NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Quartering the Wind: Early Modern

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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Quartering the Wind: Early Modern Nature at the Fringe of Politics

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of English

Seth Swanner

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

December 2017 2

ABSTRACT

“Quartering the Wind” explores the unorthodox, unstable, and seditious political values that undermined early modern English arguments for what is “natural” in human governance. I examine texts that expose a politically intricate natural world that serves no single model of orthodox politics. While ecocritical treatments of political analogies drawn from early modern nature often focus on Elizabethan visions of political and natural unity, this dissertation documents a post-Elizabethan history of political fracture, read with and through the natural world’s volatility. An array of seventeenth-century ruptures in the “natural” order of things— including the Gunpowder Plot, the 1625 plague, and the English Civil War—inspired alternative visions of “nature.” These visions seemed to justify not the “natural” monarchy of conventional

Elizabethan analogy but, rather, subversive political categories such as treason, tyranny, and rebellion. By tracing the history of the corrosion of old analogies, I demonstrate how an unruly nature resists convenient human political ascriptions and how no coherent vision of human authority—whether over animals, natural resources, or other humans—is “natural.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

5 Introduction:

Nature at the Fringe of Politics

33 Chapter One:

“Hark, peace!—/ It was the owl”: Mistranslations of “borne and sworne” Natural Allegiance in Macbeth

99 Chapter Two:

“The devil that rules i’th’air”: Astrometeorology and Tyranny in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

160 Chapter Three:

The “Beggar’s plague” and the Empty Throne: The Social Shapes of Death in Succession-Year Plague Literature

220 Chapter Four:

The World at War: The End of Nature in Hobbes, Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” and Leonard Willan’s Orgula

279 Conclusion:

Jacobean World Pictures

INTRODUCTION

Nature at the Fringe of Politics

In his 1650 compilation of essays called Paradoxes, the poet John Hall satirically reproduces the arguments of a tradition of early modern thinkers by attesting to nature’s own preference for hierarchy. Determining the best form of human governance, according to Hall, is a simple issue of extrapolating “from the course and order of nature, which in every kind formes a

Supremacy, as the Eagle among Birds, the Lyon among Beasts, the Vine among the [vege]tables, and the Rubye among stones.”1 In his political recourse to hierarchies imagined in nature, Hall follows the example of countless previous thinkers who justified monarchical authority by likening it to nature itself and, by extension, the similarly monarchical God who spoke nature into creation. Citing widespread conceptions of the lion and the eagle such as those found in

Paradoxes, Keith Thomas emphasizes that “there was a social hierarchy among animals no less than men, the one enforcing the other. . . . In popular imagery the arrangement was monarchical, with the lion, the eagle, and the whale standing at the head of each respective order of being.”2

But while Hall’s readers would have been primed for a justification of human monarchy through animal “kingship” by the commonplaces that Thomas compiles, early modern readers looking for a defense of monarchy would have been shocked by Hall’s conclusion: “an absolute Tyranny is the best Government.”3 Against a conceptual tradition of defending the beneficent naturalness of human sovereignty, Hall’s satire exploits the terms of this customary analogy in order to show that “Nature” can exceed the orthodox political values that many thinkers attempted to read in it.

1 John Hall, Paradoxes (London: John Walker, 1650), 7, italics in the original. 2 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 60. 3 Hall, Paradoxes, 3. 6

Indeed, as this dissertation demonstrates, seventeenth-century conceptions of “Nature” may just as easily model a host of political unorthodoxies, from tyranny, to treason, to civil war.

Those familiar with John Hall’s parliamentarian sympathies during the English Civil

Wars might have been on the lookout for this satirical angle. However, perhaps the most subversive thing about Hall’s essay is not his tongue-in-cheek apology for tyranny but his almost verbatim preservation of previous defenses of kingship. Indeed, Hall’s description of hierarchies in nature precisely echoes, for example, Henry Peacham’s popular courtesy manual The

Compleat Gentleman (1622), which provides an almost identical treatment of lions, eagles, and diamonds (pace Hall’s “Rubye”):

[By examining] the formes of things infinitely diuers, so according to Dignity of Essence or Vertue in effect, wee must acknowledge the same to hold a Soueraigntie . . . as well as Rule and Place each ouer either. . . . The Lyon we say is King of Beasts, the Eagle chiefe of Birds; the Whale and Whirle-poole [whales with blowholes] among Fishes, Iupiters Oake the Forrests King. Among Flowers, wee most admire and esteeme the Rose: Among Fruite, the Pom-roy and Queene- apple; among Stones, we value aboue all the Diamond; Mettals, Gold and Siluer: and since we know these to transferre their inward excellence and vertues to their Species successiuely, shall we not acknowledge a Nobilitie in man of greater perfection, of Nobler forme, and Prince of these?4

For Peacham as well as for Hall, the taxonomies of supremacy in nature bespeak a universal principle of “Soueraigntie” that organizes the world—animals, vegetables, and minerals alike— and ultimately justifies “Rule and Place each ouer other” not only in the natural world but in human polity as well.

The fact that Hall’s and Peacham’s analogies share such similar foundations—their naturalized defense of human sovereignty as well as the taxonomic examples by which that defense is staged—yet diverge so vastly in their conclusions concretizes two fundamental

4 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London: Francis Constable, 1622), 1-2, italics in the original. 7 insights that this dissertation will document. First, texts like Paradoxes call attention to the ways in which nature itself complicates the totalizing political lessons that some early modern thinkers purported to read from its structures of relation. Nature, like anything that can be treated as a text, has mercurial relations to meaning and, thus, spills over any political appropriation of its structures, especially the beneficent models of human “Souereigntie” over other humans and over other creatures. That excess, I argue, complicates early modern notions of the natural world and disturbs conceptions of those aspects of human polity that conventionally signified as

“natural.” For the texts that I explore throughout this project, this uncertainty regarding what is

“natural” for human sociopolitical structures manifests as a fascination with alternate, but still arguably “natural,” political categories. Borrowing a colloquialism for political affiliations considered to occupy a habitat outside of the mainstream, this dissertation analyzes literary moments when natural analogies like Hall’s cease to legitimize orthodox political values and seem instead to justify the political “fringe.” As we will see, the subversive, transitional, or even dangerous properties at this fringe prompted seventeenth-century writers to reevaluate what forms of governance may be understood as “natural.” In Paradoxes, for example, nature offers a politically volatile model that not only fits monarchy and tyranny simultaneously, but also demonstrates how, especially in the years during and after the English Civil War, monarchy and tyranny were conceptually the same for many writers. Tyranny, then, emerges on the fringe of the political lessons conventionally heralded by the thinkers that Hall satirizes and, thus, disrupts orthodox readings of the natural structures from which those lessons supposedly flowed.5 The

5 On the conceptual closeness between monarchy and tyranny, see Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), III.7-8; See also Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Revolution (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7-8, and Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 8 centrality of “fringe” political categories in texts like Paradoxes, then, subverted, complicated, and multiplied seventeenth-century understandings of nature, human society, and the linkages between them.

Second, the fact that Hall’s redirection of antecedent arguments need not radically alter the grounds of those arguments demonstrates not only how nature’s “fringe” politics strained thinkers’ interpretations, but also how those strains were already present in early modern thought. For instance, Peacham’s final anthropocentric move toward human polity—“shall we not acknowledge a Nobilitie in man [who is] of greater perfection, of Nobler forme, and Prince of these [other creatures]?”—is delivered not with the grammatical confidence of a declarative sentence but on the shaky hypothetical grounds of an interrogative that solicits readerly consent.

Further, Peacham’s defense of human “Souereigntie” runs through several registers with diverse relations to the cosmic principle of “Rule” that Peacham attempts to export to human forms of rule. Slipping among aesthetic (“we most admire . . . the Rose”), economic (“we value aboue all the Diamond”), and philological (the “Pom-roy and Queene-apple”) ideas of supremacy,

Peacham’s expansive selection of natural examples strains against any one political interpretation of “Rule and Place” among humans.

The conflict between “the forms of things infinitely diuers” in nature and the single organizing principle of “Souereigntie” threatens to sink the political insights that readers might draw from Peacham’s overlapping analogies of supremacy. Dividing things “infinitely diuers” by one (or even the eight taxonomies of excellence that Peacham includes here) still yields infinity.

In her study of “Lear’s Queer Cosmos,” Laurie Shannon has described the ways in which nature’s massive scale explodes any human conception of normativity—sexual, moral, or 9 natural—as “a local, single-species fiction.”6 The same expansiveness that reveals nature’s fundamentally “queer” trajectories can veer conventionally “natural” understandings of human politics toward dangerous political forms. Highlighting the politically multivocal remainder that is always embedded in arguments such as Peacham’s, Hall’s satirical defense of tyranny concludes by pointing out that “even those Philosophers, which stand most stoutly for the infinity of worlds doe also consent and acknowledge there is but one God.”7 According to the critique of naturalized politics that is at the heart of Paradoxes, only God’s infinitely beneficent rule can match and contain the expansiveness of the world (or “worlds”). For “one” human ruler to attempt this leap, according to Hall, only exposes the moral shortcomings of monarchs as well as the conceptual shortcomings of such a naturalization, leading not to the well-ordered management of a kingdom but to the dangerous form of mismanagement at monarchy’s fringe: tyranny.8

There is always an unstable excess embedded, by definition, in analogy, and this project explores the political and environmental content of those remainders as well as the historical events, intellectual movements, and texts that emphasized them. Throughout this project, I track the persistent early modern struggle to derive conclusive political values or ethics from any interpretation of “natural” order. I examine both the political interests that early modern thinkers strained to see in their world and the natural structures that defied resemblance to orthodox forms of human rule. Instead of tenable political formations like monarchy, republicanism, or even

6 Laurie Shannon, “Lear’s Queer Cosmos,” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 171-8, quote at 173. 7 Hall, Paradoxes, 29-30, italics in the original. 8 In Chapter Four, we will see how Hall’s theory of nature is abundant and multiplicative, and his political reading of that plurality here is no straightforward endorsement of one kind of hierarchy, instead theorizing alternate hierarchies (both tyrannical and otherwise) that undercut any totalizing politicization of nature. 10 democracy, I track how seventeenth-century analogies to natural order—with, importantly, very little tweaking—can point to fringe political categories like tyranny, treason, interregnum, or anarchy. At the uttermost edges of conventional political wisdom and of early modern conceptions of the “natural,” natural phenomena at the fringe of orthodoxy demonstrate not only how theorizations of human politics and nature are inextricably connected, but also how one theorization constantly challenges, expands, or endangers the boundaries of the other. In the sections that follow (and, indeed, throughout this project), I elaborate the environmental and political possibilities of natural phenomena at the fringe of politics and at the fringe of what normally, for early moderns, counted as natural.

Nature on the Fringe of Politics: The Elizabethan World Picture After Elizabeth

Analogies such as Peacham’s and Hall’s exemplify a long-recognized trope in early modern political and cosmic thought that has attracted recent ecocritical attention. This attention,

I argue, has not yet charted the analogy’s productively uneven seventeenth-century history. In

1943, E. M. W. Tillyard coined the phrase “Elizabethan World Picture” to describe the early modern system of correspondences that linked individuals, society, and nature together in one unifying worldview.9 According to W. R. Elton, the Elizabethan World Picture produced an

“analogical habit of mind” that could freely leap from ecology, to politics, to theology, and back, a syllogistic fluidity of thought that represented a uniquely premodern way of thinking.10 For ecocritics, the so-called Elizabethan World Picture holds potential ecological insights for modern

9 Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943), 77-93. 10 W. R. Elton, “Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age,” in Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 17-37, quote at 17. 11 attitudes that destructively separate the human from the natural, despite every indication that we are ecologically entangled—perhaps catastrophically—with an environment that suffers systemically from irresponsible human policies and practices. In a section devoted to the environmental study of Tillyard’s World Picture, for instance, Gabriel Egan shows how it yielded something very like a modern Gaia theory, which understands the earth as a “unitary,” living body.11 Todd Borlik, more recently, begins his study of Pythagorean animism in the sixteenth century with a similar dissection of the Elizabethan World Picture “as a kind of prolegomena to [his] study of an environmental ethos in early modern English Culture.”12 For

Egan and Borlik, the “analogical habit of mind” framed a premodern sensitivity to the environment by encouraging early modern subjects to see themselves in the world.

These critics and many others draw valuable attention to an analogical mode of

Elizabethan thought that demonstrates the intimacy that early modern subjects imagined between the human and natural worlds. Work remains to be done, however, to explore the way this intimacy encoded danger and to chart the post-Elizabethan afterlives of the Elizabethan World

Picture. Egan’s study identifies “the second half of the seventeenth century” as the moment that marked “the replacement of a vitalist model with a mechanistic model,” but his analyses begin and end with Shakespeare.13 Borlik postulates the “demise of the so-called Elizabethan World

Picture” to be even earlier with the 1605 composition of King Lear, citing “the emergence of a strident bourgeois individualism” that assails the natural/political holism of the World Picture. 14

With this, seventeenth-century England began “its slouch toward the uninhibited interrogation

11 Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 25, 29. 12 Todd Borlik, Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2011), 24, 29. 13 Egan, Green, 22. 14 Borlik, Ecocriticism, 24. 12 and subjugation of the natural world” by gradually reconceptualizing the environment as an inert collection of resources.15 For these ecocritics, then, the so-called Elizabethan World Picture began a gradual and predictable dissolution after the death of its namesake.

I do not mean to dispute the general timeline that these critics present or the environmental destructiveness of emerging modes of modern thought in the seventeenth century, but more than a “slouch” toward modernity, post-Elizabethan conceptions of nature represented a distinctive moment of instability in which the “analogical habit of mind” linking humans and the natural world was unsettled and unsettling. As my project shows in its focus on post-

Elizabethan texts, analogies between nature and human politics strongly persisted even up to the

1658 publication of Leonard Willan’s Orgula. This play presented three splintered readings of

Natural Law, each supported by divergent readings of the analogy between nature and politics and each pointing to a different political form in the contest of ideas generated by the English

Civil War. The delirious multiplication of rhetorical or conceptual junctures between nature and human politics in this text (and, indeed, every seventeenth-century text that I analyze) suggests that the history of the Elizabethan World Picture after Shakespeare was not necessarily a

“slouch” toward an ever-increasingly inert or apolitical construction of the natural world. Rather, the Elizabethan World Picture went out kicking and screaming, as many worldviews vied for supremacy throughout the period’s various upheavals of “natural” and political order. The seventeenth-century multiplication of worldviews simultaneously highlighted new ways to think about human political connections with nature and underlined the limitations inherent in the

“analogical habit of mind.”

15 Ibid., 26-7. 13

The fragmentation of post-Elizabethan World Pictures explored here arises both from contested theorizations of nature’s structures and from the period’s often explosive reckonings of political meaning. As with Peacham and Hall, these reckonings could be simultaneously conservative and radically oppositional, and it is by taking seriously the propagandistic content of these World Pictures—and also the political discontents at their fringe—that my study expands on previous ecocritical accounts. Borlik’s and Egan’s contributions rescue the environmental valences of natural analogies from the propagandistic potential that they and previous thinkers have rightly identified in the World Picture. In this, they follow a long scholarly history of exposing the exploitative politics of some early modern depictions of nature.

Raymond Williams, for instance, reads nature writing as it was often used to justify existing oppressive social or political relations.16 And important scholars of pastoral like Paul Alpers and

Annabel Patterson erect a firm nature/politics distinction in order to steer clear of this naturalizing vein in early modern poetics.17 The propagandist tendencies that these critics identify are particularly prevalent in analogical comparisons between nature and human governance. Indeed, as strained as it is, Peacham’s analogical taxonomies of cosmic supremacy are a naturalization of existing power structures that attempts to ennoble some humans, nonhuman creatures, and natural phenomena above others.

In their distrust of naturalized “propaganda,” however, ecocritics of the early modern

“analogical habit of mind” miss important cracks and slippages that could be identified through a direct confrontation of that propaganda. Both Borlik and Egan identify a sustainable

16 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1973), esp. 15-26. 17 Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Vergil to Valery (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). 14 environmental ethics in the early modern tendency to see its own social structures reflected analogically in natural structures. This is a powerful curative to the modern fantasy that humans exist outside of or above nature. However, in their selectivity regarding which political structures are sustainable, Borlik and Egan attempt to do something that, for texts firmly situated in the seventeenth-century crisis of the Elizabethan World Picture, is impossible: to subtract the

Picture’s propagandistic work from its potential systemic or ecological ethos. For instance,

Borlik writes that although “cultural materialists have justifiably sought to debunk the

Renaissance ‘World Picture’ as the ideology of an elite, its holism also fostered an ‘analogical habit of mind’ that can be seen as a forerunner of an ecological sensibility.”18 In reading around the “elite” intentions behind the naturalization of politics, Borlik follows Egan’s example:

“Tillyard’s model of the Elizabethan World Picture . . . was thinkable [to early moderns] as a model of the world even as it was dismissed as official propaganda.”19 Egan’s nuanced tension between the “thinkab[ility]” of the World Picture’s environmental ethics and the dismissal of its propagandistic content places the Picture in a precarious place that he describes elsewhere as

“the realm of the believable.”20 This allows him to distill the World Picture’s environmental benefits while discarding the social hierarchies that it naturalizes. For Egan and for Borlik, this partitioning of the propaganda yields anti-hierarchical models of human politics—enabling us

“to construct alternative, democratic foundations to society” as Egan theorizes—by “reforg[ing]” the Great Chain of Being generated in human/political analogies “from a vertical hierarchy to a horizontal bond.”21 In dismissing the “elite” political implications of nature in favor of anti-

18 Borlik, Ecocriticism, 11. 19 Egan, Green, 29. 20 Ibid., 25. 21 Borlik, Ecocriticism, 28; Egan, Green, 66. 15 hierarchical formations, these critics join a larger trend in environmental philosophy that theorizes a natural world that, according to Jane Bennett, newly gathers nonhuman entities into a

“more (vital) materialist theory of democracy.”22 Most explicit in this tradition is Bruno Latour’s

Politics of Nature, which announces its preferred ecopolitical form in its subtitle: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Critiquing the modern division between scientific facts and political values, Latour proposes a complexly democratic “collective” that joins human political meaning-making with nonhuman constituents in the global polity.23

For the seventeenth-century texts studied here, however, dismissing the hierarchical politics of natural analogies is impossible; the fringe eco-political categories inventoried here are

“radical”—not because they are totally distinct from the propagandistic naturalizations they critique, but rather, because they can seem indistinct from those naturalizing analogies. Hall’s refraction of Peacham’s defense of cosmic “Souereigntie” shows how closely tyranny and monarchy are related by merely exploiting analogical tensions that were already there. Just so, each of the following chapters shows how easily the “official” politics of naturalized analogies could drift toward unorthodox forms that lie just on their fringes. To touch on several key texts I will discuss, for Macbeth (written, ca. 1606), nature’s equivocal allegiances can, even in the same image, blurrily shift from an upright endorsement of the “natural” sovereign to a traitor’s duplicitous words. John Webster’s adaptation of burlesque almanacs in The Duchess of Malfi

(written ca. 1612, published 1623) shows how the same cosmic analogies can both promote beneficent notions of political influence and critique naturalizations of tyrannical absolutism.

22 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 106. 23 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 53-90. 16

Metaphors of plague weather in George Wither’s Britain’s Remembrancer (1628) highlight both the hopes and instabilities of monarchical succession by lingering over the deaths—that of the monarch and of English subjects—that bridge one regime to another. And, finally, the boundaries separating the commonwealth from its anarchic dissolution blend together in

Orgula’s various disarticulations of Natural Law. The indistinction of political meaning that characterizes these literary treatments of natural phenomena expands our understanding of the lenses through which early moderns viewed the natural world. At the same time, however, because they track the rough decline of the “analogical habit of mind,” the indeterminacies between “propagandist” and “fringe” analogies elucidate the shortcomings of any version of limited, human politics to find its authorizing ground in the shifting field of meaning that nature offers. As these vignettes suggest, the seventeenth-century history of the Elizabethan World

Picture was not the steady replacement of vitalist, analogical thought with an apolitical or inert view of the world, but, instead, a conflicted overlay of proliferating world pictures that could not quite contain the conceptual leakiness of either human statecraft or expansive nature.

Gunpowder Hives: Religion and “Natural” Obedience after Elizabeth

The palimpsest of worldviews in early modern England was due in part to the sometimes violent shifts in political affairs, with succession and legitimation crises abounding, most obviously with the death of Queen Elizabeth and the declining popularity of Charles I, beginning just after his 1625 succession and ending with his beheading. Crises such as these challenged the fantasies of political unity that conventional natural analogies attempted to promote. An important strain on any coherent theorization of national unity was the competing claims made 17 by multiple religious interests throughout the seventeenth century. When Hall’s satire of monarchy calls attention to the oneness of God over the potential infinitude of nature, he is accessing a long history of analogizing human sovereignty to the rule of God over the world (or worlds). But the post-Elizabethan religious climate in England was characterized by volatile theologies that diversified the models of governance that early modern thinkers could imagine both in nature and in human polity. For instance, against the political unification represented by the succession of “treble sceptre[d]” James, the narrow discovery and prevention of the

Gunpowder Plot in 1605 revealed a treasonous insurgency with ties to Rome.24 As Rebecca

Lemon has argued, this crisis of political and religious disunity prompted reexaminations of the boundary between licit protest and treason, causing some seventeenth-century thinkers to recognize the “dynamic interplay . . . between the state’s definition of treason and . . . challenges to the monarch’s increasing articulations of absolute sovereignty.”25 In the wake of the

Gunpowder Plot, then, the “naturalness” of James’s claims of sovereignty could appear, like the politically multivocal analogies of Peacham and Hall, not as a stable given but as a negotiation among many (sometimes “fringe”) political positions.

Just as the religious rupture of the Gunpowder Plot opened questions about the appropriate boundaries of sovereignty, the controversies surrounding the state response after the

Gunpowder Plot exposed the hazy limits between two incompletely separate visions of obedience: temporal and spiritual. Against the Catholic divines who asserted that James’s Popish

Recusants Act of 1605 (see Chapter One) was a temporal overreach of the Pope’s spiritual

24 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 4.1.136. 25 Rebecca Lemon, Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 3-4. 18 authority, John Donne’s preface to Pseudo-Martyr (1610) attempts a separation of temporal and spiritual authority but, instead, blurs those boundaries even further:

But for this poore worke of mine, I need no such Aduocates, nor Apologizers; for it is not of Diuinity, but meerely of temporall matters, that I write. . . . [N]ot that this obedience is not safely grounded in Diuinity, or that it is not an act of Religion, but that it is so well engrau’d in our hearts, and naturally obuious to euery vnderstanding, that men of all conditions haue a sense and apprehension, and assurednes of that obligation.26

Donne’s compromise understands obedience to James to be a temporal category that, despite its distinction from matters of spiritual authority and obedience, is still ratified by spiritual imperatives. The precise junctures between that divine ratification and its temporal manifestation in obedience toward James is by no means a simple issue, especially, as we will see in Chapter

One, for Catholic recusants whose “naturally obuious” sense of obedience differed from that of

James.

Even after the Gunpowder Plot, the threat of religious disunity and the political multivocality it produced would only increase after the 1625 accession of Charles I, the 1633 appointment of William Laud as Archbishop, and the Puritan resistance that would help ignite the English Civil War. These religious crises of the Caroline era prompted, as Chapters Three and Four demonstrate, particularly urgent reevaluations of political concepts and the adversarial arguments just at their fringes—including loyalty and treason, self-defense and rebellion, and monarchy and tyranny. Thus, as my reading of Hall has already suggested, the period after 1625 until the Restoration manifested a problematic conceptual instability in the analogical lessons that God supposedly “engrau’d” in the cosmos. For pastor Samuel Purchas’s 1657 A Theatre of

Politicall Flying Insects—which is both a compilation of entomological theories and a collection

26 John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr (London: Walter Burre, 1610), sig. B3v. 19 of religious lessons drawn from the ethical model of insects—theological multivalence in nature could undermine even the political models drawn from the legibly monarchical beehive.27

Perhaps owing to the religious upheavals that this royalist pastor lived through, the religious instruction Purchas finds in the hive does not produce a singular or stable political “takeaway.”

One observation begins, “Religion is the greatest enemy to religion, the false to the true.” He elaborates with a proverb from Tertullian: “favos etiam vespae faciunt,” but instead of providing the simplest translation (“wasps also make combs”), he appends some politically charged flair:

“Waspes also make combes, though instead of honey we find gun-powder.”28 Purchas’s admiration for monarchy—through his mutually reinforcing admiration of the monarchical bee— is clear from the rest of his text.29 But here, the problem that a politically multivalent nature poses to the boundary between proper sovereignty and the deviant forms at its fringe is one of interpretation. The honeycomb cuts both ways. Nature, like religion, is divided against itself:

“Religion is the greatest enemy to religion.” Just as beehives and wasp “combes” morphologically and linguistically resemble each other (sharing both the general hexagonal shape and the word favos that describes them), true and false religion resemble one another, and discerning one from another is a complicated act of evaluating truth value that may not be

27 This Samuel Purchas is not the better-known author of Purchas His Pilgrimage. For a helpful history of the political and theological values cultivated through analogies drawn from bees, see Jonathan Woolfson, “The Renaissance of Bees,” Renaissance Studies 24.2. (2010): 281-300. 28 Samuel Purchas, A Theatre of Politicall Flying Insects Wherein Especially the Nature, the Worth, and Work, and Wonder, and the Manner of Right-Ordering of the Bee, is Discovered and Described (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1657), 298. 29 See, for example, Purchas, Theatre, 3-4. He writes, “[T]hough [honey and wax] bee great benefits, yet there are more excellent and remarkable to bee observed from this Creature: For every Common-wealth, every Kingdome receive their best directions and precepts [from the bee]. . . . [God] by a singular prudence hath commended to us Monarchy, including in certain limits by the name of Bee; which state whosoever attains, it is necessary that hee imitate the King of Bees, who so deports and carries himself, that hee is beloved, provided for, and protected by all the bees.” 20 accessible, especially during the fractious religious period in which Purchas writes. More than this, however, the moral that Purchas extracts from the ambivalent hives of the natural world disturbingly reveals that the treason of religious insurrection is embedded within the productive monarchy conventionally represented by the image of the hive.

Miasma or Miracle?: “Nature” and “Supernature” Reconsidered

The analogical slippages from one “natural” political value to that of the enemy at its fringe is due not only to explosive shifts in theology and political thought but also to the shifting conceptual boundaries of “Nature” itself in the period. This dissertation, then, is concerned both with the unorthodox political fringes in early modern thought and with phenomena at the fringe of “Nature.” Each of the following chapters explores different liminal categories that challenge conceptual boundaries by being difficult to locate precisely within or outside of what may be considered “natural.” Perhaps the most significant of these categories, and the one that appears in each chapter, is “supernature,” describing the divine, demonic, or spiritual phenomena that purportedly transcended the physical universe in many ways, even as their effects were believed to manifest in the observable world. Precisely how God intervened in the universe or seeded the natural world with ethical lessons was an important question for determining not only how (or if) the divine participated in natural phenomena, but also the political values conveyed through that participation. Prompted by the fractious religious climate surveyed in the previous section, however, a number of competing theories regarding the precise juncture between nature and supernature emerged in early modern England. Did, for instance, God’s divine interventions actively govern every aspect of nature at every moment, or do natural phenomena “necessarily 21 observe . . . certain lawes” that God wrote into the world at the moment of creation (Richard

Hooker’s notion of Natural Law)?30 If planetary influences were thought to determine terrestrial events, how deeply were they understood to influence the human will or even shape the soul?31

And while English orthodox understandings of baptism described an exclusively spiritual form of re-birth, how could churchgoers process the various discourses of “natural” birth surrounding the rite?32 The elusiveness of any answers—explored throughout these chapters—alters what lessons for morality or governance early moderns could draw from “Nature,” and they carried special urgency for the monarch, the human analogue to God’s rule.

The Reformation splintered theories of how the divine manifested in the natural world, and as Alexandra Walsham has outlined, it also blurred the boundaries of providence and, thus, cast new doubt about where nature ended and supernature began.33 This murkiness destabilizes the character of “Nature” and opens up theological questions—and doubt—to ecocritical inquiry.

As I demonstrate in Chapter Three, for example, the bubonic plague represented a particularly hazy epistemic nexus among learned physicians who emphasized its meteorological nature, radical church reformers who preached that the plague was exclusively a supernatural punishment directly from God, and English ecclesiastical authorities who insisted upon the use of both medical and spiritual safeguards against the affliction. Whether God functioned as the plague’s primary cause, whether providence delivered the plague through secondary natural

30 See Kristen Poole, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 160-1; Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (London, 1593), Book 1, page 52. 31 See Chapter Two. 32 On the interplay between biological and spiritual kinship, see Will Coster, Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), esp. 50-1. See also Chapter One. 33 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011). 22 intermediaries, or whether God simply withheld succor while the plague raged was a matter of open debate that placed plague at the uncertain fringe between nature and supernature. The plague’s vexed theological interpretations confounded the social meanings that lay and ecclesiastical thinkers attempted to draw from the “natural disaster.” Was it a punishment from directly from God on the reprobate ill? Was it a more general consequence of postlapsarian nature? Was it merely the result of blind mechanism? These questions gained sudden political urgency when, in 1603, the plague delayed the English coronation of James after the death of

Elizabeth, thus endangering the providential meaning that many subjects accorded the public rites of succession.34

Uncertainty about what counts as “natural” was not, of course, restricted to theology but was (as it is for us today) a feature of the limits of human knowledge when it encounters the mysteries of the material world. Part of the reason that the natural vs. supernatural character of the plague represented such an epistemological flashpoint was because the machinery of its transmission was unobservable. If it was spiritual, early moderns could not resort to observable phenomena and, so, had to process the disease through faith alone. If it was meteorological, it was invisibly pneumatic, and, as Steve Mentz has outlined, the air represented a potentially rich stew of forces, influences, and contagions even though it looked empty to human perception.35

Expanding Mentz’s scope, I show how the concept of “Nature” itself (where it stands, what it describes, how far its borders extend) begins to unravel in politically provocative ways when its invisible machinery challenged human knowledge, especially as theological explanations

34 Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1985), 18. 35 Steve Mentz, “A Poetics of Nothing: Air in the Early Modern Imagination,” Postmedieval 4.1 (2013): 30-41. In addition to the plague, the airy phenomena that my project explores includes astrological influence (Chapter Two), and weather (throughout). 23 themselves diverged, making more room for scientific claims. It was an intellectual commonplace of Galenic medicine, for example, that bodies participated in a transactional humoral economy with the world at large.36 How far into the cosmos this economy extended, however, was a matter of some dispute. If, for example, celestial bodies were known to stimulate or suppress the humors of the human body, were they part of the humoral world? They were part of creation, but were they part of nature conventionally understood? The old division between the sublunary and the superlunary cosmos had begun to dissolve with Galileo’s discoveries, but what did this mean for their influence on or inclusion in “Nature”? Many granted that heavenly bodies influenced the natural world, but how many of those bodies were natural worlds of their own? After the Copernican Revolution, many early moderns became interested in an imaginative expansion of the natural world, in the possibility of many worlds, of many natures.37 From older astrological models, to more sensational horoscopes, to Protestant skepticism concerning celestial influence, and finally to the Royal Society’s attempt to rescue astrology’s credibility in

1660, the boundaries and operations of the natural cosmos were fiercely contested because what was meant by “Nature” was not stable, mappable, or knowable.

Nature’s capacity to evade our knowledge was especially challenging for seventeenth- century science, when the rise of empiricism emphasized a complex cosmos while old ways of thinking—as well as the sense of human mastery over nature—were fading away. In 1620, for instance, Francis Bacon opens his Novum Organum by asserting that “Man, being the servant

36 For more, see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 37 See, for example, Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, eds. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Ontario: Broadview, 2000), 151-251; Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither (London, 1638). 24 and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed .

. . of the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.”38

Immediately subverting any straightforward sense of mastery over the world, Bacon describes humanity as nature’s “servant” while linking that servanthood to limitations of human

“understand[ing].”

Failing to recognize these epistemological limitations leads, according to Bacon, to an overreliance on the “analogical habit of mind,” which he describes with the skepticism of many seventeenth-century thinkers already suggested above. Arguing for objectivity, Bacon cautions against such scientific fallacies as “Idols of the tribe,” which describes the human tendency to see its own form (morphological, political, or otherwise) in nature: “[T]he human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.”39 For Bacon, the sober, unbiased pursuit of knowledge offers a way around the very human propensity for measuring an infinitely complex nature by its own limited “tribal” interests, whether scientific, political, or ecological. While

Borlik attempts to revisit the ecologically positive outlook of cosmic harmony that the

Elizabethan World Picture could produce, Bacon cautions that an intellectual bias toward such harmony can be, itself, a “distort[ion]” of the mind.40 It was possible for early modern thinkers and scientists to see this because of the increasing recognition in the period that the natural world was structurally multiple and, so, constantly challenged any single totalizing image of its

38 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. R. Ellis and James Spedding (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1905), Book One, Aphorism 1. 39 Ibid., Book One, Aphorism 41. 40 Borlik, Ecocriticism, 28-9. Of the World Picture, Borlik rightly attests that “the triumph of the fractured, contrarious worldview was by no means a fait accompli in 1600” and “[n]o single explanation, as Shakespeare seems to recognize, can ultimately account for all the complex workings of the biosphere.” 25 character (scientific, political, or otherwise). Bacon writes, “The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.

And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist.”41 Here, it is the interpretive belief in a unified nature that the new science confutes. And just as Bacon’s critique of “human understanding” questions the validity of “parallels” that humans imagined in nature, my project traces the seventeenth-century epistemological challenges to “conjugates” conventionally established between the natural world and human governance.

Knowing what political postures may be derived from the scientific interrogation of a complexly signifying natural world and the larger problem of knowing what counts as “Nature” are epistemological issues of the sort that Robert Watson identifies in his important work on the late Renaissance “Real.” According to Watson, late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century artists and intellectuals “found themselves pausing in a dark woodland path in the middle of the journey from a medieval reliance on God’s intentions toward a modern notion of biochemical determinants. The common reflex was to look back to nature, but what would that mean?”42

Watson’s answer is that this historical “middle” produced the recognition that you can never go back home (specifically, oikos, the Greek root of ecology), thus generating an intellectual culture that was racked with anxiety about representing the world as it was. Early modern England was

“a culture living in constant fear of recognizing its own bad faith (in whatever sense), of finding

41 Bacon, Organum, Book One, Aphorism 45. For another ecocritical reading the possibilities of a dynamically volatile nature world, see Mentz, “Strange Weather in King Lear,” Shakespeare 6.2 (2010): 139-52. 42 Robert Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 20. 26 out that all of its supposedly objective perceptions were actually subjective.”43 According to

Watson, this breaks down intellectual “fetishization,” and the principle fetish he sees under attack in early modern England is “Nature.”

Watson thus joins a number of environmental scholars who have called for the untenability of “Nature” as a unitary or stable concept.44 Work remains to be done, however, on the specific ways that limitations or excesses in the seventeenth-century idea of “Nature” bled over to envelop phenomena that profoundly tested the scope and even the nature of “Nature” itself. Such liminally “natural” phenomena as plague, planets, and providence stretched the conceptual limits of “Nature” to its breaking point. And while Watson’s work was criticized by other early modern ecocritics for not being political enough in its focus, I show that epistemological unravelings at the fringe of “Nature” must always be political because of

Nature’s inevitable cultural work as a guarantor of perhaps the most questionably natural category of all: human governance.45

Epistemological uncertainty is a crucial feature of early modern ecology both because of the unknowable limits of nature and because of the unknowable “naturalness” of human politics and, indeed, humanity in general. Throughout this project’s analysis of fringe political forms, I

43 Ibid., 31. 44 See, for example, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Latour, Politics of Nature, 25-31; Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 45 Gabriel Egan, “Review of Robert Watson’s Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance” in The Review of English Studies 57.232 (2006): 817-9; Simon Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 11-2. In his review of Watson’s work, for instance, Egan writes, “Like literature itself, ecocriticism is a topic often approached from an interest in something else. Yet it is hard to agree with Robert Watson that ‘our struggles with ecology are, in an important sense, an extension of struggles with epistemology’” (817). Egan concludes by reorienting the ecocritical emphasis away from intellectual history and toward the political realities of environmental exploitation: “An ecocritic would answer that although the Exxon Mobil Corporation has destructive power and is itself made of human minds working in consort, the fault is not with the minds but their incorporation. Only when thus framed politically might we say that the mind/body problem is central to ecocriticism” (819). 27 analyze aspects of human life that were on the margins of what counted as natural for early modern thinkers. The negotiable space between nature and art, the opaque distinction between physical necessity and the supposed freedom of the human spirit, and the linkages between human desire and animal instinct are only a few of the phenomena that obscures the precise jurisdictions of “Nature.” The slippery challenge of delineating “human,” “nature,” and “human nature” was perpetuated by the deep longing of early modern subjects to locate themselves in the world even while lacking the sure knowledge of what to look for, and where.

This epistemological crisis, I argue, undercut political orthodoxy by both obscuring the

“Nature” that was often deployed in order to justify it and by opening a conceptual space for political categories that were, themselves, unorthodox or radical. For instance, when Macbeth’s

Ross is speaking with Lady Macduff about her potentially treasonous husband, Ross commends him, saying, “He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows/ The fits o’th’season. I dare not speak much further,/ But cruel are the times when we are traitors/ And do not know ourselves.”46 As many other characters do, Ross characterizes the political upheaval in Scotland as a climatological rupture: they are in the throes of “the fits o’th’season.” However, a deficit of self- knowledge opens a dangerous space for treason. Although Ross claims that Macduff “best knows” this season, he quickly laments that those “times” are cruel “when we are traitors/ And do not know ourselves.” Both valences of this uncertainty—that Macduff is a traitor and does not know it and that Macduff is a traitor because he lacks self-knowledge—produces a political danger arising from not only “times” and “seasons” but also uncertain humanity. It is out of this doubtfulness that treason emerges, as obscure as the epistemological puzzle of “Nature” itself.

46 Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4.2.16-9. I produce a fuller analysis of this scene in Chapter One. 28

Chapter Summaries

Each of the chapters that follow are linked to particular seventeenth-century political events that highlighted radical forms in the natural world. As I have outlined above, these forms are on the aberrant fringe of what counted as politically viable during the early modern period, and the natural phenomena which they recall are on the fringe of what was conventionally understood as “natural.” For each chapter, these phenomena are thus able to launch political and environmental critiques by radically restructuring both how human subjects were thought to inhabit the world and how nature authorized particular social formations. For instance, Chapter

One returns to Macbeth by asking to what extent loyalty is natural. The play challenges the notion that political allegiance to a paternal king is a human analogue to the reverence that all animals purportedly feel for their parents. I illustrate how King James and his supporters relied on the “natural” sentiments of parental love in order to conceptualize the 1606 Oath of

Allegiance not as an artificial contract but as a recognition that allegiance to James was a biological fact merely confirmed by the Oath. We find, however, that the figure of the traitor disrupts this supposedly straightforward verbal affirmation of “natural” allegiance. Indeed,

Macbeth’s characterization of a traitor as “one that swears and lies” extends to nature itself: to the weathers, forests, and birds of Scotland.47 The play’s representation of nature culminates in a literally multivocal environment of overlapping allegiance and treasonous double-speak. For

Macbeth, nature is championed not by the king’s “natural subjects” who pronounce their allegiance clearly but by the equivocations of the traitor who “lies like truth.”48 These

47 Ibid., 4.2.29. 48 Ibid., 5.5.42. 29 equivocations call attention to a number of merely quasi-natural categories with ambiguous significance for James and his Oath. The play’s oaths are understood not through the child’s natural adoration of his or her parents but, rather, through the baptismal covenant which exists on the unstable border between nature and supernature. Ultimately, I find that the uprising of

Birnam Wood is just not an expression of Natural Law advocating a legitimate king but, rather, a popular horticultural metaphor for baptism and a complex image of the nexus between artifice and nature: the grafted tree. Thus, while Macbeth scholarship often understands Malcolm’s triumphant accession as a restoration of the natural order, I argue that the play asserts that neither

“nature” nor “order” can reliably be described.

Chapter Two more deeply explores this problem of how to describe the limits of the natural world, which, for seventeenth-century thought, expanded unstably outward to include even the stars and planets. While modern environmental analysis tends to keep to the terrestrial world, early modern England had a robust sense of what I call astrometeorology: the idea that nature, the stars, and human politics were enmeshed in a network of mutual influence. This appeared particularly dynamically in the outpouring of poetic memorializations following the

1612 death of the heir apparent Henry Frederick. For many poets who elegized Henry, the political rupture represented by the prince’s death could be healed by imagining a newly stellified Henry shining his astrological influence onto his grieving homeland. John Webster’s

The Duchess of Malfi (written 1612) reenacts these astrometeorological characterizations in its depiction of Duke Ferdinand, who understands his own political influence through the

“tyrannous” meteorological influence of the eclipse. For the cruel duke, astrological determinism justifies a tyrannical determinism whereby all subjects derive their identity directly from their 30 rulers. However, the depiction of Ferdinand’s downfall recalls seventeenth-century burlesque almanacs, a genre of satirical horoscopes featuring “predictions” that were ostensibly based on astrological configurations but derived, instead, from commonsense knowledge of people’s worst impulses. Thus, while Ferdinand attempts to justify his tyranny through the “rule” of heavenly bodies over the weather, the play encourages us to see this as mere farce, depicting his political cruelties as principally determined by his own vicious nature. This does not mean, however, that humans are free from structures of determinism, astrological or otherwise. Indeed, humans in

Duchess and in early modern burlesque almanacs alike are shackled primarily to their own predictable depravities. Hence, while the play is often thought to predict modern notions of free, liberal subjectivity, I understand The Duchess of Malfi as a monument to human unfreedom.

Ultimately, the play derives its model of determinism from the astrometeorological world while reserving skepticism that the heavens and its meteorological effects are as easily legible as the contours of human sin.

Chapter Three explores how weather-borne disease troubles moments of royal succession and the easy providential lessons that many thinkers attempted to draw from such natural disasters. Because they coincided with plague outbreaks, the deaths of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 and King James in 1625 inspired several writers to compose plague-epics: poems that attempted to condole English subjects by depicting the plague as an altar-call from both a providential God and a succeeding monarch to repent from civil and spiritual sins. I find, however, that the greater the reliance on this providential model of disease, the less willing poets were to grant the wind’s material role in plague transmission, a meteorological etiology that constituted the dominant scientific understanding of plague in the period. I argue that these two models created a tension 31 between two simultaneous yet difficult-to-reconcile social models of death: the egalitarian recognition that any class might die of the plague (because all are subject to God’s punishment) and the acknowledgment that the poor died in greater numbers (because they could not afford to flee the plague’s corrupting weathers). This tension vividly shapes George Wither’s Britain’s

Remembrancer (published 1628), a huge plague poem that owes its bulk to the numerous logical turns, counterturns, and caveats by which Wither struggles as he attempts to integrate the providential justice of God, king, and country with the socio-material injustices of wind-borne plague. My reading of Britain’s Remembrancer complicates the scholarly trend that postulates an

“egalitarian” model for plague death that is unproblematically informed by scientific theories of miasma in early modern England. By contrast, I argue that plague literature is a snapshot of the social, theological, and meteorological anxieties that distressed both the English body and the ailing body politic.

My final chapter considers the political and ecological valences of preservation through the political uproars of the English Civil War, the execution of King Charles I, and the death of

Oliver Cromwell. Beginning with Parliamentarian rhetoric that justified political resistance based on the natural law of self-preservation, I move to Hobbes’s adaptation of self-preservation as something that, first, exacerbates the anarchic state of “mere nature” but that contractually anchors a polity after the founding of a commonwealth. I relate these varied interpretations of preservation to the seldom-studied play Orgula (1658) by Leonard Willan. Published the year of

Cromwell’s death, Orgula is a Hobbesian nightmare in which the anarchic war of “mere nature” refuses to recede behind the tenuous political grasp of the play’s fictional protectorate. In

Orgula, the forest—no longer the traditional domain of the king—becomes a place of desperate 32 outlawry where it is impossible to maintain the civil contracts that, according to Hobbes, ensure the preservation of life and state. The political maneuvers of the play’s characters—all launched by competing notions of natural preservation—eventually miscarry as even the eternally self- preserving stars seem to blink out by the play’s bitter end. Orgula’s warring, woodland anarchies and celestial expirations join with the absence of a viable successor by the end of the play, offering a grim outlook on England’s ability to preserve itself at the end of the Protectorate.

My project elaborates these complex literary and historical developments, outlining how nature resists simplified political fantasies and how some early modern thinkers deployed that insight. In this way, my project can be useful not only to literary scholars, historians, and ethicists as a new way to read the political language surrounding the early modern natural world but also to anyone thinking about our own ecological moment. We might judge the early moderns’ political metaphorizing of nature to be a quaint artifact of a historically distant era, but the frayed junctures between the political and the natural could reveal shocking, sobering, or radical things about nature and society to seventeenth-century thinkers. Even today, the rift between nature and politics is not as wide as some might think. In this age of climate change and diminishing resources, it bears repeating—as my project and the texts it surveys often do—that nature is rarely, if ever, politically convenient for human structures of power. The world owes us no allegiance, and, in fact, may urge its inhabitants toward revolution. But even this is not guaranteed. In all of its political complexity, nature supports, invades, usurps, betrays, explodes, and ignores the little kingdoms that we make for ourselves.

CHAPTER ONE

“Hark, peace!—/ It was the owl”: Mistranslations of “borne and sworne” Natural Allegiance in Macbeth

When her husband secretly absconds to support Scotland’s rightful heir, Macbeth’s Lady

Macduff interprets the offense as a breach not merely of her husband’s domestic duty to her, but of several layered and overlapping allegiances. After criticizing her husband’s apparent lapse of political duty as, allegedly, one of Scotland’s many “traitors,” Lady Macduff quickly pivots to his lapse in familial duty, alleging that he lacks “the natural touch” before contrasting him with the “poor wren” who remains by its family even in the face of great danger.1 Lady Macduff’s concatenation of avian, domestic, and political duties is, this chapter argues, representative of a complex naturalization of political fealty that increased during the years following the

Gunpowder Plot. Throughout this period—which coincided with the composition and performance history of Macbeth—the articulation and interpretation of subjects’ “natural” allegiance (as well as their “unnatural” betrayals) grew central to James’s attempted consolidation of ideological control after the political rupture that the Plot represented. As I explore in this chapter, the 1606 Oath of Allegiance, administered to subjects sworn to public office and any persons suspected of Catholic recusancy, represented a major effort to identify

“unnatural” political outliers and Catholic separatists. Lady Macduff’s lament accesses the anxieties surrounding this effort and its naturalization. The “natural touch” bridges the proper channels of domestic and political loyalty, and this natural loyalty is articulated through the swearing of oaths. When her son asks what a traitor is after she charges her absent husband with

1 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 4.2.4-12. All subsequent references of Shakespeare’s works will be from this edition and cited parenthetically. 34 treason, Lady Macduff replies, “Why, one that swears and lies” (4.2.48). Just as her likening of political duty with “natural touch” gathers political allegiance and familial affection into the same discourse, Lady Macduff suggests here that her husband’s lies include the forswearing both of political contracts like the Oath of Allegiance and of the marital oath sworn at their wedding.

Contrasted with the natural allegiance of good subjects and “poor wren[s]” alike,

Macduff’s alleged breaches of political and familial oaths registers an anxiety toward the

Jacobean associations—newly relevant after the Gunpowder Plot and the Oath of Allegiance— among proper familial duty, upright political allegiance, and Natural Law. Just as Macduff’s apparent failure is both domestic and political, Duncan’s paternal monarchy contrasts with the childless Macbeths in order to reinforce the connection between parental reverence and allegiance to a fatherly king like Duncan (or, indeed, James). Being born into a household coincided with subjection to the rule of the father according to early modern conceptions of

Natural Law, a fluid yet influential code of behavior that was authorized by God and, as testified by Paul in his letter to the Romans, could be “clearly seen” in “the things that [God] made” during creation.2 This assumption of filial submission to the father extended to the public sphere, in which birth within a state’s territory tied subjects to the monarch through the laws of that nation, which were often viewed as a legislative analogue to the unwritten laws of Nature. As I will show, swearing the new Oath of Allegiance was, for many, a language-bound translation of the broader, non-linguistic Natural Law that endeared parent to child and subject to monarch.

2 Romans 1:20, Authorized Version. Paul’s description of God’s righteousness as it manifests in creation is an arraignment of Gentiles who, while lacking the specific moral guidance of the scriptures, “are without excuse” because nature itself could have directed them to the glory of God. 35

However, the interpretation of nature’s dictates into the language of human law was not, for either James or Macbeth, a matter of simple translation, especially regarding the knotty problem of human allegiance. For Macbeth and for early Stuart England, it was unclear if the duties naturally assumed at birth mapped easily upon the political duties contracted at one’s

“Ciuill birth,” a phrase John Donne uses to defend the implementation of the Oath of

Allegiance.3 But for Macbeth, the tenuous connections linking allegiance, birth, and nature fray to reveal a network of contradictory obligations and impulses that trouble the attempt to read (or speak) allegiance from Natural Law. Macduff, to his credit, is not a traitor who “swears and lies”—at least, not in the political sense. His paternal betrayal of his slaughtered family is an unforeseen consequence of his loyalty to his political father, Duncan, as he makes his way to

England to secure the throne for Duncan’s heir. The trajectories of political and natural paternity treacherously diverge. While for many early moderns, Natural Law ratified the allegiances spoken within the Oath of Allegiance, Macbeth demonstrates just how difficult it is to get Nature to confess her allegiances. Just as Macduff is both a loyalist and a traitor according to nature, the play’s depiction of the natural world is also politically vexed. Throughout this chapter, I will interrogate conceptions of natural allegiance in early modern discourses surrounding the Oath of

Allegiance and in Macbeth, finally revealing how difficult it is to state confidently what allegiance is and what the limits of “the natural” are. Beginning with a broad discussion of

Natural Law and the ways in which it was deployed in order to defend the Oath of Allegiance after the Gunpowder Plot, this chapter details the contradictions of spoken affirmations of

Natural Law before showing how Macbeth emphasizes these ruptures, aligning nature’s

3 John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr (London: Walter Burre, 1610), 348. 36 allegiances not with the straightforwardly spoken fealty of child to parent or subject to king but with a number of phenomena that are politcally equivocal because they thrive in the conceptually hazy fringe of what counted as “Nature,” including the “speech” of birds, baptismal birth, and horticultural grafting.

By examining the contradictory allegiances of Macbeth’s nature, this chapter attempts at its broadest to complicate the modern notion of an objective, impartial world “out there” that represents a simple reality or truth. Much of this dissertation is interested in sharpening the ecocritical paradigm of human/natural embeddedness beyond the broad, often placidly pastoral, sense of mutual influence. And, so, I argue here that the embeddedness organizing Macbeth is, in a sense, that humans and nature are caught up in one another’s lies. For Macbeth, humans are not the only duplicitous agents in the world. Like the swearing-lying traitor, and like the treasonous

“equivocations of the fiend,” both human political obligation and natural allegiance are characterized by double-speak, not merely speaking cross-wise to each other, but to themselves as well. By invoking lies, equivocations, and treasons, however, I do not mean also to conjure any sense of malice (not in every case, at least). In this play, treasonous duplicity may arise not from malicious intent, but merely, as with Macduff, from competing circumstances that demand contradictory actions or, worse, contradictory natures. Indeed, Ross laments that “cruel are the times when we are traitors/ And do not know ourselves,” indicating that the duplicities of the traitor can arise even without the knowledge of the traitor (4.2.18-9). While the few ecocritics who have treated the play often characterize a natural world that is intricate, contentious, and even contradictory, none have approached the problem from the question of spoken natural allegiance, and, what is more, they almost always allege that nature eventually resolves itself of 37 its apparent duplicities. Kristen Poole, for instance, argues that the play’s representation of nature vacillates between the theological poles of Calvinism and Hookerian Natural Law (discussed below) but finally argues that Malcolm’s accession restores the “proper” theological model of

Calvinist creation.4 Richard Kerridge, too, attests that Macbeth’s nature resolves the day/night dualism that Macbeth erects by showing how the “rooky wood” of Birnam moves to support his rival Malcolm.5 This reinforces the notion that nature is a place for revealing and settling contradictions; nature, unlike humans, is true to its word. By contrast, I argue that nature does not resolve its duplicities but is, instead, defined by them.

The Politics of Natural Law, Domesticity, and Birth after the Gunpowder Plot

One of the primary difficulties of reading Macbeth as an ecocritical text is the seemingly uncomplicated way that the natural world supports Duncan’s regime and bloodline, a political anthropocentrism that installs the rightful human sovereign as the conduit of Natural Law.6

Duncan’s death causes a darkening of the countryside, and the rightful heir Malcolm seems able to “bid the tree/ [to] Unfix his earth-bound root” with his military expertise, which apparently

4 Kristen Poole, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 160-1. 5 Richard Kerridge, “An Ecocritic’s Macbeth” in Ecocritical Shakespeare, eds. Dan Brayton and Lynne Bruckner (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 194-210. 6 In addition to Kerridge and Poole, ecocritical treatments of the play include Georgia Brown, “Defining Nature through Monstrosity in Othello and Macbeth,” in Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, eds. Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 55-76; Steve Mentz, “‘Making the green one red’: Dynamic Ecologies in Macbeth, Edward Barlow’s Journal, and Robinson Crusoe,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13.3 (2013): 66-83. To various degrees, each of these ecocritics struggles with the anthropocentric resonances of Duncan’s and Malcolm’s apparent mastery of the natural world. Georgia Brown, whose study of monstrosity and taxonomic doubt in Macbeth most closely approaches my emphasis on uncertain natural allegiance, still attests that the human king guarantees the natural order by the end of the play. Steve Mentz, too, microscopically scrutinizes the line “Making the green one [ocean] red” through deep ecology, a modern movement that emphasizes natural dynamism rather than stasis. But in order to provide ecocritical value to the line, he must read around the line’s potentially anthropocentric context, which suggests that it is the blood of a human king that so sets the ocean to frothing. 38 extends beyond his army to the very trees of Birnam Wood (4.1.11-2). I contend, however, that natural allegiances in Macbeth do not so closely match the obligations of subjects, either in

Duncan’s Scotland or James’s England. What is more, these natural allegiances can pull in incompatible directions. While the ecological charisma of Duncan and his heirs seems to motivate a specific political activism in the natural world to “Unfix his earth-bound root” for its rightful human sovereign, the play in fact traces an intricate, often contradictory network of natural and political obligations, especially when those allegiances are translated into speech- acts. I argue, then, that the scholarly assessment of the play’s clashing articulations of allegiance, legitimacy, and sovereignty extends to the play’s portrayals of nature and the network of

“natural” duties that purportedly envelop early modern subjects from birth.7 These contradictions are especially prevalent through the play’s treatment of early modern discourses surrounding treason. In his reading of treason in the play, for instance, Steven Mullaney understands the play as it emerges from what is essentially a linguistic contest between the English state and traitors.8

According to Mullaney, from the Treason Act of 1534 to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, English legislation aimed to constrict and clarify the equivocal language supposedly used by traitors and, specifically, that of interrogated English Catholics. More recently, Rebecca Lemon has rejected the critical consensus that Macbeth celebrates James’s discovery of the Gunpowder Plot through

7 In addition to the scholars outlined below, see Jonathan Goldberg, “Speculations: Macbeth and Source,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, eds. Jean Howard and Marion O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 242-64; David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 217-42; Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 96-108. According to Goldberg, the play’s various moments of mirroring between legitimate and illegitimate regimes creates a “specular contamination” that breaks down the apparent distinctions between opposites (249). Sinfield demonstrates how the play’s violence unsettles the distinction between state- sanctioned violence and the seditious violence of usurpers or traitors. And Kastan’s broad-ranging analysis of the play questions the extent to which the play straightforwardly supports James’s rule. 8 Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 121-27. 39 its conceptual separation of monarch and traitor. Lemon shows how the representation of

Macbeth “demonstrates the uncanny dependence of traitor and monarch,” even in the depiction of Malcolm, who is, ostensibly, the primary figure of regenerate allegiance in the play.9 Like these critics, I argue that the contradictory allegiances of the play muddle the line between the

“imperfect speakers” of treason and the honest oaths of the naturally loyal. And, building on these critical insights, I contend that the space between rightful duty and treasonous discord erupts in the play’s fascination with the inconclusive translation of unwritten Natural Law into the supposedly legible duties of early modern civic life.

I mean “translation” literally; as James’s regime scrambled to mitigate the crisis of loyalty that the Gunpowder Plot represented, the articulation of allegiances—insofar as they were considered “unnatural” or “natural”—grew crucially important but increasily vexed, especially surrounding questions of birth. Whether subjects were enjoined to a particular allegiance because it grew naturally from birth, whether because subjects merely happened to be born within a particular nation, or because of some combination of the two was far from a settled issue, and clearly articulating allegiance could encounter significant conceptual difficulties for those who did not “naturally” feel the specific allegiances testified. This legal, natural, and linguistic liminality, I argue, gained urgency during the years surrounding Macbeth’s composition, performance, and publication as James’s subjects vowed their supposedly inborn loyalty to the king through the 1606 Oath of Allegiance.

Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Polity (1593) was an important elaboration of the theological positions of the English Church and demonstrates the haziness of

9 Lemon, Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 85. 40 the junctures between Natural Law and human statutes, and it is such a haziness that both allowed thinkers to naturalize the Oath of Allegiance and undermined confidence in that naturalization. Hooker argues that divine, natural, scriptural, and human laws are nested within one another, with various amounts of excess and slippage among those distinct layers. For

Hooker, most “commendable” human laws proceed from and are ratified by “Eternall” law, which is elaborated and demonstrated by the laws “first of nature, then of scripture.” Echoing

Paul’s assessment of the goodness of “things that [God] made,” Hooker affirms that Natural Law complements the moral laws of scripture and are “in the bosome of the earth concealed.”10 By reading scripture and nature in conjunction with one another, humans may extrapolate acceptable moral behavior. This moral reading of nature, however, is more complex than a simple one-to- one translation of imperatives. As Laurie Shannon has noted in her discussion of erotic sameness and difference in early modern “Nature,” Hooker’s depiction of individual creatures abiding by

Natural Law emphasizes “open-ended variability and even incommensurability” that run counter to monolithic modern understandings of physical law.11

This conceptual fluidity extends, also, to the ways in which Natural Law informs licit human behavior. For instance, although Hooker attests that many human laws are anchored in the goodness of Natural Law, custom can seduce people into believing that their corrupt laws are ratified by nature when, in fact, they are exclusively human. Further, while human laws grounded in nature are always good, not all exclusively human laws are bad laws, and sometimes

10 Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (London, 1593), Book 1, page 46. For a useful history of the environment as a “Book of Nature” and its relationship to the book of scripture, see Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 185-204. 11 Laurie Shannon, “Nature’s Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness,” Modern Philology 98.2 (2000): 183-210, quote at 192. 41 the less intuitive natural laws (like the injunction against incest) need to be written into human legislation in order to give them legible clarity. 12 Articulations of allegiance like the oaths that this chapter details exemplify a particularly fluid space in this already flexible framework; according to Hooker, oaths “imposed either by each man vpon himselfe, or by a publique society

. . . containeth sundry both naturall and positiue lawes.”13 Oaths thus represent the affirmation of laws that may span several of Hooker’s taxonomies, but determining what portions of an oath are

“positiue” and which are ad hoc translations of the eternally binding Natural Law is unclear.

Determining precisely where and how Natural Law intersected with human “positiue lawes” represented a challenge for thinkers after the Gunpowder Plot. As I demonstrate below, defenders of the 1606 Oath of Allegiance attempted to naturalize it by hitching it to natural laws that manifested through various (and variously unstable) discourses of birth, including biological birth within the family unity and the spiritual birth of infant baptism. But controversies surrounding the legal junctures among Natural Law, civil allegiance, and birth began even earlier than 1606 with James’s ostensible unification of England and Scotland. Jonathan Goldberg has shown that domesticity and, specifically, its procreative function was used by James to encourage the notion that the king was the civil father to England and his subjects were his born children.14 James’s speech to the 1603 Parliament about English/Scottish unity relied on a naturalized model of domesticity that, I will argue, was so prevalent and so problematic for the

Oath of Allegiance. Echoing the Anglican marriage ceremony, James announced, “What God hath conioyned then, let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull

12 Hooker, Lawes, Book 1, pages 65-72. 13 Ibid., Book 1, page 87, italics in the original. 14 Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 85-89. 42

Wife . . . I hope therefore no man will be so vnreasonable as to thinke that . . . I being the Head, should haue a diuided and monstrous Body.”15 For James, the domestic image of marriage/coronation sutured the previously “diuided” kingdoms of England and Scotland under the paternal authority of the king. Despite the promise of this metaphor, however, the legal unification of the “whole Isle” was no straightforward process because, although England and

Scottish subjects were children under the same regal father, they were born into two distinct systems of law. According to legal historian Keechang Kim, part of the work of joining the

English and Scottish systems from 1604 onward (beginning with the appointment of legal

“Commissioners of Union”) involved the increasing legal recognition of Natural Law as a system of jurisprudence that was not “confined within the kingdom of England,” both superseding and authorizing the laws of even distinct nations like England and Scotland.16

Born allegiance under a paternal monarch, especially, was thought to be a foundational natural law unifying the otherwise disparate laws of England and Scotland. In 1606, for example,

Sir Edward Coke and Lord Chief Baron Fleming argued for the naturalness of civil allegiance before Parliament, noting that “1. Allegiance was before laws; 2. Allegiance is after laws,” and, especially relevant to the contested boundaries of English and Scottish laws after the accession,

“5. Allegiance . . . extends beyond the circuit of laws.”17 The burgeoning legal presence of

Natural Law, especially regarding the allegiances enjoined by birth, culminated with the 1608 suit known as Calvin’s Case or the Case of the Postnati. The plaintiff Robert Calvin, who was born in Scotland after the 1603 accession, claimed legal ownership over a tract of property in

15 James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann Somerville (Cambridge, 1994), 136. 16 Keechang Kim, “Calvin’s Case (1608) and the Law of Alien Status,” Journal of Legal History 17 (1996): 155-71, quote at 160. 17 Cols. 569ff., cited in Kim, “Calvin’s,” 159. 43

England. The defendant, echoing the legal precedent, claimed that Calvin was an alien to

England and, thus, had no legal claim. In an important decision for the legal status of naturalized aliens, the courts ruled in favor of Calvin, both because he was born after James’s 1603 ostensible unification of the two kingdoms and because, according to Lord Chancellor

Ellesmere’s opinion, “allegiance was grounded upon the law of nature; and, therefore, it ought not be confined within the kingdom of England.”18 Still, however, Calvin enjoyed the ruling and its expansion of legislation and allegiance through Natural Law because he was one of the postnati, those born after James’s 1603 accession. The legal status of those born before 1603 (the antenati) was still defined by the legislative split between England and Scotland, and, so, the precise reach of the supposedly universal Natural Law was questionable and, importantly, subject to conditions of birth, a category that was especially controversial for its precise relationship to nature in the years following the 1605 Gunpowder Plot.

In response to the Catholic insurgency that the Gunpowder Plot supposedly represented,

James enacted the 1605 Popish Recusants Act and the entailed Oath of Allegiance to be administered to public officials and Catholic recusants. The Oath alleged not only that “our

Soueraigne Lorde king Iames, is lawfull and rightful king of the realme” but also that the Pope may not demand of English subjects more allegiance than James himself. Swearers were pressed to disclose any and all papist treasons that were known to them, and they attested that kings excommunicated by Rome may not “bee deposed or murdered by their subiects, or anie other whatsoeuer.”19 The challenge before English defenders of the Oath of Allegiance was to argue

18 Kim, “Calvin’s,” 160. 19 Text of the oath drawn from A True Report of the Araignment, Tryall, Conuiction, and Condemnation, of a Popish Priest, named Robert Drewrie (London: Iefferie Chorlton, 1607), sig. C3v-C4r. 44 that James’s paternity, as “Husband” of the “whole Isle,” superseded that of the Pope. Because this patriarchal authority depended on the blurry relationships among civil, religious, and natural fatherhood, the justification of the Oath relied on a similarly fluid etymology of nature, ratifying the Oath both through Natural Law and through categories and conditions of birth: through obligations that are as natal as they are natural. Just as one was bound by affectionate gratitude to one’s parents by Natural Law, one was also bound to a particular sovereign’s laws by the very fact of one’s birth within a country.

However, many recusants felt a tension in their consciences between what they felt were two oaths that attested contradictory allegiances and contradictory births: first, the Oath of

Allegiance confirming subjection under the king of their birth-nation and, second, their baptismal oaths, which granted them membership into the Christian community as a symbol of spiritual re- birth. Just as Calvin’s Case both resolved and revealed the political problems of birth (and

Natural Law), the Oath’s defenders attempted to resolve the tension between supposedly disparate types of birth both by simultaneously anchoring the Oath in natural laws enjoining respectful filiality and analogizing the Oath to infant baptism. As we will see, the sacrament of infant baptism, both because of its association with natal imagery and in direct response to

Catholics’ baptismal misgivings, exemplified for many thinkers the model of filial subjection that was at the heart of the Oath and, thus, demonstrated the legitimacy of pronouncing allegiance to James. As an oath of spiritual allegiance taken near the moment of birth, baptism was an important example of inborn loyalty, around which the categories of nature, law, and domesticity crystallized. Thus infant baptism analogized the natural obligations that the subject owed to king and country from his or her birth in a given state. Because they were, themselves, 45 particularly multivocal in early modern thought, the oaths taken at infant baptism were a useful analogy for the political/natural/natal discourses surrounding the Oath of Allegiance, but they could also encode significant disjunctures. As we will see, baptism itself represented an unstable nexus between nature and supernature—between innate allegiance and artificial contract—and, so, could not completely resolve civil allegiance into the “inborn” dictates of Natural Law.

Before surveying the multiple texts that understood the Oath as a civil type of baptism, it is important to understand the specific theological mechanism of the sacrament in Protestant thought. While the rite’s more recognizable aspects—the sprinkling of water or (more rarely in

England) the full immersion of the infant—were essential components of the baptismal ceremony, the sacrament as a whole was conceptualized as an oath that promised Christian fidelity through the rejection of Satan’s worldly allurements.20 For many early modern denominations, however, infant baptism posed a logistical conundrum: if baptism was a speech- act that guaranteed admission into the Christian community, how was such an oath to be performed by infants, who could not speak?21 The solution was to implement the godparents as the infant’s swearers-by-proxy or “sureties,” through whose “promise” the child may take the oath.22 The godparents’ vow was, thus, taken for that of the pre-verbal baby, and as the child was

“borne againe” into the Christian family, water was sprinkled over the infant as a symbol of that new birth.

It is important to note, however, that the precise status of the baptismal oath and the different types of birth were as fluid as Hooker’s distinctions among eternal, natural, scriptural,

20 Church of England, The Booke of Common Prayer (London, 1603), “The ministration of Baptisme.” 21 Infant, from the Latin infans, meaning “unable to speak.” OED, s.v. “Infant.” This conundrum was bypassed by the Anabaptists, who refused to administer the sacrament to anyone who could not pronounce its stipulations. 22 Church of England, BCP, “Baptisme.” 46 and human law. According to Anglican orthodoxy, baptism was a repudiation of sins inherited naturally from Adam and was, conversely, a supernatural re-birth into the kingdom of God. In this formulation of the sacrament, then, there was a firm distinction between nature and supernature, between that “which by nature [Christians] cannot haue” and the divine salvation that baptism promises.23 This separation manifested in the sacrament’s distinction between parents—the infant’s “natural” lineage corrupted through Original Sin—and godparents—the infant’s spiritual surrogates who, through faith, assured the child’s re-birth into the kinship of salvation.

While the official Anglican view of baptism strictly erected the distinction between nature and supernature, the sacrament’s designation as a kind of birth rendered baptism susceptible to naturalization as an oath that pronounced a naturally inherited allegiance to God.

In order to maintain the separation between natural birth and Christian birth, the 1604

Constitutions and Canons explicitly prohibited the infant’s biological parents from acting as godparents during the ceremony, but as historian Will Coster notes in his study of baptism, a number of Church enquiries in the seventeenth century—as well as the resulting prosecutions for offenders—demonstrated how widespread violations were.24 Many reformers considered the institution of godparents to be a holdover from Roman Catholicism, one that took spiritual power away from the nuclear family that, they thought, were best suited to speak for the infant. Calvin, for instance, had preferred that “parents [be] forced to present their children themselves and become their first sponsors” (from the Latin spondere, to pledge or swear), and the Genevan

23 Ibid. 24 Will Coster, Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 90-1. 47 liturgy allowed parents to answer their children’s baptismal vows.25 According to Coster, this baptismal conundrum amounts to an important antinomy:

Paradoxically, it was the natural bond of child to parents that gave the infant its claim to join the spiritual world where such claims were suspended . . . [Parental] ties represented the natural, secular world, where rights of property and systems of hierarchy functioned and were sustained. But the parents were also part of a second dimension, a hidden, holy, and in some ways ideal world, which paralleled the first.26

For Coster, early modern baptism could be the product of an unequal, inconsistent mingling of categories between biological and supernatural birth, mirroring the problems of matching biological to civil parenthood and, indeed, of matching natural, eternal, and human laws.

The uncertainty surrounding the role of natural parenthood in the ostensibly supernatural sacrament was not necessarily limited to more reformist nations or English parishes; rather, some fluidity between baptism’s natural and supernatural significance was built into the rite itself.

While the specific answers pronounced by the godparents were supernaturally accorded to the infant, the child’s eligibility for the rite was based upon the faith of the natural parents, which further muddled the baptismal relationship between nature and supernature. The minister

Cornelius Burges, for example, held in 1629 that an infant “borne of parents that are visible members of a setled and stablished Church . . . is to be held and reputed for one of the faithful euen from the wombe.”27 The prominent English divine Thomas Adams, too, adapts Paul’s sanctification of believers’ children as a defense of infant baptism, writing in 1629 that it

“pleaseth the Lord to admit Infants to baptisme, though they be not able to answere for

25 Quoted in Coster, Baptism, 85. 26 Coster, Baptism, 50-1. 27 Cornelius Burges, Baptismall Regeneration of Elect Infants Professed by the Church of England (Oxford: Henry Curteyn, 1629), 252. 48 themselves. And as it was in his Iustice to impute my sin to my child, to make it guilty: so it pleaseth his mercie to take my faith for my child, to make it holy.”28 The proximity with which

Adams sets the naturally heritable stain of Original Sin against the baptismal profession of the child’s faith mixes the natural lineage of sin with the supernatural redemption of baptism, each transmitted in some way from biological father to child. For Burges and Adams, the child does not need to enunciate his or her own faith because it is assumed from a Christian lineage. The godparents’ oaths, then, supernaturally profess an allegiance that, though not quite naturally heritable, often flirts that it might be through such language as being imputed “euen from the wombe.”

Even King James, in his Basilikon Doron (1599 and, for England, 1603), describes the king’s parental stewardship of his court while also pondering the heritability of baptismal models of allegiance. The text’s subtitle—His Majesties Instructions to His Dearest Sonne, Henry the

Prince—immediately announces the political stakes of the king’s domestic role, and, appropriately, he characterizes the lawful king as the “naturall father” to all of his subjects.29 The natural filial allegiance that all good subjects feel toward their sovereign leads James, through a discussion of his courtiers, into a theorization of baptismal loyalty. He writes that a king should choose young courtiers

In fide parentum [by the parents’ faith], as Baptisme is vsed. For although anima non venit ex traduce [the soul does not come from biological inheritance], but is immediately created by God, and infused from aboue: yet it is most certaine, that vertue or vice will oftentimes, with the heritage, be transferred from the parents to posteritie, and runne on a blood (as the Prouerbe is) the sicknesse of the minde becoming as kindly to some races; as these sicknesses of the bodie, that infects in

28 I Corinthians 7:14; Thomas Adams, A Commentary, or, Exposition Vpon the Diuine Second Epistle Generall (London, 1633), 595. 29 James I and VI, Basilikon Doron (London, 1603), 25. 49

the seede. Especially choose suche minors, as are come of a true and honest race, and haue not had the house wherof they are descended, infected with falshoode.30

According to James, while the soul is not inherited from the parents in the same way that the body is, the “sicknesses” of soul may “runne on a blood” like a quasi-genetic transmission of vice. Thus, in choosing his young courtiers, James must turn to another, equally liminal model: the justifications through which “Baptisme is vsed.” For James to fulfill his patriarchal stewardship of his court, he must, according to the Basilikon, weigh the patrilineal inheritance of virtuous allegiance just as a priest might weight a child’s eligibility for baptism.

After the Gunpowder Plot and the implementation of the Oath of Allegiance, the baptismal logic of fealty to a patriarchal monarch analogized and justified the Oath (and vice versa) for many thinkers. For instance, in the preacher Arthur Dent’s popular parenting manual A

Pastime for Parents (1606, with numerous editions), the language of paternity, baptism, and allegiance meet in a way that implicitly comments on the loyalties of the Oath’s swearers.

Arranged as a Protestant catechism spoken between a “Father” and his “Child,” Pastime reviews

Anglican orthodoxy, including the belief that baptismal eligibility for infants who “can make no profession of faith” is ensured “because they are the seed of the Church . . . [and] to bee born in the wombe of the Church, is vnto infants in-stead of faith and repentence.”31 As in the Basilikon, the child’s answer, redolent with the procreative metaphor of “seed” and “wombe,” blurs the

30 Ibid., 73. My translation here of the rare construction ex traduce and its nominal root tradux does not come from its literal meaning of “something brought [-duco] over [tra-] from somewhere else” but, instead, from early modern Christians who are, like James here, wondering about the specific source of the soul. Calvin, for instance, writes in A Harmonie Vpon the Three Euangelists (London, trans. 1584) that “many did thinke, that wee doe not onely take our beginning according to our body, of our parents, but that the soules also are spread ex traduce: (that is, that the father begetteth the soule of the sonne aswel as the body). . . . And truly the wordes of Christ seeme to import thus much at the first sight, that we are therefore flesh, because we are borne fleshe” (61).

31 Arthur Dent, A Pastime for Parents: or A Recreation to Passe Away the Time (London: Thomas Man, 1606), sig. G3v. 50 boundary between nature and supernature both with the biological language and with domestic emphasis that is reinforced by the catechistic form itself—delivered between father and child.

The political possibilities of this theological paternalism emerges when the father asks more precisely about the “vse of Baptisme.” The child responds, “In baptisme we do giue our names to god, put on his liuery coat & cognizance, and take the oath of allegiance to be true subjects to ye crown of heauen.”32 Here, the paternal amity implicit both in the father/child catechism and the baptismal discussion of “new birth” is accorded a distinctly political dimension when the oaths undertaken at a child’s baptism earn the urgency of the new “oath of allegiance.” That Dent’s tract was published the same year as the implementation of the Oath and reprinted frequently throughout the Oath’s Jacobean controversies encouraged the political connection, with “ye crown” gesturing not only to God’s saving authority but also, analogously, to James himself as a similarly paternal locus of allegiance.

The preacher Francis White, too, explains in 1617 that baptism is “an oath of allegiance

[that] obligeth vs to adhere to Iesus Christ our King, and his written law; and to renounce

Antichrist and other traitors, who vnder the cloake of subiection to the Church, seeke to make vs rebels to Christ.”33 The explicit reference to the Oath of Allegiance, coupled with the renunciation of “traitors” for whom the Oath was implemented, makes the political resonance of

White’s description hard to miss. Indeed, White’s elaboration of baptismal allegiance is in response to the alleged Roman position that baptism always enjoins Recusants “to obey the

Romane Church,” a belief that according to James, in his Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance

32 Ibid., sig. G1r-v. 33 Francis White, The Orthodox Faith and Way to the Church Explaned and Iustified (London: William Barrett, 1617), 397. 51

(1609), drew English recusants away from the Oath by fallaciously pitting spiritual, civil, and natural allegiance against each other.34 James details the recusants’ conundrum between their

English allegiance—received from their birth within the state’s boundaries—and their Christian allegiance—received from their “supernaturall birth”—as an illusory tension between two types of birth-oaths that should be, like Hooker’s conceptions of divine, natural, and positive law, mutually informing and compatible. He insists that the Catholic baptismal “Oath” cannot override the “double Oath” of the subject’s political allegiance “borne and sworne . . . to his naturall Soueraigne.”35 According to James, the belief that Catholic baptism implies absolute obedience to all of Rome’s dicta (especially its condemnation of the Oath) is unlawful because it would cause English subjects to “forsweare their former two Oaths, first closely sworne, by their birth in the naturall Allegiance; and next, clearly confirmed by this Oath [of Allegiance], which doeth nothing but expresse the same.”36 Here, James imagines a congruity between baptism and the terms of the new Oath, both of which are “borne and sworne.”

The commensurability that James imagines between baptismal oaths and the Oath of

Allegiance is aided by their functional similarities as oaths that “expresse the same” allegiances already conferred from birth—whether through the parents’ Christianity or their Englishness.

Perhaps most explicitly gathering together the conceptual linkages connecting the Oath, baptism, allegiance, birth, and domesticity is John Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr (1610). Written to persuade

English Catholic recusants that, as the subtitle announces, they “may and ought to take the Oath of Allegiance,” Pseudo-martyr is in some ways a text about the supremacy of one father over

34 James I and VI, An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (London, 1609), sig. T2v-T3r. 35 Ibid., 34-5, sig. T2v. 36 Ibid., 34-5. 52 another. While Pope Paul V is the person who “hath no Fathers in the Church, but . . . all are his

Sonnes,” Donne prefers the political paternity of James, “to whom . . . all the kingdom is his house” and to whom all English subjects “are his sonnes and seruants.”37 James’s patriarchal supremacy attracts, again, the language of the baptismal oath: “The same office which our sureties performe for vs at our Baptisme and Regeneration, the Lawe vndertakes at our Ciuill birth. For the Law is Communis sponsio Reip. [the common sponsor of the state].”38 Just as biological birth within a Christian household allows godparents to affirm the infant’s spiritual allegiance, so does “Ciuill birth” within England allow the “Law” to speak for the subject’s allegiance (and his or her liability to such oaths that “expresse the same”). Thus, according to

Donne, the Oath of Allegiance is one of many foregone and indigenous “publicke protestations of that Obedience to the Prince, which by our birth in his Dominions, and of his Subiects, wee had at first contracted.”39 Through this language of “Ciuill birth,” James is represented implicitly as the father who presses his childlike subjects to undertake the spiritual and civil obligations that they acquire even from the moment of their birth.

According to Donne, the words of the godparents and the written laws of the land are the verbal translations of these “natural” (meaning “native” or “from birth,” with resonances of “in nature”) obligations. As such, these translations are understood not as a promise to perform some new office or to assent to a new expansion of sovereign authority but as a vow of reportage that describes something inborn that was already there.40 Thus, oaths like that of baptism or

37 Donne, Pseudo-Martyr, 112-3, 189. 38 Ibid., 347-8, italics in the original. 39 Ibid., 348, italics in the original. 40 See J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 3-8. While he later complicates the distinction considerably, Austin’s exploration of speech-acts in his opening chapters contrasts performative speech-acts with so-called constative utterances (like descriptions or reportage). The early modern 53 allegiance are “not [taken] as new obligations, but as voluntary and publique confessions, that all the former oathes sworne in Nature and Law, doe reach and extend to that case then in question.”41 Swearing “in Nature” is a monumental question of interpretation, a verbal evaluation that judges whether or not native allegiance, if translated into language, would match the specific attestation of the oath “then in question.” According to James and Donne, the Oath does, indeed, function as a reliable translation of allegiance that, like the Christian allegiance expressed in baptism, binds the subject “in Nature” and from birth.

For actual or suspected English traitors who either forswore the Oath or refused to take it, their disloyalty was often understood to be a monstrous alienation from their natural born allegiances. This was often a case of misunderstood natural loyalty, a reverence for the Roman pater over James’s geopolitical paternity of his territory. Thus James calls George Blackwell, the

English Catholic Archpriest, an “vnnaturall and fugitiue Subject.”42 Here unnaturalness is related to a fugitive estrangement from the specific laws of England, and James emphasizes Blackwell’s breach of born duties, disparaging especially his verbal “rail[ing] against his naturall Soueraigne by birth.”43 The case of the English Catholic martyr Robert Drury, too, was understood as a geopolitical alienation from born allegiance. An English Catholic priest who first agreed to take the Oath of Allegiance before later refusing under the Pope’s general admonition, Drury was depicted as verbally and geopolitically duplicitous in his split loyalty between England and

Rome, and his execution was justified according to his eventual alienation from his English

oath, then, sits uncomfortable between several categorical distinctions, including natural and positive law, constatives and performatives, and treason and loyalty. 41 Donne, Pseudo-Martyr, 349, italics in the original. 42 James I and VI, Apologie, 12. 43 Ibid. 54 birthplace. The anonymous 1607 report of his trial and execution emphasizes his separation from the laws of the land and the “natural” allegiance that they oblige:

[Drury] departed out of this land, wherein he was borne, and at Valadolid in Spayne . . . hadde bin made a Priest by the Bishop of Leon, by authority deriued by the Pope. Sithence which time, he had returned back into this land, to reconcile, seduce, and withdraw his maiesties subiects, from their naturall dutie, love, and allegeance, to a forraigne seruice and obedience. . . . [Catholic priesthood] he might vse and exercise in the partes beyond the Seas, keeping himselfe there, but heere within his maiesties kingdome . . . [it is] treason, for any subiect borne to forsake his natiue dutie, and being made a Priest by authority deriued from the Pope, to come home again into this land, and (in meere contempt of the king and his lawes) to reconcile, seduce, and alienate loyall Subiects harts, from loue, iust regard and dutie to their Sovereigne, and subiecting them in obedience to a forraigne gouernment.44

Here, Drury’s treacherous character derives from his being an invasive geopolitical agent (for a

“forraigne gouernment” “beyond the Seas”), but he is particularly troubling because of his original Englishness. With the writer’s tactical conflation of “natiue” (that is, indigeneity in a given state) and “naturall,” he pits Drury’s expatriation not merely against the Oath of

Allegiance but also against Natural Law, which assures a filial “loue” and “iust regard” to a paternal king. Throughout the tract, Drury’s political monstrosity emerges from his refusal to take the Oath and the geopolitical antagonism between the often repeated phrases “this land” and

“beyond the seas.” By the end of the tract, the author attempts to evacuate Drury of all of his

Englishness by literally overlaying Drury’s body with the foreignness of his “Fryer-Benedictine habbet,” which was procured “beyond the Seas” as the text once again reminds us.”45 The anonymous account of Drury’s execution purports to solidify the political distinction between

“this land” and the literally and figuratively fluid “seas” that both separate the island from and

44 A True Report of the Ariagnment, Tryall, Conuiction, and Condemnation, of a Popish Priest, Named Robert Drewrie (London: Jefferie Chorlton, 1607), B1r. 45 Ibid., D3r. 55 connect it to the Catholic continent. And just as the author represents the Oath as an effective tool both for shoring up that geopolitical boundary and identifying potentially treasonous

Catholics, Macbeth makes speech an important designator of nature’s geopolitical boundaries.

However, like the double-signifying English Catholic Drury, those spoken boundaries in the play can be treasonously malleable, porous, and equivocal.

Thunder Like a “syllable of dolour”: The Contradictory Articulations of Nature’s Loyalty in Macbeth

Unlike Drury’s foreswearing or Blackwell’s “rail[ing],” Macbeth produces a vision of nature, filial allegiance, and baptism that cannot be rendered easily into politically legible language. For the play, the problem is one of translating the linguistically and legislatively permeable notion of Natural Law, the larger category around which the tensions among birth, natural allegiance, and civil indigeneity fracture in the years surrounding the Gunpowder Plot and the Oath of Allegiance. For Macbeth, the questions surrounding Natural Law, its speaking, and political allegiance extend beyond the humans living within the Scottish territories to the birds, trees, and even winds that grow out of the countryside. In the play, as with the 1606 Oath, this literally natural allegiance is understood through its “verbal” articulation, but the responses that nature provides lack the clarity of the dutifully taken oath and, instead, demonstrate the radical linguistic double-speak associated with early modern treason. In this section, I will detail the often cross-wise political meanings that occur when the play’s natural world seems to carry language or, indeed, to speak itself, and while I demonstrate this more fully in a later section, it is worth keeping in mind that each of the following examples accesses, in some way, the discourses of paternity and birth that I outlined above. 56

Early in the play, the natural world seems to be a suitable vehicle for the spoken edicts or reprimands of God and His agents. Like Hooker’s morally rich and divinely sanctioned Natural

Law, nature in Macbeth can be inscribed with divine lessons—lessons which, Macbeth worries, will speak out against him if he murders the king:

[Duncan is] here in double trust First, as I am his kinsman and his subject . . . Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off, 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. (1.7.12-25)

Macbeth’s anxiety for the angelic, “trumpet-tongued” virtues of Duncan and the “cherubin” who would publish his crime “in every eye” describes a linguistically legible supernature that both speaks out in favor of the virtuous and writes to condemn the reprobate. But just as Hooker’s conception of Natural Law is alive with spiritual lessons and supernatural agents, Macbeth worries that nature itself will manifest as a convenient platform from which to publish his misdeeds. The windy “blast” will fuction as the vehicle on which the “cherubin” ride to inform against his treason, and the airs will eventually metamorphose as “couriers” for messages themselves. Like dutiful adherents to the Oath of Allegiance, God’s agents inform against all treasons, and Macbeth worries that the very air of Scotland will help them convey their messsage.

Macbeth’s depiction of winds that passively bear the message of God’s agents evinces a belief in a natural world that is in close proximity to the supernatural world, but Macduff later 57 collapses the distinction entirely by postulating that the weather itself may announce God’s political sympathies. When attempting to convince Malcolm to return to Scotland in force, the thane describes Macbeth’s crimes both meteorologically and linguistically, saying,

Let us . . . Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men Bestride our downfall birthdom. Each new morn New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows Strike heaven on the face that it resounds As if it felt with Scotland and yelled out Like syllable of dolour. (4.3.1-8)

While Macbeth’s soliloquy above suggests an intimacy between the supernatural and the natural worlds, Macduff’s opening plea to Malcolm fully collapses the distinction; here, “heaven” signals both the divine world and the thundering Scottish skies. Furthermore, although

Macbeth’s worries about messages from wind-borne informants, Macduff ascribes a kind of linguistic agency to the weather itself, seen here in the thunderous “syllable of dolour” that echoes the cries in the Scottish “birthdom.” The weather’s suffering yearns for Scotland’s rightful sovereign in cries that, Macduff suggests, may be understood “As if” they were truly linguistic.

But while the weather’s quasi-spoken allegiances in these scenes align the natural world with Duncan’s bloodline, each of these articulations of natural allegiance is answered by another that complicates the loyalties of nature. Even the apparently straightforward nature of the thunderous “syllable of dolour” belies a tension between language and interpretation that, although vital to understanding nature’s allegiance, goes unresolved. The crack of thunder manifests as a single syllable and, as such, could indicate a nonlinguistic utterance of misery.

However, Macduff’s ready interpretation of the outburst, along with the use of the “syllable” to 58 describe the sound points to a kind of spoken language. Macduff’s Scottish thunder, then, occupies a similar place as Lear’s famous “howl,” existing somewhere between the recognizable syllables of language and the total inarticulacy of noise.

This rest of this scene is even less definitive about the air’s willingness to “speak” out against the agonies of Scottish subjects. When, for instance, Ross bears news of Scotland to

Macduff and Malcolm, he also brings a sobering rebuttal to Macduff’s conception of a meteorology that responds to Scottish injustice:

Alas, poor country, Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot Be call’d our mother, but our grave; where nothing, But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air Are made, not marked; where dead man’s knell Is there scarce asked for who. (4.3.165-70)

For Macduff, the “syllable of dolour” groaning out of the Scottish sky implicates the firmament as a meteorological sympathizer to Malcolm’s claim, but Ross’s testimony ascribes not political partisanship but meteorological indifference to the Scottish wind. When he reports, as Macduff had, the verbal abuses against the air under Macbeth’s “unnatural” rule, the “shrieks that rend the air” do not, as before, reverberate throughout a politically sympathetic sky. Instead, the subjects’ howls of suffering are “made, not marked,” a callousness toward suffering that might describe the hardened and traumatized people but, equally, could describe the sky itself. While Macduff attests that the heavens respond to the human cries that “Strike [it] on the face,” the verbal rending perpetrated against the air is, according to Ross, “not marked” by the heavens, as if they are unwilling to respond to the suffering Scottish subjects with the providential sympathies that

Macduff and even Macbeth earlier characterized. 59

In contrast to the responsive thunder theorized by Macduff, the presence of the “dead man’s knell” in Ross’s speech might suggest an unsympathetically silent atmosphere. It was a popular belief in the period that the vibratory sound of bells would tame the concussive atmospheric collisions believed to produce thunder. As Bacon notes in his Silua Siluarum (trans.

1627), “As it is beleeued by some, that Great Ringing of Bells in populous Cities, hath chased away Thunder.”46 Ambroise Paré explains the mechanics of the phenomenon in a 1575 medical text (translated in English, 1617), writing, “Thunder may be dissipated by the ringing of bells . . .

For the concussion of the clouds meeting together violently, causeth the Thunder: and by the aforesaid agitation of the Ayre; they are discipated and dispersed.”47 Ross’s emphasis on the tolling of bells, along with the air’s deafened indifference, hints at a meteorological silence, thus countering Macduff’s understanding that the thunder both hears and speaks out against

Scotland’s political woes. Instead of the providential “syllable of dolour” that seems “As if” it echoes Malcolm’s sovereign right, the wind here momentarily assumes Macbeth’s own unfeeling response to “night-shriek[s]”—which can no longer “start” him—by the end of the play (5.5.11-

15). That the natural world can seem to embody both political positions troubles any sense of unequivocal support for one ruler or another.

Just as the potential incoherence of the thunder’s “syllable” problematizes Macduff’s verbal metaphor above, Ross’s assertion of the wind’s indifference invokes the meaninglessness of noise when Macduff urges him to deliver the gruesome news of his family’s slaughter, which,

Ross warns, are “words/ That would be howl’d out in the desert air,/ Where hearing should not latch them” (4.3.194-5). Whereas Macbeth and Macduff attest that the winds are either a passive

46 Francis Bacon, Sylua Syluarum: or A Naturall Historie in Ten Centuries, ed. William Rawley (London, 1627), 43. 47 Ambroise Paré, The Method of Curing Wounds Made by Gun-shot, trans. Walter Hamond (London, 1617), B3v. 60 vehicle for or an active interlocutor to the language of political upheaval, Ross suggests here that the air is totally unable to hear Scotland’s (and Macduff’s) woes. Moreover, it seems to be a space in which words are stripped of linguistic value altogether. Just as a closer inspection of the thunder’s “syllable of dolour” reveals an interpretive blurriness between language and inarticulate utterance, Ross’s juxtaposition of “words” with “howl” collapses a similar distinction. As Ross has suggested, the “desert air” is barren of language and, thus, is better characterized with an inarticulacy that renders the intelligibility of language into the nonlinguistic sound of a “howl.” While readers might expect any number of natural sources in the desert to howl—including wolves or, indeed, the very “air” that Ross cites—it is the otherwise articulable language of human sorrow that howls here. Once again, the representation of how nature bears, reflects, or deadens human words tries the boundary of what counts as language. Indeed, by the end of the scene, Macduff’s defeated question of “Did heaven look on,/

And would not take their part?” could be understood both from a sense of providential hopelessness and from a perspective of new meteorological puzzlement (“heaven” as the upper air) that corrects his earlier confidence that the Scottish airspace resonates with interpretable syllables (4.3.225-6).

During the regicide, the problem of where nature’s allegiances stand and whether those allegiances may be understood through language becomes a phonetic riddle as both Macbeth and

Lady Macbeth strain to interpret the utterances of “night’s black agents” (3.2.54). Shortly after worrying that the windy “couriers” of heaven will publish his misdeeds, Macbeth lurks away to

Duncan’s chamber, and Lady Macbeth frets over the various peeps and screeches of nocturnal 61 creatures. Because the fuller exchange grapples with what can be understood or said during— and, especially, by—the murderous night, I quote it extensively here:

Lady Macbeth: Hark, peace!— It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman Which gives the stern’st good-night. . . . Enter Macbeth above Macbeth: Who’s there? What ho? Exit Lady Macbeth: Alack, I am afraid they have awaked, And ‘tis not done. . . . Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had done’t. Enter Macbeth below My husband! Macbeth: I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise? Lady Macbeth: I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. Did you not speak? Macbeth: When? Lady Macbeth: Now. Macbeth: As I descended? Lady Macbeth: Ay. Macbeth: Hark!—Who lies in the second chamber? Lady Macbeth: Donalbain. . . . Macbeth: There’s one did laugh in’s sleep, and one cried “Murder!” . . . One cried “God bless us” and “Amen” the other, As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands. List’ning their fear I could not say “Amen” When they did say “God bless us.” Lady Macbeth: Consider it not so deeply. Macbeth: But wherefore could I not pronounce “Amen”? I had most need of blessing, and “Amen” Stuck in my throat. . . . Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep.” (2.2.2-34)

Here, the castle and its nocturnal environs are characterized not as a quiet, sleepy locale but, rather, as a bustling and lively nightscape full of competing voices. The surest indicator of the night’s confused quasi-language is the swift, overlapping dialogue of Macbeth and Lady

Macbeth as they determine when and if someone spoke. But these voices include not merely the human agents on the stage; rather, the owl and the cricket add their voices to the nocturnal 62 cacophony. And, like the uneven political ascription of the wind’s speech in Macduff’s scene, the content of these creaturely screeches is never clear.

When Lady Macbeth hears the owl, she first interprets its cry in language (as a stern

“good night”) and as a “fatal” avian approval of their crime. Macbeth later theorizes a similar approval from the crows of the “rooky wood” when he plots the murder of Banquo, which, he imagines, shares the work of those predatory birds: “[T]he crow/ Makes wing to th’rooky wood./

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,/ While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse” (3.2.52-4). However, when Lady Macbeth’s returns to the owl in the regicide scene, her word choice seems to hint not at avian approval but at protest; she adds the “cry” of the crickets, and the owl’s voice is no longer an ominous, knowing “good-night” but a “scream.” While

Kerridge’s brief discussion of birds in the early part of the play attests that the Macbeths use owls and ravens to justify their crimes, this scene collapses that ethical confidence by muddling protest and approval even in the voice of a single owl.48 This uncertainty surrounding the

“spoken” allegiance of Scotland’s avian inhabitants is reinforced by how difficult creaturely voices (including those of humans) are to discern in the first place. Her speech begins not with assured interpretation but with hushed surprise at an unidentified sound: “Hark, peace!” This shock—echoed repeatedly throughout these lines with “What ho,” “Alack,” and a final “Hark”— exposes the problem of interpreting the voices of these “black agents” as aligned against the righteous king because, before conclusively identifying the species that uttered it, Lady Macbeth fearfully interprets the owl’s shriek as a human alarm raised against their treason. Unsettled by

48 Kerridge, “Ecocritic’s Macbeth,” 205-6. 63 the uncanny resemblance between human and avian voices, Lady Macbeth’s translation falters, rendering it momentarily impossible to evaluate the allegiance of the speaker.

Like Macduff’s and Ross’s competing interpretations of the air’s “voice,” determining the political significance of creatures’ utterances in this scene is impossible. Further, just as the inarticulacy of noise or howling in the “desert air” can, for Ross, scramble the meaning of human pronouncements, Macbeth’s chasing of nocturnal “language” reaches a crisis that subverts even his own speech. As the regicidal duo compares notes about what spoke and when, Lady Macbeth implicates the cricket in the nocturnal discord while an unnerved Macbeth describes a voice condemning him for “murder[ing] sleep.” This condemnation is, for Macbeth, uttered in discernible language but, given the linguistic confusion that nocturnal animals posed for Lady

Macbeth, it does not necessarily follow that it must have been discernible human language; it could have also been the “cry” of the owl or the cricket. Indeed, the denouncement would be eerily appropriate for nocturnal creatures—themselves defined by their exemption from the normal human timeframe of “sleep”—to utter. This linguistic crisis of meaning and provenance extends even to Macbeth himself, who finds himself unable to “pronounce ‘Amen.’” Although

Macbeth will later claim the nocturnal world’s endorsement of his murders, the night’s actual voice in this scene is unclear as to whether it is attempting to approve of or inform against his crime.

The “downfall birthdom”: Birth, Birds, and Allegiance in Macbeth

The question of nature’s allegiances and the processes by which it might communicate them is of vital importance to a period in which subjects are made to swear their allegiances to 64 their “natural sovereign” under the legislative rubric of Natural Law. Macbeth’s conscience, the faculty that interprets Natural Law, erupts in a linguistic crisis in which he cannot speak “Amen” and is uncertain about how the night speaks back to him. The political ramifications of natural duty, civil fealty, and kingship are, as we have seen, intimately related to questions of birth and domesticity by a particularly fluid understanding of natural/natal obligation. And, as I previewed at the beginning of the previous section, each of the preceding scenes references birth or kinship in some way. Lady Macbeth cannot kill Duncan because he resembles her father, Macduff’s thunder bemoans the cries of “widows,” Macbeth worries about his obligations as Duncan’s

“kinsman,” Ross complains Scotland “cannot/ Be call’d our mother,” and Macduff pleads with

Malcolm to “[b]estride our downfall birthdom.” This last term is particularly interesting.

According to the OED, “birthdom” indicates a birthright, but its only source for this definition is its use in Macbeth, which the Norton Shakespeare, understanding the “downfall” here as

“downfallen,” glosses as a “native land.”49 This gloss—a kind of portmanteau of “birthplace” and “kingdom”—makes sense in the context of Macduff’s speech, but without other points of reference, any definition proves difficult. The only other instances of the word that I could locate, from the preacher James Harwood, were decades after the publication of the First Folio and were merely used as synonyms for “birth.”50 Macduff’s coinage, then, marks a productively unstable space in which kingdoms, rights, political obligation, and familial duty collide. These are, as we have seen, the precise intersections that early modern thinkers used to naturalize the

Oath of Allegiance. But just as the play’s discussion of language is inseparable from the

49 OED, s.v. “birthdom.” Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4.3.4 note. 50 James Harwood, The Lords Prayer Unclasped (London, 1654), 319; Harwood, A Free-will Offering (Dublin, 1662), 43. 65 destabilizing presence of the landscape and its creatures, Macbeth’s representation of the political consequences of oaths is problematized through its depiction of familial kinship not only among humans but also among other animals. The various directions in which these oaths of kinships pull disrupt the already tenuous gender codes on which naturalized authority depended.

Lady Macbeth attempts to sever the act of swearing from its connection to familial duty by calling attention to the, here, non-binding obligations of motherhood. When Macbeth expresses his misgivings about the regicide, his wife chides him, saying,

What beast was’t then That made you break this enterprise with me? When you durst do it, then you were a man; ...... I have given suck, and know How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this. (1.7.47-58)

Once again, the duties conferred by an oath (“had I so sworn”) and the natural conditions of birth are placed in meaningful association with each other. But while many thinkers naturalized the obligations of the Oath through James’s civil paternity, Lady Macbeth sets parental amity against the act to which her husband has sworn. To ask “What beast was’t then/ That made you break this enterprise” erects a species distinction by which Macbeth may best express his humanity

(“then you were a man”) by keeping his oath and ignoring the pseudo-familial bond of kinship between himself and Duncan. For Lady Macbeth, the artificial bonds constructed through oath- taking are more binding than the “tender” bond of love between the mother and the “babe that milks” because the latter is a bond that both “man” and “beast” enjoy. According to Lady 66

Macbeth, then, the artificial compact struck by oaths is nobler than the biological compact of parentage because it is exclusively human.

Lady Macbeth’s disparagement of the “natural” love from parent to child attempts to disentangle oaths from Natural Law. The native affection that binds father, mother, and child into a fetishized relationship based on kindly yet authoritarian wardship was one of the pillars that supposedly spanned both the human and the animal worlds. In his extremely popular parenting manual A Godlie Forme of Householde Gouernment (1598), Robert Cleaver emphasizes the “fatherly authoritie” that is to direct the family and talks about the baseline standard of love to which nature binds all creatures, writing, “The Asse though she be dul, the

Beare and Lyon, though they be wilde and cruell, yet seeke they far and neare, to get wherewith to helpe their young. Therefore, if there be any, or can bee any, which doth forsake and leaue his own, hee is more beastly then the foolish Asse, and more vnnatural, then most cruell Beares and

Lyons, and Tygers.”51 Cleaver’s admiration for the firm bond of filial care and “authoritie” applies both to human fathers (through his emphasis on the male pronoun) and to animal parentage. Gryffith Williams’s The Delight of Saints (1622), too, draws the reverend authoritarianism of God, the love of human fathers, and the animal kingdom into a comfortable equivalency:

If you call him [God] Father, then passe the time of your dwelling here in feare; and because we are sonnes, it must be a fillial feare. . . . What thing in the world should be so deare vnto the children as their father? And therefore if I be a father, where is my loue, saith the Lord? . . . It is reported of the Storke, that he loues his sire so well, that when he growes old and feeble, the young one will carry it vpon his backe. And if the bruit beasts doe shew such loue vnto their sires, oh what loue should we shew vnto our heauenly father?52

51 Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Householde Gouernment for the Ordering of Priuate Families (London, 1598), 285, 292. 52 Gryffith Williams, The Delight of Saints (London, 1622), 362-3, italics in the original. 67

The avian Aeneas here is the metaphorical, naturalized anchor that maintains the connections among the “fillial feare” before divine authority, the filial affection of animals, and the deference that ought to be accorded the human father. Lady Macbeth’s hypothetical infanticide— perpetrated according to the fulfillment of an oath—is particularly subversive because, unlike

Macduff’s thunder, it identifies language—here, swearing— exclusively with humans. Thus,

Lady Macbeth attempts to untie oath-taking from the authorizing framework of Natural Law, a framework that, as we have seen, justified allegiance (and the swearing of it) to a paternal monarch through the very domestic discourse that Lady Macbeth denies here.

Perhaps, however, Lady Macbeth should not be our expert in what is natural. Obviously, because this “enterprise” involves the slaying of a paternal king (who “resembled/ [Lady

Macbeth’s] father”), the sworn act and the parental bond must be opposed in this case. More problematic, however, is the model of breached familial allegiance—again supposedly pronounced through swearing—delivered by Lady Macduff. I have already previewed Lady

Macduff’s wistful admiration of the “poor wren’s” protective bravery for her young, a “natural touch” that, in her estimation, her husband lacks. Lady Macduff interprets Macduff’s absence from their beleaguered household not only as domestic abandonment but also as treasonous expatriation: “His flight was madness. When our actions do not,/ Our fears do make us traitors”

(4.2.3-4). Presuming that Macduff treacherously fled from fear alone, Lady Macduff’s use of

“flight” here connects her discussion of fearful treason here with the discussion of the domestically stalwart “wren” (who does not fly but, rather, stays to defend her young) a few lines later. Lady Macduff’s linkage emerges from the discourse that conceptually linked “natural” familial obligation with national loyalties toward the sovereign power, a connection that, here, 68 implicates Natural Law as the governing apparatus that orders the wren’s defense of her children.

Thus as I noted earlier, when Lady Macduff asserts that a traitor is “one that swears and lies,” she is not merely thinking of the oath of allegiance that her husband took to defend his sovereign but also the analogous matrimonial vows that he swore at marriage, and the wren is a suitable image for her betrayed sentiments.

For early moderns, birds like wrens were important symbols for the affections and protections that could arise from a healthy domestic space, a space which was, as we have seen, increasingly politicized in the period. The stork’s diligence toward its aged parents, reviewed above, was a commonplace in the period, but birds in general provided a reciprocal ethical model for parents like Macduff.53 While the early modern exempla are almost always drawn from mother birds (a focus that causes some gender-bending confusion for male readers, as we will see below), the lessons to be learned were often for parents of either gender. Calvin, for instance, had discussed a Deuteronomic code that forbids the hunting of roosting mother birds in terms of human affection: “When a Henbird broodeth her young ones, therein we haue an image of a mothers dutie towardes her children. . . . Nowe then, seeing that the birdes haue such a care of their young ones, surely they may teach men and women their lesson, when they shewe themselues to haue no care of their Children.”54 William Gouge’s 1622 domestic manual, too, repeatedly cites the example of birds to convey the affections and obligations of human parenthood; birds provided, for instance, a model of family pedagogy: “Parents ought to begin to nurture their children so soone as they are capable of any instruction. Euen as young birds are

53 For more on the filial compassion of storks, see Henry Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise (London, 1612), 108 and J. B., An English Expositor (London, 1616), s.v. “storke.” 54 Jean Calvin, The Sermons of M. Iohn Caluin Vpon the Fifth Book of Moses, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1583), 775. 69 taught by their dammes to flie as soon as their wings can carry them.”55 To thinkers like Calvin and Gouge, the procreative virtue and domestic goodness of birds anchored human parental love and authority to the goodness of Natural Law. Indeed, for Macbeth, Banquo suggests that the nesting martlet bird, whose “procreant cradle” graces Macbeth’s castle, seems to approve the thane’s familial/political loyalties for Duncan (1.6.3-10). And the wren in particular was thought to be especially “procreant.” In Robert Chester’s 1601 poetic compilation Love’s Martyr (where

Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle was first printed), Chester provides a mostly familial catalog of birds, including the “little Wren that many yong ones brings.”56 And Henry Hawkins

1633 emblem book Partheneia Sacra muses over why creatures are rarely both “speciosa et fructifera [beautiful and fruitful], writing that, although the homely wren is “litle more then a tuft of feathers,” it will “bring forth 16 or 20 yong in a neast.”57 The impressive fecundity of the wren—along with the general discourse surrounding avian familial affection—makes the bird an apt icon for Lady Macduff’s simultaneously political and domestic critique of her husband.

Like the contradictory voices of the owl and the wind, however, the wren’s apparently straightforward family loyalty belies the complex tensions and treacheries in “natural” behavior

(1.6.3-10). The immediate difficulty with Lady Macduff’s tragic complaint against her husband’s oath-breaking is that he is, in reality, protecting Duncan’s legitimate line—the king’s “heires or

Successors,” as the Oath of Allegiance enjoins. His reward for his faithfulness to the terms of his allegiance, however, is the slaughter of his wife and children by Macbeth’s band of mercenaries.

Due and proper attention to his political allegiance leads to a mismanagement of his house and,

55 William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), 6.37, page 544. 56 Robert Chester, Loves Martyr: or, Rosalin’s Complaint (London, 1601), 117. 57 Henry Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra (Rouen, 1633), 128. 70 according to Lady Macduff, a violation of the naturalized compact struck between husband and wife that is cemented by the biological amities between parents and children. Tragically echoing the avian loyalty described by his wife, Macduff bemoans that “all [his] pretty chickens” are killed.58 Macduff’s unique situation forges an irreconcilable conflict between political allegiance and the biological allegiances of parenthood. Like Antigone’s cross-wise obligations to royal fiat and familial funeral practice, Macduff’s contradictory imperatives ensure that he must breach one of his oaths in order to uphold the other. No matter what he does, the faithful Macduff is

“one that swears and lies.” Unlike Antigone’s dual commitments, however, both of Macduff’s disparate responsibilities are, as we have seen, naturalized through the same discourses of paternity and birth. While James understood the king as the “naturall father” of his subjects,

Macduff must, according to his wife, “lack the [parent’s] natural touch” in order to defend the king’s own children. Here, political paternity is not ensured and verified through natural paternity; rather, the two paternities clash.

It is not only paternity that the presence of the wren muddles. Indeed, every early modern domestic role from paternity to maternity to even filiality blurs as this scene reveals the instability of gendered analogies of natural/domestic authority. Although Lady Macduff uses the mother wren to describe Macduff’s fatherly duties, she will, in the span of a few dozen lines, occupy the precise position of the wren staying—and dying—in her nest to defend her young.

Thus, the politicized, paternal authority that the wren supposedly represented better fit a model of feminine authority that is of less use to Macduff or, indeed, to many early modern thinkers who theorized kingship. The metaphor’s gender inversion in this scene calls attention to the

58 Ibid., 4.3.219. 71 problems of constructing patriarchy both in Macbeth and in similar metaphors throughout early modern domestic advice. In 1596, for instance, the cleric and bestiary compiler Edward Topsell comments on an avian metaphor from the Biblical story of Ruth to conclude, “[B]y this, wiues are instructed their obedience to their husbandes, that as the little birde is at the call of his damme, so wiues must be ready at the becke of their husbandes.”59 Topsell’s gender-switching analogy here (the mother bird becomes the human husband) attempts to produce a chain of obedience that flows from husband, to wife, and to children even though it is the mother hen that is the locus of authority in his metaphor. Furthermore, the leap from mother bird to human husband (not father) infantilizes the wife by exploiting the matrimonial transfer from father to husband, but it twists the apparently natural lines of authority that the analogy purports to describe. Is a human mother both a wife and a child to her husband? Is she herself a husband to her children? In his domestic manual, Gouge, too, replicates these dizzying dynamics of gender, parenthood, and authority, writing, “[F]owles and birds . . . very charily, and tenderly houer ouer their young ones . . . Thus ought husbands with all tendernesse, and mildnesse to deale with their wiues.”60 Gouge’s gender-bending commentary is based upon Paul’s “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands” passage, which, itself, analogizes husbands to Christ and wives to the church.61 Appropriately, it is Christ himself that, according to Gouge, is the model mother bird:

“If Christ by his louing vs first, did not instill loue into vs, we could no more loue him [or our wiues, from his example] then a liuing bird rise out of a cold egge, if it were not kept warme by

59 Edward Topsell, The Reward of Religion (London, 1596), 182. The scriptural passage is Ruth 3:9, where Ruth, attempting to seduce Boaz, asks him to “spread therefore the wing of thy garment ouer thine handmayd” (Geneva version). 60 Gouge, Domesticall, 4.72, page 421. 61 Ephesians 5:22-29, authorized version. 72 the dammes sitting vpon it.”62 Here, Christ is both our “damme” and, through Paul’s logic, our husband.

These avian analogies of domestic duty thus reveal the tenuousness of the gender dynamics on which analogies of political authority were based. Although John Knox’s famous

1558 condemnation of the “monstriferouse” authority of female monarchs like Mary I deployed animal analogies to demonstrate the unnaturalness of feminine sovereignty, nearly half a century of rule by Elizabeth made the early modern conception of monarchy’s gender much more fluid.63

James himself begins his defense of “natural” kingship in The True Lawe of Free Monarchies

(1598, 1603 in England) with a number of analogies showing that “[b]y the Law of Nature the

King becomes a naturall Father to all his Lieges at his Coronation,” but, ever the canny analogist,

James attempts to occupy analogously all of the fluid gendered positions of monarchy in the

Basilikon.64 He writes that a king should be a “louing Nurish-Father to the Church,” linking the conventional paternal authority of the king with the nurturing presence of a nurse or even a wetnurse.65 Lest the indistinct gender of kingship be lost on his audience, James references the

“nurishe-milke” of the nobility’s upbringing shortly thereafter, with the same word linking the role of the wetnurse with the “Nurish-Father” above.66 The early modern conception of

62 Gouge, Domesticall, 4.61, page 413. 63 John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Geneva, 1558), sig. A5v, D5v-D6r. About the unnaturalness of queenship, Knox writes, “The more that I consider the subuersion of Goddes ordre [in female monarchy], which he hath placed generallie in all liuinge thinges, the more I do wondre at the blindnes of man, who doth not consider him self in this case so degenerate, that the brute beastes are to be preferred vnto him in this behalfe. For nature hath in all beastes printed a certein marke of dominion in the male, and a certeine subiection in the female, which they kepe inuiolate. For no man euer sawe the lion make obedience, and stoupe before the lionesse, nether yet can it be proued, that the hinde taketh the conducting of the heard amongst the hartes.” 64 James VI and I, The True Lawe of Free Monarchies: or The Reciprock and Mutuall Dutie Betwixt a Free King, and His Naturall Subiectes (Edinburgh, 1598), sig. B4v. For James’s skillful deployment of natural analogy’s slippages in True Lawe, see this dissertation’s Conclusion. 65 James VI and I, Basilikon, 51; OED, s.v. “nourish.” 66 James VI and I, Basilikon, 53. 73 authority’s gender, then, could be particularly fluid, and it is this fluidity that Lady Macduff’s scene exploits. On the one hand, the persistence of the avian model in early modern culture reinforces the sense that a man’s political or domestic authority could be reinforced even through analogies that were gendered feminine; on the other hand, however, Lady Macduff’s embodiment of the mother wren’s role when she dies for her children (and when her husband fails to do the same) provides a closer match between her domestic role and the natural analogy of the female wren, seemingly suggesting that a woman is better able to embody the domestic duty and, indeed, the authority entailed in this highly politicized “natural touch.”

Given this scene’s uncertain definitions of gender, authority, treason, and dutiful filiality, it is appropriate that even the political significance of the Macduff children is obscured by the various obligations enjoined by conflicting meanings of their birth. When Macduff’s son confronts his Murderer by refusing to acknowledge that his father is a traitor, the Murderer runs him through while slandering the boy’s birth: “What, you egg!/ Young fry of treachery!” (4.2.86-

7). While “egg” here is consistent with this scene’s avian logic for this young “chicken,” the term

“fry” is usually reserved for creatures like fish or frogs that are more prolific with their teeming young.67 The Murderer, theorizing a hierarchical order of species whereby the “fry” of spawning amphibians or fish are baser than the young of other species, believes that befouled allegiances are transmitted lineally; thus, Macduff’s son is fathered not by Macduff himself but rather by

“treachery.” Monstrously suspended somewhere between avian and amphibious birth, between correct and incorrect allegiance, Macduff’s son represents the final entry in this scene’s equivocal treatment of politics, allegiance, and birth. Unlike the natural accessibility and near-

67 OED, s.v. “fry.” 74 universality of proper allegiance postulated by defenders of the Oath, Ross indicates in this scene that allegiance is unclear even to its swearers: “[C]ruel are the times when we are traitors/ And do not know ourselves” (4.2.18-9). Far from a natural, legible outpouring of heritable fidelity, sworn allegiance is inscrutably concealed from all interrogators, even from the self. Ross’s grief for the absence of political/natural self-knowledge here extends the play’s uncertainty toward the owl’s, the wind’s, the fry’s allegiances to those of humans themselves, who, ironically, understand themselves to be the interpreters of nature and its laws.

Grafted into the Law: Contested Birth, Baptism, and Nationalism in Macbeth’s Grafts

While the preceding discussions of language, wind, and animal kinship touch variously on the equivocal interfaces between nature and supernature, the play’s most thoroughgoing treatment of nature’s spiritual content and its political ramifications consists in representation of

Scotland as a horticultural polity. This representation culminates in the siege of Dunsinane by what appears to be nothing less than the forest itself. But it is not, of course, Birnam Wood that comes to Dunsinane, and a close inspection of the scene reveals not the triumphal rallying of the

“natural” order behind Malcolm’s banner but a tactically, politically, and theologically ambiguous gesture organized around the conceptually fluid motif of grafting. As this section will demonstrate, grafting represented a common yet volatile metaphor for the spiritual and political significance of the baptismal oath, describing how particular allegiances may be conferred, extracted, or transplanted. Macbeth depicts a political landscape that, through the sawed stocks, barren scions, and moldering regrafts sustained across the Scottish polity, quavers somewhere 75 between nature and artifice, between Christian baptism and the antibaptismal compact of traitorous witches.68

As Duncan’s proper heir, Malcolm’s accession to the throne after Macbeth’s death renders the “time . . . free,” a return to what Kerridge identifies as a notion of ecological futurity and a resumption of the procreative environmental imperative that I discussed above (5.11.21).69

Indeed, Birnam Wood even appears to support Malcolm when it comes “to high Dunsinane Hill” against Macbeth’s forces (4.1.109). Robert Pogue Harrison’s influential argument proposes that

Malcolm displays arboreal and procreational sovereignty: “We see in the image of Birnam Wood the law of genealogy—the family tree, as it were—vanquishing its sterile enemy. We see the law of kinship and kingship avenging itself. We see the law of the land in a strangely literalistic guise.”70 Wheras scholars of the play’s unsettled distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate politics emphasize not the ecological mastery represented by Malcolm’s concealment under the branches but, rather, the deceptiveness of the stratagem that seems to align him with the illicit machinations of traitors and usurpers, Harrison and more recent ecocritics have suggested that the heir’s apparent command of the Birnam trees represents a return of the “natural” order.71

And, indeed, both Duncan and Malcolm describe their authority as sound horticultural stewardship. When Duncan greets Macbeth after his valor on the battlefield, he characterizes the thane’s advancement as a prudent cultivation of a promising crop: “I have begun to plant thee,

68 For the witches’ compact, see Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. 60-1. 69 Kerridge, “Ecocritic’s Macbeth” 204. 70 Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 104, italics in the original. 71 Lemon, Treason, 101; Mullaney, Place, 126; Sinfield, Faultlines, 103. I have already discussed Lemon and Mullaney above, but Sinfield argues that Malcolm’s deceptions “will prove useful to the lawful good king, as much as to the tyrant.” For ecocritical treatments of Malcolm, see Kerridge “Ecocritic’s Macbeth,” 209; Poole, Supernatural, 160-1. 76 and will labour/ To make thee full of growing.” And, responding to a similar greeting by the king, Banquo reverberates Duncan’s claim of botanical and sovereign authority, saying, “There if I grow/ The harvest is your own” (1.4.28-9, 32-3). Duncan here is a farmer who has sovereignty over his dutiful cultivars. This image of symbiosis between plant and king returns at the end of the play when Malcolm accedes, saying “What’s more to do/ Which would be planted newly with the time, . . . We will perform in measure, time, and place” (5.11.30-9). With the agricultural acuity of a farmer armed with an almanac, Malcolm promises to “plant” the duties of his reign at the appropriate season.

Malcolm’s authority, however, emerges from a duplicitous conception of nature that I have detailed above, previewed by yet another moment of ambiguous speech. Just before Ross arrives in England to bemoan the indifferent Scottish atmosphere, Malcolm provides Macduff with an idyllic vignette of the English King Edward’s linguistic efficacy in curing his people of scrofula with his medicinal “benediction” (literally “blessed word”) (4.3.158-9). The purportedly beneficent speech of the English king is contrasted with Malcolm’s own, which he employs here in self-slanderous deceit to probe Macduff’s true motives. After “confessing” to greed, lust, and tyranny, Malcolm calms the loyal Macduff by saying,

I put myself to thy direction and Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure The taints and blames I laid upon myself For strangers to my own nature. I am yet Unknown to woman, never was forsworn, ...... and delight No less in truth than life. My first false-speaking Was this upon myself. (4.3.123-32)

Given the consequences of speaking contrary to nature(s) that I outlined above, the fact that

Malcolm’s words are “strangers to [his] own nature” problematizes the view that the young prince can represent the natural order. Simultaneously comforting and disturbing, congruent and incongruent to his own nature, the heir’s words trouble Macduff, who says, “Such welcome and unwelcome things at once/ ‘Tis hard to reconcile” (4.3.139-40). Malcolm’s statement is “hard to reconcile” not merely because it is both welcome and unwelcome but also because it is both true and false. By rejecting his self-slander with the term “abjure”—a word that, from the Latin, means “to renounce an oath” or “to forswear”—he paradoxically lies when he touts his honesty by claiming that he “never was forsworn.”72 The statement itself is thus duplicitous and, like

Macduff’s loyal/treacherous abandonment of his family, destabilizes the boundary between the truth in which Malcolm “delight[s]” and the lies of Lady Macduff’s definition of the forsworn traitor. Indeed, that Malcolm resorts, first, to duplicity in order to ascertain Macduff’s honesty and, later, to the problematic language of abjuration to establish his own candor reminds us that truth value itself—guaranteed by objective existence and especially, in this play, natures like

Malcolm’s “own” here—is just as ambiguous as his deceptions.

The prince’s necessary verbal unreliability to Macduff in this scene is later translated to the battlefield with his tactic to conceal his numbers under the boughs of Birnam Wood. Indeed, as with his deception of Macduff, Malcolm’s eventual military reveal is couched in terms of seeming and being, previously associated with Malcolm’s “false-speaking”: “Your leafy screens throw down,/ And show like those you are” (5.6.1-2). The tension among showing, being, and being “like” that which you are—a problem of representation like the “hard to reconcile”

72 OED, s.v. “abjure.” 78 equivocations above—recalls Malcolm’s earlier slanders, implicating Malcolm’s use of Birnam

Wood in the play’s larger, politically charged blurriness between truth and equivocation, between speaking and interpretation. But ecocritical treatments of the play seem reluctant to connect Malcolm’s earlier “false-speaking” to his woody stratagem in the play’s final act, perhaps because of Malcolm and Duncan’s horticulturally inflected claims of sovereignty. And, indeed, the witchy apparition who prophesies Malcolm’s triumph announces precisely this kind of horticultural supremacy. The vision appears as “a child crowned, with a tree in his hand” before saying that “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until/ Great Birnam Wood to high

Dunsinane Hill/ Shall come against him” (4.1.102-10). As a princely child holding a tree, the apparition consolidates horticultural, procreative, and political sovereignty into a single image.

Moreover, the conjured spectacle—to whom Macbeth may only “Listen, but speak not”— exemplifies a verbal authority associated with kings like Edward and oathkeepers who, unlike the “rail[ing]” papist Blackwell, seem to speak truth. The apparition’s arrival silences Macbeth, and, like all of the spirits, it “will not be commanded,” indexing a kind of supernal authority that renders spoken human commands invalid (4.1.91, 105).

We know, however, that this prophecy “lies like truth,” and the precise form that the prophetic, heraldic image takes when it is fulfilled complicates the horticultural supremacy that the vision supposedly announces (5.5.42). When Malcolm and his company arrive at Birnam

Wood on their march toward Macbeth’s fortification at Dunsinane, we are treated not to a straightforward image of the forest’s allegiance—and thus not, as Harrison suggests, the “law of genealogy”—but a complicated one of grafting whereby branches are cut and transplanted:

Let every soldier hew him down a bough And bear’t before him. Thereby shall we shadow 79

The numbers of our host, and make discovery Err in report of us. (5.4.4-7)

Grafting was (and is still) a widespread horticultural practice whereby a branch or twig, called a

“scion,” is artificially bound to the trunk, called a “stock,” of another tree until the tissues of the scion and the stock have grown together. The stock’s root system nourishes the scion, which keeps its flower, fruit, and leaf characteristics as the plant grows. Grafting was most often used to improve the wild stocks in one’s land in order to produce sweeter, tenderer, and more numerous fruits from, say, the sourer (though more common) crab trees. A keen grafter could produce an apple-bearing hybrid from an apple scion grafted into the stock of a pear tree, though, as we will see, the viability of the graft depends upon a number of factors among the stock, the scion, and the tender juncture of tissue connecting them. Duncan and Malcolm’s botanical metaphors of sovereignty place this image of grafting within an expressly political context that is further reinforced by the social implication of the word scion, which indicates a noble heir.73

Thus, when Malcolm bears the hewn Birnam “bough” before him as he marches toward

Dunsinane, it is an image of a scion holding a scion. And while it may seem like Malcolm’s later command to “throw down your leafy screens” discards the logic of grafting along with the boughs, Siward’s description of the same action maintains the grafting language when he details their “setting down before’t [that is, Dunsinane]” (5.4.8-10). Siward’s language here, of “setting”

Malcolm’s company in front of Dunsinane actively participates in Malcolm’s imagery of scion cultivation. In horticultural terms, to “set” is to attach the scion into the wooden divot cut in a stock.74 As horticulturalist Adam Islip noted in 1594, “First you must know that imping, grafting,

73 OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “scion.” 74 OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “set.” Setting by graft or by whole transplantation of the plant was to be contrasted with sowing, which described growing a plant from the seed. 80 and setting is all one thing.”75 Further, “setting down” is a phrase that refers to writing, and as

Vin Nardizzi and Jonathan Goldberg have shown, grafting was linked to writing, both etymologically (grafting derives from the Greek graphein, “to write”) and practically (a penknife could be used to inscribe the groove that anchored the scion to the stock).76 Indeed, conflating all of the broad meanings of this scene’s grafting, the pastor Richard Sibbs preached on the divine commandments “written, set, and grafted” in the hearts of mortals before his death in 1635.77

According to Siward’s exchange with the bough-laden scion Malcolm, the assault against

Dunsinane is figured as an attempt to regraft Malcolm back into the root of lineal succession.

The image of the graft in this scene (and, as we will see, throughout the play) complicates the tendency to read Malcolm—and legitimate kingship, in general—as the restorer of Scotland’s natural order. Instead, Malcolm’s grafting marks an equivocal rupture that troubles any clear political meaning arising from several binaries already discussed in this chapter: nature and supernature, loyalty and treason, and even oath-taking and double-speaking. The grafting logics that we find at work throughout the play emphasize not only the possibility of fruitful grafting but also, like early modern husbandry manuals, the possibility of prodigious, monstrous, or barren graftwork.78

75 Adam Islip, The Orchard and the Garden (London, 1594), 9. 76 See Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 32; Vin Nardizzi, “Shakespeare’s Penknife: Grafting and Seedless Generation in the Procreation Sonnets,” Renaissance and Reformation 32, no. 1 (2009): 83-106. 77 Richard Sibbs, Evangelicall Sacrifices, in XIX Sermons (London, 1640), 147. While Sibbs preached throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, it is uncertain when this particular sermon was delivered. 78 For more on the political and social resonances of grafting, see Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern Gardens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 148-60; Vin Nardizzi, “Grafted to Falstaff and Compounded with Catherine: Mingling Hal in the Second Tetralogy,” in Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, eds. Stephen Guy-Bray and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Routledge, 2009), 149-69. 81

Because Macbeth’s treatment of grafting is productively complex from a number of specific registers, it will be helpful to first discuss grafting’s broader meaning in the period as a liminal, artificial/natural practice first through its concise social treatment in The Winter’s Tale.

After distributing flowers to the rural attendants as the pastoral Queen of the Feast, Perdita tells the disguised King Polixines that she cannot abide “carnations and streaked gillyvors,” two strains of flowers produced by deliberate crossbreeding (4.4.82). But Polixines’s response defends plant hybridity and, through the logic of grafting, the very cross-class marriage between

Perdita and Florizel that Polixines had arrived to prevent:

Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean. So over that art Which you say adds to nature is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. This is an art Which does mend nature—change it rather; but The art itself is nature. (4.4.89-97)

Polixines’s apology of grafting—and interclass marriages contracted in order to “mend [the] nature” of the lower born with a “gentler scion”—depends on flexible definitions of art and nature that are mutually participatory in one another. Grafting, according to Polixines, marks the fluid juncture not just between stock and scion but also between nature and artifice. This harmonious mutuality, however, is ironized by his own purpose, which is to undermine exactly this kind of grafting between his son Florizel and the supposedly lowborn Perdita. Given his designs, it is possible that Polixines pronounces his defense of grafting merely in order to bait

Perdita into agreeing with a damning ethic of social commixture. If nature and art seem happily joined, it is only because Polixines has not revealed his purpose just as the real conditions of 82

Perdita’s birth (and, thus, the political meaning of the marriage here) are still concealed. It is not just Polixines’s perhaps disingenuous apology for grafting that hovers somewhere between harmony and disjunction.

Perdita’s botanical chauvinism seems to erect the conservative art/nature division to which Polixines responds, but her language, too, is ambiguous. She complains that crossbreeding or grafting “is an art which in their piedness shares/ With great creating nature” (4.4.87-8). While

Polixiness takes her assessment that grafting “shares” with nature as a statement of illicit artificiality (something redundant that “adds to nature”), this “shares” could equally be parsed as its more commonplace definition: “to participate with.” The two meanings of “shares” here thus occupy positions that are incommensurate according to Perdita: that grafted artifice is outside of nature (and thus may add to it) and that the graft is part of nature (has a share in it). Because the social and environmental meanings of grafting depend multiply on unstable definitions of art and nature, it becomes a question to what extent it can represent Natural Law or, as Harrison states about Malcolm’s accession, the “law of the land.”

Grafting’s multiple signification emerges not only from conceptual uncertainties like these but also the horticultural facts of graftwork, which depend variously on nature, art, and even luck. Because genetically disparate stock/scion hybrids are less likely to last, the viability of a graft depends upon a number of factors, not the least of which is the natural similarities (and, for the human analogy in The Winter’s Tale, the social conditions of birth) between the stock and the scion. Customarily, grafting between scion and stock is a straightforward matter of selection; numerous species and varieties of (usually fruit) trees may be successfully grafted onto one another as long as the stock and the scion are naturally similar enough to be grafted “kind vpon 83 kind,” as Islip noted, and are mutually “answerable in strength,” according to William Lawson’s popular 1618 gardening manual A New Orchard and Garden.79 To do differently is to compromise the survivability of the graft by privileging artifice over the given natural conditions of the scion’s or the stock’s cultivation. Thus, Richard Surflet’s popular 1600 translation of

Charles Estienne’s Maison Rustique warns that ignoring the natural predilections of either stock or scion may produce “monstrous” hybrids found nowhere in nature, such that not only the stock but also the fruiting scion will be “estranged from his owne nature.”80

This “estrangement” is a fitting term for the more nationalistic meanings of grafting. Just as the contested naturalness of grafting in the early modern period had much to do with the like- natured composition of the scion and the stock, the rules of their joining depended upon the climate in which each are found. Thus, grafting often became nationalized, with incompatible or unnatural grafts and techniques being associated with foreign climates, states, and persons. But like Drury’s own Catholic “estrangement” from his native England, this politicization of grafted unions could be dangerously unstable and questionably natural.

This tension between native and foreign grafts helps to organize Gervase Markham’s popular The English Husbandman (1613), the title of which immediately establishes the nationalistic stakes of his project. While Markham elsewhere admits that “Husbandry doth varie according to the natur and climats of the Countries,” The English Husbandman consistently identifies questionable grafts and grafting practices with foreign countries and foreign

79 Adam Islip, Orchard, 9; William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden or The Best Way for Planting, Grafting, and to Make Ground Good (London: Roger Jackson, 1618), 36. 80 Charles Estienne, Maison Rustique, or The Countrey Farme, trans. Richard Surflet (London: John Bill, 1600), 345. 84 influence.81 Markham’s project begins with his dismay that most husbandry manuals in English derive from Virgil, Xenophon, and writers familiar only with what is “naturall to the French.”

Markham thus undertakes to correct this discourse, which is “vtterly vnacquainted with our climbes [climates].”82 Foreignness in The English Husbandman is associated not only with the union of unlike stocks and scions but also with “strange” grafting techniques, toward which

Markham is exceedingly ambivalent. After detailing the “ordinary manner of grafting” into the cleft, Markham moves away from “constant or reasonable vnderstanding” toward “more quaint manners of grafting.” Markham likens the discussion that follows as international “trauell,” noting, also, that his discursive trip will enable English grafters to know whether or not “any authorised traueller” from elsewhere is pulling their leg when describing these “curious” practices.83 He ends his discussion of these practices with a number of prodigies that could result from these outlandish techniques, writing,

[M]any other such like conceits and experiments are practised among men of this Art, but sith they more concern the curious, then the wise, I am not so carefull to bestow my labour in giuing more substantial satisfaction . . . and am content to referre their knowledge to the searching of those bookes which haue onely strangness for their subiect, resolued that this I haue written is fully sufficient for the plaine English husbandman.84

Through the geopolitical contrast between “strangness” (meaning, literally, “foreignness” in the period) and Markham’s “plaine English husbandman,” grafting becomes a practice that teeters dangerously between the two poles of art and nature, representing both the “plaine English”

81 Gervase Markham, A Way to Get Wealth by Approved Rules of Practice in Good Husbandry and Huswifery (London: Roger Jackson, 1625), 150-1. 82 Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London: John Browne, 1613), sigs. A1r-v. 83 Ibid., 52. 84 Ibid., 58. 85 grafts that follow the general rules of nature and the merely artificial “conceits and experiments” of foreign horticultural novelties.85

The pamphleteer William Rankins, too, uses grafting in his The English Ape, The Italian

Imitation (1588) as a metaphor not of natural cultivation but of dangerous hybridization that is, as with Markham, identified with the influence of foreign “strangness”: “[By speaking Italian,] the Englishman killeth his owne with culling, and prefers the corruption of a forraine Nation, before the perfection of his own profession. This secret mischief (seeming but a stemme) in time intendeth to proue a sturdie stalke. This stalke [will be] adorned with the beautie of such painted blossomes (which Art hath graft: not Nature sprung).”86 Here, the political meaning of grafting provides Rankins with an image of ecological/national competition by suggesting that a “culling” of native English wit allows the foreign, corrupting graft to take root. However, because Italy has been grafted upon the dead English stocks, this shameful “Art”—defined against what “Nature sprung”—is not immediately legible as such; it is a “secret mischief” that looks like nature until the first “blossomes” reveal its artificiality and the true genealogy of its Italian scions. Thus, even for Rankins’s particularly hardline stance against “Art”, it is grafting’s lurking liminality between art and nature that makes it so dangerous from a national perspective.

This liminality and its nationalization could participate unstably in the discourse of patriarchal and natal obligations that we have already surveyed. For example, when Lear disowns Cordelia in Michael Drayton’s 1605 version of King Leir, the French king offers the grieving daughter a condoling image of grafting:

King [of France]: But thou art graft in another stock; I am the stock, and thou the lovely branch:

85 See OED, s.v. “strange.” 86 William Rankins, The English Ape, the Italian Imitation (London, 1588), 2. 86

And from my root continuall sap shall flow, To make thee flourish with perpetuall spring. Forget thy father and thy kindred now, Since they forsake thee like inhumane beastes...... Cordelia: As easy it is for the Blackamoore, To wash the tawny colour from his skin, Which all oppose against the course of nature, As I am able to forget my father.87

Cordelia and France theorize two competing versions of nature here, and while each addresses the natural obligations of filiality and nationhood a different way, only France’s has room for the concept of grafting. After Cordelia’s “branch” has been snapped off of her family tree by her father’s displeasure, France offers her access to a new kind of nature (as well as a new patriarchal authority) in his marital offer to “graft [her] in another stock.” According to Cordelia, however, the French king’s image of grafting and familial re-implantation is against “the course of nature.” It becomes, moreover, characteristic of a questionable, unnatural national hybridization that includes both the impossibly Anglicized “Blackamoore” and the political marriage between the French king and his English bride.

Through its complication of political naturalizations, the grafting image could trouble the discourse of natural allegiance reviewed above, and, because of Paul’s original characterization of baptism as a “graff,” grafting was able to participate in the politically fluid meanings of the baptismal covenant that I detailed above.88 Just as the Oath of Allegiance recalled baptism’s unsettled juncture between nature and supernature, grafting’s already tenuous relationship to nature made it an important analogue for the baptismal oath. In his letter to the Romans, Paul

87 Michael Drayton, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and His Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella (London: John Wright, 1605), sig. E2r-v. 88 Romans 11:17, Authorized Version. 87 discusses God’s generous extension of the originally Jewish covenant to the Gentiles in terms of a graft between a domesticated and a wild olive tree. In order to correct the gentile’s withered, unfruitful olive with the sap-rich “fatness” of God’s promise to the Israelites, Christ acts as a savvy botanist, using his sacrificial death as a “graff . . . contrary to nature” between the gentile scion and the Jewish stock.89 Paul here is speaking broadly of the promise extended to ethnicities who were not born into Jewish Law, and because baptism was a sacrament of new birth, grafting became a common way to understand the Christian’s transplanted birth through baptism into the kingdom of God. The orders of baptism in The Book of Common Prayer celebrate that baptized infants are “regenerate and grafted into the bodie of Christs congregation.”90 The language of the baptismal graft was written, also, into the Thirty-Nine Articles of the English Church.

Established in 1562-3, finalized in 1571, and reprinted numerously throughout the seventeenth century, the Thirty-Nine Articles declared the points of faith for the English Church. Its twenty- seventh article relates to the baptismal kinship struck between infants and Christ, announcing that the oath is “a signe of Regeneration or newe byrth, whereby as by an instrument, they that receaue baptisme rightly, are grafted into the Church: the promises of the forgeuenesse of sinne,

& of our adoption to be the sonnes of God, by the holy ghost, are visibly signed and sealed.”91

89 Romans 11:13-24. As we have discussed, it is not generally the scions that change their nature in a graft. Whether Paul’s reversed metaphor is a horticultural mistake is unclear, but at least one early modern divine characterized the inversion as an intentional demonstration of how much God’s grace exceeds the regular courses of nature. In The Knoweldge of Christ Jesus (London, 1634), a treatise demonstrating how various fields of knowledge can enrich scriptural study, Charles I’s chaplain Thomas Jackson notes, “To graft wild plants in sweets stocks . . . is contrary to the ordinary custome of nature, and it is in particular more contrary to the nature of the Olive, then to any other tree, because it will hardly admit of any graft by reason of its fatnesse, nor will the grafts of it easily thrive in any other stocke, if we may beleive such, as write of plants” (163). 90 The Church of England, BCP, “Baptisme.” 91 The Church of England, Articles, Whereupon It Was Agreed by the Archbishoppes and Bishoppes of Both Prouinces, and the Whole Cleargie, in the Conuocation Holden at London in the Yere of Our Lord God 1562 (London, 1571), 17. 88

Just as Will Coster reminds us that the baptismal use of natal language disrupts the distinction between natural and supernatural kinship, the baptismal graft here bridges both the metaphor of birth and the spiritual, non-natural “adoption” of the baptized by the “holy ghost.”

Furthermore, in identifying the “instrument” by which the baptismal transfer of births occurs, the Twenty-Seventh Article draws upon horticultural, theological, and even legal discourses to represent a sacrament that bears a complex relationship to Natural Law. Of course, an early modern worshiper moderately familiar with the technical details of grafting might recall the various tools—the sharp “instrument[s]” described by Islip in 1594—that assist in the precise cuts required for a successful graft.92 Additionally an early modern “instrument” could be understood more loosely as an agent, surrogate, or proxy assigned as a representative for a particular person.93 For Paul’s understanding of the new covenant more broadly, Christ functions as such an instrument, delivering believers into the productive stock of the covenant on behalf of the Father. For infant baptism in the English Church more specifically, an intercessory

“instrument” was necessary not only from Christ but also, as we have seen, from godparents.

Because infants could not articulate the baptismal oaths themselves, they required the instrumental surrogacy of their godparent “sureties.”94 Equally, however, the baptismal

“instrument” that is “visibly signed and sealed” partakes of the legal, contractual definition of the term, which designates an official document that transfers a particular right.95

The complex logics of graftwork, then, resonate with a number of politically important categories that we have already seen in Macbeth. For the question of nature and its laws more

92 Islip, Orchard, 10. 93 OED, s.v. “instrument.” 94 Church of England, BCP, “Baptism.” 95 OED, s.v. “instrument.” 89 broadly, it is an open question whether grafting follows or violates the “law of the land” that, according to Harrison, is restored with Malcolm takes power. This uncertain relationship to

Natural Law also extends to supernatural law; just as it is finally unclear to Macduff if there is heavenly providence in the thunder, the graft’s theological significance as a baptismal image allows it to participate in the sacrament’s nature/supernature equivocations. Its baptismal resonances also allow grafting to participate in the intricate political consequences of

“birthdom,” both natural within this or that polity and spiritual within the kingdom of God. And, finally, its connection to the baptismal oath is able to link grafting to the play’s equivocations surrounding swearing and forswearing, honest loyalty and “false-speaking” treason, and the Oath of Allegiance and its refusal. For the space that remains, I will show how Macbeth’s various uses of the conceptually unstable image of grafting—culminating in Malcolm’s arboreal assault before Dunsinane—troubles the straightforward allegiance that nature seems to declare for

Malcolm’s reign by the end of the play. Grafting’s early modern theological resonances in particular, which no previous scholar has explored in detail, trouble the crucial meaning of nature’s allegiances in the play. Although the play might seem to stage straightforward conflicts between subjects and traitors, good and evil, the natural order and its unnatural disruption, both

Heaven and Hell may participate in grafting. Horticultural augmentation in this play, then, represents not only a politically ambiguous hinge between nature and artifice but also a hinge between the moral agents who can lay claim to the graft. This complicates the extent to which the obligations of nature may participate in the law of the land, especially insofar as those obligations are affirmed by oaths like baptism or the Oath of Allegiance. In other words, despite the Porter’s insistence to the contrary, grafting can, in Macbeth, “equivocate to heaven” (2.3.10). 90

After Malcolm reveals his designs to assume his rightful place on the Scottish throne, the company of men depart for Scotland, and Malcolm encourages them that “Macbeth/ Is ripe for shaking, and the powers above/ Put on their instruments” (4.3.239-41). The instrumentation described here refers most explicitly to Malcolm’s political surrogacy as an agent (instrument) of

God’s will. Because it follows the sacerdotal descriptions of King Edward’s healing of his

English subjects, Malcolm’s description of these heavenly instruments recalls the king’s function as a divine proxy. But it is not merely the surrogacy of divine kingship that contextualizes

Malcolm’s speech here; indeed, the baptismal function of the graft, “as by an instrument,” informs the specific instantiation of the scion’s divine political claim. The readying of heaven’s instruments are set against the fruits of Macbeth’s reign, which are “ripe for shaking.” Malcolm’s arboreal understanding of Macbeth is a tree (or, as we will see below, a graft) that is producing sour, bitter, or, in the case of the baptismal olive, wild fruit, and it is this wildness that must be corrected by heaven’s “instruments.”

But while the scene concludes with a seeming gesture of arboreal cleansing, Malcolm’s

“instruments” direct the reader to the prince’s also problematic reference to grafting earlier in the scene. During his self-disparaging “false-speaking” to Macduff, the scion describes his untested political virtue as a young sapling that, in contrast to Macbeth’s “ripe” age, has yet to bear fruit.

However, Malcolm warns Macduff that his budding youth betrays the virtuous promise of his lineage and conceals the rank moral fruit of the tyrant:

[I]n [me] I know All the particulars of vice [are] so grafted That, when they shall be open’d, black Macbeth Will seem as pure as snow, and the poor state Esteem him as a lamb, being compared With my confineless harms. (4.3.51-56) 91

Here, Malcolm’s self-slandering turns upon an image of destructive grafting that cheapens the productive value of a fruit tree. Just as Macbeth’s political fruits are apparent for all to see,

Malcolm argues that his “grafted” vices have overwritten the righteousness of his bloodline, and the young prince threatens that when his buds are “open’d” after his own grafting back onto the throne, they will reveal a vicious nature beyond compare even to the crimes of Macbeth. While the grafting that ends the scene recalls the spiritual cleansing of the baptismal covenant, grafting here represents a sullying of moral potential. And while the theological resonances of heaven’s

“instruments” later recall an oath of baptism righteously pronounced, the graft here is, by contrast, folded into the equivocal political ramifications of Malcolm’s “false-speaking.”

Furthermore, the prince’s reference to a “lamb” here evokes the intercessory role of Christ’s sacrifice that enables the rhetoric of baptismal grafting later in the scene, but the casting of that role—here, Macbeth—hints of a moral landscape that lacks any absolute, theological anchor and is, instead, merely comparative; Macbeth will seem a “lamb,/ Being compared” with Malcolm.

What is more, it shows how vulnerable—because liminal—the language of grafting is in this play to appropriation by agents on either side of the moral spectrum, including God, the devil, and the full range of political actors for each.

Just as Malcolm’s heavenly “instruments” that prepare to regraft Scotland is answered by the “grafted” evils that Malcolm falsely claims for himself, the baptismal overtones of those

“instruments” are mirrored by the devil’s agents, whom Banquo tellingly describes as

“instruments of darkness” (1.3.122). Indeed, the witches’ presence on the stage would have indexed, for an early modern audience, specifically baptismal concepts. As Garry Wills explains in his study of the Macbeth’s depiction of nocturnality, “The devil’s compact [for witches] is a 92 parody and cancelation of the rites of baptism. . . . [T]he pact is an anti-baptism certificate. In the baptismal formula, one renounces the devil and all his works. In the devil’s pact, one renounces that renunciation.”96 As both Wills and Ian McAdam argue, Macbeth’s plea to “conjure” the witches (derived importantly from the Latin coniurare, meaning literally “to swear together”) depicts him as taking part in this anti-baptismal compact.97 Rather than merely a negatively- defined “renunciation” of baptism, however, Macbeth hints that his swearing-forswearing has added something, namely a foul graft. Early in his reign, Macbeth complains, “[U]pon my head they [the witches] placed a fruitless crown,/ And put a barren sceptre in my grip,/ Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,/ No son of mine succeeding” (3.1.62-4). Macbeth’s barrenness shares the language of horticultural dysfunction, though here Macbeth transfers, perhaps disingenuously, the blame for his sterility onto the witches. Notwithstanding Macbeth’s childlessness, it is the crown that is “fruitless” and the scepter that is “barren.” In a play that is deeply and politically invested in “which grain [that is, seed] will grow and which will not,” the witches’ fallow tending to Macbeth’s arboreal reign recalls a misgraft, Nardizzi’s term for an incompatible or otherwise botched grafting job (1.3.57).98 The normally fruiting crown and its lush scepter guarantees succession through the arboreal metaphor of a fruitful tree, yet Macbeth speculates here that he has accepted it from the witches’ dubious hands as a graft—normally taken to improve a “barren” plant—that refuses to flourish.

96 Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 60-1. 97 Ibid., 60; Ian McAdam, Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2009), 237. Wills also attests that Macbeth’s repudiation of “that great bond” when he resolves to kill Banquo is a rejection of the Christian bond contracted during baptism. 98 Nardizzi, “Grafted,” 159-62. 93

Despite Macbeth’s belief here that he is the stock for the witches’ anti-baptismal misgraft, the final scenes are as equivocal about what is grafted onto whom as they are rotten with the consequences of misgrafting. As the English and Scottish forces march toward

Dunsinane, an embittered Macbeth bemoans that he is not entitled “honour, love, obedience” that often attaches to old men such as he, saying, “I have lived long enough. My way of life/ Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf” (5.3.23-4). Macbeth’s alienation from the customary respect accorded to elders is here offered as a horticultural affliction, recalling his inability to produce both a fruitful reign and the children through which the paternal model of monarchy persisted.

Later returning to the image of rule as an unwanted graft upon his withered, beleaguered family when his wife loses her mind, Macbeth asks the Doctor, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,/ Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,/ Raze out the written troubles of the mind?” (5.3.41-4). The language here, of an affliction “rooted” in the mind suggests some arboreal illness, and, indeed, the term could be a synonym for the vascular anchoring that happens between a scion and a stock.99 Moreover, the shared conceptual history between grafting and writing encourages the reading of these “written troubles” as a diseased misgraft scribbled into Lady Macbeth’s brain.100 Shortly thereafter, a Messenger arrives to inform Macbeth of the marching scions of Birnam Wood, and the enraged king threatens him with a bad graft that will fail to nourish its dying scion: “If thou speak’st false/ Upon the next tree shall thou hang alive/

Till famine cling [wither] thee” (5.5.36-8). Macbeth’s specific designation of this torture recalls

99 See, for example, Ralph Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard, or Garden of Fruit-Trees (Oxford: Thomas Robinson, 1657), 99. A writer of horticultural guides himself, Austen is also well aware of both the practical and theological significance of grafting, and, in his forty-seventh “Observation in Nature,” writes that the heavenly gospel may be found “rooting in the heart, as a Graft in the stock, which growes there, and brings forth fruit” (italics in the original). 100 Goldberg, Writing, 32; Nardizzi, “Shakespeare’s Penknife,” 83. 94 the slow, “cling[ing]” death of a scion irresponsibly grafted onto the branch of a stock tree.

According to Islip, arboreal hybridity such as that contracted between Macbeth’s tree and his starving messenger is a spectacle that, often, expires after a slow withering. Warning his readers about that which is “extraordinarily” grafted to produce horticultural wonders, Islip writes, “[H]e that graffeth strange vpon strange; as peares vpon apples, and apples on pears, and such like, although it be done often for pleasures sake, yet will it not last: for the naturall nourishment is so that it will hardlie nourish a strange kind of fruit.”101 Macbeth’s threat against his messenger involves a “strange kind of fruit” indeed. The monstrous union imagined here between human and tree has a similar prognosis as that between genetically incompatible stocks and scions.

Because it is previewed by repeated invocations of variously unnatural misgrafts

(including one upon the prince himself), Malcolm’s attempt to graft himself back onto the throne at Birnam cannot be, as other critics have argued, a resumption of the natural order. Indeed, the nationalistic resonances of grafting reviewed above further complicates Malcolm’s use of

English forces to secure his power. As Mary Floyd-Wilson has argued, the political tensions among the northern highland Macbeth, the more geographically central Malcolm, and the southern Englanders can be understood as a geohumoral drama whereby bodily vulnerabilities based on climate may represent political vulnerabilities.102 In a horticultural context, such geological and climatological factors are particularly vital to the final viability of any graft. The likeness between the stock and scion is of utmost importance for the graft’s survival, and this standard of similarity includes a number of factors like species, size, age, and, especially, the climates native to both stock and scion. This rule of climatic likeness applies both across a

101 Islip, Orchard, 9. 102 Mary Floyd-Wilson, “English Epicures and Scottish Witches,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57.2 (2006): 131-61. 95 national boundary (as with England and Scotland) and within the counties of a particular polity.

Estienne advises against “translat[ing a scion] out of a hot Countrey into a cold,” and William

Lawson’s horticultural manual (written specifically for “the north parts of England” according to its subtitle) cautions that it is “somewhat doubtfull by reason of the Clime” that “grafts brought from South to vs in the North” will be viable.103 Malcolm’s trajectory as a south-Scotland scion, from the even more southern London, to his “setting down” before the northern highlander

Macbeth depicts Malcolm as a geopolitical hinge among three disparate (and perhaps horticulturally incompatible) climates. Such cross-climate transplantation (and the implicit suggestion of its vulnerabilities) returns in the play’s final lines; while promising to “plant” his duties as a proper king, Malcolm celebrates England’s role in uprooting Macbeth through a mingling of language, promising to anglicize his thanes as “earls” (5.11.28-31). Like Rankins’s use of grafting to argue for national linguistic purity above, Malcolm’s linguistic mixing here calls to mind the naturalness (and thus the viability) of this English-Scottish union. The problems and opportunities of national hybridization in this play—organized around the complex rhetoric of grafting—are of import not only to Malcolm’s cross-climate consolidation of power and influence but also for the “treble sceptre[d]” James, who represented a new national unity among

England, Scotland, and Wales (4.1.136).

In addition to the questionable geopolitical consequences of Malcolm’s cross-climate grafting, Malcolm’s successful ploy to overwrite Macbeth’s reign and regraft himself onto the throne has important familial ramifications for the royal line and, indeed, for Malcolm himself.

The grafted resumption of Malcolm’s line may be understood one of two ways, neither of which

103 Estienne, Maison, 348; Lawson, New Orchard, 36. 96 may be said to represent the natural order in any straightforward way (and not just because of grafting’s already ambiguous relationship to nature). On the one hand, Malcolm might have grafted himself onto Macbeth’s diseased, infertile stock. We have already seen how Macbeth’s rhetoric toward the end of the play identifies his reign with arboreal sterility, so it would make good horticultural sense to improve this barren stock with a productive scion like Malcolm’s. In addition, Macbeth’s decapitation literally transforms him into such a trunk (a term for the body without a head).104 As we have seen, however, such grafts depend upon the similarities between the stock and the scion. What would it mean for Scotland, then, if Malcolm’s graft were to fail?

Perhaps worse, what would it mean if Malcolm and Macbeth are similar enough for the graft to succeed?

On the other hand, if Malcolm’s grafting reinserts himself “as by an instrument” back into Duncan’s stock we must still contend with a number of textual remainders that complicate

Malcolm’s horticultural re-suturing of himself back into his father’s line. First, and perhaps most obvious, the very fact that Macbeth is no stranger to Duncan’s bloodline—and is closer than

Banquo’s “seed,” who will eventually enjoy its own political graft—suggests that familial nature is not the only determining factor here, as it is not the only factor in the quasi-natural rhetoric of baptism.105 Indeed, baptism is of particular relevance to Malcolm’s graft if we understand it to be set back into Duncan’s stock. In Paul’s olive metaphor for baptismal redemption, the broken native branches (the Jews who have yet to accept Christ) are able, by believing, to be “graffed

104 OED, s.v. “trunk.” 105 Furthermore, the same climatological problems between stock and scion that would endanger Macbeth’s graft also applies to Banquo, who, as thane of the highland region of Lochaber, likewise represents a more northern district. See Raphael Holinshed, “The Historie of Scotland,” in The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London, 1577), vol. 2, 239. 97

[back] into their own olive tree,” which is clearly pertinent to Malcolm here. However, Paul’s passage makes it clear that, while the gentile scion is particularly precarious, no one should

“boast” because no branch is insulated from being broken off and replaced artificially, “contrary to nature,” by a graft. What appears, then, in Macbeth’s competing and simultaneous logics of grafting is far from an unequivocal support for the naturalness of Malcolm’s regime by the end of the play; rather, what appears is a monstrous tree of graftings, regraftings, and uprootings. It is a patchwork polity among Duncan, Malcolm, Macbeth, and, later, Banquo that has ambiguous consequences not only for the politics of birth and duty in the period but also for the viability of

Scotland’s political futures. As anyone familiar with Holinshed’s Chronicles would know, it is not Malcolm’s rightful heir that inherits the throne after his death but, instead, another usurper:

Donalbain.106 Malcolm’s own brother acts both naturally (he is, after all, of Duncan’s bloodline) and, in his betrayal of his brother’s lineal prerogative, unnaturally. The apple continues to fall far from the tree.

Conclusion

Throughout this chapter I have elaborated the ways in which natural allegiances were supposedly translated into legible fiats that organized human behavior. I demonstrate that the translation of Natural Law into human articulation could be used to defend or justify existing human political authority. Understanding political oath-taking to be a linguistic outpouring of the natural facts of parentage propped up James’s paternal claim over his subjects with the authorizing presence of nature and nestled the terms of the Oath of Allegiance in Natural Law

106 Ibid., vol. 2, 259. 98 itself. For Macbeth, however, one can be certain neither of nature’s allegiances nor the human language deployed in order to describe them. Even within the same scene, nature may, like the equivocating traitor, pronounce two or more opposing loyalties. Macduff’s violation of the wren’s procreational fidelity to his family simultaneously upholds the naturalized political allegiance to the dead king’s family; the overlapping assembly of creaturely voices in the nocturnal landscape both accuses and authorizes Macbeth’s murder of Duncan; the graft among

Malcolm, Macbeth, Duncan, England, and Scotland places the political harmony of the play’s end both within and outside of the regenerate order of nature that Malcolm supposedly restores.

These waffling equivocations align nature not with the sovereign but with swearing-yet-lying traitors. Thus, both human action and Natural Law produce multiple and contesting articulations, a far cry from the one-to-one ratification of reasonable human law by the adamantine dictates of

Natural Law that many early modern thinkers attempted to theorize. In order to support

Malcolm, Macduff must leave his family and break a few “egg[s].” In order to restore Scotland,

Malcolm must chop down some branches, and it is unclear if they are able to be grafted back in.

Natural allegiance pulls in directions that are, as a baffled Macduff notes, “hard to reconcile.”

CHAPTER TWO

“The devil that rules i’th’air”: Astrometeorology and Tyranny in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

Although celestial bodies and their gravities hurtle across the cosmos with all the complexity of an ecosystem, they are not generally recognized under the conservational purview of environmental activism. Because of this, an ecocritical survey of the seventeenth-century starscape might seem beside the point to modern ecological sensibilities, which (solar winds and stray asteroids excluded) regard the cold expanse of space beyond the ozone layer as largely irrelevant to our lively island home of Earth.1 When distance is measured in the vastness of light years, it is difficult to see ourselves and our world reflected in the huge dramas of space. For early moderns, however, the stars and planets hung much more imminently, comprising an intricate framework of substantial powers that poured their influences onto the atmosphere and landscape below.

While much has been written about the prominence of astrology in early modern intellectual history, ecocriticism has missed the environmental valence of this vital cultural discourse.2 Natural astrology, so called because of its interest in the meteorological and agricultural influences of the stars, remained popular throughout the period, and because so much of early modern life hinged on the temperamental weather, natural astrology suffused early modern intellectual and vocational culture, generating a lucrative market even for specialized

1 However, for an ecological account of the gold in collapsing stars, see Graham Harman, “Gold,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 106-123, esp. 107-8. 2 See Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500-1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979); Louise Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007); and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971). 100 astrological tracts such as The Seaman’s Kalendar, The Countrey-mans Kalendar, and several distinct Shepardes Kalenders—including vocational guides like Robert Copland’s 1570

Shephardes Kalender as well as Spenser’s famous spin-off of the genre.3 Further, as Louise

Curth’s study of medicinal astrology demonstrates, the transactional humoral relationship between the early modern body and its surroundings extended to the stars and planets, which were thought to agitate or soothe the elements not only of the atmosphere but of the human body as well.4 Robert Burton, for example, complains in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that

The Heauens threaten vs with their Comets, Starres, Planets, with their great coniunctions, Ecclipses, oppositions, quartiles, and such vnfriendly aspects. The aire with his Meteors, Thunder and Lightning, intemperate heat and cold, mighty windes, tempests, vnseasonable weather; from which proceeds, dearth, famine, plague, and all manner of Epidemicall diseases; consuming infinite myriads of men.5

Here, “Comets, Starres, Planets” and the weather are joined in the ailing figure of the melancholy body, which, Burton later notes, is ever “wether-wise against such and such coniunctions of

Planets, moued in foule weather.”6 For Burton, the body’s weather-wisdom is remarkably predictive of the “tempestuous seasons” through its sensitivities to the movements of the

3 Capp, English Almanacs, 33; Robert Copland, The Shepardes Kalender (London, 1570); Thomas Lakes, The Countrey-mans Kalender (Cambridge, 1627); Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, eds. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 1-213; John Tapp, The Seaman’s Kalendar, or an Ephimerides of the Sunne, Moone, and Certaine of the Most Notable Fixed Starres (London, 1602). While Spenser’s Calender is less explicitly astrological than its occupational models, some of the eclogues bear distinct traces of astrological acumen. “Julye,” most notably, begins with an overview of constellations the summer sun passes through before complaining about the plagues that the star Sirius was thought to emit (lines 9-24). 4 Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Timothy Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003). 5 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Henry Cripps, 1621), 5. 6 Ibid., 111. 101 constellations and planets, thus involving all of heavenly creation in the environmental life of embodied humans.

Because this early modern cosmology encompassed everything from stardust to dust- storms, I will deploy the term astrometeorology throughout this chapter, after John Goad’s compendious Astro-meteorologica (1686), the title of which makes explicit and concise sense of the early modern chain of intimacies among the heavens, the weather, and the terrestrial phenomena that they helped to shape. This intimacy was, as I will show, useful to Jacobean conceptualizations of both ecological and political structure. The essayist Patrick Scot, for instance, warns Prince Charles in his advice tract A Table-booke for Princes (1621) that “Princes are of star-like influence vpon inferior bodies; If the ayre bee infected with an epidemicall quality, they that dwell therein cannot be very sound.”7 The swiftness with which Scot’s metaphor moves from the stars, to the air, and finally to the forms of life that they sustain indicates a specifically premodern ecological closeness in the structure of the cosmos.

This cosmic environmental perspective produced an apt means by which to defend the influences of human authorities over their subjects. As in Scot’s warning to Prince Charles, the language of astrometeorology in the Stuart era often imagined celestial influence as social influence, a naturalization of hierarchies that placed the subject beneath the prince just as the crude earth rested beneath its nobler atmospheres of air and star. It is toward such naturalized human hierarchies that the first half of this chapter looks, examining especially the astrometeorology that was used to praise the Stuart monarchy in the early seventeenth century.

As I will show, poets exploited the top-down language of astrometeorology to describe Stuart

7 Patrick Scot, A Table-booke for Princes, Containing Short Remembrances for the Gouernment of Themselues and Their Empire (London, 1621), 33. 102 superiority—both politically and, analogically, as an elevated (literally superior) regime of celestial bodies. This thinking, I argue, reached a crisis when the heir apparent Henry Frederick died in 1612, prompting many writers to attempt to repair the breach that the death of this astrologically auspicious prince exposed in their rhetoric of the Scottish-born prince as “Norths bright Star.”8

Not every thinker and writer, however, was interested in smoothing over this breach. The seventeenth-century witnessed increasing skepticism about astrology’s relevance to human politics. Parodic astrological pamphlets called burlesque almanacs, early English empiricists like

Francis Bacon and Thomas Browne, and the astrological skepticism of some church reformers all cast doubt on the legible intimacy between the political landscape and the stars—an intimacy on which Stuart panegyrics often depended. This doubt opened up a politically subversive space that threatened to uncouple the top-down rhetoric of authority from astrometeorology.9

In the second half of my chapter, I will argue that Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

(written ca. 1612, published 1623) entered into this climate of doubt, subtly adapting the broken celestial promise of Prince Henry’s death in order to emphasize the difficulty of deriving political insights from the natural hierarchy of influence that was thought to flow down from the noble stars, to the winds and, finally, to the lowly earth. I will argue that The Duchess of Malfi critiques human hierarchy by drawing on the astrologically skeptical literature of the period,

8 James Maxwell, The laudable life and deplorable death, of our late peerlesse Prince Henry (London: Thomas Pauier, 1612), sig. C1v. 9 I discuss Bacon’s skepticism and the broader cultural doubt toward judicial astrology in a later section. For Thomas Browne, as well as Bacon, it was the empirical focus on demonstrable causation casts doubt on the more radical prognostications of astrology. Although, for example, Browne grants a “sober and regulated Astrology,” the question of “how to single out these relations [between the heavens and earth], and duely apply their actions is a worke oft times to be effected by some revelation, and Cabala from above, rather than any Philosophy, or speculation here below.” Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London, 1646), Book 4, page 231. 103 including theological, scientific, and, in the case of burlesque almanacs, comic tracts. What emerges from Webster’s play is a critique both of astrometeorological determinism and of political determinism, Duke Ferdinand’s tyrannically extreme version of the cosmology that sustained poetic treatments of James and Henry. But while Duchess criticism often attests that this play predicts modern values of free, liberal subjectivity, the anti-determinism of the play in no way constitutes a modern, triumphal notion of freedom. Indeed, I will show that Duchess draws both from the sardonic defeatism of burlesque almanacs and from Calvinist notion of reprobate bondage—a formulation of unfreedom that stems from humanity’s own depravity. In an important imagistic inversion that this chapter explores in detail, sinfulness takes up the role of the irresistible influence of the stars, not to aggrandize humanity as in Stuart-era panegyrics but, instead, to humble it. Sin becomes, itself, the planet under which all humans are born.

Starry Politics and the Grieving Astrometeorological State

The influence of celestial bodies on the air, the earth, and the porous human body was a principal component in the way early moderns thought about their environment. And while ecosystem is an anachronism, it is hard not to hear the term’s implicit network of environmental causality in such works as The Arte of Nauigation (1589), in which translator Richard Eden makes a case for his own intellectual work, saying, “[E]uen as wholesome and temperate ayre, with seasonable weather, and fauourable influence of the heauens and planets, causeth fruitefulnes on the earth . . . Euen so the fauour of Princes and Magistrates, nourisheth, augmenteth, and amplifyeth, all Artes and Sciences by liberalitie, and extinguisheth the same by 104 miserable couetousnes.”10 Here, Eden traces an unbroken line of environmental causality from the planets to the air and, finally, to the “fruitefulnes” of the earth, thus describing precisely the kind of celestially integrated ecosystem that was so crucial to early modern thought. Of course,

Eden’s plea for patronage does not primarily crave favorable astrological influence; the pun on political influence anchors the monarch to the causative supremacy of the stars atop the environmental scale. Such puns contained significant social content, and celestial flatteries such as Eden’s politicized the cosmic entanglement of humans with nature by demonstrating how human hierarchies could be legitimized by similar structures in nature. In Henry Peacham’s The

Compleat Gentleman (1622), for instance, the nobility of kings is merely the human manifestation of a universal principle of excellence that orders the cosmos:

Among the heauenly bodies wee see the Nobler Orbes, and of greatest influence to be raised aloft, the lesse effectuall, depressed. Of Elements, the Fire the most pure and operatiue to hold the highest place; in compounded bodies, of things as well sensible and insensible, there runneth a veine of Excellence proceeding from the Forme . . . Surely, to beleeue that Nature (rather the God of Nature) produceth not the same among ourselues, is . . . to abase ourselues beneath the Beast.11

For Peacham, then, the cosmic axiom of nobility displayed by the “Orbes” and “Elements” enjoins humanity to recognize monarchical excellence while also confirming humanity’s

“natural” place of excellence above that of the “Beast.” And even though the tensions among

Peacham’s analogical leaps are exacerbated by his suggestion that human supremacy is as much a matter of “beleeu[ing]” as it is a consequence of natural “Excellence,” Peacham nonetheless attempts to convey a totalizing mode of hierarchical thought that extends from animals to kings to stars. This chapter examines how, for some writers, these structures of “beleeuing” could slip

10 Martin Cortés, The Arte of Nauigation, trans. Richard Eden (London, 1589), 4. 11 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (Cambridge, UK, 1622), 2. 105 into skepticism, and the problems of these cosmologies were of special importance for poetic conceptions of Stuart rule, which was consistently lauded in astrometeorological terms.

Peacham’s immensely popular Minerua Britanna (1612), for instance, demonstrates how early modern writers reimagined James’s authority as the beneficent influence of heavenly bodies over a subjected earth. In one emblem depicting a hand descending from the clouds to water a blooming rose, James’s countenance assumes the generative virtue of the sun to bless the moral/horticultural constitution of the realm: “Magnifique PRINCE, the splendour of whose face,/ Like brightest PHOEBVS vertue doth reviue;/ And farre away, light-loathing vice doth chase,/ These be thy Realmes; that under thee doe thriue.”12 Taken together with the rainy emblem that introduces this panegyric, James’s sunny splendor enables him to inhabit both the astrological “vertue” of the sun as well as the meteorological outpouring of favors that sustain his realm.

James’s son Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, was an especially popular subject for these astrometeorological poetics. Henry’s northern Scottish birth, for instance, was often legitimized by English writers by mapping him out in the Stuart cosmos as the North Star.

Peacham’s Minerua above gives the heir a nearly identical treatment to his father yet with the notable inclusion of the lodestar (the North Star): Henry is “still a glorious Load-starre vnto thine:/ Or second PHOEBVS whose all piercing ray,/ Shall cheare our heartes, and chase our feares away.”13 The obvious similarities between the two pieces—through the repeated reference to “PHOEBVS” that “chase[s]” away darkness—mark the continuance of kingly succession by anchoring both figures’ authority to the enduring goodness of the sun and, for Henry specifically,

12 Henry Peacham, Minerua Britanna (London, 1612), sig. D2r. 13 Ibid., sig. D4v. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed, s.v. “lodestar.” 106 the guiding virtue of the North Star. The English dedication to Marc Lescarbot’s colonial treatise

Noua Francia (1609) similarly announces Prince Henry as the “BRIGHT STARRE OF THE

NORTH” and deploys the navigational valences of the metaphor in order to encourage the colonization of the New World, hoping that civilization may by the guided to the Americas by the “Atlasses” of powerful royalty like Henry.14

Henry’s astrometeorological charisma continued throughout his life, but his death from typhoid fever in 1612 represented both an opportunity to reassert his heavenly stature and a rupture in the very terms on which that rhetoric had been founded. Following the models of older poetic traditions like that of Ovid and Virgil, seventeenth-century writers memorialized Henry through poetic stellification, an adaptation of the astrometeorological rhetorics that already surrounded the young prince. Because he was heir apparent, the young prince’s death was felt throughout the realm as an ideological crisis that occasioned a huge surge of consolatory literature—principally lyrical—from a remarkable range of contributors.15 Henry’s death threatened to expose the prince’s astrometeorological panegyrics as merely artificial, unanchored from reality with respect both to the realities of Henry’s human mortality and to the material realities of a cosmos that does not at all times map easily onto human political structures.

Nevertheless, the funeral literature inspired by his death attempted to reconcile the metaphors of natural politics with these new problems.

14 Marc Lescarbot, Noua Francia: or The Description of that Part of Nevv France, trans. P.E. (London, 1609), sig. ¶¶1r-v, italics in the original. 15 In addition to the texts detailed below, see Robert Allyne, Funerall Elegies, (London, 1613); Thomas Campion and John Coperario, Songs of Mourning Bewailing the Vntimely Death of Prince Henry (London, 1613); William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, An Elegie on the Death of Prince Henrie (Edinburgh, 1612). 107

When, for instance, Henry’s “Load-starre” image returns in Scottish writer James

Maxwell’s The Laudable Life and Deplorable Death, of Our Late Peerlesse Prince Henry

(1612), it is elevated even higher:

Lo Norths bright Star thus hath of late gone downe In the South-point of this vnited Land: His too swift course hath made him set too soone, When as his beames did blase o’re sea and sand. Our Orbe too base it was this Starre to beare; For it was worthy of a higher spheare.

Lo the rare Pearle, that we of late haue lost, A peerlesse Pearle, the Load-stone of this Ile; Whose worth did drawe from euery land and coast, The eyes of strangers many thousand mile: But this heart-drawing stone great Iames his Gem More worthy was t’adorne Ioues Diadem.16

Here, we see a play between the lodestar and the lodestone (that is, a magnet), whose heavenly prominence announces the guiding and attractive superiority of the British “Ile” even to the

“eyes of strangers many thousand mile” removed. Further, the prince’s course in the sky matches his political trajectory from the Scottish north to “the South-point of this vnited Land” in

London. His death is represented in and softened by the image of the circling night sky. The horizon of this “base” earth obscures Henry’s setting light until his proper stellification spins the sky around again to set him in the “higher spheare” of heaven. Nor, according to Maxwell, is

Henry’s salutary influence inaccessible to the lower earth even after his death; his obituary for

Henry is followed immediately by a poem “shewing how that both theologie and astrologie” approves James’s reign.17 Just as Peacham’s horticultural emblem above confers celestial

16 James Maxwell, The Laudable Life and Deplorable Death, of Our Late Peerlesse Prince Henry (London: Thomas Pauier, 1612), sig. C1v. 17 Ibid., sig. E4r. 108 prominence to Henry from James through the politics of succession, the order of Maxwell’s poems suggests that Henry’s starry charisma is not lost but is, instead, merely passed back to its paternal source.

Maxwell’s elegy, however, depends upon faulty astronomy. The North Star does not actually “set,” either “too soon” or otherwise. Indeed, the star’s signature feature—and that which invited comparison with the prince—was its fixity in the sky. That Maxwell misrepresents the astrological facts evocatively recalls how unexpected young Henry’s death was, especially when compared with the political promise that his panegyrics boasted for the prince in their rhetorical astrometeorology. Moreover, it is possible that Maxwell’s astrological license here subtly calls attention to its own poetic limitations by gradually revising down the lofty astrometeorology with which it begins. The lodestar that starts these stanzas is immediately, erroneously, described to have “gone downe,” thus revising the reader’s understanding of Henry as the North Star to, less auspiciously, any northern star that might set. By the middle of the next stanza, however, this star is reimagined downward even further, as the earthbound heaviness of the “Load-stone.” And although by the end of the stanza this stone is set, gem-like, into “Ioues

Diadem,” it is not without the divine intervention required to scoop the heavy stone into the heavens. Thus Maxwell divorces Henry’s presence even further from the natural processes of astrometeorology, which purportedly authorized the image in the first place.

The renewed possibilities—as well as the deep challenges—of posthumous astrometeorological praise is especially apparent in Three Elegies on the Most Lamented Death of Prince Henrie (1613). A product of the poetic outpouring of funeral lyrics in the months after

Henry’s death, Three Elegies includes Cyril Tourneur’s “A Griefe on the Death of Prince 109

Henry,” Thomas Heywood’s “A Funerall Elegie,” and John Webster’s “A Monumental

Columne.” To various degrees, all three elegies engage with the promise and the problems of elevating Prince Henry as a heavenly body, though, as we will see, Webster is particularly invested in explicitly probing the shortfalls of poetic artistry in relation to a cosmos of uncertain political configuration.

When Tourneur testifies, “I see HIS spirit turn’d into a starre;/ Whose influence makes that HIS owne Vertues are Succeeded iustlie.” he replaces Henry’s lost political influence with astrological influence, thus guaranteeing that Henry will be “Succeeded” by his own authority despite his terrestrial absence.18 It is Henry’s subjects, however, that become the torchbearers of his exemplary virtues according to the image, and so while Tourneur attempts to continue the hierarchical consolidation of authority in previous poetic treatments, Henry’s absence on earth here becomes perhaps disconcertingly distributive in ways that were not apparent during his lifetime. Heywood, too, attempts to ease the crisis of Henry’s death by deploying a similarly problematized image of eclipse, first through its meteorological resonance (that is, the obscuring of heavenly bodies by cloud cover) by repeatedly comparing Henry to the sun before lamenting

“So the clear’st skies with blackest clouds are shaded.”19 The meteorological and astronomical valences of eclipse collapse here because, for Heywood, Henry’s death typologically recalls that of Christ and the subsequent eclipse.20 Redeemed by the image of eclipse shared between the

18 Cyril Tourneur, “A Griefe on the Death of Prince Henry,” in Three Elegies on the Most Lamentable Death of Prince Henrie (London: William Welbie, 1613), sig. C2r. 19 Thomas Heywood, “A Funerall Elegie,” in Three Elegies on the Most Lamentable Death of Prince Henrie (London: William Welbie, 1613), sig. C1v. 20 See Mark 15:33. Ancient authors attest that the “darkness” following Christ’s passion was due to a solar eclipse, but the full moon at the Passover would have made a solar eclipse impossible. Rather than attributing the darkness to some other event, however, most early moderns claimed this attested to the miraculous nature of the eclipse. See, for example, William Perkins, An Exposition of the Symbole or Creed of the Apostles (Cambridge, 1595), 279. 110 prince and the Passion, Henry’s death becomes meaningfully sacrificial: “Let after ages of this

Prince record,/ Hee freely gaue a life, a land to saue: As gold . . . Depends vpon the Sunne, from him to haue/ His purity of Temper.”21 According to Heywood, Henry’s Christological death helped to purify the English kingdom. But while the promise of resurrection hints that the prince, like the “Sunne” (and the “Son”), will eventually emerge triumphant from his eclipse, Christ is not the explicit model that appears in Heywood’s. Instead, Heywood cites Henry’s exemplar as

“[Marcus] Curtius,” who leaped into a widening Roman chasm while “clad/ In his best Armes and mounted on his steed” in order close the “breach” and save the city.22 Despite the implicit

Christological references, Heywood’s reliance on a pagan model undercuts the hopeful poetics of resurrection that the (always temporary) image of eclipse encourages.

Before showing how Webster’s own elegy and, later, The Duchess of Malfi similarly deploy the eclipse, it is helpful to show how the image was a powerful, yet volatile one that was especially prevalent in Henrician mourning literature as a way to make sense of the starry prince’s demise. Henry’s chaplain Daniel Price, for instance, recasts Henry’s sickness as the tumultuous drama of eclipse, gathering political, meteorological, and astronomical meaning around the dying body of the young prince:

When the sunne of his Highnesse life, was ascending to the meridian, his, and our Ecclipse began, & before the noone-tide of nature, the night of death set vpon him. . . . then did that great Tyrant death first beate, then batter all the naturall forces, all the principall parts of his bodily fortresse. The besiege was not long, but cruell, when HEE forecasting the worst of events and encountering them before they came, carried this character of the valiant. . . . Shall he that was Natures mirrour . . . so ballace [ballast] himselfe with holy wisdome, that he provides to floate steddily in the midst of his tempestuous shipwrack?23

21 Heywood, “Funerall,” sig. B3v. 22 Ibid. 23 Daniel Price, Prince Henry his second anniversary (London: Joseph Barnes, 1613), 11, italics in the original. 111

Price’s menagerie of images here—including eclipse, shipwreck, and weather—might appear to a modern eye as apocalyptic bombast, but, as I have noted, early modern cosmology did not necessarily separate the motion of the heavens from the winds that, here, “batter” the prince’s natural fortress before sinking his bodily ship. Price is, then, making shrewd use of the loose valences of early modern astrometeorology, which gathered the eclipse into a system of mutual signification that involved the heavens, the winds, and the earth itself. Eclipses were thought to provoke “many great and strong winds” like the “tempestuous” blast that scuttles Henry’s ship here. Moreover, particularly blustery eclipses were thought to whip the winds into subterranean caverns to cause earthquakes, uniting the windswept image of Henry’s ship and the tremulous

“beat[ing]” of his bodily “fortresse” under the single image of eclipse.24 Thus, Price’s depiction of Henry’s eclipse resonates through the British atmosphere as the realm trembles sympathetically with the ailing prince, suffering the devastating “tempestuous” effects that eclipses were thought to provoke.

The eclipse was a peculiarly apt image to describe Henry’s death because, even more than other conventions already discussed, the eclipse bore explicit political significance in the period.25 The astrologer Richard Harvey, for example, catalogued the military disasters purportedly foretold by a 1571 eclipse, after which “many princes, and mightie potentates died.”26 The so-called “Black Munday” of March 29, 1652, too, was thought to foretell “the fall

24 Aristotle, Meteorologica, Trans. H.D.P. Lee (Cambridge, MA: Loeb, 1952), 215; Francis Bacon, The Naturall and Experimentall History of Winds. Trans. Thomas Cross (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1653), 34. The Christological crucifixion eclipse and subsequent earthquake (Matthew 27: 45-53) also helped to perpetuate the connection between eclipses, winds, and earthquakes. 25 See, for example, Capp, English Almanacs, 79-80; Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth-Century Mind (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 97-9. 26 Richard Harvey, An Astrological Discourse Upon the Great and Notable Conjunction of the Two Superior Planets, Saturn and Jupiter (London, 1583), sig. D4r. 112 of some famous kings or princes” and, according to astrologer Nicholas Culpeper, “the ruine of monarchy throughout Europe.”27 Because it was thought to be tied to the deaths of prominent figures, the influence of the eclipse on the state was particularly suitable to describe the celestial

Henry’s death, which, as Sir Walter Raleigh worried darkly, is “like an Eclypse of the Sunne,

[and so] wee shall finde the effects hereafter.”28 Dismayed not only by the immediate mourning but also by the delayed implications of the loss of an heir apparent, Raleigh projects Henry’s death into the political uncertainty of a dreaded “hereafter” presaged by eclipse.

As a potent image of astrology, meteorology, and statecraft, the eclipse functioned both as a poetic figure to express grief at Henry’s demise and as a natural analogy that installs

Henry’s authority upward among celestial powers, against the trajectory of his bodily downfall.

But if Heywood’s Christological use of the eclipse is implicitly at odds with the absence of

Christ in his poem, Webster’s “Monumental Columne” explicitly calls attention to the uncomfortable disjunctions among politics, poetry, and nature, which other writers seem less enthusiastic to identify. While his lyric is still an earnest expression of loss, Webster refuses to participate wholeheartedly in the poetics of stellification, casting Henry’s death as an excess that cannot be neatly redeemed with the easy consolations of poetic astrometeorology.

Webster begins “Columne” with an image of eclipse, but while Heywood (at least explicitly) draws from the metaphor some comfort that Henry’s absence is only momentary,

Webster depicts this naturalization as a consolation that, while a useful descriptor of sorrow, falls short of the full extent of the loss.

27 Anonymous, Black Munday: or, A Full and Exact Description of that Great and Terrible Eclipse (London: William Ley, 1651), title page; Nicholas Culpeper, An Ephemeris for the Year 1652 (London: T. Vere and N. Brook, 1652), title page. 28 Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (London: Walter Burre, 1617), 351. 113

Me thinkes I see mens hearts pant in their lips, “ We should not grieve at the bright Sunnes Ecclips “ But that we loue his light. So trauellers stray Wanting both guide, and conduct of the day: Nor let vs striue to make this sorrow old.29

If the consolations that poets offer were true in their most meaningful sense, Webster writes, the eclipse would pass and we would again have access to Henry’s much-loved “light.” Instead,

“trauellers stray” as if expecting Henry’s sun to return at any moment. Arguing for the value of unflinching grief (refusing “to make this sorrow old”), Webster claims that England is irredeemably benighted, afflicted beyond the bounds of the eclipse and, indeed, other metaphors that attempt to manufacture a easy meaning for the prince’s death.

Brian Chalk has outlined Webster’s skepticism toward poetic memorialization of the dead in the dedication of “Columne,” and Webster’s doubt extends to the poem itself.30 While the quotation marks such as those flanking the eclipse image above were meant to signal phrases worthy of memory, Webster’s commonplacing identifies lines that the reader should refrain from articulating, instead arguing that England should, in fact, grieve despite the metaphorical consolation. This distances Webster’s speaker from the commonplacing, reconceptualizing the eclipse’s condolence as something that is heard but not totally believed. It is significant that the poem also ends with commonplacing that, again, calls attention to the limitations of poetry and, again, relies on the image of a darkened sun:

“ [Elegies are] graue in metle that sustained no rust. “ Their wood yeelds hony and industrious Bees, “ Kills Spiders, and their webs like Irish Trees. “ A Poets pen like a bright Scepter swaies,

29 John Webster, “A Monumental Columne,” in Three Elegies on the Most Lamentable Death of Prince Henrie (London: William Welbie, 1613), sig. A4r, italics in the original. 30 Brian Chalk, “Webster’s ‘Worthyest Monument”: The Problem of Posterity in The Duchess of Malfi,” Studies in Philology 108.3 (2011): 379-402, 384. 114

“ And keepes in awe dead mens dispraise or praise. Thus tooke He acquittance of all worldly strife, “ The euening showes the day, and death crownes life.31

At the close of the poem Webster recalls the ideology of natural sovereignty surrounding Henry, shifting from the colonially attractive “Irish Trees,” to the “bright Scepter” of panegyric, and, finally, to the meaningful setting of the prince’s sun. As with the ironized reference to the eclipse that opened the poem, however, this bank of commonplaces distances the speaker (and, indeed,

Henry) from poetic memorialization. The only line that is not commonplaced—and, thus, is ineligible to be set down in memory—is the line that concerns Henry directly: “Thus tooke He acquittance of all worldly strife.” The dead prince, then, is beyond the touch of naturalizing conventions, which can only commemorate themselves and are of little use when confronted with the realities and limits of death and nature alike.

The self-conscious elegiac artificiality that subverts Henry’s celestial trajectories in the first and last lines organizes Webster’s skeptical treatment of natural politics throughout

“Columne.” When, for instance, the speaker turns from the prince’s supposedly solar authority to images of arboreal nobility, he signals the transition not with commonplacing but with a similarly ironizing “Simile” conspicuously flagged in the margins of the panegyric: “[L]ike the

Orange tree, his fruits he bore;/ Some gather’d, he had greene, and blossomes store.”32 On the one hand, the pun here on gather (“to harvest fruits” but also “to deduce”) marks readers’ naturalized expectations for the prince, that he has more “blossomes” in “store” with which he

31 Webster, “Columne,” sig. C2r, italics in the original. 32 Ibid., sig. A4v, italics in the original. 115 will renew and sustain the English landscape.33 On the other hand, the marginal qualifier of

“Simile” signals the constructedness (as opposed to the naturalness) of the comparison.

The next lines, too, announce the prince’s natural sovereignty before reducing the pronouncement to a delusion contracted on faulty astrology:

Wee hopt much of him, till death made hope err, . . . Old husbandmen i’th Country gan to plant Lawrell in steed of Elme, and made their vaunt Their sons and daughters shold such Trophies weare When as the Prince return’d a Conquerer From forraine Nations: For men thought his star Had markt him for a iust and glorious war. . . . Yet alas! all his goodnesse lies full low. (B1r-B2r)

Just as the vernal “Simile” questions the enunciation of the prince’s “Orange tree,” the arboreal promise of Henry’s militarism—reflected in the laureate cultivation of trees and confirmed by

“his star”—is interrupted (“Yet alas!”) by the fact of his death, which contradicts the guarantees of “star” and “Laurell.”

With the broken promise of Henry’s enshrinement in both forest and heavens, Webster questions the reigning astrometeorology that surrounded Henry’s life and death. Returning later to the language of eclipse, Webster notes finally, “This blacke night/ [that] Hath falne vpon’s be

Natures ouer-sight.”34 While “ouer-sight” hints at the hierarchical politics of astrometeorology

(with a governing Nature “overseeing” the English sorrow), Webster’s grieving skepticism accesses the term’s other valence: that of negligence, mistake, and misgovernance. The tension between these two poles—between the rhetoric of a ruling cosmos and the skeptical expectation

33 For more on the history of the royal arboreal metaphor, read specifically in relation to early modern plays, see Jean Feerick, “Groveling with earth in Kyd and Shakespeare’s historical tragedies,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, eds. Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 231-52. 34 Webster, “Columne,” sig. C1r. 116 of its failure—consolidates the possibilities and the limitations of astrometeorological poetics into a single couplet. Through both its naturalizations of Henry’s death and its repeated insistence that those naturalizations are artificially constructed, Webster’s “A Monumental

Columne” deliberately, mournfully falls short of the shining redemption attempted by the poetic conventions surrounding the prince’s death. Here, nature’s lofty governance no longer provides a wholly adequate model for Henry’s spiritual and political renewal.

“[T]a’en up in a whirlwind”: The Astrometeorological State in The Duchess of Malfi

Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, probably composed contemporaneously with “A

Monumental Columne,” features a prominent political figure who, like Henry, seems to embody astrometeorological authority and, in particular, that of the eclipse.35 The play stages the disastrous courtship between the Duchess of Malfi and her steward Antonio. Incensed at her impolitic sexual choice of a social inferior, the Duchess’s twin brother Duke Ferdinand terrorizes the couple and, finally, orders the Duchess to be strangled to death by Bosola, his Machiavellian lackey. But Ferdinand finds himself uncharacteristically remorseful of his sister’s murder, and he runs mad with grief before his eventual demise at the hands of Bosola, who finally resolves to avenge the Duchess’s murder. However, Bosola first misidentifies Antonio as Ferdinand, mistakenly killing the innocent widower before turning his sword on the duke and, finally, dying from his own wounds. Most of these intricate developments are claustrophobically restricted to

35 As Leah S. Marcus notes, the play was probably first performed a decade before its 1623 publication and certainly before 1614. Further, it seems likely that The Duchess of Malfi was written while “A Monumental Columne” was fresh on Webster’s mind; the play’s last line of “death shall crown the end” clearly recalls the last line of “death crowns life” of “Columne.” Leah S. Marcus, “Introduction,” in The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Leah S. Marcus (London: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2009), 1-113. 117 the various indoor spaces of the Amalfi court, and, so, the language of wind and weather in

Duchess has garnered only the occasional passing mention in the play’s criticism.36 The play’s preoccupation with astrology has earned more attention, but it remains marginalized in the scholarship, treated either as a curiosity relevant only to a few specific scenes or as a tangent to some other cultural discourse.37

Under the broader umbrella term of astrometeorology, however, the play’s emphasis on the stars and their disastrous weathers are not merely extraneous references. Indeed, they constitute the primary arena in which the play’s social positions are contested. As in the

Henrician elegies, Duchess is centered on a political figure as the site of metaphorical resemblances constructed between human authority and celestial influence. However, while

Henry was celebrated as a heavenly icon of virtue, Duke Ferdinand finds something much more sinister in the astrometeorological metaphors. The stars’ influential rule over the lower world becomes, for Ferdinand, a convenient justification for political determinism. Ferdinand demands that his social inferiors derive their value from his higher “influence”; as Antonio summarizes at the beginning of the play, Ferdinand “speaks with others’ tongues and hears men’s suits/ With other’s ears.”38 For the tyrannical duke, his underlings become surrogates for his will and tools for his use—mouthpieces and sounding-boards—and the astrometeorological language surrounding him (at first) confirms his political determinism. For Ferdinand—the most socially elevated character in the play—the physically elevated cosmos of the stars and their winds

36 See, for example, Roy Booth, “John Webster’s Heart of Glass,” English 40 (1991): 97-113. 37 Rick Bowers, “The Cruel Mathematics of The Duchess of Malfi,” English Studies in Canada 16.4 (1990): 369-83; Johnstone Parr, “The Horoscope in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi,” PMLA 60.3 (1945): 760-5. 38 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Leah S. Marcus (London: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2009), 1.2.91-2. All other references to this play appear parenthetically. 118 shapes the lower world with their tyrannical decrees and, so, justifies a malevolent version of political absolutism.

My focus on Ferdinand’s cosmology helps to elaborate the wider cultural and ecological implications of a character who is often taken to have narrow ideas of self and society. Before

Frank Whigham’s groundbreaking essay “Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi,” the play’s criticism tended to focus on each character’s internal motivation, but Whigham’s enduring contribution is a fundamental outward turn, to understand each character as they represent larger cultural phenomena.39 For Ferdinand, however, this outward turn has remained in the cramped aristocratic culture of marital endogamy. Thus, according to Whigham,

Ferdinand’s erotic exclusivity is directed inward at his own familial ties, manifesting in the play as the duke’s incestuous fixation on the Duchess’s sexuality. Picking up Whigham’s formulation of Ferdinand’s self-devouring eroticism, Mary Beth Rose argues for the heroism of the

Duchess’s sexual “conquest” of her secret husband Antonio while arguing that Ferdinand’s fascination with his twin sister’s body is “narcissistic,” focused in at himself.40 Although

Ferdinand is most certainly narcissistic, his politics are also directed outward, not only to his sister or to the court of Amalfi, but farther still to the weather and to the stars, the entire framework of which, he imagines, revolves according to the absolutist decrees of irresistible astrological determinism. Ferdinand’s tyranny, then, represents not only a cramped model of endogamy but, somewhat paradoxically, an expansive worldview that, like the poetic

39 Frank Whigham, “Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi,” PMLA 100.2 (1985): 167-86. 40 Mary Beth Rose, “The Heroics of Marriage in Renaissance Tragedy,” in The Duchess of Malfi: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Dympna Callaghan (New York: St. Martins 1998), 135. 119 astrometeorology of Stuart panegyric, attempted to see human social hierarchy in the larger cosmos.

Before showing how The Duchess of Malfi dissolves Ferdinand’s political cosmology, it is important to understand the totalizing, one-to-one correspondence between nature and society on which it is based. Ferdinand’s emphasis on his own elevated social status produces a meteorological poetics that privileges the tyrannies of (literally) elevated atmospheric phenomena like violent weather and, most often, high winds. For instance, Bosola describes the money with which Ferdinand bribes him as “such showers” to be followed by “thunderbolts i’th’ tail of them” (1.2.164). Bosola’s worry here is that of a keen meteorologist: by enjoying this fruitful exchange now, he may later be caught out in the storm when his obligations as the duke’s agent—as one of his “tongues” and “ears”—crash down on him. The power struggle between the

Duchess and Ferdinand is also figured in terms of the weather’s power over the lower world.

While the Duchess eases Antonio’s fears about her brother discovering their marriage by saying that they will “[s]catter the tempest,” the Cardinal marvels that the furious Ferdinand can “make

[him]self/ So wild a tempest” (1.2.381; 2.5.16-7, 50-1). In his response, Ferdinand yearns to embody those “violent whirlwinds”: “Would I could be one,/ That I might toss her palace ‘bout her ears,/ Root up her goodly forests, blast her meads,/ And lay her general territory as waste/ As she hath done her honours!” (2.5.17-21). Here, Ferdinand pines for the absolutist view of natural politics that equates the state of the air and land with the ruler’s (here, sexualized) body politic, but by embodying the violent winds above the Duchess’s supposedly squandered “lands,”

Ferdinand erects a cosmology of authority that places his windy authority above his sister’s supposedly earthy dominion. That the Duchess and her “territory” do not manifest here 120 according to her brother’s political cosmology is a major source of tension in the play and, indeed, eventually leads Ferdinand to order his sister’s murder. With the duke’s blustery disposition in mind, his command to execute the Duchess through strangulation (cutting off her air) achieves a grisly new significance as a deliberate attempt to bolster his own pneumatic tyranny.

Ferdinand’s windy politics derives its formula in part from a model of meteorological governance that would have been commonplace for early moderns: Satan’s princely command of the winds. The word devil and its derivatives appear twenty-seven times in the play and attach with marked consistency to Ferdinand, a designation that would have had distinctly meteorological overtones. When, for example, Antonio claims that the melancholic Machiavel

Bosola “would look up to heaven, but I think/ The devil that rules i’th’air stands in [his] light,” he is condemning Ferdinand’s corrupting influence on Bosola while simultaneously arraigning

Ferdinand’s political emphasis on “th’air” (2.1.94-100). When, too, Antonio describes

Ferdinand’s as-yet suppressed rage at his sister’s secret marriage, he mingles Ferdinand’s devilishness with his much-vaunted airiness, saying that, for now, Ferdinand is so quiet that he seems “to sleep/ The tempest out, as dormice do in winter./ Those houses that are haunted are most still,/ Till the devil be up” (3.1.21-4). Here, Ferdinand’s calculated suppression of his anger becomes both the seemingly unfelt “tempest” and the house-shaking “devil” that Antonio worries will soon break forth.

While modern readers might be familiar with Satan’s princely status among the other demons, the notion that he could rule the winds has not survived. Antonio’s charge that

Ferdinand is a “devil that rules i’th’air” recalls Paul’s warning to the Ephesians not to live 121

“according to the prince of the power of the air,” and according to many early moderns, Satan boasted literal dominion over the weather.41 Often discussed in anti-witchcraft treatises, the

Devil’s human subjects were thought to be able to ride through the air by his blustery dictates, which purportedly could “raise such a storme” for “the carrying away of a mans bodie by

Satan.”42 These literalizations of Paul’s letter are explicit in King James’s own Daemonologie

(1597), where he writes,

They [witches] can rayse stormes and tempestes in the aire, either vpon Sea or land, though not vniversally, but in such a particular place and prescribes boundes, as God will permitte them so to trouble. . . . And this is likewise verie possible for their master [the Devil] to do, he hauing such affinitie with the aire as being a spirite, and hauing such power of the forming and moouing thereof, as ye haue heard me alreadie declare: For in the Scripture, that stile of the Prince of the aire is giuen vnto him.43

For James, as well as for Antonio’s characterization of Ferdinand, the windy misrule of the devil indexes a kind of spiritual warfare that could be understood through the lofty dramas that were thought to be written in the very atmosphere.

Ferdinand’s devilishly elevated politics are sustained by the play’s ambivalent theorization that higher astrometeorological phenomena may determine lower entities. This cosmological determinism neatly matches Ferdinand’s absolutism whereby nobler (higher) persons regulate the nature and motions of those under them. According to Whigham,

Ferdinand’s fiercely aristocratic endogamy manifests, in the play’s earlier scenes, as a political determinism that renders his underlings “will-less” “prosthetic agents” who derive their identity

41 Ephesians 2:2, Authorized Version. 42 Lambert Daneau, A Dialogue of Witches (London, 1575), sig. H4v; Sebastien Michaelis, The Admirable History of the Possession and Conuersion of a Penitent Woman Seduced by a Magician That Made Her to Become a Witch, trans. W.B. (London: William Aspley, 1613), 285. 43 James I and VI, Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), 46-7, italics in the original. 122 from only him.44 As we have already seen, Ferdinand “speaks with others’ tongues,” and

Ferdinand opines that those “that are courtiers/ Should be my touchwood: take fire when I give fire” (1.2.42-5). Ferdinand’s ideal sycophant is as ready to receive cues from his superiors as incendiary “touchwood” is to burn when exposed to fire. Bosola, too, worries that accepting

Ferdinand’s bribes will come at the cost of his own agency; he presses the duke, saying, “It seems you would create me/ One of your familiars” (1.2.175-6). A familiar, in witchcraft, is a spirit or demon contracted specifically to do the magical bidding of a witch, and, so, when

Bosola soon concedes that “I am your creature,” he is explicitly buying into Ferdinand’s politics of determinism (1.2.204).45 Even when Bosola attempts, at the end of the play, to reassert his own will by slaying Ferdinand, he mistakenly kills Antonio, demonstrating how difficult it is to escape the chains of political determinism that bind him.

The straitening forces of determinism that bind subjects in Duchess play out not only in the play’s preoccupation with the force of higher meteorological forces but also in the related discourse of astrological determinism. For instance, Ferdinand’s strict conception of authority finds expression not only in metaphors of wind and weather but, ultimately, in the language of astrology that surrounds the duke because he imagines a convenient social determinism to be reflected in the forceful dicta of the stars. When, for example, Bosola reports to Ferdinand, “‘Tis rumoured she [the Duchess] hath had three bastards, but/ By whom we may go read i’th’stars,” the duke interrupts his line and defensively replies, “Why some/ Hold opinion all things are written there” (3.1.59-61). Bosola’s suggestion to “read” the stars is meant ironically, indexing the difficulty of discovering the children’s paternity, but Ferdinand’s reply evinces a real faith in

44 Whigham, “Sexual,” 169. 45 OED, s.v. “familiar.” 123 such augury. Ferdinand’s belief that the stars order the lower world is an astrometeorological partner to his political determinism. Indeed, when Bosola learns that he has inadvertently done

Ferdinand’s will by mistakenly killing Antonio, he collapses celestial and political determinism; as an unwitting “creature” of Ferdinand’s, he has become one of “the stars’ tennis balls, struck and banded/ Which way please them” (5.4.53-4).

Ferdinand’s relationship to all manners of determinism evokes, as do the Henrician elegies, the eclipse’s inauspicious effects on the weather and the state. As I have noted, this portent signaled tumult in both the state and, appropriately for the tempestuous Ferdinand, in the wind. It is not merely a meteorological statement, for instance, that Ferdinand “stands,” as a prince of the air, between Bosola and the light. According to the logic of the image, Bosola languishes in the shadow of the duke’s eclipse as his position beneath an elevated Ferdinand obscures the light of the sun. The precise positionality of the image, combined with Ferdinand’s known political malignancy, recalls the specific conditions of eclipse as well as the portent’s baleful effects on the state. Ferdinand’s conjoined understandings of tyranny and astrometeorology implies an anthropocentric need to measure nature by human politics, and this need also manifests in the prince as an impulse to reify his power over his sister through a theater of torments that, like Bosola’s overshadowing above, evokes the eclipse. When, for example, the duke discovers his sister’s secret pregnancy, he determines to “fix her in a general eclipse”

(2.5.79). Ferdinand later delivers on this promise with remarkable literality, confining the

Duchess to her chambers and only appearing before her in the total dark of a simulated eclipse, generated by allowing “neither torch nor taper/ [to] Shine in [her] chamber” (4.1.21-8).

Ferdinand’s mimetic diligence extends to all of the accoutrements of the eclipse: darkness, 124 political disarray, and even lunacy in the form of a cavalcade of madmen—who are commanded, appropriately, to “act their gambols to the full o’th’ moon”—in order to torment the imprisoned

Duchess (4.1.127).46

Despite its reliance on the language of deterministic structures, however, the play is not at all definitive about Ferdinand’s ability to embody the astrometeorological determinism that the play’s rhetoric tentatively affords him. For Ferdinand, at least, his tyrannical cosmology persists past the point of viability, such that it eventually becomes a running joke even for the courtiers whom he once dominated. The play thus undermines strict, totalizing readings of the starscape even as it indulges in its language. Ferdinand’s collapse into madness after he orders the

Duchess’s murder, for instance, deeply ironizes the hierarchical value that he has attached to the cosmos. When two of his former sycophants are walking together, they contrast the prince’s mad frailty with the strength of the wind that he once seemed to command and embody:

Grisolan: ‘Twas a foul storm tonight. Roderigo: The lord Ferdinand’s chamber shook like an osier. Malateste: ‘Twas nothing but pure kindness in the devil To rock his own child. (5.4.18-21)

Here, the dignity of Ferdinand’s genealogy as a “prince that rules i’th’air” is revisited with all of its former stormy import, but while Ferdinand’s devilishness previously afforded him a dreaded potency, the pointed irony here deflates the vigor of such claims, characterizing Ferdinand’s chamber with the feebleness of a willow (an “osier”) in the wind. Moreover, as he is dying during the play’s final moments, a vanquished Ferdinand whimpers, “I am broken-winded”

46 For the maddening effects of the eclipse, see William Drage, Daimonomageia (London, 1665), 7; Anonymous, Black Munday (London, 1651). Drage reports that a servant, “at an Eclipse,” a servant “was struck with Madness, and would Prophesy things they found to come to pass, and in strange Tongues.” Further, the widely distributed (and shamelessly fear-mongering) almanac for the 1652 eclipse on “Black Munday” presaged a “general madnesse and confusion to all . . . Kingdoms.” 125

(5.5.64). This depleted utterance simultaneously pronounces and subverts his previous threats of tempestuousness and, like the sycophants’ gleeful joking at the osier-frail Ferdinand, undermines the rhetoric of wind-blown power which he previously seemed to wield so competently.

Just as the duke’s windiness is paired early on in the play with the discourse of astrological determinism, the play’s later ironic treatment of Ferdinand’s blustery presumptions extends, too, to celestial bodies and, specifically, the eclipse. Indeed, Duchess’s most explicit use of the eclipse image elucidates not the duke’s political mastery but, rather, his impotence. When a newly lunatic Ferdinand is walking with one of his former sycophants, he notices someone following him. In a fit of defensive rage, Ferdinand hurls himself at the offender and pins him to the ground. The courtiers who are walking with him are baffled because the man forebodingly shadowing Ferdinand was, in fact, Ferdinand’s shadow:

Ferdinand: Look! What’s that follows me? Malateste: Nothing, my lord. Ferdinand: Yes. Malateste: ‘Tis your shadow. Ferdinand: Stay it! Let it not haunt me. Malateste: Impossible, if you move and the sun shine. Ferdinand: I will throttle it! [Throws himself on the ground.] Malateste: Oh, my lord, you are angry with nothing! Ferdinand: You are a fool. How is’t possible I should catch my shadow unless I fall upon’t? (5.1.31-6)

The mise en scène here is a precise reenactment of the positional conditions of the eclipse: the alignment of body, shadow, earth, and sun. But while the eclipse was previously an icon for the duke’s deterministic hierarchy that privileges the elevated strata of the natural world, his identity with the eclipse here brings him low, literally to the ground. As with Ferdinand’s frailty above, the rhetoric of eclipse and wind no longer installs him upward as an astrometeorological power but, rather, illustrates his own (figurative and literal) descent into madness. 126

Ferdinand’s self-eclipse in this scene is only the most explicit manifestation of the play’s critique both of absolutism and, through the failure of the duke’s own poetics, of overconfident poetic evaluations of nature’s political meaning. The duke no longer effectively controls the elevated tyranny of the eclipse; his plummet as he hurls himself to the ground brings the duke low while preserving the eclipse’s sense of political disaster. Any hint of real authority garnered from astrology is deeply ironized, however, because it deflates the would-be grandeur of embodying such heavenly phenomena. Ferdinand’s self-eclipse, then, is a conceptual inversion whereby either humans are imagined upward or heavenly phenomena are brought low (as with the duke’s groveling eclipse in the scene above) in order to subvert and ironize what would normally be celebrations of human political and environmental importance. And while, as we will see, some critics have associated similar subversions of Ferdinand’s politics with an emergent vision of liberal selfhood, the play borrows this formal machinery—which I call

“burlesque inversion”—from seventeenth-century burlesque almanacs, a genre that insisted upon the fundamental unfreedom of the human condition and, thus, cannot inaugurate a new era of liberal thought.

“[I]t is to bee doubted”: The Skeptical, Inverted Cosmos of Burlesque Almanacs

The burlesque almanac (also called “mock almanacs”) emerged from a burgeoning seventeenth-century market for almanacs and a climate of increasing skepticism toward the conventional purview of astrology. As I discuss in greater detail in a section below, the branch of astrology dedicated to predicting human affairs (especially in politics) was under attack in the period, and the burlesque genre capitalized on this skepticism with its own critique of what it 127 portrayed as an overly staid, yet empirically questionable science. These almanacs used the specialized language of the astrometeorology and the formal device of burlesque inversion in order to critique both the social conditions of English life and the specious prognostications of charlatan astrologers. Published with special frequency from about 1590 to 1620, these biting satirical works were written by a pseudonymous menagerie of folks like Adam Evesdropper,

Simon Smel-knaue, and Adam Fouleweather (an eminent “Student in Asse-tronomy”). While serious almanacs were full of sincere predictions and calendrical calculations, their burlesque counterparts dug at the expertise of astrology by providing predictions that needed little more than common sense to generate. When, for example, Thomas Dekker prognosticates that “you will this yeare by reason of certaine bitter frosts which shall driue you to drinke burnt sacke, rather desire to plead at a Tauerne barre . . . than at a Westminster barre,” the prediction is based only on the surety that it is more pleasant to get drunk on a cold night than to deal with the

London courts.47 The edge of Dekker’s critique touches both the specialized knowledge of astrology (here reduced to common-sense deduction) and the drudging inefficiency of the court system. The Duchess of Malfi is not above this kind of social critique through faux-astrology.

When Delio quips that the courtly hanger-on Malateste fights according to “the almanac, I think, to choose good days/ And shun the critical,” we know that he is only using astrology as an ironic vehicle from which to criticize Malateste’s military cowardice (3.3.21-2).

Burlesque almanacs derived much of their humor from the formal technique of inversion, ironically imagining humanity upward among the stars (like Ferdinand’s celestial presumptions) or the cosmological starscape is brought low (as in the duke’s final groveling self-eclipse). Adam

47 Thomas Dekker, The Ravens Almanacke (London : Thomas Archer, 1609), 5. 128

Fouleweather, for example, notes that conventional astrology computes summer to begin when the sun passes into the constellation Cancer, but his own calculus determines that summer

“beginneth when the wether waxeth so hot, that beggers scorne barnes and lie in the field for heate.”48 The seasonal migration of London mendicants replaces the mathematically precise motion of the sun through the constellations and, so, ironically promotes the dispossessed beggars as the sign that inaugurates the summer. This type of inversion is characteristic of the genre, which could replace the zodiacal “houses” with the buildings of London, simultaneously elevating the urban space into the sky and lowering the constellations down to the city. As burlesque astrologer Adam Euesdropper foretells, “[T]he influence of the Grocers shops being eleuated within a few sweet degrees presageth that some shamelesse Drabbes [prostitutes] shall bee still gadding about the streetes for figges, almonds, and Confects.”49 Here, the literal house of the London grocery replaces the starry “houses” through which the sun passes, supposedly presaging the prostitute’s appetites, which are hinted to be due not to any specific celestial conjunction but to the simple fact that they are “shamelesse Drabbes.” Because the night sky of burlesque almanacs is populated by bawds, prostitutes, housewives, and even, in at least one instance, genitalia, these documents make light, as Paul Yachnin has argued in his account of the genre, of the academic pomposity of some astrologers.50

This seemingly lighthearted heckling of the science, I contend, produced a complex relationship among burlesque almanacs, serious astrology, and the practice’s skeptical detractors.

48 Fouleweather, A Wonderfull, Strange and Miraculous, Astrologicall Prognostication (London, 1591), sig. D1r. 49 Adam Euesdropper, Platoes Cap (London, 1604), sig. D2r. 50 Paul Yachnin, “Introduction” to Plato’s Cap, in Thomas Middleton: Collected Works, eds. John Lavagnino and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 195-7. For an example of lustily “combust” planetary genitalia, see Euesdropper, Platoes Cap, sig. D1v-D2r. 129

While Yachnin denies that these almanacs derived their biting wit from any doubt about astrology’s scientific legitimacy, he is only partially correct.51 The burlesque almanac did, in fact, partake in the seventeenth-century culture of skepticism that questioned astrology’s accuracy, necessity, and religious lawfulness. But “skepticism” in this case does not necessarily mean that astrologically skeptical thinkers—including the authors of burlesque almanacs— outright denied celestial influence over human affairs. Instead, against the veneer of mathematical precision with which some astrologers made their predictions, these skeptics doubted that humans could read the mysterious heavens as accurately as some astrologers boasted. Astrologically skeptical literature like burlesque almanacs (and indeed The Duchess of

Malfi) thus become lessons in academic, social, and human humility.

The absurd, authority-deflating pseudonyms of the burlesque almanacs were only the beginning of the skepticism in these texts. For example, The Owl’s Almanac (1618), “copied” by the improbably named Jocundary Merry-braines, begins,

And why not an Owle prognosticate wonders, which are sure to happen this yeere, as for Astrologicall wizzards to shoot threating Calenders out of their inke-pots at the world, and yet when they hit, their fillups [flicked projectiles] hurt nothing? Lyes are as well acquainted with Astronomers, as othes are with Souldiers, or as owing money is familar to Courtiers: But Madge-Owlet fetches her predictions out of an upper roome in Heaven, where never any common star-catcher was garretted before.52

This preface seems contradictory in its dual statements of astrological skepticism and certainty— an irony appropriate to the genre. While the author characterizes much of astrology with disciplinary chicanery, he seems to have every faith that the Owl can, indeed, “prognosticate wonders.” After the merest glimpse of these forecasts, however, it is clear that the Owl’s

51 Yachnin, “Introduction,” 195. 52 Thomas Dekker, The Owles Almanacke (London: Laurence Lisle, 1618), sig. A2r-v. 130 advertised precision is due not to celestial knowledge read from an “upper roome in Heaven” but, instead, to simple knowledge of the harsh economic realities of urban life. Emulating the calendrical layout of its more serious forebears, The Owl’s Almanac writes that “The yeere begins with me when I haue money in my purse . . . [and] ends with me when my siluer is melted, and my elbowes are ragged.”53 The Owl tracks, too, the phases of the moon not through recourse to calculations according to London’s geographical meridian but by calculating the waxing and waning purses of a corrupt courtroom: “The first Returne, the rich Plaintiffe . . . with a purse warmly linde, and that’s the full moone, during which fulnes he far out-shines the

Defendant, and giues great light to the Lawyers. . . . The fourth Returne, there is a iudgement gotten against the Defendant . . . [and] his spirits are so darkened with black clouds of sorrow, that he seemes vtterly ecclipsed.”54 In her ingenious adaptation of the “Lyes” of less reputable astrologers, the Owl showcases a complex example of inversion by imagining the courtroom upward as a lunar drama, all while demonstrating that one need have no specialized knowledge of astrology to predict a poor Londoner’s financial woes.

As we have seen, burlesque inversions of the sky and the city were cast using self- conscious astrometeorological rhetoric that playfully critiqued its own deployment and, in so doing, cast doubt on astrology’s predictive accuracy. Burlesque almanacs (and, as I argue below,

Duchess) were merely adapting a more general seventeenth-century skepticism that was increasingly hostile to the specific human predictions that astrologers read out of the stars. While the scholarly commonplace that the early modern period did not separate the fields of astronomy and astrology into distinct disciplines is technically correct, it is so partly because early moderns

53 Ibid., 7. 54 Ibid., 3-4. 131 would not have conceived of the distinction under those terms. As Keith Thomas has pointed out, the relevant disciplinary division was not astronomy versus astrology but, rather, natural versus judicial astrology.55 The former, a subdiscipline of natural philosophy, studied celestial influences for “the predictions of raine, faire weather, of wet times and dry . . . and of such things as are vnder the gouernment of the superior bodies.”56 The latter—an astrology similar to modern horoscopes—attempted to extend celestial prognostication to matters of the human will and, especially, politics.

While the use of the blanket term “astrology” indicates that the two fields had yet to completely differentiate themselves from one another, the methodologies of judicial astrology were under attack during the seventeenth century. Even as the rising print culture in early modern England encouraged the increasing distribution of cheap almanacs, the empirical emphases of the new science grew skeptical of the subtle influences that the planets were thought to have on the human will.57 Astrology, Francis Bacon writes, might be “noble” in its ends but should ultimately be counted among the “vain” disciplines of natural magic and alchemy, which, he grants, are wonderfully nurturing to the imagination but do little for the “laborious and sober enquirie of truth.”58 Further, Puritanism threatened judicial astrology, whose cosmic understanding of the human will undermined, as historians Bernard Capp and Hilary Carey note, the more radical Protestant emphasis on personal responsibility and providential efficacy.59

While the skeptic John Melton admits the legitimacy of natural astrology in his Astrologaster

55 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), 361. 56 George, Carleton, Astrologomania: The Madnesse of Astrologers (London: W. Turner, 1624), 71-2. 57 Capp, English Almanacs, 23-66; Hilary Carey, Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 164. 58 Francis Bacon, The Two Bookes of Francis Bacon (London: Henrie Tomes, 1605), 22, 32. 59 Jean Calvin, An Admonicion Against Astrology Iudiciall, trans. G. G. (London: Roulande Hall, 1561). 132

(1620), it is easy for him to malign the specialized toolkit of the astrologer as superstitious tackle associated with Catholicism: “As for your Instruments, as your Mathematicall Glasse, with which you can doe wonders, your Siluer Wand, Watering Pot, foure-corner'd Cap, are but meere superstitious Ornaments, either borrowed from the Iewes or Romans.”60 Melton’s critique of judicial astrology, pitched by emphasizing the difference between “Instruments” and

“Ornaments,” relies on the Protestant characterization of Judaism or Catholicism as needlessly and idolatrously arcane in its ornamentation, which Melton compares with what he considers to be the smoke and mirrors of judicial astrology.

Just as burlesque almanacs borrowed from this culture of increasing doubt by offering astrological knowledge even while they undercut it, most astrological critiques in the period were not interested in a total denial of astrological influence on human action; rather, it was mostly at the intellectual presumption that the stars could be so conclusively read that such skepticism aimed. Indeed, one of the earliest burlesque almanacs, François Rabelais’s Pantagrueline

Prognostication (published originally in 1533) took aim at the abuses of more brazen astrological swindlers even while Rabelais himself was a believer in astrology and probably wrote serious almanacs himself.61 At the heart of such skepticism is an encouragement of intellectual (and human) humility.62 For instance, in his Astrologomania (written around 1603,

60 John Melton, Astrologaster, or, The Figure Caster (London: Edward Blackmore, 1620), 16. 61 See Dené Scoggins, “Wine and Obcenities: Astrology’s Degradation in the Five Books of Rabelais,” in Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Europe, eds. Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe Jr. (Saint Louis, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), 163-86. Rabelais’s Pantagrueline Prognostication was a separate publication from his Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (first book published in 1532). 62 While the texts below explicitly critique judicial astrology, it is worth noting here that intellectual humility is central to Bacon’s general scientific project. For instance, in 1620 he writes, “The cause and root of nearly all evils in the sciences is this—that while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind we neglect to seek for its true helps.” Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. R. Ellis and James Spedding (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1905), Book One, Aphorism 9. 133 published 1624), the bishop George Carleton takes little issue with the general and indirect scheme that he quotes from the astrologer Christopher Heydon—that “the starres incline the humour, the humour inclineth the body, the body inclineth the minde”—but rather, with the boldly specific ways in which this manifests in some astrological predictions: “[I]f you looke vpon their examples . . . you shall finde another matter [than the modest scheme outlined above].

For in the examples of their predictions, they foretell the deaths of Princes vpon such a day: the fortunes of Kings, the ruines of Kingdomes, the ouerthrow of armies.”63 Here, Carleton argues that such specifically deterministic predictions—calculated down to the “day”—are incompatible with the thoughtfully indirect chain of material inclinations in which most serious judicial astrologers believe. In 1601, too, the clergyman John Chamber tempers his occasional rejection of astrological principles with an acknowledgement that human futures might be written in the stars but that astrologers—as limited creatures—had no reliable means with which to read them so specifically. He writes, “No doubt there are in heauen a number of starres, which, since because of their distance, no man can discerne, no man can know, which notwithstanding haue their operation . . . [H]ow [then] can these paltry wisards, of a few starres, which they know, so confidently pronounce of things to come?”64 Chamber’s critique of judicial astrology here is not that the human will is exempt from the push and pull of astrological forces but that humans are in no position to “confidently” evaluate those influences as if those “wisards” were above it all, looking down.

63 Carleton, Astrologomania, 11-2. 64 John Chamber, A Treatise against Iudicial Astrologie (London: John Harison, 1601), 15-6. 134

Montaigne, too criticized judicial astrology from a position of speculative humility, providing the following excerpt from Horace after relating the story of a lieutenant who fearfully turned traitor because of an unfavorable horoscope:

God hides within night’s blackest folds, Most wisely, what the future holds And laughs if a man takes fright More than is right.65

Montaigne’s denigration of astrology here is founded not on a denial that the future cannot be found “within night’s blackest folds” but, rather, on the assurance that such knowledge is for the most part hidden from lowly (and, here, laughable) humans. Even Melton, who is more vociferous than most in his arraignment of judicial astrology, grants “the generall Influence of

Heauen,” which could include not only physical “Motion, Heat, and Light” but also certain events in the history of humanity. He writes,

Yet I cannot deny altogether, but that future Contingences may bee seene by the Contemplation of Heauen. For there is none can doubt, but that God the great Architect of this visible and inuisible World, infused a manyfold vertue and operation in the Heauens. . . . Therefore it is manifest that things are named according to their properties, which none but hee that made them, can perfectly and distinctly vnderstand.66

Even as he maintains his criticism of judicial astrology, Melton cannot entirely dismiss the language and the knowledge that have been conventionally associated with the discipline’s analysis of “Contingences.” In this passage, Melton’s critique is aimed not at astrological knowledge per se but, rather, at the pompous claim that any human may “vnderstand” the influence of the heavens as “distinctly” as their Creator.

65 Michel de Montaigne, “Of Prognostications,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 27-30. 66 Ibid., 33. 135

“[T]he stars shine still”: Burlesque Inversion, Skepticism, and the Problem of Modern Liberalism in The Duchess of Malfi

As with the skeptical texts above, burlesque almanacs and The Duchess of Malfi refused to banish the language of astrometeorology even while casting suspicion on that very language.

Indeed, one of the play’s more explicit burlesque inversions directly critiques judicial astrology’s futile attempt to read the stars with definitive accuracy. The first Madman summoned to torment the imprisoned Duchess is a self-described “astrologian” whose his millenarian predictions have gone unfulfilled by the stubborn starscape. He reports that he will correct the stars’ oversight simply by reversing their position with his: “Domesday not come yet? I’ll draw it nearer by a perspective [telescope], or make a glass that set all the world on fire in an instant” (4.2.72-4).

The astrologer fantasizes that he might either bring the stars’ predictions closer (and, so, lower) through optical magnification or (like Ferdinand) occupy the stars’ superlunary position himself so that he might focus the light through his telescope and set the world ablaze. This delusional inversion, a Servant tells us, is a symptom of madness he contracted when “the day of doom” did not arrive on “such a day o’th’ month” that he conclusively predicted (4.2.47-8). Thus, like the skepticism outlined above, the astrologer episode does not critique astrology per se; rather, it ridicules the intellectual (or political) overreliance on precise readings of the cosmos.

The play further elaborates this challenge to the stars’ definitive legibility not by explicitly denying that “all things are written there” but, rather, by providing an incomplete astrological reading. When Antonio casts a birth horoscope for his and the Duchess’s secret firstborn, the baby’s prognosis is spelled out in no uncertain terms, even while the conditions of its fulfillment are notably inconclusive. The horoscope reads, 136

The Duchess was delivered of a son ‘tween the hours twelve and one in the night, Anno domini 1504 . . . taken according to the meridian of Malfi . . . The lord of the first house being combust in the ascendant signifies short life; and Mars being in a human sign joined to the tail of the Dragon in the eight house doth threaten a violent death. Caetera non scrutantur [the rest is not examined]. (2.3.53-64)

Despite the definitive promise of “a short life” delivered by the boy’s horoscope, he is one of the play’s few surviving characters. In fact, this supposedly planet-blighted babe outlives the

Duchess, Antonio, Cariola, Ferdinand, the Cardinal, Julia, and two of the Duchess’s other children. The inconclusive nature of the horoscope is emphasized further by the “Caetera non scrutantur” that announces its own incomplete legibility. But just as astrological skeptics in the period could not totally discount the role of the stars on human actions, this horoscope is as inconclusive as it is probable. While it may not be specifically because the Mars was in the tail of the Dragon, we can be sure that the corrupt Amalfi court will not allow the star-crossed boy to survive long after the action of the play. Indeed, Antonio’s dying words are a plea that his son

“fly the courts of princes” (5.4.71). He does not, instead inheriting the rule of this scheming political culture. While the boy’s survival thus far casts doubt upon the horoscope’s specific reading of a complex cosmos, we cannot be hopeful of the child’s future prospects in so predictably corrupt a human environment.

There is another, though subtextual, horoscope in the play that shows that Ferdinand’s madness represents a failure of reading the stars definitively, while still leaving open the possibility of humanity’s cosmic entanglement. One thing to keep in mind about the Duchess’s and Ferdinand’s relationship is that they are twins and, so, would have had the same birth horoscope. That they do not have similar personalities and die at disparate times, however, both undercuts Ferdinand’s simplistic politicizing of the stars and accesses a popular early modern 137 astrological skepticism. The argument against judicial astrology from the divergent lives of twins was, as the MP Christopher Heydon complained in 1603, the “maine anchor hold against

Astrologers.”67 The chaplain Alexander Ross, for example, writes, “By this also, judiciall

Astrologers may be confuted; for we see that the soules and dispositions of men depend not on the Stars; these two [Castor and Pollux] were twins, borne under the same constellation, yet of farr different studies and inclination.”68 Similarly, John Chamber’s monumental Treatise against

Iudicial Astrology (1601) includes a large chapter on twins, describing in detail how the more definitive predictions of judicial astrologers could not explain the differences of twins even when accounting for all of the varying early modern theories of twinship, including those who were born at the same time, born at slightly different times, conceived simultaneously, or conceived during two distinct moments.69

This critique from the differentiated mortality of twins is especially relevant to The

Duchess of Malfi because, for Ferdinand, his own survival of his twin’s death so disturbs his habitual astrometeorology that he runs mad. After the Duchess is murdered, Ferdinand sees his dead twin and knows he can no longer sustain his identity nor the natural politics on which it was grounded:

Bosola: Do you not weep? Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out. The element of water moistens the earth, But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens. Ferdinand: Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle; she died young. . . . She and I were twins, And, should I die this instant, I had lived Her time to a minute. (4.2.250-8)

67 Christopher Heydon, A Defence of Iudiciall Astrologie (Cambridge: Simon Waterson, 1603), 243. 68 Alexander Ross, Mel Heliconium, or, Poeticall honey gathered out of the weeds of Parnassus (London: William Leak, 1642), 71. 69 Chamber, Treatise, 49-62. 138

Bosola taunts the belatedly remorseful prince by citing the implicit hierarchy of Ferdinand’s trickle-down astrometeorology, though he undermines and inverts it by saying that murdered blood rises up and “bedews the heavens.” In a burlesque inversion, this reversed, bloody precipitation becomes stellified as heavenly bodies. Moreover, when the duke worries that “she died young,” he is troubled not only by her death that came too early but by his own, which is stubbornly coming too late. Despite their shared astrological nativity, Ferdinand did not live

“Her time to a minute.” This full-stopped half-line is telling, cutting the line itself short despite the timeframe guaranteed by the twins’ shared nativities. While various critics have mused over the fifth act’s awkward lack of the title character, the protracted absence of the Duchess emphasizes Ferdinand’s horror that she died too soon and that, despite their linked astrological profiles, the twins did not go out of the world together.70 Because it confirms a persistent early modern critique of judicial astrology, the twin’s death deprives Ferdinand of the easily legible ontological anchor for his politics, revealing to the duke what the play’s inverted, unreliable astrometeorology has hinted at throughout: that, despite his claims, Ferdinand’s human authority is not to be easily read out of the structures of nature.

Ferdinand’s conundrum here—the absence of a reliable natural foothold for his political vision—approximates Hamlet’s quandary according to Margreta de Grazia’s Hamlet without

Hamlet; the Danish prince is denied his hereditary accession to the throne and is, then, unanchored from the land, the material guarantor of his social worth.71 The notable difference between Ferdinand and Hamlet is that, for the Calabrian duke, the issue is largely

70 For a helpful summary of criticism that addresses the play’s final, dragging act, see Christina Luckyj, A Winter’s Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies of John Webster (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 91-104. 71 Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 23-44. 139 epistemological.72 The play’s inversions, subversions, and deferrals of conventional astrometeorology is unable to say definitively how the heavens and their winds relate to the

Amalfi court; instead, it can only come out against the definitive statements in general, against the politicized cosmic certitude surrounding Ferdinand in the first half of the play. Because

Duchess’s critique of Ferdinand’s political determinism is pitched from a position of skepticism toward monolithic models of downward-flowing determinism, it may seem like Ferdinand’s madness is caused by horror at something that looks like human freedom.

But while Duchess subverts Ferdinand’s overconfident evaluations of astrometeorological determinism, it does not formulate any full-throated theory of human freedom. It is true that Ferdinand loses his mind because he survives his sister for much longer than his definitive, deterministic reading of the stars demands, but he does die spectacularly nonetheless. As with the horoscope of the Duchess’s son (and as with the predictions of burlesque almanacs), it is not the conclusions of astrometeorological prognostication with which the play takes issue; those conclusions are, tragically, as near to certain as they can get. Rather, the play challenges the conclusiveness of those prognostications. Thus, while Duchess rejects simple astrometeorological and political readings, it cannot put forward any optimistic or triumphalist theory of human freedom, and it is here that a consideration of the play’s astrometeorology can significantly contribute to existing Duchess scholarship.

Beginning perhaps with Catherine Belsey’s study of selfhood and tragedy, many critics have suggested that the play stages the transition between residual conceptions of early modern

72 For another ecocritical take on the epistemological problem of early modern nature, see Robert Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 140 subjectivity and the yet-nascent values of modern liberal humanism.73 These critics understand this transition through the Duchess’s attempt to construct a private domestic sphere in opposition to the expectations of the public sphere, represented by the demands of her two aristocratic brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal.74 And while critics like Theodora Jankowski and Wendy

Wall have slowly reintegrated the play’s conceptions of the private and public spheres in ways that do not necessarily anticipate modern liberalism, the liberatory dimension of that liberalism—its emphasis on freedom, choice, and selfhood—have gone largely unexamined in ways that challenge our modern understanding of those terms.75 For instance, while they disagree about the precise status of her emphasis on domesticity, both Alan Sinfield and Karin Coddon agree that the Duchess “asserts her own will” and is “resolutely . . . individualistic” in her “self- possession” and “self-assertion.”76 And in her study of widowhood in the period, Elizabeth

Oakes has asserted that the Duchess exercises the “freedom and choice” that early modern widows were thought to have when remarrying.77 I mean to question what exactly the play’s depiction of this freedom might be, what “self-assertion” might look like, and to what the

Duchess’s apparent choices amount. With closer scrutiny we can see that the Duchess’s freedom

73 Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York: Methuen, 1985). 74 See, for example, Karin Coddon, “The Duchess of Malfi: Tyranny and Spectacle in Jacobean Drama,” in Madness in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 1-17; Mary Beth Rose, “The Heroics of Marriage in Renaissance Tragedy,” in The Duchess of Malfi: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Dympna Callaghan (New York: St. Martins 1998), 122-43. 75 Theodora Jankowski, “Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi,” Studies in Philology 87.2 (1990): 221-45; Wendy Wall, “Just a Spoonful of Sugar: Syrup and Domesticity in Early Modern England,” Modern Philology 104.2 (2006): 149-72. 76 Coddon, “Duchess,” 7-8; Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England 1560-1660 (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 103. 77 Elizabeth Oakes, “The Duchess of Malfi as a Tragedy of Identity,” Studies in Philology 96.1 (1999): 51-67, quote at 59. 141 of choice cannot signify what it does us today and is, instead, entangled in older, yet newly problematized, models of determinism.

This modified reliance on older models of self and society is nowhere more apparent than in what critics generally identify as the strongest representation of the Duchess’s heroic freedom: her unconventional, companionate choice of a husband. Instead of representing a new political vision of selfhood, Antonio is depicted as the other (burlesque, inverted) side of Ferdinand’s coin. Antonio’s place at court, for example, is repeatedly described through astrology. Joking with the Duchess about his clandestine political influence, Antonio flirts that his “rule is only in the night” (3.2.8). Bosola, too, applies astrological language to the up-jumped Antonio, complaining about his flatterers (a problem consistently associated with Ferdinand) by facetiously telling the Duchess that “none [are] happy but such as were born/ Under his blest planet” (2.1.101; 3.2.234-5). And, immediately after Antonio warns Bosola that he is in the shadow of Ferdinand’s eclipse, the sullen Machiavel supplies a burlesque inversion by quipping that Antonio’s social advancement makes him “lord of the ascendant,” suggesting that Antonio’s moralizing is moot because soon, Bosola suspects, Antonio will be just another tyrant in power, another Ferdinand. The interplay of nocturnal “rule” and those elements which are “Under” it constitute the natural ideology that is generally associated with Ferdinand, thus troubling the conclusion that Antonio represents for the Duchess a total political alternative to the tyrannical duke. Even in the play’s opening words, we are treated to a hierarchical model of nature belonging to Antonio when the steward, newly returned from France, describes the French king’s administration at court:

[He calls his court] His master’s masterpiece, the work of heaven— Considering duly that a prince’s court 142

Is like a common fountain, whence should flow Pure silver drops in general. But if’t chance Some cursed example poison’t near the head, ‘Death and diseases through the whole land spread.’ (1.1.5-15)

Like Ferdinand, Antonio places the French king and his court higher, conceptually, than the land over which he rules. The court is a work of “heaven” and is at the “head” of the metaphorical river of the realm. Indeed, this vignette of a functional polity might seem an unattainable ideal for the diseased Italian court, but the naturalized ideology of elevated authority implied in the image of the kingly fountain is immediately reminiscent of the similarly upward-bent Ferdinand.

That Antonio seems to represent older models of subjectivity that most critics agree the Duchess resists prompts us to reevaluate, as I do below, whether the Duchess actually theorizes herself outside of established notions of subjectivity and, thus, whether she trailblazes a more radical and more “modern” politics of merit and free self-assertion.

The Duchess’s sexual choice, then, does not heroically extricate her from the deterministic pull of existing political and astrometeorological models. It does, however, demonstrate to Ferdinand that those models are not precisely restricted to his own version of absolutism and may, in fact, be wielded in multiple ways for multiple purposes. This is especially apparent in the Duchess’s own use of burlesque inversion. If Ferdinand’s metaphorical myopia installs him upward among the stars and their weather, the Duchess habitually uses similar language either to pull such upward presumption down or to divest power to a lower position. Her burlesque inversions of social and cosmic order, along with the subversive force of her critique, recall the ironically inverted skies of burlesque almanacs. When, for example, her brothers caution her against taking a lover, she soliloquizes that “If all my royal kindred/ Lay in 143 my way unto this marriage,/ I’d make them my low footsteps” (1.2.266-8). When, too, Ferdinand imprisons her, the Duchess condemns her brother with a bitter reversal of his airy rhetoric.

Duchess: I could curse the stars—. . . Bosola: Look you—the stars shine still. Duchess: Oh, but you must Remember my curse hath a great way to go. Plague that make lanes through largest families Consume them! Bosola: Fie, lady! Duchess: Let them, like tyrants, Never be remembered but for the ills they have done. (4.1.93-103)

Here, the Duchess reverses the epidemic effects that unfavorable stars were thought to engender in the air, cursing them with plague (rather than vice versa), a violent reversal directed at her brother’s own elements: the air and the stars. Her description of the stars as “largest families” suggests that it is not merely the starry court to which the Duchess pitches her curse but also to her brothers, a linkage confirmed when the lady-in-waiting Cariola echoes the Duchess’s censure of starry “tyrants,” repeatedly applying the term to her “tyrant brother” (4.2.2-4). The Duchess’s rhetorical claim here for burlesque inversion cheapens Ferdinand’s starry aspirations by ironizing the conventional excellence of celestial bodies, first, by suggesting that those supposedly incorruptible bodies could be susceptible to the plague that she speaks up to them and, second, by tarnishing their conventional poetic function as icons of Ovidian memorialization. Instead of recording the undying dramas of mythic figures—a poetics that Prince Henry’s elegies also employ—the constellations here should only be “remembered” as tyrants. The Duchess herself, however, is not immune to the degrading ironies of such burlesque inversions. During her murder, for instance, she instructs her stranglers to “Pull and pull strongly; for your able strength/ Must pull down heaven upon me” in a celestial/spiritual plea that again inverts 144 positional hierarchy, but, as with the Owl’s burlesque boast that her (commonsensical) predictions dragged “some [stars] down to helpe those that write Almanacks for London,” we know that the heavens have little to do with it (4.2.222-3).78 Indeed, we discover later from the ghostly “ECHO from [her] grave,” that the Duchess is not translated upward by heaven’s merciful condescension. Even in death, she is helplessly earthbound (“List of Roles”).

Just as her Antonio’s language exposes his inverse adaptation of celestial nobility, the

Duchess’s responses to her twin are not the first stirrings of a new discourse of liberal subjectivity but are, instead, bound up with and informed by her brother’s tyrannical cosmology.

As in burlesque almanacs of the period, however, such inversions are nonetheless powerful tools.

By adapting burlesque skepticism and contemporary arguments against judicial astrology,

Duchess provides a space for social critique that undercuts the political models that its audience might derive from stars or winds without, importantly, suggesting humans are immune to astrometeorological influence because of some excellence of will or spirit.

Because Duchess critiques social and starry determinism but does not advance a theory of human freedom, it remains to be seen what deterministic paradigm binds the inhabitants of the

Amalfi court. Just as burlesque almanacs undercut judicial astrology through its very use, there is still room by the end of the play for the tyrannous influence of celestial bodies (hence, Bosola’s final lament that “We are merely the stars’ tennis balls”). However, as I have argued, any conclusive social deployment of astrometeorology becomes suspect, yet The Duchess of Malfi is certainly definitive in its theorizations of human unfreedom. I argue in the pages that remain that the play’s characterization of humanity is irrevocably and tragically unfree because of its own

78 Dekker, Owles Almanacke, 2, italics in the original. 145 essential depravity. This notion of sinful bondage, which I call “reprobate determinism,” is adapted by Duchess and burlesque almanacs alike from Calvin’s predestinarian theology in

England. As I argue below, the reprobate determinism of burlesque astrology and of The

Duchess of Malfi theorizes a particularly bleak vision of human agency that amounts to a lonesome predestination that lacks the redeeming presence of God.

“Necessity compels me”: Reprobate Determinism in Duchess, Burlesque Almanacs, and Calvin

As I have shown, the self-critical use of astrology in burlesque almanacs portrays the stars and planets as red herrings for the social ills of England. However, even as they distance themselves from the specious methodology of judicial astrologers, this fundamental uncertainty toward astrologically legible celestial determinism did not generate a vision of human freedom.

Indeed, like the eventual certainty of “Domesday” even against the mad astrologian’s crackpot calculations, and like the near-assured ill-fatedness of the Duchess’s son despite his incomplete horoscope, burlesque almanacs were certain that their own predictions would come to pass, not necessarily through confidence in astrometeorological precision but, rather, through the fundamental predictability of human strife.

This unique balance between astrological skepticism and prognostic certainty arising from reliable human depravity drove many of the predictions of drunkenness, infidelity, and social discord that were found in burlesque almanacs. This was a characteristic feature of all burlesque examples we have explored thus far, but Adam Fouleweather forges a paradoxical union between astrological doubt and predictive certainty while providing an ironclad theory of 146 human immorality. Discussing the prodigious effects of an impending solar eclipse,

Fouleweather writes,

But heere by the waye gentle Reader, note that this Eclipse sheweth, that this yeer shall be some strange birthes of Children produced in some monstrous forme. . . . [B]ut because the Eclipse chaunceth Southerlye, it is little to be feared that the effectes shall fall in England: yet somewhat it is to bee doubted, that diuers Children shall be borne, that when they come to age shall not knowe their owne fathers: others shall haue their fingers of the nature of Lyme twigges.79

Fouleweather’s predictions here outline the monstrous efficacy of an eclipse that, despite a

“Southerlye” course that misses the English latitude, still portends “strange birthes.” For savvy readers, however, the apparent parthenogenesis that Fouleweather foretells is not due directly to the malignant eclipse but to the simple fact of cuckoldry, which causes children not to “knowe their [biological] fathers.” The twig-fingered children, too, are of “monstrous forme” not because of the portent but because their thieving fingers grab merchandise as if they were coated with sticky “Lyme.” The phrase “it is to be doubted” that begins Fouleweather’s account of these supposed marvels paradoxically deploys the word doubt both as a marker of skepticism and, using another early modern valence of the word, as an indicator of dread for imminent events.80

On the one hand, the author’s skepticism toward “Asse-tronomy” (as he calls it) is evident throughout the almanac, and so doubt signifies the tongue-in-cheek suspicion shared between the author and a savvy reader. On the other hand, doubt indexes a certainty that emerges despite this dubiety because, of course, Fouleweather is confident in his binding prediction that some wives will be unfaithful and that some children will grow up to be thieves. Thus doubt becomes a concise index both of skepticism toward astrology and certainty regarding human depravity—the

79 Fouleweather, Wonderfull, sig. B2r. 80 OED, s.v. “doubt.” 147 two characteristic features of the burlesque genre collapsed into a single word with seemingly contradictory early modern meanings.

For these almanacs and, as I will show, for The Duchess of Malfi, continued human depravity is ensured not primarily by a deterministic cosmos but, tautologically, by the fact of human depravity itself, which then becomes the new, more reliable model for a heavens that were thought to reign us in and bind us. I say “primarily” here because, as I have noted, this mode of skepticism need not totally deny the operation of cosmic influences on the human world. It is merely that those influences were not as precisely measurable as the metric of depravity. Fouleweather, for one, is confident in his forecast of cuckoldry because the human tendency toward evil is as easily legible a predictor as some astrologers think the stars and planets are.

This framework emerged at least in part from Calvin’s predestinarian theology that circulated in post-Reformation England. Indeed, because the genre’s emphasis on predictable misdeeds meshed perfectly with the predestinarian doctrine of sin’s irresistibility, burlesque almanac could be directly outfitted for Christian didacticism. John Moniepennie’s A Christian

Almanack (1612), for instance, reprints many previous burlesque witticisms, though it evacuates them of their comic tone “for the exhortation and warning of all estates.”81 The same skepticism toward judicial astrology (which the author does “not respect so much”), along with the same burlesque inversion (all carnal vanities are imagined upward as the planet Mercury), are adapted here for the purpose of inspiring intense spiritual self-scrutiny: “[T]hese [sinners], I say, shall through the Sunne [God] haue great Diseases in all the members of their bodies, in the Lunges,

81 John Moniepennie, A Christian Almanack Needefull and True for All Countries, Persons and Times (London: John Budge, 1612), sig. B1r. 148

Liuer, Hands, and Feete, yea, and the perils of their soules. . . . Whosoeuer therefore hath this disease (as there is no man without it) let him do wisely, let him proue and examine himselfe at all times, and goe to Phisike before he be sore sicke.”82 Here, the appropriate response to the punishment of sin is not an upward astrological calculus—despite the lofty metaphorical position of divine justice as the “Sunne”—but an inward turn toward the indwelling “Phisicke” of faith through Christ.

Christian burlesque almanacs like Moniepennie’s resonated with Calvinist theology because they theorized the feebleness of human agency in a predestinarian cosmos. Anthony

Nixon, for instance, elaborates a specifically theological concept of sinful determinism in his almanac The Black Yeare (1606), which appropriately concludes with a summary of several

Protestant tenets. First decrying “iudiciary Astronomers” before launching into his own sardonic astrometeorological predictions for English sinners, Nixon defends these bleak prognostications from a Calvinist position of scriptural predestination.83 He writes, “The Church of Rome teacheth, that since the fall of Adam, man hath free-will, whereas God saith, After that time, that the imaginations of mens heartes are onely euill euery day. . . . There is not one that doeth good, yea not one.”84 For Nixon, the postlapsarian truth of human sinfulness forecloses the possibility of free will, a predestinarian vision of moral dysfunction that is well in line with his burlesque predictions of London turpitude.

Indeed, for Calvin (and for all burlesque astrologians), even speaking of freedom is made ludicrous by the human tendency to do evil almost unerringly. Mocking the idea of free will,

82 Ibid., sig. C1v-C3v, italics in the original. 83 Anthony Nixon, The Black Year Seria Iocis (London: William Timme, 1606), sig. C3v, italics in the original. 84 Ibid., sig. E1v-E2r, italics in the original. 149

Calvin himself derides, “A noble freedom, indeed, for man not to be forced to serve sin, yet to be such a willing slave.”85 For Calvin, the ubiquity of original sin, transmitted genealogically down through Adam, assures that the human “will is bound by the fetters of sin.”86 Even faith and good works, according to Calvin, is produced not by some human triumph over these “fetters” but, rather, by an indwelling Christ alone: “[I]t is not [our] will; it is not [our] running that prepares the way to salvation for us. Only the mercy of the Lord is here. . . . Not that we ought not to will and to run; but because God accomplishes both in us.”87 For Nixon and, indeed, for Calvin, only

God can truly enact anything, and humans are either elect through the intercession of Christ or reprobate through the deterministic transgression of Adam.

Although The Duchess of Malfi subverts the political cosmologies of determinism, it, like the Calvinist strain in burlesque almanacs, insists on a determinism that is founded primarily upon human reprobation, which is then understood through the traditional determinism of the stars and planets. I do not mean to suggest that the supposedly devilish winds and plague-riddled stars of the play are straightforwardly Calvinist phenomena. I hope to show, instead, that

Webster’s play, burlesque almanacs, and Calvinist predestination were working through the same deterministic issues and that Duchess borrowed and adapted its critique of astrology, its structural inversions, and its conception of unfreedom from these contemporary discourses.88 My argument, then, responds to a body of Duchess criticism that, as I have discussed, has not quite

85 Ibid. 86 Jean Calvin, Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion in Two Volumes, ed. John McNeill, trans., Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 2.2.7. 87 Ibid., 2.5.17. 88 For more on predestination in other early modern plays, see Martha Rozett, The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 150 shed the language of liberal self-determination while also missing the predestinarian overtones that render such language impossible.

Far from discovering a proto-modern sense of freedom that happily sheds the definitive determinisms of judicial astrology, I find that Duchess—through its repeated emphasis on necessity, causation, and human faultiness—is preoccupied with the kind of reprobate determinism that I outline above in my discussion of burlesque astrometeorology and predestinarian doctrine. When, for instance, the Duchess stages Antonio’s banishment in order to protect their family from Ferdinand and the Cardinal, Antonio performs an astronomical lamentation that, despite its irony, bemoans the feebleness of human action: “I will not blame the cause on’t, but do think/ The necessity of my malevolent star/ Procures this, not her humour”

(3.2.196). Antonio is right that it is “not her humour” that causes the Duchess to banish him because any outburst of anger in this scene is staged. But the underhanded condemnation of

Ferdinand as a “malevolent star” identifies political malignancy rather than specific cosmic intervention as the cause of Antonio’s banishment. His grief for necessity, however, rings true from a man who is assailed on all sides by hostile interests and, so, must indeed flee Amalfi. As the Duchess notes to Antonio before their performance, “The place that you must fly to is

Ancona. . . . [S]hort syllables/ Must stand for periods. I must now accuse you/ Of such a feigned crime . . . ‘Cause it must shield our honours” (3.2.173-80). In seven short lines, the Duchess repeats “must” four times, so while readers will have been instructed to see Antonio’s

“malevolent” star for the vicious duke that it really is, it still entails a causal sense of “necessity” that, like burlesque almanacs, cannot help but use astrometeorological language to understand the problem of unfreedom. 151

Antonio’s sense of necessity returns in the play’s final act when he resolves to avenge his family on the now-mad Ferdinand. Walking with his friend Delio through the weatherworn ruins of a church, Antonio discovers that the crumbling architecture “Gives the best echo that you ever heard” (5.3.5). This echo is listed as emerging “from the Duchess’s grave” in the List of Roles, and it seems to warn Antonio of the dangers ahead in a voice that eerily resembles the Duchess’s.

When Antonio says to Delio, “Necessity compels me. Make scrutiny/ Throughout the passes of your own life; you’ll find it/ Impossible to fly your fate,” the Echo reverberates something that looks like a urgent warning: “Oh, fly your fate” (5.3.32-4). When the Echo scene appears in criticism, the Duchess’s apparent spiritual persistence beyond the fact of her bodily death is often understood as a proto-Cartesian formulation of the mind’s rational liberty whereby the free self

“has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing.”89 Sheetal Lodhia, for instance, has argued that the Echo constitutes a “Cartesian characterization of selfhood” and that it

“anticipate[s] Cartesian mechanistic dualism where consciousness constitutes subjectivity and where bodies can be automata.”90 By contrast, I argue that the Echo scene reveals that consciousness, too, can be an automaton. When the Echo admonishes Antonio to “fly [his] fate,” it may seem as if such heroic resistance is being presented as a viable option, but Antonio cites

“necessity” before plodding morbidly toward his death at the Amalfi court, heedless of the

Echo’s warnings. Most of all, however, to understand the Echo as an icon of liberal subjectivity ignores the fact that her “vocalizations” are, like Antonio’s understanding of fate, predetermined.

As an Echo, she can only recite what has been spoken by other characters, and because of this

89 Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method & Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. Deena Weinberg (Lexington, KY: BN Publishing, 2007), 32. 90 Sheetal Lodhia, “‘The House is Hers, the Soul Is but a Tenant’: Material Self-Fashioning and Revenge Tragedy,” Early Theatre 12.2 (2009): 135-61, esp. 136, 155. 152 feeble liberty, Antonio marches predictably to his fate. The Echo’s cry, then, is deeply ironic not merely because Antonio himself is resolved to his irresistible destiny but because her plea that he

“fly [his] fate” is, itself, fated by the antecedent utterances of other characters.

Such moments of determinism in the play have a peculiarly Calvinist hue, especially in the play’s depiction of Bosola. We might not expect the murderous lackey to reveal early modern theological insights, but in fact the thoughtful malcontent speaks some of the more explicitly religious moments of the play while recognizing that he suffers under a regime of reprobate determinism. After executing the Duchess at the behest of the duke, Bosola is stricken with a sudden penitence and announces the difficulty of performing good acts even while the proper use of reason enjoins us to benevolence:

[A] guilty conscience Is a black register wherein is writ All our good deeds and bad, a perspective That shows us hell. That we cannot be suffered To do good when we have a mind to it! (4.2.345-9)

For Calvin and, here, for Bosola, a “guilty conscience” procures “instruct[ion] in a right standard of conduct by natural law.”91 This inborn knowledge of good and evil, however, does not ensure that a subject will “do good” because of the reprobate determinism of human sinfulness.

Bosola’s frustration about the elusiveness of upright action may be taken one of two ways, and both accord with Calvinist understandings of sin’s inescapable bondage. The first, amounting to

“we unknowingly do evil even when trying to do good,” describes Calvin’s conceptualization of

“incontinence” whereby a sinner’s self-delusion muddies the specific application of general moral laws such that “he forgets the general principle that he has just laid down.”92 Thus, against

91 Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.22. 92 Ibid. 153 the moral lessons gleaned from a “guilty conscience . . . wherein is writ/ All our good deeds and bad,” the incorrect application of morality in specific instances can misrepresent even “murder as something good.”93 When Bosola complains earlier that “the devil [and Ferdinand]/ Candies all sins o’er,” he is evincing precisely this Calvinist understanding of moral delusion whereby evil can seem be the best course of action for a mistaken sinner.

The other way to interpret Bosola’s grievance—“that we willingly do evil even when we know the best course of action”—recalls another of Calvin’s theorization of sin’s irresistible bondage: intemperance. While incontinence, for Calvin, indexes a moral lapse through mistake or self-delusion, intemperance implies a knowledge of the good (“a mind to it”) but a willful rejection of proper action. As Calvin notes, intemperance can manifest as an existential malaise in a guilty conscience such as Bosola’s: “Sometimes the shamefulness of evil-doing presses upon the conscience so that one, imposing upon himself no false image of the good, knowingly and willingly rushes headlong into wickedness.”94 To such a mind, the torments of the conscience are not sufficient to divert the sinner from his or her “habitual evil.”95 While the depraved willingness to commit evil might seem to hint at some free human agency to do otherwise,

Calvin’s use of “habitual” diminishes that agency by suggesting that its actions are determined by the pull of previous transgressions.

These two formulations of how difficult it can be to escape sin are vital for understanding the play’s reprobate determinism through Bosola’s moral lapses and, later, his unknowing ethical blunders. Shortly after his sudden remorsefulness at the Duchess’s murder, Bosola resolves to

93 Ibid., 2.2.23. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 154 amend his character and strike back at Ferdinand with “the sword of justice,” saying, “O penitence, let me truly taste thy cup,/ That throws men down, only to raise them up” (5.2.329-

32). While it would be clear to a theologically instructed audience that vengeance is inconsistent with proper Christian mores, the ambivalently reformed murderer believes that revenge will allow him to participate in God’s justice, citing the penitential “cup” in terms that recall the

Communion supper. However, Bosola’s well-intentioned incontinence here transitions into a defeated intemperance when, as he lays in wait for Ferdinand, he seems to have full knowledge of his own sinfulness: “My death is plotted. Here’s the consequence of murder./ ‘We value not desert, nor Christian breath,/ When we know black deeds must be cured with death’” (5.4.38-40).

Bosola’s bleak circumspection here begins with an expression of “plotted” determinism, and the curative “death” to which he refers could be either his own (which he—correctly—regards as inevitable) or Ferdinand’s. Either way, he no longer fools himself by thinking that his vengeance partakes of the “Christian breath.” And yet his speculation on how a retaliatory evil might “cure” a prior murder suggests that, despite knowledge of his own evil, Bosola still craves participation in some form of justice, however un-Christian.

Bosola’s ambiguous conversion, however, offers him neither an escape from the cycle of reprobation nor a share in some non-Christian sense of retribution. Indeed, he proves himself a murderer of innocents once again in spite of his penitential conscience, mortally wounding

Antonio by mistake while waiting for Ferdinand in the dark of the court. Neither his guilt nor his intentions allows him to escape his own murderous nature, for he kills “the man [he] would have saved ‘bove [his] own life” (5.4.52). Although Bosola hopes to rectify his own murderous nature through a gesture of personal justice, his heroism falls flat as he mistakenly chooses his “habitual 155 evil.” In his study of early modern conceptions of Calvinist determinism, Daniel Cadman has elaborated exactly this ineffective moral vigilantism in Fulke Greville’s Alaham and in Calvin’s thought. Indeed, Cadman might as well have been describing Bosola when he writes, “human agency is inadequate to overturn the predetermined action and . . . well-meaning friends can often become caught up with the fate of another when attempting to intervene on their behalf.”96

For Cadman, Alaham’s adaptation of Calvinist predestination recommends adopting a stance of stoic passivity regarding one’s own fate, and readers of Bosola’s “direful misprision” that kills

Antonio are similarly made to understand that it is Bosola’s delusion of self-efficacy that does nothing other than further confirming his predestinate murderousness. Like Antonio, the

Duchess, subjects of burlesque almanacs, and Calvin’s reprobate humanity, Bosola’s course is firmly determined even in his attempts to avert it. Indeed, he notes “My death is plotted” with the clarity of a literary critic on a second reading (5.4.38).

Conclusion

At the close of the play while he is dying (as per his prediction), Bosola is asked how

Antonio died, and the exhausted murderer responds,

In a mist; I know not how— Such a mistake as I have often seen In a play. Oh, I am gone. ……………………………………… Let worthy minds ne’er stagger in distrust To suffer death or shame for what is just. Mine is another voyage. (5.5.92-103)

96 Daniel Cadman, “Stoicism, Calvinism, and Determinism in Fulke Greville’s Alaham,” in Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England, eds. James D. Murdock and Kathryn R. McPherson (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), 41-61, 59. 156

Only now does Bosola value the moral passivity “To suffer death or shame for what is just” that

Cadman associates with Calvinist notions of frail human agency and reprobate determinism. His resigned “I am gone,” delivered with the irrevocability of present-perfect tense, announces the predestined horror of Bosola’s “plotted” death. His initial meteorological analysis of Antonio’s death—“In a mist”— is, importantly, offered only insofar as it is skeptically qualified (“I know not how”) in relation to the reprobate determinism outlined above, explained from the perspective of a playgoer’s horror at “mistakes” that are as tragic as they are scripted.

Bosola’s temporary qualification of “mist” as the definitive external cause for his fatal blunder, along with the defeated etiological turn toward the urban space of the playhouse, are well in line with both the ironized astrometeorology and the urban focus of burlesque almanacs.

And, indeed, Bosola’s tenuous utterance of misty misdiagnosis is remarkably similar to one described by burlesque astrologian Adam Euesdropper when he writes, “Great Mistes and fogges will arise . . . so that some shall not see but to take their Neighbours bed for their owne.”97

Neither Bosola’s nor the adulterer’s misrecognitions are due to some easily legible determinism of the stars and weather but are, instead, due primarily to the predictable (and, for Bosola,

“plotted”) reprobate determinism that arises from human fallenness.

Against Bosola’s shrugged denial of any definitive external cause for his and Antonio’s deaths, Ferdinand’s emphasis on external cause runs contrary to much of the play’s skeptical subversion of those etiologies. When Ferdinand’s legible regime of astrometeorology collapses around him after his twin’s death predates his own, the tyrant seeks a satisfactory replacement

97 Euesdropper, Platoes Cap, sig. D2v, italics in the original. 157 for his naturalizing etiology, imagining causative virtue in everything except his own depraved character. Belatedly distraught at his sister’s death, he muses,

For let me but examine well the cause: What was the meanness of her match to me? Only, I must confess, I had a hope, Had she continued widow, to have gained An infinite mass of treasure by her death. And that was the main cause—her marriage— That drew a stream of gall quite through my heart. (4.2.270-6)

Antonio’s natural metaphor of the healthy polity’s hierarchical fountain returns here, now dribbled down to merely a diseased “stream” of bitterness. Importantly, however, a structural inversion in the image no longer identifies Ferdinand himself as the astrometeorological locus of the play’s causation. Antonio’s admiration for the downward-flowing health of a good polity is here flipped in a burlesque inversion; Ferdinand grants causal primacy to the lower “meanness” of his sister’s marriage. Throughout the course of the play, however, the audience has been trained to see the ironies of such inversions and so will agree with Leah Marcus, who finds

Ferdinand’s self-conscious and repeated identification of the “main cause” here “specious”

(4.2.273-4, note). This unsatisfied compulsion to trace the cause of the tragedy now that

Ferdinand’s deterministic scheme has been upended returns even in his last lines: “I will vault credit and affect high pleasures/ Beyond death. . . . My sister, oh, my sister—there’s the cause on’t./ Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,/ Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust”

(5.5.66-71). Here, Ferdinand’s habitual focus upward with words like “vault” and “high” returns with exhausted irony at the moment of his death (he certainly will not be heading upward), paired both with a similarly dubious, inverted ascription of causality to the lowly “dust.” And while “dust,” to Ferdinand, explicitly refers to his sister, it also ironically hints at a Christian icon 158 of human lowliness that the duke would erroneously consider to be beneath him: the dust from which humanity was created and to which it must return in death. Ferdinand’s compulsive search for an exclusively external causation—whether among the stars or in his sister’s marriage— elides his own tyrannical responsibility for the play’s horrors. While both he and Bosola share the same “necessity” emerging from their own reprobation, only Bosola achieves self-knowledge sufficient to see it. Indeed, while Ferdinand has heavenly pretentions even while surrounded by the carnage of his tyranny, Bosola admits with the predictive clarity of one who knows that

“[his] fate moves swift” down to hell: “Mine is another voyage” (5.4.77, 103).

The bloody yet inevitable final moments of Duchess concisely demonstrate the schema of human unfreedom of other early modern discourses that are increasingly skeptical of definitive sociopolitical readings of heavenly bodies while still lacking the ability to completely discard the terms of astrometeorology. While the play’s treatment of Ferdinand questions the easy sociopolitical legibility of the heavens, the play stops well short of abandoning astrological language entirely. Rather, the play’s inversions of astrometeorology mingle, though ironically, humans and their cosmic environment by understanding the traditionally determining structures of stars and planets not as reliable subjects for triumphant scientific inquiry but as an important yet limited analogy for the shackles of human sin. Just as Calvin noted that the punishment of

Original Sin “seizes and envelops innocent creatures through our fault,” the inverted and debased astrometeorology of Duchess cannot look up at the heavens without encountering a model of human depravity.98 Even without full faith in the prognostications of proudly confident astrologers, one can always forecast that sin will determine human action as predictably as the

98 Calvin, Institutes, 2.6.1. 159 moon determines the tide, as assured as the reverberated words of an echo: cuckolds will be cuckolded, fraudulent lawyers will defraud, and tyrants will tyrannize.

The Duchess of Malfi’s subtle adaptation of reprobate determinism and burlesque inversion not only counters easy politicizations of the cosmos but also illustrates the opportunities—and limitations—of a new way of conceptualizing human interaction with the environment. For early modern ecocriticism to provide a full account of humanity’s social and material embeddedness within its ecologies, it must not omit the larger apparatus of the stars and planets. This much-needed turn to astrometeorology, however, may elucidate both the ways in which humans must be politically invested in their environment and the pitfalls of such political engagement. While The Duchess of Malfi cannot escape the astrometeorology that gives its various political structures life, the play’s burlesque inversions of Ferdinand’s princely cosmology expose just how vexed it is to take us at our word regarding the political realities of the world in which we live. Because it was so contentious for early moderns, astrometeorology becomes richly problematic for the play. The stars and their winds remain the model for human unfreedom in the play, yet its inversions ask to what extent humanity is nonetheless responsible for its own miseries. Unlike the world in Calvinist theology, however, there is no redeeming God in The Duchess of Malfi, and sin becomes, for the play, a physical law, as predictable and measurable as the “plotted” course of the planets across the sky. 160

CHAPTER THREE

The “Beggar’s plague” and the Empty Throne: The Social Shapes of Death in Succession- Year Plague Literature

While Chapter One sought to elucidate more fully the bonds (and subtle breaches) between nature and supernature, this chapter explores a phenomenon that existed so firmly on the conceptual fringe between the natural and the divine worlds that, for many early moderns, it threatened to separate them entirely. Seventeenth-century physicians agreed on the meteorological foundation of at least some forms of plague, writing that a dank abundance of moisture, either evaporating miasmatically from decomposing creatures in boggy regions or condensing in the air after wetter weathers, could infect a human body with plague.1 In 1603, for instance, the surgeon Thomas Thayre designates “the corruption of the air” and “the euill disposition of the body” as two potential causes of plague, and the physician Stephen Bradwell in

1636 states that the “putrid” form of the plague arises primarily from noxious astrometeorological influences, either emitted directly from the stars or from the climate when

“the weather is unseasonable.”2 The plague’s seventeenth-century associations thus document the volatile interplay between human society and a vital, even breathing, natural world, and it is for these reasons that plague has received some recent ecocritical attention.3 But while the consensus of most scientific authorities located the plague in the festering moisture in the air, the

1 In addition to the physicians cited below, see Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague, Containing the Nature, Signes, and Accidents of the Same (London: Edward White and Nicholas Ling, 1603), sig. B4r; Ambroise Paré, A Treatise of the Plague Contayning the Causes, Signes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure Thereof, trans. anonymous (London, 1630), 4-6. 2 Thomas Thayre, A Treatise of the Pestilence (London, 1603), 2, 8; Stephen Bradwell, Physick for the Sicknesse, Commonly Called the Plague (London, 1636), 3-5. 3 Rebecca Totaro, “Introduction,” The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures 1603-1721 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012); Charles Whitney, “Dekker’s and Middleton’s Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature,” in Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, eds. Ernest Gilman and Rebecca Totaro (New York: Routledge, 2011), 201-18. 161 spiritual meaning of the disease encouraged a parallel etiology that, while not always incommensurate with its atmospheric etiology, often existed uncomfortably alongside its natural explanations. In addition to Thayre’s material etiologies, he first lists an alternate cause of the plague “that is sometimes the onely cause thereof”: “sinne.”4 And Bradwell’s treatise details two distinct strains of the disease: the “putrid,” which is transmitted through the environmental causes outlined above, and the “simple,” which “ariseth from no distemper of the Blood, putrefaction of Humors, or influence of Starres; but falleth meerely from the immediate stroke of

God’s punishing Angell.”5 The etiological division here emerges from scripturally sanctioned interpretations of plague as an avenging blow against sinners, alongside seventeenth-century radical Protestantism emphasizing an “immediate” relationship with God—a theology especially prevalent throughout popular plague literature—over and against the materially mediated providence espoused by Anglican authorities.6 And while these two ideas of providence are by no means incompatible, the urgencies of plague death could, as we will see, encourage some plague tracts and Puritan ministers to deny entirely the plague’s physical basis in search of a divine reason for a trauma that could feel both national and intensely personal.

This chapter follows the conflict between nature and supernature as it manifested in the literature that recorded the 1603 and 1625 plague outbreaks. This conflict, I argue, produced disparate political interpretations of the disease primarily through two important registers that

4 Thayre, Treatise, 3. 5 Bradwell, Physick, 2. 6 See Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1985), 44; Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and the Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23. According to Maus, “The radical Protestants . . . typically contrast an unmediated relationship between God and man, a relationship celebrated for its intrinsic inwardness, with the empty corporeality of external secular affairs.” As we will see, the “corporeality of external . . . affairs” are aligned with the external, meteorological causes of plague. 162 emphasized the challenge of reading God’s justice amid moments of national suffering. First, differences of emphasis between nature and supernature altered the sense of social, political, or economic bias that the plague could be said to have. As other scholars have noted, the political shape of plague death for early modern thinkers was a level plane in which all estates, classes, and positions were equally vulnerable to the disease.7 Imagining that the plague produced a flattened social configuration was made easier by the ailment’s immense spiritual significance.

As a scriptural symbol of punishment—most notably delivered against Pharaonic Egypt but occurring throughout the Hebrew Bible—plagues were a reminder of how God’s displeasure could immediately descend to smite even the most powerful mortals.8 Thus, the plague provided many thinkers with a vision of the afterlife whereby everyone from beggars to kings were equally subject to God, equally eligible for salvation, and equally vulnerable to God’s fury.

These egalitarian formulations of plague’s social shape were, I argue, in conflict with the material realities of plague death, which, far from reaching equally across all social stations, disproportionally affected the lower classes.9 Recognizing that the plague was especially dangerous for poor citizens who could not afford to flee the city endangered the egalitarian shape of the hereafter that plague supposedly revealed, hinting instead at a political vision that actually accentuated the cruelties of existing hierarchies. What is more, suggesting that the plague was a phenomenon that one could flee recalled its specifically weather-bound etiology, thus violating the exclusively supernatural characteristics that other early moderns formulated. The political

7 See, for example, Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp.13-20; Hristomir Staner, Sensory Experience and the Metropolis on the Jacobean Stage (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). 8 Exodus 7:14-12:36; Exodus 32:35, Authorized Version. 9 Slack, Impact of Plague, 165-9. 163 consequences of this conflict between the plague’s two social shapes—between the flattening of social hierarchies and the exacerbation of those hierarchies—is one of this chapter’s focuses. As

I show in my discussion of two plague tracts—Dekker and Middleton’s Newes from Graves-end

(1604) and William Muggins’s London’s Mourning Garment (1603)—this conflict produced unstable political interpretations of God’s justice and meteorological cruelty as writers attempted to accommodate two irreconcilable versions of plague’s socioeconomic structure.

The second register through which literature struggled with the conflict between plague’s natural origins and supernatural essence was through the already tense processes of royal succession. The political, spiritual, and meteorological meanings of death were further complicated in 1603 and 1625, when early modern writers had to process both the horrors of plague outbreaks and the deaths of Queen Elizabeth and King James, respectively. For these years, the anxieties surrounding plague death were accorded a keen political urgency that encouraged analogical theorizations between the state’s body politic and the monarch’s body natural, but the problem of how the deaths of subjects did or did not resonate with the death of the sovereign was a puzzle that was hindered by the incommensurability of the theories outlined above. For some writers, the monarch’s death reinforced the egalitarian shape of the plague by showing how all mortals owe God a death, but it was crucially important not to follow the related logic in suggesting that the monarch was one of the sinners snuffed out by God’s punishing stroke.

Other writers, however, attempted a kind of compromise whereby the sovereign’s death demonstrated the egalitarian reach of death while simultaneously reinforcing existing hierarchies by showing how the head of state’s death sympathetically resonated throughout the realm as 164 mass death in the body politic’s trunk. But as we will see, the horrendous difference between the monarch’s “death” and “plague death” for these texts fouled the totalizing lessons that one might draw from them. Moreover, succession could represent for these poets a much-needed political renewal, with the new monarch standing in for the restored mercy of a monarchical God as the plague lifted, but in reality, the arrival of the plague could exacerbate the already shaky transition of power from one monarch to the next, sapping the political and spiritual comforts that subjects might have enjoyed from a smoother succession process. By examining Thomas Dekker’s The

Wonderfull Yeare (1603) and Abraham Holland’s Hollandi Posthuma (1626), we will see how plague literature’s ambivalent treatments of providence and infected wind could, even in the same tract, undercut both the spiritual condolence that poets attempted to proffer and the naturalizing, political consolation that succession could represent for a grieving England.

For theorizations of plague’s meaning in a politically, spiritually, and physically suffering state, the role of miasmatic air in plague literature shifted in significant ways from theory to theory. Providing the consolations that their readerships craved often led plague writers toward exclusively supernatural theorizations of the disease, but the opposing impulse to represent the scientific consensus of plague’s pneumatic etiology endangered the surety of those consolations.

The powerful and often, for these texts, hopeless desire to represent plague’s supernatural meanings alongside its natural etiology in one coherent understanding of the disease exposes, ironically, the seventeenth-century incoherence of plague thought. By reading the avenues through which pneumatic language seeps into the political or theological reassurances that poets struggle to make in the face of overwhelming tragedy, we can begin to see the disjunctures, fissures, and incompatibilities in early modern plague thought, as well as the politically charged 165 ways those fissures manifest. Thus, throughout this chapter, I argue that the persistent literary presence of air pulled writers away from the conventional ideological comforts of politicizing plague death in 1603 and 1625.10 My exploration of these ruptures in succession-year political condolence culminates in an analysis of Britain’s Remembrancer (1628) by George Wither, in which the vast contradictions of Wither’s treatment of infected weather produces a network of political critique that undercuts both its egalitarian assertion of plague’s supernatural substance and its own celebration of Charles I’s succession. In Britain’s Remembrancer, as in much succession-year plague literature, the space between “The king is dead” and “Long live the king” is filled with something as unassuming as it is dangerous: the breath it costs to speak.

“Putrid” and “Simple” Plagues: The Tensions Between Two Models of Providence

To analyze the disjunctions that the plague’s political import suggested to writers of plague literature, it is important to explore, first, the complex meanings of providence in the period. Because of the plague’s prominence throughout scripture as a divine punishment, early moderns were almost universally agreed that the disease was a manifestation of God’s providence. What precisely that meant, however, was a negotiation between two providential modes: the immediate view that God directly acts in the world, often against individual sinners, and the mediated view in which God works more distantly through secondary material causes.

Recent scholars have corrected previous historical accounts of a firm immediate/mediated providence divide by showing how each vision of providence was mutually entangled with the

10 For more on the ecocritical value of air as a medium that exceeds human perception, see Steve Mentz, “A Poetics of Nothing: Air in the Early Modern Imagination,” Postmedieval 4.1 (2013): 30-41. 166 other in early modern thought.11 Alexandra Walsham, for instance, contends that the Protestant understanding of providence was active, robust, and nuanced in relation to the land. Moreover,

Adrian Streete argues that early modern Protestants valued both immediate and mediated relationships with God. And David Harley shows how English physicians looked to God to work through the physical medium of medicine to authorize and enact curative virtue.12 While these scholars are certainly right that some early modern thinkers were able to balance these two providential schemas, the spiritual and physical urgencies of the plague prompted some to deny outright that the plague (or at least some strains of it) was mediated through natural causes. For these thinkers—including the authors of popular plague literature that this chapter examines— the question of whether plague was a manifestation of immediate or mediate providence was neither the smooth negotiation that recent scholars of providence have documented nor a straightforward divide between nature and supernature but, rather, a strained series of ruptures, qualifications, and contradictions as writers struggled to accommodate two formulations of seventeenth-century plague thought that could easily tip toward incommensurability.13

While, as we will see, those who deny plague’s natural mediations were more likely to be radical Puritans and their followers, the tension between the two providential modes appears even in early modern medical tracts. Thayre, for instance, is sure to emphasize that the

11 The most influential thinker in this older school of thought is Max Weber, who argued that the Reformation “disenchanted” the world by completely separating the material from the spiritual. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge Classics, 2001), esp. 61. 12 Alexandra Walsham, “God’s Great Book in Folio: Providence, Science, and the Natural Environment,” chap. 5 in The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 327-94; Adrian Streete, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); David Harley, “Spiritual Physic, Providence and English Medicine, 1560-1640,” in Medicine and the Reformation, eds. Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell (New York: Routledge, 1993), 101-17. 13 Maus, Inwardness, 20-3. 167 meteorological causes of plague can be separate from the direct punishment of sin, which, he repeats twice, is “sometimes the onely cause thereof.”14 Bradwell, too, in 1625 delineates a taxonomy of separable causations that range from utterly immediate punishment of God to the less immediately directed “accidents” that produce a pestilential “corruption of the Aire.”15 This etiological separation—and the providences that they represent—would develop into Bradwell’s later separation of “simple” and “putrid” plagues (a split that, as we will see, Bradwell shares with a number of authors). While the simple plague is a function of immediate providence— demonstrating how God’s punishment can circumvent the laws of nature in order to directly punish a sinner—the putrid plague locates providence much farther back, mediated through the wind or celestial influences. Bradwell asserts that these two are so diagnostically distinct that he wishes the putrid variant were not called a plague at all: “The [“simple” plague] is most properly called The Plague, being the immediate Stroke of Gods hand. This [“putrid” plague should be called], The Sicknesse, because infectious, and many times Curable.”16 Bradwell here is being true to plague’s etymological roots. The word derives from the Latin plaga of the Vulgate and,

both of which designate a direct physical blow.17 The title of ,הָ פֵּגַמ ,from the Hebrew Bible

Bradwell’s tract, Physick for the Sicknesse Commonly Called the Plague, sets up his preference of terminology (it is only “Commonly” known as the plague), and the text’s meteorological focus confirms that the Sickness (and not the plague) falls under the purview of early modern

14 Thayre, Treatise, 3-4. 15 Stephen Bradwell, A Watch-man for the Pest (London: George Vincent, 1625), 3-5. For a fuller discussion of the “accident” as an intellectual challenge for providential thinkers, see Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), especially 42- 61. 16 Ibid., 5, italics in the original. For more on the linguistic slipperiness of the plague, see Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 205-10. 17 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed, s.v. “plague.” 168 medicine. And even though Bradwell’s dichotomy is complicated by the occurrence of both simple and putrid plague during a single outbreak (a diagnostic confusion about which, as we will see, plague literature often frets), the signs of one or the other were clear to Bradwell during the 1625 plague: “I observed in the last great Plague heere in London (anno 1625.) That some felt themselves manifestly stricken, being sensible of a blow suddainly given them, on the Head, necke, backe, or side: Sometimes so violently, that they have been eyther almost, or altogether over-turned: and after these and such like stroakes some have dyed, and those that recovered, escaped without humane helpe.”18 According to Bradwell, this physically sensible but purely supernatural “Stroke” is etiologically and prognostically separate from the miasmatic sickness that he and other physicians treat. As such, no “humane help” can preserve the stricken sinner from death; only repentance and God’s mercy can lift the simple plague from the ailing body.

Thus, even in a single medical tract, the tension between equally valid providential poles— mediated nature or immediate supernature—could divide the plague into two distinct diseases with two distinct modes of transmission.

While physicians promoted a measured outlook that could find both (though distinct) natural and supernatural infection during a single outbreak of plague, some radical religious thinkers preached a kind of penitent fatalism by focusing on God’s immediate supernatural interventions, to the exclusion of the plague’s preventable natural causes. A Spanish visitor to

London in 1609, for example, observed that many Puritan preachers encouraged the idea that the plague derived not from any miasma but from the immediate supernatural relationship between sinner and God: she incredulously reports that many believe the plague “will not attack any but

18 Bradwell, Physick, 2, italics in the original. 169 those already singled out by God, let them take what measures they may.”19 Most “measures” against the plague, as we will see, were designed to cleanse the infected air, and, so, operated under that assumption of a primarily miasmatic plague. Furthermore, the “singl[ing] out” that the visitor cites above is characteristic of an extremely immediate form of providential punishment.

For believers, this could produce a dangerously lackadaisical response to the prospect of infection; if they were going to contract the plague, they could do nothing to prevent it because, as the Puritan minister Henoch Clapham notes, even the “wings of the morning cannot carrie thee beyond [God’s] reach.”20 The supernatural speed with which God’s immediate “singl[ing] out” of sinners exceeded, to some, even the (entirely physical) speed of the morning sun’s horizon of light as it dashed across the countryside. For these faithful, then, the plague could reveal not how the divine and natural work together toward a providential image of God on earth but, rather, how the material and supernatural conceptions of the plague could be opposed, even antagonistic: plague “measures” as something to be circumvented by God; the horizon as something to be outstripped.

Believers in such a radically immediate providence commonly denied not only the disease’s material transmission but also its general contagiousness. Clapham, for example, was arrested by London authorities for promoting precisely this view among his followers.21 While

Clapham does not deny that some plagues may arise from natural causes, his description of the

1603 plague in London indexes a supernatural plague—“exceed[ing] the compasse and reache of

[physicians’] naturall reason and reading”—that was not contagious because it is delivered

19 Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Epistolario y Poesias, (Madrid, Library of Spanish Authors), 281-2. As translated by E. M. Wilson and quoted in Slack, Impact of Plague, 231. 20 Henoch Clapham, An Epistle Discoursing Vpon the Present Pestilence (London, 1603), sig. B2r. 21 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 158-61. 170 directly by God.22 In this he claims to follow the lead of scripture, which places primary and direct agency with God and, so, does not concern itself with nature, a “doctrine full opposite to our practise, who cast our eye more to aeryall corruption, then vnto God and his Angell smiting.”23 Many of his followers zealously applied his considerations to all outbreaks of the plague, denying both that inauspicious meteorological phenomenon could generate plague-time pathology but also, dangerously, that the plague was not communicable because such direct strokes from God need not travel through wind, blood, or breath. This refutation of contagiousness—in opposition to the authorities’ plague measures—led to his arrest in 1603.

After his release, Clapham wrote a clarifying tract in 1604 that attempted to acknowledge a more nuanced treatment of the tension between nature and supernature during plague outbreaks. And, toward this end, he was partially successful; anticipating Bradwell’s etiological split between natural and supernatural plagues, Clapham attests that these two plagues, while distinct, can occur during the same outbreak: “In this Pestilence [that is, the 1603 plague] generally scattred through the land, there so falleth out some strokes Supernaturall, some Naturall.”24 According to

Clapham, however, only the latter is mediated through physical mechanisms while the former is the same immediate, transcendent, and incommunicable smiting that got him into trouble with concerned authorities in the first place.

Writing in 1603 against this popular trend of providential belief, James Balmford’s fictional dialogue between a “Professor [of the Faith]” and a “Preacher” attempts to correct the

22 Clapham, “Epistle,” sig. B1r-v. 23 Henoch Clapham, An Epistle Discoursing Vpon the Present Pestilence (London: Widow Newbery, 1603), A4v- B1r. 24 Henoch Clapham, Henoch Clapham His Demaundes and Answeres Touching the Pestilence (London, 1604), sig. A4r. 171

“common” conception that the plague is not contagious like other, more obviously natural diseases. In his exasperation with the denaturalization and overspiritualization of the plague,

Balmford’s Preacher cautions against “mak[ing] the Bible a booke of phisicke,” arguing that the plague is transmitted not primarily through the immediate stroke of God but through “poysoned air.”25 And when the Professor emphasizes the invisible—and hence, merely spiritual— mechanism of infection, the Preacher’s response relies on meteorological comparisons; just as (it was thought that) thunder may invisibly cause “souring of drinke” and just as “cleere and wholesome ayre of the heauens is healthful for the body, though not perceiued by smell,” so too the similarly imperceptible effects of plague transmission can be explained scientifically and pneumatically.26 But although readers are meant to identify their own flawed beliefs in the

Professor’s stated notions and their correction in the Preacher’s rebukes, the dialogue form itself struggles against that one-way correction; despite the continual correction by the Preacher, the well-meaning Professor provides new articulation and, sometimes, scriptural evidence for the notion that the plague is expressly supernatural and, as such, incommunicable. For instance, the

Professor cites his own compelling experience with the disease, saying,

If the plague be contagious, why is not one infected as well as another? I haue lyen in bed with many that haue had the plague sores running on them . . . and yet I (and a great number besides me, who haue done as much) had neuer the plague yet, and trust neuershal, so long as I haue a strong faith in God: for it is written, Thou shalt not be afraid of the pestilence, for thousands shal fal besides thee, yet it shall not come neare thee; for thou hast said, The Lord is my hope.”27

The Preacher’s response to this scriptural and experiential evidence for the plague’s fundamentally spiritual essence is less a complete takedown of the Professor’s points and more

25 James Balmford, A Short Dialogue Concerning the Plagues Infection (London: Richard Boyle, 1603), 14. 26 Ibid., 14, 48. 27 Ibid., 44-5. The cited scripture is Psalm 91: 6-7, 9, Geneva Bible. 172 of a back-and-forth characterized by inconsistent success, requests for more evidence, and admissions of the Preacher’s argumentative strength.28 And while the Preacher eventually convinces the Professor that the plague may be naturally mediated, contagious, and a manifestation of God’s sometimes-direct providence, it is ultimately up to the reader not to leave

Balmford’s treatise newly armed with the Professor’s arguments and evidence for the plague’s supernatural, incommunicable character. Balmford’s text, then, is a record of the immense effort required to combat the popular view of an exclusively supernatural plague, and the built-in tension of the dialogue form often emphasizes the struggles between, rather than the reconciliation of, the plague’s two models of providence.

“Shall they escape?”: The Social Shape of Plague Death

The controversial disjunctions between the plague’s natural and supernatural etiologies generated a sharp absence of consensus regarding the theological, political, and economic lessons that early moderns could draw from the plague. While most believed that plague outbreaks were times for humble and intense personal reflection about one’s own spiritual infirmities, the meaning of death—and the forms of social critique that death can enable—was far from certain. Clapham’s insistence on supernatural causation, for instance, produces a specifically spiritual critique that transcends the standard hierarchies of London by emphasizing that God’s immediate, avenging blow “seizeth vpon old and yong, rich and poore, of all

28 Ibid., 52, 54. The Professor suggests an uneven success for the Preacher’s arguments when he says, “I take hold of the second [of your arguments] with some comfort.” The Professor also desires “mo[re] causes or reasons, why so many escape [the plague if it is indeed contagious].” And the Preacher commends the Professor’s knowledge of scripture when he cites a Psalm that is relevant to the plague’s supernatural character, saying, “I thought verily you wold not let go your hold on that part of the mightie argument.” 173 complexions whatsoeuer, so well as some of all sorts are spared, [demonstrating] that all sorts haue sinned.”29 This attachment of plague onto sin extends even to believers, who die not from infection of the corrupt air but because they demonstrate at least a momentary “want of faith.”30

Clapham’s victim-blaming here theorizes an egalitarian shape for plague death that is founded both upon the class-spanning presence of sin and the plague’s exclusively fundamental spirituality, which can bypass the preventative measures that, as we will see, more wealthy citizens could afford to take. This dual basis for plague’s capacity for social levelling is shared by the plague tracts that this section analyzes.

As we will see, however, this social vision of the plague is difficult to maintain both in the face of the plague’s natural theories and in the dueling social vision that those theories suggest: that the material conditions of poverty mean the poor die more frequently during plague outbreaks. Does the plague signify God’s cross-class justice, or does it signal economic injustice on earth? In this section, I read two plague pamphlets—William Muggins’s London’s Mourning

Garment (1603) and Thomas Dekker and Middleton’s Newes from Graves-end (1604)—to show how literature describing the 1603 plague attempted to reproduce the pneumatic denials of

Clapham and similar Puritan believers in order to advance an egalitarian formulation of plague death. The air, however, seeps back into these texts in several ways, but instead of reconciling immediate and mediated providence, the series of outright denials and subtextual affirmations between the plague’s natural and supernatural dimensions produces two socioeconomic meanings of the plague that are squarely at odds. These tracts, then, document the abiding desire

29 Clapham, “Epistle,” sig. C4r. See, also, Balmford, Short Dialogue, 57. Balmford’s Professor admits that, despite many reassurances from the Preacher, “[I]t will not out of my mind, but that godly men who die in this plague, do therefore die because they faile in faith.” 30 Ibid., sig. B3v. 174 to consolidate the social meanings of plague into one coherent providential worldview while also demonstrating how that single worldview would be fractured, inconsistent, and internally conflicted. Ultimately, this plague literature emphasizes the difficulty of conclusively locating social meaning and providential closure here at the crossroads between nature and supernature.

Dekker and Middleton’s News from Graves-end (1603) undercuts its own advocacy for supernatural causation through the persistent specter of air, which shuttles through inconsistent political shapes for the disease. While Charles Whitney has noted that this text displays a

“sensitivity to habitat [that] goes farthest in the ecological direction” and “combines the natural and divine aspects of organic ecology,” the social meaning of the London “habitat” as well as the degree to which Dekker and Middleton are successfully able to reconcile harmoniously the natural and divine are tellingly uncertain.31 At first, Graves-end seems to confirm the plague’s environmental etiology with a litany of miasmatic causes of disease, but it suddenly veers in an opposite direction by disavowing the very arguments it stacked up in its favor. Dekker and

Middleton list that sickness arises

From standing Pools or from the wombs Of Vaults, of Muckhills, Graves, and Tombs, From Bogs, from rank and dampish Fens, From Moorish breaths and nasty Dens, The Sun draws up contagious Fumes, . . . Or, being by winds not swept from thence, They hover there in clouds condense, Which suckt in by our spirits, there flies Swift poison through our Arteries, And (not resisted) straight it chokes The heart with those pestiferous smokes...... But now

31 Whitney, “Dekker’s and Middleton’s,” 204-7. 175

This monster breeds not thus.32

In this lengthy section (which even here has been abridged), Dekker and Middleton demonstrate the early modern ecological basis for disease in terms familiar to ecocritics, emphasizing the porous interrelationships between the human body and its environments, even describing the corrupting human impact on ecology through “Graves, and Tombs.” Despite Dekker and

Middleton’s exhaustive analysis of weather- and earth-borne disease, however, the tract explicitly denies this natural causation for the plague. Arguing (in these earlier pages, at least) for the uniquely supernatural character of the plague, Dekker and Middleton contrast this disease with the others above: “But, now/ This monster breeds not thus.” Like Clapham’s denial of natural causes, Dekker and Middleton’s rebuke of the pathological sciences casts doubt on the contagiousness of plague: “Can we believe that one man’s breath,/ Infected and being blown from him,/ His poison should to others swim,/ For then who breath’d upon the first?”33 And like

Clapham’s followers, Graves-end promotes, here, an exclusively supernatural etiology whereby

“God in anger” directly issues the plague against a sinful London space: “Our heavenly parts are plaguey sick,/ And there, such leprous spots do stick.”34 Just as the meteorological etiologies

Dekker and Middleton outline are ostensibly nothing more than red herrings, the bodily presentation of the disease (those “leprous spots”) is nothing more than a reflection of a fundamentally spiritual malady. However, the exhaustiveness with which Dekker and Middleton cover the prevailing scientific theories of plague at the beginning of their tract undercuts the certainty with which they emphasize the ailment’s exclusively supernatural character.

32 Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, “Newes from Graues-end,” in The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures 1603-1721, ed. Rebecca Totaro (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), lines 93-109. 33 Dekker and Middleton, “Graues-end,” lines 136-9. 34 Ibid., lines 179-82. 176

If Dekker and Middleton’s aim in this section is to defy the purely mechanical theories of

“Atheists and meere Naturians” (as Clapham calls some physicians), it is worth asking why they accord so much room to other diseases’ mechanics of transmission.35 The quoted section above about “pestiferous smokes” is merely an excerpt of all the pneumatic diseases that the plague is not, and even after Dekker and Middleton have apparently settled on a specifically supernatural etiology, they cannot escape the language of miasma and the rupture in their spiritual theory that it represents. Thus, by flanking their spiritual interpretation with the terms that their scientific denialism abjures, Dekker and Middleton strive toward a coherent worldview in which God’s specific justice manifests in natural phenomena, even as they (and many other seventeenth- century thinkers) disavow such a view in the case of plague. What remains, then, is a strained collection of contradictions yoked together by the desire to reconcile God’s justice with the world in which they lived. This yoking together produces, for Graues-end, an incoherent worldview that registers the plague as a “monster,” a term that exists appropriately on the unsettling, ill-defined verge between nature and that which falls outside of it (here, supernature).36

Thus, describing the plague as a “fierce dragon,” Dekker and Middleton go on to insist that the plague

Does neither hover o’re our heads, Nor lies it in our bloods, nor beds: ...... But this fierce dragon (huge and fowle) Sucks virid poyson from our soule, Which being spit forth again, there reigns

35 Clapham, Epistle, sig. A3v. 36 See also Georgia Brown, “Defining Nature through Monstrosity in Othello and Macbeth,” in Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, eds. Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 55-76. 177

Showers of Blisters, and of Blains.37

Here, despite having just asserted that the pestilence does not “hover o’re our heads,” Dekker and Middleton describe the “reigns” of disease over the bubonic body, hinting phonetically at the plague-riddled “rains” of scientific explanations. While “reigns” establishes Dekker and

Middleton’s later charge of “high Treason” that the sinful Londoners have perpetrated against a monarchical God, the metaphorical “Showers” of plague-sores spattering the sinner’s body invite precisely the materialism they had worked so hard to exorcise.38 Indeed, the language in which

Dekker and Middleton indulge here precisely matches the mechanism through which the

“pestiferous smokes” above are drawn up (here, “Suck[ed]”) by the sun and then condensed into

“clouds,” which, like the bubonic “Showers” here, might, indeed, rain down upon a population.

Thus, while Dekker and Middleton repeatedly suggest that they can conclusively deny the plague is not “o’re” them like some kind of weather system, suggesting a more level hierarchy that arraigns each sinner’s “heavenly parts,” they endanger their totalizing vision of justice by returning to images of natural etiology again and again.

As we will see, the issue of whether or not the plague “hover[s] o’er” an infected city raises another question that is almost universally taken up by plague literature and that is especially relevant to the social meaning the plague can impart: is it effective to flee from an infected city? This seemingly simple conundrum actually exposed the political and social ramifications of the disease’s etiology. If the plague was a natural phenomenon like a

“pestiferous cloud,” then it might, like many storms, be fled. If it could be outrun, however, this would strain the immediately providential understanding of the plague’s justice, which cannot be

37 Dekker and Middleton, “Graues-end,” lines 167-78. 38 Ibid., lines 186-7. 178 outrun. Balmford’s “Professor” asserts that he has heard “some preach against Flying into the countrey because of the plague,” and Clapham predictably concurs: “I say likewise that you cannot . . . flye from the plague: Goe where thou wilt and his right hand shal finde thee out.”39

Pronouncements like Clapham’s attempted to reinforce the notion that God’s justice superseded all material mediations and impediments, but it also bolstered the belief that the egalitarian edicts cut across all social strata. It is not convenient for any theorization of God’s immediate justice to grant that a wide margin of London sufferers died not from a “want of faith” but, rather, because they lacked the means to flee or otherwise protect themselves during outbreaks. Paul Slack has shown how these enhanced dangers for the poor were exacerbated by shifting socioeconomic demographics, increasing population densities, and the prohibitive cost of fleeing.40 Thayre, for example, writes that the plague disproportionally affects those who cannot “keepe a good diet, haue cleane and sweet keeping, liue in good aire, . . . be not pestred many in one house . . . [and cannot exercise] good meanes of preseruation.”41 Having “good meanes” and, of course, not living “many in one house” are economic privileges unavailable to the poor in suburban tenement conditions. And Bradwell affirms that “Poore people (by reason of their great want) living sluttishly, and feeding nastily and unwholsomly . . . [are] of all others . . . more subject to this Sicknesse.”42 After first prescribing flight from the city in his Treatise of the Plague (trans.

1630), influential French physician Ambroise Paré worries about economic necessities

(“businesse, or employments”) that prohibit urban escape.43 Thus, according to Slack, the “social

39 Balmford, Short Dialogue, 70; Clapham, Epistle, sig. B2r. 40 Slack, Impact of Plague, 166. 41 Thayre, Treatise, 50. 42 Bradwell, Physick, 9. 43 Paré, Treatise, 12. 179 differential” of plague death “exaggerate[d] features of the demographic scene which would not without it have been so obvious.”44 Rather than collapsing social distinctions, plague death, in actuality, widened the material disparities between social groups, especially between those who could afford to flee and those who could not.

This demographic reality, however, is in contradiction to what a number of literary scholars have noted about literature’s depiction of plague as a social leveler. Hristomir Staner’s reading of plague’s tactility in Coriolanus cites the disease as a “great leveler” that “binds consul and commoners to one another.”45 And in his discussion of the “wildness” of plague and the universal, apocalyptic image of death that it threatened, Michael Neill has argued that “the plague collapsed all differences between high and low, kinsfolk and strangers, humans and animals, and ultimately even people and things.”46 Given Neill’s assessment of the biological universality of death here, the plague’s ecocritical value is apparent, and Whitney has asserted that plague writing like Graves-end should be considered environmental literature in that it exposes our “common mortality as creaturely beings among others.”47 While previous scholars are correct to note that early modern literature depicted the disease as an egalitarian scourge, this is only half of the story. In this section, I will point out the vexed ways in which the suppressed material etiologies of the plague creep back into plague literature and subvert the egalitarian ideal with a lurking recognition of the urban poor’s unique struggles. As with the nature/supernature equivocations of Graves-end, plague literature often denies both the plague’s meteorological character and, thus, the efficacy of fleeing the plague even while hinting at the

44 Slack, Impact of Plague, 187. 45 Staner, Sensory Experience, 175. 46 Neill, Issues of Death, 20. 47 Whitney, “Dekker’s and Middleton’s,” 207. 180 dangers of staying for those who could not afford to run from “pestilential smokes.” We will see, then, that even in a single plague tract, the social form of plague death could be, paradoxically, both egalitarian and brutally hierarchical, thus disrupting any stable vision of plague’s message or God’s justice.

William Muggins’s 1603 London’s Mourning Garment, for example, seems to follow

Clapham’s lead by discounting the plague’s pneumatic etiology through, tellingly, relaying the experience of the wealthy:

God’s Messenger (the Plague) doth fear no States, But strikes both lowest and the highest Mates. Now, for the rich which have of gold such store, Feeding their bodies with delicious fare, Keeping great fires, stir not out of door, Using perfumes, shunning infected air. Shall they escape? No, the Plague will them not spare.48

Muggins’s social characterization of the plague and the celebration of God’s earthly justice that it promotes rest upon a specific denial of contemporary medical theories. Echoing the contemporary medical advice to regulate one’s diet with sustaining foods in order to prevent the plague from finding purchase in the body, Muggins’s wealthy man futilely attempts to bulwark his dietary defenses against the plague.49 Muggins likewise casts doubt on the pneumatic basis of the disease; physicians supposed that “perfumes” would neutralize the foul corruption of plague air, and the “great fires” kept in the rich man’s chambers were thought to desiccate the moist, corrupting miasma lurking in the air during an outbreak. As Paré notes, “Kindle a cleere Fire in all the Lodging Chambers of the House, and perfume the whole House with Aromatick things, as

48 William Muggins, London’s Mourning Garment, in The Plague Epic in Early Modern England, lines 468-75. 49 See, for instance, Lodge, Treatise, sig. E3r-E4v. Lodge dedicates an entire chapter to the regulation of one’s diet during times of plague, including the “flesh of Ueale, Kid, or yong Mutton.” 181

Frankensence, Myrrhe, . . . Cloves, Perfumes: and let your Cloathes be aired in the same.”50 By dismantling the dietary and, especially, meteorological aspects of plague that the wealthy might be able to circumvent, Muggins is better able to argue that the disease “doth fear no States” and, thus, promotes an egalitarian sense of God’s justice.

When Muggins uses similar language to address the rich flight from the city, however, he hints that it might be possible to escape the plague, thus momentarily providing a regional specificity to the disaster that often accompanies natural accounts of plague air. He pleads,

[W]ealthy Citizens, whose store is great, I gently woo you to have good foresight, And cast your eyes upon the needy wight, Though fear of sickness drive you hence as men, Yet leave your purse, and feeling heart with them. Remember all your riches are but lent, Though in this world, you bear such power and sway: Remember too how soon your years are spent, Remember eke your bodies are but clay, Remember death that rangeth at this day. Remember when poor Lazers woes did end, The full fed glutton, to hell, did descend.51

Just as the wealthy dead from Muggins’s earlier pneumatic denial had “of gold such store,” these fleeing “Citizens” may enjoy a “store [that] is great.” And although he will later attest that fleeing is pointless (“You heare what successe, followe them that runne,” he writes sardonically)

Muggins here momentarily and partially sets aside his theory of a purely supernatural plague that transcends socioeconomic means. The wealthy may flee and, he hints, may even escape the plague, while a charitable “purse” left behind for the poor could ease their suffering. Muggins attempts to neutralize this breach in his conception of plague’s justice by noting that if they do

50 Paré, Treatise, 15. 51 Muggins, Mourning Garment, lines 584-95. 182 not “leaue [their] purse[s]” with the suffering poor, they are only delaying God’s eventual judgement. Through a calculated collapse of disparate time frames, Muggins attempts to bring this distant punishment into the immediacy of the present plague time. Thus, Muggins cheapens the “yeares” that the wealthy might win by dodging the plague by emphasizing “how soone

[they] are spent.” By the end of the passage, the immensity of the afterlife’s eternal justice erases the little bit of life that the wealthy citizens might have won over the “poor Lazers [that is, lepers, a common comparison for a plague carrier].” Despite the temporal distance that might separate their deaths, the eternal torment of the “rich glutton” and the “end” of “woes” for the poor in heaven are described in the same grammatical tense of inevitability: “did.” Even still, the prospect that one might flee the plague threatens the natural/pneumatic denial that Muggins earlier sets up, and it requires some grammatical and temporal contortions to restore a sense of

God’s egalitarian justice, which is no longer attached to the specific plague at poor Londoners’ doors and, instead, indexes a generalized death to circumvent the spiritually troublesome material specificities of the 1603 outbreak.

Like Muggins, Dekker and Middleton provide an egalitarian vision of plague death that struggles against the realities of urban flight from a pneumatically locatable disease. Graves-end seems at first to deny, like some Puritan preachers, the efficacy of the wealthy citizenry’s flight from a plague-stricken London. After detailing the difficulties faced by the rich and powerful once they leave London (including the familiar, long reach of the “hand of vengeance,” after which “no heaped gold/ Can buy a graue”), Dekker and Middleton provide a lingering glimpse of

London’s own plague death, which similarly includes those “with [such] gold” that they “[c]ould 183 have built Castles,” with both “Servant and master” sharing one grave.52 However, after theorizing this vision of plague death that, like Muggins’s, “doth fear no States,” Dekker and

Middleton turn candidly to the disproportional plight of the lower classes, attesting the potential successes of fleeing an infected city. They write,

[If] you fear your breath is sooner caught Here than aloof and, therefore keep Out of Death’s reach ...... Tis to be fear’d (you petty kings,) When back you spread your golden wings, A deadlier siege (which heaven avert) Will your replinisht walls engirt. ‘Tis now the Beggar’s plague, for none Are in this Battle overthrown But Babes and poor.53

Suddenly the plague is theorized as a disaster from which one might successfully run “Out of

Death’s reach.” Indeed, a few lines later, he characterizes these “golden” citizens as a “swarme” that has “broke through, and felt no harme.”54 Left behind are the “Babes and poor” that are

“overthrown” by a disease that is newly defined by its socioeconomic bias: “the Beggar’s plague.”

Along with this recognition of plague’s regional locatability returns Dekker and

Middleton’s ambivalent admissions of its pneumatic character. The anxiety here of the breath being “caught” by death hints at some acknowledgement of pneumatic transmission, in contrast to their earlier denial that the plague may be contagiously “caught” from one person to another.55

52 Dekker and Middleton, Graves-end, lines 452, 476-7. 53 Ibid., lines 519-31. 54 Ibid., line 533. 55 The pathological use of “catch” (as in, “to catch a cold”) was current for the seventeenth century. OED, s.v. “catch.” 184

The designation that the wealthy survivors here fly “aloof” is a recognition both of the plague’s regional specificity (as a synonym for “far”) and of the role that wind was thought to play in the disease’s spread. A nautical term in the period, “aloof” indicated the direction from which the wind was blowing.56 Thus, Dekker and Middleton hint, the survival of the city’s wealthy population was due, at least in part, to the path of their retreat, which set them safely upwind from a pneumatic plague. No longer a sign of social leveling and universal human humility under an incensed Deity, the plague merely mirrors the hierarchies already in place in London, casting them in starker relief as the “social differentials” of plague death (as Slack calls them) expose the material vulnerabilities of the poor.

Like Muggins, Dekker and Middleton attempt to restore their sense of justice with a grammatical immediacy designed to counteract the regional locatedness that the pneumatic characteristics of plague death evoke. After granting the “social differential” of plague death,

Dekker and Middleton speculate about a future, yet-withheld punishment for the city’s wealthy.

Rather than a general, pneumatically mediated providential vision, the poem forecasts a future, more immediate execution of God’s punishment that stages a burlesque reenactment of the soul’s specific filth upon the luxurious bodies of the city’s rich. Thus, the usurer “then . . . must behold” his minted coins become bubonic stamps upon his arms; the “rich Glutton . . . shall wake from wine” to see his wine-dark veins drinking in the infection; and the adulterous spendthrift “liest panting [on his deathbed, with suggestions of sexual violation],/ Thy Luxurious hours recanting” while his money is stolen from him.57

56 OED, s.v. “aloof.” 57 Dekker and Middleton, Graues-end, lines 551-624. 185

The dizzying shifts in both tense and person in the sinners’ accounts above—from future- tense (“shall wake”) to present-tense (“liest”) and from third- to second-person (“Thy Luxurious hours”)—attempt to draw the punishment for sin into the immediacy of radically Puritan models of providence, thus eliding the regional locatability of the plague in favor of an unmediated, purely spiritual conception of disease that assails those that were “singled out,” as relayed by the

Spanish visitor to London above. The future temporal remove of the usurer’s and the glutton’s deaths creeps disconcertingly into the present tense as the proximity of “Now” advances forward with “Now [the adulterer’s coins] dance in Ruffian’s hands.” This almost clandestine invasion suddenly pounces forward to collapse the audience’s comfortable distance when the adulterer’s sins are transmitted directly to the reader; those “Luxurious hours” are “thine” as is, justly, the rich adulterer’s death: Death “clip[s] thee round about the bed/ Whilst thousand Horrors grasp thy head.”58 The physical vicinity of the reader’s head here, grabbed suddenly and personally by death, transforms the pious scrutiny of evil strangers into an immediate plea for the self-scrutiny that characterizes the Puritan emphasis on individual faith and immediate providence. The totalizing sense of God’s justice—so recently threatened by the unfair prospect of a “Beggar’s plague”—is here restored by a series of grammatical sleights of hand.

As we have seen, however, this sense of justice is far from airtight from the poem’s occasional confrontations with breath and wind alike. Just as Dekker and Middleton’s denial of natural etiology is undercut by its tempestuous opposite, the egalitarian immediacy of the wealthy’s punishment here is marked by a visible trail of grammatical tweaks that leads back to the near-exclusive suffering of the poor and the “aloof,” upwind wealthy. For these tracts, then,

58 Ibid., lines 614, 624. 186 the air helps to reveal the points of rupture between two social models of providence, showing how difficult it is to produce a totalizing worldview of God’s justice with the knowledge of economic injustice lurking just on the edge of the wind.

The “wofull throne”: Monarchy, Succession, and the Plague

Just as inconsistencies between plague’s status as nature or supernature mounted telling obstacles to the search for God’s justice (and the socioeconomic meaning of death), the 1603 and

1625 plagues presented another, politically volatile difficulty standing in the way of the plague’s meaning: the deaths of sitting monarchs. This section will demonstrate how Dekker’s The

Wonderfull Yeare (1603) and Abraham Holland’s Hollandi Posthuma (1626) use the disconcerting presence of air to undercut the divine sense of mercy and justice that succession could represent in plague literature. In turning to the specific ways in which these two texts subvert a politically convenient reading of God’s mercy in succession, it will be helpful to explore, first, the discursive problem that succession generally presents in plague literature.

The challenge for these writers is to reconcile two distinct political models of death as they attempt, again, to advance the egalitarian model of death even while enforcing the hierarchy that the monarchy sustains. Thus, these plague pamphlets often condole social and political anxiety through a double function: first, by confirming the egalitarian shape of the plague in showing that even a monarch may die, and, second, by reaffirming the political stratification of the status quo by conflating monarchical succession with the resumption of God’s providential mercy upon a now-healthful nation. Muggins, for instance, provides a sobering look at a London mother’s despair for her deceased children. That despair, however, is tellingly politicized 187 through the children’s names, Henry and Bess, matching the recently deceased Elizabeth and her royal father.59 Totaro has noted the anthropomorphization of London itself as a grieving mother in plague epics, and, just so, this London mother becomes Mother London while perpetuating the egalitarian myth that the deaths of the powerful are comparable to that of the poor plague dead.60

Tellingly, Muggins ends his plague epic by theologically reifying the social hierarchy through the simultaneous arrival of God’s grace and the appearance of James (“My crowned CESAR and his Peerlesse Queene”) as the surest sign of that grace.61

Just as Muggins is careful to characterize the royal dead with the children—who are described by their virtues as “mild” and “patient,” unlike the justly suffering sinners throughout the rest of his poem, —Graves-end associates Elizabeth’s death with mass plague mortality throughout the kingdom while attempting to neutralize any suggestion that God judges her guilty, an accusatory impulse prevalent elsewhere throughout the text.62 According to Dekker and Middleton, the plague demonstrates that God’s spiritual accounting has found Londoners lacking because of

Hours misspent (whose sums surmount The price of ransomed Kings), and there Finding our grievous debts, [God] doth clear And cross them under his own hand, Being paid with Lives through all the land. For since his Maiden Servant’s gone, And his new Viceroy fills the Throne, Heaven means to give him (as his bride) A Nation new and purified.63

59 Muggins, Mourning Garment, lines 281-308. 60 Rebecca Totaro, “Mother London and the Madonna Lactans in England’s Plague Epic,” in Medieval and Renaissance Lactations: Images, Rhetorics, Practices (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 147-64. 61 Muggins, Mourning Garment, line 673; John Taylor, The Fearful Summer, in The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures 1603-1721, ed. Rebecca Totaro (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 377-80, italics in the original. 62 Muggins, Mourning Garment, lines 292, 294. 63 Dekker and Middleton, Graves-end, lines 250-58. 188

Here, the London dead are judged to have squandered their time and, so, God takes the rest of their lives away to compensate for their sunk moral and temporal costs. However, when Dekker and Middleton mention Elizabeth (God’s “Maiden Servant”), they are careful to soften the accusatory tone: she is merely “gone,” not punished. Even still, they suggest that their (here, egalitarian) plague might have killed the queen, but not as an immediate strike against Elizabeth.

Instead, by stating that the wasted hours of foul Londoners exceeded the “price of ransomed

Kings”), Dekker and Middleton hint that the populace did not display righteousness sufficient to

“ransom” Elizabeth. Thus, Graves-end preserves its (albeit temporary) sense of the plague’s egalitarian reach from beggar to monarch while not directly accusing the monarch of the killing sins that occupy Dekker and Middleton for much of the poem.

Succession ultimately resolves this tense, subtextual meditation on royal death through the appearance of James, who is a temporal representative of the divine as God’s “Viceroy” and who also signals the cessation of the plague on a newly “purified” England. John Taylor’s The

Fearful Summer (1625) similarly reads succession as a final, purifying manifestation of God’s mercy. Just as 1603 marked both a significant outbreak of plague and the accession of James,

1625 was a particularly heavy year for plague deaths as well as the accession of Charles I following the death of James, his father. Taylor concludes, “And for the love, which to our King he [that is, God] bears,/ By sickness, he our sinful country clears,/ That he may be a patron and a guide/ Unto a people purg’d and purifi’d.” Here, God’s heavy providential hand is set upon

English sinners for the sake of Charles. What is more, through the syntactical confusion of the pronoun “he,” along with the italic echo between “he” and “King,” Taylor encourages a reading of Charles’s divinity because, finally, it is unclear if it is God or Charles who is the “patron and . 189

. . guide” for the English citizens.64 The introduction of the term “patron,” however, provides an even fuller conflation of royal identities; Taylor could also be offering the deceased James as a patron saint for England. Thus Taylor’s plague tract collapses God, Charles, and James in an equivalency that salves the anxieties of succession and plague death, at once.

Against these equivalencies (of God and monarch, of plague death and royal death, of succession and health), Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderfull Yeare (1603) undercuts the conventional readings of providence that accompany plague literature’s treatment of succession by suggesting that God’s justice is as difficult to read as the air that the plague inhabits. Echoing other tracts’ egalitarian conflation of plague death with royal death, Dekker’s pamphlet begins not with an explicit account of the 1603 plague but with the death of Queen Elizabeth, borne from what looks suspiciously like plague weather nonetheless. Dekker seems to attempt a reconciliation between individual providence and the meteorological basis for sickness, recounting the queen’s death both as a targeted call to her from the “Star-chamber of Heauen” and a natural disaster that threatens the whole realm: “The Element . . . scowled on the earth . . . her sighes being whirlwindes and her grones thunder, at length she fell in labour and was deliuered of a pale, meagre, weake childe, named Sicknesse, whom Death (with a pestilence) would needes to take vpon him to nurse, and did so.”65 A scientifically knowledgeable reader would be attuned to the meteorological understanding of the plague and, through the “pestilence” on which this sickness was nursed, might expect Dekker to state that the 1603 plague arose from some sympathy between Elizabeth’s final sickness and her realm, and, indeed, he writes that

64 Taylor, Fearful Summer, lines 377-80, italics in the original. 65 Thomas Dekker, 1603. The Wonderfull Yeare Wherein is Shewed the Picture of London Lying Sicke of the Plague (London, 1603), sig. B1r. 190

Elizabeth’s death inspired a kingdom-wide “ague.” Thus, while the same egalitarian “Element” kills both subject and queen alike, the causal chain from Elizabeth’s death to the subject’s “ague” reasserts the social hierarchy even while demonstrating how plague reveals the universal reach of death. As we will see, however, Dekker repeatedly and contradictorily re-encodes the images of sickness, health, and air that accumulate throughout his treatment of succession. In so doing,

Dekker undermines the political hierarchy that suggests all subjects die with the monarch and draw new life from healthy succession.

Just as the national trauma of the monarch’s death initiated what seems at first to be the

1603 plague, the “holesome receipt of a proclaymed king” in James repairs the supposed pathological imbalance. Indeed, James’s “receipt” describes both the king’s glorious reception and a medical receipt, the early modern word for home remedy recipes.66 Just so, James’s arrival as Apollo’s analogue inspires a flattering poem celebrating the Scottish king and proclaiming the banishment of the plaguey air and the restoration of the “royal clime,” “for our aire breedes kings.”67 As the god of poetry and the sun, Apollo/James represents the artistic health of the nation as well as the healthful solar influence that I discuss in Chapter Two. Thus, “[A] better

Lottery was drawne, Pro Troia stabat Apollo [Apollo stood for Troy], God stuck valiantlie to vs.

For behold vp rises a comfortable Sun out of the North, whose glorious beames (like a fan) dispersed all thick and contagious cloudes.”68 Dekker’s recommended translation of his Latin here conflates Apollo with the Christian God and, further, with James as this northern (Scottish) sun bathes the realm in his warmth, dissolving the threat of plague that bulged from the “thick

66 Ibid., sig. C1r; OED, s.v. “receipt.” 67 Dekker, Wonderfull Yeare, sig. C1v. 68 Ibid. 191 and contagious cloudes” and dispersing the airborne illness in the manner that early modern physicians theorized.69 It seems, then, that Dekker is delivering the same ideological condolences that the other writers above attempt. And yet the “ague,” “feauer,” and “contagious cloudes” that are arrested by James are revealed to be only metaphorical ailments as Dekker begins his proper discussion of the plague only after James has supposedly banished the contagion. In this, Dekker seems to be subtly hinting at a feature of the 1603 succession that other literary treatments of the new king elide: the plague delayed James’s coronation, thus producing an uneasy political timeframe similar to the one here, in which James’s accession did not coincide with a healthful lull in the plague, even though his eventual coronation after the plague weather stopped might have made it seem, in retrospect, that he cleared away all of England’s “contagious clouds” as an

Apollo-like figure of divine mercy.70

Dekker begins his actual account of the disease by refuting the ease of his previous poetry, writing, “[O]ut of my pen does the inck mournefully and more bitterly than gall drop on the palefac’d paper, euen when I do but thinke how the bowels of my sicke Country haue been torne, Apollo therefore and you bewitching siluer-tong’d Muses, get you gone, Inuocate none of your names.”71 Formally, this outpouring of literary sympathy for the ailing English nation announces the end of the pamphlet’s poetry as the mode shifts to a bleak prose and a series of macabre stories. Moreover, even after crowning James with poetic, divine, and meteorological competence, Dekker marks his gruesome plague description by presumptuously telling the poet-

69 Just as the heat of bonfires was thought to evaporate the moist, infectious humours lurking in the air during plague-time, the strong operation of the sun could disperse the corrupt moisture of the air. See Lodge, Treatise, sig. C2v. 70 Slack, Impact of Plague, 18-9. 71 Dekker, Wonderfull Yeare, sig. C3r, italics in the original. 192 god Apollo (and his analogue in James) to “get you gone.” The meteorological basis of plague— a “tempestuous contagious”—is retained as a real threat in this prose section, but “gone” are the ideological comforts of James’s succession, as the king’s “reciept” and “Sun” and “fan” are exposed as merely metaphorical curatives for a similarly metaphorical “ague.”72 Thus, Dekker calls attention to the fundamentally fictive nature of reading providence through the lens of ideology, especially while the real plague rages.

Abraham Holland’s 1626 collection of poems Hollandi Posthuma, too, depicts plague air as a political excess that undercuts the providential comforts conventionally accorded to succession. As with the other plague tracts I review in this chapter, Holland’s treatment of plague struggles with an internal tension that, while spread across several works in the collection, occurs primarily between his “Description of the Plague” and the several prefatory or introductory poems that come before it. These two sections, I argue, feature separate ideas of plague’s political meanings and, thus, produce conflicting visions of England’s noxious weather.

Holland’s “Description,” for example, is similar to others in that it depicts James’s death as somehow equivalent to that of plague victims (“Let the in-throned Soule of IAMES implore,/

That after Him, punish His no more”) while championing Charles as a figure of God’s providential mercies (“Heare him for us, and us for him; and stay/ Thy dreadfull vengeance”).73

Holland’s prefatory material, however, portrays a meteorological understanding of “infected air” that poetically adapts the vague dread felt by James’s death and the accession of the as-yet untested Charles.74

72 Ibid., sig. F1r. 73 Abraham Holland, Hollandi Posthuma (Cambridge: Henry Holland, 1626), sig. F1r. 74 v Ibid., sig. D4 . 193

Holland’s “Description of the Plague” is introduced by poems dedicated to prominent, recently deceased English figures including Henry de Vere, Earl of Oxford and, of course, James himself. In his dedicatory elegy to the dead king, Holland outlines the contradictory feelings assailing the loyal English citizen: grief for James tinged with joy for Charles. Holland’s metaphor of choice for this vacillating national affect is a contrarious wind that accrues pathological significance throughout his compiled poems. He writes,

[L]ike as a sodaine beame Strikes from a Tempest; you can passe no way, But by th’occurrent, one may justly say There’s a strange Conflict, a strange Monster bred Of Ioy and Sorrow streaming from one head The King . . . As when in some vncertain weather Two diuerse windes doe joyne their blasts together The wavering Forrests, and the Neuter Corne, You then may see now this, now that way borne.75

Holland characterizes 1625 not as a time of triumphal succession but as a troubling moment of emotional and political instability.76 Holland describes this upheaval as a monstrosity of wind composed of contradictory, yet “occurrent,” forces. While the coronation of James’s rightful heir affords Holland an opportunity to praise the procreative vigor of the Stuart line, the breeding described here is that of a “Monster”—and, thus, an aberration of the “natural” course of generation. Further, the grain devastated by the tempest is “neuter,” suggesting sexual indeterminacy and the famine resulting from a wind-stripped crop (“neutered” of its nutritious seeds). Holland later labels this contradictory political affect a “contagion,” which will gain etiological implications throughout Holland’s later poems that treat the plague’s “infected air.”77

75 Ibid., sig. B3r-v. 76 Dekker, Wonderfull Yeare, sig. C1v. 77 Holland, Posthuma, sig. B4v. 194

The final couplet looks forward to a future in which the political situation might be soothed:

“Almightie God assist Thee and the windes./ Be Champions for CHARLES, whate’re he mindes.”78 Considered alone, the elegy seems hopeful for the restoration of England’s stable political affect, but the plague poem that follows literalizes the contagious “windes”—against

Holland’s prayer for merciful providence here—while deepening the sense of national hurt.

In Holland’s “Introduction to the Description of the Plague” the disease displays a political opportunism that pounces upon these instabilities prompted by the royal succession. In other plague poems (including, indeed, the poem that directly follows this one), the newly enthroned successor restores the appropriate providential interpretation of disaster, but Holland’s

“Introduction” doubts that Charles’s arrival affords the nation spiritual or bodily vitality. Holland shows how Charles’s erected throne has become “a wofull throne/ For Death and Fate to sit spectatours on.”79 Just as this usurping plague replaces Charles as the de facto ruler of the city and neutralizes the would-be redemption that the king might offer, the triumphal icons of his coronation are inverted as markers of national vulnerability.

This hermeneutic reversal includes the tolling of bells—signifying death-knells instead of the birth of a “yong Prince, or a new King crown’d”—and, most importantly for Holland’s pneumatic emphasis, the pyres lit throughout the city in order to burn the dead and cleanse the infected air.80 To an oblivious observer, Holland writes, these fires might look like the politically triumphant fires lit on the “Fift of August or Nouember.” Both dates signify royal victories over

78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., sig. E1r. 80 Ibid. 195 treasonous plots (the 1600 Gowrie conspiracy and the 1605 Gunpowder plot).81 These fires, however, are not the icons of successful Stuart statecraft that they seem to be. They are, instead, symbols of pneumatic national dysfunction; the plague rewrites their political iconography, aligning the disease with Gowrie and Fawkes rather than pronouncing state victory over conspiracy. The throne here, empty except for Death, extends the bleak timeframe after the death of a monarch into a vision of misrule that imagines a treasonous triumph over England. Just as

The Wonderfull Yeare demonstrates how the language of plague air can both reinforce and subvert the ideologies of succession, the troubling conflation of succession and treason here— condensed into the single, yet politically contradictory image of an air-cleansing bonfire— demonstrates how the meaning of plague could brim over the providential comforts that authors often attempted to read into succession.

“A space of Aire about it”: The Plague as Problematic Caveat in George Wither’s Britain’s Remembrancer

As I have shown, succession-year plague literature reveals the contradictions in early modern understandings of plague, emphasizing conceptual fissures between nature and supernature, poverty and wealth, mercy and justice, prince and subject, and, finally, death and succession. And while this chapter has focused on a diverse archive of literature in order follow plague’s various conceptual inconsistencies, Britain’s Remembrancer (1628) by George Wither struggles through all of these inconsistencies even in a single text. As such, Remembrancer represents a remarkable effort to accommodate the spiritual, natural, and political tensions in

81 Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 116. 196 early modern plague thought. As with other plague texts, however, this accommodation is characterized not by congruence but, instead, by discord.

In addition to the built-in ambivalences of plague analogy, two factors exacerbate the conceptual disharmonies throughout Wither’s snapshot of the 1625 plague. First, the substantial bulk of Britain’s Remembrancer allows it to contain the multitudes of contradictions in seventeenth-century plague thought. The entirety of Wither’s poem violates the conventional brevity of plague literature, consisting of nearly 20,000 lines across its dedicatory poem and eight Cantos. And although Wither advises against fragmentary reading as if Britain’s

Remembrancer provides a single coherent message, the overwhelming length of the text emerges from narrative entanglements, backtracking contradictions, and stacked caveats.82 This poetic style and the textual length that it produces emphasize the incompatibilities of plague belief and anxiously return to the role of nature in the outbreak and what it might represent for Charles I, for England, and for Wither’s sense of providential justice.

A second reason for Remembrancer’s unique struggle with plague’s contradictory significations is George Wither’s own political ambivalence. As David Norbrook notes, Wither’s poetry increasingly identified with the ideals of the Levellers during the English Civil War.83 It would be easy to see how the beliefs of this group—including their focus on popular sovereignty through the collapse of social distinctions—accords with plague’s supposed egalitarianism- under-God that other plague literature emphasizes and that, as we will see, Wither attempts to

82 George Wither, Britains Remembrancer, Containing a Narration of the Plague Lately Past (London, 1628), 1. Wither warns his reader against selective reading, cautioning that “he that shall by fragments this peruse,/ Will wrong himself, the Matter, and the Muse.” 83 David Norbrook, “Levelling Poetry: George Wither and the English Revolution, 1642-1649,” ELR 21.2 (1991): 217-256. 197 pursue throughout his text. Indeed, Norbrook notes that Wither had a reputation for controversial political critique even in the 1620s, which chased away potential publishers for Remembrancer so that he had to set the pages himself.84 However, Remembrancer is very early in the political trajectory of Wither’s career, and the poet was only ever one of the “reluctant republicans” during the English Civil War.85 I argue, then, that Wither’s political ambivalence—which would eventually culminate in Leveller sympathies and explicit critiques of Charles I during 1640s—is particularly suited to capture the unstable political meanings of both plague and succession.

As with other succession-year plague literature, the equivocations surrounding plague’s sociopolitical meanings in Remembrancer emerge in large part from the reciprocal tensions between nature and supernature, which Wither’s frontispiece immediately stages in its attempt to overwrite infected weathers with spiritual didacticism. Depicting a cartographic England beneath a fleet of dark clouds that are being broken up by the sun’s beams, the frontispiece’s stormy demeanor clearly recalls the meteorological basis of disease. Indeed, the swollen clouds are overlaid with scenes of death, above which recline allegorical representations of Mercy and

Justice, popular figures in the providential rhetoric of plague death.86 The Tetragrammaton is printed over the sun as the divine comfort of providence punches through the fetid clouds.

Wither is careful to qualify any excessively naturalistic readings, however, and, instead, includes his own exacting gloss of the frontispiece, delivered from a divinely proferred “Vision of his

Contemplations.” Readers who understood the sun and the death-soaked clouds of the image to indicate the weather-blown etiology of the plague, it appears, were mistaken:

God would this Tempest on this Island poure.

84 Ibid., 223-4. 85 Ibid., 219. 86 See, for example, Taylor, Fearful Summer, lines 1-25. 198

Yet better hopes appear’d: for loe the Rayes Of MERCY pierc’d this Cloud, & made such waies Quite through these Exhalations, that mine eye Doth this Inscription thereupon espie; BRITAINES REMEMBRANCER: &, somewhat said, These words (me thought) The Storme is yet delaid.87

Although laden with meteorological terminology like “Cloud,” “Exhalations,” and “Tempest,” the disaster that the frontispiece’s stormclouds signifies is not “a narration of the [1625] plague” as the text’s subtitle promises but is, instead, some disaster that is “yet delaid.” Like the scowling

“Element” in The Wonderfull Yeare, the national storm possesses all of the characteristics of a plaguey weather front even as its association with the 1625 outbreak is explicitly denied. Thus, the apparently feverish clouds of the frontispiece do not signify the plague wind but are overwritten by the generalized images of carnage stamped over them. The sun, too, does not represent the meteorological cessation of any historical plague; rather, the Tetragrammaton is designed to draw attention away from the material role the sun plays in plague weather, thus distracting from the 1625 plague while gesturing toward a future disaster “yet delaid,” which, judging from the variety of non-meteorological images engraved within its clouds, may or may not have anything to do with actual storms. However, just as the sun and the cloud exist just beneath Wither’s inscriptions and just as the terms of plague-weather repeatedly tempt the reader toward the natural etiology of plague, Wither will, like other writers we have seen, struggle with the threat that pneumatic plague poses for the spiritual, social, and political certainties he attempts to read into disaster and succession alike.

Just as the “Storme” of the frontispiece does not, for Wither, characterize the 1625 plague, Wither opens his poem with an explicit (though nonetheless strained) denial of plague’s

87 Wither, Remembrancer, title page, italics in the original. 199 natural etiology in foul weather. Indeed, the First Canto (of eight) Wither describes the new king as a “sunlike” exemplar of England’s meteorological health, and it is into this fairweather polity that the 1625 plague enters.88 The plague emerges as an exclusively supernatural disaster throughout the course of this introductory canto, which begins with an allegorical account that shows God gathering his terrible powers to destroy a sinful England. Of the four horsemen, only

Famine is explicitly meteorological as the genius of bad weather and crop destruction.89 Before

God unleashes all of his fury upon England, however, his daughter Mercy and Justice interpose themselves in order to sue for their preferred method of punishment. While Justice favors the absolute desolation of England, Mercy pleads for lenience, citing the mitigating circumstances of

English sin and the goodness of Charles.90 Ultimately, God compromises between Justice and

Mercy, sending only one Horseman to rebuke English sinners. In so doing, God enumerates the advantages and disadvantages of various disasters, the social implications of which will be familiar from other plague texts. Death and War, God reckons, are too inexact, and Famine

“unequally consumes the poore.” And so:

[W]e to punish them, will send from hence, That dreadfull, and impartiall PESTILENCE. For she doth neither Rich, nor Poore preferre; . . . She visiteth The Palace, as the Cottage; and with death, Or else with sicknesse, strikes at each degree.91

Where the treatments of God’s justice by other writers of plague literature struggle to elide the

“unequall” deaths of London poor during the plague, Wither insists that pestilence is

“impartiall,” able to select precisely from among the “worst Livers” (as he claims elsewhere) of

88 Ibid., 17. 89 Ibid., 20. 90 Ibid., 38. 91 Ibid. 200 every social group.92 For Wither, God’s merciful justice rests upon the social egalitarianism of the plague, Wither’s denial of natural causation, and an immediate providence that chooses its victims supernaturally.

As with other plague literature, Wither’s particular denial of natural causation also attempts to refute the plague’s regional specificity. Wither writes that the plague derives from

[N]either Constellations, nor the Weather: For then we had beene pois’ned all together, . . . [B]irds and beasts had dy’d as well as we; And this Disease had seiz’d on ev’ry Creature Or more or less, as it partakes our nature. It was no noysome Ayre, no Sewre, or Stinke, Which brought this Death.93

Here, Wither’s denial of natural etiology is explicitly related to his denial of the plague’s general confinement to London. Scientific authorities were almost universally agreed that animals could contract the plague, but Wither’s denial of interspecies contagion encloses the plague within an immediate view of providence that denies “Ayre” or “Weather” or “Constellations.”94 These

92 Ibid., 38. 93 Ibid., 48, italics in the original. 94 Henry Chettle, A True Bill of the Whole Number That Hath Died in the Cittie of London, the Citty of Westminster, the Citty of Norwich, and Diuers Other Places, Since the Time This Last Sicknes of the Plague (London: John Trundle, 1603); Dekker and Middleton, Graves-end, lines 115-30; Holland, Posthuma, sig. F2v; Lodge, Treatise, sig. C2v; Paré, Treatise, 11; Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London, 1607), 683. Dekker and Middleton’s poem, too, denies the meteorological nature of the plague by pointing out in their plague epics that it does not infect animals. According to Graves-end, animals lack a human’s talent for sin, they cannot get the disease according to the scheme of many plague epics. This again places these epics in contention with the prevailing scientific knowledge of the day. Both Paré and Lodge state that animals are sensitive to the meteorological conditions of plague infection, the latter going so far as to say that the sudden deaths of birds signals the approach of a pestilential weather system. Henry Chettle’s broadside enumeration of 1603 plague deaths includes a note about the deaths of “beasts, birds, and fishes [that] were smitten” during a previous outbreak, and Edward Topsell’s exhaustive bestiary includes the pestilence within a discourse of trans-species ailments. It is worth noting that Holland’s “Description of the Plague” uses the relative health of animals as an ecological index not only of human wellbeing but also of economic difference. Holland indicates that plague-time depopulation inaugurates a kind of ecological misrule in which plants and animals normally trampled or sold in Smithfield Market have an opportunity to flourish during an outbreak. This mercantile impoverishment smoothly transitions mid-line to the plight of the “poore” dead perhaps because the Smithfield animal utopia recalls the starvation of the lower classes, a plague-time problem about which Holland repeatedly worries. 201 natural forces are regional and, thus, more general than the targeted form of providence with which Wither launches his critiques. We know from a later Canto, in which he parodies the specialized astrological language of a geography’s latitudes, meridians, and sextiles, that Wither is familiar with the regional nature of a constellation’s influence on the “Weather.”95

Instead of a localized swath of weather, Wither ascribes the plague only “A space of

Aire” around infected persons, the grotesque inverse of the close scent of “the Violet, or Rose.”96

This pneumatic intimacy allows Wither to deny larger meteorological causation in favor of a closer version of providence while also confronting the apparent reality of person-to-person transmission. Even this miniscule cloud of vapor, however, grants some role to the plague’s pneumatic dynamism. This “space of Aire”—and the natural forces that it represents—threatens to expand beyond the providential enclosures that Wither has attempted to construct in these earlier Cantos. This strained incompatibility between immediate providence and early modern natural philosophy produces a contradiction within Canto Two concerning Wither’s discussion of the body’s natural defenses. He begins with a familiar disparagement of the natural sciences by pointing out the diagnostic instability of the plague. The scientific endeavor of inquiring after causes, according to Wither, is mocked by a plague that is essentially mystical in nature: “[The naturalist finds] Such oppositions in the Naturall Causes,/ Such knots and riddles . . . because he seldome findes/ (As he perceives in griefes of other kindes)/ The causes and Effects agree together;/ For there is much uncertainty in either.”97 Wither distinguishes the plague from

“griefes of other kindes” through its diagnostic opacity, its essential spirituality, and its aloofness

95 Wither, Remembrancer, 152. 96 Ibid., 49. 97 Ibid., 52, italics in the original. 202 from both natural “causes and Effects.” For Wither, the plague “doth show herselfe inclin’d/ So variously [that] she cannot be defin’d.”98 The scientific impulse to define falters before a plague which “much amazes/ The naturall man.” Wither’s pun here subsumes the rigors of early modern natural philosophy with the mental deficiency of a “naturall,” a term applied to mentally disabled persons. 99

Against the providential certitude of an exclusively spiritual disease, however, Wither quickly offers one of many, many caveats that, as we will see, emphasize moments of theological, political, or providential discomfort. Wither admits that the physical symptoms of infection suggests something of a natural basis for the sickness. But, rather than proffering a unified vision of spirit and nature through mediated providence, Wither—like Clapham and

Bradwell—subdivides the plague into two distinct taxonomies: a “murth’ring Arrow which in darknesse flyes” and one that “flyes abroad by day.”100 The nocturnal/diurnal distinction here has nothing to do with the time at which transmission occurs. Instead, it denotes the closeness with which God operates upon the suffering body. The so-called nighttime plague, for instance, is an immediate stroke of punishment from “Gods owne Bow” directly aimed a victim.101 Only a spiritually revivifying repentance is effective against this manifestation of immediate providence.

By contrast, the diurnal plague works through physical symptoms and, against Wither’s earlier disparagement of pathological science, medically legible causes and effects. This “outward stroke,” he argues, is responsive to medical cures and preventatives in a way that violates his earlier assertions that the plague was mystically illegible. He assures us that he could list the

98 Ibid., 58. 99 OED, s.v. “natural.” 100 Wither, Remembrancer, 60, italics in the original. 101 Ibid. 203 medicinal recipes that protect against the plague, but “[s]ince they must often chang’d and mixed be” according to the disease’s “changeable” presentation or the body in which it is found, Wither gives it up.102 Here, the plague’s “changeable” medical presentation no longer diagnoses the disease as a spiritual ailment that evades scientific inquiry. Here, medicines—even those prescribed by the “naturall man”—may be matched to a changeable (yet still legible) illness.

Further still, the plague’s “changeable” character here may not be rooted in its own nature but, instead, in the diverse bodies—the “Age,” “Temper,” or “Complection”—of the people it infects.

In this, the “outward stroke” of the plague would be no different from the “griefes of other kindes,” Wither earlier insists may be categorically distinguished from a supernatural, socially purgative plague. The nocturnal/diurnal distinction that Wither proposes here is thus an attempt to accommodate the contradictions between nature and supernature; however, at the same time, those contradictions are rendered newly visible both through his own inconsistencies and through the taxonomic rift that he widens between these two plagues.

From this inconsistent taxonomy of the plague’s guises spring other backtracking contradictions, including a defense of medical science, a warning that a reliance upon medical science breeds sinful fear (which breeds plague), a qualification that not all fear is sinful, and

(importantly, as we will see below) a defense of reason rooted in well-founded fearfulness.103

This second canto’s series of self-revisions leads eventually to one of the central issues of plague literature that we have seen: the flight of the wealthy from the city. Once again, the acknowledgement of socioeconomic disparity between those with means to flee and those who must stay within London provokes a tense examination of the plague as a natural disaster that

102 Ibid., 61, italics in the original. 103 Ibid., 61-3. 204 might be fled because, despite Wither’s earlier refutations, of the disease’s ties to a regional climatic phenomenon. “Few staid,” Wither writes, “of any calking [calculation] or degree . . .

Those of our wanton Gentry, that could brooke/ No ayre, but Londons; London quite forsooke.”104 Here, the material advantages of the gentry and, generally, those of “degree” immediately brings to mind the material substrates of the plague; it is the “ayre” of the city that the gentry suddenly find unpalatable. As with other plague tracts, the material distinctions between social groups call to mind the material mediums of transmission in ways that violate a purely spiritual, egalitarian vision of God’s punishment.

Just so, it is the quality of the air that the wealthy attempt to improve. Describing, for example, wealthy landowners who fled to rural tenant houses that they own, Wither notes how suddenly fastidious they are to “ayre againe” the “musty Roomes” that they ought always to have kept “warme and sweet with hospitable Fires.”105 As we saw from the well-perfumed rooms of

Muggins’s rich man, the judicious circulation of healthful air and the upkeep of open fires within the home were thought to help purify the quality of the air and to offer a serviceable preventative to plague transmission. It is only when these landlords are personally endangered, however, that they provide material maintenance that helps to qualify the sickly air. Thus, the landlords’ flight from the plague reveals the socio-material disparity between them and their “racked Tenants,” with the musty air helping to indict the abuses of the wealthy.106 This turn toward the pneumatic locatability of the plague and its economic import prompts a discussion of the topographical byways through which citizens fled the city; mapped with the diseased “ayre” and the citizenry’s

104 Ibid., 67, italics in the original. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., italics in the original. 205 flight by “Land” and “Water,” Wither’s account of the social geography of flight underscores the economic advantages of those who may flee and those who cannot.

If Wither here seems to endorse a mediated providential formula of the plague’s reach, however, he quickly discards it in favor of an unlocatable version of immediate providence whereby the individual fleer—above identified as a person of means—is hounded down by the immediate hand of God. He writes, “Why with such childish terror did you try/ To run from him, from whom you cannot flye?/ Why left you so the place of your abode,/ Not hasting rather to goe meet your God/ With true repentance, who forever hath/ A mercy for us in his greatest wrath?”

The plague’s material realities here are neutralized by a supernaturally directed plague indifferent to “the place of your abode” and by a turn to immediate providence that is, as with

Dekker and Middleton’s Graves-end, marked by a transition to the second-person.

The very next line, however, backpedals from his strong stance of immediate providence.

“I doe not here deny,/ Or call in doubt” he writes, “the lawfulness to flye.”107 His contradiction here is reserved for certain classes of persons, including, first, a “King or Prince” who must “the

Place avoid,/ Which is with any noysomnesse annoy’d.”108 It is impossible to “flye” from God’s punishment unless, apparently, you happen to be an authority figure. Once more, importantly, the plague is defined by its environs (its “Place”) and the “noysomnesse” that corrupts the air, even though Wither attempts to soften the plague’s pneumatic association by referring here to “any” noisomeness (perhaps, he hints, not the plague at all). Here again, the social lines that apportion the cultural space are reinforced, rather than leveled, during a regionally specific plague outbreak. And just as Wither earlier laments the evacuation of the “wealth of London,” he here

107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., italics in the original. 206 grants the impoverishment of the city as a sensible necessity when performed by the monarch:

“[A king should flee because] many thousands are/ Of Townes, and Cities, that in him have share./ Who, would conceive it were unjustly done,/ That he should venter all their wealth in

One.”109 Wither’s treatment here of the monarch as a shared business venture may be metaphorical, but, once again, the flight of social betters calls to mind the city’s impoverishment and the plague’s regional emplacement while also delineating the barriers separating the wealthy and the poor, the king and the subject.

Wither’s contradictory commentary on the social meaning of the plague and the futility/utility of urban flight culminates in a discussion of his own inner turmoil when deciding, himself, to stay or run during the 1625 outbreak. Recorded as a meditative psychomachia between Reason and Faith, the Third Canto features some of the most explicit images of meteorological disease in the entirety of the epic. Even still, these images are fraught with denials, suppressions, and subtextual returns that characterize both Wither’s own treatment of plague and the contradictions in the general cultural understandings of the plague’s providential value. His earlier defense of reasonable fear in the face of plague outbreak returns here as the genius of Reason argues for a swift retreat from the London space, but Wither’s portrayal of

Reason in his Third Canto is a callow—and weather-wise—sophist whose arguments are valid

(at first) but must eventually be overcome in order for the reader to imbue the plague with appropriate spiritual meaning. For Reason, the plague—here a “Tempest”—is described more as a malicious weather system than an immediate stroke of God.110 As such, plague no longer attaches to the “worst livers” of London. Rather, “this Disease, with outward marks, doth strike,/

109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., 82, italics in the original. 207

The Righteous, and the Wicked, both alike.”111 Rather than in the cramped rose-like “space of

Aire,” the plague (according to Reason) palpably drips from the London air, “where men draw no breath/ But that which menaced the bodies death.” Reason pleads that he take his wealthier friends up on their offer for sanctuary in the “Wholesome Country Ayre,” contrasting the healthful remove of the rural wind with the toxic stink of the London environment: “Dost thou not smell the vapours of the Grave?/ Dost thou not tast infection in the Aire? . . . Dost thou not feele thy vitall pow’rs assail’d?” The vaporous ubiquity of the plague here, along with the transactional porousness between the human body and the air in which it is immersed calls to mind a miasmic, climatological understanding of disease and transmission.

Once again, in addition to this conceptualization of a larger, more pneumatic plague,

Reason recognizes the deepening social hierarchies of plague outbreak. Although in Wither’s earlier analogy Famine was the only disaster that both emerged from foul weather and strained the finances of city dwellers, Reason here worries that famine and plague are intertwined, that

“[s]uch Poverty upon this Towne may seize” and make feeding oneself a challenge during the outbreak.112 As the space between economic classes widens along the distinction between those who can flee and those who cannot, Wither’s Reason worries that his own modest means will not be sufficient to keep him distinguished from the starving poor.113 Wither treats this socioeconomic widening in greater detail in a later Canto, noting that the fiscally struggling class of artisans “dy’d/ Twice more then did of all sorts else beside.”114 These craftsmen, suddenly

111 Ibid, italics in the original. 112 Ibid. 113 See, also, Slack, Impact of Plague, 188. “The distinction between top and bottom [classes] was obvious, however, and epidemics simply pushed men in the middle toward one or other pole.” 114 Wither, Remembrancer, 117. 208 beset by a “hungry Poverty” that reaches up from the bottom of the lower classes, did not have store enough of wealth to sustain themselves during the economic drought but were, nonetheless, confined to the terms of their employment (and the London space). It is not that the plague provides a window into a uniquely apocalyptic vision of social redistribution; rather, the 1625 outbreak renders London a grotesque caricature of existing fiscal realities, making legible what was already there to begin with through what is, here, an essentially meteorological disaster.

However, when Faith enters the dialogue to rebuff Reason’s supposedly specious arguments, she does so with a fanfare of meteorological denial. Wither celebrates her entry:

“[S]he blew aside/ Those fogs wherewith my heart was terrifi’d.”115 Like the spiritualized captions that attempt to overwrite frontispiece’s meteorological agents, the turn here toward

Faith attempts to render these “fogs” merely representational of fear or sin even while, for

Reason, these fogs had a very real and very threatening presence. Faith is cautious to avoid references to the air throughout her disquisition, but in the one notable mention of pneumatic transmission, we see again that the broad miasmic purview of Reason’s plague depiction has shrunk significantly. While Reason implored Wither to retreat by noting the invasive ubiquity of plague air, Faith downplays such “fleshly wis[dom]” by emphasizing the spiritual opportunities of staying. She cautions in a caveat, however, not to invite bodily danger like the overzealous who “thrust[s] himself among/ The noisome breathings of a sickly throng.”116 While it was a principal actor hanging over everything in Reason’s troubled admonition, the air, here, appears only in a clarifying aside and is locally restricted to the “noisome breathings of a throng,” into which the hypothetical zealot “thrust[s]” himself. By contrast with the plague-saturated

115 Ibid., 84. 116 Ibid., 93. 209 atmosphere about which Reason worried, Faith’s language is that of cramped enclosure, confined to the mouths of a dense crowd that may easily be avoided. It is through this tense compromise— granting the plague’s pneumatic basis while refuting its meteorological immensity—that

Wither’s Faith is able to blow aside the “fogs” that disrupt the egalitarian fingerprint of God’s justice. But just as Graves-end’s denials of meteorology are still haunted by the language it rejects, the literal meaning of such “fogs” lingers on the page even as the fear it supposedly represents is blown away.

The contradictory entanglements of the plague’s natural or supernatural character, along with the social meanings they produce, spill over onto Wither’s treatment of the 1625 succession.

In the Fourth Canto, for example, musing upon London infection inspires a holy vision in which the victims of a conquering personification of Death are carted before him. Wither pronounces the difficulties of memorialization as he attempts “[t]o keepe their Names from being quite obscured/ Among the multitude. But they were gone.”117 From this Wither derives a conventional doctrine of plague social levelling, that it erases the names of “rich and poore, men, women, old and yong” so that “possible it was not, to descry/ Or who or what they were.”118

Only virtue, according to Wither, is able to distinguish one of the deceased from among the thronging multitude as they march toward the spiritual meritocracies of heaven or hell. As we have seen, silent shifts like this from the specific horrors of plague death to Death as a general concept is one of the ways in which writers promote an egalitarian vision of God’s justice during the plague.119 Indeed, Wither’s struggle to recall the names of the fading dead produces kinships

117 Ibid., 112. 118 Ibid. 119 Thus, an important part of Holland’s generalization of the 1625 plague in his “Description” of the plague is its occasional conflation with death more broadly conceived: “Death all conditions equally inuades.” Graves-end, too, 210 not only among disparate social classes but among disparate species, as well. Describing the ecological voracity of this egalitarian Death, Wither writes that he “scarce distinguished a score

[of humans]/ From Beasts, and Fowles, & Fishes. For Death makes/ So little difference twixt the flesh he takes.”120 However, the few exceptions to this polity of shared mortal obscurity are telling and include potentates who were already situated atop the hierarchy while alive. Leading this group is, unsurprisingly, James. The fleet of dead “was an Army royall, which became [that is, was appropriate for]/ A King, and loe, King JAMES did lead the same.”121 James’s inclusion here pulls in two ideological directions that will be familiar from other plague literature. First, it assures readers who suffered the specific traumas of the plague that everyone, including the monarch, is subject to the same mortality, thus distracting from the woes of present death while imagining a mortal continuity between a king and his subjects. Like the contortions of grammatical tense in Graves-end and London’s Mourning Garment, Wither meshes the narrativized now of his plague record with the simulated “now” of a holy vision that, in actuality, attempts to reconcile deaths past, horrors present, and future afterlives into a spiritualized polity of egalitarian justice.

This reconciliation, however, is endangered by the second ideological move of this passage. By including James at the head of the supposedly equal throng of dead, Wither merely confirms hierarchies already in place, simultaneously offering the promise of social leveling while also granting priority (moral, political, providential, or memorial) to the powerful.

posits that “Princes deaths do euen bespeake/ Millions of liues,” cementing the comparison between Elizabeth’s death and the 1603 plague dead, a comparison that Dekker teases (but finally withholds) when he writes in The Wonderfull Yeare that Elizabeth’s “death (like a thunder-clap) was able to kill thousands. Dekker, Wonderfull Yeare, sig. B2r; Dekker and Middleton, Graves-end, 331-2; Holland, Posthuma, sig. G1r. 120 Wither, Remembrancer, 111. 121 Ibid., italics in the original. 211

Although Wither democratizes the voracity of Death, we are contradictorily assured not only that

James triumphs over the indignities of plague death but also that he did not die like the animals supposedly milling into this “Army royall.” This contradiction is rendered even more obvious from the rest of this canto, which quickly returns to the specific troubles of 1625 London. It is here that Wither details the plague’s widening of socioeconomic hierarchies (detailed above), thus arraigning the very hierarchies that, while here benevolent and divine in its characterization of James, helps to perpetuate the “hungry Poverty” that endangered so many during the 1625 outbreak. Quavering between democratized mortality and the hierarchies of preserved glory both on earth and in the hereafter, James’s death struggles to contain all the meanings of mortality that

Wither places around it.

If royal death renders Wither’s treatment of plague death particularly ambivalent in this

Canto, it is troubled further by the author’s ambivalence toward James’s successor, Charles.

Remembrancer, as a text composed over the course of three years, is uniquely able to capture this ambivalence in part because the poem spans the anxiety of succession, the initial hopes for

Charles, and what would be, for many, keen disappointments in his regime. One of the most poignant critiques of the poem, for instance, is delivered through meteorological metaphors resonating from the text’s beginning to its end, with about sixteen thousand lines padding the author from the political danger of putting two potentially inflammatory moments together.

During his introductory Canto, Wither includes a dedicatory prayer to the newly crowned (at the time of its composition, at least) Charles. This prayer, as with the frontispiece, flirts with the natural etiology of the plague while remaining safely hypothetical:

[W]hat a light Will he [Charles] become, when he ascends the height 212

Of his great Orbe? And, oh! what pitty ‘twere His minde should ever fall below that spheare . . . How grievous would it be, that his beginning (So hopefull, and such love and honour winning) Should faile that expectation, which it hath? And, make thee [God] shut thy favour up, in wrath? Let not oh God! let not the sins of others Nor any fog (which Vertues glorie smothers) Ascending from his frailties, make obscure His rising honor, which yet seemeth pure.122

Here, Wither reenacts the conventional astrometeorological vocabularies heaped onto the monarch, comparing Charles to the sun’s “great Orbe” and the early years of his reign to the approaching zenith of the solar trajectory. At this early moment in Canto One, there is, for

Wither, optimistic “expectation” for Charles’s reign, and Wither’s brief prayer to ward Charles from the sins of himself and his advisors remains merely hypothetical.

Because the reader knows, however, that Remembrancer is a record of the plague, the specter of natural etiology hovers over this sunny horizon and the dangerous fogs. The moistures of “fog . . . [a]scending” from the earth without being evaporated by the strength of the sun was, as we have seen, one of the plague’s prevailing early modern etiological theories. And although at this point in his text Wither works to debunk such theories in favor of a radically immediate providential etiology, the language of mediated providence—importantly focused upon the public body and soul of Charles—guides this passage. His “minde” is imagined as the sun, while the earthy “fog” rising from his “frailties” signifies the plaguey temptations of the body that a weak mind, like a tepid sun, cannot purify. Thus, the conventional association of the king’s body with the geography of the land is figured here as a tenuous balance—between shining virtue and

122 Ibid., 26, italics in the original. 213 the sluggish depravities of the earthly body—that may at any moment tip over into a plague outbreak.

This becomes particularly relevant a full six Cantos later after the worst-case scenario of the above passage has, indeed, come to pass. Here, Wither repeatedly invokes his own sinful procrastination, a procrastination that, along with his difficulty in finding a publisher, resulted in the three-year delay between the 1625 plague and the publication of the epic.123 The intervening years between Canto One and Canto Seven has seen the hopes of the earlier laudatory astrometeorology languish. By 1628, the Duke of Buckingham was the clear, yet vastly unpopular, favorite of Charles and, worse (according to Wither), the religious differences between the king and his Catholic queen were a well-known source of contention with potentially national consequences.124 Wither references as much in a denaturalizing discussion of all governmental forms in which he sees each form of government arising merely from

“Customes,” detailing the disadvantages of aristocracy and monarchy, writing, “[O]ne great man among them gets the pow’r,/ From all the rest, and like an Emperour,/ Doth act his pleasure. And we know tis common,/ To have some foolish Favorite, or Woman, to governe him.”125 Charles’s vulnerability to the ill counsel of Buckingham, and his perceived religious concessions to his wife are dangerously immediate problems here.

Thus when we again see the conflation of Charles with the English land and sun, it has none of Canto One’s bright-eyed optimism and is, as we will see, characteristic of an ailing body politic. Wither’s preferred diplomatic policy for England is guardedly self-reliant, favoring a

123 Ibid., 203. 124 Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2005), 44-55. 125 Wither, Remembrancer, 265, italics in the original. 214 politics that matches the island isolationism of England’s God-given geography. According to the poet, the political and moral failures of the seventeenth century occurred because policy makers failed to “see/ Those armies, which round enclosed thee/ For thy protection.”126 This protective enclosure involves spiritual, economic, and military defenses, but it also involves the significant geographical defense of the surrounding seas; just a few lines after praising those enclosing “armies,” Wither signals his geographical admiration, writing that “[t]his Iland should not feare Iberia’s [that is, Spain’s] wrath” shortly before waxing nostalgic about the Elizabethan

England’s military mastery of the seas.127 Wither characterizes this geographical unity as bodily unity, a physical intactness that maps easily upon the virgin queen and that transfers metonymically onto all English subjects who, under Elizabeth, chastely “preserv’d their honor.”128 It was this metaphorical bodily unity that Elizabethan England’s Catholic enemies attempted (and failed) to target; their scheme to plant the insidious “Conception” of Roman

Catholicism within the national “nat’rall Mother”—who was already growing church Reform within her womb—failed to render England ill like the Biblical Rebecca, whose twins Jacob and

Esau quarreled in her womb.

In contrast to this bodily and geographical impregnability, the Stuart dynasty is characterized by a porousness that fails to respect the geopolitical implications of the island nation’s natural defenses. While Elizabeth “sought not” the “ayd” of foreign nations even when

“she had no Alliance to make strong/ Her party,” Stuart England is saddled with callow

“Alliances” and “Leagues” with their would-be enemies, concessions that, for Wither, constitute

126 Ibid., 166. 127 Ibid., italics in the original. 128 Ibid. 215 political fraternization.129 The poet’s censures here almost certainly recall the ultimately abortive—and virulently unpopular—1623 Spanish match between Charles and the Infanta and, more recently, the compact struck between the French and English that had been brokered both by his marriage to Henrietta Marie and his early laxity toward English Catholic recusants.130 As such, Wither’s criticisms evoke specific political and theological concessions to adversarial nations that had infected all parts of English culture through policy, treaty, and trade.131

These problems of the land’s vulnerability work through Wither’s later discussion of natural pathology, body politic, and meteorological disease. Just as England’s Elizabethan geopolitics warranted its own bodily analogue of chaste intactness, for instance, the Stuart body politic—alienated from the promise of its own geography—is a body traitorously open to the ravages of disease.132 This pathological state, Wither darkly assures us, extends to Charles, but he is careful to temper his censures as diplomatically as possible:

Why may not (England) a diseasednesse (Occasioned by thy unrighteousnesse)

129 Ibid., 166-7, italics in the original. 130 See Cust, Charles I, 31-43. 131 Wither, Remembrancer, 177; see also Richard Cust, “Charles I, the Privy Council, and the Forced Loan,” Journal of British Studies 24.2 (1985): 208-35. Charles’s aggressively interventionist foreign policy was, in fact, the cornerstone of a controversy known as the Forced Loan, which would occupy political discourse during the years Wither was composing these final cantos. Following the Danish Protestant defeat at the Battle of Lutter against the Catholic League in 1626, Charles was adamant to send a sizeable gift of support in order to buoy the Danish forces against the Holy Roman Empire. When, however, the 1626 Parliament failed to approve a supply grant sufficient to what Charles perceived as Denmark’s needs, he dissolved Parliament for eighteen months and instituted the Loan. While nominally a “benevolence” freely given by dutiful subjects to the king, the Forced Loan was, in fact, a compulsory tax levied without the traditional Parliamentary consent. Taxpayers who refused the Loan were imprisoned or threatened with military conscription. 132 See, Jonathan Gil Harris, “Plague and Transmigration: Timothy Bright, Thomas Milles, Volpone,” chap. 5 in Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantalism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 108-35. Wither’s theories of bodily, geopolitical, and economic integrity recall Harris’s discussion of plague. According to Harris, the intersecting discourses of early modern medicine and mercantilism helped to produce an emerging scientific paradigm of exogeny: just as external pathogens endanger a body, the corruptions of economic imports threatens the wellbeing of the state. According to Harris, however, the plague’s miasmatic status is transitional in this framework; existing somewhere between exogenous germ theory and the internal humoralism—and, I would add, mediated providence and individual spirituality—the plague’s significance vacillates between two contradictory economic models. 216

Make him [Charles] unpleasing in his course to thee, Whom thou hast praised? . . . We seldome see the Bodies torment bred By ought which first ariseth in the Head; But, oftentimes we feele both head and eyes Diseas’d by fumes which from the Body rise. . . . ‘Tis thus in nat’rall Bodies; and the like May be observ’d in Bodies politick.133

According to Wither, Charles ought not to be blamed for falling short of the expectations set for him; his distemper (probably) results from the dysfunction of English subjects, the lower, grosser organs of the body politic. Wither assures us that a lower body is “seldome” inflicted by problems originating in the governing organ of the head. The inverse, he muses, is much more likely. That is, except in the case of the plague. Because David Norbrook’s important work on

Wither focuses exclusively on the poet’s potentially leveller politics, he takes Wither at his word here, missing the conspicuous absence of the plague in this metaphor of governance.134 As we have seen, Wither’s opus is full of moments in which the offenses of the governing principle of the individual or state (here, the literal head of state) attracts the wrath of God and, thus, the destruction of the body. Whether he is asserting the fundamentally spiritual aspect of the plague or flirting with its potentially natural etiologies, Wither insists that the body’s vulnerability to the plague demands the proper management of spiritual or medicinal defenses. Distempers of the body, throughout Britain’s Remembrancer, descend almost exclusively from the mismanagement by the head, mind, or soul (as in the above example of a lukewarm sun breeding dangerous

“fog”), despite how “seldome” he claims it happens here. It is the contradictory status of the

133 Wither, Remembrancer, 229, italics in the original. 134 David Norbrook, “Levelling Poetry: George Wither and the English Revolution, 1642-1649) ELR 21.2 (1991): pp. 217-56, 221. 217 plague, fostered through Wither’s many caveats, as a natural or spiritual disease that allows there to be a more radical subtext to his disquisition on “nat’rall Bodies” here.

This medicinal rhetoric culminates in a return to the geographically plaguey metaphor of

Canto One. But although the earlier construction considers the moral fogginess of Charles’s reign an unlikely hypothetical outcome, it is, in Canto Seven, a foregone conclusion:

Endeavor to be friends with God againe: And he will all thy furious foes restraine. Thy faulty members, who doe now disturb Thy peace, he either will remove or curb, Those Graces thou perceived’st heretofore Adorne thy Soveraigne, shall be hid no more By those darke fogs which from thy sins do rise.135

Again, Wither implicitly identifies Charles’s friendly countenance with the sun, and, again, the

“darke fogs” of meteorological plague transmission haunt this passage of political unease. The disaffection here is softened, however, by Wither’s censure of the English people in general. It is their “sins” that conjured the fogs that obscure Charles’s glory and, by extension, drew on the miasmatic fogs of plague outbreak. But a reader with a long recollection will remember that, in

Canto One, it was Charles’s own “frailties” that could engender the “fog” that eclipsed his virtue.

This troubles the politically comfortable blame on which Wither relies in Canto Seven, for it undercuts his assurance that distempers of the head “seldom” cause bodily distempers; it is

Charles’s sunny “minde” that should have burned off the foggy excesses of the body. As such, it recalls formulas of providential, meteorological, pathological, and political corruption that cannot be completely overwritten by the later Cantos and are, rather, conjured by them. It is

Remembrancer’s unique time frame—written across James’s death, Charles’s accession, and the

135 Wither, Remembrancer, 241, italics in the original. 218 later flurry of controversies—that allows us to read the hopeful promises of monarchical succession in relation to their bitter disappointments by a new king. Indeed, similarities in language between Cantos One and Seven encourage precisely this kind of long-view political critique. It is through the shared image of plague-breeding moistures that Wither scathingly qualifies the providential rhetoric of succession in other plague literature, whereby succession coincides with a healthful renewal of the body politic. Indeed, Wither hints, Charles’s “frailties” may in fact be to blame for the various plagues—both real and metaphorical—assailing England from 1625-1628.

Conclusion

When, in 1643, passages from Britain’s Remembrancer were reprinted for the

Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War, Royalists were quick to respond with their own pamphlet, which did little more than reprint Remembrancer’s other, monarchically sympathetic passages and, in so doing, poking fun at Wither’s political waffling.136 As I have argued, it is precisely this waffling between mostly incompatible political, social, scientific, and theological stances that characterizes the treatments of plague in Remembrancer and, indeed, other plague writings as they endeavor to reconcile the various social meanings of the disease.

Plague literature’s emphasis on or negligence of the plague’s miasmatic character can place the disease anywhere along the spectrums of egalitarianism and hierarchy, nature and supernature, mediated and immediate providence, and royal death and hopeful succession. Plague thus becomes a vector of contested meteorological and political content. The less natural the plague

136 Mr. Wither His Prophesie of Our Present Calamity (London, 1643); Wither’s Remembrancer or, Extracts Out of Master Withers His Book, Called, Britains Remembrancer (London, 1643). 219 appears in plague literature, the more egalitarian God’s punishments seem as they leap the strictures of class to smite even the wealthiest sinner. However, just as Barbara Freedman notes that plague measures were often used to mask state control over socioeconomic protests, the egalitarian rhetoric surrounding plague death itself masked the cultural-material consequences of a meteorological disease, and the more willing a piece of literature is to grant plague’s material basis in moist English weathers, the more intensely it calls attention to that mystification of inequity.137 Similarly, plague literature’s confrontation with succession emphasizes the difficulties of squaring a natural/supernatural disease with the tensions between the death of a monarch’s natural body and the mystified enthronement of a successor. Whether a ruler’s death participates in the egalitarian model of plague death, and whether a new monarch represents a providential resumption of both power and health are questions that are, in the plague literature of 1603 and 1625, riddled with contradiction and, indeed, obscured by “darke fogs.”

137 Barbara Freedman, “Elizabethan Protest, Plague, and Plays: Rereading the ‘Documents of Control,’” English Literary Renaissance 26.1 (1996): 17-45. 220

CHAPTER FOUR

The World at War: The End of Nature in Hobbes, Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” and Leonard Willan’s Orgula

In Leonard Willan’s 1658 closet drama Orgula, the princess’s lady-in-waiting Zizania emerges from the forest brush, freshly changed into the masculine clothes that will help her and the princess flee from the plots of the royal palace. Before the princess joins her, Zizania delivers a soliloquy that exemplifies the subtle contradictions of political thought in the 1640s and 50s.

Lamenting that she “[her] self must lose” within the disguise, Zizania asks, “What Law, so tyrannous, doth us enjoyn/ With the first Rites of Nature to dispence?/ Our common preservation should prevaile, . . . Yet I unhappy must such ties inflict/ Upon my self, as no Law would impose.”1 Zizania’s lament here is not merely an expression of grief for her own suppressed femininity but is, instead, an articulation of a controversy that circulated in the years during and after the English Civil War. If the conflict were with a foreign invader, the parity of “common preservation” and self-preservation (to prevent “los[ing]” oneself) would have been assured as

Englanders took up arms to defend both their government and their own lives. As it stood, however, the internal conflict of the English Civil War, for many thinkers, set common- and self- preservation at odds. Is the obligation to maintain the monarchy more or less compelling than the obligation to defend oneself against the monarch’s forces? The overlapping answers and antagonisms surrounding this question in the 1640s and 50s is the subject of the present chapter.

Obviously, the naturalness of the instinct for self-preservation was not “discovered” by thinkers in the 40s and 50s. However, the relationships among this instinct as a foundational

1 Leonard Willan, Orgula: or The Fatall Error (London, 1658), Act 4, Scene 3, Page 57. Because of the absence of line enumerations (and modern editions), all subsequent citations will follow this format and will appear parenthetically in the body of the text. 221 precept of nature, the common obligation to defend England (whatever that meant), and the events surrounding the Civil War directed special scrutiny upon preservation as a manifestation of or a distraction from the divinely sanctioned Law of Nature and its entailed “Rites.” For the anonymous author of The Case of the King (1647), writing after Charles’s defeat in the first

English Civil War, it was not God but the “Devill” who conjured the issue of self-preservation to which, as we will see, many Parliamentarian loyalists clung: “[T]he Devill prompting them thereunto upon a wicked principle of self-preservation, to establish their own safety against all after-claps of revenge, by a destruction of the Prince, and a depriving of his Posterity, by an alteration of Government.”2 For this author, the diabolical emphasis on self-preservation compromised collective preservation by endangering the many-in-one person of Charles, who represented not only himself but also his “Posterity” and the English “Government” as a whole.

As John Milton demonstrated in his Eikonoklastes (1650), however, the principle of self- preservation represented, to many, not a diabolical temptation toward common destruction but a binding aspect of Natural Law: “[T]he right of self preservation, is much neerer, much more natural, and more worth to all men, then the propriety of thir goods, and wealth. Yet such power as all this did the King in op’n termes challenge to have over us.”3 Unlike Zizania, Milton does not privilege “common preservation” in the collective figure of the sovereign, but like her characterization of self-preservation as “the first Rites of nature,” Milton points to the naturalness of one’s own obligation to preserve his or her own life. As I demonstrate throughout

2 Basilius Anonymus, The Case of the King Stated, From the Beginning of the Warre to this Present Day (London, 1647), 12, italics in the original. 3 John Milton, Eikonoklastes in Answer to a Book Intitl’d Eikon Basilike (London, 1650), 95. 222 this chapter, the ideologies surrounding self-preservation signal a politically explosive discourse that contested how deeply self- or common-preservation participated in Natural Law.

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), I argue, attempted a systematic reconciliation of this debate’s various postures by folding the Natural Law of self-preservation into the perpetuation of a polity. For Hobbes, the “Fundamentall Law of Nature” is composed of two parts. As we will see, the first, to “seek Peace” enjoins obedience to the social contracts that preserve the commonwealth. The second, which is (as Zizania proposes) the “summe of the Right of Nature” consists of each human’s obligation to seek “the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life.”4 For Hobbes, these seemingly separate precepts—the former describing common- preservation and the latter characterizing self-preservation—may be collapsed into the same

“Law of Nature” because the best means of preserving one’s own frailties from the dangers of the world is by compacting with others for peace, a collective compact which eventually forms a commonwealth for the mutual preservation of all subjects. Without this social contract to keep the peace among subjects, humans are “in the condition of mere Nature, (which is a condition of

Warre of every man against every man).”5 This Hobbesian concept of the anarchic condition of war in “mere Nature” draws heavily from anxieties stirred by the English Civil War and constitutes, at its essence, a vision of humans’ natural condition that is characterized by the fractured, competing self-preservations of individual humans before those many individual interests were consolidated by the common preservation promised by the contracted polity.

4 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1985), Part I, Chap. 14, p. 189-90, italics in the original. All subsequent references to this text will simply provide the part, chapter, and page. 5 Ibid., I, 14, 196. 223

Although Hobbes attempted to reconcile self- and common-preservation into a single

Natural Law, this chapter documents the continuing tensions between the two—in texts by

Hobbes’s critics, in literature, and even in Hobbes himself—by showing how various depictions of “condition of Warre” cannot be fully dispeled by the peaceful establishment of a collective.

For many thinkers during and after the English Civil War, “Nature” can paradoxically encode both peace and war; in Hobbes’s terms, Natural Law and “mere nature” contain one another yet clash even after the social contract purportedly banishes the barbaric latter. In many texts, this creeping presence of war manifests as failures of preservation—political, animal, woodland, or even celestial—as various constructions of Natural Law threaten to fracture the already decentralized and adaptable concept altogether, just like the fragmented, warring self- preservations in Hobbes’s scenario of “mere Nature.” Willan’s Orgula—a text that adapts

Hobbes’s political theory and other discourses surrounding preservation—characterizes this debate through nature’s political incoherence. Indeed, when Zizania’s asks what “Law” of

“common preservation” is in conflict with the “first Rites of Nature” to preserve her “self,” she is in fact setting up a paradox. For Hobbes, this “tyrannous” law enjoining her to the “common preservation” would be Natural Law. While Hobbes would not agree with Zizania that her disguise is a failure of the “first Rites of Nature” to preserve oneself from violence, her disguise is, as we will see, directly related to her death. The decease of the princess and the common preservation that she represents follow soon after in the woodland dark that characterizes the war-torn edge of the polity. The play thus showcases the difficulty of reading a coherent political ethos from the preservations supposedly enjoined by post-Civil-War conceptions of Natural Law. 224

Throughout this chapter, I follow moments such as this, where “condition[s] of Warre” trouble the preservations supposedly enshrined in Natural Law. First, I document the splintering of Natural Law’s theorizations that was in large part occasioned by the English Civil War. This explosive loss of consensus regarding Natural Law opened spaces for explicitly voicing a view of nature that was—far from being organized under a single political paradigm of nobility or monarchy—diverse, fragmented, and, sometimes, rebellious. It is into such a space, I argue, that ideologies of preservation were able to enter as legitimate subjects of dispute. For many thinkers

(including Hobbes, Milton, and Willan), the question of what constituted “natural” imperatives toward preservation led to considerations of the primitive beginnings of human society

(emphasizing the “first” in the “first Rites of Nature”) while also gesturing toward the quasi- apocalyptic end of polity as the English monarchy dissolved in 1649. I demonstrate how Andrew

Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” (written ca. 1651) adapts this long view of history in order to show how the language of war—and that of martial attrition as a failure of preservation—has irrevocably tinged our understanding of the natural world. I then turn to a fuller discussion of conceptual tensions in Leviathan and Willan’s Orgula. Willan’s play is an understudied closet tragedy that dramatizes the apocalyptic end when nature, self, and state fail to preserve themselves any longer. Published the year of Cromwell’s death yet two years before the

Restoration settled England back into a conventional monarchy, Orgula is a Hobbesian nightmare of “mere nature” and “the condition of Warre,” offering a bleak political vision in which the concept of Natural Law—even the single notion of preservation—becomes too unwieldy to theorize a way for the self, the state, or even the supposedly eternal stars to preserve 225 themselves. In this, then, the play anticipates the fading intellectual role of Natural Law in the latter half of the seventeenth century in formulating a coherent model of human political ethics.

Self- and Collective-Preservation during the English Civil War and Commonwealth Period

As I have begun to outline, the English Civil War prompted many thinkers to examine the ways in which Natural Law enjoined self-preservation to humans and other creatures. In this section, I argue that this conceptual emphasis on the “self” in nature emerged at least in part from a politically urgent anxiety surrounding the kingdom’s fragmentation in the English Civil War, during which some Royalist thinkers imagined an almost anarchic cacophony of divided self- interests that were poised against the preservation of the collective and the conventional authority that it represented. Parliamentarian thinkers were variously inclined (or disinclined) to assuage this anxiety surrounding the tensions among the self, the collective, and a Natural Law that endorses one or the other through analogies with the natural world. For instance, in a published exchange between the archdeacon of Leicester Henry Ferne and Independent minister

William Bridge, we can see that the Natural Law of self-preservation was a topic of political dispute as early as the start of the war. In a defense of taking up arms that the 1642 House of

Parliament commanded to be published, Bridge insists upon a distinction between “unitive” (that is, collective) dissent and “divisive” (individual) dissent, and only the former is lawfully able to take up arms against the king.6 When he attempts to vindicate the Parliamentary cause through

Natural Law, however, the principle of self-preservation prompts an analogy that collapses his earlier distinction: “It is the most naturall worke in the world for everything to preserve it selfe.

6 William Bridge, The Wounded Conscience Cured, the Weak One Strengthened, and the Doubting Satisfied (London: Benjamin Allen, 1642), 1. 226

Naturall for a man to preserve himself, naturall for a Community.”7 While Bridge earlier assures his readers that he “speake[s] not” of individual dissent, his analogical chain from each natural creature “in the world,” to the individual “man,” and finally to the “Community” seems to dissolve the fundamental distinction with which he began. Here, the dual desire to deny charges of unlawful self-interest while maintaining the universality of Natural Law in each “self” produces an analogy that overreaches Bridge’s stated distinctions.

In his response the following year, Ferne alleges that this analogical slippage produces an anarchic ethics that makes each person a law unto themselves. Repeatedly worrying about a rebellious “Principat[us] [that is, a supremacy] of many” devolving into the fractured self- interests of aristocracy or, even worse, “Democracy,” Ferne charges that, despite Bridge’s protests to the contrary, the Parliamentary defense based in self-preservation privileges the individual far too much to be a legitimate political analogy derived from Natural Law.8 He writes, “[W]ere this Argument good, then might private men, or the people without the

Parliament, take Armes and resist; for self-preservation is naturall to them, and no positive Law .

. . can, according to Mr. Bridge his reason, destroy that naturall Law.”9 According to Ferne, the defense from the natural law of self-preservation falters because, if the analogy from individual creature to community held, the individual “self” could lawfully take up arms against any system of order imposed upon it. Ferne argues, rather, that the “self” and the collective must have a different standard of law: “[If self-preservation requires] the defence of the body Naturall, then must it be [done] according to the Law of God and Nature; if of the body Politique, then

7 Ibid., 2. 8 Henry Ferne, Conscience Satisfied, That There is No Warrant for the Armes Now Taken Up by Subjects (Oxford, 1643), 8, quote at 19. 9 Ibid., 42. 227 according to its Law, which this man has not any waies proved to prescribe this way of preservation by Subjects taking Armes.”10 For Ferne, the set of divine and natural laws governing the actions of individuals must be considered separately from the positive laws of the

“body Politique,” and it is this human set of laws that Parliamentary aggression violates. While

Bridge’s analogy seems to conjoin the natural imperatives of the self and the collective, Ferne thus emphasizes division, both in the way that laws should be considered and in the divisive actions of the Parliament.

We will return below to the ways in which thinkers approached this problem of self- and collective (and which collective) preservation, but it is worth noting here that Ferne’s ability to conceptually separate human and natural laws in an explicit way is a remarkable shift from earlier analogies of political form that this project has surveyed. As we saw from Henry

Peacham’s strained system of analogies in the Introduction and from defenses of kingship drawn from the “natural” analogy of paternal authority in Chapter One, affirming the linkages between human and natural law was conventionally designed to justify political unity under a sovereign, as well as the analogical contiguity between the human and natural worlds. The crisis of legitimacy posed by the English Civil War, however, threatened these entangled visions of unity upon which monarchical defenses from nature often rested. Hence, we find not unity but divisive self-interest in Ferne’s characterization of Parliamentary analogies of natural preservation, just as we find a firm separation between Ferne’s characterization of human and natural law. Contrary to many texts we have covered, this separation leads Ferne to admit that “we cannot say it is jure divino, by divine precept commanding all Nations to be so governed [that is, monarchically] or

10 Ibid., 40. 228 jure natura by natures law enforcing it.”11 Ferne attempts partially to restore the connection between monarchy and nature by noting that “Monarchy was the first government” and by granting that, while not commanded by Natural Law, monarchy is endorsed by ductu naturae [by the guidance of nature]” through the example of fatherly authority. This does not, however, constitute a law; it is, Ferne acknowledges, only an “insinuation” based upon example and analogy.12 Even from Royalist thinkers like Ferne, the political unities conventionally read into nature were suddenly thinkable as nonbinding suggestions, while the proper jurisdiction of

Natural Law is, here at least, restricted to the hearts of individual (and hopefully peaceful) subjects.

The new attention to divisions in nature—and what such divisions could mean for conventional analogies of political unity—allowed new formulations of nature’s imperatives as well as explicit critiques of older ones. For example, the poet, satirist, and Parliamentarian John

Hall was a prominent figure among the poetic circles of the 40s and 50s and explored the new rhetorical possibilities of republicanism, including the recognition of divisions in nature and how they challenged Royalist analogies of cosmic unity.13 In his 1650 Grounds and Reasons for

Monarchy, Hall writes,

That slender conception, that nature seems to dress out a principality in most of her works, as among Birds, Bees, &c. is so slender (in regard they are no more chiefs then what they fancy them, but all their prepotency is meerly predatory or oppressive, and even Lyons, Elephants, Crocodiles and Eagles, have small inconsiderable enemies, of which they stand in fear, and by which they are often ruined) that the Recitall confutes it. [A]nd if it were so, yet unless they could prove their One man to be as much more excellent as those are, and that solely, I

11 Ibid., 8, italics in the original. 12 Ibid, italics in the original. 13 For a helpful biographical profile of Hall in relation to English republicanism, see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 169-79. 229

see not what it would advantage them, since to comply with the designe of Nature in one, they would contrary it in others, where shee were equally concerned.14

Hall’s depiction of animal supremacy is not the benevolent mastery that characterized previous analogies that this project has reviewed but, rather, “predatory or oppressive” dominance that would more easily justify tyranny than kingship.15 Furthermore, the natural world here bespeaks not a unifying principle of cosmic excellence but an abiding diversity of often-reversible power relations whereby even “small” creatures may upend the oppressions of those that seem mightiest. Thus, to emphasize a unity under animal supremacy (by analogy to “One” human monarch) is to ignore the divisions that demonstrate how nature is “equally concerned” with both the kingly lion and its seemingly insignificant enemies.

Emphases like these on divisions in nature could focus even further—as they often did in discourse surrounding self-preservation—down to the individual creature. For instance, in 1644 the Scottish minister Samuel Rutherford responds to the question “Whether or no Royall dignitie have its spring from nature” by considering animals both on the species and individual levels:

“As a man commeth into the world a member of a politick societie, he is by consequence borne subject to the laws of that societie; but that maketh him not from the wombe and by nature subject to a King, as by nature he is subject to his Father who begat him; no more then by nature

14 John Hall, The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy Considered (Edinburgh, 1650), 20, italics in the original. 15 As I noted in my Introduction, the tongue-in-cheek justification of tyranny through the example of Natural Law is the subject of one of Hall’s satirical essays in Paradoxes (London, 1650). The satirical bite of the essay’s natural analogies works, like that of Grounds here, through a recognition of nature’s diversity (and against monarchical unity). According to Hall’s satirical narrator, the cosmology of nobility that supposedly authorized human monarchy extends not only to lions and eagles but also “the Rubye among stones” and “the Vine among the [vege]tables” (29- 30). The narrator’s overextension of monarchical thinking here is compounded by his use of the vine, which, in an antimonarchical parable from Judges, is actually offered kingship over plants but wisely rejects it by preferring its own peculiar vine-ness over a fantasized vision of vegetable supremacy. Thus, by subtly hinting at the self- sovereign particularities of a diverse natural world, Hall satirical undercuts claims of monarchical unity. 230 a Lyon is borne subject to another King-Lyon.”16 Here, Rutherford explicitly highlights the conceptual fissures between domestic “nature” and political allegiance that were only just visible in the years surrounding the Gunpowder Plot (see Chapter One). Indeed, he says more explicitly later that the “single familie [is] the only naturall and first society in the world,” thus severing the analogy between “natural” subjection under one’s parents and that artificial subjection under a supposedly paternal monarch. Rutherford is not, however, willing to discard altogether the analogical comparisons between human politics and Natural Law; rather, he merely aims to narrow the focus from more holistic comparison to “comparing individuals of the same kinde among themselves a Lyon with Lyon, Eagle with Eagle, and so Man with Man.”17 Rutherford’s choice of animals here is not an indifferent one; it was the supposed excellence of the lion and the eagle over the other land and sea creatures that proved, for earlier thinkers, the naturalness of human monarchical form by comparison to taxonomies in nature.18 Instead of looking for larger cross-species comparisons, Rutherford’s more particular comparisons—divided both by species and by individual creatures—finds that, just as lions are born free from subjection under any

“King-Lyon,” “Man by nature is borne free, and as free as beasts.”19 In the same way that Hall’s emphasis on tenuous power relations in nature examines the divisive strife between individual species, Rutherford’s discovery of “natural” individual liberty emerges from his method of

“comparing individuals,” thus dividing the analogical scale and subverting conventional monarchical visions of unity, harmony, or order within whole taxonomic “kingdoms” in nature.

16 Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex, The Law and the Prince (London: John Field, 1644), 90-1, italics in the original. 17 Ibid., 92, italics in the original. 18 See, for example, Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London: Francis Constable, 1622), 1-2. 19 Rutherford, Lex Rex, 92. 231

“[I]n Armies, not in Paires”: Primitive and Apocalyptic Time in Marvell’s Militant Nature

This more fractured, individuated outlook of Natural Law that produced a heightened scrutiny on the meaning of the “self’ in self-preservation also led some thinkers to consider the

English Civil War through a long view of history: either back to the primitive roots of Natural

Law during the founding of humanity’s first polities or to the apocalyptic end of all earthly forms of governance. Both Ferne’s claim that “Monarchy was the first government” and Rutherford’s assertion that the “first society in the world” was not monarchy are attempts to claim for their political vision a kind of natural priority (in the sense of being historically “prior”). Similarly,

Milton’s The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) anchors Parliamentary resistance in natural, original liberty of humankind while navigating a compromise between self-and collective-preservation. Milton writes,

The authority and power of self-defense and preservation being originally and naturally in every one of them [that is, ancient peoples], and united in them all, for ease, for order, and lest each man should be his own partial judge, they communicated and derived either to one, whom for the eminence of his wisdom and integrity they chose above the rest, or to more than one whom they thought of equal deserving.20

For Milton, the primitive creation of kings or magistrates traces its origins as an artificial, yet stabilizing coming-together of previously disparate self-preservations that were “in every one of them.” Milton’s turn to the ancient beginnings of governance here signals both an impulse to clear away the political conventions that had accreted around Natural Law and an unwillingness to dispense with the concept entirely.

20 John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jason Rosenblatt (New York: Norton, 2011), 390. 232

Similarly, by 1646, George Wither had abandoned the ambivalent politics that

(dis)organized Britains Remembrancer (see Chapter Three) and was looking backward in history to justify his republicanism. His Opobalsamum Anglicanum [or, An English Balm] (1646) cites the “preservation, of our Lives” while pronouncing the need to return to Natural Law’s “first

Foundation” of primitive legal goodness and to dispense with the “Superstructures, which pervert/ The works of Nature, by the Quirks of Art.”21 Just after the 1649 execution of Charles, too, the prominent Leveller William Everard announces their communal project “to Digge up,

Manure, and Sowe Corn upon George Hill in Surrey” as a utopian return to the right to self- preservation, beginning with yet another primitive history of humanity: “In the beginning of

Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts,

Birds, Fishes, and Man . . . but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another. And the reason is this, Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself.”22 For Everard, the collapse of the English monarchy provides an opportunity to theorize a primordial balance of self-interested preservation and, through the abolition of private property, a communal view of the earth’s resources. The political priority for

Everard, however, is with the creaturely “perfect[ion]” of the single man, thus confirming the anxieties of Royalists like Ferne who worried about the sovereignty of the individual, “private” person.

The tenuous balance between unified commonality and self-interested diversity in mid- seventeenth century conceptions of Natural Law did not only look backward to prehistoric

21 George Wither, Opobalsamum Anglicanum: An English Balme (London, 1646), pp. 2-3. 22 William Everard, The True Levellers Standard Advanced: or The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men (London, 1649), 6. 233 imperatives of self-preservation before civil law muddied the clarity of Natural Law; some thinkers looked also to the last days. The Independent theologian John Rogers saw the fall of the

English monarchy as a rare opportunity to unearth the primordial purity of Natural Law, but as a member of the Fifth Monarchists—a loose millenarian group that believed in the impending apocalyptic arrival of Christ’s kingdom—he also understood this legal cleansing as a redemptive picture of the endtimes. His aptly titled Doomes-day Drawing Nigh, with Thunder and

Lightening to Lawyers in an Alarum for the New Laws (1654) looks simultaneously forward and backward, with “Doomes-day” just on the horizon heralding a legal Reformation whereby civil laws may more closely mirror not “New Laws” but the older statutes of Natural Law, which he calls “prima regula rationis [the first rule of reason].”23 One of these statutes is, according to

Rogers, the “Law to defend herselfe [that is, Nature] from Tyranny and oppression,” and, like

Hall’s emphasis on cross-species strife, this imperative toward self-defense limns the divisions among creatures “by instinct in Dogs against Wolves; Lambs against Foxes; Buls against Lyons; and so between Chickens and Kites, Pigeons and Spar-hawkes; Patridges against Hawks.”24 For

Rogers, the self-interested frictions of species against other species do not indicate a fundamentally irrational or fragmentary cosmos but a world in which all species are united under the single reasonable dictate of self-defense.

That is not to say that nature is not a field of competing interests; indeed, nature here is in a perpetual state of predatory conflict. Such natural conflicts ensure, however, that those competing interests do not devolve into “Tyranny and oppression.” And while the human

23 John Rogers, Sagrir, or, Doomes-day Drawing Nigh, with Thunder and Lightening to Lawyers (London: Thomas Hucklescot, 1654), 32. 24 Ibid., 5. 234 tyrannies Rogers describes here are the legal exploitations of a corrupt court system, he makes it clear through similar language in his dedicatory letter that Cromwell’s “throwing down of

Tyranny and Oppression” was justified through this same Natural Law of self-defense.25 For

Rogers, this defensive imperative during the English Civil War reaches both backward to the prima regula of Natural Law and forward to the apocalyptic “approach of the FIFTH

[monarchy]” while also theorizing a vision of ongoing strife between creatures.

Adapting these political discourses of a divided natural world, Andrew Marvell’s “Upon

Appleton House” (written 1651) represents nature through the language of war. However, unlike the Parliamentary texts reviewed above, Marvell’s poem is not an unalloyed celebration of the political possibilities that imagining a warring nature enables. Nor does it critique, like Ferne, the divisiveness of the English Civil War as an anarchic overextension of analogies derived from

Natural Law. Rather, Marvell’s depiction of a bellicose cosmos is a sober confrontation of the natural inevitability of war. Simultaneously optimistic and mournful of that bare fact, “Upon

Appleton House” depicts the binocular temporality of the English Civil War—gesturing toward an end and a beginning of governmental form, as well as the primitive pasts and apocalyptic futures—as the symptom of a warring nature in which creatures must do what they can to preserve themselves.

This country house poem, dedicated to the Parliamentary general Thomas Fairfax, begins with the image of a sustainable (yet tenuously so) landscape. The architectural modesty that is a

25 Ibid., sig. A3r, italics in the original. See also, Nigel Smith, “Introduction to ‘The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector,’” in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (New York: Longman, 2007), pp. 282-3. According to Smith, the Fifth Monarchists first understood the similarly millenarian Cromwell to be integral to the divine project of ushering forth the endtimes. Only later did they turn against him when the Protector spoke out explicitly against them as “spiritually factious.” 235 convention of many country house poems is, for Fairfax’s Nunappleton House, a reflection of its preserved natural surroundings; unlike other country houses, Nunappleton House did not require the builders to “hew” the surrounding “Forrests . . . to Pastures.”26 That the forests were spared in the construction of Nunappleton might seem merely to be a pleasant consequence arising from the house’s seemingly natural outgrowth from the landscape. However, Fairfax’s involvement in the English Civil War indirectly raises the specter of the resource cost of the war and, in particular, the severe deforestations that arose from the conflict.27 As Margaret Cavendish recounts in her Blazing World (1666), for instance, “there seems to be more wood on the Seas . .

. meaning the Ships, then on the Land. . . . [T]he reason was, that there had been a long Civil

War . . . in which most of the best Timber-trees and Principal Palaces were ruined and destroyed; and my dear Lord and Husband . . . lost by it half his Woods.”28 The speaker’s admiration for

Nunappleton’s grounds is later tempered by this history of forested loss when he confronts a landscape that is both preserved against and defined by the cost of war:

But I, retiring from the Flood [of a rainstorm], Take Sanctuary in the Wood; And, while it lasts, my self imbark In this yet green, yet growing Ark; Where the first Carpenter might best Fit Timber for his Keel have Prest. And where all Creatures might have shares, Although in Armies, not in Paires. (481-88)

26 Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House,” in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (New York: Longman, 2007), line 4. All subsequent references to Marvell’s poetry will be from this edition and will appear in- text. 27 N. D. G. James, A History of English Forestry (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1981), 139-50. 28 Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World, in Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, eds. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2000), 221. 236

Here the deforestation caused by the English Civil War haunts the language that the speaker uses to describe the “Sanctuary” provided by the woods, which are described in relation to raw naval resources and, as such, are defined with a hint of contingency; they are “yet green, yet growing.”

As with many of the seventeenth-century texts reviewed above, the speaker’s outlook on nature invokes a more primitive state, here the antediluvian world of Noah, that “first Carpenter” who constructed the first ship not as a means of war but as a means of securing the preservation of species “in Paires” of male and female. Even here in the wood’s scriptural model, however, the preservation of the species is fixed to the context of the Flood’s mass killing, which occurs just on the other side of the boat’s walls. And while the forest still represents a means of preservation for “all Creatures” (recalling Everard’s Leveller ecology), it does so not merely as an icon of bountiful vitality but as a symbol of self-interested conflict and violence, with each species arranging itself “in Armies, not in Paires.”29 The choice of “Armies” here functions as an indicator of English abundance over the Noachian story (it takes much more than a pair to constitute an army); that abundance, however, is tinged with the suggestion of military deforestation and, thus, insinuates that woodland species have not shed the mass violence from which Noah’s “Ark” was meant (momentarily) to insulate them.

Like the Parliamentary theorists of Natural Law above, Marvell demonstrates how the preservation of life (here, through the Ark) reveals relationships of violence or conflict in nature.

Unlike those theorists, however, the imperatives commanding a creature’s own preservation are not merely in reaction to “oppression” (to use Hall’s and Rogers’s term); instead, the processes

29 See, additionally, lines 449-52. It is apparent from these lines that Marvell had the Levellers in mind while writing the poem. While strolling through another district of the grounds, the speaker admires, “this naked equal Flat,/ Which Levellers take Pattern at.” 237 sustaining life are themselves, as we will see, defined by the language of violence, even in the absence of perceived or actual conflict. It is important to note that by 1651 Fairfax had resigned his post as Chief Commander of the Parliamentary forces when he refused to invade Scotland preemptively.30 Fairfax’s resignation, then, represents a return to the peaceful grounds of

Nunappleton. Instead of an escape from the terms of military conflict, however, Fairfax’s retirement shows how even the peace of a garden walk must be understood through the language of military defense. Commending the artistry of Nunappleton’s gardens, the speaker describes the landscape’s cultivation in the terms of Fairfax’s military fortification, saying, “[W]hen

[Fairfax] retired here to Peace,/ His warlike Studies could not cease;/ But laid these Gardens out in sport/ In the just Figure of a Fort” (283-86). In this horticultural stronghold, the petals display their regiments’ “Silken Ensigns,” the flowery armaments fire their “fragrant Vollyes” as an olfactory show of either force or respect for passers-by, and the stars march in “vigilant Patroul” overhead (294, 298, 313). While delivered in praise of Fairfax’s military and horticultural discipline, the language of defensive fortification here draws even the speaker’s garden walk into the aggressive posturing preceding armed conflict. Thus, the “Peace” of Fairfax’s retirement is not peaceful escape from military violence; rather, even peaceful life (that is, the lives of Fairfax, the woodland creatures, and the flowers) defines itself through military defense, with war and peace entangled in a mutual dialectic that re-encodes war as a natural expression of the (here, military) ethics of self- and collective-defense that was always present in nature.

Like the invocation of the Noachian story during the speaker’s woodland walk, this traipse through Fairfax’s garden inspires the speaker to search for scriptural examples of

30 Smith, “Introduction to ‘Upon Appleton House,’” 210. 238 primitive life. The model he finds is the garden of Paradise, and while he mourns the loss of prelapsarian innocence that preceded the introduction of war into the world, that condition of natural innocence is nonetheless described through the language of war:

[England was the] Paradise of four seas, Which Heaven planted us to please, But to exclude the World, did guard With watry if not flaming Sword; What luckless Apple did we taste, To make us Mortal, and thee Waste? Unhappy! shall we never more That sweet Militia restore, When Gardens only had their Towrs, And all the Garrisons were Flowrs, When Roses only Arms might bear, ...... But War all this doth overgrow: We Ord’nance Plant and Powder sow. (321-44)

Beginning with a fairly conventional comparison between the English isle and the walled garden of Paradise, Marvell laments the “Waste” of a historically antecedent vision of national peace that is inflected through the Fall at the beginning of human scriptural history.31 For the speaker, however, this Fall into the condition of war was not, for the Paradisiacal England at least, the new introduction of sinful conflict but merely a bringing-forth of the subtextual violence that was always already written into nature. Unlike the scriptural garden, for instance, the “sword” that defends the borders of the English Paradise predates the tasting of whatever “luckless Apple” alienated English subjects from their more secure state.32 The sharp edge of military defense is integral, rather than antithetical, to the speaker’s understanding of the national “garden’s” innocence. And while the loss of this innocence entails an explicit shift in which “War . . . doth

31 For other similar comparisons, see Smith’s notes for lines 322-3. 32 Genesis 3:24, Authorized Version. 239 overgrow” the English garden, the fact that the speaker’s horticultural descriptions make use of military terminology (“Towrs,” “Garrisons,” and “Arms”) shows how even a prelapsarian peace was thinkable—or maybe was only ever thinkable—as a function of poised defense and latent conflict. Indeed, the “Silken Ensigns” and “fragrant Vollyes” described in Fairfax’s garden resonate with Paradise’s weapon-wielding “Roses,” thus bridging pre- and post-lapsarian existence through the shared language of war. For Marvell, the Fall did not generate a qualitative difference in the world; both Paradise’s past and Fairfax’s present participate in the same martial posturing. Although the speaker worries that the English now “Plant” weaponry and “sow” gunpowder, his language shows how the seeds of that violence were already endemic to the supposedly unspoiled nature of some prelapsarian past.

The speaker’s eulogy to a more peaceful—though still war-ready—nature culminates in the poem’s penultimate stanza, which characterizes a downtrodden cosmos defined by wars that will, eventually, spin out of control:

‘Tis not what once it was, the World; But a rude heap together hurl’d; All negligently overthrown, Gulfes, Deserts, Precipices, Stone. Your lesser World contains the same. But in more decent Order tame; You Heaven’s Center, Nature’s Lap. And Paradise’s only Map. (761-8)

In her reading of Marvell’s millenarian sensitivities, Margarita Stocker has argued that this passage documents “the Latter Days as the world degenerates towards its End.”33 She is correct in noting that the English Civil War occasions this apocalyptic reverie; indeed, that nature is

33 Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth Century Poetry (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986), 47. 240

“overthrown” here hints toward the military and political overthrow that Fairfax himself helped to precipitate. But while she is right to note the bleak difference between this apocalyptic deterioration and “what [the world] once . . . was,” the speaker’s previous treatment of

Paradise—to which Nunappleton leads like a “Map”—emphasizes contiguity between the two.

Nunappleton may offer a vision of an “Order[ed]” prelapsarian world, but the speaker’s language throughout the poem demonstrates the many ways in which that world “contains the same” as the war-torn, apocalyptic present and future. Like many of his contemporaries, Marvell explores the political problems and opportunities of conceptually organizing nature and its laws in the face of apparent discord—those phonetically and geographically clashing “Gulfes, Deserts, Precipices,

Stone.” For Marvell, the inelegant unity holding the world together in a “rude heap” is, paradoxically, a potentiality for conflict. “Upon Appleton House”—as a warning against the political nostalgia—both recognizes the “Unhappy” costs of war and theorizes the ways in which war was always present in nature, even during the Flood, even in the prelapsarian past when there was no such thing as violence. Like a Natural Law, war finds inevitable expression in the world and, as an eternal principle, stands at both ends of history (Paradise and apocalypse). In so doing, the poem encodes the English Civil War as a costly yet natural venture that emerges merely from the way the world was written.

Natural Law, War, and Preservation in Hobbes’s Leviathan

Like “Upon Appleton House” and many of the wartime texts reviewed above, Hobbes’s

Leviathan (1651) explores the possibilities of division and conflict as they are variously considered to be “natural.” As we will see, the problems surrounding collectivity, its 241 fragmentation into “selves,” and different scales of preservation occur throughout Hobbes’s theory of how nature authorizes polity.34 Hobbes’s text represents a monumental effort to tame the conceptual tensions in nature that the English Civil War occasioned, but Leviathan, as we will see, produces a new rift in the idea of nature: between “mere nature” and “Natural Law.” As

Sarah Mortimer and David Scott note in their detailed exploration of the Royalist controversies in Charles II’s court-in-exile leading up to the publication of Leviathan, most studies of Hobbes show how his philosophies influenced later thinkers instead of investigating what strands of contemporary thought influenced Hobbes himself.35 Joining this scholarly contextualization of

Leviathan, I show how Hobbes adapts his ideas of “mere nature” and Natural Law from the contemporary controversies that, as we have seen, juggle natural division and unity, self- and collective-preservation, and individual imperatives and Natural Law.

While Mortimer and Scott show how disagreements among fellow Royalists influenced

Leviathan’s political theory, I will show see how Hobbes’s slippery treatments of “nature” adapt the conceptual threads from both Parliamentary and Royalist thinkers. Indeed, Hobbes’s greatest rhetorical achievement is to repurpose the contemporary argument for self-preservation as a justification for absolute sovereignty rather than a naturalized rationale against the tyranny of kings. As with other thinkers in the shadow of the English Civil War, for instance, Hobbes takes the opportunity to theorize primitive, pre-governmental condition of humanity.36 Just as Everard

34 For more on nature’s scale and, specifically, how cosmic expansiveness undermines humanity’s tendency to measure nature by its own (comparatively tiny) scales of being, see Laurie Shannon, “Lear’s Queer Cosmos,” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 171-8. 35 Sarah Mortimer and David Scott, “Leviathan and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms,” Journal of the History of Ideas 76.2 (2015): 259-70. See also Noel Malcolm’s edition of Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1:19-60. 36 Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 14, 190. 242 and other Levellers attested, Hobbes claims that “Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind.”37 Because this natural equality privileges no human over another,

Hobbes notes that resources in this primitive condition are, like Everard’s “Common Treasury” of the earth, equally available to all humans; before the social contract limits their liberties through subjection to a sovereign, “every man has a Right to every thing.”38 The price of this perfect, intact freedom, however, is that they must subsist “in the condition of mere Nature,

(which is a condition of Warre of every man against every man).”39 Because all humans have equal right to all things in nature, they must vie for supremacy using any brutal methods they can. Hobbes’s definition of “mere nature” through the language of “Warre” shares other thinkers’ anxieties surrounding newly divided conceptions of nature and is, as with apologists of the Parliamentary cause, fundamentally associated with the law of self-preservation.

According to Hobbes, the “Fundamentall Law of Nature” consists in the rule “That every man, ought to endeavour Peace, as farre as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of Warre.”40 As I previewed at the beginning of this chapter, Hobbes separates this “Law of Nature” into two “branches” (first, the endeavor to peace and, second, the obligation to preserve one’s own life), and it is the second branch that Hobbes most explicitly appropriates from Parliamentary arguments: humans must endeavor “[b]y all means we can, to defend our selves.” I show below how these two “branches” of Natural Law run along the hazy distinction between self- and collective-preservation, but it is helpful to note here that “mere nature,” as it describes the failure of the “endeavour [toward]

37 Ibid., I, 13, 183. 38 Ibid., I, 14, 190. 39 Ibid., I, 14, 196. 40 Ibid., I, 14, 190. 243

Peace,” involves this second branch of the fundamental Natural Law. Thus the various contemporary discourses surrounding “natural” war and self-defense constitute a vital part of

Hobbes’s conception of Natural Law.

This natural “condition of Warre” situates Hobbes’s conception of “mere nature” within the political controversies surrounding division—“every man against every man”—as a constitutive feature of the cosmos. And, importantly, in Leviathan, the lack of consent among humans in “mere nature” sets humans apart from the other socially organizing animals. For

Hobbes, the foundational imperative of self-preservation challenges the Aristotelian classification of humans as the pinnacle of “political” animals, and Hobbes characterizes humanity as particularly miserable among nature’s meaner, self-interested creatures.41 Although he grants that “[i]t is true, that certain living creatures, as Bees, and Ants, live sociably one with another, (which are therefore by Aristotle numbred amongst Politicall Creatures),” these creatures are able to reconcile their “particular judgements and appetites” with that of their respective polities because “amongst these creatures, the Common good differeth not from the

Private.”42 While “the agreement of these creatures is Natural,” the consent of humans is “by

Covenant only, which is Artificiall,” and it is only “awe” of the sovereign’s power that maintains this artificial covenant in the absence of any natural compulsion toward consent.43

Although Hobbes’s characterization of anarchic war in “mere nature” is a literalization of critiques like Ferne’s that disparage the ethics of self-preservation, Hobbes’s treatment of pregovernmental humans in relation to other animals was radical enough to horrify even other

41 Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), I, 2. 42 Hobbes, Leviathan, II, 17, 225. 43 Ibid., II, 17, 226-7. 244

Royalist thinkers. Many of Hobbes’s contemporaries saw this not only as an inordinate derogation of Natural Law but also as an irreverent levelling of the natural states of humans and

(as we will see, certain) animals. In his 1657 critique of Leviathan, for instance, the future bishop of St David’s, William Lucy, grants that the Natural Law to preserve one’s own life is common to all creatures, but he insists that being human entails a greater natural obligation to live virtuously and to glorify God: “Life is a thing which a man injoyes in common with Beasts and Trees, and therefore if mans happiness should be in that [to preserve his own life] he were no better yea much worse then they whose excellency consists in relation to man; to live onely, is to bee a Beast a Plant only, but to live vertuously . . . is the end of man.”44 Because the

“excellency” of the natural world depends upon their “relation” to (and dominance by) humans,

Hobbes’s reduction of the right and law of nature to self-preservation collapses the teleological purpose of humans and beasts in a way that bristled Lucy.

Similarly, in his 1655 critique of Hobbes’s philosophy, Church of Ireland divine John

Bramhall takes issue both with Hobbes’s eviction of humans from the Aristotelian society of naturally political animals by critiquing what he perceives as Hobbes’s levelling of human and

(certain) animals. Hobbes’s position is that in the condition of mere nature, humans may slay another human as lawfully as killing an animal, and Bramhall disputes this from a morphological outlook of Natural Law, saying, “If God would have had men live like wild beasts, as Lions,

Bears or Tygers, he would have armed them with hornes, or tusks, or talons, or pricks; but of all creatures man is born most naked.”45 Here, the morphological vulnerability of the human species

44 William Lucy, Observations, Censures, and Confutations of Divers Errors in the 12, 13, and 14 Chap. of Mr Hobs his Leviathan (London, 1657), 143. 45 John Bramhall, A Defence of True Liberty from Ante-cedent and Extrinsicall Necessity, Being an Answer to a Late Book of Mr. Thomas Hobbs of Malmesbury, intituled, A Treatise of Liberty and Necessity (London, 1655), 107. 245 is evidence of its physical limitations and the surest proof that it is, unlike the weapon-bearing animals, a “politicall creature.”46 Moreover, the very fact of these other beasts’ violence is, according to Bramhall, only tenuously natural and, thus, should not be used for any particular political lessons. Bramhall explains that the “[Original] sin of man” caused these creatures “to rebell against the superiour [humans].”47 God’s mercy, however, has provided a glimpse (albeit limited) into human’s lost sovereignty through the example of more docile animals than those he lists above: “[T]hough the strongest creatures have withdrawn their obedience, as Lions and

Beares, to shew that man hath lost the excellency of his dominion, and the weakest creatures, as

Flies and Gnats, to shew into what a degree of contempt he is fallen, yet still the most profitable and usefull creatures, as Sheep and Oxen, do in some degree retain their obedience.”48 According to Bramhall, Hobbes ought not to compare primitive, pre-contractual humans to the more vicious creatures of nature because such beasts only provide evidence of humanity’s own “rebell[ion]” during the Fall. For Bramhall, the problem is somehow both that Hobbes’s concept of “mere nature” takes animal lives for his model of human ethics in “mere nature” and that he takes the wrong animal lives.

This critique—which blends human exceptionalism with a political bias against certain animals—was leveled at Parliamentarians and at Hobbes, alike. Almost precisely echoing Lucy, for instance, the Royalist pamphleteer Roger L’Estrange retroactively rebukes the Parliamentary defense in 1663, writing, “The Law of Self-Preservation, is a Law Common to Beasts with Men; but not of Equal Force: for their Sovereign Interest is Life, Ours is Virtue; and therefore your

46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 108. 48 Ibid. 246

Argument for Defensive Arms, upon Pretext of that Extremity, was but a Brutish Plea.”49 After the Royalist defeat in the first English Civil War, too, the anonymous O Friends! No Friends to

King, Church, and State (1648) admits that “Subjects se defendendo [may defend themselves] by that Law which nature dictates self-preservation to man, birds and beasts” but qualifies that such a law authorizes “defensive rather than offensive armes.”50 By comparison, the Parliamentarians hunted Charles “to kill him who ever can, by sword, pistoll or poison, no more sparing him then a Beare or a Wolfe in such cases of Treason, in such cases of Injustice, Heresie, and Tyranny, as

Satan hatcheth and coddles in their Serpentine heads.”51 Here, Parliamentary aggression against

Charles exceeds and violates the natural entitlement to self-defense by being too aggressive.

However, the paradox of this depiction of Natural Law is not that the Parliamentary league is being unnatural but that it is being the wrong kind of nature. It is being bearish, wolfish, and

“Serpentine.”

Because abjuring the protections of the social contract would drag subjects back into this

“mere nature” of lions, bears, self-preservation, and war, Hobbes’s political philosophy would seem to erect a firm distinction between the collective human “Covenant, which is Artificiall” and the self-interested condition of war that he perceives in nature’s other creatures. This is not, however, the case. Like many thinkers in the wake of the English Civil War, Hobbes attempts to reconcile the dilemma that the natural impulse toward self-preservation represents for the collective state. Instead of merely repudiating “nature” in general as something to be tamed through the artificial contract’s establishment of civil discipline, Hobbes’s solution is a

49 Roger L’Estrange, Toleration Discuss’d (London, 1663), 91. 50 Veridicus, O Friends! No Friends, to King, Church, and State (London: R. Austin, 1648), 23. 51 Ibid. 247 distinction between the solitary, warlike condition of “mere nature” and the peaceful edicts of

Natural Law. In many ways, the distinction (and the slippages) between these two natures is built into the grammars that Hobbes deploys when describing them. The “natural” precontractual war of “every man against every man,” for instance, emphasizes the hazardous singleness of “man”; indeed, the chain of other adjectives leading up to Hobbes’s characterization of this “natural” human life as “nasty, brutish, and short” begins with “solitary.”52 In “mere nature,” then, the natural drive toward self-preservation focuses not on subjects’ effort to defend their lives from a tyrannical power but, instead, on the precarious life of isolated humans.

When describing this same impulse toward self-preservation in the “Fundamentall Law of Nature,” however, Hobbes pivots to a plural grammar that will lay the foundation for his theory of “natural” social collectivity. Humans must strive “[b]y all means we can, to defend our selves.”53 Here, Hobbes converts the “solitary” designation of the self in “mere nature” here into a Natural Law governing many “selves.” Further, when introducing the necessity of the social contract, Hobbes writes, “The finally Cause, End, or Designe of men . . . is the foresight of their own preservation.”54 The use of the semi-plural here (“their own”) prepares the reader for

Hobbes’s attempted reconciliation between self- and collective-preservation. According to

Hobbes, the collective renunciation and transfer of rights in the founding of a commonwealth is the best chance humans have of “living out the time, which Nature ordinarily alloweth men to live.”55 Suddenly, the condition of war in “mere nature” is not the “ordinary” course of nature, and although the contract is only an artificial agreement, it is upheld by the first “branch” of the

52 Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 13, 186. 53 Ibid., I, 14, 190, italics in the original. 54 Ibid., II, 17, 223. 55 Ibid., I, 14, 190. 248

“Fundamentall Law of Nature,” which is to “endeavour Peace.” This responsibility toward peace describes the mutual laying down of arms between two or more people, which initiates the founding of any basic commonwealth and thus enables an escape from the perpetual disposition of war in the condition of “mere nature.” This escape from war unifies the disparate self-interests of mere nature into the greater protection and preservation that flows from the mutual peace of the commonwealth. This means, for Hobbes, that the natural right to preserve one’s own life is best upheld through civil obedience to the social contract and, by extension, the sovereign.

Instead of a discourse of resistance toward tyranny (which, Hobbes flippantly attests, is just a word used by people who “are discontented under Monarchy”), self-preservation enjoins subjects to maintain the collective at almost any cost.

However, just as the grammatical slippages between self and selves call attention to the strains in Hobbes’s reconciliation of “mere nature” and artificial covenant, the preservation of the self and the collective are, as we will see, only tenuously commensurate, especially in relation to the various natures of Leviathan. It is helpful to note that civil obedience, for Hobbes, ensures the more successful preservation of both the self and the collective, partially through an analogy between the (individual) body natural and the collective body politic. Indeed, Hobbes’s

“Introduction” to Leviathan begins with art’s ability to imitate many of nature’s works, including, in the commonwealth, the human body: “Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a

COMMON-WEALTH, . . . which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the 249

Soveraignty, is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.”56 He goes on to anatomize several other parts of the body politic, but of special interest here is the “Artificiall

Soul” of the sovereign because, Hobbes tells us later, the enhanced lifespans of the commonwealth’s individual subjects transfer on a macrocosmic level to the sovereign authority that governs the collective. Succession, Hobbes notes, establishes an “Artificiall Eternity” for this “Artificiall Soul” so that the state does not “return into the condition of Warre” after each generation.57 For both the body natural and the body politic, then, the preservation of life (either actual or artificial) is integral to Hobbes’s political vision.

Given this commensurate interest in preservation on the micro/macro scales, we might expect a commensurate treatment of the laws that authorize these preservations. Instead, in addition to the “Fundamentall Law of Nature” describing self-preservation and peace-seeking, the founding of a commonwealth activates several otherwise dormant natural laws that at first seem to have little to do with nature. These laws constitute a suite of specifically civil obligations that include faithfulness to contracts (the third law), social conformity (the fifth), and respect for appointed judges (the fifteenth). Perez Zagorin, in arguing for Hobbes’s legal positivism, notes how this conception of natural law differs from those of previous divines who see “Natural Law as engraved by God and nature in [human] minds and hearts.”58 Unlike, say, Hooker’s divinely sanctioned, eternal Natural Law that both obliges the rain and informs moral human behavior,

Hobbes argues that rationally-derived natural laws lack the binding a priori authority of former laws and, thus, “are not properly Lawes [before the establishment of a commonwealth], but

56 Ibid., “The Introduction,” 81, italics in the original. 57 Ibid., II, 19, 247. 58 Perez Zagorin, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 46. 250 qualities that dispose men to peace, and to obedience. When a Commonwealth is once settled, then they are actually Lawes, and not before.”59 The shift from “qualities” in “mere nature” to

“Lawes” at a commonwealth’s founding (“and not before”) corroborates the fundamental positivism that Zagorin finds at the heart of Hobbes’s theory of Natural Law. However, perhaps owing to Hobbes’s desire to reconcile the self and the collective, Hobbes partially attempts to restore the natural a priori existence of these laws by saying pre-commonwealth natural laws bind the individual “in foro interno [in the conscience],” though, he qualifies, “onely to a desire” for civil peace while not interdicting all outward means of war.60

Even still, he later contradicts this transmogrification of “qualities” into laws by insisting that the “Laws of Nature are Immutable and Eternall. For Injustice, Ingratitude, Arrogance,

Pride, Iniquity, Acception of persons . . . can never be made lawfull. For it can never be that

Warre shall preserve life, and Peace destroy it.”61 Yet, in contradistinction to this proposed eternality, Hobbes writes when describing the commonwealth’s founding that “The Law of

Nature, and the Civill Law, contain each other, and are of equall extent.”62 It is clear from his following discussion of Natural Laws becoming laws “not before” their execution through civil law that “extent” here involves both jurisdiction and temporality. Hobbes’s equivocation between the contingent legality of positive laws and the a priori existence of more conventional formulations of Natural Law shows the contradictions in thought that Hobbes must work through in order to maintain the tenuous integrity between microcosmic individual and macrocosmic polity. While Hobbes could have abandoned the notion of Natural Law entirely in order to

59 Hobbes, Leviathan, II, 26, 314. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., I, 15, 215. 62 Ibid., II, 26, 314. 251 provide a full-throated celebration of a purely “Artificiall” commonwealth, the intellectual centrality of Natural Law in seventeenth-century thought—as something that supposedly united individual and collective ethics—prompts a treatment of Natural Law that once again struggles both to reconcile self- and collective-preservation and to dispel the threat of “Warre” that rests between the two.

“[W]e seek/ Anothers life, but to secure our own”: Dueling Natural Laws and their Conflicted Preservations in Orgula

As I have argued, the tensions, uncertainties, and anxieties surrounding the reconceptualization of Natural Law during and after the Civil War stand poised between vying notions of preservation. Inviting simultaneous comparisons both with primitive, Biblical, or pregovernmental subjects and with future millenarian visions wherein political power is relinquished entirely to Christ, the English Civil War sent adrift the ways in which the state was thought to participate in the imperatives of nature, which can reflect, at once, the impulse to prolong life and the warlike provision to take the lives of other humans, animals, and trees. At the center of this uncertainty is the question of what, if anything, may legitimately be preserved in nature. Which political collective, if any, may claim ownership over the “self” that Natural

Law supposedly defends? At what point does the collective infringe upon the self such that it activates the natural right to resistance and self-preservation? How far down must one divide the polity in order to arrive at such a “self”? How much obligation do individual members or factions within the collective have to preserve the common interest?

To these questions is added another in 1658: after the death of Cromwell, can the English

Parliamentarians preserve their own legacy? Following the damage done to republican ideals in 252

1653 by Cromwell’s designation as Lord Protector, which threatened to return England to little more than a constitutional monarchy, Cromwell’s death raised questions about what would happen to the state and, specifically, how that vulnerability could be interpreted through new political readings of nature. In The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth

(1660), the last significant anti-Royalist tract before the Restoration, Milton reviews the belief that their struggles during the English Civil War were endorsed by Natural Law through a clearing away of centuries of policy detritus to return to “the light of nature or religion” that preceded “any former covenant.”63 He worries, though, that the collapse of the Commonwealth and Protectorate will leave “no memorial of their work behind them remaining but in the common laughter of Europe.”64 This lapse of political perpetuation would be in direct contrast to the durable republicanism of the Netherlands, which remains “to this day.”65 Although the play that I analyze below was written by no friend of the parliamentary “Good Old Cause,” it nonetheless evidences similar anxieties surrounding England’s ability to preserve itself both in the absence of established processes of succession and in the wake of the disturbing political multivalence of “preservation” itself as a concept throughout the 1640s and 50s.

Leonard Willan’s Orgula: or The Fatal Error (1658) is, in many ways, a record of political exhaustion as a state gradually loses all of the means of preserving itself. Published the same year as Oliver Cromwell’s death, the play features the death of another Lord Protector, the corrupt and aging Sinevero. There has been very little scholarly attention given to this closet drama that directly addresses the uncertainties and fears of 1650s England. The sparse criticism

63 John Milton, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in Selected Poetry and Prose, 419- 47, quote at 422. 64 Ibid., 426. 65 Ibid., 427. 253 that treats play tends to characterize the play as a “a thinly veiled attack on the Cromwellian protectorate,” and while I think a straightforward reading of this play’s political intricacies as royalist propaganda misses the mark, they are not wrong in their assessment of the play’s general political sympathies.66 Little is known about Leonard Willan’s life, but we know from a later seventeenth-century biographical profile that he was a “Gentleman that flourished in the Reign of King Charles the Second,” and from commendatory verses by poet Robert Herrick and the historiographer royal James Howell, it is likely that his poetry and plays circulated in manuscript throughout royalist circles before, during, and after the Interregnum.67 Further, Willan’s lengthy

“Preface” printed with the play defends the social uses of poetry and explicitly calls for the opening of the theater as a way to distribute more widely the political benefits of poetry, thus politicizing the act of reading Interregnum closet drama in the way that Marta Straznicky details in her discussion of women’s closet drama playwrights during the closing of the theaters.68 It is no surprise, then, that the play lingers over the corruptions of a Lord Protector’s court while emphasizing the virtues of the rightful princess Eumena and her supporters.

However, while Willan may have been decidedly royalist, to characterize the play’s political concerns as simply a “thinly veiled attack on the Cromwellian protectorate” is to miss the ways in which Willan’s play exemplifies the political complexity that is characteristic of the

66 Denise Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 98. See also the surveys of “anti-Puritan” closet drama by Thornton S. Graves, “Notes on Puritanism and the Stage,” Studies in Philology 18.2 (1921): 141-69, and Louis B. Wright, “The Reading of Plays During the Puritan Revolution,” The Huntington Library Review 6 (1934): 73-108. Unfortunately, these three entries comprise, if not the entirety, the vast majority of scholarly treatments of Orgula. 67 Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford: George West and Henry Clements, 1691), 511; Robert Herrick, “To M. Leonard Willan His Peculiar Friend,” in Hesperides (London: John Williams, 1648), 354; James Howell, “To His Worthy Friend, Mr. Wallan, Vpon the View of his Astraea,” in Poems on Several Choice and Various Subjects (London, 1663), 116. 68 Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550-1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 67-72. 254 closet tragedy genre. In her discussion of Elizabeth Cary’s closet play The Tragedie of Mariam

(1613), for instance, Laurie Shannon characterizes the genre through its potential for juridical analysis, political exposition, and social critique.69 And while Willan’s play is not a pure example of Senecan tragedy in the generic tradition of French playwright Robert Garnier that

Shannon describes, the political intricacy of Orgula does, as Garnier’s plays could, “dramatize the problem of obedience and unjust laws . . . [and] give extended expression to both sides of the dilemma.”70 The analytical complexity of the play is compounded further by the destabilizing admixtures between “both sides” of the political conflict that the play depicts. Rather than a firm rift between factions, the play’s various interests and philosophies flow in different ways between the two sides. The Lord Protector Sinevero, for instance, is merely (at the moment) acting as sovereign until the Princess Eumena enters adulthood. And one of Eumena’s most loyal attendants is actually Zizania, Sinevero’s daughter, who strives as best she can to honor her dual obligations. As we will see, this fluidity of interests extends troublingly to the play’s various stances of Natural Law and, in particular, its various formations of self- and collective- preservation. And so, from a Hobbesian point of view, the condition of war in “mere nature” is able, in this play, to steal into the fictional polity through its various anxieties surrounding preservation.

While Orgula stages multiple political conflicts, Willan’s later work The Exact Politician

(1670) uses a metaphor of light to provide a solution to the problems of interpreting nature’s

69 Laurie Shannon, “The Tragedie of Mariam: Cary’s Critique of the Terms of Founding Social Discourses,” English Literary Renaissance 24.1 (1994): 135-53, esp. 144-7. 70 Ibid., 145. As Shannon notes, the formal characteristics of closet dramas in this tradition “replace energetic stage action” with “long monologues and sparsely populated scenes to elaborate intellectual or philosophical issues” (145). And while Orgula often showcases long monologues on both sides of the play’s main political divide, there are, as we will see, still moments of stage action. 255 edicts. Well after the political crises of the 40s and 50s, Willan confidently provides a balanced schema in this guide to magistracy by saying that a state must provide “due conduct to our private Rights, and common preservation,” remarking how Nature “composed only to one, and for the benefit of one” while “Policy . . . constituted to many, and for the advantage of many.”

Scaling up from “one” to “many,” he says here, is merely a question of “Policy . . . follow[ing] that visible light” that “proceedeth” from Nature.71 Through the dark, lawless woods (and bedchambers) of Orgula, however, Willan imagines that the path from “private Rights” to

“common preservation” is not as straight as the beam of light that Willan would later imagine.

Indeed, in the play’s preface, Willan defends poetry and drama from the Puritan criticism that they are morally and mimetically “Erronious,” but Willan’s advocacy here is not to deny that erroneousness but to affirm and confront the winding properties of both nature and politics;

Willan asserts that there is “no Absurdity [that] can be imagined so irregular, which may not meet a parralel in the occurrences of civil Actions.”72 Willan’s defense of that which is

“Erronious” makes natural and political wandering the rule rather than the exception while simultaneously arguing for the political naturalness of Orgula, the subtitle of which announces its own erroneousness: “The Fatall Error.” Just as the path from singular Nature to collective

Policy does not seem, in 1658, as straight as he would later claim, it is also not as well-lit.

Indeed, as we will see, in the warlike outlawry on the edge of the commonwealth, even the lights that are able to preserve themselves eternally—the sun, the soul, the “light” of Natural Law— seem to blink out.

71 Leonard Willan, The Exact Politician, or, Compleat Stateman (London: Dorman Newman, 1670), 67-8, italics in the original. 72 Ibid., sig. A4r. 256

Orgula tells the story of an unnamed Protectorate as various interests vie for the rights of succession. The Protectorate, having recently triumphed in a military campaign, is on the threshold of a fragile peace, but unfortunately, its political situation is at a volatile, transitional moment. Eumena, the young princess, is nearing her age of legal maturity, at which point the rule will pass from the aged yet ambitious Lord Protector Sinevero. The Protector, however, seeks to marry the beautiful Orgula and to preserve his political legacy through a series of machinations that begins with the exile of Ludaster, the popular son of a now-deceased political rival. Sinevero quickly moves with an assassination attempt on Ludaster and an order to capture

Eumena, who represents the rightful succession but who is the last of her bloodline. Meanwhile,

Orgula, now wed to Sinevero, has ambitions of her own. Like Sinevero, she craves supremacy, but because political power is largely denied to her as a woman, she seeks a separate, yet analogous, sexual power both within her marriage and outside of it, with her amorous advances toward the handsome and virtuous page Fidelius. The tensions between these various factions are compounded by the contradictory allegiances of Sinevero’s own children, Filathes and Zizania.

The former, like his father, seeks to establish a lasting legacy for his family and so, unaware of

Sinevero’s plans to suppress the princess, seeks to contract a marriage with her. Likewise,

Zizania dutifully serves as Eumena’s lady-in-waiting and, to complicate the matter even further, falls in love with Ludaster, who represents both Sinevero’s largest political threat and Eumena’s principle love interest. Further complicating matters is the secret love that Ludaster’s friend

Ambigamor harbors for Zizania, who has, herself, a tangled network of loyalties.

This dizzying array of interests is exacerbated by the obscure settings through which much of the play’s action occurs. Ludaster, in his banishment, has fled into the forest, which is 257 depicted as a violent, opaque, and unnavigable space, especially at night. The murderousness of this dark eventually finds its way into Sinevero’s court, which is defined by the same fumbling, dangerous wandering that characterizes the forest. Thus, when Zizania and Eumena escape into the forest to procure a meeting with the banished Ludaster, they disguise themselves as male foresters to protect their virginity in the rugged wilds, but, ironically, this stratagem invites two thieves to attack Eumena with more force than they would a woman, resulting in a wound that eventually kills her. Zizania, too, becomes separated from the princess in the dark of the wood, and because Sinevero’s assassin Nefario is looking for two men (Ludaster and his friend

Ambigamor), they kill her and her brother by mistake. Even the urbane Orgula is not spared from the barbaric confusion of the night. Parallel to the blind wandering in the forest is a bed trick whereby Orgula’s servant Mundalo sleeps with her in Fidelius’s stead. When she discovers

Mundalo’s deception, however, Orgula stumbles through the dark court, catching Sinevero with her dagger and mistakenly killing him. By the end of the play, all claimants to the throne—the

Protector, his wife, his children, the princess, and Ludaster—have either been killed or gone mad, leaving no feasible mode of governance for the country. Even the vanquished rival state from the beginning of the play is in no condition to assume rule here.

By the end of the play, then, all avenues of preservation for the state and, for many of the play’s characters, for the self and even for their families have been snuffed out. Before this happens, however, the play is careful to showcase various accounts of divided, conflicting principles of preservation, demonstrating how unreliable it is to theorize a coherent conception of

Natural Law in as tenuous a polity as the play’s commonwealth (and perhaps even post-war

England). Even from the first act, the problem of divided subsets of preservation is inflected, 258 tellingly, through an account of war and a corrupt legal judgement handed down by recourse to

Natural Law. Before the events of the play, the fictional state was embroiled in a war with a neighboring nation, and the Lord Protector ordered the General Castrophilus to return to the capital. Instead, Castrophilus disobeyed and attempted a military stratagem that, apparently, put the capital at momentary risk but allowed the army to surprise the enemy, and while Castrophilus himself was killed in the attempt, the army triumphed, wiping out their enemy and winning the war.

When the army returns home, however, the state arrests Ludaster, Castrophilus’s son, for

Castrophilus’s crimes of both endangering the capital and disobeying Sinevero’s orders. Because the punishment for this kind of insubordination would be banishment for the perpetrator’s entire family, it falls on Ludaster to defend his father’s actions to the court. During the trial, the

Attorney General alleges that “disobedience [leads to the] overthrow/ Of government,” and

Castrophilus’s ploy “hazard[ed] . . . our Liberties and Lives” (1.4 p. 10). In his answer, Ludaster defends his father’s apparent disobedience by saying it was not “the immediate means/

T’establish his security” (Castrophilus does, of course, die) and by asking the Judge to consider

Castrophilus’s actions “With common Preservation ballanced” against any notion of insurrection

(1.4 p. 11). Indeed, while the Attorney General suggests there can be no such “common

Preservation” without obedience to civil authority (thus echoing Hobbes), Ludaster says that the actual survival of the state because of Castrophilus’s disobedience points out the problem of this logic: their “common Preservation . . . Will easily . . . admit/ A contradiction in the consequence.” According to Ludaster, what might seem to be insurrection is done in the service of the common good, and, furthermore, disobedience to authority during wartime is merely an 259 expression of divided, though normal, standards of law. Ludaster says that a General, “with his moving Commonwealth transports/ A Law peculiar to his Ministrie:/ Which he reforms, or abrogates at Will; . . . Nor can the nature of his Action/ Agree with order, limit; or restraint.”

That war has its own “peculiar” standard of law is a formulation that Ludaster previews when he first arrives in the capital (“Our wrongs to the Prescription of Laws/ Must here give place”), and the understanding that war’s laws do not agree with “order, limit; or restraint” suggests a faintly

Hobbesian view of war’s disruption of law (1.2 p. 4). Further, having the play’s main protagonist voice a separation of military “law” and the jurisdiction of the sovereign is somewhat shocking from a royalist writer (especially the mention here of a military “Commonwealth”) and is characteristic of this play which scrambles the standard lines of political belief in order to show how muddy and divided formulations of law were in post-war England.

Unfortunately for Ludaster, the Judge does not approve of Ludaster’s formulation of a wartime separation of law and, instead, espouses a simple scalar model that, like Willan’s formulation in 1670, may be traced from Natural Law: “[O]ur recourse/ Must to the light of

Nature be; Reason,/ Laws Principal” (1.4 p. 12). The Judge agrees with the Attorney General that this “Principal” enjoins obedience to one standard of law, rejecting a divided understanding of both law and the preservation that it demands; the Judge denies that the law “cannot be the

Branches to preserve,/ And leave the Root affords them nourishment:/ Which here the Person, and his Act transgrest,/ Do truly represent.” According to the Judge, the “doubtfull chance” to which Castrophilus exposed the state illicitly privileged the “Branches to preserve” over the common preservation of the state, which is, properly, the “Root” of the military (1.4 p. 13). For the Judge, the jurisprudential “light of Nature” enjoins a contiguity of law that is followed 260 through obedience and cemented through mutual preservation, from state to military, from root to branch. Thus, in a punishment appropriate to the division of law that Ludaster alleges, the young soldier is summarily banished from the polity, alienated from its laws and protections. As

I note above, however, we are meant to sympathize with Ludaster, and although the Judge here promotes a coherent formulation of contiguous Natural Law based on obedience and common preservation (ideas that we have seen from royalist thinkers like Ferne and Hobbes), it is strongly suggested that Sinevero directed the corrupt courts to dispose of the popular Ludaster to snuff out the “Glories” of his rival Castrophilus, which are “still surviving, in his Sonn.” (1.1 p. 2).

Thus, once again, the various postures of Natural Law and scalar orders of preservation are mingled and obscured, fundamental occlusions that, as we will see, worsen in the questionable nature of laws (or perhaps lawlessness) that govern the forest into which Ludaster retreats.

Ludaster’s banishment, we will see, represents a return to an imagined primitive condition that, like the competing contemporary theories purporting to describe such a condition, becomes repeatedly refracted through various political interpretations of nature, its supposed laws, its perceived liberties, and its felt antagonisms. It is finally unclear if the return to some antecedent, nature represents the hopeful return to the Natural Law as envisioned by the

Parliamentarians, the beastly degradation of humanity as imagined by the Royalists, or the lapse back into the bellicose condition of mere nature as theorized by Hobbes. Importantly, the forest to which Ludaster retreats is both within Sinevero’s domain and somehow outside the rule of law. In this, the play shows how nature and the state contain each other, not as a union of compatible elements but—like Hobbes’s state-sanctioned Natural Laws that suppress a different,

“mere” kind of nature—as a volatile melding of opposites. 261

For instance, Ludaster initially worries—as Hobbes did and as his detractors point out— that such a return to the wilderness threatens to nature collapses the boundary between the human and animal. When his sentence is handed down to him, Ludaster grieves, “With a more powerful guid possess me Heav’n!/ Than what but meerly doth distinguish man/ From Beast! I may restrain the wildness of/ My Passion, which swells to a Distemper,/ High as their Fury:

Reason is too weak” (1.2 p. 4). And when his friend Ambigamor conspires to restore the banished Ludaster to an estate by marrying him to his sister Orgula, Ludaster discloses to her that “Man; is too high/ A dignitie to qualifie [his] essence;/ To him inherent are Habitations,/

Distinctions, possessions.” (1.4 p.18). Ludaster is better classified, he admits, as “Beast.” While he can boast the use of human reason, it again emerges as a quality “too weak.” His reason merely informs him of his debasement, while beasts “know no difference.” After this self- disparagement, Orgula, of course, declines his offer of marriage. Ludaster worries here in a

Hobbesian sense that it is, indeed, the “Habitations,/ Distinctions, possessions” of civilized life that most properly distinguishes humans from beasts.

When Ludaster finally removes himself from the capital, however, he remains in the surrounding woods and endeavors to see his exile as an escape from the luxurious superfluities of civilization while theorizing a mode of lonesome, natural liberty that, while in tension with his previous complaints, we have seen from other political thinkers in the period. He says,

[T]he happy issue of this strife Tends not t’extinguish, but reforme a life, Which Man too vainly seeking to cherrish, Dissipates, catching at things unusefull, Or superfluous, with such a greedy toil, As his Existence meerly did depend On his own Industry: ...... 262

As if the spacious world for All was fram’d, Too little were for one...... So Bounteous Is the Law of Nature, whose Immunities Ev’n free the soul from all subjection. (2.4 p. 30-1)

Against the Judge’s understanding of Natural Law that is best expressed through obedience to a collective, Ludaster here imagines in this pre-“subjection” primitive condition a return to the

“Law of Nature” and a liberatory clearing away of culture’s “superfluous” accommodations, which had been plundered out of the earth and sea by greedy “Industry.” Like the Levellers and like Marvell’s nostalgia for a forest where “all Creatures might have shares,” Ludaster recognizes that the world “for All was framed.” For Ludaster here, the restraining customs accreting around the original “Law of Nature” may be removed, thus recalling the Parliamentary optimism for a pregovernmental humanity, the virtuous “first Foundation” of law, for instance, in George Wither’s call to remove the “Superstructures” of human industry. The foundational freedoms that such thinkers find in Natural Law promote a liberty that precedes and overrides the

“subjection” that culture imposes.

Because, however, the play is unwilling to advance any unproblematized formulation of

Natural Law, Ludaster’s assertion that the spacious world “for all was framed” contains its own critique in the bitter immorality of the beautiful Orgula. As a believer in the freedoms of nature, and, as an ambitious woman, Orgula resents (as Ludaster himself comes to do) the strictures of custom, which she views as a patriarchal limitation upon feminine sovereignty. For instance,

Orgula’s flattering attendant Amasia makes a case for Orgula’s supremacy through a celebration of natural lust, saying, “the Homage/ Of beauty far more universal is,/ Than that of Majestie: by 263 so much ods,/ As natures bounds doth Policies extend” (1.4 p. 15).73 As in Ludaster’s soliloquy,

“natures bounds” exceed the restricting pronouncements of “Policies,” and we see from a later scene that, to Orgula, these bounds should promote a fundamental liberty, though in this scene, those liberties translate to licentiousness. Orgula attempts to seduce the handsome Fidelius through a disquisition of liberated natural sexuality. Although newly betrothed to Sinevero,

Orgula denigrates marriage as yet another restriction imposed by custom on Natural Law:

“Those truly are superfluous ceremonies,/ Which custom hath induc’d to blind the world,/ Shee might those freedoms steal, Nature hath seal’d/ To us, ev’n in our first Production” (3.2 p. 43).

According to Orgula, the bounteous liberties of nature authorize an anarchic, erotic self-interest through an equally promiscuous Natural Law. As with Hobbes, Civil Law is seen as a cordoning off of the excesses of nature, and while Orgula’s license might seem to launch an attack on this line of thinking, it finds its more conventionally virtuous analogue, as we have seen, in

Ludaster’s own return to the liberating “Immunities” of the “Law of Nature.” But even in

Ludaster’s schema of a pre-“subjection” Natural Law, it is subjection itself that answers him.

Immediately after Ludaster announces the natural abrogation of servanthood, Fidelius enters the scene, identifying himself as “Your Servant Sir” (2.4 p. 31). Thus Natural Law—even in the space of three lines and even in the forest where it might be most visible—is implicated in its opposites. Like contemporary writers, the play cannot seem to agree on the moral value of the

“Law of Nature” and its freedoms.

73 See Bramhall, Defense, 107; Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 13, 187 and II, 20, 253. It is relevant to note here that Hobbes denies the patriarchal defense of masculine sovereignty that Chapter One explored. In the condition of mere nature, the few isolated compacts that arise spontaneously from the family unit are not maintained by anything so strong as that which sustains the state. Rather, the limited governance of small families is brittle and is upheld only by “naturall Lust.” Further, the chain of sovereignty in the nuclear family flows naturally not from the father but from the mother, who alone is able to nourish (if she chooses) her children. Hobbes’s critics such as Bramhall, however, demur, saying, “Paternall Government was in the world from the beginning, and the Law of Nature.” 264

The interpretive incoherence of “Nature” extends, as I have begun to preview, to the play’s crosswise depictions of self- and collective-preservation. This is perhaps nowhere more obvious than Zizania’s lamentation with which I opened this chapter. After hearing of Ludaster’s banishment and (correctly) suspecting a similar plot against her, the Princess Eumena decides to follow Ludaster into the forest. Before she leaves with her lady-in-waiting Zizania, however,

Eumena determines to procure masculine disguises for them so that they may safely walk the lawless woods without fear of being accosted. Once disguised, Zizania laments the tensions between the “Law, so tyrannous” of “common preservation” and the “first Rites of Nature” that supposedly safeguards the “self,” which, she complains, she loses in her disguise. What follows this complaint is yet another articulation of nature’s liberties:

This goodly light, whereof we so much boast, Serves but to us our thraldome to install: No sooner we do Reasons use attain, But what, who want her, do with Liberty; Her strict prescriptions do to us deny. (4.3 p. 57)

Like Ludaster and Orgula, Zizania characterizes the “light” of reason as a “strict” and prescriptive limitation on nature’s freedoms, which, for the disguised young woman, are gendered as the “Liberty” to physically express one’s sex. But although this “light” of reason was, for the Judge (and, indeed, for most early modern thinkers) the Law of Nature itself,

Zizania’s conception of the light of reason is here set against Nature and its liberties. It is unclear in this scene if collective-preservation and the light of reason constitute a Natural Law at all because, as we have seen, they are at odds with the natural right to self-preservation. But, even further, this right is not set in tension merely with reason-ordained common preservation; rather, self-preservation reveals itself to be incompatible with itself. By giving up her natural right to her 265 gendered self, Zizania imagines that she secures her bodily safety in procuring her own unharassed passage through the forest.

Even this self-preserving impulse fails, however, through the fundamental brutality of the forest. Eumena’s and Zizania’s disguises inadvertently attract the attention of Voracho and

Spuratro, two poor thieves who merely assume that the disguised women are men in the same situation as they are. After the women become separated in the night, the two thieves ambush

Eumena, and the outlaws are surprised to find how amenable the badly wounded forester is to part with her possessions and, indeed, her life. Spuratro explains himself, almost apologizing for the brutal attack but citing the desperate necessities of life in the woods as a mitigating circumstance. Wondering at the gentleness of Eumena, he asks her, “So willing to depart? had we but known/ Your minde, you longer might have liv’d, wee seek/ Anothers life, but to secure our own./ Tis money is our End” (4.4 p. 60). Here, Spuratro assumes that Eumena is as desperate to protect her livelihood as he is and defends the brutality of the attack accordingly. This situation, whereby the two woodland thieves must plunder passersby in order “to secure [their] own” lives, precisely limns the parameters of Hobbes’s mere nature: the unruled warring over the means of self-preservation outside of the contractual peace of the Commonwealth, even though, here, the attack is perpetrated against the very representative of that Commonwealth, the heir to the throne.

This condition of war is reinforced in the very next scene, though what appears here is not only the isolated ferocity of humans in “mere nature” but, instead, some combination of

Hobbesian desperation and Parliamentary optimism for the “first Foundation.” Just after Eumena 266 falls to Voracho and Spuratro’s attack, the Captain Gratianus finds her and brings her to Ludaster for treatment. Grateful, she says,

Goodness hath surely quite abandoned The sources of Civility. And now, Retracting back to the Original Of her first Reformation, hath forsook The affluence of society, in this Wilde Desart to take up her being. (4.5 p. 61-2)

Once again, the questionable “Goodness” of some “Original” state appears amidst the mere nature of the “Wild Desart,” which only the scene before was a villainous place of brutal self- interest, as represented by Voracho and Spuratro. What is more, the two thieves might even feature as “Reform[ed]” creatures in this hopeful scene of natural goodness. Gratiano, for instance, informs Ludaster of the rumors at court, reporting that Sinevero and Orgula have married, a development that he learned from “some scatter’d out-laws lately joyn’d/ To our suspended troups” (4.5 p. 62). Citing “scatter’d out-laws” so soon after similar (or perhaps even the very same) outlaws attacked Eumenia calls to mind the warring, self-interested nature that those thieves represent, and the explicit militarization of such villains as they join Ludaster’s army. Thus in this “Wilde Desart,” the “Original” civility of a supposedly primitive condition mingles with the warlike demeanor of both Hobbes’s “mere nature” and Marvell’s reveries of pregovernmental nature. The criminals’ newly found accord among Ludaster’s troops, too, evokes specifically antiroyalist ideas of self-preservation through unified militarization.74 But with the lawless brutality of Voracho and Spuratro still fresh on the audience’s mind, the

74 The reformation of these outlaws is reminiscent of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Unlike Shakespeare’s outlaws, however, these thieves are no exiled gentlemen, and, worse, their brutality against Eumena leads to her eventual death. 267 matriculation of such “scatter’d out-laws” casts doubt on the supposed “Civility” that follows the

“troups.”

Whatever tenuous compromise that this outlawed accord seems to have struck between self- and common-preservation, between the forest’s violent desperation and some originary human “Civility,” dissolves in the final scene of the play when Ludaster dies at the hands of his most loyal companion Ambigamor. Since the young soldier’s return to the polity, Ambigamor has been harboring a romantic fondness for Zizania, but when he happens upon her dying in the forest after her father’s assassins mistakenly strike her down in the dark, he mistakes her repeated calls of “Ludaster!”—her own secret object of affection—for an accusation of guilt (5.5 p. 80-1). Ambigamor immediately sets off to avenge the dead woman and, without explaining himself, forces his friend into a duel. Ludaster tries to reason with Ambigamor, but when it becomes apparent that his heartbroken friend will not relent, Ludaster innovates a tactic designed to preserve both their lives, breaking the tip off of his sword and vowing only to deflect

Ambigamor’s attacks. Through this, Ludaster figures, he will not “to [him]self . . . prove an

Homicide” by allowing himself to die, but he will also attempt to maintain the kind of close

“Amity” that, according to Willan’s preface, in his preface, may be “dispensed through the civill structure to the Composure of a generall Union, [thus leading to] the strength and glory of a commonwealth” (sig. a2r).75 In the forest, however, attempting to maintain such a “Union” is incompatible with self-preservation. Ludaster says,

75 This amity between the two friends is, in fact, explicitly linked to the mutual protections of the commonwealth near the beginning of the play. After Ludaster complains that his banishment has cost him the “Habitations,/ Distinctions, possessions” that attend life in the commonwealth, Ambigamor offers his own, saying, “Forbear you wrong our amitie;/ Our beings individual are” (1.4 p. 18). Ambigamor’s friendship, then, is Ludaster’s link to the mutual protections of the state, while his use of “individual” here suggests the protections of a “self” that is shared between the two friends. This is, of course, yet another balance between self- and common-preservation that will collapse by the end of the play. 268

What Nature first commands, see, I obey, What friendship, though contemned, thus I may. [S.D.:]Draws his sword. Letting the point of his sword fall on the ground, breaks off the point with his foot. [In the scuffle, Ludaster is mortally wounded and cries out,] Oh! thou hast thy will, he’s but half guarded I see, stands only on his own defence. (5.5 p. 85)

Eumena’s sudden entrance into the scene stops the altercation, but it is too late for Ludaster, who has suffered a deep wound that will, in a few lines, kill him. The loss is too much to bear for the already weakened and wounded Eumena, who dies mere moments after Luduster. Thus, in the space of fifty or so lines, the best hopes of uniting the military with the legitimate means of succession perish. In the duel scene, then, Ludaster attempts to reconcile a “Union” while still obeying “What Nature first commands,” which refers to Ludaster’s obligation preserve his own life. He finds, however, that at least in this case, such a reconciliation between self- and common-interest is impossible: “he’s but half guarded/ I see, [who] stands only on his own defence.” The tenuously theorized goodness and civility of this primeval woodland state has once again regressed back into “mere nature,” into the condition of war whereby Ludaster, in order to properly defend himself, must, as Hobbes recommends, “use, all helps, and advantages of Warre” in order to protect himself against his friend Ambigamor. His failure to abandon the mutual accord between him and Ambigamor has, ironically, come at the cost of the mutual accord organizing the army and, indeed, the state itself, which lacks any clear path to leadership by the end of the play.

“A bull bellowing forth flames of fire”: Extinguishing the Various “Lights of Nature” 269

In its treatment of misguided, scrambled, or miscarried attempts at preservation, Orgula is most radical. While nearly all contemporary thinkers—regardless of their political sympathies—agreed that preservation was an important injunction of Natural Law, Orgula refuses to acknowledge not only what preservation might entail but that any preservation is possible at all. This is at least in part because the “visible light” of Natural Law that, as Willan would later suggest, leads human law is not at all a reliable guide in this play. Indeed, more often than not, the play suggests that the light of nature (in its various natural, legal, and even astronomical valences) cannot even preserve itself. When, for instance, Zizania complains that the “goodly light” of reason dictates that she should disguise (and, thus, “lose”) herself, the reader will not actually know that this “light” is in fact reason for a number of lines. Instead, what appears in a first reading is this: “I my self must lose/ This goodly light, whereof we so much boast.” After her father’s assassins mistake her masculine disguise for Ludaster, it will be clear that it is by using (not losing) the “goodly light” of reason that Zizania loses her own life, but the enjambment here momentarily suggests that Zizania “[her] self” (as an intensive pronoun) has lost some light that was worthy of boasting. The disguised concealment of her femininity suggests that this is the smothered light (here, identical to the “Rites of Nature”) that

Zizania mourns, an interpretation that the rest of the play encourages. As we will see, the bright, seemingly long-lasting fires of youthful beauty is one of the primary means by which Orgula explores political and individual preservation. Such fires are consistently analogized through the eternal lights of celestial bodies. The play suggests, however, that this model of preservation seems untenable for human subjects and heavenly stars alike. When Ambigamor later mourns over Zizania’s body, for instance, he laments, “Like a declining shadow vanish hence;/ Nor leave 270 behind the least Impression,/ Since that light is extinguisht formed thee” (5.5 p. 81). Predicting

Zizania’s complete decomposition, Ambigamor imagines her bodily erasure as a lengthening

(“declining”) evening shadow that will fade into the effacing black of night. While “light” here indexes the life that is within Zizania, the metaphor here could also point toward whatever light casts the “declining” shadow of the image. Because the light that is “extinguisht” however,

Ambigamor’s reverie here looks forward to something much more apocalyptic that would signal a global failure of natural preservation: the sun’s going out.

While Zizania’s enjambment above grants her momentary participation in the (perhaps similarly momentary) brilliance of celestial fire, it is gorgeous Orgula herself who seems to embody the durable flames of the starry night. When, for instance, Ambigamor attempts to woo

Orgula on Ludaster’ behalf, he promises to do so through the orbiting “splendour” of the astrological “sphear of Love” (1.3 p.14). Immediately following this scene, the splendorous

Orgula and her ladies-in-waiting debate the precise “lustre” of her beauty, concluding that their adulations demonstrate her beauty’s “influence/ Which reflect on them,” as if they were lesser moons in orbit around her sun. And during Sinevero’s successful wooing later in the scene, he offers Orgula the means by which to make her celestial body the public object of universal admiration. Wondering why she might privately hide her beauty, Sinevero asks her

[Your] Charming Graces do thou thus Into their center recontract their force? They may with greater violence effuse Their light, by this sought Intermission, And so each time they are disclos’d, passes The world with a new Miracle? Madam, Affect a meaner way to propagate The glory of your beauty: t’will involve The world with lesse amazement, but with more Delight: which fully to beget, there must 271

Be more equality betwixt the Object And the Faculty. (1.4 p. 21)

Here, Sinevero claims that Orgula’s coy privacy and intermittent public outings match the periodic effulgence of some astrometeorological event, either comets, meteors, or thunderstorms.76 His hint toward marriage, however, implicitly offers to raise her—socially and astronomically—as a more consistently gorgeous spectacle in the eyes of the public. In addition to this offered public admiration as the Lord Protector’s starry bride, Sinevero himself craves a more intimate vision of her beauty, expressing jealousy at her “Glasse” (that is, her mirror) and saying, “Her wit yet adds a lustre to her form:/ This Ring to help me to another view/ Of your fair Lady.” In his voyeuristic proposition, Sinevero is referencing the seventeenth-century advances in glass optics that led to the invention of the telescope and its numerous improvements, thus simultaneously lifting Orgula to the position of a celestial body and expressing a desire to pull her back down to him through intimate, optical telescopy.77

Because various characters consistently associate Orgula with (presumably) immortal heavenly bodies, the rhetoric of preservation attaches to her with unique urgency as her romantic interests attempt to bolster their own preservation by relation to her seemingly ageless beauty.

We have already seen how Ludaster attempts to maintain his place in society through a marriage with Orgula, and Sinevero’s language in this scene—to “propagate” her beauty and to “beget” delight in the people who see her—gestures toward an erotic perpetuation through sex and

76 It is unclear which it is in this scene, though identifying precisely which violent astrometeorological phenomenon is of little consequence. Indeed, each of these three were, at some point or another in the early modern history of astrology, associated with the operations of bright heat at the upper levels of air in the atmosphere. We will, however, have the opportunity to speak with more historical precision about comets below. 77 For the confluence of telescopy, meteorology, and misogyny in The Duchess of Malfi and burlesque almanacs, see Chapter Two. 272 childbirth, rhetorically anchored upon Orgula’s perdurable beauty as a supposedly celestial creature.78 When she attempts to seduce Fidelius, moreover, her servant Mundalo depicts her as a repository of light and natural immortality. After leading the naïve Fidelius to a sumptuous banquet of aphrodisiacs and starry jewels, Mundalo says,

See here how splendid Lux Hath rifled Nature’s Treasury, Not onely to restore, but to exalt Her faculties; which when dispenced, shall Replisht flow from inexhausted Springs...... These Virgin Spangles [that is, the jewels] guild Nights sable robe, Whilest from their Orbs we hear Exclusive Harmony; not judging where. Here Aromatique odours . . . perspire In their immortall Essences. (5.2 p. 67)

Here, Mundalo makes good on his mistress’s belief in a freely prolific (and promiscuously liberated) natural world by offering Fidelius the choicest morsels of sub- and superlunary nature.

Imagining the menagerie of jewels as the “Virgin spangles” of the starscape, Mundalo reinforces the kind of celestial beauty that Sinevero imagines for his sunny Orgula. The celestial resonances that attach to Orgula do not merely recall the sumptuous beauty of the heavens; rather, they seem to allow a way around the play’s anxieties surrounding preservation and perpetuation. Though

Galilean astronomy would, as we will see, challenge the notion of celestial perpetuity, many

78 See, for instance, William Harvey’s Anatomical Exeritations Concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (London, 1653), 156. As a scientist and physician, Harvey posits a kind of celestial continuance on the level of the species. In answer to the age-old question of “which of these is first, namely the Egge, or the Henne,” Harvey discards a linear view of time in favor of a circular one. He writes, “[W]e may say, That that Egge from which this or that particular Henne sprung, is of more Antiquity than the Henne: and so the contrary, That Hens which produceth this particular Egge, is elder than it. For the Vicissitude and Circuite perpetuate the Race of Cocks and Hennes; while now the Chicken, and now the Egge by a constant series and return do continue an Immortal Species, out of the decay and ruines of the Individuals. And after this sort do many sublunary creatures emulate and approach to the Perpetuity of Celestial bodies. . . . And that very thing (saith Aristotle) beareth an analogie to the substance of Starres” (italics in the original). 273 early moderns understood heavenly bodies to be immortal, and Orgula’s celestial

“propagat[ion]” associates her with the undying self-perpetuation of the stars, especially in this scene. The “Lux” with which Mundalo begins his mistress’s seduction refers clearly to the luxuries set before Fidelius, but by abridging the word, it offers a false Latin etymology that associates Orgula’s luxury with “Lux”: light.79 This lux, according to Mundalo, is an immortal one. The banquet offered to Fidelius represents the delicious sum of nature’s “inexhausted

Springs,” a renewable natural treasury. The starry cabinet of jewelry is followed, too, by the smells of the banquet, which have been distilled into “their immortall Essences” with their presentation here at Orgula’s table.

It is perhaps most crucial for the aged, politically beleaguered Sinevero to seek any means to preserve his own fading legacy, and so it is his marriage to Orgula that seems to offer him some hope that his successes will be lasting. After notifying his hired assassin when and where to kill Ludaster and capture Eumena, on “This day, on the declining of the light;/ The place . . . Here in the Forest,” Sinevero has a rare moment of relief, affirming that Orgula will

“restore” “the breaches of time.” Sinevero glories in “the Flames of Beauty and/ Of Love, an

Essence I assume out-lasts/ The Age of Her, whose ashes doth renew/ Her kinde. (4.1 p. 51).

Angling for the right of political succession, Sinevero’s goal is the preservation of his line not only through his brutal scheming but also through the young Orgula, who represents, once, again, bright celestial “Flames” and a loving immortality that exceed even the self-sufficient and self-preserving capacities of the phoenix. Sinevero “assume[s]” that he will repair the “breaches of time” through the young Orgula’s fertility and his own political calculations.

79 OED, s.v. “luxury.” The word “luxury” is derived not from the Latin lux but from luxuria, which does not seem to have any association with light but, instead, simply designates luxury or luxuriousness. 274

This proves, however, to be a big assumption. Sinevero’s particular specification of the time—“the declining of the light”—illustrates the problem of relying on nature (even superlunary nature) to preserve anything, even itself. Despite all the faith that characters place in light, Orgula is, both literally and tonally, a dark play. Many characters express the mistaken confidence that the night sky is riddled with sufficiently bright lights, associated, as above, with the eternal flames of love. Ambigamor, for instance, describes his love for Zizania, despite her absence, as a planetary reflection (by the night’s “wandring traveller”) of the hidden sun.

Ludaster, depicting love’s clarity as a kind of celestial navigation, tells Fidelius that “Thy Love is Zealous of my safety still./ Be it my guide. Who steareth by such light/ Shall find no errour ith’ obscurest night” (1.4 p. 22; 5.4 p. 79). Mundalo, too, assures Orgula that Fidelius’s apparent lack of sexual interest is due to a hidden flame that will erupt when the lights are turned down:

“[I] finde this passive coldness/ Is but the bashfull softness of his youth,/ Which vail’d with nights obscurity will prove/ More hardy” (4.2 p. 54). Mundalo suspects that Fidelius’s

“coldness” here will ignite with the flames of passion when Orgula finally lures him into her bed.

Even Filathes, whose interest in Eumena is the least of the play’s romantic entanglements, assures himself that “Loves sense is clearest in the darkest night” (3.3 p. 46) even as the bandits lie in wait for his beloved and as his sister wanders, lost, to her assassination.

As we have seen the lights of love, reason, and nature do indeed find “errour ith’ obscurest night” as all of the play’s principle characters are killed, raped, or driven mad due to nocturnal “errour.” The appellation “obscure” occurs in relation to the night at least nine times throughout the play and is, here, a much more accurate descriptor of the nighttime than “bright” or “fiery,” as Eumena, Filathes, Zizania, and Sinevero are all stabbed to death in the night’s 275 obscuring misidentifications. And just as celestial lights were thought to stand in for these various characters’ preservation, the play’s multiple references to extinguishing calls to mind the blotting out of the supposedly immortal stars.80 One of the more radical astrological notions to emerge during the seventeenth century was the possibility that heavenly bodies might be composed of corruptible matter. The Aristotelian designation between incorruptible, superlunary matter and the corruptible, earthly matter was under assault by a number of seventeenth-century thinkers.81 Galileo’s telescopy, for example revealed the pitted, imperfect surface of the moon and confirmed for the first time that comets—long thought to be corrupted vapors in the atmosphere—were actually above the moon. Scientist and academic reformer John Webster, for example, cites Galileo’s cometary work in his 1654 Academiarum Examen to prove both that

English astronomy needs to be reformed and “that there are changes and mutations in the heavens, and so they are not incorruptible as is falsely asserted.”82 The immortality of heavenly bodies was becoming less and less certain for mid-seventeenth-century English thinkers.

Orgula’s own engagement with Galileo’s “Glasse” in Sinevero’s seduction scene suggests that Willan was at least familiar with the new astronomical theories emerging from the continent, and the play’s obsession with failing nocturnal lights bespeaks an apocalyptic fascination with a bleak and newly mortal night sky, especially in the final court scene. Sinevero, after waking in the middle of the night, rouses himself, despite feeling as though he “had engendred with the Night,/ And thus forsaken of the living, were/ Already numbered amongst the

80 We have already seen Ambigamor’s grief over the once-bright, “extinguished” body of Zizania and Ludaster’s denial that his banishment will not “extinguish” his life, but the soldier Gratianus vows not to allow their vicious era to “extinguish” the memory of the death Castrophilus, and Ambigamor also says the sound of Zizania’s death is “enough t’extinguish life” (1.4 p. 13; 5.5 p. 80). 81 Aristotle, De Caelo (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1922), 1.3.270a. 82 John Webster, Academiarum Examen, or, The Examination of Academies (London: 1654), 46. 276

Dead” (5.1 p. 73). After Nefarius informs him that his children have been murdered according to his own (mistaken) instructions, Sinevero strips out of his richly studded nightgown, saying,

“Hence you glorious shadows,/ Whose proper lusters only obvious make/ Your own distinctions.

Retire from your Orbs” (5.1 p. 74). Here, the nocturnal orbits (“Orbs”) of celestial bodies cannot, despite other characters’ earlier confidence, light the night sky; they twinkle only enough to distinguish themselves from the background sky. Sinevero’s demand that the heavenly bodies

“Retire from [their] Orbs,” coupled with his assertion that the “Dead” are “numbered” with the night, suggests that the nocturnal sky is not the place of perdurable light and fire that it seemed to be but is, instead, a useless scattering of diluted light that could, one night, “Retire.” Immediately after Sinevero’s nocturnal disillusionment, Orgula follows him out and, mistaking him for the bed-trickster Mundalo, murders him in the dark hallway, saying, “Hah! Vanishing! Take that to stop your Courses/ And that, and that” (5.1 p. 75). Along with Sinevero’s demand that his starry nightgown abandon its orbit around his body, Orgula’s charge that he is attempting to fade away produces a metaphorical vision of all the nocturnal lights “Vanishing” at once. Orgula’s brutal offer to help “stop [their] Courses” recalls both the vital courses of Sinevero’s body and the astrological courses of the stars and planets, which, according to the logic of the metaphor, have all but blinked out.

When she discovers that she has killed Sinevero, Orgula runs mad, and her language continues the play’s consistent conceptual associations among nocturnality, lights, and fire. But instead of connecting these linkages to the perpetuation of both natural and political succession,

Orgula depicts a fundamentally corruptible vision of the play’s previously invulnerable flames.

She raves, “‘Tis poor—cast in—of brass—/ A bull bellowing forth flames of fire—/ No, No— 277

Bound living to a stake whereon/ Is fixt a vulture preying on his heart” (5.1 p. 75). Her ramblings here reframe the play’s fascination with flames as a sick theater of torture, death, and putrefaction. The first reference is to the brazen bull, an ancient torture device that roasted victims alive inside a bronzework sculpture. Orgula’s quick correction (“No, No”) to a vulture feasting on the heart of a victim recalls the mythical Prometheus, who stole fire from the heavens to deliver it to mortals and, in punishment, was chained to a mountain while an eagle continually feasts upon his regenerating liver. If Orgula’s fiery reference here accesses any kind of logic of perpetuation, it does so only through an endless cycle of death. By altering the Promethean eagle to a vulture, she replaces the symbol of (Zeus’s) celestial glory with a symbol of bodily corruption, and we get an image of Prometheus’s body not as an icon of immortal generation but, instead, of putrefaction.

Conclusion

In the influential and widely read Eikon Basilike (1649), the author (rumored to be

Charles I himself) voices the concern of the king in terms that will be familiar to us. He writes,

“[A]lthough I can be content to Eclypse My owne beames, . . . yet I will never consent to put out the Sun of Soveraignty to all Posterity, and succeeding Kings . . . which indeed would not be more injurious to succeeding Kings, than to My Subjects.”83 For the author, the preservation of the single sovereign is of secondary importance to the continued preservation of the collective, which is meant to be, through succession, as perpetual and cyclical as the course of the sun. At the crucial historical juncture after both the execution of Charles I and the death of Oliver

83 Charles I, Eikon Basilike: The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings (London: 1649), 63. 278

Cromwell, but before the Restoration, Orgula provides a vision of what it would look like for that sun of succession to be “put out.” The play highlights the anxieties of a time in which the various “natural” and political formulations of preservation not only catastrophically fail but finally spiral out of interpretive control as the various contemporary postulations of Natural Law mingle incoherently with their opposites. Sinevero’s court and the lawless wood, peaceful obedience and insurrection, and the first instinct of self-preservation and the final failure of preservation at the end of time all somehow define the political parameters of Orgula’s

Protectorate. At a moment in English history when established notions of nature and politics had been overturned, Orgula’s bleak outlook is particularly poignant because the power vacuums left by the Civil War and the collapse of the Commonwealth could not be filled with any one clear articulation of Natural Law’s political ethics. As Peter Harrison has noted, the concept of Natural

Law in the mid-to-late seventeenth century began, slowly and inconsistently, to shed its relationship to obligation—moral, theological, and natural—and to transition into its modern valence as amoral, merely physical laws that govern the world.84 Orgula documents that transition both by showing how its various characters compulsively attempt to anchor their actions in the natural law of self-preservation and by recording the contradictions and futilities of those attempts. Indeed, just as the outlaw army gathers threateningly on the edge of Sinevero’s

Protectorate, the violences of “Nature” (and of our own making) loom over any coherent understanding of how to preserve ourselves in the world.

84 Peter Harrison, “Laws of Nature in Seventeenth-Century England: From Cambridge Platonism to Newtonianism,” in The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives, ed. Eric Watkins (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 127-48. 279

CONCLUSION

Jacobean World Pictures

Although Willan’s Orgula anticipates the dissolution of Natural Law as it was believed to enjoin particular modes of political participation, the literary history leading up to that dissolution was not one of decline but, rather, one of vibrancy, fluidity, and even multiplication.

Indeed, Orgula is able to confront the political unraveling of natural analogy not because the jurisdiction of Natural Law was, like Sinevero’s celestial hopes, “Vanishing” in the mid- seventeenth century, but because that jurisdiction fractured and expanded, leading to urgent conceptual skirmishes along the borders of several vying formulations of Natural Law. Although it is true that Tillyard’s “Elizabethan World Picture” overstates the unity that Renaissance subjects read into the world, the post-Elizabethan history of natural analogy must still, by comparison, describe “pictures” in the plural. As seventeenth-century ideas of nature multiplied and as political formulations compounded, the analogies that early moderns deployed to explain one with the other could spin beyond their control. For instance, while the several incompatible theorizations of Natural Law in mid-century England were occasioned by the English Civil War,

Natural Law’s conceptual splintering did not break cleanly along political affiliations for the various Civil-War-era writers I examine, and this political indeterminacy opened spaces in which the ravages of anarchy, self-interest, and war in nature reared up in the many worldviews of the

1640s and 50s. The creeping presence of such unorthodox or anti-orthodox political categories links the preceding chapters, and, thus, instead of the gradual decline in seventeenth-century analogical thought described by recent ecocritics, the seventeenth century witnessed an explosion of analogy, as early moderns attempted to cling to endangered worldviews. Indeed, as these final 280 pages attest in an exploration of King James’s writings, even the historically distant Chapters

One and Four are, in many ways, continuous with each other as both early-seventeenth-century texts by James and the mid-century political writers of Chapter Four deploy a lush network of analogy in order to do important political work. For James (and, indeed, for all of the preceding chapters), analogies have a “natural” tendency toward slippage, multivocality, and even sedition.

But instead of discarding those analogies because of their potentially radical instability, James accepts and even avails himself of that political risk, finally handing over his analogies to the interpretive (and, so, literary) judgment of his readership.

As we will see, James’s The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598, published in England in 1603) is interested in the paternal naturalness of monarchy like many of the texts of Chapter

One, but it also explores the mechanisms of sovereignty, law, and obedience that occupied the

Civil-War-era thinkers of Chapter Four. Just as Hobbes, Marvell, and Milton would look to antecedent models of governance to determine the extent to which nature participated in the establishment of government, James looks to “the first beginning of Kings” to find a model of consent and contract.1 According to James, the Israelites’ call for a king despite the prophet

Samuel’s warnings against potential tyranny illustrates the irrevocability of the political contract once a people has consented to it, thus “taking away . . . all excuse, and retraction of this their contract, after their consent to vnderlie this yoke [of monarchy] with al the burthens that he declared vnto them.”2 As in Leviathan, there is a clear distinction between what is licit before and after the establishment of a social contract. And, also like Hobbes, James insists that there

1 James VI and I, The True Lawe of Free Monarchies: or The Reciprock and Mutuall Dutie Betwixt a Free King, and His Naturall Subiectes (Edinburgh, 1598), sig. C6r. 2 Ibid., sig. C1v-C2r. The Israelite episode comes from 1 Samuel 8:1-22. 281 are no legitimate avenues of rebellious “retraction” once the people’s consent has been offered to a monarch. For these two thinkers, then, the most “natural” political expression is that of obedience; the “equall extent” of natural and civil law in Hobbes and, for James, the analogy of the king as “the naturall Father to all his Lieges [subjects]” help to anchor obedience in nature despite pointing to a moment before sovereignty had been contracted.3

This does not mean, however, that nature in The True Lawe (or Leviathan, for that matter) only participates in political harmony and dutiful obedience. Just as Chapter Four’s various political and literary texts struggle through several overlapping conceptions of pre- and post-contractual natures, James grants that there are agents in nature that slip free of his political vision. Anticipating Bramhall’s rejection of the postlapsarian dispositions of rebellious animals like bears and gnats, James, like Chapter One’s admirers of avian virtue, praises the filial devotion that “Storkes haue to their old & decaied parentes,” noting that no animal will strike out against its parents even when tyrannized, “except among the vipers: which proues such persons, as ought to be reasonable creatures, and yet vnnaturall followe this example, to be endued with their vipereous nature.”4 The slippage between reasonable humans acting naturally like storks and acting “vnnaturall[y]” like rebellious vipers is here openly confronted, resolved neither by withholding from vipers their place in the natural world nor by denying their potential participation in political analogies, be they ever so treacherous. Instead, James merely hopes that his subjects follow the appropriate natural analogy among the two that he describes.

This sometimes treasonous and always slippery character analogy organizes my treatment of seventeenth-century political analogy, and, like the literary texts considered here, True Lawe

3 Ibid., sig. B4v. 4 Ibid., sig. D4v. 282 confronts and redeploys those very slippages. James’s treatment of the “natural” paternity of kingship shuttles through five lengthy “just as fathers. . . so should kings” analogical constructions.5 Against this set of paternal analogies from “the law of Nature,” James describes another by authors who advocate rebellion against supposed “tyrants”: they write “that euery man is borne to carrie such a naturall zeale & dutie to his common-wealth, as to his Mother; that seeing it so rent . . . good Citizens will be forced, to put their hande to work, for freeing their common-welth from such a pest [the tyrant].”6 Like the texts featured in the preceding chapters, the fluidity of natural analogy links the language of official political fealty (here, filial love to a king) with unorthodox, radical, or violent political categories (the overzealous, treasonous love toward a maternal country). But also like the seventeenth-century literature that I detail, James does not suppress this fluidity. Instead of pitting paternal kingship against a maternal state, James wants to occupy both parental positions, accepting both the advantages and risks of analogy’s slippage from one “nature” to another. Chapter One noted how James’s Basilikon Doron (1599, also published in England in 1603) describes the monarch’s relationship to the Church as a

“Nurish-Father,” and the gender fluidity of this nursing/fathering monarch works through the first paternal analogy of True Lawe as James attests that the monarch’s “fatherly duety is bounde to care for the nourishing, education, and vertuous gouernement” of his subjects.7 For James, then, the difference between fealty and sedition is not a rigid separation between “natural” analogies of paternity and of maternity but, rather, the proper navigation of many analogies

(father/mother/“Nurish-Father”) and the active negotiation of their fluid naturalness.

5 Ibid., sig. B4v. 6 Ibid., sig. D5v, italics added. 7 James VI and I, Basilikon Doron (Edinburgh, 1599), 51; James, True Lawe, B4v, italics added. 283

The willingness of King James himself to accept and even deploy analogy’s porousness ultimately demonstrates just how seventeenth-century analogies represented political, natural, and, especially, literary problems and opportunities. With totalizing worldviews increasingly out of reach as new political rifts and new conceptual divisions in “Nature” emerged, it was an act of interpretation—reading humanity, governance, and nature—to accommodate those divisions while simultaneously delineating them more sharply. Despite analogy’s imprecision in attempting to ground human politics in the natural world, early moderns demonstrated a powerful and abiding desire to read themselves in nature, even at the risk of reading beyond what was strictly licit, to categories like treason, tyranny, rebellion. In True Lawe, this literary exercise on the structures of nature rests, finally, with the reader. At the end of James’s arguments from

“diuers similitudes drawen” from nature—including human paternity, stork filiality, “vipereous” treason, and the head’s bodily governance—he concludes by inviting the reader to share with him the burden of interpreting analogy. Responding to “such writers, as mayntaine the contrarie proposition” that other analogies may better describe kingship, James writes, “whether these similitudes represent better the offices of a King; or the offices of Maisters . . . of craftes, or

Doctores of Phisike . . . I leaue it also to the readers discretion.”8 James defends his “similitudes” between monarchy and nature not through an appeal to absolute truth value but, rather, through a

8 James, True Lawe, sig. D5r. See also George Buchanan, De Jure Regni apud Scotos (Edinburgh, 1579), 12, 16, 56; When describing “such writers,” James almost certainly had George Buchanan, his late tutor, in mind. In his 1579 De Jure Regni apud Scotos [On the Right of Kings among the Scots], Buchanan describes the responsibility of monarchs, arguing that monarchy was instituted for the sake of the people and that (in contradistinction to James’s understanding in True Lawe) tyrants may be forcibly resisted (56). For Buchanan, the analogy that best describes kingship was not the head of a body but the physician (“medicus”) that monitors and maintains a body (12). He goes on to say that such physicians must be skilled, just as masters in other vocations (“caeteris artibus artifices”) (16). James’s rejection of the “Doctores of Phisike” and “Maisters” analogies thus recalls Buchanan’s work. James’s dismissal of Buchanan’s analogies stems perhaps from the logic by which the physician/king is external to the body politic itself and, thus, may be removed and replaced (unlike James’s kingly head) if his or her skill is not to the people’s liking. 284 scale between worse and “better” representation that, here, ranges from master artisans to kings or from vipers to storks. James recognizes that a characteristic feature of analogy (and, I would add, human governance and even “Nature” itself) is its indeterminacy. Try as James might to guide his audience in the “better” direction, this indeterminacy must be evaluated, finally, by

“the readers discretion,” including readers of both James’s tract and of the natural world. The difference here between the official reading of nature and its illicit opposites is a literary one: a matter of interpretation. With only a small shift in diction, tone, or readerly “discretion,” the seventeenth-century cosmos could be either a “Book of Nature” informing righteous human behavior or a seditious rag to be suppressed.