Thomas Middleton, Uncut: Castration, Censorship, and the Regulation of Dramatic Discourse in Early Modern England

THOMAS MIDDLETON, UNCUT: CASTRATION, CENSORSHIP, AND THE REGULATION OF DRAMATIC DISCOURSE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Richard Burt

Thomas Middleton’s canon and career present us strictly repressive activity centred in the court and impli- with quantitatively significant and highly detailed evid- citly opposed to the antithetical practice of uncensoring. ence of censorship. Perhaps the best known case of cen- Within the terms of this model, Middleton is thought to sorship, A Game at Chess, continues to receive the most document either cases of radical censorship or, conversely, sustained attention of any play censored in the Renais- instances of what Annabel Patterson calls ‘those famous sance. Middleton’s Lady’s Tragedy was also censored. And puzzling cases of noncensorship’ (1984, 17).3 By contrast, I two other plays, Hengist, King of Kent and The Witch, suggest that Middleton’s contradictory cases of censorship may have been censored as well.1 More crucial than these and noncensorship present us with a more complex and instances is that the cases themselves are often extremely nuanced model of censorship involving dispersal and dis- detailed. There are six manuscripts and three printed placement. In this model, the difference between censoring quartos of A Game at Chess, the total number of manu- and uncensoring is never self-evident. scripts being significantly larger than that of any other A quick review of the production and reception of A Renaissance play. And the single manuscript of The Lady’s Game at Chess makes this paradox clear. The play was Tragedy contains evidence of censorship in the censor’s first licensed by the court censor (the Master of the own hand. Moreover, there is an unusually full record of Revels), ran nine days continuously, and was then shut contemporary responses to A Game at Chess, including a down. Middleton was ‘on the run’ for some (unknown) lengthy eyewitness account.2 time in a failed effort to escape the authorities and Through Middleton, I want to suggest, we may gain was imprisoned for some (unknown) time. The company a fuller understanding of how censorship operated and that acted A Game at Chess was briefly prevented from thereby reshape the present debate about it: some critics performing. Middleton obtained his release from prison have argued that censorship was a systematic and fully through a witty epigram to King James.4 He may or may conscious contractual arrangement; others have argued not have been forbidden to write for the stage again. And, that it was capricious and arbitrary. Similarly, some have remarkably, the company went on to perform The Spanish seen the theatre as a prime site of censorship, while Viceroy, a play on the same subject, without a licence the others have seen it as exceptional in relation to the following year (for which they received no punishment at censorship of other media. And some have concluded that theatre censorship was severely repressive, while 1 On Hengist, see Bald (1938), and Grace Ioppolo’s introduction elsewhere in others have argued that it was enlightened, tolerant, this edition: Works, 000. On The Witch, see Anne Lancashire (1983). and virtually non-existent (Heinemann, 1980; Patterson, 2 For documentation of these cases, see Bentley, 1941–68, 4:870–7, Gary 1984; Finkelpearl, 1986; Sharpe, 1987; Worden, 1988; Taylor’s edition of A Game at Chess (Works, 000), and Julia Briggs’s edition of The Lady’s Tragedy (Works, 000). For the audience response to A Game at Chess, Clare, 1990; Dutton, 1991). see Appendix A of Howard-Hill (1993). Middleton’s contribution to the present debate over 3 For the case that the play was censored, see Heinemann, 1980. For the opposite case, Patterson (1984, 17) and Howard-Hill (1993, 22). Patterson cites A Game whether stage censorship was repressive or lenient lies at Chess as one of her examples of noncensorship cases. Janet Clare (1990, 198) in the way he forces us to pose a fundamental ques- and Richard Dutton (1991, 237) have confirmed her point. Even Heinemann tion that critics have not asked: namely, ‘What is cen- wonders along similar lines: ‘The question remains: given the censorship, how was it possible for the play to be put on at all?’ (1980, 165). For further details, sorship?’ When debating the relative repressiveness or see Howard-Hill, who maintains that ‘the official reaction to A Game at Chess was leniency, efficiency or inefficiency of theatre censorship, not harsh’ (1993, 22). For an opposing account of the play and of Middleton’s career, one that stresses Middleton’s progressive politics, see Gary Taylor (1993b). critics have largely ignored the way that the similarity 4 Those who believe that theatre censorship was repressive might point out that between censorship and noncensorship puts the defini- Middleton did not write for the stage after A Game at Chess; that his entertainment tion of censorship into question, instead assuming that for Charles I (paid for by the City of London) was cancelled might be taken as further proof of Middleton’s lack of favour with the court. But Trevor Howard-Hill it operates in terms of removal and replacement; that is, quotes (without endorsing) the rumour that ‘James, Charles and Buckingham the censor demands cuts from the text and the author “were all loth to haue it forbidden, and by report laught hartely at it” . . . and [John Woolley] later passed on the rumour “(how true it is I know not) that the or an editor seeks to circumvent the censor by replacing Players are gone to the Courte to Act the game at Chesse before the Kinge, which the cut material. Censorship is implicitly defined as a doth much truble the spanish Ambassador” . . . .’ (22).

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all). Middleton continued to receive patronage from the the literary field. I suggest that censoring is a version of City of London. Moreover, A Game at Chess was printed the fetishizing critical practice Naomi Schor (1987) has (albeit illegally) in 1625, nine months after the banned termed ‘reading in detail.’ Middleton presents us with performance. The asymmetry between the play’s major what might be called a fetishized model of textual culture. political transgression and the leniency, the near absence, In calling censorship fetishistic, I mean that it involves the of repressive consequences suffered by the written text and negotiation and construction of small differences which actors, and the uncertain extent of the penalties suffered make the text desirable (either because it is the uncensored by the author, makes the case one that can as easily be version or because it is the censored version).8 Fetishism called censorship as it can noncensorship.5 involves a mainstreaming practice that increases possib- This ambiguity is a symptom, I believe, of the way early ilities for entry and access to the literary field yet, at the modern stage censorship was dispersed among a variety same time, allows texts entry not as uncensored wholes of regulatory agents and practices and of the fact that it (or forbids them entry as censored wholes) but as partial, was productive as well as prohibitive, involved cultural always already censored versions whose value is consti- legitimation as well as delegitimation.6 Censorship was tuted by (and which accrues from) their small differences more than one thing, occurred at more than one place, from other versions. In the second part, I explore the pos- and at more than one time. Moreover, Middleton’s case sibility of alternative defetishized models of textual culture, allows us to see that texts were displaced from one channel ones that would oppose a phallic, patriarchal model of or medium to another (say from print to manuscript or textual production, transmission, and consumption to a performance to print) not obliterated wholesale. Even an feminized, clitoral model or to a sodomitical model. I turn apparently destructive act like a book-burning could be specifically to Middleton’s Game at Chess in this regard understood as a symbolic rite of purification rather than because it thematizes censorship as castration. Under- an attempt to block access to forbidden books completely.7 standing censorship through the metaphor of castration, Middleton offers, then, less a way of deciding whether we will see, means that a desire for an uncensored radical particular cases can be classified as either censorship politics will inevitably be disappointed. or noncensorship than a call for a more deconstructive definition of censorship, one in which the spatial and i temporal location and limits of censorship come into Since it may seem counter-intuitive to think of censorship question, in which censorship and editorial revision and in terms of dispersal and displacement, let me begin by literary criticism, censorship and noncensorship, cannot calling attention to the limitations of the removal and be rigorously distinguished. replacement model. This approach assumes a model of Defining censorship in terms of displacement and dis- textual transmission in which censorship is clearly located persal displaces and absorbs, so to speak, a definition of in the court censor, or Master of the Revels, as he censorship as removal and replacement. It is both an al- was known. In this model the process of submitting a ternative categorization and a more inclusive one, both theatre manuscript (playbook) to the court censor for an opposition and an expansion. On the one hand, a licensing would be fairly straightforward. One could trace dispersal and displacement model of censorship keeps in a line from the text’s beginnings to its endings, from place a sense of the graduated differences between forms plot to foul papers to authorial or scribal prompt-book of punishment and repression (between having a hand to a licensed prompt-book (private transcripts may have removed and having a word removed), with ‘soft’ forms been made from the foul papers or from prompt-books) to of censorship (like critical censure) at one end of a con- performance to acquisition by a publisher or printer, then tinuum and ‘hard’ forms of censorship (like imprisonment) to a compositor (who sets the type and makes corrections), at the other. Yet on the other hand, a dispersal and displacement model unsettles a traditional hierarchy of more or less repressive punishments in so far as it shows that no 5 For fuller accounts of this case, see Howard-Hill (1993), Clare (1990), and one form of legitimation or delegitimation necessarily has Dutton (1991). 6 For a fuller account of this definition of censorship, see Burt (1993), ix–xv; 1– priority over others. Cultural capital may in some cases 25; 150–68, Burt (1994b), and Bourdieu (1991). See also Francis Barker (1984) count more than economic capital; perhaps even more for a Foucauldian account of censorship, and see Patterson (1984, 1990) and Norbrook (1994) for an opposing humanist account. provocatively, one could say that ‘soft’ forms of censure 7 See, for example, a print in John Foxe’s Actes and monuments . . . (1563) may sometimes wound more deeply than ‘hard’ forms illustrating the burning of heretical books written by Martin Bucer. At the centre of censorship. More crucially, displacement yokes, often of the illustration is a pile of books being burned. In front of this pile is a procession of priests reading religious books accompanied by torch bearers. As in executions, paradoxically, precisely those terms that the more tradi- the burning is a public performance: fire takes on metaphoric significance, not tional model wishes to oppose: repression and diversity; only as a purifying agent (destroying the corrupting influences of heretical books) production and consumption; censoring and uncensoring; but as a source of religious illumination—the tapers ‘light the way’, as it were, toward the true Church and its authorized books. public and private, among others. 8 For a psychoanalytic account of fetishism, see Sigmund Freud (1963). On In discussing the details of Middleton’s cases of cen- fetishism and displacement, see Freud (1969) and Mark Wigley (1992). For sympathetic and hostile feminist revisions of Freud’s account of fetishism, see sorship, fetishism becomes a key term in my analysis of Apter (1991); Apter and Pietz (1993); Freedman (1991); Groz (1991); Garber the way censorship permits or blocks entry and access to (1991); and McClintock (1993).

to the printing of the first edition and on possibly to later is not by any means an exceptional case. Hengist evinces editions and/or to a theatrical revival and resubmission of a similar dispersal. As R. C. Bald comments, it is unclear the prompt-book for licensing.9 In this view, censorship whether the play has been censored at all: the cuts may is a specific form of intervention and interference in have been made by the actors rather than by the censor an otherwise clearly transmitted set of signals from the (1938, xxx–xxxiii). More recently, Grace Ioppolo in the theatre company to the audience: the censor is granted present edition doubts whether the cuts can be attributed a central kind of interference or imposition, significantly to censorship. different from the kind of interference introduced, for To buttress Clare’s point about collaboration, we could example, by a printer, whose mistakes could be corrected add that dramatists might function as censors in the at will. The underlying assumption here is that the court repressive sense. In a discussion of the Acte to Restraine censor is at the apex and centre of transmission: he Abuses of Players, Gary Taylor (1993c, 51–106) points would read a manuscript and then assess it positively or out that when a text has been expurgated, the source of negatively, either burning it or licensing it as submitted (or that expurgation is almost always the theatre. One might on condition that it be revised). Censorship is understood, infer from the low number of oaths in the Middleton then, as a clearly defined (in the sense of limited) activity, canon, much lower than Shakespeare, that Middleton located in time and space. acted as a self-censor (Lake, 1975, 79). The existence This understanding of censorship is not entirely wrong, of collaboration is further confirmed by the fact that of course. The Master of the Revels licensed a text by the Master of the Revels did not double-check to make signing his name and giving his authorization at the end sure that the acting company had made the revisions he of the text. He had punitive powers and exercised them. requested. He could rely on the company to obey him, In at least one case, he burned a manuscript he was and they generally did (Dutton, 1991, 203). unwilling to license; he demanded that some texts be Thus, censorship was dispersed, not centred in the revised; and one Master, Sir Henry Herbert, threatened court, despite the increasing centralization of the Master authors, theatre managers, and actors with ‘publique of the Revels’ powers. However much power the Master punishment’ (Bawcutt, 1996, 52). The censor’s powers amassed, that power remained partly decentred by its were increasingly centralized after 1606. Whereas early dispersal even at court and within the Office itself. There in Middleton’s career there were a number of censors, were always ecclesiastical censors, and the Revels office including the Bishops of London and dramatists like John had deputies (Clare, 1990; Dutton, 1991; Martin Butler, Lyly, by the time of his last play, A Game at Chess, there 1992). In addition to the playhouse exchanges with the was a single court official and his deputies. The (apparent) Master of the Revels, we could locate the Master himself intervention of the Bishop of London in Sir John Van Olden in patronage faction struggles, as Richard Dutton has Barnavelt in 1619 is the exception that proves the rule. pointed out (1991, 247–8). Furthermore, the Acte to The Master also put into practice the Acte to Restraine Restraine Abuses of Players dispersed censorship across all Abuses of Players, passed by Parliament in 1606, making areas of theatrical production and reception in which it illegal ‘jestingly or prophanely [to] speak or use the Holy name of God or Jesus Christ, or of the Holy Ghoste or of actors as well as members of the audience could serve as spies and informers (anyone convicted would pay a fine the Trinity, which are not to be spoken but with fear and 10 reverence’ (Chambers, 1923, Vol. 4, 339). of ten pounds). (The use of spies and informers formed part of a larger pattern of administrative dispersal in early A closer look at the evidence begins to complicate 11 the assumption that censorship has a precisely defined Stuart culture. ) And individuals sometimes successfully location and definition. Consider the manuscript of The sued for libel, managing to shut down performances Lady’s Tragedy. One sees a number of different markings (Clare, 1990, 74; 92–3). and a number of different handwritings. Not all of the cuts My point that censorship is dispersed confirms a current are in the Master’s hand. Some are by the bookkeeper, consensus among critics working on early modern theatre some by the scribe. Sir George Buc, the Master of the censorship that it operated in terms of complicity and Revels, has, for example, ‘struck out a number of oaths in collaboration between censors, authors, and critics rather the manuscript, but the specifically Catholic oath “By th’ than in terms of radical oppositions between dumb cen- 12 mass” (4.3.94) uttered by the Tyrant, has been deleted sors and intelligent literary writers. Richard Dutton has by a different hand’ (Clare, 1990, 158). Similarly, a observed that court censorship of the theatre was neither wavy line alongside the passage signifies its removal, authoritarian nor totalitarian (1991, 205; 217). If the dis- although again the colour of the ink does not link the persal of censorship meant collaboration and complicity, instruction directly with Buc. Janet Clare concludes that the question remains: does it alter our understanding of the cuts and marks imply ‘a degree of collaboration

between the censor and the playhouse bookkeeper’ (1991, 9 A version of this model is described by Gary Taylor (1987). 159). She maintains that the manuscript provides ‘clear 10 On spying and the theatre, see Archer (1993). evidence that plays were censored in the playhouse, either 11 On this pattern, see Linda Levy Peck (1982). 12 Patterson’s (1984) contribution is perhaps strongest in this regard. She has in anticipation of the [court] censor’s objections or in been seconded directly by Richard Dutton (1991, 9) and indirectly by Natalie response to his verbal instructions’ (1990, 157). This play Zemon Davis (1990) and Robert Darnton (1991).

censorship? The fact that censorship was dispersed, some And how either of these examples of censorship differ from might argue, does not (and should not) significantly alter revision is hard to tell. The marking of a change in the last our sense of it as a repressive practice. Instead, we have line of the play from ‘Might all be borne so honest to their only a more rigorous, more nuanced conception of it: tombs’ to ‘Might all be borne so virtuous to their tombs’ censorship remains externally imposed by the court censor looks just like the marking used to change ‘Your king’s and internally self-imposed (as self-censorship) when un- poisoned’ to ‘I am poisoned’ (A5.2.213/B5.2.164):16 dertaken by anyone else. Furthermore, censorship would still be located temporally, occurring either before or after performance or publication. That is to say, we would still have a stable model of censorship, one that places it on These examples return us to the ambiguous way a case one side of an axis moving between the opposite poles of looks like censorship to some critics and like noncensor- repression and freedom, one that opposes agencies and ship to others. Critics have recently tried to explain the clearly demarcated discursive spaces, one that believes difference between ‘most ladies’ and ‘many ladies’ in dramatists could choose to collaborate or to resist. terms of a specific topical allusion to the Jacobean court I want to suggest that Middleton presents us with a that focused on Lady Frances Howard, who divorced her much deeper sense of collaboration and complicity, one first husband on grounds of non-consummation and who that extends to all points of the agencies and practices along with her second husband murdered Sir Thomas of literary consumption and production and thereby calls Overbury (Lancashire, 1978, 47, 276–7; Clare, 1991, into question a strict definition of censorship as repres- 161; Dutton, 1991, 198). sion, one that enables censorship to be clearly opposed While I would not want to rule out that possibility to noncensorship. Censorship penetrates and is penetrated (though this particular topical allusion has been used to by literary consumption and production. In defining cen- explain the censorship of a surprisingly large number of sorship to encompass state censorship, market censorship, plays, including Middleton’s Witch) I think the manuscript and criticism, I mean that instances of obtrusive suppres- shows that the censor’s revision cannot be decisively dif- sion belong to a continuum which also includes active ferentiated from theatrical revision in terms of its verbal support or patronage, as in the support Middleton re- outcomes.17 As one editor notes, not all of the marks ceived from the city for his civic entertainments, or his necessarily suggest censorship, some marking theatrical masques.13 Criticism, for example, may be regarded not revision (Lancashire, 1978, 280–1). My point is that this as the antithesis of censorship but as an alternate form lack of difference suggests that the censor operated proof censorship. Criticism is a form of censorship in so far ductively as a kind of editor. The change from ‘most ladies’ as it involves legitimating certain dramatic discourses and to the less pointed ‘many’ softens but, I would argue, delegitimating others. Criticism operates productively in hardly neutralizes the topical allusion since in both cases terms of establishing exclusive hierarchies and repress- ‘ladies’ remains as a figure for court corruption. The cen- ively as censure (the aim being a kind of post-publication sor has asked for an editorial revision that involves a fine censorship) in order to secure these hierarchies. In the degree of tact.18 Editing and censorship thus overlap. And productive sense, criticism, as a form of patronage, es- tablishes capital through élitist forms of censorship: the from the fact that the same marks were used by the censor exclusiveness of a given performance is part of its appeal. and by actors/authors/bookkeepers in the playhouse we The non-alienability of a court masque, say, helps create may surmise that censorship and theatrical revision were a sense of the court as the charismatic centre of power.14 Consider again the manuscript of The Lady’s Tragedy. 13 Middleton’s court patronage can be reviewed in Kawachi (1986). It might appear to provide incontrovertible evidence of 14 On the breakdown of a distinction between the masque as inalienable and public theatrical performances of dramatic texts as alienable under the early censorship in the repressive sense of removal. Crosses and Stuarts, see Burt (1993, 115–49). wavy lines, that is, mark passages that the court censor 15 Gary Taylor (1993b) finds similar synonyms in expurgated and non-expurgated oaths in Shakespeare editions. demands be deleted. But things are not all that simple. 16 One could contrast these example as soft and hard versions of censorship, the Take the much discussed change from ‘most ladies’ to revision of ‘Your king’s poisoned’ to ‘I am poisoned’ regarded as more serious ‘many ladies’ (Lancashire, 1978, 47; Clare, 1990, 161; than the revision of most to ‘many’ because it is more directly political. I would observe, however, that in both cases the displacement of one phrase by another Dutton, 1991, 198). What the censor wants removed— complicates the degree to which soft and hard instances may function smoothly ‘most’—is replaced by the scribe/author/bookkeeper with as acceptable replacements. Consider again the substitution of women for court an alternative—‘many’—that is nearly synonymous.15 politics. Anne Lancashire notes ‘the odd substitution of “woman” for “courtier”’ at A2.1.69/B2.1.75, which she points out ‘removes one kind of criticism only to Similarly, the tyrant’s line ‘Your king’s poisoned’ is add the other’ (1978, 277). changed to the virtually synonymous ‘I am poisoned’ 17 Lancashire (1978) uses it to explain censorship of The Lady’s Tragedy and (1984) to explain censorship of The Witch. The same allusion has been used to (A5.2.168/B5.2.143): interpret The Changeling as well. See Christina Malcolmson (1990, 333). As will become clear in the second section of this essay, I think the underlying premises of this kind of topical identification bear scrutiny. 18 ‘Woman’ also figures as an object of censorship in Hengist: the passage at 4.2.225–32 appears in the two manuscripts but was omitted from the printed edition. See Heinemann (1980, 144).

understood as parallel, complementary activities, not as Middleton’s reception by competing dramatists. Criticism opposed or different in kind. operated repressively as delegitimating censure. Ben Jon- Understanding that the censor functioned as an editor son and George Chapman, who sought to establish literary allows us, then, to begin to understand the ways in hierarchies as a way of reforming what they took to be the which censorship is structurally complicit with what is unacceptable diversity of the popular theatres, regarded often taken to be its opposite, namely, criticism.19 The Middleton negatively. In his epistle to his translation of Master chose plays for performance, and was therefore Homer, Chapman used Middleton as an example of Lon- an extraordinarily important critic as well as a censor: doners’ bad taste. They preferred Middleton’s Lord Mayor’s what he liked and thought highly of would get performed pageant, The Triumphs of Truth, to Homer: ‘why should at court. As an editor, the censor reads critically in a poor Chroonicler of a Lord Maior’s naked Truth, (that detail. We can adduce further evidence of the censor’s peradduenture will last his yeare) include more worth critical abilities and interests. It is worth pointing out with our moderne wizerds, then Homer for his naked that George Buc, himself an author and owner of an Vlysses, clad in eternall Fiction?’ (Steen, 1993, 30–1). impressive library, gave The Lady’s Tragedy the title The Ben Jonson was even more censorious. In Conversations Second Maiden’s Tragedy to differentiate it from Beaumont with Drummond (1619), he remarks ‘that Markham (who and Fletcher’s (also censored) The Maid’s Tragedy (Clare, added his English Arcadia) was not of the number of the 1990, 165). John Lyly and Ben Jonson both sought to Faithful Poets and but a base fellow that such were Day become Master of the Revels (Jonson obtained a reversion and Middleton’ (cited by Steen, 1993, 35). And Jonson to it in 1624). And Sir Henry Herbert (Master of the Revels excoriated A Game at Chess in The Staple of News (1626): after George Buc) wrote the following in 1624 in regard Lic. What newes of Gundomar? Tho. A second to a court performance of Middleton’s More Dissemblers Fistula, Besides Women: ‘The worst play that ere I saw’ (Bawcutt, Or an excoriation (at the least) 1996, 148). Censorship and criticism are complicit, then, For putting the poore English-play, was writ of him, Gundo- in the sense that they are overlapping activities. To such a sordid vse, as (is said) he did, mar’s vse of the game at Just as literary criticism turns out to be a form of Of cleansing his posterior’s. Lic. Iustice! Iustice! Chesse, or censorship, so too does the market. It is often assumed Tho. Since when, he liues condemn’d to his [chair], Play so cal- that court censorship is radically different from market at Bruxels. led. forces. The market is thought to allow into circulation And there sits filing certaine politique hinges, that which censorship seeks to block. And if one allows To hang the States on, h’has heau’d off the hookes. for market censorship, it is often differentiated from state (Howard-Hill, 1993, 212) censorship on the grounds that the former blocks production while the other blocks consumption. In this view, The use of a text for toilet paper is as effective a means market censorship is better than state censorship. But of taking it out of circulation as burning it. It is worth even this distinction breaks down because it is not always noting that Middleton too engaged in critical practices. easy to tell the two kinds of censorship apart. Middle- He wrote a commendatory poem to accompany the first ton’s tragicomedy The Witch illustrates the ambiguity by publication of The Duchess of Malfi and an epitaph on the showing that it is difficult to differentiate a censorious actor Richard Burbage. Furthermore, references to plays reception on the stage from a censorship practiced by are scattered throughout his dramatic and non-dramatic the court. The Witch exists only in a single manuscript works. He offered an appreciation of Joseph Hall in the and the evidence of its production on stage is a note by prefatory matter to The Two Gates of Salvation (1609) and Middleton on it. Middleton explains to Thomas Holmes, praised Utopia in The Owl’s Almanac (1618). the person for whom the manuscript was made, that Just as the opposition between censoring and uncensor- he has ‘(meerly uppon a tast of yor. desire) recouverd ing is troubled by the dispersal of censorship across all into my hands (though not without much difficultie) This aspects of literary consumption, so too it is troubled by its (ignorantly-illl-fated) Labour of mine. Witches are (ipso dispersal across all areas of literary production. A number facto) by ye Law condemned, & yt onely (I thinck) hath of critics have recently called into question the notion of 21 made her lie so long in an imprisoned obscuritie’ (Steen, an original unrevised authentic draft. Texts are revised 1993, 36). Anne Lancashire has suggested that the phrase versions originating out of impure, heteroglossic conversa- ‘ignorantly ill-fated’ refers not to the play’s failure on tions. Though some manuscripts may rightly be identified the stage, as is frequently assumed, but to its political as ‘authorial’ for editorial purposes, there is no unrevised censorship by the Master of the Revels (1983, 162–3). By Urtext originating out of a single author sitting in his contrast, I would argue that the phrase is ambiguous: it private study. may be taken literally or metaphorically, the play’s lack of stage productions being due to censorship by the court 19 For a fuller account of the relation between criticism and censorship, see Burt or to what was termed ‘censureship’ on the public stage.20 (1993, 27–77) and Burt (1994b). 20 For instances of censureship and for an account of the way its meaning We can understand further the way that censorship overlapped with censorship and criticism, see Burt (1993), 30–1, 53, 65. extends to the regulation of consumption by looking at 21 See Stephen Orgel (1988); Leah Marcus (1988, 1992); Gary Taylor (1993b).

Middleton allows us to extend this insight into authorial final draft in the form of a prompt-book or a first edition, revision to censorship: if texts cannot be unrevised, they I would argue that the manuscripts suggest the reverse. cannot be uncensored either. The differences among some Rather than moving toward a final full draft either in ma- of the manuscripts of A Game at Chess make it clear that nuscript form or printed form, Middleton and the scribes just as there is no point at which one can locate an he used put different versions into different kinds of cir- unrevised text, so there is no point at which one can culation, some shorter and some longer. As Howard-Hill locate an uncensored text. In discussing the lengths of points out, ‘textual analysis reveals that Middleton had various manuscripts, critics have differentiated between decided to make transcripts for sale even before the play more or less complete versions of the play in terms of had been revised for performance’ (1993, 4). This meant whether passages in one version not in another were that, in one case, a presentation copy was shorter than added after the play was licensed and, if so, whether the the performance copy. Whether a particular manuscript censor knew of them or not (Dutton, 1991; Clare, 1990, is an incomplete transcript or an early draft, whether 193–4; Howard-Hill, 1993, 29–33). The censorship of the additions or omissions were made by the author or the play, that is, only makes sense for these critics if at by the scribe acting as an editor, whether the additions some point in the production of the play, the author/ involve an evasion of the censor or were suggested by actors circumvented the censor’s wishes. They assume the censor, may sometimes all be, in my view, undecid- that authorial/theatrical revision can be separated from able questions. If there is no moment at which we can censorship, that Middleton, at the actor’s instigation, definitively establish the author’s unrevised text, that is revised in order to add passages that he feared the censor because there is no uncensored original any more than might not approve (similarly, the actors might have made there is an unrevised original. Any search for the origin clear an equation between the hated Spanish Ambassador of censorship will be frustrated by an infinite regression: Gondomar and the Black Knight by using Gondomar’s court censorship (defined in its repressive and productive actual litter—required to relieve discomfort from an anal senses) generates self-censorship in the actors and the fistula—and one of his actual suits, thereby changing the author that may be regarded with equal validity as being text’s meaning in a way that the court censor presumably either an anticipation of court censorship or as following could not have anticipated). One critic has used textual after the suggestions/demands of the censor. The various evidence to explain the censorship of the play in precisely versions of A Game at Chess suggest that censorship was a these terms: ‘it is almost certain that the play book which negotiation over what will or will not play in a number of Henry Herbert licensed was somewhat less provocative different venues, not the establishment of a monumental, than the play seen on the stage of the Globe’ (Clare, 1990, authorized, final version. 193). The details of Middleton’s censored plays alert us to But given the complicity between the playhouse and a structural complicity much deeper than critics have the Master of the Revels, there is no reason to assume thus far allowed, a complicity not between opposed agents that the additions amounted to an evasion of what are and spaces but between regulatory agencies at all points presumed to be the censor’s politically more conservative of literary production and consumption. This structural desires. As Trevor Howard-Hill points out, ‘It is unlikely complicity, I hope it is now clear, significantly changes our understanding of censorship from a practice that that the actors would commission a substantial revision operates in terms of removal and replacement to one unless they were already convinced they could go ahead that operates in terms of dispersal and displacement. The with performances’ (1993, 18). He maintains that the dispersal of censorship decentres the court censor, who additions make no serious difference: ‘That the Black occupies one of many competing sites of authorization Knight represents Gondomar is transparent in the early and licence that legitimate particular revisions. He is not version; the additions make the satire no more offensive at the apex of power but is caught up in a contestation than it was in the manuscript Herbert approved’ (1993, over who is going to censor, on the basis of what criteria, 19). He adds that ‘It is possible that Herbert himself might and to what extent. The difference between censoring and have encouraged enlargement of the satirical depiction of uncensoring is difficult consistently to determine not only Gondomar’ (1993, 32). Indeed, the revisions may have because censorship is dispersed across all points of literary been corrections by the Master of the Revels (1993, 19). production, transmission, and consumption but because In any case, the actors maintained that they had not it is a fetishistic practice that involves, as Freud saw, performed more than had been licensed. When the Privy displacement rather than outright removal. Censorship Council demanded ‘whether there were noe other parts is as much about displacing one version with another, or passages represented on the Stage then those expressly displacing texts from one channel to another, as it is about contayned in the Booke, they confidently said they added blocking access or destroying transgressive material. As or varied from the same, nothing at all’ (Dutton, 1991, Thomas Cogswell notes in a discussion of censorship in 244). the 1620s: Whereas critics have tended to assume that these manuscripts can be clearly positioned along a line beginning political tracts, sermons and verse, which had no with an uncensored early draft and ending with a licensed hope of receiving a license, could find a wide cir-

culation in the unofficial market for news. Lack of capitalism (Haug, 1986). Marxists assume that a specific- access to a printing press was not a crippling blow . . . . ally literary market place follows upon the emergence of a Few authors slipped . . . direct criticism into print in broader market place. I am suggesting that the reverse is 1623. Yet the government’s particularly tight control the case: the commodity is an after-effect of the literary, of the press in this period did not forestall sim- modelled upon the literary form: indeed, the market is ilar efforts; it simply forced them into channels that made possible precisely though fetishism, not the reverse. newsletters-writers had developed for circulating their The proliferation of manuscripts of A Game at Chess is manuscripts. (1989, 21, 45) due, as we have seen, to the perceived markets for them, some being sold and others presented as gifts, markets Similarly, the Acte to Restraine Abuses of Players was here understood to include economic and cultural capital directed only at profanity in performance, not in print. (though patrons sometimes made cash payments, the cash The crosses in the manuscript of The Lady’s Tragedy, for could be less important than the prestige attached to their example, may mark passages for removal only during the patronage). I am suggesting, moreover, that all number text’s performance. of texts, ranging from privately circulated manuscripts Displacement is not just about more or less narrow to publicly circulated printed texts and performances to kinds of readership and access, but involves a differential court performances could be commodities only because system in which texts circulate and become exchangeable they had already been fetishized. What looks like histor- by becoming cultural and economic capital. It involves the ical specificity from a Marxist perspective—the emergence commodification of small differences meant to increase the of a market place in the sixteenth century—is rather a text’s value, either by limiting its circulation, say to manu- misrecognized instance of a critical fetishism: ‘History’ is script (that is, the fact that it can not be shown elsewhere fetishized as that which stands outside of fetishism. gives the manuscript reader an elevated status as critic, Now some critics might want to object to my account insider, and so on) or by exceeding the limits placed on a of censorship as a fetishistic practice on several grounds. given text’s earlier circulation—the full uncensored text, Even if texts are not wholly blocked but displaced from as opposed to its performance. As Gary Taylor remarks one medium or channel to another, they might argue, it in a discussion of expurgated texts, ‘Although profanities would still be crucial to differentiate between more or less could not be played, they could be printed, or circulated narrow channels, ‘softer’ or ‘harder’ forms of censorship, in manuscript . . . . Once authors and publishers recognize greater or lesser access and availability of a text to readers a distinction between the play as performance and the and/or performances to spectators. Indeed, some critics play as literary commodity, the door is opened to various might want to argue, the most diverse range of texts/ literary embellishments of the theatrical text, including performances ought to be able to circulate as broadly particularly the restoration of material cut in performance’ and as freely in as big and heterogeneous a market as (1993b, 147). Middleton’s plays were subject to a series is possible. If discourses and their circulation were truly of regulations over literary production and consumption. diverse, truly free of censorship (in its repressive sense) I take these networks of regulation to be part of the form- displacements from official to unofficial channels wouldn’t ation of what Pierre Bourdieu (1993) terms the literary be necessary. field.22 According to Bourdieu the literary field emerges as a While I am sympathetic to what I would call the form of cultural legitimation: texts circulate as negotiable diversity position, I also think that many of its funda- currency, as both symbolic and economic capital, in so mental assumptions about censorship as a strictly repress- far as they are differentiated from other versions in the ive agency are untenable. To begin with, the circulation of same or in different media: a text in manuscript form, discourses depends on their being commodities. This para- for example, may be valued over printed versions because doxically both makes entry and access possible and limits a select, élite readership alone has access to it, while a what, where, and how texts can circulate; commodity fet- performance may be valued over a printed version because ishism is not an antidote to regulation but is itself another the former is thought to be fuller than the censored printed (paradoxical) form of regulation. A related problem with text; conversely, the printed text may be valued over a the diversity position is the correlative assumption that performance because the former is regarded as fuller than there is a strong opposition between direct and indirect a censored performance. Commodities are fetishized not, as Marxists have ar- criticism, between official and unofficial discourses; that gued, because they are reified, alienable products of labour is, an uncensored criticism would be direct, immediately (Marx, 1867; Lukács, 1968) but because their value as readable, in short, non-literary (unambiguous, without economic and cultural capital is created within an in- irony or equivocation). Yet non-literary texts were prosec- tensely differentiated literary field.23 As I am defining it, uted on the basis of their perceived literary strategies, not however, commodity fetishism is not just economic or even primarily economic. Cultural critics (Marxists fore- 22 See also Bourdieu (1984) and Bourdieu and Darbel (1990). For a New most among them) assume that the market precedes the Historicist use of Bourdieu, see Greenblatt (1989). 23 For an explicit critique of Marxist notions of commodity fetishism, see Jean literary, that fetishism depends on the market. A com- Baudrillard, ‘Fetishism and Ideology’ (1981, 88–101). See also the essays in Apter modity aesthetic, so the argument goes, is an effect of and Pietz (1993).

because of their naked, unveiled attacks on the Crown. For less expensive, more or less well-printed editions. More example, William Prynne’s index entry to Histriomastix, significantly, censorship is both a means of access and a ‘women actors, notorious whores’ was taken (mistaken, means of blocking access to the literary field. Commodi- Prynne maintained) as an attempt to parallel classical fication both permits entry to this field and excludes it on Roman and contemporary Caroline courts, to the massive the basis of whether or not it can be market-driven. In discredit of both. Moreover, the diversity position assumes my view, fetishism can nether be redeemed as a main- that there were uncensored versions of a text, however streaming practice nor dismissed as a denial or distortion difficult they might be to read critically. The uncensored of difference; rather, it draws our attention to the fact that version might be an unperformed manuscript, a printed censorship is not reducible to repression: mainstreaming text containing material censored which had been for (bringing something from the margin to the centre, from performance, or a performance of a text. invisibility to visibility) is not always easy to tell apart from By contrast, I have been suggesting that if censoring its apparent opposite, namely, censorship in the repressive is always a matter of censoring in detail, then two points sense of exclusion and marginalization since a text has to follow: on the one hand, there is no whole uncensored ori- accommodate the constraints of the commodity form in ginal version but a proliferation of always already revised, order to circulate in the first place. always already partial, always already censored versions; on the other, censorship never occurs (one can always ii locate an ‘uncensored’ version). Fetishism allows us to In addition to enabling us to see that specific cases not see both that uncensoring is an impossibility and to see cannot be definitively classified as instances of censorship why the desire for an uncensored text persists, even in or noncensorship, an understanding of censorship as countries with no official state censorship apparatus. For fetishistic throws into relief the way sexuality figures if understanding censorship as fetishism shows it always this paradox in early modern culture in general and in already occurs, the same understanding also shows that Middleton in particular.24 In Middleton’s canon as in those the phantasm of an uncensored text appears everywhere. of other dramatists, a sexual metaphorics is the vehicle of All media can potentially trump the others as the source a topical politics. For many modern critics, sexuality is of the uncensored version. Print can be regarded as fuller a transparent figure for court politics. As we have seen, than manuscript because it allows for greater access; when discussing ‘ladies’ in modern accounts of The Lady’s conversely, a manuscript can also be regarded as fuller Tragedy or women in The Witch, critics regard the court precisely because it was not subject to state censorship as the real object of criticism. Similarly, critics of A Game (Hengist, King of Kent, for example, exists in two manu- at Chess tend to read through or past the play’s sexualized scripts which are fuller than the 1661 printed version). figuration of court politics, reading images of gelding, Similarly, theatre may be regarded as harder to police rape, and prostitution as metaphors for religious, moral, or than print because performance is more fluid, allowing the political conflicts (Lancashire, 1978, 234–7; Howard-Hill, actors to inflect the text’s meanings through gestures and 1993, 40–8). But it is precisely the details of this sexual props, while, conversely, print may be regarded as fuller figuration that complicate any easy assignment of a given than performance because it includes material censored politics to the play: rather than create stable equivalences on stage. that might reinforce a model of censorship as castration But in none of these cases, I would argue, is one get- (in which castration is precisely a radical removal) the ting a completely uncensored version. (In psychoanalytic play’s sexual metaphorics call into question the self- terms, the fetish ‘replaces’ what was never there to be -identity of censorship. Hence, they call into question the removed in the first place, the mother’s phallus: the fet- difference between censoring and uncensoring. Reading in ishist misreads sexual difference, substituting an originary detail means reading in parts, in terms of a deconstructive fullness for an originary lack. In these terms, a censored account of allegory, a part-to-part relation, rather than text would be a castrated text.) To paraphrase Octave hermeneutics, a part-to-whole relation.25 Mannoni’s (1968) account of the logic of fetishism as If the fetishistic status of censorship means that texts are a knowledge and disavowal of sexual difference (‘Je sais always already censored, if it attempts to secure, that is, bien, mais quand méme . . . ’), we might say that the logic an censored, uncastrated phallic politics of textual potency of censorship is as follows: ‘I know very well texts are and plenitude, some critics might wonder whether one always already censored. Nevertheless, I want the un- might be be able to construct a defetishized model of censored version of this text.’ Fetishizing censorship means textual production, transmission and consumption. I want affirming and disavowing a difference between censored to turn now to A Game at Chess to show why this is and uncensored texts. This fetishistic affirmation and disavowal of textual difference is projected in different ways 24 For an account of the connections between sexuality and political censorship, along multiple axes. Texts enter circulation at a variety of see Burt (1993, 132–43) and Boose (1994). points, becoming commodities in terms of various kinds 25 On allegory, see De Man (1979), 188–245. Political critics often assume a more coherent notion of allegory as a decoding of one-to-one correspondences of small differences not only between more or less access- between the text and history. Hence the notable tendency in many so-called New ible texts but between more or less well-bound, more or Historicist topical readings to reinscribe Old Historicist critical practices.

impossible. Modern critics have made the politics of A Rather than ride over the play’s details in order to Game at Chess intelligible by moving away from the literal abstract a general message, then, I want to examine a and the detail (which remain opaque) in the direction particular detail through which the play inscribes the of the metaphorical and the abstract (which allows the overlooking of details as what I would call the impossibility play’s meaning to become clear). Richard Dutton phrases of a definitively uncensored reading. Middleton figures this the usual move in a manner apt for our purposes: impossibility through a specific metaphor for censorship, namely, gelding.29 Gelding is figured in the White Bishop There is room for debate about the details of the Pawn’s plot (the centrality of which has long been recog- allegory, but the broad outlines could hardly be nized by modern critics).30 It is generally read as a story of clearer . . . . De Domini and Gondomar are, Middleton the harm done by the Jesuits to the Church of England. As implies, different faces of the same threat, a relatively Gary Taylor (1993a) has observed, Middleton specifically sophisticated notion if anyone were looking for a lit- uses gelding as a metaphor for this harm. Given that cas- eralistic ‘shadowing’ of persons and recent events . . . . tration and censorship became exchangeable terms (Ben The audience was apparently expected to make sense Jonson referred to a Jesuit edition of Martial’s epigrams of composite or multi-faceted allusions which may as ‘Jesuitaru castratus’) and given the censorship (in the have no literal or one-to-one relation to persons or repressive sense) of the anti-Jesuitical tracts by Thomas events. (Dutton, 1991, 239; 241; 241) Scott and others whom Middleton used as sources, and The move toward metaphor and a general sense of the given that tolerated Jesuitical texts play a central role in play’s allegory apparently stems from a desire to save the the White Queen’s Pawn’s seduction and prostitution, it play from a crude topicality, one that would make it only is possible, as Taylor (1993a) maintains, to see gelding 31 of antiquarian and non-literary interest. It also assumes a as a metaphor for censorship. While Middleton’s gelding hermeneutic model of censorship—the whole play can be metaphor obviously assumes that censorship is painfully read even if some of the parts can not (they’re capable of repressive, the point of the metaphor, I want to argue, being dismissed as incidentals that would not change the is not to criticize censorship in general but to criticize play’s meaning). illegitimate forms of it. The play can be read as a critique of But the local allegories and details cannot be so easily Jacobean censorship—not that it was repressive, but that dispensed with. For the details turn out not to be incidental it was repressive in the wrong way, censoring texts that but in fact call into question the possibility of allegorizing have been tolerated and tolerating texts in that should the whole play. Despite the clarity of particular parallels, have been censored. In the 1620s, an almost unlimited the satirical force of A Game at Chess remains unclear in number of Jesuit texts were allowed to be circulated while modern criticism.26 Indeed, discussions of this play enact a Protestant ones were not (Cogswell, 1989, 20–35). Mid- frequent impasse in censorship studies: the more detailed dleton moralizes censorship not in terms of its presence or the case, the more impenetrable it becomes.27 In searching absences (as we tend to do) but in terms of who uses it for for an explanation for the censorship of A Game at Chess, what ends. The bad censor is a castrator. In a typically critics ignore the fact that there is an inconsistency in Middletonian moral economy, censorship in A Game at contemporary accounts, that we get multiple reasons for Chess leads to its own undoing. No forgiveness is available its performance being shut down: initially the King being to the Black Bishop’s Pawn for having gelded the White personated, and then the satire of Gondomar.28 Audience Bishop’s Pawn. The castrator is castrated, the biter bit. response to the play is similarly indefinite. Though we The play’s moral opposition between good and bad cen- have an extremely full record of responses to this play it sorship self-deconstructs, however, because the figure of too clarifies only parts of the play. An eyewitness account castration unsettles rather than underwrites an equation by John Holles is telling in this regard. Calling Holles’s of censorship with repression. Critics have noted that the report ‘the most detailed, intelligent, and (in a reviewer’s White Knight’s staged confession of his sins in an effort to sense) the most sympathetic of the known descriptions’ entrap the Black Knight compromises the moral difference (1990, 356), A. R. Braunmuller notes that Holles mis- between them (Harper, 88; Braunmuller 1991, 348–9). read the White Bishop’s Pawn as a ‘Spannish euneuch’ The White Knight’s references to sodomy pertain not only rather than English character and that he didn’t note parallels obvious to us (1990, 351; 349). Braunmuller 26 See, for example, discussions in Heinemann (1980), Dutton (1991), Clare concludes that the play leaves us with major questions (1990), and Braunmuller (1990). unanswered (‘Was the play an attack on James? on Prince 27 See, for example, Dutton’s (1991, 10–16) discussion of Ben Jonson’s Sejanus. Dutton takes it to be an example of the ‘sheer impenetrability of so much of the Charles? on the Duke of Buckingham?’ [1990, 355]) and material we have to work with’ (10). with a sense of how undefined the play’s reception was: 28 These different reasons are rehearsed by Dutton (1991, 237–48). Rather than ‘Holles’ letter . . . urges us to interpret Middleton’s allegor- take into account the multiplicities, critics have often tried to single out one of them as the real explanation. ical meanings cautiously, to respect the variety and the 29 The following discussion is deeply indebted to Gary Taylor (1993a). I thank indefinition that performances and audiences’ responses him for sending me a copy of his stimulating essay and for helping to clarify my own account of the way Middleton relates castration and censorship. necessarily (every day, every performance) lend to any 30 See Howard-Hill (1993, 38), for example. dramatic “text”’ (1990, 356). 31 On Jonson, see Burt (1993); on the tracts, see Cogswell (1989).

to Olivares (the Black Knight), the favourite of Philip IV, literature in which figurative meanings of castration were but to Buckingham (the White Knight), the favourite of precisely at stake. Protestants attacked Catholicism as James I, as well. But, more crucially, the play’s moral sexually deviant, castration being a sign of that deviancy. distinctions self-deconstruct because, as I will make clear Reginald Scot in Discovery of Witchcraft, for example, momentarily, castration is not self-identical. The sexual mocks Catholics who wish to become saints by asking metaphorics of A Game at Chess do not form a chain of angels to castrate them. Similarly, Barnabe Barnes in The binary oppositions with equivalent terms on each side, Devil’s Charter denounces Pope Alexander VI as a sexually each moralized, valued in terms of its place above or deviant monarch by staging a scene in which he castrates below another, as if one could say that uncensored is a young boy. The point of this tradition was to deprive to censored as uncastrated is to castrated, as whole is to (one is tempted to say ‘castrate’) Catholics from assigning part, as plenitude is to lack, as good is to bad. castration a positive meaning (say, as celibacy).35 These The coherence of Middleton’s moral economy depends symbolic meanings testify to the productivity of castration, on there being a clear difference between castration as a productivity that undermines its self-identity. a symbolic practice and castration as a literal practice. Understanding censorship through the metaphor of cas- This distinction allows for a kind of poetic justice: the tration, then, alters our understanding of censorship by castrator is castrated in symbolic terms; that is, the Black revealing its self-deconstructive non-identity. As a mul- Knight is not literally castrated as was the White Bishop’s tiple and paradoxically repressive practice with positive Pawn. The Black Knight’s crime and his punishment effects and meanings, castration cannot be reduced to a are symmetrical but not identical. The two meanings unified, morally reprehensible practice. The metaphor of of castration thus make it possible to differentiate the castration foregrounds not the literal status of censorship Black and White sides in moral terms (one side literally castrates, the other side only metaphorically castrates). but its (dis)figurative status; that is, castration figures an This difference secures others. There is no good gelder originary (and paradoxically productive) lack rather than as opposed to a bad gelder. (None of the admirable the loss of an originary plenitude; as such, castration is characters speaks of gelding positively.) And the play does a figure for the way that texts have always already been 36 not advocate the gelding of Jesuits (other texts did).32 But censored (see Derrida, 1987, 439–42). Castration is a the very doubleness of the meaning of castration (as real metaphor for the endlessly displaced origin and end of and as symbolic) that makes it possible to distinguish in censorship. If censorship has always already occurred, moral terms between those who literally castrate (as bad) it follows that uncensoring is always reading in detail and those who do so metaphorically (as good) also calls and hence will never deliver an uncensored ‘pay-off’, the that distinction into question. equivalent of what in the porn industry is termed the To begin with, A Game at Chess never provides us with ‘money shot’ (Williams, 1989, 8). Uncensoring is not a literal castration: the play presents us with a gelded the opposite of lack, that which replaces castration, the chess piece, not a gelded person. To be sure, Renaissance

chess pieces were constructed not as abstract shapes but 32 I thank Gary Taylor for this point and for these references. as images of persons. Yet precisely because the White 33 The problem the figuration of castration poses to those who want to decode Bishop’s Pawn is a chess piece and not a person, he an ‘uncensored’ politics in the play is crystallized in the questions of whether gelding was theatrically represented, and if so, how? If it was represented, by can only be an image of castration, not castration itself. what details would the White Bishop’s Pawn’s lack have been signified? More to Whether theatrically imaged or not, then, the play gives the point, could it have been represented given that what is being represented is us only a representation of castration, not real castration.33 a literal impossibility? In contemporary terms, one might ask ‘can a mannequin be castrated?’ Perhaps. The nearest analogue I know of is Cindy Sherman’s series (It is perhaps worth adding that for Middleton ‘real’ of ‘pornographic’ photos of nude, fragmented female mannequins exhibited at castration always appears, as it does for Freud, as figured Metro Pictures, New York, in 1992. Even here, however, female sexuality is clearly figured. It is not surprising, then, that two reviewers found the images and displaced. Consider The Changeling, in which we are difficult to read (see Hartney, 1992 and Weinstein, 1992), and one notes invited to read De Flores’s cutting off Alonzo’s ring finger that ‘Sherman’s new work has already been enthusiastically misinterpreted as as a castration: it recalls both De Flores’s earlier image exclusively concerning the link between sex and violence. What has been ignored is that these are mannequins’ (Weinstein 1992, 95). ‘I should thrust my fingers \ Into her sockets’, where 34 At stake in images of castration is not the difference between real and symbolic, ‘sockets’ means both the fingers of Beatrice-Joanna’s glove but the economy of substitutions structuring male and female desire whereby something can or cannot be exchanged for something else. On the related problem and her vagina, and an earlier pun on Isabella’s ring, of glossing and expurgating bawdy puns, see Hedrick (1994). both jewel and vagina, into which suitors may ‘thrust’ 35 John Rogers has alerted me to a perhaps even more bizarre Protestant tradition their fingers.)34 involving foreskin mutilation which tied ‘improvement’ of the genitalia to the approach of the millennium. Moreover, Middleton does not limit castration to a single 36 Following Derrida’s account of castration as necessarily figured because meaning. Castration not only has two negative meanings necessarily misread (i.e. the female body has not been castrated), we could say but a positive one as well. Castration actually empowers that censorship too is always metaphorical, available only through a figure which supplements it. I argue (1994a) that censorship’s performative, productive status the White Bishop’s Pawn, makes him lighter and hence means that its identity is never given, available only through a metaphorical faster; it does not make him ‘impotent’, but instead supplement, a supplement which critics often use in an effort to literalize censorship (as with various metaphors of the bodily mutilation, castration among displaces and disperses his power. In making the Jesuits them). For more on this point, see Burt (1993, 150–68) and Bourdieu (1991, gelders, Middleton follows a tradition of anti-Catholic 138).

achievement of phallic plenitude. Uncensoring does not Local disappointments at not finding clear-cut cases of lead to an orgasmic moment of pure presence since there repressive theatre censorship do not necessarily effect the is no uncensored text to recover. intensity of the desire for a non-commodified, defetishized, If it is clear that censorship of A Game at Chess and uncensored politics; indeed, one could argue that that Middleton’s other plays demands that we rethink cen- desire is hysterically intensified the more it is disappointed. sorship in terms of dispersal and displacement, we are To imagine that it could be satisfied would be to imagine now in a position to make clear that a desire for an un- (mistakenly) that castration ever secured binary opposi- censored radical politics will always be disappointed. The tions between disavowal and avowal, between distortion uncensored, whole, original text is precisely the phantas- and clarity, between visibility and invisibility, between matic promise that fetishism offers and always disappoints. censorship and uncensorship that some anti-fetishism fem- A salient contribution of Middleton’s case is the way that inist critics think it has (Silverman 1992; Penley 1993).39 it puts into question rather than embraces a desire for an What looks like defetishism (multiple, small differences original, uncensored, whole text. Uncensoring A Game at constituting a clitoral criticism opposed to the single, big Chess produces not a single coherent allegory (political, difference of a phallic criticism) from another perspective religious, or moral) but dispersed, fragmented allegories looks like fetishism masquerading as its opposite (small which do not come together. Indeed, they do not ‘come’ differences being that which enables the construction of a at all. While they tellingly link dramatic characters and big difference between feminist and patriarchal criticism).40 historical personages, they don’t tell the meaning of the parallel. Middleton’s play enacts a paradoxical economy The details of Middleton’s cases of dramatic censorship paradoxically place him by showing how hard it is place of both putting topical parallels into circulation and with- 41 holding their whole meaning (both inviting uncensoring him (or any other dramatist) politically. Middleton con- and making it impossible). Thus, one arrives at an un- tributes to contemporary political criticism, indirectly to be censored general allegory only at the expense of reading sure, in helping to characterize the present in terms of a in detail, only as it were by not reading. To put the point detumescence of the political, thereby opening up the pos- in its most paradoxical form, uncensoring the play as a sibility of an ambivalent, amped up, ‘freaked out’ critical whole entails censoring some of its parts. practice (iconoclastic, scandalous, tabloid), rather than On the basis of this account of censorship as fetishistic, in enabling a History of fetishism that would somehow we can begin to see why there can be no defetishized counter the repressive effects of both commodity fetishism model of textual culture that might be harnessed to and psychoanalytic models of fetishism.42 Perhaps Middle- the politics of feminist criticism and/or queer theory. To ton’s value lies in the way he might make us face our imagine that uncensoring is an antidote to censoring in disappointment at not finding a well-heeled politics, or, the repressive sense is to cling to a fetishistic narrative of to put it another way, at finding that politics are always textual transmission in which a complete integral text is more or less repressed as it is put into circulation. The 37 For an account of fetishism as securing a whole male body at the expense of uncensored text is implicitly regarded as masculine, an the female body (which is regarded as lacking), see Silverman (1992). imaginary whole prior to its castration, while the censored 38 For a similar formulation, see Haber (1993). text is constructed as feminine, as lacking integrity.37 This 39 I develop this point more fully in Burt (1994a). 40 It is perhaps already clear I would argue that any Lacanian informed account narrative is fetishistic, moreover, in that it constructs a of a ‘lesbian phallus’, of ‘displaceability’ (see Judith Butler 1992) or of a more model of textual production and consumption with clear polemically, Deleuzian informed anti-psychoanalytic account of masochism (see beginnings and endings that either reasserts patriarchal Steven Shaviro 1993) would not serve as as antidotes to Freud’s account of castration and fetishism but would instead recapitulate the problems with regard authority over its meaning or reads its textual productivity to censorship articulated here. in phallic terms (the text is productive precisely because 41 I say this notwithstanding the reasonably held view of Middleton as unequivoc- ally anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and anti-Spanish match. Though there were two it has not been censored/castrated). Critics often tell this sides to the issues dramatized in a play like A Game at Chess, Middleton is less con- story (and perhaps most intensely) in the name of an cerned with aligning himself on one side or the other than the way displacement uncensored politics (either oppositional in the neo-Whig breaks down oppositions. This interest may account for the sometimes surprising 38 reception of Middleton’s works. Consider a concrete example. Middleton might be version or consensus in the revisionist version). put at one of end of an axis, Ben Jonson at the other, with Middleton representing In so far as political critics (and here I include all a progressive anti-censorship politics and Ben Jonson representing a reactionary, political critics) have (often unconsciously) sought a de- censorious politics. Yet Jonson was mistaken for Middleton’s collaborator on The Widow (1615–16). fetishized, uncensored politics, a whole and original text, 42 By ‘freak out’, I mean both the negative sense of ‘get hysterical’ and the they have made a fetish out of oppositional, radical polit- positive 1960s sense of breaking with established (and often repressive) norms. I ics. Politics, that is, functions like a commodity rather am exploring the politics of the freak-out in a book in progress entitled Getting Off the Subject: Sexuality, Iconoclasm, and Academic Celebrity. For more on castration than as the antidote to commodity fetishism. Just as and on scandal, see Hollier (1984) and Saper (1993). the commodity constructs a desire which it never sat- 43 I say this partly to acknowledge that a detumescent or even fully ‘castrated’ politics can be an instance of phallic politics, as in the Hydra, where cutting of isfies fully (impelling the consumer to purchase another a head only leads to the growth of two more. Moreover, it would be a mistake commodity promising to do what the other did not), so to imagine that a ‘new’ historicizing practice could lead to a new way of valuing each instance of an apparently uncensored radical politics topicality over allegory, or a topicality of fragments over a topicality of the whole reading. These very oppositions would simply secure the same kind of fetishistic disappoints. Cases of repressive censorship cannot always desire and disappointment. See Leah Marcus (1990; 1992); Alan Liu (1990); be decisively distinguished from cases of noncensorship. and Patricia Fumerton (1990) for accounts of the importance of topicality and

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