Shakespeare's Dramatic Transactions 9780822382836

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Shakespeare's Dramatic Transactions

Michael E. Mooney

Shakespeare's Dramatic Transactions

Duke University Press Durham and London 1990

© 1990 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For Sally, Christopher, David, and Kate

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface

lX

Xl

Integrating Actor and Audience 1

II

Language, Staging, and ''Affect'':

Figurenposition in Richard III 23

III

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II 51

IV

Representation and Privileged Knowledge in Hamlet 77

Vll

Contents

v Location and Idiom in Othello 104

VI

Multiconsciousness in King Lear 129

VII

Voice and Multiple Awareness in Macbeth 150

VIII

Directing Sympathy in Antony

and Cleopatra 170

Notes

193

Index

217

Vin

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to my audiences, who have read or listened to portions of this study at meetings of the Modern Language Association, the New College Conference on Medieval-Renaissance Studies, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, and the Shakespeare Association of America. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appears in Othello: New Perspectives (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1990), and Chapter 6 originally appeared in Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985). I am grateful to the editors of Associated University Presses and Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint this material. I would also like to thank those who have helped in the making of this book by reading the manuscript at various stages: Miriam Miller, Ira Clark, Jack Perlette, Raeburn Miller, Richard Katrovas, Jessica Munns, Marie Nelson, Sally Cole Mooney, Susan Krantz, and Michael Shapiro. Virginia and Herbert Schwab, Robert Bourdette, George Faltings, and Edward, Mary, Maryrose, James, and Eddie Mooney helped along the way. Joanne Ferguson, Editor-in-Chief at Duke University Press, has been exceptionally kind and professional. R. Mark Benbow grounded me in Shakespeare's text, and Edward Partridge became a critic and friend at an important time. Jackson I. Cope told me to read Weimann and has stood by me since we first considered the "jigging veins of rhyming mother wits."

IX

Preface

This study enVISIons the dramatic transactions that took place when groups of spectators experienced Shakespeare's plays as plays. It therefore takes into account not only the importance of the language but also the nature of Shakespeare's dramaturgy. It differs from other stage-centered criticism by proposing the staging Shakespeare envisaged for seven of his tragedies in their original production and by describing the meaningful "affects" these plays produced in the audience. It recreates the plays by bringing to bear the theatrical and histrionic conventions Shakespeare inherited when he began to write for the stage. Dnder the phrase dramatic transaction I subsume all those elements that contribute to the theatrical experience. Everything we normally place within the spectrum of theatrical illusion - the very nature of the illusion created, the importance of nonillusionistic moments, the dramatic effects and "affects," acting values and demands, characterization, and staging- falls within the range of this inquiry. But the intent of the transaction remains my primary focus. I use the word in the figurative sense of performing or conducting a business venture, such as were the dealings of Shakespeare and his company with the public from roughly 1590 to 1613, and in the literal sense of a "bridging across" or communicative carrying through of effect from stage to audience. Shakespeare was a businessman. He and his company dealt directly with the public. During his twenty-year career he continually reached out from the hemisphere of actors to a second hemisphere - the one the spectators occupied. Theatrical space needs to be seen as a "wooden 0" comprised of Xl

Preface

these hemispheres. The theatrical experience needs to be better understood as an aesthetic transaction in which information, in the forms of language, gesture, and action, moves across the invisible line separating actors and audiences. Indeed, I share the belief that "as long as the performance of the play is substantially enriched by the potential ... significance involved in the actor-audience relationship, the full meaning of drama may be defined as an image of the impact of this relationship on the performed text. And the more the public is drawn into the world of the play and the more that the play is drawn into the real world, the more the essence of the play is brought out in the course of performance. The relationship between actor and audience is, therefore, not only a constituent element of dramaturgy, but of dramatic meaning as well." These are the words of Robert Weimann, whose work I have drawn upon for my methodological approach. When his Shakespeare und die Tradition des Volkstheaters first appeared in 1967, it was hailed as a "milestone in Shakespeare criticism" and the finest work to come out of Germany since Wolfgang Clemen's Shakespeare's Bilder in 1936. Until it was translated and republished as Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater in 1978, however, Weimann's book did not reach a wide audience; even now scant attention has been paid to this signal contribution to Shakespeare scholarship. This study stresses the importance of Weimann's work. In the chapters that follow I apply his complex idea of Figurenposition (or "figural positioning") and his thesis about the "traditional interplay" between a downstage place (or platea) and an upstage location (or locus) to Shakespearean tragedy. I outline my approach by reexamining the "affective" and "intentional" fallacies and by presenting a number of pre-Shakespearean dramatic paradigms that challenge accepted notions about the nature of Renaissance dramatic illusion. I then assert the relevance of Weimann's study to the relation between an actor and his role(s) and to the correlation between a play's language and staging. In the analyses of Richard III, Richard II, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra that follow, I apply these ideas in an attempt to envision the plays in performance. Each analysis may be read independently, but it has been my intention to proceed cumulatively, focusing, in each chapter, on a different dimension of the actor-audience relationship. Taken together, these essays explore the nature of Shakesxu

Preface peare's dramaturgy and examine the ways in which he presents his major characters. These chapters consider the verbal structures and theatrical functions implied by as well as interpretatively present in the texts. They posit a group of spectators for whom the plays were performed, a performance subtext, and an interpretative line for major characters. As such, they raise a number of theoretical issues, and it is important to acknowledge them at the outset. There are very real difficulties inherent, for instance, in positing "an" audience for a Shakespearean play and even more in suggesting how it might have responded. Shakespeare's audiences and critics have responded in so many different ways in the last four hundred years that response cannot be the product of a definitive intentionality and a unitary reception. I therefore include a range of possible reactions in my discussions of the nature of Shakespeare's transactions with "the" audience. I need to stress, however, that I am most concerned with theater as a communal event and with a play's overall effect. I do not think it very helpful to argue that response is necessarily ambivalent, indeterminable, or multivalent or that all responses are equally valid. Audiences do not generally experience contradictory interpretations when a play is performed with a consistent subtext in mind. Indeed, one of my intentions is to persuade readers that we can begin to write about authorial intention and communal effect. The performance subtexts and interpretative lines I posit are derived, empirically, from the nature of the stage conventions and the differences in the characters' Figurenpositionen. Although they often support accepted critical opinions-about, for example, the function of animal and mercantile imagery in Othello-sometimes they do not. I recognize that literary study, even an historically based textual criticism, is interpretative. When I juxtapose literary with playable values and reconsider accepted critical views in terms of locus and platea staging, I acknowledge the risk of dismissing perfectly plausible, and even historically documented, post-Renaissance stagings of the plays. I acknowledge that readers may have seen performances, may remember portrayals, may know critical commentaries, and may be able to adduce theatrical documents that are at odds with my analyses. Let us remember, however, that Shakespeare's theater was different from the theater which followed, XIU

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that the apron stage operated under different assumptions about the relationship between actor and audience than the proscenium arch stage, and that Shakespeare's dramatic personae are not always explainable in the terms provided by current psychological approaches or theories of representation.

XIV

We must try and envisage the best performance possible; dogmatise only upon that.

Harley Granville-Barker, A Companion to Shakespeare Studies

I Integrating Actor and Audience

Process versus Product Theater asks us to accept that the actors have temporarily put aside their true identities for the shadowy and shaped roles they assume on the stage. During a performance the actors assume fictional roles, and the spectators, aware that individuals like themselves have become theatrical personae, luxuriate in the illusion which makes this evanescent, unsubstantial pageant the only reality available to them. As Prospero recognizes in The Tempest, the dramatic fiction relies upon an audience's willingness to accept the illusion as "real," and he demands the same degree of attention from the inner audience to his masque. "No tongue! all eyes! Be silent," he commands Ferdinand and Miranda, and us. Only when threatened by a different stage reality does he break the illusion's magical spell, dismissing "these our actors" as "spirits ... melted ... into thin air ... like the baseless fabric of this vision" (4.1.148-151).1 Only when Caliban and his loutish companions threaten to intrude does Prospero acknowledge the theatricality of the "great Globe itself" and the dreamy stuff out of which he as an actor and we as an audience are made. In drawing together two major Renaissance topoi, Prospero touches upon an assumption about the relation between life and art that modern sensibilities seem often unwilling to accept. As we know, the Renaissance viewed art in the same relation to life as a dream stands to waking and as the stage stands to the world. Art and life were interrelated and interpenetrating, and references to the dreamlike and theatrical nature of quotidian existence permeate the literature of the period. Hence, the spectators' willingness to accept the illusion as "real" did not rule out

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another level of awareness. Renaissance playgoers attended performances conscious that the actors had other lives antecedent to their fictional personalities and what they perceived in this theatrical space was ultimately a double vision. They saw, simultaneously, the real actor and the assumed role, and this way of seeing contributed to a theatrical epistemology that played upon the knowledge that their own lives were as full of provisional identities and imaginary posturings as those of the actors. The actor thus presented himself as actor and represented, mimetically, a role; every character was seen in dual perspective, as involved in an illusory world and as merely a player in this world. One can almost always see the actor behind the role, but the frequency with which actors in Renaissance drama appear to step out of their roles to address - or otherwise break the illusion to communicate with - the spectators is a distinguishing feature of this drama, typical of the engagement it fostered with the audience. It is this relation between a presentational and representational drama and its audience that raises so many questions about the way modern criticism approaches the theater. From the earliest use in Greek drama of a nonprofessional chorus drawn from the populace, to the example of the English mysteries in which the audience could "recognize Christ on the cross as the local cobbler and still believe that they are witnessing the actual Crucifixion of the Son of God,"2 to Prospero's admission in the epilogue to The Tempest that "Now my charms are all o'erthrown, / And what strength I have's mine own, / Which is most faint," dramatists have experimented with an audience's double, and simultaneous, awareness that what they watch is illusionistic and nonillusionistic, representational and presentational. They have so experimented, I believe, because drama is finally a transaction between the spectators and the play. We may have lost the ability to understand the nature of this transaction by learning too much about its separate aspects. Renaissance commentators stressed the interrelatedness of drama and life, but twentiethcentury scholars analyzed Shakespeare's plays as self-enclosed constructs divorced from their audiences. This, to be sure, was a step forward. Reacting to the excesses of nineteenth-century biographical criticism and psychological speculation, New Critical and Formalistic methodologies freed criticism from subjectivity by asserting the primacy of the text. But be2

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cause they were largely ahistorical and more interested in poetic language and generic identity than in the theatrical dimension of Shakespearean drama, these methodologies drove a wedge between Shakespeare and his audience. Much modern criticism removed Shakespeare's work from the stage, and the study of his dramatic poetry became an end in itself, separate from the purposes of playing. New Critics, intent on the language of the text, lost sense of the way language and staging complement each other. And for many modern critics the "fourth wall" dividing actor from audience was more than just a useful term; it symbolized the division between the study of language and the recognition that a play's meaning depends upon the dramatic context. This analytical approach was less inappropriate for the drama of the early twentieth century. Modern dramatists provided a number of plays which might be understood from the text. 3 Certainly the works of Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw helped convince scholars there were few significant differences between a literary and a performed drama. This view was upheld by T. S. Eliot, who averred that he did not like seeing Shakespeare performed and who, in recognizing that Renaissance drama was presentational, nonillusionistic, and "conventional" as well as representational, illusionistic, and "realistic," called it an "impure art." For Eliot, Renaissance drama was an art in which "there has been no firm principle of what is to be postulated as a convention and what is not."4 With this bias, and with the legacy of post-Darwinian evolutionary thinking influencing our view, it became clear to many that an illusionistic, literary drama was the most sophisticated of dramatic forms. It became easy to believe that Renaissance drama evolved toward the purity of self-enclosed representation. Inigo Jones's elaborate properties and illusionistic backdrops triumphed, after all, over Ben Jonson's insistence on the importance of the playwright and the audience in creating a scene, and in this century the power of William Archer's devotion to the realistic and representational quality of Ibsenist and post-Ibsenist theater corroborated the supremacy of a playas an entity in itself.5 But if the plays of Ibsen might be fathomed from a reading of the text, the drama of the English Renaissance could not. In fact, not until Jonson audaciously published his works in 1616 did the notion that a play was more than a script enter "popular" consciousness, though classics for the 3

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schools and unauthorized quanos were available, of course. Words, in a Renaissance playscript, are meant to be spoken from different theatrical spaces; the success of a theatrical realization depends upon the way it is perceived by the spectators. It is in this sense that the theater's other hemisphere is so crucial. In this second of the theater's enclosed spaces, spectators draw a perspective on the action. Because we trust so much in Shakespeare's language, we should also trust in the way he directs our lines of sight and our attention-to different theatrical spaces and be willing to explore the ways that meaning is created in the theater. The "founh wall" of a strictly illusionistic theater does not so much prevent us from responding as separate us from panicipating in the creation of a play's meaning. The idea of an exclusively illusionistic theater, so amenable to critics bound to the analysis of a poetic drama, limits our understanding and devalues the imponance of the audience. Indeed, if plays are analyzed only as texts, neither the modern theater of illusion nor the presentational and representational theater of the Renaissance will be fully apprehended. Not all twentieth-century thinking has been limited in the way that Eliot and Archer proposed. Two continental anists and theorists developed a different, less limiting, view at about the same time the assumptions of the New Criticism took shape in England and America. In the 1920s and 1930s the Spanish philosopher-anist Onega y Gassett argued that the theatrical experience was "radically epistemological." In a series of powerful essays entitled El espeetador and in his lecture" Idea del teatro," Onega insisted upon the role spectators played in the creation of dramatic meaning. His espousal of "perspectivism," an acknowledgment that meaning can only be validated by the confluence of individual viewpoints, helped reassen the existence of communicative lines between performer and spectator. Rather than turn toward a text, Onega focused on the nature of theatrical space, "an enclosed place which contains two interacting spaces ... the hall, where the public places itself, and the stage, where the actors place themselves." What the public sees in this interacting space is a double vision of the actor and his role, in exactly the way that the Renaissance recognized the relationship between life and an, and this makes the theater a metaphor: "the stage and the actor are the universal metaphor incarnate, and this is the theater: visible 4

Integrating Actor and Audience

metaphor." In the work of Ortega's slightly later French contemporary, Antonin Artaud, the audience became even more important. Artaud declared that the spectators should be "placed in the middle of the action" and be "engulfed and physically affected by it." For his "theater of cruelty" Artaud endorsed the idea of spectacle in an attempt to return drama to its ritual origins, to a state in which the staged event reenacts a shared primordial experience or "happens" anew. 6 By replacing the audience in the play, Ortega and Artaud (and their German contemporary, Bertold Brecht) contributed to a resurgence in the theatrical "happening," accompanied by a return of the theater in the round and the apron, as opposed to the illusionistic proscenium arch stage. But in supplying an approach that counterbalanced the illusionistic and literary separateness of early twentieth-century drama, Ortega and Artaud also journeyed too far from the particular suspension that is Renaissance drama. That drama, we now perceive, is precisely what Eliot disparagingly termed it, an "impure art," and that is the strength of its distinctive chemistry. Renaissance drama is not just self-referential or selfenclosed, nor is it, to use the terminology adopted by S. L. Bethell, either predominantly "conventional" (nonillusionistic and popular) or "naturalistic" (illusionistic, realistic, and literary). 7 It is a drama that holds engagement with and detachment from the audience in equipoise; it is a theater of nonillusionistic as well as illusionistic effects, born from the synthesis of the discrete presentational and representational modes of popular and courtly or hall drama. Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe arrived at just that moment when the old traditions of the popular theater were not yet moribund and the new conventions of the continental theater of illusion would soon be introduced and, in private theaters and in courtly masques, even accepted. As a result, theatrical performance was often a mixture of two distinct modes. Direct address, in the simplest late medieval way, was still possible, and at moments in scenes where Inigo Jones's machines were used the production must have been "illusionistic" in an expressive new way. Most of the time there would have been sufficient suggestion of a particularized location to carry the basic illusion, but not enough to prevent older presentational conventions from operating. Indeed, soliloquy had probably not become so illusionistic (if in fact it ever has) that a character could still speak (in)directly 5

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to the spectators. The essence of Renaissance theater lay in the coexistence of presentational and representational modes. 8 But if our understanding of Shakespeare's theater has grown, critical response continues to lag behind. Because readers still prefer to discuss Renaissance drama as an illusionistic and literary construct, they have not been able to come to terms with either the "affect" or the intention of theatrical performance. Indeed, what occurs on stage is still assumed to be separate and distinct from what may occur in the minds of the audience. According to this premise, even if we could determine the "affect" a play created in the spectators or the playwright's and the cast's intention, we would be mired in subjectivity, less close to approximating the truth about a play's meaning than if we stayed at home and simply studied the language. 9 It is not an unreasonable or untenable position, and it has of course immeasurably enhanced our comprehension of the thematics of Shakespeare's plays. It has the practical advantage of allowing us to write about plays we may not often see and the added comfon that, after all, one is writing about, and not staging, these plays anyway. Onega's call for "perspectivism" has rarely penetrated the walls of the academic study. A criticism which seeks to describe the effect of a play must cenainly acknowledge that no single audience, nor single auditor, will necessarily respond in the same way as any other. That acknowledgment should not rule out the potential riches to be discovered in a playscript or to be found in Shakespeare's manipulation of the spectators. As the history of critical response reveals, there can never be a fixed meaning for a work of an. Meaning has always depended upon the perceiving eye. The possible reactions built into a Shakespearean play make meaning a product of the communicative act, of the playwright's and the actors' intention and of the audience's response. "Meaning" derives from a consistent, "affective" presentation of the playscript, one as true as possible to its subtlety and complexity. It resides in perception and experience as much as in "reductive intellection" after the event. And because we have begun to realize this crucial fact, we have staned to hear the calls for a criticism that does not "suppress the nature of the aesthetic experience." Because we have begun to realize that "each critic in his own way suggests some conflict between the thematic pattern he identifies on reflection and his 6

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actual experience," we have come to acknowledge again that no figure in the carpet is the carpet. Norman Rabkin, most notably, argues that "we need to learn to talk about the process of our involvement" with a dramatic work "rather than our considered view after the aesthetic event." Unfortunately, despite the valuable contributions of New Critical, Formalistic, deconstructive, psychological, and reader-response methodologies, we still tacitly "deny the possibility of authorial communication or communal aesthetic experience, ... deny that at a certain level of experience a work of art controls the responses of audiences who share its culture, even though each member of the audience may interpret those responses differently."Io Unfortunately, these methodologies direct attention away from what we feel and think during a performance. In the case of drama criticism seems particularly amiss. Although readers would agree that the most obvious difference separating drama from poetry and fiction is that drama is primarily meant to be performed, literary critics often remain within the confines of the academic study and the classroom. The affective fallacy ironically served not to protect us from subjectivity but rather to jail us. Our counterparts in departments of drama have not fared much better. Isolated by space and inclination and protected by distinctions between the performing arts and their analytic study, teachers of dramatic art also seldom venture beyond their secure demesnes. They are the guardians of performance; literary critics are the champions of the text. The division between the two has given rise to rival camps, each with its set of critical claims and each uneasily sharing the virtues and the shortcomings of the other. With some exception, dramatic and literary critics remain on their respective sides of the border. II And despite the scrupulous work of theater historians,I2 few attempts have been made to utilize objective conjectures about staging for a performance criticism. To be sure there have been essays written about stage properties and directions, but they often rely exclusively on factual details found in the text; similarly, studies of Shakespeare's use of visual images seek objective correlatives in Renaissance iconographic handbooks like Natalis Comes's Mytbologiae or Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, sometimes missing the implications these images have in performance. These are valid approaches, and I do not wish to diminish their importance, but they are immured within a critical system that 7

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allows one only at his peril to consider the impact these emblems would have had on the nobility, the merchant class, and the groundlings standing in the yard. We want students to be "affected" by Shakespearean drama, but cannot let ourselves write about those "affects" except by a kind of scholarly legerdemain that allows us to objectify what is subjective, to convert affects into effects, processes into products.

Convention and Reality We have not been able to describe a play's life in the theater because we have not accepted that Renaissance drama is presentational and representational. What has gotten in the way of our acceptance, however, can only partially be charged to our New Critical predispositions. Imperfect knowledge about stage conditions, Renaissance audiences, and popular modes of presentation also contributes to the uneasiness felt with an "affective" criticism. The truth of the matter is that it is impossible to determine the way any single play was performed on the Renaissance stage. For all that is known about the Globe and Blackfriars theaters, we actually know very little about the terms under which a particular play might have been offered. Modern productions (and records of earlier ones) are invaluable, of course, since they provide examples of the ways plays might have been performed. But for obvious reasons no modern production can duplicate an event which transpired four hundred years ago, and any two interpretations of the same play by a different (or even the same) cast or director might vary so that what we thought we understood could well be cast into doubt. Apart from a number of contemporary accounts, the best evidence about Renaissance dramatic performance comes from the plays themselves, and it is on their evidence that carefully conceived conjectures like those of Bernard Beckerman have been made. Basing his findings on the repertory of plays performed at the Globe between 1599 and 1609, Beckerman provides as clear a picture of the manner of presentation as might be thought possible: at once "ceremonial, romantic, and epic," it is a style "characterized by its reconciliation of the contradictory demands of convention and reality."13 This reconciliation, however, should 8

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not be understood as tilted in either the direction of conventionalism or realism. The dramatic illusion and psychological realism we associate with early twentieth-century drama supplies only one-half of the Renaissance's dramatic equation. The second half of that equation lies in the drama's conventionality, an aspect of the production which owes its power to the survival of popular modes of presentation well into the seventeenth century. But because readers assume that a drama which is not totally illusionistic is "impure," they may well be ready to dismiss the presentational mode, much as Theseus and Hippolyta and the young lovers appear to do when Quince, as presenter, offends them with his good will in his prologue, when Snout informs them that he is a wall, when Snug reveals that he is a lion, and when Bottom, as Pyramus, steps out of the illusion to inform Theseus that "'Deceiving me' is Thisby's cue. She is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall. You shall see it will fall pat as I told you." Indeed, in A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare winks at the ridiculous concern of the "rude mechanicals" for realism and dramatic illusion when they assign their roles, consider the possibilities of staging, and perform the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby. When the rustics meet to rehearse, Bottom raises objections to the play. Afraid the ladies will be shocked by the sword Pyramus draws to kill himself, he devises a solution: "let a prologue seem to say we will do no harm with our swords and that Pyramus is not killed indeed ... [and] tell them that I Pyramus am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver." Of course they wouldn't know. And so it goes with the discussion about the lion's power to frighten and with the considerations about how "to bring moonlight into a chamber" and how to "present" a "wall." The lion, Bottom suggests, should simply tell the ladies he is not such a "thing" but "a man as other men are." "Indeed," he should "name his name and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner." All these anxieties originate in the fear that the audience will accept the playas real, will equate actor and role, life and art. The rustics insist upon realistic and mimetic representation, but their deliberations more accurately reveal and play upon the distinctions between a nonillusionistic, presentational dramaturgy and an illusionistic, representational one. Shakespeare knew that overwrought presentation could preclude valid 9

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representation. He also knew, by mocking the strictures governing realism and conventionality in A Midsummer Night's Dream, that drama uses illusionistic and nonillusionistic effects, the difference not being in the extent of their use so much as in their skillful application. We all know how the rustics "disfigure" the play of "Pyramus and Thisby" and how the onstage, courtly audience mocks this silly stuff. It is just possible, however, that even this drama manages to move the spectators. Pyramus's death scene, the low point of the playlet, is surprisingly well received. Theseus's heart goes out a little way to Pyramus: "This passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man sad," he comments. Hippolyta may go one step further in saying, "Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man." We may identify "the man" as the wretched actor, Bottom, or as the character, Pyramus, whose suicide elicits pity if not some "tears." In either case we will acknowledge the skill of the actor who lies behind the role. In just this way did Renaissance audiences, playwrights, and actors mind true things by what their mockeries be. The man whose skill lay in playing an unskilled actor is still a source of delight: playing a bad actor well requires a great deal of aplomb. And like the individual who played Bottom playing Pyramus, Shakespeare knew well enough to mock what he knew about dramatic representation. So too, one surmises, did Shakespeare's audience. As recent studies demonstrate, the casting of one's self into a role was characteristic of the Elizabethan sense of self and identity. In this view Renaissance drama held up the mirror to nature in delineating the difficulties of establishing, maintaining, and upholding a role. 14 In certain circumstances, moreover, indirect audience address, the soliloquy, and the aside may be more revelatory and thrilling than we have imagined: they may provide moments when an actor momentarily "steps out" of the drama to reveal his "presented" self-as opposed to his represented role. To be an actor was to be a "visible metaphor" for the Renaissance's changing, provisional, and existential sense of self. To an extent not yet fully articulated, then, presentational and popular elements may reveal a great deal about a playwright's intention and the nature of production. But because "the preconceived standard of classical scholarship, with its preference for intellect, philosophical probing, and the correspondences of the Aristotelian unities, [still] measures liter10

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ary progress in the sixteenth century only by the degree to which sophisticated learning freed English drama from the fetters of ignorance and bad taste,"15 we have yet to come to terms with the ways popular Elizabethan dramatists "produced effects in the audience."16 Hempen homespuns had indeed been swaggering on English stages for centuries before A Mid-

summer Nights Dream. The problem may be illustrated by a brief reconsideration of the relative influence Thomas Sackville's and Thomas Norton's Inns of Court play, Gorboduc (1562), and Chaplain Henry Medwall's earlier interlude, Fulgens and Lucrece (1497), had on the development of later Elizabethan drama. Gorboduc received Sir Philip Sidney's approval because of its "stately speeches," "well-sounding" Senecan "phrases," and "notable morality." It also received his criticism because of its failure to observe the unities of "place and time, the two necessary companions to all corporeal actions."I? The important place it occupies in An Apologyfor Poetry, however has made the play the most important precursor of Shakespearean tragedy and history. Let us remember that in many respects Gorboduc is a "closet drama," a work of inexperienced amateur dramatists put on for a special occasion rather than of repertory theater; its value as a precursor depends on an approach to the drama from the perspective of the study. With the exception of the dumb shows preceding each act, little action occurs on stage, and rather than action, Sackville and Norton offer a drama which, in one recent opinion, "explores complex problems" by often arguing on both sides of a case, a procedure no doubt enjoyed by an Inner Temple audience accustomed to a legal "declamation or a mooting."18 For all its virtues this Tudor play of mind is more an intellectual exercise than a dramatic reenactment of human action. The neo-Senecan Gorboduc relies on illusionistic staging and declamatory speech: the opinions of characters like Ferrex and Porrex are presented as opposing positions in a dramatic debate. And although this literary style provided one important model, we should not forget that later Elizabethan drama was not composed just for declamatory speech or acted out in a purely formal way. Sackville and Norton may have been faithful to their classical sources, but that fact hardly helps us to understand the later plays. Subsequent dramatists, we justly observe and delight in knowing, misinterpreted Seneca, dramatizing the carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts Seneca 11

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intended to occur offstage. The later Elizabethans erred, but in the name of action, providing us with a drama that needs to he seen and heard and felt as well as grasped, to be apprehended as well as comprehended. It may be for this reason that Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucrece has been recognized as a more important precursor of Shakespearean drama. The audacious amalgam of popular and sophisticated cultural forms that is A Midsummer Night's Dream, that appears in the sub- and main plots of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, and that seems to have prompted the addition of an antimasque to complete Jonson's courtly masques may be seen in its infancy in Medwall's Fulgens and Lucrece. This, the first extant purely secular interlude, stands at the threshold of the English Renaissance and may well provide a better model of theatricality than do a host of later plays. Recognizing its importance, commentators return to the play again and again as an early paradigm for actor-audience interaction and for the mixture of illusionistic and nonillusionistic effects we can still discern in Shakespeare. They return to it, in short, for an early example of the attention given to a play's life in the theater. As readers note, the parallel cross-wooing of Lucrece's maid by the servants A and B supplies a comical counterpoint, a subplot action, to the main plot debat concerning the argument de vera nobilitate, or the relative value of honor and nobility.19 Drawn not from the Roman world of the play's sources but from the contemporary English countryside, A and B are presenters of and participants in the play. Importantly, they invite the audience's attention by exploiting distinct theatrical spaces: the platea, or downstage area nearest the audience, from which A and B engage the spectators "by utilizing the conventions of the outdoor communal theater ... in which the audience was a constituent element of the performance itself,"20 and the locus, or specified upstage area, toward which A and B draw our attention to watch the classical drama of Fulgens and Lucrece as it unfolds relatively free from the interruptions of "extradramatic" moments. 21 That is, through A and B Medwall's play combines direct engagement with the distancing and separation between audience and play common to illusionistic theater. In Fulgens and Lucrece "the world of popular English experience was made to intrude into and confront the illusions of the Roman lOCUS."22 And like this early interlude, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama also plays to the audience and "away" 12

Integrating Actor and Audience

from it, engaging it directly as well as maintaining the separation between actor and auditor, overtly presenting itself as a play at one moment and mimetically representing an action at the next. Gorboduc and Fulgens and Lucrece represent distinct presentational poles and are separated by over sixty years. A play closer in time to Gorboduc, and one tailor-made to fit Sidney's criticism, is Thomas Preston's unabashedly popular offering, Cambyses, King ofPersia (c. 1560). But for all its artistic atrocities, Cambyses, like Fulgens and Lucrece, provides a signal instance of theatricality - recognizable, in part, by the fact that the play as we have it has been preserved in the form of a performance script, complete with stage directions and an allocation of roles. Despite its violations of Sidney's strictures, Cambyses just might also be a more typical Renaissance drama than Gorboduc. One need only reread Cambyses to sense the legitimacy of Sidney's complaints and to admire the "great constancy" of A Midsummer Night's Dream. What is remarkable about this botched effort, however, is the way the play moves from purely illusionistic representation, seen when Cambyses addresses his counsel and Sisamnes in scene one, to the purely presentational, when the "Vice," Ambidexter, enters "with an old capcace on his head, an old pail about his hips for harness, a scummer and a potlid by his side, and a rake on his shoulder" in scene two. Ambidexter's cry to "Stand away, stand away, for the passion of God" directly recalls the entrance of the Vice from the yard common in earlier plays. His naming of himself as ''Ambidexter ... one / That with both hands finely can play" similarly draws upon the presentational conventions common to popular theater. From this point Ambidexter carries on a running commentary with the spectators in the best tradition of the Vice, informing them that his cousin, Cutpurse, is among them (vi.) and even making an offer of marriage to a maid in the audience (x.). But he also assumes a representational role and moves into the illusion to deal with the play's other characters, much like A and B, and in so doing moves from platea to locus and back again. He "moves," that is, into the illusion to confront other characters, as well as out of the illusion to speak directly to the spectators. Indeed, each time he does so, there is a change in his relation to the dramatic fiction. In Cambyses the combination of history and morality play, of sheer 13

Integrating Actor and Audience

ribaldry and farce with gruesome death, is embarrassingly crude, but the mixture of modes and manners of presentation found here helped. to clear the way for the playwrights and works that would follow. In Marlowe's and Shakespeare's hands, in plays like Dr. Faustus and Richard III, the mixture of morality play and personal history would find proper balance. The epilogue to Cambyses, so like Peter Quince's prologue to the playlet of Pyramus and Thisby, may not know the "stops," but then this play has "expressed everything" in the mild hope that "none is offended for this our doing." There is in fact a "drama" contemporaneous with Shakespeare's plays that utilizes the actor-audience interaction found in Fulgens and Lucrece and Cambyses. Like Fulgens and Lucrece, Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592) was written for amateur actors in a churchman's household. And like the earlier play, it is clearly a "presented" drama which makes explicit and "plays upon" the idea of an actor performing a role. Here the individual performing the role of the famous Will Summers enters with "his fool's coat but half on," not quite ready to play his part. He announces that role as "Will Summers' ghost" come "to present you with 'Summer's Last Will and Testament.'" He no sooner makes this announcement than he reveals that "I, that have a toy in my head more than ordinary, ... will dress me without." He insists upon the extempore and processive nature of the play, that is, by drawing attention to his costuming and even to the offstage prompter, one Dick Huntley, who urged him to "begin" the performance. He mockingly asks the spectators' forgiveness when he sees an unnamed "lord" in the audience, and he tries to set a "good face on it, as though what" he "talked idly all this while had not" in fact been his "part." He also discloses that his real name is Toy, as the Boy who offers the epilogue makes clear: "The great fool Toy hath marred the play." This playing upon the literal and theatrical meanings of "fool" makes Toy a fool standing in the line of the great Will Summers. Summers, a "fool by nature and by art," speaks the Prologue "in the person of the idiot our playmaker." After delivering its tedious, not so brief, classically influenced lines, Summers invites the audience to mock the playwright "as a coxcomb." In a real prologue he tells us this masquelike "show" will present the sickness of Summer, who will "call his of14

Integrating Actor and Audience

ficers to account, yield his throne to Autumn," and "make Winter his executor," and then says, disingenuously, "I care not what I say now, for I play no more than you hear- and some of that you heard too (by your leave) was extempore." He warns the backstage playwright that "he were as good have let me had the best part; for I'll be revenged on him to the uttermost in this person of Will Summers which I have put on to play the Prologue, and mean not to put off till the play is done. I'll sit as a chorus, and flout the actors and him at the end of every scene." "I know they will not interrupt me," he says, "for fear of marring all." It is no more than the Ghost of Don Andrea and Revenge did in The

Spanish Tragedy. The playwright takes his revenge when Toy "enters" the created illusion, drinks from Bacchus's cup, and is humiliated when Bacchus pours beer upon him and dubs him "Sir Robert Tosspot." Will Summers is crestfallen, but even this piece of action does not prevent him from commenting on the masquelike, allegorical, locus-oriented action from his platea-like position. Indeed, the fool's coarse, idiomatic, and proverbial speech is juxtaposed with the elegant, classically referenced, Latinate, iambic cadences, and lilting music found in the speech of the show's allegorical figures. After the personified figure of Summer delivers a longish commentary on worldly vanity, the fool can only complain that "I was almost asleep. I thought I had been at a sermon." Illusionistic and nonillusionistic drama coexist here, and all this "show" is not so much a play about a playas the thing itself. Toy does not mar "the play" or destroy the illusion; he performs his role as Will Summers even though he reveals his presented self. Although Gorboduc may remain more clearly in our minds than Fulgens and Lucrece, Cambyses, or Summer's lAst Will and Testament, it provided only one model for the later drama. The influence accorded Gorboduc is understandable, of course: its date is convenient for causal logic, and the prominent place it occupies in Sidney's An Apology for Poetry makes the play seem determining. Indeed, T. S. Eliot may have reinforced this view by suggesting the importance of classical models in his essay, "Seneca in Elizabethan Translation" (1927). But these may be matters, finally, of historical coincidence and of Sidney's preference for classical decorum. We need to remember that by limiting our approach to 15

Integrating Actor and Audience

Renaissance drama to learned contemporary accounts, we also limit the questions we can ask and the answers we can receive. We are still left with the problem of dealing with Shakespeare as a playwright who was, above all else, the great popularizer, using whatever learning and whatever means he had to transact business with paying customers. In this particular sense it does not matter whether we espouse the commonly held view of a popular commercial theater, a "theater of a nation," or accept the newer view of the privileged composition of the Globe audience. 23 Whatever their economic complexion, audiences could and still do enjoy a variety of dramatic fare. It is important, however, to remember that in offering his plays Shakespeare consistently defied the virtues applauded by Sidney, offending the art of poetry by violating decorum, mixing "kinges and clownes ... hornpipes and funerals," and, with one exception, ignoring the unities of time, place, and action. Shakespeare may have learned from the wonders of Astrophel and Stella, but he did not set about writing plays by observing the strictures found in An Apologyfor Poetry. In Shakespeare's plays "the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived."24 Sidney decries the playing to the audience so common in Shakespeare's art. With some exception, modern criticism does not so much disparage as avoid the "affective" dimension of Shakespeare's theatricality. In the English Institute Essays of 1969, Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, however, scholars did turn toward the question of affect, asking how a play "impinges on its audience, as it is experienced."25 One of them helped reorient our way of looking at the dramatic transaction. In asserting that "Hamlet is the tragedy of an audience that cannot make up its mind,"26 Stephen Booth not only reminded us that plays are unfolding experiences but also made the question of ambivalence part of an audience's response rather than of the play's language. In doing so he stepped away from the New Criticism toward an affective one. This different approach raises a series of complex critical questions. To what extent does a spatial and "effective" analysis of a text complement a temporal and "affective" response to a performance?27 Are the presentational and representational aspects of a play like The Teinpest parts of Prospero's persona, or are they indicative of the ways the play 16

Integrating Actor and Audience

was performed? Is it appropriate to apply the convention of the first person narrator to Prospero, a character in a form designed for performance? Such questions, and many more like them, cannot receive adequate answers given the assumptions governing current approaches. It is no longer necessary to claim that plays should be treated as plays: the argument has been a commonplace for thiny years. 28 But we need to apply a methodology which is affective and performance-oriented and which brings into fuller account the popular traditions of staging that have been scanted - all within the confines of the theatrical experience, understood in its widest sense as encompassing actor and audience.

Figurenposition Words in a Renaissance playscript are meant to be spoken from distinct stage locations. We should add that in performance characters often speak in voices which are one with their stage positions. Since the translation of Roben Weimann's Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater we have begun to realize that there is a correlation between an actor's stage location and "the speech, action, and degree of stylization associated with that position."29 The term Weimann uses to describe this correspondence is Figurenposition, or "figural" positioning; it promises to provide us, for the first time, with a means to relate the analysis of dramatic language to the flexible dimensions of the platform stage. In proposing such a term Weimann carefully examines the influence two earlier theatrical modes had on the formation of Elizabethan dramaturgy: the counly or hall drama with its basically illusionistic, representational, and self-contained frame, and the popular drama's illusion-breaking, presentational focus. Between these poles, suggested on the one hand by a play like Gorbodoc and on the other by plays like Everyman and a number of other moralities, lies the bulk of later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. In these plays, as in the mixed modalities of Fulgens and Lucrece and Cambyses, representation and presentation coexist. And at those points where A and B panicipate in the main plot'S events, just as Sir John Falstaff would do a century later, signs of a new, more flexible dramaturgy are discernible. At moments such as these, 17

Integrating Actor and Audience

"kinges and clownes" might mingle and the "matter" might "so carrieth it" that the mixture of representational and presentational elements might be said to fuse in a more comprehensive dramatic vision. In the later Elizabethan synthesis these distinct modes might be said to fuse in a "complementary perspective" that expanded on and refined "the traditional interplay between platea and locus, between neutral, undifferentiated 'place' and symbolic location ... [which] accommodates action that is both nonillusionistic and near the audience (corresponding to the 'place') and more illusionistic, localized action sometimes occurring in a discovery place, scaffold, tent, or other loci (corresponsing to the medieval sedes)" (212). As we have seen, the interplay between platea and locus provided a playwright with a means to direct and to control audience attention. Long recognized as an important analytical tool in interpretations of medieval drama, this interplay has been surprisingly undervalued as an aid to discussions of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. Seen in the simplest way, a character's platea (downstage) position clearly facilitated and fostered direct communication between actor and spectator; activity tied to a locus, on the other hand, would have maintained the illusion established at the opening of a scene. From his downstage position a character could "step out" of the play, freeing himself from the place and time of the action and allowing himself to comment on the events, to reveal his own feelings, or otherwise to engage the spectator's confidence. When bound by a locus, which might be something as simple as a joint stool or as elaborate (and symbolic) as a throne, an actor was constrained to remain "within" the temporal and spatial confines of the illusion. But even when a character was fixed within the illusion, he could still partake of the conventions governing downstage address. The audience aside, in particular, allowed an actor to disassociate himself momentarily from the created scene and to offer the direct address common to presentational theater. It is important to remember, however, that the sharper divisions between popular and illusionistic modes found in pre-Shakespearean drama are at times more shadowy and indistinct in the later plays. In The Second Shepherds' Play, Mankind, and Fulgens and Lucrece a character's delivery of illusion-breaking speeches is often facilitated by a downstage position; as my analysis of Summer's lAst Will and Testament suggests, Toy's use 18

Integrating Actor and Audience

of colloquial, prosaic, and proverb-laden "popular" speech was enhanced by his position near the audience. "Realistic" dialogue and the formal, declamatory, rhetorical blank verse poetic style we associate with kings and tragic personae are commonly tied to a specific locus and held within the play's illusionistic frame. In Shakespearean drama, however, a character's manner of speech and his Figurenposition may not always be restricted to a generalized "place" or to a particularized "location." A character did not have to move, literally, in order to create a shift in Figurenposition. As Weimann points out, "this Figurenposition should not be understood only in the sense of an actor's physical position on the stage, but also in the more general sense that an actor may generate a unique stage presence that establishes a special relationship between himself and his fellow actors, the play, or the audience, even when direct address has been abandoned" (230). Indeed, such special relationships work their way across the actor/character/audience matrix and create interesting shifts of category in the status of the character in relation to the dramatic fiction. As in Summer's Last Will and Testament, they often mark out a separation of actor from role and encourage the audience to "share the actor's observation of the character," asserting the connection of actor and audience almost at the expense of character. 30 We need only recall Richard Ill's opening soliloquy or Hamlet's first punning "aside" to sense the way a character located within the illusion may yet "establish a special relationship." Traces of direct address remain of course in the speech of Richard III, Iago, and Edmund. Their lineage may be traced to the popular Vice, whose downstage antics had delighted audiences for centuries. But it is also true that in the speeches they deliver from particularized, upstage loci we may discern the direct address typical in the moralities. A character's Figurenposition may therefore "be defined verbally as well as spatially" (230), and even when he seems fixed within the illusion, he may figuratively "step away" from the illusion through such obvious means as the "aside" or, more subtly, by a shift in idiom or intonation that reconfigures the relationship among actor, character, and audience by dissociating actor and role. All dramatic speech is of course pointed in two directions: whether lines are spoken by a character to himself, as in a soliloquy, or to another character set within the play's world, they are yet meant to be heard by 19

Integrating Actor and Audience

the audience. Presentational conventions further break down the separation between actor and audience. The effect of such devices is not to disrupt or to violate the illusion but to reach beyond the play's imagined world to the world of the spectators. At such moments the intention is to pierce the "wall" dividing audience and play, illusion and reality, "by narrowing the psychic distance between the tiring house and yard-and-galleries."31 The easiest way to communicate in this way, of course, was through direct address and choric comment. Although they operate outside the boundaries of the action, prologues and epilogues also connect the world of the drama to the world of the spectators, often in ways that either establish expectations or force us to reassess the effect of the play. Shakespeare's use of a chorus in Henry V and Romeo and Juliet, Puck's and Prospero's epilogues, and Feste's final song in Twelfth Night all serve these functions. Between these overt means of audience contact and the strictly observed moments of illusion lie such devices as the "aside," indirect choric comment, embedded address, and the soliloquy. Each lives a double life. Although they function from within the illusion, they nonetheless allow an actor to address or otherwise to engage the spectators. The conventions governing Hamlet's and Macbeth's soliloquies allow them to reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings directly to the audience without expressly acknowledging its presence. This mixture of nonillusionistic and illusionistic effects has created a great deal of critical confusion. If the dramatic situation or the playwright's intention warrants, a character might "break" the illusion at any time. It is all the more important to remember, therefore, that on the Globe's stage the actors' relationship to the audience would have been far more fluid than on a proscenium-arch stage. Shakespeare's plays are dotted with moments when - as in recent productions at the Swan Theatre-"asides" and soliloquies may have been used to communicate directly with the spectators. These are matters more related to a playwright's desire to move among a play's multiple illusionistic planes than to the imperfections of the dramatic conventions. As the plays of Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, and Edward Bond reveal, such devices are still standard parts of a dramaturgical repertory of effects. Their use in Renaissance drama makes its art a kind of diabasis that requires an audience to apprehend a play on several levels of awareness. As we know, in Renais20

Integrating Actor and Audience

sance drama the spectators' "two-eyedness" or "multiconsciousness"32 was often manifested by their "metadramatic" awareness that the play they watched was self-consciously aware of its theatricality. Shakespeare utilizes the theatrical metaphor so frequently that drama comments on life and life on drama throughout his plays. Plays within plays, eavesdropping scenes, and scenes involving multiple and receding perspectives and onstage audiences remind us that Shakespeare continually exploits the theatrical experience, "placing" the spectators on the stage and dramatizing the experience of watching a play. Indeed, the "effect of the stage and world comparison" must have been to pull the spectators in two directions simultaneously, reminding them "of the real world whose image the playhouse is, but also of the playhouse itself and the artifice" they took part in creating. 33 In this sense the phenomenological nature of the theatrical experience is an essential component of a play's meaning. A number of scholars have examined the nature of Shakespearean "metadrama," advancing a view of dramatic art that involves an audience's ability to apprehend a play on several levels of awareness and a playwright's use of "extradramatic" devices to bridge the gap between fictive illusion and real experience. These theatrically self-conscious devices cannot, of course, accurately be termed "extradramatic" or "metadramatic": everything that occurs on stage is part of the drama. Let us also remember that "audience multiconsciousness" is as basic to drama as the knowledge that an actor performs a role and that there may not, finally, be any such thing as "metadrama." The relationship between actor and role, between "reality" and illusion, and between presentation and representation is fundamental to the experience of the genre. The existence of devices calculated to "affect" audience awareness only reminds us that Renaissance drama is a theatrical transaction in which an actor may "break through" the "fourth wall" to engage the audience, alternatively standing within the play, as a participant in the drama, and "outside" the play, as its commentator or presenter. Scholars have demonstrated the important functions nonillusionistic and theatrically self-conscious devices serve, laying to rest Eliot's belief that dramatists confused the conventions of popular staging with the realism of illusionistic representation. We have yet to grasp the extent to which the coexistence of presentational and representational modes in21

Integrating Actor and Audience

fluences the experience of viewing a play. That will be the burden of this study. In the readings of Shakespeare's tragedies that follow, I examine his manipulation of audience response, panicularly in terms of his way of moving among a play's multiple illusionistic planes by shifting the pattern of presentation. I select the tragedies for study because I wish to examine a single genre. As my analysis of A Midsummer Night's Dream suggests, I believe that my approach could be applied to Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and romances and to other Renaissance plays. But an investigation of these genres would require separate studies, and to mix genres in this book would distort the focus of my examination of the ways Shakespeare presented his tragic protagonists. Throughout this book I argue that the experience of a play is circumscribed by the creation and the dissolution of the illusion and that the audience, the playwright, and the players must conspire to create the world of the play. As John Dewey insisted,34 the process of our involvement should be the subject of our discussions about art. In a drama that was so much a mirror of the forms and pressures of an age, that involvement required the spectator to confront the same tensions and resistances found in life. No one can claim that his analysis isolates the "meaningful experience" of a play. A play's meaning is inextricably connected to the conditions of its production and to the present moment of its performance. A playscript is a "bundle of potentialities," and my attempts at writing "producible" and "valid" interpretations is necessarily limited. 3; At best we can approximate theatrical meaning. But perhaps the reader will agree that several strands of that meaning have been followed and that some of the figures in the carpet have been illuminated. In this I am like a playgoer whose individual response contributes to the impact a play makes upon the spectators who face the stage. Only in this way, I submit, may we approach the meaning of dramatic action, described by Thomas Heywood as "so bewitching ... lively and well-spirited" a thing that "it hath power to new-mold the hans of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt." Only by this means will we be able to understand the feeling that prompted a Renaissance playgoer to offer to the actor "in all his hart a prosperous performance, as if the Personator were the man Personated."36

22

II Language, Staging, and '~ffect": Figurenposition in Richard III

"Impish-to-fiendish humour"

Critical waters may be at their murkiest when the character of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, surfaces for discussion. They are so turbid because two equally influential critics, working within fifteen years of each other, arrived at radically opposed interpretations of Richard's function in the play. In his classic Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), E. M. W. Tillyard argued that fascination with Richard's character clouded our understanding of the greater scheme of retributive providence at work in the drama} In what is still the onhodox view,2 Tillyard suggested that Richard III upheld the Tudor myth of retributive justice, a myth embedded in sources like Sir Thomas More's The History of King Richard III (1513), Edward Hall's The Union ofthe Two Noble and Illustre Families ofLancaster and York (1550), and Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles ofEngland, Scotland, and Ireland (1587) that Shakespeare drew upon in writing the play. But in A. P. Rossiter's provocative and lively examination, first published in Angel with Horns (1961), Richard is precisely a demonically appealing, teleologically undermining villain, who lures attention from thoughts about providence by immersing us in devilry. For Rossiter, Richard is a "huge, triumphant stage-personality," a "diabolical humourist" who generates "roars of laughter about wickednesses ... which the audience would immediately condemn in real life"; indeed, in Rossiter's view, the "consoling and comfonable" Christian principles of history seem hopelessly "naive and optimistic" when brought to bear upon the play.3 These apparently irreconcilable perspectives can be reconciled if we take

23

Figurenposition in Richard III into account a Renaissance audience's response to the reenactment of one of its most powerful historical myths. Indeed, perhaps the only way the two views can be made to make sense is to consider how an audience might have responded. It is true that, in Richard III, the providential view of history seems diametrically opposed to traditional stage practice: the clear need for audiences to denounce Richard by the play's end makes his theatrical virtuosity and fascination problematic. It is also evident that these equally valid "moral" and "dramatic" approaches are so much at odds that one is tempted to think Tillyard and Rossiter did not "see" the same play. As members of an elite, privileged audience, each scholar envisions a radically different play, and certainly any single production might highlight either of their views. But the attitudes of critics may not always match those of an audience. Interested as they are in promulgating a particular thesis, and trapped into forming a gestalt about a given work, critics sometimes see only part of the performance. Taken together, however, Tillyard and Rossiter posed the central problem of response to Richard, and they did so in such a way that they set the terms for future discussion. And yet, even in these two fine examples of the very best criticism, there remains a haunting sense that something has been missed, that criticism is far from describing the powerful effect this "early" play continues to have in the theater. It is all the more troublesome to think that a drama so obviously brilliant and masterful, so clearly successful with audiences, then and now, should be placed in the procrustean bed of Shakespeare's development, relegated to a phase of his career in which he was learning his craft. 4 Let us remember that for the Renaissance playgoer, instruction is enhanced through the means of dramatic entertainment; both instruction and entertainment combine in a spectator's awareness of Richard's dual nature as a morally damnable villain and as a theatrically delightful Vice. In this sense Richard III involves its audience in a ceremonial recognition; its power derives from the fact that it asks the spectators, finally, to make up their minds. Shakespeare influences that decision by manipulating Richard's Figurenpositionen. Such an approach will help us understand the dynamics of this theatrical transaction and will help us clarify the relationship of language, staging, and affect in Renaissance drama.

24

Figurenposition in Richard III

'~

jolly thriving wooer"

For the theatergoer there is an experiential aesthetic of apprehension as well as a reflective process of comprehension; each is intenwined with the other. We need to test critical response against imagined performance to determine the affect a play might have created in its audience, the way in which the emotional impact of a drama contributes to our understanding. But while it is undeniable that Shakespeare wished to move his audiences to any number of responses, critical response often bogs down when it tries to describe the "affect" a play might have had upon the spectators. There are good reasons for this limitation, the chief being the conditioning we have undergone by adhering to the "affective fallacy" and the resultant fear readers have about the shaky theoretical ground they stand upon when they try to give proof to their conjectures. We have always felt safer in describing the "effect" of a play, seeking refuge in the bedrock cenainty of Aristotelian terminology, and we agree that the best readings best account for a play's effectiveness. One such reading of Richard III, of course, is Wolfgang Clemen's valuable Commentary5; its impact on readers and in classroom discussion continues to be substantial. Let us recall one major interpretative issue influenced by Clemen; the opinions of both Tillyard and Rossiter may be held within its boundaries. Influenced in large measure by Clemen's analysis, critics have long argued that a change occurs in Richard during the performance. Reader after reader after reader6 has attempted to demonstrate this change by comparing Richard's brilliant, apparently effonless wooing of Lady Anne in 1,2 with the apparently strained, ultimately less-than-effective wooing of Queen Elizabeth's daughter in 4,4. They note that repetition in Shakespeare's plays is usually meant to show difference as much as similarity, and that by placing one wooing scene in each half of the play Shakespeare allows us to compare Richard's performances. Whether or not an audience would have the first wooing scene in mind during the performance of the second is not raised as an issue. Instead, critics focus

25

Figurenposition in Richard III on the fact that although Richard believes he overpowered the Queen and won her daughter Elizabeth, just as he triumphed in the contest of wills with Anne, he actually has lost. As Lord Stanley tells Sir Christopher Urswick in 4,5, the Queen "hath heartily consented" to Richmond's wish to "espouse Elizabeth her daughter" (7 -8). Three reasons are cited for Richard's failure with the Queen. One of the reasons is that Richard woos by proxy: the young princess is not present, and he must face the Queen. Such a situation serves to distance us. Like Lady Anne, the young, presumably naive Elizabeth might easily have succumbed to Richard's power, but the older and wiser Queen, his sworn enemy, is less easily persuaded. Unlike Lady Anne, she is not about to be swayed by Richard's claim that he committed murder "all ... for love of" Elizabeth (4.4.288; 1.2.121-124, 179-182). Indeed, it seems that Richard's verbal skills are less effective in the later scene, and that provides a second reason for his failure. For many readers the brilliant rhetorical and stichomythic shifts discernible in 1,2 are just not present in 4,4; although the exchange of lines and the play upon conceits between the verbal duelists are similar, Richard appears to be flat-footed. Queen Elizabeth matches his thrusts with equally powerful counterthrusts, and Richard cannot devise a stratagem to parry her advances. But perhaps the best way to sense a difference in Richard's power in 4,4 has always been to contrast his wonderfully outrageous vaunt after his success with Anne to his flat, contemptuous words when he believes he has persuaded the Queen to procure her daughter. At the end of their interview Anne only seems to have second thoughts about Richard, coyly qualifying her acceptance to his offer of marriage: Richard: Say then my peace is made. Anne: That shalt thou know hereafter. Richard: But shall I live in hope? Anne: All men, I hope, live so. (197-200) The Queen is more ambiguous: Queen: Richard:

Shall I go win my daughter to thy will? And be a happy mother by the deed.

26

Figurenposition in Richard III Queen: Richard:

I go. Write to me very shortly, And you shall understand from me her mind. Bear her my true love's kiss; and so farewell. (426-430)

After Anne departs, Richard revels in his success: Was ever woman in this humor woo'd? Was ever woman in this humor won? I'll have her, but I will not keep her long. What? I, that kill'd her husband and his father To take her in her heart's extremest hate, With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes, The bleeding witness of my hatred by, Having God, her conscience, and all these bars against me, And I no friends to back my suit at all But the plain devil and dissembling looks? And yet to win her! All the world to nothing! Ha! (227-238) But after the Queen departs, Richard caps the sequence with a single, truncated, disdainful remark: "Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!" (431). With the Queen, Richard is clearly not "a jolly thriving wooer" (4.3.43). All these comparisons are well known. Underlying them is a sense that Richard undergoes a change in the play, one based upon the psychological portrait given to us in his opening soliloquy and seen in his behavior when he gains the throne. Desire for the crown drove him on; the challenges presented by the obstacles he had to overcome powered that desire. Now that vital energy seems lost, dissipated, and verbal sullenness replaces rhetorical efflorescence; now Richard "gnaws his lip" (4.2.27) whereas before his tongue was prepared to turn the lips of "scorn" and "contempt" to personal gain (1.2.171-172). I do not think we can speak of Richard as possessing a consistent psychology. It is clear that a change in the way his character is portrayed is evident in 4,2, but I do not believe that it is logical or arguable to read a (prior) psychology into his role. I would suggest that there is less a change in Richard than in an audience's response to him, that to read

27

Figurenposition in Richard III the play in this way is to do justice to this playas a play, as a temporal process unfolding before a group of spectators, and that "spatial" analyses of the differences between 1,2 and 4,4 may be misleading. Let us consider one of the grounds for comparison. In spite of attempts to prove it so, the rhetoric in 4,4 is not less skillful than that found in 1,2, and Richard's rhetorical turns are just as capable of leading to success with the Queen. Although a production might stress a change in tone in the later scene, which would indicate that Richard's luster has diminished, it is not necessary, and it may be even more desirable to have him be as energetic as he was in 1,2. Moreover, while Richard's success may be in doubt at the end of 4,4, I do not think we need to hear Lord Stanley's words to know, retrospectively, how to feel about the second wooing scene. What I believe to be the difficulty in critical response arises from a confusion between the psychological and emblematic depiction of character, a mistaking of the play's dominant mode. During most of the play Richard is a symbolic figure, incapable of psychological change; he is the popular Vice, the comic devil of popular theater. For contemporary audiences the grafting of the Vice's persona to an historical figure must have added a startlingly new dimension to the way such roles were conceived. 7 When he does reveal a psychological dimension, in the soliloquy before the Battle of Bosworth Field, a departure from the play's symbolic mode is signaled. To provide this avatar of the Vice with the capacity for psychological change and growth is surely mistaken 8 ; rather, we should understand that Richard remains constant throughout most of the play, and that what changes is our response. Anne's acceptance of Richard in 1,2 is psychologically incredible, and no Elizabethan theory of humours put forward to explain her behavior can justify the capitulation of a young woman who has had her husband and her father murdered by the man who now woos her. Richard's rhetoric and stichomythic finesse are powerful of course, and they contribute to the sense we have of his ability to work his way with others. But the key here must lie rather in a master dramatist's intention. Shakespeare chooses to dramatize this scene,9 not simply to report it. It may well be that he does so because he wishes to demonstrate Richard's virtuosity early on; that virtuosity

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Figurenposition in Richard III is fascinating, and his accompanying vitality and impudence make him believable in our eyes. Audiences continue to love the demonstration. Shakespeare draws the event out, making it all the more remarkable and enjoyable and leading the audience into complicity with Richard. In this respect it is important to stress that Richard remains in direct contact with the spectators throughout act one, frequently addressing them by means of the soliloquy and the aside. His concluding remarks in 1,2 in fact seal the bond forged between him and the spectators in his opening soliloquy. Although the wooing of Anne introduces a new sequence, it is finally a longer, more drawn out part of a pattern of confrontation between Richard and his victims, Anne following Clarence and Hastings in 1,1, herself followed by so many others. The first two scenes of act one may thus be seen as a single unit, with Richard's soliloquy at the end of 1,2 extending a pattern in which Richard confronts an adversary and then comments to the audience about the effect of the meeting and his future intentions. As character after character is introduced, we gain a sense of the obstacles Richard must overcome on his journey toward the crown. By opening and closing these scenes with Richard's monologues, as well as by embedding a number of soliloquies and audience addresses within them, Shakespeare also provides a sense of Richard's presence and control not unlike the one we feel is possessed by Edmund in King Lear, 1,2, and by Iago in Otbello, 1,1-3. In the final speech in 1,2 Richard "frames" the sequence by recalling his opening soliloquy, playing again upon the words "sun" and "shadow" and referring to his assessment of his bodily appearance (one not "shaped for sportive tricks") as now "mistaken" since Anne evidently sees him as "a marv'llous proper man" (254). What occurs in 4,4 is quite different, and that difference is revealing. But to understand the scene's importance fully, it, like 1,2, should be approached in terms of its position in the play. In 1,1 and 1,2 Richard seems unstoppable; despite his physical deformity and limitations he is the most intelligent, engaging, and exciting character we have met (or will meet). Here the strength of Rossiter's argument may be felt. A character living in an amoral world, Richard might just be the most admirable and lively inhabitant of that world. Not until Richmond (surely another

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Figurenposition in Richard III one-dimensional character) appears in 5,2 do we meet a virtuous adversary; until he appears, we do not have a suitable person to contrast with Richard, and we must be careful not to misplace our sympathies by siding with Hastings or Buckingham, Rivers, Grey, or Vaughan, each of whom has been hoisted on his own petard. For more than four-fifths of its length the play lacks an identifiable moral center, and lacking a credible spokesman to guide it, the audience is left on its own. Because Richard functions best in an amoral world, we may even suspend our ethical judgment. The only voice to condemn Richard belongs to old Queen Margaret, historically dead, but revived by Shakespeare. She plays the role of prophetess, calling down a deadly curse on the Yorkists and their sympathizers. She is the voice of heavenly, "retributive justice" in the play; and it is Margaret, along with Anne, who evaluates Richard as a figure of evil in the play's first half. Anne's moral evaluation is discounted, of course, in the light of her capitulation to Richard's tour de force. And Margaret, when she first appears in 1,3, finds herself turned upon by the entire Yorkist faction: "What?" she says, "were you snarling all before I came, / Ready to catch each other by the throat, / And turn you all your hatred now on me?" (187-189). When she attempts to curse Richard, it is Richard who frustrates and turns her invective back upon her by getting the last word, naming "Margaret" herself as the object of her curse (233). But Margaret reappears later, in a second curious repetition of scene,lO and receives a very different response from the bereaved group ofYorkist royal wives and mothers. And it is with her appearance in the first half of 4,4, rather than in the interview with Queen Elizabeth, that we may mark a shift in the play's tone. Once again, Margaret initially appears on the fringes of the stage, speaking in aside, and waits for an opportune moment to move forward. In 1,3 she provided an antiphonal voice in her asides, possible because she spoke directly to the spectators during the course of Richard's conversation with the Queen, her relatives, Hastings, and Buckingham. As we noted, when she "comes forward," assuming a new Figurenposition in relation to the illusionistic scene, all voices turn against her. In 4,4, however, when, after her famous opening soliloquy ("So now prosperity begins to mellow / And drop into the rotten mouth of death" [1-2]) and another series of asides, Margaret approaches the 30

Figurenposition in Richard III Yorkists, she is no longer held at arm's length. When she "comes forward" in this scene, reassuming her Figurenposition within the illusionistic scene, she "sits down" with the bereaved royal family: Queen Margaret:

[Coming forward.] If ancient sorrow be most reverent, Give mine the benefit of seniory, And let my griefs frown on the upper hand. If sorrow can admit society.

[Sitting down with them.]

(35-38)

Now her voice is orchestrated with those of the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth, assimilated and harmonized in the incantatory keening of distraught wives and mothers. The complaints lodged against the women's excessive rhetoric and the confusion created by the repetition of royal names (39-43) have perhaps had the unfortunate effect of depriving this moment of its force. But because it occurs immediately before Richard's wooing of the Queen, it has a direct impact on that interview and helps to explain not only why the Queen is so steeled against him but also why the audience is in an altered frame of mind. If in 4,4 Richard seems to lack the power he had with Anne and the audience, his luster is diminished for one reason: he lacks that power because what was fun in the play's first half is simply no longer so, as we now' have seen too much of grief and suffering, counted the number of dead bodies, lamented the deaths of two innocent victims, the young Princes Edward and Richard, and listened carefully to the ritualistic keening of the women in the first half of 4,4. TyrreI's reminder that the murder of the young princes is a "tyrannous and bloody act . . . / The most arch deed of piteous massacre / That ever yet this land was guilty of" (4.3 .1- 3) plays no small part in changing the audience's attitude; the lament of the women confirms its shift in sympathy. An audience does not feel as it did because Shakespeare has manipulated its response. Although the spectators will have to wait until 5,3 for an explicit parade of victims, the play's process of cumulative moral judgment has already implicitly occurred. In this sense scenes in which Richard is dramatically effective - and scenes in which he is not - are effective only insofar as they affect the spectators. 31

Figurenposition in Richard III

"To prove a villain" I have been arguing that there is less a change in Richard than in his effectiveness in swaying his audience. Even when he seems shaken and changes his "mind" (4.4.456), Richard is not in fact any different from the villain he has always been. What alters is the audience's attitude: Shakespeare manipulates spectator response by further exposing Richard's evil nature. By 4,4 we truly recognize Richard for what he is and has been; from this moment it is not only clear what Richard is, but also that we have known the truth all along. Cumulative moral judgment has been accompanied by character revelation. And these two techniques correspond to the double impulse operating in the play. As the hero and the villain, Richard elicits approval and condemnation; because he does not have a virtuous adversary until Richmond appears, Richard plays both roles. But when Richmond appears, Vice will be defined by Virtue, and we will condemn that which most fascinated us. While it is true that Richard is "invisible" to his victims, he is not to the spectators, whom he "keeps reminded" of his "real intentions."ll Throughout the play he speaks directly to them in a series of expository soliloquies and asides, informing them of his plans. He appears to do so in 4,2, when he reveals his fears about Buckingham and his need to marry Elizabeth's daughter (28-32,60-65), and in 4,3, when he tells us what has happened to Clarence's daughter and his wife Anne (36-43). These speeches recall his soliloquies at the end of 1,1 and 1,2. But as we will see, the thrill of it all is gone. The audience will no longer wonder how far he can go but rather when he will be stopped. Emptied of the humor and liveliness, the wanton vitality and sheer sense of play they earlier possessed, Richard's asides are now less directed to the audience and more readily understood as the cold-blooded calculations of a ruthless villain. Although it would be difficult to choose the moment when the audience's sympathies shift, there is little doubt that a shift occurs. But perhaps it is important to note that when Richard proves himself a villain, and thereby ethically distances himself from us, he also literally moves

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Figurenposition in Richard III further away from the audience. Psychic nearness or distance is reinforced by Richard's proximity or remoteness on the stage; from the instant that he speaks from an upstage locus, the throne, in 4,2, he occupies a Figurenposition distinctly different from the one he held prior to this point. In this sense the play's language and staging complement each olher. Those Figurenpositionen are carefully established in his brilliant opening soliloquy. Traditionally, the speech has been divided into three sections, each of which is marked by an obvious change in style. It has not been so clearly discerned, however, that in each of the soliloquy's movements Richard also delineates one of his multiple theatrical functions, his manners of speech, and his Figurenpositionen relative to the action. The opening lines ("Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York" [1-1 3]), replete with anaphora, parallelism, antithesis, alliteration, and assonance, are as much the words of a prologue as the language of a character set within the world of the play. In contrast to this distinctive rhetoric the next group of lines (beginning with "But I, that am not shap'd for sportive tricks / Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass" [14-27]) serves to identify Richard as a character in the play; here enjambed, imbalanced, caesura-punctuated, energetic, and jagged prose rhythms, along with the egocentricity of the repeated "I" pronoun, are set against the orderly and smooth "front" of the prologue's end-stopped lines. In these lines Gloucester identifies his representational role as the Richard of the play's sources and of popular myth, as the hunchbacked figure whose physical appearance was revelatory of his inner ugliness. He introduces himself as a participant in the play's imagined world, moving, as it were, from a "figural" position outside that world to a location within it. In the soliloquy's final movement Richard announces yet a third persona: that of the Vice-presenter, for whom plotting and machination are all: And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots I have laid, inductions dangerous,

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Figurenposition in Richard III By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams, To set my brother Clarence and the King In deadly hate the one against the other; And if King Edward be as true and just As I am subtle, false and treacherous, This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up About a prophecy which says that G Of Edward's heirs the murtherer shall be. (28-40) Now Richard self-consciously displays his theatrical lineage. In so announcing his presentational persona as the "villain," Richard moves even closer to the audience; now his speech approximates that of the Vice, who in countless earlier plays delighted audiences from the platea by moralizing "two meanings in one word" (3.1.83). The parts of the soliloquy thus identify Richard's three personae as prologue to, participant in, and Vice-presenter of the play and relate those personae to his different Figurenpositionen. Although he speaks to us from the platea, he utilizes conventions common to both locus- and platea-oriented speech. And implicit in his roles as "realistic" participant and Vice-presenter are the poles of an audience's response to him. Thematically, we are to repudiate this damnable character on moral and theological grounds; theatrically, we may indulge in Richard's persona as the Vice until our moral sensibility overwhelms our theatrical pleasure. Indeed, if we take a synoptic view, it is clear that both Tillyard's and Rossiter's approaches were correct. The speech is revelatory in one further sense. Although the three distinctive styles recognizable here are related to Richard's public, private, and symbolic roles and provide him with his unique dramatic voices, one stylistic trait dominates all the others. A delight in the manipulation of language, apparent in Richard's puns and voluble eloquence, plays across the surface of these words. While he is, as a participant in the play, an historical character, he may be above all else the play's Vice figure, that figure of Iniquity whose chief appeal lay in his linguistic virtuosity. And while this speech is delivered from a locus that is simultaneously a platea, and draws from conventions governing direct address and illusionistic speech, it is the nonillusionistic mode of audience address that controls 34

Figurenposition in Richard III the style of the soliloquy. Even when the actor playing Gloucester moves from the platea to a particularized locus, he will still be able to speak (in)directly to the spectators whenever he utilizes the idiom of the Vice or exploits his privileged relationship with them. The effect of this interplay among the play's styles is important to our understanding of later scenes. Following in the footsteps of Rossiter, Nicholas Brooke reminded us that many of Richard's speeches are cast in a manner that is different from the play's dominant rhetorical style.12 Richard's public speeches, of course, are as rhetorical as those delivered by other characters; this is the formal, studied language of the history play, full of the polished periods of declamatory speech. But Richard also has his own particular voice (with important implications for the development of dramatic character). His asides are rendered in a lively colloquial manner that suits his presentational persona- and that is radically opposed to rhetorical formalism. In this sense, Brooke suggests, Richard's language is not an atavistic reminder of Gorboduc; the symbolic, rhetorical mode of "being" prominent in that play and in contemporary translations of Seneca becomes, in Richard's direct and indirect address and soliloquies, a mode of acting which breaks through the play's self-contained illusionistic frame to bridge the distance between actor and spectator}3 In Richard III the conventions governing illusionistic dialogue and locusoriented staging jostle in unique formal relationship with the plateaoriented, nonillusionistic dramaturgy and colloquial speech of the morality play's Vice figure. And that is to imply further that even when Richard is apparently bound within the illusion focused around a stage locus, he is capable of "stepping away" from that locus to address the audience or, more subtly and delightfully, to puncture other characters' rhetorical pomposity with the keen plainness of "common" speech. A version of this interplay between rhetorical seriousness and ironic and "common" speech may be seen in 2,1. After King Edward, Queen Elizabeth, Dorset, Rivers, Hastings, Catesby, Buckingham, and Grey each offer a speech of friendship and love drenched with conciliatory sentiment, Richard enters. When he provides a long rhetorical statement, full like the previous ones of hypocritical "humility," he announces his desire to end enmity in the kingdom by asserting that "I do not know that Englishman alive / With whom my soul is any jot at odds / More than 35

Figurenposition in Richard III the infant that is born tonight." "I thank my God for my humility," he says (70-72). The Queen can only say, ''A holy day shall this be kept hereafter" (74). But when she asks Edward to pardon his brother Clarence, imprisoned by Richard's treachery and Edward's order, the exercise in forgiveness comes to an abrupt end. Richard's words destroy any provisional sense of unity that may have been established: "Why Madam," he says, "have I off'red love for this, / To be so flouted in the royal presence? / Who knows not that the gentle Duke is dead? / You do him injury to scorn his corse" (78-81). The light play of politeness, the ridiculous sense of injury to delicate feelings, and the insulting naming of the Queen as "Madam" are extremely effective. Here the outer audience, privileged witness to Clarence's death, shares in the irony. Now that Clarence is dead, Richard is not, at the moment, at odds with any living Englishman; his "humility" chokes one. And this is hardly an isolated example. A later example of this ironic shift in idioms occurs when Richard tells Buckingham to blacken his mother's name by suggesting her adultery and King Edward's illegitimacy. "Yet," he concludes, "touch this [matter] sparingly, as 'twere far off, / Because, my lord, you know my mother lives" (3.5.93-94). In fact, examples of Richard's idiomatic shifts abound; in every case the success of this verbal play depends upon an audience's privileged awareness of Richard's true nature and is governed by its ability to distinguish among his voices. With the entry of the first of his victims, Clarence, Richard reveals his hypocrisy by addressing his own thoughts: "Dive, thoughts, down to my soul, here Clarence comes!" (41). Professor Clemen reminds us that here "Richard's secret thoughts, though revealed to us, must remain unknown to the other characters in the play." But even though this device may be "obvious and unrealistic,"14 it is nonetheless effective and in keeping with the practice of the Vice: it seals a compact between Richard and the spectators which allows him, throughout the first half of the play, to use his language ironically. In many of his words, as in his suggestion that perhaps King Edward "hath some intent" to have Clarence "new crist'ned in the Tower" (49-50) or in his farewell promise to his brother that "I will deliver you, or else lie for you" (115), Richard draws upon the audience's privileged awareness. They know what Richard intends to do, while the characters do not know what is going

36

Figurenposition in Richard III on, "cast" as they are into "darkness" (1.3.326). Richard thus creates and maintains an ironic tone. And like this characteristically sardonic wordplay, his other puns similarly twist meanings to delight the audience. To Brakenbury's disavowal of interest in Jane Shore's allure and attributes ("With this, my lord, myself have nought to do"), Richard responds with a bawdy pun: "Naught to do with Mistress Shore? I tell thee, fellow, / He that doth naught with her (excepting one) / Were best to do it secretly alone" (1.1.97 -100). For Rossiter and Brooke, Gloucester's linguistic virtuosity is part of his appeal as an actor, as a "talented being who can assume every mood and passion at will, at all events to the extent of making others believe in it."15 Certainly the histrionics of the role contribute to the making of this great stage figure. As an actor in this drama of "consummate acting," Richard continually asserts, of course, that he "cannot flatter and look fair, / Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog" (1.3.47 -48), admits that he is "too childish-foolish for this world" (141), and thanks God for his "humility" (2.1.73) - all the while practicing deception with his victims. And practice he does a number of roles that are "all equally successful"16 with an "unholy jocularity ... and blasphemous wit,"17 adding what his mother has omitted from her blessing, that he should "die a good old man! ," and remarking, "That is the butt-end of a mother's blessing. / I marvel that her Grace did leave it out" (2.2.109-111). With just as much impudence, bravado, delight, and false sanctimoniousness he comically cautions Buckingham: "0 do not swear, my lord of Buckingham" (3.7.220). But we know, because Richard told us, that he clothes his "naked villainy ... with hold writ" and seems a "saint, when most" he "plays the devil" (1.3.3 35ff.). Let me stress that other characters, "flXed" as they are within the illusion, do not recognize this fact. Simple victims of his stratagems like Clarence and Hastings believe Richard is exemplary: for Hastings "there's never a man in Christendom / Can lesser hide his love or hate than he, / For by his face straight shall you know his heart" (3.4.5154). But Richard knows that an actor must be able to "quake and change" his "colour," "Murther" his "breath in middle of a word, / And then again begin, and stop again, / As if" he "were distraught and mad with terror"

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Figurenposition in Richard III (3.5.1-4). And he receives assurance from his conspirator, Buckingham,

that he too can feign: Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian, Speak and look back, and pry on every side, Tremble and start at wagging of a straw; Intending deep suspicion, ghastly looks Are at my service, like enforced smiles; And both are ready in their offices At any time to grace my stratagems. (5-11) When he later threatens to be "plain" (4.2.16 ff.) with Buckingham, he is most to be feared. Certainly Rossiter's appraisal of Richard's powers is accurate: "Through his prowess as actor and his embodiment of the comic Vice and impish-to-fiendish humour, he offers the false as more attractive than the true (the actor's function) and the ugly and evil as amiable and amusing (the clown's game of value-reversals)."18 The relation between the play's language and staging may be better understood with these stylistic indicators in mind. After his presentational self-introduction in the opening soliloquy, Richard moves into the dramatic illusion in his conversation with Clarence, then out of that illusion when Clarence departs and when he comments about the meeting (11 7120). As part of his function as the play's presenter, he then introduces Hastings ("But who comes here? the new-delivered Hastings?" [121]) much in the way he announced Clarence's arrival (41), plunges again into illusionistic dialogue with another victim, and then emerges from the conversation to close the scene with a long expository soliloquy, in which he outlines the difficult steps he must climb in order to secure the throne (144-162). He concludes the scene, that is, by reestablishing contact with the spectators. The same pattern of movement determines the staging of Anne's wooing. In this scene Richard clearly moves to a particularized locus that has been brought on (and will be taken off) the stage, and his courting of Anne assumes an illusionistic character not only because the dialogue stresses the exchanges between this "sweet saint" and "foul devil" but also because it is centered on the hearse of Henry VI. In keeping with the pattern of movement established in 1,1, Richard moves "out of" the illusionistic scene after Anne leaves the stage. Alone again, Richard's 38

Figurenposition in Richard III devilish temptation of and triumph over Anne is celebrated in his gloating soliloquy (227 -263), in which he once more utilizes the impudent, "popular" idiom of his presentational persona by speaking directly to the spectators and inviting them to admire his rhetorical skills. The fact that he has but one line after the wooing of Elizabeth reveals the difference in his relationship with the spectators, but so too does the fact that prior to, during, and following the wooing Richard is not in contact with the audience. The second wooing, like the first, is absolutely illusionistic and distances the action from us, but we do not reestablish our relationship with Richard after the scene is performed. In 1,1 and 2 Shakespeare sets the pattern of Richard's movement from platea to locus. When he mounts the throne, however, he enters the illusion and does not appear to "step out" of it until his final soliloquy. The interaction between presentation and representation, when seen in performance, thus helps to control the sense of nearness or distance to Richard, and his movement from the platea to a specified locus is part of the "double delight" he provides as a tempting Vice figure and damnable villain. But there are two other important moments when Richard's location contributes to our response. The first of these moments comes when Richard appears "aloft, between two bishops," prayer book in hand, in a mock show of humility and holiness before the citizens of London (3.7). Here Richard and Buckingham stage a play. Buckingham glosses the Lord Mayor's description of Richard's appearance ("See where his Grace stands, 'tween two clergymen!'') by commenting that the clergymen are Two props of virtue for a Christian prince, To stay him from the fall of vanity; And see, a book of prayer in his handTrue ornaments to know a holy man. (96-99) These indeed are "props" in this blatantly "staged" scene. Richard's location "aloft," however, also removes him from us; as spectators, we must decide if, knowing what we know, we still wish to play the audience, to suspend our disbelief so as to believe in Richard's virtue. Richard of course "plays" the "maid's part" by answering "nay" and yet taking the offered crown, demurely accepting what he most clearly desires. But this 39

Figurenposition in Richard III staged episode, in which "the crowd, long silent ... finally concedes a reluctant 'amen' to Richard's acceptance of the title of 'England's worthy king,'" involves more than the citizens' awareness that they are "joining, for the experience of the moment, the play that Richard and Buckingham have staged."19 The "artifice" "created" here places the spectators and the citizens in a dilemma - a point to which I wish later to return. The second of these moments comes when Richard's and Richmond's tents are pitched in 5,2 and 5,3. Now two loci are on stage, and now we may compare Richard and Richmond as leaders, soldiers, and men for the first time. The staging is overtly symbolic: each man is dressed conventionally, with Richard in customary black, Richmond in white; each tent is placed to suggest further the opposing sides of this conflict between right and wrong, goodness and evil. And as the ghosts of Richard's victims enter and move from side to side, casting their curses on Richard and bestowing their blessings on Richmond, they make clear to all that Richard is a figure of disorder, evil, and hell, worthy only to "despair and die," while Richmond should "live and flourish." In doing so this final parade of Richard's sins depicts, visually and explicitly, a moral judgment already made in the minds of the spectators.

"Considerate eyes" The curves of two structural rhythms are traced in Richard III. One, more commonly known, is the rising and falling, retributive pattern of the history play, an adaptation of the movement of Fortune in men's lives. Richard "bustles" (1.1.152) in the world of the play, achieving the throne by completing a series of steps: Clarence is murdered, Lady Anne becomes his wife, King Edward dies, the young princes are disposed of. And an audience's involvement in the plotting of this series insures its complicity with Richard. After he realizes his goal, he fulfills the pattern by falling downward, as the opposition mounts against him and this devil, "Richard," "falls in height of all his pride" (5.3.176). This is one of the play's structural rhythms, and it has been further clarified by Sir Laurence Olivier's film of the drama, itself based on Colley Cibber's eighteenth-

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Figurenposition in Richard III century adaption. But let us not forget, even though the Olivier-Cibber version may remain eidetically foremost in our minds, that there is another pattern at work in Richard III. Following Cibber, Olivier focused on the "realistic" elements in the play and trimmed or cut most of the moments in which Richard does not "bustle." There are a great number of them: Clarence's dream of conscience and the overtly symbolic, antithetical responses of his murderers (1.4), Queen Margaret's continual prophetic and choric comments, the voices of the citizens (2.3), the deaths of Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan (3.3), and in particular the Scrivener's scene (3.6).20 Each provides a "static" moment within the overall energetic movement of Richard to the crown. The scenes were trimmed or cut altogether, presumably because they did not advance the action and because they appeared to be examples of earlier, and cruder, presentational and emblematic-as opposed to representational and realistic - dramaturgy. But they constitute a pattern of their own, a countermovement that treats the issues of conscience, of moral choice and responsibility, and of sympathy and empathy for Richard's victims. By the time the Scrivener directly questions the audience about the duplicity surrounding Lord Hastings' execution, it ought to be able to provide its own moral response. "Here's a good world the while!" says the Scrivener: "Who is so gross / That cannot see this palpable device? / Yet who's so bold but says he sees it not?" (3.6.10-12). From his downstage, platea position the Scrivener asks a question that begs an answer. "Bad is the world, and all will come to nought," he comments, "When such ill dealing must be seen in thought" (13-14). The murder of Clarence initiates this countermovement. As readers point out, Clarence's dream of conscience is narrated to us; in his recounting of it he relies on the past tense and utilizes pictorial images to describe the "thousand fearful wracks; / A thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon; / Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, / Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels, / All scatt'red on the bottom of the sea" into which he has fallen, "strook" overboard by his brother Gloucester (1.4.24-28). Rather than dramatize Clarence's dream, as he would do with Richard's dream on the eve of Bosworth Field, Shakespeare has Clarence recreate his own parade of sins (43 -63). In so doing Shakespeare "stops" the action and

41

Figurenposition in Richard III allows Clarence's words to linger, for a while, in our "considerate" minds. Moreover, he has Clarence acknowledge his anguished awareness of his guilt: Ah, Keeper, Keeper, I have done these things (That now give evidence against my soul) For Edward's sake, and see how he requites me! God! if my deep pray'rs cannot appease thee, But thou wilt be aveng'd on my misdeeds, Yet execute thy wrath in me alone! 0, spare my guiltless wife and my poor children! Keeper, I prithee sit by me awhile. My soul is heavy, and I fain would sleep. (66-74)

o

Brakenbury's soliloquy (76-83) draws a moral from Clarence's words, but he is not free from culpability when he relinquishes his charge to the two murderers. The murder of Clarence is in an important sense symbolic of the moral state of England, a land in which everyone wishes to be "guiltless" (94) and refuses to "reason what is meant" (93) by Richard's orders. This scene, which reveals the brutal and deadly results of Richard's plotting for the first time, makes us realize that what Richard does is in earnest. Insofar as Richard III is also a "play of mind," the opposed responses of the murderers present us with the terms of the moral debate. The First Murderer is resolute and without compunction; the Second Murderer fears the word "judgment," which breeds in him a "kind of remorse" (107-108). One's "conscience flies out" (130), however, when the Duke of Gloucester's purse opens, and the Second Murderer relents and gives way to evil. But as they argue with Clarence, who tries desperately to persuade them to save him, the Second Murderer's conscience again begins to stir and he listens to Clarence's plea to "Relent, and save your souls" (256). It is too late. As he warns Clarence to "Look behind you, my lord" (268), the First Murderer stabs Clarence violently, and the Second can only comment, using an image Shakespeare would employ again and again, that the murder is ''A bloody deed, and desperately dispatched! / How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands / Of this most grievous murther!" (270-273). Like Hastings, Clarence "tumbles down / Into the fatal bowels 42

Figurenposition in Richard III of the deep" (3.4.100-101). One murderer repents; the other does not; and the dilemma of moral choice is presented in stark terms: 2 Murd.:

1 Murd.:

I would he [Richard] knew that I had sav'd his brother! Take thou the fee and tell him what I say, For I repent me that the Duke is slain. So do not I. Go, coward as thou art. (276-279)

Richard does not appear in the scene. His absence is as powerful as his presence, if only because, for a moment, the audience is left on its own to sort out its feelings about Clarence's death. Richard reappears in the scene immediately following the murder (2.1) and reassumes control of the audience by skillfully exposing the hypocritical sentimentality of the Queen, her relatives, and Hastings. He also commands our attention in 2,2. But in 2,3 the focus shifts from him to the citizens. What I would suggest about the play's pacing should now be clear. After 1,3, scenes in which Richard dominates, capturing our interest, alternate with scenes in which he is absent. Hence those actionand intrigue-filled scenes that trace Richard's rise to the throne are balanced by equally powerful moments that make us question the state of England. This kind of pacing contributes to an audience's emotional experience. And even though, in each of these scenes, an audience's emotional response is "temporary and evanescent," the mood in which it later finds itself is "relatively permanent and stable"21 as a result of its accumulated perceptions. The forward thrust of the action is punctuated by reflective pauses, and this variation in tempo helps to determine the overall feeling the play arouses in the spectators. After 2,1 and 2, attention turns to the citizens. Faced with the uncertain state of affairs following Edward IV's death, the Second Citizen fears that it will "prove a giddy world" (2.3.5), and the First does not know why he moves with such nervous alacrity: "I scarcely know myself" (2). Both hope "all will be well" (31), but the Third Citizen recognizes that When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks; When great leaves fall, then winter is at hand; When the sun sets, who doth not look for night? Untimely storms makes men expect a dearth. 43

Figurenposition in Richard III All may be well; but if God sort it so, 'Tis more than we deserve or I expect.

(32-37)

'''Tis more than we deserve." Without truly understanding, the Second Citizen agrees: "Truly, the hearts of men are full of fear. / You cannot reason (almost) with a man / That looks not heavily and full of dread" (38-40). But unlike Brakenbury, the Third Citizen chooses to know what it means when Englishmen refuse to "reason what is meant hereby" (1.4.93) and realizes that as citizens they are in part morally responsible for the tremulous state of the kingdom. "0, full of danger is the Duke of Gloucester," avers the Third Citizen; only if the Yorkists are willing to be ruled will "This sickly land ... solace as before" (27, 30). The anxiety-ridden words of the citizens, like those of the murderers, occupy opposite sides of a moral debate. Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan use the same ethical vocabulary just prior to their executions. Rivers will sacrifice his "guiltless blood" before Pomfret Castle, hoping to satisfy God with his "true blood" which "unjustly must be spilt" (3.3.14,22-23). He hopes, as Clarence did before him, that his family, especially his sister the Queen and her princely sons, will be spared. But Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan are guilty of corruption; the citizens, on the other hand, need to recognize that even though they have not committed a criminal action, the moral dilemma they face is partly their own doing: they, along with their counterparts in the audience, have condoned the enormity of Richard's crimes by simply standing back and watching. I take it as crucial, therefore, that Shakespeare took pains to provide the responses of the citizens in 3,7, first by reporting and then by dramatizing them. 22 Richard's and Buckingham's entrances at "several doors" in 3,7, to discuss the citizens' response to the idea of giving the crown to Richard, immediately follow the Scrivener's appearance on stage in 3,6. Attention shifts from downstage as Richard poses in a different way the question that the Scrivener left in the audience's mind: how is a society to react to and to what extent is it responsible for the crimes of its leaders? "How now, how now, what say the citizens?" Richard asks. Buckingham reports their answer: "Now, by the holy Mother of our Lord, / The citizens are mum, say not a word" (1-3). Buckingham had entreated "them that did

44

Figurenposition in Richard III love their country's good" to cry '''God save Richard, England's royal king!'" but they gave no answer. Incredulous, Richard asks once more and then again. Buckingham can only repeat the citizens' response: Richard: And did they so? Buckingham: No, so God help me, they spake not a word, But like dumb statues or breathing stones, Star'd each on other, and look'd deadly pale. (23-26) Only some ten voices, followers of Buckingham planted at the lower end of the hall, cry "'God save King Richard!'" (36). Here the citizens' reaction is reported to us. At the end of the scene, with Richard posed above them,23 that response is dramatized. Buckingham exhorts the citizens to join him in bidding a "reluctant" Richard to become the king. When Richard denies their suit, Buckingham grows impatient and leaves: "Come, citizens," he says in feigned exasperation, '''Zounds, I'll entreat no more!" "0, do not swear, my Lord of Buckingham," answers Richard (219-220). But after Buckingham, the Lord Mayor, and the citizens leave, Richard relents and calls them back, ready to accept the crown and the "world of cares" it will bring, even though all "may partly see, / How far" he is "from the desire of this": Mayor: Richard: Buckingham: Citizens:

God bless your Grace! We see it and will say it. In saying so you shall but say the truth. Then I salute you with this royal titleLong live King Richard, England's worthy king! Amen. (235-241)

Although the Mayor echoes the Scrivener's words, he refuses to "see this palpable device" for what it is. 24 The citizens, however, clearly see such ill dealing "in thought" (3.6.11, 14). What they feel is expressed in their less than heartfelt ''Amen,'' which implicitly condemns Richard. By refusing to acquiesce or to play the role of conspiratorial audience to Richard's schemes any longer, they assert their morality, even in the face of the recognition that they are powerless. Their silence, and now their grudging ''Amen,'' are important. As citizens, their power is of course severely limited: there is no parliamentary body

45

Figurenposition in Richard III or representative of the people present to curb political decisions made by the court, and there is no revolutionary proletarian force operative here. Shakespeare firmly places the only power the citizens have in .the realm of morality. The decision they make here is ethical, not political. The action, no longer alternating between forward movement and reflective pause, stands still when the citizens' one word is uttered. Their counterparts in the yard and galleries may of course not respond at all. But even if they are silent, their response will be dramatized. The silent spectators who encircle the stage, citizens and Englishmen all, will have their own reaction dramatized. They will have been projected on to the stage, made a part of a ceremonial reenactment of an historical event Sir Thomas More recorded some eighty years earlier. The diachronic flow of events is briefly held in a synchronic moment. The mystery play's use of synchronism, here revivified, becomes essential to Shakespeare's dramatic purpose. Placed in the same position as the citizens, the contemporary audience must deal with its own bad conscience, its (im)moral identification with and enjoyment of Richard's cleverly diabolical schemes. The spectators are trapped in their theatrical delight and are now held responsible for their complicity. They turn against Richard at precisely this moment. In doing so, they participate emotionally in this theatrical transaction, this drama of moral awakening that is Richard III. Richard gave the play's prologue, but Richmond delivers the epilogue to the enclosed action. The word ''Amen,'' heard several times before 3,7,25 is repeated by him in the play's closing lines, first, when he accepts Derby's offer of the crown ("Great God of heaven, say amen to all!" [5.5.8]); secondly, when he claims that the end of the Wars of the Roses will be welcomed even by traitors, who will say "amen" (22); and, thirdly, in the last word of the play's final prayer: Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord, That would reduce these bloody days again, And make poor England weep in streams of blood! Let them not live to taste this land's increase That would with treason wound this fair land's peace! Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again; That she may long live here, God say amen! (35-41)

46

Figurenposition in Richard III A self-conscious appeal to the loyalties of the audience, Richmond's long epilogue encloses the created illusion in symmetrical balance with Richard's opening soliloquy. A drama of moral awakening has subsumed a dream of ambition. A spectator might well repeat the final refrain of this prayer.

"I am in / So far in blood" The audience has judged Richard and given proof to his admission that "none are for me / That look into me with considerate eyes" (4.2.29- 30). While I do not think we can read this remarkable statement backward into the play, I do believe that in words like these Richard begins to reveal a new, "psychological" dimension. This new self-awareness comes, predictably, when he enters and remains in the illusion centered upon the throne, when he appears to shed his presentational persona as the Vice in favor of a representational role as a historical character. His words here are spoken in the presence of Catesby and are understandable as an afterthought on Richard's part, as a further reaction to Buckingham's hesitancy about Prince Edward's murder. They are not generally marked as an aside, even though they may seem to function like one. But if we take them to be an aside, clearly they are not directed to the audience; while they acknowledge what E. H. Gombrich called the "beholder's share,"26 they indicate more particularly that Richard has become introspective in a startlingly new expressive manner. Here Richard's one-dimensional, symbolic "part" becomes a realistic, psychologically believable "role." When he sits on the throne for the first time, his "asides" no longer function as they did: now they are directed inward and are revelatory of his character. He now has a psychology we can hate. His announcement of his intentions in this scene, so apparently like such announcements at the end of 1,1 and 2, is also absolutely different: I must be married to my brother's daughter, Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass. Murther her brothers and then marry her-

47

Figurenposition in Richard III Uncertain way of gain! But I am in So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye. (60-65) The speech not only reveals his plans; it also contains a degree of selfawareness and a hint of self-reproach. One of these lines (63-64), we know, would be used by Shakespeare in his characterization of his other hero-villain, Macbeth. When the two figures have been compared, Richard is correctly found to be lacking in depth. It is of course an unfair comparison, not only because Shakespeare worked in a different mode in Richard III, but also because his intentions in this play are exactly the opposite of those in Macbeth. Macbeth traces a good man's loss of conscience, Richard III a villain's fall. Their downward paths may intersect, but they are traveling in different directions. Without Richard, however, tragic protagonists like Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Lear would not have been possible. In Richard's voices and in his characterization lay their potentialities. Richard's colloquial manner of speech, in particular, must have opened up new possibilities for Shakespeare, and his style of acting, as opposed to styles of being, must have suggested more flexible ways of presenting dramatic characters. In Richard of Gloucester lay the potential for development. Paradoxically, it was out of the nonrepresentational, self-consciously theatrical manner of the Vice figure that representational characters sprang. The Vice's ability to break down the separation between actor and spectator helped to make the creation of three-dimensional characters possible. In Richard III we see this process occurring. The Richard who seemed to delight in knowing that he was playing in a play becomes the Richard who is trapped in the illusion, and from his presentational self-expresssion, so rich and full, would come the more complex inner life of later dramatic characters. In Henry VI, Part Three, Richard announced that "I am myself alone." These words are recalled in his final soliloquy in Richard III, one which explores the workings of a character's mind: Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds! Have mercy, Jesu! Soft! I did but dream. o coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me! The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight. 48

Figurenposition in Richard III Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by. Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I. Is there a murtherer here? No. Yes, I am: Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason whyLest I revenge. What, myself upon myself? Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good That I myself have done unto myself? o no! Alas, I rather hate myself For hateful deeds committed by myself. I am a villain; yet I lie, I am not. Fool, of thyself speak well; fool, do not flatter: My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain. (5.3.177-195) Unlike Clarence's dream, Richard's dream has been dramatized. We note the Faustian and naturalistic detail in "The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight." We feel the psychological sense of remorse in the sweatfilled "trembling flesh." This is the stuff of nightmare. Instead of talking to the audience, Richard engages in dialogue with himself. We immediately sense, in this remarkable attempt to realize a character's words as they would be heard and felt, that the dream affects his psyche, even to the extent that he feels guilt and fears judgment for his actions. Here the recognition that he is "a villain" is an admission of guilt, not an announcement of a role he will play.27 In this soliloquy the inner workings of a character's mind are revealed to us from a locus, but with the intimacy common to platea-oriented speech; our physical distance from Richard is balanced by our psychological nearness to him. The soliloquy here assumes its double life as a nonillusionistic and an illusionistic speech and allows us to be simultaneously engaged with and detached from a dramatic character. With this soliloquy in our minds, we are able to feel a number of meaningful undercurrents in Richard's final words. In the later speech to his soldiers he may deny the power of conscience by saying it is "a word that cowards use" (5.3.309) and may deny the power of dreams 49

Figurenposition in Richard III to "affright our souls" (308), but his words now bear his new awareness. They now come to the surface bearing psychological weight. His willingness to stake all on a single cast of the die is burdened by his remorse and nervous, haunted weariness. No longer will he be able to "Bustle, bustle!" (5.3.289; 1.1.152) as he did before.

50

III Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

"I am Richard II, know ye not that"

Richard II reverses the pattern of response and order of presentation found in Richard III. Coldly judged an incompetent ruler in the first three acts, Richard II receives our sympathy by the play's end, and we temper criticism with compassion, replacing objective judgment with subjective engagement.! Rather than "moving away," Richard comes physically and emotionally closer, descending from a scaffolded locus to a downstage "place" near the spectators. In depicting the loss of his "part" as a sanctified king, Shakespeare provides him with a "role" as a fallible individual. He redefmes Richard in three successive stages, each time altering his Figurenposition and the play's manner of representation and inviting the audience to see "progressively deeper into his consciousness."2 In doing so Shakespeare uses a number of dramatic substructures to create the play's "shapes of grief" and to provide "a subtle, psychological revelation of his protagonist's nature."3 That subtle revelation of Richard's nature begins to "emerge" after his "two bodies" are divided into their "political" and "natural" selves and the "respect, / Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty" (3.2.172-173) due a king are stripped away.4 For E. M. W. Tillyard , this process recorded an historical transition from a medieval to a Renaissance world picture. 5 For Jonathan Dollimore, on the other hand, the removal of this "residual" ideology exposes the forms that power can assume. 6 Tillyard's and Dollimore's radically opposed interpretations are of course equally "producible," corresponding as they do to two putative Renaissance productions: one performed in 1595 that upheld Tudor ideology; and a second 51

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

performed in 1601 that may well have questioned that ideology and have been seditious enough to be used to place assent to a deposition upon the spectators' lips. Each interpretation is in keeping with the alternations in Richard's and Bolingbroke's Figurenpositionen and the play's stylistic variety. Neither interpretation, however, comes to grips with the forms that lie beneath the play's surface and that contribute to its shape and dramaturgy. Indeed, neither Tillyard's nor Dollimore's interpretations quite explain why, in 1595, the play might have been used to invite the spectators (and Robert Cecil) to celebrate the Tudor myth and why, in 1601, it might just as easily have been used by the Earl of Essex to condemn the very basis of that ideology. In this sense it is important to remember that the staged spectacle of a "sacrificial king of sorrows before his judges" was familiar to Shakespeare's audiences, for it is to the mysteries that we ultimately must turn for the ritualistic embodiment and mimetic representation, locus and platea staging, and synchronism that give this Tudor Passion play so much of its power.7

"To monarchize" Tillyard's view of Richard II as "the most formal and ceremonial"8 of Shakespeare's plays is certainly correct, and his belief that the play records a transition to a Renaissance world view has long influenced critical readings and theatrical performances. In identifying one of the play's dominant modes, however, Tillyard underestimates the way Shakespeare counterpoises the formal and ceremonial with the "naturalistic" and the "emblematic." It is accurate to suggest that the play's events "come to us not as the realistic imitation of an action but as the ritual presentation of a form or type of action that is framed in ceremony, encased in rhetoric, and draped with rich symbolic implications."9 In such evocations of the play's medieval tapestry, the "ceremonial or ritual form of writing" becomes "the very essence of the play."IO It may be more precise, however, to note that Richard II contains a number of styles, each finely suited to its manners of portrayal, and that no single mimetic theory comprehends its stylistic variety.ll Tillyard's understanding of the play also overlooks the dynamics of

52

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

present enactment, the ways in which the drama becomes a living process in the theater. As in Richard III, Shakespeare overlays past significance with present meaning, the ceremonial reenactment of an historical event with the contemporaneity of immediate performance. He draws the spectators into the present moment of performance in the first scene, opening a window on to the past by establishing Richard's Figurenposition above us on a "scaffold at Windsor." Here the acting area, a public place that has no inherent symbolic significance, assumes a habitation and a name when the actor playing Richard transforms it into an historical and theatrical setting. The illusion of historical time intersects with the time of performance in the "high rhetorical splendor"12 of his opening address: Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster, Hast thou, according to thy oath and band, Brought hither Henry Herford thy bold son, Here to make good the boist'rous late appeal, Which then our leisure would not let us hear, Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray?

(1-6)

Here Holinshed's description of the "great scaffold" built for Richard at Windsor becomes a scaffolded stage throne, just as it will in 1,3, when Richard sits upon the "sumptuous scaffold or theater" erected for him in the lists at Coventry.13 Holinshed's words stir Shakespeare's theatrical imagination, and a fictive locality becomes a reality in the public place of the theater, where, amid the business of putting on a play, the surrounding audience surrenders to the illusion and allows time past to incarnate itself in time present. The opening scenes' staging and rhetoric, reminiscent of earlier representational modes, are consistent with their medieval setting. In 1,1 and 1,3 Richard is tied to one of the scaffolds used so effectively in the mysteries and moralities; his crown and scepter, visible manifestations of kingship, place him at the iconographic center of attention. In each scene Bolingbroke and Mowbray flank Richard, directing an audience's lines of sight toward him. And in each of these locus-oriented scenes Shakespeare patterns the action according to a form of the debat, whereby the appellants offer testimony in utramque partem, on each side of a case.14 When Richard calls Bolingbroke and Mowbray before him to hear their 53

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

testimony in the matter of the Duke of Gloucester's death, his balanced phrasing not only reinforces the scene's ceremonialism, but also articulates spatial relationships among characters. "Call them to our presence/' he says: "face to face, / And frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear / The accuser and the accused freely speak" (1.1.15-1 7). In 1,1 those accusations, equal in power and equivalent in length, are directed to Richard, who turns first to one and then to the other before attempting to reconcile their differences (30-46, 6.9-77, 47-68, 78-83). In 1,3 a similar triad sets the shape of the scene. After Richard tells the Marshall to call forth Bolingbroke and Mowbray and to ask their names and "causes" (7-10, 26- 30), each man replies with a speech of similar duration and strength (16-25,35-41). Indeed, the Marshal's and the Heralds' words introduce and conclude the formally balanced rhetoric of this patterned speech (1115, 31-34, 104-109, 110-116). The location of character reinforces the patterning of speech, and at just that moment when interest is divided between Bolingbroke and Mowbray as they prepare to do battle, the king drops his warder. He orders them to "lay by their helmets and their spears, / And ... return back to their chairs again" (1.3.119-120). All this is reminiscent of Gorboduc and The Spanish Tragedy, where patterned speech and symmetrical alignment also determine the shape of the action. As in The Spanish Tragedy, language articulates the action and "helps the plot to incarnate itself as a physical event on a physical stage." Like Kyd, Shakespeare makes "functional the schemes and tropes of the figured style."15 But inasmuch as there is a dialectical neatness in these formal patterns and visual configurations, the rhetoric in 1,1 does not fmally reconcile opposing forces: Richard fails to harmonize the antagonism between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, and instead of synthesis there is disjunction. Nor is it exactly clear who is right and who is wrong or what is actually going on here.t 6 To explain these matters readers point us to the anonymous Thomas of Woodstock, to the play's sources, and to English history. Shakespeare's audiences might have read Holinshed or seen Woodstock, and they may have been familiar with the events that made England fall into eighty-five years of civil war. To be sure the spectators remember, Shakespeare reacquaints them with the historical facts in 1,2. Set between the ceremony and formalism of 1,1 and 1,3 is the conversation between John of Gaunt 54

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

and the bereaved Duchess of Gloucester. Their words remind us that more has transpired in 1,1 than meets the eye and invite us to view 1,3 in a different light. In this short scene, cast in a different "symbolic" mode, the antique mode of 1,1 gives way to explicit statement and to the development of a series of formal emblems. Although Gaunt acknowledges Richard's involvement in Woodstock's death, he does not believe a subject should take action against a sanctified king: God's is the quarrel, for God's substitute, His deputy anointed in His sight, Hath caus'd his death, the which if wrongfully, Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift An angry arm against His minister. (37 -41) The Duchess, on the other hand, urges him to avenge Gloucester's murder. In addition to providing the audience with genealogical reminders, she links the "seven vials" of Edward Ill's "sacred blood" to the Tree of Jesse, introducing one of the play's most powerful Biblical and natural emblems. Gaunt will not listen. He upholds the static, timeless view of divine kingship and believes their injuries should be put to the "will of heaven." This view will have to be balanced against the position provided by his brother, the Duke of York, who, after Richard confiscates Gaunt's possessions, reminds Richard that he is also the king "by fair sequence and succession" (2.1.199). If Richard removes Bolingbroke's rights, he will "take from Time / His charters and his customary rights" (195-196). Indeed, in York's view kingship is not only a sanctified state but also a matter of temporal succession. From this perspective Richard deserves to be king as long as he respects the hereditary right of others as well as of himself: if he takes away Bolingbroke's patrimony, he will undermine his own. The explicit statements in 1,2 redefine the rhetorical displays found in 1,1 and 1,3. Knowing what we do, Richard's actions take on new coloration, and Bolingbroke's studied sarcasm and Mowbray's forthright protests emerge from the formal context. Now the scenes' set pieces contain nuances that send ripples across the surface of all these words. Disquieting undercurrents may have been felt in Richard's first, "obstinately frivolous"l? gesture at reconciliation, when, asking the "Wrath-kindled" appellants to "be rul'd by me," he concluded, bathetically, 55

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

Let's purge this choler without letting blood. This we prescribe, though no physician; Deep malice makes too deep incision. Forget, forgive; conclude and be agreed, Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.

(1.1.152-157)

These undercurrents may also have been felt when he admits that he has been unable to "make" the appellants "friends" (196-197). They fully emerge in scene three, however, when he announces his decision to banish Mowbray and Bolingbroke. The formal patterning of his words does not so much elevate his language as reveal his glaring ineptness: For that our kingdom's earth should not be soil'd With that dear blood which it hath fostered; And for our eyes do hate the dire aspect Of civil wounds plough'd up with neighbors' sword; And for we think the eagle-winged pride Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts, With rival-hating envy set on you To wake our peace, which in our country's cradle Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep; Which so rous'd up with boist'rous untun'd drums, With harsh-resounding trumpets' dreadful bray, And grating shock of wrathful iron arms, Might from our quiet confines fright fair peace, And make us wade even in our kinred's blood: Therefore we banish you our territories. (1.3.125-139) Richard's rhetorically balanced, apparently logical phrasing, with its sequence of causal "fors" and its suspended grammatical structure, belies his true intent. This declamation yields personal nuance. Richard banishes the man who, according to the Duchess, helped him in the plot to murder Gloucester; he also banishes the man who appears to champion the cause of rightness. Mowbray's response makes it clear that the king has been duplicitous: ''A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege, / And all unlook'd for from your Highness' mouth" (154-155). And after Richard reduces Bolingbroke's exile from ten to six years, it is clear we have witnessed 56

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

an arbitrary and treacherous, attention-grabbing, self-aggrandizing, and unkind display of regal power. The speech is imponant in two funher senses. An air of unconscious prophecy hangs over it, and intimations of the Richard of act three may be discerned in it. "Wrathful iron arms" will be "lifted" against Richard as a result of this action, and Bolingbroke's "boist'rous late appeal" (1.1.4) will be reheard when, accompanied by "boist'rous untun'd drums" and "brazen" "trumpets' dreadful bray," he meets Richard at Flint Castle. England's "eanh" will be "soil'd" with Richard's "dear blood," and "civil wounds" will be "plough'd up" with "neighbors' sword." As the richly resonant verse suggests, the sonorous "cradle" of the country, which "Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep," will be "rous'd up" by cacophony, and "fair peace" will be frighted from her "quiet confines." Poetic as it is, Richard's exercise of power does not conceal his ineffectiveness. His fine-sounding words reverberate with hollowness. The pageantry and ceremony of these scenes, which ostensibly show what a king is as a public figure and symbolic head of state, are undercut by Richard's personal failings. The king's two bodies are divided, a fissure opening between the presentation of the king's body politic and the representation of his natural self.18 The scenes demonstrate that Richard's sanctified "pan" as a king is at odds with his character, and the play will continually push expressions of character against the ideological constraints of a "pan." After the pageantry of 1,1 and 3 and the explicit thematic statements of 1,2, the play's mode shifts, appropriately, to the naturalistic. In 1,4 Richard's true feelings are clear. Failing to mention the maligned Mowbray, he delights in telling Aumerle, Green, and Bagot that he will not let Bolingbroke return after his exile and that he banished him because of the love "the common people" (24) have for him. When he also delights in the news of Gaunt's grievous illness, since "the lining of his coffers shall make coats / To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars" (61-62), he loses all our respect. The insipid, ineffectual "prescription" of 1,1 now becomes a callous hope that Gaunt's physician will help him to his death (59-60). We know that Richard acts out of expedience and arrogance and not out of fear that "our kingdom's eanh should ... be soil'd." Act one's varying representational styles demonstrate that beneath the

57

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

ceremonial lie the psychological and contingent. Richard's words conceal political calculation, and the medieval world of jousts and tournaments, in which right is manifested in a contest of arms, is replaced by a world of political maneuverings, where might controls right. The world of tournament and tapestry is varnished and empty, its lustrous patina decorative but hollow. I9 Old forms bear new meanings as the drama begins to recall a more deeply embedded ceremonial and ritualistic form.

"I speak but idly" After the arrogant displays of acts one and two, Richard departs from the stage. Bolingbroke returns, for "Lancaster," and grows in strength and power. York yields to him, and the Welsh desert. By 2,4 we are prepared to agree with Salisbury, who fears that Richard's "glory," like a "shooting star," has fallen to "the base earth from the firmament" and that his "sun sets weeping in the lowly west" (2.4.19-21). As in 1,2, the dialogue between Salisbury and the Welsh Captain presents the emblems that dominate the following scenes and provides the spectators with privileged knowledge. They will see the effect these "tidings" have on Richard as he tries, with what becomes a painfully conscious sense of his kingly self, to hold on to the emblems that define him. When he returns from Ireland in 3,2, Richard attempts to uphold his sanctity, but we know that his power has been shaken. The sentimental self-dramatization of his maternal invocation to the "earth" (6,8) conveys an indulgent playfulness of emotion. Here Richard turns away from the realities that confront him. As he "weep[s] for joy," full of "tears and smiles" (4,9), he sets the emotional poles of the scene. At one moment, he will be confident in the knowledge that "not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king" (5455); at the next, he will be despondent, telling "sad stories of the death of kings" (156). In this scene Richard is flanked by Carlisle, who continues to uphold the "Power" of divine kingship, and by Aumerle, who redefines Carlisle's words in terms of temporal "power":

58

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

Car. Aum.

Fear not, my lord, that Power that made you king Hath power to keep you king in spite of all .... He means, my lord, that we are too remiss, Whilst Bullingbrook, through our security, Grows strong and great in substance and in power. (27-29, 33-35)

Their definitions control Richard's responses. He seeks refuge in the "Power" that made him king, but as report after report is delivered, his hopes are clouded, his pallor changes, and his smiles turn into tears. He begins to discover "what loss" it is "to be rid of care" (96), and the "exquisite cadenzas and variations" of his "consciously graceful poses"20 become alternatively self-assertive ('1\m I not king?" [83]) and selfquestioning ("How can you say to me, I am a king?" [177]). Indeed, after Scroop reports that Bolingbroke brings "hard bright steel and hearts harder than steel" (111), Richard knows that no pity or mercy should be expected. Scroop describes the mob of "common people," so held in contempt by Richard, that now rise against him: old men with "white-beards" who "have arm'd their thin and hairless scalps," "boys" who "Strive to speak big and clap their female joints / In stiff unwieldy arms," "beadsmen" who "bend their bows," and "distaff women" who "manage rusty bills." These words lead to Richard's imagined deposition, in which the pomp of royalty is removed and the fragility of kingship is seen. Imprisoned within the walls that round "the mortal temples of king," Richard has been allowed "To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks, / Infusing him[sel~ with self and vain conceit" (165-166); now he knows that "respect, / Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty" will be thrown away (172-173). He finds a form for the "taste" of "grief" (176). "Mock not flesh and blood / With solemn reverence," he says, introducing the theme of mockery so important from this point: For you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends-subjected thus, How can you say to me, I am a king? (171,

59

174-177)

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

The body natural is no longer one with the body politic. Immured within the prison of his imagination, Richard now will be imprisoned within the "rude ribs" of Flint Castle and the "flinty ribs" of Pomfret's walls. Richard's exquisite sensitivity is of course in sharp contrast to Bolingbroke's stern, cold practicality. He will not let the "bare imagination of a feast ... Cloy the hungry edge of appetite" (1.3.296-297) when he calls Bushy and Green to a reckoning. In this reconfiguring of the play's opening, Bolingbroke establishes his new Figurenposition as the central figure in a triad. His blunt directive, "Bring forth these men," is utterly different from Richard's verbosity (3 .1.1). He "weeds" and "plucks away" "the caterpillars of the commonwealth" (2.3 .166-167) and acts like a practical politician passing sentence on convicted criminals. He sees himself as an impersonal judge, although his implied reference to himself as Pilate, able "to wash your blood / From off my hands" (5-6), may make us question not only his right but also his belief that he can be absolved of responsibility for executing these men. Unlike Richard, he is also decisive: in no uncertain terms he commands Northumberland to "See them delivered over / To execution and the hand of death" (29-30).21 The allusion to Pilate is repeated when Richard identifies Bolingbroke as one of the "Pilates" who "wash their hands" even as they deliver him to his "sour cross" (4.1.2 39f£.). It is recalled as well in Bolingbroke's final speech, when he promises to make "a voyage to the Holy Land, / To wash this [Richard's] blood off from my guilty hand" (5.6.49-50). As such, it contributes to the use of a referential form of mimesis that associates Richard with Christ and Bolingbroke with Pilate. We need to note, however, that from their first appearance these allusions also contribute to the play's most important underlying dramatic context, in which "Biblical, homiletic, and ritual elements" found in the mysteries combine with a "modern and empirical mode of mimesis."22 We can only see Bolingbroke as embodying the Renaissance equivalent of a modern political opportunist, a Machiavellian figure. 23 Shakespeare's audiences may have seen him as Machiavellian, but for them his silent, tyrannical behavior as a judge may have been more reminiscent of that Pilate who gave over Christ to the mob of "common" playgoers in plays like the Ludus Coventriae's (N- Town's) Passion II. As we will see, these repeated Biblical allu-

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sions reemerge at critical junctures and provide the play with its most influential dramatic substructure. Suggestive as it is, Bolingbroke's allusion to Pilate in 3,1 is implied, not stated. His judgment on Bushy and Green is meant, at this point, to sharpen the contrast between him and Richard; and it is this contrastbetween a sanctified but inefficient and duplicitous ruler and an illegal but efficient usurper- that lies at the play's historical center. The alternations in their Figurenpositionen in the scenes that follow make that contrast all the more pointed and prepare for 4,1, when Richard's folly will be consistent with his position downstage from the throne. When Richard and Bolingbroke come "face to face" in 3,3, the staging of the opening scenes is again repeated. 24 Approaching Richard at Flint Castle, Bolingbroke announces that although he will not "oppose" the "will" of the heavens (16-19), he will use "the advantage of [his] power, / And lay the summer's dust with show'rs of blood" (42-43) if Richard does not repeal his banishment and restore his lands. Although he appears before Richard just as in 1,1, their positions are now reversed: supported by Northumberland and York, Bolingbroke does not have to request anything of Richard; stripped of the military "power" that might keep him king, Richard must rely on the sanction of divine "Power" to maintain his sovereignty. When Richard appears on the scaffolded stage gallery, he is again mounted on high, but now two views of him are juxtaposed. From Bolingbroke's perspective he appears "as doth the blushing discontented sun," already beginning to set in the "lowly west"; for York Richard is still visibly the king: Yet looks he like a king! Behold, his eye, As bright as is the eagle's, lightens forth Controlling majesty. Alack, alack, for woe, That any harm should stain so fair a show!

(68-71)

York's "show" means appearance, but here it more correctly means illusion. The sunlike radiance York sees will shortly be blotted from his sight. Richard's power is painfully hollow and illusory. His reliance on "the hand of God" makes him wonder why Bolingbroke dares to "forget" to kneel before him "to pay ... duty to our presence" (75-76); he charges

61

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

that "no hand of blood and bone / Can gripe the sacred handle of our sceptre" (79-80); and he warns that God omnipotent, Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike Your children yet unborn and unbegot, That lift your vassal hands against my head, And threat the glory of my precious crown.

(85-90)

His words reverberate with biblical cadences ("yet unborn and unbegot") that contribute to the sense of prophecy hanging over the play. But his assenions about Heaven's power, "mustering ... armies" that "shall strike," for all their providential impon, here ring hollow before the palpable show of Bolingbroke's force, marching "upon the grassy carpet of this plain" (49-50). "Wrathful iron arms" are about to be lifted against Richard's golden scepter, the "angry arm" Gaunt would not lift now raised by his son and all the "vassal hands" that side with Bolingbroke. This "plain" is not only the same downstage "place" where Bolingbroke and Mowbray stood before the king. It is also an area that includes the spectators. Modern productions fill the stage with enough soldiers to suggest an army. Shakespeare makes the audience a constitutive pan of the performance, transforming all the world into a stage by extending the scene's symbolic locus into the area occupied by the spectators. Indeed, added by the eighteenth-century editor, Edward Capell, the stage setting ("Before Flint Castle") does not do justice to the actual staging, since "plain" here indicates the piatea ,25 the acting area in which, traditionally, there was little separation between the represented world of the play and the world of the spectators. Some of their hands, arms, and hearts steeled against Richard, the spectators are included in the scene's imaginative dimensions-invited to become members of Bolingbroke's army-at this crucial moment. Indeed, they balance Bolingbroke's and York's different perspectives when Richard appears before them, feebly upholding a sunlike radiance that, for all its setting grandeur, yet "lightens forth / Controlling majesty." Those scenic dimensions will shortly be ~transformed, yet again, into a symbolic locus, a "Base court" (180), where, after his descent, Richard 62

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

will stand "face to face" with Bolingbroke and speak in an idiom that is in keeping with his new Figurenposition. Richard's long descant on what he will do "now" that he "must" "lose / The name of king" (143 ff.) concludes with an embarrassed, self-conscious recognition: "I see / I talk but idly, and you laugh at me." These words only hint at the self-expressiveness of his new persona as a kingly fool. 26 In Northumberland's description of the hysterical words that accompany Richard's descent, Richard's apparently nonsensical self-expression is more precisely defined: "Sorrow and grief of heart," he tells Bolingbroke, "Make him speak fondly like a frantic man" (184-185). Northumberland does not see that the puns and wordplay that accompany Richard's descent are appropriate to the inverted and irreverent comments of a "mockery king of snow." Frantic though they are, the words Richard uses to link his "glist'ring" descent to the progress of Phaeton and to the debasing of a king possess incisive relevance (178-183). His puns correlate spatial and emotional coordinates, and from this descent "emerges" a Richard utterly different from the master of rhetorical formality and indulgent self-dramatization. Now the words he speaks are grimly relevant. Bolingbroke kneels before him, but Richard knows this illusory and ceremonial "show" of "fair duty" is a matter of "courtesy" rather than of love or obedience (188). He understands what his descent signifies. As he lifts Bolingbroke "up," he describes that which has been enacted, playing pointedly with the meanings of "debase" and "base": Fair cousin, you debase your princely knee To make the base earth proud with kissing it. Me rather had my heart might feel your love Than my unpleased eye see your courtesy. Up, cousin, up, your heart is up, I know, Thus high at least [Touching his crown.], although your knee be low. (190-195) Richard made the "base earth proud with kissing it" on his return from Ireland; now Bolingbroke and his men "stride ... upon [his] land" and "trample on their sovereign's head" (92, 157). Richard's sun has set, and he has fallen to the base earth just as Salisbury had feared. Richard's voice is consonant with his new Figurenposition. Although 63

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

Bolingbroke protests that "I come but for mine own," Richard knows "Your own is yours, and I am yours, and all" and accepts "They well deserve to have I That know the strong'st and surest way to get" (200201). As Rossiter and Brooke point out, these words are neither formal nor poetic. Richard had fled from facts through every form of emotional exaggeration; now he drops his sentimentality and points to reality with "quiet wit and candor."27 A foolish king's frantic ravings turn into calm, assured statements. York is in tears; his response in part directs our own and is, like ours, confounded by Richard's equanimity: "Uncle," he says, "give me your hands; nay, dry your eyes-I Tears show their love, but want their remedies" (202-203). Although Bolingbroke does not actually "ascend the regal throne" until 4,1, the central characters' positions have now been exchanged. Bolingbroke came for what was his, achieved his goal, and now takes more; Richard returned what he took and now must relinquish "all." Indeed, at the moment Richard descends to Bolingbroke, each man is redefined. To this point our sympathies have been with Bolingbroke, despite the fact that he is subject to the king. Richard's fall seems well-deserved, and Bolingbroke's rise seems a triumph over arrogance and ineptness. But after he regains his patrimony, Bolingbroke does not stop there, and even though Richard has been a "fallible ruler," he is the king and possesses "absolute sanctions."28 These facts present the spectators with the contradictory pulls of allegiance to a king and sympathy for a victim of injustice. Those feelings are conveyed indirectly through the vacillations built into a dramatic character- the Duke of York - whose uncertain waverings parallel those felt by the spectators. 29 York voices his uncertainties early on. "Both are my kinsmen," he reasons: T' one is my sovereign, whom both my oath And duty bids defend; t' other again Is my kinsman, whom the King hath wrong'd, Whom conscience and my kinred bids to right.

(2.2.111-115)

He places equal weight on either side, balancing his clauses. Right and wrong are not easily balanced, however, and York admits that all is left at "six and seven." Although he does not believe Bolingbroke should "cut out his way, I To find out right with wrong" (2.3.44-45), he clearly sym64

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

pathizes with Bolingbroke's wish to regain his inheritance, and he gives in when he allows Bolingbroke to enter Berkeley Castle (2.3.159). Faced with Richard in 3,3, however, York is taken by the king's "controlling majesty," and it begins to be clear that Bolingbroke will take more than he deserves. Once Bolingbroke has Richard in his power, one wonders whether Lancaster has not gone too far, and our sympathies stan to shift toward Richard. When the two men stand face to face at the end of 3,3, our allegiances are balanced; when Bolingbroke follows Richard off the stage, our eyes follow the fallen king. The images of rising, falling, and balancing that control the characters' movements and coordinate the spectators' responses are repeated when the Gardener relates these events to the proper tending of the royal eanh and when the Queen convens politics into morality by suggesting that Richard's deposition is "a second fall of cursed man" (3.4.76).30 The Gardener speaks of the "fonunes" of Richard and Bolingbroke as "balanced" on a "scale" and of the "odds" that "weigh" Richard down. His words anticipate those Richard speaks when, like "two buckets in a well," Bolingbroke "mounted up on high," Richard "down ... drinking his grief," he asks Bolingbroke to "seize the crown" (4.1.183-189). Only at his death will Richard again "mount, mount" to his "seat ... up on high," separated from the "gross flesh" that "sinks downward, here to die" (5.5.110-112). The correlation between the play's language and staging would have been apparent when the play was first performed in 1595. The parallels between Richard's fate and his own, however, must have escaped Essex's notice when, hoping to mount on high, he restaged Richard II in 1601. Essex intended to play the role of Bolingbroke, not Richard. But the imprisonment in the Tower of one of his admirers, John Hayward-whose dedicatory epistle to Essex in his Life and Reign of Henry IV associated Essex with Bolingbroke and described him as "magnus sequidem es, et presenti judicio, et futuri temporis expectatione - should have given Essex cause to wonder whether life might dog an in ways he could not foresee. 31 '1\ mockery king of snow"

Act four opens, just as act three, with a command that assens Bolingbroke's power: 65

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

Call forth Bagot. Now, Bagot, freely speak thy mind, What thou dost know of noble Gloucester's death, Who wrought it with the King, and who perform'd The bloody office of his timeless end. (I - 5) In the light of 3,1 we assume that Bolingbroke will handle this arraignment well. We are surprised, therefore, when his investigation into Woodstock's murder degenerates into an uncontrolled brawl. Indeed, although he is as direct as he was in 3,1, he strikes a false note at the start by begging the question. We know that the pliant Bagot does not "freely speak" and that Bolingbroke's use of wrought and perform'd place blame on Aumerle as Richard's conspirator. Richard had allowed Bolingbroke and Mowbray to "freely speak" in 1,1 (17), but in this repetition of the play's opening Bagot only performs a part in accusing Aumerle. In a speech of equal length Aumerle accuses Bagot of slander and attempts, as Mowbray did, to uphold his "honor." He throws down his gage. Trying to prevent the difficulties that arose when Richard tried to make the appellants return their gages, Bolingbroke does not let Bagot pick it up. But then this inquiry breaks down, as the appellants continue to hurl accusations and draw Fitzwater, Percy, and Surrey into their quarrel. Unable to keep emotions in check or to determine guilt, Bolingbroke intervenes with another command. These "differences shall rest under gage," he says, "till" Mowbray "be repealed" and his testimony admitted as evidence. His wish to repeal Mowbray and to restore his "lands and signories" makes one feel he is just and fair. But Shakespeare immediately undercuts Bolingbroke's magnanimity. In the first of two powerful speeches he will make, the Bishop of Carlisle reveals that Mowbray's return "shall never be seen": Many a time hath banish'd Norfolk fought For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field, Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens, And toil'd with works of war, retir'd himself To Italy, and there at Venice gave His body to that pleasant country's earth, 66

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

And his pure soul unto his captain Christ, Under whose colors he had fought so long.

(91-100)

Carlisle "upstages" Bolingbroke, whose apparently sensitive response to this news is just brief and platitudinous enough to make it suspect. "Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul to the bosom / Of good old Abraham!" (103-104), he says, immediately redirecting his attention to York's salutation to him as "Henry, fourth of that name!" And though he ascends the throne "in God's name," Carlisle forthrightly opposes him in one of the play's most famous speeches, setting the retribution of God against his aspiration and calling him a "foul traitor" (114-149). In telescoping events that in Holinshed spanned ten days, Shakespeare makes Bolingbroke's ascension problematic. He turns us against him at just that moment when his success is realized. When Bolingbroke mounts the symbolic locus of the throne, he becomes the object of scrutiny and judgment and "falls" in our esteem in inverse proportion to his "rise." Carlisle's famous speech, like Gaunt's paean to England, has taken on a life of its own and may have lost some of its contextual importance. To recover that importance we need to recall that in addition to being prophetic, the speech is full of echoes that would have been familiar to contemporary spectators. The Bishop's set piece is in fact a sermon that they had heard again and again. It is a piece of Tudor orthodoxy Shakespeare puts to dramatic purpose, one that, read in churches throughout Elizabeth's reign, proclaimed that the coming of the Tudors had put an end to the Wars of the Roses. In it the official Homilies on "Obedience" and against "Rebellion" combine with the warning of Mark (3:25) and the historical background of the Wars of the Roses. Indeed, Carlisle's reference to England as Golgotha sets the present against the background of the Biblical past just as in Passion II, where the platea was localized as the "field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls."32 Once again a Biblical allusion surfaces and then withdraws before the ~orward movement of the historical moment. Temporal power underlies Northumberland's arrest of Carlisle for treason and Bolingbroke's warning to the lords among whom he had attempted to adjudicate. Bolingbroke's words cannot be taken lightly, laced as they are with menace: 67

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

Lords, you that here are under our arrest, Procure your sureties for your days of answer. Little are we beholding to your love, And little look'd for at your helping hands. (158-161)

Your is repeated four times, little twice. With the slightest change in intonation, these words will be threatening. They will reveal not only Bolingbroke's disdain for these men but also his potential ruthlessness in dealing with them. All this sets the stage for Richard's entry. Unable to shake off his "regal thoughts" and incapable of properly bending his "knee," Richard calls all those present traitors, betraying Judases. He questions why those once loyal to him will no longer cry ''All hail." And all too bitterly he recalls the communal response to a king's appearance before his subjects. The relation between critical response and producible interpretation is brought into focus at this moment. Before we consider that relation, however, let us remember that in Richard II history is presented not only as part of the ceremonial, ritualized past but also as a current action, as a "living process that directly involves and implicates the audience in the theatre."3 3As Carlisle's sermon suggests, Shakespeare recalls more than the historical and Biblical past in merging the play's illusionistic, historical locus with the immediacy of the platea. Past reenactment, captured in present performance, records what happens to Richard as he and we experience it. Shakespeare taps the dramatic potential of this moment, and as in Richard III, 3, 7, he uses the phrase "God save the King!" and the word "amen" to re-create an audience's reaction to usurpation. To cry "God save the King!" here is of course to take part in a deposition. The phrase was upon everyone's lips when York hailed Bolingbroke as "Henry, fourth of that name" and when Bolingbroke ascended to the throne "in God's name." But Carlisle's "God forbid!" silenced that cry, and now Richard enters with these words on his lips. He wonders why none will say "amen": God save the King! Will no man say amen? Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, amen! God save the king! although I be not he, And yet amen, if heaven do think him me. (172-175) 68

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

No one says "amen." The spectators, on stage and off, "are mum, say not a word." Those offstage, however, are aware of the accuracy of Carlisle's claim that the "blood of English shall manure the ground, / And future ages groan for this foul act" (137 -1 39). As in Richard III, the spectators are placed in the same position as the onstage, historical audience; as in the earlier play they have knowledge the onstage audience does not possess. Armed with this knowledge, a spectator would have participated in the reenactment of Richard's deposition knowing this "foul act" resulted in civil war. With Richard's entry into "common view," attention shifts downstage from the upstage locus of the throne, and the force of his Figurenposition now may be felt even more powerfully than in 3,3. He begins, again, by playing with words that have incisive relevance. He is willing, he says, to resign the crown, but "still" his "griefs" will be with him. Although his public responsibilities will be removed, he still must deal with his personal grief and feelings. This kingly fool plays too nicely with these meanings of "care," but they indicate the widening separation between his public and private selves (195-199). Beneath the artful, rhetorical play lies real insight. Like the "still-breeding thoughts" that occupy his mind in his final soliloquy, Richard's "cares" will "still" remain quietly embedded in his consciousness. The homophones present in his response to Bolingbroke's blunt question (''Are you contented to resign the crown?") similarly indicate the loss of identity he undergoes: ''Ay, no, no ay; for I must nothing be."34 He nonetheless "undoes" himself, ceremonially enacting his divestiture: Now mark me how I will undo myself: I give this heavy weight from off my head, And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths; All pomp and majesty I do forswear; My manors, rents, revenues I forgo; 69

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny; God pardon all oaths that are broke to me!

(203-214)

Anaphora marks the "un"-stating of kingship: tears, hands, tongue, and breath remove his balm, crown, state, and allegiances. The pattern of coronation is reversed in this "inverted rite."3 5 At the end of this performance the process of self-recognition begins. When Northumberland demands that Richard read aloud his crimes so "the commons" will be "satisfied," the language of self emerges in stark juxtaposition to the language of ceremony. Richard responds with appropriate indignation: "and must I ravel out / My weav'd up follies?" (228229). The theme of mockery reemerges, and the paradox of folly and wisdom, part of the inversion and irreverence of Richard's deposition, leads to self-knowledge. As this public show becomes a personal mortification, Richard asserts his dignity. All these" Pilates" may "wash [their] hands, / Showing an outward pity," but they have "deliver'd" him to his "sour cross" (239-241). "Water," Richard says pointedly, "cannot wash away your sin." The Christian references, repeated from 3,1 and reinforced in the allusion to Golgotha, sound the play's most evocative chord and remind us that Shakespeare has drawn this scene's dimensions from the mysteries. The image of Christ before Pilate, "mocked as king of the Jews and delivered to his sour cross,"36 comes not only from the play's French sources but also from those mysteries which, like the Ludus Coventraie, drew past significance and present meaning into conjunction. Playing his part as that silent, unjust judge, Bolingbroke turns over Richard to a theatrical audience that is no longer on Bolingbroke's side. I suppose we all silently applaud when Richard denounces Northumberland as a "haught insulting man." We are more painfully engaged with him, however, when he admits that he has "no name, no title" (254-255). He calls for a mirror. Audiences keep switching their eyes between Richard and Bolingbroke during these moments, looking for a sign of recognition or show of feeling from the usurper. None is forthcoming, and at the last all eyes come to rest on Richard. Attention rivets upon him, particularly when, mirror in hand, he dashes to shivers this simulacrum of himself. Here the "face that made beholders wink" and that covered over "so many follies" until it was "at last out-fac'd" by Bolingbroke is seen 70

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in all its brittleness. Bolingbroke believes that the "shadow" of Richard's sorrow has "destroyed" the "shadow" of his "face"; he appears, for the moment, to have wrestled attention and wordplay from Richard. Richard agrees, but reinterprets and recaptures his control of language by resecuring his Figurenposition. His wordplay repeatedly signals a shift into an idiom in which artificial "shapes of grief" become "shadows" of true sorrow. And at this moment, when attention shifts from the throne to downstage, Richard II becomes a tragedy. When the symbol of Richard's mimetic self-dramatization and self-exhibition shatters, he is left with the puzzling pieces of himself and forced into self-analysis. His eyes were so "full of tears" that he could not "see." He was a "mockery king of snow, melting away" before "the sun of Bolingbroke." Now he can perceive the substance of grief amid all the "shivers" of self-dramatization. Seen aright in the mirror, Richard's true state alters his distorted perspective. Bushy's words to the Queen resound and may be seen as proleptic, not only of the Queen's "glaz'd," sorrowful, imagined grief, but of Richard's "distinguished" form of grief(2.2.14ff.). Richard's "grief" now "boundeth where it falls, / Not with empty hollowness, but weight" (1.2.58-59). In this celebrated moment he discovers that his "grief lies all within, / And these external manners of laments / Are merely shadows to the unseen grief / That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul" (295-298). "Literary artifice, expanding in complexity and psychological correspondence, becomes an instrument of self-analysis,"37 captured in the looking glass, symbol of vanity and truth-telling, self-exhibition and self-revelation. 38 Richard now wishes to be banished from Bolingbroke's "sight"-a far cry from the words he spoke when, identifying the aspect found in "the glasses of Gaunt's eyes," he plucked four years from Bolingbroke's exile in a show of power. No longer will he use the royal "we." Public speech leads to a private, platea-like understanding of his folly. Richard's Figurenposition contrasts with Bolingbroke's silent and rigid exterior. His sentimentality and poetic conceits, once so tiresome, indulgent, and hysterical, so infused with self and vain conceit, have turned into a form of self-mockery reinforced by his stage position. The mimesis of kingship is itself a mockery, separate from the expressiveness of self. Coexisting at the start, when Richard's sense of self was his kingly part, they have been more and more divided; now a new mimesis, predicated 71

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on consciousness rather than on a part to be played, emerges from the dramatic engagement of actor and audience. In York's elegiac, evocative description of the different receptions Richard and Bolingbroke receive during their passage through London, yet another scene from the Passion is rehearsed. York reinforces the importance of communal recognition of kingship. ''All tongues cried, 'God save thee, Bullingbrook!'" when he entered London, but "No man cried, 'God save him! ,'" "no joyful tongue gave" Richard "his welcome home" (5.2.11, 2829). York reports that dust was thrown on his sacred head, Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off, His face still combating with tears and smiles, The badges of his grief and patience, That had not God, for some strong purpose, steel'd The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted, And barbarism itself have pitied him. (30-36) Here Richard carries his grief and patience with "tears and smiles" far different from those he displayed in 3,2 (9). The shapes of grief so worried by the Queen have been internalized from their personified manifestations. York had discussed the matter of choice between Richard and Bolingbroke in terms of right and wrong; now his more acute description captures the tenuously balanced feelings of pity for Richard and of recognition of Bolingbroke's power that lie at the heart of the tragedy (37 -40). York does not of course understand that this has been a play of passion, in which the hearts of men have "melted." The hearts he describes have been "steel'd" against Richard-just as Scroop had foretold (3.2.111). The spectators, however, are invited to feel differently. York's description removes the spectators from the scene and asks them to reflect upon, rather than take part in, Richard's humiliation. Invited to lift their arms as members of Bolingbroke's army, they are now asked to see these events feelingly. The similarity Richard's progress has to the journey to Calvary ensures their involvement and identifies the play's most influential underlying form. Bolingbroke has indeed played Pilate and Judas in this restaging of the Crucifixion and Passion II. In recalling the mysteries, Shakespeare realizes "the dramatic potentialities of a popular theater in which the 72

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background of ... Christian ritual and ... [the] forms of embodiment and self-expression are linked to, and interact with, more modern empirical standards of mimetic imitation and interpretation."39 Soliloquy is now Richard's proper mode of expression. At Pomfret, the illusionistic, historical locus is again projected on to the "timeless" piatea , where it merges with the reality of the audience's world. All the world becomes part of the "flinty ribs" of Pomfret's "ragged prison walls" (20-21). Richard begins with an announcement, "I have been studying how 1 may compare / This prison where 1 live unto the world" (1-2), that sets the scene in a location far removed in space and time even while it declares to the spectators that he will reveal his thoughts to them. "Because the world is populous, / And here is not a creature but myself" (34), he does not think he can make the comparison. But he tries, face to face with the silent witnesses who surround the stage, to "hammer it out." He has played "in one person many people, / And none contented" (31- 32); now he is "nothing" (38). Once a king, he is now a beggar, bereft of his kingdom. 40 His past actions weigh upon him, and he begins to see their temporal implications. Conventionality again shades into selfawareness, the anaphora of "thoughts ... Thoughts ... Thoughts" (12, 18, 23) leading to truer expression when Richard realizes that he broke the harmony of his "true time" and offers the most incisive comment yet made by a tragic protagonist: "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me" (49). Not until the Groom of the stable enters do the "badges of his grief and patience" become a "sign of love" (5.2.3 3; 5.5.65). The Groom greets him with the first sign of recognition (" Hail, royal prince!") we have heard since the third act. Now recognized, Richard is regal, magnanimous and, when attacked, courageous. Although he dies by Exton's "fierce hand," he is "as full of valure as of royal blood!" The "hand" that "staggers" his "person" "shall burn in never-quenching fire" (107 -11 3). The window on the past closes in the final scene, when we return to Windsor Castle and to the rhetorical patterning of the play's opening. Now Bolingbroke is mounted on the throne. The patterning of the speeches, whose symmetrical four- and five-line lengths are followed by Bolingbroke's rhymed couplets, recalls the rhetorical formalism of the opening scenes. As in 4,1, however, attention soon shifts downstage. After 73

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Richard's coffin is placed "in common view" in front of the throne, Exton tells Bolingbroke: "Within this coffin I present / Thy buried fear. Herein all breathless lies / The mightiest of thy greatest enemies, / Richard of Burdeaux" (5.6.30- 33). The action of Exton's "fatal hand," like all of the other hands raised against Richard, brings slander upon Bolingbroke's "head and all this famous land" (35- 36). Bolingbroke admits that his soul is "full of woe / That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow" (45-46). "With Cain go wander through the shades of night" says Bolingbroke, reminding us that he also has taken part in an even more deeply embedded mystery, a play of Cain and Abel which, lying at some inchoate, undefinable level beneath Richard II, has made him "kin with kin, and kind with kind, confound" (43; 1.1.1 04; cf. 1.3.1 77). He would like to enact Pilate's gesture, and he vows to make "a voyage to the Holy Land." But blood has "bedrenched / The fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land" (3.3.46-47), and Bolingbroke's stained-and burning-hand cannot be cleansed. He will "march sadly after," but all eyes will not be so much upon him as on Richard's casket.

''As in a theatre" Such is the playas it might have affected spectators in 1595. In the production of 1601, as Sir E. K. Chambers suggested, it seems "likely that the interest taken by Essex in the play led to some popular application of the theme to current politics."41 Armed with his own ancestral claim to the throne, Essex may well have restaged the play to make a different point. The basis of Tudor ideology, as it was conceptualized during Henry VII's reign, codified by Edward Hall, and refined and reembellished by Rafael Holinshed, lay in its teleological interpretation of the Wars of the Roses, wars that began with the deposition of Richard II and ended with Henry Tudor's triumph over Richard III at Bosworth. In upholding Holinshed's providential view in Richard II, particularly in the Bishop of Carlisle's and Richard's prophetic speeches, Shakespeare upheld Tudor ideology. In this sense Tillyard's analysis of Richard II and of the second tetralogy is accurate. But that ideology, as we know, was itself a tenden74

Engagement and Detachment in Richard II

tious interpretation promulgated to justify Henry VII's tenuous hold on the throne, and it might well be mocked at its source in the reign of Richard II. The "Exhortation, concerning good order" from which Carlisle's sermon draws was only the most obvious example of what we would term the use of propaganda and indoctrination to keep rebellion in check and to legitimize a dynasty. This ideology was written and imposed. It might be reinterpreted, however, by making Richard II a drama a clef, casting Elizabeth as Richard and Essex as Bolingbroke. Elizabeth and Essex realized that they played roles in this drama, with Essex's Bolingbroke hoping to force Elizabeth's Richard from the spotlight. The decision to perform Richard lIon the eve of his attempted coup and Elizabeth's well-known comment to the antiquarian William Lambarde suggest that the play could be used not only to recreate a past event but also to incite an uprising. The relation between the play's language and staging might be reinterpreted. To cry "God save the King!" in 4,1 is to take part in a deposition, and Essex and his followers may have seen something radically different in staging a deposition to which the spectators would be asked to give assent and in which the ideology and ceremony that shield a king are shorn away. Elizabeth's indignant comment to Lambarde reveals that she understood the point, and the official suppression of the deposition scene in the 1597 quarto and in subsequent editions printed during her lifetime attests to its power. We cannot know Essex's intentions. Nonetheless, I would suggest that in his production Essex reinterpreted Richard II, using Shakespeare's creation of a synchronous moment for his own ends. In creating drama from history as it was written by Tudor historians and received by sixteenthcentury Englishmen, Shakespeare was basically true to the accounts he used and to the "ideology" they upheld. Essex would have falsified the historical facts for his political purposes. Yet there may not finally be a difference. Essex may not have falsified history so much as made it serve his calculated interpretation just as Henry VII and Henry VIII had done. In doing so, he struck a blow at the structures of power and at Elizabeth, whose ceremonial appearances and mythological portraits bear all the marks of ideology. For the forty shillings that Gilly Meyrich paid Augustine Phillips to put on the play, the Judas-like Essex found a way to betray Elizabeth.

75

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What Essex did not realize was that an might dog life in a way he could not foresee. As Sir Francis Bacon put the matter, God turned the play "upon them." This production would be Essex's final performance before Elizabeth. He and his followers would suffer the same fate as the members of the Oxford rebellion, "Salisbury, Spencer, Blunt, and Kent," "Brocas and Sir Bennet Seely," and the 'f\bbot of Westminster" (5.6.8, 14,19), by being set high above the nation on a "scaffold." He would end up playing not Bolingbroke but Richard, awaiting cenain execution. He succeeded only in driving Elizabeth into Cecil's arms. He did not foresee that a play put to his purposes might predict his and his followers' fates. Some hearts, no doubt, were steeled against Essex; others may have pitied him; but the dominant feelings appear to have been of loss and betrayal. Essex's death was lamented, and the mixture of sympathy for him and allegiance to Elizabeth might well have made Shakespeare wonder. Tillyard's analysis of Richard II is valuable because it identifies Shakespeare's historical perspective from within the perspective he inherited. Essex's interpretation, on the other hand, would have made Richard II a "radical tragedy" which questioned the premises that "in-formed" its creation and ideological surface. 42 Richard displays an "emergent" sense of self, and in one sense the play does record a transition from a medieval to a Renaissance view. This "emergent" sense might also be interpreted, however, as one that mocks the ideology that rounds the monal temples of a king. Critical readings do not fully account for the experience of those spectators, who, in 1595, participated in a play that combined Christian drama with Tudor doctrine and who, in its final Elizabethan performance in 1601, might have taken part in one of the "forty" producible interpretations played in platea-like "open streets and houses" that asked them to mock the Queen whose presence among them was so powerful.

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IV Representation and Privileged Knowledge in Hamlet

"In Hamlet the rapport is not between actor and actor but between Hamlet and the audience"

In Richard II mockery and inversion define Richard's new Figurenposition in relation to the throne. In Hamlet "impertinence," inversion, and irreverent wordplay are part of Hamlet's Figurenposition from the moment he enters.! From the start Hamlet stands at a distance from Claudius's usurped throne, locus of supreme ambition in Renaissance drama. His figural positions allow him to move into and out of the illusion and to stand, as it were, on the margins of the dramatic action, maintaining his role within the drama and mediating between the audience and the play. In Hamlet neoclassical mimetic strictures, according to which a character is illusion-bound, are in highly complex relation to the popular tradition of staging and acting, by which a character might generate a "unique stage presence that establishes a special relationship between himself and his fellow actors, the play, or the audience, even when direct address has been abandoned."2 This is so because Hamlet is at once an image of the quintessential Humanist courtier, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, and an inheritor of that popular mimetic tradition by which the clown, antic, and Vice "moralized two meanings in one word." His Figurenpositionen are defined accordingly: as courtier, he stands within the illusion; as an heir of the Vice, he speaks from a position and in an idiom associated with the "place." Although we do not lack information about this idiom (or the nature of Hamlet's puns, wordplay, and proverbs),3 surely the importance it has for our understanding of Hamlet and the play have not received full attention. And while we 77

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cannot expect totally to explain Hamlet in this way, this tradition of acting and staging may well shed some new light on his character and the play's dramaturgy. Indeed, after nearly four hundred years of exegesis according to neoclassical, Romantic, and modern mimetic standards, the prince is an incomprehensible mystery whose "heart" we have tried in vain to "pluck out," and the play is about an audience of scholars and theatergoers who "cannot make up its mind."4 The importance of the interplay between locus and platea has been lost, and the mixture of the classical and the colloquial in the signifying actor's idiom has disappeared into the problematics of his representational, signified role. It is a commonplace to acknowledge that the play reflects modern critical pluralism and that its effect is mirrored in the similarity between the "problems an audience confronts in interpreting Hamlet" and "the problems the Prince confronts in making sense of life in Elsinore."5 Hamlet's presentational self-expressiveness has been conflated with the psychology of his representational role, and what was a convention of delay has become the justification for a psychology of indecision and a poetics of uncertainty. The "mysteriousness" of Hamlet may lie in its ability to arouse and to elude our attempts to explain. But I do not think Hamlet is finally "the tragedy of an audience that cannot make up its mind"-as Stephen Booth would have us believe of our role in the creation of the play's meaning. Nor is it ultimately true that "the actions of the audience's mind in responding to and trying to possess the event it watches" are "mirrored" in the action of the play. If the problems an audience confronts in interpreting Hamlet are similar to "the problems the Prince confronts in making sense of life in Elsinore," they are so only in the sense that in Hamlet the rapport between actor and audience is greatest. In this sense the "self-conscious subversion of authority in representation" may bring us closer to understanding why, as the Earl of Shaftesbury recognized in 1710, Hamlet has been the play that "most affected English hearts."6 This is of course to introduce in a necessarily broad way the complex issue of mimesis and response, the problem of suiting "the action to the word, the word to the action," in Hamlet. It is to adumbrate the alternations in the degree of knowledge we share with the Prince and the variations in his Figurenpositionen in relation to the play's illusionistic frame. 78

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The rapport between actor and audience is crucial, however, for without it the ways in which Shakespeare aligns our perspective with and separates it from Hamlet's would not be clear. We would not understand why Shakespeare creates moments in which we celebrate Hamlet's acuity and then are confounded by his failure to perceive, why these "discrepancies in awareness"7 are so integral to the play's effect, or why the courtier-and-antic meets the image of his likeness in the graveyard.

''A little more than kin" Shakespeare establishes Hamlet's Figurenpositionen and aligns his perspective with the spectators' when he first appears. Dressed in a melancholy mourner's (and a revenger's) conventional black, Hamlet is the last to enter the council scene (1.2), his dress and entry separating him from the orderly and rich courtly procession. 8 During Claudius's long opening speech he stands apart (and perhaps downstage) from the courtiers and lords who surround the throne, and his appearance and demeanor may well arouse interest. Yet attention remains fixed upon the throne. The balanced, measured cadences of Claudius's unctuous opening address, with their subtly rippling undercurrents ("Therefore, our sometimes sister, now our queen .... Have we ... taken to wife" [8,10,14]), command attention. And after he thanks those who have gone along with this "affair," Claudius takes up, one by one, the "affairs" of state. Each of his following speeches is introduced with a "Now" (17,26,42,64), and each is concerned with a different young man. And after he announces a possible resolution to the problems posed by Fortinbras and grants Laertes's "suit" to return to France, Claudius turns to his most important confrontation. "But new," he says, "my cousin Hamlet, and my son-" (64). We hear Hamlet's voice for the first time, and attention shifts to him from the throne. He speaks in "aside," indirectly responding to Claudius with his fine punning on the King's unnatural conjoining of "cousin ... and ... son": ''A little more than kin, and less than kind" (65). These words do more than identify Hamlet as a man who plays with distinctions. They establish his Figurenposition in relation to the throne, introduce him as a character who will maintain a privileged relationship with 79

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the audience, and invite the spectators to share the multiple meanings he fuses in single words. That Figurenposition is defined by the use of puns and wordplay in an audience "aside" and suggests that Hamlet stands, as it were, with one foot within and one foot outside of the illusion. Indeed, while wordplay is not the exclusive province of the clown, antic, or Vice, clearly Hamlet's use of it here is akin to the similar wordplay found, for instance, in Richard Ill's delightful, Vice-like, Figurenposition. Here Hamlet moralizes multiple meanings in his antic quibble and establishes a unique position in relation to the illusionistic scene. From this position he, like Richard III, will puncture rhetorical pompositity with the keen, double-edged plainness of common speech. Whether or not he actually stands downstage, that is, his language partakes of the conventions associated with the platea. His puns, wordplay, and proverbs link him to popular downstage figures, and in the course of his remarks he "moves" toward the locus of the throne, taking with him his distinct downstage idiom. That idiom is sharply differentiated from the evenness of Claudius's balanced measures. Claudius weighs "mirth with funeral," "dirge in marriage," and "delight with dole" in "equal scale" (12-13), and actors have used these antinomies to suggest the deceptiveness of his apparently evenhanded conduct of affairs of state. Yet Claudius is, in this reprise of Lylyian measures, distinctly an image of false representativity; what he represents is, in effect, undercut by what he says. The irony inherent in his speculations about Fortinbras, "thinking by our late dear brother's death / Our state to be disjoint and out of frame" (19-20), undermines his authority by recalling Horatio's and the sentinels' sense of foreboding unease in the opening scene, and the repetition of "our late dear brother's death" (1,19) points out the tenuousness of his attempt to ease so difficult a situation. The way in which he represents himself, that is, is consistent with his insincerity and calculation. Hamlet's alliterative, riddling, and punning aside further disrupts this show of sincerity, with "more than kin" drawing attention to the unnaturalness of his relationship to Claudius and "less than kind" suggesting Claudius's dissimilarity. Hamlet mocks Claudius by subverting his words and inverting his meanings. Two kinds of mimesis are in conflict here, with a style similar to the bombast of Gorboduc and to the ornate, balanced antitheses of John Lyly and his 80

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epigone opposed by a voice that slices through Claudius's to define the unnaturalness of "my cousin Hamlet, and my son." Although older modes of representation are upheld by Hamlet, especially in the atavistic, declamatory style of "The Mouse-trap," they are challenged again and again when they appear in the guise of Claudius, the Player King. Only as the confrontation among Hamlet, the King, and the Queen develops does Hamlet truly begin to "enter" the courtly scene, stepping into the illusion through a subtly shaded series of statements. Interposed between the halves of Claudius's question ("But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son-How is it that the clouds still hang on you?" [64,66]), Hamlet's first impertinent statement disrupts the illusion of dialogue and channels attention from the throne. As he "moves," step by step, upstage, however, Hamlet is increasingly drawn into the illusion. His next words, "Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun" (67), do respond to Claudius and integrate Hamlet into the dialogue. Language and stage "movement" are complementary. Because they extend the riddling and proverbial speech typical of his downstage Figurenpostition and continue to depart from the King's "meaning and point of view," however, these words stand midway between dialogue and indirect audience address. 9 Even as he begins to participate in the dialogue, that is, Hamlet maintains nearly the same degree of dissociation from the court and contact with the spectators present in his first aside. Although he becomes part of a single, locus-oriented dramatic action, his language continues to operate on a different, platea level. His second response is "impertinent" because, even as he responds to Claudius, Hamlet plays with meanings beyond those Claudius is prepared to comprehend. Similar instances occur, of course, when in his "antic disposition" Hamlet mocks Polonius, recalling these very words: Ham. Pol. Ham. Pol.

Have you a daughter? I have, my lord. Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to 'to [Aside.] How say you by that? still harping on my daughter? Yet he knew me not at first, 'a said I was a fishmonger. 'A is far gone. (2.2.182-189) 81

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And in the complex exchange with Claudius just prior to the performance of "The Mouse-trap." It is perhaps a measure of their changed relation that Claudius omits the offensive "son" from his salutation: King. Ham. King. Ham.

How fares our cousin Hamlet? Excellent, i' faith, of the chameleon's dish: I eat the air, promise-cramm'd-you cannot feed capons so. I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet, these words are not mine. No, nor mine now. (3.2.92-97)

As in the words of Richard III and other Ambidexters, Hamlet creates meanings at odds with the illusion of dialogue, taking as they do symbolic or metaphoric expressions ("How is it that the clouds still hang on you"; "How fares our cousin') literally and so inverting them via wordplay. Typically, Hamlet's replies are met by puzzled responses or by further questions. Claudius has "nothing" to do with these answers (nor does Hamlet once he provides them), but there are receding depths here, each of which, as Dover Wilson noted, is resonant with meaning: o In fact, the presence of puns and proverbs in Hamlet's idiom suggests an important distinction between the play's use of aphorisms, saws, and epigrammatic constructions, on the one hand, and of proverbs, puns, and wordplay, on the other. By one count Hamlet contains more proverbs than any other Shakespeare play, one hundred and forty, and Hamlet speaks seventy-one of them; he also uses ninety puns, more than any Shakespeare character: 1 By this measure the pointed, tersely phrased, sententious truisms found in aphorisms are equated with shallowness, insincerity, and "seeming" in Hamlet, while those older, unpretentious statements illustrating the often enigmatic (and lost) truths of folk wisdom are put to more discerning uses. Hamlet's pithy sayings are drawn from the wisdom of the folk, and they are neither authored nor authoritative. They have a depth of content and are stylistically different from the thinness of Gertrude's self-evident moralizing in "all that lives must die," from Claudius's opening antitheses and chiasmic refinement of Gertrude's words ("Your father lost a father, that father lost, lost his"), from Laertes's brotherly (and commonplace) "sentences" to Ophelia (1.3), and, in a supreme instance, from Polonius's catalogue of saws in the superficial ad82

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vice he gives to Laertes: "Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice"; "Neither a borrower nor a lender be"; "To thine own self be true" (1.3.68, 75,78). As Gertrude knows, there is more "art" than "matter" in Polonius's verbal baggage, his wit not distinguished by its brevity (2.1.9 5). There are differences in each of these characters' idioms, to be sure, but they are superficial, condoling, or aphoristic in a way Hamlet will not countenance. In this sense Hamlet truly does "wipe away" all "trivial fond records" and "saws of books" (1.5.99ff.) in keeping the death of his father foremost in his mind, and he mocks those who, like Osric, only have the "tune of the time" (5.2.190). When he draws upon other storehouses of wisdom, it will be from Judges (11), Psalms (144:4), and Matthew (10:29) and from classical literature, and even in two of these cases his allusions are mixed with references to popular ballads ('J epha Judge of Israel") and folk games ("Hide fox and all after") (2.2.403; 4.2.30-31,5.2.219-220). When he responds to his mother in 1,2, Hamlet in fact denies the equation of outer appearance and inner construction, opposing Polonius's advice to dress well but conservatively, "For the apparel oft proclaims the man" (1. 3.72). Here Hamlet appears to be absorbed into the dialogue for the first time, but even now he carefully separates himself from the court's "common" feelings and affected seeming. Claudius's pomposity is followed by Gertrude's summary judgment on the death of her husband and Hamlet's father: Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color 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. Thou know'st 'tis common, all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity. Ham. Ay, madam, it is common. Queen. If it be, Why seems it so particular with thee? Ham. Seem, madam? nay, it is, I know not 'seems.' 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath, 83

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No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (68-86) ''Ay, madam, it is common." The apparel does not proclaim the man. More than merely playing on words, Hamlet dissociates himself from courtly and common "shapes of grief" (as does Richard II) by asserting the sincerity of his emotion and the truthfulness of its representation. Even in this dialogue his wordplay sets him apart from the court, from those whose emotions can be denoted by appearance. He has within him something that "passes show," and he uses a theatrical metaphor to assert the authenticity of his representational self, to distinguish himself from these false displays-and from such conventional forms, moods, and shapes as the revenger and melancholic might assume. A new character, distinct from his forebears in the "Ur-Hamlet," in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and in John Marston's experiments in the revenge genre, announces his arrival on the stage. The resemblance between outer appearance and inner feeling, between conventionality and character, is questioned from within the negative terms of Hamlet's self-definition. Outer, superficial appearance, like the superficial idiom in which it is dressed, is seen as falsely representative. In this sense Hamlet embodies, rather than represents, a mimetic truth, and his rejection of the court is simultaneously moral and theatrical, his Figurenposition defining "that within which passes show." It is no coincidence that Hamlet is Shakespeare's most thematically and theatrically self-conscious play, that words like act, seems, show, and play bear thematic and performative meanings. Hamlet's metadramatic self-consciousness is part of his dual nature as a representational character and a presentational actor. 12 Later, of course, he paradoxically will use a deliberate "show"- an antic disposition - to hide his true feelings and to protect his vulnerable, shaken self. Here mockery and inversion coordinate his moral and thematic as well as histrionic Figurenpositionen. 84

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Although Claudius is superficial, he is not obtuse, and his reply to Hamlet lets the audience know he is a formidable and mighty opposite. The verbal fencing of his response feints with derisive adjectives. He describes Hamlet's mourning as "obsequious" (in its primary and secondary senses), "obstinate," "impious," "unmanly," "incorrect," and "unschool'd" (92ff.). His real thrust, however, comes when he returns Hamlet's words: in the light of "what we know must be," Claudius says, Hamlet's behavior is "as common / As any the most vulgar thing to sense" (98-99). This riposte is followed by an order and a reassertion: Hamlet is to stay in Elsinore, in "the cheer and comfort" of Claudius's "eye," in effect to remain in the "sun"; he is also to remain "Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son" (116-117). The deeply embedded irony of his reference to the "first corse" (105) notwithstanding, he reimposes his shallow norms upon the retrograde prince by requiring Hamlet to "be as ourself in Denmark" (122). As is well known, Hamlet responds not to Claudius but to Gertrude, agreeing that he will in all his best "obey" ber. This "gentle and unforc'd accord" is nothing to celebrate, but Claudius proposes that the cannon fired to salute his toasts should dispel the "clouds" that "hang" on Hamlet (126).

'~

hawk from a hand-saw"

In showing how Hamlet "steps" into and out of the illusion in 1,2, I have stressed the alternation in the degree of his dissociation from and association with the illusionistic scene. In effect, such variations employ principles of stagecraft that complement the strictures found in neoclassical poetics. They walk the line separating illusionistic from nonillusionistic staging as well as representational from presentational acting. Neoclassical poetics divide scenes in terms of entrances and exits; Shakespeare adds to these divisions, molding his scenic contours in terms of Hamlet's Figurenpositionen. Hamlet's opening (65) "aside" leads into a conversational exchange-with the King and Gertrude (68-128). His scene-ending aside ('1\1l is not well / I doubt some foul play" [254ff.]) issues from a second conversation -with Horatio and the sentinels (160-253). His first soliloquy (129-159) is placed between these exchanges. Aside, dialogue, solil85

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oquy, dialogue, and "exit" aside chart Hamlet's progress in relation to the illusionistic scene. In his asides and soliloquies Hamlet maintains audience contact and reinforces his Figurenpositionen according to that "equilibrium of involvement and distance characteristic of Shakespeare's treatment of his audience."13 And because his Figurenpositionen vary along a spectrum of dissociation from and association with the illusion, the transition to soliloquy is absolutely natural whenever he is alone on stage. In his soliloquies he reestablishes proximity to the spectators, speaking to them without expressly acknowledging their presence and revealing the depths of his embodied self. He exploits the dimensions of his Figurenpositionen. Such is the case in the first, highly emotional, soliloquy, "0 that this too too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!" (1.2.129ff.), when he reveals himself as a distraught, suicidal young man, whose ideals have been shattered by his mother's incestuous and "o'erhasty" marriage and who views the world as an "unweeded garden / That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely" (135-137). Here he embodies true grief; his emotion is not in excess of the situation unless we agree with Claudius's assessment. 14 His insolent, apparently unprevailing waywardness is defined as deeply felt despair, and his sense of revulsion at human frailty leads to a death wish. In this outpouring allusions to the "Everlasting" and to "Hyperion," "Niobe," and "Hercules" combine with unspun references to a garden gone to seed and to Gertrude's "unrighteous" tears (154). Although he must, as he says, "hold" his "tongue" about these matters when he is before the court, he takes the spectators into his confidence, sharing his feelings with them and strengthening the bond created in his first aside. Hamlet and the spectators are drawn back into the scene when Horatio, Barnardo, and Marcellus enter, Hamlet's momentary failure to recognize them facilitating the transition to dialogue. Having placed Hamlet in privileged relation with the spectators, Shakespeare now brings the events of the opening scene into conjunction with the workings of Hamlet's mind. Hamlet echoes Horatio's memorable remark about the Ghost as "a mote ... to trouble the mind's eye" and admits that Horatio's disclosures "trouble" him (1.1.112; 1.2.185,224). The questions he asks make him the principal questioner in a play cast in the "interrogative 86

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mode" 15 : "Saw, who?" "The King my father?" "But where was this?" "Did you not speak to it?" "Hold you the watch tonight?" ''Arm'd, say you?" "From top to toe?" "What, looked he frowningly?" "Pale or red?" ''And fix'd his eyes upon you?" (190ff.). Indeed, when Hamlet first sees the Ghost, his anguished questions ("What may this mean ... ?" [1.4.39ff.]) articulate Horatio's, the sentinels', and the audience's questions. The spectators' perspective is securely aligned with Hamlet's. The subtle track of their engagement runs parallel to his. After the Ghost departs, leaving behind an injunction to revenge and a plea to "remember me," Hamlet's already shaken composure is permanently affected. He makes Horatio and Marcellus swear they will not reveal that he has "put on" (in its thematic and theatrical senses) an "antic disposition" (1. 5.172). In the exit aside that follows, as in the one in 1,2, he renews audience contact and reinforces the sense that "The time is out of joint" and that, "cursed spite," he must be the one "to set it right."16 After he assumes the persona of an antic, however, that contact depends upon the secret knowledge Hamlet shares with the spectators, who know that he only "acts" like a madman and that his antic pose shields his true instability. The importance of Hamlet's antic disposition has not been overlooked, but surely the effect it has on his rapport with the audience deserves further attention. Indeed, although it is present in the play's oldest source, in which Ambleth feigned madness, its particular use in Hamlet is not always clear. When is Hamlet in antic guise? When is he not? Is the guise solely a means to find out direction by indirection? Or does it also serve to shield his instability? To answer these questions, we need to reinforce the distinction between Hamlet's antic persona and the truly unstable self visible in his first soliloquy, in his "wild and whirling words" (132) after he confronts the Ghost, and in other moments during act two and the rest of the play.17 For Hamlet's antic behavior is a potent form of presentational mimesis that extends, in exaggerated form, the wordplay found in his opening words. It is not "the buffoonery of an emotion which [Shakespeare] cannot express in art,"18 but one of the multiple mimetic forms used in Hamlet's characterization. It protects his shaken representational self (much as it protects Edgar when he turns into mad Tom in King Lear) and allows him to maintain the Figurenpositionen established in 1,2. Hamlet's 87

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antic disposition is primarily verbal and is akin to the clowning and topsy-turvydom present in his platea-like complementary perspective. His true instability is something else again, something more akin to the classical madness of Hercules Furens and as such an equally potent form of representational (and psychological) madness. Characterized by a loss of control, by raving, and by vehemence, Hamlet's "madness" may be seen when he berates Ophelia (3.1), when he "lapses" into uncontrolled passion in the closet scene (3.4.107), and when he "rants" as well as Laertes. At moments like these he suffers from "mere madness" and the "fit" that works on him (5.1.284-285; cf. 5.2.229ff.). There is little "temperance" or "smoothness" in his words, and he violates his own mimetic dicta when he "out-Herods Herod" by tearing "a passion to totters, to very rags, to spleet the ears of the groundlings" (3.2.9-11, 14). Hamlet's antic clowning is far different. Dramatically effective (and humorous) because characters like Polonius cannot distinguish between it and Hamlet's true instability, Hamlet's antic disposition allows him to draw from an idiom common to the "place," his riddles and puns again inviting the spectators to share his impertinent perspective. Such is the case in his first appearance in antic guise, when he calls Polonius a "fishmonger" (a procurer, seller of flesh, who will "loose" his daughter to Hamlet) and accuses him of dishonesty: Do you know me, my lord? Excellent well, you are a fishmonger. Not I, my lord. Then I would you were so honest a man. Honest, my lord? Aye, sir, to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man pick'd out of ten thousand. Pol. That's very true, my lord. Ham. For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion- (2.2.174-182)

Pol. Ham. Pol. Ham. Pol. Ham.

Such replies operate on literal and figurative as well as locus and platea levels, and they are "pregnant" with multiple and complex meanings. In them matter and impertinency are mixed. There is "method" in their "madness" and an apt perceptiveness that, as even Polonius recognizes, 88

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reason and sanity could not so prosperously be deliver'd of" (209211).19 In them Hamlet speaks in an idiom and from a figural position shared with the spectators, who delight in the irreverent mocking of illusion-bound characters like Polonius, Claudius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern. Falsely secure in their superficial perceptions, they cannot accurately explain "what is the matter" in Hamlet's "words, words, words." When they try to discover why neither "the exterior nor the inward man / Resembles that it was" (2.2.6-7), Hamlet deliberately misleads them. Only the spectators truly know what troubles him. And yet, for all their privileged knowledge, those spectators have, for several centuries, wondered why Hamlet has not swept to his "revenge" (1.5.31). He now does "nothing," seemingly "unpregnant" of his cause like a 'John-a-dreams" and "neutral to his will and matter" like Pyrrhus (481-482, 568-569). The problem is that his antic mask shields his inner thoughts from everyone in the theater. When he emerges from his antic mask, as he does in the scornful comment after Polonius departs ("These tedious old fools!" [219]), he does not reveal why he has not acted. And while it clearly means to focus upon a melancholy moment apart from the plot, Ophelia's description (2.1.7 4ff.) of Hamlet's appearance in her closet does not, finally, help. Her description hardly suits his antic disposition: it is not distinguished by wordplay and mockery but by silence and anguish, and there is, of course, no need for him to assume an antic pose with Ophelia. 20 The meeting with Ophelia most reminds us of the disillusionment that emerges when, discarding his antic disposition, he offers the brooding and melancholy speech on man (29 5ff.). This speech is not "antic" in any sense consistent with his wordplay. In it Hamlet admits that he has lost all his "mirth." Despite his refusal to specify the cause to his quondam friends, he should be taken at his word. When he perceives that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not "honest" (237) and do not "deal justly" (276) with him, he reassumes his antic pose and uses a "crafty madness" to keep aloof (3 .3 .5 -10). "I am but mad northnorth-west," he says, "When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a hand-saw" (378-379). The welcome he extends to the players, even more so than the one he gives to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is full of courtesy and kindness. In these exchanges, as in his unguarded moments with Horatio, 89

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we see traces of an untroubled Hamlet. There is nothing antic or "mad" in them. But while he admires the "honest method" used in the First Player's recitation and shows that he too can perform with "good accent and good discretion" (444, 466-467), he knows that his "actions" have not added up to anything. As we know, his scene-ending soliloquy raises the problem of acting and action. How should he "act," or represent himself? Why has he not taken "action," given the "motive and the cue for passion" (561) that he has? Relinquishing his antic pose, he reveals to the spectators that he is troubled by his lack of action, doing so in terms that are theatrically self-conscious and psychologically, self-questioning and that suit his "whole function" with "forms to his conceit" (556- 55 7). His "tears" do not drown the "stage," and his "horrid speech" does not cleave the "general ear" (562 - 563),21 but he knows that he has not "acted" as he might have and accuses himself of cowardice, indecision, and daydreaming. If the player he so admires can show such emotion "all for nothing, / For Hecuba" (557-558), why hasn't he taken action? The spectators must wait until the scene's final lines to understand that his delay is based upon his uncertainty about the Ghost, his "weakness," and his "melancholy." By asking the players to perform "something like the murther of my father" (595), the appropriate vehicle for bringing to light the hidden representativity in a Player King, Hamlet hopes "to catch the conscience of the King" (605).22 The represented self that lies beneath Claudius's stylistic veneer will be brought to light shortly after the nunnery scene begins. After listening to fifty more lines the spectators learn, from Claudius himself, that the Ghost told the truth. They will know the answer to the play's central secret. The Prince must continue to explore the way "painted" words conceal the truth that lies behind appearance.

"What means this, my lord?" Claudius reveals his guilt in an aside just before he and Polonius bestow themselves, seeing unseen, behind the arras. It is the first of act three's many surprises, even though it follows, naturally enough, from Polonius's comment on the way that with "devotion's visage / And pious 90

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action we do sugar o'er / The devil himself" (3 .1.46-48). Claudius extends the metaphors of painting, harlotry, and deceit so much a part of Elsinore: How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience! The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word. a heavy bunhen! (49-53) Although many readers find the aside distracting, its imponance should not be overlooked. It not only prepares for Claudius's "blenching" in 3,2 and his soliloquy in 3,3, but also shifts the source of the spectators' privileged knowledge in a way typical of this act and the rest of the play. Indeed, this disclosure changes everything. Cenain of Claudius's guilt, the spectators might well hope Hamlet will pierce through the arras, exacting revenge from this damned, smiling villain. Claudius's revelation serves as a prelude to the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, a speech that is an "utter curse" for an actor "distracted by the knowledge that the audience is repeating one's lines." Because it is a "purple patch which everybody in the audience waits for,"23 its original effect may be lost. To recapture some of that effect, we need to keep in mind, first of all, that Hamlet delivers the soliloquy while Ophelia "walks" (42) (or stands or kneels) within the scene's nominal locus, a lobby at coun, and while Polonius and Claudius remain behind the arras. 24 Ophelia's presence affronts neoclassical and modern standards of verisimilitude, of course, and she often exits before Hamlet's entry and returns near the end of the soliloquy. But there is no textual authority for her depanure, and to remove her is to shape the play according to principles to which Shakespeare only panly adhered. This may be the most prominent use of locus and platea staging in Renaissance drama. Hamlet's neutral position on the platea is "outside" the illusion of a lobby at court and consistent with his downstage Figurenposition. He stands at one remove from the scene, and Ophelia, Claudius, and Polonius do not "hear" him. And yet, although the soliloquy is delivered from an undifferentiated "place," its meaning derives in part from the theatrical context. Hamlet does not "step into" the scene until the end of the soliloquy, but the "character 91

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and value of this speech lie in the fact that it leads on to the next part of the scene."25 Hamlet's final words are an integral part of the soliloquy. A transition to dialogue c.omes when he sees Ophelia and addresses her: "Soft you now, / The fair Ophelia. Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins rememb'red" (88-89). The second thing to keep in mind about the speech is that it follows hard upon the emotional "0, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" soliloquy.26 After making a decision, Hamlet again unpacks his heart with words. The end of 2,2 promises activity; this soliloquy undercuts those expectations at the precise moment the play's central secret has been revealed. It not only enlarges the scope of Hamlet's consciousness but also confounds, distracts, and frustrates the audience as much as his delays. Here Hamlet's and the spectators' knowledge are at cross-purposes; for the first time since 1,2, their perspective is separate from his. Because they know Claudius is guilty, they may even want Hamlet to see him behind the arras. 27 They no longer need grounds more relative than the Ghost. As in the prayer scene (3.3), they listen to Hamlet soliloquize at a time when their knowledge lies elsewhere. And like that later speech, this eloquent disquisition is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" (84). The dominant movement of the revenge play is toward the taking of revenge; in this speech that current is turned "awry and loses the name of action" (86-87). It "changes the rhythm of the actions we are witnessing."28 After Hamlet greets Ophelia, he quickly realizes that her "noble mind" (99, 150) is full of pretense. Ophelia does not acknowledge their recent meeting ("many a day"; "long longed"), and her sententious rhymes ("for to the noble mind, / Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind" [99100]) quickly betray her seeming. Hamlet quickly reassumes his antic pose. But here there is a difference. Hamlet is not only antic, but truly unstable and cruel. His antic behavior merges with his "madness" in a way difficult to disentangle. When he raises the issue he posed to Polonius ("Ha, hal are you honest?" [103]), he mocks and teases Ophelia. When he turns ugly and insulting, playing on the different meanings of "nunnery" (120), attacking her ("marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them" [137 -139]), and accusing her of "painting" and of making her "wantonness her ignorance" (145), his instability surfaces. Her "paintings" have made him "mad." This is the cruelest mo92

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ment in the play. Like Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, Ophelia has joined Claudius's cast of seemers, but she has been made to do so. Hamlet does not know she is her father's pawn. The spectators do, and they know as well that others are listening to this conversation. They may delight in Hamlet's perspicacity when he asks her, "Where's your father?" (129). '~t home," lies the bewildered young woman. They are shocked nonetheless by his cruelty. Ophelia is not guiltless, but she is a victim. This unsettling moment leads to Ophelia's madness, to her giving of a symbolic, dissembling "daisy" to everyone in Elsinore, to her death amid all those colorful flowers, and to Gertrude's significant "scattering" of "flowers" upon Ophelia's coffin (5.1.243). Hamlet's "noble mind" may be "blasted with ecstasy," but Ophelia's will be "o'erthrown" (150, 160).

In 3,1 Shakespeare complicates the relationship between Hamlet and the audience, altering the degree of knowledge it shares with him. In 3,2, on the other hand, the spectators are invited to share his perspective once again and to participate in the drama of observation and comment he stages for Claudius's benefit. Here an audience of actors watches a performance put on by a band of traveling players. That audience is watched by the spectators in the theater- and by Hamlet and Horatiofor some telltale sign whereby "guilty creatures sitting at a play" will by the "cunning of the scene" be "strook so to the soul" that they proclaim their "malefactions." At Hamlet's furthest illusionistic recess lies an embedded playlet which captures, in small, the discrepant awareness and the gradation in illusionistic depth characteristic of the play. There are indeed many degrees of awareness here, and each response to the playlet is carefully adjusted to reflect the speaker's knowledge. These boxes of illusion are linked to Hamlet's Figurenpositionen and recall the corresponding spheres of awareness in The Spanish Tragedy. This signifying "image of a murther done in Vienna" reenacts Claudius's crime and threatens his flawed rule. In its use of a rhymed, declamatory style, "composed of a number of moral commonplaces" and full of polished antitheses, the playlet also holds a mirror up to Elsinore. 29 It is full of resonances for the on- and offstage audiences. "What to ourselves in passion we propose, / The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. / ... Our thoughts are ours, their ends none 93

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of our own," says the Player King in words with meaning for Hamlet (194-195, 213). "In second husband let me be accurs'd! / None wed the second but who kill'd the first," says the Player Queen (179-180). "That's wormwood," says Hamlet. ''A second time I kill my husband dead, / When second husband kisses me in bed," she continues. "I do believe you think what now you speak / But what we do determine, oft we break," responds the Player King (186-187) in words that will evoke from Gertrude, a woman who believes she sees "all that is" (3.4.132), a psychological evasion: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" (230). "0, but she'll keep her word," answers Hamlet (231). "Have you heard the argument," asks Claudius, "is there no offense in 't?" "No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest-no offense i' th' world" answers Hamlet, playing on the word. "What means this [the dumb show]' my lord?" asks the naive, bewildered, and soon to be disturbed Ophelia. "Belike this show imports the argument of the play" (136, 139-140). There are many levels of meaning and degrees of awareness here, and only the audience, and Hamlet, can quite capture them all. In keeping with his Figurenpositionen, Hamlet serves as chorus, participant, actor, playwright, and audience, mediating among the illusionistic playlet, the onstage audience, and the spectators. He chooses not to sit by Gertrude (or Claudius), finding Ophelia's "lap" more attractive and seeking a keener perspective from which to observe the King. His "idle" and antic comments ensure that the play evokes a reaction. Although they are interspersed with suggestive comments to Ophelia and with mockery of his mother, Hamlet's taunts are directed chiefly at Claudius. He pours poison into Claudius's ears. The King must bear up under Hamlet's double-edged words and ignore the insults implicit in the story. Even Claudius's serenely calm, apparently impenetrable exterior is shaken, however, when Hamlet glosses Lucianus's action in pouring poison in Gonzago's ears: ~ poisons him i' th' garden for his estate. His name's Gonzago, the story is extant, and written in very choice Italian. You shall see anon how the murtherer gets the love of Gonzago's wife. (261-264)

"The story is extant." "The King rises," frighted with true fire, uncovering his hidden self not through his words but through an action that pro94

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claims his malefaction. He reveals that within him which passes show. He is asked how he "fares" (267, 92). Illusion has power over reality, and the playlet overflows its illusionistic constraints, waves of meaning, each precisely linked to the degrees of awareness held by the characters, issuing forth and moving across its audiences. In their signified reenactment of Claudius's crime, the players suit "the action to the word, the word to the action" and hold "as't were the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure" (3.4.1 7-18, 22-24). An extreme and heightened version of the playacting at court, the playlet brings to light the hidden representational self that lies beneath Claudius's public role. Claudius shows that he is a "Vice of kings," a king of "shreds and patches" (3.4.99, 102) who performs a conventional part (2.2.319- 326). Just as in the court, so with the players, whose signifying playlet is finally at odds with what they have signified. Hamlet delights in his success and asks Horatio whether his dramatic skills might not get him "a fellowship in a cry of players" (277 - 278). And when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern return, he delights as well in resuming his antic pose. Guildenstern does not understand him, and Hamlet mocks him much as he later will ridicule Osric: Guil. Ham. Guil. Ham.

The King, sirAy, sir, what of him? Is in his retirement marvellous distemp'red. With drink, sir? (299-302)

We note the mocking returns of "sir" and the embarrassing reference to Claudius's nocturnal wassails. Guildenstern would like Hamlet to "put" his "discourse into some frame, and start not so wildly from my affair," but Hamlet continues to mock him from a perspective outside the "frame" of the locus-centered dialogue. All this banter leads to devastating irony when Rosencrantz poses, once more, that futile and insipid question: "Good, my lord, what is your cause of distemper?" "Sir, I lack advancement," answers Hamlet, who illustrates his point with a proverb (3 37ff.). 30 Indeed, Hamlet grows weary of their duplicity. He severs himself from them in his famous tongue-lashing ('''Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play'd on than a pipe?") and from Polonius in the nonsensical dis95

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cussion about the shape of "yonder cloud" ("like a camel ... like a weasel ... or like a whale"). The exasperated irony of "they fool me to the top of my bent" makes it clear that he tires of the way they treat him like a fool (364ff.). The spectators share Hamlet's perspective and understand the doubleness of his words. His delay seems conventional enough now, and the moment for action has come: 'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. Now I could drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on. (389-393) It seems, at last, that Hamlet will assume and be ready to perform the conventional part of a revenger. Attention now shifts to Claudius. His agonizing and speculative soliloquy reveals the workings of his mind. Provoked, perhaps, by Hamlet's stinging use of the word, Claudius examines the nature of his "offense." He knows it is "rank" and that it bears "the primal eldest curse upon't, / A brother's murther" (3.3.36- 38). He knows "Offense's gilded hand may shove by justice," but that his "cursed hand" cannot be cleansed "white as snow" (58, 43, 46). "Mercy" will not confront the "visage" of "offense," which sugars over "The devil himself" with "devotion's visage" (3.3.47; 3.1.46-48). Nonetheless, he "kneels" in prayer, hoping all may be well. But once again, the spectators are taken by surprise. They have been told Hamlet is going to his mother; here he unexpectedly appears, sword in hand, a Pyrrhus standing over Priam, ready to exact vengeance. 31 He now has an opportunity to perform the role of revenger. In this example of simultaneous staging, as in the nunnery scene, conventions of locus and platea allow Hamlet to soliloquize while a silent figure kneels nearby. And just as in 3,1, the spectators balance what they know with what they hear. Hamlet believes Claudius is "a-praying"; the audience knows he only tries to pray and that Hamlet would do well to act now. But Hamlet decides to postpone the taking of action until some more "horrid hent," when Claudius is "about some act / That has no relish of salvation in't" (3.3.88,91-92). He takes "devotion's visage" for reality. An opportunity 96

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to take action is lost. His unexpected entry, and now his decision to put "Up" his sword, block, distract and divert the audience's expectations. 32 In the closet scene Hamlet finally cuts through the arras - and kills the wrong man. He believes "it the King" (3.4.26). The audience knows it could not have been. Hamlet has been deceived by appearance, first when he did not kill Claudius, secondly by killing Polonius. When he might have acted, he did not: he was scrupulously concerned with the "scanning" of action (3.3.75). When he should not have acted he did, murdering the wrong man. He is wrong, twice, and this is precisely the point. In act three Shakespeare manipulates the spectators. By privileging their knowledge from the beginning of the act, Shakespeare places them in a position of "superior awareness" whereby they know more than anyone on stage. By altering the degree of knowledge they share with the Prince and the knowledge they alone hold, he also creates situations in which the spectators first celebrate Hamlet's acuity and then are frustrated by his failure to perceive. When he kills the wrong man, that sense of frustration may be at its height. Hamlet's virtues- his reason and his perspicacity- turn into failings. In Shakespearean tragedy the limitations of finite knowledge are repeatedly exposed; rationally considered actions are beset with error. It therefore should not be surprising that Hamlet should fall into error. Surprise and upset expectation may also seem the stuff out of which an "artistic failure" is made, and certainly the events are astonishing and shocking enough to make Hamlet liable to that charge. Such inconsistencies make audiences question the character of the Prince and the construction of the play. Let us remember that there is nothing conventional about his character or the structure of the play, that at each point when expectations are set they are quickly redefined, that unconventionality operates on the level of structure. In Hamlet the spectators discover that they cannot know what will happen. They are also led to realize the way "chance turns into larger design, randomness becomes retribution." These peripeties, like the later episode with the pirates, the discovery of the letter ordering Hamlet's death, and the lucky circumstance of his "father's signet," not only provide Shakespeare with a way to suggest the inscrutable workings of Providence but also allow the spectators to share Hamlet's belief at the moment of its articulation. 97

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When Hamlet comments on the death he "gave" Polonius, he recognizes that "heaven hath pleas'd it so / To punish me with this, and this with me, / That I must be their scourge and minister" (173 -17 5). His realization clarifies the play's patterning of event by suggesting that what happened accidentally is actually part of Providential design. 3 3 Hamlet and the spectators know that the death of Polonius damns Hamlet. The Globe becomes a theater of God's judgments. Hamlet also gains something in this scene. In speaking "daggers" to his mother, he turns her "eyes into" her "very soul" and makes her see "such black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct" (89-91).34 Caught within her own false illusions, she does not see the Ghost or hear it speak. But after Hamlet breaks through the tissue of illusions that holds her, forcing her to protest too much, he releases her "lim'd soul" and the deeper springs of feeling she holds within. We see a Gertrude that passes show. Hamlet receives her promise of loyalty: "I have no life to breathe / What thou has said to me" (198-199). Whatever we make of her behavior in act four, this scene reunites Hamlet and Gertrude. The arras that hung between them comes down.

"Whose grave's this, sirrah?" In act four Hamlet engages in antic behavior with the "spunges," Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and with Claudius. He also offers a soliloquy before entering the illusion for the last time. After watching Fortinbras and his army pass "over" the nominal "plain" of the stage, he offers his final soliloquy. It recapitulates the concerns that have absorbed him. He wonders why "He that made us with such large discourse, / Looking before and after," gave us the "capability" to "reason" if it were "To fust in us unus'd" (4.4.36- 39). He restates the problem of the nature of man in terms of the nature of action, again charging himself with delay, with cowardice, and with thinking "too precisely on th' event" (41). And he directly compares himself to Fortinbras, measuring himself against a norm of manly and military might. "I do not know / Why yet I live to say, 'This thing's to do,'" he tells us. "Examples gross as earth exhort me":

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Witness this army of such mass and charge, Led by a delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, Even for an egg-shell. (46-53) As the trailing clause reveals, Hamlet feels admiration and scorn for Fortinbras, a man of action who will not let "some craven scruple" (40) deter him and whose code of honor will not allow questions of integrity to interfere with the pursuit of fame (53, 56). In act four Shakespeare invites the audience to measure Hamlet against his foils, Fortinbras and Laertes, each of whom has lost a father and seeks redress, and also against Ophelia, who, having lost a father, falls into madness. Fortinbras acts without thinking; Laertes plays the part of a conventional revenger, willing to cut Hamlet's throat "i' th' church"; Ophelia, caught within a world of seeming, falls into a "weeping brook," "divided from herself and her fair judgment" (4. 7.12 6, 175; 4.5.85). In this act Shakespeare also shifts the source of the spectators' privileged knowledge for once and for all. Claudius's scene-ending soliloquy in 4,3 makes it clear that Hamlet is being sent to his death in England, and the villainy he and Laertes concoct in 4,7 makes it equally clear what lies in store for Hamlet upon his return. When he returns, Hamlet may be dressed in a "sea-gown" that signals a change in his character. It may be more precise, however, to note that upon his return he discards his antic disposition and speaks from a different Figurenposition. When he appears with Horatio, "afar off," he crosses the platea and enters the illusion surrounding a symbolic locus. He speaks like a courtier and in an idiom in sharp contrast to the gravedigging clowns' riddles and equivocations. They mock juridical language and the privilege of class, whereby "If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out 0' Christian burial." Indeed, here the courtier meets the clown. Although he is part of a locus-oriented action, the First Clown's words continue to operate on a platea level. Now Ham-

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let is held within the illusion and must suffer the indignity of misunderstanding when the gravedigger literalizes his metaphoric expressions. "How came he [Hamlet] mad?," asks Hamlet: 1. Clo. Very strangely, they say. Ham. How strangely? 1. Clo. Faith, e'en with losing his wits. Ham. Upon what ground? 1. Clo. Why, here in Denmark. (5.1.156-161)

In his nonsensical reply the Clown plays upon the meaning of "strangely" as "foreign," developing his previous reference to the madmen in England. He then shifts the grounds of meaning by responding literally to Hamlet's use of the word as "unusually." Hamlet's reply tries to "ground" this discourse in some "frame," but once again the basis of meaning shifts back to a location: "Why, here in Denmark." Hamlet plays the straight man, and it is doubtful if his antic pose would help him match wits with the gravedigger. The Clown does not know who Hamlet is, and the actor playing Hamlet can share this joke with the audience. But when Hamlet tries his best to best the Clown by punning on "lie" and "liest," his quiddities do not stand up to this quibbling upholder of Adam's profession, who, like some long-forgotten Will Summers, once had a flagon of Yaughan's finest Rhenish spilled on his head by a TarItonish Yorick. We may recall Hamlet's antic mockery when Polonius asked "What is the matter, my lord?" (2.2.193). "Between who?" answered Hamlet. Indeed, one of Polonius's questions reverberates. "Will you walk out of the air, my lord?" asked Polonius. "Into my grave," returned Hamlet, who stands before just such a grave and contemplates the fact of mortality so metonymically signified by the skulls that land at his feet. In his final soliloquy he questioned the "imminent death of twenty thousand men," who "go to their graves like beds," fighting "for a plot / Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause" (4.4.60, 62-63). He now stands at such a locus, where courtiers and their ladies, politicians and lawyers, tanners, jesters, and even loved ones take their rest in plots "tomb enough / ... To hide the slain" (4.4.64-65). Hamlet has little sympathy for the clown's impertinence: "How absolute the knave is!" he says, "we must speak by the card, or equivocation 100

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will undo us. By the Lord, Horatio, this three years I have took note of it: the age is grown so pick'd that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe" (1 37-141). Although he does not know it, his speculations about the "base uses" to which "we may return" have painfully personal, immediate relevance. His comments about Yorick and Alexander apply as well to Ophelia, who will soon "come" to this "favor" (194), will soon be just another skull. All the stage becomes a graveyard, the skulls the gravedigger shovels up serving as grim reminders of the locus. His equivocations have a sobering effect. "Whose grave's this, sirrah?" asks Hamlet. "Mine, sir," answers the Clown with all the proletarian wisdom and impertinence of such characters as the Cobbler in Julius Caesar (118-119). As his garbled refrain implies, this "pit of clay for to be made" is "meet" for every "guest" (96-94, 120121).35 It is also fitting that Hamlet should hold Yorick's skull aloft, offering, from within the locus of a graveyard, the most memorable image of himself to remain in the mind's eye. He learns that all the roles we play are subject to the determining fact of mortality, which cuts through all seeming, shows, and pretense. All the gambols, gibes, and self-resembled shows by which Yorick mocked his own grinning dissolve in the vision of Hamlet holding Yorick's skull. In this emblematic rendering of memento mori and contemptus mundi themes, Hamlet is captured-and held -within the play's illusionistic frame. 36 The clown reminds us that all human folly has its limits. Hamlet, on the other hand, does not know that his own apparently detached, satirical speculations bear distressing implications. He will not realize the grave before him belongs to the "fair Ophelia" (242) until he overhears Laertes complain about the lack of ceremony that attends his sister's burial. In 3,1 his "soft you now, the fair Ophelia" led him into the scene; here his "soft, but soft awhile" leads him to discover that the fair Ophelia is being quietly interred (217). Shocked, he comes "forward" and leaps into her grave to grapple with Laertes. His "thoughts" are now "bloody," and in warning Laertes not to challenge him, he reveals that he has within him "something dangerous" (4.4.66; 5.1.262). Hamlet seems fatalistic, and twice in this act he will say "it is no matter" (5.1.290; 5.2.213). But we know he will be ready to "answer well" (3.4.176)-that he will respond, nobly, to whatever may happen. He 101

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believes that "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will" and that "heaven" is "ordinant" even "in the fall of a sparrow" (5.2.10-11, 48, 220). He knows "readiness is all," and he will "le~ be" (220,224). Particularly effective in the light of what the spectators know awaits him at the duel, his speech denies all those fears of the "undiscover'd country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns." Prior to the duel he admits to Horatio that "thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart" (212). But he faces uncertainty with equanimity. When a "table" is "prepar'd" with "flagons of wine on it" and "Officers with cushions, foils," and "daggers" enter, the unlocalized place where he and Horatio talk is transformed into the locus of a duel. The spectators know "the odds" are set against Hamlet. To the accompaniment of trumpets and pieces that "go off," Claudius pledges Hamlet's health, placing that "dram of ev'l" into Hamlet's cup (1.4.6 s.d.; 1.4.36). But there will be "no shuffling" here (3.3.61; 4.7.137). These "enginers" will be "hoist" with their own "petar." Gertrude will "carouse" and drink from the cup intended for her son, Hamlet will exchange the poisoned rapier with Laertes, and Claudius will taste the envenomed point and "drink off" the remainder of the poison. Claudius wished to stage this event, but matters escape his control. He becomes a spectator who watches Gertrude place the poisoned cup to her lips. He does not intervene. All the spectators, on- and offstage, are "but mutes or audience" (335) to these events. The locus of the play encompasses the audience in the theater. 37 Those offstage, however, know more than the "yet unknowing world" (3 79). They will not need to be called "to the audience" (387) to learn "how these things came about," to hear "of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, / Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, / Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause, / And ... purposes mistook / Fall'n on th' inventors' heads" (380-385). Horatio's words suggest that the events have been haphazard and random, full of ironic peripeties. He and the onstage audience do not know the events have been revelatory of a design apparent only to an audience of privileged spectators, for whom the confines of art provide a stable refuge. The play's final "peal of ordinance" celebrates a hero's death. Caught between doubt and certainty, Hamlet dies believing that he has performed the role Providence assigned him. 38 Shakespeare combines antic 102

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clowning with tragic acting in a form we now call classical. He writes a daring, experimental play, deliberately rich and strange, one that defies conventionality and expands the dimensions of theatrical representation by creating the finest role that "a man might play." For more than three centuries audiences have agreed with Samuel Pepys, whose entry for 31 August 1668 records his dual awareness: "Saw Betterton as Hamlet ... the best part, I believe, that ever man acted." Indeed, as one of the most perceptive of early commentators, George Farquhar, noted in 1702, the play's violation of (neo)classical dicta has not stood in the way of its success: "[Hamlet] is long the Darling of the English Audience, and like to continue with the same Applause, in Defiance of all the Criticism that were ever publish'd in Greek, and Latin."

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v Location and Idiom in Othello

"The special pathos of our urge to intervene"

Commenting on Othello's deathbed speech in 1927, T. S. Eliot suggested that the Moor was only "cheering himself up" and that his suicide was as full of "self-dramatization," self-deception, and self-idealization as his fictional life. Taking this hint, F. R. Leavis in 1937 anatomized the sentimentalist's Othello, claiming that the tears Othello sheds at the end are for "the spectacle of himself." Othello was a subject for debate until Dame Helen Gardner reestablished the noble Moor in our minds in 1955. She recognized that the Eliot-Leavis view deprived Othello of the opportunity to reinstate himself and that it raised the "whole question of how the characters in a poetic drama present themselves, of the selfconsciousness of the tragic hero by which he creates himself in our imagination." 1 Gardner responded eloquently to the challenge, and there seemed, for a time, to be something like a consensus of opinion about Othello's vulnerable yet powerful faith in the nobility of human action. By 1980, however, Othello was once again reeling. Stephen Greenblatt cast Othello as a "self-fashioner" whose "identity depends upon a constant performance ... of his story"; the psychoanalytic studies that followed accounted for Othello's loss of faith in Desdemona by uncovering various flaws in his character. 2 And in a powerful reading Mark Rose expanded Greenblatt's attack on another front by exposing the frailty of Othello's "romanticizing imagination."3 Greenblatt and Rose had, in effect, anatomized Othello's "bumbast circumstance / Horribly stuff'd with epithites of war," and their analyses proved, once again, that Othello had "nonsuited" his "mediators" (1.1.13 -16). 104

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In these analyses Othello's belief in the absolutes of conduct, valor, and love becomes a dangerous form of romantic absolutism, and the "tension" between this "absolutism and the antithetical values of the marketplace," held in balance in earlier plays, turns into a "contradiction" used "to drive the tragedy." Othello becomes a public figure and a stranger "we apprehend at a certain distance"; he and Desdemona are full of "an exquisite and dangerous romantic beauty." Iago becomes a "high priest" who sacrifices the lovers with our consent, drawing "the audience into dynamic engagement with his purposes, mobilizing destructive emotions that we may not wish to acknowledge," and inviting us to "participate in the splitting apart of Othello's martial pastoral."4 There is little question that Shakespeare sets static, idealized, upstage "pictures" of the lovers against the machinations of a downstage Vice, or that he juxtaposes the lyrical blank verse related to these upstage locations with a coarse, animalistic, and mercantile idiom associated with the "place." Othello and Desdemona's Figurenposition, like that of their sonnet-lover predecessors, Romeo and Juliet, holds them within the play's illusion and makes them vulnerable to Iago's predations. Iago's Figurenpositionen, on the other hand, allow him to speak to the spectators. But let us note that his figural positions are linked not only to his representational "role" as Othello's "Ensign" but also to his nonrepresentational "parts" as the play's "Villaine" and presenter and that Iago's transactions with the spectators are, ultimately, typical of the Vice. Othello has been an easy prey, but the discovery of his weaknesses does not do justice to the play's effect on an audience that "feels the possibility of tears rising throughout an action" it yearns "in vain to interrupt."5 Although there may appear to be valid reasons for thinking so, Othello is not to blame for what Iago does to him. The spectators provide a mediating presence here, and they must avoid falling into the trap Iago sets for them.

"I' th' alehouse" Let us begin by distinguishing between the play's idioms and recalling the way Iago invites others to share his perspective. At the end of 2,1 Iago lets us know that he intends to put Michael Cassio "on the hip" 105

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to "Abuse him to the Moor in the rank garb" (305-306). By bringing Cassio down, lago hopes to take Cassio's place as lieutenant and to set into motion his revenge against Othello. But Cassio proves difficult to bring down. When he enters in 2,3, lago finds Cassio ready to guard the citadel while Othello and Desdemona enjoy the "fruits" of their union. For his opening gambit lago claims that Othello deliberately advanced the watch so he could spend more time making the night "wanton": lago.

Cassio. lago. Cassio. lago. Cassio. lago. Cassio. lago.

Our general cast us thus early for the love of his Desdemona; who let us not therefore blame. He hath not yet made wanto.n the night with her; and she is sport for Jove. She's a most exquisite lady. And I'll warrant her, full of game. Indeed, she's a most fresh and delicate creature. What an eye she has! Methinks it sounds a parley to provocation. An inviting eye; and yet methinks right modest. And when she speaks, is it not an alarum to love? She is indeed perfection. Well- happiness to their sheets. (14-29)

lago's words invite Cassio to see Desdemona as "sport for Jove" and "full of game," her eye "a parley to provocation." But Cassio matches lago's images with ones that identify her as "a most exquisite lady," "fresh and delicate," her eye "inviting" but "right modest." Indeed, Cassio so upholds Desdemona that lago soon gives up trying to persuade Cassio to see things his way: "Well-happiness to their sheets." lago will not bring "happiness" to Othello and Desdemona's "sheets": he will transform those wedding "sheets" into winding ones, and Othello will "strangle" Desdemona in "her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated" (4.2.105; 4.1.207-208). As we will see, the love-in-death or Liebestod theme is as powerful in Othello as it is in Romeo andJuliet. For the moment, however, I would like to draw attention to the patterning of this exchange. Here, as in Desdemonas questions about being a "whore" in 4,2 (115 ff.) and in her and Emilia's words about women who might commit adultery "for all the world" in 4,3 (61ff.), Shakespeare sets distinct idioms and opposed value systems at odds. As in act one, he dramatizes different ways of perceiving 106

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and defining value. Not believing in "virtue," lago rationalizes love as "merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will" (1.3.334- 335). In Desdemona's declaration of love for Othello, on the other hand, love is a kind of religion. Defending her marriage after her own quietly powerful entry, she insists that her "heart's subdu'd / Even to the very quality of my lord" and explains that "I saw Othello's visage in his mind, / And to his honors and his valiant parts / Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate" (1. 3.250-254). Readers and scholars have long recognized that Othello contains contrasting idioms, that of the "alehouse" and that of the sacramental world of love. As the exchange between lago and Cassio makes clear, the perspectives are diametrically opposed. They provide the play with distinct linguistic "worlds." The dramaturgical significance of this opposition has not been fully understood. In Othello one idiom infects the other, thematically and dramaturgically, and the coarse, animalistic, obscene, relativistic, and prosaic language of the "place" taints the lyrical, idealized, poetic, and spiritual values found in Othello's and Desdemona's locus-centered language. In Othello, as in Romeo andJuliet, Shakespeare sets mercantile value against the spiritual absolutes embodied by the lovers. Indeed, the relation between place and location, and the corresponding idioms associated with these figural positions, remind us of the opposition between downstage, prosaic language and bustling movement, and upstage lyricism and stillness in Romeo and Juliet. What most distinguishes Othello from Romeo and Juliet is of course the source of this downstage idiom, Shakespeare's finest Vice, lago, who controls and envelops the action and whose sheer number of lines asserts his dominance. Indeed, when lago's way of seeing and valuing comes to dominate Othello's, the results are tragic. lago's ability to turn "virtue into pitch" (2.3 .360) is apparent from the start. As readers note,6 lago uses economic, light, diabolic, and animal images when he awakens Brabantio to warn him about the loss of his daughter, to "poison" his "delight," and to "Plague him with flies" (1.1.68, 71). ''Awake! what ho, Brabantio! thieves, thieves! / Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags!" (79-80). '''Zounds, sir, y'are robb'd" (86). Desdemona is itemized as an object to be stolen-and violated. ''An old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe ... your daughter ... [is] cover'd with a Barbary horse," is "making the beast with two backs," is in the 107

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"gross clasps of a lascivious Moor" (88-89, 111-112, 116-117, 126). Indeed, lago will again and again "begrime" Desdemona's "visage," as "fresh as Dian's," with "black" (3.3.386-387). lago "poisons" Roderigo's and Brabantio's minds just as he will try to poison Cassio's and will succeed in poisoning Othello's when he convinces the Moor that Desdemona is not "honest" (3.3.325-326). "Exchange me for a goat, / When I shall turn the business of my soul/To such exsufflicate and blown surmises," says Othello when lago first leads him to question Desdemona (3.3.180-182). "If I do prove her haggard, / Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings, / rId whistle her off, and let her down the wind / To prey at fortune" he continues later, "plagued" with thoughts that, like "flies," "quicken" "even with blowing" (3.3.260-263, 273, 276-277; 4.2.66-67). Recalled from his advice to Roderigo in 1,3, lago's homily on his purse is part of the seduction. Setting the loss of "good name" and "reputation" against the "theft" of his purse, he introduces Othello to that monster, "jealousy." "It were not for your quiet or your good, / Nor for my manhood, honesty, and wisdom, / To let you know my thoughts," he tells Othello. "'Zounds, what dost thou mean?" asks the Moor. Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. . . . 0, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on. (3.3.152-161, 165-167) Here an absolute ("Good name") undergoes a patently economic evaluation and is, despite being defined in contrast to such valuations, redefined and tainted. lago's conflation of the "spiritual and the proprietary," of "the romantic and absolute with the commercial and contingent," will be common. 7 It is lago, of course, who steals Othello's "soul" and separates him from his "chrysolitic" "jewel," Desdemona, and it is lago who "robs" Othello 108

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and Desdemona of their "good name." Roderigo may bemoan the loss of his "jewels," which, he thinks, have been given to Desdemona (4.2.198); Brabantio may think Othello a "foul thief" who has "stol'n" his "jewel" (1.2.61; 1.3.195). But it is Iago who robs these men, and Othello who most painfully feels the loss of "what is stol'n" (3.3.342). Iago reveals to Othello "some monster in his thoughts / Too hideous to be shown" (3.3.107-108). He corrupts Othello's mind by perverting his imagination, acknowledging, even as he does so, the power by which "jealousy / Shapes faults that are not" (147-148). Desdemona would rather lose her valueless "purse" or her handkerchief than the love of her "noble Moor," so "true of mind" (3.4.25-27). When he redefines her, she will "understand a fury in [his] words / But not the words" themselves (4.2.3233) or the "reasons" why his "clear spirit" is "puddled" (3.4.142). She knows that she never "gave" Othello "cause" to be jealous, but Emilia, a benign inhabitant of the "alehouse," knows that jealousy is "a monster." Desdemona may hope that "heaven keep the monster from Othello's mind!" (3 .4.158f£.). But his words are indeed infected, his "tranquil mind," "content," and belief in the nobility of conduct and valor utterly "gone"as his "Farewell" speech makes clear (3.3.345-357). Othello's "occupation" is gone, and with it his belief in a world defined by romantic absolutes; the values of the marketplace invade and destroy Othello's beliefs, and Iago exposes the vulnerability-and fragility-of a romanticizing imagination. Othello's ideals lose their meaning, become begrimed black as pitch. Instead of turning back thoughts of infidelity, he turns "Turk," becomes an infidel. "Love" becomes carnality, and faith is reduced to testimonial facts, "ocular proof," "causes," and "satisfying reasons."8 Othello loses command of the imaginative shapes that define him, moving outside a relationship based on faith and reducing his love to the equivocal evidence of things seen. Iago's cruelest line is, predictably, his suggestion that Desdemona's "honor is an essence that's not seen" (4.1.16). By the end of the third act Othello turns into the figure of darkness his nobility and language so belie in the opening scenes. His eloquent responses to Brabantio and to the Venetian senators thwart Iago's earlier attempt to make him into a "devilish" Moor. When Iago urges him to avoid Brabantio, Othello insists that he "must be found." "My parts, my 109

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title, and my perfect soul/Shall manifest me rightly" (1.2.30-32). His behavior gives the lie to Brabantio's accusations, and his powerful words, "Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them" (59), disarm his enemies and assert his nobility. His self-command, poise, and presence, his control, make everyone in the theater "incline" (1.3.146) to him just as Desdemona did when he told his story. He is a magnificent, dominating figure we observe "at a distance, just as we might observe a public figure or a stranger." His actions and bearing fuse in his words, and the allure of exoticism draws us to this romantic figure with "poetry in his casual phrases,"9 so much so that after-listening to him, the Duke admits, "I think this tale would win my daughter too" (171). But when lago burdens Othello with an "aspic's tongue," Othello turns into a figure of darkness, invoking "black vengeance from the hollow hell" (3.3.446, 450)}O "In the due reverence of a sacred vow" he betroths himself to lago, engages his "words" to him, promising himself "bloody thoughts." He now speaks in lago's idiom. Once Othello's "fair warrior," Desdemona is now a "fair devil" and a damnable "lewd minx" (2.1.182; 3. 3.479, 47 5).

"Goats and monkeys" When Othello falls to lago, he loses his bearing and the sense of value that sustain him. As one of the play's most influential commentators, Robert B. Heilman, puts it, "the breakdown of Othello from Act IlIon is a collapse of certain props of assurance - the assurance of being loved and the assurance of position - upon which his personality rests."11 Breakdown, collapse, props, and position are crucial, for Othello loses the very Figurenposition and special relationship with the audience established in the opening scenes when he falls into incoherent babbling at Iago's feet in 4,1. Here is eloquence broken into shards: Lie with her? lie on her? we say lie on her, when they belie her. Lie with her! 'Zounds, that's fulsome! Handkerchief- confessions - handkerchief! To confess, and be hang'd for his labor- first to be hang'd, and then to confess. I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words 110

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that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips. Is't possible? Confess? Handkerchief? a devil!

[Falls in a trance.]

(4.1. 34-43).

Incoherent, yes, but psychologically precise. As Michael Goldman points out, "Othello is raving, and in his agitation pieces of the items lago has planted in his brain whirl before him."12 Later in 4,1 he will also fall in our minds when, assuming one of lago's Figurenpositionen "outside" a scene, he eavesdrops on Cassio's conversation with Bianca and misperceives from his false "downstage" position; when, after plotting the double murder of Desdemona and Cassio, he welcomes Lodovico and slaps Desdemona in the play's most "intolerable spectacle" 13 ; and when, in the course of formal, dignified conversation with Lodovico, he berates Desdemona, erupting with irrational harshness: Concerning this, sir-O well-painted passion!I am commanded home.-Get you away; I'll send for you anon.-Sir, I obey the mandate, And will return to Venice. - Hence, avaunt!

[Exit Desdemona.] Cassio shall have my place. And, sir, to-night I do entreat that we may sup together. You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus.-Goats and monkeys!

(257-263).

His reference to Cassio resonates. Othello's tortured and splintered mind cannot contain what is within, and he concludes with the words lago used to picture Cassio and Desdemona "prime as goats, as hot as monkeys" (3.3.403; cf. 3.3.180-182). Hardly the stuff of his address to the senators, his words indicate the loss of the position and stage presence he once so calmly and eloquently commanded. Indeed, no matter where he "stands," literally or figuratively, Othello is trapped inside one of Iago's false illusions, and the alterations in his language and position are governed by the conventions associated with down- and upstage speech. These changes in Othello's Figurenpositionen are embedded in his speech and in the play's action. And yet, while Heilman's acute analysis of the relation between action and language hints at these changes in Figurenpositionen and begins to consider the 111

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"techniques of infiltration" by which Iago "flows" into the community of the play,14 we have yet fully to understand the dramaturgical means by which this infiltration occurs or the relation it bears to the play's effect upon the spectators. In this sense it is important to remember that, when lago invites a character to share his perspective, he often plays upon the very idea of "overhearing" so fundamental to the nature of dramatic performance, In which the spectators eavesdrop upon the action. In Othello the spectators witness an action in which scenes are often staged by lago, scenes in which what they hear and see is at variance with what the characters appear to perceive and during which the spectators are helpless observers. Indeed, when Othello literally "sees" and "hears" from lago's perspective, he substitutes the equivocal evidence of things seen for a belief in things unseen. The most familiar of these moments occurs in 4,1 when Othello overhears lago and Cassio, apparently talking about Desdemona but actually about Bianca. When Othello "withdraws," lago tells us what he intends to do: Now will I question Cassio of Bianca, A huswife that by selling her desires Buys herself bread and clothes. It is a creature That dotes on Cassio (as 'tis the strumpet's plague To beguile many and be beguil'd by one); He, when he hears of her, cannot restrain From the excess of laughter. Here he comes. Enter Cassio. As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad; And his unbookish jealousy must conster Poor Cassio's smiles, gestures, and light behaviors Quite in the wrong. How do you now, lieutenant?

(93-103)

Set "outside" the illusionistic scene, Othello eavesdrops upon a scene of misunderstanding and misperception. Here lago greets Cassio after he "reenters" the illusion, just as he appears to "step out" of it after Othello withdraws. He does not actually "move," but he has, as it were, stepped outside the illusion to address the audience. And because they have been privileged, the spectators know that Othello will misinterpret the follow-

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ing conversation: standing on the fringes of the scene, he will construe things clean from the meaning of the things themselves, and the spectators will not be able to help him. In this "staged" scene Iago "blocks" the actors and is helped by a walkon, Bianca. The scene is representative of the play's dramaturgy and use of fluid and undifferentiated settings. Throughout Othello Iago engages the audience and the characters in his soliloquies and private conversations. The spectators and the characters then "withdraw," so to speak, to witnes,s a scene, and are addressed or reengaged in private conversation at its end. In a way typical of Shakespearean scenic construction, these conversations often begin in undifferentiated "places" that are localized only in the course of the scene. The first scene is exemplary, for during its course Iago moves from an undifferentiated place to a particularized 10cation.15 In 1,1 the spectators overhear Iago and Roderigo in conversation in a Venetian "place" that will be transformed into a location beneath Brabantio's "house," at one "window" of which the aroused Brabantio will respond to Iago's and Roderigo's taunts. At the opening of 1,2 Othello speaks privately with Iago before confronting Brabantio in another unlocatable "street," and at the end of 1,3, localized as a Venetian "council chamber" by use of a table and some lights, we again overhear Iago and Roderigo in conversation before Iago offers us his first soliloquy. In 2,3, as we have seen, Iago and Cassio initially engage in private conversation. At the scene's end Iago and Cassio and then Iago and Roderigo speak alone before Iago addresses the audience in a closing soliloquy. This pattern of withdrawal and reunion is repeated in the temptation and fall scene, 3,3, in which, as in 4,1, Iago moves into and out of the illusion, alternately assuming his representational role and speaking to the spectators in his presented self. Indeed, this scene falls into two parts, with Iago's soliloquy (321- 329) placed between Othello's temptation and fall. Dialogue, soliloquy, and dialogue map the dramaturgical contours of the scene, which concludes with Othello's outcry: "Damn her, lewd minx! 0, damn her, damn her!" (476). By 5,1 Othello has only to stand aside and listen in the dark to believe the "brave Iago, honest and just," has kept "his word" (31,27) by murdering Cassio. Iago has "taught" Othello, who steels himself for revenge:

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Minion, your dear lies dead, And your unblest fate hies. Strumpet, I come. Forth of my heart those charms, thine eyes, are blotted; Thy bed, lust-stained, shall with lust's blood be spotted.

[Exit Othello.]

(33-36)

Othello is cast into darkness, unable to see or to hear accurately, captured within an illusory and false "downstage" position. In his concluding couplet he gives his "worst of thoughts / The worst of words" (3.3.132-133).

"I kissed thee ere I kill'd thee" These scenes seem "staged" because the spectators know Iago's true intentions. They are dramatically possible because Iago establishes his downstage Figurenposition early in the play. But there is another reason why his "practices" work so well. He is diabolically effective because his victims, like those of his villainous predecessor, Richard III, are "cast in darkness." Othello and Desdemona simply do not know what is going on. They are "ignorant as dirt" (5.2.164). In this sense Othello and Desdemona, like Romeo and Juliet, are bound within the illusion, their language and manner of portrayal holding them within the play's pictorial frame. Indeed, in his portrayal of the lovers, Shakespeare draws upon a number of literary and iconographic traditions. There is little need to rehearse in detail the mythological and iconographic backgrounds Shakespeare drew upon to relate Othello and Desdemona to such mythological figures as Mars and Venus. They have been examined fully and well}6 His borrowings from the sonnet tradition, however, have not received full credit. As we know, Romeo and Juliet first meet at Capulet's feast, where, after the servingmen's banter, the Capulets, Tybalt, the Nurse, and the guests enter, and the masked ball begins amid the whirling measures of masked dancers. Those fluid movements "stop" when Romeo asks the Servingman, "What lady's that which doth enrich the hand / Of yonder knight?" (1.5.41). And after Romeo's lyrical and rhapsodic description of Juliet's beauty (44-53), he

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approaches her. "The measure done," he has "watched her place of stand" (50) and advances to her. Here the lovers create an onstage, fixed picture that remains in our minds. Here, in an elegant verbal and visual duet, they "make blessed" their hands, and their kiss appropriately supplies their embedded sonnet (93-106) with its couplet. Juliet's "Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake" is embraced and held by Romeo's "Then move not while my prayer's effect I take" (105-106), with their accompanying kiss holding time in suspension. When Romeo and Juliet first intenwine their hands and lips, their interlocking words create a moment of suspended action and separate them from the surrounding movement. Juliet recalls Romeo's paradoxes when she finds out his name ("My only love sprung from my only hate!" [138]), and she supplies the play's dominant topos in saying that if Romeo "be married, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed" (1 34-1 35). This still point within a turning circle will be revisualized at the play's end, when Romeo and Juliet lie intertwined in deadly stasis upon the bedlike locus of the tomb while all the others hasten around in confusion. These elements are recalled at those moments in Otbello when movement is contrasted with stasis, energy with lyricism, and images of death with feelings of love. These contrasts are linked to the play's staging. Indeed, although the relation they bear to "sonnet figures" may be less noticeable, Othello's and Desdemona's characterization owes a great deal to sonnet narrative and to the Liebestod. Repeatedly, Juliet and Desdemona receive the idealizing praise common in the sonnets. Both pairs of lovers are "lifted" from literary love traditions and are created from the naturalization of poetic convention. I ? Shakespeare establishes these iconographic and poetic contexts in 2,1, a carefully constructed scene that invites us to view the characters from a unique perspective. Cassio is the first of the Venetian force to land at Cyprus after the tempest that separates Othello's ships and destroys the Turkish fleet. His comments raise expectations about the arrival of the "divine Desdemona" (73), a transcendent maid who, like Juliet, Petrarch's Laura, and Dante's Beatrice, "paragons" poetical "description and wild fame" and "excels the quirks of blazoning pens" (61-63). When she appears, Cassio tells all the men of Cyprus to kneel:

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0, behold, The riches of the ship is come on shore! You men of Cyprus, let her have your knees. Hail to thee, lady! and the grace of heaven[.] Before, behind thee, and on every hand, Enwheel thee round! (82-87) Here the men encircle her. The action "stops." Desdemona is set apart, held in everyone's eyes, frozen in our view much as Juliet is. And here Desdemona's mythological and religious iconography as Venus and the Virgin is established.t s She silently stands at the still point of a turning circle of figures. The neo-Platonic, syncretic traditions Shakespeare draws upon to create this "chrysolitic" "jewel" crystallize in her dramatic entry. All this lyricism is of course negatively defined when Desdemona asks Iago, "Come, how wouldst thou praise me?" His encomium comes in couplets that play with the very words and conventions Shakespeare so often mocks and upholds in the sonnets: Iago.

If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit, The one's for use, the other useth it. Des. Well prais'd! How if she be black and witty? Iago. If she be black, and thereto have a wit, She'll find a white that shall her blackness hit. Des. Worse and worse. Emil. How if fair and foolish? Iago. She never yet was foolish that was fair, For even her folly help'd her to an heir. (129-137)

We hear echoes of Sonnet 127, of the tone of Sonnet 130. Later the alternation will be between "Lie" "with her," "on her" (4.1.33), recalling Sonnet 13 8's moral and sexual distinctions. "These are old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i' th' alehouse." They are also menacing, as the reference to Iago's "invention" coming from his head like "birdlime does from frieze" (126) and the meaning "white" and "black" bear in the play remind us. Iago is a poor versifier, as his frustrated sonnet proves (148-160), and he cannot praise a "deserving woman." His apparently playful view of women is actually cynical and sinister, and his folk wisdom and punning 116

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humor are laced with profanity. With Othello's arrival, however, poetry once again becomes musical. "Lo, where he comes," says Cassio (181). "0 my fair warrior!" says Othello; "My dear Othello!," answers Desdemona. This is Mars greeting Venus, love and war commingled. The lovers' kiss joins them before our eyes: Des.

Oth.

The heavens forbid But that our loves and comforts should increase Even as our days do grow! Amen to that, sweet powers! I cannot speak enough of this content, It stops me here; it is too much of joy. And this, and this, the greatest discords be

[They kiss.] That e'er our hearts shall make!

(193-199)

As we know, Othello will again kiss Desdemona before he murders her. And when he dies, his couplet draws from the Liebestod topos underlying the action: "I kissed thee ere I kill'd thee. No way but this, / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss" (5.2.358-359). Like Romeo and Juliet, the lovers reunite when they lie in stasis on the locus of their bridal-and-death bed. Othello's couplet returns him and Desdemona to the tradition from which they emerged. Although Othello's "spirit" has been expended in a "waste of shame," he is able, in his final action, to fall again into "Desdemona's arms" (2.1.80).

"I lack iniquity" There is, of course, another dramaturgical force and another style at work throughout the play. Othello and Desdemona are set within the ill usion. lago is not. His voice and downstage Figurenposition provide a different perspective. When Cassio takes Desdemona by the hand in 2,1, lago offers his own commentary: lago.

[Aside.] He takes her by the palm; ay, well said, whisper. With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, 117

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smile upon her, do; I will gyve thee in thine own counship. You say true, 'tis so indeed. If such tricks as these strip you out of your lieutenantry, it had been better you had not kiss'd your fingers so oft, which now again you are most apt to play the sir in. Very good; well kiss'd! an excellent counesy! 'Tis so indeed. Yet again, your fingers to your lips? Would they were clyster-pipes, for your sake! (167 -177) lago condemns Cassio's gentlemanly kissing of his hand by using his characteristic metaphors of hunting and trapping. Standing on the edge of the illusionistic scene, he alternates comments and nods to Cassio and Desdemona with glosses on their actions. And when Cassio kisses his fingers once more, lago adds vulgarity to the description. He will similarly "set down the pegs that make this music" (260) when he sees Othello and Desdemona kiss, striking a discordant note that clashes with Othello's aria of love by commenting on an upstage action from his downstage place. None of the characters "hears" lago, of course. His comments are audible only to the spectators, with whom he has developed a privileged relationship. In this sense lago recalls Richard III, that other figure of Iniquity who moralized "two meanings in one word." Like Richard III, lago is an identifiable symbolic Vice who maintains a realistic facade. But with lago, as with Richard III, critics seem torn between the poles of psychological analysis and theatrical convention - as the later editorial addition of Ensign to the ViLLaine of the Folio's Dramatis Personae suggests. Although there is little doubt that lago is a type figure, it is also clear that Shakespeare conflates his persona as the Vice with his representational role. His motives for behaving as he does so multiply during the play that he seems, finally, to be a figure of "motiveless malignity"- a phrase that suggests his innate depravity. It seems to me, however, that discussions of lago's psychology and motivation have obscured not only his theatrical lineage but also the nature of his transactions with the spectators. "Motive-hunting" flattens out the process by which the spectators are led to recognize lago's lineage and to condemn him for what he is.I 9 In order to trace the process by which the spectators come to recognize lago's lineage, we need to keep in mind that he possesses distinct psychological and theatrical personae and that each corresponds to a dif118

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ferent Figurenposition. Indeed, the subtle shifts in his position relative to the illusion are not easily noted when we conflate the psychological and the emblematic. From his Vice-like perspective "near" the spectators, Iago encourages the audience to indulge in devilry; he invites the spectators to participate in the duping of Othello and his other victims. His psychological persona, on the other hand, distances him from the spectators and invites them to examine his motives. The degree of his association with and dissociation from the spectators and the illusion varies from moment to moment and from scene to scene, of course, and the wayan actor decides to play the role will determine which persona is to dominate at any particular moment. Indeed, to play Iago well, one must blend devilry and depravity. When we first see Iago, however, he is a "character" set in the world of the play, and his morality persona is not evident. In the opening dialogue he reveals himself only as a disgruntled, envious subordinate who dislikes the Moor because Othello passed him over by appointing Cassio as his lieutenant. '''Tis the curse of service; / Preferment goes by letter and affection, / And not by old gradation, where each second / Stood heir to th' first" (1.1. 35- 38). His "reasons" for not loving the Moor are, apparently, justifiable: even though he had seniority, practical experience, and the support of "three great ones of the city" (8), Othello overlooked him in favor of an "arithmetician" and a Florentine outsider. His grievance seems legitimate enough, and certainly would have seemed so to those in the audience who, even today, appreciate his remarks and side with him, drawn into complicity with his prejudices and complaints. Not until he explains that he follows the Moor "to serve my turn upon him" do we realize his disappointment is laced with deep-seated hatred and a desire for revenge. But even now there is nothing to indicate he is a figure of Iniquity. His code of self-interest and his hypocrisy are deplorable, but the reasons he provides seem "satisfying" and seem to grow, naturally enough, from losing a position he thought should be his. In the final line of his well-known speech to Roderigo, lago may suggest another dimension: In following [Othello], I follow but myself; Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, 119

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But seeming so, for my particular end; For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In complement extern, 'tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at: I am not what I am. (58-65) Although the last phrase, with its diabolical inversion of God's "I am that I am," hints at his underlying part (and may be delivered in precisely this way), it is better understood as confirming his hypocrisy rather than truly revealing "the native act and figure" of his "heart." It may be more effective and dramatically engaging, in fact, if, at the start of Othello, Iago possesses only the unattractive but identifiably human feelings of jealousy, envy, and hate. Indeed, by subordinating his morality to his realistic persona, Shakespeare invites us to consider his motivation. No wonder analysis of his character follows a psychological path. By providing us with "satisfying" reasons, Iago elicits psychological responses. Here is a character who does evil not for its own sake but because he believes he has been wronged. His egocentricity and hypocrisy contribute to his psychological makeup. Unlike Richard III, that is, who admits that he is "determined to prove a villain" in his opening soliloquy, Iago does not immediately identify himself. Shakespeare may not have wanted Iago to reveal himself at the start because he wished to play upon an audience's response to the Moor's devilish blackness. He may also, I think, have wished to draw the spectators into complicity with Iago, the better to lead them to a revelation about Iago's underlying part and to suggest the dehumanization that occurs when a man steeps himself in sin. Like Richard III, Iago will be a presenter of, a participant in, and a commentator upon the action. But the order in which Iago introduces his personae is different from Richard's. Unlike Richard, Iago does not delineate these personae in a playopening soliloquy, and he does not conclude scene one or two with asides, soliloquies, or scene-ending couplets. When scene two begins, Iago is again a "character" in a play engaged in conversation with another character: Iago.

Though in the trade of war I have slain men, Yet do I hold it very stuff 0' th' conscience 120

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To do no contriv'd murder. I lack iniquity Sometime to do me service. Nine or ten times I had thought t' have yerk'd him here under the ribs. Oth. 'Tis better as it is. (1-6) His hypocrisy is obvious, and his speech may even contain a deeply embedded reference to the Vice, Iniquity. But there is no clear indication, here or in the final conversation with Roderigo in 1,3, that lago will be more than a "naturalistic" character. Act one concludes as it began, with lago duping Roderigo and articulating his code of self-interest. Not until the end of his soliloquy, after he gives another reason for hating the Moor ("it is thought abroad that 'twixt my sheets / H'as done my office" [387-388]) and after we hear him "thinking aloud," does lago's natural complexion truly begin to emerge: Let me see now: To get [Cassio's] place and plume up my will In double knavery-How? how?-Let's seeAfter some time, to abuse Othello's ear That [Cassio] is too familiar with his wife. He hath a person and a smooth dispose To be suspected-fram'd to make women false. The Moor is of a free and open nature, That thinks men honest that but seem to be so, And will as tenderly be led by th' nose As asses are. I have't. It is engend'red. Hell and night Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light.

(1.3.392-404)

The soliloquy closes act one, asserts lago's dominance, and establishes his unique relationship with the spectators. lago muses in a psychologically realistic way, offers his plans to the spectators as a presenter might, and then, in his scene-ending couplet, hints at the presentational figure lurking beneath his representational role. As lago shifts, that is, between his representational role and his presentational parts, he subtly alters his Figurenpositionen in relation to the illusion. 20 Here lago establishes a rapport with the spectators that, like Richard 121

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Ill's, provides them with privileged knowledge. At times it will be like the "rapport established by the comedian in the music-hall."21 Full of "an unholy jocularity and a blasphemous wit,"22 lago will taunt and torture his victims with glee. "How do you now, lieutenant?" (4.1.103), he greets Cassio, never missing an opportunity. "I see this hath a little dash'd your spirits," he comments after reminding Othello that Desdemona deceived "her father, marrying you" (3.3.214, 206). "How is it, general? Have you not hurt your head?" he asks after the Moor "Falls in a trance." "Dost thou mock me?" answers Othello (4.1.43,59-60). lago is indeed a devilishly witty thrill seeker who skirts close to revealing himself. 23 He delights, most of all, in puncturing the hyperbolic praise heaped upon Desdemona, as his reply to Roderigo's claim, "she's full of most bless'd condition," makes clear: "Bless'd fig's end! The wine she drinks is made of grapes. If she had been bless'd, she would never have lov'd the Moor. Bless'd pudding!" (2.1.250-253). At times his stratagems are so successful that he cannot believe it. When Othello declares that his "occupation's gone," lago questions, "Is't possible, my lord?"; this refrain is heard when Cassio laments the loss of his "good name" and "reputation" (2.3.287) and becomes part of Othello's incoherency in 4,1 (42-43). A savage comedian, lago clearly enjoys telling Othello about Cassio's dream and about Desdemona's being "naked with her friend in bed / An hour, or more, not meaning any harm" (4.1.3-4). He equally delights in awakening people in the night. On each of these occasions lago's sardonic humor depends upon the perspective he shares with the spectators, who simultaneously delight in and are repulsed by his fascinating devilry and whose own devilish pleasure comes from seeing how lago's plans actually work. lago also provides a running commentary on the action in the manner of a chorus. From 1,3 to 5,1 he speaks at least one soliloquy or aside in the scenes in which he appears. All these strategically placed speeches make him the play's presenter, underscore his dominant role in the action, and ensure our dramatic engagement with him. At times they deepen his psychological makeup, since in them he often adds reasons for his actions and formulates his plans by "thinking aloud." They are psychological and expository. In one important soliloquy, however, lago sheds his persona as a psychologically believable "character" to disclose

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his underlying theatrical lineage, and this soliloquy best reveals the relationship between him and the spectators.

"How am I then a villain" At the end of 2,3 lago convinces Cassio to enlist Desdemona's "help" to put him in his "place again" (319). After Cassio bids the "honest" lago good night, lago turns to the audience, assuming an undifferentiated position "downstage" and dissociating himself, momentarily, from the action. lago mockingly questions the spectators: And what's he then that says I play the villain, When this advice is free I give, and honest, Probal to thinking, and indeed the course To win the Moor again? For 'tis most easy Th' inclining Desdemona to subdue In any honest suit; she's fram'd as fruitful As the free elements. And then for her To win the Moor, were 't to renounce his baptism, All seals and symbols of redeemed sin, His soul is so enfetter'd to her love, That she may make, unmake, do what she list, Even as her appetite shall play the god With his weak function. How am I then a villain, To counsel Cassio to this parallel course, Directly to his good? Divinity of hell! When devils will the blackest sins put on, They do suggest at first with heavenly shows, As I do now; for whiles this honest fool Plies Desdemona to repair his fortune, And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor, I'll pour this pestilence into his earThat she repeals him for her body's lust, And by how much she strives to do him good, She shall undo her credit with the Moor.

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So will I turn her virtue into pitch, And out of her own goodness make the net That shall enmesh them all. (336-362) Here lago plays, ironically and self-consciously, with the adjective so often associated with him. His advice is "honest." And with "As I do now," lago admits that he is like the devil, turning good into evil. The terrible pathos of acts three, four, and five is anticipated, and the utter helplessness of the audience is made plain. It might even be said that lago teases and taunts the spectators, who are powerless to prevent what will occur. As records of performance indicate, spectators have often felt compelled to shout warnings to Othello and Desdemona, they have wept and "cried out," and they have observed the scenes, "not at all with that uneasy curiosity which changes moment by moment from fear to hope but with something of that inexpressible anguish that possesses us while, in a court of justice, we participate in the vain efforts of the unhappy ones dragged toward a fatal and indubitable condemnation."24 Here, at the threshold of the great temptation and fall scene, lago not only tells the spectators what he intends to do but also reveals his kinship with other stage Vices. Appearing to deny it, he consciously acknowledges his histrionic part and toys with the audience's knowledge ("what's he then that says I play the villain"; "How am I then a villain"). This theatrically self-conscious soliloquy is revelatory, not of his character, but of his underlying "part." He is a "villain" who "puts on" the "blackest sins" with "heavenly shows." This "zestful malice" is spoken by a "lover of footlights," an actor the spectators "Curst for Acting an III part" so well. 25 "Knavery's plain face" is seen at last (2.1.306). Although lago has been self-seeking and Cassio's lieutenancy is in sight, he now intends to commit evil for its own sake and will use Desdemona's goodness to "make the net / That shall enmesh them all." A "diabolical personality" emerges "from the multiple folds of humane seeming,"26 and his hypocritical "seeming" now becomes his "being." It is not a question of acknowledging, as in Richard III, that we have known what lago truly is all along, but of discovering what he is. In this soliloquy lago provokes the spectators and creates the "special pathos of our urge to intervene" in the action. 27 In the scenes that follow, our participation in Othello's dilemma will shift 124

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between what we know and what we see occurring and will depend upon our having, as Othello has, two images of Desdemona-his image and the truth. 28 And during all the painful scenes of her arraignment the pace never lets up, the events tumbling forward in "accelerating speed" toward the catastrophe. 29 All this contributes to the play's grip upon the emotions of the audience, a grip more relentless and sustained than in any other tragedy. And throughout it all our moral judgment is at war with our theatrical engagement. Shakespeare "plays" the dynamics of one against the other,30 creating a tension between the perspective we continue to share and our sense of moral outrage. We have entered the action from lago's perspective and have stood outside the illusionistic scene, eavesdropping, observing, and mediating in our minds: we now find ourselves part of a process over which we have little control. lago's allure has been so powerful, our perspective so ensnared within his, that we have been caught. In keeping with his hypocritical ways, lago has caught all the credulous. This tension explains why the slap Othello gives Desdemona is so "intolerable" and why the Willow Song is so poignant. It may also explain why Othello has always been so easy to blame for his downfall and why Desdemona has become too good to be true, her "innocence" so "uniquely annoying."31 After we discover that lago is the Vice, however, his reasons for behaving as he does turn into rationalizations. As lago adds more and more reasons to justify his hatred of Othello, he becomes less and less believable. As those reasons multiply, they strain our credulity and undercut their claim to truth. After this soliloquy, however, we understand why he is so motiveless. He no longer provides us with reasons, and he becomes more and more like a dehumanized Vice. Only his "credulous fools," Roderigo, Cassio, and Othello, continue to be caught. They still receive "satisfying reasons" (4.2.244-245; 5.1.9). Othello's "It is the cause" soliloquy, with its unclear referent, betrays his faulty reasoning. There have been no "causes," and Cassio's words to Othello, "I never gave you cause" (5.2.299), only remind us how superficial are all the reasons given in the play. lago never completely sheds his representational role, as his aside in 5,1 makes clear: "This is the night / That either makes me, or fordoes me quite" (128-129). And he reinforces the psychological sense of self125

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contempt by condemning Cassio as one who "hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly" (19-20). But that representational role is laminated upon a presentational part, with lago's lineage as the Vice determining his stage movements and devilish machinations. We see flesh and bl~od figures, not abstractions, even in morality plays. From this soliloquy forward, however, Iago is as much the play's Vice as one of its representational characters, and he becomes increasingly viperous, more and more like a tempting, uncoiling, diabolical snake, whose Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons, Which at the first are scarce found to distaste, But with a little act upon the blood Burn like the mines of sulphur. (3.3.326-329) When Othello reenters here, lago greets his victim with relish: "Look where he comes!" (330). Envenomed, Othello murders Desdemona in "the bed she hath contaminated." After he realizes what he has done, he knows that he will "roast ... in sulphur" and that when he and Desdemona meet "at compt," her look "will hurl" his "soul from heaven, / And fiends will snatch at it" (5.2.279, 273-275). But "heaven" will also requite lago's actions "with the serpent's curse" (4.2.16). Emilia's words to Othello and her advice to Desdemona that some "eternal villain, / Some busy and insinuating rogue, / Some cogging, cozening, slave" has "devis'd this slander" (1 3013 3) are insights, teasing revelations about lago's true nature as one who "proves" himself a "villain" and whose "plots" and "inductions" set characters "in deadly hate the one against the other" (RIll.1.1. 30ff.). Emilia's words raise the hope that the characters will recognize lago as the source of evil in time to save Desdemona and increase the pathos of our urge to intervene. Only at the end, however, is lago's symbolic dimension apparent to all. "Where is that viper? Bring the villain forth," Lodovico orders (5.2.285). Othello will not believe what we know to be true. He looks "down towards" lago's feet to see if they are cloven, and then wounds him, saying, If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee. [~unds

[ago.] 126

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Lod. Wrench his sword from him. lago. I bleed, sir, but not kill'd. (287-288)

This "demi-devil" will not die, nor will he tell why he "ensnar'd" Othello: "Demand me nothing; what you know, you know: / From this time forth I never will speak word" (303-304). He will no longer provide "reasons" or "motives" or "causes," nor will his words infect. He no longer lacks "iniquity" to do him "service" (1.2.3). In drawing Othello into bestiality, lago loses his humanity. He is correctly identified as a "demi-devil" and a "viper."3 2 Now recognized as a "hellish villain" (368) whose "words" have poisoned Othello, lago will speak no more. Othello is again articulate. He will punish the "circumcised dog" he has become. And he will recover the calm, controlled, lyrical, and exotic musical purity of a voice that was so tainted. We hear Othello's renewed voice in the play's final moments: 33 "Soft you; a word or two before you go." When Emilia recognized the "villainy" of Othello's action, Othello fell "on the bed," crying out as he did when he fell at lago's feet in 4,1 (5.2.198). "Rising" again, he challenged Emilia, justifying his action: "0, she was foul!" (200). Now that he knows of lago's villainy and understands the enormity of his action, he once again rises to full stature. In this private court scene, as in the formal scene in 1,3, he retells his story, aware of his loss of a "jewel" he threw away. He speaks as he did at the play's opening, knowing full well that the "services" he has "done the state" will not be sufficient to extenuate or "out-tongue" all "complaint" (1.1.18-19; 5.2.339). "No more of that," he says, manifesting himself rightly. He appeals for an objective assessment of a lifetime of heroism tainted by a moment of folly, and he splits himself, in his recounting of the Aleppo incident, into a servant of the state and an alien presence, concluding his tale with a "thus" that murders the Turk within himself. He may be only "cheering himself up," but it is more accurate to realize that Othello reasserts his nobility by passing judgment upon his crime. The "rhetoric of his self-definition," tenuous though it may be, requires us to reawaken our faith. 34 As G. K. Hunter put it in 1967, in words that respond to later criticism, "Othello's black skin makes the co127

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existence of his vulnerable romanticism and epic grandeur with the bleak or even pathological realism of Iago a believable fact .... We admire him - I fear that one has to be trained as a literary critic to find him unadmirable - but we are aware of the difficulty of sustaining that vision of the golden world of poetry.... We are aware of the easy responses that Iago can command, not only of people on the stage but also in the audience. The perilous and temporary achievements of heroism are achieved most sharply in this play, because they have to be achieved in our minds, through our self-awareness."35 The deep seated, "curiously compelling" "reasons" for Iago's appeal need to be recognized and denied in favor of Othello's tragic stature. 36 As his couplet makes so clear, Othello dies upholding the romantic and poetic absolutes of conduct "by which he creates himself in our imagination." Iago's valuations do not triumph. He will live on, only for a while, in tortured silence. A terrible and yet triumphant sense of pathos sweeps over the spectators when, dying with a kiss, Othello "falls" onto the bed that defines the lovers' dramaturgical and poetic locus.

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VI Multiconsciousness in King Lear

"The hope of the reader"

Readers of King Lear must now "acknowledge" the widely influential view of Edgar first proposed by Stanley Cavell, who questioned the sincerity and timeliness of Edgar's decision not to reveal himself to his grief-stricken, blinded father until it is too late to save him. 1 Cavell's opinion has affected the response of critics as divergent in their approaches as Janet Adelman and S. L. Goldberg and has taken hold in many quarters. 2 It is a misleading view, in my opinion, not only because it ignores basic facts about the ways Shakespeare "manages" his dramatic personae, but also because it fails to describe the relationship between a character's language and his stage location. It may be most mistaken, however, because it loses sight of the "affective" response to King Lear that Shakespeare elicits from his audience. Readers who share Professor Cavell's perspective overlook the functions Edgar performs as a "choric" character and as the "symbolic" figure of Poor Tom, preferring to limit their focus to psychological examinations of his "realistic" persona. This is surprising, especially in the light of Maynard Mack's suggestions about the ways Shakespeare "manages" his characters in the play. ''At any given instant," Mack wrote in 1965, "characters may shift along a spectrum between compelling realism and an almost pure representativeness that resembles ... [the] esse [or being] of the Morality play."3 Indeed, as Mack sees the matter, an audience must be able to shift between the verisimilitude of Lear's passion and curse on Goneril in 1,4 and the "representativeness" of Edgar's stripping down to become Poor Tom in 2,3 (or of Kent in the stocks at the end of 2,2). Mack's judgment demonstrates the inadequacy of the "realistic" ap129

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proach by reminding us that characters in Renaissance drama are not just psychological states but also, at times, symbolic figures. When we add Edgar's third, choric and metadramatic, function to his realistic and symbolic (or representative) parts, we may begin to sense the complexity of his depiction. Shakespeare utilizes Edgar in multiple ways, not the least of which is as a moral agent who tries to save Gloucester from despair. This is why anyone approach to his character is necessarily reductive. But Mack's comments may be important in another sense, since the recognition that Edgar serves multiple functions also implies that he performs his parts from different figural positions in respect to the play's illusionistic frame. Each of Edgar's personae, that is, requires a different awareness about the relation between a character, as the audience responds to him, and his role(s), his stage position, and the play's modes of presentation. In this chapter I am going to argue that Mack's views are in keeping with the complex nature of Edgar's Figurenpositionen in King Lear. I will demonstrate that the three dimensions of Edgar's role correspond to distinct "figural" positions within the play's illusionistic frame and to different "realistic," "representative," and "choric" personae. In establishing these categories, I do not mean to ignore Mack's "corollary peculiarity" in the language of Shakespearean character, in which speech is "always yet more fully in the service of the vision of the playas a whole than true to any consistent interior reality."4 We need only remember the wisdom of Edgar's advice to Gloucester that "Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither, / Ripeness is all" (5.2.9-11) to recognize that his language is in the service of the play's vision.5 Speech like this, to be sure, is one of Edgar's - and Kent's and Lear's - functions in the play. But this assessment does not so fully accommodate the sense we have that Edgar, in addition to playing a symbolic part as Poor Tom, undergoes a number of changes in his character at tbe same time that he guides our response. In my view the contradictory feelings that Stanley Cavell created derive from the failure to distinguish Edgar's role as a participant in the illusionistic action from his function as the symbolic figure of Poor Tom or as a commentator who stands, as it were, outside the play. These three dimensions of his role truly denote his Figurenpositionen. They are also integrally related to Shakespeare's "affective" manipulation of his audience in King Lear. 130

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"Edgar I nothing am" The question of privileged knowledge is an imponant one in this respect. As we have seen again and again, the information given to an audience by a character- but which other characters on stage do not know-often determines spectator response. The giving of this kind of information may be noticed at the opening of King Lear. Cordelia's two asides while Lear attempts to measure his daughters' love for him separate her from the locus of the scene and invite us to see these events from another perspective. They are not audience asides, but they do offer a privileged view on the action and prepare for Cordelia's apparent filial ingratitude. Banished Kent's opening soliloquy in 1,4 provides another, more obvious example, since from this point until his appearance in 5,3 we know what no one on stage knows, that Caius is Kent in disguise. But a third example may determine our response to the play more than do the first two. Edmund's soliloquy in 1,2, with its invocation to "Nature" and its announcement of his intentions, establishes his privileged relationship with the audience. Here Edmund's plot to "trick" Gloucester into believing that Edgar intends to murder him suggests his dominance, and the ease with which he accomplishes the deception makes us realize just how defective Gloucester's sight is and how naive is Edgar. In this scene Edmund behaves "realistically," to be sure, but he also reveals his symbolic nature as the Vice, so famous for and expen in engaging the audience's attention from the platea in countless earlier plays. 6 Edmund remains set "within" the illusion in this scene, but he also functions in a manner that ovenly recalls his devilish theatrical predecessors. This revelation about Edmund's symbolic undenrappings, however, is linked to another revelation. By revealing his theatrical lineage, Edmund also provides Edgar with the presentational pan he will assume. Edmund "cues" Edgar, who then appears "like the catastrophe of the old comedy." But if Edmund correctly identifies his own cue as "villainous melancholy," he mistakenly adds that he will heave a "sigh like Tom o'Bedlam" (1.2.134-136). That, we know, is the pan Edgar will play. Edmund's theatrical metaphors are simultaneously thematic (Edmund sees himself 131

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and Edgar as playing parts in this deception) and metadramatic (in the sense that the lines are self-consciously theatrical). They are simultaneously enclosed within the illusion and self-consciously aware of this play as a play. Many readers are aware of the similarity between this scene and the opening sequence of scenes in Richard III and Othello, where Richard and Iago also assert their dominance and establish a relationship with the spectators. But in Othello, Iago is the only character to maintain such a relationship. In King Lear, Edmund shares the audience with Edgar. In his soliloquy in 2,3, one that is approximately the same length as Edmund's in 1,2, Edgar announces his disguise. And like Kent, who remains on stage at the end of 2,2 stocked as eaius, Edgar provides us with a stage image. Kent's position on stage corresponds to a particular locus, the stocks, and placed as he is within the selfcontained, illusionistic frame of the play, Kent remains unaware of Edgar's presence. By placing both characters on stage at the same time, one in the background and one in the foreground, Shakespeare offers us two images, each of which depicts the disastrous consequences of loyal behavior and filial faithfulness in Lear's shaken kingdom. By having Edgar appear between the end of 2,2, when Kent stoically accepts this tum of Fortune's wheel, and the beginning of 2,4, when Kent greets Lear ("Hail to thee, noble master!"), Shakespeare conveys a sense of the passage of time. But Edgar's soliloquy, delivered from downstage, platea position, also has its own separate and distinct purposes. This pause in the forward movement of the action allows us to share in the predicament of one of the play's noble characters, one whose total number of lines will be second only to Lear's. More important, the soliloquy allows Edgar to establish his privileged relationship with the audience. In addition to adumbrating the large role he will play in the events, this soliloquy delineates Edgar's personae as a symbolic figure and as a commentator who will guide our response. As he establishes the fullness of his realistic role and introduces his symbolic and choric personae, however, an audience must be able to attend to these disclosures with the "multiconsciousness"7 so much a part of theatrical experience. When Edgar grimes his face "with filth," blankets his "loins," elfs all his "hairs in knots," and "with presented nakedness" prepares to "outface / The winds and persecutions of the sky" (9-12), he transforms himself into Poor Tom. In his final words in this speech he also adds his choric func132

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tion to these two personae. The lines, "Poor Turlygod! poor Tom! / That's something yet: Edgar I nothing am," indicate the multiconsciousness that is necessary. In saying "Poor Turlygod! poor Tom!," Edgar may well speak with Tom's inflection, returning to his own voice when he considers the viability of the disguise: "That's something yet." The shift in inflection would thus suggest the two personae. As a realistic participant in the events, Edgar tells us that he has lost his identity as a son of Gloucester: "Edgar I nothing am." As a character who will next appear in Tom's visceral shape, Edgar now assumes a second persona. In these senses Edgar does, as Mack says, shift "along a spectrum between compelling realism and an almost pure representativeness." But implicit in the very nature of the soliloquy, in which an actor engages an audience's confidence, is Edgar's third persona as a commentator. As Kenneth Muir's gloss suggests, Edgar here figuratively steps outside the illusion to advise the spectators that, from this point, he will play the role of Tom: from now on, he tells us, "Edgar I nothing am."S Understood in each of these senses, Edgar's final lines delineate his realistic, symbolic, and choric personae- and their corresponding voices- in the play. The truth of the matter is that these personae are not readily separable. At least not, that is, from the perspective of a reader in his study. Such a reader, envisioning the confrontation between Lear and Poor Tom in the "to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain" in 3,4, may accept that Edgar has undergone a transformation from earl's son to crazed Bedlam. Spectators do not make the transfer so easily. Spectators must keep in mind that Edgar is now Poor Tom, but balance the indentification with the knowledge dogging them that they are, nonetheless, still seeing Edgar. Movement on stage may well indicate that Edgar recoils more sharply than we can imagine when Gloucester includes him in pointedly asking "What are you there? Your names?" (3.4.128). "Poor Tom," replies Edgar, who immediately plunges deeper into his disguise by cataloging what he eats, swallows, and drinks (129-39). Although we cannot be sure Edgar recoils from Gloucester, certainly Gloucester has Edgar in mind here, as we later learn in the conversation the now blinded Gloucester has with the Old Man leading him: Old Man. Gloucester.

Fellow, where goest? Is it a beggar-man? 133

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Old Man. Gloucester.

Madman and beggar too. He has some reason, else he could not beg. I'th' last night's storm I such a fellow saw, Which made me think a man a worm. My son Came then into my mind, and yet my mind Was then scarce friends with him. I have heard more since. (4.1.29- 35)

But the double awareness we must maintain best emerges in Edgar's repetition of the phrase "Tom's a-cold." The phrase is repeated four times in 3,4 (58, 83, 146, 172). The first, second, and fourth times Edgar speaks it, he refers solely to his physical condition as Tom. The third time Edgar speaks these words comes after Gloucester asks his name and commiserates with Lear's paternal misfortunes. "Our flesh and blood, my lord," he says, "is grown so vild / That it doth hate what gets it" (145-46).9 Lear does not answer. But Tom does, and for the second time in the scene Edgar adds the word "Poor" to the phrase. "Poor Tom" (146) is indeed impoverished and cold, beggared and outcast child that he is, and we shade into the area of Edgar's own suffering. In our analyses of 3,4 especially, we tend to overlook Edgar's own psychological dilemma in favor of stressing his symbolic function in the Lear plot. Lear's identification of Tom as the "thing itself" rightly claims our attention as one of the recognitions at the heart of the play. But the importance of Lear's reaction obscures any sense we have that Edgar is still, in fact, Edgar. In the trial scene (3.6), however, we may more easily separate these two dimensions of his role- and add a third dimension to them. As the scene opens, Edgar continues to rave in the manner of Tom, but embedded in and introducing his maniacal outbursts are statements which suggest that Edgar drops Tom's mad idiom and speaks in his own voice. Let us consider one such sequence of comments. First, after taking his place at the mock trial, Edgar remarks, "Let us deal justly" (40), and follows the statement with a snatch of an old song. Then, when Lear starts to rage uncontrollably, Edgar echoes a line he used earlier: "Bless thy five wits!" (3.4.58; 3.6.57). Finally, as Kent intercedes to remind Lear of the "patience ... you so oft have boasted to retain" (58-

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59), Edgar speaks his first "aside": "My tears begin to take his part so much, / They mar my counterfeiting" (60-61). Only the last of these statements is marked by editors as an aside, but they all may be considered "asides" of sorts, delivered with increasing degrees of dissociation from the illusionistic action. Any reader of the play will grasp the thematic relevance of Edgar's "Let us deal justly"; formalistic and spatial analyses link the line to anyone of many references to justice in the play, particularly to Edgar's own assertion, "The gods are just," in 5,3. Whether it be ironic or mocking, unconsciously significant or ominously foreboding, the line thus stands slightly apart from its context. The second of these utterances ("Bless thy five wits!") raises a different sort of problem. In repeating a line he employed in a "mad" context, Edgar seems to do little more than add to his string of nonsensical phrases. But the line does more. It not only anticipates, in its syntactic shape, a number of other "blessings" to be given in the play; it also serves as Edgar's first choric comment, meant to guide audience response to Lear's plight. Although it is not an aside, the line reaches beyond the immediate to elicit an emotional reaction. It is important to note that when Edgar speaks in explicit aside, he uses language ("take his part," "mar my counterfeiting") that separates him from the illusion and accompanies his words with tears which reinforce the empathy he feels. The tears he sheds indicate his emotional response and invite a similar response from the audience. Although Edgar clearly remains within the illusion here, he also "steps outside" the illusion to convey his feelings to the audience. A shift in his relation to the illusion, that is, need not be accompanied by a shift in his location on the stage. His Figurenpositionen may indeed be defined both spatially and verbally. When we hear his last line in this sequence, we more fully comprehend what we have hitherto only apprehended as a multiple and complex rendering of his role: "Poor Tom," he says to himself, "thy horn is dry" (75)}O

"When we our betters" Edgar's comments in 3,6 are carefully modulated to evoke and ultimately to direct audience response. Their effectiveness depends on the

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acting skill with which he maintains a privileged relationship with the audience and on the spectators' knowledge that Poor Tom is still Edgar, even though no one within the illusion is aware of the fact. But these statements are premonitory ones; Edgar's explicitly choric voice does not fully emerge until the conclusion of 3,6, when he remains on stage to deliver a scene-ending soliloquy. Edgar's speech on the value of community and the need for compassion confirms our feeling that he has been emotionally involved in the scene's mad proceedings: When we our betters see bearing our woes, We scarcely think our miseries our foes. Who alone suffers, suffers most i' th' mind, Leaving free things and happy shows behind, But then the mind much sufferance doth o'erskip, When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship. How light and portable my pain seems now, When that which makes me bend makes the King bow: He childed as I fathered! Tom, away! Mark the high noises, and thyself bewray When false opinion, whose wrong thoughts defile thee, In thy just proof repeals and reconciles thee. What will hap more to-night, safe scape the King! Lurk, lurk. (3.6.102-115) In this speech, given while the Fool and Kent bear off the King, Edgar articulates what he feels and relates his misfortune to Lear's. He acknowledges the danger of solipsistic suffering and recognizes the value of "bearing fellowship." He now sees his own "pain" to be "light and portable" compared to the King's burden, and he resolves to throw off ("bewray") his disguise when "just proof" of his integrity recalls him to his rightful position. He lets us know, in short, what his psychological state has been since his soliloquy in 2,3. All this and more the soliloquy provides. What has not been seen is that Edgar here speaks in three voices and that he slides from his choric to his realistic and finally to his symbolic persona during the course of the speech. The soliloquy may be divided, in fact, according to these changes in voice and persona. The first six lines (102-107) are purely choric: Edgar 136

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comments on the larger significance of the King's plight by addressing his remarks directly to the spectators. His use of the pronouns "we" and "our" serves to join, rhetorically, his own experience to that of the outer audience. Both have, after all, been equal parties to the King's crazed delirium. Edgar's "we" is thus inclusive and general. But in the next six lines (108-113), the pronouns change from "we" and "our" to "me" and "my," signaling a shift into Edgar's "realistic" persona that is accompanied by a corresponding modification in tone: whereas before he spoke in a public and choric voice, he now speaks in a private and reflective one. Now the magnitude of Lear's madness is applied to Edgar's specific dilemma. Only now does Edgar recognize that "that which makes me bend makes the King bow" and that Lear has been "childed as I fathered!" (109-110). Influenced by the preceding trial, he goes on to use legal terminology (opinion, just proof, repeal) to express his hope that he will be given the opportunity to be reconciled with his father. In these lines Edgar remains a character within the play; in following his vocal shifts from choric character to realistic participant, we have, as it were, moved with him back into the illusion from his Figurenposition "outside" the play. As we might expect, the last stage of our reintegration into the illusion comes when Edgar reassumes his part as Poor Tom. This shift, too, is signaled by a change in voice. Perhaps Edgar speaks in Tom's mad idiom in saying "Tom, away!" (110), but not until his final words here may we be certain Edgar has once again become Tom. While the words disturb us, since they abruptly change the tenor of the passage, an auditor will hear and understand that Edgar is once again Tom. "Lurk, lurk" (115), he says to close the scene. He had, in his previous sequence of comments in 3,6, dissociated himself from the illusion; he now completes the process of reinvolvement in that illusion. Despite these shifts in persona, there is an internal consistency to Edgar's character throughout the play. Shakespeare maintains this consistency by linking Edgar's thoughts and actions, even when a scene intervenes between his appearances. Such is the case when we next view him in 4,1 and feel as if we had never left him. But an event of major im portance occurs in 3,7 - the blinding of Gloucester- and this action has a certain bearing on our response to Edgar. His brooding speech at the opening of 4,1 continues the thoughts expressed in the soliloquy that 137

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closed 3,6. It begins with an apparent nonsequitur, "Yet," whose logical referent may well be his prior soliloquy and which suggests that he has been brooding over his change in fortune: Yet better thus, and known to be contemn'd, Than still contemn'd and flatter'd. To be worst, The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune, Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear. The lamentable change is from the best, The worst returns to laughter. Welcome then, Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace: The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst Owes nothing to thy blasts. (1-9) In further developing the topos implicit in the recognition that what "makes me bend makes the King bow" (3 .6.109), Edgar explicitly associates his state with the fickle operations of fortune. He reasons that it is better to know he is "contemn'd" than to allow himself to be selfdeluded. Here we can discern the same mixture of choric and realistic speech: his lines are choric and personal and offer, as readers point out, a definition of tragedy based on the de casibus theme. When he welcomes the "unsubstantial air," believing he has withstood fortune's vagaries, however, the lines now belong solely to Edgar's "realistic" persona. But we sense that Edgar is rationalizing. And when Gloucester enters, "poorly led," Edgar absorbs one of the play's many shocks. He has learnt and grown from his suffering thus far, but his dearly bought knowledge is "followed at once by an experience that explodes it."11 Presented with the sight of Gloucester, Edgar realizes the "worst" may be worse still: "I am worse than e'er I was" (26), he laments. For the first time since 2,3 there is a separation between Edgar's and the audience's knowledge. Prior to this point he inhabited a privileged perspective with the spectators. They alone are aware mad Tom is Edgar in disguise, and the fact grants them a degree of knowledge. But they have witnessed Gloucester's blinding, Edgar has not, and a rift now divides their understanding from Edgar's. Edgar's part as a character who stands at a distance from the action now partly merges with his realistic role, and his soliloquy on the vagaries of fortune becomes no more than a rationalization. His cry, "0 138

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gods!" (25), not only recalls Gloucester's three cries in 3,7 (35, 70, 92), but also delimits the extent of his ken in calculating the inscrutable ways of the gods in King Lear. Although Edgar's limitations as a choric character make him an unreliable spokesman, there is a corresponding increase in his believability as a character in the play. And even if Edgar's views may now be seen as fallible, he still communicates with the spectators through his asides, still maintains, qualified though it now may be, a privileged relationship with them. While Edgar may not, the spectators hear Gloucester's thoughts about Poor Tom and his son (31-35). But Edgar responds as we would wish to Gloucester's despairing judgment that ''As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, / They kill us for their sport" (36-37). "How should this be?" communicates Edgar in aside, and immediately he intuits that to reveal himself to Gloucester would serve no useful purpose: "Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow, / Ang'ring itself and others" (3739). He offers his father one of Tom's mad blessings: "Bless thee, master!" (39).

At this point we begin to question Edgar's wisdom in remaining in disguise rather than revealing his true identity. Put another way, it is here we question Shakespeare's decision to allow Edgar to continue dissembling rather than to embrace his father. We will do so again when he admits his "fault" in not revealing himself "unto him, / Until some half hour past" (5.3.193 -194). If he has not heard Gloucester speak about the way "my son came into my mind" in the storm, Edgar may still be guarding his identity from discovery. But the interpretative controversy here hinges on the reason why Edgar feels he "must" remain in disguise. After repeating the phrase he used twice in responding to Gloucester in 3,4 ("Poor Tom's a-cold"), Edgar seems convinced he "cannot daub it further" (4.1.52). ''And yet," as he tells us, "I must" (54), and he again shifts from talking in aside to speaking directly to Gloucester, blessing him a second time: "Bless thy sweet eyes, they bleed" (54). But why "must" he? In my view Edgar recognizes that playing the "fool to sorrow," that is, pandering to his father's despair, will not save the ruined earl. He decides, with the force of his realization that one's burden will be lightened when "grief hath mates and bearing fellowship," to try to save his father. He decides that to reveal himself would not help Gloucester regain his 139

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self-esteem. Edgar fully reassumes Tom's voice (56-63) and agrees to lead Gloucester, a man who has not seen because he "does not feel" (69), to Dover Cliff, from where Gloucester will "no leading need" (78). Edgar listens in silence as Gloucester gives the lie to his opening words in this scene: "That I am wretched / Makes thee the happier" (65-66). But when the madman agrees to take the blind man's arm, he also agrees to take on the task of restoring Gloucester's faith.

"In nothing am I chang'd" In 4,6 Edgar reveals to the audience that he trifles "thus with [Gloucester's] despair ... to cure it" (33-34). This aside should clarify, retrospectively, Edgar's earlier decision; for readers who object to Edgar's behavior in 4,1, however, this "cryptic" aside may sound like too little clarification come too late. But as Robert B. Heilman demonstrates,12 in order to overcome the sin of despair, Gloucester must totally transform his ways of perceiving and understanding the world: he must deny the norms of sensory experience to reawaken his faith and to learn how to "Bear free and patient thoughts" (4.6.80). As a moral agent, Edgar assists Gloucester in this task, and even though he "tricks" him, the deception is not meant to harm Gloucester, as Edmund tricked him earlier. "Trickery" itself is neutral; it gains meaning only with knowledge of the agent's intention. As Harry Levin suggests,13 however, the molehill scene may well involve more than Edgar's educative deception of Gloucester. The audience is also nearly tricked into believing Gloucester has fallen so far down Dover Cliff that "ten masts at each make not the altitude" he has "perpendicularly fell" (53-54). There is immense controversy surrounding the effect this scene has, with consensual opinion holding the view that an audience would not believe they were actually at Dover Cliff, about to watch Gloucester's suicide attempt.14 As Levin points out, however, one thing is certain about the scene: here Shakespeare interweaves an audience's illusionistic assumptions with Gloucester's salvation. In this scene both are blind, after all, if in different ways: Gloucester believes the "ground is even" (3); given theatrical convention (and Gloucester's ruined eyes), the audience 140

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is prepared to accept "Whatever is said on the subject of immediate place as the setting"15 and instead may well believe Edgar when he tells Gloucester the ground is "Horrible steep" (3). After he "falls," Gloucester questions, "But have I fall'n, or no?" (56); now aware Gloucester has been tricked, the audience knows he has, if only a few feet. But before the spectators fully comprehend Edgar's chicanery, Shakespeare has manipulated their expectations a number of times. On the relatively bare apron stage, the illusion must be established at the beginning of each scene, and here Shakespeare plays upon the very idea of an audience's illusionistic expectation. The powerful, "vertiginous" impression Edgar's speech on the vista before them has had on readers, at least since Samuel Taylor Coleridge's comments, in fact creates the illusion of sights and sounds Gloucester's-and the audience's-"deficient sight" (23) can only visualize: Come on, sir, here's the place; stand still. How fearful And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low! The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half way down Hangs one that gathers sampire, dreadful trade! Methinks he seems no bigger than his head. The fishermen that walk upon the beach Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge, That on th' unnumb'red idle pebble chafes, Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong. (11-24) The pains Shakespeare takes to create the illusion of Dover Cliff have made many readers doubt whether they ever knew Edgar's intention. 16 As critical testimony bears out, there are two possible responses to these events. If we do not sense Edgar's true purpose here, we are willing to believe we are on Dover Cliff. On the other hand, if we sense that Edgar intends to trick Gloucester as a way of saving him from despair, we go along with the deception. It seems to me that the truth of the 141

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matter probably lies somewhere in between: individual audience members may feel one way or the other~ but the majority of them find themselves moving between their illusionistic assumptions and their nonillusionistic knowledge. In this scene spectators participate in the program of Gloucester's renewal, a process involving the denial of his accustomed ways of perceiving the world, and they do so in a way that places them in a position similar to Gloucester's. Indeed, the most revealing aspect of the scene could well be the realization that Shakespeare is consciously manipulating audience expectation. The theatrical multiconsciousness required here corresponds not only to different illusionistic and nonillusionistic effects in the theater but also to the Figurenpositionen implicit in Edgar's realistic and "choric" personae. When Gloucester tells Edgar, now dressed as a peasant, "Methinks thy voice is alter'd, and thou speak'st / In better phrase and matter than thou didst" (7-8), an auditor is uncertain how to respond. Shakespeare has Edgar speak in blank verse, as opposed to his earlier prosaic language, to indicate his "alter'd" voice. But Edgar, speaking in blank verse, immediately tells Gloucester "Y' are much deceived. In nothing am I chang'd / But in my garments" (8-9). "Edgar I nothing am" indeed. Gloucester here persists, "Methinks y' are better spoken" (10), but to no avail. The exchange raises two different sets of questions about Edgar's vocal shifts throughout the play. One set is related to Edgar's role within the illusion. A second set is involved with the relationship between his realistic and choric personae. The most glaring modification in Edgar's voice comes when he adopts a "Somersetshire" dialect at the end of this scene, but he may also speak in slightly altered voice when he appears to challenge Edmund in 5,3. These are but two examples, however. In fact, Edgar speaks with different inflection not only in these instances, but also in his "dispositions" as Poor Tom, as a peasant, and as the man who tells Gloucester his "life's a miracle" (55) after the supposed fall from the cliff. His is indeed a demanding theatrical role, perhaps the most difficult in the play. Only at the play's beginning and end can it be said he uses Edgar's "true" voice, and even in these cases the naive dupe of the play's opening has matured sufficiently to allow him to "speak what we feel" at its close.I 7 These vocal changes are tied to Edgar's disguises and mark stages in 142

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his attempt to regain his true identity. They are recognizable in the text, and they occur within the illusion. But what of the less noticeable vocal shifts from his realistic to his choric persona? Quite apart from the questions raised by his changes within the illusion, Edgar's two personae also raise the issue of multiple meaning in his language. All good readers of Shakespeare are sensitive to and possess the ability to discern multiple meanings in language. But readers of a play do not often have the ability to link these meanings to an actor's performance or to an audience's multiconsciousness. We teach students the way we believe a line ought to be read, thereby "fixing" its meaning, but all too often a performance gives the lie to our surmises or makes us see there is more (or less) in the line than we originally thought. Such may well be the case when Edgar tells Gloucester "Y' are much deceiv'd" (4.6.9). In what sense is Gloucester deceived? In a primary sense Edgar instructs his father that he is wrong to think his voice has changed. Gloucester still believes, and the audience knows, differently. Although that audience may have to wait to be certain, they will discover that Gloucester has been correct three times: he is right in saying the ground is level, that he does not hear the sea, and that Edgar's speech is altered. But he is also "much deceiv'd" in three roughly corresponding senses: his son is duping him as to his real identity, is duping Gloucester's ability to feel and hear, and is drawing attention to Gloucester's defective ways of perceiving the world. The line points in many directions at the same time: Gloucester has been self-deceived; Edgar here deceives him further; and the audience, whether it recognizes it or not, is a witness to deception. Edgar's next words clarify the relation between his multiple meanings and his different personae. As a character who shares a privileged perspective with the spectators, Edgar tells Gloucester he has not "chang'd" except "in his garments." Despite the apparent transformations in his state, he still remains Edgar, son of Gloucester. He plays upon the meaning of "change" as a modification in voice or tone and as an alteration in condition, but his father cannot understand the line in both of these senses because of the deception. He must interpret it as a denial of his statement that Edgar's voice seems to have "alter'd," and he responds by repeating his observation: "Methinks y' are better spoken." Edgar's true identity as an earl's son surfaces, if only for a moment, and Gloucester notices 143

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it. But spectators have a greater task here. To understand fully the dynamics of the exchange, an audience must not only attend to the immediate illusionistic context but also recall their prior, privileged knowledge. By using a line syntactically similar to the last line in Edgar's soliloquy in 2,3, Shakespeare at least assists them in their interpretative task: "In nothing am I chang'd / But in my garments," says Edgar, referring first to his change in dress and secondly to his unchanged identity. As Edgar exorcizes the specter of Poor Tom and calls Gloucester "thou happy father," we again attend to his words with the double awareness that he speaks of Gloucester as a fonunate old man the gods have preserved and as his natural parent.

"Speak what we feel" In convincing Gloucester that "Thy life's a miracle" and in encouraging him to "Bear free and patient thoughts," Edgar succeeds in restoring Gloucester's faith and sounds the note of romance that pervades the play's founh act. We all feel, at this point, that all will be well. Immediately, we, Gloucester, and Edgar absorb another shock, the "side-piercing sight" of Lear, "crowned with weeds and flowers." Edgar will relate to the audience his own assessment of Lear's and Gloucester's meeting: "I would not take this from repon; it is, / And my hean breaks at it" (141-142). And he will tell us funher that Lear's ravings mix "matter and impertinency ... Reason in madness" (174-175). But even after this scene of recognition we assume all may be well, since we see Edgar take his first decisive action by killing Oswald. Events in the play seem to show, as Albany comments when he learns about Cornwall's death, "you are above, / You justicers, that these our nether crimes / So speedily can venge!" (4.2.78-80). And Edgar himself seems to have reached a plateau of understanding. Gloucester asks him "what are you?" (4.6.220).18 In his reply Edgar again lies to Gloucester about his identity, but he does so in a revealing way. In lines full of precipitates from earlier speeches ("a most poor man," "fonune's blows") that now crystallize in his humble and mature awareness of his own "possibilities," Edgar identifies himself as a man who has learned from the "known and feeling sorrows" he has 144

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endured, and who is capable, above all, of empathy: ''A most poor man, made tame to fortune's blows, / Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, / Am pregnant to good pity" (4.6.221-223). Oswald intervenes but is quickly disposed of, and there is hope, when Edgar again takes Gloucester by the hand (4.6.284), that the virtuous characters in King Lear will thrive. Indeed, Lear's awakening in Cordelia's presence does nothing to change our feeling. All the virtuous characters have suffered and endured, and Lear's request to Cordelia to "bear with me. / Pray you now forget, and forgive; I am old and foolish" (4.7.82-83) again sounds the note of romance. Even Nahum Tate would have been satisfied with King Lear had it maintained this mode. But the play has further shocks in store. To this point the experience of an audience closely parallels Edgar's experience throughout the play.19 It has held on to his perspective and gone through what he has gone through. But it is also true, as Maynard Mack reasons, that "three times" in the play a "formula summarizing Edgar's present stage of learning is presented ... only to be followed at once with an experience that explodes it": He [Edgar] observes that to be mad Tom is to be at Fortune's nadir with no change possible except for the better, then meets his blinded father and knows 'I am worse then e'er I was.' He heals his father's despair at Dover Cliff, but finds him after the battle 'in ill thoughts again' and ready to 'rot' where he is. He pronounces judgment on his brother and on his father's act in begetting him, in full confidence, as we have heard him say, that 'The gods are just,' only to learn in a few moments that Cordelia has been hanged at the order of that brother and under the countenance of those gods. 20 As we have seen, in the first of these cases the audience is aware of Gloucester's blinding, while Edgar is not, and this fact separates its experience from his. But the shocks that come to Edgar after this point are shocks for everyone present, especially those who believe "The gods are just" in King Lear. Edgar's career in the final act and one-half thus parallels the audience's; he has taken them by the hand as well, and the sheer number of lines he has in the play only suggests his large role in guiding that response. To be sure, there are other characters whose experience we share in 145

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King Lear. Kent immediately comes to mind. He explained to the spectators the purpose of his disguise in 1,4, and throughout the storm scenes we are aware he too is in disguise. But we do not get so involved with Kent as we do with Edgar. Although the two characters perform complementary roles in the Lear and Gloucester plots, there are important differences between them. Kent belongs to the symbolic Lear plot but acts concretely; Edgar belongs to the concrete Gloucester plot but functions symbolically as Poor Tom in the Lear plot. Kent represents the norms of manhood and service in the play; Edgar contributes to the play's use of clothing imagery and, in his external condition as Tom, parallels Lear's internal condition. It is Edgar, however, who also establishes much of the play's tone, Edgar who serves as the play's choric voice, Edgar whose experience we emulate in viewing the play. We are, in fact, closer to Edgar than to Lear, who seldom responds to anyone (thereby increasing our sense of his isolation) and whose towering presence removes him from us. His tragedy is the one we must learn about, but it is Edgar who teaches us the way we should react. Because we share so much of Edgar's perspective, however, we (and especially those readers Cavell has influenced) often find him wanting. We will not forgive him for being a less than perfect raisonneur, forgetting to realize that he is himself learning and growing during the play and that his choric speeches are only provisional judgments on the significance of the action. We do not forgive his "fault" in waiting until the last moment to reveal his true identity to Gloucester, when, hearing the truth, Gloucester's "flaw'd heart ... / 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly"-even though Edgar tells us that he did save Gloucester "from despair" (5.3.197-200, 192). We go through the play blaming him for not revealing himself and then hear what happens when he does. If Edgar and Cordelia had behaved differently, so the reasoning goes, this would not be the outcome. These are impressionistic responses to the imagined moral efficacy of Edgar's revealing himself to his father. As such, they bear little weight. But the feeling that lies behind this impressionism may be more valid. King Lear demands an affective response from its audience; as Michael Goldman perceived, Shakespeare pushes our response to extremes at the end of the play.21 146

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Readers who continue to fault Edgar and Cordelia for their actions are in error, but their response is understandable, as Samuel Johnson's well-known testimony makes abundantly clear. 22 Such a response is understandable because it touches, subliminally, upon the most disturbing psychological fact about King Lear, the death of Cordelia. If there is a psychological truth about the play, it is that the experience of reading or viewing Lear is an unsettling, even distressing one. What occurs in the final scene indeed confounds "the hope of the reader." Such an affective response as Samuel Johnson's may miss the mark by expressing what one would have liked to happen, but it does aim at the heart of the matter. It may also partly explain the impetus behind, and the tremendous two-hundred-year success enjoyed by, Nahum Tate's rewritten version, in which Lear lives to an even older age and in which Edgar and Cordelia marry and live happily ever after. To different degrees Cavell, Johnson, and Tate have each imaginatively rewritten the play in the hope that its "shocks" might be softened, better endured. But Edgar is not responsible for the play's most shocking event. He, Kent, and Albany constitute an on-stage audience less aware of what may occur to Lear and Cordelia than are the spectators in the theater. Throughout 5,3 their privileged knowledge grants them some measure of equanimity; now, however, the greatest source of their anxiety derives from the privileged knowledge they once again possess. This knowledge they share not with Edgar, but with the villainous Edmund, and it is Shakespeare's intention to return the source of our privileged knowledge to Edmund, as was the case at the play's opening. They have seen Edmund send the Captain to do "man's work" (39), in some unspecified manner to dispatch Cordelia and, they must suppose, Lear. They may watch and applaud the way Edgar regains his lost name and title ("My name is Edgar," [170]) and feel that the creaking and groaning wheel of justice and fortune "is come full circle" (175) when Edmund is mortally wounded. But they must surely be put on edge when a Gentleman enters "with a bloody knife" crying "Help, help! 0, help!" (223). Edgar again responds as we would want him, asking "What kind of help?" (223), but this time he lacks the knowledge to help. The audience is on its own. "What means this bloody knife?" (224) demands Edgar, the appropriate character to voice the question everyone on stage, and especially off stage, has 147

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on his lips. ''/ 'Tis hot, it smokes, / It came even from the heart of-a, she's dead!" (225-226), answers the Gentleman. The referent of "she's" is ambiguous and may well be a deliberate obfuscation on Shakespeare's part. "Who dead? Speak, man," asks Albany, increasing the anxiety of everyone present, but especially the spectators', since the onstage audience has simply "forgot" (237) about Lear and Cordelia. But it is only the deaths of Goneril and Regan, not Cordelia, and we may all settle back. For a moment. The pacing here reveals Shakespeare at his finest, with lulls leading to frenzies as a result of the dextrous manipulation of the audience. 23 All may yet be well. This "judgment of the heavens" (232) is reassuring, and we greet Kent's arrival with composure. But once again, in keeping with the scene's - and the play's - alternating reassuring and tensioncreating moments, our response quickens. Edmund makes fully clear that the Captain was sent "To hang Cordelia in the prison, and / To lay the blame upon her own despair, / That she fordid herself" (254-256). We are all too familiar with what follows. Albany'S hope that "The gods defend her" (257) is devastatingly undercut by Lear's entrance with Cordelia in his arms; his lines only cruelly serve to cue Lear's entry. Our sustaining props throughout the play, Kent and Edgar, are as helpless as we are, and only guide us to see these events as "the promis'd end" or "image of that horror" (264-265). There has been justice, but it has not been, as it often is not, equitable, and we realize that the gods have all along stood by simply waiting while Lear's tragic choices have brought on tragic consequences. But it is correct that we return to Edgar in the play's last speech (provided that we follow the Folio text). Throughout 5,3 the audience has been separated from him, but it is fitting that the spectators, on and off stage, now share his mature vision. We may have blamed him for not guiding our response earlier, but in these lines he speaks yet again what we all feel: 24 The weight of this sad'time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say: The oldest hath borne most; we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (324-327) 148

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The new king's formal couplets and rhetoric do not disguise the intent of this speech by our voice of "feeling" in the play. Edgar has helped us bear the "weight of this sad time." We may have blamed him for not knowing what was about to happen, but he has been as helpless and human as we have. Edgar's "we" embraces everyone within and without the play and is pointedly spoken to all. His realistic and choric voices are now one. His humane perspective is all the more affecting because of his Figurenpositionen in King Lear. Reader and spectator, literary critic, and theatrical interpreter, have been led to this point. Our knowledge of a character's Figurenpositionen can help us link language, staging, and "affect" in Renaissance drama.

149

VII Voice and Multiple Awareness in Macbeth

'~s

sensitive as Hamlet ... as ruthless as Richard III"

When Macduff "cows" Macbeth's "better part of man," Macbeth realizes that the Witches have been "juggling fiends" who paltered with him "in a double sense," keeping "the word of promise" to his "ear" and breaking it to his "hope" (5.8.18-22). Banquo knew that to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray's In deepest consequence. (1.3.123-126) But his admonition was lost upon Macbeth. Only when faced by Macduff does Macbeth question the equivocation of the fiends. It is too late. This Thane of Cawdor dies willingly, throwing "away the dearest thing he ow'd, / As 'twere a careless trifle" (1.4.10-11). He comes to realize fully, "There's nothing serious in mortality: / All is but toys: renown and grace is dead" (2.3.93-94). Once Duncan's "worthiest cousin," Macbeth turns into a traitorous usurper. He yields to "that suggestion / Whose horrid image" unfixes his hair and makes his "seated heart knock" at his ribs "against the use of nature" (1. 3.1 34-1 37), turning into someone whose "fell of hair" cannot "rouse and stir / As life were in't." "Direness, familiar to [his] slaughterous thoughts," cannot startle him any more (5.5.11-15). He had "unseam'd" the "merciless" Macdonwald "from the nave to th' chops, / And fix'd his head upon our battlements," subduing a man "worthy to be a 150

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rebel, for to that / The multiplying villainies of nature / Do swarm upon him" (1.2.22-23, 10-12). He had also, "point against point, rebellious arm 'gainst arm," curbed Sweno's "lavish spirit" (1.2.56-57). Now the traitorous Macbeth must die, and Macduff will enter with Macbeth's "armed head" to proclaim "the time is free" (5.9.21). What Macbeth "hath lost," the noble Macduff "hath won" (1.3.67). These references demarcate the perimeters of action in Macbeth. Within their boundaries Shakespeare delineates the hardening of Macbeth's heart and the loss of his capacity to feel. And yet, because he knows what has happened to him, because, time and again, he records that awareness in his soliloquies and asides, Macbeth retains the equivocal appeal of a hero-villain. Indeed, as E. A. J. Honigmann points out,l when readers describe Macbeth's paradoxical attraction, they often arrive at opposed conclusions. Suggesting that Macbeth "shrinks" during the play and that his tragedy is one of "decreasing moral awareness," Robert B. Heilman argues that Macbeth is a "contracting character who seems to discard large areas of consciousness as he goes."2 From this perspective the "compunctious visitings of nature" matter less and less to him; with compunction removed Macbeth allows "the very firstlings of [his] heart" to be "the firstlings of [his] hand" (4.1.147-148); his rich and vivid (moral) imagination becomes dull and sterile. For Wayne Booth, on the other hand, Shakespeare keeps "two contradictory streams moving simultaneously: the events showing Macbeth's growing wickednesses and the tide of our mounting sympathy."3 According to this thesis, Duncan's murder occurs offstage because Shakespeare does not wish us to condemn Macbeth; set against his action is the "mounting sympathy" we feel for him. But when Banquo and especially when Lady Macduff and her son are murdered before our eyes, our response shifts from sympathy to antipathy. Logically opposed to the view which holds that we respond to Macbeth with "mounting sympathy" would be one which, like Heilman's, might argue that we respond to Macbeth's growing indifference to murder with "mounting antipathy."4 I do not think there is a "tidy line of response" to Macbeth, and it seems to me that Honigmann is correct when he proposes that our "mixed response" "zig-zags" as we alternately sympathize with and are appalled by Macbeth. In keeping with his practice Shakespeare turns the 151

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audience against Macbeth at the moment he enters "as King," but the spectators do not finally separate themselves from him. While "the steady coarsening of Macbeth's moral nature ... affects the audience adversely," Shakespeare also takes steps to "protect his tragic hero." Because he is "his own accuser we can participate simultaneously with his moral and criminal nature."5 The horrors of Macbeth's actions burst upon the audience with the murder of Macduff's family in 4,2. Yet Shakespeare focuses on Macbeth's loss of conscience more than on his crimes. Indeed, he maintains a mixed response by splitting the action into two dimensions and by providing Macbeth with two different "voices."

"I am in blood stepp'd in so far" To begin to come to terms with the play's dimensions and the nature of an audience's multiple awareness, a comparison with Shakespeare's other hero-villain will again be instructive. In my concluding comments on Richard III, I made a number of distinctions between Macbeth and Richard III, stressing that, although their careers trace a downward path, they travel in different directions. Richard was always a villain. The spectators needed to acknowledge what they knew all along and to assert their moral natures. Macbeth, in contrast, falls into villainy, and his asides and soliloquies document his loss of conscience. On the surface he resembles Richard, but beneath that surface lie psychological depths. And yet in several important structural ways Macbeth does resemble Richard III. Like the earlier tragedy, Macbeth contains two rhythms, each demanding a different response. One structure, discernible in the play's opening and closing concinnities, traces Macbeth's rise and fall and recalls the similar pattern found in Richard III. Within these boundaries lies the play's overarching dramatic action, "the swelling act / Of the imperial theme." The contours of this grand action are well known and bear a number of resemblances to Richard III. With the help and prompting of Lady Macbeth, Macbeth achieves the throne by murdering Duncan. He appears to be secure in the kingship, but from the moment he "enters" 152

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crowned "as King," Macbeth wonders whether he "shall ... wear these glories for a day? / Or shall they last, and we rejoice in them?" (RIll. 4.2.5 -6). Like Richard when he ascends the throne, Macbeth feels that "To be thus is nothing / But to be safely thus," and he reveals that Banquo must now die lest his heirs "father ... a line of kings" (3 .1.47-48, 59). Like Richard Ill's, Macbeth's murderers remove those who stand in his way. But Macduff escapes, to England, and joins with Malcolm. There they learn, with "each new morn," that in Scotland "New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows / Strike heaven on the face" (4.3.4-5). And when they learn that Macbeth has had Macduff's innocent wife and children murdered, they steel themselves against him. Lennox and Rosse, who attended the "tyrant's feast," confirm their deep suspicions. They move to Malcolm's and the English side to "give ... sleep to our nights" and to "Free from our feasts and banquets bloody knives." They will not "sup" with Macbeth, ruler of a darkened world. Macbeth has made Scotland a country "suffering . . . Under a hand accurs'd!" (3.6.22, 34-35,48-49). They do not need a Scrivener to question them, "Here's a good world the while! Who is so gross / That cannot see this palpable device? / Yet who's so bold but says he sees it not?" (RIll 3.6.10-12). Speaking with Rosse and the Old Man after Duncan's murder, Macduff poses his own questions: Ross.

Here comes the good Macduff. How goes the world, sir, now? Macd. Why, see you not? (2.4.20-21)

Macduff will not attend Macbeth's coronation. As Lennox and the anonymous Lord make clear in 3,6, everyone in Scotland comes to see what Macbeth has done. Morally awakened and outraged, Menteth, Cathness, Angus, and Lennox join Macduff, Rosse, Siward, Malcolm, and the English army to march against Dunsinane Hill. Like Richard III, Macbeth begins his descent after he ascends the throne. The forces that will defeat him rise against him. He is more and more isolated, and "Those he commands move only in command, / Nothing in love." His "secret murthers" stick on "his hands," and his "borrowed robes" hang "loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarf153

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ish thief" (1.3.109; 5.2.19-22).6 Reduced in stature, Macbeth completes this structural pattern by falling to Macduff and by receiving the same ignominious treatment he meted out to Macdonwald. In its broad structural outlines Macbeth resembles Richard III. But Macbeth contains another structural rhythm, different from the countermovement present in Richard III. Within its limits lies a "drama of internal awareness,"7 and it is here, as John Russell Brown notes, that a different set of organizing principles for the play may be sought "at a level of consciousness in the characters below that which is expressed fully in the denotative meaning of the words they speak."8 Within this subtext Macbeth's words resonate with meanings beyond their immediate illusionistic context, and Shakespeare depicts Macbeth's latent consciousness. None of the illusion-bound thanes ever see the inner disintegration of Macbeth. The only witnesses to this psychological drama are the spectators (and, for a time, Lady Macbeth), who follow, step by step, in inverse proportion to his rise, Macbeth's moral decline. Uniting these rhythms is their "common tragic resolution" in Macbeth's destruction. 9 Separating them is the divided response evoked by a hero-villain. At the end of the play Malcolm and the thanes celebrate the fall of a cursed usurper and a villain; the spectators, aware that Macbeth is a villain, also lament the loss of his soul. Their response is dual, for he has been the play's protagonist and antagonist. At the end Macbeth is a tragedy only for the spectators, whose privileged knowledge stays with them. To the extent that Macbeth resembles Richard III, he is his mirror image. Dramaturgically, thematically, and characteristically, Macbeth is the obverse of Richard III. The "outer" illusionistic play of crime and punishment is a palimpsest upon a drama of internal awareness}O Macbeth's and Richard's distinctly different downward paths only intersect when they echo each other's words: "I am in / So far in blood" that "Sin will pluck on sin" (RIll. 4.2.63-64; Macb. 3.5.135-136). Whatever external resemblance Macbeth bears to Richard III is overshadowed by Shakespeare's exploration of the "art" by which the "mind's construction" can be found in "the face" (1.4.12). These comparisons help to explain Macbeth's paradoxical attraction and suggest the direction Shakespeare's art has taken. In measuring the distance between Richard III and Macbeth, we mark off the dimensions 154

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of Shakespeare's changing approach to character. Set within the illusion, the thanes respond to Macbeth just as we might suppose audiences did to the ponrayal of Richard III. They panicipate in a drama of moral awakening. Spectators at performances of Macbeth respond differently. Macbeth has two personae, one apparent to the characters and a second known only to the spectators. His presentational "pan" as a villain is at odds with his inner, representational "role" as a sentient, vividly imaginative, and fearfully moral man. There are "two" Macbeths-one "bloody, bold and resolute," another haunted and imaginative-and as actors have discovered, reconciling these "mighty opposites" is the major challenge posed by the role. II Although his personae collapse into one at the end, a second awareness yet dogs the audience and haunts their minds, still draws them "to feel and to share the ache of the mind diseased, the rooted sorrow."12

"Look how our partner's rapt" To come to terms with the "mixed response" Macbeth evokes, we need to apply those dramaturgical principles Shakespeare used throughout his career, keeping in mind that Macbeth contains distinct structural rhythms. In the first half of the play Macbeth's desire for the kingship is set against his fear of the "deep damnation" that will accompany Duncan's "taking-off" (1.7.20). The "swelling act of the imperial theme" is at odds with the visitings of nature revealed in Macbeth's soliloquies and "asides." The aside, in panicular, is used in new ways in Macbeth, ways that are in keeping with the doubleness of the action. In this sense it will be instructive to recall the way Shakespeare establishes Hamlet's Figurenpositionen and aligns our perspective with the Prince's in the council scene (1.2). In that scene Hamlet's relationship to the locus-oriented action is plotted by a carefully patterned series of dramatic speeches. Aside, dialogue, soliloquy, dialogue, and final aside mark those movements. In Macbeth something quite similar occurs, but in this play the aside and soliloquy serve not only to depict the workings of Macbeth's mind, but also to establish the doubleness of the action. From his first appearance Macbeth leads a double life as a character set within the play 155

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who yet reveals his thoughts to the spectators from his figural positions within the illusion. The dramaturgical means by which Shakespeare establishes these Figurenpositionen are crucial to our understanding of an audience's multiple awareness, of its "mixed response," and of Shakespeare's continuing experimentation with the ponrayal of inner life. When we first see Macbeth and hear him speak, he is clearly set within the illusion. We know two things about him that he does not know: Duncan has named him Thane of Cawdor, and the Witches' words have infiltrated his speech: "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" (1.3.38). After the Witches "hail" him as "Glamis," "Cawdor," and "King hereafter," he "seems," as Banquo says, "rapt withal" (57). When he speaks again, he wonders why these hags came to possess "this strange intelligence" and why they "stop" his and Banquo's "way / With such prophetic greeting" (76-78). And when Rosse and Angus enter to "hail" him as Thane of Cawdor, thereby confirming the Witches' second prophecy, Macbeth wonders "why" they "dress me in borrowed robes" (108-109). When he realizes he is the Thane of Cawdor, however, he speaks his first "aside," separating himself from the illusion of dialogue: "Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor! / The greatest is behind!" (116-117). He then "turns," reengaging Rosse and Angus in conversation ("Thanks for your pains") only to step out of that dialogue to speak, again in aside, to Banquo: "Do you not hope your children shall be kings, / When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me / Promis'd no less to them?" (118-120). After his aside (123 -12 6) to Macbeth, Banquo speaks with Angus and Rosse ("Cousins, a word, I pray you"). And now, after the shon aside ("Two truths are told") that introduces the play's grand dramatic action and an offhanded, preoccupied repetition of his comment to Rosse and Angus ("I thank you, gentlemen" [127-129]), Macbeth provides his first deeply introspective "aside." It functions much like a soliloquy and traces Macbeth's thoughts in the "very process of conscious formulation"13: [Aside.] This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion 156

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Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is But what is not. (130-142) Rationality and logic, seen in the binary opposition of "ill" and "good," dissolve before a horrid image. It is premonitory of the many strange images of death that Macbeth will create}4 Here as elsewhere in the play Shakespeare signals the penetration of deeper layers of consciousness by a colon. 15 Here he also introduces three of the play's major motifs: the vividness of Macbeth's moral imagination ("horrid image ... horrible imaginings"), the relation between action ("function") and thought ("surmise"), and the issue of time and consequence. He presents Macbeth as a man torn between the desire to be and the fear of what it would cost to become king. This aside is delivered while the other characters "speak," inaudibly, to each other. Only Macbeth's voice is heard. He does not have to come downstage to deliver these lines, although in modern production he often does. Indeed, the "aside" added by the eighteenth-century editor, Edward Capell, is wholly inadequate to describe what occurs when, for the first time, the character embeds himself in an illusion he himself creates. Here a shift in Macbeth's manner of speech corresponds to a change in his relation to the immediate illusionistic context. The effect of the aside is akin to what we might call a meditative "voice over," whereby we hear a character's "thoughts" while other characters do not. 16 The effect is also to split the illusionistic action into two dimensions. When Banquo speaks again, he repeats his earlier line: "Look," he tells Rosse and Angus, "how our partner's rapt." He and the thanes see a silent, brooding man, lost in contemplation. The spectators, on the other hand, have heard his thoughts. Two levels of action and awareness coexist here, and a new representational use of a presentational device is seen, one in which, in the midst of a locus-centered conversation, a platea-like disclosure emerges. 157

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Indeed, as with Hamlet, Shakespeare carefully patterns Macbeth's asides. Three short asides (two of which are conventional while the other is spoken to Banquo) lead into this longer, introspective aside; three 'more short asides lead from it to renewed dialogue. Two of them are also conventional musings ("If chance will have me king" [143-144] and "Come what come may" [146-147]), and one is again spoken to Banquo (153155). These different kinds of aside, and their corresponding Figurenpositionen, invite us to move into and out of the recesses of Macbeth's mind. They mark increasing degrees of dissociation from the illusionistic context and proximity to Macbeth's deepest thoughts and suggest a Figurenposition in which a meditative speculation emerges from an illusionistic context. This sequence is crucial to our understanding of the play's double structure and an audience's multiple awareness. Three different kinds of "aside" are present. The first, conventional kind allows us to hear, parenthetically, what a character "thinks" while he stands within the illusion, engaged in conversation with other characters. The second allows us to overhear what two characters say to each other while other characters do not hear them; it is similar to an embedded dialogue or to speaking behind someone's back. The third kind, more like a soliloquy than an aside, allows us to share a character's most private thoughts and feelings. These different asides all occur from within the illusionistic scene. All three provide the audience with privileged knowledge and are so subtly shaded that they are in keeping with the degrees of awareness held by the characters. Rosse and Angus know nothing of the Witches' prophecies, and they, appropriately, are not privy to any of these asides. Macbeth and Banquo, each hailed by the Witches, exchange their private feelings about those predictions. Macbeth alone reveals that they have affected his fears and desires. The different degrees of knowledge displayed give rise to multiple awareness about the action's different levels. None of the thanes ever know what Macbeth truly thinks. But Banquo will maintain a unique relationship with Macbeth from this point. It will be developed in the conversation he has with Macbeth just before Macbeth goes to murder Duncan (2.1.11-30). It will make us wonder what thoughts lie beneath the surface of Banquo's words when, awakened after the murder is discovered, he must "countenance this horror," be shaken 158

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by "fears and scruples" and fight his suspicions of "treasonous malice" (2.3.80, 129ff.). And it will prepare us for his soliloquy in 3,1, when he announces his fear that Macbeth "play'dst most foully" for what he now "hast" (1-10).17 Indeed, Macbeth's "fears in Banquo stick deep." And like Banquo, Lady Macbeth will also know the Witches' prophecies and Macbeth's "black and deep desires." But only the spectators fully participate in Macbeth's dilemma. They alone witness in its entirety Macbeth's struggle to uphold his moral nature. These different levels of knowledge and degrees of awareness play across the surface of Macbeth and determine our response. When Duncan greets Macbeth as his "worthiest cousin," we know Macbeth's apparently magnanimous and gracious statement, that the "service and loyalty" he owes Duncan "pays itself," hides the fact that as these words fall from his lips his mind is full of slaughterous thoughts. Here Macbeth's dramatic entry draws attention to the importance of finding the "mind's construction in the face." Macbeth has been one of Duncan's dutiful "children and servants" (1.4.22-23, 25), but as his "aside" here reveals, he is wrestling with how to "hide" his "black and deep desires" from the light and with how, now that Duncan has named Malcolm heir to the throne, he can overcome that obstacle. "That," he says, "is a step / On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap, / For in my way it lies." He asks his "eye" to "wink" at the actions of his "hand" but knows that he should "let that be / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see" (4853).18 Duncan's arrival at Inverness is similarly attended with ironies. We know that when Lady Macbeth greets Duncan, her warm words and promise of "service," so genuinely expressed, disguise her true feelings. She protests that her and her husband's "service ... Were poor and single ... Against those honors deep and broad wherewith / Your Majesty loads our house" (1.6.14-18). We will discover that their betrayal of Duncan will result in "curses, not loud but deep" (5.3.27). In moments like these there is a discrepancy between the response of Duncan and the thanes to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and the knowledge the spectators possess. We hear these protestations of loyalty and hospitality differently than do the thanes and the king. In Macbeth the action takes on another dimension because of the audience's privileged knowledge. Macbeth's first true soliloquy, in 1,7, deepens the relationship between 159

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him and the spectators. Here Macbeth exposes his latent consciousness even more intensely than in his first aside. The soliloquy brings his dilemma into sharp focus. "If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well / It were done quickly," he reasons. If the murder of Duncan could "trammel up the consequence," it might well be done. But Macbeth knows that actions have consequences and that "bloody instructions" return "to plague th' inventor." In this speech the series of colons marked in the Folio seem to indicate the ever-deepening march of thought from a binary, evenhanded concern with time and consequence to the vividly imaginative similes that spill forward, not logically but emotionally. More intensely than in his first, introspective aside, logic gives way to acute visual stimulation. In Macbeth's visual imagination, Duncan's "virtues / Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu'd against / The deep damnation of his taking-off: / And Pity, like a naked new-born babe ... or Heaven's cherubin ... Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, / That tears shall drown the wind" (1-24).19 These horrid images stir his moral sense and convince him to "proceed no further in this business." As we know, Lady Macbeth challenges his fears. "Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dress'd yourself? Hath it slept since? ... Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valor / As thou art in desire?" she questions, adding to the imagery of drunkenness, clothing, and sleep and striking at his own separation between thoughts and deeds (35- 36, 3941). She also, we know, answers his definition of what "become(s) a man" by calling him a "beast," reminding him that neither "time, nor place" did "adhere" when he suggested this enterprise to her and encouraging him to "screw your courage to the sticking place" (45 ff.). She spurs him to commit murder. But Macbeth's ability to imagine is not blanketed. The vivid visual imagining found in 1,7 becomes hallucinatory when he sees the dagger in his mind float before his eyes, even sees "gouts of blood" upon it, in 2.1 (3 3ff.). One of his mind's horrid images is projected before him. Inner vision and thought interlace with the actions of his hand as the dagger in his mind becomes the dagger he draws and grasps. The firstlings of thought become the firstlings of his hand, and his eyes and hands wink at each other. The spectators are invited to share in these fantastical, murderous thoughts and in the projection of subjective consciousness; 160

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they are invited to envision what Macbeth sees floating before him. Outer perception is colored by horrid images. Macbeth knows that this "bloody business ... informs / Thus to [his] eyes," and reasons himself back into reality. Nonetheless, he has been marshaled the way he was going. He moves with "Tarquin's ravishing strides ... like a ghost" toward Duncan to create that "breach in nature / For ruin's wasteful entrance." His moral dilemma reaches a crisis when, the murder committed, he tells his wife that he could not say ''Amen'' to the drowsy grooms' pious "God bless us." "'Amen' / Stuck" in his "throat" (2.2 .24f£.). The harrowing and nightmarish quality of these events most sticks with us, however, when Macbeth realizes that "a little water" will not clear his hands of the deed. The "knocking at the gate" appalls Macbeth, makes his seated heart knock at his ribs. But when he "sees" "hands" that "pluck out" his "eyes," he knows that "great Neptune's ocean" cannot "wash this blood / Clean from my hand." "No:" he says: "this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one, red" (54f£.). The action of his hands now indelibly stains the operations of his mind, just as it will imprint Lady Macbeth's mind and hands. Their "hurt minds" no longer receive the "balm" of sleep. "'Macbeth doth murder sleep'; ... Macbeth will sleep no more." These events take on symbolic and macrocosmic dimensions in the Porter scene and in Lennox's description of the night (2.3.54-61). Like Wagner, Robin, and Dick in Dr. Faustus, the Porter comically counterpoints Macbeth's drunken aspirations from his "downstage" perspective and serves as a foil for Macbeth's radically innovative Figurenpositionen. And in Lennox's description the full effect of the murder may be seen. '''Twas a rough night," responds Macbeth in words that have more meaning than Lennox can understand, "equivocating" as they do between Macbeth's two "voices." During these brief exchanges with Lennox and Macduff, Macbeth tries to remain calm, but we know that his words are labored and that he speaks with a double voice. After the murder is discovered, however, the inner psychological drama appears to recede behind the surface. But because the audience is attuned to the doubleness of the action, it interprets one of Macbeth's speeches in 2,3 differently from the way it is interpreted by the characters. Spoken in the presence of Lady Macbeth, Macduff, Banquo, Lennox, and Rosse, this speech 161

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seems to be Macbeth's public response to Duncan's murder. His words "so perfectly extend his private musings," however, "that it is quite ambiguous whether they are here a private utterance or a public speech."20 Colons again release the flow of subliminal images: Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had liv'd a blessed time: for from this instant, There's nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys: renown and grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of. (91-96) Macbeth has placed the poisoned chalice to his own lips, "taken" upon himself the "present horror" of the "tiIlIe," and emptied his "life" (1.7.1112; 2.1.59; 2.3.69). But is this an "embedded" soliloquy, or is it a speech to the thanes? Commenting on these lines, one reader suggests "it is, as if for the moment," that Macbeth "loathes the murderer as much as anyone present."21 I would agree. I would qualify that statement, however, by suggesting that the speech is both a private, reflective acknowledgment that the murder has utterly damned him and a public address to the other thanes. The thanes simply do not understand these words as we do. Interpretable as a public utterance, this speech finally has meaning as a private revelation shared with the spectators. The words' contextual, denotative meanings take on major subtextual nuances; the immediacy of a revelatory utterance overflows the constraints of the illusionistic context. As we will see, Lennox and Rosse will be present at later moments when Macbeth's words are not "heard" in the same way as the audience understands them. The thanes' suspicions about the murder of Duncan will grow into proof, and their reactions reinforce the dilemma of an audience that is sympathetic to and repelled by Macbeth. 22 What will affect the spectators more, however, is their next view of Macbeth, now hardened in crime; his "Had I but died" speech is the last truly moral statement he makes. In the soliloquy after he enters "as King" (3.1.47-71), he is concerned only with keeping what he "play'dst most foully for." What was a meditative and specular instrument used to conduct an inward debate now mirrors solipsistic, cold-blooded, nervous calculation. 162

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When he tells us that Banquo must die, his voice is harsher, altered. His mind has been defiled, and he has given up the "eternal jewel" of his soul. He now fears what Banquo may "dare," the "dauntless temper" of Banquo's "mind" that may make Banquo wrench Macbeth's scepter with an "unlineal hand." Macbeth's Figurenposition is the same, but the content of his speech has utterly changed. He has turned into a bloody tyrant, and none are for him that look into him with considerate eyes. He plans a murder without the slightest compunction. His growing isolation is seen when he does not reveal his plan to kill Banquo to Lady Macbeth. She thinks "what's done, is done" (3.2.12). He is committed to a different course. The "restless ecstasy" of "wicked dreams" and "Pale Hecat's offerings" dominate his mind; "night's black agents" take hold of him (2.1.50, 52; 3.2.53). We are of course still privy to his secret thoughts. But we no longer sympathize with them. In the embedded dialogue between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth at the locus of the feasting table, we again "hear" what the thanes do not. Neither the thanes nor Lady Macbeth sees Banquo's Ghost, and they do not hear her whispered challenge, 'f\re you a man?," or her belittling of his painted "fear" and "air-drawn" daggers (3.4.57 -84). The Ghost that haunts Macbeth is invisible to the thanes. But we know that Macbeth is an outcast from life's feast, rapt in sights only he and we can see. And at the end of this scene his faded reflections acknowledge that his ability to feel has been numbed. He intends to feast upon the images found at a different locus, the weird sisters' cauldron. Now a self-possessed megalomaniac, he will let nothing stand in his way: For mine own good All causes shall give way_ I am in blood Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er. Strange things I have in head, that will to hand, Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

(134-139)

Strange images of death control his mind, and there no longer is a separation between moral vision and physical action. Unlike Hamlet in the prayer scene, he will act without scanning the consequences. "Function" is no longer smothered in "surmise." He believes his "strange and self163

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abuse / Is the initiate fear that wants hard use" (140-141). We see his heart turning into stone.

''A poor player" At this point a shift in the source of our privileged knowledge accompanies the shift in our sympathies. Sometimes omitted in production, the conversation between Lennox and the unnamed Lord in 3,6 allows us to discover that Macduff has fled to England and that Lennox and the other thanes are turning against Macbeth. Young Lennox knows that Scotland is a "suffering country / Under a hand accurs'd" (48-49). He had entered Duncan's death chamber with Macbeth and endorsed the slaughter of the grooms. He had showed concern for Macbeth at the feast. 23 When he enters in 4,1 to tell Macbeth that Macduff "is fled to England," however, he hides his true feelings. Macbeth's aside here, in which he reveals, for once and for all, that "from this moment / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand" (4.1.146147),24 indicates that his heart has now absolutely hardened. He will have Macduff's "wife" and all that "trace him in his line" murdered. Macduff will not father a line that will "stretch out to th' crack of doom" (117). But this aside, as we know, is delivered in the presence of a thane who will no longer countenance Macbeth's actions and who, when we see him next, will join the other thanes in the march toward Birnan in the hope that "the sovereign flower" will "drown the weeds" (5.2.30-31). When the First Murderer stabs Macduff's little "egg" and a screaming Lady Macduff runs off stage, the audience is terrified. Rosse's conversation with Lady Macduff, the boy's questions to his mother, and the Messenger's warning all prepare for these horrid images. In this powerful scene we see more vividly than with the murder of Banquo the strange images of death Macbeth can create. Our sympathies have utterly shifted. But if Macduff's son dies, the "boy Malcolm" lives and gains in strength. The scene with the unnamed Lord (3.6), the scene in England (4.3), and the scene in which the thanes move to join the English forces (5.2) show the awakening moral and military strength of Macbeth's adversaries. The Macbeths, on the other hand, lose their composure and strength. Lady 164

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Macbeth's sleepwalking scene suggests how diseased and "infected" their "minds" have become. She is condemned to wash away spots that no one but her and the spectators can truly imagine. Lady Macbeth cannot cleanse her hands of the deeds she and Macbeth have committed. "What's done cannot be undone" (5.1.68). The thanes know that Macbeth has made Scotland a land that needs to be purged. As Cathness says, "march we on / To give obedience where 'tis truly ow'd. / Meet we the med'cine of the sickly weal, / And with him pour we, in our country's purge, / Each drop of us" (5.2.25-29). The images of disease and sickness that pervade 4,3, 5,1, and 5,2 prepare the spectators to see Macbeth as the source of his country's ills. By this point in the play, the spectators have not seen Macbeth for over an act of playing time (4.2-5.3). He has been removed from their sympathy and no longer serves as the source of their privileged knowledge. When he reappears, he is indeed an arrogant, unfeeling, overconfident tyrant, "tainted" not with fear but with a diseased mind: Bring me no more reports, let them fly all. Till Birnan wood remove to Dunsinane I cannot taint with fear. What's the boy Malcolm? Was he not born of woman? The spirits that know All mortal consequences have pronounc'd me thus: 'Fear not, Macbeth, no man that's born of woman Shall e'er have power upon thee.' Then fly, false thanes, And mingle with the English epicures! The mind I sway by, and the heart I bear, Shall never sag with doubt, nor shake with fear. (5.3.1-10) This tainted mind will not sag or shake. It does not appear, as Angus suggested, that Macbeth now feels "his secret murthers sticking on his hands" (5.2.16-17). The man Lady Macbeth believed "too full of the milk of human kindness" now nastily "damns" the "cream-fac'd" Servant who brings news of the approaching enemy (11). He no longer lacks "the illness" that should attend ambition. He is overcome by it. His ability to feel appears to be gone, and his tragedy appears to be one of "decreasing moral awareness." And yet, for all his apparently decreasing moral awareness, he has 165

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not lost his acute sense of self-awareness. There are two "voices" in his soliloquy: Seyton! - I am sick at heart When I behold - Seyton, I say! -This push Will cheer me ever, or disseat me now. I have liv'd long enough: my way of life Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf, And that which should accompany old age, As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but in their stead, Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not. Seyton! (19-29) Harsh calls enclose embedded, private reflections. One voice, strident and angered, is callous. A second voice seems half in love with easeful death. The colon reintroduces a meditative, colorfully poetic Macbeth, whose way of life "Is faII'n into the sear, the yellow leaf." He has lived long enough and has lost his chance to live a blessed time. Indeed, this remarkable speech is set against the view of him as an unfeeling man. If it suggests that "those he commands," like Seyton, "move only in command," it also suggests that his "pester'd senses" do "recoil and start" at everything "that is within him." ''All that is within him does condemn / Itself for being there" (5.2.23-25). As the speech develops, Macbeth becomes a figure who appeals to and repels us. He recognizes what has happened to him, and Shakespeare puts into his mouth words that elicit those feelings of empathy the spectators had utterly abandoned. These words reveal that he does "feel/His secret murthers sticking on his hands" and that he is "sick at heart." He is again a hero-villain, and the action regains its doubleness. In his conversation with the Doctor, Macbeth asks about his wife's health. "Not so sick, my lord," answers the Doctor, ''As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, / That keep her from her rest" (5.3.37-39). When Macbeth responds, he speaks of Lady Macbeth's illness in words whose import might well indicate his awareness that there is no cure for a mind diseased: 166

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Cure her of that. Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff That weighs upon the heart? Doc. Therein the patient Must minister to himself. Macb. Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it. (39-47) "Cure" her "of that": "the patient / Must minister to himself." Depths of feeling rise to the surface. Macbeth would like to know a cure for the images that haunt him, but he is lost and hopeless. There is no physic for his pain. Other meanings emanate from within the illusionistic context, harsh words again enclosing a psychologically pregnant response. His words still retain their poetic and imaginative sensitivity. Readings that posit either a decreasing "consciousness" or a "tide of mounting sympathy" reduce the action to a single dimension and fail to distinguish between Macbeth's different "voices." An actor does not, in fact, have to choose to play Macbeth either as a detestable, duplicitous villain or as an appealing hero. Both of these "voices" are present in the playscript; they are not only embedded at that "level of consciousness" in the character below that which is expressed fully in the "denotative meaning" of the words Macbeth speaks but are also present in his intonation. In this sense, the doubleness and ambiguity we associate with a reader's experience are not, finally, different from the alternation in voice we properly associate with performance. Indeed, Macbeth's highly imaginative speeches in this act are very much at odds with the thesis which argues that, as he hardens in crime, his imagination becomes less vivid and he loses his ability to feel. The armor he nervously fumbles with, buckles, and unbuckles only lightly shields his vulnerability. The defeatist and nihilistic content of his words is at odds with their imaginative expression. In the final scenes two different sides of Macbeth-one worthy of hate, another empathy-are again offered to our view. There is an armored Macbeth who bustles amid the hurly-burly of war, an arrogant, 167

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overconfident tyrant who believes his "castle's strength / Will laugh a siege to scorn" (5.5.2- 3). This is the Macbeth who resembles Richard III and the satanic devils of morality plays.2 5 There is also a Macbeth who possesses great self-awareness and whose final speeches are calm and reflective. When Seyton exits to investigate the "cry within of women," Macbeth realizes that his senses have been dulled (9-15). He believed that he could not "taint" or "shake with fear" (5.1.3, 10). But here he acknowledges he "almost forgot the taste of fears" (9). Is it possible anyone "so insensitive" as Macbeth is supposed to have become would be so "alert to his own insensitivity"? Can we argue that here Shakespeare "presents coherently and in fully articulate poetry, what is conscious but not self-conscious in Macbeth"?26 When Seyton returns with news of the Queen's death, Macbeth offers the most imaginatively powerful speech in the play: She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (17-28) The colon amplifies his introspection. A response to Seyton precipitates a raptness. For many, Macbeth's reaction to his wife's death suggests a callousness in keeping with his insensitivity. For actors, Macbeth's words have more often indicated a sadness that her death had to come too soon. 27 It is more accurate to realize that both responses are embedded here and that actor and audience share a revelation which, for all its apparent callousness, is a heartfelt expression of sorrow. Once again the duality of speech and voice emerges: set within the scene, Macbeth delivers an illusion-breaking revelation of an interior state of mind from a neutral 168

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locus. An introspective and poetic voice emerges from the illusionistic context. Does this speech express Shakespeare's view of "the hopelessness of a hardened sinner, to whom the universe has now no meaning"?28 Or does it reveal Macbeth's state of mind? Can we separate these words from the actor who speaks them? Strictly speaking, the speech is not a soliloquy. Like his earlier "Had I but died" speech and so many others, it is rendered in the presence of other characters. The conventions governing self-reflective address give way. The speech powerfully captures Macbeth's state of mind and sense of nothingness. He feels the weariness of a life in which one cannot raze the written troubles of the brain or wash away the perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart. The "swelling act / Of the imperial theme" has turned into the performance of "a poor player" who "struts and frets his hour upon the stage," and who now selfconsciously mocks the voices he employed so sensitively throughout his performance. Metronomic ticks mark the march of time and the coming on of Macbeth's own death. Macbeth is a damned man, full of desperate courage, ticking off his remaining seconds. When he meets Macduff, he has enough compunction to urge Macduff away: "Get thee back, my soul is too much charg'd / With blood of thine already" (5.8.5-6). Macduff has "carv'd out his passage" to Macbeth, however, and will not be turned away (1.2 .17ff.). ''A-weary of the sun," aware that Macduff is not born of woman, Macbeth fights on as one who had been studied in his death. Because players on the stage are like players in the world, who strut and fret and then are heard no more, Macbeth retains our sympathy even as we condemn him as a villain. The Witches' prologue determined the structure of Macbeth, a play in which "Fair is foul, and foul is fair," and both "hover" in "the fog and filthy air" in a pitch-and-toss of good and evi1. 29 At the play's end we recognize the horrid image Macduff brings on; we had seen it hovering above the Witches' cauldron. Macbeth's tragic role overwhelms his morality play part. The dramaturgy of the "place" serves the demands of multidimensional characterization.

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VIII Directing Sympathy in

Antony and Cleopatra

"Marble countenances"

Antony and Cleopatra may be the last bastion of the New Critical approach to drama, the last play to be read as a self-contained dramatic poem and analyzed in terms of its ambiguity and ambivalence. As we know, what began as a suggestive approach to Shakespeare's imagery emerged full-blown in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as a methodology which applied the principles of spatial and poetic analysis to the plays and explored Shakespeare's use of that most favored ofJohn Donne's figures, paradox. The New Criticism's treatment of Shakespeare's use of paradox is inherently complex, but certainly a list of significant contributors to this approach would include T. S. Eliot, whose interest in the "metaphysical conceit" influenced later readings by G. Wilson Knight, Cleanth Brooks, and many others. By turning the plays into verbal icons, these critics determined the course of literary analysis. 1 Indeed, even though its limitations are now clear, the New Criticism continues to influence our understanding of Shakespearean drama. In their notable attempts to read the plays "affectively" and theatrically, of course, Stephen Booth and Michael Goldman transform New Critical responses into audience reactions, relocating its fascination with ambiguity and paradox. Nonetheless, even in their work the legacy of the New Criticism remains strong. Even though we have turned the ambiguities present in texts into the uncertainties felt by audiences, thereby shifting the grounds if not the terms of discussion, the principles of the New Criticism continue to influence the analysis of Shakespearean drama. Janet Adelman's analysis of Antony and Cleopatra is representative of 170

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this shift in approach. She stresses the "uncertainty" characteristic of response to the play rather than its poetic language and argues that such uncertainty derives from our ignorance about "the inner states" of Antony and Cleopatra and from "their own insistent questioning."2 In making these statements Adelman acknowledges a debt to Maynard Mack, who reached similar conclusions a decade earlier. Also locating the play's ambiguities in our response, Mack notes that "We are encouraged by Shakespeare in this play to disengage ourselves from the protagonists, to feel superior to them, even to laugh at them, as we rarely are with his earlier tragic persons." Although he qualifies this judgment by asserting that "against" such "laughter ... the playwright poises sympathy and even admiration," Mack concludes his overview by making the point that ':4.ntony and Cleopatra, like life itself, gives no clear-cut answers."3 As Adelman and Mack see the matter, the pervasive ambiguity of Antony and Cleopatra is not limited to our response to the protagonists; it is also built into the play's structure and dramatic technique. In this view Cleopatra's "infinite variety" is representative of the play's kaleidoscopic shifting of scene and locale, as we are at one moment in Egypt, the next in Rome, only to be cast back to Egypt. 4 "In the world the dramatist has given his lovers," Mack comments, "nothing is stable, fixed, or sure, not even ultimate values; all is in motion."5 Seen from this perspective, the play's audience and readers are similar to the fickle Roman populace, which, "Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream, / Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide, / To rot itself with motion" (1.4.45-47). But if such an approach admirably measures the play's ambiguity and "infinite variety," it also tends to obscure Shakespeare's manipulation of his audience. When read from the perspective of the study, the play may well strike us as inherently ambiguous in its presentation of Antony and Cleopatra. The conflicting impressions we receive may make us feel that Antony and Cleopatra, like Hamlet, is a "tragedy of an audience that cannot make up its mind." When a play is performed, however, ambivalent feelings often disappear. Not every Shakespeare play is a "problem play." The apparently contradictory impressions we receive about Antony and Cleopatra during the play are not the same as our lingering impression as it closes. This is a world well lost for love. Antony is a bungler, but he is also one of the most "remarkable" men "Beneath the visiting moon." 171

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Cleopatra is "riggish" and "cunning past man's thought," but she is also "a lass unparallel'd." The final view of the protagonists sticks in an audience's mind more than the playwright's multifaceted presentation of them. The confluence, and not the multiplicity, of perspectives channels response to Antony and Cleopatra, and it is time to acknowledge that while Shakespeare may have built ambiguities into the play, he has also woven into it means to guide us. Although we may be uncertain about how to respond to Antony and Cleopatra in the first half of the play, we are less in doubt after act three. All the varying shifts of scene and all the waverings of the protagonists cease when we enter the marble constancy of Cleopatra's monument.

'~

place i' th' story"

One of the reasons we are less in doubt is the crisis undergone by Enobarbus. Enobarbus is Shakespeare's invention, the character who grows from the Domitius he found in North's Plutarch. Because he is Shakespeare's invention, readers have supposed that Enobarbus functions as a choric commentator or as a raisonneur. What is certain is that he develops a privileged relationship with the audience and that his Figurenpositionen help to guide response to Antony and Cleopatra. As we have seen again and again, Renaissance playcraft was so flexible that a character bound within the illusion might well take on choric and "metadramatic" personae and emerge from the illusion to (in)directly address the spectators. Such a character is Enobarbus, who is at once a part of the illusion and a bridge between the audience and the play. As a detached, cynical observer he seems unaffected, but as he is slowly drawn into the events, he undergoes a crisis of confidence in Antony that parallels the crisis the spectators experience. As the degree of his involvement increases, he emerges as a choric spokesman. If Enobarbus's cynical detachment helps disengage us from the protagonists in acts one and two, he painfully engages us in acts three and four. It is important, in this sense, to remember that Shakespeare invites us to pass judgment upon Antony and Cleopatra from the start. In the opening scene we are asked, with Demetrius, to judge the degree to 172

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which "this dotage of our general's / O'erflows the measure" (1.1.1-2). "Behold and see," says Philo, "The triple pillar of the world" "transform'd / Into a strumpet's fool" (12-13). Presumably set in downstage positions, Philo and Demetrius stand between the audience and Antony and Cleopatra, and Philo's comments color its view. As Bernard Beckerman points out, to judge Antony and Cleopatra from Philo's perspective is to see them with Roman eyes, and the entire scene, complete with its use of a "Sprecher" figure, is framed to ensure that we "Take but good note" of the way this "plated Mars," like the eunuchs who attend Cleopatra, now "fans" a "gypsy's lust" (10).6 That is, from the start we inhabit a perspective hostile to the lovers, whose infamy was one of the commonplaces of classical literature. What has not been recognized is the similarity the scene bears to a classical painting in which two Romans standing in the foreground behold the entry of this notorious pair of lovers. Indeed, when Philo invites us to "Look where they come!" Antony and Cleopatra are held in our view. Unlike the sight of Desdemona and Othello arriving at Cyprus and of Romeo and Juliet at Capulet's feast, however, we behold this visual tableau through distinctly critical eyes, and Antony and Cleopatra are found wanting. Antony "approves the common liar, who / Thus speaks of him at Rome" (60-61). No qualifying voice is heard: Antony and Cleopatra's banter about "how much" love he has for her, his denial of the messenger from Rome, and his grand wish to embrace the "nobleness of life" in Cleopatra seem to confirm Philo's description: Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space, Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life Is to do thus [embracing)-when such a mutual pair And such a twain can do't, in which I bind, On pain of punishment, the world to weet We stand up peerless. (33-40) His fustian is grand and excessive. The eyes of this plated Mars "now bend, now turn" upon a "tawny front." As we will recognize, however, it is Antony's and not Philo's view that 173

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is to be valued. To judge Antony by Philo's standards is to play Caesar and to measure Antony's passions by an ideal of moderation and not by the greatness of his emotion. The scene. defines Antony from a Roman perspective and sets the world of empire at odds with the world of love. It does so dramaturgically: as in Othello, a downstage perspective is set against an upstage one. And what occurs here will be typical of the play. Repeatedly the lovers are framed within a hostile perspective. We are invited to judge them from a negative perspective-only to have our perspective collapse so that we discover their immeasurable faults "become" them. Enobarbus is not present in 1,1, and when he first appears in 1,2, there is little to indicate the function he will serve. In this scene he is solidly located in the illusion. He is another Roman attracted by Egypt's sexual pleasures, and his "fortune" is indeed to be "drunk to bed" (46). But by scene's end he begins to perform a more important role. Alone on stage with Antony, Enobarbus asks, "What's your pleasure, sir?" (131). He is ready to continue the banter present in the scene, and in the following conversation he counterbalances Antony's changed mood. Shakespeare clearly intends to demonstrate the characters' friendship and to juxtapose Antony's "Roman thoughts" with Enobarbus's levity. When he learns that Fulvia is dead, Enobarbus suggests "the tears live in an onion that should water this sorrow" (169-170). According to Enobarbus, Antony is blessed to be rid of such a wife as Fulvia, free now to indulge himself with Cleopatra, she who "hath such a celerity in dying" (143). The "strumpet's fool" of 1,1, however, now believes he must break his "Egyptian fetters" or lose himself "in dotage" (116-117). ''A Roman thought" has "strook him" (82).

In 1,2 Enobarbus provides humorous cynicism, and from this point he will continue to do so. As this scene-ending conversation suggests, however, he will also perform a dramaturgical function. As even a cursory reading reveals, Enobarbus begins and ends numerous scenes in conversation. He opens scenes with Lepidus (2.2), Agrippa (3.2), Eros (3.5), Cleopatra (3.7,13), and Antony (4.2); he closes scenes in conversation with Antony (1.2), Agrippa and Maecenas (2.2), Menas (2.6), and Pompey and the carousers (2.7). On each of these occasions Enobarbus's prefatory remarks color the response we have to the scene and his con174

Directing Sympathy in Antony and Cleopatra cluding ones distill its import. Like Philo in 1,1, Enobarbus frames scenes for us. Even before he adopts a Figurenposition close to the audience, that is, Enobarbus determines a scene's tone. In the opening dialogue with Lepidus, for example, he recognizes that in speaking with Caesar, Antony may well intone with "soft and gentle speech," but that he will "answer," finally, "like himself" (2.2.3-4). In the concluding dialogue with Menas he confirms what we suspect, that Antony and Caesar will not remain friends for long and that "the band that seems to tie their friendship together," the marriage of Antony and Octavia, "will be the very strangler of their amity" (2.6.120-122). And in his most important closing speech, on the coming of Cleopatra up the river Cydnus, he more than changes our opinion of her; he becomes Shakespeare's mouthpiece for the admiration of Cleopatra against all the scorn we may have felt. After listening to him, we share his admiration for the "infinite variety" that allows her to make "defect perfection" (2.2.231). In these ten opening and closing sequences Enobarbus speaks from within the dramatic illusion. But because they help to direct response, his speeches make him a "reflector" character like the Duke of York in Richard II, one embedded in the illusion but whose reactions parallel our own. Enobarbus is placed, unobtrusively, in a unique, privileged relationship with the spectators, who are unaware of his influence. His Figurenposition begins to change, however, when he actually speaks in "aside" in 3,2, and we can notice a stage in his gradual emergence as a choric figure. In 2,2 he interrupts Antony's conversation with Caesar and is upbraided (65-66, 103ff.). In 3,2 he overtly comments on a conversation while it is in progress, and his voice emerges from the illusionistic context. While Octavia whispers farewell to Caesar before leaving with Antony, Enobarbus mockingly asks Agrippa whether Caesar "will weep" (50); to Agrippa's rejoinder that Antony wept when he found Julius Caesar and Brutus dead, Enobarbus suggests Antony was "that year indeed ... troubled with a rheum" (57). This is more levity, but it also reminds us of Enobarbus's loyalty. "What willingly" Antony "did confound" he also "wail'd"-even to the point that Enobarbus wept (57-59). Later in act three, however, his friendship with Antony starts to weigh upon Enobarbus. The angry conversation between him and Cleopatra that opens 3,7 introduces the dilemma he will face. Enobarbus knows 175

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Cleopatra's presence at Actium will distract Antony, but Cleopatra insists upon being "in these wars" and questions why she should "not ... be there in person" (3,5-6).7 "Your presence needs must puzzle Antony, / Take from his heart, take from his brain, from's time" (10-11), he tells her. When he learns Antony will fight Caesar at sea, relinquishing his "absolute soldiership" on land, he knows Antony's passion for Cleopatra, and not his reason, governs him. He and Canidius try to convince Antony to change his mind, with Enobarbus insisting that Antony will give himself entirely to "chance and hazard" (47) if he fights at sea. Knowing full well, from the Soothsayer, that Caesar's "natural luck" will "beat" him '''gainst the odds" "at any game" (2.3.26-28), Antony nonetheless brushes aside Enobarbus's advice. He subjects himself to chance and hazard. Enobarbus here listens to a soldier implore Antony to fight on land and watches Antony again' ignore the advice given to him. In 3,7 Enobarbus learns of the confusion between Antony's reason and emotion; in 3,10 he witnesses the political and military results of Antony's emotional decisions. Speaking with Scarus, Enobarbus recognizes the shameful consequence of Antony's action at Actium when, the "vantage" evenly balanced, he "hoists sail" and "flies after" Cleopatra: "That I beheld. / Mine eyes did sicken at the sight and could not / Endure a further view" (15-17, 20). As Scarus says, "we have kiss'd away / Kingdoms and provinces" (7-8). When he discovers that Canidius intends to join Caesar's ranks, however, Enobarbus remains loyal. The first in a sequence of prominently positioned speeches in acts three and four, his scene-ending speech is not spoken from a perspective outside of the illusionistic dialogue but is delivered from a Figurenposition that embraces Canidius within as well as the audience outside the illusion: "I'll yet follow / The wounded chance of Antony," Enobarbus says, "though my reason / Sits in the wind against me" (34- 36). These references to vantage, square, rates, measure, and odds coordinate our response to Antony's apparently excessive behavior. When he agreed to marry Octavia, Antony promised he would keep his "square" in the future, not "o'erflow" the "measure." He is clearly unable to do so. His "blemishes" are manifest (2.3.5-7). He lets his will sway his reason and gives over the "brave squares of war" (3.11.40). Utterly tied to Cleopatra's rudder "by the strings," he gambles away a third of the world for a kiss 176

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that, he believes, "rates / All that is won and lost." But at least he has Cleopatra. When she appears to be willing to "pack cards" with Caesar, however, Antony seems absolutely hopeless. In 3,12 we watch Caesar deny Antony's suit for peace and listen to him instruct Thidias to "win" Cleopatra from Antony, to "promise" her all she wants and more (27). In 3,13 we shift to Alexandria to hear Enobarbus and Cleopatra discuss Antony's decision to follow her at Actium. Enobarbus admits that Antony made "his will / Lord of his reason" and that he alone is "in fault" for following her (3-4). And when he overhears Antony challenge Caesar to single combat, he offers a further insight:

[Aside.] Yes, like enough! high-battled Caesar will Unstate his happiness, and be stag'd to th' show Against a sworder! I see men's judgments are A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them, To suffer all alike. That he should dream, Knowing all the measures, the full Caesar will Answer his emptiness! Caesar, thou hast subdu'd His judgment too. (29- 37). Antony clearly does not know the "measures." This speech, Enobarbus's first true "aside" to the audience, not only reveals his state of mind but also comments upon Antony's naive belief that Caesar will agree to fight him. Here Enobarbus emerges as a spokesman who defines the spectators' feeling about Antony at this point. In a second aside he admits that his "honesty" has begun "to square" with him, begun to force him to acknowledge Antony's unfitness (41). But here he also admits that allegiance to a "fall'n lord" is a virtue beyond reasonableness, one which helps a character earn "a place i' th' story" (46). The line seems self-conscious, since Enobarbus was not in Plutarch, but it also bears thematic importance, since by being loyal Enobarbus knows he will be remembered. Generally regarded as an example of Shakespeare's "impure art," it allows Enobarbus to step "outside" the illusion for the first time. As he will from this point forward, Enobarbus here comments on the events from a figural position that utilizes the conventions governing both locus- and platea-oriented speech. 177

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Enobarbus's crisis of confidence comes in the second half of this scene when he watches Cleopatra receive Caesar's agent, Thidias, and comments about the meeting and about Antony's reactions in a series of "asides." When Thidias tells her that Caesar knows she embraces Antony not "as you did love him, but as you fear'd him," Cleopatra answers with an enigmatic "O!" When he tells her that Caesar believes "the scars upon her honor" are "constrained blemishes," Cleopatra mockingly agrees, complimenting Caesar "as a god" who "knows / What is most right": "Mine honor was not yielded," she says, "But conquered merely" (5662). "To be sure of that, / I will ask Antony," says Enobarbus in another aside, and he exits to tell him (62-63). When Cleopatra tells Thidias that she kisses Caesar's "conquering hand," and will be "prompt / To lay [her] crown" at Caesar's feet and to "hear / The doom of Egypt" (75f£.), however, we may well wonder whether she isn't packing cards with Caesar. And when Antony and Enobarbus return to see Thidias kissing Cleopatra's hand, Enobarbus knows Antony's emotions will overflow. As he tells us, again in an aside, Thidias "will be whipt" (86). And after he listens to Antony accept Cleopatra's excuses ("I am satisfied") and hears his ranting vaunts against Caesar (140f£.), Enobarbus offers a final, controlling soliloquy. Antony's instability appalls him: Now he'll outstare the lightning: to be furious Is to be frighted out of fear, and in that mood The dove will peck the estridge; and I see still A diminution in our captain's brain Restores his heart. When valor preys on reason, It eats the sword it fights with. I will seek Some way to leave him. (194-200) In keeping with the emergence of his choric persona, he speaks in dialogue, then in a series of asides, and finally in soliloquy in this scene. His speeches here, like Hamlet's, Macbeth's, and Edgar'S, are precisely patterned to reveal his "figural" movements in relation to the illusionistic scene. Like Edgar, he comments upon the action by subtly altering the degree of his association with and dissociation from the illusionistic context. He will stay with Antony long enough to witness his sentimental sad178

Directing Sympathy in Antony and Cleopatra dening of his servants and to rebuke Antony for making him and his men "onion-ey'd" (4.2.35). The remarkable symbolic scene in which the soldiers ''place themselves in every corner ofthe stage" to hear "the god Hercules, whom Antony lov'd," now leave him (4.3.16) and the scene in which Cleopatra and Eros rearm Antony (4.4) mark the passage of time while Enobarbus moves to the Roman side. When Antony learns of Enobarbus's defection from the Soldier who implored him to fight on land, he can only cry, "0, my fortunes have / Corrupted honest men!" (4.5.16-1 7) and feel the loss. He orders Enobarbus's treasure sent after him. And when we next see Enobarbus in Caesar's camp, Enobarbus begins to square with the meaning of his defection. Once again Enobarbus maintains a Figurenposition that allows him to step outside the illusion. After learning that the reasonable and pragmatic Caesar will place "in the vant" those soldiers who deserted, so "Antony may seem to spend his fury / Upon himself" (4.6.8-10), Enobarbus offers a soliloquy in which he comments on the lack of "honorable trust" Caesar has in the deserters and admits that in leaving Antony "I have done ill, / Of which 1 do accuse myself so sorely / That 1 will joy no more" (17-19). And in another, scene-ending soliloquy, given after he learns Antony "hath ... sent" all his treasure to him, "with / His bounty overplus" (20-21), Enobarbus recognizes fully his inner corruption: 1 am alone the villain of the earth, And feel 1 am so most. 0 Antony, Thou mine of bounty, how wouldst thou have paid My better service, when my turpitude Thou dost so crown with gold! This blows my heart.

(29-33)

Enobarbus will not fight against Antony. He will find a ditch wherein to die, a fugitive Judas who remembers too late that for all his faults, Antony is more noble than the reasonable and prudent Caesar could dream of being. What Enobarbus realizes is also discovered by the audience, and his career in acts three and four captures the rhythm of response to Antony. As he leads us to recognize, Philo's and Caesar's perspective is to be found wanting. Excess becomes overabundance. His recognition that Antony is a "mine of bounty" will deepen and resonate when, after "sur179

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prising" her, Proculeius urges Cleopatra to accept Caesar's "bounty" and "nobleness" (5.2.43,45) and Cleopatra declares that Antony's "bounty" had "no winter in't; an autumn it was / That grew the more by reaping" (5.2.86-88). Indeed, by the end of act four we no longer have equivocal feelings about Antony, "a Roman by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished" (4.15.57 - 58).8 All the references to quantitative measurement are redefin~d, intrinsically and qualitatively, in terms of Antony's noble bounty and largess. His excessive spirits have been expanded in acts of love. Enobarbus's hean breaks from the weight of that bounty, and Cleopatra realizes that Caesar will appraise and allow her greatness at the cost of selling her as a "merchant" would "a prize" (5.2.183). The question she so coquettishly posed to Antony when they first were framed in our view has been panly answered: Cleo. Ant. Cleo. Ant.

If it be love indeed, tell me how much. There's beggary in the love that can be reckon'd. I'll set a bourn how far to be belov'd. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new eanh. (1.1.14-17)

The quantitative metaphors, submerged here, emerge redefined as the wealth of the spirit in act four. Antony does not "abuse / The bounteous largess given" to him and is no "Profitless usurer"; no example of "Unthrifty loveliness," Cleopatra will not finally "spend" her "beauty's legacy," "so great a sum of sums," upon herself alone. She will not finally pack "cards" with Caesar (4.14.19). She will be "noble" to herself and die in dreams of Antony (5.2.192). As she tells us, with Antony's death: 0, wither'd is the garland of the war, The soldier's pole is fall'n! Young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon. (4.15.64-68) The "odds is gone" but not at all in the sense that Caesar has beaten him '''gainst the odds" in this game for empire (2.3.25 ff.). Rather, with An-

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Directing Sympathy in Antony and Cleopatra tony's death there will be no distinctions between "boys" like Caesar and men like Antony. We will watch Cleopatra earn her salvation in the final scenes and see how she will rise in our esteem. Deeply flawed, Antony and Cleopatra turn their vices into virtues by the play's end. It might be said that they make "defect perfection" (2.2.231). The phrase is not finally oxymoronic or ambiguous. It describes the shape of the action in Antony and Cleopatra, a shape whose contours are molded in part by Enobarbus's

Figurenpositionen.

"O'er-picturing that Venus" As we know, one of Enobarbus's speeches stands out from all the rest. His pictorial description of Cleopatra's voyage up the river Cydnus evokes all her splendor and brilliance, all her majesty and attraction. All nature bows to this work of art, who, "breathless" from hopping forty paces down a public street, yet breathes forth allure: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies; for the vildest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish. (2.2.234-239) Enobarbus's words themselves beggar "all description," themselves "o'er" picture that description of Venus which, "commonly drawen in picture," Shakespeare found in North's translation of Plutarch. 9 Commentators have examined Enobarbus's portrait in detail, noting the mythological and iconographic backgrounds underlying not only this portrait of Cleopatra but also the play's association of her with figures like Omphale, Dido, Isis, and Venus and of Antony with Hercules, Aeneas, Bacchus, Atlas, and Mars. lO As R. K. Root observed, "in the series of great tragedies classical mythology plays a quite insignificant part, but in Ant/ony] ... it suddenly reasserts itself with surprising vigor."ll

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These associations contribute to the elevation of Antony and Cleopatra to semidivine status; they are part of the play's use of hyperbole and excess. It is also true, as Plutarch points out, that Antony believed himself descended from Hercules, that when Antony's soldiers hear noises beneath the stage they suggest the sounds come from Hercules, and that Antony links himself to ''Alcides'' wearing the shirt of Nessus after Cleopatra's ships treacherously surrender to Caesar. In his rage Antony certainly resembles Hercules.I 2 It ·is just as true that Cleopatra, as Plutarch also points out, continually wore the habiliments of Isis. While all these allusions enrich the characterizations of Antony and Cleopatra,13 I would agree with Raymond B. Waddington that "the mythological and cosmological affair of Venus and Mars" is of primary importance, others being subsumed typologically.I 4 As Waddington reminds us, Antony is linked to Mars from the start. In Philo's description Antony's "goodly eyes," That o'er the files and musters of the war Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn, The office and devotion of their view Upon a tawny front; his captain's heart Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper, And is become the bellows and the fan To cool a gypsy's lust. Here we are invited to measure Antony's temper, which, like glowing, "plated" metal, now cools and hardens for a "gypsy's lust." The simile associating Antony with Mars is of course only the first of many allusions linking Antony to classical heroes and deities. It would remain just an allusion did it not introduce a system of reference that spans the drama. When she resolves to commit suicide, Cleopatra denies Isis's "fleeting moon" as her planet and is addressed by Charmian as the "eastern star," Venus (5.2.240, 308). When Antony dies, Cleopatra pays tribute to him as "the garland of the war." And when Antony acknowledges that he must break "These strong Egyptian fetters" or "lose myself in dotage," he may be recalling any number of depictions, drawn in the pictures of Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and 182

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Francesco Cossa and found in numerous literary accounts, of Mars "enfettered" or stripped of his armor and weapons by Venus. 15 Indeed, if Antony's and Cleopatra's entry suggests that Antony is devoted to cooling Cleopatra's lust, it may also suggest, iconographically, that Venus has removed this Mars's sword, made "weak by [his] affection" (cf. 3.11.67; 4.14.23), and that the Cleopatra who puts her "tires and mantles" on him while wearing his "sword Phillipan" (2.5.22-23) is Venus Armata. The eunuch Mardian can think of "What Venus did with Mars" (1.5.18), and even when he lies about her suicide, he truly will say "My mistress lov'd thee, and her fortunes mingled / With thine entirely" (4.14.24-25). Certainly Eros's name is exploited for its effect, and his presence during the rearming of Antony in 4,4 and in subsequent scenes has symbolic importance. As John F. Danby suggests, "the play" may well be "Shakespeare's study of Mars and Venus, the presiding deities of Baroque society, painted for us again and again on the canvases of his time."16 It may also be "rather like a perspective picture"17 that, viewed from different angles, paints Antony "one way like a Gorgon, / The other way 's a Mars" (2.5.116-117). I would suggest that these allusions provide the play with a mythological substructure in which Antony and Cleopatra perform the parts of Venus and Mars. I would further suggest that the visual effect of this mythological enactment indicates a shift in dramatic technique. These mythic allusions assume structural importance when the play's scenes dramatize episodes taken from the myths surrounding Venus and Mars; they also reveal that Shakespeare continually "pictures" the lovers. Most obviously, Enobarbus pictures Cleopatra for us in the Cydnus speech, but let us remember that his is a narrative description. This is not the case at the play's opening, when the lovers' entry is framed by a commentary, glossed in a way similar to the iconographical exegesis common in the Renaissance. As we also noted, Enobarbus's comments frame many scenes for us, and there is a sense that characters "move" into and out of scenes throughout the play. At times the play's pattern of framing commentary "suggests that we see the central figures as actors in a play within the play."18 The structure of Antony and Cleopatra is influenced by pictorial considerations, and in at least one of its scenes a mythic substructure determines scenic form. 183

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When Philo draws attention to the "plates" and "buckles" of Mars's armor, he expands upon conventional depictions. As commentators recognize, he also anticipates 4,4, when Eros and Cleopatra rearm Antony. In this scene what seemed only a set of allusions gathers into form. When the lovers enter, Antony calls for Eros to bring his armor: Ant. Eros, mine armor, Eros! Cleo. Sleep a little. Ant. No, my chuck. Eros, come, mine armor, Eros.

(1-2)

The scene abounds with naturalistic detail and may remind us of Lear's pulling on his boots or of the arming of Macbeth. But never is naturalism more subject to mythological coloration. Cleopatra's "sleep a little" seems domestic enough and suggests that the lovers have just arisen, with Antony apparently dressed in a tunic suitable for sleeping and as a warrior's undergarment. But her words also pointedly allude to those many depictions of Mars as a "sleeping loving swain" while Venus and her Cupids play with his armor. Here Shakespeare animates a picture in which an awakening Mars is rearmed by Venus and Eros and in which she replaces those buckles and plates she removed from him. I9 As Antony knows, Cleopatra is "the armorer of [his] hean" (7), and his words to her appropriately mingle love and war:

o

love, That thou couldst see my wars to-day, and knew'st The royal occupation, thou shouldst see A workman in't.... To business that we love we rise betime, And go to't with delight. (15-18, 20-21) A fair warrior, he gives her a soldier's kiss and "goes fonh gallantly," a "man of steel" once again (36, 33). The shape of this scene is molded by its mythological sources. As the play upon "armorer" as amare-armare reveals,20 moreover, the scene draws us deeply into syncretic Renaissance literary and iconographic traditions surrounding Venus and Mars and the warrior-lovers of sonnet tradition. It is a tradition that will join Antony and Cleopatra not only to Othello and Desdemona but also to Romeo and Juliet, each of whom 184

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is "pictured" for us and nourished by the Liebestod, and whose lyricism is at odds with the world. As we know, when Mardian falsely tells Antony that Cleopatra is dead in 4,14, Antony asks Eros to help him shed his armor, reversing the pattern of 4.4. In 4,8, after beating Caesar's men "to their beds" in the second day's battle, he addresses Cleopatra as "thou day 0' th' world," again offers his Venus a chance to "chain [his] arm'd neck," and invites her to "leap" "attire and all, / Through proof of harness to my heart, and there / Ride in the pants triumphing!" (13-16). When he encourages her to let the valorous Scarus kiss her hand - in contrast to his rage at seeing Thidias do so - we know that the events of 3,10- 3,13 have been reversed. But when she beguiles him to the "very heart of loss" (4.12.29) in the next day's battle, Antony feels more like Hercules wearing the shirt of Nessus than Mars enfettered by Venus. Nonetheless,' when he is told Cleopatra is dead, he is truly shaken. Removing his armor, he also sheds his mythological part as a Herculean Mars. ''All length is" now "torture" (4.14.46), and in disarming himself he loses his armored "visible shape" and "dislimns," deliquesces, and discandies before us. He has a new part to perform now, however, one that allows him to "become" himself again and to solidify once more. Desiring to be reunited with Cleopatra in death, he calls out to her, "I come, my queen! ... Stay for me!" (4.14.50). He asks Eros to kill him. But Eros would rather die than kill Antony, and Antony knows that Eros and Cleopatra have "got upon" him a "nobleness in record" (98-99). For many readers Antony's failed suicide proves he is a bungler, not even able to kill himself. It is more to the point to recognize that Shakespeare wishes him to play one more scene. With one notable exception, Shakespeare is basically faithful to Plutarch's account of Antony's suicide attempt, and this exception best reveals his dramatic intention. Overlaying it with the Liebestod, Shakespeare converts Antony's suicide into the action of a lover who, falling upon his sword, hopes to be "A bridegroom in [his] death, and run into 't / As to a lover's bed" (100-101). Antony mortally wounds himself, unaware that his beloved is alive; as in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare allows the spectators to know what his protagonist does not know. It does not matter to Antony, however, when he learns that Cleopatra is not dead but "lock'd in her monument" (120). 185

Directing Sympathy in Antony and Cleopatra Like Romeo going to "Capel's monument," Antony travels to her to enact his final moments. Once he is there, Cleopatra feels the weight, not of her sport but of her loss, as she and her maids draw him "aloft" (cf. 1. 5.21). Critical controversy surrounds the staging of the monument scene, particularly in terms of the nature of the structure used to depict the monument, the way Antony's bleeding body is raised to Cleopatra, and the effect Shakespeare intends the scene to have. 21 I see no reason to suppose a scaffold was erected or brought on stage to represent the monument, and I think the use of the tiring house facade is in keeping with the use of the "balcony" and the "window" "aloft" in Romeo andJuliet (2.1 ; 3.5). The Liebestod underscores the similarity between the lovers' plights. I also think the Folio's stage direction, "They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra," should be observed, even though this direction may be at variance with Plutarch's description of the "chaines and ropes" used to "draw" Antony "up" (30). The physical danger and theatrical risk of dropping Antony notwithstanding, the emotional effect of the scene depends, at least in part, on Cleopatra's initial fear of lifting him up ("I dare not, / Lest I be taken") and on the effort she must expend to hold him and to bear his weight. Indeed, the struggle to hold on to Antony ennobles Cleopatra and steels her for the events to come. To this point we have "participated in the experience" of the play's many commentators "more than in the experience of the lovers," and we have been asked "to notice the world's view of them more often than their view of the world."22 When we enter the play's first truly localized setting, however, the pattern of framing commentary disappears, and we participate in the lover's experience with no one to intervene. The play's shifting perspectives and kaleidoscopic changes come to a halt when we enter Cleopatra's monument, and there is a modification in pace and tone when the lovers perform their final rite. Antony believes he has "triumph'd" over himself in committing suicide, and in their final embrace the lovers capture the bittersweet pathos of the Liebestod. Cleopatra knows "none but Antony / Should conquer Antony" (4.15 .15-1 7). When she welcomes him, she would love to have the power to revive him with her kisses: "Die when thou hast liv'd, / Quicken with kissing" (38- 39).

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But Antony does die in her arms, and for a moment it seems that Cleopatra is "dead too" (69). As Iras's words suggest, it appears that Cleopatra has died. The stage direction for Cleopatra, "[Faints.]," was added by Nicholas Rowe, but even if it were in the Folio, it could not help the spectators. They must assume, from Iras's words and Charmian's laments, that Cleopatra is dead from grief. Shakespeare stages a balcony-death scene in which Cleopatra, holding Antony in her arms, collapses over his dead body. She apparently dies with a kiss. In envisioning this scene, that is, Shakespeare draws from the staging, action, and effects present at those moments in Romeo and Juliet and Othello when the lovers fall into each other's arms and the action stops. Up to this point Cleopatra has been as inconstant and enigmatic as the "fleeting moon," her actions governed by self-interest and selfpreservation. When Antony is in her arms, however, she becomes resolute. She knows her "honor" and her "safety" do not "go together" where Caesar is concerned, and she trusts only "my resolution and my hands ... None about Caesar" (46-47, 49-50). When Antony dies, the "crown 0' th' eanh doth melt," and Cleopatra faints. The Cleopatra who revives may be "no more but e'en a woman," but she determines to do "what's brave, what's noble." She resolves to emulate Antony, to die "after the high Roman fashion, / And make death proud to take us" (86-88). Caesar's tearful response to the news of Antony's death and the tribute he pays to his "mate in empire" funher enlarge Antony in our minds (5.1.43 ff.). It is no doubt characteristic of Caesar that he should break off his words when the Egyptian enters to tell him that Cleopatra, confined in her monument, "desires instruction, / That she preparedly may frame herself / To th' way she's forc'd to" (54-56). Words like these, along with the evidence of the Seleucus episode, make many readers feel Cleopatra is once again her inconstant self, ready to do Caesar's bidding if it will be to her advantage. Even though this message is absolutely inconsistent with her words of resolution some fifty lines before, it seems to many that Cleopatra is ready to pack cards with Caesar. Let us remember that she told Charmian and Iras she would do what is noble. She will "kneel" obsequiously to Caesar (5.2.113) only to beguile him.

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If she is inconstant and "cunning past man's thought," she is so only to Caesar. When Proculeius surprises her, she tries to draw a dagger to kill herself. Proculeius tries to persuade her to "let the world see" Caesar's "nobleness well acted, which your death / Will never let come fonh" (5.2.4446); his nobility will, however, come at Cleopatra's expense. We know Caesar will use "her life in Rome" to make his triumph "eternal" in memory (5.1.65-66). Like Antony, who feared being "window'd in great Rome" (4.14.72), Cleopatra would rather die than be hoisted up and shown "to the shouting varlotry / Of censuring Rome" (5.2.55-57). She knows "Mechanic slaves / With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall / Uplift" her "to the view" and that quick comedians Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels: Antony Shall be brought drunken fonh, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I' th' posture of a whore. (209-211, 216-221) These theatrically self-conscious words not only draw attention to the boy who plays the role of Cleopatra but also remind us that, from Caesar's perspective, Antony and Cleopatra are nothing more than infamous, self-indulgent, excessive voluptuaries. Indeed, the highly skilled boy playing Cleopatra labels that perspective as inadequate and inferior to the one now being enacted. 23 As Caesar discovers, Cleopatra will "perform" "the dreaded act" he "so sought'st to hinder" (5.2.331- 332). Caesar would not be "stag'd to the show like a sworder," and neither will Cleopatra. She will stage her own final scene. The lyrical dream Cleopatra shares with Dolabella reveals the imaginative depth of her feeling for a man whose "delights / Were dolphin-like" and "show'd his back above / The element they liv'd in" and whose image condemns "shadows quite" (5.2.88-90, 100). Enthralled by her, Dolabella admits that Caesar will indeed "lead" her "in triumph" (109). It is with this lyrical dream and Dolabella's disclosure in mind that we should approach the Seleucus episode, in which Cleopatra convinces Caesar that she cares only for herself and in which she acts just as she did in 188

Directing Sympathy in Antony and Cleopatra haling the messenger up and down (2.5). These actions are meant to be characteristic of her inconstant self. 24 She has "already" made other provisions, however, ones that "beguile" Caesar and make him an "ass / Unpolicied" (323, 307-308). She knows Caesar "words" her so she will "not / Be noble to" herself(191-192). Readers who question her motives sometimes forget that when she orders Charmian to "Hie thee again. / I have spoke already, and it is provided; / Go put it to the haste" (194195), we know she has already prepared for her suicide, even if we do not know the means. She who "hath such a celerity in dying" also "hath pursu'd conclusions infinite / Of easy ways to die" (1.2.144; 5.2.355). Her "celerity is never more admir'd / Than by the negligent" Caesar, whom she cunningly outwits (3.7.24-25). At the play's end Enobarbus's narrative description is dramatized and pictured for us. Cleopatra's "resolution's plac'd" and she is "marble-constant" (238, 240). She assumes her splendor and power when she dresses in her robe and crown and "like a queen" is bound "again for Cydnus / To meet Mark Antony" (227-229). Sexuality and death mingle in her "immortal longings" for the asp, whose "stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, / Which hurts, and is desir'd" (295-296). Cleopatra embraces her death, calling out to her "Husband" in words that echo those Antony spoke in yearning to be reunited with her in death (4.14.50). The infinite variety of her parts as Venus, Empress of Egypt, "gypsy," lover, wife, mother, and quean converges in the final, most "fitting" and becoming action of "a princess / Descended of so many royal kings" (326-327). In death she finds a "new heaven, new earth," where "all the haunt" belongs to her and Antony. The Guard who bustles in arrives too late to prevent her suicide, and Charmian completes his sentence by telling him, "Caesar hath sent ... Too slow a messenger" (321). The "rustling" of the Guard and the "marching" of the Romans is in contrast to the static picture of Cleopatra, who "looks," as Caesar says, "like sleep, / As she would catch another Antony / In her strong toil of grace" (346-348). "Death" commits a "loving act upon her" (1.2.143-144). The vision of an unmoving, recumbent Cleopatra, lying in a bed on a stage that has become a monument, is the play's answer to the epic Roman world of history and action. Enthroned in death, Cleopatra lies in a timeless, dreamlike state of con189

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stancy at odds with the "vagabond flag" upon the stream of history, which "Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide, / To rot itself with motion."

''A lass unparallel'd" The vision of a marble-constant, sculptured Cleopatra belongs as much to the neoclassical, proscenium arch "picture" stage of John Dryden's adaptation, All for Love (1677), as to Shakespeare's imaginatively sumptuous Baroque evocation. What came to be known as Cleopatra's "Dryden pose" of course still survives in modern production, where Cleopatra's portable day-"bed" often gains a "high, throne-like back."25 Although "the posture of the dying Cleopatra" is "much more analogous with the closing scene in Dryden's All for Love than with Shakespeare's play," it may also be true that Dryden's admirable adaptation drew inspiration from what was implicit in his source. 26 The stage directions in Allfor Love, with their suggestions "of arrested movement" and "still pictures," are in keeping with the praise Restoration and eighteenth-century commentators gave to performers with "statuesque beauty, marble countenances, just and measured actions, lofty height, fine proportions, 'majestical dignity,' and picturesque attitudes."27 Like all great art, Dryden's play reflects and creates the images of its time. It may be equally true, however, that what Dryden decided to depict was already present in Shakespeare's play. In its use of mythological portraits, classical sources, and framed scenes and in its utter lack of major soliloquies, Antony and Cleopatra anticipates the more illusionistic dramaturgy of the Restoration. The play's problematical staging, of course, kept it from the stage between 1660 and 1759, and it was the only Shakespearean tragedy not produced during this hundred year period. The very things that make Antony and Cleopatra the supreme achievement of the unlocalized stage-its scenic shifts and geographical leaps between Egypt and Rome-stood in the way of its performance in the Restoration and sealed its fate in the eighteenth century, when David Garrick's 1759 epic production was not well received. Only in Dryden's adaption, in which kaleidoscopic movement 190

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gives way to a single, monumentlike location, "The Temple of Isis," was the play produced in a form compatible with stage conditions and acceptable to contemporary taste. Dryden's rewriting cost the play the contrast between movement and stasis so important to its conclusion, but it preserved those opportunities to picture the lovers in statuesque poses. In Allfor Love, as in Antony and Cleopatra, the lovers continually waver and change their minds only to solidify at the end. In keeping with their locations within the illusion, they do not address the spectators, and as in Shakespeare's play, they are not so much provided with moments of selfrevelation as with occasions for self-dramatization. In reducing the play's dimensions, Dryden isolated and preserved the manner in which the lovers were represented and brought the pictorial qualities of their deaths into sharp focus. He deleted the most presentational aspects of Shakespearean dramaturgy: the alternations between platea and locus; the scenic shifts on an unlocalized platform; characters like Enobarbus whose Figurenpositionen relative to the play's illusionistic frame guide our response, and the Clown, who wishes Cleopatra "all joy of the worm"; and words like Charmian's tribute to Cleopatra as "A lass unparallel'd," in which distinct down- and upstage idioms mingle. These things most remind us of the balance between the presentational and colloquial and the representational and Latinate that lies at the heart of Shakespeare's dramaturgy. Only once in the three hundred years after its first performances was there a chance to see Antony and Cleopatra in its Renaissance form. It is lamentable but perhaps appropriate that the first neo-Renaissance production, to be directed by the William Poel-influenced Harley GranvilleBarker and performed at the Savoy in 1914, was canceled due to the onset of World War I.

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Notes

I. Integrating Actor and Audience 1. All citations will be taken from G. Blakemore Evans, textual ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974) . 2. Anne Righter Banon, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London, 1962), p. 20. 3. See Roben Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Roben

Schwanz (Baltimore, 1978), p. 7. 4. "Four Elizabethan Dramatists," in Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (London, 1932), p. 96. 5. See Playmaking: A Manual ofCraftsmanship (Boston, 1912) and The Old Drama and the New (Boston, 1923); Thomas Postlewait, ed., William Archer on Ibsen: The Major Essays, 1889-1919 (Westpon, 1984). O. B. Hardison examines the influence of evolutionary thinking in Christian Rite and Christian Drama: Essays on the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore, 1965). 6. For discussion of Onega and Anaud, see Jackson I. Cope, The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama (Baltimore, 1974), pp. 4-11; also see Idea del Teatro (Madrid, 1958) and The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York, 1958). Anaud's theories have been

put into practice by Jerzy Grotowski; see his Towards a Poor Theatre, trans. T. K. Wiewiorowski (New York, 1969). For Grotowski also theater is "what takes place between spectator and actor" (p. 32). In The Theater Event: Modern Theories ofPerformance (Chicago, 1980) Timothy J. Wiles analyzes the "affective" theories of Stanislavski, Brecht, Anaud, Grotowski, and Handke. 7. Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (London, 1944), pp. 15, 22, 25-29. 8. Michael Hattaway examines the Elizabethan synthesis in Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London, 1982).

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Notes 9. William K. Wimsatt,Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional" and "The Affective" fallacies, in The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky., 1954), pp. 3-18,21-39. 10. Shakespeare and the Problem ofMeaning (Chicago, 1981), pp. 33, 2 7, 22. For recent semiotic considerations see Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London, 1980) and Shakespeare's Universe ofDiscourse: Language Games in the Comedies (Cambridge, 1984); Patrice Pavis, "Reflections on the Notation of Theatrical Performance," in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (New York, 1982), pp. 109-130; and "Drama, Theater, Performance: A Semiotic Perspective," special issue of Poetics Today 2 (1981). Bert O. States explores the phenomenology of theater in Great Reckonings in Little Rooms (Berkeley, 1985), and Alvin B. Kernan has some suggestive remarks about theatrical epistemology in "Shakespeare's Stage Audiences: The Playwright's Reflections and Control of Audience Response," Shakespeare's Craft, ed. Philip H. Highfall, Jr. (Carbondale, Ill., 1982), pp. 138-155. 11. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of "Othello" (Berkeley, 1961), The Masks of "King Lear" (Berkeley, 1972), and The Masks of "Macbeth" (Berkeley, 1978); J. L. Styan, Shakespeare's Stagecraft (Cambridge, 1967) and Drama, Stage, and Audience (Cambridge, 1975); Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton, 1972), The Actor's Freedom: Toward a Theory ofDrama (New York, 1975), and Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy (Princeton, 1985); Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609 (New York, 1962) and Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method of Analysis (New York, 1970); Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater; and John Russell Brown, Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (London, 1966). To these studies must be added the work of E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies: The Dramatist's Manipulation ofResponse (New York, 1976); Ralph Berry, Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience (New York, 1985); and Jean E. Howard, Shakespeare's Art ofOrchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (Urbana, 111., 1984). Although these approaches differ from mine, they all deal with "affective" response. For recent analyses of stage conditions and theatrical effects, see Alan C. Dessen's Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge, 1984); Anne Pasternak Slater, Shakespeare the Director (Totowa, N.J., 1982); and Peter Holland, The Ornament ofAction: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge, 1979). 12. Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1600, vol. 1 (New York, 1963); vol. 2, pt. 2 (New York, 1972); Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage: 1574-1642 (Cambridge, 1970); Richard Hosley, "The Playhouses and the Stage," A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Kenneth Muir and Samuel Schoenbaum (Cambridge, 1971), and "The Playhouses," in The Revels History ofDrama in English, vol. 3 (London, 1975); and Richard Southern, The Staging ofPlays Before Shakespeare (London, 1953), Medieval Theatre in the Round (New York, 1958), The Open Stage (London, 1953), and The Seven Ages of the Theatre

194

Notes (London, 1962). Also see P C. Kolin's report and, with R. O. Watt, bibliography in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 15-16 (1972 -197 3): 3-14, 33-59; and Renaissance Drama, n.s. 4 (1971). 13. Shakespeare at the Globe, p. 216. See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 1987), for a comprehensive discussion of Renaissance playgoing and playgoers. 14. See Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven, 1973), and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980); Thomas F. Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto, 1978); and Robert R. Hellenga, "Elizabethan Dramatic Conventions and Elizabethan Reality," Renaissance Drama, n.s. 12 (1981): 27-49. 15. David M. Bevington, From ''Mankind'' to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 1. 16. Hardin Craig's "Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist in the Light of His Experience," Studies in Philology 39 (1942): 226. 17. Albert Feuillerat, ed., The Prose l1iJrks ofSir Philip Sidney, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1912), p. 38. 18. Joel Altman, The Tudor Play ofMind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of English Drama (Berkeley, 1978), p. 225. 19. Cope, pp. 101-107; Weimann, pp. 106-110. 20. Weimann, p. 108. 2 1. See Doris Fenton, The Extra-Dramatic Moment in Elizabethan Plays before 1616 (Philadelphia, 1930). 22. Weimann, p. 108. 23. Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York, 1952); Anne Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers ofShakespeare's London, 1576-1642 (Princeton, 1981). 24. Sidney, l1iJrks, 3: 38. 25. Norman Rabkin, ed., Reinterpretations ofElizabethan Drama: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York, 1969), p. vii. 26. "On the Value of Hamlet," in Rabkin, ed., Reinterpretations ofElizabethan Drama, p. 152. 27. For recent considerations, see Charles Frey, "Interpreting The Winter's Tale," Studies in English Literature 18 (1978): 307-329; Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning; Barbara Mowatt, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances (Athens, 1976); and Harry Berger, Jr., "Text against Performance in Shakespeare: The Example of Macbeth," Genre 15 (1982): 49-79. 28. See Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays, 1675-1707 (Carbondale, 111., 1985), p. 5. 29. Weimann, p. 224. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses. 30. See Peter Holland, "Resources of Characterization in Othello," Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989): 119-132, esp. 130. 195

Notes 31. Maynard Mack, "Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays,"

Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor ofHardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia, Mo., 1962), p. 281. 32. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (London, 1961), p. 51; Bethell, pp. 13, 30. 33. Mack, p. 281. 34. Art as Experience (New York, 1934); Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning, pp. 24- 31. 35. Milhous and Hume, pp. 3-34. 36. An Apology for Actors (1612), in Shakespeare Society Papers 15 (London, 1843):40. On the new art of "personation" and the need to "apprehend" dramatic characters, see also Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Chicago, 1988): 100-103, and Weimann, "Society and the Individual in Shakespeare's Conception of Character," Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981): 2 3- 31.

II. Language, Staging, and ''Affect'': Figurenposition in Richard III 1. See Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1944), p. 209. 2. Tillyard's view of Richard III has been challenged by Wilbur Sanders, in The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge, 1968), and by Robert Ornstein, in A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1972). 3. Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, pp. 13, 15, 21- 22. 4. Rossiter, p. 4: "To say that the play is an 'early' work is an evasive, criticism-dodging term. Early it may be; but the play is a triumphant contrivance in a manner which cannot properly be compared with that of any other tragedy-nor any history." 5. Wolfgang Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare's "Richard III", trans. Jean Bonheim (London, 1968). 6. For a recent example, see Thomas F. Van Laan's Role-Playing in Shakespeare, p. 144. 7. See Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea ofthe Play, pp. 86-91; and Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York, 1958). 8. Three psychoanalytic readings are Robert Heilman's "Satiety and Conscience: Aspects of Richard III," Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver (Englewood Cliffs, 1970); Richard P. Wheeler, "History, Character, and Conscience in Richard III," Comparative Drama 5 (1971-1972): 311-321; and Robert N. Watson, Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). 9. See Waldo F. McNeir's "The Masks of Richard III," Studies in English

Literature 11 (1971): 167-186. 196

Notes 10. Although it is clear that Shakespeare here is repeating with a difference, the first half of 4,4 has not received the attention given the second half. 11. Rossiter, p. 17. 12. Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London, 1968), pp. 53-56. Also see Ralph Berry's Shakespeare and the Awareness ofthe Audience (New York, 1985), pp. 1629, for a reading of Richard III that utilizes many of Brooke's, Rossiter's, and Weimann's findings to arrive at a very different sense of "bonding" with the audience than mine, and Roben C. Jones's Engagement with Knavery (Durham, N.C., 1986), pp. 27-62, for an incisive analysis of the relationship between Richard and the audience. Jones's "Dangerous Spon: The Audience's Engagement with Vice in the Moral Interludes," Renaissance Drama, n.s. 6 (1973): 45-64, outlines the pattern by which the spectator is encouraged to "move from engagement in the entenainment of the vices to judgment that places that son of entenainment in perspective." See Alan C. Dessen's Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln, Neb., 1986), pp. 38-54, for a discussion which, like my own, corroborates Jones's view. 13. Brooke, p. 56. 14. Clemen, p. 8. 15. Rossiter, p. 16. 16. Righter, p. 88. 17. Rossiter, p. 19. 18. Rossiter, p. 20 19. Wheeler, p. 310. 20. Also cut were pans of 4,4 and 5,3. The spectacularly successful RSC production of 1984, with Antony Sher as a spidery and psychopathic Richard complete with arm crutches, made Richard's "bustling" all the more pronounced; see Nicholas Shrimpton's review in Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 205-207; and the essays of S. P. Cerasano and R. Chris Hassel, Jr., in Shakespeare Qua1terly 36 (1985): 618-629, 630-643 (respectively). Also see Sher's }Car of the King (London, 1985). As Cerasano points out, Sher sometimes "brought his Richard a bit too close to the audience for comfon." In Hassel's review the word "amen" begins to take on some of the imponance I give it. In Songs ofDeath: Performance, Interpretation, and the Text of Richard III (Lincoln, 1986), Hassel examines the Olivier-Cibber version in detail. 2 1. Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956), pp. 7-8. 22. A comparison with Sir Thomas More's account is instructive. 23. David Bevington, Action is Eloquence (Cambridge, 1984), p. 103, comments that an actor mounted on high was a "tableau familiar to audiences of street shows and royal entries, in which the royal figure receives petitions from his subjects." 24. The Lord Mayor was of course duped earlier, when Richard and Buck-

197

Notes ingham, "marvellous ill-favored," outrageously pretend to defend the castle of England against an apparent coup. After listening to their reasons for beheading Hastings, the Lord Mayor is convinced that they have acted in the nation's best interest. As he says, he will let their words "serve" "as well as I had seen" (3.5.62-63). 25. See 1,3,20; 2,2,109; and 4,4,198. 26. Art and Illusion: A Study ofthe Psychology ofPiaoria I Representation (New York, 1960), pp. 181-287, esp. 238. Also see Jones, pp. 50-59, for a fine discussion of the audience's "considerate" mind. 27. Jones, p. 59.

III. Engagement and Detachment in Richard II 1. Phyllis Rackin's "The Role of the Audience in Shakespeare's Richard II," Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 262-281, provides a recent treatment of the

shift in sympathy. 2. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare's Plays in Performance, pp. 115-130, esp. 121. 3. Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage, pp. 102-124, esp. 108. 4. Ernst H. Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), pp. 24-41; rpt. in "Richard II": Critical Essays, ed. Jeanne Newlin (New York, 1984), pp. 73-93. 5. Shakespeare's History Plays, pp. 244-263. The arguments against Tillyard are now powerfully familiar. "Shakespeare and History," Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), reevaluates Tillyard's contribution. In '''Tis my picture; Refuse it not,'" Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 254-256, M. M. Reese offers a mediated defense. 6. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 2-1 7, esp. 6, 8, 12. Dollimore's terms are drawn from Raymond Williams's Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), pp. 121-127. Also see Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago, 1984), p. 6; Louis Althusser, For Marx (London, 1977), and Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London, 1977); Stephen Greenblatt, ed., The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, 1982), pp. 3-6, and Renaissance Self-Fashioning; and Catherine Belsey, The Subjea of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London, 1985). 7. A. P. Rossiter, "Prognosis on a Shakespeare Problem," Durham University Journal 33 (1941): 136; and English Drama from Early Tudor Times to the Elizabethans (London, 1950). J. Dover Wilson, ed., "Richard II," New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1939), pp. vii-ix; and Sir E. K. Chambers, William

198

Notes

Shakespeare, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1930), pp. 320-321, discuss Edward Hoby's invitation to Robert Cecil in 1595 to see "K. Richard present himselfe to your view." 8. Tillyard , p. 245. 9. Herschel Baker, introduction to "Richard II," The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 803. 10. Tillyard, p. 251. 11. Rossiter's view of "Unconformity in Richard II," in Angel with Horns, pp. 23-24, is to be set against Walter Pater's and Richard Altick's sense of its "musical composition": Pater, Appreciations: Shakespeare's English Kings [London, 1889]), rpt. in Newlin, pp. 193-206; Altick, "Symphonic Imagery in Richard II," PMLA 62 (1947): 339-365. On the "discontinuities" in Richard's character and changes in his speech, see Rossiter, pp. 25-26, 28; Travis Bogard's "Shakespeare's Second Richard," PMLA 70 (1955): 192-209; and Maynard Mack, Jr., Killing the King: Three Studies in Shakespeare's Tragic Structure (New Haven, 1973), pp. 1-74. 12. Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies, p. 110. My description of the acting area is adapted from Weimann, p. 80. 13. Holinshed's Chronicles, 493/2/56-494/2/40; Peter Ure's Arden edition, Richard II (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 181-197, esp. 182, 184, contains relevant passages. On the use of scaffolds as loca in the mysteries, see Weimann, pp. 5596. Ure, notes to pp. 107-115, comments on Shakespeare's use of Holinshed to create stage locations. Naturalistic stage locations, added by eighteenthcentury editors with neoclassical preferences, have been upheld by modern editors. For Shakespeare's audience these scenes were located on the Renaissance stage, transformed via language into specific imaginary places. Roy Strong and Stephen Orgel examine the way ceremonial presentation enhanced the power of the monarch by distancing him in, respectively, Splendor at Court, Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater ofPower (Boston, 1973) and The Illusion ofPower: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, 1975). The issues are amplified in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the

Renaissance. 14. See Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind, p. 225. 15. Jonas Barish, "The Spanish Tragedy, or The Pleasures and Perils of Rhetoric," Elizabethan Theatre, ed. J. R. Brown and B. A. Harris (London, 1966), pp. 59-86, esp. 59, 65, 67. 16. In Political Characters of Shakespeare (London, 1945), pp. 130f£., John Palmer raises the question of what historical facts the spectators might have remembered. 17. John Gielgud, "King Richard the II," in Stage Directions (New York, 1963), pp. 23-35; rpt. in Newlin, pp. 139-144. On modern productions of Richard II, see M. M. Reese, The Cease ofMajesO' (London, 1961), pp. 257-259; and Newlin, pp. 107-183, especially the essays by C. E. Montague on F. R.

199

Notes Benson's portrayal and by Stanley Wells on John Barton's 1976 RSC production in which Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson played the roles of Richard II and Bolingbroke alternately. 18. I have partly adapted these presentational and representational views from Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, 1978). While Iser's concern is with the "reader," many of his insights can be transferred to the "viewer" to the extent that "envisioning" is related to "vision." Eric La Guardia wrestles with the difference in the nature of presentation in "Ceremony and History: The Problem of Symbol from Richard II to Henry V," Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene, are., 1966), pp. 68-88. 19. Compare Derek A. Traversi, Shakespeare: From "Richard II" to "Henry V" (Stanford, Calif., 1957), p. 46. 20. Gielgud, pp. 139-140. 2 1. E. W. Ives, "Shakespeare and History: Divergencies and Agreements," Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 22, and Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1: 354, suggest that, in the 1601 production, Gilly Meyrich and the rest of Essex's swordsmen would have interpreted the sentencing of Bushy and Green as the sentencing of Cecil and Ralegh. 22. Weimann, pp. 65ff. The theatrical sources of these images complement those found in the anonymous La Chronicque de la Traison et Mort de Richard Deux Roy Dengleterre and Jean Creton's Histoire du Roy d:Angleterre Richard II. See Kantorowicz, pp. 84ff., and Ornstein, pp. 107n, 120. J. A. Bryant, "The Linked Analogies of Richard II," Sewanee Review 65 (1957), comments on "Shakespeare's persistent use of Biblical story as analogue for his secular fable." Cf. Wilson, p. xi, and Pater on the playas Christian ritual. 23. Irving Ribner, "Bolingbroke, a True Machiavellian," Modern Language Quarterly 9 (1948): 177-184. 24. Cf. Anthony Brennan's allied discussion of pattern and variation in Shakespeare's Dramatic Structures (London, 1986), pp. 13-38. 25. Capell also added the stage direction, "[with Forces]," that appears at the beginning of the scene. As Weimann, p. 79, points out, the "place" corresponds to the "plain" in the Cornish Round and to the "green" in David Lindsay's Satire of the Three Estates. Wilson, pp. lxxxix-xci, discusses William Poel's production (with Harley Granville-Barker as Richard) in 1899 at the University of London; it would appear that Poel made the auditorium a "place" at this moment. 26. On Richard as king, sun god, and kingly fool, see Kantorowicz, pp. 8182. Lois Potter considers the way Richard uses wordplay to undermine Bolingbroke in "The Antic Disposition of Richard II," Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 33-41. For acute discussions of language in the play, see James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis, 1971), pp. 149-186, and Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare's Talking Animals (London, 1973), pp. 73-104.

200

Notes 27. Rossiter, Angel with Horns, p. 28; Shakespeare's Early Tragedies, pp. 127128. The quotation is from Brents Stirling, "Bolingbroke's Decision," Shakespeare Quarterly 2 (19 51): 27- 34; rpt. in Shakespeare, "Richard II": A Casebook, ed. Nicholas Brooke (London, 1973), pp. 158-168. 28. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967), p. 85. 29. Rabkin, pp. 87-88. For Rabkin, York is the first of Shakespeare's "reflector" characters who "epitomizes and directs our shifting sympathies." Gielgud, p. 43, calls him a "wavering chorus." Compare Rackin, pp. 273-281, and Reese, pp. 247-250. 30. The images of rising and falling are examined by Paul A. Jorgensen, "Vertical Patterns in Richard II," Shakespeare Association Bulletin 23 (1948): 119-1 34; and by Anhur Suzman, "Imagery and Symbolism in Richard II," Shakespeare Quarterly 7 (1956): 355-370. Both readers draw from Willard Farnham's The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (1936; rpt. Oxford, 1956), pp. 415418. 3 1. Ives, "Shakespeare," pp. 19- 35; and Chambers, 1: pp. 353 - 355; 2: 323327. See J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth (London, 1938), J. A. Williamson, The Tudor Age (London, 1961), and E. W. Ives, Faction in Tudor England (London, 1979), for pertinent details. Ure, pp. lvii-lxii, and Wilson, pp. xvi-xxxviii, provide concise summaries. Also see Annabel Patterson's "Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V," Renaissance Drama, n.s. 19 (1988): 2962, in which she reconsiders the evidence addressed by Evelyn May Albright and Ray Heffner in their polemical PMLA essays, 1927-1931. Patterson's analysis of the political and dramatic context in 1601 is acute and especially telling when she cites the contemporary historian William Camden, whose Annals considers the fix Hayward was in after Essex's steward, Gilly Meyrich, arranged for the special performance of "the play of Kyng Harry the iiijth": "Merrick was accused ... that he had ... procured an old out-worne play of the tragical deposing of King Richard the second, to be acted upon the public stage before the Conspirators; which the lawyers interpreted to be done by him, as they would now behold that acted upon the stage, which was the next day to be acted in deposing the Queene. And the like censure given upon a Booke of the same argument, set forth a little before by Hayward a learned man, and dedicated to the Earle of Essex, as if it had beene written as an example and incitement to the deposing of the Queene; and unfortunate thing to the author, who was punished by long imprisonment for his untimely setting forth thereof, and for these words in his preface to the Earle: Great thou an in hope, greater in the expectation of future time" (Annals, trans. R. Norton, 4 pts. fol. [London, 1630], pp. 192-193). 32. See U re, notes to pp. 132-133, for the echoes found in Carlisle's speech. Compare Louis Adrian Montrose's discussion of the "Exhonation, concerning good

201

Notes order and obedience to rulers and magistrates" (1559), in "The Purposes of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology," Helios, n.s. 7 (1980): 53ff. On the staging of Passion II, see David Bevington, ed., Medieval Drama (Boston, 1975), p. 480. 33. Rackin, p. 262. 34. See Joseph A. Porter, The Drama ofSpeech Acts: Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy (Berkeley, 1979); M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London, 1957), pp. 73-88, esp. 87. 35. Walter Pater comments on the inversion of ritual in Appreciations, Newlin, pp. 201-202. 36. Kantorowicz, p. 85. 37. Traversi, p. 43. 38. Ure, p. lxxxii. 39. Weimann, p. 68. 40. Although it is only adumbrated here, the evocation of a beggar-king to embody aplatea occasion reappears in King Lear, 4,6,154ff.; see Weimann, "Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theater," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 401417, esp. 41 7, on this matter and on the "impertinence" and irreverence of a mock-king. 41. Chambers, 1: 354. 42. Dollimore, pp. 3-28; Dollimore and Sinfield, pp. 8, 12. Cf. the cautions found in J. Leeds Barroll, ''A New History for Shakespeare and His Time," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 441-464; and Edward Pechter, "The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama," PMLA 102 (1988): 292-303.

IV. Representation and Privileged Knowledge in Hamlet 1. See Weimann, pp. 120-151, on "impertinency" as a mode of nonsensical self-expression and on "sport" and mimesis in the structure of wordplay. 2. Weimann, p. 230. 3. See Weimann, p. 13 3ff.; M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950), p. 807; Helge Kokeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven, 1953); Wolfgang Clemen, The Development ofShakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), pp. 106-118; M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London, 1957), pp. 111-129; J. Dover Wilson, ed., "Hamlet," New Cambridge Edition (Cambridge, 1934),

The Manuscript of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and the Problem of Its Transmission, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1934), and What Happens in "Hamlet" (Cambridge, 1935). Wilson's influence has diminished, but his work on Hamlet remains imponant. On his desire to impose a stable interpretation on the play, see Terence Hawkes's

202

Notes "Telmah: To the Sunderland Station," Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1986), pp. 310-332; and Edward Pechter, "Remembering Hamlet: Or, How It Feels to Go Like a Crab Backwards," Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987): 135-147, esp. 146-147. 4. Stephen Booth, "On the Value of Hamlet," in Rabkin, ed., Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, p. 152. This synoptic formulation transforms the response of commentators into the reactions of an audience and conflates Coleridge's famous judgment with Laurence Olivier's sense of Hamlet as "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind." On Hamlet's "mysteriousness" and "perplexity" see Maynard Mack, "The World of Hamlet,". The Yale Review 41 (1952): 502-523; and Harry Levin, The Question of"Hamlet" (New York, 1961). 5. Michael Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 1213; the point is repeated from Shakespeare and the Energies ofDrama, pp. 77, 84. 6. Weimann, "Mimesis in Hamlet," in Parker and Hartman, pp. 275-291, esp. 277. Claude C. H. Williamson includes the Earl ofShaftesbury's comment in Readings on the Character of Hamlet (London, 1950), p. 5. Also see the comment made by the eighteenth-century playwright, George Farquhar, in his Discourse upon Comedy (1702) (Williamson, p. 4). John Russell Brown recalls Tyrone Guthrie's observation about Hamlet's rapport with the audience in "The Setting for Hamlet," Hamlet, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, StratfordUpon-Avon-Studies, vol. 5 (London, 1963), pp. 163-184, esp. 169. 7. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Tragic Practice (Oxford, 1979), p. 1. 8. On the appropriateness of Hamlet's "inky cloak" and "customary suits of. solemn black" for a mourner, scholar, and melancholic, see Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, 1984), pp. 82-84, 94ff. I examine the self-consciousness of the revenger in "'This Luxurious Circle': Figurenposition in The Revenger's Tragedy," English Literary Renaissance 13 (1983): 162-181. 9. Weimann, pp. 230-233, discusses the use of a pun and proverb here. My sense of the scene is partly influenced by Rosamond Gilder, John Gielgud's "Hamlet" (New York, 1937), pp. 37-38. 10. For the meaning of these proverbs, see What Happens in "Hamlet," pp. 105ff.; "Hamlet," notes to pp. 170ff., 198. On the speech to Claudius, see Weimann, pp. 132, 231, and "Mimesis," p. 285; and Brian Vickers, The Artistry ofShakespeare's Prose (London, 1968), pp. 248ff. David Wiles offers valuable suggestions on the source of Hamlet's idiom in connection with Will Kemp's departure from the Chamberlain's Men in Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge, 1987), pp. vii-ix, 57-60. I agree that "Hamlet has taken over from the clown / Vice the function of mediating between play and audience" and that "Burbage united within Hamlet the figures of clown and tragic hero" (59-60). In this sense Shakespeare violates Sidney's stricture about the "mingling" of "kings and clowns"-even though Hamlet condemns the

203

Notes antics of clowns who extemporize and "set on the audience to laugh though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be consider'd" (3.2.38ff.). Also see Wiles, p. viii, and Weimann, "Mimesis," pp. 286-287, for discussion of Ql's interpolation at 3.2 .45ff., in which Hamlet shows disdain for clowns who keep "one sute / Of ieasts, as a man is knowned by one sute of / Apparell, and Gentlemen quotes his ieasts downe / In their tables, before they come to the play." 11. Se~ Weimann, pp. 130,236; M. P. Tilley, p. 807; and M. M. Mahood, p. 166. A number of scholars consider the play's different idioms: Clemen, pp. 106-109; Una Ellis-Fermor, The Frontiers ofDrama (London, 1945), pp. 88ff.; M. M. Morozov, "The Individualization of Shakespeare's Characters Through Imagery," Shakespeare Survey 2 (1949): 93-101; R. A. Foakes, "Hamlet and the Court of Elsinore," Shakespeare Survey 9 (1956): 35-43; G. K. Hunter, "The Heroism of Hamlet," in Brown and Harris, pp. 90-109, esp. 102; Roy Walker, The Time Is Out of Joint (London, 1948), pp. 35- 39; and Maurice Charney, Style in "Hamlet" (Princeton, 1969), pp. 221ff. 12. Metadramatic readings include Charles R. Forker, "Shakespeare's Theatrical Symbolism and Its Function in Hamlet," Shakespeare Quarterly 14 (1963): 215-229; Sigurd Burkhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, 1968); Lawrence Danson, Tragic Alphabet (New Haven, 1974), pp. 22-49; James Calderwood, To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in "Hamlet" (New York, 1983); and Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare's Talking Animals, pp. 105-126. These studies develop suggestions found in Mack and in Anne Righter's Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, pp. 138-147. On Hamlet as revenger and melancholic, see Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton, 1940), and Laurence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, Mich., 1951). 13. Righter, p. 205. 14. This is, of course, T. S. Eliot's assessment in "Hamlet and His Problems," Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York, 1932). See Paul Gottschalk's The Meanings of Hamlet (Albuquerque, 1972), pp. 19-21, for further discussion. 15. Mack, 503. Eleanor Prosser sees the Ghost as a devil and usefully focuses the controversy surrounding its provenance in Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford, 1967), pp. 119ff. Goldman, Acting and Action, p. 37, notes how the question is integral to the play's effect. Gottschalk (pp. 56-62, 142-151) summarizes the different viewpoints. 16. Cf. Weimann's discussion of the "aside," pp. 233-236. There is of course no reason to accept the "asides" added by modern editors; on a stage like the Globe the actors' relationship to the audience would have been far more flexible than on a proscenium-arch stage, and asides and similar conventions would have been much more fluid in the circumstance Shakespeare was used to. 17. Wilson, "Hamlet," p. lxii; What Happens, pp. 93ff., 213ff., 224ff. 18. Relying perhaps on Coleridge's speculations about Hamlet's puns as "exu204

Notes berant activity of mind, as in Shakespeare's highest comedy, or as the language of suppressed passion," Eliot comments that "the levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not pan of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in an"; Essays, pp. 125-126; Terence Hawkes, ed., Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare (New York, 1969), p. 145. Hamlet's deliberate "buffoonery" is essential to his ponrayal and to the mimetic forms that ponrayal assumes. Cf. Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy, p. 436, and Wilson, What Happens, pp. 88-135. Saxo Grammaticus's celebration of Amleth's feigned "dulness" is apposite: "0 valiant Amleth, and wonhy of immonal fame, who being shrewdly armed with a feint of folly, covered a wisdom too high for human wit under a marvelous disguise of silliness!"; Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7 (New York, 1973), p. 15. 19. Cf. Wilson, What Happens, p. 105; Weimann, pp. 127ff. 20. A. C. Bradley posed the problem: "his appearance and behaviour are such as to suggest both to Ophelia and to her father that his brain is turned by disappointment in love. How far this step was due to the design of creating a false impression as to the origin of his lunacy, how far to other causes, is a difficult question," Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1904), p. 130. My view is more in keeping with Walker's, pp. 43ff. On the issue of Hamlet's "disordered attire," see Wilson, What Happens, p. 96, and his textual direction, "Hamlet," p. 43. There is no textual evidence to suppon Wilson's stage description. While antic dress would suit well with his mockery of Polonius, it seems out of place with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and with the players. For an analysis of the speech on man, see Vickers, pp. 253-254. 21. Weimann, "Mimesis," p. 282: "For the Prince to address himself to the activity of an actor as a model of purposive action points to yet another use of the mimesis of mimesis." Cf. Roy W. Battenhouse, "The Significance of Hamlet's Advice to the Players," The Drama ofthe Renaissance: Essaysfor Leicester Bradner, ed. Elmer M. Blistein (Providence, 1970), p. 26. Hamlet's horrid speech may cleave the general ear, but I do not find the speech self-reflexive in this way. 22. One of the more remarkable moments in Olivier's film version comes when Hamlet stabs the locus/throne at the end of the soliloquy. 2 3. Gilder, p. 55. 24. Polonius tells Ophelia to "walk you here" and to "read on" a book. Because movement behind Hamlet would be distracting, she often stands or kneels during the soliloquy. 25. Gilder, p. 55. 26. When there is an act pause or intermission, this alternation is not as marked. For comment on Hamlet's emotional swings, see Bradley, p. 124; Wil205

Notes son, "Hamlet," pp. lxiiiff.; and Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1946-1947), pp. 81-82. Also see Richard L. Sterne's John Gielgud Direas Richard Burton in "Hamlet" (New York, 1967), pp. 68, 331. 27. Wilson's well-known argument is that Hamlet overhears Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius in 2,2,158ff. and therefore knows that Polonius and Claudius are behind the arras in 3,1; What Happens, pp. 130-134. 28. Goldman, Aaing and Aaion, pp. 29, 41. 29. Wilson, Manuscript, 1: 27; cf. G. R. Hibbard, The Making of Shakespeare's Dramatic Poetry (Toronto?, 1981), pp. 17-18; and Foakes, p. 41. 30. Wilson, "Hamlet," p. 207; Weimann, pp. 131-132. The proverb is from George Whetstone (1579): "Whylst grass dowth growe, oft sterves the seely steede." 31. Goldman, Aaing and Aaion, p. 25, and Energies of Drama, p. 88. 32. Goldman, Energies of Drama, p. 84. 33. See Weimann, pp. 217-218, on this speech as (in)direct audience address in keeping with Hamlet's Figurenposition. Also see Fredson Bowers' classic"Hamlet as Minister and Scourge," PMLA 70 (1955): 740-749. On the way "chance turns into larger design, randomness becomes retribution," see John Holloway, The Story ofthe Night (London, 1961), p. 35, and Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments (Athens, Ga., 1976), pp. 101-126. 34. See Frye, pp. 164-166, on the moral significance of "spots." Gertrude's behavior after this point is clearer in Q1. 35. Wilson, "Hamlet," p. 234, cites Vaux's ballad in full. 36. See Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1954), pp. 137-138. For comment on the gravediggers' words from a proletarian and Bakhtinian perspective, see Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater (London, 1985), pp. 188-193. I am in agreement with Bridget Gellert Lyons: "On entering the graveyard [Hamlet'S] first remark (with its obvious pun on 'grave') is tantamount to a denial of his behaviour in earlier episodes: 'has this fellow no feeling of his business, that 'a sings in grave-making?' (5.1.64). It is now the Clowns who do most of the fooling, and the quibbles they indulge in, based on their inability or unwillingness to understand what their interlocutor is saying, are not in fact very different from Hamlet's more deliberate quibbling earlier. Yorick's skull, the focus of the early part of the scene, is the most visible token of Hamlet's abandonment of the comic mode. His meditations about death and the passing of all things include thoughts about the transitoriness of the jokes and antics of the Court Jester. To the extent that Hamlet himself has been fulfilling the role of jester, the scene is a comment, visual and verbal, on the whole 'antic disposition,'" WJices ofMelancholy (London, 1971), pp. 77-112, 105. Also see David Young, "'Hamlet': Son of 'Hamlet,'" Perspeaives on "Hamlet", ed. William G. Holzberger and Peter B. Waldeck (Lewisburg, Pa., 1975), pp. 184-206, esp. 204-205.

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Notes 37. Cf. Righter, p. 147. 38. Cf. Thomas Hyde's discussion of this point in "Identity and Acting in Elizabethan Tragedy," Renaissance Drama, n.s. 15 (1984): 114.

v. Location and Idiom in Othello 1. T. S. Eliot, "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," Selected Essays, p. 130. F. R. Leavis, "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero," Scrutiny 6 (1937): 259-283; rpt. as "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero: or The Sentimentalist's Othello" in The Common Pursuit (London, 1952). Helen Gardner, "The Noble Moor," Proceedings of the British Academy 41 (1955): 189-205; cf. Emrys Jones's comment in Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1971), p. 132: "Othello ... acquires full reality only in the presence of a theatre audience." The Eliot-Leavis view is upheld by L. C. Knights in An Approach to "Hamlet" (London, 1960), pp. 15-20; it is challenged by John Holloway in The Story of the Night, pp. 5556. 2. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, pp. 222-257. Edward A. Snow, "Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384-412; Stanley Cavell, The Claim ofReason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford, 1979), pp. 485, 491; Carol Thomas Neeley, "Women and Men in Othello," The VWJmans Part, ed. C. R. S. Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana, 111., 1980). Cf. Rossiter, Angel with Horns, pp. 199-200. 3. "Othello's Occupation: Shakespeare and the Romance of Chivalry," English Literary Renaissance 15 (1985): 293-311, esp. 298, 304. Also see Antoinette B. Dauber, "Allegory and Irony in Othello," Shakespeare Survey 40 (1988): 123-133. 4. Rose, pp. 302, 299, 311. 5. Michael Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 46. 6'. Robert B. Heilman, Magic in the ffib: Action and Language in "Othello" (Lexington, Ky., 1956), pp. 45-98. 7. Rose, p. 298. 8. The most influential reading of the play in these terms is Winifred M. T. Nowottny's 'justice and Love in Othello," University of Toronto Quarterly 21 (19 51-19 52): 330- 344. 9. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 188. 10. S. L. Bethell, "Shakespeare's Imagery: The Diabolic Images in Othello," Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952): 62-79. Heilman, pp. 64-68. 11. Heilman, p. 139. 12. Goldman, p. 53. 13. Bradley, pp. 179, 205.

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Notes 14. Heilman, p. 45. 15. Harley Granville-Barker, in Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. 2, pp. 3-98 passim, notes how frequently the stage location is indefinite. 16. In Rosalie Colie's Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton, 1974), pp. 135177. In her discussion of sonnet influence Colie cites Harry Levin's "Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1961): 3-11. 17. Colie, pp. 149ff. 18. Colie, p. 150, identifies relevant iconographic sources. 19. Bernard Spivack's Shakespeare and the Allegory ofEvil examines the morality play background. Daniel Seltzer's "Elizabethan Acting in Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 201-210, esp. 206-207, distinguishes between the detail and variety of Iago's "formal persona" and the "recognizable emblem" of his morality persona, as does Bethell in The Popular Dramatic Tradition, pp. 87-89. In "Iago-Vice or Devil?" Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968): 53-64, Leah Scragg adds some interesting refinements to Spivack's view. Also see Bradley, pp. 209ff., and Granville-Barker, Prefaces, 2: 98 -112. 20. See Peter Holland's "Resources of Characterization in Othello," pp. 128131, for further comment on these shifts; and Stanley Edgar Hyman, Iago: Some Approaches to the Illusion of His Motivation (New York, 1970), for the multiple possibilities inherent in the role. 21. Arthur Sewell, Character and Society in Shakespeare (London, 1951), p. 81. 22. Rossiter, Angel with Horns, p. 19. 23. Heilman, pp. 79-80; cf. W. H. Auden, "The Joker in the Pack," in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York, 1948). 24. Marvin Rosenberg, in The Masks of "Othello", pp. 19,216,5, 34, recalls Samuel Pepys's anecdote and reminds us that the play has always been notable for its power to cause tears; also see Goldman, pp. 46-47. Nowottny, p. 178, comments that act four is "hardly to be borne" and cites the words (here translated) of De Broglie. 25. Heilman, p. 48; Rosenberg, p. 15. Granville-Barker, p. 22, calls this soliloquy the "nodal point" in the drama. 26. Heilman, p. 99. 27. Goldman, p. 69. 28. Nowottny, p. 340. 29. Bradley, p. 177. 30. Rose, p. 299. 31. Robert Grudin, Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 130-131. Cited by Dauber, p. 125. 32. See Heilman, pp. 95ff. In Shakespearian Players and Performances (Cambridge, 1953), pp. 124-131, Arthur Colby Sprague describes Edwin Booth's portrayal of Iago as a "snake-like" "demi-devil," particularly in the final act but also,

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Notes in later years, in his earlier soliloquies. Rosenberg also offers valuable information on Macready's portrayal of Iago as "a revelation of subtle, poetic, vigorous, manly, many-sided deviltry" (p. 124). 33. On the recovery of Othello's exotic and powerful "voice" see Maynard Mack's "The Jacobean Shakespeare" in Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies, vol. 1 (London, 1960); and G. Wilson Knight'S "The Othello Music," in The Wheel ofFire (London, 1930), pp. 97-119. 34. Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton, 1977), p. 85. 35. "Othello and Colour Prejudice," Proceedings of the British Academy 53 (1967): 139-163, esp. 163. 36. Rosenberg, p. 171.

VI. Multiconsciousness in King Lear 1. "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear," in Must lte Mean What lte Say? A Book of Essays (New York, 1969). 2. Adelman, introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of "King Lear" (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1978), pp. 1-21; Goldberg, An Essay on "King Lear"

(Cambridge, 1974).

3. King Lear In Our Time (Berkeley, 1965), p. 67. J. L. Styan's "Changeable Taffeta: Shakespeare's Characters in Performance," Shakespeare: The Theatrical Dimension, ed. Philip C. McGuire and David A. Samuelson (New York, 1977), pp. 138-139, assesses the limitations of psychological-realistic approaches. 4. Mack, p. 68 and note. See Leo Kirschbaum, "Banquo and Edgar: Character or Function?" Essays in Criticism 7 (1957): 1-21, for a view of Edgar as a plot device; Hugh Maclean, "Disguise in King Lear: Kent and Edgar," Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1960): 49-54, for a view of Edgar as a "realistic" character; and Russell A. Peck, "Edgar's Pilgrimage: High Comedy in King Lear," Studies in English Literature 7 (1967): 219-237, for a view of Edgar that mediates between Kirschbaum's and Maclean's. 5. Citations from King Lear, as for all the plays in this study, are taken from G. Blakemore Evans, textual ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974). As my choice of text indicates, I base my analysis on what is now recognized as one of the "conflated" versions of King Lear. Steven Urkowitz, Peter W. M. Blayney, Gary Taylor, and Michael J. Warren address the editorial and critical problems arising from conflation of the Quarto and Folio texts of the play in a number of studies. The issues raised are important, particularly in the cases of Edgar and Albany. For instance, Edgar's speech in 3,6,102-115 is found only in the Quarto; the Folio, on the other hand, expands his speech in 4,1,1-9 and assigns Edgar the play's final speech, which Quarto gives to Albany. Michael 209

Notes

J. Warren has dealt with these matters incisively in "Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar," in Shakespeare, Pattern ofExcelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark, 1978), pp. 95-107. It seems clear, especially in terms of my argument, that Quarto and Folio "flesh out" (albeit in different ways) Edgar's "choric" and "realistic" voices, with Quarto generally expanding his choric, Folio his realistic, personae. But I am aware that my attempt here ignores Warren's concluding demand: "What we as scholars, editors, interpreters and servants of theatrical craft have to accept and learn to live by is the knowledge that we have two plays of King Lear sufficiently different to require that all further work on the play be based on either Q or F, but not the conflation of both" (p. 105). 6. See Mack, pp. 56-62, and Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory ofEvil. 7. In addition to Bethell, p. 81, see Weimann, pp. 246-52, and Stephen Booth's "King Lear," ''Macbeth,'' Indefinition and Tragedy (New Haven, 1983), p. 33, for discussion of the way "an audience thinks in multiple dimensions." 8. Kenneth Muir, ed., King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1952), p. 77n, glosses the line by offering "realistic" and "metadramatic" readings: "There is some hope for me as Poor Tom; I am nothing, I am doomed, as Edgar. Or possibly the words mean merely 'I am no longer Edgar.'" Also see Styan, p. 138. 9. Muir, p. 118, cites the Cowden Clarke edition: "Gloucester, reminded perhaps by some tone or inflection in his son's voice, links Edgar's supposed villainy with that of Goneril or Regan." 10. Muir, p. 127, notes that Bedlam beggars wore a horn about their necks to put drink in, but also cites the eighteenth-century editor George Steevens: "Edgar also means that he is unable to play his part any longer." If we accept these two readings we acknowledge Edgar's three personae. 11. Mack, p. 62. 12. This Great Stage: Image and Structure in "King Lear" (Baton Rouge, La., 1948). 13. "The Heights and Depths: A Scene from King Lear," in Shakespeare and the Revolution ofthe Times: Perspectives and Commentaries (New York, 1976), pp. 162-186. Also see Alvin B. Kernan's "Formalism and Realism in Elizabethan Drama: The Miracles in King Lear," Renaissance Drama, n.s. 9 (1966): 59-66. 14. Alan C. Dessen argues that the "fictional nature of the plummet from the cliff would be obvious to the audience" in "Two Falls and a Trap," English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 291-307, esp. 303. Among other recent responses, see Derek Peat, "'And that's True too,' King Lear and the Tension of Uncertainty," Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 43-53; and James Black, "King Lear: Art Upside. Down ," Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 35-42. 15. Levin, p. 176. 16. Stephen Booth, in "King Lear," points out that this description provides 210

Notes the most perfectly realized (imaginary) description of setting to be found in the play; see p. 165, n.25. 17. See William R. Elton's perceptive comments in King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, 1966), p. 84n, where he relates these disguises to Edgar's quest for identity. Also consult Thomas F. Van Laan's ''Acting as Action in King Lear," pp. 72-73, and F. T. Flahiff's "Edgar: Once and Future King," pp. 222-237, both' in Some Facets of "King Lear": Essays in Prismatic Criticism, ed. Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff (Toronto, 1974). 18. In asking the question Gloucester echoes the one he asked Poor Tom in 3,4. Cf. Elton, pp. 84-88. 19. See F. D. Hoeniger, "The Artist Exploring the Primitive: King Lear," Some Facets of "King Lear," pp. 95-97. 20. Mack, p. 62. 21. See Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama, pp. 94ff. Also see Booth, p. 57, on Edgar's decision not to reveal himself and on what happens when he does. 22. "Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to suffer in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles.... A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life; but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if the other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue. In the present case the public has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play until I undertook to revise them as an editor." Arthur Sherbo, ed., Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 8 of The Yale Edition ofthe ltWlrks ofSamuel Johnson (New Haven, 1968), p. 704. See Booth, "King Lear," pp. 56, 56-57, for a view similar to my own. 23. William H. Matchett, in "Some Dramatic Techniques in King Lear," McGuire and Samuelson, pp. 185-208, writes of the way Shakespeare keeps us "off balance" by manipulating "audience responses" and by building that response around the "rhythms of suspense and hope." Booth, p. 10, comments that "Edgar's questions are our questions." Also see pp. 10, 11, 46 for relevant comments on Edgar and the "affect" of King Lear. See Richard Fly, Shakespeare's Mediated ltWlrld (Amherst, 1976), pp. 90-91, 97-99, for a different view; and Nicholas Brooke, "Shakespeare: King Lear," Studies in English Literature 15 (1963), for an earlier opinion on Shakespeare's manipulation of the audience.

211

Notes 24. See Mack, p. 63; and Sheldon P. Zitner, "King Lear and its Languages," in Some Facts of "King Lear," pp. 3- 5, for further comment on Edgar's final speech and on the different "languages" in King Lear. Also see Zitner, pp. 9-10, 16, 20, 21, for other perceptive comments on Edgar's speeches.

VII. Voice and Multiple Awareness in Macbeth 1. Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies: The Dramatist's Manipulation of Response, pp. 126-149. 2. "The Criminal as Tragic Hero," Shakespeare Survey 19 (1966): 12-24. Cited by Honigmann, p. 139. Also see Maynard Mack, Jr., Killing the King, p. 160. 3. "Shakespeare's Tragic Villain," in Laurence Lerner, ed., Shakespeare's Tragedies: An Anthology ofModern Criticism (New York, 1963). Cited by Honigmann, pp. 134, 138. 4. Honigmann, p. 136. 5. Honigmann, pp. 136, 138. 6. See Cleanth Brooks's well-known examination of clothing imagery: "The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness," The l%ll Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), pp. 22-49. This point was first made by Caroline Spurgeon in Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge, 1935). 7. Mack, Jr., pp. 182ff. 8. Focus on ''Macbeth'' (London, 1980), pp. 249, 253. Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks ofMacbeth, p. 61, cites Mrs. Montagu's admiration for the "art with which Shakespeare exhibits the movements of the human mind, and renders audible the silent march of thought" (An Essay on the Writings . .. of Shakespeare, 1769). Cf. Wolfgang Clemen: "we feel what is in progress beneath the surface of the spoken word" (Shakespeare's Dramatic Art [London, 1972], pp. 78). 9. Mack, Jr., p. 182. 10. The play's use of mystery and morality elements is in keeping with this external, illusionistic palimpsest. See Glynne Wickham's "Hell-Castle and Its Doorkeeper," Shakespeare Survey 19 (1966): 68-74. 11. In ''Macbeth'' and the Players (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 23 3f£., 245f£., Dennis Bartholomeusz considers the way Gielgud's 1937 and Olivier's 1955 portrayals dealt with this division. Olivier's use of "different voices" may well have reconciled these "mighty opposites." Rosenberg, p. 105, also notes the way Olivier "experienced the character from within . . . as it developed in his imagination, so did it in the imaginations of the spectators." Gareth Lloyd Evans provides a useful survey of performances in "Macbeth: 1946-1980 at Stratfordupon-Avon," Focus on ''Macbeth,'' pp. 87-110; and Rosenberg, p. 512, cites the

212

Notes interesting review of Macready's portrayal in The New Mirror, December 9, 1843: "In the first three acts, almost as sensitive as Hamlet, in the last two, he is almost as ruthless as Richard [III]. Yet still his ferocity is very distinguishable from [Richard's]. His vigour is passion; his severity is impulse; his courage is the frenzy of shame. To the last, through the rings of the steel-armour of sternness with which he has encased his breast, you catch a glimpse of the same, susceptible, excitable quick spirit, which, in the morning of his days, had made his appreciation of virtue so intensely keen, and his sense of the departure from it so fierce an anguish." 12. Richard David, "The Tragic Curve," Shakespeare Survey 9 (1956): 125. 13. From Derek A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (New York, 1956), rpt. in Approaches to ''Macbeth,'' ed. Jay L. Halio (Belmont, Calif., 1966), p. 47. 14. Compare R. A. Foakes, "Images of Death: Ambition in Macbeth," and D. J. Palmer, "'A New Gorgon': Visual Effects in Macbeth," both in Focus on ''Macbeth,'' pp. 7-27, 54-69 (respectively). 15. I rely, as Rosenberg does, on the Folio's punctuation. There is, of course, no reason to assume that the punctuation is authorial. 16. David's perception about the 1955 Glen Byam Shaw RSC production is apposite: the action was often "presented, as, in a sense, outside time ... [it was] Macbeth's nightmare vision of his own predicament" (p. 125). Also see Goldman, Acting and Action, pp. 110-111: "The experience of the play puts us inside Macbeth's head as he finds himself wholly committed to deeds whose abhorrence he registers with the intensest sensitivity." 17. As his soliloquy in 3,1 reveals, Banquo hopes that the "truths" spoken to Macbeth will also come true for him. 18. Kenneth Muir, in the Arden Shakespeare, ''Macbeth'' (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 25n, recalls Harley Granville-Barker's response to this "aside": "the disclosure of Macbeth's mind, not in a soliloquy, but in two rather ineptly contrived asides, is surely, in such a play and with such a character, unShakespearean" (Preface, p. xxvii). I would suggest that Nicholas Rowe's "aside" is incorrect: Macbeth has "humbly" taken his "leave," and Duncan tells Banquo, "Let's after him, / Whose care is gone before to bid us welcome" (47, 56-57). That is, the speech is not a true "aside" but rather another example of locus and platea staging, whereby Macbeth is downstage from Duncan and Banquo. Hence Rosenberg, p. 155, notes that the speech is generally performed as a soliloquy and delivered downstage and that it takes added resonance from Duncan's upstage comment: "It is a peerless kinsman" (58). We may compare Hamlet's Figurenpositionen in 3,1 or Iago's in 2,1. 19. As Rosenberg notes, many editors and directors try to improve the Folio's punctuation, removing the colons after "quickly" (cf. Muir, p. 37n) and "success." Rosenberg comments: "The substantial colon-marked pause after success indicates the springboard to new imagining" (204). 213

Notes 20. Nicholas Brooke, "Language and Speaker in Macbeth," in Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Muir (Cambridge, 1980), p. 71. Cf. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 358. 21. Michael Mullin, ed., ''Macbeth'' on Stage: An Annotated Facsimile ofGlen Byam Shaws' 1955 Promptbook (Columbia, 1976), p. 100. Rosenberg comments: "finally he is speaking to himself, more deeply from his hean than he himself may know, so that the audience hears the double voice of pretense and the cry of truth" (370). 22. Banholomeusz, p. 266, cites Byam Shaw on this point. Also see Harry Berger, Jr., "Text Against Performance: The Example of Macbeth," p. 66, for comment on the thanes' "reflexive judgment on silent complicity." As my argument implies, textual nuance and performance choice may not be as much at odds in Macbeth as Berger thinks. 23. Roy Walker usefully examines Lennox's behavior in The Time Is Free (London, 1949), as does Rosenberg, passim. For many Lennox is a time-server and a hypocrite. 24. Samuel Johnson added the "aside" here. I would mark the shift in "voice" just before "The flighty purpose" (146) and would end it at "But no more sights!" (155). So understood, the dialogue with Lennox would give rise to another internal statement delivered in the presence of a character. The "asides" added by eighteenth-century editors tell us more about neoclassical poetics than about the subtle shifts in Figurenposition present in Shakespearean dramaturgy. 25. Wickham, pp. 70ff. 26. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, p. 74. 27. Rosenberg, p. 613. 28. Bethell, pp. 74, 98. Granville-Barker touched upon the dual awareness necessary here in commenting that Macbeth's final reflective speeches "do not go over well" in close conjunction with his arrogant and fierce vaunts. See Prefaces, vol. 6 (London, 1974), pp. 78ff. 29. L. C. Knights, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" Explorations (London, 1951), p. 18.

VIII. Directing Sympathy in Antony and Cleopatra 1. See Eliot's introduction and Knight's chapter, "On the Principles of Shakespearean Interpretation," in The Wheel ofFire (Oxford, 1930), pp. xiii-xx, 1-16. Knight's reading of Antony and Cleopatra as a lyric poem is in The Imperial Theme (London, 1931). Brooks, The l%ll-Wrought Urn. 2. The Common Liar (New Haven, 1973), p. 30. John F. Danby also stresses the play's ambivalence and "controlling structure of opposites"; see Poets on Fortune's Hill (London, 1952), pp. 128-151. 214

Notes 3. See the introduction to the Pelican Antony and Cleopatra (Baltimore, 1960). 4. See Adelman, p. 30. Granville-Barker, Prefaces, vol. 1, pp. 371ff, puts to rest objections about the play's scenic shifts. Also see Danby, pp. 128-131, for comment on the play's "cinematic" technique. 5. Mack, introduction; also his "The Stillness and the Dance," Shakespeare's Art, ed. Milton Crane (Chicago, 1973). 6. See Beckerman's "Past the Size of Dreaming," Twentieth Century Interpretations of /lntony and Cleopatra," ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973), pp. 99-112. For an artistic parallel to the staging of this scene, see Wylie Sypher, Four Stages ofRenaissance Style (New York, 1955), pp. 143-144. Sypher discusses the use, in the left-hand corner of Tintoretto's Presentation ofthe Virgin, of the "Sprecher"- a "sharply accented foreground figure who faces outward toward the spectator, yet twirls inward, gesturing or glancing toward the action behind him." As my argument will suggest, Enobarbus's Figurenposition may well owe something to the "Sprecher" figure. 7. EmrysJones, in Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1971), pp. 239-242, comments on Enobarbus's Vice-like aside here. 8. For views of Antony as a "fool" at this moment see Richard S. Ide, Possessed with Greatness (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), pp. 122-124; Matthew Proser, The Heroic Image (Princeton, 1965), pp. 208-213; and J. L. Simmons, Shakespeare's Pagan ltWJrld (Charlottesville, 1973), pp. 148-149. I am in more agreement with the view proposed by Arnold Stein in "The Image of Antony: Lyric and Tragic Imagination," Kenyon Review 21 (1959): 586-606. 9. M. R. Ridley, ed., the Arden edition, Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge, 1954), p. 262, provides the relevant passage from North's Plutarch. 10. See J. Leeds Barroll, "Enobarbus's Description of Cleopatra," Tulane Studies in English 37 (1958): 61-78; and Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, Mass., 1961). 11. Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (New York, 1903), p. 130. 12. See Eugene Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden (New York, 1962), pp. 113-121. 13. Adelman, pp. 55-101, treats the mythological backgrounds fully. 14. "What Venus Did with Mars," Shakespeare Studies 2 (1963): 210-217. 15. See Waddington, pp. 214-215, and Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York, 1968), pp. 81-96, esp. 89. 16. Danby, p. 151. 17. Waddington, p. 220. 18. Adelman, pp. 34-35, 39. 19. See Wind, pp. 90-91. 20. Wind, p. 92. 21. See Ridley, pp. 247-257; Granville-Barker, vol. 1, pp. 404-407; Mar215

Notes garet Lamb, Antony and Cleopatra on the English Stage (Rutherford, N.J., 1980), pp. 180-185; and C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored (London, 1953), pp. 58-59. 22. Adelman, pp. 39-40. 23. See Michael Shapiro, "Boying Her Greatness: Shakespeare's Use of Coterie Drama in Antony and Cleopatra," Modern Language Review 77 (1982): 1-15. 24. For comment on the Seleucus episode, see M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays (London, 1910), pp. 428-433; Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare's Sources, vol. 1 (London, 1957), p. 205; William Rosen, Shakespeare and the Craft ofTragedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 15 3ff.; Reuben Brower, H,ero and Saint (Oxford, 1971), p. 341; and Honigmann, pp. 165ff. 25. Lamb, p. 37. Milhous and Hume, pp. 107-140, offer a survey of approaches to and producible interpretations of All for Love. 26. W. M. Merchant, Shakespeare and the Artist (London, 1959), p. 49; Lamb, p. 37. 27. Lamb, pp. 42-43.

216

Index

Actor-audience relationship, xii, xiv, 1-4,6, 10, 12-14, 17-22,35,48, 72, 77-79, 91, 94, 100, 119, 124, 133, 143, 155, 19 3 n. 6, 204 n.16 Address to audience: direct, 5, 18-20, 34, 42, 77, 112-113, 123; downstage, 18; indirect, 35, 81, 206 n.33 Adelman, Janet, 129, 170, 171, 209 n.2, 215 nn.4, 13, and 18,216 n.22 Affective fallacy, xii, 194 n.9; response, 6-8, 16, 17, 25, 129, 130, 146, 147, 194 n.11; theories, 193 n.6 Albright, Evelyn May, 201 n.31 Althusser, Louis, 198 n.6 Altick, Richard, 199 n.11 Altman, Joel, 195 n.18, 199 n.14 Antic (figure), influence on Hamlet, 77, 79-81, 84, 87-90, 92, 94, 95, 98-100, 102, 205 n.20 Archer, William, 3, 4, 193 n.5 Artaud, Antonin, 5, 193 n.6 Aside, 10, 18-20, 29, 30, 47, 79-81, 85-87,90,91, 113, 122, 125, 135, 139, 140, 155-160, 164, 175-178, 204 n.16, 213 n.18, 214 n.24 Auden, W. H., 208 n.23

Audience: divided from actor, 3; multiple awareness of, 1, 9, 20, 21, 103, 150, 152, 156, 158, 210 n.7; onstage, 1, 10, 21, 69, 93, 94, 102, 147, 148. See also Response, audience Babb, Laurence, 204 n.12 Bacon, Sir Francis, 76 Baker, Herschel, 199 n.9 Barish, Jonas, 199 n.15 Barroll, J. Leeds, 202 n.42, 215 n.10 Bartholomeusz, Dennis, 212 n.11, 214 n.22 Barton, Anne Righter, 193 n.2, 196 n.7, 197 n.16, 204 nn.12 and 13, 207 n.37 Barton, John, 200 n.17 Battenhouse, Roy W., 205 n.21 Beardsley, Monroe C., 194 n.9 Beckerman, Bernard, 8, 173, 194 n.11, 215 n.6 Beckett, Samuel, 20 Belsey, Catherine, 198 n.6 Benson, F. R., 199 n.17 Berger, Harry, Jr., 195 n. 27, 214 n.22 Berry, Ralph, 194 n. 11, 197 n.12 Bethell, S. L., 5, 196 n.32, 207 n.10,

217

Index Bethell, S. L. (continued) 208 n.19, 210 n.7, 214 nn.26 and 28 Betterton, Thomas, 103 Bevington, David, 195 n.15, 197 n.23, 202 n.32, 210 n.5 Biblical subjects, 55, 60, 62, 67, 68, 200 n.32; homiletic elements, 60; Judas, 72, 75, 179; Pilate, 42, 60, 61, 70, 72, 74 Black, James, 210 n.14 Blackfriars Theater, 8 Blayney, Peter W. M., 209 n.5 Bogard, Travis, 199 n.ll Bond, Edward, 20 Booth, Edwin, 208 n.32 Booth, Stephen, 16, 78, 170, 203 n.4, 210 n.16, 211 n.22 Booth, Wayne, 151 Bowers, Fredson, 204 n.12, 206 n.3 3 Bradley, A. C., 205 nn.20 and 26, 207 nn.9 and 13, 208 n.29, 214 n.20 Brecht, Bertold, 5, 193 n.6 Brennan, Anthony, 200 n.24 Bristol, Michael D., 206 n.36 Brooke, Nicholas, 35, 37, 64, 197 n.13, 199 n.12, 201 n.27, 211 n.23, 214 n.20 Brooks, Cleanth, 170, 212 n.6, 214 n.1 Brower, Reuben, 216 n.24 Brown, John Russell, 154, 194 n.11, 198 n.2, 203 n.6 Bryant, J. A., 200 n.22 Bullough, Geoffrey, 205 n.18 Burbage, Richard, 203 n.l0 Burkhardt, Sigurd, 204 n.12 Calderwood, James L., 200 n.26, 204 n.12 Cambyses. See Preston, Thomas

Camden, William, 201 n.31; Annals, 201 n.31 Capell, Edward, 62, 157, 200 n.25 Cavell, Stanley, 129, 130, 146, 147, 207 n.2 Cecil, Robert (first earl of Salisbury), 52, 76, 199 n. 7, 200 n. 21 Cerasano, S. P, 197 n.20 Chamberlain's Men, 203 n.l0 Chambers, Sir E. K., 74, 198 n.7, 200 n.21, 201 n.2 Charney, Maurice, 204 n.11, 215 n.10 Chekhov, Anton, 3 Chorus, 2, 15, 20, 94, 122, 201 n.29

La Chronicque de la Traison et Mort de Richard Deux Roy Dengleterre, 200 n.22 Cibber, Colley, 40, 41, 197 n.20 Clarke, Charles and Mary Cowden, 210 n.9 Clemen, Wolfgang, xii, 25, 36, 196 n. 5, 197 n.14, 202 n. 3, 204 n.11, 212 n.8 Clown, 38, 77, 80, 99-101, 191, 203 n.10 Clowning, as mimetic form, 88, 103 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 141, 203 n.4, 204 n.18 Colie, Rosalie, 208 nn.16-18 Comes, Natalis, 7; Mythologiae, 7 Commonplaces, as aspect of declamatory style, 93 Complementary perspective, 18, 88 Conventions, dramatic. See Dramatic conventions Cook, Anne Jennalie, 195 n.23 Cope, Jackson I., 19 3 n. 6, 19 5 n .19 Craig, Hardin, 195 n.16 Creton, Jean, 200 n.22; Histoire du Roy d'Angleterre Richard II, 200 n.22

218

Index Danby, John F, 183, 214 n.2, 215 nn.4 and 16 Danson, Lawrence, 204 n.12 Dauber, Antoinette B., 207 n.3, 208 n.31 David, Richard, 213 nn.12 and 16 Dibat, 12, 53 De Broglie, Le Duc, 208 n.24 Dessen, Alan C., 194 n.11, 197 n.12, 210 n.14 Detachment, degree of, 5, 49, 51, 172 Dewey, John, 22 Dialogue: illusionistic, 19, 35, 38, 49, 81-86,92,95, 113, 119, 155, 156, 158, 163, 175, 176, 178,214 n.24; nonsensical, 95, 100, 135 Dollimore, Jonathan, 51, 52, 198 n.6, 202 n.42 Donne, John, 170 Downstage, xii, 12, 18, 41, 44, 51, 61, 62, 69, 71, 73, 79, 80, 81, 91, 105, 107, 111, 114, 11 7, 118, 12 3, 132, 15 7, 161, 17 3, 174, 21 3 n. 18. See also Platea Dramatic conventions, xi, xiii, 3, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 17, 18, 20, 21, 34, 35, 78, 79, 80, 84, 95, 96, 97, 99, 103, 111, 118, 140, 158, 169, 177, 204 n.16 Dramatic speech, forms of: colloquial, 19, 35, 48; declamatory, 11, 19, 35, 56, 81, 93; formal and ceremonial, 52; idiomatic, 15; "impertinent," 77, 100, 101; inversion in, 70, 77, 84, 120; irreverent, 63, 77, 89; mocking, 59, 63, 65, 70, 71, 77, 84, 89, 94, 100; patterned, 54; proverbial, 15, 81; rhetorical, 19, 26-28, 35, 39, 5 3, 55, 6 3, 69, 7 3, 80. See also Aside; Soliloquy Dramaturgy, xi, xii, xiii, 9, 17, 35,

41,52,78, 113, 169, 190, 191, 214 n.24 Dryden, John, 190, 191 Elam, Keir, 194 n.10 Eliot, T. S., 3- 5, 15, 21, 104, 170, 204 n.14, 205 n.18, 207 n.1, 214 n.1 Elizabeth I, 67, 75, 76, 201 n.31 Ellis-Fermor, Una, 204 n.11 Elton, William R., 211 nn.17 and 18 Emblematic depiction, 28, 41, 52, 101, 119 Embodiment, forms of, 38, 52, 73, 84 Engagement, degree of, 2, 5, 12, 51, 72, 8 7, 105, 122, 12 5 Equivocation, 99, 101 Essex, Earl of, 52, 65, 74-76, 200 n.21, 201 n.31 Evans, Bertrand, 203 n.7 Evans, G. Blakemore, 193 n.1, 209 n.5 Evans, Gareth Lloyd, 212 n.11 Everyman, 17 Evolutionary thinking, postDarwinian, 3 Extradramatic elements, 12, 21 Farnham, Willard, 201 n.30, 205 n.18 Farquhar, George, 103, 203 n.6 Felperin, Howard, 209 n.34 Fenton, Doris, 195 n.21 Figural positioning. See Figurenposition Figurenposition (figural positioning), xii-xiii; in Antony and Cleopatra, 172, 175, 176, 179, 181, 191, 21 5 n.6; defined, 17, 19; in Hamlet, 77-81, 84-87, 91, 93, 94, 99, 206 n. 33; in King Lear, 130, 135, 137, 142, 149; in Macbeth, 155, 156,

219

Index

Figurenposition (figural positioning) (continued) 158, 161,163,213 n.18, 214 n.24; in Othello, 105, 107, 110, 111, 114, 11 7, 119, 121; in Richard II, 51, 52, 53, 60, 61, 63, 69, 71, 77; in Richard III, 23-24, 30, 31, 33, 34. See also Locus; Platea Flahiff, F. T., 211 n.17 Fly, Richard, 211 n.23 Foakes, R. A., 204 n.11, 206 n.29, 213 n.14 Forker, Charles R., 204 n.12 Formalism, rhetorical, 35, 54, 73 Fourth wall, 3, 4, 21 Frey, Charles, 195 n.27 Frye, Roland Mushat, 203 n.8, 206 n.34 Fulgens and Lucrece. See Medwall, Henry Gardner, Dame Helen, 104, 207 n.1 Garrick, David, 190 Gielgud, John, 199 n.17, 200 n.20, 201 n.29, 203 n.9, 206 n.26, 212 n.11 Gilder, Rosamond, 203 n.9, 205 nn.23 and 25 Globe Theater, 1, 8, 16, 20, 98, 204 n.16 Goldberg, S. L., 129, 209 n.2 Goldman, Michael, 111, 146, 170, 194 n.11, 203 n. 5, 204 n.15, 206 nn.31 and 32, 207 nn.5 and 12, 208 n.27, 213 n.16 Gombrich, E. H., 47 Gorboduc. See Norton, Thomas; Sackville, Thomas Gottschalk, Paul, 204 nn.14 and 15 Granville-Barker, Harley, xv, 191, 200 n.25, 206 n.26, 208 n.15, 213 n.18, 214 n.28, 215 nn.4 and 21 Greenblatt, Stephen, 104, 195 n.14, 198 n.6, 199 n.13, 207 n.2

Grotowski, Jerzy, 193 n.6 Grudin, Robert, 208 n.31 Gurr, Andrew, 194 n.11, 195 n.13 Hall, Edward, 2 3, 74; The Union of

the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and l'Ork, 23 Handke, Peter, 193 n.6 Harbage, Alfred, 195 n. 23 Hardison, O. B., Jr., 193 n.5 Hassel, R. Chris, Jr., 197 n.20 Hattaway, Michael, 193 n.8 Hawkes, Terence, 200 n.26, 202 n. 3, 204 n .12, 205 n.18 Hayward, John, 65, 210 n.31; The Life and Reign of Henry IV, 65 Heffner, Ray, 201 n.31 Heilman, Robert B., 110, 111, 140, 151, 196 n.8, 207 nn.6 and 11, 208 nn.14, 23, 25, 26, and 32 Hellenga, Robert R., 195 n.14 Henry VII, 74, 75 Henry VIII, 75 Heywood, Thomas, 22; An Apology for Actors, 196 n. 36 Hibbard, G. R., 206 n.29 Hoby, Sir Edward, 199 n.7 Hodges, C. Walter, 216 n.21 Hoeniger, F. D., 211 n.19 Holinshed, Raphael, 23, 53, 54, 67, 74, 199 n.13; Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 23 Holland, Peter, 194 n.11, 195 n.30, 208 n.20 Holloway, John, 206 n.3 3, 207 n.1 Homilies, 67, 201 n.32 Honigmann, E. A. G., 151, 194 n.11, 212 nn.2, 4, and 5, 216 n.24 Hosley, Richard, 194 n.12 Howard, Jean E., 194 n.11 Hume, Robert D., 195 n.28, 196 n.35, 216 n.25

220

Index Hunter, G. K., 127, 204 n.11 Hunter, Robert G., 206 n.3 3 Hyde, Thomas, 207 n. 38 Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 208 n.20 Ibsen, Henrik, 3 Iconographic backgrounds, 7, 53, 114-116, 181, 184 Ide, Richard S., 215 n.8 Ideology, 51, 52, 74-76 Idiom, shifts in, 19, 35-36, 39,63,71, 77, 78, 80,82, 84, 88, 89, 99, 104, 105, 107, 110, 134, 137, 214 n.24 Illusion, theatrical, xi, xii, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 13, 15, 17- 22, 35, 37- 39, 47, 48, 53,77,80-82,85,86,89,91,93, 95,99, 100, 105, 112-114, 117, 119, 121, 131-1 33, 135, 136, 137, 141-143, 154-158, 168, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 191; degree of association with, 85, 86, 119, 178, 181; degree of dissociation from, 81, 85, 86, 119, 135, 158, 178 Illusionistic context, 2-6, 9-10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17-22, 30, 31, 34, 35, 38, 39, 49, 68, 73, 78, 80, 85, 86, 93-95, 101, 112, 118, 125, 130, 132, 135, 140-142, 144, 154, 157, 158, 162, 167, 169, 175, 176, 178, 190, 191; nonillusionistic moments, xi, 2-3, 5, 9-10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 34, 35,49, 85, 142 Inflection, shifts in, 133, 142 Intentional fallacy, xii, 194 n.9 Interpretation, producible, 22, 52, 68, 73-76, 216 n.25 Intonation, shifts in, 19, 68, 167 Iser, Wolfgang, 200 n.18 Ives, E. W., 200 n.21, 201 n.31

Jones, Emrys, 207 n.1, 215 n.7 Jones, Inigo, 3, 5 Jones, Robert C., 197 n.12, 198 n.27 Jonson, Ben, 3, 12 Jorgensen, Paul A., 201 n.30 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 198 n.4, 200 n.22, 202 n.36 Kemp, William, 203 n.10 Kernan, Alvin, 194 n.10, 210 n.13 Kirschbaum, Leo, 209 n.4 Knight, G. Wilson, 170, 209 n.3 3, 214 n.1 Knights, L. C., 207 n.1, 214 n.29 Knowledge, degree of, 78, 93, 97, 138 Kokeritz, Helge, 202 n.3 Kolin, P. C., 195 n.12 Kyd, Thomas, 5, 54, 84; The Spanish Tragedy, 15, 54 La Guardia, Eric, 200 n.18 Lamb, Margaret, 216 nn.21, 25-27 Lambarde, William, 75 Leavis, F. R., 104, 207 n.1 Levin, Harry, 140, 203 n.4, 208 n.16, 210 n.15 Liebestod, 106, 115, 117, 185, 186 Lindsay, Sir David, 200 n.25; The Satire of the Three Estates, 200 n. 25 Location, on stage, 5, 17-19, 33, 39, 54, 73, 100, 104, 107, 11 3, 129, 135, 191,208 n.15. See also Fig-

urenposition; Locus; Platea Locus, xii, xiii, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 33- 35, 38, 39, 40, 49, 51-5 3, 62, 67, 68, 69, 7 3, 77, 78, 80, 81, 88, 91, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 107, 11 5, 11 7, 12 8, 131, 132, 15 5, 15 7, 16 3, 169, 177, 191, 205 n. 22, 21 3 n.18; defined, 12. See also Platea

Johnson, Samuel, 147, 211 n.22, 214 n.24

221

Index

Ludus Conventriae, 60; Passion II, 60, 67, 72, 202 n.32 Lyly, John, 80 Lyons, Bridget Gellert, 206 n. 36 MacCallum, M. W., 216 n.24 Mack, Maynard, 129, 130, 133, 145, 171, 196 nn. 31 and 33, 203 n. 4, 204 n.12, 209 n.4, 210 nn.6 an~ 11, 211 n.20, 212 n.24, 215 n.5 Mack, Maynard, Jr., 199 n.11, 212 nn.2, 7, and 9 Maclean, Hugh, 209 n.4 McNeir, Waldo F, 196 n.9 Macready, William Charles, 209 n.32, 213 n.11 Mahood, Molly M., 202 nn.34 and 3, 204 n.ll Mankind, 18 Marlowe, Christopher, 5, 12, 14; Dr. Faustus, 12, 14, 161 Marston, John, 84 Martz, Louis L., 206 n.36 Masque, 1, 12, 14, 15 Matchett, William H., 211 n.23 Medwall, Henry, 11, 12; Fulgens and Lucrece, 11-15, 17, 18 Merchant, W. M., 216 n.26 Metadrama, 21, 84, 130, 132, 172, 200 n.26, 204 n.12, 210 n.8 Meyer, Leonard B., 197 n.21 Meyrich, Gilly, 75, 200 n.21, 201 n.31 Milhous, Judith, 195 n.28, 196 n.35, 216 n.25 Mimesis, 9, 52, 60, 71, 78, 80, 87 Mimetic theory, 71, 73, 77, 78, 84, 87, 88 Mockery, 14, 59, 76, 95, 99, 116, 122 Montagu, Elizabeth R., 212 n.8 Montague, C. E., 199 n.17

Montrose, Louis Adrian, 201 n. 32 Morality play, 13, 14, 35, 65, 119, 120, 126, 129, 168, 169, 208 n.19, 212 n.10 Moral judgment, 24, 30-32, 34, 40-44, 46, 47, 84, 125, 152, 154, 155, 164 More, Sir Thomas, 23,46, 197 n.22; The History of King Richard III, 23 Morozov, M. M., 204 n.11 Mowatt, Barbara, 195 n.27 Mullaney, Steven, 196 n. 36 Muir, Kenneth, 133, 210 nn.8-10, 213 n.18, 216 n.24 Mullin, Michael, 214 n.21 Multiconsciousness, 21, 129,132, 133,142, 143,210 n.7 Mystery play, 46, 52, 74, 78, 212 n.l O. See also Ludus Coventriae Myth, Tudor, 23,33,52 Mythological backgrounds, 114, 116, 181-185, 190 Mythology, classical, in the Renaissance: Mars, 114, 117, 173, 181-185; Venus, 114, 116, 117, 181-185, 186 Nashe, Thomas, 14; Summer's Last Will and Testament, 14-15, 18, 19 Neale, J. E., 201 n.31 Neeley, Carol Thomas, 207 n.2 Neoclassical poetics, 77, 78, 85, 91, 103, 190, 214 n.24 New Criticism, 2, 3,4,7, 16, 170; ambiguity as aspect of, 26, 148, 162, 167, 170, 171, 181; ambivalence as aspect of, xiii, 16, 170, 171 New Mirror, The, 213 n.11 North, Sir Thomas, 172, 181, 215 n.9; Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, 172, 177, 181, 182, 185, 186, 215 n.9

222

Index Norton, Thomas, 11; Gorboduc, 11, 13, 15,35,54,80 Nowottny, Winnifred M. T., 207 n.8, 208 nn.24 and 28 Olivier, Sir Laurence, 40, 41, 197 n.20, 203 n.4, 205 n.22, 212 n.11 Orgel, Stephen, 199 n.13 Ornstein, Robert, 196 n.2, 198, n.3, 200 n.22 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 4-6, 193 n.6 Oxford rebellion, 76 Pacing, 43, 148 Palmer, D. ]., 213 n.14 Palmer, John, 199 n.16 Pasco, Richard, 200 n.17 Pater, Walter, 199 n.11, 200 n.22, 202 n.35 Patterson, Annabel, 201 n.31 Pavis, Patrice, 194 n.l0 Peat, Derek, 210 n.14 Pechter, Edward, 202 n.42, 203 n.3 Peck, Russell A., 209 n.4 Pepys, Samuel, 103, 208 n.24 Performance approach, xii, xiii, 5-8, 12, 16, 17, 22, 39, 52 - 5 3, 68, 112, 143, 167 Persona(ae), xiv, 1, 16, 19, 28, 33-35, 39, 47, 63, 87, 118-120, 122, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136-138, 142, 143, 155, 172, 178,208 n.19, 210 n.S; choric, 20, 41, 129, 130, 132, 13 3, 135-139, 142, 143, 146, 149, 172, 175, 178, 210 n. 5 Phillips, Augustine, 75 Pilate. See Biblical subjects Place, undifferentiated downstage, xii, 4, 18, 19, 51, 53, 62, 77, 88, 91, 102, 105, 107, 113, 118, 169,200 n.2 5. See also Platea Planes, multiple illusionistic, 20, 22

Platea, xii, xiii, 12, 13, 15, 18,34, 35, 39, 41, 49, 52, 62, 67, 68, 71, 73, 76, 78, 80, 81, 88, 91, 96, 99, 131, 132, 157, 177, 191, 202 n. 40, 213 n .18; defined, 12; timelessness of, 68, 7 3. See also Locus Poel, William, 191, 200 n.25 Porter, Joseph A., 202 n.34 Potter, Lois, 200 n.26 Presentation, theatrical, 6, 8, 9, 14, 17, 21, 22, 39, 51, 57, 130, 171 , 172, 200 n.18 Presentational drama, 2-6, 8-10, 12, 13, 16-18,20,21,34,35,38,39, 41, 48, 85, 8 7, 157, 191 Presentational part, 2, 10, 14, 15, 22, 33, 34, 47, 68, 78, 84, 105, 11 3, 120, 121, 122, 126, 131, 155 Preston, Thomas, 13; Cambyses, King of Persia, 13-15, 17 Privileged knowledge: of audience, 36, 58, 77, 89, 91, 99, 112, 122, 131, 138, 144, 147, 154, 158, 159, 164, 165; source in actor's relationship with audience, 35, 36, 79, 86, 131, 132, 136 , 139, 14 3, 172, 175 Proser, Matthew, 215 n. 8 Prosser, Eleanor, 204 n.15 Proverbs, 19, 95, 203 nn.9 and 10, 206 n.30 Psychoanalytical approach to dramatis personae, xiv, 2, 7, 9, 27, 28, 49, 50, 51, 104, 118-120, 122, 129, 130, 147, 152, 209 n.3 Psychology of character, 27, 47-50, 71, 78, 88, 90, 94, 111, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 134, 136, 152, 161, 167 Puns, 37, 80, 82, 203 n.9, 205 n.18 Rabkin, Norman, 7, 195 n.25, 196 n.34, 201 nn.28 and 29

223

Index Rackin, Phyllis, 198 n.1, 201 n.29, 202 n.3 3 Realism, theatrical, 9, 10, 21, 128, 129, 133 Reese, M. M., 198 n.5, 199 n.17, 201 n.29 Representation, theatrical, xiv, 3, 9, 10, 13, 17, 21, 39, 51, 52, 57, 62, 77, 78, 81, 84, 103, 200 n.18 Representational drama, 2-6, 8, 9, 13, 16-18,21,33,41,47,48,53, 57, 78, 84, 85, 88, 157, 191 Represented role, 2, 10, 13, 15, 33, 47,78,84,87,90,95, 105, 113, 118, 121, 125, 126, 155 Response, audience, xiii, 6, 7, 16, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31-32, 34, 39, 41, 43-46, 51, 64, 65, 68, 78, 120, 128, 129, 130-1 32, 135, 137, 141, 145-148, 151, 152, 154-156, 159, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174-176, 179, 191, 194 n .11, 200 n.18, 203 n. 4 , 211 n.23 Ribner, Irving, 200 n.23 Richardson, Ian, 200 n.17 Riddles, 88, 99 Ridley, M. R., 215 nn.9 and 21 Ripa, Cesare, 7; Iconologia, 7 Role: and actor, xii, 2, 4, 9, 10, 1315, 19, 21, 27, 33, 34, 37, 47, 49, 51, 65, 75- 77, 78, 103, 105, 11 3, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 126, 130, 132 -1 35, 138, 142, 155, 169, 174, 188, 200 n.17, 208 n.20; and part, 14-15, 47, 51, 57, 71-72, 84, 95, 99, 103, 105, 120, 121, 124, 126, 130-1 31, 135, 137, 138, 155, 169, 18 3, 18 5, 189, 210 n.1 0 Root, R. K., 181 Rose, Mark, 104, 207 nn.4 and 7, 208 n.30 Rosen, William, 216 n.24

Rosenberg, Marvin, 194 n.11, 208 nn.24 and 25, 209 n.36, 212 nn.8 and 11, 21 3 nn.15, 18 , and 19, 214 n.27 Rossiter, A. P, 23-25, 29,34,35, 37, 38, 64, 196 n. 4, 197 nn .11 , 15, 17, and 18, 198 n. 7, 199 n .11 , 207 n.2, 208 n.22 Rowe, Nicholas, 187, 213 n.18 Sackville, Thomas, 11; Gorboduc, 11, 13, 15,35,54,80 Sanders, Wilbur, 196 n.2 Saws, 82, 83 Saxo Grammaticus, 205 n.18 Scaffold, 18, 53, 76, 186 Scragg, Leah, 208 n.19 Second Shepherds' Play, The, 18 Self-consciousness, theatrical, 21, 47, 63, 78, 84, 90, 177, 188 Self-dramatization, 58, 63, 71, 104, 191 Seltzer, Daniel, 208 n.19 Seneca, 11, 15, 35; Hercules Furens, 88 Sewell, Arthur, 208 n.21 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 78, 203 n.6 Shakespeare, William, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 2-7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21-25 Antony and Cleopatra, xii, 170-191 , 214-216 (notes) Hamlet, xii, 16, 19, 20,48, 77103, 150, 155, 158, 163, 171, 178, 195,202-207 (notes) Henry V, 20 Henry VI, Part Three, 48 Julius Caesar, 101 King Lear, xii, 29, 87, 129-149, 202 n.40, 209-212 (notes) Macbeth, xii, 20, 48, 150-169, 178, 184, 212-214 (notes)

224

Index

A Midsummer Night's Dream, 9-12, 22

Othello, xii, xiii, 29, 48, 104-128, 132, 173, 174, 184, 187, 207209 (notes) Richard II, 51-77, 84, 175, 198202 (notes) Richard III, xii, 14, 19, 23-50, 51, 53, 68, 69, 74, 80, 82, 114, 118, 120, 122, 124, 132, 150, 152-155,168,196-198 (notes) Romeo and Juliet, 20, 105-107, 114, 115, 11 7, 17 3, 184-186 The Tempest, 1, 2, 16, 115 Twelfth Night, 20 Shapiro, Michael, 216 n.23 Shaw, Glen Byam, 213 n.16, 214 n.22 Sher, Anthony, 197 n.20 Shrimpton, Nicholas, 197 n.20 Sidney, Sir Phillip, 11, 13, 15, 16; An Apology for Poetry, 15, 16 Simmons, J. L., 215 n.8 Slater, Anne Pasternak, 194 n .11 Snow, Edward A., 207 n.2 Soliloquy, 5, 10, 19. 20; in Antony and Cleopatra, 178, 179; in Hamlet, 85-87, 90-92, 96, 98-100, 205 n.22; in King Lear, 131, 132, 133, 136-1 38, 144; in Macbeth, 155, 156, 158-160, 162, 166, 169,213 n.18; in Othello, 113, 120-126, 208 n.25; in Richard II, 69, 73; in Richard III, 27-30, 33-35, 38, 39, 42, 47-49 Sonnet, influence on characterization, 105, 114-116, 184, 208 n.16 Southern, Richard, 194 n.12 Speech, dramatic. See Dramatic speech Spivack, Bernard, 196 n.7, 208 0.19, 210 n.6 Sprague, Arthur Colby, 208 n. 32 Sprecher, 173

Spurgeon, Caroline, 212 n.6 Stage: apron, xiv, 9, 17, 141, 190; proscenium arch, xiv, 5, 20, 190, 204 n.16 Staging, 35, 38,53,61,62,135, 140; simultaneous, 91, 96, 132, 140, 186, 187, 199 n.13, 204 n.16, 213 n.18, 215 n.6 Stanislavski, Constantin, 193 n.6 States, Bert 0., 194 n.l0 Steevens, George, 210 n.10 Stein, Arnold, 215 n.8 Sterne, Richard L., 206 n.26 Stirling, Brents, 201 n.27 Stoppard, Tom, 20 Strong, Roy, 199 n.13 Styan, J. L., 194 n.11, 209 n. 3, 210 n.8 Summers, Will, 14, 15, 100

Summer's Last Will and Testament. See Nashe, Thomas Suzman, Arthur, 201 n.30 Swan Theater, 20 Synchronism, Shakespeare's use of, 46, 52 Sypher, Wylie, 215 n.6 Tate, Nahum, 147 Taylor, Gary, 209 n.5 Theater: continental, 5; popular, 5, 13,28,72 Thomas oj "-'0odstock, 54 Tilley, M. P, 202 n. 3, 204 n.11 Transaction, dramatic, xi, xii, 2, 16, 21, 24,46 Traversi, Derek A., 200 n.19, 202 n. 37, 21 3 n.1 3 Tudor ideology and myth, 11, 23, 51, 52, 67, 74-76 Ure, Peter, 199 n.13, 201 nn.31 and 32, 202 n.38 Urkowitz, Steven, 209 n.5

225

Index Van Laan, Thomas F, 195 n.14, 196 n.6, 211 n.17 Vice (figure), 13, 19, 24, 28, 32-36, 38, 39, 47, 48, 77, 80, 95, 105, 107, 118, 119, 121, 12 5, 12 6, 131 , 197 n.12, 203 n.10, 208 n.19, 215 n.7 Vickers, Brian, 203 n.l0, 205 n.20 Voices, dramatic, 17, 30, 34, 35, 36, 48, 63, 79, 117, 127, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 142 -14 3, 149, 150, 152, 157, 161, 163, 166-169, 209 n.33, 210 nn.5 and 10,212 n.ll, 214 nn.21 and 24 Waddington, Raymond B., 182, 215 nn.15 and 17 Walker, Roy, 204 n.11, 205 n.20, 214 n.23 Warren, Michael]., 209 n.5 Watson, Robert N., 196 n.8 Watt, R. 0., 195 n.12 Weimann, Robert, xii, 17, 19, 193 n.3, 194 n.11, 195 nn.19, 20, 22, and 29, 197 n.12, 199 nn.12 and 13,200 nn.22 and 25,202 nn.39

and 40, 203 nn.6, 9, and 10, 204 nn.11 and 16, 205 nn.19 and 21, 206 n.33, 210 n.7 Wells, Stanley, 200 n.17 Wheeler, Richard P., 196 n.8, 197 n.19 Wickham, Glynne, 194 n.12, 212 n.10, 214 n.25 Wiles, David, 203 n.10 Wiles, Timothy]., 193 n.6 Williams, Raymond, 198 n.6 Williamson, Claude C. H., 203 n.6 Williamson,]. A., 201 n.31 Wilson, ]. Dover, 82, 170, 198 n.7, 200 n.25, 201 n.31, 202 n.3, 204 n.17, 205 nn.18-20 and 26, 206 nn.27, 29, 30, and 35 Wimsatt, William K., Jr., 194 n.9 Wind, Edgar, 215 nn.15, 17, 19, and 20 Wordplay, 37, 63, 71, 77, 80, 82, 84, 87, 89, 200 n.26 Young, David, 206 n.36 Zitner, Sheldon P., 212 n.24

226

About the Author Michael Mooney is Associate Professor of English and Director of the University Honors Program at the University of New Orleans.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mooney, Michael, 1947Shakespeare's dramatic transactions / Michael Mooney. p. em. ISBN 0-8223-1039-2 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616-Tragedies. 2. Shakespeare, William 1564-1616 - Dramatic production. 3. Theater audiences - England - History- 16th century. 4. Theater audiences - England History-17th century. I. Title. PR2983. M56 1990 822.3v 3-dc20 90-2770 elP