Black and White and Red All Over: Bloody Performance in Theatre and Law

GARY WATT Black and White and Red All Over: Bloody Performance in Theatre and Law

Legal ritual is for the most part performed in black and white – not only with black letter texts, but also by means of the black textiles that make up lawyers' gowns and suits. Only occasionally, but then most significantly, the law has allowed the bloody hue of red to seep through; most notably in the sanguine form of a red wax seal. There is nothing more significant than blood – it is the original sign – and the Latin for "small sign" gives us the word "seal." Small in size it may be, but in legal documentary contexts it is a concentration or distillation of the great sign ('signum') of blood. A red seal set on a legal form shows that the law's social performance has operative power. As the seal of red wax on documentary formality is, or was, the preeminent signifier of the ritual performance of a legal text, so in terms of textile, the bloody red of the judge's silk signals the office of judgment. It is not by accident that the lead prosecutor, on the fateful final day of the trial of Charles I, was, "for the first time, robed in red" (Wedgwood 1964, 154). The red of judgment contrasts with the black and white office of advocacy. I am here recalling a description of lawyers that Jonathan Swift placed in the mouth of Captain Lemuel Gulliver. Lawyers, he said, are "a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid" (Swift 1726, IV.5). Legal commentators have for the most part lacked the imagination to see that, in the context of courtroom ritual, the red textile of judgment is the red of blood; and that the blood is signaling the essentially violent nature of legal performance. Dramatists, in contrast, have seen the signal and have alerted their audiences to it down the centuries.1 The process by which law frames rules and documents and judgments to rectilinear lines can be termed a process of "performance," because it produces forms to which the fluid shapes of life must conform. Lawyers are the architects – the master technicians – of social structures. Legal frames set bounds to the ambit of human expression and the flow of life in something like the way that structural engineers limit the flow of liquid concrete to the shape of pre-fabricated "forms." Even in the world of theatre, the effect of a dramatic performance is in some sense violent in so far as it artificially frames life to the script, and the artefacts, and the architecture, of the dramatic scene. Blood serves as a shared sign of legal and theatrical performance because blood is expressed when life is compressed. To illustrate this claim, I will focus on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599) and two domestic tragedies by anonymous authors: A Warning to Fair Women (c.1590)2 and A Yorkshire Tragedy (performed 1605, published 1608).3 Each of these plays explores

1 For an earlier, French language, version of this article see Gary Watt, "Le symbole du sang dans la performance légale et théâtrale de l'Angleterre du début de l'époque modern," Littératures classiques 3/2010 (N°73), 311-323. (www.cairn.info/revue-litteratures-classiques1-2010-3-page-311.htm). 2 In terms of date, all that can be said for certain is that the play was written sometime between the mid 1580s and the date of 1599 which appears on the title page of the first edition (Canon 1975). 3 A Yorkshire Tragedy was probably written by Thomas Middleton (Cawley and Gaines 1986; Kirwan 2010).

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 28.2 (September 2017): 23-33.

themes of legitimacy and illegitimacy, of natural inheritance and unnatural bloody murder, through the violent issue of blood. In the theatre of early modern England at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries, the stain of blood, especially that which marks white flesh and white cloth, connects murderous deeds and executions to the legal "execution" of documentary "deeds." Bloodied innocent flesh and bloodied white clothes and bloodied white handkerchiefs are juxtaposed in text, and as tangible stage properties, to legal matters and to the physical materials of legal documentary formality, notably square-cut sheets of parchment (blanched animal flesh) sealed with blood-red wax. The sign of blood on white skin and white sheets performs violence and makes a memento of it; and, when it is juxtaposed with legal materials and legal matters, serves to signify the violence inherent in the demand that human life should conform to the formal constraints of law. When early modern playwrights employed physical properties of red on white to signify the bloody nature of legal performance they were no doubt appropriating the symbolic power of medieval hagiography, which frequently employed the relic of a martyr's blood to recall the murder of the saints and the crucifixion of Christ himself. In this, they were following a practice that dominated medieval drama (Gatton 1991); but they were also reviving a motif, though they might not have been conscious of it, which the ancient Greek dramatists had employed in their plays. An example appears in Sophocles' Antigone. Creon, King of Thebes, had decreed that Polyneices (eldest Winter Journals son Oedipus' incestuous union with his mother Jocasta), having died in an assault upon his native Thebes, must be left unburied as a punishment for his supposed treachery. Antigone, a sister of Polyneices, insisted upon laying him to rest and was imprisoned at Creon's command when it emerged that she had secretlyPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) performed burial rites for her brother. In the following passage of text, Antigone expresses the conflict between the law of the State and the laws of life laid down in blood and

for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution brotherhood and religious belief. She considers the perpetual and unalterable laws of life, death and blood to be more fundamental than the ephemeral and variable laws of the State and to be more fundamental, even, than laws governing the legal status of marriage: Had I had children or their father dead, I'd let them moulder. I should not have chosen In such a case to cross the State's decree. What is the law that lies behind these words? One husband gone, I might have found another, or a child from a new man in first child's place, but with my parents hid away in death, no brother, ever, could spring up for me. Such was the law by which I honoured you. (Wyckoff 1954, 900-920) Sophocles' Antigone (c.442 BC) might have been influenced by the conclusion of Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes (467 BC). Aeschylus depicts Antigone's dilemma, which is the classic conflict between the fixed and enduring law of familial blood and the changeable law of the State, as a conflict between the State and the blood of the whole race. The chorus having been split in two by the dilemma, one half says: Let the State do, or not do, as it will. We here will follow Polyneices to his Grave, And take Part in his burial. This sorrow belongs to the whole race of Cadmus;

And what a State upholds as just Changes with the changing of time. (Vellacott 1961, 1051-1078) In Sophocles' play, the climax of the conflict is the imprisonment of Antigone, her death by hanging in her cell and the death of her lover Haemon, Creon's son. Over- come with grief when he discovers Antigone's corpse and impassioned with rage at his father when he arrives at her dungeon grave, Haemon inadvertently kills himself upon his own sword. The line that sets the seal on the tragic scene is delivered by a messenger to Haemon's mother Eurydice. He reports the death of Haemon (the "man of blood") in appropriately bloody terms. We are told that in his final embrace with Antigone, "he gasped out blood, red blood on her white cheek" (1238-1239). The symbolism of the red on white is multi-layered. It performs a ritual remembrance of death; of the sort that achieves pre-eminence in the white host and red wine of the Christian communion rite.4 This memorial aspect is attested to elsewhere in Greek drama, for example in Euripides' The Suppliant Women (422/3 BC). Euripides' play records how the Argive invaders of Thebes, allies of Polyneices, had been denied burial by Creon who kept custody of their corpses. When the mothers of the slain went to the Temple of Demeter to make supplication for her aid, the attendants to the goddess urged them to "Bloody the white fingernail along the cheek, and stain the skin!" for "To mourn the dead brings honour to those who live" (Jones 1974, 139). The red on white is also symbolic of loss of innocence. The authors of the article "What Is Antigone Wearing?" conclude that Antigone's white garb is her wedding dress: But she does not shed her blood in the ensuing gamos of a bridal bed, not even in the dutiful lacerations of her cheeks in mourning for her brother at the grave, that promise renewal of life. In a monstrous reversal of the ritual of life celebrated by the wedded couple reprising the hieros gamos of Father Sky impregnating Mother Earth with his rain/semen, Haemon falls upon his sword. Blood replaces his seed as he crimsons An- tigone's 'white cheek' with 'a swift stream' (1228) offering only death. (Bennett and Tyr- rell 1991, 109) Thirdly, the mark of red on white provides a tangible representation of the fact that blood will issue forth when the natural laws of life and death and blood are made to conform to the laws of the State. The first two layers of meaning can be read through the third, palimpsestically, thus the conformity of natural law to the laws of State is itself exemplary of innocence lost and of a death deserving a material memorial. In death, Antigone becomes a formal document attesting to the dilemma of the choice between the enduring laws of life and the ephemeral laws of the land. Haemon's blood on Antigone's innocent white flesh is the seal on the document. Let us hear Antigone's question, "[w]hat is the law that lies behind these words?" as an invitation to search for the silent laws, laws of sign and symbol, that lie behind written texts and the spoken word. Such a search will reveal that the theatrical mark of red on white is more than merely representative of the violence inherent in performance; it is a realisation of that violence. It is not merely an illustration of the principle of performance, but also an instantiation of the principle that performance by its nature must produce blood. Performance makes life conform to artificial constraints, it is therefore a form of violence and the issue of blood is inevitable; as it was when Procrustes made his visitors conform to the dimensions of his bed by lopping off their limbs. Law is exemplary of the violent nature of performance because it requires

4 Andrew Sofer refers to the Eucharist wafer as the "ur-prop of post-classical Western drama" (2003, 31).

human life to conform to legal categories and to the regular lines of legal rules. It should not be forgotten that a great many of the victims (especially the martyrs) depicted in the violent drama of the middle ages and the early modern period are victims of legal or judicial processes. It is when we appreciate that law is performance and performance is blood that we see the deep significance of Shakespeare's reference to "the bloody book of law" (Othello 1.3).5 John L. Austin identified certain forms of words to be active and not merely de- scriptive. He called them "performative utterances" (Austin 1979, 235-6) or, as he subsequently termed them, "speech acts" (Austin 1962). We are concerned with the silent counterparts of such concepts, what may be called "performative properties." Staged properties of red on white represent the violent performance of law, but they are more than merely mimetic. The theatrical necessity of blood is an instance of obedience to the law of performance, and not merely an expression of it. A major reason why the transformation or deformation of the human form is central to medieval and early modern "théâtre de la cruauté" is because the process of making an artificial form out of the body indicates the violence inherent in the very art of performance. In the words of a stage direction to the 15th-century play, Le Mystère du vieil testament, "Il faut du sang" (there must be blood). In early modern England, as elsewhere in Europe, formal documents, including legal documents, were frequently sealed with blood-red wax. Such documents were not performed on paper, but on parchment or vellum (the flesh of an innocent, even unborn, animal). Accordingly, the legal form of a seal of blood on innocent white flesh was, like the death-tryst of Antigone and Haemon, a documentary performance of lost innocence and of life constrained by law. In a paper written almost half a century ago, Norman Rabkin argued that the sight of stage blood was a sign of obedience to the laws or conventions of revenge, and, in particular, to the laws of the theatre of revenge (Rabkin 1964).6 I would not dissent from that, but I would contend that another law – the law of performance – is at work in, and signified by, the mark of a blood red stain upon a pure white surface. We will turn now to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599). The basic plot is Plu- tarch's, which came to Shakespeare from Sir Thomas North's translation (1579), and to North from the translation by Jaques Amyot (1559). The issue of blood flows through the play from beginning to end. We will enter at the point where Brutus and the other conspirators resolve to kill Caesar. One of the conspirators proposes an oath to seal the conspiracy, but Brutus objects that they should not: […] think that our cause or our performance Did need an oath, when every drop of blood That every Roman bears, and nobly bears, Is guilty of a several bastardy If he do break the smallest particle Of any promise that hath passed from him (2.1.140-145)7 Brutus conceives the conspiracy in terms of a legal contract, with the stage of "promise" followed by the stage of "performance." In English law a bare promise to perform a service has no contractual force unless the promise is made in return for a counter-promise of payment or for some other consideration. However, a promise

5 For other significations see Gaakeer (2010). 6 For a compelling gender reading of the blood in Julius Caesar, see Paster (1989). 7 Unless otherwise stated quotations from Shakespeare are from Bate and Rasmussen (2007).

made in a document under seal has binding force. Brutus insists that no spoken oath (no performative utterance) is required, because their Roman blood will suffice to seal and legitimate their mutual promise and turn it from promise to performance. "Per- formative property" replaces "performative utterance." The contrast to "bastardy" is designed to indicate the legitimacy of the conspirators, but Shakespeare's audience would know that bastardy was a formal and unreliable test of true legitimacy. Elizabe- than laws could confer formal legitimacy on children born out of wedlock and they could turn children born within wedlock into bastards. As Sir Edward Coke expresses it, parliament can "bastard a childe that by law is legitimate viz. Begotten by an adul- terer....& legitimate one that is illegitimate" (Institutes Part IV, cap. i). At first sight, Brutus appears to believe in a law of blood that is deeper than the law of the State, but his appeal to Roman blood is actually devoted to the political idea of Rome rather than to any personal notion of kinship. He is the dramatic de- scendant of Creon, who placed the laws of the polis (the "city-State") above any bond of familial blood. A little while later, Brutus confirms that he would prefer to avoid bloodshed if there were any way to slay the spirit of Caesar, but alas "In the spirit of man there is no blood" and "Caesar must bleed for it!" (2.1.168-171). Brutus calls the conspirators to "dismember" Caesar; to cut him down to size. In summary, he acknowledges that he is plotting a performance for which there must be blood. The reason for this, we now know, is that the issue of blood is inevitable where laws of family and friendship are made to conform to the laws of State. Perhaps Brutus knew it too, for he asks: "Did not great Julius bleed for Justice's sake?" (4.3.21). This recol- lection of Caesar's wounds follows immediately on from Brutus' call to "Remember March, the Ides of March remember!," so the dis-membered Caesar is now re- membered and the blood-stains on his toga become, as the sign of red and white so often is,8 a lasting memorial to the performance of the law of State. In his oration at Caesar's funeral, Mark Antony appropriates Brutus' rhetoric of blood and turns it against him. At the climax of his speech, just before he reveals Caesar's bloody corpse, he surveys Caesar's bloody clothing wound by wound: Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through: See what a rent the envious Casca made: Through this, the well-belovèd Brutus stabbed, And as he plucked his cursèd steel away, Mark how the blood of Caesar followed it, As rushing out of doors, to be resolved If Brutus so unkindly knocked or no, For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel, – Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him. – This was the most unkindest cut of all. (3.2.171-180) Antony appeals to higher laws than the law of the State. He appeals to the law of blood and the law of the gods. The appeal to the gods is obvious. The appeal to the law of blood is more subtle. Antony accuses Brutus of putting ephemeral matters of State before a kindred duty to Caesar, who was like a father to him. The repeated

8 It should be acknowledged that the juxtaposition of red and white has other primal ritual significations which are not my subject here. One of these is the signification of the hunt. Antony makes express reference to this sign when, in an apostrophe to the dead Caesar, and in the presence of his murderers, he says: "Here thy hunters stand, / signed in they spoil, and crimsoned in thy Lethe" (3.1.219-20). This signification is not restricted to European traditions. Thus Victor Turner notes, in his study of the Afri- can Ndembu tribe, that "[m]ost rites of the hunters' cult are characterized by conjunction of white and red symbols" (1967, 78).

reference to Brutus' "unkindness" is designed to emphasise his disobedience to the law of kindred blood. The description "most unkindest" is effective as an impassioned double-superlative tautology, but it makes most sense if we understand "unkindest" to mean "not the sort of thing that should occur between kin."9 The portrayal of Brutus as a kin-slayer also evokes the belief of the ancient Greeks, so clearly demonstrated in their tragic drama, that the Furies would avenge every shedding of kindred blood. The uncovering of Caesar's corpse is the dramatic climax of Antony's speech and it has great symbolic significance, but there is an equally significant semiotic performance earlier in the play when Antony produces Caesar's will to the plebeians (Carpi 2016, 196; Watt 2016, ch. 4). In early modern England, there was no requirement to seal a will (Shakespeare's own will was not sealed), but Shakespeare understood the performative potency of a sheet of pure white animal skin sealed with blood-red wax and so the will is presented as "a parchment with the seal of Caesar." There can be no doubt that the seal was red. If the blood on Caesar's white toga does not confirm it, then it is confirmed by the words uttered by Antony as he holds aloft the primal insig- nia that is the sealed will. He announces to the plebs that if they could read it (we might say, read the sign of it) they would "go and kiss dead Caesar's wounds, / and dip their napkins in his sacred blood" (3.2.130-31). The tangible properties of the sealed will are thereby bound to the familiar motif of the blood-spotted napkin. Mul- tiple significations of red on white are present: martyrdom, deity, memorial, lost innocence, and, above all, the issue of blood which we expect when the demands of State clash with the demands of kinship. It is when the plebs call for the will to be read that Antony piles on the full weight of his rhetoric to squeeze every last drop from the sign. "'Tis good you know not that you are his heirs" he says (blatantly revealing the key content of the will, even as he purports to conceal it), and then his (or Shake- speare's) masterstroke: "For, if you should, O, what would come of it!" What might be the answer to this rhetorical question? The logical answer is the "blood" of revenge, and the triple assonance of "good," "should" and "would" compressed into Antony's two lines perhaps suggests that answer to the subconscious mind before the logic of the word "blood" strikes the hearer's consciousness. There must be blood. The bloody handkerchief or napkin was already a well-handled stage property by the time of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. For example, it features heavily in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.10 It also features in the domestic tragedy A Warning for Fair Wom- en, which is based on the actual murder of a Mr Sanders by his wife's lover. Anne Sanders had entered into an adulterous tryst with a Mr Browne and consented to the murder of her husband by Browne's hand. In the play she repents, but too late. With an echo of the promise and performance of Caesar's murder, the figure of Tragedy promises "what's here expressed, in act is to be done." The pact of their mutual promises must be performed in blood. At the scene of the murder, Browne seals his deed in the standard sign of performance: the mark of blood upon white cloth. The line "now will I dip my hankerchief in his bloud, /And send it as a token to my love [...]" (1385- 86) is reminiscent of that employed by Shakespeare's Antony. Browne makes express what is only implied in Shakespeare's play – that the stained handkerchief represents bloody performance: "Upon this bloody Handkercher the thing, / As I did promise and

9 Plutarch's Life of Marcus Brutus speculates that Brutus might have been the natural son of Julius Caesar by his lover Servilia. 10 Andrew Sofer argues that "Kyd exploited spectators' residual faith in magical handkerchiefs and long- ing for ocular experience by transforming the handkerchief from a token of all believers' salvation into a personalized fetish that embodies the principle of private vengeance" (2003, 75).

have now performed," (1412-13). Subha Mukherji writes that "in its statement of promise and performance, this gesture enacts a perverse marriage sequence" (2006, 120). It therefore reminds us of the inverted nuptials witnessed in the death tryst of Haemon and Antigone. When the token is sent to Anne Sanders, the bloody sign becomes a badge of shame: Oh shew not me that ensigne of despaire, But hide it, burne it, bury it in the earth, It is a kalender of bloody letters, Containing his, and yours, and all our shames (1935-38) The "kalender of bloody letters" is an allusion to the calendar of the Church of England in which saints' days were marked in red ink. It expresses the close connec- tion between textiles stained in blood and documentary texts marked red. Anne Sand- ers began with "unspotted innocence" and in the trial scene she wears a white rose in token of this, but she had "a finger in her husband's blood" and in the trial scene we are told that the white rose she wears "free...from staine" changes "hue." We are not told which new colour it takes. Mukherji supposes that it is "purple or crimson" (2006, 122). In early modern drama "purple" was a synonym for blood red (see, for example, Shakespeare's Richard II 3.3.93-4). Mukherji makes the insightful sugges- tion that Anne's wearing of the unspotted rose was a "non-verbal" gesture which she employs "almost as a legal emblem" (2006, 123). The white rose is indeed as vocal in its silence as the handkerchief itself. In the following passage, the silent wounds (the marks of blood which Browne has duplicated on the handkerchief) metaphorically acquire a power of speech and thereby fulfil the handkerchief's function as a "performative property." In language that precisely parallels that which Shakespeare's Antony employs to describe the speaking power of Caesar's bloody robes (Antony refers to "sweet Caesar's wounds" as "poor poor dumb mouths" (3.2.221) and wishes his oratory were powerful enough to "put a tongue / In every wound of Caesar" (3.2.224-5), Browne reports that: I gave him fifteene wounds, Which now be fifteen mouthes that doe accuse me, In ev'ry wound there is a bloudy tongue, Which will speake, although he hold his peace, By a whole Jury I shall be accusde (1995-99) Subha Mukherji observes how the mouths immediately evoke an imagined judicial trial (2006, 112). A reason for this association, I submit, is that the form of the bloodied white cloth instantiates the law of performance that connects the legal and theatrical worlds. Finally, we come to A Yorkshire Tragedy,11 a domestic tragedy based on a 1605 pamphlet account of the murders of two young boys committed earlier that year.12 The murderer was their father, Walter Calverley of Calverley, Yorkshire, who was arrested before he could carry out his intention to kill his third and youngest boy.

11 First published on 2 May 1608 as a work by William Shakespeare, Shakespeare might have made a minor contribution (perhaps "Scene i, or the prose passages in Scenes ii and iv") to a work by Thomas Middleton (Cawley and Gaines 1986, 2-6). 12 Two most vnnaturall and bloodie Murthers: The one by Maister Cauerley, a Yorkeshire Gentleman, practised upon his wife, and committed vppon his two Children, the three and twentie of Aprill 1605..etc. (Cawley and Gaines 1986, Appendix A). Cawley and Gaines note that the pamphlet was entered in the Stationers' Register on 12 June 1605 and its authorship has been convincingly attributed to George Wilkins.

Examined before Justices of the Peace the following day, he claimed that the murders had been motivated by long-standing doubts over his paternity of the boys, and he claimed that his wife had "uttered speeches and given signes and tokens" to fuel those doubts. He also claimed that his wife had on many occasions put him in fear of his life. The pamphlet and play allude to the allegation of bastardy, but place most em- phasis upon Calverley's financial prodigality. The wife is portrayed throughout as the epitome of innocence and long-suffering virtue. The pamphlet reports that, even before the murders, the healthy balance of humours within her (depicted as "the civill contention...of white and redde") had turned to "death-like palenesse" due to sorrow and consumption caused by her husband's cruelty. The play records that, even after the murders, she remained his forbearing and forgiving wife: Oh, my sweet husband, my dear distressed husband, Now in the hands of unrelenting laws! My greatest sorrow, my extremest bleeding; Now my soul bleeds. (x.5-8) She asserts that her husband's violence caused her to bleed in her body, whereas she is wounded in her soul by the violence that the legal process has inflicted on him in the name of justice. Her complaint against her husband, echoing Brutus' "most unkindest cut" is that "Unkindness strikes a deeper wound than steel" and "[y]ou have been still unkind to me" (x.12-13). Her complaint against the law is more profound. Physical wounds make the body bleed, but when the very processes of law inflict harm the injustice offends the soul. The wife testifies from her own experience that legal processes strike as deep as any physical blade and are as well capable of cutting husband from wife, parent from child. At his arraignment, Calverley stood mute (refused to plead guilty or not guilty) and therefore could not be made to stand trial. The contemporary method for extract- ing a plea was to apply ever-increasing weights to the body of the accused; a process known as peine forte et dure. Thus on the 5th August 1605, still refusing to plead, Calverley was pressed to death like paper in a printing press in a final graphic performance of the law's demand for conformity. Why suffer so much rather than stand trial? Perhaps to avoid the public performance of trial and execution; perhaps to die by the quickest means. Perhaps – to take the most benevolent view – to protect the inheritance of his surviving son. If Calverley had been found guilty of murder at trial, his supposed "corruption of blood" would have prevented his estate from passing by inheritance to his heir and seen it instead forfeited to the Crown.13 By being pressed to death, the real Calverley died innocent in law and his surviving son was able to inherit his father's estate as the issue of his blood. Returning to our main theme, we can observe that Calverley was hard pressed by the law before he turned to murder. Even leaving aside his fear that his issue by law might not be his children by blood, it is clear from both pamphlet and play that the final trigger of the murders were debts for which he had subjected his lands to mortgage at law. The pamphlet tells us that his brother, his kin by blood, had stood as security for Calverley and had been imprisoned for his debts. In the play, the brother and the blood-red seal become one, for we are told that Calverley "has consumed all, pawned his lands and made his university brother stand in wax for him" (i.48-9) The metaphor of legal documentary formality is immediately pressed home by the aside

13 "Corruption of blood is when any is attainted of felony or treason, then his bloud is said to be corrupt, by meanes whereof his children, nor any of hi bloud, cannot be heires to him" (Rastell 1636).

"There's a fine phrase for a scrivener! Puh! He owes more than his skin's worth" (i.50- 51). At the very end of the play, the same metaphor tells us that the brother "in bond lies overthrown" (x.74) while Calverley faces "a deadlier execution" (x.75). Only when the bloody performance is done, does Calverley realise his error, and it is nota- ble that in his late lucidity he appropriates the language of "deed" that connects theatrical to legal performance. He warns: "Let every father look into my deeds, / And then their heirs may prosper while mine bleeds" (x.59-60). There was no lucidity in the bloody heat of the performance itself. Then he was "like a man mad in execution" (vii.30) – executing a deed by hand as if executing a final testament in law. And what form did the execution take? His challenge to the fates is more than mere apostrophe: "Fates, / My children's blood shall spin into your faces" (iv.109-110). The words call to mind the spray of blood breathed by Haemon upon Antigone's white cheek. When Calverley's terrible promise is finally performed, as he kills his eldest son, the seal on the deed takes the now familiar form: "Son: Oh, what will you do, father? I am your white boy!. Father: Thou shalt be my red boy. Take that!" (iv.97-98)

Postscript "[T]he marks of writing try to contain and repress the blood [whereas] painting and colour attempt to give voice to it" (Irigaray 1987, 173).14 The thesis of this paper has been that the processes of law, because they require conformity, are essentially performative; and, because conformity to the frames of law is a violent performance, we should expect that it will betray this fact through the sign of blood. The law tries to repress blood under layers of rules and the marks of writing, but blood inevitably seeps out and dramatists have been especially adept at relating the significance of the law's red marks to the violence of legal performance and the exercise of State power. There is reason to believe, however, that the stain of blood is slowly and subtly being suppressed from public sight. A small but significant indica- tion of this trend is the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989. This apparently prosaic and parochial statutory miscellany includes a provision reforming the law governing the formalities for the execution of deeds for the sale of land. At the time of its enactment it appeared to be just one small step in the incremental mod- ernisation of the technical practice of real estate transactions leading to electronic conveyancing, but looking back by the long lights of law's cultural history it can perhaps be appreciated as a giant leap in the law's attempt to master, or to hide, its semiotic heritage; for by the statute of 1989 it is no longer required that a deed for the transfer of legal title to land should be sealed. As a consequence of the 1989 Act, the old ritual form of words – the performative poem which required a deed to be "signed, sealed and delivered" – passed into history on the last day of July 1990.15 No longer would a deed of mortgage or sale drip with the bloody stain of legal performance. Since that date, the execution of a deed would be bloodless; it being required only that the signing of the deed be witnessed and that the document be clear on its face that it is a deed. Witness of the written signature was introduced as a legal requirement at precisely the moment that the sign of blood disappeared. The mark of language, in-

14 This translation by Alain Pottage (Pottage 1998, 41). 15 The Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989 (Commencement) Order 1990, section 2 (a).

deed the inscription of the very word "deed" on the surface of the document, replaced and concealed the performative deed of spilling blood.

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