression of emotion identified with Rome.31 Even when engaging the emotional shifts I have just briefly described, such readers see Brutus primarily in struggle to contain his emotions, portrayed as a “man who refuses to be moved by his own passions” out of his commitment to political and philosophical abstractions, a man “walling himself up in an image of principled consistency.”32 However appealing such “principled consistency” might be in theory, critics have widely agreed that Shakespeare, while presenting Brutus as sympathetic, is critical of the personal and political costs of what is taken to be his Stoic philosophy. For instance, citing the play’s emphasis on the self-destructive results of a program of repressing emotion and the ways in which repressed and unacknowledged emotions nonetheless inform characters’ actions, Geoffrey Miles argues that “the play thus, in a very traditional way, calls into question Stoic apatheia.”33 Miles notes that Antony’s speech disclaiming stony attitudes among the populace as “neither humanly attainable nor desirable” is typical of this Renaissance humanist tradition, one which in England featured a pun on Stoic and stock, or block of wood.34 For John Anson, mineral imagery like Antony’s is part of Shakespeare’s “attempt to represent the pathologic constrictiveness of Stoic morality.” The “violence” performed by Stoic doctrine on “both human nature and conscience” is attested in Caesar by the embodied metaphorics of what Anson calls “induration.” He takes the play’s physiological vocabulary seriously, tracking the consistency with which the play links Stoic processes to depictions of hardness of the heart and fieriness of the hand.35 According to Anson, the fl inty imagery associated with Brutus epitomizes Shakespeare’s global critique of Stoic Rome itself: “the process of induration . . . reaches its logical conclusion in his reduction to a fl int, that passive instrument of fi re itself so paradoxically cold.”36 Like Salutati’s passionate denunciation of the Stoic sage as “a tree trunk, a useless piece of wood, a hard rock and obdurate stone” (quoted earlier), Anson’s evocation of Brutus’s “reduction to a fl int” is almost lyrically suggestive but raises further questions. What is the significance of the “paradoxical” fieriness and coldness of fl int? In what ways might fl int’s hardness and

268

Lara Bovilsky

passivity convey elements of Brutus’s Stoicism? Is Brutus’s fl intiness in fact a “reduction” of his humanity and does it indict Stoic doctrines? More broadly, if, as I have argued, mineral identity does not necessarily represent a loss of affective intensity, but may in fact bear the most intense passions, then what does Brutus’s fl intiness signify for Shakespeare? How does Brutus’s mineral identity compare to the plebeians’? As we saw, Murellus and Antony denounced stoniness in the mob, knowing such denunciation would reliably produce fervent responses. Seemingly, disavowal of corporate stoniness leads to the most predictably passionate crowd behav ior. Is flintiness similarly disavowed or overcome to produce Brutus’s emotion? If so, why does Brutus seem to be treated as a special case? Why do his passions attract so much notice both within the play and by its readers? A parallel between Brutus and the plebeians is made available early in the play, when Cassius first presses Brutus to condemn Caesar’s overreaching. Cassius is elated at the ease with which he elicits initial signs of success: “I am glad / That my weak words have struck but thus much show / Of fire from Brutus” (1.2.174–6).37 Their dialogue directly follows the tribunes’ angry encounter with the Caesar-venerating craftsmen, and it is not difficult to see Cassius’s pleasure as resembling Flavius’s gratification when the craftsmen hurry in shame from the tribunes’ disciplinary speeches about their stoniness: “See where their basest mettle be not moved. / They vanish tonguetied in their guiltiness” (1.1.62–3). For his part, Cassius hardly wishes to render Brutus similarly mute and is not attacking his “base[ness]” as the tribunes contemptuously do in their turn. In fact, he is attempting to praise Brutus, to cheer his emergent fire. And yet, in emphasizing that Brutus may be moved with “weak words,” as opposed to reasoned argument or independent patriotic indignation at Caesar’s ambition (as he might have characterized Brutus’s position), Cassius is, inadvertently or no, crowing at his own easy power over Brutus in ways that recall the tribunes’ self-satisfaction performed moments earlier. In invoking a sparking flint as he speaks of Brutus’s “show of fire,” Cassius, like the tribunes, celebrates the way in which speakers can work on the particular materiality of their auditors, taking advantage of base mettle or fl inty nature. All that we have seen of the smoothness of such manipulation might seem to entail simple passivity on the listener’s side— and such passivity in turn might seem compatible with comparisons to fl int. We are used to thinking

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

269

of stones or fl ints as things that are acted on and cannot act themselves. However, as with Antony’s fantasy of stones that would “rise and mutiny” in response to the virtuoso jeremiad of a Brutus-Antony, the assumption of passivity is complicated by the fact that what is being described is the rousing of emotions within hearts of stone. The discourse of mineral identity implies and must accommodate mineral agency. Such agency is conflictingly gestured to in the verb typically used to describe the changes within or actions performed on mettle and fl int, registering the ambiguities of a subjective object. The crowd and Brutus alike are “moved,” a term perfectly balanced between transitive (“impelled, incited”) and intransitive (“affected by emotion, inclining”) meanings. This passive participle does not distinguish between inner and outer sources of emotive arousal (“stirred, roused”).38 The process of moving an auditor is (perhaps not surprisingly) intersubjective, muddying the difference between the stony and fiery impulses that originate within the crowd and those implanted there.39 If the crowd’s “basest mettle” may easily be “moved,” Brutus at first appears more resistant solely in being fully aware of the process as Cassius attempts to influence him: What you would work me to, I have some aim . . . For this present, I would not, so with love I might entreat you, Be any further moved. (1.2.162–6)

Brutus’s “moved” equivocates between claiming and disclaiming ownership of the emotions stirring within him. He seems to be saying both that he does not wish to be acted upon further by Cassius and that he (Stoically) does not wish to feel further emotion. In either case, we may note that Brutus’s flinty bosom is not particularly resistant to emotional turbulence, nor does Brutus imply here that mastering his emotions is within his command. As we have seen, Cassius interprets Brutus’s plea as evidence of initial success, and expresses this with the metaphor of “str[iking] . . . fi re from Brutus” discussed previously. For Cassius, the aptness of the flint metaphor lies in its implying just what Brutus’s entreaty admits: in the right hands, Brutus is prone to feel and to spark.40 To call Brutus’s nature flinty, then, is not to imply primarily that he is unfeeling (as in the speeches to the plebeians we have seen), but rather that

270

Lara Bovilsky

his susceptibility to deeply lodged, fiery passions that smolder within him may be accessed through vigorous external stimulus. Flint was, proverbially and empirically, hard and cold, but before Francis Bacon paved the way for an accurate understanding of heat and friction, flint was also believed to harbor fire deep within it.41 This fire was hidden and inaccessible until it was released—not generated—by force or beating. Thus, explaining the relevance of flint to marriage rituals of Northern European peoples, Peter Martyr writes: “For as the flynt hath in it fyre lyinge hydde whiche appeareth not but by mouynge and force, so is there a secreate lyfe in both kyndes of man and woman whiche by mutuall coniunction coommethe furth to a lyuynge byrth.”42 Likewise, in Troilus and Cressida, Thersites ridicules Ajax’s posturing to Achilles: “[wit] lies as coldly in him as fire in a flint, which will not show without knocking.”43 The hiddenness and fi xedness of flint’s fire meant that it seemed to possess great analogical explanatory force for problems of affective recalcitrance or frowardness, or for the impenetrability of the human heart. As John Lyly has Camilla remark in a lovers’ debate in his Euphues: “You know Surius that the fire is in the flint that is striken, not in the steele that striketh, the light in the Sun that lendeth, not in the Moone that boroweth, the loue in the woman that is serued, not in the man that sueth.”44 Lyly’s connection between flint’s hidden freight of fire and emotion that may seem wholly absent in a chilly Petrarchan mistress is worth noting in connection to Brutus. Cassius’s abrasiveness with Brutus is knowing and strategic, but he is not transferring fire to Brutus; rather, he is liberating it from within him. The analogy between the hidden currents that might lie undetected in the human bosom and the fire that needed to be forced out of fl int is a productive one in the early modern period but largely unfamiliar to us. Given the knowledge that the fire was not really within the flint (and perhaps the obsolescence of flint as a daily means of generating fire), the sense of fl intyheartedness that would survive up to the present day preserved only the metaphors that refer to fl int’s unyielding nature and convey resolve or pitilessness.45 But before the advent of modern thermodynamics, fl int might evoke a much wider range of emotions, including passions far removed from our sense of fl int as non-reactive. For instance, flint’s recalcitrant fire could contrast with Christian zeal: “It sheweth the excellẽcy of the nature of holy things: they are fire (not in the flint, hardly be[a]t out; but) in the bosome, that

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

271

46

will not be concealed.” Alternately, the fire in flint might symbolize the salvific importance of self-chastisement: “Grace in the heart is often like fyre in flint insensible vntill it bee beaten.” 47 As such slogans suggest, the fi re in flint was noted for being “insensible,” that is, escaping immediate detection, and for being obtained only with difficulty (“hardly be[a]t out”). Small wonder that these qualities, along with the enduring oddness that this fire was housed within a substance conspicuously lacking its heat, energy, or brightness, let alone fire’s constant, utterly plastic physical metamorphoses, allowed fl int to figure persistent ironies, willful hy pocrisy, and, more interestingly, the mystery and resilience of submerged passions. For example, in a sonnet whose title observes that “In trust lies treason,” a sentiment monotonously reinforced over fourteen lines, John Taylor finds in flint his most vivid figure: For as the fire within the fl int confi nde, In deepest Ocean still vnquencht remaines: Euen so the false though truest seeming minde, Despight of truth the treason still retaines.48

Taylor wishes to capture the doggedness and fervor of treachery, but his image of fire locked within a stone and somehow “vnquencht” at the bottom of the sea seems to resonate beyond the binary ironies of deceit. Taylor presents this fi re as an incongruity or paradox, burning beneath an infi nity of ocean. Taylor uses “deepest Ocean” to amplify the oddity of fi re within stone and to play up the concatenation of elements incompatible with fi re that are yet unable to suppress it. But his lines also evoke a protective quality of the fl int (its impermeability allows the fi re to burn undiminished by the surrounding water), suggesting that the same barrier that conceals emotions or intent from the eyes of others may also nourish and sustain what is kept hidden. Finally, in an agreeably vertiginous apposition, Taylor’s simile converts the image of a fl int lying on the ocean floor into a figure of enormous interpersonal distance and mutual alienation. Taylor’s quatrain suggests, then, that the mysterious, unquenchable passions of the fl inty bosom are both screened and cultivated by their apparently inert frame, and that they can appear at odds both with the stolidity of their bearer’s normal state, and with the more transparent and predictable emotions of others.

272

Lara Bovilsky

This array of associations with flint— and most of all the suggestion of the uncanniness of flinty emotions, their incongruity with the exterior by which they are characteristically shielded—goes some way toward explaining how Brutus may maintain a reputation as a Stoic adept even when he appears to experience emotional distress and disturbance with regularity. To describe Brutus as affectively flinty shifts our attention from breaches or shortcomings in his Stoicism to an understanding that what passes for his Stoicism has been subtly misdiagnosed by those around him—with the possible exception of Cassius, who needles Brutus more than once about his failure to conform to Stoic norms correctly. Flintiness may outwardly resemble adherence to Stoic doctrines (especially a tendency not to manifest minor emotional disturbance), but a flinty nature in fact limits the relevance and applicability of Stoic practice, since its recalcitrant emotive style is physically determined. We might imagine that the insulation from emotion characteristically offered by his flinty bosom may even compromise Brutus’s ability to control his fiery emotions when they are aroused. To be sure, the surges of emotion associated with Brutus appear to be a far cry from the discipline, resolve, rationalization, constancy, and apatheia associated with Stoicism. Brutus’s emotional trajectory can seem virtually melodramatic. By his own report, Brutus begins the play “vexed . . . / Of late with passions of some difference, / . . . poor Brutus, with himself at war” (1.2.39–46). As we have seen, Cassius soon stresses Caesar’s unworthiness and ambition to him, striking sparks; their conversation unnerves Brutus, scuttling any semblance of Stoic equanimity, as he admits when he is alone: Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream . . . the state of man Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection. (2.1.61–9)

Once more, the inherently political and eruptive force of “motion” or emotive impulse within Brutus is evoked in his nerve-wracked self-description as a kingdom in revolt. This description develops without substantially al-

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

273

tering his earlier figuration of himself “at war.” Sleep deprivation and hyper-consciousness of his horror and internal turmoil make daily life seem hallucinatory by comparison.49 Such effects are not fully elaborated in the play, but they make Brutus out to be little more Stoic than Macbeth in similar circumstances. Portia treats the emergence of his disabling anxiety, evidenced in abrupt, “ungentle” behavior, as pathological, and so at first treads lightly, “fearing to strengthen that impatience / Which seemed too much enkindled” (2.1.241, 247–8). His impatient behavior makes Brutus virtually unrecognizable to her: “Could it work so much upon your shape / As it hath much prevailed on your condition, / I should not know you Brutus” (2.1.252–4). Like Cassius, Portia will persuade Brutus to bend to her wishes; he will reveal the conspiracy, transferring a substantial portion of anxiety to her. To gain his trust, she wounds herself in an attempt, as Gail Kern Paster argues, to refigure the liabilities associated with her gender and to conform instead to what is assumed by Portia and others to be Brutus’s masculine, constant Stoicism—voluntarily assuming pain and bearing it as if casually.50 Brutus is not aware she is wounded until she tells him: Portia evidently bears her wound more placidly and Stoically than Brutus his murderous conspiracy. As he exclaims, presumably admiring but also, surely, chastened and further moved by her: “O ye gods, / Render me worthy of this noble wife!” (2.1.301–2). While Portia’s self-wounding succeeds in admitting her to Brutus’s confidence, Brutus’s impulse is to read himself by comparison as unworthy and less Stoic. Tellingly, Brutus adopts the mantle of the Stoic sage only in the wake of Portia’s death, and then as a demonstrable screen to cover up a flinty flare of his passions. He is given an irresistible opening—as in the classic litmus test for sages, he is informed of the death of a loved one and responds with calm acceptance: messala: Then like a Roman bear the truth I tell, For certain she is dead, and by strange manner. brutus: Why, farewell, Portia . . . (4.3.186–8) Left at that half line, the performance might be convincing, but Brutus immediately overcompensates, rushing into a superfluous rationale for his apathetic reception, though unasked:

274

Lara Bovilsky

brutus: Why, farewell, Portia: we must die, Messala: With meditating that she must die once I have the patience to endure it now. (188–90) Brutus’s calm is also unconvincing because, of course, he has just been picking a series of fights with Cassius in private, finally excusing his unprecedented behav ior (Cassius: “I did not think you could have been so angry”) by revealing Portia’s suicide (4.3.141, 145), which he has known about all along. When he makes this confession, his torrent of grief-induced anger and irritation has temporarily spent itself, which Brutus explains in turn as deriving from his inability to sustain anger: O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb That carries anger as the fl int bears fire, Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark And straight is cold again. (109–12)

An anger slow to spark and quick to abate departs from most contemporary models, which track the “initiation, experience, and duration of an impassioned state” according to one’s degree of mettle. Normally anger was expected either to come and go quickly, or to be slow to build and to resolve.51 Brutus’s particular form of susceptibility to anger is therefore distinctive to his fl inty identity. After he confesses his loss to Cassius, he seems to wish only to prevent the reemergence of his uncontrollable emotion. As one subject to fl inty emotion, his means of suppression is to stifle any further discussion with the ever-provoking Cassius that might further chafe at him: “Speak no more of her . . . . no more, I pray you” (4.3.156, 164). His later personation of a Stoic sage to Messala and company (quoted earlier) provides a convenient means of avoiding such discussion, and the difficulty this “crux” has posed for critics—Brutus acts as though ignorant of Portia’s death when he has just revealed it to Cassius— only exists for readers uncomfortable with the ideas that Brutus might employ Stoic theory manipulatively and that he, or Shakespeare, might be even momentarily inconstant, not “like himself” (5.4.25). Others have argued before me that Shakespeare presents a “loose” Stoicism or none at all; Gilles Monsarrat observes that Brutus “is never a Stoic and not always stoical.”52 My interest is in what Shakespeare does with Bru-

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

275

tus instead of providing a rigorous critique of Stoicism. Shakespeare does not propel Brutus’s tragedy by depicting him as operating from purely intellectual commitments that lead him astray, or as suffering from a dissociation of mind and body that catches up with him.53 Instead, as Paster has argued is true for the early modern period generally, Brutus’s emotions are “imagine[d] . . . as part of the fabric of [his] body.”54 For Brutus, a finely delineated character is precipitated by his depiction as belonging to a physiological type, and this type presents human specificity as emerging out of common ground with generic and inhuman kinds. Brutus is represented as possessing a distinctive, even isolating, affective system that, at crucial moments, limits his discernment and agency and conditions both his actions and his most authentic and powerful emotions on external vicissitude. When so moved, Brutus is a kind of human subject which (I choose my pronoun advisedly) is also a mineral object.

Coda The tragic cast of Brutus’s flinty affect is given baroque embodiment in the manner of Portia’s suicide. Plutarch recounts that Portia “tooke hotte burning coles, and cast them into her mouth, and kept her mouth so close, that she choked her selfe.”55 Shakespeare compresses and slightly modifies this account, with Brutus efficiently telling Cassius that, “her attendants absent, [she] swallowed fire” (4.3.154). While the mechanics of Shakespeare’s Portia’s actions are radically less clear than in Plutarch, more than one critic has described this method of suicide as “horribly appropriate” to a Stoic context, i.e. a context of valorizing the “suppression of emotion.”56 Such a reading does seem to fit with Plutarch’s vivid depiction of Portia “chok[ing]” on the coals as she urgently holds them in. Yet Shakespeare’s Portia’s less elaborated ingestion of fi re might be read rather as a fatal attempt at incorporation of emotion than as emotional suppression. If her “voluntary wound” (2.1.299) was a bid to refigure herself as Stoic and masculine, bearing pain without complaint, her internalization of fi re when “her attendants [were] absent” seems straightforwardly to aim at refiguring herself in Brutus’s emotional image: as containing a store of fiery affect experienced in isolation that appears alien and horrifying to others when revealed.

276

Lara Bovilsky

(Accordingly, Brutus tries to conceal both Portia’s and his own share of  such fi re at once when he refuses to speak of her death.) As with John Taylor’s fl int burning mysteriously under the waves, the fi re Portia swallows would seem to have to continue to burn within her to exact its mortal price. Seen this way, Portia’s fire swallowing is a cannier reading of her husband but perhaps a more critical one. Where the whole point of the wounded thigh was that it might be borne “with patience” (2.1.300), as she says, this later attempt at self-mutilation is fatal, is undertaken when she is, by Brutus’s report, “impatient” (4.3.150), and seems to underscore that his own earlier “impatience,” which she “fear[ed] to strengthen . . . seem[ing] too much enkindled” (2.1.247–8), was a kind of fire indeed best smothered. “Impatient,” her act refuses passivity through a fatal homeopathy. Portia compounds the anxiety within her and materially overwhelms her store of desperation and ner vousness with the substance, fire, so often used to figure the outpouring of passion. She explodes Antony’s principle of ontologically redemptive emotion: “being men . . . it will inflame you” (3.2.144–5). Once more, the imagery of mineral emotion is used with individuating force to suggest extremes of passion far beyond what may be experienced by normal human beings, extremes Portia cannot sustain. It would take a frame more dense, hard, and rigid to withstand and nurse her fury and grief, her anger and desperation. A rocky bosom. A heart of stone.

Notes 1. Andrew Marvell, ed. Frank Kermode and Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 22. 2. I quote from Laurie Shannon, “The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 472–9, 477. Recent work in this vein is abundant, with Shannon one of the standouts; some is cited later in this essay. 3. Introduction, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 16. 4. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. William S. Anderson (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 6.301–10; and trans. Horace Gregory (New York: Viking, 1958), 156–7, translation slightly modified. Note that Ovid describes Niobe

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

277

as rigidifying both externally and internally, with the exception of her flowing tears. 5. Tiffany Jo Werth sees the story of Niobe as implying exactly the opposite belief: that ungodly or blasphemous behav ior was marked in the period as inhuman precisely in its figuration as stony. For Werth, Niobe is “dehumanized” by her stoniness, ongoing weeping notwithstanding (194). See Werth, “A Heart of Stone: The Ungodly in Early Modern England,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 181–203, esp. 194–5. 6. Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London: 1612), 158. 7. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 2–3, 9; Katherine Rowe, “Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’s Macbeth,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions, 169–91, 171, 179. 8. Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 86. Schoenfeldt provides an interest ing and useful account of the competing models with which comparative heat and coolness were evaluated: for Galenic physiology, coldness was inimical to masculine vigor and virtue; for various theories of the passions, heat often signified rashness and emotional vulnerability. See Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 74–95. 9. Mary Floyd-Wilson, “English Mettle,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions, 130–46, 132. 10. Floyd-Wilson, “English Mettle,” 134, emphasis hers. 11. See Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), for the full articulation of Floyd-Wilson’s recovery of early modern geohumoralism. The Galenic nonnaturals, or environmental influences on the early modern humoral subject, included air and climate, exercise and rest, sleep and waking, diet, excretion or retention of superfluities, and the passions. See Floyd-Wilson, “English Mettle,” 133–4, and Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 101. 12. Emphasis added. All quotations of Shakespeare follow the Norton edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997), except where other wise specified. 13. My reading of Niobe as exploiting or even producing her stone transformation is, perhaps, unorthodox, though Ovid names no other agent who has caused her transformation. My reading fits within the trajectory of Ovid’s frame of her story as one of hubristic competition with the gods (for which the loss of her fourteen sons and daughters is her punishment). Niobe sustains this hubris even after all her sons have been slaughtered by Apollo, unwisely bragging that

278

Lara Bovilsky

she retains more children than Apollo’s mother Latona (“so many / Are dead, and still I win!”). The transformation of this committed competitiveness into totalizing grief is Latona’s triumph but also Niobe’s, because she is literally and literarily immortalized by it, perhaps more fully than she would have been by her children. 14. Most such accusations in Shakespeare are not marked as Christian or religious, and I present their content accordingly. Jennifer Waldron traces parallel tensions to those I have described that are found in Biblical and Reformation figurations of stony hearts, which she sees as the ultimate source of Shakespearean imagery of stony-heartedness. Like me, Waldron concludes that porous boundaries between mineral and human are regularly conveyed by this imagery. See Waldron, “Of Stones and Stony Hearts: Desdemona, Hermione, and Post-Reformation Theater,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, 205–27, esp. 207–15. 15. Richard Strier, “Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions, 23–42, 23, expanded and revised as Chapter 1 of his The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 16. The loss of the polis is Salutati’s variation on a classic Ciceronian anecdote, in which a Stoic sage receives news of the death of a child by noting, “I was already aware that I had begotten a mortal.” See Strier, “Against the Rule of Reason,” 25, and Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945), III.xxiv. For a dif ferent take on the tensions and pleasures involved in the production of such a persona, see Jonathan Crewe’s analysis of Thomas More in Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 79–100. 17. Seneca, The Workes of Lvcivs Annaevs Seneca, Both Morall and Naturall, trans. Thomas Lodge (London: 1614), 658. See also the discussion of Seneca’s importance to early modern thinkers for understanding Stoicism in Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 38–62. 18. Quoted in Strier, “Against the Rule of Reason,” 25. 19. The speech appears in the Folio but not the 1597 quarto. 20. The affective apparatus figured here would seem well-suited to contagion, inasmuch as Elizabeth’s image suggests the desirability of cultivating one’s own hardness in response to hardness like Richard’s. Even as her terminology criticizes Richard’s rockiness, she represents a strong argument for apatheia or Niobe-like mettle. 21. The language specifying Richard’s “kind” by assessing how his physiology shapes his interactions with others and his emotional capacities is identical

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

279

to that Floyd-Wilson considers in relation to larger groups we can identify as early modern ethnicities or races. 22. Renaissance literature abounds with imagery of entities described as semifigurative whetstones and imagined to sharpen emotions or to incite human agents to action (OED “whetstone” 2c). Such descriptions are only “semi” figurative, as the sharpeners of intellectual faculties and feelings they reference are figured as operating exactly like whetstones, as though wit, desire, or resolve themselves might actually be honed by blunt material. In the discussion of Julius Caesar that follows, we will see the tie between stony hearts and the nature of political incitement worked through in detail. 23. Compare Demetrius’s counsel to Tamora in Titus Andronicus: “let it be your glory / To see her tears; but be your heart to them / As unrelenting fl int to drops of rain” (2.3.139–41). Flinty-heartedness here produces elation; it is resistant to emotion only in the form of pity. 24. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell, Arden 3d Series (London: Thomson Learning, 1998). 25. See Coriolanus 1.1. Cf. the far more canny English citizens and scrivener of Richard III who either are loathe to provide the expected crowd responses Richard programs for them or else execute his commands fully penetrating their “palpable” engineering (2.3, 3.6.11). Unlike the Roman tribunes, Richard uses the accusation of mineral identity retrospectively and privately when the crowd won’t respond to his cues, precisely to suggest their resistance to political manipulation: “what tongueless blocks were they!” (3.7.43). 26. Conventional wisdom at the time assumed that metals, too, could catch fire. 27. Julius Caesar may not be as universally taught in American high schools as may once have been the case; however, preliminary data analyzed by Jonathan Burton suggest that it is one of four tragedies that together account for 85  percent of the Shakespeare taught in secondary school. See Burton, “The Bard and The Poet Campus,” The Rock 83, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 42–6. In more absolute terms, the play’s familiarity to students may vary according to their school funding: Arthur N. Applebee’s classic treatment of “Stability and Change in the High-School Canon” reports that Caesar was taught in 70 percent of American public high schools, but only 54 and 42 percent of Catholic and private schools, respectively. See Applebee, “Stability and Change,” The English Journal 81, no. 5 (Fall 1992): 27–32, 28. 28. Elias Canetti traces the ways in which stone heaps and acts of stoning are regularly similarly employed to figure corporate human emotional agency. See Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962), 50, 88. 29. For the related criticism of political or theatrical orators as “wooden” in their failures to rouse their auditors to the requisite human per for mance of

280

Lara Bovilsky

virtue and sensitivity, see Vin Nardizzi, “ ‘Post-Human’ Performers: Wooden Actors on the English Renaissance Stage,” in this volume. 30. David Lucking notes a contrast between Brutus’s repeated citation of reason in his explanations of his actions and his failure to specify the content of his reasoning. Lucking argues that the play presents Shakespeare’s sense that human behav ior is “imponderable,” where I see in the play a strong interest in the mechanisms of emotional and political shifts, which can explain political action. See Lucking, “Brutus’s Reasons: Julius Caesar and the Mystery of Motive,” English Studies 91, no. 2 (2010): 119–32, 120. 31. John Anson argues that the 1590s saw an intensification of English interest in Stoic and Neostoic thought, citing John Stradling’s translation of Justus Lipsius’s Two Bookes of Constancie, in 1594. Anson, “Julius Caesar: The Politics of the Hardened Heart,” Shakespeare Studies 2, no. 1 (1966): 11–33, 13. Miles argues that while awareness of Stoicism had never disappeared, a pan-European Humanist reconsideration of ancient texts flourished and intensified throughout the sixteenth century, featuring both admiring and critical (anti-Stoic) views, in line with Strier’s findings and analysis. Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans, 63–82. The play’s Arden editor notes that Plutarch, Shakespeare’s source for Brutus, “categorically” specifies that Brutus was a Platonist, not a Stoic, but that inasmuch as he engages a philosophical school directly, Shakespeare appears more interested in the possibilities raised by Stoicism, perhaps because he is interested in the nature of affective reticence. See David Daniell, Introduction to Caesar, 52n. 32. Quoting from, respectively, Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans, 131; and Donald  R. Wehrs, “Moral Physiology, Ethical Prototypes, and the Denaturing of Sense in Shakespearean Tragedy,” College Literature 33, no. 1 (2006): 67–92, 76. Miles is acute on the punitive potential of the ideal of constancy. See, for example, Miles, 115, 146–7. 33. Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans, 131. 34. Ibid., 131, 67. See “stock,” OED 1b. 35. Anson, “Julius Caesar,” 19, 13, 27–9. 36. Ibid., 30. Anson continues: “It is not for Brutus alone but for all his countrymen, however, that the fl int can stand as an appropriate symbol.” 37. Attentive to Cassius’s “show,” David Daniell reads Cassius’s mood here as “grudging—or tactful” rather than elated ( Julius Caesar, 175n). While performances could resolve this in various ways, of course, I see no reason that his gladness cannot be genuine or even played down with false modesty in reaction to Brutus’s stridently expressed distaste for the trend of current events in Rome. “Show” in the sense of empty or deceptive display and the fl int image work awkwardly together: a fl int produces no illusory sparks. “Demonstration” may be intended instead. 38. “Move”: OED 25b; 26a; 31a; 9. The word is as close as English can come to Greek’s middle voice. “Moved” is, of course, employed universally to describe

Shakespeare’s Mineral Emotions

281

the kindling of emotion, not just in the mineral contexts I am interested in here. My point is that mineral identities are not treated as automatically unfeeling or passive in the language that conveys them. 39. The play seems to assume that roused emotions will automatically possess political content, and being “moved” likewise associates politics and shifting affect. Compare the fi rst recorded uses of “motion” to mean political uprisings (OED 1a; 1387), a sense still current in our notion of political “movements”; and, soon after, “impulse or inward prompting,” (OED 12a; 1390); and later, indifferently, “voluntary or reflex movement” (OED 3b; 1425). Daniel Juan Gil tracks a similarly intersubjective but anarchic movement in Julius Caesar’s mob violence, an “uncanny terrain” of “unsociable intersubjectivity” whose acts of destructive incorporation express a deep “revulsion from . . . social order.” See Gil, “ ‘Bare Life’: Political Order and the Specter of Antisocial Being in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Common Knowledge 13, no. 1 (2007): 67–79, 76, 69. The argument is revised in Gil’s Shakespeare’s Anti-Politics: Sovereign Power and the Life of the Flesh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 20–41. 40. Note that although Cassius subsequently alludes to Brutus’s resistance to his plea and uses fi rmness to evoke Brutus’s resolve (“Well, Brutus . . . I see / Thy honourable mettle may be wrought / From that it is disposed . . . who so firm that cannot be seduced?” [1.2.307–11]), his use of flintiness here by contrast signals Brutus’s emotional susceptibility to influence. As we have seen, not all forms of hardness are necessarily opposed to pliability. 41. For Bacon on friction, see Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (London: 1620), Book II.13, 20. 42. Peter Martyr, Decades of the New World, trans. Richard Eden (London: 1555), 647. 43. Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.248–9. 44. John Lyly, Euphues and his England (London: 1580), 95. 45. The additional association of miserliness with flint begins in the eighteenth century. While this association may derive force from the senses of flint as hard or unyielding, the notion of “skinning a flint” to retain scraps of negligible value is technically independent of the mineral’s own qualities. 46. William Crashaw, The Sermon Preached at the Crosse (London: 1609), 8, italics his. 47. Zachary Boyd, The Last Battell of the Soule in Death (London: 1629), 1069, italics his. 48. John Taylor, The Sculler rowing from Tiber to Thames (London: 1612), sig. F4r. 49. Presumably such dissociation is heightened by Cassius’s further manipulation, such as forging notes that echo Cassius’s own flatteries (1.2.314–19)—notes found by Brutus’s servant, strangely enough, when “searching the window for a fl int” (2.1.36), a detail Shakespeare adds to his source material in Plutarch.

282

Lara Bovilsky

50. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 106. The argument is developed further by Coppélia Kahn, in Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 99–101. Cynthia Marshall surveys an entertaining swath of critics who endorse the gendered discourse of Stoicism in approving of Portia’s gesture in “Portia’s Wound, Calphurnia’s Dream: Reading Character in Julius Caesar,” English Literary Renaissance (ELR) 24, no. 2 (1994): 471–88, 474. 51. Floyd-Wilson, “English Mettle,” 132. Describing the cultural norm, Floyd-Wilson writes that “people with mettle are not easily kindled, and neither are they easily extinguished. They do not ignite with every little spark, but when they blaze with valor, they burn long and steadily” (132). 52. Miles summarizes the heated debate about Shakespeare’s philosophical precision, while himself focusing on depictions of constancy to avoid a “blind alley.” See Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans, 125–6. See also Gilles Monsarrat, Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature (Paris: Didier-Erudition, 1984), 139–44, 143. Monsarrat notes the circularity of the argument that first assumes Shakespeare is writing about Stoicism and then reads Brutus’s non-Stoic behav ior as either Shakespeare’s indictment of Stoicism or of Brutus as “an imperfect, shallow Stoic” (143–4). 53. For an argument about Brutus’s attempted dissociation of body and ethics, see Wehrs, “Moral Physiology,” 76–7. 54. Paster, Humoring the Body, 5, emphasis hers. 55. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Thomas North (London: 1579), 1080. 56. Barbara J. Bono, “The Birth of Tragedy: Tragic Action in Julius Caesar,” ELR 24 (1994): 449–70, 465; Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans, 144. The latter phrase is Miles’s only.

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism Joseph Campana

Is the h in human the same as the h in humanism? What, or who, is the human in humanism? Is this the same human as in humanity? What creature nestles inside the various humanisms and humanities we now inherit? To ask if the humanism in Renaissance humanism is related to the humanism in posthumanism is, in fact, to pose questions such as these, questions more fundamental than questions of periodization or historical difference. There is little surprise that most varieties of posthumanism are grounded in a questioning of the human, whether from the perspective of animal studies or ecology, cybernetics or systems theory. As the essays in this collection have shown, skepticism about the nature of the human was part and parcel of Renaissance humanism, making the straw Vitruvian man of some critiques of Renaissance humanism even more flimsy. Assertions of human superiority and mastery were balanced by equally potent anxieties of human depravity and incapacity. Still, the question remains: What vision of the human hovers behind any assertion, positive or negative, about the value and 283

284

Joseph Campana

meaning of any variety of humanism? For the purposes of these closing reflections on what Renaissance Posthumanism might signify, the human that constitutes humanism concerns the letter H, imitation, the mirror, the child, and, perhaps all-too inevitably, Hamlet. In his account of humanism, Tony Davies crystallizes a history of assumptions about this phenomenon in arguing that it “is inseparable from the question of language. ‘Man,’ in the old definition, is the ‘talking animal.’ The fifteenth-century Florentine umanisti from whom the word ultimately derives were above all language teachers, rhetoricians, translators, and the tools they forged for their trade were the lexicon and the glossary.”1 Of course, it was this very attention to language that produced, in Thomas Greene’s potent and influential account, an intense “humanist pathos.” “A civilization discovered its cultural paths,” Greene argues, “by the light behind it of a vast holocaust, and it used this mythical light as the principle of its own energy. It made its way through ruins by the effulgence cast in their destruction, finding in privation the secret of renewal, just as Aeneas, sailing westward from the ashes of his city, carried with him the flame that had consume it burning before his Penates.”2 This pathos was the product of “the scandal of mutability, the ungrounded contingency of language,” which resulted from an adoration of ancient cultures that constituted aweinspiring precursors but who also provoked extraordinary anxiety in that they were evidence of the decay and death of languages and cultures, no matter how great.3 As such, Greene suggests, “humanist pride and humanist despair emerge as two faces of a single coin. The satisfaction of learning is repeatedly subverted by the confrontation with its tragic limits.” 4 As Greene later argues, “The sense of loss of a precious past was a common element in the humanist enterprise . . . There is no doubt that hopeful calls for revival masked deep anx ieties, fears of enduring feebleness, doubts of the given vernacular, worries over an irreversible decline in human capacities.”5 The solution, Green argues, and a concept to which this essay will return, was imitation, which, “at its richest became a technique for creating etiological constructs, unblocking—within the fiction of the work—the blockages in transmission which created humanist pathos.”6 More fundamental, then, than the triumphalism Jacob Burkhardt identified with the birth of individualism and the veneration of the ancients constitutive of Renaissance humanism in his, of late, much-critiqued The

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

285

Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is a sense of loss and pathos that must be calibrated with respect to our understanding of both the human and humanism. Take George Chapman’s iconic translation The Whole Works of Homer, Prince of Poets, In His Iliads, and Odysses, first published in 1609.7 The frontispiece features an ornate triumphal arch to blazon forth this eminent work (see Figure E-1). The figures of Achilles and Hector glare across the title, each standing before one of the two pillars supporting the arch over which a portrait of Homer sits. Homer’s portrait is framed by the figures of Mulciber and Apollo, the divine architects of Troy. Both the text of the title and the wrathful glares of Hector and Achilles connect the pillars, making a ghostly letter “H.” To turn the page of the 1616 and later editions is to find a portrait of the author facing a large H constructed of the pillars of Hercules with the text “Musar: Hercul: Colum” bridging the two columns (see Figure E-2).8 The H commemorates a death, and indeed the entire work is dedicated “To the imortall Memorie of the Incomparable Heroe. Henry Prince of Wales.” Indeed, Henry’s seal hovers over the cross-bar of the H with its motto “Ich Dien,” or “I serve.” Homer, prince of poets, and Chapman, translator of Homer, retain their faces while Henry, King James’s son and often-described as England lost hope, does not. He remains a suggestive concatenation of Hs: Henry, herculean in his heroism. But he is also the great and wise prince, the ideal to which so much humanist pedagogy was addressed, although Chapman was not Henry’s tutor but a poet seeking patronage even after the death of his would-be patron. Of course, the real prince Henry may have been more than a little skeptical of the ideal of the scholar-prince.9 In the dedicatory epistle, Chapman describes Henry as the quintessence of the human, he “in whom Humanitie to her height is raised.”10 Much of the epistle addresses not only Henry’s virtues but also poetry’s powers, which outstrip “Pillars, or Pyramids,” to secure the great prince’s memory.11 Although a measure of self-promotion and poetry booster-ism dominates the close of this epistle, what emerges early on is a portrait of the prince as a man of both great learning and native virtue. In just a few pages, so many tenets of the humanist legacy coalesce: the veneration of the ancients, the translation of ancient texts, and the prince as both humanist patron and beneficiary of humanist knowledge, and, thus, an exemplary statesman. Yet Chapman is a late product of Renaissance humanism, belated with respect

Figure E-1. Title page. [Works. English] The whole works of Homer; prince of poetts in his Iliads, and Odysses. Translated according to the Greeke, by Geo. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Figure E-2. Frontispiece. [Works. English] The whole works of Homer; prince of poetts in his Iliads, and Odysses. Translated according to the Greeke, by Geo. Folger Shakespeare Library.

288

Joseph Campana

to both its Italian origins and even its northern European exemplars, More and Erasmus. Further still, his exemplary human and humanist, Prince Henry, was already dead, making the way for the eventual disaster of Charles I. Posthumous though it is, in what does Henry’s great “humanitie” lie? It is, in this case, a product of his exceptional status. The prince is described at one moment utterly human, the next quasi-divine. The H of his name is constructed of the columns of Hercules, and he is compared by Chapman with Alexander. He dwells in the company of heroes, company Chapman dreams to associate with: Hector, Achilles, Hercules, Alexander, and of course Homer. This is no average human invoked at the opening of the great Renaissance translation of the great epic of western culture. In another literary primal scene, Hamlet launches into a monologue easily mistaken for a humanist manifesto: What a piece of work is a man—how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties, in form and moving; how express and admirable in action; how like an angel in apprehension; how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (2.2.269–74)12

Hamlet presents us with yet another “H,” yet another prince hurtling toward death, and he, too, has been associated with fundamental questions about humans, humanity, and even humanism. Mike Pincombe calls this speech “a locus classicus for the ‘philosophical’ interpretation of Renaissance humanism.”13 Alan Bullock, with reference to this very speech, refers to Hamlet as a “disillusioned humanist.”14 Ronald Knowles refers to Hamlet’s “conscious rejection of Renaissance humanism” as a kind of “counter-humanism” rooted in pessimism and skepticism about claims for the human.15 Alan Fisher designates Polonius as “Shakespeare’s last humanist,” especially in his relationship to the articulation of moral precepts and “the transfer of sage generality from an authoritative source to oneself.”16 The texture of the drama renders Polonius aggravating and often foolish but at the same time “he is a recognizable version of the kind of man that a humanist training was supposed to produce.”17 Patrick Grant locates a similarly pessimistic humanism in Hamlet, arguing, “if Hamlet is a Humanist document at all, it has the disturbed, saturnine caste of a late, exhausted Humanism tainted by disappointment and unsure of its bearings.”18 Although she notes a tendency

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

289

shared by Shakespeare and his moment “to question the prescriptions of early northern humanisms such as Erasmus and Thomas Elyot,” Aysha Pollnitz notes that Shakespeare’s transformation of the source tales for Hamlet include “the story’s relocation to a sixteenth-century court that had embraced humanist pedagogy” as part of a consideration of the relationship between the education of princes and good government.19 Robert B. Bennet finds in Hamlet that “the Augustinian emphasis on man’s fallen nature” calls “into question whether the dual goals” of what he calls “Christian humanism— spiritual purity and worldly service— are mutually compatible.”20 Referring to more contemporary humanisms, Catherine Belsey finds Hamlet to be “the unified and unique subject of liberal humanism.”21 Similarly, Neil Rhodes says of Hamlet, “This most celebrated work by the most celebrated of all writers owes its status in part to its being a blueprint both for humanism and for modernity.”22 No fewer than three contributions to the recent volume Posthumanist Shakespeare treat Hamlet, though these essays remain invested in the estrangement of the human and make little reference to humanism, Renaissance or later.23 To ask “what is humanism” might also be to ask “what is the matter with Hamlet?” Of course, what isn’t the matter with Hamlet might be the better question. That something is rotten in the state of Denmark comes as no surprise given the extraordinary attention lavished on this problem prince and problem play in a lengthy critical tradition. Hamlet’s eminently quotable sentiment enjoys not only an extraordinary life as one of the most flexible and promiscuously applied Shakespeare allusions but the rottenness in question has always seemed to resonate far beyond the plot of Shakespeare’s glacially paced revenge tragedy. T. S. Eliot, in his infamously less-thanappreciative consideration of the play, locates a particular danger in the play: Few critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often fi nd in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had

290

Joseph Campana

Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his fi rst business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift effects . . . And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interest ing, than have found it interest ing because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.24

Mystery without consequence, such is Eliot’s damning evaluation. Little lurks beneath the enigmatic smile except the dangerous capacity for “vicarious existence” provoked by the play’s protagonist. If critics look at the play and see an enigmatic smile, they look at Hamlet and see themselves. Hamlet is, in other words, a mirror. Hamlet, quite notably, invokes the very same figure of the mirror when he offers his famous tutelage in dramaturgy, advising that properly executed theater allows one to “hold, as ’t were, the mirror up to Nature,” (Hamlet 3.2.21–2). At least, this is Hamlet’s advice to the visiting players when they arrive in Elsinore. In one of several primal mirror scenes that here will concern me, Hamlet seems to be offering tutelage in humanity: Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance—that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing whose end, both at the fi rst and now, was and is to hold, as ’t were the mirror up to Nature to show Virtue her feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure . . . O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praised— and that highly—not to speak it profanely, that neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. (3.2.16–34)

If the purpose of playing is to imitate humanity, then the failure to do so suggests not merely bad per for mance but flawed creation at the hands of “Nature’s journeyman.” The bad actor—impure, profane, unchristian, and

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

291

a badly made man— can’t even manage to seem what he supposedly already, by nature, is. What is his crime? Over-, not under-, acting: trying too hard to be human. The good actor, on the other hand, does not merely reflect but shapes the nature of the real: “show Virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Clearly the easy correlation of Hamlet (or Hamlet) with any stance toward humanism can be dangerous because we must consider carefully the question of what it means to imitate humanity. Davies is keen to point out the frequent misquotation of Hamlet’s speech, which is so often rendered “What a piece of work is man” instead of “What a piece of work is a man” (my emphasis). This misquotation appears, Davies points out, even in Bullock’s The Humanist Tradition in the West and resonates, Davies argues, with a misreading of Pico della Mirandola’s famous treatise translated as Oration on the Dignity of Man, though neither titled that by its author nor even translated into English until the mid-twentieth century. The reception of the speech is similarly structured by misapprehensions: first, that Pico’s oration stands behind Hamlet’s soliloquy, and second, that Pico’s oration presents “a portentous evocation of a transcendent ‘Man.’ ” Hamlet’s reference to a man, Davies argues, “exposes the extent to which, unlike later humanisms, the writing of fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century humanists is explicitly and self-consciously entangled in the problematics of sexual difference.”25 Shakespeare may not have been thinking of Pico when he penned Hamlet’s ambivalent paean to man, but Shakespeare and Pico alike struggle with the question of what it means to hold a mirror up to either man or to nature. Pico certainly extols the virtuosity of the human, asking “Who is there that does not wonder at man?”26 Man is, after all, the recipient of an extraordinary capacity for self-fashioning, for “It is given to him to have that which he chooses and to be that which he wills.” Pico admits, of course, that this might result in an ascent or a decline on the scale of being: If he cultivates vegetable seeds, he will become a plant. If the seeds of sensation, he will grow into a brute. If intellectual, he will be an angel, and a son of God. And if he is not contented with the lot of any creature but takes himself up into the center of his own unity, then, made one spirit with God and settled in the solitary darkness of the Father, who is above all things, he will stand ahead of all things.27

292

Joseph Campana

Certainly Pico articulates a sense of human priority, and yet in what is this privilege rooted? Man may have the capacity to “stand ahead of all things” but this is a passageway through “the solitary darkness of the Father.” Human nature may experience none of the limits of lesser creatures, but in truth it also has, as Pico ventriloquizes in the voice of God to Adam: “no fixed seat, no form of their very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire.”28 Later, Pico states more directly, “man fashions, fabricates, transforms himself into the shape of all flesh, into the character of every creature” for “man is not any inborn image of himself but many images coming in from the outside . . . man is an animal of diverse, multiform, and destructible nature.”29 For Laurie Shannon, this makes a “menagerie” or “bestiary” of man who contains all potential qualities.30 Yet it seems equally true when Andreas Höfele, in sympathy with Giorgio Agamben, describes this moment as the exposure of a rift in the humanity.31 Indeed, Pico here seems to refer to capacity not actuality. That is to say, until he aspires, the human is that which has no qualities. Let us remember how that exemplary natural historian, Pliny, understood man: as a creature that is belated and naked, with capacity only to weep and learn. Pliny, here rendered by Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation, arrives at man partway through his treatise, although he protests, seven books too late, that “to make a good entrance into this treatise and historie, me thinkes of right we ought to begin at Man, for whose sake it should seeme that Nature made and produced all other creatures besides.”32 But before the celebration of human dignity begins, Pliny begins to discourse on the miserable and belated nature of man: this great favour of hers [Nature’s], so bountifull and beneficiall in that respect, hath cost them full deare . . . For first and formost, of all other living creatures, man she hath brought forth all naked, and cloathed him with the good riches of others. To all the rest, given she hath sufficient to clad them everie one according to their kind . . . man alone, poore wretch, she hath laid all naked upon the bare earth, even on his birth-day, to cry and wraule presently from the very fi rst houre that he is borne into this world: in such sort, as among so many living creatures, there is none subiect to shed teares and weepe like him . . . The child of man thus untowardly borne, and who another day is to rule and commaund all other, loe how he lyeth bound hand

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

293

and foot, weeping and crying, and beginning his life with miserie, as if he were sent into this world to make amends and satisfaction by his punishment unto Nature, for this onely fault and trespasse, that he is borne alive.33

Much was made of the misery of man in the era of Renaissance humanism, a subject to which scholars have recently returned. But I want to pause a moment here on one facet of that misery, which is not merely nakedness or the weeping but that man suffers for having been born alive and is as such “untowardly borne.” In truth, the word “untowardly” was already being used to describe a perverse or willful nature as early as Tyndale, though the more likely significance here would be, “Not having or showing inclination, disposition, or readiness to or for something; disinclined” (OED, untoward). Man has neither disposition nor inclination nor even that quality Hamlet so famously prioritizes when he claims, “readiness is all” (Hamlet 5.2.160). Animals, however, have all that man lacks in having a nature: “As for all other living creatures,” Pliny argues, “there is not one, but by a secret instinct of nature knoweth his owne good, and whereto he is made able . . . man onely knoweth nothing unlesse hee be taught; he can neither speake, nor goe, nor ear, other wise than he is trained to it: and to be short, apt and good at nothing he is naturally, but to pule and crie.”34 One answer to the question—“What does Hamlet see when he holds a mirror up to man?”— would be pure aspiration, which is also to say nothing as yet actualized. So, what did “Renaissance man” see when he looked into a mirror? Maybe the mirror itself: Was there anything else to see if man was, manifestly, nothing at all? It seems there was little more appealing than a mirror in early modernity.35 I do not, of course, mean actual mirrors, the mirror as object or technology in the age of Shakespeare, fascinating as that may be. To be sure, mirror devices, though they sometimes take center stage, weren’t really needed in a literary ecosystem in which every standing pool or even the liquid pools of the eyes offered up a reflective surface. There were mirrors everywhere, which is to say texts that reflected, reflected on, and projected an ideal-real ity: Instructive works for princes and magistrates especially abounded, but they were not the only figures whose reflection thinkers hoped to shape in their fun-house factories. Moreover, early modern authors were never more revealing than when they were on the offense. It was an age of attacks, defenses, prologues, epilogues, and apologies

294

Joseph Campana

written in a combative style sharpened by skewering the perceived enormities of others. In such jagged mirrors one gets a view of what it means to try— and often fail—to imitate humanity. Take, for instance, the 1587 polemic A Mirrour of Monsters, “compiled” as the title pages indicate, by Will Rankin and “Wherin is plainely described the manifold, & spotted enormities, that are caused by the infection sight of Playes, with the description of the subtile slights of Sathan, making them his instruments.” Rankin, who travels abroad to test his native virtue against the “common condition of other countries,” visits Terralbon, a place “so godlie in gouvernmement, so politique in proceedings, so walled for warre, and fortified with freends, that it is hard to be censured whether the place be more blessed, for the plentie of all things, necessarie for a flourishing commonwealth, or for the tranquillous peace it continuallie enjoieth.”36 Yet something is rotten in the state of Terralbon: the theater. In a punishing screed against thespians, Rankin begins to imagine them in a series of shockingly varied forms. They are consuming caterpillars, canckers, muddie motes, painted sepulchres, masses of rotten bones, wels without water, dead branches, cockle amongst corn, unwholesome weeds, fiends, serpents, rude beats, insatiate monsters, the limbs of Satan, and minotaurs. It takes little time for the average Renaissance polemic to heat up, and this holds true for Rankin. But to look in Rankin’s mirror is to see two things: a cascade of creaturely referents (animal, vegetable, and mineral; living, dead, and otherwise) that, in attempting to capture the depravity of the actor, confuse the status of the human actor as a life form; and the figure of a monster uncannily like the figure of Pliny’s (and arguably Pico’s and Hamlet’s) man. “Vnder colour of humanitie,” Rankin writes, “they present nothing but prodigious vanitie”: “vanitie” or, in other words, nothing. Rankin’s dark tone may attract our attention, but beneath his attack lies the figure of the human as an actor in crisis. A fundamentally privative conception of the human comes to the fore in the trope of the human as an actor upon the stage that is the world. The human lacks definition, experiences a radical plasticity and, as a consequence, tends toward imitation. Such notions link together disparate texts, from Hamlet’s celebration of the power of theatrical players to Rankin’s antitheatrical assault to humanist Juan Luis Vives’s 1518 A Fable About Man, which features just such a per for mance of the human before a council of gods, evoking at first wonder and amazement at the plasticity of the crea-

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

295

ture but then shock and discomfort when the human imitates Jove. Here’s the “what a piece of work is a man” moment from that text: “There were no cheers to greet him but a silence of wonder. The whole man lay bare, showing the immortal gods his nature akin to theirs, this nature which, covered with mask and body, had made of him an animal so diverse, so desultory, so changing like a polypus and a chameleon, as they had seen him on stage.”37 We will come back to the polypus and chameleon that is man, but whether in bono or in malo, the human is most characterized by a plasticity that reveals little beneath it. A radical and at times theatrical plasticity characterizes the human for Pico, Vives, Rankin, and arguably Shakespeare. While Hamlet suggests that unskillful performance provokes the failure to imitate humanity, references to children’s companies in the Folio text of Hamlet locate that unsettling plasticity in the figure of the boy actor. Indeed, as Hamlet asks after the welfare of the visiting players, Rosencrantz indicates their fall in favor, which is explained by the growing taste for children’s companies. But there is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for’t. These are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills and dare scarce come thither. (F 2.2.337–42)

Scholars and editors regularly unpack the topical references here with respect to the use of children as mouthpieces in the war of the theaters. But these children are not merely pawns in the theatrical rivalries of the day. We might say Rosencrantz dehumanizes these children when they become a predatory, avian swarm, “an eyrie of children, little eyases.” Yet Hamlet’s response, which considers their status and their welfare, may not in fact be a sign of compassion as some have argued.38 What, are they children? Who maintains ’em? How are they escotted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards if they should grow themselves to common players—as it is most like if their means are no better— their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession? (F 2.2.343–7)

Where do these children fit in the creaturely scheme in which man is “paragon of animals” but also “quintessence of dust?” Certainly, they seem to

296

Joseph Campana

imitate humanity poorly. The source of the problem may be the texts written by playwrights engaged in the war of the theaters, but these children perform in the very overdone manner Hamlet decries earlier in the scene. Yet overdoing offers these children an almost heroic quality with a teasing reference to Hercules. Hamlet asks, “Do the boys carry it away?” to which Rosencrantz responds “Ay, that they do, my lord—Hercules and his load to” (F.2.2359–60). Hercules was not only the ancient hero and laborer but also the figure featured on a flag at Shakespeare’s Globe, literally bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders and acting the part of a patron saint of strenuous art of theater. These references to boy actors, I would suggest, are not only topical referents to the war of the theaters but also indices of a primary concern for Renaissance humanism: the maturation of children and the share of humanity acquired in the process. In other words, the child is a problem because it must be educated into its humanity, and yet its adult humanity is potentially at war with its pre-human childhood. As such, it is both not-yet or not-quite human and quintessentially human in its radically plastic nature. As Michael Witmore puts it, “Physically slight and fine of feature, children seemed to be stamped from a preternaturally flexible medium, one that—like the stuff of imagination—was subject to its own kind of physics, indifferent to the brute necessities of matter and motion.”39 This explains, Witmore argues, the “deep association of children with mimesis and imaginative absorption,” a pronouncement echoed by Blaine Greteman in his assertion of the child’s “unthinking mimesis” in a study of Milton and the relationship between youth and political consent.40 Rather than a developmental figure superseded by the adult human (but to which, in certain circumstances the human might return), the child represents an intensification of the plastic, mimetic nature of all humanity. In Hamlet’s evocative phrase “imitate humanity” lie two distinct problems. First, there is the problem of what humanity is, considering its lack of content and unsettling plasticity. The figure of the child represents an intensification of that plasticity. The child is, at once, not yet human and quintessentially human. Second, and consequently, there is the problem of imitation, which can be both a symptom of that radical plasticity and a solution to it, in the form of pedagogically deployed imitative practice. Thus the problem of defining what is it to be human or have humanity is inextricably linked to imitation.

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

297

The impulse to imitate derives directly from the privation humans experience from birth. “Since [Nature] lets us be born ignorant and absolutely skilless of all arts,” Vives argues, “we require imitation.”41 The consequence of being untowardly born, it seems, is to be born overly malleable, although that malleability is often described in quite familiar language addressing the child’s potential. William Bullein’s The Government of Health: A Treatise describes them in accordance with the familiar conventions of humoral disposition as “hot and moist, very like unto the seed whereof they bee procreated.”42 Henry Cuff’s The Difference of Ages paints a similar portrait of the plasticity of children. “Our infancy,” he argues is, “full of moisture, as the fluid soft substance of our flesh manifestly declareth: our youth bringeth a farther degree of solidity.”43 Childhood, Cuff continues, is like “the spring, where in all things together with a pleasant verdour and greenesse flourish and by a plentifull supply of moisture continually increase in growth.” 44 What Cuff calls the “budding and blossoming age” connects incipient humanity (or childhood) to a tangle of vegetative language reminiscent of both the Aristotelian vegetative soul and widespread horticultural metaphors in educational texts. Ptolemaic astrology also plays a part in constructions of the ages of man; youth was similarly conceived of in the language of plasticity. The “Infant age is allotted to the moones milde and moist dominion” while in “Boy-hood, Mercury hath charge over, inclining us to sportfulnesse, talk, and learning.”45 Moist and malleable, mercurial and sportful: plasticity is associated with infancy, with childhood, and particularly with the age of learning, which explains the educational edifice that comes to be built around the child to deploy imitation to stabilize the overly mimetic nature of the malleable child. Indeed, medical treatises were not the only source of what have become clichés about the nature of childhood potential. England’s great pedagogue, Roger Ascham, argues that “the pure clean wit of a sweet young babe is, like the newest wax, most able to receive the best and fairest printing and, like a new bright silver dish never occupied, to receive and keep clean and good thing that is put into it.”46 The receptivity that makes the child suitable for impression also inspires a cascade of metaphors. Ascham continues, Every man sees (as I said before) new wax is best for printing, new clay fittest for working, new shorn wool aptest for soon and surest dyeing, new fresh flesh

298

Joseph Campana

for good and durable salting . . . Young grafts grow not only soonest but also fairest, and bring always forth the best and sweetest fruit; young whelps learn easily to carry; young popinjays learn quickly to speak.47

Rebecca Bushnell, Mary Thomas Crane, Wayne Rebhorn, and Pollnitz amongst others have noted the prominence of horticultural imagery in accounts of the instruction of children.48 Italian humanist educator Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini claims that “just as farmers place fences around their young trees, so it is the duty of your instructors to encircle you with teachings in keeping with a praiseworthy life and with admonitions from which the shoots of the most correct morals will germinate, for to receive a proper education is the source and root of virtue.”49 Erasmus too argued that “the seeds of morality must be sown in the virgin soil of [the child’s] infant soul so that, with age and experience, they may gradually germinate and mature and, once they are set, may be rooted in him throughout his whole life.”50 In spite of the prevalence of such horticultural metaphors, Erasmus is not alone in comparing the child to beasts. “There is no wild animal so fierce and savage,” he argues, “that it cannot be controlled by the persistent attention of a trainer. Why should he think that any human spirit is so hopelessly crude it will not respond to painstaking education?”51 The larger point is not the exclusively animal or vegetable nature of the child but rather that its plasticity inspires a cascade of comparative referents, from wax to seeds and shoots to clay to wool to beast. To put the mirror up to the human or trace the lineaments of the H in human is, for Giorgio Agamben, to locate a fundamental lack. In his influential The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben makes reference to an “anthropological machine,” by which he means that set of concepts and operations that establish the category of the human, a machine that makes “the human” through a series of strategic distinctions and interrelations from “the animal.” With reference to Pico’s Oration, Agamben claims, “The anthropological machine of humanism is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human—and, this, his being always less and more than himself . . . The humanist discovery of man is the discovery that he lacks himself.”52 Agamben’s prose here is as provocative as it is problematic. His schema recognizes two anthropological machines, one

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

299

classical and one modern. In what broken middle does the Oration rest in a text that leaps, in the space of one sentence, from Pico to Linnaeus? Moreover, some might wonder how representative Pico’s view is. More importantly, to dwell on some lack at the center of the human is perhaps to miss the radical plasticity that I have traced here; this leads me to consolidate a series of theses about what it means to think of humanity and humanism through the imitative compulsion in the human, one localized particularly in the figure of the child, which represents both what is not (or not yet) and what is quintessentially human. First, then, the so-called human is not the placeholder of a constitutive lack but, rather, a creature marked by radical plasticity. Plasticity is its content. The attempt to hold the mirror up to that human is thus to encounter a cascade failure of intelligibility. The human is always the failure of the human because the designation human dwells in possibility: It is aspirational. This failure, which manifests itself here in a dizzying array of potential identities and identifications across forms and states of life, elicits an elaborate set of technologies of compensation, correction, and repair, which we might call humanism. Nowhere is this more clear than in Rankin or Vives, in which the human struggles to attain one singular and defining form but, rather, cascades through a series of life forms. The cascade failure of the human, which is a process that elicits continuous reparative response, forces us to reconsider moments of mirroring for the extent to which they reveal a constitutive and even, at times, uncontrollable imitative impulse, which may be one of the few defining features of the so-called human. This would be not merely to trouble the border between human and non-human or to dislodge the supremacy of the human or to insist upon interdependence of the human and the non-human (I take all three propositions to have been asserted usefully in recent criticism) but rather to find new ways of calibrating proximity and cohabitation—(to borrow from John Donne) the “before, behind, between, above, below” of the milieu humans share with many others. The mirror has been a potent figure for calibrating proximity between human and other forms of life, from Hamlet’s rumination on the imitation of humanity to contemporary queries about the web of analogy that links together human and non-human life. Arguably, recent theories of mirroring and imitation, especially those invoking the status of the human, might be seen as the distant descendants of Hamlet. The problem Jacques

300

Joseph Campana

Derrida raises in The Beast and the Sovereign as the problem of analogy, which we might describe as the extended metaphorization of animals, Donna Harraway famously describes as the problem of the “animal mirror”: “People like to look at animals, even to learn from them about human beings and human society . . . We polish an animal mirror to look at ourselves.”53 So often the consequence of such analogy is to denude creatures of life in the interest of a kind of forced labor of signification. Non-human creatures are reduced either to allegorical exemplarity, as if composed of no more than imitable or inimitable qualities, or to objects subject to the oftenviolent production of knowledge. But perhaps mirrors offer a stranger view of the human and the non-human than we expect. Perhaps that mirror is even stranger when we ask ourselves what happens when the figure that appears in the animal mirror is the figure of the child. For in spite of a couple decades of scholarship problematizing notions of the human and the animal in early modernity, the child has played relatively little part in such conversations. The animal and child coalesce in the act of imitating humanity in one the more famous of twentieth- century mirror moments: Jacques Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function.” It is hard not to be captivated by the mirror fascination in this, one of the founding texts of the un-founding of the subject who, from a very young age, is oriented toward a specular fictional of coherence. How quickly we tend to speed past the two, fascinating non-human moments in the text. The first makes reference to the infamous mirror test, which for some determine which species possess consciousness as a kind of self-awareness proven by the recognition of one’s own image in a mirror. While Gordon Gallup is often credited with developing the test, earlier versions were conducted by Charles Darwin and Wolfgang Kohler, the latter appearing on the first page of Lacan’s essay. Thus, Lacan’s point is that, while chimpanzees have greater instrumental attention than young children, the child “can already recognize his own image in such a mirror.”54 At this point, the chimpanzee exits and the 18-month old human appears ready for its close-up in the mirror stage: For the total form of the body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage, is given to him only as a gestalt, that is, in an exteriority in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

301

constituted . . . this gestalt, whose power [pregnance] should be considered linked to the species, though its motor style is as yet unrecognizable— symbolizes the I’s mental permanence, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination.55

How easy to leap forward to the “alienating destination” at the end of the sentence, but I want to dwell for a moment on the phrase “whose power should be considered linked to the species.” Just moments later, to bolster his case about what appears to be a basic mimetic drive or inclination in the human, Lacan waxes eloquent on the subject of pigeon gonads: The fact that a gestalt may have formative effects on an organism is attested to by a biological experiment that is so far removed from the idea of psychical causality that it cannot bring itself to formulate itself in such terms. The experiment nevertheless acknowledges that it is a necessary condition for the maturation of the female pigeon’s gonad that the pigeon see another member of its species, regardless of its sex; this condition is so utterly sufficient that the same effect may be obtained by merely placing a mirror’s reflective field near the individual. Similarly, in the case of the migratory locust, the shift within a family line from the solitary to the gregarious form can be brought about by exposing an individual, at a certain stage of its development, to the exclusively visual action of an image akin to its own, provided the movements of this image sufficiently resemble those characteristic of its species.56

Lacan is cagy, moments later, when he considers applying the limiting term “nature” to describe humans, and yet the mirror stage seems to be based on a basic mimetic inclination written, if differently, into the organic structures of pigeon, locust, and human infant. Each hears the call of similitude or is called upon to respond to mirror images or to imitate, to strut and fret on a mirror stage in a strenuous act of resemblance. Are these three forms of life so dif ferent after all? Resemblance lurks also at the heart of one more recent moment of mirror fascination: the mirror neuron, which looms large in the thought of Paolo Virno. Virno argues for an original “co-feeling” between members of any species—the human species, for instance—rooted in a form of reciprocal recognition itself rooted in mirror neurons. What disrupts this paradise of co-feeling? Propositional thought and language: “Language inoculates negativity into the life of the species. It enables the failure of reciprocal

302

Joseph Campana

recognition. The linguistic animal is the species capable of not recognizing its own kind.”57 We are wired for reciprocity, according to Virno, but the entry into language, which humanizes the yet-to-be-human child, ruins the possibility of co-feeling. We look at performances of the human and fail to be moved. How, then, to realize Virno’s goal, a politics whose “eminent duty is to experiment with new and more effective ways of negating negation, of placing ‘not’ in front of ‘not human?’ ”58 But whether we endorse or decry Lacan or Virno, or place trust in mirror tests or mirror neurons, Renaissance languages of mirroring, resemblance, and similitude might provide more nuanced ways of describing humanity, the human, and even humanism. The cascade failure of intelligibility that constitutes the human renders particularly visible a series of performances before mirrors, which reveal the constitutively and contagiously imitative nature of the human in its most concentrated forms, the child. Myriad are the modalities of reference for the child of the Shakespearean corpus. Take The Winter’s Tale, in which, in a single scene, the perhaps-mad King Leontes hails his son, Mamillius, in at least thirteen dif ferent ways: boy, bawcock, copy, calf, egg, page, collop, villain, kernel, squash, friend, man, squire.59 This by-no-means-exhaustive list begs a certain question: Do all of these referents exist in a state of similitude or equivalence with respect to the opening term “boy”? The list includes human and socially marked referents aplenty, to be sure, but a full half of this list render the monarch’s offspring as animal (bawcock, calf), vegetable (kernel, squash), book (copy and, arguably, page), and partial or synecdochal object (collop, egg, Mamillius). The murdered princes of Richard III are rendered mineral (“innocent alabaster arms,” RIII 4.3), animal (lambs), angelic, and vegetative (“unblown flowers,” roses, and lilies, which they share with the eventually-extinguished would-be boy-king Arthur in King John). Arthur, usurped and utilized by every power broker in the play, glides like a phantom through many figurations, appearing as or associated with personifications of Death, Grief, and Commodity and, less allegorically, with monstrous births and rotting corpses. Animal, vegetable, mineral, angel, allegory, corpse, child. Should we add to the list the changeling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Augment our vegetative child with references to the sonnets? Should we add to the list the “vials of blood” Blanche deploys to denote the children of Edward III or the

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

303

“fruit” and “graff” to which Lucrece refers in imagining the bastard product of her violation in The Rape of Lucrece? Child as pool of blood, child as fruit, as life itself, as revenant. How much simpler it is to think of Leontes’s opposite, his childhood friend and “twinned lamb,” Polixenes, whose son Florizel is simply “my parasite, my soldier, statesman, all.” Apparently, it’s more sovereign than beast in Bohemia. Still, was Leontes merely mad, driven by “Affection” to an insanely cascading catalogue of species and type-defying monikers for Mamillius, or does he have a point? Let’s assume that he does. Why do conversations about the non-human rarely devote significant attention to the figure of child? Why are children all-too-human even as figurations of childhood in early modernity range from little adult to little beast, with way-stations in between. Early modern discourses position the child in a state of teasing similitude to the animal with respect to forms of depravity and irrationality that threaten, yet also define the precarious state of the human. The study of non-human figures and an early modern animalhuman divide has fostered fascinating work on personhood, rationality, and human exceptionalism. Yet to what extent should such projects account for children? It is not that the child is wholly absent. Rebecca Ann Bach includes but does not really discuss children in the “animal continuum” she detects in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while Erica Fudge, Bruce Boehrer, and Witmore spare a little time for the (ir)rationality of child. But is this the promised end? Let’s recall that Leontes encounters Mamillius as yet another of these cascade failures of the human. “Art thou my boy?” he asks at first in response to his jealousy at the spectacle of physical gestures of affection between Hermione and Polixenes. But the anxiety comes to rest in the figure of the child, not the wife: “They say it is a copy out of mine.” Desperate for affirmation from his child, Leontes badgers him, “How now, you wanton calf! / Art thou my calf?” before getting to his real concern. Leontes’s famous crisis of faith in his wife (and even in his own wits) is juxtaposed with a desperation to affirm a world in which the past determines present and future, a desperation posed genealogically in the necessity of utter resemblance between father and son (no “bourn” or boundary between one and the other). Indeed, Mamillius must not only resemble his father (a copy) but, more importantly, be another iteration of him: “Looking on the lines of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil 23 years,” Leontes admits. His ambition

304

Joseph Campana

is not only to return to a pastoral, pre-sexual world of homosocial and homoerotic friendship and fostering bonds with Polixenes but to replace, entirely, his child as the link in a chain of unimpeachable paternity that can no longer be assailed by figures of falseness: women, water, wind, and dice. Mamillius assents simply with “I am like you they say.” Yet what Leontes identifies as “falseness” we might identify simply as the signatures of a radical mutability associated with the child and also with forms of futurity soon to be (and yet not quite yet) manageable by technologies of risk, insurance, and decision. Whether early or post-modern, conversations about the animal-human divide—or about the human–non-human divide—have tended to leave children aside. We miss something in strictly presuming the humanity or animality (or even vegetality) of the child. What if the child is best categorized as neither human nor animal but of the order Pliny identifies, of being born alive? Rather than understanding that as sentimental—the human as child, as weeping, naked thing—we might understand the child, so often rendered in vegetative terms, as an opportunity for examining roots and forms of life. We might understand the child as the elusive figure in the mirror; as the letter h that initiates our reflections on humans, humanity, and humanism; as the uncontrollable impulse to mimic and the cascade of life forms that results. In the annals of science memes, a recent YouTube sensation has been the mimic octopus, or thaumoctopus mimicus, which is often described as the first known species to intentionally take on the characteristics of multiple species and is referred to as “nature’s greatest actor.”60 If we understand Renaissance humanism as a series of systems resulting from the fact that the human constantly performs a crisis of imitation, we might be forced to concede “what a piece of work is a man” because “what a piece of work is a child.” Is the child, then, the mirror of the human or the mirror of humanism? Thus far, the child has appeared as an exemplary instance of human plasticity, which is linked to a sometimes seemingly uncontrollable mimicry. Witmore and Greteman, too, suggest that the child was associated with mirrors. Thus, Witmore sees the child as “a connection to some universally shared capacity for play and imposture” while also invoking “the Stoic image of the child as speculum naturae, or ‘mirror of nature.’ ”61 As Greteman puts it, “The child playing with a mirror was an extraordinarily common

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism 62

305

image to figure the child’s mimetic being.” And yet, what if the child is not merely a mirror, greedily imitating, but, rather, a mirror test for humanity? Both Witmore and Greteman cite John Earle’s defi nition in Microcosmographie: “A Childe is a man in a small Letter, yet the best Copie of Adam before he tasted of Eve, or the Apple; and hee is happy whose small practice in the World can only write this Character. He is natures fresh picture newly drawn in Oyle, which time and much handling, dimmes and defaces. His Soule is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurr’d Note-booke.”63 Greteman, following Witmore, indexes this moment as proof of child mimicry. And yet if the child is a speculum naturae, for Stoic philosophers and for Renaissance thinkers alike, it is because the child is an exemplary instance of the human, “a man in small Letter, yet the best Copie of Adam.” Although the child is described as a “white paper unscribbled with observations of the world” this does not indicate a child empty of content until written upon. Indeed, the world writes upon the child and in so doing sullies and obscures. Moreover, Greteman quotes Apples of Gold, with Pictures of Silver: “The natural man is just like a Child, that (beholding his natural face in a glass) he thinks he sees another Childs face, and not his own. We do not love our selves above others; then we see others better then our selves.” 64 What is interest ing here is, again, the extent to which the child is both the face of the adult human—the distillation of a species tendencies—and a kind of mirror test for the human. In one sense, the human, as child, fails the test in failing to recognize the self in a mirror. In another and perhaps more power ful sense, however, this failed test of self-reflexivity indicates an outward, ethical orientation, as “we do no love our selves above others.” In looking at the child as a small letter, a copy of Adam, and as a creature seeking something outside of and better than itself, do we find the human in Renaissance humanism by failing the very mirror test that would become a primary means of isolating, in singularity, one exemplary species? Imagine humanism as a series of letters in a state of constant rearrangement and therefore spelling a series of shifting, resonant concepts. Or, imagine humanism as a series of mirror tests. Indeed, the child is not the only mirror test we encounter in an effort to understand the perhapsparadoxical formulation “Renaissance Posthumanism.” For Kenneth Gouwens, we might say the mirror test of posthumanism, the revelatory mirror

306

Joseph Campana

of self-assessment, is Renaissance humanism precisely because of the temptation of novelty. Posthumanism is best understood, then, not as yet another gesture toward supersession (poststructuralist, postmodern, posthuman, or even post-contemporary) but rather a phenomenon seeking contact with habits of skeptical inquiry and disputation. Thus it is not the case that, say, familiar notions of human dignity provide the primary test of humans or humanism in the Renaissance, although that topic, with its ramifications for how we understand the capacities humans do or do not share with other life forms, remained important if contested. Thus “the humanist era of that moment helped to prepare the way for current discussions of the human, and more generally may prompt us to appreciate our indebtedness to the past for tools and concepts that are too often put forward as unprecedented.” Interestingly enough, although the ambivalent attention to dignity has seemed to provide a kind of mirror test for Renaissance humanism, Gouwens makes clear that we might turn our attention to searching, skeptical disputation as a signature of what is both human and humanist. Humanist disputation might serve the function of what Jacques Derrida calls for in The Beast and the Sovereign when he describes his task as a “slow and differentiated” and a “prudent, patient, laborious deconstruction” of human sovereignty.65 Humanist disputation might also serve to jam the gears of Agamben’s “anthropological machine.” And yet as Stephen Campbell indicates, to engage with Renaissance humanism is to understand a more fundamental deconstruction than that of the distinction between human and non-human in “the slow, methodical, unemotive, and above all non-tragic annihilation of the marvelous creature Marsyas.” To be sure, a kind of test emerges in the way painting mirrors human form and in so doing explores profoundly denaturing forms of violence that make questionable assertions of human singularity. But if Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas is a test of humanism, it is so because scholars such as Erwin Panofsky codified a series of humanist icons that ironically call into question fundamental categories of figure and ground which, far from solely aesthetic markers, index the problem of distinguishing between creature and environment. Of course, this story of humanism as a slow and patient deconstruction of the logics of human sovereignty and exceptionalism poses a spatial and a temporal paradox that Judith Roof identifies with Rabelais. For Roof, the

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

307

mirror text is a Silenic box that confounds distinctions of inside and outside, anterior and posterior. And given that this volume attempts to account for Renaissance humanism as that which did not, in fact, provide the foundations of a naïve if potent human-centered humanism, what is there to deconstruct when, as Roof puts it, “humanism had always already been borne by its apparent successor as a condition of its coming into being at all.” Thus distinctions between humanism and posthumanism, father and child, birth and ordure become perilously and preposterously intertwined. Rabelais offers us another Marsyas-like, confounding creature in the hybrid figure of Silenus. To remember that Silenus was tutor to the young god Dionysus we see another paradoxical formulation. The Dionysian implies a loosening of structures and yet education, which had such a fundamental role to play in Renaissance humanism, implies just the opposite. What, indeed, is it to be tutored by such a hybrid figure? In what was does education in humanism reside if not a Silenic box? To follow Holly Dugan from the twisting paths of romance to the emergence of natural history, from Alexander to Edward Topsell, is to identify the role sexual violence plays in the test of both humanity and humanistic efforts to catalogue and codify the natural world. The mirror test Dugan locates in the Life of Alexander is whether the “ravishment of human women mark the domain of the human or of the animal.” To think of bestialization as, quite conventionally, that tendency of the human to be always in danger of surrendering rationality and descending into animality is to ignore the extent to which appropriate sexuality might require brutality. Humanism is the mechanism that ambivalently attends not only to the transmutation of “romance” into “natural history” but also that governs the sexualization of the “man” in the human. To ignore that mechanism is to “ignore the terrain on which the question of species boundaries is continuously posed” that is to say gender, and to misconstrue both the history of humanism and the history of sexual violence. Dugan and Erica Fudge both raise critical questions about the relationship between articulations of the human in humanism and articulations of the non-human in the resurgence of natural history in the Renaissance. The rise of humanistic inquiry spurred the formation of communities whose members were part of a series of conversations about the nature of the human and the nature of knowledge itself. And yet what if Renaissance humanism

308

Joseph Campana

has seemed to fail the test of posthumanism because of a limiting vision of what constitutes the archive of the past? Thus Fudge seeks in the margins and ellipses, the wills and testaments of seventeenth-century England, a way of accounting not some great metaphysical dance related to the great chain of being, but, rather, the ontological choreography that binds humans and animals in formations we consider central to the history of humanism, like friendship. It isn’t so much that Fudge asks if, say, cows had a Renaissance, than that she asks if the ossification of humanistic inquiry in Bacon or Milton, limits our understanding of how widely cherished were the “vivid expressions of what the orthodox philosophy of the age holds that a human should be.” If at times Renaissance Posthumanism suggests that the founding texts of humanism disrupt such orthodox philosophies, it remains equally important to look elsewhere in the period—to “tacit knowledges” (21)—for some sense of what puts the h in humanism and for some sense of what humans might have seen looking back at them when they looked into any of the animal mirrors of the era. Take the parchment Jack Cade stares at in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, to which Julian Yates directs our attention. What stares back when he, like Fudge, seeks “the occluded or silent actors than enable the writing of one par tic u lar world”? For Fudge those occluded and silent actors live in the margins of texts seemingly lowlier than the great texts of the Renaissance, while for Yates the materiality of what have become great texts offers not the face of the perfect and proportioned human but a multispecies archive produced by “the shifting relations between variously human persons, sheep, cows, goats, dogs, wolves, and grass as large swaths of land were transformed from arable, agricultural use or tillage to pasturage, recoding labor relations, land use, and status in the process.” Thus to consider sheep— from the skin of books to the shepherds of pastoral to encomia addressed to sheep to the evolution of enclosure—is to learn that “one way to write the being we have called ‘human’ differently is to alter the way ‘sheep’ as well as other beings (goats, dogs, wolves, ticks, etc.) with whom we come into being are written also.” Like Fudge and Yates, Vin Nardizzi forces us to consider what test the archive poses to emerging ideas of posthumanism, Renaissance or other wise. The archive seems to reveal not the perfection of the human as measure of all things but, rather, the failed performance of humanity, like Hamlet’s im-

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

309

perfect actor, whose natural state seems to be a kind of woodenness that places the human in companionship with both the vegetative world and the materiality of Renaissance theatrical structures, which are themselves composed of wood. If we thus take the “post” in posthumanism in this very dif ferent way with “a wooden actor at the center of the wooden O, theater inadvertently discloses the radical contingency of its success and, in so doing, runs the risk of unleashing unruly beasts— audience members—on the actor and the stage.” In a sense, the wooden actors complicate the way we think of the great mirror test of theater, at least the emerging naturalistic theater for which Shakespeare is so often praised, which would be the test of liveliness or aliveness. The very theatrical discourses that condemned wooden actors, over-actors, and children for their excessive or insufficient imitations of the human identify something distinctively and uncannily unhuman at the heart of the human, making the imitation of life always an art, which is to say a techne. Perhaps then larger questions asked, of late, with respect to the nature of the life of life forms might prudently be asked with respect to the simulation of life in the age that witnessed the coincident rise of both Renaissance humanism and naturalistic theater. Like Nardizzi, Diane Wolfthal tests the human and fi nds something wooden at its heart, though for Wolfthal the peculiar manifestation of the vegetative occurs in a long-standing and visually well-documented obsession with the mandrake. Like Dugan and Fudge, Wolfthal locates a fascinating fracture between classicizing mythic discourses of human-plant hybrids, such as the myth of Daphne, and the emergence of discourses of natural history ever more anxious to uphold a new scientific standard. And yet an ever more fascinating fracture occurs in images of the historically anthropomorphic mandrake as sexual difference comes to the fore. For although it is easy, to see the “man” in mandrake in images and in folk beliefs that mandrakes sprouted from the urine or semen of men, Abraham Bosse’s 1650 etching of a mandrake depicts “an image of a woman’s lower body topped by foliage.” What to make of such mysterious figurations? Is this one more signature of the reduction of the female body to mere sexual and reproductive function or do these mandrakes sustain a connection to ancient and often-unruly discourses of fertility and naked sexuality in spite of the potent desire of natural historians “to purge their publication of any remnants of superstition and depend instead on observation”?

310

Joseph Campana

What kind of mirror is a rock? Is a stony orator more or less potent than a wooden actor? How do we test the efficacy of the per for mance of the human, whether that performance is conducted by men, boys, rocks, or tree? Certainly, the discourse of the lithic in medieval and early modern studies in on the rise, leaving us to ask how this familiar metaphor for imperviousness to human affect might, in fact, reveal something more than merely metaphorical in an affectively redolent contact zone Lara Bovilsky identifies in a “common emotional ground between human and mineral.” These mineral experiences do not merely reflect but seem, in fact, to shape human affective and ethical states. We might say, in fact, that one holds a mirror up to nature to see how to convey, experience, and communicate a broad range of emotional experience. Why, indeed, imitate humanity when the “human affect resonates with metal, wood, and stone, it would seem, at varied frequencies.” The example of Julius Caesar moreover suggests that such resonances remain central to how a polity or, more appropriately, commons would be understood and even activated in various political contexts. Perhaps the idea of a commons is then best understood in the “common ground” Bovilsky identifies, which very much includes the ground itself. Harraway warned us of what happens when we look into animal mirrors only to see ourselves looking back. But how capacious, now, must be the mirrors in which we look to find the human and corresponding humanisms? Human or animal-sized, child- or mandrake- or rock-sized? How about Earth-sized? On November 13, 2014, the satirical news source The Onion published news that “Astronomers Discover Planet Identical to Earth With Orbital Space Mirror.”66 In a characteristic gesture of devastatingly deadpan coverage of human narcissism, the story reports how NASA’s “$2.9 billion aluminum glass mirror, which stretches over 180 feet wide and 147 feet tall, has already produced invaluable data suggesting that our solar system may contain a terrestrial planet of the exact same size, shape, and surface composition as Earth.” As a fictional mission leader states in the article, “ ‘It is remarkable to find another celestial body where water is not only present but also covers two-thirds of the planet’s entire surface. What may be even more surprising is that it was discovered in a part of space that was previously thought to be completely empty . . . It turns out that, in a universe that’s 93 billion light years wide, a planet perfectly suited for human life was right next to us in our own solar system.’ ” As the screw of this satire turns

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

311

and turns, the story details a subsequent mirror, causing even more misrecognition. “At press time,” we learn, “NASA had reportedly launched its Orbital Space Mirror 2 to the side of Earth opposite that of its original Orbital Space Mirror, leading scientists to conclude that there may actually be an infi nite number of Earth-like planets stretching outward forever in a straight line through space.” What a Hamlet this makes of the human, who “could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” (Hamlet 2.2.248–9). The Vitruvian man may have passed away but only to be replaced by the Earth-shaped mirror. And what is this bad dream if not an intuition of emptiness for which first one then a myriad images of companion Earths compensate? Behind this moment of narcissism—a moment that takes the planetary itself to figure the human—the terror of singularity stares back, the terror of looking into space and seeing emptiness extend infi nitely. Thus the human constructs mirror machines to cover over that fundamental plasticity that can appear, terrifyingly, to suggest the human is nothing itself at all. Perhaps humanism’s great mirror test is how we respond to the insufficiency of human singularity, which fails either because it is untrue (we are not as singular as we would like to think) or because singularity is a prison-house from which we long to escape into commonalities we can imagine with great fervor yet which we struggle to experience or act on. No wonder we encounter this fantasy of placing a great mirror to reflect the Earth we are now so assiduously deforming that our response is a terrified complacence. These simulacra offer phantasmatic replacements and whole new worlds to conquer, worlds in which we fi nd similitude in the midst of estrangement. And yet, what the mirror of Renaissance humanism show us is that to look in the animal mirror is to see, as Vives did, a dif ferent face than we may have expected: “The whole man laid bare, showing the immortal gods his nature akin to theirs, this nature which, covered with mask and body, had made of him an animal so diverse, so desultory, so changing like a polypus and a chameleon, as they had seen him on stage.” How power ful and how fragile are mirrors but even more so are letters. In an extraordinary history of the fortunes of the letter H, Daniel Heller-Roazen details the story of its ambivalent and often-endangered existence. “A letter,” he tells us,

312

Joseph Campana

like every thing else, must ultimately meet its fate and, over time, every written sign of speech falls out of use . . . Letters can also vanish more than once, and, like spirits they can make themselves perceptible long after some would pronounce them quite defunct. A classic case is the grapheme h, from the spelling of whose current English name, ‘aitch,’ the letter itself, tellingly, is by now absent. The sign of the sound characterized by linguists as a pure aspiration or a glottal fricative, h belongs to the alphabets of almost all the languages that make use of the Roman script. But the value it designates remains often imperceptible in speech; and in the passage between languages, it is almost always the first to go.67

As Heller-Roazen reminds us, the h was frequently under fire disdained by Catullus, Augustine, Aulus Gellius, Claudio Tolomei, and more. Humanism was not particularly kind to the letter: Starting in the mid-fifteenth century, grammarians, typographers, and teachers in Italy, Spain, France, and England called the grapheme to the court-house of national orthography, often threatening to do away with it altogether . . . In Il Polito, a treatise on orthography published in 1525, Claudio Tolomei thus considered the possible functions of the grapheme at some length, before reaching his verdict, which was unsparing: “I say,” he declared, “that no force obliges us to want this h among our letters.” And in the same years, Giovan Giorgio Trissino recalled in his Grammatical Doubts that h “is no letter,” subsequently adding: “it is a totally useless mark of breath.”68

Unlike in Italy, “The threatened mark found at least as many friends in early modern England . . . The first orthographers of the language were in any case united in their defense of the contested grapheme.” 69 What may seem, here, like a fascinating curiosity begins to seem much more relevant when we consider Augustine, the great influencer of humanisms to come, and his attack on the teachers of his day for their concern with this aspirational letter, which revealed an over-attachment to grammar amongst those who “ignore the eternal rules of everlasting salvation . . . A man who has learnt the traditional rules of pronunciation, or teaches them to others, gives greater scandal if he breaks them by uttering the first syllable of ‘human being’ [ominen] without aspiration than if he breaks your rules and hates another human being, his fellow man.”70 It is hard to ignore Augustine’s canny juxtaposition of “h” and “human,” although he finds petty

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

313

and pedantic the attention to the letter that, at least in English, still begins both “human” and “humanism.” Greater than pedantry or grammar is a kind of co-feeling of human for human. And yet that is the very crux of our pronouncements of, and about, humans, humanism, and post-humanism. What binds such disparate phenomena together? Can just a letter, or even a series of letters, create commonality without initiating the dramatic cycles of exceptionalist hubris and corresponding existential despair that makes Hamlets of us all? H, human, humanism: These are modes of aspiration whose ultimate efficacy and end are still unknown, which is no doubt why we keep wrestling to grasp such subtle yet pervasive phenomena. Perhaps that is why Aulus Gellius thought “it should be called a spirit rather than a letter.”71

Notes 1. Tony Davies, Humanism (London: Routledge, 1997), 4. 2. Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 3. 3. Ibid., 5. 4. Ibid., 9. 5. Ibid., 32. 6. Ibid., 19. 7. For a comprehensive account of the front matter of Chapman’s translation, see John A. Buchtel, “Book Dedication and the Death of a Patron: The Memorial Engraving in Chapman’s Homer,” Book History 7 (2004): 1–29. 8. As Buchtel argues, “The publication of The Whole Works of Homer as a substantial folio in 1616 introduced two notable additions to Chapman’s book, in the form of two new plates in the preliminaries: a memorial engraving and a portrait of the author” (2). 9. As Aysha Pollnitz relates, “In 1603 James scolded his eldest son, Prince Henry, for failing to make satisfactory progress at his lessons. Henry’s response was defiant: ‘I know what becomes a Prince. It is not necessary for me to be a professor, but a soldier and a man of the world.’ Many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries resolved the question of what ‘became a prince’ simply by praising royal children for excelling in all capacities” (“Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought, ed. David Armitage, Conal Condren, and Andrew Fitzmaurice [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 124). 10. George Chapman, The Whole Works of Homer (London: 1616), 2.

314

Joseph Campana

11. Chapman, 3. 12. All subsequent references (to act, scene, line) to Hamlet are to William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare 3rd series (London: Thomson, 2006). 13. Mike Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson, 2001), 176. 14. Alan Bullock, The Humanist Tradition in the West (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 44. 15. Ronald Knowles, “Hamlet and Counter-Humanism,” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 1048–9. 16. Alan Fisher, “Shakespeare’s Last Humanist,” Renaissance and Reformation 26, no. 1 (1990): 38. 17. Ibid., 37. 18. Patrick Grant, “Imagination in the Renaissance,” in Religious Imagination, ed. James Mackey and John McIntyre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), 86–101. 19. Pollnitz, 123, 122. Of Hamlet she says, more specifically, “Considering the student-prince’s learning in view of contemporary humanist pedagogical debates suggests that education was a force retarding his capacity to act,” (132). 20. Robert B. Bennett, “Hamlet and the Burden of Knowledge,” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 77–8. 21. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 52. 22. Neil Rhodes, “Hamlet and Humanism,” in Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan, Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 120. 23. See Laurent Milesi, “(Post)-Heideggerian Hamlet”; Marie-Dominique Garnier, “Loam, Moles and l’homme: Reversible Hamlet”; and Ivan Callus, “ ‘This?’ Posthumanism and the Graveyard Scene in Hamlet”; all in Posthumanist Shakespeare, ed. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Calus (Houndsmill: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). 24. T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1934), 95, 99. 25. Tony Davies, Humanism (London: Routledge, 1999), 99. 26. Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 6. 27. Ibid., 5. 28. Ibid., 4. 29. Ibid., 6. 30. Laurie Shannon, “Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2009): 172.

Epilogue: H Is for Humanism

315

31. See Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 54–55. 32. Pliny, The History of the World, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), 152. 33. Ibid., 152–3. 34. Ibid. 35. See Deborah Shuger, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder”: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 21–41. 36. Will Rankin, A Mirrour of Monsters (London, 1587), 2. 37. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Selections in Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 390. 38. See Bart van Es, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 195–231. 39. Michael Witmore, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 5. 40. Ibid., 7; Blaine Greteman, The Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 12. 41. Juan Luis Vives, Vives on Education, ed. Foster Watson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 189. 42. William Bullein, The Government of Health: A Treatise (London, 1595), 10. 43. Henry Cuff, The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life (London, 1607), 114. 44. Ibid., 115–16. 45. Ibid., 121. 46. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence Ryan (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1974), 34. 47. Ascham, 34–5. 48. For the overlap of educational and horticultural treatises, see Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 73–116; Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth- Century Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 53–76; Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Thomas More’s Enclosed Garden: Utopia and Renaissance Humanism,” English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976): 140–55; Pollnitz, 126–7. 49. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, “The Education of Boys” in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. Craig W. Kallendorf, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 137. 50. Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. Lisa Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5. 51. Ibid., 11.

316

Joseph Campana

52. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 30. 53. Donna Harraway, “Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic, Part II: The Past Is the Contested Zone: Human Nature and Theories of Production and Reproduction in Primate Behav ior Studies,” Signs 4, no. 1 (1978): 37. 54. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 75. 55. Ibid., 76. 56. Ibid., 77. 57. Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 176. 58. Ibid., 190. 59. All subsequent references (to act, scene, line) to The Winter’s Tale are to William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher, Arden 3rd series (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 60. http://www.videobash.com /video_ show/mimic-octopus-5981 61. Witmore, 22, 118. 62. Greteman, 174. 63. John Earle, Micro-cosmographie (London, 1628), B3v. 64. Richard Yonge, Apples of Gold from the Tree of Life (London, 1654), 3. 65. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign: Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 76, 301. 66. http://www.theonion.com /articles/astronomers-discover-planet-identical -to-earth-wit,37437/. 67. Daniel Heller-Roazen, “H & Co.” Cabinet 17 (Spring 2005), n.p., http:// www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/17/ heller-roazen.php. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Augustine, Confessions, 1.18, trans. R. S. Pine- Coffi n (London: Penguin Books, 1961), 38–9, quoted in Heller-Roazen. 71. The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellus, trans. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 128–9, quoted in Heller-Roazen.

Acknowledgments

Humanists—of all varieties—thrive on conversation and colloquy, dialogue and debate. As such, all intellectual endeavors worth the effort engender debts, and happily so. Renaissance Posthumanism is no exception. The idea began with a conversation between the editors and then was first realized as a lively seminar at the 2010 Shakespeare Association of America conference. We thank the SAA for including the seminar and we thank all who took part in that initial conversation, whether as participants, respondents, or members of the audience. In 2012, generous support from the Humanities Innovation Fund at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University allowed us to continue that conversation as a symposium in Houston that included the contributors to this volume as well as Laurie Shannon, Henry Turner, and Cary Wolfe, all of whom were vital interlocutors. Fordham University Press has been extraordinary to work with, starting with initial conversations with Tom Lay and the late, and deeply missed, Helen Tartar. We thank Tom Lay for continuing Helen’s extraordinary legacy and for his unflagging support for Renaissance studies. Insightful reports full of feedback from our anonymous readers improved the volume, especially the introduction and epilogue. The fine production staff at Fordham work under the direction of the very capable managing editor, Eric Newman, and made this volume easy to assemble and, now, a pleasure to behold. Lindsay Sherrier provided invaluable research and copyediting assistance. In a letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch wrote that “there is no lighter burden, more agreeable, than a pen,” the truth of which spans humanisms past, present, and future. We thank our companions and colleagues who make our burdens agreeable and light. 317

This page intentionally left blank

Contributors

Lara Bovilsky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and of essays that have appeared in ELH and Renaissance Drama. She is completing a book entitled Almost Human: The Bounds of Personhood in Early Modern England. Joseph Campana is Alan Dugald McKillop Chair and Associate Professor at Rice University. He is the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (Fordham, 2012), which won the South Central MLA Book Prize, and two collections of poetry, The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005) and Natural Selections (Iowa, 2012), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. His essays have appeared in PMLA, Modern Philology, ELH, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Studies, and elsewhere. He is currently completing two studies, The Child’s Two Bodies, which considers children and sovereignty in the works of Shakespeare, and Bee Tree Child, which explores scale, multiplicity, plasticity, and other new rubrics for calibrating the relationship between human and non-human worlds in the Renaissance. Stephen J. Campbell, the Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins University, is a specialist in Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His work has focused on the artistic culture of North Italian cities, on court artists such as Ferrarese painter Cosmè Tura and Andrea Mantegna, on the representation of Judaism in Christian art, on the rise of mythological painting, and on the history of collecting. He has also published articles on aspects of Giorgione, the Carracci, Agnolo 319

320

Contributors

Bronzino, Michelangelo, and Rosso Fiorentino. His most recent book is Art in Italy 1400–1600, coauthored with Michael Cole (Fall 2011). In May 2012, he delivered the Bross Lectures at the University of Chicago, on the subject of the geography of Italian Renaissance Art, to be published by University of Chicago Press (2015). Holly Dugan is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University. She is the author of The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England ( JHUP, 2011) and the coeditor with Lara Farina of the “Intimate Senses,” a special issue of the journal Postmedieval 3.4 (2012); she is co-authoring a book on Shakespeare and Primatology with Scott Maisano. Erica Fudge is professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Her books include Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Macmillan, 2000) and Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Cornell, 2006). Recent essays on humans and animals in early modern culture have appeared in Angelaki; New Formations; Theory, Culture and Society; and History and Theory, and she contributed the essay on animal history to the Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. She is the director of the British Animal Studies Network, which runs twice-yearly meetings and provides a forum for the development of animal studies across disciplines and within and outside of academia. Kenneth Gouwens teaches history at the University of Connecticut. He has published extensively on early-sixteenth-century Italy, including a monograph, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Leiden: Brill, 1998); a critical edition and translation of Paolo Giovio’s dialogue, Notable Men and Women of Our Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); and most recently an article on Giovio’s elaborate description in that dialogue of the beauty of Vittoria Colonna (Renaissance Quarterly, 2015). Essays related to his contribution to the present collection include “Perceiving the Past: Renaissance Humanism after the Cognitive Turn” (American Historical Review, 1998), “Human Exceptionalism” (in The Renaissance World, ed.  J.  J. Martin, 2007), and “Erasmus, ‘Apes of Cicero,’ and

Contributors

321

Conceptual Blending” ( Journal of the History of Ideas, 2010). His current book project analyzes comparisons drawn between humans and simians, both in the Renaissance and in our own era. Scott Maisano is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His most recent publications include “Shakespeare’s Revolution: The Tempest as Scientific Romance,” about Prospero and particle physics in The Tempest: A Critical Guide (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare); “Now,” about Einsteinian spacetime in The Winter’s Tale, for Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford University Press); “Rise of the Poet of the Apes,” about intelligent apes and monkeys in plays from the beginning to the end of Shakespeare’s career, for Shakespeare Studies; and “Seen / Not Seen” about “behind-the-scenes,” “offstage,” and “bawdy” (or in a word “obscene”) matters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for iPad (Luminary Digital Media). He is currently coauthoring a book on Shakespeare and Primatology with Holly Dugan and writing a new Shakespearean comedy entitled Enter Nurse, or, Love’s Labour’s Won. Vin Nardizzi is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He has published Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (University of Toronto Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the 2013 Theatre Book Prize. He is working on a new book project called Vaster Than Empires: Growth, Vegetables, and Poetry. With Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Stockton, he coedited Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 2009) and, with Jean E. Feerick, The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Judith Roof is William Shakespeare Chair in English at Rice University. Her work ranges through many areas of twentieth-century and contemporary studies, including comparative modernisms; drama and performance studies; film studies; theories of sexuality; science, literature, and culture; and contemporary British and American fiction. She has authored books on feminist, narrative, and lesbian theory, including A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (Columbia, 1991), Come As You Are: Narrative and Sexuality, recipient of Narrative’s Perkins Prize (Columbia, 1996), and All About Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels (Illinois, 2002), as well as

322

Contributors

books about concepts and trends in contemporary culture—Reproductions of Reproduction (Routledge, 1996), The Poetics of DNA (Minnesota, 2007), and What Gender Is, What Gender Does (Minnesota, forthcoming). She has also edited several collections of essays on feminist theory, psychoanalysis, drama, and very odd archives. Diane Wolfthal is the David and Caroline Minter Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Art History at Rice University. She has authored In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Art (Yale University Press, 2010), Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity, and Memory in Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy (Brill, 2004), Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and The Beginnings of Netherlandish Canvas Painting (Cambridge University Press, 1989). She has coauthored the Corpus of Early Netherlands Paintings: Los Angeles Museums (2014) and Princes and Paupers: The Art of Jacques Callot (2013), and edited or coedited volumes on peace and negotiation, the family, and how the rise of the monetary economy affected Eu ropean culture and values. A co-founder of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, she is writing a book titled Household Help: Images of Servants and Slaves in Europe and Its Colonies. Julian Yates is Associate Professor of English and Material Culture Studies at University of Delaware. He is the author of some thirty essays on Renaissance literature and culture, questions of ecology, and literary theory and two books: Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) was a finalist for the MLA Best First Book Prize and What’s the Worst Thing You Can Do to Shakespeare? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), coauthored with Richard Burt. His work has been sponsored by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, a Franklin Award from the American Philosophical Society, and a long-term NEH Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. His current work focuses on questions of ecology, genre, and the posthuman.

Index

Academy of Lynxes, 242 actors: the humanist task of drama and, 195–8, 199; liveliness and, 202–4; orators and, 196; “overdoing,” 204–5; personation, 201–2; plasticity in the figure of the boy actor in Hamlet, 295–6; trope of the human as an actor upon the stage of the world, 294–6; wooden, 198, 200 (see also wooden actors) Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, 298 Agamben, Giorgio: anthropological machine concept, 70, 298–9; on Heidegger’s Dasein, 17; on Heidegger’s notion of “the open,” 17–18; notions of “the open,” 12, 13 Alberti, Leon Battista, 62n80 Alcionio, Pietro, 42 Alexander: Aristotle and, 127, 132, 135, 136; birth and hybridity, 125–7; Renaissance natural histories and, 133–7; violence and animality, 132–3. See also Life of Alexander Allegory of Prudence (Titian), 86 amulets: of mandrake, 230, 232 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 152 Anatomy of Plants (Grew), 242 Anatomy of the Genital Parts of Man and Woman (Graaf ), 242 Anderson, Virginia DeJohn, 158–9 the animal: and the child in the act of imitating humanity, 300–1; notions of “the open” in critical posthumanist

thought and, 12–13, 17–18. See also farmyard animals; human–livestock relations; man and animal; multispecies writing animal mirror: Haraway on the problem of, 300 animal ravishment: Alexander’s birth and hybridity, 125–7; confluence of Renaissance and posthumanist perspectives on sexual violence and, 137–8; legal categories of rape, 130; in Life of Alexander, 28–29, 120–2, 127–8; literary histories, 122–8; natural histories, 132–7; wildness and wildmen, 122–4, 127–8 Animal That Therefore I Am, The (Derrida), 19 Annunciation (Titian), 75, 76, 84 Anson, John, 267 anthropological machine, 70, 298–9 antiquity: Renaissance humanism and the recovery of, 52–3 apes, 133–4 aphrodisiacs, 225 Apollo Flaying Marsyas (Romano), 67, 69, 70, 74 Apology for Actors, An (Heywood), 198, 200, 202 Apology for Raymond Sebond (Montaigne), 51, 53 appurtenances: in early modern wills, 160–1

323

324

Index

archive: humanities modeled as, 174–5; multispecies writing and, 175–6, 177 Aretino (Dolce), 73, 74, 75 Ariosto, Ludovico, 74 Aristophanes, 113–14 Aristotelianism, 52 Aristotle: Alexander and, 127, 132, 135, 136; on distinguishing men from beasts, 49–50; Petrarch on, 25; Renaissance translations, 42 Arte of Rhetorique, The (Wilson), 196 Ascham, Roger, 297–8 Assumption (Titian), 74 Astrophil and Stella (Sidney), 206 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 207–9, 214 atheism, 56–7n20 Augustine, Saint, 15, 45, 312–13 BABEL Working Group, 7 Bacchus and Ariadne (Titian), 78 Bach, Rebecca Ann, 303 Bacon, Francis, 161, 206–7, 230, 270 Balet Comique, Le (Beaujoyeulx), 148 Basie, John, 160 Beast and the Sovereign, The (Derrida), 299–300, 306 Beaujoyeulx, Balthazar de, 148 Beda, Noél, 42 Being and Time (Heidegger), 11 Belsey, Catherine, 289 Bembo, Pietro, 48, 74 Bennet, Robert B., 289 Beresford, M. W., 183 Bestiaire divin (Guillaume le Clerc), 225, 226, 229 bestiaries, 133–7 Bestiary (Thaon), 225–6 birth: in Gargantua, 99–100, 106–8 body: early modern notions of dance and, 148–50; mandrake figured as, 31–2, 228–30, 231–5; Titian’s concerns with human boundaries and the difference/undifferentiation of the body, 79–86 Bohde, Daniela, 94n23

Boldrini, Nicolò, 87 Book of Precious Stones (Orpheus), 110 Borin, Françoise, 240, 244 Bosse, Abraham, 31–2, 222, 223, 235–45, 309 Bourdelin, Claude, 235 Bouwsma, William, 41 Bovilsky, Lara, 32, 310 Bradley, Richard, 160 Bragadin, Marco Antonio, 71–2 Braidotti, Rosi, 3 braquette, 111–12, 116, 119n4 Brockman, John, 8–9 Bruni, Leonardo, 42 buggery, 130–2, 141n33, 142n37 Bullein, William, 297 Bullock, Alan, 288, 291 Burbage, Richard, 202–3 Burkhardt, Jacob, 53, 284–5 Burton, Robert, 152 Calarco, Matthew, 19 Callus, Ivan, 6 Campana, Joseph, 32–3 Campbell, Stephen, 26–7, 306 care: care-fi lled cross-species relationships, 146–7; in human–livestock relations, John Law’s notion of, 145–6, 148 “Care and Killing” (Law), 145–6, 148 Carleton, Dudley, 150 Carpenter, Nan Cooke, 119n6 Cartwright, Kent, 195 Cassirer, Ernst, 46 Castiglione, Baldesar, 73–4 Catholic reform: influence of Renaissance humanism on, 48–9 Causes of Dearth, The (Hales), 184 Cecil, Robert, 182 Celenza, Christopher, 49 Cesi, Frederic, 242 chameleon, 237, 239 Chapman, Chris, 145 Chapman, George, 204, 285–8 Chastillon, Louis Claude de, 236

Index children: the child and the animal in the act of imitating humanity, 300–1; horticultural imagery for educating, 298; imitation and the education into humanity, 296–8; and the mirroring of the human or of humanism, 32, 304–5; modalities of reference for the child in Shakespeare, 302–4; plasticity in the figure of the boy actor in Hamlet, 295–6 Chism, Christine, 140n22 choreography. See dancing and choreography; ontological choreography Christianity: Renaissance humanism and, 41, 53 Chrysippus, 50 Cicero: conception of human dignity, 45; on human–animal friendship, 152; Milton and, 18; on speech and humanness, 40 Circe (Gelli), 50 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Burkhardt), 53, 284–5 Cocke, John, 196 codpiece: in Gargantua, 109–13 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 221 Cohen, Tom, 171 Coke, Sir Edward, 131 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare), 209 communication: between man and animal, Montaigne on, 164n28 communism: humanism and, Heidegger on, 58n37 companion species, 12, 14, 22, 23, 184 comparative ethological studies: of sheep, 172–3, 177 conceptual blending, 43 Contarini, Gasparo, 48 Conversino da Ravenna, Giovanni, 47 Copenhaver, Brian, 46 Corregiano, Il (Castiglione), 74 Council of Trent, 48–9 courageous temperament, 258–9 Crane, Susan, 122 Critical Humanisms (Mousley), 9

325

critical posthumanism: notions of “the open,” 12–13, 17–18; Renaissance humanism and, examination of, 2–8, 11. See also posthumanism Crowden, James, 145 Crowning with Thorns (Titian), 71 cruelty: stoniness as, 261–2, 264 Cuff, Henry, 297 Cussins, Charis, 146 cybernetics, 6, 16 Cynthia’s Revels ( Jonson), 200 Danae (Titian), 78 dancing and choreography: early modern conceptualizations of, 148–50; Haraway’s conceptualization of, 146, 148. See also ontological choreography Dante Alighieri, 74 Daphne myth, 222, 224, 240, 309 Darwin, Charles, 300 Dasein, 11, 13, 17 Davies, Tony, 284, 291 Death of Acetaon, The (Titian), 72 de’Barbari, Jacopo, 70 de’Cosimo, Piero, 70 de Pizan, Christine, 222, 224, 240 Derrida, Jacques, 10; on the archive, 176; on the deconstruction of human sovereignty, 306; on the human and the animal, 19; language and human prostheticity, 174; poetics of the literal and, 175–6; on the problem of the analogy, 299–300; on the question of the animal, 12 Descartes, René, 62n83 “Despoiled at the Source” (Zorach), 79–81 Despret, Vinciane, 155–6, 188–9 Dewey, John, 44 Dialectical Disputations (Valla), 62n86 diamonds, 113 Diana and Actaeon (Titian), 71, 82–3, 84–5, 96n34 Diana and Callisto (Titian), 79–81, 84, 87, 96n34

326

Index

Difference of Ages, The (Cuff ), 297 Dionne, Craig, 7, 221–2 Dioscorides, Pedianus, 224, 226–8 Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, A, 183 disputation: Renaissance humanism and, 49, 53–4 Dodart, Denis, 235 Dolan, Frances, 137 Dolce, Ludovico, 73, 74, 75, 81, 87 Dollimore, Jonathan, 164–5n32 Donne, John, 149 drama: actors and the humanist task of, 195–8, 199. See also actors; wooden actors Dugan, Holly, 28–9, 307 Earle, John, 305 education: horticultural imagery, 298; into humanity, imitation and, 296–8 Edward VI, 183 Eliot, T. S., 289–90 Elizabeth I, 182 Emblems, Les (Alciat), 197 emeralds, 110, 118n3 “Emerging Third Culture, The” (Brockman), 8–9 empirical investigation: Bacon’s notion of, 161 enclosure process: multispecies writing and, 29–30, 169–70, 183–7 England: co-writing of “sheep” and “human persons” in, 178–87; enclosure process and multispecies writing, 29–30, 169–70, 183–7; legal history of sexual crimes, 129, 130–2, 141n33, 142n37 Épitre d’Othéa (Pizan), 222, 224, 240 Erasmus, 25, 48, 49, 298 eros: the erotic post in Twelfth Night, 210–14; in the works of Titian, 78, 79 essay form: Montaigne and, 49, 53–4 Euphues (Lyly), 270 “excellent Actor, An” (Webster), 195–6, 198

Fable About Man, A (Vives), 294–5 Fall of Man, The (Titian), 84 Farme, James, 160 farmyard animals: in an early modern ballad, 154–5; Vincaine Despret on, 155–6; John Law’s notion of care for, 145–6, 148; naming of, 159–60; problem of early modern printed materials on, 150–1; tacit knowledge of, 156–62. See also human–livestock relations Fella, Thomas, 179–80 Ficino, Marsilio, 47, 51–2 fi re: Portia’s suicide in Julius Caesar and, 275–6 First Booke of Cattell, The (Mascall), 178–9 Fisher, Alan, 288 Flaying of Marsyas (Titian): Daniela Bohde’s understanding of, 94n23; Melanie Hart’s analysis of, 93n14; Panofsky’s response to, 65; pictorial structure, 67–9; problem of the making and history of, 71–2; problem of the relationality of the characters in, 69–70; Renaissance humanism and, 26–7, 306; Giulio Romano’s Apollo Flaying Marsyas and, 67, 69, 70, 74; scholarly accounts of, 65–7; as Titian’s inquiry into man and animal, humanizing and animalizing, 26–7, 72–3, 89–91 Fleming, Juliet, 176 fl intiness: Brutus’s mineral identity in Julius Caesar and, 32, 267–5; literary history of, 270–1, 281n45 floral-maidens, 124–5 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 258 Formato Foetu, De (Spiegel), 244 Foucault, Michel, 4, 181 Francis (pope), 16 Freedberg, David, 242 Fuchs, Leonhard, 231, 237, 240 Fudge, Erica, 29, 307–8 fundament, 106–7

Index Gallup, Gordon, 300 Gargantua (Rabelais): ambivalent conception of humanism in, 99–100; circular order and relativity in, 105; “Corrective Conundrums,” 105–6; enboxings, bracketings, and a decentering of the humanist universe in, 27–8, 100–17; Gargantua’s codpiece, 109–13; Gargantua’s hat-medallion, 113–14, 119n6; Gargantua’s heraldic colors, 114–15; lock and bottle figures in, 103–4; posthumanism and, 115–17; “A Prophetic Riddle,” 116; Martine Sauret on the “architecture” of, 119n7; silenic box figure, 27–8, 100–3, 108–9; temporality and repetition in, 109; “The Drunkards’ Conversation,” 107–8; trope of birth, 99–100, 106–8 Garrard, Mary, 87, 95–6n30 Gelli, Giambattista, 50 Gellius, Aulus, 313 gems: Gargantua’s codpiece and, 110, 112–13, 118n3 gender: Abraham Bosse’s mandrake image and, 31–2, 242–4, 245; posthumanism as lacking interest in, 222 Genesi ad Litteram, De (Augustine), 15 Genesis, 13, 225 Gerade, John, 226 Gessner, Conrad, 134–6 Giorgione, 88, 97–8n41 Giovane, Palma, 71 Giustiniani, Vito R., 40 Globe playhouse, 208–9 Goldberg, Jonathan, 97–8n41 Goldstein, Carl, 241 Gouwens, Kenneth, 25–6, 35–6n39, 305–6 Government of Health, The (Bullein), 297 Graaf, Reinier de, 242 Grafton, Anthony, 42, 53 Grant, Patrick, 288 Gravdal, Katherine, 130 Greene, Thomas, 284

327

Greteman, Blaine, 296, 304–5 Grew, Nehemiah, 242 grief: mineral identity and, 253–4, 255–6 Guarini da Verona, Guarino, 41 Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie, 225, 226, 229 Gutting, Gary, 1 Hagen, Karl, 43 Hales, John, 184 Hamlet (Shakespeare): Eliot’s evaluation of, 289–90; humanism and, 288–91, 293, 311; overacting in, 204; plasticity in the figure of the boy actor, 295–6; “To be, or not to be,” 18 Haraway, Donna: on da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Renaissance humanism, 5; model of the multispecies, 169, 176; notion of companion species, 12, 14, 22, 23; notions of choreography, 146, 148; notions of “the open,” 12, 13, 14; on the problem of the animal mirror, 300 Hart, Melanie, 93n14 hat-medallion: in Gargantua, 113–14, 119n6 Hatton, Sir Christopher, 182 Hayles, N. Katherine, 2, 6, 7, 16 Heemskerck, Martin, 244, 245 Heidegger, Martin: critique of humanism, 10–11; on humanism and communism, 58n37; influence of Genesis on the thought of, 13; on the limits of reason and speech, 24; notion of the Dasein, 13, 17; notions of “the open,” 12, 13, 17–18; on the relationship between man and animal, 14 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 311–12 Henry Prince of Wales, 285, 287, 288 Henry V (Shakespeare), 132–3, 201, 259 Henry VI, Part II (Shakespeare): cruelty as stoniness, 262; innocent lamb, parchment, and zoomorphic play in, 167–70, 176–7, 180, 187–8, 308; ovine or bovine Jack in, 186 heraldic colors: in Gargantua, 114–15

328

Index

Herbrechter, Stefan, 6 Hercules Gallicus, 196, 197, 198, 203, 214, 215 Heywood, Thomas, 198, 200, 202, 206, 214 Hildegard of Bingen, 226 Historiae Animalium (Gessner), 134–6 historia stirpium, De (Fuchs), 237, 240 Historie of the World (Pliny the Elder), 203–4 “History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline, The” (Panofsky), 64–5 History of Foure-Footed Beastes, A (Topsell), 134–7 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 53 Holland, Philemon, 203–4 hominis dignitate, De (Pico), 65 How We Became Posthuman (Hayles), 2, 6, 16 Hull, Roger, 156–8 human dignity: Renaissance humanist conceptions of, 44–6 human exceptionalism: Kenneth Gouwens on, 35–6n39; Renaissance humanist conceptions of, 25–6, 49–52, 62n80, 62n86; Laurie Shannon on, 36n39 human/humanity: the child and the animal in the act of imitating, 300–1; co-writing of “sheep” and “human persons” in England, 178–87; as disability, and notions of “the open” in Paradise Lost, 12–25; human–animal– land enclosure process and multispecies writing, 29–30, 169–70, 183–7; the human as the failure of the human, 299; imitation and the education into humanity, 296–8; Pliny on the nature of man, 292–3; sexual violence as a trope to defi ne, 120–2; trope of the actor upon the stage of the world, 294–6; visions of in Renaissance humanism, 283–93; weeping and, 203–4

humanism: Agamben’s anthropological machine and, 298–9; etymology, 40; Heidegger’s critique of, 10–11; the human as the failure of the human, 299; the letter H and its history, 285, 311–13; re-humanizing of, 8–9; in relation to posthumanism, Cary Wolfe’s analysis of, 3, 38–9, 44, 54, 221. See also Renaissance humanism humanisme, 44 Humanismus, 43, 44 humanist art history: Panofsky’s notion of, 64–5 Humanist Manifesto, 44 Humanist Tradition in the West (Bullock), 291 humanities: crisis in and movement toward posthumanism, 1–2 human–livestock relations: in an early modern ballad, 154–5; as care-fi lled cross-species relationships, 146–7; Vincaine Despret on, 155–6; John Law’s notion of care in, 145–6, 148; limits of empirical investigation, 161; in Milton’s Masque of Blackness, 151–2; naming of animals, 159–60; notions of ontological choreography, 29, 146–7, 152–4; problem of early modern printed materials on, 150–1; tacit knowledge of, 156–62 imitation: the child and the animal in the act of imitating humanity, 300–1; education into humanity and, 296–8 Index of Prohibited Books, 49 innocent lamb: parchment and zoomorphic play in Henry VI, Part II, 167–70, 176–7, 180, 187–8, 308 inside/outside: figuration in Gargantua and the decentering of humanism, 27–8, 100–17 interval: in the works of Titian, 64, 77–9 Jacopo Pesaro Presented to St. Peter (Titian), 75, 77, 94n24

Index

329

Keller, Abraham, 118n1 Kemp, Martin, 241 Kett’s Rebellion, 185 Kietzman, Mary Jo, 212 King Lear (Shakespeare), 209 Knowles, Ronald, 288 Kohler, Wolfgang, 300 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 40–1 Kristeva, Julia, 80–1 Kurzweil, Ray, 16

letter H: in Chapman’s Homer, 285, 286–7; history of, humanism and, 285, 311–13 “Letter on Humanism” (Heidegger), 10–11 Life of Alexander: Alexander’s birth and hybridity, 125–7; animal ravishment in, 28–9, 120–2, 127–8; floral-maidens and transcultural sexual encounters, 124–5; Renaissance humanism and, 307; wildness and wildmen in, 123–4, 127–8 “Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare” (Turner), 5–6 L’imperfection des femmes, 243–4 liveliness: actors and, 202–4 Lives of the Artists (Vasari), 74 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 200 Lucking, David, 280n30 Lucretius, 97–8n41 Luhmann, Niklas, 10 Luther, Martin, 15–16, 48, 49 Lyly, John, 270

La Brosse, Guy de, 237 Lacan, Jacques, 300–1 Lacquer, Thomas, 244–5 Lactantius, 45 lamb. See innocent lamb Lancre, Pierre de, 230 language: Paolo Virno on, 301–2 Laocoön: Titian’s parody of, 86, 87 Latour, Bruno: on modernity, 4–5; on Thelma Rowell’s comparative ethological study of sheep, 172–3, 177, 188; on a “well-articulated proposition,” 170–1 Lawson, James, 96n34 Le Brun, Charles, 240 leisure. See otium Lenoir, Timothy, 6 Leonardo da Vinci: on human cruelty, 62n80; Vitruvian Man, 3, 5, 67, 68 Leo X (pope), 48

MacKay, Ellen, 214 Maclean, Ian, 52 Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, 6, 16 Majors, Johann Daniel, 242, 245 man and animal: Cicero on human– animal friendship, 152; in critical posthumanist thought, 14, 19; hybridity in Life of Alexander, 125–7; Montaigne on communication between, 164n28; notions of companion species, 14, 23, 212; in notions of “the open” in critical posthumanist thought, 12–13, 17–18; and notions of “the open” in Paradise Lost, 13–25; in Paradise Regained, 21–4; Renaissance humanist conceptions of human exceptionalism, 25–6, 49–52, 62nn80,86; in Renaissance natural histories and bestiaries, 133–7; Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas as an inquiry into humanizing and animalizing, 26–7,

James VI, 150 Jardine, Lisa, 42 Jermyn, William, 158 Jerome, Saint, 25 jewels: Gargantua’s codpiece and, 110, 112–13, 118n3 Joan of Arc, 230 Jonson, Ben, 150, 200, 206 Josephus, Flavius, 225 Joy, Eileen A., 7, 221–2 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare): mineral emotions in, 32, 262–76, 310 (see also mineral identity/emotions)

330

Index

man and animal (cont. ) 72–3, 89–91; Titian’s naturalism and, 85–9; violence and animality in tales of Alexander, 132–3; wildness and wildmen in literary narratives of sexual violence, 122–4, 127–8. See also animal ravishment; human–livestock relations; multispecies writing Mandragora (Robert), 236 Mandragora mas (Robert), 238 mandrake: Abraham Bosse’s engraving of, 31–2, 222, 223, 235–45, 309; figured as Daphne by Christine de Pizan, 222, 224, 240; figured as the human body, 31–2, 228–30, 231–5; images of, 31–2, 222, 223, 224, 226–35; Renaissance humanism and, 309; sexuality and, 31–2, 224–5, 226, 232, 233, 235, 237, 240–2; textual accounts of, 224–6 Marchant, Nicolas, 235 Martyr, Peter, 270 Marvell, Andrew, 253–4, 255 Marx, Karl, 44 Mascall, Leonard, 178–9 Masque at Ludlow Castle (Milton): human–livestock relations in, 151–2; notions of temperance and dance in, 149–50 Masque of Blackness ( Jonson), 150 materia medica, De (Dioscorides), 224, 226–8 Mazza, Damiano, 82, 83 McCracken, Peggy, 124–5 McHugh, Susan, 177–8 McTighe, Sheila, 241 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 204–5 melancholy, 47 Melanchthon, Philipp, 48 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des plantes, 235 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 255–6 mettle, 258–9, 261 Michelangelo, 73, 74 Microcosmographie (Earle), 305

Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 303 Miles, Geoffrey, 267 Milton, John: notions of “the open” and humanity as disability in Paradise Lost, 12–25; on original sin, 15; posthumanism and, 2, 11. See also Masque at Ludlow Castle mineral identity/emotions: activation of courageous temperament, 258–9; broadening of human ontology and, 254–5, 262; grief and, 253–4, 255–6; as a source of sensitive characterization, 260–2; stony constancy, 256–8; stony-heartedness, 259–60 mineral identity/emotions (in Julius Caesar): array of figurations in, 262–3; Brutus’s emotional fluctuations and a critique of Stoicism, 266–75; kindling of emotions in the plebeians, 263–6; Portia’s fiery suicide, 275–6; Renaissance humanism and, 32, 310 Minerva Britanna (Peachem), 257 mirror neurons, 301–2 mirrors/mirroring: the child as the mirror of the human or of humanism, 304–5; Haraway on the problem of the animal mirror, 300; Lacan on, 300–1; as a means of examining Renaissance humanism, 32–3, 293–313; mirror neurons, 301–2; narcissism and, 310–11 “Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, The” (Lacan), 300–1 Mirrour of Monsters, A (Rankin), 294 misery: Renaissance humanism and, 46–7, 284–5 modernity: Latour on, 4–5 “Monkey Laocoön” (Titian), 86, 87 Monsarrat, Gilles, 274 Montaigne, Michel de: on communication between humans and animals, 164n28; essay form and, 49, 53–4; questioning of human exceptionalism, 51; religious faith and, 53 Moravec, Hans, 16

Index More, Thomas, 178, 182, 183, 186–7 Mott, Thomas, 158 Mousley, Andy, 9, 10 multispecies writing: animals and plants used as prosthetized instruments, 177–8; the archive and, 175–6, 177; co-writing of “sheep” and “human persons” in England, 178–87; human– animal–land enclosure process and, 29–30, 169–70, 183–7; innocent lamb, parchment, and zoomorphic play in Henry VI, Part II, 167–70, 176–7, 180, 187–8, 308; notions of otium and co-authoring, 187–90; poetics of the literal and, 175–6 naming: of farmyard animals, 159–60 narcissism, 310–11 Nardizzi, Vin, 30–1, 308–9 Natura (Heemskerck), 245 natural histories: of Alexander’s encounters with wildness, 29, 133–7 Natural History (Pliny the Elder): on Aristotle and Alexander, 135–6; on gem stones, 113, 118n3; on the mandrake, 224–5 naturalism: and creative un-making in Titian, 85–9 Nayar, Pramad, 3, 21 Nemesius of Emessa, 53 Neostoicism, 255, 258, 259 Nevile, Jennifer, 148 New Herbal (Turner), 231 New Humanists, The (Brockman), 8–9 New Kreuterbuch (Fuchs), 231 Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel, 43 Niobe myth, 255–6, 277–8n13, 277n5 Novum Organum (Bacon), 161 Nymph and Shepherd (Titian), 88–9 “Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn” (Marvell), 253–4, 255 Nysum, John, 159 Odyssey, The (Homer), 50 “Of Boldness” (Bacon), 206–7

331

Of cruelty (Montaigne), 51 “Of Education” (Milton), 15 On Conjugal Love (Venette), 242 Onion, The, 310–11 On the Cleverness of Animals (Plutarch), 50 On the Misery of Human Life (Conversino da Ravenna), 47 On the Nature of the Gods (Cicero), 45 ontological choreography: in human– livestock relations, 29, 146–7, 152–4; notion of, 146; Renaissance humanism and, 308 The Open: Man and Animal (Agamben), 12, 13, 298–9 “the open”: in critical posthumanist thought, 12–13, 17–18; and humanity as disability in Paradise Lost, 12–25 opifi cio Dei, De (Lactantius), 45 “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (Pico della Mirandola), 45–6, 61n69, 291–2, 298–9 orators: actors and, 196 original sin: notions of the post-human man and, 15–16 Orpheus, 110 otium, 186, 187–90 overacting, 204–5 Ovid, 255–6 Panofsky, Erwin, 64–5, 306 Pantagruel (Rabelais), 105 Paradise Lost (Milton): notions of “the open” and humanity as disability, 12–25; posthumanism and, 2 Paradise Regained (Milton), 2, 21–4 parchment: innocent lamb and zoomorphic play in Henry VI, Part II, 167–70, 176–7, 180, 187–8, 308 Paster, Gail Kern, 256, 258, 273, 275 pathos: Renaissance humanism and, 46–7, 284–5 Paul III (pope), 48 Peachem, Henry, 256–8 Pérez, Antonio, 73

332

Index

Perrault, Claude, 235, 237 personation: actors and, 201–2 Petrarch, 25, 43, 47 Phallus impudicus, 242 Physica (Hildegard of Bingen), 226 Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius, 298 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 45–7, 52, 65. See also “Oration on the Dignity of Man” Pietà (Titian), 71 Pincombe, Mike, 288 plants: sexuality and, 242. See also mandrake Plato, 113 Platonism, 52 playhouses: woodenness and wooden actors, 207–9 Plett, Heinrich R., 196 Pliny the Elder: on Aristotle and Alexander, 135–6; on the child, 304; on gem stones, 113, 118n3; on man and weeping, 203–4; on the mandrake, 224–5; on the nature of man, 292–3 Plutarch, 50, 275 poetics of the literal, 175–6 Pole, Reginald, 48 political leadership: as the kindling of emotions in the plebeians in Julius Caesar, 263–6 Pollnitz, Aysha, 288–9 post-human: notions of original sin and, 15–16 Posthuman, The (Braidotti), 3 posthumanism: blind spots of, 221–2; Abraham Bosse’s mandrake etching and, 31–2, 244–5, 309; Gargantua and, 115–17; Heidegger’s critique of humanism and, 10–11; meanings of, 117n1; movement of the humanities toward, 1–2; Posthuman Shakespeare, 5–7; in relation to humanism, Cary Wolfe’s analysis of, 3, 38–9, 44, 54, 221; Renaissance humanism and, examination of, 2–8, 11, 37–8, 44, 54, 170–7; Cary Wolfe on the meaning of,

6–7, 9–10, 117n1, 173–4; wooden actors and, 30–1, 201, 309 Posthumanism (Nayar), 3 Posthumanist Shakespeare (Herberchter & Callus), 6 Posthuman Shakespeare, 5–7 postmedieval (journal), 7 Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 80–1 “Praise of Sheepe, A” (Mascall), 178–9 Presentation of the Virgin (Titian), 77 Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (Panofsky), 65 Proportions of the Human Body according to Vitruvius, The. See Vitruvian Man Protestant reform: influence of Renaissance humanism on, 48 Purchas, Samuel, 198 Quint, David, 132, 133 Quintilian, 49 Rabelais, François, 118n1, 306–7. See also Gargantua Rabinowitz, Paula, 137 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 181–2 Ramus, Petrus, 49 Rand, Thomas, 158 Rankin, Will, 294, 299 rape: legal histories, 129–32, 141n33. See also animal ravishment; sexual violence Rape of Europa (Titian), 78 Rape of Ganymede (Mazza), 82, 83 Raphael, 74–5 ravishment: legal histories, 129–32; in Life of Alexander, 307. See also animal ravishment; sexual violence religious reform: influence of Renaissance humanism on, 48–9 Renaissance humanism: ambivalent conception of in Gargantua, 99–100; Chapman’s Homer, 285–8; Christianity and, 41, 53; conceptions of human dignity and misery, 44–9, 284–5; conceptual overview, 39, 40–4; culture

Index of disputation and, 49, 53–4; decentering in Gargantua, 27–8, 100–17; on distinguishing men from beasts, 49–52; Hamlet and, 288–91, 293, 311; the humanist task of the actor in drama, 195–8, 199; influence on Protestant and Catholic reform, 48–9; the letter H and, 285, 311–13; mirrors and mirroring as a means of examining, 32–3, 293–313; notions of children, humanity, and imitation, 296–8; Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” 291–2; Pliny on the nature of man, 292–3; posthumanism and, examination of, 2–8, 11, 37–8, 44, 54, 170–7; recovery of antiquity, 52–3; re-humanizing of, 8–9; trope of the human as an actor upon the stage of the world, 294–6; visions of the human and humanity, 283–93 Rhodes, Neil, 289 Richard II (Shakespeare), 209 Richard III (Shakespeare), 260–1, 279n25, 302 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 12, 13 Roberts, Nicolas, 235–7, 238, 240, 242, 244 Romano, Giulio, 67, 69, 70, 74 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 209 Roof, Judith, 27–8, 306–7 Rorario, Girolamo, 50 Rowe, Katherine, 256, 258 Rowell, Thelma, 172–3, 177, 188–90 Royal Academy of Sciences (Paris), 232, 235–7 Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor), 232 Sacred and Profane Love (Titian), 75, 77 Sadoleto, Jacopo, 48 Salih, Sarah, 244 Salutati, Coluccio, 260 satyrs, 70 Sauret, Martine, 119n7 Savonarola, Girolamo, 47

333

Schoenfeldt, Michael, 258, 277n8 Scholastics, 42, 52 Schultz, James, 244 Seneca, 50, 259 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 42 Sextus Empiricus, 51 sexuality: the mandrake and, 31–2, 224–5, 226, 232, 233, 235, 237, 240–2; posthumanism as lacking interest in, 222; transcultural sexual encounters in Life of Alexander, 124–5 sexual violence: confluence of Renaissance and posthumanist perspectives, 137–8; legal histories, 129–32; in Life of Alexander, 307; literary histories of animal ravishment, 28–9, 122–8 (see also animal ravishment); as a trope to defi ne humanity, 120–2 Seymour, Edward (Duke of Somerset), 183, 185 Shakespeare, William: on human lust, 149; modalities of reference for the child in the plays of, 302–4; Posthuman Shakespeare, 5–7; on the “unperfect actor,” 200. See also individual works Shakespeare’s Humanism (Wells), 9 Shannon, Laurie, 36n39 sheep: co-writing of “sheep” and “human persons” in England, 178–7; enclosure process and multispecies writing, 29–30, 169–70, 183–7; innocent lamb, parchment, and zoomorphic play in Henry VI, Part II, 167–70, 176–7, 180, 187–8, 308; notion of otium and co-authoring, 188–9; Thelma Rowell’s comparative ethological study of, 172–3, 177, 188–90; tax on, 183–5 Shiebinger, Londa, 242 Sidney, Philip, 206 Silence at Ramscliffe (Chapman & Crowden), 145 silenic box, 27–8, 100–3, 108–9, 307 singularity, 16

334

Index

Skura, Meredith Anne, 202 Smith, Bruce, 131 sodomy, 130–2, 141n33, 142n37 Somerset, Duke of. See Seymour, Edward Song of Songs, 225 Sonnet 23 (Shakespeare), 200 Sonnet 32 (Pico della Mirandola), 46–7 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 202–3 Spiegel, Adriaan van, 244 sports and pastimes of the people of England, The (Strutt), 208 Stechow, Wolfgang, 222 Stengers, Isabelle, 174 Stoicism: Brutus’s mineral identity in Julius Caesar and, 267–75; critiques of, 259–60; on distinguishing men from beasts, 50 stoniness: as active or sustained cruelty, 261–2, 264; broadening of human ontology and, 254–5, 262; as emotional constancy, 256–8; as lack of natural human tenderness of attachments, 259–60; as a source of sensitive characterization, 260–2 Stories of Primitive Man (de’Cosimo), 70 Strier, Richard, 259 Strutt, Joseph, 208 Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 15 tax: on sheep, 183–5 Taylor, John, 271, 276 temperance: early modern notions of dance and, 149–50 Tempest, The (Giorgione), 88 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 209 Terence, 1 Teskey, Gordon, 19 Thaon, Philippe de, 225–6 theaters: woodenness and wooden actors, 207–9 Thirsk, Joan, 182 Thomas, Keith, 159 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 15 Three Ages of Man (Titian), 86

Three Books on Life (Ficino), 47 Thucydides, 53 Tillyard, E. M. W., 164–5n32 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 209 Titian: career of as a “new path,” 73–5; concerns with human boundaries and the difference/undifferentiation of the body, 79–86; eros and, 78, 79; the interval and, 64, 77–9; naturalism and creative un-making, 85–9; Raphael and, 74–5; sensory experience of sight and touch, 75–8. See also Flaying of Marsyas; individual works Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 209 Topsell, Edward, 134–7, 178–9 Trinkaus, Charles, 44–5 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 205, 270 Turner, Henry S., 5–6, 7 Turner, William, 231 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 210–14 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The (Shakespeare), 203 Two Satyrs (Titian), 86 Uexküll, Jakob von, 172–3 Utopia (More), 178, 182, 183, 186–7 Vadian, Joachim, 42 Valeriano, Pierio, 59n55 Valla, Lorenzo, 48, 53, 62n86 Vasari, Giorgio, 74 Vendramin Family with a Relic of the True Cross (Titian), 77 Venette, Nicolas, 242 Venus and Adonis (Titian), 74, 81–2, 84 Venus with a Musician (Titian), 78, 79 Vergil, 38 Vienna Dioscorides, 226–8 Vinge, Vernor, 16 Virno, Paolo, 301–2 Vitruvian Man (da Vinci), 3, 5, 67, 68 Vives, Juan Luis, 294–5, 297, 299, 311 Voigt, Georg, 43–4

Index Waldron, Jennifer, 278n14 Warde, Robert, 160 Wars of Alexander, 123, 140n22 Webster, John, 195–6, 198, 202 weeping: humanity and, 203–4 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour), 4–5 Weil, Kari, 13 Wells, Robin Headlam, 9 Werth, Tiffany Jo, 277n5 Westminster II, 129 What Is Posthumanism? (Wolfe), 2, 38–9, 173–4 When Species Meet (Haraway), 5 Whether Beasts Are Rational (Plutarch), 50 White, Hayden, 122, 123 Whole Works of Homer, The (Chapman), 285, 286–7 Widow’s Tears (Chapman), 204 wildness/wildmen: in literary narratives of sexual violence, 122–4, 127–8; in Renaissance natural histories, 133–7 wills: insights into human–livestock relations through, 156–8 Wilson, Thomas, 196 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 302, 303–4 witchcraft, 230 Witmore, Michael, 296, 304, 305 Witt, Ronald, 43 Wolfe, Cary: analysis of posthumanism in relation to humanism, 3, 38–9, 44,

335

54, 221; on the meaning of posthumanism, 6–7, 9–10, 117n1, 173–4; posthumanism in Milton and, 2, 15; on the posthumanist description of the human, 201 Wolfthal, Diane, 31–2, 309 Wollheim, Richard, 90, 95n28 wooden actors: the audience turned to “brute beasts” and, 215; character study of, 200; the erotic post in Twelfth Night and, 210–14; posthumanism and, 30–1, 201, 309; productive failure and, 201, 214–15; Renaissance descriptions of, 198, 200, 201, 206–7; woodenness of the playhouse and, 207–9; wooden stage posts and, 201, 209–10 wooden stage posts, 201, 209–10 Woodward, Donald, 153 Worthen, W. B., 6, 7 Wunderli, Richard, 131, 142n37 Yamamoto, Dorothy, 124 Yates, Frances, 241 Yates, Julian, 29–30, 308 Young, Helen, 122 Zoographies (Calarco), 19 zoomorphic play: in Henry VI, Part II, 167–70, 176–7, 180, 187–8, 308 Zorach, Rebecca, 79–81, 95n28