Shakespeare and the Apocalypse: Visions of Doom from Early Modern Tragedy to Popular Culture 9781441179944, 9781472555229, 9781441183224

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Shakespeare and the Apocalypse

Continuum Shakespeare Studies Passion, Moderation and Prudence in Shakespearean Drama, Unhae Park Langis Shakespeare and His Authors: Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question, Edited by William Leahy Shakespeare in China, Murray J. Levith Shakespeare in Japan, Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw Shakespeare and Moral Agency, Edited by Michael D. Bristol Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre, Keith Gregor Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England, Edited by Liz Oakley-Brown Shakespeare’s Cues and Prompts, Murray J. Levith Shakespeare’s Musical Imagery, Christopher R. Wilson

Shakespeare and the Apocalypse Visions of Doom from Early Modern Tragedy to Popular Culture

R. M. Christofides

Continuum Shakespeare Studies

Continuum International Publishing Group A Bloomsbury company 50 Bedford Square 80 Maiden Lane London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © R. M. Christofides 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. R. M. Christofides has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-7994-4 e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-8322-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christofides, R. M. Shakespeare and the apocalypse : visions of doom from early modern tragedy to popular culture / R. M. Christofides.   p. cm. – (Continuum Shakespeare studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-7994-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-8322-4 (ebook pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4411-0130-3 (ebook epub) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Apocalypse in literature. 3. English drama–Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600–History and criticism. 4. English drama (Tragedy)–History and criticism. I. Title. PR3011.C47 2012 822.3’3–dc23 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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For Jodie and Belinda, may our little family always be this happy.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

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A Note on Typography

ix

List of Figures

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Preface Chapter 1: The Reechy Painting and the Old Church Window

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Chapter 2: Hamlet and the Living Dead

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Chapter 3: Masochistic Damnation in Othello

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Chapter 4: Macbeth and the Angels of Doom

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Chapter 5: The Promised End of King Lear

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Chapter 6: The End

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the innumerable and unsung custodians of the wall paintings and stained glass I have had the pleasure of seeing in churches throughout England and Wales: their unheralded work not only made a book like this possible but, far more importantly, maintains for public consumption the few remnants of a glorious, but largely overlooked, cultural and artistic heritage. Nascent versions of some of the ideas in Chapter 3 appeared in ‘Iago and equivocation: the seduction and damnation of Othello’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 15:1. Thanks to Catherine Belsey for her exemplary advice and guidance over the years. Thanks to Jodie Matthews for her invaluable comments and suggestions as well as her unstinting support; this book is as much yours as mine.

A Note on Typography

When using early modern texts, I have modernized ‘i’, which also served for ‘j’. Also, I have replaced the long ‘s’ with the familiar modern version throughout. Where I have maintained the capitalization of theological terms, for example, Doom, Judgement, Judge, Last Judgement and Apocalypse, it is to emphasize their specifically Christian resonance. Moreover, I have also maintained the capitalization of quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible.

List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Doom painting at Holy Trinity Church, Coventry, Warwickshire Figure 2.1 Christ rising from the dead at St Peter and St Paul Church, Pickering, Yorkshire Figure 2.2 Christ depicted at St Teilo’s Church, Cardiff Figure 2.3 ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Charlwood, Surrey Figure 2.4 Detail of the Doom painting at St James the Great Church, South Leigh, Oxfordshire Figure 2.5 Detail of the stained glass Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire Figure 3.1 The Great West Window of St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, with a stained glass depiction of the Doom Figure 3.2 Detail of the stained glass depiction of the Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, showing a devil carting a soul off to hell Figure 3.3 Detail of the stained glass depiction of the Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, showing a snatching devil fended off by an angel Figure 3.4 Detail of the stained glass depiction of the Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, showing a soul whipped to hell by a devil Figure 3.5 Detail of the doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire, showing a devil driving souls to hell Figure 3.6 Doom painting at Holy Trinity Church, Coventry, Warwickshire, showing a snarling hell-mouth

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List of Figures

Figure 3.7 Detail of the doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire, showing a devil thrusting souls into the hell-mouth Figure 3.8 Detail of the stained glass depiction of the Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, showing the devil with a head beneath his shoulders Figure 4.1 Doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire Figure 4.2 Detail of the Doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire, showing two ‘trumpet-tongu’d’ angels resurrecting the dead Figure 4.3 Detail of the stained glass depiction of the Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, with two trumpet-wielding angels Figure 4.4 Doom painting at St James the Great, South Leigh, Oxfordshire Figure 4.5 Doom painting at St James the Great, South Leigh, Oxfordshire, showing a red angel blasting the damned to hell Figure 4.6 Detail of the doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire, showing a small, cherubic angel lifting a soul up to heaven as another angel wakes the dead with a trumpet Figure 4.7 Detail of the doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire, showing a devil driving the wicked into the ‘deep damnation’ of hell, as a striped demon keeps the cauldron fire burning with his bellows Figure 5.1 St George slays the dragon at St Peter and St Paul Church, Pickering, Yorkshire Figure 5.2 Christ stands by the mouth of hell at St Peter and St Paul Church, Pickering, Yorkshire Figure 5.3 Detail of the stained glass depiction of the ‘Prick of Conscience’ at All Saints Church, York, showing the apocalyptic sea-snake Figure 5.4 Doom painting at St James the Great, South Leigh, Oxfordshire, showing a hell-mouth manned by the devil and his dragonish beast

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Preface

I have a recurring nightmare about the end of the world. London’s famous telecommunications tower, a structure that dominated the skyline visible from my childhood home, slowly falls. Meanwhile, in a lecture hall just below, a bullet grazes my shoulder. The violence quickly spreads: panic on panic is deeply redoubled. Shots are fired between colleagues and associates, even friends. A moment later, I am running through a narrow corridor as the ceiling begins to bend and crack. Before the ceiling collapses, before the tower crushes me, I wake up. ‘The problem with the apocalypse’, a friend of mine once told me, ‘is that it never actually arrives’. As this book contends, Shakespeare’s tragedies stage this aspect of eschatology. Apocalyptic imagery was widespread in medieval England and clearer than the oblique messages delivered by the unconscious via dreams: wall paintings that depicted the Doom were commonplace in every preReformation church. Usually found above the chancel arch directly in front of the congregation, these large, vivid images of divine salvation and sulphurous damnation could not be missed. Nor could they be misunderstood. Centrepieces of the church iconography that acted as a mode of religious instruction for the mostly illiterate parishioners, depictions of the Doom warned every man, woman and child of the eternal consequences of their mortal actions. A righteous life would be rewarded with grace on Judgement Day, just like the souls on the wall saved by swooping angels. Alternatively, never-ending fire awaited sinners, thrown into a lizard-like hell-mouth by the array of sinister demons that stared down on the pews with menace. Not only did many of these Catholic images survive the zeal of sixteenthcentury Protestant iconoclasts, they also held a firm place in the collective memory of local communities. In a time of mandatory church attendance, their impact was such that Shakespeare, even in the unlikely event that he never encountered one, would have been well aware of the trumpet-blasting angels and snatching fiends that were among the standard elements of



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Doom paintings. Moreover, that so many of his dramatis personae reference these images suggests that Shakespeare, like the majority of people in early modern England, knew the iconography collectively referred to as the poor man’s Bible just as well as the biblical narratives they illustrated. Most of this iconography was destroyed as part of Reformation decrees to obliterate idolatrous imagery. Adherence to these decrees was far from universal and in many of the compliant churches Doom paintings were simply washed over, present, if not completely apparent, below a thin surface of lime. It may have been the obscured, half-existence of these images that convinced Shakespeare to use the Apocalypse they portrayed as a force that, as this book proposes, promises dramatic resolution in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear, but which never arrives to provide unequivocal salvation and damnation. We are still obsessed with apocalypses today. Current cultural and political debates often return to the future of the planet: climate change, aggravated geopolitical relations, state and civilian terrorism and the periodic renewal of nuclear tensions are all perceived to threaten humanity with the kind of widespread destruction feared during the Cold War. Popular culture, in particular cinema, television and novels, fictionalizes these varied concerns by uniting the religious and the secular, the philosophical and the scientific. Our screens show us young children blown apart by nuclear detonations and the dirty grey rubble of their annihilated home cities; the scorched earth wandered by the unfortunate survivors, the indomitable resistance or the mercenary anti-heroes; and the barren landscapes stalked by the murderous, the infected or the barbarous tribes. Humans will destroy Earth. Humans will leave Earth. Humans will be annihilated. We will all be cyborgs, aliens or disembodied, downloadable consciousnesses in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Perhaps we already are. In both contemporary fiction and the critical practices it elicits, articulations of the apocalypse have proliferated. In early modern England, however, the end of the world was almost universally understood in the Christian context that Doom paintings depicted. There are three main aspects to this book. First, it analyses the role of the Apocalypse – also commonly referred to as the Doom, the Last Judgement or Judgement Day – in the Bard of Avon’s elite quartet of tragedies. The dramatis personae of these plays call for divine intervention that would untangle and clarify all the equivocations, misconceptions and ambiguities that lead them to tragedy. At their most desperate, these tragic heroes invoke the final Judgement promised by the Bible, an event most memorably foretold through the proto-psychedelia of St John of Patmos’s wild vision in

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the Book of Revelation, a swirling, hallucinatory tale of heaven’s climactic victory over hell and the definitive assessment of every soul. Shakespeare, however, withholds any heavenly dénouement from these plays. Human pain and confusion, denied the declaration of metaphysical truths that determine punishment and redemption, persist. Tragedy can thus be understood as the irresolution of malevolent misunderstandings. By way of contrast, the problems that occur in comedies as a result of misconstructions and misapprehensions are solved. Indeed, sometimes divine intervention determines this closure. Comedies, by definition, have endings that oppose those of the tragedies: the malicious are punished or are penitent, the benevolent are redeemed, the lost are found, the estranged are reconciled, frustrated lovers are finally married and confusion is barred. Comedy, then, can be understood to offer the resolution absent from tragedy, a resolution that frequently displays the supernatural justice Shakespeare both invokes and withholds from Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. Secondly, this book analyses these plays from a poststructuralist perspective. Specifically, it appropriates elements of contemporary critical practices, in particular psychoanalysis and deconstruction, in order to examine Shakespeare’s plots. Previous attempts to read Shakespeare in the light of poststructuralism have been accused of a bias for the incidental, minor and relatively inconsequential moments of Shakespeare’s texts in order to play elaborate, verbose and overcomplicated word games. As a result, although poststructuralism has helped to open up Shakespeare studies to new and liberating readings, its adherents are said to eschew the artwork in its entirety and ignore the connections, or indeed disjunctions, between the margins of the text and the design of the whole. My aim is to answer this accusation by scrutinizing specific elements of Shakespeare’s language in relation to the plots of each play. In short, the book aims to use poststructuralist theory in order to comment on Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. By doing this I intend to show that productive intersections between poststructuralism and early modern studies need not intimidate or baffle the reader. Indeed, the two disciplines can fit together rather well: for instance, in its concern with the instability of language, a condition exemplified by equivocation, deconstruction can help us to explore the irreducible differences that characterize both early modern uses of English and the sometimes disparate versions of Shakespeare’s plays. With these intersections in mind, this book follows the recent academic focus on Shakespeare as a literary, as well as a theatrical, figure and foregrounds the process of signification. In other words, it values and



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examines the way Shakespeare’s words make meaning. For philosopher Jacques Derrida, one of the key figures of poststructuralism, a word or other signifier has meaning as a result of differences that occur within the language system. To make this clear, consider the signifier ‘man’, a hotly contested term in Macbeth. Poststructuralist theory states that we understand what ‘man’ means because it differs from ‘woman’, from ‘beast’ and from ‘mouse’, not because it has a mystical connection to something ideal in the world. Furthermore, any strict, uniform, or conclusive meaning of ‘man’ is constantly deferred because new contexts demand new articulations, new matrices of differentiation. This twin operation of difference and deferral defines language. Consequently, signification cannot be closed, final, or held in place because the signifier, first, has no access to free-standing concepts, no access to ideas that exist outside language and, secondly, develops over time, literally, because it unfolds as we speak or write, an unending process of negotiation and discovery. To put it another way, the signifier is separated from any full or sovereign meaning: it has many, often opposed, meanings, as Macbeth’s, Lady Macbeth’s, Malcolm’s and Macduff’s diverse understandings of ‘man’ indicate. Language, then, can best be understood as equivocal. Only a metaphysical presence outside language could, according to Derrida, provide full, sovereign, unequivocal meaning. Appropriate this notion for the plays and God can be understood as the kind of metaphysical presence that Derrida posits, and the Apocalypse as the moment when He provides final, stable meaning. Without this intervention, the malevolent dramatic creations we encounter exploit linguistic instability with devastating, unchecked effects. There are synergies, then, between how language works and how Shakespearean tragedy works. Simply phrased, Shakespeare’s tragedies are structured like a language. The texts do present the Apocalypse in indirect ways. The third aspect of this book is the critical mining of pre-Reformation imagery, in particular the Doom paintings to which Shakespeare’s heroes, anti-heroes and villains allude. Recurrent throughout the plays in question, this imagery was an attraction to those visiting from abroad as well as a religious pedagogical tool. In the light of this, Hamlet’s fear of the unavoidable Judgement that follows hard upon death, the apocalyptic passions excited in Othello and Macbeth by their demonic sins and the desolate nihilism of the pagan apocalypse that drains the life from Lear, can all be seen as textual monuments to the most striking and influential iconography ever seen in an English church. Deliberately or not, we still draw on the characters and fables of Doom imagery today when we tell each other stories about the end of the world, so modern-day films, television series and literature are cited

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as examples of how powerful iconography deep-rooted in the popular psyche has been rearticulated, refashioned and re-imagined for a more secular world throughout culture. This book, then, proposes that the Christian Apocalypse, as depicted on medieval church walls, is called upon to resolve tragedy, as well as clarify the malicious ambiguities and dissimulations of language that are the cause of tragic events. In so doing, it explores the relationship between a deus ex machina that, with one fearsome, fiery stroke, could provide the final, absolute justice that would end, fend off or reverse tragedy and the unstable human language that this cataclysmic event could anchor. That Shakespeare keeps any metaphysical revelations offstage allows malignant equivocations to drive the plots of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear to tragic conclusions. Chapter 1 examines the three aspects of this book mentioned above in greater detail, while Chapter 2 examines the impossible choice Hamlet faces between a Ghost whose provenance is dubious and Claudius, who is both Hamlet’s uncle and his father. Neither the Ghost nor Claudius can authoritatively, unequivocally request Hamlet’s fidelity, as both disrupt the family order that depends upon a system of clear differences for its meaning. Through the resultant confusion strikes the graveyard scene, which introduces the theme of God the Father’s authoritative Judgement by replaying the legend of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’, a popular memento mori painting that supported Doom imagery. Othello’s position is interpreted as an interstitial one in Chapter 3, the impressive general moving from an insider to an outsider in Venetian society, ensnared by Iago’s cunning mode of address. Iago switches between lies and equivocations in order to realize his schemes, while Othello, disgraced by his murder of the innocent Desdemona, beckons damnation in a self-condemnation laden with Doom imagery. Chapter 4 examines the trace of otherness in Macbeth as an effect of language and time. Equivocation is the temporal, not just linguistic, condition of the play, with the prophetic trace of the future invading the play’s present most apocalyptically in Macbeth’s soliloquy at Act 1 Scene 7, a monologue terrorized by the sound of Doom’s trumpets. Chapter 5 proposes that King Lear brings together Christianity and paganism. Ostensibly set in pre-Christian times, the play nevertheless articulates its issues in the deeply Christian language of Shakespeare’s day, not least the mythological serpentine beast inspired by scripture that rears its Leviathan-like head throughout and the Shakespearean image of the Apocalypse that concludes the drama. Lear, who compares himself to the



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wrathful dragon, dies with the murdered Cordelia in his arms; it is an unredeemed, mortal image of the end of the world that stands in place of the promised Doom of paintings and stained glass. This painful end confounds the expectation of salvation, with Cordelia as the soteriological figure who initially hurts Lear but also returns from exile to save him. To conclude, the final chapter reasserts that Shakespeare’s tragedies are structured like a language. If the irresolution of confusion constitutes tragedy, where even though protagonists expect apocalyptic intervention it never arrives to grace the good and burn the wicked, then we can also describe language in the same way. Ultimate, categorical meaning never appears to clarify the consequent misconceptions and miscalculations of human communication. Indeed, all of Shakespeare’s plays turn on the very fact that a word, sentence or paragraph can mean many things, and literature, as well as its attendant criticism, could not exist without this inherent diversity. This apocalyptic dynamic of language, a dynamic illustrated by pre-Reformation religious iconography, continues to influence the way we tell each other stories today about the moment when we will no longer be here, a moment eternally on the horizon. Undoubtedly, in Shakespeare’s plays and in popular culture today, the problem with the apocalypse is that it never actually arrives.

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Chapter 1

The Reechy Painting and the Old Church Window

Apocalypses Then and Now We are still here. (Or at least we believe ourselves to be, which, for the purposes of this book, will suffice.) Angelic trumpet blasts have yet to raise the dead out of their sodden graves, demonic reapers with rigor-mortized skin, dragging the damned to the hot, burning bosom of hell, stalk our movie screens rather than our streets, and the overlord who sits in judge­ ment upon all our souls has, thus far, kept His divine counsel. Eschatology, the branch of Christianity concerned with the end of the world, exists precisely because of the continued non-arrival of its object of study; in order for eschatology to be an ongoing subject of interest, the world-destroying event of annihilation and cathartic, holy rebirth with which it concerns itself must not have happened. Yet. Alongside the theological scholars who make the end of the world their business, culture has long circulated stories that imagine or allude to the imminent but still-to-come destruction of humanity. As we shall see, this paradox of the triumph of the skies being there as a consideration and not there as an actual occurrence, a trope that unfixes any distinction between presence and absence, has deeply important consequences for the study of language and literature: this dynamic structures both language and Shakespearean tragedy. To rephrase this, the usual patterns of apocalyptic narratives provide allegories both for the ways in which Shakespeare’s tragic plots develop and for how language produces meaning. Without the divine intervention that ties up loose ends and brings unity to comedies, tragedy has no recourse to a utopian conclusion. Language works in a similar way, as without divine intervention it is unfixed, unanchored and unstable. Moreover, Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists call on the final, apocalyptic Judgement, the literal, promised Doom, which would end confusion and ward off or reverse tragedy. Earthly destruction

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Shakespeare and the Apocalypse

and disaster thus stand unredeemed by any supernatural disclosure or revelation, by apocalyptic punishment for the wicked and salvation for the just. In short, this book contends that language is structured like an apocalyptic narrative and that, in turn, Shakespeare’s tragedies are structured like a language. Such a structure, however, will prove to be unlike what we commonly understand as a structure; it is a structure haunted by an antistructural anomaly. That is to say, the arrival of the Apocalypse, which, as the Greek origin of the word signifies, promises the revelation of unequivocal, univocal truths, never materializes. Instead, it remains forever just out of reach in some fiery, earth-shattering future, in the realm of the ‘yet’, the absence that, paradoxically, defines eschatology. By its focus on the Apocalypse, eschatology makes this absence partially present to us, in harrowing, textual forms. Deliberately or not, Shakespeare mimics this schema by withholding the cataclysmic event that his tragic dramatis personae nevertheless call upon. The luckless, blighted and fatally obdurate either fear or appeal to the form of Judgement seen in pre-Reformation representations of the Apocalypse, church paintings and stained glass depictions commonly known as Dooms. On the stage, a deus ex machina such as this could undo the ambiguities and dissimulations of language, and, by extension, resolve, avert or forestall tragedy. However, Shakespeare ultimately keeps this divine intervention offstage, allowing the tragedy to play out. Consequently, equivocations, which are actively, even supernaturally, cleared up in the comedies, propel the plots of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear to their tragic conclusions. In the modern age, the creative opportunities afforded by an unknowable event have made it possible for the final moments of humanity to be rearticulated throughout popular culture for a more secular society. Shakespeare’s audience would almost exclusively have understood the event in Christian terms as the return of Christ to defeat the Antichrist, judge each and every person, alive or dead, and build a kingdom of heaven on Earth. Contemporary fiction, on the page or on the screen, draws on religious mythology when it reinvents the Last Judgement as an apocalypse with a small ‘a’. For example, these apocalyptic scenarios are common in the field of science fiction, a genre that will be drawn on throughout this book, with James Cameron’s Terminator films perhaps the most commer­ cially successful manifestation of the trend. Concerned with a yet-to-arrive nuclear apocalypse foretold by a time-travelling soldier, the original 1984 film, The Terminator, follows the fortunes of Sarah Connor, future mother of



The Reechy Painting and the Old Church Window

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a post-apocalyptic hero, as she and the soldier are pursued by a cyborg assassin, while the 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, follows Connor and her young son as they try to prevent the impending disaster from ever occurring. In a scene from the original that encapsulates the dilemma faced by the characters of the films, Kyle Reese, the time-travelling soldier, finds himself unable to adequately communicate with police interrogators who believe him to be either insane or withholding vital information on a killing spree of Los Angeles residents all called ‘Sarah Connor’. Reese, of course, is not insane or withholding the truth but is temporally out of joint: his words, and the words of anyone with knowledge of the future war, lose any truth value because they are post-apocalyptic words delivered to pre-apocalyptic interlocutors. A tension, then, exists between language and the advent of an apocalypse, one on which the suspense of the Terminator films relies. Examining the textual politics of the Cold War, Jacques Derrida articulates this tension in a rare moment of simplicity: ‘No truth, no apocalypse’ (Derrida, 1984: 24). In the case of the exclusively divine apocalyptic arrival familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences, linguistic nuances and contradictions are eliminated by a supernatural figure through which absolute knowledge flows, a figure who delivers, at the end of the world, an end to the flux and instability of language. Prior to the cataclysm language is characterized by an absence of truth, by misconstruction, misunderstanding and ambiguity, an unstable condition summed up by equivocation, and, as Catherine Belsey notes, ‘equivocation .  .  . is the paradigm case of all signifying practice’ (Belsey, 2001: 83).

The Apocalypse and Equivocation Equivocation was topical in 1606 when Father Henry Garnet, implicated in the Gunpowder Plot of the previous year, was tried before the King’s Council at Guildhall. He justified his opaque answers at the trial on the basis of his adherence to the Jesuitical doctrine of mental equivocation, which allowed him, he claimed, to fulfil his obligation to his inquisitors but still observe the covenant of the private confession that revealed the plot against King James I. One reason for dating Macbeth as late as 1606 is the widely held belief that Shakespeare’s hell-porter alludes to Garnet’s trial: Knock, knock. Who’s there, i’th’other devil’s name? – Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who

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Shakespeare and the Apocalypse committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O! come in, equivocator. (2.3.7–12)

The hell-porter’s imaginary newcomer arrives there because he has been unable to equivocate to heaven. This canny, conning practice, from the Christian perspective of the four tragedies in question, only occurs in a fallen world. But rhetorical art cannot hoodwink God: the Last Judgement, the definitive, unequivocal separation of the saved from the damned, is the point when all equivocation comes to an end. Early-modern Bible illustrations imply just such a difference between mortal language and the language of God. Woodcuts from the first page of Genesis suggest, in some cases, the transparency of language before the fall, its singular meaning and, in other cases, the opacity of a fallen language where meaning runs riot. Some woodcuts show the Tetragrammaton, the Hebraic name of God always rendered without vowels to emphasize its ineffability, placed above creation. Several other versions have instead Adam naming the animals overseen by the Tetragrammaton. Before the Fall, Adam could not misname the animals because the truth and clarity of his choice was guaranteed by God. Conversely, these prelapsarian images are replaced in some editions with a depiction of the Fall in which Adam and Eve stand by the Tree of Knowledge, their disgrace written in English on the unfurling scroll that links them to the tree, the unspeakable, ineffable Tetragrammaton above them in the angry sky. Viewed up close, the acquiescent animals that Adam once blessed with their divinely sanctioned names now wear looks of despair as they surround him and Eve (see Belsey, 2001: 36–46). Consciously or unwittingly, such woodcuts present a division between man and God as, at the same time, a difference between mortal and immortal communication. The Fall marks the point at which the Creator lets go, but it also signals the moment when human beings start to emulate His creativity, to exploit a fallen language in the possession of multiple, disseminated meanings. Ironically, the full possibilities of such a language are realized by equivocation; it is language at the apex of its creative powers. Not only would Shakespeare’s plays lose much of their complexity without equivocation, a condition only possible in a fallen world, but, without the heterogeneity afforded language by its separation from an unequivocal source, literature, including Shakespeare’s plays, might not be possible at all. Paradoxically, equivocation – the playful movement of language – can be seen not just as a curse of the Fall, but as one of its recompenses.



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An unfixed linguistic trope, equivocation threatens inaccuracy even as these few paragraphs seem to promise the opposite by providing a definition. Father Garnet’s equivocations were effectively lies, exemplifying equivo­ cation as a way of lying by withholding part of the truth, but it may also be a strict adherence to the letter of the truth that invites another meaning. Alternatively, equivocation exploits the plurality of meaning, inviting uncertainty through utterances susceptible to more than one reading. Examples of these definitions are evident in modern political controversies. In 1992 Bosnian Muslim Dzemal Partusic revealed the atrocities perpetrated in a Bosnian-Serb prison camp with an equivocation: ‘I don’t want to tell any lies, but cannot tell the truth’ (Vulliamy, 2008). Partusic’s words, practically a definition of equivocation, confirmed the suspected atrocities by explicitly withholding any confirmation, satisfying both an inquisitive reporter and the prison camp’s gun-wielding guards. Defeated 2008 Democratic presidential candidate and current Secretary of State Hilary Clinton did indeed lie about the circumstances of her own visit to Bosnia in 1996. Video footage of her arrival at Tuzla showed it to be routine, with no hint of the hazardous, unseen sniper-fire she would later recall. As the BBC reported, Clinton described the error as a ‘misspeak’, an ambiguous term that suggested a dramatic exaggeration but fell deliberately short of admitting the lie (‘Does “misspeak” mean lying?’, BBC). Such public relations tactics also characterized the New Labour government in power in Britain from 1997 until 2010 and, in the summer of 2008, came back to haunt one of its two major architects. Without a clear declaration of intent, David Miliband, Foreign Secretary at the time, nevertheless signalled the start of an ultimately aborted leadership campaign against then Prime Minister Gordon Brown with opaque, but calculated, comments: ‘I have always wanted to support Gordon’s leadership’. The dissimulation was swiftly paraphrased in the national press: ‘I hoped he would be a good Prime Minster, but I have been forced to conclude that he cannot be’ (Rawnsley, 2008). Miliband’s statement addressed the Labour Party in a manner similar to Macbeth’s temptation of Banquo: help me to replace our current leader, and your loyalty to me will be repaid. Fatefully, Miliband would come to rue his patience when, in a Shakespearean twist, he was beaten to the party leadership by his ambitious younger brother, Ed, who declared his candidacy after another tense period of prevarication. Shakespeare did not need to wait until the trial of Father Garnet to discover the possibilities of equivocation. The practice features in his plays much earlier. Villainous characters make seemingly innocent statements that mislead others, or they use ambiguous terms that invite

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misapprehensions but maintain their integrity. Such linguistic manipu­ lations are not, however, exclusively evil. Jokes exploit double meanings to display the wit of the speaker, and romantic couples suggest their love with words that shy away from declaring it. Furthermore, it is not only a way of speaking; it may also be structural. Many characters hold titles or occupy positions that are equivocal, for example the comic heroines who equivocate when they tell the truth disguised as boys, the dramatic irony in these cases dependent on meanings available to the audience but not to the figures on the stage. Derrida has argued that Western philosophy – or metaphysics, as he calls it – traditionally, and erroneously, assumes an external point of reference, a transcendental signified where unequivocal truth resides. In the Christian worlds of Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, as well as in the profoundly Christian language that invades the pagan world of King Lear, such a transcendental signified can be taken as God, or, appropriately, the Logos. In this design­ ation often used by Christian theology, Jesus Christ is linked to the original Greek ‘logos’ that denotes both ‘reason’ and ‘word’. The divine reason connects truth, rationality and language, as in the New Testament: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (Jn. 1.1). As Derrida himself puts it, ‘all the metaphysical determinations of truth . . . are more or less immediately inseparable from the logos’ and, by way of example, this can be understood ‘in the sense of God’s infinite understanding’ (Derrida, 1997: 10–11). The main implication of Derrida’s work on language is that communication does not take place in the simple, transparent way we commonly assume because messages are not received in the exact forms they are sent. Separated by disobedience from the authority of the Logos (as God, or divine law, which cannot lie or be irrational), Adam and Eve and their descendants have lost their hold on the connection between truth, reason and speech and must understand or delude each other as best they can. Equivocation, whether as ambiguity or dissimulation, is not just a historical issue; it is the human experience of language. Pre-Reformation religious imagery of the Last Judgement envisages a Logos – the triumphant, returning Christ – who, in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear, is taken as capable of arresting both equivocation and tragedy. These four plays unleash the dark, anarchic side of linguistic heterogeneity when the holy Logos, the transcendental signified lacking from a fallen language is, analogously, withheld by Shakespeare. But this lack not only accounts for the tragic consequences seen in Shakespearean tragedy; it is also the very condition of artistic possibility. Antony and Cleopatra, considered by many to be one of Shakespeare’s major tragedies, similarly



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explores the creative might of human language and its fractured relationship with divinity. Cleopatra, a mortal character, also has immortal, otherworldly qualities: her beauty positions her outside the play’s world, as a Venus-like goddess beyond the inadequate descriptions of her exotic seductive powers. Unlike in the four major tragedies studied in the following chapters, where a metaphysical presence is summoned but kept offstage, Cleopatra is an onstage presence defined in metaphysical terms. That fulsome praise in her honour is delivered in her absence separates her supernatural erotic powers from her presence before the audience. Although Cleopatra’s ineffable beauty escapes adequate description, the play relies on the power of the signifier to persuade Shakespeare’s audience that the boy playing Cleopatra can be compared to a goddess of love. This signifying power flourishes in the absence of a Logos but can also be abused to engender the crosspurposes that plague the figures of tragedy. In comedies any misunderstandings are finally resolved. Moreover, sometimes closure explicitly depends on divine intervention. Hymen, goddess of marriage, reveals Rosalind’s true identity and, as a result, resolves the events of As You Like It. We see Rosalind reunited with her father, the Duke, and married to Orlando, while all the other romantic loose ends are tied up. In Pericles, the immaculate Diana, chaste, lunar goddess of the hunt, directs Pericles to her temple where he finds the wife for whom he grieves still alive, while in Cymbeline the tablet left by thunder-throwing Jupiter foretells the succession of disclosures and discoveries in the final scene of the play, where Imogen and Posthumus are reconciled and Cymbeline finds his long-lost sons. In another example, Apollo’s Oracle at Delphos offers the truth against which the disgrace and rehabilitation of Leontes is measured in The Winter’s Tale. Leontes dismisses the Oracle’s words as false, but they are confirmed by the death of his son, Mamillius, and the Oracle is validated again at the end of the play with the arrival of Leontes’s lost daughter, Perdita, which leads to Hermione’s mystical revival. These plays have, by definition, endings that point in different directions to those of the tragedies: protagonists are redeemed, doubts are resolved, malevolent figures are punished or seen to repent, lost siblings are found, parents and children are reconciled and lovers are married. The resolution that a comedy offers counterpoints the endings of the tragedies, often displaying the supernatural justice anticipated, feared, but ultimately withheld by Shakespeare from his ill-starred heroes. To mortal eyes, however, divine messages can still equivocate. Hymen bars confusion, but the declarations of Apollo’s Oracle and Jupiter’s tablet still require interpretation. Despite the apparent neat completeness of the endings, a difference still seems to hold in these plays between encountering

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Shakespeare and the Apocalypse

the Logos and its symbolization in a fallen language, a difference also seen in St Paul’s epistle to the Christians of Corinth: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face’ (1 Cor. 13.12). The tragic heroes, however, do not come face to face with the Logos. Instead, the intervention of a cloud-bursting transcendental signified, of the redeeming, all-powerful Judge, is withheld and equivocation runs riot, its structural effects and the misapprehensions and misconstructions it invites producing tragic finales.

Visions of Doom Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 horror classic Night of the Demon begins with psychologist Professor Henry Harrington’s arrival at the mansion home of Doctor Julian Karswell, an unhinged rival he has denounced as a fraud. Harrington begs Karswell, a mysterious, devil-worshipping warlock, to remove the curse he has placed on him in exchange for a public apology. Karswell agrees, and requests from Harrington the runic parchments that carry the spell. Much to his eventual misfortune, Harrington reveals that these parchments burned spontaneously not long ago. On hearing this, Karswell cuts short the visit and leads out the man he secretly knows to be doomed to meet his grisly fate alone. Content with Karswell’s initial agreement to undo the curse, Harrington travels home in the misguided belief that he has been spared, a notion of which he is soon disabused. As he parks his car outside his house clouds of smoke billow through the trees, the effervescent puffs a liminal point between here and another, darker world, then through this fizzing portal in the night emerges aflame the horned and pig-nosed demon that kills Harrington. Winged and clovenhoofed, this relentless demon that goes on to stalk the protagonist, John Holden, was based by production designer Sir Ken Adam on medieval pictures of demons (Earnshaw, 2005: 56). These demons, devils or fiends were almost universal in pre-Reformation depictions of the Doom, grabbing souls, whipping the damned in the direction of hell, or carting them off to a fiery hell-mouth. Harrowed by shame and guilt, Othello offers himself to these sadistic monsters, calling for Judgement as he invites, and despairs of, the heavenly wrath that could punish Iago. Patricia Parker proposes that Othello claims the authority of ‘a husband as final judge and executioner of a too open and too “liberal” wife’ (Parker, 1996: 251–2) but, after Desdemona’s murder is exposed as foul and wrongful, Othello gives Desdemona that authority as he pictures her gaze thrusting his soul away from heaven and towards hell to be snatched at



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by fiends that exact brutal, retributive justice on sinners and wrong-doers, just as the creature in Night of the Demon does when it eventually crushes the rancorous Karswell instead of the innocent Holden. Allusions within the tragedies reference all aspects of apocalyptic imagery, artworks not critically mined before now. Macbeth and Hamlet, like Othello, also draw heavily on these depictions of the Doom. Macbeth is haunted by apocalyptic vision in a soliloquy replete with references to Judgement Day, and, before Lady Macbeth spurs him on to regicide, he considers the murder of Duncan a damnable offence, visualizing trumpet-wielding angels that condemn the crime with their blasts. Angels with trumpets featured in most Dooms, their heavenly blasts waking the dead to be saved or damned by the ‘everlasting judge’ dreaded by Hamlet in the First Quarto (Q1, 7.119).1 In this particular text of Hamlet the hero explicitly names the fear of God as the decisive point on man’s moral compass, while all three texts of the play remind the audience of the inevitability of death and the Judgement that follows. Indeed, the graveyard scene reworks a painting often found on the walls of medieval churches called ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’, a supplement to the message conveyed by Dooms. Hamlet’s iconic encounter with Yorick’s skull summons the imagery of this memento mori, which showed gruesome cadavers warning living kings that the wealth and power they hold cannot defy death. A few years after Hamlet, Shakespeare ends King Lear with a conflation of a Christian and pagan apocalypse. Kent and Edgar invoke the Doom imagery introduced in Hamlet and so prevalent in Othello and Macbeth, acknowledging the moment Lear enters with a dead Cordelia in his arms as an image of the Apocalypse. The poor man’s Bible – the title by which pre-Reformation church imagery has come to be known – warned medieval parishioners of the consequences of their actions, and, it seems, Shakespeare invoked, appropriated and reinterpreted images of death and, especially, the Doom in these four tragedies. These visions haunt the language of the plays, but the apocalyptic Judgement they imagine never arrives on stage to save the innocent and damn the wicked, to stop the tragedy caused by equivocation. Depictions of the Doom were widespread and many, as well as a small number of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ paintings, can still be seen today across Britain, survivors of Protestant iconoclasm. Extant images are often faded and difficult to make out, but the vitality and visibility of these images to medieval parishioners cannot be overestimated. Vivid and unavoidable, church imagery, including wall paintings and stained glass, was used as an educational tool by parish priests, more than likely not

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Shakespeare and the Apocalypse

scholars themselves, to inform their mostly illiterate congregations. Little is known about the anonymous artists responsible for these creations but they were probably journeyman painters (see Rouse, 2010: 21–3) or, in the case of stained glass, glass painters supervised by a master glazier. Along with images of Christ and devotional images of the Virgin Mary’s life, death and miracles, these artists furnished the walls of medieval churches with biblical tales, morality tales and Christian saints. These included selected scenes from both the Old and New Testament, idealized portraits of various saints and moralities as recognizable to churchgoers as ‘The Three Living and Three Dead’, such as the ‘Warning Against Idle Gossip’, which showed the devil embracing two gossiping women, and ‘The Seven Works of Mercy’, which instructed parishioners to clothe the naked, feed the hungry and provide drink to the thirsty. Other moral messages, often found in the same church, included pictorial representations of the seven deadly sins and the selfexplanatory ‘Warning to Sabbath-breakers’. With densely packed narratives, these images could be subtle, surreal or even grotesque, and would surely have made a pro­found impression on all who saw them. Above the chancel arch of Coventry’s Holy Trinity Church, a short drive from Stratford-uponAvon in Shakespeare’s county of Warwickshire, a recently restored example shows how ornate, complex and frightening Doom paintings in particular could be (Figure 1.1). In the centre sits Jesus Christ flanked by his apostles, and to the left the naked dead rise from their uncovered tombs, resurrected by a trumpeting

Figure 1.1  Doom painting at Holy Trinity Church, Coventry, Warwickshire.



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angel who stands by a stairway to heaven, steps to be ascended only by those judged worthy. The unworthy are condemned to hell, sited on the other side in the bottom-right corner of the painting, the most common place for hell-mouths. This fanged, monstrous opening to the eternal flames below is guarded by demons who dangle the unworthy into its mouth, while just above more dead rise to be judged, serenaded to life by another angel with a resurrecting trumpet. Inspired chiefly by the visions of St John of Patmos in the Bible’s Book of Revelation, as well as elements of the Book of Daniel and Matthew’s gospel, Dooms like this were intended to instruct parishioners across Britain and save their souls, but they also looked over the congregation with a menace that must have been overwhelming. But did Shakespeare himself see them? The evidence would certainly seem to suggest so. During the Reformation, imagery, including wall paintings and stained glass, was destroyed as a result of iconoclastic zeal following injunctions by both Edward VI and Elizabeth I. Although most Doom paintings were whitewashed over in the course of the sixteenth century, obliterated by the decrees made by the emergent Protestantism of the English Reformation, Shakespeare would have been aware of their content and almost certainly would have seen one. Edward VI in 1547 ordered that all pictures, paintings and stained glass in churches be removed, so church walls with paintings were washed and then covered with a coat of white lime. As Eamon Duffy writes, ‘conformity was almost universal’ to these diktats (Duffy, 1992: 481). However, Duffy’s words also betray the possibility that some churches could have escaped the fervour sweeping through England’s parishes. At some point in his life, Shakespeare most probably saw a Doom painting, or even a stained glass version. That Elizabeth I ordered more removals from places of worship in 1559, just five years before Shakespeare’s birth, suggests, at the very least, that enough pictures, paintings and stained glass had survived for further action to be deemed necessary. The 1559 injunction, as Margaret Aston sets out, ‘did not prescribe an aniconic church’. Whether because of Elizabeth I’s own resistance to this destructive mania, public affection for such imagery, or the practical difficulty of annihilating idolatrous imagery with the totality envisaged, ‘the way was open for compromise, for the retention, even the restoration, of imagery’ (Aston, 1988: 304, 307). It would appear that pre-Reformation imagery thus had a chance of surviving the Protestant revolutionary zeal for long enough to be available to Shakespeare. In Much Ado About Nothing he seems to reference this iconography, evidently counting on his audience to recognize the allusion. Claudio and Don Pedro have been duped by false

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Shakespeare and the Apocalypse

evidence of Hero’s infidelity. Recounting his dastardly involvement in the slander, Borachio, on a tangent, talks about the eccentricities of fashion, which turns about all the hot-bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty, sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoh’s soldiers in the Reechy painting, sometime like god Bel’s priests in the old church window. (3.3.127–31) The picture of Pharaoh’s soldiers discoloured by smoke would seem to be one of the many wall paintings that illustrated biblical tales in medieval churches, and the subsequent invocation of priests in the stained glass of church windows suggests the survival of pre-Reformation iconography in glass, either in reality or in the popular memory. Moreover, as late as 1643–4, long after Shakespeare’s death, William Dowsing worked his way through Suffolk and Cambridgeshire doggedly implementing a Parliamentary Ordinance to destroy surviving superstitious and idolatrous monuments. Conformity to the injunctions of 1547 and 1599, then, may have been far from universal for quite some time before the intervention of Victorian renovation destroyed hundreds of images. But most importantly, the content of these pictures would have been fresh in the memory of local communities, and throughout early modern Britain, and must have been familiar at least by repute to Shakespeare. As Duffy notes: The churchwardens’ accounts of the period witness a wholesale removal of the images, vestments, and vessels which had been the wonder of foreign visitors to the country, and in which the collective memory of the parishes were, quite literally, enshrined. (Duffy, 1992: 480) In an era of mandatory church attendance, it seems highly improbable that any congregation could be unaware of what had so recently adorned the church walls that surrounded them, especially when the very absence of these objects of religious creativity resulted from one of the key ideological struggles of the period’s sectarianism. And if the items removed were fascinating for visiting foreigners and, for so long, a mode of religious instruction for the mostly illiterate parishioners, the language of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear can be understood as a cultural representation of, perhaps, the most dramatic example of the images that persisted in the collective memory even after they were effaced, pulled down or carried away.



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Poststructuralist Apocalypses The poststructuralist account of language can help us to understand how Doom imagery influenced Shakespeare’s tragedies. In particular, deconstruction, Derrida’s conception of language as differential rather than referential, and its associated notion of dissemination, can shed light on the plots of the plays. One day entire libraries may well be filled with books defining Derrida’s anti-philosophy, but, this particular vision of the end of days aside, here are some key pointers or methodological foci of the approach with which to orientate ourselves through the critical potential that deconstruction offers. To begin with, ideas, for Derrida, do not exist independently of language, a notion he picks up from elsewhere. It was Ferdinand de Saussure who initially took to task the traditional concept of language operation that believed a sign to correspond with a pre-existing referent, that is to say that a word such as ‘boy’ corresponds in a natural or mystical way to a material concept in the world, a kind of Platonic ideal of ‘boy’ with which we are all, somehow, in tune, programmed by God or by the mentoring of the womb to automatically understand. Saussure broke the sign in two, into a signifier – simply, a word or any symbol that conveys meaning – and a signified – the mental concept to which the signifier relates – and privileged the signified within the linguistic sign over the paranormal referent in the world. In other words, language itself, not the outside world, determined meaning (Saussure, 1974: 65–70, 111–22). For instance, we comprehend the term ‘boy’ in its difference from the term ‘girl’, not because either word is esoterically or spiritually fixed to a defining entity or concept in the world. Even so, Saussure maintained the attachment between signifier and signified, a relationship he described as arbitrary rather than, as in the story of Adam ascribing names to the animals, divinely ratified. Standing on Saussure’s shoulders, Derrida points out that the Swiss linguist had not realized the full potential of his own insight. Whereas Saussure saw signifier and signified as flipsides of the same coin, Derrida argues that the signified is just another signifier, erasing any distinction between the two: ‘the signified always already functions as a signifier’. After all, the mental concept signified by the word ‘tree’ is still itself an image or a word or a cipher. And so, like the references of a dictionary, signifiers point us towards other signifiers: ‘“Signifier of the signifier” describes . . . the movement of language’ (Derrida, 1997: 6). Language may well be differential, then, but as a continual chain of successive differences between signifiers, a continuum Derrida calls dissemination. ‘Words, words, words’,

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replies Hamlet eccentrically when Polonius asks him what he’s reading (2.1.92). The process of dissemination produces traces. So, following Saussure, Derrida goes on to argue that meaning results from the trace of difference, since we understand a term by reference to the trace of its differentiating other. To put it another way, we understand a term not according to the absolute difference between it and other terms, but by the connecting traces between them upon which this difference relies. Simply put, imagine I describe ‘boy’ as ‘not girl’, I still need the term ‘girl’ in order to make my notion of the term ‘boy’ understandable to you, which hints at a subtle bond between two apparently antithetical terms. Meaning, hence, depends on the trace of ‘boy’ in ‘girl’, a trace that marks ‘the relationship with the other’ (Derrida, 1997: 47). An effect of this trace is to unfix, or deconstruct, binary oppositions such as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, oppositions arranged in accordance to a hierarchy where one term has cultural pre-eminence over the other. Indeed, we know that biological sex is much less binary than the verbal opposition between ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ implies and that the codes of patriarchal culture apply, of course, to boys and girls as much as they do to men and women. As an effect of these linguistic procedures, the signifier, according to Derrida, has no access to free-standing concepts, which separates it from any possible fullness of its own meaning. Because the movement of language is one of continual differences between signifiers, any final, conclusive meaning remains deferred by this procedure of dissemination. Only a metaphysical presence outside language could, by its apocalyptic arrival, ensure an arrest to this unfolding process and guarantee the fullness – the conclusive, stable, unequivocal meaning – of the signifier. In a world still devoid of divine guarantees, signification cannot, however, be closed, final, or held in place, and equivocation stands as its general condition. This vision of an oscillating, fluctuating language compliments the unfixed spelling and grammar of early modern English, not to mention the variations between Shakespeare’s texts, and can also be seen as a condition that Shakespeare deliberately exploits as an instrumental part of his tragic plots, which themselves withhold divine resolution. Drawing at one point on Derrida’s work in his extensive reappraisal of Shakespeare in the light of poststructuralism, Malcolm Evans locates a linguistic battleground in the early scenes of Macbeth. On the one hand there is an ‘attempt to construct an unequivocal idiom’ that includes ‘the theory of the divine right of kings and its place in the Great Chain of Being’. On the other hand is ‘an inescapable undertow of negation . . . the hurly-burly of



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language’ (Evans, 1989: 114). Put another way, equivocation disturbs a metaphysical order that assumes a transcendental signified. Evans’s insight can be taken further: this struggle should be viewed as a fundamental one throughout Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. Adopting this approach attempts to answer R. A. Foakes’s critique of poststructuralist accounts of Shakespeare. Although Foakes generously concedes the poststructuralist liberation of Shakespeare criticism, he also believes that it undermines the aesthetic pleasure found in ‘the design of the whole’ by focusing ‘on the particular, the fragmentary, the anecdotal, the borders of literature’ (Foakes, 1993: 222). Although this book does not pretend to offer a totalizing account of the texts, it does not marginalize the texts in the way Foakes suggests, instead studying the relation between Derrida’s conception of language and the dramaturgy of the plays with an examination of the role an unstable language plays in the plots of the tragedies. When Hymen intervenes at the end of As You like It, she orders reconciliation to take place ‘If truth holds true contents’ (5.4.128). Evans calls this a validation of the restored order that opposes the tyrannous interregnum of Duke Frederick ‘in which those in power manipulate language to sustain official versions of “truth” that are patently false’ (Evans, 1989: 147). We might place a different emphasis on this dramatic event: the intervention of a transcendental signified not only exposes lies, reveals dissimulations and resolves misunderstandings, but, in so doing, thwarts the tragedy they threaten to cause. In the big four tragedies, linguistic fluctuations, witting and unwitting, are unchecked and unresolved by a deus ex machina, while the interstitial positions of Claudius and the Ghost, Iago’s temptation of Othello and the general’s dual position as insider and outsider, the temporal and linguistic condition of Macbeth, as well as Cordelia’s double-edged role as both a disgrace to Lear and his saving grace, all perform an active part in bringing about the tragic conclusion of each play. Following the recent return to the importance of Shakespeare’s language initiated by Frank Kermode and, in particular, Lukas Erne, close scrutiny of the texts dominates my methodological approach. Kermode, writing on this occasion for a non-academic readership, states that Shakespeare’s literary skills have been marginalized, an unwanted side-effect of the modern proliferation of Shakespeare studies, so that ‘the fact that he was a poet has somehow dropped out of consideration’ (Kermode, 2000: vii). Erne, in response to the claims of performance theorists that Shakespeare wrote solely for the stage, offers a more substantial argument that Shakespeare also wrote for publication. The peak of playbook publication,

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Erne proposes, came between 1594 and 1613 and so what is particular about Shakespeare’s career in London ‘is that plays stopped having a public existence that was confined to the stage’. Successful and a shareholder in his company, Shakespeare ‘could afford to write plays for the stage and the page’ (Erne, 2003: 14, 20). However, rigorous textual analysis that treats the plays as literary works must also acknowledge the demands of the early modern stage as we understand them. Taking up Erne’s implication that extant texts are our most unmediated encounter with Shakespeare, we must also acknowledge that early modern experiences of Shakespeare occurred predominantly in the theatre. Therefore, poetry and dramatic function cannot be divorced in the plays. When, as Hamlet begins, the sentry on guard is challenged by his replacement, the reversal of protocol indicates an uncanny unease in the dark. But a contemporary audience would need to be convinced of the night-time setting of the scene: we know performances occurred in the middle of the afternoon, so words have to do the work that, these days, can be done with a dimming of the lights. Barnardo solves the problem: ‘Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to bed, Francisco’. Francisco responds by stressing the melancholy mood: ‘For this relief much thanks. ‘Tis bitter cold, | And I am sick at heart’ (1.1.7–9). This reinforces the importance of Shakespeare’s language; it is the power of the signifier that convinces Shakespeare’s audience that the wary, brooding sentries change shifts uneasily at midnight rather than in broad daylight. Any present-day poststructuralist account of Shakespeare must acknow­ ledge an intellectual debt to new historicism, cultural materialism and psychoanalysis. New-historicist Stephen Greenblatt is the key figurehead of a methodology designed to understand the Shakespearean canon in relation to dominant early-modern ideological institutions. Greenblatt sets out his stall in Shakespearean Negotiations, where he contends that ‘works of art, however intensely marked by the creative intelligence and private obsessions of individuals, are the products of collective negotiation and exchange’ (Greenblatt, 1988: vii). In Hamlet in Purgatory, where religious images from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries illustrate the role of purgatory in Hamlet, Greenblatt seems to allow Shakespeare greater agency in a search for ‘the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter’ (Greenblatt, 2001: 4). However, as with his earlier work, the literary object of study takes second place to the historical context. Addressing the variations between Shakespeare’s texts, Greenblatt states that there has ‘probably never been a time since the early eighteenth century when there was less confidence in the “text”’ (Greenblatt, 1988: 3). This justification for



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giving political discourse and events priority over an unstable text comes at a heavy price: Shakespeare’s plays are relegated in importance, footnotes to their own exegesis. Cultural materialism offsets Greenblatt’s concern for social, economic and political circumstances by privileging the language of the text; it foregrounds the language of Shakespeare, employing the close textual scrutiny new historicism can tend to eschew. The foreword by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield to the seminal Political Shakespeare explains cultural materialism as ‘a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis’ (Dollimore and Sinfield, 1985: vii). The political commitment of cultural materialism can, in part, be seen as a reaction to the inequalities of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and my focus on the machinations of language is equally a response to the political spin of both Tony Blair’s New Labour project and its successor in government, the Conservative-led coalition headed by David Cameron, both of whom value the public’s perception of governance at least as highly as governance itself. Spin is defined as ‘a bias or slant on information, intended to create a favourable impression when it is presented to the public’ (Oxford English Dictionary); it is the modern incarnation of Father Garnet’s controversial equivocations. Blair’s government, it seems, understood what Dollimore says of representation: ‘it is never merely a reflection of the pregiven, but something which helps both to control and constitute what is given and what is thought’ (Dollimore, 1989/1990: 479). Maybe we can consider Iago as a twisted prototype of the modern political spin doctor. Not only this, but Hamlet’s delay can also be seen as the apathetic response to the ideological wasteland of political leadership, Macbeth, with his unchecked ambition, as an early progenitor of ruthless, careerist politicians and the multiple betrayals in King Lear as a proleptic vision of a cut-throat world. Meanwhile, those who believed in the bright future promised for Britain by New Labour, or who have seen the Tea Party movement hinder President Barack Obama’s ability to kick-start positive social change in America, may now feel as duped and disillusioned as Othello. Just as cultural materialism searched the margins of the text to remove the shackles of ideological appropriations of gender, race, class and sex in Shakespeare, any celebration of the signifier’s power will inevitably include the possibilities it offers as a manipulative political tool. In the realm of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud has been a useful resource for several generations of critics, with Hamlet proving the most fruitful source of analysis for both Freud and the Shakespeare criticism he inspired. Philip Armstrong, in a study of the relationship between Shakespeare and psychoanalysis, calls the scribbles Hamlet frantically makes on his tables after

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the intervention of the Ghost as ‘a moment that in Freudian terms represents the inscription upon the psyche of the superegoic law of the father’ (Armstrong, 2001: 52). Alternatively, I centralize the moment Hamlet addresses the Ghost as ‘King, father, royal Dane’ (1.4.45). In the psycho­ analysis of Jacques Lacan, the paternal trinity of names invokes the Name-ofthe-Father – more simply referred to as the Father – as a structural, rather than biological, position in language, a privileged signifier that directs the development of the subject. Coppélia Kahn has focused on Shakespeare’s protagonists as products of a particular family structure (see Kahn, 1981) but, as Armstrong puts it, Kahn ‘tends to take the Shakespearean family as a replica of the twentieth-century Oedipalised nuclear family’ (Armstrong, 2001: 188). Armstrong himself, in the light of Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage – where the young child is inducted into culture by an identification with its reflection – uses the repetition of Renaissance ‘models of cognition – the eye of the mind, mirror of the intellect, mind as inner arena’ in Hamlet to examine the identification between theatrical spectacle and spectator (Armstrong, 1996: 224). But Lacan’s emphasis on the Father regenerates Hamlet’s dilemma otherwise, as a choice between the Ghost and Claudius, both of whom occupy unsteady positions that undermine their claim to the place of Father. For Janet Adelman, emphasizing the maternal as a reaction to the patriarchy and misogyny feminist critics have located in Freud and Lacan, the mother previously absent in Shakespeare ‘returns with a vengeance in Hamlet’ (Adelman, 1992: 10). However, the failure of the play’s patriarchal system can be attributed to the failure of either Claudius or the Ghost to occupy the structural position of the Father, a Lacanian trope that compliments the importance assigned to kings and fathers in early modern society, which saw a conflation between the two. For this reason, Duncan’s success as a king in Macbeth, as a Father-figure, makes his killing all the more horrific, and in King Lear, Lear gives up the duties of kingship but still tries to retain its benefits, a vacillation that leaves him vulnerable to Goneril’s and Regan’s thirst for power. As the next chapter proposes, the paternal emphasis of Lacan’s Name-of-the-Father theory not only sheds light on the twists and turns of Hamlet, but the apocalyptic elements of Hamlet lead us to a further examination of the Father’s linguistic role.

Note 1

All references to the First Quarto of 1603 and the Folio of 1623 are to Shakespeare (2006c).

Chapter 2

Hamlet and the Living Dead

Midnight’s Approach I’m not the only one who has apocalyptic nightmares. Someone close to me recently dreamt that she was standing on the roof of a castle overlooking a graveyard. Nearby stood a large clock tower atop of which crouched a grimacing stone gargoyle. The time was close to midnight, the point when the end of the world would come. As the floor began to shake, as the crenellations crumbled and fell into the rumbling graveyard far, far below, she rushed down the spiral staircase to escape. Before reaching the last step, before the ground beneath her feet cracked open to spit out the dead and swallow her whole, and just moments before midnight, she woke up. ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?’ the gravedigger Goodman Delver asks his flummoxed sidekick in Hamlet. ‘When you are asked this question next, say “A gravemaker”. The houses he makes last till doomsday’ (5.1.41–2, 57–9). Welcome to the graveyard of the apocalypse. Exhumed body parts chucked upwards by the morbidly chirpy gravedigger have a dual function in the graveyard scene. The scene provides both a darkly comic allusion to the resurrection of the dead always seen in Doom imagery, as well as a more thorough enactment of the pre-Reformation memento mori ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’. Stripped of flesh, the dug-up skulls of Yorick and his unnamed bedfellows allegorize the Apocalypse, mediating the audience’s encounter with the final Judgement of God. Furthermore, in fulfilling this symbolic task, these bodiless heads achieve what Claudius and the Ghost cannot. Ultimately, the play’s two potential fathers qualify for the double-edged condition of father-and-not-father, and, as a result, fail to occupy the clear, kingly position of symbolic Father that is representative of God. Instead, it is left to the skinless, soil-smeared skulls Hamlet contemplates to stand

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in the earthly place of the unequivocal, transcendental Logos of the play’s Christian universe. As Hamlet begins, the opening three lines of the conflated Arden edition offer a question, a demand and a statement that resonate throughout the play: BARNARDO  Who’s there? FRANCISCO  Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself. BARNARDO  Long live the King! (1.1.1–3) An omen of the early threats posed by the Ghost and the approach of Fortinbras’s army, the opening question also doubles as a description of Hamlet’s dilemma. Who, really, are the Ghost and Claudius? Can either claim to act as Hamlet’s father when both lay claim to the role without proper justification? The Ghost demands that Hamlet reveal himself as a traditional revenger and take speedy retributive justice in retaliation for the murder of his father: ‘If thou has nature in thee, bear it not’ (1.5.81). But Hamlet’s response to this demand opposes the swift and bloody redress the Ghost expects, offering, instead, the unfolding of the play’s metaphysics of kings and fathers as Hamlet struggles with a command that proves difficult to obey. Given the turnover of kings in the play, with Hamlet himself effectively monarch for the brief duration of his dying breaths, Barnardo’s cry of monarchical devotion does not turn out to be just ironic; it also predicts Hamlet’s inability to obey the impossible laws imposed by impostor fathers. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, one of the major inspirations for poststructuralism, posits the Name-of-the-Father as a structural position in psychoanalysis influenced by the cultural role of fathers who are ‘identified . . . with the figure of the law’ (Lacan, 1989: 74). By this Lacan means that culture has tended to associate the external law and authority of the state with biological fathers, and he extends this association to those who occupy positions of authority explained in paternal terms. Monarchs, presidents and religious leaders exemplify the Name-of-the-Father: they stand in place of a higher, paternal, sometimes divine truth, a Logos which they symbolize and embody. Structural Fathers like this play a crucial role in the symbolic order, Lacan’s conception of language as anchored by, and organized around, privileged signifiers against which other signifiers are set and measured: invested with certain principles that provide the foundation for civilized society, privileged signifiers such as the Name-of-the-Father enforce



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the Law, internal commands that check the unbridled imperatives of the unconscious. Thus, in the family drama of psychoanalysis, the Name-of-the-Father confers identity and prohibits incest, locating the subject by placing him or her within a lineage and emphasizing the incest taboo. In Hamlet, the king’s murder by Claudius precipitates an uncertainty in this formulation when regicide and the marriage of Gertrude and Claudius cause confusion: Claudius becomes father and uncle, Gertrude mother and aunt, Hamlet son and nephew. Shakespeare’s play can thus be seen to anticipate the agonistic relationship between the unequivocal Logos and its representation in a linguistic land­ scape we experience as equivocal, a difference stressed by the replacement of old Hamlet with a spectre that assumes his shape on the one hand and a substitute father on the other. Or, to rephrase this as a heavyweight tête-à-tête between two of the biggest hitters in poststructuralism, the play sets Lacan’s conception of language against that of Derrida. In one corner sits Lacan’s symbolic order, arranged spatially around primal signifiers that stabilize language. In the other corner sits Derrida’s process of dissemination, arranged temporally along a continual chain of unfurling differences that defer stability in language. Not only can it be argued that Hamlet lends itself to interpretation by Lacanian psychoanalysis but, due to its scrutiny of emble­ matic Fathers, it also pre-empts Derrida’s criticism of Lacan’s symbolic order as the source of a phallogocentric truth – a truth attributed to a masculine Logos – that psychoanalysis purports to reveal (Derrida, 1987: 411–96). If, as Shoshana Felman argues, literature works as the unconscious of psychoanalysis (Felman, 1977: 10), then Hamlet can be employed to interrogate the unspoken gaps, the unconscious, of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this sense, the play performs a key deconstructive turn: it sets out the position of the Name-ofthe-Father but, with the very same gesture, undermines it. Initially, attempts are made to win Hamlet’s trust, to deliver irresistible decrees from the place of the symbolic Father. Claudius, a dead man walking from the moment his biblical crime is revealed, lays claim to the role vacated by old Hamlet’s death: ‘That which dearest father bears his son | Do I impart toward you’ (1.2.111–12). However, Claudius makes his attempt to solicit filial piety from his newly acquired son as both an uncle and a father, a contradiction that becomes an obsession for Hamlet. Undead and zombified, the Ghost speaks from a strange, supernatural place when it asks Hamlet to obey its homicidal command: ‘If thou didst ever thy dear father love . . . Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’ (1.5.23, 25). Despite this appeal in the name of filial piety, the nature and motive of the Ghost is constantly debated by those it stealthily haunts. With the death of the

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venerated father and the introduction of these untrustworthy figures in his symbolic stead, the Name-of-the-Father speaks from an unstable, decentred position, a deconstruction of the proper system of differences, meanings and order of the family usually reinforced in language around the focal point of the Name-of-the-Father. Hamlet’s problem, then, is not psychosis or, as was traditionally thought, procrastination, but the absence of an authority figure who would force him into action. Psychosis, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, occurs as a result of the paternal law’s expulsion from the symbolic universe, which Lacan describes as ‘the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in the place of the Other’ (Lacan, 1989: 238). Or, to put it another way, in the healthy psyche the Name-of-the-Father speaks from the place of the Other. For Lacan, this Other denotes the unconscious and the symbolic order, with the symbolic order as both language and the entire cultural domain language articulates; it is a psychosocial place occupied by old Hamlet who, even posthumously, neither Claudius nor the Ghost can dislodge. According to this psychosocial arrangement a personal crisis such as Hamlet’s must also have a social dimension, and, fittingly, a clear demarcation did not exist between public and private spaces in Elizabethan society. Hamlet presents this undifferen­ tiated sphere, a sphere which includes, as Francis Barker puts it, ‘the father who is as a king in the family and the king who is as a father in the state’ (Barker, 1984: 31). Consequently, family equivocations double as state equivocations, and Hamlet in turn receives commands both as a son of the king and as a subject of the king: his alienation and antic disposition bear the marks of a struggle with an unstable symbolic order, with a language that operates in accordance with Derrida’s fluid, temporal rules rather than the more fixed, spatial rules of the Lacanian linguistic network. But the promise of a stability to come abides. A vanitas similar to the warped, anamorphic skull that skews across Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous 1533 painting ‘The Ambassadors’, Yorick’s dirt-filled skull rises from the grave to introduce the realm of the living dead; it is a reminder of death’s inevitability and the subsequent day of reckoning, of the apocalyptic force that could provide resolution and uniformity to language as well as to Hamlet’s own, impending tragedy.

Masquerades of the Dead: The Equivocal Provenance of the Ghost The living dead walk through Hamlet before the gravedigger unearths the skeletons of the long deceased. Invoking the indeterminate provenance of



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the Ghost, the opening line of the play poses a question that haunts the dramatic events and hints at the proximity of disturbing presences. When Barnardo asks ‘Who’s there?’ he immediately unbalances the military etiquette of the battlemented scene, as it is Francisco on guard who has the right to challenge anyone or anything approaching from out of the darkness, and this disruption of protocol indicates the oncoming sentry’s jumpy unease. An ominous darkness thus becomes apparent to an audience that hears the needy question, a question that has been the final words of many a horror film’s sacrificial victim. ‘Who’s there?’ The knife-wielding killer. The anarchic poltergeist. The blood-thirsty vampire. Open the door and you’re doomed. The play’s early exchanges immediately specify the time of day and convey the sense of discomfort, trepidation and slight, subtle imbalance that permeates Elsinore. Francisco, relieved of his sentry duty, reinforces the anxious mood when heralding the entry of Horatio and Marcellus, of whose imminent arrival he is even aware: ‘Stand, ho! Who is there? (1.1.15). Evidently, the fear is infectious. In late 2005 the Wales Theatre Company’s production of Hamlet at Cardiff’s New Theatre used the modern theatre setting to emphasize this horror. As the winter winds howled outside, whistling down Park Place and rattling the windows of the pubs and bars on Greyfriars Road, indoors the misty darkness on the stage was broken by director Michael Bogdanov with the sudden, blinding projection of the Ghost on a large screen. As well as setting the scene of embryonic disturbance, Barnardo’s question delivers an instant, dramatic portent of the slow, zombielike march of the Ghost, a silent night-stalking that drives the action of the play with revelations that simultaneously hinder Hamlet’s ability to act. Barnardo revises his question after Horatio and Marcellus enter: ‘Say, what, is Horatio there?’ (1.1.21). Horatio, as a scholar, is summoned to the watch as a sceptical witness: HORATIO BARNARDO MARCELLUS

What, has this thing appear’d again tonight? I have seen nothing. Horatio says ‘tis but our fantasy, And will not let belief take hold of him, Touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us. Therefore I have entreated him along With us to watch the minutes of this night, That if again this apparition come, He may approve our eyes and speak to it. (1.1.24–32)

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What kind of thing will appear tonight? Horatio describes an in­definable presence, a nondescript thing beyond adequate articulation, while Marcellus conflates something feared with something supernatural but visible. Setting up an analogy between Shakespeare’s fictional Ghost and Karl Marx’s philosophical and political haunting of the present, Derrida describes the initially silent spectre as ‘nothing that can be seen when one speaks of it’ (Derrida, 1994: 6). Yet the problem seems to be that, even when seen, this presence cannot be easily defined. Hamlet’s famous words to his trusty ally are appropriately hazy, a reaction to the Ghost’s vagueness: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, | Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (1.5.174–5). Indistinct outlines and ambiguous labels surround a ghoul, a vision, a ‘thing’ without a name. This dreaded thing, this fantastical apparition, finally appears as it is spoken of, usurping the tale of its appearance with a repetition of the past: BARNARDO

Last night of all, When yond same star that’s westward from the pole, Had made his course t’illume that part of heaven Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, The bell then beating one – Enter GHOST

MARCELLUS Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again. BARNARDO In the same figure like the King that’s dead. (1.1.38–44) This brief appearance suggests the primacy of a signifier that signifies only fleetingly. Prototypical of Banquo’s reception of the witches in Macbeth, Horatio asks: ‘What art thou that usurp’st this time of night?’ (1.1.49). Indeed, this anachronistic supernatural interruption echoes the other­ worldly intervention of the witches, who cause a schism in the temporal and linguistic stability of Macbeth. In Hamlet, the Ghost appears in a form that resembles the recently deceased King of Denmark but does not convince the wary watchmen that it is anything more than an apparition that seems to imitate him: ‘Looks a not like the King?’ asks Barnardo (1.1.46). Doubt and confusion confound the scholar Horatio, who is overcome with ‘fear and wonder’ by what looks upon him, by what he sees but cannot name (1.1.47). Barnardo’s opening question has signalled the start of a motif constantly repeated in relation to the Ghost.



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Horatio then reinforces the paranoia spread by the Ghost’s trudge across the stage, joining the military threat to Elsinore with the supernatural threat the watchmen fearfully await: ‘This bodes some strange eruption to our state’ (1.1.72). Unable to warrant the need for their night-time watch, the presence of the Ghost substantiates the anticipation of another unwelcome and unclear disturbance sensed by the King’s Guard and the amazed Horatio. Marcellus, for one, knows no reason for his sentry duty: Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows, Why this same strict and most observant watch So nightly toils the subject of the land? (1.1.73–5) Horatio puts him straight. Prince Fortinbras has ‘in the skirts of Norway here and there | Shark’d up a list of lawless resolutes’ to recover by force lands lost by his father to old Hamlet in a duel (1.1.100–1). Or ‘At least the whisper goes so’ (1.1.83). The threat to Elsinore remains shrouded in mystery, the stuff of whispers, with both the ghostly likeness of old Hamlet and the nearing army of Fortinbras seeming to pose a double threat. In the minds of the frightened watchmen at least, the apparition that mimics old Hamlet also signifies the approach of Fortinbras’s disparate rabble. Silent, the Ghost withholds what it signifies, while the possibility of war waged by the Norwegian prince remains unconfirmed by the court. A double threat becomes one threat and one omen, while the equivocation, the conflation, repeats and perpetuates the question: ‘Who’s there?’ Elizabethan audiences may well have doubted that the Ghost was the returned soul of the departed king. Though there was a widespread popular belief in revenants, this idea was contrary to the Christian teachings of the period. What did connect the church and folk beliefs was the moral imprecision of such appearances, and it was likely that the Ghost was perceived primarily as a presence that could be located anywhere on the spectrum between benevolent and malevolent. Just forty years ago, Eleanor Prosser invited viewers and readers of Hamlet to consider that, contrary to most presentations of the play over the previous four centuries or so, the protagonist is not morally obligated to obey the Ghost and that this form of old Hamlet is not necessarily benevolent. Rather, Prosser stated that the common religious beliefs of the time would have led the audience to understand the Ghost in a variety of ways, and this would have included the possibility of something devilish (Prosser, 1971: 101–2). Thus, to the Elizabethan audience well-versed in Catholic beliefs and bombarded with

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Shakespeare and the Apocalypse

Protestant correction, the Ghost probably had an unfixed moral position. To boot, it cannot be discounted – and it would be prudent to consider it likely – that the presence of a figure with meaning for an audience comprised of both Protestants and Catholics may have been a deliberate ploy by Shakespeare. Certainly, the offence the Ghost takes to Horatio’s demand, ‘By Heaven, I charge thee speak’ (1.1.52), would be enough to make the audience at least wary, and possibly sceptical, of the spectre’s intentions. Emanating from the hell beneath the stage, the Ghost’s demand that Horatio and Marcellus swear allegiance cements the sense of devilry, while the Christ-like stage direction of the Second Quarto when the Ghost ‘spreads his arms’ contradicts demonic signifiers with a powerful introductory gesture that compensates for its reticence (Q2, 1.1.126–7).1 We are wrong-footed once more when the Ghost’s exit is prompted by the cock crow (1.1.142), as nature’s early-morning alarm call was commonly believed to dispel ghouls, goblins and the general evils of the night. Shakespeare, it seems, resisted the temptation to make the Ghost’s provenance explicit. Perhaps, as E. Pearlman speculates, Shakespeare even ‘decided to engage his audience intellectually by casting doubt on the very nature of his specter’ (Pearlman, 2002: 81). These possibilities seem to hold for the Ghost: it is a spirit that may be good or bad; it is a Catholic soul in purgatory; it is – considering the almost unanimous Protestant belief that the age of miracles passed with the coming of Christ and the establishment of the church by his apostles – a hallucination or a demon in the seductive shape of a much loved, and recently passed, king. As a spirit, only its actions will reveal its motives and plans. As a soul in purgatory, it inhabits an uneasy position between heaven and hell until its earthly wrongs are put right by the living, telling truths in order to bring justice. As a demon masquerading in the form of old Hamlet it could be an instrument of darkness that wants to win Hamlet to his harm. The labels used by the young prince to speak about the Ghost capture these various beliefs; it is both a Protestant spectre that takes on the shape of his ‘noble father’s person’ (1.2.244) and a classical or Catholic spectre that is his ‘father’s spirit’ (1.2.255). Additionally, Horatio considers the Ghost to be a common revenant disturbed by unresolved corporeal matters: If there be any good thing to be done That may to thee do ease, and grace to me, Speak to me; If thou art privy to thy country’s fate, Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid,



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O speak; Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life Extorted treasure in the womb of earth, For which they say your spirits oft walk in death, Speak of it, stay and speak. (1.1.133–42) Above all, the spectre seems to be a popular folk ghost that cannot rest while some issues remain unsettled. Hamlet acknowledges the Ghost as an equivocal presence. When the clock does indeed strike twelve the next night, a time that heightens the expectation of a supernatural, otherworldly intervention, Hamlet accompanies Horatio and Marcellus to the watch: HAMLET What hour now? HORATIO I think it lacks of twelve. MARCELLUS No, it is struck. (1.4.3–4) The sombre, misty mood of the witching hour, the hour when the apparition is ‘wont to walk’ (1.4.6), has crept up on the watchmen, and Hamlet recognizes the Ghost as an impalpable vision: HAMLET

Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. (1.4.39–44)

Praying for protection to the agents of God’s grace points towards a threat, but the juxtapositions that follow complicate the sense of imminent danger, the array of oppositional appellatives tracing the Ghost’s abstruse supernatural position. In Hamlet’s eyes the vision could be good or bad, may herald salvation or damnation and have heavenly or diabolic intentions. Others are more cautious than this in the pale, translucent gaze of the Ghost. ‘What if it tempt you toward the flood . . . Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff?’ (1.4.69–70) warns Horatio. Step into the darkness and you might not return.

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But Hamlet, like Macbeth, is seduced by a figure he cannot define. The witches in Macbeth look ‘not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth’, their androgyny and fantastical appearance fascinating to Banquo and Macbeth (1.3.41). Hamlet, too, finds himself intrigued by a figure visible on the earth but seemingly from another realm, and his first haunting by the Ghost foreshadows Banquo’s and Macbeth’s run-in with the witches. On the Scottish heath, in an echo of the question that dominates the opening of Hamlet, Macbeth bids the witches to reveal their identity: ‘Speak, if you can: – what are you?’ (Macbeth, 1.3.47). In Hamlet, the mourning prince makes a similar bid, challenging the Ghost to speak: ‘O answer me. | Let me not burst in ignorance’ (1.4.45–6). Influenced by its resemblance to his father, Hamlet addresses the Ghost by the name of his father, and a trinity of other names that delineate the structural position of the Nameof-the-Father: ‘I’ll call thee Hamlet, | King, father, royal Dane’ (1.4.44–5). These invocations of the crown’s consolidating paternal force nevertheless follow hard upon Hamlet’s wonder at the Ghost’s sketchy spectral presence. Others have also exploited the Ghost’s equivocal influence. Matt Haig’s recent novel, Dead Fathers Club, reworks Shakespeare’s play, setting it in the north-east of modern-day England. Eleven-year-old Philip’s mother marries his Uncle Alan soon after the death of Philip’s father. Not long after the marriage, the ghost of Philip’s father visits him wearing a ‘T shirt which said King of the Castle with the word CASTLE written in red capital letters’ (Haig, 2007: 4). As in Hamlet, a ghost that claims to be the protagonist’s father appears in apparel that signifies his paternal authority. But, like the figure that haunts the battlements of Elsinore, the phantom that haunts Philip in Dead Fathers Club comes from a place beyond definition: When Mum was in the bathroom getting ready I sat and looked at the five Guppies and then I saw a reflection in the fish tank. It wasnt like a normal reflection it was like a reflection of a reflection and I turned round and it was Dads Ghost and I said Dad? in a loud voice. (Haig, 2007: 16) The wispy reflection of this ghost emphasizes its otherworldly origin, and, like Hamlet, Philip addresses the spectre as his father at the same time that he questions its origin. Like the Ghost in Shakespeare’s play, this apparition may assume the shape of the protagonist’s father, but it is an equivocal representation that emanates from a supernatural place.



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To begin with, the Ghost wins Hamlet’s attention and trust, and we, as audience or reader, are encouraged to share in this trust. Measured but authoritative, the taciturn Ghost’s first words command the stage: ‘Mark me’ (1.5.2). This instruction presents the Ghost as a blank page ready to be marked, a manifold process of interpretation literalized when Hamlet scribbles down the Ghost’s words. In Macbeth, the amphibological modes of address employed by the witches seduce Macbeth, while, in Othello, Iago employs equivocations and lies that invite Othello to volunteer the murderous intention the fiendish ensign suggests with a non-committal shrug. Despite its initial silence, the Ghost turns out to be more explanatory: I am thy father’s spirit, Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confin’d to fast in fires. (1.5.9–11) Here the absent Logos makes its presence felt through the sentence to which the Ghost claims to have been condemned, a torturous, purgatorial cleansing of its ‘foul crimes’ (1.5.12–13). Audiences hear the scheming Iago and the riddling witches plot and ruminate without the protagonist present, but in Hamlet the audience and the hero hear the revelations of the Ghost together, a shared experience and knowledge of the dreaded apparition. We are one with Hamlet. As a result, this identification between audience and hero invited by the play’s action determines our disposition towards the Ghost, countering the bitterness of the Ghost’s revengeful urgings. Moreover, this identification with Hamlet persuades us to believe in the benevolence of this frightful thing, especially as Hamlet twice refers to the spectre as ‘poor ghost’ (1.5.4, 1.5.96). When the Ghost pledges to unfold a foul tale of murder, Hamlet’s ultimately ironic first words of revenge indicate the righteous, bloody conviction of a traditional revenger: ‘Haste me to know’t, that I .  .  . May sweep to my revenge’ (1.5.29–31). Though ironic when considered at the end of the play, Hamlet’s words set up the expectation of vengeance, and the Ghost substantiates this expectation by promising Hamlet a tale so horrid that he will be compelled to act: ‘Duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed . . . Wouldst thou not stir in this’ (1.5.32–4). If Hamlet has misjudged the Ghost at this point, we are urged to make the same mistake. Mapping out a moral vista of the play, Hamlet and the Ghost are then placed in opposition to the villainous Claudius. The tale Hamlet yearns for

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and which the Ghost divulges also provides the despicable enemy who must fall in the name of justice: Know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father’s life Now wears his crown. (1.5.38–40) Claudius is the venomous snake that has stung and poisoned the Eden of Elsinore. Biblical in nature, the Ghost’s words demonize the new king and sanctify the Ghost: it is not the spectre that cowers away from the morning light that should be feared, but the serpent-like Claudius who hisses in Gertrude’s ear at night. Hamlet brings us further on side: ‘O my prophetic soul! My uncle!’ (1.5.41). He was right about Claudius, and the audience was right to believe him. All this indignation sharply contrasts with the matter-of-fact pragmatism Claudius offers in response to Hamlet’s continued mourning, where nature’s ‘common theme | Is death of fathers’ (1.2.103–4). Deal with it, boy! On the cusp of two arcs, one callous and insensitive, the other pointedly honest, Claudius’s reputation is placed on a wicked trajectory by the Ghost’s no-holds-barred story of horror: Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts – O wicked wit, and gifts that have the power So to seduce! – won to his shameful lust The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen. (1.5.42–6) Hamlet has already compared Claudius to a satyr inferior in the light of old Hamlet’s majesty, which shone as bright as the sun god Hyperion’s (1.2.139–40), and the Ghost pulls no punches in portraying Claudius as beastly, as, in the Second Quarto and Folio, ‘a wretch whose natural gifts were poor | To those of mine’ (1.5.51–2). Christian morality permeates the Ghost’s language, with Claudius as the fiendish, treacherous villain. Such bursts of moral outrage problematize the Ghost’s supernatural origin. An otherworldly force with human emotions, the Ghost is presented by Shakespeare ‘as a fellow creature who just happens to be a spirit’ (Pearlman, 2002: 80). This spirit speaks with a jilted lover’s spite about



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Gertrude’s superficial virtue, mirroring Hamlet’s shattered image of his crying, mournful mother weeping inconsolably for her dead husband: Within a month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing of her galled eyes, She married – O most wicked speed! To post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! (1.2.153–7) Gertrude’s remarriage exposes her grief as a façade since, for Hamlet, ‘a beast that wants discourse of reason | Would have mourn’d longer’ (1.2.150–1). For Hamlet it is the desirous speed that propelled Gertrude to her husband’s brother’s bed that rankles; for the Ghost it is the sinister charm that won her. As the Ghost is humanized, Claudius is demonized, portrayed as something less than human. Shifted by the Ghost into the position of the devil, Claudius has witchcraft at his disposal. The devil is not here in the dark night of this scene, not the one condemned to suffer the flames of purgatory every day. Instead, the devil crawls through the court to take a place by Gertrude. Claudius, like a cockroach that remains bold under the kitchen light, must be stamped on. But demonic imagery also surrounds the Ghost. Doomed to fires of cleansing or punishment, it cowers when daylight approaches, as photophobic as an insect that scuttles into the damp darkness when that kitchen light is switched on: ‘But soft, methinks I scent the morning air: | Brief let me be’ (1.5.58–9). Puck’s words to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream describe another nightly escape from the encroaching brightness of the ghoul-zapping dawn: And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger, At whose approach, ghosts wandering here and there Troop home to churchyards. (3.2.380–2) Here souls return to consecrated ground before sunrise, but the damned souls return to their burial sites too before the morning star rises: Damned spirits all, That in cross-ways and floods have burial, Already to their wormy beds are gone, For fear lest day should look their shames upon:

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They wilfully themselves exil’d from light, And must for aye consort with black-brow’d night. (3.2.382–7) Elizabethans who committed suicide were commonly buried at crossroads, unless, like those who drowned, their bodies were not recoverable, but they are included by Puck in the nightly migration of ghosts back to hallowed graves. Hamlet’s passionate outburst when the haunting ends – the Ghost suspiciously departs as a ‘glow-worm shows the matin to be near’ (1.5.89) – displays his doubt as to whether the Ghost belongs with the damned or the saved souls that disappear as the morning light breaks: ‘O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? | And shall I couple hell?’ (1.5.92–3). Best had, young prince. After all, the Ghost shuffles around in a place called hell. The Globe Theatre’s trapdoor was used by players to rise up on to the stage from the cellarage area beneath, known to them as ‘hell’. In a discussion of Elizabethan stage and printing history, Tiffany Stern states that the use of this space as both a grave and a hell-mouth suggests the possibility that ‘the ghost in Hamlet is evil’ (Stern, 2004: 26). Stage directions do not designate from whence the Ghost enters and exits so we cannot be sure that the Ghost came and went through the trapdoor. However, we do know that it moves around in the vault below, urging Horatio and Marcellus to swear secrecy, which, in performance, certainly suggests a hellish provenance, as a return either to the grave or to the deep-down fires of damnation. And Hamlet’s own words signify the possibility of the Ghost as evil: although he seems convinced by the Ghost’s tale, he does not discount the possibility of it having untoward intentions for him. As much for us today as for Elizabethans, things lurking under the cellar door are potentially evil. These scary things that lie in wait downstairs are commonplace in horror films, and Sam Raimi’s 1981 zombie gore-fest The Evil Dead, in which evil spirits are housed in the cellar, is a classic case. Five American students travel to a secluded cabin for a holiday. (Already you can tell that this is not going to turn out well.) In the cellar, they find the Book of the Dead alongside the disturbing recordings of the previous resident, a professor of the occult dedicated to the study of the book. ‘Join us’ drone the spirits unleashed by the flesh-bound book, and, one by one, the Michigan State students turn on each other as they are transformed into unsettlingly gleeful zombies with worm-eaten skin and silvered eyes devoid of pupils. One of the petrified kids locks his possessed sister back in the cellar, and, from there, she plays an equivocal game not unlike the Ghost’s, switching between her normal self, imploring her brother to release her, to



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help her, and the haggard, rigor-mortized killer determined to eat live human for dinner. Lamberto Bava’s 1985 horror film Demons transfers the imagery of hellish creatures beneath the stage to an equivalent modern setting, the cinema. At a recently renovated Berlin cinema, a young woman scratches her face on a mask displayed in the lobby. During the film she turns into a fanged, vomiting demon, and her sickness spreads fast. The film’s apocalyptic tag line promises that the Goodman Delvers of this world will have their work cut out: ‘They will make cemeteries their cathedrals and the cities will be your tombs’. On the English-language poster for the film, demonic shadows emerge upwards, eyes a-shine, from some devilish place below and when the demon spawn surface en masse in the film to attack their friends and family in the audience, it is from underground, coming up to the auditorium from the stairs or bursting through the floor. As in The Evil Dead, the uninfected in Demons face aggressive, subterranean creatures that resemble, or actually were, former friends or lovers, siblings or parents. And yet not every resurrection from six feet under is considered evil. At the foot of Yorkshire’s foggy northern moors sits Pickering’s parish church of St Peter and St Paul, containing one of Britain’s most complete set of surviving Biblia Pauperum. These astonishing frescoes were accidentally rediscovered in 1852 and the pictorial narrative on the south wall culminates in Christ rising from the dead. Placed on the spandrel space in the middle of two arches, this painting shows a surprised watchman falling backwards as Christ, stigmata still evident, rises up from his grave to the acclaim of two angels (Figure 2.1). If those watching Hamlet at the Globe wondered whether the Ghost was brethren to the shape-shifting devils and demons they associated with colliers and other underground workers, they might also have had in mind prevalent iconography that tended to show Jesus breaking up out of graves that, in order to make this core Bible tale more accessible, looked similar to the ones Elizabethans saw in their daily lives. Does the Ghost just masquerade as old Hamlet or is it really him? Uncertain of the cellarage creature’s intentions, Hamlet cannot without question obey its command to avenge old Hamlet’s murder. To test its authority, ‘The Mousetrap’ seeks evidence to prove Claudius guilty: ‘I’ll have grounds | More relative than this’ (2.2.599–600). The words of the Second Quarto and Folio, as well as the First Quarto’s ‘sounder proofs’ (Q1, 7.434), evoke a sense of solidity in opposition to the immateriality of the Ghost and its tale. This ‘perturbed spirit’ (1.5.190) Hamlet was ready to swiftly serve ‘May be a devil’ (2.2.595). As Lacan observes, the

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Figure 2.1  Christ rising from the dead at St Peter and St Paul Church, Pickering, Yorkshire.

Ghost does not offer Hamlet the prohibitions of Law because it ‘is constantly being doubted’ (1981: 34–5). The play goes even further by prompting us to consider whether anyone can be so beyond doubt as to unambiguously offer the prohibitions of Law, but in the particular case of the Ghost, as a spectre, as an illusory Father, its uncertain, equivocal origin bars it from the structural position of the Name-of-the-Father, to the extent that Hamlet disobeys the Ghost’s only explicit prohibition: ‘Taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive | Against thy mother aught’ (1.5.85–6). Rather than psychosis or a mode of protection that hides murderous intentions, Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ (1.5.180) helps him to resist the Ghost’s order. Appearing again in order to reiterate its command and interrupt Hamlet’s vitriolic attack on Gertrude, the Ghost begs Hamlet to heal the inner torment he has caused Gertrude: ‘O step between her and her fighting soul’ (3.4.113). Franco Zeffirelli’s film version of Hamlet introduces the Ghost to Gertrude’s chamber as she kisses her son passionately, emphasizing the Oedipal prohibition of the second spectral visitation. But more than just a clumsy challenge to the incest taboo, Hamlet’s attack has contravened the explicit demand that he does not turn against his mother. Furthermore, in Gertrude’s closet, Hamlet once more seeks the protection of God’s agents of grace before tangling with the demonic Ghost: ‘Save me and hover o’er me with your wings, | You heavenly guards!’ (3.4.104–5). Hamlet’s evident fear at the sight of the Ghost counterpoints his exposition



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of old Hamlet as an ideal Father, a glorification only possible in his father’s absence: See what a grace was seated on this brow, Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill, A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. (3.4.55–62) Endorsed by the gods themselves, old Hamlet was blessed with the physiognomy of their divine qualities, with the hair of a Titan and the warlike gaze of Mars. And, like the messenger Mercury, old Hamlet mediated heavenly orders to mortal men. Hamlet’s eulogy to his father places old Hamlet in the position of a Law that both commands and threatens, while distinguishing old Hamlet from the enigmatic and baleful phantasm that roams the battlements at Elsinore. Psychoanalytically speaking, cellarage creatures such as the Ghost are untrustworthy because they disrupt the social and psychical order when they come out of their proper place. By way of example, this topology of dangerous forces under the floorboards has a long history on the silver screen and David Fincher’s Fight Club employs this archetypal arrangement directly in a scene that sees Tyler Durden, a mythical gang leader of uncomplicated masculine energy played masterfully by a ripped Brad Pitt, literally put words into the mouth of Ed Norton’s unnamed narrator, speaking through him from the cellar. Throughout the film, the countercultural Durden operates as the unnamed narrator’s unconscious, training him up for a spartan, self-denying lifestyle. Stripping away their desires, the men of Fight Club become agents of primordial, unconscious drives unmoved by one of the key injunctions of the twenty-first century superego – to spend, enjoy and associate spending with enjoyment. As forces of unconscious mayhem, the men of Fight Club take on the towering financial institutions that have co-opted the spirit of social rebellion and funnelled it into manageable streams of profitable behaviour, the streams of drunken, excessive product accumulation by which the lives of Durden and his gang were once defined. What the film thus demonstrates is a topological opposition between cellar-dwellers and the hazard they pose to the

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skyscrapers of acceptable cultural behaviour. Whereas Durden has a clear and obvious place in the psychoanalytic structure of Fight Club, the Ghost in Hamlet problematizes that very structure. When at its most instructional, from its initial ‘Mark me’, to the first farewell of ‘Remember me’, and the final ‘Do not forget’ of its unexpected return (1.5.91, 3.4.110), the subterranean Ghost imitates the Name-of-the-Father that sets out acceptable cultural behaviour from on high. But the Ghost is only a logocentric imitation, an untrustworthy Shape-of-the-Father materialized from an unknown supernatural source, a cellar-dweller in the wrong place to play the exalted role of trusted Father.

A Foul Stench: Claudius the Uncle Father Norman Cohn wrote that medieval eschatology often saw in the run-up to the Apocalypse a ‘mortal struggle waged by good fathers and good children against bad fathers and bad children’ (Cohn, 1970: 84). Hamlet provides an extended meditation on what constitutes good and bad fathers, as well as good and bad children, an exergue to the apocalyptic visions in the graveyard. In the shadow of the looming End, Claudius is the bad father. Like the Ghost, Claudius occupies an equivocal position that undermines the authority of the Name-of-the-Father, in his case as both Hamlet’s father and Hamlet’s uncle. Gertrude’s choice of Claudius perplexes Hamlet in the extreme, a baffling exchange of the father he deifies for ‘a mildew’d ear | Blasting his wholesome brother’ (3.4.64–5). At issue here is more than just the quality of the new lover Gertrude has selected: the impact of ecclesiastical law on Elizabethan society rendered this instance of incest, as John Dover Wilson once stressed, ‘so important that it is scarcely possible to make too much of it’ (Wilson, 1951: 43). Family equivocations that result from the replacement of old Hamlet by his brother, Claudius, as well as Gertrude’s dual position as mother and aunt, complicate a structure that depends upon a clear order of systematic differences for meaning. In the Second Quarto and Folio, Claudius inadvertently introduces the audience to the disruptions to the family structure which affect Hamlet: Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we, as ‘twere with a defeated joy, With an auspicious and a dropping eye,



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With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage In equal scale weighing delight and dole, Taken to wife. (1.2.8–14) Who’s there? New uncertainties caused by regicide and the Queen’s speedy remarriage are immediately apparent as Gertrude’s sinful, incestuous relationship advances Claudius to the throne and blocks Hamlet’s inheritance claim. Not only does Hamlet’s obsessive focus on Gertrude’s second marriage contravene the Ghost’s inadequate prohibition, but, as Lisa Jardine proposes, Hamlet obsesses over his mother’s remarriage because Gertrude ‘embodies the contradictory claims of kinship on women’ in the early modern period (Jardine, 1996: 47). Femininity in Hamlet violates these claims: it ‘functions as excess’ according to Jacqueline Rose, an excess that disturbs patriarchal, psychoanalytic authority (Rose, 2008: 136). However, femininity in Hamlet can also be seen as immovable. Gertrude is not replaced by a different woman, but remains in place with old Hamlet substituted in a reversal of the phallocentricity of Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, the phallus – another privileged signifier that symbolizes sexual difference and relates to desire and signification itself – in Hamlet is ‘entirely out of place in terms of its position in the Oedipus complex’ (Lacan, 1977: 50). By this Lacan means that Hamlet finds Claudius, linked with the phallus, in the place where he wants his father to be, and so cannot kill the original father who, in the Oedipal triangle, he really wants to kill. The play, as Lacan interprets it, thus confirms the unattainable nature of the phallus. We can articulate this dislocation differently: as a result of Gertrude’s union with Claudius, the play demonstrates the unstable nature of the Name-of-theFather. That is to say that the Name-of-the-Father is always already out of place in terms of its position in Lacan’s symbolic order, and embarks on a voyage within a patriarchal order it should instead regulate by playing a central, stabilizing role. Two early-modern world views are in conflict here. On one side is a society organized around God, where cultural and linguistic figures stand in His place, lieutenants of the Logos. Linguistically, this world is organized around the same principles as Lacan’s symbolic order, with an emphasis on cultural, religious or political positions representative of God’s will. On the other side is a society organized around man, where human language and transcendental signifieds such as the Logos are, as Derrida also sees it, separate, where privileged signifiers such as the Name-ofthe-Father are seen, under scrutiny, to operate just like other signifiers.

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Hamlet negotiates the transitions between a world of divinely inspired communication and a world of exclusively mortal communication, and we need only look to Britain today and its anachronistic Commonwealth, where the doctrine of monarchical divine right exists alongside a proliferation of non-Christian and non-religious communities, to see that the competing socio-linguistic arrangements evidenced by the texts of the play are still very much with us. Hamlet’s exchange with Gertrude in her chamber concerns – what else? – the replacement of old Hamlet by Claudius: HAMLET Now, mother, what’s the matter? QUEEN Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended. HAMLET Mother, you have my father much offended. (3.4.7–9) Hamlet throws Claudius’s dual identity as father and uncle back at Gertrude. In a line absent from the First Quarto, Hamlet refers to Gertrude as ‘the Queen, [her] husband’s brother’s wife’ (3.4.14), stressing his overfathered status. Sneaky Polonius, hidden behind the arras, cries out and, as a result, dies on the point of Hamlet’s suddenly thrust rapier, a committed, even rash, action that answers the play’s opening demand to ‘Stand and unfold yourself’. With Claudius absent, Hamlet displays a murderous decisiveness that would please a classic revenger, such as Thomas Kyd’s Lorenzo: ‘Where words prevail not, violence prevails’ (The Spanish Tragedy, 2.1.108). The complications that make the regicide demanded of Hamlet so problematic momentarily disappear, but the troubled hero wastes no time in returning to words, specifically to the matter of civilizing Gertrude: QUEEN O what a rash and bloody deed is this! HAMLET A bloody deed. Almost as bad, good mother, As kill a king and marry with his brother. (3.4.27–9) Nothing the Ghost reveals implicates Gertrude in the killing of old Hamlet, yet Hamlet’s statement returns us to the main equivocations at stake in the play. To Hamlet’s mind, the composite crime he imagines not only ‘blurs the grace and blush of modesty’ (3.4.41), but has a far broader impact. Gertrude’s double offence unhinges the truth value of language, so that marriage vows become



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‘As false as dicers’ oaths’ (3.4.45). In the later texts, Gertrude’s damnable act abuses language entirely, as well as the holy laws language symbolizes: O, such a deed As from the body of contraction plucks The very soul, and sweet religion makes A rhapsody of words. (3.4.45–8) Her crime has not only perverted marriage, but all solemn, contractual agreements, and, because of this offence, language has become discordant, extravagant and confused; it is an offence that incurs a heavenly sorrow and wrath as great ‘as against the doom’ (3.4.50). Here Hamlet invokes the unequivocal, apocalyptic Judgement that could stop all equivocation, but which remains offstage in the play, allowing the tragedy to play out; it is the transcendental signified, the Logos, that could bring resolution and stability to a language polluted, in Hamlet’s mind, by the union of Claudius and Gertrude. The proximity of marriage to funeral brought on by this union entails the possibility of father/uncles and mother/aunts, and Gertrude’s opposing titles anticipate the inverted emotions of old Hamlet’s funeral and the royal wedding. Claudius articulates her position as Hamlet’s mother and aunt, as a joint-ruler in joint possession of antithetical titles, a description that swaps the emotions linked to funerals with those linked to weddings. As Hamlet bitterly remarks to Horatio, ‘The funeral bak’d meats | Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’ (1.2.180–1). Grief and ecstasy are strangely indistinguishable, antitheses in sudden cohabitation; it is with a compromised, beaten joy, an eye inclined to weeping and another looking up in happiness, with which Claudius and Gertrude wed. Marriage and funeral ceremonies are associated with inappropriate feelings, which, like the illogical rhymes of the witches in Macbeth, are to be revealed as the truth of the matter. The mourning rites in Hamlet do not only follow hard upon the marriage celebrations but, in opposition to Claudius’s excesses, they are reduced rites. Lacan tells us that mourning compensates for the inability of language to cope with an event that sits outside its realm of meaning, its coordinated practices ‘performed to satisfy the disorder that is produced by the inadequacy of signifying elements’ (Lacan, 1977: 38). Old Hamlet’s murder at the hands of Claudius creates an impasse: the dead cannot be mourned properly, or given the appropriate ceremonies, without threatening the

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new, precarious status quo. Claudius’s acquisition of his brother’s throne and wife in one fell swoop leave old Hamlet, so the Ghost claims, ‘Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d’ (1.5.77), without the Christian ritual provisions for the afterlife, setting the tone for what is to follow. Not only must Hamlet forget about his father, but Laertes must come to terms with his father’s ‘obscure funeral’ (4.5.210). With a state funeral denied Polonius in favour of political expediency, so that the accusations that may harm Claudius ‘hit the woundless air’ instead (4.1.44), Laertes snarls that his father was buried with ‘No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o’er his bones, | No noble rite, nor formal ostentation’ (4.5.211–12). Ophelia, maddened by the twisted Oedipal killing of her father at the hands of the man she loves, is another victim of the rotten court, laid to rest without the conventional parade, her ascetic funeral due to her suspected suicide. ‘What ceremony else?’ Laertes repeatedly asks (5.1.216, 218), but the Priest firmly denies any further service that would profane the sacrament offered to ‘peace-parted souls’ (5.1.231). Death is, in these ways, unaccounted for in Hamlet because the appropriate or expected procedures that would ascribe it meaning are withheld in order to protect the king’s position, a position in need of violent defence irrespective of its heavenly mandate. Hamlet’s introduction by his uncle and now father underlines the infraction that imperils the king’s precarious position: ‘But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son’ (1.2.64). Where Greenblatt and the new historicists attempt to speak with the dead, the presentism of Terence Hawkes attempts to ‘talk to the living’, to use current issues as access points to Shakespeare, and Hawkes argues that in European cultures the uncle plays the lax, humorous role in opposition to the strict, disciplinarian authority of the father, so ‘when Claudius seems able, even willing, to change his role from uncle to father, he’s proposing a fundamental transgression’ (Hawkes, 2002: 4, 136). Replacing Hamlet’s dead father traduces the family unit, and Hamlet’s first words to Claudius in the Second Quarto and Folio seek to disentangle the equivocation of their new relationship: ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’ (1.2.65). They are more than kinsmen as father and son and less than kinsmen in their similarity to one another in emotion and deed, a quip that conflates the sense of ‘kin’ as relation, kindred or, indeed, kind, with ‘kind’ as ‘birth, origin, descent’, ‘the family, ancestral race, or stock from which one springs’ and also ‘naturally well-disposed’ (OED). Hamlet’s succinct, sarcastic equivocation falls short of an explicit attack but implies his suspicion and resentment of Claudius: the new king falls short of Hamlet’s nature and disposition, is less than well-meaning, less than Hamlet’s father. If the structural position of the Name-of-the-Father



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brings discipline into line with the commands of the unequivocal Logos, which in the world of Hamlet is the apocalyptic Christian God, the union of Claudius and Gertrude contradicts the prohibition on incest as set out in the Holiness Code of the second part of Leviticus in the Old Testament: ‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife: it is thy brother’s nakedness’ (Lev. 18.16). Claudius, as King of Denmark, stands as one of the play’s Father-figures, but the very marriage that wins him that structural position also disturbs the schematic of the family ordinarily supported by paternal law. Similarly, Hamlet’s pun in the Second Quarto and Folio that he is ‘too much in the sun’ (1.2.67) plays on the overdetermined family trinity that has over-Fathered him: the king, who was Hamlet’s father, lies dead, and the new king, also Hamlet’s father, lives. Hamlet’s acidic responses explore the ambiguities introduced by this disruptive trope, one which, throughout the play’s cultural history, has given it ‘the power to shake the most firmly-planted binary representations’ (Danson, 1992: 37). Meanings that depend upon differences between the binaries of fathers and uncles, mothers and aunts and sons and nephews, are absent in Hamlet. Trying to compliment and belittle Hamlet at the same time, Claudius damns his aloof son-cousin with faint praise: ‘’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, | To give these mourning duties to your father’ (1.2.87–8). These kind words are also tight-fisted, suggesting that Hamlet’s grief is flippant, and offer little more than a reserved and hurried introduction to the inevitable rebuke that follows: ‘But you must know your father lost a father, | That father lost, lost his’ (1.2.89–90). Scepticism towards Hamlet’s ‘obsequious sorrow’ (1.2.92) grows as the tone of Claudius’s speech becomes increasingly didactic, portraying Hamlet as immature. Turning the screw, Claudius goes on to question Hamlet’s manhood, because to persever In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness, ‘tis unmanly grief. (1.2.92–4) Hamlet’s grief is prodigal, unnecessarily insistent, as well as disrespectful to the natural, new and inevitable state of affairs, an emasculated fuss caused by  a cry-baby. Where Lady Macbeth appeals to Macbeth’s masculinity by accusing him of being ‘too full o’th’milk of human kindness’ to seize the throne (Macbeth, 1.5.17), Claudius labels Hamlet ‘unfortified’, ‘impatient’,

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‘simple and unschool’d’ (1.2.96–7), adding that his reluctance to accept the death of old Hamlet as swiftly as the rest of the court is ‘peevish’ (1.2.100). Lady Macbeth rouses Macbeth’s primordial aggression, but Claudius robs Hamlet of his manhood by describing him as a spoilt, sobbing child, and the metaphorical pat on the head that patronizes Hamlet becomes an accusation of self-indulgence that is ‘a fault to heaven, | A fault against the dead, a fault to nature’ (1.2.101–2). Claudius attempts to strengthen his grip on the throne with an analysis that, in the eyes of the court, as well as the audience, will make Hamlet seem unfit to rule, a subtle political manoeuvre that turns on Claudius’s loaded use of ‘nature’: the same sweet, loyal dedication to his father that Claudius applauds in Hamlet also offends the natural passage of life. Although Claudius’s chastisement of Hamlet is more close-lipped in the First Quarto, it follows the same line: This shows a loving care in you, son Hamlet, But you must think your father lost a father, That father dead lost his, and so shall be Until the general ending. Therefore Cease laments, it is a fault ‘gainst heaven, Fault ‘gainst the dead, a fault ‘gainst nature, And in reason’s common course most certain None lives on earth but he is born to die. (Q1, 2.40–7) At first, Claudius calls Hamlet ‘the most immediate to our throne’, but he ends by reiterating the crossover of ‘cousin, and . . . son’ with Hamlet as his ‘chiefest courtier’ rather than Denmark’s heir to the throne (1.2.109, 117). Rhetoric that subtly debases Hamlet’s qualities also attempts to legitimize Claudius’s custody of Hamlet’s inheritance. This very public loss of inheritance is at the same time inseparable from Hamlet’s deeply private loss. When Gertrude asks why the common theme of death ‘seems . . . so particular’ (1.2.75) with Hamlet she disregards the upheaval to his position as prince and son; it is a symbiotic role that finds itself split. As Barker states, Elizabethan society conceived of the king’s body as the contemporary instance of Christ’s earthly symbolization of God’s heavenly will, the body that ‘encompasses all mundane bodies within its build’ (Barker, 1984: 31). A depiction of Christ at St Teilo’s Church in Cardiff, a recreation of a medieval church previously at Pontarddulais, West Glamorgan, illustrates the belief: bearded and red-haired, this Christ may well have intentionally resembled Henry VIII, the connection between the



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Figure 2.2  Christ depicted at St Teilo’s Church, Cardiff.

Messiah and the monarch emphasized by the Tudor roses that flank him (Figure 2.2). William Tyndale’s 1528 anti-Catholic text The Obedience of a Christian Man encouraged its readers to submit to a social hierarchy with the king at the top and fathers supreme in their homes. Almost a century later, James I would draw on scripture to make this point in a speech to Parliament in 1609: ‘Kings are . . . compared to Fathers of families: for a King is trewly Parens patriæ, the politique father of his people’ (James I, 1965: 307). For a present-day comparison, the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak tried to resist the 2011 revolution that eventually swept him from power by addressing the nation in ‘a father’s dialogue with his sons and daughters’ (‘Egypt unrest’, BBC). The term James I used to denote his position as the father of the people now also refers to the power of the state to usurp the rights of the parent, guardian or carer, a power Mubarak clearly wanted to claim. Indeed, the social hierarchy set out by James I, and to which both Tyndale and Mubarak advocated submission, chimes with Lacan’s psycholinguistic hierarchy, with the Name-of-the-Father as parens patriæ, the

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parenting Other. In a reversal of the ordinary experience of the Elizabethan subject, Hamlet’s problem is to find himself subject to a parens patriæ who should be his biological father but is not, a dilemma unique to Hamlet and which thrusts him into a linguistic wilderness outside the usual experience of the princely subject for whom the state should be an actual, rather than figurative, family. Troubled state and family dynamics seem also to impair Hamlet’s desire. The pre-linguistic drives of the unconscious are, according to Lacan, translated into conscious thought via the metaphors and metonymies of language. In the disconnect from the pre-linguistic to the linguistic realm of the psyche arises desire, which can never be satisfied because it springs forth out of the incomplete, asymmetrical transference from what we want to what we can say we want. Hamlet’s crisis exaggerates this schema to an eccentric degree, as his desire for Ophelia, particularly in the Second Quarto and Folio, vacillates. He rejects Ophelia, teases her with lascivious sexual connotations and, finally, admits his love for her only at her funeral. As if this morose girlfriend dodging was not enough, Hamlet denies the existence of love letters sent to Ophelia (3.1.93–6) then makes explicitly contradictory statements: HAMLET I did love you once. OPHELIA Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. HAMLET You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I loved you not. OPHELIA I was the more deceived. (3.1.115–20) Tormenting Ophelia, Hamlet admits to the trace of man’s original, sinful aspect, an invasion of vice into virtue that corrupted his declarations of love, then sums up the equivocation with an order that plays on the Elizabethan slang use of ‘nunnery’ as a brothel, suggesting both chastity and lustfulness: ‘Go thy ways to a nunnery’ (3.1.130). Alexia Papalazarou’s direction of Sam Bobrick’s comedy, Hamlet II (Better Than the Original), at the Anoikhto Theatre in Nicosia, Cyprus, in December 2007, linked Claudius’s ambiguous position with the grotesque, confused desires of Hamlet. After the hasty marriage of the queen and her new king, Laertes cannot decide if his homosexual lust should be satisfied by Claudius or Hamlet, as Hamlet repeatedly escapes from the overtly Oedipal attentions of his mother only to accidentally return to her embrace when faced with Ophelia’s youthful desperation. Ophelia, disgruntled, takes on all-comers, including Claudius, who sometimes deliberately, sometimes innocently, confuses her with



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Gertrude. All the while Polonius holds a supernatural torch for the Ghost, itself flirting outrageously with the audience. And, as this stand-up comedian version of Hamlet surveys the orgiastic scene, the famous question of whether it is better to be or not to be in such a world becomes, in the Greek translation, an ‘aporia’, an impasse that, like Shakespeare’s use of ‘nunnery’, points the audience down opposite roads. After the original Hamlet pushes Ophelia away, he pulls her back again in the preamble to ‘The Mousetrap’, refusing Gertrude’s company to sit beside the girl he cannot help avoiding: ‘No, good mother, here’s metal more attractive’ (3.2.108). As the court settles down to watch the play-within-the-play, Hamlet turns on the outrageously bawdy charm as part of his antic disposition: HAMLET OPHELIA HAMLET OPHELIA HAMLET OPHELIA HAMLET OPHELIA HAMLET

[lying down at Ophelia’s feet] Lady, shall I lie in your lap? No, my lord. I mean, my head upon your lap. Ay, my lord. Do you think I meant country matters? I think nothing, my lord. That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs. What is, my lord? Nothing. (3.2.110–19)

Ophelia rebuffs Hamlet’s implication and he clarifies his meaning only to return to the sexual theme with polite innuendo that contains a clandestine reference to the nothing, the virginal O, between Ophelia’s legs, the fair matter of her undiscovered cunt. All the unravelled signifiers of the play push Hamlet to a search for meaning beyond signification. Alone before the audience for the first time, the hero’s initial soliloquy spells out his turmoil: O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. (1.2.129–32) Close to the Christian sin of despair, Hamlet wishes that his body would dissolve or that God did not prohibit suicide. Editorial debate surrounding the word ‘sullied’ offers three possibilities – the ‘solid’ of the Folio, the ‘sallied’ of the

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Quartos and the conjectural ‘sullied’ in the Arden edition. The sense in the Folio is of a solidity or thickness that opposes Hamlet’s nihilistic drive towards a state of diffusion and dissolution. Both Claudius and Gertrude question this ‘nighted colour’ in the face of death’s ubiquity (1.2.68), but Hamlet’s spiky response refutes their pragmatism and distinguishes unattainable signifiers that can denote him accurately from theatrical signifiers that equivocate: ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play. (1.2.77–84) More than just the outward indicators of mourning, these actions pre-empt the play-within-a-play and allude to the disingenuous nature of Gertrude’s and Claudius’s own sorrow, a difference Hamlet goes on to clarify: ‘I have that within which passes show, | These but the trappings and the suits of woe’ (1.2.85–6). To protect his position as king, Claudius dispatches Hamlet to England in the care of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Rosencrantz’s sycophantic reply to the commission in the Second Quarto and Folio unintentionally evokes the contested death of old Hamlet, as well as the threat posed by Hamlet’s out of control woe: The cess of majesty Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw What’s near it with it. Or it is a massy wheel Fix’d on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortis’d and adjoin’d, which when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boist’rous ruin. (3.3.15–22) To paraphrase the slimy Rosencrantz, a royal death creates an eddied drag that draws in its surroundings, sucking them into its whirlpool, a description



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of the royal throne of Denmark in tune with Lacan’s organizational Nameof-the-Father. Rosencrantz refers to the threat posed to Claudius by Hamlet’s prickly idiosyncrasy but, at the same time, evokes the murder of old Hamlet, while Claudius, ‘like a man to double business bound’ (3.3.41), must constantly resist the spiralling pull of majesty’s end, despite being the reason for it. A king’s fall, like a turn of Fortune’s wheel, determines the mood of all subjected to it. Derrida identifies a chronological madness in Hamlet, where times and dates, which ordinarily situate and arrest meaning, are inconsistent (Derrida, 1995), a temporal dislocation that can be transposed to the position of Fathers in the play, where the paternal guardians of chronological sanity disrupt, rather than stabilize, meaning. An earlymodern deconstruction of Lacan’s symbolic order, Rosencrantz’s allegorical wheel has Claudius at its heart as the Name-of-the-Father struggling to keep the excesses of signification in check. Hamlet’s wordy tricks and turns, his experimentation with what seems and what denotes, are language games that signal Claudius’s very serious lack of control. Put simply, Claudius endangers Denmark because he cannot offer the security Rosencrantz ascribes to a king and resolves to defend. Kingship, like the Lacanian Father, operates under a deadly paradox. When Hamlet playfully conceals the whereabouts of the slain body of Polonius he also equivocates on the political doctrine that ascribed to a king two bodies, one natural and one political: ‘The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body’ (4.3.26–7). This implied threat to Claudius warns that kingship does not protect the king from death, and that, more straightforwardly, the office of king itself outlives the death of the individual who occupies it. Hamlet’s riddle also points out that a body may hold the position of king, but that kingship does not reside in that body, a sideways attack on Claudius as unfit for purpose. James L. Calderwood stresses that Claudius is only referred to by his title in the dialogue of the play because ‘the royal class name obscures whereas the proper name proclaims individuality’ (Calderwood, 1983: 8). More than this, when Claudius becomes king he attains a symbolic title that supersedes his name. Nonetheless, instead of a Father fixed in his dominant position at the high peak of Rosencrantz’s metaphorical mountain or the centre of the his allegorical wheel, a usurper-king and impostor-father stands as the privileged signifier in Hamlet, exposing the symbolic Father as equally part of the same disseminated chain of meaning as any other signifier. Shakespeare, then, presents Fathers who destabilize the structural position assigned to them. With characteristic complexity, Nicholas Royle states in his deconstructionist analysis that Hamlet is ‘the impossible

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dramatisation, deferral and enactment, presentation, analysis and abyssing of the signature’ (Royle, 1995: 106). What we can take from this is that proper names in Hamlet, especially fathers’ names, raise expectations that the play confounds. Hamlet stands in the shadow of his father’s name, as inadequate as Claudius in comparison, the Ghost’s identity as old Hamlet is constantly doubted and Claudius’s crimes endanger the office he holds from the instant he exchanges his own identity for an ill-gotten crown. Reflecting, in the prayer scene, on the poisonous attainment of his twin prize of queen and crown, Claudius admits to a troubled conscience concealed from everyone around him. His first admission comes as an aside that confirms his guilt and offers the audience a glimpse of the insincere genuflection to come: The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plast’ring art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word. (3.1.51–3) His words, like the beauty of a painted face, are artificial: they may be fair, but his crime reveals their falsehood. This division between his words and the effects of his crimes is reproduced as he kneels in search of salvation. Alone and, if only for a short while, distanced from the trappings of his crime, Claudius admits that his regicide ‘is rank, it smells to heaven’, and his desire to pray is constantly obstructed ‘Though inclination be as sharp as will’ (3.3.36, 39). Holding the reward of his foul crime, he struggles to request forgiveness: ‘That cannot be, since I am still posses’d | Of those effects for which I did the murder’ (3.3.53–4). Prosser identified ‘an active conscience that cannot be silenced’ in Claudius (Prosser, 1971: 185), but his continued possession of his regicidal gains undercuts any attempted repentance before heaven: In the corrupted currents of this world Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft ‘tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law. But ‘tis not so above: There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature, and we ourselves compell’d Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults To give in evidence. (3.3.57–64)



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Claudius, like the treasonous equivocator the hell-porter in Macbeth imagines, can sidestep or buy off justice in the here and now but cannot mislead heaven. By choosing the aspect of prayer’s ‘twofold force’ (3.3.48) that forgives a past, committed sin, Claudius appeals to the unequivocal Judge who will ruthlessly expose, and wrathfully punish, his crime. Unlike corruptible earthly judgement, the final Judgement of an unequivocal Logos cannot be bought or hoodwinked, and Claudius can only offer a failed and riddling prayer: ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go’ (3.3.97–8). The First Quarto, where Claudius’s closing words are less of a conundrum, sums up what is at stake: ‘My words fly up, my sins remain below. | No king on earth is safe if God’s his foe’ (Q1, 10.32–3). More explicit than the later texts, the First Quarto closes the prayer scene with an affirmation of the divine danger Claudius faces: though he can equivocate to the ears of men, from whom rhetoric and political machinations can withhold the full truth, the foul stench of his crimes and trickery reap everlasting damnation before God. As Claudius kneels, a deliberating Hamlet sneaks up on him. Claudius admits defeat in his attempt to be absolved, but, ironically, Hamlet allows his father/ uncle the repentance which, so says the Ghost, old Hamlet was denied: Am I then reveng’d, To take him in the purging of his soul, When he is fit and season’d for his passage? No. (3.3.84–7) The penitence Claudius cannot whole heartedly perform does, in Hamlet’s mind, offer the king an undeserved salvation, diluting the intended revenge. For Claudius to be truly damned his soteriological prayer cannot be interrupted and revenge must wait until a more suitable time: Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent: When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed, At game a-swearing, or about some act That has no relish of salvation in’t, Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven And that his soul may be as damn’d and black As hell, whereto it goes. (3.3.88–95)

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Murder must occur at an appropriately foul moment to send Claudius head-first into the hungry mouth of hell. Margreta de Grazia singles out Hamlet’s determination to damn Claudius as a desire that in church tradition ‘belongs exclusively to devils’, identifying the young prince we tend to idolize with the devils that consign souls to hell’s eternal fires in Doom paintings (de Grazia, 2007: 188). However, Hamlet’s inaction provides the time for Claudius’s attempted repentance, deconstructing the opposition between salvation and damnation. Claudius survives being stabbed in the back because his death at this time will, Hamlet believes, save his soul, but this deferral of vengeance allows Claudius to snatch at the very salvation Hamlet wishes to deny him. Hamlet contemplates his blade, holding back for a day unhindered by any trace of salvation, while Claudius fears the damnation Hamlet delays, performing the very act that could save him, a glimpse of salvation as damnation is plotted. Hamlet swings from heaven to hell and back again as he agonizes over what to do, and the texts of the play also equivocate on the path of Hamlet’s orbit around his task. Lukas Erne finds the emphasis in the First Quarto ‘on the swiftly moving action, on plans formed and carried out’, differentiating it from the longer, more cerebral later texts intended for the page (Erne, 2003: 235). A further distinction can be made between the Second Quarto and the other texts. When Claudius walks out of ‘The Mousetrap’, Hamlet states his readiness to ‘drink hot blood, | And do such bitter business as the day | Would quake to look on’ (3.2.381–3), but he still recoils, and while the First Quarto and Folio texts move through the closet scene, Hamlet’s banishment to England and then the play’s bloody end, the Second Quarto adds a soliloquy that diverts the audience back to Hamlet’s vacillating introspection. As Fortinbras and his men march through Denmark to claim a meaningless patch of land in Poland, Hamlet mulls over his inaction in the face of a far greater imperative: How stand I then That have a father killed, a mother stained, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep; while to my shame I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men That for a fantasy and trick of fame Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain? (Q2, 4.4.55–64)



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Back, pendulum-like, to ‘thinking too precisely on th’event’ (Q2, 4.4.40), Hamlet berates himself for not having the determination of others, repeating the self-doubt provoked by the performance of the player: ‘What would he do | Had he the motive and that for passion | That I have?’ (Q2, 2.2.495–7). As well as this repetition, the bloodthirsty language that punctuates ‘The Mousetrap’ resurfaces: ‘O, from this time forth | My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth’ (Q2, 4.4.64–5). The variations from text to text offer us a protagonist who progresses towards revenge in a more linear fashion in the First Quarto and Folio, while in the Second Quarto he continues to scold himself for his quiescence. Opinion has varied on Hamlet’s suspended revenge. Some have interpreted Hamlet’s hesitations as weakness, such as A. C. Bradley who believed Hamlet to be held back by ‘a state of profound melancholy’ triggered by Gertrude’s shallow, lustful and hasty marriage to Claudius (Bradley, 1957: 86). John Dover Wilson admired Hamlet’s noble sensibilities, but still considered him to have a glaring weakness: when he is ‘called upon for deeds he fails, dismally and completely’ (Wilson, 1951: 276). G. Wilson Knight excused Claudius, opining in 1930 that ‘one can hardly blame him’ for conspiring with Laertes to kill Hamlet. In the process, Knight saw Hamlet as a cruel, inhuman ‘ambassador of death’ who ‘deals destruction around him’ as he tries to cope with the burden of the Ghost’s injunction. Later, in 1947, Knight conceded that ‘Hamlet starts as an admirable young man’ and ‘Claudius is a criminal opportunist’ (Knight: 37, 45, 298). Others have seen a stronger hero in Hamlet. G. K. Hunter defended Hamlet ‘because he keeps facing up to and (however desperate) maintaining some control over the flux of action’ (Hunter, 1963: 104). All these critics, in their own ways, were writing about whether Hamlet’s hesitations are heroic or not, whether his reaction to his task is the correct, most admirable one. Hamlet’s response can be seen differently: caught between the equivocal provenance of the Ghost and Claudius the father/uncle, Hamlet lacks the ideal, Mars-like Father who could compel him to act. Recently, Catherine Belsey has asked whether Hamlet makes ‘the proper response of any God-fearing hero’ to a murderous command from another world (Belsey, 2007: 117). To take this further, Hamlet cannot obey the Ghost, nor, for that matter, can he obey Claudius, and the play questions whether Law permits him to obey either of them. The opening night of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production of Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Courtyard Theatre, directed by Gregory Doran, offered an insight into this Law. With the house lights still on, and with red-shirted ushers still showing people to their seats, Francisco walks slowly across the stage three times on

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his watch. Officially, the play has yet to start, the lights have not been dimmed and many seats are still empty. Nevertheless, the audience fell silent, and Lacan would probably see this internalized self-regulation as an effect of Law. The audience was comfortable in the knowledge that the figure on stage signified the start of the play, or at least required their silent attention, despite the fact that a line had yet to be spoken and, beneath the glare of the lights and the sound of people shuffling into their seats, the actor could easily have been ignored. David Tennant’s manic and amusing Hamlet then emphasized the contrast between the Courtyard audience and the young prince’s performed madness: during the play-within-the-play he neither kept his mouth shut nor resisted interfering, stepping into its stage-space to cajole, prod and push the players. Of course, Hamlet’s behaviour is not aimed at the players but at provoking Claudius, and his comments demonstrate his distrust of the king, but this lack of control also betrays the lack of an admirable, iron-willed patriarch who could impose restraint or offer proof reliable enough to justify sharp revenge. Both the Ghost and Claudius are untrustworthy, ineligible as Hamlet’s father because they are eligible for the condition of father-and-not-father, a suspect, shady place from which to commandeer the godlike authority Hamlet associates with old Hamlet. Polonius, meanwhile, comically dovetails this firm, disciplinarian sovereignty with the circuitous, confused ramblings of his paternal speeches, a playful, unintended debasement of the clout associated with Fathers. The prayer scene exemplifies the two-pronged issue Hamlet faces. In the name of vengeance, Hamlet must do wrong in order to achieve right, an equivocal act that ‘deconstructs the antithesis which fixes the meanings of good and evil, right and wrong’ (Belsey, 1985: 115). Revenge can only serve to perpetuate the effects of murder: Claudius possesses the crown, so Hamlet must murder the King of Denmark to avenge the murder of the King of Denmark. Any projected reprisal thus repeats the crime of regicide; it is a second act of injustice, another murder, another crime, designed to rectify the first unjust act. At the same time, Claudius’s frustrated attempt to pray also explores his position as king, as heaven’s anointed representative, and the hellish means that won him the crown. To put it in the deconstructed Lacanian formations that have been the methodological tactic of this chapter, Claudius is unhappily located between the structural position of Father who symbolizes absolute, unequivocal meaning, and the equivocal position of regicidal father/uncle who disrupts the order of the family and the differences on which it depends, differences which, as King, Father and Royal Dane, he should reinforce. Patricia Parker points out that Hamlet



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cannot know who his real father is because the poisoned, adulterous union of Claudius and Gertrude complicates the ‘Christological motif of the Son who is the perfect bearer of his Father’s will’ (Parker, 1996: 178). However, more than question the identity of Hamlet’s father, the play presents two figures trying, but failing, to inhabit the role of the Name-of-the-Father as the bearer of the Law. Derrida might have put it something like this: through the figures of the Ghost and Claudius Hamlet eulogizes the Name-of-the-Father along the same propositional tracks that destabilize the Name-of-the-Father: the play at once worships the symbolic Father then relentlessly equivocates on a signifier Lacan puts forth as a privileged, stabilizing influence. Reflections of Shakespeare’s deeply religious times, the texts of the play nevertheless explore the linguistic void created by the divorce of immortal and mortal communication, a cleavage elided by the traditional concept of language operation that linked a sign to a referent by the transcendental fibre optics of faith, a spiritual philosophy chipped at by Saussure and cut down by Derrida. In a Christian universe such as Hamlet’s, this separation would be of an unequivocal Logos in heaven from the equivocal, fallen language of Adam’s and Eve’s progeny, a separation undone not by the quasi-transcendental Name-of-the-Father returned to signifying normality by the play, but by the Apocalypse, by the divine, definitive and irrevocable stepping-in of the biblical transcendental signified, the Logos as God. Without this eternally adjourned Judgement Day, there is no truth.

The Ghouls of Doom Eternally adjourned the End may be, but its invocation in Hamlet reminds both audience and dramatis personae alike that its possibility remains. In the final act of the play, Hamlet peers into the mystical, truth-bearing zone of the Logos in perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy. Just as visions of the Doom accompany Macbeth’s moral struggle with the consequences of regicide, forthcoming Judgement also weighs upon Hamlet’s situation: To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

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Must give us pause – there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life. (3.1.64–9) Dread of the afterlife impedes action and makes ‘cowards of us all’ as earthly enterprises ‘lose the name of action’ (3.1.83, 88). Consequences beyond the grave inspire this Christian conscience, and in the Quarto of 1603, as Stern suggests, ‘God has .  .  . a much less ambiguous presence’ (Stern, 2004: 56). In this text Hamlet is quick to employ apocalyptic language: O that this too much grieved and sallied flesh Would melt to nothing, or that the universal Globe of heaven would turn all to a chaos! (Q1, 2.55–7) And Hamlet’s soliloquy in the First Quarto returns to this theme with an explicit consideration of Judgement: To be, or not to be – ay, there’s the point. To die, to sleep – is that all? Ay, all. No, to sleep, to dream – ay, marry, there it goes, For in that dream of death, when we’re awaked And borne before an everlasting judge From whence no passenger ever returned – The undiscovered country, at whose sight The happy smile and the accursed damned. (Q1, 7.115–22) More directly here than in the Second Quarto and Folio, Hamlet’s words allude to the pre-Reformation Doom paintings that become so evident in the language of Macbeth and Othello and are explicitly referenced in relation to the inverted Pietà of death that concludes King Lear. The ‘joyful hope’ of reaching heaven (Q1, 7.123), the existence of which is not doubted, restrains Hamlet, who considers the contrasting fates seen every Sunday by parishioners throughout early modern Britain on the chancel arch or framed in coloured glass, where the saved are lifted skywards by flying angels and the condemned are shoved down to hell-fire by snorting demons. Will Hamlet be saved or damned if he kills Claudius? Is he heaven’s ‘scourge’ or ‘minister’ (3.4.177)? Caught between heavenly and earthly



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justice, the Hamlet of the Second Quarto and Folio tells Horatio that there can no longer be any debate: a dead Claudius must be the right outcome. Regicide becomes a moral imperative, not a matter of obeying a phantom howling in the cellar: Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon – He that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother, Popp’d in between th’election and my hopes, Thrown out his angle for my proper life And with such coz’nage – is’t not perfect conscience To quit him with this arm? (5.2.63–8) The Folio goes one further than the Second Quarto. To leave Claudius’s offences unpunished, including the burgeoning rap sheet of felonies designed to bury any knowledge of the initial, fratricidal regicide and the speedy, incestuous marriage to Gertrude, to let him live and wade deeper into evil, is ‘to be damned’ (F, 5.2.68). When Hamlet passes up the chance to butcher Claudius it is because the violent interruption to prayer might send Claudius to heaven by default, but now the same blood-drenched act would save Hamlet himself from damnation. Like a Möbius strip where surfaces are both outside and inside and never one or the other, Hamlet’s road to damnation becomes its opposite, the road to salvation and, in chiral tandem, Claudius’s fortunate salvation doubles as his certain damnation. Plainly speaking, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t but, as the play approaches its endgame, Hamlet decides it is better to ‘do’ (yet only in a celestially endorsed context). Heavenly providence bolsters this new-found moral imperative: There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. (5.2.215–18) Sensing something awry in the proposed fencing match with Laertes, Hamlet appeals to the scriptural sparrow that ‘shall not fall on the ground without your Father’ (Mt. 10.29). Furthermore, in the First Quarto Hamlet sees the sovereignty of God over the affairs of man as ‘predestinate’ (Q1, 17.45). According to Fredson Thayer Bowers, the Old Testament laws legitimating private revenge were ‘twisted so as to apply to state justice, or

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were ignored, or contrasted to the new world created by Christ’ due to the progressive moral and legal condemnation of Shakespeare’s time (Bowers, 1940: 12–13). Hamlet bends the rules of blood vengeance to suit his needs, pairing his agency with the sovereignty of God over man’s free will, a union of Hamlet’s mortal concerns with religious teleology consecrated in the apocalyptic graveyard. Doom imagery, and corresponding artworks such as medieval wall paintings of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ legend, profoundly influenced a largely illiterate population that was legally required to go to church, affecting the mode of worship of early modern parishioners and ‘the ways in which they thought and created’ (Aston, 1988: 2). More­ over, the sectarian struggles, the predominant ideological battleground of the period, imprinted such images in the cultural memory of the society in which Shakespeare lived. He would no doubt have known the Christian legend of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ or other ones much like it, especially as the Guild Chapel in Stratford-upon-Avon housed a painting of ‘The Dance of Death’, a similar but less common variety of the legend that presents a grinning skeleton randomly selecting those to die from a diverse collection of people, a painting which, although degraded, can still be seen behind the chapel’s north-wall panelling. At the very least, Shakespeare must have been aware of the legacy of imagery that depicted such Christian tales to his friends, family and co-workers, because the skull-juggling antics in the graveyard scene of Hamlet seem to retell the story by uniting it with attendant scenes from the end of the world. A popular memento mori, ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ has three corpses warn three kings of the inevitability of death and subsequent Judgement, urging the living to repent with an ominous reminder that nothing can prevent the inevitable: ‘As you are, so were we: as we are, so you will become’ (see Rosewell, 2008: 81–3). On one wall of Holy Trinity Church in Wensley, Yorkshire, fragments of a painting bear this very inscription, the words weaving in and out of the lower halves of the living dead, their legs tasselled with feasting worms. The most complete extant version can be seen at St Nicholas’s Church in Charlwood, Surrey, near Gatwick Airport, where three charred living dead block the path of three crown-wearing riders on horseback, the image surrounded by the visible remains of other wall paintings that once would have covered most of the interior (Figure 2.3).2 A close up of the Doom at St James the Great Church in sleepy South Leigh, Oxfordshire, shows cracked tombs spitting forth their zombie dead, memorials of the inexorable weighing of all souls, here revived by the trumpet of a diving angel



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Figure 2.3  ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Charlwood, Surrey.

Figure 2.4  Detail of the Doom painting at St James the Great Church, South Leigh, Oxfordshire.

beneath an ascendant Latin message welcoming the fortunate blessed to join Christ in heaven (Figure 2.4). Goodman Delver’s joke that his houses last until doomsday makes it clear that Hamlet, surrounded by degraded bodies to one day be trumpet-blasted back to life, has wandered into the graveyard of the Apocalypse where buried bones fly up from below.

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When Hamlet and Horatio approach, Goodman Delver’s sidekick has already exited and this leaves three living on stage to contemplate three exhumed skulls. I first noticed the clear numerical connection I had somehow previously overlooked when watching Hamlet, directed by Paul Miller, at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre in late 2010. From the grave situated under the theatre’s cellar door, the gravedigger threw up three skeleton heads for Horatio and John Simm’s angst-ridden version of the young prince to catch. Three living, three dead, replicating the numbers of the vanitas. Performances visualize what even careful readings sometimes miss. Hamlet then confronts the skull of Yorick the court jester with black humour, replicating the moral message of the vanitas: Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. (5.1.183–8) Hamlet explains death’s ubiquity to the dead jester, his subsequent medi­ tation on the somatic fate of historical figures a Christological perspective on wealth and power with Alexander and Julius Caesar the great men reduced to simple, crude matter: ‘Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust’ while Caesar is ‘dead and turn’d to clay’ (5.2.201–3, 206). Many versions of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’, such as the extant painting at St Pega’s Church in Peakirk, Northamptonshire, showed the living kings to be wealthy and powerful, finely dressed to indicate their wealth and status in contrast to the decayed corpses or skeletons they met. As one of the demons in the Wakefield mystery cycle’s Judgement cackles: ‘Where are the goods and the gold that ye gathered together? | That merry company so bold riding hither and thither’ (Wakefield: 454). John Webster, whose grisly, morbid tragedies take an unforgiving look at the human condition, worked a hellish round into The Duchess of Malfi that draws on elements of ‘The Dance of Death’ and ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’, in the process elucidating the grim corporeality of Hamlet’s tongue-in-cheek pontifications. Ferdinand torments his sister, the Duchess, with singing and dancing madmen who welcome death as they herald the Apocalypse: FIRST MADMAN: Doomsday not come yet? I’ll draw it nearer by a perspective, or make a glass, that shall set all the



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world on fire upon an instant. I cannot sleep, my pillow is stuff’d with a litter of porcupines. SECOND MADMAN: Hell is a mere glass-house, where the devils are continuously blowing up women’s souls on hollow irons, and the fire never goes out. (The Duchess of Malfi, 4.2.73–9) For Webster’s unyieldingly brutish creations, the torture chamber awaiting the Duchess in the afterlife can only be seen through a perspective, or telescope, which enlarges a far-off place always on the skyline. As the madmen continue their deathly serenade, Ferdinand’s head assassin, Bosola, takes on the role of the grinning skeleton that singles out those about to die. Playing Death, Bosola forewarns the Duchess to what favour she will soon come when the executioners kill her: Thou art a box of worm seed, at best, but a salvatory of green mummy: what’s this flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in: more contemptible; since ours is to preserve earth-worms. (The Duchess of Malfi, 4.2.124–8) Savouring the vulgar details, Bosola describes the organic decay of buried flesh slowly consumed in the soil or ground up into the medicinal powder once made from mummified corpses. The all-singing, all-dancing madmen and Bosola’s macabre observations link, as Hamlet does, memento mori imagery to the end of the world. When this event spied by Webster’s madman through a telescope does actually appear on the sunless horizon, equivocation must be avoided, and Hamlet, faced with Goodman Delver’s brainteasers and witticisms, finds he must ‘speak by the card or equivocation will undo’ him (5.1.133–4). Infidelities of language are impossible in the presence of the Logos, but, even in the representative graveyard of the Apocalypse, theological clarity has yet to fully arrive. In Hamlet, as in Othello, Macbeth and King Lear, Shakespeare teases us with visions of Doom but holds back its transformative conflagration, shaping an unhappy ending via dramatic and linguistic disorders intrinsically linked to each other. Language, in this sense, follows the structure of apocalyptic narratives that envision a forever-delayed finality. Shakespearean tragedy, where the end remains nigh so that tragedy can be tragedy, is structured like a language. As Hamlet stares into the empty eye sockets of his former jester’s disinterred skull, we see that end enacted but still nigh.

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Is there a more iconic image in the Shakespearean canon than Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull? An entire book, or at least a very long chapter, could be written on the various incarnations of memento mori like this in art, literature, film and even advertising. A large section of that endeavour would probably need to be dedicated to Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, The Seventh Seal, throughout which skeletons and cadavers constantly appear. Connections with Hamlet are laid bare early on when two knights just returned from the Crusades at the time of the Black Death are met only by a corpse and, shortly after, three players discuss performing ‘The Dance of Death’ in Elsinore as one of them tries a skeleton mask on for size, jigging about like a reanimated Yorick. Bengt Ekerot as Death was made up to resemble a skull by Bergman, who, son of a preacher, was fascinated by medieval wall paintings. No doubt an expression of this interest, when the knights finally arrive at a small town they find a church painter putting the finishing touches to a vanitas, entering into a debate with him over the role of these elements of the poor man’s Bible. Bergman’s classic also presents this kind of pre-Reformation imagery in conjunction with the Book of Revelation, from which the film takes its title, as the town residents believe the plague to be St John of Patmos’s vision coming true. Currently, television drama Sons of Anarchy, which loosely follows the plotline of Hamlet, employs a skull as the symbol of the SAMCRO motorcycle club, a reaper emblazoned on the highly prized jackets of the bikers and tattooed across their backs, a permanent Yorick inked on to the skin of all, including Jax Teller, who grapples with the hard-nosed vision his stepfather has for the club and the idealism he finds in his deceased father’s notebook. Consciously echoing Hamlet, Sons of Anarchy also interprets graveyard encounters as apocalyptic. Disillusioned with the club and awaiting a funeral, Jax spends the night at the graveyard sleeping in the doorway of a tomb house called ‘Patmos’. As he awakes, a Curtis Stigers and the Forest Rangers cover of ‘John the Revelator’ plays, a traditional gospel blues song about St John of Patmos writing the Book of Revelation. In Cameron’s The Terminator skulls are the recurring motif of the immi­ nent apocalypse, a devastating nuclear attack that prompts a war between self-aware machines and humanity’s remnants. Sent from the future to kill Sarah Connor and ensure victory for the machines, the unstoppable cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger assumes its most frightening guise when a fire burns away its human flesh to reveal its mechanical endoskeleton. On its clicking and whirring shoulders sits a smiling robot skull, a futuristic memento mori and Hollywood’s most quoted grim reaper. Human skulls also litter the panoramic shots of the post-apocalyptic battlefields in



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Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which begins with children playing on park rides, a green, grassy idyll that fades into the future where a skeleton sits slumped over the steering wheel of a burnt-out car, the playground rides now mangled and battered in the dark, bare and skull-strewn background. A metal foot crushes one of the skulls and then the camera moves up to the robot’s gleaming, maniacal grin, a shot that represents the transfer of power from man to machine by panning from organic to artificial memento mori. An altogether fleshier hint of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ can be seen in John Landis’s 1981 cult horror An American Werewolf in London, in which the decomposing cadaver of Jack Goodman stalks his friend, the lycanthropic David Kessler, advising him to commit suicide before he takes more lives. Landis also directed Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which covers just about all the cliché elements of mainstream horror possible to cover in a music video, including possessed demons that come up through the floorboards from the place where the Ghost resides. Zombie dancers also rise from their mist-shrouded graves to supply jerky, stiff-limbed support to Jackson as he taunts a sacrificial damsel with her unavoidable fate, a parodic moment that, like the graveyard scene in Hamlet, brings together grizzly memento mori ghouls with the souls resurrected come doomsday. From the graveyard scene onwards Hamlet seems a different figure, with an understanding, as Maynard Mack suggested some sixty years or so ago in an influential essay, of ‘the boundaries in which human action, human judgment, are enclosed’ (Mack, 1951: 521), but he acts spontaneously when his hand is forced. Like Othello, who, overcome with guilt and shame, takes his own life as payment for the wrongful murder of Desdemona, the cost for Hamlet of administering earthly justice is his earthly existence. And whereas Othello believes his action has damned him to hell’s everlasting fires, for Horatio Hamlet is bound for heaven: he wishes Hamlet ‘flights of angels’ to sing him to his rest (5.2.365). Stephen Greenblatt states that Horatio’s angels ‘figure in many images of Purgatory’ (Greenblatt, 2001: 51), but depictions of purgatory were rare compared with the Dooms of the chancel arch that had angels carrying saved souls to heaven. This can be seen happening most beautifully in the stained glass version at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, next to a small red devil cheekily trying to tip St Michael’s soul-weighing scales (Figure 2.5). When Hamlet does, finally, carry out the Ghost’s command, he does it as one of the living dead. The poisoned rapier, the ‘treacherous instrument’

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Figure 2.5  Detail of the stained glass Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire.

(5.2.322) intended for Hamlet, betrays Claudius when the wounded Hamlet also wounds him with it: ‘The point envenom’d too! Then, venom, to thy work’ (5.2.327). Just to be sure, a doomed-to-die Hamlet then forces Claudius to drink from the poisoned cup that was to guarantee Hamlet’s death, and the prince returns to the sinful royal marriage as he stamps the usurper out of existence: Here, thou incestuous, murd’rous, damned Dane, Drink off this potion. Is thy union here? Follow my mother. (5.2.330–2) He may take his sweet time about it, but when he does it, he does it emphatically, and his ‘hasta la vista, baby’ punch line unites the pearl floating in the poisoned cup with the marriage that was murderously won, sending Claudius tumbling into hell close behind Gertrude. Wilson Knight urged us to consider Hamlet’s ‘consciousness of death’ as the real threat to Denmark (Knight, 1949: 32), while, according to Maynard Mack, Jr, Hamlet



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renders Denmark ‘as a possible type of the fallen garden’ (Mack, 1973: 82). Alternatively, we can say that the play’s revenge takes us to a liminal point between life and death – to that effervescent portal in Night of the Demon through which the medieval fiend of fire emerges ablaze – as Hamlet, dying, becomes death’s barely breathing ambassador, a brother to the ghouls of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’. Close to death, still alive but fatally poisoned, he delivers justice from a place neither living nor dead, deconstructing the opposition between the earthly justice that first compelled him and the divine providence that he believes controls his destiny. Though he never wears the crown, Hamlet still fulfils his vocation and becomes king fleetingly, giving his dying voice to Fortinbras’s coronation. With one foot in the mortal realm and one foot in the immortal realm as he does so, Hamlet occupies the position of the Name-of-the-Father that reconciles the two; it is Hamlet, not Claudius or the Ghost, who as he passes over to an unequivocal world comes to be identified, momentarily, with the ‘divinity [that] doth hedge a king’ (4.4.123), with the celestial sword of death and Judgement that anoints the Father of the state.

Notes 1 2

All references to the Second Quarto of 1604–5 are to Shakespeare (2006b). By public transport, take the G4 bus from the airport’s South Terminal, but do beware: at the time of writing, signs in the terminal are only for certain bus companies, none of which operate a service to Charlwood. Head for the car park, where there are numerous bus platforms, and alight outside the Rising Sun pub, from where the church graveyard can be seen at the top of a small, narrow street.

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Masochistic Damnation in Othello

Dragged to Hell In a creepy underground car park, loan officer Christine Brown thinks over her day at work. Stung by ambiguous, implied criticisms of her softheartedness, she took the chance to impress her boss and win a promotion when customer Sylvia Ganush arrived. Mysterious, repulsive and not quite of this world, the withered Ganush coughed sickly ectoplasmic globs of mucus into an embroidered handkerchief as she begged for yet another extension on her home loan. Keen to prove that compassionate farm girls can also be hard-nosed, Christine stayed firm, had security remove Ganush and the grotesque old lady was shamed and made homeless before a bank full of people. As Christine sits in her car trying to convince herself that she made the right call, the embroidered handkerchief appears from nowhere to spread itself against the windscreen. It floats slowly around the car and as Christine follows it she turns to see Ganush sitting on the backseat, breathing hoarsely in the silent dark. The two fight until the weird, slimy Ganush rips a button from Christine’s coat, holds it aloft chanting ancient incantations in an unknown tongue and passes it back to Christine. The spell of the Lamia, the demon that drags the accursed to hell, has been set. Thus begins Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell, a 2009 film that updates Night of the Demon to the apposite setting of Los Angeles, City of Angels. With the ominous, horned shadows of the Lamia that are projected on to the windows and walls of Christine’s home, Drag Me to Hell pays homage to the medieval demon that mercilessly hunts down its victims in Tourneur’s classic. When, finally, the diabolic silhouette takes Christine, it rends open the ground at Los Angeles Union Station and reaches up through roiling flames to snatch her. It is a similar, damned fate that Othello, consumed by guilt, wishes for himself when he discovers that he has been tricked into the murder of his innocent wife, Desdemona. Where equivocations regarding Christine’s

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soft-heartedness convince her to deny Ganush, the doubts Iago conveys with equivocal words and gestures about Desdemona’s chastity compel Othello to commit literature’s most famous crime of passion. Like Christine Brown, Othello makes a fateful decision based on speech that is perceptibly incomplete. Derrida’s views on the incompleteness of speech help to illuminate the abused general’s plight. Speech and writing is the first binary opposition that Derrida deconstructs. In a critique of the Western philosophical tradition that emphasizes the supremacy of one over the other, Derrida points out that philosophers, from Plato onwards, have considered speech to be natural and writing little more than a supplement, citing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language as a prime example of written language denounced as an artificial parasite that feeds on spoken language. Even Saussure, who debunked the theonomy of linguistic signs corresponding mystically with referents in the world, maintained the pre-eminence of speech. However, Derrida argues that speech, like writing, adheres to the temporal process of dissemination, the unfurling chain of differences between signifiers that defers the possibility of any single, uncontested meaning. Mindful of this similarity, Derrida mischievously turns received philosophical wisdom on its head and gives writing pre-eminence over speech, even going so far as to call speech another type of writing, one written on the ear rather than the page. As evidence for this deconstruction, Derrida cites the inadequacy of speech alone as proof that it needs the equitable support of writing. Clarifying gestures highlight this inadequacy, identifying speech as a structure that ‘can accomplish itself . . . only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy’ (Derrida, 1997: 145). Think of the hand signs, the shrugs or the facial expressions we use to make the things we say clear, or clearer, to our interlocutors. These gesticulations prove that speech has to be supplemented, or supplanted, because of ‘the anterior default of a presence’ (ibid.) – the lack of an extra-linguistic origin, a Logos, from which speech emerges complete. Speech, then, cannot be naturally complete if it needs to be supplemented, and this necessity betrays an absence or gap that Derrida calls the originary lack. These philosophical ins and outs can be summed up in the following way: while writing may seem parasitic because it can be called a supplement, calling something a supplement tacitly admits that what it supplements requires supplementation. In simple terms, speech, like writing, lacks plenitude. And speech without plenitude, without presence or truth, necessarily equivocates and necessarily requires clarifying gestures.



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Derrida’s logic of supplementation can be found at work in the vulnerabilities of Othello and the mode of address with which Iago misdirects him. Iago uses unfinished sentences along with supplemental gestures as a subtle offensive tactic that seduces Othello, exploiting the contradiction between the opportunities Venetian society offers outsiders and the latent prejudices that nevertheless remain against a Moor sent to defend the honour of Venice on the same night he secretly marries its whitest, most innocent daughter. Othello’s fall occurs in a Venetian state that Shakespeare’s audience may well have known was, as Giovanni Botero noted, ‘preserued .  .  . as an vntouched virgin from the violence of any forreine inforcement’ (Botero, 1940: sig.N4r) and, as William Thomas observed, also a liberal place where ‘if thou be a Jewe, a Turke, or beleeuest in the diuell . . . thou arte free from all controllement’ (Thomas, 1549: sig.Z1r). As Ania Loomba points out, a key aspect of European encounters with other peoples is ‘the conversion of the outsider to the service of dominant culture’ (Loomba, 1989: 50), and European nations have always required – in the form of colonialism and migrant labour, to name two instances – supplementation from outsiders they invariably posit as a threat. Othello, an insider and an outsider at the same time, is a supplement to Venice, an additional extra whose presence suggests an originary lack, one that modern-day nationalisms always try to mask with the myth of a natural or pure identity endangered by newcomers. Revelling in the vicissitudes of language, Iago targets Othello’s fragile interstitial position, exploiting proto-racist attitudes in order to bring chaos and disorder. At the eye of the murderous storm Iago whips up, Othello wishes for damnation at the clawed hands of hell’s snatching fiends. Almost always seen in pre-Reformation depictions of the Doom, the image of a demon or fiend dragging a soul to hell symbolizes the fiery eternal embrace into which Iago locks Othello. Iago plays the devilish role as an anti-Logos, who, like the Vice of medieval morality plays, manipulates an unstable language in order to expertly confuse and deceive his opponents, to make the untrue appear true. Othello, disgraced, beckons infernal punishment, an apocalyptic self-condemnation that speculates on Iago’s devilishness and affirms Desdemona’s angelic innocence with comparisons to archetypal figures from Doom imagery, such as those that can most spectacularly be seen in the colourful stained glass that survives at St Mary’s Church in Fairford. But the wrathful Judgement Othello desires does not arrive. With this dramaturgical technique Shakespeare delivers tragedy by withholding the divine intervention that resolves the potentially hazardous misapprehensions of comedy. Consequently, Othello,

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like Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, has the same eschatological structure as language, where the arrival of a Logos is pushed back to an apocalyptic horizon on which final meaning sits deferred. Malevolently creative, Iago takes advantage of the multiple, mutable meanings possible in speech unanchored by a Logos, his shrugs and purposefully incomplete statements tangling up Othello in a web of equivocations. Maddened by his own private Lamia, persuaded that Desdemona has cheated on him with Cassio, Othello brings a horrific end to a literary romance engulfed by demonic visions.

Othello’s Equivocal Identity The state’s best general and its most prized military asset, Othello is both an insider and an outsider in Venice. He commands the stage at the start of the play with composure, uses words that align him with the civilized Christian values of Shakespeare’s Venice and enjoys the full confidence of the senate. Yet he is a Moor, an exotic adventurer and warrior who eventually conforms to Iago’s racially themed account of him. Unlike the weak-willed duo of Brabantio and Roderigo, and, of course, the irredeemably diabolical Iago, Othello recognizes his damnable faults, taking his own life with a selfpunishment he both delivers on behalf of the state and receives as an enemy of the state, a suicide of honour that articulates his double-sided position as integral, but external, to the Venetian core. Othello begins by confounding the expectation of blackness it sets up. Shakespeare’s previous depiction of a Moor, the dastardly Aaron in Titus Andronicus, confirmed the pejorative connotations of blackness made by Elizabethan minds, what G. K. Hunter called ‘a powerful, widespread, and ancient tradition associating black-faced men with wickedness’ (Hunter, 1967: 142). Indeed, Aaron has a ‘fleece of woolly hair’ (Titus Andronicus, 2.2.34) like those that also cover the heads of Christ’s black tormentors in religious images that date back to the Middle Ages and are used by Hunter to illustrate his assertion. Some critics have considered Othello to be tawny or light-skinned and that the associations of a flexible term such as ‘Moor’ are, as Daniel J. Vitkus writes, ‘all constructed and positioned in opposition to Christian faith and virtue’ (Vitkus, 1997: 160). A decade earlier than Vitkus, Anthony Gerard Barthelemy stated that ‘the only certainty a reader has when he sees the word [Moor] is that the person referred to is not a European Christian’ (Barthelemy, 1987: 7). The text, however, seems to describe a figure more like the ‘coal-black Negro’ imagined by Hunter



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(1964: 51). Sarcastically, Iago refers to the man he so evidently despises as ‘his Moorship’ (1.1.32), enticing Roderigo to label Othello ‘thicklips’ (1.1.65), an epithet of embryonic racism that echoes Aaron’s reference to the ‘thick-lipped’ child Tamora bears him (Titus Andronicus, 4.2.177). Brabantio also follows Iago’s name-calling lead: the provocative imagery of a hot and lusty ‘black ram’ who ravishes Brabantio’s daughter, the ‘white ewe’ Desdemona (1.1.87–8), produces an anxious response from the easily manipulated father. This anxiety reflects the Elizabethan and Jacobean understanding pointed out by Hunter of blackness as ‘the colour of sin and death’ (Hunter, 1967: 140). However, rather than a barbaric figure in opposition to Christian virtue, Othello enters the stage imperiously and, when swords are drawn for the first time in the play, he dissuades any violence by telling all to ‘Keep up [their] bright swords, for the dew will rust them’ (1.2.59), diffusing the aggression between his and Brabantio’s attendants. Opinion has varied on what these calming words say about Othello. For A. C. Bradley they exemplified Othello as Shakespeare’s most poetic creation. Bradley renounced the idea of Othello as ‘a study of a noble barbarian . . . who retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his Moorish blood’, and instead saw a noble Moor ‘unusually open to deception, and . . . likely to act with little reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable’ (Bradley, 1957: 151). Rejecting the relevance of Othello’s skin colour to his essential character, Bradley nevertheless still ascribes to him traits associated in Shakespeare’s time with the savagery of blackness: he forgets that Othello is not as easily seduced by Iago as Roderigo and Brabantio, that he demands ocular proof and has enough self-reflection to take his own life in shame while imploring those around him to remember his service as well as his crime. F. R. Leavis, on the other hand, cut Othello far less slack. Leavis came out fighting, calling Bradley’s approach ‘completely wrong-headed’ and the poetic language Shakespeare gives his protagonist the words of a man with ‘a habit of self-approving selfdramatization [that] is an essential element in Othello’s make-up’. Rather than a noble Moor, Leavis imagined Othello to be ‘at the best, the impressive manifestation of a noble egotism’ (Leavis, 1952: 136, 142). Othello’s blackness is only parenthetically mentioned by Leavis to emphasize the disparity between the general and Desdemona, but this distinction makes Othello culpable and ignoble precisely because he stands in opposition to Desdemona’s whiteness. In different ways, both Bradley and Leavis were writing about Othello’s blackness while claiming to do otherwise, reaffirming the pejorative associations of blackness Hunter had illustrated with religious iconography. Contrary to these perceptions, Othello’s introduction on the

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stage would surely have surprised Shakespeare’s audience with a figure who contradicted casual, everyday perceptions of blackness as evil, best fit for slavery, or at best primitively innocent, behaving instead as an authoritative, controlled and gracious man of Christian virtue. The audience would have been certain that Othello, despite his background of otherness, is a valuable asset to Shakespeare’s Venice. Early on, the Turkish threat impels the Duke to send Othello to Cyprus posthaste: The Turk with a most mighty preparation makes for Cyprus. Othello, the fortitude of the place is best known to you, and, though we have there a substitute of most allowed sufficiency, yet opinion, a sovereign mistress of effects, throws a more safer voice on you. (1.3.222–6) Popular opinion in Venice, which governs decisions made by the state, believes Othello’s command to be more assured than the Governor of Cyprus, Montano, to whom the Duke seems to refer. So Othello is not only a black man trying to make his way in the white man’s world, but an outsider given significant responsibility by a major European society due to his wartime experiences and abilities that augment the state’s military prowess, and historical accounts confirm that outsiders with useful skills could attain prominent positions in Venetian society. Gasper Contareno, in Lewes Lewkenor’s 1599 translation, wrote that ‘forrain men and strangers’ were welcomed into the higher echelons of Venetian society ‘in regard of their great nobility, or that they had beene dutifull towardes the state, or els had done vnto them some notable seruice’ (Contareno, 1969: 18). According to Thomas, in the sixteenth century, Venetians were considered ‘better merchauntes than men of warre’ (Thomas, 1549: sig.W3v), a sentiment echoed later by Botero. Both Thomas and Botero describe a moment in Venetian history when the frequency with which outsiders achieved military prominence peaked, although the authority Shakespeare gives Othello reverses the usual practice of Venetian society as documented by Botero: By sea they choose generals out of their owne common-wealth: by land, strangers, both for generall, for captains, and for all other men of warre. For by land . . . their law permitteth not any Venetian borne to be captaine ouer the armie. (Botero, 1601: sig.O1r)



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Thomas had earlier explained this law in much the same way: By sea the Venetians theim selfes gouerne the whole, and by lande they are served of straungers, both for generall, for capitaines, and for all other men of warre: because theyr lawe permitteth not any Ventian to be capitaine ouer an armie by lande. (Thomas, 1549: sigs.Y1v–Y2r) A clear division held between the land army, always governed by nonVenetians, and the navy, always governed by Venetians. Contemporary theatre-goers who could read, and had access to these texts, may not have been particularly astonished to hear that Othello was better qualified than any Venetian to defend Cyprus from the advance of the Turkish galleys, or that despite his foreignness he seems to be handed the position of what Thomas called a ‘Proueditore, who (out of Venice) is of no lesse authoritee, than the Dictatour was wont to be in Rome: specially by sea’ (Thomas, 1549: sig.Y2r, original emphasis). This position was created at times of great danger to the state, when ‘they create over the whole nauie a captaine generall with heigh and soueraigne authority, not onely ouer the same, but also ouer all maritim prouinces’ (Botero, 1601: sig.O1r). Here Othello represents what Homi K. Bhabha calls ‘the double entendre of the supplement’ that compensates for a lack in the origin (Bhabha, 1994: 154): his warlike qualities are employed in the name of Venice, but they also underline the absence of warlike qualities in Venice. Many of the illiterate theatre-goers in the sixteenth century would have known few if any of these details about Venetian life, but even when shorn of its own supplemental contextual background the play still tells the story of an outsider whose military skills have made him a man of honour in Venice. Not only does Othello supplant Montano’s authority as Governor of Cyprus, but he holds the key post in the forces that sail there to withstand, from the island’s sun-kissed shores, a naval attack by more unacceptable, and unwelcome, strangers. The commission Othello receives confirms his significant reputation, and both audience and reader are made well aware that Othello has accomplished more than enough on the battlefield to deserve the senate’s highest respect. Even Iago acknowledges Othello’s worth, setting out his unparalleled ability to lead the Cyprus wars on behalf of the Venetian governors: ‘Another of his fathom they have none | To lead their business’ (1.1.150–1). Included in the Arden edition of the play is Shakespeare’s source text, Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, in which the Venetians appoint the Moor as a commandant of their soldiers in Cyprus, a position ‘given only to noble and loyal men who

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have proved themselves most valiant’ (Othello, p. 372). Hence, when Iago delivers with relish the accusation that Othello has stolen Desdemona against her will, the proud general makes it clear that his achievements will outdo her father Brabantio’s imminent complaint before the governing body: Let him do his spite; My services, which I have done the signiory, Shall out-tongue his complaints. (1.2.17–19) Othello puts faith in his past services to speak more effectively than any grievance with a turn of phrase that anticipates his wordy defence, the poetic narrations of his predicament that G. Wilson Knight long ago highlighted in The Wheel of Fire as Othello’s music (Knight, 1949: 97–119). These lilting, passionate words eventually overcome Brabantio’s highly influential voice, which Iago says has ‘potential | As double as the duke’s’ (1.2.13–14), indicating the regard for Othello by senators who are either unmoved by the colour of his skin or do not face the rhetoric that dupes Roderigo and Brabantio. To the senate, Othello is one of them, an insider, and a valuable asset to the state. Sure he has the confidence of the senate, Othello trusts in his own abilities to compliment his non-violent, calm demeanour. His appointment of Cassio as his lieutenant comes despite personal entreaties from three high-ranking Venetian governors on behalf of Iago who, rejected, angrily remarks that Othello was not swayed by the intervention of the petitioners: But he, as loving his own pride and purposes, Evades them, with a bombast circumstance Horribly stuffed with epithets of war, And in conclusion Nonsuits my mediators. For ‘Certes,’ says he, ‘I have already chose my officer.’ (1.1.11–16) Such a bitter tale unwittingly describes a general in control of his affairs, who refuses to be unduly influenced and uses language that, although bombastic according to the hostile Iago, confirms the authority of Othello on military matters. The man knows what he’s doing and subsequent events vindicate his choice of lieutenant as sounder than that of the high-ranking



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petitioners, who are presumably part of the council that sends Othello to Cyprus. Othello’s mission to Cyprus also signifies his proven value to the state; it is a value so great that even though he secretly marries the coveted, virginal daughter of a leading aristocrat – and a very popular aristocrat, if Iago’s words can, fleetingly, be trusted – his military worth to Venice outflanks any offensive manoeuvre. As Othello himself states, he will not hide from Brabantio’s challenge because his previous actions and his current blamelessness, along with his legal right to marry Desdemona, will be his advocates: ‘My parts, my title and my perfect soul | Shall manifest me rightly’ (1.2.31–2). But, as the Duke points out, Othello must ‘slubber the gloss of [his] new fortunes’ (1.3.227–8), must darken the lustre of his recent marriage to Desdemona, with a difficult and violent expedition that his very worth to Venice obliges him to accept. The Duke’s use of ‘slubber’ equivocates, signifying Othello’s dark skin and the disjointed wedding night, as well as bleakly foreshadowing the death of Desdemona. To slubber is ‘to stain, smear, daub, soil’, ‘to sully’ a renown or reputation and ‘to obscure, darken’ (OED). Shakespeare employs the word in only one other place, when Salerio recounts the phrase Antonio uses to forbid Bassanio’s hasty return from Belmont in The Merchant of Venice: ‘Slubber not business for my sake Bassanio, | But stay the very riping of the time’ (2.8.39–40). In the light of this unusual usage, ‘slubber’ in Othello can be understood to impel the general to hurry and fumble the carnal business of his wedding night with Desdemona, a union frustrated by their journey to Cyprus in separate ships then interrupted by the drunken attack on Roderigo carried out by Cassio and orchestrated by Iago. For poor Othello sexual satisfaction seems to wait on the same unreachable horizon as the Apocalypse and linguistic homogeneity, and the frustrated general complains that he has ‘but an hour | Of love, of worldly matter and direction’ (1.3.299–300) before he must deal with the alarming developments in Cyprus. Clearly, the old man prefers slow love, and the play never confirms whether he finds the time he feels he needs with Desdemona. Oliver Parker’s 1995 film version of the play, the first to cast an actor of African descent in the title role, includes a sex scene between Othello and Desdemona that removes the doubt and intrigue that surrounds the consummation of the marriage in the play. Against the ribaldry, the Duke’s use of ‘slubber’ finds an alternative, twisted truth when Othello murders Desdemona, an act of violence that replaces the postponed war with the Turks. Iago’s seduction of Othello leads the general to suspect that Desdemona’s honour has been besmirched: ‘Was this fair paper, this most goodly book | Made to write “whore” upon?’

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(4.2.72–3). These words portray her innocent whiteness as tarnished by the dark ink that inscribes the supposed voracity of her sexuality, replicating the common early modern belief that blackness signified the monstrous, devious and devilish. Karen Newman argues that Othello is structured around the monstrousness seen in the sexual appetites of both femininity and blackness, a hideous excess that the union of Desdemona’s desire and Othello’s colour represent (Newman, 1987: 143–62), but Othello’s words unify blackness and femininity in a different way by confirming Desdemona’s sexuality as stained, smeared or slubbered by an accusation of infidelity he imagines as written in sinful black across her pure, white and virginal honour. Iago refocuses the same scheme of blackness as a negative cover or contamination of whiteness on Othello when he rouses Brabantio with the warning that Desdemona will be ‘covered with a Barbary horse’ (1.1.110). Barbary horses are wagered by Claudius at the end of Hamlet, so, in the light of the earlier play, Iago’s reference commodifies Othello as an exotic luxury renowned for his prowess. Furthermore, ‘slubber’ seems to foretell the murder of Desdemona, when Othello covers her in another sense, a warped conclusion to the ‘stubborn and boisterous expedition’ the Duke foresees in Cyprus (1.3.228–9): Othello does not provide Venice with a glorious victory against the Turks but instead smothers Desdemona, punctuating Iago’s endeavours with domestic tragedy and turning the ensign’s lewd provocation into a perverted prophesy of the play’s end. In May 2011, President Barack Obama reluctantly produced his birth certificate in response to attacks on his national identity. Obama’s intercontinental heritage was enough for radical right elements to query whether he was born in America and thereby question the legitimacy of his presidency, a debate with disturbing racial undertones (‘A certificate of embarrassment’, New York Times). Likewise, Brabantio wields Othello’s past as a coded signifier of his non-Venetian blackness. Incited by Iago, Brabantio portrays Othello as an outsider unfit to marry his daughter. Extolling Desdemona’s virtues, Brabantio questions whether she could ‘fall in love with what she feared to look on’ (1.3.99) and segregates ‘The wealthy, curled darlings’ of Venice his daughter rejected from the ‘sooty bosom | Of such a thing’ as Othello (1.2.68, 70–1). This attack stresses the gap ‘of nature, | Of years, of country, credit, everything’ (1.3.97–8) that separates Othello from Desdemona, a proto-racism that tarnishes Othello ‘almost exclusively in the context of his contact with a white woman’ (Loomba, 1989: 49). Not content with demeaning Othello as a lover, Brabantio ignores the many services done by him in the name of the state and situates his unwanted son-in-law as a foreigner, an interloper in the place where



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Desdemona should have placed a fair and more suitable husband. Blackness and otherness, though inoffensive to the senate, become a failing in Brabantio’s eyes when Iago points out that Othello fills the gap that the state’s most eligible white bachelors, not to mention Brabantio himself, cannot fill. Meeting these prejudices diplomatically, Othello points out that his cultural difference from the Venetians was a source of wonderment to Brabantio before it enthralled Desdemona. With the promise of a tale that will prove he did not bewitch Desdemona into marriage, Othello displays oratorical style that makes a mockery of the apology he offers in advance for his rough, unskilled speech as he ties together three stories, starting with his relationship to his accuser: Her father loved me, oft invited me, Still questioned me the story of my life From year to year – the battles, sieges, fortunes That I have passed. (1.3.129–32) These lines situate Othello in Venice: the conflicts that he has endured, survived and excelled in as a non-Venetian have led the Venetian court to promote him to a respectable position and, in the case of the Cyprus wars, to rely on him as their best soldier. Expanding on his adventures, Othello catalogues the misfortunes and narrow escapes that led him to a slavery followed by emancipatory redemption, a ‘travailous history’ (1.3.140) succeeded by a list of bizarre and extraordinary wonders that enthralled Brabantio. Rather than his skin colour, Othello’s past, a past alien to the blond-locked youths who vied for Desdemona’s hand, separates him from the other Venetians present, a past that captivated Brabantio and enticed Desdemona to return ‘with a greedy ear’ (1.3.150) throughout their courtship. While he draws attention to his unique history, Othello also asserts his assimilation to Venetian life by setting out his military service: For since these arms of mine had seven years’ pith Till now some seven moons wasted, they have used Their dearest action in the tented field, And little of this great world can I speak More than pertains to feats of broil and battle. (1.3.84–8)

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Othello says what he means by withholding it. Reflecting on the long, worthwhile years of dutiful soldiering, from the human-rights-abusing age of seven onwards, substantiates for the audience, on and off the stage, the golden opinion of Othello held by the senate. This is no sham the kind of which might be employed today by a mercenary footballer who states his love for a club and its fans before joining the hated, cross-town rivals the next day. Employed on the strength of his reputation as a fearsome, canny warrior, Othello professes love for the soldier’s life, which, as he tells Iago, he would not sacrifice for all the treasures hidden by the sea. That Othello claims to know little of the world away from war further impresses on his audience his happy commitment to the tumultuous and savage arts, but it also doubles up as a subtle suggestion to the senate that a significant proportion of his violent struggles have been dedicated to Venice. This understated double talk fulfils the promise he makes that his professional record will be his most steadfast advocate, and says implicitly what it does not explicitly confirm: the senate should take into account that Othello has sacrificed all the other aspects of the world for the battlefield, and done so in the name of Venice. I love this club and its fans (do not forsake me). Derrida proposes that even in early linguistic theory every repetition is different because the practice of quotation shows that the sign – the word, symbol or gesture traditionally thought to refer directly to the material thing or referent that exists in the world – ‘can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts’ (Derrida, 1988: 12). As we have already seen, for Derrida words, symbols or gestures are signifiers that invoke other signifiers, not signs metaphysically glued to referents outside language. Therefore, language is meaningful but not referential, with the meaning it generates determined by how, and in what context, a signifier gets used. By way of illustration, in a recent comedy sketch comedian Ronnie Corbett visits a grocery store to unfreeze his Blackberry and replace his Apple, toying with the contemporary gist of the words by using them in an incongruous setting. The words make perfect sense but, because the unusual context asks the viewer to juggle two distinct understandings, they appear ridiculous, demonstrating that signifiers, in Derridean terms, have other meanings when repeated in other contexts. Othello’s politic words before the senate flip Derrida’s insight on its disseminated head: they are different from the bolder words Othello uses when speaking to Iago but reiterate the same meaning – the worth of his military service and the advocacy it will provide in the face of Brabantio’s attack – in the language appropriate to a more sensitive context.



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These judicious words also allude to Othello’s Christianity. Initially, Othello foregrounds his relationship to Brabantio as the catalyst for courting Desdemona, the tales of adventure and danger that won her being first desired by her father, but then his respectful courtship shifts attention adeptly on to another Father with a ‘redemption’ from slavery (1.3.139) tinged with biblical themes of deliverance and atonement. Jonathan Burton sees the role of religious difference in Leo Africanus’s Geographical Historie of Africa, which was published in English in  1600, as important to our understanding of Othello due to the ‘establishment of women and darkskinned Africans as a “more other”’ that nullify Africanus’s lighter-skinned, Muslim otherness (Burton, 1998: 61). In Othello, the mythical images of cannibals and freaks, of the ‘Anthropophagi, and men whose heads | Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (1.3.145–6) that are thought to have been inspired by Pliny’s Natural History, also create an other more other than Othello. Moreover, these creatures from a non-Christian environment are set against the overtly Christian language that comes immediately after they are mentioned and relates the courtship of Othello and Desdemona: She’d come again, and with a greedy ear Devour up my discourse; which I, observing, Took once a pliant hour and found good means To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart That I would all my pilgrimage dilate. (1.3.150–4) Desdemona’s wide-eyed fascination elicits a ‘prayer’ that encourages Othello to woo her with the action-packed, fantastical journeys that constitute his ‘pilgrimage’, a word that conflates the notion of a journey with an act of religious devotion. Utterly unlike the irreligious or infidel beast some of Shakespeare’s audience may have expected to see, Othello confidently, astutely and quite regally enters the fray with Christological statements that avoid arrogance or sycophancy but, gently, remind the senate of the sterling services they have long received from him. Greenblatt argues that Othello ultimately submits to the narrative selffashioning of both his own speeches and the suspiciously evasive prompts Iago invites him to fill out with his worst thoughts, contesting that Othello ‘at once represents the institution and the alien, the conqueror and the infidel’ (Greenblatt, 1980: 234). To be more exact, over the course of the play Iago actively alters the perception of Othello from an institutional ally, a leader of men, to an alien sexual threat, from a proud emblem of imperial

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Venetian conquests to an invader representative of the perceived hordes of infidel invaders. In this process, Iago takes advantage of the cross-purposes of cosmopolitanism where unconditional hospitality that gives refuge or sanctuary to all outsiders in need of a home has always, in practice, come up against an age-old and agonistic political conditionality that seeks to enforce limits and quotas (Derrida, 2001: 3–24). At the ideological heart of this resistance to cosmopolitanism is the idea that it must be controlled because the outsider poses a threat even when he or she has become, as a result of the sanctuary or refuge they receive, an insider. Iago makes use of the lingering myth of natural, original or untainted indigenous identity that excludes newcomers in spite of – or, perhaps more accurately, because of – the manpower they provide for services insufficiently catered for prior to their arrival, a resistance voiced by the retrograde spin of ‘those who come and take our jobs’. Those supplements that come and take jobs end up taking women too. Brabantio’s fear that, as Iago crudely phrases it, ‘an old black ram | Is tupping [his] white ewe’ (1.1.87–8), moves Othello from the position of insider to outsider, a separation seen mainly by Brabantio, Roderigo and Iago. But, after Iago’s dazzling, delicate display in the temptation scene in which the ensign stresses Desdemona’s rejection of a suitor of her own ‘clime, complexion and degree’ (3.3.234), Othello himself calls into question his suitability for Desdemona’s hand in marriage: Haply for I am black And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have, or for I am declined Into the vale of years – and yet that’s not much – She’s gone, I am abused, and my relief Must be to loathe her. (3.3.267–72) So self-assured at the start, so much a major citizen of Venice highly respected by all save one fiend, Othello submits to Iago’s pejorative vision of him and starts to question whether he really belongs, reproducing the rhetoric of anticosmopolitanism. Although he consistently contravenes the self-imposed notion of ineloquence, and dismisses his age as an issue in the same breath that he ponders it, Othello’s blackness remains the mark of a strangeness, foreignness and otherness implanted in his mind by Iago. Perhaps Othello also remembers the Duke’s placatory description of him as ‘far more fair than black’ (1.3.291), kind words that still use skin colour as the measure of morality and appropriate match-making. When Brabantio delivers his



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complaint at the same moment that Othello receives a ‘special mandate for the state affairs’ (1.3.73), the on-stage gathering conflates the state institutions that include Othello with the private grievance of Iago and his tools, Brabantio and Roderigo, who all attempt to exclude Othello from Venetian life. As his final act, Othello reclaims this narrative of exclusion and alienation with suicide speeches that re-assert his Venetian self as the inseparable, indivisible flipside to his non-Venetian self, the additional supplement without which the so-called original cannot function, the migrant worker without whom the supposedly self-sufficient state cannot fulfil its geopolitical obligations. Contemplating the sword strapped to his thigh, Othello returns again to the military prowess that defines him: I have seen the day That with this little arm and this good sword I have made my way through more impediments Than twenty times your stop: but, O vain boast, Who can control his fate? (5.2.259–63) This rampaging force is given a more humdrum expression when laid at Venice’s feet in the general’s final speech: ‘I have done the state some service, and they know’t: | No more of that’ (5.2.337–8). Shifting from the braggadocio of the battle itself to the routine service violent turmoil constitutes in the vocabulary of the state reaffirms the difference between the confident, self-assured, almost cocky Othello and the logical political animal, an adaptability that marks out Othello as an adept reader of, and astute responder to, social exchange. Once more, Othello uses other words appropriate to a new context in order to conjure up the same meaning, interrupting his fighting talk as he recognizes the irrelevance of his battlehardened combat skills. Even in the corridor approaching death, committed to his own apocalypse, Othello has the self-awareness to drop the swagger and self-confidence he also displays when boasting to Iago and employ prosaic diplomacy that alludes to his worth. But no more of that, right? Wrong. Othello cannot resist one last mention of his service. For better or for worse, tales of sword and sorcery won him his position, won him Desdemona and he recounts a suicide story that sees him kill himself as if he was the other against which he defines himself: In Aleppo once, When a malignant and a turbanned Turk

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Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog And smote him – thus! (5.2.350–4) The Turkish other so concerning to Venetians and Western Europeans in Shakespeare’s time is both identified with Othello as he stabs himself and also the victim of the patriotic action he recounts, bringing together potential war hero and potential war victim in a union still poignant and provocative now. Judith Butler’s Frames of War finds a dichotomy in the discourse surrounding the American-led wars of the early twenty-first century in Afghanistan and Iraq which values US citizens as worthy of grief and Middle Eastern war victims as unworthy of grief, a dichotomy produced internally when illegal workers killed in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre were not named and, therefore, not grieved. On the receiving end of this approach sits the American citizen who sees powerful media commentaries ‘render the subject’s own destructiveness righteous and its own destructibility unthinkable’ (Butler, 2009: 47, original emphasis). Butler’s insight can be mapped on to the representation of the unworthy Turk against the worthy Venetian, a discourse set out and immediately ripped up by Othello’s inclusion of the Turkish other from beyond the frame of the play, at once naming and undermining a historical prejudice that still invades Turkey’s accession to today’s European Union, a resistance to the Muslim other inside Europe that Othello’s suicide anticipates by 400 years. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Othello’s suicide would also have brought to mind the iniquitous tag hung on the Ottoman Turk by popular eschatological hermeneutics of the day. English thinkers frequently published interpretations of the apocalyptic passages of the Bible, especially the Book of Revelation, a trend initiated by John Bale’s The image of both Churches, initially published in 1545 and the first Reformer account of how St John of Patmos’s vision should be interpreted. Many of these thinkers, such as John Foxe, whose 1563 text Actes and Monuments describes the persecution of Protestant martyrs, saw the Turk as the Antichrist. Michael Neill, in an essay examining the marriage bed in Othello as a nexus of early modern racial and sexual politics, feels that Othello must speak his own funeral oration ‘in the absence of any witness sympathetic enough to tell the hero’s story’ (Neill, 1989: 383), but this oration also performs a function only possible with Othello as its source: as he takes his own life he conflates his valued Venetian identity with his unvalued otherness, his crusading



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virtue with the Antichrist Turk he was sent to fight, so that his death deconstructs the antithesis of grievable insider and ungrievable outsider. Burton calls Othello’s final, schizophrenic speech a ‘simultaneous affirmation of his Otherness and desperate attempt to reclaim his standing’ (Burton, 1988: 58). More than that, when Othello stabs himself, acknowledging his murderous act as a confirmation of the poisonous imagery Iago used against him, he asks onlookers to remember the honourable figure who usurped the pejorative notions of blackness that serve as a misleading prologue to his regal entrance: Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that that loved not wisely, but too well; Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe. (5.2.340–6) Worked into a fatal distraction by Iago’s agitations, Othello goes on to punish, on Venice’s behalf, the base outsider who has repudiated its rewards. If ‘Venice haunts Shakespeare’s play long after the action has shifted to Cyprus’ (Platt, 2001: 140), the Cyprus wars also haunt the Venice of the play: at a time when the City of Bridges was host to a diversity of foreigners and its dominions were threatened by a more powerful empire, Othello’s suicidal deconstruction of the opposition between outsider and insider allegorizes the contemporary struggle between Venice and the Ottoman Empire for control of the eastern Mediterranean. This historical event provides the backdrop for Othello and, incidentally, is still manifested in Cyprus by the long-standing strife between antagonistic Greek and Turkish identity politics, divisive ethnonationalisms that elide the island’s history of religious cooperation and coexistence, a unique polyculturalism symbolized by Othello. As Emrys Jones made clear, the play seems to be set around the first Turkish attack on Greek-speaking Cyprus in  1570, with the island eventually lost to the Turks in 1571 when it ‘underwent a violent conversion from Christian to Turkish rule’ (Jones, 1968: 52). Othello’s equivocal position, replayed by his violent self-sacrifice of shame, problematizes any clear detachment of Turkish outsider from Venetian insider. In one final, bloody stroke, he represents the institution and its external threat, a representation that both provokes and allays Venetian anxieties about the

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external other he internalizes, anxieties that were relevant to contemporary audiences taught to fear the Turk as a geopolitical omen of unholy trouble to come. Traditional critical standpoints that, like the views of Bradley and Leavis, have seen Othello as the problem of Othello not only reduce the striking figure we initially encounter but simultaneously downplay the influence of Iago, who first provokes these anxieties desperately appropriated by Othello’s despondent end with ingenuous language games worthy of the devil.

Advocacy for the Devil: Iago the Anti-Logos If the devil surfaced, where would he hide? Taylor Hackford’s 1997 film The Devil’s Advocate calls him John Milton, a nod to Paradise Lost, and makes him the head of a powerful law firm. Milton, played with characteristic gusto by Al Pacino, hires a young, unscrupulous and unbeatable lawyer called Kevin Lomax, immediately enticing him with glamorous, voluptuous and available mistresses who appear in sexual fantasies that blend into reality. When the devil reveals himself to be Lomax’s father, the final confrontation takes place in a deserted New York, a city magically evacuated for the imminent unholy war to be fought against God by the devil’s offspring. For hell to triumph over heaven, Lomax must give in to the desires Milton has excited in him and incestuously conceive the Antichrist with his demonic half-sister. Refusing to play the role of the bad father’s bad son, Lomax shoots himself in the head instead, sabotaging the apocalyptic hostilities and waking up in his old life only to be stalked once more by the devil in another guise. Throughout, Milton, cast from the same traditional mould of evil doublespeakers as Shakespeare’s demi-devil Iago, provides equivocal interventions in the form of advice or facetious personal support that entraps Lomax, playing on his insecurities so that he freely chooses the most damaging course of action. More subtle than Pacino’s wiseguy version of Satan, Iago intervenes with devious words and gestures that exploit a fallen language in order to draw out Othello’s insecurities. As he outlines his Machiavellian interests to his dupe, Roderigo, Iago offers a riddle that describes himself, obliquely, as an equivocator: ‘Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago. | In following him I follow but myself’ (1.1.56–7). A seeming statement of the obvious, this couplet unites and divides the general and his ensign by hinting at Iago’s contempt for Othello while synchronously linking Iago’s success to Othello’s station, a scheme of falsified connections made possible by equivocations



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and lies. When Iago explicitly calls his allegiance to Othello nothing more than show by playing on the meaning of ‘sign’ as a token or military banner and, alternatively, as an act of pretence, he lies: ‘I must show out a flag and sign of love, | Which is indeed but sign’ (1.1.154–5). Despite Iago’s words to the contrary here, the power of these signs of love led Laurence Olivier, after a meeting with Freudian psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, to play Iago as secretly besotted with Othello, but the plotting ensign makes clear the absolute divorce of his secret motivations from his outward presentation, a separation that he promises to one day unify: Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty But seeming so, for my peculiar end, For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In complement extern, ‘tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at: I am not what I am. (1.1.58–64) Iago’s pledge to reveal his secret motivations when his ends have been met is never fulfilled, the promise of disclosure finally broken by his refusal to provide the explanation Othello demands for all the iniquitous machinations: ‘Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. | From this time forth I never will speak word’ (5.2.300–1). In the past, those who wished to understand Shakespeare through his plays thought they could find his personal philosophy inscribed on the page or performed on the stage, a conventional interpretative stance exemplified by the now clichéd reading of Prospero as a cipher for Shakespeare’s final, definitive views on his art in The Tempest. Rather than equate the play with the man, we can, instead, equate the structure of the tragic plot to the structure of language, with Iago’s linguistic dalliances a microcosmic realization of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, as well as in Othello. Iago’s unfulfilled promise of clarification mirrors, on a linguistic level, the promise of an apocalyptic Logos made by the various visions of Doom seen by Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. For tragedy to function as tragedy, this specifically Christian clarifying force is kept offstage, differentiating these plays from the comedies ushered towards happy endings by divine hands. For language, the arrival of a Logos – a transcendental signified that could be a religious, cultural, psychoanalytic or scientific vessel through which absolute truth flows – is also deferred, a

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perpetual delay that results in heterogeneity, the creative force that makes literature possible. Both language and these Shakespearean tragedies are thus structured by an anti-structural anomaly; it is the absent presence of apocalyptic arrival, an envisioned end always just around the corner, that produces dramatic misadventure and linguistic meaning in the forms with which we are familiar. Iago the anti-Logos revels in the absence of a Logos in Othello, prompting tragedy via the anarchic possibilities of a heterogeneous language. Bernard Spivack saw Iago as inspired by the psychomachia of pre-Renaissance morality plays, an allegory of evil who views man as ‘uninhibited and uninspired by any participation in divinity’ (Spivack, 1958: 424), while Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster recently added that the Vice of morality plays are almost invariably equivocal figures (Weimann and Bruster, 2008: 26). The dramatis personae of these medieval dramas personify Christian values, and Mankind clearly exemplifies this tendency by pitching the equivocating Mischief against the moralizing Mercy on the subject of the Last Judgement: MERCY God preserve you all at the Last Judgement. For, sickerly, there shall be a strait examination. ‘The corn shall be saved, the chaff shall be brent’ – I beseech you heartily, have this premeditation. MISCHIEF I beseech you heartily, leave your calcation, Leave your chaff, leave your corn, leave your dalliation; Your wit is little, your head is mickle; ye are full of predication; But, sir, I pray you this question to clarify: Mish-mash, driff-draff, Some was corn and some was chaff. My dame said my name was Raff. Unshut your lock and take an ha’penny! (Mankind: 41–52) Serving the same purpose on stage as Doom imagery served on the chancel arch or aisle window, Mercy attempts to teach the audience how to save their souls, paraphrasing apocalyptic gospel along the way (Mt. 3.12). This didactic monologue, however, is rudely interrupted by Mischief’s riddling riffs that ridicule and contort Mercy’s words. Despite Mercy’s saintly tone, Mischief, as Weimann and Bruster put it, ‘seizes upon it so as to “moralize” another meaning in the same image’ (Weimann and Bruster, 2008: 35). As Richard III, Shakespeare’s other notorious mischief-maker, phrases it in a



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clear comparison to the personifications of morality plays, ‘like the formal Vice, Iniquity, | I moralize two meanings in one word’ (Richard III, 3.1.82–3). Mischief’s intrusion shatters the illusion of a linguistic connection between man and God by adapting, revising and playfully editing Mercy’s words, a creative possibility that, by the same logic, makes his own ridiculous rhymes readable, inter­pretable and, no matter how vague or dense, still meaningful. Richard Hillman’s analysis of Everyman puts forward ‘the failure of communication between God and man, figured in the fallen state of language’ as a precursor to poststructuralist theories of language (Hillman, 1997: 44), and Iago, as Vice, as anti-Logos, thrives in the absence of a transcendental signified identified by poststructuralist theories of language, an absence that allows the demonic ensign, in the tradition of the Vice, to deal deceit linguistically until the trumpets blast. If the devil’s greatest trick was to convince us that he does not exist, Iago’s greatest trick is to make Othello and Desdemona the source of their own downfall. So when Iago says that Cassio did ‘Lie’, he allows Othello to imagine all the possibilities suggested by the word in this context: ‘With her, on her, what you will’ (4.1.34). The myriad meanings send Othello into a fit: ‘Lie with her? lie on her? We say lie on her when they belie her! Lie with her, zounds, that’s fulsome!’ (4.1.35–7). Although Othello can explain away one expression as the telling of lies, he finds it more difficult to explain away the sexual implication, desirous imagery introduced by Desdemona’s salacious repartee with Iago. While Iago states from the onset that he is not the honest ensign others see, Desdemona forewarns us that the wanton young bride she briefly appears to be merely disguises her anxiety over Othello’s uncertain fate on the rough seas to Cyprus: ‘I am not merry, but I do beguile | The thing I am by seeming otherwise’ (2.1.122–3). This fateful echo of Iago’s counterfeit signs of love presages Othello’s mistake: he accepts the satanic Iago’s lies as honesty and Desdemona’s truths as dissimulation and dishonesty, a misrecognition that leads him to brand Emilia with ‘the office opposite to Saint Peter’ at the gates of hell in her defence of Desdemona, an ironic substitution of place for Iago’s wife (4.2.93). Faced with Desdemona’s protestations, Iago showcases the quick-witted mental dexterity that will turn the fiction of her lustfulness into an apparent fact for Othello. He claims that his ‘muse labours’ (2.1.127) but, like Othello before the senate, Iago delivers his speech smoothly, beginning with simple, aphoristic praise of Desdemona: ‘If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit, | The one’s for use, the other useth it’ (2.1.129–30). Lewder language takes the place of this restrained tribute of courtesy when Desdemona

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encourages Iago to praise a ‘black and witty’ lady (2.1.131): ‘If she be black, and thereto have a wit, | She’ll find a white that shall her blackness fit’ (2.1.132–3). Both the ‘fit’ of the Folio that E. A. J. Honigmann opts for and the ‘hit’ of the Quarto emphasize the possible connotation of ‘blackness’ as vulva and hint ominously at the mixed marriage of Desdemona and Othello. Desdemona may well call these absurdities ‘old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i’th’ alehouse’ (2.1.138–9) but they indirectly refer to her, Iago’s irreverent attitude to virtue insinuating that innocents like Desdemona are hypocritical because the sinful only perform the same ‘foul pranks which fair and wise ones do’ (2.1.142). Wilfully improper, Iago goes on to list the merits of an upstanding, morally strong and chaste woman – a profile drafted to fit Desdemona – then dismisses such an ideal woman as fit only ‘To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer’ (2.1.160). Apparently flippant and harmless, these shilly-shallying ditties are sideways clues to Iago’s stratagem. This dismissal of a feminine ideal comes in as casual a manner as the manufacture of Desdemona’s death. Honigmann argues that Iago consis­ tently reminds the audience of motives that are ‘connected . . . by his class feeling’ (Honigmann, 1976: 84), but Cassio’s tactful remark that Iago ‘speaks home’ (2.1.165) offers more than just a pre-emptive apology for any offence caused to courteous society by a smut-peddling member of the hoi polloi: alongside Desdemona’s talk of bawdy bars, Cassio’s haughty stepping-in reveals the extent to which Iago amuses and scandalizes those around him with the very licentious immorality that will disgrace them, camouflaging dangerous honesty as burlesque comedic quips, a titillating tactic that counterbalances Desdemona’s disavowal of her role in the lewd banter. A significant element of Othello’s tragedy is that the hero accepts the lascivious lie Iago constructs as truth and rejects Desdemona’s abhorrence of it, taking Iago’s disguise, rather than Desdemona’s denial, at face value. Oiling the wheels of his fiction’s turn to fact, Iago has Othello believe him to be the virtuous one. He gives the impression of only hesitantly reporting Cassio’s assault on Montano, an event he orchestrates with Roderigo, then responds virulently to reservations over the veracity of his account with a dissembling response that signifies doubly: ‘Touch me not so near’ (2.3.216). This simple plea feigns grave disappointment with any damage done to Cassio but also admits to the accusation of both embellishment and calculated restraint, an admission audible only to the viewer or reader privy to the developing imbroglio. His glee obvious to the privileged audience, Iago delivers a sober account that fakes neutrality and persuades Othello that his ‘honesty and love doth mince this matter, | Making it light to Cassio’



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(2.3.243–4). Sucked in and softened up, Othello goes on to be seduced in the temptation scene by the assumption that Iago extenuates Desdemona’s fault by withholding that which would indict her: ‘This honest creature doubtless | Sees and knows more – much more – than he unfolds’ (3.3.246–7). Not only does Cassio’s fall pave the way for Iago’s rise, it creates the conditions that make Iago’s defamatory attack on Desdemona credible for Othello. Dissimulations like this also occur elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work, most relevantly in Cymbeline when Iachimo fails to seduce Imogen with similar techniques, presenting himself as virtuous at the same time that he hints at Posthumus’s infidelity: What! are men mad? Hath nature given them eyes To see this vaulted arch, and the rich crop Of sea and land, which can distinguish ‘twixt The fiery orbs above, and the twinn’d stones Upon the number’d beach, and can we not Partition make with spectacles so precious ’Twixt fair, and foul? (Cymbeline, 1.7.32–8) Iachimo uses images that allegorize the difference between Imogen’s splendour and Posthumus’s fictional Italian strumpet, while the audience who have witnessed the wager placed on Imogen’s honour are complicit with the equivocation, well aware that the meditation on faithfulness refers to Posthumus. Lacking Iago’s consummate control, Iachimo gets too verbose and fails to deceive Imogen, who insists that the visiting Italian unambiguously state what he at once intimates and suppresses: ‘Discover to me | What both you spur and stop’ (Cymbeline, 1.7.98–9). Iachimo’s baroque outbursts urge Imogen to consider the likelihood of Posthumus’s inconstancy but, in the same stroke, conceal Iachimo’s deceit with a façade of good intentions. Where Iachimo’s lustfulness betrays him, the neutrality to which Iago successfully lays claim in the aftermath of the brawl provides the foundations of trust necessary for the beguiling of Othello. When this beguilement happens in the temptation scene, Iago repeats Othello’s words in order to give them a different meaning. Derrida stresses the ‘essential iterability’ of language, in which he includes the alterity that comes with every repetition because, by definition, a repetition occurs in a different context (Derrida, 1988: 9). Whereas Othello shrewdly and unpretentiously gets across the same meaning to the senate that he

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confidently boasts to Iago, Iago pounces on the opportunity offered by the shamed Cassio’s guilty disappearance from Desdemona’s side to repeat, to cite, Othello’s own words with a new, provocative accentuation. Like a shifting spotlight, these reiterations invite Othello to take a look at what they illuminate and re-illuminate, to assume the worst in what Iago will not say. As with all encounters, seduction begins with an offhand question that tempts: IAGO OTHELLO IAGO

Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, Know of your love? He did, from first to last. Why dost thou ask? But for a satisfaction of my thought, No further harm. (3.3.94–8)

Iago hides the supposed thought for which he seeks clarification and then lures Othello in with potential doubts over Cassio’s role in the wooing of Desdemona: OTHELLO IAGO OTHELLO IAGO OTHELLO

Why of thy thought, Iago? I did not think he had been acquainted with her. O yes, and went between us very oft. Indeed? Indeed? Ay, indeed. (3.3.98–102)

Access to further information denied, Othello delves deeper into the gentle surprise at Cassio’s frequent role as a go-between, twice repeating Iago’s words, initially with a reciprocal surprise and then as a restatement intended to remove suspicion. Drawn in further and further, the very repetition Othello makes raises an irresistible doubt and, seeing the ball fumbled, Iago takes the chance to reverse the flow of interlocution: OTHELLO IAGO OTHELLO IAGO OTHELLO

Discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest? Honest, my lord? Honest? Ay, honest. My lord, for aught I know. What dost thou think?



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Think, my lord? Think, my lord! By heaven, thou echo’st me As if there were some monster in thy thought Too hideous to be shown. (3.3.102–11)

In this moment of transition, Iago’s scheme of anaphora starts to make powerfully disruptive allusions with Othello’s own choice of words. An echo, or the figure of Echo, that changes the meanings of words was a technique widely exploited by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. In Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi a voice that echoes from the Duchess’s grave supports Delio’s concerns but contradicts Antonio by repeating his words: DELIO ECHO ANTONIO ECHO DELIO

Wisdom doth not more moderate wasting sorrow Than time: take time for’t; be mindful of thy safety Be mindful of thy safety. Necessity compels me: Make scrutiny throughout the passes Of your own life, you’ll find it impossible To fly your fate. O, fly your fate! Hark: the dead stones seem to have pity on you And give you good counsel. (The Duchess of Malfi, 5.3.30–7)

Bounced back at them, Delio’s and Antonio’s words become explicit warnings against reconciliation with the Cardinal, anticipating the case of mistaken identity that leads the avenging Bosola to murder Antonio in the place of the Cardinal. Similarly, echoes play a role in Venus and Adonis as night interrupts the frustrated goddess’s lustful pursuit and leaves her alone with the sound of her own voice reverberating sympathetically from nearby caves: And now she beats her heart, whereat it groans, That all the neighbour caves, as seeming troubled, Make verbal repetition of her moans; Passion on passion deeply is redoubled: ‘Ay me!’ she cries, and twenty times, ‘Woe, woe!’ And twenty echoes twenty times cry so. (Venus and Adonis, 829–34)

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Here the poem moves from one of wooing to one of woe, as the night of lamentation is cruelly followed by Adonis’s death on the morning hunt. If Othello is an ‘echo chamber’ (Moisan, 1991: 50), Iago’s repetitions, his echoing of Othello, restate the issue of Cassio’s honesty with harmful prospects too horrid to be revealed. These slippery manoeuvres escape any definitive answer, and, by virtue of that escape, hint that Cassio may not be honest in every sense of the word at a moment in the play when the issue of wooing becomes one of woe. Iago’s deliberate hesitancy on the subject of Cassio’s honesty queries the reliability of the lieutenant’s honest appearance. To a Jacobean audience an honest person could be reputable regardless of his or her moral standing, or ‘held in honour’ (OED), that is, have an honourable or respectable position, but it did not necessarily follow that their social standing would make them ‘worthy of honour’, ‘free from disgrace’, or ‘chaste’ (OED). Iago’s focus on what Cassio seems to be implies that Cassio’s outward show of honesty might be deceptive: IAGO OTHELLO IAGO OTHELLO IAGO

For Michael Cassio, I dare be sworn, I think, that he is honest. I think so too. Men should be what they seem, Or those that be not, would they might seem none. Certain, men should be what they seem. Why then I think Cassio’s an honest man. (3.3.127–32)

As George Puttenham wrote in 1589, the rhetorician who uses repetition as a tactic ‘doth much alter and affect the eare and also the mynde of the hearer’ (Puttenham, 1936: 198), and in this exchange Othello’s use of ‘honest’ is turned against him. The appreciation and praise Othello bestows on ‘Honest Iago’ (1.3.295) flies back the way it came, echoed in order to indirectly suggest its opposite, dishonesty, an invocation of the division between honest appearances and dishonest intentions that intensifies the dramatic irony by recalling Iago’s own pretences of love for Othello. By simple, casual restatement, Iago ensures that the general implores him to give his ‘worst of thoughts | The worst of words’ (3.3.135–6), the ruminations he withholds sowing a seed of doubt that ultimately germinates into the murder of Desdemona. Supplemental to Iago’s incomplete speech are facial expressions that press home his sinister point to an increasingly agitated Othello:



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And when I told thee [Cassio] was of my counsel In my whole course of wooing, thou criedst ‘Indeed?’ And didst contract and purse thy brow together As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brain Some horrible conceit. (3.3.114–18) Iago’s equivocal mode of address entices a tormented Othello to interpret an unstable text, a linguistic trap without an exit. Knowingly tight-lipped, the ensign’s controlled statements petition Othello to consider the likelihood of Desdemona’s infidelity, artful innuendos and grimaces of concern playing Othello’s vulnerabilities with an abridged linguistic menace that accuse Desdemona by proxy. Tactically taciturn, Iago speaks through his interlocutor, soliciting Othello to question Desdemona’s chastity on his behalf. Tim Blake Nelson’s O, a 2001 film adaptation of Othello set in an American high school, takes the link between self and other evident in the temptation scene as the key to Othello’s and Iago’s relationship. The jealous Hugo tells O, star of the basketball team and the school’s only African-American pupil, that the two must depend on each other to fulfil their dreams: ‘I’m you, O. I’m part of you’. This connection between self and other turns on Iago’s studied use of speech and body language: the clarifying gestures he uses flag up the negative undertones to his ambiguous utterances, tempting Othello to guess at what Iago conceals. If, to paraphrase Derrida, clarifying gestures are examples of supplementation that indicate the originary lack of incomplete and unstable speech, Iago the anti-Logos exploits the lack of self-sufficiency in speech in order to echo Othello, adding grimaces that underscore the alterity of repeated words. But when Iago senses Othello’s vulnerability, his taciturnity quickly becomes loquacity. Teasing out the general’s command that he speak his mind, Iago deliberately procrastinates and stresses at length that his thoughts may be unpalatable ‘As where’s that palace whereinto foul things | Sometimes intrude not?’ (3.3.140–1), employing the tact of patient, ‘dilatory time’ (2.3.368). Patricia Parker identifies three meanings of ‘dilation’ at work in Othello: delay, amplification and accusation (Parker, 1985: 54–74). Iago brings all three meanings together and, as Othello begs him not to bury thoughts from a deceived friend, increases the pressure: IAGO

It were not for your quiet nor your good Nor for my manhood, honesty and wisdom

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To let you know my thoughts. OTHELLO Zounds! What dost thou mean? (3.3.155–7) The blasphemous exclamation absent from the Folio but present in the Quarto emphasizes Othello’s exasperation, as does the ‘By heavens’ (3.3.164) a few lines later that prefixes the general’s determination to know Iago’s thoughts. Although, according to Stern, Othello’s seduction by Iago is slower in the Folio because his ‘furious exclamation becomes .  .  . a question, a demand for more information (Stern, 2004: 55), in both texts Iago’s equivocations intrigue Othello more with each line in a process of slowly released, need-to-know information that confirms Iago as ‘the dramatist within the play itself’ (Parker, 1985: 65). Brabantio and Roderigo both fall under his spell, and Othello too allows himself to be orientated by Iago’s use of language. As the word count rises so too does Othello’s conviction of being wronged, and when Iago declares that the ‘cuckold lives in bliss | Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger’ (3.3.169–70), the once-imperious general’s stark lament of ‘O misery’ (3.3.173) completes the movement from a question of wooing to a question of woe. Another aspect of Iago’s offensive repertoire is to turn Othello’s cultural difference from Desdemona against him, pouncing on Othello’s reiteration of Brabantio’s horror to rework the words of disbelief. ‘For nature so preposterously to err’ (1.3.63) by matching Othello and Desdemona must, for Brabantio, be the result of Othello’s witchcraft; in Iago’s rhetoric the union becomes the symptom of a carnal desire and lust in Desdemona that must, inevitably, remedy itself: OTHELLO IAGO

And yet how nature, erring from itself – Ay, there’s the point: as, to be bold with you, Not to affect many proposed matches Of her own clime, complexion and degree, Whereto we see, in all things, nature tends – Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. (3.3.231–7)

Murray J. Levith contends that, like Cyprus, Othello has a veneer of civilization ‘but waiting to erupt at any moment are dark forces’. Desdemona’s murder would thus confirm Levith’s view of Othello as a representative of ‘primitive and elemental chaos’ (Levith, 1989: 32).



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Should we opt to reject this essentialist, colonialist reading, the dark force that begins to stir in Othello’s interrupted sentence is the spectre of Iago’s, Roderigo’s and Brabantio’s proto-racist ideology, and, as a result, at this juncture of the temptation scene Iago capitalizes on the opportunity to position Othello as exterior to Venice and its values. Loomba makes clear that ideologies ‘only work because they are not entirely external to us’ (Loomba, 2002: 91). Ideologies, then, speak through us, and so Iago does not awaken or provoke Othello’s essential nature or character in the temptation scene, but catches the ghost of Brabantio’s proto-racist ideology that speaks through Othello. Desdemona’s rejection of suitors more appropriate to her country, character and rank are re-marked as expressions of her waywardness and, by extension, the possibility that she may return ‘to her better judgement’ (3.3.240). The implication cannot be ignored: Desdemona is not virtuous because Othello would be no choice for a virtuous Venetian woman. Later, in  4.1, this theoretical expulsion becomes a reality when Iago physically positions Othello outside of Venetian discourse, pretending to open the door to Venice’s secret codes of behaviour at the same time that he slams it shut. Encouraged by Iago to hide and watch his conversation with Cassio, Othello secretly, silently looks out for ‘the fleers, the gibes and notable scorns | That dwell in every region of [Cassio’s] face’ (4.1.83–4). The bawdy backslapping actually concerns Bianca, but Iago advises Othello to take heed of gestures that will demonstrate Cassio’s contemptuous use of Desdemona, gestures wanting the speech Othello struggles to hear. General and ensign are close together in the temptation scene, where Iago’s gesticulations reinforce his equivocations to Othello. Cassio’s actions, manipulated by Iago, reinforce only what Iago ensures Othello hears, verifying the accusation of infidelity to Othello’s discreet, tormented gaze. For Loomba, the play offers the prime early modern example of how racial attributes such as skin colour, religion and location ‘were animated by notions of sexual and gender difference’ (Loomba, 2002: 93). In 4.1 both the sexual betrayal of Othello and his otherness are underlined as the one reinforces the other, a movement symbolized by the precious handkerchief that undoes Desdemona. Possession of a lady’s handkerchief was considered proof of adultery in fifteenth-century Venice (Newman, 1987: 155), and Shakespeare uses the strawberry-spotted fabric Iago manoeuvres into Cassio’s possession as a mangled symbol of Desdemona’s promiscuity, a miniature of the stained sheets of the honeymoon bed. Furthermore, as a vexed Othello explains to Desdemona, the handkerchief Bianca produces before Othello’s stolen

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glances was given to him by his mother and carries a very un-Venetian significance: ’Twould make her amiable and subdue my father Entirely to her love; but if she lost it Or made a gift of it, my father’s eye Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt After new fancies. (3.4.61–5) More than just a symbol of sexual betrayal, of the virginity supposedly awarded to Cassio, the handkerchief is also an aphrodisiac and, like the hypnotic drift of the handkerchief that transfixes Brown in Drag Me to Hell, recalls the magical otherness of which Othello earlier stood accused. Before the senate Othello distances himself from such witchcraft in defence of his marriage to Desdemona, but here that witchcraft, and the associated otherness, returns to anticipate Desdemona’s death and Othello’s damnation: ‘To lose’t or give’t away were such perdition | As nothing else could match’ (3.4.69–70). The unvoiced gestures along with the chance entrance of the handkerchief seem to verify Iago’s statement that Venetian women ‘do let God see the pranks | They dare not show their husbands’ (3.3.205–6), and this apparent truth of sexual mores furthers Othello’s exclusion from the centre of Venetian cultural knowledge. Ben Saunders considers falsehood to be ‘the only essential truth of [Iago’s] character’, a psychopathology that sees the soliloquies as ‘insights into Iago’s character that remain unknown to Iago himself’ (Saunders, 2004: 156), while Michael Neill notes that the inconsistent, contradictory motives of Iago’s sexual jealousy and professional envy offer ‘symptomatic expressions of his core of resentment, the cancer of comparison at the heart of his being’ (Neill, 1984: 121). These falsehoods disguised as truth can be understood another way. As humans we experience language as heterogeneous, unstable and in a continual state of flux; it is the transcendental signified, the Logos, that can bring stability and resolution to language. But, in the fallen world of Othello, a fallen language lies at the mercy of Iago the anti-Logos who deconstructs the opposition between truth and falsehood, an opposition that the Logos would reinforce with its apocalyptic intervention. Set on a hellish wheel of fire by Iago, Othello rejects the satanic torture of his devilish ensign’s mode of address:



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Avaunt, be gone, thou hast set me on the rack! I swear ‘tis better to be much abused Than but to know’t a little. (3.3.338–40) Othello demands to be ‘satisfied’ (3.3.393), to be released from the purgatorial space in-between truth and falsehood into which Iago drags him where language ‘begins to break upon the rack of equivocation’ (Neill, 1984: 125). Iago’s rack, the infernal torture and tease of falsehood disguised as truth, stretches meaning to the point where the dramatis personae border on, seem to glimpse, a universe of immortal and divine existence beyond the threshold of their mortal world, a liminal point where the play’s language of salvation and damnation comes close to convergence with the supernatural world where that salvation and damnation are unequivocally delivered.

Masochistic Othello: Fetishes of Judgement and Damnation As a child I had a repeated nightmare about darkness. In the half-light of a small electric lamp, my warm bedroom that overlooked the bright, busy Euston Road was softly a-glow, a safe cradle nestled in the centre of London’s protective palm. While dressing for bed or doing my homework or engaged in some other childhood task, the lamp suddenly cuts out. Holding a candle I open the door, and in the darkness of the hall someone, or something, breathing hoarsely in the silent dark steps closer and closer. The candle illuminates a flickering shape. I flip the light switch repeatedly until the electricity returns, buzzing, and there, towering over me, stands an indescribable creature, a thing of horror, a phantasmagorical amalgam of every monster or mythical beast I’d ever seen on the movie screen or read about in books. Before its glowing eyes meet mine, before its razor-sharp fangs draw blood and before its clawed hands rip me to shreds, I wake up in a room lit only by the soft glow of an electric lamp. Creatures hidden in the dark are a commonplace motif of horror fiction. At the very start of the zombie apocalypse television series The Walking Dead, Rick Grimes wakes up in a deserted hospital and, in a dark stairwell, lights matches to find his way out. The extreme tension of the scene depends upon the viewer’s expectation that, each time he strikes a match, one of the zombies that have ravaged America will appear to make us and

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Grimes jump with fear, an expectation conditioned by the conventions of the genre. This mode of building tension has become such a cliché, particularly cinematically, that it can be used to convey a sense of fear or trepidation across genres. Unlike this scene from The Walking Dead, which inventively scares the viewer by repeatedly creating, then thwarting, the anticipations we associate with its genre, John Hillcoat’s moving 2009 bigscreen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road imports this horror convention and follows through on the expectations the technique sets up. The main characters, an unnamed man and his son, explore a dark cellar in the hope of finding food and supplies. Led by the light of the man’s cherished Zippo lighter, the two homeless hobos are instead surprised by crazed and desperate humans imprisoned in the cellar, some of them emaciated, some of them even limbless, all of them barely alive carcasses stored and painfully preserved as a food source for their cannibalistic jailers. In Shakespeare’s most vivid horror scene, Othello, his path lit by a candle, steps into Desdemona’s bed chamber to bring darkness: ‘Put out the light, and then put out the light!’ (5.2.7). Desdemona, unable to sleep, asks the same fateful question that structures Hamlet, a question that designates her as the killer’s victim: ‘Who’s there?’ (5.2.23). It is unconscious forces imagined as monstrous, it is a shuffling, blood-hungry zombie, it is Othello: ‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!’ (5.2.1). A Jacobean audience would have understood ‘cause’ as, among other things, ‘a matter before a court for decision’ or a ‘trial’ as well as a charge, accusation, or blame (OED). Indeed, Othello warns Desdemona to ‘Take heed of perjury’ (5.2.51) when she denies giving the strawberry-spotted handkerchief to Cassio. Shakespeare later used the word in the latter sense as a mock judgement when the maddened Lear refers to the affair that produced Gloucester’s bastard son, Edmund: ‘What was thy cause? | Adultery? | Thou shalt not die – die for adultery? No!’ (King Lear, 4.6.108–10). Othello, like Lear, plays the judge, but whereas Lear rallies against divinity, Othello unites human and divine redress by portraying himself as a minister of heavenly justice: ‘This sorrow’s heavenly, | It strikes where it doth love’ (5.2.21–2). Having just claimed that Desdemona’s ‘balmy breath . . . dost almost persuade | Justice to break her sword’ (5.2.16–17), his bittersweet words of love and sorrow paraphrase the traditional Christian proverb that God punishes those He loves. Ominously, Othello advises Desdemona to pray ‘to heaven and grace’ for pardon (5.2.27). Othello judges on behalf of God but, of course, the audience knows he has misjudged Desdemona, knows his sword of justice should rightly break, and Desdemona’s insistent



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denial of adultery exposes Othello’s unhappy conflation of transcendental and mortal judgement: O perjured woman, thou dost stone my heart And makest me call what I intend to do A murder, which I thought a sacrifice! (5.2.63–5) Unable to reconcile a falsely sworn Desdemona with the chastity she protests, the sway from murder to sacrifice forecasts Othello’s damnation for wrongful murder. Presciently, Othello’s reflection on his cruel act foresees the spiritual ruin he feels when faced with the excruciating knowledge of Desdemona’s innocence: Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that th’affrighted globe Should yawn at alteration. (5.2.98–100) This image echoes the Book of Revelation in which St John of Patmos witnesses the momentous, celestial eclipses heralded by the angelic trumps of the Apocalypse: ‘And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon’ (Rev. 8.12). But Othello’s remaking of that sky-shattering vision proves an anticlimax as the usurpation of stellar norms expected to greet Desdemona’s death does not arrive. Asphyxiating Desdemona, Othello delivers brutal, human justice laced with Christological language, then stabs himself to death with a sense of worldly amends, his thwarted desire for perdition quickened by a self-slaughter religiously forbidden. The deed done, Othello initially considers Desdemona to be set for a hellish fate but Emilia’s horrified response paints him as the minister of hell: OTHELLO She’s like a liar gone to burning hell: ’Twas I that killed her. EMILIA O, the more angel she, And you the blacker devil! (5.2.127–9) Othello’s blackness stands in stark opposition to the fair whiteness of the sanctified Desdemona, a connection stressed by Emilia’s condemnation

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that, intentionally or by common turn of phrase, links Othello’s blackness to the devil in the same way as Iago does when he taunts Brabantio: ‘The devil will make a grandsire of you’ (1.1.90). Macbeth employs the same schema when scolding a servant: ‘The devil damn thee black, thou creamfac’d loon!’ (Macbeth, 5.3.11). In his collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English proverbs, Morris Palmer Tilley lists one proverb in particular that brings the devil together with the coal-blackness of a collier or coalman: ‘Like will to like, quoth the devil to the collier’ (Tilley, 1950: 382). Settling down to play the famous chess game of The Seventh Seal, the disillusioned knight, Antonius Block, holds out his clenched fists and asks Death to choose his pieces, which turn out to be black. Wryly, and with a half-smile, Death notes the appropriateness of his choice. Notions of devilishness as blackness, as demonstrated by The Seventh Seal, still pervade art, music and literature today, even if, for the most part, these tropes are consciously separated from the pejorative readings of skin colour stripped and scrutinized in Othello. Cormac McCarthy’s oneiric masterpiece Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West ingeniously trades on this lexicon through the albino Judge Holden, a mysterious villain who, physically and philosophically, teeters on the edge of what registers as human. The novel follows the fortunes of a nameless kid who joins the Glanton gang, historical scalp-hunters who traversed the United States and Mexico borderlands in the middle of the nineteenth century. McCarthy turns this deserted wasteland into an apocalyptic nightmare of unthinkable violence, desperate suffering and extreme human indifference that debunks sympathetic mythologies of bow-legged cowboys rootin’ and a-tootin’ their way through the wild west with a ‘howdy’ and a ‘yee-haw’. For one of Glanton’s amoral riders, the ex-priest Tobin, Holden is a ‘sootysouled rascal’ (McCarthy, 1985: 124) who rescued them from Apache Indians in the most dastardly way possible. ‘Give the devil his due’ he says in cautious appreciation of the life debt he owes to Holden (ibid., 125). Like Othello, the characters in Blood Meridian believe they reach a doorway to an immortal world, an anteroom to hell akin to the portal of swirling clouds or the cracked, lava-filled earth through which steps the murderous medieval creature of Night of the Demon and Drag Me to Hell. Tobin tells the kid how Holden led the riders to rocky plains that felt like damnation’s edge: I’d not go behind scripture but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up again and I could well see in



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the long ago how it was little devils with their pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that had by misadventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world. (ibid., 130) In this chaotic hellhole imprinted with cloven hooves, Holden scrapes sulphur – the brimstone of biblical lore – out of the rocks in order to pound a urine-soaked ‘devil’s batter’ into gunpowder (ibid., 132). Un-pigmented skin blackened by the gunpowder dough, Holden feigns surrender and lack of ammunition, beckoning the Apaches into a slaughter. Competing correlations of skin colour and wickedness are sketched out in the novel, begging the question answered by the early modern notion that the white devil is worse than the black, a proverb Webster took as the title for The White Devil. Striding relentlessly on through the sparse, unyielding landscapes of Blood Meridian, Holden comes to represent an unusually white satanic evil in McCarthy’s narrative, a pattern that Tobin repeatedly inverts with scriptural allusions to the devil’s blackness which align Holden with the dark-skinned Indians and Mexicans seen as savages from hell by the white cowboys who remorselessly scalp them. Decorating the walls and windows of parish churches throughout the land in Shakespeare’s day were pictures of fair, white souls commonly seen being carted off to a red, fiery hell by vividly coloured, or dark, often black, devils. Othello, like Blood Meridian, draws on this Catholic, pre-Reformation art, a stunning extant example of which can be seen in St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire. The church retains a set of late medieval glass made largely in Westminster by Barnard Flower, the King’s Glazier, between 1500 and 1517 with the help of glaziers and glass painters from the Netherlands. On the southern edge of the Cotswolds, Fairford lies just east of Cirencester, a town that was accessible from Stratford-upon-Avon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries along the old Roman road, the Fosse Way. Driving to Fairford in early 2008 required an alternative route: rivers had burst their banks and many roads were flooded, drowned by the persistent rain of the previous days, near-cataclysmic deluges evocative of the biblical occurrences that inspired the illustrative stained glass to be seen on arrival. The Great West Window of St Mary’s depicts the Doom and is split in two: the upper half, a Victorian renovation, shows Christ in Judgement, with Mary and St John the Baptist kneeling down on either side, and a sword of justice rests on one of Christ’s shoulders; below the transom lies the original,

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medieval stained glass in which angels raise the dead with their trumpets, a golden-armoured St Michael holds scales of justice, St Peter guards the entrance to heaven and, to the right, blue devils carry the damned souls to hell where a black, monstrous Satan sits (Figure 3.1). Although, further on, we’ll look at some more of the details from St Mary’s Great West Window, the overall impact of this stained glass, as well as the many others housed therein, simply cannot be done justice on the page. They may be off the beaten track, but should you ever have the chance to go and see these wondrous survivors of an otherwise mostly lost heritage, do, for these vibrant gems are one of Britain’s greatest unknown artistic treasures. To see them lit up on a bright day so that even the grey concrete floor sparkles with their striking colours not only offers a chance to witness the unique and special beauty talented glaziers can impart on a whole room but, as much as possible from our historical distance, this sight also gives us a feel for the hypnotic power the very best Dooms must have exerted on their God-fearing parishioners. The iconoclastic keenness of Reformers led to most images being removed from places of worship, but an exception seems to have been made for

Figure 3.1  The Great West Window of St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, with a stained glass depiction of the Doom.



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stained glass in the Elizabethan era. The 1559 injunction by Elizabeth I to remove iconography from places of worship included a clause for the preservation and restoration of stained glass windows, an indication of her ‘concern that church buildings should be decently maintained’. And there was a pragmatic reason why stained glass windows had a better chance of survival than other images: they ‘were permitted to remain intact because of the expense of replacement’ (Marks, 1993: 231, 232). Many stained glass windows thus had a chance to escape the sectarian battles of the early modern period, and Shakespeare may well have seen these colourful depictions of the endtimes. We know that they were widespread and we know that the Reformation took a while to penetrate areas remote from London. Perhaps, even, it was difficult to avoid them. Not only would the ideological struggle itself have kept such artworks fresh in the cultural memory of early modern society, but in an era of mandatory church attendance parishioners would have seen these instructional harbingers intended to relate biblical narratives to largely illiterate parishes and undoubtedly talked about them to those who, however improbably, had not. Shakespeare, at the very least, must have paid close and careful attention. Fallout from Othello’s crime of passion reflects the conventions of Doom imagery exemplified by the sparkling glass surviving at Fairford. Iago’s schemes exposed, Othello calls for the divine to step in: ‘Are there no stones in heaven | But what serves for the thunder?’ (5.2.232–3). Othello expects thunderbolts of punishment rather than just ordinary thunder before a final, futile demand finds only Iago’s silence: OTHELLO IAGO

Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body? Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word. (5.2.298–301)

Soul and body irreconcilable to God, Othello accepts his hell-bound route in exchange for the reasons why, but Iago the anti-Logos, like heaven’s thunderous stones, remains silent. Defined by enigmatic irresolution, Iago performs an equivocal evil that, like the allegorical personifications of medieval morality plays, functions as the alternating, supplemental current of a wrathful unequivocal good, a Logos both the dramatis personae and the audiences who enjoyed Iago or his dramatic antecedents were confident would make an imminent apocalyptic intervention. Like Macbeth, who

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cowers at the thought of his regicide being proclaimed by the horns of the Apocalypse, Othello imagines the fearful moment of account, a time when he will face Desdemona: When we shall meet at compt This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven And fiends will snatch at it. (5.2.271–3) In the stained glass at St Mary’s Church, devils cart souls off to hell where Satan awaits (Figure 3.2), and one literally snatches at a soul protected by an angel with a golden staff (Figure 3.3). One of the Evil Souls in the Wakefield mystery cycle’s Judgement trembles at the sound of trumpets also because ‘fiends, that fill us full of fear, | Will pounce upon us in their pride’ (Wakefield: 440), an indication that a longstanding tradition of synergy and exchange existed between Dooms and drama for Shakespeare and his contemporaries to mine. Moreover, the

Figure 3.2  Detail of the stained glass depiction of the Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, showing a devil carting a soul off to hell.



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Figure 3.3  Detail of the stained glass depiction of the Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, showing a snatching devil fended off by an angel.

everlasting torture for which Othello yearns draws on the graphic sadomasochism commonly seen in renderings of perdition: Whip me, ye devils, From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur, Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! (5.2.275–8) In St Mary’s stained glass, a red devil with a flail whips a rising soul away from heaven and towards the fires of hell (Figure 3.4). Elsewhere in Gloucestershire, at St Nicholas’s Church in Oddington, the Doom painting that adorns the north wall of the nave shows a devil forcing recently roused souls on their vexed journey to a fiery hell (Figure 3.5). Seductive and sinister, the satanic minions in The Devil’s Advocate shape-shift into grotesque fiends who snatch the soul of Lomax’s neglected wife, their sibilant whispers maddening her until she slits her throat with a shard of glass. Recurrently in Hollywood horror

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Figure 3.4  Detail of the stained glass depiction of the Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, showing a soul whipped to hell by a devil.

Figure 3.5  Detail of the doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire, showing a devil driving souls to hell.



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frenzied fiends such as these sophisticated sirens in disguise grasp at the living from the depths below. A landmark of twentieth-century horror, Brian De Palma’s 1976 paranormal shocker, Carrie, ends with a dream sequence that completes the protagonist’s transition from angelic outcast to avenging demon, a movement captured by one of the original movie posters which has two pictures of lead actress Sissy Spacek, one as the smiling prom queen dressed in white, the other as a diabolic figure soaked in blood. Tormented by her overbearing, evangelically Christian mother, the awkward, lonely Carrie White finally finds acceptance with her peers only to be cruelly ridiculed at her high school prom. With her telekinetic powers, Carrie exacts deadly revenge, turning the prom hall into a fiery death pit. In the epilogue, the only survivor of the prom, Sue Snell, dreams of penitently visiting Carrie’s grave, a rocky, isolated and oversized patch of land warped by the irregularities of oneiric space and marked only with a desecrated cross bearing the slogan ‘Carrie White burns in hell’. As Snell kneels down to place flowers on the grave, Carrie’s still-bloody hand shoots up through the soil and grabs her. No film has realized the sadomasochistic aspects of medieval demonology more overtly than Clive Barker’s 1987 Hellraiser. Inspired by Catholic imagery infused with the stylistics of fetish clubs, Barker’s Cenobites are sadists who take their willing victims beyond the dichotomy of pleasure and pain to an ecstatic extreme where the curious and the guilty are gruesomely abused. When the reprobate Frank Cotton escapes from hell and returns to earth, he resurrects himself by feeding on the flesh of the living. Led by the iconic Pinhead, whose tessellated face is held together by nails, the deformed, pierced and leather-clad Cenobites hunt Frank down and return him to the depths of their underworld lair where they carry out a peculiar brand of justice, lacerating his body with sexualized instruments of unbearable torture. Tony Randal’s 1988 sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, imagines the home of the Cenobites to be a massive labyrinthine puzzle in which the two heroines come face to face with Leviathan, the biblical sea monster defeated in the Book of Revelation and refashioned by Hellbound as a puzzle to be solved by those who desire access to the flailing whips, the burning winds and the sulphurous, flowing fires of everlasting punishment, the divine lashes and scourges wished for by a self-destructive, masochistic Othello. Whereas Macbeth meets the rhyming threesome of witches, who with their enigmatic prophecies initiate the upheaval that turns Macbeth into a hellish tyrant, Othello encounters the snatching fiend Iago, his own

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personal Cenobite, who with intended and targeted misspeaks leads him to an excruciating, infernal abyss. After all, as Brachiano postulates in The White Devil, the cloven-footed devil is ‘a rare linguist’ (5.3.108). Othello’s attack on Iago tests the materiality and truth of these beliefs: ‘I look down towards his feet, but that’s a fable. | If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee’ (5.2.283–4). A thrust blade wounds Iago, who doesn’t die: ‘I bleed, sir, but not killed’ (5.2.285). True to form, Iago neither confirms nor denies anything, teasing all with the possibility that, more than just a parabolic dramatization of evil, he could very well be a member of the undying devilish assembly that Jacobean churchgoers would have seen on the walls and windows of their churches, an illustrated mythology of the Apocalypse that Shakespeare employs to so clearly convey Scotland in Macbeth as a living hell. Familiar with the whip-wielding demons of doomsday and their angelic counterparts, Jacobean audiences would have been expected to also understand the on-stage allusions to the fate of the damned in Othello, references that Christopher Marlowe explored directly in Doctor Faustus. As Faustus anxiously awaits damnation he fears the grasp from below of fiends that will snatch him to hell: ‘The divel wil come, and Faustus must be damnd. | O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me downe?’ (Doctor Faustus, 13.72–3, original emphasis). Faustus, like Othello, pictures fiends that pull him down to hell. As Neill points out, Iago’s service to Othello ‘is that of a Mephistophilis’ (Neill, 1984: 129). So Marlowe, it seems, was influenced by the same images as Shakespeare, and devils enter the stage to literally drag Faustus off to hell. According to an inventory in Philip Henslowe’s diary, the Rose Theatre had a ‘Hell mought’ among its props for the Lord Admiral’s Men, who consistently played Marlowe’s works (Henslowe, 2002: 319). And even these production mechanics of the early modern stage still resurface in the vocabulary we use to talk about death: McCarthy’s Blood Meridian describes a Yuma shot to death who ‘went down like a player through a trap’ (McCarthy, 1985: 279). A detail from the chancel arch in Coventry’s Holy Trinity Church shows a leathery, snarling hell-mouth ready to swallow the souls of the wicked being forced downwards by demons from the apocalyptic chaos above (Figure 3.6), and back in St Nicholas’s Church in Oddington a devil thrusts souls into a mouth-like chasm with eyes and a twisted, fiery nose (Figure 3.7). The mouth of hell, then, was a common image. In St Mary’s stained glass window, however, a jackal-like Satan sits where the hell-mouth would be, with eyes and teeth in his stomach, undigested remnants, perhaps, of a swallowed soul (Figure 3.8).



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Figure 3.6  Doom painting at Holy Trinity Church, Coventry, Warwickshire, showing a snarling hell-mouth.

Figure 3.7  Detail of the doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire, showing a devil thrusting souls into the hell-mouth.

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Figure 3.8  Detail of the stained glass depiction of the Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, showing the devil with a head beneath his shoulders.

On a playful, but not entirely improbable, note, this depiction of Satan, like the red devil that hovers with menace as the angel fights off a snatching fiend (figure 3.3 again), takes us back to the anthropophagi with heads beneath their shoulders. We might choose to understand Othello’s use of the anthropophagi as an embellishment of his Christian identity with a dangerously close non-Christian past, a deconstruction of opposing classical and Christian myths. Had Shakespeare seen, or heard of, this particular stained glass Doom, he may well have noted the connection between the Plinian creatures we now suppose he had read about and St Mary’s preReformation devouring devil. King of the bottomless pit, gatekeeper to the torturous place of destruction Othello calls forth, this abomination chews up the souls collected by his fiends on Judgement Day – that moment of eschatological finality deferred in both language and Shakespeare’s tragic dramaturgy, that religious closure still awaited in the pews watched over to this day by the devouring menace of the Apocalypse.

Chapter 4

Macbeth and the Angels of Doom

The End is Always Nigh: A Horror Story of Tremendous Proportion Assessing an apocalyptic tone he locates in philosophy, Derrida argues that ‘the West has been dominated by a powerful program that was also an untransgressible contract among discourses of the end’ (Derrida, 1992b: 48), a vogue tendency, in other words, to proclaim the end of a range of subjects believed to be past their zenith, near to extinction, or no longer viable in their current forms – the death of religion, the end of history, the demise of the class struggle, the collapse of the financial market and so on. As each doomed topic adapts, transforms or finds new vitality or relevance, successive commentators find the need to revise the predictions of their predecessors and proclaim the end anew. Take, for instance, the wave of student and unionist action that marked the start of the decade in Britain. When drastic spending cuts threatened the educational and career prospects of the middle classes alongside those of the disenfranchised poor, tentative talk of how class can be understood in the twenty-first century became acceptable after many years in which any class-based politics was seen by politicians as a vote-losing anachronism. Perhaps, then, the discourses of class had survived the apocalypse marked out for them and were now articulated from new positions of subjectivity still to be adequately registered and read. Derrida can use the term ‘apocalypse’ with a small ‘a’ to refer to the notion of class struggle and a plethora of other social, cultural, economic or political events each of which at certain times are spoken about with an apocalyptic tone, but to most it denotes the Christian rapture, ‘a horror story of tremendous proportion’ predicted lately by American preacher Harold Camping for 21 May 2011 (McGreal, 2011), just one day from the typing of this sentence and seventeen years after his original prediction. If you are reading this, we are evidently still here. (Or at least we believe

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ourselves to be, which, for the ongoing purposes of this book, continues to suffice.) To the early modern citizen the term almost always meant the revelation of the future bequeathed to St John of Patmos, a divine disclosure recorded in the New Testament. It was an event believed to be inevitable, an event zealously predicted, dated, revised and re-dated, and an event that finds, in the atmosphere and language of Macbeth, stunning dramatic realization. Following on from the earlier works of Bale and Foxe, John Napier’s 1593 text A Plaine Discouery of the whole Reuelation of Saint John predicted Christ’s coming in 1688, while Thomas Brightman’s posthumously published Workes of 1644 also set the date for the late seventeenth century. Others were more ambitious, such as Thomas Rogers who predicted in Of the ende of this wordle, and second comming of Christ from 1577 that the arrival was right around the corner and should be expected before the end of the sixteenth century. These prophecies were often made in relation to current religious and political concerns, with those Reformers not exclusively obsessed with the Turk eager to paint the Catholic papacy in Rome as the Antichrist surrounded by his Babylonian whores. Napier tied the seven angelic trumps that St John hears and the seven seals of a magical book that St John sees to significant historical events of which the last and most significant was the Reformation, and in similar fashion Arthur Dent’s 1607 The Ruine of Rome saw the Armada’s defeat as the first victory of Armageddon. It is in this cultural context that the nebulous, diffuse prophesying of the witches in Macbeth incurs the political animus that turns Scotland into a vision of Armageddon, a happening that will bring the ‘deep damnation’ that haunts Macbeth (1.7.20). Yet this happening can never absolutely arrive within the fallen world of the tragedy for the same reason a fallen language can never arrive at conclusive, stable, homogeneous meaning. Apocalyptic ascension to justice and homogeneity, an event heralded by the trumpeting angels of Doom, is still to come. ‘Truth’, continues Derrida, ‘is the end and the instance of the last judgment’. The deferred possibility of arriving at truth constitutes ‘the transcendental condition of all discourse’ with the rapturous act of revelation as ‘the self-presentation of the apocalyptic structure of language’ (Derrida, 1992b: 52, 57). If truth stands as the teleology of metaphysics, as the final destination of logocentric discourses, then equivocation marks the journey and, for poststructuralist accounts, is the general and persistent state of language. Certain cases of this paradigmatic signification have long been regarded as perfect for crafty utilization. In 1589 Puttenham defined amphibology as to ‘speak or write doubtfully and that the sense may be



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taken two wayes’. An example of equivocation, amphibology can be a menacing linguistic tactic used by ‘false Prophets as appeareth by the Oracles of Delphos’ (Puttenham, 1936: 260, original emphasis). Users of amphibology influence and exploit the ambitious to dwell upon the things that frighten them so that hope and fear may read in amphibology what it most desires, or, more accurately, what the speaker can be taken to mean without ever confirming it explicitly. In consequence, amphibology can turn its victims into the instigators of insurrection and rebellion, their malleable minds fuelled by ‘vaine hope or vaine feare’ (ibid.). The cryptic cackles of the witches, those earth-bound harbingers of catastrophe who are themselves crippled and inverted manifestations of the chancel arch angels an anguished Macbeth envisions, exemplify Puttenham’s description of amphibology. They seduce Macbeth, who in turn redeploys this mode of address to tempt Banquo, while Malcolm rhetorically tests Macduff. Mediated by these rhyming riddles, time also equivocates in Macbeth. Supernatural others whose propositions Macbeth is enticed into deciphering, the witches first set the scene of unreality: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (1.1.11). This paradox anticipates Macbeth’s pensive response to victory at the battle of Fife: ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’ (1.3.38). Such a foul day of thunder and lightning, saturated by death and the play’s repeating motif of blood, is made fair by victory at Fife, a conundrum prefiguring the ensuing dramatic events that confirm the witches’ amphibologies to be true when the foul and fair future of their teasing verses occurs. Soon after Macbeth becomes Thane of Cawdor, Lady Macbeth feels ‘The future in the instant’ (1.5.58), an acknowledgement of how the initial prophecy on the heath has impelled a trace of the future to invade the present. Due to this trace, equivocation becomes the temporal, as well as linguistic, condition of Macbeth: Shakespeare’s witches exploit the inherent instability of language in order to deliver prophecies that disrupt the sequential, linear chronological flow from the present to the hereafter. No one can be trusted in such a turbulent milieu, and where no one can be trusted, negative deconstructive shadows are cast over the future of Scotland by the trace of the other invading the selfsame. Fulsome praise of Macbeth’s honour suggests his dishonour while Malcolm disavows vices that threaten the virtues he professes. Malcolm, for instance, claims that the degeneracy and immorality with which he taints himself are nothing more than a fiction but the trace of that fiction remains, his pretence inviting a relationship between fiction and fact when his false weaknesses are distinguished from his true strengths by means of reference to each other.

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Put another way, Malcolm states his virtues in opposition to vices he falsely adopts with the result that vice plays a role in articulating virtue, an alternating current of signification that disrupts complete dissimilitude to the extent that vice and virtue mark each other in the affirmation of their opposite. Thus, Malcolm presents the feigned semblance of the virtues he professes because they follow soon after his ‘first false speaking’ (4.3.130), and, as Derrida puts it, the other always ‘presents itself in the dissimulation of itself’ due to the oppositional trace in the selfsame (Derrida, 1997: 47). Noxious factionalism turns the unavoidable, inbuilt ambiguities of bluff and masquerade against feudal society’s organizing principles, a value system Malcolm seeks to restore. Because the promised Doom evoked throughout Macbeth never actually arrives unabridged to resplendently resolve these ambiguities, key components of this value system are severely tested by the pandemonium unleashed by the witches on Scotland’s gloomy panoramas, with definitions of manhood the most overtly scrutinized.

Imperfect Manhood Consider once more the killer cyborg in The Terminator, a walking memento mori of a nuclear holocaust to come. Physically indistinguishable from humans, it renders obvious or common-sense definitions of man redundant. Slavoj Žižek describes this terrifying automaton as ‘the embodiment of the drive, devoid of desire’, uncomplicated by the vacillating human wants engendered by the Lacanian symbolic order via which our uncontrolled pre-linguistic drives are converted into more manageable, ordered desires (Žižek, 1991: 22). What separates this invincible murderer from its human victims is not just an indestructible metal body but an artificial consciousness unconnected to the formulations of language that make remorse, mercy, pity and compromise possible, at least in the forms we collectively recognize and discuss. Time-travelling soldier Reese struggles to make his police captors understand that the suspect they believe to be a man, a suspect who bleeds, sweats and smells like a man, is also, beneath the surface of living tissue, an apocalyptic machine incapable of reason, guilt or human social exchange, and impervious to any kind of persuasion or pain. Indeed, imagine the pain such a soulless thing with no concept or appreciation of pain can inflict. Macduff hears the news that his wife and children have been murdered on the order of Macbeth, a heartless, politically motivated slaughter that elicits this response from Malcolm: ‘Let’s make us med’cines of our great revenge, | To cure this deadly grief



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(4.3.214–15). Though Malcolm urges him to turn sorrow into a vengeful, unstinting remedy, Macduff refuses to believe that his family have been exterminated and cries out against the tyrant’s hellish action. So Malcolm implores him to rally against the news another way: ‘Dispute it like a man’ (4.3.219). Macduff’s introspective answer makes clear that though he must be brave and warlike he must also connect with the emotions that set humans apart from unfeeling terminators: ‘I shall do so; | But I must also feel it as a man’ (4.3.220–1). How a man chooses to behave determines whether Scotland falls into the abyss or saves itself from self-destruction. In an egotistical world teetering on the edge of violent insanity, a bleak landscape further darkened by macho pride, by doubt and suspicion, ‘man’ becomes a cataclysmically contested term in Macbeth. And it is a term contested across gender boundaries. Before the witches have even spoken to Banquo and Macbeth, we as readers or audience members are left in no doubt that they straddle an unknown magical netherworld and the finite, corporeal realm in which the two generals find them: BANQUO

What are these, So wither’d and so wild in their attire, That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth, And yet are on’t? Live you? or are you aught That man may question? You seem to understand me, By each at once her choppy finger laying Upon her skinny lips: you should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so. (1.3.39–47)

Displaying the quick and fluid insights of moral intuition that distinguish him from Macbeth, Banquo marvels at the witches’ androgyny and questionable humanity, their shrivelled, decayed appearance and their uncultivated clothing, keen to know exactly what unnatural, fantastic creatures block his path: ‘I’th’name of truth, | Are ye fantastical, or that indeed | Which outwardly ye show?’ (1.3.52–4). Have the witches stepped through that same fizzing portal to the supernatural world that conjures stalking demons of the night? Macbeth demands confirmation: ‘Speak, if you can: – what are you?’ (1.3.47). Are they human or not, demonic or not, female or not? Otherworldly, confusing, indefinable creatures that prefigure the end of the world and resist such easy categorizations stand upon the wild heath.

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Demonic, witchlike qualities are linked to manhood for Lady Macbeth, who asks ill spirits to make her, like the witches, as much male as female: Come, you Spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood, Stop up th’access and passage to remorse; That no compunctious visitings of Nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Th’effect and it! (1.5.40–7) To be unsexed, to be unwomanly, consists of a dreadful mercilessness that will fill Lady Macbeth’s body completely. She fears that Macbeth is ‘without | The illness’ (1.5.19–20), without the wickedness, needed to take the crown, actively resisting the compassion that might obstruct her aspirations and which also dampen Macbeth’s political ardour. Joanna Levin has argued that, according to the Witchcraft Statute of 1604, Lady Macbeth would have been considered a witch for invoking evil spirits, a capital offence under the regulation (Levin, 2002: 39). And as Macbeth approaches, Lady Macbeth invites the ‘murth’ring ministers’ with a nurturing and sexual statement: ‘Come to my woman’s breasts | And take my milk for gall’ (1.5.47–8). This may well recall the trials for treason by sorcery that took place in Scotland between 1590 and 1591 when more than 300 witches, it was alleged, had gathered at North Berwick and ‘indulged in hitherto unheard of obscene rituals . . . in the physical presence of their master, the Devil’ (Larner, 1984: 9). Watching the play, James I could well have bracketed Lady Macbeth’s invitation with the events alleged during the trials, as well as the lewd ‘forme of adoration’ he himself had written in 1597 was a common rite performed by witches (James I, 1966: 37). An everyday Jacobean at the Globe would most likely have seen Lady Macbeth as a nod to these accused sorcerers, a half-sister to Shakespeare’s witches, and her commitment to the murderous cause additionally serves as an ingress to new considerations of manhood. Welcoming a union with forces that work hard to seduce her husband, Lady Macbeth draws inspiration from the lyrical prophecies that foretell Macbeth’s acquisition of Cawdor, a seemingly instantaneous future that emboldens her to plot Duncan’s murder and thereby actualize the witches’ predictions in full. As Macbeth searches his soul, she steps on stage as the catalyst to eventual regicide:



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I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself And falls on th’other – Enter LADY MACBETH. (1.7.25–8) Timing is everything, and Lady Macbeth arrives as the punctual imperative that will drive on Macbeth’s un-spurred intent. Privately concerned that her husband is ‘too full o’th’milk of human kindness, | To catch the nearest way’ (1.5.17–18), Lady Macbeth’s subsequent warring words dispute the meaning of manhood with Macbeth, who at first refuses to pursue the regicidal plan: We will proceed no further in this business: He hath honour’d me of late; and I have bought Golden opinions from all sorts of people, Which would be worn now in their newest gloss, Not cast aside so soon. (1.7.31–5) Caroline Spurgeon proposed that the image of ill-fitting garments constantly recurs in Macbeth (Spurgeon, 1935: 324–35) and here the anti-hero metaphorically wears the effusive appreciation and praise he has recently earned. To act in a dishonourable manner would be to lose these garments, and the honour they represent cannot, for Macbeth, be separated from a conception of manhood defined by an adherence to feudal conventions. When, later, Macbeth suggests that all ‘briefly put on manly readiness’ in the aftermath of Duncan’s murder (2.3.131), he wears this manliness – hypocritically, given he carries out the regicidal bloodbath. In his study of metaphor in the play, Cleanth Brooks opines that Macbeth ‘can only pretend to be the loyal, grief-stricken liege’ (Brooks, 1968: 29): killing the king contradicts the obligations of fidelity that establish a man as loyal and honourable in a feudal society. Her fears confirmed, Lady Macbeth turns the sartorial metaphor against Macbeth with a swift and cutting reproach that targets his masculinity: Was the hope drunk, Wherein you dress’d yourself? Hath it slept since?

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And wakes it now, to look so green and pale At what it did so freely? (1.7.35–8) Lady Macbeth equates Macbeth with a loudmouth who talks big when drunk but loses his nerve when sober, a braggart who reflects fearfully on the words of Dutch courage delivered without restraint during the heady night before. Separating the apprehensions of the morning after from the bravado of intoxication, this contrast between the faint-heartedness of sobriety and the bold desires of a drunken haze paves the way for the battle between what Macbeth wants to do and what he feels he ought to do, a conflict Lady Macbeth exploits: Art thou afeard To be the same in thine own act and valour, As thou art in desire? Would’st thou have that Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life, And live a coward in thine own esteem, Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would,’ Like the poor cat i’th’adage? (1.7.39–45) The proverbial cat likes to eat fish but not to get her paws wet, and the pejorative analogy sums up Macbeth’s moral acrobatics, where his apprehensions stand in the way of his goals. For Lady Macbeth a man’s actions must overcome his reservations in order to realize his desires but, for Macbeth, manhood must be more temperate than the desires that tempt it to its own betrayal: ‘I dare do all that may become a man; | Who dares do more, is none’ (1.7.46–7). On the one hand, the social structure of Macbeth makes kingship highly desirable but, on the other hand, kingship is forbidden to all but one person, which makes it precarious. Inevitably, the principles that govern social exchange and regulate behaviour – the play’s psychosocial laws – come into conflict with the urge to be king, a will to power that leads Macbeth to step beyond the parameters of feudal relations and commit a regicidal act. In Lacanian terms, the desirability of kingship engenders a proto-Oedipal conflict that pitches the feudal subject against the state’s symbolic Father, the Name-of-the-Father against whom super­ egoic imperatives prohibit unlawful action. Contravening this prohibition strips Macbeth of the very qualities that are revered in a king and locks Scotland into a waking nightmare without exit.



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Despite the internal boundaries placed by psychoanalytic laws, in practice competing interests are always a threat to Scottish security in Macbeth. Harry Berger Jr’s analysis of the early scenes found ‘something rotten in Scotland’, a Hamlet-style structural malaise that claims both Macdonwald and Macbeth as its victims (Berger, 1980: 5). Macbeth in particular swings like a pendulum from desire for the benefits of kingship to the kinship codes to which strict adherence have so advanced him, codes that proscribe the violent betrayal that leads him to the throne. Paradoxically, these rules of engagement that first hold Macbeth back are defined by the factionalism and warfare they are designed to exclude, feudal relations that remain ‘precarious and potentially bloody’ until Malcolm redistributes power at the end of the play (McLuskie, 2004: 8). Consequently, tyranny as a modus operandi delineates notions of manliness and unmanliness concurrently. Macduff decrees that ‘Boundless intemperance | In nature is a tyranny’ (4.3.66–7), an inclination inappropriate to a man’s obligations of fealty. Whoever disregards these constraints cannot be considered a man of worth, so for Macbeth to exceed the agreed-upon limits of masculine restraint and control constitutes a disavowal of feudal relations. To contravene the communal potlatch that guarantees a healthy polity reduces the man but, as a conniving Lady Macbeth sees it, the courage that acts on ambition can make him too: When you durst do it, then you were a man; And, to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man. (1.7.49–51) Ruthless action, not regulated desire, augments Macbeth’s masculinity, a definition that measures his status in proportion with how far he discounts the principles of conduct expected from general and thane, a scale of manliness inverting Macbeth’s own conception of male honour. Organizing the elimination of Banquo and his son, Fleance, Macbeth appropriates this inversion to put the squeeze on his hired muscle. ‘We are men’, claims one of his goons (3.1.90). Big talk needs big action to back it up. With a comparison to the names by which breeds of dog are distinguished, Macbeth urges them to prove what kind of men they are: The valu’d file Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, The housekeeper, the hunter, every one According to the gift which bounteous Nature

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Hath in him clos’d; whereby he does receive Particular addition, from the bill That writes them all alike; and so of men. (3.1.94–100) Man, Macbeth circuitously tells his henchmen, is a many-faceted species engorged with categories not all of which nature has blessed with the necessary gifts required for the sickening task at hand. Are you a real man, or are you the kind of man who is no man at all? This conceit aims at convincing the murderers to do the dastardly deed, to show that they ‘have a station in the file, | Not i’th’worst rank of manhood’ (3.1.101–2), a conceit regulated by the deconstructive logic of manhood that differs from itself, where men can be classified until those in the worst rank are barely men at all, declassified to a lesser, despised opposite, a pejorative othering entailed by the taxonomic allegory Macbeth uses. These genera return to mock Macbeth when he rants uncontrollably at the sporadic visitations of Banquo’s ghost. ‘Are you a man?’ asks an exasperated Lady Macbeth (3.4.57). Though he claims to be a ‘bold one’ (3.4.58), she insists that he is ‘quite unmann’d in folly’ (3.4.72). Editing the Arden edition, Kenneth Muir adds a stage direction absent from the Folio in this scene so as to clarify the movement of the bedevilling spectre: ‘Why, so; – being gone, | I am a man again’ (3.4.106–7). Macbeth’s words do seem to indicate the departure of the ghost but David Worster proposes, as a performance option, the ghost’s continued presence on stage in order to cast doubt upon Macbeth’s claim to be, once more, a man. However, Muir’s addition consolidates a correlation in the text between Macbeth’s intermittent madness and the ghost’s recurrence on the stage. Nevertheless, because the Folio does not confirm Macbeth’s words it retains the silent possibility that the haunting continues up to the scene’s end. Worster’s argument may be far-fetched, but the ghostly reminder of Macbeth’s dishonour does perpetually haunt the tyrant’s honourable façade, itself a spectral trace of an abandoned masculine honour. As if fighting bloody, exhausting internecine battles then immediately being taunted by the flirtatious, encoded premonitions of three freaky witches were not enough, Macbeth has to come home to this: his wily, insistent wife reminds him that what becomes a man domestically can be lost by doing what becomes a man politically. Like Lady Macduff, Lady Macbeth places her husband’s loyalty to her above fealty codes: ‘From this time | Such I account thy love’ (1.7.38–9). A quarrelsome trouble and strife adds to Macbeth’s confusion as personal and political commitments come



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into conflict. The warning that the solemnity of the marital contract will be undercut by adherence to other, rival social contracts asks Macbeth to balance the tyranny he considers unmanly with the unmanliness of abandoning undertakings promised, however obliquely, by him to his wife. Not done, Lady Macbeth invokes parenthood alongside marriage, bullying the altruism and self-sacrifice out of Macbeth with an image of infanticide that demonstrates the gravity with which she holds a spouse’s word: I have given suck, and know How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this. (1.7.54–9) Potentially killing with such sickening violence the suckling baby underscores the importance of an oath. Moreover, this rejection recalls the ill spirits invited to take Lady Macbeth’s milk for bile, her mothering breast swapping the babe for black magic as the pity embodied in the play by Macbeth’s vision of a stellar newborn child becomes a twisted, pitiless version of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22). To win Macbeth’s commitment, the murdering ministers of the macabre masquerade as a baby the femme fatale batters to death out of loyalty. This is the steely resolve of one who should ‘Bring forth men-children only’ (1.7.73). After this fatal intervention, Macbeth submits to his wife’s vision of what a man should be, resolving to kill Duncan and embrace the tangible future mapped out for him by Lady Macbeth, a dire future of horrors she plots in the amphibological light shed by the prophesying witches.

Imperfect Time When Rosse brings the news that Duncan has made Macbeth Thane of Cawdor, the fulfilment of the witches’ first prophecy provokes a startled response from Banquo: ‘What! can the Devil speak true?’ (1.3.107). Some Jacobeans at the Globe very likely believed that witches and magic could have real effects but, as Stephen Orgel writes in a rich and wide-ranging article, even for the unconvinced, witchcraft and the supernatural were ‘as much part of reality as religious truth’ (Orgel, 1999: 145). As the authorities

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executed people for witchlike activities, the public debate extended to the publication of many books on witchcraft, such as Reginald Scot’s sceptical The discouerie of witchcraft from 1584 and George Gifford’s two equally disbelieving texts, A Discourse of the subtill Practices of Deuilles by Witches and Sorcerers of 1587 and A Dialogve concerning Witches and Witchcraftes of 1593. Opposing Scot’s scepticism, James I wrote his Daemonologie in 1597, so Shakespeare’s audience would certainly have known of the debates surrounding witchcraft and, furthermore, that witches, in the opinion of their king, were ‘of that kinde that consultes with the Deuill’ (James I, 1966: 29). Given that James I thought himself to be a descendent of the historical Banquo, an unsurprising contrast exists in Macbeth between the conspiring, mealy-mouthed ambivalence of the witches distrusted by Banquo and the benevolent powers supported by England’s pseudo-messianic king, blessed with ‘a heavenly gift of prophecy’ (4.3.157). Enigmatic in his theatrical absence, the English king offers a reference point for the Christian forces in revolt against Macbeth’s violent dictatorship while the neutral riddlings of the dark and scheming witches are aligned with the devil by Banquo, despite their validity: ‘And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, | The instru­ ments of Darkness tell us truths’ (1.3.123–4). To suggest the existence of the devil also suggests God’s existence, for ‘who denyeth the power of the Deuill, would likewise denie the power of God’ (James VI & I, 1966: 54–5). Using the example of Robert Kett, who, with an inspirational speech at what is now called Kett’s Oak, led a rebellion in  1549 in response to the enclosure of common land by the aristocracy, Steven Mullaney points out that the traitor in Renaissance England is ‘seduced by a language without origin’ (Mullaney, 1988: 121). In Macbeth, prophecy, assumed to be the work of the devil and his demonic allies, emanates from a supernatural place outside language and beyond a linear teleology of set beginnings or final causes to wreak havoc in the play. As with the Terminator franchise, futures that invade the past with terrible outcomes are now a staple of Hollywood cinema. Steven Spielberg, father of the archetypal modern-day blockbuster, addressed the conditionality of the future in 2002 with Minority Report, a neo-noir in which the Precrime police force prevent imminent crimes foreseen by mutated humans whose powers of precognition are abused for the purposes of espionage. But nowhere on the silver screen has this theme been more gleefully explored than in Back to the Future from 1985 by director Robert Zemeckis. Guitarplaying high-school kid Marty McFly, played by the ever-youthful Michael J. Fox, travels in a DeLorean time machine to 1955 where he accidentally stops his parents from falling in love, endangering his own existence.



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Catastrophically disinherited, erased from existence entirely, or prodigally reinstated in the family hierarchy in line with the swapping destinies of spectral and substitute fathers, McFly comes across as a goofy, inter-temporal Hamlet on a skateboard, but the film also shares an organizing aporia with Macbeth: does knowledge of the future shape the protagonist’s actions or do the protagonist’s actions shape the future? This conundrum finds crystallization in Back to the Future when McFly inadvertently plays Chuck Berry’s 1958 track ‘Johnny B. Goode’ three years prior to its actual release. Band member Marvin Berry immediately calls his cousin to notify him of this new, groundbreaking sound, a twist that problematizes the idea of a unique and fixed beginning or source: the small-town white boy inspires one of the pioneers of rock and roll with a rock and roll song by a later version of that same pioneer. Pulling on a similar thread, does Macbeth kill King Duncan as a consequence of the witches’ prophecies or do the witches’ prophecies simply direct Macbeth to an action they already know will pass? What, or who, is the source of regicide? Like Back to the Future, Macbeth scrutinizes the idea of any obvious origin of influence by setting two timelines into competition. The quasi-reasonable rhymes delivered by the witches cause a schism in the space-time continuum that McFly, in the high school vernacular of the 1980s, might describe as ‘heavy’, yet the sensible nonsense ultimately proves to be the truth of the matter. Promising great honours, the witches begin their amphibological seduction of Macbeth: 1 WITCH  All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glamis! 2 WITCH  All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor! 3 WITCH  All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be King hereafter. 1.3.48–50 Macbeth falls silent, seeming, an alacritous Banquo observes, ‘to fear | Things that do sound so fair’ (1.3.51–2), while the projected acquisition of Cawdor’s title affirms that, as Banquo suspects, the witches ‘can look into the seeds of time’ (1.3.58). Reappraising Shakespeare in the light of poststructuralist, political and feminist theories, Evans states that in the early scenes of Macbeth ‘the theory of the divine right of kings and its place in the Great Chain of Being is made one with nature’, and that the hurlyburly of language invades this metaphysical hierarchy to interrupt its ‘“natural” quality’ (Evans, 1989: 114). We are back, then, to the competing poststructuralist language schemas of Lacan’s pseudo-monarchical stratifications and the systematized chaos of Derridean dissemination.

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To borrow the terminology of thermodynamics, Lacan’s schema can be said to have low entropy in the sense that it has a defined shape or composition, while Derrida’s schema can be said to have high entropy because its constituent parts – the signifiers – can be rearranged with greater variety because they are not tied to any master signifiers or a particular spatial arrangement. How we tend to think communication works and how we experience communication working are often very different, and the mind-bending question of time troubles contemporary physicists along similar lines. What time is now when the light from distant stellar objects takes so long to reach us? And if the universe is expanding at an exponential rate, with time as a function of distance, how does this alter the way we talk about time? These questions no doubt massively oversimplify complex scientific issues, but it is clear that our long-held assumptions about time are being challenged by the speculations of modern science. So, just as an experiential rift splits theories or assumptions of a natural hierarchy in the signifying chain from the more flexible exchange of signifiers in everyday practice, any clear-cut or unified sense of time we might have seems out of step with rigorous examinations of time’s flow. In Macbeth, the prophetic utterances of the witches interrupt any linear quality of time assumed to be natural or obvious. Complicit with the amphibologies on the heath, we seated in the theatre or at home reading are privy to knowledge Macbeth has yet to receive, and the news Rosse soon breaks confirms the witches’ prophecy as a trace of the future that invades the present, especially as Macbeth inherits the title of a traitor. Before possible routes to accession can be mapped out, before plots can be hatched and considered, the witches greet Banquo with predictions that prematurely divide him from Macbeth: 1 WITCH  Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. 2 WITCH  Not so happy, yet much happier. 3 WITCH  Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none. (1.3.65–7) These contradictory foresights describe Banquo as both inferior and superior to Macbeth, a father of kings without his own crown, a linguistic pattern of foul fairness where paradoxes end up being accurate. Macbeth’s advancement validates what the witches perplexingly say, and this amphibological enmeshment of the fair with the foul also enmeshes the past and present with the future as the unfolding action bears out the strange intelligence of their equivocations.



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Television series Battlestar Galactica, one of the most exhaustive, impressive and critically acclaimed manifestations of the apocalyptic trend in science fiction, contains original and delicate portrayals of prophesying covens that have a similar plot function to Shakespeare’s weird threesome. A reworking of an earlier series, Battlestar pitches the viewer between two apocalypses, the one with which it begins and the one it hurtles towards. Set in an unknown galaxy sometime in the apparent future, it follows the desperate survivors of a nuclear attack inflicted by the cylons, servant robots who have evolved into organisms indistinguishable from humans and intent on blasting their former slave masters out of existence. Pursued across space by the cylons, a fleet led by the last military battlestar, the Galactica, searches for the mythical planet Earth, described in the holy books as the site of a new beginning for humanity. This series of prophecies influences the shared dreams of three pivotal female characters, elliptical providential visions that echo the witches’ riddles, hazing around the edges just enough to fit the interests not only of each dreamer’s individual circumstances but also fuelling the vain hopes or fears of all those close to them. As Battlestar develops, human polytheism and cylon monotheism overlap, pointing man and machine towards a common end, with the tripped-out, celestial visions of another seer, Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace, acting as psychedelic signposts on the race to Earth. As the series unfolds, Starbuck herself becomes the focus of cryptic addresses made by clairvoyant creatures known as hybrids. Plugged into the mainframe of the cylon mother ship, the hybrids speak in a lyrical computer code that, in its poetry, often steps beyond mere programming to become ambiguous divinations upon which Starbuck’s fate seems to depend. Throughout Battlestar, the sacred, dreamed or computerized predictions that propel the action only make sense, like the riddles of the witches, in retrospect, their slippery truth apparent once the struggle between human and cylon has concluded. Needless to say, what seems like a conclusion to the series turns out to be a deferral, a subtle extension of confusion, a question answered with another question: the show’s timeframe is stitched into mortal human existence in this galaxy, the finality of the apocalypse and the new, heavenly dawn it heralds put off as we are returned to the coffee-fuelled hustle and bustle of a recognizable New York day, with the events of Battlestar revealed as the prelude to our own history on Earth. We are still here, but, unbeknown to us, as the offspring of a union between biology and machinery. Derrida tells us that ‘the future is not present, but there is an opening onto it’ (Derrida and Ferraris, 2001: 20, original emphasis). Lady Macbeth, like ‘Starbuck’ and the dreaming threesome in Battlestar, becomes a devoted

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disciple to the trace that worms its way through this opening, welcoming home her victorious husband with a redaction of the fortunes foretold for him: ‘Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! | Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter!’ (1.5.54–5). Divination rends open a fissure from the here and now to the future-to-come, a liminal portal through which Lady Macbeth steps boldly: Thy letters have transported me beyond This ignorant present, and I feel now The future in the instant. (1.5.56–8) The future may not be present but its trace teases Lady Macbeth with augured clarity beyond the opacity of the moment, beyond a present always shadowed by future unknowns. And yet the tantalizing future laden with riches becomes a Pandora’s Box that releases hope first and holds back Macbeth’s disgrace: past the glory set out in the letters lie a litany of horrors waiting to mark his short, grotesque reign as a tyrannous interregnum too hideous and unfortunate to be mentioned. As sure as Macbeth’s glory is, the royal ascent of Banquo’s bloodline must, on the clairvoyant witches’ say-so, be certain too. Time brings hazards as well as gifts. And time is never done. Macbeth uses ‘done’ to mean both ‘finished’ and ‘executed’: ‘If it were done, when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well | It were done quickly’ (1.7.1–2). In other words, if Duncan’s assassination could be over with when carried out, without any later repercussions, then it should be carried out quickly. Like time and an apocalyptic language, the deadly deed Macbeth contemplates will never attain the fullness or completion ensured by a transcendental signified, by the Book of Revelation’s divine, Christian intervention in which the seventh and final angel of Judgement Day heralds ‘a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done’ (Rev. 16.17). The Seventh Seal ends with this very passage, an acknowledgement of both the apocalyptic carnage of the Black Death and the arrival of Death personified to collect his victims. Shakespeare, mining the same source as Bergman, takes an interest in how exactly time is done, how it is produced and how it finishes. M. M. Mahood focused on the use of ‘done’ in Macbeth and suggested that, because Fleance escapes the murderers sent to kill him and Banquo, Lady Macbeth’s assertion that ‘what’s done is done’ (3.2.12) is inaccurate. On the contrary, Mahood proposed, with Fleance alive the future envisaged by the witches, one that sees Macbeth’s horrid deed inadvertently reward Banquo’s progeny with



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the crown, still lurks on the horizon: completion remains beyond reach, slipping through Macbeth’s fingers, and all that can be done is not done if Banquo’s descendants live to be kings (Mahood, 1957, 136–41). According to Mahood, this results from the play’s primary dramatic conflict between a religious notion of time ‘in which the change of hour and season .  .  . symbolises both the impermanence of things within time and their extratemporal permanence’ and an irreligious notion of time as ‘the momentous event alone’ or ‘duration alone’ (ibid., 132). Taking Mahood’s insight on, the ‘surcease’ and the corresponding ‘success’ wanted by Macbeth (1.7.4), a combination that supplies unswerving resolution, is always deferred, pushed back to that ever-distant eschatological point at which everything – language, time, existence on and off the stage – is done and dusted, wrapped up, completed or obliterated. Analysing the discursive strategies of the millennial tradition, Stephen D. O’Leary notes that apocalyptic rhetoric imposes ‘a teleological structure upon the human experience of time’ (O’Leary, 1998: 197), an illusory linear construction shattered in Macbeth by temporal shifts. From his first engagement with the time-bending witches, Macbeth anxiously recognizes that, rather than the potential completion suggested by apocalyptic teleology, the human experience of time is always unfinished, incomplete or undone: Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings. My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man, That function is smother’d in surmise, And nothing is, but what is not. (1.3.137–42) Kermode suggests that in this aside ‘the present is no longer present, the unacted future has occupied its place’ (Kermode, 2000: 205). But this temporal exchange does not fully displace the present by giving up all current events in return for those still to be acted – and Kermode’s choice of words, perhaps deliberately given the great command he had of everything Shakespearean, invoke the events still to come in a play that acts out an apocalyptic landscape in lieu of the event itself, an event that dramaturgically, qua tragedy, it withholds. Instead, the surmise, or ‘slight trace’ (OED), of the future marks the instant so that the instant differs from itself, with the outcome that Macbeth’s actions are at once motivated and hampered by ideas rooted in the hereafter.

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Macbeth’s shaken conception of his unified self finds articulation in the conflation of ‘single’ as ‘unaccompanied or unsupported by others’ and ‘slight, poor, trivial’ (OED). Shakespeare employs the latter meaning in The Second Part of King Henry IV when the Lord Chief Justice ridicules Falstaff’s claim to youth: ‘Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?’ (1.2.181–3). At the other end of the scale, Iago puts Brabantio’s influence as double that of the Duke’s in Othello. ‘Single’ as both withered and individual articulates the threat to the protagonist’s unity from fearful imaginings. In an analysis of sovereignty in Macbeth, Richard Horwich described ‘wholeness, completeness, or coherence’ as the ‘unattainable condition’ sought by the play’s dramatis personae (Horwich, 1978: 366). More than that, in a fallen world equivocation – coherence or incoherence veiled as its other – is the condition of mankind, the condition of language and the condition of time, which is never done and never arrives at the dreaded midnight hour. What happens if the hereafter’s tremendous horror story does arrive? If the gargoyle-guarded clock in the apocalyptic dream does strike twelve, the dreamer reaches the final step, and the ground cracks open to spit out the dead and swallow her whole? Divided into twelve chapters, each a minute closer to midnight, Alan Moore’s celebrated graphic novel Watchmen imagines a dark, alternate twentieth-century history in which outlawed superheroes work covertly for the American government. As nuclear war with the Soviet Union looms, the plot builds up to the fake apocalypse of a midnight alien invasion staged to unite the Cold War superpowers against a fictitious common enemy. Millions of lives are still sacrificed by a killing spree calculated to be a lesser evil than nuclear annihilation. The mastermind of the hoax, retired superhero Ozymandias, asks Dr Manhattan if what he did was right in the end. Dr Manhattan, a super being alienated from humanity by the ability to understand time and space outside the finitude of human comprehension, informs him that nothing ever ends, differentiating his godlike insight from mortal experience. As Derrida tells us, the imminence of our death drives us to act now, and this tension between present action and future imaginings characterizes humanity: ‘Only a mortal can speak of the future in this sense, a god could never do so’ (Derrida and Ferraris, 2001: 23). Mortality entails a structure of living whereby a future trace always already penetrates the present so that time, like language, is defined by difference, a difference only erased by the apocalyptic Logos that delivers us, as Macbeth puts it, to the ‘last syllable of recorded time’ (5.5.21). Macbeth’s response to Lady Macbeth’s death



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paraphrases the angel that heralds Armageddon with the cry ‘that there should be time no longer’ (Rev. 10.5–6). Until that day, man can never be ‘perfect; | Whole as the marble, founded as the rock’ (3.4.20–1). Here Shakespeare echoes a commonplace idea straightforwardly explained in Sophonisba, his fellow playwright John Marston’s witchcraft play in which the star-crossed protagonist of the title says that ‘Gods naught foresee, but see, for to their eyes | Naught is to come, or past’ (sig.C2v, original emphasis). In Macbeth, time’s imperfect state, a state caused by the prophecies that mediate godlike temporal omniscience to earth-bound foresight, keeps the murder of Duncan, even when done, incomplete. The rewards for which Macbeth commits regicide are under threat beyond the present, where Fleance ‘the grown serpent lies’ and ‘in time will venom breed’ (3.4.28–9). Watching the play, James I may have considered himself real-life evidence that time’s insistent, inconclusive pace would eventually undo Macbeth, as it did the anti-hero’s historically documented counterpart.

Imperfect Speakers If temporal equivocation is one condition of Macbeth, linguistic equivocation leads to the plotting and execution of Duncan’s murder as well as the apocalyptic aftermath of tyranny. Rhetorical invasions by the future co­exist, catalyse even, tropes of dishonourable honour and vice-like virtues. Jonathan Goldberg explores Macbeth’s relationship to its sources, principally Holinshed, in order to consider history – in this case the history Shakespeare draws on for the play – as a ‘heterogeneous dispersal’ rather than linear, homogeneous and fully recoverable (Goldberg, 1987: 247). Alternatively, the relationship can be inverted so that we can look at the different aspects of Holinshed brought together by Shakespeare so as to understand the many, dispersed meanings of honour and dishonour, virtue and vice, in the play. Duncan has usually been associated with Christian purity, a whiter-thanwhite image frequently emphasized in performance by a demeanour of beneficence. Orgel debunks this common saintly image, contending that, in practice, ‘Duncan’s rule is utterly chaotic, and maintaining it depends on constant warfare’ (Orgel, 1999: 146). Holinshed’s Chronicles bear this out, describing the historical Duncane’s administration as ‘feeble and slouthfull’ (Holinshed, 1587: 171). Taking this into account, the witches’ ‘hurlyburly’ (1.1.3) could refer to the disorder already swirling around them in Scotland and not just the further troubles they mystically foresee, while Duncan’s

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proclamation of Malcolm as next in line to the throne becomes a cunning attempt to trump a legitimate claim, with the title of Thane of Cawdor a consolation prize for Macbeth. Holinshed reported that when Duncane made Malcolme Prince of Cumberland, a position always given to the future king, Macbeth ‘began to take counsell how he might usurpe the kingdome by force, having a just quarell so to do’ (ibid.). Shakespeare’s audience may well have known the histories drawn on in the play, but political astuteness probably dictated that the text itself should deviate from Holinshed’s historical commentary, which suggests that the nemesis of James I’s supposed forefathers had legitimate pretensions to the throne. Prudently, Shakespeare never has Macbeth state this claim and instead has him ascribe to fortune the role of kingmaker: ‘If Chance will have me King, why, Chance may crown me, | Without my stir’ (1.3.144–5). The usurpation that Holinshed explains as the understandable response to an illegitimately thwarted claim, Shakespeare turns into an abominable act carried out by a reluctant antihero, a deft move from honour towards dishonour that, by resisting completion, elegantly avoids rigid moral alignment. Following this movement, we can see in the bleeding Captain’s words a trace of dishonour in the honour credited to Macbeth: For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name), Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish’d steel, Which smok’d with bloody execution, Like Valour’s minion, carv’d out his passage, Till he fac’d the slave; Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him, Till he unseam’d him from the nave to th’chops, And fix’d his head upon our battlements. (1.2.16–23) On the one side, the Captain praises Macbeth’s bravery with awe and respect, presenting an honourable and fearless warrior who scorns fickle fortune’s slings and arrows. On the other side, the Captain synchronously narrates a tale about a ruthless warrior who punished Macdonwald’s treachery without words or ceremony, terminating the rebel’s life by cutting open his torso. At first, the Captain calls Macdonwald and Macbeth ‘two spent swimmers, that do cling together | And choke their art’ (1.2.8–9), and as Berger insisted this simile hints at the problems in Scottish society that make both figures in the play ‘equally victims of a common social weather’ (Berger, 1980: 8). Macbeth eventually takes Macdonwald’s place as the



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decapitated traitor when Macduff presents the tyrant’s severed head to Malcolm but, in addition, the connecting image of the two tired swimmers struggling together taints Macbeth’s honour with Macdonwald’s dishonour from the start. Reporting the second phase of the battle at Fife, the Captain once again offers Duncan a gentle clue to oncoming dangers: ‘So from that spring, whence comfort seem’d to come, | Discomfort swells. Mark, King of Scotland, mark’ (1.2.27–8). A trace of dishonour emerges from the very place where Macbeth’s honour originates, and soon the sword of honour that unseamed Macdonwald becomes the diminished dagger of disgrace (2.1.33–8), a metaphor for the shame of needless regicide. In Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta the Captain’s speech is used to stress the moral ambiguity of its anti-superhero, V, a lone vigilante inspired by Guy Fawkes who single-handedly wages a terrorist campaign of resistance that builds towards blowing up the Houses of Parliament in a fascistic, dystopian London. Interrupting an attempted rape, V repeats the speech from Macbeth, terrifying victim and perpetrators alike. Laced with images concurrently appealing and unappealing, the Captain’s monologue introduces Macbeth and V with double-edged clues to their qualities and their ultimately questionable legacies. James McTeigue’s 2006 film adaptation of V for Vendetta precedes this scene with Lewis Prothero, an irascible, fanatical TV presenter in the evangelically conservative mould of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, justifying the totalitarian regime’s agenda. Prothero’s reminder to his viewers of the omniscience of judgement pointedly refuses to dissociate God from Britain’s High Chancellor, a politico-religious equivocation with an apocalyptic tone that leads into the recitation from Macbeth. Shakespeare flags up Macbeth’s potential dishonour with further additions to his source. According to Holinshed, Makbeth finds ‘Makdowald lieng dead there amongst the residue of the slaine bodies’, which include Makdowald’s wife and children whom he killed rather than allow to be executed as an example to others (Holinshed, 1587: 169). However, Shakespeare has Macbeth brutally kill Macdonwald, a retributive mutilation more suited to the ‘dead butcher’ (5.9.35) of Malcolm’s obituary than the compromised hero of the Captain’s eulogy. In this sense, the honour of violence depends upon the authorizing voice and whether or not the victims are represented as worthy of grief: Duncan endorses the actions of his ‘valiant cousin’ (1.2.24) because they coincide with allegiance to the king, while Young Siward dies ‘like a man’ (5.9.9), his masculinity affirmed by violent support of the new state’s cause. Macbeth, however, makes a mockery of Duncan’s endorsement by reprising the ominous manner in which he

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rips up Macdonwald’s body with first regicide and then his extreme brutality as king. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2007 production of the play accentuated the perilous omens lurking in Macbeth’s initial valour. Director Conall Morrison began with a silent enactment of the battle at Fife which showed Patrick O’Kane’s Macbeth slaughter his way to the front of the stage where, after a brief moment of indifferent reflection, he broke the neck of a crying baby. Not only did Morrison’s exergue anticipate the play’s images of hellish or heavenly babes, it also visually dramatized in clear terms what the text adroitly hints at, extracting the hidden signs of Macbeth’s dishonour from the Captain’s ill-boding speech of praise. Paving the way for dishonourable regicide, the generative, anarchic symbiosis of treason and amphibology pervades the exchange between Banquo and Macbeth in the castle at Inverness: BANQUO MACBETH

I dreamt last night of the three Weïrd Sisters: To you they have show’d some truth. I think not of them: Yet, when we can entreat an hour to serve, We would spend it in some words upon that business, If you would grant the time. (2.1.20–4)

Banquo serves up a deft equivocation that is both a subtle invitation and an innocent statement of fact: the oneiric appearance of the witches lies out of his conscious control, suggesting no underhand motive, but he goes on to remind Macbeth of the full extent of the partially fulfilled prophecies. Should the predictions of the witches come to pass entirely, Macbeth’s reign will be usurped by Banquo’s lineage, and the allusion to this predicted status quo relays a quiet, tentative willingness to negotiate the terms for throne-snatching plans. Macbeth bats back with a lie that politicizes the situation as he deceives his ally for the first time, an untruth then compounded by rhetoric. Now set on Duncan’s murder, Macbeth uses the royal ‘we’ to initiate discussion, a seemingly innocent reference to the two interlocutors that diplomatically divulges Macbeth’s impending grab for power. When Banquo agrees in principal to talks, Macbeth lays out the basis for negotiation: If you shall cleave to my consent, when ‘tis, It shall make honour for you. (2.1.25–6)



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With duplicitous ambiguity Macbeth tries to tease the general on side, implying that Banquo’s allegiance in the event of Duncan’s death will elicit rewards. A delicate admission amid the canvassing it may be, but it is a step too far: Banquo’s suspicions are aroused and he senses something treasonable in the space Macbeth exploits between the material honours on offer and the honour of integrity. Displaying the sharpness that, from this instant, threatens Macbeth, Banquo counters with an equivocation that flips Macbeth’s material notion of honour on its two-faced head: So I lose none In seeking to augment it, but still keep My bosom franchis’d, and allegiance clear, I shall be counsell’d. (2.1.26–9) Watching his step, Banquo addresses Duncan’s natural or unnatural death without declaring any commitment to treason or any suspicion of foul play, avoiding criticisms that might endanger him. In the event of Duncan’s natural death Banquo would lose no honour in increasing his status innocently and without guilt. Having said that, Banquo can accept Macbeth’s counsel so long as he follows the correct protocol of fealty and serves one lord at a time, side-stepping any vague, possibly underhand, political manoeuvres, a steadfastness that resists the treasonable act bubbling under the surface of this conversation. Compliance with any action against the current king would make Banquo guilty by implication, so he affirms personal, human honour ahead of the honour of titles and distinctions gained by improper, dishonourable means. Although Banquo diverges from Macbeth’s devious motives, treasonous amphibologies force him to adopt a reciprocally equivocal mode of address, reproducing the non-committal language of a hitherto clandestine insurgency. If, as Mullaney puts it, ‘amphibology marks an aspect of language that neither treason nor authority can control’ (Mullaney, 1988: 125), then both Macbeth and Banquo can be thought of as at the mercy of the linguistic forces unleashed in Macbeth, at the mercy of the naïve hopes and fears on which, for Puttenham, amphibology preys. Later, Macbeth’s accession to the throne proves the amphibologies of the witches to be genuine prophecies, offering encouragement to Banquo: ‘May they not be my oracles as well, | And set me up in hope?’ (3.1.9–10). Despite suspicions that Macbeth ‘play’dst most foully’ for the crown (3.1.3), Banquo feels the seductive pull of supernatural promises that beckon him towards a tense,

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dishonourable feudal allegiance, his silence compliant with the treacherous murder of the king. Even Macduff, the tyrant-killing action man, does not escape the pattern of honour presented as dishonour. Abandoned, Lady Macduff questions her husband’s motives: LADY MACDUFF ROSSE LADY MACDUFF ROSSE

What had he done, to make him fly the land? You must have patience, Madam. He had none: His flight was madness: when our actions do not, Our fears do make us traitors. You know not, Whether it was his wisdom, or his fear. (4.2.1–5)

Lady Macduff sees only guilt in Macduff’s departure for England, but Rosse encourages endurance through Scotland’s deepening sedition. Picking up on Lady Macduff’s infuriation, Rupert Goold’s 2007 production of Macbeth at London’s Gielgud Theatre made Rosse a well-meaning bureaucrat weakly compliant with the Stalinist oppression of the production’s Soviet setting. Contrary to Goold’s interpretation, Rosse voluntarily puts himself in the way of considerable harm with his appearance at Macduff’s castle in Fife: ‘I am so much a fool, should I stay longer, | It would be my disgrace, and your discomfort’ (4.2.28–9). Rosse’s defence of a covert departure made amid uncontrollable circumstances maintains the possibility of Macduff’s honour, an honourable act of diplomacy carried out by a man in the dishonourable employment of a dictator. With the tempestuous imagery of the play’s initial thunder and lightning, Rosse goes on to chart this ebb and flow of commitments: I dare not speak much further: But cruel are the times, when we are traitors, And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumour From what we fear, yet know not what we fear, But float upon a wild and violent sea. (4.2.17–21) Compromised by his delicate political position, Rosse is reluctant to engage with the wild, rebellious flow of meanings ungoverned by the hierarchical institutions of Macbeth. These stormy, unpredictable movements scramble



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any linear time scale or univocal meaning desired by Christian metaphysics and the tenuous yet complicated omerta codes of fealty, so that treachery cannot be recognized as such even by its agents. And just when Scotland seems at its nadir, both Macduff and Malcolm are corrupted by the trace of vice that penetrates virtue. At the heart of their introspective exchange, Malcolm, Scottish king-in-waiting, revives the image of the bloody dagger that maims Scotland: ‘Each new day a gash | Is added to her wounds’, Malcolm says of his beleaguered country (4.3.40–1). Conceding that ‘There would be hands uplifted’ to celebrate his claim (4.3.42), Malcolm tests Macduff’s integrity by pretending to be a wholly unworthy successor: My poor country Shall have more vices than it had before, More suffer, and more sundry ways than ever, By him that shall succeed. (4.3.46–9) A spectral identification occurs between Malcolm and Macbeth, where the restoration of moral purity will not be guaranteed by Malcolm’s supposedly debauched kingship, his pretence aligning him with the vices of a tyrant. Subsequently convinced by Macduff’s honest despair, Malcolm disclaims the character of a horrid future-king he has created: I put myself to thy direction, and Unspeak mine own detraction; here abjure The taints and blames I laid upon myself, For strangers to my nature. (4.3.122–5) The reconstitution of his morality disavows the vices he confessed as merely a fiction, where the negative qualities that threatened to blight his reign as king of Scotland are now unknown to him, providing hope for Scotland. Horwich claimed that Malcolm’s simple dismissal of vices shows no understanding of the very human struggle against vice, and this inability to understand ‘complex truths does not augur well for the prospects of renewed harmony and order in Scotland’ (Horwich, 1978: 370). Put in Derridean terms, Malcolm’s disavowal stalks him in the form of the trace. Let’s recap Derrida’s notion of dissemination, through which meaning is produced via a matrix of connecting traces between terms and their

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differentiating others. To return to our earlier example, when I describe ‘boy’ as ‘not girl’, I require the term ‘girl’ in order to convey what I mean by ‘boy’, bonding two apparently oppositional terms to the extent that the meaning of ‘boy’ depends on the trace of ‘girl’. This trace deconstructs binary oppositions such as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, which are usually arranged according to a hierarchy where one term enjoys cultural superiority over the other. As a knock-on effect of this linguistic procedure, the signifier, without access to stand-alone metaphysical concepts in the world outside language, can no longer be seen as fully present with regard to its meaning. Furthermore, this dissemination, this continual movement of differences along the signifying chain, defers conclusiveness or full presence. So, in short, language does not fall fully formed from the sky but is, rather, the historical product of an ongoing, unfolding process. Another coinage Derrida uses to unite the differing and deferring axes of dissemination is differance – with an ‘a’. Deriving from the French verb différer, meaning both ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’, Derrida’s neologism highlights the graphocentricity of language: to distinguish his différance from the standard différence, the term has to be seen in writing. No distinction can be made on a phonetic level, an instance of writing taking centre stage and a subversion of the tendency, from Plato to Saussure, to damn writing as speech’s parasitic supplement. Derrida calls this tradition phonocentric logocentrism because it associates speech with rationality, an association philosophy has formalized but which has as one of its foundational premises the spoken ‘Word’ that begins the Gospel of St John whereby a religious Logos does drop language fully formed from the sky. By the blazing cacophonies of its apocalyptic arrival, such a Logos could one day burst through the clouds and arrest differance, ensuring, in tandem with the Judgement of mankind, the unequivocal fullness of the signifier. The two go hand in hand. Which actions lead to salvation and which to damnation answers a key ethical and linguistic question: what definitively constitutes goodness or badness, without qualification, without exception, without equivocation? Derrida, of course, is far too cute to completely rule out or ridicule messianic possibilities, religious or not, but for now the clouds remain intact, the snatching demons subterranean still, the horns of the Apocalypse yet to be blown by angelic lips and equivocation stands as the general condition of a mutable language orchestrated by the trace of the other always already concealed within the selfsame, a trace that links apparent opposites such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘boy’ or ‘girl’.



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As Malcolm denounces all the sins and imperfections he laid upon himself, he presents the dissimulation of himself, the vices he disavows still coiled asp-like, ready to invade and corrupt the virtues that befit a king. Though he calls his self-defamation just a fiction, the trace of that fiction remains as a threat and this naïve comprehension of virtue and vice convinces Horwich that Malcolm ‘may be seen as, potentially, a Macbeth in embryo’ (Horwich, 1978: 371). At the moment of recoiling, professing the opposite to absolve himself and give Scotland hope, Malcolm fits into the riddling scheme of foul fairness that veils dishonour as honour and, like the trace that cannot ‘be summed up in the simplicity of a present’ (Derrida, 1997: 66), he cannot be absolutely virtuous or wholly good. Berger feels that ‘the prowess by which [Macbeth] preserves Duncan’s kingdom is at the same time a claim to praise and admiration worthy of a king’ (Berger, 1980: 19), and this counterintuitive warning to Scotland’s future also applies in reverse to Malcolm, whose claims to kingly worth establish his conceivable unworthiness. The throne within touching distance, Malcolm’s ‘first false speaking’ (4.3.130) evinces his case in a demonstration accompanied by its own undermining logic. Nonplussed Macduff, silenced by Malcolm’s turnaround, eventually offers a pensive, confused response to the disavowal: ‘Such welcome and unwelcome things at once, | ’Tis hard to reconcile’ (4.3.138–9). While, as Kathleen McLuskie argues, Malcolm ensures Scotland’s future (McLuskie, 2004: 8), an unwelcome threat is still situated at the margins of Malcolm’s welcome accession. Roman Polanski’s film version of Macbeth ends with a disillusioned Donalbain entering the witches’ hovel, an ominous appraisal of Scotland’s prospects that ponders a second strike of violent, unimaginable upheaval and torment. Polanski’s epilogue, like Berger’s view of Macbeth and Macdonwald as victims of a diseased structure, posits a dysfunctional polity in continuous need of a traitor, a role into which Polanski puts Donalbain. Alan Sinfield’s cultural materialist article reads Macbeth in the context of Europe’s sixteenth-century move from feudalism to absolutist states, urging us to consider the play as a dramatization of the clash between ideologies that see the king as untouchable, a position advocated by King James I, and dissident standpoints that, inspired by George Buchanan’s writings, see the people as the source of political power. For Sinfield, the exchange between Malcolm and Macduff indicates how a tyrant and a good king can overlap in qualities (Sinfield, 1986). The slaughter of Macduff’s family barbarously displays Macbeth’s destruction of purity in the name of disorder, but Macduff still finds himself caught up in the bewildering chaos of dishonourable

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honour, first by the disgust of his deserted wife and then by the vices he allows Malcolm. Sinfield writes that ‘Macduff is prepared to accept considerable threats to the welfare of Scotland’ (ibid., 70), insisting that Malcolm, when king, can indulge his lust and get away with it: You may Convey your pleasures in a spacious plenty, And yet seem cold – the time you may so hoodwink: We have willing dames enough. (4.3.70–3) Encouraging Malcolm to appear virtuous, Macduff echoes Lady Macbeth’s advice to Macbeth: ‘To beguile the time, | Look like the time’ (1.5.63–4). When Macbeth eventually acquiesces he resolves to ‘mock the time with fairest show’ (1.7.82). By sanctioning Malcolm’s dissimulated vices, Macduff yields the conditions necessary for those vices to emerge, occupying the same position in relation to Malcolm as Lady Macbeth does in relation to Macbeth. He may concede that ‘avarice | Sticks deeper’ than womanizing, but he assures Malcolm that his greed will also be catered for regardless: ‘Scotland hath foisons to fill up your will’ (4.3.84–5, 88). Only Malcolm’s apocalyptic prediction of a reign that will ‘Uproar the universal peace, confound | All unity on earth’ (4.3.99–100) disheartens Macduff, a belated abhorrence that nostalgically mourns a romanticized past but still excuses credible threats to any new order. Early on in Macbeth the ‘intractability of language’ announces a more ingrained disorder than the one just defeated (Evans, 1989: 114), and the dialogue Malcolm and Macduff share inadvertently states the likelihood of further disorder. Restricted by the perverse political chains that, as Rosse tells us, hide treachery from its unwitting perpetrators, neither Malcolm nor Macduff can know exactly what they mean as speakers. Abandoning the analytic quality that, albeit malevolently, deciphered the amphibologies of the witches, Macbeth presumes to see and hear precisely what the three apparitions conjured by the witches mean, failing to interpret the clues to his demise and only belatedly realizing what he calls, in one of the play’s most commented-on lines, ‘th’equivocation of the fiend, | That lies like truth’ (5.5.43–4). Macbeth’s corporeal dramatis personae make clear but imperfect statements in contradistinction to the impossible absurdities of the incorporeal witches that ultimately prove true; in a milieu of subtle nuances and withheld intentions, only the witches seem to know exactly what they mean.



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The Soliloquy of Doom Agents of a dark magic who vanish into thin air, the otherworldly witches open a swirling portal through which supernatural expressions of language and time emanate in forms alien to the mortals caught in the Christological eye of this temporal-linguistic storm. Gazing into this inter-realm portal, Macbeth catches sight of Judgement Day in perhaps the play’s most famous soliloquy, an apocalyptic vision laden with the commonplaces of Catholic, pre-Reformation Doom imagery. Troubled by the ongoing and unpredictable effects should Duncan be murdered, he begins by imagining bypassing the divine judiciary of the afterlife: If th’assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all – here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. (1.7.2–7) Macbeth’s commitment wavers as he contemplates the ramifications of regicide, clinging to the hope that a completed act might also bind up earthly consequences. Willing to risk the searing flames of damnation if success could be assured in the here and now, the karmic return of impartial justice in the present still scares him nevertheless: But in these cases, We still have judgment here; that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague th’inventor: this even-handed Justice Commends th’ingredience of our poison’d chalice To our own lips. (1.7.7–12) Blood-drenched examples will indeed return with violent intent in the current life when a vengeful Macduff cuts off Macbeth’s head, while Banquo’s ghost serves up a message from the hereafter that unavoidable Judgement lies in wait. In no time at all, however, Macbeth’s thoughts turn again to the damnation he so casually, cavalierly dismissed.

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Retributive, human justice makes way for the Last Judgement that represents the final, unused building block in the open-ended apocalyptic construction of language and Shakespearean tragedy, a linguistic and dramaturgical Armageddon present as a possibility and absent as an actual, arrived occurrence. Fantastical and action-packed, the triumph of the skies never materializes but offers, in exchange for its non-arrival, a religious idiom in which ineffable metaphysical concepts such as messianic resolution, stability and arrival can be phrased, an eschatological lexicon that breaches the wall separating presence and absence with heavenly ciphers. So although Shakespeare does not include the supernatural arrival that, with deities such as Jupiter, Hymen and Diana, delivers happy endings to some comedies, this unseen sine qua non of tragedy, this prerequisite of apocalyptic absence, still obsesses a hyperactively meditative Macbeth: Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d, against The deep damnation of his taking-off; And Pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s Cherubins, hors’d Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind. (1.7.16–25) Whereas Hamlet must obey an untrustworthy ghost to kill an untrust­ worthy king, Macbeth’s target carries out his regal duties with the humility and clarity required of a symbolic Father. Jenny Wormald explains that Scots saw the Gunpowder Plot as parricide as well as treason, the political horror reinforced with a ‘personal chill particularly associated with the Scottish concept of their king as father not of their country but of themselves’ (Wormald, 1985: 164). Lady Macbeth cannot kill a sleeping Duncan because he successfully functions as the Name-of-the-Father, so much so that she sees her own father in the king’s visage: ‘Had he not resembled | My father as he slept, I had done’t’ (2.2.12–13). In the lonely depths of his Inverness stronghold, Macbeth associates Duncan’s unlawful death with the heavenly Father atop the paternal hierarchy and His direct, unmediated torrent of omniscient scorn. Welcome to the hellish castle of the apocalypse; perhaps this is the castle the gargoyle



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overlooks in the apocalyptic dream, with Hamlet waiting in the graveyard below. Macbeth weighs his sin against the heavenly trumps that will rouse the dead and sing his crime to the universe, an angelic music revealed to St John of Patmos who saw that ‘a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which [he] heard was as it were of a trumpet talking’. Seven angels opened one each of the book’s seven seals in John’s wild, psychedelic ecstasy, ‘and to them were given seven trumpets’ (Rev. 4.1, 8.2). One of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets fuses the ‘four angels standing on the four corners of the earth’ (Rev. 7.1) with the horn-blowing cherubim of chancel arch Dooms, imploring them to resuscitate deceased souls as well as those yet to die, poeticizing, as Marston does in Sophonisba, the timeless eternity of gods and the godlike: At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise From death, you numberlesse infinities Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe, All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow. (Donne: 8) Adorning the north wall of the nave at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, rests an extant but faded Doom painting replete with trumpeting angels, conventions of the art form. Shakespeare’s hometown, Stratford-uponAvon, is not far from here, linked to Cirencester by a stretch of the Roman Fosse Way, which is now the A429 that cuts across Gloucestershire and runs directly through Stow-on-the-Wold. Just east of Stow, on the A44, is Oddington. Driving there followed a circuitous route around – rather than through – the Vale of Evesham, as many of the smaller roads into the county were closed off due to a peculiar repeat of the floods that drowned this area earlier that particular year, cataclysmic heavy rain that also hindered my visit to Fairford’s St Mary’s Church in another spookily apt reminder of the ominous and fearful natural forces that assail the world in St John’s fantasy. Like those usually found above the chancel arch, the painting at St Nicholas’s mixes the Last Judgement with the parable of the sheep and the goats (Mt. 25.31-46), depicting Christ enthroned in heaven above the moon, surrounded by apostles and saints (Figure 4.1). To the right of the Logos the righteous ascend into heaven, and to his left the wicked are sent down to a hell-mouth that gobbles them up the way the Rose Theatre’s hell-mouth prop may have done in performances of Marlowe’s

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Figure 4.1  Doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire.

Figure 4.2  Detail of the Doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire, showing two ‘trumpet-tongu’d’ angels resurrecting the dead.

Doctor Faustus. Below the moon can be seen the influence of the Book of Revelation as two angels at Christ’s feet sound their instruments to revive the dead who rise at the bottom of the tableau (Figure 4.2). Orders of apocalyptic angels with trumpets were often seen in apocalyptic iconography, also appearing in the stained glass of St Mary’s Church (Figure 4.3).



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Figure 4.3  Detail of the stained glass depiction of the Doom at St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire, with two trumpet-wielding angels.

Sometimes these angels were the primary focus of a Doom. Hidden in Oxfordshire, South Leigh can be so quiet you might think the world really had ended. Parking the car by some disused garages, I wandered round the small, seemingly deserted village on a quiet Saturday afternoon amusing myself by imagining that this was the calm, leafy and resolutely genteel landscape of post-apocalyptic middle England. Housed in the village church of St James the Great is possibly my favourite Doom painting, a wonderfully preserved piece that spreads out from the chancel arch over the north and south walls as if reaching out to engulf the building, a cracking reminder of the busy artistic canvas a church interior once resembled and worth reproducing here in its entirety to relay an albeit slightly faded idea of what a medieval or early modern churchgoer would have seen above the chancel arch as they sat in the pews week after week (Figure 4.4). Centrepieces of the scene, the two swooping angels are, in Christ’s absence, flanked by two Latin messages that deliver His judgement. We have already seen the white angel close up (back in Figure 2.4) reviving the souls headed for heaven under the benign banner that reads ‘Come ye blessed of my Father’, and – mark, Macbeth, mark! –the appropriately attired red angel blasts to life the damned from under the other, baleful banner that reads ‘Depart, ye cursed’ as these cursed are herded to hell by a demon and a slithering snake (Figure 4.5). One of the resurrected souls doomed to eternal fires buries her head in her hands, inconsolable. ‘Alas’,

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Figure 4.4  Doom painting at St James the Great, South Leigh, Oxfordshire.

Figure 4.5  Doom painting at St James the Great, South Leigh, Oxfordshire, showing a red angel blasting the damned to hell.

wails an Evil Soul in the Wakefield mystery cycle’s Judgement, ‘I hear that horn that calls us to our doom’ (Wakefield: 440). Nowhere in the desolation of Macbeth, austere Scottish vistas tarnished by warfare and made strange by witchcraft, do the last days feel closer than when these winged harbingers swoop vengefully through Macbeth’s



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nightmare. Throughout the play their blasts warp into the sound of the death knell, a bell that summons Duncan ‘to Heaven, or to Hell’ (2.1.64) and which Lady Macbeth hears as the ‘fatal bellman’ (2.2.3). Ringing again as Macduff discovers a slaughtered Duncan, Lady Macbeth calls the clanging ‘a hideous trumpet’ (2.3.80). Preparing for the final battle, Macbeth, daring the universe to take its best apocalyptic shot at him, cries out ‘Ring the alarum bell!–Blow, wind! come, wrack! (5.5.51), while immediately after Macduff orders his troops to let the ‘trumpets speak; give them all breath, | Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death’ (5.6.9–10). Current revivifications of the trumpeting figures of Doom include Battlestar Galactica’s reckless but brilliant fighter pilot Starbuck, who develops into a futuristic incarnation of these painted angels, a seraphic warrior haunted by coruscating astral images that seem to guide her destiny through the war between human and cylon. Lead to her apparent demise by her determination to uncover the secrets of this glittering array of galactic signifiers, Starbuck returns from the dead to be greeted as an angel by some, a demon by others and as the neutral, disinterested harbinger of death by the witchlike hybrids that entice her to decode their digitized prognostications. Like the angels with which Shakespeare would have been familiar, Starbuck has a musical instrument that signals the end of humanity, and the simple, eerie piano tune that she always plays without knowing why morphs into Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’, a song that alludes to the fall of Babylon. Scored in her childhood dreams, Starbuck’s haunting tune announces the final, cathartic union of human and cylon that sees both reborn on Earth as a single race of organic mechanisms posited as our ancestors. Other popular references to heaven’s angelic army are more explicit. Scott Stewart’s 2010 film, Legion, takes the plotline of The Terminator and replaces its time-travelling cyborgs and soldiers with fallen angels battling for an unborn child who could save humanity. On the remote edge of the Mojave Desert, customers at the Paradise Falls diner fend off crazed icecream men and bloodthirsty, scatological grandmothers possessed by a disgruntled, disappointed God’s angels. As the beleaguered diners hold out against the swarming masses, trumpet blasts from the sky disperse the clouds, shake the earth and initiate the final stand between the dutiful Gabriel and the honourable but rebellious Michael, convinced that God will be reconciled to his children if the baby of hope survives. A recurrent eschatological conceit, a saviour child appears to John who sees ‘a great wonder in heaven; a woman . . . with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered’ (Rev. 12.1–2). In Macbeth this babe takes a gruesome

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route from the newborn child of pity who rides the trumpet blasts to the newborn child Lady Macbeth sacrifices, one of the barbarous ‘men-children’ her ‘undaunted mettle should compose’ (1.7.73–5). In more hokey fashion, Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy from 1995 imagines an apocryphal twentythird chapter of the Book of Revelation that prophesies a powerful dark soul guarded by a saviour child. Christopher Walken’s vindictive, streetsmart Gabriel leaves heaven to retrieve the soul, hoping to turn the tide of a second war in heaven and restore the angelic orders to God’s affection at mankind’s expense. In search of the saviour child, Gabriel sits on the steps of her school inviting schoolchildren to blow on a special trumpet that shatters the school windows and initiates the film’s concluding celestial battles. Twenty-first century audiences may be less devout than early modern theatregoers, but Shakespeare’s apocalyptic imagery uses a system of representation so appealing that it finds, in either corny or nuanced ways, manifestation throughout our more secular culture. Distressed by the eternal, damned shame regicide will bring, Macbeth fears that trumpet-tongued angels like Gabriel will proclaim his guilt on Judgement Day when the ‘last trumpet’ (Hamlet, 5.1.223) will play and ‘the mystery of God should be finished’ (Rev. 10.7). These fears are echoed in King Richard III as the two murderers dispatched by Richard to kill the Duke of Clarence discuss their homicidal options: 2 M.  1 M.  2 M.  1 M. 

What, shall I stab him as he sleeps? No: he’ll say ‘twas done cowardly, when he wakes. Why, he shall never wake until the great Judgement Day. Why, then he’ll say we stabbed him sleeping. (1.4.99–103)

The First Murderer worries that they will be accused of cowardice when the deafening trumpets blast should they stab the Duke in his sleep, an identical crime to the frenzied stabbing of Duncan in his bed-chamber. Meanwhile, the Second Murderer frightens himself with words that lead him to disentangle the earthly and transcendental aftermath of his actions: 2 M. The urging of that word, ‘Judgement’, hath bred a kind of remorse in me. 1 M.  What, art thou afraid? 2 M. Not to kill him – having a warrant – but to be damned for killing him, from the which no warrant can defend me. (ibid., 1.4.104–9)



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According to the Second Murderer, a ‘passionate humour’ that ‘makes a man a coward’ has momentarily taken hold of him and caused his attack of conscience (ibid., 1.4.113–14, 128). Like Lady Macbeth, the Second Murderer holds manhood apart from the compassion and pity that stop man from fulfilling his desires: ‘A man cannot steal but it accuseth him; a man cannot swear but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his neighbour’s wife but it detects him’ (ibid., 1.4.129–31). Following the First Murderer’s fleeting reluctance to act, his renewed commitment elicits macho compliments from the admiring Second Murderer: ‘Spoke like a tall man that respects thy reputation!’ (ibid., 1.4.144). The fear prompted by thoughts of the Doom replicates Macbeth’s anxiety over the everlasting damnation reaped by sinful actions on earth. Carrying the king’s warrant to kill may excuse the Second Murderer in this life, but nothing can defend him from the great day of reckoning when all earthly warrants for our actions become worthless in the face of an unequivocal, omniscient Judge. The bleakly comic fears of the murderers in King Richard III are revisited by the sinister humour of the hell-porter as he welcomes to the apocalyptic castle of doomed souls the imaginary arch-equivocator who will inevitably fail to hoodwink heaven. To Shakespeare’s spectators the references made by the hell-porter through the fog of his hangover would have brought to mind the figure of Father Garnet, tried and executed in 1606 for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot after justifying equivocation in the name of confessional covenants. Not only this, but overworked hell-porters are mentioned in mystery cycles, with the allusion in Wakefield’s Judgement made by the complaining Second Demon: Souls come so thick of late now to hell As ever; Our porte at hell-gate Is in so sad a strait, Up early and down late, Rest has he never. (Wakefield: 440) Hell relocates to Inverness Castle, manned by the ‘Porter of Hell Gate’ (2.3.1–2), and when Macduff finds Duncan murdered in his bed he wakes those sleeping to ‘see | The great doom’s image’ (2.3.76–7), an explicit reference to the church iconography that informs mystery cycle Judgements and saturates Macbeth. As we have seen, the innumerable dead climbing up from their graves are a constant of Doom imagery and, like a trumpet-tongued angel raising up the souls of all humanity, Macduff rouses everyone at

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Figure 4.6  Detail of the doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire, showing a small, cherubic angel lifting a soul up to heaven as another angel wakes the dead with a trumpet.

Figure 4.7  Detail of the doom painting at St Nicholas’s Church, Oddington, Gloucestershire, showing a devil driving the wicked into the ‘deep damnation’ of hell, as a striped demon keeps the cauldron fire burning with his bellows.



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Inverness to behold the bloody crime as if they too stand before the dreadful endtime scenes: ‘As from your graves rise up, and walk like sprites, | To countenance this horror! (2.3.78–9). Faced with the resurrected hordes, little wonder Shakespeare’s red-nosed hell-porter hits the bottle with such gusto. Repeating Macduff’s response to the death of Duncan, a distraught Edgar and Kent in King Lear refer to Cordelia’s death as an image of the Doom too, infusing their pagan world with the Christian vocabulary of Shakespeare’s day to help define the loss of salvation. On the wall of St Nicholas’s Church, a small, cartoon-like cherub pulls a naked body up to heaven from the top of a turret (Figure 4.6), performing the salvation Shakespeare holds back. The comic touch of pity at St Nicholas’s brings deliverance to one righteous soul, but Macbeth anticipates that the pitiless nature of his deed will damn him to the same dreadful satanic fires into which devils force the wicked (Figure 4.7), the sulphurous rivers of bubbling lava and mountainous flames welcomed by Othello. Just above the dragon-mouthed gates of hell a demon, recognizable by his striped attire, uses a bellows to keep a cauldron fire going as a kneeling figure begs for mercy. Seduced by the clairvoyant witches, by amphibologies that are future truths, Macbeth could well be that genuflecting figure whose own tears drown the howling winds when it is finished and when it is done, when the apocalyptic conclusion language, tragedy and time build towards finally comes.

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Dark Dungeons and Lizard-Like Beasts Today’s apocalyptic imagery infiltrates unlikely places. Globally recognizable video game character Mario, a chirpy, chubby, Italian American plumber, repeats an endless task, forever rescuing the somewhat easily captured Princess Peach from the clutches of his arch-enemy, Bowser. Like a pixelated Sisyphus on a never-ending trial of endurance, the moustachioed Mario runs and jumps across various treacherous, booby-trapped terrains manned by legions of hostile trolls until he eventually reaches an underground lair defended by ghosts, ghouls and moats of molten lava where he confronts Princess Peach’s evil captor. ‘It’s a-me!’ declares the little hero as he adjusts his dungarees in preparation for jumping up and down on the oversized head of his tyrannical cartoon nemesis. Bowser, a dragon-like creature based on the scaly water sprites of Japanese folklore, resembles the firebreathing monster of innumerable myths deeply embedded in our collective psyche, including the plague-bearing dragon slayed by St George, the unnamed dragon that costs Beowulf his life and the Japanese scourge of submarines and skyscrapers, Godzilla, a mutated nuclear abomination now a mainstay of Western popular culture. All these serpent-like giants, even those with Oriental origins, have traction with Occidental audiences for whom they have a common progenitor in the hell-guarding Leviathan of biblical lore defeated at Armageddon, a sea-dragon painted on medieval and early modern church walls as the very jaws of hell and which surfaces as the embodiment of aggressive evil in the otherwise pagan world of King Lear. Even though pagan gods are repeatedly invoked to set the pre-Christian mood of King Lear, the play inevitably employs the heavily Christianized vocabulary of early modern society, of which biblical dragons and eschatological narratives are two of the most prominent examples. Invocations of these narratives that were colourfully emblazoned on the

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interiors of parish churches across the land take King Lear beyond its historical setting, transcending any specific time period and, with a double gesture that provides the entry point for a deconstructive reading, layering the religious assumptions it articulates with irreligious or contrareligious antidotes. Derrida resists defining deconstruction because a crucial element of his methodology is to query the definitiveness of definitions, exploring instead the impact on a text or discourse made by the strands within it that undermine reductive, homogeneous expositions of its purpose. On one occasion, with reference to the process of translation, he does venture to explain deconstruction as ‘both more than a language and no more of a language’ (Derrida, 1989: 15, original emphasis), as a critical framework that brings linguistic plurality to bear on notions of static monolinguistic texts that articulate sealed monocultural identities, an ingrained polyvalency at work in the way King Lear fuses Christianity and paganism. To give one example, the only specific reference to a Christian God in the entire play can also be heard as a reference to pagan gods. When Lear and Cordelia are reconciled, the old man pleads with his daughter to retreat into isolation with him so that they can be ‘God’s spies’ (5.3.17). Consistent with early modern usage, neither the Quarto nor the Folio edition of the play have an apostrophe before or after the ‘s’, so the texts refer to a polytheistic belief system as well as a specific, Christian God. A theatre audience unable to distinguish an upper case ‘G’ can also hear this statement two ways, as both the traditional pagan gods of the play’s yet-to-be Christianized world and the Christian God who saves the worthy, damns the wicked and smites the devilish dragon on Judgement Day. This multivalent power of signification allows for Cordelia’s double-edged function in King Lear. Her refusal to sycophantically profess enduring love in return for her dowry sends Lear spiralling so far into madness that he challenges the fury of the elements, an iconic scene which has played a major part in setting the tone for the deserted, weather-beaten and tumultuous landscapes of current apocalyptic fiction. Offended by Cordelia’s reticence, Lear calls on pagan gods to witness him banish and disown his youngest daughter. Loyal servant Kent urges him to retract this ‘doom’ (Q 1.1.137), uniting quotidian human adjudications with the spiritual arbitration of the skies.1 Unintentionally offensive words become redemptive actions as Cordelia develops into a Christ-like saviour of hope who goes from being her father’s poison to his remedy, like the pharmakon in Plato’s Phaedrus that Derrida explains ‘partakes of both good and ill’ (Derrida, 1981: 99). At the dire, unredeemed conclusion, the doom



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contested by Lear and Kent arrives oblique and warped when Lear and Cordelia both die, confounding any expectation of salvation. As in Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, the plotline of King Lear follows the apocalyptic structure of language, awaiting revelation from the transcen­ dental signified, a Logos whose presence, whose exegesis, is only partial, twisted or subject to competing hermeneutics. This always deferred arrival of the Logos characterizes tragedy and structures the production of meaning in language. By virtue of this non-arrival – because we do not know for sure what the end of the world will look like until we are faced with the end of the world – the Apocalypse can be imagined in a variety of forms: dark, atmospheric dungeons where colourful and cute digital dragons dwell, sober portrayals of a grey, collapsing, dysfunctional world or the final holy battle between good and evil. In King Lear Shakespeare delivers his own interpretation, the promised end envisioned as pre-Christian. Theatrically staging common Pietà iconography that depicted a dead Christ held by Mary, the conclusion of the play substitutes the whip-wielding devils, trumpet-tongued angels and fire-breathing hell-mouths of the Christian chancel arch for an alternative image of horror, a slain Cordelia lying limp in Lear’s dying embrace.

Christian Words in a Pagan Universe When Edgar convinces his father, Gloucester, that he stands on the edge of Dover Cliff, the illusion he creates depends on a language that, for Goldberg, ‘slides into an abyss, an uncreating, annihilative nothingness’. Goldberg calls this ‘the failure of the sign’, where an ineffective signifier does not reach the signified to provide intelligibility (Goldberg, 1988: 254, 247). In this account, language does not refer directly to its surroundings so must be meaningless. But the events supposedly taking place at the cliff’s summit show exactly the opposite: language as a creative power that determines meaning by a differential process, by dissemination, by the continual chain of successive differences generated independently of the outside world. The efficacy of the signifier – the inventive potential of the language we all use – convinces Gloucester that he teeters on the edge of the ‘chalky bourn’ that Edgar describes (4.6.57), even though they are not at Dover. Others have been equally convinced. Part of this massive stretch of chalk now bears the name Shakespeare Cliff, while a nearby housing estate has roads named King Lear and Gloucester Way, as well as a King Lear pub. Joe Wright’s 2007 film Atonement, based on the Ian McEwan

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novel of the same name, also returns the famous white cliffs to their association with fiction. The false accusation of young Briony Tallis destroys the love affair between her sister, Cecelia, and Robbie. An elderly Briony Tallis then writes a book on the events as an act of atonement but admits that the happy ending to the love affair between Cecelia and Robbie in her story is fictional. The two lovers were never reunited and both died tragically. In the film’s final scene, we see them walking happily along Dover beach and into a cottage overlooked by the cliffs, an event that Briony Tallis has made up. The cottage at Dover symbolizes this fiction, and the film seems to reference the famous cliffs as a well-known instance of literary illusion, a history of make-believe made possible by pre-apocalyptic signifying practice. Believing himself to be perched on the very edge of those cliffs, Gloucester offers a Stoic defence of suicide before he tries throwing himself to his death: O you mighty gods, This world I do renounce and in your sights Shake patiently my great affliction off. (4.6.34–6) The blinded old man merely falls to the ground and Edgar once more tricks him, dropping his Poor Tom persona and telling his father that he was not alone atop Dover’s sheer white cliffs as he leapt: As I stood here below methought his eyes Were two full moons. He had a thousand noses, Horns whelked and waved like the enraged sea. It was some fiend. (4.6.69–72) In the shape of various fiends, the devil was popularly understood to tempt people to take their own lives. ‘He led me to that place’ Gloucester says of this composite devil (4.6.79), which resembles several of the beasts, dragons and behemoth sea-dragons strewn through the Book of Revelation. Gloucester’s failed self-slaughter also brings to mind the panicked desperation in St John of Patmos’s vision of the world’s end where ‘men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them’ (Rev. 9.6). Rather than Goldberg’s abyss, Evans views the Dover Cliff scene as the ‘absent centre of the play’ where destructive



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nothingness becomes the other side of a ‘utopian plenitude’ (Evans, 1989: 226, 228). In other words, language does not collapse into a black hole because it is not referential. Instead, the absence of a material referent makes heterogeneity possible, allowing Edgar to switch from devil to Samaritan and Gloucester to convert to Christian forbearance regardless of the pre-Christian setting: Henceforth I’ll bear Affliction till it do cry out itself ‘Enough, enough’ and die. (4.6.75–7) Joseph Wittreich sees Shakespeare’s play as offering a ‘topsy-turvy version’ of the anonymously authored King Leir that paganizes the essentially Christian story of this earlier play (Wittreich, 1984: 178), a designer mishmash replicated by director Trevor Nunn in his 2007 Royal Shakespeare Company production that, for a pagan-style ritual, dressed Ian Mckellen’s Lear in golden robes resembling the vestments still worn today by Orthodox priests and bishops. But such moments of literary deception and preemptive Christological turns of phrase, as in the scene on Dover cliff, show us something more besides. Rerouting the flow of Wittreich’s suggestion, King Lear Christianizes a world before the Christian era, deconstructing the opposition between the Christian values framed by the contemporary vernacular of the dramatis personae and the pagan universe of antiquity they inhabit. Globe audiences may well have been familiar with Leir, the legendary eighth-century King of Britain, whose story was recounted in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudo-historical Historia Regum Britanniae and later retold in Shakespeare’s most probable source, Holinshed’s Chronicles. Readers as well as theatregoers of the early seventeenth century would probably have been aware of the explicitly Christian King Leir, so the name of Shakespeare’s play would have produced the expectation of a classical setting, a historical aspect the title page of the Quarto text foregrounds: King Lear is a ‘Chronicle Historie’ (Shakespeare, 1608). The belief system of King Leir is clearly a monotheistic Christian one even though it draws on the same ancient story Shakespeare uses. Early on, Leir calls on a Christian God as he expresses love for his daughters: ‘How dear my daughters are unto my soul | None knows but He that knows my thoughts and secret deeds’ (King Leir, 1.3.6–7). Similarly, when Leir banishes Cordella, she puts her faith in ‘Him which doth protect the just’ (King Leir, 1.3.131). Elsewhere, supernatural allusions

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are more precise, as when Perrilus appeals for divine wrath to punish Gonorill and Ragan for sending a messenger to take Leir’s life: O just Jehovah, whose almighty power Doth govern all things in this spacious world, How canst Thou suffer such outrageous acts To be committed without just revenge? (King Leir, 4.7.206–9) The failure of the murderous messenger leads Ragan to bemoan the ‘heartless men in Christendom’ (King Leir, 5.5.22) that are so easily swayed by entreating words of the kind used by Perillus. Before stepping into the Globe, then, a contemporary audience’s expectations may well have been poised between the pagan history of the Leir tale and the overt Christianity of King Leir. Trumping any easy assumptions these spectators may have made, Lear’s supernatural allusions in King Lear make the pagan setting explicit. Disowning Cordelia for refusing to affirm her love in a mealy-mouthed way, Lear appeals to Hecate and the astrological sway of heavenly spheres: For by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate and the night, By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be, Here I disclaim all my paternal care. (1.1.110–14) The mystical, consecrated powers of solar deities predate and anticipate monotheism, while Hecate, chthonic deity and, in early modern culture, goddess of witchcraft, also inhabits a time long before Christianity. Lear later insists ‘by Apollo’ and ‘by Jupiter’ that he will stand by his banishment of Cordelia, and further on mentions ‘high-judging Jove’ (1.1.161, 179; 2.2.417). Rather than summon God’s omniscience, Lear assigns the responsibility for man’s beginning and end to pagan gods and the movements or purposes of celestial bodies. Persuaded by Edmund that Edgar seeks his life, Gloucester too assigns divine providence to the skies, rather than one all-powerful being beyond them: ‘These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us’ (1.2.103–4). Just as Lear does, Gloucester refers to the power of planets and stars, rather than God, to control human destiny, and any apocalypse towards which humanity hurtles



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seems to be a pre-Christian one with a small ‘a’, a disaster dictated by the deified forces of the galaxy. Maynard Mack suggested that Jacobean audiences may have engaged with many of the figures, communities and hierarchies in King Lear as up-to-date aspects of out-of-time surroundings, features less relevant to Victorian audiences (Mack, 1972: 23). Against these facets, which add texture to the background, the play also imposes a royal hierarchy distinctly Jacobean. The ceremonial stage-direction that introduces the royal family in the Quarto deploys them in descending order of importance: Sound a sennet. Enter one bearing a coronet, then Lear, then the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall; next Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, with Followers. (Q, 1.1.32–3) First enters the coronet, the symbol of authority. Lear, the wearer of the coronet, follows. After him, in patriarchal order, come Albany and Cornwall, followed by Lear’s three daughters, with the eldest first. It is Lear’s foolish complication of this hierarchy that destabilizes the nation he wilfully divides up. When Claudius lays claim to the symbolic structural position of Father in Hamlet he fails to unequivocally occupy it because, by marrying his brother’s wife, he disrupts the order of the family he should, as its patriarchal figurehead, guarantee. Lear, on the other hand, delegates the king’s accountability but seeks to retain the compensatory benefits of ‘The name, and all th’addition’, giving away the political functions of the role; ‘the sway, | Revenue, execution of the rest’ are split between Cornwall and Albany (1.1.137–8). This equivocation has a twofold force: not only does Lear yield power but he also divides a role designed for a single figurehead, a difficult compromise symbolized by the indivisible coronet Cornwall and Albany are instructed to part between them, a synecdoche for indivisible kingship. In Macbeth the exclusivity and desirability of kingship renders it precarious but in King Lear the vulnerability of kingship stems from its problematized abdication, a fractured, incomplete and destabilizing passing on of power that would both have chimed with a Jacobean populous so recently exposed to the political anxieties of competing claims to the throne. As the health of Elizabeth I deteriorated no successor was explicitly or publicly named, in opposition to Lear’s fumbled, game show division of the British crown in proportion to fulsome and very public proclamations of love. Historically, an eventually smooth succession was orchestrated by Robert Cecil, so by contradistinction King Lear – performed before the court at Whitehall on 26 December 1606 – tacitly endorses the dynastic

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Union of the Crowns created by James I’s accession. With this performance in mind, not only does a Christian theonomy infringe upon the pagan, preChristian domains of King Lear but the play gently, abstrusely engages with God’s watching elected representative as well as contemporaneous national experiences of upheaval and transition.

Into Hell’s Scaly Jaws: The Wrathful Dragon of Doom All these references to the seventeenth century in a historically distant Britain pepper King Lear’s pagan locales with the lexicon and monarchical lineages ratified by Christianity, chief of which is the stinging, sharp-toothed dragon. ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath’ Lear warns Kent (1.1.123), denoting the serpent anciently identified with kingship as well as the biblical dragon of war and violence. Stephen Batman’s translation, and empirical gloss, of Bartholomaeus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum valorizes the dragon as the ‘most greatest of all Serpents’ (Batman, 1582: fol.360r). Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch also connects this distinguished creature to kingship when it describes the death of King Cleomenes of Sparta. His dead body hung on a cross, Cleomenes was seen with ‘a great Serpent wreathed around his head’, a mysterious event interpreted as a sign that Cleomenes was ‘belouved of the gods’. North’s translation concludes that ‘the auncients in old tyme, of all other beastes . . . did consecrate the Dragon to Kinges and Princes, as proper vnto man’ (Plutarch, 1579: 874). Naturally, a more negative connotation was more immediate to the groundlings in the Globe pit or those wealthier spectators higher up in the amphitheatre’s seats who would have known the tale of St George slaying the poisonous, plague-ridden dragon, a common narrative of the Biblia Pauperum which, today, can still be experienced at Pickering’s parish church of St Peter and St Paul where a glorious painting of the legend remains on the nave’s north wall largely unspoilt (Figure 5.1). Across the pews on a south wall spandrel a fresco of Christ’s descent into hell has damnation’s razor-toothed gateway ablaze and crammed with souls, including Adam, holding an apple, and Eve, carefully watched over by two spiky demons (Figure 5.2). Fittingly, as the throne’s uncurbed power and privilege allows his irrationality to border on tyranny, Lear’s admonishment of Kent signifies primeval regal might in tandem with satanic embodiments of evil, the play manifesting age-old connections between dragons and hell-mouth monsters. The Book of Revelation conflates the wily serpent that tempts Eve in the Garden of Eden with the dragon that duels with God: ‘And the great



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Figure 5.1  St George slays the dragon at St Peter and St Paul Church, Pickering, Yorkshire.

Figure 5.2  Christ stands by the mouth of hell at St Peter and St Paul Church, Pickering, Yorkshire.

dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil’ (Rev. 12.9). Once cast out, this form of Satan raises a seven-headed monster from the boiling sea, a beast that bears the number 666. Within the Roman walls of York, All Saints Church contains an extant stained glass rendition of the ‘Prick of Conscience’, a medieval treatise that allegorizes the seven deadly

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Figure 5.3  Detail of the stained glass depiction of the ‘Prick of Conscience’ at All Saints Church, York, showing the apocalyptic sea-snake.

sins with the seven-headed monstrosity of Apocalypse imagined by All Saints’ glaziers to be a wolfish sea-snake (Figure 5.3). St John of Patmos’s morphing, kaleidoscopic chimeras mainly influenced medieval Doom imagery in which the hell-mouths that devoured souls were not just red or orange fireballs but frequently reptilian, like the head-on sea-dragon we have already seen chomping away on souls at Holy Trinity Church in Coventry (back in Figure 3.6). Snapping out of the clasping jaws of the fearsome lizard-like creature depicted in profile at St James the Great Church in South Leigh, Oxfordshire is another dragonish beast, while the devil himself mans the saw-toothed entrance to his torturous domain as his winged minions corral the damned in the direction of hell (Figure 5.4).



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Figure 5.4  Doom painting at St James the Great, South Leigh, Oxfordshire, showing a hell-mouth manned by the devil and his dragonish beast.

Lear’s self-identification with the dragon acts as a metaphor for majesty’s irresistible will but also has the pejorative biblical correlations brought together by the extraordinary hell-mouth scene of the wonderfully vivid Doom on St James the Great’s walls and mentioned, too, in Mankind by Mercy, who warns us to beware ‘that venomous serpent | From the which God preserve you all at the Last Judgement’ (Mankind: 40–1). These correlations resurface in perhaps the most quoted line of King Lear, when the rejected king bemoans Goneril’s and Regan’s deviously planned inhospitality: ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is | To have a thankless child’ (1.4.280–1). Lear, like Satan, has raised his own beasts, ones ‘More hideous . . . Than the sea-monster’ (1.4.253), and the venomous sting of his unholy creation becomes a recurrent theme. Goneril’s ‘Sharp-toothed unkindness’ (2.2.324) makes her both ‘serpent-like’ (2.2.350) and a ‘gilded serpent’ (5.3.85), while the providential dragon’s tail of the moon’s orbit beneath which Edmund jokes he was conceived bears the treasonous tooth that bites Edgar (1.2.129, 5.3.119–20). Religious connections retuned, these scaly, menacing behemoths have acquired the status of popular culture’s pre-eminent symbol of nuclear apocalypse. Where Elizabethans and Jacobeans would have seen the dragon mainly as a mythical endtimes antagonist with antique or scriptural roots, we have come to separate out those associations from the arguably more prevalent signification – the mutated dragon as a terrifying realization of the threat modern humanity poses to itself. There is nowhere else to start

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but with the Alpha and Omega of atomic monstrosities, Godzilla. Or, as the titular city-stomping giant of Ishirō Honda’s original 1954 Japanese film is called, Gojira, a giant, freakish side-effect of thermonuclear experiments that rises from the waters of Tokyo Bay like a radioactive Leviathan to annihilate the city. In 1954 Gojira tapped into the collective experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to provide a cinematic warning against mankind’s love for the bomb, a warning with purchase in the West not only because of the global politico-cultural importance of August 1945, particularly during the Cold War years, but also thanks to Gojira’s resemblance to the dragons of apocalyptic art, literature and folklore. In 2008, Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield took the 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre to be at the forefront of our minds, reshaping Godzilla for a post-9/11 world. Consciously mimicking the grainy, amateur footage of the Twin Towers collapsing that was instantly broadcast worldwide, street-level cinéma vérité shots of nothing but dust are interrupted by people running past the camera lens openmouthed, people terrorized by a threat hidden in the residual static of the documentary-style filmmaking. Cloverfield replaces the twin emblems of American financial strength targeted by al-Qaeda with the beheaded emblem of American cultural strength when the unseen threat reveals itself to be a gigantic creature that unceremoniously decapitates the Statue of Liberty, all the while shedding deadly parasitic creatures that fall through the night like hellish minions. The camera follows the sculpture’s head as it bounces off a building and crashes into the middle of a busy street where manic New Yorkers still find time to snap it on their camera phones as the city around them burns, a dark parody of the addictive power new media have to rapidly reframe and rearticulate events. Monster movies like Gojira and Cloverfield perform a similar function, re-presenting the mythical dragon on the cinema screen as a relevant response to anxieties moulded four centuries after King Lear. Given the proclivity of cinema, and fiction in general, for rebooting ideas stored deep in the cultural memory, underwater monsters are not always reptilian. If the graveyard into which Hamlet strolls, the windswept, austere Scotland that surrounds Macbeth, Othello’s inner torment and the tumultuous heath where a soaked and wind-whipped Lear rages are Shakespeare’s apocalyptic sceneries, a self-destructive Hollywood often sees Los Angeles and the Southland metropolitan areas of southern California as the only real alternative to New York as the site of humanity’s end. Christine Brown is hunted down by the medieval Lamia in Pasadena while Greater Los Angeles provides the backdrop to the Terminator franchise, Legion, and, in  2011, Jonathan Liebesman’s Battle: Los Angeles. The latter



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follows a platoon of bronzed marines as they hold off alien invaders with square-jawed, all-American courage and brotherhood, resisting the superior weapons and numbers of their outer-space colonizers with a trusty combination of ‘hell yeah!’ determination and misty-eyed schmaltz. The alien invasion is inaugurated by spaceships hidden in the Pacific Ocean, giant mechanical Leviathans that come up from the rolling boil of the sea to release the extra-terrestrial soldier drones intent on claiming the land. When the victorious marines arrive at a military camp in the Mojave Desert they see Los Angeles on fire in the distance, a hellish scene of destruction that forebodes a sequel. Infinitely more substantial and more stylish, Cormac McCarthy’s compelling, peerless novel The Road offers underground or water-dwelling beasts that range from oneiric and mythological, to serpentine represen­ tations of evil, and on to industrialized allegories. Set some years after an unnamed catastrophe has ravaged civilization, The Road charts the journey of a man and his son as they search for the coast. On their way they pass through rural wastelands and deserted towns littered with charred human remains, occasional survivors emaciated by hunger or sickness or both and murderous, cannibalistic tribes. At the start of the novel the man remembers dreaming about a black lake deep within the walls of a cave where a subterranean creature ‘raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless’ (McCarthy, 2006: 3). Sourcing the same legends as a jabbering Edgar’s ‘lake of darkness’ and the devilish, wrathful beasts that therein dwell (King Lear, 3.6.6–8), the man’s nightmare welcomes the reader to earthly hell, a place where even the hatchway to a desperately needed and timely bounty of food looks ‘like a grave yawning at judgement day in some old apocalyptic painting’ (McCarthy, 2006: 131). Unlike a curious Hamlet in the graveyard of the apocalypse, the man and boy steer clear of innumerable scorched skulls and rotten cadavers as they slowly trudge towards the sea, sidestepping a gruesome collection of memento mori that include a grotesque frieze of human heads (ibid., 76–7) and a pile of bodies melted shape­less ‘clutching themselves, mouths howling’ (ibid., 160–1). To escape momen­ tarily from this grim, ceaseless nightmare of reality, the man recalls his pre-apocalypse life, on one occasion thinking about snakes he saw as a child: Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number . . . Like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day.

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The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be. (ibid., 159) Burnt in place of the abstract concept they have come to embody in the collective psyche, the slithering mass of snakes are interchangeable with the asp that leads Eve astray and the serpentine dragon let loose on Judgement Day. When the man and his boy finally arrive at the coast they are not greeted by the paradise they hoped would alleviate their suffering but by ‘the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of’, a bleak, grey sludge in which a half-submerged tanker is the depressing centrepiece; it is an industrial cetacean beast that lolls menacingly in the water like a metal Moby Dick, a lonely, rusted remnant of the cataclysm (ibid., 181). McCarthy’s literary use of scriptural conventions give the scraps of society in The Road theistic metaphors with which to make sense of the seemingly Godless world they aimlessly and helplessly roam, a trope that replicates the structure of language itself, which awaits the revelation of unequivocal, univocal truths that are the preserve of the Logos. Despite its fiery, earthshattering present, The Road nevertheless still exists in the realm of the ‘yet’, a world that has self-destructed in the absence of the Logos. McCarthy’s novel depicts a post-apocalyptic world where future challenges still loom, a constant of post-apocalyptic fiction that, regardless of the catastrophic, decimated societies imagined, exists in a material world before the finality predicted by eschatological narratives. In this paradoxical sense, all postapocalyptic fiction explores the effects of an apocalypse with a small ‘a’ where disasters damage mankind but leave humanity, however small the numbers may be, to fight on another day. By virtue of presenting some kind of world, however pummelled by horrific adversity, post-apocalyptic fiction such as The Road still has humanity awaiting an end, a resolution, some definitive sense to the senselessness around them, and these metaphysical expectations are inseparable from the Apocalypse from which they take their cultural cues, a religious or extra-linguistic event that is final, alldestroying, irreversible and leaves no calculable remainders. On this theme, Derrida distinguishes what is apocalyptically announced from the announcement itself, from, as he puts it, ‘the discourse revealing the to-come’ (Derrida, 1992b: 58), effectively bifurcating what arrives when the world ends from how we communicate this expected arrival. More radical than it may initially seem, this dichotomy situates what happens when the world ends beyond the register of anything we can say, the



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apocalyptic announcement promising the arrival of the unknown that is unknown due to the incomprehensible finality of a yet-to-arrive Apocalypse. Derrida calls this trope the messianic, where the ‘condition on which the future remains to come is not only that it not be known, but that it not be knowable as such’ (Derrida, 1996: 72). Announcements of onrushing tragedies include: the end of the world catastrophes and cataclysms, the upheavals, the thunderbolts and earthquakes, the fire, the blood, the mountain of fire and the sea of blood, the afflictions, the smoke, the sulphur, the burning, the multiplicity of tongues and kings, the beast, the sorcerers, Satan, the great whore of the Apocalypse. (Derrida, 1992b: 58) All these are still part of apocalyptic discourse: the announcement and the content of the announced are flip sides of the same coin like signifier and signified, where the signified operates as a signifier. After all, the mental concepts signified by Derrida’s scenarios of the end are still themselves images or words or ciphers. We have no access to the announced, to what will arrive in actuality, to what constitutes the transcendental revelation, because it exists outside apocalyptic discourse in the realm of the Logos. This absence conditions apocalyptic discourse, an absence present only partially via speculative constructions of various disasters – religious, environmental, military and so on. These speculations are made possible by our distance – linguistic and teleological – from the end of the world. In Derridean terms, the deferral of the end of the world makes differing expectations possible, with the trumpeting angels, snatching fiends and soul-swallowing hell-mouth Leviathans anticipated by the chancel arch or stained glass a religious example of our shared characterization of how the end might look. Consequently, the Apocalypse sees dissemination in eschatological action. The biblical images Derrida lists are rites that make the ineffable event intelligible to us, veils that mask a horror beyond comprehension. Back on the silver screen this division of the apocalypse now from the greater apocalypse to come can be seen in Robert Wise’s 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu and his giant robot protector, Gort, arrive to deliver a message and an ultimatum, an alien visitation that threatens humanity. The people of Earth narrowly avoid destruction only to be warned by the extraterrestrial messenger that doom will be incurred anyway if the violent aggression of humankind threatens inter-galactic peace. In Scott

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Derrickson’s 2008 remake, our disregard for the environment replaces our taste for warmongering, Klaatu this time challenging the people of Earth to save the planet or be destroyed for Earth’s sake. Both times, although Earth stands still, suspended in the realms of apocalyptic discourse, disaster is postponed to another day with an apocalyptic tone defining the portentous arrival of a strange and wondrous newcomer. Following the same pattern but in an overtly Christian way, The Book of Eli, a 2010 film directed by the Hughes Brothers, tracks a devout nomad as he shepherds the only extant Bible westwards through the irreligious aftermath of a nuclear war pursued by those who would harness the book’s religious allure in order to control the illiterate survivors rebuilding civilization. As in The Road, Christian faith inflects understandings of the devastation while alluding to a greater day of account to come. These works of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction all poeticize and apotheosize immense disaster, and, generally speaking, the one presents the disaster in motion while the other presents its outcomes. Herein lies a genre slippage: these forms tell the stories of mankind fighting on with the net result that apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction both exist in a universe still awaiting bittersweet abolition and divine rebirth. This black nothingness precedes metaphysical transformation in the new worlds of grace or disgrace promised by Christian eschatology, a narrative firmly woven into the early modern web of culture and so strong that it still underwrites the way fiction forms secularized or even religious disaster in the twenty-first century. In King Lear and elsewhere, Shakespeare employs these variegated dynamics of apocalyptic thinking by unifying disastrous present judgements with the ultimate Judgement to come. When Lear disowns Cordelia, Kent asks Lear to reconsider his sentence: Reverse thy doom, And in thy best consideration check This hideous rashness. (Q, 1.1.137–9) Shakespeare employs the word ‘doom’ as both a general verdict or sentence to punishment and the day of reckoning when God will judge the living and the dead. And, of course, most of the pre-Reformation stained glass and paintings that have been critically mined in this book, artwork McCarthy uses as a simile in The Road, are commonly referred to as Dooms or Doom imagery. The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare notes fifty-four instances of ‘doom’, used primarily in the sense of arbitration on predominantly negative occasions, as when Aaron plots the destruction of Titus’s family in



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Titus Andronicus: ‘This is the day of doom for Bassianus, | His Philomel must lose her tongue today’ (2.2.42–3). In all, ‘doom’ occurs six times in Titus Andronicus with each citation concerning violence and banishment, ending with Lucius’s decision that the villain Aaron be buried in the earth and starved: ‘This is our doom; | Some stay to see him fastened in the earth’ (5.3.181–2). More than once in the sonnets the term is used to mean doomsday: Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire, shall burn The living record of your memory: ’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity, Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. (Sonnet 55) A living document of the youth’s excellence, preserving it beyond all war, death and bad blood until the world’s end, the sonnet forestalls the equivocation of ‘doom’ by specifying the last, ending doom, differentiating this instance from other significations. Elsewhere in the sonnets, love is defined as unchanging and unchangeable until doom arrives: Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. (Sonnet 116) Love lasts until everything ends, outliving physical beauty that falls to ravaging time and enduring until the brink of nothingness. The witches in Macbeth conjure a procession of Banquo’s royal progeny, a phantasm that foretells the failure of Macbeth’s tyranny and, to him, seems everlasting: ‘What! will the line stretch out to th’crack of doom?’ (4.1.117). And, for Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra, doom’s roar should be greater when Antony dies: The breaking of so great a thing should make A greater crack. The round world Should have shook lions into civil streets And citizens to their dens. The death of Antony

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Is not a single doom; in the name lay A moiety of the world. (5.1.14–19) Doom doubles as death and fate in Caesar’s words, but on the momentous occasion of Antony’s death it lacks the thunderous impact worthy of such a passing. As well as a rift or fissure, this crack evokes the crunching sound Macbeth fears an arriving Apocalypse makes, a sound to shake the cosmos in a matter befitting a triumvir of the Roman Empire. Mentions of doom in Antony and Cleopatra join death, doomsday, cataclysmic change and fate with the major political turmoil surrounding Antony’s death to the extent that Cleopatra’s plea to the messenger, Thidias, yields more than just her acquiescence to Caesar: Most kind messenger, Say to great Caesar this in deputation: I kiss his conqu’ring hand. Tell him I am prompt To lay my crown at’s feet, and there to kneel Till from his all-obeying breath I hear The doom of Egypt. (3.13.77–82) Egypt’s doom designates Caesar’s judgement on the Queen of Egypt but also signals significant historical change: Cleopatra’s imminent death initiates the demise of the Hellenistic dynasty and the rise of Roman control in the eastern Mediterranean. Along similar lines, Lear’s doom of Cordelia in King Lear sets in motion a simmering civil war and an invasion by France, conflicts that cost Lear, Cordelia and Gloucester their lives and which counterpoint the relatively successful replacement of Elizabeth I by James I. Accompanying this subtle political commentary are salient lessons for the soul. Colourful Dooms overhanging early modern parish congregations were vanishing thanks to zealous Protestant iconoclasts, but sermons continued the same proselytizing message thanks to textual substitutes for the disappearing artworks. According to the Book of Revelation, which was the key scriptural template for the medieval pictorial representations of Judgement Day, the damned are those that ‘Neither repented . . . of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts’ and will be incinerated by the fires of Armageddon (Rev. 9.21). Lear dares the judgement of the gods for crimes that tarry with these damnable sins,



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sins also listed in ‘A Commination against sinners’, an instructional liturgy from the Protestant Book of Common Prayer which insists that churchgoers ‘walke more warely in these daungerous dayes, fleeing from such vices, for the whiche ye affirme with your owne mouthes, the curse of god to be due’, clearly stating the purpose of Doom imagery (‘A Commination’, sig.P7v). Spitting forth biblical arguments of condemnation, Lear’s wild rage could be lifted straight from this manual for parish priests: Hide thee, thou bloody hand, Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue That art incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Has practised on man’s life. (3.2.53–7) The murderer stained by his crime, the falsely sworn who deceive and the unchaste that feign modest virtue will all be held to account by the ‘dreadful summoners grace’ (3.2.59). ‘A Commination’ pours everlasting scorn on the same wrongdoers: ‘Cursed are the unmercifull, the fornicatours, the adulterers, and the couetous persons, the worshyppers of images, slaunderers, drunkardes, and extorcioners’ (‘A Commination’, sig.P7v). To hell in a fiend’s handcart go they all. Judy Kronenfeld proposes that, contrary to Marxist and cultural materialist readings of King Lear as proto-communist, the language of the play is ‘well accounted for by traditional Protestant rank-respecting exhortations to and concepts of charity’ (Kronenfeld, 1992: 764). Certainly, Lear’s prayer for the quivering wretched of the earth appears to paraphrase the Song of Mary – also known as the Magnificat – present in both the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Common Prayer. The ‘houseless heads and unfed sides’ (3.4.30) are those of ‘low degree’ exalted in the Song of Mary (Lk. 1.52), while the humility of ‘Take physic, pomp’ (3.5.33) might have reminded an early modern audience well-acquainted with the canticle that God ‘hath scattered the proud’ (Lk. 1.51). Lear’s resolution ‘to feel what wretches feel’ and then ‘shake the superflux to them | And show the heavens more just’ (3.4.34, 35–6) brings to mind the alms-giving and government-controlled charity of Shakespeare’s day central to the Protestant hierarchy set out by Kronenfeld. Then again, his sentiments also reword the apocalyptic promise to ‘give unto every one of you according to your works’ (Rev. 2.23), to fill ‘the hungry with good things’ and send the rich ‘empty away’ (Lk. 1.53), a biblical promise visualized by medieval Doom imagery. Sectarian doctrinal practice of the

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time thus lends Lear’s holier-than-thou speech a hint of state-sponsored Protestantism without omitting the general apocalyptic tone of King Lear, one influenced by an idolatrous Catholicism heavily sanctioned by the authorities. Even ‘A Commination’ walks this Reformist tightrope; it warns against the worship of carved or molten images with no mention of the paintings and stained glass still present and still popular in many churches, perhaps differentiating these conspicuous artworks from smaller church objects and sculptures easier to remove. And, by textually reproducing the most popular educational illustration of the poor man’s Bible, the liturgical text maintains the doomsday theme widespread in Catholic idolatry while towing the general iconoclastic line of the Reformation. Or, it maintains its doom on Doom while disavowing Dooms. Ranting on as he wanders the storm-tossed heath, Lear dares the cataclysmic ‘cataracts and hurricanoes’ and the ‘sulphurous and thoughtexecuting fires’ to do their worst (3.2.2, 4) in a chaotic Patmos of his own making (Rev. 6.12–17). The lonely, apocalyptic heath and the hovel of refuge have proved influential apocalyptic scenarios most common today in the field of science fiction, a genre which can be said to have begun with The Last Man, Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel that concludes with a solitary man in a world emptied by plague. Subsequently, the vision of a last human wandering alone through the razed cities and burnt country of a postapocalyptic wasteland has become something of a cliché, one famously fictionalized by Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, given the bigbudget treatment in  2007 with Will Smith as the protagonist and filmed twice before that, in 1964 as The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price and in  1971 as The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston. George A. Romero’s seminal 1968 zombie apocalypse Night of the Living Dead, progenitor of the modern zombie and walking dead films, also drew on Matheson’s novel for inspiration. Lear, Edgar in the guise of Poor Tom and the Fool find shelter from the blustering elements in the rural hovel that plays out within the apocalyptic madness without, a pattern re-imagined by Romero’s horror flick in an isolated farmhouse from where the claustrophobic Vietnam-era survivors battle their own creeping insanity as they struggle to keep the ghoulish carnage outside at bay. Can we imagine Hamlet marshalling an army of the living dead outside Lear’s shack in some eclectic battle of doomsday visions? If King Lear is replayed inside Romero’s farmhouse, outside lies Hamlet’s graveyard of the apocalypse. Lobotomized, reanimated versions of ourselves, the zombies reaching through the window are our memento mori, refashioned expressions of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ cadavers.



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Almost ubiquitous in the apocalyptic landscapes we read about or watch on the screen today is the old man roaming the burnt plains, a damaged soothsayer and haggard pseudo-prophet in the mould of Lear maddened by his exposure to the inhumanity of humanity. This commonplace of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction wanders into The Road much to the concern of the man and his guiding light, the boy. Talking with the man over a sparse last supper, Ely claims he ‘knew this was coming . . . always believed in it’ (McCarthy, 2006: 142), framing his pessimistic expectations in the theonomic idioms that govern how the novel’s unnamed event is talked about: ‘There is no God and we are his prophets’ (ibid., 143). For every old man in dying need of hope there is an innocent young child to spark it. Alone in a world seemingly abandoned by God, Ely swings back and forth from nihilism to a lost faith half-rekindled by seeing the boy: When I saw that boy I thought that I had died. You thought he was an angel? I didnt know what he was. I never thought to see a child again. I didnt know that would happen. (ibid., 145) A soteriological figure, the boy provides a young canvas onto which the desire for redemption is projected by Ely and the man. Lost in the physical brutality of a stark, brittle world collapsing around him, the man considers killing himself and the boy in an act of mercy sparing them the cannibalistic barbarity of society’s leftovers. He repeatedly resists this suicide pact because he sees the same fire of hope in the boy that Ely sees: ‘If he is not the word of God God never spoke’ (ibid., 4). When Cordelia returns from exile, she takes on the mantle of a Shakespearean prototype for the boy in The Road, a Christ-like figure whose passion provides the old man stumbling on through King Lear with one last shot at salvation. However, before she becomes this saving grace, Cordelia first poisons Lear against her.

Poisonous Remedies: Cordelia the Redeemer Cordelia, who does not ‘speak and purpose not’ (1.1.227), can say nothing to outdo her sisters in the staged showcase of adoration, her deeds instead proving her love for her father: her taciturnity precipitates Lear’s madness, her love in practice honours the bond between parent and child. Cordelia’s infamous ‘nothing’ equivocates like the pharmakon Derrida identifies in

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Plato’s Phaedrus ‘as both remedy and poison’, a medicine that announces itself as opposite to itself. Though her words are disagreeable to Lear, her actions redeem him, and so, like the pharmakon, Cordelia is ‘linked as much to the malady as to its treatment’ (Derrida, 1981: 70, 99), her letter to Kent offering a soteriological promise that manifests itself in the form of an antidote that will heal all inflicted wounds and ‘give | Losses their remedies’ (2.2.167–8). Unambiguously stating her desire to be a holy remedy to Lear’s hellish pain, Cordelia wishes to be his cure: ‘O my dear father, restoration hang | Thy medicine on my lips’ (4.7.26–7). Reciprocally, Lear describes Cordelia as ‘a soul in bliss’ while he is ‘bound | Upon a wheel of fire’ (4.7.46–7), welcoming Cordelia’s remedy as if it were a venomous drink: ‘If you have poison for me, I will drink it’ (4.7.72). In recognition of Cordelia’s potential and cause to hurt him, Lear receives her antidote as a poison, an equivocation previously used by Shakespeare in The Second Part of King Henry IV when Northumberland tries to find strength in adversity after his son’s death: ‘In poison there is physic’ (1.1.137). The same equivocation resurfaces a few years later when Cleopatra calls her thoughts of an absent Antony a ‘most delicious poison’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5.28) in much the same way you or I might name our pleasurable vices poisons. Richard C. McCoy believes that Lear, when reunited with Cordelia, fails to ‘acknowledge his needs and desires’ and makes instead a ‘desperate effort to regain some control’ (McCoy, 2003: 51). What Lear does acknowledge, inadvertently or with full awareness of the chaos enveloping him, is Cordelia’s dramatic function, her pharmakonic effect on the course of King Lear. Disowned and banished, Cordelia still maintains that she has no cause against Lear, invading Britain with French forces in order to restore him to the throne, deeds that demonstrate the love she once withheld. A medicine and a poison to her father, Cordelia is a pharmakonic figure within which ‘these oppositions are able to sketch themselves out’ (Derrida, 1981: 99). King Lear begins with an equivocation at the heart of the kingdom’s splitting. Cordelia refuses to outdo her sisters for her share of the realm, but in any case the dowries on offer prove to be unequal, an imbalance set up by Lear: ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most, | That we our largest bounty may extend’ (1.1.51–2). The most generous expression will inherit the best share of a tripartite kingdom so whoever claims most convincingly to love Lear best wins his rhetorical game show. Demonstrating the artificiality of the speeches, Nunn’s production had each sister approach a lectern and address the audience as if they were politicians fishing for potential voters. Goneril professes to love Lear ‘more than word can wield



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the matter’ (1.1.55), but then proceeds, in the wordiest manner, to declare the depth of her feelings: Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty, Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour. As much as child e’er loved, or father found, A love that makes breath poor and speech unable, Beyond all manner of so much I love you. (1.1.56–61) That’s a whole lot of love. How could Regan possibly match it? She claims to be ‘made of that self mettle as my sister, | And prize me at her worth’ (1.1.69–70). From the instant the ceremony of flattery ends, the two elder sisters will begin to plot against their father but Lear has already decided who will take first prize: Goneril and Regan each receive a bountiful third, as lavish as that awarded to the other, but Cordelia will receive a ‘more opulent’ share (1.1.86). But, unbeknown to Lear, an unexpected crisis of faith looms around the corner. As Goneril and Regan fall over themselves to profess undying love for their father, Cordelia experiences a divide between signification and what it signifies: Then poor Cordelia, And yet not so, since I am sure my love’s More ponderous than my tongue. (1.1.76–8) Cordelia’s love is weightier, more profound, than expression, a love beyond articulation. But silent, dignified loving only serves to antagonize Lear and induce the tragic events that unfold. From nothing comes something terrible: LEAR What can you say to draw A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak. CORDELIA Nothing, my lord. (1.1.85–7) Ewan Fernie, adopting a Christian perspective, assigns Cordelia ‘the virtuous sense of guilt and shame which her father and sisters lack’. Fernie puts

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Cordelia on a moral pedestal for an essential quality she has within, but the sanctification of Cordelia can also be understood as an intertextual moment rather than an example of a character who ‘remains perfectly shamefast and modest’ (Fernie, 2002: 179). Cordelia’s rebuff resembles the silence of Jesus in the court of King Herod: And when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceeding glad: for he was desirous to see him of a long season, because he had heard many things of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him. Then he questioned with him in many words; but he answered him nothing. (Lk. 23.8–9) Herod could find nothing with which to accuse a silent Jesus, and so returned him to be tried before Pilate; Lear renounces Cordelia for the nothing she offers. Coppélia Kahn’s psychoanalytic reading links Lear’s aggressive dismissal to a ‘frustrated incestuous desire’, one that leads Lear to demand confirmation of Cordelia’s complete love before he gives her away (Kahn, 1986: 39). This rash and vitriolic response misinterprets Cordelia’s attitude: Lear expects her to answer in the same profuse manner as Goneril and Regan but, when she does not, he mistakenly assumes that ‘nothing will come of nothing’ (1.1.90), taking her words at face value. On the contrary, Cordelia answers Lear’s question directly. She could say nothing to outdo Goneril and Regan because, in a fallen language, she cannot say what she truly feels. Until kingdom come, Cordelia, like Hamlet, lacks the signifier that can denote her truly, and her coded reference to the bond between parent and child costs her the pre-eminent place she holds in Lear’s heart: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty According to my bond, no more nor less. (1.1.91–3) The bond most immediately signified is that of filial duty but the pejorative shackle of bondage also comes to mind, as does the legal sense of a deed or contract and uses relating to confinement or imprisonment. No wonder Lear urges Cordelia to think about her diction: ‘How, how, Cordelia? Mend your speech a little, | Lest you may mar your fortunes’ (1.1.94–5). For the most part in King Lear ‘bond’ denotes the relationship between parent and child, and Edmund uses it when he deceives his father, Gloucester, into thinking that Edgar has patricidal intentions:



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I told him the revenging gods ‘Gainst parricides did all their thunders bend, Spoke with how manifold and strong a bond The child was bound to the father. (2.1.45–8) In other plays, Shakespeare predominantly uses it as a legal term, such as in The Merchant of Venice where the term refers to the legally binding agreement between Shylock and Antonio. Shylock loans money to Bassanio and then arranges to meet the guarantor, Antonio, and officially record the transaction: ‘Go with me to a notary, seal me there | Your single bond’ (The Merchant of Venice, 1.3.140–1). ‘Bond’ occurs more times in The Merchant of Venice than the sum of all the other instances in Shakespeare’s works, and its legal sense returns in Macbeth as the tyrant hopes for the deaths of Banquo and Fleance: Come, seeling Night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful Day, And, with thy bloody and invisible hand, Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond Which keeps me pale! (Macbeth, 3.2.46–9) That bond of life Macbeth’s hired murderers threaten is compared to a contract that will be torn to pieces by death, while the stamp of a close, encompassing night that blinds returns us to the seal of Shylock’s and Antonio’s bond. A Midsummer Night’s Dream also uses the language of legal formalities, this time to describe marriage. Theseus warns Hermia that she will die if she does not give up her love for Lysander and marry Demetrius on the same day Theseus marries Hippolyta, ‘The sealing-day betwixt my love and me | For everlasting bond of fellowship’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.84–5). Romantic and filial love, the mystical contract of life and judicial procedures are all encompassed by Shakespeare’s use of ‘bond’, so Cordelia’s curt statement of love not only sets out her affection for her father as clear, obvious and in no need of mealy-mouthed adornments but also carries the legal connotations recurrent in The Merchant of Venice, as well as suggesting bondage, obligation and servitude. Her refusal to play Lear’s rhetorical game costs Cordelia a dowry won with the ‘glib and oily art’ she abhors (1.1.226), reminding Lear that she obeys the bond of nature rather than a bond that stakes her economic

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future on a hypocritical speech. She emphasizes her commitment to her father in contradistinction to the pledges made by Goneril and Regan: Good my lord, You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you and most honour you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? (1.1.95–100) Stating the condition of the bond between parent and child as a reciprocal exchange that involves obedience, love and honour, Cordelia includes the caveat that the duties she owes to her father have been appropriately returned. Then once again she holds out against any indulgence of her father’s whims, pouring sarcastic scorn on Goneril’s and Regan’s total devotion to their father when they have husbands. Taking umbrage, Lear disowns his preferred daughter and compares her to the savage ‘Scythian’ and the sub-human canni­ bal that ‘makes his generation messes | To gorge his appetite’ (1.1.117–19). Very soon, Lear begins to see the error of his self-indulgent ways. Grandiloquently spouting forth the magnificence of her love, Regan compares her florid statement to Goneril’s: ‘In my true heart | I find she names my very deed of love’ (1.1.70–1). Deeds are actions but deeds are also contracts. Playing on this equivocation, Kent urges the two bombastic sisters to act on their devotional paeans: ‘And your large speeches may your deeds approve’ (1.1.185). Kent’s comment also doubles as a warning: Lear’s deed of passing on the kingdom, a literal contract or deed for lands and power, binds Goneril and Regan to offer ‘good effects . . . from words of love’ (1.1.186). Needless to say, both sisters break their promise. First, a bold Goneril makes her father wait for a dinner that never arrives and sends Oswald out to brusquely deal with the inevitable complaints, pushing an agitated Lear close to the edge. Stoking the fire, Goneril then advises her father to reduce the numbers of his train, threatening to ‘take the thing she begs’ (1.4.239). Incensed, Lear weeps: Life and death, I am ashamed That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus, That these hot tears, which break from me perforce, Should make thee worth them. (1.4.288–91)



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Self-shorn of his previous supremacy, Lear can no longer ignore this kind of warning and he feels the intense emotions it elicits as an embarrassing blow to his masculinity. Kahn argues that Lear’s tears mark his ‘progress toward acceptance of the woman in himself’ (Kahn, 1986: 46) and, by extension, Lear’s shaken masculinity also marks his distance from the king’s status as Name-of-the-Father and the psychosocial authority that privileged signifier ensures. Hamlet disturbs the system of hierarchical differences that structure a patriarchal symbolic order by replacing old Hamlet while maintaining Gertrude’s centrality in an economy predicated on the exchange and movement of women. King Lear also unsettles this patriarchal economy when Lear splits the role of king between the duties he would rather give up and the perks he would rather not. Newly vulnerable to the capriciousness of his daughters as a result of this self-inflicted fall from phallocentric grace, Lear confirms a symbolic emasculation with hot tears that he believes are ‘women’s weapons’ (2.2.466). Goneril’s opportunity to hurt Lear comes when he divides the kingdom and its monarchical functions, stepping away from what Derrida called the ‘the proper place’ of the Name-of-the-Father in Lacan’s linguistic matrix (Derrida, 1987: 480). Then, when Regan supports Goneril’s stance, the great love to which breath could not do justice finds a twisted manifestation when an unloved, betrayed Lear feels the throttling ‘mother’ (2.2.246), the condition Edward Jorden described as a ‘choaking in the throat’ (Jorden, 1603: sig.C1r). Kara L. Peterson thinks of Lear’s affliction as a deliberate ploy by Shakespeare to show Lear as either mad or feminized, a possibility rarely considered by editors. Should we focus on the text, rather than what Shakespeare might have intended, this moment illustrates Lear’s incomplete movement away from the proper place of a symbolic, masculine Father. Lear, with no recourse to the sway of kingship once his exclusive right but nevertheless expecting to be treated as if he still held that right, suffers an affliction that Jorden believed was more appropriate to ‘the passiue condition of womankind’ (Jorden, 1603: sig.B1r). Goneril and Regan may feminize Lear, but only when the once-venerated father speaks from an unstable, decentred position as king and not-king. As in Hamlet, the Name-of-the-Father in King Lear is always already on a voyage within Lacan’s symbolic order, reduced to the vacillating operations of non-privileged signifiers in a patriarchal realm it should, as the privileged focal point, bind together instead. Short of breath and starting to realize his mistake, Lear turns the legal sense of ‘bond’ against Regan. Forced out by Goneril, Lear reminds Regan of the contractual demands to which she agreed by fulfilling the terms of the verbose verbal agreement Cordelia resisted:

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Thou better knowst The offices of nature, bond of childhood, Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude. Thy half o’the kingdom hast thou not forgot, Wherein I thee endowed. (2.2.366–70) Should Regan not provide the food, shelter and clothing requested, a contract, a deed, a bond will be broken, one that delivers Lear his due in return for what he has bequeathed his daughters. A gift, according to Derrida, must not be acknowledged or reciprocated in any way because the expectation of something in return destroys the notion of a gift: ‘For there to be a gift, there must be no . . . debt’ (Derrida, 1992a: 12). The half of the realm that Regan was given requires her to fulfil Lear’s expectations, in which a daughter’s obligation to her father is measured by an economic exchange. What Lear provides by way of inheritance is not a gift; it is an inviolable debt incurred when Regan and Goneril accept their inheritance on the condition that they repay their father commensurate with his material needs, the size and nature of which he decides. Lear’s volte-face occurs when, to his mind, Goneril and Regan default on the debt they owe to him, an economic crisis that converts latent Electra-complex psycho­ dynamics into credits to be loaned or repaid. Cordelia’s second coming aims to violently resolve this credit-crunched family drama as she returns to England with French forces, the remedy to Lear’s distress. Her Christ-like qualities are perhaps never more apparent in King Lear than when she paraphrases the gospel of St Luke to justify the French invasion aimed at returning Lear to the throne: ‘O dear father, | It is thy business that I go about’ (4.4.23–4). When Mary and Joseph leave Jerusalem after a Passover feast they are separated from the twelve-year-old Jesus. On their return they find Jesus deep in conversation with the learned of the temple: And when they saw him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business? (Lk. 2.48–9) Though both want to carry out the work of a father, Jesus separates himself from his parents in order to serve God the Father while Cordelia aims to



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restore her biological father to his symbolic position on earth. Lear, a chastised god, greets his lost daughter with the humility reserved for holiness: CORDELIA

[Kneels.] O look upon me, sir, And hold your hands in benediction o’er me! [She restrains him as he tries to kneel.] No, sir, you must not kneel. (4.7.57–9)

Neither the Quarto nor the Folio have stage directions here but Foakes’ editorial additions seem justified by the text, which indicates that Lear attempts to kneel down beside Cordelia. Lear’s thoughts return again to kneeling as if in prayer when Edmund takes him and Cordelia prisoners: ‘When thou dost ask me blessing I’ll kneel down | And ask of thee forgiveness’ (5.3.10–11). Lear feels as though his actions require forgiveness but, crucially, Cordelia claims that there is nothing to forgive. Confronting the difficulty of forgiving historical injustices, Derrida balances unconditional religious forgiveness with the conditionality imposed by politico-judicial processes that demand repentance in exchange for forgiveness (Derrida, 2001: 34–5, 44–5). At the centre of this dilemma Derrida finds an aporia whereby ‘forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable’ (ibid., 32). If we only pardon the forgivable, the notion of forgiveness disappears: only actions we deem unforgivable challenge us to forgive. These aporias are finally resolved on ‘the apocalyptic horizon of a final judgement’ (ibid., 33), a second coming evoked by Cordelia’s return. In Christian terms, an unforgivable sin would be a mortal sin, while a forgivable sin would be venial. Pointedly, then, Cordelia maintains that she has suffered no injustice: the excusable does not require excusing. Reprising her hurtful ‘nothing’ in a healing form, Cordelia says she has ‘no cause’ against Lear (4.7.75), dividing Lear’s actions from the actions of Goneril, Regan and Edmund. Lear has merely committed a venial sin; the mortal sins are listed in ‘A Commination’. Those who, like Goneril, Regan and Edmund, wilfully act against their parents, turn away the homeless and abandoned, conspire against their neighbours, have murderous intentions, follow the desires of man, they all run the risk of suffering the ‘fyre, and brimstone, storme and tempest: this shalbe theyr potion to drinke’ (‘A Commination’, sig.P8r). Could it be that Shakespeare had this potion of the Apocalypse in mind when Lear asks for Cordelia’s poison? The young princess Lear once chased

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from the kingdom as if he were the satanic dragon has become his redeemer, the last hope of the anarchical apocalypse unleashed by Lear’s pompous, if forgivable, wrath. Bradley saw King Lear as a renunciation of the world in favour of the soul with Cordelia as a saviour who redeems Lear before his death (Bradley, 1957: 198–276), while Barbara Everett made the case for a more pessimistic account with a critique of the redemptive interpretations inspired by Bradley. However, both Bradley and Everett saw Cordelia as the play’s Christfigure. Placed in the stocks by Cornwall and Regan, Kent reads Cordelia’s letter as if it were an epistle from just such a Logos: Nothing almost sees miracles But misery. I know ‘tis from Cordelia, Who hath most fortunately been informed Of my obscured course. (2.2.163–6) Kent envisages miracles as the preserve of those most in need or as changed circumstances that appear miraculous to the eyes of the distressed, placing Cordelia in the position of redeemer who, as her letter states, will seek ‘to give | Losses their remedies’. When the Gentleman describes Cordelia’s reaction to Kent’s letter, a scene only in the Quarto, he reaffirms Cordelia’s superhuman goodness: KENT GENTLEMAN

Made she no verbal question? Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of father Pantingly forth, as if it pressed her heart, Cried ‘Sisters, sisters, shame of ladies, sisters, Kent, father, sisters, what, i’ th’ storm, i’ th’ night? Let pity not be believed!’ There she shook The holy water from her heavenly eyes And clamor moistened; then away she started To deal with grief alone. (Q, 4.3a.25–33)

McLuskie views Cordelia’s ‘dutiful pity’ as an attempt to engage audience sympathy for Lear when they might otherwise see him as tyrannically patriarchal, while the Gentleman’s speech implies that Cordelia ‘resolves contradiction’ (McLuskie, 1985: 101). This resolving force highlighted by McLuskie structures the Gentleman’s tribute:



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Patience and sorrow strove Who should express her goodliest. You have seen Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears Were like, a better way. Those happy smilets That played on her ripe lip seem not to know What guests were in her eyes, which parted thence As pearls from diamonds dropped. In brief, Sorrow would be a rarity most beloved If all could so become it. (Q, 4.3a.16–24) Through the holy grace of Cordelia’s tears patience and sorrow harmoniously strive for pre-eminence, a paradoxical struggle overcome with a superior idiom of grief. This idealized exaltation of Cordelia as one whose enduring love will save the king and his kingdom promises for King Lear the resolution and stability provided in language by the apocalyptic arrival of the Logos. Of course, this does not arrive; it is always out of reach, always happening tomorrow. Even though we, now, are still here, an always-looming apocalypse helps formulate the way we talk about when we will no longer be here, and the Apocalypse looming on the chancel arch helped Shakespeare formulate the same conception. Crushing the hope represented by Cordelia delivers King Lear’s final blow. Like Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, the plot of King Lear has the same eschatological structure as language, where the arrival of a Logos, of a transcendental signified, is endlessly postponed to the apocalyptic horizon of final, absolute meaning. For King Lear to work as tragedy, the soteriology embodied by Cordelia – a crusading force present in every Doom extant and still intact or lost to the sectarian iconoclasm of history – must ultimately fall short of the majestic redress given to grievous atrocities by a returning Christ, who saves the innocent and damns the wicked on Judgement Day. That we are led to believe another ending, even the ending of all endings, could be possible constitutes a major part of the tragedy. This anti-structural anomaly also conditions language, in which the arrival of such a Logos, or any other vessel that funnels absolute truth, remains in perpetual deferment, an envisioned end that, by not arriving, makes the linguistic heterogeneity familiar to us possible. Confounding the dramaturgical and religious expectations King Lear sets up, Edmund confesses that he and Goneril have already ordered Cordelia’s death. ‘The gods defend her’, cries Albany (5.3.254) to no avail as Lear enters the fray with a dead Cordelia in his arms. Bradley gives the depressing end a positive spin because, as he sees it, Lear

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eventually dies believing Cordelia to be alive (272–3). Critiques of redemptionist readings, such as J. Stampfer’s, emphasize the relentless turmoil and point to Lear’s insistence that Cordelia has ‘no life’ (5.3.304) while Belsey describes the play as ‘bleak to the point of nihilism’ because it mimics the design of popular folk tales with happy endings only to subvert the pattern at the last (Belsey, 2007: 50). From an apocalyptic perspective, Cordelia’s death, whether Lear dies knowing it or not, signifies a failure of apocalyptic salvation. In this scenario, salvation and damnation both lie ahead, forestalled but equally likely. Maybe redemptionist, nihilist and apocalyptic interpretations are all as wrong as each other. Maybe the Apocalypse came and went and we are already in hell. Maybe it happened in King Lear or happened to us too or happened a long time ago before Shakespeare put pen to paper and nobody noticed, for, to paraphrase the wandering Ely, we cannot recognize tomorrow’s apocalypse when it does not know who we are (McCarthy, 2006:, 142). King Lear, like McCarthy’s novel, sits between an apocalypse-like disaster and the still-to-come Apocalypse it resembles, but The Road hints that what we are witnessing might, in fact, be eternal suffering and the characters whose fortunes we follow are already damned, lost souls in scenery that stresses the hellish atmosphere: He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (ibid., 110) This is somewhere populated by cold-blooded cannibals and remorseless looters who stalk the ‘exhausted cities . . . like shoppers in the commissaries of hell’ (ibid., 152), some horrid ‘cauterized terrain’ (ibid., 12) through which the man and the boy doggedly push a cart as if they were the stained glass demon in St Mary’s Church, Fairford, carting souls off to the devil (back in Figure 3.2). This is somewhere in which absolute truth has, according to the man’s view of it, already been revealed and, for the man, the boy and the dangerous, discarded stragglers they meet, the truth proves never-endingly harsh. Could it be that, when Lear hauls a murdered Cordelia on to the stage, we see proof of hell, proof of the promised Apocalypse having arrived and damned us to a nefarious existence in which,



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as Gloucester bemoans it, ‘Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father’ (King Lear, 1.2.106–9)? Or does Lear’s enduring bond with Cordelia, or the man’s enduring bond with the boy, give us some hope that, current horrors aside, we are not in hell yet and time remains to save our souls? Through the hellish life it portrays, The Road offers a series of twisted Pietàs that place the soteriological boy in the protective arms of his father, desperate embraces of hope foregrounded by McCarthy’s sparse yet lyrical prose. King Lear finishes with Shakespeare’s own Pietà. As Lear lays down Cordelia’s dead body, Kent asks ‘Is this the promised end?’ ‘Or image of that horror?’ responds Edgar (5.3.261–2). Together, Kent and Edgar articulate a disappointment that separates the end of the world from visions of the end of the world. Derrida differentiates the messianic, which is the apocalyptic human condition of constantly awaiting an incomprehensible future for which no preparation can be made, from religious messianism, which awaits a known Messiah expected at a preordained time. He does this ‘so as to designate a structure of experience rather than a religion’ (Derrida, 1994: 167–8). Only when the Messiah actually arrives can the messianic be united with religious messianism. Kent’s and Edgar’s words reinforce the distinction made by Derrida: the conclusion to King Lear differentiates Shakespeare’s messianic dramaturgy from the Christological messianism it invokes because the end of the play does not deliver the promised end of the Doom. Simply put, in King Lear and in  all apocalyptically themed discourse, it is always an image of the promised end we experience because the true horror of it exists in an inconceivable, incommunicable future to come. The pre-Christian setting merely underlines that even a biblical Apocalypse can only be represented as an apocalypse with a small ‘a’. Specifically, Edgar compares the sight of Lear cradling Cordelia’s corpse with Doom imagery, replacing the swooping angels, snatching fiends and devouring, dragonish hell-mouths with a tragic, pagan Pietà: in the place of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Christ Shakespeare puts a crumpled Lear with Cordelia’s inert, lifeless body in his arms. Hellish, but not hell; apocalyptic, but not the Apocalypse. Something else, something pharmakonic – a poisonous remedy. The Pietà was another pre-Reformation painting common to parish churches as part of the poor man’s Bible. Sadly, hardly any remain in a reasonable condition. St John the Baptist Church, in Hornton, Oxfordshire, holds perhaps the least degraded version but, thanks to the handy work of determined iconoclasts or myopic Victorian renovators, even this extant

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example is hard to make out and lacks the colourful, striking clarity of, say, the urban Doom at Coventry which has benefited from lengthy and costly restoration or the Doom at sleepy South Leigh which perhaps escaped the destructive attention given to the artworks at the nearby church in Hornton. Close to Milton Keynes, St Lawrence’s Church, in Broughton, Buckinghamshire, houses a ‘Warning to Swearers’ that centres on a Pietà. The ‘Warning to Swearers’ was intended to stop parishioners from swearing in Christ’s name by illustrating the new wounds each blasphemous utterance inflicted upon his body, which was usually the solo centrepiece of the painting. Uniquely, the painting in St Lawrence’s instead depicts Mary carrying a mutilated Christ. Shakespeare’s recapitulation of the Pietà punctuates the progression of Doom imagery we have encountered in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and, finally, King Lear. The spooky graveyard scene in Hamlet re-presents the message delivered by the gruesome cadavers of ‘The Three Living and Three Dead’ memento mori, while in their darkest, most intensely emotional moments, Othello and Macbeth are terrorized by the resurrecting angels and marauding demons of hell-fire that gazed down on practically every medieval and early modern congregation. As the curtain comes down on the English-language world’s most revered and culturally embedded quartet of tragedies, Lear, the combustible Leviathan dragon given a taste of his own medicine and then some, grieves over Cordelia’s corpse, Shakespeare’s final revivification of the Dooms dis­ appearing around him, an on-stage appropriation fused with the expiatory gore of the Pietà. But where the Christian Pietà soothes the nightmare it illustrates with the theological balm of Atonement, ascribing a spiritual positivity that reorientates death as holy sacrifice, Shakespeare visualizes pain, anguish and death as shorn of any deliverance, of the divine compensation symbiotic with the terrible perdition of Judgement Day. Demons pushing carts may turn out to be imaginary, a poetic fantasy, but then so are the rescuing angels. Kent and Edgar speculate as to whether what they see before them is the Doom or merely a replica, a living effigy of the last day. By definition, the image is not the metaphysical thing itself, and the heavenly salvation of the Apocalypse that, for the fortunate, for the good, sweeps them up and away from the hot, snapping jaws of damnation stays offstage. King Lear – in keeping with the dramaturgy of Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth – invokes but withholds the Doom, a traumatic reconciliation between heaven and earth preceded and set up by the Pietà. Tantalizingly out of reach, the blazing, sulphurous and apocalyptic Judgement that ends all equivocatory confusion and the tragedy it helps to bring about guarantees, by its absence, the austere, desolate outcome of the play. Earthly destruction



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and disaster caused by linguistic twists and turns stands unredeemed by supernatural disclosure, a ghostly coup de théâtre that holds back the end it promises – a spectral Logos that might, one day, emerge in excelsis from a fizzing portal in the clouds to deliver cloven-hoofed punishment for the wicked or winged salvation for the just.

Note 1

All references to the Quarto and Folio, rather than the conflated Arden text, are to Shakespeare (2000).

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Come Forth and Yield Your Account Let’s pretend for a moment that the Apocalypse has arrived in the form Christianity tells us. You are there right now, a witness to the end of everything. In the city buildings crumble, rivers burst their banks and the ground is split open by geysers of hot lava. In the country mountains fall, seas engulf the land and the skies are blackened by the beating wings of a million descending angles. Around you, the buried clamber up from their graves to the sound of horns so loud even the ears of the dead bleed. Maybe you are one of these zombies, soil still in your mouth, body withered and decayed, flesh worm-eaten and falling from your bones. You wish you said more prayers when you were alive, or made those little gestures of everyday kindness that were so easy to neglect, or could take back all the hurtful words you ever used when, in the distance, a fiery gateway appears from nowhere, creates itself out of thin air and starts to chomp its jagged saw-like teeth. You try to run the other way but, as in a nightmare, you are sucked backwards by an invisible tractor beam, your feet heavy as lead pulled through mud. As a silent void of dark nothingness replaces the violent cataclysm, gentle hands try to pull you up towards the sunlight breaking through above and away from hell’s reptilian jaws only for another, hotter hand to snatch your foot, dig in its claws and drag you back down. Now you are face to face with the fiend, a cackling demon eager to throw you into the everlasting fire, and you wonder which fiend it is. It could be Flibbertigibbet, Smulkin or Modo. Or maybe Mahu, Frateretto or Hoppedance. These black angels listed by a raving Edgar in King Lear were taken from Samuel Harsnett’s 1603 treatise A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, which ridiculed and condemned the exorcisms conducted by Catholic priests. However, the demon into whose glowing eyes you are most likely to stare come Judgement Day is one Tutivillus who, according to common lore, carried a sack containing the words of idle chatter and the

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words skipped over or omitted from prayer. A regular on the medieval stage, Tutivillus was such a popular feature of the morality play that the action would break off prior to his appearance in order for a collection to be taken, the earliest known instance of generating revenue this way. Should the spectators watching Mankind have stumped up the cash necessary to lure this fiend out into the open, he would have introduced himself to them as the Lord of Lords, ‘Ego sum dominantium dominus’ (Mankind, 475, original emphasis), cheekily echoing the nom de guerre of the holy warrior with the sword-like tongue St John of Patmos sees step out of the sky (Rev. 19.16). Crucially, then, Tutivillus (or Titivillus) was associated with the Apocalypse, and in the Wakefield mystery cycle’s Judgement he presents his sack of irreligious vocabulary as condemnatory evidence against the damned. What this stage devil represents is the intrinsic link between language and the end of the world, a theatrical metaphor for the specifically linguistic account we give when we no longer see God through a glass darkly but directly, as well as the impact this metaphysical moment has on language. Criticizing the ill-mannered, abusive and scatological Nowadays, Naught and Newguise in Mankind, Mercy ponders their fate come this fearful moment with particular reference to how modes of communication will structure the final encounter: How may it be excused before the Justice of all, When for every idle word we must yield a reason? They have great ease; therefore, they will take no thought. But how, when the angel of heaven shall blow the trump, And say to the transgressors that wickedly have wrought, ‘Come forth unto your judge, and yield your account’? (Mankind, 172–7) On the divine side sits the language of the Logos and on the mortal side sits our fallen language. The hell-porter of Macbeth also emphasizes the impossibility of hoodwinking heaven, stressing the same disparity between rhetorical accounts of the soul and ineffable logocentric clarity, between the inherent equivocation of human speech or writing and the unequivocal Word. Tutivillus, with his sack of blasphemous words, acts out a possible end point for language’s apocalyptic narrative when, as the judge to whom Mercy alludes dispenses holy justice, the truths for which we constantly search are revealed, obliterating linguistic difference. In such dramatizations of Christian eschatology, divine intervention would thus trump the Derridean process of dissemination. Instead of the



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signifying chain’s differential continuum – the successive differences between signifiers that accounts for the mutability of language but also, by virtue of that mutability, continually defers any comprehensive finality – the Logos channels meaning directly. In other words, we no longer comprehend a term via reference to the trace of its differentiating other but via the Logos. To put it simply, where I once described ‘boy’ as ‘not girl’, needing the term ‘girl’ in order to make my notion of the term ‘boy’ understandable to you thanks to the subtle bond between these two terms culturally constructed as antithetical, post Apocalypse the Logos guarantees our direct understanding of ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ in much the same way that Adam could not misname the animals because his choice was also God’s choice. Think about this from another literary angle. One of the reasons Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was so controversial can be found in the title, which refers to an apocryphal tale re-imagined in one of the novel’s dream sequences. In a passage omitted from the Quran, Mohammad passes on a revelation that seems to endorse polytheism but then quickly recants the claim, blaming the malign influence of Shaitan. If the Word can be invaded by the sly-talking devil, this casts doubt upon the omnipotent nature of God. Prophets always speak directly to the man upstairs because mediation by any other source lends itself to Iago-style manipulations, so if the hotline to God can be hacked then not even He can make the incorruptible statements that are supposed to be His preserve. What Tutivillus theatrically demonstrates is the Apocalypse’s twofold force of administering justice and, in so doing, untying the knots of human communication. Clearly familiar with the tropes and traditional features of morality plays, Shakespeare would have noted the connection Tutivilllus makes between the promised Judgement of humanity and the simultaneous elimination of quibbles, misconstructions, misapprehensions and all other linguistic grey areas that can be arranged under the banner of equivocation. Shakespeare’s exploitation of that connection in Romeo and Juliet pitches this dual action against the creatures and characters affiliated with its advent. Hearing of Tybalt’s death at Romeo’s hand, Juliet invokes the same trumpet blast feared by Macbeth: ‘Then dreadful trumpet sound the general doom’. Juliet’s concern is not only the death of her cousin and banishment of her husband, but also a route beyond the conflicted accounts of Romeo, who she sees as a ‘Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical’ as well as ‘A damned saint, an honourable villain’ (3.2.67, 75, 79). Lovesick and torn, Juliet invites the crack of doom as a means to disentangle the incongruous juxtapositions of heaven and hell that schizophrenically constitute Romeo,

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an otherworldly judicial-linguistic power personified on the boards by Tutivillus and his sack of damnable utterances. Bearing in mind the deeply religious nature of medieval society and an early modern society only tentatively starting to shift its shared psychical conception of the cosmos from one organized around God to one organized around the subject, a movement anticipated by the advent of the Shakespearean soliloquy, Tutivillus concurrently performs the theonomy of language alongside the Judgement central to the Christian framework of morality plays and mystery cycles. Shakespeare’s twist to this formula is to withhold the apocalyptic deus ex machina that could undo all forms of ambiguity and dissimulation and, by extension, haul the deserving up to heaven and sentence the undeserving to an eternity in flames. At the same time, references to pre-Reformation imagery, especially of the Doom, so familiar to contemporary audiences invoke the ultimately absent celestial power that in a variety of forms elsewhere in the Shakespearean canon converts potential tragedy into divine comedy. Mankind hurtles towards an ending of despair when Tutivillus convinces the eponymous, representative hero to kill himself, winning his soul for the devil on Judgement Day, only for Mercy to intervene and save the day, while in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear a similar yet more harrowing redemptive power haunts the speech and imagination of the dramatis personae only to confound the expectation of its arrival. Despite the warnings of skeletons and cadavers, or the portentous poetry of fiends, angels, sea-monster dragons and devouring hell-mouths, at the end of each tragedy the envisioned mercy of the Apocalypse never arrives (not yet). Tragic dramaturgy and eschatological narratives have this pattern in common. This absent presence makes eschatology possible because it can only exist as a mode of study in which the triumph of the skies is a future consideration and not an actual occurrence and, by blocking off the route to a utopian conclusion, this absent presence defines tragedy. Moreover, this apocalyptic dynamic not only allegorizes the ways in which Shakespeare’s tragic plots develop but also, as we have seen, the production of meaning in language.

Missives from Immortal Sources So if Shakespeare’s tragedies are structured like a language, a structure haunted by the anti-structural anomaly of the ‘yet’, of the foretold but unseen horizon on which the elusive Logos remains, coming and to come, what happens on the stage when such arrivals do occur? Although comedies



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disentangle the misunderstandings that threaten their utopian endings, happy endings are seldom absolute even when they are explicitly the result of divine intervention. Shakespeare’s comedies often have negative remainders in the form of dissenting figures and divine messages that still require interpretation, so not only do plays such as As You Like It, Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale counterpoint the tragedies, but they shed further light on the dramatic and literary role of a transcendental signified: when the Logos does not deliver the unequivocal closure it promises, what we see in conflict are what the Logos can achieve in metaphysical theory and what it can achieve in practice on the page or on the stage. From a mortal point of view, missives from immortal sources can still equivocate. In Cymbeline, Jupiter’s tablet foretells the reconciliations and reunifications that follow but the Soothsayer must still interpret the mysterious inscription before it is understood to describe in a sideways fashion the relentless disclosures and discoveries of the conclusion. Apollo’s Oracle declares that Leontes will be heirless unless something lost is found again, a prophetical truth clarified when the return of Leontes’ long-lost daughter, Perdita, leads to Hermione’s mystical revival. These are examples of the opaque communications comic heroes receive when they do not come face to face with their god or gods, and yet even when gods are embodied on stage a negative undertow still disrupts the utopia they herald. Offering audiences fictional visions of alternative, egalitarian ways of life, comedies, with their unlikely scenarios, stunning coincidences, straightforward oppositions between bad and good and overtly fantastical, contrived outcomes, still remind us that these alternative possibilities are both tenuously constructed and removed from the less serendipitous realities of our own existence. To paraphrase Kiernan Ryan’s neat summation, both the world of the play and the world of the audience are scrutinized by the comedies. The puns, riddles and deliberate mis­ understandings and misrecognitions made by many of the characters expose language as fluctuating and changeable, highlighting the instability of structures the viewer too easily takes to be fixed and unalterable. Synchronously, what Ryan calls effects of estrangement undermine the concord on stage (Ryan, 2002: 115–21). Taking this analysis on board, we can say that the instability and confusion Hymen bars in As You Like It returns in the form of the malcontent Jacques’s dour denial of the general gaiety the goddess of marriage brings to the proceedings. Jupiter’s involvement in Cymbeline constructs a happy ending founded on death and decapitation, while the international relations that led to war in the play are reasserted rather than altered. Right in the midst of celebration, Cymbeline,

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like Macbeth, suggests that problematic apparatuses of governance have not been adequately reassembled. Furthermore, the narration by Time in The Winter’s Tale and the poet John Gower in Pericles lends an unreality and artificiality that conditions the unfolding events. Consequently, when a transcendental signified does show its revelatory hand of resolution there is still slippage: a difference seems to hold between, on the one hand, an unequivocal source and, on the other, its equivocal symbolization in human language. A deeper look at The Winter’s Tale exemplifies this slippage, as well as how this affects categorization of the play. One of the late plays, The Winter’s Tale is grouped with the comedies and often called a romance, as are other late plays such as the aforementioned Pericles and Cymbeline and also The Tempest. Romances, in Shakespeare’s day, were dramatic adventure stories, usually involving kings, queens, princes and princesses whose fates were guided, guarded or governed by supernatural control. One popular example was Robert Greene’s Pandosto, first published in 1588 and Shakespeare’s main source for The Winter’s Tale. The events of Shakespeare’s comedy are set in motion when the King of Sicilia, Leontes, suddenly decides that the pregnant Hermione has been unfaithful to him with his childhood friend Polixenes, the King of Bohemia. Furthermore, as Polixenes has been staying in Sicilia for nine months, Leontes also convinces himself that Polixenes has fathered the child to whom Hermione will soon give birth. Seeing Hermione persuade Polixenes to stay another week, Leontes utters his famous aside: ‘Too hot! Too hot! | To mingle friendship far, is mingling bloods’ (1.2.108–9). The tragic events of the first half of the play are triggered by this moment of irrationality. On the back of this crazy assumption, Leontes tries to have Polixenes killed by Camillo, who instead tells Polixenes of the murderous plan and flees with him to Bohemia. Then Hermione is imprisoned and publicly accused, while Antigonus is ordered to dump the newborn Perdita on the shores of Bohemia. Finally, both Hermione and Prince Mamillius die in quick succession. Traditionally, two explanations have been offered for why Leontes reacts so wildly and tyrannically. First, that Shakespeare did this deliberately due to dramatic constraints: as we know, performances generally lasted for approximately two hours so Leontes had to abruptly decide that Hermione had been unfaithful for the action to develop and conclude in time. Secondly, and more pertinently for our concerns, some critics have interpreted the sudden turn as necessary in setting the scene for subsequent redemption and reunification: in the second half of the play, Perdita falls in love with Florizel, Prince of Bohemia, Hermione miraculously comes back



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to life and the family are reunited. Along the way we also meet a lovable rogue, Autolycus, who lightens the mood. Many who read the play or see it performed often find themselves debating whether what they see can be called a comedy. Although the family are brought back together, Prince Mamillius has died, Hermione has been falsely accused and apparently dead for sixteen years, Perdita banished at birth and Antigonus torn to pieces by a bear. With the exception of the half funny, half violent fate that befalls Antigonus, these moments of distress led Andrew Gurr to argue that with The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare was exploring the differences between tragedy and comedy, a difference elucidated by the role of the Oracle. Comedy qua comedy resolves the misunderstandings or confusions that threaten happy endings and, as has been pointed out, often this closure explicitly relies upon supernatural intercession. Deities and deified entities, such as Hymen, Jupiter or Diana, play small but highly significant roles that punctuate the crowd-pleasing comedies, but we encounter the Oracle of The Winter’s Tale half-way through the play. Deep within the holy sanctuary of an age-old city, a priestess, so the ancient Greeks believed, channelled the wisdom of Apollo and would provide written answers to any question; it is this Oracle of Apollo that clears Hermione of any guilt. Nevertheless, Leontes rejects its words with tragic outcomes. Introducing the Oracle’s proclamation, Leontes states that the trial of Hermione demonstrates his commitment to being a fair king rather than a tyrant: Let us be clear’d Of being tyrannous, since we so openly Proceed in justice, which shall have due course Even to the guilt or the purgation. (3.2.4–7) Keen to dispel any accusations against him, Leontes promises to let justice run its course and prove Hermione’s guilt or innocence. Publicly accused of high treason for committing adultery with Polixenes and conspiring with Camillo, Hermione puts her faith in the imminent godlike providence: If powers divine Behold our human actions (as they do), I doubt not then but innocence shall make False accusation blush, and tyranny Tremble at patience. (3.2.28–32)

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Her innocence, she believes, will embarrass her false accusers, and her patience will triumph over the high-handed, unreasonable bullying of Leontes. An officer then reads out the proclamation from Apollo’s Oracle: Hermione is chaste; Polixenes blameless; Camillo a true subject; Leontes a jealous tyrant; his innocent babe truly begotten; and the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found. (3.2.132–6) Breaking his promise to follow divine direction, Leontes dismisses the Oracle’s words as false. Tragically, they are soon confirmed by the death of his son, Mamillius, leaving Leontes without an heir unless his missing daughter is found. The Oracle is validated again at the play’s magical end with the return of Perdita, the lost girl. In common with other comedies, the play has a resolving figure from another, ethereal dimension but, going against the grain of the romantic conventions that underwrite Shakespearean comedy, the supernatural logocentric presence does not stop tragic events from occurring. The Winter’s Tale, then, disrupts any simple definition of comedy, deconstructing the opposition between comedy and tragedy. Although the play was listed as a comedy in the First Folio of 1623, it has, regardless, proved difficult for readers, audiences and critics to categorize. The trial scene marks the end of the tragic movement of the play at the court of Sicilia and, as Act Four gets under way, the personification of Time explains that sixteen years have passed, paving the way for the comedic second movement set mostly in pastoral Bohemia. Generally, the first half of the play is seen as tragic and the second half as comic. Recently, critics have compared the two parts of The Winter’s Tale in a variety of ways. Phebe Jensen, for instance, argues that the play investigates the sectarian tensions of the day, with the tyranny of Leontes providing a subtle metaphor for the Protestant authorities that clamped down on religious festivals, an iconoclastic dogma that, of course, also extended to greatly reducing the number of wall paintings and stained glass available to us today. Opposing this iconoclasm, the popular festivals, which were often associated with the artistic idolatry of Catholicism, are represented in the pastoral scenes of the play. James A. Knapp sees the play as a long philosophical meditation on human relations, with Leontes first failing to sympathize with others and then progressing to a more ethical engagement with those around him. Elsewhere, feminist critic Janet Adelman has argued that the play presents the response of Leontes’



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insecure masculinity to the maternal power Hermione signifies, something negotiated in the second, comedic sequence of The Winter’s Tale (Adelman, 1992: 219–37). Despite writing from different perspectives, these critics concur that a more complex dramaturgical arrangement is in place than one simply or easily generalized as comedy or tragedy. Half-failed, halfsuccessful, the Oracle’s prognostication announces the completion of the play’s tragic section and acts as a hinge to subsequent comic sequences, a hinge that swings from heavenly unequivocal origins to problematic articula­tions of such an idiom in a mortal register characterized by ongoing vicissitude.

An Image of that Horror What, then, can possibly be said to clarify heavenly mysteries? Philip Roth’s powerful novel Nemesis charts the gradual apostasy of Bucky Cantor as he tries to fathom the cosmic logic behind a polio epidemic that strikes down the children of his community. Paying his respects to a bereaved father, Bucky can offer nothing by way of response to the heartfelt questions he faces: ‘Where are the scales of justice?’ the poor man asked. ‘I don’t know, Mr. Michaels.’ ‘Why does tragedy always strike down the people who least deserve it?’ ‘I don’t know the answer,’ Mr. Cantor replied. ‘Why not me instead of him?’ Mr Cantor had no response at all to such a question. He could only shrug. (Roth, 2010: 48) Unable to join his friends fighting in the Second World War and flummoxed by the war waged at home on local children by an indiscriminate disease, Bucky suffers a very personal catastrophe, a questioning of his belief in God that eventually leads him to reject his future prospects in favour of an isolated life of bitter contemplation. This self-destructive, irrational choice taken by an upstanding and decent man has its roots in Bucky’s inability to make any sense of tragedies he witnesses but reluctantly escapes: ‘The meaninglessness of it! A terrible disease drops from the sky and somebody is dead overnight. A child, no less!’

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Mr. Cantor wished that he knew a single word to utter that would alleviate, if only for a moment, the father’s anguished suffering. But all he could do was nod his head. (ibid.) Alleviation only comes with the scales of Lady Justice demanded by the father, classical symbols which, in biblical and Islamic lore as well as GraecoRoman mythology, represent the even-handed coherence of the divine. Bucky’s frustration grows as he realizes that nothing satisfactory can be said or written to explicate the inexplicable, and anything appropriate would, in any case, only be so fleetingly. For Cantor the force that could make tragedy reasonable or intelligible is the Abrahamic God, a transcendental signified that was the ubiquitous Christian Logos for Shakespeare’s profoundly religious time. Part of a more diverse, more secular cultural web, twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction redeploys powerful religious iconography embedded in our collective memory in order to imagine a game-changing event or conduit of transformative knowledge, a Logos that is still sometimes biblical but also political, philosophical or scientific. Don DeLillo’s novella Point Omega lists these proliferating sources of our demise when the conversation between the narrator and Richard Estler, a retired war adviser, turns to the stories we tell ourselves about the end of the world: ‘Look at us today. We keep inventing folk tales of the end. Animal diseases spreading, transmittable cancers. What else?’ ‘The climate,’ I said. ‘The climate.’ ‘The asteroid,’ I said. ‘The asteroid, the meteorite. What else?’ ‘Famine, worldwide.’ (DeLillo, 2010: 64) Debated, but available for empirical study, these earthly disasters do not require belief to the same extent as the Apocalypse foreseen by St John of Patmos. Even so, Estler still sees in these non-religious events – often described as ‘biblical’ depending on their scale – a crossover between cataclysm and communication in the form of the omega point, a maximum achievable complexity of human consciousness preceding a quasi-religious transformation:



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‘Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it’s not a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea outside of our experience.’ ‘What idea?’ ‘What idea. Paroxysm. Either a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion.’ (ibid., 91) Folk tales of the end, even physical, non-spiritual ones, are inextricably linked to a profound shift in who or what we are and the way we communicate. As in Nemesis, a personal apocalypse occurs in Point Omega, a microcosmic paroxysm that comes with the incomprehensible disappearance of Estler’s daughter who vanishes into the novella’s desert landscape, a deathly step beyond signification similar to Hamlet’s wish that he would ‘melt, | Thaw and resolve . . . into a dew’ (Hamlet, 1.2.129–30). If comedies such as The Winter’s Tale can be said to dramatize the problematic discrepancies which inevitably arise when revelatory gods or godlike figures are included in the signifying practice of mortals, DeLillo’s meditation on mortality replays this imperfect matching of two asymmetrical blueprints of communication but with worldly, material substitutes for Apollo’s Oracle or the Christian omega point wished for and called forth in Shakespearean tragedy. Given the complexities of literally spelling out the effects metalinguistic entities have on human affairs, an artistic conundrum that offers almost limitless scope for creativity but has, at its core, the central impossibility of representing the infinite with finite forms and content, perhaps obliquely visualizing the viewpoint of eternity is a more satisfactory option. Naturally this applies to the oneiric horror of the Dooms still dotted around Britain and also to the various political, nuclear, environmental or terroristic incarnations of this imagery, apocalypses with a small ‘a’ most commonly restructured for modern cinema and television audiences as a nightmarish dream. The personal nightmares that have infiltrated this book are one, unconscious way of taking a step back from the imagined event itself and, along similar lines, the dreams of modern-day fiction also view the end of humanity askance or through a reverie that circumnavigates catastrophe so as to see it clearer. In The Terminator we only see the coming postapocalyptic war between the last outposts of humanity and their machine overlords through the harrowing dreams of the soldier from the future, Reese. Haunted by visions of his past that still await us in that terrible future, Reese repeatedly sees in his troubled sleep a dark, indistinct landscape lit up briefly by laser fire from the patrolling sentries of metal doom who hunt

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down the human resistance without rest, retreat or remorse, their electric blue blasts intermittently illuminating skulls and shattered skeletons in a mechanized dance of apocalyptic death. Terminator 2 pictures the actual nuclear Armageddon itself through the nightmares of Sarah Connor, mother to humanity’s renegade messiah, John Connor. The opening shots of the film switch from children playing happily in a park to the destruction of the aftermath, Sarah Connor filling in the gap between the existence she knows and the one she knows is coming with nightmares of atomic explosions that mushroom into the sky, blowing apart the children on the park rides like papier-mâché dolls. Continuing the theme of indirect access to the apocalypse, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines ends with the nascent leader of mankind deep in a protective bunker as the day of reckoning that, by its absence, drives the franchise finally arrives unseen above ground. Battlestar Galactica employs a similar trope, adding evolutionary and pseudo-Christian ingredients to the science fiction pot. Two female cylons and President Laura Roslin all share the same dream, an amphibological prophesy that links human and cylon destiny in unclear ways that bend in accordance with the personal or political ambitions of each dreamer. All three envision repeatedly confronting each other as they follow Hera, the first human-cylon child, through an opera house, only to see her snatched and carried through a doorway that shuts out her cylon mother and her human protector. Shedding retrospective light on the prophetic dream, Battlestar finishes by reaching the promised land of Earth with the future of humans and cylons predicated on the death of both races; it is an apocalyptic destruction that guarantees the survival of a unified race with Hera posited as our mitochondrial Eve, mother to a new species of organic machines who populate a planet idealized throughout the series as heavenly. Even Bergman’s resolutely Christian The Seventh Seal approaches the dual issue of the presence of a deity and the presence of Judgement Day through faith and hermeneutical interpretation rather than explicit contact with the divine. When Antonuis Block makes an inadvertent confession to Death, he does so next to a sculpture of Christ that sits beneath an arch adorned with winged angels and demonic dragons. Desperate to perceive God directly rather than through half-promises and unseen miracles, the tortured Block desires the metaphysical knowledge reserved for the Apocalypse being heralded outside, where self-flagellating villagers take the historical plague sweeping the nation to be a sure sign that the events of the Book of Revelation are already happening. All these varied speculations as to what the end of the world might look like, convocations of often quite different ideas about what will happen and



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when stitched together for the purposes of the stage, the screen or the page, are made possible by the paradox with which we began. If the problem with the apocalypse is that it never arrives, it is a problem replete with recompense. The paradox that makes eschatology possible, the non-arrival of its object of study, also provides the mutable conditions for us to fictionally, even non-religiously, construct and then reconstruct that object of study. Built in to these mutable conditions is an always already postponed teleological climax, a recurring deferment that does not exclude the messianic event ever happening but retains its looming possibility as an impending, overwhelming force. This dynamic, which also apocalyptically structures language, accounts for the pamphleteering of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that tried repeatedly to specify a date for the Doom, and, when that date passed, simply rescheduled for the next significant politico-religious day, week, month, year or decade, depending on how accurate the author dared to be. Indeed, what makes Terminator 3 feasible or credible is the delay built in to the concept of Judgement Day which, according to the timeline set out in The Terminator and Terminator 2, should have occurred before the start of the third instalment. No future but what we make for ourselves – with the proviso that, at the end of this variable future over which we have agency and control, Judgement Day comes no matter what we do. We catch a glimpse here of the tightrope all theology walks between free will and predetermination. If a god or gods are so perfect how can they allow X, Y or Z to happen? Because we have free will. Having said that, the execution of that freedom will definitely be judged. But gods are perfectly good too, so even those who step damnably out of line may be forgiven. Interestingly, after Terminator 3, the franchise was, to use the movie buff’s turn of phrase, rebooted: despite the comings and goings of free will nuclear destruction did happen just as predicted, so there was no preapocalyptic place left to go. The result? Terminator Salvation, which reinvented the pre-apocalyptic saga as post-apocalyptic, another instance of postapocalyptic fiction that still inhabits the realm of the ‘yet’, a realm in which humanity, however reduced, lives to fight another day. As with The Road, Battlestar Galactica or any fiction that contemplates an apocalyptic end, even after Armageddon Terminator Salvation always works towards another, greater, more cataclysmic finality, bifurcating, as Derrida does, the moment the world actually ends – a moment beyond signification because signification operates only as long as the world continues – from the assorted announcements of this moment. The promotional tag line for the film neatly captures this formula: the end begins. So even when the apocalypse arrives, it does not arrive.

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As a consequence, the Apocalypse differs from itself. A manual for the pitfalls of a wayward life, The Book of Revelation, along with apocalyptic aspects of other texts such as the Book of Daniel and parts of the New Testament gospels, was considered so useful as an instructional tool that artistic impressions of this scripture on the chancel arch or in stained glass windows were usually the centrepiece of a medieval or early modern parish church, placed where the congregation could not avoid their bittersweet horror. Re-imaginings of St John of Patmos’s strange, kaleidoscopic hallucination and the Dooms that illustrated it for predominantly illiterate parishioners are now so common that often we no longer recognize the influence these works still have in our living rooms, cinemas or bookshops. Hidden, sometimes discreetly, in stories of razed cities, scorched countryside and dishevelled wanderers who emerge from these modern-day scenes of annihilation are connections to the biblical progenitor and Biblia Pauperum that fascinated Shakespeare’s contemporaries and forcefully impacted on the writing of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. The film Legion, perhaps knowingly, makes the point that these connections are often recalibrated: a devout cook refuses to believe that the bloodthirsty armies gathering outside the besieged diner are possessed by angels, not demons, because he has read the Bible and knows how the story goes. Concept­ ualizations of the Apocalypse can only happen prior to its occurrence, and the humorous aside in Legion shows us furthermore that when the end is witnessed it cannot be recognized as such because it will not conform to historically ensconced conventions of how it will unfold. Yet to arrive and yet to be experienced, the Doom will inevitably confound our expectations, take us by surprise, blow us away. Pre-Reformation Dooms, then, stand in lieu of the anticipated event, representing something to which they have no direct access. This schema applies to language too. Signifiers, without any metaphysical connection to a stable, stabilizing referent, create meaning in tandem with each other via the process of dissemination. Spatially and temporally as we speak or write or sign, language unfolds along the signifying chain according to an apocalyptic dynamic that would need the intervention of a transcen­ dental signified, a Logos, to arrest this heterogeneous development. For Shakespearean society this organizing principle was the apocalyptic Logos of Christianity depicted by Doom imagery, the incarnation of God who returns to take the lid off the world, stop time and announce that it is done. On that day of cataclysmic clarification, all becomes clear, all is resolved, all doubt and confusion eliminated when the seals of God’s book are opened and the secrets inside revealed. The unfortunate, ill-fated or calamitously



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stubborn dramatis personae of Shakespearean tragedy invoke this Apocalypse as it was pictured by the poor man’s Bible, but its effects are ultimately withheld from the action of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear, a plot system we can call messianic dramaturgy. Structured along the same lines as the apocalyptic dynamic of language, these four plays are haunted by the promise of salvation for the just and damnation for the wicked, a promise Shakespeare breaks, a rabbit-in-the-hat trick in which the hat is empty at the end. As the curtain drops, this dramaturgical slight of hand secretes the transcendental signified announced by the skulls, skeletons, cadavers, the devils, angels, dragons and hell-mouths, spectres that herald a non-arrival. When the cat is away, the mice will play, and canny, conniving villains employ malevolent equivocation to wreak havoc in a world distanced from any supernatural redemption of the earthly destruction and catastrophe they cause. Hamlet’s playful riddles, teasing, and sometimes bullying word games work through the havoc caused to state and family by Claudius, the play’s chief plotter and provocateur. As a regicidal, fratricidal and incestuous king, Claudius, like the Ghost of indeterminate provenance, cannot occupy the position of the Lacanian Father, a semi-apocalyptic linguistic presence that regulates the symbolic order and mediates the truth of a masculine Logos. A reworking of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’ acts as a reminder in the graveyard of the apocalypse that death and the gaze of this truth awaits all, inevitably, unavoidably and unequivocally. By setting the unambiguous effects of such divine justice against the mayhem Claudius funnels into the play, Hamlet charts the fluctuating exchange of two early-modern world views. One view sees society as arranged around God, where cultural, religious or political figures symbolize His wishes in the same way as the Name-of-theFather enforces superegoic commands. The other, emergent conception sees society as arranged around man, a schema in which, as Derrida argues and Hamlet demonstrates, privileged signifiers such as the Name-of-the-Father are reduced to the disseminated function of other signifiers. Fiendish Iago, as the anti-Logos of Othello, refuses to explain his actions and transparently disclose his motivation, revelling darkly in the opportunities offered by the dissemination of signifying practice and achieving his wicked ways with equivocations and lies. Iago’s seemingly innocuous remarks, aided by calculated shrugs and grimaces, imply what they feign to hide. Eventually, this mode of address exploits Othello’s vulnerabilities with a proto-racist attack on a man held in high esteem by Venetian society. Tormented by thoughts of Desdemona’s supposed infidelity and convinced by the suggestion that he is an outsider rather than

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an insider, Othello mistakenly, injudiciously and unbearably kills the innocent wife he falsely believes to be guilty, a passion killing engulfed with demonic visions. Shamed by his damnable mistake, Othello beckons the glazed and painted snatching fiends of Doom, taking his own life as both servant and enemy of Venice. Seduced by the witches’ prophecies, by the present trace of the absent future, Macbeth in turn offers Banquo promise-crammed temptations on his way to the bloody gain, and ruthless retention, of kingship. Macbeth does finally get what he deserves, but it is not the trumpet-tongued comeuppance that he fears and that finds out arch-equivocators. Nor does his death guarantee a healthy future for Scotland. Irrespective of Macbeth’s decapitation at the hands of Macduff, the vice that threatens the country still lurks at the margins of the virtuous Malcolm’s accession to the throne in a polity seemingly designed to fail, destabilized, perhaps unalterably, by the murder of Duncan. In an environment conditioned by linguistic as well as temporal vacillation, dishonourable intentions are presented as honourable, an instance of the schematic dissimulation throughout Macbeth, a pattern of foulness disguised as fairness that engulfs innocent lives with frightening, indiscriminate frequency. Macduff’s killing of the savage, regicidal Macbeth wins the crown for Malcolm and replays Macbeth’s own heroic disembowelling of the traitor Macdonwald, which gained Macbeth so much honour. The end of the play, like the beginning, presents heroism that betrays the likelihood of treacherous bloodlust to come. At the end of King Lear, onlookers try to bear the heartbreaking sight of a dead Cordelia in a dying Lear’s arms, a deeply unjust Pietà explained with reference to images of the Doom. However, the pagan apocalypse Shakespeare gives us is shorn of the new, redemptive spiritual order associated with the earth-shattering Christian event name-checked, out of time, by Kent and Edgar. A deconstruction of any assumed or purported division of Christianity and paganism, the conclusion to King Lear offers one last instance of a pre-Christian setting given Christian resonance by the vernacular of the day. Likewise, seeping into the speeches of Lear and those around him are images of the dragon, a malleable monster that pops up in scripture and legend as the hell-mouth, the Leviathan, or the sharp-toothed serpent, satanic embodiments of evil that are in constant mythological exchange with each other. At the other, alternating end of the moral spectrum from the wrathful, dragonish forces, Cordelia takes the role of a Christ-like figure that both hurts and heals Lear: like the pharmakon Derrida tracks through Plato’s Phaedrus, Cordelia is both a poison and a remedy representing a soteriological promise broken in the final scene.



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Throughout this book, we have tracked the ways in which pre-Reformation imagery, in particular the fantastical protagonists who colourfully enliven illustrations of the Doom, are the harbingers of a promised end dramaturgically deferred in Shakespearean tragedy, a movement that mirrors the apocalyptic dynamic of language. These surreal, grotesque, sometimes cartoonish creations are reinterpreted by modern-day fiction in a circulation of images without a referent. Today’s apocalyptic representations share imagery with early modern drama, and early modern drama, in turn, shares imagery with the chancel arch or the stained glass window, because, in the absence of the Apocalypse as a signified, all these signifiers can do is refer to each other. Like medieval painters and glaziers, like Shakespeare and his professional peers, we can imagine what the apocalyptic scenario might be like, not what it will be, tapping into a collection of textual and pictorial resources that exist precisely because the event itself remains a forthcoming enigma yet to be encountered or experienced. The Apocalypse with a capital ‘A’ familiar to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theatregoers, or our popular culture’s often secularized refashioning of this happening as an apocalypse with a lower-case ‘a’, is also viewed as the time when language finds – or, from a Christian perspective of language as fallen, finds again – the logocentric grace of full, conclusive presence and meaning. The presence of medieval religious iconography’s dramatic, literary or cinematic offspring and the simultaneous absence of what that iconography portrays take us beyond the metaphysical antithesis of presence and absence, invoking and deferring a metaphysical framework that, as Derrida puts it when, fittingly, describing the inherent drift of the letter’s destination, ‘does not succeed in arriving, precisely by arriving’ (Derrida, 1998a: 42). Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear make this absence partially present to us by using apocalyptic imagery that operates as ‘the trace that arrives only to efface itself/only by effacing itself, beyond the alternative of presence and absence’ (ibid., 44). When Shakespeare keeps his doomsday powder dry, when he holds back the arrival invoked by his dramatis personae, he holds back dramatic and linguistic resolution, which, structurally, must be held back, can only be held back, due to the absolute, obliterating finality of its effect on both tragic drama and language. To restate the case, tragedy in these plays is the irresolution of malevolent misunderstandings caused by equivocations that plague their victims. So to put it succinctly one last time, language is structured like an apocalyptic narrative and, mirroring this dynamic, Shakespeare’s tragedies are structured like a language. The visions of Doom that, in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear, announce an arrival always

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just around the corner resurface today in diverse ways, repeated with differences in the new, ever-changing contexts of modern production. Powerfully resonant, the pattern of an imminent but still-to-come destruction of humanity even permeates our dreams. Before the glowing eyes of the beast meet ours, before its razor-sharp fangs draw blood and before its clawed hands drag us to hell, we wake up. Before reaching the last step, before the ground beneath our feet cracks open to spit out the dead and swallow us whole and just moments before midnight, we wake up. Before the ceiling collapses, before the tower crushes us all, we wake up. The problem with the apocalypse is, indeed, that it never arrives. But at least we made it to the end of this book. We are still here. For now.

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212

Index

References in bold indicate whole chapters. Adelman, J.  18, 192–3 American Werewolf in London, An  61 amphibology  29, 110–11, 121–2, 130–1, 136, 147, 196 see also equivocation Antony and Cleopatra  6–7, 165–6, 170 Armstrong, P.  17–18 As You Like It  7, 15, 189 Aston, M.  11, 56 Back to the Future  120–1 Bale, J.  80, 110 Barker, F.  22, 42 Barthelemy, A. G.  68 Bartholomeus  156 Batman, S.  156 Battle: Los Angeles  160–1 Battlestar Galactica  123, 143, 196 Belsey, C.  3–4, 51–2, 180 Berger, Jr, H.  117, 128, 135 Bhabha, H. K.  71 Bible illustrations  4 Blair, T.  17 Bobrick, S., Hamlet II (Better Than the Original)  44–5 Bogdanov, M.  23 Book of Common Prayer, The, ‘A Commination against sinners’  167–8, 177 Book of Eli, The  164 Book of Revelation  11, 60, 80, 97, 105, 124, 126–7, 139–40, 143–4, 152, 156–8, 166–8, 186, 196, 198 interpretation of  80, 110 see also eschatology Botero, G.  67, 70–1 Bowers, F. T.  55–6

Bradley, A. C.  51, 69, 82, 178–9 Brightman, T.  110 Brooks, C.  115 Brown, G.  5 Burton, J.  77, 81 Butler, J.  80 Calderwood, J. L.  47 Cameron, D.  17 Camping, H.  109 Carrie  105 Clinton, H.  5 Cloverfield  160 Cohn, N.  36 colonialism  67, 92–3 Contareno, G.  70 cultural materialism  16–17, 135, 167 see also Dollimore, J. and Sinfield, A. Cymbeline  7, 87, 189–90 Cyprus wars  81 Danson, L.  41 Day the Earth Stood Still, The (1951 and 2008) 163–4 de Grazia, M.  50 DeLillo, D., Point Omega  194–5 Demons  33 Dent, A.  110 Derrida, J., apocalypse  3, 109–10, cosmopolitanism  78 deconstruction  150 differance  134 dissemination  13–15, 66, 76, 87, 121–2, 133–4, 201

214

Index

Logos  6, 37 supplement  66–7, 91 trace  112, 135 forgiveness  177 future  23, 126 gifts  176 messianic  162–3, 181, 197 on Hamlet  24, 47 pharmakon  150, 169–70, 200 psychoanalysis  21–2, 53, 175, 199 Devil’s Advocate, The  82, 103–5 Dollimore, J.  17 Donne, J.  139 doom imagery  2, 8–12, 19, 50, 56–7, 67, 145–7, 163–4, 166, 168, 181, 188, 195, 198–9, 201 angels  9, 11, 33–4, 54, 56–7, 61–2, 100, 102–3, 110, 139–44, 146 demons  see devils devils  8–9, 11, 50, 54, 56–7, 61–2, 67, 99–100, 102–8, 146–7, 156–7, 200 dragons  149, 156–62, 200 fiends  see devils hell-mouths  11, 106–8, 156–8 Leviathan  105, 149, 163, 200 stained glass  9–12, 61–2, 67, 99–104, 106, 108, 140–1, 157–9, 192, 198 Drag Me To Hell  65–6, 94, 98 Duffy, E.  11–12 Earnshaw, T.  8 Edward VI  11 Elizabeth I  11, 101, 155–6, 166 equivocation  2–8, 14–15, 22–41, 47–9, 52–3, 59, 65–85, 87, 91–2, 95, 101, 110–11, 126, 127–36, 155, 169–70, 186–90, 199–201 Erne, L.  15–16, 50 eschatology  1–2, 36, 80, 138, 149, 162, 164, 186, 188, 197 Evans, M.  14–15, 121, 136, 152–3 Everett, B.  178 Everyman  85 Evil Dead, The  32–3 Felman, S.  21 feminism  18, 192–3

Fernie, E.  171–2 Ferraris, M.  123, 126 Fight Club  35–6 Foakes, R. A.  15, 177 Foxe, J.  80, 110 Freud, S.  17–18, 83 Gifford, G.  120 Gojira  160 Goldberg, J.  127, 151, 152 Goold, R.  132 Greenblatt, S.  16–17, 40, 61, 77 Greene, R.  190 Gunpowder Plot  3, 138, 145 Gurr, A.  191 Haig, M., Dead Fathers Club  28 Hamlet (film)  34 Hamlet (play)  9, 16–18, 19–63, 74, 144, 155, 175, 195, 199 Harsnett, S.  185 Hawkes, T.  40 Hellraiser films  105 Henry VIII  42–3 Henslowe, P.  106 Hillman, R.  85 Holinshed, R.  127–9, 153 Honigmann, E. A. J.  86 Horwich, R.  126, 133, 135 Hunter, G. K.  51, 68–9 I Am Legend (film and book)  168 James VI and I  3, 43, 114, 120, 127–8, 135, 155–6, 166 Jardine, L.  37 Jensen, P.  192 Jones, Emrys  81 Jones, Ernest  83 Jorden, E.  175 Kahn, C.  18, 172, 175 Kermode, F.  15, 125 Kett, R.  120 King Lear  9, 18, 54, 96, 147, 149–83, 185, 200 King Leir  153–4



Index

King Richard III  84–5, 144–5 Knapp, J. A.  192 Knight, G. W.  51, 62, 72 Kronenfeld, J.  167 Kyd, T., The Spanish Tragedy  38 Lacan, J., desire  44 mirror stage  18 Name-of-the-Father  18, 20–2, 34–7, 40–1, 43, 46–7, 51–3, 63, 116, 138, 175, 199 on Hamlet  33–4, 37, 39 Larner, C.  114 Last Man on Earth, The  168 Leavis, F. R.  69, 82 Legion  143, 160, 198 Levin, J.  114 Levith, M. J.  92 Loomba, A.  67, 74, 93 Macbeth (film)  135 Macbeth (play)  3–4, 9, 14–15, 18, 24, 28, 29, 41–2, 98, 105–6, 109–47, 165, 173, 200 McCarthy, C.  96 Blood Meridian  98–9, 106 The Road  161–2, 164, 169, 180–1, 197 McCoy, R. C.  170 McGreal, C.  109 Mack, M.  61, 155 Mack, Jr, M.  62–3 McKellen, I.  153 McLuskie, K.  117, 135, 178 Mahood, M. M.  124–5 Mankind  84, 159, 186–8 Marks, R.  101 Marlowe, C., Doctor Faustus  106, 139–40 Marston, J., Sophonisba  127, 139 Matheson, R., I Am Legend  168 Merchant of Venice, The  73, 173 Michael Jackson’s Thriller  61 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A  31–2, 173 Miliband, D.  5 Miliband, E.  5

215

Miller, P.  58 Minority Report  120 Moisan, T.  90 Moore, A., V for Vendetta  129 Watchmen  126 morality plays  67, 84–5, 101 see also ­Mankind and Everyman Morrison, C.  130 Mubarak, H.  43 Much Ado About Nothing  11–12 Mullaney, S.  120, 131 mystery cycles  188 see also Wakefield ­mystery cycle Napier, J.  110 Neill, M.  80–1, 94–5 new historicism  16–17, 40 see also ­Greenblatt, S. Newman, K.  74, 93 Night of the Living Dead  168 North, T.  156 Nunn, T.  153, 170–1 O  91 O’Kane, P.  130 O’Leary, S. D.  125 Obama, B.  17, 74 Olivier, L.  83 Omega Man, The  168 Orgel, S.  119, 127 Othello (film)  73 Othello (play)  8–9, 29, 61, 65–108, 126, 199–200 Papalazarou, A.  44 Parker, P  8, 52–3, 91–2 Pearlman, E.  26, 30 Pericles  7, 189–90 Peterson, K. L.  175 Pietà  54, 151, 181–2, 200 Plato  13, 66, 134, 150, 170, 200 Platt, P. G.  81 Pliny  77, 108 Plutarch  156 poststructuralism  13–15, 20–1, 85, 110, 121–2 presentism  40

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Index

Prophecy, The  144 Prosser, E.  25, 48 psychoanalysis  17–18, 83, 117, 172 see also Freud, S. and Lacan, J. Puttenham, G.  90, 110–11, 131 race  68–82 Rawnsley, A.  5 reformation  11–12, 100–1, 110, 168 Rogers, T.  110 romances  190 Romeo and Juliet  187–8 Rose, J.  37 Rosewell, R.  56 Roth, P., Nemesis  193–5 Rouse, E. C.  10 Rousseau, J.-J.  66 Royal Shakespeare Company  51–2, 130, 153 Royle, N.  47–8 Rushdie, S.  187 Ryan, K.  189 St John of Patmos  110, 194 see also Book of Revelation Saunders, B.  94 Saussure, F. de  13–14, 53, 66, 134 Scot, R.  120 Second Part of King Henry IV, The  126, 170 Seventh Seal, The  60, 98, 124, 196 Shelley, M.  168 Simm, J.  58 Sinfield, A.  17, 135–6 sonnets  165 Sons of Anarchy  60 spin  17, 78 Spivack, B.  84 Spurgeon, C.  115 Stampfer, J.  180 Stern, T.  32, 54, 92

Tennant, D.  52 Terminator films  2–3, 60–1, 112, 120, 143, 160, 195–6, 197 Thatcher, M.  17 Thomas, W.  67, 70–1 ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’  9–10, 19, 56–61, 63, 168, 182, 199 Tilley, M. P.  98 Titus Andronicus  68–9, 164–5 Tutivillus  185–8 Tyndale, W.  43 V for Vendetta (film)  129 see also Moore, A. Venus and Adonis  89–90 Vitkus, D. J.  68 Vulliamy, E.  5 Wakefield mystery cycle  58, 102, 142, 145, 186 Wales Theatre Company  23 Walking Dead, The  95–6 wall paintings  33–4, 42–3, 192 see also doom imagery ‘The Seven Works of Mercy’  10 ‘Warning against idle gossip’  10 ‘Warning to Sabbath-breakers’  10 ‘Warning to Swearers’  182 Webster, J., Duchess of Malfi, The  58–9, 89 White Devil, The  99, 106 Weimann, R.  84 Wilson, J. D.  36, 51 Winter’s Tale, The  7, 189–93, 195 witchcraft  114, 119–20 Wittreich, J.  153 Wormald, J.  138 Worster, D.  118 Žižek, S.  112



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