Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value 9781512809398

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Stage-Wrights

NEW CULTURAL STUDIES Series Editors Joan Dejean Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Peter Stallybrass Gary A. Tomlinson A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Stage-Wrights Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value PAUL Y A C H N I N

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 1997 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yachnin, Paul Edward, 1953Stage-wrights : Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the making of theatrical value / Paul Yachnin. p. cm. — (New cultural studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8122-3395-6 (acid-free paper) i. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600—History and criticism. 2. Theater and society—England—History—i6thcentury. 3. Theater and society—England—History—I7th century. 4. English drama—i7th century—History and criticism. 5. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Technique. 6. Middleton, Thomas, d. 1627—Technique. 7. Jonson, Ben, 1573?-1637— Technique. 8. Authorship—History—i6thcentury. 9. Authorship—History— I7th century. 10. Canon (Literature) I. Title. II. Series. PR658.S46Y33 1997 822'.309—dc2i 96-54900 CIP

for Liane . . . you brightness of our sphere, who are The muses' evening, as their morning star.

and for my mother and father

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Contents

Textual Note and Abbreviations

ix

Preface

xi

1. The Powerless Theater

1

2. Desdemona's Voice: Historical Interpretation and the Operations of Minds

25

3. The Knowledge Marketplace

45

4. Instituting Mirth in Renaissance Comedy

65

5. Reflections of Theater in the "Tragic Glass" from Marlowe to Middleton

93

6. "Gargantua's Mouth": Orality, Voice, and the Gender of Theatrical Power

129

Notes

171

Works Cited

193

Index

205

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Textual Note and Abbreviations

All Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, textual ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). The spelling of all quoted early modern texts has been modernized. The following works are cited parenthetically in the text: Bullen

The Works of Thomas Middleton. Ed. A. H. Bullen. 8 vols. London: John C. Nimmo, 1886. Chambers E. K. Chambers. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923. HSS Benjonson. Ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, n vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52. Orgel Benjonson: The Complete Masques. Ed. Stephen Orgel. Yale Ben Jonson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969. Parfitt Benjonson: The Complete Poems. Ed. George Parfitt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

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Preface

Ben Jonson said goodbye to the public playhouse in 1629. It was not the first time he had done so, and it would not be the last. The occasion was the failure of his play, The New Inn, at the Blackfriars. As a parting shot, he wrote an attack, not his first, on the institution of the theater. Framed as an "Ode to Himself," it announced his boundless scorn for the commercial drama: Come leave the loathed stage, And the more loathsome age, Where pride and impudence in faction knit, Usurp the chair of wit: Indicting and arraigning every day, Something they call a play. Let their fastidious, vain Commission of the brain, Run on, and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn: They were not made for thee, less thou for them. (Parfitt, 282) Jonson turned away from "the loathed stage" along with its idiot spectators, consigning them to the witless productions—the "swill," "mouldy tale[s]," "scraps," and "sweepings"—of the players and dramatists, or, as he called them, "The stagers, and the stage wrights" (Parfitt, 283). "Stage-wrights" is Jonson's nonce word, a term parallel to "playwright" (possibly also a Jonsonian coinage); both words point to what he believed to be the absolute difference between the transcendent value of the poet and the social degradation of the men who worked like manual laborers within the

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"loathed" public sphere of the playhouse. Jonson wanted to be a poet rather than a playwright; but, as this book will argue, if he wanted to be a poetic "teacher of things divine" (HSS, 5:17), he had also to be a stage-wright. "Stage-wright," of course, is more than an insult. Not that Jonson intended it to be anything other than insulting, but the word nevertheless conveys something of the complexity involved in writing for the English Renaissance theater. Writing for money, for common tastes, for performance in commercial houses before paying customers—all this connected playwriting with ungentlemanly occupations such as leatherworking (Shakespeare's first trade) and bricklaying (where Jonson started his working life), and rendered the profession of playwriting antithetical to what Jonson viewed as the higher calling of poetry. But the designation "poet" was hardly an adequate alternative description. Even court poets were little better than playwrights, their supposed advantages being that they were "rewarded" for "service" rather than paid for making a product and that they were required to be more sycophantic than were their commercial counterparts. Furthermore, a writer like Jonson could not live without a public audience; and he certainly could not live without money. That is why he returned to the stage again after the failure of The New Inn^ writing The Magnetic Lady (1632) and A Tale of a Tub (1633), even after having turned his back forever on the theater in 1629. The truth of his situation, and of those of William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton too, was that a person who needed to earn a living and who wanted to count for something in his society could not be a poet without also being a laborer. Facing that practical and ideological dilemma, the commercial dramatists attempted to redescribe playwriting in legitimate terms, wresting positive meanings from the debased language surrounding their paid work in the common playhouse. Jonson's boldest bid for literary legitimacy was the 1616 folio publication of The Workes of Benjamin Jonson. And although Sir Philip Sidney did not intend to dignify hardhanded mechanicals by associating them with the golden world of poetry, he nevertheless translated the Greek word "poet" as "maker." Overall, Jonson,

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Shakespeare, and Middleton were inescapably degraded by their work as stage-wrights, but they were also the most important makers of the emerging value of the theater and of their labor within it. In this book, then, I examine the theater's project of institutional legitimation. I consider the ways in which Elizabethan and Jacobean plays negotiated between the socially degraded activity of playwriting and the dramatists' desire for social prestige. While some other critics emphasize how the drama was broadly implicated in early modern culture, I look at that drama from the viewpoint of the interests of the theater. This is important because much recent criticism has regarded the drama as a mirror of the culture, as if it had no particular institutional content or agenda of its own. But neither Shakespeare, Jonson, nor Middleton's plays provide anything like a transparent glass on Renaissance culture. Rather, their drama depicts the world in ways refracted by the interests of the playing companies and the playwrights. In my approach, I assume the existence of an element of continuity between then and now which makes this book something of what Hans-Georg Gadamer might call a consciousness-raising confrontation with the past. Like Shakespeare, modern Shakespeareans are traders in words. Our work is often regarded as mere play, even by us. Our claims to be able to provide spiritual uplift or political leadership to our students and readers are sometimes regarded with approbation, but more generally with skepticism, especially by those outside the academy. Both Renaissance English playwrights and modern humanists (and antihumanists) face a broadly similar dilemma, and both groups attempt to rewrite themselves in terms that will garner social prestige. This element of historical continuity underpins my local, institutionalist focus. While culturalist critics tend to exclude what connects them with what they find in the work of Shakespeare and his fellows, my project of localizing the drama in relation to playwriting and legitimation assumes the importance of a line of historical continuity between the early modern theater and modern literary studies, especially with regard to the project of enhancing the value of literary and subsidiary discourses. It will come as no surprise that the value of literature has a his-

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tory, that what makes literature good has been different at different times. At various junctures, literature has been good by virtue of its capacity to inculcate virtue, good on account of its promotion of the vernacular, good because it distracts people from their troubles, good for its opening up of a critical view on the dominant culture, good because it gives us access to a "higher" sphere. These "goods" are not mutually exclusive; often they work in combination, and sometimes they jostle each other in a rapidly shifting competition for dominance. That the mode of valuating literature is changeable rep resents one of the key assumptions underlying this inquiry into how Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton tried to assure that their plays would be seen as worthwhile. The value of theater, like the value of most other things, is produced as part of larger systems of cultural exchange and revision. This book offers an account of the exchanges, revisions, and inter textual contests that contributed to the revaluing of the Renaissance theater. In Chapter i, I argue that the English Renaissance theater was powerless. This view contradicts one of the central assumptions of historicist critics, old and new alike. It is important to make the argument, however, because it helps explain so much in the historical record that appears baffling from the point of view of those who believe in the social and political power of the drama, because it helps explain why playwriting seemed frivolous and unworthy as a profession, and also because it discourages the unexamined idea that the theater existed in what might be called a total relationship with society, as if we could just "read off" truths about early modern England by paying attention to Shakespeare's plays. A powerless theater, in contrast, is a theater that operates first of all in the sphere of its own interests (interests which, to be sure, are connected in various ways to the culture in general). The claim that the theater was powerless rather than powerful is based on the historical record, but it is also grounded in a theoretical assumption about the relationship between the operations of power and the operations of minds. In Chapter 2,1 articulate this assumption and develop an argument for the possibility of both real historical knowledge and real freedom. I make a case for the equal

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legitimacy of the operations of minds alongside the operations of power. To understand a past culture is not only to grasp the operation of certain formative discourses and practices but also to understand how that culture seemed to the people who lived in it. Any attempt to gain historical knowledge involves moreover a recognition of what Gadamer calls our situatedness in "the web of historical effects." I suggest that such a recognition might make it easier for us to take into account the constructive freedom and agency of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton as they worked to enhance their own worth in what I call "the knowledge marketplace" of Renaissance England. Chapter 3 explains how Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton attempted to trade their "play money" for the esteem of their fellows in the knowledge marketplace of early modern England. I outline the basic conditions of the marketplace—the complex status of plays, playing, and playwriting—and the ways in which the early lives and social milieus of the three men tended to influence the way they constructed their own legitimacy. Shakespeare's bourgeois background helped shape his career and the particular values that he promoted within his plays, just as Jonson's boyhood education at the elite Westminster School contributed to his uneasy allegiance with aristocratic culture, and just as Middleton's city background colored the representations of value in his plays. These men chose neither the conditions of their upbringing nor the terms of their social legitimation, but they did decide to become writers and they learned how to manipulate the idioms of value that were given to them by their culture. The conditions of freedom and self-description cannot be mastered and may not even be fully visible to any individual person, but neither are persons the dupes of ideological forces utterly beyond their control or awareness. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are devoted, respectively, to the dramatists' redescriptions of theater in the two principal Renaissance genres of comedy and tragedy, and in relation to the representation of women and the politics of gender. In all the plays that I look at in these chapters, Shakespeare and Jonson emerge as great opposites—the privatized, radically inward value of the Shakespearean theater against the

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public, political worth of the Jonsonian. Middleton's relationship to this central contest is complicated: having perhaps learned the techniques of skeptical interrogation from Christopher Marlowe, he is playfully critical of all foundationalist claims about theatrical value, and his plays put into action the full dialogism of a brilliantly parodic dramatic art. Overall, the tripartite competitive rewriting of theater is carried on in terms of private, public, and parodic forms of value. These forms are usually connected with Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton, respectively, but, as we will see, they often interweave in complex patterns of exchange and contestatory redescription. To write about early modern dramatists is also but not only to write about ourselves. We share with the dramatists the problem of being traders in words and also the capacity for being innovative redescribers of our own literary activities. That this kind of historical criticism involves an effort of self-envisioning does not invalidate its results as history. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton redescribed their commercialized writings in the terms of legitimate cultural currencies. Understanding the playwrights' search for value can illuminate the problematic and competitive strategies by which modern literary scholars seek to valorize their own work. This is not to suggest that self-aggrandizement was all that the drama accomplished. Nor is it to suggest that present-day academic writing is directed exclusively toward its own valorization. To study Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton's past achievement is to begin to come to terms with the activity of doing literary studies in the modern Anglo-American knowledge marketplace. Most important, understanding the drama at the institutional level can enable broader cultural analysis by specifying how the theater's representations of the world served its own interests first of all, and hence how those representations refracted rather than reflected the culture of Renaissance England. *

*

*

Many people have supported my work toward an understanding of the institutional politics of the English Renaissance theater. At Toronto, Alexander Leggatt, Jill Levenson, Brian Parker, G. B. Shand,

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and Sheldon Zitner taught me, by wonderful example, the discipline of historical criticism. Anne Lancashire was an exemplary doctoral supervisor and continues to be a source of good judgment and a good friend. Among many others who have contributed to this project by their friendship and engagement with the issue of the politics of literature are Leeds Barroll, Michael Bristol, W. L. Godschalk, Barbara Hodgdon, Ed Jewinski, David Scott Kastan, Michael Keefer, Lynne Magnusson, Alan Nelson, Patricia Parker, Edward Pechter, Paul Stevens, and Gary Taylor. Phyllis Rackin graciously raised my spirits when grace was most welcome. Lars Engle critiqued the chapter on tragedy with his usual acuity. My colleagues at the University of British Columbia, especially John Wilson Foster, Joel Kaplan, Bill New, Paul Stanwood, and Mark Vessey, have provided intellectual companionship and valued guidance. I have had many wonderfully stimulating conversations with Kay Stockholder. Penelope Rensley checked quotations and references, but is not responsible for errors I sneaked by her. Earlier, shorter versions of Chapters i and 4 were published in English Literary Renaissance 21: i (Winter 1991): 49-74 and Shakespeare Quarterly 43:1 (Spring 1992): 51-66, respectively. I thank Arthur Kinney, editor of ELR, and Barbara Mowat, editor of SQ for permission to reprint and for being demanding and supportive readers. I am pleased also to record my gratitude to the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for providing the funding that made my research possible in the first place. I am thankful for the published work of Jonathan Dollimore, Stephen Greenblatt, and Louis Montrose. While I disagree with many of their conclusions, I have nevertheless profited from their groundbreaking explorations along the conventional disciplinary borders that separate literature from history and politics. Also on the cutting edge between disciplines, Barbara Freedman's historical and theoretical work has provided me with a model of imaginative and rigorous scholarship. Anthony Dawson has been my friend and co-worker for the past seven years. His work has informed mine at every turn; he has read every draft of this book and has given unstintingly of his wide

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learning and his deep understanding of Renaissance drama. The debt I owe him cannot be repaid, except perhaps by the completion of another book. Finally, it is a pleasure to acknowledge my children, Thomas and Maryth, who have taught me about the making of value by growing into young adulthood so beautifully. My most profound obligations are recorded in the dedication.

I

The Powerless Theater

THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT the English Renaissance theater was wide-ranging. Combatants argued about issues such as the Deuteronomic prohibition against transvestism, the moral status of theatrical make-believe, the social pretension of the players, the political, social, and religious influence of the plays, and the risks or benefits attendant upon the sheer size of an assembly of people who were not engaged in work or worship. Supporters of the stage stressed the theater's capacity to combine instruction and delight so as to promote citizenship and morality; detractors insisted that the theater spread discontent and degradation.1 Thomas Nashe, on the pro-theater side, claimed in 1592 that plays constitute "a rare exercise of virtue," that they inspire patriotism by bringing on stage the heroes of English history, that they teach cautionary lessons by demonstrating the punishments wrongdoers and rebels inevitably incur: In plays, all cozenages, all cunning drifts over-gilded with outward holiness, all stratagems of war, all the cankerworms that breed on the rust of peace, are most lively anatomized. They show the ill success of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of civil dissension, and how just God is evermore in punishing of murder. . . . They are sour pills of reprehension wrapped up in sweet words. Whereas some petitioners of the Council against them object, they corrupt the youth of the city and withdraw 'prentices from their work . . . as for corrupting them when they come, that's false, for no play they have encourageth any man to tumults or rebellion, but lays before such the halter and the gallows; or praiseth or approved! pride, lust, whoredom, prodigality, or drunkenness, but beats them down utterly.2

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Phillip Stubbes, on the opposite side, fulminated in 1583 that the theater was "Venus's palace and Satan's synagogue."3 In copious rebuttal of arguments such as Nashe's, Stubbes wrote: And whereas you say there are good examples to be learned of them, truly so there are. If you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, lie, and falsify; if you will learn to jest, laugh, and fleer, to grin, nod, and mow; if you will learn to play the Vice, to swear, tear, and blaspheme both Heaven and Earth; if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean, and to divirginate maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, slay, kill, pick, steal, rob, and rove; if you will learn to rebel against princes, to commit treasons, to consume treasures, to practice idleness, to sing and talk of bawdy love and venery; if you will learn to deride, scoff, mock and flout, to flatter and smooth; if you will learn to play the whoremaster, the glutton, drunkard, or incestuous person; if you will learn to become proud, haughty, and arrogant; and finally if you will learn to condemn God and all his laws, to care neither for Heaven nor Hell, and to commit all kind of sin and mischief, you need to go to no other school, for all these good examples may you see painted before your eyes in interludes and plays.4

Not surprisingly, this comparison reveals that Nashe and Stubbes share much common ground; in particular, they both believe that the theater has the power to influence its audience in profound ways. The idea that the theater was powerful endured throughout the whole Tudor and Stuart age. However, the currency of the idea diminished considerably during the late Elizabethan and through the whole Jacobean period. It tended to be replaced by the idea that the theater was powerless, and indeed irrelevant to the system of power. In this chapter, I argue that, in response to the conflicting pressures of censorship and commercialism, and in the relative political stability of the period 1590-1625, the players promulgated the idea of the disinterestedness of art, extended the techniques of what Annabel Patterson has called "functional ambiguity" practiced by early Elizabethan playwrights, and advertised that plays were separate from the operations of power.5 As a result of both the vigor of Elizabethan government censorship and the compliance of the players with that censorship, the theater of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period came to be viewed as powerless, unable to influence its audience in any

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purposeful or determinate way. The playing companies won from the government precisely what the government was most willing to give —a privileged, profitable, and powerless marginality.6 The theater that emerged in response to the conflicting pressures of censorship and commercialism was able to address topical issues, and thus to appeal to a large and heterogeneous audience, precisely because drama was perceived to be separate from real life and because play was perceived to be separate from power.7 My argument that the drama was viewed as separate from the operations of power is not meant to imply that the theater was without real historical consequences. But a historical understanding of the early modern stage requires setting it in its own time rather than projecting it into its future, especially in terms of the kind of narrative that attempts to bind a performance of Hamlet at the Globe in 1600 to the execution of King Charles in i649.8 Such narratives are doubly unhistorical: they refuse to localize and they assume the operation of a causal chain that is incapable of demonstration. In a recent effort to rehabilitate the idea of the power of Elizabethan theater, Louis Montrose rightly criticizes naive arguments about theatrical power but depends upon the merely theoretical claim that the drama caused a far-reaching rethinking of personhood and politics.9 I suggest that the local, historical meaning of the drama can be recovered only in terms of Elizabethan-Jacobean political, social, and literary cultures, and also in terms of the contemporary separation of literary from nonliterary discourses. The case I make for the powerless theater is not intended to preclude the theater's power to excite discussion concerning political and social issues. Indeed, I argue that, between about 1590 and 1625, the stage persistently represented the issues of the moment. Nevertheless, I suggest that these representations were usually seen to subsist in a field of discourse isolated from the real world, and that such representations were seen as incapable of intervening in the political arena. There are of course a number of cases where the players and playwrights did get in trouble with the authorities. Ben Jonson was in jail twice, once for his part in The Isle of Dogs (1597) and on another occasion for Eastward Ho! (1605). He told William Drummond that he

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had been summoned by the authorities to answer charges concerning other plays. And several plays by other writers attracted the notice of the authorities. Among these are Samuel Daniel's Philotas (1605), George Chapman's Byron plays (1608), and of course the famous instances of Shakespeare's company's performance of a Richard II play on the eve of the Earl of Essex's rebellion in 1601 and the same company's staging of Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess twenty-three years later. In addition, surviving playscripts such as The Book of Sir Thomas More (c. 1595), Middleton's Second Maiden^s Tragedy (1611), and Philip Massinger and John Fletcher's Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Earnavelt (1619) demonstrate the operation of preperformance censorship. This evidence might suggest that the authorities must have thought that the theater represented a powerful threat to the government itself; and many scholars have indeed been persuaded that the stage was generally viewed as a significant political force in Renaissance England. But while the punishments could be brutal (in fact they never were with regard to the players or playmakers), and the censorship might be arbitrary and thick-skinned, it does not seem likely that such punishments and censorship grew out of any consistent, governmental fear of the power of the theater. Janet Clare's fascinating study of censorship is driven by an unexamined assumption that the theater fought for freedom of expression against an oppressive and fearful government. About The Malcontent (1604), Clare tells us that "Marston anticipated the charges of political and personal associations that would attend such an uncompromising account of the abuses of power."10 Clare speaks about the playwrights' "oblique references to the fetters of censorship and to the system of spies and informers" (18), but what is striking about the political situation of the playhouse is that the government never even bothered to place an official in the audience in order to supervise performances, in spite of the players' acknowledged ability to augment and focus the approved playscript in unprescribed ways, and in spite of the fact that Edmund Tilney's original commission had called for the players to "present and recite" their plays before him (quoted in Clare, 12). The Spanish public theater of the same period was far more strictly policed. Each playing company was headed by an autore nominated by

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the Council of Castile; and after 1638, two alguttciles de comedies were appointed by the government to supervise performances in each theater.11 Not surprisingly, Clare's assumption that the theater was seen to be powerful makes it difficult for her to explain the general leniency of the government with regard to the players—the fact that the Privy Council's 1597 order to "pluck down quite the stages" was never acted upon, or that printed satires were called in and burned in 1599 while satirical plays flourished, or that John Hayward underwent the most Draconian of state trials because of his published history of Richard II and Henry IV while Shakespeare's company was questioned and then exonerated after performing a play that, on the face of it, also seemed to support Essex's attempted coup d'etat.12 More striking still are the differences between the government's successful suppression of sacred, Catholic drama on the one side and its toleration of the commercial theater which replaced that drama on the other. Clare discusses the former as if it were the seed out of which grew the late Elizabethan Office of the Revels. To a degree there is continuity between the eradication of popular, Catholic drama and the policing of commercial theater, but the differences are surely more significant. In the 15605 and 15708, the government extirpated the religious drama in spite of the fact that it was widely supported by very many people in the country. If the Crown had been as apprehensive about the commercial drama as many scholars say it was, why did it not suppress that drama also? There would indeed have been far fewer obstacles to putting an end to the commercial theater. The parties directly disadvantaged would have included the companies of actors, a few investors, and a handful of aristocratic patrons, as against the hundreds of guild members and city authorities directly involved in the production of the religious drama. The explanation is simple: the government was determined to put a stop to the religious drama, but it held no such brief against the commercial theater. The religious drama represented a profound ideological threat to the Elizabethan regime; the commerical theater represented no such threat. Clare and other "old historicists" are by no means alone in their belief in a powerful theater. Materialist criticism of approximately the

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past fifteen years has shared the assumption that the theater mattered centrally to the shape and direction of English society. The political and cultural power of the theater has held pride of place, from early work by Stephen Orgel, Jonathan Dollimore, and Stephen Greenblatt through to recent books by Jean Howard and Louis Montrose.13 This various and important body of work tends to share the view that the theater operated in what might be called a total relationship with early modern English culture. Representations of gender, rank, and race in the plays are to be equated with the conditions of gender, rank, and race in the society at large. Issues of institutional specificity—how plays served the particular interests of the playing companies or how they signified in the playhouse—count for very little in this criticism. Materialist critics, furthermore, have tended to assume that the political position of the theater did not change significantly during the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. According to Dollimore (speaking about the Jacobean stage), "[t]he authorities feared the theatre," and consequently they attempted—in Dollimore's words—"to predetermine the nature of all drama."14 Greenblatt also recognizes the power of the theater, although as a friend rather than an enemy of the dominant political order. "And yet even in 2 Henry IV" Greenblatt writes, "where the lies and the self-serving sentiments are utterly inescapable, where the illegitimacy of legitimate authority is repeatedly demonstrated . . . even here the audience does not leave the theatre in a rebellious mood. Once again, though in a still more iron-age spirit than at the close of i Henry IV, the play appears to ratify the established order."15 Dollimore has praised the stage for reasons that parallel Stubbes's reasons for blaming it; both see the stage as the major threat to the status quo, as an intervention in the transmission of the ideology of order. One can certainly imagine Stubbes agreeing with Dollimore's claim that the theater had been partly responsible for the breakdown of social order leading up to the Civil War. "Is it too ambitious," Dollimore writes, "to see ... a relationship between the drama and the English revolution? . . . If the causes of [the] collapse [of the established institutions of Church and State in 1640] can be discerned in the previous decades then, at the very least, we might

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postulate a connection in the early seventeenth century between the undermining of these institutions and a theater in which they and their ideological legitimation were subjected to sceptical, interrogative and subversive representations."16 On the other side, Greenblatt is able to take account of the apparent subversiveness of the theater by positioning subversion as one element in the theater's authorization of monarchical power. Greenblatt's argument is more complex and subtle than defenses of the theater such as Nashe's, but differs very little from such defenses in terms of what it sees as the overall politics of the stage. Whatever their differences, scholars such as Dollimore and Greenblatt are united in opposition to the critical tradition in which English Renaissance literature has been depoliticized and dehistoricized. Overall, the new historical movement is committed to the idea that "literature" was a cultural practice fully engaged in the life of society. Dollimore, for example, has argued against the idea that literature passively reflects history; for Dollimore, early modern literary representations of history—especially tragic representations—should be viewed as practices that intervened in contemporary history: Thomas Elyot, in The Governor, asserted that, in reading tragedies, a man shall be led to "execrate and abhor the intollerable life of tyrants," and for Sidney tragedy made "Kings fear to be tyrants." Puttenham in The Art of English Poesy had said that tragedy revealed tyranny to "all the world," while the downfall of the tyrant disclosed (perhaps incongruously) both historical vicissitude . . . and God's providential order. . . . In contrast Fulke Greville explicitly disavowed that his own tragedies exemplified God's law in the form of providential retribution. Rather, they were concerned to "trace out the high ways of ambitious governors." He further stressed that the "true stage" for his plays was not the theatre but the reader's own life and times—"even the state he lives in." This led Greville actually to destroy one of his tragedies for fear of incrimination—it could, he said, have been construed as "personating . . . vices in the present Governors, and government." . . . Those like Greville . . . knew then that the idea of literature passively reflecting history was erroneous; literature was a practice which intervened in contemporary history in the very act of representing it.17

Dollimore's sample of contemporary views on early modern tragedy indicates that the idea of a powerful literature—even a powerful theater—did persist; however, the sample is unrepresentative of

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the views of commercial writers—it does not follow that a tragedy by a professional like Shakespeare would have been seen to be as politically volatile as one by a courtier like Greville. Dollimore assumes that the conditions of the production and reception of literature would have been just the same at the Globe as they were at Whitehall. Importantly, he ignores the fact that the idea of the power of poetry in general was itself contested in the Renaissance. Both George Puttenham and Sir Philip Sidney, for example, decried the way their contemporaries regarded poetry—as sheer "fantastical" frivolity. Puttenham complained that neither poetry nor poets were taken seriously: "But in these days (although some learned princes may take delight in them) yet universally it is not so. For as well poets as poesy are despised, and the name become, of honorable infamous, subject to scorn and derision, and rather a reproach than a praise to any that useth it: for commonly who so is studious in the art or shows himself excellent in it, they call him in disdain a fantastical: and a lightheaded or fantastical man (by conversion) they call a poet."18 Sidney, although he made the moral instructiveness of poetry central to his Apologie^ acknowledged as well that poetry was not powerful—"poor poetry, which from almost the highest estimation of learning is fallen to be the laughingstock of children."19 Furthermore, the power of poetry to "move" its readers toward moral amelioration was jeopardized by the questionable social status of the poet as poet. In spite of his defense of poetry, for example, Sidney could not escape his own socially conditioned poetic amateurism or his courtly disdain for the activity itself of writing poetry: "I will give you a nearer example of my self, who (I know not by what mischance) in these my not old years and idlest times, having slipped into the title of a poet, am provoked to say something unto you in the defence of that my unelected vocation" (1:150-51, emphasis added). John Donne, who also could not evade the contradictions attendant upon the writing of poetry, remarked in a letter that "he is a fool which cannot make one sonnet, and he is mad which makes two."20 In Discoveries, Jonson too acknowledged the low standing of poets: "He is upbraidingly called a poet, as if it were a most contemptible nickname" (Parfitt, 383).

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9

Thus, in a courtly milieu, the status of the activity of writing poetry and the power of poetry to influence its readers were both controversial issues. Courtier-poets found their activity burdened by the contradictions consequent upon their own undisclosed commercialism; men who needed to continue to think of themselves as courtly dabblers were in fact in the business of commodifying their talent in the scramble for advancement. The severity of their dilemma is indicated by the poets' own attempts to recuperate poetry, the activity of writing poetry, and the social status of the poet.21 For professional playwrights, matters tended to be more straightforward because the commercialism of playwriting was notorious. As a consequence, of course, playwrights were socially degraded. Men who were anxious about their social standing—Ben Jonson, for example—felt uncomfortable working in the theater, and attempted either to escape "the loathed stage" or to suppress the commercialism of their activity—as Jonson did by publishing his plays in folio under the provocative title The Workes of Benjamin Jonson.22 Other playwrights maneuvered differently in relation to the problems of status attendant upon their mercenary careers: Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood seem to have been unashamed professionals; as we will see in Chapter 3, Shakespeare and Middleton and Jonson himself all achieved some measure of respectability by pursuing careers parallel to, rather than separate from, their careers as dramatists.23 To a degree, the sheer social "lowliness" of commercial-theater plays made them a priori less politically important than either court closet drama or court masques.24 When, for example, King James forgave the "insolency" of the King's Servants' production of Game at Chess in 1624, his anger seems to have been mollified by the realization that they were working actors whose motivation was mercenary rather than political: . . . upon their petition delivered here unto him, it pleased his Majesty to command me to let your Lordships to impart to the rest of that honorable Board, that his Majesty now conceives the punishment if not satisfactory for all their insolency, yet such, as since it stops the current of their poor livelihood and maintenance . . . his Majesty would have their Lordships connive at any common play licensed by authority, that they shall act as before.25

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The testimony of early modern poets and playwrights suggests further that the "power" of poetry was undermined by readers' tendency toward misinterpretation, especially toward topical allegorization—a critical practice that Jonson ascribed to "invading interpreters . . . who cunningly, and often, utter their own virulent malice, under other men's simplest meanings" (HSS,s:i9). Poetry in the theater was further incapacitated by being subjected to the interpretive practices of the actors and by the actual presence of a large assembly of potential "invading interpreters." Indeed, the playwrights seem to have promoted "invading interpretation" as a way of transferring the production of potentially offensive topical meaning from their own texts to the "malicious" imaginings of their audiences, since by virtue of this transfer of the production of meaning, the stage could carry political meanings but need not acknowledge such meanings as its own. At around the turn of the century, Shakespeare produced—in Hamlet's play-within-the-play—a brilliant critique of the idea of the powerful theater. Hamlet himself believes that the passionate univocality of the theater has the capacity to galvanize a diverse and divided audience into a unified or at least knowable community. Thus, Hamlet believes, a theatrical speech about the murder of his father should be able to cut through both the ideological contradictions that perplex his world and the attendant universal condition of secrecy and deceit, cleaving the general ear, revealing everyone to everyone in each one's true moral condition, and disclosing the true meaning of every action and utterance. In the event, the success of The Murder ofGonzago is problematic: in spite of Hamlet's attempts to prescribe interpretation, the onstage audience's understanding of Gonzctgo remains divided. In Hamlet's eyes—it is true—the play has held the mirror up and has shown Claudius the image of his crime; that is what the play-withinthe-play means to Horatio as well and even in part to Claudius (although Claudius sits through two-thirds of Gonzago, including a precise recapitulation of his crime, without seeming to "get it" at all). To the Queen, however, and to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the "Mousetrap" constitutes Hamlet's threat against the legitimately elected King. In fact, the "Mousetrap" is incapable of meaning the

The Powerless Theater n

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same thing to all the members of its onstage audience because they respond to it in ways determined by their own political views. Thus Horatio's "Mousetrap" subverts the authority of the monarch, but Guildenstern's "Mousetrap" enhances the legitimacy of Claudius's rule by revealing the subversive ambition of Claudius's nephew. Shakespeare's "Mousetrap" suggests that a theater that has no control over what it means is in no position to be able to influence its audience toward any particular political viewpoint. The commercial theater of around 1600 was similarly powerless to influence its audience toward one view or another of the political issues of the time. As we will see, its powerlessness derived in part from its innovative compliance with Elizabethan censorship; in part, the stage was perceived to be politically irrelevant because it was mercenary and "base," and hence below the levels on which political matters were decided. Perhaps, most important, the powerlessness of the theater should be understood as the price the players paid for their liberty to address topical issues and so to appeal to a public audience. This problematical exchange of power for freedom is the central condition of production of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton's plays, and it makes itself felt in all their representations of the world outside the theater. *

*

*

Did the players, playwrights, audiences, and authorities of Shakespeare's time generally think that the theater was powerful:1 The answer, as I have suggested, is no. In order to survive and to prosper, the Elizabethan players made—and were compelled to make—a crucial maneuver in the face of the conflicting demands of the censor (who insisted that they not intervene in politics) and the commercialtheater audiences (which insisted that they represent political issues). Many dramatists promulgated the idea of the separateness of poetry. The stage, in this view, was outside the arena of political conflict; theatrical discourse was unrelated to the discourses of politics; the "recreation" of play had nothing to do with the operations of power. The dramatists themselves succeeded in diminishing both the per-

12

Chapter i

ceived and the real political importance of the stage. The polemical theater of the early and middle Tudor period gave way to the recreational theater of Elizabeth's reign. Numerous factors contributed to the creation of the conditions that governed the stage. First was censorship, which as Patterson has argued, forced writers to develop strategies of indeterminacy (Patterson's "functional ambiguity"), and in effect (as Shakespeare's "Mousetrap" suggests) to turn the production of meaning over to their audiences.26 Second was commercialism, which, beginning with the opening of the Red Lion in 1567 and the Theatre in 1576, allowed the players a greater degree of independence from their aristocratic sponsors, and also tended to make the players more responsive to the demands of the public audience.27 Commercialism altered the dynamics of performance and affected the politics of the stage. The theater of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward, Mary, and the young Elizabeth had been dependent upon the patronage of a group of politically active aristocratic sponsors. The conditions of commercial performance required that the players please their audiences, both public and courtly. The players were no longer expected to promulgate a particular view of political affairs; on the contrary, the players were now only constrained to stay within the changeable bounds of the permissible. The acquisition of their own theaters had the peculiar effect, therefore, of reducing the playing companies' dependence upon their aristocratic sponsors and so freeing them to address a variety of topics in an objective spirit, and at the same time, of diminishing the power of the theater to influence the political issues about which it was now free to speak. The third factor that contributed to the creation of a powerless theater comprised both the theory of poetic separateness and the techniques that enabled the dramatists to represent political issues and yet refrain from seeming to express positive opinions. This view of poetry as "fantastical" discourse (to use Puttenham's term) was important during the period; poets were able even to turn such kinds of conventional detraction to advantage. Thus the "poetry is dream" trope became the basic self-mocking and self-defensive strategy of the Elizabethan poets.28 The "Prologus" in John Lyly's The Woman

The Powerless Theater 13

13

in the Moon (published 1597) declares "all is but a poet's dream."29 Puck begs the audience's pardon for the "weak and idle theme" of Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595) by suggesting that the audience itself has slumbered and dreamed the play. Middleton excuses the wicked satire of Game at Chess by having "Error" confess in the Induction that the whole play is merely his dream: " CT is but a dream, / A vision you must think."30 However, while the separateness of poetic language from "real" language might be evoked as a witty defensive ploy, the idea that poetry was mere "play" remained an imputation that had to be answered. Not surprisingly, apologists such as Sidney did not attempt to exculpate poetry by arguing that poetry is a discourse like any other, that art is not autonomous from other cultural practices, or that poets might have particular reasons, even particular political reasons, for writing. Sidney does not reinstate poetry as one cultural practice among many; rather, he builds upon the separation of poetry from real-life discourses by aligning poetic discourse with the ideal. He severs poetry's connection with mundane discourses, with everyday standards of truth, with the natural world, and with the activity itself of writing and reading poetry, yet insists—paradoxically—upon poetry's capacity to instruct real-life readers in a life of virtue. According to Sidney, poetry is outside and separate from the world, but gains leverage to improve the world by virtue of its connection with the ideal through the uncanny mediation of the imagination. The Sidneian recovery of the power of poetry through the idea of the separateness of poetic discourse allowed poets to claim a generalized moral authority while remaining outside the system of power. Sidney gave poetry a power that was not powerful in any ordinary sense. Jonson, of course, endorsed Sidney's Horatian emphasis on the instructive capacity of poetry, but resisted the gathering of literary language into the magic circle of the aesthetic. It is significan therefore that there is nothing like Spenserian political allegory in Jonson's plays and none in the masques excepting Neptune^s Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624). For all his political quietism, Spenser produced purposeful allegorizations of events of great political significance such as the European religious wars and the execution of

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Chapter i

Mary Stuart; in contrast, the avowedly engaged Jonson risked only some very small-scale topicalities in his early work—a send-up of Marston, a self-serving appeal to the Queen's good taste, a satirical poke at King James and the Scots. The senescence of the allegorical mode in playwrights as outspoken as Jonson suggests the pressure of the movement of literary discourse toward the sphere of the aesthetic during the early years of the seventeenth century. The Sidneian mystification of the power of poetry allowed playwrights to claim to be able to address political issues from a privileged position outside the operations of power. Marston, in the Epistle to The Malcontent, recognizing the dangers attendant upon malicious misinterpretation, avers that his satire is "general and honest" and has no application to actual persons. His play, he insists, is—like his ideal reader—"always simple": Surely I desire to satisfy every firm spirit, who, in all his actions, proposeth to himself no more ends than God and virtue do, whose intentions are always simple: to such I protest, that with my free understanding I have not glanced at disgrace of any, but of those whose unquiet studies labour innovation, contempt of holy policy, reverend, comely superiority, and established unity: for the rest of my supposed tartness, I fear not but unto every worthy mind it will be approved so general and honest as may modestly pass with the freedom of a satire.31 Inevitably the ideology of the separateness of poetry from other cultural practices penetrated beyond the prologues and epistles and affected the nature of the plays themselves. Lyly's Endimion (1588), a play written for both court and public audiences, begins with a prologue that wittily excuses the play in terms with which we are already familiar: Most high and happy Princess, we must tell you a tale of the Man in the Moon, which if it seem ridiculous for the method, or superfluous for the matter, or for the means incredible, for three faults we can make but one excuse. It is a tale of the Man in the Moon. It was forbidden in old time to dispute of Chymera, because it was a fiction: we hope in our times none will apply pastimes, because they are fancies; for there liveth none under the sun, that knows what to make of the Man in the Moon. We present neither comedy, nor tragedy, nor story, nor anything,

The Powerless Theater 15

15

but that whosoever heareth may say this, Why here is a tale of the Man in the Moon.32

Endimion represents the new direction of the drama after the advent of commercialization. In the play itself, the relationship between literary vehicle and historical tenor is contrived to be both generalized and highly attenuated; as a consequence, the play invites— but does not authorize—interpretation as political allegory. Endimion encourages the Elizabethan proclivity toward topical allegorization by virtue of the name and attributes of the demigoddess with whom Endimion is in love.33 However, while the identity of Cynthia is clear, the identity of Endimion and the overall meaning of the play as political allegory is indeterminate—a fact indicated by the modern scholarly dispute about the play.34 None of the proposed topical readings is persuasive, and it is probably true—as Peter Saccio has said— that no schematic allegory could be made to adhere to the multiple love intrigues of Lyly's play.35 Endimion, then, has the capacity to accommodate a range of topical allegorical meanings; it is designed both to encourage the audience to pursue these meanings and to obstruct any attempt to fasten on any one in particular. Lyly wrote both for the infant commercial theater and for the court. While doubtless he was more concerned with the reception of his plays at court, it would have been both difficult and undesirable to avoid giving the impression that the plays he staged at Paul's or Blackfriars were still incandescent with the glamorous and intrigueridden atmosphere of Whitehall. In fact, the "royalism" of Lyly's plays must have constituted one of their most attractive features for his paying audiences.36 Plays like Endimion were written so as to suspend allegorical meaning in the interstices between text and reception, between performers and audience, between the putatively isolated poetic discourse on the one hand and real-life persons, events, and issues on the other. Such plays often encouraged allegorical exegesis by protesting at the outset their "simplicity" (like Marston) or their devotion to "fancy" (like Lyly); they empowered allegorizing interpretation by developing dramatic actions and relationships between dramatic characters that were roughly analogous with actual events

16

Chapter i

or relationships of the day; finally, they disallowed positive allegorical meaning by maintaining the mutually exclusive interpretive fields of the imaginative and literary on the one side and the actual and historical on the other. Such plays maneuvered between the demand for topicality in the commercial theater and the need to be discreet before either a royal audience or a government censor. In general, then, the playwrights moved to open up dramatic form to a multiplicity of interpretations in order to capture as large a segment of their heterogeneous audience as possible, and also to be able to represent political issues from the blind of their devotion to the nonpolitical world of the imagination. Not surprisingly, this strategy of turning over the production of meaning to the audience sometimes had unforeseen consequences, especially in view of the audience's habitual allegorizing, which had allowed the development of these "pseudo-allegories" in the first place. Shakespeare's Richard II, to cite a famous instance, was appropriated by the "invading interpreters" of the Essex party. The story of Bullingbrook's ouster of Richard II had been seen as a spur to Essex's ambitions in the years leading up to his abortive coup in 1601. On the eve of the uprising, Essex's followers paid the Lord Chamberlain's Men forty shillings to perform a Richard II play, probably Shakespeare's; apparently, they believed the play would arouse the citizens to support the Earl's attempt against Elizabeth. In the event, the special performance does not seem to have had any effect: the rebellion fizzled, and the players, after a brief investigation, were exonerated and were back playing at court within days of the trial of Essex.37 The Essex party's use of Shakespeare's play demonstrates how the open form of commercial-theater plays was susceptible to allegorizing and politicizing interpretive practices; however, it also suggests that such plays could not easily be enlisted as propaganda in actual political conflicts. Under the pressure of commercialism and censorship, the stage had distanced itself from the operations of power and had moved into the sphere of its own interests; not even the Earl of Essex could summon the theater back to its preElizabethan function as an instrument of propaganda at the beck of the powerful. Indeed, there is something old-fashioned in the Essex attempt to commandeer the leading commercial theater in Eng-

The Powerless Theater 17

17

land; in contrast, Augustine Phillips, one of the Globe shareholders, sounds dry and almost condescending to the Earl's followers. The play, he later explained to the Privy Council on behalf of the Lord Chamberlain's Company, was "so old and so long out of use that they [Essex's followers] should have small or no company at it. But at their request [we] were content to play it."38

To modern readers, the Essex party's use of Richard II has always been puzzling because the play seems so ill-suited to the purpose of inciting rebellion. Unlike earlier plays like John Bale's King Johan (1538) or Respublica (1553), Richard II is evenhanded rather than partisan in its treatment of politics and history. It works to realign audience sympathy toward Bullingbrook and Richard midway through the action, and can even accommodate opposing overall interpretations of the relative merits of the two leading characters. Like Endimion^ Richard II possesses the openness to differing, even opposing, interpretations characteristic of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in general. However, where Endimion leaves open the question of the very existence of its political meaning, Richard II is able openly to represent political issues by producing a political message that is depoliticized (that is, incapable of exerting determinate political influence) by virtue of being bifurcated, or twofaced. Elizabethan-Jacobean playwrights developed the possibilities of indeterminacy inherent in drama's dialectical production of meaning so that their plays could be staged both at court and in the public theaters, and so that the plays would please both the orthodox and the heterodox. Plays like Doctor Faustus, Richard II, Henry F, or Game at Chess were able to represent political issues because their meanings were so easily appropriated to opposing political points of view. In a word, the overall meaning or point of view in these plays is designed to be indeterminate, open to a range of interpretations arrayed along an axis between orthodoxy, providentialism, and hierarchy at one pole and subversion, realpolitik, and revolution at the other. The generalization and attenuation of topical and political allegory and the splitting of political point of view represent the two

i8

Chapter i

principal techniques by which the playwrights were able to bring onto the stage the issues, and even the personalities, of the day. Of course, the players were often able to treat political matters without having to resort to evasion. Plays such as Lyly's Midcis (1589), Robert Wilson's The Three Lords cind Three Ladies of London (published 1590), and Dekker's The Whore of Babylon (1606; in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot) could be unashamedly topical because they all took patriotic positions at moments when the nation was united in the face of a foreign threat. Nevertheless, the production of generalized and two-faced political meaning remained a central feature of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—the means by which the playwrights both put into practice the ideology of the separateness of poetic discourse and maintained the strategic powerlessness of their theater. *

*

*

Did the authorities "fear the theater" (as Dollimore has claimed)? Did they try to predetermine the nature of all drama? The answer to these questions is yes, but not in the way Dollimore understands them. Official "fear" of the power of the theater did exist at one time; however, government fear could hardly have been a persistent condition of the theater's existence. The players would not have continued to flourish, and indeed to expand their activities, had the Queen been in an unalleviated state of anxiety concerning the subversive power of the stage. That the Queen was once fearful of the political consequences of an unrestrained drama is clear from the severity of the restrictions she imposed upon the players in the first year of her reign. Even if she did not exactly undertake to predetermine the nature of all drama, she did set out clearly what subjects the players were not going to be permitted to dramatize. In her Proclamation of May 16,1559, the Queen ordered her local officials to disallow the performance of all plays having anything to say about politics or religion: The Queen's majesty [doth] straightly forbid all manner interludes to be played either openly or privately, except the same be notified beforehand and licensed within any city or town corporate by the mayor or other chief officers

The Powerless Theater 19

19

of the same. . . . And for instruction to every of the said officers, her majesty doth likewise charge every of them as they will answer: that they permit none to be played wherein either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonweal shall be handled or treated, being no meet matters to be written or treated upon but by men of authority, learning, and wisdom, nor to be handled before any audience but of grave and discreet persons.39

Elizabeth's fear of the drama, however, was not likely to have been occasioned by the players themselves. Indeed, over the next forty years the Queen generally supported the players, especially in the face of the city's opposition to their activities. In 1572, for example, the Queen's Privy Council instructed the city to allow the performance of plays in order to provide recreation for the citizens (the Queen's order is recorded in the minute book of the Court of Aldermen): Item, this day, after the reading of the Lords of the Queen Majesty's most honorable Council's letters, written in the favor of certain persons to have in their houses, yards, or back sides, being overt and open places, such plays, interludes, comedies, and tragedies as may tend to repress vice and extol virtue, for the recreation of the people, and thereby to draw them from sundry worser exercises, the matter thereof being first examined, seen and allowed, by such discreet person or persons as shall be by the Lord Mayor thereunto appointed, and taking bonds of the said housekeepers not to suffer the same plays to be in the time of divine service. (Chambers, 4:269)

Elizabeth harbored few fears about the theater in itself; however, she was concerned about the propagandistic use to which the theater might be put by its aristocratic patrons. In view of the highly politicized and partisan theater that had existed during her girlhood and in view of the instability of her reign at its inception, Elizabeth's decisive move to discourage the players from handling political and religious matters is understandable. During the explosive period between Henry VIII's break with the Roman Church and the consolidation of Protestant power under Elizabeth, players were often employed to promulgate one view or another in the controversy.40 The theater had been an important instrument of the powerful factions engaged in the political and religious conflicts in the years before Elizabeth came to the throne. It should not be surprising that

20

Chapter i

Elizabeth's 1559 suppression of theatrical representations of political and religious issues was being carried out at the moment her first Parliament was meeting in order to establish the groundwork for the future course of England. The Queen was already under considerable pressure from the Catholic right and Protestant left, and it is easy to understand her desire both to deprive the contesting parties of the polemical resources of the drama and to suppress popular discussion of these matters.41 The increasing stability of the reign attendant upon both the consolidation of aristocratic power in the Protestant-led Council and the sense of national mission focused in the person of the Virgin Queen removed the conditions that had made sponsored polemical drama both possible and popular. No longer subject to the propagandistic requirements of pre-Elizabethan factionalism, the companies now found that professionalism was replacing partisanship as the crucial virtue of their trade. In the relative calm of the Elizabethan regime, the players' continuing existence was dependent primarily upon their association with the court. Their court patrons and the Queen's Privy Council provided the protection from harassment and prosecution that the players required in order to tour the provinces and to perform in and around London. Such high-ranking support was dependent upon two factors: the players must continue to please the Queen and so enhance the position of their patrons, and the players must offend neither the courtly nor the public audiences.42 Over approximately the next forty years, in the correspondence that passed between the Privy Council and the city of London concerning the players, the Council never suggested that the theater ought to be permitted because it was an instrument of political indoctrination. While the councillors regularly insisted that the plays must be of the kind "as may tend to repress vice and extol virtue," their principal arguments on behalf of the players were, first, that the players must practice before a public audience so that they might be at their best when they entertained at court and, second, that they were "poor men" who were entitled to earn a livelihood.43 From the point of view of the national government, then, the players were to be tolerated because they provided entertainment at

The Powerless Theater 21

21

court and because they were harmless. The powerlessness rather than power of the theater constituted the players' guarantee of continuing conciliar support. As early as 1559, for example, we find Lord Robert Dudley asking his colleague, the Earl of Shrewsbury to endorse Dudley's players' license to tour, assuring him that the players are wellbehaved and politically innocuous: I have thought among the rest by my letters to beseech your good lordship's conformity to them likewise, that they may have your hand and seal to their licence for the like liberty in Yorkshire; being honest men, and such as shall play none other matters (I trust); but tolerable and convenient; whereof some of them have been heard here already before diverse of my lords. (Chambers, 4:264)

The city, of course, had notions about the players different from those of the court. The city's opposition to the drama was a significant factor in the development of the theater during the last quarter of the century. The Lord Mayors' letters to the Privy Council during that period (especially during the 15805) called repeatedly for the complete suppression of the players. This attack on the stage was based on practical considerations such as the threat to public order, the danger of the spread of plague (a concern shared by the Privy Council), and the fact that plays lured citizens away from work and worship; however, the Mayor and Aldermen also insisted that plays were sinful, that the players, if they had not been the liveried servants of noblemen, would have been vagabonds, that the drama tended to corrupt its audience, and that playing incurred the wrath of God.44 The city's opposition to the drama ceased to be a decisive factor around 1600. This was accomplished by several means: the Council compromised with the city by limiting (at least on paper) the number of playing companies to two, and the court curbed the city's power concerning the content of the drama by conferring all such powers upon the Master of the Revels.45 Indeed, the city viewed the function of the Master as a direct abrogation of the customary means of controlling the stage.46 The appointment of the Master of the Revels, then, had the overall effect of facilitating the growth of the commercial drama by entrusting its supervision to a servant of the drama-loving

22

Chapter i

court. The Master, moreover, had an interest in the continuance and even the increase in dramatic activity because he was paid by the companies for each play text he was asked to approve. By 1600 the court had appropriated the official supervision of the drama; furthermore, in 1603 court supervision was consolidated by transferring the acting companies to direct royal patronage—creating the King's, Queen's, and Prince's Servants of companies previously attached to noblemen. In the face of the centralization of supervision in the King himself, the city fathers must have realized that they had lost the battle to suppress the players.47 It is also worth noting, although the evidence is deficient, that the tone of the city's letters about the drama grew more moderate after about 1595.48 By the turn of the century, the theater had won the struggle for survival by virtue of the fact that the most powerful authorities in the nation viewed it as powerless, as a source of delight and recreation— and as an occasional nuisance—rather than as an instrument useful for the political indoctrination and manipulation of the audience. The censorship the government exercised over the drama was inconsistent but generally permissive toward the treatment of topical matters. The cavalier attitude of the Master of the Revels and of the government as a whole toward the stage was consonant with the idea of the powerless theater that emerges from contemporary documentary evidence and from the plays themselves, and it persisted up until around 1625 when religious wars on the Continent and the accession of King Charles exacerbated long-standing divisions between court and country and precipitated the repoliticization of poetic discourses. That is, in the increasingly politicized and polarized atmosphere of the Caroline period, it became difficult for poets to represent political issues without seeming to be partisan. I am talking about tendencies in the political status of the theater rather than about wholesale shifts from political to nonpolitical interpretive fields. That said, we can nevertheless see an overall movement of the theater back into the political arena taking place during the later i62os.49 Until that time, the government normally viewed the theater's representations of politics as disengaged from the political arena, a view reflected in the permissiveness and inconsistency

The Powerless Theater 23

23

of Elizabethan and Jacobean censorship.50 That drama's topicality was couched in pseudo-allegory or generalization or was rendered neutral or two-faced; but the drama did represent the political issues of the day. In the theater of the Elizabethan-Jacobean period, political meaning was depoliticized either by being contained within the aesthetic as the object of imaginative representation or by being made the product of the audience's reception of the text rather than the product of the text itself. The stage's representation of power was normally not allowed to coalesce into the kind of univocal meaning that might be seen as an attempt to intervene in the real world. Even in cases where the players clearly overstepped the bounds of the permissible, the Council and the monarch always showed themselves disposed to be forgiving. The evidence on this score is persuasive: not a single prominent poet or playwright during the reigns of Elizabeth and James—not even Jonson—was prosecuted for libel whereas nonliterary writers were generally subject to much harsher treatment.51 As we have seen, the author of Richard II and the players who staged it on the eve of the Essex rebellion went unpunished. However, Sir John Hayward, author of a book called The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII a spur to Essex's ambitions (it was dedicated to the Earl), was tried twice and was imprisoned in the Tower until after Elizabeth's death.52 Toward the end of James's reign, as we have also seen, the same company of players was promptly forgiven for their nine consecutive performances of Middleton's scandalous Game at Chess\ whereas, Thomas Scot, the author of the polemical pamphlets upon which Middle ton drew for his satire, was forced to evade arrest by fleeing to Utrecht in the Netherlands. (Once there, he sought the protection of Prince Maurice of Nassau and continued to publish extremist puritan pamphlets until he was stabbed to death in 1626.)53 The implications of these comparisons are clear. The authorities do not seem to have counted on the players to support the established political order by instructing the public in the official view on matters of state and religion, and they do not seem to have thought it possible for the players seriously to disrupt the political order. On the other hand, the authorities expected the nonliterary press

24

Chapter i

generally to promote the government line; and, accordingly, they punished dissident nonliterary writers severely. Put another way, nonliterary discourses were generally seen to be powerful, whereas poetic and especially dramatic discourses were not. The powerlessness of the stage guaranteed the players a prosperous security because, as we have seen, a powerless theater was perceived by the authorities to pose no threat to the established political order. For the right to discourse about politics, however, the players were obliged to surrender the substance of their words; they were content to speak but to say nothing, content—in other words—to play. The players, and playwrights, earned their security. In "An Ode. To Himself," his splendid renunciation of the commercial theater, Jonson wrote: "this security, / It is the common moth, / That eats on wits, and arts, and oft destroys them both" (Parfitt, 160). The crystallization of the idea of powerless literary art that took place during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, an ideological accommodation in the face of the conflicting pressures of commercialism and censorship, persists in the classic Anglo-American idea of "literature" as a discourse fundamentally separate from the real world—privileged, playful, and allowed only a mystified "power" outside the arena of political conflict and historical change. I should add that there is an important theoretical issue underlying my argument for the powerlessness of the early modern theater. I have been taking it more or less for granted that an institution such as the stage was not powerful if it was not thought to be so, that the theater could not have been a major political force given that most authorities and other witnesses thought that playing was just good fun, even if it was on occasion a public nuisance. In this view, the operations of power are not separable from the operations of minds. In the following chapter, I develop a theoretical case for the importance of taking into account the operations of minds in our studies of the social place of the Renaissance stage. To do so, it is necessary first of all to localize the meaning of the drama of early modern England.

2

Desdemona's Voice: Historical Interpretation and the Operations of Minds

To LOCALIZE THE MEANING of Elizabethan drama is to attempt to grasp what the plays meant within the sphere of the theater. It is also to begin to understand how our accounts of Renaissance theater are themselves conditioned by local, institutional factors. That our understanding of the past is situated in the present does not mean, however, that we cannot possess real historical knowledge. Instead, it means that historical knowledge is dialectical through and through; it develops in relation to contemporary interpretive environments and to the past eras to which it is directed. Neither an object nakedly open to analysis nor a darkly unknowable Other, the past is rather both the goal and the ground of historical interpretation. Moreover, as we will see, the dialectical nature of historical knowledge requires a recognition that we resemble Shakespeare and his fellows in a number of significant ways. Like them, we are imaginative rewriters of the ideological status of what we write. Like them, we understand something but not everything about the conditions of our social existence. To localize playwriting is to consider the traditions of description and redescription that connect early modern playwrights with their modern critics. History emerges here as neither a unified grand narrative nor a discontinuous series of self-enclosed periods, but rather as a weaving together of local scenes of action and interpretation through numerous lines of continuity. We are separated from the theater of Shakespeare, Middleton, and Jonson because the local conditions of reception of their drama have changed and continue to

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change depending on historical period and institutional setting, but we remain in touch with the theater because of similarities between our interpretive environment and theirs and because we valorize our writing about plays according to legitimating strategies that grew out of their redescriptions of playwriting. Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that we cannot gain objective knowledge of the past since our own "historical consciousness is itself situated in the web of historical effects."1 But he does not think that we are cut off from understanding the past because of the fact that we are inescapably situated and hence incapable of aperspectival knowledge. To the contrary, the state of being situated in history is for him the primary enabling condition of historical knowledge: Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; it is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naive assumption of historicism, namely that we must transpose ourselves into the spirit of the age, think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance toward historical objectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognize the temporal distance as a positive and productive condition enabling understanding. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us. (297)

Gadamer imagines history as a river flowing down to us from the past; it is also a system of streams flowing between a multiplicity of locales. Living in the present, we are more directly connected to some past locales than to others, and we are closer to some past locales than to some others of our own time. To begin to understand this historical interweaving of local interpretive environments, let us consider Henry Jackson's brief account of a performance of Othello^ given at Oxford by the King's Servants in 1610, against later accounts given by A. C. Bradley, Helena Faucit Martin, and Peter Stallybrass. What we will find is that Desdemona's meaning has been and continues to be conditioned by local factors, especially those connected with the particular institutional setting of the production of the play's meaning. So Desdemona means differently, depending on whether she is acted in Oxford in 1610, read as English literature in

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the same university three hundred years later just when Shakespeare is becoming academically important, or analyzed in a postmodern academic setting where Shakespeare is often taken to be an index of early modern English culture. Not only are versions of Desdemona markedly different in different interpretive environments, and not only are versions similar in similar environments, even when they are separated by centuries, but all versions of Desdemona lead back in one way or another to the original conditions of her production. Henry Jackson was a twenty-four-year-old scholar and future cleric when he saw Othello, probably at Corpus Christi College. He had been admitted to Oxford in 1602 at age sixteen. In 1607, the president of Corpus Christi, Dr. Spenser, had employed Jackson to transcribe, arrange, and prepare for the press a collection of writings by Richard Hooker. Two years after the staging of Othello, Jackson himself published a controversialist religious pamphlet—Wickliffs Wicket; or a Learned and Godly Treatise of the Sacrament. In later years, Jackson edited Hooker's "Opuscula" and translated and edited other works of divine and classical learning.2 So this eyewitness of Shakespeare was a serious-minded and learned scholar, even in his early twenties. More important, he was a thoroughgoing university man; in his account of the play, he emphasizes his and the audience's passionate response to Desdemona: They also had tragedies, which they acted with propriety and fitness. In which (tragedies), not only through speaking but also through acting certain things, they moved (the audience) to tears. But truly the celebrated Desdemona [Desdemona ///#], slain in our presence by her husband, although she pleaded her case very effectively throughout [quanquam optime semper ctiusam e0it]^ yet moved (us) more after she was dead, when, lying on her bed, she entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance [in lecto decumbens spectantium misericordictm ipso vultu implorctret}?

Jackson attributes his response largely to the character's rhetorical power. Perhaps he finds that Desdemona's is the part in the play closest to his own ideas about drama. Perhaps his praise for the boy actor playing Desdemona has to do with the boy's rhetorical skills of persuasion, an interpretive emphasis arising from the humanist, academic tradition of using drama to teach rhetoric. He sees Desde-

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mona as an outspoken and impressive advocate of her own cause. She even "speaks" when she is dead, moving the audience to tears by the eloquence of "her" acting. Whichever of the two early texts of the play we look at, whether the 1622 Quarto edition (Q) or the 1623 Folio (F), it is easy to see how Jackson's view of Desdemona as orator and advocate makes good sense of the lines she speaks and the scenes in which she appears. Although Jackson ignores Desdemona's possible acquiescence to Othello's slanders before the visiting Venetian delegation (4.1) and her somewhat tongue-tied response to his death threats (5.2), it is nevertheless not difficult to see how an actor could play Desdemona the way Jackson reports her role. In the text, Desdemona speaks eloquently before the Venetian council. Just before she recommends to her husband that Cassio be forgiven his drunkenness, she draws attention to her own rhetorical powers of persuasion: My lord shall never rest, I'll watch him tame, and talk him out of patience; His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift, I'll intermingle every thing he does With Cassio's suit. Therefore be merry, Cassio, For thy solicitor shall rather die Than give thy cause away. (3.3.22-28) And even in the "brothel" scene, by which time most modern critics have her sinking into dumb helplessness, Desdemona seems still to be speaking with conviction and force. In answer to Othello's charge that she is an "Impudent strumpet!" (words that appear only in Q), she says, "By heaven, you do me wrong." "Are you not a strumpet?" Othello blusters. She counters, No, as I am a Christian. If to preserve this vessel for my lord From any other [so F; Q replaces "other" with "hated" ] foul unlawful touch Be not to be a strumpet, I am none. (4.2.82-85)

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Not only does Jackson's Desdemona makes sense of the text in the localized terms of the early seventeenth-century university, but his response also encourages us to consider Shakespeare's advocatory female characters in light of the relationship between the commercial theater and the university. To what degree do advocate figures such as Portia, Paulina, Lady Macbeth, Viola, and Desdemona reflect the commonplace humanist association that links young male students, acting, and instruction in rhetoric? To what degree do Shakespeare's women advocates represent his theater's attempt to enhance its own social profile by relating its use of boy actors to the "gentlemanly" practices of the university? In this view, the university might have been more than just a performance venue; it might have been an institution whose interests and practices contributed to the shape and emphases of the public drama, including what often strikes us as Shakespeare's protofeminist representations of outspoken women.4 Opposite to Jackson's outspoken Desdemona, A. C. Bradley's classic account of Othello, written at the beginning of this century, gives us a speechless tragic heroine: . . . the suffering of Desdemona [is] . . . the most nearly intolerable spectacle that Shakespeare offers us. For one thing, it is mere suffering; and ceterispambus, that is much worse to witness than suffering that issues in action. Desdemona is helplessly passive. She can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not even in silent feeling. And the chief reason of her helplessness only makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful. She is helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. I would not challenge Mr. Swinburne's statement that we pity Othello even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more unmitigated distress. We are never wholly uninfluenced by the feeling that Othello is a man contending with another man; but Desdemona's suffering is like that of the most loving of dumb creatures tortured without cause by the being he adores.5

The point here is not that Bradley misconstrues Desdemona, but that he sees her in a localized way. His description of the character as a perfectly loving "child of nature" ("when bruised, [her love] only gave forth a more exquisite fragrance" [167]) makes a certain sense of the role even though, like Jackson's on the other side, it ignores much of what is there in the text. The brothel scene, for in-

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stance, might yield an insulted and angry Desdemona who strikes back with stinging irony, especially if the actor emphasizes the Folio reading of line 84: "any other foul unlawful touch." And that might connect with what Desdemona says when Othello leaves her alone on stage—her only lines spoken in soliloquy: "'Tis meet I should be us'd so, very meet. / How have I been behav'd, that he should stick / The smalPst opinion on my least misuse?" (4.2.107-9). But these playing possibilities notwithstanding, Bradley's view does connect cogently with the text, primarily on the strength of the idea that however forcefully Desdemona might speak in her own defense, Othello refuses to listen. What is important is that Bradley idealizes Desdemona. It is not just that he admires her—Jackson was also an admirer and Bradley himself was working to rehabilitate the character in the face of a not uncommon view of her as spoiled or even sinful.6 It is rather that the philosophically-trained Bradley tends to think of Othello and Desdemona more or less as subject and object or self and world rather than as individuals with separable thoughts, purposes, and emotions. In his rethinking of the play, Bradley is served by the fact that he sees Otkello as literature rather than as theater. This literary turn, still so important to our understandings of Shakespeare, means that Bradley does not have to contend with an actor who would tend to bring to Desdemona a certain distinctive viewpoint and voice. So for all his careful psychologizing of her, his analysis finally gives us a Desdemona purged of normal human attributes. This Desdemona is a "dumb animal" because the world has neither view, voice, nor intention, but has only what meaning is ascribed to it by speaking, intending subjects. Since she is seen as having meaning only in relation to Othello's apprehension of her, Desdemona is unable to speak so long as he will not hear her. In contrast to Bradley's idealized version of a silent Desdemona, the Victorian actor Helena Faucit Martin brings a strong positional ity to the role, standing up to Othello and fighting for her life and reputation. Faucit Martin's version of the character is closer to Henry Jackson's than it is to Bradley's. Jackson's focus on Desdemona's "pleading her case" is related to connections between oratory and

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acting in the university, whereas Faucit Martin's focus is the result of her professional engagement with the role, but both commentators, unlike Bradley, write with Desdemona's words resonating in their ears. Indeed, Faucit Martin, who played opposite William Charles Macready's Othello in the midcentury, suggests that the core of her performance in the murder scene is precisely the character's desire to speak: My friends used to say, as Mr. Macready did, that in Desdemona I was "very hard to kill." How could I be otherwise? I would not die dishonoured in Othello's esteem. This was bitterer than fifty thousand deaths. Then I thought of all his after-suffering, when he should come to know how he had mistaken me! The agony for him which filled my heart, as well as the mortal agony of death, which I felt in imagination, made my cries and struggles no doubt very vehement and very real. My whole soul was flung into the entreaty, but for "half an hour!" "but while I say one prayer!"—which prayer would have been for him.... All things conspire against her,—her very tears, her prayers, her asseverations, give countenance to her guilt. She is hurled headlong down the precipice, but, alas! not killed at once. The strong young life will not leave its tenement—the mortal agony is prolonged; even the dagger's thrust, which is meant in mercy that she may not "linger in her pain," is not enough. The soul will not away until it asserts the purity of the sweet casket in which it has been set. It lingers on in pain until the poor body can speak, not, as before, to stony ears that will not listen, but to those of a sympathising woman. Then, with bitter moans, and broken breath, she stammers out with her last gasp of life—"A guiltless death I die!"7

A comparison of these three versions suggests the historical insufficiency of the claim that Bradley's Desdemona is "Victorian," or Edwardian (or that Jackson's is Jacobean). In view of the fact that Faucit Martin is closer to the Jacobean playgoer than she is to the Edwardian man of letters, all explanations of interpretive difference based exclusively on a model of long-term cultural change begin to look unreliable. Bradley interprets Desdemona in the light of a set of disciplinary emphases as well as from a particular position in history. That does not mean that his interpretation is invalid or unhistorical. On the contrary, while Bradley's reading is institutionally conditioned, it arises along lines of continuity that connect him with Shakespeare; it participates in traditions related to the special nature

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of women vis-a-vis men, the power and danger of romantic love, and the conversional capacity of art and poetic language. This drawing together of the cultural horizons of Bradley and Shakespeare is underwritten by the fact that the idealizing diction of Bradley's description of Desdemona ("her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute") finds its origins in Othello's extremist language of praise and condemnation. Peter Stallybrass's 1986 interpretation of Othello in terms of the gender politics of the body sets itself against patriarchal idealizations of Desdemona but derives its basic understanding of the shape of the character from Bradley: In Othello . . . the female voices are constituted fictionally, by a male author. It is not sufficient, then, to "recover" Desdemona's silenced voice; we must also ask how it is constructed. I have suggested that Othello is a function of a particular form of class aspiration through romance. And lago can be seen as a function of the projected fears of class hierarchy and sexual possession. But Desdemona, I suggest, fulfils two different functions. The Desdemona of the first half of the play is an active agent, however much she may be conceived of as the "spiritualization" of Othello's legitimation. She is accordingly given the freedom we tend to associate generally with the comic heroine. In fact, in the first two acts it is Othello who is the primary object of scrutiny, and so is correspondingly portrayed as controlling his "appetite" (1.3.262). It is only when Desdemona becomes the object of surveillance that she is reformed within the problematic of the enclosed body. Hence, in the second half of the play, the worse lago's insinuations, the more she is "purified." In other words, the play constructs two different Desdemonas: the first, a woman capable of "downright violence" (1.3.249); the second, "A maiden never bold" (1.3.94). Desdemona's subservience, enforced by her death, has already been enforced by the play's structure.8 Following Bradley, Stallybrass takes it for granted that Desdemona becomes silent and that the play idealizes her as a wholly admirable character. Of course, Bradley thinks that the play's idealization of Desdemona is a good thing, whereas Stallybrass thinks that such idealizing is part of a patriarchal project of objectifying and disempowering actual women. As we have seen, that Desdemona is idealized is not untrue to the play, but rather represents a partial account of her role. Initially, at least, Bradley psychologizes Desdemona in

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terms of an idea of truncated development. He speaks of her "individuality and strength," which might eventually have proved "surprising to her conventional or timid neighbours," but comments, "[i]n her brief wedded life she appeared again chiefly as the sweet and submissive being of her girlhood; and the strength of her soul, first evoked by love, found scope to show itself only in a love which, when harshly repulsed, blamed only its own pain" (166-67). Stallybrass reads Desdemona in different terms but according to a similar pattern. In his view, there are two different Desdemonas rather than one changing Desdemona. That is the case because the play is said to make the character serve two separate functions—first as the correlative of a romance of social advancement and second as a guarantor of the purity of the enclosed body into which the social climber has been incorporated, both the body of the aristocratic woman and the "body" of the aristocracy itself as an exclusive class. Desdemona's silence and purity can be a given in Stallybrass since the condemnation of Desdemona against which Bradley was arguing has been discredited and because Stallybrass's analysis of the play is still bound within the discipline of literary studies rather than the interpretive environment of theatrical performance.9 In contrast to the theatrical, speaking Desdemona of Jackson and Faucit Martin, Stallybrass reads Desdemona along Bradleian lines and then reads that silent, suffering figure back into an analysis of early modern culture whose gender politics she is seen to exemplify. We might say that Bradley's Desdemona constitutes the principle of selection by which Stallybrass assembles the early modern "production of a normative 'Woman' within the discursive practices of the ruling elite": "This 'Woman,'" Stallybrass says, "like Bakhtin's classical body, is rigidly 'finished': her signs are the enclosed body, the closed mouth, the locked house" (127). In Stallybrass's argument, the figure of an enclosed Woman that is called forth by an inherited reading of Desdemona becomes the supposed cultural norm in whose terms we should be able to understand the character. To be sure, this constitutes a circular interpretive method, but that does not necessarily vitiate either the historical argument about the cultural importance of a certain construction of

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Woman or the attendant reading of Desdemona. Fear and loathing of women's "scolding" and a corresponding approbation of female silence are indeed expressed in many Renaissance texts, as Stallybrass shows. But the circularity of the argument does create certain blind spots. Other, competing Renaissance versions of "Woman" receive scant mention; after all, there was a debate going on at that time, on the stage and elsewhere, between "feminists" and "antifeminists." Stallybrass links Emilia's splendid denunciation of masculine hypocrisy and her heroic truth-telling to real-life acts of feminine political resistance, which, with one exception, lay a quarter-century or more in the future of the play's first performances. But women speaking out bravely for the truth were not strangers to Jacobean audiences, familiar as they were with characters such as the three Queens of Richard III, Helena in All}s Well That Ends Well, or Isabella in Measure for Measure. Emilia's outspokenness thus belongs to a long-standing literary tradition of idealizing women and also using female characters to reveal the wickedness and weakness of men. This tradition evidently informed Henry Jackson's response to the play, characterized, as we have seen, by an admiring view of Desdemona as an eloquent advocate rather than as the "passive terrain" that was indeed an ideal for female personhood, both in the play to a degree and in other contexts. Stallybrass retains the outlines of Bradley's literary Desdemona but strives against chronology and context in order to associate Emilia with political rather than literary figures of female resistance. This combination suggests the local, institutional agenda of a criticism that projects its desire to be politically interventionist onto the works it studies while reproducing conventional literary ideas about the shape and cultural preeminence of those works. Finally, the desire to politicize does not sever the line of continuity that runs from Shakespeare to Bradley to Stallybrass. Desdemona continues to be heard, if faintly, because the patriarchal ideas about "Woman" put in question in Stallybrass's essay are partly Shakespearean in origin and because the liberationist tenor of Stallybrass's argument has strong connections with the way Emilia—following indeed upon Desdemona's example—gives voice to the issues of women's dignity and freedom.

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A general principle emerges from this account of the various and related interpretations of Desdemona. It is that we are not cut off from the past. There is no need to imagine that we are imprisoned in the present, compelled by the very nature of time-bound knowledge never to grasp anything of the past beyond a reflection of present concerns. But neither is there any basis to the fantasy of a complete, objective knowledge of the past. It is a false dichotomy that portrays history as either "a realm of retrievable fact or a construct made up of textualized traces assembled in various configurations by the historian/interpreter."10 Historical interpretation is indeed conditioned by local factors, but those factors, including our interpretive vocabularies, are themselves products of the past. *

*

*

Our connectedness with the past should help to dispel the notion that the production of early modern drama was conditioned by an ideological formation so ubiquitous and invisible that Shakespeare and his fellows did not understand the meaning of the plays that they wrote. Since we (like them) are situated in "the web of historical effects," it seems reasonable to think that they (like us) possessed some degree of understanding and freedom. I would argue therefore that historical criticism needs to consider the operations of minds as well as the operations of power. I suggest that Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton possessed a degree of autonomy and understanding, but that in order to legitimate their activity as professional playwrights, they were obliged to negotiate in what might be called "the knowledge marketplace" of Renaissance culture, the ensemble of descriptions and relations that conditioned but did not determine what and how people thought. I am interested in individual persons, but I do not think that such persons ever get entirely free of the operations of power. These particular persons—Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton—negotiated for their own worth and the worth of their common enterprise by redescribing the institution of the commercial theater. I emphasize the category of consciousness because I am interested more in consciousness and power together as a complex where

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both have equal legitimacy than in either power as the oppressor of a putatively "free" consciousness (what Michel Foucault calls the "repressive hypothesis") or consciousness as an effect of power (the commonplace postmodernist view).n How might our understanding of culturally significant institutions such as early modern theater be changed if we thought about power as interdependent with consciousness? Is it possible that power is not power unless it is so construed by knowing, intending subjects? Clearly, once some aspect of life is intersubjectively empowered, it conditions knowing in ways that are not in anyone's control, but might it not nevertheless still be true that consciousness and power are of equal weight in the exchanges that shape, sustain, and transform the social order? One consequence of insisting on the equal legitimacy of power and consciousness is to give a renewed prominence to the part individual subjects play in the social order. It has been far too easy to theorize about power without having to think about the persons who hold power or who are held in power's grasp. The idea that consciousness itself is an effect of power has allowed many theorists and many Renaissance scholars to press their claim that individual subjects are the products of certain transpersonal forces that operate over those subjects' heads. But if consciousness and power are seen as equal, then it will be more difficult to ignore the activities of persons in the fields of culture and history. That will be the case even though consciousness does not necessarily belong to persons or fall under their complete control (since the terms in which we think are given to us by what Charles Taylor calls "webs of interlocution").12 If we see power and consciousness as interactive, then we will not assume that the social dynamic is to be equated with either Althusserian "interpellation" or Foucauldian "subjection"; instead, we will think of the ordering social dynamic as comprising an ongoing, interactive development of ideological and behavioral norms on the part of subjects who know some things, but who do not know everything. Foucault says that "[pjower must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody's hands."13 Certainly, the ordination of certain fancies and behaviors

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rather than others as normative, the transformation of particular tricks of the mind and body into influential ideologies and practices, is not in anybody's hands—but neither does such a process take place over the heads of the participants in any given community. Foucault himself seems to countenance such a view when, toward the conclusion of the first volume of The History ofSexuality, and in the face of his own brilliant analysis of the ubiquitous and protean constitutive operations of power, he exhorts us to resist what we might have thought he would see as biopower's irresistible production of subjectivity: "It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibilities of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures."14 To be sure, and in spite of the occasional moment of revolutionary utopianism, Foucault's overall position is bound to strike us as deterministic. While he often attempts to balance power and knowledge as players in a dynamic interrelationship, this precarious stance can never be sustained for very long because he tends to think that "truth" is an effect of power rather than vice versa, and because he normally begins by bracketing the individual subjects who might otherwise be seen to be holding power, or using knowledge, or being produced or conditioned by power/knowledge. Power and knowledge might be balanced within the sphere of the person, but if persons are thought to be effects of power (and so long as one cannot embrace a Hegelian idea of world-consciousness), then power must emerge as the preeminent term. Since Foucault assumes from the start that there is nobody there, it is not surprising that his analyses slight the importance of consciously held knowledge. In Discipline fond, Punish he admonishes us, somewhat contradictorily, to acknowledge the systemic rather than contestatory nature of knowledge and power, but he also seems to suggest that they are terms of equal weight: "We should admit rather that power produces knowledge . . . that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is

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no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations."15 Later in the same study, however, he restates the relationship between power and knowledge in harder, far more deterministic terms: "power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production" (194). If Foucault were to allow knowledge truly to rank alongside power, then he might be inclined to present a scene where persons—never completely free but nevertheless knowledgeable about a thing or two in the world they inhabit—have gained some power to negotiate their meanings, values, and conditions of living within the myriad interconstitutive exchanges of power and knowledge. If consciousness were to count in its own right, he might imagine a world of persons—however personhood is to be defined— rather than a world offerees. Jurgen Habermas has analyzed Foucault's attempts to escape from "the philosophy of the subject," especially how Foucault has tried—unsuccessfully—to wrest power and knowledge away from their inescapable involvement with "acting and judging subjects": [Foucault's] approach cannot lead to a way out of the philosophy of the subject, because the concept of power . . . has been taken from the repertoire of the philosophy of the subject itself. According to this philosophy, the subject can take up basically two and only two relationships toward the world of imaginable and manipulable objects: cognitive relationships regulated by the truth of judgments; and practical relationships regulated by the success of actions. Power is that by which the subject has an effect on objects in successful actions. In this connection, success in action depends upon the truth of the judgments that enter into the plan of action; via the criterion of success in action, power remains dependent on truth. Foucault abruptly reverses power's truth-dependency into the power-dependency of truth. Then foundational power no longer need be bound to the competencies of acting and judging subjects—power becomes subjectless. But no one can escape the strategic conceptual constraints of the philosophy of the subject merely by performing operations of reversal upon its basic concepts.16 That these ostensibly banished "acting and judging subjects" are never in fact far from Foucault's mind is clear enough at the many

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moments in his writings when he speaks to us, points something out to us that we did not know before, and suggests that knowing it might make a difference to our lives. These moments obviously include passages where he urges us toward resistance, but also those more numerous places where he is enlightening about the ways in which power "produces reality . . . produces domains of objects and rituals of truth." Not only do knowing, intending persons—the writer and his readers—become visible at such moments in spite of their exclusion from discussion elsewhere in his work, but also knowledge appears here in a liberating guise surprisingly at odds with his explicit representation of knowledge as an offshoot of power. That persons and their grasp of the conditions of living tend to be implicit in Foucault's critical history of the construction of the subject warrants enlisting his theory of power and his analyses of the institutional production of subjectivity in a historical project oriented toward understanding intersubjective bids for legitimacy within particular institutional and cultural fields. Paul Smith has achieved something like this refraining of the poststructuralist decentering of the subject. Smith enlists Louis Althusser rather than Foucault, and he is much more devoted to the project of making poststructuralism politically forceful than he is concerned with the specifically historiographical ramifications of his argument for agential subjects who "simultaneously exist within and make purposive intervention into social formations."17 Nevertheless, his shifting of the angle of view so that it includes persons as persons rather than as mere effects of power remains highly instructive for anyone pursuing an understanding of how Renaissance playwrights might have negotiated for legitimacy within an ideological field not of their own making, not under their control, and not even fully visible or comprehensible to them. Smith suggests that contradictions within ideology and the sheer multiplicity and variety of interpellative effects allow the individual subject room to move. He argues for a "form of subjectivity where, by virtue of the contradictions and disturbances in and among subjectpositions, the possibility (indeed, the actuality) of resistance to ideological pressure is allowed for (even though that resistance too must be produced in an ideological context)" (xxxv). What Smith de-

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scribes is a world of persons and forces rather than a world offerees. Perhaps many Renaissance scholars have forgotten that we live (and Shakespeare lived) in the former rather than the latter because they have been blinded by the light of Foucault's relentlessly objectifying, dehumanizing historiography.18 My interest in the consciousness of historical individuals such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton makes mine a hermeneutical project—by which I mean an attempt to recover the interpretive context for a set of texts peculiar to those texts' producers and first readers and viewers. "Hermeneutical effort," Habermas writes, "is aimed at the appropriation of meaning; in each document, it hunts out a voice reduced to silence that should be roused to life again."19 We can distinguish this interpretive undertaking from what Foucault calls "archaeology," that is, an artifactual analysis of a particular "domain" of texts and social practices. Foucault speaks slightingly of a historical practice that pretends to be able to see "on the great mythical book of history, lines of words that translate in visible characters thoughts that were formed in some other time and place," and recommends instead "the density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use)."20 While I do not imagine that it is possible accurately and fully to recover the "thoughts that were formed in some other time and place" and while I recognize my own historical situatedness and the consequent impossibility of aperspectival historical knowledge, I nevertheless question Foucault's refusal to attend to the thoughts of "some other time." Can such a refusal have any binding force when the alternative approach endorsed by Foucault directs us toward a "system of discursivity" in which texts are said to have certain effects? 21 Why should we think that an inquiry into the first participants' "inside view" of a set of texts is less valid than an approach that seeks to define "the system of discursivity" in which texts and practices operate? There are of course divergent emphases: the hermeneutical approach highlights consciousness, meaning, and interpretation, whereas "archaeology," focusing on analyses of effects rather than on interpretations of meaning, turns its attention toward

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a discursive system whose makeup is unrelated to the significance it had for the individual subjects who produced and read the texts in the first place. Hermeneutics attempts to get "inside" past cultures and so gives weight to what historical individuals have said about themselves; it pays attention to their horizon of consciousness and attempts to discover points of both contact and divergence between the present-day horizon of knowledge and that of the culture in question. Archaeology is primarily interested in the operations of power that go on beneath the horizon of consciousness of any given culture. But in neither case is the enabling context or system evidently in the texts that are studied. Both the hermeneuticist and the archaeologist must use their intuition, imagination, and judgment and must deploy techniques of selecting, connecting, categorizing, abstracting, and generalizing in order to make sense of the texts they read. All this would seem to make the choice between hermeneutics and archaeology a matter of temperament, and to some extent that remains true in spite of whatever arguments are mounted on either side. But for all the methodological pitfalls that lie in wait for hermeneutical analysis (projecting present concerns upon past texts, assuming anachronistic models of subjectivity, misinterpreting), is not the archaeological project flawed in a more radical way? One aspect of that flaw consists in the fact that by denying the dead their voices, archaeology itself must also become voiceless. How is it that materialist critics can routinely attribute intention to their own writings— they mean to say something and labor to get their meanings across to their readers—yet they are able to argue that historical texts have discursive effects but neither meanings nor intentions nor authors? If the dead cannot speak with some authority and validity, then how can we speak about the voicelessness of the dead, not to mention about our own more immediate concerns? There is another point more important than the archaeologists' habit of assuming in their own history-writing the very consciousness and intentionality that they attempt to expunge from the historical subjects they study. A little reflection tells us that, however much we might be conditioned by factors of which we are not aware, our lives could hardly be grasped by someone who refused to pay attention to

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how our lives seem to us. While our particular, situated awareness is complex, hard to trace, and even inadequate as an analysis of why we live in the ways we do, it is nonetheless clear that subjects' awareness of themselves makes up a weighty part of their history. For this reason, historical interpreters of early modern drama should attempt to understand the plays they study in terms of both power effects and meanings, not merely in order to underwrite their own capacity to produce what they want to be seen as meaningful discourse, but also because history is a scene of meanings—whether grasped fully, apprehended less perfectly, or only glimpsed with one part of the mind— as well as an arena of power relations. It might be objected that the kind of hermeneutical history that I want to bring to bear on early modern drama is burdened by the facts that writers often say more than they know (or that texts often mean more than their authors imagine), that historical meanings are not recoverable because sociolinguistic contexts change in ways that we cannot trace with certainty, and that would-be historical criticism is in fact bound by its own historically specific frame of reference. As Gadamer's work suggests, this last objection is merely a negative way of describing the basic condition of possibility of historical criticism. The first two objections suggest how difficult hermeneutic analysis is, but they do not represent fatal flaws in the project itself. That is so because the meanings I am attempting to reconstruct are not exclusively those of the writer. I think that the Hirschian approach, where "meaning" is said to be exclusively what the author intended, is far too restrictive.22 Such a hermeneutics imagines a knowledge marketplace where one solitary individual sets his or her own prices and trades exclusively with the Eternal. Clearly, a more flexible, less author-centered approach to texts is required. A cultural hermeneutics, an analysis of texts in terms of historically specific interpretive communities, might well be able to account for the operations of minds as well as those of power, the voices of authors as well as those of their readers or viewers. Stephen Greenblatt recommends just such an approach in his introductory essay in Shakespearean Negotiations. He begins by recording his own desire to be able to hear Shakespeare's voice and to enter into conversation with him: "I began with the desire to speak

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with the dead."23 After working through some of the questions surrounding the apparent voicedness of classical literary texts ("how did so much life get into the textual traces?"), Greenblatt reaches a telling and salutary conclusion that, although at odds with the strong strain of archaeological historicism in his work, nevertheless arrestingly suggests the possibilities of a historical criticism that takes consciousness as well as power into account: I had dreamed of speaking with the dead, and even now I do not abandon this dream. But the mistake was to imagine that I would hear a single voice, the voice of the other. If I wanted to hear one, I had to hear the many voices of the dead. And if I wanted to hear the voice of the other, I had to hear my own voice. The speech of the dead, like my own speech, is not private property. (20)

In spite of Greenblatt's emphasis here on the constitutive function of consciousness in texts, culture, and history, much of his work and the work of new historicists generally has achieved its success by deploying materialist, "archaeological" interpretive practices. There can be no doubt that new historicism has been able to advance our historical and political understanding of literary texts by building upon Foucault and other post-Marxist thinkers. It has done so principally by allowing us to read across conventional discursive and disciplinary boundaries. It sees King Lear and a Protestant tract against exorcism, or A Midsummer Nights Dream and Simon Forman's erotic dream of Queen Elizabeth, or The Taming of the Shrew and the public shaming of an unruly married couple as equivalent cultural practices bound together by the common denominator of power. This approach places diverse phenomena inside a unified interpretive field, as if they answered to more or less the same interpretive criteria and performed more or less the same "cultural work."24 Reading across the differences between literary texts and other kinds of cultural evidence allows new historicists to read for cultural reproduction and contestation on a large scale.25 But "reading across" differences is also "leveling" differences, and it is here that new historicism's project of historicizing early.modern theater seems in danger of foundering.26 While allowing us to interpret early modern theater in relation

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to large-scale cultural structures and shifts, new historicism cannot help us understand either the precise nature of the theater's relationship with early modern culture nor the degree of power the theater possessed. Indeed, since power is seen as circulating everywhere, not belonging to anyone but rather doing its work through an ensemble of discursive formations and material practices, there can be little basis to the commonplace new historicist insistence on, or assumption of, the cultural and historical importance of the theater.27 On the contrary, the logic of the new historicist position can suggest no reason to see playmaking or playing or playgoing as any more important than any other practice. And, in view of this "seamless" continuity between theater and other cultural practices, there can be no basis for the commonplace new historicist claim that the theater mattered in some particular way in early modern England.28 However, if we focus on the operations of minds as a supplement to the widespread focus on the operations of power, we will be able to overcome the problem of not being able to speak about either degree or difference, a problem that vexes archaeological attempts to historicize early modern literary culture. The only reason to think that the theater mattered in some special way to the development of early modern culture consists in the idea that persons at a play might grasp something about their lives that they would not otherwise have been able to understand. This was Louis Montrose's position in his 1979-80 essay "The Purpose of Playing." "In the society in which Shakespeare lived, wrote, and acted," Montrose said, "the practical effect of performing his plays may have been to encourage the expansion and evaluation of options. Plays are provocations to thought and patterns for action."29 An emphasis on the agential, intentional, and voluntaristic equal to that on the circulatory, systemic, and transpersonal model of the social formation would allow us to see the culture of Renaissance England as a place in which subjects, neither completely free nor unfree, negotiated for their own value in the ideological currencies of the day. How Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton worked to create the worth of the profession of dramatist in the knowledge marketplace of early modern England is the subject of the next chapter.

3

The Knowledge Marketplace

To IMAGINE THE SOCIAL ORDER as a knowledge marketplace is to take into account the interactivity of power and consciousness and the coexistence of both forces and persons. In society as a marketplace, individual subjects have a measure of autonomy and selfdetermination in their exchanges with others and with the community, but they cannot by themselves determine the nature or value of the currency of exchange. Where it is knowledge that is being traded, certain ideas, ideologies, lexicons, and subject positions will "pass current," and others will not. Some ideas will be rejected as counterfeit or merely worthless. A man who aspires to the knighthood will be hospitalized in the twentieth century but honored in the fourteenth (provided he is of the appropriate social rank). A man in early modern England (like Ben Jonson) who claims to be a moral leader of the political community, when in fact he is a "playmaker," will be viewed as overweening, whereas late twentieth-century AngloAmerican culture will find the same claim unexceptional when made about playwrights such as Arthur Miller or Caryl Churchill. To imagine early modern English culture in the economic terms of a marketplace is not to suggest that there was any kind of radical equality between the buyers, sellers, tradespeople, poor tinkers, rich usurers, or princes of the realm. Elizabethan London did not resemble the Monopoly game of idealized laissez-faire capitalism where each player receives an equal amount of cash at the outset and wins or loses by virtue of his or her skill, intelligence, and luck. On the contrary, the status hierarchy of Renaissance society made some individuals millionaires of symbolic capital at birth, and many others very nearly paupers. No question also but that the rich in real capital

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also tended to be lords of the symbolic kind. But since wealth in a knowledge marketplace is measured in language and in forms of symbolic self-presentation that win the assent of one's fellow players, then no one who could speak the language or imagine other ways of seeing and being seen would ever be completely penniless. Indeed even the state of being penniless could confer a certain kind of status. To understand the notional force of Christian values over against the largely secular values embodied in the status hierarchy, consider Shakespeare's Sonnet 94. Although some individuals might be "the lords and owners of their faces" while many others are "but stewards of their excellence," the condition of being a patrician "lily" rather than a plebeian "weed" cannot shelter the aristocratic transgressor from attracting the disapprobation of the whole community: "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." A knowledge marketplace like that of early modern London was workable because the currency of certain ideas, lexicons, and subject positions was more or less stable and enduring. The theater's situation was no doubt complex and even contradictory, but it was hardly unthinkable. Although, as Leeds Barroll has noted, "the public playhouses and their professional acting companies were phenomena so turbulently new to London that no comfortable conceptual models had yet accommodated them,"1 we can nevertheless discern certain regular ways of speaking about plays and playwriting, as well as certain regularly occurring contradictions that proved fertile soil for the cultivation of innovative redescriptions of theater. A commercial-theater drama was normally a "play" rather than a "work." In 1616, Jonson's presumptuous and influential publication of The Workes of Benjamin Jonson in the folio format usually reserved for more prestigious works aroused the telling witticism: "Pray tell me Een^ where doth the mystery lurk, / What others call a play you call a work" (HSS, i: 13). Of course, Jonson knew the normal word "play" as well as the particular meanings that clustered around it. When he was imprisoned for his part in Eastward Ho's satire of the King and his fellow Scots in 1605, he wrote to petition the powerful Earl of Salisbury to intercede on his behalf: "I am here (my most honored Lord) unexamined, or unheard, committed to a vile

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prison. . . . The cause (would I could name some worthier) . . . is, a (the word irks me, that our fortune hath necessitated us to so despised a course) a play, my Lord" (HSS, 81194-95). Unworthy, irksome, despised—a commercial-theater play was usually thought of as a loose order of words and actions performed and so in effect created by a company of players; it was not generally regarded as a unified work of art written by an author and then merely conveyed to the audience by the actors. The royal commission that in 1581 expanded Edmund Tilney's powers as Master of the Revels gave him authority over "all and every player or players with their playmakers."2 Thirty years later, Henry Jackson of Oxford University wrote about the company of actors' performance of Othello: "They also had tragedies, which they acted with propriety and fitness" (quoted in Riverside, 1852). Although Shakespeare was well-known in the university community (at least on the evidence of The Parnassus Plays [1598-1601]), it does not seen to have especially signified for Jackson that the play was authored by Shakespeare.3 For the same reason, when a play attracted the censure of the authorities, the Privy Council normally called on the playing company rather than the dramatist for an explanation. Jonson was a telling exception to this practice, and also an exception that helped change the rule. Indeed, Jonson's history of clashes with the censor provides one instance of the capacity of the literary system to begin to recognize the importance of authorship in relation to commercial-theater plays. But as late as 1624 the normal practice was still more or less in place. In the wake of Middleton's Game at Chess, Secretary Conway wrote to the Privy Council about "the boldness now taken by that company," and the Council in turn summoned members of the King's Players: "We have called before us some of the principal actors and demanded of them by what licence and authority they have presumed to act the same."4 The authorities were not uninterested in Middleton and they even sent someone out to look for him, but they did not view him as the principal responsible party. That dramatic performances were generally regarded as collectively produced made it possible for playwrights to reframe their texts

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as not theatrical and not collective—as authored poems or works written and printed for gentlemanly readers rather than as plays staged by the players for the commonality. That redescription came easily to Richard Jones, the publisher of the 1590 octavo edition of Marlowe's Tawburlaine'. Jones's epistle, "To the Gentlemen Readers," opens by drawing a parallel between watching and reading the "two tragical discourses." Both theater-going and play-reading are leisure activities to be taken up "after your serious affairs and studies." But by far the greater part of Jones's advertisement for the plays is developed by disidentifying reading from watching and disentangling "stately history" from foolish spectacle (it is not clear of course just what is being disentangled from what or just how putatively nonauthorial "jestures" could be recognized as such in the printer's copy): I have purposely omitted . . . some fond and frivolous jestures, digressing and, in my poor opinion, far unmeet for the matter, which I thought might seem more tedious unto the wise than any way else to be regarded—though, haply, they have been of some vain conceited fondlings greatly gaped at, what times they were showed upon the stage in their graced deformities. Nevertheless, now to be mixtured in print with such matter of worth, it would prove a great disgrace to so honourable and stately a history.5 As scholars such as Jonas Barish, Richard Helgerson, Timothy Murray, and Joseph Loewenstein have argued, Jonson was perhaps the most important promoter of this kind of redescription of commercialtheater plays.6 The Latin epigram on the title page of The Alchemist (1610; published 1612) declares that Jonson labors in the interests of a fit readership though few rather than in an attempt to excite wonder in the common herd of playgoers (HSS, 51283). The Alchemist's preface elaborates what he calls in Hymenaei (1606) the "noble and just advantage that the things subjected to understanding have of those which are objected to sense" (Orgel, 75). "In preface and dedication and apologetical epistle . . . ," Barish explains, "Jonson appeals to readers over the heads of playhouse audiences. The latter . . . are bent on instant gratifications of a kind he has little wish to supply. . . . " According to Barish, Jonson believes that "[rjeaders, simply by virtue of literacy, possess a certain irreducible minimum of knowledge and

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discipline. . . . The end result of such considerations is to make the printed script rather than the live performance the final authority; the play moves formally into the domain of literature" (139). What emerges from the work of Barish and others, as well as from Jonson's own writings, is a picture of a man who developed an account of his own worthiness as a writer by deploying a certain set of antithetical terms—eye and mind, spectator and reader, play and poem, show and substance, body and soul. But what needs to be emphasized is that such legitimating projects are always complicated by discursive crosscurrents and by the individual subject's inability to see the whole of the knowledge marketplace. No one, not even Jonson, could master the terms by which playwriting was vilified or praised. No one could predict just how such terms might be read or rewritten. So the 1616 folio Workes^ which is the high-water mark in Jonson's bid for a specifically literary respectability, also takes care to emphasize the plays' connections with the theater. Performance histories are specified on the title pages of all nine plays included in the volume. The title page of the folio Alchemist draws our attention to the fact that it was "Acted in the year 1610. By the Kings Majesties Servants"; and a full, interpolated page at the end of the play is given over to identifying the "principal comedians" by name (HSS, 5: 285,408). What are we to make of this? How can we square Jonson's interest in stage history with his antitheatricalism:1 Perhaps Jonson wanted to place his plays historically in terms of their original performances (although, of course, they were extensively revised for folio publication), or perhaps he decided that the theater was not so degraded after all. It might be true, as Timothy Murray has suggested, that the folio "fabricates a lasting textual temporality transcending the sporadic moments of theatrical performance and quarto publication";7 but perhaps the assumption that Jonson, and Shakespeare, were antitheatrical, an assumption that is counterintuitive at the very least, needs to be reexamined in terms of an understanding of how antitheatricalism itself might have formed part of the playwrights' strategies of legitimation.8 In any case, Jonson's inclusion of the details of performance history contradicts his practices elsewhere and suggests

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something of the discursive complexity that attended the social status ofplaywriting. One further example of that complexity, specifically Jonson's inability to master the language of his own argument, is to be found in the antitheatrical preface included in the quarto edition of The Alchemist. Here Jonson gives the contrast between substance and show a mercantile twist that enforces but also undermines the distinction he wants to draw: If thou beest more [than a reader], thou art an understander, and then I trust thee. If thou art one that tak'st up, and but a pretender, beware at what hands thou receiv'st thy commodity; for thou wert never more fair in the way to be cozened (than in this age) in poetry, especially in plays: wherein, now, the concupiscence of dances, and antics so reigneth, as to run away from nature, and be afraid of her, is the only point of art that tickles the spectators. (HSS, 5:291) On the face of it, Jonson seems to be saying that his "art" is outside the marketplace of commodified entertainment. He writes for "understanders" rather than for spectators. Spectators are tickled and cheated by dances and antics, but his literary text has none of these frivolities. His writing does not "run away from nature" whereas plays do. On the other hand, an "understander" is a spectator who stands in the yard of the theater as well as one who understands. This pun disturbs the coherence of the whole argument. The value of The Alchemist seems to depend upon the worth of the reader, but the "super-reader" Jonson imagines is also an "understander" in both senses, an individual of sublime apprehension and the lowest of the common herd. It is important to see that the instability of meaning here is an effect of contradictions inherent in the conditions of production of Jonson's play rather than just another instance of the supposed slipperiness of all signification. Jonson might want to dissociate The Alchemist from the commercial theater and enforce its connections with what Barish calls "the domain of literature," but both spheres were in fact highly commercialized. Indeed, the Blackfriars playhouse (where the play most likely was staged)9 could claim far more social cachet than could John Stepneth's bookstall "at the

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west end of Paul's" (HSS, 51283), where the quarto was put on sale to the public. Just as a play was not normally called a poem or a work, so a professional dramatist was often a "playmaker" or, worse, a "playwright." Both terms tended to be pejorative, combining the frivolity of "play" with the social degradation of manual work. The word "playwright" did not acquire its modern, neutral meaning until after 1687. Jonson used it exclusively as a term of derision. In Epigram 49, he wrote: "Playwright, I loathe to have thy manners known / In my chaste book; profess them in thine own" (Parfitt, 49). Worse still, "poet" was used more or less interchangeably with "playmaker" to designate the profession of dramatist. Jonson attempted to enforce the distinction between "poet" on one side and "playmaker" or "playwright" on the other, purifying the former by blackening the latter two. In the Epistle to Oxford and Cambridge in Volpone (1605), Jonson expatiated on the particular dignity of the poet, especially as opposed to the "naughty" usurpers of the title in the theater: He [i.e., a poet] . . . that comes forth the interpreter, and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine, no less than humane, a master in manners; and can alone (or with a few) effect the business of mankind: this, I take him, is no subject for pride and ignorance to exercise their railing rhetoric upon. But, it will here be hastily answered, that the writers of these days are other things; that, not only their manners, but their natures are inverted; and nothing remaining with them of the dignity of poet, but the abused name, which every scribe usurps: that now, especially in dramatic, or (as they term it) stagepoetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy, all licence of offence to God, and man, is practised. (HSS, 5:17-18) *

*

*

I have been focusing on some forms of Jonsonian legitimation because, as an aspirant to what Helgerson calls the officium—the office and the duty—of the laureateship, Jonson is quite explicit about his claims to social status.10 Jonson's public volubility on this matter does not mean, however, that Middleton and Shakespeare were unconcerned about how others regarded them, whether because, as professional playwrights, they knew themselves to be simply outside

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the contest for prestige, or because, as sublime artists, they knew that what really mattered had nothing to do with social status. It is rather that Middleton and Shakespeare's rewritings of theater and playwriting tend to be implicit rather than explicit. On one occasion, Middleton advertises his profession, but even then it is far more low-key than Jonson's braggadocio self-promotion. Middleton signs himself "Poeta & Chronologer Londinensis" when he contributes a commendatory poem to John Webster's Duchess ofMalfi (published 1623); he makes a point about the worth of theater by praising Webster's play as "this work of fame," and by comparing it favorably with aristocratic funereal architecture. According to Middleton, Webster's "plainness" expresses "More art than Death's cathedral palaces, / Where royal ashes keep their court."11 Usually, however, Middleton and Shakespeare redescribe playwriting in the course of writing their plays. Shakespeare seems to be inviting spectators to think of him as a poet, and slyly suggesting the transcendent worth of his poetic imagination, when he has Theseus opine on the subject of lunatics, lovers, and poets. And as has long been recognized, a figure very like Jonson's "teacher of things divine" seems to shimmer before our eyes in subdramatist characters such as Duke Vincentio and Prospero. While I do not think that Jonson by himself, or Middleton or Shakespeare by themselves, could possibly have engineered the kind of massive cultural shift that has transformed lowbrow playmakers into high-culture authors, I do think that each of the three had a hand in it. While Jonson was the most vociferous and helped prepare the way for the canonization of Shakespeare, it is Shakespeare of the three who has had the most profound influence on the status of dramatic and indeed literary art in Anglo-American culture. Middleton's role is a good deal harder to pin down, but perhaps we might say that he reprises the skeptical drama developed by Christopher Marlowe in a way that brings it devastatingly to bear on Shakespeare's valorizing versions of the poetic imagination. Of the three, Middleton best represents the recursive and somewhat risky capacity of dramatic literature to provide a political and ethical critique of itself. The various "arguments" for the legitimacy of playwriting that are built into the plays themselves were doubly burdened; their claims for the value of drama were challenged and put in question both ex-

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ternally and internally. The dramatists were not able freely to valorize theater, which tended to remain both socially degraded and morally suspect throughout the period; but they were able to attempt to revalue the activity of playing and playwriting in other, culturally legitimate currencies. So, as we will see in the chapters that follow, the drama was rewritten as conversional work or as politically reformative mirth, or was reconfigured in terms of a privatized, autonomous subjectivity or as an instrument of patriarchal order or as a liberating challenge to that order. Furthermore, no rewriting of the theater could represent it in a completely unburdened or original way. In large measure, plays remained marginal or even "counterfeit" texts. For this reason, the plays are the register of the playwrights' consciousness of their own professional illegitimacy as well as a record of their attempts to enhance the dramatic currency they brought to their exchanges in the marketplace. The question was, how could one represent this "play money" so as to be able to trade it for the esteem of one's fellows? * * *

Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton not only wrote plays within the knowledge marketplace of early modern England—they grew up in it too. The particular condition of their upbringings oriented them in specific ways toward their society and toward their work as dramatists. While their struggles for legitimacy were intense, there was nothing unique about their desire for esteem and success; on the contrary, their labors for social recognition were typical and representative of those of men from similar social backgrounds and with like orientations toward the status hierarchy and the values of their society. The only special element about them was their choice of profession. The only truly unique facet of their lives is the permanence and wide influence of the literary record they produced of their negotiations for legitimacy—the dramatic literature that was, among other things, their principal argument for their own worth. An element of Jonson's character can illustrate the emphases of my approach. Visiting Scotland in 1619, Jonson told William Drummond that he had "beat Marston and took his pistol from him" (Par-

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fitt, 465). He boasted also that he had killed an enemy soldier in the Netherlands in hand-to-hand combat and that after his return to England he had mortally wounded another man in a duel: In his service in the Low Countries, he had, in the face of both the camps, killed an enemy and taken opima spolifr from him, and since his coming to England, being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary, which had hurt him in the arm, and whose sword was ten inches longer than his: for the which he was imprisoned, and almost at the gallows. (Parfitt, 467)

Of Jonson's vaunts, only the last is corroborated. In 1598 Jonson killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel fought in Hogsden Fields beyond Shoreditch. Jonson later told Drummond that Spencer had been the aggressor, but Jonson confessed to the murder at his trial, and only escaped the death penalty by claiming "right of clergy," a loophole that permitted felons to avoid hanging, for one time only, on the strength of their ability to read. Jonson's goods were confiscated and he was branded on the thumb; then he was released (HSS, 1:18-19). What are we to make of this tendency to commit acts of brutality and to boast about them afterward? One answer has been suggested by David Biggs who reads Jonsonian violence both socially and psychologically, but with an emphasis on the psychological. The young man's anger against the world arose, Biggs explains, because of a range of deprivations he was made to endure at an early age: The visible and proximate causes of Jonson's anger lie in the circumstances of his childhood. In the distant background (if he was aware of it) there was the knowledge that he had been deprived of his familial estate and gentlemanly status by a series of unlucky accidents. Other deprivations lay closer to home. His father had abandoned him before he was born; his mother had transferred a share of her affection to the bricklayer whom she married while Jonson was still a young child; he had been separated from his surrogate father Camden without being allowed to complete his course of studies at Westminster. This young man bore a heavy load of resentment.12

If we view Jonson's violence from a sociological angle, we will see his violence not only as expressing his personal resentment against

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social and familial losses, but also as an attempt to emulate one of the central attributes of the upper classes—their extraordinarily violent tempers and their keen readiness to take offense. According to Lawrence Stone, violence was endemic in Elizabethan society: "Impulsiveness was not reproved, readiness to repay an injury real or imagined was a sign of spirit. . . . Moreover a gentleman carried a weapon at all times, and did not hesitate to use it. It was none other than Philip Sydney [sic] who warned his father's secretary that if he read his letters to his father again 'I will thrust my dagger into you. And trust to it, for I speak in earnest.' The Sydneys were not a particularly violent family, but it was Philip's nephew who stabbed his schoolmaster with a knife when he threatened to whip him."13 The fact that quick tempers and acts of violence, especially dueling with swords, were class markers specific to male members of the Elizabethan gentry suggests that Jonson's violence might have been an imitation of a certain kind of conduct called for by his orientation toward an aristocratic ethos rather than an expression of an inward neurosis inculcated during childhood.14 Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton lived between the two principal status categories of English Renaissance society, those of commoner and gentleman; and they lived also between different ways of gaining and reckoning social status. These were money and blood— on the one side a mercantile standard where property conferred status, and on the other a metaphysics of rank passed from father to son through the bloodline. Of course neither wealth nor blood on its own could confer indubitable social prestige. Riches without aristocratic parentage bound a person to the degraded sphere of the marketplace; high birth without money rendered one a beggar at the table of the wealthy. Nor was there any untroubled, ideal way of joining money and blood. On the contrary, each could produce the worst possible version of the other—money could frame blood as airy pretension, blood could characterize money as filthy lucre. Middleton's Oxford education, so far as we can reconstruct it, is exemplary of this double bind. He was a gentleman by birth, but that inherited rank was devalued by the threat of poverty, which made ungentlemanly working a necessity. The stain of poverty on the pu-

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rity of his gentle blood was hardly cleansed by a university education. If anything, Middleton's Oxford experience seems to have exacerbated his problematic situation rather than serving as a route to enhanced social status. "Orphaned" at five years old by his father's death, Middleton enjoyed, in spite of a youth harried by litigation between his mother and stepfather, the protection offered by the city to the orphaned offspring of citizens. Indeed, partly on the strength of the city's caretaking, Middleton was able to attend university, a privilege available to neither Shakespeare nor Jonson.15 But Oxford only led him further into the gap between birthright and finances. That, at any rate, is implied by the record of Middleton's registration at Queen's College, his departure from university before completing the B.A., and his satire of university life in his 1604 pamphlet Father Hubburd}s Tales,, or The Ant and the Nightingale. There the Ant tells the Nightingale the story of his life as a student, how he put himself into the service of a lowborn but rich fellow student, how he suffered from the cold, how he stayed awake night after night pursuing his studies, how he was burdened by inescapable and demeaning poverty: By this time, madam, imagine me slightly entertained to be a poor scholar and servitor to some Londoner's son, a pure cockney . . . Now, as for study and books, I had the use of my young master's; for he was all day a courtier in the tennis-court, tossing of balls instead of books . . . in the meantime, I kept his study warm, and sucked the honey of wit from the flowers of Aristotle—steeped my brain in the smart juice of logic, that subtle virtue,—and yet, for all my weighty and substantial arguments, being able indeed to prove anything by logic, I could prove myself never the richer. (Bullen, 8:102-3) While this certainly resonates with what Middleton's time at Oxford might have been like, we can see already how he is transforming the experience of contradiction into the simplified, idealized configurations of class, wealth, and worthiness characteristic of early comedies such as Tour Five Gallants (1604:*) or The Puritan (1606?). Middleton's lack of a London father is contrasted favorably with the cockney's degraded condition of being "some Londoner's son." The well-to-do but somewhat clownish plebeian is linked to

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witless courtiership, "tossing of balls instead of books." In comparison, the Ant is the true scholar and gentleman whose certainty that he is worthier than social betters such as cockneys and courtiers rises in inverse proportion to how profoundly he sinks into misery and social humiliation. The Ant even suggests that university education would have led to advancement if only he had not been seduced by poetry, "that sweet honey-poison, that swells a supple scholar with unprofitable sweetness and delicious false conceits" (81104). We might think that that is a likely enough explanation of the fact that Middleton left university without completing his degree. Indeed the idea that Middleton was in some way diverted from the advancement promised by a university degree, along with their own understandable prejudices, has persuaded many scholars of the view that Middleton "failed" to attain the B.A. These scholars believe that he wanted to continue, but that he ran out of money.16 Middleton's "failure," however, begins to look more complicated when we consider several social and biographical factors. Middleton probably did have enough money to keep him at Oxford through to graduation.17 If he had graduated, would he not then have been able to pluck the fruits clustered on the "spreading branches of art and learning" (Bullen, 8:103) which the Ant so happily imagines? The answer is, probably not. University graduates normally looked forward only to penurious employment as either clerics or teachers. Men in these professions normally earned less than twenty pounds per annum.18 Furthermore, monied gentlemen's sons did not usually take the degree, but rather went to university to "pick up," as Lawrence Stone has said, "bookish, classically-orientated training which they had come to believe that every gentleman ought to have."19 Finally, we must ask, how serious were Middleton's scholarly intentions in view of the fact he had begun writing would-be patronage poetry even before entering Oxford? While logic can hardly account for the career decisions of a twenty-year-old, a logical analysis of the evidence nonetheless suggests that Middleton left Oxford, not because he could not continue, but rather because he did not want to take the degree. Such reluctance is understandable, given

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a culturally conditioned ambition to fulfill the promise of his gentle birth by becoming a poet and a client of wealthy aristocrats such as the Earl of Essex and Baron Compton, the dedicatees of his two earliest poems. Perhaps most striking is the record of Middleton's registration at Queen's College, Oxford. Beside his name in the college subscription book is the designation generosi fis. This administrative seal on his gentle birth is crossed out, however, and plebei filius is written in its place. What are we to make of this substitution, that by a penstroke dropped the young man below the line that separated the wellborn from the base? Perhaps it represents no more than a hasty and erroneous correction. But maybe it preserves one of the first moments when Middleton grasped the particular stresses of the conflicting claims of money and blood. He was entitled to the first designation. But since commoners paid reduced fees, perhaps he elected to forgo rank in the face of financial need.20 In the canceled designation and its replacement we can see an epitome of the conflicting ways of measuring a person's "worth," and of the vexed choices they imposed upon specific individuals, certainly men like Middleton, Jonson, and Shakespeare, who were pulled one way by the allure of gentle blood and the ethos of gentility and another way by financial exigency and an emerging set of bourgeois values. Overall, the common denominator for Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton was a desire for social legitimation and esteem, a desire that was capable of fulfillment only in the conflicted terms of the status hierarchy. Each achieved a measure of legitimacy by developing a career parallel to his work as a professional playwright—Shakespeare as a theatrical entrepreneur, Jonson as a court poet, and Middleton as a writer of mayoral pageants and as the "Chronologer" of the city. As part-owner of the Globe and sharer in the most successful playing company in Europe, Shakespeare rose to the rank of gentleman by virtue of the financial successes that allowed him to buy New Place in Stratford and to win the coat of arms that his father had been unable to obtain.21 Jonson, the posthumous son of an impoverished gentleman and stepson of a bricklayer, rose from the abject condition of a strolling player to become an important figure in the

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life, cultural and otherwise, of the Jacobean court.22 Middleton of course failed to become a gentlemanly or courtly poet and had to ply his trade in the humbler world of the commercial theater, but he too eventually achieved somewhat higher social standing as a literary functionary of the city administration. Considered very broadly, their choices can be seen to have been conditioned by formative childhood experiences that oriented them in certain ways toward the social formation of rank. Shakespeare followed his father into business, but chose a different, highly innovative form of commerce; and where his father had failed, Shakespeare succeeded, returning to Stratford a wealthy, propertied gentleman.23 Jonson's formative experiences took place at Westminster School, which he entered at age seven, his fees being subsidized by an unidentified patron.24 The school was an elite institution, close to Whitehall and patronized by the Queen; its students, excepting the scholarship pupils, represented some of the most important families in England. Jonson claimed his Westminster master, William Camden, as a surrogate father, replacing the father who had died before Jonson's birth; and Jonson also seems to have attempted to "cancel" his early working-class self, the stepson of a London bricklayer, replacing it with another, gentlemanly self. All Jonson is recorded as having said about his first seven years is that he was "brought up poorly" (HSS, 1:139); in contrast, Camden was for Jonson "most reverend head, to whom I owe / All that I am in arts, all that I know" (Parfitt, 39). That Jonson aligned himself with the court and courtly values follows from his early experience with the elite society of Westminster School in much the same way that Shakespeare's entrepreneurial self-advancement follows from his upbringing as the son of a businessman. But of course Jonson was not a member of the gentry, so his class aspirations were inescapably shadowed by the taint of lowborn social climbing. To appreciate his position as outsider, we can compare Jonson with John Donne, who while born a Catholic was also a full-fledged member of the gentry.25 Donne avoided publication of his literary writings, whereas Jonson sought it out. Also important are the differences between each man's sense of his readership. That

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Donne's literary aspirations were fulfilled within an upper-class coterie is clear from the history of the circulation of his poems; but however much Jonson wanted to write from the position of a court ethos, he persisted mostly in writing to a popular readership. Nowhere is this clearer than in his 1629 "Ode to Himself," written in response to the failure of The New Inn, where he encourages himself to "leave the loathed stage" and to devote himself to celebrating King Charles. It is clear, however, that Jonson could not sever his ties with a public readership. In contrast to Donne, Jonson was not able to satisfy his desire for social legitimation exclusively within the circles of and around the court. In the closing stanza of the "Ode," the readers whose awestruck reception of his royal poems are supposed to vindicate him are the very people he claims to be casting off; in fact, he does not write for the King, but rather for those whom he claims to disdain: But when they hear thee sing The glories of thy king; His zeal to God, and his just awe of men, They may be blood-shaken, then Feel such a flesh-quake to possess their powers, That no tuned harp like ours, In sound of peace or wars, Shall truly hit the stars When they shall read the acts of Charles his reign, And see his chariot triumph 'bove his wain.26 (Parfitt, 283-84) In ways similar to Shakespeare and Jonson, Middleton's early upbringing helped to shape the course of his career. His boyhood connections with the Aldermen of London influenced his later "return" to the city and the emerging values of the city, a return evident in the large number of civic pageants he produced for the city fathers, and epitomized by signing himself "Poeta, & Chronologer Londinensis" in The Duchess ofMalfi. But also like Shakespeare and Jonson, Middleton's rewriting of himself was multisided and restless. That was the case because the social formation of rank in general was riven

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by contradiction and because a mercantilist redescription of individual worth could hardly have been entirely satisfactory in a society still largely governed by courtly values. Moreover a professional dramatist like Middleton was not likely to have aligned himself easily or completely with the drama-hating city administration. While his work for the city was both remunerative and, by his own indication, prestigious, he nevertheless did not abandon his work in the theater, and he continued to produce plays that satirized and even exploded the values of the city.27 In a provocative study, Margot Heinemann has attempted to align Middleton's drama with the putatively oppositional values of the city and generally with a so-called "parliamentary puritan opposition."28 She mounts a fascinating case for reading a multifaceted body of work along strongly defined ideological lines, but finally her case does not succeed. It is unconvincing for a number of reasons. As scholars such as Kevin Sharpe and Conrad Russell have argued, it is misleading to speak about an "opposition" in early Stuart England. According to Russell, "[i]t is ... characteristic of an 'opposition' that it is united by some common body of beliefs, which it does not share with members of the government. This ideological gulf between 'government' and 'opposition' is impossible to find in Parliament before 1640."29 Heinemann argues that Middleton was developing an ideological program that is exemplified, in her view, by A Game at Chess. There is some force in the argument here, since from one viewpoint Game at Chess was populist and violently anti-Catholic. But Game at Chess is a much more complex text than that since it managed to be both royalist and antiroyalist at the same moment. And militant opposition to Spain was widespread in 1624, held in common by groups of differing political outlooks. Furthermore, it is difficult to square Heinemann's view of Middleton with plays such as The Puritan (1606?), royalist pamphlets such as The Peacemaker (1618), or the satirical treatment of puritans that is widely distributed throughout Middleton's work from the early family of Love (1602?) to the late Hengist, King of Kent (i62O>). So perhaps the point is not that Middleton was oppositional (since the plays and other writings will not support such a claim); rather, it would be truer to say that he tried, in texts such as Women

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Beware Women (1621:*), The Changeling (1622), or the Duchess of Malfi epistle, to recuperate commercial theater by enhancing the value of commerce, and that he framed such enhancement in oppositional binaries such as production and consumption, charitable works and magnificent display, work and play, plainness and decorativeness. These terms were common currency and could be deployed in arguments of all stripes, but they circulated far too freely to allow us to tie them exclusively to any particular ideological or class position. Middleton was no more an oppositional writer because he compared unadorned art favorably with "cathedral palaces" than was Shakespeare a revolutionary for suggesting the possible corruption of those "that have pow'r to hurt." While Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton legitimated themselves to some degree in spheres peripheral to the theater, they also attempted to earn social esteem as working playwrights. Such negotiations for social status in the unconventional institution of the theater must have seemed arduous and largely ineffective. Jonson's abandonment of the stage during the years of his ascendancy at court (1616-26) suggests that he saw the pointlessness of courtly selffashioning by means of commercial-theater plays; and perhaps Shakespeare's retirement to New Place at around age forty-seven suggests a similar desire to seek status through conventional means. Even Middleton, who had income neither from investments nor by way of court patronage, reduced his activity somewhat in the theater once he had established himself as a pageant poet for the city. Before 1613, the year that saw the production of his first Lord Mayor's Show, Middleton wrote or collaborated in perhaps fifteen plays; between 1613 and his death in 1627, he wrote and produced seven Lord Mayor's Shows, three masques, numerous entertainments, and perhaps ten plays. In order to be able to legitimate their work as commercial playwrights, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton had somehow to change how theater meant\ they had to reinscribe dramatic discourse in some interpretive field or in terms of some foundational value different from the interpretive field and the valuelessness or cultural weightlessness of the powerless theater. They attempted this rein-

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scription in ways that were conditioned by upbringing and outlook. In broad terms, the protobourgeois Shakespeare placed dramatic discourse in the field of the private. In the private, as Shakespeare represented it, what was most valuable was precisely what was beyond representation and so outside the public, political sphere. As a consequence of this privileging of the private over the public, Shakespeare hollowed out the public sphere, reconfiguring the public order as a teeming but empty scene. Moreover, by making representation the border separating value from valuelessness (so that inward phenomena lose the very quality that makes them valuable by virtue of being represented), Shakespeare implied that playwriting was to be valued for reasons having nothing to do with its material conditions of production or its conventional status. In contrast to Shakespeare's "privatization" of theater, Jonson seems to have wanted to place drama back in the public field that Shakespeare was working to reveal as a mere theatrical scene. The courtier Fulke Greville burned an "Antony and Cleopatra" play because he feared that it would be interpreted as an attack on Queen Elizabeth's treatment of the Earl of Essex.30 The would-be courtierpoet Jonson wanted his drama to be as politically volatile, and as important, as Greville's. Jonson sought to restore the drama's capacity to intervene, and to be seen to intervene, in political controversies. To repoliticize the theater, Jonson had to test the limits of government censorship. While the authorities seem normally to have thought of theatrical commentary on political matters in the way Duke Senior responds to Jaques's railing (that is, by interpreting political criticism as a form of entertainment), it was possible to overstep the bounds of the permissible and so make one's play into more than "mere" recreation. Of course, breaking the boundaries of what was permitted was a dangerous game since the government response that would mark a particular play as politically powerful might also entail the punishment of its author. In spite of this danger, Jonson ventured to "shadow" contemporary events and issues in ways that were seen to be interventionist. More than any other playwright, Jonson attempted to write the theater back into the political arena; plays such as the collaborative Isle of Dogs and Eastward Ho, Cynthia's

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Revels, Sejanus, Epicoene, and Catiline shadowed events in purposeful ways and got Jonson into trouble with the authorities. Typically, Middleton parodied other playwrights' claims, especially Shakespeare's, for the value of their work. So where Shakespeare produces value as private and inward in Othello, Middleton accelerates the onset of jealousy in The Witch (3.3) so as to "reveal" the apparently private phenomena of love and jealousy, not merely as capable of being represented, but as mere effects of representation. Love is a discursive formation that operates automatically through a would-be inward subject who is in fact only a shimmering composite of discursive surfaces. Middleton's parodies resemble Jonson's, except that Jonson grounds his parodic attacks on other playwrights in a view of theater as a powerful, public institution, whereas Middletonian parody remains dangerously ungrounded. Middleton often legitimates his theater by suggesting its power to reveal the hypocrisy and emptiness of theater. To some degree, the recursive, selfconsuming quality of Middletonian legitimation is a product of the theatrical style of the boys' companies at the turn of the century— the "aery of children, little eyases . . . [who] exclaim against their own succession" (Hamlet, 2.2.339, 351). However, theatrical legitimation was necessarily a slippery undertaking, especially in view of what Robert Weimann has called the "mingle-mangle conditions of authorization" under which the early modern theater was compelled to operate.31 The lability of all terms that might be invoked in an apology for playwriting suggests the uncertainty of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton's attempts to write themselves into the early modern status hierarchy. But what is encouraging is how energetically and productively they contested each other's versions of theatrical value, how brilliantly they negotiated in the knowledge marketplace, especially in view of the weakness of their bargaining position, and how much they achieved. In the chapters that follow, we will analyze some of these contests and negotiations—within the great Renaissance genres of comedy and tragedy, and across the embattled terrain of the representation of women and the politics of gender.

4

Instituting Mirth in Renaissance Comedy

I HAVE BEEN ARGUING that the English Renaissance theater was powerless and socially degraded, that the playwrights attempted to redescribe their profession in more attractive terms, and that these redescriptions were playfully and productively competitive with each other. These ideas are important for a history of Shakespearean, Jonsonian, and Middletonian comedy. From A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595) to A Mad World., My Masters (c. 1605) to Bartholomew Fair (1614), the dramatists shaped their comedies in relation to the social place of the comic theater. They produced competing representations of mirth and differing claims for the value of comedy. In this chapter, I develop an interpretation of Bartholomewcomedy. In this chapter, I develop an interpretation of Bartholomew Fair through readings of Dream, Mad World, Measure for Measure (1604), and The Tempest (1611). By tracking the contest for value through a range of plays, I attempt to map the dialectical contests that went on between Shakespearean, Middletonian, and Jonsonian forms of mirth. Mirth was a more formalized social phenomenon in the English Renaissance than it is today.1 Traditional seasonal pastimes such as mummings and feasts of misrule, although sometimes riotous and anarchic, helped reaffirm the health of the community. The playhouse must have been a mirthful place for its audiences—otherwise they would not have continued to attend. But the commercial theater's relationship with traditional merrymaking was nevertheless problematic for a number of reasons: a privately owned playhouse that was excluded from the system of power and that put mirth on

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sale on working days as well as holidays could not easily take its place as a purveyor of socially restorative festivity. In the face of these complexities, the dramatists developed several versions of the relationship between mirthfiilness and theatricality. In a sense, the comedies are answers to the question of the theater's institutionalizing of mirth. As I have argued, the process of depoliticizing the drama seems to have been ongoing through the nineties, and more or less completed by the turn of the century. While in 1604, a play such as Measure for Measure represented power, it did so from a position in the interstices of power. To approach the play as if it spoke either for authority or for subversion (or for some middle position) simplifies Shakespeare's theatricalized politics by mistaking the sphere of the theater's interests for that of some other social grouping or institutional sphere.2 While the theater functioned primarily in the sphere of its own interests (so Shakespeare wrote for the benefit of Shakespeare and the King's Servants rather than for the benefit of King James), nevertheless playwrights were able to legitimate their activity only in the terms of the Elizabethan-Jacobean knowledge marketplace, a market whose ideology of artistic production continued to be dominated by the increasingly outmoded model of service and reward. As rewritings of contradiction, rather than as mere reproductions (ideology reproducing itself) or as resolutions (ideology seen steadily and wholly from a position outside ideology), Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton's plays engaged their authors' dilemma without being able fully to comprehend or alter the material or ideological conditions of their own production. In general, contradiction opens up ideology to interrogation and manipulation because contradiction disturbs the placidity of discursive practices, but contradiction does not afford a transcendent vantage point because it is itself a product of ideology. Specifically, the uneasy activity of playwriting in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries made the playwrights want to represent theater in a coherent way, but the fact that they were inside the conflicted ideological system made it impossible for them to produce any fully coherent representation. I situate Bartholomew Fair at the end of a procession of comic

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forms. I think that both city satire and problem comedy addressed the problem of legitimating theater in a new and aggressive way— overturning the Elizabethan claim (such as is made in A Midsummer Night's Dream) for the theater's role as a unifying and gentrifying influence, and subjecting the Elizabethan stage's representation of itself as a locus of public mirth to a savagely hilarious or disturbingly grim critique. Bartholomew Fair is Jonson's attempt to revive the Elizabethan stage's representation of itself as the place of socially reformative mirth. To represent theater as mirth, Jonson had in some way to deal with Middleton's—and his own—mordant critique of Elizabethan comedy, had to take into account plays such as The Alchemist or Mad World as well as plays like Measure for Measure and The Tempest, which in their turn countered city comedy's corrosive rewriting of Elizabethan comedy. The intensity of these plays' attempts to unburden themselves of the contradictions between patronage and commercialism was in part a consequence of the enhancement of the theater's status on the one hand and its commercial success on the other, and in part a consequence of the social ambition of the three playwrights. Thus the "darkness" of Shakespeare's Jacobean comedies, which has been widely attributed to a turn-of-the-century sense of despair in the face of political and moral corruption,3 may rather be attributed to Shakespeare's realization of the degrading commercialism of the drama consequent upon the remarkable success of the theater itself. As its ideological position becomes increasingly conflicted between "service and reward" and commerce, Elizabethan theater clung to the ethos of the patronage system. That many playwrights wished to efface the commercial success of their activities is not surprising. For one thing, their predecessors had been dependent upon aristocratic patronage, for both livelihood and prestige. The advertised association between theater and court served, furthermore, to enhance the appeal of productions in the popular playhouse. Also important is the fact the playwrights preferred the model of service and reward. That is so because the patronage system had inculcated a view of commercial exchange as merely a degraded distortion of patronage relations.4 This is not to say, of course, that the patronage

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system afforded a stable ethical model of artistic production. Patronage could hardly provide indubitable legitimacy since, from a marketplace point of view, "service and reward" looked like a hypocrite's dressed-up version of commercial exchange. Commercialism and patronage were thus not only antithetical, but also subversive of each other in that each produced the worst possible version of the other. The Elizabethan comic theater attempted to resolve these contradictions in terms of the figure of mirth. Shakespeare and others developed the idea of the theater as mirth in order to reconcile the stage's divided position between commercialism and patronage, and also the players' divided mission—performing in their own public playhouses and also at court as liveried servants of the aristocracy. In the face of this dilemma, the Elizabethan theater represented itself as the gathering place of mirth. In a play like Dream, the theater is represented as the embodiment of a principle of social cohesion flexible enough to accommodate diverse and even opposed groups (along with their diverse and even opposed aspirations), yet sufficiently cohesive to be able to order such groups hierarchically. While the conflicting claims of commercialism and patronage called forth the figure of mirth, the conflict was not thereby resolved. Rather, conflict was displaced onto mirth itself in the context of its production in the playhouse. In Dream, the resources of comic theater contribute to both a release of repressed desires and an articulation of diverse ideological positions that eventuate in the festive recuperation of an inclusive social order. So the Elizabethan theater represented itself as the agent of hierarchy made mirthful. But in fact the theater was subversive of both hierarchy and mirth. Theater undermined social hierarchy because playgoers took their places according to their ability to pay rather than by virtue of their social rank. Moreover, the mirthful experience of theater-going was undermined by the fact that it was neither "public" (in the full sense) nor "free." After all, customers had to pay to get into the playhouse, and once inside their freedom to participate was limited by the basic need to pay attention to the play. Of course, the theater's subversion of rank and commercialization of mirth did not necessarily annul the continuity between festi-

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val and theater for which modern scholars such as C. L. Barber, Robert Weimann, and Michael Bristol have argued.5 We have all sat in theaters in which ability-to-pay seating reproduced real-life social inequalities, and we have nevertheless sometimes felt a surprising collectivity with other members of the audience through the mediation of the drama. The point, then, is not that commerce necessarily canceled the possibility of mirth in the Elizabethan playhouse, but that it constituted a burden that theatrical mirth had in some way to manage. Important also is Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's critique of the tendency in accounts of carnivalized literature to ignore "the difference between popular festive rituals and the literary appropriation of such rituals."6 Stallybrass and White are discussing Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais rather than Barber's treatment of Shakespeare, but the point still stands: as Jonson himself asserts in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, the public space of the Smithfield Fair and the "public" space of the Hope playhouse are differently configured and have distinctive aesthetic standards and codes of conduct. The marketplace and the theater, popular festive rituals and theatrical appropriations of such rituals are not interchangeable. Rather, as Stallybrass and White go on to suggest in relation to literature, they are complexly interconnected but nonetheless distinct discursive domains: "Sites and domains of discourse, like the theatre or the author's study or the marketplace, are themselves hierarchized and ranked, emerging out of an historical complex of competing domains and languages each carrying different values and kinds of power" (61). * * *

A Midsummer Night^s Dream and A Mad World, My Masters develop antithetical versions of mirth. Both plays are centrally concerned with mirth as a cultural phenomenon—with the ways in which mirth is able or unable to resolve social tensions. Both plays are concerned with the relationship between mirth in the streets and mirth in the playhouse. Each ends with a play-within-the-play whose

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relationship to the main action implies a politics of theatrical mirth. In Dream, dramatic mirth is an agent of social harmony since it is able to contain the tensions consequent upon the competition between commercialism and courtliness. In Mad World, in contrast, it is an agent of disruption: the commercial core of theater vitiates the festive spirit that comic drama claims to embody.7 In A Survey of London (1598), John Stow defined commercial theater as a kind of public sport, as a continuation of "leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, casting the stone," skating, sliding, jousting, hunting, cockfighting, and tennis. Such an assimilation of theater to virtually "contentless" forms of recreation might seem naive or eccentric to modern readers, but was in fact a widespread contemporary view of theater: "Let us now," saith Fitzstephen, "come to the sports and pastimes, seeing it is fit that a city should not only be commodious and serious, but also merry and sportful.. . . "When the great fen . . . which watereth the walls of the city on the north side, is frozen, many young men play upon the ice ... some tie bones to their feet and under their heels; and shoving themselves by a little picked staff, do slide as swiftly as a bird flieth in the air. . . . Sometime two run together with poles, and hitting one the other, either one or both do fall. . . . Many of the citizens do delight themselves in hawks and hounds. . . . " Thus far Fitzstephen of sports. These, or the like exercises, have been continued till our time, namely, in stage plays, whereof ye may read in anno 1391, a play by the parish clerks of London at the Skinner's Well besides Smithfield, which continued three days together, the King, Queen, and nobles of the realm being present.... Of late time, in place of those stage plays, hath been used comedies, tragedies, interludes, and histories, both true and feigned; for the acting whereof certain public places, as the Theatre, the Curtain, etc., have been erected. Also cocks of the game are yet cherished by divers men for their pleasures.8 Stow's view of theater as contendess sport constitutes Shakespeare's point of departure in Dream.9 Theseus's instruction to "Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments, / Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth" (1.1.12-13) resembles Stow's account in that it empties mirth of political content and because both Stow's and Theseus's accounts of mirth as contentless are based on an idealization of hierar-

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chy.10 Furthermore, neither Stow nor Theseus makes any distinction between sport and theater as forms of recreation. The first rehearsal of the mechanicals' play in Dream follows naturally from the ducal instruction to make merry. Finally, both Stow and Theseus ignore the fact that their identification of theater with sport can be maintained only by suppressing the commercialism of the stage. Stow's "certain public places, as the Theatre, the Curtain, etc." are not "public" in the way "the great fen . . . which watereth the walls of the city on the north side" is public; on the contrary, the Elizabethan theaters were privately owned, either by the acting companies or by theatrical entrepreneurs like Philip Henslowe, a fact that is ignored in Stow's account. Theseus's partial understanding of the social meaning of theater matches Stow's, since Theseus is presented as unaware that the mechanicals' "sport" is undertaken for profit as well as out of "simpleness and duty" (5.1.79, 83). But here Shakespeare's representation of theater becomes more complex than Stow's—more complex because Dream undertakes to legitimate itself and Shakespeare's activity as its author whereas Stow's Survay merely assimilates theater into a larger nostalgic portrait of Elizabethan London. Dream manages both the contradiction consequent upon its own commodification of "public" mirth (which is supposed to be free) and its own divided commitment between court and public audiences by allowing commercialism and populism a voice, while containing that subversive voice within the larger pattern In A Survey of London (1598), John Stow defined commercial mates the playwright's ideologically burdened activity and recuperates the threatened "mirthful" experience of playgoing by including commercialism in the mirth that unifies the society of the play. On the morning after the night's confusions in the forest, the tradesmen gather to mourn the loss of Bottom the weaver. In his absence, they say, their play of "Pyramus and Thisbe" cannot go forward. Snug the joiner comes on and tells them that the Duke has been wedded: "Masters, the Duke is coming from the temple, and there is two or three lords and ladies more married. If our sport had gone forward, we had all been made men" (4.2.15-18). I am interested in the relationship between "sport" (theatrical merrymaking

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freely and dutifully bestowed) and becoming "made men" (the commercial motive ignored by Stow, and even here assimilable to a courtly view of artistic production). The relationship between the terms parallels the somewhat vexed condition of playhouse reproductions of public mirth. Dream manages this problem by including Snug's contradiction in the larger pattern of alienation of one group from another in the play. Flute's daydream about the pension Bottom might have won ("And the Duke had not given him sixpence a day for playing Pyramus, I'll be hang'd" [4.2.21-23]) represents, even as it attempts to cover, the working-day instrumentality of the tradesmen's "sport," and, as C. L. Barber has remarked, "seems pointedly allusive to Shakespeare's company."12 Furthermore, when Theseus instructs Philostrate to "Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments, / Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth," he obviously does not have "hard-handed" workingmen in mind, nor does he expect that the injunction to be mirthful, with its suggestion of collective merrymaking, will in fact encourage a group of tradesmen to break with the community in order to ensure their exclusive rights over their dramatic property—as Peter Quince says: "meet me in the palace wood, a mile without the town, by moonlight; there will we rehearse; for if we meet in the city, we shall be dogg'd with company, and our devices known" (1.2.101-4). However, in terms of the design of the play, the tradesmen's materialistic ambitions and hilariously reductive version of "poetry" represent merely one more gap in Theseus's knowledge of his subjects. Because the complexity of the tradesmen's motives remains unknown to Theseus, both commercialism and populism can be expressed in Dream without coalescing into an oppositional stance. The court party, the young lovers, and the tradesmen know little about each other's motives or views, yet they comprise a community through the mediation of mirth. The play shows how mirth can reinstate social harmony because it alone, by virtue of its multivocality, is able both to contain and to permit the expression of the conflicting ideological positions held by different social groupings. In the playhouse, Dream made mirth work by allowing the expression of its own commercial motive. Of course, it softened its commercialized rela-

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tionship with the audience. The spectators, "gentles all," were no doubt charmed by the parallel with the onstage court audience, but the play did not attempt to hide the fact that both audiences had bought the flattery they received from the players. Shakespeare's production of mirth in Dream legitimated itself by including its own commercialism as one voice among many in the discordant harmony of the playhouse. Thomas Middleton's Mad World, My Masters has numerous points of contact with Dream. One of the most intriguing occurs when the mother of Frank Gullman, the play's courtesan, weaves a fiction in order to entrap the protagonist, Follywit. Up to the moment of his seduction by Gullman, Follywit has been the perfect confidence artist, successfully pilfering the estate of his grandfather, Sir Bounteous Progress. Follywit falls in love with Gullman, whom, he believes, is a "bashful" virgin. While Frank Gullman has already sold her virginity (according to her mother at least fifteen times [1.1.149] ),13 the commodification of "bashful maidenhood" remains central to the women's confidence game. Not surprisingly, the mother's pitch to Follywit is in the form of a complaint against her daughter's pretended modesty: I need not have been in that solitary estate that I am, had she had grace and boldness to have put herself forward. Always timorsome, always backward; ah, that same peevish honor of hers has undone her and me both, good gentleman. The suitors, the jewels, the jointures that has been offer'd her! We had been made women forever, but what was her fashion? She could not endure the sight of a man, forsooth, but run and hole herself presently. (4.5.36-44)

If we can arrest temporarily the speech's slide into multiple levels of irony, we can see how Frank Gullman's supposed failure to be sexually sportive parallels Bottom's absence from theatrical "sport," and how their lack of participation in mirth has cost their companions their respective rewards: Snug's "we had all been made men" parallels the mother's "We had been made women forever."14 Furthermore, we can begin to see a series of metadramatic parallels between the women in Mad World and the tradesmen in Dream.

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Middleton's courtesan plays to a male audience which believes that her performance is motivated by "bashful maidenhood," when in fact she is pursuing her own agenda (she is accumulating a dowry in order to purchase a respectable marriage!). The onstage audience of "Pyramus and Thisbe" also is incapable of understanding the complexity of the tradesmen's reasons for performing. However, while the self-interest of the tradesmen is included in the mirthful, discordant harmony that comprises the Dream's representation of itself, the self-interest underlying Frank Gullman's performance of virginity ramifies throughout the play, and extends to every character and action. It is not merely that every major character in Mad World is a petty capitalist, driven by social and mercenary self-interest to cornmodify his or her intelligence, wit, or sexuality; it is rather that the ethos of commercialism saturates every instance of mirth in the play, so that mirth is consistently wrenched toward self-interested instrumentality. We learn that Sir Bounteous Progress's renowned hospitality itself is maintained in order to fulfill his social aspirations (see 2.1.6-58) and that it is funded by his neglect of the poor (see 3.3.525). Even his body belies his bountiful name: "cSlid, [Frank Gullman says] 'tis the knight that privately maintains me; a little short old spiny gentleman in a great doublet?'" (3.2.5-6) Like Dream, Mad World represents the theater in terms of mirth. "'Tis Lent in your cheeks, the flag's down" (1.1.35), Follywit says, referring to both the custom of raising the playhouse flag during a performance and the routine closing of the theaters during Lent. Indeed, just prior to the performance of the play-within-the-play, Sir Bounteous Progress reiterates this connection, his language drawing attention to its sheer conventionality: "Feast, mirth, ay, harmony, and the play to boot: / A jovial season" (5.1.110-11). Middleton amplifies the theater's commodification of mirth. Far from including commercialism in the mirthful and gentrified experience of theatergoing, Middleton's comedy aggressively represents theatrical mirth as a confidence game in which the audience is the dupe. Or, in a another figure (which relates the self-representational strategies of Mad World to those of Measure) ^ theatrical mirth is the allure of the prostitute: Follywit, disguised as a courtesan, declares "The hair

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about the hat is as good as a flag upo'th' pole at a common playhouse to waft company" (3.3.131-33). One complication is that both plays, to a degree, project their own degraded commercialism onto other versions of theater. Thus the Athenian tradesmen represent the players (in relation to whom the commercial-theater audience is gentrified), but the tradesmen are also not the players—they are a vulgar parody of the players in contrast to which the players themselves appear to be not tradesmen. Similarly, the "private"-theater play, Mad World, projects its commercialism onto Shakespeare's "common" theater, the boys at times sending up the vulgarity of the "public" theater, as in the remark that "the hair about the hat [of a prostitute] is as good as a flag upo'th' pole at a common playhouse to waft company."15 The play-within-the-play in Mad World crystallizes Middleton's Jacobean critique of Shakespeare's Elizabethan politics of mirth.16 Its title, "The Slip," can mean a counterfeit coin, an escape, or a slide (compare Romeo and Juliet, 2.4.45-48: "You gave us the counterfeit. . . . The slip, sir, the slip"). Performed by Follywit and his companions in order to rob Bounteous Progress, it ridicules the idea of theater as the meeting place of mirth. "The Slip" illustrates how the self-interested agenda of the players subverts social harmony, not by adopting an oppositional stance (Middleton does not represent the theater as powerful), but rather by counterfeiting—deceiving the onstage audience of its expectations and stealing its property. The commercialism and the consequent falsity of theatrical mirth are figured in the single image of "the slip"—a counterfeit, an evasion and a play performed within the play. Although Mad World, like Dream, allows the expression of the theater's commercial motive, it does not try to enhance theater in terms of the unifying figure of mirth. On the contrary, Middleton's play shows how commodification falsifies mirth, making it indistinguishable from both sexual "sport" and a full repertoire of confidence tricks. This satirical view of the theater might have eased the players' contradictory position by disclosing rather than disguising their commercial motive, but it clearly does not in itself constitute a legitimating self-representation. This is the case in spite of the fact

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that, to a degree, "The Slip" is not self-representation (of Paul's Boys), but a parodic projection of "counterfeiting" onto the adult "public" companies. What makes Mud World a legitimation of theater is not primarily the relationship between Middleton's and Shakespeare's theaters (Paul's and the Theatre/Globe), but rather the relationship between Middleton's Jacobean and Shakespeare's Elizabethan versions of theater as mirth. In large part Mud World contrives its own legitimation by adopting a critical and moralist relationship with festive, romantic comedies like Dream, which are thereby "unmasked" as selfinterested falsifications of the theater's place in the political order. Thus the "uncovering" of the hypocrisy of the theater which is central to city comedy's metadramatic meaning should be seen primarily as referring back toward Elizabethan comedy rather than as selfreferential. By virtue of this critical view of earlier versions of theatrical mirth, the city-comedy playwrights were able to invest with moral urgency their own aggressive candor about the theater's selfinterested counterfeiting. * * *

Measure for Measure can be read in terms of the dialectical transformation of theatrical mirth between the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and as implicated in and responsive to the ideologically burdened position of the theater. In terms of this transformation, Mad World's critique of Shakespeare's Elizabethan politics of mirth represents a version of the position Shakespeare himself was developing in Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), All's Well that Ends Well (c. 1603), and Measure for Measure (1604), plays in which the figure of festival is either expunged from comedy, transformed into private and illicit desire, or transplanted to the inhospitable ground of satire or tragedy. The differences between city comedy's revisionist politics of mirth and Shakespeare's own revision of his earlier position have to do both with Shakespeare's investment in his own Elizabethan comedies and with the fact that Shakespeare's ideological dilemma was more acute than Middleton's. After all, Shakespeare was the most

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successful Jacobean playwright—both leading author for the King's own company of players and a major shareholder in the leading theatrical "company" in Europe. As we have seen, it was conventional to think of playgoing and plays as "sport" or "merriments." For both Stow and Theseus, theater as sport is a contentless popular activity in a well-ordered society—an indicator rather than an agent of the smooth operation of hierarchy. In Shakespeare's Elizabethan elaboration of that view, theater is more than sport, because the players have a secret commercial motive and—in a contrary spirit—because theater as mirth is able to reconcile the conflicting motives of different social groupings. In their turn, Jacobean city comedies such as Mad World explode Shakespeare's Elizabethan politics of mirth by showing how commercialism, far from being recuperated by the mirth it produces, in fact wrenches mirth toward the antithetical position of self-interest. Middleton's hollowing out of mirth in terms of self-interest also disallows Shakespeare's gentrification of theater-going. Bounteous Progess's use of drama for social self-promotion revises Theseus's blithe acceptance of the tradesmen's "simple and dutiful" dramatic offering, suggesting that it is also politically self-interested at its core, indeed that it is instrumental to the preservation of Theseus's "right" to power. In Measure, Shakespeare shifts the ground of his legitimation of the theater from the public to the private. By means of this shift, Shakespeare attempted to circumvent the problem of trying to legitimate playwriting in the public terms of patronage or commerce. He also was following out the theater's general project of depoliticization as well as continuing the development of a mode of characterization that makes figures like Hal and Hamlet "self-signifiers" in contrast, say, with Spenser's production of figures whose signifieds lie outside themselves. In this broader view, Measure forms part of Shakespeare's innovative "privatization" of drama. Shakespeare's shift from the public to the private allowed Measure to represent theater as the place of private conversional work rather than as the gathering place of the mirth of political reconciliation.17 If theater must be seen to be doing some good in order for

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playwriting to be seen to be worthwhile, and if all political purposes are blocked by the felt powerlessness of the theater and burdened by contradictory models of artistic production, then the best the theater can do is to exert itself with respect to the individual subject as individual rather than as a member of the community. For this reason, Measure represents itself in terms of a different kind of comic payoff. The working-day atmosphere, presided over by a subdramatist who must wrest success from a mirthless play world by dint of laborious and even tedious theatrics, yields at the end not the festive renewal of the social order (as in Dream), but, on the contrary, only the private renewal of some of the characters. While this shift from the public to the private allowed Measure to evade the Jacobean critique of Elizabethan comedy (that it was promoting itself instead of promoting the mirthful order of the community), it could not alleviate the burden of commercialism (since, if anything, the contradictory position of Shakespeare's theater was more rather than less intense in the wake of the players' promotion to the royal livery). However, rather than attempting to repudiate the Middletonian—and Shakespearean—critiques of Elizabethan theatrical mirth, Measure in fact elaborates the idea that theatrical mirth is deeply self-interested. In the play, mirth is an eroticized aspect of human nature rather than a happy version of community. Furthermore, this privatization and eroticization of mirth is linked to a commonplace antitheatrical yoking of the playhouse and the whorehouse, as in Middleton's "hair about the hat is as good as a flag upo'th' pole at a common playhouse to waft company."18 In other words, in Measure, when Shakespeare makes sexual desire the scapegoat for the illegitimacy of his activity as a commercial playwright, he is following and adapting an antitheatrical fashion. In the play, Juliet's pregnancy and Claudio's death sentence are consequences of their "mutual entertainment" (1.2.154); Isabella (according to Angelo) considers Claudio's lovemaking "A merriment [rather] than a vice" (2.4.116); and, for Lucio, lechery is "sport" ("[The Duke] had some feeling of the sport; he knew the service" [3.2.119-20]). In Dream, "sport" includes a range of legitimate pleasure-seeking activities, both sexual and theatrical; in As You Like

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It, "sport" is eroticized and potentially illicit.19 In Measure, in contrast, "sport" has exclusively a sexual meaning, and is always illicit— productive of deceit, disease, and unborn children regarded as mere embodiments of their parents' sin (2.3.19). This grim reduction of mirth to guilt-ridden sexual desire is a major element in the antitheatricality of the play's self-representation, and, as Anne Barton has suggested, seems reflective of Shakespeare's "disillusionment" and "disgust" with the emptiness of theatrical imitation.20 I suggest, however, that Shakespeare's disgust arose primarily from the social, as opposed to the moral or ontological, degradation of playwriting. More important is the idea that Shakespeare used this disgust to legitimate the drama. This is not to suggest that Shakespeare's antitheatricalism was pretended. It was likely real enough, but plays like Measure channeled it in creative ways. Measure argued for its own value by providing its audiences, themselves implicated in the play's demonization of mirth, with examples of salvation from the sin of mirth under the guidance of a dramatist figure. But however brilliantly Measure staged its own legitimation, it could not fully resolve the contradictions underlying its production. Indeed none of Shakespeare's legitimating strategies could be entirely successful. This, as we have seen, was because each play was only a rewriting of contradiction, capable neither of writing itself out of contradiction nor of changing the material and ideological conditions of production. One indication of the persistence of contradiction in Measure is the way coin imagery registers the unease consequent upon the King's Servants' commercial success. Coins were legitimate only when they bore the impress of the King's face; similarly, the King's countenancing of the drama legitimated the players, and also increased the taking in of coins from the public audience. However, the enhanced profitability of playwriting under the countenance of the King threw into high relief the theater's position between the models of exchange on the one side and service and reward on the other. And since "the coin," which was supposed to be able to "pass current" between the model of market value on the one hand and that of transcendent, or "sovereign," value on the other, could not in fact mediate between these incommensurable

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ways of valuing, it had to remain always in jeopardy of being discovered to be counterfeit itself or of discovering the falsity of the countenance that impressed it. In other words, the Renaissance "crisis of representation" suggests either that the coin was misappropriating the authority of the royal countenance (Angelo abusing his power as substitute; the players capitalizing on their royal livery) or that the royal countenance itself was misappropriating the market value of the coin's metal by impressing itself upon it (Vincentio impressing Angelo into the task of restoring order to Vienna "in th' ambush of my name" [1.3.41]; James promoting himself and his policies through Shakespeare's company).21 The image of the coin as a double "slip" (either as counterfeit itself or as evidence of the falsity of the royal system of according value) implies the radical instability of Shakespeare's commercialized relationship with royal patronage and is in this respect linked with Middleton's "Slip," which also registers the mutually subversive effects of commerce and patronage. In contrast with the exclusively political range of meaning in "The Slip," however, Measure links the production of coinage with reproduction. When Claudio threatens to desire life more than he desires the preservation of his sister's chastity, Isabella upbraids him in terms that connect with the play's recurrent yoking of counterfeiting and illicit generation: Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair! For such a warped slip of wilderness Ne'er issu'd from his blood. (3.1.140-42) Claudio's "slip" from a stoic acceptance of death suggests to Isabella the possibility that her brother might be a "slip of wilderness," some degenerative strain let into the family bloodline, and also a counterfeit, a disfigured product that "issu'd" from his mother's illicit sexual "play." Isabella's accusation makes Claudio a counterfeit as well as a counterfeiter—one of those "that do coin heaven's image / In stamps that are forbid" (2.4.45-46). The play's linking of the "two usuries" (3.2.5-6), commerce and whoring, translates, as we have seen, the players' commercialism into the terms of the anti-

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theatrical conflation of playhouse and whorehouse and aggressively projects that translated secret motive onto the pleasure-seeking audience. However, the play's outward projection of its secret motive extends even up to the new King himself, whose livery the players had recently put on and under whose countenance they were profiting in the public theater (from the viewpoint of patronage, "coin[ing] heaven's image / In stamps that are forbid").22 For this reason, Vincentio is portrayed as irreducibly double—either a sovereign evangelist who employs theatrics in order to renew the souls of certain of his subjects (even though he started out with a politically reformative agenda) or a scheming confidence man who outdoes his city-comedy counterparts by managing to consolidate his "moral right" to rule Vienna and by marrying Isabella, the city's central object of desire. Finally, then, Measure can be seen to set out with a political agenda, which becomes enmeshed in the problematics of motive, especially the central problem of Vincentio's motivation. The problem of just what Vincentio wants to do (reform Vienna, test Angelo, marry Isabella) has the effect of shifting interest from the broader "issues" to the never fully knowable feelings and thoughts of a particular character. This focusing down onto the sphere of the private, onto the inner realities of characters whose "thoughts are no subjects" (5.1.453) is central to Shakespeare's revised claim about the good his plays are able to do. I suggest that the Jacobean Shakespeare, in order to be and to be seen to be worthwhile, severed the continuity between the private and the public—a continuity that, for instance, had allowed the Elizabethan Shakespeare to represent theater as able to recuperate patriarchy through the transformation of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. In contrast with Kate's volubility at the end of her play, Isabella's silence at the end of Measure opens up an incommensurable gap between the political world which determines what happens to her and her private, unmediated world which defines what she is. One of the many effects of Shakespeare's innovative emphasis on the privacy of the self, the impossibility of mediating one's inner reality into the political world where it can be seen and shared by others (marked here by Isabella's silence), was to preclude the possibility of

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any figure of community (including mirth) from being able to provide the ground of theatrical legitimation. However, the problem with Shakespeare's substitute claim about the good that the theater is able to do is that the private self can never provide an incontestable public account of itself, so that Vincentio must, after all, remain uncertain about what Isabella is, and we must (and we do) remain uncertain about what Vincentio is. And Shakespeare must have remained uncertain about the members of his audience, reconstructed as they were as private individuals by Shakespeare's revised representation of theater-going. So, of course, contradiction persisted for Shakespeare's theater by virtue of the private playgoer's inability to report back convincingly on the spiritual amelioration that the theater represented itself as being able to provide. That twist, at any rate, seems to be what is being rewritten on Prospero's island. *

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In "The Induction on the Stage" in Bartholomew Fair, Ben Jonson distinguishes his comedy from moldy plays like Titus Andronicus and The Spanish Tragedy as well as from "drolleries" such as The Tempest.2* The Scrivener explains that Jonson wants the audience to be contented with the real world: "If there be never a servant-monster i' the Fair, who can help it? he says; nor a nest of antics? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries" (Induction, lines 128-32).24 This is a familiar rhetoric of separation, but the connections among Jonson's comedy, Thomas Kyd's tragedy of blood, and Shakespeare's romance are as important as the differences. Jonson thinks that he can write in opposition to his fellow playwrights, but he, like them, faces the same set of problems, and the same drive toward legitimacy registers, however differently, in each of their plays. That they face the same problems means that Bartholomew Fair is related to The Spanish Tragedy and The Tempest, as well as to Dream, Mad World, and Measure, in a dialectical rather than an oppositional way. Excepting The Spanish Tragedy, these plays were participants in an unfolding contest for value within a specific genre, competing ways of managing the energy of comic theater.

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What was the nature of the energy of the Jacobean comic theater? As I have suggested, the different versions of mirth in Renaissance comedy had to do with the interests of the theater first of all. Middleton depicts a world bereft of stability—a city in which merchants are thieves, tradesmen wittols, and tradesmen's wives whores. But the topsy-turviness of Middleton's "mad world" reflected the position of the commercial theater far more accurately than it represented the actual life of the London bourgeoisie. Comic energy, even though projected in various ways onto the world outside the playhouse, belonged to the sphere of playmaking. Middleton might have suggested that the world was mad, and Shakespeare might have argued that reality was a dream or that society was infected by sinracked mirth; but they spoke from a particular point of view. Jonson's project was to put the energy of comedy back in its place in the playhouse and to reconnect theater and world in a normal, stable way that would bring to an end the permutations of Shakespearean and Middletonian transference, the complex of emulation and revenge that is expressed in their plays through the many paradoxes about the empty theatricality of reality and the full reality of theater.25 The Tempest provided Jonson with a template for the legitimation of the comic theater.26 Jonson borrowed a setting that islands the action as well as a figure of authority, a surrogate dramatist, who oversees all the other characters. Both setting and supervisor are important in Jonson's attempt to valorize comedy in the face of the corrosive satire of Mad World, the depoliticizing maneuvers of Measure ^ and the utopianism of The Tempest. Bartholomew Fair was an attempt to contain the energy of comedy as it had come to be enacted in the Jacobean theater. Where most of his earlier comedies try to kill the spirit of mirth gone bad, Bartholomew Fair works to civilize the energy of comedy, both by keeping it separate from a political order that then is able to channel it toward licit purposes, and by placing it under supervision. *

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Toward the end of his holiday at the Smithfield Fair, Bartholomew Cokes wants only to go home. He has been robbed of every-

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thing but his ungainliness and foolishness: "Would I might lose my doublet, and hose too, as I am an honest man, and never stir, if I think there be anything but thieving, and coz'ning, i' this whole Fair" (4.2.67-69). Bartholomew thinks it unkind that the Fair that bears his name should have so humiliated him, but he rouses his courage to ask the madman Trouble-All for assistance: Friend, do you know who I am? Or where I lie? I do not myself, I'll be sworn. Do but carry me home, and I'll please thee, I ha' money enough there; I ha' lost myself, and my cloak and my hat; and my fine sword, and my sister, and Numps, and Mistress Grace (a gentlewoman that I should ha' married), and a cut-work handkerchief she ga' me, and two purses, today. And my bargain o' hobby-horses and ginger-bread, which grieves me worst of all. (4.2.79-86)

Cokes learns that, whatever their superficial similarities, the Fair resembles neither him nor his world. We might be reminded of the weariness of the courtiers in The Tempest following the "forth-rights and meanders" on their own magic island, but central is the uncanniness of both settings, the way both island and Fair can be revelatory of the world and yet unlike anything normal. Hierarchies of rank or wealth hold up outside the Fair: everyone knows that Cokes is an imbecile, but that does not prevent his brother-in-law, Justice Overdo, from wanting to marry him to Grace Wellborn. Once at the Fair, however, he is set upon and fleeced by Lantern Leatherhead, Joan Trash, Ezekial Edgworth, Nightingale, and the seller of pears. The denizens of the Fair comprise a confederation different from society at large.27 Trash and Leatherhead insult each other one moment, but a moment later Trash defends Leatherhead's reputation against Wasp's accusations. Still later they help each other combat Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. Edgworth the cutpurse is generous with his stolen goods, and a mess of knaves runs to the aid of Ursula the pig-woman when she scalds her leg. This social harmony contrasts with the sharp-dealing of most of the holiday visitors. Bartholomew Fair is a parasite culture feeding on the citizenry of London, a marketplace of "thieving and coz'ning," but it also comprises a society more festive and less hypocritical than that of the "respectable" Overdo, Cokes, Busy, or Quarlous. By islanding the degraded energy of comedy in the Fair, Jonson

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insists on the existence of another place where things are more settled. While there are connections between the theatricality of Smithfield and the actuality of London, the Fair remains a markedoff place to which people go in order "to see sights" (2.5.31) and to eat roast pig. Busy is a glutton and a hypocrite in both locations, but only at the Fair are his vices displayed. In contrast to the London of act i where dealings take place behind closed doors, Smithfield is a public show. Jonson emphasizes the parallels between the Fair in the play world and the theater in the world; both provide "excellent creeping sport" (1.5.138). Quarlous reiterates the point: "We had wonderful ill luck to miss the prologue o' the purse, but the best is we shall have five Acts of him [i.e., Bartholomew] ere night: he'll be spectacle enough!" (3.2.1-3). Bartholomew Fair shares The Tempest's metatheatrical agenda, but where Shakespeare equates world and stage from the point of view of eternity, Jonson emphasizes the differences that make theatrical imitation socially beneficial. Consider the underlying disagreement between the way Prospero's "revels" speech binds us together by virtue of our actorly ephemerality and Jonson's claim, in Discoveries., that the best men stand outside the stage-play of life: "Good men . . . the stars, the planets of the ages wherein they live . . . placed high on the top of all virtue, looked down on the stage of the world, and condemned the play of fortune. For though the most be players, some must be spectators" (Parfitt, 407). Important also is the distance between Jaques's idea that "all the world's a stage" and Jonson's opinion that acting is something that we do rather than what we are: "I have considered, our whole life is like a play wherein every man, forgetful of himself, is in travail with expression of another. Nay, we so insist in imitating others, as we cannot (when it is necessary) return to ourselves" (Parfitt, 407) "Totus mnndas agit histrionem" the motto of the Globe theater, was subject to a range of interpretations. Jonson affirms the integrity of real life and individual identity against the commonplace metatheatrical argument that equates living with playing.

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Following on plays such as Measure and culminating a long project aimed at the privatization of playgoing, The Tempest develops a case for a conversional theater. Under the eye of the subdramatist Prospero, each islanded soul comes face-to-face with itself through the mediation of dramatic display. Shakespeare's leveling of world and stage impels us toward introspection because everything outward is made to seem illusory. Exemplary of the evangelical power of spectacle, which the play provides as a model of play-watching, are Trinculo's remorseful response to Ariel's tune (3.2.130), Alonso's recognition of the operations of justice in the wake of the harpy scene (S-B-PS-JO 2 )? Ferdinand's awestruck reception of Prospero's marriage masque, (4.1.122-24) and Caliban's conversion in the face of Prospero's "brave" presence (5.1.261-63, 295-98). This advertised conversional power is one of Jonson's targets in Bartholomew Fair, not of course because he opposes the idea of drama being able to reform its audience, but rather because "conscience-catching" is an intensely private matter, and so threatens to remove drama from the political arena. A drama whose chief virtue is said to be the spiritual betterment of its audience members will inevitably slip out of a public field since its effects at root are private and invisible. Is Caliban truly converted, or is he only feigning in order to evade punishment? How sorry is Antonio? How much wiser is an audience after having seen The Tempesti Jonson eschews Shakespeare's particular valorization of drama because conversional art must also be private art. Although there are many would-be prophets at the Fair, no one in the play except Busy undergoes anything like a conversional experience. Busy's conversion culminates his dispute against the Puppet Dionysius. Busy denounces the profanations of Dagon ("that idol, that heathenish idol . . . such as are your stage-players, rhymers, and morrice-dancers" [5.5.1-11]), and is confuted by Leatherhead's most learned puppet: Busy. I am confuted, the cause hath failed me. Pup. Dion. Then be converted, be converted. Lea. Be converted, I pray you, and let the play go on!

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Let it go on. For I am changed, and will become a beholder with you! (5.5.106-10)

Busy's transformation into a playgoer satirizes puritan opposition to the theater. But it also ridicules the conversional experiences of characters such as Alonso or Angelo. In Jonson's view, theatrical conversion promotes the interests of the theater rather than the spiritual well-being of the audience. The conversion of Busy from an opponent of the theater to "a beholder" rewrites Shakespeare's privatized theater according to city comedy's "unmasking" of the secret, commercial motive of theatrical legitimation. So where Angelo or Alonso is converted at an inward and unrepresentable level by theatrical spectacle, Busy is converted by empty spectacle to the vain pleasures of spectatorship. *

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At the core of Jonson's attempt to channel the energy of comic theater toward a public, political arena is a construction of what might be called "visual authorship." Jonson builds into the play a system of looking relationships that places the dramatic action under the steady gaze of a figure of authority. Indeed, the design of the action promotes spectatorship as opposed to participation as a form of power. Characters such as Overdo and Wasp become spectacles as soon as they give up being spectators. The play encourages the rowdy audience to become "beholders" along with Busy. The audience's visual authority is strictly limited, of course, since it is merely a dependent offshoot of a more acute vision. Important in this regard is Jonson's attempt to rewrite Shakespearean "private" authorship. As A. D. Nuttall has suggested, Shakespeare "shimmers" in the character of Prospero.28 The Tempest seems to invite spectators into an uncanny relationship with the author and his vision. The "contract" between each playgoer and Shakespeare is private and inward rather than public because Shakespeare is not present in the play in any demonstrable way, but never-

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theless his shimmering presence calls forth a powerful emotional investment. Dryden, asserting that Shakespeare spoke through The Tempest^ characterized the play as "that circle [in which] none durst walk but he."29 The "Articles of Agreement" between the spectators and "the author of Bartholomew Fair" reprise Shakespeare's affective contract with his audience, but force into view the commercial exchanges and material conditions of production that are effaced in Shakespeare's play. Where The Tempest's performers are spirits and its shows are bestowed freely by a mage, the ballad singers and puppeteers of the Fair entertain only for cash. Like the mechanicals' plot in Dream, the Induction reminds the audience that the Lady Elizabeth's Servants also work for money and that the success of the play depends on such unmagical considerations as the condition of Littlewit's hose. The Stage-keeper who tells us that the play will begin as soon as the stitch in Littlewit's black silk stocking is repaired also thinks that Jonson might be lingering backstage. He is hesitant to criticize the play because he fears he might be overheard by the poet (or the poet's man), especially since Jonson has already beaten him for having dared to offer advice. Jonson and Shakespeare are both present in their plays, both constructing themselves as authors whose vision has a hold on the production of meaning. But where Shakespeare is everywhere and nowhere, his vision a suffused presence that shimmers throughout the text, Jonson is in the tiring-house, watching, or at least listening to, the performance. Jonson characterizes himself as a bully who terrorizes the actors and defrauds the audience. He claims to have "now departed with his right" of censure, but the contract with the audience actually denies the rights it seems to grant. The Induction promises a play "made to delight all, and to offend none, provided they have either the wit or the honesty to think well of themselves'"' (lines 83-85, emphasis added); the agreement guarantees that "it shall be lawful for any man to judge his six pen'orth, his twelve pen'orth . . . to the value of his place -.provided always his place get not above his wit" (lines 88-92, emphasis added). By means of this banter, the play preserves the integrity of public mirth while allowing city comedy's argument that theatrical festiv-

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ity cloaks a mirthless commercialism. Jonson's authorship is a selfdramatization that serves the design of the play. But his authorship is also a position exterior to the play's design, a vantage point from which he watches the audience watching the play. This parallels the King's idealized position at the court performance ("Your Majesty hath seen the play, and you / Can best allow it from your ear, and view" [Epilogue, lines 1-2]), except that Jonson is unseen by the Hope audience whereas the King was visible at court. Jonson rewrites the invisibility of Shakespearean authorship in another register. The author Jonson, unseen and silent "behind the arras," oversees the networks of watchful mirth. *

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The small black wooden box containing Cokes's marriage license to Grace Wellborn travels through the day of the Fair along with the fairgoers. It passes from hand to hand—from Solomon to Littlewit to Wasp to Cokes and back to Wasp. At a certain point, Edgworth steals the license; and the box, now empty, continues on its wanderings in Wasp's unwitting possession. At various times, the box is the object of the close attention of Wasp, Cokes, Edgworth, Quarlous, and of course the spectators. Early on, incidentally, it is eroticized by Wasp who outrageously warns Littlewit to beware of being made a cuckold by his own servant: "Good Lord! How long your little wife stays! Pray God, Solomon, your clerk, be not looking i' the wrong box" (1.4.24-26). As a consequence, the later violation of the box by Edgworth at Quarlous's behest parallels the citizens' loss of proprietary mastery over their women—Win Littlewit and Mistress Overdo who become "birds of the game" in order to satisfy the sexually rapacious Edgworth (4.5), and Dame Purecraft and Grace Wellborn who marry the two gallants, Quarlous and Winwife. More to the point in this discussion, the box is a telling symbol of the relationship between Jonson's "visionary" authorship and the tawdry and empty spectacle of theater. Quarlous's relationship with the box parallels Jonsonian authorship. Quarlous keeps the box in view, knows its true value, and is able

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to determine its fate, even though he is one of the few characters who does not touch it. Jonson is the watchful guarantor of the value of a fundamentally empty institution, one whose steady, knowing gaze valorizes playing, and who keeps an unseen eye on theater in order to hold it in its licit place in Jacobean society. It is interesting to compare the box in Jonson's play with the empty box that appeared in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (i59O>), according to Jonson, "five and twenty, or thirty years" previous to Bartholomew Fair (Induction, line no). Jonson disparages Kyd's play, but Dekker informs us that Jonson had acted the part of Hieronymo in a strolling company of players (HSS, 1:13). Jonson's borrowing from Kyd is remarkable because it suggests how what the Stage-keeper refers to ruefully as the long-forgotten "stage-practice" of "Master Tarlton's time" could in fact migrate from generation to generation, carrying with it certain key dramatic effects and certain ways of representing theater.30 The Spanish Tragedy's villain, Lorenzo, arranges to have Pedringano murder Serberine. In order to remove Pedringano in his turn, Lorenzo has him apprehended for the murder and then buys his silence with the promise of a pardon. Lorenzo sends a boy messenger to reassure Pedringano; he gives the boy a small wooden box that is supposed to contain the condemned man's pardon. The boy is told not to open the box, but he does so anyway and finds that it is empty. The empty box is fatal to Pedringano, but it is theatrical magic. Both in his soliloquy and in his role in the hanging scene that follows, the boy finds himself acting a part because of his unavoidable complicity in Lorenzo's villainy. His complicity has the effect of vitalizing the hanging scene; his secret knowledge of the box's emptiness produces complex ironic relations among him, Pedringano, and the audience. Furthermore, the ironic play of knowing and unknowing looks in the scene enhances our awareness of the boy as an inward, thinking subject. And the box is more than theatrical magic because it registers, if only obliquely, the complex relations between the players and their aristocratic patrons. In this regard, we might remember that Kyd was arrested and tortured in 1593 at the hands of the Privy Council, not of course for his dramatic writings, but in order to discover the

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source of certain libels apparently directed against foreigners living in London. And we might also consider that the drama of the 15808 was perhaps implicated more immediately in the operations of power than it would be in the 15905 and through the early Stuart period. In any case, the boy's soliloquy weaves a fascinating set of connections among the wickedness of the powerful whose patronage brings theater into being, the empty box that the boy holds and is held by, his transformation into an actor, and the theatricalization of the impending hanging of Pedringano: My master hath forbidden me to look in this box, and by my troth 'tis likely, if he had not warned me, I should not have had so much idle time; for we men's-kind in our minority are like women in their uncertainty: that they are most forbidden, they will soonest attempt. So I now. By my bare honesty, here's nothing but the bare empty box. Were it not sin against secrecy, I would say it were a piece of gentleman-like knavery. I must go to Pedringano, and tell him his pardon is in this box; nay, I would have sworn it, had I not seen the contrary. I cannot choose but smile to think how the villain will flout the gallows, scorn the audience, and descant on the hangman, and all presuming of his pardon from hence. WilPt not be an odd jest, for me to stand and grace every jest he makes, pointing my finger at this box, as who would say, "Mock on, here's thy warrant." Is 't not a scurvy jest that a man should jest himself to death? Alas, poor Pedringano, I am in a sort sorry for thee, but if I should be hanged with thee, I cannot weep.31

There is no distance separating theater, power, and the players; the boy cannot choose but hold the box that plunges him into theatricality. The emptiness of the box hollows him out, so that he too must be seen to be what he is not. Playing and power are just points in a circuit, and the box is the switch. Bartholomew Fair's box represents the same kind of transmission point between playing and power. But while the relationship is more or less the same in both plays, Jonson changes the nature of the participants. Lorenzo can control the box, even at a distance, because of the boy's fear of court power, and that kind of power is embedded in the structure of social hierarchy. Quarlous need not touch the box because his visual advantage and cleverness have won him the services of Edgworth the cutpurse. For all that he is a figure parallel to Jonson, Quarlous is finally

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more a player than a patron. Jonson takes control of the box that, with its wooden walls and its license, is a figure of the theater in its political context. He takes that figure away from the powerful and delivers it back to the playing companies and especially dramatists, not as a liberatory or oppositional gesture but rather as a way of shifting the supervision of the drama from authority to authorship. The "master-poet" lays claim to the supervisory roles of the patron and the censor. The box is still empty, of course, but now the author can see to it that it will go where it will do the most good. The connection between Bartholomew Fair and The Spanish Tragedy suggests that the issue of theatrical legitimation cuts across the principal Renaissance genres of comedy and tragedy. Perhaps the most important difference between them for the purposes of the present discussion has to do with the fact that the central value of comedy involves people living in community while the heart of tragedy comprises the fate of the person as individual in relationship with the world. It is to the competing forms of tragedy and rival versions of the tragic person that we turn in Chapter 5.

5

Reflections of Theater in the "Tragic Glass" from Marlowe to Middleton

WHY is SEJANUS (1603) not as good as Hamlet (c. 1600):* While Hamlet has had its detractors and Sejanus its defenders, there is no doubt that Shakespeare's play is generally held to be better than Jonson's.1 Invidious comparison between Shakespearean and Jonsonian tragedy goes back to the seventeenth century. In a commendatory poem prefixed to the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems, Leonard Digges compared the affective power of Julius Caesar and Othello with the pedantry of Catiline and Sejanus: So have I seen, when Caesar would appear, And on the stage at half-sword parley were Brutus and Cassius; O how the audience Were ravished; with what wonder they went thence, When some new day they would not brook a line, Of tedious (though well-labored) Catiline's; Sejanus too was irksome; they prized more Honest lago or the jealous moor. (quoted in Riverside, 1846) Digges's dispraise of Jonson hints at a more fundamental distinction. The characters in Julius Caesar "ravish" the spectators, the particularized antagonists in Othello galvanize audience attention; but Jonson's tragedies are so tedious that they arouse an awareness of

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the constructedness of the play text rather than involving the audience in the fates of lifelike persons. The difference, a familiar one in the history of the reception of the two writers, is between Shakespearean vitality and Jonsonian artifice.2 Jonsonian tragedy is deficient in characterization. Shakespeare gives us knowable, threedimensional characters who suffer and learn; but Jonson gives us flat, or two-dimensional, characters who, since they are incapable of inward and revelatory suffering, seem to belong to satire rather than tragedy.3 What are the origins of Hamlet's ascendancy over Sejanust Most important in this regard is the nature of the value at the heart of each tragedy. The core value of the play world and the particular construction of the characters constitute an implicit claim about the nature of theatrical value. Sejanus locates value in public interactions between autonomous, public persons. What is tragic in the play is that hardly any such interactions can take place in Tiberius's Rome. Jonson offers his political theater in recompense for the implied loss of a public, knowable community in the real world of Jacobean England. Hamlet, a predominantly existential tragedy, valorizes the private, unrepresentable self. Hamlet's tragedy is the loss of that self, his fatal fusing with the revenger's role that he had earlier found too stagy. The tragedy is that the absolutely valuable private self can never find adequate expression within the universe of representation.4 As we have seen in the previous chapter, Shakespeare's valorization of the private suggests that the theater is worth something to the members of the audience as inward individuals rather than as political or social subjects. In a third position is Middleton's Women Beware Women (1621?). Women is remarkable because Middleton, reprising what might be called Marlovian interpretive oscillation, permits no foundational value to stand in his play world. His characters seem autonomous and inward at one moment and machinelike or twodimensional at the next. Neither public truth nor the authority of the inward self is allowed to subsist as the ground of value. Hamlet's supremacy has to do with the predominance of the view that tragedy is involved with the basic and unchanging issues of existence rather than with the political or social conditions of daily

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life. In this view, tragedy is a contemplative rather than an active form. In tragedy, pure skeptical knowledge, as opposed to the operations of power, emerges as truly powerful. Nietzsche explains Hctmlefs sublimity as an effect of the hero's absolute knowledge: "the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have^ained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things . . . true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man."5 So influential has this view of tragedy been that, until recently, sociopolitical tragedies such as Sejanus or Women have seemed to miss the mark altogether. Mad World, My Masters or Bartholomew Fair might be judged by some to fall short of their Shakespearean counterparts, but no one thinks that they are not comedies. Middle tonian and Jonsonian tragedy has suffered under a more severe prejudice. The Shakespearean bias suggests that if tragedy has to do with the individual in the face of the universe, then Jonson and Middleton's plays are not tragedies at all. Recent materialist criticism by Jonathan Dollimore, Catherine Belsey, and others has attempted to revive political tragedy as the more valuable form. Such criticism disparages Shakespeare as a promoter of "bourgeois" individualism or maneuvers in order to recruit him as a writer of political tragedy.6 The case for "radical tragedy," the argument that the tragedies of Shakespeare and his fellows signified primarily in a political register, is hampered because its proponents claim that the inward self, as we understand it, did not exist in Shakespeare's time. Since personhood was outward, so the argument goes, we dehistoricize when we focus on the inwardness of a character like Hamlet. But as Katharine Maus has shown, the materialist banishment of Renaissance inwardness is itself unhistorical 7 Maus cites numerous texts that testify to the ordinariness of the idea of interiority; one of these is Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Mind (1604): For that we cannot enter into a man's heart, and view the passions or inclinations which there reside and lie hidden; therefore, as philosophers by

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effects find out causes, by proprieties essences, by rivers fountains, by boughs and flowers the core and roots; even so we must trace out passions and inclinations by some effects and external operations, (quoted in Maus, 5)

While Maus's historical argument puts in question the materialist case against a Renaissance tragedy of inwardness, she does not distinguish adequately between Shakespeare's ontological claim that the private is incommensurate with public signifying practices and the epistemological concern (in Renaissance psychology and jurisprudence) with the difficulty of ascertaining the particular contents of someone else's mind. The distinction is important because it suggests that Shakespearean tragedy produced the figure of unrepresentable inwardness for particular institutional reasons. It is important to see Hamlet's "that within which passes show" as a truth-effect rather than as truth. In Hcimlet, the priority of inwardness over outwardness that is central in Wright is preserved, but the circuit between them is kinked so that, while inner states can in principle authenticate outward displays, such displays can never lead back to the states that are their invisible, unknowable source. We can know the flower with certainty only by the root, but we can never know the root. *

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The attempt to read all Renaissance tragedy as radical, or to read all of it except Shakespeare as radical, simplifies a competitive field that had space for a range of tragic forms. To begin to get a more detailed idea of the complexity of that field, let us consider representative passages from the plays that are of principal concern here. The first is from Hamlet'. Seems, 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, 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,

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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. (1.2.76-86) Shakespeare's production of a problematic inward subjectivity operates by implication rather than by assertion. In fact, Hamlet does not admit to any problem; on the contrary, he protests that his inward, invisible grief guarantees the public truth of his melancholy behavior and mourning garments. Not surprisingly, the problematic relationship between inward condition and public display emerges because of the protestations themselves. A man who stands to become king might well feel happy rather than sad in the aftermath of his father's death, but might insist on his sadness in just the way Hamlet does. The second passage is from Sejanus.8 It is spoken by the heroic Caius Silius, one of the Germanicans, about two sycophantic followers of Sejanus. We might say here that Jonson's character proffers anatomization as an antidote to the Shakespearean problem of inwardness: Satrius Secundus and Pinnarius Natta, The great Sejanus' clients—there be two Know more than honest counsels; whose close breasts, Were they ripped up to light, it would be found A poor and idle sin to which their trunks Had not been made fit organs. (1.22-27) The last passage is spoken by the Duke in Women Beware Women.9 Convinced by his brother the Cardinal to forgo an adulterous relationship with Bianca, the Duke congratulates himself in soliloquy for his moral resolve, since he has determined to abstain until after he has had Bianca's husband murdered and has married the new-made widow: She lies alone tonight for 't, and must still, Though it be hard to conquer; but I have vowed

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Chapter 5 Never to know her as a strumpet more, And I must save my oath. If fury fail not Her husband dies tonight, or at the most Lives not to see the morning spent tomorrow; Then will I make her lawfully mine own, Without this sin and horror. Now I'm chidden, For what I shall enjoy then unforbidden, And I'll not freeze in stoves. 'Tis but a while, Live like a hopeful bridegroom, chaste from flesh; And pleasure then will seem new, fair and fresh. (4.1.267-78)

The contradiction between the Duke's determination to marry Bianca "without this sin and horror" and his premeditated assassination of Leantio might, of course, be resolved somewhat in performance. An actor might make the Duke more coherent by suggesting that "sin and horror" derive from the Cardinal's bookish moralizing rather than from the Duke's own conscience. The closing lines of the speech would then be spoken laughingly, the Duke congratulating himself on duping his brother. But that interpretation would need to ignore the Duke's confusion between Christian morality and the honor system. More than that, it would miss the fact that moral good, aristocratic honor, and sexual pleasure are equally and indistinguishably desirable to the Duke. In the face of that apparent triple good, he is unable to discern how they differ from one another and how those differences require him to exercise ethical judgment of some kind. He fails to realize that while murder might be a legitimate course of action when one lusts after another man's wife, the same murder, especially when carried out by another, contradicts the demands of the honor code and, of course, is irreconcilable with the ideal of a virtuous life. The three passages suggest competing views of the tragic subject. Shakespearean subjectivity comprises "that within which passes show," an inward and private selfhood that is conterminous with seeing through representation—seeing representation, including self-representation, as "actions that a man might play." Shakespeare

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produces this kind of inwardness by having his characters put in question their own external attributes. Hamlet seems at a loss to represent his true state to the world in any convincing fashion because all his actions could be seen as playacting. If another character were to suggest that Hamlet's "inky cloak" is a disguise rather than a reliable indicator of grief, then Hamlet would appear as a mere liar whose true thoughts could in principle be discovered. Jonsonian subjectivity rewrites Hamlet's unrepresentable inwardness as mere secrecy. Secrets, however well guarded from public scrutiny, are never in fact incommensurable with public ways of signifying. Even the closest breasts, in Jonson's view, are capable of being "ripped up to light" and so made knowable; in effect, Jonson suggests that Hamlet's inwardness does not surpass signifying practices, but only evades them for a time. Finally, Middleton's Women rewrites Shakespearean subjectivity parodically as an effect of the disjunctions between value systems. The Duke's meditation on chastity and murder is fractured between the opposing pressures of Christian morality and the honor code. In Shakespearean tragedy, such a disjunction might startle a character into deep self-consciousness (as Macbeth is startled into selfcommuning when he recognizes that "This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill; cannot be good" [1.3.130-31]). In Middleton's parodic version, the very possibility of a constitutive self-consciousness is precluded since the Duke's subjectivity consists precisely in being subjected to disjunction, tripped by the ideological system into a condition of unknowingness, here signaled by the unremarked contradiction between repulsion from "sin and horror" on the one side and self-satisfaction at the prospect of the murder of Bianca's husband on the other. Of course, the correlation between Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and, respectively, private, public, and parodic constructions of the tragic subject is far more complicated than the three passages suggest. To begin with, Middleton's parodic subject is not a "construction" of subjectivity at all, but rather a processive making and unmaking of previous constructions. Furthermore, characters such as Women's Bianca or The Changelings Beatrice-Joanna and

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De Flores are similar to the Shakespearean model. The "public" characters in Sejanus often seem close to recognizing the Hamlet-like impossibility of making themselves known or of knowing others. Finally, Shakespeare is capable of all three constructions of the subject, and even of mixing the three constructions in one character—witness the way the disjunction between virtus and virtue causes a temporarily unknowing Macbeth to agonize over his inability to say "Amen." At the moment "Amen" sticks in his throat, he is like Middleton's Duke, except that his failure to grasp the significance of his words is too grim to be laughable. In a more sustained instance, Coriolanus's claim to self-authorship is put in question by the view that the play itself develops of its hero, not as a free individual, but rather as a figure whose belief in his own autonomy is determined by the ideological system.10 The conditions of the production of Renaissance tragedy relate to the general conditions underlying the depoliticized drama. Writers of tragedy in the powerless theater faced the problem of working in a genre that had carried considerable political weight in the earlier part of the century. Pre- and early Elizabethan tragedy had been connected with elite interests and serious treatments of political and historical topics. Plays such as John Bale's King Job an (1538) and Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc (1562), the narrative tragedies in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559), and tragedies such as those by Fulke Greville and Samuel Daniel suggest the uses to which tragedy was put in the politicized theater of the pre- and early Elizabethan period and in the closeted political theater of the later Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. Writers in the powerless theater emphasized the traditional idea of tragedy as a serious and culturally weighty dramatic form as one way of legitimating the activity of playwriting. Even Stephen Gosson, in his antitheatrical tract The School of Abuse (1579), blamed the abuses of the players mostly on comedies and praised his own theatrical treatment of Catiline's tragedy on account of its demonstration of "the reward of traitors . . . and the necessary government of learned men."11 In Tamburlaine (1587), as we will see, the "tragic glass" is advertised as superior to the "jigging veins of rhyming

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mother-wits / And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay" (Prologue, lines 1-2).12 The cultural weight of earlier tragedy that had attracted the commercial dramatists to the genre in the first place also encouraged them to seek to legitimate their own writing in terms of some selfrepresentation that could confer value on their new, powerless type of tragedy. Working in the politically "weightless" discourse of the common playhouse, these playwrights reached out into their culture for ways of legitimating their profession. With the exception of a few instances, including Sejanus, where writers attempted to make tragedy matter in the political arena, the energy of the tragic drama throughout the period derived from this pursuit of a value outside the political field. An account of these three playwrights' negotiations within the genre of tragedy should begin, however, with Christopher Marlowe. *

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Among other things, Marlowe was "a poet and a filthy playmaker." 13 Working as "a filthy playmaker" must have been somewhat vexing for him, an activity that required some kind of legitimating strategy in order to be reconciled with his social ambition. I do not think that it would have been possible for him to have thought about his playmaking as a suitable vocation for a scholar, gentleman, operative for the Crown, and associate of courtiers such as Walsingham and Raleigh. That he was in fact the son of a shoemaker probably exacerbated rather than eased the class implications of his work as a commercial writer. Thomas Kyd's comment that "his Lordship [apparently Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange] never knew his [Marlowe's] service, but in writing for his players, for never could my Lord endure his name, or sight" underlines the social degradation of playmaking, especially since Kyd seems to assume that playwriting is located outside the system of normal client-patron relations.14 Marlowe was a socially ambitious but mostly unconnected Elizabethan who found himself writing plays for the commercial theater. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton were similar. How might this type of person have felt writing plays for a theater that was so-

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cially degraded and also generally seen to be powerless? I suggest that the form of Marlovian tragedy is explicable in relation to his need to produce a representational strategy that would serve to legitimate both his plays and his professional activity as a playwright. As I have noted, the foundational value that emerged after Marlowe in the great Shakespearean tragedies of the early seventeenth century comprises an interiorized and transcendent selfhood. The Shakespearean tragic subject is the central figure in an interpretive grid through which Marlowe's tragic protagonists, especially Tamburlaine and Faustus, have been misread in much modern criticism. Important in this regard is the difference between Shakespeare's privatization of transcendence and Marlowe's production of interpretive oscillation. Shakespearean tragedy is legitimated by virtue of a higher good that is incommensurate with power and representation; Marlovian tragedy refuses to authorize any foundational value. Whereas Shakespeare idealizes the selfhood of his tragic protagonists, Marlowe sets tragic subjectivity in oscillation between irreconcilable interpretive fields.15 By disabling conventional responses, Marlowe attempted to keep the meanings of his tragedies under his own authority and so out of the grasp of commercial-theater audiences. According to Stephen Greenblatt, the energy of Marlowe's drama is related to the rise of a market economy. He tells us that capitalism unsettled the value system, and opened up a vision of the void underlying all values, now seen as constructed rather than as intrinsic. This void constituted the ground of possibility for Marlovian tragedy: "magnificent words are spoken and disappear into a void. But it is precisely this sense of the void that compels the characters to speak so powerfully, as if to struggle the more insistently against the enveloping silence."16 Greenblatt adduces the acquisitiveness of capitalism in general as the engine driving the supposed demystification of power and the emptying out of language, identity, space, and time in Renaissance England. I would suggest, however, that the main participants in the early modern expansion of the market economy and overseas trade remained believers in the divine ordination of rule and the providential ordering of history. Given that the often skeptical representations of politics and history in the commercial theater differed so widely from the Christian views of power and

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history held by early modern capitalists, it is clear that we need to explain the Marlovian void in some other terms. The point is to identify a more institutionally specific relationship between the rise of the market and the development of tragedy. Perhaps the so-called "Renaissance crisis of representation" needs to be seen not as widespread throughout early modern culture but as localized in particular spheres of activity, such as the commercial theater, where the production of stable, legitimate meaning had in fact been put in question. In this view, Marlovian tragedy, bound within the sphere of "playing," was driven by a desire to register its meaning somewhere else and so become more than "mere" recreation. The legitimating strategy of Marlovian tragedy is the production of a hermeneutics of suspicion whose area of activity is the relationship between divine providence and human history. Incidentally, Marlovian interpretive oscillation continued to influence Shakespeare, especially in the history plays or in a "problem" comedy such as All's Well That Ends Well, where we do not know whether Helena is an agent of divine providence or a schemer who pretends to be a divine agent. In Marlowe this hermeneutics is fully formulated in the second Tamburlaine play. There Marlowe sets up an oscillation between seeing the hero in terms of a determining relationship with the divine or in terms of a drive toward self-determination. The legitimating strategy of Marlovian drama consists in this to-and-fro movement between the private field's claims to transcendence and the public field's limitation of heroic energy. C. L. Barber explains that "Tamburlaine is a strange, anomalous work because it embodies the release of energy characteristic of Elizabethan tragedy, but in a heroic form which puzzles our sensibilities, conditioned as they are by the tragedies that followed. . . . It overrides potential ironies, miming omnipotence by confirming, in stage action, magical expectations launched by Marlowe's 'mighty line.' "17 Barber's account of how Tamburlaine realizes in the world what, at first, is merely imagined can be supplemented by reference to the differences between the two plays. Tamburlaine's selfauthorship is uncontested in the first play. His private aspirations have easy purchase on the world because his power is underwritten by the divine. The first play's Tamburlaine is simply "the man or-

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dained by heaven" (2.1.52). He is the agent of his actions, even though those actions are made charismatic by virtue of their connection with the supernatural. That is so because the relationship between Tamburlaine's actions and the divine authority that "royalizes" (2.3.7-8) them is unexamined, and because the divine itself is identified only in terms of what it is not. Tamburlaine's god is not Islamic, not Christian, not even exactly pagan, but plural, often classicized, often folded into fate or destiny—overall an ensemble of supernatural powers that energizes Tamburlaine without defining his meaning or undermining his autonomy. The difference between the plays consists in the second's interrogation of the issues surrounding Tamburlaine's "ordination." The sharpening of these issues in the second play destabilizes interpretation, since the significance of Tamburlaine in general is seen to differ depending upon the nature of the deity. The second play reframes Tamburlaine's previously unconstrained aspiration in a vexed interpretive field. In the first play we tend to value Tamburlaine on his own terms; in the sequel, we cannot settle on just what terms we are to use. The second play constructs interpretive dilemmas that both invite and disable analysis. For example, the Christian Sigismund betrays and subsequently is defeated by the Islamic Orcanes. The defeated Sigismund interprets defeat as (the Christian) God's punishment for his treachery. On the other side, the pagan Orcanes calls before the battle upon the Christian God to help him defeat the treacherous Christians: "Thou Christ that art esteemed omnipotent, / If thou wilt prove thyself a perfect God . .. / Be now revenge upon this traitor's soul" (2.2.55-58). In this way, the pagan victory is at first provocatively preferred as evidence of the power of the Christian God, but then the meaning of events is shown to be a matter of interpretation: Ore. What sayest thou yet, Gazellus, to his foil, Which we referred to justice of his Christ And to His power, which here appears as full As rays of Cynthia to the clearest sight?

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Gaz. 'Tis but the fortune of the wars, my lord, Whose power is often proved a miracle. Ore. Yet in my thoughts shall Christ be honoured, Not doing Mahomet an injury, Whose power had share in this our victory. (2.3.27-35) Toward the end of the play, Marlowe's destabilizing practices are brought to bear, even more provocatively, on the interpretation of Tamburlaine himself. Tamburlaine burns the Koran, challenges "Mahomet" in the name of the quasi-Christian "God that sits in heaven, if any god, / For he is God alone, and none but he" (5.1.200-201). Moments later he is taken by the sickness that eventually kills him. Read as punishment, the sickness seems to support the legitimacy of Islam; reading the burning of the Koran and the advent of sickness skeptically as unrelated events calls into question the providentialist terms that Tamburlaine himself has deployed throughout the play. Finally, reading Tamburlaine's disease as imposed by the Christian God as punishment for mistreating sacred books in general is troubled by the fact that by punishing His "scourge" at this juncture, the Christian God cannot but be seen to be promoting a nonChristian faith. The interpretive instability of the ending of the second play, remarkably different from the victory that closes the first, gives us a Tamburlaine whose claims to transcendence can be neither dismissed nor accepted. Being God's scourge empties out his autonomy and self-determining power; calling himself by that designation restores his autonomy and self-determination but jeopardizes the very field in which the designation—any designation—signifies. Marlowe can be seen to have attempted to problematize interpretation in order to gain what the prologue of the first play also seems to want—a higher status for his playwriting, a confirmation of the worth of his plays by virtue of their being neither "jigging" nor the product of "rhyming mother-wits" nor kept "in pay," but rather "stately," filled with "high astounding terms" and capable of authoritative representation on their own terms:

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Chapter 5 From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of War, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threat'ning the world with high astounding terms And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. View but his picture in this tragic glass And then applaud his fortunes as you please.

I note that Marlowe's revisionist version of the "tragic glass," conventionally the figure of art's effectual engagement with the world, both registers the powerlessness of the theater in 1587 and looks ahead to the massive inward turn that the theater was about to take. This is because Marlowe's tragic glass does not look outward in order to reflect the world, but rather is turned toward what it is itself producing—the picture of Tamburlaine. Beyond this twist in the representation of representation is the fact that the play's popular success caused it to falter in its drive toward value. Inasmuch as the Tamburlaine of the first play was a projection of Marlowe's desire to have his drama valued on its own "stately" terms, so the audience's inscription of that play in the field of commercialized recreation must have been disappointing to the playwright. Marlowe's attempt to enhance the status of playwriting faltered because the play was a huge popular success. *

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The tragic mirror that in Marlowe is turned away from an engagement with the world turns back in Hamlet: "the purpose of playing . . . is, to hold as 'twere 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" (3.2.20-24). Hamlet turns the mirror back to face the world, suggesting a version of drama as effectually engaged with real events, even capable of generating an oppositional discourse. Hamlet imagines that he can use dramatic performance to achieve political reformation. A highly charged speech might madden the guilty and appall the innocent; a cunning

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interlude might compel his uncle to make a public confession. Theater itself might be the means by which signifying practices could be cured of their debilitating theatricality. Of course, Hamlet cannot speak authoritatively for Hamlet, and, as we have seen in Chapter i, The Murder ofGonzago has little capacity to prescribe what it means for its courtly audience. Indeed from another point of view, Gonzago has an effect just opposite to the one Hamlet intends. Instead of catching the King in a spotlight of public shame and so restoring the political community to health, the "Mousetrap" sets in motion a wave of distrust that exacerbates the general condition of social fragmentation. Inasmuch as Gonzago disseminates suspicion rather than certainty among the onstage audience, it not only fails to hold the mirror up to nature, but also shifts altogether the import of the mirror as a figure of theater. Theatrical specularity provides no access to an objective view of oneself but rather only allows entry into a situation where each person's self takes its place in a series of selves, each regarding the others with self-conscious distrust. Such a mirroring arouses a sense of the blank unknowability of others and intensifies each one's sense of inwardness. Indeed, while Gonzago confirms the King's guilt in Hamlet's eyes, its conversional operations also render him, especially in the prayer scene, more inward and so even more impenetrable to Hamlet's searching gaze. In the play, this mutual blankness is not merely an indicator of social or political alienation; rather, it is the key factor in the condition of having a self. *

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We can get a clearer sense of Shakespeare's privatization of transcendence by comparing Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) with Othello (1604). A comparison of the two plays suggests that the Jacobean Shakespeare rewrote value as private, as inexpressible and so incapable of providing the basis of an oppositional discourse. In Romeo and Juliet, love is valuable and private, but its privacy is accidental rather than intrinsic. Friar Lawrence believes that the love can be consecrated secretly and then introduced publicly in order to end the feud between the two families; of course, he fails to reckon with the

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operations of Fate, but that is of no overall consequence since Fate's purpose is also to make peace, although by means of death rather than love. In the play as Fate directs it, Romeo and Juliet's love is extraordinary but not incapable of signification; it is introduced publicly in the wake of the lovers' deaths and does bring about an end to the feud. Because the private is capable of meshing with the public, the private experience of romantic love in Romeo and Juliet can exercise a corrective power with respect to the public world. In contrast with Romeo and Juliet, the privacy of Desdemona and Othello's love is intrinsic and not merely dictated by circumstances; indeed their love is characterized as being incapable of signification. The ineluctability of Othello and Desdemona's love has paradoxical consequences. Although their love exists as the center of value in the play, it can never stand as incontestable. They woo each other by understanding each other's language in private rather than public terms, attending to the meanings of each other's words at the level "below" denotation: My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd That heaven had made her such a man. She thank'd me, And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her, I should but teach him how to tell my story, And that would woo her. (1.3.158-66) Othello and Desdemona deploy irony in order to woo each other in circumstances that make open courtship difficult, but once irony is allowed into the field of their exchanges, it is unstoppable. And while their "private" language allows a moving sense of their being in touch with each other at a psychic or spiritual level, they are—or, more precisely, Othello is—incapable of knowing in public terms (i.e., unable to prove to another man) that Desdemona loves him or is faithful to him.

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Once lago draws Othello into the project of inscribing the ineluctable private experience of love in the public terms of gender, age, race, culture, and "ocular proof," the love is "revealed" to be ungrounded, perhaps an "act" on Desdemona's part; and Othello's confidence in Desdemona's affection is transformed into folly. Private love, heavenly at first because it is undefinable, becomes the abyss from which issue the passions that destroy love in the lover's drive toward determinate, public meaning. In Othello, the private fails to mesh with the public. The private experience of love is incapable of providing the basis of an oppositional position, say, against racist or sexist prejudice. Beyond that, private love is incapable even of defending itself against what consequently emerges as the cogent position, developed in the play itself, that finds Othello sexually possessive rather than genuinely loving. What did Shakespeare gain by rewriting value as incommensurate with power and representation? One part of the answer is a new style of characterization, another is a new configuration of personhood, a third (as we have seen) is a new model of playgoing as private and conversional rather than as public and socially reformative, and another is a huge popularity that, in contrast to Tamburlaine, does not seem to have aroused the disdain of the literati.18 Typically, disapprobation of Tamburlaine turned Marlowe's own contempt for the "clownage" against him. In Discoveries, Jonson said that the language of "the true artificer . . . shall not fly from all humanity, with the Tamerlanes and Tamarchams of the late age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers" (Parfitt, 397-98). A fifth benefit that Shakespeare earned by privatizing value consists in the way characters such as Hamlet seem to have resisted topical allegorization by becoming self-referencing. Shakespearean depth-characterization thus helped shelter the theater from what Jonson called "invading interpreters." It is worth pointing out that, with the exception of Richard 17, Shakespeare's plays never seem to have attracted the censure of the authorities. The fact that his plays are bare of the kind of disclaimers that hedge in Jonson's suggests how Shakespeare built protection into his plays through characterization, and also how Jonson's plays resisted Shakespeare's innovation, deploying suggestive

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disclaimers in order both to protect themselves against interpretive invasion and to maintain their engagement with the political field. Pre- and early Elizabethan tragedy had been largely a "mirror for magistrates," a politically engaged displaying of proper and improper relations between rulers and subjects.19 The allegorical production of political meaning in the theater requires a more or less clearly articulated relationship between the dramatic action and its political "target," and that in turn requires that the plot be more prominent than the characters. In part Hamlet depoliticized tragedy by reversing the Aristotelian ranking of plot over character. Hamlet is more important than the plot because the action lives through his understanding of it. This reversal underlies long-standing interpretive controversies about Hamlet and his actions. Some critics argue that Hamlet's vengeance, when it finally arrives, is what Michael Goldman calls a complete or meaningful action.20 Other critics believe that Hamlet loses what is most valuable in him by embracing the task of vengeance.21 But few critics think that the issue is the working out of the plot; on the contrary, the issue is whether the action of the plot fulfills or annuls Hamlet.22 As Goldman suggests, that is partly because actions are not actions in Hamlet unless they are recognized as intelligibly meaningful. By emphasizing what might be called the thought content of an act, Shakespeare shifts attention decisively from plot to character. As a consequence of this shift, Hamlet was able to recast tragedy as the depoliticized scene of the private self's struggle to find adequate expression within the universe of discourse and action. Not only did this scene of struggle encourage identification with the hero by virtue of who, as opposed to what, he is, and not only did it open the experience of tragedy equally to all members of the audience at the level of their constitution as private, knowing subjects rather than as political subjects of differing ranks, but it also reconfigured playgoing itself as private rather than as public. An idealized epitome of privatized playgoing is Cleomenes' experience of Delphi: . . . the burst And the ear-deaf'ning voice of the oracle,

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Kin to Jove's thunder, so surpris'd my sense, That I was nothing. (The Winter's Tale, 3.1.8-11) The spectacular, Jove-like production of oracular truth nullifies the spectator, or, more precisely, startles the spectator into an awareness of self as "no thing." The hermeneutics of identification promoted by Shakespearean inward characterization invited playgoers to locate their own foundational value in private subjectivity. As I have suggested, the production of a hermeneutics of identification through inward characterization tended to disable politicizing interpretive practices because the very terms of the political field were made to seem unreal and without value. *

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Jonson rewrote Shakespearean inwardness as secrecy in an attempt to reinscribe drama in the political field. Jonson suggests that personhood is not constituted by its knowing itself and the world as unreal, but that persons are stable, unified beings who are able either to withhold themselves from the knowledge of others or to reveal themselves fully. To have a self in Jonson is to have what Thomas Greene calls the "quality of fixed stability," which is recognizable against the background of protean change.23 Furthermore, as Jonson saw it, one of the necessary conditions of value is that it must be capable of being visible and knowable. This is not to suggest that Sejanus contains uplifting examples of the public self or of exchanges between selves that show the universality of "the good." To the contrary, the play enhances the value of public, political selfhood by recording its tragic ineffectuality within the world of the play. As Greene suggests, the upright characters in the play are powerless: Arruntius does nothing but rail and Lepidus stays out of politics as far as he is able.24 Jonson's tragic representation of the incapacity of public selves and public values registers the political powerlessness of the theater, but the play also offers itself as a morally good and effectual voice of protest within the Jacobean political arena. Jonson's repoliticization of theater would have been enhanced

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for certain members of the audience (and for some readers) because of his use of Tacitean history. J. H. M. Salmon suggests that Jonson's particular use of Roman history had to do with his relations with the Sidney-Essex circle, a group for which Tacitean history served to express factionalist opposition to the Crown. According to Salmon, the opening sequence of Sejanus resembles the critical depictions of the court in the Tacitean-Senecan works of William Cornwallis and others. Moreover, Salmon suggests that Jonson's character, Cremutius Cordus, is reminiscent of a contemporary group of "Tacitean 'politic historians.' "25 Annabel Patterson goes further in seeking to place Jonson's play in the same interpretive field as John Hayward's The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie ZZII, a historical work dedicated to the Earl of Essex that, as we have seen in Chapter i, got its author imprisoned for supporting the Essex rebellion.26 But even though Jonson succeeded so far as to be summoned by the Privy Council to answer charges "both of popery and treason" (Parfitt, 469), commercial-theater plays, including Sejanus^ remained in a field separate from the operations of power. In fact, we do not know what the Council found objectionable about the play, and all we know about the incident derives from Drummond's report of Jonson's conversation.27 Tacitean history changed its political nature when it crossed the border separating factionalist politics from commercial theatrics. Like A Game at Chess's connections with Thomas Scot's oppositional pamphlets and like the parallel subject matter of Hayward's Henrie Till and Shakespeare's Richard 77, Jonson's use of Tacitean history was transvalued by being imported into the sphere of the commercial theater: some of Middleton, Shakespeare, and Jonson's plays had discernible ties with inflammatory material and issues, but none of these plays incurred the kind of censure reserved for writers outside the theater. Jonson's attempt to repoliticize theater was, moreover, hampered by both the recreational status of the stage and the currency of the Shakespearean view of drama as aesthetically or spiritually powerful. Such a drama was addressed to individuals and to universal concerns, but had little to say about local, political issues. This limitation on Jonson's claim for the socially reformative value of theater was not

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diminished by the fact that many of Jonson's contemporaries, including many members of the aristocracy, seem to have thought of the commercial theater as a pastime; and also by the fact that Jonson himself was unable to evade completely the Shakespearean construction of tragedy in terms of the figure of the individual possessed of something "within" of great value that is misprized by others. Jonson's Stoic ideal of solitary individualism slid easily into the Shakespearean condition of radical interiority. Lepidus is an example of the Stoic ideal. He declares his selfsufficiency and noninvolvement with the world. When Arruntius asks how he avoids government persecution, he declares that he uses no "Arts"— None, but the plain and passive fortitude To suffer, and be silent; never stretch These arms against the torrent; live at home, With my own thoughts, and innocence about me, Not tempting the wolves' jaws: these are my arts. (4.293-98) Jonson imagined the writing of Sejanus also as a solitary business, but in this case the sense of self-sufficiency in opposition to the world sits uneasily with the desire to make a mark on the world. Looking ahead to the composition of his tragedy, he wrote, "Leave me. There's something come into my thought, / That must, and shall be sung, high, and aloof, / Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull ass's hoof" ("Apologetical Dialogue," Poetaster, HSS, 4: 324). The lines are repeated in "An Ode. To Himself" and they carry the same contradiction, for singing requires auditors, and the problem remains for the inward self, which seeks some way of making its truth known in the world. That Jonson felt somewhat like Hamlet when he began writing Sejanus could not have facilitated the attempt to repoliticize tragedy. We can perhaps better understand Jonson's rewriting of Shakespeare by comparing the opening passages of Sejanus and Hamlet.

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Hamlet*s opening lines suggest that identity, as an effect of signifying practices, cannot be identical with selfhood: Bar. Who's there? Fran. Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself. Bar. Long live the King! Fran. Barnardo.

Bar.

He. (1.1.1-5)

The Shakespearean private self cannot "stand and unfold itself"; it can only attempt to represent itself to another in formulaic terms. The self even maintains a certain distance from its name: "Barnardo. / He." Barnardo's "He" insinuates his private subjectivity by suggesting how he knows his own public identity as "other."28 Hamlefs theater is, to begin with, a dark scene where the person can neither see nor be seen, yet where his personhood depends upon being seen as it is not, depends, that is, upon the necessarily deficient ways in which others see all representations of "that within." In contrast, Sejanus's theater is the scene of visibility and knowability. Sabinus and Silius know each other on sight: Sab. Hail, Caius Silius! Sil. Titus Sabinus, hail! You'are rarely met in court! Sab. Therefore, well met. Sil. 'Tis true: indeed, this place is not our sphere. Sab. No, Silius, we are no good engineers; We want the fine arts, and their thriving use Should make us graced, or favoured of the times. We have no shift of faces, no cleft tongues (I-I-7)

Jonson's dialogue closes the gap between private subjectivity and public identity so that Sabinus and Silius are precisely what they are seen to be. Further, the "simplicity" of Jonsonian outward char-

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acterization is linked with the characters' direct and knowable relationship with the political order. Whereas Shakespeare's private subject's relations with politics are always oblique by virtue of the fact that the person is constituted as other than his public identity, Jonson's public subjects are able (because they do not "see through" their own identities) to "stand and unfold themselves" in determinate relations with the state. In contrast to Hamlet's sentries' heartsickness in the face of events that resist interpretation and in which they are implicated, Sabinus and Silius define themselves as autonomous and knowable to each other by virtue of their opposition to the corrupt and theatrical court: "We want the fine arts, and their thriving use / Should make us graced, or favoured of the times. /We have no shift effaces, no cleft tongues." *

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The actual powerlessness of the theater complicated Jonson's repoliticization of drama. When he dissuades Tiberius from arresting the outspoken Arruntius, Sejanus suggests the usefulness of an oppositional discourse that serves the interests of what it opposes and whose discursive "power" is emptied out into its countenancing of real power—discursive power harnessed and directed as horse by rider: By any means, preserve him. His frank tongue Being lent the reins, will take away the thought Of malice in your course against the rest. We must keep him to stalk with. (3.498-501) Nevertheless, even under this threat of "containment" by the very political field in which it desired to signify, Sejanns worked to restore the continuity between the private and public that Hamlet had put in question. The two categories and the terms "private" and "public" themselves are yoked throughout the play. "Close breasts" can be "ripped up to light" (1.24-25), and secret thoughts ("The

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knotted bed") can be found out by "cleaving" the head and hurling the "panting brain about the air, / In mites as small as atomi" (1.25358). Secrets, being materially "put into" one person by another (1.347-48), can be got out again by someone else. The private is not a separate space, but only an antechamber to the public space where all can be known. Arruntius comments on the stage-play of imperial virtue when Sejanus is showily recommending Tiberius for the honor that Tiberius has made a show of refusing: 'Tis your most courtly, known confederacy, To have your private parasite [Sejanus] redeem What he [Tiberius], in public subtlety, will lose To making him a name. (1.385-88) Macro, entering into his public career, declares, "what before / Was public, now must be thy private" (4.81-82); Sabinus keeps the Germanicans "company / In private, and in public" (4.106-7); the corrupted senators are said to "force their private prey from public spoil" (4.240). By virtue of this continuity of private and public, even so consummate an actor as Tiberius, whose heart, it is said, "Lies a thought farther than another man's" (3.98), can, finally, be seen as he is. Even crocodile tears, whose epistemological implications would be rewritten to dizzying effect in. Antony and Cleopatra, are here easy to distinguish from real tears: "[Afer] steeps his words, / When he would kill, in artificial tears—/ The crocodile of Tiber" (2.422-24). In order to enhance the apparent political force of his tragedy, Jonson developed an implicit critique of Shakespearean theater. The moral authority and truth value of Arruntius and Lepidus's "seeing through" the theater of Tiberian power continues to constitute the central value of Sejanus, but their perspicacity is powerless in the face of theatricalized imperial power. In this view, the antitheatricality of Jonson's play targets Shakespeare: the Roman Senate, whose members constitute an ignorant, self-interested, and tractable audience for the show trials of Silius, Cordus, and Sejanus himself, resembles the Shakespearean theater against which Jonson was formulating his own legitimacy. However, it also parallels the theater (the Globe) in

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which Sejanus itself was staged. Furthermore, if Tiberius is a figure of the playwright Jonson (as Gordon Sweeney has argued),29 he can also be seen as a figure of Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare, Tiberius emphasizes the incommensurability of private and public (1.479502); Tiberius, more like Shakespeare than like Jonson, scripts the action and then retreats into a private space. The key to Tiberius's dominance in absentia is the indeterminacy of his intended meaning. By linking Shakespearean tragedy and Tiberian tyranny, Jonson was able to clear some discursive space for his revisionist representation of tragedy. Jonson, however, did not seek merely to rewrite Shakespearean tragedy in Sejanus-, he also wanted Shakespeare's tragedies themselves to be seen as interventionist rather than as quietistic, political rather than private. By linking, at a figurative level, the infinitely flexible and devious power of Caesar with the production of meaning in Shakespearean tragedy, linking Caesar and Shakespeare in terms of their manipulations of their audiences through absence and indeterminacy, Jonson represented Shakespeare's depoliticized tragedy as the secret agent of the state power that put genuine socially reformative drama in jeopardy. In addition to rewriting Shakespeare as the secret agent of state power, however, Jonson also seems to have wanted to align Shakespeare's privatized tragedies, Julius Caesar in particular, alongside Sejanus in terms of their putative opposition to courtly corruption. He wanted to arouse the politicizing interpretive practices that Shakespeare seems to have succeeded in disabling. To this end, Jonson stages the show trial of the historian Cordus: a writing fellow they [the Germanicans] have got To gather notes of the precedent times, And make them into annals—a most tart And bitter spirit, I hear, who, under colour Of praising those, doth tax the present state. (2.304-8) The charge against Cordus is that his history of the assassination of Julius Caesar, with its praise of Brutus and Cassius, was written

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with the covert purpose of undermining the state. In the trial, Cordus is said to have affirmed that "'Cassius was the last of the Romans' " (3.392; the accuser quotes from Cordus's published writings), and by this to have sown "sedition in the state" (3.381): yea, Caesar's self Brought in disvalue; and he aimed at most By oblique glance of his licentious pen. Caesar, if Cassius were the last of Romans, Thou hast no name. (3.402-6) Cordus's somewhat disingenuous defense of both free speech and the integrity of his intentions made in response to this accusation is translated from Tacitus, but the "seditious" affirmation that is central to the accusation is quoted from Julius Caesar: "The last of all the Romans, fare thee well! / It is impossible that ever Rome / Should breed thy fellow" (5.3.99-101).30 At this moment in Sejanus, Jonsonian tragedy can be seen to be "hailing" Shakespearean tragedy just as Sabinus hails Silius at the play's beginning, the two recognizing each other on sight and sharing the fact of their autonomy as public subjects by virtue of their articulate opposition to the corrupt political order whose theatricality each of them is able to see through. *

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That Sejanus failed at the Globe in 1603, got Jonson in trouble with the Privy Council, and was a succes d'estime for a gentrified readership suggests the complex effects of Sejanus's legitimating selfrepresentation. The play's adventure in the political arena suggests also the volatility, and intelligent flexibility, of Jonson's negotiations for legitimation, especially as compared with the apparently quietist effectiveness of Shakespeare's depictions of the stage as personally conversional rather than as socially reformative. Whatever their differences, however, Shakespeare and Jonson

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were aligned in that they sought some stable position that would serve to legitimate their tragedies; and they were aligned also in that they both found that foundational value in some version of individual autonomy. One way or another, the tragic subject is able to bring within the horizon of its authoritative and independent consciousness everything that exists: in Jonson, by virtue of a clear seeing of the world from a free and accurate viewpoint; in Shakespeare, by virtue of the emptying out of the world into autonomous consciousness itself. Women Beware Women differs from both Shakespearean and Jonsonian tragedy on the strength of its rejection of the foundational value of autonomous individuality. Women locates its own value in parodic restatements of both private and public constructions of the subject. Middleton learned from Marlowe the techniques of ironic disruption. The Florence of Women is less numinous than the Asia of Tamburlaine, so Middleton's disruptions do not focus on relations between human action and divine ordination. Nevertheless there is a resemblance between the two plays: Tamburlaine is the guardian of persecuted Christians as well as a murderous tyrant; Leantio's mother is a convincing advocate of old-fashioned honesty and simplicity and also a petty thief of aristocratic delicacies (3.2.184-87). Anthony Dawson has argued that Women cannot choose between a moralist and a sociological frame of reference; with regard to Bianca, he suggests that the text is divided between a sympathetic, subjective presentation of her tragedy and a moralistic, even emblematic, condemnation of her sinfulness.31 The text's dividedness represents Middleton's deliberate intervention in the long-standing contest around the figure of the tragic subject. As in the second Tamburlaine play, meaning in Women is unstable because we do not know what kind of interpretive framework to apply to events or characters. The actual textual contact between Women and Shakespearean and Jonsonian drama is more attenuated than is the case between Hamlet and Sejanus?2 The only points of contact are Middleton's satirical rewriting (in the marriage masque in 5.2) of Jonson's 1606 "Masque of Hymen,"33 and the echo of Juliet's death-kiss in Bianca's suicide. Nevertheless, the contest among Shakespeare, Jonson, and

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Marlowe around the figure of the tragic subject is the appropriate interpretive context for understanding Middleton's design. Middleton's elaboration of Marlowe keeps meaning moving between three framework positions. Middleton's characters are either subjected to social forces beyond their understanding, or they understand the world and operate within its rules and values, or they signify in opposition to the system of rules and values that they eclipse by virtue of their tragic stature. The first position is usually identified with Middleton's Calvinist or social deterministic critique of the idea of freedom.34 The second is Jonsonian since it is associated with characters like Sabinus and Silius who know the world as it is, clearly and completely in the light of moral truth. The third position is closest to Shakespearean tragic subjectivity. In the play, these framework positions operate like shifting tectonic plates. Of course, not every character or scene is subject to the full range of interpretive stresses. The first position is dominant and the other two are attached to specific characters. Bianca is most prominently the character who seems transcendent over social and moral determinations because Middleton's emphasis on her psychological complexity tends to promote audience identification rather than judgment.35 Like Hamlet, she can be explained but not understood by reference to a moral framework. The Cardinal most resembles Jonson's version of the public self. His long speeches in 4.1 and 4.3 cut through the other characters' confusions and rationalizations, providing us, if not them, with a coherent moral and theological understanding of events. Dawson points out that in one recent production of the play, "there was a ripple of audible relief in the audience when the Cardinal made his great fourth act denunciation."36 No doubt but that Middleton's primary style of characterization is ironic and analytical. The organization of events and the composition of speeches persistently critiques the characters' claims to authority and autonomy and reveals their self-awareness and agency as ideological effects. But in view of the at least provisional credibility of characters as differently conceived as Bianca and the Cardinal, it is apparent that Middleton does not merely explode previous versions of tragic subjectivity, but rather keeps private and public versions of

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the self in circulation. Moreover, Middletonian irony does not flatten out the characters: Leantio has no mastery over the processes of his own evaluative reasoning, but he is not a stereotypical character either, largely because his sensibility combines elements drawn complexly from Protestant marriage manuals, city comedy, romantic poetry, and misogynist literature, and because his world is naturalistically detailed. Overall, the combination of different kinds of characterization makes Women a different kind of tragedy altogether, a critical register of the thirty-year-old tradition of competing tragic forms. The materialist view of individual autonomy as a form of ideological subjection underlies, as I have suggested, the Duke's "conversion" from adultery on one side to murder and marriage on the other. Isabella's easy shift from innocent virgin to worldly adulteress similarly undoes any impression of her inward coherence or selfknowledge. The Duke and Isabella, among other characters, are unable to negotiate the total system in which moral terminology makes sense. They can use the words correcdy in sentences, but they cannot reconcile them to other moral terms or to real-life situations. This linguistic hollowing out of moral autonomy puts in question both Jonsonian and Shakespearean forms of selfhood where both public and private selves owe their privileged position to their ability to articulate their relationship with the world in some kind of evaluative language. What would be the foundational value of Hamlet's selfhood if he could not trope Gertrude's casual use of the word "seems"? What would be the worth of Sabinus if he did not know that the words "graced" and "favoured" were to be ironically inflected in his statement, "We want the fine arts . . . Should make us graced, or favoured of the times"? In contrast, Middleton's characters suffer a kind of moral aphasia. Consider Isabella's speech after she discovers that her aunt Livia has lied to her and that Hippolito, her adulterous lover, is indeed her uncle: [Aside] Was ever maid so cruelly beguiled To the confusion of life, soul, and honour, All of one woman's murd'ring! I'd fain bring

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Chapter 5 Her name no nearer to my blood than woman, And 'tis too much of that. Oh shame and horror! In that small distance from yon man to me Lies sin enough to make a whole world perish. [To Hippolito] cTis time we parted, sir, and left the sight Of one another; nothing can be worse To hurt repentance; for our very eyes Are far more poisonous to religion Than basilisks to them. If any goodness Rest in you, hope of comforts, fear of judgments, My request is I ne'er may see you more; My request is I ne'er may see you more;

. . . [Aside} But for her That durst do dally with a sin so dangerous, And lay a snare so spitefully for my youth, If the least means but favour my revenge, That I may practise the like cruel cunning Upon her life, as she has on mine honour, I'll act it without pity. (4.2.129-50) Isabella's speech, like other speeches by her fellow characters, is marked by the speaker's blithe uncomprehension of her own meaning. Isabella deploys a rich and varied moral vocabulary, comprising both Christian terms and terms relating to ethical or civil values. She understands the goodness of maidenhood and the cruelty of the deceit that precipitated her loss of spiritual integrity and social standing. That she does not discriminate here between Christian and worldly "goods" is not so important as the fact that she ignores her own decision to commit adultery. No question but that her "shame and horror" at "sin enough to make a whole world perish" are deeply felt, even though, again, she seems unaware of her sin of adultery, and even though her consciousness of the need for repentance and her "fear of judgments" seem to lead directly to her decision to "practise" on the life of Livia, although to be fair, she recognizes that murder and pity are different kinds of things.

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Isabella is unlike characters such as Hamlet or Arruntius because her articulation of her own value in relationship with the world is incompetent. She and her fellow characters put in question the credibility of their predecessors by suggesting how a private tragic subject such as Hamlet, for all his apparently articulate grasp of the conventionality of the moral system, nevertheless repeatedly insists that the most worthy act for him is the murder of his uncle in retaliation for the murder of his father, or how the scrupulous criticism of tyranny promulgated by a public subject like Arruntius is seized upon and put to use by the illicit power it opposes. Women undermines the authority of the tragic subject in Shakespeare and Jonson by insisting on the supremacy of the language of the moral system—however contradictory that language is—over the individual subject's empty boast of self-mastery. Middleton's undoing of Shakespearean and Jonsonian tragic subjectivities does not come completely to rest in this materialist critique of private and public autonomy. As I suggested, the Cardinal and Bianca keep Jonsonian and Shakespearean forms of subjectivity in circulation in the world of the play. It is at least conditionally true that the Cardinal provides a stable interpretive framework.37 He interrupts the wedding procession of the Duke and Bianca on the grounds that "religious honours" cannot "sanctify hot lust" (4.3.1,18); the authority of his analysis is underwritten by the steadiness of his language, and his condemnation of their sin is justified in spite of the Duke and Bianca's counterarguments. He articulates the previously unseen contradiction in the Duke's "moral" postponement of marriage to Bianca, and normalizes and organizes moral language, restoring clear demarcations between ironic and unironic usages (note especially how the ironically inflected "fruits of your repentance" anchors his assessment of his brother's action): Cease, cease; religious honours done to sin Disparage virtue's reverence, and will pull Heaven's thunder upon Florence—holy ceremonies Were made for sacred uses, not for sinful. Are these the fruits of your repentance, brother?

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Inasmuch as his clarity holds sway, Women seems an example of a Jonsonian socially reformative tragedy, a play engaged in the political arena in opposition to both courtly corruption and the corrosive effects of courtliness on the whole social order.38 However, the authority of the Cardinal's interpretive framework is dependent upon his credibility, and that is put in question. The Cardinal is right about his brother's sinfulness because the Duke has achieved the superficial respectability of Christian matrimony only by having the bride's husband murdered. But since the Cardinal does not know that, the Duke's ad hominem argument has force in spite of the Duke's own hypocrisy: Here y' are bitter Without cause, brother. What I vowed, I keep, As safe as you your conscience, and this needs not— I taste more wrath in ct, than I do religion, And envy more than goodness. (4.3-24-28) In addition, the Cardinal soon makes his peace with the sinners, kissing and making up with Bianca in a disturbing display of diplomatic temporizing. "Beware a brother's envy; he's next heir too" (5.2.20), Bianca informs us in an aside before going on to share with us her plan to have him poisoned. Bianca and the Duke are sinful, but Middleton contrives the action so as to leave open the possibility of the Cardinal being a more successful sinner than they. The technique reproduces in a secular setting the interpretive trap that Marlowe sets for the audience when the Islamic Orcanes prays to a Christian god and is apparently rewarded with victory over a Christian army, or when Tamburlaine sickens and dies after having burned the Koran. Middleton's play engages and disables interpretation by making and

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undoing tragic forms of selfhood and constructing and deconstructing interpretive frameworks. If the Cardinal is a Jonsonian public subject, Bianca comes closest to Shakespearean inward subjectivity. She is consistently interesting from a psychological viewpoint, especially in the way she displaces her rage away from the Duke, who deserves her anger, and redirects it toward the other characters. She performs a Juliet-like suicide by kissing the lips of her poisoned husband, who is accidentally dead by her hand: Give me thy last breath, thou infected bosom, And wrap two spirits in one poisoned vapour [Kisses the Duke*s body} Thus, thus, reward thy murderer, and turn death Into a parting kiss. My soul stands ready at my lips, E'en vexed to stay one minute after thee. (5.2.193-98) While, like almost all the other characters, she had intended to murder her enemy, she becomes the one who seeks her own death (and a love-death at that) in contrast to all the other characters who are paid for their own treachery. Her tragic stature allows her to transcend the frame of the Cardinal's normative morality. That is the case in part because she assimilates into the production of her own meaning the moral condemnation that would otherwise define her worth: "But my deformity in spirit's more foul—/ A blemished face best fits a leprous soul" (5.2.204-5). Moreover, as the play draws toward its close in the relative calm after the uproariously deadly wedding masque, her centrality invites the spectators to engage with her at the level of their private and inward selfhood. "What make I here?" Bianca cries, "These are all strangers to me, / Not known but by their malice, now th' art gone; / Nor do I seek their pities" (206-8). Throughout the play Bianca has been the object of the desiring male gaze, but she has also been a thinking subject. In her deathscene she becomes a magnet of erotic and evaluative attention. Attractiveness and fascination at such a pitch can win an identifkatory

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investment from an audience. The effect is like Bianca's first impression of the Duke: "Did not the Duke look up?" she asks her motherin-law, "Methought he saw us." Leantio's mother answers (wrongly as it turns out): "That's ev'ry one's conceit that sees a duke; / If he look steadfastly, he looks straight at them" (1.3.105-7). Looking into Bianca's eyes modulates into looking through her eyes. A closing glance at the opening scene of Women will suggest the intricacy of Middleton's parodic rewriting of Shakespearean and Jonsonian tragedy. Whereas Hamlet and Sejanus each opens with a pair of actors whose "I-thou" relationship suggests a certain view of subjectivity and a certain representational practice, Women opens with a tripartite relationship that mixes together and undermines Shakespearean and Jonsonian models. Leantio directs his mother to gaze at Bianca ("Look on her well, she's mine. Look on her better" [1.1.42]) so that she will approve Leantio's "crime" of marrying Bianca. Bianca occupies a position in relation to Leantio and his mother that inverts the position of the corrupt court in relation to Sabinus and Silius: both pairs of characters confirm their own knowability to each other in terms of their shared knowing of a third thing. But where in Sejanus the focal point of triangulated stability is the knowable court, the same position in Women is occupied by the silent figure of Bianca, whose knowability is put in question by both her lengthy silence and Leantio's concern that she not overhear what he hears as his mother's incitements to wifely rebellion (1.1.71-110). Here Shakespearean hearing (privileged at the beginning of Hamlet) cuts across Jonsonian seeing. Specifically, the fact that Bianca might hear and interpret Leantio's mother's words destabilizes her as the object of Leantio and his mother's gaze. The possibility of Bianca's inwardness (emphasized by the fact that she is able to hear and to reason) puts in jeopardy Leantio's specular construction of himself and his relations with others as public. Women Beware Women was a latecomer to the argument about the value of tragedy but seems nevertheless a serious entry in a field that was increasingly dominated by plays given over to adventitious experimentation with Shakespearean forms. That Middleton revived Marlovian skepticism in a critical rewriting of Jonson and Shake-

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speare suggests the long-lived importance of the tragic subject within the institution of the commercial theater. From Marlowe's "high astounding terms" to Shakespeare's "that within" to Jonson's "tax[ing] of the present state" to Middleton's complex revisionism, the theater made its greatest ideological investment in the value of tragedy. When tragedy—whether the tragedy of state or of the inward individual—began no longer to make sense to its audiences, the theater's multiform project of legitimation must also have begun to founder. *

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Given the dominance of Shakespearean tragedy, Anglo-American culture has tended to exclude the political from the category of the tragic; the core action of tragedy since the Renaissance has remained the momentous struggle between the self and the world that engages audience members as individuals rather than as members of a political community. In our century, Bertolt Brecht has mocked this model of total engagement with the private tragic subject's doomed attempts to find public acknowledgment and fulfillment: In Aristotelian drama the plot leads the hero into situations where he reveals his innermost being. All the incidents shown have the object of driving the hero into spiritual conflicts. . . . The individual whose innermost being is thus driven into the open then of course comes to stand for Man with a capital M. Everyone (including every spectator) is then carried away by the momentum of the events portrayed, so that in a performance of Oedipus one has for all practical purposes an auditorium full of little Oedipuses.39

In his own practice, of course, Brecht could never entirely reform or repoliticize the tragic drama of "innermost being." His tragic protagonists often are most dramatically successful when they are most inward. This conflict in the Brechtian theory and practice of tragedy suggests that while Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton neither originated nor resolved the issues surrounding the value of tragedy, their competition for legitimacy did establish the particular interpretive boundaries of the production and reception of both later and earlier versions of the form.

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I have not yet discussed the element of gender, although it is prominent in the "tragic glass" of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton. That much is clear from the particular disposition of characters and functions in the opening scene of Women Beware Women. In the next chapter, we turn the glass again, this time to reflect on the institutional functions of both the representation of women and the politics of gender and the family in three plays—As You Like It, Epicoene, and More Dissemblers Besides Women.

6

"Gargantua's Mouth": Orality, Voice, and the Gender of Theatrical Power

"[C]RAM 's WITH PRAISE, and make 's / As fat as tame things" (The Winter's Tale, 1.1.91-92). Hermione's desire for her husband's praise suggests one version of the linkages between orality, voice, gender, and theatrical power: Leon. Is he won yet? Her. He'll stay, my lord. Leon. At my request he would not. Hermione, my dearest, thou never spok'st To better purpose. Her. Never? Leon. Never, but once. Her. What? have I twice said well? When was't before? I prithee tell me; cram 's with praise, and make 's As fat as tame things. One good deed dying tongueless Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that. (1.1.86-93) By virtue of her rhetorical powers of persuasion, Hermione wins Polixenes' presence in Sicilia for one more week. In view of her eloquence, it is somewhat puzzling that she implies her inability to speak with authority about her own rhetorical prowess. More puzzling still are the play's maneuvers to suggest that she is indeed not the master

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of her own speech. That is what I mean by "orality": the word suggests the oral dependency of infants on their mothers while they are nursing and learning language. For an infantilized subject such as Hermione suggests she is at this moment, "orality" refers to the lack of an autonomous voice. To begin with, the image by which Hermione solicits praise represents her as force-fed, just as poultry was penned and overnourished until becoming what one farming manual calls "cram-fat."l The figure of the Queen "as fat as tame things" contains three competing views of her: one, her sense of herself as wife, mother, and lady— crammed with her husband's praise and the fruit of his seed; two, Leontes' delusion of his wife as a deceiver crammed with Polixenes' bastard child; and three, the play's view of her as a pharmakos, destined to undergo the deathlike sacrifice that will initiate the movement toward a tragicomic ending. The evocation of Hermione's voicelessness begins with her use of an image whose significance she does not understand. She intends to express her complacence in her husband's love, but the image means more than she knows. While she refers to her condition wittily as that of a prize dog or a favorite child, the idea of the "slaughter" of good deeds reinforces the sense that her life is threatened, the threat implicit in the sentence, "cram 's with praise." "As you cram and feed capons," wrote Conrad Heresbach in The Whole Art of Husbandry ^ "so you may fat, cram or feed hens also and in a shorter space. Also you may cram chickens [i.e., chicks] sooner than either of them both."2 The image puts Hermione's autonomous personhood in question. It conflates her discursive, sexual, and alimentary connections with the world, unites her husband's words, seed, and the sustenance that he is said to provide, and represents her ears, vagina, and mouth as mouth alone.3 By this conflation, the speaking and eating mouth—the site of negotiations between the world and the person—is reduced to a receptacle. Her orality suggests that she is the replete subject of the discursive, sexual, and alimentary systems of patriarchal subjection. Moreover, Hermione's lack of verbal mastery is enacted in the way her words take their place in the contest between Leontes' jealousy and the tragicomic move-

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ment of the play. Her qualities—her social grace, her flirtatiousness, a certain racy style, her bad temper with her son, her family pride— are sacrificed. The competition to define her as either an adulteress or a chaste wife erases all her attributes except her goodness and purity. Hermione's subjection to a nurturing but threatening patriarch is also a projection onto a female figure of the male fear of subjection to a maternal caregiver. According to Nancy Chodorow, maturing boys rather than girls begin to feel threatened, feel their identities under attack, by virtue of their need for a nurturing maternal figure.4 As we will see, this view of the mother's breast as an object to be desired and feared gets a more direct treatment in Jaques's "seven ages of man" speech; but here it is curiously reversed and given back to the play's central nurturing figure herself. And that too is part of Hermione's redemptive function, since she pays the price for men's love/hate relationship with women—that state of violent ambivalence that directs her husband's story.5 This analysis of Hermione's subjection to patriarchy and patriarchy's projection onto her of the male fear of the nurturing maternal figure leaves certain questions unanswered. What is the purpose of depicting the Queen as incapable of autonomous speech when in fact she, like so many of Shakespeare's women characters, is a gifted orator? What is the purpose of keeping secret the two women's management of events behind the blind of Paulina's public function, a role that is both an expression of and a screen for female power? What does the play gain by suggesting that the public world of men is shadowed by an underground economy of meaning directed by the two women:1 Why are the women made to seem desperate, secret, and conspiratorial when in fact they are running the show? I suggest that there is a connection between the women's secret plotting and Shakespeare's project of legitimation. The play represents the women as morally, religiously, and intellectually superior to the men, and yet as having to conspire because they are under the sway of male power. From one angle, Hermione is helpless and voiceless because her husband will not hear her; from another—that of the view we have of her in the theater rather than the view filtered

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through the play world—her self-defense in the trial scene (3.2) is compelling. Overall, Winter's Tale couples a representation of female orality and voicelessness within a male interpretive community with an evocation of female authority operating in an underground dramatic economy. Of course, this opposition is complicated by Paulina's public speaking, but she becomes a public figure only after she gets the King's ear, and she achieves that only by joining with Hermione in a conspiracy that is invisible to both the other characters and the theater audience. Female power has divine warrant but operates in uncanny, secret ways beneath the surface of the world of men. This production of uncanny female power begins to look even more complicated when we consider that the boys who played women in Shakespeare's playhouse must have been highly articulate performers. As we saw in Chapter 2, the early seventeenth-century playgoer Henry Jackson was greatly affected by the quality of Desdemona's speaking. That the boy actors were trained to speak movingly and that Shakespeare wrote them beautiful, powerful lines means that his project of institutional legitimation built on the silent, transcendent value of the feminine principle was at odds with some of the traditions and resources of the theater. It is nevertheless the case that Shakespeare gives female identity a particular twist toward the uncanny and unspoken. Indeed, a woman such as Desdemona is not literally silent; rather, the fact that she is misrecognized by her husband registers her great worth relative to the unhearing world of masculine power. This kind of representation of female identity, language, and power is common in Shakespeare and has given rise to a view of him as a protofeminist. In an article on Antony and Cleopatra, Jyotsna Singh has argued that Shakespeare redescribed the theater, which was coded feminine by antitheatricalist writers, by revising the value of femininity: . . . when the antitheatricalists attack actors for effeminizing themselves and their audiences, they seem to concede immense theatrical power to unrestrained femininity, and to counter that, exhort women to conform to static models of virtue. Shakespeare radically revises these negative associations be-

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tween women and actors. By conflating femininity and theatricality in such positive and powerful terms in the figure of Cleopatra, the playwright is identifying femininity as one of power's crucial modes.6

I agree with Singh's focus on the general linkages between femininity and theatricality and with the idea that the impetus for Shakespeare's innovations in female characterization came partly in response to antitheatricalism, but I would also note that there are problems with the idea of Shakespeare's positive "feminization" of the theater. While it is true that the antitheatricalist argument is based in part on an equation of women and actors—according to Jean Howard—"interchangeably, in the same rhetoric of contamination and adulteration," the main thrust of antitheatricalism is nevertheless framed in terms of idleness and wantonness, as opposed to good works and chaste life, rather than in terms of masculine and feminine polarities.7 Phillip Stubbes's view is typical: [Plays] being used . . . to the prophanation of the Lord his sabbath, to the alluring and inveigling of the people from the blessed word of God preached to theaters and unclean assemblies, to idleness, unrhriftiness, whoredom, wantonness, drunkenness, and what not? and which is more, when they are used to this end to maintain a great sort of idle persons doing nothing but playing and loitering, having their livings of the sweat of other men's brows . . . then are they . . . at no hand sufferable.8

In this framework, "masculine" and "feminine" serve as dynamically interrelated signifiers rather than as the anchors of the antitheatricalist argument. Playgoing is a form of sloth that makes both men and women wanton and vicious. By virtue of this sliding into illicit pleasure, men lose their manly virtue, soften and become effeminate; but in a sense so do women. Indeed, so the argument goes, women are particularly vulnerable because they are more impressionable; and because they are victims of playgoing, they are not categorized alongside the idle, wanton actors. In this context, the word "effeminate" signifies primarily a sinful softening of manly moral resolve, and a concomitant hardening into bestial lustfolness, rather than a sexual transformation.9 Stephen Gosson's use of the word is representative: "Plutarch complaineth that ignorant men, not know-

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ing the majesty of ancient music, abuse both the ears of the people and the art itself with bringing sweet consorts into theaters, which rather effeminate the mind, as pricks unto vice, than procure amendment of manners, as spurs to virtue."10 Similarly, women who dress in masculine attire do not become masculinized, as we understand the word, but rather become more like what they already are. In a section in Anatomic of Abuses—a section not concerned with the stage—Stubbes invokes the Deuteronomic prohibition against crossdressing and condemns women who put on men's clothing. But his charge against them is not that they become like men; to the contrary, he accuses them of "adulterating] the verity of their own kind," becoming "monsters of both kinds—half women, half men," and by these means "paint[ing] out to the whole world the venerous inclination of their corrupt conversation" (F5V-F6). Another problem with the argument for Shakespeare's positive feminization of the stage is that so much of his work reproduces patriarchal views of women. As Kathleen McLuskie has argued, the work of patriarchy is going on throughout the canon at a structural level.11 Antifeminism is more explicit in early plays such as The Comedy of Errors (c. 1592), The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1594), and i Henry VI (1592) with its jingoistic and misogynist portrayal of Joan of Arc. Even ostensibly protofeminist plays such as The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596), As Ton Like It (c. 1599), Measure for Measure (1604), and The Winter's Tale (c. 1610) can be seen as effectively antifeminist because their gifted and morally uplifting female heroes move within a narrow field of possibilities and because women's articulate energy serves finally to renew the social order that holds them in place as daughters, wives, mothers—as figures that signify exclusively in relationship to men. The question of Shakespeare's position on the Renaissance debate about women seems unanswerable. The undecidability of the question suggests that Shakespeare did not mean to say anything in general one way or another about either women or the principle of the feminine. He did not intend to develop any kind of case for or against the equality of the sexes; rather, the complexity of his representations of women suggests that the Renaissance discourse of gen-

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der difference supplied a particular language in which he was able to redescribe the theater. This is not to say that Shakespeare was not genuinely interested in gender issues, or that his depictions of men and women did not have sociopolitical consequences, but it is to suggest that such depictions primarily served institutional interests rather than the interests of the culture. Shifting the angle of interpretation in this way helps explain why Shakespeare's "gender politics" seem so unstable. Writing from within a culture that valued the male above the female, and within an institution that was often associated with effeminacy, he—and Middleton, Jonson, and others—elaborated the terms clustered around male and female principles in order to legitimate the activity of playwriting. The dramatists set out to redescribe the stage in the language of gender rather than to rewrite the gender system of early modern England. Since promoting the female as superior to the male is always a vexed undertaking in patriarchal cultures, since the primary purpose was self-legitimation rather than social justice, and since gender difference was only one descriptive language among others, it should not be surprising that Shakespeare and his fellows highlight questions about gender in some plays and not in others or that they reverse positions from one play to another or even within a single play. Certainly, there are distinct variations in the ways the playwrights deploy gender difference. Many of Shakespeare's women characters, especially in plays after and including The Merchant of Venice, are avatars of transcendence. Characters such as Portia, Rosalind, Viola, Helena, Isabella, Desdemona, Cordelia, Cleopatra (in complicated fashion), and a quintet of women in the final plays— Marina, Imogen, Perdita, Hermione, and Miranda—are lively embodiments of a higher order, and they function as agents of redemption for their male counterparts. It might be argued that these characters mystify women's real-life subordination to men by making women seem spiritually and emotionally effectual while leaving them politically powerless. That is the case for some of them, but Portia, Rosalind, Helena, Isabella, Cordelia, and Cleopatra operate in the world and bring about practical results as well as the spiritual better-

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ment of others, although it is true that they mostly do so either in male disguise or as representatives of powerful men. Jonson's women characters are impressive in another register. Some, such as the Ladies Collegiate, Madam Would-be, and Ursula are figures of appetitive sin. With Lady Haughty and her fellows, Jonson follows the kind of technique Shakespeare used with "La Pucelle"; a woman whose transgression might be deemed ennobling in a Faustian fashion is revealed to be merely a creature of fleshly desires. These women are monsters of sexual domination whom the plays undertake to discipline. While these characters and the attendant techniques of deflation belong to a misogynist tradition, other characters, such as Livia (in Sejanus\ Dol Common, and Dame Purecraft, are equal with Jonson's men, at least in crime and hypocrisy. Jonson differs from Shakespeare most strikingly in that his women characters do not effectually embody the core values of the plays in which they appear. Whereas Desdemona and Cordelia are carriers of what their respective plays view as most worthy, Jonson's virtuous women, such as Agrippina (in Sejanus}^ Celia, and Grace Wellborn, are tepid figures unable to embody convincingly the values they espouse. Middleton's women characters are more various in type than either Shakespeare's or Jonson's. Earlier plays like The Phoenix (1603?) and Tour Five Gallants (1604:*) have somewhat stereotypical female figures of either vice or virtue. A more particularized style of characterization begins, roughly speaking, with Moll Frith in The Koarin0 Girl (1611; with Dekker). Thereafter, Middleton creates numerous powerful women characters—the virtuous Duchess in More Dissemblers Besides Women (1619?), or sinners such as Livia and Bianca in Women Beware Women (1621?) or Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling (1622). These figures, whether good or bad, are focal points of audience engagement. Middleton's female characters differ from Jonson's because of their centrality and stature; they differ from Shakespeare's because they are not usually avatars of transcendence. More Dissemblers' Duchess is a paragon of virtue, but because she is psychologically realistic, she is not transformed into a Cordelia-like embodiment of grace. Beatrice-Joanna and Bianca are vicious, but are never transformed into monsters as are Goneril and Regan. In the

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face of the shift from figures like the "gossips" in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) to a character like the Duchess, Linda Woodbridge has suggested that Middleton was guided by market conditions rather than by moral or political convictions: "Middleton had earlier specialized in vicious satire on women. Now, something had dawned on him. If he were alive today, Middleton would be selling a lot of Tide."12 If we put aside Woodbridge's satirical tone, we can appreciate her illuminating view of the relationship between the culturally framed business of playwriting and the range of dramatic representations of women. No doubt there were moral, philosophical, and personal reasons, in addition to institutional motives, for the particular direction each playwright took in representing women; however, institutional conditions offer the greatest explanatory power. Broadly considered, the three writers line up on opposite sides of a division between privatizing and politicizing ways of representing women—Shakespeare valorizing women for their inward grace rather than for their capacity for public action, Jonson and Middleton locating women along with men in a public field. But while men and women are the same kind of creatures for both Jonson and Middleton, women themselves are represented in opposite ways by the two playwrights. Jonson demonstrates the need to subordinate women to men; Middleton, especially in his later plays, suggests that women, being as intelligent and capable as men, deserve the same right of self-determination and merit the same kinds of reward and punishment. The point is that while Middleton and Jonson take up opposite sides on the issue of gender, they both use the language of gender in order to contest Shakespeare's depoliticization of the drama. Having been excluded from the arena of political power, Jonson and Middleton suggest the capacity of the theater to intervene in the politics of gender and family. In what follows, I discuss briefly both the Renaissance language of gender difference and the particular form of Shakespeare's feminization of theatrical power. Then I consider the institutional function of representations of female identity and voice in As You Like It, Epieoene, or The Silent Woman, and Middleton's More Dissemblers Be-

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sides Women. I take Shakespeare as most important and read Jonson and Middleton in relation to his gendered redescription of theater. I suggest that one of Shakespeare's most influential innovations was to valorize the drama by reversing the usual ranking of the male and female principles; Shakespeare rewrote playwriting by linking theater with "femininity as one of power's crucial modes" (Singh, 117). My figure for Shakespeare's feminization of theatrical power is "Gargantua's mouth." The phrase appears in As You Like It, where, in response to Rosalind's flurry of questions and her demand to be answered "in one word," Celia says, "You must borrow me Gargantua's mouth first; 'tis a word too great for any mouth of this age's size. To say ay and no to these particulars is more than to answer in a catechism" (3.2.225-28). The Rabelaisian giant possesses supernatural powers of expression. In Rabelais, Gargantua is able to converse comfortably even with six pilgrims, and a tun of salad, in his mouth.13 In Shakespeare's version, the giant is imagined as able to speak, even though the terms of Rosalind's interrogation cram his mouth with contradiction. Gargantua's mouth may stand as a symbol of the freedom of expression which Rosalind wins in spite of the fact that her mouth is filled with the words of others, and beyond that as a symbol of the "impossible" power of a theater whose characters and plots were nothing but copies of real things.

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What was the nature of the early modern language of gender difference? Thomas Laqueur has demonstrated the currency in the Renaissance of a one-sex system in which the female was believed to be an imperfect version of the male. According to Laqueur, Renaissance medical theory held that men's and women's reproductive systems were homologous, the only difference being that women's were inside their bodies whereas men's were outside. This difference was owing to the coolness of female relative to male anatomy; in terms of humoral physiology, female coolness was seen to indicate woman's inferiority to the more perfect "hot and dry" man.14 The global applicability of the idea that—to quote Laqueur—"men and women were arrayed according to their degree of metaphysical perfection,

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their vital heat, along an axis whose telos was male" has been challenged by Patricia Parker, who writes that a[t]he model of the female as an imperfect or incomplete version of the male was itself questioned well before the early seventeenth-century rejection by most medical authorities of the homology of male and female, or the model of female 'defect' or 'lack' linked to the argument from heat."15 In addition to the complexity in the medical literature itself, there existed a long-standing tradition of framing gender difference as absolute opposition rather than as graduated continuity. At least as far back as Aristotle, people seem commonly to have portrayed male and female as polar opposites—form and matter, limited and unlimited, active and passive, at rest and moving, light and darkness.16 To think about gender difference as an opposition of contraries rather than as a privative opposition (i.e., male is to female as sight is to blindness) is not, of course, to embrace the equality of the sexes. Indeed, women were seen to be driven toward sexual union with men by virtue of their opposite nature; as Aristotle expresses it, "matter desires form as the female the male."17 But in spite of the fact that almost all descriptions of difference led to the reiteration of male superiority, the language of polar opposition complicated that of hierarchical continuity since it suggested that the feminine was separate from and ontologically necessary to the masculine rather than a defective version of male perfection. Both views of gender difference were in circulation in the Renaissance; in Shakespeare, there is an overall shift from a relationship of analogy between male and female toward a relationship of polarity or even incommensurability. Of particular interest in understanding the connections between gender and the Shakespearean theater is the contest between, on the one side, a Galenic-Hippocratic view that both women and men "concocted" seed out of blood and that both male and female seed were materially and formally requisite for the conception of offspring and, on the other, an Aristotelian view that male seed impressed its form upon female matter, women being incapable of producing seed.18 The latter view underlies Sonnet 3's punning image of male husbandry: "For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?" The former, opposite view is expressed

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in the same sonnet: "Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime." Sonnet 3 implies that having children requires the action of male seed upon female earth, but it also suggests that the young male addressee of the poem resembles his mother. The complexity of the sonnet makes an important point about Shakespeare's approach to the biology of reproduction. In spite of scholarly claims that Shakespeare represents woman as vessel and man as maker in the process of human reproduction, the truth is that he sometimes has it one way and sometimes has it the other.19 More often, certainly, the male protagonist is recognized by virtue of his resemblance to his father. In As You Like It, Orlando is welcomed by Duke Senior in these terms (2.7.191-95); and examples of male and female children's authenticating physiological resemblance to their fathers occur throughout Shakespeare's works. As an infant, Perdita is said to resemble her father in every detail—"Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father" (Winter's Tale, 2.3.99-100). Similarly, Florizel is so plainly like Polixenes that he looks like a printed copy of the paternal original: Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince, For she did print your royal father off, Conceiving you. Were I but twenty-one, Your father's image is so hit in you (His very air) that I should call you brother

(5.1.124-28)20

Hermia's father, according to Theseus, "compos'd [her] beauties," imprinted her "as a form in wax" (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.47-50). Hal's legitimacy as son of King Henry is jokingly guaranteed on the strength of a villainous trick of his eye and a hanging of his nether lip that are said to be just like his father's (i Henry IV, 2.4.404-405). Even the future Queen Elizabeth is said to resemble her father "As cherry is to cherry" (Henry VIII, 5.1.169). But characters are also said to resemble their mothers. Pericles, at the moment of his awakening, begins to recognize his daughter by her resemblance to her mother:

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My dearest wife was like this maid, and such a one My daughter might have been. My queen's square brows, Her stature to an inch, as wand-like straight, As silver-voic'd, her eyes as jewel-like And cas'd as richly (Pericles, s.i.ioy-n)21 Although Aaron, in Titus Andronicus, asserts his fatherhood of Tamora's child on the basis of racial resemblance ("my seal be stamped in his face" [4.2.127]), he seems unsurprised by the fact that his countryman Mulietus has sired a white baby: "His wife but yesternight was brought to bed; / His child is like to her, fair as you are" (4.2.153-54). These examples of the relationship between gender and physiological inheritance suggest that Shakespeare was familiar with both one-seed and two-seed models of biological reproduction and that he had no particular investment in either view on its own account. His use of one or the other model tended instead to be determined by the requirements of plot, characterization, or theme, and also by his project of rewriting the theater in terms of what we can call the principle of "face and grace." Specifically, by developing the principle of face and grace into a theory of theatrical mimesis, Shakespeare staked out an area of feminized artistic power. The phrase "face and grace" derives from Jonson's "Masque of Hymen," where the terms designate characteristic male and female elements of reproductive inheritance. Although both parents seem able to produce seed, and although both are conduits for grandpaternal "spirit," they nevertheless differ fundamentally from one another because the father contributes the physiological form of the child while the mother adds only her own graceful bearing. As the epithalamion draws to a close, the singer blesses the couple with a wish for fair, legitimate offspring: And Venus, thou, with timely seed (Which may their after-comforts breed) Inform the gentle womb, Nor let it prove a tomb,

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Chapter 6 But ere ten moons be wasted, The birth, by Cynthia hasted. So may they both ere day Rise perfect every way. And when the babe to light is shown, Let it be like each parent known; Much of the fathers face, More of the mothers gmce, And either grandsire's spirit And fame let it inherit, That men may bless th'embraces That joined two such races. (Orgel, 93-94, emphasis added)

The principle of face and grace also determines Perdita's inheritance from her parents. As an infant, Perdita is said to resemble her father as printed copy mirrors original text. Upon her return to Sicilia as a grown woman, her identity is established on the basis of written and material evidence; only then is her resemblance to Hermione noted, and at that it pertains exclusively to her bearing rather than to her features. In answer to the question, "Has the King found his heir?" the third gentleman says, Most true, if ever truth were pregnant by circumstance. . . . The mantle of Queen Hermione's; her jewel about the neck of it; the letters of Antigonus found with it, which they know to be his character; the majesty of the creature in resemblance of the mother; the affection of nobleness which nature shows above her breeding; and many other evidences proclaim her, with all certainty, to be the King's daughter. (5.2.30-39) Shakespeare's usage complicates the Aristotelian one-seed-andthat-seed-male model, which declares that the woman's reproductive system provides the matter upon which male form "prints off" its image. From one point of view, Shakespeare surpasses the antifeminism of Aristotle's De Generatione Animalium since Aristotle allowed that maternal features were passed on through menstrual blood whereas Shakespeare suggests that paternal features comprise

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the only physiological endowment inherited by offspring.22 But from another view, Shakespeare undermines Aristotle by suggesting that maternal inheritance is uncannily inward and hence more influential than what in consequence begins to appear as the merely superficial elements of physiognomy. In the cases where his female characters are depicted as unable to pass on physiological features to offspring, Shakespeare allows such women to instill attributes of character through breast-feeding. Attributional characteristics of either the mother or the wet nurse are passed on in breast milk (a concoction of blood) and enter the child through the mouth; in contrast, paternal characteristics, both physiological and attributional, are instilled either through the blood (out of whose "finest part" male seed is concocted) or metaphysically through the spirit. Female endowments are occulted and unstable in transmission (endowments may come from either mother or wet nurse), and are difficult to pinpoint in the child. In contrast, male endowments (barring marital infidelity) are public and stable in transmission and easily recognizable. In a tellingly ambiguous passage, Juliet's nurse exclaims, "were not I thine only nurse, /1 would say thou hadst suck'd wisdom from thy teat" (Romeo and Juliet., 1.3.67-68). Similarly, Volumnia's claim that she is the source of Coriolanus's courage is made even less authoritative than such a claim would ordinarily be by virtue of its rhetorical purpose: "Do as thou list; / Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'st it from me; / But owe thy pride thyself" (Coriolanus^ 3.2.128-30). The mother's part in her child is inward, hard to trace, unstable, and yet deeply influential. Shakespeare configures theatrical mimesis in terms of the principle of face and grace. Already feminized by its exclusion from the "masculine" arena of power, by its association with what Patricia Parker calls the "effeminizing aspects o f . . . involvement in the arts of words," and by antitheatricalist charges of the drama's "effeminization" of the audience, Shakespeare's theater represented itself, not as masculine, but rather as true to wedlock with masculinized power.23 The practices of dramatic imitation were the matter upon which real life, real power, and real history impressed themselves. Just as female

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characters are often depicted in Shakespeare as unable either to engender or incontestably to alter the offspring of men, so also the feminized theater, "this wooden O," was depicted as crammed with the productions of history and power, adding its zero of representation to the reality of historical figures, locales, and events. Like Hermione as the self-described replete subject of the practices of Leontes' "husbandry," the Prologue of Henry V gracefully denies the play's own capacity to speak authoritatively or purposefully about English history: Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million, And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. (Henry V, Prologue, 11-18) The other locus dtissicus in Shakespeare for the nature of theatrical representation is Hamlet's advice to the players: "the purpose of playing . . . was and is, to hold as 'twere 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" (3.2.20-24). The feminization of theatrical power is felt in the shift from a mirror that shows female moral personifications to themselves to a feminized mirror that shows "the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." Just as Florizel's mother "prints off" the image of Polixenes onto Florizel, so theatrical representation mirrors the world by taking an imprint of the time's form. As Stephen Greenblatt has noted, mirrors were thought somehow to take a material impression of the image they reflected, in the way wax takes the form of the seal or paper the imprint of the type.24 In this view, the second part of Hamlet's image suggests that theatrical practices constitute merely the waxy matter that takes the print of the time's form and "pres-

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sure" (that is, "impression"). In Swetnam the Woman-Hater (published 1620), the feminist advocate Atlanta, like Isabella in Measure for Measure, argues for women's blamelessness by virtue of their natural impressionability: Would any man, once having fixed his seal To any deed, though after he repent The fact so done, rail at the supple wax, As though that were the cause of his undoing:125 Theater, like women, is blameless because of its impressionability. But in Hamlet's image of an impressionable theater, the judgmental force of the objective mirroring of female personifications carries over to the feminized mirroring of the body of the time's form and pressure. The collocation of judgmental force with impressionability suggests that theatrical mimesis is productive of an inward awareness of self in gendered subjects, and even a heightened self-consciousness in male and female subjects that admits no distinction between genders. On this account, the players in Shakespeare's playhouse, mere ciphers in regard to the real world, nevertheless asserted their ability to work on their audiences' "imaginary forces." Like the underground economy of meaning managed by the women in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's theater rewrote itself as powerless with regard to the "masculine" world of the state, yet uncannily aligned with what emerged as a higher, feminine world of inward truth. *

*

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While Shakespeare was able to a degree to reverse the usual ethical attributes attendant upon male and female principles, it is important to recognize that he was never able to rewrite the drama's associations with feminine powerlessness, loquacity, and sexual attractiveness so as to produce an unburdened feminization of theatrical power. To suggest that women are smarter and abler than men, fluidity (of ego, social role, gender) superior to boundedness, fiction truer than quotidian truth, and play more productive than work constituted a useful legitimating representation of theater. But such re-

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versals could neither rescue theater from the taint of its exclusion from public affairs nor relieve Shakespeare's ambivalence toward plays that could claim only a feminized power. The language of gender difference, like all forms of language, could not be mastered by any single speaker, not even Shakespeare. Although As Tou Like It is a central text in Shakespeare's quasifeminist redescription of theatrical power, the play nevertheless registers an aversion from the theatrical and the feminine. As has long been recognized, Jaques's "seven ages of man" speech (2.7.139-66) decries the ways in which role-playing hollows out living people. The seven figures in the speech—seven stages in man's life—are depicted as theatricalized stereotypes: they enter and exit, wear and "shift" their bodies like costumes, and speak the prescribed languages of social roles. Theatricality seems the enemy of an authentic personhood. Jaques insists on the ways in which the figures are defined by the particular languages that issue from their mouths: "the lover, / Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress' eyebrow," or the "soldier, / Full of strange oaths," or "the justice, / . . . Full of wise saws and modern instances." Not only are the figures defined and "flattened" by virtue of the typical languages they utter, but their words seem also to have been put into them in the first place. Several are crammed "full"—filled with breast milk or woeful ballads or "strange oaths" or "wise saws." Most important, the whole line of male figures overflowing with socially determined attributes descends from the infant crammed full of nurse's breast milk. "[T]he infant, / Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms" (2.7.143-44) sets the stage for the pageant of figures who are empty by virtue of being filled, and locates the replete subject of language under the authority of the feminine and the theatrical. The speech adds a metatheatrical element to the contemptus mundi figure that likens sinful life to addiction to the breast. As Francis Quarles wrote in Emblcmes (1635): What, never filled:1 Be thy lips screwed so fast To the earth's full breast? For shame, for shame unseize thee!

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Thou tak'st a surfeit, where thou shouldst but taste, And mak'st too much not half enough, to please thee. Ah fool, forebear; thou swallow'st at one breath Both food and poison down; thou draw'st both milk and death.26 "Mewling and puking" characterizes the utterances of all the figures and suggests the infantilizing orality of those who regurgitate their words rather than speaking them. In spite of their seeming authority and their big manly voices, the men speak no more than has been spoken to them; even the oaths and quarrels of the leopardlike soldier are insubstantial: bearded like the pard, Jealous in honor, sudden, and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. (2.7.150-53) Moreover, the queasiness aroused by the whining, vomiting, helpless infant extends through the whole line, contributing to the entropic movement as the figures wind down from lover and soldier to plump, garrulous justice and to "lean and slipper'd pantaloon." The procession culminates with the deathbed figure whose lack of teeth, vision, and sense of taste closes the circle that began with the milky infant: Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness, and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing. (2.7.163-66) Under the authority of the feminine and the theatrical, the newborn and the nearly dead are one and the same. The theatricality of living means that one is always a woman's man; like "the earth's full breast," such living yields "both milk and death" (Quarles, 49). Jaques wishes to exempt himself from the "wide and universal

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theatre," casting himself as "his own man" rather than as the infantilized subject of the conventions of language, conduct, and dress. He wants to distinguish himself from those of uncertain manhood, like the youngster whose "mother's milk were scarce out of him" (Twelfth Night, 1.5.161-62). The author of The Arraignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615; attributed to Joseph Swetnam) declares his manly independence in similar terms: "I am weaned from my mother's teat, and therefore never more to be fed from her pap, wherefore say what you will for I will follow my own vein."27 In conversation with Rosalind, Jaques insists that his melancholy is original and self-authored: "a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels" (4.1.15-18). Rosalind, however, dismisses him in the familiar terms of the feminine and the theatrical: "Farewell Monsieur Traveller: look you lisp and wear strange suits" (4.1.33-34). The play's first answer to the disruptions that feminized theatricality introduces into the familial economy of male identity is Orlando's parthenogenetic inheritance of his father's spirit. Orlando possesses an internalized class and gender entitlement that has passed from father to son directly and that seems thereby to have evaded the problems of the female transmission of male seed and the infant's dependence upon a female caregiver. It is as if Orlando had inherited both face and grace from his father, and nothing from his mother: "He [i.e., Oliver] lets me feed with his hinds, bars me the place of a brother, and as much as in him lies, mines my gentility with my education. This is it, Adam, that grieves me, and the spirit of my father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against this servitude" (1.1.19-24). In the ensuing argument with his brother, he declares his sense of filial connection: "I am no villain; I am the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys. He was my father, and he is thrice a villain that says such a father begot villains.. . . The spirit of my father grows strong in me, and I will no longer endure it" (56-59, 70-71). Because his identity comes from within along a male bloodline, Orlando seems not a mere player, not the subject of the conventional languages and social roles that thwart Jaques's attempts at self-

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authorship. Since Orlando's identity derives from the spirit of his father rather than from the milk of his mother, he seems grounded in a realm logically prior to that of representation. Orlando's spiritual inheritance from his father is only part of the play's initial answer to the problem of the theatrical and the feminine. The inward guarantee of his nobility and manliness is matched by the corporeal "truth" of Rosalind's womanliness. She can act the part of a man, and even call into question the naturalness of gender difference, but only until her female nature seizes hold of her, both through her longing for Orlando, which is like the Aristotelian notion of female matter desiring male form (1.3.11, 3.2.180-250, 4.1.205-17), and through her weakhearted swooning at the sight of his blood. In response to Oliver's "You a man? You lack a man's heart," Rosalind declares: "I do so, I confess it. Ah, sirrah, a body would think this was well counterfeited! I pray you tell your brother how well I counterfeited" (4.3.163-67). Counterfeit acts and real acts, outward femaleness and inward maleness, a full ensemble of stable and enduring binary categories, a full realm of being undergirding the world of appearances: the play develops a grand recuperative answer to Jaques's question about the theatrical and the feminine. Men are determined by neither mother's milk nor social convention because they draw their being from within themselves and from the spirit of their fathers; and they know that this is true because women, being bound within the corporeal, are just the opposite.28 This antifeminist answer, however, is inadequate for a number of reasons. In the play world, Orlando's spiritual inheritance of his father's class entitlement is at least questionable since by its nature it is incapable of proof and the best he can do is to act as if he were entitled to high status. (He is not in any case entitled to marry a princess.) At the level of representation, "Orlando" is in fact an actor and so possesses very little social cachet. Similarly Rosalind's natural womanliness is put in question by the fact that she is a boy actor, a point upon which the epilogue insists, and by the fact that her convincing failure to counterfeit swooning (i.e., she seems to be swooning indeed) is itself a counterfeit. The layering of truth-effects is so

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thick in the scene that the audience is bound to be put in mind of the theatricality of her womanhood. The play's use of metatheatrical irony has the effect of folding the foundational realm of true manliness and true womanliness back into the universe of representation. The play's better answer to Jaques's question is not antifeminist but quasi-feminist, not a denial of theatricality but an exploration of the liberating possibilities of intensified versions of playacting. Strategies of theatrical representation allow characters such as Celia and Rosalind to fashion an original construction of their identities separate from cultural determinations. Like Hermione, Rosalind's relationship with patriarchal culture is expressed in terms of sexual, alimentary, and discursive repletion. Because the women characters in general are constrained by language and social expectations to a degree that would terrify men like Jaques, they become exemplary of the ways in which theatricality can mine beneath certain socially and biologically given identities. In Celia and Rosalind's exuberant game of mockery, for example, news of the court becomes pigeon food intended to enhance their market value: Cel.

. . . Here comes Monsieur Le Beau. [Enter Le Beau.]

Ros. Cel. Ros. Cel.

With his mouth full of news. Which he will put on us, as pigeons feed their young. Then shall we be news-cramm'd. All the better; we shall be the more marketable. Bon jour, Monsieur Le Beau. (1.2.90-97)

Celia's "bon jour" epitomizes one strategy of theatrical representation and demonstrates the operation of Gargantua's mouth as the agent of inward freedom in the face of discursive repletion. Without even having to hear it, we know that the affected salutation "bon jour" is always in Le Beau's mouth. Le Beau's "bon jour" in Celia's mouth mocks Le Beau's courtly style by reproducing it, and suggests Celia's inward independence from the courtly language she imagines filling both Le Beau's mouth and her own. In a related incident,

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Rosalind describes herself as desirous of drinking both Celia's tidings of Orlando and Orlando himself. Whereas men are emptied by being filled, women seek fulfillment through sexual, discursive, and alimentary repletion: Ros. Good my complexion, dost thou think, though I am caparison'd like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition? . . . I prithee tell me who is it quickly, and speak apace. I would thou couldst stammer, that thou mightst pour this conceal'd man out of thy mouth, as wine comes out of a narrow-mouth'd bottle, either too much at once, or none at all. I prithee take the cork out of thy mouth that I may drink thy tidings. Cel. So you may put a man in your belly. (3.2.194-204) In spite of her desire, Rosalind puts off putting in a man so that she can put on a man, in both senses of acting the man's part and deceiving a man. Her playacting as the misogynistic Ganymede, which allows her to test Orlando's love in the face of conventional antifeminist arguments against love, takes place in the space between falling in love and the inevitable moment of her entrance in female dress to the scene of her own wedding. The space of the deferral of her desire for marriage and the gendered identity formation that it ratifies parallels the opening in power that Shakespeare has taught us to call theater. Neither Rosalind's playacting nor Shakespeare's theater represents itself as able to change what is seen as fixed in the real world; but both, by virtue of their feminized power, claim the capacity to create the value of inward freedom.29 At the conclusion of the play, Rosalind submits happily to the patriarchal ordering of the sexes. Although her ritual giving of herself to her father and Orlando disrupts the economy of male relations in which women normally pass as counters from man to man, she nevertheless relinquishes the strategies of theatrical self-representation in order to gain a definite place in the gender system. But while she gives herself up to patriarchal marriage, her stage-managing of the

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ceremony of surrender nevertheless produces an uncanny inward meaning in the scene—the difference that does not make any difference, since Orlando and Rosalind would probably have married anyway even if Rosalind had revealed herself as soon as she arrived in Arden. Our awareness of Rosalind's self-conscious and inward freedom does not change what happens but rather changes how what happens is seen, by both the characters onstage and the audience. Like Le Beau's "bon jour" in Celia's mouth or Hermione and Paulina's unseen plotting, Rosalind's secret management of her father's repossession of her adds to the way things are the value of private knowing—the fact that Rosalind knows that she is acting in a scene of her own devising and the fact that we know she knows. "Gargantua's mouth," the figure of Rosalind's and Shakespeare's feminized theatrical power, is, of course, a mere fiction, beyond "any mouth of this age's size" (3.2.226-27). Yet as the principal value of the Shakespearean theater, Gargantua's mouth persists as the figure of the civilizing pressure of each one's awareness of each other one's knowing inwardly more than she or he speaks. *

*

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If the editor of the New Mermaids edition ofEpicoene is correct, Shakespeare gets a mention in Jonson's play. It occurs in the midst of Truewit's diatribe against "this goblin matrimony" (2.2.31). A wife, Truewit tells Morose, will spend all his money keeping up with fashions, will seduce boys and eunuchs, and will ape and meddle in men's activities and interests: she feels not how the land drops away, nor the acres melt, nor foresees the change when the mercer has your woods for her velvets; never weighs what her pride costs, sir, so she may kiss a page or a smooth chin that has the despair of a beard; be a stateswoman, know all the news; what was done at Salisbury, what at the Bath, what at court, what in progress; or so she may censure poets and authors and styles, and compare 'em, Daniel with Spenser, Jonson with the tother youth, and so forth. (2.2.106-15)30 Jonson's claim for his own youthfulness might be charming, but the passage about "Jonson with the tother youth" adumbrates the

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nature of the threat that mannish women pose to male writers. By having to submit to the censure of female patrons, a writer such as Jonson, or "the tother youth," might lose his own authority and might see his literary productions relocated to a feminine cultural sphere. As Jaques suggests, the most dire consequence of coming under the authority of the feminine is not that a man becomes womanly but rather that he becomes like a helpless child. The implied threat to Jonson's literary manhood links him with Clerimont's "ingle" (1.1.23), the page who is infantilized by Lady Haughty: "The gentlewomen play with me and throw me o' the bed, and carry me in to my lady, and she kisses me with her oiled face, and puts a peruke o' my head, and asks me an' I wear her gown, and I say no; and then she hits me a blow o' the ear and calls me innocent, and lets me go" (1.1.12-17). Jonson was in danger of being unmanned and having the authority of his writings diminished by the power of women. David Riggs has suggested that Jonson's interest in gender and poetic authority in 1608-9 had a biographical context. He argues that the misogyny ofEpicoene vented Jonson's resentment against the Queen and other powerful court ladies such as Lucy, Countess of Bedford and Cecilia Bulstrode.31 Jonson had been writing his way into the feminine world of Queen Anne's court; the 1608 Masque of Beauty, written within a year ofEpicoene, advanced Jonson's pursuit of court patronage by virtue of its celebration of women in terms of a neoplatonic female principle: Had those that dwell in error foul, And hold that women have no soul, But seen these move, they would have then Said women were the souls of men. So they do move each heart and eye With the world's soul, true harmony. (Orgel, 73) This view of the feminine is like Shakespeare's representation of women as avatars of transcendence in nearly contemporary plays such as Othello (1604), King Lear (1605?), and Cymbeline (1609?), and although it is a feminist version of Jonson's own "face and grace"

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model, it is not representative of his usual view of gender difference. Even in a epideictic poem such as Epigram 76 "On Lucy Countess of Bedford" (published 1616), Jonson balked at praising the female soul. The poem is framed as an exercise in drawing the ideal woman, cataloging the attributes of creaturely perfection, and discovering, at the end, the actuality of the ideal in the subject herself: "My muse bad, Bedford write, and that was she" (Parfitt, 58-59). It is remarkable that after listing ideal gentlewomanly qualities such as fairness, freedom, wisdom, high birth, virtue, humility, courtesy, and sweetness, Jonson crowns this female paragon with an indwelling male spirit, a masculine soul that brings her the "even powers" of stoic self-mastery: I meant each softest virtue, there should meet, Fit in that softer bosom to reside. Only a learned, and a manly soul I purposed her; that should, with even powers, The rock, the spindle, and the shears control Of destiny, and spin her own free hours. Where Jonson was less well-disposed toward the female subjects of his poetry, he was not so kind. In revenge for an apparent insult offered him by Cecilia Bulstrode, he wrote the vitriolic "Epigram on the Court Pucell" (1609?; published 1640), a poem that connects with the antifeminist satire ofEpicoene and underlines the validity of Riggs's biographical reading of the play. Particularly important is the emphasis on how Bulstrode's literary and other interests are a cover for promiscuous desire and how her apparent erudition comprises mere forms of language that she has learned by rote: What though with tribade lust she force a muse, And in an epicoene fury can write news Equal with that, which for the best news goes, As airy light, and as like wit as those? What though she talk, and cannot once with them Make state, religion, bawdry, all a theme? And as lip-thirsty, in each word's expense, Doth labour with the phrase more than the sense? (Parfitt, 195-96)

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Bulstrode was a Gentlewoman of the Bedchamber to the Queen and a cousin of Lucy, Countess of Bedford. In Conversations•, Drummond reports, "That piece of the pucelle of the court was stolen out of his pocket by a gentleman who drank him drowsy, and given Mistress Bulstrode; which brought him great displeasure" (Parfitt, 479). No doubt he was in trouble with Mistress Bulstrode herself, not to mention Lady Bedford and possibly even the Queen. "This episode," Riggs says, "raises suspicions about Jonson's tributes to the Queen and her ladies. It indicates that he had come to resent his dependence on the favor of these powerful women. When one of the lesser members of Queen Anne's entourage criticized him, he unleashed his anger in the 'Epigram on the Court Pucell,' but to no avail: after the exchange of hostilities was over, and he had done his best to make amends, he was still worried that Cecilia's friends would hold him accountable for his attack on her."32 Given the antifeminist bias of seventeenth-century English society in general, it is not surprising that Jonson was ambivalent about his clientage within a circle of female patrons. The implication of Truewit's speech, that Jonson's worth as a "poet and author" might suffer diminishment under the censure of mannish women, had accordingly a real-life model, since court poets such as Jonson or Samuel Daniel (but not Shakespeare) had to submit their work to female judges. Jonson portrayed the Queen's circle loosely as a college of social-climbing bluestockings living in the city—"ladies that call themselves the Collegiates, an order between courtiers and country madams, that live from their husbands and give entertainment to all the Wits and Braveries o' the time" (1.1.71-74). His ambivalence toward the Queen's court is captured in the contradictory attitude toward the Collegiates expressed by the three gallants in the play, especially by Clerimont and Dauphine. They hold the women in disdain, but pine to be admitted to their company. Clerimont bemoans his exclusion from Lady Haughty's presence a moment after he curses her "autumnal face, her pieced beauty" (1.1.81). The entry of Dauphine into collegiate society for which Truewit has been laboring serves only to demonstrate the worthlessness of the women: "all their actions are governed by crude opinion, without reason or cause" (4.6.58-59). When Dauphine finally finds himself in the company

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that he craved, he is barely able to contain his contempt: "Slight, they haunt me like fairies, and give me jewels here; I cannot be rid of'em" (5.2.46-47). Did Jonson intend to give offense? In the dedication to Sir Francis Stuart that prefaces the play in the 1616 folio, he speaks of "how much a man's innocency may be endangered by an uncertain accusation" (3); in a second prologue, "Occasioned by some persons impertinent exception" he again declares the purity of his motives: If any yet will, with particular sleight Of application, wrest what he doth write, And that he meant or him or her will say, They make a libel which he made a play. (lines 11-14) Do these professions of innocence relate to a public perception that Jonson had mocked the Queen's court?33 Or are they related to the possibility that Arabella Stuart had taken offense at an allusion to her rumored engagement to the self-proclaimed Prince of Moldavia? 34 Or was Jonson advertising his denials of libel in order to encourage topical interpretation? Whatever the case, the existence of these questions reminds us of the broad differences between Jonson's and Shakespeare's ways of redescribing theater. As we have seen in the cases of Bartholomew Fair and Sejanus, Jonson was endeavoring to maintain drama's place within a political arena whereas Shakespeare was valorizing his plays in other terms. But neither Jonson's attempts to politicize the drama, nor Epicoene's connections with court politics, nor the different venues and playing companies of Shakespeare's and Jonson's plays ought to distract us from the central fact that Ar You Like It and Epicoene were participating in the querelle desfemmes in the commercial theater. The differences between them should not obscure how both men used the language of gender difference in order to redescribe the worth of playwriting. That the central issue for Jonson is the worth of letters rather than the place of women is clear throughout the play as well as in Truewit's misogynist diatribe. The speech mocks women of a certain

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class, but it also uses antifeminist satire in order to align literary writing with legitimate forms of discourse such as theological polemics, mathematics, and political theory. According to Truewit, a wife ("If learned, there was never such a parrot" [2.2.71-72]) will want both to "censure poets and authors and styles" and to compare certain outstanding practitioners such as "Daniel with Spenser," and "Jonson with the tother youth." But in the same breath Truewit charges that she will seek also to meddle in a range of weighty matters: "[or so she may] be thought cunning in controversies or the very knots of divinity, and have often in her mouth the state of the question, and then skip to the mathematics and demonstration, and answer in religion to one, in state to another, in bawdry to a third" (115-19). Jonson generalizes female meddling in male affairs in order to rehabilitate literary writing as a "masculine" discourse. The women who infantilize poets also trespass on the fields of public affairs, state politics, divinity, and science. The "skipping" women themselves guarantee poetry's place among serious, masculine undertakings; their desire to parrot the languages of men underwrites the worth of those languages at the same moment that it reveals the worthlessness of the women themselves. Cecilia Bulstrode's "lip-thirstiness," the Collegiates' aping of true learning, and the way the wife of Truewit's speech holds legitimate forms of discourse "in her mouth" exemplify Jonson's focus on the orality of women. Jonsonian feminine orality differs from the Shakespearean version in that Jonson represents the female mouth as voracious whereas Rosalind's or Hermione's mouths are filled up by a male discourse that threatens female selfhood. Shakespeare produces the inwardness of women's identities and the authority of women's voices out of the sense of the violation and repletion of the female subject. Shakespeare's women come to themselves under the terrible pressure of subjection to what is in effect a foreign language, a tongue they are obliged both to speak and to acknowledge as their own. Consider the way that Katherina's final speech in The Taming of the Shrew is conventionally interpreted as an ironic outward sign of her inward being, or how Hermione is able to express herself in spite of—and because of—the fact that she owns none of her words. In

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contrast, the Jonsonian woman who has male discourses "in her mouth" appropriates the forms of particular languages for selfpromotion and is neither interested in nor capable of understanding their substance. Although she talks volubly, she has no voice because she has nothing to say outside of "look at me." Jonson's linking of women's orality, talkativeness, and sexual openness participates, of course, in a long-standing antifeminist tradition. In his Catechisme (1564), Thomas Becon wrote: "The whore is never satisfied, but is like as one that goeth by the way and is thirsty: even so does she open her mouth, and drink of every next water that she may get."35 In the allegorical play Lingua (1607), the female character who symbolizes the tongue is condemned for sowing dissension among the five male senses. "Communis Sensus" grants her her life, but instructs "Gustus" "to keep her under the custody of two strong doors, and every day till she come to eighty years of age, see she be well guarded with thirty tall watchmen, without whose license she shall by no means wag abroad."36 Female power and sexuality are equated with women's speaking, and female speech is bound within the masculine rule of the jaws and teeth. These differences between Jonson and Shakespeare are not necessarily an effect of what some have seen as Shakespeare's feminism. In Shakespeare, the female mouth whose repletion figures inwardness is continuous with a wide range of depth-effects, which produce inwardness by suggesting the great difficulty of "speaking what we feel." Jonson's play is misogynist, but its misogyny serves the institutional interests of the theater and Jonson's project of legitimating playwriting as a "masculine," public activity. In this view, there is no good case to be made for Shakespeare as feminist on the basis of an attack on Jonson as misogynist. The whole culture being biased against women, playwrights had to contend in one way or another with the view of their activity as effeminate. Jonson gave drama a masculine orientation through interventionist representations of sexual politics whereas Shakespeare alleviated the feminization of drama by gendering power itself. A better case might be made for Middleton as feminist in that he joined the battle over the "woman controversy" on the women's side. But even Middleton's apparent

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feminism needs to be measured against the persistent antifeminism of English society, the literary tradition of "defenses of women," the fact that Middleton's drama, from beginning to end, expressed antifeminist views alongside more enlightened ideas of sexual politics, and the fact that Middle ton, like his fellows, was working toward professional legitimacy. Indeed the antifeminism of Epicoene is part of a wider satire of people who fail in various ways to perform according to what Terence Hawkes calls Jonson's "moral principle" of "manly linguistic behaviour."37 This group includes almost everyone in the play outside the three gallants—Morose, who is afflicted by all discourses but his own, lower rank characters such as Tom Otter and Cutbeard who "[smatter] Latin" (4.7.49), the false gentlemen La Foole ("a windfucker" [1.4.74]) and Jack Daw (a poetaster), and the women, including Mistress Otter, the Collegiates, and the silent woman. Otter and Cutbeard valorize classical learning by virtue of their lack of Latin. The false gallant La Foole helps to rehabilitate the virtues and forms of expressions proper to true gentility. And Daw underwrites the worthiness of a host of classical authors simply by denouncing them (2.3.40-90), and his "tinking" verses put Dauphine in mind of Jonson's ego-ideal, the Protestant poet-warrior Philip Sidney. While women are not the only abusers of language in Jonson's play, it is nevertheless true that three of the men who fail the test of "manly linguistic behaviour" are themselves unmanly. Captain Otter is emasculated by his wife, and La Foole and Daw are cowards who follow the women's example by fleeing in terror from Morose's "huge long naked weapon" (4.3.2-3). Gender remains therefore the key term in Jonson's defense of "manly" poetry. Since the only legitimate speakers are the three gallants, it is not surprising that Jonson's drama strikes us as opposed to the linguistic practices of women, men of the working classes, and upstarts of both sexes, and as aligned with the interests and discourses of men of the upper classes.38 At the end, Epicoene plays nearly the same trick on the audience that Shakespeare was to play in Winter's Tale. Where, however, Shakespeare's play develops a women's underground economy of

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meaning, Jonson's surprises the audience with the revelation that the production of meaning has been managed from start to finish by men. Shakespeare suggests that an invisible female force has brought the narrative to a happy conclusion, Jonson that there has been no female element at all at the core of the action, but only Dauphine, the silent woman (in fact, a "gentleman's son" [5.4.189]), and Truewit and Clerimont as accomplices. All the rest of the action was nothing more than noise. Jonson's design encloses the production of dramatic meaning within a circle of male-to-male relations, thereby giving the play an authoritative masculine voice with which to address the issue of the stage's place in the sexual polity of early modern London. The revelation of Epicoene's, and Epicoene^s, true gender allows the theater to repair the social and moral damage that the drama was accused of doing, especially to its female spectators. Antitheatricalist writers warned that women were particularly liable to the wanton snares of playing. According to John Northbrooke, "None ought to haunt and frequent those places where interludes are, and especially women and maids."39 Truewit repeats the accusation in his speech of warning to Morose: "Alas, sir, do you ever think to find a chaste wife in these times:1 Now? When there are so many masques, plays, Puritan preachings, mad folks, and other strange sights to be seen daily, private and public" (2.2.31-34). However powerless with regard to state politics, Jonson's newly configured "masculine" theater speaks as an authority on the proper conduct of women and men. Truewit adopts a mock-chivalric tone in his speech to the baffled gallants and Collegiate ladies about the reformation of the sexual order achieved by the three true gentlemen and the cross-dressed gentleman's son: Nay, Sir Daw and Sir La Foole, you see the gentlewoman [Epicoene] that has done you the favours! We are all thankful to you, and so should the womankind here, specially for lying on her, though not with her! You meant so, I am sure? But that we have stuck it upon you today in your own imagined persons, and so lately, this Amazon, the champion of the sex, should beat you now thriftily for the common slanders which ladies receive from such cuckoos as you are. . . . Madams, you are mute upon this new metamorphosis! But here stands she that has vindicated your fames! (5.4.212-29)

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That the silent woman is a boy acting the woman's part to help Dauphine win his inheritance suggests how the Jonsonian theater attempted to rehabilitate even theatrical transvestism. Cross-dressing, always a sore point with the antitheatricalists, becomes a wholesome practice dedicated to the interests of male rule. In the play world, it is a technique of masquerade under the direction of the well-born Dauphine that facilitates the legitimate, male-to-male transmission of property. In the real world, the play suggests, transvestism does the boy actors nothing but good; Dauphine has brought the young man up for six months with care and at great expense (5.4.189-90). Epicoene speaks to an audience finely differentiated in terms of rank and gender—ladies, lords, knights, squires, waiting-wenches, city-wires, even down to "your men and daughters of Whitefriars" (Prologue, 22-24). The overall social movement, both within the play world and within the Whitefriars' audience as Jonson configures it is toward a hierarchical reordering of a population of noisily competing individuals; and the key to this theatrical and social reformation is, above all, the silencing of women. A comic epitome of this is Jack Daw's panegyric to male speech coupling with female silence as an ideal of fruitful heterosexual relations: Nor is't a tale That female vice should be a virtue male, Or masculine vice, a female virtue be: You shall it see Proved with increase, I know to speak, and she to hold her peace. (2.3.114-19) Similarly, Morose celebrates his impending marriage to Epicoene ("a dumb woman, be she of any form or any quality, so she be able to bear children" [1.2.23-24]) by "sealing" both their contract and her silence: "Let me now be bold to print on those divine lips the seal of being mine" (2.5.84-85). Jonson acknowledges the foolishness of these speakers, but the play nevertheless endorses the silencing of women as necessary to social order, and even as a festive element.

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The conclusion of the play, which "seals" the contract between theater and masculine authority, restores the Collegiate women to their legitimate place in good society, their bad reputations being blamed on the "common slanders which ladies receive from . . . cuckoos" such as La Foole and Daw. The rehabilitation of women's fame, however, is achieved by a male "champion of the sex," and it requires their voices to be silenced, presumably in dumb wonder at the genius of male authority, foresight, and eloquence. *

*

*

More Dissemblers Besides Women begins by inviting us to "read" the "life and praise" of a widowed duchess who has preserved her chastity for seven years "to th' wonder of her sex" (1.1.12), and its knotted plot begins to unravel in the penultimate scene when a woman, disguised as a page, gives birth, very nearly on stage, to an illegitimate child.40 The birth reveals the hypocrisy of Lactantio, the child's father and the play's principal dissembler. The text-like transparency of women characters—the Duchess as book and Lactantio's mistress as "page"—might be seen to mirror Shakespeare's representation of Desdemona as "fair paper" and "goodly book" (Othello, 4.2.71). Middleton's framing of his play between moments when women are legible signs might seem to connect his representations of female identity and theatrical power with Othello's production of Desdemona as "one entire and perfect chrysolite" (5.2.145). Or the design of More Dissemblers might be taken to parallel the way As You Like It moves to contain Rosalind's subversion of gender difference on the basis of the evidence of her body—the Page's swooning in the pain of labor matching Rosalind's fainting at the sight of blood. In spite of these similarities, however, Middleton and Shakespeare's representations of female identity and theatrical power go in different directions. Shakespeare's legitimation of theater depends upon an inward freedom in characters such as Rosalind that persists on a level separate from, but not oppositional to, the operations of power and the everyday reality of gender difference. Middleton's women characters seldom rise out of the condition of psychological normality so as to become either radically interiorized selves or sym-

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bolic markers of value. "More Dissemblers Besides Women" means that men too can be hypocrites, but it also means that women, since they can be dissemblers themselves, never become either entirely opaque or transparent. Against Shakespeare's production of a double world of incommensurate masculine and feminine principles in which the value of theater can persist without reference to the public world of men, Middleton insists on a single world in which men and women are essentially the same kind of beings. In his view, theater can join the struggle against the double standard that unfairly distinguishes men from women. A 1619 date of composition suggests that More Dissemblers was a rejoinder to pamphlets such as Joseph Swetnam's The Arraignment ofLewde, Idle, Froward, find Unconstant Women (1615; five editions to 1619) in which "simple and plain-meaning men" were warned against women, "dissembling in their deeds, and in all their actions subtle and dangerous for men to deal withal";41 and that it was aligned with feminist works such as the pamphlet The Worming of a Mad Dogge (1617) by "Constantia Munda" or the Red Bull comedy Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women (performed 1617-18; published 1620), in which women were warned against the "crocodile tears of base dissembling men."42 A central feature of Middleton's play is that it replaces allegorized women with versions of women's voices. The Duchess starts out as a patriarchal text. The song that opens the play invites the public to study the letter of her virtue: To be chaste is woman^s glory, 'Tis her fame and honour's story: Here sits she in funeral weeds, Only bright in virtuous deeds; Come and read her life and praise, That singing weeps, and sighing plays. (1.1.1-6) Indeed the Cardinal of Milan has transformed her into a library of homiletic books: "Whole volumes have I writ in zealous praise / Of her eternal vow" (1.2.6-7). Yet the Duchess chooses her own course

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of action; and, in the play's closing lines, she speaks about the moral complexity of living in a fallen world as well as about the hypocrisy of men. As is the case with Epicoene, More Dissemblers legitimates its author on the strength of its intervention in sexual politics. The difference is that Middleton joins the war on the side opposite to The Silent Woman. More Dissemblers' tangled plot emerges out of the forms of Jacobean tragicomedy. There are six principal characters—three men and three women. The men include the Cardinal of Milan, Lactantio (the Cardinal's nephew), and Andrugio (the general of Milan). The women are Aurelia (beloved of Andrugio), Lactantio's mistress disguised as a page, and the Duchess. The Page and Aurelia are in love with the villainous Lactantio, the Duchess falls in love with the soldierly Andrugio, Andrugio loves Aurelia, and Lactantio loves only his own pleasure. At the end, Andrugio and Aurelia are united, as are Lactantio and the Page. The Duchess chooses to withdraw from worldly life. Tragicomic form allows Middleton to open up the limited plot and character possibilities of tragedy and comedy in the direction of novelistic contingency. In contrast with the protagonist in Webster's The Duchess ofMalfi, to which Middleton is indebted, the Duchess of Milan does not seal her fate by deciding to remarry. Furthermore, Middleton's Cardinal is unlike the Aragonian brothers of the Duchess of Main. While at first shaken by the Duchess of Milan's determination to break her vow of chastity, the Cardinal changes his mind and offers to support the Duchess's plans for remarriage. The play combines a critique of Shakespearean comedy and tragedy with a weighty discourse about proper moral conduct, especially with regard to domestic politics—relations between men and women, the relative merits of marriage and single life, the benefits of offspring, constancy, chastity, and the possibilities of reformation and forgiveness. The inter textual critique and the moral discourse are complicated by the string of surprises in the plot as well as by Middleton's often hilarious handling of character. Middleton reprises the Shakespearean romance of transvestism in a critical feminist register. The pregnant Page was seduced into

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leaving her friends and family in Mantua by Lactantio's "strange oaths" and promises of marriage (3.1.14-15); but Lactantio and the Page have circulated a story out of'Twelfth Night. "The prettiest servant / That ever man was blessed with!" the Cardinal says to his nephew, 'tis so meek, So good and gentle; 'twas the best alm's-deed That e'er you did to keep him: I've oft took him Weeping alone, poor boy, at the remembrance Of his lost friends, which, as he says, the sea Swallow'd, with all their substance. (1.2.152-57) But the Page is not Viola, Milan is not Illyria, and Lactantio, although he opens the play like Orsino by listening to melancholy music, is not the hero of a festive comedy. Middle ton places the romance of cross-dressing and the erotics of female service in the context of power relations and sexual reproduction, a view reiterated by the salacious irony of Lactantio's response to the Cardinal: 'Tis a truth, sir, Has cost the poor boy many a feeling tear, And me some too, for company: in such pity I always spend my part. (157-60) Middleton carnivalizes his feminist rewriting of Shakespeare. The Page serves to critique as unrealistic Shakespeare's cross-dressed romantic heroines, and her pregnancy is represented sympathetically (like that of the Duchess of Malfi or Hermione). But she is nevertheless a target of laughter in the scenes where Lactantio mocks her (1.2.157-61; 3.1.1-28), in her scene with Dondolo where she is suffering from morning nausea (1.4), and in Dondolo's satirical account of her, given within her hearing: "I could never get that little monkey yet / To put off his breeches: / A tender, puling, nice, chitty-fac'd squall 'tis" (3.1.95-97). By virtue of her morning sick-

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ness, backache, abdominal pain, and shortness of breath (1.4.1-10; 5.1.14, 31, 36), she is more intensely present to the audience than any other character. Yet Middleton still makes her laughable. The dancing lesson (5.1) remains funny even when the dancing master, Signor Sinquapace, threatens to use instruments of torture in order to make her perform. She gives voice to her pain and humiliation in a series of asides; just before she is to be made to dance, she says: "I'll wish no foe a greater cross upon her" (179). "Come on, sir," Sinquapace urges, "now; cast thy leg out from thee; lift it up aloft, boy: a pox, his knees are soldered together, they're sewed together: canst not stride? . . . I shall never teach this boy without a screw; his knees must be opened with a vice, or there's no good to be done upon him" (198-204). Near the end of the scene, she collapses on the stage and cries out for a midwife. The dancing class exemplifies Middleton's rewriting of Jonson's exclusionary and Shakespeare's identificatory dramaturgy, since it encourages the audience's sympathy for the very character who is the central target of a savage joke. The scene demonstrates how Middleton is able to rewrite his competitors' representations of gender in a critical register and also how his art elaborates the dialogism inherent in dramatic form and ever present in the densely populated and complexly motivated site of playing and playgoing. The scene gives strong expression to opposite sides of "the woman question" and moves drama toward the fully dialogic orientation associated with the novel, a form where "there are always two consciousnesses, two language-intentions, two voices and consequently two accents participating in an intentional and conscious artistic hybrid."43 *

*

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At the end of the play, Middleton reverses conventional Shakespearean male-female relations. Once Lactantio disavows Aurelia, she asks the steadfast Andrugio for forgiveness, and persuades him to marry her because she wants to bear legitimate offspring: Aur.

I was nineteen yesterday, and partly vow'd To have a child by twenty, if not twain: To see how maids are cross'd! but I'm plagued justly;

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And.

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And she that makes a fool of her first love, Let her ne'er look to prosper. [Aside.]—Sir — [To Andrugio.] O falsehood! Have you forgiveness in you? there's more hope of me Than of a maid that never yet offended. Make me your property? I'll promise you I'll never make you worse; and, sir, you know There are worse things for women to make men. But, by my hope of children, and all lawful, I'll be as true for ever to your bed As she in thought or deed that never err'd. I'll once believe a woman, be't but to strengthen Weak faith in other men: I have a love That covers all thy faults. (5.2.155-71)

Aurelia articulates as a private motive and public goal the desire to bear children, which, in As Ton Like It, rises irresistibly from the biological substratum of Rosalind's female nature. More important, the scene reverses, and by reversing politicizes, exemplary Shakespearean moments such as Mariana's redemptive declaration of faith in Angelo or Desdemona's "heavenly true" trust in the abusive Othello. Aurelia admits her wrongdoing, and Andrugio forgives her, much as Mariana, Desdemona, or Cordelia forgive the men who wrong them. Middleton's reversal of gender roles highlights the process of symbolization that underlies so much of Shakespeare's characterization of women. Furthermore, Middleton does not merely reverse the roles of men and women. Andrugio does not become a mere masculine version of the Shakespearean female saint who forgives because it is her nature to love selflessly; on the contrary, he remains, like Aurelia, a rational risk-taker who is willing to enter into marriage because it satisfies his own emotional requirements. Finally, More Dissemblers Besides Women also gives expression to the patriarchal ideal of the silent woman. It stakes its legitimacy on the transformation of female texts into female voices; like Epicoene, it

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represents theater as an authority on sexual politics, if not on state politics. To mark his distance from Jonson's masculine theater, however, Middleton transfers the ideal of the voiceless female mouth from the center of the play to the outskirts of a comic interlude. On Dondolo's report, his mother was indeed a silent woman— Stark dumb, sir. My father had a rare bargain of her, a rich pennyworth; There would have been but too much money given for her: A justice of the peace was about her; but my father, Being then constable, carried her before him. (3.1.53-57) Not only did her speechlessness render her an ideal wife, but it also made her the perfect mother: "I was the happiest child in all our country; /1 was born of a dumb woman" (3.1.52-53). From his mother, Dondolo learned to read the voiceless speech of silent women, and his ability to understand what Lactantio calls his "mother-tongue" (3.1.71) counters Jonson's ideal of the silent woman whose intentions are no more than an echo of those of her male master. Dondolo translates for Lactantio the mother-tongue of the imprisoned Aurelia. While Dondolo's account of Aurelia's body language is saturated with erotic innuendo, her message nevertheless emerges as an expression of a desire for liberty rather than as an expression of sexual desire, a distinction Dondolo himself makes in his reading of Aurelia's "gaping" mouth: Imprimis\ she first gap'd, but that I guess'd Was done for want of air, 'cause she's kept close; But had she been abroad and gap'd as much, 'T had been another case. (3.1.60-63) Silencing the woman does not produce the hierarchical sexual order that Jonson represents as the contribution a masculine theater can make to society. "[S]he first gap'd . . . for want of air": to deprive a woman of freedom is to produce the very openness that led to her

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enclosure in the first place. And neither does female silence bring about the value of privatized freedom that Shakespeare claims as the peculiar benefit of his theater. Dondolo's account of Aurelia suggests that silencing the woman produces not the interiorized discourse of the mind, but rather the public language of the body. Shakespeare's "Gargantua's mouth" represents the value of playing, playgoing, and playwriting as separate from the material exchanges that take place between playwrights, players, and audience members; Jonson's sealing of the female mouth suggests a view of theater as a site of the production of public distinctions between female and male, commoner and gentleman, audience and author. In contrast, Aurelia's gaping mouth represents an irrepressible expressiveness and openness. The gaping female mouth speaks although it is silenced and expresses a desire for liberty as well as sexual desire. More Dissemblers'" carnivalesque combination of slapstick comedy and weighty moralist instruction as well as the mixed messages of Aurelia's mouth suggests that Middleton's theater represents itself not only as a sexual authority, but also as a sphere of public exchange among audiences, actors, and playmakers, with neither hidden spaces nor private languages, neither impenetrable boundaries between genders nor unassailable hierarchical divisions. Shakespeare and Jonson were prominently involved in the construction of what Richard Helgerson has called an "authors' theater."44 Both developed influential models of theatrical value. But both or them, and Middleton also, were workers in, rather than authors of, the process of institutional change. After all, Shakespeare's transcendent women characters were played by clever, articulate boys; and Jonson could hardly have stopped the mouths of his unruly audiences or his fellow writers in the masterful manner of a Truewit silencing the Collegiate women. The playgoers came to talk as well as to listen; as Jonson ruefully notes in the prologue to The Staple of News (1626), they brought with them "a longing to salute or talk."45 So in spite of Shakespeare and Jonson's competing strategies of theatrical legitimation in the early modern knowledge marketplace, perhaps they would allow Aurelia's "gaping mouth," rather than Gargantua's mouth or the sealed mouths of the Collegiates, to speak for them about the value of theater as itself a marketplace of ideas, ideologies, and languages.

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Notes

Chapter i. The Powerless Theater 1. See Jonas Barish, The AntitheatricalPrejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 80-131; and David McPherson, "Three Charges against Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Playwrights: Libel, Bawdy, and Blasphemy," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 2 (1985): 269-82. 2. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Devil, in Works, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, rev. and corr. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), i: 213-14. 3. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583; facsim. repr., Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1972), LTV. 4. Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, L8v-Mi. 5. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 3-23; for examples of early Elizabethan practice, see Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 38-60; and David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 127-86. 6. For the marginality of the Shakespearean theater, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For a recent, brilliant discussion of marginality in Shakespeare, see Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 7. For an analysis of the flexibility, or even laxness, of government control of the drama, see Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (London: Macmillan, 1991). See J. Leeds BarrolPs discussion of the real-life social and political marginality of the players in his "Shakespeare without King James," in Politics, Plague, and Shakespeareys Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 23-69. 8. See Franco Moretti, '"A Huge Eclipse': Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty," Genre 15 (1981): 7-40.

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9. Louis Adrian Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19-105, esp. 30-40. Montrose's critique of my article, "The Powerless Theater," English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 49-74, underestimates the degree to which we agree about what can be said about the influence of the drama. He chides those who "make exorbitant claims about the social and/or political significance of the Elizabethan drama in its time" (5711), but maintains the stage's all-important connection .with the master term "power" by asserting that the drama had a profound and long-lasting ideological influence: "My point is that the source of the theatre's power was in its very theatricality', and in the implications of theatricality for the construction and manipulation of social rules and interpersonal relations—implications touching fundamental epistemological and sociopolitical issues of causality and legitimacy, identity and agency" (104). This differs from the idea that the drama had "real historical consequences" only by seeming to know what they were and by folding those putative consequences back into an apparently historical account of the theater. Furthermore, Montrose is not satisfied with making a merely theoretical case for the theater's ideological and political power. This is somewhat vexing for his argument because writings about the theater in the 15905 and later tend not to emphasize its ideological threat or benefit to the state. A Privy Council order, June 22,1600, allows the usual argument of the city fathers that plays are the "daily occasion of the idle, riotous, and dissolute living of great numbers of people," but still refuses to ban playing: "And yet nevertheless it is considered that the use and exercise of such plays, not being evil in itself, may with good order and moderation be suffered in a well-governed estate" (quoted in Montrose, 63; Chambers, 4:330). In Montrose, "good order and moderation" is made to apply to the populace rather than to the playing companies, and the Council's pragmatic defense of public recreation becomes part of its plan to expand the apparatuses of public control: " . . . with careful regulation, it could be made to serve the interests of the commonweal and the state by inculcating 'good order and moderacion' in its audiences" (64). 10. Janet Clare, "Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority": Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 115. n. Melveena McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 1400-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 185,192. 12. For a Foucauldian analysis of early modern censorship, see Richard Burt, Licensed by Authority: Eenjonson and the Discourses of Censorship (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1-25. While Burt's approach allows him to explain the contradictions in the treatment of dramatists that vex arguments such as Clare's, he does not distinguish sufficiently between the control of writing for the commercial theater and the control of plainly illicit

Notes to Pages 5-8 173

173

writings (Catholic, militant Puritan) that were subjected to an elementary and savage kind of suppression. That difference depends upon how much power a particular kind of writing was seen to have had. Burt argues that the idea of censorship as simply opposed to free expression is peculiarly modern and is not applicable to early modern England. But while I am instructed by his analysis of the continuity between court and market censorship, I suggest that rigorous and consistent state censorship was in fact practiced in Elizabethan and Jacobean times—it just was not applied to the commercial theater. 13. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York and London: Routledge, 1994); Montrose, Purpose of Playing. Of course, the new historicist scene is far more complicated than these brief remarks suggest; Montrose was, with Greenblatt, one of the founders of new historicism and Greenblatt's own position has been complex and changing. It remains true nonetheless that "power" has been the master term of historicist criticism over the past fifteen years. On the topic of "power" in new historicism, see Edward Pechter, What Was Shakespeare? Renaissance Plays and Changing Critical Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 49-86. An important exception to this emphasis in recent criticism is Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 195-245. Helgerson focuses learnedly and powerfully, if one-sidedly, on the particular institutional pressures that led Shakespearean drama to develop what he sees as its antipopulist bias. Also important are two books that relate the institution of the theater to an emergent market economy. See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 14. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 23. 15. Stephen J. Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry F," repr. in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 41. 16. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 3-4. 17. Jonathan Dollimore, Introduction to Political Shakespeare, 9-10. 18. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 18.

174

Notes to Pages 8-12

19. Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie^ in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols., ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1:151. 20. Quoted in R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 180. 21. For Renaissance attempts to rehabilitate poetry, see Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 22. On Jonson's attitude toward theatricalism in general, see Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 132-54; and John Gordon Sweeney Ill^Jonson and the Psychology of the Public Theater (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). 23. On the social position of playwrights, which during the period rose "from an exceedingly low status to a moderately low one," see Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590 -1642 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 38-61; quotation from 57. For a recent discussion of the low status of the playing companies, see Helgerson, Forms of 'Nationhood, 196-204. 24. For an important revisionist analysis of both censorship and the status of plays, see Philip J. Finkelpearl, " 'The Comedians' Liberty': Censorship of the Jacobean Stage Reconsidered," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 123-38. 25. Letter from the Earl of Pembroke to the President of the Privy Council, August 27,1624, quoted in A Game at Chesse, ed. R. C. Bald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 165. 26. Patterson's theory of the "hermeneutics of censorship" figures prominently in my understanding of Shakespeare's theater. I differ from Patterson in that she tends to privilege politically subversive meanings as what the author really meant, whereas I tend to see both subversive and orthodox meanings as manipulations of available political viewpoints. Moreover, where Patterson sees censorship as the principal condition of production of Renaissance drama, I see it as one element in a complex that includes censorship, but also and more importantly, includes the commercial and artistic pressures and opportunities attendant upon the diversity both of audiences and of theatrical venues. A less politically engaged, and more open-ended, model of the production of topical meaning is developed in Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 27. See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespearejs London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 10-11,115-21. 28. See Jackson I. Cope, The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 211-44.

Notes to Pages 13-20

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29. John Lyly, Complete Works, ed. R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 3:241. 30. A Game at Chess, ed. J. W. Harper, New Mermaids (London: Benn, 1966), lines 49-50. All quotations from Game at Chess are from this edition. 31. John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. Bernard Harris, New Mermaids (London: Benn, 1967), 5. On the topicality of The Malcontent, see Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), i84-9332. Lyly, Complete Works, 3:2O. "Apply" means to attempt to relate a work of the imagination to events and persons of the day by means of allegorical interpretation. 33. Commentators agree that she is intended as a complement to Elizabeth: see G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 97; Peter Saccio, The Court Comedies of John Lyly: A Study in Allegorical Dramaturgy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 173; Bevington, Tudor Drama, 178. 34. Critics either have abandoned the idea of political allegory entirely or have formulated highly generalized versions of the play's topical meaning. See Hunter, John Lyly, 186-89; ~Bcvmgton,Tudor Drama, 180-83. 35. Saccio, Court Comedies of John Lyly, 171. 36. On Lyly's multiple audiences, see Hunter, John Lyly, 97-98. 37. On the circumstances surrounding Richard II and the Essex rebellion, see Peter Ure, Introduction to Richard II, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1961), Ivii-lxii. For a critique of the new historicist interpretation of the Richard II anecdote, see J. Leeds Barroll, "A New History for Shakespeare and His Time," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 441-64. 38. Quoted in Ure, Introduction to Richard II, Iviii. 39. Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), 2:115. 40. See Bevington, Tudor Drama, 27-126; and Norman Sanders et al., The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 2, 1500-1576 (London: Methuen, 1980), 12-23. 41. See Wallace MacCaffrey, The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 45-63. 42. See J. Leeds Barroll et al., The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 3,1576-1613 (London: Methuen, 1975), 3-27. 43. In 1581, for example, the Council wrote to the Lord Mayor: "Tendering the relief of these poor men the players and their readiness with convenient matters for her highness's solace this next Christmas, which cannot be without their usual exercise therein. We have therefore thought good to require you forthwith to suffer them to use such plays in such sort and usual places as hath been heretofore accustomed, having careful regard for con-

176

Notes to Pages 20-22

tinuance of such quiet orders in the playing places as tofore you have had" (Chambers, 4:283 - 84). 44. See, for example, the letter, May 3, 1583, from the Lord Mayor to Sir Francis Walsingham (Chambers, 4:294); and also the letter, February 25, 1592, from the Mayor to John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury (Chambers, 4:307-8). 45. See Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, vol. 2, pt. 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 9-29; Button, Master ing the Rev els, 78-81. 46. In 1592, for example, the Mayor sought the assistance of the Archbishop of Canterbury: "In consideration whereof, we most humbly beseech your Grace for your godly care for the reforming of so great abuses tending to the offence of almighty God. . . . And because we understand that the Queen's Majesty is and must be served at certain times by this sort of people, for which purpose she hath granted her letters Patent to Mr. Tilney, Master of her Revels, by virtue whereof he being authorized to reform, exercise, or suppress all manner of players, plays, and playing houses whatsoever, did first license the said playing houses within this city for her Majesty's said service, which before that time lay open to all the statutes for the punishing of these and such like disorders" (Chambers, 4:307-8). 47. Whether or not they also had begun to change their minds concerning the moral character of drama in general is not clear; however, it is worth noting that, in 1600, the Privy Council put the issue to the city in a way that made contradiction nearly impossible. The councillors emphasized the connection between the harmlessness of drama in itself on the one hand and the Queen's fondness for the players on the other: "And yet nevertheless it is considered that the use and exercise of such plays, not being evil in itself, may with a good order and moderation be suffered in a well-governed estate, and that, her Majesty being pleased at some times to take delight and recreation in the sight and hearing of them, some order is fit to be taken for the allowance and maintenance of such persons, as are thought meetest in that kind to yield her Majesty recreation and delight, and consequently of the houses that must serve for public playing to keep them in exercise" (Chambers, 4:330). 48. See Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (1908, repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1961), 178: "During the period [1592-1642] the theaters seem to have been undoubtedly one of the chief gathering points for these vagabonds. . . . The city authorities realized vividly all these troubles. It is notable that throughout the decade this is the argument against plays which the municipality chiefly emphasizes,—that they serve as the rendezvous for rascals. . .. The Puritan contention that theatrical performances are in themselves sinful, and draw down the wrath of God, is scarcely brought forward,—in contrast to the course of the argument during the years 1580-1584." See also the letter, April 12, 1607, from the Lord Mayor to the Earl of Suffolk (Chambers, 4:339); Wickham, Early English Stages, 2:2:23 -29.

Notes to Pages 22- 33

177

49. For a provocative study of the politics of the Caroline theater, see Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 50. For the inconsistency and permissiveness of censorship, see F. J. Levy, "Review of Dangerous Matter, English Drama and Politics in 1623/24 et al.," Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 294-306; and Button, Mastering the Revels. 51. Finkelpearl, "Censorship," 123-24. 52. Ure, Introduction to Richard II, Iviii-ix. 53. For Thomas Scot, see Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 155-57. For further comparisons between government treatment of literary and nonliterary writers, see Gildersleeve, Government Regulation, 134; and Finkelpearl, "Censorship."

Chapter2. Desdemon^s Voice: Historical Interpretation and the Operations of Minds 1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed. rev., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), 300. 2. Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. "Jackson, Henry." 3. Jackson's letter is reproduced in Geoffrey Tillotson, "Othello and The Alchemist at Oxford in 1610," Times Literary Supplement) no. 1642, July 20,1933, 494. The letter and the translation used here can be found in Riverside, 1852. 4. I take up the question of the conditions of the production of Shakespeare's women characters in Chapter 6. 5. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (1904; repr., London: Macmillan, 1964), 145. 6. See the survey of nineteenth-century attacks on Desdemona in Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Othello: The Search for the Identity of Othello, lago, and Desdemona by Three Centuries of Actors and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 206-17. 7. Helena Faucit Martin, On Desdemona ([Edinburgh]: William Blackwood and Sons, for private circulation, [1881]), 90-91; emphasis in original. 8. Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 141. 9. For a discussion of new historicism's slighting of the theatricality of early modern drama, see Anthony B. Dawson, "The Impasse over the Stage," English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 309-27.

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Notes to Pages 35-43

10. Jean E. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 23-24. 11. For the "repressive hypothesis," see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality', vol. i, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 15-49. 12. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 36. 13. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972 -1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 98. 14. Foucault, History of Sexuality ^ 157. 15. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 27. 16. Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 274. 17. Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject, vol. 55 of Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5. 18. An alternative angle of view that includes persons as well as the operations of power is formulated, somewhat diffidently, by Louis Adrian Montrose in his "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture" (in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser [New York and London: Routledge, 1989]), 30: "The possibility of political and institutional agency cannot be based upon the illusion of an escape from ideology. However, the very process of subjectively living the confrontations or contradictions within or among ideologies makes it possible to experience facets of our own subjection at shifting internal distances—to read, as in a refracted light, one fragment of our ideological inscription by means of another. A reflexive knowledge so partial and unstable may, nevertheless, provide subjects with a means of empowerment as agents." 19. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, 250. 20. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 128. 21. Foucault, Archaeology, 129. 22. I am referring to E. D. Hirsch Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967); for critiques, see Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher} Dilthy, Hei-

} and Gadamer (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1969),

60-68; and Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 256-80. 23. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), i. 24. I am referring to Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare and the Exorcists," repr., in Shakespearean Negotiations, 94-128; Louis Adrian Mon-

Notes to Pages 43-48

179

trose, " 'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," Representations 2 (1983): 61-94; and Karen Newman, "Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare's Timing of the Shrew" in Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 33-50. 25. See Louis Adrian Montrose, "Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 5-12, for a succinct statement concerning new historicism's project "to resituate canonical literary texts among the multiple forms of writing, and in relation to the nondiscursive practices and institutions, of the social formation in which those texts have been produced" (6). 26. For rigorous critiques of the new historicist failure to account for significant differences within culture, see Carolyn Porter, "Are We Being Historical Yet?" South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988): 743-86; and James Holstun, "Ranting at the New Historicism," English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 189-225. 27. For examples of this assumption, see Mullaney, Place of the Stage, 96-97,103; and Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 2. 28. I take the word "seamless" from Leonard Tennenhouse, "Representing Power: Measure for Measure in Its Time," The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 141. 29. Louis Adrian Montrose, "The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology," Helios n.s. 7 (1979-80): 68.

Chapter 3. The Knowledge Marketplace 1. Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare3s Theater, 8. 2. Quoted in Clare, "Art Made Tongue-Tied" 11-12. Emphasis added. 3. The Three Parnassus Plays', ed. J. B. Leishman (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1949). See extracts in Riverside, 1837-38 4. Mr. Secretary Conway to the Privy Council, August 12,1624; Privy Council to Conway, August 21,1624, in Appendix A, A Game at Chesse, ed. R. C. Bald, 159-160,162. 5. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. J. S. Cunningham, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), in. 6. Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 132-54; Helgerson, Laureates, 101-84; Timothy Murray, Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France (New York: Oxford University

i8o

Notes to Pages 48-58

Press, 1987), 23-93; Joseph Loewenstein, "The Script in the Marketplace," Representations 12 (1985): 101-14. 7. Murray, Theatrical Legitimation, 71. 8. A similar point is made in passing by Michael D. Bristol, Carnival find Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York and London: Routledge, 1985), 117. For an in-depth study of how Jonson uses antitheatricalism selectively in a project of theatrical legitimation, see Burt, Licensed by Authority. 9. For The Alchemist's first venue, see F. H. Mares, Introduction to The Alchemist, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1967), Ixiii-lxv. 10. Helgerson, Laureates^ 47. 11. John Webster, The Duchess ofMalfi^ ed. John Russell Brown, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1964), 4. 12. David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 18-19. 13. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 223-24. 14. E. Pearlman makes a similar point about Jonson's violence in his "Ben Jonson: An Anatomy," English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 368. 15. Details about Middleton's life are drawn largely from Mark Eccles, "Middleton's Birth and Education," Review of English Studies 7 (1931): 43141; and Eccles, " 'Thomas Middleton a Poett,'" Studies in Philology 54 (1957): 516-36. 16. See Mildred G. Christian, "Middleton's Residence at Oxford," Modern Language Notes 61 (1946): 90-91; and David George, "Thomas Middleton at Oxford," Modern Language Review 65 (1970): 734-36. 17. Middleton had enough funds to keep him at Oxford through to his twenty-first birthday in 1601, at which time he was going to inherit twentyfive pounds, certainly sufficient for his final year (see Eccles, "'Middleton a Poett,'" 524-26). For the annual cost of university education, see Lawrence Stone, "The Educational Revolution in England, 1560-1640," PastandPresentzZ (1964): 71. 18. For salaries of teachers, see Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 124-25; for clerics, see Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of the Church: From Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 113. 19. Stone, "Educational Revolution," 70. For percentages of gentleman graduates to nongraduates, see Charlton, Education, 138; and Mark H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-164-2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 12720. According to Stone, "Educational Revolution," 60, it was not uncommon for sons of the gentry to matriculate plebeifilius in order to pay the reduced fees.

Notes to Pages 58-66

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21. Gerald Eades Bentley, Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961), 36-42. 22. Riggs, Benjonson, 20-21, 240-67. 23. For John Shakespeare's "rise and fall" in business, see S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 30-44. 24. Details of Jonson's early life are drawn from Riggs, Benjonson, 917; and HSS, 1:1-4. 25. For the socially conditioned differences between Donne and Jonson as, respectively, amateur and laureate writers, see Helgerson, Laureates^ 2535; see Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 3-24, for a discussion of the conditions of the production of coterie verse. 26. Compare Donne's treatment of the relations between an aristocratic performance and a popular audience in "The Extasie," in which the "pure lovers' souls" are seen to "descend" into the cognitive range of "weak men," or in "Ecclogue," where the bride consents to make visible her transcendent beauty: "Thus thou descend'st to our infirmity" in Complete Poetry, ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), 132,183. In neither case is popular reception of any consequence; on the contrary, aristocratic meaning is inherent and inviolable. 27. R. C. Bald, "Middleton's Civic Employments," Modern Philology 31 (1933-34): 65-78, provides information on remuneration. 28. Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre. 29. Conrad Russell, "Parliamentary History in Perspective, 16041629," History 61 (1976): 18; see also Kevin Sharpe, "Parliamentary History, 1603-1629: In or Out of Perspective?" in Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, ed. Sharpe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 1-42. 30. See Fulke Greville, "Life of Sir Philip Sidney," in Selected Writings, ed. Joan Rees (London: Athlone Press, 1973), 150-51. 31. Robert Weimann, "Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theatre," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 406.

Chapter 4. Instituting Mirth in Renaissance Comedy 1. See Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvellj and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1-63, for an excellent discussion of the politics of mirth in terms of a cultural model whose center of power is the monarchy. 2. For Measure as a play on the side of authority, see Tennenhouse, "Representing Power," 139-56. For Measure as speaking for subversion,

182

Notes to Pages 66-73

see Louise Schleiner, "Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure" PMLA 97 (1982): 227-36. 3. See, for example, Anne Barton (Eighter), Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 154-55. 4. Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeareys Genres (London: Methuen, 1986), 164. 5. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare^s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959; repr., Cleveland and New York: Meridian, 1968); Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, trans. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Bristol, Carnival and Theater. 6. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 60. 7. For a discussion of city comedy as a large-scale attempt to resolve the ideological contradictions between commerce and celebration, see Susan Wells, "Jacobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City," ELH^ (1981): 37-60. My discussion differs from Wells's in that I focus on the contradictions within the theater itself whereas Wells focuses on how the theater—by virtue of its assumed vantage point over contradiction—was able to provide recuperative models for its society. 8. John Stow, A Survay of* London, ed. Henry Morley (London: Routledge, 1890), 117-19. 9. Of course, even theater conceived of as contentless sport might be seen as politically significant inasmuch as sport can be viewed as a form of political control over the people. King James's collocation of plays and games is no doubt informed by this politicized view of sport: "For I cannot see what greater superstition can be in making plays and lawful games in May, and good cheer at Christmas . . . And . . . this form of contenting the people's minds, hath been used in all well-governed republics." Quoted in Marcus, Politics of Mirth, 3. 10. For Stow's nostalgic idealization of London, see Wells, "Jacobean City Comedy," 43-44. 11.ForadiscussionofthepopulistcountertextofDream,seeBristol, Carnival and Theater, 172-78. See also the analysis of the play's negotiations, within an aristocratic optical regime in Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 154-91. 12. Barber, Festive Comedy, 149. 13. References to A Mad World, My Masters are to the Regents Renaissance Drama Series edition, ed. Standish Henning (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). 14. The irony of the mother's speech is compounded by the facts that

Notes to Pages 73-80 183

183

the women were played by boys, and that the male actors impersonating women were subject to condemnation for effeminacy and homosexuality. So "made" in "We had been made women forever" is not only the adjective "successful" or "secure," but also the verb "made into." This irony releases the ironic ambiguity of the word "backward," linking this metatheatrical double entendre with the play's recurrent interest in "Italian" love and gender-switching (see 3.3.58-62,103-15). 15. Emphasis added; see also 5.1.40,55-58. 16. I am indebted to Anthony B. Dawson's discussion of "The Slip" in "Giving the Finger: Puns and Transgression in The Changeling," Elizabethtin Theatre 12 (1993): 93-112. 17. For a related account of Measure's inward turn, see Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, 103-15. Mullaney's analysis differs from mine in that he reads the inward turn (in a Foucauldian way) as doing political work rather than work specific to the institution of the theater. On a related topic, Measure's representation of theater in terms of conversionary work (supervised by a duke, to boot!) serves to alleviate the degrading working-day reality of the playhouse. Rather than projecting "work" onto inferior players (as in Dream), Measure is able to spiritualize and gentrify work. Cf. Jonson's distaste for the tradesman-class ethos of the theater in "Ode to Himself": The stagers, and the stage-wrights too; your peers, Of stuffing your large ears With rage of comic socks, Wrought upon twenty blocks. (Parfitt, 283) Jonson alludes to Pericles by name in "Ode"; is he also remembering Isabella's hyperbolical "twenty heads to tender down / On twenty bloody blocks" (Measure, 2.4.180-81)? 18. On the conventional polemical linking of theater and illicit sexual activity, see ^-&r\s}\,Antitheatrical Prejudice, 80-89. 19. See Af Tou Like It, 1.2.23-29. 20. Barton (Righter), Idea of the Play, 153-62. 21. Cf. lonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson., Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 234. With regard to the ideology of monetary value in Measure, it should be noted that, in Tudor England and in Jacobean Ireland, the marketplace rather than the royal countenance often served to underwrite the value of the coinage. On several occasions, the government attempted to debase the coinage by reducing or removing its precious metal content; on such occasions, market forces took over and had the effect of forcing the monarch to restore the precious metal content of the coinage.

184

Notes to Pages 80-90

Measure's audience would have been aware that the value of coinage did not necessarily depend exclusively on royal authority. See C. E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 81-112; for the crisis in Irish currency (which James alleviated), see Baldwin Maxwell, "Middleton's The Phoenix," in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James G. McManaway et al. (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), 743-53. 22. For sensible arguments for the connection between Vincentio and King James, see J. W. Lever, Introduction to Measure for Measure, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1967), xlviii-li; Goldberg, Politics of Literature, 2,31-39. 23. James Shapiro observes that Jonson desisted from open tilting at Shakespeare so long as he was writing for the King's Servants. Bartholomew Fair was performed by the Lady Elizabeth's company. See his Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, I99i), 15524. All quotations from Bartholomew Fair are from E. A. Horsman's edition, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1960). 25. One way to explain Jonson's handling of comic energy in Bartholomew Fair is to consider how the play mixes together different types of the form. The play is both festive like Dream and satirical like Mad World. In "Bartholomew Fair as Urban Arcadia: Jonson Responds to Shakespeare," Renaissance Drama n.s. 14 (1983): 151-72, Thomas Cartelli suggests that the play is "a satire that is 'festive'" primarily because of Jonson's anxious literary relationship with Shakespeare; and in separate studies, Jonathan Haynes, The Social Relations of Jonson's Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 119-38, and Leah Marcus, Politics of Mirth, 24-63, map the competing foulness and fairness of the play in relation to histories of public festivity. My focus is broader than Cartelli's and narrower than Haynes's and Marcus's. I explain Jonson's festive satire in relation to a history of comic forms and in light of Jonson's project of politicizing the theater. 26. For the relationship between Bartholomew Fair and The Winter's Tale, see Burt, Licensed by Authority, 78-114. Also see Alvin Kernan's brief but insightful remarks in The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 3,15761613, ed. J. Leeds Barroll et al. (London: Methuen, 1975), 456-58. 27. See Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 205-6. 28. A. D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare's The Tempest and the Logic of Allegorical Expression (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 157,15929. The Works of John Dry den, general ed. H. T. Swedenberg Jr., 19 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962-79), 10:6. 30. As Ian Donaldson notes, the black box's theatrical career continued at least up to Congreve's The Way of the World (1700). See his The World

Notes to Pages 90-95

185

Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 144-4531. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Mulryne, New Mermaids (rev. ed. London: A & C Black; New York: Norton, 1989), 3.5.

Chapters. Reflections of Theater in the "Tragic Glass" from Marlowe to Middleton 1. For the reputation of Sejanus, see Philip J. Ayres, Introduction to Ben Jonson, Sejanus, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 22-28. T. S. Eliot is the most famous of Hamlet's detractors; see "Hamlet" (1919) and "Postscript" (1933) in Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (repr., Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1963), 98-104. In Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), Gerald Eades Benrley argues that Jonson stood higher than Shakespeare, and that "not Hamlet, Lear, Othello, or Macbeth, but Catiline, was the premier English tragedy in the minds of seventeenth-century writers" (2:112). Benrley's views have been contested by E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare** Impact on His Contemporaries (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 40-45. 2. For a brief history of comparative reputations of Jonson and Shakespeare, see Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson/Jonson and Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 1-16. 3. I am indebted to three studies of "the self" in Jonson and/or Shakespeare: Thomas M. Greene, "Jonson and the Centered Self," Studies in English Literature 10 (1970): 325-48; Lawrence Danson, "Jonsonian Comedy and the Discovery of the Social Self," PMLA 99 (1984): 179-93; and Edward Pechter, "Julius Caesar and Sejanus: Roman Politics, Inner Selves and the Powers of the Theatre," in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Essays in Comparison, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 60-78. 4. See A. P. Rossiter, Angels with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (London: Longmans, 1961), 177, 186. Cf. Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 54~735. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 60. 6. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1985). Also see Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays

186

Notes to Pages 95-111

on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984); Terence Hawkes, "Telmah," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 310-32; Margreta de Grazia, "The Motive for Interiority: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Hamlet" Style 23 (1989): 430-44. 7. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995). 8. All quotes from Sejanus are from the Revels edition, ed. Ayres. 9. All quotes from Women Beware Women are from the Revels edition, ed. J. R. Mulryne (London: Methuen, 1975). 10. For this reading of Coriolanus, see Dollimore, Radical Tragedy', 218-30. 11. Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (1579; fascim. repr., New York and London: Garland, 1973), Cy. 12. All quotes from Tamburlaine are from the Revels edition, ed. J. S. Cunningham. 13. Edmund Rudierde, quoted in C. E Tucker Brooke, ed., The Life of Marlowe and The Tragedy of Dido (1930; repr., New York: Gordian, 1966), 113. 14. Quoted in Brooke, Life of Marlowe, 104. 15. My idea of Marlovian interpretive oscillation owes a debt to Joel B. Airman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 321-88. 16. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 200. 17. C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 4918. Gabriel Harvey commented that Hamlet had that in it "to please the wiser sort"; quoted in Harold Jenkins, "'Hamlet' Then Till Now," Shakespeare Survey 18 (1965): 35. 19. See Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 80-115. 20. Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of the Drama (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 81. 21. On this tradition, see Jenkins, "'Hamlet' Then Till Now," 37-41. 22. There are of course notable exceptions, among which are formalist studies such as E. E. Stoll, Art and Artifice in Shakespeare: A Study in Dramatic Contrast and Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 90-137; and C. S. Lewis, "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?" 1942; repr., in Studies in Shakespeare: British Academy Lectures•, ed. Peter Alexander (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 201-18. 23. Greene, "Centered Self," 330. 24. Greene, "Centered Self," 333~34.

Notes to Pages 112-20

187

25. J. H. M. Salmon, "Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England," in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 179-80. 26. Annabel Patterson, "'Roman-cast Similitude': Ben Jonson and the English Use of History," in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 381-94. 27. Most scholars suggest that the play alluded to the downfall of Essex. See Patterson, " 'Roman-cast similitude," 384. Ayres, Introduction to Sejanus (16-22), argues that Jonson was censured for drawing invidious parallels between the show trial of Caius Silius and the treason trial of Walter Raleigh. 28. It is interesting that the "bad" quarto of 1603 recasts this opening exchange in terms of conventional characterization and "public" subjectivity by changing Barnardo's pronoun: "i. Stand: who is that? / 2. Tis I." 29. Sweeney, Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater, 47-69. 30. Shakespeare, of course, got the epithet from North's translation of Plutarch, but Plutarch is not prominent among Jonson's sources and, in any case, the epithet—if it was heard as an echo at all—would have reminded the 1603 Globe audience of Julius Caesar rather than of Plutarch. Pechter, "Roman Politics," 69, cites this and other echoes of Julius Caesar in Sejanus. 31. Anthony Dawson, "Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape," Studies in English Literature 27 (1987): 316. 32. The historical evidence suggests some competition between Middleton and Jonson. Middleton borrowed, to critical effect, from Jonson's "Masque of Hymen" on several occasions; Jonson called Middleton "not of the number of the faithful, i.e. poets, and but a base fellow" (Parfitt, 465); in The Staple of News (1626), Jonson excoriated Middleton's Game at Chess because in writing it Middleton had capitalized on Jonson's masque Nept^ine:>s Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624), which, incidentally, was never performed, its place at court on the night scheduled for performance being supplied by Middleton's More Dissemblers Besides Women. See my "A Game at Chess: Thomas Middleton's 'Praise of Folly,'" Modern Language Quarterly 48 (1987): 107-2333. For Middleton's use of Jonson's Hymenaei, see Mulryne's notes, Women, 5.2.50, 97,117,138. 34. For the Calvinist Middleton, see Irving Ribner, Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order (London: Methuen, 1962), 123-52; and John Stachniewski, "Calvinist Psychology in Middleton's Tragedies," in Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies The Revenger's Tragedy, Women Beware Women, The Changeling: A Casebook, ed. R. V. Holdsworth (London: Macmillan, 1990), 226-47. For the sociological Middleton, see Dawson, "Economy of Rape"; and Laura Bromley, "Men and Women Beware: Social, Political, and Sexual Anarchy in Women Beware Women" Iowa State Journal of Research 61

i88

Notes to Pages 120-31

(1987): 311-21. Margot Heinemann reads Women as a sociologically framed attack on the upper classes; see her Puritanism and Theatre., 172-74,180-99. 35. See Verna Ann Foster, "The Deed's Creature: The Tragedy of Bianca in Women Beware Women,"Journal of English and Germanic Philology 78 (1979): 508-21. 36. Dawson, "Economy of Rape," 316. 37. For an argument that the Cardinal establishes an authoritative Christian frame of reference, see J. B. Batchelor, "The Pattern of Women Beware Women" Yearbook of English Studies 2 (1972): 80. 38. For readings of Women as oppositional, see Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre, 180-99; and Albert H. Tricomi, Anticourt Drama in England, 1603-1642 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 72-79. 39. Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang; London: Methuen, 1964), 87.

Chapter 6. "Gargantua's Mouth": Orality, Voice,, and, the Gender of Theatrical Power 1. A. S., The Husbandman, Farmer and Grasier's Compleat Instructor (London, 1697), 148. 2. Conrad Heresbach, The Whole Art of Husbandry Contained in Four Books, trans. Barnabe Googe, enlarged and corrected by Gervase Markham (London, 1631), 309-10. Heresbach's instructions continue: "first take them as soon as their dams forsake them or that they be able to defend themselves, and put them into a pen that is low and not too much cloyed with light, then take wheat meal bran and all [sic] to mixing it with new milk. Make a stiff dough thereof and out of it make your crams, then steeping them in milk, cram the chickens therewith morning, noon, and night and have great care to have your crams very small for fear of choking . . . in fourteen days they will be as fat as they can wallow." 3. For a discussion of Leontes and Hermione's displacement of the sexual onto the oral, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 268-69. 4. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 92-110. 5. Two psychoanalytic essays on the sexual politics of Winter's Tale to which I am indebted are Peter Erickson, "The Limitations of Reformed Masculinity in The Winters Tale" in Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 148-72; and Janet

Notes to Pages 131-40

189

Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 219-37. 6. Jyotsna Singh, "Renaissance Antitheatricality, Antifeminism, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra" Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 117; also see Phyllis Rackin, "Shakespeare's Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry," PMLA 87 (1972): 201-12. 7. Jean Howard, "Renaissance Antitheatricality and the Politics of Gender and Rank in Much Ado about Nothing" in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (London: Methuen, 1987), 168. 8. Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, 1f6-1f6v. 9. For the supposed centrality of the antitheatricalist fear of transexuality, see Laura Levine, "Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642," Criticism 28 (1986): 121-43. 10. Gosson, Schoole of Abuse, 63. 11. Kathleen McLuskie, "The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure" in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 88-108. 12. Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind., 1540 -1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984)5258. 13. Francois Rabelais, Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and his Son Pantagruel, trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux, 3 vols. (1653; repr., London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), i: 105-7. 14. Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations 14 (1986): 1-16. Also see his expanded account of the history of sexual difference, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). 15. Laqueur, "Politics of Reproductive Biology," 3; Patricia Parker, "Gender Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germain," Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 339-40. See also Katharine Park and Robert A. Nye, "Destiny is Anatomy," review of Making Sex, by Laqueur, New Republic, February 18,1991, 53-57; and Paster, Body Embarrassed, 16-17, 79~84, passim. 16. Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 2-3. 17. Quoted in Maclean, Notion of Woman, 40. 18. See Laqueur, "Politics of Reproductive Biology," 1-7; Maclean, Notion of Woman, 28-46; and Stephen Greenblatt, "Fiction and Friction," in Shakespearean Negotiations, 73-86. 19. See Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies," 72-73. See also

190

Notes to Pages 140-51

his recent book Purpose of 'Playing', 124-44. The newer version of the argument takes somewhat into account the complexity of Shakespeare's views, and more fully the controversy about the biology of reproduction in early modern England, but it reiterates the earlier claim that Shakespeare articulates centrally the theory that male seed is the efficient cause of procreation: "A Midsummer Night's Dream dramatizes a set of claims that are repeated in various registers—and not without challenge—throughout the Shakespearean canon: claims for a spiritual kinship among men that is unmediated by women; for the procreative powers of men; for the autogeny of men" (Purpose of Playing 144)- To construct Shakespeare's multiform representation of reproduction as "a set of claims . . . not without challenge" is to assume that he held a coherent position on the issue and that he was centrally interested in the question of biological reproduction in its own right. The fact that there are very different versions in Shakespeare suggests rather that he was less interested in reproduction per se than in how it might signify in particular dramatic contexts and with respect to the value of his feminized dramatic art. 20. The complexity of Shakespeare's view is signaled by the Florizel's mother's active role in "printing off" a copy of her husband. Thanks to Stephen Guy-Bray for pointing this out to me. 21. Note that this passage is introduced by Pericles taking on the role of a parturient woman: "I am great with woe, and shall deliver weeping." 22. See Maclean, Notion of Woman, 37. 23. Patricia Parker, "On the Tongue: Cross-Gendering, Effeminacy, and the Art of Words," Style 23 (1989): 451. 24. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations', 7-8. See also Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia, 1985), 138-3925. Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women (London, 1620), £4. 26. Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), 1.12, p. 49. 27. [Joseph Swetnam], The Arraignment ofLewde, Idle, Fraward, and Unconstant Women (London, 1615), A3. 28. For the embodied nature of women and the spiritual nature of men in Shakespeare, see Phyllis Rackin, "Foreign Country: The Place of Women and Sexuality in Shakespeare's Historical World," in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 68-95. 29. See Barbara J. Bono's discussion of "a female 'double-voiced' discourse . . . one that simultaneously acknowledges its dependence on the male and implies its own unique positive value," in "Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare's As Tou Like It" in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Harvard English Studies 14 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 189-212. Also see

Notes to Pages 151-62

191

Jean E. Howard, "Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 434-35. 30. Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, ed. R. V. Holdsworth, New Mermaids (London: Ernest Benn; New York: Norton, 1970). All citations refer to this edition. See Holdsworth's gloss on 2.2.114: "tother youth. Probably Shakespeare: by 1609 it must have been as commonplace to compare the two leading dramatists of the time as it became after the Restoration." Cf. HSS, 9:17. 31. Riggs, Ben Jonson, 147-57. For the Queen's political and cultural influence, see J. Leeds Barroll, "The Court of the First Stuart Queen," in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 191-208. 32. Riggs, Ben Jonson, 153. 33. HSS, 10:34, points out that, in her letters, the Countess of Bedford addressed Lady Cornwallis by her surname just as Lady Haughty addresses "Morose." 34. La Foole explains to Clerimont how Daw draws "maps of persons" such as "the Prince of Moldavia, and of his mistress, Mistress Epicoene" (5.1.20-21). The passage seems to allude to rumors of a plot to carry out a secret marriage. According to the dispatch of the Venetian ambassador, February 8,1610, "Lady Arabella is seldom seen outside her rooms and lives in greater dejection than ever. She complains that in a certain comedy the playwright introduced an allusion to her person and the part played by the Prince of Moldavia. The play was suppressed. Her Excellency is very ill-pleased and shows a determination in this coming Parliament to secure the punishment of certain persons, we don't know who" (quoted in HSS, 5:146). 35. Quoted in Newman, Fashioning Femininity, 10. 36. [Thomas Tomkis], Lingua: Or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Sensesfor Superiority (London, 1607), 5.19. 37. Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare's Talking Animals: Language and Drama in Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 157. 38. That Jonson could not find an adequate class position for the activity of playwriting is indicated by his own ambivalence toward the gallant trio of Truewit, Dauphine, and Clerimont. Dauphine is not open with his friends, and Truewit and Clerimont are competitive and guarded with each other. See Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist, 129-30. 39. John Northbrooke, A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine playes or enterludes. . . are reproved (1577?; facsim. repr., New York and London: Garland, 1974), 62. 40. All quotations from More Dissemblers Besides Women refer to Bullen, vol. 6.1 am indebted to Inga-Stina Ewbank's discussion of the construction and deconstruction of textualized characters in the play and also her remarks on intertextual relations between the play and its Shakespearean pre-

192

Notes to Pages 162-69

cursors, especially HamleP, see her "The Middle of Middleton," in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama: Essays for G. K. Hunter, ed. Murray Biggs et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 156-72. 41. [Swttn.zm\, Arraignment, 4-5. 42. Swetnam the Woman-Hater, E4v. See David Lake, "The Date of More Dissemblers Besides Women" Notes and Queries n.s. 221 (1976): 219-21. Lake adduces Arraignment and Swetnam the Woman-Hater, among other texts and events, as contextual evidence for the date of the play. 43. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist. trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 360. 44. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 199. 45. Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Anthony Parr, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 71.

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Index

actors, and homosexuality, 182-83 n-i4 Adelman, Janet, 188-89 n.5 Althusser, Louis, 39 Altman, Joel B., 186 n.15 Anatomic of Abuses, The (Stubbes), 134 Anne (Queen of England), 153,155 antitheatricalism, and gender, 133-34. See also Jonson, Ben; Shakespeare, William Apologie for Poetrie, An (Sidney), 8 Aristotle, no, 139,142 Arraignment ofLewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, The (Swetnam), 148,163 audience: gentrifying representations of, 73; indentificatory investments by, 125-26; Jonson's configuration of, 161; Jonson's relations with, 88; production of meaning by, 10,16 Aurelia (character), 166-69 Axton, Marie, 171 n.5 Ayres, Philip J., 187 n.27 Bale, John, 17,100 Barber, C. L., 69, 72,103 Barish, Jonas, 48-50,174 n.22 Barroll, J. Leeds, 46,171 n.7,17511.37, 191 n.3i Barton, Anne, 79,191 n.38 Batchelor, J. B., 188 n.37 Becon, Thomas, 158 Bedford, Countess of (Lucy Russell), 153, 155 Belsey, Catherine, 95 Bentley, Gerald Eades, 174 n.23,185 n.i Bevington, David, 171 n.5

Blackfriars playhouse, 50 Bono, Barbara J., 190 n.28 Book of Sir Thomas More, The, 4 Bradley, A. C., 26, 29-34 Brecht, Bertolt, 127 Bristol, Michael D., 69,180 n.8,182 n.n Bulstrode, Cecilia, 153-55 Burt, Richard, 172-73 n.i2,180 n.8 Butler, Martin, 177 n.49 Camden, William, 59 Cartelli, Thomas, 184 n.25 Catechisme (Becon), 158 Celia (character), 150 censorship: permissiveness of, 22-23; of playtexts, 4; views of, 171 nn. 5, 7,172— 73 n.i2,174 n.26. See also Characterization; Jonson, Ben; Master of the Revels; Theater Challis,C. E.,i84n.2i Chapman, George, 4 characterization, style of: in Jonson, 9394,114-15; in Kyd, 91; in Middleton, 94,120-21; in Shakespeare, 77, 93-94, 100,109, in, 114-15; and censorship, 109 Charles (King of England), 22 Chodorow, Nancy, 131 Clare, Janet, 4-5 comedy, energy of, 83,184 n.25 Compton, William (Baron), 58 Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, The (Chapman), 4 Conway, Edward (Secretary, Privy Council),47 Cornwallis, William, 112

206

Index

Court of Aldermen, 19 crisis of representation, 103 culture and symbolic marketplace, 45 Daniel, Samuel, 4,100 Danson, Lawrence, 185 n.3 Dawson, Anthony B., 119-20,177 n.9, 183 n.i6 Dekker, Thomas, 9,18 Desdemona (character), 26-34,132 Digges, Leonard, 93 Dollimore, Jonathan, 6-7,18, 95 Donaldson, Ian, 184-85 n.3o Donne, John, 8,59-60,181 n.26 drama: attenuation of political allegory in, 15,17; depoliticization of, 66; dialectical nature of, 17; localized meaning of, 25; redescriptions of, 62-64; topicality of, 23. See also Literature; Poetry; Theater Drummond, William, 53 Dryden, John, 88 Duchess of Malfi (character), 163-64 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster), 164 Dudley, Robert. See Leicester, Earl of (Robert Dudley) Dutton, Richard, 171 Eliot, T. S., 185 n.i Elizabeth (Queen of England), 18-20 Emblemes (Quarles), 146-47 Endimion (Lyly), 14-15,17 Erickson, Peter, 188 n.5 Essex, Earl of (Robert Devereux), 16,58, 112 Ewbank, Inga-Stina, 191—92 n.4O face and grace. See Representation, theatrical model of Faucit Martin, Helena, 26, 30-31 Finkelpearl, Philip J., 174 n.24,175 n.3i First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, The (Hayward), 23,112 Foucault, Michel, 36-40 Freedman, Barbara, 182 n.u

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xiii, xv, 26, 42 gender: representation of, in Jonson, 159; representation of, in Shakespeare, 140-41; and theatrical legitimation, 135; theories of, 138-39. See also Women, Lord Chamberlain Genemtione Animctlium, De (Aristotle), 142 Globe playhouse, 116,118 Goldberg, Jonathan, 183 n.2i Goldman, Michael, no Gorboduc (Norton and Sackville), 100 Gosson, Stephen, 100,133 Greenblatt, Stephen, 6-7,42-43,102, 144,173 n.i3 Greene, Thomas, in, 185 n.3 Greville, Fulke, 63,100 Habermas, Jiirgen, 38 Hamlet (character), 10-11 Harvey, Gabriel, 186 n.i8 Hawkes, Terence, 159 Haynes, Jonathan, 184 n.25 Hayward, John, 5,23,112 Heinemann, Margot, 61,188 n.34 Helgerson, Richard, 48,51,169,173 n.i3, 174 n.2i Henslowe, Philip, 71 Heresbach, Conrad, 130 hermeneutics, and Foucauldian archaeology, 40-43 Hermione (character), 129-32 Heywood, Thomas, 9 Hirsch,E. D.Jr.,42 history: and consciousness, 35,42; dialectical nature of, 35; dialectical nature of knowledge of, 25; nature of, 25-26 Holstun, James, 179 n.26 Honigmann, E. A. J., 185 n.i Hope playhouse, 69 Howard, Jean E., 6,133 interpretation, and cultural change, 31 Jackson, Henry, 26-31,47,132 James (King of England), 9, 89

Index Jaques (character), 147-48 Jones, Richard (publisher), 48 Jonson, Ben, 13-14; antitheatricality of, xi-xii; background of, xv; and censorship, 47,63 - 64; and conversional theater, 86-87; female patronage of, 135, 153; and Kyd, 82; metatheatricality of, compared with Shakespeare's, 85; politicized theater of, 94,112-13; reputation of, compared with Shakespeare's, 93-94; rewriting of Shakespeare in, in; self-legitimation of, 50-51; selfpromotion of, 52; and Shakespeare, xv-xvi, 82; status of, 58-60; Tacitean history in, 112; topicality of drama of, 156; violent tendencies of, 53-55; "visual authorship" of, 87-92; works: The Alchemist, 48-50,67; "Apologetical Dialogue," Poetaster, 113; Bartholomew Fair, 65-67,69, 82-92,156; Catiline, 93; Conversations, 155; Discoveries, 8, 109; Eastward Hoi, 3,46; Epicoene, 137, 152-62,167; Epigram 49,5i; "Epigram of the Court Pucell," 154; Hymenaei, 48,119,141-42; The Isle of Dogs, 3; The Magnetic Lady, xii; "Masque of Beauty," 153; Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion, 13; The New Inn, xi-xii, 60; "Ode to Himself," xi, 60, 183 n.i7; "An Ode. To Himself," 24, 113; "On Lucy Countess of Bedford," 154; Sejanus, 93, 95, 97,100-101, ui19,126,156; The Staple of News, 169; A Tale of a Tub, xii; Volpone, 51; The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, xii, 9,4-6. See also Audience; Middleton, Thomas; Shakespeare, William; Tragedy Kernan, Alvin, 184 n.26 Kingjohan (Bale), 17,100 King's Servants, 9, 26, 79. See also Lord Chamberlain's Servants Kyd, Thomas, 82, 90-91,101 Laqueur, Thomas, 138 Leicester, Earl of (Robert Dudley), 21

207

Lever, J. W., 184 n.22 Levine, Laura, 189 n.9 Levy, F. J., 177 n.5O Lingua (Tomkis), 158 literature: and libel laws, 23; mystification of, 24; and nonliterary press, 2324; and political allegory, 13; and popular festivity, 69; and theater, 33; value of, xiii-xiv. See also Drama; Poetry; Theater Loewenstein, Joseph, 48 Lord Chamberlain's Servants, 16-17. See also King's Servants Lyly, John, 14-15,18 Macready, William Charles, 31 Malcontent, The (Marston), 4,14 Marcus, Leah S., 174 n.26,181 n.i, 184 n.25 Marlowe, Christopher, 48,52, 94,100106,109,119-20,124 Marotti, Arthur F., 181 n.25 Marston, John, 4,14 Master of the Revels, 21-22. See also Censorship; Theater; Tilney, Edmund materialist criticism: historiography of, 6; institutional agenda of, 34. See also New historicism; Power; Tragedy Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 95-96 Maxwell, Baldwin, 184 n.2i McDonald, Russ, 185 n.2 McLuskie, Kathleen, 134 Midas (Lyly), 18 Middleton, Thomas: background of, xv, 180 n.i7; borrowings from Jonson in, 187 n.32; critique of Shakespeare in, 165; and Jonson and Shakespeare, xvi; and Marlowe, xvi; rewriting of Jonson and Shakespeare in, 123; selflegitimation of, 51-52; upbringing and status of, 55-58,60-61; works: The Ant and the Nightingale (Father Hubbard's Tales), 56-57; The Changeling (with Rowley), 62, 99; "Epistle," The Duchess ofMalfi, 62; The Family of Love, 61; A Game at Chess, 4, 9,13, 23,

208

Index

Middleton, Thomas (continued) 47, 61,112; Henkist, King of Kent, 61; A Mad World, My Masters, 65, 67, 6970, 73-77,83; Af0r£ Dissemblers Besides Women, 137,162-69; T&£ Peacemaker, 61; T&£ Puritan, 56, 61; Tfo Second Maiden's Tragedy, 4; T/;£ Witch, 64; Hfomift Beware Women, 61-62,94-95, 97-99,119-26; Tour Five Gallants, 56. &£ «/$•» Jonson, Ben; Orality; Shakespeare, William; Tragedy; #»/£ names of specific characters Mirror for Magistrates, The, 100 mirth (as social phenomenon), 65,72; and commercial theater, 65-71,74-75,83; eroticization of, 78-79. See also Comedy; Theater modern criticism: continuity between early modern drama and, xiii Montrose, Louis Adrian, 3, 6,44,172 n.9, 173 n.i3,178 n.i8,179 n.25,189-90 n.i9 Mullaney, Steven, 171 n.6,179 11.27, 183 11.17 Murray, Timothy, 48 Nashe, Thomas, 1-2 new historicism, 43-44,173 n.i3. See also Greenblatt, Stephen; Materialist criticism; Montrose, Louis Adrian; Mullaney, Steven; Power Nietzsche, Friedrich, 95 Northbrooke, John, 160 Norton, Thomas, 100 NuttalljA. D., 87 orality: and representation of women, in Middleton, 168-69 Orgel, Stephen, 6 Orlando (character), 148-49 Oxford University, 26-27,55-58 Page (character), 165-66 Parker, Patricia, 139,143,171 n.6 Parnassus Plays, The, 47 Passions of the Mind, The (Wright), 95~96 Paster, Gail Kern, 188 n.3

Patterson, Annabel, 2,12,112,174 n.26, 187 n.27 Pearlman, E., 180 n.4 Pechter, Edward, 173 n.ig, 185 n.3 Phillips, Augustine, 17 Philotas (Daniel), 4 plays, commercial-theater: descriptions of, 46-51 playwright, descriptions of, 51-52 playwriting: careers parallel to, 58; and courtly poetry, xii; ideological contradiction in, 66; legitimation of, xii-xiii; and manual labor, xii, 75 Plutarch, 187 n.3 o poetry: and dream, 12-13; mystification of, 14; separateness of, 11-13; social status of, 9; views of, 8. See also Drama; Literature; Theater Porter, Carolyn, 179 n.26 power: and consciousness, 35-38. See also Hermeneutics, and Foucauldian archaeology; New historicism Privy Council, 19 Puttenham, George, 8 Pye, Christopher, 179 n.27 Quarles, Francis, 146-47 Rabelais, Francois, 138 Rackin, Phyllis, 189 n.6,190 n.28 Red Lion playhouse, 12 representation, theatrical model of ("face and grace"), 141; Jonson's version of, 153-54; Shakespeare's use of, 143-44. See also Women, representation of reproduction, biological: Shakespeare's representation of, 143. See also Gender Respublica, 17 Riggs, David, 54,153-55 Rosalind (character), 138,149-52 Rosenberg, Marvin, 177 n.6 Russell, Conrad, 61 Sackville, Thomas, 100 Salisbury, Earl of (Robert Cecil), 46 Salmon, J. H. M., 112

Index 209 Schleiner, Louise, 182 n.2 Schoenbaum, S., 18111.23 School of Abuse, The (Gosson), 100 Scot, Thomas, 23,112 Shakespeare, William: antitheatricalism of, 79; background of, xv; and A. C. Bradley, 31-32; conversional theater of, 86; and Greville, 8; and Jonson, xv-xvi; and Marlowe, 102; and "the private," 77-78, 81, 87-88, 94; reputation of, compared with Jonson's, 9394; self-legitimation of, 51-52,131; status of, 58-59; style of characterization of, 77, 93-94, ioo, 109, in, 114-15; and censorship, 109; and university community, 47; works: All's Well That Ends Well, 76,103; Antony and Cleopatra, 116,132; As Ton Like It, 78-79, 137-38,140,146-52,156,162,167; Coriolanus, 143; Hamlet, 3,10, 64,9397,106-7, n°, 113—15» I26,144-45; i Henry IV, 140; Henry V, 144; Henry VIII, 140; Julius Caesar, 93,117-18; Measure for Measure, 65 - 67,76 - 8 3, 183 n.i7; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 13, 65, 67, 69-75,78,140; The Murder ofGonzago, 10,107; Othello, 26-34, 47, 64, 93,107-9,162; Pericles, 14041; Poems (1640), 93; Richard II, 1617,109,112; Romeo and Juliet, 75,107— 8,143; Sonnet 3,139-40; Sonnet 94, 46; The Taming of the Shrew, 81; The Tempest, 65, 67, 82-88; Titus Andronicus, 82,141; Troilus and Cressida, 76; Twelfth Night, 148; The Winter's Tale, no-ii, 129-32,140,142,145,159. See also Characterization; Jonson, Ben; Middleton, Thomas; Tragedy; and names of specific characters Shapiro, James, 184 n.23 Sharpe, Kevin, 61 Shrewsbury, Earl of (Talbot, Francis), 21 Sidney, Philip, xii, 8,13,55,159 Singh, Jyotsna, 132-33,138 Smith, Paul, 39-40 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 82, 90-91

209

Spenser, Edmund, 13 Stallybrass, Peter, 26, 32-34, 69 Stepneth, John (bookseller), 50 Stone, Lawrence, 55,57,180 n.2O Stow, John, 70-71 Stuart, Arabella, 156,191 n.34 Stuart, Francis, 156 Stubbes, Phillip, 2,133-34 subject: autonomy of, 45; interiority of, 95-96; Jonson's version of, 99; Middleton's version of, 99; self-presentation of, 46. See also Characterization; Hermeneutics, and Foucauldian archaeology; New historicism; Shakespeare, William Survay of London, A (Stow), 70-71 Sweeney, John Gordon, III, 117,174 n.22 Swetnam, Joseph, 148,163 Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women, 145,163 Tacitus, and Renaissance factionalism, 112 Tamburlaine (Marlowe), 48,100-106, 109,119,124 Taylor, Charles, 36 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 179 n.28,181 n.2 theater: aristocratic sponsorship of, 12; censorship of, 2; city opposition to, 21-22; commercialism of, 2,12,15; controversy about, i, between Privy Council and city, 20; and counterfeiting, 79-81; depoliticization of, 112; feminization of, in Shakespeare, 133; government fear of, 18-19; government toleration of, 20-24; marginality of, 3; and patronage system, 67-68; political allegory in, 16; powerlessness of, xiv, 2, n; professionalism of, 20, propagandistic use of, 19; and prostitution, 80-81; recreational function of, 12; and Spanish theater, 4-5; specularity of, 107; and sport, 70-71,77,182 n.9; status of, 11; subversive power of, 18; and suppression of Catholic drama, 5; threat to morality of women by, 160.

2IO

Index

theater (continued) See also Audience; Drama; Literature; Mirth (as social phenomenon); Poetry; and names of specific playhouses Theatre (playhouse), 12 Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, The (Wilson), 18 Tilney, Edmund, 4, 47 tragedy: closet versions of, 100; Marlovian style of, 103; materialist definition of, 95; Middletonian style of, 98-99; Nietzschean description of, 95; preElizabethan versions of, 100; Shakespearean style of, 94-95,98-99; specularity of, 126 Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, The (Massinger and Fletcher), 4 transvestism, theatrical, 161; Middleton's critique of, 164-65 Ure, Peter, 175 n.37

Weimann, Robert, 69 Wells, Susan, 182 n.7 Westminster School, 59 White, Allon, 69 Whole Art of Husbandry, The (Heresbach), 130 Whore of Babylon, The (Dekker), 18 Wilson, Robert, 18 Woman in the Moon, The (Lyly), 12-13 women, representation of: and inward freedom, 151; Jonson's versions of, 136-37,156-58,164; and male university students, 27, 29; Middleton's versions of, 136-37,158-59,162-64,169; orality in, 130; and representation of players, 73-74; Shakespeare's versions of, 33-34,135-37,156-58,162-63; and theatrical legitimation, 134,145; and theatrical power, 131 Woodbridge, Linda, 137 Worming of a Mad Dogge, The^ 163 Wright, Thomas, 95