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Michael West Theater of Enigma in Shakespeare’s England Michael West Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2017 Michael West All rights reserved ABSTRACT Theater of Enigma in Shakespeare’s England Michael West Theater of Enigma in Shakespeare’s England demonstrates the cognitive, affective, and social import of enigmatic theatrical moments. While the presence of other playgoers obviously shapes the experience of attending a play, I argue that deliberately induced moments of audience ignorance are occasions for audience members to be especially aware of their relations to others who may or may not share their bafflement. I explore the character of states of knowing and not-knowing among audience members and the relations that obtain among playgoers who inhabit these states. Further, I trace the range of performance techniques whereby playgoers are positioned in a cognitive no-man's land, lying somewhere between full understanding and utter ignorance—techniques that I collectively term “enigmatic theater.” I argue that moments of enigmatic theater were a dynamic agent in the formation of collectives in early modern playhouses. I use here the term “collective” to denote the temporary, occasional, and fleeting quality of these groupings, which occur during performance but are dissipated afterwards. Sometimes, this collective resembles what Victor Turner terms communitas, in which the normal societal divisions are suspended and the playgoers become a unified collectivity. At other times, however, plays solicit the formation of multiple collectives defined by their differing degrees of knowledge about a seeming enigma. In either case, I show that a core achievement of early modern theater of enigma was to link issues of knowledge with issues of belonging—even when that pleasurable sense of belonging is as transient as the occasion of performance. Table of Contents Introduction: Enigmatic Theater………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One: “Broken English”: French Language and the Divided Playgoers of Henry V..37 Chapter Two: Hamlet, “Inexplicable Dumb Shows,” and the Pleasures of Confusion……..82 Chapter Three: “I am I,” “I am not what I am”: Tautology, Contradiction, and Enigmatic Clowning...…………………………………………………………………126 Chapter Four: Whispering, Politics, Prophecy, and King Lear’s “one word in private”…..157 Coda……….………………………………………………………………………………..191 Bibliography.……………………………………………………………………………….197 i Acknowledgements This dissertation could only have been written because of the care that I have received from many people, at Columbia and beyond. Thanks first to my parents, Thomas West and Grace Starry West, for showing me by example that the scholarly life can be richly rewarding and very much worth living. Thanks to Monica Spence and Katie Israel for watching my boys for so many hours; thanks to my wife Mary for believing in me and this work even when unsure about its details, and for supporting and tolerating five years of train rides on the Metro-North railroad. Thanks to those who were willing to talk and think with me about enigma, obscurity, and cognate concepts in the very early stages, especially Kathy Eden and Julie Crawford. Thanks to those who have read so much of this and more in the Columbia early modern colloquium and for teaching me how to be a good graduate student: especially John Kuhn, Chris McKeen, Seth Williams, Noémie Ndiaye, Rachel Dunn, Ben VanWagoner, Andrea Crow, Alexander Lash, Gabriel Bloomfield, Tim Lundy, Bernadette Myers, Liza McIntosh, Chelsea Spata, and Kevin Windhauser. Thanks to those outside Columbia who have made me feel like a person who has something to offer, including Joseph Bowling, Kristina Huang, Ross McDonald, Laura Kolb, Billy Junker, Carla Mazzio, and Adam Zucker. Thanks to my committee: to Molly Murray for hearing in my early ramblings something along the lines of “Leo Strauss meets Alan Macfarlane,” and for invigorating and at times intimidating written feedback; to Bill Worthen for repeatedly calling me back to real theater and not just its textualized imaginings; and finally to Jean Howard, for looking me in ii the eye during that first seminar, for seeing a dissertation here before I did, and for combining exactingly high standards with unwavering support and encouragement. iii Introduction: Enigmatic Theater In this dissertation I ask what happens in an early modern London playhouse when some playgoers come to know that they do not know something: when they are made particularly aware of the specific character of their ignorance. The effects of such occurrences are varied, but each is inflected by the specifically communal character of playgoing in early modern England, whereby one is made continually aware of the other playgoers surrounding oneself. This factor definitively distinguishes early modern playgoing from modern scholarly reading, and I will repeatedly seek to bridge the imaginative gap between the two practices. How does the presence of these playgoers shape the experience of attending a play in early modern England? What is the feeling of knowing and not-knowing among this mass of bodies? How does each state feel, and what relations obtain among playgoers who inhabit these states? Early modern plays repeatedly stage such situations, in which an onstage “audience” (and the playhouse audience) knows more than those that it oversees and intellectual competencies help determine social distinctions. Take the case of Twelfth Night, in which an inset group—Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Fabian—observes Malvolio finding, reading, and interpreting a letter that they (and the playgoers) know has been forged by Maria to resemble that of the Lady Olivia. The playgoers know in advance, as Fabian puts it, “how imagination blows” Malvolio, which leads him to find what he is looking for in the enigmatic letter, part of which he reads aloud: I may command where I adore; 1 But silence, like a Lucrece knife, With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore: M.O.A.I doth sway my life.1 Having just fantasized aloud about marrying Olivia, Malvolio looks to make this “fustian riddle” refer to himself: “what should that alphabetical position portend? If I could make that resemble something in me! Softly – “M.O.A.I.…‘M.’ Malvolio. ‘M.’ Why, that begins my name!” (2.5.116-19,123-24). Yet Malvolio quickly points out that the letters do not seem to point toward himself, because “there is no consonancy in the sequel…‘A’ should follow, but ‘O’ does” (2.5.127-9). Undaunted, he resolves “to crush this a little” so that “it would bow to me” (2.5.136-38). All this while, Toby, Andrew, and Fabian crack jokes at Malvolio’s expense, vilifying him as a “cur,” a “rogue,” a “scab,” a “trout,” and a “woodcock”—all of which emphasize Malvolio’s foolishness and mark him as one outside the community of good fellows, as one who knows less than they (and the playgoers) do (2.5.125,27,30,32,72,19,82). In Frank Kermode’s terms, Malvolio is an “outsider,” one who cannot “hope to achieve correct interpretations,” unlike we “insiders,” who are able to “divine the true, the latent sense”—which, in this case, is that there is in fact no “latent sense.”2 When playgoers are invited to mock Malvolio for his manifestly “crush[ed]” interpretation of “M.O.A.I.,” they are invited to feel themselves as insiders who know what the outsider Malvolio does not: namely, that he is being tricked. Yet the playgoers’ feelings of superiority and competence—feelings that the scene is at pains to elicit—are at the same time only partially justified. Because despite the advantage that playgoers have over Malvolio, they do not possess full knowledge. What, after all, does 1 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2008), 2.5.39-40; 2.5.94-97. Subsequent citations are given in the text. 2 The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 3. 2 “M.O.A.I.” actually mean? The letters invite decipherment, and critics have responded to this invitation in two ways: by trying to solve the riddle or by scorning such endeavors entirely. Yet to claim that one knows what “M.O.A.I.” means has been to prove oneself an outsider, definitively demonstrating that, like Malvolio, one simply does not get it.3 The smart set has always demonstrated its superiority by claiming that the riddle is unsolvable and admits of no solution.4 At this moment, then, you know that the letter is a fake, which is more than Malvolio knows: you are no fool, like he is. But at the same time, you are also curiously like Malvolio. You are both ignorant: caught between trying to decipher “M.O.A.I” and not knowing whether you should even try. In this curiously mixed epistemological and affective state, playgoers are offered the awareness that they are both comfortingly unlike Malvolio and uncomfortably like him. There is no escaping this crux: to claim that one understands how the joke is being played on Malvolio—that one knows what “M.O.A.I.” means—would 3 Many have tried to solve the riddle. Among these include Leslie Hotson, who claims that it signifies the four elements: “Mare Orbis Aer Ignis” (The First Night of Twelfth Night [London: R. Hart-Davis, 1954], 166), and Lee Sheridan Cox, who suggests “I AM O(livia)” (“The riddle in Twelfth Night” Shakespeare Quarterly 13.3 (Summer 1962): 360). Inge Leimberg argues that the letters, when properly rearranged from MOAI to IMAO, cites Revelation 1:8: “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” and “is an ironic pointer to Malvolio's ruling passion, self-love” (“’M.O.A.I.’ Trying to Share the Joke in Twelfth Night 2.5 (A Critical Hypothesis)” Connotations 1.1 (1991): 85).
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