Shadows and the Substance of Shakespearean Drama

Janine Harper

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

Janine Harper

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2018 Abstract

England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was the stage for explorations of the physics of light and its representation in art. Although much critical attention has been paid to this interest in light, there has not yet been sufficient attention to the concurrent fascination with its absence as epitomized by shadows. I argue in this dissertation that the phenomenon of the shadow existed as a powerful trope for artistic and literary expression in the period; I conceive of the Renaissance shadow not, however, just as a figure of negativity or privation, but also as one of doubling and of excess in

English usage.

My study identifies three prominent and interconnected senses of shadows that are of special importance to Renaissance dramatists such as Shakespeare, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Richard Brome, and John Webster. I investigate debates surrounding the nature of the “shades” of ghosts, familiars, and other supernatural phenomena as they are discussed by natural scientists and demonologists, and as they are staged in Hamlet,

Macbeth, and The Late Lancashire Witches. The problems of imitation, subordination, and spectrality that haunt these plays also figure in staged relations of social “shadowing” that obtain between speakers and mediators in Measure for Measure and The Merchant of

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Venice, and between masters and servants in The Tempest and The Duchess of Malfi. As synonyms for the forms and practices of art, shadows are associated with popular denigrations of visual and rhetorical art; in Cymbeline and Philaster, they also evoke the anxiety surrounding art’s power to betray its objects with unfaithful semblances and to encourage scandalous acts of imitation. In examining these works, I show how the discourse of shadows reveals the liminal spaces and hidden undersides of early modern scientific, philosophical, and theatrical cultures. Attention to the shadow, its cognate terms, and its related phenomena engages debates that captivated dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century regarding the operations of the mind; the unstable boundaries between science, magic, and art; and the social value of the theatre itself as a site of highly affective language and gesture.

Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of my committee, for whom I have nothing but the highest respect and deepest gratitude. I am indebted to my supervisor, Elizabeth Harvey, for seeing my thesis from its vague beginnings through to its completion as a body of work that we were both excited to discuss, and for helping me to reach that point with thoughtful and encouraging questions and suggestions at our many meetings over the years. Likewise, I am grateful to Katherine Larson, who was always ready with keen advice and new reading material, and who also encouraged me to hone my pedagogical skills in ways that complemented my dissertation work. Many thanks go, too, to Lynne Magnusson, whose enthusiastic support for my project came with much-needed pushes to think outside my comfort zone, clarify my reasoning, and tighten up my close readings. Last—but certainly not least—I am grateful to Liza Blake and Mary Thomas Crane, my internal and external examiners, respectively, whose insightful questions not only made for an exciting conversation in my defense, but also helped to illuminate new directions for my work to take in the coming years.

This project was also made possible by the generous financial support of numerous funding bodies. I want to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which funded my work with Canada Graduate Scholarships at the master’s and doctoral level, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, which provided me with financial support in the fifth year of my studies. My project was also supported by the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Science and School of Graduate Studies, which provided me with conference travel grants, and by the Shakespeare Association of America, whose Graduate Student Travel Awards allowed me to attend annual meetings and engage in productive seminar conversations with fellow Shakespeare scholars. I am grateful as well to the Department of English for selecting me as the recipient of the Avie Bennett Scholarship and Viola Whitney Pratt Memorial Scholarship, and for continuing to support my research in my sixth year with the Doctoral Completion Award.

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I am indebted to a nigh-innumerable array of friends and colleagues whom I have been lucky to know, work with, and share ideas with over the years. I owe my thanks to the many members of the Shakespeare Association of America—and especially to Drew Daniel, Subha Mukherji, Elizabeth Swann, and Adam Zucker—who generously read and offered insightful advice on early drafts of these chapters. I offer my warmest thanks, too, to Jeremy Lopez for acting as a pedagogical role model and a source of alternatives to my own critical reading methods during our many years of shared undergraduate Shakespeare teaching. I am grateful to Alexandra Johnston, Sally-Beth MacLean, Carolyn Black, Patrick Gregory, Kathy Chung, and the other members and associates of the Records of Early English Drama office here at the University of Toronto—not simply for taking me on and empowering me to contribute meaningfully to REED’s digital humanities projects, but also for giving me years of good conversation and moral support.

I am eternally grateful, too, to the friends and colleagues within my doctoral cohort who cared for and supported me over these past seven years, and who were always willing to examine my drafts with a much-needed external perspective. Among these friends, I want to single out Jeff Espie, John Estabillo, Deni Kasa, and Sarah Star, who joined me in our very first dissertation workshop group and who may not realize how instrumental their thoughtful critiques were to the transformation of my early drafts into successful chapters. My love and thanks go out, too, to all the members of the movie night crew for being there for me during those long weeks of writing and revising, and for laughing with me at the many curiosities that I pulled out of old plays and treatises over the years. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my parents, Craig and Peggy Harper, whose support gave me the courage to begin this academic journey, and whose encouragement helped me to see it through.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Foreshadowing………………………………………………………….. 1 I: Ambitious substances……………………………………………………...... 1 II: “thy fair imperfect shade” ………………………………………………...... 8 III: “I’ll call thee Hamlet” …………………………………………………...... 21 Chapter 1: Describing the Demonic in Macbeth and The Late Lancashire Witches….. 32 I: Renaissance witches, at home and abroad…………………………………….. 37 Witchy words and white magics ………………………………………. 37 The shadowy universe…………………………………………………. 42 Lancashire’s “crisis of mediation”…………………………………….. 45 II: Dark demonological matters…………………………………………………. 47 Representative “shaddowes”…………………………………………... 47 Fantastical printings…………………………………………………… 51 III: Witchcraft, testimony, and forensic drama………………………………….. 55 Macbeth’s solipsistic shadows………………………………………… 55 Arthur’s imaginative empiricism……………………………………… 61 IV: Communal errors, bodily truths……………………………………………... 66 Bloody witnesses………………………………………………………. 66 Self-incriminating speakers……………………………………………. 68 “The future in the instant”……………………………………………... 71 Brome and Heywood’s loose judicial ends……………………………. 75 Chapter 2: Cymbeline and Philaster’s Rhetorical Shadows ………………………….. 80 I: The rhetorical shadow…………………………………………………………. 84 Rhetoric’s “coulours and shadowing”…………………………………. 84 Innogen’s shadow……………………………………………………… 88 Italian passions and English passivity…………………………………. 95 Artificial Arethusas……………………………………………………. 100 II: The shadow of Narcissus…………………………………………………….. 104 Revisionary histories…………………………………………………... 104

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“It is a woman!”……………………………………………………….. 109 “Harmless lightning”.………………………………………………….. 113 Chapter 3: Shakespeare’s Shady Echoes……………………………………………… 120 I: Talking heads and substitutes…………………………………………………. 123 Sonic shadows…………………………………………………………. 123 The “logic of deferral”………………………………………………… 128 Supplements and substitutes…………………………………………... 132 II: Echoes of Narcissus………………………………………………………….. 135 Dubious echoes………………………………………………………... 135 Shakespeare’s bad listeners……………………………………………. 140 Conversation and seduction…………………………………………… 143 III: Selfhood and sycophancy…………………………………………………… 148 “Good echoes”………………………………………………………… 148 Shady self-conduct.……………………………………………………. 153 Chapter 4: The Servant in the Shadows……………………………………………….. 158 I: The inevitable shadow………………………………………………………… 163 Servants and their substances………………………………………….. 163 Service and ambition…………………………………………………... 166 II: Erotic servitude……………………………………………………………….. 173 “this patient log-man”…………………………………………………. 173 “a lord of mis-rule”……………………………………………………. 179 III: Servants and other selves……………………………………………………. 185 “I would hang on their ears like a horse-leech”……………………….. 185 “another my selfe”…………………………………………………….. 188 IV: Things of darkness…………………………………………………………... 199 Coda: Periscian States…………………………………………………………………. 206 Works Consulted………………………………………………………………………. 213

Introduction Foreshadowing I: Ambitious substances

HAMLET …there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me [Denmark] is a prison. ROSENCRANTZ Why, then your ambition makes it one; ’tis too narrow for your mind. HAMLET O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. GUILDENSTERN Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. HAMLET A dream itself is but a shadow. ROSENCRANTZ Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow. HAMLET Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows. (Hamlet 2.2.244-57)1 In one of Hamlet’s Folio-exclusive passages, Shakespeare’s prince uses a moment of idle banter with his companions to make veiled comments on the troubles that plague him in Denmark. He has returned home to find that his father is dead, his loathed uncle Claudius is on the throne, and his mother has married the new king. Hamlet, who remains stubbornly in mourning, is troubled not just by others’ relative haste to cease their grieving, but also by the arrival of a ghost who claims to be Hamlet’s father and to have been murdered by the new king. “Remember me” (1.5.91), the ghost tells Hamlet as it exits the stage after their first meeting. This appeal for vengeance is phrased as a demand that Hamlet continue to cling psychologically to the source of his grief, and so remain in the “prison” that Denmark has become in Hamlet’s private

1 Unless otherwise noted, all references to Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic works are cited from The Norton Shakespeare (2nd edn.). Throughout this dissertation, I cite early printed editions of Renaissance writers’ works, including some early editions of Shakespeare’s plays; I retain these older texts’ spelling and punctuation, but modernize several archaic printing conventions (i/j, u/v, vv/w) for ease of reading.

1 2 conception. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are unaware of the reasons behind Hamlet’s expressions of distress, and their responses to the prince’s remarks are transparently sycophantic, but it is through their logical play that Hamlet reaches his paradoxical conclusion about the insubstantial nature of kingship and heroism. The term “shadow” denotes, literally, an area of comparative darkness created by an object’s interception of light; figuratively, it also connotes a fleeting, insubstantial, or unreal object of vain pursuit.2 Beggars—who implicitly lack ambition—thus become bodies, while “our monarchs and outstretched heroes” become the shadows to these beggars, stretching beyond them in pursuit of their dreams but enjoying only a fleeting existence. In this scene, Hamlet is feigning madness with two men who are in league with Claudius; he thus gives his listeners little reason to take his remarks seriously. Despite his flippancy, however, his equation of monarchs and heroes with shadows demands further probing within a play whose protagonist obsessively contemplates his own actions (and inaction) in response to the ghost’s imperative in similar terms.

Hamlet’s rhetorical playing with the shadow and its analogues in this passage indeed illuminates three closely related facets of this figure that are crucial to this study. First, the shadow figures the threat of mortality that constantly hangs over the living but which is troubled by the appearances of ghosts—shades—whose haunting presence suggests that living reality is not completely partitioned from the unknown underworld of the afterlife. Hamlet insists that ambitious dreams, and by extension the lives of the ambitious, are ephemeral. The sudden appearance of Old Hamlet’s ghost at Elsinore reveals, however, that the border of the “undiscovered country,” from which Hamlet insists “No traveller returns” (3.1.81-2), is highly permeable. Hamlet alludes to this revelation in the claim that he suffers from “bad dreams,” signaling his anxiety regarding the apparent dissolution of boundaries between the world of the mortal/waking and that of the dead/sleeping. Ghosts emerge on the stage out of the underworld to demand remembrance and action from the living. The vengeful shades who spur the acts of violence and premature self-destruction that characterize revenge tragedy thus make visible (and literal) the inescapable haunting of the present by the errors and enmities of the past. Yet, as Hamlet’s discomfort and his subsequent hesitation to act upon the ghost’s imperatives suggest,

2 See OED “shadow” (n.) I.1.a, II.4.c, II.6.a. I will return to each of these connotations—and introduce additional ones—below.

3 these figures also confront their witnesses with the possibility that ghostly encounters might really be the stuff of dreams and hallucinations.

Second, Hamlet’s commentary on earthly ambitions also draws the shadow into the domain of the social, where the image of the cast shadow figures the rooting of social identity in contingent relations of power. The ambitious dreams that heroes and kings allegedly possess mark a distinction between powerful figures and beggars. Hamlet claims, however, that one is a “shadow” to the other, and so reasserts a sense of their fundamental likeness—particularly in the implicit susceptibility of both to the looming shadow of death—and mocks the powerful for the vanity of the pursuits upon which their sense of identity and difference depend. Hamlet, a prince, implicitly counts himself among these vain shadows, but elsewhere he criticizes his self- perceived lack of ambition and his failures to act in similar terms. After the First Player’s speech on Hecuba’s grief, for instance, Hamlet asks whether it is not “monstrous” that the player, “in a fiction, in a dream of passion” (2.2.529), is moved to tears, whereas Hamlet remains “Like John- a-dreams, unpregnant of [his] cause, / And can say nothing” (2.2.545-6). Later, Hamlet again bemoans his inaction despite the “Excitements of [his] reason and [his] blood” offered by his father’s murder and his mother’s remarriage (4.4.9.48); he compares himself to Young Fortinbras, “Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed / Makes mouths at the invisible event” of an upcoming battle (4.4.9.39-40).3 In Hamlet’s complaints, the inner worlds of princes and commoners alike, their dreams and imaginings, possess an affective capacity that Hamlet’s lived experiences cannot match. Concepts that Hamlet renders cognate with shadows—ambitions, fantasies, fictions, dreams—thus waver maddeningly in his speeches between figures of power and of impotence, between signifiers of his own inadequacies and ideals of receptivity, passion, and action that he finds in others and after which he might model himself.

Hamlet’s deprecating self-comparison to the First Player brings me to the third strand of my study. His conflation of dreams with beggars’ shadows is embodied by this player and his “dream of passion,” which participate in the widespread association of mimetic—and especially dramatic—art with the shadow. The theatre becomes a metonym for a variety of artistic forms and practices, while the Player’s weeping as he describes a grieving Trojan mother signals the

3 The Norton edition of Hamlet marks passages exclusive to Q2, including Hamlet’s comments on Fortinbras’s army here, and Horatio and Barnardo’s comments on the walking dead in 1.1, with these sub-numbers.

4 affective force of these arts despite their fundamental unreality. It was, of course, a commonplace for actors, acting, and art in general to be likened to shadows;4 Shakespeare’s audiences were thus well-equipped to perceive a metatheatrical joke in a declaration from a prince played by an actor that kings are the “shadows” cast by beggars. So too does this joke obtain for modern critics and playgoers, for whom the association between shadows and imitation remains. The art-as-shadow trope is most pointed, however, for English authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These authors’ work evinces a rooting in the humanist veneration of Greek and Roman authors, and in the educational programs of memorization and imitation that established them as familiar yet potentially overshadowing models.5

Literary art, in other words, was for Shakespeare and his contemporaries a practice of illusion- making that was fueled in no small part by conversations with the shades of the dead. The shadow, in its association with death and the supernatural, stands at the center of contemporary debates surrounding the nature and the uncertain boundaries of the known world and the otherworld beyond it. It also evokes social tensions surrounding ambition and the mutability of the self that captivated writers at the turn of the seventeenth century, even as it figures a contemporary fascination with imitation and a turn toward the venerated past. Yet, particularly as a theatrical metaphor, the shadow exists as a figure for forms of popular entertainment, for appealing spectacles, for the pleasure and the affective power of language and gesture unbound by the limits of reality. Over the course of this study, I offer a study of Renaissance English rhetorics of the shadow that draws these strands of meaning together and examines them through the lens of the Shakespearean stage.

I am not the first critic to note the importance of the shadow and its related metaphors and cognate phenomena to Western literature, philosophy, and art; nor, indeed, am I the first to note this figure’s importance to Shakespeare’s particular art. My work follows in the footsteps of

4 See OED “shadow” (n.) II.6.b; see also my discussion of pamphlets on the Renaissance theatre below. 5 On Shakespeare’s classical education and evidence thereof in his works see, e.g., T.W. Baldwin’s foundational William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke and, more recently, Lynn Enterline’s Shakespeare’s Schoolroom and Charles Martindale and A.B. Taylor’s essay collection Shakespeare and the Classics. The fitness of English itself to good poetry relative to classical (and contemporary continental) tongues was in question in the late sixteenth century, as Philip Sidney suggests in his defense of English’s capacity for poetic rhyme and metre (146). (Sidney goes on to blame English “poet-apes” rather than English itself for English poesy’s alleged poor reputation [147].)

5 scholars of art history, and especially those of Victor Stoichita, whose Short History of the Shadow explores the representation (and denigration) of the shadow as a “negative entity” in relation to light in Western art (8), ranging from classical stories of art’s origins in shadow- tracing through the use of dramatic lighting (and shadowing) in twentieth-century photography.6 I am also indebted for my interest in the shadow, in its discussion as a visible phenomenon, to critics—including Joel Fineman, Martin Jay, and Stuart Clark—who have elucidated the tension that exists between the ocularocentrism of Western culture and a pervasive sense of distrust regarding fallible individuals’ visual and judgemental acuity;7 in Renaissance poesy, this tension is inextricably linked to light/shadow and substance/shadow binaries.8 More broadly, my study takes cues from recent work on the forensic qualities of Renaissance English drama by Lorna Hutson and Holger Syme.9 I examine staged scenes in which shadow/substance binaries are

6 John Hollander’s The Substance of Shadow—a book-length study of the shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance through the twentieth century—was published posthumously in 2016 as the first draft of this thesis neared completion. Its relatively recent publication date, together with its exclusive focus on poetry, prevented it from bearing any significant influence on the genesis of my own work. Hollander’s observations on Renaissance poetry nonetheless dovetail with my own; see, e.g., Hollander’s assertion that shadows’ “insubstantiality has allowed [them] to be seen both as residues or traces of something palpable and more profoundly animated and, more enigmatically, as emanations of something internal to us” (3)—a double potential that underlies my own discussions of shadow/body relations throughout this study. 7 See Jay’s Downcast Eyes for a summary of pre-Enlightenment ocularocentric thinking, and especially “the alternating traditions of speculation with the eye of the mind and observation with the two eyes of the body” (29); I discuss these twinned forms of seeing in Chapter 2’s study of the imaginative effects of lyric poetry. See also Fineman’s discussion of “visionary motifs” in relation to the poetics of praise in Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (11). Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye discusses the increasing characterization of vision by intellectuals in terms of its “uncertainty and unreliability, such that access to visual reality could no longer be normally guaranteed” (2). 8 Shakespeare’s speaker in Sonnet 43 claims, for instance, that his eyes “best see” in dreams (1), for there, “they look on thee, / And, darkly bright, are bright in dark directed” (3-4); if this “shadow shadows doth make bright”— that is, if the imaginative image of the beloved makes a dream “bright”—“How would thy shadow’s form form happy show / To the clear day with thy much clearer light” (5-7). Even in dreams, the speaker’s beloved is persistently associated with light even as this beloved is rendered, himself, a shadow within the shadow of a dream. Elsewhere, however, the speaker demands of Cupid in a sonnet on the “dark lady,” “If eyes corrupt by over-partial looks / Be anchored in the bay where all men ride, / Why of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forgèd hooks, / Whereto the judgment of my heart is tied?” (87.5-8). The same eyes that render beloved forms at night create “hooks” to a corruptible judgement. The shadow is also often employed by critics as a figure for the work of imagination and rhetoric. Fineman, for instance, describes metaphor as “opaque, a color, shade, or shading whose dazzling, veiling brightness adds a shine or sheen to that which like a lamp it will light up” (11). 9 Hutson’s The Invention of Suspicion argues that dramatists of the 1590s and beyond evince a new concern with “casting doubt on the reliability and probability of the signs and indications on which people base judgements about one another” (12). Syme argues in Theatre and Testimony that Elizabethans and Jacobeans “relied thoroughly on deferral, mediation, or representation as engines of authority,” and also that “the theatre established itself as the central form of cultural expression in the period” because it too “is an art profoundly dependent on similar mechanisms of embodied mediation as its basic functioning principle” (2); as such, “properly mediated reports, or testimony more generally, were understood to have the power to conjure past events or absent persons in Shakespeare’s England” (209).

6 deployed by Renaissance writers figuratively to describe acts of mediation and judgement in which characters attempt rhetorically to reconstruct and explain past trauma, and also to distinguish between the constructions of others’ speeches and the unseen passions and actions that these words purport to represent.

My work stakes out a fresh critical intervention, however, in several respects. First, the formal, temporal, and geographical specificity with which I examine the shadow—i.e. within plays staged in late Elizabethan through early Caroline London—sets my work apart from broader chronological surveys (such as Stoichita’s and Hollander’s), as well as from the work of critics whose interests range across Renaissance Europe (as Clark’s do), or whose analysis focuses largely on other genres (as in William Engel’s observations on shades in emblem books and prose histories10). The early-seventeenth-century stage deserves close critical inquiry as a site where playwrights worked out their obsession with memory, imitation, and repetition—both within the plots of their plays and, more broadly, in the reiterative nature of the English repertory theatre itself. Second, to the best of my knowledge, no other critic has undertaken a sustained study of the Renaissance English shadow, despite its haunting of the margins of existing studies of death and theatrical art.11 Third, my work is broadly in accordance with existing critical definitions of the shadow as—to borrow Stoichita’s phrasing—a negative entity, but I explore its associations not just with absence or privation, but also with doubling excess and rhetorical wit in Renaissance usage.

The figure of the shadow in Renaissance literature exists as something that seems to derive at least some part of its identity and significance from another object, yet which is by definition distinct from this object. The shadow thus becomes an entry point into problematizations of the

10 Engel treats “shades” in three broad senses of the term: “shadows of things in the world represented on the stage,” translators’ and dictionary-makers’ “linking of meanings through sounds no less than semantic implications” (as in the effort to capture the “spirit” of a text’s original language), and the expression of individual histories in terms of a history of the world that is “haunted” by the inevitability of decline and death (Death and Drama 4). 11 Engel’s focus on decay and decline is, for instance, comparable to my interest in shadowy ghosts, but I also consider connotations of the shadow beyond these ones, and am less concerned than Engel is with the subject of history as a narrative of decline. On ghosts (“shades”) as a long-standing theatrical metaphor, see Marvin Carlson, who invokes the shadow-as-ghost as a figure for the experience of playgoing: “The present experience is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations while these ghosts are simultaneously shifted and modified by the processes of recycling and recollection” (2). A particular production may, for instance, be “overshadowed” by an actor who becomes closely bonded to a particular role, so that “for a generation or more all productions are haunted by the memory of that interpretation” (66).

7 relationships between substances and appearances, bodies and texts, originals and doubles; it is a figure that troubles binaries of excess and insufficiency, presence and absence, originality and imitation. My approach to the concept of the shadow begins with the cataloguing of shadow- language in relation to these concerns, but each chapter moves beyond concordances and into larger investigations of figures and phenomena that are related to the shadow and which share its cultural associations. A number of other scholars have used singular lexical terms as a means of approaching the epistemological and philosophical concerns of Renaissance literature;12 the shadow is one of these pivotal terms. Attending not just to its widespread appearance and manifold significations but also its subtle reverberations within the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries allows us to see what has been obscured by a critical emphasis on light and positivity. Explicit references to shadows therefore become anchors within studies of larger networks of associated concepts, and of speeches and writings wherein the shadow itself may be absent but its associations and its imaginative work are still clearly felt. The figure becomes, especially, an anchor-point for a larger investigation of a broader array of visual and linguistic phenomena—and of the relations between these phenomena—that are at play in these works. “Shadows” as I explore them in this study thus exist literally as shadows that are projected onto cave walls or which suffuse nighttime scenes, but they also appear more subtly in constellations of figures and phenomena that captured the imaginations of Renaissance writers: from the shades of vengeful ghosts; to the shadows of actors, substitutes, sycophants, and other figures that seem to double and echo one another; to the shadowing-forth of prophetic writings; to the colours and shadowing of well-wrought poetic rhetoric. In the following section, I define and expand upon these key concepts, and concurrently establish the contexts within which the shadow and its

12 Mary Thomas Crane argues that “the mental connections and associations of semantic webs and prototypes seem especially evident in Shakespeare’s work” (Brain 24), and that Shakespeare’s plays tend to “hover” around a polysemic word (“or a group of related words”), “repeating it, worrying it, using it in all of its different senses, punning on it, in ways that reveal its embeddedness in semantic webs and its implication in ongoing social process” (25). Crane explores, for instance, the significance of the word “suit,” which “named a nexus of ways in which desire was both satisfied and controlled, as well as ways in which clothing was used both to reveal and to conceal the self” (94). This approach to the cultural roots of words and ideas crosses methodological boundaries. In addition to Crane’s cognitive studies approach to Shakespeare, see, e.g., Roland Greene’s discussion of the sixteenth-century semantic changes of “blood,” “invention,” “language,” “resistance,” and “world” in Five Words; Bruce Smith’s historical phenomenological study of “green” in The Key of Green; and Patricia Parker’s feminist rhetoric-studies approach to the “preposterous” as both a concept and a rhetorical trope in Literary Fat Ladies (67), or, more recently, Parker’s study of “nothing,” “noting,” and other homophones in relation to “pervasive fears of infidelity and cuckolding” in Cymbeline and Much Ado (“Noting” 103).

8 network of related phenomena have been examined by both Renaissance writers and modern critics.

II: “thy fair imperfect shade”

The word “shadow” is derived from the Old English “scead(u)we,” a term that signifies comparative darkness and which thus places the physical phenomenon in binary and contingent relationships with both light and substance: the shadow is defined by an absence of light, and the cast shadow is derived from a body—a substance—that intercepts light.13 From its earliest uses, the shadow was also richly figurative, for it was inextricably intertwined with biblical notions of ephemerality and dissolution. It appears in the “shadow of death” of early English translations of Psalm 23, and also in translations of and commentaries on Job’s plea for a reprieve from his sufferings before his journey “into the countrie of darknesse and into the shadow of death” (qtd. in Engel, Death and Drama 3);14 Job’s speech, as Engel notes, “brings home the melancholy implications lurking within the darkness that shades off from ‘ombra’ into ‘oblivion’” (4). In Renaissance Christian lexicons, invocations of the shadow occasionally work against this association with oblivion, instead suggesting forms of heavenly consolation. Thomas Wilson thus notes in his Christian Dictionarie that the shadow may denote “A refreshing or comfort from God,” like a “Shadow” that comforts a traveler on a hot day (Ff4r). The term is, however, most frequently associated in these lexicons with forms of symbolic doubling, as in Niels Hemmingsen’s Postill, or Exposition of the Gospels, which incorporates the shadow into his understanding of the “type”: Hemmingsen defines it as “a figure, shadow, signe, token, representation, or Image of a thing too [sic] come” (Xx7r).15 Yet, the relations between the shadow and the thing that it signifies may confuse an undiscerning perceiver when the shadow is

13 See the “Etymology” section of OED “shadow” (n) as well as sense I.1.a. 14 Engel’s quotation from Job 10 is derived from Arthur Golding’s 1574 translation of John Calvin’s sermons on Job (N8v). 15 See also Hemmingsen’s gloss for “Prefigurate”: “covertly, darkly, or slightly too foretoken, foreshew, import, shadow, or represent a thing too come” (Xx6r). This is the typological sense of the shadow: an interpretation of scripture and history that sees one event or person as signifying (figuring, shadowing) both itself (the type) and a second event or person (the antitype) that “fulfills” this first one. See especially Erich Auerbach's discussion of this figure in Mimesis (73–6).

9 deceptively imitative in a binary shadow/substance relationship. Wilson defines the term “image” as “an immaginary vanishing shaddow” that reflects “the lightnesse and unconstancy of all earthly things,”16 and also as “a shadow or a vaine likenesse” that seems like “the true goodnesse and felicity it selfe” (R3v). On one hand, then, the shadow enters English figurative usage typologically, as a figure through which present darkness and misfortune presage death, and Job’s suffering in this darkness anticipates that of Christ. On the other hand, the suggestion that life’s ills are shadows of death renders life itself imitative and unreal relative to the transcendent hereafter, and the association of shadows with semblances and the imaginary marks objects of desire and pursuit within this life as vain ones.

In addition to these biblical reminders of life’s shadowy ephemerality, Renaissance readers would have been aware of a tradition of classical philosophy that associated the phenomenal world with the shadow in a manner similar to Wilson’s usage. The minor influence of Plato’s dialogues on Shakespeare’s works, in part through contemporary Neoplatonic texts and translations, is a subject of occasional critical inquiry.17 I do not intend to make a case for the Republic’s significant allusive presence in Shakespeare’s plays, but many playful Renaissance references to mimetic shadows bear the influence of a popular understanding of Plato’s theory of Forms, especially as this theory is expounded in a language of light and shadow within his cave allegory. In Book 7 of the Republic, Plato describes a hypothetical situation in which prisoners are fettered in a cave and made to watch the shadows of objects parading before them on the cave wall, which these prisoners take for the objects themselves. A prisoner who is released from his fetters and brought outside would be dazzled painfully by the sun, but might begin gradually to perceive the world around him first by looking at “shadows” (“σκιάς”), then reflections in the water, then finally “the things themselves” (516b). The goal of this progression, Plato’s Socrates explains, is to “see the sun,” to contemplate its nature, and so to understand that it is “somehow responsible” for the things that he sees before him and whose imitations he once watched in the

16 This usage of the shadow, as a synonym for all that is fleeting and mutable, is a common theological one. See also Ficino, who argues in his Platonic Theology that “qualities [of matter] are nothing other than the affections of the same—mere shadows [umbras] that come and go like the reflections of lofty trees in a rushing stream” (1.3.15). 17 A.B. Taylor describes this influence as “an occasional but recurrent feature of modern Shakespeare Studies” and offers a short catalogue of plausible echoes of Platonic dialogues (both direct and, notably, through Ficino) in the Sonnets and several plays (276). Taylor observes that Shakespeare would likely have read Latin translations of Plato and other classical philosophers in educational compendia (278).

10 cave (516b-c). In this allegory, the “visual activity” of the freed prisoner is “considered to be equivalent to cognitive activity. In effect, the scopic desire in the simile of the cave, precedes, represents, indeed symbolizes the desire for knowledge” (Stoichita 22). As Stoichita points out, “the shadow is charged with a fundamental negativity” in its opposition to the sun (25), so that the movement from shadow to light represents the ultimate aim in the individual’s philosophical movement from the study of the sensible to that of the intelligible.

Later, Plato also aligns mimetic art implicitly (and derogatively) with the shadows in the cave— which are themselves effectively a theatrical performance, a shadow-puppet show—when he identifies the painter as “an imitator of what the others [i.e. other makers of things] manufacture,” and so as “three stages away from nature” in his making of imitations (596e). Likewise, “all composers of poetry are imitators of images of virtue and of every other subject they deal with” (601a). If the poet’s work were to be stripped of its “poetical colors,” the work would be like the face of someone “in their prime … but not beautiful” (601b). Since perceptible objects are themselves imitations of the higher Forms, artists are in this sense makers of the shadows of shadows; as early as Plato, moreover, the denigration of mimetic art carries with it a sense of suspicion regarding the deceptive appeal of artifice. Yet, by the sixteenth century, an emerging interest in the depiction of shadows among continental art theorists led to the shadow’s conception as a device of artistic verisimilitude within a larger privileging of art’s potential for precisely the kind of vivid artifice that troubles Plato. The representation of shadows on canvas became essential to the simulation of shape, perspective, and relative depth.18 Renaissance painters indeed found shadows lying at the origins of their art: Pliny the Elder (via Philemon Holland’s translation) writes in his Natural History that the art of painting began, by all Greek accounts, with the “drawing onely the shadow of a person” (Yy5r). The first instance of pottery as art, he adds later, began when a woman traced the outline of her lover’s shadow on the wall and her father, the potter Dibutades, pressed clay onto the tracing to make a relief, so that the man’s lover “might injoy his visage yet in his absence” (Aaa6r). For Pliny, this relief work is a

18 See, e.g., Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s treatise on Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge (Mm3r); and Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting (30–3). Light and shadow intertwine, for instance, in Lomazzo’s instructions to a painter who would depict a group of men standing behind one another: “although they be equally lightned, yet we must pain the second which is farther off from the eie darker” so as to create an illusion of depth (MM5r). See also Salomon de Caus, who describes the best painting as that which comes closest to achieving a sense of the natural (“[le] naturel”) through accordance with the rules of perspective and shadow (40v).

11 substitutive object that the creator “put[s] toward the task of remembering an absent and desired body” (Saltzman 2). The pleasure derived from gazing upon this object is a conscious version of that which Plato’s fettered prisoner experiences: that is, both the lover and the prisoner enjoy a perceptible object that always gestures toward its absent (or, in the case of the cave, at least unseeable) origin, but which, for the lover, also substitutes for an otherwise impossible visual experience.

These twinned stories of art’s genesis in shadows were well enough known to have been adapted to other artistic contexts. Alberti refers in passing to the art of shadow-tracing in his discussion of painting’s origins in On Painting (46), where he cites not Pliny but Quintilian, who describes the progression from shadow-tracing to painting as analogous to the development of the rhetorical arts. For Quintilian in his Orator’s Education, rhetorical art must consist of something beyond the imitation of past orators, for “It is a disgrace … to be content merely to attain the effect you are imitating”; if artists rested thus content, “the only painting would consist in drawing outlines round the shadows cast by objects in the sun” (10.2.7-8). In Quintilian’s version of the first shadow-tracing, the act troubles relations of pure substitution or memorialization by insisting upon a disjunction between past and present, between object and shadow and art, as essential to the history and value of the artist’s work. Quintilian’s artist traces an object of sensory experience—the cast shadow—produced as the sun hits a body, but successive works of art transform this process into something other than the denigrated production of imitations. The painting, like the oration, is an aesthetic object, a source of pleasure in itself, and a creation whose relations to increasingly complex disciplinary rules and conventions enhance this pleasure.

Quintilian’s analogy anticipates the importation of the painterly shadow into widespread English usage as a rhetorical term, especially within authors’ discussions of elocutio, the canon of rhetorical style.19 Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century and extending through the seventeenth,

19 The others are inventio (the invention of arguments), dispositio (the effective selection and organization of arguments), memoria (the memorization of arguments), and pronuntiatio (the use of voice and gesture in the delivery of arguments). Popular English treatises whose rhetorical prescriptions disproportionately favour elocutio include Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553), William Fulwood’s Enimie of Idleness (1568), Angel Day’s English Secretorie (1568), George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), and Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (2nd edn., 1593). See Roland Greene, however, for a discussion of the importance of inventio to

England saw an explosion of vernacular rhetoric manuals,20 most of which drew from works by classical theorists—including Quintilian—for their material. The most popular manuals devoted a disproportionate degree of space to style relative to the other rhetorical canons, and so to the systematic translation and definition of rhetorical tropes and schemes, while highlighting elocutio’s utility to civil conversation and literary pursuits.21 These manuals commonly use the term “shadow” as a synonym for both rhetorical tropes and the images themselves that these tropes construct.22 George Puttenham thus likens descriptive rhetoric’s capacity to create vivid pictures for the imagination to skilled painters’ use of “coulours and shadowing” (Q4r), while his contemporary Henry Peacham says of metaphors, “they are not onely as pleasant colours of all kinds, but also as readie pensils pliable to line out and shadow any maner of proportion in nature” (D3v). Peacham likens the artist’s use of line and shade—techniques for creating distinctions between and gradations within planes in art—to metaphor’s capacity to establish distinctions and similarities (“proportion[s]”) between the objects that it yokes together.

rhetoric’s canons as a “a preliminary but determining part” of rhetorical composition (25); see Greene more broadly for an account of the changing significance of “invention” over the course of the sixteenth century (15-40). 20 Peter Mack notes that Wilson’s Art saw eight reprintings, while Day’s English Secretorie, which features extensive marginalia detailing specific tropes at work in his sample letters, saw its final reprinting in 1635 (76). Puttenham’s Arte was printed only once; as such, Mack encourages circumspection about linking Puttenham’s advice with Elizabethan educational practices, but goes on to note the value of studying Puttenham’s contributions to the genre of the “English style manual” (77). 21 Latin editions of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria were widely available in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the text did not appear in English until the eighteenth, but many English rhetoricians’ treatises display a familiarity with Quintilian. Peter Mack discusses the basis of popular Renaissance English style manuals in Latin ones—chiefly Quintilian’s treatise and pseudo-Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium—in Elizabethan Rhetoric. See especially 76-102 for a discussion of the manuals’ tripartite function: as “translations of Latin handbooks,” as “guides to Latin rhetoric” for readers of Latin, and also as sources of rhetorical “figures … adapted to the needs of English” (101). On Shakespeare’s use of Quintilian and other classical rhetoricians in the schoolroom and beyond, see Enterline, who examines Latin lessons on prosopopoeia and ekphrasis—the arts of “impersonation and description”—as “crucial components of school exercises in oratory” and important aspects of Shakespeare’s poetic and dramatic craft (21). In 1987, Patricia Parker argued that “we need to pay attention to the exploitation of the terms and structures of rhetoric, in ways which would lead into the figurative logic shaping both lines and scenes, and from the plays themselves into the order of discourse and discourse of order they both echo and turn on itself”; Parker indeed noted that a “return to rhetoric in contemporary criticism and theory” was then already underway (Fat Ladies 96, 97). Rhetoric studies are perennially popular in criticism on English Renaissance poetry and drama; in addition to Enterline’s and Mack’s work, see also, e.g., book-length studies by Raphael Lyne (Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition) and Madhavi Menon (Wanton Words). Recent shorter critical work that approaches Shakespeare— and especially the language of desire and jealousy in Shakespearean drama—through classical and Renaissance rhetorical cultures includes that of Benjamin Beier, who contrasts the “dark view of human knowing” embodied by Othello’s Iago and his deceptive rhetoric with Cymbeline’s Innogen: a figure of “ethical rhetoric” who resists “skilled sophistry” when Giacomo propositions her (45, 56); and Roderick McKeown’s discussion of the trope of paradiastole—“the tactical description of vices in terms of virtue” but also a trope associated with flattery and hypocrisy (35)—in a broader discussion of the “mutability and danger” of jesting speech for Much Ado’s Beatrice and Hero (36). 22 Grant Williams also notes this double usage (47).

Descriptive figures of speech in general, Puttenham argues, “set foorth many things, in such sort as it should appeare they were truly before our eyes” (Dd2r). The rhetorical “shadowing” of verbal artifice thus presented Shakespeare’s contemporaries with the possibility of discarding the seeming priority of substance over shadow. In relation to bodies in time, the shadow became a figure not just for eschatological dissolution or misleading semblance, but for tropes of vivid description. In representing objects in words to the imagination, these tropes ideally created an effect not of diminishment but of presence within listeners’ minds, transcending the limits of distance, decay, and absence.

The darker senses of the shadow still, however, apply in its rhetorical usage. Thomas Wilson refers to metaphor and allegory as “shadowes” that conceal criticism and moral precepts from those who cannot understand them or who would reject them in more straightforward forms (Rhetorique n3v).23 Yet, Peacham also cautions users of antonomasia, the practice of calling someone by another name, to avoid unduly imputing vices to the trope’s objects with “shadowed signification” (C4r).24 Donne similarly takes up the shadow as a figure of seductive concealment in one of the Paradoxes and Problems, wherein he proposes to answer to the astronomical question, “Why Venus starre onely doth cast a Shadowe?” (Paradoxes 33). Donne’s answer rapidly blurs the boundaries between the shadows of physics, rhetoric, and art. He wonders whether “the workes of Venus neede shadowing covering and disguising” before correcting himself: “those of Mercury need it more. For Eloquence, his occupation”—including, satirically, the eloquence of a marriage proposal—“is all shadowes and colours; … Eloquence is a storme and tempest that miscarryes us” (33). Donne’s “A Lecture upon the Shadow” similarly invokes the positions of the shadows cast by lovers on a walk over the course of a day as figures for forms of disguise and deception that characterize different stages in love’s maturation and decay.25

23 Distinct from the Thomas Wilson who compiled the Christian Dictionarie cited above. 24 This sense of the shadow, as potentially slanderous speech, is captured also in the term “umbrage.” Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English dictionary defines “Ombrage” as “An umbrage; a shade; a shadow; also, jealousie, suspition, an incling of” (Lll1v). The phrase “Donner ombrage à”—literally, to give shade to—thus signifies, “To discontent; make jealous of, or put buzzes into the head of” (Lll1v). I return to this understanding of the shadow as umbrage throughout this study in my analyses of defamatory speeches. 25 See Elegies, p. 78–9. In the speaker’s “Lecture … in loves philosophy” (2), the morning sun’s cast shadow is a figure for growing love, while the afternoon shadow is one for love in decline: “As the first [shadows] were made to blinde / Others; these which come behinde / Will work upon our selves, and blind our eyes” (16-18). If perfect love

These intertwined understandings of shadows—philosophically as recursively imitative art and as unreal semblances of real (and proper) objects of study, and also artistically as the stuff of both verisimilitude and deceptive semblance—undergird playfully pejorative Shakespearean conceptions of shadows and shadowing as inadequate pieces of visual, rhetorical, and theatrical art. The Merchant of Venice’s Bassanio criticizes both the portrait of Portia that he finds in the lead casket and his own ability to describe the portrait: “look how far / The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow / In underprizing it, so far this shadow / Doth limp behind the substance” (3.2.126-9). The entirety of Sonnet 53 examines the relations between the beloved-as- substance and the “millions of strange shadows” that “tend” on him (2); among these shadows, the speaker names Adonis, whose “counterfeit is poorly imitated after you” (5). This allusion combines the artistic and typological, and also faintly the Neoplatonic, understandings of the shadow. Adonis’s beauty prefigures that of the young man, such that both Adonis himself and his verbal portrait are “counterfeit[s]” of the beloved. The poem as a whole searches out aspects (“shadows”) of its addressee in the world around him, rendering the young man the ideal that “in every blessed shape we know” (12). The speaker’s appreciative gaze, in moving from the shadows to the beloved substance, performs an eroticized version of the Platonic progression from the sensible to the intelligible, even as the sonnet itself remains fixed on the young man’s corporeal beauty.

Elsewhere, in Sonnet 43, Shakespeare’s speaker describes the experience of dreaming of his beloved, and marvels that “to unseeing eyes [his] shade shines so” (8). He also longs, however, for this “shadow’s form” (6)—that is, for the waking sight of the young man, the “form” from which this “fair imperfect shade” is derived (11). Shakespeare’s commentary on the shadowy nature of dream-visions reflects the conceptual parallels between dreams and shadows, while also illuminating a subtle distinction between these terms. Both are frequently associated with imitation and ephemerality, but English discussions of dreams are bound up in larger debates on the nature of human consciousness in a way that extends beyond the conceptual territory of the shadow. The world of dreams is an essentially private and inward one; Renaissance dream interpreters held that dreams could be significant and possibly even prophetic, but acknowledged

is figured as noon—when “We doe those shadowes tread; / And to brave clearnesse all things are reduc’d” (7-8)— this perfection can, according to natural and amorous philosophy alike, only be fleeting.

15 that most were imaginative reflections of daytime fears and desires or the products of mundane physiological processes.26 In their most literal sense as absences of light, shadows—in contrast with dreams—are externally visible phenomena. So too does the figurative language of shadows typically connote phenomena that may have their genesis in dreams or imaginings, but which seem to have an existence outside the mind and to possess a capacity to produce subtle effects within it. Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream thus implores the play’s audiences, if the “shadows” that are the players have given offense (Ep.1), to think of the play as a “weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream” (5-6). The act of dismissing these offensive players not as shadows but as dreams robs them of their significance, and indeed of their sense of reality and their affective nature, to irritable waking audiences.

On the stage, the body of the actor brings together physical, rhetorical, and figurative senses of the shadow, for the dramatic invocation of shadows is frequently tied not just to critiques of art within dramatic fictions, but also to actors’ metatheatrical self-deprecation as purveyors of mimetic art. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus thus says of the amateur actors who plan to perform at his wedding, “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them” (5.1.208-9). His speech tacitly aligns Shakespeare’s company with the incompetent actors within the play but also, as in Puck’s later speech, renders the work of actors unreal and essentially harmless to their audiences. The acknowledgement of the theatre as imitative and shadowy did not, however, exempt it from attacks by its critics on moral grounds. Indeed, for English anti-theatrical pamphleteers, this imitative quality held dangerous temptations for playgoers who were themselves prone to feats of imitation. The implication of anti-theatrical pamphleteers’ writings, in contrast with Theseus’s and Puck’s dismissive

26 See Peter Holland’s and Kathleen McLuskie’s essays on Renaissance dream interpretation in Peter Brown’s collection Reading Dreams (125-46, 147-67); Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan, and S.J. Wiseman’s more recent collection The Terrors of the Night; and Per Sivefors’s briefer summary of conflicting theories of dreams’ significance and the ethical concerns surrounding their interpretation (162-8). Much of the 1576 edition of Thomas Hill’s Most Pleasaunte Arte of the Interpretacion of Dreames, which defends dream interpretation as a difficult but valuable art, is devoted to an exhaustive and disorganized catalogue of specific dream-content and its prognosticative significance (E5v-P6v). Reginald Scot and Thomas Nashe are unified, conversely, in their skepticism regarding the prophetic significance of dreams. Nashe draws on theories of dreams as gastric and imaginative in nature simultaneously in The Terrors of the Night: “A dreame is nothing els but a bubling scum or froath of the fancie, which the day hath left undigested; or an after feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations” (C3v). Scot phrases his skepticism more bluntly: “as for dreames, whatsoever credit is attributed unto them, proceedeth of folly: and they are fooles that trust in them” (O1r). (Scot also cites Hill and his treatise as an example of dream interpreters’ “folly and vanity” [O2v].)

16 commentaries, is that these dramatic shadows are not harmless dreams, but are rather pernicious spectacles that affect witnesses’ passions, thoughts, and actions beyond the space of the stage. A common line of anti-theatrical discourse held that the derivation of pleasure from witnessing shadowed vice on the stage was a suspicious activity in itself, but also that the imitation of vicious action in plays fostered imitative behaviour in the witnesses to this action. Stephen Gosson thus argues that the staging of immoral actions “brings us by the shadow, to the substance of the same” (Playes Confuted G4r–v). William Prynne, a successor to and frequent quoter of Gosson in his own antitheatrical writings, likewise employs the shadow/substance binary to stress the danger of the shadow: “if the substance be evill, the shadow of it cannot be good” on the stage (N3v).27

In his defense of actors, conversely, Thomas Heywood valorizes drama by divorcing the theatre from the pejorative implications of shadow, and instead highlighting and reframing the stage’s (and the shadow’s, and the impressionable playgoer’s) mimetic nature as usefully instructive. For Heywood, “A Description is only a shadow received by the eare but not perceived by the eye,” and “lively portrature is meerely a forme seene by the eye”; the stage, which combines both descriptive shadows and lively visible forms of things, is better able to represent “action, passion, motion, or any other gesture,” and so “to moove the spirits of the beholder” to both admire and emulate legendary figures and heroes from classical and English history on the stage (B3v).28 In the prologue to the anonymous play The True Tragedie of Richard the Third, the

27 On anti-theatrical pamphleteers and their treatment of the theatre as “the focus for discharging anxieties about many sorts of social changes or threats to established power,” see especially Jean Howard’s The Stage and Social Struggle (6). (It is telling, in this context, that Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors argues that the aim of plays is “to teach the subjects obedience to their King” and to deter “all trayterous and fellonious stratagems” by showing traitors’ “untimely ends” [F3v].) Howard cautions that these tracts are “obviously formulaic and ideologically motivated” and that they often reiterate material from classical and contemporary anti-theatrical texts (22), and so cannot be taken as accurate depictions of the public stage at the time of their publication. When I refer to these pamphlets in Chapter 3’s discussion of echoic speech on the stage, I do so in tacit agreement with Howard’s insistence that these documents were “ideological productions designed to master or mask contradictions in the social and economic life of the culture in which they were produced,” and that they were often, accordingly, wide- ranging “general anatomies of social folly” (23). 28 This understanding of the stage as a vehicle for moral education is a common one in defenses of the stage and of poesy more broadly. See, e.g., Philip Sidney, who is largely dismissive of English drama (with the exception of Gorboduc), and who argues, “Our Tragedies and Comedies” fail to observe the rules of “honest civility” and “skilful Poetry” (Defence 139). Sidney insists nonetheless that poetry “hath been the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse: whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges” (103). Note the faint echo of the Platonic cave allegory in Sidney’s representation of the pursuit of knowledge in solar terms, in implicit contrast with shadowy “ignorance.”

17 ghost of Clarence enters and cries out for revenge, prompting Truth to ask Poetrie, “what makes thou upon a stage?”; Poetrie responds, “Shadows,” and Truth offers to “add bodies to the shadowes” in a tragedy “That will revive the hearts of drooping mindes” (A3r).29 As in Heywood’s treatise, Truth’s commentary suggests that the effects of the stage (here, its uplifting qualities) are owed to its capacity to give embodiment to poetic words. In identifying Poetry’s work as shadows, Truth “emphasizes how the play will make shadowy histories real,” such that “stage ghostliness functions as a synecdoche for the work of theatrical representation itself, combining shadows and bodies into theatrical experience” (Outterson-Murphy 254).30 For Heywood and the anonymous playwright, the stage becomes a space where historical and fantastical exemplars (including negative ones) are presented for playgoers’ appreciation in a way that maximizes the affective power—and so the effectiveness—of their incitements to virtue.

Despite their radically different evaluations of the value of stage acting, these writers on drama are united in their conception of the theatre as a site of shadowy imitation both on- and off-stage. When Heywood insists that the theatre can “moove the spirits of the beholder,” he is not using “spirits” purely as a metaphor; his usage also evokes the internal “spirits” that were understood by Renaissance physicians, including the Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius, as unseen carriers of heat through the body’s arteries, and so as “the chiefe and principal Instrument, that procureth and executeth every action” (B7v). These spirits “bridged the human subject and the ambient world,” and “worked in intricate concert to create physiological effects, the passions, and to activate such mental faculties as the imagination” (Harvey 370). Lemnius and his contemporaries describe spirits’ movements in terms of exchanges between the body and this “ambient world,” as productive of individuals’ personalities and behaviour, but also as ever-changing and moving

29 This exchange is also noted by Outterson-Murphy (254). 30 In a more literal and gory sense, Truth seems here also to promise that audiences’ hearts will be revived by the loading of the stage with dead bodies by the conclusion of the play’s tragic plot. Heywood claims that “English blood” will “hunnye at [the] valor” of “any bold English man presented” on the stage (B4r). (To “hunnye” suggests longing or gratification; see OED “honey” [v.] 3, 4.) The True Tragedie’s introduction suggests that the pleasure and the corresponding instructive value that Heywood finds in English history plays is predicated in part on audiences’ desire specifically for the kind of punitive, just violence that choric figures like Clarence’s ghost and the figure of Truth foreshadow—which may explain why these speakers do not seem troubled by the intimation that bloodlust is an integral feature of spectatorship in the ideal Renaissance theatre. I am grateful to Melanie Lo for drawing Heywood’s concept of “hunny[ing]” to my attention.

18 in response to both internal and external stimuli.31 When Heywood describes actors stirring the spirits of audiences who see and hear their exemplary action, then, he imagines theatrical spectacles moving spectators’ bodies in a literal sense, through the movements of spirits, to feel and to act in imitation of play’s protagonists. If actors are, in one sense, imitative shadows, the commentaries of pro- and anti-theatrical writers alike persistently mark them as, in another sense, the bodies after which audiences model their own passions and actions.

In Chapter 1, I expand upon conceptions of the shadow as a figure of imitation and influence as I explore its entanglement with supernatural phenomena in the Renaissance popular imagination. For seventeenth-century playgoers, the term readily connoted the dark figures of ghosts, demons, and familiars that emerged at night. Focusing on the ways in which witnesses described past encounters with the supernatural, I argue not only that witnesses take up the language of shadows to describe the objects of these encounters, but also that their speeches constitute a kind of “shadowing” in themselves, in the sense in which Renaissance rhetoricians employ the term. The vivid language of descriptive testimony must, in courts of law as on the stage, make the stuff of the supernatural imaginatively present for listeners after the fact, uniting speakers and interlocutors in a shared rhetorical experience of the unknown and unseeable. I approach this subject through Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Brome and Heywood’s The Late Lancashire Witches, two seventeenth-century witchcraft plays that are particularly concerned with the ways in which the speeches of others come to shape, as if magically, individuals’ experiences and judgements of acts of witchcraft whose existence these plays’ audiences largely took for granted, but whose nature and prosecution became a subject of significant skeptical debate in the period. Although I am chiefly concerned with the effects of dubious testimony on receptive ears, this chapter also shades into a discussion of magical speech’s temporal dimensions, particularly in the form of prophecy: ambiguous language that casts the shadow of the future onto the present in

31 Thomas Wright, for instance, comments that “when we imagine any thing, presently the purer spirites flocke from the brayne, by certayne secret channels to the heart” and the heart “immediately bendeth, either to prosecute it, or to eschewe it” (D7r). Lemnius’s Touchstone of Complexions discusses at length the roots of personality in different kinds (and temperatures) of spirits, but does not treat these roots as entirely fixed; Lemnius catalogues actions by which his readers may change their spirits’ nature. (People of cold complexions, for instance, tend toward sleepiness, solitude, and ravenous eating; to combat these tendencies, they should exercise, drink wine, laugh, and eat, among other things, ginger and pepper [H8v–I2r].) As Elizabeth Harvey notes, Renaissance physicians also distinguish different kinds of spirits associated with different sources and locations in the body: natural/liver, vital/heart, animal/brain (369–70). These distinctions, however, are not observed by Heywood, who discusses the theatre’s power to influence the movements of spirits in general terms.

19 ways that guide its recipients’ perceptions and actions, and which inform the meting-out of justice in both plays’ ambivalent conclusions.

Chapter 2 returns to the visual arts and rhetorical ornamentation in a reading of a pair of contemporary and analogous tragicomedies: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster. Both plays dramatize the shadowing of love and marriage by the possibility of infidelity; they open with characters whose love is already established—and, in Cymbeline, affirmed legally in marriage—but whose professions of jealousy, with their anxious anticipation of a time when this love is no longer exclusive, captures the dark side of a union that professes to last forever. In these plays, I argue, the rhetorical “shadowing” that constitutes the language of love poetry becomes a locus of concern for the broader potential for language to betray its objects, while this language’s deployment in scenes of competitive sexual boasting also reflects characters’ obsession with women’s chastity and uncertain fidelity. These concerns are embodied in Cymbeline by Giacomo, the nighttime visitor who intrudes into Innogen’s bedroom at night to collect details for elaborate love-poetry on her imagined adulterous acts. They are also raised explicitly by Philaster’s characters, who obsessively couple their amorous speeches with the self-conscious insistence that verbal artifice always carries the suggestion of concealment and counterfeiting—terms that Renaissance rhetoricians link to shadows and, inextricably, to the tropes and schemes of their art.

These initial chapters focus on conceptions of the shadow as a double, composed of vivid language, to a phenomenal body, whether this double is constructed in amorous speeches or forensic narratives. Chapter 3 retains this interest in doubling rhetoric, but also turns toward bodies themselves as potential shadows to one another. I use sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural-scientific studies of light and sound, where the term “shadow” is occasionally used to denote the auditory phenomenon of the echo, as a framework through which to approach a similar convergence of echoes and shadows in contemporary literary portrayals of representatives and mediators. Renaissance natural magicians’ experiments with sound evince an interest, centuries before the invention of audio recording technologies, in devices that would capture and preserve sound and especially speech. Concurrently, literary writers played with fantastical figures of reiteration—including bronze “talking heads” and versions of Ovid’s Echo—whose perfect echoing becomes in itself, paradoxically, a means to subvert the aims of speakers whom they seem bound helplessly to imitate. In this context, I read Shakespeare’s The

Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure as plays that at once indulge fantasies of echoic representation and repeatedly stage the collapse of these relations. These collapses, I contend, are effected through the agency of figures whose representational claims are all the more troubling for their speakers’ insistence upon their speeches’ tethering to an absent, authoritative origin. The echo and the shadow, I argue, are bound up with subversions of authority and acts of representation that cast shadows upon the character and self-conduct of the sources of their echoic speech.

In Chapter 4 I turn, finally, from the sycophant to the servant; with this turn, I examine the relations of reciprocal care between masters and servants, which Renaissance writers on civic and domestic duty describe as a kind of shadowing. Shadows abound in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century images of masters who give protective shade to their subordinates, but also in portraits of servants who, shadow-like, at once follow their masters physically and act as extensions of these masters’ bodies. The Tempest and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi turn, I argue, on failures of this ideal that result from situations in which exploitative master-servant relations—between, for instance, Prospero and Caliban and Ferdinand and Bosola—lead to the breakdown of ideals of shadowing-as-servitude. I contend, further, that critical attention to the explicit language of shadows and shadowing in Renaissance dramatizations of service relations highlights a kind of chafing on the part not just of servants but also of masters against the ethical obligations of their mutual bonds. This language betrays a resistance especially among individuals in positions of power to acknowledge the roots of authority and identity in the bodies and actions of enabling servants.

These chapters are united not just by their pursuit of the shadow’s shifting and sometimes mutually exclusive connotations through a variety of texts and contexts, but also by their repeated returns to the English Renaissance theatre as a site that stages different forms of the shadow and its cognate terms while also persistently, explicitly, calling attention to its own essentially shadowy nature. It is a space to which playgoers flocked to witness dreamlike fictions unfold through the mimetic performances of troupes whose spectacles were authorized by the wealthy patrons whom they served. Yet, this stage is also a space haunted by ongoing debates regarding the value of dramatic shadows to the suggestible eyes and ears of their witnesses. In one of many arguments in support of the English stage, Heywood recounts a “home-borne” instance of the theatre’s redemptive power (G1v). A Norfolk woman, he recounts, sees a play in

21 which a woman murders her husband in order to be with her lover, but is subsequently tormented by her husband’s ghost. As the playgoing woman sees the character suffering in a fit of conscience, she too cries out, “I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatening and menacing me” (G1v), and confesses to poisoning her own husband. This anecdote is especially germane to my study in that it captures the capacity of actors-as-shadows to create, in effect, imitative shadows of themselves in the playgoers who are affected by their art. Heywood’s anecdote posits this quality of the stage, moreover, through the appearance of a figure that links the theatre to the shades of ghosts and other spectral figures. In the next section, I return briefly to Hamlet as a means of exploring ghosts’ the significance for Renaissance playgoers while also bridging the overview of shadows’ connotations above into a study of Shakespeare’s dramatic art. As I will argue, the ghost of Old Hamlet becomes a locus of interpretive energies for Hamlet’s characters in its (dis-)embodiment of questions surrounding the shadow as a figure associated with darkness, death, imitation, and deception.

III: “I’ll call thee Hamlet”

Hamlet begins at night, and with a challenge from the guardsman Barnardo to an unknown other. “Who’s there?” (1.1.1), Barnardo asks, prompting his fellow guard Francisco to reveal himself. This demand immediately signals the play’s larger concern with the sounding-out of identity and, with it, conscience and motivation. Hamlet will wrestle with this difficult task in striving to justify his longed-for act of vengeance, but it also consumes the attention of the characters who assemble in 1.1 in ignorance of Claudius’s alleged act of murder. After Barnardo and Francisco’s exchange, Horatio and Marcellus join the guardsmen’s company, and the men’s thoughts turn to another unknown figure: an apparition whom Barnardo and Marcellus claim to have seen wandering Elsinore’s battlements during multiple night-time watches (1.1.31), and who later lures Hamlet into a private conversation where he affirms that he is the “spirit” of Old Hamlet and is “Doomed … to walk the night” (1.5.9-10). In 1.5 as in 1.1, a figure emerges out of the darkness to confront a troubled witness; unlike Barnardo, however, Hamlet finds no reassurance in his visual and auditory perceptions, for his conversation with the ghost leaves him with lingering questions about its nature and significance. The uncertainties that Hamlet and his

22 companions express about this apparition are bound up in contemporary debates surrounding “shades” and “shadows”: terms used interchangeably to denote ghosts, apparitions, strange visions, and other incorporeal supernatural phenomena. The language of shadows lent itself readily to Renaissance writers’ descriptive accounts of ghosts, fairies, and other spirits that generally emerged, like the ghost of Old Hamlet, at night and whose nature was figuratively dark—that is, obscure, sometimes ominous, and possibly illusory—to their witnesses.

The OED’s first recorded use of the term “shade” in the supernatural sense is indeed a Shakespearean one: it appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1623), where Mistress Quickly addresses her companions, who are dressed as fairies, as “You moonshine revellers, and shades of night” (5.5.36).32 The association of ghosts with shade, shadows, and the night was, however, available to educated English writers well before this explicit usage through the term “umbra,” which in Latin and its Romance-language derivations commonly signifies both a visible absence of light and a visible supernatural presence. As early as 1538, Thomas Elyot’s Latin-English Dictionarie thus defines “Umbra” as “a shadowe,” and “also that, whiche was callid a gost of a man being deed, whiche not only paynims but also christen men supposed dyd appere visibly vnto men” (Ee4v).33 Elyot’s brief definition betrays, however, a hint of skepticism: witnesses once “supposed,” implicitly erroneously, that they saw the “shadows” of ghosts and that these shadows were the visible forms of dead men. In his treatise on witchcraft and demonic magic, Daemonologie, James I denies the existence of ghosts altogether, arguing that “spirites, when they appeare in the shaddow of a person newlie dead” to the friends of the deceased, are tricks played by the devil to deceive “ignorant Christians” (Daemonologie I2v–I3r). Pierre Boaistuau discusses spirits and other apparitions more ambivalently; he considers “whether the shadowes of deade men do returne,” and concludes that God may send “diverse kindes of visions” to

32 See OED “shade” (n.) 6.a, b. The OED describes the usage of “shade” to denote a spectre or phantom, specifically, as rare, but also records the term’s frequent indistinguishability from the related and more common sense 2.b (“the darkness of the nether world; the abode of the dead, Hades”). Mistress Quickly’s address to the “shades” as spectres is specific to the First Folio version of Merry Wives. Q1 (1602) gives, “You Fayries that do haunt these shady groves” (G2r); the shade-ghost connection is absent in this earlier text, but the association of the supernatural with the “shady” night anticipates F’s identification of the costumed cast as a group of night-dwelling spirits. 33 See, e.g., the entry for “umbra” in the Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary (3rd edn): “shade, shadow; ghost (of a dead person); sheltered conditions, privacy; darkness; empty form, phantom.” John Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary A Worlde of Wordes similarly defines the term “Ombra” as “a shade, a shadowe, a ghost, a spirit or larve [i.e. spectre]” (X3r).

23 witnesses (X4v, Z1r). He adds that, if we are awed by “the viewe of straunge things presented upon theatres or stages,” we should not find it strange “if Divels … do abuse oure fragilitie in shewing us visions, Idols, and figures … suggesting infinite follyes and conceites” (Z2r). Boaistuau’s theatrical analogy partakes both of James’s demonological skepticism and of the antitheatrical pamphleteers’ concerns regarding audiences’ suggestibility: a ghost confronts its witnesses with a spectral form that may be a remnant of a deceased loved one, or which may present forms, speeches, and gestures that a devil counterfeits. If the shade’s performances fall into the latter category, they are tailored, like the vicious theatrical spectacles of Prynne and Gosson’s treatises, to move the credulous to awe and error. In England circa 1600, Protestant audiences would likely have scoffed at a ghost’s claim to have emerged specifically from a Purgatorial prison. Yet, these same audiences might have been generally receptive to the idea that a vision of deceased acquaintance could appear to them, particularly if the apparition was framed as the tempting work of the devil.34 Regardless of doctrinal prescriptions for belief, moreover, Shakespeare and his audiences would likely have exchanged, themselves, “old wives’ tales and fireside stories” of spirits that emerge from their graves to walk the earth and haunt old acquaintances (Belsey, “Sad Tale” 24).35

There is little in Hamlet to suggest that the ghost is purely the stuff of imagination, and much to suggest that it is one of these supernatural shadows of uncertain origins and intentions. Shortly after Marcellus complains that Horatio has deemed the ghost “but our fantasy” (1.1.21), Horatio himself sees it and confirms that “the sensible and true avouch / Of [his] own eyes” secures his belief (1.1.55-6). Yet, even as they affirm the ghost’s existence, these witnesses express

34 Protestant orthodoxy need not, of course, have dictated the appearance of ghosts within dramatic fictions, but critics have generally acknowledged that contemporary theological debates regarding the existence of Purgatory inform Hamlet’s depiction of the ghost. The ghost claims that he must “fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away” (1.5.11-13, emphasis mine), hinting that Purgatory may be his daytime abode. The pioneering study for this strand of critical thought is Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory, which argues that English Protestants of the sixteenth century attacked the Catholic concept of Purgatory as “a piece of poetry,” and that “The terms of this attack in turn … facilitated Shakespeare’s crucial appropriation of Purgatory in Hamlet” (3). This attack did not, however, eliminate the concept of Purgatory from popular discourse. Boaistuau’s suggestion that God might send strange visions to witnesses is somewhat unusual; nonetheless, as Belsey notes, “the majority of Protestant thinkers were obliged to make certain concessions to vernacular narrative: although there were no ghosts, demons might yet impersonate them to win us to our harm” (“Sad Tale” 9). 35 The practice of telling fireside stories notably appears in The Winter’s Tale, where Shakespeare’s Mamillius offers to tell his mother and her ladies a “sad tale” for “winter” that features “sprites and goblins” and a man who “Dwelt by a churchyard” (2.1.28, 32).

24 uncertainty, similar to that which Boaistuau embraces, regarding the ghost’s identity. Barnardo comments that it appears “In the same figure, like the king that’s dead” (1.1.39), and Horatio asks it, What art thou that usurp’st this time of night, Together with that fair and warlike form In which his majesty of buried Denmark Did sometimes march? (1.1.44-7) Neither man identifies the ghost straightforwardly as Old Hamlet, even as they recognize signs that seem to signify that identity; rather, the ghost is “like” the dead king, and it takes (“usurp[s]”) the king’s “warlike form.” These pointed invocations of semblance and seizure suggest that the shade before them, even as the men acknowledge its perceptible existence and note its lifelike and recognizable appearance, may in fact be “a representation and not the thing itself,” a thing that is derived from the old king’s form, a costumed “demonic (or theatrical) illusion rather than a true substance” (Outterson-Murphy 256).36 Accordingly, Horatio’s speeches on the ghost shift from an insistence upon its unreality to a concern for the effects of this ghost’s undeniable presence, whoever it is (or pretends to be), on the imaginations of its witnesses. Horatio’s claim to be passionately “harrow[ed] with fear and wonder” upon first seeing the ghost (1.1.42), as Outterson-Murphy notes, suggests “bodily penetration and disruption … as by a plow harrowing soil” (257), which itself suggests the disruptive physiological effects understood to accompany fear responses.37 The term also “brings to mind

36 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass note that Renaissance stage ghosts are, paradoxically, “more fully materialized for us than any other role” in that they are so often given extensive descriptions in speeches and stage directions; “If a ghost says … ‘remember me,’ remembrance is materialized through the physical attributes that named the person when alive. … If a ghost is a mnemonic, the Renaissance ghost is often remembered by what it wears, what is most visible and tactile—its clothes” (249). As Hamlet’s characters suggest, however, materiality and mnemonic significance are not exactly synonymous with identity. Their skepticism bears out Jones and Stallybrass’s assertion: “The grosser the signs of materiality, the more the observers are likely to detect fraud and imposture” (248). 37 This reading is fully possible only in the Folio; Q1 reads “horrors” and Q2 gives the irregular “horrowes.” For context on the Folio’s “harrow[ing],” see especially Francis Bacon’s summary of fear’s corporeal effects in Sylva Sylvarum, which include “Palenesse; Trembling; The Standing of the Haire upright; Starting; and Skritching” (Aa3v). Many of these effects, Bacon explains, are caused by the movement of bodily substances in response to the stimulus; paleness, for instance, is the result when “the Bloud runneth inward, to succour the Heart” and trembling occurs when “through the Flight of the Spirits inward, the Outward Parts are destituted, and not sustained” (Aa3v). Horatio’s conception of his awe as a kind of disruptive “harrowing” is in keeping with Lemnius’s understanding of the spirits as easily influenced by external stimuli; the sight of the ghostly spirit forces Horatio’s spirits to redistribute rapidly and unevenly.

25 the traditional medieval notion of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell” but, whereas Christ “raid[s] Hell to release the ghosts,” Hamlet’s ghost emerges from the underworld and “invades its spectators” (257). The ghost’s appearance, Horatio argues, is “A mote … to trouble the mind’s eye” (1.1.106.5): an inducement to dire imaginings, conceived in physical terms as a provocative foreign particle that lodges itself within the mind.38

Hamlet expresses his own uncertainty about the ghost’s significance when he wonders whether the ghost is “a spirit of health or goblin damned” (1.4.21). When the ghost beckons to Hamlet to follow it alone, Horatio seems to assume that it is the latter: he attempts to hold Hamlet back, lest the ghost lead him toward the sea, “And there assume some other horrible form / Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason / And draw you into madness” (1.4.53-5). Horatio, harrowed by the sight of the ghost as it appears in its armour, fears that the ghost might change its appearance to something that would move Hamlet’s spirits to terror and to a corresponding fit of rash action. Horatio is, in a sense, not wrong to question the ghost’s intentions. The shade does not manipulate Hamlet visually into an act of suicide, as Horatio fears, but it does strive rhetorically to push Hamlet toward rash action with a summary of Old Hamlet’s ill-timed death—“by a brother’s hand / Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatched, / Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin” (1.4.74-6)—that ushers in the play’s revenge plot and its questionable regicidal imperative.

Critics have noted the ghost’s resemblance in this scene to the shades that emerge from the underworld to introduce classical tragedies—notably “Senecan shades” (Belsey, “Sad Tale” 6)— and to the vengeful ghosts of Renaissance revenge plays who similarly enter choric scenes to describe their grievances and demand violence, often from the personified figures of Time, Poetry, or Revenge.39 The ghost’s account of his demise seems also of a piece with the brief

38 The mote has a distinct internationally political cast in Act 1. Barnardo, like Horatio, sees the ghost as a “portentous figure” (1.1.106.2), and offers this appraisal after hearing from Horatio that young Fortinbras—whose father Old Hamlet killed in battle—is marching upon Denmark, implying that the ghost is connected to this new threat. When Hamlet later follows the ghost alone, Marcellus adds that its presence affirms his suspicion that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.67). 39 As Greenblatt puts it, “No one, even among the most rabid Puritan antitheatricalists, could imagine [stage ghosts] to be secret agents for the pope’s Purgatory. Their ancestry is manifestly classical rather than Catholic” (Hamlet 153). For a brief account of Seneca’s ghosts, see Belsey, who observes that the ghosts of Thyestes and Tantalus, with whom Agamemnon and Thyestes open, enter “to deliver a doom-laden prologue and then leave the plot to unfold”; in Agamemnon, especially, the ghost with its graphic descriptions of violence past and to come “ratchet[s] up audience expectations concerning the appalling nature of the events about to be staged” (“Sad Tale” 6). On the

26 surge in popularity of “ghost complaint poems” in the late sixteenth century (Jellerson n.p.).40 Unlike these choric figures, however, Hamlet’s ghost addresses its complaint not to audiences, readers, or abstract personifications of vengeance, but directly to the character from whom it desires vengeful action. Unlike, for instance, the accusatory ghosts of Banquo and Caesar in other Shakespearean tragedies, moreover, this ghost makes itself visibly present to a larger on- stage audience whose dubious commentary affirms its existence beyond the realm of imagination and dreams;41 this is an armour-clad ghost whose visible and audible (possibly clanking) presence renders it all the more uncanny. This self-revelation seems to place the ghost among contemporary vernacular ghosts who, in fireside tales, emerge from the grave to demand acknowledgement or retribution from troubled witnesses.42

Even with the context supplied by these potential sources and analogues, however, the ghost is an outlier among Renaissance ghosts in its sporting of the full suit of armour in which Old Hamlet killed Old Fortinbras.43 R.A. Foakes suggests that the armour marks the ghost as a figure out of time, beyond its old Catholic purgatorial associations; the gear associates the shade with “an old ethos based on violence,” in contrast especially with the diplomacy with which Claudius attempts to settle Young Fortinbras’s impending invasion (44). Elsewhere, Foakes adds that

English stage, in addition to the ghost of Clarence in the True Tragedie, see, e.g., the ghost of Andrea in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, who describes his untimely death at Don Balthazar’s hands (“Death’s winter nipped the blossoms of my bliss” [1.1.13]); Revenge promises the ghost that he will see Balthazar “deprived of life by Bel- Imperia” (1.1.89). 40 Jellerson identifies William Baldwin’s The Mirror for Magistrates (1559) as the precursor to this trend. In Hamlet, the ghost’s insistence that his death was “foul and most unnatural” (1.5.25), and also untimely in that he died unshriven (1.5.77-9), is perhaps also of a piece with the Mirror’s subversive stories of magistrates whose deaths are similarly abrupt and unwarranted. Jellerson points to the story of the Earl of Salisbury, a beloved and upright nobleman who was killed accidentally by a stray piece of ordnance, as one that “scandalously speaks against the [Mirror’s] entire project of reading providential lessons into history” (n.p.). 41 I will return to Banquo’s ghost, which only Macbeth can see, in Chapter 1. In Julius Caesar, the ghost of Caesar appears to Brutus at night, after Brutus has listened to “a sleepy tune” (4.2.318), and has opened a book to read as his attendants sleep (4.2.523.sd); the circumstances of its appearance suggest that the ghost may be a portentous dream-vision. 42 Belsey summarizes a variety of ghost stories, ranging from a medieval Latin collection through the clergyman Joseph Glanvill’s compendium of supernatural folklore, Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681). Many of these stories feature revenants who require assistance from the capable living. In Glanvill’s treatise, for instance, a man encounters a ghostly horseman at a crossroads whom the man recognizes as a recently deceased acquaintance; the ghost “change[s] itself into many prodigious shapes” and threatens the man until he agrees to help ensure that the ghost’s property, lately appropriated by his widow, is properly bequeathed to the ghost’s surviving son (qtd. in Belsey, “Sad Tale” 18). 43 The ghost is, indeed, “uniquely among the more than sixty stage ghosts in the drama of the period, clad in armour” (Foakes 34).

Shakespeare “had Virgil’s Aeneid in mind” in giving the First Player a speech on the story of Dido and Aeneas in 2.2 and possibly also in having the ghost speak of purging fires that recall those of Virgil’s underworld in Book 6 of the Aeneid (45). To these Virgilian observations, I would add that Hamlet’s armoured ghost also evokes the shades within this underworld, of which the Stygian ferryman declares, “This is the land of Shadows, of Sleep and drowsy Night” (“umbrarum hic locus est, Somni Noctisque soporae” [6.390]).44 As Aeneas wanders through this shadow-space, he encounters the shades of martial men—including those rewarded with a relatively pleasant afterlife in Elysium—who bring with them and continue to use the arms, horses, and chariots that they enjoyed in life (6.651-5); among them is Aeneas’s father Anchises, from whom Aeneas seeks prophetic advice.

I do not wish to push this association too far, but it is worth considering the shade of Anchises as an analogue to the (possible) ghost of Old Hamlet in that the comparison brings into focus these spectres’ shared roles as paternal stirrers to violent passions and politically-oriented activity in their living progeny. Rather than venturing forth into this world to seek his father’s shade, Hamlet is confronted by it in the world above; rather than delivering to Hamlet a prophecy of his progeny, the ghost looks to the past and relates the circumstances of his own death. Yet, just as Anchises’s aim in prophesying for Aeneas is to “fir[e] his soul with love of fame that [is] to be” and also to tell him “of the wars he must ... wage” in the conquest of Italy (6.890), so does the ghost recount Old Hamlet’s murder as a means of inspiring vengeance and a corresponding act of regicide in his son—and, indeed, the ghost explicitly demands these twinned responses. Hamlet demands to know how his father died so that he can “with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love / … sweep to my revenge” (1.5.29-31). “I find thee apt,” the ghost tells Hamlet, “And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed / That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, / Wouldst thou not stir in this” (1.5.31-4). Both speakers thus stress that immediate action should be the result of the ghost’s revelation and the passion that it inspires in its recipient. Hamlet in

44 Unless otherwise noted, citations from the Aeneid are taken from H. Rushton Fairclough’s two-volume edition of Virgil’s works. Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne’s 1573 translation of the Aeneid—one of the earliest full English editions of the epic—generally does not translate “umbra” as “shadow.” This line, for instance, reads, “Here is the seate of soules, the place of sléepe and slumbry night” (D3r).

28 particular makes action inextricable from attention; to think about Old Hamlet’s murder is to act upon it as swiftly as the thought arrives, carrying with it both love and grief for a lost father.45

Hamlet declares he is “bound to hear” the ghost’s words, and the ghost replies, “So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear” (1.5.6-7). The act of attending secures, as if prophetically, Hamlet’s plotting and achievement of vengeance, summed up in a command from the ghost that drives Hamlet’s action—“remember me” (1.5.91)—and in Hamlet’s response: “thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmixed with baser matter” (1.5.102-4). In the wake of this revelation, so Hamlet argues, all of the prince’s other thoughts are overwritten by the ghost’s imperative. Hamlet’s statement here has the force of a binding vow. As John Kerrigan observes of revenge tragedy in general, “The revenger tells us what he will do, and insists that he will stick to his plan. To his potential as a re-actor, the revenger adds the capacity—latent in any actor who comes onstage—to initiate action through the promise of action. This is how the play will turn out, whatever intrigues disrupt it, if it becomes a revenge tragedy” (45). The problem with these binding imperatives and promises, with Hamlet’s response to them, and with the inevitable revenge-tragedy bloodbath in Act 5, is that they belie the profound uncertainty that clings to the ghost and its revelations. All who see the shade recognize that it is “like” Old Hamlet (1.1.39, 41, 57; 1.2.199), with all the uncertainties that “like”-ness implies; this shade encourages Hamlet to take up his father’s desires in pursing vengeance, but it cannot secure Hamlet’s full confidence in the truth of its words and appearance.

Hamlet himself embraces this ambivalence in his first encounter with the ghost: after he reminds himself that its “questionable shape” demands further interrogation, he nonetheless tells it even before it speaks, “I’ll call thee Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane” (1.4.25-6). His lines at once stress the ghost’s appearance as a poor guarantor of truth, recall the familial bond that should secure his willing cooperation, and rhetorically collapse his own identity into that of the “royal Dane” through the invocation of their shared name, as if the ghost’s connection to the deceased

45 Aeneas also tells his father, “thy sad shade, meeting me so oft, drove me to seek these portals” (6.6.695-6). Fairclough, who translates “imago” as “shade,” is adding an explicit shadow where one is merely suggested by the figurative connections between shadows, images, and ghosts in Virgil’s original. Regardless, Aeneas’s comments suggest that he is, like Hamlet will be in Shakespeare’s play, driven to act by striking performances of fatherly grief and direct paternal imperatives as delivered by a ghost.

29 king is unquestionable. Likewise, Hamlet concludes his meditation on the ghost’s words with the affirmation that his “word” (i.e. motto) is “remember me” (1.5.112), but he also adds to the ghost’s command a reminder of his own “That one may smile and smile and be a villain” (1.5.109). The extra note that Hamlet enters into his tables seems to affirm the ghost’s accusations, but the qualifier (“may”) also suggests a need for further confirmation of the guilty conscience behind the king’s smile and also, accordingly, for evidence of this hidden conscience from sources other than the ghost with its own familiar appearance.

In 3.3, Claudius professes his guilt in soliloquy,46 but Hamlet enters to contemplate killing his uncle just after Claudius finishes this confession. The king dies in Act 5 without ever revealing his crime to anyone—including Hamlet, who spends much of the play attempting to sound out his uncle’s conscience. Hence Hamlet’s staging of The Mousetrap, which he believes should move Claudius, like the tormented widow of Heywood’s anecdote, to express his guilt and so justify his murder at Hamlet’s hands. Claudius does, indeed, stand up and interrupt the play as if moved to confess by its content (3.2.243-8), and Hamlet exclaims to Horatio, “I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound” (3.2.263-4). Claudius does not, however, cry out like Heywood’s guilty widow to declare his crime to the court, and Hamlet does not murder his uncle in this scene. The king’s outburst is in fact ambiguous, as Hamlet seems tacitly to recognize despite his triumphant remarks: the play-within-a-play’s depiction of a nephew murdering his uncle might stir Claudius’s conscience, but it might just as easily persuade the king that “Hamlet is a dangerous madman, who has designs on his life, and must, at all costs, be got quietly out of the country, and, if possible, out of the world” (Greg 406).47 “Hamlet is tragic,” Amir Khan argues, “because it charts out the terror of a world of contingency and half-knowledge, and how to justify oneself lacking knowledge, armed only with a hunch” (40–1). Hamlet lacks the confirmation of Claudius’s confession, which only Shakespeare’s audience witnesses. From Hamlet’s perspective, his inaction constitutes a failure to uphold his promise to the ghost to

46 The king identifies his offense explicitly as “a brother’s murder” (3.3.38). 47 Also cited by Amir Khan (34), who comments, “Claudius’s confession allows us to take a position of strength against Hamlet, to validate our distance from him, to enact revenge on him for not knowing what we have the privilege of knowing” (39). Against a critical tendency to ask why Hamlet delays, Khan asks readers and playgoers to consider a counterfactual situation: what if we, like Hamlet, did not witness this confession? This position “gives us access to the world of contingency that all of the characters within the play are situated in immediately” (40, italics in original).

30 remember (and so to avenge), but it potentially also reflects this position of “contingency and half-knowledge,” and “attests not to his weakness, but to the prudence and wisdom befitting a prince” who has been tasked by a dubious ghost with the murder of Denmark’s new king (Khan 31).

Hamlet thus confronts its audiences with a manifold failure of theatrical “shadows” and rhetorical “shadowing” to function as they were idealized and feared by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It is never wholly clear to Shakespeare’s characters whether the ghost is Old Hamlet or a devilish apparition whose aim is to trick Hamlet with an awe-inspiring theatrical performance of grief and vengeful speech, complete with a glorious martial costume. The theatre within the play itself is conceived by Hamlet (and also by Heywood in his Apology) as a space of shadows that are nonetheless productive of passion and confessional truth; yet, this theatre at once moves its intended audience but fails to produce movement that is unambiguously legible. Hamlet repeatedly asserts his willingness to take up the ghost’s vengeful desires as his own, but he is not moved promptly to the decisive action that his vows would seem to entail. Despite his self-motivating soliloquies, Hamlet instead identifies himself persistently as the wrong kind of shadow: the pale imitation of his paternal namesake, the insubstantial dreamer, and the imperfect actor rather than the ambitious hero about which he jests with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act 2.

Hamlet indeed refrains from acting upon the ghost’s imperatives until the last possible moment, when Laertes reveals that Hamlet has been poisoned by his rapier, so that Hamlet rises to the role of revenger less through his intricate plotting, and more by a last-ditch effort. In his dying lines to Horatio, Hamlet asks his friend to tell his story to others (5.2.288-91); yet what, exactly, does this story sound like if it comes from a teller who has not heard the ghost’s story and who seems only vaguely to know about Claudius’s guilt from Hamlet’s ambiguous remarks after the staging of The Mousetrap? How exactly will Horatio represent the details of his friend’s story? In a sense, these questions are irrelevant: the play’s concluding lines leave us as playgoers, armed with our knowledge of Claudius’s confession, with the sense that justice has been served, albeit in a roundabout way. At the same time, by the end of Hamlet’s fifth act, Shakespeare’s characters exit without attaining complete access to the knowledge that would justify Hamlet’s just revenge within the play’s fiction. It remains for Horatio, Young Fortinbras, and the few other survivors of Hamlet and Laertes’s duel to piece together the circumstances of this bloodbath,

31 with no guarantees that these characters will move beyond the realm of shadowy intuitions into the light of full knowledge. This attempted movement on the part of Act 5’s survivors is, indeed, never staged in Hamlet. In the next chapter, however, I turn to a series of plays and prose texts in which the rhetorical forensic reconstruction of shades and their activities is integral to the unfolding drama of witchcraft plays and trials of the early seventeenth century.

Chapter 1 Describing the Demonic in Macbeth and The Late Lancashire Witches

In Macbeth 3.4, a hired murderer approaches the Scottish king at a banquet to confirm that Macbeth’s sometime friend and late rival Banquo lies “Safe in a ditch … / With twenty trenchèd gashes on his head” (3.4.25-6). Macbeth does not even have the opportunity to take his seat at the feast before Banquo’s ghastly apparition appears, displaying the reported violence in what Macbeth calls its “gory locks” (3.4.50). The scene’s stage directions indicate entrances for the “Ghost of Banquo” (3.4.36.sd, 87.sd), so that audiences may also see the ghost;1 yet, while Macbeth cries out, “Hence, horrible shadow, / Unreal mock’ry, hence!” (3.4.105-6), the only spectacle that Lady Macbeth and the other dinner guests see is that of their raving king. It is also possible that Banquo’s accusatory “shadow,” like that of Old Hamlet, may not actually be Banquo, as Macbeth insists when he dismisses it as an “unreal mock’ry” of the dead man. Unlike Hamlet’s ghost, however, this shadow’s existence itself is under question, as Lady Macbeth indicates when she argues that the apparition is merely “paint[ed]” to Macbeth by his “fear” (3.4.60). It is possible that the ghost can reveal itself exclusively to Macbeth; Lady Macbeth offers the equally plausible explanation, however, that her husband’s passions have conjured up a ghost, just as the anticipation of Duncan’s murder once drove Macbeth to hallucinate the image of an “air-drawn dagger” leading him to Duncan’s chamber (3.4.61).

Whatever the nature of the tormenting ghost might be, it is present to Lady Macbeth and the other guests only in an imaginative sense, and this presence effect is achieved through Macbeth’s impassioned speeches. As Lady Macbeth’s skeptical response indicates, however, impassioned descriptions do not guarantee shared responses from their

1 Directors occasionally defy the stage directions. On the implications of casting an actor to play the ghost (or not) see, for instance, Thomas Cartelli, who notes that “Macbeth’s dramatically private vision becomes an experience that is theatrically shared” if the ghost “physically appears” (“Banquo’s Ghost” 389); if the ghost is visible only to Macbeth, the king’s perspective is profoundly isolated from those of audiences, both on- and off-stage.

32 33 listeners, and the divergent experiences of the various guests at the banquet plunge the scene into a chaos of conflicting interpretive possibilities. This chaos is compounded by Macbeth’s personal relationship with the ghost, whose presence prompts outbursts of terror and denial from its sole on-stage witness: “Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me” (3.4.49-50), Macbeth tells the mute apparition. The hypocrisy of this response is transparent to playgoers who have just witnessed his conversation with the murderer, but his speech may also be unintentionally revelatory to the on-stage dinner guests. The other attendees lack audiences’ privileged access to Macbeth’s murderous thoughts and actions, but his outburst nonetheless provides them with an impetus to reconsider recent deaths and disappearances from which Macbeth has benefited suspiciously.2 Macbeth thus calls supernatural apparitions into being for his listeners, but the effects of this rhetorical conjuring exceed Macbeth’s (and his wife’s) capacity for control, shaping the action of the play itself in ways that will lead to the king’s downfall.

Macbeth, like most Renaissance plays that represent magic on the stage, does not engage in any explicit dialogue with demonologists on the nature or plausibility of particular magical phenomena.3 A significant point of intersection between the works of witchcraft plays like Macbeth and the treatises of contemporary demonologists lies, nevertheless, in their shared interest in the experiential gaps that emerge between individuals in their encounters with the supernatural. Hannah Arendt argues that “For us, appearance— something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality”; as such, “even the greatest forces of intimate life”—sensory experiences, passions, thoughts—“lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized, and deindividualized” (50, emphasis mine). Arendt’s understanding of shared sensory experience as a condition of reality is helpful as a frame

2 Lennox explicitly raises these suspicions: Duncan “Was pitied of Macbeth; marry, he was dead, / And the right-valiant Banquo walked too late” (3.6.4-5)—events which he describes as “strangely borne” (3.6.3). 3 The earliest extant text of Macbeth (that of the First Folio) contains material taken from Middleton’s The Witch, perhaps suggesting the extent to which theatrical audiences’ expectations for spectacle, rather than academic theses, might dictate a play’s (borrowed) content: the witches’ songs at 3.5.38-73 and 4.1.44-60 in Macbeth correspond to the witches’ songs at 3.3.39-72 and 5.2.63-79 in Middleton’s play. (These songs are referred to by their opening phrases, but not given in full, in the First Folio: “Come away, come away, &c.” [mm6r], and “Blacke Spirites, &c.” [mm6v].)

34 through which to view Renaissance experiences of the supernatural: that is, as ones that are often intensely individualized and which are brought out of “shadowy” personal experience and into a sense of shared perception largely—and with difficulty—through rhetorical means.

When Macbeth denounces the “shadow” that sits in his chair, he further evokes its close association with ghosts and, simultaneously, with all that is imitative and unreal. His exclamations thus define Banquo’s ghost as both a horrifyingly real phenomenon and an unreal figment of a guilty imagination. So too do the Weird Sisters, despite their relatively unambiguous existence, occupy this ambiguous space between reality and imagination on Macbeth’s stage: by the end of the play, every character who has spoken with or learned about them has died, so that their existence and influence on the play’s events remains “shadowy,” in Arendt’s sense of the term, to the survivors of Macbeth’s reign. The ambiguous nature of Macbeth’s supernatural “shadow[s],” their straddling of the boundary between reality and hallucination and their perceptibility to others only through witnesses’ descriptive speech, is a reflection of larger Renaissance debates on the nature of supernatural phenomena—even in contexts where the existence of the supernatural is not itself in question. Records from English courts of law, which prosecuted witches and other alleged practitioners of magic, reflect an effort formally to deprivatize the stuff of the supernatural through depositions—descriptions of victims’ encounters with these forces—that allowed jurors and magistrates to pass judgements. Many demonological writers also, however, examine how fallible individuals and their rhetorics of descriptive report may erroneously influence how individuals perceive, discuss, and even choose to prosecute such phenomena. This concern is implicitly a skeptical one; it is therefore not surprising that Reginald Scot’s hyper-skeptical Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) describes professions and accusations of witchcraft alike as “naturall effects … falselie imputed” to witches through “deceit and diabolicall words” (U8v), and casts testimony from witches and witchmongers alike as a contribution to wrongful prosecutions. Yet, as I will show, James I’s Daemonologie (1597), a text that explicitly identifies witches as a threat to James’s kingdom and encourages magistrates to

35 prosecute witches,4 acknowledges (and grapples with) this problem of report in similar terms.

In this chapter, I use these and other demonological treatises and prose texts on the supernatural as points of entry into a study of magical spectacles of uncertain reality, and their conversational communication, on the English stage. At one end of the early- seventeenth-century tradition of witchcraft on the English stage lies the tragedy of Macbeth (1606); at the other, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), a comedy.5 These two plays, despite their temporal and generic differences, share with contemporary demonological treatises a concern for the illuminating yet potentially dangerous entanglement of magic, dialogue, and perception. The opening sections of this chapter adopt, however, a somewhat broader focus on the literature of demonology as a means of demonstrating the widespread use of shadows and shadowing to describe phenomena that existed, to Renaissance eyes, on the uncertain boundaries between the preternatural and the supernatural. My intent is not to present philosophical or scientific works as background material to staged plays, even in those cases when it is possible for Shakespeare to have read and borrowed from a given treatise;6 it is, rather, to present these works as objects of analysis in themselves, and as participants in larger, deeply- entrenched debates on the nature and power of magical language into which the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries intervene.

At the time of Macbeth’s composition, James I had succeeded to the English throne; in addition to maintaining an interest in demonology, the king was a self-professed

4 James declares in his preface that his intent is twofold: first, to show that “divelish artes have bene and are”; and, second, to describe “what exact trial and severe punishment they merite” (A3r). 5 Unless otherwise noted, all references to The Late Lancashire Witches are cited from Helen Ostovich’s digital edition of the play. 6 As Richard Strier notes, Shakespeare and Scot share an interest in, for instance, the figure of Robin Goodfellow (177). More broadly, Shakespeare seems to have been familiar with contemporary skeptical thought, and could have read the works of Scot and his “Reformation fellow-skeptics,” who were united by their conviction that miracles had ceased—and, therefore, that the miraculous effects of supposed witchcraft were impossible (177). (On Scot’s skepticism as a function of his anti-Catholic sentiments, see especially Benjamin Bertram, who argues that Scot’s “opposition to the witch trials rested on the premise that the very belief in witchcraft ought to be thrown in the ashcan of history along with all related papist practices” [30].)

36 descendent of the historical Banquo as well as the patron of Shakespeare’s theatrical company. It is a critical commonplace to credit the genesis of Macbeth and its staging of scenes from Scottish history to Shakespeare’s gratitude (or pandering) to James and his interests both dynastic and demonological.7 The play bears, however, a less facile connection to its patron through the interest Shakespeare evinces in forms of imaginative and judgemental error related to the operations of spectral and rhetorical shadows and their representation in report. As I will explore further below, Renaissance demonologists understood language itself—especially as manifested in witches’ maleficum—to be at once the basis of magic and the means by which it could be exposed and undone. Visible demonstrations of possession and other magical afflictions were rare in English witchcraft trials; instead, convictions were based on the reports of victims. Yet, as Scot especially fears, these testimonial reports did not necessarily guarantee truth—and might indeed inflame shared misjudgements. Witchcraft plays frequently take up this concern in their employment of employ report as both a substitute for and supplement to visible spectacle, and as a counterpart to the magical language of charms, conjurations, and prophecies. This usage is not simply a matter of dramatic expediency; rather, it is a means of staging its characters’ processes—often divergent and deeply flawed ones—of conversational meaning-making.

In both The Late Lancashire Witches and Macbeth, magical language is most literally present in the chanted spells of staged witchcraft.8 Witches are not, however, the only characters who wield transformative language. Shakespeare’s Macbeth uses this power for himself when he creatively interprets the Weird Sisters’ prophetic words, rhetorically fabricating and interpreting bloody scenes in order to spur himself on and, later, to control (with decreasing efficacy) how others will interpret potential signs of his

7 See, e.g., Stephen Greenblatt’s introduction to the Norton Shakespeare edition of Macbeth (835), as well as the introductory remarks to the play in Proudfoot et al.’s Complete Arden edition (773). 8 The Second Witch, for instance, lets Macbeth into the witches’ gathering in 4.1 with the chant, “By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes. / Open, locks, whoever knocks” (4.1.61-3); the witches later chant together to call up a series of apparitions: “Come high or low, / Thyself and office deftly show” (4.1.83-4). These short rhymed orders find an echo in Mistress Generous’s order to Robin as she places a magical bridle on him in The Late Lancashire Witches: “Horse, horse, see thou be, / And where I point thee, carry me” (3.2.469).

37 culpability. The Late Lancashire Witches takes up Macbeth’s interest in the effects of language on perception, but its characters rarely soliloquize self-consciously on the possible solipsistic roots of their perceptions, nor seem in such speeches—as Macbeth often does—to talk themselves into positions of belief or skepticism. Rather, Brome and Heywood tend to stage characters in conversation; their characters repeatedly confront strange sights and exaggerated social upheavals that, as possible spectacles of magic, produce dialogue and heated debate among groups of witnesses. By Act 5, however, the play’s least reliable witnesses not only become Lancashire’s chief witchmongers, but also persuade others to see as they do. The effect is a profound uncertainty: not about the identities of the Lancashire witches, but about the validity of the rhetorical foundations upon which their conviction is based.

I: Renaissance witches, at home and abroad

Witchy words and white magics

My argument here is that descriptive speech and the rhetorical foundations of witchcraft convictions constitute a kind of magic in themselves. This position is, on one hand, a metaphorization of language’s effects on the thoughts, perceptions, and judgements of listeners. On the other hand, this argument proceeds from a Renaissance understanding of magic as founded upon, and countered by, powerful words. Magical pacts and spells were commonly described by both English and Continental writers as dark mirrors or inversions of Christian (and especially Catholic) rituals. If, as Stuart Clark notes, “Christ had given power to the word to confer grace during penance, baptism, and other sacraments,” the devil “tried to convince his followers that magic utterances, unguents, rings, and other paraphernalia had the same kind of force” (Thinking 84-5).9 James I’s Epistemon, for instance, recounts confessions from witches who claim to have convened

9 Clark is paraphrasing André Valladier’s La Saincte Philosophic de l’Ame, a printed version of a 1612 Advent sermon. For a survey of demonic inversions of sacred rites, as described in European writings on witches and demons, see especially Clark’s chapter “The Devil, God’s Ape” (Thinking 80-93).

38 in churches with the devil at the pulpit (F3r). Even when not couched in forms of ritual inversion, witches’ words were considered a dangerous force, as Scot insists in his imitation of a typical witchcraft charge: “she railed, she curssed, she mumbled and whispered, and finallie she said she would be even with me: and soone after my child, my cow, my sow, or my pullet died, or was strangelie taken” (A6v). Incensed words and allusions to future harm were sufficient evidence for victims to draw a causal relationship between their personal sufferings and the activities of suspicious neighbours; witches and their victims also took it for granted that these words could, in themselves, inflict the sufferings that they predict.

Yet, as Alan Macfarlane observes, “a ‘witchcraft prosecution’ might as easily be for looking in a crystal ball to discover where lost goods were as for supposedly injuring a person by evil and supernatural means” (4). To be a “witch” in Tudor or Stuart England did not necessarily entail the practice of malefic magic; indeed, activities labeled and prosecuted as witchcraft could consist of measures meant to counter witches’ arts.10 James I’s commentary in Daemonologie is representative of the general legal attitude toward beneficent magics at the time: he refers to the use of “all that which is called vulgarly the vertue of worde, herbe, and stone”—magical plants, knots, talismans, and other spoken or crafted charms—as “the Devilles rudimentes,” forms of forbidden magic that enticed practitioners toward ever more serious offenses (C2r). Legal strictures did not, however, prevent individuals from seeking magical solutions to their troubles: in his study of witchcraft practices in Renaissance Essex, Macfarlane collects numerous anecdotes on the practices of cunning folk, practitioners of “white magic” whom individuals commonly consulted not just for magical charms, but also for advice on a variety of personal matters.11

10 Clark thus argues, “much of the literature dealing with ‘witchcraft’ in early modern Europe was an attempt to demonologize the traditional resources favoured by ordinary people in need” (Thinking 459). 11 It was common, for instance, to see a cunning person for legal advice, medical diagnosis and treatment, the seeking-out and recovery of lost or stolen goods, and, most relevant, the discovery and thwarting of local malefic witches and their spells. See especially Macfarlane 120-30.

A distinguishing feature of cunning folks’ craft is its significant verbal component: many magical remedies were themselves verbal in nature—spoken charms and wearable holy writings were common cures for witchcraft-induced illnesses (Macfarlane 125)—but practitioners also “provided an outside, apparently objective and impartial, analysis of a person’s relationships” (122). Hence the common practice of consulting cunning folk to confirm whether a particular affliction was the result of an act of witchcraft, and to determine the particular witch(es) behind the act. In asking “probing questions” about a client’s suspected magical afflictions, “the cunning man’s aim was to bring this [suspicion] out into the open and to give it confirmation” (123), and often also to draw on local gossip and name resident witches as part of a “business of allocating blame” (124). Individuals consulted local white magicians not just for magical cures, then, but also for words: healing speech, but also explanatory affirmations and lists of suspicious names that encouraged victims of malefic magic to take action for themselves against the sources of their troubles. As James I notes, formally imprisoning witches was one means of breaking their charms;12 as such, accusations of witchcraft or condemnatory testimony at court, insofar as these words resulted in a witch’s conviction, existed as complements and analogues to the magical cures sold by cunning-folk. There is, however, is a dark side to the practice of helpful magic beyond its criminal status from a legal standpoint, as Macfarlane’s discussion of gossip suggests: the capacity to allocate blame convincingly is not necessarily synonymous with the power to uncover truth. A cunning person helps to demystify frightening supernatural experiences; their words may also, however, structure and focus narratives of suspicion within communities whose members may be predisposed to find dark dealings behind neighbours’ everyday activities.

Despite the plays’ temporal and generic differences, Macbeth shares with The Late Lancashire Witches a tacit preoccupation with the way that others’ speech guides

12 Private imprisonment, James’s Epistemon argues, is insufficient, but “where God beginnes justlie to strike by his lawfull Lieutennentes, it is not in the Devilles power to defraude or bereave him of the office, or effect of his powerfull and revenging Scepter” (H2r). James’s insistence upon the power of magistrates to render magic impotent is a function of his tendency toward absolutism, but the argument itself is a common one; Doughty in The Late Lancashire Witches expresses a similar sentiment when he tells the captured and powerless witches that it is a “common feat of the old juggler”—i.e. the devil—“to leave you all to the law, when you are once seized on by the talons of authority” (5.5.1029).

40 listeners’ attention to strange incidents within their communities, whether this speech makes sense of past events or gestures toward future grievances. Both plays evince this interest in part through their pervasive “translacing,” a rhetorical technique identified by George Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie as the distribution of etymological echoes of words throughout a line, stanza, or passage.13 Stephen Greenblatt uses this term to describe Shakespeare’s art in much broader terms: he finds a form of translacing in Lady Macbeth’s echoes of the Weird Sisters’ magical charms in her own spell-like invocations of the “spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts” to “unsex” her (1.5.38-9), and in her resolution to “pour spirits” into her husband’s ear (1.5.24).14 Translacing, in this expansive figurative sense, aptly describes one way in which many seventeenth-century witchcraft plays rhetorically confuse the already blurred boundary between magic and social unrest, and between malicious witches and domineering wives: verbal connections between characters—some of whom, like Lady Macbeth and the witches, never meet on- stage—emerge through the echoes of key words and phrases. The technique as Greenblatt redefines it also appears in The Late Lancashire Witches, and is especially evident in characters’ tendency to use the language of bewitchment not just in their descriptions of the effects of magical charms, but also, often winkingly, to denote mundane incidents of social misconduct.15 The play’s translacing is also occasionally allusive: in Act 2, for instance, Seely calls to his wife Joan, “Come away, wife, come away” (3.1.362), faintly echoing one of the songs sung by the witches’ spirits in Macbeth (3.5.38).16 Elsewhere, Winny Seely comments to Joan regarding her slovenly dress, “you look like one o’ the Scottish weyward sisters” (1.2.153), referring explicitly to Macbeth’s ghastly Weird

13 Puttenham calls the term “Traductio, or the Tranlacer [sic]”; in one example, he translaces the word “life” into “live, living, lively, livelode” within a single poem (Z3v). Puttenham’s definition implicitly requires proximity for its effects; Greenblatt’s reimagining of the term on a larger scale demands audiences’ sustained attention to distant echoes, as well as to broadly thematic similarities between speeches. 14 Greenblatt argues that Lady Macbeth “is not revealed to be a witch, yet the witches subsist as a tenebrous filament to which Lady Macbeth is obscured but palpably linked” (“Shakespeare Bewitched” 34). 15 Whetstone, for instance, intimates that his mother was a known witch (1.1.35-7), but when questioned adds that she “by her beauty and fair looks bewitched my father” and produced a bastard son (1.1.38). The question of Whetstone’s witchy heritage is thus left open with a self-consciously tired metaphor of love as bewitchment. 16 The song is itself taken from 3.3.39-72 of Middleton’s The Witch.

Sisters, and also implicitly inviting audiences to bring these two plays into conversation.17

As in Macbeth, the cumulative effect of translacing within the play is the tainting of every character and every act in Lancashire with a sense of the supernatural; Brome and Heywood render everyone potentially a witch. The playwrights draw witches and their victims into chains of rhetorical associations, and so highlights the ease with which the rhetoric of witchcraft implicates those whom it touches. As I will discuss at length in the next section, witchcraft trials could—and did—end in convictions based on knowingly false accusations, misleading or inconsistent testimony, and impossible confessions, thus rendering the shared “truth” of judicial pronouncements a function of individuals’ idiosyncratic observations and collectively-made judgemental errors. As an entry point into the ways in which literary and scientific works depict this problem of collective error, I turn now to Johannes Kepler’s Dream, an allegorical voyage of discovery that draws parallels between astronomical investigations, literary fictions, and acts of witchcraft. In Kepler’s narrative, new discoveries at the frontiers of natural science are rendered analogous to acts of magic, but so too do the practices of discovery and communication, especially as Kepler describes them in his explanatory notes, come to resemble the charms and conjurations of magicians. The text’s disastrous initial reception reflects, however, the high stakes of Renaissance debates on the existence of magic and the magical effects of report as it spreads through communities of readers and speakers.

17 It is also tempting to read the gentleman Shakestone’s name as an echo of “Shakespeare.” As Ostovich observes in the notes on the play’s dramatis personae, however, the name is most likely a testicular pun that connotes “a threateningly ‘macho’ display” (n.p.). To the best of my knowledge, no modern critic has accepted the invitation to explore other potential connections between these two plays. Critics tend to focus on The Late Lancashire Witches exclusively when discussing the play as an object of literary analysis; see, for instance, Charlotte Coffin’s “Theatre and/as Witchcraft” and Meg F. Pearson’s “Vision on Trial.” When the play is placed in critical conversation with other plays, it is generally mentioned only briefly and within broader historicist studies of witchcraft beliefs in early modern England; see especially James Sharpe, who compares the witchcraft plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, including Brome and Heywood, all of whom employed “a range of sources from which to construct … stage versions of witches” and who “drew on them as the mood took [them]” (“Sabbat” 176).

The shadowy universe

In 1611, Kepler privately circulated a manuscript of his Dream: an allegorical narrative that describes a meeting between a fictional Icelander named Duracotus and a “daemon” (102).18 This creature, summoned by Duracotus’s witch mother Fiolxhilde, gives him a lesson in lunar geography from the perspective of a visitor standing on the moon. The daemon also explains how one might travel there: daemons wait for a lunar eclipse, and then travel in the Earth’s shadow to the shaded moon, carrying willing human travelers with them along the way (102–6). In his extensive footnotes, Kepler explains this voyage’s allegorical significance. He derives the term “daemon” from the Greek word “daiein,” which he glosses as “to know” (102 n.51), and which is “here understood to be the science of astronomy” (103 n.55). Eclipses, Kepler notes, are rare occurrences; as such, few philosophers study them and use “shadow measurement” to understand “heavenly affairs” (102 n.56). Yet, like the daemons waiting to cross in the shadows, some intrepid astronomers “lie in wait for lunar eclipses and, using them as a ladder, dare the ascent to the moon: that is, attempt an investigation into the nature and courses of heavenly bodies” (106 n.64). The practice of magic is for Kepler both a figure for and a parallel to the observational frontiers of Renaissance natural science. He identifies both as occult arts in a twofold sense: their knowledge is available only to initiates,19 and the successful teaching and practice of both disciplines requires “repose”—ceremony and seclusion—as well as “attentiveness, and carefully selected words” (100).20 In his Arte of English Poesy, George Puttenham comments that allegory creates “a duplicitie of

18 Although it may seem odd to include a German astronomical text within a discussion of English witchfinding activities, there are at least two justifications for engaging with the Dream here. First, Kepler was a known figure in English scientific and literary circles; John Donne refers to him explicitly in Ignatius: His Conclave (1611), of which Kepler possessed and annotated a copy. (For evidence of Kepler’s possession of this copy, see, e.g., Jonathan Holmes [197–8]). Second, Kepler’s use of magic and witchcraft as figures for his scientific pursuits enabled unintentional receptions of his text; both the rhetorical strategies of the Dream and the consequences of its circulation illuminate some of the dangers of rumour and reception that Shakespeare and other English writers depicted in their own works. 19 See OED, “occult” n. A.1.a: “Not disclosed or divulged, secret; kept secret; communicated only to the initiated.” 20 Kepler describes an instance of his optical magic: he secludes himself in a particular room, writes a phrase backwards (like magical “characters”) on a slate hanging outdoors, and uses an aperture and white covering on the opposite wall to reflect the phrase, now reading forwards, onto the covering. He summons his visitors in to observe what he calls “my ceremonies, my rituals” (100 n.44, n.46, n.47).

43 meaning or dissimulation under covert and darke intendments” and consists of “sence translative and wrested from the owne signification” (S2v, X4r). This “translative” method of signification is central to the Dream: the moon-dwellers’ lunar-centric understanding of the universe gently mocks earth-dwellers’ similar misunderstandings,21 while the text itself upholds, through Duracotus’s education, the study of eclipses’ shadows as one means by which observers might achieve a higher understanding of astronomical principles. In this context, the “dark intendments” of allegory, properly interpreted, draw readers into a scientific community. They become the means by which Kepler obscurely describes the methodology of his studies, praises the work of fellow astronomers, and communicates his own findings to these colleagues.

The science of shadows was familiar to Kepler. He wrote at length on the geometry of lunar eclipses in The Optical Part of Astronomy (1604), and had also seen the sketches and descriptions of the moon and other celestial bodies in his colleague Galileo’s Starry Messenger (1610). The Copernican thesis of the Dream had likewise been explored more explicitly in Kepler’s earlier New Astronomy (1609). Controversial novelty, in other words, was not necessarily a pressing reason for Kepler to disguise his ideas in an allegorical narrative. As Elizabeth Spiller argues, however, the Dream is concerned with the act of reading as itself “a form of perception” in a period of new cosmological discoveries (105). Reading is a means, that is, by which others might visualize phenomena that they do not yet possess telescopes and other tools to observe, or, as in the case of the sight of Earth from the moon, phenomena which cannot be observed at all through existing technologies.22 Kepler’s text draws attention to the acts of shared picturing and interpretive contemplation required for its comprehension, and indeed represents its own protagonist engaged in such acts: the voyage is not experienced by

21 The inhabitants of Kepler’s moon wrongly regard their home as fixed while the sun and other celestial bodies “pass from east to west” over it (131). In his notes, Kepler adds that “We earth-dwellers” likewise “consider that the level surface on which we stand, and along with it the turrets on our church towers, rest motionless while the stars move past those turrets from east to west” (131 n.135). 22 Spiller describes the Dream as a response to Galileo’s Starry Messenger and the observations generated by his use of the telescope. Galileo’s text “introduced new strategies of reading to capture the new observations that his readers could not yet see through the telescopes that they either did not have or could not use” (105); these strategies included the incorporation of extensive illustrations and diagrams (106).

Duracotus personally but is related to him by the daemon. Like the reader of Galileo’s descriptions of the moon, and also like ideal the readers of the daemon’s moon voyage who puzzle out its allegorical significance, Duracotus effectively adopts another observer’s perspective through his words, sharing this other’s vision and the knowledge that comes with it.

Kepler’s lunar allegory generated, however, not scientific but psychological controversy, and did so through readers’ all-too-great willingness to allow their imaginations free play with the shadowy vision supplied by Kepler’s narrator. The Dream was published posthumously by Kepler’s son in 1634, but an early unauthorized version of the book appeared in the duchy of Württemberg, Kepler’s home, where the frame narrative’s description of Duracotus’s spirit-summoning mother became the basis for witchcraft accusations against Kepler’s own mother, Katharina. The Württemberg readers did not interpret the Dream’s allegory as Kepler intended; instead, they wrested the allegory’s text toward alternative, hyper-literal, significations that were available to them in the apparent correspondences between Kepler’s characters and his own biography. In Kepler’s narrative, Fiolxhilde is a figure for “untaught experience,” out of whose death scientific pursuits emerge (89 n.3).23 Kepler’s early readers, however, took Fiolxhilde as a double to Kepler’s mother and, by 1615, Katharina’s neighbours had incorporated alternative interpretations of the Dream into their collective re-envisioning of her documented history of eccentric behavior as the actions of a secret witch.24 Kepler’s mother passed away following a harsh imprisonment and trial; Kepler responded by composing the Dream’s explanatory footnotes, which painstakingly unpack the scientific allegory in order to deny the demonological biography.

23 See, however, Mary Baine Campbell’s discussion of Fiolxhilde’s ambivalent portrayal, especially in relation to the book’s presentation as “a transcript of oral, daemonic lore to which Duracotus’s mother provides him (and therefore us) the access” (138). 24 John Lear (whose account of Katharina’s persecution I follow) describes the circumstances in the introduction to his edition of the Dream. Katharina Kepler was an herbalist (22); she was also prone to strange behavior, ranging from her infamous litigiousness toward her neighbours (who reciprocated with witchcraft charges; see 29-30), to the bizarre allegation that she wished to silver her deceased husband’s skull and use it as a goblet (31).

The Dream, originally published in Latin, was not translated into English until the twentieth century, and its 1634 publication date disqualifies it as a potential influence on Shakespeare or Brome and Heywood. Yet, the Dream shares with demonological literature an interest in language as “magically productive rather than passively descriptive” (Campbell 138); in Kepler’s text, language creates, as if magically, forms of perception and accompanying knowledge of objects that would otherwise be hidden and unknown. This sharing is readily apparent in the astronomy lesson that the daemon gives Duracotus, but it is also catastrophically present in the divergent interpretive uses to which early readers of Kepler’s book put its allegory. Far from an aberration, however, the unintended interpretive uses the Dream are a logical consequence of the process, encouraged by Kepler’s own text, by which individuals integrate the knowledge generated by description into their own perceptions and judgements.

Lancashire’s “crisis of mediation”

Brome and Heywood’s contemporaneously published Late Lancashire Witches is a comedy; it too, however, documents dark consequences that arise when witchmongers adopt others’ stories to account for their own ambiguous perceptions. Doughty, the play’s self-appointed chief witchmonger and a frequent witness to the effects of the Lancashire witches’ magic, decides in Act 5 to collect stories of magical torments from other Lancashire residents as part of his effort to apprehend the culprits. Among his interviewees are the Miller and the Boy, who describe and retroactively reread a variety of off-stage incidents as acts of magical malice in light of Doughty’s own discoveries of witchcraft. In conversation, Doughty and his interlocutors stage a process of interpretation that, like the reception and interpretation of the Dream by Kepler’s neighbours, brings speakers and their suspicions into mutually reinforcing dialogue. The Miller claims that witches were responsible for both terrifying spectacles—“One night in my sleep they set me astride stark naked a top of my mill” (5.1.864)—and everyday annoyances—“all last summer, my wife could not make a bit of butter” (5.1.866). Doughty reports to the Miller, “I have sought about these two days, and heard of a

46 hundred such mischievous tricks” (5.1.871), affirming the Miller’s judgement and also revealing that Doughty has been seeking such stories actively. Some of the “tricks” catalogued by Doughty comprise events from earlier scenes; in this scene, the Boy retells the events of Act 4, in which he was kidnapped by witches and forced to attend a feast consisting of the magically stolen contents of the wedding banquet (5.1.873). Yet, the Boy also adds additional, unstaged, material to his account: he alleges, for instance, that he recently “fought a quarter of an hour” with the Devil himself in physical combat (5.1.881). Unlike the witches’ feast, the Boy’s fight with the Devil is not presented on- stage, leaving audiences to judge the veracity of his claims in a way that Doughty—who is immediately convinced—does not.

Recent studies by Lorna Hutson and Holger Schott Syme have explored characteristics of Renaissance judicial practice and their refractions through dramatic literature of the period. Syme devotes particular attention to the mediated nature of judicial evidence: state agents such as justices of the peace performed a formal, legal version of the amateur gathering and organization of evidence that Kepler’s readers and Brome and Heywood’s Doughty perform. In doing so, these agents, whose official roles enhanced the credibility of the testimony they presented, “controll[ed] what narrative of a crime would be presented to a jury” for consideration (36).25 Concerns about the reliability of such legal procedures—about the mediation and tailoring of evidence especially—abound in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such that Syme argues that the period saw a cultural “crisis of mediation” (2). In witchcraft trials especially, as I will discuss in the next section, false or misleading testimony that gave voice to common beliefs and local gossip frequently led to wrongful convictions. Plays constitute fruitful ground upon which to explore this crisis: dramatic literature can stage both the visual spectacle and the rhetorical description after the fact, as well as the visibly empty or inaccessible space and the impassioned discussions that visualize unseen matter for listeners’ imaginations. As

25 Syme positions Theatre and Testimony’s argument in part as a response to Hutson’s emphasis on a fundamentally communal, collaborative model of forensic investigation (see, e.g., Hutson 66-8). Jurors, Syme insists in agreement with Hutson, were not “self-informing” but could “reject any testimony, no matter how much it was designed to persuade them” in court (35). Yet, as Syme points out, “what reached that jury was largely in the control of magistrates rather than the community” (35).

Hutson observes, dramatists of the 1590s and beyond evince a new concern with “casting doubt on the reliability and probability of the signs and indications on which people base judgements about one another” (12). Their plays explore, in other words, the consequences of where and how characters attain knowledge about others’ hidden actions, interiorities, and identities.

One source of this knowledge—as Kepler’s book and Doughty’s story-gathering alike suggest—is the descriptive testimony of others, with the potential legal ramifications that the term “testimony” implies. Although rhetoricians like Puttenham generally cast the figures of rhetoric as tools for poetic representation and self-advancement, their work is adapted from the treatises of classical rhetorical theorists, who discuss rhetoric’s picturing and persuasive power chiefly in the context of courts of law. Aristotle, who defines rhetoric as “the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever” (Rhetoric 1.2.1), thus opens his treatise with a more focused treatment of common prescriptions for judicial oratory.26 Persuasion in court involves the selection and presentation of information to judges or jurors in ways that ideally make past crimes imaginatively present to listeners and enables legal judgements. The Late Lancashire Witches, as I will discuss below, was indeed based in part on an infamous contemporary witchcraft trial that became, in retrospect, a study in the powerful influence of questionable yet vividly compelling evidence.

II: Dark demonological matters

Representative “shaddowes”

In 1633-4, a Lancashire boy named Edmund Robinson claimed to have been kidnapped by witches and taken to a magical feast, leading to the accusation of as many as sixty

26 Aristotle comments that other (unspecified) writers on rhetoric focus on “how to put the judge into a certain frame of mind” (Rhetoric 1.1.9); he notes elsewhere that “trickery” is common in forensic oratory, in the sense that judges, “listening merely for their pleasure, surrender to the pleaders” (Rhetoric 1.1.10).

Lancashire citizens of witchcraft and the conviction of approximately twenty.27 The judges responsible for the convictions at the Lancashire assizes refused, however, to pass a death sentence. They instead referred the case to Charles I and the Privy Council, who in turn sent the Bishop of Chester to assess the situation and summoned four of the alleged witches to London for further investigation. The Bishop found that the accusers were hardly impartial, that some accusations were based on questionable retroactive re- readings of defendants’ conduct, and that the testimony of one elderly self-professed witch was riddled with contradictions and impossibilities.28 At London, meanwhile, a team of midwives examined the convicts for visible signs of devilish pacts, but found no witch-marks or other damning evidence. Finally, Robinson confessed that he had composed the tale of his kidnapping as an excuse for neglecting his chores, leading to the defendants’ exoneration. He revealed, moreover, that he had been inspired by the stories of others: “he had heard the neighbours talk of a witch feast that was kept at Mocking Tower in Pendle Forest about twenty years since” and had used this material to “frame … tales” about local suspected witches (Bruce 152). Robinson is likely referring to the similar events of the 1612 Pendle witch trials, whose proceedings had not only been published, but also evidently persisted in Lancashire gossip for children to overhear.29 An entire community of self-professed witnesses had thus framed their individual pieces of damning testimony about others around a supposedly authoritative eyewitness account of malefic acts that had itself been shaped by others’ stories.

In The Late Lancashire Witches, Doughty’s readiness to accept others’ fantastical testimony seems part of a generalized satirical treatment of English witchfinding. The

27 I take these statistics, and adapt the subsequent brief summary of the events in question, from James Sharpe’s introduction to The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (“Context” 4–5), as well as from Alison Findlay’s account of the 1633-4 trials in this same volume (146–9). Bruce’s edition of the 1634-5 Calendar of State Papers collects depositions related to the trials (see especially 77-9, 141, 144, 152-3). 28 For a record of the bishop’s misgivings, see the Calendar of State Papers (ed. Bruce), 77-9. Some of the accusers were engaged in disputes with the accused witches regarding unpaid debts. One woman’s identification as a witch was based on her habit as a child of throwing a pail down a hill, overtaking it, and pretending to call the pail to her. 29 Pendle Hill is located in east Lancashire. On the close relationship between the events described in testimony at the Pendle trials and Robinson’s storytelling, see, e.g., Hirsch (93–4), and Pearson’s (117). Thomas Potts, a law clerk, published his records of the Pendle witches’ case as The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613).

Boy who describes his kidnapping by witches and his duel with the devil to Doughty is likely a more specific theatrical counterpart to Edmund Robinson,30 and the play as a whole stages what Findlay calls “the workings of the folk process by which beliefs in the supernatural abilities of a suspect could grow via rumour” (148). At the time of their play’s composition, Brome and Heywood knew of the convicts’ summoning to London but Robinson had yet to confess. Critics therefore cannot take it for granted that the playwrights consciously represented the witches as wrongfully convicted victims of exaggerated storytelling; there is some evidence to suggest that Brome and Heywood were in fact commissioned to compose a play in support of the convictions.31 Yet, even under the demands of a hypothetical strategic commission, the playwrights might have marked the similarities between the present case and the Pendle trials, and their satirical treatment of the bumbling Lancashire witchfinders evinces a sense of uneasiness regarding the reliability of individual witnesses and collective storytellers that the playwrights share with contemporary legislators and demonologists.

In 1597, James VI of Scotland—soon to be James I of England—published Daemonologie, a treatise on the occult in the form of a dialogue between the ever-curious Philomathes and his all-knowing mentor Epistemon. In its comprehensive discussion of supernatural threats to James’s kingdom, Daemonologie occasionally raises the question of depositional accuracy in witchcraft prosecutions. In one section, Philomathes proposes that witches might use spells to impersonate innocent people, or that convicted witches might accuse other people of invisible magic acts. It is difficult to verify, for instance, whether or not an accused witch has really attended a coven meeting in a dream or

30 Berry observes that the play follows depositions from Margaret Johnson (one of the accused witches) and Edmund Robinson especially closely (217). See also Berry 217-221 for sustained comparisons of depositions from Johnson and Robinson with speeches from Meg and the Boy, their dramatic counterparts. 31 See especially Berry, who argues that Brome and Heywood were given access to court documents in exchange for penning a play in support of the prosecution (222)—a plausible explanation not just for the witches’ apprehension and threatened execution in Act 5, but also for the close correspondence between scenes and speeches from Brome and Heywood’s play and depositions from the ongoing Lancashire case. See also, however, Hirschfeld, who challenges Berry’s reading; Hirschfeld argues that, even if The Late Lancashire Witches was commissioned, patronage did not necessarily require Brome and Heywood to portray the witches’ guilt definitively (355). Hirschfeld’s reading highlights the playwrights’ tendency to “portray witchcraft as festive revelry, turning malefica into sport”—and “qualify[ing]” both in the process—in the context of Charles I’s controversial reissuing of his father’s Book of Sports (363).

50 assumed a spectral form to torment a victim (Daemonologie L4r), for magistrates have only the words of self-professed agents of the devil or these agents’ victims with which to judge invisible actions. Philomathes’s comments are prescient, considering the Lancashire trials; Epistemon nevertheless upholds the value of witchcraft prosecutions, insisting, “God wil not permit that any innocent persons shalbe slandered with that vile defection [of witchcraft]” (L4r–v). As evidence, Epistemon cites, for instance, …the confession of a young Lasse, troubled with spirites, laide on her by Witchcraft. That although shee saw the shapes of diverse men & women troubling her, and naming the persons whom these shaddowes represents: yet never one of them are found to be innocent, but al clearely tried to be most guilty, & the most part of them confessing the same. (L4v, emphasis mine) Epistemon’s witchy “shaddowes,” as he uses the term, are spectral apparitions. They are also shadows in the sense of the term that I noted in Macbeth’s response to Banquo’s ghost and in the responses to Kepler’s mother by early readers of the Dream: they are shadows-as-rhetoric, descriptions of unseen matter that profoundly shape how others judge present and visible bodies.

The woman insists that these “shaddowes” come to torment her as representatives—as both agents and images—of the malicious owners who are currently on trial. Yet, Epistemon’s lass cannot bring the “shaddowes” themselves to court as evidence; it is unlikely that she would be permitted even to display visible symptoms of her torment in court.32 A process of verbal identification thus makes a figure of description stand for a witchy body: a body that the court cannot itself examine as evidence, and one that the victim has not witnessed directly touching or otherwise attempting to harm her. Despite Epistemon’s self-assurance, a sense of uneasiness regarding the reliability of individuals’

32 Syme observes that victims of demonic “fits” were often removed from court if they began to display their affliction: “The ‘spectacular’ moments historians have described as the centrepieces of witchcraft trials often took place in private houses and magistrates’ chambers, but only very rarely in courtrooms, where such displays were precisely what early modern justices strove to avoid. … [T]he historical record contains only a single instance of a jury being allowed to witness at first hand the testing of a possession victim” (214).

51 perceptions and judgements pervades this passage. Why, Epistemon implicitly demands, would anyone confess to a capital offense that he or she did not commit?

Fantastical printings

One answer, and one that Scot repeatedly insists upon in his treatise, is that witchcraft carries with it a sense of power and prestige that might otherwise be unavailable to its more marginalized and vulnerable practitioners. Scot’s falsely accused witches are most often gendered female: widows, embittered crones, beggars, and other women who lack defined or stable roles within their communities, and who are often forced to rely upon neigbhours’ charity (C4r-v). Mutual resentment renders such women apt to curse others and their property, and also renders these would-be witches “easilie persuaded” by the devil that “what mischiefe, mischance, calamitie, or slaughter is brought to pass … is done by themselves” (C4r).33 Scot also, however, recounts stories of accused witches who accept their charges—as in the case of a male servant who was “verie necessarie and diligent” that he convinced himself that his talents were magical; when he was imprisoned and sentenced to burn, “he seemed more willing to suffer, than to loose his estimation in that behalfe” (B5r). Some self-professed witches enjoy, and even benefit from, their reputations.

Another, and related, answer to the problem of self-professed witches’ unreliable confessions is, for Scot, that witches suffer from melancholic delusions (F2v). This judgement is not completely unorthodox, insofar as it ascribes witches’ confessions to imbalances and errors of their internal senses. English passions-writers indeed commonly consider the capacity of devils and their agents to alter the mind and its passions—not

33 Stuart Clark summarizes social conditions affecting women—including new property laws, population and marriage trends that produced more widows and spinsters, and economic changes that disrupted old systems of charity—“that, from an external perspective, seem to have produced ‘accusable’ people” (Thinking 107; see 106-8 generally). Clark cautions, however, that “witches were accused not because they were women but because they were witches” (110); it seems logical to turn an accusatory eye toward the local elderly widow who has explicitly cursed you when striving to find a cause for your son’s sudden illness, your inability to churn butter, or the death of your cow.

52 through magic, per se, but through their subtle interference with existing bodily processes. Levinus Lemnius, in his Touchstone of Complexions, thus comments that the devil’s “fetch is slyly to insinuate himselfe into our mindes, cogitations, counselles and willes” (C6v). Thomas Wright also considers the “Suggestions of the Divell” in his list of impediments to virtue in The Passions of the Minde in Generall. The devil, he notes, “being a spirite, by secret meanes can enter into the former part of our braine, and there chop and change our imaginations” (Y5v). Echoing Wright, Pierre de la Primaudaye comments that, far from merely speaking suggestively, the Devil is capable of directly “print[ing] in [sorcerers’] fantasie the images of those things he representeth unto them” (Nn3r); what seems like a malefic charm is really a devilish illusion.34 When passions- writers discuss the magic of the Devil and his servants, then, they often imagine a process by which these agents might create false images and “print” them directly upon a receptive imagination, and thus lead self-professed witches to believe genuinely in the power of their arts. The prefatory letter to the reader in Scot’s Discoverie condemns equally “the arrogancy of those [witches] which take upon them to worke wonders” and “the desire that people have to hearken to such miraculous matters, unto whom most commonly an impossibilitie is more credible than a veritie” (B4r–v). Scot does not deny the existence of the Devil or his capacity for temptation; he indeed argues elsewhere, like Lemnius and Wright, that the Devil can corrupt the imaginations of his victims.35 Self- professed witches are not, Scot suggests, conscious liars: they merely convince themselves, and others, that they can “worke wonders.”

34 The publication dates of these texts—1576, 1604, and 1618, respectively—reflect the consistency and conventionality of this model of malefic mental influence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As Clark notes, “it was virtually the unanimous opinion of the educated that devils, and, a fortiori, witches, not merely existed in nature but acted according to its laws. They were thought to do so reluctantly and … with a good many unusual, or ‘preternatural’ manipulations of phenomena, yet they were always regarded as being inside the general category of the natural” (Thinking 152). This emphasis on the preternatural boundaries of witches’ power would seem to severely limit their potential for mischief; practically speaking, however, it granted them potential influence over anything deemed to occur in nature, including errors of the senses and disorders of the mind. 35 Witches are “by [devils] … onlie deceived; the instruments of their [f]antasie being corrupted, and so infatuated, that they suppose, confesse, and saie they can doo that, which is as farre beyond their power and nature to doo” (G4r).

James’s Daemonologie explicitly denounces the “damnable opinions” of “SCOT an Englishman, [who] is not ashamed in publike print to deny, that ther can be such a thing as Witch-craft” in its own prefatory letter (Daemonologie A2v). Despite his condemnation of Scot, however, there are moments in Daemonologie when James discusses forms of sensory or imaginative error in ways that seem to echo the misgivings of his nemesis.36 James also occasionally questions, like Scot, the judgemental powers of individuals who see through the lens of others’ testimony. One of the dialogues in Daemonologie features a discussion of ghosts in which Philomathes wonders what it means when spirits “appeare in the shaddow of a person newlie dead, or to die, to his friendes” (Daemonologie I2v, emphasis mine). Philomathes, who had above questioned the nature of the “shaddowes” as perceived by witches’ victims, also expresses his doubts about ghostly shadows here, for his phrasing—the spirits “appeare in the shaddow of a person”—suggests a disjunction between beloved body and visiting spirit.37 His mentor Epistemon affirms, in turn, that these “spirites” are really the Devil in disguise: he makes witnesses “beleeve that it was some good spirite that appeared to them then, … ether to forewarne them of the death of their friend; or else to discouer unto them, the will of the defunct, or what was the way of his slauchter, as is written in the booke of the histories Prodigious” (Daemonologie I3r). Epistemon’s reply evinces a qualified skepticism that denies not the phenomenon itself, but questions its origins and its creator’s intent, and mocks the credulity of its victim.

Epistemon is likely referring here to Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires Prodigieuses (1560), a compendium of wonders that does indeed contain stories of helpful spirits.38 James’s Devil apparently not only reads extensively, but also relies on his victims’ own knowledge of literature on the supernatural, combined with their love for their deceased

36 He denies, for instance, the popular belief that witches can transform into animals in order to attend the sabbat, declaring such miracles impossible for anyone but God to perform; he proposes instead that the Devil might manipulate witches’ sight to make them believe that they do so (G1r). 37 An available connotation for the term “shadow” involves precisely this manner of disjunction: “An unreal appearance; a delusive semblance or image” (OED, “shadow” (n.) II.6.a). 38 Published in English as Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature (1569). As I noted in the Introduction, Boaistuau collects stories of visiting shades, and suggests noncommittally that these spirits are sometimes angels and sometimes devils that God permits to trouble their victims (Y1r–Z2r).

54 acquaintances, in order to achieve his deceptions. It is all too tempting, in other words, for witnesses to read present sights in accordance with the background of past experiences. James’s suggestion to readers who wish to protect themselves is simply to accept Protestant orthodoxy over wonderful stories as the grounds for interpreting personal experiences. The Devil, he argues, only tricks “ignorant Christians” who wrongly believe that the spirits of the dead can return to their friends (Daemonologie I3r). James’s prescriptions are, in turn, explanatory devices akin to Kepler’s footnotes to the Dream, which he composed to preclude misinformed readings: both authors highlight interpretive errors in order to encourage their readers to avoid dangerous illusions and mistaken conclusions by learning how to interpret properly from more reliable sources.

Kepler was not merely grasping at fantastical imagery when he took up a demonological allegory to represent his lunar meditations. Rather, Duracotus’s fantastical tale brings together physical, rhetorical, and demonic shadows in a text whose allegory encourages its readers to consider the parallels between literal magic and the transformative power of language. Its reception also demonstrated, however unintentionally, the darker side of language’s creative power. As tales of witchcraft spread within communities—in Württemberg as in Lancashire—it becomes increasingly easy for individuals to discover close correspondences between these tales and their personal experiences. Witches appear within communities as stories of their activities spread; their neighbours effectively bring the supernatural into reality where it did not necessarily exist before by speaking about it.39 As I will show in the next section, this shaping of perception is precisely the intended magic of speech on Macbeth’s stage, as well: not just in the speeches of witches like the Weird Sisters, but also in the parallel words of Macbeth himself as he plots and effects his rise to power. Macbeth’s soliloquies evince a rhetoric of conjuration that, like the words of a witch’s charm, or like the equivocal suggestions of the Weird Sisters’ prophecies, seem magically to induce unthinkable acts.

39 To speak about the supernatural is also, potentially, to conjure real demons to the stage or the court. See especially Syme’s collection of anecdotes in which “acted conjurations [are] taken for the real thing—if not by the devil himself, at least by an audience ready to expect satanic interventions in their everyday lives” (123-31; 128), including Thomas Middleton’s account of an incident in which “the olde Theater crackt and frighted the Audience” at a staging of Doctor Faustus (qtd. in Syme 127).

III: Witchcraft, testimony, and forensic drama

Macbeth’s solipsistic shadows

Macbeth’s early scenes repeatedly stage the consequences that monarchs and magistrates face when their perceptions lack appropriate guidance,40 or seek it from suspicious sources. “[T]he supposed ‘authority’ of appearances,” Syme observes, “is utterly misleading, as the visible can only become meaningful, can only speak truth, if perceived through the eyes of an already informed observer” (249–50).41 Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters are, like Brome and Heywood’s Miller and Boy, James’s Boaistuau, and Kepler’s Duracotus (sans annotations), questionable informants. The witches appear to Macbeth and Banquo in 1.3, and hail Macbeth in successive addresses as “Thane of Glamis,” “Thane of Cawdor,” and “Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter” (1.3.46-8). These speeches are not acts of storytelling, per se, but their words present Macbeth—who is at this point only the Thane of Glamis—with a rhetorical puzzle that seems to hint at a section of his life’s narrative that has yet to be revealed. Informed observation is not, however, synonymous with truthful judgement. Just as the prior study of French wonder catalogues may predispose an observer to see a friendly ghost where there is only an evil spirit, so does the memory of the witches’ speeches encourage Macbeth to perceive more proofs of his impending advancement in signs that are far more ambiguous than he acknowledges. As Macbeth himself puts it, “chance may crown me” (1.3.142-3), but his contemplation of Duncan’s murder both before and after this statement evinces the assumption that his success is predicated upon the crime.

40 1.6 opens with both Duncan and Banquo—future victims of Macbeth’s ambitions—standing obliviously before Macbeth’s castle and contemplating its “pleasant seat” and “delicate” air (1.6.1, 10). 41 Syme is commenting here specifically on another Shakespearean instance of guided vision: Much Ado’s Claudio, whose “knowledge” of Hero’s adultery in 4.1 (a deception arranged by Don John) determines his response to her blushes. The irony of Claudio’s professions of knowledge is not lost on Syme; as I will discuss further below, this irony also applies to Macbeth’s own discovery of perception-conditioning knowledge. Whereas Syme’s account of Claudio’s vision of Hero involves the staging of visual evidence with accompanying dialogue, however, I focus on the ways in which language itself can guide—perhaps even produce, in Macbeth’s hallucinations—visual experience without an immediate visual counterpart.

The witches’ ambiguity is essentially a rhetorical vice. Puttenham, in his discussion of rhetorical faults, explicitly identifies prophecy as an instance of undesirable “Amphibologia, … or [the] figure of sence incertaine” (Ff3r). For Puttenham, “all our old Brittish and Saxon prophesies be of the same sort, that turne them on which side ye will, the matter of them may be verified”; rebellions are led by “propheticall rymes, which might be constred [sic] two or three wayes as well as to that one whereunto the rebelles applied it” (Ff3v). Amphibologia is technically the vice of its creator, and Puttenham accordingly ends this section with a warning to aspiring writers to refrain from ambiguous speech unless it is “for some purpose” (Ff3v). Equivocal speech is endlessly interpretable, to a variety of potentially self-serving ends. Yet, Puttenham’s discussion of amphibologia in British history offers an alternative conception of this rhetorical vice that complicates the ascription of blame for its effects. Much critical energy has been directed at Macbeth’s interest in subversive equivocation, particularly in that the Weird Sisters are easily read as equivocating Jesuit figures.42 Puttenham criticizes, however, not just the speakers of equivocal words but also the recipients who elect to “constr[ue]” them to suit their own rebellious designs. When amphibologic speech is prophetic in nature, the significance of its promissory language lies partly in the minds and hands of fallible interpreters who act upon it.

In an aside, Macbeth takes up this interpretive role as he reflects upon the possible significance of the witches’ words in light of the news that Duncan has appointed him Thane of Cawdor: Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor.

42 A valid reading, considering the Gunpowder Plot as historical context. See, for instance, Garry Wills’s Witches and Jesuits, and Frank L. Huntley, who argues that Macbeth is “seduced by [the] technical equivocation” of witches whose allegiance lies with the Devil rather than their king—a parallel to English Jesuits’ equivocality and their prioritization of Popish interests over their duty to James I (397). See also, however, Kathleen McLuskie, who critiques the critical tendency toward “historical allegory” in such readings of the play (“Humane” 3). McLuskie regards “the legitimation of the Stuart dynasty” as reflected in the play’s concern for patrilineal succession—and not the Gunpowder Plot—as Macbeth’s historical touchstone (9).

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs Against the use of nature? (1.3.130-6) The early acts of Macbeth focus obsessively on its protagonist’s physiological wrestling with the possible implications of prophetic words in a way that is inseparable from this rhetoric’s psychological effects. Here, Macbeth casts himself as a passive sufferer, akin to one of Lemnius’s or Wright’s victims of devilish tricks: he imagines himself as “yield[ing]” to a powerful, invasive “suggestion” that makes his hair stand on end and his heart pound unnaturally. These are common signs of fear to Renaissance natural scientists: in Sylva Sylvarum, Francis Bacon identifies “The Standing of the Haire upright” as a symptom of the passion of fear: blood rushes in toward the heart and the skin’s pores close, leaving the hair erect (Sylva Aa3v). Macbeth’s body seems, likewise, to be closing itself off in the wake of a sensory invasion that raises his fear. The “start[ing]” that Banquo notes in Macbeth’s reaction is, however, a more ambiguous sign of terror. Bacon writes that “Starting” simultaneously betokens an “Apprehension” of a frightening sensory object and “an Inquisition, in the beginning, what the Matter should be” (Aa3v)—an act, in other words, of straining toward the source of stimulation even in the midst of fear. In accordance with this corporeal wavering, Macbeth also audibly wavers in his soliloquy between the poles of inquisition (his new title suggests the words “Cannot be ill”) and apprehension (the prophecies “cannot be good” if his body reacts so violently).

The term “suggestion” here evokes at once conversational insinuation and a kind of compulsion evinced in the passive language with which Macbeth describes his unfixed hair and forced palpitations. Yet, although Macbeth characterizes himself as a passive recipient of demonically implanted images and the treasonous thoughts that come with it, his body and mind alike seem creatively to strain toward an act of murder that is not itself apparent in the witches’ words. Macbeth’s agency is already apparent in his ambivalent contemplation of the “horrid image.” In this same aside, moreover, he articulates a “thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical” (1.3.138): a murder that, thus far, consists only of a vague “horrible imaginings” (1.3.137) Macbeth’s murderous thought does not

58 simply emphasize the apparent inevitability of the witches’ predictions; grammatically, it also connotes “a thought that will itself murder, a thought that is equivalent to the physical act of murder” (Curran 392).43 Macbeth’s words are, in this sense, doubly magical: his murderous thought exists as both a prophetic hint at a future action not predicted by the witches themselves, and as a form of testimony on an event that has already passed in Macbeth’s imagination and which his words bring into existence for audiences. Macbeth appears to think of himself as Syme’s “already-informed observer” and, to an extent, his murderous thoughts are indeed informed by the witches’ suggestions; his willingness to imagine the murder as already acted-out, however, reflects an impulse to take up the power of predictive speech for himself independent of the witches’ rhetoric.

In Act 2, Macbeth continues to conjure up vivid and disturbing images for himself. As he prepares to murder his king, Macbeth pauses to wonder, “Is this a dagger which I see before me …?” (2.1.33), calling out to a vision that is neither called for by stage directions nor assuredly real to Macbeth himself. Macbeth’s descriptive soliloquy presents, nonetheless, a scene of imaginative perception through language. He describes the dagger as hanging with “The handle toward [his] hand” (2.1.34), that it resembles the one that he draws (2.1.40-1); later, he notes that there are “on [the] blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, / Which was not so before” (2.1.46-7). The dagger is unreal, yet these are sufficient details to give it a location in space and a distinct, bloody, possibly changing appearance to listeners’ imaginations. The dagger is thus both there and not there, both for audiences and for Macbeth himself. When his attempt to grasp the weapon fails, he thus demands, Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain? (2.1.36-9)

43 One effect of Macbeth’s reliance on the implanted-images model of demonic influence is the (attempted, at least) displacement of agency in the upcoming crime from himself to the witches: to borrow Curran’s phrasing, it is allegedly their thought, implanted in Macbeth’s mind, that will murder.

Macbeth here briefly entertains the possibility that he suffers from a physiological disorder. He acknowledges that the influential relationship between the imagination and the senses is such that a feverish hallucination might appear to one of the external senses regardless of its objective existence; he tends to “medicalize mental anguish” (Roychoudhury 225).44 Yet, far from dismissing the dagger as without significance due to its possible feverish genesis, Macbeth frames it as a “creation” that, even if false, both reflects his thoughts and pushes him toward their fulfillment. He affirms, “I see thee yet, … / Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going, / And such an instrument I was to use” (2.1.40-3). Although he concedes that “There’s no such thing” (2.1.47), he immediately adds, “It is the bloody business which informs / Thus to mine eyes” (2.1.48- 9); the dagger is significant precisely because of its solipsistic origins. As in his earlier contemplation of his murderous thought, Macbeth here imagines the murder as if it is an existing event with perceivable effects; the dagger is simultaneously the product of his mind and a symbol of an event that this bloody vision prophetically calls into being.

Houston Diehl rightly identifies Macbeth as a “maker of images” (197).45 Andrew Sofer likewise describes Macbeth’s image-making as the “magic” of the stage and refers to the critical process of interpreting his invisible but significant images as “spectral reading” (332, 335)—a fitting term especially in a play so concerned with ghosts, apparitions, and feverish visions. Shared images do not, however, guarantee a shared response: to picture Macbeth’s dagger is, potentially, to embrace a process of seeing with a difference, as I have already hinted in my brief discussion of Lady Macbeth’s skeptical remarks on the unseen ghost in Act 3.46 A kind of judgemental divergence, with attendant criticism, is also available to playgoers in Act 2. Alternative interpretations for the dagger abound in

44 Suparna Roychoudhury also argues that Macbeth’s subsequent troubled sleep and vivid hallucinations suggest that he suffers from a melancholic disorder (218). 45 Other characters in fact ascribe this power to Macbeth even before he demonstrates it himself in his reactions to the witches’ prophetic statements. Ross tells Macbeth, for instance, that he makes “strange images of death” on the battlefield (“Macbeth” 1.3.95), anticipating at once the image of the bloody dagger that Macbeth pictures, and the more literal bloody image of Duncan’s corpse that Macbeth makes and which the court will later discover. 46 Sofer notes, likewise, that language gives unstaged and/or invisible actions and objects form, purpose, and a kind of imaginative presence for listeners. The chaotic potential of such rhetorical picturing can be indirectly observed in the conflicting responses to Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth (Sofer 335).

60 relation to an existing literary (and especially emblematic) tradition, of which Macbeth demonstrates no awareness. Diehl observes that the hanging, bloodied dagger is a conventional “emblem of betrayal, death, and sin”; it signifies the threat to Macbeth’s own body and soul posed by his impending act of murder (199).47 A playgoer who is aware of the alternative connotations of hanging and bloodied daggers may find that significance in Macbeth’s vision even when Macbeth cannot do so for himself.

Macbeth occasionally acknowledges the possibility that his acts and visions might bear alternative interpretations. As he soliloquizes on the impending murder, for instance, he imagines that the king’s virtues / Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against / The deep damnation of his taking-off” (1.7.18-20), And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind. (1.7.21-5) Macbeth imagines a heavenly alternative to the bloody, murderous imagery that fills his other soliloquies, but in the process he also pictures a scene in which he loses interpretive control of his deeds as reports of Duncan’s murder become a trumpet blast that assaults others’ ears and eyes simultaneously. This blurring of vision and audition most readily suggests the corporeal effects of pity—the tears that others will shed for Duncan and his virtues—but the image of the cherubic assault on others’ eyes, paired with that of the “sightless couriers of the air,” seems also faintly to evoke the mechanisms of report. Though the murder itself will go unseen by others, Macbeth suggests, news of the crime will spread, leading others to hear about the “horrid deed” and to picture it through the “eye” of imagination—and so to judge Macbeth and his actions accordingly. Macbeth is not dissuaded by possible signs that his powers of judgement and interpretation are fallible, nor by his conviction that others will condemn him for acting on his own

47 The dagger is an emblematic image of tragedy in general (a visual warning to Macbeth of his future), as well as a weapon associated with the Vice figure in Tudor drama (an unflattering comparison for Macbeth to assume). See Diehl 199 and 203 n. 15.

61 prophetic visions. Yet, just as the witches do not literally bewitch Macbeth into murdering Duncan, so does Macbeth lack the rhetorical power to foreclose the kinds of divergent interpretation—and condemnation—that his equivocal language makes possible for audiences, both on- and off-stage. In this respect, the play’s initial acts offer to its audiences a privileged position of observation and judgement: Macbeth’s contemplative soliloquies encourage resistant readings of both his speeches’ imagery and the conclusions (and courses of action) that Macbeth derives from his own words. Shakespeare’s successors, however, will go on to problematize their own audiences’ informed positions by playing with the same relationships between rhetoric, apperception, and judgement.

Arthur’s imaginative empiricism

The prologue to Brome and Heywood’s The Late Lancashire Witches begins with the announcement that the play’s subject is “Those witches the fat jailor brought to town” (Pr.1), referring to the arrival of the Lancashire witches in London for re-examination. The effect of this prologue is to render the witches’ existence in Lancashire certain; it is merely a question of where and how they operate within Brome and Heywood’s fiction. The play’s first post-prologue scene accordingly stages a discovery of witchcraft in Lancashire but, whereas the prologue anticipates a spectacle of magic, 1.1 offers only a hunting party whose members vigorously debate whether a past event was magical in nature or not. After the speaker of the prologue exits, three Lancashire gentlemen— Arthur, Shakestone, and Bantam—enter, lamenting the loss of a hare after an unsuccessful hunt. Arthur sees the hare’s disappearance as so improbable as to be evidently the work of a witch, and so demands, …was’t possible In such a fair course and no covert near, We in pursuit, and she in constant view, Our eyes not wandering but all bent that way, The dogs in chase, she ready to be ceased,

And at the instant, when I durst have laid My life to gage my dog had pinched her, then To vanish into nothing! (1.1.6) Arthur supports his interpretation of the hare’s disappearance by insisting adamantly upon his status as a qualified witness. His list of the conditions for his sensory experiences (fixed eyes, the absence of visual obstructions, visible contact between hare and dog…) makes his discovery of witchcraft into a series of repeatable empirical observations, a narrative of uninterrupted and unimpeded visual experience whose abrupt end can only be interpreted as unnatural. Arthur’s collective pronouns (“We in pursuit,” “Our eyes not wandering”) and his rambling rhetorical question offer a single interpretation of the event and preclude disagreement by describing the visual experiences described in his speech as a shared picture from one perspective, complete with a vanishing point—the hare—upon which all lines of sight converge. If shared perception is a criterion of reality, Arthur’s speech stresses obsessively the extent to which everyone in the hunting party saw the hare as he did.

Yet, Arthur’s companions respond by probing the assumptions that condition Arthur’s rhetorical portrait of this spectacle of witchcraft. Bantam scoffs, “you speak this / Because a hare hath crossed you” (1.1.5), suggesting that Arthur’s reaction is the product of frustration and superstition.48 Shakestone adds that the hare’s “’scape appear[s] but natural, / Which you proclaim a wonder” (1.1.10). The sensory details and clarity of vision that Arthur reports are not necessarily guarantors of truth; it is the work of Arthur’s own cognition that gives them specific meaning as signs of witchcraft—as evidence that a “wonder,” as opposed to a perfectly natural phenomenon, has occurred.49 This meaning is highly debatable to Arthur’s companions, who have seen the hare and

48 Ostovich offers a similar interpretation in the notes to 1.1.5. 49 “Wonder” has a particular cultural significance in this context. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park observe that “Wonders tended to cluster at the margins rather than at the center of the known world, and they constituted a distinct ontological category, the preternatural, suspended between the mundane and the miraculous. … To register wonder was a to register a breached boundary, a classification subverted” (14). In other words, Arthur sees as a “breached boundary”—something inexplicable according to currently known rules of nature—that Shakestone denies when he describes the hare’s behaviour as firmly within the bounds of the mundane.

63 acknowledge its escape, but consider the situation from very different physical and psychological positions.50 Arthur, increasingly agitated by his companions’ refusal to submit to his perspective, argues again that his own visual experiences are guarantors of truth: what I see And is to me apparent, being in sense, My wits about me, no way tossed nor troubled, To that will I give credit. (1.1.11) Macbeth repeatedly questions his body’s health and his mind’s fitness to judge what he sees, but also ignores his own cautionary remarks. Arthur’s speeches, in contrast, repeatedly stress the fitness of his senses. His speech denies the possibility of mental error, and does not acknowledge potential influences (whether witchy or simply passionate) upon what his senses supply to his judgement; as such, his remarks leave observers with few clues from Arthur himself as to the aptness of his self-evaluation.

Bantam tells Arthur, however, “Come, come, all men / Were never of one mind, nor I of yours” (1.1.12). His response suggests that collective experience does not guarantee “one mind” among spectators, and encourages Arthur to discard his stubborn insistence on the universality of his judgements even when they concern an object of shared experience. Shakestone finally turns the conversation toward the men’s dinner prospects (1.1.13), and so ends their discussion of the hare’s disappearance without an agreed-upon conclusion about its cause. The next scene invites a reevaluation of Arthur’s error. This invitation comes, however, not through any further debate between Arthur and his fellow witnesses, but through the positioning of 1.1 between a prologue that affirms the presence of witches in Lancashire and a parallel spectacle of witchcraft in 1.2. As in Macbeth’s soliloquy on the dagger, these scenes displace the work of dissenting interpretation from the play’s characters to its audience. In 1.2, Doughty witnesses a series of inversions of

50 Somewhat ironically, the frustrating plurality of perspectives in this scene constitutes what Arendt would describe as a guarantor of reality: “Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear” (57).

64 authority at his neighbour Seely’s house: Seely is lectured by his son on fiscal irresponsibility, Seely’s wife is bullied by her daughter for her habits of dress, and the family as a whole is ruled over by their two servants. Doughty, who observes these inversions of authority and recalls that the Seely household was “till very lately, as well governed a family as the country yields” (1.2.466-7), reaches a conclusion: “Sure all the witches in the country have their hands in this home-spun medley” (1.2.468-70). Like Arthur, Doughty witnesses a spectacle that might be mundane, yet which is so irregular that he can make sense of it only by judging it to be supernatural in origin.

Subsequent evidence validates Doughty’s interpretive claim: Act 2 opens with a coven composed of Lancashire women, many of whom are known to both Arthur and Doughty, celebrating (as the witch Meg puts it) “the distraction [they] have set / In Seely’s house” (2.1.538-9). The women also formulate a plan to “spoil the hunters’ sport” later (2.1.560), and arrange to metamorphose themselves into hares and other beasts to divert the men from the chase (2.1.568-81). Doughty is right to see witches behind Seely and his family’s domestic disturbances; perhaps, so this discovery suggests, Arthur is also right to see the hare as a witch, and so to trust his interpretation of the chase despite his companions’ skepticism. Helen Ostovich comments that the disruption of the hunt in Act 1 “demonstrates the impact of witchcraft (female sport) on male sport” (1.1.3.n). This is the reading of the hare’s disappearance that Arthur offers; the witches do not, however, explicitly claim responsibility for this particular failed hunt. My point here is not that Arthur (or Ostovich) is wrong, for there is no unambiguous evidence that the witches did or did not spirit Arthur’s hare away. Rather, it is easy—not just for Arthur, but for playgoers present through Act 2—to overlook the circumstantial nature of the evidence for witchcraft behind the first hunting incident.51 There is no guarantee that audiences

51 Coffin also explores Arthur’s supposed discovery of witchcraft in 1.1 in light of the witches’ vague retroactive hints at their culpability, but examines this uncertainty chiefly from the witches’ perspective. Coffin argues that the witches’ speeches on a projected disturbance of the hunters’ sport are a “telescoping of past and future, intentions and facts” that “draws attention to the artificiality of everything that the play presents” (103). While I do not disagree with Coffin, our emphases are somewhat different: Coffin’s argument is a fundamentally metatheatrical one that likens the construction of witchcraft as a criminal act to constructions of theatrical artifice, and to the witches’ playwright-like organizations of sports and masques. I am less interested in the nature of the witches’ play itself than in the manner in which other characters rhetorically construe this play and other uncertainly magical spectacles.

65 will take up this structural suggestion to judge, and possibly to misjudge, with Arthur. Yet, if they do so, they use the rhetorical foundations of Arthur’s and Doughty’s remarks to establish a perspective and a judgement on an unseen and unverifiable event.

The Late Lancashire Witches stages visual and judgemental errors and oversights on a scale that is both smaller and larger than their Shakespearean precedent. Smaller, in that the poor judge in question is a gentleman and not a future king, and one whose interpretive missteps threaten the social cohesion of a hunting party rather than the stability of a kingdom. Larger, however, in that rhetorically founded error is no longer the product of one man’s solipsism. Macbeth himself repeatedly stresses the fact that his responses to the witches, and to his own rhetoric, seem to be exercises in ambitious delusion. Brome and Heywood, in contrast, make Arthur’s questionable speculations on the supernatural seem less the products of an individual’s illness, and more a plausible response and a shared matter of debate. I have thus far focused on supernatural “sights” that are in actuality invisible: not just to most of The Late Lancashire Witches and Macbeth’s on-stage audiences, but also to playgoers themselves, for whom the descriptive rhetoric of Shakespeare and Brome and Heywood’s characters must create absent objects or even entire scenes that significantly influence staged dialogue and action. In the following sections, however, I turn to several key instances of visible stage magic in both plays, while maintaining this chapter’s focus on the relationship between speakers’ rhetorical constructions and their judgements of others. The latter halves of both plays present audiences with a turn toward visible supernatural spectacles, while continuing to call attention to characters’ interpretive speeches on these visible spectacles as a force that gives them their power and significance.

III: Communal errors, bodily truths

Bloody witnesses

Macbeth’s stage directions do not call for the presence of Duncan’s body on the stage, but traces of it remain on Macbeth, as Lady Macbeth indicates when she reminds him to clean the blood—“this filthy witness” (2.2.45)—off his hands. Her orders imagine the blood as a speaking object that might testify (“witness”) to others who did not see Macbeth’s deed. The couple’s subsequent actions reflect, however, an effort to abuse others’ assumptions about the testimonial significance of blood and other silent witnesses. When Macbeth refuses, Lady Macbeth offers to return to Duncan’s chamber on Macbeth’s behalf and tamper with the crime scene by placing daggers next to Duncan’s servants. “If he [i.e. Duncan] do bleed,” she resolves, “I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt” (2.2.53-5). The notion that a corpse would bleed in the presence of its murderer was a Renaissance commonplace, such that James I casually refers to the practice of corpse-touching as a forensic process in his comments on signs of criminality in Daemonologie: if a murderer handles the body of their victim, the body “wilgush [sic] out of bloud, as if the blud wer crying to the heaven for revenge of the murtherer, God having appoynted that secret super-naturall signe, for tryall of that secrete unnaturall crime” (Daemonologie L4v–M1r).52 James argues for the body’s ability to testify beyond death to the mind’s hidden passions; Duncan’s corpse might likewise speak for itself once more by bleeding if Lady Macbeth approaches, thus incriminating her as an accomplice to the murder. This gushing blood is, however, a mutable sign as Lady Macbeth describes it: not because it lacks the supernatural significance that James ascribes to murder victims but, rather, because its status as a sign of guilt depends on dynamics of vision and presence that are easily manipulated.

52 On the practice of “corpse touching” as a forensic process, see especially Malcolm Gaskill’s “Reporting Murder” (8 et passim). This phenomenon appears elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works. Notably, in Richard III, Lady Anne claims that the body of Henry VI begins to bleed when Gloucester approaches. “Dead Henry’s wounds / Ope their congealèd mouths and bleed afresh” (1.2.55-6), she observes. Like Lady Macbeth, Anne imagines the body as speaking—testifying—wordlessly through its effusions.

Neither the significant body nor the proposed act of painting is portrayed on the stage. Rather, Macbeth offers a rhetorical counterpart to Lady Macbeth’s planned visual artifice when he incriminates Duncan’s blood-covered grooms with his testimony. Macbeth has conveniently precluded interrogation by killing the men—an act that he owns, but which he presents as further proof of his care for his dead king: Here lay Duncan, His silver skin laced with his golden blood, And his gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature For ruin’s wasteful entrance; there the murderers, Steeped in the colours of their trade, their daggers Unmannerly breeched with gore. Who could refrain, That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage to make ’s love known? (2.3.108-15) In Macbeth’s impassioned speech, Duncan’s silver skin and golden blood are the objects of an aborted blazon with all the trope’s attendant admiration. The dead king’s wounds become a “breach in nature,” while the grooms’ daggers are “breeched with gore”; Macbeth thus links his portrait of the men and their instruments sonically—indeed, by translacing the terms in Puttenham’s understanding of the device—and so further implicates the grooms in an unnatural crime against their monarch that gives rise to the unnatural wounds. In describing his impassioned murder of the grooms, Macbeth also casts himself as a body that reacts—like the supernaturally bleeding corpse—impulsively and courageously in response to the sight of Duncan’s alleged killers. His monologue evinces an effort to direct and shape his listeners’ perspectives that I have elsewhere referred to as a form of magic. Here, moreover, Macbeth gives horrifying and ambiguous images—sullied daggers, bloodstained grooms, a corpse that (possibly) bleeds in his presence—unequivocal significance in the minds of his interlocutors. As in Arthur’s speeches on the vanishing hare, Macbeth’s rhetorical question (“Who could refrain…?”) imposes universality upon listeners by rendering alternative responses to the sight of Duncan’s corpse unthinkable to loyal subjects. The promise of a visible, self-explanatory body is ultimately an empty one as it applies to Duncan, whose corpse never appears on stage but whose visible blood is an unstable signifier in Macbeth’s testimony.

Self-incriminating speakers

Macbeth 2.3 dramatizes the ease with which forms of forensic storytelling shape the identities and meanings of silent or absent bodies, but subsequently stages, in the banquet scene at 3.4, the limits of this power as Macbeth struggles to control how others react to Banquo’s selectively visible ghost. The staging of spectral apparitions in The Late Lancashire Witches partakes of these concerns; Brome and Heywood also, however, more clearly implicate the recipients of stories in the dialogic production of shared perceptions and the knowledge that comes with them. Arthur and his friends from the hunting party, participants in 1.1 in a case study of the tenuous relations between empirical storytelling and truth, become the objects of a bawdy supernatural joke about hidden identities in 4.5. Whetstone complains to his witchy aunt Mistress Generous that Arthur and the other gentlemen have “abused and called [him] bastard” (4.5.801), and demands that she help him to play a trick on his abusers. Mistress Generous instructs Whetstone to assemble the other men in a private room within the Generous household, and gives him a note with additional orders. Under these orders, Whetstone gathers Arthur and his companions, and offers to show the men visions of their fathers; predictably, Mistress Generous (who stands on-stage but unseen by the men) responds to their requests by conjuring up spirits in the shape of conventionally adulterous characters who have implicitly cuckolded the men’s supposed fathers. The prank thus mockingly transforms the gentlemen from Whetstone’s abusers into his fellows.

These spirits are common philanderer figures but, from the perspective of each gentleman, they are also unusually personalized in nature. Bantam, the first man to accept Whetstone’s offer, receives a vision of a pedant; as music plays, stage directions call for the spirit to point at Bantam and look at him “full in the face” (4.5.822.sd). It would be absurd, of course, to describe this scene as a deliberate analogue to the appearance (and accusatory gestures) of Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth 3.4; the pedant whom the spirit impersonates in The Late Lancashire Witches may still be living and, in any case, the spirit’s pointing and staring cannot be accusatory, for Bantam is not guilty of his parents’ possibly adulterous actions. Unlike Macbeth’s guests, moreover, everyone at Whetstone’s gathering sees the spirit enter and gesture toward Bantam. A parallel exists, nonetheless,

69 between Macbeth and Bantam in the way that each man’s speeches give significance to his respective ghostly apparition and communicate this significance to others. Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost and its gestures, and cries out, “Thou canst not say I did it. Never shake / Thy gory locks at me” (3.4.49-50); his outburst registers for his listeners the gore they cannot see, and also evinces the guilt that they likely suspect and which Macbeth exposes in striving to deny it. For Bantam and his listeners, meanwhile, the spirit raises questions of identity, and Bantam himself answers them: without prompting, he identifies it as “a pedant in my father’s house, / Who, being young, taught me my A B C” (4.5.824). The apparition on the stage is likely clothed in a way that makes him visually identifiable as a stock pedant figure. Bantam’s response, however, enables Whetstone to respond in turn with a more specific, and plausible, story. Bantam’s supposed father went to the Lancaster assizes, leaving his wife alone; the pedant, Whetstone reports, “crept into his [i.e. Bantam Senior’s] warm place, lay close by her side, and then were you got” (4.5.825). Bantam’s companions receive similar revelations from other spirits who enter on cue: Shakestone sees “my mother’s tailor” and adds, “I remember him ever since I was a child” (4.5.835). Arthur, finally, sees Robin the groom, one of Master Generous’s servants, a frequent presence on-stage, a known philanderer, and, as Arthur confesses, a former servant to Arthur’s father (4.5.846).53

This prank entails the “chopp[ing] and chang[ing]” and “printing” of the imagination that Wright and La Primaudaye describe as the power of the devil and his associates, for Mistress Generous’s spell seems to reach into the memories and attendant anxieties of Arthur and his companions for its conjurations. Yet, Whetstone does not merely rely on his aunt to conjure up recognizable figures from the men’s childhoods; he also offers plausible stories about the gentlemen’s conception once he has discovered precisely who these ghostly fathers are. It is possible that Mistress Generous might have heard gossip about these men’s parentage and reported it to Whetstone in her note, whose contents are

53 The tailor and groom are given the same stage directions as Bantam’s pedant “father” (4.5. 833.sd, 840.sd). Whetstone tells Shakestone of the tailor’s relations with Shakestone’s mother: “when he came to take measure of her upper parts, [he] had more mind to the lower” (4.5.836). He teases Arthur with the observation that, when Arthur’s father was away, Robin “stood for his attorney at home” (4.5.847).

70 never revealed. Regardless of what Whetstone may or may not already know, however, Brome and Heywood present his storytelling as part of the magic: the philandering spirits’ appearances become significant to their witnesses (and more amusing for Whetstone) through dialogue in which Bantam and the other men become accessories to their own pranking. In response to this prank, the other gentlemen laugh at Bantam (4.5.826), who complains that he is “abused” and “jeered” (4.5.827, 829). This shared laughter at one character’s expense is a comic version of the shared discomfort expressed by the other banquet attendees in Macbeth 3.4.54 Here as in Macbeth, moreover, collective listening cannot guarantee a shared response; the act of speaking a spectacle into a sense of significance paradoxically isolates the speaker, who cannot fully participate in his companions’ reactions.

In both Macbeth and The Late Lancashire Witches, the art of rhetoric is a magical tool, and one that is increasingly the property not just of witchy characters but also of those speakers who respond to and transform supernatural phenomena for themselves. With the clearing of errors in each play’s fifth act comes, however, a final interrogation of the extent to which magical speech itself can be redeemed, and its perspective-shaping capacities turned to beneficent uses. Up to this point, I have discussed these plays’ supernatural shadows in terms of presence: both as strange experiences encountered by characters in the present moment, and as conversations staged before present audiences in which even past experiences are interpreted in relation to present fears and desires. This temporal focus is obviously insufficient to describe the action of a play like Macbeth, whose tragedy springs in no small part from the future-oriented speech of prophecy. As I will discuss further, however, Brome and Heywood also effect a complicated turn toward the future in order to reconsider the legal ramifications when communities’ investigative and interpretive energies become bindingly predictive in nature.

54 The laughter in this scene is also representative of the festive nature of most of the witches’ pranks. Mistress Generous herself tells Mall, “This night we’ll celebrate to sport: / ’Tis all for mirth. We mean no hurt” (4.5.805); indeed, most of the witches’ staged acts of magic in the play either create exaggerated versions of mundane social unrest, or highlight (and poke fun at) characters’ social, and especially sexual, anxieties.

“The future in the instant”

When Macbeth describes his horrid or bloody images and grasps at beckoning daggers, he strives to pin down numerous instances of vicious amphibologia. He acts, moreover, on what Daniel Keegan calls, in relation to Shakespeare’s history plays, a “wager” on the significance of predictive speech (422), both that of the witches and his own. Macbeth’s decision to murder Duncan is a wager upon the triumphant significance of the hanging dagger as a metonym for the bloody deed, which he makes against the image’s other, more ambiguous, associations. Lady Macbeth embraces the wager, too, in her exclamation to Macbeth, “Thy letters have transported me beyond / This ignorant present, and I feel now / The future in the instant” (1.5.54-6). To experience “The future in the instant” is to deny the belated nature of prophetic revelation; it is to claim, instead, unambiguous knowledge of prophecy’s obscure significations. Macbeth implicitly regards prophecy as an unstoppable force insofar as it thrusts inevitably toward his own triumph; when ambiguous predictions seem to propel others toward glory, however, he expresses a greater willingness to consider the mutability of predictive speech. Macbeth’s act of regicide is itself a murderous foreclosing of alternative futures in which the succession might pass to him without Duncan’s murder. So, too, does Macbeth order Banquo and Fleance’s murder: fretting that Banquo will, as predicted, become “father to a line of kings” (3.1.61), he chooses to render this patrilineal future impossible by simply cutting it off.

Keegan argues, however, for the inherent fragility of sovereign rhetorical guidance, and for the instability of the future that it strives to secure: “political action is revealed as a wager through its encounter with radically democratized interpretive energies,” so that “Royal futurity, that dream of predictive prophecy, becomes one prophetic wager among many” (423).55 Keegan sees the audience itself as a source of this energy (423); I have already suggested that Macbeth’s audiences are indeed tacitly encouraged to consider a variety of alternative interpretations for Macbeth’s proleptic signs. Such dissenting and

55 Keegan’s observations here are limited to the king’s efforts to control how others picture the future in Henry VIII, but they readily map onto the “interpretive energies” of other Shakespearean characters.

72 divergent energies are also apparent on the stage immediately after Macbeth secures his accession, as Macbeth’s subjects read the ailing land, the unnatural behaviour of animals, and other strange events as signs of his illegitimacy.56 These interpretations fuel, in turn, the on-stage and direct resistance that erupts in the play’s latter acts; Macduff and Malcolm’s victory is secured by their ability to bend the supernatural forces of predictive speech to their own ends.

Macbeth’s final acts are potentially troubling in their treatment of the Weird Sisters, who are never acknowledged—let alone punished—for their role in Macbeth’s rise and fall. This lack of acknowledgement is comprehensible, however, as part of a pattern of displacements that cast Macbeth as a practitioner of rhetorical magic in his own right. This displacement is apparent in Macbeth’s prophetic speech-craft; it is also, however, increasingly a function of metonymic patterns that magically intertwine with prophetic statements. Macbeth’s downfall is precipitated by his simultaneous desire and inability to recognize and control the ways in which metonymic devices shape both past and future. Metonymy, like prophecy, is persistently associated with witchcraft in Macbeth: charms and curses in the play operate through the significant correspondences between parts and wholes, and through the contiguities between bodies and concepts. When the First Witch, for instance, plans to use a severed “pilot’s thumb” in a charm to plague a ship with storms (1.3.26), she draws on the contiguities between thumb and hand, and pilot and ship, in order to fashion the thumb into a malefic charm.57 So too does Macbeth envision

56 See especially the scene that follows the discovery of Duncan’s body, in which Ross and the Old Man comment on the recent disappearance of the sun during the day (2.4.6-7), and observe that Duncan’s horses “Make war with mankind” (2.4.18), and have broken out of their stalls and consumed each other. Their dialogue reflects a shared yet veiled recognition of Macbeth’s crimes. 57 I am implicitly casting synecdoche as a subset of metonymy here. This decision is based in part on both tropes’ operation through relations of physical and/or figurative contiguity (rather than, e.g., the combination of difference and likeness that structures a metaphor). Early modern rhetoricians generally distinguish between metonymy and synecdoche, but tend to confuse the boundaries. Peacham, for instance, offers the common metonymic substitution of crown for king, but also offers “Hannibal” for Hannibal’s army (E2r); the latter might reasonably be identified as a synecdochic substitution of one part of the army for the whole. In Puttehman’s broad definition, metonymy comprises “speaches, where ye take the name of the Author for the thing it selfe; or the thing conteining, for that which is contained”; he summarizes the trope yet more vaguely as “wrong nam[ing] the person or the thing” (X2r).

73 the dagger as a metonym: a tool associated visually with the murder through its bloody dudgeon, as well as a promise of events to come.

Macbeth receives another set of prophecies from the Weird Sisters’ apparitions in 4.1. Their statements contain impenetrable metaphors that Macbeth reads as nonsensically literal statements but which unfold in time as predictions of metonymic contiguities. One apparition, a crowned child bearing a tree, proclaims, “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him” (4.1.108- 10). Macbeth responds by deferring the fulfillment of the temporally ambiguous conjunction “until” to a forever-receding future: “That will never be” (4.1.110), he asserts. An armed head also warns Macbeth to “beware Macduff” (4.1.87), to which a bloody child adds, “Laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” (4.1.95-7). Macbeth, initially rattled by the head’s prediction, finds reassurance in the child’s words: “Then live, Macduff—what need I fear of thee?” (4.1.98), he scoffs. Macbeth’s response to the moving wood denies his defeat with more rhetorical wagering. He at once envisions it as a possible future event and defers it endlessly; his response to the man not born of woman, meanwhile, gazes backwards to a past that, in Macbeth’s estimation, cannot possibly hold the event of Macduff’s non-birth, and which therefore cannot enable Macduff’s future triumph. In both cases, Macbeth stakes his confidence upon an absolute belief in his own interpretive capacities.

Prophecy exposes hitherto unnoticed points of contact between its words and the events of histories both personal and national. Against Macbeth’s strident denial, however, Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill in the branches torn from trees by Malcolm’s army so as to “shadow” their numbers (5.4.5). Malcolm acts in ignorance of the apparition’s words, but his actions nonetheless create a metonymic substitution— branches for “Birnam”—that reveals a divergent interpretation for the prophecy. When a prophecy’s recipients become aware of its predictions, moreover, they may—like Puttenham’s rebels—consciously force these relations as they grapple interpretively to expose how their experience of history is contiguous with prophecy’s revelations, and how past events lead into the future thus revealed. The matter of the man not “of woman born” is explicitly addressed and reinterpreted by Macduff, who maps the figure of the

74 unborn man onto his own history. When Macbeth meets Macduff on the battlefield, he boasts, “I bear a charmèd life, which must not yield / To one of woman born” (5.10.12- 13). Macduff responds by denying Macbeth’s professed invulnerability with the assertion, “Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” (5.10.15-16), thus casting his surgical birth as a non-birth. In the midst of their martial clash, then, each man advances a wager on the supposed relationships between invisible histories and visible bodies, which the prophecy’s belated truth will yoke together in a way that enables one man’s triumph. Macduff presents caesarian delivery not just as a violent operation, but also as a violent intervention into a proper (“timely”) temporal order. Macduff’s birth, upon which no character has hitherto commented, becomes noteworthy when history is touched by the words of prophecy. Events in time are shaped and reshaped—both retrospectively and anticipatively—by prophecies’ words as their recipients consider events through the lens of predictive speech.

Macduff kills and beheads Macbeth; in the play’s closing scene he reenters, brandishing Macbeth’s severed head. His final speech once again claims his opponent’s rhetorical magic as his own: Hail, King, for so thou art. Behold where stands Th’usurper’s cursèd head. The time is free. I see thee compassed with thy kingdom’s pearl, That speak my salutation in their minds, Whose voices I desire aloud with mine: Hail, King of Scotland! (5.11.20-5) The severed head serves as a metonymic magical charm for Macduff: the act of brandishing it ends the battle definitively, for Macbeth’s decapitation and his head’s display constitute a literal and bloody counterpart to the termination of his reign. The head also ushers in this speech, which, spell-like, secures listeners’ consent to Malcolm’s succession. Malcolm’s head, to which Macduff rapidly reorients the gazes and bodies of his listeners, replaces the tyrant’s severed head as both the object of speech and the figurative head of Scotland. Macduff also describes the other men as “pearl[s]” “compass[ing]” the new king: his rhetorical ornamentation arranges them as kingly ornaments around Malcolm while Macduff attributes his salutation to both the thoughts

75 and mouths of these same followers. This speech both echoes the witches’ prophetic address from Act 1—“All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!”—and recapitulates the imagination-shaping rhetoric of Macbeth’s speeches. Whereas the witches’ address offered an ambiguous prophetic hint, however, Macduff’s statement is a declarative one on an action that he conceives as already complete despite the fact that Malcolm has not been officially crowned. In Macduff’s speech, the restoration of order and sovereignty becomes a future affirmed in the instant, a prophetic statement of accession that touches and shapes present action, and a unanimously endorsed fact that is mirrored in the visible organization of bodies, eyes, voices, and grammar around Malcolm that Macduff commands. This address thus replicates the time-shaping and dissent-suppressing rhetoric of Macbeth’s earlier speeches, while also turning it toward a consensus that betokens comic resolution rather than tyrannical rule. The accumulation of contrasts between Macbeth and his opponents Macduff and Malcolm seems to promise an end to the play’s violence, both physical and rhetorical. Yet, the relatively democratized interpretive energy with which Macbeth’s victims challenged his rule disappears in this final scene. There is no guarantee at the play’s end, in other words, that Malcolm’s reign, though currently both the product and productive of peaceful consensus, will not become another round in an endless cycle of violence bolstered by sovereign speech.

Brome and Heywood’s loose judicial ends

Macduff and Malcolm’s ambiguous efforts to shape consensus and restore order provide some rhetorical and generic context for the strangely tragic undertones of the concluding scenes of The Late Lancashire Witches, in which Doughty and his fellows capture and interrogate Mistress Generous and the other witches. As in Macbeth, persuasive speech centers auditors’ gazes on a severed part whose metonymic significance to a community is unfolded through processes of descriptive interpretation that hint, through echoes of earlier lines, at their own instability. The witches’ captors participate, however, in fundamentally collaborative and playful conversations in the process of her apprehension; their conversational model of investigation thus seems to provide an alternative to the

76 faintly troubling replication of domineering, quasi-prophetic rhetorical magic that haunts Macduff’s lines. Yet, Mistress Generous’s fate in the play proved sufficiently shocking to at least one Renaissance playgoer as to undermine the comic resolution. In a letter on an early staging of the play, Nathaniel Tomkyns describes the conclusion to the Generous family’s plot as the only “tragical part” of a “merry” play (qtd. in Ostovich, n.p.). In Act 4, she metamorphoses into a cat in order to help a group of witches to torment the Soldier as he guards a mill at night. The Soldier severs the cat’s paw in retaliation; detached from Mistress Generous’s body, the paw loses its magic and reassumes its human shape, which Master Generous recognizes for the wedding ring that it bears. The recognition leads not just to Mistress Generous’s apprehension, but also to the capture of the entire Lancashire coven.

Tomkyns’s insistence upon the tragedy of this prosecution belies the lightheartedness with which it is conducted. Act 5 of Brome and Heywood’s play is filled with torturous punning on the hand, whose discoverers uphold it as a part that both stands for the witchy body and also speaks—or at least writes confessions—on behalf of both its own absent body and, more broadly, the coven to which the body belongs. Arthur asks Master Generous, “Know you the hand, sir?” (5.3.940), playing on the etymological and metonymic connection between hands and handwriting in order to cast the severed limb as an incriminating document penned by Mistress Generous. The Soldier echoes Arthur: “if one of the parties shall deny the deed, we have their hand to show” (5.3.944). He puns, again, on hands and hand-written confessions, but this time also establishes the singular hand as a confession in itself from multiple witches. When she is later shown the hand, however, Mistress Generous tells her captors, “I will say nothing, but what you know you know, / And, as the law shall find me, let it take me” (5.5.1045). The limb’s status as incriminating evidence thus depends on the future findings of “the law,” which Mistress Generous ensures will be based on the words and stories of others. These stories are mutually reinforcing, and they are also productive of further re-readings of past events in Lancashire; hence Doughty’s collection of stories of witches’ mischief. The hand, identified as that of Mistress Generous, reinforces points of contact across time between her hand as a symbol of agency and past grievances that seem, in retrospect, to be her and her coven’s fault. Macduff looks back to his birth as significantly “untimely”

77 in light of a prophecy that makes it so; likewise, the residents of Lancashire may reevaluate past events (butter that will not congeal, cases of sleepwalking, nights of impotence…) that are now touched by the present witchy hand as a metonymic confirmation of malefic activity in Lancashire.

Ironically, then, the ubiquitous hand puns gesture toward a significant gap between the written language of confession, the hand-as-metonym, and the reality of Mistress Generous’s absent and later willfully silent body. The puns thus also mark a disparity between the play’s fantasy of communal discovery and the reality of certain voices’ absence from unfolding processes of verbal knowledge-making. In the scene of the hand’s discovery, the collaborative puns on the hand and its depositional significance serve a function similar to that of the testimony that identifies tormenting “shaddowes” in James I’s ideal witchcraft trials. Recall Epistemon’s insistence that witchcraft accusations always prove accurate; the verdict of a witchcraft trial, which Epistemon insists is always a guilty one, becomes in this context an especially belated revelation. The accusations themselves reflect backwards in time upon strange, often wholly private, torments that are rendered real and comprehensible in the accusations’ light. They also gaze toward a future conviction that will be secured by depositions that expose the relations between malefic shadows and the witchy bodies that produce them. A guilty verdict formally labels and criminalizes malefic acts, but the accusation itself, Epistemon insists, must preclude these actions’ identification as anything but witchcraft in order for his justification of witchcraft accusations to stand. Yet, if Mistress Generous maintains her silence, the entire investigation of the witches of Lancashire will consist of testimony from speakers who are already convinced of the witches’ guilt.

A further complication to the case against the witches lies in the witchmongers’ desire to collaborate with future prosecutors. When the self-appointed band rounds up the coven, Arthur asks his companions, “shall we try if we can by examination get from [the witches] something that may abbreviate the cause unto the wiser in conmmission for the peace before we carry them before ’em?” (5.5.1030). Arthur proposes that the men interrogate the witches and obtain depositions from them; he implies, moreover, that their work will eliminate the need for a fuller interrogation of the suspects—that is, their

“abbreviate[d]” report will serve as the grounds upon which the assize judges will consider the witches and their alleged crimes. The participants in this exercise of investigative and interpretive energies thus aim to secure a future conviction out of the uncertain events of a formal investigation. As Ostovich notes, Arthur’s proposal illegally circumvents the authority of a Justice of the Peace (5.5.1030n), who would normally be responsible for the selection, shaping, and presentation of evidence to the assize judges. This proposal is not, however, merely illegal; its results also prove essentially useless. The only character who is willing to confess to her witchhood is Meg, and the only acts to which she confesses are her sexual escapades with her familiar, Mamilion, who has now deserted her. Doughty’s probing questions do not elicit a confession that would connect Meg and her coven to the pranks of the preceding acts; the interrogation—“Was he a good bedfellow?” (5.5.1064), Doughty demands—merely produces a new and titillating account of private pleasures.

The Late Lancashire Witches offers audiences a more obviously satisfying ending as a witchcraft play than Macbeth does in at least one respect: these witches, unlike the Weird Sisters, are discovered and captured for questioning. The play’s conclusion hints, however, at the potential for judicial miscarriages inherent to the processes of collective story-gathering and -telling that enable the witches’ apprehension. The witches are guilty of most of the staged mischief in Brome and Heywood’s Lancashire, but the play’s resolution is, nevertheless, potentially discomfiting in its replication of strategies of conversational mediation that demonologists, natural scientists, and passions writers of the period problematize. The play itself upholds these strategies as uncertain in other scenes, from Arthur’s opening arguments on the hare, to Doughty’s fifth-act indiscriminate story collecting. The collaborative nature of the hand puns also belies the fact that the initial accusation against Mistress Generous from the Soldier is the product of one individual’s private experiences and judgements. One man’s testimony engenders and supports a cascade of revelatory accusations from other characters; as shared topics of conversation, these accusations become something more than the private experiences of individuals, both in the eyes of witchmongers and in the judgements of the law, without necessarily reflecting a clear relationship to truth.

The Epilogue looks, finally, to the future, and defers the judgement of the play’s fictional witches and the real Lancashire defendants alike to a court of law: its speaker claims, “We … dare not hold it fit / That we for justices and judges sit” (Ep.1084). The real Lancashire witches were indeed awaiting the results of a second investigation at the time of the play’s first staging; in hindsight, the accusations would prove entirely false. The present deferral is, however, tinged with irony: Brome and Heywood’s characters have at this point not only pronounced the witches guilty unofficially, but also taken steps to guarantee the coven’s future formal conviction by gathering and tailoring accusatory depositions. From the witchmongers of Kepler’s Württemberg who used one author’s ambiguous story as an interpretive lens, to the survivors whom Macduff organizes around Macbeth’s severed head, to prosecutors led by Doughty-as-witchfinder, groups of interpreters take up, add to, and circulate individuals’ tales of curses and witchcraft, affecting in turn the ways in which recipients see, judge, and act. Like the words of ambiguous prophecies, these tales retroactively make past experiences comprehensible; they also give birth to—indeed, in some cases, virtually secure—future action based on these newly-revealed truths. The individual’s powers of interpretive speech are dangerous in their capacity to infect others’ imaginations, as Macbeth amply proves, and as The Late Lancashire Witches mocks especially in the figures of Doughty and the other Lancashire gentlemen. Conversation in both plays seems, however, at once a solution to this problem and a permutation of it—one that may merely replicate the questionable foundations of individual judgements on larger scales.

Chapter 2 Cymbeline and Philaster’s Rhetorical Shadows

In Hamlet and Macbeth, shadowy ghosts emerge from the underworld as visible, haunting reminders of lost kin and past wrongs to characters who are poised, like Hamlet, to achieve vengeance on their behalf, or who, like Macbeth, are directly responsible for their present ghostly state. So too in Cymbeline does a group of ghosts enter in Act 5 to seek redress for earthly wrongs: as Posthumus Leonatus lies sleeping in a British prison, the shades of his family members enter to summarize the play’s cuckold plot and complain to Jupiter for allowing Giacomo, a “Slight thing of Italy,” to “taint [Posthumus’s] nobler heart and brain / With needless jealousy” (5.5.158-60). Yet, these ghosts do not address the living characters to whom their complaints pertain, and nor do they find much satisfaction in the response of their intermediary: Jupiter dismisses these “Poor shadows of Elysium” back to their “never-withering banks of flowers” with the reminder that their cries for help are unnecessary. “Whom best I love, I cross, to make my gift, / The more delayed, delighted” (5.5.191-2, 195-6), he declares, and adds that Posthumus “shall be lord of lady Innogen, / And happier much by his afflictions made” (5.5.201-2). The play’s sole explicit reference to shadows thus marks the ghosts as ineffectual mouthpieces for Posthumus’s grievances who are consigned to a static (“never-withering”) space outside the play’s time and action, neither driving the passions or self-conduct of the living, nor indeed making themselves visible to these earthly actors.

These ghosts are outliers in a play that is, as I will argue, pervasively concerned with the hyper-affective qualities of highly stylized language, but their entrance nonetheless marks the point in Cymbeline where this language is turned toward redemptive ends. Immediately after dismissing the ghosts, Jupiter in fact stakes out his promised intervention in Posthumus’s present bad fortunes through a rhetorical act. As Posthumus sleeps, Jupiter leaves him a tablet that couches a prophecy of Posthumus’s return to happiness in allegorical references to the actions of “a lion’s whelp” (i.e. Posthumus) who will be “embraced by a piece of tender air” (Innogen, his estranged wife), while “a

80 81 stately cedar” and its branches (Cymbeline and his lost children) will be reunited. Through these actions, the prophecy promises, “shall Posthumus end his miseries, / Britain be fortunate and flourish in peace and plenty” (5.5.232-7). Posthumus awakens, discovers the tablet, and recognizes that its words resemble “the action of [his] life,” but dismisses them as “senseless speaking, or a speaking such / As sense cannot untie” (5.5.242, 240-1). The tablet and its predictions have the force of what John Kerrigan calls both a riddle and a charm: a “knot of information” and “a binding speech act that brings about change,” respectively, which overlap in the “puzzling and oracular” promissory language of prophecy (318). This puzzle is solved for Posthumus only after he has reunited with Innogen and witnessed the reunion of Cymbeline with his lost sons, when a soothsayer has explained how these events align with the tablet’s words. Jupiter’s incomprehensible tablet, with its belated exposition, thus seems of a piece with the witches’ predictive yet deliberately obscure speeches in Macbeth. Yet, Jupiter’s reassurances to the ghosts preclude a reading of his prophecy as a “verbal trap” like the ones that the Weird Sisters set for Macbeth (Kerrigan 317); whether or not Posthumus comprehends it, the tablet serves as a reinforcing and strangely florid written counterpart to Jupiter’s earlier, more straightforward, speaking-into-being of Posthumus’s happiness.

What, we might ask, is the point of this doubling-up of promissory speech in Cymbeline? One answer lies in the rhetorical tropes that the tablet takes up in representing Posthumus’s and Britain’s future. As I noted in the Introduction, Shakespeare’s contemporaries routinely referred to forms of figurative language that draw out imaginative, and often puzzling, connections between individuals and symbolic objects in terms of “shadows.” As epithets, the tablet’s titles (“lion’s whelp,” “stately cedar”…) might also be deemed, more specifically, a form of antonomasia’s “shadowed signification” as Henry Peacham defines it (C4r).1 In his rhetorical manual The Garden of

1 Antonomasia is a trope of substitution by which an epithet is given instead of a proper name (as in Jupiter’s prophecy), or which entails the attribution of a proper name to another object so as to evoke attributes associated with this name. For an instance of this latter usage, see Shylock’s insistence in The Merchant of Venice that Portia is “A Daniel come to judgement” when she seems to be arguing in Shylock’s favour at court (4.1.218). (I return to this passage in Chapter 3.) See the Introduction for a summary of rhetoricians’ tendency to use the shadow as a figure for rhetorical tropes.

Eloquence, Peacham introduces this concept in a cautionary remark on antonomasia’s potential to create wrongful associations (C4r). This double potential of the “shadows” of well-wrought speech is a feature of the rhetorical arts in general, and of rhetoric in Cymbeline specifically. Jupiter’s prophecy performs a comic version of the yoking- together of bodies and figures that, elsewhere in the play, is largely productive of tragedy: other speakers employ this rhetorical strategy to create unexpected and often damning associations. In this chapter, I argue that the occasion for the ghosts’ pleading with Jupiter—Posthumus’s “taint[ing]” with “needless jealousy”—arises as a dark consequence of what Renaissance rhetoricians described, largely in celebratory ways, as the power of rhetorical art, with its capacity to call bodies and objects to mind, bring them into unexpected contiguities, and, more troublingly, inflame passions and bind listeners to action. The frequent couching of precepts on these rhetorical arts within the language of shadows should be taken as a deliberate and significant choice on the part of Renaissance rhetoricians. This usage, I contend, reflects the association of shadows not just with artistic representation but also with Platonic counterfeits and artful deceptions; it illuminates a fundamental cultural ambivalence that surrounds the power of the rhetorical arts and the speakers who practiced them, and which is embodied in Cymbeline by the Italian rhetorician Giacomo.

In this study, however, I also examine Cymbeline’s contiguity with, and gradual divergence from, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s analogous tragicomedy Philaster. In both plays, metaphor and metonymy are implicated in romantic and political crises of fidelity. Philaster is an illuminating precedent and foil to Cymbeline,2 particularly in the relative pessimism that Beaumont and Fletcher’s play evinces in its characters’ questioning of the fidelity not just of women but also of the amatory rhetoric used to describe them. In Act 1, the King of Sicily and Calabria captures Renaissance anxieties surrounding the deeply ambivalent connotations of the shadow in visual and rhetorical art by denying their significance altogether. After delivering an effusive verbal

2 Suzanne Gossett notes in the Arden edition of Philaster that the plays’ composition dates are strictly “inferential” (4), but there is a preponderance of evidence for a first-staging date of 1609 for Philaster and 1610 for Cymbeline (7).

83 portrait of his superlatively chaste daughter Arethusa to a potential suitor, the King insists that this portrait does not “add / An artificial shadow to her nature,” and adds, “I boldly dare proclaim her yet / No woman” (1.1.108-111). He acknowledges only to deny that the “shadow” of excessive praise may overlay Arethusa’s body, and insists upon what Arethusa is (perfectly chaste) by invoking womanhood as a concept that stands in figurative association with what she is not (sexually experienced), even as the qualifier “yet” holds, almost prophetically, the promise of a change that this marital match will bring about. The King suggests not just that his words might be inaccurate, but also, in couching this concern in a visual metaphor of shading, that verbal artifice might shape the way in which the suitor perceives—and desires, and subsequently acts upon that desire with—Arethusa, who is present but silent during this speech. When one of Arethusa’s ladies accuses her of fornication with Philaster’s page, the resulting sexual crisis turns on Philaster’s readiness to take, and indeed compose, new and deeply misogynistic verbal portraits as the grounds specifically for violent action against the objects of this portraiture.

Cymbeline persistently couples language and betrayal in ways that mirror the concerns expressed by Philaster’s King. This is particularly the case in the lascivious fantasies of Innogen that Giacomo fabricates in the play’s chamber scene, to which I turn as a counterpart to Philaster’s scenes of verbal portraiture. Giacomo’s surveilling of Innogen’s body, conducted to win a wager, plays out in a spatial and temporal situation that leaves the significance of his expressions of frustrated passion suspended between affect and affectation. There is, however, also a predictive, even binding, quality to his speeches that transcends their context: the terms of Giacomo’s blazoning in this scene— especially his echoes of Shakespeare’s epyllion Lucrece—express aggressive desire in ways that couple this desire with the pending decadence and death of its objects. His use of rhetoric stands as a dark counterpart to Jupiter’s prophesying in this play, to the King’s predictive qualifier in Philaster, but also more broadly to approving contemporary accounts of rhetoricians’ creative art. Yet, Cymbeline also stakes out a Shakespearean intervention in broader cultural debates surrounding the ethical obligations of skilled speakers; the play’s conclusion suggests—in a way that Philaster does not—that the

84 same shadows of rhetorical artifice that establish sexual scandal might double as a redemptive force for undoing wrongful associations and securing knowledge and truth.

I: The rhetorical shadow

Rhetoric’s “coulours and shadowing”

To imagine (and fear) that words might add “An artificial shadow” to a subject’s “nature” is to posit language as a deceptive cover to its objects. In his Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham seems simultaneously to attend to this pejorative understanding of language and to refashion the shadow, along with other terms that connote artifice and/or deception, into praise for the rhetorician’s art. He thus refers to the tropes of elocutio collectively as “ornament” (Q3v), suggesting, as Philaster’s King does, that language is an adornment;3 he compares ornaments’ skilled use to painters’ “coulours and shadowing” (Q4r), but also renders poetic ornamentation analogous to pleasing “courtly habillements” and later to cosmetics’ “crimson tainte” (Q3v, Q4r). Embedded yet unacknowledged in these images of dress and cosmetics, and paired with the “shadowing” of painterly art, is the suggestion that well-wrought speech is a verbal complement to visual forms of artifice that may deceive even as they delight, creating illusory signifiers on bodily surfaces where none truly exist.

Puttenham’s tendency to valorize rhetorical artifice in terms that bear negative connotations is characteristic of his discussion of descriptive figures in general, which, he argues, “set foorth many things, in such sort as it should appeare they were truly before our eyes” (Dd2r). Putting things “before our eyes,” however, involves what Puttenham calls the “Counterfait,” a kind of all-encompassing term for mimetic rhetoric. Counterfeits appear throughout his marginal notes on forms of hypotyposis, or vivid

3 Recall from the Introduction that “elocutio” is the rhetorical canon of style. Renaissance rhetoricians’ treatises tend to focus on translating, defining, and illustrating figures of speech; properly speaking, however, the canon also encompasses a variety of contextual considerations for these figures’ deployment (e.g. clarity, appropriateness, the choice of plain/middling/high speech…).

85 description; Puttenham translates “prosopopoeia,” for instance, as “the Counterfait in personation,” and “pragmatographia” as “the Counterfait action” (Dd2v). The term “counterfeit” is, on one hand, potentially an innocuous borrowing from the visual arts, where “counterfeit,” like the term “shadow,” often signifies a work of visual portraiture.4 On the other hand, the term was, at time of the Arte’s publication as now, commonly used to denote a forgery or disguise. Puttenham’s own usage is in keeping with this double significance, particularly as it emerges in his discussion of invention: [N]othing can be kindly counterfait or represented in his absence, but by great discretion in the doer. And if the things we covet to describe be not naturall or not veritable, than yet the same axeth more cunning to do it, because to faine a thing that never was nor is like to be, proceedeth of a greater wit and sharper invention than to describe things that be true. (Dd2r) To craft a vivid description of an action or to speak as a poetic persona is implicitly, for Puttenham, to be a peddler of forged goods; yet, the ideal rhetorician is also lauded precisely for this ability to forge. Here, the more skilled a rhetorician is at his art, the more his descriptions can represent absent objects or diverge from “things that be true” while still achieving a presence effect for his listeners: a sense that rhetorical things are “truly before our eyes” as they appear in the imagination, which Puttenham lauds as the goal of poesy. No matter how vivid and affective, the rhetorical picture is to Puttenham essentially a counterfeit, an artistic shadow traced in the stylized language of poesy. Yet, poesy gives audiences the illusion of an intended object’s presence that allows for imaginative play beyond the limits of time and space and regardless of absence or privation. Vivid rhetoric, like painterly “coulours and shadowing,” potentially creates, and possibly embellishes, an object of desire in its own right, a portrait in materials with which a speaker may play imaginatively beyond the limits of what is phenomenally present.

4 See OED “counterfeit” (adj.) 9, and (n.) 3.a.

For Cymbeline’s lovers, rhetoric’s shadowing must substitute for vision in the wake of Posthumus’s exile from Britain for his clandestine marriage to Innogen, King Cymbeline’s daughter. Before Posthumus leaves, Innogen asks him despairingly, “When shall we see again?” (1.1.125); her longing to see her husband will not be fulfilled in a literal sense until the final scene of the play, when the Roman invasion of Britain drives most of the play’s cast to Milford Haven. Between these acts, Innogen and Posthumus find some consolation in letters and reports whose words allow the lovers to “see” one another imaginatively. In 1.3, Innogen thus listens as Posthumus’s servant Pisanio describes how Posthumus “did keep / The deck [of the ship], with glove, or hat, or handkerchief / Still waving” until he dwindled to an indistinguishable point on the horizon (10-12). Posthumus is absent from both Pisanio’s and Innogen’s sight, yet the servant’s words make him present once more, and indeed render him in perspective. As such, Innogen can imaginatively place herself at the scene of leave-taking: she comments that she “would have broke [her] eye-strings” by following the receding ship “till the diminution / Of space had pointed him sharp as [her] needle” before she “turned [her] eye and wept” (1.3.17-22). Innogen thus situates herself in the scene and fabricating its perspectival shifts, surpassing Pisanio in her efforts to see and, in turn, imagining her heightened passionate response to this strictly hypothetical experience. Innogen’s act of picturing represents an ideal of imaginative vision—Puttenham’s “counterfait[ing]”—in which a speaker’s words allow a listener effectively to share their perspective on an unseen event, and so also to feel the passions that come with it. As expressions of longing, however, her speeches also undermine this ideal by constantly gesturing toward the absent body that words cannot make corporeally present; Pisanio’s speech presents Innogen with an opportunity to fantasize in passionate detail about what she “would” do but cannot.

This tension between the impulse to indulge passionate rhetorical fantasies and the recognition of words’ insufficiency as vehicles for this indulgence is a recurring feature of the language of desirous description in Cymbeline. Below, I turn to a darker version of this tension that emerges most prominently in the rapacious blazoning fantasies uttered by Giacomo, the Italian whom the ghosts denounce in Act 5. The blazon is a subtype of vivid description that stands out in its simultaneous concern with the representation of

87 desirable bodies and probing of the limits of poesy’s potential to satisfy this desire. As a term derived from the art of heraldry—the painting or description of coats of arms (“blazons”) according to disciplinary rules of image and colour5—the poetic blazon, like the heraldic one, represents identity through artistic convention. Its subject is a beloved, generally feminine, body whose parts it catalogues and embellishes with the colours and designs of heraldic devices; hyperbolically laudatory metaphors likewise associate these colourful parts with beautiful and/or valuable objects. In its Petrarchan mode, the blazon’s speaker is, stereotypically, a frustrated male admirer whose unattainable desires are channeled into these lavish descriptions. The effect of this lyric blazoning is at once to convey the beloved’s beauty, physical and often also moral, and to assert the speaker’s own power and desirability as an effect of his rhetorical wit. Hence, for instance, Philip Sidney’s Astrophil, whose brief blazon of Stella’s face (“Queen Virtue’s court” [Astrophil and Stella 9.1]) conceives of its object as a lavishly constructed house: Astrophil praises Stella’s “Red porphyr” lips-as-door and describes her cheeks-as- porches as “Marble, mixed red and white” (9.6-8). Stella’s dark eyes are windows made of “touch”—touchstone, used to test metals’ purity, or touchwood, used as kindling—and they “without touch … touch” others (9.12). The blazon’s repetitive metaphors of, and punning on, touch ironically underscore Astrophil’s inability to physically touch his beloved. This contact is, in other words, strictly imaginative and figurative: a rhetorical counterfeiting, to borrow Puttenham’s terms, of a desired exchange. When he describes himself not as the rare metal whose mettle is proven with Stella’s touch, but as the “straw” that is passionately touched, and burned, by Stella’s intangible gaze (9.14), he underscores his own perpetual relegation to a poetic realm of voyeuristic metaphor and frustrated corporeal desire—this despite the lyrical wit of his writings.6

Yet, the rhetoric of amorous praise also potentially provides a desiring speaker with a

5 See OED, “blazon” (n.) I.2.a and I.3 as well as (v.) 3.a. 6 Heather Dubrow notes that “uneasy juxtapositions of mastery and impotence” are characteristic of Petrarchan poetry (28). Astrophil’s repetitive punning on “touch” is representative of a desire for (rhetorical) mastery; this punning fails, however, to move Stella, and Stella’s own power to touch is one that overwhelms the touched Astrophil. As Dubrow observes, Sidney’s sequence “repeatedly reminds us of [Astrophil’s] failures as both a poet and a lover” (107).

88 means of imaginatively enjoying a fulfillment that they cannot achieve corporeally, as Puttenham’s valorization of artistic wit and rhetorical counterfeits suggests. When treated as objects of desire in themselves, and not simply as inadequate substitutes, the blazon’s collections of eroticized parts hold the power to circumvent the apparent priority of substances over shadows, for the blazon “privileges the sensual signifier over the sensual signified” (Williams 46). In crafting a poetic blazon, and “in shaping, balancing, and ordering the signifiers, the poet not only creates but also manipulates, caressing and fondling, his beloved”; it is the rhetorical figures themselves that provide the “vehicles” for this “dallying with the beloved’s shadow” (47). In the next section, I move on to an analysis of Cymbeline’s chamber scene and its aftermath, where blazoning language juxtaposes desire and artistic impotence, but also incorporates the binding and predictive language that I noted in my discussion of Jupiter and the ghosts as well as Philaster’s King above and which, in this scene and its subsequent retelling, sets in motion the tragic thrust of the play’s plot.

Innogen’s shadow

In Cymbeline 1.4, Posthumus’s exile takes him to Italy, where he passes time by boasting about his wife to other men. “Your Italy contains none so accomplished a courtier to convince the honour of my mistress” (1.4.83-4), he proclaims to his companions. Giacomo responds that he could achieve the feat “With five times so much conversation” (1.4.90), and persuades Posthumus to bet on his boast, with a ring that Innogen gave to Posthumus before his departure as the prize. The bawdy joke embedded in Giacomo’s insistence upon his skilled “conversation”—the term potentially connotes both verbal and sexual intercourse7—seems deliberate, for, in his first attempt to win the wager, Giacomo seeks an audience and a private conversation with Innogen, in which he insinuates that Posthumus has been unfaithful to her and showers her with expressions of amorous praise

7 On the latter, see OED “conversation” (n.) 3, as well as my discussion of eroticized conversation in Measure for Measure in Chapter 3.

89 and offers of adulterous vengeance.8 When Innogen rebuffs his advances, Giacomo decides to turn his conversational powers on his rival instead: he hides himself in a trunk that Innogen stores in her bedroom and emerges from it as she sleeps, intending to assemble a catalogue of details about Innogen’s body and her surroundings that he will relate to Posthumus as evidence that his seduction attempt was successful.

Giacomo resolves upon his emergence to “note the chamber” (2.2.24), and specifically to find “some natural notes about [Innogen’s] body” (2.2.28). In this act of notation, however, Giacomo finds a kind of fulfillment for his unrealized seduction in 1.4 as he dallies rhetorically with an imagined Innogen composed of the fragmented parts and eroticized metaphors of a blazon. His speeches are immediately troubled, however, by their self-conscious literary associations: Giacomo places himself in the role of “Our Tarquin” as he prowls about the bedroom (2.2.12), drawing attention to the parallels between his nighttime surveillance and the actions of the Ovidian, and later Shakespearean, rapist. He compares the sleeping Innogen’s white skin to a “fresh lily” on the bed (2.2.15); he then sees her lips—“Rubies unparagoned” (2.2.17)—touching one another, and exclaims, “That I might touch! / But kiss, one kiss” (2.2.16-17). Together, these lines recall the commentary of Lucrece’s narrator, who, in Shakespeare’s earlier poem, describes Tarquin’s surveilling of the sleeping Lucrece in similar terms: Lucrece, too, possesses a pair of “coral” lips that deny a would-be lover (here, an amorous pillow) a kiss as she rests her cheek on a “lily hand” (420, 386). Lucrece’s closed eyes have “sheathed their light” and are “canopied in darkness” (397-8); Innogen’s eyes enter Giacomo’s catalogue as “enclosèd lights” that are “canopied / Under these windows” (2.2.21-3). In both works, the eyelids’ canopy at once precludes beautiful eyes’ description and serves as a non-obstacle behind which a speaker’s poetic gaze effectively peeps in picturing the unseen lights.

8 Giacomo wishes, for instance, to “bathe [his] lips” on her cheek and to feel the touch of her hand, “Whose every touch, would force the feeler’s soul / To th’oath of loyalty” (1.6.100-103). This attempt at lyric seduction falls flat, however, when he reaches the point of his argument: when he encourages Innogen to take her “revenge” and offers to be “More noble than that runagate [Posthumus] to your bed” (1.6.136, 138), Innogen responds by dismissing Giacomo and criticizing her “ears that have / So long attended” (1.6.142-3).

The language of conscious reflection upon sensory experience (i.e. the act of “not[ing]”) becomes a spur to desire. As Lucrece’s narrator asks, “What could [Tarquin] see but mightily he noted? / What did he note but strongly he desired?” (414–15); to reflect upon one’s visual experiences is to raise one’s passions. For Giacomo, the most provocative note is the “mole, cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops / I’th’ bottom of a cowslip” on Innogen’s breast (2.2.38-9). The mole becomes a bloody secret within the flower whose future revelation to Posthumus, as Giacomo puts it, “Will force him think I have picked the lock and ta’en / The treasure of her honour” (2.2.40-2). The simile complements his earlier floral imagery, while the “crimson drops” within the cowslip hint at an as-yet unfulfilled violence. Giacomo’s address to Sleep—“thou ape of death, lie dull upon her, / And be her sense but as a monument / Thus in a chapel lying” (2.2.31-3)—poses a similar threat: his speech echoes Lucrece’s narrator again, who describes the sleeping Lucrece as “like a virtuous monument” that “lies / To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes” (391-2). These lines place Giacomo, implicitly another pair of lewd eyes, at a threshold between appreciation and action, between noting the monument and violating it. The movement from one state to the other seems already to be underway in his rhetorical peeping beneath Innogen’s eyelids, and in his snatching of a bracelet from Innogen’s arm that Posthumus placed there in Act 1 (hence his address to Sleep, given as he pries it off). This movement seems indeed to be guaranteed through Giacomo’s self-situation within the period of suspension after Tarquin “press[es] the rushes” and before he “wound[s]” Lucrece’s “chastity” (2.2.13-14).9 The space of Innogen’s bedroom, furnished by Giacomo’s amorous speeches, becomes one where the vocalization of sexual aggression anticipates the intruder’s violation of the aestheticized body before him; appreciative notation slips into narrative and makes an implicit threat of violence perceptible to the audiences who watch and listen.10

9 Giacomo’s self-identification as “our Tarquin” also casts umbrage on Posthumus’s boasting in 1.4 by drawing him into clearer comparison with his analogue in Lucrece: Collatine, who “unwisely did not let / To praise the clear unmatchèd red and white”—i.e. Lucrece (10-11). Lucrece’s narrator comments, “Perchance his boast of Lucrece’ sov’reignty / Suggested this proud issue of a king, / For by our ears our hearts oft tainted be” (36-8). Homosocial boasting and competition, in both the play and the poem, precipitates sexual violence. 10 Giacomo’s scene of note-taking is thus one in which a male gaze is “refract[ed] through someone who criminalises it”; the scene is commonly read as one in which audiences who gaze upon the sleeping

Giacomo’s soliloquizing suggests that noting is “a stimulant to desire,” yet also hints that this notation is not just an “alternative to sight but … something even more arousing” (Roberts 252). His expressions of longing to peep and touch indeed posit language itself as penetrative in a way that his senses are not; Giacomo’s “metonymical conflation” of her body with the bedroom “accentuates rather than deflects the violence of his assault” (Harvey 379). His words collapse the roles of narrator and perpetrator into one set of roving eyes, hands, and tongue, and they also intimate an as-yet unfulfilled threat through a blazoning language that is pointedly allusive. At the same time, the terms of Giacomo’s description are stock Petrarchisms whose twisting to rapacious ends has already been effected in Shakespeare’s earlier poem. Innogen does not notice the intruder, let alone confront him and experience physical violation and death as Lucrece does, while Giacomo’s self-conscious poetic figures and literary allusions mark him not as a Tarquin, but as a Renaissance sonneteer: a frustrated would-be lover for whom the poetic enjoyment of blazoned parts becomes an end in itself.

When Giacomo returns to Posthumus in 2.4, he indeed narrates a version of this scene in which he dares to touch Innogen’s lips, skin, and mole; the sexual violence promised in his speeches is achieved through a privileging of (and eroticized playing with) imaginative signifiers over the untouchable and unspeaking body that he began in 2.2. This privileging is evidenced especially in his promise to Posthumus that he will relate “circumstances … so near the truth as [he] will make them” that their revelation must “induce you to believe” (2.4.61–3). The term “circumstances” in this speech refers most plainly to the evidence that he deems sufficiently reflective of Innogen’s lusty actions that he need not “confirm with oath” what he claims to have seen (2.4.64).11 Yet, at the same time, Giacomo seems, winkingly, to acknowledge his own power of falsification in his insistence that he “will make” circumstantial evidence speak to Innogen’s adultery and “induce” belief. Giacomo’s use of the blanket term “circumstances” to denote all of

Innogen with Giacomo are encouraged tacitly “to use the observer’s point of view or commentary to criticize or correct their own” (Roberts 237). 11 Though, of course, Giacomo will go on to swear, “By Jupiter, I had [the bracelet] from her arm” (2.4.121)—not technically a lie.

92 his evidence indeed reflects a practical erasure of the distinctions between objects’ physical presence and their intentional presence in the imagination’s pictures. From the bracelet that Giacomo can literally carry back to present to Posthumus, to Innogen’s body, which he can only steal and carry to Posthumus’s imagination in words, all of Giacomo’s evidence relies on a shroud of descriptive narrative for its illusion of significance and of proximity to truth.

Giacomo’s account begins on the periphery of Innogen’s bedroom, where he boasts that he “slept not, but … / Had that was well worth watching” (2.4.67-8). The “Such and such pictures” (2.2.25), noted in his survey of the room in Act 2, become in this scene’s retelling a tapestry depicting “Proud Cleopatra when she met her Roman” and a chimney- piece depicting “Chaste Dian bathing” (2.4.70, 82). Scenes of spectacular seduction (Cleopatra and Antony) and voyeurism (Diana bathing before Actaeon) are thus incorporated into Giacomo’s slippage between observation and fantasy. Whereas Giacomo’s soliloquizing in 2.2 underscores the rhetorical and narrative analogies between himself and Tarquin through shadowed signification, however, his speeches to Posthumus in 2.4 persistently focus on Innogen, highlighting the symbolic relationships between her body and its eroticized surroundings in a way that attributes both desire and desirability to Innogen herself. Posthumus is initially skeptical, and counters that Giacomo might have heard reports of these movables “here, by me / Or by some other” (2.4.77-8).12 Despite this suspicion, however, Posthumus gives Giacomo some further narrative threads to pick up when he demands, upon seeing the bracelet in Giacomo’s possession, “Is it that / Which I left with her?” (2.4.98–9), to which Giacomo replies: Sir, I thank her, that. She stripped it from her arm. I see her yet. Her pretty action did outsell her gift,

12 Rebecca Olson comments that Posthumus’s protest—“that the ekphrasis sounds like one of his own”— “might already be a victory for Giacomo” in that it seems to “transfer authority to the speaker/poet” (55). Certainly, this perceived transfer of authority is Giacomo’s aim. In the moment, however, Posthumus’s point seems less about Giacomo’s poetic skill, and more about his ability to recall and parrot existing reports, as he reasserts below when he complains that Giacomo’s description of the chimney piece is something “Which you might from relation likewise reap, / Being, as it is, much spoke of” (2.4.86-7).

And yet enriched it too. She gave it me, And said she prized it once. (2.4.100-4) When Giacomo declares, “I see her yet,” he introduces his description of Innogen’s eroticized gesture as a moment of vicarious vision for Posthumus, who finds in Giacomo’s words an invitation to adopt an imaginative perspective that is like his own but not quite his own, and which shares Posthumus’s amorous appreciation even as it transforms the meaning of familiar objects and gestures by associating them with new analogues and strange witnesses. This description of the bracelet’s stripping-off indeed restages, in reverse, the moment in Act 1 when Posthumus places it as a “manacle of love” upon Innogen’s arm and asks her to wear it “for [his] sake” during his exile (1.1.123, 122). Giacomo was not a witness to Posthumus’s scene of leave-taking; nevertheless, he recognizes the bracelet as a moveable sign of fidelity, a symbol simultaneously of Posthumus himself and of Innogen’s loyalty to him insofar as it remains on her arm, and therefore also as a sign whose significance is easily shifted.13

Posthumus, still skeptical, demands of Giacomo, “Render to me some corporal sign about her / More evident than this; for this was stol’n” (2.4.119-20). His need for a surer “corporal sign” momentarily establishes a privileged distinction of sensory experience and material evidence from the secondhand experience of Giacomo’s report and the sight of the pilfered bracelet that this report suffuses with meaning. Giacomo’s response, however, reasserts the lack of distinction between sensory and imaginative pictures, between the Innogen of his portraiture and the real Innogen who slept through his notation. Giacomo promises additional details “For further satisfying” (2.4.134); he offers, however, another descriptive “render[ing]” of Innogen that also takes the term “corporal” in a literal sense to mean further descriptions of Innogen’s body. Giacomo notes that “under her breast—Worthy the pressing—lies a mole, right proud” and adds, “I

13 Love-tokens occupy a position of ambivalence as objects of sight. On one hand, gazing upon, such tokens may “stimulate a fantasy of possessing [the beloved’s] entire body sexually” (Hammons 38)—a metonymical fantasy. On the other hand, when given to others, these gifts often “raise fears about relinquishing control over one’s feelings” to the beloved, and engender anxieties about “misplacing” or “misreading” an object that has been invested with personal significance (39); metonymy’s power and significance is highly mutable.

94 kissed it, and it gave me present hunger / To feed again, though full” (2.4.134-8). Whereas Giacomo’s account of his receipt of the bracelet focused on Innogen’s “pretty action,” this description of the mole is filled with hints at Giacomo’s own actions and sensory experiences; his question, “You do remember / This stain upon her?” (2.4.138-9), then invites Posthumus to recognize these experiences as mirrors of his own.

Posthumus responds affirmatively and with revulsion: “Ay, and it doth confirm / Another stain as big as hell can hold” (2.4.139-40). Posthumus readily accepts Giacomo’s implicit wordplay on stain-as-mark and stain-as-sin: the usage perfectly encapsulates his fear of betrayal. In Puttenhamn’s Arte, metaphor (“the Figure of transporte”), functions by “wresting … a single word from his owne right signification” in order to make it signify something “not so naturall, but yet of some affinitie or conveniencie with it” (V4v). The “transporte” that Puttenham describes is not simply a matter of the transfer of attributes from one object to another. It is a moment, as Puttenham puts it, of unnatural signification that turns out to be natural after all: for a metaphor to work, the listener must already share with the speaker a sense of the new signification’s appropriateness or “affinitie.” The natural unnaturalness of Puttenham’s metaphor is reinforced by his subsequent description of catachresis. This trope, as Puttenham notes, is often counted among the rhetorical vices for enacting a wresting of signification so alien to a listener that it appears to be an “abuse” and a “neither naturall nor proper” application of words to things (X1v). A proper metaphor, conversely, makes a listener feel that they have overlooked a point of similarity that was already in their understanding and merely awaited elucidation. In Cymbeline, abuse slips into affinity when Posthumus at once accepts his double’s portrait of Innogen and rejects the desire that inheres in this portrait’s language, generating inappropriate figures of transport—like that of the mole- as-stain—for himself. Posthumus’s psychic distress and his subsequent resolution to have Innogen murdered result, then, from a scene in which the rhetorical play inherent to the blazon becomes dialogic and malicious until, finally, Posthumus participates in his interlocutor’s wresting of meaning.

Italian passions and English passivity

In the Arte, Puttenham evinces an interest in “the language of a poem as an immediate experience” (Galyon 30). Good poesy, he insists, involves a kind of sympathetic vibration between poet and audience; it consists of “slipper words and sillables” that are easily formed by the tongue and of “harmonicall” motions of the mouth that “breedeth to th’eare a great compassion” (L2v). Puttenham’s insistence that good rhetoric fosters this “compassion” is a version of the Ciceronian commonplace that rhetoricians must feel the passions that they wish to inspire in others; his commentary also prizes “poetry’s designs on the bodies and selves of those who produced and consumed it” (Craik 158).14 In Cymbeline, however, Giacomo’s performance of desire and Posthumus’s reaction to it exist as a dark version of this harmony; this performance also serves as a reminder of the consequences of actors’ superlative capacity—per the works of theatrical pamphleteers— to foster passion and imitative behaviour in their witnesses despite the unreal nature of their performances.15

Thomas Wright describes the act of oration itself as “an externall image of an internall mind, or a shaddow of affections” that the speaker wishes to communicate to and induce in others (M8V). He also argues elsewhere, however, that, “if thou wilt please thy master or friend, thou must apparrell thy selfe with his affections, and love where he loveth, and hate where he hateth” (H1r). Although Wright’s remarks on oration tie its success to authenticity, his prescriptions for sycophantic self-conduct potentially divorce persuasion from this requirement through metaphors of concealment and ornamentation (“shaddow,”

14 In De Oratore, Cicero writes, “[T]he very quality of the diction, employed to stir the feelings of others, stirs the speaker himself even more deeply than any of his hearers” (II.xlvi.191-2); “no man can be a good poet who is not on fire with passion” (II.xlvi.196). See Linda Galyon for an expanded discussion of Puttenham’s (frequently idiosyncratic) translations and adaptations of classical rhetorical terms. For example: Puttenham discusses enargeia, a term that typically connotes “devices of verisimilitude” (Galyon 30). Quintilian defines enargeia as language that “dominates” recipients’ attention and displays its object “in such a way that it seems to be actually seen” (8.3.62). In Puttenham’s treatise, enargeia’s thrusting is focused on the ears, and defined through metaphors that blur auditory and visual experiences, while retaining this sense of immediacy: devices of enargeia are meant “to satisfie & delight th’eare onely by a goodly outward shew set vpon the matter with words” (R2r). 15 See my discussion of treatises on the theatre in the Introduction. See especially Stephen Gosson’s insistence that the staging of immoral actions “brings us by the shadow, to the substance of the same” (Playes Confuted G4r–v).

“apparrell”) that stress the potential inauthenticity of expressions of mutual affection. This potential for persuasive duplicity, founded upon the kind of sensory and imaginative assault that Puttenham lauds, lies at the core of Giacomo’s rhetorical strategies in Cymbeline: he seems, like Wright’s hypothetical sycophant, to “apparrell” himself in words that assault Posthumus’s ears and imagination with rhetorical expressions of desire and vivid accounts of sensory experiences, all of which Posthumus once believed to be exclusively his own. Giacomo’s speeches seem at once to reflect a genuine desire and to hint at their own inauthenticity, capturing Wright’s tacit ambivalence regarding the need for sincerity in the communication of “affections.” Giacomo aims to incense rather than to please, but nonetheless earns a strange form of trust from his rival, such that Posthumus tells him, “I will kill thee if thou dost deny / Thou’st made me cuckold” (2.4.145-6).

Cymbeline also, however, presents this sexual and rhetorical crisis as overdetermined. To Posthumus’s ready jealousy, the dynamics of presence and absence in Posthumus’s exile and exchange of moveable love-tokens, the erotic implications of Giacomo’s blazoning language, and the overwhelming sense that Giacomo is disingenuously emulating Posthumus’s own passions and actions as they pertain to Innogen, Shakespeare adds physiological strengths and vulnerabilities that are geographical in nature as factors in Posthumus’s ready acceptance of his own cuckolding. As Posthumus and Giacomo negotiate the terms of their bet, Giacomo boasts that he will “bring from [Britain] that honour of hers which you imagine so reserved” (1.4.113-15), and, when Posthumus expresses a sudden reluctance to wager Innogen’s ring, adds, “If you buy ladies’ flesh at a million a dram, you cannot preserve it from tainting. But I see you have some religion in you, that you fear” (1.4.118-20). Giacomo’s metaphors of possession, finance, and international commerce, paired with the image of tainted flesh (to which the men’s subsequent comments on Innogen’s “stain” are potentially a faint echo), incense Posthumus, who expresses his hope that “This is but a custom in your tongue” that will give way to some “graver purpose” (1.4.122-3). “Custom” here potentially signifies an idiosyncratic individual tendency to frame bodies and their romantic bonds as commercial and as inevitably tending toward “tainting.” At the same time, within a conversation between an Englishman and an Italian in Rome, Posthumus’s scoffing at his

97 interlocutor’s “custom” hints at a concern that Giacomo’s interest in proving the mutability of Innogen’s affections is part of a larger Italian attitude toward sexual and marital relations: one that Posthumus himself may take up through exposure to this environment or through the compassion-breeding speech of his Italian rival.

This “custom” seems, indeed, to have permeated Posthumus’s own expressions by the end of Act 2, when he, like Giacomo, takes for granted women’s easily changeable affections, and proclaims that “Nice longing, slanders, mutability, / All faults that man can name” are inherent to women and are “the woman’s part” in men (2.5.26-7, 22). Posthumus’s mutability is in keeping with contemporary assumptions about English passivity: Wright, for instance, claims that men from “beyond the Alpes,” including Italians, (rightly) regard Englishmen as “simple, uncircumspect, unwarie, easie to be deceyved, and circumvented” (A3v). Renaissance Englishmen’s impressibility is indeed proverbial among humoral theorists: their “moist” and “exceedingly pliant and vulnerable” constitution mirrors the waters surrounding their island home, and leads them readily to “adopt, try on, or even absorb the shifting elements of the external world” (Floyd-Wilson 54).16 Italy’s climate and educational culture, conversely, confer upon its residents the ability to “better conceale their owne Passions, and discover others,” such that Italians and Italy itself constitute a notorious threat to English subjectivity (Wright A5v).17 Wright describes the purpose of his treatise in broader terms in his introductory comments: his aim is to teach his readers “how to discover other mens passions, and how to behave our selves when such affections extraordinarily possesse vs” in “religious, civil, & gentlemanlike conversation” (A5v); Wright’s remarks on Italians suggests, however, that foreign conversation constitutes an especially pressing threat to his English readers.

16 Mary Floyd-Wilson collects evidence for this characterization of the English complexion from humoral theorists ranging from the twelfth through the late seventeenth century (54-6). 17 (Wright also here attributes this capacity for concealment and discovery to Spaniards.) Roger Ascham figures English mutability as degrading Homeric metamorphosis in his advice to a father seeing his son off to Italy in The Scholemaster: “Some Circes shall make him of a plaine English man, a right Italian” (H4v). Innogen’s resistance to Giacomo’s rhetorical snares speaks to her fidelity, but, in this interpretive context, it is potentially also an effect of the British climate in which she mounts her resistance.

Puttenham argues that good poetry produces sympathetic vibrations in a receptive ear; Wright’s remarks suggest that some people are more susceptible to these effects and, further, that some spaces are more conducive to both rhetorical education and rhetorical arts’ effects. Giacomo capitalizes on all of these factors: he “insinuates himself into the minds and attitudes of his British targets,” including Posthumus, upon whom he “works … through the ear” (Parolin 199). The savvier British characters who respond negatively to Giacomo’s deceptions, conversely, consistently take up the network of associations between Italy, Italian rhetorical skill, and English physiological and psychological passivity, and also tend to frame Giacomo’s Italian speech-craft in terms of corporeal violence and/or poison.18 Innogen stands in pointed contrast with her husband when, in her first conversation with Giacomo, she condemns her ears for having “So long attended” this “assault” from a man who speaks as if he is “in a Romish stew” (1.6.143, 152, 154). Pisanio later refers to Posthumus’s change of heart as “a strange infection” that has “fall’n into [Posthumus’s] ear” (3.2.3-4); Posthumus does not name Innogen’s accuser in the letter that he sends calling for Innogen’s death, but Pisanio immediately concludes that the detractor must be a “false Italian, / As poisonous-tongued as handed” who has “prevailed / On [Posthumus’s] too ready hearing” (3.2.4-6). The setting for Posthumus’s deception implicitly enhances this transfer of sympathies, for Posthumus, an Englishman abroad, is enveloped by an Italian climate while his mind is assaulted by a foreign discourse of adulterous desire and jealousy; Giacomo’s crafty Italian words thus enter an ear, and poison a mind, that is disposed to accept a pernicious influence.

There is nothing overtly nation-specific about the terms of Giacomo’s rhetorical assault. He indeed effects Posthumus’s rhetorical cuckolding through an impression of sameness that he creates in his fantasies of seduction. Italian and British man alike claim to have

18 Italians are also notorious intriguers. Ascham refers to Italy as “full of vanitie, full of factions” (I1r), and derides Italian “pollicie” as fostering within travelers “a factious hart, a discoursing head, a mynde to medle in all mens matters” (I1r); Wright refers to Italians somewhat more politely as “very politique and craeftie” (A5r). Innogen notes Pisanio’s distress upon receiving a letter from Posthumus in 1.6, and speculates that “drug-damned Italy hath out-craftied [Posthumus], / And he’s at some hard point” (3.4.15-16); after Pisanio reveals the damning letter, she concludes that “Some jay of Italy, / Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him” (3.4.48-9). As I noted above, even the ghosts seem to go out of their way to recognize Giacomo’s nationality, referring to him as a “Slight thing of Italy” who has “taint[ed]” Posthumus with “needless jealousy” (5.5.157-60).

99 seen and loved Innogen; Posthumus accepts as truthful those speeches that cast Giacomo as his usurping double and which foster a distressing slippage between Giacomo’s passions and his own. Nevertheless, the Italy from which Giacomo hails, where Posthumus in exile receives Giacomo’s report, and which Posthumus’s loved ones condemn, is markedly the “decadent contemporary Italy” as described and derided by English conduct and travel books (Parolin 189).19 Giacomo, “the most characteristic denizen of this Italian space” (189), does not simply stand as a rapacious double to Posthumus or a figure for the Italianate sexual jealousy that infects and plagues him.20 I argued above that Giacomo’s allusions to Lucrece become as-yet-unfulfilled threats of sexual violence. Giacomo is also, however, representative of a larger-scale threat as an anachronistic figure for a geographically specific, rhetorically sophisticated form of decadence that implicitly threatens a contemporary British empire that is embodied by Posthumus. While Posthumus remains in exile in Rome, a Roman army makes its way toward Britain to force Cymbeline to resume paying tribute to the empire. As a flourishing ancient Roman empire attacks a struggling Britain, then, Giacomo insidiously invades Posthumus’s consciousness with his crafty words. Whereas Cymbeline’s British army repels the overt invasion, however, Posthumus’s British mind is ill equipped to resist Giacomo’s subtle speeches—a fact that Posthumus’s closest confidants recognize in their denunciation of “Romish” sexual appetites and poisonous speech, even as Posthumus himself fails to.

Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster offers, in contrast with Cymbeline, an especially pessimistic treatment of rhetoric’s shadows in part because the play lacks the international intrigue and the hyper-emphasis on English vulnerability that characterizes Cymbeline’s commentaries on Posthumus’s errors. Philaster, moreover, also lacks the disjunctions between visual and auditory experience that collectively help to secure

19 See also Ascham, who cautions readers, “Italie now, is not that Italie, that it was wont to be” (H3v). 20 For a summary of Jacobean constructions of contemporary Italians, see Floyd-Wilson (137-8). Italians’ jealousy is proverbial, such that, in a marginal note in his translation of Benedetto Varchi’s The Blazon of Jealousie, Robert Tofte observes, “at this day the Italian is counted the man that is most subject to this vice, … being hee that is most prone, as well as to suspect, as to be suspected about Womens matters” (E3r; also qtd. in Floyd-Wilson 137).

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Giacomo’s success. Posthumus cannot see or question Innogen as Giacomo describes her seduction; rhetoric’s objects are, conversely, frequently present on Philaster’s stage in the moment of their description, such that speech guides immediate visual perceptions in subtle and often sinister ways. Beaumont and Fletcher’s play also begins with court intrigue in a nominally Italian setting, much as Shakespeare establishes Italy as a locus of rhetorical intrigue. The specifics of time and place rapidly dissipate, however, as the play turns toward a protagonist whose naïve suggestibility marks him as closer to an English subjectivity than to an Italian one. The Italian-ness of Philaster’s court is a garment that Beaumont and Fletcher’s characters put on, a shadow that slightly overlays an essentially English setting. The distrust of lyric praise as represented in Philaster is embedded in the play’s rhetorical culture; it is not merely the product of an individual’s nationality or his habitually mistrustful subjectivity, but a problem with which every member of the King’s court wrestles from the play’s opening scene.

Artificial Arethusas

Philaster opens with a speech from the King that at once purports to represent the unseeable and to question subtly all speech that makes such representational claims. Philaster, like Cymbeline’s Posthumus, is enamored of a princess: Arethusa, whose father, the King of Calabria and lately of Sicily, has usurped his second title from Philaster. The King, unaware of Arethusa and Philaster’s relationship, intends to secure his wrongful succession with a diplomatic marriage between Arethusa and the lecherous Spanish prince Pharamond. The play’s first flattering description of Arethusa thus comes not from the adoring Philaster, but from the King, who strives to sell this match to Pharamond as Arethusa stands silently on the stage. Arethusa, the King argues, is desirable precisely because there is nothing to report about her desires: her age and gender, he claims, teach her “Desires without desire” and “discourse and knowledge / Only of what herself is to herself” (1.1.101-2). Arethusa’s perfect insularity and inarticulacy are mirrored in her mute presence on the stage; these qualities seem to

101 preclude altogether the possibility of discovering, let alone articulating, the latent sexuality inherent in the suggestion that she is “yet / No woman” (1.1.110-11).

The only kind of honest discourse—“honest” in the sense of truthfulness as well as sexual propriety—for Arethusa is, in the King’s understanding, no discourse at all. The King suggests, moreover, that all discourse on this subject, whoever the speaker, is inherently suspicious, and so appeals to Pharamond: Think not, dear sir, these undivided parts That must mould up a virgin are put on To show her so, as borrowed ornaments, To talk of her perfect love to you or add An artificial shadow to her nature. (1.1.105-9) Terms related to cosmetics and dress in the King’s speech—“parts,” “show,” “ornaments,” “artificial shadow”—waver here in their significance between forms of visual and rhetorical concealment, and indeed recall the ambivalent terms of Puttenham’s discussion of ornament. Arethusa’s “undivided parts” are the “demeanour and bodily signs” that the King describes (Loughlin, “Dismemberment” 29), and also, euphemistically, her most secret bodily sign: the undivided parts of her hymen. The passage “stress[es] the unreliability of those bodily signifiers which purport to demonstrate a woman’s virginal state”; the hymen in particular is an unseeable “site of pure ambiguity” to Renaissance eyes (29). This speech, however, raises a problem not just of bodily signs, but also of rhetorical signs, for the term “parts” also refers to the King’s parts of speech,21 which must create the invisible “parts” for Pharamond’s imagination. The King’s speech thus betrays a misogynistic anxiety that pervades the court: if these parts cannot be seen and tested, if they are only available to scrutiny through their rhetorical representation, the immediate assumption is that they are not virginal and that Arethusa and her father use modest blushes and rhetorical ornaments to feign otherwise. The King at once insists upon the perfect fit between word and body and

21 See OED, “part” (n.1) I.1.c. The OED’s first recorded use is from a section on the rules of grammar from the 1517 edition of Stephen Hawes’s allegorical poem The Pastime of Pleasure, wherein Graunde Amoure—the poem’s protagonist—comments that there are “Viii. partes of speche” (583).

102 calls up this anxiety, such that his metaphors of “undivided parts” and unborrowed “ornaments” threaten constantly (to borrow Puttenham’s terms) to wrest the King’s words toward the vulgar significations that they would deny.22

Philaster is not wholly unique in staging the dangers and uncertainties of the language of praise; Giacomo’s ability to wrest words’ meanings precipitates Cymbeline’s own crisis of imagined infidelity. In Cymbeline, however, the problem with the rhetoric of praise has less to do with the fidelity of poetic vision to literal vision—something that Posthumus largely cannot test for himself in his exile—but of this rhetoric’s entanglement with homosocial competition. Giacomo refers to Posthumus’s boasting as an act of making “His mistress’ picture” (5.6.175): presumably a loving act of description, but one that renders Innogen both a singularly precious possession and, as Posthumus himself puts it, “not a thing for sale” (1.4.73).23 In thus describing Innogen in mercantile terms, Posthumus invites Giacomo and the other men to attempt to purchase her affections—or, failing that, to seize Innogen, as Giacomo fantasizes about in the chamber scene.24 In Philaster, in contrast, the competition between Pharamond and Philaster for Arethusa’s hand is irrelevant to the King’s speech. Arethusa becomes an object of exchange between the King and Pharamond as a means of securing the succession; as the King’s attempt to curtail skepticism suggests, the disjunction between praise and its object is always potentially there, irrespective of competitive intent.

As with Giacomo’s soliloquizing, however, the King’s portrait of Arethusa holds the power to guide recipients’ thoughts, passions, and actions. Pharamond evidently takes up

22 I use the term “vulgar” here in keeping with Menon’s commentary on metaphor as a transferring trope: “the emphasis on the appropriateness (and hence the beauty) of metaphor is everywhere undermined by its function of transference, which if anything, gives obscenity free reign rather than reining it in” (14). 23 Olson argues that “Posthumus proves not only that his mistress is superior but that he too is superior. Posthumus, confident in his ekphrastic skill, repeatedly instigates such rivalry” (55). This reading captures Posthumus’s instigative tendencies; however, the specific details of this reported “picture” of Innogen are left largely to audiences’ imaginations, for the men only allude to it in their discussion of Posthumus’s past boasts. 24 In addition to Lucrece’s condemnation of Collatine’s boasting—noted above—see Sonnet 21, in which Shakespeare’s speaker suggests that every act of praise is also a commercial act: he denounces the poet who is “Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse, / Who heaven itself for ornament does use (21.2–3), and concludes, “I will not praise that purpose not to sell” (14). Note, again, the use of terms related to painting and ornamentation as analogues to poetic imagery.

103 this portrait for his own imaginings, for in Act 2 he jokes with Megra that Arethusa is “afraid to lie with herself if she have but any masculine imaginations about her” (2.2.112- 13). Pharamond echoes the King’s language of fear and nigh-absurd insularity, and also takes the King’s words as predictive, bluntly adding their unspoken consequence: “I know when we are married I must ravish her” (2.2.113-14). For Pharamond, a marriage between himself and the Arethusa constructed by the King’s speech in 1.1 leads inevitably to an act of rape, for it renders her unable to articulate, or indeed experience, any kind of sexuality or sexual desire, let alone consent to a sexual act. Metaphor, particularly in definitions like Puttenham’s that stress its function as a “wresting” of signification, “seems inseparable from a kind of violence or violation” (Parker, Fat Ladies 38).25 This violence is apparent in Giacomo’s remarks on the sleeping Innogen, whom he notes and imagines as a collection of pillageable goods and as the Lucrece to his intruding Tarquin. The Arethusa that Pharamond and the King picture is a similar collection of metaphors and eroticized parts fashioned out of the language of praise that, conflated with Arethusa herself, casts a similar shadow over Arethusa: she, too, becomes a target of sexual violence that lurks in the future as imagined and articulated by others.

Arethusa evinces, as Shakespeare’s Innogen does not, an awareness of the existence of her doubles within others’ imaginations. In the scene following the King’s speech, Arethusa calls Philaster to her room in the palace, and warns him that she has words for him that “ill beseem / The mouth of woman” (1.2.39-40). At first, she feigns indignation at Philaster’s repeated protests at court regarding his right to the crown; it is clear, however, that when Arethusa declares, “I must and will have them”—i.e. Sicily and Calabria—“and more” (1.2.62), this political ambition is really a veil for her pursuit of Philaster’s love, “without which all the land / Discovered yet will serve me for no use / But to be buried in” (1.2.83-5). Arethusa reveals a forthrightness in 1.2 that belies her father’s insistence that she feels “desires without desire,” but she also speaks to Philaster immediately after her father has drawn a distinction between Arethusa’s unspeaking chastity and a hypothetical “queen” whose “eye / Speaks common loves and comforts to

25 The violence seems particular to Puttenham’s definition; Wilson, for instance, merely refers to metaphor as an “alteration of a worde” from a proper meaning to an improper but agreeable one (Rhetorique L8r).

104 her servants” (1.1.113-14). Arethusa seems keenly aware of the expectations others hold about her words and body language alike, especially in her repeated insistence that Philaster turn his face away before she will declare her love (1.2.65, 67, 81). These protests reflect her uncomfortable recognition of the significant gap between herself and her undesiring rhetorical double. Her attempt to turn Philaster’s gaze away from her displays of passion constitutes a turn toward the unreal yet implicitly more desirable fantasy of chaste inarticulacy that seems to captivate both Pharamond and Philaster.

Philaster was not present for the King’s commentary on his rhetoric of praise; his response to this confession nonetheless takes up the anxieties surrounding “undivided parts” that are latent in the King’s speech. His response is incredulous at first (“Is’t possible?” [1.2.85]), and then suspicious: “But how this passion should proceed from you / So violently, would amaze a man / That would be jealous” (1.2.94-6). This response at once denies his own jealousy and paints Arethusa’s desire as suspicious in a way that mirrors the King’s attitude; other men, Philaster comments, would take her frank declaration as a spur to jealousy and suspicion. Whereas Giacomo succeeds by fashioning the materials of his notation into an account of seduction for Posthumus, Philaster requires little encouragement to adopt an unflattering portrait of Arethusa, even in this scene before she is accused of sexual misconduct. As I will discuss in the next section, Philaster in fact performs most of the play’s vivid and distressing erotic acts of description for himself, and does so while taking his own imaginative acts of portraiture as the grounds for revising his own memories of Arethusa and the passions that accompany them.

II: The shadow of Narcissus

Revisionary histories

When the King and his retinue catch her in a nighttime tryst with Pharamond, Megra resolves “not [to] fall alone” (2.4.164), and therefore claims that Arethusa has been sleeping with Bellario, the young page whom Philaster employs as a go-between. The

105 courtier Dion shares the news with Philaster as part of his effort to motivate his companion to reclaim his usurped crown, but he also expands upon the sordid story by placing himself at the center of the discovery. When he confronts Philaster with the news, he insists to his friend, “your virtues / Cannot look into the subtle thoughts of woman. / In short, my lord, I took them, I myself” (3.1.107-9). As when the King professes to describe Arethusa’s hidden parts and desires for Pharamond, Dion’s account of his penetrative visual experience—as both self-professed eyewitness and judge of moral character—must substitute for Philaster’s insufficient vision and/or his naivete in order to “mould up” a picture of an unfaithful Arethusa for him.

Dion’s scant report rapidly infects Philaster’s imagination, enabling him to fabricate unflattering portraits of both Arethusa and Bellario for himself. Shortly after Philaster receives the news of Arethusa’s infidelity, Bellario enters, and Philaster exclaims, “See, see, you gods: / He walks still, and the face you let him wear / When he was innocent is still the same” (3.1.148-50). Nothing about Bellario is visibly different, but Dion’s claims have enabled Philaster to identify a previously unobserved disjunction between Bellario’s inward vices and the innocent face that he “wear[s]” as a deceptive ornament. Before he dismisses Bellario, Philaster further torments himself with a series of questions to his servant about Arethusa’s beauty: Is she not parallelless? Is not her breath Sweet as Arabian winds when fruits are ripe? Are not her breasts two liquid ivory balls? Is she not, all, a lasting mine of joy? … [I] placed thee there To pry with narrow eyes into her deeds. Hast thou discovered? Is she fallen to lust, As I would wish her? Speak some comfort to me. (3.1.201-4, 214-17) Like Giacomo, Philaster offers an account of the material treasures of a desirable body. Whereas Giacomo presents his blazon within a narrative of seduction, however, Philaster’s speech is more characteristic of a Petrarchan lover’s vacillation between “success and failure, agency and impotence, and control and helplessness” (Dubrow 23).

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Philaster’s demands appear to follow an impulse to assert possession of Arethusa and control over the appreciative gaze. Yet, these rhetorical questions locate the blazoning gaze (and nose) in Bellario; they encourage the page to imagine Arethusa’s body as a “mine” of circulating goods to describe and enjoy in Philaster’s stead. Philaster thus creates a fantasy of agency not as a seducer, but as a self-cuckolder, and his questions retroactively cast his employment of Bellario as part of this effort to sabotage his own romantic efforts. As Philaster stresses Arethusa’s breath and breasts as objects of shared sexual desire, picturing them and associating them with these valuable goods becomes a form of self-torture; this torture, in turn, guides how Philaster considers Arethusa’s formerly beloved body, now displaced in his imagination by its rhetorical double, when it reappears on stage. His subsequent offer to “divide [Arethusa’s] soul and body” with his sword proceeds out of this confusion of words and bodies (4.5.85), for Arethusa’s body, like Innogen and her mole in Posthumus’s imagination, has become an object of disgust through her identification with her lusty rhetorical double.

Giacomo’s speeches to Posthumus in Cymbeline 2.4 provide Posthumus with a blazoning fantasy similar to the one that Philaster articulates here: a vision in which another man possesses his own appreciative eyes and roving hands. Much like Philaster, Posthumus also takes it upon himself to picture his rival’s actions when left to his own devices. Alone on the stage after conceding victory to Giacomo, Posthumus thus imagines Giacomo as “a full-acorned boar, a German one,” who “Cried ‘O!’ and mounted; found no opposition / But what he looked for should oppose” (2.5.16–8). In these lines, Posthumus adds a richness of detail not present in Giacomo’s account through his language of animal copulation: he imagines this scene from the boar’s perspective, and is incensed by the superficiality of his beloved’s resistance—a pretense at opposition that, insofar as it is “what [Giacomo] looked for,”26 further titillates the assailant with a coy

26 There is some debate among critics as to whether or not “what he looked for” is Innogen’s hymen. Posthumus complains that Innogen restrained him from enjoying the “lawful pleasure” of sex within the bonds of marriage; perhaps, these terms suggest, the lovers did not consummate their marriage. (See, for example, Loughlin’s discussion of Innogen’s “symbolic deflorations” in Giacomo’s speeches [Hymeneutics 69].) It is equally plausible, however, that Posthumus—who demonstrates an obsession with Innogen’s past coyness—simply assumes that the lovers would be further aroused by a temporary performance of “opposition.”

107 show. Innogen’s feigned resistance also stands in contrast with Posthumus’s memory of his own relations with her; Innogen, Posthumus claims, “restrained” him from taking his “lawful pleasure” (2.5.9). As in Philaster’s blazon, then, Posthumus’s speech constitutes at once an assertion of mastery in its rhetorical complexity and an admission of impotence and failure in its shifting of the appreciative gaze’s location from the speaker to a rival who enjoys a greater success than the speaker himself.

This rereading of Innogen’s past conduct extends even to the language of colour and the embodied passions: when Posthumus reflects on Innogen’s past rebuffs, he complains that she refused him “with / A pudency so rosy the sweet view on’t / Might well have warmed old Saturn” (2.5.10–12). The “sweet view” on Innogen, once identified as Posthumus’s gaze, is now transferred to the “yellow” Giacomo (2.5.14). From this new perspective, moreover, Innogen’s pudency does not entail the warming of melancholy with rosy blushes or the deflection of desire with a chastity like white “unsunned snow” (2.5.13). Posthumus’s “memory of [Innogen’s] chastity” is briefly “poised between nostalgia and a new aggrieved frustration” in these lines on the “sweet view” of her shows (Lyne 155); this nostalgia rapidly disappears, however, as Posthumus contemplates the lovers’ speedy copulation, which is wholly incompatible with the deferrals that Posthumus remembers. The reds and whites of Innogen’s complexion that Giacomo noted in 2.2 emerge again in Posthumus’s speech as temporary and unreliable states—blushes and cold shows—that hide lusty desires and indeed inflame her lover’s passion. For the fact of Innogen’s seduction to make sense, Posthumus must radically change the significance of his memories of Innogen; his fantasies, in turn, draw on these new truths to engender the grotesque fantasies of animal copulation that Posthumus supplies in his soliloquy.

The sudden shift that both Posthumus and Philaster experience from unquestioning love to violent jealousy is an effect of seductive rhetoric, which in both plays induces a profound reordering of listeners’ perceptions, memories, and actions around itself. Merleau-Ponty offers a means of theorizing this shift in his discussion of the value-fact: “My thought, or my evidentness, is not one fact among others, but rather a value-fact that envelops and conditions every other possible one” (419). The recognition of a thought as

108 evident and true is contingent upon its fitting within the horizons of what is present to one’s perception; it cannot contradict other “‘true’ thoughts” (419). New thoughts arising out of experience can, however, lead to a revised understanding of past thoughts’ significance. The recognition of error becomes, in effect, the recognition of the “actual signification” behind an error’s “supposed signification” (419). Philaster and Posthumus’s newly discovered truths are so incompatible with previously held ones that they must find the truth-in-error of past experiences, devaluing old truths in favor of present ones. So long as Philaster or Posthumus remains convinced of these new thoughts’ truth, moreover, he must take them as the foundation for subsequent thoughts’ possibility. Both men thus extrapolate from these thoughts: Philaster extends Arethusa’s betrayal to all women, insisting that all the winds in the world “Kiss not a chaste one” (3.1.120), while Posthumus questions the fidelity of his mother, allegedly “The Dian of [her] time” (2.5.7). Posthumus’s criticism is also self-directed: he concludes that he must be a “counterfeit” coin, “stamped” by “Some coiner with his tools” (2.5.5-6). Posthumus rhetorically creates his body anew as a counterfeit—a bastard of unknown parentage—in the act of describing his mother’s adultery. New truths emerge, however, not out of direct experience, but out of others’ alleged perceptions adopted as his own. Merleau-Ponty imagines dialogue as a reciprocal lending of thoughts, in which “perspectives slip into each other”; “even the objection raised by my interlocutor draws from me thoughts I did not know I possessed such that if I lend him thoughts, he makes me think in return” (370- 1). Cymbeline and Philaster portray precisely this slippage and lending of thoughts in characters’ shared blazoning rhetoric, yet conversations in both plays create not an ideal of reciprocity, but a kind of turning-inward by which others’ words validate a listener’s fears and radically shift the ways in which these listeners conceive of themselves, their memories, and their relations with others.

Both Posthumus and Philaster integrate conversational stories of infidelity into their damning private reflections that overlay the objects upon which the men turn their gazes, including the feminine bodies of both imaginative and sensory experience. Giacomo’s professions of frustrated desire suffuse his verbal portraits of Innogen’s body; he never fulfills this desire physically, but instead uses Innogen’s sleeping body as a reflective surface for them as he notes her tantalizing features. Posthumus, in turn, transforms the

109 imagined scene of Innogen’s betrayal into a reflection of himself and the bastard origin that he fears. Philaster’s distress, meanwhile, becomes a matter of narcissistic self- reflection almost from the moment that Dion gives him the news of Arethusa’s infidelity: his blazon obsessively projects his own gaze and erotic sensory experiences onto Bellario, whom Dion’s speeches only vaguely conceive as a sexual rival. In On Painting, Alberti argues that Narcissus was “the inventor of painting,” and asks readers, “To paint … is what else if not to catch with art that surface of the spring?” (46). Alberti offers a conception of art as essentially inward-looking in its representational aims insofar as he draws on a mythological narrative in which the reflected image is that of the self. In rhetoric as in painting, the stuff of Alberti’s art becomes “fleeting” and “only visible in the pool as long as Narcissus gazes at himself” (Baskins 25). This tale of self-obsession is especially provocative in English translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: in Golding’s, Narcissus’s reflection on the surface of the water, after which he pines, is described as a “shadow” (F5r).27 The shadow as reflected image, especially as it appears as a reflected image of the self, is a common figure not just for the painter’s art, but for poetic self- representation; hence, for instance, John Lyly’s dedicatory epistle in Euphues and His England. Just as the first painter’s first work “shadowed … the protraiture of his owne person,” so did Lyly “coulour [his] owne Euphues” (A2r). In both Cymbeline and Philaster, Narcissus-as-painter likewise becomes an apt figure—more so than the shadow-tracer—for the increasingly monologic and solipsistic, rather than conversational, origins of rhetorics of praise and blame.

“It is a woman!”

As rhetoric’s colours and shadowing proceed, increasingly, from forms of pleasurably solipsistic fantasy (as in Giacomo’s blazon) or of masochistic self-scrutiny (as in Philaster’s and Posthumus’s self-deprecating speeches), Philaster’s characters respond by proposing acts that would violently disrupt the relationship between the gazer and the

27 See OED “shadow” (n.), 5.a.

110 reflective body. Philaster anticipates this turn in his blazon scene when he demands of Bellario: Tell me thy thoughts, for I will know the least That dwells within thee or will rip thy heart To know it. I will see thy thoughts as plain As I do now thy face. (3.1.226-9) Philaster imagines the figurative images of memory—and with it, evidence of the page’s secret desires and sexual self-conduct—as literally visible images that Bellario would conceal from his master, and which corporeal violence will expose if conversational access to these secret truths fails. What immediately follows, however, is not an act of violence that would torture secret truths out of the page, but the abbreviated blazon that Philaster attributes to Bellario: a moment of rhetorical picturing that defers the physical violence for which Philaster longs to a later act.

Arethusa similarly imagines her own body as a surface on which her desires might be exposed to Philaster’s scrutiny when her protests of innocence fail to signify. She implores the gods, “Make my breast / Transparent as pure crystal” so as to reveal all of her thoughts to her accusers (3.2.130-1), echoing Philaster’s literalization of inward thoughts as visible pictures. Later, she wishes that she might be metamorphosed into a hind to “die pursued by cruel hounds, / And have my story written in my wounds” (3.2.172-3). Arethusa’s speech offers an implicit allusion to Actaeon, the Ovidian hunter who gazes upon the bathing Diana and, as punishment, is metamorphosed into a deer and torn apart by his own hounds. The allusion seems inappropriate to Arethusa, whose actions in the play bear no obvious relation to Actaeon’s voyeuristic violation of the goddess’s privacy. It is comprehensible, however, in relation to Arethusa’s own recognition, earlier in the play, that any expression of desire that she might make (or indeed any gaze that she, like the queen with the roving eye, might make) is invariably treated as suspicious in her father’s court. Even Philaster, to whom Arethusa professes her exclusive love, not-quite-jokingly treats her ability to articulate this passion to one man as an ability to do so to all, and so casts her honesty as cause for jealousy. Arethusa’s longing to display her “story” in her own wounds is a bloody version of the chaste inarticulacy that her father attributed to her in Act 1: her allusion reflects a desire

111 to circumvent this logic by ripping the truth of her desires and actions from, and displaying this truth upon, her body.

Arethusa’s desire for self-exposure is deferred to both a later act and a surrogate body: the King finally calls for men to “Bear away that boy / To torture” and vows to “have [Arethusa] cleared or buried” depending on what Bellario reveals (5.5.64-5). This threat of torture finally persuades Bellario to confess that he is Dion’s lovesick daughter Euphrasia, who has disguised herself as a page so as to be near Philaster. Philaster’s response to the revelation reflects an immediate revision of perceptions and passions around the new truth of Euphrasia’s body: he exclaims to Arethusa, “It is a woman! Thou art fair / And virtuous still to ages, in despite of malice” (5.5.133-4). Arethusa appears “fair / And virtuous” again, not because Philaster’s belief in her innocence triumphs, but because Philaster sees Euphrasia’s female body as incapable of the sexual fantasies that Philaster has attributed to it. The story of her tryst with Arethusa is now revealed to be impossible, so that the shadow-Arethusa of Philaster’s rhetorical imaginings is destroyed.28 Most shocking about Euphrasia’s revelation is the extent to which the truth of her identity has been kept a secret—not just from other characters, but also from Beaumont and Fletcher’s audience.29 Whereas Shakespeare’s audience witnesses Innogen’s cross-dressing as the boy page Fidele in Cymbeline, the revelation of Bellario’s identity in Philaster is, on the play’s first viewing, potentially a shock that encourages witnesses to revisit and revise memories of Bellario, his appearance, and his conduct

28 The theatrical joke is, of course, that Euphrasia’s body is that of a boy actor, so that “It is [not] a woman” after all. The play encourages audiences to reevaluate Bellario’s past speeches and actions in light of the revelation that the page has always pined after Philaster; so too can Bellario’s past expressions of desire, now known to be directed toward Philaster, be re-read as homoerotic as they proceed from a boy actor. The ever-present possibility of same-sex desire goes without explicit acknowledgement in this play (and is indeed antithetical to Philaster’s conclusion that Arethusa cannot have loved Euphrasia-as-Bellario), but is a subject of critical interest. See, e.g., Loughlin’s reading of desire and Philaster’s boy actors (“Cross- Dressing,” 41-2); and, in relation to Shakespeare’s heroines, Peter Berek on “Cross-Dressing, Gender, and Absolutism” in Philaster and other Beaumont/Fletcher plays (esp. 360–2). 29 It is for this reason that I have elected to refer to Bellario with masculine pronouns throughout the preceding discussion and in references to scenes in which characters still operate under the assumption that Bellario is a young boy. Q1 refers to Bellario as “Leons [i.e. Dion’s] daughter” in its list of actors, but audiences for the staged play would have lacked this privileged information. The audience may perhaps guess that the page is really a woman, but Euphrasia does not make her identity explicit until Philaster’s final scene.

112 alongside the play’s equally shocked characters. In other words, the play’s conclusion demands of its audience the same reconfiguration of imagination and memory around the present truth that Philaster previously performed in accusing Bellario of adultery and which he must do again in the moment when Euprhasia reveals herself. Although no character explicitly reconsiders Bellario’s past conduct, the vivid language of earlier scenes readily offers itself up to retrospective re-interpretation. Philaster, for instance, describes having met Bellario as the page made flower garlands and wept by a fountain (1.2.113-40). This entire scene opens itself to reinterpretation in the wake of Euphrasia’s revelation. Bellario’s “pretty helpless innocen[t]” weeping face (1.2.123), not to mention his extensive knowledge of flowers and garland-making and the “prettiest lecture” that he gives Philaster on his flowers’ meanings (1.2.134), were then taken by Philaster as signs of Bellario’s boyish innocence. They are now, however, revealed to be sure—indeed stereotypical—signs of Euphrasia’s hidden gender; in retrospect, even Philaster’s word choices in his descriptions of the page, especially his insistence upon Bellario’s “prett[iness],” seem unacknowledged intuitions of the truth.

With her self-revelation, Euphrasia also disavows all potential jealousy as she refuses to acknowledge the possibility of competition with Arethusa. Euphrasia expresses her desire not to marry, and instead to “serve the princess, / To see the virtues of her lord and her” (5.5.188-9). Far from excluding this potential competitor from her home, Arethusa agrees, arguing, “She that loves my lord, / Cursed be the wife that hates her” (5.5.194-5). Language itself seems to conform to the innocent body that Euphrasia reveals as both she and Arethusa strive to establish a stable and innocent understanding of visible bodies and inward desires. The potentially suggestive terms with which the women describe their relationships (“love,” “service”) are denied their licentious possibilities through the explicit rejection of jealous impulses. Philaster’s characters thus discard one set of rhetorical shadows that were fabricated and cast over Arethusa’s and Euphrasia’s bodies by Philaster’s jealousy, even as the play’s relatively omniscient audience potentially performs a similar act in reevaluating the self-conduct of “Bellario” in earlier scenes. Yet, Arethusa’s desires and her bodily integrity, once known through men’s speeches, are still only known through forms of rhetorical shadowing that render one character a reflection of another’s desires. Arethusa’s chastity is established, from Philaster’s perspective,

113 through the contingent reinforcement of Euphrasia’s implicitly incompatible body: Euphrasia becomes a double to Arethusa, just as Bellario once seemed to shadow Philaster. Arethusa’s most problematic bodily truths thus continue to exist at a mediated distance from Arethusa herself from the perspectives of others. Philaster does not wholly resolve this problem, but rather leaves it suspended in a comic reconciliation between characters who cease to question the shadows that bodies and words cast over one another when the language of praise ceases to establish vulgar associations, and instead becomes flattering once more.

“Harmless lightning”

Shakespeare’s reconciliations of the tensions between corporeal bodies and the rhetoric of the body in Cymbeline turn on these tensions’ gradual descent into farce, despite the gravity of the sexual and military conflicts of the play’s latter acts. In Cymbeline 2.2, Giacomo soliloquizes on—and over—Innogen’s sleeping body in a way that, as I have argued, not only lays the rhetorical groundwork for his duping of Posthumus in 2.4, but also casts a menacing shadow over Innogen herself in marking out the contiguities between her story and that of Shakespeare’s Lucrece, even as Giacomo chooses not to act out his self-assigned role as a potential Tarquin. Echoes of these simultaneously violating and ineffectual, isolated and ominous vocalizations of sexual aggression are apparent almost from the moment that Giacomo returns to the trunk in Innogen’s bedroom. In the scene that immediately follows, Cloten—Cymbeline’s preferred match for Innogen— stands outside Innogen’s window in the hope of winning her affections. He comments, “I am advised to give her music o’ mornings; they say it will penetrate” (2.3.10-11), and then doubles down on this crass sexual pun by instructing a group of musicians to “penetrate her with your fingering” and to “try with tongue too” (2.3.12-13). The musicians obediently perform an aubade that pictures “chaliced flowers” growing around springs and “winking Mary-buds [that] begin / To ope their golden eyes” in the sun’s light (2.3.20, 21), before calling on Innogen herself to awaken. The echo of Giacomo’s floral language here seems deliberate: the song constitutes a celebratory piece of verbal

114 art that likens Innogen’s body to a flower under an aggressive gaze (or, as the case may be, under a sunny blaze) that penetrates and exposes its hidden inner spaces.

The circumstances of the song’s delivery, however, establish Cloten’s own violation of Innogen’s body as an auditory, rather than visual, probing, and the song itself also solicits a response from its sleeping object, as Giacomo’s poetry did not. Cloten seems indeed to take a response for granted, for his insistence that the music “will penetrate” evokes not just the auditory penetration of Innogen’s receptive ear, but also the affective penetration of her mind, which together will lead to the sexual penetration that is Cloten’s aim. These repetitive references to music as sexual penetration collapse the intersubjective temporality of his desired relations with Innogen into themselves: that is, to listen is to be penetrated. Like Giacomo’s notations, however, Cloten’s song ends in frustration. When Innogen, unmoved, enters, it is only to deny Cloten’s advances, so that the threatened sexual violence of amorous noting and musical notation is reduced in this scene to an impotent bawdy joke. Yet, Cloten’s failure to penetrate here gives rise to further violence: spurned by Innogen, who tells Cloten that Postumus’s “meanest garment” is more precious to her than Cloten (2.3.128), he resolves to murder Posthumus and rape Innogen in her deceased husband’s clothing (3.5.134-6), once again deferring the threat of sexual violence that seems secured by his poetics of aggressive desire to another scene.

These intimations of violence couched within laudatory poetry continue through 4.2, where Innogen—at this point disguised as the boy page Fidele—consumes a potion that puts her into a death-like sleep. Meanwhile, her long-lost and still-unrecognized brothers Guiderius and Arviragus quarrel with and decapitate Cloten, then return to their cave in the Welsh mountains to discover Innogen’s body. The brothers pick up the play’s thread of floral imagery in performing a funeral song for this “sweetest, fairest lily” (4.2.202), and in strewing Innogen’s grave with flowers, including “the flower that’s like [Fidele’s] face, pale primrose” (4.2.222). Finally, they set Cloten’s headless corpse next to Innogen and leave, so that Innogen awakens alone, sees the corpse, and comments, “These flowers are like the pleasures of the world, / This bloody man the care on’t” (4.2.298-9), making

115 explicit the elsewhere-implicit association between ephemeral flowers and death.30 The intimations of violence and death that inhere in elaborate performances of desire— suggested forcefully by Giacomo’s speech on Innogen as the not-yet-violated lily, and deflated in Cloten’s non-penetrative song to Innogen’s opening Mary-bud eyes—find their fulfillment in the apparent death of, and mourning songs for, the flower-strewn object of these men’s affections, only for this fulfillment to be immediately undone and applied to a different object.

Innogen’s meditation on ephemeral flowers leads her, moreover, to soliloquize on the headless body, which she mistakes for that of Posthumus: I know the shape of ’s leg; this is his hand, His foot Mercurial, his Martial thigh, The brawns of Hercules; but his Jovial face— Murder in heaven! How? ’Tis gone. (4.2.311-14) Innogen’s questions to the corpse perversely stress its inability to provide unmediated access to truth. She is “astute enough not to assume that clothes secure the identification on their own,” but her attempt to identify the body and explain its presence relies upon the visual comparisons and extrapolations of “metaphors—which distract her—and synecdoches—which delude her” (Lyne 134). Her despairing rhetorical questions, posed to an unspeaking, mistakenly identified body, also parody the fruitless rhetorical work that Giacomo performs upon Innogen in 2.2 and the non-penetrative demands that Cloten and his musicians make of her in 2.3. Innogen’s own poetry cannot move its object, and it proceeds out of a misrecognition so extreme as to render the scene one of farce. Whereas expressions of desire earlier in the play at least posit themselves as creative and binding, the poetics of desire is exposed, here, as a force of self-distraction in which allusive

30 The echo of Giacomo’s floral language in Innogen’s speech to Cloten’s corpse is also noted by Elizabeth Harvey, who adds, “Her awakening amid the flowers her brothers have strewn on her apparent corpse pairs the scene with her earlier sleep in which Iachimo served as the voice of waking awareness” (380). Innogen’s confused description of the preceding scenes as a “dream” (4.2.308)—a kind of waking dream that she describes as still “Without me as within me; not imagined, felt” as she looks upon what she believes is the corpse of her husband (4.2.309)—structurally echoes Giacomo’s penetration into her metonymic bedroom after she closes her eyes at the beginning of 2.2; both scenes place her in a state between wakefulness and nightmarish dreaming.

116 language draws wholly inappropriate—indeed, dramatically ironic—connections between godly figures and a collection of erstwhile loathed parts.

I suggested in my opening comments, however, that Cymbeline does not end with this dismal view of poetic rhetoric’s potential to secure truth or drive action and, indeed, that Jupiter’s prophesying exists as a redemptive force within the play. This redemption, I would argue, comes about through a subtle refiguring of the ways in which characters conceive of, and deploy, rhetorical ornaments. In Act 5, most of the play’s cast converges at Milford Haven, where Cymbeline’s army defeats the Roman forces and, in the process, captures Giacomo as well as Posthumus, who has joined the losing Roman army in a suicidal response to Pisanio’s false report that he has killed Innogen under Posthumus’s orders. As Posthumus lies sleeping in fetters, the ghosts of his family members enter to comment on his situation, and are soon joined by Jupiter, who delivers the tablet that promises an end to Posthumus’s (and Britain’s) suffering. The dramatic situation constitutes a restaging and a revision of 2.2’s chamber scene: a character enters to speak about an oblivious sleeping other—in Jupiter’s case through speech that is written as well as spoken—in ways that call future actions and speeches into being through a proleptic language of associations and epithets.

These scenes differ, obviously, in their respective speakers’ motives and intentions; more importantly, Posthumus awakens with some awareness of this visitation,31 as Innogen does not, and presents Jupiter’s words as a puzzle that others might help him to solve, as Innogen cannot. Even before he reads its contents, Posthumus’s reaction to the prophecy is tinged with suspicion: he looks at the tablet’s cover, and tells it, “Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment / Nobler than that it covers” (5.5.228-9). This echo of Innogen’s earlier prizing of Posthumus’s “meanest garment” seems deliberate on Shakespeare’s part: whereas Innogen takes for granted the fidelity of cover to contents when confronted with Cloten’s well-dressed corpse, Posthumus approaches a similar body/cover relationship skeptically. This skepticism stands in implicit contrast, too, with his ready

31 He later reports to the Roman soothsayer, “As I slept, methought / Great Jupiter, upon his eagle backed, / Appeared to me with other spritely shows / Of mine own kindred” (5.6.427-30).

117 assumption that Giacomo’s elaborate speeches on his act of seduction are accurate representations of—rather than layers of rhetorical artifice that overshadow—Innogen’s bedroom, body, and desires. Posthumus’s subsequent reaction to Jupiter’s prophecy also restages and revises his earlier readiness to find images of himself in others’ words: “The action of my life is like it, which / I'll keep, if but for sympathy” (5.5.242-3), he declares, foregoing the impulse to reorder his memories and self-perceptions around this newest mirror of his life in words.

These patterns of revisionary echoing reverberate throughout the play’s final scenes, culminating in a series of conversational exchanges in which Shakespeare’s characters break their earlier solipsistic patterns of meaning-making through forms of supplementary conversation. Giacomo, most notably, complains, “The princess of this country, and the air on’t / Revengingly enfeebles me” (5.2.3-4); when he is captured, he decries his “false spirits” directly to Cymbeline (5.6.148), and offers a third and final commentary on his intrusion into Innogen’s bedroom. Giacomo persistently marks himself and his activities as characteristically Italian and rhetorical in nature: he frames his actions as those of a mind “quenched / Of hope, not longing” (5.6.195-6), where “longing” is uncoupled from erotic poesy, and instead refers to his impulse to put his “Italian brain” to cunning use against his “duller” British targets (5.6.196-7). His activities in 2.2 thus become the collection of “simular proofs” and “marks / Of secret on [Innogen’s] person”—the mole’s spots—whose revelation, he explains, tricked Posthumus in Giacomo’s subsequent report (5.6.199-206). The chamber scene and its contents are stripped, in this retelling, of their copious Petrarchan trappings and associated sexual threats; they are rebranded instead as specious, affected expressions of a customary craft, while the British air itself becomes conducive to the righting of these rhetorical wrongs. Giacomo’s revisions also lead to the rhetorical reframing of other, similar bodily marks: Belarius, who listens to this story, not only confesses to kidnapping Cymbeline’s sons, but also matches Innogen’s mole with the one on her brother Guiderius’s neck and gives this second mole it a new meaning: it is a “natural stamp” and “wise nature’s end in the donation / To be his evidence” for his familial heritage (5.6.367-9). As in Giacomo’s revisions to his notes on Innogen’s mark, Belarius at once acknowledges his past deceptions and rhetorically shadows a body that he has wronged

118 with new significance; in figuring the mole as a stamp and a piece of evidence, he helps, moreover, to make sense of the sudden appearance of Cymbeline’s supposedly lost children on the stage, contributing to the “linguistic self-reflection” that pervades this scene (Bauer 189).

In the wake of others’ revelations, Posthumus thinks to show his tablet to the Roman soothsayer Philharmonus, whom he asks to “show / His skill in the construction” of its meaning (5.6.433-4). Philharmonus explains that Posthumus Leonatus is obviously the “lion’s whelp” (5.6.443-5), but the “tender air” that embraces Posthumus requires a little more effort: Philharmonus identifies it as Innogen, explaining that “tender air” is “mollis aer” in Latin, “and ‘mollis aer’ / We term it ‘mulier,’ which ‘mulier’ I divine / Is this most constant wife” who has, indeed, just embraced Posthumus after their long separation (5.6.447-9, emphasis in original). This etymological explanation is a stretch at best,32 but it, too, participates in Act 5’s chains of meaning-making through metaphors’ wresting of significance. The term “mollis aer” suggests that Innogen is tender, even weak,33 yet Giacomo finds himself “enfeebled” by both the British air and by Innogen herself, who is linked symbolically to this air as a British princess and as the “tender air” of the prophecy; Innogen becomes synonymous with the air in this scene,34 embracing and forgiving Posthumus just as the British air at Milford Haven envelops him upon his return from Italy.

In the midst of these reunions and reconciliations, Cymbeline observes that Innogen, “like harmless lightning, throws her eye” on the men around her, “hitting / Each object

32 Matthias Bauer notes that commentators tend to read the derivation of “mulier” from “mollis aer” as incorrect, and thus as evidence of Shakespeare’s “distrust of language” (187); Bauer argues, however, that Shakespeare uses this idiosyncratic derivation “as an example of etymology as ‘true speaking’ or ‘soothsaying’” (188)—as, indeed, Philarmonus does in rightly identifying the figures named in Jupiter’s prophecy. 33 Bauer observes that medieval and Renaissance etymologies of the term “mulier”—woman—derive it from “mollis … in a context suggesting the deficiencies of the female sex” (187). Isidore of Seville, for instance, writes, “the word woman (mulier) comes from softness (mollities)” and adds, “strength is greater in a man, lesser in a woman, so that she will submit to the power of a man” (XI.ii.17; noted also in Bauer 187). 34 Harvey notes a further air/heir pun here: the etymology for mulier is false, but it “connects the play’s ubiquitous imagery of air and its capacity to shape and reveal character with Innogen’s role as Cymbeline’s heir” (383).

119 with a joy” in a “counterchange” (5.6.395-7). In thus describing Innogen, Cymbeline renders her representative of a newfound understanding of vision and passion that embraces the possibility of exchange in lieu of the aggression and solipsism, the unfitting and often violent wresting of meaning through metaphor, that characterized the penetrative operations of vision tied and visual metaphors earlier in the play. It is perhaps telling, however, that the “counterchange” that Cymbeline finds in Innogen’s gaze is an implicitly wordless one. Cymbeline’s comic conclusion is not predicated, per se, on silence or denial, as Philaster’s resolution of lingering sexual tensions essentially is. Whether or not Giacomo, for instance, chooses in Act 5 to own the aggressive sexual desire that he expressed in the chamber scene (and it is a wise choice not to, considering his audience), the wager plot is undone. Likewise, after Cymbeline refers to Innogen as “harmless lightning,” Innogen goes on acknowledge verbally her joy at this “gracious season” (5.6.402). Yet, the redemptive work of Cymbeline’s cast relies on a revisionary impulse that cannot wholly take into account the darker parts of speech that were conducive to the play’s near-tragedy. In choosing to resume paying tribute to Rome, moreover, Cymbeline establishes a parallel ambivalent resolution to the play’s military plot: the king repairs Britian’s relations with a nation whose eventual fall is embodied in the anachronistic figure of Giacomo. With the renewed peace between Britain and Rome comes the potential for the former simply to imitate the worst vices of the latter: the alliance hints at the potential for Britain’s own future fall from empire and its mutable inhabitants’ parallel descent into rhetorical corruption. Nonetheless, the “artificial shadow” of laudatory description, acknowledged and feared by Beaumont and Fletcher’s King, becomes in Cymbeline a force for securing truth when the bodies that it brings together on British soil, and the compassion that it breeds between sympathetic ears in this space, can be directed toward redemptive ends.

Chapter 3 Shakespeare’s Shady Echoes

In Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Narcissus spurns the affections of the nymph Echo, who curses him to experience the same lovesickness that she herself feels. Narcissus gazes into a spring and falls in love with what he sees: “like a foolish noddie / He thinks the shadow that he sees, to be a lively boddie” (F5r). Narcissus thus dies pining after an insubstantial reflection of himself, identified by Golding as an unattainable “shadow.” Golding’s usage is not unusual: the OED dates the first use of “shadow” to denote a reflection (especially a person’s reflection) to the twelfth century, and indicates its common use through the seventeenth;1 by 1623, the word “shadow” could even be used to denote reflected light.2 The widespread association of shadows and reflections seems, in such instances, to override the intriguing absurdity of the identification of light as its opposite in the shadow, and to hint at a pervasive Renaissance interest in the figurative richness offered to writers by physical phenomena of reflection and return.

In The Wisdom of the Ancients, Francis Bacon’s commentary on the myth builds upon Narcissus’s association with shadowy reflections and self-love. Bacon likens his Narcissus to a man who chooses to live a “solitary, private, and obscure life, attended on with a fewe followers, and those such as will adore and admire them, and like an Eccho flatter them in all their sayings” (A7r). Bacon’s translator here gives “obscure” for the Latin original’s “umbratilem,”3 accidentally obscuring in the process a rhetorical connection between Narcissus, Echo, and the shadow. The “Eccho[es]” of flatterers in this commentary constitute a verbal complement to the visual phenomenon of the shadow-as-reflection, for they yoke the shadow in its association with diminishment and death to Narcissus’s destructive self-obsession. Just as Narcissus dies in pursuit of his double in the form of a visible reflection, so does the reclusive man fall into obscurity

1 See OED “shadow” (n.) 5.a. 2 See, e.g., OED “shadow-light” (n.). 3 See De Sapientia Veterum (B5v).

120 121 and “stupid[ity]”—a kind of social and intellectual death—by associating exclusively with flattering speakers whom Bacon identifies as the man’s sonic reflections. Unlike Narcissus’s inanimate shadow in the water, however, Ovid’s nymph and Bacon’s sycophantic Echoes alike are living beings with an existence outside their relationship with their respective Narcissuses. Whether out of compulsion, love, or a desire for advancement, they repeat a speaker’s words and speak to his most desirable qualities; yet, they do not purport to be him in any straightforward sense. Indeed, part of the pleasure— and the corresponding personal danger—of hearing these echoes lies in the listener’s knowledge that his desires and opinions emerge so perfectly from the mouth of someone who is manifestly not the flattered listener himself.

In the following pages, I explore the echo as a concept closely related to the shadow in Renaissance English usage. Echoes are deeply entangled with shadows in scientific texts and mythological commentaries alike, which not only theorize these auditory and visual phenomena in similar ways, but also often bring them into explicit comparison. The echo, as in Ovid’s narrative, is a figure of perfect repetition; it also, however, evokes forms of narcissism in its association with individuals’ longing for reflections of the self in others, especially as these reflections emerge in acts of imitation and verbal flattery. Renaissance echoes are associated also with subversive forms of verbal doubling: that is, with acts of reiterative representation in which speech betrays its originator when it is received and reiterated by others. Taken figuratively, then, the echo raises concerns similar to those surrounding the rhetorical shadow, and its figuring of the fraught relationship between language and truth that I explored in Chapter 2. The echo’s association with Narcissus also, however, reflects a particular concern among Renaissance commentators like Bacon with the potential perils of self-representation, and of self-obsession, when it is contingent upon the doubling speeches and actions of unreliable others.

Focusing on The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, I examine how Shakespeare’s theatre treats relationships of representation and mediated speech that are often figured as forms of “shadowing” in senses both visual and sonic. The Merchant of Venice presents itself as an obvious object of study, for its characters self-consciously play with the relations between substances and shadows in discussions of bodies and art.

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Shadows emerge explicitly in the guessing game that determines Portia’s husband, where they are associated with—and come to denigrate—the portraits that Portia’s suitors discover in the caskets.4 They also figure in Measure for Measure: the play’s plot unfolds under the surveilling gaze of Vincentio, Vienna’s “duke of dark corners” (4.3.147), who leaves the city’s government to a substitute, dons a friar’s hood, and observes his subjects while hiding in the shadow of this disguise. Neither play seems especially concerned with echoes at first glance; the term “echo” in fact does not occur explicitly in either. As I will expand upon below, however, sonic forms of repetition and doubling are central to both plays’ comic plots, which center on acts of mediation and substitution. My study thus moves through three different yet related points of contact between the echo and the shadow on the stage and page, as they appear in three distinct yet related figures of echoic repetition and doubling: magical talking heads and substitutive heads of state that store and release authorities’ echoic speech, moralized Echoes who subversively repeat others’ words, and sycophants who claim to echo the sentiments of others to whom they cling.

I begin with natural scientists and magicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These writers record their efforts to overcome sound’s ephemeral nature in the service of fantasies of perfect preservation and communication; the failures of such experiments provide some context for the failures of sonic mediation on Shakespeare’s stage. Writers in other disciplines, I contend, express an interest in darker realizations of natural scientists’ sonic fantasies; a sense of anxiety pervades sermons, conduct books, and anti- theatrical pamphlets regarding the physiological and psychological persistence of sound, and especially of speech, within receptive bodies. The echo functions in these contexts like the shadow: as an imperfect imitation, an extension of a body that engenders it, a force of creativity and subversion, and a figure of disturbing excess. Like the shadow, the echo as it emerges from the mouth of another is potentially a force of betrayal when

4 See, e.g., the inscription that Aragon reads upon choosing the silver casket and finding a death’s-head inside—“Some there be that shadows kiss; / Such have but a shadow’s bliss” (2.9.65-6)—or Bassanio’s remarks upon finding Portia’s portrait in the lead casket. He comments, amazed, upon the portrait’s beauty and verisimilitude, before adding, “Yet look how far / The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow / In underprizing it, so far this shadow / Doth limp behind the substance” (3.2.126-9).

123 others wrongfully perceive it as synonymous with the words and desires of the speaker from which it purportedly originates.

I: Talking heads and substitutes

Sonic shadows

In The Merchant of Venice, Bellario sends Portia to court with a letter claiming that she is “Balthasar”: a young lawyer who is “furnished with [Bellario’s] opinion which, bettered with his own learning, … comes with him” (4.1.156-8). Portia’s performance is predicated not just on her successful cross-dressing—a borrowing of visual and auditory signifiers of gender—but also on an act of vocal substitution by which she will effectively voice Bellario’s legal opinion in court. Vincentio figures his relationship with Angelo similarly when he proposes that Angelo be “In our remove … at full ourself,” and that “Mortality and mercy in Vienna / Live in [Angelo’s] tongue and heart” (1.1.43-6). The Duke’s orders cast Angelo as a bodily container and vocal mediator for his speeches and, more broadly, for the city’s law. These relations between authorities and representatives reproduce in an auditory register some of the issues surrounding rhetorical doubling and substitution that I have previously described in association with the shadow. The plays’ authority figures imagine their doubles not, however, as antagonists or imperfect representations of themselves, but as participants in a collaborative relationship by which others reiterate their words and fulfill—indeed, improve upon—their intentions. Bellario thus claims that Portia-as-Balthasar “better[s]” his legal judgements; Vincentio, concerned that he might seem tyrannous for suddenly punishing crimes that he has long given a “permissive pass” (1.3.38), appoints Angelo to “in th’ ambush of [Vincentio’s] name strike home” (1.3.41). Of course, Vincentio grossly misplaces his trust in Angelo, but even Portia, whose judgements enable a comic resolution to Antonio’s legal plight, capitalizes deceptively upon the collaborative aural relationship between herself and Bellario in arguing for Antonio’s exoneration. I will return to these problems below; for now, however, I wish to examine natural scientific,

124 anatomical, and philosophical contexts that underlie the fantasy of giving and embodying voices, even as they cast this fantasy as nigh-impossible to achieve through non-demonic means. In the process, I establish the grounds for a closer study of the relations between the echo and the shadow that illuminates the darker possibilities of echoic speech— relations at which writers like Bacon and Golding hint in their treatments of Echo and Narcissus.

The echo and the shadow are distinct yet closely associated physical phenomena, and are indeed treated as analogous in On the Soul, where Aristotle describes the echo as a rebounding of air “like a bouncing ball” that is produced when this air hits another mass of contained air (111). He adds that all sounds likely produce echoes, even if the echo is not actually perceptible to the ear, and supports this position with reference to the visual phenomena of light and shadow. He argues that “light is always reflected,” but that “this reflected light is not always strong enough … to cast a shadow, which is the distinguishing mark by which we recognize light”; so may one fail to perceive the faint echo generated by a weak sound (111–13). The shadow and the echo are thus alike in their inevitable gesturing toward the original phenomena—light and sound—without which they would not exist. The analogy that Aristotle thus establishes between light and sound in terms of their genesis, movement, and perceptible effects persists, moreover, in Renaissance English natural scientific texts.5 In Sylva Sylvarum, Bacon takes up the suggestive blurring of light and sound in order to highlight the relatively chaotic movements of the latter. He begins by describing sound as a “Body percussed” that is “renewed” in a spreading “Percussion of the Aire” (H4v, emphasis in original). This spreading effect is one of the differences between sound and light. It is possible, he comments, to “command” “Species Visible” using a mirror, because these species travel in “Right Lines” and are thus easily guided (I4r). Sound, conversely, “is hard to master; Because the Sound filling great Spaces in Arched Lines, cannot be so guided,” and as

5 This analogy indeed remained suggestive for natural scientists well into the nineteenth century. John Tyndall could thus, in 1867, describe the diminishment of a sound’s perceived intensity in terms of a “shadow” of sound produced behind an obstacle to its motions: “A sound-wave certainly bends thus round an obstacle, though as it diffuses itself in the air at the back of the obstacle it is enfeebled in power, the obstacle thus producing a partial shadow of the sound” (22).

125 such, “we see there hath not beene practised, any Meanes to make Artificiall Eccho’s” (I4r). Bacon never specifies precisely what an “Artificiall Eccho” is, but in context—in the midst of a catalogue of experiments in amplifying sound and in creating audible echoes from low-volume noises—one possible definition is an echo that exists perceptibly without an audible impact of objects immediately preceding it. Elsewhere, Bacon offers a long catalogue of “Dissents” between audible and visible phenomena (K2v-K3v), but for my purposes, it is in these discussions of echoes’ bouncing movement and the impossible fantasy of artificiality that a crucial distinction between visible and audible phenomena implicitly emerges. The echo differs from the shadow in that light and shadow readily present themselves as a presence/absence binary—a relationship of difference—whereas sound and echo do not separate so easily. The echo exists, rather, in a relation of sameness, extension, and superfluity to an original sound. An “Artificiall,” origin-less echo—an accumulation, in other words, of rebounding copies without a presently perceptible source—is a fantasy of control, captured in Bacon’s language of “command” and “master[y],” that Bacon cannot find the means to produce experimentally.

This understanding of sound as a series of spreading copies with an identifiable origin also informs the ways in which sound is conceived as a perceptible experience. Helkiah Crooke, for instance, argues that the air is “affected with the qualitie of a sound” when two bodies strike each other; the impact affects the surrounding air in turn, akin to the spreading motion of ripples in water (Ff7r). The ear is “outwardly … alwayes open,” enabling this altered air to enter and strike against the eardrum, which in turn moves the bones in the ear and “maketh impression of the character of the sound” (Ff7v). The “inbred Ayre” of the ear canals carries the impression of a sound until it reaches the auditory nerve, “which conveyeth it thence unto the common sense as unto his Censor and Judge” (Ff7v). For Crooke, hearing is an inherently violent process of copying and translation as sound’s impressions move from the site of impact, through the air, to the eardrum, and through the inward air, until the mind itself receives them and is intellectually “moved” to judgement. At no point in this process of transmission is voluntary action ascribed to the body; as Pierre de la Primaudaye puts it, the ear “cannot lay hold of [sound] or keepe it fast, as it were with griping hands, but entring in of it

126 selfe, it is so long detained there whilest the sound reboundeth in the eares, and then vanisheth away suddenly” (Kk3r). La Primaudaye draws an analogy between ears and “griping hands” that makes the ear itself—however ineffectual—a microcosmic reflection of the body as a whole that strains toward the source of a sound.6 Such metaphors of active engagement seem, however, obviated by the general assumption that sound enters the body regardless of the listener’s volition: the extent of the body’s straining or shrinking is ultimately irrelevant to ears that are always open and prepared to receive the strikes of sounds moving through the surrounding air.

Sound is ephemeral, but the actions of the common sense upon sound hint at a form of intellectual permanence; the phenomenon of the echo finds a parallel in the work of the faculties of memory and imagination, which potentially retain and reiterate the words of absent or silent speakers. The implicit analogy that I am drawing here between the mind and modern audio recording technologies is deliberate, for one of the most prevalent fantasies of sound’s storage and preservation in Renaissance England took speech as its object of preservation and the human head as a figure for this nigh-impossible goal. Giambattista della Porta notably records an experiment in which he overcame the rapid dissipation of sound by speaking with a friend at a long distance through a pipe (Bbb1r). He then gestures toward a more sophisticated application for his observations: if he could trap spoken words in longer, winding, sealed leaden pipes, the sound would be “shut up” therein and held “so long as [he] pleased” (Bbb1r), ready to be released for listening at will. Della Porta also adds a brief note on the inspiration for his invention: “I read that Albertus made an Artificial head, that spake at a set time: I might hope to do the same by this invention” (Bbb1r). Della Porta’s own hypothetical talking box is not explicitly conceived as a head, but its winding tubes that receive and carry sound evoke the canals of the inner ear, while the head itself effectively stores sound—as if in memory—before releasing it through an open tube-as-mouth. Unlike the human head and its auricular

6 See Chapter 1. Bacon’s notes in Sylva Sylvarum on the passions of fear and curiosity do indeed offer the possibility that the body and its fluids might strain toward (or shrink from) sources of sensory stimulation depending on the passions that the stimulation arouses

127 structures, however, della Porta’s invention captures the physical phenomenon itself and retains it indefinitely, even in the absence of the original speaker.

The “Artificiall head” that inspired della Porta’s experiment is an infamous figure of “aesthetically and morally dubious animation” in both popular fiction and scientific experimentation (Borlik 130).7 Often attributed to Albertus Magnus (as in della Porta’s treatise) or to Roger Bacon, the artificial head’s moral dubiousness lies in its supernatural associations: in most accounts, it is not a natural scientific experiment, but the product of demonic magic. This darker version of the head appears, for instance, on the Renaissance stage in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589), in which the magician Roger Bacon conceives of his most impressive spectacle of magic as a “monstrous head of brass” that will “tell out strange and uncouth aphorisms, / And girt fair England with a wall of brass” (11.17–20). The head itself is fashioned under the friar’s orders by the devil “Belcephon” (2.56), so that the fulfillment of Bacon’s plans will be achieved (so Bacon hopes) through multiple layers of mediation. Yet, the head acts out: it never builds the wall, and it only speaks to chide Miles, the friar’s inattentive servant, that the time for its magic “is,” then later “was,” and is “past” (11.53, 65, 75), before a hand emerges from a cloud and breaks the head apart with a hammer (11.75.sd). Bacon complains that Miles has “watch’d, and would not when the head did will” (11.99), ascribing blame for this disaster to the servant’s refusal to follow the head’s demands. Despite this displacement of authority, however, Bacon suggests that his success as a magician is tied to the work of his creation as he mourns the loss of his fame as a result of the head’s spectacular failure (11.112-14).

Della Porta’s and Bacon’s instances of brazen head-craft are closely intertwined as versions of a fantasy in which one body becomes a container for the words of another—a fantasy that proves disappointing in its execution. Della Porta’s head is a kind of automaton, capable neither of adding to the words it “hears” nor emitting them of its own

7 The brazen head is a common motif in histories and romances in and beyond della Porta’s time; see Todd Borlik for a summary of its use by writers ranging temporally from William of Malmesbury to Cervantes (129-31).

128 volition. Leaving aside the factual impossibility of the experiment,8 this head faces a greater problem left similarly unconsidered: it inevitably preserves the mispronunciations, wavering or cracking voices, and factual mistakes that are put into it for future listeners. Greene’s head, conversely, seems to possess a will and an ability to deliver words and build walls beyond Friar Bacon’s own. It contains a demonic voice that is not Bacon’s, but which ought to impress scholars and carry out its labours as its creator demands. As I will discuss further below, Measure for Measure’s multiple substitutions are epitomized by another talking-head figure: Ragozine, whose severed head participates in a chain of gruesome substitutions. Unlike the brazen heads in these other texts, Ragozine’s head is wordless; what unites Shakespeare with Della Porta and Greene is, rather, their shared interest in failures of aural doubling, in forms of disruption, miscommunication, and loss of control that link the physical properties of sound (doubling/echoic, chaotic, ephemeral, difficult to contain) and the figurative properties of speech (similarly repeatable, but also unreliable as it passes from speaker to speaker). As I will explore further below, the embarrassments that arise from failed efforts to give and preserve speech obtain regardless of the degree of perfection with which a talking head can repeat the words that suffuse it.

The “logic of deferral”

Although the actual act of filling a metal body with sound remained a dubious fantasy (both practically and morally), other, more figurative forms of vocal preservation and representation were common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bacon’s image of the vain Narcissus, who surrounds himself in obscurity with Echo-like sycophants who repeat his sentiments, constitutes a mocking refashioning of a common phenomenon. The act of speaking not just for but as someone else as if embodying their voice was in fact a

8 Della Porta comments that he has not actually tried this experiment (Bb1r). Still, his name appears among a list of natural magicians whom Walter Charleton derides for their “insolent” practice of “Phonocamptical Magick” (Ee1v). (The term “Magick” for Charleton is a pejorative one; it signifies not experimentation on the boundaries of the natural—as in the field of “natural magic,” of which della Porta is himself a practitioner—but ignorance that gives rise to impossible sonic fantasies.)

129 quintessentially Renaissance experience, as was the act of attending to someone speaking as such. Holger Schott Syme opens Theatre and Testimony with an account of a typical performance of mediated speech: a man wearing “a simple black robe or an elaborate gown of office” describes past events (a crime, a meeting between kings, a supernatural phenomenon…) to his listeners while maintaining that “the words are not his at all, but belong to another, absent voice” (1), such as that of a monarch, plaintiff, or poet. Syme describes this event as an everyday feature of the public performance of speech in spaces as varied as public squares, courts of law, and Shakespeare’s stage. Speaking as another is, ideally, “a representational act that diminishes the real presence of the man’s body and makes it almost less palpable than that of the voices that come to inhabit his mouth,” so that “An act of embodied mimesis results in a momentary presence effect” (1). The magistrate who speaks royal proclamations or presents depositional narratives is not wholly synonymous with his monarch or his plaintiffs, as evidenced in the need for supporting documents (e.g. royal writs, signed depositions, scripts) that authenticate his speech; at the same time, the “presence effect” is predicated on these supports as signs of authenticity.

Syme refers to this back-and-forth relationship between presence and absence, representative and authority, as “a logic of deferral,” and argues that “authority-through- transmission or mediation” is a broader cultural trope (9). When a speaker—whether a Justice of the Peace reciting a deposition in court, the Lord Keeper speaking on behalf of Elizabeth I, Portia speaking on behalf of Bellario, or an actor reciting Angelo’s lines on the stage—draws listeners’ attention to who they are not by gesturing to their authenticating sources, they reinforce the impression that they embody the voice of this authority even as this voice audibly proceeds from a visibly different body. Measure for Measure is especially concerned with these relations of authority-through-transmission as they center on Duke Vincentio, who evinces an obsessive concern for his body as an object of scrutiny and mischaracterization, and who looks to others’ representational acts as a solution to his uneasiness regarding self-display. Hence his insistence to Escalus, “I love the people, / But do not like to stage me to their eyes” (1.1.67-8), and his later lament that “false eyes” watch him and misrepresent his conduct in rumours (4.1.56). Vincentio attempts to circumvent such abuses by appointing Angelo to speak for him,

130 thus turning from vision toward audition, and from presentation toward representation; his plan will remove his own body from public display, and instead achieve an authoritative aural “presence effect” in the body of his deputy.

Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice inherently stage this presence effect in the bodies of the actors who play out Shakespeare’s scripts, but it is also central to characters’ self-conscious acting within the world of each play. The “logic of deferral,” this gesturing toward an absent source, rather than the disguise itself, is in fact what enables Portia to come successfully to Antonio’s aid in the guise of a young male lawyer. Portia’s adherence to classical prescriptions for orators in court is itself a reiterative gesture toward authorizing sources;9 other audible elements of her performance at Antonio’s trial at once solidify and complicate her visible disguise, both on and beyond the stage. Portia tells Nerissa that she knows of the “raw tricks of … bragging Jacks” and will “practice” them in putting on her disguise (3.4.77-8): she will, for instance, boast of youthful masculine fighting and lovemaking and, in so doing, “speak between the change of man and boy / With a reed voice” (3.4.65-6). Portia thus recognizes masculinity as performative, while also giving a metatheatrical nod to the body of the boy actor— potentially an aspiring “bragging Jack” himself—who takes up the role and voice of this character.10 Portia acknowledges the possibility that the actor playing this role might experience a loss of control over the youthful pitch, and possibly also the pubescent cracking, of his voice. She also suggests that any audible wavering between youthful and manly speech could be a deliberate show within the fiction of her cross-dressing. Her declaration anticipates a moment when the imperfect relationship between the play’s script (and its call for a female speaker) and the boy actor’s vocal performance thereof becomes audible. The mismatch at once disrupts a theatrical illusion and reinforces

9 See especially Quentin Skinner’s remarks on Portia’s performance (220–5). 10 I draw, here, on Gina Bloom’s Voice in Motion for my discussion of Portia’s voice. In the chapter “Squeaky Voices” (21–65), Bloom explores the Renaissance dramatization of “Male mastery over the physiological production of the voice” as well as losses of this mastery (54), ultimately arguing that “voice blatantly upsets gender dichotomies” (63). Bloom’s discussion of boy actors focuses chiefly on the figure of the “crack,” a term that denotes lively young men and hints at their “cracking” pubescent voices (42). The term “crack” is never used in The Merchant of Venice—which may explain why Bloom does not discuss Portia’s boyish voice here—but Portia’s desire to brag and vocally waver seems of a piece with Bloom’s broader analysis of similar disruptions of gender dichotomies.

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Portia-as-character’s disguise as a marker of young masculine identity within this illusion, making her performance as Bellario’s apprentice all the more credible.

Bellario himself argues that “Balthasar” possesses an education of his own that “better[s]” the judgements that Bellario has supplied, thus empowering Portia not simply to repeat his sentiments but also to build upon and enhance them. Portia’s audience at court indeed seems to assume that it is Balthasar’s “better[ing]” of Bellario’s opinions (and not simply Bellario’s opinions in themselves) that decides the outcome of Shylock’s case against Antonio. Tellingly, when Portia-as-Balthasar initially sides with Shylock in the matter of the pound of flesh, Shylock refers to her as “A Daniel come to judgement” and a “wise young judge” (4.1.218). His allusion to the apocryphal story of Daniel’s judgement of Susanna casts Portia’s argument that the court cannot alter the terms of the bond as both a rigid upholding of the law and a moment of enlightened rebellion against the tyrannical authority of Portia’s elders,11 who would grant Antonio an undue and, from Shylock’s perspective, illegal mercy. When Portia subsequently reverses her judgement, Graziano mockingly takes up the terms of Shylock’s praise (“Oh upright judge! / … O learnèd judge!” [4.1.307-8]), again underscoring this judge’s individual learning and interpretive capacities without any apparent reliance on the authority in whose place she claims to speak. Portia’s pretense at speaking as a passive vessel for Bellario’s legal learning may establish her credibility, but this pretense rapidly falls away through the court’s appreciation of her individual ingenuity. Portia cultivates signs both audible and visible that she is a lawyer’s apprentice. Yet, even the imperfections of her doubling voice and her potential differences of judicial opinion—her departures from a purely echoic relationship with Bellario—contribute to her convincing performance as not just a substitute but also as a speaker who supplements Bellario’s judgements.

11 In Daniel 13, two elders proposition Susanna in private; when she refuses their advances, they publicly accuse her of promiscuity and sentence her to death. God inspires Daniel, however, to intervene: he reveals that the elders have borne false witness and condemns them. The story ends with the elders’ execution in Susanna’s place. Shylock’s exclamations thus cast him as another Susanna who awaits Balthasar’s Daniel- like intervention.

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Supplements and substitutes

This supplementary relationship is also Duke Vincentio’s stated goal when he appoints Angelo as his deputy in Measure for Measure. This play is, however, even more explicitly and pervasively concerned than The Merchant of Venice with patterns of substitution, and its characters often express a sense of unease about the power and consequences of such substitutions. Vincentio’s investment of his voice in the body of another emerges as a questionable abdication of speech and, with it, power. I noted above that Vincentio asks Escalus, “What figure of us think you [Angelo] will bear?” (1.1.16). The metaphor seems to cast Angelo as a passive vessel for another man’s (or an abstract legal entity’s) imperatives. Yet, in describing Angelo as “bear[ing]” his figure, Vincentio also takes up a metaphor of pregnancy that accords Angelo himself a degree of formative force. Women’s capacity to impress their own sensations and passions upon developing fetuses, potentially producing children who were visibly marked and marred by grotesque feminine imaginings, was in fact proverbial;12 Vincentio conflates ducal and parental anxieties, using the unstable metaphor of pregnancy to highlight his lack of control over the ways in which his substitute will speak in his absence.

One of Angelo’s first acts as the substitute duke is to apprehend Claudio on a charge of fornication whose penalty is execution. Claudio suspects that Angelo refuses to exercise mercy in a legally grey situation in order to set an example (1.2.142-8); Angelo, meanwhile, repeatedly echoes Vincentio’s insistence that legal judgements “Live in [his] tongue and heart,” but does so in order to profess a lack of agency. He thus explains the situation to Claudio’s sister Isabella and adds, “It is the law, not I, condemn your brother” (2.2.82), and later refers to himself as “the voice of the recorded law” as he “Pronounce[s] a sentence on [Claudio’s] life” (2.4.61-2). Angelo professes to be a

12 See, e.g., Crooke, who observes, “We reade that in the precinct of Pisa, a woman brought foorth a female childe full of haire like the haire of a Camell, because (saith the Author) she was wont to kneele before the picture of Iohn Baptist, cloathed in Camels haire” (Cc6v). For an account of Platonic and Aristotelian theories of the imagination’s influence on conception, and their reception in Renaissance Europe, see Katharine Park’s discussion of the maternal imagination and other feminine contributions to generation in Secrets of Women (141–50), as well as Marie Hélène Huet’s catalogue of Renaissance theories on the connection between women’s imagination and birthmarks, birth defects, and monstrosity (13–35).

133 helpless vessel for judicial pronunciations, however, in the midst of a series of willful and illicit sexual propositions to Isabella. Just before insisting upon the absoluteness of the law’s decree, he asks Isabella, Which had you rather: that the most just law Now took your brother’s life, or, to redeem him, Give up your body to such sweet uncleanness As she that he hath stained? (2.4.52-5) Once again, it is “the law” rather than Angelo that will kill Claudio. He subsequently asks her, “Might there not be a charity in sin / To save this brother’s life?” (2.4.63-4), again casting mercy as an object of sexual exchange. These questions disingenuously tailor the conversation to Isabella’s sensibilities. Angelo reframes his proposals in terms of Christ- like self-sacrifice, redemption, and charity: acts that should rightly be his own to grant under the terms of his tongue’s investment with both “mortality and mercy,” but which he perversely offers to Isabella instead. Portia’s feigned wavering between judgements in The Merchant of Venice hints, in both the content and the cracking of her speech, at the ease with which vocal signifiers of authority may be cultivated and manipulated. Angelo’s citation of his authenticating sources in Measure for Measure—his claim to speak helplessly on behalf of both Vincentio and the “recorded law” on fornication while propositioning Isabella—is a fuller realization of the persuasive and subversive potential of the talking head as a figure of vocal representation and dubious repetition.

Vincentio, still in his friar’s habit, intervenes before Angelo can execute his plans; in the process, he performs another act of substitution by which one head replaces another in a most literal sense. When Angelo calls for Claudio’s hasty execution, Vincentio hopes to save Claudio by having the Provost substitute the head of Barnardine, a long-time resident of the Venetian jail, for that of Claudio. As Vincentio puts it, “death’s a great disguiser, and you may add to it” (4.2.162): if the Provost shaves Barnardine’s head and beard, the head will look sufficiently like Claudio’s to enable the substitution. This plot is complicated, however, by Barnardine’s drunken refusal to consent to his own death, and so by his refusal to participate in the play’s exhaustive patterns of substitution. Fortunately, the Provost reveals that a pirate named Ragozine, “A man of Claudio’s years” with a “beard and head / Just of his colour” (4.3.64-5), has recently died in the

134 prison; the closer resemblance between the two men ensures that Ragozine’s head will be an easier substitute when the Provost delivers it to Angelo. Ragozine’s severed head, unlike the talking heads of Bacon or della Porta, cannot speak for itself in any literal sense. Indeed, what makes it so effective as a substitute for Claudio’s head is its combination of speechless openness to deceptive signification; the Provost’s words and the head’s features determine its identity for the deputy duke. The pirate’s head thus seems to present Angelo with the realization of his desires and imperatives, while in actuality leading him astray.

There is a kind of cynicism inherent to Measure for Measure’s substitutions of bodies and heads that is not strongly present in The Merchant of Venice, where the chief act of talking-head substitution (that of Portia for Bellario at court) saves Antonio through a successful verbal fulfillment and bettering of an absent authority’s intentions. In Measure for Measure, Vincentio’s shame and his desire to avoid scandal motivate him unwisely to appoint Angelo as his substitute. Angelo, meanwhile, expresses desires that are troublingly non-specific in their objects and which leave him vulnerable to the substitutive tricks that structure the play’s plot: he readily accepts Ragozone’s severed head as Claudio’s, and also—as I will discuss further below—takes Mariana’s equally silent body for that of Isabella during the bed trick.13 As Alexander Leggatt observes, however, “The substitutions that are central to the plot are all, in various ways, unsatisfying”: Angelo “fail[s] to perform adequately” as the substitute duke (344), Mariana’s silent performance in the bed trick fools Angelo yet does not move him to call off Claudio’s execution, and Barnardine simply refuses to perform. Barnardine’s refusal, especially, “appears as an obstinate refusal to enter into the representational strategies either of the Duke or of the play itself” (Griffiths 562). Barnardine’s defiance is the most explicit form of resistance to Measure for Measure’s strategies of substitution, but the

13 Angelo’s indifference potentially speaks to the broader indifference of the law itself in the play. As Huw Griffiths puts it, “the desire of the law for a body upon which to work is a desire that is satisfied with resemblance rather than identity, just as happy to work with a stand-in as with the real thing”; “In order to produce sovereign justice, a body is needed, and that body needs to be amenable to being made to mean something: a mediated body” (562)—hence the ease with which Vincentio and the Provost discuss potential substitutes for Claudio.

135 imperfect performances of other characters—and especially of Angelo and Mariana— incorporate alternatives to the talking-head model of mediation. In their scenes of verbal sparring, these characters participate in forms of conversation in which echoic, mediating speech becomes a tool for defiance and, especially, for the fulfillment of vicious desires.

II: Echoes of Narcissus

Dubious echoes

Angelo insists that he speaks with the voice of the law, but his appeals to Isabella draw incessant attention to his own desires. His misuse of the language of the law thus renders him another kind of echoic figure: a descendent of the Ovidian Echo, who is cursed with the ability to speak only by repeating others’ words, but who nevertheless finds ways to assert her desires to Narcissus. Echo’s reiteration of Narcissus’s speeches in Golding’s translation, especially, allows her to relentlessly attribute these desires to her speeches’ unwilling source. Narcissus runs from Echo, declaring, “I first will die ere thou shalt take of me thy pleasure”; Echo “aunswer[s] nothing else thereto, but take of me thy pleasure” (F4v). Echo is, like the bronze head, a body that takes in the words of another, but she is also a consciously disingenuous speaker who adopts others’ words and uses repetition to refigure their significance. With her imitation comes, indeed, an imperative: her echo becomes a demand that Narcissus recognize within himself the desire that Echo feels, and so take the pleasure that is offered to him. Echo’s response to Narcissus thus perversely attributes her own amorous pursuit to the boy; the significance of his protests (and his pronouns) is dramatically altered through their partial reiteration through another body.

A similar linguistic playfulness inheres in Renaissance treatments of twisted and fragmentary echoic speech. The graveyard echo in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is a disembodied voice that takes up and repeats fragments of Antonio’s lines, lending his

136 words a new predictive significance through omission.14 More loosely, the echo becomes a force of erotic subversion on the tongue of Sidney’s Astrophil, who echoes Stella’s own repetitive denials of his advances (“No, no”) in order to argue “That in one speech two negatives affirm” (Astrophil and Stella 63.14). The echo becomes infamously productive of sexual tragedy when it is taken up by Shakespeare’s Iago, who inflames Othello’s jealousy by provocatively echoing fragments of Othello’s speeches.15 The nymph Echo is also moralized, as in Sandys’s translation of the Metamorphoses, as a figure of “self- love” that “converts into a sound; that is, into nothing” (N2r).16 Sandys’s devaluation of echoic repetition—and indeed of sound in general—as insubstantial noise, dangerous self-obsession, and “nothing” renders Echo an auditory counterpart to Narcissus’s fruitless visual self-obsession. His moralization resonates, likewise, with Astrophil and Iago, both of whom repeat fragments of others’ speeches in order to deliver scandalous insinuations to self-serving ends.

Not every instance in which words pass from body to body is productive of subversion or error. Indeed, Echo’s repetitive speech is in some contexts valorized as a figure for the imitatio tradition, while alternative myths enable readings of Echo as Philosophy or as a tenth member of the classical muses.17 Bacon notably identifies her in The Wisdom of the

14 Antonio declares, “Echo, I will not talk with thee, / For thou art a dead thing,” to which the echo responds, “Thou art a dead thing” (5.3.38-9). Webster’s audience is teased with the possibility that the echo is the voice of the deceased Duchess, whose concerned ghost provides warnings that Antonio does not heed. 15 Consider Othello’s Iago, who, as I noted above, shapes Othello’s reactions to innocuous spectacles simply by repeating his victim’s own significant words See especially the words “honest” and “think,” which Iago provokes Othello to load with suspicious significance through echoic repetition in 3.3.105-12. (“By heaven, thou echo’st me / As if there were some monster in thy thought” [3.3.110-11], Othello muses.) Iago not only engineers deceptive spectacles for Othello to witness, but also positions himself as the sole source of Othello’s judgements thereupon, entrapping him in exclusive and repetitive conversations. Speech circulates between characters who become “locked in a stifling exchange of recycled, poisonous speech that works upon Othello's own passions” without any other voices that might interrogate or deny Iago’s claims (Deutermann 54). 16 Sandys also, however, breaks off this moralization to express his wonder at an “artificiall device under ground” at the Tuileries that can “repeate a verse, not lowdly uttered, without failing in one sillable” (N2r- v). As in della Porta, speech may be insubstantial, but it is nevertheless the object of intense natural scientific curiosity. 17 On which see especially Judith Deitch, who summarizes these Echo traditions (229–32). Deitch notes two broad alternative strands of Echo traditions: Echo as connected to the muses, to pastoral poetry, and to “antique modes” of poetry; and Echo as she appears in Ovid as a figure of “effete and epigonic reiteration” (230).

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Ancients not as Narcissus’s spurned lover but as Pan’s wife and as a praiseworthy figure of repetition. Working from the assumption that the name “Pan” suggests the “all” of the world, he comments that Echo, who can only repeat what is spoken to her, is an ideal wife for “the World or Nature,” which “doth enioy it selfe, and in it selfe all things els” (B6v). Echo conveys a Baconian scientific ideal: “that alone is true philosophy, which doth faithfully render the very words of the world, … it being nothing els but the image or reflection of it, not adding any thing of its owne, but onely iterates and resounds” (B7r). Bacon’s Echo, who can only repeat what is given to her, thus represents a perfect philosophy based on accurate reiteration and representation.18 She provides a verbal parallel to Narcissus’s reflected shadow, but one in which vanity and self-obsession are metamorphosed into both outward-looking inquiry and admirable self-knowledge.

Bacon is by no means univocal in his interpretation of Echo’s significance. If Echo represents perfect knowledge, she also potentially represents the idle chatter of questionably useful philosophical discourse: “vaine and idle paradoxes” are among her all-encompassing reflections (B7r-v). I would contend, however, that the more ambivalent portrayals of talking heads and parroting nymphs generally share a common interest in sonic repetition not as an abstraction (Echo-as-Philosophy) or in terms of inanimate containment (echoes in bronze heads), but as an audible phenomenon and as a process of reiteration by a voice that belongs to a particular body with its own passionate inclinations, fallibilities, and agendas.19 The body, though conceived by natural scientists

18 Compare Macrobius, who describes Echo as “the darling of Inuus [i.e. Pan],” one of multiple sun-figures in the Saturnalia. For Macrobius, the sun’s “nature … is to make dark the things that are bright and withdraw them from our sight and to give light to things that are in darkness and bring them before our eyes” (147). Note here, as in Plato (as discussed in the Introduction), the equation of light with knowledge and shadow/darkness with a state of ignorance. Echo in the Saturnalia is a figure of divine mystery, and indeed unknowability, in contrast with Bacon’s figure of reflection and knowledge. For Macrobius, she is “the symbol of the harmony of the heavens—and this harmony is dear to the sun as the ruler of all the spheres whence the harmony is born—a harmony, however, which can never be perceived by our senses” (148). 19 Deitch similarly cautions against “mov[ing] too quickly from girl to abstraction” (230), particularly in discussions of the Ovidian Echo, whose speech Deitch characterizes as “excessive, skilled, and put to immoral purpose” even before she is cursed (232). In Sandys’s translation of the Metamorphoses, Narcissus demands, “Is any nigh?” to which Echo replies, “I” (L3r). As Bloom notes, Sandys might have translated “nigh” and “I” as “here, here”—the terms appear in the middle of a line and so need not rhyme— but instead his Echo “declares her personhood using the grammatical signifier of subjectivity” and so “represent[s] aural reverberations as Echo’s self-expression” (“Disembodied” 131); Sandys’s Echo may be

138 anatomically as a passive receiver of sound, is not a neutral surface into which speech sinks or from which words simply rebound. To vocally double someone is, potentially, to take up and make known their intentions at a physical and temporal distance. Such doubling is potentially also, however, a means to make one’s own desires and judgements known while claiming to repeat the words of another, as Shakespeare’s Portia and Angelo so aptly prove in their respective legal pronouncements.

Echo defiantly twists the significance of Narcissus’s questions and protests, while Narcissus himself resists the attempts at echoic seduction that result from these rhetorical twists. Both failures of speech to move the mind of its recipient as intended are surprising within a rhetorical culture that renders the ear, with its always-open and receptive nature, a site of ethical concern. As Bloom observes, Protestant sermons often “privilege the ear as the holiest of bodily organs” (Voice 118), and identify “Proper hearing” as a process of “actively working to absorb the seed of God’s Word through one’s ears” (120). They also exhibit, however, an ambivalence about audition that centers on the ear’s physiological inability to discriminate between good speech and bad, and on the impact that this anatomical deficiency might have upon the ways in which vulnerable listeners spoke in turn. God is not the only speaker whose words might penetrate the ear, and with the ear’s always-openness comes the possibility that the mind itself might be similarly undiscerning—that it might, in other words, take up others’ vicious words for itself. John Donne thus preaches, “take heed what you hear; for certainely, the Devil doth not cast in more snares at the eye of man, then at the eare” (qtd. in Bloom, Voice 113). Although much of this devilish influence involves the physical manipulation of humours or spirits and the alteration of the mind, the devil is also characterized by passions-writers as a purveyor of wicked “suggestions” who “propound[s] Vertue as a most bitter object” (Wright Y5v).

disembodied, but she is not an abstraction. In William Caxton’s translation, Echo lacks this declaration of personhood, but, in the subsequent moralization, she becomes a figure for two forms of moral failure. First, Echo signifies the “good renomee,” i.e. good reputation, that hides vice “by the shadowe of theyre fals dyssymylacion” (141)—another shadow/echo intersection in which dissimulating speech obscures a vicious nature. Second, in relation to Narcissus, she is a figure for the “grete renomee & fame” that Narcissus rejects in his pride (142). In both figurations, Caxton’s Echo remains a fallible individual rather than an abstract figure for poetic tradition.

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This concern for devilish influence is also apparent within critiques of popular theatrical culture, in which the theatre is often conceived as a vehicle for lascivious speech that encourages playgoers to take up staged vices for themselves. Playwrights’ words were acted out on the stage by players whose bodies and voices were invested with the words of their scripts as another kind of presence effect, while staged conversations filled the receptive ears, and so the minds, of playgoers who were tacitly encouraged to imitate the vices they thus absorbed. As I noted in the Introduction, William Prynne draws on the shadow’s mimetic associations in his tirade against the stage in Histriomastix: The shadow of a knave hurts an honest man; the sent of a Stewes an honest Matron; and the shew of Theaters a simple gazer, &c. … There set they abroach strange consorts of melody to tickle the eare; costly apparell to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to ravish the sence; and wanton speech, to whet desire to inordinate lust. These by the privy entries of the eare slip downe into the heart, and with gunshot of affection gaule the minde where reason and affection should rule the roste... (Kkk2v) For Prynne, imitation is a force of seduction. The “shadow” of a knave in the street or on the stage suggests an imperfect or fleeting representation, something that is glimpsed only briefly yet which is capable of harming the observer. It also suggests a dark reflection of the self: the knave and the actor are not necessarily like an honest man, yet the honest man comes to be like them through imitation. These comparisons, Prynne acknowledges, are not his own: he cites them from Stephen Gosson’s 1579 Schoole of Abuse.20 Prynne’s and Gosson’s shared conception of the theatre’s charms posits the visually spectacular aspects of performance as productive of immoderate passions; yet, this passage, especially, gives equal weight to the penetrative auditory aspects of the theatre. Borrowing the anatomists’ understanding of the ear’s receptivity, Prynne-via- Gosson argues that staged songs and “wanton speech” “slip” through the ears into the heart to raise uncontrollable lust and other vicious passions.

20 See Gosson, Schoole B6v.

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The assumption underlying anti-theatrical texts like Prynne’s and Gosson’s is that there is something darkly compelling, even infectious, about the ways in which vicious actors speak. In a dark version of Echo’s curse to repeat only what others speak to her, playgoers cannot help but imitate the scandalous actions and words that they see and hear. I have dwelled at length upon Echo in this context because her striking variety of incarnations suggests a broader ambivalence toward verbal doubling that informs my reading of Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice: echoing in Ovid as in Shakespeare is rarely a matter of straightforward, compulsive repetition. Echo’s twinned capacities for perfect reiteration and disingenuous self-expression speak readily to the relations between compelling speakers and vulnerable listeners in both plays. With this figure in mind, then, I return now to Angelo and Portia, but also turn to these characters’ performative efforts to produce sonic reflections of themselves and their own desires in listeners who do not always respond in perfectly echoic ways.

Shakespeare’s bad listeners

Sexual scandal is never allowed to flourish in The Merchant of Venice in the same way that it does in Measure for Measure, but its characters express a strong concern for the pernicious effects of subtle sensory shows. As in Prynne, most of The Merchant of Venice’s characters adhere to an implicitly Christian judgemental framework that privileges the inward and the spiritual, and which conversely encourages suspicious responses to beguiling sensory shows.21 This framework lies, especially, behind the casket game that Portia’s father has posthumously established to determine Portia’s husband, and which Bassanio reasons his way into winning. It is possible for Portia to abuse her position as the executor of her father’s will, much as Angelo abuses his status

21 Shylock is the obvious exception. To be clear, there is also a tendency toward hypocrisy among Shakespeare’s Christian characters regarding this system of binaries. Modes of thinking that privilege inwardness over outward shows, charity over wealth, mercy over punishment, and New Testament over Old rapidly break down in the face of convenience and desire—as, for instance, in Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia’s dowry, but also in the trial scene, in which Portia exploits a legal loophole in order to punish Shylock after repeatedly stressing the value of mercy.

141 as the voice of the law, and much as Portia herself will later capitalize on her status as Bellario’s substitute: she may, subverting her father’s orders, simply tell her preferred suitor which casket is the correct one. Yet, her stated devotion to the game—“the will of a living daughter [is] curbed by the will of a dead father” (1.2.21-2), she insists (and laments) to Nerissa—is such that critics tend to resist readings of her conduct toward Bassanio in Act 3 that would cast it as a form of subtle cheating.

As Erin Minear notes, however, Portia’s song seems to offer Bassanio a verbal hint in its initial end rhymes:22 Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head? How begot, how nourishèd? Reply, reply. It is engendered in the eyes, With gazing fed; and fancy dies In the cradle where it lies… (3.2.63-9) The rhymes “bred,” “head,” and “nourished” all rhyme with “lead,” subtly gesturing toward a further rhyme that will constitute another echoic “reply,” an alternative to the inadequate eyes, that the song seeks from Bassanio. Minear concedes that there are no obvious “semantic associations” between the rhymed terms in the first part of the song and the answer to which they allegedly point (44), so that the rhyme itself constitutes the only meaningful connection between the terms.23 In response to protests that this attempt at cheating does not fit with Portia’s character, or that Shakespeare’s audience was unlikely to notice the too-subtle hint, Minear argues that “the rhyming ‘hints’ correspond so closely to the way Shakespeare works in general. Words are always reminding characters of other words” (43).24 Recall Puttenham’s insistence in the Arte upon the

22 See especially Minear 43. For an expanded account of debates surrounding Portia’s song up to 1963, see Peter Seng’s summary (36–43), which Minear here cites. 23 The song itself also answers its own question in the second stanza, lyrically precluding a response from Bassanio. 24 Recall that traducio—the translacer—as Puttenham, especially, defines it relies on auditory resonances to create connections and meanings. Greenblatt’s definition, which focuses chiefly on figurative resonances,

142 importance to successful oration of “slipper words and sillables” that are easily formed by the tongue and which “breedeth to th’eare a great compassion” (L2v). The potential compassion-breeding effect of Portia’s song is largely independent of any recognition of the words’ significance. It is thus meant to enter Bassanio’s ears and influence his subsequent speech in a way that does not require him to grapple with the specific significance of words like “bred” and “nourished,” but instead to participate in their audible pattern.

Portia’s subtly significant sounds do not, however, move her suitor’s passions and judgements in precisely the intended manner. Minear’s description of the song casts its reception as an ideal of listening in which Bassanio recognizes that words themselves are sonically significant, and allows them to push him through auditory connections between thematically unrelated terms. I would, however, qualify Minear’s reading somewhat, for Bassanio himself does not seem to listen to the song or take up its imperative as Portia might hope. The potential value of inattention to sound, against the implicit demand to attend made by the cheating song, is in fact one of the subjects of Bassanio’s response. Immediately after the song ends, Bassanio comments, “So may the outward shows be least themselves. / The world is still deceived with ornament” (3.2.73-4). Bassanio lists, among other offenses, the “tainted and corrupt” plea “seasoned with a gracious voice” (3.2.75-6), heresy hidden “with fair ornament” in text (3.2.80), a vicious man who hides his nature with “Some mark of virtue on his outward parts” (3.2.82), and “beauty … purchased by the weight” (3.2.88-9). These are all instances in which the impression of a desirable quality is “engendered,” as Portia’s servants put it, in a perceiver by appeals to the senses that veil the truths of speakers’ identities and intentions.

Bassanio, who chooses the lead casket, arrives at the right choice by rejecting the sensory “season[ing]” that makes the gold and silver caskets appealing but which also forms the hint in Portia’s song. Bassanio thus listens for the ethical imperative that is embedded in the song’s figurative content rather than attending to its sonic imperative: he recognizes

speaks more clearly to, for instance, Macbeth’s omnipresent echoes of witchy speech than it does to the auditory echoes in Portia’s song here.

143 the song’s associations between the faulty “fancy” engendered by looking and the death of this fancy in the “cradle” (read: casket) upon which it mistakenly settles. When he finally pronounces the word “lead,” then, Bassanio identifies the casket as “thou meagre lead, / Which rather threaten’st than dost promise aught” and insists, “Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence” (3.2.105-7). In making his choice, he chooses rightly, but does so through a form of critical listening and judgement that rejects both the empty promises of visual splendor and the uncertain significance of auditory eloquence. Even in close, relatively private quarters, and in conversation with a woman and her attendants whose favour (and finances) Bassanio explicitly desires, Bassanio thus strips others’ voices of their coercive power. Measure for Measure’s Isabella is a successor to Bassanio in her own verbal relations with others: in her adamant refusal of bodily temptations, and in her alleged refusal to listen at key conversational moments to a speaker who strives to create reflections and expressions of his desires in the body of another.

Conversation and seduction

Claudio and Lucio arrange for Isabella to discuss Claudio’s sexual transgressions with Angelo in a private audience. The situation constitutes a piling-up of dangerous topics, places, and participants for conversation; indeed, the term “conversation” could itself be taken in the period to refer to the sexual act that Angelo hopes will proceed out of their exchange. “Conversation” bears a wide range of connotations beyond its dialogic one for Renaissance ears, including commerce, intimacy, familiar speech, self-comportment, and sexual activity. This last usage hints at contemporary assumptions—and anxieties—in surrounding the entanglement of erotic desire and sex with other forms of interpersonal intimacy and exchange identified as “conversation.”25 The mingling of sex, commerce,

25 On these connotations, see OED “conversation,” especially n. 3, 2, 7.a., and 6. Women were assumed to be complicit in the sexualized entanglement of conversational connotations as speakers whose words might not simply express desire, but also indicated in themselves a woman’s openness to other forms of “conversation.” As Katherine Larson notes, “Conversation, particularly conversation transpiring between men and women … tapped into popular anxieties concerning the speaking woman, whose words were assumed to herald an unchecked sexual appetite” (30). On the stage, Larson points, for instance, to

144 and conversation lurks subtly behind the comedic plot of The Merchant of Venice; it is present, especially, in lines from Bassanio that rapidly shift back and forth between Portia’s physical, moral, and monetary assets as objects of desire.26 In Measure for Measure, however, this entanglement becomes explicit and pervasive. It exists in the sub- plot involving Mistress Overdone and her brothel,27 inheres in Claudio’s descriptions of his crime,28 and it informs Angelo’s proposed exchange of sex for mercy. After his first conversation with Isabella, Angelo complains in an aside, “She speaks, and ’tis such sense / That my sense breeds with it” (2.2.144-5). The pregnancy metaphor reiterates Vincentio’s own ambivalent figuration of his words’ ambiguous rebirth in another’s body, but here also stresses an ironic reversal of the expected relations between himself and Isabella as impregnating and pregnant: Isabella’s words, Angelo claims, penetrate his body and “breed” desires within it that will lead him to propose the exchange of Isabella’s virginity for Claudio’s life. Isabella is adamantly chaste in her conversation with Angelo, yet intimations of her sexuality are thrust upon her speech by the men who engage her in conversation and explicitly draw connections between speech and sexuality.

There is nothing especially odd about the way in which privacy emboldens Angelo to reveal his desires, but the increasingly vivid and violent erotic imagery that suffuses Isabella and Angelo’s exchanges passes between the two characters. This movement constitutes a form of echoing that is generally not recognized by the characters themselves, but which instead serves to hint to audiences at the insidious ease with which

Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, in which Herod accuses his wife of infidelity because he conflates her “verbal openness” with sexual availability (30). 26 See especially Bassanio’s first speech on his plan to pursue Portia: “In Belmont is a lady richly left, / And she is fair, and, fairer than that word, / Of wondrous virtues” (1.1.161-3), he tells Antonio. His praise blurs Portia’s monetary wealth, beauty, and virtue. 27 See, e.g., Pompey’s consolation to Mistress Overdone upon hearing the news that her brothel must close: “good counsellors lack no clients: though you change your place, you need not change your trade” (1.2.87- 9). Pompey draws a comparison between the work of a bawd, which he elevates to the status of a commercial trade, and a lawyer’s skilled use of legal discourse. 28 Note, for example, Claudio’s initial hesitation even to name what he has done: “but to speak of [it] would offend again” (1.2.115), he declares, equating speech itself with fornication. Claudio later describes his relations with Juliet as “The stealth of our most mutual entertainment” and the pregnancy itself as evidence “With character too gross … writ on Juliet” (1.2.131-2), rendering conception itself a matter of both private enjoyment and uncontrollably communicative bodily signs.

145 words slip between speakers in the midst of more overt—and overtly resisted—attempts at influence and persuasion. Isabella articulates a relatively benign, hopeful version of the subtle movement of significance earlier in Act 2 when, after describing Christ’s sacrifice to Angelo, she reminds the deputy, “O, think on that, / And mercy then will breathe within your lips” (2.2.79-80). Mercy, a quality endorsed by Isabella, ideally becomes an implanted thought that will “breathe” from Angelo’s lips in turn as he listens to her and then pronounces Claudio’s exoneration. When this appeal fails, Isabella asks Angelo to search his own heart for desires akin to Claudio’s; if Angelo experiences “A natural guiltiness, such as is his, / Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue / Against my brother’s life” (2.2.142-4). If the appeal to mercy aims to shape Angelo’s conduct with implanted thoughts, this appeal to “natural guiltiness” ideally works by finding a kind of sympathetic echo of itself in the listener’s mind: a recognition of likeness that leaves Angelo too ashamed to prosecute Claudio. Isabella’s pleas are ineffectual, however, in the face of a desire that, doubling down on the sexualization of women’s speech, takes as its fuel the explicitly chaste conversation that comprises Isabella’s pleas and refusals. Angelo does take up some of Isabella’s ideas, but only insofar as his echoes of her pleas further reinforce the perversity of his response. Her invocations of Christ (2.2.74-81), saints (2.2.130), and confession (2.2.141) are meant to foster a tendency toward mercy and self-scrutiny. They provide Angelo, however, with a set of inappropriately sacred imagery that he uses to describe his desires after Isabella leaves their first meeting.

Angelo renders himself neither a sinner who shares Claudio’s shame nor, in Isabella’s phrasing, one of the “Great men [who] may jest with saints” (2.2.130), but a saint himself: a man who, Christ-like, is tempted by a Satanic enemy who has taken a particular interest in Angelo’s unassailable chastity. “O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, / With saints dost bait thy hook” (2.2.184-5), he laments in soliloquy, ironically taking up his victim’s terms to cast himself as the innocent target of a conversational temptation. After his first exchange with Isabella, Angelo thinks of his relations with Isabella as a kind of impregnation, imagining that his heart contains “the strong and swelling evil / Of my conception” (2.4.6-7). Angelo here “says that Isabella's language has penetrated and impregnated him with his own evil desire for her” (Crane, “Pregnancy” 285), thus acknowledging that his body is not quite so “walled off from

146 influence” as he has previously insisted (280). Yet, as Angelo himself figures it, and as in Vincentio’s earlier reference to Angelo’s uncertain bearing of his figure, metaphors of permeability and influence break down in his self-conscious insistence that the conception is not Isabella’s fault, but is rather of his own perverse doing. Like the monstrous imaginings of a pregnant woman, Angelo’s own thoughts (his “conception[s]”) work upon the material of Isabella’s speeches and transform it into a “swelling evil” in defiance of a straightforwardly penetrative understanding of Isabella’s language.

Throughout his attempt at seduction, moreover, Angelo is confronted with Isabella’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the sexual significance of his words, let alone agree to the terms of his sexual exchange. When Angelo encourages her to sin on Claudio’s behalf, Isabella refigures her desire for Claudio’s pardon and her request that Angelo go against the decree of law to grant it as if they are really the “sin[s]” to which Angelo refers, and for which she will take responsibility and pray for forgiveness (2.4.69-73). As Angelo’s speech grows more explicit, Isabella insists that she has “no tongue but one” and entreats him to “speak the former language” (2.4.139-40), hinting that she understands the terms of his offer while encouraging him to return to the subject of justice and charity without the sexual connotations that he has introduced. Isabella’s response stresses the failure of Angelo’s words to penetrate her ears and mind: she claims, in identifying her “tongue” as monolingual, to be unable to translate Angelo’s speeches on “sweet uncleanness” into meaningful statements, let alone reciprocate the desire they express. Instead, whether, as Angelo puts it, Isabella is sexually “ignorant” or simply “seem[s] so craftily” (2.4.74-5), she persistently steers the conversation toward chaste significations that are absurd in contrast with the increasing explicitness of Angelo’s proposals.

Whereas Isabella’s saintly rhetoric infiltrated Angelo’s conversation and soliloquizing in 2.2, Angelo’s violent sexual imagery rapidly works its way into Isabella’s speeches in 2.4. Angelo asks Isabella if she would be willing, in order to “fetch [her] brother from the manacles / Of the all-binding law” (2.4.93-4), to “lay down the treasures of [her] body …

147 or else to let him suffer” (2.4.96-7); Isabella responds by repurposing his language of treasure and torture: Th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies, And strip myself to death as to a bed That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield My body up to shame. (2.4.101-4) Much critical attention has been devoted to the extravagant sadomasochism of Isabella’s refusal. Particularly when considered alongside her strange remarks to Claudio about this conversation, her response is easily read as the over-compensatory protestations of a woman who recognizes and cannot wholly repress her sexual desires.29 Without denying the validity of this and similar readings of Isabella’s protestations, I want to suggest that the images of whipping, ruby wounds, and stripped, bed-ridden longing in her speech seem also to be taking up Angelo’s own language of confinement and sexual martyrdom. The enclosed, relatively private space of Angelo’s audience chamber is stifling, as is the one-on-one nature of his conversation with Isabella: the circumstances enable an infectious circulation of air and auditory impressions between speakers.

Angelo’s warning to Isabella against publicly airing the details of this private conversation—“you shall stifle in your own report, / And smell of calumny” (2.4.158- 9)—characterizes the probable response, both on- and off-stage, to her vehement protests of chastity. Merely producing the vibrations of sexual scandal carries, for other listeners, imputations about Isabella’s own sexuality against which she cannot defend herself.30 This is particularly the case on-stage, where these imputations are given force for other

29 It seems cruel of Isabella to tell Claudio that she has refused to trade her virginity for his life. Yet, she does tell him and, when Claudio begs her to reconsider, she responds, “Is’t not a kind of incest to take life / From thine own sister’s shame?” (3.1.140-1), thus equating self-sacrifice with incest. Jessica Slights and Michael Morgan Holmes summarize past psychoanalytic readings of Isabella’s speeches as “indicative of displaced and perverse eroticism” (281). They go on, however, to offer alternative reading that brings to light parallels between Isabella’s speech and women writers in the imitatio Christi tradition, which provided “a way for women to empower themselves in a patriarchal culture” with the language of corporeal torture and martyrdom (281). 30 This is a reprisal of a problem that I identified in Chapter 2 in relation to the “discourse” of Philaster’s Arethusa. The King insists upon Arethusa’s perfect inarticulacy, for, should Arethusa disclose knowledge of her sex or sexuality in conversation, she would hint at sexual appetites that are incompatible with the portrait of chaste virginity that the King strives to establish of her.

148 characters by Angelo’s own denials of misconduct. Yet, the circulation of words, at least in these scenes, is clearly not synonymous with a meaningful transfer of desire from Angelo to Isabella. Whatever assumptions that Angelo might make about the relations between women’s conversation and sexuality, and whatever ambivalence Isabella herself might feel about her impending membership in the repressive sisterhood of Saint Clare, Isabella rejects Angelo’s sexual bargain. Like Angelo does with her images of saints, however, Isabella takes up her opponent’s terms, perversely echoing and amplifying them as a rhetorical strategy in the midst of her statements of opposition. Angelo’s vague visions of “sweet uncleanness” as sexual exchange are given rhetorical force by Isabella in masochistic images that are even more vivid and violent than they are in Angelo’s original usage. Each speaker in Measure for Measure deploys the language of charity, sin, treasure, and torture to dramatically different personal ends. This failure of shared meaning-making stands in contrast with how words and desires are imagined to move the mind to vice by Prynne and his antitheatrical contemporaries: the act of picturing the eroticized images as spoken by another ought to be, but is not, an inevitable spur to the passions that inhere in such images. Yet, Measure for Measure’s imperfect spurring differs also from the failures of moving language in The Merchant of Venice, where unprovocative words work in spite of themselves in the casket scene. Measure for Measure’s Angelo is keenly aware of the provocative significance of Isabella’s words, and indeed uses them, Echo-like, to signify his own passions—yet, also Echo-like, ultimately cannot move the object of his desire to speak as he does.

III: Selfhood and sycophancy

“Good echoes”

Thus far, I have considered two broad strands of echoic speech on the Renaissance stage: first, the vocal “echoes” of representational relations between speakers, which constitute a variation on patterns of rhetorical doubling that I have noted in other plays; and, second, the “echoes” of compelling and compelled speech, by which words—and with them, sometimes, desires—pass between speakers. In both of these forms, there exists a

149 constant tension between the potential for echoic speech to capture and mediate truth, thus fulfilling otherwise impossible desires, and the possibility that perfect reiteration is, in reality, a form of defiance. The disingenuous echo that betrays its originator is thus a complement to the kinds of disingenuous rhetorical shadowing that I have discussed in previous chapters; both forms of the echo are indeed imaginatively entangled with the shadow through natural-scientific and mythological commentaries on echoes and Echo. There remains, however, one further permutation of this concern for echoic speech’s power to betray that I wish to consider, and it lies in a further point of intersection between the echo and the shadow that is founded on the shadow’s use as a figure for both proximity and likeness: that is, the character of the sycophant.

In Jonson’s Epicene, Clerimont explains in an aside why Lady Haughty has suddenly requested that Epicene visit her: “you are invited thither o’purpose to be seen and laughed at by the lady of the college and her shadows” (2.3.5-7). Elsewhere, Truewit describes this “college” as a group of socialites who gather at entertainments in order to “cry down or up what they like or dislike in a brain or a fashion” (1.1.61-2). In their mockery, Truewit and Clerimont conceive of this so-called college of women as “shadows” in terms that straddle the audible and the visible: Lady Haughty and her hangers-on entertain themselves by making visible spectacles of others, including Morose’s new wife, but membership in the college requires participation in a collective verbal response to these spectacles, whether a declaration of good taste or a cry of laughter. To be a “shadow” to Lady Haughty is to follow her physically in attending her parties; it is also, however, to cultivate a sameness of opinion, which is manifested in the audible repetition of Lady Haughty’s sentiments.

For Jonson’s Haughty as for Bacon’s retiring Narcissus, sycophants exist as another point of contact between the echo and the shadow in that sycophants imitate others and follow them, physically and psychologically, just as shadows cling to bodies. As early as the 1580s, the term “shadow” could indeed suggest someone who follows another, frequently with the embedded pejorative suggestion that this follower is a toady or a parasite.31

31 OED “shadow” (n.) 8.a.

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Clerimont evidently has this connotation in mind when he refers to the laughing “shadows” of Lady Haughty’s college. As Bacon’s moralization of Echo suggests, the term “echo” was occasionally used in a similar manner to signify a person who “reflects or imitates the language, sentiments, or conduct of others” or who “assents obsequiously to the opinions of another” (OED, “echo” [n.] 6).32 This form of obsequious echoing appears elsewhere in Epicene within speeches that are not literally echoic but are, rather, presented as figurative echoes of others’ beliefs or desires for the purpose of flattery. Morose identifies Otter and Cutbeard, for instance, as “Good echoes” when they pose as lawyers and offer Morose their legal advice (5.3.188). They earn this moniker not just because they literally repeat each other’s legal judgements,33 but also because these judgements reflect Morose’s sentiments: the men tell Morose what he wants to hear about his proposed divorce from Epicene, and so goad him to a public confession of impotence as justification for this separation.

I do not wish to press this analogy between the echo and the shadow further than their suggestively loose figurative usage in these and similar contexts will sustain. Yet, I find it intriguing that even the OED participates in the slippage between the audible and the visible in defining the “echo” in figurative use as one who “reflects” the sentiments of another, and so gestures unwittingly back toward the shadow-as-reflection with which I began this chapter. Jonson is, moreover, not alone among Renaissance writers in blending and confusing the audible and the visible, the echo and the shadow, in ambivalent writings on flattery and imitative speech. In its brightest form, echoing becomes an expression of friendship: Donne thus writes in an epistle to Thomas Woodward (“All haile sweet Poët…”) that other poets’ efforts compare to Woodward’s own as “late twilights to mid-day” and asks of his friend, “write, that I may follow, and so bee / Thy debtor, thy’echo, thy foil, thy zanee” (Satires 8, 29-30). Other poets’ words, Donne insists, are dark and dull imitations of Woodward’s own. Donne further flatters his friend

32 Note that the OED’s first recorded usage is dated 1631; it is cited from one of Donne’s posthumously published verse epistles that was originally penned in the 1590s. (Bacon’s usage is unrecorded.) 33 Their reasoning on the legal justification for Morose’s divorce, for instance, is highly repetitive: Otter: Then, frigiditatis causa— Cutbeard: Yes, causa frigiditatis— (5.3.183-4)

151 with the suggestion that he “follow[s]” Woodward, suggesting not just that he replies to his friend’s letters, but also that Woodward’s letters provide a model for him to “echo” as a lesser writer.

At their darkest, however, expressions of praise that purportedly verbalize a target’s opinions or valorize their inward qualities do not bear a straightforward relationship to truth. This is the case even when this praise is explicitly presented in terms that stress its accuracy, as in the “shadows” of mirrored reflections, or the “echoes” of verbal reflections. Jonson’s “good echoes” of misleading legal counsel are a case in point; so is the reflective situation feared by Julius Caesar’s Brutus. The relations between the shadowy mirror and flattering speech as a device of revelation and reflection emerge in Cassius’s lament that Brutus has “no such mirrors as will turn / Your hidden worthiness into your eye, / That you might see your shadow” (1.2.58-60). In response, however, Brutus expresses his concern, first, that Cassius’s flattery leads to “dangers” (1.2.65); and, second, that Cassius “would have me seek into myself / For that which is not in me” (1.2.66-7), even as Cassius purports to praise Brutus’s character with a metaphor of perfect reflection. As in Jonson’s play and Bacon’s moralization, sycophancy and self- interest are inextricably intertwined in ways that render uncertain speeches that purport to uncover and reflect hidden truths about an object of praise. To shadow and to echo someone else physically and verbally is, then, potentially to obscure one’s own identity and intentions for ambiguous purposes.

In The Merchant of Venice, Portia tricks Shylock into insisting upon upholding both Venetian law and the terms of his bond to the letter; she does so, like Jonson’s Otter and Cutbeard, through her careful deployment of flattering echoic responses to his arguments. Shylock repeatedly and adamantly insists upon the law’s (and his own) implacability: “I crave the law, / The penalty and forfeit of my bond” (4.1.201-2); “I charge you, by the law … Proceed to judgement” (4.1.233-5); “There is no power in the tongue of man / To alter me. I stay here on my bond” (4.1.236-7). In the process of thus stating his case, Shylock gives Portia a vocabulary with which to act as a Baconian sycophantic Echo, before revealing herself as the disingenuously repeating Echo of Golding’s translation: she upholds and then undermines his claims in the same terms. Per Shylock’s request,

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Portia reads both the bond and Venetian law literally, arguing in Shylock’s favour and also echoing him in her arguments: as “there is no power in Venice / Can alter a decree establishèd” (4.1.213-14), she claims that “this bond is forfeit, / And lawfully by this the Jew may claim / A pound of flesh” from Antonio (4.1.225-7). Subsequently, however, Portia twists Shylock’s position from plaintiff to defendant based on technicalities that arise from Shylock’s insistence that the court is powerless to alter the terms of the law, which happens also to prohibit Shylock from spilling a Christian man’s blood. Portia permits him to take precisely one pound of Antonio’s flesh, but no more or less, and without drawing blood, lest he forfeit both his property and his life. Portia subsequently reminds Shylock that he “urge[s] justice” and that the law requires that he “have nothing but the forfeiture” (4.1.309, 338). Her words reiterate Shylock’s own insistence upon the penalty; however, they ring no longer as favourable judgements but as mocking echoes that present Shylock with an impossible task.

A further incentive to pursue the relations that I have traced between the echo and the shadow lies in the ways in which the visible shadows of darkness and disguise bear upon the effectiveness of the echoes of delegated, repeated, and obsequious speech in this play. I argued at the beginning of this chapter that Portia is all the more effective as a lawyer because she skillfully negotiates the relations between her lawyerly disguise, her representational authority in relation to Bellario, and her ambiguously feminine or boyish voice. Portia’s playing with voice and disguise persists through Act 5, in which Portia and Nerissa return to Belmont at night. Upon their return, Lorenzo hears Portia speaking before he sees her, and remarks, “That is the voice, / Or I am much deceived, of Portia” (5.1.109-10), to which Portia replies, “He knows me as the blind man knows the cuckoo— / By the bad voice” (5.1.111-12). Implicitly, the absence of visual detail, established by the cover of darkness and Portia’s absence from the stage, facilitates Portia’s identification by Lorenzo before she enters. Conversely, in Act 4, Bassanio sees Portia in her lawyer’s disguise at court, but fails to recognize her. In earlier scenes, Bassanio must grapple with the audio-visual distractions of Portia’s disguise and the unexpected circumstances in which he encounters her lawyerly speech, all of which are designed to lead him, and the rest of the court, astray.

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The intersection of the shadows of darkness, disguise, and deceptive speech in Portia’s body and voice is not productive of tragedy except insofar as it leads to Shylock’s humiliation at court. Even the confusion that arises from Bassanio’s inability to hear Portia’s voice in the body of Balthasar at Antonio’s trial becomes the basis of a brief and easily resolved erotic joke at Bassanio’s expense.34 In his later tragicomedy, however, Shakespeare turns this confusion to much darker ends, even as it remains integral to the play’s comic resolution. Measure for Measure, as I have suggested throughout this chapter, tends to stage moments when vocal representation goes disastrously awry in a way that The Merchant of Venice’s echoic speeches do not; the play also, however, dares audiences to place a measure of trust in moments when the alleged truth of purportedly echoic speech is further complicated by darkness and disguise.

Shady self-conduct

Duke Vincentio places himself at the heart of Measure for Measure’s shadow-echo intersections when he dons a friar’s habit and remains in Vienna to observe his deputy. In his disguise, Vincentio is tormented by Lucio, who tells strange tales of Vincentio’s conduct while the Duke himself is secretly within earshot. Lucio he claims to be “an inward of [Vincentio’s]” (3.1.372), and so to know that the Duke “had some feeling of the sport” and that “if the old fantastical duke of dark corners had been at home, [Claudio] had lived” (3.1.362, 4.3.146-7). Lucio’s tales of Vincentio’s secret dealings stress a sense of similarity between himself—a man who knows “the sport” as a frequenter of Mistress Overdone’s brothel and the father of an illegitimate child—and Vincentio, who never comments on his own sexual history. The typical echoic sycophant

34 After successfully defending Antonio, “Balthasar” convinces Bassanio to give up his wedding ring as thanks, so that when Portia reunites with Bassanio at Belmont and sees that the ring is gone, she swears in mocking revenge, “I’ll have that doctor for my bedfellow” (5.1.232). Bassanio is allowed to panic at the prospect of his cuckolding only briefly before Portia reveals her role in Antonio’s defense, thus deflating the sexual threat and allowing Bassanio and Gratiano to participate in the joke. Hence also Gratiano’s joke about Nerissa’s secret identity: “were the day come, I should wish it dark / Till I were couching with the doctor’s clerk” (5.1.303-4).

154 attempts to cast himself as like the object of his fawning praise; Lucio reverses this relationship in encouraging others to perceive Vincentio as a reflection of himself. The Duke complains in response to Lucio’s slander that others produce “volumes of report” about his actions and “Make [him] the father of their idle dream” (4.1.57-60). Vincentio describes Lucio’s rumour-mongering with the same speech-as-birth metaphor that he uses in casting Angelo as a mediator of his voice. Here as in Angelo’s abuses, however, Lucio and other idle reporters transform Vincentio’s impotent legal decrees into a monstrous birth: in this case, a hint at the possible ulterior motives behind the Duke’s lax enforcement of the city’s laws.

My point here is not that anyone believes (or should believe) Lucio’s claim to intimate knowledge of Vincentio’s conduct. Rather, I find it striking, especially considering Vincentio’s anxiety regarding how others’ speeches define and undermine his identity, that the specific terms of Lucio’s claims have proven critically resonant as representations of the duke’s character.35 The title “duke of dark corners” becomes a fitting one for Vincentio, particularly as it applies to his physical appearance for much of the play. Lucio’s demand that the friar “Show [his] knave’s visage” in Act 5 suggests that, until his revelation, no one has bothered to scrutinize his face. This darkness is not simply a source of dramatic irony by which Lucio is emboldened to spread scandalous rumours about a man who secretly stands before him. The shadows of Vincentio’s hood also create a situation in which the Duke’s self-voiced speeches exist at a peculiar distance and obscurity in relation to his body for much of the play. Vincentio is known to the residents of Vienna, until his revelation, only as a voice that sounds out from a hood that obscures his face and which therefore establishes his words not as his own, but as those of the mysterious “Friar Lodowick.”

35 Studies of the Duke indeed tend to accord with Lucio’s insistence that Vincentio is “A very superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow” (3.1.379), particularly as evinced in the misplaced favouritism that the Duke displays toward Angelo, and in the excesses of his fifth-act humiliation of his subjects. On Vincentio and Angelo’s relations and their possible connection to James I’s favouritism see, e.g., Carolyn E. Brown’s “Poorest Princes.” For further discussion of Vincentio’s theatricality and his spectacles of punishment, see William Dodd, “Power and Performance”; and Tina Krontiris, “The Omniscient ‘Auctor.’”; as well as Kaplan, who notes that Lucio’s comments on Vincentio’s “unweighing” character “contain elements of truth” (99).

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The Duke’s simultaneous presence and, from others’ perspectives, absence becomes at times a source of self-conscious irony: Vincentio-as-friar tells Isabella, for instance, that her actions will “much please the absent duke” (3.1.200-1), and warns Lucio that, “if ever the duke return,” he will ask Lucio to “make [his] answer before him” for his stories (3.1.392-3). In The Merchant of Venice, Portia similarly tells Bassanio, on hearing him claim that he would trade his wife’s life for Antonio’s, “Your wife would give you little thanks for that / If she were by to hear you make the offer” (4.1.283-4). In some editions of the play, Portia’s speech here is marked as an aside.36 Like Vincentio’s remark, however, her speech could plausibly be heard by other characters while also functioning as what Drew Daniel has called a “melancholic aside” (143): an expression that gestures toward a speaker’s inwardness, and so “solicits interpretation, ascription, and diagnosis” from playgoers who possess a “privileged point of access” to the speaker (142). In both Portia’s and Vincentio’s speeches, the claim to understand and verbally reflect an absent other’s sentiments functions as both an echoic address to other characters as I have characterized echoic speech elsewhere, and a kind of unmarked aside to playgoers. Only Shakespeare’s audience possesses, at this point, the fuller knowledge by which apparently speculative gestures toward absent others mask both presence and authentic prolepsis; both characters articulate a personal response to others’ remarks that is imperceptible to other characters on the stage from behind the shadows of disguise and deliberately obfuscating speeches.

More so than Portia, however, the Duke becomes persistently associated with a rhetoric of darkness that complements both his shadowed face and his clandestine action, his secret surveillance of Angelo, throughout the play.37 Lucio’s comment that the Duke “would have dark deeds darkly answered” (3.1.409) not only stands in striking rhetorical parallel with the Duke’s resolution to “Pay with falsehood false exacting” (3.1.501),38 but

36 Greenblatt et al.’s Norton edition, for instance, marks it; Portia’s lines are, conversely, directly spoken in Orgel and Braunmuller’s Pelican text. 37 Vincentio’s dark lurking anticipates the concept of the shadow-as-pursuer, which came into widespread English use in the nineteenth century with the rise of detective fiction, but was available to English writers in the seventeenth century; see OED, “shadow” (v) 12.a. 38 These are, in fact, instances of translacing (false/falsehood, dark/darkly)—as discussed in Chapter 1—in which the eye-for-an-eye logic of the response to vicious action is reinforced by the audible repetition.

156 also unwittingly hints at the methods by which Vincentio effects Angelo’s punishment. In donning a friar’s hood and covertly orchestrating a nighttime bed trick to entrap Angelo, Vincentio fulfills the implicit eroticism of Lucio’s prediction while taking advantage of physical shadows for his deception. In Act 3, then, “Friar Lodowick” coaches Isabella on the points of prudence that she must observe in order to run a successful bed trick. Among other instructions, the Duke cautions Isabella to ensure “that the time may have all shadow and silence in it” (3.1.239). This is a wholly conventional piece of bed trick advice: if the deputy duke Angelo cannot see or hear his partner, it will be easier for Angelo’s wrongly discarded fiancée Mariana to take Isabella’s place in his bed, and so secure Claudio’s pardon without exchanging Isabella’s virginity for it. Vincentio’s instructions nonetheless introduce, in their implied substitutions, another moment when perceptible shadows and representative voices intertwine. In this case, however, they are folded into the spatiality and temporality of the tryst in a way that allows past speech to reverberate intellectually within a new context. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia’s legal speech and lawyerly disguise become an audio-visual distraction that prevents Bassanio from correctly identifying her; paradoxically, the absence of sight and sound altogether— guarantors of proper and appreciative hearing at the end of the play—serve a similar function here. In the imagined scene of the bed trick, the “shadow” becomes at once the cover of darkness that obscures the substitution of one woman for another, the female body that occupies Anglo’s bed and appears as “shadow and silence” to Angelo’s senses, and Isabella herself, for the absent woman’s earlier proposals condition Angelo to mistake the present substitute’s silent and indistinct body for her, even in a moment of close physical intimacy. A silent voice in the dark corners of Angelo’s bedroom becomes synonymous with an absent body whose prior demand for silence has marked out a space and time in which silence is itself a guarantor of presence and authenticity.

Vincentio’s bed trick thus returns us to the remarks on pursuit and sycophancy with which I began this section, and more broadly to the kinds of echoic fantasies, as imagined and feared by natural scientists and magicians, upon which this chapter is founded. The bed trick succeeds because Angelo perceives in the darkness and silence of his bedroom a body that seems willingly to act out his prurient fantasies, just as he later perceives in Ragozine’s silent head the fulfillment of his legal demands. The words demanding

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“shadow and silence” that enable this acting-out of Angelo’s fantasies ultimately come, however, from Vincentio himself, who speaks through Isabella as she makes the demand, and who herself “speaks” silently through Mariana within Angelo’s bedroom. While this dizzying array of substitutions enables Measure for Measure’s characters to achieve a comic resolution, it also makes the play’s conclusion dependent upon the same relations of representation that have proven unstable and suspicious earlier in the play. In some respects, this reliance upon forms of shadowing and echoing as I have defined them in this chapter is not so different from the situation in which The Merchant of Venice’s characters find themselves: Portia can only exonerate her husband’s friend by misleading Shylock and betraying his assumptions about her conduct as Balthasar. Yet, others’ words cling to Vincentio, even after his unmasking, in a way that is not so apparent in Portia’s case. There is a suspicious superfluity to Vincentio’s disguise and substitution plots—a sense, as made explicit by Lucio himself, that Vincentio might have intervened much earlier, yet maintains a stubborn reliance upon the relations of aural representation for which he expressed his longing in Act 1. The consequence of this reliance is a deeper vulnerability to others’ manipulations. Lucio, especially, seems to speak for and as Vincentio; from the perspective of an attentive playgoer, Lucio’s speeches potentially bleed provocatively and read retroactively into Vincentio’s own justifications for his shady behaviour. To “know” Vincentio as a critic, then, is potentially to read him in precisely the way that the Duke fears his own subjects will: that is, through the voices of other characters whose speeches purportedly take up his own words, illuminating strange points of likeness between themselves and the ruler whom they may or may not misrepresent.

Chapter 4 The Servant in the Shadows

Shakespeare’s comedies are replete with characters whose commentary on plays and playgoing centers on the unreality of acting. Kings, servants, and metatheatrical choric figures alike make explicit appeals to audiences and patrons to suspend their disbelief and to give their approving applause after the fifth act ends, and so to help render the unreal both pleasurable and profitable. Hence, most famously, characters’ commentary on acting in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. During a scene change in the mechanicals’ inept production of Pyramus and Thisbe, Theseus comments, “The best in this kind [i.e. actors] are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them” (5.1.208-9). Puck later encourages audiences to imagine the entire play to be a dream “If we shadows have offended,” and, regardless of their enjoyment, to clap their hands so that he may make “amends” (Epi.1, 16). Such appeals—particularly as they emerge in prologues and epilogues—constitute, of course, a dramatic convention; the rhetoric of shadows that marks theatrical calls for imagination and charity plays with the conventional association of the shadow, as a figure for all that is imitative and/or ephemeral, with actors and acting. The effect of these pleas on behalf of shadows is to give the imaginative faculties of playgoers the power to authorize and sustain theatrical fictions, while also essentially depriving these shadows, in their insubstantiality, of the power to offend perceivers or otherwise affect their reality in any lasting way.

Yet, in the process of rendering shadows harmless, these speeches also serve as a reminder that shadowing-as-acting was authorized on the Renaissance stage by another form of shadowing that did, in fact, bear upon reality: that of servitude. Companies of actors, the “shadows” of Puck’s epilogue, adopted positions of service and supplication for their existence, both nominally to playgoers (as in Puck’s request for applause), and formally to the aristocratic patrons who provided companies with the legal authorization required to put on their entertainments. The names of many companies, like the Lord Chamberlain’s (and later King’s) Men, themselves evoked members’ status as servants to, even possessions of, their patrons; dedicatory prefaces to printed plays likewise stressed playwrights’ dependence upon their patrons’ good will, and their authors often

158 159 explicitly identified themselves as “servants.”1 The circumstances that enabled theatrical performances to exist in Elizabethan and Jacobean England contributed, then, to the forging of a series of imaginative interconnections between actors, servants, and shadows.

Theseus seems convinced that actors’ work can only ever cast their bodies as imitative and inferior shadows to substantial people who exist beyond the stage. He also imagines these shadows as existing always at the mercy of potentially unappreciative audiences. Other Shakespearean lords seem interested, however, in playing with, and blurring, the distinctions between shadow and substance, character and player, servant and master. In the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, a servant enters to inform the Lord that a group of “players / That offer service to your lordship” has arrived to entertain him (Ind.1.73-4). Meanwhile, the Lord himself is busily creating his own entertainment: he and his servants have tricked Sly, a drunken freeloader, into playing the role of an amnesiac lord to whom these players will present their production of Shrew. The Lord and his servants, in other words, serve a vagrant who comes to believe that he is a master; the players take on the parts of noblemen, merchants, and lovers for Sly’s lordly amusement, and they do so under orders from their master, the “real” lord, who is himself a character played by an actor who collaborates with his company to perform a script penned by a playwright in the service of a patron. In an ideal performance of Shrew, everyone involved in this complex arrangement performs feats of imitation through costume and self-comportment; everyone takes up new roles with a readiness and an ease that threaten to destabilize the assumed boundaries between reality and play, between substances and shadows. All the while, an off-stage audience watches these layers of service within service as they fold into each other in the space of the theatre. Sly and the

1 David M. Bergeron collects many of these self-identifications over the course of his study of dedicatory epistles in printed plays and other entertainments. See, for example, Thomas Heywood’s epistle to Edward, Earl of Worcester, in An Apology for Actors (1612), where he writes, “I am bound to you … as a servant” (qtd. in Bergeron 163); Thomas Middleton’s professed desire “to do service to your fame and worthiness” in his epistle to the mayor (improbably also named Thomas Middleton) in The Triumphs of Truth (1613) (qtd. in Bergeron 66); and George Chapman’s dedication in The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn (1613), which offers “all my future service” to Sir Edward Phelips, the then-current Master of the Rolls (qtd. in Bergeron 63).

160 players, in their acting, imply that the Lord’s own status, and the status of every other character beyond the Induction, is a form of acting in itself: his lordship, the scene suggests, is an insubstantial shadow that overlays his own body.2 Nevertheless, the Lord merely enjoys the “sport” that is Sly’s performance (Ind.1.87)—as, hopefully, do Shakespeare’s audiences.

The destabilizing of class distinctions effected by Sly and the Lord’s role reversal in the Induction is thus only barely contained by its comic framing, which anticipates—but does not stage—Sly’s return to the gutter after the Lord has had his fun. Critical discussions of service on the Renaissance stage tend to take up this tension between acting as play and acting as subversion as an object of study; they tend also, accordingly, to focus on the servant figure and his (or, somewhat more rarely, her3) capacity to negotiate or even disrupt hierarchical relations of service. The servant’s mutable identity is made perceptible through the audible and visible signifiers of language and dress, and especially livery. Crafty servants manipulate these perceptible qualities as self-conscious actors; their motives range, under interpretation, from self-interest, to duty, to friendship, and to even love.4 Critics have also discussed the ways in which accepting the services of a subordinate might undergird and even shape the identities of masters, patrons, and other

2 See especially David Schalkwyk, who notes, “All claims to social status from this point on … are filtered through the baring of performance in the Induction, even when the parallels are not drawn explicitly” (60). 3 The debate regarding whether or not Shrew’s Kate is “tamed” into wifely submission, notably, continues to circulate in critical conversations. Judith Weil, for instance, argues that Kate’s hyperbolic speech on women’s duties at the end of Shrew reflects her escape from “the perpetual farce and domestic rivalry of conventional marriage” and shows her enjoying the “greater freedom to please oneself by pleasing others, a kind of in-house theater based on responsiveness to the needs of a small audience” (59; see 52-9 generally). When Kate claims that women are “bound to serve, love, and obey” (Shrew 5.2.168), she self-consciously takes up Petruchio’s patriarchal language in order to negotiate a role for herself in their relationship. (Weil concedes, however, that this reading does not entirely answer “all questions about [Kate’s] sincerity and her future happiness” [59]—significant questions, for sure.) 4 The first decade of the 21st century saw a revival of interest in Renaissance conceptions of the servant figure, driven at least in part by a push to uncover the historically-specific forms and dimensions of service—see especially David Evett’s Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England (2005)—and to complicate existing readings of servant characters on the stage through attendance to intersecting discourses of friendship, duty, and desire. Significant studies in this vein include Laurie Shannon’s Sovereign Amity (2002), Judith Weil’s Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays (2005), and David Schalkwyk’s Shakespeare, Love and Service (2008).

161 characters who are placed in positions of superiority to crafty servants.5 No sustained attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which these discourses of service intersect with those of shadowing. I have already hinted at some of the possibilities inherent to such an investigation in my discussion of mediators and sycophants— particularly Measure for Measure’s Lucio, who claims to speak to Vincentio’s dark deeds and secret desires, and so forces the duke defensively to redefine his own shady behaviour. In this final chapter, I turn to relationships of service as a different yet related form of interpersonal “shadowing”: one that is based on uneven relations of power between employers and the servants who follow them, and indeed often depend on them for their well-being, yet become instrumental to the acting-out of these employers’ desires in ways that transcend the association of shadows with imitation and insubstantiality.

In King Lear, Shakespeare’s king demands, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” to which the Fool responds, “Lear’s shadow” (1.4.195-6). The “shadow” to Lear here is implicitly the Fool, who indeed comments throughout this scene on his oblivious king’s character and situation.6 To find a shadow of oneself in another is, as I argued in Chapter 3, to entrust one’s desires to an unreliable other; it is also potentially to allow this other to illuminate aspects of one’s self, as the Fool mockingly suggests. Yet, to rely on such shadows is perhaps even—as I will contend below—to blur identities and affects with someone whose subordinate status carries with it the assumption of fundamental difference. The Tempest forms the core of my Shakespearean study of service in its comprehensive survey of fraught master-servant relationships; this chapter also, however, ranges more broadly within and beyond the Shakespearean canon to show how other plays—chiefly Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi—adapt the rhetoric of shadowing to playwrights’ particular approaches to the ambiguities of service cultures. As I trace the shadow and related figures for relations of service through this series of plays, my aim is

5 This is particularly the case in discussions of costume; see, for instance, Amanda Bailey, who examines the giving of livery and other clothing to servants as foundational to superiors’ sense of their own identities and a visible display thereof in relation to Shrew’s servant characters (89 et passim). 6 The Fool tells Lear, for instance, “thou madest thy daughters thy mothers” (1.4.138-9), and teases him, “I am a fool; thou art nothing” (1.4.159).

162 not to contest recent critical assumptions about conceptions of service in Renaissance England; this chapter indeed operates on the general consensus that Shakespeare and his contemporaries stage relations of service as a means of exploring the broader mutability and contingency of identity as it is rooted, especially, in shifting conceptions of class and gender. Rather, I argue that attention to the shadow and its cognate concepts in this context, with its attendant anxieties about imitation, representation, and imagination, contributes to our understanding of the fundamental ambivalence of staged service relations. As I will show, attending to the shadows in characters’ rhetorics of service illuminates new ways of approaching, for instance, the strange moments of likeness between Webster’s Ferdinand and Bosola and the fraught relationships between Prospero and his servants both airy and corporeal.

This study will require some narrowing of focus for the sake of manageability, for the term “service” holds a strikingly wide variety of potential connotations. As Judith Weil puts it, to “serve” someone in Renaissance England could entail performances of “courtly love, sexual intercourse, practical joking, religious ritual, and military conduct, not to mention the formulas of politeness” (2). Weil adds that, in Shakespeare, “by far the largest number of ‘service’ references … concern work, followed by politeness behavior and military occupations” (2). To this list of service roles, we might also add the relations of patronage, as I noted above; the bonds between family members, not just between husbands and wives, but also between parents or guardians and children, for many of whom “Coming of age … coincided with a prolonged period of household service or apprenticeship” (Weil 18);7 and the work of intelligencers, who act as servants to their employers and may also use service roles as disguises. With some qualifications, we might also consider friendship as a form of mutual service, particularly as it was conceived between men as a bond of reciprocal care.8 I will return to many of these

7 See also Schalkwyk, who describes domestic service and apprenticeships as “part of a life cycle” that ensured that many people who became masters would have had experience as servants themselves (23; see 21-3 generally). 8 Friendship and service were not always regarded as wholly compatible concepts. Some aristocratic writers advise men to hire servants rather than be served by friends, for, as Walter Raleigh puts it in his Advice to a Son, “those that will serve thee without thy hire will cost thee treble as much as they that know their fare” (qtd. in Weil 85). In his essay “Of Friendship,” Montaigne insists that friends, being “no other than one

163 connotations throughout this chapter, but my interest lies chiefly in two categories of service that frequently intersect and which are most persistently associated with the shadow in Renaissance drama: the bonds of eroticism and intelligencing. Although many of the servant characters that I discuss perform domestic duties, I have deliberately shifted my discussion away from domestic service except where it intersects with these two categories. This choice is based in part on the wealth of existing studies of Renaissance household servants by other critics. More pertinently, the kinds of shadowing explored in my earlier chapters—and particularly the relations of representation and sycophancy in the previous one—also lead naturally to a study of the service bonds that I will examine here.

I: The inevitable shadow

Servants and their substances

Shakespeare’s contemporaries do not often explicitly make an approving connection between the servant and the shadow. A rare exception is Stefano Guazzo’s Civile Conversation, which treats service only obliquely, but, in George Pettie’s 1581 English translation, occasionally takes up the language of shadowing to describe the ideal relations of imitation between men in positions of mastery and their dependents, and indeed between Christ and every Christian.9 Somewhat more ambiguous is the text of Thomas Dekker’s 1600 comedy Old Fortunatus, in which stage directions place a servant named Shadow visibly following one of Fortunatus’s sons upon his first entrance

soule in two bodies, according to the fit definition of Aristotle, … can neither lend or give ought to each other” (I5v; also qtd. in Weil 85). Friendship and service seem, in these cases, to be antithetical concepts. 9 Clergymen, for instance, must set a godly example to their followers, for “it is in vaine to goe about to make the shadowe straite, if the bodie whiche giveth the shadowe bée crooked” (D8r). Husbands, likewise, must set an example: “as christ is the head ouer man, so man is the head ouer the woman. And therefore if he follow his head in leading a Christyan lyfe … no doubte but [the wife] will follow her head, as the shadowe doth the body” (Bb5r). Note Guazzo’s focus on the self-conduct of masters in both contexts: he conceives of shadowing subordinates as imitative, and sometimes helplessly so. As we shall see, this inability to self-regulate does not generally characterize servants on the stage, but Guazzo’s concern for masterly self-conduct is a common one.

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(B4r.sd). Shadow grumbles about the misfortunes that attend his service throughout the play, but he is distraught when both of his masters die, for he suddenly finds himself not just without employment but also, in his lack of a masterly “substance” to follow (K4v), essentially without purpose.10 In Thomas Cranmer’s 1552 Prayer Book, the shadow is defined, conversely, in absolute distinction to the loyal servant: Cranmer’s notes associate shadows with forms of bondage, and contrast them with a Christian understanding of service as volitional and therefore as free in spirit.11 It is not especially odd, however, that shadows rarely figure in English treatments of service: the shadow is a fundamentally ambiguous figure whose association not just with imitation but also with deception and subversion trouble its inclusion in works whose aim is generally to describe ideal master-servant relations.

While treatises on masterly self-conduct do not often engage directly with the concept of the shadow, many do treat with concern the possibility for servants and masters in a variety of contexts to overturn such ideals. It is useful to return, on this subject, to Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall. Wright’s treatise casts the faculty of reason, personified, as a monarch whose rule is tenuous under the constant threat of rebellion from the passions and senses. In this allegory, the microcosmic bodily hierarchy complements the macrocosmic social one of Renaissance England; yet, in the microcosm (as implicitly in the macrocosm), the ideal master-servant relations between reason and the senses and passions are easily subverted. These latter inward qualities are described as “two naughty servants who ofttimes bear their love one to an other than they are obedient to their Master” (B4v)—i.e. reason—and as rebels who resist with “force” reason’s attempts to establish “continencie” (B5r). Service as a concept rapidly blurs into subversive forms of friendship: sensuality and passion goad each other into rebellion,

10 “O, see, see, O my two masters, poore Shaddowes substances; what shall I doe? whose body shall Shaddow now follow?” (K4v), he wonders. 11 “Christes Gospell is … a religion to serve God, not in bondage of the figure or shadowe but in the fredome of spirite” (qtd. in Evett 13). Evett refers to this understanding of service as freedom as “volitional primacy”: “one treats as self-imposed … various conditions and actions that are in fact imposed from outside” (7). This understanding of volition, whether made explicit or not, allowed writers to distinguish service from forms of slavery; this valorization of subordination as Christian duty underpins many English idealizations of service (as above in Guazzo’s remarks on Christian life).

165 while reason not only capitulates to its unruly subjects, but also chooses to please them as a friend without provocation. As Wright explains, “reason once being entred into league with passions and sense, becommeth a better friend to sensualitie than the passions were before” in its capacity to invent “new delights, which the passions never could have imagined” (B5v). To mismanage one’s servants, Wright suggests, is to welcome changes to one’s own self that may be irrevocable; it is potentially to allow subordinates to become the models for one’s own desires and self-conduct instead of providing this model to them. Merely to have a servant, however, is also to acknowledge a need—even, potentially, a deficiency—that is fulfilled by an agent who exists in a relationship with one’s self that is akin to, but not quite, a form of synecdoche. The body of a servant is materially and visibly distinct from that of a master, yet treatises on service tend to identify servants as additional helpful appendages to their superiors.12 Elizabeth I in the eye- and ear-studded dress of Isaac Oliver’s Rainbow Portrait thus visibly demonstrates her superlative power of surveillance even as the dress serves as a reminder of this power’s basis in the ears and eyes of her intelligencers. On a microcosmic scale, Wright’s personified Reason similarly relies on the information supplied by the senses and passions in order to “stand in deliberation” on a course of action (B5v), making perceptible her dependence upon them.

Ambivalent responses to this dependence, and to the potential reversals of affective and authoritative positions that may come with it, take many forms on the Renaissance stage. My aim in this chapter is to show the ways in which Renaissance attitudes toward service

12 See, e.g., Robert Cleaver and John Dod’s A Godly Forme of Houshold Government on wives: “like as a man having one hand or one foote, if by any meanes he get himselfe an other, may thereby the more easily lay hold on what he listeth, or go whither he will: even so, he that hath married a wife, shall more easily enjoy the healthfull pleasures, and profitable commodities of this present life” (K7v). Hands and other body parts are omnipresent in William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties; Gouge observes, for instance, that “the particular worke which appertaineth to a servant by vertue of his place is to have an eie to his master, to see what he requireth at his hands” (Qq8v). Variations on the phrase “at his hands,” whose pronoun grammatically obscures the distinction between masters’ and servants’ hands, occur throughout Gouge’s treatise in relation to both the tasks to which masters put their servants and the wages and other rewards that servants can expect in return for their diligence. Particularly in this figuration, the master-servant bond may also be considered a form of metonymy: the servant’s hands are distinct from those of the master, yet they also become representative of, and come to substitute for, the master’s hands in carrying out his orders.

166 and mastery are complicated by their intersections with discourses of shadowing that emphasize the performative, imitative, and potentially erotic nature of master/servant bonds. With this aim in mind, I begin with The Tempest, a play whose characters are linked by a variety of service bonds and who experience the possibility—and the potential consequences—of their alteration, and even dissolution, on Prospero’s island. I noted above that Renaissance writers tend not to draw flattering comparisons between servants and shadows. It is fitting, then, that The Tempest’s explicit servant-shadow connection lies in the figure of Caliban: a disgruntled slave to whom Prospero refers as his “thing of darkness” after apprehending Caliban in the midst of a failed rebellion (5.1.278-9). Prospero’s characterization of Caliban as a dark and monstrous possession is typical of his attitude toward the inhabitants of the island who are bound to serve him.13 Yet, when Prospero acknowledges Caliban to be his own dark thing, he not only takes responsibility for the slave’s misconduct, but also recalls a common political form of the shadow. As a response specifically to a foiled regicidal plot, the line resonates with contemporary political treatises whose writers invoke the shadow in their descriptions of the relations of mutual dependence between rulers and the ambitious subordinates who enable their rule—and in their accounts of instances when those ideal relations collapse.

Service and ambition

Francis Bacon begins his essay “Of Great Place” with the observation that “Men in Great Place, are thrice servants: Servants of the Soveraigne or State; Servants of Fame; and

13 It would be remiss of me, here, not to acknowledge the significant body of postcolonial criticism—much of it centered on Caliban—that explores the nature and extent of Shakespeare’s participation in the ideological work of English colonial projects. On this general subject see, e.g., Stephen Greenblatt’s foundational essay “Invisible Bullets,” which explores Shakespearean drama’s concern with “the production and containment of subversion and disorder” through the lens of English colonial endeavours (Shakespearean Negotiations 40). For discussions of staged postcolonial adaptations of Shakespeare that attend to this dramatic concern see, e.g., Thomas Cartelli’s Repositioning Shakespeare and Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin’s essay collection Post-Colonial Shakespeares. My critical aims converge somewhat with postcolonial perspectives on The Tempest, in that I am concerned with structures of power in the play. I am also concerned, however, more specifically with service as a kind of extension of selfhood and power as speakers like Prospero construct it, and my interest in such constructions is not necessarily limited to the indigenous residents of the island and their relations with colonizers.

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Servants of Businesse” (H3v). Despite the lack of freedom that these service roles thus entail, Bacon argues that these men long to maintain them;14 as such, they grow “impatient of privatenesse, even in Age and Sicknesse, which require the Shadow” (H4r). On one hand, Bacon’s argument is representative of Renaissance political writers’ tendency to adopt the shadow/light binary in their discussions of public life and government, rather than taking up the shadow/substance one that generally governs discourses of poesy and visual art. Youth, able-bodiedness, and the ability to exercise political power are all qualities that Bacon implicitly associates with light and which are, he notes, inevitably “Eclipse[d]” by old age or disgrace (H4r). On the other hand, Bacon is something of an outlier in his association of shadows exclusively with private life and retirement or seclusion, and so also in his implicit argument that the shadow is antithetical to the activities associated with servants of “great place.”15

For other writers, the shadow figures prominently in prescriptions for effective government, albeit also in case studies where its usage slips into faintly pejorative significance. Hence, notably, Machiavelli’s commentary on shadows in The Prince, where he argues that a noble man may rise to princely power through the support of his equals, “for the great ones seeing themselves not able to resist the people, begin to turne the whole reputation to one among them, and make him Prince, whereby they may under his shadow vent their [ambitions]” (E1r).16 In this passage, the shadow becomes a figure

14 My use of the term “men” here is deliberate: Bacon’s language, like that of his contemporaries, is consistently gendered, and his text evinces a tacit assumption that political life (like poesy, rhetoric, and natural science) is an exclusively masculine sphere of activity. 15 Recall that Bacon takes up a similar position in his commentary on Narcissus and Echo in The Wisdom of the Ancients, where a life spent in seclusion and surrounded by sycophants is an “obscure” one (A7r). 16 Note especially OED “shadow” (n.) 2.a. Shadowing as a political metaphor is not an English imposition: the term “shadow” in early English translations of both The Prince and the Discourses on Livy is consistently a translation of “ombra.” (See, e.g., this same section of The Prince in Il Prencipe Di Nicolo Machiavelli, an Italian edition of The Prince published in England in 1584: the other nobles raise a prince to power “per poter sotta l’ombra sua sfogare l’appetito loro” [C1v, emphasis added].) I have, however, given “ambitions” in keeping with modern translations of the Italian “appetito,” for which Edward Dacres’s 1640 translation gives the somewhat idiosyncratic “spleenes.” With the exceptions of The Art of War and the History of Florence (first translated in 1562 and 1595, respectively), English translations of Machiavelli’s works did not appear in print until well into the seventeenth century, though Italian versions were available. Katharine Eisaman Maus notes that Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights seem both to have read their Machiavelli and to have resolved to use him in “a restricted, even peculiar, way” that has left critics to debate the extent of playwrights’ familiarity with his treatises (versus their familiarity with popular assumptions about The Prince or with the “Machiavel” as a creation of the English theatre) (36).

168 for princehood, and especially for the role that princes play in protecting their subordinates, who in turn take this protection for granted in return for supporting a prince’s rule. English translations not just of Machiavelli but also of his sources tend to follow suit: Philemon Holland’s translation of Livy’s History of Rome repeatedly uses variations on the phrase “shadowed under” to refer to the protections that rulers afford individual subjects whose behavior is not always scrupulous, or in some cases to denote the protective relations between generals or consuls and the cities that they serve.17 The protective shadow is, likewise, a common figure in Shakespeare’s history plays, albeit one often associated with abuses of power and civil conflicts that erupt when characters are emboldened by the assumption that they are safe from reproach under rulers’ protection.18 The Prince hints similarly at the darker—that is, more selfish and potentially rebellious—motivations behind and consequences of princes’ and nobles’ relations in its suggestion that both groups uphold this relationship deliberately and out of self-interest.

Paradoxically, it is in accepting a position of subordination and in maintaining a prince’s rule that the people who live in this prince’s shadow are enabled to pursue (“vent”) their own otherwise impossible desires and ambitions. This darkness inherent to political shadows becomes even clearer in case studies in which shadows become metaphors for the effective ruler’s twofold dependence: not just upon the actions and support of his subordinates, but also upon his own shady acts of fraud and deception for diplomatic purposes. This usage is common in accounts of historic acts of political subterfuge in which clever rhetorical framing enables princes and generals to “shadow” the motivations

Regardless, English writers’ use of the shadow in discussions of government is strikingly similar to Machiavelli’s usage. 17 See, e.g., a Spanish town that is “shadowed under the wing of the Romane amitie” (Ddddd4r), or the consul who allegedly “shrowd[s] himselfe under the shadow and protection of the Tribunes” (P5v). Protective shadowing need not be wholly real; thus, it “appeere[s]” to other cities that “under the shadow of Scipio his wing, that citie which is the ladie of the world [i.e. Rome], was couvert and protected” (Rrrr2v), and this appearance deters invasions. 18 Consider King John’s Limoges, whom the deposed prince Arthur tells, “God shall forgive you Coeur-de- lion's death, / The rather that you give his offspring life, / Shadowing their right under your wings of war” in siding with Arthur against King John (2.1.12-14). See also, however, Timon of Athens’s Alcibiades, who raises an army to march upon Athens against the senators who have allegedly abused their authority. Alcibiades claims that he and his companions have hitherto “slept within the shadow of [the senate’s] power” (5.5.6); the shadowy protection of an authority figure need not be a force for good.

169 behind their expedient actions.19 As in literary treatments of shadows and shadowing, then, one of the political shadow’s common connotations evokes popular fears surrounding misleading rhetorical framings and embellishments. The shadow’s alternative use as a figure for the protective relations of service between kings and their subordinates establishes shadowing as a mutually beneficial interpersonal act; it also suggests, however, that hierarchical relations of power are always in danger of upheaval through the personal ambitions and self-interested behaviour of those “shadowed” people who help to establish these relations in the first place.

Consider, in this context, Caliban’s changing relations with Prospero, which culminate in his recognition as Prospero’s “thing of darkness.” Earlier in the play, Caliban complains that he “first was mine own king” before Prospero arrived and usurped his title (1.2.345). Unlike Machiavelli’s shadowed “great ones,” Caliban does not voluntarily raise Prospero to kingship, but he does insist that he enabled Prospero’s ascension. In return for lessons in speech and astronomy (1.2.337-9), Caliban showed Prospero “all the qualities o’th’ isle” required for survival (1.2.340). These benefits are lopsided: while Prospero gains the knowledge required to rule the island independent of its former self-professed king, Caliban’s reward from Prospero is the largely futile ability to voice his resulting grievances to his usurper, as he notes when he accuses Prospero, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse” (1.2.366-7). Caliban’s language lessons from the magician also, however, give him the means to entice Stefano and Trinculo into his conspiracy to murder Prospero. Caliban sees “freedom” as a condition synonymous with getting “a new master” (2.2.176-7); as he appeals to Stefano for help, he promises to show Stefano where the island’s springs are, and to “get thee wood

19 Walter Raleigh’s History of the World recounts a story about Hannibal, who assembles an army on the pretense of attacking a city that has challenged him; marching on it allows him “to shadow his actions” as he prepares for war against Rome (Nnnnn1v). Elsewhere, Raleigh identifies wives as dangerous influences to rulers, for they are able to “cover over and shaddow many malicious purposes with a counterfeit passion of dissimulate sorrow and unquietnesse” (G6r). In Edward Dacres’s translation of the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli argues that a would-be reformer must keep “the forme or shadow of the ancient customes, to the end the people perceive not the change of them, though indeed they are quite new, & farr different from the fore-past” (E10r). Thomas Bedingfield’s translation of the History of Florence links shadowing with self-preservation: after a man of a rival family is murdered by members of the Donati family, letters conveniently emerge that incriminate the slain man in an act of treason; rumours abound that the letters were “forged by the Donati, to shadowe the infamie” of the murder (E2v).

170 enough” for fires (2.2.152-6). Caliban’s appeals are, of course, transparently ridiculous: he seeks government and protection from a drunken butler, and also promises to perform menial labour for his new king shortly before singing in joy that he will no longer “fetch in firing / At requiring” (2.2.173-4). Nonetheless, Caliban’s speeches to Stefano anticipate a reenactment of his friendly first encounter with Prospero, while also reframing this new encounter as a knowing, voluntary act of subordination. Caliban rages at his ill treatment at the hands of the king whom he has effectively created, but this rage does not prevent him from attempting to raise and serve another king of his choosing.

Caliban’s ambivalent attitude toward his own service role is reflective of a general one among the Tempest’s characters, who tend to consider service bonds at once onerous and inescapable. In 2.1, Alonso, the King of Naples, sits on the beach with his retinue, contemplating his miraculous survival of a shipwreck and lamenting the apparent loss of his son Ferdinand. The courtier Gonzalo attempts to distract his grieving king by idly discussing the government of the island on which the survivors have found themselves. Gonzalo, imagining himself as both the “king” of the island and a magistrate charged with its “plantation” (2.1.145, 143), describes his commonwealth as one made up of “contraries” to the features of existing forms of government (2.1.147). In addition to abolishing—among other things—wealth, marriage, and succession, he insists that there would be “no name of magistrate,” no “contract,” no “use of service,” and “No sovereignty” on his island (2.1.149-51, 156). Sebastian and Antonio are quick to point out that Gonzalo’s proposal to dissolve rulers and servants’ hierarchical bonds contradicts his desire to govern the island as its king (2.1.157-8). Even in his fantasy of peaceful anarchy, Gonzalo thus seems unable to conceive of a state that lacks an overseer who would, as he puts it, “Execute all things” (2.1.148). Gonzalo dismisses his plan as “merry fooling” when the other men mock him for this oversight (2.1.175); yet, his speeches are nonetheless intriguing, for they simultaneously suggest that service bonds are an inevitable feature of characters’ social organizations, and hint at a pervasive longing for an escape from these same bonds. This longing persists even among noble characters like Gonzalo who seem, unlike Caliban, only to benefit from them.

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Gonzalo’s and Caliban’s respective concerns for service and its discontents reverberate throughout the play. Unbeknownst to the shipwrecked courtiers, The Tempest’s central patriarchal figure—Prospero, the former Duke of Milan—dwells on this remote island as a result of a drastic overturning of political hierarchy. Deposed by his brother Antonio, Prospero seeks vengeance through a magical storm that shipwrecks Antonio and his fellow travelers on the island, and so places them at the mercy of Prospero and the spirits who attend him. The island setting for this revenge plot also becomes a space of fantasy for the stranded kings, councilors, servants, and slaves who are all collaterally affected by Prospero’s vengeance, and who consider alternatives to their present hierarchical relations. Antonio thus secretly encourages Sebastian to overthrow Sebastian’s brother Alonso, the King of Naples; in a small-scale parody of this attempted regicide, Stefano and Trinculo, servants to Alonso, drunkenly botch Caliban’s plot to kill Prospero and rule the island in his place. Meanwhile, Alonso’s son Ferdinand is captured and enslaved by Prospero, and Ariel, Prospero’s enslaved spirit, hopes to earn his release when Prospero regains his dukedom. All of the play’s significant strands of action thus turn on the chaos into which characters’ existing relations of service and mastery have been thrown as servant characters come increasingly to resent their existence in the shadows of others and to regard their subordination as neither willingly chosen nor enabling. Many of the shipwrecked men perceive in the remote locale a power vacuum waiting to be filled, while Prospero’s servants take the sudden influx of island-dwellers as an impetus to devise new ways to escape their subjugation to the magician.

Prospero not only monitors these plots, but also strives to encourage and entrap most of the plotters. To say that Prospero himself does so, however, is to conflate the magician who plans out his vengeance with the shadows who execute it, for Prospero’s enslaved spirits act, effectively, as extensions of Prospero’s body in their fulfillment of his desires. Ariel, especially, strands, surveils, teases, and traps the would-be rebels on Prospero’s behalf; the tempest itself which provides the occasion for this mischief, Prospero reveals,

172 was a storm “Performed” by Ariel under his orders (1.2.195).20 Ariel subsequently describes the effects of the storm for his master, who presses the spirit for details. Prospero’s ignorance is dramatically conventional in that it licenses Ariel’s imaginative representation of the unstageable details of the storm for Shakespeare’s audiences. It also, however, reflects the magician’s fundamental dependence upon his spirits, both for the maintenance of his rule over the island’s other residents, and for the execution of what he elsewhere calls “mine art” (1.1.28).

Prospero is not entirely powerless; Ariel remarks, for instance, that the magician has some power of prognostication, for he has foreseen “through his art” Sebastian and Antonio’s betrayal of Alonso (2.1.293). The spirit himself also stresses that his service bond with Prospero renders his power a function of the magician’s will, as when Prospero calls to him, “Come with a thought!” and Ariel responds, “Thy thoughts I cleave to” (4.1.164-5). Prospero’s expression is a colloquial demand for haste, but, together with Ariel’s reply, it also figures their relations as a kind of corporeal connection by which Prospero’s thoughts direct Ariel’s actions as if the spirit is at once a body independent from the magician and an appendage to him. Yet, for much of the play, Prospero directs Ariel to monitor the rebellious plots of the island’s other inhabitants and directs own his energies toward a single plot: that is, Ferdinand’s courtship of Miranda, which Prospero encourages while maintaining a façade of opposition. In some respects, Miranda and Ferdinand’s amorous relations stand in striking contrast with the murderous plots that the island’s other residents pursue; yet, from their first meeting, the couple participates in an eroticized version of the same discourses of service and rebellion that mark the play’s other strands of action. This participation at once establishes strange moments of likeness between Ferdinand and other servant characters in the play, particularly insofar as the lovers unknowingly act as Caliban and Ariel do to further Prospero’s aims, while also allowing Ferdinand and Miranda to resist—or at least subtly redefine—their roles as extensions and enablers of Prospero’s vengeful will.

20 Prospero never explicitly refers to his spirits as “shadows”; nonetheless, Ariel’s existence as spirit (recall OED “shadow” [n.] 7, and also “shade” [n.] 6), performer, servant, and supporter renders him a shadow in multiple senses.

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II: Erotic servitude

“this patient log-man”

Ferdinand begins his stay on Prospero’s island by confronting nigh-insurmountable losses. Shipwrecked on the beach, alone, and convinced that his father is drowned along with the rest of his companions, Ferdinand faces Prospero, who threatens to add a loss of personal liberty to this loss of familial life. “I’ll manacle thy neck and feet together” (1.2.465), the magician warns him, and subsequently leads the captured prince off the stage. Ferdinand does not reappear until Act 3, when he enters with the complaint that Prospero has tasked him with carrying and piling “Some thousands of … logs” (3.1.10). Ferdinand’s imprisonment and his exaggeratedly onerous labour place the prince in a role similar to that of Caliban. The slave claims, as Ferdinand does, to have been a monarch prior to his servitude, for Caliban insists that he is the rightful ruler of the island through the bloodline of his mother, the witch Sycorax, who ruled before Prospero’s arrival. Prospero ignores both men’s protests, and coerces them to perform demeaning physical tasks for him: Caliban is responsible for gathering wood for the island’s inhabitants (1.2.314-15), and he is also the habitual object of Prospero’s violence—roles that Ferdinand shares upon his arrival. Immediately before Ferdinand enters in 1.2 and provides Prospero with a new target, Caliban thus exits the stage under the threat of “old cramps” and “aches” that Prospero will magically inflict upon Caliban as punishment if he refuses to gather fuel for a fire (1.2.372-3).

Caliban functions, especially in Act 1, as a kind of dark image of Ferdinand who expresses a twisted version of the prince’s passions in both his animosity toward Prospero and his desire for Miranda. Caliban’s desire is, however, a rapacious one: Prospero accuses him of “seek[ing] to violate / The honour of my child” (1.2.350-1).21 Caliban does not deny the accusation, and indeed adds, “Thou didst prevent me; I had

21 Prospero cites this attempted rape as the reason for Caliban’s enslavement: prior to this act, Prospero claims, he treated Caliban “with human care, and lodged [Caliban] / In mine own cell” (1.2.349-50). Audiences are left to determine for themselves the extent to which Prospero’s words on his treatment of Caliban can be trusted.

174 peopled else / This isle with Calibans” (1.2.352-3). In contrast with this narcissistic sexual violence, Ferdinand’s desire reads as naively innocent. The prince is awe-struck at his first glimpse of Prospero’s daughter, whom he initially mistakes for (or, at least, flatteringly calls) a goddess (1.2.425-6), and from whom he desires “good instruction” on how to conduct himself on the island (1.2.428). The prince thus imaginatively places Miranda in a position of power over him as a kind of divine tutor. This eroticized relationship of instruction stands in striking parallel with Miranda’s claim to have taught Caliban to speak (1.2.358-61)—an effort for which, she accuses, Caliban repaid her with an attempted rape.22 Caliban’s framing of the attempted rape as an effort to populate the island with other selves renders his sexual desire subordinate to his longing to reclaim the land from Prospero. Ferdinand clearly does not long for a similar rapacious reversal of power between himself and his jailor or tutor; to suggest otherwise would be to grossly mischaracterize the prince. Nonetheless, Ferdinand and Caliban’s rhetorical parallels center on Miranda and her body, which become a focal point for characters’ resistance to Prospero and for the magician’s own attempts at mastery.

While Caliban plots to overthrow Prospero, Ferdinand ceases to chafe at his own imprisonment as he comes to the decision that the view from his cell is the only one worth seeing: My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up. My father’s loss, the weakness which I feel, The wreck of all my friends, nor this man’s threats To whom I am subdued, are but light to me, Might I but through my prison once a day Behold this maid. (1.2.490-5)

22 There is some debate as to whether this speech is misattributed to Miranda; its tone does seem somewhat more suited to Prospero, the play’s patriarchal figure and the more likely language tutor. (See 1.2.354.n7 in the Norton text.) Nevertheless, Miranda has ample cause to criticize Caliban, and the pedagogical parallels between Caliban and Ferdinand that this speech introduces, if the Folio’s attribution is correct, are intriguing.

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There are literary precedents, including Petrarchan ones, for this figuration of captive desire,23 but the prince’s contemplation of his charmed spirits mingles convention with reminders of the island’s other captive spirits: notably, the spirit Ariel, whom the witch Sycorax once confined “Into a cloven pine” (1.2.279), where he remained in “torment” for twelve years (1.2.289). Ferdinand, in contrast, figures his own spirits’ imprisonment as a kind of freedom in itself, for magical enfeeblement and physical confinement alike are precisely what allow him to exercise his will insofar as this will is synonymous with a desire to see and appreciate Miranda.

By the time he reappears on the stage, Ferdinand has accepted the physical pains of service as a kind of trade for the indulgence of his voyeuristic impulses and the passions that come with it. This reframing enables him, in turn, to recast Prospero’s degrading commands as a form of self-aggrandizement. Upon his entrance, Ferdinand thus announces, “There be some sports are painful, and their labour / Delight in them sets off” (3.1.1-2). Ferdinand acknowledges Prospero as the source of the “sore injunction” to carry logs (3.1.9-11), an order that aligns him once again with Caliban, the magician’s other log bearer. Caliban follows Prospero’s order to fetch fuel in Act 1 only because, as Caliban himself puts it, he has no choice: “his [i.e. Prospero’s] art is of such power / It would control my dam’s god Setebos, / And make a vassal of him” (1.2.375-7). Ferdinand, however, derives delight from his hard labour by reframing his work as service to Miranda rather than her father. Also like Caliban, then, Ferdinand attempts to choose a new master for himself: as Ferdinand puts it, “The mistress which I serve”— not Prospero—“quickens what’s dead, / And makes my labours pleasures” (3.1.6-7).24 When Miranda offers to assist him, Ferdinand further valorizes his log-bearing as a chivalric

23 See especially Canzoniere 76 (“Love with his fawning empty promises”) and 89 (“I fled the prison in which Love held me fast”), both of which meditate on love as imprisonment, and which treat as ambivalent the possibility of escape. “I missed the shackles and chains / that now seemed even sweeter than going free” (89.9-10), Petrarch’s speaker laments upon staging a temporary escape from his jailor Love. One of Ferdinand’s early English analogues is Chaucer’s knight Arcite in The Canterbury Tales, who, upon being freed from his prison cell, realizes that “blisse” consisted of sitting “Yfetered in his prisoun” where he was able to enjoy “the sighte of hire whom that I serve” (I [A] 1229-31). The physical and psychological pain of imprisonment was made desirable to Arcite by the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing his beloved Emelye through the bars; his freedom is now an impediment to desire. 24 The bawdy potential of Miranda’s ability to “quicken what’s dead” seems deliberate in this context. There is still room in discourses of chaste service for bawdy eroticism.

176 endeavour, claiming that he undertakes it so that his mistress need not: “I had rather crack my sinews, break my back, / Than you should such dishonor undergo / While I sit lazy by” (3.1.26-8). Just as the Petrarchan perspective on imprisonment informed his response to Prospero’s threats in Act 1, so do Petrarchan notions of love-as-slavery further justify Ferdinand’s physical labour. Many ladies’ words have “into bondage / Brought my too diligent ear” (3.1.41-2), he claims, but his bondage under Miranda’s supervision is most willing.

When Ferdinand claims to serve a mistress who quickens him, he draws on a long- standing literary tradition of eroticized metaphorizations of service. In my discussion of Epicene in the previous chapter, I passed over a bawdier instance of this figuration in the alleged self-conduct of Lady Haughty and her “college” of women. As Truewit puts it, Haughty’s companions collectively “cry down or up what they like or dislike in a brain or a fashion” (1.1.61-2), and so act as “shadows” to Lady Haughty in a pejorative sense (2.3.7)—that is, as sycophants and as self-conscious imitators of her actions and sentiments. I left unacknowledged, however, the sexual quality of some of this college’s shared activities: the women are also united in their pursuit of Dauphine, who observes to his male friends that the women “are jealous and rail each at other” over his company (5.2.44-5). He cites as evidence a letter from Mavis, who writes to him, “The ladies here, I know, have both hope and purpose to make a collegiate and servant of you” (5.2.48-9). For Dauphine and Mavis, “service” holds sexual connotations; Mavis’s letter warns Dauphine that the other ladies plan to have him serve their desires, but Mavis also solicits from her addressee a mirrored expression of her desire, and a pledge of sexual “service” to herself exclusively.

Mavis’s use of the language of servitude to describe the college members’ desires participates in an English tradition of double-entendres that link relations of mastery and service to expressions of erotic desire and also to desire’s secret, often illicit, fulfillment.25 Sexualized relations of service also abound in sonneteers’ Petrarchan

25 See, e.g., Pompey’s joke that the bawd Mistress Overdone has “worn [her] eyes almost out in the service” (Measure for Measure 1.2.90-1). It is also apparent in Giacomo’s adulterous offer to Innogen, “Let

177 conceits; there, however, unlike the bawdy versions of service above, speakers’ self- identification as servants figure a desire for intimacy that is only rarely fulfilled and more often agonizingly deferred. Sidney’s Astrophil thus demands of Stella, “give apt servants their due place” (Astrophil and Stella 85.9); Astrophil envisions his “due place” in this sonnet as a position from which he can see Stella’s face or smell her breath. Elsewhere, Astrophil’s verses, “like bad servants show / [His] wits, quick in vain thoughts” of Stella (21.3-4), hinting at his wish for a greater intimacy than the passive observation that is his due as a servant. Shakespeare’s poetic persona similarly uses service as a figure for sexual self-abasement in the Sonnets: he refers to himself as a “slave” to his lover, and proclaims, “I have no precious time at all to spend, / Nor services to do, till you require” (57.1, 3-4). From this position of self-abasement, the lover-turned-servant is licensed to demand fulfillment from a potentially unwilling master whose obligation becomes, likewise, to demand services.

Ferdinand’s glorification of his own service evinces a similar desire to perform other services for Miranda and to see this desire reciprocated. Ferdinand cannot, to be clear, completely overlook the indignity of his physical labour; he comments to Miranda that no prince such as himself would normally “endure / This wooden slavery” (3.1.61-2). As he adds, however, “The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service” (3.1.64-5). This profession of love retroactively reframes every act of Ferdinand’s on the island, no matter how demeaning under normal circumstances, as a step in his courtship of Miranda, for it stresses the temporal priority of his love-as-service over his forced service to Prospero. This justification is a Petrarchan commonplace, as are all of Ferdinand’s effusive professions of love. Yet, his insistence upon the instantaneous nature of his love also recalls Evett’s concept of “volitional primacy” (7): a “capture of initiative” by which a servant frames “the first significant action of the [master-servant] relationship” as “an act of his own will” (143). To play the log-man and carry his burden

me my service tender on your lips” (Cymbeline 1.6.141); in Whetstone’s declaration that the groom Robert “served” Arthur’s father, by which he means that the groom served him a turn in fathering Arthur (Brome and Heywood, The Late Lancashire Witches 4.845); and in the King of Sicily and Calabria’s accusation that the page Bellario has performed “That good service shames me to speak of” for Arethusa (Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster 3.2.20).

178 is, as Ferdinand imagines it, not to act as Prospero’s arms or to act out Prospero’s thoughts as Caliban and Ariel are compelled to do. Rather, it is to “play,” as if theatrically, the role of servant within a larger, and valorized, performance of erotic service to his beloved that is volitional rather than coerced.

The moments of rhetorical and/or performative likeness between Ferdinand, Ariel, and Caliban do not establish Ferdinand as a rival ideal of willing service in contrast with Prospero’s other grudgingly obedient servants. Ferdinand does not make his temporary enslavement bearable by accepting his status as a servile shadow to Prospero, and nor does he seem to think of himself as benefitting from his existence, so to speak, within Prospero’s shadow on the island; he professes, rather, to suffer for Miranda’s sake. However Ferdinand rhetorically reframes his log-bearing, moreover, he acts unknowingly to further Prospero’s plans. If Ferdinand and Miranda marry, their union will secure a claim to both Milan and Naples for the couple’s future children, and so establish a dynasty for Prospero that is greater even than the one he seeks to reclaim from his brother.26 The magician’s apparent opposition to the would-be couple lies in his stated desire to ensure that the lovers act upon their desires within a form (i.e. marriage) that will legitimize this dynastic claim.27 What seems to Ferdinand like the volitional pursuit of personal desire, then, is ultimately a course of action that bolsters the political and economic power of the same man against whom Ferdinand would stage his eroticized rebellion. In other words, whether he realizes it or not, the prince participates in an ideal

26 This plan is reflected in Prospero’s asides, which begin almost immediately upon Ferdinand and Miranda’s first meeting. When, for instance, Miranda is awestruck by Ferdinand’s appearance, Prospero comments in an aside, “It goes on, I see, / As my soul prompts it” (1.2.423-4). As Michael Neill notes, Ferdinand’s rhetoric of service “nicely illustrates how even the potential subversiveness of romantic love could be contained by the chivalric conventions that rewrote its affront to authority as a licensed inversion of hierarchy” (24). 27 See especially his resolution to make the “swift business” of courtship “uneasy,” “lest too light winning / Make the prize light” (1.2.454-6), and his later threats to Ferdinand should the prince “break [Miranda’s] virgin-knot” before their marriage ceremonies have been fully conducted (4.1.14-23). This obstructive, controlling impulse is a common one among fathers on the stage—compare, for instance, Page’s rejection of his daughter’s preferred suitor in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the King of Sicily and Calabria’s diplomatic matchmaking for Arethusa in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, or the matchmaking game that Portia’s father plays from beyond the grave in The Merchant of Venice.

179 performance of political service, supporting Prospero’s political ambitions while giving vent to his own erotic ones.

Ferdinand’s refiguring of service in terms of volition and pleasurable fantasy stands, nonetheless, in discomfiting contrast with the painful corporeality and lack of volition that mark Ariel’s and Caliban’s understanding of their subjection. Domestic service and slavery on Prospero’s island establish the magician’s servants as synecdochic extensions of his body and will. Erotic service as Ferdinand figures it, in contrast, at once proceeds from the self and aims at eliciting a reciprocal exchange of care and pleasure—to which Miranda does in fact respond in her playful adoption of Ferdinand’s rhetoric of servitude. At the same time, the deliberate echoes of other servants’ words and experiences in Ferdinand’s own threatens to upset the distinctions between these characters’ conceptions of service. This shared language gestures toward the potential for rebellious reversals of hierarchy in all, including eroticized, relations of service, toward which Caliban strives in attempting to rape Miranda and rebel against Prospero. Ferdinand’s repurposing of the language of service also hints, however, at an unrealized ideal of Renaissance service against which Prospero’s inhumane treatment of Ariel and Caliban might be measured. The prince’s professions of love-as-service at once reflect the inability of The Tempest’s characters to conceive of their relations without reference to existing hierarchies of power, and hint at the subversively egalitarian potential of service bonds refigured in terms of mutual care and fulfillment.

“a lord of mis-rule”

In The Tempest, Ferdinand and Miranda’s courtship becomes one form of service among many that are dramatized, and thrown temporarily into upheaval, on Prospero’s island. Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi takes, in contrast, the valorized and eroticized bonds of service between women and men as its central subject: the recently widowed Duchess’s clandestine marriage to her steward Antonio is the driving force behind the play’s tragic action. The play also suggests, as The Tempest does not, that these bonds might truly be subversive as the Duchess embraces them, for her remarriage not only elevates a man of

180 relatively low station, but also produces children, including a son who threatens to upset Amalfi’s line of succession. The Duchess’s desires thus pit her against her twin brother Ferdinand, who seems vehemently to oppose any marital choice that the Duchess makes on her own,28 but who is particularly incensed that his sister chooses to marry a steward. The Duchess has a second brother, the Cardinal, who also disapproves, but it is Ferdinand who strives to expose the Duchess’s husband and “purge” what he sees as an “infect[ion]” of their family’s blood in the match (2.5.26). This opposition between the two siblings also establishes the play’s central master-servant bonds: the Duchess’s close relations with Antonio find a dark mirror in those between Ferdinand and his intelligencer Bosola, whose willingness to serve Ferdinand’s murderous impulses beyond the dictates of conscience constitutes a perversion of his servant role. Through Ferdinand, Bosola obtains a position as the Duchess’s Provisor of the Horse;29 his proximity to the Duchess in this role allows him to spy on her on Ferdinand’s behalf, and eventually to discover the identity of her husband. Bosola’s betrayal of the Duchess within this service role, which culminates in her murder at his hands, renders Bosola, structurally, a kind of dark twin to Antonio; Bosola’s insistence that he “rather sought / To appear a true servant than an honest man” in committing the murder on Ferdinand’s behalf likewise constitutes a perversion of Antonio’s earlier claim to serve the Duchess selflessly “with body and soul” (4.2.331-2, 3.2.209).

Michael Neill describes The Duchess of Malfi as a play that exhibits a “deep and pervasive skepticism about the very nature of service” (33), for “to be a servant of any kind in Webster’s corrupted places is to expose oneself to insufferable degradation” (32). As evidence, Neill points not just to Bosola’s “humiliating quest” for advancement (32), but also to Antonio, whose good stewardship does not prevent Ferdinand’s “dismissal of him as a venial drudge” (32), and whose marriage the Duchess cannot acknowledge publicly. Neither fulfilling service nor drudgery generates the concrete rewards of which

28 See especially Ferdinand’s verbal bullying of his sister in Act 1: “Marry! They are most luxurious / Will wed twice” (1.1.297-8). 29 A prestigious position. As Neill observes, Antonio and Bosola are both, in their respective positions, “senior court officers” (32).

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Bosola dreams; nor do relations of service save these pairs from tragedy, for by the end of Act 5, all four of these characters (among others) lie dead. It is worth noting, however, the implicit qualification in Neill’s description of the play’s setting: the degradation associated with service in the play is endemic to the “corrupted places” in which these master-servant pairs operate, but it is not necessarily inherent to service itself. Antonio and the Duchess’s relationship presents audiences with the possibility, albeit one that the couple never fully realizes outside the dark spaces of fantasy, of an escape from the degradation that characterizes service culture in Amalfi.

The Duchess keeps her marriage a secret even after the births of several children, so that Antonio remains publicly a subordinate to her while, privately as her husband, he is conventionally her superior.30 Each party in this marriage is thus, in a sense, simultaneously the master of and a servant to the other in different contexts. This confusion of what ought to be mutually exclusive social roles leads the Duchess to tease Antonio in their bedchamber with the comment that she hopes it will become customary for “noblemen” to “come with cap and knee / To purchase a night’s lodging of their wives” (3.2.5-6). The confusion likewise leads Antonio to insist playfully that he “must” lie in the Duchess’s bed (3.2.7)—a statement of husbandly prerogative for which the Duchess calls him “a lord of mis-rule” (3.2.7), and which once again blurs marital and political conceptions of authority. Although Antonio adds that his “rule is only in the night” (3.2.8), “misrule” as it emerges in subversive rhetorical play is characteristic of the couple’s interactions elsewhere. Indeed, despite their cautiousness, the Duchess and Antonio devise ways at court to obscure commentary on their marriage’s hierarchical complications within discussions of political subversion. The Duchess thus debates with her steward, as the rest of her attendants listen, whether men should take up the French custom of wearing hats before their ruler. When she invites Antonio to “Be … the example to the rest o’ th’ court” in putting on his hat first (2.1.128), she encourages him to make a public display of his elevated social status—albeit one that signifies as such only to himself and his wife.

30 See, e.g., Guazzo’s discussion of the husband as “head” to the wife (Bb5r), as noted above.

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By Act 3, Bosola has shed some light on these fantasies: he knows that the Duchess has an as-yet unknown lover, and that they have children. Although he does not know of their secret marriage, he also suspects that Antonio is at least the Duchess’s “bawd” (2.3.66). Bosola has also obtained a key to the Duchess’s bedroom, which he gives to Ferdinand so that the duke may eavesdrop on, and then confront, his sister as she speaks of her lover and children. The Duchess does not reveal Antonio’s identity, but Ferdinand’s threat— keep this identity a secret, lest the discovery “beget such violent effects / As would damn us both” (3.2.94-5)—is sufficiently terrifying that the Duchess immediately arranges to convey her husband to safety. Her plan requires, as a pretense for sending away a vital member of her household, that she ironically dismiss her superlatively good steward for false dealings. As in their bedroom and court banter, Antonio and the Duchess hide expressions of love within their dialogue.31 Antonio’s comments about service also, however, recall those of Bosola: his denunciation of “the inconstant / And rotten ground of service” (3.2.198-9), especially, resonates with Bosola’s complaints throughout the play on his ill treatment by his masters, beginning with his observation upon his first entrance that it is a “Miserable age, where only the reward of doing well is the doing of it” (1.1.31-2). Antonio’s lamentations at once hide affirmations of love and echo Bosola’s complaints about the uncertainty of relations of dependency.

Bosola’s obsession with good service and due recompense is, moreover, what finally prompts the Duchess to reveal her husband’s name: after she dismisses Antonio, Bosola springs to Antonio’s defense, expressing skepticism at the charges and referring to the steward as “too honest” (3.2.245). Bosola thus launches into a speech in praise of Antonio specifically and servants in general that is couched in the language of political shadowing: [A]n honest statesman to a prince Is like a cedar, planted by a spring;

31 For instance, her insistence to the other gentlemen that she “would have this man be an example to you all” is, overtly, a warning to would-be corrupt servants, but also subtly hints at Antonio’s good example to informed listeners (3.2.189). Likewise, Antonio’s declaration, “I am all yours” (3.2.206), is not just a statement of resignation but also an affirmation of his love.

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The spring bathes the tree’s root, the grateful tree, Rewards it with his shadow… (3.2.265-8) Bosola’s phrasing is somewhat odd in that it leaves unclear who is the cedar and who is the spring. Its parallel grammatical structure, however, implicitly yokes together subordinate statesman and shadowing cedar, and superior prince and spring, and places them within a relationship of reciprocal nurturing. Bosola never explains exactly what the “shadow” represents in his simile, but the overhanging shadow that he describes most commonly connotes, as I observed above, the shelter and protection afforded to subordinates by their superiors in political contexts; shadowing in this sense rarely encompasses the benefits that masters might accrue from their servants as Bosola describes them here. Further complicating this analogy is the fact that, while the images themselves are not unusual as they apply to statecraft in the play, trees and springs are deployed elsewhere as discrete figures for princehood rather than for service. Although they occasionally speak of reciprocity in service relations, moreover, most of Webster’s characters tend to discuss service relations in terms of abuse, neglect, and mutual bad influence. Ferdinand thus describes his brother the Cardinal as a great “cedar tree” who stands above Bosola (1.1.242), and whose neglect for his former servant is therefore excusable. Elsewhere, Bosola says of Ferdinand, “He and his brother are like plum trees that grow crooked over standing pools”; Bosola adds that “they are rich and o’erladen with fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on them” (1.1.48-51), implicitly casting himself as one of these scavenging creatures. If princes take anything from their statesmen in the play, in turn, it is counsel, and even this offering is treated with some suspicion. Antonio therefore imagines princes’ courts as springs from which pure water ought to flow, “but if ’t chance / Some cursed example poison ’t near the head, / Death and diseases through the whole land spread” (1.1.13-15); the Cardinal, one of these proverbial poisoned springs, “engend[ers] toads” and casts forth “political monsters” through his influence (1.1.159, 162-3).

Bosola is, of course, not an entirely reliable commentator, and his remarks on honest statesmen and shadowing cedars seem calculated to elicit a confession from the Duchess. Yet, his insistence upon the mutually beneficial relationship between cedar and spring potentially renders servants protective shadows to their grateful superiors in an upheaval

184 of the shadow’s typical political associations. His speech not only confuses the play’s typical (poisonous, corruptive) patterns of service-related imagery, but also valorizes this confusion in a way that exceeds the requirements of convincing performance.32 When the Duchess, moved by Bosola’s speech, tells him that Antonio is her husband, Bosola likewise expresses amazement that he lives in an “ambitious age” in which it is possible to “prefer / A man merely for worth, without these shadows / Of wealth and painted honours” (3.2.279-82). His speeches on merit fit the Duchess’s marriage into his broader fantasy of just rewards for services well rendered; when Bosola next invokes the shadow, several lines below his cedar-and-spring allegory, it is in a shadow/substance binary in service of his denigration of wealth and titles (both “shadows”) as faulty indicators of an individual’s worth. Merit, the implicit “substance” in Bosola’s lines, becomes a new and better grounds for preferment, and also one that Bosola paints as radical within the political culture of the play. Although the Duchess herself insists to Ferdinand that she has “not gone about, in this, to create / Any new world, or custom” (3.2.110-11), Bosola casts the Duchess’s actions as deeply subversive—not just in their defiance of Ferdinand’s wishes, but, more importantly, in their reflection of a new attitude toward merit that, so Bosola claims, generations of poets and scholars will commit to lasting memory in their writings (3.2.286-301). The question of Bosola’s sincerity remains suspended in this scene, however, for he is both over- and under-invested in the radical change that he perceives in the Duchess’s actions. In Bosola’s speeches, the Duchess’s eroticization of service becomes a logical extension of the kinds of preferment and promotion for which Bosola strives in his own relations with Ferdinand, but he delivers these speeches as Ferdinand’s employee and in the midst of an attempt to destroy the Duchess’s marriage on his master’s behalf.

32 Frank Whigham observes, “Many readers accept Bosola’s speech as ‘sincere’; others think it a ploy to loosen the duchess’s tongue. I think it is both: his own authentic response, managed in pursuit of his employer’s goal” (219).

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III: Servants and other selves

“I would hang on their ears like a horse-leech”

Antonio is the first character to comment on Bosola and his antagonistic relations with the other members of the Duchess’s court. Upon Bosola’s first entrance, Antonio identifies him as “The only court-gall,” and explains that Bosola “rails at those things which he wants” but lacks the means to achieve (1.1.23, 25). What Bosola wants, as he himself states, is to “thrive” (1.1.37)—that is, to be financially rewarded and “advanced” by his superiors (1.1.55). Although Antonio is clearly the more successful of the two servant characters in this respect, he and Bosola are united in their reliance upon service relationships for their thriving, and Act 1 stages a series of contrasts between Bosola and Antonio in their respective striving. In the same scene in which the Duchess praises Antonio for his stewardship and proposes to him by referencing his social climbing (“Raise yourself, / Or if you please, my hand to help you” [1.1.418-19]), Bosola returns to the court in search of employment after serving a sentence in the galleys for murder. As the courtier Delio notes, it is an open secret that Bosola’s crime was “suborned” by the Cardinal (1.1.69-71), who refused to protect his subordinate and who now refuses to compensate him. Bosola is aware of the perils of service to the Cardinal and his brother, but even as he rails at them for their abuses, he continues to hound them for employment. He thus wonders “Who would rely upon these miserable dependences” (1.1.54), but does so immediately before petitioning Ferdinand for a dependence. The Duchess proposes the sexual intimacy of marriage to Antonio as a reward for his good stewardship; Bosola, too, longs for rewards that he imagines in terms of physical intimacy, but he strips these rewards of the reciprocal eroticism that marks Antonio and the Duchess’s service bond. Instead, Bosola figures his miserable relations with the brothers in terms of the self- serving physical contact between parasite and host: just after referring to Ferdinand and the Cardinal as crooked plum-trees fed on by “crows, pies, and caterpillars” (1.1.48-51), he tells Antonio that he wishes he were one of their “flattering panders” so that he might “hang on their ears like a horse-leech till I were full, and then drop off” (1.1.51-3). Whereas Antonio becomes a grateful shadow to the ruler who honours him, Bosola casts

186 himself as a one of the many undiscriminating blood-suckers who flock to the Duchess’s brothers for dubious rewards.

Shadowing as a figure for reward and/or protection is a political ideal, and one that Bosola briefly entertains in his figure of the cedar and the spring, but this ideal has broken down in Amalfi long before the play’s first act. Bosola conceives of the court as a whole as infected with parasites, and when the Duchess is forced to banish Antonio, Bosola similarly refers to the officers who denounce Antonio as “lice” who “drop off” the steward when they cannot hope to benefit from their association with the former favourite (3.2.37). This conception of service as parasitism, antithetical to Antonio’s and the Duchess’s understanding of their relations (and to Bosola’s ideal of the shading cedar), finds an analogue in Jonson’s Volpone. There, the “fly” Mosca plays the part of the devoted servant to the play’s titular protagonist, while secretly plotting to suck Volpone dry. Alone on the stage, Mosca observes in soliloquy that “almost / All the wise world is but parasites, or sub-parasites” (3.1.13)—a chain that he has witnessed firsthand in the parasitical activities of the wealthy men who surround the childless and aging Volpone and shower him with gifts in the hope of being made his heir. Volpone’s playing with these men culminates in a final trick in which the fox bequeaths his fortune to Mosca, fakes his own death, and watches gleefully as Mosca dismisses the fortune seekers. “My witty mischief, / Let me embrace thee” (5.3.102-3), Volpone exclaims after Mosca insults the lawyer Voltore; at no point does Volpone evince any suspicion that this witty mischief-maker will turn his talents on his master and refuse to return the inheritance. Although Mosca’s plot is foiled when Volpone reveals to the Senate that he is still alive, leading to the restoration of order (though also to both Volpone’s and Mosca’s imprisonment), Jonson leaves audiences with the knowledge that even the play’s titular fox is easily deceived by a parasitical servant’s performance of fidelity.

Mosca claims, however, to be distinct from the chain of parasites whom he helps to gull, for he identifies himself as a particular type of parasite: a “fine, elegant rascal” (3.1.23), a man who can be “there, and here, and yonder, all at once; / Present to any humour, all occasion, / And change a visor swifter than a thought” (3.1.27-9). The superlatively competent parasite is thus characterized, according to Mosca, by his secret existence as

187 the figure with whom I began this chapter: the actor, who changes himself to suit the humours of his patron and indeed puts on any “visor” required of him. Mosca’s readiness to perform a variety of roles,33 combined with his explicit acknowledgement that servility is itself a performance that he temporarily puts on for parasitical purposes, is implicitly another form of Evett’s volitional primacy. This performance is also, however, representative of a concern, frequently dramatized on the Renaissance stage, for the inscrutable motives behind shows of faithful service. On one hand, the faith in adversity of self-disguising servants, like Shakespeare’s Kent or Dekker’s Shadow, becomes a nigh-impossible ideal, and one that is frequently treated with suspicion;34 on the other, servants like Jonson’s Mosca expose and indeed exploit service systems’ tendency to foster parasitism and hypocrisy.

Like Mosca, Bosola characterizes his service as parasitism, as when he longs to “hang … like a horse-leech” on his master’s ear. Also like Mosca’s “fine elegant rascal,” Bosola evinces a willingness to play whatever role his master demands of him: over the course of his service to Ferdinand, he takes on the guise of a Provisor of Horses and intelligencer, hides his identity in the clothing of an elderly tomb-maker and bellman while tormenting the Duchess, and finally performs the duties of an executioner on Ferdinand’s orders. As the Duchess lies dying, Bosola demands “The reward due to my service” from his employer (4.2.293), claims to have committed the murder because he “loved / You that

33 Mosca’s visors are largely rhetorical rather than costume-based, insofar as his service to Volpone requires him to, for instance, encourage multiple men to shower Volpone with gifts, heap praises upon Scoto of Mantua (i.e. Volpone in a mountebank’s disguise) in order to facilitate a seduction, and pretend to be Volpone’s heir. 34 Most infamously, Lear banishes Kent for (rightly) questioning the king’s decision to deprive Cordelia of her dowry (1.1.164-75). Suspicion itself motivates disguise: Kent returns to Lear in the guise of a servant, professing a desire “to serve him truly that will put me in trust” (1.4.12-13). Dekker’s Shadow is both exceptionally good at disguising himself and exceptional in the lack of ulterior motives behind his serving of his masters’ humours. See especially Old Fortunatus 4.2., in which Shadow and his master Andelocia disguise themselves both visibly and audibly as Irish costermongers and trick a group of nobles into purchasing apples at a grossly inflated price. Shadow asks his master, “Did I not clap on a good false Irish face?” (J2r); when Andelocia acknowledges that the disguise “became” him, Shadow replies, “Yet thats [sic] lamentable, that a false face should become any man” (J2r). Elsewhere, Shadow says of his garments, “apparell is but the shaddow of a man, but shaddow is the substance of his apparell” (K2r). Shadow’s commentary suggests the extent to which his identity is based on service and is visibly manifested in his livery, but he also plays discomfitingly on the ease with which other disguises “become” (suit? transform?) him as needed.

188 did counsel it” and “sought / To appear a true servant” rather than an “honest man” (4.2.330-2), and, once Ferdinand has left the stage after refusing to reward his servant, soliloquizes on his penitential tears (4.2.361-4). As in his speeches on Antonio’s worth, the extent of Bosola’s love for Ferdinand and the degree to which his grief is derived from his lack of compensation are unclear. Bosola’s will is enfolded into his master’s, such that he pursues Ferdinand’s interests beyond the dictates of conscience, and potentially beyond the limits of volitional primacy that would make this pursuit an effect of personal ambition. His service to Ferdinand renders unclear the distinctions between extremes of loyalty and of self-interest and, indeed, between Ferdinand and Bosola themselves.

“another my selfe”

In discourses of service as in, for instance, those of sycophancy as discussed in the previous chapter, the shadow’s common association with doubling and imitation is still present, particularly as it applies to servants and their powers of disguise (and, frequently, deception), and as the shadow is embodied by subordinates who are explicitly identified as “shadow[s]” to their masters. In addition to Dekker’s servant Shadow, consider Shakespeare’s Poins, a member of Prince Hal’s Eastcheap crew in the Henry IV plays. In Act 2 of 2 Henry IV, Hal prepares to pay Falstaff a visit and Poins tells him, “I am your shadow, my lord; I'll follow you” (2.2.137). This declaration of devoted service follows, however, in the wake of Hal’s receipt of a letter from Falstaff, who warns the prince to avoid familiarity with Poins. The man, Falstaff claims, “misuses thy favours so much that he swears thou art to marry his sister” (2.2.108-9).35 To be a “shadow” to Hal is thus, potentially, not only to follow the prince physically and cling to him figuratively for advancement, but also to profess, and to seem to act upon, feelings of devotion that may

35 Whether Falstaff can be trusted as a judge of Poins’s character, considering his own desire to profit from Hal’s rise to power, is another question that the play does not satisfyingly answer.

189 or may not be real, and which may hide sinister (or at least, in Poins’s case, allegedly self-serving) ulterior motives.

The shadow’s physical existence as an image that extends from a body—and which is at once derived from, dependent upon, and yet perceptibly distinct from this body—is thus pressingly representative of a widespread conception of service in terms of the extension of masters’ faculties into the bodies and wills of their servants. The reality of this extension is questionable, as Falstaff’s letter highlights, but treatises on servants and service culture nonetheless idealize it. In his sermon The Servants Dutie, Thomas Fosset thus writes, “my servant is to me, alter ego, another my selfe” (C6v). An ideal servant has “a care of my goods in mine absence as I my selfe have” and a master “must do that by [his] servant which [he] can not doe by [his] selfe” (C6v). Note here Fosset’s interest in absence and substitution—a good servant can be trusted to act in the interests of an absent master—as well as his blurring of affect and action in the concept of “care.” The term as Fosset employs it suggests both the labour that a servant performs in order to keep his master’s goods safe, and the psychological concern for these goods that the servant shares with a master and which motivates careful labour. Fosset’s insistence that masters “must” act through their servants is, likewise, at once a typical understanding of servants as instruments to their masters, and a surprising acknowledgement of the necessary dependence of masters upon servants to fulfill otherwise impossible desires.

Fosset himself sees nothing subversive in this figuration of service. Yet, his insistence upon the service bond as a kind of extension of subjectivity and action from master to servant offers the implicit possibility that a bad servant is merely acting out the desires of a man whose ego has become his own; there is nothing to suggest, moreover, that this other self cannot influence the master in a reversal of the ideal movements of care that Fosset imagines. This blurring of roles and identities is captured in Wright’s allegory of the struggle between Reason and the senses and passions, where Reason rapidly adopts and caters to the whims of her subordinates. Yet, even the ideal that Fosset embraces comes to seem troubling as it is conceived by Webster’s Ferdinand, who demands that his subordinates not only serve him, but also learn to become Ferdinands themselves in closely emulating his passions. When one of his hangers-on makes a joke at Ferdinand’s

190 expense, at which everyone but Ferdinand laughs, the duke thus interrupts them with a reminder: “Methinks you that are courtiers should be my touchwood, take fire when I give fire; that is, laugh when I laugh, were the subject never so witty” (1.1.122-5). Yet, Antonio also describes Ferdinand’s relations with others at court as a confusion of borrowed faculties in which Ferdinand himself “take[s] fire” from others: “He speaks with others’ tongues, and hears men’s suits / With others’ ears” (1.1.173-4)—emulates, in other words, others’ judgements while pointedly ignoring petitioners’ requests—and also “Dooms men to death by information, / Rewards by hearsay” (1.1.176-7)—that is, relies on the dubious reports of intelligencers in his doling-out of favours and punishments. This sharing of tongues and ears is not inherently suspicious; Renaissance dramatists often figure the kinds of delegation, and the structures of mediation, that were characteristic of law and rule in the period in terms of sensory borrowing and lending.36 Antonio presents Ferdinand’s synecdochic relations with others, however, as a symptom of something that is lacking in the duke: a need to surveil and a moral bankruptcy that are filled and served by the slippage between Ferdinand’s selfhood and those of others.

Enter Bosola, whom Ferdinand employs “To live i’th’court here, and observe the Duchess,” and also to note the “suitors [who] do solicit her for marriage” (1.1.252, 254). Although Ferdinand allegedly employs a variety of eyes and ears and tongues, Bosola is the only character in the play who acts on stage as an extra set of senses and limbs to Ferdinand, and he quickly resigns himself to “do[ing] / All the ill man can invent” as this other self in return for the gold that Ferdinand has given him (1.1.274-5). He expresses, nonetheless, some reservations that Ferdinand “would create me / One of your familiars. … [A] very quaint and invisible devil, in flesh: / An intelligencer” (1.1.258-61). Bosola likewise calls the duke “a corrupter” (1.1.265), and although he accepts Ferdinand’s offer of employment, he does so with the affirmation, “I am your creature” (1.1.287). Bosola’s faint protests establish Ferdinand’s patronage as a kind of dark magic: like a witch who

36 On these borrowings and lendings, see the previous chapter generally and, for a comedic version of these structures, my discussion of The Merchant of Venice’s Portia specifically; see also Elizabeth I’s dress, with its eyes and ears, in Oliver’s portrait as discussed above.

191 carries out acts of mischief through conjured spirits,37 Ferdinand uses his subordinates to effectively extend his senses and actions into places where he otherwise has no access— as when, most pertinently, he urges Bosola to use his new provisorship to gain access to the Duchess’s “private lodgings” (1.1.281), where Ferdinand himself cannot go. Bosola’s rhetoric of creation conveniently strips him of volition in his false service to the Duchess, but his insistence that he is Ferdinand’s “creature” also plays on the association of the term “creation” not just with magic but also with both fabrication and elevation; his accusation that Ferdinand would make him a “familiar” similarly evokes the term’s association with both witchcraft and high-ranking household service.38 Ferdinand’s creative witchcraft thus promises the tangible rewards for which Bosola longs, even as it renders the servant’s actions the inevitable effects of the duke’s will; to borrow a phrase from Prospero, Bosola is ideally Ferdinand’s “thing of darkness.” Here, too, Ferdinand and Bosola become a dark mirror to the Duchess and Antonio, for Ferdinand’s “creation” of Bosola anticipates the Duchess’s marriage proposal later in this scene. Although Antonio can, as Bosola believes he cannot, choose not to consent to this partnership, the Duchess similarly vows to “make” Antonio a “lord” for his services as both steward and husband (1.1.430).

Ferdinand’s creative capacity becomes, however, a problem for the duke in a way that it does not for the Duchess, for Ferdinand is increasingly murderous in his attempts to surveil and control the Duchess’s desire through his familiar, and he denies his role in the Duchess’s murder in ways that are increasingly pathological. At the scene of the Duchess’s death, he repeatedly wishes not to see her body or Bosola’s face,39 and accuses Bosola of failing to exercise mercy: “Why didst thou not pity her?” (4.2.272), he demands of his familiar. His accusations ring somewhat ironically, however, in the wake of his refusal to heed Bosola’s plea to “go no farther in your cruelty” prior to the

37 See especially Brome and Heywood’s witches and their familiars as staged in The Late Lancashire Witches, above. 38 On creation in its non-magical senses, see OED “create” (v.) 1.a and 2.a; on familiars, see OED “familiar” (n.) 1.a and 3.a. 39 Ferdinand exclaims at the sight of the dead Duchess, “Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young” (4.2.263). He also tells Bosola repeatedly to leave: “Never look upon me more” (4.2.316); “Get thee into some unknown part o’th’ world, / That I may never see thee” (4.2.325-6).

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Duchess’s execution (4.1.118); what Ferdinand wishes for, in retrospect, is an act of defiance in which Bosola’s conscience would override his master’s imperatives. This defiance is, in fact, both an ideal of service and a dramatic convention by which a servant objects to a morally unsound order and, in the process, prompts his master to follow his example and choose an upright course of action instead.40

This conception of the servant as a sort of perceptible, externalized form of a master’s conscience is another version of Fosset’s other-selfhood, albeit one in which the master is encouraged to take up the cares of the servant. It notably appears in The Tempest, where Ariel questions the rough treatment that Prospero has ordered him to give Alonso and his companions. The spirit reports that he has confined the prisoners “as you gave in charge” (5.1.8), but adds, “Your charm so strongly works ’em / That if you now beheld them your affections / Would become tender” (5.1.17-19). Ariel comments that he would feel this tenderness, “were I human” (5.1.19), implying that Prospero’s own apparent lack of pity is a personal deficiency: a lack that makes him something less than human. The magician immediately denies this accusation in his vow, “mine shall” (5.1.19), and he has, of course, given no particular indication that he has murderous intentions; nevertheless, Ariel freely voices an objection to Prospero’s conduct and provides an affective model for his master. He thus influences, or at least speaks as if he influences, Prospero’s passions and self-conduct in a way that defies Prospero’s understanding of his spirits as creatures that act on his behalf and “cleave to” his thoughts. Bosola’s extreme subservience in The Duchess of Malfi, conversely, renders him incapable of questioning orders in a meaningful way, let alone exercising his moral right to defiance in the face of an unjust order. It does not seem to occur to Ferdinand, meanwhile, that he has explicitly denounced such acts of defiance as undesirable in his hangers-on elsewhere; only when the consequences become distressing does Ferdinand begin to question the blurring of his

40 Defiance on moral grounds is a subject of interest in texts on servants’ duties, whose authors generally place servants’ obligations to God and his commandments over those to a fallible master. Robert Cleaver and John Dod’s authorization of disobedience is representative: “if their maisters shall command [servants] to do any thing that is unhonest, unlawful, wicked, unjust, or ungodly, then they must in no wise obey it” (Aa6r; also qtd. in Schalkwyk 222). In Shakespeare, see, for instance, Pisanio, who refuses to execute Innogen under Posthumus’s orders in Cymbeline; or Kent, who ignores his banishment in order to secretly serve his king in King Lear.

193 selfhood with Bosola’s and strive to establish a sense of disagreement and difference— and therefore different degrees of culpability—between himself and his familiar.

Ferdinand’s participation in the murder precipitates a madness that is marked by an obsession with what he sees as a monstrous transformation within himself. Ferdinand, the Doctor reports, has been caught stealing out at night to dig up bodies and howl; he adds that the duke “Said he was a wolf, only the difference / Was, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, / His on the inside” (5.2.16-18), and that he thus called for men to rip open his flesh and examine his inner hair (5.2.18-19). This sudden onset of lycanthropia emerges from the guilt that Ferdinand strove to deny in Act 4. The wolfish nature of his madness, specifically, seems a poetic fulfillment of his earlier insistence that “the wolf shall find [the Duchess’s] grave, and scrape it up” to expose the crime (4.2.308); Ferdinand becomes simultaneously the exposing wolf, the evidence itself that must be exposed, and the criminal whose actions warrant this gruesome corporal punishment. His obsession with his internal lycanthropic hair also constitutes a remarkable turn inward for a character who has hitherto been marked by his simultaneous acting through and dependence upon the bodies of others. Ferdinand cannot explicitly acknowledge the roots of his madness, and indeed tells his attendants, “What I have done, I have done; I’ll confess nothing” (5.2.53-4). Still, his insistence upon his internal hairiness constitutes a recognition, albeit still a veiled one, of something distressing that he perceives within himself and which he dares others to expose. That is, despite his attempts to ascribe blame to his intelligencer elsewhere, the impetus for the murder of his sister lies within the dark passions that haunt his own subjectivity and which are “scrape[d] … up” in his madness.

The precise nature of this haunting is a subject of critical debate. To discuss the Duchess and her passions is also inevitably to wrestle with Ferdinand’s overblown reaction thereto; one possibility is that Ferdinand’s own passions are incestuous.41 Certainly, there

41 One of the foundational voices on Ferdinand and his passions belongs to Whigham, who describes Ferdinand as “a threatened aristocrat, frightened by the contamination of his supposedly ascriptive social rank, and obsessively preoccupied with its defense”; “the crucial aspect of Ferdinand’s hyperbolic reaction

194 is something suspiciously vague about the duke’s motivation in hiring Bosola and attempting to obstruct the Duchess’s marital pursuits.42 Ferdinand is obsessed with his sister’s body and sexuality, and he repeatedly expresses a longing to violate her privacy and to probe her bodily integrity. Anticipating his desire to rip himself open later in the play, Ferdinand wishes in Act 2 to “Root up [the Duchess’s] goodly forests, blast her meads / And lay her general territory to waste” as a complement to the “waste” that she herself makes of her “honours” (2.5.17-21). He pictures the specifics of the Duchess’s trysts, describing the “strong-thighed bargeman,” among other characters, whom his sister must be entertaining (2.5.43); later, he demands a key of Bosola so that he may infiltrate the bedroom where his sister entertains these men, and “force confession” from her there himself (3.2.79). Finally, he insists that “my blood [ran] pure in” “that body of hers” before her remarriage (4.1.121-2, emphasis added), and, in his dying confession, he names “my sister” as the cause of his downfall without specifying whether it is “by ambition, blood, or lust” that he has fallen (5.5.71, 72). Ferdinand’s obsession seems derived in no small part from his concern for his family’s noble lineage, which he perceives to be threatened by the Duchess’s marriage to an untitled man. Yet, his speeches also persistently render the Duchess a part of himself, and indeed place parts of himself in the Duchess, in rhetorical formulations that evoke incestuous desire whether or not Ferdinand consciously acknowledges it.

A perceptive reader or playgoer might expect to find the language of shadowing in Ferdinand’s lines about his sister’s body, particularly as he and the Duchess are fraternal twins. This language would stress both likeness and physical closeness between the two, rendering the Duchess another self to Ferdinand in a common literary language of other- selfhood; as such, it would complement the blurrings of bodies and selfhoods that Ferdinand effects in his speeches on his sister (as well as his subordinates) throughout the play. Curiously, however, this language does not appear in characters’ commentary on

to his sister is that the sexual and the social—concerns with incest and with purity of status, rank, or blood—are concentric categories” (191). 42 When Bosola questions why Ferdinand would have his sister stay a widow, Ferdinand responds, “Do not you ask the reason: but be satisfied, I say I would not” (1.1.257-8).

195 twinship, even in instances where it would complement existing light-and-shadow imagery. Antonio, for instance, refers to the Duchess herself as a source of benevolent light and as a model of womanly conduct who eclipses past ones—“She stains [i.e. shades] the time past, lights the time to come” (1.1.209)—but at no point is one twin described as staining or illuminating the other. Webster is not alone in his apparent lack of interest in the shadow’s potential richness as a figure for twinship. Shakespeare, for instance, never refers to twins as “shadows” despite the abundance of twin siblings in his plays, some of whom self-consciously imitate one another.43 Jonson’s invocation of the shadow in his characters’ acts of imitation and sycophancy, meanwhile, never leads him explicitly to comment on twinship as a potential visible, bodily complement to those relations.44 Medical writings on twins define the phenomenon of twinning in terms of abundance (or, occasionally, monstrous excess), but similarly neglect to capitalize on the connotations of the shadow.45 In Duchess, the absence of twins-as-shadows perhaps also lies in characters’ tendency to stress the extreme differences between the Duchess and her siblings.46

43 The Comedy of Errors contains two pairs of siblings with shared names, but no references to the Antipholuses or Dromios as “shadows” of one another. Twelfth Night’s Viola and Sebastian are fraternal twins who are so similar in appearance that Antonio asks Sebastian, “How have you made division of yourself?” and exclaims, “An apple cleft in two is not more twin / Than these two creatures” (5.1.215-17). In The Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaboration with Fletcher and an adaptation of the Knight’s tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Palamon and Arcite, the titular cousins, are twins of a sort in that they are interchangeable in Chaucer’s text and not especially distinct in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s version. There is, then, some unintentional irony in the lady Emilia’s insistence that “Palamon / Is but [Arcite’s] foil, to him a mere dull shadow” (4.2.25-6). This speech is perhaps the closest that Shakespeare comes to establishing an explicit connection between twins and shadows. 44 My search through Jonson’s corpus led only to one instance of twins-as-shadows, and there only in reference to a figurative twinning: in A Challenge at Tilt, two cupids appear and claim exclusively to have attended a marriage ceremony the previous day. Each contends that the other is an “impostor” (21); the Second Cupid thus demands of Jonson’s audience, “Do I not look liker a Cupid than he?” (30), while the First Cupid mockingly refers to this other as “My little shadow” (35). 45 Helkiah Crooke, for instance, argues that twins are formed when “seede” enters the womb on multiple occasions (and possibly settles into—or is “dispose[d]” by the womb itself into—different areas) (Dd6v- Ee1r). Renaissance writings on twins tend, however, to evince a greater interest in forms of twinning characterized by hybridity rather than doubling; hence Ambroise Paré’s catalogue of reports of “monsters caused by too great abundance of seed” (Mmmm2r–5v), which is dominated by illustrations of conjoined twins both human and animal, and Montaigne’s essay “Of a monstrous child,” whose titular child is “fastned and joined to an other childe” (Oo2r). 46 After describing the brothers, Antonio says of the Duchess’s speech, appearance, and virtues, “You never fixed your eye on three fair medals / Cast in one figure, of so different temper” (1.1.188-9).

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Acknowledging what the shadow is likely not in this play helps, however, to clarify the significance of Ferdinand’s sole use of the term “shadow” in Act 5. In the midst of a fit, Ferdinand demands of his attendants, “what’s that follows me?” and then attacks his own shadow (5.2.31-2, 38.sd). Ferdinand seems at once to acknowledge this shade as an extension of himself (he refers to it as “my shadow” [5.2.41]), and to reimagine it as something frightening and wholly distinct from himself—indeed, as a living entity that he can “throttle” and take to Hell (5.2.38). This latter comment, especially, offers the possibility that Ferdinand regards his shadow as a figure for Bosola, the servant who clung to Ferdinand for advancement in the play’s first four acts, who carried out his shady orders, and whom Ferdinand blamed exclusively for the consequences of these orders in Act 4. By the time of Duchess’s first staging, however, to fear or fight one’s own shadow was a common expression denoting baseless terror or vain pursuits; it is also an expression whose variants Webster similarly employs in other plays to describe situations in which a character’s passions and actions are fueled—as here—not by perceptible evidence, but by forms of self-reflection and imagination that become pathological.47 Ferdinand’s attempt to fight his shadow is an absurd act, and one that he performs as he wrestles internally with the knowledge of his own culpability in the Duchess’s death. When Ferdinand sees his shadow and cries to his attendants, “Let it not haunt me” (5.2.36), he balks at an image that is at once a figure for the accomplice who has made Ferdinand’s dark impulses his own, and an external, visible complement to the wolfish hair that he imagines within himself.

Prior to Ferdinand’s crisis of conscience and his inner metamorphosis, Bosola and his fellow executioners prepare to strangle the Duchess. She responds with simultaneous resignation and defiance, demanding that the men “Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out, / They then may feed in quiet” (4.2.235-6). The Duchess’s lines, which cast the

47 See OED “shadow” (n.) II.4.b. The White Devil’s Flamineo comments that the jealous man “many times makes his own shadow his cuckold-maker” (1.2.105). In The Devil’s Law-Case, the Capuchin advises Romelio (who is, at this point, guilty of attempted murder), “Were I in your case, / I should present to myself strange shadows” (5.4.69-70), to which Romelio responds, “Turn you, were I in your case, / I should laugh at mine own shadow” and assumes that the friar’s advice is meant “to make me coward” (5.4.71-3).

197 brothers as ravenous animals, are proleptic in retrospect, for they faintly anticipate Ferdinand’s lycanthropic transformation. In imagining herself being “laid out” in death so that her brothers can “feed” upon her, the Duchess also figures her execution under Ferdinand’s orders as an act of cannibalism that, together with Ferdinand’s lycanthropy, evokes “The shamefull act” and wolfish transformation of Lycaon in the Metamorphoses (Ovid B3v). In Ovid’s narrative, Jupiter descends to earth in order to spy on his misbehaving mortal subjects. His travels bring him to the home of the Arcadian king Lycaon, who allows Jupiter to stay as a guest; Lycaon, questioning whether this traveler is really a god, resolves to “steale upon [him] in the night, and kyll [him] unbeware” (B4v). Lycaon also butchers, roasts, and stews a hostage entrusted to him by the Molossians, but is prevented from serving this cannibalistic feast to his guests by Jupiter, who brings the house’s roof down and transforms Lycaon into a wolf, destroying the king’s household and ensuring that Lycaon’s “cruell heart in outward shape doth well it selfe bewraye” (B4v). Lycaon’s attempt to murder a guest and devour a man in his care marks him as a violator of the obligations of both hospitality and politics, for which he is metamorphosed into a beast whose new form is appropriate to his inhumane behavior. Ferdinand’s actions evince a similar twofold violation, and earn him an appropriate beastly retribution: he obsessively probes the bodily and spatial privacy of a head of state, arranges for a murder that the victim figures as feeding, and imagines that he has grown a set of inner wolfish hair in the wake of his crime.48

48 Michael Steffes discusses the Duchess-Lycaon connection at length in his study of wilderness metaphors in the play. As Steffes observes, interpretations of the story of Lycaon in the Renaissance figure his cannibalism as a political metaphor in which “The lord gnaws away at his subjects’ substance” (40). (For a brief catalogue of Renaissance commentaries on Lycaon as a cautionary political tale, see Steffes 39-41.) In Steffes’s reading, Ferdinand’s lycanthropy constitutes “the centre of a metaphoric pattern in which all members of Ferdinand’s princely house are linked with the wild, with wolves, or with other predatory, wolf-like wild beasts” (37). The Duchess herself notably describes the act of proposing to Antonio as “going into a wilderness” (1.1.359); seizing upon this image of boundary transgression, Steffes describes the Duchess as a character whose “self-indulgence has taken her beyond the cultural boundaries that could protect her” (46). Although I would argue that the commentary offered by the Duchess’s subjects, together with the proposed accession of her and Antonio’s son, marks a valorized difference between her self- indulgent conduct and that of her brothers, Steffes rightly perceives the Duchess’s marriage as a transgression of social conventions that leaves her tragically vulnerable to Ferdinand’s plot.

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The parallels between these two characters are not exact: Lycaon never attempts to blame a servant for his actions, and Ferdinand casts himself, at least initially, as a kind of Jupiter figure in his attempts to discover his sister’s purported sexual misconduct through espionage. Ferdinand’s murderous impulses also slide into expressions of incestuous desire that are not present in Lycaon’s story, and he directs these impulses toward a twin sibling who, though often described with adulation by others, is not literally divine. The echoes of Ovid’s narrative in Duchess are nonetheless suggestive, for they implicitly posit Ferdinand, rather than his rebellious sister, as the chief agent of social transgression in the play. The first four acts of Webster’s play, read through this Ovidian lens, stage a series of violations of household boundaries that are perpetrated by Ferdinand at his sister’s court: like Lycaon, he repeatedly strives to enter—and do violence to—bodies and spaces where he should not be, whether personally or through Bosola. Incestuous and murderous desires finally become, in the image of the wolfish Ferdinand feeding on his sibling, a form of cannibalism by which Ferdinand in his passion consumes and destroys his family; in the process, he takes on a lycanthropic form that, like Lycaon’s wolfish metamorphosis, “bewraye[s]” the inner inhumanity that he strives to deny.

Bosola’s instrumentality to these violations at once complements and complicates this reading of Ferdinand’s madness. A change of heart leads Bosola to betray Ferdinand and avenge the Duchess, so that he is ultimately responsible for exposing and destroying the play’s Lycaon analogue. Yet, prior to this change, he is complicit in, and indeed at times actively supportive of, Ferdinand’s wolfish behavior. Bosola’s speeches on his frustrated desire to discover the Duchess’s private life blur, like his employer’s, into expressions of a wish to see and probe her body, as when he calls for a wind to blow away the pregnant Duchess’s “bawd farthingales” and loose gown, and so expose “The young springal cutting a caper in her belly” (2.1.152-5). His longing to be a “horse-leech” to Ferdinand and the Cardinal also marks him as another greedy feeder like his master, and one whose parasitical striving leads him to violate his own contracts of household service: first to the Duchess and later also to Ferdinand. Bosola’s efforts, both to advance and later to avenge, expose and ultimately consume the Duchess and her kin; here, too, then, Bosola’s relations with his master effect a strange blurring of identities that is apparent in both action and figuration. Bosola’s existence as a set of hungry eyes, ears, and hands

199 through which Ferdinand violates his sister’s privacy renders the men’s service relations at once a symptom of and a means of perpetuating Ferdinand’s transgressive, penetrative desire. Ferdinand once encouraged a kind of permeability between himself and his family, servants, and hangers-on; after the Duchess’s death, his grief, guilt, and/or desire seem, from his perspective, maddeningly to transcend inward/outward and self/other distinctions. Symptoms of his distress spread beyond his mind and body, filling both his physical shadow and the figurative shadow that is his sycophantic servant, even as his illness seems also to expand inward to fill his dark inner cavities with beastly hair. By Act 5, Webster’s use of the shadow as a figure for master/servant relations has shifted from a political inflection to a supernatural one, but his usage remains rooted throughout the play in the permeable and eroticized boundaries between servants and masters. In Bosola’s speech in praise of Antonio’s service, the shadow stands as a figure for an egalitarian ideal of mutual care and reward. In Ferdinand’s usage, it comes to signify this ideal’s dark alternative: a form of obsessive, possibly incestuous, self-interest that leads Ferdinand to deny others this reciprocity but which also leads, in the relationship between himself and Bosola, to a maddened dissolution of the boundaries between aristocratic self and subordinate other that Ferdinand seems so desperate to protect.

IV: Things of darkness

Antonio and the Duchess’s marriage “redirect[s] desire socially toward a realm of egalitarian reciprocity and power sharing” (Correll 83), such that even the couple’s sexually-charged private rhetoric plays with their social distinctions as a means of expressing and inflaming desire. Although this union is destroyed, the piling-up of bodies on the stage by Act 5 comes to seem less the inevitable consequence of Antonio’s ambitions or the Duchess’s desire than the result of Ferdinand’s violent, possibly incestuous, personal opposition. Regardless of this opposition, moreover, a piece of the Duchess’s union and the egalitarian possibilities that it symbolizes remains in the form of Antonio and the Duchess’s sole surviving son, whom Delio encourages his peers “To establish … / In ’s mother’s right” as the new duke in the play’s closing speech (5.5.112-

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13). As such, even as Delio and his peers continue to regard heredity as the grounds for political power and preserve the old hierarchical system of rule, they do so while celebrating and elevating the product of the same transgressive marriage that Ferdinand once dismissed as an infection of his family’s noble blood. Ferdinand’s desire exists in Duchess as a force productive of madness and death, and one whose dark influence on Amalfi’s court is at least putatively purged by the survivors of the fifth-act bloodbath.

In The Tempest, conversely, potentially radical acts of desire are ultimately folded into, indeed become integral to, the play’s return to the status quo for which Prospero longs, such that even Ferdinand’s erotic rebellion is staged within the shadow of the magician’s social and political ambitions. In the process of effecting this return to order, Prospero also evinces an awareness of his political and psychological entanglement with at least some of his servants in a way that largely eludes Webster’s Ferdinand. In the final scene of The Tempest, Prospero exposes Stefano, Trinculo, and Caliban’s plot to murder him and rule the island, and tells Antonio, “Two of these fellows you / Must know and own. This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.1.277-9). For Antonio, to acknowledge Stefano and Trinculo as his own entails taking responsibility, as a superior, for the conduct of the subordinates who have threatened Prospero’s life. Implicitly, however, this act of acknowledgement also entails claiming them as “his” in a manner similar to the veiled recognition of selfhood in others that Webster’s Ferdinand makes: Stefano and Trinculo’s behaviour, though not ordered by Antonio himself, nonetheless replicates that of their lord, albeit on a parodically smaller scale. The duke and his drunken subordinates alike are guilty of striving, as Antonio says to Sebastian of their own murderous plans, to turn “fellows” (or even superiors) into “servants” (2.1.269-70).

Antonio does not respond to Prospero’s imperative to know and own his servants; indeed, he remains silent for the rest of the play’s conclusion, thus rendering the brothers’ already questionable reconciliation further strained. Also left uncertain are the precise terms of Prospero’s relations with Caliban, his own “thing of darkness.” Certainly, Caliban is “his” throughout the play insofar as he lives as Prospero’s slave and performs manual labour on Prospero’s behalf. As Caliban himself points out, he is also in some respects Prospero’s creation, in that Prospero and/or Miranda taught him to speak (1.2.366-7), and

201 also, in enslaving and tormenting him, gave him cause to curse his masters and plot to overthrow them—a reading of Caliban’s relations with Prospero that I pursued in the first section of this chapter. Yet, it is also possible that Prospero identifies, in this speech, a shadowy image of himself in Caliban. The slave is not just Prospero’s dark creation or troublesome responsibility; Caliban’s complaints of usurpation and ill treatment recall Prospero’s resentment at his deposition as well as his longing to reclaim his title. Caliban’s foiled attempt at revenge likewise speaks to a possibility that always lurks behind the magician’s plotting: that is, Prospero’s unrealized yet ever-present potential for a violent magical vengeance against the enemies who have wronged him and placed him in his present position of abjection. Whereas Webster’s patriarchal figure repeatedly violates the social, spatial, and bodily boundaries of servants and kin, Shakespeare’s patriarch concerns himself with the restoration of these boundaries through his surveillance and manipulation of the shipwrecked nobles’ regicidal plots as well as his guidance of the young lovers’ passions into acceptable channels. At the same time, Prospero’s troubled relations with these other characters hint at a dark side to this vision of order’s restoration: the play’s comic restorations are predicated on the work of servants like Ariel, Caliban, and, briefly, Ferdinand, whose complaints and admonitions gesture toward a current of physical and psychological violence, often perpetrated by Prospero himself, that threatens to upset the master-servant identities, and with them the political and social boundaries, that Prospero works to redefine.

Christopher Tilmouth argues that “Shakespearean drama … repeatedly emphasizes selfhood’s position as something called into being dialogically, in association with others” (20). Consider, for instance, Ulysses’s claim in Troilus and Cressida that “no man is the lord of any thing … Till he communicate his parts to others” and nor does he know of these “parts” in the first place “Till he behold them formèd in th’applause / Where they’re extended” (3.3.110-15; also qtd. in Tilmouth 19). The Tempest and other Renaissance plays that treat service and its discontents present audiences with a similar yet subtler version of this dialogic association in their staging of the ambivalent relations between masters and their shadowing servants. Servants’ identities are sometimes called into being through explicit accounts—appreciative or denunciative, as the case may be—

202 of their physical or psychological “parts.”49 Masters’ identities, meanwhile, are frequently defined through their exercises of power, yet in the process these masters expose the degree to which power and, with it, identity are dependent upon their relations with the servants who act as their eyes, ears, and hands. Above all, kings and slaves alike in Shakespeare’s plays are defined through speeches, like Prospero’s above, in which the actions and passions of one illuminate those of another; particularly in The Tempest, this illumination is a function of the relations of likeness that emerge obliquely in characters’ rhetorics of service.

Ulysses’s insistence that the “applause” of others is necessary to the formation of selfhood also plays with a conception of identity as performance: the “parts” that one communicates to others for affirmation are not just bodily parts or mental faculties, but also, in a larger sense, the roles that a given individual plays and which intersubjective acknowledgement (with approving “applause”) gives a sense of reality. These remarks return us to my opening comments, where I observed that Shakespeare’s Theseus and Robin express the conviction that the performances of actors, theatrical “shadows,” are ephemeral and essentially harmless. Both Theseus at the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe and Robin in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s epilogue argue, as I noted above, that the bodies of actors can only ever exist as derivative shadows to the real bodies that they imitate, and only if they are sustained by the interest and pleasure of the observers whom they serve. Critics often describe Prospero not as one of these ephemeral shadows, but as a playwright figure, and more specifically as a stand-in for Shakespeare himself.50

49 See especially characters’ commentary on Caliban’s appearance. Prospero first describes him as “A freckled whelp, hag-born—not honoured with / A human shape” (1.2.285-6), and, upon first seeing him, Antonio describes the slave as “a plain fish” (5.1.269); whether or not these evaluations can be trusted, Prospero’s, especially, seems meant to complement his moral evaluation of Caliban and his rapacious self- conduct. 50 See, e.g., Stephen Greenblatt, who argues that Shakespeare “is implicated in this figure of his magician hero” (Will in the World 376); Lena Perkins Wilder, who notes characters’ resistance to the “executive control” of Prospero as a “playwright figure” who “browbeat[s]” others into reciting past events and affirming the magician’s own perspective on them in “mnemonic fantasies of control” (172); and Daniel Vitkus, who observes that the play’s text “offers the possibility” of a reading of Prospero as an exploitative playhouse owner or manager (411). Vitkus qualifies, however, that “There are no direct, one-to-one correspondences at work here (such as Prospero = Shakespeare, Prospero = playwright, or Ariel = player)” but rather there is “a range of different theatrical identities” represented in the figure of the magician and his servants (411).

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Certainly, Prospero’s manipulation of spirits and shipwrecked noblemen alike on the island constitutes a playwright-like ordering of the play’s events, and one whose moral ambiguity is perhaps an ambivalent reflection of Shakespeare’s own career and artistry near the end of his career. Beyond the biographical and textual grounds for objecting to this reading of Prospero (and/or Shakespeare),51 however, the play’s opening scenes themselves complicate the magician’s theatrical identity. In Act 1, Prospero casts himself not as a playwright figure, but as a passive patron and playgoer whose trust is abused by a servant, and whose power to create (as playwright) or approve (as spectator) becomes, in any case, irrelevant in the face of this actor’s rebellion.

When Prospero describes his deposition to Miranda, he acknowledges his own negligence as a factor,52 but nevertheless denounces his brother for striving to be more than a substitute, and frames his accusations in the language of rhetorical and theatrical performance. Though Antonio (so Prospero accuses) was appointed only to “execut[e] th’outward face of royalty” on Prospero’s behalf (1.2.104), he wished “To have no screen between this part he played / And him he played it for” (1.2.107-8); the people’s love for Prospero prevented Antonio and his ally Alonso from killing the rightful duke outright, so instead the conspirators “With colours fairer painted their foul ends” and merely exiled Prospero (1.2.143-4). Prospero thus narrates a nightmarish scenario in which an ambitious actor’s performance perniciously shifts the boundaries between the stage and the world beyond it as easily as one might take down a theatrical prop (a “screen”) used to establish spatial distinctions between characters. His invocation of patronage, performance, and painting in the account of his deposition is particularly apt in its suggestion that political identity, like theatrical identity, is highly mutable. His terms suggest likewise that political power is always unstably grounded in the support of others whose actions and motivations are themselves mutable and at times inscrutable. Antonio is charged with playing the role of duke on behalf of a patron who is not particularly

51 Note, e.g., Shakespeare’s ongoing participation in theatrical culture post-Tempest, as well as the play’s positioning as the first text in the First Folio; J. Gavin Paul thus argues that The Tempest in both its early performances and the First Folio “represents not an ending, but a beginning” (185). 52 “The government I cast upon my brother, / And to my state grew stranger, being transported / And rapt in secret studies” (1.2.75-7).

204 involved in, and who indeed gradually loses control over, the activities of his servant. In his ambition, Antonio thus transforms himself from player to ruler through a coup that tears down the “screen” of deputization between himself and the duke. On one hand, this reading of Antonio’s coup implies that his performance as the new duke of Milan is just that: an ephemeral performance that will end when the real duke returns, just as the rebels on Prospero’s island are doomed to return to the status quo when the magician intervenes to end the brief show. On the other hand, like Sly’s lordly role-playing in Shrew, the ease with which this ducal role changes hands suggests that lordly identity is itself a performance, an insubstantial shadow that overlays a given body.

Prospero’s theatrical metaphors continue into the play’s fifth act, where they also continue to reinforce this troubling reading of lordship. As Prospero prepares to put on his old ducal robes and reveal himself to his captives, he declares, “I will discase me, and myself present / As I was sometime Milan” (5.1.85-6). To “case” something suggests an act of clothing or enclosing,53 so that Prospero’s act of discasing himself entails, simultaneously, his disrobing and his self-liberation. In invoking an act of release, his speech also vaguely recalls his freeing of Ariel from his physical confinement—the pine tree—and anticipates the spirit’s own final discasing at Prospero’s hands: that is, the end of his enslavement, which will follow the end of Prospero’s tenure on the island. More suggestively, these lines contain one of only two Shakespearean uses of the word “discase.” The other occurs in The Winter’s Tale, where Camillo orders the thieving peddler Autolycus to “discase” himself and exchange clothes with Prince Florizel so that the latter can elope in disguise (4.4.618). In both plays, the term signifies a change of costume that betokens at once a loss of identity and a freedom of movement and action that comes with performing a new identity. Florizel’s loss is largely temporary: although his decision to marry a peasant and abscond to Sicilia seems to entail discarding his identity as prince of Bohemia,54 the play ends with his reconciliation with his father. For Prospero, the loss seems more final: in discasing himself, he must also irrevocably free

53 See OED “case” (v.1) I.1 and 2. 54 (A marital choice that is strikingly similar to Ferdinand’s own resolution to marry a supposedly low-born woman who is really an exiled noblewoman in The Tempest.)

205 his spirits and discard his magical books, the players and props associated with his old robes and role. Yet, just as re-casing allows Florizel to seize a husbandly role, so does the act enable Prospero to assert his identity as Duke of Milan to his captives, and so subsequently to return to Milan as its rightful ruler.

That this change is symbolized by, and articulated in the language of, a theatrical change of garments seems especially fitting in a play that begins with an orchestrated performance of magic and which concerns itself with forms of performance on scales both large and small, from Antonio’s theatrical act of usurpation to the masque that secures Miranda and Ferdinand’s chaste marriage. Both of Prospero’s identities— magician-king and Duke of Milan—become performances that he can put on and off, his visible costume change signaling to his assembled servants and captives the role that he currently plays. In this respect, then, Prospero is not so different from his usurping brother as he might wish to declare: both men experience their rises to (and falls from) authority in ways that are inextricably tied to the language and accoutrements of theatricality. Yet, it is through their changing relationships with, and recognition by, superiors and subordinates that these performances of power attain—and retain—a sense of reality. It is also fitting, then, that the play ends with an epilogue, spoken by Prospero’s actor, that appeals to audiences for their “good hands” (Ep.10). Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest concludes with a speech that absorbs the production’s playing with identity and power dynamics into a request for applause that reasserts the play’s fantastical and implicitly harmless nature. Shortly after asserting his subversive power to case and discase himself at will, Prospero claims that his “charms are all o’erthrown” (Ep.1), and that he will remain “confined” on the island without spectators’ assistance (Ep.4). Only the “prayer” (i.e. applause) of the audience has the power to “relieve” him (Ep.16); in pleading for applause, like his comic forbears, he places his feeble self at the mercy of the playgoers who sustain his fiction and allow him to exit at the end of the play. Whether Prospero and his shadows have offended or amused, the audience need only clap to end the spell.

Coda Periscian States

“In every clime we are in a periscian state,” writes Thomas Browne, “and with our Light our Shadow and Darkness walk about us” (Christian Morals 213). The term “periscian” refers to a phenomenon in which shadows revolve around the body from which they are cast over a period of time. The “periscian state” is a mundane one for inhabitants of the earth’s polar regions, who are thus circled by their own shadows on summer days;1 in Browne’s Christian Morals, however, this phenomenon becomes a metaphor for the state of uneasy anticipation that Browne sees as endemic to life itself. In Browne’s “perisician state,” every thing that exists is dogged by reminders, like clinging shadows, of its inevitable non-existence.2 So too are the living confronted with the inadequacy and, often, the pain of this present existence in the face of that which is to come; as such, Browne proclaims, “To enjoy true happiness we must travel into a very far Countrey, and even out of our selves” (214).3 The shadow is closely intertwined with Browne’s sense of time’s passage as a figure, on one hand, for all that is past and gone and, on the other, for the greatest mysteries of faith to come. He indeed cautions his readers that “Time past is gone like a Shadow” but also figures the contemplation of “Heaven” as an “Ingression into the Divine Shadow” (233). Browne’s writings reveal a preoccupation with the shadow as a figure for forms of transcendence that are themselves bound up with obscuring metaphors and with the obscurity of death. There is no temporal space, so to speak, that Browne finds free from shadows as figures for the self’s annihilation. This darkness itself becomes, however, productive of knowledge: “Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible”—stars, for instance, would be imperceptible “were it

1 See OED “periscian,” adj. B. Browne may have found the term, with reference to a specific and vaguely oppressive geographical phenomenon, in Louis Leroy’s Of the Interchangeable Course, or Variety of Things in the Whole World. In Robert Ashley’s translation, Leroy describes inhabitants of the poles as “they which have their shadowes round about them in the forme of milstones” (C3v). 2 “Our contentments stand upon the tops of Pyramids ready to fall off, and the insecurity of their enjoyments abrupteth our Tranquilities” (213). 3 See Job 10:20-2, in which Job demands some comfort from God before he embarks upon his own journey to “the land of darkness and the shadow of death.”

206 207 not for darknesse” (Cyrus N3v)—and, in the image of the self’s folding into a heavenly shadow, darkness becomes “the very medium of the self-communication of God” (Lobsien 150).4

Browne’s readers would likely have perceived the echoes of Job 10 in his writings’ preoccupation with present and pending shadows of death. His literarily-inclined readers might also, however, have noted a secular analogue to this periscian state in the figure of Shakespeare’s young man in Sonnet 53, whom the speaker asks, “What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?” (1-2). When I discussed this passage in the Introduction, I suggested that the “shadows” surrounding the addressee refer to the imperfect imitations of the beloved-as-form that the poem’s speaker finds in the external world, and to past objects of desire—like Adonis and Helen—who stand as types to the young man’s antitype. As John Hollander notes, these “strange shadows” are also potentially (among other things) “followers” and “other representations, emanations, flattering or otherwise falsifying” (25). They are, in other words, possibly both the sycophants who crowd around the beloved and the flattering portraits, visual or verbal, that these admirers construct of him. Among these shadows, the sonnet hints further, stands the speaker himself, whose sonnet sequence constitutes a long performance of flattering rhetorical portraiture. Portraits-as-shadows are indeed valorized in the Sonnets as a kind of counter to the threat of death, which is itself occasionally described as a shadow—as in the promise that death will not “brag thou wander’st in his shade / When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st” (18.11-12). The poetic shadow’s power to overcome the deathly one is, however, always a questionable one. Shakespeare’s speaker thus wonders, “Who will believe my verse in time to come / If it were filled with your most high deserts?” (17.1-2), and he repeatedly places the

4 Browne adds, “The Sunne it self is but the dark simulachrum, and light but the shadow of God” (Cyrus N3v, emphasis in original). Browne seems to have liked this metaphor of light-as-shadow well enough to have used it repeatedly in his discussions of the necessary humility of faith. In Religio Medici, for instance, he professes a love for metaphor and allegory as a form of “description, periphrasis, or adumbration” that reveals the impenetrable “obscurity” of divine mysteries and which makes “Reason … more humble and submissive”—as in the irrational phrase “Lux est umbra DEI” (21, emphasis in original).

208 power of his poetry in tension with that of fatherhood as another, possibly better, means of transcendence.5

Whereas Browne’s periscian states, before and after death, figure the pursuit and attainment of divine knowledge, the shadows that tend on Shakespeare’s still-young and beautiful subject thus convey a distressed, strangely preemptive, earthly nostalgia. They trail inadequately behind an idealized body that is imagined as already in the process of being lost, and they grow paradoxically less effective as memorializing devices over time and in proportion to their fidelity. Browne’s Christian writings offer the hope of an end to the despair that might attend on these thoughts of annihilation: that is, through the acceptance of decay and the contemplation of the journey into the shadow of death as a spiritual experience. I have also suggested that one of the potential aims of art and poesy, meanwhile, is to renounce art’s memorializing function—or at least to devalue it—and to uncouple the shadow from the substance. In, for instance, the impossibly penetrative blazons of the English sonnet tradition, the disappointment that Shakespeare’s speaker registers is precluded by art that treats the poetic shadow as an object of pleasure in itself that often has little relation to its supposed origin.

I want to close by gesturing briefly toward at least one poetic meditation on the value of re-coupling shadow and substance and, indeed, on the potential pleasure fostered by the conscious recognition of their disparities. In the elegy “His Picture,” Donne’s speaker offers a portrait of himself to his mistress before he embarks on a voyage:6 Here take my Picture, though I bid farewell; Thine, in my heart, where my soule dwells, shall dwell. ’Tis like me now, but I dead, ’twill be more When wee are shadowes both, than ’twas before. (1-4)

5 Sonnets 15 through 19 form a group in which the speaker considers the preservative power of verse. Reproduction emerges as “a mightier way / [to] Make war upon this bloody tyrant, time” (16.1-2), but the speaker nonetheless asserts the power of verse to make “My love … ever live young” (19.14). 6 Likely a military expedition. See Gary Stringer’s variorum for a summary of critical commentaries on the elegy’s possible historical circumstances (820-1); critics’ interest in pinning the elegy to a specific mid- 1590s military expedition can be traced back to at least 1890.

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These introductory lines evoke the substitutive and memorializing functions of art, and thus partake of the aggrieved nostalgia that Shakespeare’s speaker raises in the Sonnets.7 In Donne’s version of the shadow-as-portrait, the picture is like Shakespeare’s verbal portrait: it is an imperfect substitutive object, a slightly-off “shadowe” of the lover. Donne’s speaker diverges from Shakespeare’s, however, in his claim that it is possible for the portrait to seem more, rather than less, accurate over time. The picture preserves an image of the lover as he was at the time of the portrait’s creation; as the lover ages, the unchanging picture will overtake its mutable original in its visual fidelity to the past self. This process culminates in the intertwining of death and art in the figure of the shadow: the portrait may be a mere shadow of its object, but when the speaker’s death renders him a ghostly shadow, the picture remains to preserve an image of him as he once was.

Donne’s persona also, however, describes this process of shadowy self-diminishment as already underway. The rest of the poem indeed focuses not on the picture’s reception in the distant future, but on its consideration in the interim between the portrait’s presentation and the subject’s death, when it is possible to compare shadow and substance visually. The lover imagines that his journey will leave him in a “weather- beaten” state (5), whose details he goes on to recount. The “Picture” offered up for consideration thus becomes the poem itself as an anti-Petrarchan portrait of his near- future self, a grotesque body “with rude oares torne, or Sun beams tann’d” outwardly, and inwardly a broken “sack of bones” (6, 9). Upon his return, the speaker’s portrait, held up for visual comparison, will therefore serve to remind its viewer of its object’s reduction to a figure so “foule, and course” that his “rivall fooles” will scoff at his beloved for having loved him (11-12). So too does the speaker suggest that the portrait’s recipient might someday gaze upon the youthful image shadowed on its surface and see it as a reminder of her own inevitable alteration: “thou shalt say,” Donne’s speaker predicts, “Doe his hurts reach mee? doth my worth decay?” (13-14).

7 Compare also Pliny the Elder’s story of pottery’s origins—noted in the Introduction—in which Dibutades makes a clay relief of a man’s face for his lover to “injoy … in his absence” (Aaa6r).

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These doubts evoke the dark side of the artistic shadow with its capacity to shape subtly the perceptions, and with them the passions, of its witnesses. The lover dismisses his rivals and their commentary as “fooles,” but nonetheless exposes a fear that the portrait will betray its original by driving his beloved not to remember him and remain faithful, but to cast him aside.8 The problem is not that she will prefer the picture itself to her lover, but that the unchanging image transcends the limits that time and experience place on real bodies—like those of the lovers—and so highlights through contrast the unflattering changes that these bodies undergo. The picture that Donne’s speaker offers his mistress is likely a miniature intended to be worn by its recipient;9 it is thus a figurative shadow that literally clings to a body, constantly offering to the wearer its reminder of the inevitability of decay in contrast with its own unchanging surface. To look on a familiar picture—even that of another, Donne suggests—is to recognize yourself as already on the journey to Browne’s “far Countrey,” ever further from the ideal images of yourself and others that memory holds.

Against this prediction of mutual decrepitude and dissatisfaction, however, the elegy concludes with a hopeful alternative in which the lover anticipates a response from his beloved to her own questioning impulses: That which in him was faire and delicate, Was but the milke, which in love’s childish state Did nurse it: who now is growne strong enough To feed on that, which to disus’d tasts seemes tough. (17-20) The shadow-as-portrait still recalls, inevitably, an absent origin from which it is derived: the “fair and delicate” man who presents this piece of art. Taken as a reminder of the

8 Donne’s speaker implies that death is a possible outcome of his voyage, but also hints that “the real danger in his departure is the death of being abandoned” (Flynn 21). The elegy falls within the congé d’amour genre: that is, poetry written on the occasion of a lover’s departure for military service. As Arthur Marotti notes, however, Donne reverses the typical purpose of such poetry—the mistress’s reassurance that her lover will remain faithful and return when his service ends—“by having the speaker take his own constancy for granted and make his mistress’s the issue” (99). See also Posthumus’s anxious placement of a bracelet on Innogen’s arm as a “manacle” to secure her fidelity in Cymbeline (1.1.123). 9 Noted by Gardiner in the Oxford edition of Donne’s elegies (25). As evidence for Donne’s interest in miniatures, Gardiner points, for instance, to the miniature of Donne by Isaac Oliver, dated 1616, and to the engraving prefixed to the 1635 edition of Donne’s Poems, which is likely a copy of a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard (25).

211 fairness that was, however, this shadow serves less to convey a sense of loss than to mark—indeed, in the poetic presentation, to secure as if prophetically—a disjunction between past and present. The elegy, meanwhile, posits that this disjunction is itself more beautiful and longed-for than the delicate self that the portrait captures. Donne’s elegy takes up devotional metaphors of consumption as maturation;10 its final lines fashion the spiritual progression from milk to meat into a corporeal one in which erotic desire is constant but the mistress’s attraction specifically to those delicate outward appearances is superseded by her appreciation of a “worth” that is not predicated on them.11 Over time, the self that the picture presents to its recipient thus comes to be associated with his mistress’s “childish” love: a love that grows on the milk of an initially superficial attraction but which, as it matures, will not balk at—will, indeed, implicitly crave (“feed on”)—torn and tanned flesh because it is that of her lover.

The point of the portrait, as a leave-taking gift, is to pull a mimetic image of a body out of time and fix it on a static surface, where it serves as a visual reminder of the fixity of the giver’s love and solicits the recipient’s fidelity in return. The threat of death looms, however, over the elegy in its entirety. This threat lies in the association of art with death through the shared figuring of portraiture and ghosts as shadows, and it inheres in the poem’s repeated insistence upon decay and death as processes that art cannot counter. The portrait itself, Donne’s speaker hints, may indeed help to secure the death of the love that it is meant to sustain. Yet, it is precisely in giving in to the periscian state that the portrait offers, held up alongside its object’s weather-beaten body, that the lovers may arrive at a higher understanding of their ever-growing bond. The portrait still exists as a memorial object, but what it truly and subtly memorializes is the “faire and delicate” image itself as a symbol of the immature love that the lovers have transcended. Donne’s

10 See Paul’s figuration of milk as spiritual immaturity in 1 Corinthians 3:1-2; see also Hebrews 5:12-14. Noted also by Gardiner (25). 11 John Carey argues that the “craggy features” Donne’s speaker describes make him “more worthy, but also more appetizing to women” even though he “pretend[s] the opposite” throughout the poem (66). This interpretation certainly helps to explain the hyperbolic tone of the speaker’s self-deprecating portraiture (by rendering it ironic), but it somewhat works against the poem’s adaptation of Biblical metaphors of spiritual progress, which suggests that cragginess is something that the mistress will grow used to, rather than something she ought to find inherently desirable.

212 elegy makes no particular provisions for the future when both lovers are shades, leaving no one to speak to the portrait’s deeper significance as part of their shared history; nor, indeed, does the elegy guarantee the response from the picture’s recipient that it solicits. For now, however, the piece of art and the poem itself exist not just as love-tokens, but as secret signs. They serve as reminders that bodies decay and their shadows are imperfect, but also that it is possible for a love to inhere between them that transcends, and indeed grows with, time and change. Donne’s portrait is, finally, an image that shadows forth the growth and maturation of this love that will come.

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