Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England 9781472555250, 9780826441690, 9781441179432

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Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England

Continuum Shakespeare Studies Shakespeare’s Cues and Prompts Murray J. Levith Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre Keith Gregor Shakespeare and Moral Agency Edited by Michael D. Bristol Shakespeare in China Murray J. Levith Shakespeare in Japan Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw Shakespeare and His Authors: Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question Edited by William Leahy

Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England

Edited by Liz Oakley-Brown

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 © Liz Oakley-Brown and contributors 2011 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. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4411-7943-2 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors

vi viii

Introduction 1 Liz Oakley-Brown 1. Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity Barbara Correll

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2. A Midsummer Night’s Symposium: Translating Platonic Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 46 Erica Birrell 3. ‘Silence! Trouble Us Not!’: Travail and Translated Identity in The Tempest 74 Julia Major 4. Harming Macbeth: A British Translation Paul Innes

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5. ‘Most Retrograde to Our Desire’: Translating Recusant Identity in Hamlet 131 Richard Chamberlain Afterword 169   Ton Hoenselaars Index 183

Acknowledgements

This collection of essays grew out a session that I organized on ‘Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England’ for the British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference hosted by Newcastle University from 1 to 4 September 2005. I would like to thank all the participants for a stimulating dicussion. Three essays in this volume were originally delivered as papers at this seminar, and I am indebted to Erica Birrell, Barbara Correll and Julia Major for very patiently revising their talks for print. I am delighted that Richard Chamberlain and Paul Innes accepted my invitation to publish their research as part of this book. A special word of thanks to Ton Hoenselaars for producing the Afterword. More generally, I am grateful to Nigel Wood for the opportunity to present my burgeoning thoughts on Titus Andronicus as part of the panel that he convened on ‘Shakespeare and Translation’ at the inaugural British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference which took place at De Montfort University, Leicester from 29 to 31 August 2003. For their amity and intellectual expertise, mention must be made of my colleagues in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, notably Arthur Bradley, Sally Bushell, Kamilla Elliott, George Green, Abir Hamdar, Hilary Hinds, Andrew Tate and Lindsey Walker. I am particularly pleased to acknowledge Alison Findlay’s support and collegiality. She gave astute comments on several parts of this book which enabled me to reshape and refine my thoughts on Shakespeare and translation. I have also benefited from recent discussions about translation and spatiality with my research student, Charlotte McCool. As ever, Claire Jowitt, Louise Wilkinson and Nick Walsh have provided timely professional advice and unconditional friendship. For his kindness, unwavering belief and genuine interest in my research



Acknowledgements vii

activities when he has so many of his own, I would like to thank my partner, Rob Douglas. The editorial collective Group Étienne Dolet (Departament de Traducció i interpretació, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) kindly allowed Barbara Correll to revise an earlier version of her essay, published in their online journal Doletiana: Revista de Traducció Literatura/Arts 1 (2007), for this volume. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust gave their permission for the image from the RSC’s 1987 production of Titus Andronicus to be used on the cover of the book. Helen Hargest, Images Resources Co-ordinator at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, expertly located the photograph. Finally, I would like to thank Anna Fleming for encouraging the publication of this project in the first place, and all at Continuum – especially Colleen Coalter – and Fakenham Photosetting for their forbearance and expertise in guiding this collection towards its completion.

Notes on Contributors

Erica Birrell is a graduate of Emory University and is currently an independent scholar. In addition to her work on Shakespeare and Renaissance Platonism, she has research interests in trickster figures in early medieval Irish and Welsh literature, and in kingship, memory and identity in Marlowe’s plays. She is currently working on the role and history of women in the early medieval Pictish and Scottish kingdoms. Richard Chamberlain is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Northampton where he teaches Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature. He is the author of Radical Spenser: Pastoral, Politics and the New Aestheticism (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and is working on a new book, Shakespeare’s Refusers. Barbara Correll teaches English Renaissance literary and cultural studies at Cornell University. She is the author of The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (Cornell University Press, 1996) and essays on Erasmus, Donne, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster. She is completing a book on the crossing of amatory and economic discourses in Shakespeare and Donne, and continues to pursue her interests in adaptation and translation. Ton Hoenselaars is Associate Professor in the English Department of Utrecht University. He is the author of Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Associated University Presses, 1992). Among other publications, he has also edited, alone or with others, Shakespeare’s Italy (Manchester University Press, 1993, revised edition 1997), The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama (University of Delaware Press, 1997), English Literature and the Other Languages (Rodopi, 1999), Shakespeare



Notes on Contributors ix

and the Language of Translation (Arden Shakespeare, 2004), Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Challenging Humanism (University of Delaware Press, 2005). Paul Innes is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He specialises in Critical Theory and English Renaissance Literature and Drama. His publications include the Dictionary of Class and Society in Shakespeare (Continuum, 2007) and Shakespeare and the English Renaissance Sonnet: Verses of Feigning Love (Macmillan, 1997). His current research interests are on the culture of Renaissance performance, and the forms and functions of the epic. Julia Major is currently based at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her publications have examined allegory and the English vernacular in the work of Edmund Spenser. Her latest project re-maps Shakespeare’s vernacular translation and the rise of English national consciousness in the context of Eurasian cultural exchange. Liz Oakley-Brown is a lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Writing at Lancaster University. Her recent publications include the monograph Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2006) and the co-edited collection The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval and Early Modern (Four Courts Press, 2009). She is currently completing a book on Thomas Churchyard.

Introduction Liz Oakley-Brown

By pretending that we know what translation is, i.e. an operation that involves textual transfer across a binary divide, we tie ourselves up with problems of originality and authenticity, of power and ownership, of dominance and subservience. But can we always be certain that we know what a translation is? Susan Bassnett (1998)1 The text is old; the orator too green. William Shakespeare (1593)2

Shakespeare and Translation Shakespeare has long been associated with the topic of translation. Ben Jonson’s famous comment about his contemporary’s linguistic skills in the encomium ‘To the memory of my beloued, The avthor mr. william shakespeare: and what he hath left vs’, for example, has stimulated much discussion of the playwright’s knowledge and use of classical material:3 And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke, From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke For names; but call forth thund’ring Æschilus, Euripides, and Sophocles to vs, Paccuuius, Accius, him of Cordoua dead, To life againe, to heare thy Buskin tread, And shake a Stage:4

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Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity

Often impelled by the isolated phrase ‘thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,’ scholars from a diverse range of critical and theoretical domains have industriously investigated the intricate networks of translations and translated materials inscribed in the dramatic and non-dramatic verse. Yet – at least from an Anglo-American critical perspective – viewing Shakespeare’s texts through the prisms of translation processes is a relatively recent exercise.5 As suggested by Susan Bassnett’s epigraph to this introduction, the comparative neglect of this specific area of enquiry might be explained by translation’s ambiguities.6 Indeed, ‘guaranteed by the word’s etymology’ 7 and the fact that it is both a practice and a metaphor,8 it is hard to grasp an exact sense of ‘translation’. In the words of John Sallis, ‘Translation goes astray’.9 Nonetheless, as George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (first published in 1975) has shown, encounters with Shakespeare’s works,10 whether printed or performed, are saturated with the multifarious effects, and the affects, of translation. As he purposefully employs J. M. Nosworthy’s 1955 Arden edition of Cymbeline (c.1611) to construct a painstaking textual analysis of Posthumus’s diatribe against women (2.5.1-35), the opening pages of Steiner’s elegant and sustained study make manifest the Shakespearean dialogue with translation. Defining ‘[t]he editor’s task’ as one which ‘is, in the full sense, interpretive and creative’,11 Steiner’s extended reading of the play and its afterlife establishes one of the tenets central to his thesis: ‘When we read or hear any language-statement from the past, be it Leviticus or last year’s bestseller, we translate.’12 By reminding his twentieth-century audience that ‘Interprète/interpreter are commonly used to mean translator,13 After Babel clearly argues for a more nuanced comprehension of ‘translation’ than the clear-cut rendition of one language into another; this is ‘[u]nderstanding as [t]ranslation’.14 While his focus is far greater than the Shakespearean terrain with which his book begins, Steiner’s thorough use of the dramatic episode to explain the complexities of intralingual translation exposes the interwoven textual, critical and dramatic signifiers inscribed in the play and, markedly, the temporal limits of those signs. ‘Reader, actor, editor’, Steiner contests, ‘are translators of language out of time’.15 In so



Introduction 3

doing, and arguably anticipating the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies, After Babel is also evocative of the ways in which readers, actors, editors and certainly authors themselves are subject to, and subjects of, translation. Though not directly influenced by Steiner’s work, Stephen Greenblatt’s paradigm-shifting Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980) evidently inhabits a comparable postSaussurean environment. Greenblatt’s remark that ‘There is no translation that is not at the same time an interpretation’,16 for instance, chimes with Steiner’s stance. Of course, whereas Steiner’s thesis has a wide-ranging historical sweep, Greenblatt’s New Historicist approach mindfully focuses on a period of textual production. One enduring feature of Greenblatt’s ‘cultural poetics’17 is its insistence that Renaissance ‘self-fashioning is always, though not exclusively, in language’.18 In contrast to post-Enlightenment thinking that renders translation subordinate to original works,19 early modern England’s humanist and reformed agendas value translative activities. At the same time, the period’s variable relationship to vernacularism keeps the binary opposition of translation/original in sway. Given its prominence in the early modern period, Greenblatt does not treat translation as a discrete form of textual production. Rather, it is bound up with the composite linguistic processes which fashion the self. Even so, Greenblatt announces that ‘men went to the stake in the early sixteenth century over the rendering of certain Greek and Latin words into English,’20 a statement glossing the violent demise of figures such as William Tyndale – the Lutheran Bible translator – who was strangled and then burned in 1536 for heresy.21 Thus, by reminding his readers of translation’s material effects,22 Greenblatt provides a powerful illustration of the means by which translation participates in conceptions of selfhood and, by extension, otherness.23 Post-Tyndale, England’s press for reformed religion, combined with humanist ambitions, resulted in a flurry of translations into English. According to Peter Burke, ‘The period 1570-1630, when the English vocabulary expanded most rapidly, was also a great age of translation’.24 However, it should be noted that ‘the balance of trade’25 between the vernaculars was somewhat one-sided, and that

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England’s ‘exports [of translations] were extremely low before the 1660s’.26 And as a counterpoint to early modern England’s desire for hegemony, Warren Boutcher reminds us that ‘virtually nobody outside the British Isles ever dreamt of needing to learn English’.27 Sixteenth-century translators, then, inhabited the interstices of language and ideology, simultaneously brokering cultural exchange and negotiating the dialogic textures of literary translation.28 But what of early modern monolingual English subjects? How might translation have constructed their identities? To what extent are the cultural politics of translation in England evident in vernacular texts? In what ways might the burgeoning Protestant English subject cope with the soundscapes of linguistic differences caused by the ‘Tens of thousands of Continental migrants [who] passed in and out of London and other major towns during the reign of Elizabeth I’?29 One way of responding to these kinds of questions is to consider Shakespearean texts as discursive sites of translation. In the ‘Foreword’ to Ton Hoenselaars’s 2004 collection of essays, Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, Inge-Stina Ewbank recounts the paper that she delivered a decade earlier at the International Shakespeare Conference: I echoed continental scholars’ regret that the study of translations tended to be regarded by the Anglo-American community of Shakespeare scholars as an ‘interesting and harmless occupation for researchers abroad’, irrelevant to mainline Shakespeare Studies.30 Here, Stina-Ewbank throws into relief notions of self and otherness residing in Shakespeare studies at that time and explored in her own important publication ‘Shakespeare Translation as Cultural Exchange’.31 These observations apparently prompted further research on translations of, and engendered explicit interest about translation practices in, Shakespeare. Thus in 2005 Jonathan Hope reported that ‘“Shakespeare in Translation” is now an established area of study: no longer in Inga Stina-Ewbank’s much-quoted phrase, “the Cinderella of Shakespeare studies”’.32 In terms of



Introduction 5

translation in Shakespeare, a noteworthy strand of criticism has also emerged which makes full use of the poetic, political and dramaturgical possibilities of this topic, for example: Michael Neill’s ‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories’ (1994)33 and ‘The World Beyond: Shakespeare and the Tropes of Translation’ (1996);34 Patricia Parker’s Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (1996);35 Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s ‘Scenes of Translation in Jonson and Shakespeare: Poetaster, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (2002);36 and Dirk Delabastita’s ‘“If I know the letters and the language”: Translation as Dramatic Device in Shakespeare’s Plays’ (2004).37 In 2006, Hoenselaars neatly summarized the twenty-first century climate: Current interest in Shakespeare and/in translation reveals how research under this banner may creatively be conducted into matters linguistic, their political realities, and, beyond, into the broader cultural issues raised by this process, both in Britain and abroad.38 Aptly demonstrating how far critical perspectives on Shakespeare, translation and identity have developed over the past three decades, 2006 also saw the publication of Michael Cronin’s Translation and Identity, a provocative and ambitious book which explores how ‘translation is central to any proper understanding of the emergence of cultural identity in human history’.39 Part of Cronin’s project includes historically contextualised and ideologically motivated explorations of ‘translation in Shakespeare’.40 Accordingly, he has: [T]rack[ed] an intra-textual translation presence to show how Shakespearean drama through the conduit of translation articulates English and more broadly European concerns with language, power, identity, metamorphosis, proximity and control in the context of intercultural contact.41 Anchored in Irish-Anglo history and driven, in the main, by post­ colonial sensibilities, Cronin considers such issues as the refraction

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Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity

of archipelagic concerns in Henry VI, Part 2 (c.1591), Henry V (c.1598) and As You Like It (c.1599-1600), adroitly concluding that these Shakespearean dramas place translation and ‘questions of identity [. . .] obdurately centre stage’.42 Indebted to this kind of critical genealogy, the essays in Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England contribute to the on-going discussion. While their focus may be predominantly Anglophonic, the authors are acutely aware that ‘Englishness’ is constructed and contested by the cultural politics of translation.43

‘Theatre Abounds in Translation’44 My own interest in Shakespeare, translation and early modern identity politics was initiated by the episode in Titus Andronicus (c.1592)45 in which Ovid’s Metamorphoses makes its ‘strange cameo’:46 Enter Lucius’ son [young lucius] and lavinia running after him, the Boy flies from her, with books under his arm. [He drops the books.] Enter titus and marcus. Boy Help, grandsire, help! My aunt Lavinia Follows me everywhere, I know not why. Good uncle Marcus, see how swift she comes. Alas, sweet aunt, I know not what you mean.47 One of the books that Lavinia is so desperate to obtain – a desire apparently depicted in the photograph on the cover of this collection48 – is Ovid’s mythopoeic work of translation and transformation which includes the tale of Philomela,49 the model for the terrifying violations of the Andronici woman’s body.50 In fundamental terms, Shakespeare’s earliest Roman tragedy examines the early modern humanist interest in translatio imperii.51 It is also ‘Arguably the most popular Shakespeare play in translation during the early years’.52 From its appropriation and adaptation of classical myth, to concepts of knowledge transfer and its own translatability, Titus Andronicus is thus steeped in a particular set of translation



Introduction 7

discourses. In a previous article, I suggested that the playwright’s deft transposition of Ovidian tropes of pursuit at the start of 4.1 is emblematic of the patriarchal strictures governing translation at this time.53 As a means of introducing some of this volume’s textual and cultural concerns, in what follows I take up and extend my earlier comments on this tragic ‘scene of translation’.54 In her discussion of ‘Shakespeare’s learned heroines’, Heather James rightly maintains that ‘Shakespearean women’ desire ‘the expressive liberties Ovid takes with erotic, rhetorical, and social conventions’.55 Yet, by comparison with Bianca and Lucentio’s playful dialogue in 3.1 of The Taming of the Shrew (c.1590) as they translate two lines from Ovid’s Heroides,56 Lavinia’s desperate efforts to seize and employ the Metamorphoses provides a grim expression of such aspirations: titus boy marcus titus marcus

Lucius, what book is that she tosseth so? Grandsire, ’tis Ovid’s Metamorphosis; My mother gave it me. For love of her that’s gone, Perhaps she culled it from among the rest. Soft, so busily she turns the leaves! What would she find? Lavinia, shall I read? This is the tragic tale of Philomel, And treats of Tereus’ treason and his rape – And rape, I fear, was the root of thy annoy. See, brother, see: note how she quotes the leaves. (4.1.41-50)

From hereon, Lavinia is encouraged to follow Marcus’s instruction to move from the Ovidian text and to write the names of her violators in the sand. After watching her uncle’s demonstration, Lavinia ‘takes the staff in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps, and writes’ (4.1.76 s.d) the Latin words ‘Stuprum – Chiron – Demetrius’ (4.1.78). As scholars have comprehensively discussed, Roger Ascham’s technique of teaching Latin by way of ‘double translation’57 – a process advocating that students translate ‘out of Latin into English, and out of English into Latin again’58

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– is seeded throughout Shakespeare’s works. Consequently, ‘Like a schoolchild’, Jonathan Bate explains, ‘Lavinia reads from her Ovid and then writes her text’.59 Dirk Delabastita probes this image further: Lavinia, raped and mutilated can explain her ordeal only by making a double translational detour, first pointing to a similar tale of treason and rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (in Golding’s 1567 translation?), then writing a few Latin words in the sand for the others to interpret (after translation?).60 However, while boys in the upper forms of grammar schools often used Ovid’s poem as a means of learning Latin versification,61 early modern English codes of conduct censured women’s textual engagement with erotic Ovidian material, in Latin or in the vernacular.62 For instance, Juan Luis Vives’s pronouncements in the Instruction of a Christen Woman (Latin 1524; English 1529) on ‘What books ought to be read, and what not’ condemned Ovid’s ‘books of love’. Borne out of tragic circumstances, Lavinia’s material interaction with the Metamorphoses which she ‘tosseth’ and ‘quotes’, a demonstrably laboured act, seems a spectacular comment on the sexual politics of Ovid’s reception and translation in sixteenthcentury England. Acknowledging the play’s interest in early modern pedagogical principles, Colin Burrow proposes that in their efforts to surpass Tereus’s atrocities ‘by both cutting out her tongue and chopping off her hands’, Lavinia’s Gothic violators, Demetrius and Chiron, behave ‘like grotesque parodies of Elizabethan schoolboys who had been taught to imitate, learn from, and overgo Ovid’.63 Yet Titus Andronicus also shows a figure horrifically transformed by way of Ovidian myth becoming a translator herself. Cruelly denied her position as a speaking subject, and surrounded by men who define her as a martyr (3.1.82; 3.1.108), translation provides agency as her transient but trenchant inscriptions shore up familial revenge. The fact that these concerns are played out on the body of a raped and mutilated woman require further comment.64 The violence which envelops the Andronici woman – evidently coupled with the language



Introduction 9

of martyrdom – bears traces of Tyndale’s demise as recorded in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563).65 To be sure, Lavinia becomes a discursive site of sixteenth-century sexual and religious politics. In the most terrifying way, she embodies translation.66 Titus Andronicus thus explores contemporaneous socio-political tensions surrounding translation and early modern identity politics. However, on another level, Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy also engages with the theatricality of early modern translation practices. Before early modern schoolboys engage in the ‘double translation’ process, there is an earlier stage in which tutor and student take on aspects akin to those of performer and auditor.67 At the start of ‘the second booke’ of The Scholemaster (1570), Roger Ascham instructs: After that your scholer, as I sayd before, shal cum in deede, first, to a readier perfitnes in translating, than, to a ripe and skilfull choice in markying out hys sixe pointes, as 1. Proprium. 2. Translatum. 3. Synonymum. 4. Contrarium. 5. Diuersum. 6. Phrases. Than take this order with him: Read dayly vnto him, some booke of Tullie, as the third booke of Epistles chosen out by Sturmius, de Amicitia, or that excellent Epistle conteinyng almost the whole first booke ad Q. fra: some Comedie of Terence or Plautus: but in Plautus, skilful choice must be vsed by the master, to traine his Scholler to a iudgement, in cutting out perfitelie ouer old and vnproper wordes:68 In advance of his demonstration of the means by which Lavinia should proceed with her ‘double translational detour’, Marcus asks his prospective ‘audience’ to ‘Sit down, sweet niece. Brother, sit down by me’ (4.1.65), and the stage directions inform us that ‘They sit’. In this way, he creates a kind of theatrical space in which

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to perform, as Ascham recommends, in front of his novitiate translator. Marcus then requests: My lord, look here; look here, Lavinia. He writes his name with his staff, and guides it with his feet and mouth. (4.1.68) Margaret Tudeau-Clayton has argued that ‘The playwright-actor’s stage and the translator’s page ‘rhymed’ in early modern English culture inasmuch as they both constituted sites for the production, regulation and interrogation of the boundaries of our English tongue’.69 As Marcus turns from his onstage ‘audience’ to his own performance of writing, in a play that is so thoroughly absorbed in the dark sides of translation – and let us remember that both translation and drama possess bifurcated perspectives70 – the theatricality of those processes are briefly exposed. Such theatricalities are also evident in Venus and Adonis (1593).71 Once again, its overt classical source is Ovid’s Metamorphoses.72 This textual legacy, combined with the poem’s prefatory materials – a Latin epigraph from Ovid’s Amores and a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, a student of the eminent translator, John Florio73 – evokes the homosocial environment of Tudor grammar schools. It is against this backdrop that Venus’s role of would-be sexual, rather than textual, pedagogue takes shape. A great deal of the poem’s wit in the first half of the poem comes from the goddess’s interrogation of Adonis for his lack of interest in the ‘syllabus’, that is, Venus herself: ‘Were I hard-favoured, foul, or wrinkled-old, Ill-nurtured, crooked, churlish, harsh in voice, O’erworn, despised, rheumatic and cold, Thick-sighted, barren, lean and lacking juice, Then mightst thou pause, for then I were not for thee; But having no defects, why dost thou abhor me?’ (133–38)



Introduction 11

In many ways, like the contemporaneous comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595), the poem is an extended scrutiny of desire.74 Rather than amalgamating, for instance, ‘Antique Fables’ with ‘Fairy Toys’,75 Venus and Adonis blends classical mythology with the language of the Elizabethan schoolroom as a means of examining love’s elusiveness. The well-known example of polyptoton, ‘She’s Love, she loves and yet she is not loved’ (610), echoes the juvenile parsing of verbs, while Adonis’s petulant behaviour – he pouts (33), frowns (45), ‘lours and frets’ (75) – accompanied by his taunting wink (90) is redolent of a recalcitrant schoolboy. However, though the couple eventually kiss, and perhaps more, the tone of the Shakespearean text shifts. If the first half of the poem is a kind of erotic parody of the schoolroom, Adonis’s final speech takes the early modern verse into a different emotional sphere: ‘I hate not love, but your device in love, That lends embracements unto every stranger. You do it for increase: O, strange excuse, When reason is the bawd to lust’s abuse! ‘Call it not love for Love to heaven is fled Since sweating Lust on earth usurped his name, Under whose simple semblance he hath fed Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame; Which the hot tyrant stains and soon bereaves, As caterpillars do the tender leaves. [. . .] ‘More I could tell, but more I dare not say; The text is old, the orator too green. Therefore, in sadness, now I will away; My face is full of shame, my heart of teen: Mine ears that to your wanton talk attended Do burn themselves for having so offended.’ (790–810)

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Working with an Ascham-like grasp of the translator’s task as he endeavours to excise an ‘unproper’ word, Adonis repudiates Venus’s brand of ‘sweating Lust’ in favour of an alternative, but ineffable, concept. After commenting on his inarticulacy – ‘The text is old, the orator too green’ – Adonis recoils from Venus to hunt the boar which will lead to his transformation into ‘A purple flower’ (1168). Ultimately, he leaves the subject of translation to end the poem as a translated subject himself.

Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England While discourses of translation pervade Shakespeare’s non-dramatic verse, the plays’ intersemiotic qualities render them exquisite sites of textual and cultural exchange.76 Thus, by focusing on a generically diverse selection of Shakespearean drama, the ensuing essays consider translation’s liaisons with the kinds of religious, national, gendered and emotional identities reviewed above. Chapters 1 and 2 take up and develop Shakespearean interests in humanist endeavours. In ‘Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity’, Barbara Correll discusses the ideological ramifications of identity politics in a play, and perhaps a playwright, marked by marked by ‘double translation’. As it concentrates on the interpellation of masculine subjectivity, Correll’s exploration of Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy also provides an analysis of the ways women unsettle the homosocial pedagogical domain. Like Correll, Erica Birrell’s essay, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Symposium: Translating Platonic Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ examines Shakespeare’s engagement with classical material. Whereas Coriolanus (c.1608) takes on, among other things, a triply-translated source text, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, Shakespeare’s comedy grows out of a comparatively enigmatic source. As scholars such as Thomas Moisan have shown to great effect, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is thoroughly engaged with interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic translation.77 However, by taking a detailed and sustained approach to the Elizabethan play, Birrell illuminates



Introduction 13

Shakespeare’s theatrical translation of Plato’s Symposium and its philosophical treatment of love. Following on from the first two chapters’ engagement with issues of civility and eloquence, the book’s central essay considers Shakespearean representations of popular and elite speech. While contemplating a text contemporaneous with the publication of the King James Bible (1611), Julia Major’s paper, ‘Silence! Trouble Us Not!’: Travail and Translated Identity in The Tempest’, foregrounds the lasting effects of Tyndale’s biblical translations. Mindful of the period’s ‘fluid orthography’,78 and ultimately making connections between corresponding figures of transport, Major observes how the discourses of Tyndale’s translation and travel impact upon this Jacobean romance. Chapter 3’s discussion of socio­ lingusitic schisms is extended in Paul Innes’s ‘Harming Macbeth: A British Translation’. Via notions of ‘translation and empire’ and ‘performance as translation’, Innes reflects on ways in which Shakespearean texts are subject to time and space. As his title suggests, Innes highlights tensions in the cultural transference of Scottish national identity and history in representations from Holinshed’s Chronicles of Scotland (1587) to the BBC’s Macbeth (1983). Taking the argument into a post-structuralist domain, Innes reminds us of translation’s disturbing effects as he shows how ‘A buried layer remains just beyond the field of vision, haunting an unsettled play with the phantom of its origins’.79 The final chapter pulls together a stand of theoretical enquiry that runs through the volume as a whole. Although the topic of twenty-first century theories of translation irrupt in Correll’s and Innes’s contributions, Richard Chamberlain’s ‘“Most Retrograde to Our Desire”: Translating Recusant Identity in Hamlet’ explicitly addresses the means by which Shakespeare’s tragedy challenges prevailing trends in translation theory. For Chamberlain, the logic of refusal presented in Hamlet lays bare the politics of translation’s intractability. Inga-Stina Ewbank acknowledges that ‘In questions of translation, poetics readily slides into politics’.80 The essays in this collection illustrate that Shakespearean drama is immersed in the poetics and identity politics of translation. At the same time, Shakespeare’s texts interrogate the meaning of translation itself.

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Notes   1 Susan Bassnett, ‘When is a Translation Not a Translation?’, in Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), pp. 25–40, p. 27.  2 William Shakespeare, ‘Venus and Adonis’, in Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2007), pp. 125–229, 806. All subsequent quotations will be given parenthetically.   3 For an excellent discussion of the debates about Shakespeare’s knowledge of classical languages, see Charles and Michelle Martindale, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–44.  4 Ben Jonson, ‘To the memory of my beloved, The author mr. william shakespeare: and what he hath left us,’ in mr. william shakespeares comedies, histories, [and] tragedies, ed. John Heminge and Henry Condell (London: 1623), sig. A4r.   5 For a detailed account of Shakespeare and translation, see Ton Hoenselaars, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. Ton Hoenselaars, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), pp. 1–27. This exceptional collection of essays also contains Dirk Delabastita’s annotated ‘Guide to Further Reading’, pp. 289–306.   6 Hoenselaars, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.  7 John Sallis, On Translation (Bloomington, NI: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 23. While Sallis provides an illuminating and detailed analysis of the word, translation may be broadly defined as: ‘I.1.a. Transference; removal or conveyance from one person, place, or condition to another; I.2.a. The action or process of turning from one language into another; also, the product of this; a version in a different language’. OED, online edition (2009). For another excellent discussion of early modern England’s engagement with the term, see Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language,



Introduction 15

Culture, Context (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), pp. 116–84.  8 Susan Bassnett, ‘The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies’, in Translation, Translation, ed. Susan Petrilli (Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 433–49, p. 446.  9 Sallis, On Translation, p. xi. 10 I would like to acknowledge Shakespeare Survey: Close Encounters with Shakespeare’s Texts 62 (2009) which was published as this volume was coming to completion. As its title suggests, many essays in this yearbook of Shakespeare studies and performance engage with the overarching topic of Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England. 11 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 2. Noting Steiner, Charles Martindale makes the important observation that ‘any modern account of Shakespeare can be construed precisely as a translation’. Charles Martindale, ‘A Methodological Postscript’, in Shakespeare’s Ovid, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2000, pp. 198–215, p. 201. 12 George Steiner, After Babel, p. 28. 13 Steiner, After Babel, p. 28. 14 Steiner, After Babel, p. 1. This is the title of Steiner’s opening chapter. 15 Steiner, After Babel, p. 28. 16 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), p. 115. 17 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 5. 18 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 9. 19 See further Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995). 20 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 108. 21 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 115. 22 There are other translators of the period who were executed for heresy, for example Étienne Dolet (1509–46). 23 For an erudite examination of some of the linguistic and ideological issues underpinning the practice and study of translation, see Theo Hermans, ‘Translation’s Other’, An

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Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College London on Tuesday 19 March 1996 [date accessed 4 April 2010]. 24 Peter Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 7–38, p. 36. 25 Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, p. 22. 26 Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, p. 23. 27 Warren Boutcher, ‘The Renaissance’, in The Oxford Guide to Literature in Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 45–55, p. 50. 28 Jonathan Bate suggests that ‘a translation is [. . .] hermaphroditic. A translated line is written by two authors, the original and the translator’. Jonathan Bate, ‘Elizabethan Translation: The Art of the Hermaphrodite’, in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), pp. 33–51, p. 36. 29 Lloyd Edward Kermode, Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 1. Beyond Shakespeare, I am indebted to Carla Mazzio’s stimulating discussion of these issues. See Carla Mazzio, ‘Staging the Vernacular: Language and Nation in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature 38 (1998): 207–32. 30 Inge-Stina-Ewbank, ‘Foreword’, in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. Ton Hoenselaars, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), pp. ix–x, p. ix. See also Ton Hoenselaars, ‘Between Heaven and Hell: Shakespearian Translation, Adaptation and Criticism from a Historical Perspective’, The Yearbook of English Studies 36 (2006): 50–64, p. 59. 31 Inge-Stina Ewbank, ‘Shakespeare Translation as Cultural Exchange’, Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995): 1–12.



Introduction 17

32 Jonathan Hope, ‘Thou art translated’, The Times Literary Supplement, 19 and 26 August 2005, pp. 10–11. 33 Michael Neill, ‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 1–32. 34 Michael Neill, ‘The World Beyond: Shakespeare and the Tropes of Translation’, in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, ed. R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner (Newark: University of Delaware Press), pp. 290–308. 35 Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 1996. 36 Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Scenes of Translation in Jonson and Shakespeare: Poetaster, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Translation and Literature 11 (2002): 1–23. 37 Dirk Delabastita, ‘“If I Know the Letters and the Language”: Translation as a Dramatic Device in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. Ton Hoenselaars, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning), 2004, pp. 31–52. 38 Hoenselaars, ‘Between Heaven and Hell’, p. 64. 39 Michael Cronin, Translation and Identity (London: Routledge, 2006), cover blurb. 40 Cronin, Translation and Identity, p. 93. 41 Cronin, Translation and Identity, p. 94. 42 Cronin, Translation and Identity, p. 111. I was alerted to the topic of ‘The Translation Archipelago’ at the one-day seminar organised by Michael Cronin and The Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City University, 19 November 2004. An important related title is John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 43 I am drawing here on Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown, ‘Introduction’, in Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, ed. Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2001), pp. 1–6. 44 Sallis, On Translation, p. 34. 45 See further Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford:

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Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 103 ff.; Colin Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanist Culture’, in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 9–27, p. 19; and Delabastita, ‘“If I know the letters and the language”’, p. 51. 46 Adam McKeown, ‘“Entreat her hear me but a word”: Translation and Foreignness in Titus Andronicus’, in The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Luise von Flotow and Daniel Russell (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2001), pp, 203–18, p. 208. 47 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1995), 4.1.1–4. All subsequent quotations will be given parenthetically. 48 Titus Andronicus, 1987, Swan Theatre, dir. Deborah Warner. I am very grateful to Helen Hargest, Image Resource Coordinator at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, for her assistance. 49 Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, third edition (London: Heinemann, 1989), 6.401–674. All further references are from this translation. 50 See further Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, pp. 103–17. 51 See Titus Andronicus, ed. Bate, pp. 16–19. 52 Hoenselaars, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. 53 Liz Oakley-Brown, ‘Titus Andronicus and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Studies 19 (2005): 325–47. 54 I use the phrase in the wake of Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Scenes of Translation in Jonson and Shakespeare’. 55 Heather James, ‘Shakespeare’s learned heroines in Ovid’s schoolroom’, in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 66–85, p. 68. 56 For a detailed discussion of this scene, see James, ‘Shakespeare’s learned heroines in Ovid’s schoolroom’, especially pp. 68–71. 57 Many scholars provide useful discussion of this process. For immediate reference and further detail, see Barbara Correll’s essay in this volume, pp. 22–45.



Introduction 19

58 Roger Ascham, ‘The Scholemaster’, in Roger Ascham: English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), pp. 170–302, p. 239. 59 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, p. 104. 60 Delabastita, ‘“If I know the letters and the language”’, p. 51. 61 R. W. Maslen, ‘Ovid in Early Elizabethan England’, in Shakespeare’s Ovid, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 15–30, p. 17. 62 See further the discussion in Liz Oakley-Brown, Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 63 Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanist Culture’, p. 19. 64 Arguably, the episode is designed to prompt further enquiry. As Colin Burrow comments: ‘It is one of the many suggestive weaknesses of Titus that it is not explained why Lavinia needs to have the Metamorphoses itself before her, before she can write down the names of her assailants. But the theatrical awkwardness testifies to the power of classical texts for Shakespeare; rather than being objects of unqualified veneration, they can be used within the lives of their readers to enable them to communicate. Classical books speak for present occasions’. Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanist Culture’, p. 19. 65 Jonathan Bate forges connections between the play’s anachronistic use of Christian imagery, ‘a Reformation context’ and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, pp. 19–20. 66 While many scholars have engaged with Lavinia’s efforts, Leonard Barkan’s insightful analysis of the Metamorphoses and Titus Andronicus ultimately informs my reading: ‘Many of the great figures of Ovid’s poem define themselves by their struggle to invent new languages. That is clearest in the case of metamorphic victims like Acteon or Io, who must labour to use human language fitting their consciousness once their shape has turned beastly. But it is equally clear of other sorts of victims, like Narcissus who must discover a language of paradox that suits his situation. Philomela’s is merely the most extended of all these struggles. Her mutilation is another

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language-denying metamorphosis.’ Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 247. 67 For a fascinating discussion of the ‘poetics of pedagogy’, see Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), especially pp. 27–64. In her examination of John Brinsley’s Ludus Litarius (1612), Margaret Tudeau-Clayton reminds us that ‘schoolboys’ training in delivery constituted a form of theatrical performance’. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Informing Youth, Confirming Man: an English schoolboy’s Virgils’, in Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 47–77, p. 55. 68 Ascham, ‘The Scholemaster’, p. 238. 69 Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Scenes of Translation in Jonson and Shakespeare’, pp. 3–4. 70 See further my comments on John Webster’s The White Devil. Liz Oakley-Brown, ‘Translation’, in A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture: Volume One, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 120–33, p. 129. 71 See further Dympna Callaghan, ‘The Book of Changes in a Time of Change: Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ in Post-Reformation England and ‘Venus and Adonis’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 27–45; William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977); and John Roe, ‘Ovid “Renascent” in Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander’, in Shakespeare’s Ovid, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 31–46. 72 10.503–739. 73 Park Honan, ‘Wriothesley, Henry, third earl of Southampton (1573–1624)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, Oct 2008 [accessed 23 April 2010]. For a reading of the poem which takes account of its dedicatee, see Patrick M. Murphy, ‘Wriothesley’s Resistance:



Introduction 21

Wardship Practices and Ovidian Narratives in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis’, in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Philp C. Kolin (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 323–40. 74 See further Catherine Belsey, ‘Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis’, Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 257–76. 75 I am drawing on Thomas Moisan, ‘Antique Fables, Fairy Toys: Elision, Allusion, and Translation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Philp C. Kolin (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 275–98. 76 For an interesting discussion using discourses of meme and gene theory to ‘investigate why Shakespeare’s plays are sites of translation-adaptation-appropriation par excellence for memetic propagation within and across cultures’, see Mike Ingham, ‘Following the Dream/ Passing the Meme: Shakespeare in “Translation”’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 28 (2008): 111–26, p. 111. 77 Thomas Moisan, ‘Antique Fables, Fairy Toys’. See also Ingham, ‘Following the Dream/ Passing the Meme’ and Sallis, On Translation, especially pp. 34–45. 78 Julia Major, this volume, p. 75. 79 Paul Innes, this volume, p. 104, p. 120. 80 Quoted in Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead, ‘Introduction’, in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), pp. 1–13, p. 8.

Chapter 1

Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity Barbara Correll

Translation is the most intimate act of reading. I surrender to the text when I translate. Gayatri Spivack (1993)1 [. . .] this butcherlie feare in making of latines [. . .]. Roger Ascham (1570)2 This essay investigates the relationships between a Shakespearean tragedy and Latin learning in the early modern English grammar school: the pedagogy, that is, known as ‘double translation.’ It treats a historical case in which the cultural and economic politics of translation are linked to issues of early modern subject formation. As a historical-theoretical study of a play and a specific translation pedagogy and ideology, it may also speak to contemporary translation theory.3 Although I limit my study to Coriolanus (c.1608), its source texts and documents of humanist pedagogy, these issues may ultimately also aim towards a theory of adaptation that takes into account both Shakespeare’s translation-adaptation practices and their relationship to current adaptations of Shakespeare, the latter perhaps another case of transmission or translation of cultural authority. For insofar as ‘Shakespeare’ still signifies the gold standard of the canon and has the institutional and cultural authority to discipline subjects who are required, even in their curricular ‘choices,’ to study the Bard, Shakespeare as author-



Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity 23

function quite arguably shares characteristics of early modern humanist translation pedagogy as interpellating activities. Shakespeare’s Roman play Coriolanus is a tragic drama that both adapts and culturally ‘translates’ or transports Plutarch (via North) and a Virgilian ethical-political narrative of romanitas on the one hand, and engages with questions of translation pedagogy on the other. My reading of this tragedy hypothesizes links between historical practices and texts, and addresses the relationship between translation and the genesis or engendering of the culturalmasculine subject. In ‘The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies’ Susan Bassnett argues for the importance of moving translation studies beyond linguistic interest, beyond the ‘formalist vacuum’, and considering ‘the text embedded in its network of both source and target cultural signs.’ ‘Translation,’ she writes, is [. . .] always enmeshed in a set of power relations that exist in both the source and target contexts. The problems of decoding a text for a translator involve so much more than language, despite the fact that the basis of any written text is its language [. . .]. If translation studies has been increasingly concerned with the relations between individual texts and the wider cultural system within which those texts are produced and read, it is therefore not surprising that within cultural studies, and in post-colonial theory in particular, translation is increasingly being seen both as actual practice and as metaphor.4 While Bassnett and others are not uncritical of the power issues in translation, even defining it ‘as mimicry of the dominant discourse,’ much seems to depend on the position or status of both source text and translator.5 For example, Gayatri Spivack’s rapturous account of her labours in translating the Bengali author Mahasweta Devi – ‘Translation is the most intimate act of reading. I surrender to the text when I translate’ – represents translation of post-colonial writing as ‘a simple miming of the responsibility to the trace of the other in the self,’ or what amounts to an ethical-political action that disperses rather than supporting or perpetuating hegemonic

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power and privilege, and that empowers the culturally marginalized.6 By contrast, Karl Marx metaphorizes translation in The Eighteenth Brumaire to describe a process of revolutionary transformation as a phase of language learning in which the new political subject actively ‘forgets’ or abandons a ‘mother tongue’ of old and constraining political ideas, and embraces emancipatory thought as cultural-linguistic fluency, a political second nature: Just so does the beginner, having learnt a new language, always re-translate it into his mother tongue, but he has not assimilated the spirit of the new language, nor learnt to manipulate it freely, until he uses it without reference to the old and forgets his native tongue in using the new one.7 Finally, in a sustained reading – or rather, translation – of Walter Benjamin’s foundational essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), Jacques Derrida interrogates the notion of translation as a duty and debt to ‘render’ and ‘make restitution’ of meaning.8 Translation for Derrida is ‘Babelian performance’ or ‘a Babelian event’ in which Babel is not a figure of disorder and incomprehensibility but a site of ‘an annunciation, an alliance and a promise’:9 The ‘tower of Babel’ [. . .] exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification [. . .]. What the multiplicity of idioms actually limits is not only a ‘true’ translation, a transparent and adequate interexpression; it is also a structural order, a coherence of construct [. . .]. It would be [. . .] up to a certain point justified to see there [in the figure of Babel] the translation of a system in deconstruction.10 Here, while the translator remains ‘an indebted subject,’ the translator’s agency is assumed, the positive value of an intimate relationship to source text is even eroticized as ‘Babelian performance’ gestures towards kinship among languages: ‘translation liberates’ in its ability to ‘make language grow’ in a ‘movement of love’ (Benjamin’s phrase) in which the translator has a freedom



Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity 25

and translation ‘extends the body of languages, [. . .] puts languages into symbolic expansion’.11 Like Spivack and Marx, who also valorize translation’s activating political or even utopian capacity, Derrida does not have the case of early modern double translation pedagogy in mind. What, then, might be gained if contemporary translation theory were to take account of translation’s historically situated disciplinary practices, manifested in the early modern pedagogy of double translation? What happens, that is, when the task of the translator is schoolwork, and the goal is rendering a young and liminal subject the subject of cultural-intellectual assimilation? In many respects, early modern Latin translation does not appear comparable to contemporary studies of translation; it may even be seen as a sort of inversion. In preparing students, even as it submits them to power, the putatively apologetic, marginal or service status of the modern translator stands on its head: Latin learning is the very ticket to the cultural hegemonic. The grammar school pupil performed his work of translation as an apprentice to power through translatio imperii. The goal was to Latinize the student; that is, to make him not only fluent in the source language but also competent to achieve and demonstrate Latinity as mastery of grammar and faithful transmission of values at the end of the process. Here, apparently, source text and target text (classificatory terms of modern translation theory) are one, aimed towards producing one disciplined, symbolically structured subject. At the very least, with regard to translation theory, the humanist pedagogy of translation and Latin learning speaks to Bassnett’s observation that ‘Translation [. . .] is a primary method of imposing meaning while concealing the power relations that lie behind the production of that meaning’.12 It would seem, however, that Shakespeare had some interest in exposing those power relations which grammar school translation pedagogy would keep hidden. Shakespeare’s most provocative work may be his cultural translations or adaptations of classical sources, themselves mediated by source texts, like Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans, that also translate and presumably transmit Roman history. His Greek and Roman texts, such as The Rape of Lucrece (c.1593), Titus Andronicus

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(c.1592), Troilus and Cressida (c.1602), or Antony and Cleopatra (c.1606), are distinctively marked not only by their powerfully unsettling interrogations of classical authority and by representations of that authority as a cultural dead letter box, unregenerative, even deadly, but also by Shakespeare’s thematizing early modern questions of cultural masculinity and subject formation itself. This interrogation is remarkably developed in Shakespeare’s Roman play Coriolanus in which the most assiduous student of romanitas and especially his fully ventriloquized tutor in Roman values, his mother and, in effect, father-surrogate Volumnia, tacitly but poignantly address the Renaissance subject of Latinity. John Florio may have considered published translation the work of ‘reputed females’,13 inferior as well as feminized, but in the early modern grammar school the work of learning and translating Latin, a complex process of translation, adaptation, assimilation and symbolic structuration, was a masculinizing and class-building exercise. Latin language learning had a professional trajectory, preparing young men for legal, clerical, administrative positions in a socially select sphere. Even, according to Richard Halpern, when the schools did not provide the practical or technical skills that the merchant classes required, grammar school education was seen to offer prestige, ‘a mechanism of class distinction on its own’ that thus ‘gave a cultural coherence to the ruling groups.’14 As the early modern notion of translatio imperii claimed a seamless continuity of classical values from Rome to England, so the young male student-subject of Latinity, such as a young William Shakespeare in his Stratford grammar school, could be expected to master the language of elite learning and thus parlay that ability as his cultural capital.15 He would be interpellated as the competent and disciplined translator, the affirmative transmitter of romanitas as learned through intimate, daily Latin instruction, through the labour of reading Ciceronian prose, the imitative work of reading verse and epic, Horatian, Ovidian, Virgilian, in exemplary classical texts.16 Such labour also entailed specific pedagogical practices in translation. I believe we can regard Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as a key example



Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity 27

of translation/adaptation practices set in a historical context of ‘double translation’; that is, English humanist Roger Ascham’s pedagogy by which boys, taken from the home or mundus muliebris and the mother tongue at about age seven and placed in the company of boys and male schoolmasters to learn the father language, learned Latin as an exercise in socialization and cultural hegemony. Ascham condemned the conventional practice of learning Latin by a model of imitation, through memorization of rules and under the constraints of often severe corporal discipline: No learning ought to be learned with bondage: For, bodelie labors, wrought by compulsion, hurt not the bodie: but any learning learned by co¯pulsion, tarieth not lo¯g in the mynde: And why? For what soeuer the mynde doth learne vnwillinglie with feare, the same it doth quicklie forget without care. [. . .] Socrates [. . .] doth more plainlie say: [. . .] bring not vp your children in learning by compulsion and feare, but by playing and pleasure. (p. 198; emphasis mine) What I would question, however, is whether the praise and pleasure that Ascham would have in place of corporal punishment really freed students from what he knowingly deplored as ‘that butcherlie feare in making of latines,’ or whether it actually bound them more intimately to the authority of their school masters and to the learning and translating of classical texts and their cultural authority. In other words, it may be that the difference that Ascham underscores between the two learning methods turns out to be no real difference at all. Ascham summarized his method, the origins of which he himself located in Pliny and Cicero, as follows:17 First, let him teach the childe, cherefullie and plainlie, the cause, and matter of the letter [Epistles of Cicero]: then, let him construe it into Englishe, so oft, as the childe may easilie carie awaie the understanding of it: Lastlie, parse it ouer perfitlie. This done thus, let the childe, by and by, both construe and parse it ouer again: so, that it may appeare, that the childe douteth

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in nothing, that his master taught him before. After this, the childe must take a paper booke, and sitting in some place, where no man shall prompe him, by him self, let him translate into Englishe his former lesson. Then shewing it to his master, let the master take from him his latin booke, and pausing an houre, at the least, than let the childe translate his owne Englishe into latin again, in an other paper booke. When the childe bringeth it, turned into latin, the master must compare it with Tullies [Cicero’s] booke, and laie them both togither: and where the childe doth well, either in chosing, or true placing of Tullies wordes, let the master praise him, and saie here ye do well. For I assure you, there is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good witte and encourage a will to learninge, as is praise. (p. 183) Young students first read Latin texts and translate texts from Latin to English; then, translating from English to Latin, undergo in what Walter Ong famously called ‘a Renaissance puberty rite,’18 a process of cultural assimilation and subjectification that reinforced the notion of translatio imperii et studii. The real lesson is generated from the student sitting down with the master to have his translation evaluated and corrected: But if the childe misse, either in forgetting a worde, or in chaunging a good with a worse, or misordering the sentence, I would not have the master, either froune, or chide with him [. . .]. For [. . .] a childe shall take more profit of two fautes, ientlie warned of, then of foure thinges, rightly hitt. For than, the master shall haue good occasion to saie vnto him, N. Tullie would have vsed such a worde, not this: Tullie would have placed this word here, not there: would have vsed this case, this number, this person, this degree, this gender: he would have vsed this moode, this tens, this simple, rather than this compound: this aduerbe here, not there: he would have ended the sentence with this verbe, not with that nowne or participle. etc. [. . .] [A]fter this sort, the master shall teach without all error, and the scholar shall learne without great paine: the master being led



Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity 29 by so sure a guide, and the scholer being brought into so plaine and easie a waie. (pp. 183–84)

Corporal chastisement, harsh criticism, rote learning and merely imitative conformity to rules are proscribed here. In their place, however, Ascham substitutes more subtle but arguably insidious psychological coercions: the rules are still there, though conforming to them is more internalized and in the hands of a powerful, friendlier authority figure, ventriloquizing classical authority (‘Tullie would have used such a worde, not this’) who offers, or as well withholds, approval. Both methods worked toward the goal of students’ cultural assimilation through mimetic processes. As Halpern describes it, A mimetic education installs the subject in a play of mirrors, a dialectic of imaginary capture by a dominant form. It thus produces the ideological effect that Louis Althusser has dubbed ‘interpellation,’ or ‘hailing,’ wherein the subject comes both to recognize himself within and to depend upon a dominant specular image. This [. . .] ‘interpellative’ mode of ideological domination is distinctive in that the subject comes to assimilate or internalize a set of practices and thus enacts his subjection ‘automatically,’ as if he himself had chosen it. It is a way of rerouting the subject’s desires or energies for the purposes of ideological incorporation.19 Citing an ancient source, Thomas Elyot compared the authority of the grammar school master to that of a prince or a tyrant: Moreover teaching represents the authority of a prince; wherefore Dionysius, King of Sicily, when he was for tyranny expelled by his people, he came into Italy, and there in a common school taught grammar, wherewith when he was of his enemies embraided and called a schoolmaster, he answered them that although Sicilians had exiled him, yet in despite of them all he reigned, noting thereby the authority that he had over his scholars [. . .].20

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Ascham, on the contrary, sought to mitigate pedagogical authority and condemned the intellectually inhibiting desire to please the schoolmaster, declaring that ‘there is no one thing, that hath more, either dulled the wittes, or taken awaye the will of children from learning, then the care they have, to satisfie their masters, in making of latines’ (p. 182), but in effect he made it the cornerstone of the pedagogy of double translation.21 In both pedagogical methods the objective is the transmission of and the assimilation to classical values by submission to the schoolmaster’s authority, overt or intimately more covert, and second-nature internalization of the Latin text. Both methods, that is, aim toward a double translation, a double life for the Latin grammar student as the enunciated subject of Latinity, the bearer and reproducer of a heritage, a discipline, and values. Rather than constituting an alternative, Ascham’s double translation seems to give the game away on translation pedagogy as producing ‘improvement of mind, the fruits of discipline’ that would culturally, intellectually accoutre the student for both elite and marketable endeavours, for life as the early modern masculine subject.22 How did Shakespeare, the former grammar school pupil, respond to this process of assimilation and subject formation?23 Whatever method of Latin learning prevailed in his formative educational experience, one that made use of physical chastisement or the gentler schooling of the humanist reformers, he seems to have absorbed the lessons only to reflect on them later in his dramas.24 Shakespeare’s construction of characters spectacularly at odds with classical authority may be seen as an active response to the cultural constellation of translation, transmission and subject formation, especially to the sacrifices it exacts from the enunciated subject.25 His contemporary Ben Jonson clothed his authority in assiduous imitation, even to the point of calling for a transhistorical and transcultural identificatory conflation: requisite in our poet, or maker, is imitation, to be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use. To make choice of one excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him, till he grow very he, or so like him as the copy may be mistaken for the principal.26



Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity 31

In the case of his Roman tragedy Sejanus, Jonson produced a literal translatio imperii studiusque, the 1605 Quarto transporting Latin texts in a prominent citational apparatus that typograph­ ically flanked and propped up the dramatic text, allowing the reader to see the two texts side by side, while early modern texts regularly included classical or biblical citations in the marginalia. In other words, Jonson’s citations form actual and substantial columns. This early modern text might not actually be ‘mistaken for the principal,’ but the 1605 Sejanus stands as an exercise in concretely represented, admiring imitation. In contrast, Shakespeare’s response to classical authority offers a critical difference.27 Instead of Jonson’s burnished Latinity and authorizing apparatus of massive citation, he seems to have had some sense that the student of Latinity entered an interpellating citational apparatus of languages, grammar, discipline, a process of reproducing norms that extracted significant costs.28 In Shakespeare’s play, Coriolanus and Volumnia, two culturally imprinted and hybridized characters, quintessentially Roman and somehow significantly also out of the Roman compass, constitute a powerful critical reflection on Roman values, an interruption or even radical interrogation of translatio imperii. As problematic, even malfunctioning signifiers of a dominant culture, their roles suggest that the Romanicity – shaping oneself to a standard of correctness, making Latin and classical authority a second nature, taking in the values of constancy, amor patria, stoic self-denial, virility and honour – that Ascham’s Renaissance translation pedagogy seeks to transmit is always already dysfunctional, perhaps even irredeemably so, even as it remains a power to answer to. Shakespeare’s source text is ‘The Life of Coriolanus’ from Plutarch’s Lives, in the English Renaissance a triply translated work: written in Greek, soon translated into Latin, translated from Latin to French by Jacques Amyot (1559) and finally translated from French to English by Thomas North (1579).29 Notably, Plutarch’s own work might be considered something of a double translation: his Parallel Lives compared Greek and Roman historical figures and were written in Roman-colonized Greece in the first and second centuries ce.30

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Staging Antony’s inability to leave Cleopatra and thus reproduce – or translate – Aeneas’s narrative of renunciation in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare refuses Plutarch’s condemnation of Cleopatra as well as his moralizing pronouncements on Antony’s character and his unmanly attachment to pleasure, instead putting such criticisms into the mouths of characters of more dubious authority – Philo, Octavius – and countering their statements with another, perhaps even subversive perspective.31 Shakespeare makes a powerful and provocative thematic point of Antony’s vacillation between grim Roman thoughts such as discipline, self-renunciation, constancy, duty, stoicism – that is, those of the assiduous grammar school student – and Egyptian mirth, as a nearly utopian realm of desire. Rome may not melt into the Tiber in Shakespeare’s Roman texts, as Antony wishes at one moment in the play (1.1.34–35),32 but in effect Shakespeare unsettles Roman cultural heritage and scrutinizes the classical authority that strongly informs political and educational formations in early modern England, the very authority that he answers to in adapting, emulating and competing with classical sources. That scrutiny, effectively introduced in early works such as Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece,33 continues in Coriolanus, where Antony’s anti-heroic ambivalence towards Roman discipline, his interpellative attachment to romanitas in conflict with his will or ‘affection’ for Egyptian pleasure, is readdressed in a text about another decisive moment in Roman history in which the masculine subject, intensely involved with a female figure, comes to be at odds with political interests of the state. If Antony ‘flunks’ Romanicity, then surely Coriolanus should be the ‘A’ student. Raised by his widowed mother in Roman virtues, sent by her to battle for Rome from the age of sixteen, he is not the uneducated and unformed figure of Plutarch’s Lives but rather, in Shakespeare’s treatment of the source material, the figure of all that is Roman. While Antony laments that (Roman) authority melts from him (3.13.95), Coriolanus exists in a culturally congealed condition of pure service to the aristocratic state, refusing any material or political reward, and his loyalties are radically inverted when Rome banishes him and he joins his and Rome’s Volscian



Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity 33

enemy, Aufidius. It is his very diligence as the student of Rome that causes him to crash and burn. Antony’s delinquency is linked by Plutarch to Cleopatra, while Coriolanus’s Roman failures are conventionally assigned to his mother. Yet Plutarch says little of Volumnia and more of Coriolanus’s attachment to her,34 while Shakespeare develops the son-mother/pedagogue relationship in a far more complex way than his source in constructing an especially imprinted, even distilled Roman character. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus calls Volumnia ‘the honour’d mould / Wherein this trunk was fram’d’,35 metaphorically underscoring her biological maternity and his bond as the child she has borne, but when Volumnia acknowledges her formative role, replying, ‘Thou art my warrior: / I holp to frame thee’ (5.3.61–62), she conveys a double meaning that points to her doubled role as birth mother and pedagogue or framer. In particular, it is Coriolanus’s selfless warrior-patrician valour that blinds him to political and market exigencies that Volumnia sees more clearly. He slights the people’s tribunes, aggressively insults common citizens as ‘scabs’ and ‘fragments,’ imagines himself quartering them with his sword and making a heap of their bodies ‘as high / As I could pick my lance’ (1.1.165; 1.1.198–99). Volumnia’s pride in her son’s honourable deeds is voiced in gory and disturbing images: ‘Oh, he is wounded; I thank the gods for’t [. . .] there will be large cicatrices to show the people when he shall stand for his place’ (2.1.120; 2.1.146–47). She boasts of an occluded maternal function in sending her son ‘to a cruel war’ (1.3.14), ‘to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame’ (1.3.13–14) at an age ‘when [. . .] a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding’ (1.3.7–9); she discloses a jarring substitutive predisposition when she declares ‘If my son were my husband I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honour, than in the embracements of his bed’ (1.3.2–4); and she offers an ever-disturbing and much noted kind of heroic simile in imagining a bloody Coriolanus’s return from battle: The breasts of Hecuba When she did suckle Hector, look’d not lovelier

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Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood At Grecian sword contemning. (1.3.40–43) In their excess, perhaps we could call Coriolanus and Volumnia hyper-translators of romanitas. For, as adapted from Plutarch, Shakespeare’s Volumnia often says less about maternity than about the ravages of the cultural patrimony she is tasked to pass on; that is, she is herself a transmitter, a translator. She is conventionally read as the cause of her son’s downfall, and her rapturous and instrumentalizing views of Coriolanus’s wounds as what can be marketed for political gain mark her as a bloody-minded mother. Yet pathologizing her character amounts to taking an effect for a cause, ignoring the conflicts of her adaptive labours and Coriolanus’s own mixed interpellation. By occupying the maternal role and actively functioning as a surrogate for the absent father, while voicing paternal-patrician authority to encourage or ‘nurture’ the martial leanings of Coriolanus, she stands, like him, in an awkward configuration of family, state, cultural patrimony. Coppélia Kahn places Volumnia in historical Rome, where mothers would participate in their sons’ educations, would prepare them to serve Rome.36 For Shakespeare, however, the pedagogical model is the homosocial sphere of the schoolmaster and curricular discipline in the humanist grammar school, set apart from the mundus muliebris.37 Mother and educator, his Volumnia is an English translation, a paternally ventriloquized maternal figure, singularly loyal to state and warrior-aristocratic values. At the same time, however, she is savvy about the market in a properly interpellated hero’s career path which is, in other words, that of the subject of humanist pedagogy training to market his Latinity. Unlike his mother, who can count on her son’s wounds (‘there will be large cicatrices to show the people when he shall stand for his place. He received in the repulse of Tarquin seven hurts i’th’body’ (2.1.146–49)), Coriolanus is the student of romanitas who has never absorbed the lesson of the professional trajectory of Latin learning in the Renaissance: administrative service, social promotion, cultural-political ‘marketability.’ Because, in an act that



Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity 35

amounts to cultural disavowal, he cannot endure the market or appeal to the populace that is the material, economic and fleshly base beneath the ideological superstructure of romanitas, he cannot meet the demands of political candidacy. Here, however, is where Volumnia’s hybridity becomes important. The gory figurative passages may distract us from taking note of Volumnia’s supplementary but culturally logical market trajectory, an addition to the paternal role-playing by which she instructs Coriolanus. She is equally aware of the distance between hearts and brains, honour and policy, war and peace. Thus Volumnia’s caution, ‘I have a heart as little apt as yours, / But yet a brain that leads my use of anger / To better vantage’ (3.2.29–31), is legible to her as the mediator and tutorial voice of a more negotiable – or fungible – romanitas that Coriolanus would have unsullied. Assuming the paternal role seems to give Volumnia the ability to do a cost-benefit analysis of ideology; she can endure or, rather, anticipate some moments of impurity in order to prevail politically; she is more than willing to market her son’s achievements. But such pragmatic manoeuvring would have no place in the official curriculum which Coriolanus has absorbed. He is, in her words ‘too absolute, / Though therein you can never be too noble, / But when extremities speak’ (3.2.39–41).38 Though she persuades him to present himself again in the gown of the candidate and ‘spend a fawn upon ’em / For the inheritance of their loves and safeguard / Of what that want might ruin’ (3.2.67–69), the scene ends with his banishment, and his vow to destroy Rome. Unable to turn to the market of popular acclaim for which, without his realizing it, he’s been groomed or ‘framed’ all along, he can only turn inside-out and seek the enemy with whom, as pure warrior, he has always identified: [. . .] were I anything but what I am, I would wish me only he. [. . .] He is a lion That I am proud to hunt. (1.1.230–35) The exemplary Roman becomes the counter-exemplar.

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The ‘proper’ allusion here is to Virgil’s Aeneas, the model subject of translation in grammar school where reading The Aeneid would be a standard character-building exercise. Both Antony and Coriolanus fall short of the Roman epic model, but it is their very failure that constructs the rich material of the two plays. In Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus describes the admiral ship of Cleopatra’s navy, the ‘Antoniad,’ but, as well, Antony as the ignominious mock-hero of a parodic and aborted epic, an epic that will never be written, that sees him chasing Cleopatra’s Egyptian ships rather than, as Aeneas with Dido, leaving her for empire and civiliz­ ation. Coriolanus’s failure or refusal to make the transition from warrior to political honours, despite Volumnia’s exhortations and coaching, makes him the exile who threatens to lay waste to the Rome that Aeneas founded. In North’s Plutarch, Coriolanus is the anti-Aeneas, as he starts sacking Roman cities: they [the Romans] had intelligence at the length that the enemies [Coriolanus, leading the Volsces] had layed seige to the cittie of Lavinium, in the which were all the temples and images of the goddes their protectours, and from whence came first their auncient originall, for that Aeneas at his first arrivall into Italie dyd build that cittie. (p. 352) In exile, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus rejects his family name – Caius Martius, the name that signifies his martial honors and which he purchased with blood at Corioles – and he waits to be renamed in the Roman ruins he intends to create. Cominius calls him ‘a kind of nothing, titleless,’ waiting to forge another name ‘in the fire of burning Rome’ (5.1.13–15). That appellation hovers hauntingly over the text; were it to be given us, it would be ‘anti-Aeneas.’ Volumnia comes to Coriolanus’s camp with his wife and son to appeal to him to spare Rome, and in that confrontation Coriolanus is caught on the interpellative hook of a mother’s son. She comes not as the ventriloquized paternal surrogate, the pedagogue and hybrid that she has been, but as the voice of emotion, family, blood. His quest not to ‘Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand / As if



Schooling Coriolanus: Shakespeare, Translation and Latinity 37

a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin’ (5.3.35–37) seems less delusional than utopian, but it cannot be sustained in the tragedy. In Act Five’s appeal, Volumnia presents herself as a mother, yet her role has always been doubled, has always combined maternity with the role of the schoolmaster, the intimate pedagogy of double translation, and the professional itinerary that translates the student of Latinity to his marketplace role. Coriolanus is swayed by his mother to abandon revenge against Rome, but he cannot return to be the exemplar of romanitas: ‘Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my part and I am out, / Even to a full disgrace’ (5.3.40–42). The Tribune Sicinius who has been Coriolanus’s enemy in Rome wishes that ‘he had continued to his country / As he began, and not unknit himself / The noble knot he made’ (4.2.30–32), but it seems that for the Roman subject there is only knitting or unknitting. Coriolanus is undone not by maternity but by a life of double translation and by dedication to ideals he has absorbed of pleasing the master. By the play’s conclusion, following Coriolanus’s violent death at the hands of a vengeful Roman mob, Volumnia is reassimilated, hailed as Rome’s saviour. Hailing indeed. That she can be the life of Rome and the death of Coriolanus takes us to the question of Coriolanus’s own interpellation crisis: quintessentially Roman, the very figure of virtus, he is expelled as Rome’s scapegoat. The Roman values he embodies are not equipment for living, even as he is caught in an endless grammar lesson, the ‘echo-chain’ of citationality that Judith Butler identifies as the process of symbolic law:39 he cannot live as a Roman. Thus the subject of translation is culturally triangulated as the young Latin student, the character Coriolanus and Shakespeare, all negotiating the subject-forming circuits of early modern humanist pedagogical regimes, Rome and cultural masculinity. Within this constellation we can locate translation practice as both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, a response to a structure of domination perpetuated by the valorized transmission of traditional authority. In a tragic drama that stages the struggle between the enunciated subject and the subject of the enunciation, Coriolanus stands as a drama of translation in which the student of romanitas and Latinity, however assiduous and

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deeply imprinted, cannot but fail spectacularly as the subject of Latinity. Shakespeare’s reworking of the Coriolanus story from the Lives offers a strong translation agenda that moves from source to subject formation. Even as it passes on, reinvokes, revoices, resignifies a classical source and authority, Coriolanus actively reflects on the tradition that becomes the agenda of translation – translatio imperii studiusque – as treacherous and deadly to its most exemplary subjects. Perhaps we could suggest, though, that in Coriolanus’s downfall, resistance to cultural transmission emerges as the transgressive residue of the ideologized subject.

Notes An earlier version of this essay appeared in the online journal Doletiana: Revista de Traducció Literatura/Arts 1 (2007). I would like to thank the editorial collective Group Étienne Dolet (Departament de Traducció i interpretació, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) for permission to include parts of that work in this print publication.   1 Gayatri Spivack, ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 170–200, p. 183.  2 Roger Ascham, ‘The Scholemaster’, in Roger Ascham: English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), pp. 170–302, p. 183. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.   3 For a related discussion, see Walter Mignolo and Freya Schiwy, ‘Double Translation: Transculturation and the Colonial Difference’, in Translation and Ethnography: The Anthropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding, ed. Tullio Maranhão and Bernhard Streck (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), pp. 3–29. A comparison between early modern pedagogy and colonial practices falls outside the scope of this paper, but it is worthwhile considering the links between both hegemonizing forms. One might hypothesize that colonization of the



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early modern subject in the grammar school is a prerequisite for other colonizing practices. That the two are historically contiguous seems no accident, and invites future work. For recent work on translation and post-colonial resistance see Translation, Power, Subversion, ed. Román Álvarez and Carmen África Vidal (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1996).  4 Susan Bassnett, ‘The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies’, in Translation, Translation, ed. Susan Petrilli (Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 433–49, p. 446.  5 André Lefevre and Susan Bassnett, ‘Introduction: Proust’s Grandmother and the Thousand and One Nights: The “Cultural Turn” in Translation Studies’, in Translation, History and Culture, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (London: Pinter, 1990), pp. 1–13, p. 6.   6 Spivack, ‘The Politics of Translation’, p. 181.  7 Karl Marx, ‘From ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in The Portable Karl Marx, trans. and ed. Eugene Kamenka (New York: Penguin, 1983), pp. 287–323, p, 288. ‘So übersetzt der Anfänger, der eine neue Sprache erlernt hat, sie immer zurück in seine Muttersprache, aber den Geist der neuen Sprache hat er sich nur angeeignet und frei in ihr zu produzieren vermag er nur, sobald er sich ohne Rückerinnerung in ihr bewegt und die ihm angestammte Sprache in ihr vergibt’. Karl Marx, ‘Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte’, in Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe: Werke. Artikel. Entwürfe (Juli 1851 Bis Dezember 1852), I.11 (Berlin: Deitz, 1985), pp. 96–189, p. 97. The maternal metaphor in the passage is striking for its odd parallel to grammar school education in which the young male subject would be educated to abandon, in effect ‘forget’, the maternal sphere and the mother tongue for the father tongue of Latin.  8 Jacques Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, in Difference in Translation, trans. and ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 165–207.   9 Derrida, ‘Babel’, p. 175, p. 201, p. 202. 10 Derrida, ‘Babel’, pp. 165–66. 11 Derrida, ‘Babel’, p. 189, p. 190.

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12 Bassnett, ‘The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies’, p. 445. 13 Quoted in Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), p.1. Florio’s comment that ‘since all translations are reputed femalls, delivered second hand’ appears in the dedication ‘To the Right Honorable my best-best Benefactors, and most-honoured Ladies, Lucie Countesse of Bedford, and hir best-most loved-loving Mother, Ladie Anne Harrington’ prefacing Book 1 of his translation of Montaigne’s Essayes. John Florio, The Essayes [. . .] of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne (London: 1603), sig. 2Ar. 14 Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 23–4. See further his remarks on the limited usefulness of the grammar school: ‘because of their almost exclusive focus on the classical tongues, students sometimes forgot how to read English, and many were incapable of reading numbers, even well enough to use an index or to find biblical quotations, by the time they graduated [. . .]. Nor was a knowledge of classical Latin widely useful to the landed and merchant classes themselves, though it was helpful in a number of professions including the law and the ministry’ (p. 23). 15 I am speaking locally here; there are versions of this imperialnational ideal in other countries as well. 16 Mary Thomas Crane thoroughly describes the variety of texts used in the grammar schools, and shows that not only classical authors were read. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). See also T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944) and David Cressy, Education in Renaissance England (London: Edward Arnold, 1975). One thinks of the popularity of Erasmus’s Familiar Colloquies, as well as the vulgaria composed by schoolmasters themselves. See further William Nelson, ed., A Fifteenth Century School Book: From a Manuscript in the British Museum (Arundel 249) (Oxford:



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Clarendon Press, 1956). My point, however, is that it is translatio imperii studiusque at the centre of Latin learning and that the classical texts held a valorized position in the curriculum. 17 These origins are discussed in William E. Miller, ‘Double Translation in English Humanistic Education’, Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1963): 163–74. 18 Walter Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 103–24. 19 Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, p. 29. And, Halpern stresses, ‘Mimetic assimilation was fundamental to all humanist pedagogy. Histories and epic poetry were read for imitable exempla [. . .]. Social roles, cultural decora, and literary style were all assimilable through imaginary identification and internalization’ (p. 34). 20 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor (1531: reprinted New York: Dutton, 1963), p. 18. 21 See further the many examples from the vulgaria in Nelson, ed., A Fifteenth Century School Book from which the following is typical: ‘I laboure and enforce as moche as I can to please the maister in all thynges. the which, if I may brying it aboute, I shall not do to hym so great a pleasure as to myselfe, for ther is no mann to whom I am more beholde to. howbeit, he doth nothynge for me for nought, but he of my father shall have rewardys accordynge to hys labours’ (p. 32). 22 Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, p. 23. 23 As Stephen Greenblatt explains, the free grammar school in Stratford was the King’s New School where, characteristically, ‘the instruction was not gentle: rote memorization, relentless drills, endless repetition, daily analysis of texts, elaborate exercises in imitation and rhetorical variation, all backed up by the threat of violence’, and ‘Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping [. . .], pedagogical reputations were made by the vigour of the beatings administered’. Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 25–28. 24 Halpern states that ‘humanist theories of gentle schooling did not develop solely in reaction to long-standing traditions of

42

25

26 27

28

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Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity cruelty; on the contrary, the sixteenth century simultaneously witnessed both an intensification of physical punishment in schools and the humanist alternative of persuasion’(p. 35). This would be to agree with Rebecca Bushnell’s dialectical reading of early modern pedagogy as placing students in a realm of both freedom and authority, one reflected on in pedagogical treatises as well. See further Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1996). Ben Jonson, Discoveries (c. 1616: reprinted New York: Dutton, 1923), pp. 3057–63. Ben Jonson, Sejanus his fall, Written by Ben Jonson (London: 1605). See further John Jowett, ‘“Fall before This Booke”: The 1605 Quarto of Sejanus’, Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 4 (1988): 279–95. For a different view of Jonson’s relationship to Latinity that stresses the social resource of Latin for the ambitious bricklayer’s son, see Don Wayne, ‘Mediation and Contestation: English Classicism from Sidney to Jonson’, Criticism 25 (1983): 211–37. Cathy Shrank reads Shakespeare’s play as a sort of cautionary tale of the relationship between civil speech and civic values, a lesson of early modern humanist pedagogy that Martius fails to learn. For Shrank, his ‘uncivil language’ corresponds to ‘his antipathy to the civic community’. Cathy Shrank, ‘Civility and the City in Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2002): 406–23, p. 408. My essay is obviously at odds with her thesis, but for another recent approach to the play, rich in its critical potential for questioning republic and subject formation, see James Kuzner, ‘Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus and the Birth of Republican Rome’, Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 174–99. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, North’s highly influential 1579 translation was reprinted in 1595, 1603 (with added lives) and 1612. See further F. O. Matthiesson, ‘North’s Plutarch’, in Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1931: reprinted London: October Books, 1965), pp. 54–102.



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30 See further Rebecca Preston’s interesting ideas on Plutarch as colonial subject. Rebecca Preston, ‘Roman Questions, Greek Answers: Plutarch and the Construction of Identity’, in Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, ed. Simon Goldhill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 86–122. Bart Westerweel evaluates Shakespeare’s relationship with Plutarch as a literaryaesthetic one in which dramatic effects stand over representation of events. Bart Westerweel, ‘Plutarch’s Lives and Coriolanus: Shakespeare’s View of Roman History’, in Recreating Ancient History: Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period, ed. Karl Enenkel, Jan L. de Jong and Jeanine De Landtsheer (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 187–211. 31 See North’s translation where much is made of Antony’s dissipation and delight in ‘childish sports (as a man might say) and idle pastimes’ (p. 205), ‘all the foolish sports’ (p. 206), ‘these fond and childish pastimes’ (p. 207), as well as his ‘being so ravished and enchanted with the sweet poison of her love that he had no other thought but of her, [. . .] more than how he might overcome his enemies’ (p. 224). Thomas North, Shakespeare’s Plutarch, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (London: Penguin, 1968). All quotations are from this edition. In Antony and Cleopatra, Philo begins the play by speaking of ‘this dotage of our general’s’, and calls him ‘The triple pillar of the world transformed / Into a strumpets fool’ (1.1.1; 1.1.12–13). Octavius repeatedly condemns Antony’s sensual Egyptian agenda, calling him ‘the abstract of all faults / That all men follow’ (1.3.8–9). William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1995). All further references will be given parenthetically. 32 See further T. W. Baldwin, Shakspeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek; Robert Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Robert Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’.

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33 Nancy Vickers has noted Shakespeare’s heterogeneous attitude toward Roman matters in The Rape of Lucrece where the poet sees the high stakes of blazoning and anatomizing a woman in a homosocial competition, yet writes a ‘master’-work of emulation and competition, one that will prove his credentials as a serious writer precisely because he avails himself of the classical authority that he questions. This occupation of several positions seems a crucial part of Shakespeare’s adaptive work. Nancy Vickers, ‘“The blazon of beauty’s best”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 95–115. 34 In North’s translation, Martius, ‘being left an orphan [sic] by his father, was brought up under his mother a widowe, who taught us by experience, that orphanage bringeth many discommodities to a childe, but doth not hinder him to become an honest man, and to excell in vertue above the common sorte’ (pp. 313–34). For him ‘the only thing that made him to love honour, was the joye he sawe his mother dyd take of him’, and ‘thinking all due to his mother, that had bene also due to his father if he had lived: dyd not only content him selfe to rejoyce and honour her, but at her desire tooke a wife [. . .] and yet never left his mothers house therefore’ (p. 317). 35 All quotations are from William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1976), 5.3.22–23. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically. 36 Coppélia Kahn, ‘Mother of Battles: Volumnia and Her Son in Coriolanus’, in Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 144–59. 37 See further Ascham’s remark that English students were disadvantaged by not living in Rome and speaking Latin at home: ‘In very deede, if childre¯ were brought vp [. . .] where the latin tongue were properlie and perfitlie spoken, as Tib. And Ca. Gracci were brought vp, in their mother Cornelias house, surelie, than the dailie vse of speaking, were the best and readiest waie, to learn the latin tong’ (p. 185). However



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such a statement is at odds with the early modern humanist concern, voiced by Ascham, Elyot and Erasmus among others, that boys should be taken from their mothers’ care and placed under the moulding influence of their teachers. For more on such moulding see my The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 58–76. 38 ‘Extremities’ here is glossed as ‘extreme situations’ but it seems also to pun on and recall Menenius’s fable of the belly (1.1.95ff.) where the plebeians are the limbs or extremities. 39 See further Judith Butler: ‘When the law functions as ordinance or sanction, it operates as an imperative that brings into being that which it legally enjoins and protects. The performative speaking of the law [. . .] works only by reworking a set of already operative conventions. And these conventions are grounded in no other legitimating authority than the echochain of their own reinvocation’. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 107.

Chapter 2

A Midsummer Night’s Symposium: Translating Platonic Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Erica Birrell

I It is well known that Plato’s Symposium does not set out a straightforward treatise on love. In fact, as Robin Waterfield observes, [. . .] it is about ero¯s, which is the Greek word for passionate love and in the context of relations between human beings means primarily ‘sexual desire’. Nevertheless, Plato extends the reference of the word a great deal in the course of the work, until the only possible English translation for ero¯s is ‘love’ – love as the motivating force in all of us.1 From Phaedrus’s to Alcibiades’ speeches, the symposium format allows for many models of love to be posited, considered and contested. Yet Christian Neoplatonists of the Renaissance generally interpreted Socrates/Diotema’s account of the so-called ‘Ladder of Love’ as the classical author’s conclusive comment on the topic, thus relegating much of the Symposium to the lesser roles of establishing and augmenting Plato’s Socratic dialogue. In (very) broad terms, then, the Renaissance transformed Plato’s composite examination of ero¯s into a relatively undemanding set of culturally acceptable principles whereby the male subject employed a female object of ‘Beauty’ for contemplation, a process ultimately leading to



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the understanding of ‘True Beauty’ or divine thoughts.2 However, this essay suggests that, through the medium of popular theatre, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595) takes a different approach to Plato’s disquisition on love. By translating and transforming the classical discussion into a multifaceted, open-ended play, I argue that the Elizabethan drama has more in common with Plato’s consideration of ero¯s than with contemporaneous discourses of Christian Platonism. The lists of sources for A Midsummer Night’s Dream vary widely,3 yet Ovid’s Metamorphoses appears so consistently that scholars have labelled the play ‘Shakespeare’s Metamorphoses’.4 Apart from a few striking exceptions which I examine in the ensuing discussion, critics seldom go beyond the play’s engagement with late-sixteenth century Neoplatonism. By contrast, I posit that the links between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Plato’s Symposium are sustained, and that the classical dialogue speaks to the play thematically and intertextually. Indeed, if the play can be called Shakespeare’s Metamorphoses, in my opinion it is also his Symposium. Of course, from a practical point of view, one objection to any claim that Shakespeare used Plato’s Symposium in writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that there is no tangible evidence that the playwright had direct access to the material. While English translations of the Greek source text were not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, intermediate versions were available. As a schoolboy, Shakespeare may have encountered aspects of the Symposium from compendia, such as Nanus Mirabellus’s Polyanthea.5 Marcilio Ficino’s 1484 Latin translation of Plato’s text proved popular, and by the late sixteenth century several translations based on this rendition were published in France. Notably, the addition of the adjective ‘honneste’ to ‘amour’ in the title of Guy le Fèvre’s translation, Discourse de L’Honneste Amour sur le Banquet de Platon: Par Marsile Ficin (1578), illustrates the extent to which the Symposium owed its popularity to the increasing interest in Neoplatonic love arising from Diotema’s speech. In the same year as le Fèvre’s Plato, Jean de Serres produced a new Latin translation dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.6 Continental editions certainly made their way to the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge and into private collections such as Ben Jonson’s.7 In the 1590s, Shakespeare was ‘on close

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terms with Jonson’ and may have had access to the library which ‘the “learned Ben” allowed his friends [to] use’.8 According to Stephen Medcalf, [A]s [. . .] the Martindales [. . .] put it [. . .] ‘Shakespeare’s “small Latin” (as Jonson saw it) would have allowed him to read Latin books if they were not too difficult, without translation where necessary’. And the Latin of the most widely available translations (Ficino and de Serres) is far from difficult.9 As part of an important collection of essays on Platonism and the English Imagination, Medcalf explores Venus and Adonis (c.1593), The Pheonix and the Turtle (c.1601) and Troilus and Cressida (c.1601) in terms of the beloved, Beauty and Truth, thus focusing on those aspects of the classical text most commonly adopted by Renaissance Neoplatonists. However, in spite of the mainstream absorption of Plato’s ideas, Medcalf finds that it likely that the Platonic passages in his selection of Shakespearean texts suggest direct interaction with the classical works in Latin translation. Furthermore, he contends that Plato ‘put his philosophy forward not as a code of doctrine, but dramatically as a set of explorations, in dialogues that look like plays’.10 Shakespeare, therefore, ‘was behaving in a thoroughly Platonic way when [. . .] he tried his hand at a play in which people try to argue philosophically—Troilus and Cressida’.11 This is the same strategy that I see at work in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the outset, Shakespeare uses a series of allusions to Plato’s Symposium which tie the play to the philosophical discussion. Like symposia, as Medcalf suggests above, dramas can contain a wide cast of characters. Thus Shakespeare’s comedy uses its dramatis personae to present diverse viewpoints just as easily as symposia. But while a symposium offers description, A Midsummer Night’s Dream dramatizes verbal and non-verbal effects of love. For example, whereas Eryximachus talks about the possibilities of influencing a body to good love rather than unhealthy love (186d), Shakespeare’s play shows the external forces of love upon theatrical bodies, notably the young Athenians’ and Bottom’s. Rather than Alcibiades



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recounting the woes of role-reversal, whereby the beloved must chase the lover (216c–d), A Midsummer Night’s Dream explores the contravention of orthodox codes of conduct through Helena’s woodland pursuit of Demetrius in 2.2.12 Arguably, Pausanius’s abstract description of Athenian parents who discourage their children from accepting the lovers who court them (183c) gains cultural and emotional weight when a theatre audience learns of Egeus’s disapproval of Hermia’s suitor (1.1.22ff). The confusion and chaos of the Shakespearean plot which encompasses the Athenian lovers and the artisan Bottom getting lost in the forest – and lost in love – make for a forceful metaphor. Yet, as scholars have comprehensively demonstrated, A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s concluding scenes of marriage present material examples of the ways in which love’s unsettling dynamics may be controlled. The Athenian location which begins A Midsummer Night’s Dream is actually closest to Plato’s Socratic discourse on love, the Phaedrus. However, other parallels pull A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Symposium into dialogue. For instance, Plato’s text does not end with a speech on love, but rather gives an account of one of the narrators falling asleep and waking in the early morning to overhear the remaining symposium participants discussing the relationship between drama (both tragedy and comedy) and philosophy. This self-reflexive turn is also evident in Shakespeare’s Renaissance play. The main characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream also fall asleep after the night of words and actions which revolve around the topic of love, and it is on the following day that they watch and comment upon the play-within-the-play. Thus, the play’s intersections of drama, rhetoric and philosophical commentary closely resemble the Symposium and therefore participate in the wider Platonic conversations. Indeed, Shakespeare’s thorough and sustained engagement with Plato’s work is indicated by the fact that each speech in the Symposium is echoed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In order to demonstrate the thorough translation of Platonic love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and following the order in which they appear in Plato’s dialogue, I will proceed from this point to examine the Symposium’s speeches alongside Shakespeare’s play.

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II Phaedrus’s proclamation on love is the first of the formal speeches. Accordingly, it warrants close attention in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Phaedrus focuses on the courage love inspires (179a). These symptoms and benefits of love are so common in western culture that it is easy to miss the point that Demetrius’s and Lysander’s mutual accusations of cowardice as they quarrel over Helena (3.2.400–20) resonate with Phaedrus’s views. Phaedrus then moves on to the farthest extreme of bravery – the willingness to die for love – and he tells of ‘Alcestis, who was the only one prepared to die for her husband’ (179b) and who is praised for her noble deed. Of even greater worthiness is Achilles who ‘didn’t choose just to die for Patroclus, but even to die as well as him, since Patroclus was already dead’ (180a), a sacrifice made more impressive because Phaedrus insists that Achilles was the beloved, not the lover, in the homosocial bond. So when Hermia – who is in the role of Lysander’s beloved, wooed and won by him – tells Demetrius, ‘If thou hast slain Lysander [. . .] plunge in deep, / And kill me too’ (3.2.47–49), like Phaedrus’s Achilles, she requests a simultaneous death. Throughout the early scenes in the forest, the two Athenian women avow that they would face death if they cannot have requited love. Helena exits declaring she would ‘die upon the hand [she] love[s] so well’ (2.1.244). As she returns to the stage, her opening line, ‘Stay, though thou kill me, sweet Demetrius’ (2.2.90), takes up her foregoing theme. Hermia does not expect death from her lover, but as she leaves the stage she refers to death as the only alternative to finding Lysander again: ‘Either death, or you, I’ll find immediately’ (2.2.162). Just as Phaedrus aligns love with a willingness to face death, Shakespearean lines such as these keep the association between thwarted love and death fresh in the theatre audience’s mind. Hermia, at least, appears to have read her Plato closely and models herself on Phaedrus’s highest principles of love, declaring her desire to follow Lysander to death. After Phaedrus’s pronouncements, Plato’s Pausanias describes contradictions within Athenian codes of love in which a lover is praised for going through extraordinary measures to win his



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beloved, even though the parents and the peers of the object of such love are discouraging. Clearly, Pausanias’s perspectives chime with A Midsummer Night’s Dream dramatization of its quartet of Athenian lovers. While they become enmeshed in other paradigms of love – particularly those proposed by Eryximachus and Aristophanes – Hermia continues to act in a mode more in keeping with Pausanias’s comments. As Helena and Lysander argue that they did, do or should possess an almost mystical oneness with Hermia, she professes friendship and love while maintaining some distance. Hermia rejects Lysander’s plea for oneness, and for shared sleeping arrangements, by demanding that he ‘Lie further off [. . .] / Such separation as may well be said / Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid’ (2.2.63–65). Here, Hermia operates under the auspices of Pausanias’s speech. Lysander’s pursuit of the Athenian woman under her father’s disapproval, and even Hermia’s hesitance to be completely caught, illustrates Pausanias’s point as adapted by Renaissance culture’s constraints. Pausanias comments that ‘our society encourages lovers to chase their boyfriends, and the boyfriends to run away’ (184a). Though maintaining the social paradoxes surrounding such pursuit, Shakespeare transposes the Platonic homosocial image.13 Hermia is concerned with what is proper, what ‘Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid’. In this way, she is obeying the social expectations of both the classical and early modern worlds. Hermia plays the role well, running away while enjoying the chase. To be sure, her pleasure is evident as she tells Lysander, ‘Thy love ne’er alter till thy sweet life end’ (2.2.67), a line which shows that Hermia appreciates and accepts Lysander’s love even as she rejects his desire for physical union. There is a certain absurdity in maintaining such propriety when she has already defied social strictures by eloping with her beloved. However, by going through the motions of decorum in the middle of the wilderness, Hermia’s actions foreground the artificiality of Athenian social codes of conduct. Once more, there is a precedent in the Symposium. Pausanias contrasts the different expectations for lovers in different societies (182b), and he begins with the local situation stating that ‘in most states, it’s easy to grasp the conventions that govern love, since they have been defined

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in a straightforward manner; but here and in Sparta the matter is complex’ (182b). Markedly, Shakespeare’s Athens is less temperate than Plato’s. Yet as Shakespeare’s couple flee patriarchal authority to join Lysander’s ‘widow aunt’ who resides in a ‘place where the sharp Athenian law cannot pursue’ (157–63) them, A Midsummer Night’s Dream suggests that such rules are regional and arbitrary, a rather faithful translation of Pausanias’s theme. Another notable feature of Pausanias’s speech is his celebrated division of love into two types: Common love and Celestial love. From Pausanias’s descriptions, Common love seems the more prevalent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Of the personified Common form of love, Pausanias says that ‘his effects are totally random’ (181b), thus bringing to mind Puck and his applications of the love-juice.14 Pausanias describes the effects of Common love on lovers saying ‘they’re attracted to the bodies rather than the minds of the people they love’ (181b), and most of the praise given to the women of the play focuses on their beauty. Once his love has temporarily been turned from her, Hermia asks Lysander in bewilderment, ‘Hate me? Wherefore? [. . .] / Am I not Hermia? [. . .] / I am as fair now as I was erewhile’ (3.2.272–74), three questions which interrogate the relationship between outward appearance and the self. Lysander’s reply that he ‘never did desire to see thee more’ (3.2.278) aligns his rejection of Hermia to his dismissal of the sight of her.15 Neoplatonic theories maintaining that the contemplation of the beloved’s beauty leads the mind to heavenly thoughts complicate this reading. However, in one of Helena’s accusations the Neoplatonic trajectory is broken back into the two categories of love described by Pausanius: Have you not set Lysander [. . .] To follow me and praise my eyes and face? And made your other love, Demetrius, [. . .] To call me goddess, nymph, divine, and rare, Precious, celestial? (3.2.222–27)



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The words and actions of the two men which Helena describes are all symptomatic of love, yet they are different in nature. Whereas Lysander’s ‘praise’ of Helena’s ‘eyes and face’ is a typical example of Common love, Demetrius defines the Athenian woman in ‘[C] elestial’ terms. In this scene, Lysander’s love for Helena derives from the random actions of Puck. By contrast, Demetrius’s love arises from Oberon’s influence, a topic I will address further on. Evidently, it is Demetrius who remains in love with Helena and marries her while Lysander’s potion-induced love is cured. The third speech in Plato’s Symposium is delivered by the ­professional doctor, Eryximachus,16 who argues that love affects everything, not just human relations but concepts such as music, weather and medicine. In one of the few critical discussions of Platonic rather than Neoplatonic citation in Shakespeare’s works, A. B. Taylor compares the language of ‘Titania’s account at their first meeting of the widespread effects of her and Oberon’s quarrel’ (2.1.82–117) to Eryximachus’s speech in the Symposium.17 Taylor’s detailed analysis of the ways in which Plato and Shakespeare deal with the themes of common love and chaotic weather can be taken further. While Eryximachus considers various topics, he dwells longest on his own profession, medicine: physical health and physical disease are two different things, dissimilar from each other. Now, where there is dissimilarity between things, there is also a dissimilarity between the things they desire and love. The love experienced by a healthy body, therefore, is different from the love experienced by a sick body [. . .]. What it takes to be a true professional [doctor] is the ability to discern within these processes which loves are good and which are bad, and then to effect a change so that a body acquires a good love rather than a bad; that is [. . .] to make a body gain a love which it should have, but doesn’t, and rid itself of the presence of the other kind. (186b–d) Shakespeare reintegrates the categories of human love and medicine so that, in the form of the love-juice, the medicinal trope has a

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material bearing on the practicalities of the plot. When Oberon first describes the plant he needs, he calls it ‘a little western flower’ (2.1.166), also called ‘love-in-idleness’ (2.1.168). ‘Flower’ (2.1.169) is repeated, then re-categorized as a ‘herb’ (2.1.169), a term implying some sort of use, whether medicinal or merely flavourful. Oberon proceeds to describe the use of this particular herb like a doctor, saying, ‘The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid / Will make or man or woman madly dote / Upon the next live creature that it sees’ (2.1.170–72). Soon after, the terms ‘Herb’ (2.1.173) and ‘juice’ (2.1.176) are used again. As to the procedure, Oberon plans to ‘drop the liquor of it in her eyes’ (2.1.178). The entry from a sixteenth-century book of remedies, William Bullein’s [. . .] Bulwarke of defence against all sickness, soarenesse, and vvoundes that doe dayly assaulte mankinde (1562), offers a useful parallel in the description of the herb Hilarius also ‘called Melanthium, which you do name Nigella [. . .], this herb that ‘the iuice dropped into the eye, healeth a disease called Epiphora, whiche is droppynge of theym’.18 The use of multiple names, the terms ‘herb’ and ‘juice’, and the procedure of dropping the juice into the eyes, all correspond to Oberon’s actions. Another entry in Bullein’s guidebook has similar echoes. According to Bullein’s description, a concoction of juices from various herbs is a ‘liquor’ which ‘represseth the swellyng of the eye lyddes, of a colde cause, it dryeth vp the bleare eyednesse, it stoppeth the flowyng of teares, it cleareth the syght’.19 Here we see the term ‘liquor’ used in a medicinal context. However, Oberon’s love-juice has an effect nearly opposite to that of the medicinal herb in Bullein’s book. For both Titania and Lysander, Oberon’s potion distorts sight rather than clearing it. Furthermore, whereas Bullein’s herb inhibits the ‘flowyng of teares’, Lysander is ‘in tears’ (3.2.123) while compelled to woo Helena. Oberon is sure to mention he can restore Titania’s accustomed sight ‘with another herb’ (2.1.184), thus returning to the effects and counter-effects of herbs and medicine. Bullein’s terminology and the effects described for herbs used on the eyes are not unusual. However, in Platonic terms, Oberon knows that he is going to induce a ‘bad love’, as it were, but is prepared to restore Titania to ‘good love’ when he is ready. Indeed, at this moment of the play, Shakespeare’s



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King of Fairies seems to be the reverse of Eryximachus’s professional physician. By contrast with Plato’s doctor, Oberon is able to discern and to effect a change, but in this episode it is from good to bad rather than bad to good love. If Oberon is playing anti-doctor with Titania, he compensates by trying to aid Helena and Demetrius more in the manner of a true physician. Oberon applies the love juice to the Athenian’s eyes in preparation for the appearance of Helena, so that Demetrius should ‘Beg of her for remedy’ (3.2.109). Unlike his charm on Titania in which he hopes she will ‘Wake when some vile thing is near’ (2.2.40), Oberon here says ‘When his love he doth espy’ (3.2.105) and ‘When thou wak’st, if she be by’ (3.2.108). In Titania’s case, he is inducing an apparently unhealthy love and therefore it does not matter what she looks upon for anything will be a negative object of desire in this context. In the line ‘Do it for thy true love take’ (2.2.34), as pointed out by Jan Blits, ‘Oberon distinguishes between love-juice love and true love. Titania, he says, will “take” – that is, mistake – what she sees for her “true love” ’.20 When he applies a charm to Demetrius, however, Oberon indicates that there is a specific object already determined to be ‘his love’. Oberon has examined the case and decided that the love juice can be used as a corrective to redirect Demetrius from Hermia to Helena who should, according to Oberon’s judgment, be his love. This juxtaposition between true beneficial love and false unhealthy love occurs again in the countercase of Lysander. When the juice is applied to a healthy patient, to continue the metaphor, Oberon accuses Puck thus: Thou hast mistaken quite And laid the love juice on some true love’s sight. Of thy misprision must perforce ensue Some true love turned, and not a false turned true. (3.2.88–91) In these lines, Oberon specifically identifies a distinction between false and true love and the possibilities for human appetites to be manipulated in either direction. Demetrius also uses the language of medicine to describe his

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mutable love, and he explains that ‘But like a sickness did I loathe this food; / But, as in health, come to my natural taste, / Now I do wish it, love it, long for it’ (4.1.168–70). In contrast with Oberon’s use of herb juice to effect material changes in love, Demetrius’s language employs simile to illustrate emotional transformation. Yet both Shakespearean examples solidify the connection to Eryximachus’s speech. Oberon and Demetrius discuss the divergent desires of a healthy versus a sick person and equate their perspectives to love. Using the same general metaphor, Lysander, while under the influence of the love-juice, has his true tastes replaced by unhealthy ones. He says to Hermia, his supposed ‘true love’ (3.2.91), ‘Out, loathèd med’cine! O hated potion, hence!’ (3.2.264), thus emphasizing that his amorous inclinations have been inverted by the application of what, to Demetrius, is indeed medicine. For Lysander to be returned to health, a different herb must be applied and, like Oberon, Puck uses medical terminology in the application itself: ‘I’ll apply / To your eye, / Gentle lover, remedy’ (3.2.450–52). A last example of Oberon’s self-appointed role as physician comes in his blessing upon the couples in which he makes a direct link between the true nature – or we might say the health – of the couples’ love and the subsequent wellbeing of their children: Now, until the break of day, Through this house each fairy stray. To the best bride-bed will we, Which used by us blessèd be; And the issue there create Ever shall be fortunate, So shall all the couples three Ever true in loving be; And the blots of Nature’s hand Shall not their issue stand; Never mole, harelip, nor scar, Nor mark prodigious, such as are Despisèd in nativity, Shall upon their children be. (5.1.377–90)



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Without the Platonic material, Demetrius remains under a magical enchantment. However, recognition of Eryximachus’s speech and the ways in which medicinal discourses pulse throughout the play render a different rationale for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s concluding matrimonial scene. Likewise, traces of Aristophanes’ speech, the fourth in Plato’s Symposium, appear frequently in Shakespeare’s comedy. Lysander tells Hermia they have ‘One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth’ (2.2.48) and explains that ‘I mean that my heart unto yours is knit, / So that but one heart we can make of it; / Two bosoms interchainèd with an oath – / So then two bosoms and a single troth’ (2.2.53–55). The concept comes directly from Aristophanes’ well-known discourse on love which describes the ways in which lovers should be unified, and Shakespeare’s language echoes the hypothetical scenario. ‘Imagine’, he says that Hephastus came with his tools and stood over them as they were lying together, and asked, ‘What is it that you humans want from each other?’ And when they were unable to reply, suppose he asked instead, ‘Do you want to be so thoroughly together that you’re never at any time apart? If that’s what you want, I’d be glad to weld you together, to fuse you into a single person, instead of being two separate people [. . .]. (192d) The terms translated above by Robin Waterfield as ‘weld’ and ‘fuse’ – sunthxai and sumfusai – are both closer to the term ‘fuse’. The image can be of binding, fusing, nailing or riveting together, though with the latter word in particular, sumfusai, there is also an organic connotation, ‘to grow together’21 or ‘make you grow into one’.22 Similarly, the imagery at this moment in the play is suggestive of a physical craft that links two things together to the point of becoming one thing. So ‘sunthxai’ and ‘sumfusai’ in the Symposium become ‘knit’ and ‘interchainèd’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later, Helena’s speech to Hermia about their former friendship echoes Lysander’s and draws upon more of Aristophanes’ speech. Helena says it was ‘As if our hands, our

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sides, voices and minds / Had been incorporate’ (3.2.207–8), a reasonable translation, into the first person as well as into English, of the image of the whole humans described by Aristophanes. These original humans were joined all the way along their lengths, forming round humans with four legs and four arms all working in unison. According to Aristophanes’ story, Zeus ‘cut every member of the human race in half, just as people cut sorb-apples in half’ (190e). One of Helena’s similes evokes Aristophanes’ speech by also using fruit to describe the relationship between whole or parted humans. While the link may seem superficial, the image helps to link Helena’s words to the philosophical concept that underlies them. Helena says, So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition, Two lovely berries molded on one stem; (3.2.208–11) For the moment, the separation of the two bodies into Helena and Hermia is not a violent divide. The image of the cherries growing together, ‘molded’ together, replies to and almost reverses the splitting of the sorb-apple. The phrase ‘we grew together’ once again recalls sumfusai, the offer to ‘make you grow into one.’ It also introduces a range of interpretations of Helena and Hermia’s relationship, from the homosocial to the homoerotic. But we can extend this analysis. As A Midsummer Night’s Dream turns the topic of love in new directions, the play participates in philosophical conversation. Indeed, the Shakespearean dialogue with Plato is equally as complex as the original classical debate. The relationship of the young women in the play to the gods also responds to Aristophanes’ account of the relationship between ancient humans and their deities. Aristophanes says that before their punishment, the ‘strength and power’ of the ancient mortals ‘was terrifying, and they were also highly ambitious. They even had a go at the gods’(190b). Plato’s Symposium thus adds a new aspect to Helena’s image of the two women being ‘like two artificial gods’



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(3.2.203). In this prior history, when the two women were joined so fully, they, like the whole humans in Aristophanes’ story, bore comparison to gods. In fact, although the image appears more benign, seemingly addressing their creativity rather than ambition and terrifying power, Helena and Hermia actually appear more powerful than their Symposium counterparts since they are likened to gods, while Aristophanes’ whole humans merely worry the gods. This evocation of Platonic imagery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream marks a drastic change from the beginning of the play. Here, the language describing these women living apart from men is one of strength. Earlier, the rejection of men was something to ‘endure’ (1.1.70). Becoming a nun in service to Diana is presented as a difficult alternative to death requiring Hermia to ‘live a barren sister all [her] life, / Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon’ (1.1.72–73). The state of womanhood sans men thus moves from barren fruitlessness to artistic creation. Furthermore, Helena and Hermia, through bonded female friendship or perhaps something more than friendship, have now effectively supplanted consideration of the goddess Diana and have become like gods themselves, achieving what the undivided humans in the Symposium could not. Originally, the women were in an idealized, strong and unified state but were ‘rend [. . .] asunder’ (3.2.215) not by gods but by Hermia herself who leaves her erstwhile companion to ‘join with men’ (3.2.216) or rather, a specific man. Plainly Helena is aggrieved because Hermia has willingly torn herself away from Helena in favor of binding herself to Lysander. Aristophanes describes three original human genders that, when these eight-limbed humans were split in half, gave rise to the three possible types of couples: the ‘androgynous’ gender that produced men were attracted to women and vice-versa, the ‘female’ gender that produced women were attracted to other women, and the ‘male’ gender that produced males were attracted to other males (191d–e). Male-female relationships may dominate the play, but all three pairing types are at least alluded to in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As demonstrated above, Helena uses the language of sexual love as described by Aristophanes in lines such as the one proclaiming that the two women had ‘two seeming bodies but one

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heart’ (3.2.212). Not only does Helena engage in the love-language of Aristophanes when she is in the forest, but earlier in Athens she praises Hermia in terms that could easily have come from a lover, though in context they are couched as jealousy: O happy fair! Your eyes are lodestars, and your tongue’s sweet air More tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear. (1.1.182–85) The lines evoke Petrarchan conceits and a pastoral love setting. Helena later speaks explicitly of love for Hermia as she exclaims ‘I evermore did love you, Hermia’ (3.2.306). Like Plato’s scrutiny of the term ero¯s, Shakespeare probes the language of human relationships as the meaning of the word ‘love’ hangs ambiguously between the love of friendship and a love that involves erotic dimensions.23 There are also two cases in which male homoeroticism is suggested. The first comes in the opening scene of the play where Lysander says in anger ‘You have her father’s love, Demetrius; / [. . .] Do you marry him’ (1.1.93–94). Egeus replies, Scornful Lysander! True, he hath my love, And what is mine my love shall render him. And she is mine, (1.1.95–97) While Egeus’s reply artfully backs away from Lysander’s ‘Scornful’ suggestion of same-sex marriage, obviously a dangerous notion in Renaissance England, it does not refute the topic. And so, with Lysander’s suggestion of a homoerotic relationship resounding in the audience’s ear, Egeus’s retort might render Hermia as a lover’s gift. Strikingly, the hierarchical relationship between the older and the younger man is precisely the pairing that is given most thought and space in the Symposium. While I am not suggesting that the passage actually implies a homoerotic relationship between the



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two men, the episode recalls Plato’s work. Moreover, as Douglas E. Green has shown, Oberon’s obsessive interest in the changeling boy also raises questions of homoeroticism, again of uneven ages after the fashion of the Greeks.24 The changeling is described as ‘A lovely boy’ (2.1.22) and ‘so sweet a changeling’ (2.1.23). His precise age is left ambiguous but since he is Titania’s ‘attendant’ (2.1.21) it is most likely that he would have been played by an adolescent boy of about the same age as the beloved boys discussed at such length in the Symposium. The fact that he never speaks in the play makes him an emblem, a voiceless object of desire. When Oberon attains the boy he instructs someone to ‘bear him to my bower’ (4.1.60). His treatment of the changeling child thus parallels Titania’s command that the fairies should ‘lead’ Bottom to her ‘bower’ (3.1.168). Like Titania, Oberon wants the changeling boy to be his attendant, his henchman (2.1.121). Given the descriptions of the silent boy as sweet and lovely, the role of henchman might well recall Zeus’s cupbearer, Ganymede, and the erotic relationship in that tale of master and attendant. A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s representation of all three kinds of coupling indicates the ways in which, on a local and overarching level, it engages with the Symposium’s thorough investigation of love. The first scene of the play ends with a 26-line soliloquy from Helena on, among other things, the attributes of a personified Love and his effects. Most of the speakers in the Symposium use a similar approach and thus its position so early in the play is one of the first signs that A Midsummer Night’s Dream will go beyond conventional comedic plots in order to take time to engage with Platonic philosophies. For instance, Helena proclaims that Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. (1.1.232–35) According to Jan Kott, ‘The imagery here shows a striking similarity to the formulas of Florentine Neoplatonists, particularly Marsilio

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Ficino and Pico della Mirandola’.25 However, Act One’s final moments warrant detailed comparison with the Platonic material. Thematically and stylistically, Helena’s speech most closely resembles Agathon’s, the fifth formal speech of the Symposium. For instance, after offering different proofs concerning the actions of Love, Helena’s conclusion, ‘And therefore is Love said to be a child’ (1.1.238) matches that of Agathon on the question of Love’s age: ‘he is therefore young himself’ (195b). Helena, like Agathon, seeks to assign personified attributes of Love that more or less logically follow from her experiences and observations of this emotion. Both thematic and argumentative resonances appear earlier when she states that ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind’. Helena is disparaging Love while Agathon’s speech praises Love, yet the rhetorical techniques used and the attributes mentioned are similar. Her statement that ‘Love looks [. . .] with the mind’ is weaker than, but related to, Agathon’s assertion that Love ‘makes his home in gods’ and men’s dispositions and minds’ (195e). The link between mind and Love is important to both of them. Finally, in order to make erudite points in their respective arguments, both Agathon and Helena are playing with the tension between the attributes of the phenomenon of love and the attributes of the personification of Love. Agathon’s delineations of Love receive further treatment in Shakespeare’s play. For example, Agathon claims not only that ‘oppression and Love are incompatible’ but also that ‘Love is never dealt with harshly’ (196b). A Midsummer Night’s Dream challenges this Platonic viewpoint with the renowned counter-claim, ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ (1.1.134). Both the classical and Shakespearean assertions use ‘never’, a term which is indicative of an absolute rule, yet they are observations that are clearly opposed. Shakespeare goes on to use evidence in the plot to demonstrate instances in which love is dealt with harshly. By threatening to kill his daughter rather than let her marry against his authority, Egeus is certainly willing to treat the love between Hermia and Lysander unsympathetically. As we have seen, this parental disapproval parallels Pausanias’s comments on the



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subject. Thus Shakespeare’s example would appear to support one part of the Symposium over another. Though the love of Hermia and Lysander wins out in the end, the inclusion of the familiar plot of love threatened by parental oppression is a strong challenge to Agathon’s assertions. Helena’s love for Demetrius also receives a callous response, in this case from the beloved object of desire himself. Though he originally wooed her, by the beginning of Act Two Demetrius spurns Helena, advising her to ‘Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit’ (2.1.211) and ultimately threatening to ‘do [her] mischief’ (2.1.237). In this instance, love is met with rejection and the risk of physical harm. Yet Oberon’s sympathetic actions toward Helena mean that, by the end of the play, she marries a now-loving Demetrius, a conclusion which leaves the complex argument largely unresolved. I have already discussed the ways in which knowledge of Eryximachus’s speech has a bearing on the play’s deployment of the love-juice. However, that the power of inducing love comes from a flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream echoes another of Agathon’s points. ‘As for the loveliness of Love’s complexion’, he explains, This is symbolized by his practice of making flowers his home. Love doesn’t settle on a body, a mind, or anything else which has no bloom or whose bloom has faded; but a fragrant spot full of flowers – that’s where he settles and remains. (196a–b) An association between love and flowers exists in the medieval courtly love tradition, but the concept of Platonic Love actually residing in flowers is more specific. Oberon recounts the origins of the flower that is so pivotal to the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he tells of how one of Cupid’s ‘love shaft[s]’ (2.1.159) missed its mark of a ‘fair vestal’ (2.1.158) and ‘fell upon a little western flower’ instead (2.1.166). The flower thus retains a power similar to the original arrow. Viewed through Agathon’s lens, the fact that the arrow could not hit its mark might imply that the woman, the ‘imperial vot’ress’ (2.1.164), did not have the

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‘bloom’ to ­accommodate love, whereas the physical flower did. Love, figured first in Cupid’s arrow, has the potential to settle in a human mind with symbolic bloom or a physical flower equally well. Agathon also claims that ‘everyone is happy to carry out any of Love’s commands’ (196b), and no one in the play, whether mortal or fairy, can resist the effects of the love-in-idleness herb. Shakespeare’s introduction of the love potion presents a significant development of Agathon’s delineation of where to find a form of ‘Love’ whose commands everyone blithely obeys. The Symposium’s next speaker, Socrates, avoids giving a speech per se. Unlike the rest of the participants, Socrates delivers two instructional dialogues in the form of his signature question-andanswer method of argumentation. First he questions Agathon and then he recounts a past dialogue in which Diotema is in the position of the instructor. Socrates covers two important issues in these exchanges: love and learning, and love of the repulsive. Agathon asserts that ‘Love is good at all aspects of creativity in the field of education’ (196e). Later, Diotema explains that ‘Love is bound [. . .] to love knowledge’ (204b). When the discussion moves on to humans’ experience of love, she explains that when a person who is ‘mentally pregnant’ (208e) finds a mind attractive then ‘he takes on this person’s education’ (209c). The argument invokes both a love of immortality leading to the desire for procreation as well as attraction to the mind of the beloved figure. Throughout the Symposium there has been a close alliance between the relationships of the lover/beloved and the mentor/mentee. However, this kind of demarcation is further complicated by Diotema’s liaison with Socrates in which ‘She also taught [him] the ways of love’ (201d). The topics of love and instruction have thus been collapsed into instructions about love, a subject which, of course, appears frequently in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.26 For example, shortly after the men have stepped aside for ‘private schooling’ (1.1.116), Helena asks Hermia ‘O, teach me how you look and with what art / You sway the motion of Demetrius’ heart’ (1.1.192). Helena is explicitly asking for a lesson in seduction and there follows a comparison of the (unsuccessful) techniques they have each been using to try to attract or repel Demetrius. Helena and



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Hermia’s idyllic period of adolescent companionship, described as ‘schooldays friendship’ (3.2.202), is similarly allied with education. In his own speech, Agathon mentions, almost as an aside, that Love is ‘love of beauty, obviously, because there’s no such thing as love of repulsiveness’ (197b). Socrates takes up this earlier point by reminding Agathon of his comment that ‘the gods’ concerns became organized as a result of their love of things of beauty since it’s impossible to love repellent things’ (201a). Socrates then extends this observation by arguing ‘then it follows that Love loves beauty, not repulsiveness, doesn’t it?’ (201a). The premise that Love is love of beauty, in turn, is the foundation for Diotema’s speech and hence Neoplatonic love. Notably, Shakespeare consistently argues against a key idea in Plato. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, beauty is often in the eye of the beholder and those eyes are subject to all sorts of influences. Far from it being impossible to love repulsive things or people, Shakespeare presents examples of love for other beings of variable kinds. Dismissing higher virtues as well as physical beauty as reliable criteria for attractiveness, the worthiness of the young men and the beauty of the young women are called into doubt. The most blatant example of a love for the ‘monstrous’ is Titania’s enchanted love for Bottom. Puck reports that ‘My mistress with a monster is in love’ (3.2.6), a line which makes his viewpoint clear. Furthermore, the fact that his friends flee him (3.2.24) foregrounds Bottom’s repellent form. After the spell is removed Titania exclaims, ‘O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now’ (4.1.74), demonstrating how changeable her perceptions of love are. Yet Oberon’s spell makes it clear that the kind of love the spell will induce can cause attraction to any living thing, no matter how repulsive: ‘What thou seest when thou dost wake, / Do it for thy true love take;[. . .] / Wake when some vile thing is near’ (2.2.33– 40). Not only is it possible for Titania to love something ‘vile’, it is exactly what Oberon intends. As such, the King of Fairies’ spell challenges Agathon’s assertions that one cannot love repellent things. Without considering Plato, the situation presented in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where a fairy queen falls in love ‘with a monster’ raises questions about the nature and definition of love.

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Comparing the situation with Socrates’ arguments adds a precise Platonic dimension to the discussion. The other example of monstrous love is perhaps less readily apparent to a modern audience. Theseus’s love for Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, could also be seen as the love of a monstrous woman. In the Renaissance, Amazons were often seen as ‘an emblem of monstrosity’,27 and a threat to the patriarchal order of society.28 Marrying Hippolyta, thus subjecting her to a man’s authority, might temper the Duke of Athens’ love for such a ‘creature’. Yet Theseus’s passion for Hippolyta instigates the opening lines of the play which includes the image of the ‘old moon’ who ‘lingers [his] desires, / Like to a stepdame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man’s revenue’ (1.1.1–6). Here, the speaker pictures himself as one who is subject to the authority of a woman who has the power to postpone his desires. This is an odd, but significant simile, for a man about to wed an Amazon. Thus, from the very beginning, the audience is not permitted to accept Theseus and Hippolyta’s marriage as simply a ‘taming’ of the social threat posed by the powerful woman. In a jarring contrast to Agathon, and Socrates’ conclusions on the subject, Theseus’s desire for an Amazon wife remains tinged with otherness. As I stated in this essay’s introduction, one of the most influential sections of the Symposium is Socrates/Diotema’s ladder of love whereby ‘You should use the things of this world as rungs in a ladder’ (211c), expanding your knowledge and understanding in increasingly abstract ways until ‘you finally recognize true beauty’ (211c). This is ‘not beauty tainted by [. . .] all that mortal rubbish, but absolute beauty, divine and constant’ (211e). This conception of the purpose of love as leading an individual to contemplation of divine perfect beauty was particularly popular and central to Renaissance Neoplatonism which, in turn, is central to Sarah Carter’s analysis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While numerous scholars have postulated at least a vague influence of Neoplatonism on Shakespeare’s works, Carter’s article is one of the few attempts to examine carefully the Platonic discourses in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. According to Carter, ‘The communion of the divine with the mortal in the play’, where the fairies stand as the divine, ‘points



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towards a demonstration of Neoplatonic philosophy’.29 For this critic, the relationship between Titania and Bottom is significant for both Ovidian and Neoplatonic registers.30 Carter acknowledges that there is ambiguity in this dynamic, equating Titania’s intention to ‘purge [his] mortal grossness’ (3.1.142) with the Neoplatonic heavenly aims of love, while pointing out that the fairy queen is enthralled by the bestial Bottom, the lowest form of desire. But if Titania’s initial desire for Bottom brings to mind the heavenly ascension of Neoplatonic love, then in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that journey is actually reversed. Bottom does not climb the ladder of love; Titania descends it. Notably, Bottom’s very name reveals the joke of what she is seeking – the very lowest of loves. Neoplatonic love, and the parts of Socrates/Diotema’s speech from which it sprang, are thus inverted and ridiculed. One of the play’s closest resonances with Plato is its interest in liminality, a largely neglected element in Renaissance Neoplatonism. Socrates and Diotema stress that personified Love ‘occupies middle ground’ (202d), often acting as mediator between gods and mortals. Earlier scholars have equated the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the classical gods,31 an interpretation that certainly has some merit. However, there are a number of details that problematize such a simple equation. Foremost among these is the mention of the classical gods in Shakespeare’s play: Diana or Hecate (1.1.89; 4.1.68), Venus (3.2.21; 3.2.107), Apollo (2.1.231) and most of all Cupid, the first more casual invocations (1.1.169; 1.1.235) setting up references more important to the plot. The love potion Oberon and Puck use so extensively has its origins with Cupid (2.1.155–68). Oberon’s account is so specific that he gives the impression that Cupid is a contemporary character who remains absent from the stage. Since the classical gods actually exist in the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, equating the fairies with the ancient deities is not an entirely satisfying interpretation. Instead, as Puck’s inaugural address of ‘How now, spirit, whither wander you?’ (2.1.1) suggests,32 the category of spirits is more suited to Shakespeare’s supernatural beings. While the classical gods remain distant figures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairies interact with mortals, thus satisfying Diotema’s criteria:

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‘All spirits occupy the middle ground between humans and gods’ (202d–e) and ‘the gods can only ever communicate and converse with men (in their sleep or when conscious) by means of spirits’ (203a). It is the fairies who bring the magic of Cupid’s arrow, via the juice of the flower it struck, to affect the young lovers (as well as one of their own). Moreover, Diotema mentions that it is only through spirits that it is possible to ‘cast spells’ (203a), a trait clearly shared by Shakespeare’s figures. In terms of location and liminality, Socrates uses the green space as an appropriate setting for the origins of Love. It is only when one of Love’s parents, Plenty, had ‘gone into Zeus’s garden, collapsed, and fallen asleep’ (203b) that Poverty impregnates herself with Love. Diotema uses Zeus’s garden, surrounded by the revelry of Venus’s birthday party, as the setting for the inception of love. A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s depiction of the fairies’ forest framed by wedding preparations and festivities presents a close parallel to the Platonic scenario. A garden and a forest could both be considered part of the ‘green world’ and both function in these respective works as the site where love is created. Whereas the Symposium stages the origins of Love, Shakespeare dramatizes the foundation of several individual instances of that ‘motivating force’. While the associations between love – Celestial and Common – and gardens has a rich textual history,33 the fact that Plenty falls asleep in this space and the importance of that sleep to the inauguration of love is a far less common element. The title of the play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, obviously foregrounds its interest in sleep-related concerns, and the effects of potion-induced love are apparent as characters awake from their slumbers. Procreation, partially conflated with other forms of creation, is another topic in Socrates/Diotema’s speech explored by Shakespeare. Diotema states that ‘procreation is as close as a mortal can get to being immortal and undying’ (206e). Since the Platonic text makes it clear that procreation does not mean simply giving birth to babies but producing ideas and art as well, this informs our reading of the play’s conclusion. Though Shakespeare’s comedies generally end with engagement or marriage, not all reference what was expected to come out of a marriage: children. But one of the



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last things mentioned about the three newly-wed couples is their ‘issue’ (5.1.381; 5.1.386) or ‘their children’ (5.1.390). Oberon bestows a blessing on the couples, sparing their offspring from ‘the blots of Nature’s hand’ specifically declaring ‘Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar, / Nor mark prodigious [. . .] / Shall upon their children be’ (5.1.387–90). While the blessing is well meant, it also brings to mind all those possible ways a child – the product of physical procreation – might be born physically imperfect. Humans can have little conscious impact on the form of their children, introducing another way that biological generation might be considered inferior to mental and artistic reproduction. In Shakespeare’s comedy, the lines of attraction and love are constantly overlapping, shifting and interweaving. Ultimately, the primary confusion of the four young lovers resonates with the tangled love of Alcibiades, Socrates and Agathon that appears towards the end of Plato’s text. The chaos is foregrounded when the final member of the group, Alcibiades, enters the symposium ‘extremely drunk’ (212d). Amidst this disturbance, not only do both Socrates and Alcibiades shift positions between lover and beloved, but also the very object of their attraction shifts between each other and Agathon. Only Agathon consistently remains in the position of the beloved. Like Agathon, Hermia remains the object of desire. By contrast, Helena’s role echoes that of Alcibiades. There are surely traces of Alcibiades’ complaint that Socrates ‘disdained and scorned [his] charms so thoroughly, and treated [him] so brutally’ (219c) in Helena’s accusation to Demetrius, ‘you do me mischief’ (2.1.239). Furthermore, both Alcibiades and Helena consider the ‘character [and] self-control’ (219d) or ‘virtue’ (2.1.220) responsible for such behaviour, a pertinent question for both the classical and the Renaissance text.

III There are many ways in which Shakespeare’s play scrutinizes the vagaries of both intellectual and physical desire. However, observing the connections between the Symposium and A Midsummer Night’s

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Dream adds an arresting aspect to the play’s intricate portrayals of love. As I have argued, the Shakespearean figures at times echo, interact with and augment Plato’s dialogue. And like the texts produced by Ficino and his followers, the late sixteenth-century romantic comedy functions, on occasion, as a kind of commentary on the classical antecedent itself. In sum, Shakespeare’s dramatic animation of the many guises of Platonic – rather than Neoplatonic – love ably translates the philosophical debate for an Elizabethan theatrical audience.

Notes  1 Plato, Symposium, trans. and ed. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. xi. All subsequent quotations will be given parenthetically.   2 For a nuanced examination of the cultural dissemination of Platonic concepts, see Sears Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995).  3 For a wide-ranging list of sources and antecedents see William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. H. F. Brooks, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. lviii–lxxxviii.  4 Niall Rudd, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe in Shakespeare and Ovid: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Metamorphoses 4.1–166’, in Creative Imitation and Latin Literature, ed. David West and Tony Woodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 173–94, p. 193. See further A. B. Taylor, ‘Ovid’s Myths and the Unsmooth Course of Love in A Midsummer’s Night Dream’, in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 49–65.  5 A. B. Taylor, ‘Plato’s Symposium and Titania’s Speech on the Universal Effect of her Quarrel with Oberon’, Notes and Queries 51 (2004): 276–8, p. 278.  6 Sears Jayne, Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985), p. 22.



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  7 Taylor, ‘Plato’s Symposium’, p. 278. For a more detailed account of the availability of Plato’s text in England, see Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England (1995).   8 Taylor, ‘Plato’s Symposium’, p. 278.  9 Stephen Medcalf, ‘Shakespeare on Beauty, Truth and Transcendence’, in Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 117–25, p. 118. Medcalf cites Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 11. 10 Medcalf, ‘Shakespeare on Beauty, Truth and Transcendence’, p. 122. 11 Medcalf, ‘Shakespeare on Beauty, Truth and Transcendence’, p. 122. 12 David Bevington, ed., ‘William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Texts and Contexts, ed. Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 11–86, 3.2 405–20. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically. 13 See further: Jill Kraye, ‘The Transformation of Platonic Love in the Italian Renaissance’, in Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 76–85; Todd Reeser, ‘Fracturing the Male Androgyne in the Heptaméron’, Romance Quarterly 51 (2004): 12–28; and Marc Schachter, ‘Louis Le Roy’s Sympose de Platon and Three Other Renaissance Adaptations of Platonic Eros’, Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 406–39. 14 The affinity between Puck and the random-dealing Cupid has been noted by Sarah Carter, although she looks only to intermediate Platonic sources. Sarah Carter, ‘From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: Ovidian and Neoplatonic Registers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Early Modern Literary Studies 12.1 (May, 2006) [date accessed 25 June 2010], 2.1–31, 2.18. 15 For example, H. F. Brooks comments that ‘The way perception is dwelt upon is illustrated by the fact that “eyes” are mentioned far more frequently than in any other play of Shakespeare’s’.

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Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. H. F. Brooks, p. cxxxvii. 16 He is described thus by Robin Waterfield. Waterfield, Plato: Symposium, p. 100. 17 Taylor, ‘Plato’s Symposium’, pp. 276–77. 18 William Bullein, Bulleins bulwarke of defence against all sickness, soarenesse, and vvoundes that doe dayly assaulte mankinde: which bulwarke is kept with Hilarius the gardener, [and] Health the phisicion, with the chirurgian, to helpe the wounded soldiours. Gathered and practiced from the most worthy learned, both olde and new: to the great comfort of mankinde: by William Bullein, Doctor of Phisicke, 1562 (London: 1579) Early English Books Online [date accessed 14 Feb. 2006], fol. 25. 19 Bullein, Bulleins bulwarke of defence, fol. 38. 20 Jan H. Blits, The Soul of Athens: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 76. 21 My thanks to Kevin Corrigan for his help with Greek terms. Though the credit goes to him, any mistakes here are completely my own. 22 Plato, Symposium of Plato, trans. Tom Griffith (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 192d. 23 As Valerie Traub explains, ‘the meanings of homoerotic desire during the early modern period seem to have been remarkably unfixed, with contradictory meanings existing across a complex field of signification’. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 111. 24 Douglas E. Green, ‘Preposterous Pleasure: Queer Theories and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 369–97, p. 375. 25 Jan Kott, ‘Titania and the Ass’s Head’, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 107–25, p. 115. Originally published in Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary (1964), trans. Boleslaw Taborski (London: Methuen, 1967).



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26 I am indebted here to Richard Rambuss’s seminars on ‘Scenes of Instruction and Seduction’ (Emory University). 27 Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard, ‘Female Attachments and Family Ties’, in William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Texts and Contexts, ed. Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 192–264, p.199. 28 Paster and Howard, ‘Female Attachments and Family Ties’, pp. 194–200. 29 Carter, ‘From the Ridiculous to the Sublime’, 2.2. 30 Carter, ‘From the Ridiculous to the Sublime’, 2.9. 31 Charles and Michelle Martindale observe that ‘The fairies in the Dream can in part be seen as a modernization of Ovid’s gods’. Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, p. 72. 32 For an informed discussion of this topic, see Matthew Woodcock, ‘Spirits of Another Sort: Constructing Shakespeare’s Fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Critical Guide, ed. Regina Buccola (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 112–30. 33 For example, see Alison Findlay, ‘Gardens’, in Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 17–65.

Chapter 3

‘Silence! Trouble Us Not!’: Travail and Translated Identity in The Tempest Julia Major

I The question of whether to interpret the play literally or figuratively has provided an enduring critical watershed in the literary history of The Tempest (c.1611).1 On the one hand, beyond the persistent analogies that involve reading Prospero as a figure for the dramatist himself, critics have variously determined that the play is a vessel for allegorical interpretations.2 On the other hand, recent readings of the play in postcolonial contexts require a focus on the historical events of navigation, colonialism and national enterprise as the culturally shared experience that ‘literally’ preoccupied late sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century England.3 In this essay I will take a sociolinguistic approach to argue that The Tempest is engaged with the longitudinal consequences of William Tyndale’s translations of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English. In so doing, I examine the interplay of figural and literal modes of interpretation at work in the transposed networks of discourse that fund the action of the play, along with the cultural politics of diglossia4 that characterizes the sixteenth-century English vernacular. In contrast to recent studies of Shakespeare and religion, this essay offers no claims about particular narratives within or versions of the Bible that Shakespeare may have read, or even about his own religious investments. Rather, it is an attempt to establish the validity of reading The Tempest as a negotiation among competing discourses,



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especially those that are indebted to biblical translation and the rising science of navigation.5 Amid the specific set of ideological concerns inaugurated by Lutheran initiatives for reform, the 1520s brought forth the first two translations of Tyndale’s New Testament (Cologne 1525; Worms 1526) and the first translation of a navigational treatise into English, Robert Copland’s The Rutter of the Sea (1528).6 While not obviously connected, vernacular biblical and navigational discourses share instrumental aims and social audiences. Whereas Tyndale’s translations focus on arriving at the literal sense of the word in the language of the common people, the earliest English texts on navigation strive for accuracy and plainness of meaning so as to be useful for unlearned seamen. They both, one might say, display the travails of translation. In the fluid orthography of early modern English, the dual connotations of the verb to ‘travail’, that is, to labour with one’s body (as in childbirth or farming) and to undertake the difficult motions of wayfaring on sea or land,7 coalesce in treatises on early modern navigation. Almost a century later, Shakespeare’s language in The Tempest performs within itself both the socio-historical processes of language change that had been taking place in the sixteenth-century English vernacular and the cultural politics of translation that made these changes possible. In particular, this play demonstrates the shift in hermeneutic space that was taking place in understanding the literal sense as it moves from being associated strictly with littera, the literal letter of historical, biblical truth, to the empirical truths of ordinary experience that are paving the way for scientific advancement in fields such as mathematics, instrument making and navigation.8 Tyndale’s contributions to the sociolinguistic terrain of sixteenthcentury England – endorsement of the common language and common people, resistance to class distinctions, privileging of experience as the means of determining the truth, and validation of the literal sense – resulted in an unabashed plain speech that David Norton has called ‘basic English’. In Norton’s terms, this is ‘not just an English for ploughboys but an English of ploughboys’.9 One consequence of Tyndale’s translations was that they provided the most suitable model for the evolution of the discourse of

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navigation in sixteenth-century prose. Tyndale’s translation of the scriptures disaggregated the artificial connections in the ‘golden’ world between civility and eloquence, gentility and truth by legitimating the ‘language of fishermen’. It is this newfound legitimation, particularly as it exists in the early discourses of navigation appearing in the navigational treatises of compass-maker Robert Norman and other early scientific writers, that can be heard ringing in the voice of the Boatswain in the opening scene of The Tempest.10 A similar nexus of ideas concerning the social conflicts rooted in the history of the literal and the figural reappears within the context of navigation dramatized by Shakespeare during the shipboard confrontation in the opening scene. At the beginning of the play, the notion of verisimilitude in the shipwreck scene is created in part by the sense of the literal truth being expressed in plain English, meaning not only that the playwright has created the dramatic expectation that the shipwreck is a real one, but that both the language and the actions of the play authentically represent the current experience of English navigation and of the English vernacular.11 Shakespeare’s dramatic plot intensifies the tension between the literal and the figural that runs parallel within the discourses of navigation and the search for truth within seeming appearances that is central to The Tempest. Notwithstanding aristocratic desires for the separation of linguistic spheres, popular and elite vocabularies and styles of language jostle together in the drama of Shakespeare.12 The language of The Tempest itself performs the politics of diglossia that prevailed in vernacular sixteenth-century English, exposing along with its plurivocality the seams of emerging social tensions in its consciousness of class distinctions. In turn, the sociolinguistic schisms correspond to the tensions already noted between the literal and the figural, that explosive inheritance of Reformation scriptural hermeneutics. Transposed into sixteenth-century imagery, the play captures the tension between hard-headed commercial truths of British navigation propelled by desires for global imperialism, and the manifold, assailable truths of political allegory whose ship of state both is and is not battered to pieces on the alien coast



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of Prospero’s island.13 In a literal vein, the language of the play accurately reflects the emerging story of British navigation, particularly in the speech of its common sailors that is set over against the power, social status and authority of humanist classical translation, repeatedly invoked in the dialogue of the courtiers. Indeed, the discrimination in registers of language also responds to the social differentiations among Shakespeare’s audiences.14 Thus its duality concerns not only the space between the literal and the figural, but also the tension between the vulgar and the learned, a tension that was heightened by the cultural politics of biblical translation. Class-based diglossia is significant because the social status of the speaker who is a gentleman provides the most reliable index as to the truth of the message.15 The question remains, how could simple English, the language of the ploughman, be made acceptable to bear the weight of truth that was ordinarily associated with the virtue and civility – expressed in the courtly speech – of the gentleman? In The Tempest, the agency of the vernacular – made available to unlearned, uncourtly writers through Tyndale’s translations of scripture into the simplest English prose – becomes audible particularly in the Boatswain’s challenge to hierarchical authority, in Caliban’s railing at his own disempowerment, and in Miranda’s artless yet bold protestation of her love for Ferdinand. As Shakespeare creates these dramatic representations of the differences between nobleman and mariner, exiled magician and native, and courtly man and island woman, the playwright challenges the expectation that only the gentleman is able to speak or embody the truth. Furthermore, he does so by using the common literary vernacular of plain English inherited from the biblical translations, if not also the doctrinal polemics, of Tyndale.

II The initial shipboard scene featuring the shipmaster, the Boatswain and the nobility is dense with meaning, yet verbal communications seem only half-heard and half-understood, as if disrupted

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by distance and storm. The critical reader, as well as the audience watching the dramatization of the shipwreck, may well wonder if the nautical mishap is to be understood as a literal, physical event that is actually occurring, or as a scene whose significance is primarily figural, one to be gauged as the emblematic foundering of the ship of state.16 The early modern tendency to interpret ships within an allegorical framework appears prominently in Sir Henry Manwayring’s Sea-Mans Dictionary (1644), the plainspeaking handbook of nautical jargon dedicated to clarifying the ‘Practique Mechanicall working of Ships’, where Sir Henry cannot resist including an excruciatingly detailed figural analogue of ‘The State of a Christian, lively set forth by an Allegorie of a Shippe under Sayle’.17 Yet to audiences who first viewed The Tempest three decades earlier, the naturalistic stage directions of the shipwreck scene, ‘Enter Mariners, wet,’ immediately following the Boatswain’s command to ‘Lay her a-hold, a-hold!’18 must have aroused the equivalent expectation that the mishap was being presented in verisimilitude as an actual event, much like the real-time wrecks happening to some of their less fortunate contemporaries on their New World voyages.19 The Master’s cry for the Boatswain opens the play, but in Shakespeare’s day it was the Boatswain who was the de facto navigator of the ship and the one charged with encouraging and enforcing the seamen to perform their duties.20 The nameless Boatswain’s efforts to right the ship in the face of the storm are manifested in a series of opaque orders issued in sailors’ English, the arcane dialect of the sea, whose formal publication had to await the appearance of Maywayring’s Sea-Mans Dictionary.21 In addition to the long-standing notoriety of its colourful epithets, sailors’ English is a workingman’s speech where each object and action within the ‘wooden world’ of the ship is matched with a short, precise and descriptive term.22 In Shakespeare’s transcription, the simplicity and correspondence to material realities evident in the language of the mariners embodies the speech of ‘Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants’ later advocated by Thomas Sprat as the utopian tongue of the Royal Society, whose aim was to ‘reject all the amplifications, digressions and swellings of style’ associated



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with rhetorical eloquence in favour of a ‘primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words’.23 However, as Marcus Rediker asserts, the language of early modern mariners defines their trade, their identity and their social position, while simultaneously separating them from the land and its ordered civilities of politics, social rank and polite speech.24 According to the social divisions established by Shakespeare’s near contemporary, the political theorist Sir Thomas Smith, sailors belonged not among the rulers but the ruled, a class which consisted of: day labourers, poore husbandmen, yea marchaunts or retailers which have no free lande, copiholders, and all artificers, as Taylers, Shoomakers, Carpenters, Brickemakers, Bricklayers, Masons, &c [and who] have no voice nor authoritie in our common wealth, and no account is made of them but onelie to be ruled, not to rule other.25 The ensuing dialogue between the Boatswain and the nobility sets up the tension between the authority of the rulers and revolt of the ruled that simmers throughout the remainder of the play. During the sixteenth century, the trade of navigation was freshly fired with Protestant zeal for empire.26 While that urge might account, at least in part, for the complex geopolitical palimpsest of The Tempest, there remains the unexplained factor of resistance to social authority in the demeanour of the Boatswain. Seeking explanation, literary critics have extended themselves to find sources and analogues for this scene in Virgil and other classical texts.27 Without denying the presence of the former, the obvious connection may lie in another source so ubiquitous to sixteenthcentury ears, so close at hand, that perhaps only the humility of its origins has denied it further critical consideration. In the simplicity of his language, his sturdy resistance to hierarchical authority, and his anecdotal reference to the Gospels, the Boatswain is drawing upon the language and register of Tyndale’s earlier translations of the Bible. With opening exhortations notably lacking in profanity, the

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Boatswain simultaneously rips out a string of imprecations against the storm and hearty commands to his men. His labours are thwarted by the appearance of King Alonso among his nobles, along with his counsellor Gonzalo. The Boatswain wastes few words in chiding them for their distracting interruption. Still civil, he states his reasonable request: ‘I pray now, keep below’ (1.1.11). But when Antonio (the devious brother who has ousted Prospero from his dukedom in Milan and who will shortly plot revolt against Alonso) insists on demanding the whereabouts of the Master, the Boatswain grows short-tempered and rasps ‘You mar our labour. Keep your cabins! You do assist the storm’ (1.1.14). Heedless, Gonzalo interposes a request to ‘be patient’ (1.1.15) and thereupon the Boatswain explodes ‘When the sea is. Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin! Silence! Trouble us not’ (1.1.15–17). Like the cries of the importunate sea, the Boatswain’s radical understanding of social equity knows no respect for rank or royalty, particularly where nautical knowledge is concerned. Manwayring concurs, observing that ‘very few Gentlemen (though they be called Sea-men) doe fully and wholly understand what belongs to their Profession’, further noting the reluctance of seamen to reveal their arts to ‘the better sort’.28 Undeterred, Gonzalo persists in requesting that the Boatswain remember the quality of those on board. It is at this point that the Boatswain utters some plain English worthy of Tyndale: You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority. If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap (1.1.19–24) Certainly many members of The Tempest’s seventeenth-century audience would have recognized the biblical allusion contained in the Boatswain’s warning. As C. S. Lewis pointed out, ‘If you echoed the Bible everyone knew that you were echoing the Bible’.29 The



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Boatswain’s apt rejoinder suggesting that if the nobles really are so powerful then they ought to ‘command the elements to silence and work the peace of the present’ would have generally recalled the Gospel narrative, widely available in Tyndale’s English, of Jesus commanding the winds and waves to silence whilst on board ship in the midst of a tempest on the Lake of Galilee.30 It is evident that it is his provocative allusion to divine authority, expressed in language reminiscent of Tyndale’s words translated into vernacular scripture, which earns the Boatswain ire and curses from the nobles. In the 1530s, royal injunctions had reaffirmed the illegality of owning Bibles translated into English, and the vernacular scriptures still carried the whiff of heresy.31 Not only has the Boatswain implied that none but a divine presence can still the waves and make peace in the present moment; he has challenged the bumbling shipboard authority of nobility seeking to establish itself by birthright rather than by earned merit and material labour. Gruffly, the Boatswain orders his terrified superiors to leave: ‘Out of our way, I say’ (1.1.25). His rebellion in the face of established hierarchy is a bold move that recalls Tyndale’s arguments against corrupt church clerics in The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528).32 Indeed, the Boatswain is treading dangerously upon sacred ground, that is, the grounds of hereditary privilege. Uttering curses, Sebastian, brother to King Alonso, accuses the Boatswain of blasphemy; after all, weren’t seamen widely known for their ‘rough talk’?33 Furthermore, his insurgency is a sin against the right of kings. The Boatswain counters with a rude but practical suggestion to Sebastian, ‘Work you, then’ (1.1.39), which inverts the social order supporting the very institution of nobility. But one thing must be said in defence of the Boatswain: while the nobility are crying out in alarm, he is travailing to save his ship. In so doing he distances himself from the prerogatives and punishment of piracy, the suppressed insinuation lurking beneath the threats of Antonio and Gonzalo. Gonzalo’s implicit gallows humour lacing the remark ‘I’ll warrant him from drowning’ (1.1.43) refers to the fate of those sailors who fled the hierarchy of authority and obedience at sea, where rigid order was maintained by the right to command, for the ‘lower-class utopia’ of piracy.34 Both the rebellious roaring of the elements and the imputed

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rebellion of the Boatswain challenge the ‘courtly discourse’ of the nobles.35 What is at stake here and elsewhere in the play is the staging of ‘class relations reduced to their most elemental form, the Master-Slave dialectic’, wherein the Boatswain becomes the figure of revolt.36 But if the Boatswain is associated by the nobles with dangerous rebellion against authority, to his shipmates he is the actual governor in the storm who knows both how to obey and how to command. He is the leader of a ‘new society’ that instead of the hierarchy of rank will be governed by ‘the superiority of personal character’.37 Where does the Boatswain find the strength and authority to resist his superiors? Surprisingly, perhaps, it may be from his knowledge of the Bible. As Christopher Hill has argued, ‘Direct access to the sacred text gave a sense of assurance to laymen which they had previously lacked, and so fortified long-standing criticism of the church and its clergy’ and, by association, others in positions of authority.38 Drawing upon homely examples and proverbs of apprentices, farmers and labourers to protest the abuses of ecclesiastical power, Tyndale had initiated the tradition of Protestant resistance to authority with polemics such as The Obedience of a Christian Man. Furthermore, the prefaces to his biblical translations were filled with advice to the common people on how to ignore the authority of the prelates in order to read the scriptures for themselves. In turn, such autonomous interpretation sponsored ‘relatively democratic notions, countering the traditional view that politics was a matter for the élite, the aristocracy and clergy, only’.39 It was Tyndale, after all, who (paraphrasing Erasmus) had retorted to a high cleric: ‘I defy the Pope and all his lawes, and [. . .] if God spare my lyfe, ere many yeares I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest’.40 In fact, the chain of reasoning published by Tyndale led directly to the idea of resistance as spiritual duty.41 The bequest of Tyndale’s translations included the grounds for a revolutionary new identity as well as newly constituted vernacular language. Here in Shakespeare’s play, the clipped phrases of the Boatswain’s orders and curt rejoinders to the nobility recall the plain-style English not only of Tyndale’s gospels, but also of early navigational treatises



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that owe a hidden debt to the straightforward narrative prose fashioned by Tyndale’s translations. Sociolinguistically speaking, the Boatswain’s mode of address and the schooled elegance of the nobles are ‘socially incommensurable’.42 Gonzalo, along with many readers since, may be excused for being befuddled by the nautical orders, such as the final command barked by the Boatswain to ‘lay her a-hold’.43 For all practical purposes the two men are speaking different dialects, where their only shared forum is the common literary vernacular of the biblical translations provided by Tyndale. ‘Social classes, racial ghettos speak at rather than to each other’, George Steiner reminds us, where class-related dialects wield ‘accent [. . .] like a coat of arms – and an instrument of ironic exclusion’.44 Although still speaking English vernacular, Gonzalo’s allusions perform a contrasting mode of address, a high style used both among the nobility and the powerful and by those who would address them – court poets, diplomats and those who wished to catch the ear of the monarch. In this setting, allegorical forms of address and allusions to classical texts continued to flourish, particularly where these could cloak the purposes of diplomacy with coded exchanges of privy information, all the while performing a shared language of familiarity, where the real news was hidden under ‘dark conceits’.45 Yet exclusion by allusion works within, as well as between, social classes. While the Boatswain may have understood Gonzalo’s threat veiled within the salty proverb that ‘his complexion is perfect gallows’ (1.1.27–28), thus shoring up the class distinction between the mariners and those who ruled the commercial labour markets upon the high seas,46 the counsellor’s learned references to ‘Widow Dido’ in 2.1.73 may have halted the seaman’s invectives. Ironically, those very allusions are used against Gonzalo by the other nobles within his party.

III Universally studied in humanist schools across Europe, the Aeneid provided a common literary currency for a wide variety of political

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and personal allusions, recognizable only to those with the requisite education in Latin. For decades, Virgil’s imperial mimesis of Homer for the Romans had occupied a central place in the new programmes instituted by Renaissance humanist educators, and in turn became an influential source text for Shakespeare. While fragments of the Aeneid are scattered throughout the plays and narrative poems, the seemingly random chain of references to Dido in 2.1 of The Tempest offers perhaps the most transparent, yet baffling, connection to Virgil in all of the Shakespearean corpus.47 Part of the puzzlement about how Dido is functioning in this instance of high, courtly language can be traced to widespread diplomatic uses of vernacular humanism across early modern Europe, particularly since Shakespeare may be referencing not only Virgil but also Montaigne’s reading of Dido.48 One after another, the miraculously preserved lords and nobles familiarly banter Dido’s name to and fro, as if in a courtly game of quoits or tennis, where meanings fluctuate unevenly among them and the only shared commonplace is the elongated echo of her name.49 Like the cohabitation of Latin and the vernacular, translated references to the idealized world of the Aeneid jostle and rub shoulders with the common crowd of political fears and worries present in seventeenth-century England. Among these, Dido herself functions like a foreign tongue, a ‘resident alien’ whose doubly iconic identification with both the previous sovereign, Elizabeth, and the failures of romantic love, is overshadowed by her appearance in the alien cultural space of Prospero’s island. As the figure of genealogically diverse traditions and competing translations, she is the ‘insider-outsider’ whose site of original textual construction is so complex and contradictory that she becomes an unreadable cipher, a figure of untranslatability.50 Like everything else in this subtle island, which in Prospero’s words, ‘will not let you / Believe things certain’ (5.1.124), interpreting Dido’s name and her place in history is fraught with duplicity. This is not surprising, given the fact that the differing legends of Dido ‘dramatize the existence of competing histories in what counts (for some) as the cultural literacy of the West’.51 Both Gonzalo’s attempt to distract King Alonso with courtly



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sallies about the Golden Age and the ambiguous references to Dido being batted back and forth among the younger lordings reveal the ways in which courtly discourse functions as veiled insinuation and privy exchange of coded information among those who are able use the translated idiom of classical texts for their own ends in the give-and-take of diplomatic intelligence.52 It is clear from their guffaws and innuendos that Antonio and Sebastian are referencing a different narrative tradition – Virgil’s powerful revision of the earlier legend of Dido the chaste queen – and that their political purposes in doing so are veiled from Gonzalo.53 Gonzalo, still loyal to the older, courtly model of humanism in the service of honesty rather than private intelligence, would be summarily dispatched by Antonio as one who prates ‘amply and unnecessarily’ (2.1.259–60). His simple analogies comparing present-day Tunis to ancient Carthage and the environment of Prospero’s island to the Golden World ignore the pressing political implications at stake in the volatile world of current Mediterranean geopolitics.54 Gonzalo’s version of the Golden World is equally out of touch with the political realities of social unrest in seventeenth-century England. Garrulously intermingling tales of Eden and Ovid, he wishes that ‘nature should bring forth / Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, / To feed my innocent people’ (2.1.158–59). He would have a headless commonwealth, one with neither magistrates nor letters, with ‘all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure’ (2.1.150–51), instead of the pristine moral landscapes of the Edenic Golden World, what King Alonso is more likely to have espied in Gonzalo’s subtext concerned the contemporary threat of political insurrection from the ‘many-headed monster [that] was composed of masterless men, those for whom nobody responsible answered’, those who were all too eager to ruin the stability of the status quo by rising up against the propertied class and seizing their wealth.55 No wonder he protests against Gonzalo’s discourse as so much nonsense. All these assertions and counter-assertions about what truly is or is not real in Prospero’s island come to a head in the person of Caliban, who speaks the painful truth of displacement in the language of ‘grammatical rebellion’.56 Variously read as a natural slave

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c­ haracterized by ‘baseness’,57 an irrepressible character of ‘childlike exuberance’,58 and ‘a type of Adam who names the elements of God’s creation in a childlike naively concrete language’,59 Caliban, whose first words in the play are ‘There’s wood enough within’ (1.2.314) possesses an earthy intelligence that remains trained on the empirical evidence of his senses. Even in the midst of his vituperation of Prospero at the beginning of the play, he interrupts himself with the reminder, ‘I must eat my dinner’ (1.2.330). No factor links The Tempest to the New World more strongly than its identification of Caliban as unteachable monster, one of the ‘savages and men of Ind’ (2.2.56).60 However, any facile assumptions of an isomorphic equivalence between Caliban’s physical presence and his moral condition are destabilized by his powers of language. The subjectivity of Caliban, who simultaneously utters base rebellion and lyrical poetry, has been of longstanding interest to playgoers and critics. Among early readers of Shakespeare, John Dryden wished to separate Caliban from the rest of the human tribe, opining that ‘his language is as hobgoblin as his person’, while Nicholas Rowe, reiterating a later critical consensus, announced that ‘Shakespeare had not only found out a new character in his Caliban, but had also devis’d and adapted a new manner of Language for that Character’.61 Although Caliban’s language of cursing may seem the antithesis of prayer,62 syntactically he is without question speaking the plain and simple language of Tyndale’s Bible, one that overall is characterized by ‘finite verbs, few participles, subject-verb-object order, few dependent clauses, parataxis (a simple train of complete sentences joined by “and”), Saxon vocabulary, mostly monosyllables’.63 But Shakespeare presses the linguistic genealogy a step further. Caliban, in his role as ‘savage critic’ accuses Prospero of betrayal in these words:64 [. . .] When thou cam’st first Thou strok’st me and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in’t; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night. (1.2.332–36)



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Not only Caliban’s syntax but also his language of naming reverberates with the language of Tyndale’s Genesis, the revolutionary translation upon which all succeeding sixteenth-century English Bibles were based: ‘And God made two great lights: A greater light to rule the day, and a less light to rule the night, and he made stars also’.65 As Julia Lupton remarks, this allusion places Caliban in Eden, ‘the pristine landscape of the world’s birthday’, where ‘Caliban becomes a type of Adam, naming the elements of God’s creation in a childlike, naively concrete language’.66 The specificity of his language is brilliantly revealed in his prayer to Trinculo: I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts, Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset. I’ll bring thee To clustering filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee Young scamels from the rock. (2.2.162–67) Caliban’s vivid verbal presencing of plants, animals, birds, and the hard labour of digging recalls Tyndale’s biblical language of ploughboys. The rhythm is unmistakably Tyndale’s, and it maintains the same direct yet rhythmic syntax, the same direct and simple clarity. Although there is an air of strangeness from the unfamiliar wildlife, its poetic yield is not opacity but real-world solidity.67 It is the familiar solidity of the plain, comfortable cadences of the common literary vernacular; it is the earthy, four-square, yet unassumingly apt language of Tyndale’s biblical translations. It is the same language that gave expression to the instrumental and experimental knowledges produced by artisans and instrument makers, which would in turn help launch modern science.68 And it is the instrumental, quotidian language of the vernacular made possible by Tyndale. Just as Tyndale’s translation unsettled the established hierarchies of learned and unlearned, high and low, so Caliban’s language upsets the ordinary criteria of class-inflected language. Where the speech of aristocrats usually appeared as verse set against the

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common prose of commoners, Caliban’s language ‘cuts across those boundaries’, leading keen readers to expect the unveiling of masked nobility.69 But unlike Edmund Spenser’s shepherd knight Calidore in Book VI of The Faerie Queene, who throws off his rude garments to reveal the prince beneath, Caliban remains Caliban. Where Caliban remains rustic islander, Ferdinand is all nobility. In the diglossic world of The Tempest that houses Caliban’s earthiness, there is no mistaking the aristocratic identity of Ferdinand, who treads even the waves beneath him as if he were swimming to Prospero’s island straight from the shores of the Aeneid.70 As a figure of Aeneas translated to the New World, his arrival is heralded by Ariel’s fitting lyric on the strange translation of Ferdinand’s father Alonso from a physical to a metaphysical identity. In Ariel’s aria, the passage through death by drowning corresponds to the ‘moment of failure’ in translation that ‘leads directly to the creation of something new’.71 Alonso has been transubstantiated into a sea changeling: Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. (1.2.397–99) Although sheltered and unsophisticated, Miranda immediately recognizes the nobility of the young king, an assumption Ferdinand vindicates at once with his free, vernacular translation of ‘O dea certe’ – ‘Most sure the goddess’ (1.2.419) – then as now one of the most famous lines from the Aeneid.72 As the educated members of Shakespeare’s audiences would have known, this line echoes the recognition scene between Aeneas and his mother Venus as the battered hero steps onto the shores of Carthage.73 On the sociolinguistic level of language, it would seem that Shakespeare is replicating a high-low version of diglossia exemplified by the difference in speech between Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand on the one hand, and Caliban on the other. Ferdinand, conscious of his rank, expresses simultaneous faith in his own status as the



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pre-eminent speaker of his language and unabashed surprise at hearing it on the lips of Miranda: ‘My language? Heavens! / I am the best of them that speak this speech, / Were I but where ‘tis spoken’ (1.2.427–29). In contrast, the ‘low’ status of Caliban’s language appears self-evident: witness his truncated ballad, ‘Ban, ban, Ca-caliban / Has a new master: Get a new man.’ (2.2.180–81). Such an opinion is reinforced not only by Miranda’s rebuke, When thou didst not (savage) Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known. (1.2.354–57) but also by Caliban’s famous rejoinder: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse’ (1.2.362–63). So it would seem that Caliban’s barbarian gibberish is set in counterpoint to the high eloquence of the nobility, especially that of Prospero, whose linguistic powers to evoke ‘cloud-capped towers’ and ‘gorgeous palaces’ (4.1.152) have invested the imaginary island world with all the magic promised by the Ciceronian enargeia of eloquence that materializes the ineffable by bringing it ‘upon the eyes’ (4.1.40). But what is the language that Caliban speaks? The fiction of the play would have us believe it is Italian, masked by English.74 However, as Abdelkebir Khatibi puts it, ‘A foreign tongue is not added to the native tongue as a simple palimpsest, but transforms it’.75 Accordingly, Caliban’s native tongue is, if not fully erased, then transformed, by translation. All that remains are the old names of his mother and her god – Sycorax, Setebos – and the ‘thousand twangling instruments’ (3.3.135) haunting Caliban’s dreams. It might be possible to subordinate Caliban’s speech to that of Ferdinand as the revelation of a blustering rustic, were it not for the elemental beauty of his speeches in naming the native goods of his island. And it is here that the agency of literal plainness makes itself apparent as Caliban’s language turns away from an allegorical reading of the book of the world. ‘Literalism means that only words

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refer; the things of nature do not’, argues Peter Harrison, asserting that the reformed hermeneutics of the literal sense liberate the natural world from the chains of allegory and provide a catalyst for the development of natural science in the seventeenth century.76 As we have seen with Gonzalo and the younger nobles, language delineates social difference even among the aristocracy who are presumed to be the rulers. Prospero’s vision of aristocratic order governs the betrothal masque hosted by Greek deities, and the discovery scene of the young lovers reveals Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess, the game with the ‘imperial sub-text’ that symbolizes the intellectual leisure of an aristocratic order’.77 The scene of the chess game, as Donna Hamilton points out, is Shakespeare’s revision of the great cave scene between Aeneas and Dido in the Aeneid, where tragedy and loss are now transmuted into lovers’ banter.78 ‘Sweet lord, you play me false’ (5.1.172), accuses Miranda. Ferdinand, ever the gentleman, immediately denies the charge: ‘No, my dearest love, / I would not for the world’ (5.1.172–73). In a quintessentially Shakespearean rejoinder that recalls his own lyrical assertions in Sonnet 88,79 Miranda replies, ‘Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle / And I would call it fair play’ (5.1.174–75). As the simple voice of the literal sense, Miranda provides the agency of belief in the unseen substance of the heart rather than in externally demonstrable class- and gender-based certainties that have structured the contest over authority from the very first scene of the play. In spite of – or because of – the sociolinguistic differences inherent in the class-based polarities of diglossia, it is at this point where the common literary vernacular of Tyndale emerges as a shared tongue where courtly and common voices together may find commonality of expression. Instead of the socially divisive cultural politics of diglossia, here is an ‘imagined linguistic community’ whose constitutive authority is drawn from sacred texts, but whose traditional hierarchical oppositions have been dissolved.80 Rather than being ‘stranded within a very narrow courtly discourse’,81 Miranda and Ferdinand realize reciprocity because Miranda is able to draw upon the ‘plain and holy innocence’ (3.2.82) of Tyndale’s biblical vernacular in order to make visible the profound



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yet simple language of the heart. In shape and feeling very much like Tyndale’s simply worded translations that linguistically evoked ‘a new kingdom of possibilities’,82 Miranda confesses her love with tears, ‘At mine unworthiness, that dare not offer / What I desire to give, and much less take / What I shall die to want’ (3.1.77–79). Her language has both the clarity and mystery of a folk saying or proverb, and like Tyndale’s it is both clear and strange. As David Daniell is quick to point out, ‘What Shakespeare and the Bible have in common is that language, at the highest moments, of elemental simplicity, from the Gospels’.83 In Tyndale, the free and unforced association of holiness with plainness rather than with latinate eloquence signals the appearance of something new in the language, the agency of the ordinary. The fact that holiness and plainness walk together without shame here in Miranda’s unembarrassed proposal of marriage recalls the ‘startlingly simple and hence accessible English’ of Tyndale’s translations of scripture.84 Tyndale opened the way in his translations with a heightened form of ordinary spoken English, adorned with native syntactic flexibility and the subtly patterned rhythms he metaphorized – carried across – from Hebrew. This spoken English became the common literary vernacular available for the expression of all, including both navigators and playwrights.

IV In its language as well as its structure, The Tempest is a play resonant with the unspoken meanings of gaps and spaces, leading it to function across time as a dramatic version of the ‘open text’ whose disjunctive poetics irresistibly beckon critics and directors to fill its lacunae with their own translations of meaning. In his Epilogue at the end of the play, Prospero invites a similar ‘levelling, horizontal ethic of interdependence and reciprocity’.85 In the aftermath of breaking his staff, Prospero lays aside the strength of his magic and speaks of the end of his travail and the beginning of his travel. Effacing himself into the figure of a vessel under sail, he begs the audience to

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[. . .] release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. (Epilogue, 9–13) Prospero’s simply stated admission that his efforts will remain incomplete without the participation of his listeners returns the audience to the ‘exegetical economy of openness’ that goes hand in hand with the biblical translations instituted by Tyndale, where the translation functions as a ‘communal and collective social practice which admits a multiplicity of languages and readers’.86 In the travail of the common literary vernacular, translated by Tyndale and spoken here by Prospero, the differences of high and low are not erased but are momentarily transfused by meanings exchanged among the linguistic community at work within the open text of translation.

Notes  1 According to Stephen Orgel ‘It was Thomas Campbell in 1738 who first found in Prospero a piece of Shakespearian autobiography, a claim developing out of the assumption that the play was Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage’. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 100. David Daniell’s opinion is that ‘The start of the allegorical approaches to The Tempest can be dated exactly to August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s lecture on the comedies of Shakespeare in Vienna in 1808. [. . .] It was Schlegel who first related Ariel to the airy elements and Caliban to the earthy, suggesting an allegory which coincides with Elizabethan and Jacobean humour-psychology’. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. David Daniell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 50.   2 For example: on political allegory, see Claudia W. Harris, ‘The



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Tempest as Political Allegory’, in The Tempest: Critical Essays, ed. Patrick M. Murphy (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 561–86, p. 526; on philosophical allegory, see Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), p. 157. For a discussion of The Tempest as an allegory for alchemy, see Michael Srigley, Images of Regeneration: A Study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Its Cultural Background (Stockholm: Uppsala, 1985).  3 Representative viewpoints on Shakespeare’s Virgilian investments may be found in Donna B. Hamilton, Virgil and The Tempest: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1990); Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and David Wilson-Okamura, ‘Virgilian Models of Colonization in Shakespeare’s Tempest’, English Literary History 70 (2003): 709–37. For Caliban’s enduring usefulness to postcolonial critics, see Jyotsana G. Singh, ‘Caliban versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest’, in New Casebooks: Shakespeare’s Romances, ed. Alison Thorne (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 205–25; John Thieme, ‘Caliban’s New Masters: Creolizing Archetypes in Kamau Brathwaite’s Arrivants Trilogy’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 5 (2003): 27–39; and Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History, ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For arguments placing The Tempest against a backdrop of European and Mediterranean political involvements, see Jerry Brotton, ‘“This Tunis, sir was Carthage”: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest’, in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 23–42; and Richard Wilson, ‘ Voyage to Tunis: New History and the Old World of The Tempest’, English Literary History 64 (1997): 333–57.  4 The cultural politics of diglossia actively participate in the cultural politics of translation. For representative publications on the turn to cultural politics in translation studies, see Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed.

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Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998); Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, ed. Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2001); Liz Oakley-Brown, Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); The Cultural Functions of Translation, ed. Christina Schäffner and Helen Kelly-Holmes (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1995); and Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation as Cultural Politics: Regimes of Domestication in English’, Textual Practice 7 (1993): 208–23.  5 I draw here on Roland Greene, ‘Not Works but Networks: Colonial Worlds in Comparative Literature’, in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 212–23, p. 214.  6 A translation of Pierre Garcie, Le Routier del la Mer (Rouen: c.1502–10).   7 As Arthur Kinney observes, ‘In the Tudor period, to translate meant to transport, [. . .] that is, to travel from one language (or place) to another. [. . .] The relationship is also chiastic: travel is recorded through language, just as language relies on an external world for its employment. Such connections, however, are never complete. [. . .] Thus it seems natural enough that the Tudors, seeing the discrepancies, added to this labour, punning by means of the homonymic travel with its commonplace interchangeable spellings of travel and travail, the connection made both by sight and sound.’ Arthur Kinney, ‘Introduction’, in Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Mike Pincombe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. xiii–xvii, p. xiii.   8 See Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).  9 David Norton, ‘Buttons and Ribbons, Hartgoats and Hedgehogs, Soleams and Stellios: a Wayward Courtesy Lecture for Laborious Fainty Snoutnosed Runagates on some Words in Tyndale’s Old Testament but Missing from the Authorised Version’, Reformation 1 (1996): 128–37, p. 132.



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10 For an argument concerning Robert Norman’s effect on early English science, see Edgar Zilsel, ‘The Origin’s of Gilbert’s Scientific Method’, in Roots of Scientific Thought: A Cultural Perspective, ed. Philip P. Wiener and Aaron Noland (New York: Basic Books, 1957), pp. 219–50. 11 See further W. B. Whall, Shakespeare’s Sea Terms Explained (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1910) and R. C. Holmes, ‘The Sweet Swan on Salt Water’, The American Neptune 11 (1951): 209–14. 12 See Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice and also Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). For a related argument see Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 13 David Norbrook observes that the contemporary significance of the emblem of the ship of state ‘had a greater appeal for seventeenth-century radicals than the traditional figure of the body politic because it viewed the state as an artificial construct rather than part of the order of nature, and implied progress towards a new destination. The figure of the pilot daringly wresting control of the ship of state from its commander was to be used to justify the Puritan Revolution’. David Norbrook, ‘“What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?”: Language and Utopia in The Tempest’, in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 21–54, p. 33. 14 As David Norbrook argues, ‘Despite their royal label, the King’s Men owed most of their revenue to public performances; Shakespeare’s plays were thus able to pit different discourses against each other with far greater freedom than courtly literature’. Norbrook, “‘What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?”’, p. 35. 15 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 16 On the philosophical meanings inherent in the emblem of shipwreck, see Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator:

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Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, tr. Steven Rendell (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). Henry Manwayring, The Sea-Mans Dictionary, or an Exposition and Demonstration of all the Parts and Things Belonging to a Shippe together with an Explanation of All the Termes and Phrases Used in the Practique of Navigation (London: 1644), sigs. A3v–A3r. William Shakespeare, The Tempest: Sources and Contexts, Criticism, Rewritings and Appropriations, ed. Peter Hulme and William Sherman (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 1–82, 1.1.45. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Anne Barton (London, Penguin, 1968), p. 8. It is often assumed that Shakespeare’s plot is indebted to contemporary accounts of shipwreck, particularly that of the Sea Venture in Bermuda in 1609. Harold B. Allen, ‘Shakespeare’s “Lay Her A-Hold”’, Modern Language Notes 52 (1937): 96–100, p. 99. See also Dorothy Denneen Volo and James M. Volo, Daily Life in the Age of Sail (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 107. William Matthews suggests that ‘Steam and speedy voyages may have flattened out the sailor’s idiom in recent years, but in the slow days of sail the sailor might really have spoken a dialect. Shakespeare’s mastery of naval terminology has presented a puzzle to scholars of naval history’. William Matthews, ‘Tarpaulin Arabick in the Days of Pepys’, in Essays Critical and Historical dedicated to Lily B. Campbell, by members of the Departments of English, University of California (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1950), pp. 111–36, p. 112. According to A. F. Falconer, Shakespeare’s knowledge of the sea demonstrated throughout his plays surpasses his more general knowledge of professions such as law and medicine. Concerning nautical knowledge, Shakespeare is a ‘professional,’ who is ‘drawing on a whole body of unified knowledge in the manner of one who understands it from within’. This is particularly true of the opening scene of The Tempest, which ‘discloses what he knew of the discipline and working of a Royal ship and is a striking example of his grasp of seamanship. He brings in a series of difficult manoeuvres with the daring inclusion of one that was



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controversial (the striking of topmasts), and uses all the appropriate technical terms throughout’. A. F. Falconer, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sea and Naval Terms including Gunnery, second edition (London: Constable, 1966), pp. vii–viii. 22 J. H. Parry, ‘Sailors’ English’, Cambridge Journal 2 (1949): 660–70, p. 662. See also Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 163. 23 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Studies, 1966), p. 113. 24 Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, pp. 163–64. 25 Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum: A Discourse of the Commonwealth of England (London: 1583). Cited in Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 246. 26 See Christopher Hodgkins, Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). 27 Heather James suggests that the Boatswain’s speech commending the nobility to silence is ‘a specific allusion to Virgil’s first epic simile of Neptune’. James, Shakespeare’s Troy, p. 201. 28 Manwayring, The Sea-man’s Dictionary, sig. A2r. 29 C. S. Lewis, The Literary Impact of The Authorised Version (London: The Athlone Press, 1950), p. 22. 30 Mark 4.39. 31 Tyndale’s New Testament Translated from the Greek by William Tyndale in 1534, ed. David Daniell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. xxix. 32 Christopher Hill suggests that Tyndale ‘anticipated much subsequent radical protestant thinking’. Christopher Hill, ‘Tyndale and His Successors’, Reformation 1 (1996): 98–112, p. 99. 33 Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, p. 31, p. 162.

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34 Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, p. 164, p. 108. 35 Norbrook, ‘“What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?”’, p. 21. 36 Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, p. 10. 37 Robert F. Willson, ‘The Boatswain’s Rule: The Opening Scene of The Tempest’, Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 12 (1979): 258–66, p. 259. 38 Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 11. 39 Hill, The English Bible, p. 414. 40 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London: 1563), p. 514. Quoted in Craig R. Thompson, ‘Scripture for the Ploughboy and Some Others’, Studies in the Continental Background of Renaissance English Literature: Essays Presented to John L. Lievsay, ed. Dale B. J. Randall and George Walton Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977), pp. 3–28, p. 3. 41 Hill, The English Bible, pp. 414–15. 42 Christopher Warley uses this phrase to discuss Shakespeare’s sonnets. Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England, p. 13. 43 In his investigations into early nautical terminology, H. B. Allen argues that the phrase ‘lay a-hold’ should actually be rendered lay ‘a-hull’, which refers to the stratagem where ‘in foul weather, when they are able to bear no sail, the manner is no more but taking in all the sails and tying down the helm to the lee side of the ship’. H. B. Allen, ‘Shakespeare’s “Lay Her A-Hold”’, p. 99. By contrast, W. B. Whall explains that ‘lay her a-hold’ is ‘an obsolete term for keeping a ship close to the wind’. W. B. Whall, Shakespeare’s Sea Terms Explained, p. 30. 44 George Steiner, After Babel, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 32–3. 45 On courtly and diplomatic uses of vernacular humanism, see Warren Boutcher, ‘Vernacular Humanism in the Sixteenth Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 189–202. 46 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed



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Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000), p. 31. 47 Hamilton, Virgil and The Tempest, p. 17. 48 See further Gail Kern Paster, ‘Montaigne, Dido, and The Tempest: “How Came that Widow in?”’, Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 91–94. 49 Russ McDonald argues that critics have explored just about every critical context except that of the acoustic. He writes, ‘I would argue that the operation of these acoustic and lexical echoes is musical, and that this music is only indirectly functional’. Russ McDonald, ‘Reading The Tempest’, Shakespeare Survey 43 (1991): 15–28, p. 24. 50 Katarzyna Marciniak, Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2006), p. 87. 51 See Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). See also Kristian Jensen, ‘The Humanist Reform of Latin and Latin Teaching’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 63–81. 52 Boutcher, ‘Vernacular Humanism’, p. 197. 53 Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, p. 2. 54 See further Brotton, ‘This Tunis, sir, was Carthage’; Deanne Williams, ‘Dido, Queen of England’, English Literary History 73 (2006): 31–59; and Richard Wilson, ‘Voyage to Tunis’. 55 Christopher Hill, ‘The Many-Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking’, in From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly, ed. Charles H. Carter (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 296–324, p. 298. 56 Norbrook, “‘What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King”’, p. 41. 57 Matthew DeCoursey, ‘The Logic of Inequality: Caliban’s Baseness in The Tempest, Cahiers Elisabéthains 64 (2003): 43–51, p. 43. 58 Deborah Willis, ‘Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse

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66 67 68

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Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity of Colonialism’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 29 (1989): 277–89, p. 283. Julia Lupton, ‘Creature Caliban’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 1–23, p. 8. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century’, in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fred Chiapelli, volume 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 561–80, p. 566. Quoted in “‘What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?”’, p. 40. Tom McAlindon suggests that ‘the root context of Caliban’s curse is a conceptual antithesis [. . .] in which the other term is blessing’. Tom McAlindon, ‘The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest’, Studies in English Literature 41 (2001): 335–55, p. 337. David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 251. Anthony Pagden, ‘The Savage Critic: Some European Images of the Primitive’, The Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 32–45. Quoted in Andrew Hadfield, ‘Peter Martyr, Richard Eden, and the New World: Reading, Experience, and Translation’, Connotations 5 (1996): 1–22, p. 6. Tyndale’s Old Testament, Being the Pentateuch of 1530, Joshua to 2 Chronicles of 1537, and Jonah, Translated by William Tyndale, ed. David Daniell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 15. Lupton, ‘Creature Caliban’, p. 8. On the opacity of Caliban’s world, see Greenblatt, ‘Learning to Curse’, p. 575. See Edgar Zilsel, ‘The Origins of Gilbert’s Scientific Method’, Roots of Scientific Thought: A Cultural Perspective, ed. Philip P. Wiener and Aaron Noland (New York: Basic Books, 1957), pp. 219–50. Norbrook, ‘“What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?”’, p. 43. For the suggestion that Shakespeare is imitating the Virgilian passage on the snakes swimming to shore to attack the priest Laocoön, see Hamilton, Virgil and The Tempest, p. 22



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71 Carmine G. Di Biase, ‘Introduction: The Example of the Early Modern Lexicographer’, in Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carmine G. Di Biase (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 1–30, p. 9. 72 Aeneid 1.328. Virgil. Aeneid, trans. and ed. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 73 Hamilton, Virgil and The Tempest, p. 21. 74 See Jack D’Amico, “‘Where the devil should he learn our language?” – Travel and Translation in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carmine G. Di Biase (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 239–54, p. 239. 75 Abdelkebir Khatibi, ‘Diglossia’, in Algeria in Others’ Languages, ed. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 157–60, p. 158. 76 Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 492. 77 On Prospero’s recapitulation of social hierarchy in the betrothal masque, see Norbrook, ‘“What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?”’, p. 36. On the chess game possessing an ‘imperial sub-text’, see Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing, p. 248. On chess as the symbol of aristocracy, see William Poole, ‘False Play: Shakespeare and Chess’, Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 50–70. 78 Hamilton, Virgil and The Tempest, p. 103. 79 The poet’s narrator avows in Sonnet 88, ‘Such is my love, to thee I so belong, / That for thy right myself will bear all wrong’. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 92–95. 80 I have adapted Benedict Anderson’s famous definition of the nation as ‘imagined political community’. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6. 81 Norbrook, ‘“What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?”’, p. 35. 82 Daniell, The Bible in English, p. 387.

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83 David Daniell, ‘Shakespeare and the Protestant Mind’, Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 1–12, p. 12. 84 Peter Auksi, ‘“Waxing Soft and Melting”: William Tyndale and the Prose of Regeneration’, English Renaissance Prose 2 (1988): 3–6, p. 2. 85 McAlindon, ‘The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest’, p. 336. 86 Rita Copeland, ‘Rhetoric and the Politics of the Literal Sense in Medieval Literary Theory: Aquinas, Wyclif, and the Lollards’, in Interpretation: Medieval and Modern: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 1–23, p. 20.

Chapter 4

Harming Macbeth: A British Translation Paul Innes

The old acting superstition masks a perception that Macbeth (1606) is a travesty. Supposedly cursed,1 Shakespeare’s drama is haunted by the ghost of a great Scottish king angered by the playwright’s misrepresentation of his reign. The play Macbeth harms Macbeth. Students and critics are well aware of the dubious chronicle histories that inform the Scottish play that was written by an Englishman. The shadowy history that is memorably misconstrued becomes subsumed into the emergence of the Renaissance United Kingdom. One has to remember that the Renaissance versions of the story, particularly Raphael Holinshed’s, are written in a context of the probable unification of the kingdoms of England and Scotland. The same could also be said of the short references in George Buchanan’s work.2 Hence the energy that has been expended on the play’s contemporary references to James VI of Scotland. Witch trials, treason plots, discussions of kingship and tyranny – all come together at the moment of the new succession so effectively emblematized by the play’s insistence on the mirrored future of a Stuart Britain.3 This essay is concerned with tracing the serial implications of the various versions of the Macbeth story as they interact with the play. In that sense, the current concern is not with either Macbeth or Macbeth. Nor should the relationship between the two Macbeths be seen as any straightforward correlation. Rather, the play relates to its prehistory more as a field of possibilities, a rich seam of transformative operations that lays open a whole set of possible intertextual and intercultural referents. This is not to say that

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there is necessarily a limitless play of multiple meanings, in which pretty much anything goes. I am seeking to delineate the logic that underpins the play’s use of its decidedly partial and inadequate sources. The material that is available to the playwright for refashioning is of very poor quality when considered purely as historical information because of its misrepresentation of Scottish history. But at the same time it provides the Englishman with an opportunity to translate, as it were, into the idiom of the Renaissance London playhouse. There is also the further series of translations of this material that takes place in its subsequent history as part of the Shakespeare corpus. Critics, readers and audiences come to the play encrusted with the debris and detritus of its previous interpretations, building even more layers of meaning on top of the ones initially generated for Shakespeare’s audiences, royal or otherwise.

Translation and Empire Two imperatives of social change are at work upon the half-remembered history of early medieval Scotland to produce the British translatio imperii. Firstly, it is entirely to be expected that what passes for a historical tradition comes to Shakespeare in such a partial manner. Cultural shifts enact upon the reign of King Macbeth a process of unsuccessful familiarization. The emergence of a feudal Scottish state from its so-called ‘dark age’ roots can only be re-interpreted at one remove by later historians attempting to render its troubled story intelligibly familiar. There then takes place a second translation into the idiom of the Renaissance. Even so, the result is not completely successful. A buried layer remains just beyond the field of vision, haunting an unsettled play with the phantom of its origins. All of this is well enough known, but there is still a need for a more thoroughgoing analysis of the shifts in representation that are occasioned by the play’s occluded layering of meanings. In this respect translation theory provides a means of dealing with such multiple transformations: ‘the study of translation is the study of cultural interaction’. This comment is made by Edwin Gentzler in



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his foreword to an influential collection of essays by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere.4 After a heady period of change, they seek in this volume to evaluate the state of translation studies towards the turn of the millennium. It would be fair to characterize their understanding as something that goes far beyond the systematic transposition of meaning from one language into another. Gentzler continues: Pioneering work by translation studies scholars such as Lefevere provide us with models from the past that will have enormous influence on cultural studies and identity formation in the future.5 In accordance with this logic, the play Macbeth could be viewed as an early Renaissance British translation of material that is at least in part historically and culturally alien. The translatio imperii that is enacted through the Shakespearean text (or at least, what we have of it) recalls the etymological roots of the term as the Latin equivalent, in rhetorical theory, to the Greek term metamorphosis: ‘The task is less to copy an original, but to compose an analogous text’, in a movement of ‘transmutation’.6 The historical moment of the play’s production, the congruent emergence of the nascent British state, is shot through with halfdigested and partially obscured layers of meaning. These have to be domesticated as far as possible in order to render intelligible the interaction between the Macbeth story and the point at which James VI of Scotland becomes James I of Britain, if the play Macbeth is to make any sense at all to its contemporary audiences. For the group of theorists of translation to which I am referring, translation ‘takes place not just between cultures, but also inside a given culture’.7 This would include the rewriting and reinscribing of texts from a prior historical moment. Such reworking manages the textual materials, recycling them in the service of concerns more appropriate to the historical moment in which the later text is produced.8 The model is therefore one of a more dynamic interaction between a play such as Macbeth and the sources on which it draws. Furthermore, as Stephen J. Lynch has commented in a slightly different context:

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Though traditional source studies have tended to see sources as static building blocks that Shakespeare picked over, rearranged and artfully improved, the sources themselves can be reexamined as products of intertextuality – endlessly complex, multilayered fields of interpretation that Shakespeare refashioned and reconfigured into alternative fields of interpretation. We can reconsider the source texts not merely as raw material for plot and character, but as dynamic and often inconsistent texts involving layers of implicit and subtextual suggestions.9 Lynch does not deal directly with Macbeth, since there are other plays in which a more one-to-one correspondence exists between source material and Shakespearean play. However, the comments he makes are relevant precisely because he wishes to move away from a monolithic comparison that simply assumes textual coherence in the sources, never mind Shakespeare. The sources themselves can be viewed as dynamic intertexts: Such source texts (themselves products of intertextuality) offer not singular or univocal expressions of Renaissance culture, but multivocal expressions of conflicting tendencies within that culture.10 The logic of this meeting between an intertextual field of source material and the circumstances of the Renaissance play produces a multiplicity of potential meanings, some of which may be more latent than others. In the case of Macbeth, the various layers of translation can be extremely difficult to unpick, but the effort is still worth making.

The Play’s Scotland The state of Scotland in the play is so intricately linked with the condition of sovereignty that it is almost impossible to discuss either separately. The later histories through which the various events are filtered combine with the context of the Stuart accession



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to the British throne. The way this is managed in performance is by means of the play’s notorious insistence on mingled emblems of light and darkness. Thus the light of Duncan’s reign is interrupted by the frightful darkness of Macbeth’s usurpation, with true right and justice re-established in the figure of Malcolm; or at least, such is the traditional reading of the play. Such a critical position does have a certain logic to it, especially since the line of succession from Duncan is almost snuffed out with his murder. This standard view of the succession as dynastic primogeniture comes down to the Renaissance via a chronicle tradition that post-dates the period of the historical Macbeth. However understandable this may be, it is complete nonsense when one returns to the system of royal inheritance that existed in the Scotland of the historical Macbeth. A structure similar to Irish Celtic tanistry pertained. The kingship in Scotland alternated between two royal dynasties: the family to which the play’s Duncan belongs and their more northerly cousins. This is probably a direct result of the unification of the Scots of the west and lowlands with the Picts of the highlands and the north east by Kenneth MacAlpine in the ninth century. The details are unclear, but it would seem that the lowland royal branch had aspirations to male primogeniture, familiar enough from most European states with some form of connection to the Roman past. It is possible that this tendency came into existence, or was at least accelerated, by this family’s geographical proximity to the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Danes to the south. Such a complex historical situation is well beyond the capabilities of the later chroniclers to understand, let alone inscribe, although it should be noted that Holinshed is aware of the practice of alternating royal lines: [. . .] by the old lawes of the realme, the ordnance was, that if he that should succeed were not of able age to take the charge vpon himselfe, he that was next of bloud vnto him should be admitted.11 Holinshed has not fully grasped the logic of the movement from one royal line to the other, since he suggests that the succession of

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an older man only takes place when the one with right by primogeniture is too young to succeed. There is in fact a precedent for Holinshed’s implication in English history. When Richard I died, his youngest brother John was faced with the possibility of the throne being contested by his nephew Arthur. The latter was the son of the (deceased) middle brother, Geoffrey, and strictly speaking by the rules of primogeniture, young Arthur should have become king after his uncle Richard. But the rules of succession were not fully settled, and the fact was that John was a mature man and also had possession of England. Arthur was on the continent, being educated in his father’s domains there.12 It is clear from the opening Act of King John (c.1596) (1.1) that Shakespeare was in fact well aware of the ramifications of these historical details. The playwright’s representation of the conflict between John as King of England and his French counterpart stems from several underlying causes, but the French support for Arthur’s claim is shown to be the main one. In Macbeth, unlike the situation faced by the young Arthur Plantagenet, the conferral of the title of Prince of Cumberland upon Malcolm marks him as being of age, as well as being heir. But of course it would be unfair to expect the later chroniclers to realize fully the implications of the ancient Scottish doubled system of royal inheritance. They are writing centuries later in cultures for which masculine primogeniture is so much the established norm that any other possibility is almost unthinkable, never mind the complexities of an early medieval Scotland that has powerful traces of residual Celtic practice. It seems that instead of allowing the kingship to pass to the royal cousin Macbeth after his own death, as had been the practice before his own accession, Duncan invested his son Malcolm Big Head (Canmore) as Prince of Cumberland, thus attempting to force him on Scotland as heir to the throne. What happened next is again unclear, but it would seem to be a direct result of a structural anomaly: the heir who is recognized as such by the logic of primogeniture may easily be overshadowed by an older, experienced warlord with a claim by the alternative method. Macbeth may have rebelled, or may have been attacked by Duncan. In any case, Macbeth’s forces killed Duncan, probably in the northern part of the kingdom, since Duncan is buried at Elgin.



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Treachery or some form of ambush may have been involved, but this is not certain. After two years of guerrilla warfare, Duncan’s sons fled the country; as a good semi-anglicized lowlander, Malcolm appealed to the powers further south for succour.13

Military Power and the Succession Despite the difficulties, it is possible to trace a little of this history even in Shakespeare’s play. In a long aside, Patricia Parker has noted the contemporary Renaissance aural pun on ‘cousin’ and ‘cozen’; cousins cannot be trusted, something that has obvious resonances for the play’s textual traces of two competing houses of royal kindred.14 It feeds into Macbeth in some very specific ways, almost from the outset. Banquo initiates the sequence when he and Macbeth are met by Angus and Rosse: ‘Cousins, a word, I pray you’ (1.3.127). Their meeting occurs just after the witches have spoken their prophecy, and before the two captains return to court. It serves to delineate the close kinship connections between the various members of the aristocracy in the play, something that is easily accessible as a locus of meaning to Shakespeare’s audiences. The Oxford English Dictionary denotes the cousin as: A collateral relative more distant than a brother or sister; a kinsman or kinswoman, a relative; formerly, very frequently applied to a nephew or niece.15 The Dictionary goes on to note the legal implications of these wide connotations in its second main entry for the word: In legal language formerly often applied to the next of kin, or the person to whom one is next of kin, including direct ancestors and descendants more remote than parents and children. (Here taken as 5 L. consanguineous).16 The term ‘cousin’ serves as a catch-all, varying in its usage from the technically precise connection between close kindred to denoting

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a more diffuse sense of vague aristocratic relationships by loose ties of intermarriage and consanguinity. Macduff calls Rosse ‘cousin’ (2.4.36), and the latter repeats the term to Lady Macduff and her young son (4.2.25). Macduff uses the term once more when he bids Rosse welcome to the English court (4.3.161). Malcolm himself refers to his southern kinship, when he describes Siward’s son as his cousin (5.6.3). Such a word loosely ties the members of the aristocracy together into a peer group, but as Patricia Parker notes in another context, it is not a neutral term: The question of whether there can be atonement in the midst of so much cozening and duplicity affects, finally, the question of the harmony that may be achieved at the play’s own end.17 Her comment refers to the denouement of The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–98), but it is pertinent also to the court of Duncan in Macbeth. Already at this point in the play it is a word that functions in an atmosphere of growing mistrust and change, echoing the aural pun on untrustworthiness and trickery. Macbeth completes the line, immediately emblematizing the possible results in his famous aside: Two truths are told, As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme. (1.3.127–29) Zonal staging emphasises the importance of what is happening here. Banquo temporarily physically separates from Macbeth in order to converse with the other noblemen, permitting the Macbeth figure to speak directly to the audience in a manner that later criticism will re-interpret in accordance with a form of interiority. Stage choreography therefore underlines the crucial importance of what at first sight might seem like a relatively unimportant short scene; at the very least, this encounter shows Macbeth already drifting



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away from the other Scots nobles. The implications of Renaissance staging techniques will be more fully discussed later; what matters for the moment is to note the ways in which stage business interacts with the spoken word to layer the play richly with multiple levels of meaning.18 When Macbeth finally does enter Duncan’s court he interrupts the King’s musings on Cawdor’s treasons. Duncan shifts to greet Macbeth as ‘O worthiest cousin!’ (1.4.14), an exclamation that is by now hedged around with multiple contradictions. Duncan goes on to repeat the mistake he made in trusting Cawdor by further investing Macbeth with the dead traitor’s titles. Furthermore, as has been recognized by more than one critic, the seething tension that contextualizes the scene of Duncan’s court here can be played so as to undercut the courtly veneer: [. . .] as Harry Berger has persuasively argued, the opening scenes of the play enact an elaborately concealed hostility between Duncan and Macbeth.19 Here, Jonathan Goldberg’s observation is itself based on Harry Berger’s intuition,20 and their awareness can be further glossed with reference to the tendency of noble and royal cousins to cozen. In structural terms, it is distinctly probable that Duncan has no choice other than to reward his potentially dangerous kinsman. Conventionally, Duncan’s state is represented as incapable of defending itself except by relying upon powerful warriors such as both Cawdors, a direct consequence of the kind of underlying logic of feudalism so carefully explored by Norbert Elias.21 Alan Sinfield has noted this problem in an essay on Macbeth in Faultlines, and it is possible to extend and refine the analysis.22 Since the centre of Duncan’s Scotland is the lowlands from Perthshire southwards, he needs noblemen such as Macbeth (whose power base lies in what is now Moray) to maintain locally strong military forces in order to be able to defeat incursions, such as that of the Norwegians at the periphery, before they can threaten the centre. These forces can – indeed must – also be pressed into service in order to deal with internal insurrection.

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But in accordance with the logic advanced by Elias and Sinfield, a massive structural problem emerges: how can the royal centre be certain that the armies at the margins will remain loyal? English medieval history is full of equivalent situations, as Shakespeare’s history plays demonstrate. His Scottish play re-imagines an unfamiliar Scotland as semi-feudal, representing the shadowy past by means of the familiar issue of the overmighty subject, the marcher lord who is capable of seizing power because of the military might invested in him by the state. In this respect the dynastic history described earlier reappears in a new guise, but one that is intelligible to Shakespeare’s contemporary audiences. As Duncan says of Macbeth: ‘It is a peerless kinsman’ (1.4.58), describing him as without peer and, at the same time, as above the other peers. Thus the Shakespearean play reactivates the historical problem of competing royal cousins in a displaced form. Moreover, royal cousins do have a certain resonance for the Tudor and Stuart dynasties. Their histories are littered with the frustrations and bodies of alternative, competing royal lines, some of which have at least as much claim to the throne of England as theirs do. From Henry of Lancaster’s deposition of Richard II, through the Wars of the Roses to Henry VIII’s judicial murder of the Duke of Buckingham, the ruling house is always well aware of the potential threat posed by any other line that could seem more attractive.23 Elizabeth Tudor’s aversion to the succession question is well known, leading to her severe ill-treatment of cousins of her own who might be considered as monarch after her death.24 These are not simply historical details. The term ‘cousin’ resonates so much through Macbeth that it becomes a kind of metonymy, condensing a whole series of contemporary Renaissance concerns about lineage and loyalty. In effect, it operates as a crucial node or nexus for the success of Shakespeare’s translation of Scots history. The word works to familiarize the audiences with an alien milieu.



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The Usurper’s Scotland To continue with the play’s structured version of Scottish history, all that is needed is to note the differences between the two Scotlands in the play; not, however, by means of the internal, personal attributes usually given by critics to the figure of Macbeth, but in terms of the shift his usurpation (as the play has it) inaugurates in Scottish political geography. To some extent, Shakespeare’s play already figures this movement when Duncan arrives at castle Macbeth: This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses. (1.6.1–3) This is something of a standard, even stereotypical, response of the lowlander to the highlands. It reinforces the sense of a geographical split in Scotland, perhaps in a manner that owes more to memories of the source material than to Shakespeare’s own intentions. This is no trivial point, since the demarcation between Duncan’s Scotland and that of the usurper fractures the country along exactly this faultline. What was geographically and politically central to Duncan becomes marginal under Macbeth; so too that which was on the margins becomes the centre. The shift that is enacted follows exactly the move from the initial royal family to its cousins, the alternative royal line. And again, there is a correlation with the versions of English history that were familiar to at least some of Shakespeare’s audiences, even if only in popular form. The over-mighty war leader on the periphery of the kingdom is a very well known personage on London’s stages – Hotspur from I Henry IV (c.1596–97) being an obvious example. This point needs to be further glossed with reference to the investiture of Malcolm as Prince of Cumberland (1.4.38–39). Shakespeare’s play is of course unable directly to acknowledge the disinheriting of Macbeth that is entailed, but this submerged factor returns in the shape of the play’s semi-feudal sensibilities. Malcolm

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is young, while Macbeth is a veteran warlord, and again is it worth noting that the seriousness of this situation would not be lost on Shakespeare’s audiences. It does not come entirely as a surprise that the consequence is a seizure of power. The play further refines the geographical difference between the two reigns by representing Macbeth as a horrific tyrant. But this too has an underlying structural sequence to it. By shifting royal power away from the lowlands, Macbeth is in danger of creating a replica of the context of his own rise to power. He needs to contain the area that is now the periphery, as well as eliminate any potential threats posed by other noblemen. In a sense, therefore, Macbeth as King plays out a far more sophisticated understanding of the need to control elements that could lead to his own unseating. In this respect he is a more effective ruler than Duncan, since he does not need to rely on other warlords to police his borders for him. However, the methods by which he manages his new kingdom lead inexorably, in a different manner from Duncan’s mistakes, to an even more violent revolution. The only warlord who could possibly challenge Macbeth is of course Banquo, a fact well underscored by the witches’ prophecy about the future greatness of Banquo’s line (1.3.67). So Macbeth kills him. He tries to do the same to Macduff, whose lands, crucially, lie in anglicized Fife. The result is an invasion from England that seeks to put the obviously pro-Saxon Malcolm on the throne. The danger to Macbeth is amply reinforced by internal insurrection in the form of the Scots nobles his reign has alienated. What is important here is the way in which Duncan and Macbeth emblematize sovereignty. Both embody elements of royalty in a way that leads to their unseating, although in the case of Duncan the play cannot directly acknowledge that in his own way he creates the situation that leads to Macbeth’s rise to power. The underlying logic is of course clear enough, and both monarchs behave in a way that destroys them. Neither demonstrates enough circumspection to survive, and this problem is a major issue for a society that seems to have been obsessed with the ways in which public figures operate.25 Trust and friendship among the political classes was something of an obsession for the Renaissance English: should one trust completely in someone else at all?26



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In broad terms, the translation of this material into a play would make perfect sense to Shakespeare’s contemporary English audiences. The fractiousness of the Scots aristocracy was well known, as was their jealousy of any attempts by any king to curb their military power. In point of fact, the Battle of Dunsinnan Hill did not see the end of King Macbeth. It took three more years of campaigning by Malcolm before Macbeth was caught and killed, perhaps in a similar situation to that of the death in battle of Malcolm’s father. Lulach, the son of Macbeth’s queen Gruoch by her previous marriage, continued the resistance for another year until he too was killed.27 There are also some final historical ironies. Malcolm’s kingship is a major initial stage in the developing historical enmity between Scotland and England, because he repays the favour done to him by giving refuge to noblemen fleeing the Norman conquest of Scotland’s southern neighbour. William the Conqueror invaded Scotland in 1072, at least partly in retaliation for Malcolm’s support of the Saxons. Malcolm himself was killed in 1093 in battle against the Normans he seems to have hated so much.28 The accession of James Stuart of Scotland to the English throne provides a Renaissance moment at which the long rivalry between the two nations would supposedly be ended. It certainly makes historical resonances with contemporary politics available for interrogation in dramatic form.

Bearded Witches A further set of problems for Shakespeare’s handling of these translation problems is posed by the witches. Whether or not the play does in fact slightly predate the accession of James I, the Scottish king’s experience of dealing with ‘witchcraft’ presents the English playwright with a dangerous opportunity.29 An opportunity, of course, because it allows him to make some topical references, but also dangerous, since a playwright in the Renaissance has to make sure that the topical information will not be taken the wrong way, particularly when a reigning monarch is involved. To some extent,

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Shakespeare’s use of the witches avoids the element of danger, because of course they function as a convenient scapegoat. Even so, the on-stage representation of the witches can be interestingly imprecise; Simon Forman calls them ‘women feiries or Nimphes’.30 This observation by a very early audience member raises the possibility that the witches’ appearance may well belie Banquo’s comments on first meeting them: 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) In his bewilderment, Banquo’s language returns to the stereotype of the witch, something that is borne out by the collocation of confused darkness that surrounds them throughout the play. But the potential contradiction between this standard discourse and Forman’s passing commentary is reminiscent of the passage in Holinshed: ‘[. . .] there met them three women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of elder world’.31 Such shifts in visual representation (costume, appearance) render these figures as something of a contradiction, reinforcing Banquo’s verbal inability adequately to define them. There is scope here to exploit the inexactitude, to use the staging in such a way as to problematize the stereotype. Holinshed’s own prose remains vague about who these ‘witches’ were: [. . .] afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, bicause euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken.32



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This is not a trivial point: Shakespeare’s stage translation of Holinshed’s witches points to a metamorphic crux, similar to the aural play recalling the importance of cousins. The witches are of course capable of vanishing into the insubstantial ether, while at the same time the play struggles to replay the stereotypes in the other scenes in which they appear. Their representation also shades over into Lady Macbeth, as well as the Macbeth figure. Peter Stallybrass, among others, has noted the linkages here, which he characterizes in terms of unnatural mothers.33 His is an important point to make, particularly because of the possibly truncated nature of the text of the play that has come down to us. However, it can be glossed further by reference to the play’s transference of meaning as a form of cultural translation. As previously noted, Macbeth’s wife Gruoch was an important figure in her own right. The fact that she had a son from her previous marriage remains as a textual echo, since she has in fact given suck, just not to any biological offspring from her second husband. The symbolic unity to which Stallybrass refers here underpins the play’s representation of violent femininity, including Lady Macbeth’s ‘invocation’ speech (1.5.38–54). The interconnection between the Macbeth family and the witches in the play is further reinforced when Macbeth visits the witches in their lair at 4.1. What is not described at all by the play is exactly how Macbeth knows where they live. This seems like an obvious point to make, and can be explained away by remarking upon the unifying symbolism of Macbeth’s dark similarity with the world of the witches. Perhaps it is simply another symptom of the play’s concise economy of detail; Macbeth in the later part of his reign is so steeped in blood that it is simply logical to assume a more developed relationship between him and the witches. It is also distinctly possible that some textual elements have been lost. But there is another option. Here too may be recognized another example of the submerged detritus that accompanies Shakespeare’s translation. As Nick Aitchison has pointed out, the historical Macbeth and his queen were very closely associated with Scottish Celtic Christianity, as opposed to the more Romanized Catholicism of his opponents. The historical Macbeth seems to

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have been a pious king in the manner typical of the times; he even went on pilgrimage to Rome.34 By contrast, the play emblematizes Malcom’s exile in England (4.3) by locating him at the court of the saintly Edward the Confessor. He is the King of England whose kinswoman married Malcolm, and who would go on to become Saint Margaret of Scotland for her services to the Roman Catholic Church. Two major conflicts can be discerned here. The first, of course, is the political fighting between the two Scottish royal houses. The second is the long process by which the Roman centre contested and finally assimilated competing versions of Christianity at the European periphery. The way in which Shakespeare’s play elides Lady Macbeth and her husband with the witches may well be a displaced memory of the historical Macbeth’s Celtic Christian affiliations, translated into the Renaissance vocabulary of the caricatured witch. Aitchison has traced the support of Macbeth and his queen for the Culdees of Loch Leven, a group of Celtic Christian monastics.35 In effect, the play retains echoes of a culture clash which in the long run turns out to the advantage of the Roman Catholic Church. This is what lies behind the play’s representation of the unholy alliance of the Macbeth family and the witches. They conflate elements of paganism and Renaissance stereotypes with residual traces of an alternative version of Christianity. The play needs them to be ill-defined, to be black and evil, and also insubstantial at the same time, as Banquo demonstrates.36 The difficulty of their definition may be part of a grudging, partial sensing of the importance of Celtic culture for the play. Harking back to comments made earlier about the two Scotlands of Duncan and Macbeth, it seems reasonable to follow up with a further structuration. That is, the play translates its early medieval source material by means of the conflict between the Celtic Macbeth and the anglicized Malcolm, at least as it is possible to present them in performance. In historical terms this is a massive oversimplification, but it does enable the play to differentiate between the two lines. The demonized Celtic Macbeth is of course destroyed, and the right Christian Malcolm triumphs, but the subterranean echoes of a culture clash remain. As Macbeth progresses more and



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more towards his demise, his language develops this distinction. We have already seen how Duncan describes Inverness, marking his family clearly as lowlanders, at least when confronted with the sight of Macbeth’s castle. But Macbeth himself later takes on more of what Shakespeare would presumably have considered a more appropriately outlandish ‘Scottish’ vocabulary: macbeth servant macbeth servant macbeth

The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac’d loon! Where gott’st thou that goose look? There is ten thousand – Geese, villain? Soldiers, Sir. Go, prick thy face, and over-red thy fear, Thou lily-livered boy. What soldiers, patch? Death of thy soul! those linen cheeks of thine Are counsellors to fear. What soldiers, whey-face? (5.3.11–17)

Macbeth compares his own preferred colours of red and black with the paleness of the poor servant in a whole series of convoluted insults, peppered with Scottish-sounding words. The passage also gives the playwright further opportunity to reinforce Macbeth’s devilish associations, more of which is to come as the play reaches its climax with Macbeth relying on the witches’ prophecy. The differences between Macbeth and Malcolm become more and more clearly borne out by the language they use. The identification of Macbeth with the witches fails because he gets them wrong; he misrecognizes their prophecies. And when one further remembers the initial responses Banquo makes to their appearance, one begins to glimpse a paradoxical but rigorously precise formulation. Macbeth sees the witches more clearly than Banquo, but clarity fails the man who would be king. Macbeth seeks the truth value of the witches’ utterances and apparitions throughout the play, while Banquo is puzzled by what Macbeth perceives, and is then killed off. What is at stake here is the nature of authority. The destruction of Duncan will precipitate a new Scottish dark age in which the only meaning that is plain is the

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truth of regicide, a truth that cannot be uttered. Macbeth sets himself on this path because he seems authorized to do so by an alternative world to that of Duncan. The way in which the play revolves around Macbeth’s construction of a different form of authority marks it out very precisely as a Renaissance text: when the king’s (religious and moral) control is removed, what is left? There is here a performance echo of the logical contestation of authority unleashed by the Reformation.

Performance as Translation It is no wonder that so many modern performances seem to feel the need to represent Duncan as some sort of saint – for a good example, see the scenes in Duncan’s court in Trevor Nunn’s well known minimalist production for the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1976. However, a straightforward presentation of the two Scotlands will not, of course, stand before a subtle analysis. I will return to this point as part of my concluding comments on modern perceptions of the play’s violence. But it is nevertheless a good starting point for the ways in which the requirements of Renaissance performance themselves enact a further movement of translation on the various layers of re-interpretation we have followed so far. A comparison may be made with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its own concomitant further dark corners. In the earlier comedy, Athens is the human centre, with the truly dark world mentioned several times by the wood spirits as its ‘other’, the wood itself functioning as a liminal space between these two opposed locales.37 Shakespeare’s England is opposed to Macbeth’s Scotland in a similar structure, with the Scotland of the lowland royal family acting as a more familiar, but still strange, liminal area in its own right. This is a rather obvious structural analogy, but it does serve a certain critical purpose: it points to relative degrees of strangeness, or estrangement, from the central London performance of the play. That is why Macbeth contains so many elements that seek to familiarize its audience with the relatively well-known Scotland of the



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lowland kings, the ‘rightful’ ones in the play’s political economy. These are relatively easily apprehended, and the extremities of Macbeth’s Scotland must logically be so much more extreme, even as they strangely echo the historical events. In other words, the play’s status as performance piece enacts a series of further transformations on the Macbeth material. To return to Susan Bassnett’s work theorizing translation; she makes a series of observations on performance and translation that would seem pertinent to the present discussion: Pirandello saw the playtext as belonging principally to the author, so that the performance was seen as an attack upon that author’s intentions because it was no more than a copy. This is obviously an extreme position, but it raises the fundamental question of the relationship between the written playtext and any eventual translation of it, be that translation interlingual or intersemiotic, i.e. into performance.38 In this essay on translation and theatre, Bassnett is concerned to trace not only theatrical translations of texts from one language into another, but also how theatrical performance itself acts as a form of translation, including the translation within the same language from one medium to another. Her essay is, appropriately enough, subtitled ‘Further Reflections on Translation and Theatre’, and she uses Shakespeare’s Richard II (c.1595) as a test case. Basnett refers especially to early modern practices of characterization, plot inconsistency and writing collaboration, and how these differ radically from later naturalistic conventions. There are obvious resonances here for the ways in which Macbeth translates and harms Macbeth, leading us back to the famous awareness that the play unfairly demonizes its protagonist. The play stages its denigration of the Macbeth figure not only through the kinds of meanings I have been at pains to trace so far, with their half-memories of the historical Macbeth. It still seems an obvious point to make, but, pace Bassnett, subsequent performance conventions have obscured the Renaissance staging techniques that flesh out the persona of Macbeth. Following on from Robert

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Weimann’s work, Margreta de Grazia has investigated the performance tradition, Hamlet (c. 1600) and Hamlet in exactly this way. But she also extends and refines his analysis of Hamlet as a stage figure in important ways.39 A similar procedure can suggestively be implemented with Macbeth as well. As with Hamlet, the Scottish protagonist is associated with blackness. When this is combined with his ruddy violence, he becomes a particularly effective descendant of the Vice figure, which helps to explain the issue of his conflation with the witches that was noted earlier in this essay. The play does not provide any form of narrated justification as to how it is that Macbeth is able just to go and visit the witches, but then perhaps it does not need to because the context of the performance tradition provides it in visual form. Dressed in black, Macbeth moves towards the central pit of the stage that is descended from the old representation of hell’s mouth.40 He does not necessarily go into it in the same way that Hamlet wrestles Laertes there, but Macbeth very clearly moves into its stage zone for the prophetic sequence in 4.1. The identification of Macbeth with a very specific performance area is a simple technique of familiar visualization. It also, incidentally, picks up on the Porter’s famous (and hellish) equivocations at 2.3.1–20. If the critics are right and the Porter is a reference to the Gunpowder Plot,41 the effects on authority are extremely powerful. Weimann labels the powerful combination we can discern here as Figurenposition, a portmanteau term for a very specific unity of characterization, stage position, choreography and language; there is no direct equivalent in English, appropriately enough for an essay like this which is concerned with the logic of translation.42 The Figurenposition of the Porter foreshadows Macbeth’s later movement physically towards the witches in the crucial prophecy scene. This is not to contend that Shakespeare theorized his use of the staging techniques that were open to him, as though their effectiveness can be traced back to his all-powerful authorial consciousness. Rather, we can glimpse here a little of the dramaturgical logic available to playwrights at that particular point in time, on a very specific kind of stage. In the case of Macbeth, the



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translation of reworked source materials on to the London stage produces another transformative layer, and it is this element of translation that results in the harm done to the historical Macbeth. The figure of Macbeth is not powerful on its own stage because of some internal characterization, but because it enmeshes very precisely a whole series of prior theatrical considerations that are embedded in Shakespeare’s performance culture.

Subsequent Performance Cultures The process continues into the play’s critical history, and its subsequent performance history.43 Multiple interpretations of the play are easily structured upon the two Scotlands. An obvious example is the BBC Shakespeare’s version (1983), with its use of indistinct tartans to emphasize the Scottishness of the milieu. One could take this revisionist logic further by staging the Scotland of the lowland family as almost medieval, in contrast to a more homespun highland setting for the reign of Macbeth. Such procedures emphasize the differences between the two lineages. However, there is also scope for a transformative operation, one which takes advantage of the underlying structural similarities between the reigns. Trevor Nunn’s version has already been noted as portraying Duncan as some kind of saint figure. At one point Macduff lays a priestly cope around the aged king’s shoulders, as the latter beats his breast and mutters ‘mea culpa’ several times under his breath. This does present Duncan as saintly, but it also brings to the fore his physical helplessness, with the corollary of his need to rely on powerful warriors such as Macbeth to protect his kingdom for him. The presentation of Duncan here can also have the effect of making members of the audience wonder about precisely what it is that Duncan has done in his past to merit such a litany. Other well known productions have taken the hint, undoing any easy opposition between the two Scottish courts. Roman Polanski’s film version (1971) shows Duncan as a mature man, but one who is physically very powerful. He rides at full speed

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towards Macbeth’s castle, obviously relishing the freedom of physical exhilaration. Interestingly, this film does not develop what might be an obvious correlation between Macbeth and Macduff, with the latter replacing the former in his structural role as potential usurper. Instead, Polanski has young Fleance make an appearance between Malcolm and the throne after Macbeth’s death, and the film ends with the sight of Donalbain going off to the dwelling of the witches. In this version, the implication is clear: the cycle of violence does not end with Macbeth’s death. Scottish society is still geared up for conflict, which means that the logic of Macbeth’s career is systemic. Polanski uses the medium of film to translate the play most effectively. Another of his unusual choices is to make Lady Macbeth seem younger than her husband. Played by Francesca Annis, Lady Macbeth seems more vulnerable than the standard assumption that she is older and more powerful than Macbeth. Polanski also shows scenes that do not exist in the play, since they take place off-stage: the deaths of Duncan and Lady Macbeth. The translation into film gives the director the freedom to image powerful moments of the play, although the special effects of the dagger that leads Macbeth to murder his king locate the film in its period of production. What is important about all of this is the way that film permits extra licence to be taken with the text. A performance of the play, whether on stage, video or film, has to beware the witches. Their presentation needs to work in order to keep the audience with the play, since the cultural associations of the witch are largely obsolete for modern audiences. Audiences that find the BBC’s 1983 representation of the witches funny are hardly likely to treat the rest of the play with any seriousness, regardless of individual performances. This is not a minor point, since it is the downside of the modern preoccupation with the characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. By extracting them and layering them with ahistorical assumptions of character psychology and the priority of the individual, later cultures (especially western ones) focus on some elements of plays from this period at the expense of others. This is only to be expected, but it can produce situations in which the more difficult elements to translate from



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Shakespeare’s culture can become extremely problematic in modern performance.44 Versions that relish the opportunity for change are often successful precisely because they translate the play. Polanski translates it into the language of film. Akira Kurosawa famously translates it into Japanese, producing perhaps the most effective rendering of the play, which brings us back to the point of this essay. According to Graham Holderness: Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) is the most complete translation of Shakespeare into film. The text is abandoned altogether, not even translated; the action shifted from medieval Scotland to feudal Japan; a western Renaissance tragedy becomes an Oriental samurai epic.45 Holderness goes on to characterize the various critical and artistic responses to Kurosawa’s film. The debate seems to revolve round the relative status of the two masterpieces, the play and the film, and just how much the latter really can be described as a translation. Certainly, none of the names given by Holderness would dispute the status of the film in itself, leading one to the interesting conclusion that the freer a translation is, the more effective it can be. Translation produces something new, whether it be the chroniclers’ attempts to render intelligible elements of Scottish history, Shakespeare’s British stage translation, or later re-interpretations for different cultures and media. Every translation changes what comes before, while at the same time retaining traces of its predecessors. Underlying it all is still the awareness of the harm this British play has done to a relatively obscure Scottish king. But this is precisely the point: cultural translations of this kind enact transformations, even as they seek to replicate some form of the original. And perhaps the most interesting translations are those that embrace metamorphosis.

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Notes   1 This is my own explanation; the superstitions about performing the play are so well known that even Wikipedia refers to it in the first paragraph of its entry on the play. This position in the entry makes the ‘curse’ into a major defining element of the play in modern popular culture.  2 These are helpfully appended to the second Arden edition of the play: William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir, The Arden Shakespeare (1962: reprinted London: Methuen 1984), pp. 164–89. This is the edition that will be used for all textual references in this essay. All subsequent references to the play will be given parenthetically. For more in-depth discussions of Shakespeare’s sources and the use he makes of them, see Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 volumes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–75) and Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sources (London: Continuum, 2001).  3 Kenneth Farrow fully traces the historiographical tradition that is inherited by Buchanan and Holinshed. Kenneth D. Farrow, ‘The Historiographical Evolution of the Macbeth Narrative’, The Scottish Literary Journal 21 (1994): 5–23.   4 Edwin Gentzler, ‘Foreword’, in Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), pp. ix–xxii, p. ix.   5 Gentzler, ‘Foreword’, p. xiv.   6 Gentzler, ‘Foreword’, p. xix.   7 Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, ‘Introduction: Where Are We in Translation Studies?’, in Constructing Cultures: Essays in Literacy Translation, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998), pp. 1–11, p. 9.  8 Patricia Parker suggestively relates Renaissance English trans­ lation practice to the feminine gender. Patricia Parker, Shakespeare From the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 137–42.  9 Stephen Lynch, Shakespearean Intertextuality: Studies in Selected Sources and Plays (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 1.



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10 Lynch, Shakespearean Intertextuality p. 117. 11 Cited in Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir, p. 172. 12 For details see Alexander Rose, Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History (London: Phoenix, 2003), pp. 90–91. 13 For a detailed narrative of this history, as well as some commentary on the various questions and issues that are left partially unanswered, see Nick Aitchison, Macbeth: Man and Myth (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999), pp. 1–98. His book also contains a useful explanatory diagram of the double lines of succession on p. 12. 14 Parker, Shakespeare From the Margins, pp. 127–36. 15 OED, second edition on compact disc. 16 OED, second edition on compact disc. 17 Parker, Shakespeare From the Margins, p. 136. 18 The most important book on these issues is Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). He further develops his insights in Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). In relation to the ways in which the figure of Hamlet might have been enacted on its own stage, Weimann’s thesis is interrogated and extended in Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 183–86. See also my own comments on stage techniques in my essay ‘“Pluck but his name out of his heart”: A Caesarean Cross-section’, in Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature, ed. Jonathan Holmes and Adrian Streete (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005), pp. 79–98, pp. 92–95. 19 Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Speculations: Macbeth and Source’, in Macbeth: Contemporary Critical Essays ed. Alan Sinfield (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 92–107, p. 95.

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20 Harry Berger, Jr., ‘The Early Scenes of Macbeth: Preface to a New Interpretation’, English Literary History 47 (1980): 1–31. 21 Norbert Elias theorizes the underlying structural principles of the feudal system, as well as the problems it encounters in the uneven development of monarchical absolutism. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). 22 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 95–108. See also Marilyn French, ‘Macbeth and Masculine Values’, in Macbeth: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Alan Sinfield (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 14–24. 23 For a full treatment of the career of Richard II and the Lancastrian usurpation see Bryan Bevan, King Richard II (London: The Rubicon Press, 1990). An accessible and detailed treatment of the Wars of the Roses is available in Alison Weir, Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses (London: Pimlico, 1998). On the dubious nature of the Tudor claim to the throne, see Michael Bennett, The Battle of Bosworth (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), pp. 58–62. Henry VIII’s destruction of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, is described in Derek Wilson, In the Lion’s Court: Power, Ambition and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 188–91. 24 See especially Sarah Gristwood, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen (London: Bantam Books, 2004). For the possible alternatives to Elizabeth see Alison Weir, Elizabeth the Queen (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 41–43. 25 Lacey Baldwin Smith provides a very full treatment of the mentality of the English Renaissance political classes. He has a long section, for example, on the ways in which the education system was supposed to inculcate the survival skills of the politician. Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (London: Pimlico, 2006), pp. 101–17. 26 As well as Smith, Treason in Tudor England (2006), see Paul Innes, Class and Society in Shakespeare: A Dictionary (London:



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Continuum, 2007), pp. 243–49 and Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 27 See further Aitchison, Macbeth: Man and Myth, pp. 83–98. 28 For a description of the course of Malcolm’s warfare with the Normans, see Alexander Rose, Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History (London: Phoenix, 2003), pp. 32–35. 29 T. C. Smout’s accessible book relates the social and religious configurations that result in the Scottish witchcraft persecutions of 184–92. T. C. Smout: A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (London: Fontana, 1998). James VI’s involvement is mentioned on p. 188. See also Peter Stallybrass, ‘Macbeth and Witchcraft’, in Macbeth: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Alan Sinfied (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, pp. p. 25–38, p. 27. 30 Quoted in Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir, p. xv. 31 Quoted in Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir, p. 171. 32 Quoted in Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir, p. 172. 33 Stallybrass, ‘Macbeth and Witchcraft’, pp. 30–35. Terry Eagleton’s essay in the same volume valorises the witches precisely because they lie outside the warrior state. Terry Eagleton, ‘The Witches are the Heroines of the Piece’, in Macbeth: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Alan Sinfield (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 46–52. 34 Aitchison, Macbeth: Man and Myth, pp. 77–83. 35 Aitchison, Macbeth: Man and Myth, pp. 74–77. 36 For more on the witches, see Mary Floyd-Wilson, ‘English Epicures and Scottish Witches’, Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006): 131–61. 37 For a discussion of Platonic liminality in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Erica Birrell’s essay in this volume, pp. 67–68. 38 Bassnett and Lefevere, ‘Introduction: Where Are We in Translation Studies?’, p. 91. 39 de Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet, pp. 191–94. 40 See de Grazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet, p. 191. 41 Muir sums up the critical relationship between the Porter and the Gunpowder Plot. See Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir, pp. xxv–xxxii.

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42 Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, pp. 224–36. 43 Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004) is devoted to ‘Macbeth’ and Its Afterlife. See especially William C. Carroll, ‘“Two Truths are Told”: Afterlives and Histories of Macbeth’, Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004): 69–80 and Paul Prescott, ‘Doing All That Becomes A Man: The Reception and Afterlife of the Macbeth Actor 1744–1889’, Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004): 81–95. 44 Sinfield’s Faultlines contains a full chapter devoted exactly to these problems. Sinfield, Faultlines, pp. 52–70. 45 Graham Holderness, ‘Radical Potential: Macbeth on film’, in Macbeth: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Alan Sinfield (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 151–60, pp. 155–56.

Chapter 5

‘Most Retrograde to Our Desire’: Translating Recusant Identity in Hamlet Richard Chamberlain

[The Earl of Derby] Desires that the course begun may be continued; good has already been wrought, by the men being for the most part conformable. Secret and church Papists, being men of ability, are the only dangerous people; asks their resolution about the wives, who are in many cases so obstinate, that their husbands complain. Calendar of State Papers (1592)1 Every translation must fit one world inside another, but not every work to be translated has been shaped by emphatic opposition to the world into which it must be fitted. Robert Hullot-Kentor (1997)2

I Elizabethan England had a problem about saying no. Official records reveal the government’s awareness of their own failure to coerce the population adequately, and one of the issues which most preoccupied them was the behaviour of religious recusants, those Catholics who ‘refused’ (the word is derived from the Latin recusare) compulsory attendance at Church of England services. These English Catholics were not merely feared as a ‘fifth column’ in the event of a Spanish invasion; their principled denial of the law also called the government’s authority into question in everyday

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contexts. They secretly persisted in their own rituals, refusing to acknowledge the religious ‘settlement’ which the government presented as a fait accompli from which it would be simply unreasonable to dissent. One effect of recusancy was thus to aid the construction of a new identity for this persecuted minority. According to Peter Holmes, ‘Soon the activity – recusancy – signified Catholicism itself: by refusing church attendance a man distinguished himself clearly from Protestants, and showed himself and the world what he was’.3 The aim was not merely not to act, but also to be seen not to act: authority’s recognition of one’s resistant inactivity was vital. It was paradoxical enough, however, that a positive identity should result from a campaign of resistance based wholly on a principled absence of action. Indeed, such highly visible non-attendance, or (in the case of ‘Church papists’) attendance with pointed non-participation, must have been a particularly irksome, unaccountably powerful form of protest as far as the Elizabethan authorities were concerned. As a crime of omission, it was especially difficult to detect and punish by force, and was uniquely immune to ‘rational’ persuasion. Every act of recusancy highlighted those points at which official rule was unable to handle an alternative logic – hard-line yet elusive – which repudiated commonsense consensus, the basis upon which its case for a new, moderately Protestant England was founded. There is some evidence that this dangerously questioning, if resolutely negative, spirit infiltrated other areas of social life, beyond the immediate religious conflict. In the North of England, the Earl of Derby was kept busy policing the activities (or, rather, the calculated inactivity) of the recusants. The Privy Council wrote to him in 1592 about an incident which arguably encapsulates the infectious tendency of contempt for officially administered order: We have considered of your Lordship’s letters reporting unto us the lewd and foule disorder lately committed at a buriall in that county [Lancashire] of a Recusant, wherein as we have cause hartely to thank your Lordship for the care you do shew in all those occasions that concerne her Majesty’s service and the good and quiet government of those counties, so we do



‘Most Retrograde to Our Desire’ 133 like very wel the course your Lordship doth meane to take to examin the aucthors of this audacious fact, that som exemplarye punishment may be shewed and inflicted upon the offenders.4

In this case, passive religious resistance clearly provoked an outbreak of violence against ‘good and quiet government’. This Lancashire graveyard scene suggests the dramatic potential of a confrontation between the law and an ‘unreasonable’ code which cannot and will not be governed, which sets its face against those everyday trade-offs and co-operative negotiations which underlie the orderly reproduction of power. Like Shakespeare imagining the fisticuffs at Ophelia’s grave, ‘the aucthors of this audacious fact’ appear to have brought a complex of ill-defined tensions into sharp focus. The burial of the dead unleashed the silent fury generated by a fundamental contradiction at the core of English society. Oddly, perhaps, for a play often read as representative of Shakespeare’s open-endedly inclusive genius, so much in Hamlet (c.1600) also depends upon obstinate self-withdrawal from what other people desire. The atmosphere of the last phase of 1.2 for instance (which concludes with Horatio, Marcellus and Barnardo reporting to Hamlet their sightings of his father’s ghost), is built up from displays of unbending will: the ghost’s reportedly ‘fixed’ and ‘constant’ (1.2.233–34)5 gaze, Hamlet’s persistent questioning of the three witnesses, and their determination to report what they have seen exactly as it happened. The ghost of Old Hamlet is not the only one in the early passages of the play who imposes absolute demands (‘Remember me’ (1.5.91), ‘Swear!’(1.5.157)) with contemptuous unconcern for what anyone else thinks. On both sides, Hamlet and the reporters are impelled by a desire for rigorous accuracy, even if it comes at the expense of ‘reasonable’ social behaviour: hamlet horatio hamlet

His beard was grizzled, no? It was as I have seen it in his life, A sable silver’d. I will watch tonight. Perchance ’twill walk again.

134 horatio hamlet

Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity I war’nt it will. If it assume my noble father’s person, I’ll speak to it though hell itself should gape And bid me hold my peace. I pray you all, If you have hitherto conceal’d this sight, Let it be tenable in your silence still; (1.2.240–48)

In this play, the creative hesitation of the undecidable sits alongside the violence of the decision. This scene is marked by a peculiar mixture of the emphatic and the tentative, passionate assertions of what they have seen, or what Hamlet purposes to do, with much conditional ‘perchance’, ‘if it’, ‘if you’. Certainty and doubt are perhaps most perfectly married in Horatio’s ‘I war’nt it will’, which has both a guarantee intended to back up his account of the ghost’s reality, and an inevitable note of doubt (not ‘It will’, but ‘I war’nt it will’). Similarly, Hamlet’s intention to speak to the ghost is both highly conditional (‘If it assume my noble father’s person’), and unconditional (‘I’ll speak to it though hell itself should gape’). There is an unreasonable determination here to face either the unknown or the all-powerful at the cost of his life, or even his soul. The questioning, musing dimension of the play thus sits alongside the fixed will often displayed by Hamlet in the early stages; neither the claims of friendship nor enmity will be able to sway this utter determination. Absolute rejection of established authority (hell is credited with more power than heaven, investing this rebellion with Satanic associations which anticipate Milton) echoes in every corner of the play. The prevalence in this scene of uncompromising demands, especially for complete accuracy, establishes a theme running throughout and beyond the play, questioning the critics as much as the hapless characters caught up in the tragedy. The failure of Hamlet’s determination to revenge is famous, but the theme of individual determination promptly to escape the trammels of expected co-operation, often to be found at a much less obvious level of the action, has not been recognized to the same extent:



‘Most Retrograde to Our Desire’ 135 hamlet  And fix’d his eyes upon you? horatio Most constantly. hamlet  I would I had been there. horatio It would have much amaz’d you. hamlet Very like. Stay’d it long? horatio  While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred. marcellus barnardo Longer, longer. horatio Not when I saw’t.

}

(1.2.233–39) The Ghost is not the only one who refuses to give in and go away. In this moment, Horatio also returns insistently, in a way which disrupts and disturbs his fellows. Although the scene does not represent a debate or altercation, Horatio unexpectedly perseveres with ‘Not when I saw’t’ in correction – or rather negation – of a clamorously declared majority view. His initial estimate, ‘While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred’, uses a round figure, which, though approximate, might show an aversion to false impressions of exactness. Horatio’s intransigent rally interrupts the gripping descriptions of the Ghost, and the dramatic fluency of the scene: it stands out as the ‘rub’ which the interpreter cannot ignore, even though they are keen to play on unimpeded. This inconspicuous moment reflects much else in the play concerning the critical force of interruptions and negations. Horatio’s unabashed refusal is a fleeting shadow of Hamlet’s own emphasis in eschewing a blithely upbeat statement: perhaps the Ghost tarried for a count of a hundred, perhaps not. The key is not the statement of truth but the negation of untruth: it was certainly no longer, and Horatio thinks that this is a point worth making more than once, even at the expense of his comrades’ good humour. This element of radically unaccountable disobedience threatens to discover a wound in early modern culture which is impossible to mend. This kind of nay-saying passes from the merely eccentric

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and ‘humorous’ to a dangerous abandonment of the sense that social relations are natural, consensual and commonsensical. Is it going too far to say that, in such moments as this, the play begins to question the assumption that anyone refusing to participate in these ‘ordinary’ practices and beliefs is an outsider, a spoilsport or some kind of traitor, someone to be mocked, excluded or even killed? Putting refusal into the mouths of powerful, or relatively powerful, people such as Hamlet and Horatio, who are supposed to have the audience’s sympathy, neutralizes the usual disguise of mockery and contempt thrown over it by a culture keen to keep everything going like clockwork. The first half of Hamlet shows that the sheer arbitrariness of refusal in its purest form, oblivious to counter-argument and contemptuous of punishment, implies the failure of an entire system of rule. Indeed, it was this very nexus of social control at which Pius V directed his bull of 1570 which excommunicated the Queen, called for her assassination and demanded the invasion of England: And also [declare] the nobles, subjects and people of the said realm, and all others who have in any way sworn oaths to her, to be forever absolved from such an oath and from any duty arising from lordship, fealty and obedience; and we do, by authority of these presents, so absolve them and so deprive the said Elizabeth of her pretended title to the crown and all other the above said matters. We charge and command all and singular the nobles, subjects, peoples and others aforesaid that they do not dare obey her orders, mandates and laws. Those who shall act to the contrary we include in the like sentence of excommunication.6 The consequences of this for a state government are potentially disastrous; if everyone were to obey the command of a ‘higher’ authority and suddenly cancel their obedience to the law and customs of their own country, government would be impossible. Such a wave of civil disobedience, imagined and advocated by Pius’s bull, would be more destructive of England as the Tudors knew it than a hundred Armadas. Through it, political disobedience or treachery is linked to individual obstinacy, both at a textual level



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and historically. The Pope’s rash and (one would think) potentially self-damaging document confers an unusual degree of power upon an apparently idealistic thought: what if one simply decides to say ‘no’? While no one succeeded in assassinating Elizabeth, and it seems that no epidemic of obstinate refusal undermined her rule, Shakespeare’s play indicates that the role of the individual in legitimating her regime, and the whole social order, was a matter of profound cultural anxiety. For the Shakespearean critic, it is tempting to draw an analogy between this resistant, recusant identity (founded, paradoxically, on the absence of action) and the behaviour of a number of key figures in the plays – among them Hamlet, Cordelia, Malvolio, Jaques, Katharina, Thersites and Apemantus – whose disruptive quality follows from declining to do what their surrounding social order expects of them. Contrary to an ingrained critical prejudice, according to which Shakespeare is fundamentally a ‘sharer’, whose works celebrate a generous-spirited ethic of social cohesion and participation, it might be argued that a principle of dissidence based on negativity centrally inhabits the plays in a way that calls this happier conception of the Shakespearean spirit into question. If this alternative, ‘refusing’, Shakespeare is countenanced, his roots might be traced in the politically charged negativity of the Elizabethan Catholics and the tremors it sent throughout English society.7 As with most of the scenes of celebration and the expression of community in Shakespeare, the (compulsory) churchgoing that was at the heart of English communal life took place in the awareness that others were sitting it out, thereby calling the practice and its intended political message into question. Indeed, Shakespeare could be read as ‘translating’ recusant identity and its effects into dramatic character and action, in an imaginative mediation of something which is so ‘absent’ and negative that it might be expected to escape representation. Here is a potentially powerful historicist anecdote with which to approach an understanding of negativity and negation in Shakespeare, and one which makes quite explicit the translative nature of the connection, the theatre’s creative capacity to exploit parallels and equivalences in the signifying systems of its time. On this basis, we could see recusancy translated into fashionable

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melancholy (in Hamlet), satirical comedy (in Twelfth Night (c.1600)) or a comical satire on fashionable melancholy (in As You Like It (c.1599–1600)), all of which register a profound anxiety about the unravelling of authority. Yet such a promising historicist reading of Shakespearean refusal quickly runs up against contradictions which problematize the exchange-based, communicative relationship it proposes between social tensions and the dramatic forms into which they are translated. Something in the nature of Shakespearean refusal rejects the construction of a false identity which would limit its power to unsettle coercive common sense. The translative equivalence proposed by such an historicist reading places and explains the disruptive absence (the will not to do something) in Shakespeare’s text. These contradictions would inform, in particular, the interpretation of Hamlet, a play which is overtly moulded by a logic of refusal (and which has, especially of late, been read in terms of Catholic contexts). The very likelihood of this translative historicist reading of recusancy in this text invites us to wonder if refusal (whether recusant identity or Shakespearean dissidence) and translative substitution make suitable bedfellows after all. Do the very characteristics of recusancy, which seem to reflect, engender and explain Shakespearean refusal, interrupt the clear transmission that such an interpretative move requires?

II For one uncharacteristic moment, Horatio has his negative truth and he is sticking to it. The fact that this seems ‘out of character’ makes his refusal even more mystifying, troubling and untranslatable. The effect of his intransigence is more likely to create obscure discomfort, a sense of being irked or unsettled, than to elicit any more overt reaction. This applies both to other Shakespearean characters, who are baffled and disturbed by any unflinching withdrawal from the social etiquette of participation, and to the play’s critics. Drawing attention to this fleeting moment as an instance of challenging negation also goes against the grain of acceptable critical practice in that it values a dead-end which



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offers no edifying alternative. Horatio’s absolute certainty, and the act of drawing attention to it, are unilateral positions made with scandalous disregard for polite convention and the feelings of others. He does not reach out, does not seem interested in joining a social dialogue. Rather, he seems completely secure, eschewing consultation, compromise and external validation. To celebrate such negativity, recognizing its sheer-sided immunity to consensual compromise and blank indifference to contextual recovery, is to ignore the driving logic of contemporary criticism, grounded, as it is often at pains to remind us, in exchange, reciprocity, chiasmus and (perhaps most significantly, but least prominently, of all) translatability. Admiring such an isolationist stance leads us not through the labyrinths of difference, but deflects us from a cultural text that both shapes and is shaped by historical contexts. It does not go along with the fluidly transformative relations between ‘non-literary’ culture and Renaissance drama familiar from the new historicisms; for the same reason, it does not feel like the mutually liberating encounter often assumed to characterize the translative. This optimistic view is illustrated by Susan Bassnett when she writes that Walter Benjamin, in ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), famously depicted translation as a life-enhancing activity that ensures the survival of a text. The life of a text is prolonged through translation, as a whole new generation of readers is empowered to read something that might otherwise fade into obscurity as tastes change. It is the translator’s task, Benjamin suggests, ‘to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work’.8 This passage suggests a deep positivity of outlook in translation. Translation theory, like (and partly because of) post-structuralism, enables us to escape outdated commitments to authorial genius and the artwork’s autonomous originality, into a situation in which texts live on between languages, in the flow of cultural construction and re-inscription. For this sort of criticism, Shakespeare’s plays

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are always in process as they are transformed by new cultural encounters. Translation studies thus perhaps forms an instance of the way in which theories which begin from ‘radical’ and anti-humanist claims end up reinforcing the old feeling that Shakespeare is fundamentally a sharer. Shakespeare is at once the co-operative man of the theatre, a ‘sharer’ in the ownership and control of his company, and one who can show us how to feel, to imagine the experiences of others, and thus to become more fully human through a process of readily communicative, ‘empowering’ and ‘life-enhancing’ exchange. In this context, Horatio’s intransigence (and a criticism which senses some hope in his determined autonomy) represents an anti-translative force, the voice of the shuttle silenced by a sledgehammer. Beginning from the assumption that cultural anxieties about refusal must inform, and therefore allow us to understand, Hamlet, the unilateralism of Horatio’s stance now seems to exceed, or fail to match up to, the ideals of cultural participation embodied in post-structuralism, translation studies and ‘new’ historicist critical practice. The Shakespearean refuser possesses an infuriating power to defeat the contextual techniques deployed to grasp the historical fact of the literary malcontent, ethical dissident or spoilsport. The refuser’s negation of ‘sharing’ will always leave a troubling logical remainder once the socially ill-adjusted character has been historicized away. The medium of exchange upon which such transfers depend has itself been disabled by a character who reveals the possibility of an unequivocal ‘no’. The refuser opens a void in the symbolic order of cultural participation to which the usual translative historicist gestures seem an inadequate response. Viewed in such a light, the sense of realism offered by recourse to handy historical contexts such as Catholic recusancy begins to look like an ideological mystification or disciplinary self-justification. In refusal, that is, the new historicisms confront the possible death of the inescapable participation upon which their theory of culture is predicated. That realization of its finitude cannot be simply ignored or transfigured. Truly implacable individual refusal threatens to collapse canons of interpretative validity based on critical consensus and on the



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apparently democratic, but really (from the perspective of refusal) coercive and constraining, historicist fetish of the contextual. It is equally hard for translation theory to respond to the matter of refusal in Shakespeare’s plays, because refusal runs counter to its deeply-held values of openness, sharing and social participation. An essay by Alessandro Serpieri exemplifies this problem, and the ways in which the assumptions underlying approaches to translation are shared with the ‘new’ historicisms and with traditional humanism: An amazing number of neologisms are scattered throughout the canon, and they always signal an outburst of expressive energy, the emergence of new ‘voices’ in the semantics of the vocabulary. They are the frontiers of language, the starting points for new adventures of the mind into the realm of experience. One of the greatest difficulties in translating Shakespeare lies, in my opinion, in conciliating the expected with the unexpected, the confirmed meaning, however marvellously expressed it may be, with the generative configuration of a new meaning. Shakespeare’s energy spurts from these layers of language where knowing and inventing dramatically co-operate both in phrases and speeches, and, at the theatrical level, in the interactions of complex minds and attitudes. This energy is not fully endogenous, does not circulate only within the mind of the artist, but is based on cultural and social exchanges, on intertextuality and on the ‘negotiations’ of which Stephen Greenblatt has spoken in Shakespearean Negotiations.9 Here, Shakespeare is energetic, a go-getter, a seeker after new meanings, new thoughts and new language. He is also, however, a team-player, inventing through the ‘social and cultural exchanges’ beloved of Stephen Greenblatt. Whilst it is good that the individual has a positive outlook, this seems to say, it must be expressed in terms of, and for the sake of, the group. Shakespeare’s texts, we are made to feel, are fundamentally extroverted, sharing, combining, synthesising. It would not do to see them as conditioned in any significant way by a wholly ‘endogenous’ logic of refusal.

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Such resounding positivity about a sharing Shakespeare also characterizes the voluminous historicist readings produced in recent decades. Contextualist criticism has affinities with translation theory in the way it produces interpretations of Shakespeare, and prominent historicists have openly celebrated it as a liberating aspect of their critical practice, using metaphors of translation to describe their work. In Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Stephen Greenblatt, still at an early stage of New Historicism’s development, could be speaking of the continuity between the fluid, decentred nature of translation and his own effort to persuade readers that Shakespeare’s plays were not merely produced by solitary inspiration and labour: If one longs, as I do, to reconstruct these negotiations, one dreams of finding an originary moment, a moment in which the master’s hand shapes the concentrated social energy into the sublime aesthetic object. But the quest is fruitless, for there is no originary moment, no pure act of untrammelled creation. In place of a blazing genesis, one begins to glimpse something that seems at first far less spectacular: a subtle, elusive set of exchanges, a network of trades and trade-offs, a jostling of competing representations, a negotiation between joint-stock companies. Gradually, these complex, ceaseless borrowings and lendings have come to seem to me more important, more poignant even, than the epiphany for which I had hoped.10 This is a Shakespeare for whom movement, exchange and negotiation are more important than authenticity or artistic integrity. Shakespeare has become a text, or rather part of an unlimited network of relations within which the value and meaning of any item alters as it is exchanged, passed around from one participating group to another. In that this picture removes the prime individual, replacing his majestic sway with an ‘unspectacular’ process carried on by many actors, Greenblatt’s early modern culture has overtones of democracy and self-effacing modesty, which many critics have been anxious to echo. Within this context, it is significant that Greenblatt aligns such



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universal negotiation with the translative by identifying traditional literary-critical desiderata, such as aesthetic autonomy, expression and authorial intention, with the ‘untranslatable’: The attempt to locate the power of art in a permanently novel, untranslatable formal perfection will always end in a blind alley, but the frustration is particularly intense in the study of the Shakespearean theatre [. . .]. If there is no expressive essence that can be located in an aesthetic object complete unto itself, uncontaminated by interpretation, beyond translation or substitution – if there is no mimesis without exchange – then we need to analyse the collective dynamic circulation of pleasures, anxieties and interests.11 Here, the decentred worldview of New Historicism is identified with the novel freedom of translation, as it busily undoes the privileged enclave of authorship and opens it up to the bracing circulation of ‘social energy’. In Shakespeare from the Margins (1996), Patricia Parker’s readings of Shakespearean wordplay, including play on the word ‘translation itself’ (and, beyond that, punning on all sorts of translative activity), provide brilliant demonstrations of the links which are to be made between individual words, complexes of meaning and historical formations. Her historicist method is itself a form of translation, on the terms in which she asks us to understand translation, in ‘all of its early modern resonances, from translation between tongues and metaphor as Puttenham’s “Figure of Transport” to adultery as a form of theft and the material translation, conveyance or transferring of goods or property.’12 Translation thus becomes almost indistinguishable from any other sort of transformation, such as imitation, re-writing or metaphor. The deconstructive insight that the play of meanings is, in principle, limitless, produces criticism saturated with links, connections and unfixed borders which undermine conservative (here patriarchal) ideologies: [B]ehind these scenes of translating, conveying, stealing or goingbetween in Merry Wives there lurks, as so often in Shakespeare,

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the figure of Mercury. Mercury as go-between is explicitly invoked when Mistress Quickly, the mistranslator of Act IV, scene i and the play’s principal go-between, is called a ‘she-Mercury’ (II. ii.80), a phrase that links this translative female to the figure who is not only famously an interpres (go-between and translator) but a notorious conveyer, patron both of language and of thieves.13 Parker makes this extended, early- and post-modern idea of translation central to her project of taking Shakespearean wordplay seriously, in contrast to the still prevalent Johnsonian prejudice against quibbles and puns in Anglo-American criticism. For her, bringing a deconstructive approach to language together with the current imperative towards cultural and historical contexts, Shakespearean meaning is anarchic and excessive, transgressing all critical attempts to order and delimit it. On the other hand, however, despite the effectiveness with which she unites wordplay and politics, the optimistic assumption that translation is always something connective and socially engaged misses the unsettling power of the disconnected. The celebratory outlook which characterizes much of the field of current translation studies, and parallel developments in historicist criticism, is in contrast to the passage at the head of this essay, in which a letter from the Earl of Derby is summarized for the Council. The women it speaks of were not ‘translative females’ but obstinate refusers, stick-in-the-muds rather than ‘she-Mercuries’. Perhaps this problem, in which these women are ‘untranslatable’, and adamantly against change despite the backsliding of their all too co-operative, conformist husbands, should give us pause about the easy way from textual free-play to human liberation. The emergence of a side to Shakespeare which runs counter to the ‘sharing’ ethic privileged by the institution of criticism, that does not automatically favour the ‘joiners’, will no doubt be welcome to some, who have a degree of scepticism about translation (so conceived) as an agent of liberation. Michael Neill has stressed ‘the aggressive face of translation’,14 and the fact that ‘Translation [. . .] is always a two-edged sword: it is both an instrument of power, mastery and expropriation and a vehicle of self-transformation



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entailing disorientation and even the threat of self-loss.’15 Lawrence Venuti has investigated possible means of reducing the domination and domestication of a ‘foreign’ culture involved in the translation process,16 and Tejaswini Niranjana has emphasized that: Translation as a practice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism. [. . .] In creating coherent and transparent texts and subjects, translation participates – across a range of discourses – in the fixing of colonized cultures, making them seem static and unchanging rather than historically constructed.17 A translative process can fix an object, in the process of transforming it, into a severely restricted range of permitted interpretations. Paradoxically, all the ceaseless ‘negotiation’ can create a predictable, knowable and controllable world. Curiously, while Greenblatt gives a name to what is immune to such all-pervasive negotiation, the ‘untranslatable’, his statements assume that nothing at all is untranslatable – for instance, when he states that criticism focusing on fascinating ‘textual traces’ can no longer ‘profitably centre on a search for their untranslatable essence’.18 They can no longer do so because he doesn’t believe that there is an untranslatable essence, in these texts or anywhere else. His ‘untranslatable’, in fact, refers to something that does not exist, and indeed it becomes for him almost synonymous with the non-existent. It is in the nature of a fabulous beast, a by-word for the impossible or illusory with which to mock the gullible back to reality. Yet the ‘untranslatable’, a term with no material referent, is strangely prominent in his discourse, called into being by a desire to demonstrate the universality of exchange. It is as if the untranslatable is negation conceived as the unspeakable reverse of negotiation, the bogey-man, a touch of the Real, which stubbornly returns to haunt the New Historicist project. In other words, translation theory might question rather than reinforce this model of translation as optimism concerning exchange, and thus resist its politically conservative implications. It could be time to salvage the ‘untranslatable’ before it is finally negotiated out of existence.

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III If it is right to say that an identification of translation with negotiation, exchange and participation underlies Greenblatt’s early New Historicist project quite openly, and other subsequent ‘new historicisms’ more tacitly, Shakespeare’s plays assume extra significance because they figure so insistently the kind of characters who are, or think themselves to be, or would like to be, untranslatable. We have already seen, in discussing Horatio, how Hamlet is a play informed by an ethic of refusal; the prince himself, however, is a more complex example, and the quality of his refusal has more profound implications. The sense in which Horatio’s companions are checked in their assumption of easy co-operation is writ large in Hamlet’s scenes with Claudius. In rigorously and precisely refusing Claudius’s blandishments, he makes himself exactly opposite to him in every particular. Thus, there is unmistakably greater significance to the King’s remark that For your intent In going back to school in Wittenberg, It is most retrograde to our desire [. . .], (1.2.112–14) than reservations about Hamlet’s living arrangements in the near future. ‘It is most retrograde to our desire’ is a consciously grand line, placing the unusual word (sounding somewhat technical or mathematical-scientific) prominently. The line draws attention to itself, interrupting the flow of Claudius’s slightly frantic beseechings, the word ‘retrograde’ itself an obstacle to swift and painless expression, which seems to enact struggle – those acts of clawing-back or swimming against the tide – which are dramatized in this scene, and in the play as a whole. Furthermore, it is not the king’s wish that Hamlet should not go to Wittenberg, but his desire, a word that (even if one resists the temptation to read it in terms of psychoanalysis) indicates that this particular point is just one manifestation of a complex of underlying tensions. Claudius really cannot stand the way this deadly struggle remains



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spoken-yet-unspoken, staged by Hamlet as a series of witty verbal negations, frustrating each appeal by turning its own logic against it: king hamlet king hamlet

But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son – A little more than kin, and less than kind. How is it that the clouds still hang on you? Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun. (1.2.64–67)

Most people probably feel that Hamlet’s refusal of the King’s offer of friendship is not a spectacle of churlish self-indulgence, nor would they agree that Hamlet’s behaviour is simply a sign of uncontrolled grief. Rather, there is a powerful sense that he is being asked to endorse a state of affairs which is both false and wrong. Earlier hints in the dialogue (not to mention the effect of the audience’s own fore-knowledge of the play) have intimated the illegitimacy of Claudius’s rule. However, Hamlet’s steadfastness in the face of these compromising appeals, and the brilliance of his wit in turning these tainted terms of affection – ‘cousin’, ‘son’ – against their speakers, lends an authority to his critical stance which goes well beyond what could be justified, at this point, by the facts established in the narrative. His negations (using ‘sun’/​ ‘son’ not only to block Claudius’s fatherly approaches, but also to frustrate his calming stock of nature imagery, dispersing the emotionally responsive ‘clouds’ with the cuttingly immediate and brazenly social ‘sun’) anticipate what we subsequently learn, or re-learn, about how Claudius became king. That is to say, it is Hamlet’s attractiveness as a refuser that makes us want to believe in Claudius’s guilt, even before we have any firm evidence for it. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet is unhappy that his father has not received the proper funeral rites, that (in Lacanian terms) his death has not been sufficiently integrated into the symbolic order, but remains an anomalous, uncanny, unsolved problem haunting the court. The Ghost, however, is in a sense superfluous: the black-suited, melancholy prince himself embodies the problem, perplexing, distressing and irritating all those who have benefited from the old King’s death, and who have thus told

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themselves that there are no unresolved issues. Hamlet, always the same – melancholy, black-clad, with hooded-eyes – makes himself a continual, unwelcome reminder that the reality lived out by Claudius, Gertrude and the court flunkies who appear in the play is a serious self-deception. The evidence that the old King has not been mourned properly, that there has been something amiss with the transfer of power, entrenches the audience’s identification with Hamlet and politicizes both his criticisms of Claudius-Gertrude and the view of the spectators. The way in which Gertrude frames her plea that Hamlet should abandon his self-destructive mourning calls to mind the figure of Antigone: queen

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not for ever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust. (1.2.68–71)

The dust from which the son seeks continually to disinter the father is the same ground, obsessively pawed over, with which Antigone wants to cover her brother’s body. His worldly, meansends desire is to right wrongs, to do things properly and to restore the symbolic order to the way it should be. There is thus a side to Hamlet’s endeavour that seeks a restoration of the shared activity of the symbolic, to get back onto correct terms with all and sundry, to patch up the strange gaps which have been appearing in the socially constructed reality of Denmark. At least, that is one way of reading him: as someone who might be satisfied if Claudius could be exposed as a murderer and usurper, if his father could be reburied with the proper ceremony, and if his mother would show contrition and lead a life appropriate to her widowhood. Yet there is something about Hamlet’s refusal which should make us doubt whether it could in fact be limited to these reasonable, socially acceptable bounds. As is well known, he makes very little effort to bring any of these things about. Rather, he castigates himself for



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being unwilling or unable to do so, for (despite all his conscious self-promptings) persisting in an ongoing stance of refusal, rather than constructive social action. He cannot kill the King, but persists in this living death, refusing to give way on his desire; or rather, as Slavoj Žižek, re-reading Lacan, would have it, his drive, because his drive to refuse persists beyond the pragmatic, real-world engagements of desire. It is instructive to think of refusal in general, and Shakespeare’s refusers in particular, in terms of this difference between desire and drive, and indeed Hamlet is one of the examples Žižek draws upon to illustrate it: Our interest in this distinction concerns its relation to the ‘second death’: the apparitions that emerge in the domain ‘between two deaths’ address to us some unconditional demand, and it is for this reason that they incarnate pure drive without desire. Let us begin with Antigone, who, according to Lacan, irradiates a sublime beauty from the very moment she enters the domain between two deaths, between her symbolic and her actual death. What characterizes her innermost posture is precisely her insistence on a certain unconditional demand on which she is not prepared to give way: a proper burial for her brother. It is the same with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who returns from the grave with the demand that Hamlet revenge his infamous death.19 Claudius finds to his cost that Hamlet has himself entered the space ‘between two deaths’. In his ‘antic disposition’ (1.5.180) he casts off the subjectivity of Prince, soldier, and poet. He tries to be a revenger, the literary or ‘symbolic’ role his ghostly father has set out for him, but finds he is instead a pure refuser: a figure for whom there are fewer literary antecedents. As far as Hamlet is concerned, he is wrestling with a number of painful and contradictory desires, some consciously referring to their proper objects, others no doubt mediated by intervening fantasies and disguised objects. But for Claudius, whose desire is to translate his resistant ‘son’, Hamlet has the power to destroy him and keeps coming

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onwards, much like (in another of Žižek’s analogies) the robotic killer in the Terminator films.20 As far as Claudius can see, Hamlet is inexorable, both as a physical threat and as a ceaseless verbal negation which makes Claudius by turns speechless and incontinently verbose: king

’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father, But you must know, your father lost a father, That father lost, lost his — and the survivor bound In filial obligation for some term To do obsequious sorrow. (1.2.87–92)

Up to this point, Claudius maintains his composure in appealing to common sense, to the reasonable, socially-accepted limits of proper mourning. This is a duty, a socially-demanded sign of sadness and a recognition of loss. So much for that. The dramatic reason for the speech’s continuation, however, must be Hamlet’s behaviour or demeanour as his uncle is speaking those words. He goes on, evidently with a rising temperature, But to persever In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness, ’tis unmanly grief, It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, An understanding simple and unschool’d; (1.2.92–97) To go beyond the accepted limits of reasonable mourning – in other words, to be genuinely affected by the death, not just mourning at the level of performative convention – is obstinacy, an ‘impious’ moral fault, punishable, it would seem, by heaven. And if that doesn’t persuade the presumably unimpressed-looking Hamlet, perhaps an accusation of immaturity will sting him into a response. Hamlet’s ‘retrograde’ desire is to return to ‘school’ in



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Wittenberg, and he clearly fancies himself something of an intellectual. Claudius reveals his contempt for the non-participant by infantilizing Hamlet, and throwing in accusations of cowardice and impatience for good measure, but to no avail. Claudius’s next question seems addressed as much to himself as to Hamlet, as his argumentative faculties begin to fail: For what we know must be, and is as common As any the most vulgar thing to sense – Why should we in our peevish opposition Take it to heart? (1.2.98–101) Despite all the reasonable reasons Claudius advances for not taking these things to heart, Hamlet still does so, putting him in a position beyond any logic the King can bring to bear on the problem. Hamlet is not interested in ‘reasonable’ arguments, but persists with a self-confidence and verbal-argumentative rigour which seems more resilient each time it is challenged. Spurred on by Hamlet’s response to his words, and by his own growing sense of the feebleness of such ‘commonsense’ logic, Claudius throws himself into a frantic and (he knows, it seems) ineffectual listing; the more supposedly incontrovertible his reasons, the more impeccable his seconders (heaven, the dead, nature, reason) the more impotent his persuasion: Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd, whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried From the first corse till he that died today, ‘This must be so’. (1.2.101–106) Clearly enough, Claudius’s ‘desire’ is that Hamlet should accept his father’s death and assent to his mother’s new marriage and the new king’s rule in Denmark; further, that he should join with everyone

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else in conspicuously enjoying himself, and so participate in the ideological consolidation of the new king’s rule. Claudius’s attempt is to ‘translate’ Hamlet, at first by subtle persuasion – diverting his course from principled refusal into family ‘kindness’ and Danish good fellowship – and later by literally conveying him to England, where he is to be murdered – translated, or tranformed, into a corpse through the agency of the English king. In fact, many of the characters attempt to ‘translate’ Hamlet and his inconvenient refusal by co-opting him into the Danish culture of enjoyment, by cajoling him into a good humour through old school friends, by re-writing his refusal as love-melancholy, and finally by a kind of literal kidnapping, first by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and then by pirates. All this happens because of the first translation in the play, Hamlet’s sudden refusal to participate in the culture of mutual self-congratulation at Claudius’s Elsinore. That the only response to intransigent refusal, it seems, is to kidnap it, ‘re-translating’ it by stealing it, indicates that true refusal cannot be transformed or worn down with temptations and threats; it is this which irks those with a deep investment in the coercive structure of values which keeps the powerful in place. The inexorable refusal of Hamlet ‘spooks’ Claudius here because he seems like a force of nature rather than a pliant human being. His brother’s son has become a nightmarish figure in that he refuses all coaxings and cajolings; he refuses to stop refusing – to ‘grow up’ or ‘be reasonable’; he even refuses to be killed, returning like the Terminator from the death Claudius intends for him in England, even though he evidently cares nothing for his own life. From Claudius’s perspective, Hamlet is not acting out of self-preservation, but is merely an implacable automaton, engendered by faults in the reality he has constructed in Denmark and the violent origins of his rule. Hamlet remains untranslatable – he cannot be converted into some secure symbolic role, nor appropriated by any disciplinary manoeuvre. His absolute refusal comes out of nowhere: it is an irruption of the Real which threatens to overflow the symbolically-constructed ‘reality’, kept going by the operations of desire and enjoyment, of which Claudius is now the ringmaster and chief beneficiary.



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The King starts to fall apart, and his ideological grip on the populace starts to disintegrate. His speech imploring Hamlet to be reasonable descends into panicked, compulsive listing and crazily over-determined logic. Reason, whom one might expect to have little need to raise its voice, is driven to cry out ‘This must be so’ (1.2.106). The violence of the refuser’s intransigence – his immunity to persuasion, reason or consensual judgement – mirrors and exposes the violence of power (which operates in disguised form as Claudius’s ‘commonsense’ reason, and the false happiness experienced at court). While the efficacy of Hamlet’s refusal arguably depends on his own position as one of the élite, Shakespeare’s play shows, nevertheless, that the fact of refusal itself (whatever the context) can be intensely disruptive insofar as it eludes the grasp of translation-as-control.

IV Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory,21 makes the play the story of a translation. In it, he reads Shakespeare’s dramatic career as one long betrayal of his father’s will that he should remain in and defend the Catholic faith. In other words, it is a re-writing of the truth, both a distorted reflection of the story and the construction of a stance of neutrality which will not topple him into the bloody resistance struggle. Hamlet itself is thus a carrying-over of traumatic matter into theatrical entertainment, an example of the ‘circulation of social energy’ described in Shakespearean Negotiations. Whatever the merits of this interpretation, however, it necessarily installs the act of fluent translation as the keynote of the play, and thus sidelines the protagonist’s drive against translation-as-exchange (along with the self-exclusion and implicit social criticism exhibited by Horatio, Ophelia and the Gravedigger) as he tries to fend off the pawing attentions and ruined affections of those around him. On the assumption that translation consists in this sort of easy symbolic exchange, it would seem that the hero is shown to pit himself against the very translative forces which brought him into being as a literary character, which is perhaps reason enough for us, contra

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Greenblatt, to focus upon him as a refuser of the expected and demanded social flexibility. Is this, however, really to divorce Hamlet-as-refuser from translation? Benjamin’s understanding of translation rejects commonplace notions of it as an aid to facile communication, or a creative liberation into carefree dialogue with other cultures or periods of history, and as such would seem aligned with, rather than opposed to, refusal. In ‘The Task of the Translator’, the introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, Benjamin is, as ever, keen to criticize an idealist or aestheticized view of culture, but he is equally removed from the untheorized celebration of circulation, exchange and straightforward communicability which underlies the new historicisms. For Benjamin, ‘No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener’; only an ‘inferior’ translation would try to communicate what a text ‘says’ to readers who cannot understand the original.22 The ‘essential substance’ of a work of art is ‘the unfathomable, the mysterious, the poetic’, and these can never, by their nature, be transmitted as information to the readers of a translation.23 Crucially, translations are governed by the ‘translatability’ of their originals. This translatability consists in two things: whether an adequate translator will ever be found for the work, but much more importantly, whether its nature ‘calls for’ translation: ‘Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability’.24 Some works remain for ever ‘translatable’ even though no-one has succeeded in translating them; not, that is, according to the standard of accurate communication, but rather, of faithfulness to the ‘specific significance inherent in the original’.25 Benjamin’s translatability, therefore, is something intractable, recalcitrant: it has no connection with community, communication or the sociably pragmatic; rather, it is an essential quality of an object, regardless of whether that object remains untranslated, and perhaps even, therefore, largely unknown to the wider world:



‘Most Retrograde to Our Desire’ 155 One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance.26

Benjamin’s notion of the ‘translatable’ has no patience with negotiation: it inheres in the individual artwork, with no reference whatsoever to other people and their attempts to win over the solitary, resistant object to intelligibility: a unilateral gesture born of the logic of refusal I have been tracing in Hamlet. The Prince himself is ‘translatable’ only in the sense that he incessantly ‘calls for’ the translative efforts of Claudius and the others. To their dismay, however, he remains himself, untranslated and untransformed. The translatability of Hamlet is answerable only to a moment beyond history, when viewed (as Adorno has it) ‘from the standpoint of redemption’.27 The entangled and impotent negotiations of class and society are unable to transfigure an object which can only be truly understood from a radically different – for Benjamin, apocalyptic – perspective. In the Ghost’s return from Purgatory, in Hamlet’s fears about the eschatological consequences of suicide, and his reasons for not murdering Claudius as he prays, the play makes repeated appeals to a standpoint beyond negotiation and exchange. It is important to recognize that the translative ‘afterlife’ of literary works, cited approvingly by Bassnett (above), is not, for Benjamin, a matter of their periodic recreation by succeeding social formations, but rather a forceful (if all too plausible) misappropriation of the object by powerful, disingenuous contemporary interests. He speaks of the artwork’s historical ‘afterlife’ not as a happy creative reshaping, but as the dogged persistence of an original’s essential significance illuminated, however luridly, by its every rewriting in another language, time or culture. Like the ghost of Old Hamlet, the artwork which possesses true translatability returns as itself (‘Armed at point exactly, cap-à-pie’ (1.2.200)) to disrupt the convenient pleasures of the present moment:

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Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife. [. . .]The idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity.28 This afterlife does not mean that the ‘greatness’ of artworks consists in their compliant openness to reinterpretation, but rather that it persists as a disruptive – and real – haunting. Whether their new authors, translators or redactors like it or not, subsequent versions of any important work are tied to the inconvenient qualities of the original, which frustrate ‘communicative’ efforts to gloss over the material causes of human misery. Hamlet provides a powerful instance of this logic of translation-as-refusal, or rather translatability-as-refusal, one which should perhaps inform more of the work on Shakespeare’s plays carried out within this increasingly significant area of critical theory. Reading from the perspective of translation need not, however, endorse an image of what might be termed Shakespeare the Sharer; rather, it can reveal a drama of obstinacy and obstruction which forces the unpleasant side of ‘well-adjusted’ social participation into the open. As we have seen, Claudius’s desire is to ‘turn’ Hamlet easily and soon; to make him melt and resolve himself into the new King’s affirmative culture of celebration. The play offers a perfect example of such desirable suppleness in Hamlet’s eminently biddable university friends, who are consequently interchangeable, at least in name: king Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern. queen Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz. (2.2.33–34) Hamlet, by contrast, utilizes the mechanisms of such acquiescence in order to enforce his own untranslatability. The episode with the pirates, as related to Horatio in Hamlet’s letter, epitomises this dialectic of translatability in the play: ‘Finding ourselves too slow



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of sail, we put on a compelled valour, and in the grapple I boarded them. On the instant they got clear of our ship, so I alone became their prisoner.’ (4.6.15–18) The water-thieves transfer Hamlet from one ship to another, from one direction and resolve to another. In fact, he enables and perhaps intends this himself by boarding the pirate ship. Indeed, there is an interesting combination of passivity and heroic force in this account: they did not take him prisoner, so much as he ‘became’ their prisoner. This suggests both that he has engineered it (the pirates don’t deserve much credit because they were the unwitting agents of his plan) and that becoming prisoner happens to him automatically as one boat drifts away from the other. He is thus ‘translated’ by thieves, but curiously the sliding of his identity here enables his adamantine refusal – by means of this slipperiness he returns as the implacable repressed to haunt Claudius at Elsinore. Hamlet proves to be the most intransigent of refusers, and through that intransigence the most adept warper of others’ fixed purposes. Most disturbingly of all, perhaps, he can undermine anyone’s position by exercising an imagination which feeds upon the omnipresence of mutability. In a sense, this is the most repressive consensus of all, the natural processes from which no one, not even a king, can abstain: hamlet  A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. king What dost thou mean by this? hamlet  Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. (4.3.27–31) This speech turns the very premise of the ‘natural’ and ‘common’ fact of death, used by Claudius in his attempts to win Hamlet round at the beginning of the play, against the King. Processes of participation, circulation and exchange here curiously mutate into the negation of a social system that depends on participation, circulation and exchange: the social-symbolic economy of the Danish monarchy is reduced to dust by Hamlet’s poetic logic, making

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connections that undermine a piece of feudal ideology which is itself based upon making connections. Hamlet’s wordplay, and other ‘translative’ strategies, are designed to frustrate the representatives of an affirmative culture which seeks to neutralize the threat of his various gestures of refusal: Enter Polonius hamlet God bless you, sir. polonius  My lord, the Queen would speak with you, and presently. hamlet  Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? polonius By th’ mass and ’tis — like a camel indeed. hamlet Methinks it is like a weasel. polonius It is backed like a weasel. hamlet Or like a whale. polonius Very like a whale. hamlet Then I will come to my mother by and by. (3.2.364–74) Here he draws Polonius in with an enthusiastic ‘God bless you, sir’, which must provoke in the latter a good deal of relief: the Prince is amenable to the society of the court after all; things are back to normal. There is no further necessity for coercion; the ‘present’ attendance of the good son (both punctual and sane) on his royal mother is to be expected once more. However, Hamlet exploits this touching readiness on the part of authority to believe that the crisis is over to dismiss the threatened disgrace as if it had been a mere dream. As he makes his next remark, Polonius clings to this momentary respite: the question seems mad, but there may just be a rational reason for it. Here Polonius represents authority putting hope before experience. Hamlet then proceeds to turn Polonius’s game of seeking common assent to the inherently ridiculous against the old master, asking him to acquiesce in the comparison of the cloud first to a weasel and then to a whale. Hamlet negates the culture of affirmation by hijacking the process and making its own



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exponent prove the bad faith of the whole manoeuvre by which society is organized in Denmark. Finally, Polonius’s summons for Hamlet to attend the Queen ‘presently’ has been turned inside out: he will do so ‘by and by’, that is, on his own terms or not at all. Polonius’s first reply – ‘By th’ mass and ’tis — like a camel indeed’ – is a typical commonsensical reply because it assumes that the speaker is merely indulging in a piece of whimsy, as if to say ‘this isn’t “serious”, I might as well agree; where’s the harm?’ But Hamlet continues to probe the object (that most mutable and insubstantial of objects, but also substantial, huge, conspicuous and sublime of objects, a cloud); the context of his original response whisked away from him, Polonius is forced to offer further details, whether real or imagined, with which to support the comparison in which he didn’t believe in the first place. Having forced him into a realistic or objective reading of the cloud’s shape, his tormentor now shifts his ground again, revealing the utter (and insane) subjectivism of his assumed stance, and the satiric intention of the whole exchange. Hamlet achieves this victory over Polonius through a process of translation, or rather of failed or untenable translation. Metaphor, the figure of ‘transport’, is transmuted to simile, a metaphoric comparison which holds back from suggesting full identity between its terms – one which is usually associated with a ‘poetical’ tone of artificial delicacy. Here, though, the effect is used as a weapon against Polonius. The latter is placed in a series of impossible positions, unable (while clinging to his fantasy of hoped-for sanity in the prince, and in any case for reasons of protocol) to gainsay the chain of comparisons Hamlet proposes. This is stalled metaphor as vicious satire: apparently delicate, eccentric, musing, it is in fact a crippling demolition of Polonius and a damning anatomy of the ideological underpinnings of Claudius’s state, and presumably of his own father’s as well. Hamlet has used the process of mixed comparison and transformation inherent in translation instrumentally, as a stick with which to beat not just Polonius but the whole reassuring notion of common sense, as peddled by Denmark’s rulers, and to expose its role in affirming and maintaining the ‘bad’ or inauthentic

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society. His trick here seems whimsical, but in fact it is terrifying for Polonius and for everything he represents in terms of the interests of power. Hamlet’s translation/‘transformation’ discredits the whole idea of ‘agreement’ itself: between the tenor and vehicle of metaphor, between the translated and ‘target’ text, and in every cultural exchange in which the subject is expected to say ‘yes’ to the truths proposed by the powerful. In Hamlet’s world, ‘agreement’ must always result in a violent false identity. This really is too much, however; Hamlet has made Polonius look foolish, but that is hardly unusual. What is out of the ordinary is the analytical thrust of his mockery, the rupture it inflicts upon the closed economy of common sense in the play-world, which spreads out from every such piercing moment of the Prince’s refusal of agreement.

V Yet, ultimately, Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most flawed refusers: somehow, for no apparent reason, he suffers a loss of nerve in the final act, and capitulates to the repressive consensus at Elsinore. In conversation with Horatio at the opening of the final scene, the refuser has become stoical and fatalistic. Though he is still adamant that he should revenge his father, and unrepentant about his summary despatching of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his painful alienation from society and his given place in it has eased: But I am very sorry, good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot myself; For by the image of my cause I see The portraiture of his. (5.2.75–78) He seems to settle into patterns of class behaviour, recognising the bonds of nobility and courtly conduct that (in addition to revenge) link him with Laertes. His contempt for Rosencrantz and



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Guildenstern is framed in terms of his own greatness, now newly apparent to him: ’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes Between the pass and fell incensed points Of mighty opposites. (5.2.60–62) The use of the plural in ‘We defy augury’ (5.2.215) might thus be read as the emergence of the royal within his so-far refusing persona, appropriating to itself the general, reflective consideration of the shared human condition that earlier speeches have shown. Tellingly, though, this emerging royalty, according to which he perceives himself (even as he foresees his own death) at the centre of the social organization, is conceived not merely as naked power, but also as a reasonable integration into the ‘shared activity’ of the symbolic order. He thus attempts to rationalize his offence to Laertes, excusing himself with ‘reasonable’ excuses and faint appeals to Horatio’s agreement, no longer living through his intransigent refusal: I’ll court his favours. But sure the bravery of his grief did put me Into a tow’ring passion. (5.2.78–80) The pure refuser he once was would have refused the duel (notably, the stolid Horatio still urges him to do so), no matter how ‘base’ or ‘bad-sportish’ that would have seemed. But Hamlet, formerly so ready to offend anyone and everyone, must now play his part. Though he still harries Osric’s showy words and shallow fashions, doted on by the ‘drossy age’, he is obeying social forms just as closely. Doubtless this change in the protagonist is dramatically helpful: in allowing him to participate in the duel, the play prepares for his tragic death, but in doing so it also ruptures the logic of refusal it has maintained so effectively up to this point. Hamlet is given a death which is accidental but still recognizably

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noble; the crowd are not sent home irked by lingering irritation at the social system; not, at least, by anything they have witnessed in the final scene. This second transformation is summed up in the sentence ‘I am constant to my purposes, they follow the King’s pleasure.’ (5.2.197– 98). Although he still intends to kill the king, this purpose has lost its more fundamental drive to negate Claudius as the symbol of a corrupt and corrupting social order – a drive which has led him to question even the worth of the royalty he possesses more ‘legitimately’ than the present King. Now killing Claudius would merely be the instrumental act of a revenging royal prince, part of the ‘shared activity’ of politics, and part of the well-thumbed script of Renaissance revenge tragedy. ‘The King’s pleasure’ is both Claudius’, in that he has at last succeeded in getting Hamlet to play the game, and that of the symbolic King, whose place in the symbolic order is continually reaffirmed and reinvented by the shared activity of the corrupt patronage system we have seen at work in the play. Hamlet’s eyes are now open to reasonable purposes and motivations; he is no longer the blind destroyer. He is still determined, but his desire, even if it is for revenge, is now in tune with society; he may be a physical threat, but he is no longer disquieting in that persistent way which Claudius found it so hard to put his finger on, and has thus lost his socially critical force. The play might therefore be thought to fail in terms of refusalas-translatability. The Benjaminian translatability Hamlet displays throughout most of the play is finally surrendered to a conventional morality conforming to familiar stereotypes of noble behaviour, despite the earlier implication that such feudal values are now thoroughly rooted in the baseless exchange economy of the early modern world. Other Shakespearean refusers, notably the ‘cynic philosopher’ Apemantus in Timon of Athens (c.1605), offer more authentic instances of refusal as unswerving negation than any to be found in Hamlet. This is very different, however, from the case of the Archbishop of York. In this instance, the history of religious recusancy in Elizabeth’s reign exceeds the literary text in its display of the disruptive effects of the negative, and also demonstrates that



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this disturbing power latent within the positivity of culture is not confined to Catholic recusant identities. In 1580, the Archbishop made a stand against the Privy Council, who desired the use of one of his houses for confining Catholic recusants. As far as the Council could see, he had no good reason for doing so: A letter to the Lord Archbishop of Yorke in answer of his Lordship’s letters of the xxvth of the last in answer of another by order from their Lordships written unto him from Mr Secretarie Walsingham touching the lending of his Lordship’s house at Batersey for the keping of persones refusing to conforme themselves in matters of Religion; which seeing neither his Lordship nor anie of his predecessors have of longe time used and is not fitt to lodge his Lordship at any Parliament, especiallie in winter, considering his Lordship’s age, and that therefore his Lordship at his last being here made choice of another house, their Lordships thincke it somwhat strange that his Lordship denied the use of his said howse, and therfore his Lordship for these respectes is again requested to yielde his consent herto, and to advertise their Lordships with speede convenient of his meaning there in.29 This contention suggests that refusal, with its worryingly unaccountable power to disturb, was alive and well in sixteenthcentury England, spreading throughout society as an ‘antic disposition’ with a persistent and invasive life of its own. The punishment of one kind of refusal is hampered by more refusal, this time from one of those who might most be expected to favour conformity. In the face of this opposition, the Council is forced to take on the role of Claudius, demolishing every ‘reasonable’ motive for the Archbishop’s veto, but the obstinate cleric clearly has no intention of submitting. Refusal seems to have cut loose from its tame, organized religious context and stalks early modern culture as the insoluble problem it is, eating away at a social fabric so dependent on consent and playing the game. As in Shakespeare’s plays, refusal marks one out, and as such it might be said to confer identity. At the same time, though, it makes the self a

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space of nothingness. It is impossible to function as a person, with a personality, within a society whose strings one has cut. Whilst the Archbishop’s intransigence might seem to stand in some kind of ‘explanatory’ or illuminating relationship to the Shakespearean refusals I have been discussing, however, it is hard to go along with readings of the plays which seek to place the crisis of refusal in ‘historical’ contexts so as effectively to absorb its challenge. While each act of refusal happens in a unique moment, and is generated by material forces, something about refusal refuses to be fixed into position and placed at a safe distance by context. To the extent that context depends on co-operation, on interaction, on a tacit acceptance that all readings are translations and that translation is something sociable and communicative, it is short-circuited by refusal. Thus critical attempts to contextualize the trauma it induces are blind to its utopian force. The bafflement and incredulity with which refusal is met shows up the alien element which has entered the situation, an intrusion of non-linear history, or what Benjamin calls messianic time.30 Contradictory historical forces, or rather an index of a viewpoint which is outside history altogether, have entered a limited social reality and called into question the unspoken bonds which allow it to continue and to justify itself as a reasonable and orderly arrangement. However much critics may obfuscate this crisis by depicting the historical variations which attend it, refusal is the black hole of context: an impossible disappearing-point towards which culture feels itself constantly drawn. The case of the Archbishop shows us something that doesn’t ‘explain’, ‘contextualize’, or ‘translate’ the literary work, but rather redoubles its message or impact, revealing the power of individualistic refusal that rushes headlong against coercive consensus. While it does not place, explain or contextualize Hamlet, it does illuminate in it something unpalatable to conformist interpreters, and an educational apparatus which exhorts us (directly and indirectly) to be reasonable, to see the other person’s view, to consider all sides of the question, to interact, to be a listener, a communicator, a good ‘team player’. Hamlet in his earlier scenes, and Ophelia in her later ones, are none of these things: they are



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good talkers, but bad communicators; they resist every kind of translation, meaning-construction and the processes of creative rewriting attempted by Polonius and others. The fundamental refusal of ‘translation’ that they exemplify will always stymie disciplinary efforts to ‘place’ particular works and their details by anchoring them to a reassuringly ‘historical’ cultural context. They do not reveal or broach or raise something about ‘early modern culture’; rather, they expose the limits of culture as a conceptual keystone of the postmodern humanities, especially in the various forms of historical contextualism. Whether or not it is behind the times to talk of a capitalized ‘New Historicism’, the fundamental attitude towards the literary text which that approach embodied is still prevalent, though it increasingly shows signs of strain as critics begin to investigate ideas like aesthetic value, and even ‘humanism’, once more.31 These recent developments, although fraught with dangers of complacency, nostalgia and latent conservatism, are at least breaches in the stifling orthodoxy which contextual criticism has become. Historicism-as-translation has turned out to be virtually compulsory and irrationally self-justifying: the implicit condemnation of the possibility of ‘refusal’ in such criticism reveals its own inherent violence. Historicist criticism, in which the explanatory turn to cultural context has been as routine as the common cold, runs counter to Lawrence Venuti’s impulse to attack the repressively assimilative potential of translation in the hands of the powerful. It has been carried on in the name of openness to difference, and, of late, underwritten by an appeal to collective or commonsense wisdom, which is both rigorously exclusive of the wider energies of criticism, and contemptuous of any heterodox position. In refusing, from a position of power, to listen to non-contextualizing arguments, it has refused the very idea of the refuser. In the light of this critical context, it is tempting to read Hamlet’s ‘tragic problem’ as the need to reject the weight of collective expectation, rather than the difficulty of overcoming his own hesitancy, in order to respond to Claudius’s crime in a society which is ‘out of joint’ (1.5.196), yet so sanguine about its healthy state. It is not possible, however, for Hamlet’s satire simply

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to cleanse Denmark of its informing bad faith, returning it to a state of healthily clear thought and expression. The bad effects of compulsory agreement have so thoroughly affected the structure that it is impossible to mend. Rather, it is Hamlet and Ophelia who must be driven out or killed, in which case, these two, along with Shakespeare’s other refusers, constitute a radical gesture in their unresponsive blankness. Hamlet’s wit does not sparkle, but absorbs light, draining the fellow-feeling out of his associates because they actually have only ‘bad’ or inauthentic fellowship to offer. He is a ‘bad fellow’ in that he negates what passes for good company; he is disturbing, disquieting, not because he looks dishevelled and distracted, but because his language refuses the social dialogue upon which good fellowship, ideological legitimation, historical contextualism and translation are all premised. Translation, within Shakespearean criticism as elsewhere, is thus in some danger of becoming a by-word for ‘good fellowship’, a happy-go-lucky compliance with an inauthentic imperative to share. As the ghost of Old Hamlet would no doubt confirm, however, an afterlife is not necessarily ‘life-enhancing’. Translation, if it is to be more than toothless as an instrument of artistic and social criticism, should aspire to be the kind of affront or refusal which Benjamin thought it to be. This play suggests powerfully that there is a place for translation as communication, participation, interaction, reciprocity and creative freedom — but not yet.

Notes    1 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic. Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, and James I, 1591–94, ed. C. S. Knighton, twelve volumes (London: Longman, 1856), p. 288.   2 Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), pp. xi–xxi, p. xi.   3 Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 83.



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 4 Acts of the Privy Council of England, New Series, vol. XXII, A. D. 1591–1592 (1901), p. 529 (reproducing p. 399 in MS).   5 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982). All further references will be given parenthetically.  6 The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary, ed. G. R. Elton, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 427.  7 For sustained consideration of the concept of ‘refusal’ in relation to literature, see The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal, ed. Caroline Hamilton, Michelle Kelly, Elaine Minor and Will Noonan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). With specific reference to Shakespeare, see Douglas A. Northrop, ‘Shakespeare’s Comic Refusers II’, in Proceedings of the 11th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature, ed. Michelle M. Sauer (Minot, ND: Minot State University, 2003). I am grateful to Professor Northrop for sending me several unpublished papers further exploring the same theme.  8 Susan Bassnett, ‘Engendering Anew: Shakespeare, Gender and Translation’, in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. Ton Hoenselaars, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), pp. 53–67; p. 54.   9 Alessandro Serpieri, ‘Translating Shakespeare: A Brief Survey of Some Problematic Areas’, in Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Rui Carvalho Homem and Ton Hoenselaars (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 27–49, p. 29. 10 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 7. 11 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 4, p. 12. 12 Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 124. 13 Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, p. 126. 14 Michael Neill, ‘The World Beyond: Shakespeare and the Tropes of Translation’, in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, ed. R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996), pp. 290–308, p. 290.

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15 Neill, ‘The World Beyond’, p. 291. See also Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from ‘The Tempest’ to Tarzan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 16 See Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998). 17 Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 2–3. 18 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 5. 19 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 21–2. 20 Žižek, Looking Awry, p. 22. 21 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 22 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 70–82, pp. 70–71. 23 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 70. 24 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 71. 25 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 71. 26 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 71. 27 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), p. 247. 28 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 72. 29 Acts of the Privy Council, 1580–81, volume XII, new series, ed. John Roche Dasent (London: HMSO, 1896), pp. 144–45 (p. 121 in MS) [1580]. 30 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 245–55. 31 See for example Andy Mousley, Re-Humanising Shakespeare: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

Afterword Ton Hoenselaars

Anxiety and Wonder The Shakespearean texts are firmly steeped in the Renaissance encounter with foreign, European cultures, and in the emergence of the nation. As a consequence, they display great awareness of multiple languages, and in so doing convey a sense of both anxiety over non-communication and wonder at the often unknown other. We cannot fail to notice a certain tension in Julius Caesar (c.1599), where Caska says he fails to understand one of the main source languages of the Renaissance – Greek: cassius Did Cicero say anything? caska Ay, he spoke Greek. cassius To what effect? caska  [.  .  .] those that understood him smiled at one another, and shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was Greek to me.1 A comparable moment occurs in The Taming of the Shrew (c.1590), signalling how anxiety surfaced not only around Greek, but even more around Latin, one of the other source languages of the Renaissance that not everyone at the early modern playhouse was expected to understand, including Shakespeare himself, if Ben Jonson is to be believed when he claimed that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin, and less Greek’. As Hortensio interrupts the stereotypical quarrel between master Petrucchio and servant Grumio, an exchange in Italian follows, but it is Greek to the Italian Grumio:

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petruchio Signior Hortensio, come you to part the fray? Con tutto il cuore, ben trovato, may I say. hortensio  Alla nostra casa ben venuto, molto honorato signor mio Petruchio. Rise, Grumio, rise: we will compound this quarrel. grumio Nay, ’tis no matter, sir, what he ’leges in Latin.2 The unease and miscommunication explain why Shakespeare devises multiple strategies not to alienate the spectators from the play. For example, it explains the trial scene in Henry VIII (1613) where Katherine of Aragon is prepared to speak English rather than Latin in order to avoid general confusion. When Cardinal Wolsey suggests a switch to Latin in aid of the Spanish Queen’s defence – ‘Tanta est erga te mentis integritas, Regina serenissima’ – she replies: O good my lord, no Latin; I am not such a truant since my coming As not to know the language I have liv’d in [. . .] Pray speak in English; here are some more will thank you, If you speak truth for their poor mistress’ sake.3 Moments such as these (besides arguing in favour of the playwright’s proto-Catholicism) reveal Shakespeare as a craftsman, preventing incomprehension in the very arena where intelligibility is the sine qua non of any dialect or mode of multilingualism. The sudden early modern affluence of languages was not only a source of anxiety. Even Julius Caesar converts Caska’s unease over unintelligible Greek into a vision of wonder and excitement at foreign tongues into which the events at the Capitol will be translated. This is how Cassius notes that he and the other conspirators have just made the headlines for centuries to come: How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, In states unborn and accents yet unknown? (3.1.112–14)



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This joint sense of awe and wonder explains how Shakespearean drama tends to derive much of its creative energy from an awareness of a multilingual reality and the effort to cope. It brings into focus the reality of the Babylonian curse and enables us to appreciate the intense creativity to bridge the language gap by means of translation.

Translation in Shakespeare ‘Translation’ is performed on various levels within the text of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.4 Often, the plays trade in multiple languages rather conspicuously, like Henry V (c.1598). The language lesson between princess Katherine of France and her maid-in-waiting is a case in point, but so is the language lesson in The Taming of the Shrew which starts off with two lines from Ovid’s Heroides, ‘Hic ibat Simois, hic est Sigeia tellus, / Hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis’: lucentio Here, madam: Hic ibat Simois; hic est Sigeia tellus; Hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis. bianca Construe them. lucentio Hic ibat, as I told you before – Simois, I am Lucentio – hic est, son unto Vincentio of Pisa – Sigeia tellus, disguised thus to get your love – Hic steterat, and that Lucentio that comes a-wooing – Priami, is my man Tranio – regia, bearing my port – celsa senis, that we might beguile the old pantaloon. [. . .] bianca  Now let me see if I can construe it: Hic ibat Simois, I know you not – hic est Sigeia tellus, I trust you not – Hic steterat Priami, take heed he hear us not, – regia, presume not – celsa senis, despair not. (3.1.31–43) This exchange – besides feeding the notion that the translator is ever likely also to be a traitor – combines foreign-language learning

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with bawdy innuendo, as was also the case in Henry V, and we find a similar association in The Merry Wives of Windsor (c.1597–98), where young William finds himself caught between the Welsh-accented Latin teacher, Sir Hugh Evans, and the unlettered Mistress Quickly, mistaking their Humanist endeavour for a lesson in depravity (4.1). Such instances of linguistic translation in Shakespeare – with a straight line leading to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) – easily obscure the more poetic or metaphorical instances of translation in the plays and poems, like those linked to the period’s model text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is pervasive, notably in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595), which also contains what may well be Shakespeare’s most famous reference to ‘translation’ – when Bottom with the ass’s head on invites the comment: ‘Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated’ (3.1.114–15).5 Curious and significant about the second half of this over-quoted line – ‘Thou art translated’ – is that none of these words has preserved its original meaning or usage. The words ‘thou’ and ‘art’ have become archaic and have vanished from everyday usage, whereas Shakespeare’s use of the participle ‘translated’ in a metaphorical sense – which may have startled the Elizabethans too – also differs from the meaning of the term when we speak of our attempts to mind and bridge the Babylonian gap. English-language editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may emphasize that its meaning here is ‘transformed’, and Russ McDonald may add that it ‘literally’ meant ‘gone over to the other side’.6 But the popular use of the phrase ‘Thou art translated!’ today – frequent in the title of reviews of new translations – unfortunately bypasses this complexity and its associations with one of the most vital of literary texts informing Renaissance culture, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the case of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his transformation from a man into a beast, Shakespeare and his spokesman Peter Quince effectively place the term ‘translation’ on the sliding scale of metaphor, thus inviting interpretations of the concept that leave reference to the purely linguistic exercise far behind as they creatively recognize modes of exchange and transfer in social, political and ever broader cultural terms that may be analogous to the traditional linguistic translation process. Shakespeare’s own



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metaphorical use of ‘translation’ marks the beginning of the fascinating work of Michael Neill and Patricia Parker, who study translation as a process, often within the Shakespearean text, that reveals a fascination with ‘crossings’ of every kind.7 The results are challenging and welcome, as long as we remain aware that what looks like a creative expansion of the original term must also be recognised as a process of eroding the language-oriented perception of translation.8

Shakespeare in Translation The scholars who study the performance of ‘translation’ on various levels within the text of Shakespeare’s plays and poems are generously eclipsed by the vast numbers of those who focus on the way in which the increasingly multilingual and language-conscious texts of the English Renaissance, and especially the Shakespearean texts, began to lead lives of their own across the English Channel, in continental Europe at first, but in the centuries that followed also beyond – as had been predicted in Julius Caesar, ‘In states unborn and accents yet unknown’ (3.1.114). Concerned with the afterlives of Shakespeare in languages other than early modern English, this field of study focuses on the translation of Shakespeare’s work itself, and studies that unique process of dissemination without which one could not even begin to understand Shakespeare’s current fame, that process which started soon after Shakespeare’s death. Translating Shakespeare in the traditional, linguistic sense of the term seems to have begun around 1620 – when part of Venus and Adonis was published in Dutch. In view of the formative role that, among other things, the Metamorphoses played in Shakespeare’s career, it is not without interest, certainly, that Venus and Adonis was published as a translation not of Shakespeare but of a translator who had put Ovid into English: it was presented as a poem that had been ‘put by an English Poet, first into English and recently by an amateur into Dutch rhyme.’9 There is no mention of Shakespeare either in the 1620 edition in German of Englische Comedien und

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Tragedien [English Comedies and Tragedies], which included Titus Andronicus, the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ sequence from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice [Das Wohl­ge­sprochene Urtheil, oder Der Jud von Venedig – The Well-spoken Judgement, or The Jew of Venice], Twelfth Night [Tugend und Liebesstreit, oder Was Ihr Wollt – Virtue and Love Combat, or What You Will], and possibly also Hamlet [Der Bestrafte Brudermord – Fratricide Punished].10 It was only slowly that through the process of translation Shakespeare’s name became a household word, and the man a world author in his own right. For a long time, research used to occupy itself with the relative effectiveness, the aesthetic status or the relative accuracy of these translations. Gradually, however, attention also came to be devoted to the cultural history of Shakespeare in translation, with special attention to the way in which national traditions have adopted Shakespeare. A case in point is the early nineteenth-century translation of Shakespeare into German by August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck. By fashioning a German Shakespeare, Schlegel and Tieck revealed the as yet unsuspected potential of the German language itself. And as we know, this unmistakable circulation of energy between Shakespeare and the German language was to add fuel to the argument that Shakespeare was the third German classic after Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. What the Schlegel-Tieck translation reveals in extremis is that every translation is also a form of national appropriation, each made in the image of a particular country or political system. Given the intrinsically political nature of language, translating Shakespeare into another nearly automatically grants the playwright and poet a new nationality. Although ‘Translation in Shakespeare’ is a fertile field, it does not have the expansive and reproductive quality of the field known as ‘Shakespeare in Translation.’ On the one hand, despite 400 years of Shakespearean translation, there are still new languages which have not yet taken up the challenge posed by the linguistic variety and complexity of Shakespeare’s early modern English text. On the other hand, due to the natural development of languages, translations age, which is one of the reasons why there is a continuous



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flow of new translations that update and revise, and in the act also challenge and seek to rival existing ones. The field continues to expand in geographical terms because Shakespeare is translated into new languages, but it also continues to grow in temporal terms, as the history of translation in each language becomes ever longer and more complex. For obvious reasons, the practitioners of ‘Shakespeare in Translation’ are unlikely to be monoglots, having always had their own language besides knowing Shakespeare’s. Yet the impressive geographical scope of this field of focus and the implicit multilingualism of the academics active here tend to obscure the fact that we are not dealing with a single powerful majority, but with a great many tiny pockets of interest, with a great many scholars who are really stuck within the narrow circuit of their own single, Angloforeign binaries. Certainly, all may on occasion share a conference podium where English is spoken. But the point remains that for most of the scholars working in this field, the language of their immediate neighbours may remain more distant than the world’s lingua franca, English. In short, English-language research into Shakespeare and translation does not end the Babylonian curse. Certainly, the significant theoretical advances of recent decades – in postcolonial terms, but also in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and race, and the acknowledgement of intersemiotic modes of translation – have created a significant opportunity for all to discuss the translation of Shakespeare in more abstract, theoretical and supranational terms.

Shakespeare’s Translations The essays in this collection are representative of a third type of research in which Shakespeare Studies and Translation Studies meet. Here, the emphasis lies on the way in which Shakespeare looked upon translation and used translated materials as his source, but also on the way in which the playwright and his work may be understood within the context of a range of early modern translation cultures, in the widest sense of the term.11

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This area of research – occupied mainly with the translation of the literature of Medieval and Renaissance Europe as well as the classical materials in Greek, Latin and Hebrew – would look at Julius Caesar and interrogate Caska’s alleged ignorance of Greek in his words about Cicero above: ‘those that understood him smiled at one another, and shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was Greek to me’. They would note that Caska’s statement is not in line with Shakespeare’s Plutarch, because there he actually speaks Greek.12 By translating Caska from a speaker of Greek into a Roman monoglot, Shakespeare would seem to have simplified matters. By substituting Latin for Greek, he adopted a strategy that neatly parallels his more famous instance of classical translation in the same play, where Caesar’s famous last question to Brutus is not spoken in Greek – the language in which, as Suetonius reports, it was originally spoken as ‘kai su, teknon’ – but in Latin, as ‘Et tu, Brute?’ (3.1.77). One wonders, was this strategy perpetrated just for the London audience, or because the playwright himself, as Jonson believed, knew ‘little Latin and less Greek’? Given the sharp focus on the classical languages, it hardly comes as a surprise that much of the attention in the research area best defined, perhaps, as ‘Shakespeare’s translations’, has a historical orientation and focuses on the impact of Plutarch on Shakespeare, and even more on the impact of Ovid. Approaches here may vary considerably. Liz Oakley-Brown has with great philological panache demonstrated how we may read different stages of the Reformation into the sixteenth-century translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English.13 For his unparalleled treatment of Shakespeare and Ovid, however, Jonathan Bate, sought to define art as ‘a translation of life into special languages with codes of their own’, as a process, therefore, that is emphatically realized not only by translators in the strict bilingual sense of the term, but by the engagement of all writers, actors and directors, readers and interpreters in their admiration of existing writers.14 Only on rare occasions do we witness an attempt to see where this process of translation led after Shakespeare’s death. Exemplary in this respect is OakleyBrown’s own discussion of the social identities we may intuit when we compare the sequence in Titus Andronicus (c.1592) showing



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Shakespeare’s characters themselves engaged in the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the rendering of the sequence in Edward Ravenscroft’s late-seventeenth-century adaptation of the play as Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (1678).15 Acknowledging that translation was the core business of the Renaissance, and that the Shakespearean material is a complex site where some of the more vital and formative issues were negotiated, the contributors to Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England address a number of fascinating themes that get to the heart of the period’s concerns. The essays in this finely balanced collection devote attention to the major translation thoroughfares of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the furthermost reaches of Roman and Greek antiquity, and the way in which, as a number of Shakespeare plays help bring into focus, these contributed to shaping a range of distinctly new social identities. Barbara Correll shows how the early modern grammar school instruction in Latin – interpreted as a combined process of translation, socialization and male-gendered subject formation – may enhance our appreciation of Coriolanus (c.1608) as a Roman tragedy that stages the sacrifice that the complex system of classical authority demanded from the enunciated subject. Rather than concentrate on the tensions underlying the early modern English absorption of Latin language and culture, Erica Birrell illustrates with great sensitivity and an astonishing wealth of examples how A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be read as a ‘translation’ of Plato’s Symposium; by identifying the so-called models of love in Shakespeare’s comedy, it may be read as a Ficino-like commentary on a key Greek text of the Renaissance. These essays on Greek and Latin issues are flanked in this collection by a discussion of William Tyndale’s Bible translation of the 1530s. Julia Major argues that this Reformation act of translation did not simply involve a move from one language to another or the communication of a new mode of Bible reading, but also the creation of an authority structure for the common tongue, the creation of a language with space for the competing social discourses that we may recognize in The Tempest (c.1611). Paul Innes’s essay examines Anglo-Scottish relations, as he traces

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the complex process of verbal as well as intercultural translation or transformation by which Macbeth (c.1606) became an English play in London. In his discussion, Innes concentrates on the immediate historical contexts, and the ways in which the Reformation’s denominational struggle played a vital role in shaping the main character’s sense of social identity. But he also has an eye for intersemiotic translation as the play was staged in early modern London and as it was appropriated by Roman Polanski and Akira Kurosawa, with cultural translation leading to transformation. Richard Chamberlain’s ‘Most Retrograde to Our Desire’ also probes the Reformation subtext of Shakespeare’s work, but – somewhat unexpectedly, perhaps – this discussion of Hamlet (c.1600) studies how the play engages with and gives expression to an emerging recusant identity. The essay boldly investigates issues of characterization and self-identity as these involve negation and affirmation, passive resistance and explicit refusal, as well as translatability (or pliability) and untranslatability. In the process, Hamlet is turned into a fascinating site of ‘translation’ with great historical as well as contemporary theoretical relevance.

Shakespeare, Language and Culture In all the various overlapping areas between Shakespeare Studies and Translation Studies discussed above, we witness how in recent decades the traditional focus on language has been complemented and indeed occasionally superseded by a focus on culture. Notably, this broadening of the translation area beyond the traditional linguistic range and into the open-ended field of culture was also accompanied by a process of polarization between the Anglophone and non-Anglophone traditions. The vast and still expanding army of international scholars studying Shakespeare’s afterlives in Europe and beyond – scholars for whom a certain unchosen non-English language governs both their daily communication and the version of Shakespeare read and studied at home – tends to focus to a larger degree and with greater sensitivity on the vital operation of exchange



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between living languages in everyday communication. The mainly Anglophone scholars, who in the first instance study the genesis of the Shakespearean text through a process of translation from the classical period to the seventeenth century, and from the Renaissance continent to Britain, have considerably fewer tangible languages to contend with than the former group, whereas no languages are added to complicate or challenge this situation. The relatively narrow and also rather static range of languages affecting early modern culture may explain why Anglophone scholars in recent years have tended to concentrate more on theoretical explorations, and pursue ‘translation’ in an ever broader metaphorical sense of the term, prioritizing intersemiotic and intercultural modes over purely linguistic forms. In their attempt to describe how cultures of translation contributed to shaping Renaissance identities, and how social identities of the Renaissance may be understood in terms of multiple metaphorically defined processes of translation, the essays in this collection, though prioritizing Anglophone theory, do not lose sight of the linguistic realities of the Shakespearean world and text, be it in a focus on the translation cultures of the grammar school, or the pervasive impact on English that the Reformation achieved. These essays, therefore, also offer a valuable lead for the more linguistically oriented translation research conducted by the non-Anglophone segments of the Shakespearean field stretching across the globe. Both the Anglophone and the globalizing approaches to Shake­ speare and translation stand to profit from the way in which these essays, in much more subtle terms than my summary of them can convey, chart multiple Renaissance cultures and identities. On the one hand, with these explorations, it becomes easier to identify and study the dynamic of classical and Renaissance cultures as they fed and continue to feed into the larger networks of communication and exchange, affecting languages and cultures worldwide. There are numerous unexplored parallels between Shakespeare’s early modern engagement with the classical heritage, and the non-Anglophone’s (sometimes reluctant) willingness to acknowledge the authority of Shakespeare as he and his work are allowed to nurture

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the translation cultures of a global world! On the other hand, with a sharper insight into the ways in which the European continent and the rest of the world have tended to translate and absorb these early modern codes of gender, selfhood, social, religious and national identity, the predominantly Anglophone community may also find its own perceptions challenged as well as enhanced. How do, say, the earliest continental translations of Shakespeare negotiate the classical heritage, the Europe-wide Reformation, as well as issues of gender and nationhood? Parallel situations could rub off some lustre of what may still seem unique traces of early modern translation cultures, but there will equally be continental engagements with such cultures that foil the English condition with even greater force. It would appear that we may truly look forward to what Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost (c.1594) calls a ‘great feast of languages.16

Notes  1 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell, The Arden Shakespeare (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 1.2.277–83. All further references will be given parenthetically.  2 William, Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Brian Morris, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1981), 2.1.22–27. All further references will be given parenthetically.   3 William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Cengage Learning, 2000), 3.1.394–97.   4 Dirk Delabastita, ‘“If I Know the Letters and the Language”: Translation as a Dramatic Device in Shakespeare’s Plays,’ in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, ed. Ton Hoenselaars, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), pp. 31–52.  5 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. H. F. Brooks, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1979), 3.2.114–15.  6 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Russ



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McDonald, in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 269n.  7 Michael Neill, ‘The World Beyond: Shakespeare and the Tropes of Translation’, in Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 399–417; and Patricia Parker, ‘Translation, Adultery and Mechanical Reproduction in The Merry Wives of Windsor’ and ‘Translating, Conveying, Representing and Seconding in the Histories and Hamlet,’ in Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 116–48, pp. 149–84. See also Kate Sturge, ‘Cultural Translation’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, second edition (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 67–70.   8 For a discussion of this issue see Ton Hoenselaars, ‘Translation Futures: Shakespeareans and the Foreign Text’, Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 273–82.   9 J. C. Arens, ‘Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1–810): A Dutch Translation Printed in 1621’, Neophilologus 52 (1968): 421–30, p. 423. 10 See Ernest Brennecke and Henry Brennecke, Shakespeare in Germany, 1590–1700. With Translations of Five Early Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 11 Encyclopaedia of Literary Translation into English, ed. Olive Classe, 2 volumes (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), pp. 1265–68. See also Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sources (London: Continuum, 2001). 12 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell, p. 329. 13 Liz Oakley-Brown, ‘Translating the Subject: Ovid’s Meta­morph­ oses in England 1560–67’, in Translation and Nation towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, ed. Roger Ellis and Liz OakleyBrown (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2001), pp. 48–84. 14 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and his ‘Elizabethan Translation’, in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. Shirley Chew and Alistair

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Stead (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), pp. 33–51, pp. 50–51. 15 ‘Titus Andronicus and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Studies 19 (2005): 325–47; and Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 16 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, The Arden Shakepeare (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 5.1.35–36.

Index

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5, 11, 12, 46–70, 120, 172, 174, 177 Adorno, Theodor 155 Aitchison, Nick 117–18 Althusser, Louis 29 Amyot, Jacques 31 Annis, Francesca 124 Antony and Cleopatra 26, 32, 36 Arthur I, Duke of Brittany 108 As You Like It 6, 138 Ascham, Roger, double translation 7, 22–38; Scholemaster 9–10, 22–38 Babel 24 Babylonian curse 171–75 Bassnett, Susan 1, 2, 23, 25, 105, 121, 139, 155 Bate, Jonathan 8, 176 Baudelaire, Charles 154 Benjamin, Walter 24, 139, 154–55, 164, 166 Berger, Harry 111 Bible see also William Tyndale King James 13 Boutcher, Warren 4 Buchanan, George 103 Bullein, William, Bulwarke of defence against all sickness, soarenesse, and vvoundes that doe dayly assaulte mankind 54 Burke, Peter 3 Burrow, Colin 8 Butler, Judith 37 Carter, Sarah 66–67

Catholics and Catholicism 117–18, 131–66 Cicero 9, 26, 27–28, 89, 169, 176 Copland, Robert The Rutter of the Sea 75 Coriolanus 12, 22–38, 177 Cronin, Michael 5–6 Cymbeline 2 Daniell, David 91 Delabastita, Dirk 5, 8 Derrida, Jacques 24–25 Devi, Mahasweta 23 diglossia 76–77, 88–90 Dryden, John 86 education, translation and 8–11, 22–45, 47, 64–65, 83–84, 150–51, 171, 179 see also Roger Ascham Elias, Norbert 111–12 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 4, 47, 84, 112, 136–37 Elyot, Thomas, The Book Named the Governor 29 empire, translation and 104–6 England 1–13, 26, 32, 60, 74–75, 84–85, 103, 108, 112–25, 131, 136–37 Englische Comedien und Tragedien 173–74 Erasmus, Desiderius 82 Europe 5, 83–84, 107, 118, 169, 173–75, 180 Ewbank, Inge-Stina 4, 13

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Index

Ficino, Marcillo 47, 48, 62, 70, 117 figurenposition 122 Florio, John 10, 26 Forman, Simon 116 Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments 9 Gentzler, Edwin 104–105 Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany 108 Goethe, Wolfgang 174 Goldberg, Jonathan 111 Golding, Arthur 7 Grazia, Margreta de 122 Green, Douglas E. 61 Greenblatt, Stephen 3, 141–54 Gruoch, Queen of Scotland 115, 117 Gunpowder Plot 122 Halpern, Richard 26, 29 Hamilton, Donna 90 Hamlet 5, 13, 122, 131–66, 174, 178 Harrison, Peter 90 Henry IV, Part One 113 Henry IV, King of England 112 Henry V 6, 171, 172 Henry VI, Part Two 6 Henry VIII 170 Henry VIII, King of England 112 Hill, Christopher 82 Holderness, Graham 125 Holinshed, Raphael 103, 107–108, 116–17, 125 Holmes, Peter 132 Homer 84 homoeroticism 58–61 homosocialism 10, 12, 34, 51, 58 Hope, Jonathan 4 Horace 26 Hullot-Kentor, Robert 131 humanism 6, 3, 12, 22–38, 77, 83–85, 141, 165, 172 interpellation 12, 29, 31, 32, 37 see also Louis Althusser

James VI, King of Scotland / James I, King of England 103, 105, 115 James, Heather 7 Jayne, Sears 70n John, King of England 108 Jonson, Ben 1, 30, 48, 169, 176; Poetaster 5; Sejanus 31 Julius Caesar 169–70, 173, 176 Kahn, Coppélia 34 Kenneth I, King of Scotland 107 Khatibi, Abdelkebir 89 King John 108 Kott, Jan 61 Lacan, Jacques 147–49 Lefevere, André 105 Le Fèvre, Guy 47 Lewis, C. S. 80 liminality 4, 67–68, 120 London 4 Lost in Translation, dir. Sofia Coppola 172 love, translation of 11, 12, 46–73 Love’s Labour’s Lost Lulach, King of Scotland 115 Lupton, Julia 87 Lynch, Stephen J. 105–4 Macbeth 103–125; BBC, dir. Jack Gold 123, 124; film, dir. Roman Polanski 123–24; RSC, dir. Trevor Nunn 120 see also Throne of Blood McDonald, Russ Malcolm III, King of Scotland 108 Manwayring, Henry, Sea-Mans Dictionary 78 Marcillo, Ficino 62 Margaret, Saint 118 Martindale, Charles and Michelle 48 martyrdom, translation and 8–9



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see also William Tyndale Marx, Karl 24–25 masculinity 22–45 Medcalf, Stephen 48 Merry Wives of Windsor 110, 143–44, 172 Milton, John 134 Mirabellus, Nanus 47 Montaigne, Michel de 84 navigation 77 Neill, Michael 5, 144–45, 173 new historicism 2, 140–46 see also Stephen Greenblatt Niranjana, Tejaswini 145 Norman, Robert 76 North, Thomas 31, 36 Northrop, Douglas A. 167n Norton, David 75 Ong, Walter 28 Ovid, Amores 10; Heroides 7, 171; Metamorphoses 7–10, 47, 67, 85, 172, 176–77 Parker, Patricia 5, 109–10, 143, 173 performance, translation as 120–23 Phoenix and the Turtle 48 Pico Della Mirandola, Giovanni 62 piracy and pirates 81, 152, 156–57 Pius V, Pope 136–37 Plato, Phaedrus 49; Symposium 12, 46–70, 177 Plautus 9 Pliny 26 Plutarch, Parallel Lives of Noble Grecians, and Romans 12, 23, 25, 31–36, 176 post-colonial criticism 23 post-structuralism 139 Protestants and Protestantism 4, 79, 82, 132 psychoanalytic criticism 146–53

see also Jacques Lacan Puttenham, George 143 Rape of Lucrece 25, 32 Ravenscroft, Edward, Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia 177 Rediker, Marcus 79 Reformation 76, 120, 176, 177, 178–80 refusal, translation and 131–66 Richard II 121 Richard II, King of England 112 Rowe, Nicholas 86 Royal Society 78 Sallis, John 2 Sandys, Edwin, Archbishop of York 162–63 Schiller, Friedrich 174 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 174 Scotland 103–25 Serpieri, Alessandro 141 Serres, Jean de 47, 48 Sinfield, Alan 111 Smith, Thomas, De Republica Anglorum: A Discourse of the Commonwealth of England 79 Socrates 27 sonnet 88, 90 Spain 131 Spenser, Edmund, Fairie Queene 88 Spivack, Gayatri 22, 23, 25 Sprat, Thomas 78 Stafford, Edward, Duke of Buckingham 112 Stallybrass, Peter 117 Stanley, Henry, Earl of Derby 132, 144 Steiner, George 2–3, 83 Taming of the Shrew 7, 169, 171 Taylor, A. B. 55

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Index

Tempest 13, 75–102, 177 Terence 9 Terminator, dir. James Cameron 150 theatricality, translation and 4–12 Throne of Blood, dir. Akira Kurosawa 125 Tieck, Ludwig 174 Timon of Athens 162 Titus Andronicus 6–9, 26, 32, 176 translatio studii et imperii 6, 25, 26, 28, 104, 105 travail, translation and 75 Troilus and Cressida 26, 48 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret 5, 10 Twelfth Night 138 Tyndale, William 3, 8, 13, 74–92, 177

Venuti, Lawrence 145 Virgil 23, 26, 79; Aeneid 36, 88; Dido 36, 83–85, 90 Vives, Juan Luis, Instruction of a Christen Woman 8

Venus and Adonis 10, 11, 48, 173

Žižek, Slavoj 149–50

Wars of the Roses 112 Waterfield, Robin 57, 46 Weimann, Robert 122–3 Welsh accent 172 William I, King of England 115 witches 109, 114, 115–19, 122–24 women, translators as 7; Lavinia 8; Volumnia 34 Wriothesley, Henry, Earl of Southampton 10